Hey, thanks for listening.

This is Ross Kenyon.

I'm the host of Reversing Climate Change, the podcast you are listening to right at this very moment.

Before we get into the bulk of today's show, I'd love to tell you about our sponsors, Absolute Climate and Philip Lee LLP.

I've made great radio with both of them.

They should be familiar to you if you listen to this show, but I want to tell you about why you should learn a little bit more.

The first sponsor is Absolute Climate.

I did a show with their founder Peter Miner few months back and a lot of people love that show.

I was asking a question of can registries design their own methodologies for carbon markets without it being a conflict of interest?

An absolute climate's thesis is no, they shouldn't be in the business of doing that.

We actually need to disintegrate functionality within carbon markets even further.

They are literally the only independent standards body for carbon removal that exists.

Their name is very well chosen.

I think they are some of the most aggressively idealistic people within carbon removal.

It's come up on reversing climate change so many times about how and why there's tension between commercial teams and science teams within carbon markets.

There's some fundamental tension between the rules of running a business, or I should say the rules of running a profitable business is maybe a better way to put that and climate impact.

And I think Absolute is one of those companies that, at least from my experience of what I know of them over there, I think they're going to be some of the staunchest holdouts just trying to make sure that there can be a justified true belief that a ton purchase is a ton truly removed.

They're betting big on not compromising.

It's a bold strategy.

I respect the absolute hell out of that.

Absolute is very much doing things their own way, and they stand out to me and I will never mistake them in a lineup.

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I really am endlessly fascinated by what they're doing.

And that's also true of our other sponsor, Philip Lee LLP.

In fact, I told him to pitch me on some weirder legal shows.

I really like doing shows about the law.

I think the law is such a fascinating part of our shared social life.

It structures so much of it.

It's badly understood by most people.

Just structuring deals within carbon removal is hard.

I'm talking grown up deals here, like when you're trying to put together an enormous package, complicated structuring, a lot of money, changing hands, The stakes are high.

You really do need a good lawyer.

I'm sorry to tell you that if you are a startup out there in carbon removal, you're going to probably pay a fair amount of money to lawyers.

There's just no way around it.

Your choice is basically do you get a bad lawyer or a good lawyer.

One really cool thing I can say on Philip Lee LL PS behalf.

Well, one Ryan Covington and I did a very fun show about how basically no one except for an elite few really know what bankability and project finance even mean.

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Reversing Climate change.

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And now here is the show.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast.

I'm the host, Ross Kenyon.

Today we have a regular to the show, a true legend of carbon removal, Grant Faber.

I'll tell you about what we're talking about today first before I do a little opportunity for you.

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But whatever you choose to do, here is the intro for Grant.

Grant is formerly of the Department of Energy working on carbon removal.

We do the show about that.

I'll put a link at the show notes, and if you're in Spotify, you can just go look at the episodes that are linked to through this episode.

Grant compiled a list for data analysis of 700 carbon removal companies.

Almost all of the companies, as far as he can discern, except for the many artisanal biochar producers, those are making biochar equipment.

Besides those, he's pretty confident that nearly all of the carbon removal companies that exist are represented on this list.

It's fascinating to look at the numerical values here to do actual quantitative analysis of the space, and seeing all these numbers analyzed in this way caused me to think some new thoughts and give additional texture to my thinking about carbon removal.

The link to Grant's work cataloguing this data, your ability to access it, to play with it, it's all in the show notes.

Go check it out.

And here is your show with Grant Favor.

Grant, you're back again.

Yes, I am Ross.

Yes, I am.

You have an extremely comprehensive list of I mean, how confident are you that this represents 100% of all carbon removal companies in the world?

Well, I am 100% confident that it does not represent 100% of carbon removal companies in the world, but I am 90% confident that it represents at least 90% of all carbon removal companies in the world that are not artesian, a biochar or biochar equipment manufacturing companies.

But everyone else that does durable carbon removal should hopefully be on this list or shortly represented via crowdsourcing.

It's amazing that if you are only confident this represents 90% of those companies, you can't figure that out.

Who else could possibly figure that out?

That is the data just that heterogeneous.

It's just that fragmented.

You can't find it.

Yeah.

So interestingly, so how I built this list, similar to how I built the Director Capture company list a year and a half ago or so, was I took every database, every other database of all DAC companies and every other list list from Frontier and X Prize, Cdr and FYI and so forth, Circular, Carbon Network and combined all of them that I could find at least all the active companies.

