Ben Keene’s career journey from a remote Fijian island to co-founder of Rebel Book Club

The Escape Artists, episode 4

Ben Keene’s career journey from a remote Fijian island to co-founder of Rebel Book Club

To listen to the episode in full and follow The Escape Artists visit this link. Or search for The Escape Artists wherever you get your podcasts. 

For the fourth episode of The Escape Artists, Skye and Dom were joined by the wonderfully inspiring Ben Keene, co-founder of Rebel Book Club. From an island in Fiji, to the English West Country, via the beaches of West Africa, Ben has spent the last 20 years exploring how to make a positive impact through building startups, communities, and adventures.

Find out more about Rebel Book Club here

About the podcast:

Dom Jackman & Skye Robertson bring you incredible stories from those who have made their Escapes. From bold heretics to wild entrepreneurial journeys, we share the ups and downs, and the lessons learned along the way. 

We hope it brings inspiration to those looking to make the leap into something different. Because life’s too short to do work that doesn’t matter to you.

Episode 4 transcript:

Skye: Today’s Escape Artist is Ben Keene, the co-founder of Rebel Book Club. From an island in Fiji via the beaches of West Africa to the English west country. Ben has spent 20 years exploring how to make a positive impact through building startups, communities and adventures. 

Dom: Ben Keene. Great to have you on the podcast.

I'm very excited about this conversation. We've worked very closely together for years, but there's still a lot more to your story than escape. So I'm excited to kind of jump into it. Skye, Have you got any, any words? 

Ben: Well, I think what I was going to say was, I was recalling when we first connected and I got this email from Dom and Rob, back in 2009. The email was essentially an invitation to a launch event for this thing called Escape the City, not Flee the City. I was running an ecotourism business called TribeWanted then, and I remember getting this email and thinking, oh, when I'm back in London, I've been invited to this thing in January and kicking off the new year with a bunch of people who are trying to change careers and do something different.

I thought, ‘this sounds like my crowd.’ I remember chatting to Rob about the plan for this event and he was quite excited about it. I thought I'd come along and join in the conversation. I turned up and this was in Soho and there was a queue down the street.

It was about five in the afternoon. I thought oh, there's this there’s this Brazilian nightclub called here called Guanabara. I thought, this is great, after I've done this talk on careers, maybe we can go and have a drink, there’s a band, and I hadn't been in London for a while. I got in and there was you and Rob and a bunch of volunteers running around in Escape the City hoodies, like maniacs going, ‘okay, we're ready, we've got this, we've got the screen and we've got the music.’ 

I asked, ‘why is everyone so hectic?’ They said well we've got 600 people that bought tickets. I thought 600 just for a launch event, and saw them all queued outside to come into this event that I was about to speak at. I'm sure you were a lot more scared than I was, because I had no anticipation up until that moment.

That was when we met, right? What was that event like for you? 

Dom: Yeah, it was crazy. It was our first event. So I had quit my job two weeks before that and I was just going hell for leather, and putting everything into it and it kicked off with a 650 people event.

Ben: It was a brilliant night.

Dom: It was crazy, I had no anticipation and I was really scared because we obviously had to do some talking at it and I had never really done any public speaking before so that was the thing I was most scared about. That was kind of terrifying going up onto that stage but it was also very illuminating because I had a lot of work colleagues there and it was like quite a public way of escaping and saying this is what my idea is. 

Ben: It was your coming out party Dom. There were a lot of angry bankers to witness it. That was the vibe I got. I went to the bar to get a drink and there were a lot of suits. Thankfully the Escape Community has diversified a lot since that moment, but there were a lot of suits at the bar and they were like, oh yeah, ‘I hate this’ and very grumpy. I thought, ‘wow, no pressure on the speakers tonight then.’

 But it was fun. I've not seen a startup kickoff with such in-person momentum as that - apart from someone selling exclusive sneakers - but in terms of like a mission led startup it was brilliant to be part of. The momentum around those meetups kept going - and it turned into different things right Skye - but it was a fun thing to be part of at that time. 

Dom: Going back to the beginning. Let's take it from university. What was the first idea you had about what you wanted your career to be?

Ben: It was in a queue at a milk round and you know this story because you were probably in that queue as well, maybe that same university, maybe a few years apart.

Dom: You were a year above me.

Ben: Yeah. I remember being in that queue - for those who don’t know what a milk round is, it's those corporate brands going around universities and trying to recruit people for their graduate programs and they put on beer and pizza nights and so on.

And usually it's their graduates who've gone on those programs from that university and come back two years later and say, ‘I'm making loads of money.’ I remember listening to one speech - maybe it was a particularly bad speech - and this guy said, “it's great, it's really interesting, blah, blah, blah, product development, training in this, et cetera… but the bottom line is I'm making loads of money.”

