Nat Bullard: Grounded in Data

Nat Bullard is co-founder of Halcyon, an AI-enabled energy information platform, and one of the energy sector's most respected data storytellers. Each year, Nat publishes an annual presentation on the state of decarbonisation, drawing on hundreds of data points to give business leaders a clear-eyed view of where the energy transition actually stands. In this episode, he joins Jenn to discuss why understanding the present moment is the only reliable foundation for thinking about the future.

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Read Nat’s book recommendations: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

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This podcast is brought to you by Re:Co, a tech-powered advisory company helping private market investors pursue sustainability objectives and value creation in tandem. 

Produced by Chris Attaway

Artwork by Harriet Richardson

Music by Cody Martin

#FutureInSound #Energy #Decarbonisation #DataStorytelling #PrivateEquity #ESG

Transcript

[00:00:00] JENN: Welcome to The Future and Sound podcast. I'm your host, Jen Wilson. This is a podcast where we discuss people, planet, and profit. In each episode, we'll learn from world-leading experts who can help us see the future we want. And our role in it.

[00:00:45] JENN: I'm delighted to be joined by Nat Bullard today. He's the co-founder of Halian, an AI enabled energy information platform, and he's also one of the energy sector's most influential. Data storytellers. Prior to co-founding Halm, Nat spent 15 years at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. He joined New Energy Finance as a startup and worked there through its acquisition by Bloomberg, an expansion to cover every sector of global emissions.

[00:01:15] JENN: He finished his time at Bloomberg New Energy Finance as the group's chief content officer. One of the many reasons why Nat is a living legend in the energy field is his brilliant annual deck on decarbonization. His latest presentation was released in January, 2026, and if you haven't flipped through it yet, you'll get a teaser today, and I strongly recommend that you do.

[00:01:37] JENN: Na, welcome to the Future and Sound podcast. 

[00:01:39] NAT: Jen, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Uh, and I look forward as ever to having a chat about everything going on in our world, uh, and with, with, uh, 200 slides that I put together as a frame for us to have a conversation.

[00:01:57] JENN: What's the story? How did you get started with this annual presentation idea? 

[00:02:02] NAT: You know, I'm gonna start with something funny, which is, uh, I, I will tell you that my favorite anecdote about building this series, and it tells you something about the demand that was there, was that in the second year that I did it, I had a load of people come up to me like, I read this thing every year.

[00:02:15] NAT: I was like, well, by which you mean you read it this year now and you read it the year prior. Um, and I actually will do a quiz with people and a ask them how often I've been doing it. And a lot of people have told me that I've been doing this since the middle of the last decade. I was like, no, I guarantee you I have not.

[00:02:31] NAT: I've only been doing it since 2023, in fact. So the reason that I do this is that. I find that we collectively struggle with a kind of present moment, stock take on where we are much less, uh, um, look into the dear into the deep future and actually. There's a connection between those two, which is that I think the only way to get a good, coherent view of the future is to have an even better, coherent view of the present.

[00:03:03] NAT: You and I find, I found in conversations really all over the world in my 15 years at, at Bloomberg and, and prior to that at New Energy Finance, that you would walk into rooms with extremely senior and otherwise very well-informed people who were. Miles away from observed reality in anything happening in energy climate, decarbonization, sustainability.

[00:03:26] NAT: And I realized over time that part of the challenge was that people tend to go in and do a presentation in those contexts that has a view of the future, which tends to bog people down in the metaphysics of projections and discount rates and things like that. That begins without a firm grounding in the present moment without a view of where we are right now.

[00:03:50] NAT: So that was sort of the prime mover, and that's for me too, was to make sure that I had a good, coherent view of the present moment. That was the one. The other was that you often find presentations that capture a very deep look at one per. Particular domain, transportation, electricity, liquified natural gas, whatever expertise tends to be domain bound interest tends to be range bound.

[00:04:16] NAT: And as a result, you have all of these bits and pieces that don't necessarily talk to each other. They do tend to talk to each other in the form of in integrated, general equilibrium model, let's say. But that's not really the way that most people think. So I also saw an opportunity to put this all into one frame.

[00:04:33] NAT: And then the third is that having done the work of making the song empirical and observational. I also thought that there was some value in a little bit of narration, and by that I mean how I choose to group all of these things. Back in the day at Bloomberg, I used to do one that was an essentially descending order of emissions, and it was fine, but it's not, that's not a story that that's, that's a rubric.

