Latest / Second Nature / E188 Tom Crowther: Stop Trying To Save The World

Transcript

E188 Tom Crowther: Stop Trying To Save The World · Second Nature

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for coming in.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me, mate.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um London Climate Week.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: How's it been so far?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the answer to that question has never not been Carnage, but it's always more Carnage than last time.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: How many of these are you being too?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: London Climate Weeks.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think only maybe this is my fourth, but it's like exponential growth of the number of events you have to speak at, and you've stopped remembering what words mean.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it's good.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: How has it changed over those four years?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to believe that we are shifting from despair until and and and subtly our consciousness is tipping towards opportunity.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Four years ago it was like, oh, we've got to do this just because we have to, and we have a moral obligation.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And now I think slowly but surely people are going, oh my god, we're gonna do this because it's gonna create a better world.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd like to see that exponentially grow.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I've just written my wrap-up piece for the week, and that's the piece.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um so we started this business 2021 five years ago, and almost the line that was used as uh metaphorical Everest was when BlackRock arrive.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: When Blackrock are here, then it's of a scale, a seriousness.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: When trillions of dollars are interested in a conversation, then we've solved a load of stuff, right?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: I was invited to a reception by BlackRock last night, and one of their global managing directors opened with, we want to invest in this sector.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: We have trillions of dollars, we are serious about natural infrastructure, and it that just sums up the week from saying that would be the ridiculous aspirational point to them talking our language.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, no, it's not our language, the collective language that we've arrived at in terms of natural infrastructure.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: It is completely changed.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: There is none of that moral grandiosity and like shaming other people and yelling.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: There's actually now solutions and activities and progress, and it isn't if or when, it's what's happening now, and that's felt completely different.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 100% agree.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's about the future, not panicking.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a panicky future, it's an embracing the future.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, do you know John Elkington, the author?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: I know of, but not personally.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: You read Green Swan?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: No, you would adore it.
• 2:22
  unknown: Yeah.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: So he talks about the exponential 20s and how this period should have been the equivalent of the 1920s, but with um sustainable startups and regenerative industries and all those things.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: And you sort of sat there in 2020 and you're like, is it there yet?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: 21, is it there yet?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I look there now and I go, Oh hell, we're in the middle of this.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: And it is that so five.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: So at this event last night, Environment Bank were there, Rebalance Earth were there, which are two or three of like the most forward-thinking natural capital companies in Britain, and we all started around 2021.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: And and it is, we are seeing that, and and it's easier now because there are more people and it's faster and it's more interesting, and the talent that's come into the sector, you just wouldn't have got five years ago.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like the the young graduates who would have gone into a big four or into banking are now coming into the sector, and it's just transformative.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm super exciting from the next five years of climate weeks because they're on the up.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: There's no going back.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: I I I have to wonder, you know, it's always like a confluence of things that happen, but in my world, pre-2019, nature was not part of anything.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you mention nature, people said it was a distraction from carbon emissions, or and it was all infighting, or it was all climate action means being furious at someone else or denying.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was all despair and panic and denial.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I I I we had our trillion trees chaos in 2019, but at the same time, there was another like there was like a few chaos moments that happened in 2019, and then then then like you know, the World Economic Forums and the UNs and the and then everyone starts sort of like getting on board, and then it starts being like a cool thing, and then the then the finance started flowing in, and and suddenly like over time, I I agree by 2020 or 2021, it was suddenly like wait, this is now just part of the move.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is like human well-being, environmental health is is is getting up there with GDP as one of the indicators of where where we're moving forward, and it's like it's not coming back, and people need to realize that.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Do you ever wonder?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: So someone will announce a report, a paper, a book, an initiative, and you never know at the point of announcement which is gonna be the thing that gets any traction.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because four or five of them just drop away, and then you look and you're like, oh, that has grabbed, and it's I I'm sure people have studied this, I haven't just looked into the research enough.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: But I sometimes wonder, is this gonna be one of those that grabs?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know, which of these elemental building blocks actually get us to somewhere?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: There never appears to be any rhyme or reason to it.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: I always think it's just the ones that have a big number in it.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: If someone goes, Oh, we've raised a billion dollars to give to people, people go, quickly, get behind that.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Leaf Coalition is booming, the is booming.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes they stay, sometimes they disappear.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: But either way, they bring momentum to the movement.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: That again, with this trillion trees thing, it's like no one even knows what a trillion is, but it sounds epic.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like big visionary numbers wherever they come from, often they flitter away, but the momentum just can't stop building.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's like the outrider theory, right?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: You make a leap into the future and it makes it so much easier.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Roger Bannister, four minute mile, he goes and breaks it.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: People thought it wasn't humanly possible, and then a number of people in the following weeks immediately broke it because he leapt over a barrier.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's really interesting.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: You shoot for the moon, you fall amongst the stars, which sounds it's a saying that people say, but it always feels like the opposite.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Shoot for the stars and you'll fall near the moon.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Either way, it's a it's good.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: You're getting you're getting somewhere.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: The environment sector didn't do that five years ago, though.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: No, it literally just worried about the thing straight in front of it and got sad and despair as opposed to going, no, no, no, let's go do something.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what's felt totally different.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, like, the present is it's just a future that we once feared.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we were always panicking about the future.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're like, oh, well, it's all right now, but in five years it's gonna be so bad.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, no, no, it's it's it's actually better than it was before.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: We are building, yes, yes, destructive practices are currently higher than regenerative practices, but the lines are going like that, and they are crossing without doubt in the coming years.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of the gifts about doing the type of work we do that you can genuinely believe today is as bad as it's ever gonna be, and that we are making progress, we're taking a step forward.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: It was actually um at my first book launch, a hand we did a QA afterwards, and a load of the team were on stage, and Hanna went up and said, How on earth do your so this was two years ago?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: 18 months ago?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: 18 months ago, I think.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Han went up, how on earth do your team stay so positive in the face of climate change and everything else?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: And um one of the team went, because we get to try.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: We get to try and do something, we're taking a step forward, we're doing something, we're not waiting for someone else to save us, we're actually proactive.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I think in life, if you are trying to make whatever you're doing better, that's that's that makes you feel so much better.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hundred percent agree.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's almost like people are overwhelmed by this thing going, oh God, I'll never save the world, so what's the point?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone around me is not doing anything, so what's the point?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're all sort of like quietly adhering to this this this this quiet conviction that we're doomed to a bleak future, so what's the point of even trying?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, actually, the act of trying is really fun.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And if you gain a little bit of enjoyment, don't try and save the world.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna save the world.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Just just do a thing that's a bit fun, you'll gain some enjoyment from it, and the more enjoyment you get, the more you'll do it, which will make more people more likely to do it.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the more you'll engage in the process, the more enjoyable it gets.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And sort of like you build momentum, and you might accidentally save the world whilst whilst alleviating the need to save the world.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's a famous American football coach called Bill Walsh.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: He was like the Alex Ferguson of American football in the 80s, and uh he said the score takes care of itself, so improve your processes, make yourself better every day, make everything right, forward steps, progress, organization, the score will take care of itself.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um you kind of span multiple worlds, right?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: In terms of the environment, natural capital sector, but also the academic world.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: I've uh a long time ago, I had a foot in the latter, now fully in the former.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's a really collegiate, supportive world that has built over the last five years.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: How does that compare and contrast with the academic world?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: They say academia progresses one retirement or one death at a time.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's always slower to move, which look, I actually think there's something in that.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's credibility academia brings credibility because it's slow, it is, it takes its time, it assesses any new idea, however good or bad, gets brutalized for a few years before it's sort of like collectively accepted.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And academia is as harsh uh an environment to be building in new ideas.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I do see there's this little, again, there's the sort of like every time academia takes a little step forward, actually, I would say even 30 years ago, academia was quite rightly focusing on how devastating the threat is, and society, in accordance, goes, Oh my god, yes, you're right, this threat is brutal.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it always reminded me of what Einstein used to say: science is just the formulation of everyday thinking.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's like what we what we observe and feel, we do analysis on.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if it doesn't match what we observe and feel, it's not good science.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: But if it does, we go, okay, right, that that is a real observation, and then we do more analysis and we sort of like we reinforce it into reality.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And 30 years ago, the reality of our world was there's an overwhelming threat that not enough people are aware of.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: We need urgency, we need, we need fear and panic, we need to wake up to this chaos.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I do think academia did its job beautifully back then.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think it it it highlighted the risk, the threat that society needed to like formulate its thinking around.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, I think we are in an urgent need, as you mentioned, for the opportunity story.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: We are now, everyone's aware.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: 89% of the people on the planet want to see climate action.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: They don't take that action because they're worried that no one else is doing it.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: We everybody knows, whether you want to or not.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Even Trump's planting trees on the White House lawn.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's in, everybody's aware, everybody's stressed.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is we now also know that those fears and stresses only activate our sympathetic nervous system, so it drives fight or flight reactions, which lead us to climate denial, we stick our head in the sand, or we fight against one another.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And academia needs to transition towards the opportunity story.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: The the the immense amount of regeneration that can come with our our joyful engagement in the future.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And when we start, when academia starts telling that story, I believe society is ready to latch on and build an incredible regenerative world.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: Beautiful.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um you've got a hell of a story.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: Can you give us, if if your life story was a book, give us the chapters and take us back to the start where you grew up and bring us through that contents page to get you sat here today?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: I um was born in Namibia, classic.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: My parents, I think, were on holiday, and they were like, screw it if we're cancelling our holiday to have that kid.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh born in Namibia.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: My parents were from South Africa, but we moved to Wales when I was three, uh, where I always thought I was cool because I was South African until one day Wales scored a try against South Africa in rugby and I cheered, which made me realize that I'm actually Welsh and I am to this day a Welshman.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um I yeah, went to Union Cardiff, um, you know, sent you in the capital of Wales.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Not necessarily the most um outspokenly uh competitive university, but it's an awesome place to be.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the most spectacular place to be.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: I went into university as a dyslexic, kind of struggling student, got kicked out of a class for throwing my mate's hat off his head and it landed on the projector.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And getting kicked out of that class was the best thing that ever happened on my career trajectory because I met the professor who kicked me out of the class, took me to the pub afterwards and was like, What is wrong?
