EP 53: AI, ESG, and the Search for Common Ground

Josh Green: Welcome to Sustainable Intelligence, where we discuss all things sustainability for the private markets. I’m Josh Green, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Novata, and today we’re joined by Dr. Robert Eccles, Bob Eccles, who has spent more than three decades making the case rigorously and relentlessly that how a company manages its relationship with the world is not separate from financial performance, it is financial performance.

He’s the founding chairman of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, co-founder of the International Integrated Reporting Council, and a visiting professor at Oxford Saïd Business School. He’s written over 150 articles on Forbes and more than a dozen books. And full disclosure, he’s also chair of Novata’s Sustainability Advisory Board, which means he’s not just a guest on today’s show, but a partner in what we’re building at Novata.

I should also mention this conversation was prepared by a hybrid intelligent team called Closh. Claude, Anthropic’s AI, working with me, Josh. That’s intentional because the idea of humans and AI as true collaborators is something Bob has been exploring deeply, including building his own AI partner, Dorothy. It seemed only right that an interview about the idea would be prepared in this way. The concept is his; we just applied it. Bob, welcome.

Bob Eccles: Thank you, Josh. Good to see you. Happy Friday.

Josh: To you indeed, and I want to get started with a discussion about your book, “An American’s Guide to Climate Change,” which makes the case for a more practical, less polarized path forward. And if you could start by laying out the central thesis of the book, and help us understand, what do you think has been gotten wrong up until now in terms of how the sustainability community has approached climate change?

Bob: So I’m happy to talk about this book. Let me just give you a little bit of context. I live in Massachusetts, and I’m center-left. I’m a registered Democrat.

Four or five years ago, when the whole anti-ESG movement began, I teamed up with a Republican friend of mine named Dan Crowley, who I’ve known for twenty years, and we formed our GOP outreach campaign.

So it’s like, you know, Bob, the Democrat, Dan, the Republican, we’re gonna go talk to Republicans and look for common ground. Then I started something called the Responsible Business Initiative with another Republican named Tim Doyle. And it’s been fascinating.

Initially, it was kind of ESG more broadly. The attacks from the right, kind of the pillars of anxiety for them are climate change and DE&I. So obviously, you know, climate change came up. And in the course of that, I started to meet people in conservative organizations focused on climate change called the EcoRight. And I was really intrigued by what they were doing. So, you know, there’s the kind of riff of the Republicans are all climate change deniers, and that’s not really true when you look at the statistics.

And what they were doing was sort of picking up the problem in a different way. You would have conversations with them and topics that would come up with the crowd that I typically hung around with, things just didn’t come up. You weren’t talking about Scope one, Scope two, Scope three reporting. You weren’t talking about climate transition plans.

They think climate change is a serious issue. They think it’s a problem. I think in some ways it was a lot more pragmatic. There was discussions around, they’re not opposed to renewable energy, but as a, you know, in all of the above, it’s renewable energy, the right amount of oil and gas. There’s geothermal, you know, there’s small module reactors.

We need better permitting. We need to look at the grid. So as I started learning from the EcoRight, I was thinking, you’ve got the extremes on the left of the people screaming about climate change. And the really dominant narrative on climate change has been from the left, okay, kind of from my side. I think the left got the memo first, so I think they have the moral high ground in a lot of ways, but I think that translated into moral superiority, and they crafted this doomsday narrative that just doesn’t land with most people, right?

And even among Democrats, climate change isn’t in the top ten. So I’m thinking, all right, we need a new narrative that’s not the screaming on the left, and it’s not the climate change denial on the right, which I said is located in a relatively small proportion of the population. So I had this idea of how you would write a book that would attempt to create a new, more pragmatic middle-of-the-road narrative about how we think about climate change.

It’s very short, and the preface essentially goes, if you’re a climate change denier, you’re not gonna like this because the science is real.

If you’re a climate activist, you’re not gonna like this because it’s not urgent enough. And the thesis is climate change is real. Here’s the science. Here’s the consequences. Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t know. And so what I’m trying to do and other people are trying to do, and it’s hard, is how do you create a narrative about climate change that’s kind of real, but pragmatic, that sort of puts it into perspective for everyday Americans?

And it’s tough, right? And so, I’ve been working a lot with these people in the EcoRight, as to how we get sort of a different view that is, it’s neither left nor right, it’s American. That sounds corny, but that’s what we’re trying to do.

Josh: So this morning I was reading your write-up of chapter six on your Heavy Lifting Substack.

