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E177 Asger Strange-Olesen: The Additionality Problem · Second Nature

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for coming.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: This has been six months in the making.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Probably getting you across here.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is that when when we met?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's when we met.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: You um you were the first person I've ever heard.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Honestly, you um so I think I I was I closed the conference.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, yep.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it was immediately after you, wasn't it?
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was straight after you.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I was sat at the back of the room waiting to go on.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: And these conferences sometimes often it's lots of similar narratives at these conferences.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm sat there and you're on stage, and all of a sudden I see this guy talking about data analytics and and sport and that cap and I'm like, sorry, what this only usually happens in my head.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: This is amazing.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: And but you could and you you'd um in fact, do you want to uh tell people what the crux of what you were describing was about?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Back then, yeah in Roddam.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's my it's my uh uh traveling roadshow on that exactly.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was basically that we uh that forestry is ripe for that, that forestry is ripe for the same time of analytics, to just imagine what we can create of value from forestry uh by picking up the data that's already there.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Nature produces data every every day.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: We just never had the senses to pick it up.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: We can handle that data.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it's basically like saying in football, now you analyze can you get better at avoiding penalty kicks, or where should I where in the air is my uh center back best?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so how should I make sure I play the pressure on him?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um and we can do the same football.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: What part of this forest asset, where does the tree grow well without any incense, where do it get the right sunlight, where would the next wind not hit?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's where we don't have to create that much structural diversity.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in the other end, where the wind comes in and there's a lot of shade and you have a wet ground, so trees are less easy to topple, that's where I need to do my uh resilience building in the forestry.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: So just imagine getting to that level without having to send people out with with sensors every day.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: We just get it.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: We just look.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: So that just I was I couldn't believe because prior to that, in my mind, we were the only people that were looking at data in that way, and we're the only people that were talking about it.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden I'm like, oh god, I've got I've got to go speak for an hour now.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: And my brain was just rushing with the ideas of what we could talk about.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we crossed as you came off stage, and I remember just saying, our investors are from Brighton.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you were like, What?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: What then we had a great chat on the back of it, and that's how we end up here today to deep dive into some of this.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I would love to hear your background story.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: So we're surrounded by books, but if if you, as the book, was on the shelf and we reached down and pulled it off, what are the chapters of your life and career that have got you to where you are today?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Brilliant question.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, as an as a matter of fact, I started out studying literature.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I love books.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: I just I read every day.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a book warrior, my wife says.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the chapters of my life.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think in the introduction, you would get the scenery of really well planned, nice uh Copenhagen suburbia.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you would have orderly gardens, you would have rows of nice houses, you would have a uh a school teacher and an engineer bringing up three kids in a very uh well-balanced and uh nice upbringing.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a few sharks.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you would sort of get the uh the um the sentiment in that introduction of something being very quiet but also slightly risk-averse and not taking too many chances, and um and a third kid uh being introduced into the story, the youngest, the youngest in the family, the youngest in the generation, thinking everybody's bigger than me, everybody's wiser than me.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: How can I ever find a place here?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then, not knowing at the time, I think the introduction will end up with this kid somehow having an idea.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I need to be a creative contrarian.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that would be the introduction.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then you'd have many chapters, probably still writing, obviously.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um we could jump forward um 10, 11 years.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and when you were when you were a kid, what did you think you'd do when you grew up?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh I had a pretty uh pretty detailed plan.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was quite sure that I would spend a couple of years as a uh as a football manager, and then I would uh grow bored of that.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And in the meantime, I've somehow I picked up a pilot certificate.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I would start an airline company uh and I would start flying from Europe to Africa because uh nobody flew to Africa apart from the French and the English.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: So that was sort of my idea, and then at some point in time that would turn into being Prime Minister of Denmark.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: That was my plan.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's always good to set like really easy, attainable goals earlier, yeah, and then go get them.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I said that to my uh school teacher, and she was like, Okay, I think you do have the skills for it, but that's quite a plan.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what to say.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there are also three horrible jobs.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because the first job, you're guaranteed to be fired within two years, pretty much.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: The second one, uh, trying to run an airline profitably is an absolute nightmare.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Really, really challenging industry.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then the worst of all is being a politician.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I wouldn't do any of it nowadays.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: So when you when you did step away from childhood and and what what was the first chapter?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: Did you go extended education or straight into work?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: What was the first step?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think um where there was a turning point or an infliction point.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um coming back to the story here today around forest and data and football and sports, in 1992.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I was 11 years old, and uh there was horrible things happening in Yugoslavia.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: There was a civil war.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but then uh Yugoslavia was uh sort of pulled from the European Championship in football, and Denmark came in.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So uh 11 uh holiday lads were pulled in from the beaches, put to the European Championship, had no idea, no tactics, but they loved it, they were relaxed, there was no expectation, then they went on to win the whole thing.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Before that day, I hadn't watched the football game, sports told me nothing.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then those two weeks, I believe, championships were short of back then.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so okay, I obsessed with football.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: From there on I started playing football um and everything around it.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's and was that a pattern across Denmark, like everyone watched it.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: My dad is not at all into football, so he was out.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think he was cutting a hitch row or something on the evening of the final, and the neighbor next door just opened his door, shouted out today, uh, you're uh you're an heretic.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're not watching this.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody else was watching this.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yes, that was everyone.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I think those iconic victories and moments are underrated in terms of the impact they have, because you can totally draw a line between that event in '92 and the quality of players and everything that has followed since then.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: I had a similar conversation a couple of nights ago with this incredible international banker who he was living in Atlanta of the time at the Atlanta Olympics, and then was in the UK for 2012.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he said there was loads of negativity around London about the Olympics, and he was like, No, no, no, just you wait.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Wait until you see the impact of the Olympics on a city and on a generation.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't see the benefit four years, but you do see it in 12 and 16 because there is a there's a delay, there's a wavelength between the action and when you actually see the consequence of it.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, all the young uh boys and girls to start at sports and get an idol, and maybe they started uh sports and nobody ever thought about, that's what the Olympics do.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Did role models are role models something that's important to you?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, but they're ever-changing.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like one going through uh the whole thing.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I think at that at that European championships, it sort of got that first idea of okay, these people have a they have a sense of belonging, they support each other, they believe in what they do, they play without um a lot of expectations.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I they were sort of they they were the the rascal ones, the odd ones out.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I I very much as a third child uh identified with that.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: So it was more like 11 idols that came into my life there, because they all had their personalities and they were odd characters, and none of them really had a good playing career.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: None of them were at at major clubs in Europe.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um maybe only Peter Schmeichel, right?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Peter Schmeichel, true, in the very early days of your career, yeah.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but they made it, and I think that that really taught me the uh the you need to be dedicated at what you do and and believe in it, else there's no point.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: But also work around expectations, your own expectations, that if they're too high, you'll just be um sort of uh constrained.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure I succeeded in that, but uh it was a reflection already back then.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Move us forward through the timeline.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think another um um another inflection point um would be 99.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was just turning 18.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was working in a record store in Copenhagen.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um one of those small ones um where people were wearing uh they were not uh taking a shower for a week and they were really geeking out about some bootleg tape and all that.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I was there, young guy, um, with a couple of super geeks.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we were also sort of the um uh underground store.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we met a lot of uh musicians that came along and um had a lot of backstage uh and could come to concerts and really great times.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um and what me and one of my colleagues um then won a competition by one of the big um uh record companies uh around creating the most elaborate uh David Bowie uh display.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: So we won that, made it into a small concert with David Bowie, made it backstage, and I ended up in the bar, age 18, uh having a drink with David Bowie.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he was speaking of idols, uh, one of our main idols there, just the the idea that he could reinvent himself again and again and again and again and again by picking up what would be coming the trend of next year, uh, and turn that into music that everybody loved.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I sat there, age 18, speaking to this guy.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, okay, uh where do I go from here?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: This guy that I've admired is just in front of me.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's just been 20 minutes and he was totally down to earth.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he asked totally down to earth questions.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that also that part of okay, famous people, big people, big people, um, they're not necessarily uh gods, they're humans like the rest of us.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: That was also an important thing.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: How do you um how does someone reinvent themselves so many times but it not ever appeared disingenuous or inauthentic?
