#166 Alasdair MacLeod: Boarding school childhood, Newspaper publisher turned soil carbon entrepreneur, working with Rupert Murdoch and building Macdoch

Vidi Tagawal
What if we could reimagine the traditional notion of a high flyer? Hey friends, welcome back. Or welcome to the High Flyers podcast where we do reimagine a high flyer showcase the brightest and most relatable role models and companies and their journey from sunrise to today as one of the premier products in our curiosity centre lineup, providing on demand intelligence featuring Olympic athletes, business and cultural leaders, students, journalists, investors, founders and more from around the world to help you be 1% better every single day. I'm your host Vidi Tagawal and let's have some fun. Thanks to you, this podcast continues to rank in the global top ten podcasts by both Spotify and Apple Podcasts for the past two years running.

And we hope you're enjoying our catalog. Of 150 episodes featuring guests from twelve countries across nearly 30 industries. My guest this week is Alastair McLeod in this episode 166. This year, as you know, we're focused on only featuring guests who rarely do interviews or featuring guests in unique new formats, and I believe this is Al's first ever public interview in such depth. Alistair is the executive chairman of Macdoc, a private investment company with officers Sydney and London.

Vidi Tagawal
Macdoc comprises of Macdoc ventures investing in early stage tech startups, Macdoc agriculture, using capital to drive global climate change solutions, and Mactoc foundation. Al was previously a senior leader at Nuscorp for over 20 years and fun fact, he is married to one of Rupert Murdochs daughters. Al was born in Glasgow, Scotland and now splits his time between Sydney and London. In this conversation, Al opens up about his story, including attending boarding school aged eight in England and his reflections on the culture there and how that's influenced where his kids went to school, Al's two siblings, and the influence of his dad, an accountant and mum, a lover of the outdoors. As he shares, we covered various topics, including how Al came to Australia when he was 23 and the interesting story behind that move, working for Citibank in Hong Kong in his first job out of university.

How you met prude. Yes, he shared that story and we dive deep into his time working at News Corp from 1989 to 2010 and really seeing the ride of the media landscape. And I really enjoyed asking him about the crucible moments in media, the story with Rupert Murdoch, not appreciating the Internet and how that's changed, how he helped set up new businesses within News Corp, both in London and then in Australia, and his learnings about how to build an enduring brand and Rupert Murdoch's boldness and the role of media today in a very different landscape. We also cover the decision making behind farming and regenerative agriculture being the third phase of Al's career and how he's actively involved in the space today and the types of capital that can drive change in climate solutions and the verticals within his Mactoc family office. And I particularly enjoyed unpacking Al the human being, how he switches off by riding horses on a weekend or watching live sport, the key influences other people have played in his story to date and what he's got left on his bucket list.

It's now time to explore your curiosity. Please enjoy.

Alastair McLeod, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Villas. I'm looking forward to chatting, I'm excited. And I'm grateful you've said yes, because I appreciate you've not shared your story in a lot of detail before and I think a lot of previous guests have recommended you, so hopefully this is fun.

Let's start with our fun facts, as we do with every episode. Where were you born and where do you live now? I was born in Glasgow in Scotland, and I now divide my time between Australia and the UK. And I'm currently speaking to you from my office in Sydney. Nice.

And I like your background. It's a nice background. Is that a farm behind you? That is a landscape of our home in the southern Tablelands in New South Wales. You can actually.

You can't quite see it, but just there is the way where it says, Alistair is where our house is. I see. That's so cool. And from a work perspective, what was your first job and what do you do now? Was it my first proper job or my first kind of either?

Either. You decide. Well, my first proper job was I worked for an american bank, which in those days was called Citibank and is now called city. But prior to that, I'd done sort of university holiday jobs and school holiday jobs. And in actual fact, my first ever paid job was on a dairy farm close to where I grew up, in Ayrshire in southern Scotland.

And. But we were actually, we lived in the countryside. We weren't farmers like my dad was a Glasgow businessman, but we were surrounded by dairy farms. So I kind of grew up with inamuks farming country. And when I was about 16, I went off and spent four weeks in my school holidays working on a dairy farm.

And my memory of that was spending the entire time cleaning out old in Scotland, you have to bring all your dairy cows in during the winter and then during the summer they all have to be cleaned out. So I spent my life cleaning up the, you know, the dairy farm residue. Oh, it's so interesting. It must feel full circle coming back into the space now. And how would you describe your various roles now?

Well, the simplest way to answer is to say, I'm a farmer, but that's not really true. I mean, like, I run our family office, if you like, and our family office is really based in London, but in Australia, we have a bunch of really interesting things going on, particularly in the agricultural space, in the technology space. And we also have the Macdoc foundation, which is based in Australia, which is very interested in the confluence between the agricultural space, the conservation space, and the climate space, doing a bunch of work sort of around this area of what agriculture should look like in a decarbonised world. And that's kind of what keeps me interested in moodlepieces. I'm excited to unpack some of those aspects as we talk in this conversation.

