Second Nature

192 Episodes

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E193 Tim Wigmore: What Cricket Can Teach Us About Data, Business, Talent & Risk

2026-09-1701:28:12

Rich Stockdale has given away more copies of Crickonomics than any other book. Not because he is obsessed with cricket, although that helps, but because he thinks it might secretly be one of the best business books ever written. Tim Wigmore has spent his career using statistics, economics, history and brilliant writing to understand why cricket actually works. What followed became a conversation about far more than sport: Moneyball for land, why data can make coaches worse, why unconventional...

E192 Sam Larner: Why Talent Alone Doesn't Build a Winning Team

2026-09-1002:04:38

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 r...

E191 Nadia Nikolova: The Uncomfortable Truth About Investing in Nature

2026-09-0301:37:22

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 t...

E190 Cain Blythe: Stop Trying To Save Nature! This Is How We Actually Fund It

2026-08-2701:24:08

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 st...

E189 Nathan Curtis & Ben Stansfield: What Makes A Great Lawyer?

2026-08-2001:31:15

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 contr...

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