Ben Yeoh Chats

Sophie Purdom co-writes a climate and innovation newsletter read by tens of thousands, ClimateTech VC.  Sophie has worked in start ups as an operator. She is a venture capitalist investor. She has written widely on sustainable investing. We speak on how Sophie came to climate tech investing, the importance of knocking on doors and being helpful. What Sophie learned working for local government (Providence) and how climate has always been her through line into investing. We discuss what areas of climate tech are over-invested in and under-invested in, and why she’s interested in the climate-industrial-tech area. We chat about investment philosophy, the VC geography and gender lens and how she seeds the landscape on access to capital at the seed and pre-seed stage. Sophie explains the concept of “brown spinning” and the pros/cons of taking assets private or selling brown assets to less responsible entities. “This concept is what we would call brown spinning. So taking publicly held brown or underperforming - from a climate perspective -  assets private in order to hypothetically avoid rigorous accounting and operate with capital providers that are less ESG inclined. Fascinating topic. One of the many downsides to divestment: if there's a will then money will often find a way to finance these things.One positive example in the case of reversing brown spinning s is AGL in Australia. One of the largest energy giants out there and billionaire, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes playing the activist investor role as an individual, coming in and buying up more and more percentage ownership in this business in an effort to strongly nudge activists, push them towards greener practices and he succeeded in getting that board vote and changing the outcomes of that business. So that's one very rare splashed all over the front page of the media example of how there's a way of green spinning these private brown assets potentially back to good. But to be fair, the majority of the stories that should be told unfortunately go in the other direction.One that caught my eye …Another billionaire, Harold Hamm is trying to take the shale (gas) Company that he founded - Continental Resources - private. He owns (already) about 83% of this oil and gas US based company. The idea is take the company private because the public market investors are skeptical of plowing money into a non-ESG aligned (strategy).  He thinks he can get a better return or cheaper capital in the private market - the quintessential brown spinning concept. I'm concerned about it. I'm not exactly sure what you do here other than you can't go too hard or too fast on ESG reporting requirements without bringing folks along on the management train and leave them out because the worst case scenario is they hop off of the reporting requirements and go operate in the dark.” We play over-rated, under-rated on: Lifting Weights, Carbon tax, Green New Deal, Tesla Carbon offsets, Nuclear Power, Carbon removal and the woolly mammoth. We finish on Sophie’s current projects and her career and life advice. Transcript and video available here.

Francesca Sanderson managed an ethical equities fund at JPMorgan as an asset manager but quit that to live for a year living off grid.  She then became a social impact investor with Big Society Capital and now runs the Arts Impact programmes currently at Nesta. We chat about what she learned, missed and loved about living off-grid. How she has a more pluralist world view. Fran talks about what she learned at JP Morgan. The power and the weaknesses of institutional and organisational strength. “when I was at JP Morgan,I  would be watching people move from their CFA and then go now I'm going to do an MBA and I'll be “why do you want to do an MBA? That's not interesting.”  Now, with the benefit of 20 years hindsight, I don't think there's anything more interesting or crucial than how organizations work and how stuff gets done” We discuss social impact, its opportunities and risks and highlight some brilliant projects. We chat on the the tyranny of numbers and data and the tension between process and oversight, and over burdensome bureaucracy and slowness. We play overrated/underrated addressing stakeholder capitalism, the settlement movement, and cycling. Fran ends on her advice, be trustworthy: “I think that this is a reflection on life and society and where we are today. Trust is underrated. I think I just behave in a trustworthy fashion. It's a long termist thing. It's not freewheeling, can we get away with its culture at all, but ultimately for the benefit of the planet of society, just be honorable when it's not an easy thing to do.” Transcript and video are available here.

