Second Nature

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.

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.

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.

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 growing up the youngest of six in a single-parent household in Hackney — produced someone who understands both how markets actually work and why the environmental movement so often gets in its own way.

He talks about why not every carbon credit is equal and why that's heresy to the people who built this market. Why a major tech company funded a project pumping millions of tonnes into the atmosphere and called it carbon neutral. Why 50 businesses in the carbon space are about to disappear. And why the faster this market gets boring, the better.

One of the most forensically intelligent conversations Second Nature has ever had.

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 conversation BNG has ever had on record.

We get into why developers actually championed this policy — and then lost faith in it. Why legal loopholes designed for 25 square metres are somehow being claimed on 48-hectare sites. Why farming families who once slammed the door on habitat banking are now calling to get in. Why the polluter must pay — and why the protector must profit. And why, if we don't fix the exemptions regime soon, we risk hollowing out the very demand that holds this entire market together.

This is BNG unfiltered. The failures, the fixes, the farming families keeping their land for the first time in generations, and what the next chapter of Britain's nature market actually needs to look like. We're still on dial-up. The question is whether we have the nerve to get to broadband.

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 there — the Canadian wilderness, the sommeliers who said no, the grand cru Bordeaux château that said yes, and the philosophy that runs through every single bottle.

If you've ever thought alcohol-free wine was a compromise, this conversation will change your mind.

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? It’s still being invented in real time.

This is the honest conversation most people avoid.

What happens when you stop treating nature as priceless… and start pricing it?

Dimple Patel didn't arrive at the CEO chair via the usual route. She grew up on a council estate in the north of England, the daughter of immigrants who had their house burnt down and opened the shop the next morning anyway. She got to Cambridge on scholarships, traded through the 2008 financial crisis at Goldman Sachs, scaled a coffee chain to 37 stores and sold it to private equity, pivoted into tech, exited a second company days before the consumer market collapsed — and then walked into the biodiversity space to lead NatureMetrics, one of the most important science and technology businesses operating in the natural capital economy today.

This is a conversation about what it actually takes to build something from nothing. About the work hard fallacy — why grit alone isn't enough and what you need instead. About what happens to your identity the morning after you sell the business you poured everything into. About why you should never tell anyone your company is for sale. About the real cost of debt funding, aggressive investors, and signing commercial leases without reading the small print. About building a culture that bridges world-class scientists and commercial operators. And about the one piece of advice Dimple would give her younger self — not to believe in yourself, but to trust your conviction that you'll find a way through.

If you've ever built something, tried to build something, or wondered what separates the people who make it from the people who don't — this one is for you.

Can investing help solve environmental challenges — while still delivering strong returns?

In this episode of the Oxygen Conservation Podcast, Rich Stockdale speaks with Ian Simm, Founder and CEO of Impax Asset Management.

For more than two decades, Ian has been investing in companies that enable the transition to a more sustainable economy — from renewable energy and water infrastructure to smart materials and pollution control.

Today, Impax manages around £25 billion on behalf of institutional investors including pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.

But Ian’s journey into environmental investing didn’t start in finance.

It began with adventure — travelling across China as a teenager and later crossing the Sahara on a tandem bicycle — experiences that shaped his view of the environment and the role business can play in protecting it.

Rich and Ian explore how capital markets can accelerate environmental solutions, why renewable energy and water infrastructure remain some of the biggest opportunities ahead, and where climate and resource risks are still mispriced by global markets.

This episode is about markets, leadership, and the long-term transition to a more sustainable global economy.

What happens when financial markets finally realise nature isn’t external to the economy — but fundamental to it?

In this episode of the Oxygen Conservation Podcast, Rich Stockdale speaks with Vian Sharif, Founder of NatureAlpha — a company using AI and environmental data to help financial institutions understand how their investments impact the natural world.

Today, NatureAlpha’s insights inform institutions representing over $25 trillion in assets, helping investors identify risks linked to biodiversity loss, water stress, pollution and ecosystem degradation.

But Vian’s journey didn’t begin in finance boardrooms.

It began with a transformative moment in Kenya that changed how she saw the relationship between nature and the global economy.

This conversation explores the rise of nature risk in financial markets, the role of AI and data in conservation finance, and why the next major shift in investing may revolve around biodiversity and natural capital.

Because protecting nature isn’t just environmental.

It’s economic.