And, Al, as the purpose of this show is to reimagine a high flyer. Is there a high flyer, you know, who you feel hasn't got the recognition they deserve? I'm sure there's heaps. I mean, I might have to come back to you on that one, Vinic, because no one springs to mind immediately, but I'm sure there's. I'm sure there's heaps.

Okay, well, we shall come back to that at the end of the conversation. Let's go back to your sunrise, as I call it, your childhood. Al, you talked about growing up in Scotland. What are your memories of the environment and the influence of family? I mean, I had one of those strange british upbringings where you had your home, but I was actually sent to boarding school, aged eight, in England.

So my childhood was kind of split between school holidays at home and being at boarding school. So it was a kind of strange mixture, really. And do you have any. Did you have any siblings growing up? I've got an older brother and a younger sister, and we all kind of, you know, did the same thing.

I guess the sort of the moment that when the whole family kind of got together was summer holidays, which some people go to the beach for their summer holidays. We always used to go and climb mountains and chase fish and deer and do all those things that you do out in the wilds that I think gave me a lifelong love of being in the outdoors. And my brother and sister and I still do that, actually, once a year we get together with. For a week a year, we get together with as many of our kids as we can and we go to Scotland and climb mountains. I spoke to some of your team prior to this and they said you love your morning walks.

I think you're up pretty early and Eric's got to keep up with you if he walks alongside you, so you're pretty brisk. Eric has short legs, but it's an important part of my day because it's the moment where you can kind of unpack what's happened the previous day and sort of get yourself ready for the coming day. Some people say, I'll come for a walk with you in the morning, and I normally kind of go, you know what, I actually like being on my own. It's kind of really nice, just kind of having an hour of thinking time. Then you mentioned your dad was an entrepreneur.

What did your parents do for work? No, no, he wasn't an entrepreneur. I wouldn't say he actually was an accountant by trade, but he kind of became not entrepreneurial at all, but he kind of became in those days. And I'm kind of talking about the sixties and seventies, when Glasgow was a sort of great, sort of center of industrial, slightly faded industrial grandeur. Admittedly, he was very involved in some of the big businesses that were based in Glasgow, and so that was his career.

But I wouldn't have said it was an entrepreneurial one. It was much more of a sort of, you know, business establishment career that he had. And your mum, did she have an influence on you growing up? Which she was always a great outdoors person as well, so I think she imbibed in all, imbued in all of us, a sort of love of the outdoors and she didn't have a. She didn't have a career.

My mom, she was. She was a mother and a wife, but, yeah, she was a great lover of the outdoors. Well, one of the things that a lot of people said to me in my homework is you're very. You're one of life's enthusiasts, you're very curious and you're always willing to ask questions and learn. And was that always the case as a kid?

That's a really good question. I don't think so, because I think that. I think my upbringing was very kind of traditional and british and conventional and I think a lot of things that we were, that were sort of instilled in us as young men was, this is the way the world works. And I've been lucky enough, I think, to break out of that. I mean, I came to live in Australia when I was quite young.

I was kind of in my twenties. And, yeah, you kind of learned that the world doesn't revolve around the way that the sort of very traditional kind of british way of looking at the world was. And I think that's been a very big influence on me. I think when everyone, when people meet me, I certainly sound very conventionally british. I certainly appear very conventionally british.

But I. One of the things that I've loved in my life is sort of one of the reasons why Australia has been such a great influence on me is because you have all this familiar sort of british sights and scenes and all the rest of it. But people think very differently in this country. I was trying to explain it to Tony Abbott, interestingly enough, who's a great monarchist and a great fan of the United Kingdom. And I said to him, Tony, the thing is, people in this country are always thinking about the future, and they're always optimistic about the future.

And that is a great attribute of Australia. And I think Britain always tends to think a little bit that its best days are over. Now, I probably wouldnt say that to any of my british friends, but I think that whole thing of tradition and convention, obviously the royal family are a very important part of it, is very much part of what is part of the fabric of Britain. And I think what ive always found very refreshing about Australia is that people don't think like that at all. And I really love that about this place.

Yeah, that's a really interesting reflection because also that maybe ties in, Alan, to your boarding school experience where going out of home so early. I've never been to boarding school, but I know a lot of friends who went to boarding school. Did that teach you a lot of life lessons early on, that you just had to become more grown up? Oh, I think it teaches you resilience. Yeah, you got, you just gotta know about grown up.

I mean, I think in a lot of ways, you live a very positive life at boarding school, but I think it teaches you to be self reliant and, yeah, it's valuable in that extent, but I think it also. I think it also, particularly in those english schools, it kind of, you kind of get a sort of feeling when you leave places like that that the world really does, the sun really does shine out of your backside. And I don't think that's a terribly healthy thing for young men to be taught. Self confidence, yes, but not some of the kind of arrogance that can appear sometimes from those very privileged english boarding schools. I'm curious on that.