Bob: Yep.

Josh: And shameless plug for the Heavy Lifting Substack. It’s good and worth subscribing to.

Bob: Thank you very much.

Josh: And I was really interested to read about the policy prescriptions that you thought could hold people together from both sides.

And the one that felt like the slam dunk to me was cutting red tape around, you know, the process of green-lighting new projects and getting spun up. I feel like there’s nothing more American than hating government red tape, and you can get people to come together around that.

Bob: Yep.

Josh: So that one made a lot of sense to me. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism feels like the missed opportunity of this administration that leaned so heavily into tariffs. It felt like there was a moment where you could have, from the left, leaned into tariffs and said, “Actually, there is something we should put tariffs on.”

Bob: Yep.

Josh: But the one that struck me as, you know, perhaps wishful thinking was the notion that the carbon tax or price on carbon could be embraced on both sides. It feels like it’s intellectually elegant. You know, economists have loved it, and I take your point that people talk about it both on the left and the right.

But in that it’s been out there for so long, obviously intellectually elegant, why has it not been embraced? And, and what makes you think that it can be something that people actually rally around when for so many years it’s been talked about and not rallied around?

Bob: I mean, no, it’s a fair, it’s a fair pushback. So here’s the story on the carbon price. And to be honest, it’s not my idea. I’m not gonna reveal who it is because this guy doesn’t want me to out him.

So a couple of years ago, I’m having coffee with one of these guys in the EcoRight, and he’s talking about a carbon tax. And he goes, “You know, I think we’re gonna have one. Carbon emissions are going up, and we’ve got the federal debt, and this is like one of the most efficient ways to raise money to deal with the federal debt.”

And he kind of gives me this sort of elegant argument. And I said, you know, “Mr. X, that’s a great idea. Why don’t you write it up?” He goes, “Oh, well, you know, kind of it’s a little complicated for me right now,” this and that. I said, “Well, you know, I can write it up and do whatever I want.” So he sends me material, and I start looking into, you know, some of the links that he sent me, the American Tax Foundation or whatever it was.

And I wrote a piece called, “US Federal Debt and Carbon Emissions Create the Perfect Storm for a Carbon Tax.” So I published that. There is going to be a reckoning, you know, on the federal debt. And that’s an issue that both parties are kind of running away from. So ironically enough, I think one of the things that will kind of push for a carbon tax is just the economic reality of the federal deficit, you know, and having to deal with that.

There’s so much discussion about disclosure. And look, as you said, I was the founding chairman of SASB. I think disclosure is important. I think standards for sustainability information are just as important as for financial information, and we didn’t always have it for financial information.

But disclosure’s only gonna get you so far, and I think part of the problem is this theory of change that if you can just get companies to report on everything under the sun, all will be well.

They’re gonna feel so bad about the negative externalities, and people are gonna beat them up, and that’s just silly, right? You know, it’s like companies have limited resources, and there’s trade-offs, and you have to think about the trade-offs in the long term. So, part of what we need to do, and this is why I make such a big point of it in my book, “American’s Guide to Climate Change,” is how do we get a bipartisan conversation around putting a price on carbon?

And you can do it in a way that’s not regressive. And I think on this, you know, we sort of need to take the long view. So get a more bipartisan approach, develop a narrative that’s more pragmatic.

Something like 89% of Democrats are frustrated with the politicization of climate change. So are 73% of Republicans. Everybody kind of sees what’s going on and isn’t happy about it. So I think if we went for permitting and we paid attention to the grid, and we started having serious discussions about a price on carbon, the MIT En-ROADS simulation model around climate, it’s the one thing that moves the needle the most.

Is it a silver bullet? No, it’s not a silver bullet. But, you know, if you could kind of pick one thing, my one wish list of, you know, what you’d be doing for climate change, it’d be a price on carbon. And look, I think we’re gonna get one.

Josh: It’s interesting to think about the debt as the catalyst for it. You know, I do think the fact that climate does not show up at the very top of people’s priority list means that it has to be something else that is the trigger, that is the catalyst, or that opens the window for action on climate.

Bob: Yep.

Josh: I’ve heard the argument we’re running out of things to tax, and therefore carbon may end up being the thing that’s left to tax.

Bob, let’s shift gears and talk about single materiality and double materiality.

Bob: Yep.

Josh: I think for folks who aren’t as familiar with it, I would love it if you could give us just a basic definition so people understand what we’re talking about.