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: I've asked myself that question.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um I don't know, I can only guess.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think it's a question of always saying um that things can you can get better, and better is not static.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's sort of the shortest way I can think of it right now.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um you need to have a lot of context.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Censors out and pick up so what's changed since last time I felt that did something good because you can't just repeat yourself.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's also what we see when big football clubs sort of fall from uh from the sky.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: They just we had one recipe, we just do the same by the same players, everybody gets older, we don't have that forced rejuvenation of the team, but at some point in time you'll not perform anymore.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how you do it.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it's a drive.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: One of the um How do you do it?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Necessity.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Necessity.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: I I think in in the if someone if someone ever says to me, Um, oh, I've always been the same person, I've always I'll go, Wow, that worries me.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because that means you've had no feedback, you've not learned anything, you've you've stayed exactly the same.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I am so different from previous versions of me, they genuinely don't feel like the same person.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: So you go back to my childhood, that's not the same human being at all.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: Through to I I often joke that even when I was doing PhD, so like early 20s, I I don't like who that person was at all.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was super aggressive, super competitive, I was broke, I was in the north, I was angry and resentful and thought the world was unfair, and I was arrogant and ignorant and thought I knew everything and knew nothing.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I wouldn't have liked younger me.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Nope.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm very fortunate my wife fixed a lot of those traits.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's my third infliction point.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: Take us there.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: That is exactly um uh working at a uh managing a cocktail bar in Copenhagen.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh my wife Hannah was one of the uh uh the other uh cocktail bartenders, and yeah, long story.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Fell in love and moved in and got married.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but um she is, if anything, uh more curious, more a creative contrarian than I am.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's part of that.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh reinventing yourself is that you're always challenged.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm always asked, could you have done that different?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Could you have done it better?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: What did you learn this time around?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And everything in life, in childcaring, in everything, and uh just meeting someone, really a uh the someone uh that picks up on even when I say very abstract or uh odd things, or when I mess up, I'm terrible at keeping order in the fridge and all that stuff.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, how could you do that better next time?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: In a loving way.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's just I don't know what I've done without her.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: I would probably just have been the same version of myself.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: So how many years have you been married now?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, 15.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: And how many different marriages have you had in those 15 years?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: What I mean by that is how many people have you been and how many people has she been?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because I remember being taught by when people have been married a long time.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: So uh again, the same colleague the other night has been married 35 years.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: My wife is 35, and he's been married that entire duration, and and um and I I always remember being taught you you don't stay in the same marriage, you fall in love with the person again and the different person they become.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: How many marriages have he had?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Three or four.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: I I in hindsight, I think uh those 15 years also with kids and uh and so on comes in a couple of phases that are mostly sort of the transitions between phases are because of external factors that change.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: So getting hitch, yes, uh moving back into suburbia, uh different jobs.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh the COVID lockdown was also a change uh because that very much that allowed me uh to move back and work from home, which I've done ever since.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that as an introvert like me that um that likes to think about things before I go do, that was a lot better.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh allowed me also to be um very much very much more present at home when can kids come back from school and drive into sports and all of that.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and which uh changed the dynamics of of how we organize our everyday lives.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that changed also relationship and family in in a good way.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: I I think people being able to work from home and flexible working for us.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, OC wouldn't be what it is without.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: So as a result of that, I get to source resource from now anywhere in Europe, yeah.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the pool of talent I would be finding would have been in and around Exeter or a city, maybe maybe London as well, but to start with, it would have been Exeter.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: So you're going from hundreds of millions of potential talent to look at to like two million people or something.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: So and I think the productivity benefits you get from people not spending, in fact, not just productivity, but positive emotion, positive energy levels of people not spending an hour or even longer commuting in the morning before they start their work and then afterwards at the end for no conceivable benefit to the business.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just think it's been immeasurable.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I I know some traditionalists struggle with people working away from the office.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: To me, that's just a trust factor.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if you if you can't trust your people to work when they want to, you've got the wrong people.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Or your systems or processes or tools, or in fact, no, your culture's wrong, and it's your fault as a leader.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I I love remote working.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think you just get way more out of people and they get way more out of their lives as a result.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: And those that thrive in that environment didn't thrive before.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you also unleash a lot of, as you say, positive emotions and energy and uh creativity because those people are just in the right setting.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I do believe that's probably a tangent, also.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: But as you said there with governance and and uh management and leadership, if anything, that's a challenge to leaders that need to sit next to whomever they're managing.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can't, as a leader, as an experienced leader, being ambitious and expecting your staff to be flexible and agile and all those buzzwords, if you can't adopt new ways of managing, why should you claim to be all that you are claiming?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: You need to follow, reinvent yourself.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I can manage per distance.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Of course I can.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um instead of saying, well, you cannot manage per distance.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: In these in these inflection points as we're stepping through, where does the current version of you career-wise first appear?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um it appears.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: When does that appear?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think it appears on the backside of of the lockdowns.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when we get back into business, um and at that time I had joined uh first YouTube council, FEC as Chief Climate and Ecosystem Office of Globally.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was a very different uh environment and a global NGO.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh I got exposed in a good way um to a lot more diversity than I ever had before.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because suddenly you're an organization that had uh an indigenous people uh part to it, that had uh offices that were active and and thriving, uh, that I was working with on a weekly basis in Latin America, in Russia, in Africa, in all European countries.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that global reach uh was um it started out uh to me very much as a um um really getting into the the the nuts and bolts and of of cultural diversity and how you manage that.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that changed a lot.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: We could speak for hours on that, but one thing it also did is that it sort of said, okay, if you look at yourself, then uh and and Denmark and Danes, we're probably one of the few people around the world that still live in the land we've always lived.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: We can claim to be indigenous people, but we don't see ourselves at that.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Very few do in Europe.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we did some Vikings did go someplace at an island here and wreak some havoc.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but that's a side uh story in this regard.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: So thinking of myself as coming as a 2,000-year cultural heritage tied to the land I'm living at, um, even though I don't own land in that sense, um that was a bit of a a change.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Just thinking, well, we were we are all indigenous in some way.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Some of us just not me, but some live very far from where they're indigenous.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I can see the the loss of value, the loss of um not value, the loss of uh cultural values, the detachment you get from that.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: That that made a a significant change to my thinking, uh that exposure.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: And and take us from there to IWC, how do we get there?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we get there by um I knew for 15 years I knew IWC was existing.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um I had an eye on them.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then this role came up.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was in a uh I FSC was in a difficult situation uh at that point in time, and I just knew that this uh role was uh too good to pass.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um for a number of reasons.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um one uh important one was that uh I knew that I don't see I don't see had that uh uh culture I wanted to join.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized that a couple of other organizations I've worked with I hadn't paid enough enough attention to culture.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um they had that.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: You work from home.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: We don't register, we don't register child sick, we don't register a lot of stuff.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: We we we trust uh to a large extent.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: You're uh self-managing, and you have a small group of very competent people that work together to uh to solve together.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that really appealed to me.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then also um there was this as as we'll be talking about today, the um the idea of growing uh on data, on climate, on uh open source uh approaches.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um I pitched that um at my first job interview, and we sort of okay, we're on the same page, we want to do the same.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it was uh formalities from there on.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: Love it.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: So for people who've never heard of IWC, tell us about the business, the scale, and just outline what you guys do.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: We're a small, um, by comparison, a niche um forest uh investment uh and asset manager uh based in Copenhagen, been around for 35 years, um, that uh manages investments for um for institutional investors into uh forestry and and agriculture.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it was a fairly small group.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um we have a couple of people around the world where we were active, uh, but we're still a very tight-knit group of uh in the in the forest direct investments arm where I am.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: 15 people, I think, 14, 15 people, um, with a a uh a conviction that there is none no one size fits all, that every investment, that every uh investor create a product, create a strategy that fits their needs.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and that takes that you're agile, that you're flexible, that you reinvent your own product again and again.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: So in terms of scale, just shy six billion under management, is that right?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: That includes uh that's the total, but that includes the um the uh we have an advisory business as well, uh, which has separated uh uh Chinese wall, um uh but trade under the same uh overall name.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um so including assets under uh advisory, then yes, in that order.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we were acquired by BNP Parabet, the French uh uh financial institute and conglomerate uh a couple of years ago.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that gave us access to uh to the world in a in a way we couldn't do ourselves uh as a small outfit.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: And in terms of the type and number of LPs you work with, how broad is that investor base and and how big?
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's very European.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and it's continental European.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I believe that's also uh we see ourselves as one of fairly few sort of genuinely continental European-based asset managers in this space.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that uh that the whole EU regulatory basis and policies over the last 15 years uh we've actively supported.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's in our values to say, okay, it's good with regulation.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: It we need to fix uh the market failure with regulation, among other.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that appeals also to a certain segment of uh of investors of LPs that believe in the same and that have adopted EU regulation.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's very much where we are.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: You've won a number of hats throughout your career in terms of policy and regulation and now how do you think about the role now?