[00:05:00] NAT: It's not a story, and it's not a narrative that helps you explain, and it doesn't speak to the way that. Businesses organize themselves, and you can see as I've done this now since 2023, you can see across that time themes that sort of emerge, some of which become durable, some of which go away, and you can see areas in which large chunks of the business community.

[00:05:25] NAT: Coalesce around an idea whether it's well-formed or not, and then run with it whether it's robust or not. And so I wanted to sort of do a similar bit of storytelling, a lot of which is, is organized around. Making sure that stories make sense and, and in and incorporate as much observed reality as possible.

[00:05:46] JENN: I wanna build on this idea of the two points that you made, one building off of a grounded reality and also weaving together multiple different themes from your presentation. So. As ever, what's being said significantly changes our experience of reality, which is, I guess, part of what your presentation is trying to level set us on.

[00:06:08] NAT: Mm-hmm. 

[00:06:08] JENN: At Ricoh, we work with a lot of private equity, uh, clients. Um, and you know, I remember in 2021, our clients were. Being told, if you're talking to investors, just talk about ESG. Like say that ESG is your top priority, and then flat, fast forward to today, they're being advised by the same advisors.

[00:06:27] JENN: Don't mention the word ESG, 

[00:06:29] NAT: don't mention it at all. 

[00:06:30] JENN: You can't touch on it. Um, you know, it just focus on, you know, core financial value creation, et cetera. So when I look at, when I was looking through your presentation again, that, um, a couple of the what's being said, slides stood out to me. You know, a slide on ESG being dead.

[00:06:49] JENN: Um, the fact that there are very few TED Talks focused on climate, you know, some of these versus, you know, previously where we had quite a bit of hysteria or ESG was sort of the zeitgeist. Um. We also, if we step back, this wasn't in your presentation, but you know, often you have narratives around, particularly in the us this backlash against renewables or that we can't decarbonize if developing countries, you know, also don't decarbonize yet, when we look at what's happening in your presentation nation second warmest year in 2025, to be sure climate change is a serious issue.

[00:07:29] JENN: Lots of headlines about E-S-G-E-S-G being dead, however. I should also say outflows from US sustainability funds since 2022. So those, you know, those areas you covered, but we know that in January, 2026, there's a record number of science-based targets, um, validated. And one of your slides pointed out that only in the US and Australia did respondents.

[00:07:52] JENN: To a Morningstar, um, questionnaire say that they are, well, basically, that they're less likely to say yes to fiduciary duty and ESG are aligned. And so I guess my question, this is, and for everybody listening, this is a tiny snippet of a wealth of knowledge in this presentation that you've gotta read, but just at a very high level, na, I guess my question for you is ESG dead.

[00:08:16] JENN: And based on your answer to that question, what are the implications for our global energy system? 

[00:08:22] NAT: So, um, I love this question, and you, you, for those of you who imagine the two of us giggling here at each other about it. I have to step back a year because last year's deck I had an entire section called, it's a 2021 thing, and what I did is this, this sort of cross asset correlation, if you will, of all of these different sectors that launched all of these different initiatives about decarbonization, which I think were in many ways rhetoric in front of action.

[00:08:52] NAT: And part of my conclusion, which. Was profoundly unsatisfying. Mind you, and downright, I think, potentially insulting to plenty of people according to what they told me was that this is all a bunch of stuff that got decided during COVID when we weren't at work, uh, when pe more people were sort of left to their left largely to their, their solo devices.

[00:09:11] NAT: And I think very prone to building narratives, uh, and to narrative creation. And that's why we saw all these things sort of like hit their peak and then come off the boil. Be it a Ted Talk or a new commitment to, uh, net zero or whatever it is regarding ESG, indulge me and your audience, and I will read the headlines that I popped into my, actually one of my very favorite slides, which is called ESG is dead, or it's not.

[00:09:37] NAT: I have eight headlines and I'm gonna read them from left to right and top to bottom is ESG. Dead. ESG is dead. ESGs death will only make its ideas stronger. Is ESG dead or just evolving? ESG in Australia isn't dead, it's just growing up. Issues for boards 2025 is ESG dead, far from it. And then finally, ESG is dead.

