Second Nature

Oxygen Conservation

Life on Earth is changing faster than ever. Second Nature introduces you to the people driving that change.

Join host Rich Stockdale as he sits down with some of the most interesting people working at the intersection of nature, business, finance, adventure, leadership, and politics. Together, they uncover the stories, lessons, and truths that will shape the future of our planet.

Expect everything from extreme journeys in the wild to high-performance insights, from conservation breakthroughs to the realities of building purpose-driven organisations. These conversations challenge assumptions, spark new thinking, and shine a light on what it really takes to make an impact in the world at scale.

Started in 2023 and brought to you with support from Knight Frank, Second Nature is your chance to learn from the people pushing boundaries and creating change—one honest conversation at a time.

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S1 · E190
Thursday · 1 hr 24 min
E190 Cain Blythe: Stop Trying To Save Nature! This Is How We Actually Fund It
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.
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S1 · E189
August 20 · 1 hr 31 min
E189 Nathan Curtis & Ben Stansfield: What Makes A Great Lawyer?
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?
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S1 · E188
August 13 · 1 hr 47 min
E188 Tom Crowther: Stop Trying To Save The World
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.
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S1 · E187
August 6 · 1 hr 8 min
E187 Katie Neck & Elena Doms: Building A Movement
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.
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S1 · E186
July 30 · 1 hr 43 min
E186 Ollie Potter & Kevin Webb: The Nature Tech Revolution
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.
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S1 · E185
July 23 · 1 hr 32 min
E185 Benedict Macon-Cooney: Winning The AI Century
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.
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S1 · E184
July 21 · 1 hr 53 min
E184 Soma Pitiryi: The Human Algorithm
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.
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S1 · E183
July 16 · 1 hr 39 min
E183 James Cameron: The Lawyer Who Changed Climate
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.
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S1 · E182
July 9 · 1 hr 25 min
E182 Luke Baldwin: Rarer Than Diamonds
Luke Baldwin started a carbon credit business in 2023 — by his own admission, the worst possible year to do it. The market was in freefall, trust was gone, and nobody was buying. Two years later, his business closed the first deal in the world to capitalise future carbon removals as an intangible asset on a corporate balance sheet. This conversation goes into why the environmental sector still hasn't built a product good enough to compete for capital, why "voluntary carbon markets" is the wrong name for the wrong reasons, and why nature-based credits are about to become one of the scarcest assets on the planet — rarer than diamonds, in Luke's words. We get into the mechanics of the Clyde & Co deal, why insurance is quietly becoming the backbone of the entire carbon market, and why nobody buys a house because it's "high integrity." This is a masterclass in the financial architecture nobody in this sector wants to talk about — and why that architecture is the only thing that will actually move institutional money.
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S1 · E181
July 2 · 51 min
E181 Clifford Chance, Live: The Honest Room
Five years ago a carbon credit was $1 and largely a joke. Today it's hundreds of pounds a tonne, rated, insured, and traded on an exchange. The people who did that are in this room. Live at Clifford Chance during London Climate Action Week 2026, Rich convened a panel that doesn't usually end up on record together: a Magic Circle funds lawyer, the CEO of Climate Asset Management, a conservation operator negotiating the contracts that underpin gold-standard carbon credits, the CEO of the Lifescape Project, and one of the leading legal experts in the carbon market. The conversation was honest from the first question. What's still hard? What isn't working? And what would you change tomorrow if you could? What followed was the sector's real conversation — the one that normally stays behind closed doors. On why regulation keeps arriving as a stick and never a carrot. Why the biggest biodiversity market in the world isn't BNG, it's the US wetland mitigation banking system — and most people in this room don't even know it exists. Why fund structures designed for a decade are being asked to hold assets that need a century. Why OC just received the highest nature-based carbon credit rating ever awarded. And why, if you mandate that every large corporate offsets their emissions tomorrow, this entire market changes overnight. Full live conversation from London Climate Action Week 2026 with Lily Marcel, Rich Stockdale, Adam Eagle, Hannah Davies, Martin Berg, and Adam Hedley.
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S1 · E180
June 30 · 1 hr 4 min
E180 Nature Inc. Live: Live From London Climate Week
The economy has always been a subsidiary of nature. We just didn't have the instruments to prove it. Now we do — and the conversation is getting uncomfortable in the best possible way. Recorded live at London Climate Week, this is the conversation the sector has been having in private, finally happening in public. Tripp Wall of Pantheon Regeneration, Siddarth Shrikanth of Just Climate, and Dimple Patel of NatureMetrics spend 90 minutes on the hard questions: where capital is actually moving, what AI sovereignty means for nature tech businesses, why bananas are going extinct and nobody's noticed, why we spent a decade yelling at people instead of inviting them in, and whether the next 12 months will finally produce the iconic transactions that shift allocator psychology for good. There's no consensus here. There's challenge, disagreement, and a room full of people who are done waiting. What unites them is the belief that the tools exist, the moment is real, and optimism is a strategy — not a sentiment.
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S1 · E179
June 25 · 1 hr 23 min
E179 Allister Furey: Manufacturing Trust