I then watched all these people queue up and say, ‘yeah, I'll apply for this graduate program.’ I found that really conflicting moment because half of me thought there's a privileged path there that's secure and you're conscious of debt you've built up at uni and this is what everyone does. And then the other half of me, the bigger half for me I guess, the idealist said, ‘what the hell is this about? I'm standing in a queue with people who are studying anthropology and Middle Eastern studies and business and politics and philosophy and who are smart, privileged, but interesting people. And they're all queuing up to sell basically high street products or do the numbers behind them.’ I thought ‘this is weird.’

So I went away and had an idealistic moment. Then I went off traveling in my time out from university and I started working as a volunteer with a community development travel startup in Newcastle called Madventurer, set up by this one geordie guy.

I became his first employee and started working for him the next summer. I was driving Land Rovers round West Africa to Timbuktu and to be honest - as I'm sure many people who are part of this community will know - it felt like that was my education. That was the moment when I was like, ah, this is what the world looks like beyond the bubble of an English university town and this is what I want to be part of and learn about. 

Then I spent the next 6 years working in that community adventure, tourism space, and eventually starting my own business called TribeWanted, which was this crazy project to crowdfund a remote island somewhere in the world to develop a sustainable village on it.

So this was 2005/6 and we went on that adventure and that shaped everything else for me. 

Skye: How did the idea come about for TribeWanted?

Ben: Well, Skye, do you remember Myspace? 

Skye: I sure do. I loved having the tune on your profile. 

Ben: And that guy Tom who was friends with everyone.

Skye: He was friends with everybody. 

Ben: So Myspace was the starting point. I know Dom knows this because you were definitely around that time. So at that moment, in terms of what was going on online, it was myspace, MSN Messenger and, Hotmail was the big email account that was about.

But Myspace was the first kind of social network and was changing this conversation in the music industry around how people interacted online and believe it or not, there was a time where people didn’t socialize online. It was very much just pushing content at people and services at people. So Myspace was gathering people around music and artists and there was a band in the UK called the Arctic Monkeys who went to number one, a Sheffield band who went to number one around the world because they built this huge following on MySpace and suddenly they exploded. And so the game started to change in that industry. 

This guy got in touch with me on MSN Messenger - I was running my first online attempt at a business, which was called Career Break Cafe. The idea was simply to try and provide a bunch of resources and inspiration for people who were taking time out to travel from their careers who weren't 18 year olds and were dealing with things like mortgages and negotiating with their bosses. It was an early Escape the City idea focused on travel, but the business model was hard work. It was selling banner adverts. You remember those kinds of skyscraper and banner ads selling things like travel insurance and adventure holidays.

I started to get some momentum. I thought wow, I've got a huge amount of traffic to justify selling these ads at this price to run a one person business. But it led to a conversation on MSN Messenger out of the blue with this guy in Liverpool called Mark, who said, ‘I've been following your travel blog and your ideas, have you seen this thing called, Myspace? 

I responded and essentially his initial thought was, what if you could build a MySpace type community around a travel destination, could you create an interesting new project or media idea there?

There was something about it that was intriguing because one of the challenges in community based tourism at the time was that you only could sell it at once. Someone would come along and pay to be part of this big adventure or community project over that summer holidays or another time of the year, but essentially you only sold it once. Repeat business was hard.

So I thought here's something that could potentially solve a business model issue. One, because people could be part of it for longer through the social network and two, it could help educate people in advance and stay connected to the project afterwards. But ultimately the thing I was excited about was could you get an online community and a real world community connected?

I know everything has an Instagram page now, like lampposts and dogs and stuff, but in 2006, it was this band (arctic monkeys). So there was something in his idea and we started talking, I fell in love with the idea. I know Skye, you always have this analogy with teaching escapees about dating your ideas and getting your ideas out to the world and it felt like that.

I fell heavily for this idea without really knowing how we were going to make it happen but we started searching for islands online and got immersed in that world and negotiated with his island in Fiji, which we didn't have any money for.

But because I'd had this experience of traveling and working I was confident enough to go there and sit down and negotiate a lease for the island with a 65-year-old Fijian chief. And then we had to raise 25,000 pounds in six weeks to put a deposit on this lease.

The thing that tipped me over the edge to go for it was something really mundane, which was that my young person's railcard was about to expire. I was 26. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get serious, I've either got to go and get a job like the one I ignored in that queue at university, or I’ve got to go and do something bold.’

So we put this tribewanted.com out, it was a simple three page website with a PayPal button and membership options. The business case model behind it was a bit shaky, but we thought the idea was exciting. I remember writing a very simple press release, like ‘a tribe is wanted to build a sustainable community.’