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Why are you in this class if you hate it?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I don't hate it, I love a color.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm obsessed with nature, I'm obsessed with biodiversity, it's the most magical thing ever.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I just can't keep up with the classes and the you know, I can't do the reading and the stats.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he was like, nonsense.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Just find the piece of the part, piece of the journey that you enjoy and do that.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: And if you enjoy it, you'll do it more, which will make you do it more and enjoy it more.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: Are you retrospectively diagnosing the dyslexia or are you new at the time?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, no, we knew.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was I think I was like off the charts bad.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I it was like I was like 14 and and the scale went down to like eight, and I was like lower than an eight, which was, you know, I I succeeded.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: I passed my test.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I mean you you managed to get into the course in uni regardless of that.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, so that was when I was young.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: So then, you know, that there are lots of tools available for dyslexics, even back then.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we had loads of, you know, I had reading help, I had like little things that would help me read read the stuff, and I to be honest, it's not it's not reading that's the problem, it's the sort of comprehension of it.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: So either I can read out loud and I won't understand a freaking word, or I can read it and understand it and it'll just take me ages, and it was fine.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: I just put in a bit of extra effort.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't think dyslexia is in any way a hindrance, it just makes you think other ways, it makes you like get rounds.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Does that change your sort of ways of working and workflows today as a result?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Still I I like to think I'm way more creative than than you would be if you just read things and it worked.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm I'm I definitely am much more efficient at taking information from an academic paper because I don't read it.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: I like I know the places where I'm where I need to get the information from.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: I could I've not read an entire academic paper for years, and yet I consume all that information a lot.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that you know, I even remember in school, you know, when you had to like go up and sit next to the teacher and read, and then she was like, you know, she she'd be watching you read, and then one day, you know, every now and again there'd be some kid playing in the back of the thing, and she'd be like, Shh, you gotta do that.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I would notice her doing that, and I'd immediately skip like a paragraph and a half, and she'd come back and then I'd notice her attention, and then I'd be like a paragraph on, and she's like, Well, he's he's going really well, you know, like it just gets your little creative ways around the system, and um, and I think it helps creativity, yeah.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Fascinating.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh are people um how often do you tell those stories about that sort of chapter?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Does it ever come up?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: I've never told that one.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um don't talk about it.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: I did I did once do uh a speech about it with my dyslexia, but no, it's not a main.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: The reason I ask is so um my I I don't I was never diagnosed with dyslexia or anything, but I was in the maths and science for me was a piece of piss.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: And speed of thought was always fine.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: Language was awful.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like my dad could barely read, he couldn't write.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: But he was he was a builder, incredibly good, practical and engineering.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: My mum, academically awful but incredibly emotionally aware.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: I got the good bits of both, I got lucky.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: My little brother got the reverse.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: Dad's temper, mum's intellect, not good.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: So um I picked up those bits, but language I always struggled, and it wasn't so my mum got me like extra tuition to get me through GCSE English.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, people see me now, third books coming out, they see the business, uh, especially because most of the founders in this sector are Oxbridge grads.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: So they assume I was like them, and I'm like, I really wasn't like this is I had to figure out how to use my brain and how to work and those little tricks and hints and things.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm still a slow reader to now.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like um, a couple of people, Chris in the team and Matt, they turn a page, so they're they're both Oxbridge, and they're like, bang, bang.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, what are you doing?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: It takes me hours to read long form, and I still I highlight, I scribble in the margins, but I can connect ideas in a way they cannot, yeah, and the speed of processing.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, people often assume I was clever, you I wasn't.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it took me a while to figure out how to use my brain.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, reading the audiobook for my book.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, that is the most brutal torture.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've never read an entire book out like that.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: I refused to do it.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like we started, and I just wanted to change everything.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I was like, I can't go with this.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's horrendous.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: You read all your errors, all the terrible text you wrote in your book.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's carnage, but yeah.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so we're in Cardiff.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Cardiff.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I've met this professor, he's an absolute legend.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: He's literally, he he he's just told me to stop trying and to start enjoying.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I start enjoying, and lo and behold, my grades start going well, and you know how it is, and then everyone start wants to start collaborating.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Have you used that advice again with students since then?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, of course.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: I yeah, no, everything I ever advise students is about the enjoyment, definitely.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: But the book is the first time I've really articulated it.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so you know, when you take extra time to think it out, it's like now, it's now definitely part of my process.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but no, for sure, enjoying the journey is the only thing I would I want from my students.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: So like that's the only thing that matters.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, like the more you enjoy it, not only did I end up doing a bit of extra, you know, I I worked more than I was doing other.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was always trying to get out of class and trying to avoid work and blah blah blah.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you're enjoying it, it's it's intrinsic.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're motivated to do it, and then other people want to collaborate with you.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: No one tells a professional surfer to go surfing less.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I love that.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you you told me that great the other day, and I loved it.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, it's the same for everyone.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: No, no one wants to go to the party that they should go to.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: You go to the party you want to go to.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like, it's it's so weird that we have this should in our society.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: There's no should in the world, it's only can.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Get to, yeah, get to.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: So then, so then yeah, you you need ended up going really well.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: I got you know, just just got the top grade, you know, like by you know, you when you round up, um, which then that professor then offered me a PhD.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: You went straight undergrad to PhD.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: I went traveling for a couple for a year and a bit.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that was interesting, hectic.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: But um, I what I would have loved to do is traveling now, where you can like go to regenerative farms and go to eco-tour ecolodges and find them.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you couldn't even find them when we were exactly.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can find you a million now to go on the best ecotourism holiday ever.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, but then I was just frantically panicking about trying to find a hostel tomorrow and we had no internet.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: When you went to uni, did you were you even thinking about what a job might be or career?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I I I always knew that it it just had to be with nature, but I thought I was dumb, so I was like, okay, I'll I'll help clean someone's pond, or you know, I was like assuming it would be I knew it was gonna be with nature though, I had no choice for that.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um definitely didn't think it'd be in academia.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then yeah, did my PhD with this guy, and again, same philosophy, just enjoy it and a blood.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: Was the invitation um he had the topic and the question or said to you, okay.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, yeah.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't creative enough to come up with well, not I don't even think it's a creativity thing.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think students, I think there's an infinite landscape of oppos of questions you can ask in research, which is actually too overwhelming.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, where do you possibly begin in an infinite scape?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it's useful if someone goes, I in my career have found this useful and it's given rise to some papers, and then you go, okay, I can jump on that.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem in academia is you jump on that, and then your job is to persuade yourself that that little niche is the most important thing in the world, and you need to continue being the expert on that little niche for eternity because you've persuaded yourself it is so, and that is how academia gets into these little silos that get lost.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I was at that point well into the niche.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was growing fungi on petri dishes, putting bugs on them and watching them interact.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so we had um one of the founders of superorganism in this morning.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know Kevin?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: So um, and it's so interesting hearing him process uh an opportunity of an investment.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: So he falls in love quickly, just as you're supposed to do with the PhD topic.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: But then his job is to decide he's wrong as soon as possible and to test it and be like, no, actually, I'm stepping away.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: You can't really do that on a PhD.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you have to fall more and more in love for the four years.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because the last time I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat was 18 months into my PhD.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: I had not done a thing.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'd literally gone to the gym, played American football, and chased girls around.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's all I'd done for 18 months.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: Woke up and went, I am fucked.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: If I do not like, and I just started making lists, I'm like, I've just got to so effectively I did the PhD in 18 months because otherwise, you know, I'm not failing, I'm not having that.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: But it's so interesting how yeah, you are committed, it doesn't go away.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: My advice now is if someone says, should I do a PhD?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you absolutely want this to be your entire life for several years.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's not a good model for anything because it doesn't allow flexibility.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you've you've locked yourself in, you are obsessed with this topic forever.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sentence.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: But that said, I it I've got PhDs in my group who who start studying soil root architecture and end up studying cloud, you know, cloud patterns, and they they evolve throughout the PhD.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think I am very open to my PhDs going completely off top.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's always a a line of thought for um for like how you went from there to there to there to there.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there's historically too much focus on you've got to do one study and then that's got to lead you on to the next study, which is leading you onto the next study, which isn't how the world works.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: So is that more is that widespread now or principally you?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: It it's it's principally me, but it it's okay if if If your PhDs are publishing really high impact papers, then then people won't be so critical.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: But if you start like so we're very different, we haven't pivoted in terms of the business model, but most do, most have three or four.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: So why wouldn't a research approach have pivots as well?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's insane not to pivot.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: No, no industry, no organization would ever be built in where you're like, right, unfortunately, we're rigidly structured in this way forever.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Any change, AI emerges, you cannot engage in it.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, you there's no way that inflexibility is a benefit.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so PhD is met.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: The um I met Greg Jackson, the octopus NG CEO's chief of staff last week.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: She did her master dissertation on the application of machine learning to improve sustainable businesses, etc.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, that must have been the most amazing time to do it.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, not overly, I was two-thirds of the way through the research when ChatGTP arrived.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: So that kind of meant it point.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: It became irrelevant.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: Bless her.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: So fun.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and the PhD was on?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, my PhD was on.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: To start with, what was it on?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, it stayed on this.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was flattening soil into trays, popping fungi on, watching them grow, and literally asking the question do different bugs make the architecture of the fungi grow differently?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Which was fascinating to look at.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful, incredible images.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: Not necessarily the most vitally important of questions, but it did teach me how to pitch an idea.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're pitching, you're trying to sell a paper, you're trying to explain why it's really important that I know that a calumbola eats fungi a bit differently than a woodlouse, you have to be able to argue that hard.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think is that the most valuable sort of secondary skill you've got during the time?
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my definitely my skill is being able to convince people of the relevance of something.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so as we're finishing the PhD, were you thinking about career at that point?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: Were there commercial applications?
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: What was your focus?
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: No, I mean, honestly, selling what I was doing set me up for selling anything.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as I was out of the PhD, I was like, oh my god, right, now I'm gonna start researching what I think might be might be relevant.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I got into soil carbon loss, you know, how you know warming is driving soil carbon loss, which is driving more warming.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's such an easy sell when you discover that.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like it's actually we've got a devastating feedback loop that might drive our planet towards collabs, or modelling global forests.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the easiest pitch ever.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to explain why forests are important when you start a thing at your introduction.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it was like I'd open, it was like I was now out of the PhD.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: My mind was suddenly, I was like free to go, right?
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'll research anything.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: It can be the most interesting thing in the world or the or the most impactful thing in the world, and I can just go.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: My viver.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the guy said, Well, it was tricky because I had two major issues.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: One, my mate, I've never told anyone this, and and my thesis does exist, so someone's gonna be able to find this.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: My mate had snuck into my PhD and tweaked some of the references.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: He called one of them was penis URA, and the other one was I can't quite remember.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Do we still speak to this mate?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Mate, he's my best mate, he's an absolute legend.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the other one was Lady Gina, I think.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, back in the day.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know if we're I don't know if we're allowed that one.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I and and so and and the the guy had he gone through it and he just circled so all my papers were published, right?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: So he couldn't actually edit anything, but he just circled that, and there was another pointy circle where it was like, So you do you remember doing like the most basic of statistics, like an ANOVA or like a linear model?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: This was ANOVA.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was comparing two things, and in one of the experiments, I had one bar that was like this and one bar that was zero, and I'd done a statistical test showing that this number is statistically different from this number, and he was like, Yeah, but you know you can't you you can't include zeros in an anover.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's you you can't have a statistical test looking at that.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Oh, and he went, but it's published, so I can't do anything about it.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, that was the easiest ever.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: So post PhD, straight into research?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because the that guy, Heaven Jones, I need to say his name.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: The guy is an absolute legend.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: I swear I'd be cleaning ponds now if it wasn't for Heaven Jones.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: Tells me to love it.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is he still around?
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: He is still around.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's he shouldn't be.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: If Heaven's listening, retire and chill out, please.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: He is an angel of a human.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: He like, while I was struggling in my academia, there was another kid in our school who was struggling socially, and he would meet me and him individually on a regular basis, teaching me, encouraging me to just like, you know, try and do more experiments, and encouraging that guy, he was he like set him targets of like, you know, speak to someone else in a party this week or or you know, just go to a gathering.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Or he he would like set him social targets.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: He he's truly just out to support anyone he engaged with.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: Send him a copy of your book.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: I I I can't remember.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think he'd care about my book.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I I speak with him a lot.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're very close.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: I need to, yeah, I'll get it.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: So so often there's someone when we tell stories like this of people's background, there's somebody who had a grandparent or a teacher or something.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: And more often than not, you go, have you told them?
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, no.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I didn't think about that.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: Tell them.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: So you've got it covered, it's fine.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: I have written about him in the book extensively.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: The guy is a legend.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: So he now helps everyone.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: He he's just doing too much.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: He teaches everyone.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: He he goes to bed at three and comes back into work at six.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's just one of those people.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: He's probably one of those that if he does stop.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm I'm I'm yeah.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I want him to I want him to retire and be healthy because he's gonna he's say he's just joy for everything that encounters him.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, um weirdly getting emotional about Heaven now.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's alright.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: So Heaven sought me out.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: I did an amazing PhD, I loved it, soil, trays, and fungi, but but published all of my papers, which you know then set you up.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: So he I then got a job in Yale.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: My postdoc was in Yale, and then it was sort of like from that moment, you know, they they say the only difference between people who get to Yale and not is that they applied.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I would have never even considered applying before I had these papers, but now that I've got these papers, I was like, oh, I'll apply.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: And no one's smarter, it's just you're more open-minded and you're Are they actually not smarter?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think so.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: They are more open-minded though.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you they they just don't have the barriers, the the barriers are removed, the self-imposed barriers.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're all smart in our own different ways, but they've just like, oh no, I can of course I can try that.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the the core, the root core of of intelligence, I think, knowing that it's worth it.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: That was my longest sort of position pre-po pre-professorship.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I was four years, and it was epic.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: I I had so I I was carrying all my fungi actually at that point.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: We were doing like thermal adaptation of microbes and showing how you know climate change is going to stimulate microbial activity, driving more climate change.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it was during that that I had a pretty brutal stroke.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: I had a uh I jumped off a cliff and smashed my head into the water.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I jumped off the cliff before and I thought and I was terrified of it.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I like went in a full pencil, entered perfectly because I was so riddled with fear.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: The second time.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: How high are we talking?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was about 40 feet.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, a bit over 40 feet.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was hectic.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: It was one where the like where the waves you stop seeing waves below, you just see like like shimmering surface.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was like I remember being up there being like, wait a minute, I can't.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's a regular activity, cliff diving and well, I I do I do like a bit of a little bit of an adrenaline hit.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, um was into it, and I and I I've actually had I've had other injuries jump since then jumping off cliffs.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: I jumped, I jumped off a cliff and ripped my um I can't I don't know if it's called the filtrum or the the little line that holds your your lip to your thing, and it was just like blood everywhere.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, what have I done now?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't quite as bad as the stroke.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um so anyway, landed when I jumped off the second time.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, I've done this before, I can handle it.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: Halfway in the air, was like, oh my god, I'm still shitting myself.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is mental and looked down to assess the situation, and the water twatted me in the face, and it was hard.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I came out, had a little nap.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: You were conscious when you came up.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, I was just sleepy, and then my mates were still with me.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I was with my mates, we we were, and I sort of stopped having the beers, and they carried on having the beers, and yet I was still acting more drunk than them.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was it was all a bit weird.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I they one of my mates told me the other day, actually, it was my birthday, and he reminded me, he was like, We were late for watching the US Open.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: We were sprinting to watch the US Open, but apparently, in my mad state, I I forced them all to stop on the street because I had to buy a trilby.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's never happened before.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: I've never desperately needed a trilby and missed a tennis match as a result.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was doing it, it was weird stuff.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was walking into walls buying trilbies, it was all over the place.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I yeah, went into hospital and he said essentially he was like, Oh, you've just got a concussion.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember this period?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like, is your are you aware of like what happened?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I I weirdly, you know how when you speak it out loud, you turn it into reality?