Allister Furey trained as a biologist, fell into AI before anyone called it AI, built kite-powered wind energy systems, sold a company to a competitor, ran operations in Singapore, and ended up building a carbon ratings agency. Not because it was the plan. Because the market was lying and someone had to say so. Allister is CEO and co-founder of Sylvera — the data business that rates carbon and commodity credits, prices geospatial data, and tries to inject statistical rigour into a market that has spent years rewarding a good story over a real outcome. He's one of the most technically formidable people to appear on this podcast, and this conversation covers more ground than most. We get into what it actually takes to build consistent, manufactured opinion at scale — the moment they had to call clients and tell them millions of dollars of credits had been wrongly rated, the analogy that changed how they think about quality, and the single thing that needs to happen before voluntary carbon markets can grow. The answer involves the Treasury, the emissions trading scheme, and a direct challenge to how we think about the licence to pollute. It's closer than most people think — and more political than most people want to admit.
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S1 · E178
June 18 · 1 hr 47 min
E178 OC Round Table: Building A Dynasty
Five years ago there was no portfolio. No team. No podcast. No estates. The highest carbon credit price was under £20. Biodiversity net gain didn't exist. Rich had a business plan and a conviction that you couldn't scale conservation without capital — and almost everyone told him it was too complicated, too risky, or too ambitious. This episode is the five-year reckoning. Gathered with three of the people who built it with Rich Stockdale: Fiona Milden, Managing Director; Andrew Dewar, Head of People and Culture; and Chris White, Head of Natural Capital and Oxygen Intelligence, Rich looks back at what it actually took. The recruitment stories that made him cry. The culture decisions that kept them honest at 8pm on a Thursday night. The world-record carbon credit prices. And the AI and data system, Claudia, that a US competitor raised $100 million to build while OC built it in the day job. But this isn't a victory lap. It's a live question. How do you protect culture as you scale? How do you keep hiring people smarter than you? What does it cost personally to work at this level? And what does the next five years look like when you're building a business you think will be acquired by Nvidia or DeepMind? This is a conversation about what it actually takes. Not the idea. The execution.
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S1 · E177
June 11 · 1 hr 38 min
E177 Asger Strange-Olesen: The Additionality Problem
Asger Strange Olesen has spent 15 years building context most people in this space only claim to have. Carbon developer, EU Climate Directorate, FSC Global Chief Climate Officer, now heading climate and biodiversity at IWC — a $6bn forestry asset manager backed by BNP Paribas. He has been inside the policy rooms, the certification bodies, the investor meetings, and the forest itself. This conversation goes to places the sector tends to avoid. Why additionality — the foundational rule of the carbon market — is philosophically broken, and why no equivalent market mechanism on earth works the same way. Why forests already in existence are technically worth nothing under current rules. Why every government programme designed to fix the land use crisis has collapsed under its own bureaucracy before reaching the people it was designed to change. The data conversation is equally forensic — backpack lidar, open-source carbon modelling, and why the real breakthrough in forest measurement isn't above the canopy. It's what's happening beneath it. Plus Asger's policy blueprint for 2030: a mandatory nature and carbon footprint on every product sold in European markets, simple enough that land managers don't need to believe in climate change to participate. Complexity doesn't scale. This episode makes the case.
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S1 · E176
June 4 · 1 hr 33 min
E176 Richard Kelly & Robert Guest: Britain Is Running Out of Trees
Richard Kelly and Robert Guest were employees 63 and 64 at Foresight. They built a £150 million portfolio in 12 months, took it public on the London Stock Exchange during COP26, watched interest rates destroy their share price through no fault of their own, delisted — and then rebuilt. Within months of going private, their three biggest shareholders rolled straight back in. That's not a recovery story. That's a vote of confidence in people. This is one of the most complete journeys Second Nature has hosted: from internal innovation lab to IPO, from listed markets to take-private, from 50 forests to nearly 100 assets across 31,000 hectares — and 12.5 million trees in the ground. The UK imports 80% of its timber. It's the second largest net importer in the world, behind only China. Richard and Robert are quietly building the answer to that — and they haven't even started talking about carbon yet. We get into the reality of raising capital in a market that was moving against you. The emotional cost of doing everything right and still getting punished by macro forces beyond your control. And how AI is reshaping the due diligence process.
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S1 · E175
May 28 · 1 hr 39 min
E175 Insurance Round Table: The Market Nobody Talks About
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 locking 20% of their value in a buffer forever. This round table brings together three people building that infrastructure from the inside: Natalia Dorfman, CEO of Kita — the world's first specialist carbon and natural capital insurer; Will Butler, CEO of Gaia Sicura — the world's first insurance broker exclusively for nature regeneration; and George Pawley, General Counsel at Oxygen Conservation, who has been placing and stress-testing these policies in the real world since the beginning. Between them, they cover the full chain from project risk to policy placement to legal execution. Rich goes deep on how insurance unlocks capital that nothing else can reach, why buffer pools are a relic from a world before specialist insurers existed, what happens to this market if political risk starts getting priced into BNG, and why AI is simultaneously liberating and terrifying for a sector that runs on expert judgment. The future of natural capital isn't just about planting trees. It's about making those trees insurable.
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S1 · E174
May 21 · 1 hr 45 min
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.
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S1 · E173
May 14 · 1 hr 31 min
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.
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S1 · E172
May 7 · 1 hr 49 min
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.
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S1 · E171
May 6 · 1 hr 9 min
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.
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