It sounded so far-fetched, it sounded like a reality show, except it wasn't. I put it out there through a friend who worked in PR and it was silence for two days. You’ve got all this pent up anticipation - for anyone who's built up to making a big career change or becoming a business idea out into the world, or like just making a big change in life - and then it's D-Day and then just tumbleweed. All those doubts that you had suddenly are front and center. Anyway, 48 hours later, I woke up with a message from a mate and he said, ‘hey, what's this island thing you're doing?’ It was someone I hadn't heard from for ages. I said like, ‘how'd you hear about that?’ He says it's on page three of the Metro,

Dom: Boom, page three of the Metro, that’s the big slot!

Ben: It was a big slot back in the 00’s. So no professional journalists took any notice of it, but then this intern picked up this press release and thought it looked interesting, took it to her boss, and they said, yeah, run with that. From there that acted as our press release and all the serious media then picked it up. The next three months were a bit mad and we ended up getting a lot of press for a tiny project and it generated a whole load of responses. So we got a lot of wild west internet people signing up to our project. Then we had to make it happen for real. 

Skye: So you had this idea that you wanted to lease an island in Fiji and build a sustainable community. From there you got in touch with an estate agent, basically about leasing an island, and then you flew all the way there to talk to this person about leasing an island and you had no idea if it was going to work or not. 

Ben: Yeah, essentially. I think the decision to fly out there was that the nephew of the chief, the landowner of the island I was talking to online was a lawyer in Australia - and his story was really interesting because the reason that he left his tiny little island to study law and moved to Australia, was that a lot of the land issues that date back to colonial times and he was trying to help people protect and hold onto their lands.

And so he was working with Aboriginal communities in Australia around land rights and law. So when I was talking about how do we protect and do a more sustainable model of tourism where there's more ownership in the local community, it really resonated with him. And he said, you have to come meet my uncle.

I was like, can you not jump online? This was obviously way before Zoom and Skype, but can we not have a phone call? He said no, he's never been online. So I knew we had to sit down in person, but I guess the confidence to do that came from running these trips I'd been doing for the last two years in West and East Africa and other parts of the world.

So I knew that the community tourism side of it I was clear about - the online tech and business side of it I had no idea. The risk on the finance to just fly out there and make it happen was more the power of the idea and the adventure. 

Dom: The project was a phenomenal success in many ways, but also you haven't mentioned that you got the BBC to do a six part documentary? 

Ben: Yeah, Paradise or Bust, they called it Dom. 

Dom: That's right. I remember watching it.

Ben: I said ‘we’ve got a great name, it's Tribewanted, that's the best name just use that. They said, no, no, we're calling it something else, we're calling it 'Paradise or bust’, which actually as a documentary series worked really well. 

Dom: But it was prime time, BBC one or two new year slot on a Sunday, wasn't it?

Ben: It was the Apprentice slot on a Monday night at nine o'clock in the middle of winter, January, February. The weird thing about that - so many great things happen when all the media stuff kicked off, loads of production companies got in touch - and essentially if you're in a production company, you see this story in the news, ‘tribewanted two young entrepreneurs move to an Island and invite the world to come.’ It's like a ready-made TV show as far as they're concerned, except it's real and it's a real risk as opposed to being fabricated for television.

After having a bunch of lunches with production companies, we ended up signing up with one called Shine TV. They were great, they were with us for 18 months, it was quite full on, they became great friends the production team, they observed the project and they told the story of the Fijian community really well.

Of course they told all about the conflict and the problems we had within the project as well. Essentially the documentary became ‘oh, what's Ben's problem this week?’ You run out of fuel for the boat or the water tank is leaking, or he’s run out of money or someone's stolen something in the village, or there's a scam accusation on the internet. There was always a problem, there was a fire, there was a cyclone. 

The funny thing is, with that project is that when it's aired on TV it's a year or two years of content, all condensed into five hours. That's still a lot of TV time but it does make everything seem very dramatic and that's without even dramatising the content, it's just pushing it altogether.

I remember when people watched it who didn't know about the project and they got in touch and said ‘oh my God, your life's crazy’ or ‘this project is crazy’ and replied that it was quite an intense year but it was also spread out. The other thing that was crazy about the TV thing is that people watch it and see us building these traditional Fijian houses and putting up the solar panels and stuff and they say ‘can I come and help you finish doing that, can we get involved?’ I'd reply… ‘‘this was two years ago.’ 

But it was a cool experience and it helped fund the project, it helped take the story much further. So yeah, I'm really proud of that series. 

Skye: I admire a lot of things about you Ben - I'll just flatter you on this podcast - but one of the things that I really admire about you is you're quite humble about things. You say, ‘oh yeah and then I did that and then I made this happen,’ but it takes an extraordinary amount of courage to do something like that, it’s very brave. You're putting yourself out there. You're pushing aside the self doubt, you’re giving it a go. And so many people stop themselves at that point of ‘what if it doesn't work?’ I'm curious about where that courage comes from? 