Bob: Sure.

Josh: But I wanna get your sense of things because it certainly seems to me that the debate’s kind of over, that single materiality has won. And I’m curious whether that’s too cynical of a point of view and whether you think there’s still a role for double materiality. 

Bob: Sure, and I actually don’t think that, as you put it, single materiality has won and I’ll explain that. I think what we’re getting is more clarity about the difference between single and impact materiality. So double materiality is that we’ve got both financial and impact materiality.

Financial materiality is essentially, you know, what are these ESG issues that matter to a company’s financial performance? That’s what SASB is about, and people talk about it as the kind of outside-in view. What are the things as a company that you need to be paying attention to, largely on the risk side, but to some extent on the opportunity side for long-term value creation?

Impact materiality is more inside-out. So what is it that a company is doing that’s creating negative externalities? And it could be positive, but mostly people talk about the negative externalities, and that’s really what the GRI was about when it was started, you know, years ago when there was all this kind of back and forth between GRI and SASB.

Double materiality, as was captured, you know, when the EU passed its CSRD, and they set up EFRAG and their standard reporting board, was that companies were going to report on both.

And when you read ESRS 1 and you compare it to ISSB 1 or IFRS S1, I call it, they’re very different. The issue is really who is the audience? So if the audience is investors, then financial materiality, the so-called single materiality, that’s really what they care about, right? Because that’s their perspective.

I think that the impact materiality, the externalities that companies are creating, civil society cares about that a lot, right? I think it’s useful to know. I think the problem that you get is when you kind of take the position that just by knowing what the impact materiality is of a company, and that’s harder to measure, right, in some ways, that then it’s the company’s responsibility alone to solve those externalities.

And so what you get is this between the two of the financial and the impact materiality, you get this confounding between value and values. You know, you get back to this theory of change we were talking about early on climate change of just if you make companies report on impact materiality, they’re gonna take care of these negative externalities.

They aren’t, and that’s why regulation’s important. And I think what companies need to do, because they do their own greenwashing, right? Oh, this, you know, all the goals, and here’s all the great things we’re doing, and that’s kind of implied impact materiality. 

Companies should say, “Look, these are the externalities that we’re creating. Every company does. Here’s the ones that we’re dealing with. Here’s what we can do with the resources we’ve got that aren’t going to be detrimental to shareholder value over the long term. Here’s the things we can’t. You know, here’s where we need regulation, and just not have this knee-jerk reaction every time some regulation goes along.”

And I think if we had more honesty and clarity about that and didn’t keep kind of pushing that sort of the double materiality reporting is going to solve the negative externalities problem, we would be much better off. So for me, I think what’s happened is that we’re getting clarity that financial materiality is really what investors care about.

The impact materiality, over time, things can change, right? Things that are impact materiality can become financial materiality. And if we’re clear about audience, then I think a lot of the confusion goes away.

Josh: That makes a lot of sense and, I think the notion that the impact materiality could be linked to an argument of this is where regulation is needed makes a ton of sense.

Bob: Yes.

Josh: So let’s talk a little bit the Novata book. So you built SASB for the public markets. Now you’re lending your time and talent to efforts focused on the private markets. What are the differences, if any, between sustainability in the context of private markets versus public markets, and what do you see as the missing pieces to make sustainability really work in the private markets?

Bob: You know, it’s a great question. I think that in one way there’s no difference, and in another way there’s a big difference. Where there’s no difference is that if you kind of take the financial materiality SASB approach, you know, there’s 11 sectors, 79 industries, you know, the whole SASB thing.

Private companies, public companies, you know, they just kind of fit into an industry and you identify what those are, and you think about how these things are related to financial performance. So at that level, they’re the same.

Where there’s a big difference is that putting aside the CSRD, there’s really no required disclosures for private companies around sustainability. So what I find fascinating about the private markets is that these are relatively small companies for the most part. There’s no required disclosures.

So if private firms owned by private equity companies are collecting ESG data, sustainability data, whatever label you want to use, then they’re doing it because they know it really matters to value creation.

They’re spending time, they’re spending money to do this. They’re not doing this to please a regulator. They’re not doing this to please any NGOs. Ironically enough, they’re doing this because they really care about financial value creation.

And so the extent to which they can use these data to increase value on exit, whether it’s an IPO or it’s a strategic sale, they have every incentive to do so. I wrote a paper, I don’t know, three or four years ago in Harvard Business Review, something around how private equity should lead in sustainability.