So I did that for DAC, now I've done it for Cdr.

So I'd say that it's comprehensive in the sense that it includes all the active companies from these other lists.

So should definitionally be the most comprehensive out there.

But it gets really challenging, I would say particularly for biochar because there are just so many existing very small biochar outfits out there.

And really just for tractability and to focus on making the list a little bit more meaningful, I had to exclude artisanal biochar.

So just, you know, because anybody can buy a $200 like little Contiki kill and just light some biomass on fire and make biochar and then it's not that much of a step up to then call that a company or form an LLC or something around that.

So I had to make some exclusions.

But yeah, I would say even though I scoured biochar member directories or biochar trade group directories and things of that nature, it was still, there are probably still some biochar companies non artisanal that are missing from the list that are just so hard to break my head around.

But everything else should be pretty pretty tightly.

Wrapped up, I'm looking at the Companies by technology section on the analysis tab.

And like if you go to the very bottom, there's one company each for river alkalinity, pit lake alkalinity, and oceanic bio slurry.

I know, I know who each of those companies are.

But as you go to the very top of the list here, 295 biochar companies, that represents 42.1% of all companies in carbon removal.

It's a very big spread there, I think it's fair to say.

Definitely.

Yeah, it's huge.

And I wasn't totally surprised going into it just because the barriers to entry to doing biochar are just smaller than a lot of these other pathways.

And there there are a notable amount of DAC companies.

I did split DAC among solid sort of liquid solvent, membrane and so forth.

But yeah, so there's just maybe something there's looking at the top of the list, 176 DAC companies.

But yeah, it's still just blown but away by biochar which is by by which is far in a way that the other the most common company type.

But I will note that the the data for some of these companies is perhaps a bit skewed in terms of the totals in the sense that a biochar company may only be doing a few 1000 tons of removal per year relative to DAC or BRW or Beck's companies that are in many cases aiming to do hundreds of thousands, millions of tons of Cdr per year going forward.

So there's a much larger proportion of bio of individual biochar companies that are trying to do their thing.

But due to biomass limitations or just the other ways that those businesses came to be, in a lot of cases, each individual companies is probably aiming for a much smaller amount of annual removal, at least at first.

Where do you cut off artisanal?

Where does industrial biochar actually start in your taxonomy?

So some may argue that I made a bit of an arbitrary distinction here, but essentially if anyone used uses some kind of Contiki kiln or it's just some errors, it was very if it was very apparent to me when reviewing the company's website that they were just using a small open air kiln where you just more or less combust the biomass and then scoop up the remaining ash.

And in those cases, I classify those as more artisanal.

There's probably more rigorous definitions out there, but in general, I tried to only include companies that were using official large scale, like more industrial biochar, pyrolysis or gasification kilns or equipment.

So yeah, if a company uses equipment from a company like Pyreg or something like that, then and if there's can be sufficient say emissions controls on that process, if it's actually seemed feasible to me that, well, OK, this process could track and try to mitigate methane emissions that could arise from the pyrolysis process.

It's like OK, this is more of an industrial operation that will be suitable for large scale durable Cdr crediting or medium to large scale Cdr crediting as opposed to small artisanal operations that may be primarily for the purpose of just making and selling the biochar, not necessarily creating carbon credits.

Well, if there's one thing I associate you with, it's being an edge case Lord.

Is that what an edge Lord is, by the way?

If so, that's what you are.

Grant actual dictionary definition.

We're we're reclaiming this term now, Grant, as the edgelord supreme, surely you tortured yourself.

I'm sure someone has a Conti that they've, you know, rigged up or they have some sort of, you know, pyrolysis device that they got from an OEM that they improved in some way where you're like, oh crap, this is somewhere between the two categories.

So how much sleep did you lose trying to do to deal with that?

I lost a fair amount of sleep.

To be totally honest.

I've been thinking about this list and working on it.

And that's not even a joke.

I literally was up in bed, could not fall asleep when I was building this list thinking about how should I make that cut off and it's challenging.

I would say that if there are folks out there who can make a rigorous argument and want to submit their company to the to the form to be added to the list and and can make an argument that their operation really is for the express purpose of carbon dioxide removal rather than just a very small scale biochar operation, then I'd I might be open minded.

But it's challenging because if I allow one artisanal in and every other artisanal person in the world can come along and say, well, why are they in and I'm not in And it just could challenge the the list a bit.