Ben: Well it's kind of you to say Skye, I wouldn't use those words myself. So it's brilliant that you have used those labels, courage and bravery. I think it is because the alternative doesn't attract me, so I'm pulled towards these exciting possibilities, creating something new, trying something different, having an adventure. But I'm equally pushed away from a world of work or status quo that I'm not happy about, and I don't really want to end up in. 

I think it's realising that the older you get - especially what's happened in the context of the last 10 years of the world - being aware of your good fortune and privilege and how you can use that more purposefully. But I think in my twenties it was pure idealism, and the lack of fear. There's definitely self doubt there, of course, there always is, I still have plenty of it, in fact maybe more now than I did then even though I know a lot more. 

The lack of fear is overwhelmed by the opportunity. So it's not like the fear doesn't exist, it just gets pushed away by the thought of ‘wouldn't it be great if we did this?’

And then of course you can always do a Dr. Pepper ‘what's the worst that could happen’ question. And of course loads of shit can go wrong, it always can. But then it can go wrong in your very structured and secure life, everything can fall apart quite quickly and it was selfish because I just wanted to sit under the stars with some people who've lived on these islands for a long time who are open to doing something different across a different culture and learn from them.

And we did. And that was the best thing about that project, amongst all the buzz of the publicity and the media and all the fun of that and building a community online and so on. When I look back on those five years that we lived there I think, wow, did that happen? Did we get to do that?

And then one of the best things that came out of that project was that we got to invite four of our friends from the Fijian community to come over to the UK, to participate in a bunch of projects and basically give them a tiny bit of return hospitality.  Seeing your home country through the eyes of people who live in that region of the world out on the islands was fascinating.

They couldn't understand why St Paul's cathedral was a church and the Gherkin wasn't. “Why is your spirit house so small? And what's inside that big Gherkin thing?” I said, ‘it's a bank’ and they're like, “what?!” So I learned a lot from living with those people, both at home and then when they came here.

Dom: Just tie the story off with Tribewanted in 30 seconds. 

Ben: What happened was we lived and worked on this beautiful island of Vorovoro for five years. So many positive things came out of it as I've already shared, especially the local impact and the story that was told about the leadership of that Fijian community, of being proud of culture and sustainability and the impact it had on all the people that visited and followed the story. 

The business model was really hard. I'm still paying off the debt from it and we've wrapped that project up in 2011. So a decade on I’m slowly paying off that debt. I didn't regret that, it feels like an educational debt, like an MBA type debt. School trips still go there from the US so the project has carried on. After that we ran two more long-term Tribewanted projects. We thought we'd go for a real challenge next, which was from Fiji to Sierra Leone, which I can tell you a whole other story about. I lived on the beach in Sierra Leone in West Africa for a year, which was amazing.

We built an ecotourism project there, which still runs - not as Tribewanted - but it runs the local community tourism project. Then we ran a project in somewhere very different after that, which was in Umbria and in Italy. 

Skye: It's so nice, it’s so good 

Ben: So for people in the UK, it's like a river cottage type model of residential where they're surrounded by olive groves and living off the land. That was great to be part of that, but Tribewanted as a business in the UK anyway, wrapped up a while ago now. It's interesting because since then we've seen things like Airbnb explode and changed the whole hospitality industry and many other businesses.

And I think some of the ideas we're exploring, which was around bringing people together online to connect with different places and the idea of more authentic community-based tourism has taken off in different ways, at least up until COVID. Digital nomads and those kinds of trends, which we were part of in the early days, but where we had exceptional experiences and one off projects, we didn't quite figure out the business case or the business models and some of these other things have since. But, no regrets.

Dom: So much of your identity was so tied up with Tribewanted and you were then co founder of Tribewanted, the guy on the TV, was leaving that really difficult? 

Ben: Sitting here now, no, but I’m sure at the time it was. I felt a lot of guilt around it financially because it was clear that it wasn't going to work long-term unless someone just threw a lot of money at it, which they wouldn't from a business point of view, they’d only do it because they really cared about it. I think the guilt was really around ‘am I letting our Fijian partners down’ even though we invested heavily in the community and their infrastructure, which they all owned.

So I was able to offset that guilt with some rationality, but it was still a strong emotion. Plus there were loads of challenges with the project so the mixed feelings of guilt but the relief was huge because it was a big chunk of responsibility. It was just one project, but there were a lot of eyes on it. We had 40 people working on it, we had people coming from all over the world so, yeah, that was a relief when I took that step back. And if I'm being honest there was a moment when the Fiji project wrapped up where I could have drawn a line under it and walked away and reflect on it and decide what's next but I thought, ‘I think we can still make this work, but let's do it a slightly different way.’ 

So that period, I was 30 to 35, I was still leading a lot of Tribewanted stuff - this is when I overlapped with meeting Escape The City - where I thought actually, is this really the long-term thing that I want to be doing, as much as I loved it. And again, the business case was hard. We'd worked really hard, we did everything, we’d got amazing publicity, we had a great project on the ground, and if we were lucky we would break even.