We're jumping around, but did that play a role in the schools your kids went to? Did you try and influence how they got their view of the world? Well, they all went to school in Sydney, really. I mean, none of them. Well, actually, they did board a bit, weekly board, but they were basically at day school in Sydney.

And, you know, they were at private schools. They were good schools and they got a pretty good education, but it was different for mine and that it wasn't sort of that very high bound english style of education. You mentioned earlier about coming to Australia when you were 20. So was that post university that you came to Australia? So post university, I actually was 23, I think.

And I think I said to you, my first job at a university, which I kind of got through a set of, it's amazing how you have moments in your life when you kind of look back and you think, that was extraordinarily fortunate. I got this job working for Citibank in Hong Kong. That was my first job at a university, and I was there for a year. And what I hadn't realized was that business in this particular unit of Citibank was not particularly good. And there was going to be a bit of bloodletting.

And my boss, who was this very gruff english guy, for some reason, really liked me. I never quite understood why he liked me so much, but he threw me a lifeline, and my lifeline was to go and work in Sydney. I just couldn't believe my luck. I couldn't believe what I was being told. He said, look, go to Sydney for six months.

Went to Sydney for six months. And I'd actually been working on a project that the bank had been involved with, which was actually financing the first ever tourist resort at what was then called Ayres Rock, but of course, is now called Uluru. So I came to Sydney and kind of helped the team here with that financing and kind of never looked back, arrived, couldn't believe my luck. Loved it kind of pretty much from the moment I got here and spent another five years working for Citibank, which was great fun, made a lot of good friends, learned a lot about financial markets and things like that. I think they're important things for anyone in business to learn, but you want to make sure that you never get bullshitted to by the bankers.

It was an important grounding, but I kind of knew that it wasn't the thing I was going to do for my career. I stayed for five years and then moved on. Right. And this was in the eighties, is that right? Yeah, this was 84 to 89.

Really? Yeah. What was your view of your career early on? Because you come across to me as a very driven person who's very calculated to some extent in the things you involve yourself with now. But were you like that early in your career where you'd set career plans, you'd go, I want to be here in three years?

Here in five years? I don't think so. I mean, I think. I mean, I think. I think I've just been very fortunate to have a sort of.

I mean, I kind of feel like I'm on my third career and I feel like I've been very fortunate to have those three careers and worked with some great people and learned a lot of different skills. Let's go into the News Corp story in a second. But I want to also talk about, were you a single man at this point or had you met. I was a single man, but I actually met my wife, my then to be wife, in Sydney in, I think, 1988. And she's australian, as you probably know, but she's a great anglophile.

She persuaded me that we should go back and live in London for a while. Right. I thought, okay, well, we'll go back and live in London for a while, thinking that we'd come back to Australia at some point. And of course her plan was that we go back to London and stay there. So the fact that we actually ended up back in Australia was, I guess, unexpected for Prue, but not quite so unexpected for me.

Right. And did you just meet through mutual friends? Did you meet just through the society? Yeah. The first marriage in London broke up and so she came back to live in Australia for a while and she decided she wanted to come and live in Sydney.

And the only person in Sydney she knew was the girl I was sharing a flat with. So we. Right, yeah. Got to know each other. So interesting.

How interesting is that? Let's go into 1989, because I believe that's when you started your career with News Corp. Right, in London, as you touched on. And then you were there till 2006, if my research is correct, 2000. So I worked in London from 89 to about 2002, and then I came back to Australia, still with News Corp from 2002 until about 2010.

Let's talk about media. I think. I mean, we're on a podcast here. It's a form of media in today's world. But I think you've got a really good sense of.

You've followed the media landscape really well. Share the early insights of the media landscape. So when you were in News Corp in the nineties and the early two thousands. What was media like back then? Like, when you reflect on that now, what were those crucible moments?

Look, I've always loved sort of the news, and I always loved reading newspapers to go and get a job in the media. And I worked very much on the newspaper side of News Corp, rather than the sort of tv side, was just, I loved it. I was just kind of completely smitten by the, by the whole thing and sort of by the sort of mid nineties, after I'd been there for four or five years, I had a lovely job. I was general manager of Times newspapers, which is essentially the publisher. I wasn't the editor, but I was the publisher of the Times and the Sunday Times, which are sort of two great sort of bastions of the uk media.

And I then made rather, by the late nineties, I made rather a silly career move because I could see this thing called the Internet kind of coming down like a sort of train coming down the tunnel at us. And News Corp is an organization because everything that News Corp does comes from the boss. And Rupert had always been pretty skeptical of the Internet in those days. And so we weren't really engaging, in my view, enough with what the sort of threats and opportunities for the Internet were going to be. And then in the late nineties, let's say it was 98, you might remember there was a leading Internet business called Yahoo, which no one really has heard of these days.

