Second Nature

What if the most valuable person in a rugby team isn’t on the pitch?

Sam Larner has spent years pulling apart professional rugby through data. And the numbers expose some uncomfortable truths: teams overpay for experience, coaches repeatedly recruit the same profiles, unconventional players are systematically undervalued, and sometimes the difference between winning and losing is buried among 50,000 data points nobody in the stands will ever see.

But this conversation goes much further than rugby. It’s about building high-performance teams. When should you trust data over instinct? How much is one superstar actually worth? How do you give people enough freedom to make decisions under pressure? And why might the teams willing to look stupid be the ones with the biggest competitive advantage?

Impact investing has spent years fighting for a tiny slice of institutional portfolios. Nadia Nikolova thinks that is the wrong fight.

As CEO of ResponsAbility, managing almost $6 billion across emerging markets, Nadia sits at the intersection of institutional capital, climate, sustainable food and financial inclusion. She explains why impact investments should compete for the same 95% of portfolios as everything else, and why the industry needs better data, ratings, scale and replicability to get there.

But the conversation goes much further. From growing up during Bulgaria's hyperinflation to watching capital transform nations, from blended finance and the $150m pension fund investment that marked a major milestone for ResponsAbility, to AI potentially creating a "missing generation" of workers and robotics threatening the labour-cost advantage of emerging markets. The question running through it all: what happens when capital starts pricing the future properly?

For years, the nature sector built projects first and asked where the money would come from later.

Cain Blythe thinks that has to change.

From the first major investment into Broughton Sanctuary to Credit Nature's expansion across Europe, Africa and New Zealand, the conversation is finally moving beyond good intentions. Where is the demand? Who is going to buy? What return can nature generate? And how do you build a market that can move enough money, fast enough?

We get into why the sector still struggles to sell, why distribution could be the biggest unlock, how AI could create an entirely new class of nature investors, and why Cain's next book argues that the more we tame the world around us, the more afraid we become.

Nature is moving from environmental obligation to financial opportunity. But what does it actually take to turn biodiversity, habitat and ecosystem services into something institutional capital can invest in?

Nath Curtis and Ben Stansfield have spent two decades watching renewable energy evolve from a new, uncertain industry into an investable infrastructure market. Now they are seeing many of the same patterns emerge in natural capital: from BNG and habitat banks to regulation, offtake contracts and the structures needed to bring serious institutional money into nature.

But there are still some big questions. Can government accelerate the market without killing it? Can AI replace parts of professional services without destroying the human expertise clients actually pay for? And what happens when nature becomes a genuinely investable asset class?

For years, the environmental movement told us to be afraid of the future. Tom Crowther thinks that story has run its course.

From discovering 3 trillion trees on Earth to watching his trillion-tree research explode into a global movement, and then become one of the most criticised ideas in environmental science, Tom has seen what happens when a scientific idea escapes the lab. He talks about the backlash, the mistakes, the lessons, and why nature is finally becoming part of the economic and political conversation.

But the most interesting part of Tom's story isn't scientific. At 26, he survived a devastating stroke that changed his relationship with his own mind, sent him through two years of depression, and ultimately changed how he thinks about the future. Now, through Restor, he is watching restoration scale through a different kind of feedback loop, one where healthier nature improves people's livelihoods, which creates more incentive for nature to recover. He says 172 million hectares are already part of that story.

Nature doesn't have a science problem.

It has a communication problem.

From Formula 1 paddocks to boardrooms, from global brands to Climate Week, Katie Neck and Elena Doms explore why the future of conservation depends less on convincing people they're wrong and more on showing them what's possible. Commercial thinking, personal brands, storytelling and optimism aren't distractions from protecting nature—they might be the reason more people join the mission.

Along the way, they discuss why Formula 1 became an unlikely lesson in sustainability, how founders can build influence beyond their company, where AI genuinely creates value, and why reconnecting people with nature starts with understanding what they already care about.

Everyone agrees nature matters. Almost nobody understands where the real opportunity is.

Nature tech is quietly becoming one of the most important investment themes of the next decade. AI is changing conservation faster than most people realise. Data centres are forcing a rethink of environmental infrastructure. And the companies that solve biodiversity, agriculture and ecosystem restoration won't just protect the planet—they'll build entirely new markets.

Rich sits down with Ollie Potter, founder of Nature Tech Memos, and Kevin Webb, founder of Superorganism, to explore why London Climate Week felt like a tipping point for the sector, why AI may become nature's greatest ally, and why the biggest technology companies in the world could soon become the largest investors in real natural assets. If they're right, we're watching the foundations of a trillion-dollar economy being built in real time.

Everyone agrees AI will change the world.

Almost nobody is asking what happens when governments built for the industrial age try to govern the intelligence age.

Benedict Macon-Cooney has spent over a decade inside the Tony Blair Institute, advising political leaders around the world on AI, state capacity and government reform. This isn't a conversation about chatbots. It's about whether Western governments can still deliver, why public services are getting more expensive while outcomes deteriorate, and why AI might become the biggest reform opportunity since the post-war settlement.

From DeepMind and SpaceX to healthcare, defence, natural capital and economic competitiveness, this conversation explores what happens when technology moves faster than politics—and why countries that fail to adapt won't simply fall behind. They'll become irrelevant.

Everyone talks about product-market fit. Hardly anyone talks about founder-market fit.

Soma Pirityi believes we've been measuring startups the wrong way. After building businesses, losing money, working in venture capital and studying AI, risk and entrepreneurship across Cambridge, UCL and St Andrews, he reached a simple conclusion: companies rarely fail because of the spreadsheet. They fail because of the people behind it.

This conversation explores why founders romanticise failure, why AI won't replace great co-founders, how investors really make decisions, why cognitive diversity matters more than intelligence, and why understanding psychology could become the biggest competitive advantage in business.

James Cameron has spent four decades operating where politics, business and the environment collide. He helped shape modern international climate law, advised governments across the world, founded one of the first climate investment businesses to manage over $1.7 billion, and still believes the biggest opportunities are ahead of us.

But this conversation isn't really about climate.

It's about reinvention. About being expelled from school twice before becoming one of the world's leading legal minds. About why great ideas rarely progress in a straight line. Why optimism is a competitive advantage. And why the people who build the future are usually the ones naïve enough to believe impossible things can be done.