That was fine when I was living on site, my costs were super low, but this was not a longer-term career path. After two or three projects I didn’t see this turning around, even though you'd meet  so many passionate people, I think this is true with the escape community as well.

It just attracted those kinds of passionate, curious people, many who become friends along the way and that was fantastic. Every time you were like, ‘I think I might just step out of this now’ someone would say ‘no, no, no keep doing it.’ It's not their job right, so it was a lot easier. I think it’s like when people give you feedback on ideas, I'm always conscious of this. When someone's working on an idea, business idea or career change idea, it's very easy to say, ‘yeah, you should definitely do that.’ Then when you're actually doing it yourself, it's a lot harder, they're not taking any of the risks, they're just sharing their opinions. 

But it was great. I've got the pictures up around me, on the wall here from that time and the people and the places and it just feels like a dream, even though it was a big chunk of time. I'm lucky I'm one of those people that when I look back on things I’ve got pretty rose tinted glasses and I remember all the highlights but there was a lot of pain there as well.

Dom: We haven't talked about good idea criteria, which we have to weave into this story because this is your favourite question. 

Ben: Why don't you explain what is a good idea criteria? 

Dom: Well, I feel like you actually came up with this concept. The good idea criteria is: what are the elements of success for you and in your career or in your life to be happy? What are the main elements that you need in order to have a fulfilling career and life? We named it the good idea criteria here. I don't know if we named it that or if we nicked it from someone else. 

Ben: Well you nicked it from Plato and Socrates and all the other great philosophers over what makes a fulfilling life? What's great about that question is that often we go through our life and you might ask it in the pub, but then you can't remember the next morning. We don't often ask it seriously around our working lives, which is why something like Escape The City is so important. But actually when you sit down with a group of people and do it in a structured way, as well as a kind of philosophical and curious way, and then build a bunch of outcomes out of it of what paths that you can go down, it's amazing. You never regret having that conversation. 

So it was interesting when I came into Escape, I obviously had thought about these questions. I remember running workshops on the island which were essentially Escape School type workshops and asking where do you feel like you must belong in life? And these are a bunch of travellers, so some of them are a little lost or looking for something different, running away from something, running towards something. 

Then when I came back to London and connected with you guys and got involved with Escape, it was like the more structured version of that, what makes a good life, what makes a good career, what makes a good idea If you're starting a business? And the criteria for me hasn't really shifted. It's that mix of what would happen, what’s the possibility of it going this way plus can we do something? Is this going to have a benefit to the people involved with it? We don't want to create suffering. I'm not saying people start ideas or projects or business with a goal of creating suffering in the world, no one does. It's more a case of have we really thought through how this might play out? With Tribewanted ultimately we didn't, but it worked out as a positive impact.

So can it work? Can I make a positive impact? Is it sustainable? Is there a good business case behind it? And then the last thing is, are we thinking about this enough, are we excited about it? I think too often people make the decisions where they follow ‘I think this is the right thing to do’ rather than ‘is this what I'm excited to do.’

And it doesn't necessarily have to be exciting in terms of the idea itself. You can make your nut butters and you don’t necessarily have to be passionate about nuts, but you need to be passionate about really wanting to bring this thing into the world because you think it can change things.

Maybe you want to create the opportunity to build a work culture that's slightly different, or you want to try and shift policy in this space or whatever it is. So it doesn't have to be the product or service that you're super passionate or excited about, but it has to be the journey that you go on.

Dom: Can we just go through those again. Impact is one, 

Ben: Yes, the impact model, which has to be last to be sustainable.

Dom: Okay, so you've got the impact to the businesses having, then it has to be sustainable from a financial perspective, and what was the other one? 

Ben: It needs to be fun, you need to be wanting to do it. That sounds obvious, but I think sometimes that gets missed.

Skye: So I wanted to ask, you were thinking ‘what am I going to have to do next?’ You got involved with Escape, you helped literally thousands of people start ideas and change their careers and inspired so many people. As you get older and you have more responsibilities the temptation is to step away from being bold. What I really love is that you, after all of these things, you took your three young children and moved to an island in Thailand as an adventure. That's the stuff most people dream about, what was that process of thinking, ‘I need an adventure. I've been in London doing all of this stuff, which is great, but we need another adventure.’ 

Ben: Thanks for reminding me, Skye. It's that same question, wouldn't it be wonderful if… or what would happen if… and then off you go. The reason that came about was because of a mundane situation - we were trying to sell our house, the Brexit vote had just happened, everyone was angry and the housing market crashed and we couldn't sell our house for a year and it just slowed down. 

So I thought, well let's just rent because we were ready to make a move for various reasons. We’d had three little ones and we thought ‘let's just go and rent somewhere.’ We wanted to get out into the countryside a bit more and do our own mini Tribewanted without the tourism business model. We were just going to live a bit closer to nature and bring up our kids there. 