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think about it is is it more building and delivering, or is it stewardship?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: In your mind, what's the the essence of the role?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: Of the role as as hitting up climate and biodiversity work in a business like this.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think it's all of the above at the same time.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um I have a couple of sort of uh currents in this space that I'm trying to to swim with um and follow.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um and one of them is very much on the data quantifying what we do in climate and biodiversity.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's been uh with me for the past 10 years.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I think that's definitely not just go and do.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's being in front of it now, also with AI coming in.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's really being on the forefront, testing things, fail fast, uh uh maybe apply a technology or a sensor without exactly knowing what you want to use it for, because you're gonna learn when you do it and figure out what what sense it can make.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: You can't in that space, I don't believe you can come out successful if you're sort of what they call a smart follower.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you need to be out there.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: We literally had this debate at our senior management team this week, and um 80% of the senior management team are like, no, no, no, we totally get it straight in.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe 20% were like, well, I'd I'd rather be a follower here.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, nope, nope.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: That that's that's not a choice any that's not a choice anymore.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was pretty specific about that.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think being a sort of small core group has has helped you be agile and adopt AI quickly?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because it it it it comes with two maybe on-scene uh upsides um that um one is that what you see is what you get.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm in the forest installing equipment together with my team, but I'm also here talking to you.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in front of the investors, I'm speaking at the conferences, but I'm also the one writing up the procedures we need.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: So uh we're all in it.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's not like, well, governance, that's that bloke over there in that other department.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's me.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh getting the right data, that's my team and me.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's one thing that we're we're all in it, and we all know what the one next door is about.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the second thing that which is a um thing that's uh it's a conviction of mine is that um with such a small, tightly knit team, you are um blessed not having uh too many uh coordination meetings.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: I've always had a saying from being in some very big organizations that as soon as you have people hired with a coordinator role, then it's because you've become too big.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because you need someone to make sure that I call a guy I should be calling because we are in this together, then you don't have the right culture.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't want to have coordinators.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the other thing.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: We just call each other up.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have sort of internal um uh information walls, or I do an I do uh we do a planning exercise together.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how could your team help my team the next 18 months?
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we talk about that, but we do it on the go as the need arises, when the next opportunity or challenge comes out.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Default for action.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let's fix it.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and let's not spend too much time on other than sort of high-level market trends, uh trying to uh second guess what happens in the next 18 months.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Things are so fast nowadays.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um how do you balance those two factors?
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: So things are so fast now, but nature isn't, and forestry growth and and woodland progression is generational, it's not minutes.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: How do you live in those two worlds?
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really good question.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: How do you?
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think the the cheesy answer would be I I find uh grounding and solace in the forest, um because it doesn't have that haste and uh commotion that that we as humans uh sort of uh tend to give ourselves.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I think um the reality is yeah, I think the reality is that that nature is not stagnant, it's ever changing as well, and it changes every day.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if you uh with the right eyes and the right senses, yeah, exactly.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: You will see how it that's dynamic every day.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that's nature is probably even more high-speed than we are.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we just don't see it, don't think of it.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Do you um how do you feel about the sort of moral challenge we sometimes get?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: That I don't know if it translates quite the same in Denmark, but in the UK we get, oh no, no, it's inappropriate to make a profit out of nature because nature is priceless and you know it's it's beyond money, and almost we're we're tarnishing the idea of nature in the environment if we seek to make it a financial a financial thing or put a value on it.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: How do you respond to that challenge?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that's uh maybe to be fairly neutral about it, say counterproductive.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: The way I see it is that we can choose um to try to fix uh the uh the economy and financial system before we fix uh nature and climate crisis, or we can do the opposite way around, or we can try to use the nature and climate crisis to change, uh, to make modifications to the financial system, the economic logic of the world.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that particular standpoint there sort of says, no, no, no, no, no.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let's keep them apart.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and and we need to get keep profits out of nature, but nature is profits.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: Wherever we have a plot of land that's managed, then that's managed because someone is, by that management, delivering a service to someone, meaning that land is at the beginning of a supply chain, meaning there are multiple companies down that supply chain that makes a living from, among others, what comes of this land.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: So it's already profit from nature.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and if we just take that away, um, we lose a lot of livelihoods, we lose a lot of cultural heritage.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to change that.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: But that create that necessitates that we put in place positive incentives that are equally um that are equal to what the land manager, if we just call him that, him or her that, would get in the marketplace.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that's that's a um uh something I've been almost obsessed with the last couple of years is that idea of um how do we make the economic incentives for uh correcting the market failure, uh to correct the market failure that is behind the uh the uh climate and biodiversity crisis in the land sector?
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um how do we make that as subtle and unnoticed and scalable that even those that don't believe in it will change their uh the way they manage land?
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's that's the challenge we've never tried to solve for.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: How close are you getting in your uh theories and hypotheses about how that might work?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um taking some major leaps forward, but uh not anywhere a final solution on that or a uh a uh a uh recipe for how to do it.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea I think is um that um spent now 15 years in this space, uh is this the longest chapter of your career in one space?
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but I've had the um sort of the the privilege, it was an intent, but I could never control it.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was an intent from the day one that I thought um you can make more bold and more um and take more risk in your decisions if you know exactly what the risk is, and if you know exactly how the Indian or the system or the ecosystem around that uh bold or mechanic or part of a machine that you're trying to change here.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um but that means you need to understand the uh the system you're working in.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I started out 15 years ago hoping that I could sort of do a 360 on land management.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of saying, okay, I work supply chains, and then at some point in time I get tired of supply chains uh starting in forests, so I moved to supply chains starting in fisheries or whatever.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was saying, no, first I was a carbon developer.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: Then I was with the Danish uh in the Danish government, then I was in the EU regulating, then I was as a consultant helping investors and supply chain companies working around sustainable sourcing, uh bioenergy and uh risk commodities for deforestation.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: Then I moved into FSE certifying good practices.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of that, so with that switch to um uh transition to IWC, it was like now I've been spending 15 years, or at that time 12 years, um forming opinions on how others should manage land.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's time I put my hand on the boiler and try to put some of this into practice, and that's what IWC offered.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, interesting.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: So uh so many thoughts.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: First one being uh I will sometimes get frustrated when I don't see others being, and I love this word, audacious enough.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think the environment sector's incredibly guilty of that.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: We we try and we try and we just want another strategy report.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: We don't actually want action or a solution.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: We want to be seen to be trying or seen to be caring as opposed to actually and we don't want to pay for it in terms of taking a risk.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then your description of you you gathering context in that context.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: You can't ask someone to be audacious if they don't understand the consequences of that audacity.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can't ask them to jump off a ledge if they don't understand what's beneath it or how big the fall is or anything like that.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: So actually, there's there's a realization there that I can perceive an opportunity and a chance, and I can encourage people to be audacious because I've spent 20 plus years gathering the context.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, um, I remember working with a guy early in my career, and he and he walked into my office at the end of the day, and and I'd been in, this is when I was working in government, and I'd been there five or six years, and he walked in and went, I figured it out.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Figured what out?
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, I realize how you know everyone and how it seems like you've been here 10 years.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: And he went, You just worked twice as much as everybody else, and smiled and walked out again.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: And his point being, if if you put in the time and the effort to gather all that context that you did, it allows you to make far more informed decisions and gives you the confidence and the bandwidth and the latitude to be more risk-based and to be more audacious.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly it.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'd never thought about it in that way.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: Very well explained because that's you did it.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: I just paraphrased it back to you.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but there's some good additions there because that it's exactly that.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's the context is the word.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and some people are more context-oriented.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I often ground myself in context, so that's the downside of it.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: But still, if you if you learn to sort of navigate that, then you can exactly make those more audacious decisions.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um AI can give us that now.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: It can.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you know what is bullshit and what's not when AI comes back, then you can do that.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: But you can also end up deadly wrong.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: You still need to ask the right questions as well.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: And have the context to sort of qualitatively assess whether what comes back, even if it sounds persuasive, it might not be factual.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it reminds me of uh, I think a couple of uh weeks into uh my stint as a in the European Commission where I worked in the uh climate directorate under the then climate commissioner uh Connie Hedegaard, a Danish uh woman.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we were just about to uh publish a piece of legislation we worked on for some time uh called LULUSEF, um, which is I'm probably one of the people in Europe that said that word, that acronym the most times.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and that's the what I've had nightmares about.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: Land use, land use change and forestry.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was the first rule in Europe, the first legislation in Europe on how countries should make up their climate accounts for agriculture and forestry.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that was in 2012.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: It got adopted.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: We were there in the Berlimon, in her office, a couple of days before the publication, and she said, now I've worked, now we've worked on this for a year and a half because it's so important.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't still don't feel comfortable publishing it because I don't understand it.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: And right there, talking about infliction points, it sort of makes me, we have so many people in decision processes around the landscape that basically don't understand the mechanics, let alone the data or lag of it.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: So they end up making sort of idealistic or ideology-based decisions when what we need is uh the incentives to change the behavior on the ground of the change agent, which is the land manager, whomever that is, whatever observation or political orientation they have, we need them to change.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: But we sit up here and talk about stuff that is idealistic.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that disconnect is really what I'm um sort of obsessed with, and that's where you need context.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's where you need to understand what's the implication of what I'm asking for right now.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: The challenge in that scenario is the the individual on the ground with the context to make a more informed decision often just doesn't want anything to change anyway.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we need, and that's exactly it.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that's sort of the thing we haven't solved for in a lot of policies.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um and where um the UK has made a couple of steps in that direction with the biodiversity net gain and stuff like that, where you you do get in tangible cash-in account incentives for a change where you can sit as a land manager and think, on this plot of land, what's my best option?