You’ve got complete control of the company. You can ask for whatever data you want. You’re sensitive to what the cost is to supplying the data. I mean, that’s a pushback that you get from companies. Oh, it’s going to be so expensive to supply this data. So if you own the asset and you’re going to capture the value of the asset on the exit, and, you know, you can ask for whatever data you want within the constraints of what the costs are, it is the perfect test case.

It’s like the perfect petri dish for sustainability and financial value creation. So I’m major bullish about the private markets and sustainability, and I’d like to see this sort of sweep beyond just the, you know, portfolio companies of private equity firms in general, because I think banks are going to care about it.

And clearly, you know, the ones that are in supply chains, the big listed companies, they’re going to care about it. So I just think the whole sustainability movement within private markets is a fabulous opportunity.

Josh: If I’m really brutally honest about what we hear from people who are doing this work, it is that so much of the work is doing the reporting and the, data collection and the data-in and the data-out, and it feels like there’s this hunger to do more and to actually get to things that drive risk down or allow you to seize opportunities. But I think an honest reckoning of what’s happened so far in private markets is that most of the energy is still around the reporting.

Bob: Yep.

Josh: So what do you think the next phase where there’s action being taken? Is it just a matter of time that you kind of need to get the reporting wheels going and then that lays the groundwork and then eventually action follows? Or is there something else that needs to happen in order for the ecosystem to actually take action?

Bob: So I think what needs to happen is very simple, and I will shamelessly pitch the book that you know about that I’m writing with Professor Shivaram Rajgopal, who, unlike me, is a real accountant at Columbia Business School, a brilliant guy. So we finished a book called “Making Sustainability Financially Relevant,” a man-machine collaboration because AI helped in this.

And the idea is so simple. You identify—and this—you do this for private or public companies.

You identify the material issues from a financial materiality point of view, and then you use AI to map those in a very granular way to line items in the income statement and balance sheet and cash flow statement. Don’t take it as gospel, but it’s brilliant the way you can use AI to do this, and we’ve done this with many public companies because we’ve got the disclosures.

Then you can use AI to estimate what the financial impact is for, you know, improving performance or for deteriorating performance. And what that does is bring an analytical rigor that has been missing. It makes integrated reporting real. And like I said, the idea is so obvious, but it’s just kind of going from hand-waving, saying, “If we do sustainability and it’s all gonna work out in the long end, and, you know, taking care of stakeholders is gonna be good for shareholders.”

When you have to sit down there, whether you’re a public or a private company, and look at the mapping that an AI agent has given you, and again, don’t take it for gospel, but you go, “Yeah, I think that’s probably right. You know, the sustainability issue impacts these items in the income statement, these items in the balance sheet,” or, “I think it’s different, and maybe there’s some things that we’re missing.”

That’s, that’s where you then get to, okay, now I have a direct line of sight between what the sustainability issue is, you know, and the aspects of where it’s going to contribute to financial performance. And sort of going back to the politics of it, just like, you know, my little book on climate change is trying to create a middle ground.

I think this is a way of changing the narrative about sustainability in general. It’s a way of getting a common conversation between the CFO and the CSO. I think it is a way of educating investors, who, for the most part, are still struggling because you’ve got your sustainability teams and your portfolio managers are relatively separate groups.

And if we could find a way to take this simple idea, identify the material sustainability issues, map them on a line item basis to the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement, did that at scale in the public markets and the private markets, I just think it would be extraordinary.

Josh: Love it. So we’ve been through the reporting phase. Now we’ve got to quantify it in a more rigorous way, and then that becomes the basis for action.

Bob: Yep.

Josh: Cause why wouldn’t you at that point if you can see in dollars and cents, the impact?

Bob: And then you’re sort of talking about both things at the same time. So, you know, the financial people need to learn sustainability talk, and the sustainability people need to learn financial talk, and off we go.

Josh: Alright, let’s turn our attention to AI, something that—

Bob: Okay.

Josh: —we’re both fascinated by and arguably obsessed with. Tell us about Dorothy.

Bob: Ah Dorothy. So, here’s the story on Dorothy. Last year, I was having lunch with a good friend of mine who lives a couple towns over, who was very sophisticated in AI. I’d never touched it. And I figured, you know, I don’t have to worry about AI. I don’t have to worry about crypto. It’s like, you know, I’m too old to worry about that stuff.