Nadia Asparouhova (previously writing under Nadia Eghbal) is an independent researcher with widely read essays on a range of topics most recently philanthropic funding including effective altruism and ideas machines, and recent ideas in funding science.  She’s written books about the open source community. She has worked in start ups and venture. She set up and ran Helium grants, a microgrant programme. She is an Emergent Ventures fellow. We speak about what she learned from microgranting and reviewing thousands of applications. We discuss what she thinks about EA influenced philanthropy, and why she is personally pro-pluralism. Nadia talks about why doesn’t consider herself a creator and the downsides and upsides on he creator economy as currently formed. We discuss parallels with the open source community. We chat about Nadia’s work as an independent researcher versus her work at start-ups and how they are fulfilling in different ways. Nadia examines what faith means to her now. We chat on the importance of intuition and the messiness of creative science and learning. We talk about science funding and how we might be the cusp of something new. Nadia expresses optimism about the future as we discuss possible progress stagnation. On a more personal note, we chat about how Nadia was a vegetarian and how and why she changed her mind. But also that she could not be a complete only  carnivore  either. We discuss the importance of family stories that shape us and the role the stories of her grandmother played in her life. We play over-rated under-rated: -Effective Altruism -Miami -Crowdfunding -Toulouse -Newsletters -Katy Perry Nadia talks briefly about a seed of an idea around anti-memetics. Nadia ends with her advice to others. Follow your curiosities. Transcript is available here. How are crypto billionaires most likely to change charitable giving Effective Altruism (EA) aside? “Broadly my worldview or thesis around how we think about philanthropy is that it moves in these sorts of wealth generations. And so, right now we're kind of seeing the dawn of the people who made a lot of money in the 2010s with startups. It's the “ trad tech” or startup kind of cohort. Before then you had people who made a lot of money in investment banking and finance and the early tech pioneers, they all formed their own cohort. And then you might say crypto is the next generation after that, which will eventually break down into smaller sub components for sure but we don't really know what those things are yet, I think, because crypto is still so early and they've sort of made money in their own way. ...When you have a group of people that have made money in a certain way that is almost by definition it's because it's a new wealth boom. They made their money in a way that's distinctly different from previous generations. And so, that becomes sort of like a defining theory of change or worldview. All the work that they are doing in this sort of philanthropic sense is finding a way to impose that worldview. …what will crypto's contribution to that be? ...I think in the crypto kind of generation you might see instead of thinking about the power of top talent, I think they're more about giving people tools to kind of build their own worlds..."

Carl Saxton-Pizzie trained as an actor and worked in tv before founding a sustainable grocery delivery company, Wholegood, in 2007 (with a van and £500). Wholegood is on track for £30m in revenue and employes 160 people. This is a small business success story, a start up in the “old economy” but very much touching “new economy” ideas such as sustainability and delivery services. You can find Wholegood products in most UK retailers, Ocado one of the largest examples. We talk about Carl’s entrepreneur journey, what acting taught him and the importance of sustainability and purpose. I ask him what he wished he had known in 2007. Carl thinks over some of his best ideas and worst ideas including why organic coconut water didn’t work out and how brilliant his non-plastic packaging is. We discuss the importance of mental health, resilience and managing and why story telling is important. What it might mean to have a great career, why trucking is under rated and who the fastest packer is. We think on the plastic bag tax, minimum wages and being scared of failure. We chat on how being an actor is a kind of “classlessness” but why qualifications can be over rated. Carl ends with his career and life advice. It's so easy to become blinkered with your single vision of what success or your current success looks like that you stop forgetting that there will be other successes. You can get up and you can carry on. You have to be brave and you have to be able to not get lost in the idea that you're currently in. Step back or step out and do something else. Transcript and video is available here.