But in about mid 1998, Yahoo overtook News Corp in market capitalization, and suddenly Rupert went, holy shit, it's time we did something about the Internet. And I remember a whole bunch of us were taken off to a villa that he was actually on his honeymoon, and a whole bunch of us from London were flown out to his villa in Tuscany. And we spent the entire weekend planning all these things we were going to do on the Internet, everything from websites for the newspapers to, we were going to do a recruitment site, we were going to do an auction site, we were going to do all these amazing things. And we then flew back to London on the Monday morning. And my boss at the time, who was the guy that ran all of the UK, sort of hauled me into his office and said, right, we've decided we're going to do all these things that we talked about over the weekend and you're going to be in charge pointing at me.

And I said, great, I can do that. Which, of course, was completely wrong because I had no idea what I was doing. And I knew that this was sort of something that was going to be a great challenge. To the business, but in terms of how to set up a whole bunch of new online businesses, that was way beyond my capacity at that particular point in time. And I had sort of 18 months of extreme stress setting up all these businesses, trying to kind of make some.

Because in those days, if you remember, I mean, there wasn't really a business model for a lot of this stuff. So trying to make some sense as to how we were going to actually turn them into businesses, and we were actually spending a lot of money. We had a lot of money to spend on product development and marketing and all this kind of stuff. But trying to understand how to turn them into businesses was difficult. And anyway, there was a thing.

There was an annual event in the news talk days. And funny enough, when I listened to Daniel Petrie's interview, he talks about his annual trip to Seattle to see Bill Gates. We all did exactly the same thing. We did an annual trip to either LA or New York to see Rupert, to present our annual business plans. And so I'm winding forward now to the early two thousands.

The tech crash happened in about March 2000. The budget presentations tended to be in sort of May, just before the start of the new financial year. So I remember going to LA in May with all these great plans for how we were going to keep on spending money on the Internet and developing all these products, and still hadn't really worked out what the business plan looked like, what the business model looked like. And anyway, the first person I saw when I arrived in LA was the guy who had my equivalent job in Australia, who had just done his budget presentation that day, and he looked like he'd been through a ringer. He was just a total mess.

And it turned out it was quite funny looking back at it. But of course, everyone from Rupert Dan, had completely fallen out of love with spending money on the Internet. So all of us that appeared to present our budgets with all these big spending plans, we just got ripped to pieces. What do you think changed Rupert's mind on the Internet? It was the tech crash.

It was the tech crash in 2000, when I think he was forced into it by the markets that kind of said, look, we want to know what your online plans are, but we didn't really have business plans in those days. And if you look back at sort of the early days of Google and Facebook and things like that, they didn't really have a business plan either. They just kind of went, yeah, we think this is a good thing to do. But there wasn't a business model behind them. So we were in the same boat.

And so turning up in LA with the sort of plans to spend all this money without a real business model behind it, it was just asking for trouble. And trouble was what I got.

When you think back of that time, Al, in reflection, I think News Corp have built this enduring business with these global brands in three geographies, right? The UK, Australia and the US. And you said you've been involved with the UK and Australia post your time in London. What did you learn about building an enduring brand in hindsight? Look, I mean, the extraordinary thing about News Corp and Rupert is that people underestimate.

Well, maybe they don't, but he's just extraordinarily bold. He's not frightened to kind of take a big roll of the dice. And anyone that's followed his story closely would have seen what he did, for example, with sky television in the UK, which very nearly sent him bust in the early nineties. When I first started working for the company, when Prue and I were married, he launched a satellite television set service in the UK. Extraordinary vision, because at the time, no one paid for television in the UK.

It was all kind of free and it nearly sent him bust. But he's known, he's never been afraid of sort of making those bold moves. And I think that goes with the newspapers. I mean, I mean, look at the Australian. It's always been, it's always been a kind of marginal financial proposition, the Australian, but he's just always backed it.

And I think that's what you got to do to build these brands. Just be bold. Back to the episode in a moment. If youre new to the High Flyers podcast and enjoying this episode with Alastair McLeod, you might enjoy episode 99 with Michael Tollo from Blackbird in his only public interview to date. Or episode 109 with Terence Jayaratnam, the Asia Pacific climate change and sustainability partner at Ensign Young and access, all 165 plus episodes@thehighfliespodcast.com.

Vidi Tagawal
that's thehighfliespodcast.com. now back to the episode.

Well, you were managing this train right when you came back to Sydney. So when I came back to Australia, actually, the first job I had, which I absolutely loved, was managing a whole bunch of suburban newspapers that were sort of, there were free sheets that were distributed through the letterboxes of pretty much all the houses in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. So I used to spend quite a bit of time sort of zipping from one city to the next. And they were extraordinary businesses because in those days they still made lots of money, and they're all pretty much been shut down now. Or they're online because it was all based on real estate advertising or job ads or ads for treaties, and it's all gone online.

