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Zero Ambitions is a podcast about sustainability and the built environment. There is no single solution to fixing the built environment, so we're talking our way through as much of it as we can. We find interesting guests who know what they're talking about and speak with them about sustainability, good practice, and how to make a difference because the challenges are massive and the problems complex. You can also find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/91573716. Hosted by Jeff ...
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Welcome to the Ideas Lab Podcast, where you can learn from the world’s greatest creative and entrepreneurial minds to help you turn your ideas into original businesses, books and brands – because in a crowded world, it pays to stand out. Your host is John Williams, bestselling author of 'Screw Work Let’s Play' and 'Screw Work Break Free' and founder of The Ideas Lab London. Our focus is on the rebels, creatives and innovators with a new take on their topic that has allowed them to carve out ...
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Press Profiles

Russell Sherman

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These are the top journalists that drive the news cycle, but what drives them? Industry veteran Russell Sherman sits down with some of the most influential journalists in business news to hear their backstories, memorable moments, and latest perspective on the news today. They are used to asking the questions, now we’ll “turn the tables” and get a behind-the-scenes look on how the news gets made.
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Something-like twelve months on from inception we thought we'd catch up with what's happening at Living Places, the multi-disciplinary, impact-focused consultancy co-founded by this week's guest Cat Magill. Where last year Rufus Grantham came on the podcast to tell us all about the organisation he was in the midst of founding, this year Cat joined …
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James Mackintosh spent six years at Oxford studying philosophy. It turns out that was the perfect training to become a financial markets columnist. On this episode of Press Profiles, we explore James's nearly 30-year career spanning the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. We discuss his writing process and his search for endlessly interest…
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This week's guest is Caroline Ashe Brady of KORE Retrofit in Ireland, one of the objectively successful one-stop-shop retrofit providers to have emerged over the past few years. Caroline is a business leader who we’re a proper fan of, so apologies in advance for our ‘so Caroline please tell us, why are you so great’ style questioning. That said, yo…
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Returning champion Lisa Ann Pasquale rejoins us on Zero Ambitions to talk about dogs and retrofit. Mainly retrofit though. Informed by Lisa's experiences as a retrofit coordinator, technical lead at RetrofitWorks, and Technical Manager at The Retrofit Academy she knows an awful lot about the challenges faced by retrofit practitioners. Windows, vent…
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Returning champion Ellora Coupe joins us to talk about the recent report that Her Own Space has published about the place of women in the retrofit sector, which is heartening, insightful, and damning in equal measure. A great piece of work that everyone interested in the sector should heed. Perhaps more importantly, she's with us to promote the inc…
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This week we're going by Joseph Little, Head of Construction & Building Performance in the School of Architecture, Building and Environment at TU Dublin. He joined us to talk about the journey he's been on leading the MSc in Building Performance over the last seven years, but we got into a lot more. Joseph has been deeply involved in the promotion …
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In a life that has brought her to almost every corner of the earth, Diane Brady has made a career of finding stories in unexpected places. Now, she is turning her attention to bringing Fortune’s live events and CEO initiative to the next level. On this episode of Press Profiles, we discuss where she wants to take the franchise, along with some of h…
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This week we're thinking about retrofit differently with Dan Hill from Dark Matter Labs (DML). Or rather, we're talking about retrofit's potential to become a movement for social change. In reality, retrofit is about much more than fabric and economics, it's about people and how they live. With that in mind we should be thinking much more about eng…
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This week we're joined by Iva Merheim Eyre from SMARTER4EU to talk about her recently published report the Catalogue of Good Practices, a document that details a variety of place-based hybrid finance models that have been used to rebuild and renovate homes in locations as wide-ranging as the postwar Balkan states to London's own Westminster. This i…
