Everyone talks about capital flows into nature. Nobody talks about what has to be true before that capital will move. Insurance isn't a nice-to-have in natural capital markets — it's the load-bearing wall. Without it, the deals don't close, the banks don't lend, the corporates don't buy. With it, you get carbon credits on a balance sheet as assets instead of liabilities. You get BNG units trading like real infrastructure. You get developers who can actually monetise their projects without loc...
May 28
1 hr 39 min
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 valuat...
May 21
1 hr 45 min
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 form...
May 14
1 hr 31 min
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 communic...
May 7
1 hr 49 min
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 ab...
May 6
1 hr 9 min
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. W...
May 5
1 hr 22 min
Tommy Ricketts is the co-founder and CEO of BeZero Carbon — the company that built the world's first carbon ratings agency, walked into COP26, and got told they were the single biggest risk to the carbon market. That was 2021. By 2023, the projects their critics were defending were in freefall. Tommy spent years at Bank of America training under a number-one ranked analyst, pitching ideas to hedge funds whose entire job was to intellectually destroy you. That background — combined with growi...
Apr 30
1 hr 21 min
Britain's biodiversity market was two years old when someone tried to kill it. Not deliberately — just through the spectacular collision of political timing, an overloaded planning system, and a regulatory bottleneck that hit at the worst possible moment. In this episode, I sit down with three of the people who were there — Emma Toovey of Environment Bank, Fiona Milden of Oxygen Conservation, and Alexa Culver of RSK — the day after the Land Use Framework dropped, for the most honest conversat...
Apr 23
1 hr 18 min
Paul Beavis ran a €90 million global champagne business. He was the face of one of the world's most prestigious drinks brands. And he walked away from all of it. What he built next took three years of searching every great wine region on earth, 178 attempts to name a single product, and a back vintage tasting at Claridge's that nobody in the industry thought was possible. Wild Idol is the alcohol-free wine that serious wine drinkers are quietly switching to. This is the story of how it got ...
Apr 16
1 hr 2 min
A $1 billion bet on nature sounds like impact. It’s actually something far more uncomfortable. Martin Berg isn’t guessing where this goes—he’s building it. From inside global finance to running a $1BN natural capital platform, this is what happens when markets collide with ecosystems. Land becomes strategy. Carbon becomes currency. Biodiversity becomes… investable. But beneath the ambition sits tension. Investors want returns, not ideals. Corporates want certainty, not risk. And the market? I...
Apr 9
1 hr 24 min
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