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I wouldn't have remembered it had I not been speaking to people.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: But people were like, Oh, how are you doing?
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I have the distinct feeling.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: I I remember describing this distinctly, like, I have the distinct feeling that I am not the same human that that went to bed.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: So like I I I I know that there was an entity that we call Tom Crowther, and I know he did all this dumb stuff and had a PhD and did whatever, but I am not that I am a different entity, I am separate, and it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't unsettling, it wasn't like bad, it was just like different.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, I am kind of like separated, it was weird.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: Went to the doctor, he goes, Oh, I'm sure you just got a concussion, put me in a CT scan, and he just sort of he came in, came back, and he just like had a neck brace and put it around my neck.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: Were you still on the table at this point?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: Were you sat up?
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm sat up and he's just don't move, don't move, the ambulance is coming, the ambulance is coming.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, Why?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why was I cycled here?
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, just don't.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: And were you talking as clearly as you are now?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: I was sweating weirdly, so it made me I lost the regulation on the my on the right side of my body, so my left side just went chaos.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was sweating like a beast on the left side to compensate.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then yeah, it gets me in the in the in the hospital, and you know, I was told that it's a called a pontine stroke.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's in the pons region of your brain, which is your brain stem, so it's up there with the most important places.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it, you know, it does autonomic stuff like breathing and talking and thermoregulation, the stuff that you need to not die.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: So often people die or get locked in syndrome, so you you're unable, you know, you lose your bodily function, but you're in there.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's the worst.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that would be way worse than dying.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I can't speak for people who've done it, but I would be scared of that.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: Make the same choice as you would.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and yeah, I it was mental because I was in the hospital, and it every doctor comes in was like, Oh, mate, you're chatting.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is fine.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, don't worry, we'll get you out of here in no time.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: Let me just go check it.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just go check the scan and see what's going on.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: And they come back going, uh, mate, I'm afraid we're gonna have to keep you in for a long time.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: You should be dead.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like, literally, it was that.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: They literally phrased it.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: I was in a ward, and I I still to this day can't remember the name of the ward, but it was a ward that implies it's the imminent death ward.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was like the ward where we're ready to pack people up.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was You've got to use the imminent death ward somewhere, like on a sticker on a door or something.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was carnage.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then one of the doctors, when I was going to bed that night, I was like, he said, Look, we're gonna have someone next to you all night to puncture your lung in case you stop breathing and do that.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Why?
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: So they were expecting it to progress.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: They were like, Oh, this is gonna get worse.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, I have the impression that like a golf ball-sized region of my brain had died and like a single neuron had made it, you know, like one tiny, and they were like, if any movement happens and that neuron goes, it's it's all over.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: So they were already punctual my lung.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just like, Why has this happened?
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why could this how is this possibly happening?
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: You managed to go to sleep.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: You must have been like, what the oh well.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: I remember trying to cry.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was so British.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, I was like, this is the saddest I could ever feel.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've wasted my life.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: Everything's I every time I've drunk a beer, it's the biggest waste of my life.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because this thing that is your consciousness is everything that exists, and how could I have jeopardized it?
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: What was and I tried to cry and I went, Oh fuck, I'm not going out that way.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: Right, all right, enough of that.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't bring myself to cry, but I was devastated.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so I asked this guy, what happened?
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he was like, you know, it could be any number of things, you know, it's weird that you're 26, but maybe it's the jumping off the cliff that doesn't seem like it would have been enough.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's you've got AIDS, and I was just like, What?
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: What are you just gonna drop that one in there?
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I was like cycling through every person I'd ever had any sexual interaction with, being like, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, guys, for sure.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is definitely it.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was carnage, and that night I was, yeah, it was I I promised that I would never touch a drop of alcohol or anything that affects your consciousness ever, ever again.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that lasted not so long, but uh but I came immediately out and went, oh my god, I need a beer.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: But uh it was it was a very profound feeling at the time.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like you can lose your legs, you can lose your arms, you can lose your everything.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: It would be horrendous.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: I empathize with anyone who's experienced that, but it's not as bad as losing your the thing that's creating reality.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a big worry.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: How long were you in hospital?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Only four days because there was no nothing else wrong.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: So they did tests, they did every test you've ever known, and like everything was fine.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was just there's a hole in your head, there's a hole in your brain.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's the weird thing.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: And have you seen the scans?
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: So does it just look like a darker area?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: He uh I can't actually remember if it was darker or whiter now.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: I it was like 15 years ago.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um but yeah, it was just a little area where we could yeah, you just goes, you know, this is the stroke like when someone shows you a you know baby in a what's it called in one of those scans.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um but it was yeah, it was it was just like unreal.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then I the the th the really weird thing is I came out and I was on a high.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was like on crack.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: It was like the best possible feeling.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was just like, I can't tell you how much I appreciate the feeling of my fingers.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: That I'll never experience life as dick colourful and and beautiful as that.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like walking out of that hospital.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: Did you think you were fine as you were walking out?
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like as you come out, you're like, Well, that's fine, I'm alright.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh no, I did think so I I knew that I was a little bit wobbly.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: I taught myself to juggle in the hospital just so I could call it a stroke of genius.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I was exactly, and I was like, you know, I was I was walking alright.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was I was I I knew that I was overthinking stuff a little bit.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, is that normal?
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: Is that how my brain's supposed to interpret stuff?
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, whatever, I'm living the dream, I get a brain, it's fine.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it was it was like good for the next week or so until I went back for my routine checkup.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, it wasn't routine.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there was a there was there were people wanting to study this because it is very rare for someone to have a Pontine stroke and be totally and symptomless.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I went for these checkups, and the guy goes, How are you feeling?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I'm not gonna say I'm totally normal.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: I I'll say, look, I'm you know, I'm feeling good, but every now and again I do wonder if if I'm seeing that tree right or if I'm feeling that feeling right.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you sound like How do we know we were seeing it right to start with?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly, exactly.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it set me off on a very philosophical journey that hasn't stopped until today.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the at the time, I guess I hadn't explored those considerations, and I was like, I'm not sure if what I'm perceiving is.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: Did anything like um your taste in things?
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like they sometimes say people like coffee, come out and hate coffee, or anything like that changed immediately?
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: I a few of my friends said I was a little bit less of a twat afterwards, but apparently that faded.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe they would just be nice.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they got a headache after the lies.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um they no, I I came, I I I had this doctor's appointment, and he goes, How are you doing?
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Yeah, all right, but I'm always wondering if I'm perceiving things quite right.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm always wondering if I'm a bit a bit strokey.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he just went, Oh, oh god, uh right, you seem like someone who overthink overthinks things.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's something we want to sort of account for, we want to we want to handle that.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm gonna prescribe you some antidepressants.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point, when I was 26 in my life, I'd not even considered that I was depressed or could be.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: I I you know, depression is a real thing in the world, but it happened.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't at that I I I mean, my timeline's not fully tight on this, but when I think back to so I'm a little bit older than you, but coming out of uni at a similar time.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, it might have lined up pretty closely because you travelled between degree and so people weren't talking about depression.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_02: No, and it just especially not with men, like just get on with it.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly, exactly.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: And and they were certainly not like you know, work on yourself and and explore, explore your feelings.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: The concept of taking antidepressants to me would have been like, well, fuck, I'm weak, I've failed, I can't cope.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly, and yet that's the only option offered to you by the doctor.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you're like, so either I'm weak and I and and acknowledging that I'm depressed.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, and of course, you're in a US context on this point.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: They love a bit of a of course.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: They love a bit of a pill.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: So they so he's give me these pills.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: In I again, I don't in any way think he obviously he was doing it for the right reason.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think he wanted to help me.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, but my god, the feelings that I experienced in that moment when he said, I'll give you antidepressants.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, me, what shh?
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I like it was physical pain, like tingling of anxiety tingling down my body.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: I remember, I remember it going from top to bottom.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: I remember it's like one of the most mindful experiences of my life.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was horrendous.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh my god, I could be depressed, I could be, what is that gonna feel like?
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, that sounds so bad.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: What how would I get out of it?
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: What happens if I don't?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: And like, and then and then you go, oh my god, all these thoughts confirm that I must be depressed.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: That is undoubtedly depression.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: That is depression acting.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, it feels awful.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: It feels awful when I say that.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I've just said it, it's done now.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: I've I'm gonna call my dad.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and like dad goes, of course you're not depressed.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: That is terrible diagnosis.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do not listen to that.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: But we'd said the word depression eight times in the conversation, so it was like more in me.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I I had two years of that process never stopping.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: Never stopping.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: Just did you take the pill?
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't take the pills, but it didn't matter.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: I literally just continually went, continuously went, just think, just look forward, just don't worry, don't you're not thinking about it because it's fine because it's not there, but it's uh obviously I'm it's there because I'm oh no, I'm feeling the adrenaline.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay, right.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: Just keep it's okay, just smile, look at night, yeah, talk to the next person, it's fine because everything they don't see it, they don't notice.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: Were you functioning relatively normally externally?
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think my friends noticed much.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's what they always say, right?
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_02: You don't notice.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but you'd already learnt how to be a really good liar by that point.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe because the tools and techniques you'd picked up to mask the dyslexia and the getting through shit.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: If I was you, I'd have been having a brutal migraine too.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was like literally, I yeah, you you like I wasn't saying I'm I'm when you know I wasn't denying it, but I also wasn't saying it out loud because you don't like saying it out loud again reifies it.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: You've said it, which then reinforces it.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, and every time it was the worst thing is like when things are bad, you're like, oh god, this is there's never an end to this.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: But when things are good, you also don't feel good, and you're like, oh, that means I've lost the feeling of good, which reinforces your belief that it's bad, and then it's like you're just traveling down this cycle of thoughts.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm not sure it's the right phrase, but that overthinking pattern, yeah.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: Did that present before the stroke?
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: I am of the belief that there is no such thing as an overthinking pattern.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone on the planet has a perpetual voice of thinking.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: We are whether you're high achiever, low achiever, dumb, smart, what you know, based on someone's per perspective of you, like it doesn't, we are all talking to ourselves inside our heads.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: With it, however much you listen to that thought doesn't really matter.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: The point is, it is a totally natural saying I'm not thinking thoughts in my head is like saying the I don't feel the air moving past my body.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it's perpetually there.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: You can just latch onto it with anxiety or allow it to progress like the wind.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: And when we're feeling good, those thoughts are just they're just moving like clouds.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: And when we're feeling bad, they are owning and shaping our reality.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's it was through Buddhist practices that I discovered over that, over those two years that I got really into those thoughts.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, they're not a bad thing, they're just an interesting, they're like birds tweeting outside the window.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: They're like cars driving by outside.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're not they're not good or bad, they're just things, they're just things that are flying by.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: And you can, and and the more you sort of like appreciate that interesting pattern of those thoughts, the more you can be like, do you know what?