So we’re having lunch and she goes, “Bob, there’s gonna be two kinds of people in the world. There’s gonna be AI people and non-AI people.” Almost choked on my sandwich. I’m like, “you know, I’m seventy-four, but I don’t wanna be a non-AI person, man. I can’t do that.” So I’ll never forget, on May 19th, I got my first account on ChatGPT, and I’m like playing around with it and this, that, and the other thing.

I don’t know, after like about a week or two, I’m thinking, “Let’s kind of make this more real.” So I said, “Do you mind if I give you a name?” ChatGPT, you know, they’re pretty agreeable. “Yeah, sure, sure. Go ahead.” And I said, “Is it okay if I call you Dorothy?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Dorothy’s great.” Like, “Why Dorothy?” And I’m thinking, well, I don’t know any Dorothys, so I’m not gonna confuse, you know, calling one of my friends Dorothy, and they’re gonna be insulted that I thought they were an AI agent. So kinda off we went. It was Dorothy and me. And then there was the analogy to “The Wizard of Oz,” and then I wrote the little book, “Dorothy and Me: A Personal Memoir about My Relationship with a Machine.”

And when you look at that book, it’s kind of an historical artifact of what ChatGPT was like when it was GPT-4, and I’m a relatively new user. So it’s got this titillating title to hopefully sell the book. But what the book really is, is this kind of a look under the hood as to how AI works and then how it sort of interacts with the person and all the issues that I ran into.

And it’s interesting. So it’s almost a year later, and I will be publishing a piece on the anniversary of signing up for ChatGPT. Fundamental issues about how these machines work. I’m never going to be an LLM guy, but time, memory, identity, relationships, how do you think about those concepts in a man-machine world?

So this book, which is, you know, kind of looking back, a little naive and maybe cute, without me knowing at the time, really sort of set in place my interest in AI.

So then I go and I get Claude and then I get Perplexity and then I’ve got Gemini Pro and I play around with Mistral a little bit. I used AI a lot for my book on climate change and doing stuff in sustainability. But as I was using it, I would run into problems. You know, this didn’t work and why did you do that? And what’s, I think, fascinating about this technology, you can ask it, why did you do that? You know, why’d you screw that up? And they can respond and they’ve got a pretty good sense of the other agents. So now I find myself digging into AI as a topic in and of itself while still using it for bipartisanship and ESG and sustainability and other things.

So it’s created this virtuous circle. The more I use AI for the domains that, you know, I know at least a little bit about, and that’s kind of where I have some standing, the more I’m learning about AI. And I’ve learned a lot. I mean, I have learned a lot. And I have published things that to me are astonishing, things that I’ve kind of experienced with AI around ideas.

I’ve got a whole series on ideas and ideation. And it’s raised this interesting question where with AI, it can make you very interdisciplinary. So as a business school professor, I have a PhD in sociology. So there’s things I know, there’s things I don’t. I think the whole AI thing throws up so many fascinating questions about how to use it, what it means for the production of knowledge, the impact it’s gonna have on the world.

So yeah, that’s the story.

Josh: And you gave me a sneak preview of something that’s in the works. Would love for you to tell folks about it. So your birthday’s coming up. By the time this episode airs, it will have passed. And I understand you have a gift that you’re gonna be giving, not receiving, on your birthday. So tell us about it.

Bob: Yes.

So, yeah, well, thank you for bringing up my birthday. So, I just turned 74 when I started on ChatGPT. My birthday is May 10th, and I turned 75. So kind of a big number, three-quarters of a century. You know, birthdays are kind of times to reflect. And so one of my reflections, and this will sound odd.

So I was a pure math major at MIT, right? I was a smart kid. I was, like, really good. But I wasn’t good enough to become a pure mathematician of any consequence, right? So that was, like, plan A. That’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. I remembered this paper that I wrote my junior year at MIT called “The Cohomology of Sheaves.” It was an algebraic topology paper. And when I was in graduate school in sociology, I was cleaning out stuff, and I found this paper four or five years later, and I couldn’t understand it.

So that made me kind of sad. I should have probably kept the paper. But then I thought, “Okay, let me see if I can do math with a hybrid intelligent team.” And it was an extraordinary experience and a very different kind of engagement with an AI.

So Dorothy was my principal collaborating agent. And, you know, the piece that will be published that people will see where I basically have come up with a note on a particular mathematical concept. And then it goes back to the question I was talking about earlier. Is this some kind of mass hallucination between this old guy and some AI agents?