And things like the Wentworth Courier or the manly daily still exist, but pretty much all of them have been shut down. How do you look at the landscape today when you compare now that you're a bit not directly connected with the media landscape and we'll get to your work present day, but when you think of media today and if you think of podcasts, you think of TikTok. A lot of these platforms are decentralized, where people can just start and build something and build an audience around it. What are some areas of media today that interest you? Yeah, it's an interesting question.

I mean, I'm afraid I'm still a great consumer of newspapers. Yeah. Yeah. Mainly I read them on an iPad, but I love nothing better settling down on a Saturday morning with the printed papers and having a good read of the papers. So I still love that.

But of course, we use. I use social media a bit. I'm on LinkedIn and I think for my industry that I'm now involved with, I mean, that's very good to keep in touch with people from all over the world that are kind of doing things that I'm interested in. I don't follow TikTok, I follow Instagram a bit. I find it quite time.

We all have sort of down moments when you might get onto Instagram reels or something like that. Yeah. Stuff happening and then before you know it, 20 minutes has gone by and you just wasted 20 minutes. It's good fun. But I mean, is it useful?

Yeah. One interesting thing, though, is that my daughter actually has got a. She publishes a magazine in London, and she's now going back to the printed word because. And actually, one of the things that she's doing alongside her magazine is these, they're kind of writing classes, because she's kind of saying, she's 28 and she's saying that so many people of her age have kind of grown up on social media and they've grown up on these sort of bite sized chunks of media, and they've kind of forgotten the pleasure of either constructing or consuming the written word. And she started these kind of writing courses and she says she gets amazing response from people that come to them because they're kind of, they feel released from the sort of the trap of social media.

I think one reflection I had recently was with watching sport. I imagine you're a sports fan is growing up, I'd watch a lot of live tv. You'd sit and watch the whole game whether it's tennis or cricket or the AFL was. Now I don't watch it, I just watch the highlights and it's an interesting reflection on this world we live in where our attention spans are so short. A two hour game feels like a lifetime whereas a 20 minutes clip is like a great summary.

Yeah, that's interesting. But we are recording this visit on Friday morning and I can tell you what I'm going to be doing at 08:00 this evening is I'm going to be sitting, having dinner and watching Friday night footy and I'm really looking forward to it. Who's your team? Who's your footy team? I don't follow any team in particular.

Okay. And footy for us in Sydney of course means NRL. Whereas are you in Sydney or you're in Melbourne? I'm in between Sydney and Melbourne so I spend my time in both cities and yeah, AFL is bigger in Melbourne. Yeah.

I will be watching NRL tonight. Yeah. Are you a rugby union man? I'm not even quite sure who's playing actually. Let's find out.

Yeah. What about rugby union? Are you into the rugby? Yeah, look, a bit. I actually find it quite hard work now to be honest.

Yeah. I mean, I know that there are great rugby games and quite often actually the guy that comes and looks after our garden at our house in the country who's a mad keen rugby fan, I'll always see him on Monday morning and he'll say, oh, did you see that great game of rugby over the weekend? And of course I've missed it. So, you know, you can get great games of rugby but you can also get very boring games of rugby. And I feel that rugby's kind of lost its lustre a little bit as a result of that.

But Rugby Australia will eliminate me for. But that's kind of slightly what I feel. I love watching critique. If you've got time in the summer to sort of sit down in front of the tv and watch a test match, nothing better. One of the highlights of 2024 for me so far is I had dinner with Pat Cummins the other day which was phenomenal.

I saw that because you're doing the climate cricket for climate. Yeah. Yeah. Because he is, everything he's made out to be is he's just a wonderful human being. That reminds me of a question I was going to ask you later on, but how do you switch off?

Because you work twelve hour days. You're managing a team in the UK, managing a team here. You're learning about new areas. Is this your switch off? 08:00 have dinner and watch some footy?

Yeah, certainly for Friday night. Yeah. And then probably Saturday morning, I'll get on my horse and I'll go for a good ride over those hills that you can see in the background. And I absolutely love that as well. And is that every week?

Every weekend when you're free? I'm afraid not. Yeah. Last weekend I was traveling. The weekend before that I was actually in the US.

I probably could have found a horse, but I didn't. But I. Whenever I'm down at home in the southern Tablelands, I get my horse and go for a two or three hour ride. And it's just a beautiful way to switch off. Tell me about people and then we'll get to your present day work is through your journey.

You've met a lot of interesting people either through your work or through society. Super connected. Like, you'll reach out to people and I think Martin's been to your farm many times, and you'll just ask him questions and you're just curious and you want to learn. How big a role have people played in your life in terms of learning or even keeping you abreast of the information in the world? Look, I think that's terrifically important.

Viniti and I love, I mean, Martin, he's been to stay with me a couple of times, and we just tried to kind of fill the house full of interesting people that have got kind of interesting views on what's going on. And I love doing that. I mean, you might not agree with everything, but I just think it's fascinating to hear from people that have got different points of view and have got different life experiences and just to hear what, how they see things. I think one of the things that I think is happening, maybe this has always happened, and maybe this is just a sort of. I think that people are kind of becoming very siloed in their sort of little belief systems whereby I'm this kind of person.