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I honestly believe we need to sort of um uh be successful in the transition of our landscapes that we so badly need, both for biodiversity and climate crisis.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way around getting a um an incentive to the ground, uh to the individual manager that is so simple and so immediately appealing that he doesn't think of it as a climate or biodiversity incentive.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: It just needs to be the the everyday decision making around how to uh harvest or tillage or not, what to plant and something.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, biodiversity pricing is ingrained or in what I do or climate pricing.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't get that with support schemes, we don't get that I'm afraid to say uh with uh carbon crediting schemes, they can do some, they can't do all of it.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: But anything that requires a project and an application and someone to write up uh 200 pages of a document and hire someone else, that's not gonna be scalable.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's not gonna convince those that don't believe.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: We need carbon credits, they have an important role, we need support schemes, they have an important role, but they're never gonna make it before the sort of just throwing a number out there.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: 40% of all land will be sort of uh readily transformed by these incentives.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um only simplicity scales, doesn't it?
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: You can't scale complexity.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I I heard, I can't remember which side of the equation I I heard this on, but I I think it was an early day sales platform for Tesla.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: And Elon Musk had found out you could register for a Mastercard or something in six clicks on the website.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: So he came back in and said, How many clicks does it take to buy a Tesla?
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: And they went back and did the work.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it's the guy doing user interface at Tesla, and he came back and said, Oh, it's 47 or something.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: And Musk said, I want it in six.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: And they went away and looked at it, and it transpired that legally they could do it in six.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: All the rest of the clicks were someone in Tesla going, Oh, we should probably just make sure, or just make sure.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so our our head of operations, Dave, he talks about as soon as you get an engineer involved, every engineer goes, I'll just put 20% more contingency in that.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: Then it gets passed down the line, and the next one goes, I'll just put 20% more in there.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: So you end up building a bridge that can't support the weight it needs, it can support a hundred times the weight it needs, and the contingency that's built in.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I think my learning on this last week actually has been it needs to be simple to scale, and we need to strip out as much as possible.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you know, when when we choose to bring a direct-to-customer carbon credit sales platform onto the market, it's gonna have six clicks because if it's got more than that, it's too complicated.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then you'll need to handle the complexity behind the scenes.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's always about that, right?
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: When you simplify, you put complexity to someone else.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but we can handle it.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: Just tell it what you want.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: Use your voice, just talk to it.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well I I love having conversations with people who are anti AI because they'll say, Oh, well, how do I fix it if it doesn't work or how uh how this or how that?
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: And you know they haven't tried.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because as soon as you try, if something doesn't work, how do I fix this?
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: It'll fix it for you.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: All you need to do is have that conversation with it.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um we are there's never been a better time to handle the complexity behind the scenes and present simplicity to the the then that that comes back to the the sort of infrastructure, the systems, the processes, the governance we've got.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: Have you and I talked about John Elkington, the author?
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: Nope, but I read about him in another book the other day.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe mine.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: He's in there.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: So he literally invented the word sustainability.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: So he's amazing.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: He we he was on the podcast, uh, guest number 99, and we've got him coming back in again.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote one of my favourite books called Green Swans, about sort of emerging uh businesses of the future.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um he's he's just just the most amazing man, but he he talks about the need for simplicity and and clarity in everything we do about this.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: And um he's just right.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean he's been right for 20 years, so that's the that's the key point.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um his his thought on regulation and governance, though, is he talks about how we're trying to run a 21st century economy with a 13th century operating system.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we have a government where people sit for hours and debate nothingness and try and give decisions to 80 million people in the UK.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's no longer fit for purpose.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: We we can do every decision, it could be a vote now, literally on your smartphone.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: We do not need 650 people sat in parliament trying to represent 80 million.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: Sadly, I don't think we can fix that one today.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you should have been Prime Minister.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's where it ends up, right?
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: Your timeline is that sometime soon you do there next?
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm not sure.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm quite sure I'm not cut out for modern politics.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um you need to yeah, you need to high-speed bullshit too much on social media.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, and it's and it's a horrific experience to be in, and no one would want to do that.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't want that for my family.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: Horrific experiences.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um where are you on uh carbon markets today and how has that changed over the last few years?
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's changed in the way that um whereas I well, I've had just about any position on carbon markets over the last 15 years.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh speaking.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: You have a fully formed perspective on these.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I hope uh at least a lot of context on it.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and reinventing that position multiple times.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think five years ago, I was sort of payment for uh for ecosystem services, that's carbon credit.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only viable option we have right now.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um and in the meantime, in particular working in in FSC with a lot of big companies, can realize that the carbon credits to me is an incredibly powerful and necessary tool, but there are limits to what it can do for us.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, in particular in the space of carbon removals in the forestry sector, then with dynamic baselining that at a philosophical level, at some point in time we run out of additionality.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then that tool is no longer viable to us.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: If everybody has uh sequestered and locked up in permanence requirements the carbon they can in the forest, uh then management opportunities in that forest are limited.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you would probably move that harvest to someplace else if we still think we want to use um trees for a lot of purposes.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um Just on that point, yeah.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: How have we ended up in a situation where you pay for it once?
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: So But that's exactly it.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: We we've got some building work going on at home at the moment.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: So we've taken a storage unit round the corner to move stuff out of our house to put in there.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: I don't pay for that once and leave that there for as long as I want.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Nope.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: I pay every week for that storage unit.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: And if I leave that in there forever, I am going to pay for that.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: If I if I take a security deposit box in Switzerland to put my prized possessions in there, I don't pay once, I pay in perpetuity for that.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: How have we developed a market mechanism that allows you to pay once?
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's gonna be a long, unfolding conversation, but um the short of long is because of additionality.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because of additionality and permanence.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: Much needed in a project world uh 10-15 years ago where you had no regulation, where you had no uh no incentive to do anything, uh, we needed to be able to carve out, much like you carve out uh the uh the dividends you get when you buy a share in a company.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: But if I don't buy a share in the company, if I buy the company, then I wouldn't give myself the uh the return uh or the the um uh if the company made a made a surplus of the company was earning money, you wouldn't transfer that from that company to the parent company via uh stocks or shares.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: That would be too cumbersome, too difficult.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: You would lose a lot of value on the way.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you don't have to create sort of a legal instrument that can be traded and bangled and traded like an asset.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what we do with carbon credits.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: We need that for nature restoration.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: We need that where we pull land out of management and need a funding mechanism to make sure that re-establishing nature makes sense.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: But if we're in lands that are already nature, or if we're in lands that will continue to be under management, then there is a provision of services: uh carbon, resilience, biodiversity, habitat, water, uh pollination, you name it, all the services that nature continues to give, but we don't price those.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and we don't price them because they're not additional.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if I improved from one day to the next, uh sort of the the pollination happening in my productive forest, uh, but didn't change harvest levels, um, but somehow otherwise uh changed the I couldn't claim that I did any additional change, but I'm still making the provisioning of pollination from that forest easier.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think additionality is madness.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: Additionality is a really tricky one.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: Additionality has a crucial role when you're in a sea of unknowns, when you're conducting a project in a space where you want to see a massive change that will only happen if uh human management changes.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and if you want to carve that out and create it as a financial instrument that you sell off as an asset that lives its own life, that is on the balance sheet, then yes, you need additionality because you need to know what is in the credit of the service and what is still back in the land.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: What can I claim me as a landowner unless you sell all of it?
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um but if you don't, and and land management nowadays has so many more situations than that, then additionality is not it didn't come uh on a uh down from Mount Sinai written in stone.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: We need to be able to talk about that.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's a conversation I think is difficult to have nowadays.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: I I I tried with our friendly AI help um to find other markets and other examples that use additionality in the same way, and I really struggled.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have any uh equivalence where you've seen it?
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_01: You mean in in other market mechanisms that only paid for additionality and not So my example being if we go out for dinner at a restaurant tonight, we don't walk in and they don't say to us, What would you have eaten at home?
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: How many calories are in it?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: How much would you have enjoyed it?
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the difference in that is X, that's what you pay.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you just pay for the service you receive, not the difference.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: I can't find another example.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: Are you aware of any?
