Second Nature

E174 Ed Thorne & Greg Robson: Relationships Can't Be Automated

Greg Robson and Ed Thorne founded Sand River three years ago with a simple but radical premise: the companies solving the ecological crisis are the best businesses on earth — they just haven't been funded that way. Both came from operational backgrounds. Neither had the next great idea to save nature. What they had was the judgment to find the people who did. This conversation goes deep into how you invest in a market that barely exists yet, what you actually look for in a founder, why valuation is mostly theatre, and what happens when AI — the thing everyone says is terrible for the planet — turns out to be nature's most powerful advocate. Greg draws a line that most people in this space are too cautious to say plainly: if we continue treating nature as infinite and free, and we build an intelligence more sophisticated than ours before we've fixed that, we will have earned what comes next. There's also a genuinely beautiful argument in here about partnership, about the moment you stop doing what you're told is valuable and start doing what you believe is valuable, and about why the best time to get on the playing field is exactly when the problem looks too big to solve.

E173 Tim Christophersen: The $7 Trillion Secret Destroying The Planet

Tim Christophersen had a UN contract running to 2038. Diplomatic passport. Lifetime security. A ringside seat to every major environmental agreement on the planet. He left. That decision tells you something important about where this man thinks the real leverage is — and where it isn't. He's spent 30 years building the architecture the world runs on: the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the global biodiversity framework, the early scaffolding of nature markets. He's written one of the formative books on nature of our time. And his conclusion, after all of it, is quietly devastating — the frameworks exist, the science exists, the money exists. What's missing is imagination. The ability to picture what abundance actually looked like before we forgot it was ever there. Now at Salesforce, deploying 65 million trees and making the case for a bio-economy that replaces extraction with restoration, Tim is one of the most quietly radical thinkers in the room. This conversation goes to uncomfortable places — the philosophy that stripped nature of its soul, the subsidies spraying gasoline on a burning house, the question of whether governments will ever actually show up, and why the answer might not matter if the right people move fast enough.

E172 David Gerard: Wonder Is a Business Strategy

David Gerard has spent 30 years learning how to make people forget to be cool. From FAO Schwartz at six years old to the highest-rated show in Las Vegas, from Google's marketing floors to coaching Fortune 500 CEOs on stage presence, David has built a career at the intersection of wonder, attention, and human connection — and in an AI world that's automating everything else, that intersection has never been more valuable. Rich and David go deep on what magic actually teaches you about communication, perception, and leadership. Why the best performers — magicians, comedians, F1 drivers — all have one thing in common. Why authenticity is the only moat that AI can't erode. And why the conversation every leader needs to be having right now isn't about technology — it's about presence. This one covers everything from breathwork and breathwork to boardrooms, Darren Brown to data analytics, the Stanford marshmallow test to what it really means to build a career that's entirely, unapologetically you.

E171 Troy Carter: AI Will Save the Forests

Carbon markets are broken. Not because the projects don't work — but because nobody has decided they should. Troy Carter, founder of Earthshot Labs, has spent five years building the end-to-end infrastructure to get serious money into reforestation and conservation projects worldwide. He's watched the market go hot, go cold, and watched good operators go bankrupt for reasons that have nothing to do with their work. Now he thinks the whole fragmented, mistrustful, acronym-ridden industry is about to consolidate — and whoever ends up at the centre of it stands to do something genuinely historic. Rich sat down with Troy in San Francisco during Climate Week to talk about why the demand problem is more real than the financing problem, why AI companies might be the unexpected saviours of conservation, and why he's been posting on LinkedIn asking if anyone wants to do a roll-up of distressed carbon projects. They also go somewhere most conversations in this space never reach — the sacred relationship between humans and the rest of this planet, and whether without that, none of this is actually worth fighting for.

E170 Dimitri Theocharis: The Hyperscalers Are Coming

Dimitri Theocharis grew up watching an economy collapse. So he left. New York, San Francisco, Harvard Business School. Then something unexpected: a climate startup in the UK that needed someone who understood both money and markets. Dimitri is now CEO of Ecologi, a platform at the intersection of carbon accounting, nature-based funding, and the voluntary carbon market — working with over 16,000 businesses and betting on a consolidation wave that will reshape the entire industry before 2030. We get into the AI arms race and why he thinks it's net positive for nature. The hyperscalers, space mining, the Elon rollup theory. The voluntary carbon market, and why most criticism of carbon credits comes from people who don't understand what they're criticising. And at the end — because Dimitri takes his biomarkers more seriously than most people take their careers — we get into longevity, nutrition, and why the smartest people in the room are quietly doing the boring health stuff everyone else ignores.