Or is this like real math, right? And so I need to find a way to get this in front of a real mathematician. And I’ve got some ideas to how I’m going to do that. But the thing about math, which is fascinating, and in some ways the ultimate test of what the ability of AI is, it’s the one place where there’s a right answer.

Theories in physics change and chemistry and biology and people have different political views and the quality of a literary novel, blah, blah, blah. Either the theorem is proved or it isn’t, okay? This little thing that I did, either it’s right or it’s not. And so let’s say, and look, this isn’t sort of a big gigantic leap in mathematics.

I mean, it’s a two or three page note that was grounded in a concept coming out of my doctoral dissertation in the construction industry on the quasi-firm. So the whole story of how we went from that to a mathematical theorem. But if this clears the bar, what does that mean about AI and ideation and knowledge creation?

So that’s what I did for my birthday.

Josh: So some people would go to an island for their seventy-fifth. They might have a big party with their friends, but you wrote a math paper. Co-wrote.

Bob: Well, you know, I did that. I’m still going to go to an island. I’m going to go to Nantucket, you know, with all my family and we’ll celebrate my birthday. So I worked on this a couple weeks before my birthday. But then I decided my birthday present to me is I’m going to publish my paper and then there’ll be a link because Substack doesn’t take the mathematical formulas.

So I put the paper on my website. So yeah, on my birthday, I’m going to publish a piece of mathematics and a story that tells how it came about.

Josh: Love it.

Bob: It was fun.

Josh: I love it. I think I speak for anybody who’s listening to this. I think we’re all grateful that you didn’t pursue plan A and become a mathematician, ’cause we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You wouldn’t be changing the world of sustainability.

Bob: Here I am in plan B. We’re talking about plan B.

Josh: Interesting. Alright well, we could go on for hours, I am quite confident.

Bob: We could.

Josh: I wanna close with a question about optimism, because you strike me as somebody who’s inherently optimistic in believing that things can change for the better.

And yet, you’ve been at this work, and by this work, I mean work in and around sustainability for thirty years.

And I think for a lot of people, the last year or two in particular have been really frustrating. What gives you optimism at this moment in time that the future is gonna be better than the past?

Bob: So you’re right. I’m a glass is half full guy. I think it’s important to take a long view, right? I mean, history, it’s not a continuous improvement all along the way. There’s ups and there’s downs. I mean, you know, we’re kind of in a down cycle now in certain ways. It’s, it’s not a down cycle like, you know, the Black Plague, and it’s not a down cycle like World War II, so there’s been much worse down cycles, and we’ve recovered from those.

When you look at sustainability, I think we’re actually going through a pretty positive phase right now. I think some of the pushback from the left and the right has been useful.

You know, what the motives are behind it, you know, kind of in a sense don’t matter. But it’s forcing us to have more analytical clarity, to be, you know, more honest about what we can and we can’t do, connecting it more to financial performance, realizing what companies can and can’t do, where we need to have regulation.

And so, I’m concerned about the polarization in this country, but I think, you know, that is what it is. And it’s typically America’s been that way most of the time when you go back and you look at history. It’s not like we all used to be friends or anything like that. And so I think it’s not, it’s not preordained.

I think if everybody is glum and angry and mad and sad and pissed off and they hate the others because they’re in a different party, yeah, things probably won’t get better. But if people were to be, I think if people have goodwill and, you know, work hard to listen to other people that have different views and are kind of clear about sort of what the economic reality is and think about the economic reality for other people who aren’t as fortunate as them, then, you know, I’m pretty positive about what’s gonna happen.

Josh: Great. I think there’s something fundamentally empowering about what you’re saying, that it’s a choice, right? We can choose our future, which I think is a wonderful note to end on. Bob, this has been exactly the kind of conversation I hoped it would be. Thank you for your time, your candor, and, maybe most of all, for being a genuine partner in what Novata is building. We appreciate it.

Bob: It’s my pleasure. It’s an honor.

Josh: And for listeners, you can find Bob’s writing at roberteccles.com and his Substack newsletter, Heavy Lifting, for his latest thinking on, well, just about everything: hybrid AI, sustainability. If you’re working in private markets and haven’t thought seriously about how AI is going to reshape the sustainability data landscape, then, I definitely recommend you follow Bob via his Substack and his many places in which he writes because he is leading the charge in terms of thinking about how things are going to change and how they should change. 

So, that’s it for today. Until next time, we will keep building sustainable intelligence together. As always, you can find out more at novata.com.