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_00: There is additionality, perhaps there's additionality in all of that.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's just simple additionality because you eat everything on the plate.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in a few places you have this eat as much as you can, which is basically we had a pile of food before you came, now we have less food, you pay for the difference.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's simple additionality.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it's every every time you pay because of change, then there is additionality somewhere in there.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: We just made it very complicated in the carbon space, and everybody talks about it in a way we don't do in a lot of other businesses.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yes, there is additionality, but um not in a sophisticated or complicated way as as we do.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: The thing that I think is heartbreaking is you you look at some of we we've got incredible areas of Atlantic rainforest in the UK that that we own and manage.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's literally worth nothing from a carbon perspective because it already existed when we bought it and it was baseline and it hasn't been planted.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that just doesn't make any sense.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's like again, we go back to Switzerland, we find a safety deposit box full of diamonds.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, that's that's not worth anything because it's already got diamonds in it.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't make any sense to me.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_00: Nope.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we need to um I think we need to correct that before we can really uh uh give it a scalable shot at at addressing the biodiversity and climate crisis.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that goes back to uh uh the protect our pay uh protect or profits principle, which we just need to come across.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: Say more.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: That uh protector profits principle is at the core of all of this.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um that we've sort of um it reminded me of of um there was this best-selling book a couple of years ago, uh Sara Lang thought regenerative agriculture or something that made a splash you in the UK, uh, where she talks about in the book explains very well how everybody in the debate about sustainable landscapes sort of have a childhood idea of a farmer being someone who just pets animals and is smiling all the time and sun is shining and flowers, and a contrasting view that uh that's uh an old grumpy man in a big machine that just uh destroys everything in an ecological rage.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and in reality, everybody that manages land or however you want to go about it politically, or what views, observations they have, they care about it in their own way.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: They want to make a living for it, they're probably attached to it.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and they are uh most often, I would assume, uh, from an honest point of view, uh, living up to their own values and trying to get the best of it.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um but in that makes different from all most of the rest of us.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_00: They are also, they need to make a living to support a family from the land, from their business, which they happen to live in and on, and maybe even have a family tie with.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then we expect them to go and do stuff that either takes uh submitting 400 pages of applications, and maybe they gave half of the money for three years to do a change that comes with 10,000 prescriptions.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a very good change agent scenario use case?
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: No, not from my point of view.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: Or we uh uh we um condemn them for not doing what would be economically disadvantaged to them.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um who who how would I do if someone claimed that said I should be doing that in my work life?
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I sometimes get asked, um, what what do you tell the neighboring farmers?
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, nothing.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's not my business, it's it's their land.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: I say, Would you like to come and see what we're doing?
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: You're very welcome.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, fantastic.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_01: Have a lovely day.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's not my place to tell someone else what to do with their land, as much as it is, I'm not gonna tell you what to do with your bathroom or your kitchen.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's none of my business.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna be respectful for your property and privacy.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in that setting, then currently those that believe in it, or some other non-financial driver, will go and make a change unless they can come up with a business model.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um and there's not many of those.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that comes back to that nobody pays them for protecting nature.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_00: So even if they, even if uh someone would be uh an imaginary farmer would be really against anything vogue, anything climate change, I'm quite sure if the best economical solution, the best highest return to support them and their family was to expand that hedge row or to retire that drained wetland, they would do it on day one.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm I was even told by someone the other day that there is a fairly big, powerful uh group in the Republican side of the uh the US party that wants to conserve nature because that goes back to conserving the US as it was, make it great again.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_00: Even those created that narrative.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they want to go there, and they despise everything we represent sitting in in the studio having a podcast and fine uh addressing the financial crisis, or the biodiversity crisis, right?
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember um if it made the edit for book two, but there was a piece I wrote about how um the environment doesn't care about your political persuasion.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think we need to take the political out of uh how we address the climate uh and biodiversity crisis because we've made it to a point where it's uh it's it's uh counterproductive.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_00: We need to make sure that there is a business case for the average farmer for protecting nature in a way that can compete with what they're doing right now.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think there are ways to do it, but the political discourse is not going that direction.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not close enough to recall the detail, but perhaps you can help me out with it.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh wasn't there a government sort of offering or calling in Denmark uh a 100 million euros scale in terms of government looking to provide similar mechanisms through carbon markets?
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um 80% of what you said are spot on.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um yes, there's this huge uh sort of uh quintessential uh groundbreaking uh triparty agreement.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh the part that's not in there is carbon markets, and the part that's not in there is private uh funding at all.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um there is um a tax on some farming activities, um, and then there is a support scheme to plant a forest.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's some political targets for how much should be untouched natural forest, how much should be uh sustainably managed forest.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there are some uh graduations of these incentive schemes um for protecting groundwater, protecting biodiversity, uh preventing uh nitrogen leaching, and so on and so forth.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's a huge plan.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_00: But all of the money in there are taxpayer money, and they're all dispersed through um subsidy schemes.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: And those subsidy schemes are managed by local authorities but need uh sort of second-order sign-off by a central unit.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: And um they are based the the strategies and priorities for that comes from local voluntary networks in in regions.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_00: You already have three governance layers before anyone started submitting.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: And right now, I saw the number the other day, but I I forgot it.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's a subset of the expected applications that come in.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we're back to the same.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um slow, bureaucratic, expensive to administer.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: An incentive you need to raise your hand for, full out a lot of papers, and get half of the money you need to make the change.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: Is that going to transform a lot?
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think so.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: It is not a protector profits principle.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: No, and complexity doesn't scale.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_00: And complexity doesn't scale.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think we found the uh title of the episode penny Simplicity Scales.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we'll we'll put you in your prime ministerial role for the day.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: Congratulations.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, again, you are so uniquely placed to offer comment on this because you've worn so many hats across the years.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: What could we do to help make things better?
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: On the uh climate biographic crisis.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um I would do two things.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: Three things.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um I would put in place tomorrow a requirement that from 2030 and every year onwards uh everyone that places a product on the European or UK markets, if I had that in my powers, um should be um able to present a uh a uh nature and uh carbon footprint that could be in a in deficit now, but need to hit uh net negative in 2050 and then immediate trajectory for the part of your product that you put on the EU market.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then I would um uh put in place a mechanism that's already underway, but it's voluntary in the EU.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's called performance certificates, that is basically saying if you want to have your uh the carbon balance and later nature balance of a particular property recognized, then it needs to follow these calculation rules and be uh certified against these rules, and then you get a certificate for the balance of nature or or in this so far carbon on your property in this given year, and then make sure that the any company needs to retire one of these certificates for every positive impact they want to account in their towards their target, and then the rest would be hands-off.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: How do you implement that with simplicity?
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's the next thing.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um it is, and maybe that's because I um I'm so ingrained in it over the years, it is much more simple than anything we have right now.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because it would be um it would basically be hands-off for uh politicians, it would be hands-off for uh government agencies, for anything else than putting in place that certification system.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the rest is a farmer, a company that can provide numbers on your balance, make you help uh help you make your uh your uh carbon balance accounting for that plot of land.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then I'm quite sure that most land managers, either on the on the on their own or with a farm extension service or whatever rural jobs you would create by putting this in place, would be able to figure out what to do on that land.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: We are not prescriptive what you should do.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: We don't expect additionality.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: Just make sure that you are net positive on your plot of land.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: And all company needs to have across the supply chain a net positive uh footprint.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I would say 2030, they need some time to get that system up and running.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end of the day, it's just data.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: So if we think about the complexities of taxation in the UK and the amount of so I'll do it in a UK context, you can you can take us to mainland Europe, but there are hundreds of thousands of people involved in HMRC and taxation.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_01: We're about to make half of those irrelevant through the impact of AI.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: So if we overlaid a carbon and a nature accounting facility on top of the government taxation system, you wouldn't need to add any more people.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_01: As we talked about AI at the start, resource neutral, wider range of skills, different way of looking at things.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: That is interesting.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant, Rich.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_00: That is the missing piece in what you just said.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, that's that could be the way it should be set up.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because I wanted simplicity, as we talked about.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_00: It needs to be an everyday, almost unnoticeable part of what you already do.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, of course, it's tied to your taxation and you're reporting that way around.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: And remote sensing autonomous devices, the internet of things.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's go there actually, because you and I are super keen on this.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: Talk to me about how you're utilizing data, information, remote sensing across the business.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um let's just separate um data from the data management systems and the modeling and the analytical tools we use because we and uh we decided to start there.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: Figure out um how what's what's gonna be our sort of um our analytical engine and picked up a uh A uh open source tool called Flint, uh full lens integration tool that has been developed by greenhouse gas inventory people, real greenhouse gas forest carbon nerds scientific over the last uh 20 years, uh, by the Canadian and Australian governments, and said, okay, we adopt that because it's transparent.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's based on 200 uh and more peer-reviewed papers.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's been revised and it's been audited by government auditors over the last many years.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it gives us a community, a global community of independent experts that can both help but also review, add to.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's really uh community-based.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_00: I like that idea, but at the same time, it gives us control.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it gives us control on what I consider essential data for our business and also for compliance and business model and uh uh investor satisfaction.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I wanted a tool like that.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we started there because we uh the type of data we get in when you operate globally as we do on a given forest property.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_00: One thing is just metrics and terminology is different.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, maturity and data collection, what the government provides, we need to work with a multitude of different types of data.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we really need a flexible tool.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and Flint can do that.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_00: And all of those um uh flexible data sources, again, case by case, forest by forest, is then what do we have?