So here's what I believe. And I just think it's incredibly important now more than ever, because there's so much that needs to, so much in the world that needs to be questioned, that needs to be challenged, that needs to change. I think now more than ever, we need to kind of, we need to be able to keep an open mind, and we need to be able to think about the changes that we want to see in society and how you help those changes come about. And I think we're entering a period where, and you see this in politics all the time, where there are sort of very fixed belief systems that kind of aren't particularly helpful, I don't think. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that's true.

And that's why I think, to your point discussion earlier about long form versus short form, I think you can actually share a point of view in long form. Right, where short form people just clip that and get a ten second bite, which often is not their full stories. We're very headline driven. And if you're headline driven, you just completely overlook the sort of nuance and subtlety of a story. I mean, when I give you an example.

Yeah, please. One of the things that we're very involved with now, both through the work that we do and through the foundation, is we're trying to do what we can to make the case for livestock, because we think that for a whole bunch of different reasons, keeping livestock in the food system and in the landscape is really important. But yet you get a whole bunch of headlines in the media and from climate people saying, ah, livestock creating terrible climate problems. So therefore, we've got to do without livestock and work how to survive off a plant based diet. And those headlines are not really very helpful.

They're completely neglecting the subtlety of the story of why livestock in the landscape and why meat in our diets is such an important thing for health of the planet and people in the developed world. But most importantly, in the developing world. Let's spend some time on this topic, Al, and maybe take one step back, is when you first started to get into this space. And I found a great quote that you said in one of your interviews. You said, I wasn't a farmer, I was a newspaper publisher.

So farming was completely new to me. Unpack that. How did you decide that farming is where you'll get started in this third phase of your career? Well, again, that kind of happened completely by accident, because on the farm where our houses in the southern tablelands, which you can see in the background here, when Prue and I and the kids were back in Sydney, we would go down to. So the farm originally was bought by my father in law in the sixties.

And we used to go down there for the summer holidays and spend a lovely time with kids being out and about in the open air. And we. I love being there and I wasn't involved with the farm. And there was a farm manager, farm staff and all this. And then sort of in the mid noughties, there was a really bad drought, and we kind of had completely the wrong management strategies in place for managing a drought.

And as I'm fond of saying, with the wrong management strategies in place, we were able to create an environmental crisis, an economic crisis, an animal welfare crisis, and a human welfare crisis, all by doing it the wrong way. I sort of took it upon myself to kind of go, well, if this is what the wrong way, what is the right way look like? And so I kind of took myself off to meet early proponents of what became called regenerative agriculture, to learn from them and see what they were doing and how they were doing it. And I found that approach deeply appealing. And I found that it was something that I wanted to be involved with because it just made sense.

It just made total sense that if we're going to continue to make land productive in an environment which is going to be increasingly unstable because of stable weather patterns, that we just had to learn how to do this better. And I think that we've come a long way since then. I think the whole industry's come a long way since then, because I think in the early days, these guys were kind of looked on a bit askance by the sort of mainstream farming community as kind of hippie farmers that didn't have to make money or worry about what they were growing. And I think we've now got to a point whereby people are recognizing that the whole farming system does need to shift to a more sustainable footing, and we do need to be thinking about our landscapes as well as the commodities we're producing. And if we think about it that way, then not only will our landscape be better off, but actually our businesses will be better off as well.

And so one of the major projects that we're funding through the foundation is this research work that's trying to make the connection between the state of natural capital on a farm and its long term profitability, because we're trying to prove the premise that that investing in nature is actually good for your business, rather than getting in the way of business. What are some elements of that you think the general population doesn't understand? That you've clearly put your money, time and identity behind the way that farmers. Have kind of been educated all the way through the last century. And certainly, if I'd been a farmer from the word go, like my career had all been in farming, I would have been taught to go out in the morning and kill anything that was not directly related to production.

I was growing wool then all I had to do was produce really productive pastures, and I might spend a lot of money developing those pastures. If I was growing wheat, then anything that was not directly related to producing wheat, then that had to be got rid of. And I think we're now beginning to understand that's come, that's led to great advances in farm productivity, which has all been good. The post war green revolution, which was all about farm productivity, has saved countless lives. It saved countless lives from starvation.

So we mustn't knock it. It was an incredibly important part of world economic development and lifting people out of poverty and out of starvation. But we've learned now that came at quite a cost, and the cost was to our environment. And now that we are as a sort of global community, we're now thinking about the challenge of climate change. We're beginning to understand how that green revolution has affected climate change, the way the industrial revolution has affected climate change.