[00:10:05] NAT: Long ESG point. So what you can see in this is that we're, we're very prone to stories, and I think we're very prone to a whole bunch of local maxima. What I don't have in here is all of the different places. What I didn't narrate rather is all the different places come from. Some of this is from SocGen, some of it is from Barron, some is from link leaders, some is from.

[00:10:27] NAT: First advisors, some, some say business school. So each one of these places is taking a sort of different bite at the same apple. What I will say is that actually what you alluded to earlier, go back to your fund managers and your allocators and just say, this is really about fundamentals of finance and, and about either either alpha or beta, uh, or it's about good governance.

[00:10:49] NAT: Whatever it is, is actually, I think correct. I will say that. ESG was is such a broad umbrella that it's very challenging to enact, and this is something that I've been on record as saying for almost 10 years, which is you could go to a company that has, and there are, there are all legion companies in this category that have fantastic environmental records at very poor corporate governance.

[00:11:14] NAT: That doesn't mean that they're bad companies, but if they have, for instance, a board run entirely by preferential shareholder founders, that doesn't really necessarily count to me as great corporate governance. So. I think we do see it stepping back into just being better parts of business. And I think you also see, in particular in Europe, that for the largest asset managers, broader sustainability focuses and asset allocation haven't changed at all.

[00:11:40] NAT: And there's a disproportion here between the amount of noise about ESG being dead North America and Australia, and the relatively tiny role that these two markets play in sustainable finance. Another way to put it is. Go right ahead, Australia, go right ahead. US like Europe and its tens of trillions of dollars are going to continue to allocate accordingly.

[00:12:03] NAT: Do I also think that there is need for a great deal of simplification and rationalization? I will give you a take from one of the last things that I did at Bloomberg, so this is now about four years ago. It was post COVID, just so we're just getting people back in the office. And I, for some reason was drag gooned into moderating a panel about some extremely EU related, bit of sustainable finance.

[00:12:29] NAT: And my first thing that I said when I walked in there, as I said, you all know me, uh, I'm familiar with all of your work, but I'm not an expert. So my challenge is we are going to have this discussion without a single acronym. And if you use an acronym, you have to define it on first measure for everyone.

[00:12:47] NAT: And what alarmed me, frankly, was how difficult it was to do that. How difficult it was to have a kind of informational principles based conversation. And it was just a lot of what to my mind was, was Argo Bargel stuff I had no idea about. And also I found that practitioners had a hard time stepping back and explaining it in fundamental financial terms as opposed to things that were being driven by the minutia of particular packages of something or other.

[00:13:17] NAT: And I found that. Frustrating and also a bit worrisome in terms of what to me was the fragility that it then set up for exactly what we've observed. A bit of rhetorical backlash against something that I think leaves itself semiotically open to criticism because of its absolute complexity.

[00:13:43] JENN: Hey, it's Jen. I just wanted to take a quick moment to let you know a bit about Ricoh and what we do. We're a tech enabled advisory firm that helps private market investors and companies measure sustainability metrics Using our software platform, we also help you to set targets and focus your efforts on sustainability areas that really matter for your business.

[00:14:05] JENN: And finally, we help clients to translate all of this work into your core value creation strategy or your business model. 

[00:14:13] NAT: Check us out@re.co.com to get in touch. Alright, now back to our conversation.

[00:14:22] JENN: Let's get into a very specific, a aspect of ESG, then sustainability as it's often now called in our field. Sure. Um, at the beginning of our conversation, we're talking about 2025, you know, being the second warmest, uh, year on record since, uh, industrialization. I guess when you're telling people or sharing, you know, your, uh, research and summaries around renewable energy in the state of renewable energy, those of us who are caught up in the headlines of what's happening in the us, um, many projects being canceled or paused, et cetera.

[00:14:58] JENN: If you take a step back from that and just share the story of renewables, battery, storage, wind, solar, you know, where are we not, is it all doom and gloom or you know, how do you, how do you see where we are right now when it comes to renewables? 

[00:15:13] NAT: So it's not at all, and in fact we should begin that you, you referenced the us Let's begin with a massive narrative violation, which is found in the data, which is that natural gas is losing share in the US power market.

[00:15:25] NAT: And it's not, it's not losing its absolute generation. It is losing share. I'll give you one. Guess what It's losing share to which is wind and solar power. There are some marginal bumps that happen in coal, but to your point, you have a story which is political, uh, and to some extent policy driven. And then you have reality, which is power dispatch driven.