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna, I don't need to focus on those ones.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Those ones aren't necessarily the thoughts of depression aren't bad things.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: That it's depression is a thing inside, or it's a seed inside all of us that's there to be like, hey, look, I'm here in case of an emergency and you need some adrenaline, or or I'm here in case you need to protect yourself from something, I'll be, I'll be there.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also seeds of joy and happiness, then and you can allow yourself to sort of like the more you sort of like look at those thoughts, the more you can have agency to be like, oh, do you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna appreciate those ones and allow my awareness to settle on the other ones, and then that fertilizes the joyful ones, and you can gain the the the agency for more enjoyment and it and it starts being a feedback loop that builds in a different direction.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I I don't think I'm an overthinker.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think anyone is.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are just thoughts.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_02: Do you do you think of and describe your brain as part of you or separate?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: I would I would say m my consciousness is a is an experience that that I am part of.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: My brain is just, you know, the fleshy part.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like another organ.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I definitely wouldn't say it's I I think arguably all of the biggest challenges in the human condition are in in the creation of other.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's like we say this is a thing and that's a thing, and therefore this can fight against this or this can disagree with that.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we need to recognise the whole holisticness of it all.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_02: I am I think when I say my brain, I mean my consciousness.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: But I do think about it as separate in that I will catch myself thanking my brain for things.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think I told you this when we last spoke.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: I can I can set this has developed recently.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: I can remember every name I've ever heard.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: And up until being about 30, I could re This is how I ended up getting a first of my PhD.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_02: I realized I could play back conversations if I turned up to lectures.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not not written words, or if I hear a conversation, I can I can recite it back.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: So ultimately, it's not like visual memory, uh photographic memory.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_02: I don't see it on the page, I can remember the but if you think about it, I had audio, I didn't read, I had audiobooks as a kid, and then I had a TV in my room.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: So for years I'd been drilled listening, listening, listening.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um so realize I go to lectures, I can just play most of it back, so that'll do.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_02: That was enough to get through.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: So my grades went like 50%, 60%, 80%.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: Because in the third year I was like, oh, I can do this now.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_02: So that that that clicked in.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's an interesting way of like sort of processing your brain, but I've I've realized lately we could be having a conversation.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: I can want to share a story, and I can say to the back of my brain, please go back and find that and give me it back.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: And and we can be still having this conversation, and then it'll go, Rich, Rich, I've got your answer, and it'll return it.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_02: And and I can leave that going for a while.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that's developed in the last year or so in terms of thinking.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_02: But I I will say, Oh, thank you, brain, or whatever.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_02: And we've just got a new PA that's working.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: She's and she goes, You know, you thank your brain for stuff.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, Yeah, and she's like, That's you, like you're doing it.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, It doesn't feel like me.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like it's just but that's funny you say that because I do like that.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: I really it it feels like a mindfulness thing.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you're being mindful of a process that your that your holistic body is doing.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, you feel like thanks exactly.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: When you when you do again, when you like mindfully notice something, it it like it only brings a sort of like a joyfulness.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like that again, one of the Buddhist monks that I I I really like, he always says, like every time he's like furious or pissed off or upset or angry or whatever, he he like take because it what it does, it like consumes you, and you're like your whole body's in it, and you're like, I've gotta I gotta do some stuff, I've gotta say some things and tell people where they're at.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: But he he has this practice of going, oh hello, to sort of whatever the emotion is.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, Oh, hello, thanks, thanks for being here to sort me out.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he like immediately minimizes it and turns it into a thing that's within him, not him within the thing.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, Oh, thanks for being here.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'll I'll come back to you when I need you.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: When I'm like in a physical fight, maybe I'll need I'll need you.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: But right now, I'm gonna I'm gonna let some of the other guys get involved.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like this like mindful awareness of the journey that is the human condition is really cool.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't think I believe everyone feels or experiences it the same way.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_02: You don't?
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think if if people are blessed with quick brains and can think about stuff and have a level of almost intellectual horsepower.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know when you speak to someone you know a level.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think the cost of that is the thought pattern and the weight and the awareness and seeing things at speed.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think there are people in my life that um certainly younger years that um didn't have that intellectual thing, and the benefit for them is they didn't feel or aware of things in quite the same way, so they didn't have to carry the consciousness that we perhaps do.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: I I do I have this, I I totally have the same thing.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: I've got some best mates who I'm like, you're never gonna be depressed because you're never gonna ever think that.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: You're just doing you, and I'm so jealous that you're named.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I also reckon I have this theory that I've also never spoken out loud.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think 30-year-olds are the most fucked.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think I think there's this thing between our conscious awareness and our subconscious awareness.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the conscious awareness sort of comes out.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: It like the conscious is more prominent than the subconscious after like 17 and it peaks at 30 and then it sort of goes back down.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: And like by, I don't know, at some point it sort of like goes back the other way, and by the, you know, by the time you're 90, I'm sure that it's more subconscious than conscious.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember just being when you're 30, you're like, everything is a thought that is very tangible, and you're like, can't it's hard to escape, and you can get consumed by those thoughts quite easily.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I've and I most people who I've spoken about depression to, they they describe that like late 20s or early 30s were like prime time.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you cannot get away from your thoughts because they are all about they're all over the place.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder if that timeline moves with respect to sort of world events and um your personal economic situation and stuff.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_02: So the curve's the same, but the the I am a bit more.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there's a peak of of the amount to which thoughts are prominent in our mind and shaping our who knew this was going to be a graph heavy podcast classic.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_02: So the end of that period, was there an easing out of that, or was there a I'm sweet, I'm good after that period.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: How did you bring yourself through?
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I I'm I I heard this podcast by a guy called Alan Watts.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Many people know him.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: He's like a he's like a kind of like he he he's a philosopher, but he definitely tends towards the Buddhist side of things.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: And he he was I was still in this depression, like just unable to think a thought that got me out of it.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: And like when you try and fix a problem with the thing that got you into the problem, it's obviously you know the classic.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm trying to think my way out of a problem that is driven by thoughts, which is not helping.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: Every thought made things worse.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he he just did this thing, it got it nailed me at the time, and I'm not sure if it resonates with others.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, imagine you're on a desert island, no telecommunications, no access to anything, there's a and you somehow learn that a comet's coming to hit Earth, everyone's gonna die.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: Everything, everyone is gonna die in three minutes, no access to them, you can't tell anyone, you can't talk about it.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: You might think it'd be horrible, but actually, for those three minutes, once you've like acknowledged the moment, it might be the most free you've ever experienced because the human condition is so focused on the anxiety of the future.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: We are always worried about kind of, oh, am I gonna pay my taxes?
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: Am I gonna get a job?
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is my girlfriend gonna cheat on me?
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: Am I gonna lose my this?
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: Am I gonna, I'm worried about where I'm gonna sleep tonight, and my hotel run out?
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like you're always projecting into the future an anxiety that hasn't arrived yet.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and and and it's a state of existence, is this this state of like fear of the future?
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he was like, for those three minutes, you might just actually feel it all and go, oh my god, oh my god, the wind is so fascinating and the sand is so tingly and the grass is so sticky, and it's all un I mean, like this little firework display of emotions, like a human body is just this firework display of just unbelievableness all the time.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: And soon it'll be gone forever.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: There won't be pain, it'll just be gone forever, as far as we know.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so you all you've got to do is just experience it unconditionaled, unconditioned it for a few for a couple of minutes, and you might just have the best three minutes of your life.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: At the time he was saying to me, I was just like, oh my god, that would be unreal to not fear that I'm gonna get more depressed and that I'm gonna go insane and that I'm gonna get be one of you know, be a crazy person on the street, you know, begging for money and or going to insane asylums.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I was so scared of the future that the idea that I could just exist in those three minutes was nice.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then he went, in the grand scheme of things, for the 13 billion years of our of our universe, your three three minutes is um complete uh completely equivalent to the 80 years you were planning to live anyway.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's just nothingness, 80 years of full firework display, and then nothingness.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you should be treating every minute like that.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just like, oh my god, that's incredible.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: I truly, I and I just started feeling all my feelings and and no and noticing all the thoughts, even the bad ones, as like just an interesting expression of existence.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like they're all just fascinating.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is just fascinating, and you know I was just like in it for that minute.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so honestly, it was quite a hard stop.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: My depression ended when I when I heard that, and it like got better and better and better over time, and and I felt like I'd developed a real resilience through that two years.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you think that resonated with you so much?
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's because I was so overwhelmingly scared about the future.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was convinced that this thought that I'm having now is giving me more depression, which is then necessarily it's like I was on an inevitable progression towards losing my friends, losing my family, losing my sanity, losing more job, losing my place in society, and losing my mind.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the only scenario, the best scenario possible is one flew over the cookie's nest.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was just gonna be mad.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I and it was and I was it was like an inevitability.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: I was that's the way things are going because every thought was only making me more stress, which was giving me more thoughts.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then suddenly I was like, oh, wait a minute, I can just be here, and actually, here is unreal, and it's I can feel my fingertips and they're incredible.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like even if I died in 10 seconds, this is still awesome.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it was like it suddenly awoke like woke something in me that was an appreciation for the present.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_02: Has anyone ever asked you how a thought moves through your mind?
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: They've never asked me that question.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: So let me buy you some time.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um mine a firework displays give me a word, it goes cool every which direction.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: I have to decide which of those like multicoloured mind maps to grab hold of, and then that one goes to other things, and that one goes to other things, and they move me into times and places and things like that.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um couple of other answers I've had.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_02: We've got this board member, he's like James Bond.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: He's so suave and sophisticated.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_02: And he, if he expresses a thought, it is a perfectly formed, beautiful wave, and he's thought about every aspect of it, and it is done.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_02: Delivered, it is delivered.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Abby, our marketing manager, she says her thoughts are like tube maps.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_02: She goes somewhere, is it left or right?
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's left.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_02: Go somewhere, is it left or right?
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: They're very linear and blocky in that regard.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_02: How do thoughts move through your mind?
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually thinking similar to almost like just being on a road in a city where where I don't get to choose, I don't choose right or left.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just thinking about this one, and then I've gone right, and I'm not I'm only thinking about this one, and then I've gone left, and then I'm only thinking I'm totally absorbed by the last one.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, I don't, I'd love to see the firework display where I can be like, oh, that connects to that, and I and I can take this route, but I don't.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just like fully absorbed in everything.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you say you'd love to see it.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's pretty noisy.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: I can believe it.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's when I say it's taken me a lot of years to control that.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_02: And if I have a drink of alcohol, the connections are just a mess.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I can't find so I'll know it's there.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like the the word or the name, I'll know it's there, and I can't get it.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_02: I can't get to it, and that's so frustrating.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's the bit uh it's funny, you said you use the phrase losing my mind, and in my head, I saw you like try and grab it and pull it back.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's the bit that scares me more than anything.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because, and I know I know Alzheimer's and things like this, it's perfectly logical to be afraid of that, but my identity is so tied to the way my brain works, that's the bit I'm I'm scared of in terms of losing because yeah, it is it is instantaneous the way thoughts move for me.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like but you say it's logical to be afraid of that.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: I agree it's it's a scary thing, and yet our logic to be afraid means that we have bad feelings now, even before getting it.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, yeah, it's understandable to be afraid of it, not logical.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_00: But if we can like allow ourselves to be first appreciating the awesomeness of this current moment, and then even looking at that fear as another wave, another firework, another, oh look at that fascinating expression of the moment.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like you you you gain a sort of like freedom from it that is unbelievable.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like I freedom was the thing that I've that I craved the most during my depression.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_00: I was in a dark tunnel, and every single thought, every step, every action took me further down, and there was no way out.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I was in it, I was a small thing, and the depression was bigger than me, and it was Are you still doing adventurous stuff in that period, like outdoory stuff?
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but but for the reason that many people actually say, I was doing it to try and stop thoughts.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, if I have enough adrenaline, I won't think thoughts.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's true, it works.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like you got you do an intense rock climb and you can only think about the angle of your finger.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is true, for that moment you're free, but then you come back down, you go, it's like waking up.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you wake up and you got some anxiety and it just goes and it takes over.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_00: I would have that the second I stopped rock climbing or the second I stopped kite surfing, it would just back in.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh god, right, we're in again.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: What what year did we come out of this period?
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: I can't tell you the I was 26 and I came out when I was 28.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: So um 12 someone can do the maths.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_00: 14?
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_00: 12 years ago.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you're right, I'm 40.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm 40 now.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_00: 40 this weekend.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, correct.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: Is that is that chapter two?
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: Is that the second half?
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: I would say so.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_00: I I so literally for my research, the implications were were immediate.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like I not only was all fear of doing big picture research vanished, I was like, right, I'm gonna only do global stuff now.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna do, I'm gonna I remember coming up being like, oh my god, we haven't I've only got a moment on this planet.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've got to, I'm I'm not, I can't wait to get to the the crazy stuff.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna go big now.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the next study I did was mapping the world's trees, the first global sort of biodiversity assessment I've ever done.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'd been in Petri dishes until then.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um first time technology came into play.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't do it.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: I had to meet people who are brilliant at it.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, you know, I was I could do the theory, I could do the the the ideation, but the you know, coding up a global model, I was like, oh my god, I need to find people.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is this is pre-vibe coding, oh my god, yes, natural language models.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, this is a long time ago.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: So this was we, you know, these were linear models.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: We did it in the first one.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was like really, but at every single pixel on the entire planet, very computationally intense, a lot of computation, like computer, you know, figuring out computational challenges.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: And um, but it was like until that time, I would have never dreamed of trying to do a global study because who the hell am I to say anything like that?