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_00: What's the minimum we have?
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_00: Where do we need to make assumptions and where can we uh over the next uh five, ten, fifteen years um get better and better data, and then put in place a uh a roadmap for all the time pushing the margin for what can we do this year to get better data?
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think uh I'm really amazed by what you've explained, how you guys build your model in the UK.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_00: That could probably be replicated a few places, but in my many parts of the world, um uh that would be a major, major lift.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we were sort of early on thinking um this is going to be an audacious plan, as you said, but you're only gonna achieve it in small incremental steps that always require that someone who knows okay, what's the next data barrier in this forest we can push forward?
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we've invested um in testing a couple of uh yeah uh technologies and we're gonna test um uh backpack LiDAR soon, uh in a couple of weeks.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, in some of our forests, uh we use a little bit of remote sensing, but it's not a lot, and that's probably where I sort of have an irrational side to it as a soil scientist by background.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh remote sensing with a closed canopy can't tell me not much about the forest, so I need the forest floor and the soil, so I need to go there anyhow.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I'd much rather to sort of jump the uh leapfrog past the current uh remote sensing offerings and just get into um uh lidar backpacks right away.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_00: Or at over I have a lot of faith in uh or trust in um uh what do you call it?
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_00: Self-flying drones with LIDAR on it.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_00: When we get to that, that's gonna be a breakthrough.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's interesting you reflect on.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's been really liberating.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_01: So this is the first year where we've really talked in detail about our approach to data and analytics and tech and the whole suite.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of use those.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've started talking about technology more than I've started talking about data.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because in my head, when I'm talking about data, I'm talking about the whole spectrum from acquisition and processing management and analytics.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, that doesn't really land that well with people, so I tend to talk about technology more than I do principally data now.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_01: But the most exciting thing we're doing at the moment is the next stage of our MRV-based approach, so our monitoring, reporting, and verification.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_01: So we've now got it to centimeter level precision and mapping individual tree uh carbon storage, which is super cool.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_01: So uh drone data to do the exact canopy you've talked about, machine learning to identify individual trees by species and type and uh density of um the canopy itself, and then on the ground led our data to cross-reference what's there and to really make sure the forest floor is factored into the equation because it just so much of it's missed.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_01: And our initial testing is demonstrating somewhere between 19 and 20 percent more carbon stored than you would believe on traditional methods, and that is super, super exciting.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_01: But it do it does present other challenges.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_01: So we are now producing on a hundred-acre test plot terabytes of data, yeah.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Terabytes, so you know, and there is a footprint associated with that, and energy and a water, and a demand usage for that.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_01: How is that something you think about in terms of the AI footprint and the additional consequences of what we're doing around data?
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_00: The current level of AI use um in-house is fairly small.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_00: I do think it's it's something we do need to uh to handle well.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um in the uh we have one supplier that does some AI for us, and they handle that in their uh sort of footprint.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_00: If we talk about the accounting side of things, but it's certainly something to be considered.
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um the question is I don't know if if those data centers uh what they're doing in that space.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard, isn't it?
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_01: So what one of the phrases I've I've hit upon, it's um so so book two is gonna come out in June.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Book three is out in January.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Whoa.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_01: So uh for those of you who don't know out there, number one was kind of the idea behind oxygen conservation in our sort of literally first chapter.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Book two was more the business side of it.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Rewilding Wealth, and it's about the economics, the financials of the model, and how it works.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Book three is the data and tech tech side of it.
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um working title um natural intelligence.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, like my two-word titles again, but breaks down how we look at data and tech and and every aspect of it.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the phrases that appears a lot in there that I hit upon is that the more reliant we become, the more the more digital the world becomes, the more reliant we become on nature.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because every one of those data centers is a physical thing.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this cloud we talk about isn't a cloud, it's concrete and steel and and microchips and silicon and sand that's been printed to a micron.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um the more digital we become, the more reliant we are on nature for space and energy and water and cooling and the environmental footprint and the people that need to build these places and work on them.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I in a in a bizarre kind of way, and maybe this is the optimist in me, but I think as we rush to build these data centers, that's how ultimately we end up funding the nature recovery who need to, because this is uh taking us down the investment line a little bit.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_01: If if you are one of these big hyperscalers, uh, an NVIDIA, an Amazon Web Services, a meta, uh in fact, let's look at Anthropic last month.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, eight billion of profit in a single month.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_01: If they want to diversify their balance sheet and and the cash they have there, where can they put it that is not exposed to the exact same investment case they're making?
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Where can they put it that isn't exposed to AI disturbance and and um disruption?
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_01: The only place is real assets, which lends itself to the space, the energy, the land, the water, that they need real asset base.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think we are going to see, in the same way that the the railroad tycoons and the industrialists became the philanthropists that paid to improve the world.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think these hyperscalers are going to be philanthropists, but I do think they're gonna be the investors that pay for the restoration of the landscapes they need to support their data centers.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Am I mad in that hypothesis?
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: No, not at all.
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um in fact, it's uh uh I love that you're connecting those two.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I guess you mean that in a way of going beyond the like of Microsoft that buys credits to uh offset whatever they did back in the day.
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that this is real that that land, and they don't make it more of it, uh becomes that final um that that ultimate, I should say, investment case again on the backside of technology.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_01: So because it's also not tying the credit rather than paying for the security deposit box, if cash is irrelevant to you, why wouldn't you just buy the bank?
• 1:15:26
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_01: So the hyperscalers, rather than paying for a credit price, why wouldn't they just buy the underlying land and benefit from the year-on-year perpetual storage?
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because they're not paying once, they'll own it forever.
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_01: But that goes for everyone.
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_00: That goes for the big uh I mean, and this is this is another place where a lot of this context maybe comes through.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_00: But um at the end of the day, the transition you want to see in the landscape is also a transition both away from managed land into unmanaged, but also improvement within managed land.
• 1:16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And managed land per definition is that it's because someone's sourcing someone something from there.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are the Unilevers or the Nestle's or the IKEAs or the you name it of the world, you have a massive land footprint.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um and we rely in all our climate policies on companies reducing their uh their footprint ultimately.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that would mean they do it within their own land that they have some sort of financial operational control over via the supply chain.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's how scope three is defined.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um why would they not just buy that land or lease it or pay the farmer directly without a credit to make that change?
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Or set up funds that would buy up that land and make that change.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Are you um are you familiar with Rebalance Earth, Rob Gardner's guys?
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_01: So Rob is very much in that mindset.
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_01: He he doesn't want credited systems, he he wants uh ecosystem service payments.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I think there is an ab again, back to simplicity.
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's a simplicity and there's a clarity for a service contract, a service is being provided and received, ergo a payment is due.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think that would I think we're gonna see more of those.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_01: I I think pollination, you mentioned it earlier.
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it's one of the exciting areas that uh there are, as I understand it, there are fragments of that already in the um, I think it's almond farming in the sort of US West Coast, whereby uh farmers will literally pay for a pollination service to arrive with hives of bees on the back of a lorry that are that's not a million miles away from an ecosystem service market.
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not.
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I think um the thing that's um uh that's the gap we need to bridge to to come to that uh world, to that panacea, to that paradise is again data on these services.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you want to people to pay for them, they need to know how much they paid for it.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Before I take it on a different tangent, the this is a totally random question.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, have you have you seen that uh SpaceX is listed to IPO in the US this year?
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_01: So they're bringing Tesla, SpaceX, the Musk Empire together, and they're gonna IPO, seeking a 2 trillion valuation.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_01: The intent of that IPO.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_01: So uh Tesla are gonna go, Tesla and SpaceX are gonna go this year.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're also uh OpenAI are planning to go either this or next, and then Anthropic are going to IPO.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um those three companies will IPO for more than the total value of companies that have ever IPO'd in history.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_01: That is a staggering valuation, right?
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_01: The scary bit about the SpaceX one, they've openly stated they they've now reduced, it's a bit like I was talking about scaling earlier, the unit cost of moving a kilo of cargo into space and back has gone from something like a million dollars a kilo down to SpaceX think they can do it for a hundred pounds a kilo in the next iteration of rockets.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_01: So the reason they want to do this IPO is they plan on mining the moon for precious metals.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_01: What on earth, Bond-esque like sci-fi world, are we living in if we're gonna start mining the moon?
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_01: So almost that in fact, that's the that's the shot we need of you just rubbing your head with that because we've we've decided we've done enough damage on this planet, let's go and mine the moon instead.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about uh land managers and terrestrial footprint.
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_00: What's that gonna be?
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Lunar footprint?