[00:15:46] NAT: If you look around the world, um, yet another record year of deployment for pretty much all of the generation technologies and renewables, plus a massive year for battery energy storage. Build a real, a real rebirth of large scale nuclear power. Being led marginally, frankly, by China at the same time that you have record coal burn, you have record gas burn, you have record emissions, uh, but you also have China total emissions flat for about the last 18 months.

[00:16:18] NAT: You've got India's power sector emissions that, uh, that actually tipped a little bit. Uh, so I would say you have all the instrumentation in place. To change the shape of the sector using renewable energy. You also have markets that I think are, are fascinating to look at and easy to discount because of their relative scale, which is quite small, which is the power market, for instance, in Africa.

[00:16:42] NAT: Uh, which. To put it more accurately is not a power market. It is woefully, in fact, fundamentally and existentially unders supplied with electrons, but not surprisingly, after the kind of stuff that was part of very much development, finance, and, and, and, uh. Development policy action a year, years, and years ago, get a bunch of renewable energy in there is now actually happening on an almost entirely commercial basis of tens of gigawatts of, of somewhere modules being sold a year into Africa, into markets that I really do believe we'll start to develop around those as their prime movers of power.

[00:17:24] NAT: Now there's all kinds of big questions that come up around that in terms of what the eventual fundamental grid looks like. But the most important thing to think about is that they're effectively permissionless by comparison to what it would've taken to have, uh, the World Bank or the IFC finance, some sort of mega project equivalent.

[00:17:43] NAT: And so I, I want us, I want us to recognize that the speed and the suppleness with which all of these sorts of things are happening. So, no, it's, it's, um, it, it is as ever I think mixed. We do not have a market, even within markets. The, the markets themselves are not monoliths, and so we, we should again, as ever be very data-driven in terms of what's happening and where there are particular places where you see.

[00:18:09] NAT: Economics where you see particular economics in place like a us, the US power sector, and its ROV relationship to gas fired power is both acute and different for most parts of the rest of the world. But you can also see in the case of the world's biggest and most demanding electricity consumers, some interest in gas and a great deal of interest again in renewables.

[00:18:31] NAT: So. You know, there, there's, there's a kind of like, who do you wanna believe? Like, you know, uh, me or your lying eyes sort of, sort of thing at play here. But if you, if you observe the data, you can see that there's still a great deal of momentum in, uh, in renewable power. It is, I will say marginally lopsided towards China in terms of.

[00:18:51] NAT: The role that China plays against that, you know, compared to everything else, um, but atmospheric. This is of no consequence whatsoever. Whether China decides to deploy 300 gigawatts a year of solar. Uh, does not materially impact any other country. It will do so for, its for on its own devices and on its own recognizance.

[00:19:10] NAT: Um, but it does in no way prevents other company, other countries from doing something. I tend to be fascinated in that regard about talking about winning, you know, countries winning the race and doing this, that, or the other in the power sector. Well, nothing's, one country's a development of its power sector does not necessarily impair or impinge another country's ability to do so.

[00:19:31] JENN: It's interesting and often it's, you know, interlinked. We remember the days of significant subsidies in Germany, uh, for solar. 

[00:19:39] NAT: Yes, we do. 

[00:19:39] JENN: Which certainly has supported a drastic, uh, reduction in cost adoption, and then reduction in cost, sort of getting us into, um, the virtuous cycle of innovation and costs coming down.

[00:19:54] JENN: Speaking of, uh, that particular topic, um, I was in Singapore. I understand that you're based in Singapore. 

[00:20:00] NAT: I am indeed. 

[00:20:00] JENN: Um, and uh, I was talking to a private equity investor and he said, look, Jen, I don't care at all about carbon emissions. It's just like I'm investing in India. I need security to supply.

[00:20:12] JENN: It's taking way too long to get a natural gas, uh, turbine. So we go to renewables. We just, we've gotta, we've gotta get moving and building infrastructure. And you have a great slide on this particular topic, wondering if you can share with the audience. Basically, there's a push to book natural gas turbines and there's a significant leg and being able to order and install.

[00:20:35] NAT: Certainly, well we're, we are likely to be, well, not likely, we are, uh, structurally undersupplied demand for turbines is well in excess of the supply capacity that this, the handful of global manufacturers of gas turbines can do. They're also, they will expand capacity, but they have institutional memory for good reason of, uh, expanding right into the teeth of what turned out to be a massive decline in demand.