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Jeff and Dan are joined by Dr. Peter Rickaby again. We were due a catch up so we recorded the conversation because he's always interesting. Peter should need little introduction, so we'll just say he's our favourite retrofit expert (sorry everyone else) and our most frequent guest on the show. He's only returned to the pod, not to the UK. In princi…
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This week we're joined by Nesta's Deputy Mission Director, Andrew Sissons, to discuss his take on why the UK has such a weird relationship with heat pumps. It was inspired by an excellent Twitter thread on the subject that gained quite a bit of attention the other week. We talk through it all so you might as well listen, or just take a look at the …
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Laura Kreutzer is one of the longest tenured reporters in Private Equity. A scholarship student who earned her way into some of the most prestigious educational institutions, Laura has brought keen insight, deep understanding, and a warm personality to her coverage of the ever-changing asset class. On this episode of Press Profiles – live from Laur…
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The other week we had a chance to have a conversation with Cypren Edmunds, President of the European Straw Building Association about building with straw, experiences in retrofit, and the meandering path that led him to the green building trade. For us, it was a really interesting chat because we got to talk about how he got into greed building via…
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The Recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive is now enshrined in EU law, which has big implications for the built environment everywhere. Even the South East of England. To mark the occasion and get the lowdown on what this all means, we invited friend of the show Ciarán Cuffe back on to talk about it. For those who might not remember, he's…
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Kate Crawford is a building nerd who is obsessed with measuring performance. She's currently, Technical Director at KLH Sustainability, a multidisciplinary consultancy working in the built environment. Kate has a very interesting background in terms of her experience and she's now working on a very fascinating project in which she's researching and…
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Caroline Hyde has thrived in several roles at Bloomberg for the past 16 years, most recently leading the charge at Bloomberg Technology alongside co-anchor Ed Ludlow. But before she brought her infectious energy to TV, she was working on the other side of the screen as a PR professional. On this episode of Press Profiles, we discuss her early trial…
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This week we're talking about modular construction and Natural Building Systems with MD Chloe Donovan. Chloe is a really interesting character with a fascinating product that she's bringing to market. Unusually, she's a farmer who got into building and then found herself as an entrepreneur in the febrile world of modular building and MMC. We talk a…
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Up next we're speaking with Falk Bleyl, CTO at Utopi, about their sensor-based data platform technology. He describes it as an ESG platform which is true but it massively underplays the true value of what their product offers. Heads up, normally, we'll at least try to couch the conversation within a broader context but in this episode, we've barely…
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Lloyd has been in Paris. He came back very enthused and excited by his experience there and wanted to communicate why to our listeners. “In the face of the climate emergency, a swift transition of the buildings sector is a direct requirement to achieve the goals set by the Paris Agreement”. Approximately, 1,400 people from 70 countries gathered in …
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This week we got into an area of retrofit that feels neglected: commercial space. It's a subject we definitely touch upon but never really get into , so in order to remedy that we're getting stuck in. First up is a conversation with architects Harry Browne and Séamus Guidera of RKD Dublin who came recommended to us by friend of the show Richard O'H…
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Oliver Shah has rapidly become one of the most impactful journalists in Britain. His quick career rise to associate editor at the The Sunday Times (the paper he grew up reading) has been due in large part to his ability to find the "sizzle on the steak" when it comes to journalism. On this episode of Press Profiles, my UK colleague and guest co-hos…
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We are delighted to bring you a conversation with Professor Emeritus Susan Roaf, of Heriot-Watt University this week to talk about a bunch of fundamental problems in building design and the management of thermal comfort. She is a wonderful guest and we're looking forward to having her back. Originally, we planned to talk about her article COP 28: N…
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This week we're joined by Nigel Banks, Technical Director - Zero Bills & Low Carbon Homes at Octopus Energy. Nigel joined us to discuss his recent article: Fabric Fifth, a slightly polemical riposte to fabric-first dogma, and an interesting philosophy for retrofit. As it turned out, it’s an apposite follow-up to last week's episode with Fionn Steve…