Annemarie is Director of Innovation for the Seetec Group. Before that, she was, Director of Policy and Strategy at Future Care Capital - a national charity that uses the insight gathered through evidence-based research to advance ideas that will help shape future health and social care policy to deliver better outcomes for society. We chat about what is under appreciated about libraries and how to think about public goods and common ownership of those goods. Annemarie discusses the idea of a Sovereign Health Fund and how to think about healthcare data as a public good, what trust is needed and how health value can be created by pooling data. We discuss the benefits and cons of social media, how tricky regulation is (partly because it always behind the times) and how there might be more benefits that commonly thought of. Annemarie talks about her work and Seetec’s on the future of justice and how leveraging data and digital technology can help shape a better justice system and also prevent re-offending. She offers insights in to how new technology is creating new forms of crime and whether more careful thinking can prevent these types of crime from occuring. How will crime in the metaverse work out? We chat about how different ownership models and for-profit or not-profit can shape the purpose and outlook for employees. The importance of optimism and the sense of looking after something for the next generation. Annemarie notes Henry VIII gave powers to the secretary of state but didn’t consider accountability provisions. She raises the challenge of accounting standards for intangible assets and proposes an idea of giving NFTs (digital assets) to children at birth (cf. Bored Ape Yacht Club). Annemarie is more of a nonfiction reader but she commissioned a work of science fiction and we speak about imagining different types of future and how to inspire people. We play overrated/underrated on: Big Tech regulation GPDR (data regulation) GDP Carbon tax Digital Health Innovation agencies Calories on menus Annemarie ends our conversation on giving out her life advice. Transcript and video are available here.

What is it like to go deaf and then gain back your hearing? On this episode, I speak to Sophie Woolley. Sophie is a writer, performer and theatre maker.  We have been friends for a while and I have learned a lot about Deaf culture and from her personal journey and one as a creative. We have a meandering chat about her creative journey, how felt she had to write about her story of going deaf and then gaining hearing again via a cochlear implant. We recorded the podcast while Sophie is in Taiwan. She chats a little on her experience there and Taiwan’s COVID management. This is a long conversation between friends discussing the complexities of Sophie’s experience. I was particularly intrigued by her thinking on what it might mean to be a cyborg and being augmented and being part of both Deaf culture and hearing culture.  I am still thinking about her comment about captioning AI being her friend and how we can often simply criticise AI in a way we would not critique a human. (But also there’s no need to anthropomorphize AI either). Transcript and Video links here. Image credit: Justin Munitz

Stian Westlake is the chief exec at the Royal Statistical Society, and before that he was a policy advisor to government and the executive director at Nesta. He is the co-author with Jonathan Haskel of Capitalism without Capital, and they have a new book out, Restarting the Future (22 March 2022).  Stian discusses how recessions might be different under an intangible economy. I ask him (H/T Tyler Cowen) how national security concerns might be different in a very intangible world. Part of his answer: ...if you are an interconnected, relatively open economy, and Russia was always the most relatively interconnected of the BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] countries, the intangible economy kind of makes it easier to turn off those taps in a way…. how dependent some of these kinds of more security based, more military based factors have been on intangible assets. We've probably all seen the stories of the dependence of the Russian air force on US GPS devices, which has led to them being more observable and perhaps has played a role in the fact that they have not been as present in the conflict as people thought they would be. I think that kind of interconnectivity is like many things in the intangible economy. It's great for winners, it's great if you're the US or if you're a US ally and it's probably not so great for the losers. … We chat about these observations: Stagnation Inequality Dysfunctional Competition Fragility Inauthenticity And Stian offers an intangible lens to explain the observations. We discuss: BS jobs and whether culture and trust might be upstream of this. Why we need new institutions to tackle intangible challenges, whether this would be more technocractic and if there is a political economy challenge on this. The importance of where the intangible meets the tangible, for instance, we have heat pump technology but not the intangible systems and ideas to install them. Sanitation is “hardware” but building and co-ordinating all this is an intangible and institutional challenge more than a hardware challege. What the trade-off is between losing red tape and increasing the risk of corruption. Stian argues for why the tax treatment of debt and equity would be a good idea (while acknowledging this would be politically hard). We play over/under rated on: Innovation Prizes, Blogging, Sugar tax, Carbon tax, Plastic Bag Tax, Innovation agencies, GDP and UBI, universal basic income. Stian ends with some life and career advice. Video and transcript are available here, with further links.