[00:21:01] NAT: So that's one factor in terms of sort of. Preventing supply from fully rising to what demand might be. The other is cost, like the, the cost of a combined cycle gas plant in the US has doubled in the last couple of years. Um, and there's no evidence to be found that that trend is going anywhere but up for the time being.

[00:21:23] NAT: This is one of those things we uncovered Hal on all the time. We're really not in a situation where that, where that's gonna reverse at any time soon. And so if you think from the perspective as your private equity investor was alluding to of security supply and time to power, then you will find that many people will be going renewables plus storage to meet almost all or all of the, the demand that they have on an asset by asset basis.

[00:21:48] NAT: And that's the other thing that I think is important is to think about this as a. Disaggregated set of collective decisions individually, people are going to make the decision that I can't get it. You know, I, I, if I grade good luck to me to try to get a gas turbine tomorrow. Maybe I can get one in 2032 and I'll be paying half of its cost to deposit.

[00:22:07] NAT: Right now I. So why would I do that? Why would I not go elsewhere to give myself power right now and act accordingly? And the speed, speed and sort of suppleness of supply, uh, for renewables and storage is, I think, underrated in that, in that sense. And, and something that should be made, I think, much more clear as part of the value proposition for these technologies in many of the markets around the world.

[00:22:33] JENN: Pivoting a little bit to one of my favorite slides, and I'm gonna ask you soon about your, some of your favorite slides or slides that deserve, uh, potentially a little bit more attention than they, uh, necessarily get in terms of, uh, the analysis or the story that they tell. But let's start with one of my favorite slides, which is.

[00:22:52] JENN: A slide about the GDP percentage, GDP being spent on data centers. I know everybody loves to talk about this particular slide. I don't have the slide in front of me, but I believe it's around 2% of us, GDP, and. It's dwarfs the amount that was spent on other large infrastructure buildouts or getting to the moon or these kinds of things in Yeah.

[00:23:17] JENN: Uh, in the 20th century, um, again, we're talking to a lot of, uh, private equity investors and they're excited about data centers and mm-hmm. You know, they wanna invest and they wanna be part of this big boom. And so I guess my question for you is. When you look at this information and you look at the reality and the scale of what's happening, you know, what are your initial, you know, reactions to that?

[00:23:43] JENN: Do you think that, I mean, everybody wants to know, is this gonna continue? Is this not, it's very difficult to predict, but, you know, what's your reaction to the scale of spend? And then I guess the only other question that I have following that is. If you are a private equity investor, you know, how would you proceed when it comes to the build out?

[00:24:01] JENN: What would you be thinking about when it comes to the build out of, uh, data centers, uh, given this, you know, real pile on to this direction? 

[00:24:10] NAT: So. This is another case where it's actually very empirical. It's very dramatic, but it's very empirical. The worth it you that you're discussing. Just to slide 32 of my deck is, uh, entirely borrowed from Michael S's team at JP Morgan asset management or wealth management.

[00:24:25] NAT: Um, and. Uh, there are similar sources for all of this stuff. And in fact, actually in the beginning of this year, after I published my deck, I did some more of my own calculations to verify things such as broadband and to re and to update the tech CapEx and to add in some things such as like the, uh, exploration and production CapEx in North America and the 24 and then in the 2014 range.

[00:24:49] NAT: Uh, and the main thing is that like, yes, we actually don't have anything. That is of this scale, including building broadband, including drilling for oil and natural gas. Yeah. A dozen years ago. That is anything like where we are right now. This is being led by a small number of companies. Um, they're all playing essentially the same game.

[00:25:09] NAT: Uh, in direct competition with each other to secure compute build foundation models to one way or another, be be the, the, the major player in, in artificial intelligence. They're big, well-capitalized companies. They have historically done all of this sort of thing on balance sheet out of free cash flow.

[00:25:29] NAT: Now they're, they're turning to pretty much every corner of the capital market that you can think of to help fund it. And to be honest, that's about the extent of my opinion on it. In the same way that you could venture an opinion about building broadband in the year 2000, uh, and where that was gonna go, I think it was very evident in that case that the.

[00:25:51] NAT: Capacity was being built in excessive demand. We had years of dark fiber. We are not likely to have years of dark data centers. I don't think that anybody is building any of this stuff with the intention of not running it. You could always have some discontinuity come along technologically or economically that makes that happen, but I would wager that there's a sort of.