And then I thought, hold on. We were thinking of renting somewhere in England or the UK but I can spend this money anywhere. I’d just started this new business called Rebel Book Club, I was working on that alongside Escape the City and working mainly online.

Why can't we go anywhere in the world? None of the kids were in school full-time yet. I remember asking this question to Suze my wife, and she could just see the look in my eye and thought, ‘oh no, that’s it’. I think it was that feeling and I had that real excitement about the possibilities.

Then I looked at the business model for the family . What would it cost for us to do this? I'm like you Dom, I quickly sketched out a spreadsheet of numbers - and this is something I learned from you actually, which was can you validate this quite quickly with the numbers - and it looked realistic. Then it was, what are our good idea criteria for our family adventure? And they were, we want a different sort of climate culture to the UK, we want somewhere that the kids could get involved with a small international community school so that way they weren't full-time with us as we thought that would be too much. And that we could get fast wifi so I could work. 

So it was really interesting, I looked at all the digital nomad sites and this whole world of families who travel the world with their kids, it's wild.

Then we got it down to Sri Lanka, various parts of Southeast Asia and then I was just spending my evenings on Google earth. I needed to find a school and a co-working space. I found this place Koh Lanta, an island in Southern Thailand, and there was a global village school and an international school for people passing through this part of the world, you know?

I thought, this looks good. And then literally around the corner, there was this coworking space and the beach was there. So we moved there and it would be interesting to have Suze on the podcast at this moment because I’d say ‘it’s amazing’ but she’d say, ‘it was really hard!’

But she was full time with the kids, with 3 kids under four years old in 40 degree heat. There was a lot of good infrastructure there. The other thing that was a reason not to go - which I'm so glad we pushed back on was that the kids are too young to remember it.

You go through all this effort because there's a lot of logistical effort to move a family like that across the world. You go through all this effort and then 20 years later and they don’t remember it. But actually as I've learned, so much in terms of formation of us as people happens in the ⅘ years of our life, maybe not surprisingly in terms of our cognitive development and emotional development and so on. 

So actually the more you can do with your children within a secure, loving, structured way in terms of exposing them to experiences the better. It doesn't mean you have to move to Thailand, it just means it's going to have a big impact on their lives, even if they don't remember it.

Skye: So, Ben, you went to Thailand, you left working and teaching at Escape, you were already running Rebel Book Club, and you decided that you were going to work on Rebel Book Club full-time when you were in Thailand and give it a proper go.

Can you tell us a bit more about Rebel Book Club, how it got started and what happened when you started to work on it full time? 

Ben: It's great having you guys here cause you're reminding me of my career path. Rebel Book Club happened when I was on another adventure in Bali. We had just had our daughter Isla, she was one. I guess that was a warmup test for the Thailand trip. So that was two years prior to that. In fact, Dom, we hung out there and I remember you giving that Escape the City talk with monkeys, bamboo and great coffee to all these digital nomads. It was brilliant, sitting on bean bags, you couldn't get more cliched.

I was in Bali, running a little startup side program to pay for our trip, and we did this really fun idea session, which we've done lots of with Escape over the years, but I remember we were sitting in a bar and there were about 15 of us and we went around the table.

Everyone knew they had to bring some crazy or random ideas about businesses to the evening and we just shared them. You have a round of drinks and everyone shares their ideas and someone's just noting them down on the spreadsheet, that would probably have been your job if you were there Dom. Then you have another round of drinks and something to eat, and then you do another round of ideas. 

So by the end of the night, you have a hundred ideas on the spreadsheet with everyone's name. And people are making them up and it’s my kind of dinner basically. And the next day I was going through a spreadsheet thinking ‘which of these ideas am I going to steal and launch?’ No, I just sharing it with everyone. There was one written in there by this guy Ben, saying, ‘I'm trying to figure out how I can get better at finishing books.’ I've got loads of books and on my Kindle and I'm not finishing them and I want to get more value out of them. It wasn’t a radical idea but there was something about it that stuck with me.

I thought ‘I have that problem too.’ And it would just be interesting to build a little learning project around that, even if it's just between the two of us. So we had a chat and we decided to run a first version of this little book club in Bali, we read a book over a month, invited the group to it, designed a little cocktail around it and I was like, ‘that was fun!’ 

Of course it's not necessarily a new idea, book clubs have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but I said to Ben - and maybe this is the key moment - ‘when we get back to London, should we do this again? And should we invite people to join us? And shall we focus on helping people really make sure they try and read the book? And organise a meetup where we talk about what we can do with our learning and cement it and have a cocktail and charge people for it so that we're accountable to them and they are to us?’ 