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: And my P my professor, the guy I was working with, was just like, what?
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing trees.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: I've never even worked on like I've never even worked on trees, let alone global trees.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've never oh, okay, you can give it a go.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then we got it published in Nature.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: We showed there's three trillion trees on the planet.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was like this this enormous global, you know, media of chaos.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he was loving it.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_00: He was like, again, I was lucky enough to have a flexible enough Ph Ph uh postdoc supervisor that he was like, yeah, go for it.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: And he would have got away with that in the UK.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, only because I brought in my own money, so I actually was funded by myself, so it was fine.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_00: But no, no, I I think normally academic uh an academic supervisor wouldn't the narrative we get more than anything is you should be in the US rich.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_02: This would fly ten times.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's true.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is very true actually.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I got advised by multiple professors in in in the UK don't even bother with academia because there's there's no point, you'll never make a difference.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then you get to America and it's like everyone feels like they're gonna change the world, and whether it's right or wrong, it feels good.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're really fortunate now because I don't get this anymore.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_02: But early in my career, it was like, you're a bit much, can we turn it down?
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, whereas in the US, they're like, oh no, turn this, please bring it more 100%.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now that is a good thing about the US.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I there's lots of things I don't love, but the but the like enthusiasm for for expression is is cool.
• 1:00:14
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so we've got three trillion trees.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, three trillion, the world has three trillion trees, all very exciting.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_00: From that minute, then so sort of like I don't know.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: There were others doing global scale biodiversity stuff, but but really biodiversity had been this this field that or ecology is it was a field that was done in locations, and so one person would do an experiment in a field, someone would do an experiment in another field, they would get different results and they would argue about it.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, no, no, no, there's just yours is a dry field and yours is a wet field, or whatever.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so this this global modelling approach was really useful.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: And like I got lots of funders approaching me, and and I got a Marie Curie award and uh to to do it to do this work, and we kept working on global soils, global biodiversity, global profile important to you.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to say no, but I I don't I I just really wanted to keep doing it, and the profile enabled you me to keep doing it, so it's kind of like a a bit circular.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: I I I I I I I would imagine it was yes, but but because it's useful.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_02: I I feel very similar.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I think um as the business has grown as my sort of personal um profile.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it allows you to get to places you couldn't have done.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_02: It unlocks connections and conversations, and you know, I I can pretty much speak to anyone we want now within a couple of comments, which really helps.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_02: And speed of execution, speed of change, but it's not for the sake of that, yeah it's to grow a sector and to help bring this to life and all the things we talked about about how London Climate Week now feels.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_02: We've played a little part in that in terms of bringing that forward, and without those networks and connections, you can't do it.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_02: You can't do it on your own.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, no, exactly.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's a means to an end, and it is a useful thing to use as long as you're like sort of mindful of the fact that that's not you.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a little picture you're painting.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, we're all doing it, whether you have a prof a public profile or not, everyone is managing their own profile.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: Again, you might want to be the most private person ever, but you still are reacting to the way others you think others think about you.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: If I think you think I'm dumb, I'm gonna be a little bit more shy, and maybe that'll reinforce the dumbness.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: If I think you think I'm funny, maybe I'll tell more jokes and maybe it'll it'll work out.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like it we're always sort of curating our little profile.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, when it becomes public, it does become a useful asset.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: In in your I mean it's a key part of fundraising.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_00: 100% as well.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: I I 90 90% of our funding comes from fundraising from that profile.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not, it's just simply a fact like normally you academics have to rely heavily on writing grant proposals.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't done one since I was in my postdoc.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_02: And it's the thing most academics hate.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh exactly, it's brutal.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: You spend you're judged based on how many papers you make, and yet you have to spend 90% of the time fundraising to make the paper, which is in itself hard.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's carnage.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I've been freed up from that, which then frees all my time to do research.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's been useful.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then a few years later, we had this next study, which then shows okay, we've three trillion trees on the planet now.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: There was once six trillion, and we've halved the number, but of the amount we've lost, a third of it could be available for recovery.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: And just carnage ensues.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was unreal.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: So at the time, like in the in the moments afterwards, it was all really positive.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's like, oh my god, nature has the potential to recover at massive scale.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's 0.9 billion hectares, one trillion trees, and a third of our carbon drawdown needs.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: So a third of what we need to draw down in the fight against climate change.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like nature had not been part of the conversation.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: Nature had not been a prominent component of COPS or climate weeks at all until that point.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was all about emissions reduction, which is, you know, top priority.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: But nature was not in the conversation at all.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then suddenly, oh my god, this is a third of the conversation.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it was like this huge everyone in the nature world was like, yes, finally we're getting recognized.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: Fine.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, yes, we're here.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, there was, because of the amount of attention, it was like, I think it was 60 million people in the first day and 600 million by the end of the month.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was just like it didn't, you know, normally a 60 million thing spikes and then goes back down.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_00: But this would kept growing.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then the World Economic Forum launched their trillion tree campaign.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: The UN decade on ecosystem restoration gets launched.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_00: Trump starts planting trees in the White House.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: What did you have around you in terms of support at this point to how I was like, you know, I was a 30-year-old, enthusiastic you know, scientist going, oh guys, yeah, nature's good, nature's good, I promise.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I was so naive and dumb.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_00: I can't like I can't tell you the amount of mistakes.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's like everything was a mistake, and they amplify on one another, and every criticism you you you react incorrectly, and every praise you incorrect you react incorrectly, and then they add to one another and they fit.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I was trying to amplify how great this message is, and what once the the story started getting twisted a little bit, so again, through no one's intentional fault, the media reads this as plant a trillion trees to save the world.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_00: And in our heads, m most of us think that's a reasonable in fact that they think that's what the paper was about.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you think of planting a trillion trees, you think, right, we're gonna have to get machines, we're gonna have rows and rows of trees, we're gonna hopefully catch as much carbon as we can, and it turns into a massive carbon farming image in your mind.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then suddenly the trillion trees campaign became synonymous with mass plantations, monoculture forestry.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: Monoculture forestry.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like the the eucalyptus trees, the spruce trees, the pine trees that we that literally my career was out to undo.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was my career is built around biodiversity.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: We want to promote biodiversity.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, biodiversity is gonna be this good thing, and then suddenly it was the exact opposite.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm doing all these events and podcasts and stuff talking.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: About how good nature is, and everyone's hearing when I say the word nature, they're hearing the word tree planting, and they go, Well, you say tree planting's good, but and I go, No, no, I didn't say tree planting, did I?
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: I said nature.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I think people people won't realize who haven't been involved in how the media machine works.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_02: One story gets replayed 80 times, almost as one lead story, and then it that exact thing will get cropped and appear in every, and then that one goes, and that one goes.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_02: And as soon as it moves a millimeter, you you can't pull it back, it's gone.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_02: Never.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_02: And you you don't own it anymore either.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_02: As soon as you put a sentence, whatever that sentence was meant to be or intended to be, it's just gone.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you can't remember if it was your mistake or your intonation or your what or their mistake, or it's just it's it's it's out there now.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you're usually.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_01: How many years is this after depression period?
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: So this is now three years after depression period.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: You must have been like, fuck, I don't want to go back again.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: Can't have this again.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_00: I have to admit, it was trauma beyond beyond what I could have expected.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, you know, full abuse from everyone in my field, some of the people I respect most in the field, like people who I'd been looking up to and aspiring to, just saying, this is moronic, this is so bad, it's devastating, it's dangerous, it's ecoside, it's genocide.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_00: They they think it's about what I was getting criticized for, you know, kicking, you know, people kicking indigenous communities out of lands and cutting down rainforests and planting monoculture, like all the most terrible things.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: And they thought I'd done a science paper to endorse it.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: But none of them will have read the paper.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, the word true.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_00: No, exactly.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_00: Who goes back to the paper?
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_00: So then it you know, full, full uh hatred.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I you know, it's awful.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_00: And there's another thing here, everyone says, ah, haters gonna hate.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_00: But if your haters all have PhDs, then the rest of society thinks that that they are objectively correct and that you are a moron.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like it's it's crushing.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_00: I, you know, was massive job in security, massive fear, lost friendships, lost everything.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that depression period kept me sane through it.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was meditating, I was present, I was experiencing the sad feelings as interesting waves.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_00: If I hadn't had that, yeah, we're talking about it.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_02: So you're reconciling that that gave you the tools to provide.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_00: One million percent.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_00: Don't survive it without that.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: One million.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I've had other brutal periods since, but that gave me the tools to remember.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_02: That almost sounds like gratitude for that period for what it taught you for the it's the best things that ever happened to me.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_00: The worst things that happen to you are if you manage to come through them with authenticity.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like so often people say the worst things that happen to you are the best things that happen to you.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do we drag ourselves out of being hated by the world's media and that makes on tricks?
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll tell you what, you don't do is frantically try and tell people that what is right.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like the the harder I tried, the more energy just goes into it, the more you contribute, the more you fuel the fire, the you know, the more you try and tell it's people have again you hear people say it, you know, like wise people say, you know, don't defend yourself because you're just fueling the fire.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_00: But like you can't, it's so hard not to defend yourself.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, when eventually is there a uni press team or anything that that you were able to call upon or we can call this, but if it's I'm stepping on ground that's difficult.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let's let's okay that it wasn't I think any other university in the world, I'm probably alright.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was uh it was so there was a there was a bit of a backstory to it that the paper wasn't going that in in the university that I was at, you have a certain number of articles that that get publicised each year.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and our lab had a very unusual scenario of publishing seven science and nature papers that yeah.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_00: Normally anyone's getting a science and nature paper, it's like the front page news.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_00: We had seven, so they've gone, look, you've already had you were getting too much.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you've already had your load, we're not gonna do this one.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then two days before it, they go, Oh my god, this seems like it's gonna be mental.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_00: So they do a press release which does say plant a trillion trees to save the world.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, we've we've already done our other stuff.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, wait, what's that?
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_00: What's that thing?
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_00: What the fuck is that?
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And carnage ensues from the press release, and that look, I think it would have happened anyway.
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think when people hear trillion trees, they also think plant a trillion tree.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't think it's the press release that did it, but it wasn't, it wasn't we we didn't manage to manage it in a very mindful way, so it was uh it was gonna be it's hard.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like now, this is the thing.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_02: So that situation happens now.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_02: You pick up the phone, I put you in touch with FDS Global, who uh our mates who are like the biggest strategy consultants in the world.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_02: We've got this, don't you worry.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_02: But having the right people you can call who've been.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um do you ever watch The West Wing?
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I love the writing on it, and there's the Leo and Josh scene where it's like guy falls down a hole.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember this scene?
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_02: No, first guy comes past, and um I think it's uh doctor throws a prescription down, and the next guy walks past and says something to him, and then his his mate, a friend walks by, jumps in the hole.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_02: What the hell are you doing?
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_02: You're in the hole.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_02: I've been down here before, I know the way out.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what you need in a situation.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_02: So our chairman's a amazing man called Benny Higgins, and he ran uh the retail part of RBS when they bought Nat West, and they were the biggest bank in the world, and he's done and seen everything.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_02: And having the ability to ring Benny and go, This has just happened, what should I do?
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_02: It priceless, right?
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_02: So having those people who've seen everything in that God, yeah, and you're the guy to call now.
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Someone else gets in that situation, bring you, you'd be like, but it was funny because even like a year and a half afterwards, I had people who were mates, like really good people in my group, still like speaking to the media going, he never said we could plant a trillion tree.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, wait, wait, are you putting the emphasis on the right word there?
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's the word plant that I didn't say.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's and he's like, Oh, because even after a year and a half of me saying, I never said to plant a trillion tree.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_02: We were getting some shit on the back end of that as well, right?
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it just the the the leaves everyone was.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was it was brutal, there was massive momentum, insane amounts of funding, and wherever insane amounts of funding goes, criticism comes and questions come, and like everyone, however good work they were doing, they could always be criticized if it was relating to trees because there was a trillion heat.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And like you could only do what you do in the context you've got.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_02: But if you had a whole marketing and media team at that point, there would have been an angle to maximize it.
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_02: Did you did you see it this week?