[00:26:14] NAT: Analog to Parkinson's law. Your Parkinson's law is that work expands to fill the time you allocate to it, and I would argue that computation will expand to fill the energy allocated to it. If you had something come along and somehow you had a data center that was being built and kept dark, I don't think that would actually stay that case for very long.

[00:26:35] NAT: I think something will come along to fill that void. The other thing that's important to think about, and this is a bit outside the realm that we're discussing here, is all of the things that happened downstream from all of this. So the broadband CapEx story, I think is instructive, very easy to see. I think that you could have an over capacity and lots and lots of dark fiber once the internet bubble burst in 2000.

[00:27:02] NAT: Very difficult to see that, that dark fiber. Is what would get lit up to build things like Amazon Web Services a few years later. I think it's very difficult for people in the abstract to think ahead to what might be the result of all of this sort of stuff. Um, certainly there is a, there is a lot of demand for the, for usage of, of.

[00:27:30] NAT: AI models. In fact, it's up something like tenfold on pure token token basis in about the last 12 months. So like we're not, we're not howling into the void here. There's definitely demand for all of this sort of stuff. And there's, there are great questions about who wins. There are big questions about what the fundamental model will be.

[00:27:50] NAT: But for the private equity investor right now, probably the only thing that might be, that might be worse than becoming part of this and having it become, uh, boom, turned to bust, is never getting involved at all. Uh, bold would be the investor that says that they don't have a strategy or they don't have a play here.

[00:28:07] NAT: But the question is, what part of it are you gonna play in? Are you gonna be in the powered land, the renewables powered land business? Or are you gonna be writing leases for, uh, you know, for structures? A lot of different open questions here. 

[00:28:20] JENN: I've had my turn to talk about favorite slides, Nat, and now I'm turning it over to you.

[00:28:25] JENN: You've been asked, uh, by many podcast hosts and others, you know, specific, you know, slides to describe specific slides. But I'm interested in your view on if there's a slide or a collection of slides that tells a story that really warrants more discussion and isn't being asked to go about sufficiently by hosts like me.

[00:28:47] NAT: There is a section here that I haven't talked about much yet that I was, I was happy with. It was the section, I have a section called Electrons, photons, and Molecules, and it's within the molecule section. It's about hydrogen in particular for those of you reading along at home. That's starting around slide 173, and I'm glad you asked about this because I feel like this is, this is one of those things that runs the risk.

[00:29:13] NAT: Of being essentially memory hold and just not talked about by anybody, but we, and it's another one of these 2021 things, we had this real surge of interest in green hydrogen that I think was a kind of perfect confluence of a lot of sort of things. Deep decarbonization goals, net zero targets corporate standards.

[00:29:35] NAT: Uh, what at the time was very soft, in fact, shrinking global electricity demand, uh, a lot of technical oversupply for clean energy that that could energize the process of making green hydrogen and. That allowed people, I think the, the, the narrative, uh, leeway or framework to talk a lot about this being something inevitable.

[00:29:58] NAT: And I feel like what we're seeing now is that on an evidence-based examination, it's really just not happening. And it's really important for people to dig into why instead of just not talk about it, why are we not digging in on green hydrogen? Well, um. It's a big integrated system, each step of which is expensive and lossy from an energy perspective, uh, the demand is not inherently there.

[00:30:25] NAT: If you were to build this thing, you need to build a top to bottom supply and delivery chain, each one of which relies upon another step, either I guess it's the very beginning or the very end relies on on, on steps and infrastructure on either side of it, and it's just, it's just going to prove to be difficult to do and in a rising interest rate, or at least a non-zero interest rate environment.

[00:30:51] NAT: It means that financing is going to be challenging. Um, it means that without, without deep policy support, the market applications are gonna be narrower and narrower. And I just want people to make sure to look very closely and clearly at this as a market A, decide B if it actually is a market or not, and C, do a lot of postmortem.

[00:31:18] NAT: If you think the sector is completely dead or at least close, look diagnosis, if it's still kicking along as to why it is what it is. And I just, I just feel like this is stuff that we run the risk of kind of not talking about at all and not learning any lessons from not learning where success could be found.

[00:31:39] NAT: Uh, and also not learning why it is that things may not have worked. And so this is a section that I, I haven't talked about much, but I do think is worth us spending time with as an idea. 