He said, ‘yeah, let's do it.’ We talked about startup ambition, this was the opposite of Tribewanted, we said our goal was to get 15 people to pay us £15 for one month and we would run what we called Rebel Book Club. And the rebel part was could you rebel and actually finish your book? And two, could we actually turn some of the reading that we do into action in our lives? 

Because a lot of us are very good at reading or being curious about stuff, but not turning it into action. And you can't do that with every book you read, but there's a lot more we can do. So that was the question we asked, and we got 24 people in that first month. We had a great meetup on the roof of the Virgin office and Paddington, and we drank some rum and we were like, should we do this again? And then the crowd said yes. So that was, as of this month, 80 months ago, 2015. So we've run it every month since, and Rebel Book Club - which is now my equal main focus - has been one of those projects and jobs that's just always been a pleasure.

Tribewanted was really intensive. If I think of them as relationships, Tribewanted was that first love, really intense, full-on, amazing. I fell into it hugely, but it was also a whirlwind. Rebel Book Club built slowly, maybe because it's a book club not an adventure travel business, it's always been about connecting people around learning and having fun with learning, it's felt really enjoyable. 

We're trying all sorts of different things now. We’ve been through COVID with it so it used to be very focused on physical meetups - which are returning - but with COVID everyone went online and I was just grateful I wasn't running a travel business. But we've learned so much and that's the privilege of it is that every month you're like, ‘oh, what are we learning about now?’ Modern monetary policy this month, next month, history of magic, last month attachment theory and relationships. So it's really diverse in terms of what we explore. It’s great, it feels like the university education I always wanted. 

Dom: I've always admired Rebel Book Club, just the simplicity of it, the simplicity of the idea, 

Ben: Because it isn't deliberately trying to be ambitious or change the world. It accidentally does in some ways for people, not everyone, but a lot of people who join will turn around and say - because of the book they read or because of someone they've met through it, or because of an event that they were at - that it completely shifted their thinking on it. 

And of course, with reading, as we know from the Escape School, you've got to read the right thing at the right time. When you're trying to change careers and you read the right inspiring human story, or you do the right good idea criteria exercise, It can really shift things.

Skye: So obviously Rebel Book Club is ticking a lot of the boxes for you. It deliberately is not overly ambitious or trying to save the world, but it is impacting people's lives. I know for you, impact is such an important part of who you are and your life and the projects you've done with Tribewanted. And the ideas that you got the most excited about working with Virgin startups and through Escape so I can see how your second project came into the picture, which is obviously Raaise and focusing on a big problem in the world where there's an opportunity for a lot of impact and where we need a lot of impact. Can you tell us a bit about Raaise and how your commitment to improving the climate has brought you to working on that?

Ben: Like you said Skye, it’s become the project I've been looking for for a long time, ever since I started Tribewanted. Even going back before then, I remember becoming a member of the World Wildlife Fund and got my little Panda sticker when I was 12 years old. And so I guess that sort of interest in nature and the environment - and the challenges have been growing around it in my lifetime - have always been there. 

But in some ways I've been surprised that I haven't had more of a focus on this work up until now. I've done bits and pieces around it, supported people who've built businesses in this space. So the quick backstory behind it is that there was this brilliant couple Amy and Neil Carter James, a couple in love, career, work, life, all in. They started and ran this amazing beach lodge in Northern Mozambique called Guludo for 15 years and used to recruit through Escape The City.

I remember when some of the earliest exciting job opportunities from Guludo were on it and the picture of their amazing lodge. They won all the awards and I connected with them through the responsible ecotourism network and community. And every award and event Amy would be up there collecting them because it was as this brilliant honeymooners lodge that was having this really big, positive impact on up to 60,000 people in that region, in terms of education and healthcare and clean water and so on.

So I've always admired them. Anyway, they got back in touch a year ago and they said, ‘hey Ben, we're working on this new idea - sadly the lodge was destroyed in a cyclone along with a lot of the communities in Northern Mozambique, plus an awful growth in terrorism in that region.

Essentially they witnessed the reality of the climate crisis on the front line, both in terms of the accelerating extreme weather, but also the fight over fossil fuels and the instability and the poverty that sadly impacts that region.

So they started looking at building a fund in Australia to come up with interesting new ideas for sustainable tourism, and then COVID happened and no one wanted to put any money into tourism because the world stopped travelling. So they pivoted towards focusing on what they call climate startups.

And by that they mean any startup businesses trying to tackle one part of the climate and nature crisis. So as you can imagine, this impacts every aspect of life. It's from our food systems to our health care, through our education models, through to our built infrastructure, transport and of course, energy and carbon. So it's really everything. 

The idea for Raaise was to be a funding space and community for people who want to invest in startups that are attacking this crisis and for those founders to get the funding and the backing they need but with a slightly more founder and investor friendly model than we think is currently out there.