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there was an event supposed to be on extreme heat, and the genius marketing manager cancelled it based on extreme heat.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, really?
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_02: The credit call was fantastic.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I was just like, we were sat in the back of the car when this came through, and I was like, that person is a genius gift, gift to just take it.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, we've got to cancel it, it's too hot.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that is genius beyond belief.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_02: If you'd have had the room and the space and the objectivity to go, actually, we can Trump would have lent into it, wouldn't he?
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_02: It'd have gone, plant more, it'd have turned up in a hat with plant more trees on it or whatever.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_00: No, but he did.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_00: So Trump got into the trillion tree campaign and he goes, the US is gonna plant a trillion trees.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_00: He planted a tree on the White House lawn because of this, which obviously then now it's a partisan thing.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_00: So now Republicans are gaining force to say how terrible the trillion tree campaign is because Trump said he's gonna plant a trillion trees.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_00: So now it's a it's a political and a and a scientifically hated thing.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, there were there were people, there was Democrats demolishing me saying this guy doesn't know shit, he doesn't know what he's talking about, he's never done science in his life.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was brutal in every dimension.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like all the people, and you like I'd actually had it before.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'd I'd had a paper before where we again, where we showed soil warming is driving more uh also atmospheric warming is driving driving soil carbon loss, which is driving more warming, huge climate change tipping point, and it got loads of media, and then and then I was actually Trump said something about he wasn't criticizing me, but he said something like that is bullshit.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, this guy's a moron, and that went in the media.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I had a bit of like hatred from Republicans then, and it's so fine getting haters before the tree or that was before.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_00: That was before, and it's so fine getting criticized by haters who are not on your wavelength or not in agreement, but when you're getting total abuse, and by the way, I would argue liberal getting the wrath of the liberal side is a thousand times more brutal than getting a wrath of the of the um less liberal side, and and it's being criticized by the people that are otherwise on your side, saying the things that you agree with, so you can't even deny, you can't even push back, you can't even argue.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, yes, I agree.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_00: If anyone ever said that, that would be crazy.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I it's it was brutal.
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely brutal.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, bring us forward from that chapter.
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Good time.
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_00: So while everyone else is talking about mass tree planting and how whether it's good or bad.
• 1:15:00
  SPEAKER_02: We at least they didn't like label you forester of the year or something.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Could have awarded you like campaign.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so look, I should uh I should also be clear, this wasn't all bad.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_00: There was unbelievably good things came out of it.
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like they say, the UN decade is this mega movement, it's absolutely incredible.
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's the amount of funding that went into nature was through the roof.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Whether even so like grassland scientists were often saying, Oh, these bastards just want trees all over the grasslands.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then the grassland scientists got way more funding.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it like even people criticizing me were getting a platform for way more funding.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Conservation got way more funding.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_00: Every funding exploded through the good and the bad of all this.
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it was actually really good.
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_00: And some of that funding came towards us to do what to essentially people saying, right, what is it that you are proposing to build?
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I sort of said, look, we don't need drones planting trees.
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_00: We don't need armies of people planting trees and kicking people off the land.
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_00: We need to find the people who are already in connection with nature.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And there are billions of people on our planet living in direct contact with nature right now.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_00: The infrastructure's already there.
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_00: They know how to restore their land way better than we do because they need it for their survival.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_00: All we need to do is shine a light on them.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so we built this platform in collaboration with Google and with Salesforce and with some amazing funders.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_00: We built this platform called Restore.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_00: So again, it's not a tree planting platform, it's almost the opposite.
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a find all the rural community.
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like a like a social media, but in a mapping format.
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_00: So like a map which allows indigenous communities and farmers to draw around their land and become visible to the world.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And they go, look, this is what I'm doing.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then and you can see what they're doing.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_00: And and not only so they get free data, all the ecological data that I've been generating from our lab, all that information is free to them.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_00: But more importantly, they gave visibility to their customers and to donors and to funders, and they become visible for the first time.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And what's the most incredible story?
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_00: We now have hundreds of thousands of the millions of projects around the world.
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the the most regular story we get is before a store, I just felt so alone.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the loneliness that was crushing us.
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like you're you're trying to revitalize nature for your children and for your livelihoods, and yet you don't know if anyone else anywhere else is doing it.
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Are you just fighting an uphill battle alone?
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Is deforestation just going to come and wipe out your land in 10 minutes, anyways?
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_00: It it's like this heartbreaking journey of you know solitude.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then suddenly they learn, oh my god, there's someone just up the road who's doing their chat, they've got similar challenges.
• 1:17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, we can we can talk to each other, we can join forces and form a cooperative.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, together as a cooperative, we can gain access to more money.
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, we can it's like being part of a movement is the most freeing thing for all these incredible projects.
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's we built that platform in 2021, and it's now grown to this huge sort of online it's like Google Maps, but you don't see hairdressers and shops, you see conservation projects or regenerative farms or you know, incredible rewilding projects.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_02: Have you seen and sort of realized the clear linear road between your three minutes on that desert island and what you built with your store?
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_02: Because in the absence of being present and seeing and feeling everything that was happening, you found an identity and a belonging and awareness of what was going on.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's what you gifted to everybody else, the awareness of their thing, the visibility of where they are, and then the realization, only from that point of oh wow, I'm present, I'm real, I'm aware of everything, and I'm not alone, but there's people around me as well.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_02: That is such a good spot.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is exact I actually wish we'd been pitching it that way.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's it's you're not we're not proposing to do anything new, we're not proposing to implement anything or engineer anything, it's just saying bring awareness to what's there, and then attention can nourish it, finance can nourish it.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_00: That is exactly what it is.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_00: You just did it, I didn't do it, you just told that story.
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um I had the exact same realization when I read Tim's book.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm reading Tim's book, I'm reading Tim's book, and you go to open up the end of it, and it's almost as if auction conservation is the conclusion of his book.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_02: So he's talking about the the awareness of nature and all the different implementation things you could do and how it could be a business side of it.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_02: And and I literally wrote to him and I was like, I I wish, and and he came on the podcast and said he wished he'd known about OC when he wrote it because it it like is the the the conclusion the bringing all those things together and making it a real physical thing.
• 1:19:40
  SPEAKER_02: So you're so um you're hanging around with Trump and planting trees.
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, best mate.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody loves it.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_02: This begins to calm down, or does it, or is just the like what's the wavelength of this?
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_02: Is it like little waves that come off the back end of it?
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was five years of actually.
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_00: I spoke to a guy who won the Nobel Prize once and he went, Oh mate, I love your work.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I went, Oh, you can't, and people in my field do not.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he went, dude, I won the Nobel Prize.
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't able to go to a conference for four years afterwards.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was completely shamed until the Nobel Prize was given.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's like academia takes four or five years to keep on, and that was about my journey as well.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_00: It was about four or five years before we then, you know, I didn't the next big paper with all of the researchers who criticized me and all the ones who agreed.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_02: We had like hundreds of scientists on it, and we re-evaluated it with new data, with more data, with but what made you emotionally able and willing to invite the critics in?
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_02: Why didn't you just say fuck you?
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_02: I remember.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, who is it that said was it Mandela who said hating someone is like drinking poison and thinking it's gonna kill the other man?
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it like doesn't help anyone in any way.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and and also the funny thing in you know, academics are just people too.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, you know, I'd had this paper that just had this crazy attention, and everyone's going, oh what bullshit, it's so bad, it's so dumb.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_00: And yet anyone in the world I could invite at that time, would you like to collaborate on a paper?
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, Oh my god, yes, yes, I'm in.
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_00: There was not a single person wasn't interested.
• 1:21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's like it's a funny thing, like that, you know, all publicity is good publicity.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was definitely there, it was just a high energy time.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, right at that moment, things are better than none.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so um, I would always wrap like try turning a stationary battleship around.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_02: You can't, whether it's good momentum or bad momentum, you can work with it when there's nothingness, when no one's picking up the phone.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_02: When, you know, I uh when I came out of uni 2008-9 after PhD, there was nothingness because everything could stopped.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's the margin call, the movie, the music had stopped.
• 1:21:50
  SPEAKER_02: There was no movement across the world.
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_02: You can't do anything in that situation, even a crisis.
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_02: You can do something because there's some momentum to work with.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_00: Literally, however bad it gets, it's only energy that can be steered.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you steer it in if you uh if you go at it with anxiety and panic, you will propagate the energy, still gets propagated, just goes to more anxiety and panic.
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you face whatever it is with with like you know, hopefulness and enjoyment, then good things propagate out of it.
• 1:22:16
  SPEAKER_00: And and it is, it's just this I I totally believe that now.
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_00: I I without doubt believe that what gets amplified are the qualities of what you put into the world.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_02: And also, one of my favourites is this too will pass, as a saying.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like however good it is, however bad it is, it's gonna pass at some point.
• 1:22:33
  SPEAKER_02: Make the most of it while you can.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_02: I used to be so bad at whatever I was doing, I'd want to be doing the other thing.
• 1:22:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I'd really want to get to an event, but then I'd want it to be done, as opposed to no, no, no, make the most of this period.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, I I have been away four days straight, we've done 18-hour days.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'm literally getting driven home through the night tonight so I can get home, but I'm still able now to really enjoy being here, yeah, knowing that tomorrow I'll really enjoy being at home.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_00: That makes it so much nicer to do the podcast.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, if I was like, Oh fucking hell, I want to be out the door.
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_00: I gotta get this done, gotta get this done.
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it's brutal.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if it's just a good chat and you're talking to someone who's genuinely enjoying it, it's the easiest thing ever.
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoy.
• 1:23:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um you ever heard much of Jimmy Carr's philosophy?
• 1:23:14
  SPEAKER_02: No, watch some Jimmy Carr podcasts that are not him doing comedy.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_02: You ever spent any time with stand-up comedians?
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_01: A couple.
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:23:22
  SPEAKER_01: So clever.
• 1:23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:23:23
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's the speed of thought and the awareness and the processing.
• 1:23:26
  SPEAKER_02: I genuinely think Jimmy Carr is one of the best philosophers we have in Britain.
• 1:23:31
  SPEAKER_02: They asked him what's the meaning of life.
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_02: He said, Enjoying the passage of time.
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, Jimmy.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, Jimmy.
• 1:23:39
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 1:23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 100% agree.
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, was that the point when you you had enough of the US at this point?
• 1:23:45
  SPEAKER_02: Is that waiver you still?
• 1:23:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm back in Europe at this point.
• 1:23:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I mean I'm in I'm in Switzerland now.
• 1:23:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I that had happened actually before the Trillion Trees chaos chaos.
• 1:23:53
  SPEAKER_02: And when you were when you were going from Yale to Switzerland, yeah, was it actively seeking Switzerland?
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_02: Or you were like, right, I've done my US chapter somewhere else.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:24:03
  SPEAKER_00: How did the I I actually wanted to go back to the US?
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_00: I I was I was thinking the US is gonna be my thing, and then I just got offered a few because I had that trillion the first three trillion trades paper, I'd had a fair bit of interest from universities, and I was choosing between them, and the and the one I went to just had an incredible offer, you know, really good offer to set you up because professorships aren't created equal, right?
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_02: They're very different in terms of the composition.
• 1:24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so normally in America or in the UK, you get extra extremely sort of low budget for your s for your own salary.
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_00: You then any money you bring in, you have to pay about half of it to the university.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_00: In America, also you know, relatively limited, but you you you do get you'll often get a startup package that gives you a bit of funding to get your things off the ro off of the thing, uh, to get your research going.
• 1:24:51
  SPEAKER_00: But any grant you bring in, you pay about a third of it to the university.
• 1:24:55
  SPEAKER_00: In this place, they gave you an you know, in Switzerland, they give you an annual budget to keep things going.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, oh my god, that's magic.
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_00: And there's zero overheads on any money you bring in.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just like you can just do proper research and just focus on the other.
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Are there any other countries that operate a similar structure?
• 1:25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, Saudi Arabia.
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think China.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_00: I there are other places, but yeah, Switzerland at that time was just like through the roof at the peak.
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it was a very exciting, and Switzerland is beautiful.
• 1:25:25
  SPEAKER_00: When did you move back to Switzerland?
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, moved to Switzerland.
• 1:25:29
  SPEAKER_01: 2017.
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_01: 2017.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_02: And how do we go from arriving back over there to having just published your is this your first book?
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my first book.
• 1:25:39
  SPEAKER_00: I um I it was during the chaos of the Trillion Tree stuff.
• 1:25:44
  SPEAKER_00: I did my TED talk.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'd done a few TEDxes, but the TED isn't all, you know, all the the the the bump.