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Extra terrestrial footprint, yeah.
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Whoa.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was already complicated.
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's just gonna make matters even more complicated.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_00: But uh the the thing that the thing I thought you were going at with that uh story was that drop in marginal cost of moving cargo into space.
• 1:20:00
  SPEAKER_00: How do you see it?
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_00: I I'm I'm seeing that that drop is gonna happen on the marginal cost of a lot of sensor data in our space over the next five years, and those that get it right, they will they may not have the same valuation, but they're gonna be uh uh have an endlessly scalable business.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we had the guys from Foresight in on the podcast this morning.
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_01: So they IPO'd their sustainable forestry fund in how long ago?
• 1:20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Ten years ago?
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um maybe five years ago.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Something like that, five years ago, and then ended up delisting and going private again.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we talked about how it won't be tomorrow, but in five to ten years, there will be a number of publicly listed natural capital companies because it there's no logical way there can't be because people's perceptions of the environment.
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_01: I I also quite get excited about the fact that go back three or four years, there were hundreds of thousands of people around Europe attending Greta Thunberg marches about environmental crisis and climate collapse.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Those people are now in the education system, they're they're starting to enter the workplace, they're not in the boardroom yet.
• 1:21:13
  SPEAKER_01: No, they're not in the C-suite yet, they're going to be in five to ten years.
• 1:21:17
  SPEAKER_01: And when they're when they're on the board of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and they're making decisions like, no, no, we need a planet to live on.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_01: We want a future.
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then they're gonna start having children as well, and then their perception and views of the future will change dramatically as a result.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_01: And not only that, they can now change things 10 times, 100 times faster than we ever could because of AI.
• 1:21:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we are gonna see this absolute explosion in that.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, my goal and ambition for what we're doing is so so we're gonna raise external capital for the first time this year.
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we're seeking a half billion raise, which will take us to unicorn status, which would be super cool.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but by 2030, 2032, I want to be in a position where we can list this as a multi-billion pound uh business working across Europe and the UK and the US.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think if we can do that, we can get the cost of delivery, the cost of management, the cost of data, we can get everything to that to that same value point that you can only get to a scale.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_00: At five clicks.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_00: We need to get that climate impact.
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_00: So simplicity and low cost, and then you have a scalable business.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Completely agree.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's what we need.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's it.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we make this everyday action for the farmers, for the foresters.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_00: So um brilliant of you, Rich.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Let's make it happen.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Let's make it happen first.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um, so we're five years old in June, so book two will come out on our fifth anniversary.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_01: When you think back about the sector, environment, natural capital, what are the things that in your mind have changed the most in the last five years?
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um that in the beginning of that period five years ago, uh, suddenly everyone was a sustainability consultant.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they were, yeah.
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone knew about it.
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I have people I've known for 20 years work in completely different sectors.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_00: I want to switch to sustainability as well.
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, yeah, you don't just pull it in there uh copy your uh resume and put in a new name.
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and we've seen last year or two that there's been some consolidation there.
• 1:23:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I think uh we've gone from a climate biodiversity craze that maybe this is a bit of a two-sided coin here.
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um maybe there was too many people in the space for some time because that also meant you got a lot of uh views, you got a lot of decisions made without context.
• 1:23:48
  SPEAKER_00: So you got a lot of decisions that were not audacious, not bold, not transformative, perhaps not even impactful.
• 1:23:56
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, you had someone else rock up again and go, maybe we should think about recycling.
• 1:24:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, yeah, yeah, no, we've we've done that.
• 1:24:03
  SPEAKER_01: We've done that conversation.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think that yes, history repeats.
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's sort of I I when I started out, uh I got my first job, it was just a couple of months before this uh uh dreadful Copenhagen climate summit back in 2009.
• 1:24:19
  SPEAKER_00: And um then we had a small climate craze.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we had the conversation, can we price forest carbon?
• 1:24:25
  SPEAKER_00: We had the conversation, uh, how do we uh regulate all of this?
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_00: In the EU, we had the conversation should forest and agriculture be included in the EU ETS anytime soon, and you know what it fell on?
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have the data.
• 1:24:40
  SPEAKER_00: We cannot produce credible data.
• 1:24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then 10 years later, we have that conversation again.
• 1:24:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what does it fall on?
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have the data.
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_00: We can't uh not only measure, but we can't gather it, we can't uh verify it.
• 1:24:53
  SPEAKER_00: We we that will add too much um disruption into the ETS system that already was sort of fairly wobbly at the time, and carbon prices were low before 2019.
• 1:25:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um so we're just having the same conversations again and again in some of these spaces.
• 1:25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think that's that was the there was a lot of people coming to the space with a lot of attention.
• 1:25:19
  SPEAKER_00: There was a boom in conferences, there was a boom in papers released.
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_00: But they all not not all, but there was quite a bit of replicating what we've already done in two cycles.
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I sometimes I felt like Peel didn't care about history.
• 1:25:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's such a such an important point.
• 1:25:38
  SPEAKER_01: And do you know what?
• 1:25:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm guilty of that sometimes.
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly earlier in my career, I was really guilty of going, I've got this idea, I must be the first person who's thought of this.
• 1:25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, wait, no, no, no.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_01: Understand what's gone there.
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's easier now.
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_01: Again, with the tools and techniques we've got, you can hit chat of any kind and you can say, talk me through the history of this.
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_01: What are the in fact?
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_01: I've built a particular Claude Skill that says, wherever I encounter this situation, please give me examples from history from other sectors that can help me understand it in context.
• 1:26:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's so few things that we haven't seen and faced before in one way, shape, or form.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_01: So um, yeah, again, we all need to be context junkies, don't we?
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_01: To understand it.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_01: And just no more if you imagine the bell curve of what we were getting.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_01: So in that saturated environment, we were getting lots of like D-level ideas and C level ideas, but you need a million rather than needing 10 of those to get one great one.
• 1:26:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you just put so many people in the room, yeah, you end up with more collisions and more conversations, but you also end up with more bad ideas that you have to work through.
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great point, actually.
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we are we are seeing it now.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_01: One of the one of the things I'm I'm excited about about the change over the five years is the the really talented people we have in the space now.
• 1:26:52
  SPEAKER_01: People that five years ago wouldn't have looked at the sector, now really are really talented graduates that would have gone into banking or strategy consultancy or big four.
• 1:27:01
  SPEAKER_01: They're now coming into the environmental space, and then that just changes the quality of putting better players on the pitch, aren't we?
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry?
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_01: We're putting better players on the pitch now than we were within.
• 1:27:11
  SPEAKER_00: We are, and and players that view the game in a different way.
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think it would you point you made before about how generations as they move up the power ladder are changing decisions.
• 1:27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I feel we're over exaggerating and over-reliant on the ability to change other people's mind, sort of in in the same generation.
• 1:27:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's rarely happening when it comes to it.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but changes happen when generations C grow up and see, I want to do different.
• 1:27:42
  SPEAKER_00: I can do better than that, coming back to where we started, but reinventing yourself.
• 1:27:46
  SPEAKER_00: Humans are again and again reinventing themselves because we're looking at the generations before us and our parents and say, that didn't work, that didn't work, that didn't work, that hurt.
• 1:27:56
  SPEAKER_00: I want to do different.
• 1:27:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how we change.
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_00: That generation, the generations that come up now, those incredibly talented people, I totally agree.
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_00: They just take many of them just take sustainability for granted.
• 1:28:08
  SPEAKER_00: They just take terrestrial boundaries for granted.
• 1:28:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they're a native digital.
• 1:28:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I I'm really not upset about the loss of ESG as a moniker.
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think.
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_01: So CSR, ESG, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:28:24
  SPEAKER_01: Bridge.
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_01: Just a bridge to understanding.
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you show me anybody who doesn't think an investment should be sustainable.
• 1:28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Who is actively choosing an unsustainable investment?
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Who is choosing one with no governance?
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_01: And who is actively choosing one that's seeking environmental damage?
• 1:28:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now, some people are uh complicit and ignorant to the fact that it has it, but no one's going, I would invest in that, but it's not doing enough damage for me.
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_01: I want more.
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's just not necessary anymore.
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like no one says to you, Oh, what's your favorite search engine?
• 1:28:56
  SPEAKER_01: Just Google something.
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_01: We don't need the language anymore.
• 1:28:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's done, it's done enough.
• 1:29:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's moved us a bit further forward, it's now getting some baggage.
• 1:29:03
  SPEAKER_01: Just ditch it and let's have a different conversation.
• 1:29:06
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And and I just this morning I was uh reading a piece from uh the carbon market and just noticing that in that space it's the same.
• 1:29:16
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody has high integrity, high quality credits.
• 1:29:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:29:20
  SPEAKER_00: Does anyone go to the market to buy low-integrity uh low quality credits?
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what do they pay then?
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so let's just take that away.