And so we now need to think about how we can kind of continue to produce food in a profitable, resilient way, but deal with climate change in a way that we're not just contributing to climate change, but we can actually provide part of the solution. And that's now one of, I guess my main thrust is how do we produce food, but also provide a solution for climate change at the same time? Something you mentioned earlier was that in your view, Australia thinks about the future. And you spoke about spending time with some of the politicians and I do some work in climate technology from a venture capital perspective as an investor and help startups. And a common critique I hear is they struggle to overcome the regulations in Australia or struggle to explain to politicians the impact of climate change.

What advice would you give to people like that who want to drive change, but are struggling to get the buy in from corporates and government? Well, I mean, timing is everything. And I believe that most of my work is done with nature, and I believe that nature is going to be, and investing in nature is going to be a very important solution for us. But I also believe that technology is going to be a very important solution for us. And anyone that's investing in technology that's going to address climate challenges needs to just persevere.

We need technological solutions, whether it's finding the right solution for carbon capture and storage, or finding the right solution for flying airplanes without fossil fuels, the landscape for technological innovation is completely boundless and we've got to be investing heavily in all of them. Now, where the work that I do fits into all this is that farmers and landscape managers have got at their disposal a technology that nature provides for free, and it's called photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is actually the most powerful technology for removing carbon from the atmosphere. And so we've got, as farmers and as land managers, while all these other technologies for removing carbon from smokestacks and from gas plants and all that carbon, what we can do as farmers is we can harness photosynthesis to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere right now, and we can do it for a fraction of the cost that all these other technologies are going to involve. All these other technologies that you talk about are incredibly important, and it's very important that we keep investing money in those technologies, but it's also very important that we think about the role that nature can play right now.

One of the things I heard you say in an interview, you said, even in a decarbonized world, we still need fossil fuels. And I think you spoke about even wind turbines needing fossil. Fossil fuels. And I think the common person on the street might be surprised by that, because the perception is decarbonization means no fossil fuels. Can you unpack that for us?

Well, look, when we can work out how to make steel without fossil fuels, great. We can make wind turbines without fossil fuels. Right now. We haven't worked out how to do that. Now, maybe there's a solution using hydrogen that can get us there.

I don't know. It's not really the area that I work in, but like it or not, the world is very dependent on fossil fuels. And until we found the technologies to replace those fossil fuels, we're going to remain dependent upon fossil fuels. So that's why investment in technology is so important. But meantime, let's harness nature to remove what carbon we can.

That's kind of what I'm thinking. One of the insights that came up in my research, and I don't know if people know this publicly, is your farm manager. You used to have a farm manager who's now, I think, moved on to other things. I don't know if you want to talk about him and the role he played in setting up your farm early on. Is this Bert?

Yeah. Bert, yeah. Is he, like, he's got his own business now, right? Bert worked with me at Cavern back in the noughties, and is now Bert's going places. He's got a business, impact AG Partners, which I'm still involved with, the director of it.

And it's a great business, Burt, a great entrepreneur. He's now CEO of a Nasdaq listed SPAC, which, I mean, I think this is, and it's going to be the SPAC is called the agricultural and natural solutions Acquisition company. So what we are beginning to see in our videos is we are beginning to see big money professional investors thinking about this new asset class that's called natural capital. And why is natural capital important? It's important because investing in nature is important because if we truly want to have a resilient future, then we've got to invest in nature.

Institutional investors are now thinking about natural capital as an asset class in its own right. And Bert is riding that wave by launching himself onto Nasdaq as the CEO of a SPAC. Yeah, when that came up in my research, I thought maybe I'll ask you, and I appreciate you answering that. And on your point about types, maybe. He should be your next high flyer.

Vinit. Maybe he's the high flyer who deserves more recognition. Right to the question at the start, perhaps you touched on an interesting point just then al around the types of capital to drive climate solutions. As we know MacTalk have Macdoc Ventures, which is more traditional venture capital. Then there's this private equity, there's family office.

And from where I sit, I've seen family offices and private equity play a much bigger role in climate solutions. Given often the business cycles are longer, they're more high capex businesses, they're more physical businesses. How do you think about that in terms of the types of capital, if you have to give advice that can truly drive change in climate impact, do. You think about this quite a bit? Because we really have, certainly in our australian family office, we have three pools of capital.

We have what we call the MACD AG group, which is investing in farms and investing in some of the technologies that we deploy across farms. We've got this new business, Atlas Carbon, which is a carbon project developer for grazias. Then we've got Macdock Ventures, which is investing in purely tech businesses. And then we've got the Macdoc foundation, which is deploying philanthropic capital. The way that we look at this is that there's various different ways of deploying capital to help shift the system.

And philanthropy's got an very important part to play in how this happens. Because with philanthropic capital, you can do things that you can't do with any other type of capital, because if you like, it's the riskiest form of capital. You're basically saying, let's spend this money. We know we're not going to see that money again, so let's spend it really well and take some risks. Venture capital, yes, is risky money, but you're hoping that some point in the future, you're going to see that money back with a decent return.