• 1:25:51
  SPEAKER_00: And where where's that recorded?
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was during COVID.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was the worst time ever to have your TED talk.
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was during COVID, so it was online.
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I had a so but they are intense.
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_00: I had to like stand in a black room for eight for like a full day reciting a 15-minute speech over and over and over and over again.
• 1:26:08
  SPEAKER_02: Did you learn it word for word?
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_00: No, I did I I so I normally do my speeches quite mostly word for word, but I didn't need to in this because it was recorded.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of like read it over and over again and did it with different emphasis and stuff.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I was young, it would it's nowhere near the TED talk I'd like to do now.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_00: I would smash a TED talk if it with different content now.
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_00: I believe I can't learn speeches.
• 1:26:29
  SPEAKER_02: I really but actually no, let me rephrase that.
• 1:26:32
  SPEAKER_02: I I haven't.
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't.
• 1:26:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm way better with a set of bullets and freelancing, but I've never had to be very specific about wording.
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_00: I only needed it when I was worse.
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_00: I now I'm saying the same.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't I I know generally the arc and I know that the the key hit points that I'm gonna have.
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_02: I hit best if you give me 20 photo slides and then my chapter headings, bang.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_02: Oh great, I'll riff off that for five minutes.
• 1:26:56
  SPEAKER_02: Bang, I'm off that one because that lets me interact with the audience.
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's the thing I do but you can't do that in a TED talk.
• 1:27:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's not exactly and and I can't um I'm I think my best forum is like this QA, because then I can bounce off a question and I can bring the audience in.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_02: That's the thing I think I do the most different to the sector.
• 1:27:15
  SPEAKER_02: I don't talk at an audience, I engage with one.
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_02: So if I know people in the room or or I'll be because I mentioned about the reading the room, yeah.
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_02: I can watch a room and I can, if someone's super excited, I'm like, you want to add something, don't you?
• 1:27:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I can bring them in.
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, where's so many people are so bothered about being I remember being taught to drive and the instructor being like, you're too bothered about what's in the car to be bothered about what's outside, like that with the audience.
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, in fact, Formula One analogy, um, I love this analogy.
• 1:27:40
  SPEAKER_02: They say most of the Formula One drivers, it takes a hundred percent of their attention to keep the thing on the road.
• 1:27:45
  SPEAKER_02: The really good ones, so Lewis Hamilton, Max Estaff, and Fernando Alonso, they only need 50% of their brain to keep the car on the road so they can see what's going on around.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_02: They're thinking about strategy.
• 1:27:55
  SPEAKER_02: And because I enjoy speaking with an audience, I don't need my whole brain to think about what I I'm saying I can play with the room.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_00: I do agree.
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_00: When when I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm I think I do a good speech w because I've forced myself to learn the the thing.
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_02: Elena Doms, she preps really well and she does an incredible speech because she's prepped.
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's my that's me.
• 1:28:15
  SPEAKER_00: I used to be the worst in school, the worst in class.
• 1:28:17
  SPEAKER_00: I had to like remember doing you know public speaking classes and or not, you know, one of the classes in uni and I had to stay behind after everyone and recite it in front of my best mate, which was the most awkward thing ever.
• 1:28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh just because the professor was like, no one can be this bad.
• 1:28:31
  SPEAKER_00: But because I like forced myself to get to to like learn, I was able to like smash it.
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_00: And and now I can be a little bit more fluid, and yeah, I love it when I'm engaging with the audience and stuff.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's much more more enjoyable.
• 1:28:44
  SPEAKER_00: But there was a yeah, so it was back at the time, just did the TED talk, and there was this pew poll, you know, these poll polling things in the US, and they did a polling for the most popular climate change solutions, and it was always like 50%, 50%, you know, 50-50 on all the things, except the Trillion Trees campaign had 97% uh preferability.
• 1:29:03
  SPEAKER_00: And and so Penguin reached out to us and were like, Oh, this is crazy, you should write a book.
• 1:29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I actually said no originally, but at the same time, uh, an agent, a book agent, reached out and were like, Oh, you know, you should consider this.
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she was like, Oh, you should write a book about trees.
• 1:29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, that's gonna be one-dimensional.
• 1:29:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna write a book about trees.
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_00: And and she goes, Look, you should just write down 10 things that you find interesting in life and see if you can find a theme.
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_00: And like within an instant of doing it, it's the best bit of advice I've ever had.
• 1:29:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was immediately I was like, Oh my god, feedback loops, they're all feedback loops.
• 1:29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Oh actually, wait, everything's a feedback loop.
• 1:29:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, I can't, the whole universe is feedback loops, and I was like immersed in it, and then I was like, cool, penguin back, quickly, let's get back, let's get back on it.
• 1:29:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so we uh got on the book train.
• 1:29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to admit, it has been such a cool experience, particularly for a scientist, because as academics, we publish, you know, hundreds of papers, but each paper is one sliver of your thinking, and it's like less than one millionth of the of the arc of the story.
• 1:30:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're just tackling one tiny little piece of reality, and then you get judged on that piece.
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_00: You do a study about trees, and all the grassland scientists say, Oh, you hate grasslands.
• 1:30:12
  SPEAKER_00: You do a paper about grasslands, all the you know, the coral reef people go, What about coral reefs?
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_00: And and yet now with the book, you can give your full arc of your story.
• 1:30:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's you can go deep into it, you can be mindful about the journey, you can like you can bring in personal experience and learned experience, and it's such an enriching experience.
• 1:30:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think anyone should do it, whether you're gonna publish it or not, it's quite a good good journey to be on.
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_02: What was your writing process?
• 1:30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Panic for four years.
• 1:30:39
  SPEAKER_02: I I did I think four years start to finish in terms of.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I originally w started working with a ghostwriter, which you're not supposed to say out loud, but not a single word made it into the book because he was a lovely bloke, really nice.
• 1:30:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I think they're good for like books about you know, memoirs.
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you're a famous person saying I did this, then this, then this, fair enough.
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm like, feedback loops created the universe.
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_00: They also create our concept of self and how we interconnect with nature.
• 1:31:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, What are you banging on about?
• 1:31:08
  SPEAKER_00: He'd be he'd I'd say it, and then a week later he'd give me some text, and I was like, That's not what I said.
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, Well, I don't know what is what madness is floating about in your brain, and so we're like, it was uh it was what it was, but um, but it was really useful just to talk it out with someone, actually.
• 1:31:22
  SPEAKER_00: That was very useful because normally when you write a book, you're very alone.
• 1:31:24
  SPEAKER_00: You're like you do it with Chat GTP now, can't you?
• 1:31:26
  SPEAKER_02: True to sit and have the chat, true, exactly.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_02: So um, I've written up a reflection every day this week on um on LinkedIn, and my process now, which has only just happened this week, because we're walking between events, I'm literally chatting with chatters, which is what we call Chat GP in our team, um, and saying, Here are my reflection on this, I think this, I think this, I think this.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_02: Can you capture an outline of this article for me?
• 1:31:46
  SPEAKER_02: Bang it, and as I've got back of an evening, I've gone, sweet, I've got my outline and right around it.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, nice.
• 1:31:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I I I use Chat GPT for for like conversation.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I'd be like, Oh, I'm gonna write about the fall of the Mayan civilization.
• 1:32:01
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have any examples of a of of an individual who suffered particularly at the you know the inequality that gave research over?
• 1:32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:32:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it was obviously really useful for giving out examples and stuff, and then you have to double check them and realize they're all wrong.
• 1:32:15
  SPEAKER_02: But how much is has any of the early stuff stayed stuff you wrote like three, four years ago, or most of it you've evolved through to a newer version now?
• 1:32:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm pretty surprised at the fact that actually the story arc is identical.
• 1:32:27
  SPEAKER_00: It literally, nine sections, there are still nine sections, it's the same.
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_00: And and I remember the the what I was surprised about is that at the beginning I was like, There's no way I'm gonna write a book that talks about the creation of the universe and talks about the you know the details of ecological restoration, but that also talks about the feedback loops of how you create a self-identity and how there are no such thing as facts in the world, and how you know all the I was like, there's this is gonna be such a messed up, like higgledy-piggledy combination of my thoughts, and I will I I couldn't imagine it fitting together, but but what I really liked in the journey is how it like slowly came together to form an arc of a story that I think I think makes uh sense, hopefully.
• 1:33:10
  SPEAKER_02: Is there um when you think about it in terms of the bits you're most proud of, what aspects of it are any sort of lines of thought or phrasing does it make you smile?
• 1:33:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I okay.
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_00: I would say the stuff about allowing Actually, no, it's the stuff about engaging in regeneration as an opportunity rather than a chore, is the sort of base, the base argument I want to get to.
• 1:33:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I was always wondering how I would get that.
• 1:33:40
  SPEAKER_00: I used to and um journalists used to ask me, how would you remain so positive when you work on climate change?
• 1:33:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't have the right words.
• 1:33:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be like, oh, it's because I feel I feel like my positive feelings are gonna help, and and I feel like it's it's you know, it's worthwhile being joyful anyway.
• 1:33:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and and and I would always like it wouldn't work.
• 1:33:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was like the the process of like working through your thoughts on that was really helpful.
• 1:34:03
  SPEAKER_00: So to get to the point where it's like we are not denying all the bad things that are happening, we are not refusing to acknowledge the suffering and we are holding them with our, you know, with with empathy, but you can also allow your attention to nourish the opportunities that bring enjoyment, things that improve your health, your wealth, your fun, and your fashion choices.
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_00: And when they do, that makes you like it, which makes you do it more, which makes you like it more, which makes you do it more, which makes other people start liking it, which makes them do it more.
• 1:34:32
  SPEAKER_00: And accidentally these momentum, these loops of regeneration start building.
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_02: Everything compounds.
• 1:34:38
  SPEAKER_00: Everything compounds.
• 1:34:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is the basis of a feedback loop.
• 1:34:41
  SPEAKER_00: Feedback loops started at the creation of the universe, and you know, uh gravity pulled bits of matter together, which gave them more gravity, pulling more matter together, pulling more gravity.
• 1:34:51
  SPEAKER_00: From from that dawn of universe, you would never have imagined anything could exist, let alone everything we see here.
• 1:34:56
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, once that process gets going, once that compounding process gets going, of course it would create stars, of course it would create the hugest fusion reactions that the universe has ever seen.
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's just inevitable, the bigger they get, the more they pull.
• 1:35:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the bigger they get, the more they pull.
• 1:35:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that exact same process gives rise to life, which makes more opportunities for more life, which makes more opportunities for more life, gives rise to climate change, which then spurs on climate change, and it also gives rise to our cell sense of self.
• 1:35:22
  SPEAKER_00: The more I believe I am this way, the more I act in accordance with that belief, which then reinforces the way you believe that I am that way, and it all turns into a thing.
• 1:35:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if, and again, if we characterize our future as doomed, then every action that propagates from our anxiety and our panic will propagate doom.
• 1:35:41
  SPEAKER_00: We will fight, we will be insecure, we'll be worried, we'll be we'll have denial, we will continue to you know shape our reality in exactly that trajectory.
• 1:35:52
  SPEAKER_02: Henry Ford, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
• 1:35:56
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:35:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great quote.
• 1:35:59
  SPEAKER_02: You um I think uh we spoke earlier about how when we did book launch one, someone asked us about how we state so positive.
• 1:36:07
  SPEAKER_02: That person is on the board of our investors.
• 1:36:10
  SPEAKER_02: So if I write up a uh chapter for book two inspired by that question, I then loop back round, and each of the chapters in in my book is like a short essay.
• 1:36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever read Um The Messy Middle by Scott Belski?
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's a great book.
• 1:36:26
  SPEAKER_02: It inspired how I wanted to write.
• 1:36:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I um I try and read prior to AI, I read every day, but like four pages, because I'm not a fast reader.
• 1:36:35
  SPEAKER_02: So at the end of the day, I'd read two or three pages, a couple of ideas, and move on.
• 1:36:38
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:36:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I wrote a book that could be read like that.
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_02: So it could be read really short, snappy chapters.
• 1:36:43
  SPEAKER_02: So um Matt, the member of the board of directors, asked me about you know how we may taste a positive.
• 1:36:49
  SPEAKER_02: I reflected on that in the article, and each of the articles have a short reflection where I revisit them later and go, how my opinions change.
• 1:36:56
  SPEAKER_02: I got Matt to write the reflection on the piece in spite.
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_02: Talk about the feedback loop, mate.