[00:31:51] JENN: I love this answer. Na, you know, what are the things that we think a lot about at Ricohs? Not just the postmortem, but also the pre-mortem, 

[00:32:00] NAT: right?

[00:32:01] JENN: So placing ourselves into the future. Imagining. 'cause the problem with the postmortem is the patient's already dead. That's 

[00:32:06] NAT: already dead. That's right, that's right. 

[00:32:07] JENN: Um, it's already dead. So how do we put ourselves in the future? Imagine a successful outcome and you know, a disastrous outcome and think about how we got there.

[00:32:16] JENN: Mm-hmm. And the sequence of events and these stories and these, well, the looking back to different sectors and what the stories are can really help inspire us to ensure that. We don't repeat the same mistakes. 

[00:32:31] NAT: I, we, we think analogically and in fact, those are the most powerful things that we can do, is to say this is a sector composed of these, of these elements with these kind of natural laws of organization.

[00:32:45] NAT: What else is like that? Let's explore what those industries look like and do that rather than, well, we all read the same consulting report that said that green hydrogen is gonna be a an $11 trillion market by the year 2050. 

[00:33:00] JENN: I would love to continue asking you questions about the slides, but I also know that we have limited time and you've been very generous with your time.

[00:33:06] JENN: Na. So I'm gonna shift into how not Bullard thinks. What information do you consume? 

[00:33:12] NAT: I read a lot where I can, I try to read as much long form as I can, so I read a fair amount of history. I like to read a lot of things that are kind of, uh, tangential to where we are in terms of energy. Uh, I find I, I I, I learn a lot more structurally from reading stuff that I'm not deeply familiar with.

[00:33:30] NAT: The last great book that I read over the holidays was, uh, w David Marx's book called Blank Space, and it's a cultural history of the 21st century, which the author freely admits is a real challenge to write essentially in a history in real time. Uh, but wonderful in in exactly the spirit we just discussed of essentially doing pre and post-mortem on things that are.

[00:33:51] NAT: That are happening right now, and I found that very useful. I, of course, these days I read an awful lot of bank research and I actually find the research that comes not necessarily out of sell side, but more out of general, general research, just like the, the, the JP Morgan Wealth and Asset Management, uh, research on CapEx that we alluded to, because it tends to take a bit more of an historical look these days.

[00:34:17] NAT: I spend a lot of time. Learning by doing. I do an awful lot of work with Claude Code, uh, and working in tandem with the, you know, a very professionalized setup of AI chatbots to help me, help me learn new ways of doing things, become more efficient with my work, and sort of expand the surface, the rate determining step on me.

[00:34:43] NAT: Doing the deck every year is time more than anything. And so in where I can substitute technology for time, it tends to be great. 

[00:34:51] JENN: And my final question for you nad, is if there was one book that most shaped the way you think. What book would that be and why? 

[00:34:58] NAT: So it's, it's definitely a piece of science fiction.

[00:35:01] NAT: This will come as almost no surprise, I'm sure to your audience. Um, uh, it, it's William Gibson's novel called Pattern Recognition. It's the first in his penultimate trilogy, uh, and it's set in New York City and London and Moscow shortly after. Nine 11. Uh, I find it a very poignant book because I moved to New York City and signed a lease on September 1st, 2001, which in retrospect, if we're to do a retro on it is an odd time to be moving to New York.

[00:35:35] NAT: Um, but it's also, what, what I enjoyed about it is that it captures the spirit that he distills elsewhere. And I'll come back to it of squinting a little bit at, at the present moment and seeing elements of the future. He has. Gibson has a famous quote, which he says, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.

[00:35:55] NAT: And I think within any kind of systems examination, we should ask ourself that question, embrace that spirit, and trying to find where in today we have intimations of the future. 

[00:36:10] JENN: Matt Bullard, thank you so much for joining The Future and Sound Podcast. 

[00:36:14] NAT: Thank you, Jen. Appreciate it.

[00:36:23] JENN: The Future and Sound Podcast is written and hosted by Jen Wilson and produced by Chris Attaway. This podcast is brought to you by Ricoh, a tech powered advisory company helping private market investors pursue sustainability objectives and value creation in tandem. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to tell a friend about it, and if you have a moment to rate us in your podcast app, we'd really appreciate it.

[00:36:47] JENN: Until next time, thanks for listening.