Stephan Guyenet completed a PhD in neuroscience, then went on to study the neuroscience of obesity and eating behavior as a postdoc. He’s also been involved with Givewell and Open philanthropy projects. In 2017, he wrote the book the Hungry Brain. We discuss two competing obesity models: one based around  a model of energy balance with the brain as one of the main central controllers. And one model which  s based more around an insulin - carbohydrate pathway. The carbohydrate - insulin model emphasizes the role of insulin from glycemic load inputs. While not necessarily mutually exclusive, Stephan explains how the brain centric energy balance model can explain some data, in his view, that the carb-insulin model does not. Stephan notes much individual variability and how the naming “energy-balance” is perhaps not the best type of name for the model. We discuss the challenge of processed foods, which tend to be easy to eat and tasty foods. Stephan notes that the combination of fat + carb (eg in chocolate!) is very appetising. We chat about the role of genetics, and satiety. We chat about two classes of  obesity drugs, one rimonabant (using cannabinoid receptor pathways)  which has been withdrawn; and the other being GLP-1s. We talk about the possible role of inflammation and some intriguing data on Alzheimer’s. I ask about his view on intermittent fasting, also on the microbiome. I talk about my challenges with exercise and we discuss how some people probably are not wired to enjoy intensity training whereas some others are. We talk about effective altruism and what he has learnt from his work at Givewell. We play over-rated | under rated on: Climate Change Nuclear War Rogue AI risk Giving away more wealth Animal welfare Diversity of thought We chat about making cider, growing your own food and cycling in Seattle. Stephan ends with his general diet advice.  Links to academic papers and video available here.

Alec is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress. The IFP is dedicated to to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future. Alec and co-founder Caleb Watney are supported by prominent progress thinkers such as Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collinson. We discuss the competing interests that prevent physical infrastructure such as power lines, or cafe “parklet” structures from being easily built.   Alec explains how using a framework borrowed from Effective Altruism: impact (will it be impactful), tractability (is it possible?), under-researched (are many other people working on the challenge?) - is a useful framing.   Alex discusses why biosecurity (pandemic preparedness), meta-science (understanding how science progresses) and immigration (in particular high skilled) are the initial areas of interest and what other areas, like climate, might be next.   We speculate on what intractable bluesky policies we would potentially pursue.   We play over-rated/under-rated (in honour of Tyler Cowen):  -Carbon tax   -Planning laws   -Crypto  -Rogue AI  -Animal welfare   -Charter cities   -Innovation agencies   -Remote working    Alec ends with his life advice for others in thinking about a career on how to have the most impact in your life. Transcript and video are available here, with links.

Chris Stark is the Chief Executive of the UK’s Climate Change Committee. The committee is an independent statutory body which advises the UK and developed governments on emissions targets and preparing for and adapting to the impacts of climate change. I think he is one of the most important and thoughtful thinkers on climate change policy today. We discuss what is most misunderstood about climate policy, the likely co-benefits and the scale of investments needed especially in the UK in replacing “old inefficient stock”. What positives/negatives came out of COP26 (recent international climate conference) and what to hope for in COP27 and beyond. Why COP26 might have been considered a corporate COP as a criticism but why that might not be bad. Why sector specific strategies might be a better plan than a focus on carbon tax. Why adaptation or resilience has been a bit of a “Cinderella” in climate discussions. What the science suggests is already baked into 2050 scenarios and so what we should be thinking about adaptation as well as mitigation. The complexities and challenges around “behaviour change” and why it’s not a great term. Why we might not need a complete culture change (in the sense of changing lifestyles) but the intersection of behaviour and technology. (For instance, still driving cars but electric cars on a decarbonised grid.) Why a sense of fairness is one the most important climate policy (political economy) considerations and what we should think about in terms of climate impacts falling unequally across countries and peoples. What role finance has to play. Chris references the work of Nick Robins here.  We discuss: Climate assemblies (and why Chris changed his view on them) Divest/engagement strategies Carbon offsets Carbon taxes The role of nuclear Land use Road charging And we end with advice Chris has for people. Transcript and video is available here, along with links to the CC and Nick Robins work.