• 1:37:01
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 1:37:01
  SPEAKER_02: So he he started the business essentially by providing us with a ton of funding, which allowed us to do what we're doing, which answered his question about how we stay suppositive, and I got him to reflect back on seeing that whole love it.
• 1:37:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's so good, I adore it.
• 1:37:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, how on earth did you get Mark Benioff to write one of the reflections on your book?
• 1:37:21
  SPEAKER_00: How Mark's a legend.
• 1:37:23
  SPEAKER_00: Mark is so Mark was trillion tree campaign.
• 1:37:26
  SPEAKER_00: He you know got me involved in the WEF.
• 1:37:29
  SPEAKER_00: He was the one who said, Look, we're gonna do this trillion tree campaign, we're gonna restore the world.
• 1:37:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was before the words went back.
• 1:37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm good.
• 1:37:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm friends, I would call him a friend.
• 1:37:38
  SPEAKER_00: We I've been to his house and meditated with a with a Buddhist monk um in in Hawaii.
• 1:37:43
  SPEAKER_00: We I love the guy.
• 1:37:45
  SPEAKER_00: He's he is genuinely so dedicated to good stuff.
• 1:37:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually related to the example we were talking about before when you were talking about Microsoft.
• 1:37:55
  SPEAKER_00: The more visible you become in trying to do a good thing, the more enemies you accrue.
• 1:38:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that trillion tree campaign was taken so out of context that it was totally misrepresented.
• 1:38:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he he got absolutely battered by it, and I got battered by it too.
• 1:38:09
  SPEAKER_00: But but the any all of his competitors who just stayed quiet and didn't talk about climate change are all fine.
• 1:38:15
  SPEAKER_00: You can omit as much as you want, destroy the world as much as you want, but try and do something good, you stick your head out of the podcast.
• 1:38:20
  SPEAKER_02: He was um he was on the All-In podcast a couple of weeks ago, and he was brilliant.
• 1:38:24
  SPEAKER_02: And um, they literally quote him as the example of if you've got a CEO because Salesforce could be accused, they're a behemoth, right?
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_02: In terms of scale and size.
• 1:38:36
  SPEAKER_02: And the the narrative there is, oh, they're going to be disrupted by AI, they're fucked.
• 1:38:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:38:40
  SPEAKER_02: Not them specifically, but everyone of that scale.
• 1:38:42
  SPEAKER_02: And they go, Oh, but not Salesforce because of Mark.
• 1:38:45
  SPEAKER_02: Because he's so sharp and so adaptable.
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, they did a massive acquisition last week, didn't they, about bringing in uh an autonomous agency system to help scale agent force and things like that?
• 1:38:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like that shows the power of leadership that is present and credible and aware and on it still.
• 1:39:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:39:01
  SPEAKER_00: The guy I I couldn't speak highly enough.
• 1:39:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think he's an absolute ledge.
• 1:39:05
  SPEAKER_00: He'd be good to get on the podcast.
• 1:39:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that'd be fun.
• 1:39:08
  SPEAKER_01: That'd be fun.
• 1:39:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but was launched last week, two weeks ago, when yeah, about a week and a half ago.
• 1:39:13
  SPEAKER_01: How's that process been for you?
• 1:39:16
  SPEAKER_00: I I've got to say, the the like writing of a book is such a like present mind, you know, you're sitting looking out of a window contemplating the world and putting your thoughts together.
• 1:39:25
  SPEAKER_00: My name is very different.
• 1:39:26
  SPEAKER_02: My name is Lisley.
• 1:39:27
  SPEAKER_02: I I write when I travel.
• 1:39:28
  SPEAKER_02: So because I don't do the most of the driving, I'm sat in the back of a car, I'm sat on a plane or whatever.
• 1:39:33
  SPEAKER_02: I I write, I don't get travel sick at all, so that's when I do my writing.
• 1:39:36
  SPEAKER_02: But is it frantic or was it was it contemplative?
• 1:39:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was contemplative, nailed it.
• 1:39:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, yeah, I think it was, and I think it's how I process so it's how I quiet in the fireworks.
• 1:39:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:39:49
  SPEAKER_02: So if you ask me what I think about something, I can give you five smart ass answers of different perspectives.
• 1:39:55
  SPEAKER_02: But what do I really believe I need to?
• 1:39:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm exactly the same.
• 1:39:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm exactly the same on that.
• 1:40:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, that I and that is, I feel like I've shored up answers to questions that I would have done so much better before the book, done much worse before the book, but I'll I'll nail them now because I've got I've I've thought through the wording and I've got it got it right.
• 1:40:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like I remember before the book, I wanted I was really anxious because I know when I say, look, we've got to be optimistic about the future, it it makes many people really upset.
• 1:40:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, no, I'm sorry, there is over undue suffering, there is terrible suffering happening in this world, and I have associated with that suffering, and you're telling me to just deny my feelings or or break my reality.
• 1:40:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's it, it causes suffering if it you if you don't find the right wording.
• 1:40:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really risky topic, I think, to to like tiptoe into.
• 1:40:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I was really anxious about getting it right.
• 1:40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas now I feel feel like I've got the wording to like go in and be bold and and say the statements because I feel like I've yeah, found my wording.
• 1:40:49
  SPEAKER_00: Did you finish writing it?
• 1:40:51
  SPEAKER_00: Just before it was in December.
• 1:40:54
  SPEAKER_00: And are you have you continued to write since then?
• 1:40:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I've I've had a little pause because I publish loads of papers too each year, right?
• 1:41:00
  SPEAKER_00: We publish like 50 papers a year, so I'm still most of my writing is papers.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_00: 50 papers a year out of your wow on average, yeah.
• 1:41:07
  unknown: Interesting.
• 1:41:08
  SPEAKER_02: Are you primary author on most of those?
• 1:41:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh maybe like no, like final author, like the senior.
• 1:41:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I will probably be maybe a third or maybe a half.
• 1:41:18
  SPEAKER_02: Does the mental process of editing and reviewing those feel fundamentally different to writing the book?
• 1:41:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, totally.
• 1:41:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because academic papers, I know the the equation now.
• 1:41:27
  SPEAKER_00: I know exactly how to that sentence goes there.
• 1:41:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, I don't even need to know the topic.
• 1:41:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just like, you need to say here, and yet we have never known, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:41:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like it whereas the book is full story curation.
• 1:41:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:41:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I finished it in yeah, December, and it was what I was shocked about is how brutal everything since has been.
• 1:41:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like, okay, now you've got to you you've had this long, you know, mindful experience where you're exploring your thoughts and your wordings, and then suddenly it's summarize it in one sentence, go, go, go, go, go.
• 1:41:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it was like, that was, that was, I didn't like it.
• 1:42:00
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't like the period since finishing, up until publishing, and yet now it's out, it's gone again.
• 1:42:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm free again.
• 1:42:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, oh, it's cool.
• 1:42:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's people buying it, people saying they like it, and like, and like, and you know, it's it's I feel the pressures off.
• 1:42:14
  SPEAKER_00: I've still got loads of big launches coming, but I don't really care.
• 1:42:18
  SPEAKER_00: You're doing the smallest bookshop in Britain.
• 1:42:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's doing the oldest.
• 1:42:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've got I've done the I'm doing the biggest in the in in the world in in New York, and I think I'm getting the smallest bookshop in Britain as well.
• 1:42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's good.
• 1:42:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's very cool.
• 1:42:31
  SPEAKER_02: I um I didn't like book one, it wasn't very good because it was never really meant to be a book, and I was figuring out how to do it.
• 1:42:38
  SPEAKER_02: So that was last year.
• 1:42:40
  SPEAKER_02: Two two two I'm not embarrassed about, two I quite like.
• 1:42:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um so two came out a few weeks ago, went top ten in terms of financial and economic stuff on on Amazon, which was great.
• 1:42:55
  SPEAKER_02: Three's better.
• 1:42:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I've kept going, and um so three is is natural intelligence, it's gonna come out in December.
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_02: And it is the intersection of it because it's because it's part of my thinking process.
• 1:43:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's part of and I the reason I asked about whether you'd kept going, because I think I'd miss it.
• 1:43:11
  SPEAKER_02: If I wasn't writing, I would miss it.
• 1:43:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna do it again for sure.
• 1:43:14
  SPEAKER_00: I but I yeah, I I need to get some I again.
• 1:43:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think if I could pause my academic writing for a little bit, I'd have I'd have the mental space for it.
• 1:43:21
  SPEAKER_00: But right now I've always got to edit papers and um, yeah, we'll see how my career the the thing is doing a professorship along with it is a bit hectic.
• 1:43:30
  SPEAKER_00: I I need to find the way in which I balance these.
• 1:43:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think you might be better with chaos and it being hectic.
• 1:43:38
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe so, like um we we'll sometimes get asked some of the podcast studios, people are like, Oh, so is this what you do full time?
• 1:43:45
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like no, yeah, no, no, no.
• 1:43:48
  SPEAKER_02: So the books, no, no, no, that's just that's the travel job.
• 1:43:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's that the running the business is the fun part.
• 1:43:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but it's all a bit, I know they all they infuse into one another they're on one journey.
• 1:43:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard for people on the outside though to be like, oh wait, so you do that, right?
• 1:44:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, no, no, no, that's a bit.
• 1:44:04
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, don't don't people love putting you in boxes, yeah.
• 1:44:06
  SPEAKER_02: I love people cannot cope with the fact that um I have a PhD in data stuff.
• 1:44:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they assume I'm a marketing person because I can talk and because we do this, and they're like, and you can see them well, but but I only do that half of it, and I couldn't do this part of it, and that doesn't Which can sometimes piss people off.
• 1:44:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like you get particularly in academia again, it's like, wait, if he's doing that, that, and that, then he must be bad at that.
• 1:44:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then how come his papers are all are good?
• 1:44:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's really shit at the stuff I don't do.
• 1:44:34
  SPEAKER_02: I can't sing, I can't dance, me neither.
• 1:44:37
  SPEAKER_02: Ice skate, I like I can't.
• 1:44:38
  SPEAKER_02: There's loads of stuff I'm terrible at, and I just don't do it.
• 1:44:41
  SPEAKER_02: I just stick to the lanes that I'm actually pretty good at.
• 1:44:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um what are you most excited about for the for the rest of this year when you look ahead?
• 1:44:50
  SPEAKER_02: What are the things that you're like, I really get to do that?
• 1:44:52
  SPEAKER_02: I'm super excited about it.
• 1:44:54
  SPEAKER_00: So our our our move, so the platform that I mentioned before, Restore, is just now growing at a ludicrous scale.
• 1:45:02
  SPEAKER_00: And what what's cool is that look, it's great that lots of restoration projects are happening, but they're they're all building momentum under the same feedback loop, right?
• 1:45:10
  SPEAKER_00: That it's not places where people are planting trees and having to maintain them.
• 1:45:15
  SPEAKER_00: Every time you say we're gonna restore loads of the, we're gonna restore the world, people go, how are you gonna keep those forests there?
• 1:45:20
  SPEAKER_00: How are you gonna keep those grasslands thriving?
• 1:45:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, that's not how it works.
• 1:45:24
  SPEAKER_00: It works when there's a feedback loop going, where where nature being there improves people's livelihoods, which reincentivizes more nature, which improves their livelihoods more.
• 1:45:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we've now got 172 million hectares of land where people's livelihoods are doing better because nature's doing better.
• 1:45:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that means it's just no one's putting in any effort, it's just scaling of its own volition.
• 1:45:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like the more nature there is, the better people do.
• 1:45:48
  SPEAKER_00: And you see the joy in communities of seeing it.
• 1:45:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so it'll be the first time we publish the full scale of global, the state of global restoration.
• 1:45:57
  SPEAKER_00: That paper is going to be the coolest and biggest impact thing because the world has only seen news of destruction for the last 50 years.
• 1:46:06
  SPEAKER_00: There'll be a scientific paper showing 170 million hectares where unbounded rejuvenation is happening from the bottom up, truly like the people living there are doing better.
• 1:46:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like, it's I I'm I just can't wait to share it.
• 1:46:20
  SPEAKER_02: So we do finish every episode the same way.
• 1:46:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm supposed to ask you, um, I'm supposed to my role.
• 1:46:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, what's the one question I haven't asked you you wish I had?
• 1:46:29
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like you've we've we've covered all the main topics that I want to, but there's also I could keep doing this for hours.
• 1:46:36
  SPEAKER_00: The main question you haven't asked me is when are you coming back on?
• 1:46:42
  SPEAKER_01: October.
• 1:46:43
  SPEAKER_01: October it is.
• 1:46:45
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.