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We were blessed to enjoy a great conversation about retrofit and what we should consider our priorities, with the vastly experienced retrofit firebrand Fionn Stevenson. It was a challenging, surprising, and free-wheeling conversation spurred by a call to action she made on LinkedIn some time ago, in which she decried fabric-first approaches and dec…
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As the son of a butcher, Dan Colarusso grew up seeing how the sausage got made. Now, he oversees sausage making of a different type. As Senior Vice President of Business News at CNBC, Dan is the man behind all the decisions that affect the network’s programming. He has honed his news judgment and style over the course of 40 years, influenced by sto…
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We enjoyed the company of Ecomerchant’s Will Kirkman a business that's specialised in sustainable and natural building materials for the building trade and consumers. We mainly rambled our way around the culture of building in the UK, how embodied carbon has always been on the Ecomerchant agenda and the impact that sustainable and natural building …
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This week is all about the challenges of low-impact building in the sphere of self build with Tara Fraser, a chartered civil and structural engineer, and a director of Build Collective in Bristol. On the recommendation of former guest (and Tara's colleague) Beth Williams, we recently had a chat with her about a self-build project she worked on that…
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Part two of our series on shading, this time with a return appearance from Tom Dollard of Pollard Thomas Edwards who joined us in January 2023 to talk about lazy thinking. Ostensibly, this time we met to talk about the Good Homes Alliance design guide for shading, as a follow-up to December's episode with Zoe De Grussa. On reflection we realised th…
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Bloomberg News is one of the biggest news organizations globally, with 2,400 reporters, and coverage that reaches every medium from wires, to broadcast, to print, and radio - and John Micklethwait is the man that sits atop of it all. On this episode of Press Profiles, we discuss John's career journey from The Economist to Bloomberg, some of his fav…
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With us this week is new friend, Kelly Alvarez Doran, via an introduction from Lloyd to talk about his experiences at COP28 and his carbon reduction consultancy Ha/f Climate Design that's challenged itself to reduce Canadian construction's emissions by half. We get sidetracked almost immediately while we talk about Kelly's background as an architec…
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This one is about conservation-led retrofit and the retrofit of commercial (or institutional) building stock. We were invited to see a recent Iarnród Éireann (Irish Railway) retrofit project and meet with Heidi Hopper-Duffy (Environmental & Sustainability Manager) and its architect David Hughes (Senior Conservation Architect & Energy Specialist). O…
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The first of our Dublin field recordings is with Archie O'Donnell a long-time face green building in Ireland, a fella who Jeff has a lot of time for, and someone Alex and I hadn't met yet. It was a good call. Originally trained as an architect, Archie has worked his way through the industry, recently joining Danish/Irish consultancy KOSMOS, so ther…
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This week we have Lloyd's latest Passive House Plus Revisited, a conversation with passive house heads Alan Clarke and Nick Grant about the passive house archive project that left Lloyd so smitten when he visited it last summer. That we’re discussing archive systems shouldn’t put folk off - the point is about thinking differently, about what the ch…
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Most sports reporters sit in the press box. Abe Madkour’s staff of reporters sit in the C-Suite. On this episode of Press Profiles, we sit down with Sports Business Journal’s Publisher and Executive Editor to explore his love for the "game behind the game" and how he has built an industry-renowned publication that covers the business of sports. We …
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Happy new year! This week's episode brings you a conversation with Ethan Wadsworth of DiscreteHeat the manufacturers of our new favourite energy efficient (non-radiator and non underfloor) based heating system ThermaSkirt. We're not there to bang on about a product we like, what we found interesting about this one is that it’s an overnight, award-w…
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Happy post-Christmas day, hope you made it through OK. Today we have part two of the latest Passive House Plus revisited, looking at Lloyd Alter's favourite article of 2021: Seeing the wood for the trees - Placing ecology at the heart of construction. Again, we're joined by authors Lenny Antonelli and Andy Simmonds talking about mass timber, embodi…
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Merry Christmas! This week we have a Passive House Plus revisited two-parter for you, led by our occasional co-host Lloyd Alter, looking at his favourite article of 2021: Seeing the wood for the trees - Placing ecology at the heart of construction. We're joined by authors Lenny Antonelli and Andy Simmonds and the conversation wheels around, coverin…