And this is to take risk out of the equation or to minimise it. One of the reasons we're in a mess with the climate crisis is because we've been taking all these risks with burning fossil fuels continually over the last half century, especially when the scientists and the political and business leaders have known that it's damaging a very fragile ecosystem to the point where it is shifting it beyond repair. Yet we've not done anything about the investment models that we've seen come out of Silicon Valley and all these crazy businesses that we've followed over the last 10 years because we're already interested in them. They're exciting but they're one hit wonders, they are unicorns. There's a reason that these big businesses are called unicorns because they barely exist or they're mythical creatures. And so with Raaise, what we're trying to do is take some of the risk out of that initial investment deal that you make between founders and early stage investors. There's no equity given upfront, you have this safe agreement which means that you can have future equity if you invest now, or you can get a return on your investment in different ways. And so the founder has more control, which is really important when you're a mission-led business, and then the investor has more flexibility in how they get a return and more chance of getting a return. Not necessarily a thousand X or a hundred X, but two to four X over the next few years. So a more sustainable investment model basically. So all the businesses we're starting to work with already like the beyond plastic type models, taking plastic out of everyday household goods.

There's so much great innovation out there the solutions are really exciting they just need to be scaled up and the stories need to be told around them so that more people can easily switch.

And then we've been working on the legal side of the structure of the fund and it will be open in January. 

Dom: Really? Open as in, the platform is going to be live?

Ben: Yeah, the platform and first investments will be being made. We're not calling it crowdfunding because it's going to be starting with what is termed as ‘sophisticated investors,’ which is a really weird term, because it doesn't mean that they're really smartly dressed, it just means that they have a certain amount of wealth. 

So in Australia, I think it's $250,000 that's proven income or a certain amount of assets. In the UK it's £150,000. So these are people who are starting to invest, but not necessarily huge investments. So £10,000 or £20,000 at a time. So that's the level we can start at legally, looking for impact investors or people who want to offset their taxes, and invest in climate and different ways to move your money into something that's going to make an impact in the world and get you a return. 

And then for the founders, we've got a lot lined up in Australia, but we're looking for a lot more in the UK. Oddbox would be a great example of the type of business we're looking for but earlier stage probably. So if you're looking to raise between a £100,000 and £2m - beyond your kind of bootstrap first version, you've got a product that's validated, got some momentum, but you now need to scale up your team, your investment in the product, other aspects of the business, then we can help. 

Dom: Come and talk to Keeno, he's got the cash. 

Ben: I haven’t but we're going to make it happen for you.

Skye: He's going to connect you with the cash. 

Ben: I'm really excited about it and I was in Glasgow at the Cop 26 for the first three days and I already thought here's an opportunity just to go and witness and get a sense of what it's like on the ground, as well as following all these climate events on the news.

And I had a really positive experience. It was really great to see how they're trying to shift - if you’re a small business - how you move from trying to have a cultural impact through changing consumer behaviours, telling stories of an industry like food waste for example, this is the problem this is the part we can play, this is how you can get involved, this is our activism. So there's that kind of cultural shift that these businesses can have and B Corp have done that incredibly well, just purely some amount of money that people are now spending in this space. 

But the next challenge is how do you change policy? Because as we all know, if we're really going to move at the speed we need to in tackling these existential crises, we need to change government policy quickly to keep fossil fuels in the ground so enough funding goes to the communities and regions of the world to mitigate against the climate crisis and adapt because it's already happening.

And so there's this thing called The Better Business Act, which has come out of the B Corp community, which is all about changing part of the company's act. It's pretty geeky, but it's fascinating. It's changing a line in the companies act that all businesses are part of that says actually you're responsible for your externalities as well as your direct spending. So your externalities are if you cut a forest down to build a furniture business, you're responsible for the carbon released from that forest and you can't just offset it, you're responsible for the impact on the community. And a lot of us are naive to think, well surely you're responsible for that anyway - but no. 

By the way, if there are lawyers listening, this is probably the most exciting decade to be in the game of law because whether it's ecocide, which is companies being taken to court because of not being responsible for their impact on nature and the environment, or whether it's activists, or the Better Business Act, this is a great time to be a lawyer if you want to change the world. I'm now getting into that world of finance and law through startups which are probably the two areas I least expected to be going into, but I like it. 

Time is moving and the reality of the climate crisis - especially which is at the intersection of so many of the big problems in the world like inequality and race and gender injustices and all the big things that we're aware of - but often feel even in our privileged positions that we can't do much about. It feels so futile, right? When you look at the scale of all these problems, you have to be in the right frame of mind, connected, and talk to the right people.

In terms of your work outside of your consumer behaviour and your citizenship which is voting and activism which is increasing in importance all the time, it's about how we spend our time with our work and what we do with our money if we have it are the real areas of impact. So that's why I think the Escape The City project and similar communities and businesses that try and help people really think about the work they're doing matter more than ever, because we're in this age of crisis.