And then the way that we deploy our main sort of pool of investment here across our farms and across our farming businesses and across businesses like impact AG is we kind of think a lot more deeply about how do we actually create businesses that will bring all this together and show how this can work in practice. What's next on your to do list when you think of, like, we're sitting in May 2024, what's coming up next that you want to achieve in life that you haven't yet? Yeah. Look, I'm very passionate about the work we do at the moment and I want to keep doing that. I think for me, I'm going to be 63 this year, so I'm not getting any younger.

And while I still want to be very involved, I need to think about how I kind of build a bit of robustness around me to make sure that that can. That can continue. I'm not going anywhere in a hurry, but I'm not getting any. And I do spend quite a bit of time out of the country because, yeah, my wife and most of the family are essentially in the UK. I'm thinking a little bit about that.

You know, I'd like to do. I've been to South America for the first time this year and I love that. Went to Brazil, so I'd like to do. We all want to do more traveling and I want to be able to. We've just done it.

We've just been in a trip through the US to see some of the. Through our foundation. We actually make grants in the US as well, just because there's a lot of innovation there. And I just love getting out and seeing people that are doing interesting things and there's plenty of them in the US, so that's really fun. So I want to do more of that.

Yeah. Before we move to the rapid fire round to close us out, is there anything you want to share that I haven't asked you yet? Oh, I think you've done a pretty good job with it. Oh, thank you. Live feedback.

I appreciate it. Al, let's move to the rapid fire sprint to close us out. Is there one non work investment of time and energy you've made in your life that you consider the best? I learned to ride a horse when I was about 45. Oh, wow.

That was a really important thing to do. Nice. Is there one thing you want to learn in the next six months? How to ride my horse better. What do I want to learn?

Look, I think there's always things that you want to learn, and particularly in this space that we're working in, where you're thinking about how the world's changing and how you can help dad along. I love learning about all that. I mean, I could tell you about all the books I want to read and the languages I want to learn and the musical instruments I want to play, but we just know that's not going to happen. You can try maybe an hour a week. Yeah.

Yeah. Is there one interview question you love asking prospective candidates? I don't know if you still interview people for jobs, but when you did, what was one question you loved asking them? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think I'm always kind of quite interested why people want to come and work with us.

I mean, what's the thing about us that kind of really attracts people? And so I'm always interested to hear that. I mean, I think I love having people around that are kind of passionate and self motivated and want to kind of get on and I try not to get in the way of that too much. I mean, they probably all say that I get in the way too much, but I try not to, so. Well, that's what I love to see in people that I work with is.

Yeah, last one. Is there one pet peeve or is there something that really annoys you that people should know about?

The probably is, but I can't. Yeah, like, some people say they don't like people turning up late. Some people like grammar in emails. Anything like piss. Pedantic.

Like that annoys you? Like, I'm very clean. I like being very tidy and clean. And that's my pet peeve. Yeah.

Look, I like punctuality. I like. I've been told you like writing on a piece of paper. Is that something you enjoy doing? Like, you'll write ideas on a piece of paper, you'll have your calendar on your paper, right?

Sometimes, yeah. I have a paper diary, but I have an electronic diary, too, that Lou kind of my assistant, looks after, but I also have a paper diary. Look, there's my paper diary. Because I just find it's a very nice way of sort of seeing how the weeks and the months and the years are turning out. And because I spend quite a bit of time, either here in the UK and I've got a four week period when I'm going to be here.

I could curate that four weeks as. Closely as possible and time zones and that probably. Yeah, I don't think I have a pet peeve. I mean, I probably do, but yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Cool. Well, that brings us to a close. I'm so grateful that you opened up and I hope I asked you some good questions. But thank you for your time and I wish you all the best.

I hope people find my story interesting. I mean, there's plenty to do and it's been fun talking. Well, there you have it. That's the end of my conversation with Alistair McLeod in this episode one. Interviews like this one, where the guest has rarely shared their story before, are my favorite because it's an opportunity to make them comfortable enough to open up and I can really tap into my curiosity given there isn't a huge amount of publicly available information online.

Vidi Tagawal
Al was fantastic. I loved his candor about his life experiences, including how he met his wife, stories of working with Rupert Murdoch and Building News Corp, and his third career in the agriculture space today with MacDock his family office. I hope you enjoyed this one. As always, all my details in the show notes if you wouldn't get in touch with feedback on how I can improve, or if you want to partner with us as a sponsor brand, or if you want to recommend future guests, and I'd love for you to rate and review, view the show, and always follow us. We've got some really world class guests coming up and you'll be the first to find out if you're following the show on Spotify, on Apple, or any other podcast players.

And I'll catch you very soon.

#166 Alasdair MacLeod: Boarding school childhood, Newspaper publisher turned soil carbon entrepreneur, working with Rupert Murdoch and building Macdoch

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1. Introduction

2. Media Career

3. Shift to Agriculture

4. Environmental Impact

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