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On this edition of Press Profiles, we head to the Middle East to sit down with the head of one of the leading news organizations in the UAE. Mina Al Oraibi was born in Iraq, and growing up her and her family were exiles in Saudi Arabia. She has spent time in the UK, US, and now the UAE. She shares her global perspective and a lifetime of experience…
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It's all about shading, overheating, and solar gain with Zoe De Grussa this week. She's the author of that infamous Camden overheating case study that Jeff always references and, at the time of writing, is technical and sustainability consultant at the British Blind and Shutter Association (BBSA). We cover Camden, but perhaps more interesting is th…
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We are joined by Loreana Padron to talk about what it is that a Head of Sustainability does and, more broadly, the value of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) to all the stakeholders in a retrofit project. Loreana tells us about the path she's taken to becoming Head of Sustainability at Architecture firm ECD, a leading sustainability-focused practice,…
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Today we're talking about standards. In short, it's about how standards are written and why retrofit shouldn’t just be about products or carbon. It's never short with us though, is it? We're sure that all of our listeners will have complained about PAS2035/2030 at some point, admiring its ambition while lamenting its restrictions. We've all certain…
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The NYSE is an institution, and so is Bob Pisani. The CNBC veteran has been manning the floor of the exchange for the business network for more than 25 years. On this edition of Press Profiles, we hear about his encounters with notable luminaries such as Walter Cronkite, Muhammad Ali, and Barry Manilow (who knew he wrote the State Farm jingle?). We…
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We invited Tania Jennings back. Most folk in the retrofit or social housing space will probably be aware of Tania from LinkedIn and the myriad jobs she has. If you don’t know her yet, check her LinkedIn. Anyway, she wrote a thing for Architect’s Journal about fuel poverty, Covid, and inevitably retrofit and it was excellent. It sparked a conversati…
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If you fancy, you can settle in for a long one this week, in which Jeff and Dan speak with award-winning Canadian architect and passive house designer Cedric Burgers. We cover all sorts because he has led a pretty interesting life and he has a lot to say about sustainable building design, particularly his love for passive house as a philosophy, the…
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This week we're talking about natural fibre insulation and the potential of biogenic building products with IndiNature manufacturer (and co-founder) Sam Baumber. It feels like a timely follow-up to last week's episode about quantifying embodied carbon, particularly in relation to the role biogenic products have in providing a mid-to-long-term carbo…
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If you’re looking to understand how to approach carbon accounting in the built environment, we’ve got you. Brought in to tackle some big questions around accounting for carbon we were joined by sustainable building expert John Butler. Jeff’s been talking about getting John on for ages, for reasons he explains in the episode, and when we caught sigh…
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Peter Thal Larsen's career was shaped in part by the great financial crisis. As a reporter for the Financial Times, he had a front row seat to all the action. From there, he pivoted to Reuters’ financial commentary site, Breakingviews, and a little over a year ago he took the helm of the organization as Global Editor. We discuss that journey and th…
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Jeff received a press release that piqued his interest, so we invited the man behind the call to action, Joseph Kilroy, (Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB)). Joseph joins us to talk about their ideas for increasing the pace of change required to meet the ubiquitous net zero 2050 targets. They're calling …
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This week we're joined by Mike Fell, energy researcher at UCL, amongst many other things. We've been following Mike's work for a while, (mainly because the pump:chic work is really interesting to us) and when we clocked he's co-authored this paper about realist approaches in energy research we saw an opportunity to bring him onto the podcast. Reali…
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This week Jeff introduced us to a new friend he met while working on a EU funded green finance project, Alexandra Hedesiu, Head of ESG & EU Advisory Services at EnerSave Capital. The EU Life-funded project is called Smarter Finance for EU, and its aim is to develop the market for credible green home certifications and associated green mortgage, loa…
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