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's a credit.
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And what are you paying for?
• 1:29:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what are you using it for?
• 1:29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Reassuringly low quality credits.
• 1:29:39
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:29:40
  SPEAKER_00: Consistently low quality.
• 1:29:42
  SPEAKER_00: We guarantee there's no additionality here.
• 1:29:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um we're pondering the idea of a direct-to-consumer credit model.
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we've had a lot of inflow lately from people, oh, can I offset with you?
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, no, we we don't, we never thought we'd offer a direct-to-consumer mechanism.
• 1:29:59
  SPEAKER_01: You you can see echoes in my thinking on this because like that's why I was listening to the approach on how Tesla sell direct and things like that.
• 1:30:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're thinking about doing it.
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_01: We're thinking about having it whereby one or two of our projects are available literally on the website and doing something whereby you can click, you can do a really uh simple self-assessment of uh a flight, a choice, a decision, and the environmental impact of it, AI supported, and one or two clicks later, you can buy one of our credits to offset your personal footprint in terms of that.
• 1:30:32
  SPEAKER_01: I hadn't previously thought we would get there, but when we started talking about it as a team, we said, okay, if we fast forward five or ten years, do we think the ability to offset your carbon footprint and then maybe your nature footprint, do we think that will be a direct-to-customer product?
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we all agreed it would at some point.
• 1:30:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we were like, well, maybe we have a go.
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Just should have a go.
• 1:30:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um I very much, very much agree that there's going to be a demand for that.
• 1:30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um and just on um being the old grumpy man here.
• 1:31:05
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know about more futures?
• 1:31:07
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 1:31:08
  SPEAKER_00: In uh in Brandenburg and northern Germany.
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_00: They did peatland restoration starting in 2017 only based on personal offsetting and a webpage where you click in and support local re-wedding back to nature of peatlands.
• 1:31:23
  SPEAKER_00: They never had an ambition of scaling beyond Germany.
• 1:31:26
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted to test and show it.
• 1:31:33
  SPEAKER_00: They've written up half of the scientific papers you find on that matter.
• 1:31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so uh go to a study tour to Stralsund and then uh take it from there.
• 1:31:42
  SPEAKER_00: So Griefswald, University of Griefswald.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_00: More futures.
• 1:31:45
  SPEAKER_00: M-O-O-R.
• 1:31:46
  SPEAKER_00: M-O-O-R, it's the German word.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_00: More futures.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant work they did.
• 1:31:51
  SPEAKER_00: They developed all the methodologies themselves.
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_01: See, exactly what we talked about before.
• 1:31:55
  SPEAKER_01: You assume you came up with a new idea.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_01: We have not.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_01: Borrow borrow it from the people.
• 1:31:59
  SPEAKER_01: But nobody else picked it up.
• 1:32:00
  SPEAKER_01: So uh what was the um uh did you know Apple had the iPad before they even released an iPhone, but it failed when they tried to release it.
• 1:32:12
  SPEAKER_01: There was no market for it.
• 1:32:14
  SPEAKER_01: But once people had got used to an iPhone, they then wanted so I think in in all these things we do the the the timing is so so so important.
• 1:32:23
  SPEAKER_01: What's the next evolution in chapter for you?
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_01: What is the next reinvention of you?
• 1:32:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's digital.
• 1:32:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I truly think that's uh sort of um I have um I guess we all have so many ideas in my head that doesn't come out on how all of this could play.
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And just being able to um with AI and a lot of digital tools produce much more easily digestible material and just go digital in the way you express yourself.
• 1:33:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's something I've wanted to do, but haven't gone there.
• 1:33:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in the process of working with our team to set up uh so I'm so often on the road, I've got a laptop on my knee, I'm doing things like this.
• 1:33:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I've written down seven or eight things while you were talking that are ideas that I want to go explore.
• 1:33:20
  SPEAKER_01: I want to get to a point where I have a permanent fix-based setup at home where that doesn't go in my- So that right now that's gone in my very pretty spreadsheet to-do list that I'll show you after because you'll love it.
• 1:33:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's so geeky.
• 1:33:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Claude enabled.
• 1:33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that shouldn't be going in the to-do list.
• 1:33:35
  SPEAKER_01: That should be going in the live agent that's running this so that by the time we finish talking, it's gone right, Richard.
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_01: Listen to this.
• 1:33:42
  SPEAKER_01: We've got this, this, and this.
• 1:33:43
  SPEAKER_01: You might want to think about this, ditch these two ideas, and I've booked you a ticket to go see the More Futures guys.
• 1:33:48
  SPEAKER_00: And here is a structure for uh the two uh social media posts you can do.
• 1:33:52
  SPEAKER_00: Fill in blanks here, change what you want.
• 1:33:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I created a picture that shows you in the uh thinking about this brilliant edge you're in marketing it or whatever, stuff like that.
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we need to.
• 1:34:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's so close, right?
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's so close to being able to do that.
• 1:34:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it's coming, it's coming by the day.
• 1:34:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've I've loved every minute of this conversation.
• 1:34:12
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for is it already over?
• 1:34:14
  SPEAKER_01: For finding the time.
• 1:34:15
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're we're pretty tight on it, yeah.
• 1:34:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um I always finish in the same way.
• 1:34:20
  SPEAKER_01: What's the one question I haven't asked you you wish I had?
• 1:34:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's um where's the world heading?
• 1:34:33
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I refuse to be pessimistic.
• 1:34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think a lot of what we've talked about today is is sort of comes together to be optimistic um among other than that, a disproportionate amount of the trouble we have in the world right now is because of uh old men of generations before us have difficulties grasping uh a digital world, a world with sustainability, a world with new generations, um, but they're gonna die out.
• 1:35:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the generations that come in they think about behavior, they think about allowing the individual to be whomever you are, they think about um living a healthy work life, or as I say, life uh life work balance.
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's gonna be other challenges coming up, but I think a lot of the structural problems in the world that comes to a head these days, it feels like it.
• 1:35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Also the dependence on oil and all that by 220 years we were in a very different place.
• 1:35:46
  SPEAKER_01: Are you more or less optimistic about the future than you were five years ago?
• 1:35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Probably less optimistic.
• 1:35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting, but still optimistic.
• 1:35:57
  SPEAKER_00: But that was that was a a sort of optimism bliss because everything was optimistic, if everything was good, everything was going the right way, and it that's never true, because then coming back to where we started, then you don't reinvent it.
• 1:36:13
  SPEAKER_00: Five five years ago, we were still in COVID lockdowns.
• 1:36:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we were on the back end of it, at least in in in Denmark.
• 1:36:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um but there was so much everybody was a sustainability consultant, everybody wanted to do good.
• 1:36:27
  SPEAKER_00: The economy had at least in in parts of Europe done a lot better than we feared.
• 1:36:32
  SPEAKER_01: I um I think it's your point about everyone was there though, right?
• 1:36:37
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone was there, but no one knew how to do anything.
• 1:36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the reason I'm more optimistic now is um I I'm just I'm so so obsessed with everything AI at the minute.
• 1:36:48
  SPEAKER_01: And um Demis Asabis at Google Deep Mind, I think is is gonna be remembered as an Alan Turin, an Albert Einstein.
• 1:36:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think he's genuinely amazing.
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, his his mission statement is he wants to create um genuine AGI for the scientific and the medical breakthroughs it can bring.
• 1:37:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, he that his Nobel Prize was for protein folding and understanding protein synthesis.
• 1:37:16
  SPEAKER_01: The ability to apply that type of thinking, computational power.
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you were talking before, I was like, right, I'm going to do a project that pulls in every single open source model that relates to land management globally, and get Claude to build an into an interaction of that.
• 1:37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Someone will have already done it, so I'll bring that one in as well and loop it, loop it back through and everything.
• 1:37:40
  SPEAKER_01: But if you apply that computational power, that potential, that technology, to carbon capture and storage, to land use design, to all these problems, all of a sudden we actually have we've never had a lever to pull to solve these existential global problems.
• 1:37:55
  SPEAKER_01: Anthropic and open air.
• 1:37:57
  SPEAKER_01: They're building as a lever.
• 1:37:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lever now, and we don't even need to pull it.
• 1:38:00
  SPEAKER_00: We have to ask it to be pulled.
• 1:38:02
  SPEAKER_00: And most of those problems, uh, the barriers that we talked about earlier for pricing nature, traceability, sensors, uh um uh having getting the incentive right, uh, handling that big data, all of that can be solved by technology solutions.
• 1:38:19
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe we can just AI ourselves out of that tight spot.
• 1:38:26
  SPEAKER_01: Completely agree.
• 1:38:27
  SPEAKER_01: Mate, thank you so much for coming in.
• 1:38:28
  SPEAKER_01: I've loved every minute of the podcast.
• 1:38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Really appreciate it.
• 1:38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.