So I had to make, I hate to say it, but I had to make a partially arbitrary cut off at determination, which pains me.

But in terms of companies that I have relative confidence could be medium to large scale suppliers of carbon of durable carbon dioxide removal credits verified under existing standards that could be sold and used in like corporate or national emissions inventories.

I hope that this list does a good job at at capturing such companies.

All right, even with so many biochar companies winnowed out of the main enormous list, you still have nearly 300 companies.

42.1% of carbon removal that's taking place is in biochar, non artisanal biochar.

It's an enormous number.

What do you make of it being Yeah, an order of magnitude bigger than the next category of solid sorbent DAC?

Yeah, I I've speculated on this for for some time.

I think it's one thing that really benefits biochar is that similar in in some sense to AG liming for ERW that there was already an existing knowledge base around it.

People were already making biochar for various uses for decades before we really had a conception that, OK, this is going to be a perhaps major component of the carbon of the durable carbon dioxide removal portfolio.

So I think that existing knowledge base, existing technology, I I believe I've seen some reports from some international biochar groups that indicate that actually the majority of biochar that's produced today, carbon credits are not sold coupled to to that biochar.

It's just made for its agricultural benefits or other purposes as outlined in books like burning.

And so yeah, I think that has created a tremendous advantage.

Whereas for DAC companies, even though DAC is the second most common of the four main pathways featured on this list, those companies essentially all came to be within in the last several years, with the exception of the major incumbents like Climb Works and Carbon Engineering, which have been around for, OK, you know, 10 or 15 years.

But the vast, vast majority of that companies have really spun up in the past five to 10 years.

So yeah, it's that's to do with the with that existing knowledge base, I think.

I'm surprised to see the number of DAC companies here as well.

I guess if you tallied them all up, I'm wondering across all DAC, how much does it represent?

So I think at the top of the list, it notes that DAC companies are 25% every total.

So right now the list is sitting at an even 700 companies.

And so DAC is yeah, about 180.

So about 25% or 1/4 of all companies, whereas bikers is sitting at 60%.

So yeah, I think part of that is also a function of in some cases for some of the DAC companies that are featured on the list, it may be one or two Co founders with a new sorbent idea that they're working on commercializing.

So it's not necessarily that each DAC company is like we imagine when we think of an heirloom or a climb works like, OK, they have this major pilot facility and they're trying to secure out these huge off takes.

But a lot of debt companies are private like incorporated companies, but they may be very small, have very little funding.

And a good number of them are are honestly at risk over the next few years of either just dissolving, going bankrupt, having the founders just change course and just go do other things with their lives or perhaps being acquired.

And so, yeah, these numbers may be very much in in flux.

I am surprised to to see direct air capture so prominently.

On the one hand, it represents the only what I presume to be profitable exits that I've taken place to think carbon removal essentially all to Occidental Petroleum, but they're also heavily policy dependent right now with 45 Q or they need to have their eye to an acquisition by oil and gas.

It seems like those are the the main ways of doing things.

But those are big outcomes and not everyone is going to get a deal like that.

And there's only been what, 3 that I know of for Oxy that came out of that category and it still represents here 3 out of 85.

That's not a huge number and so you're basically betting on policy and being well connected or getting one of these big off takes.

I would be scared to work at a dot company seeing these numbers and maybe that's a nicer way or a less nice way of saying what you just said.

Yeah, Ross, no, it's honestly the putting the list together was a little bit sobering, even though right now there's 700 total companies and there's all these companies in each space.

And perhaps over the next few years we'll see more companies spin up in each one.

But when I was just looking at the numbers and just thinking about the political difficulties that we're living in, fiscal austerity, anti climate misinformation, so and so on and so forth, the various issues that might be or that are facing carpet removal industry and thinking that OK, also a lot of these companies are startups and there's a natural base rate of failure of startups that's depending on where you set the baseline and kind of look at the the stage of company.

The failure rate is rather high.

You know, there's a lot of percentages out there depending on if you're looking at seed stage or Series A, series B, so forth.

But failure rates can be anywhere.

I've seen between like 70 and 98% for like new company ideas.

And over a long enough term, there's even higher failure rates for a lot of companies.

So yeah, like looking at this list seeing, OK, let's say there's 700 companies and let's say the rate of dissolution will be somewhat similar to the rate of new company formation over the next couple of years, which is a strong assumption.

But if that's the case, but then over the medium term, we could expect 8090% of these companies to go bankrupt, dissolve or otherwise be consolidated, then we're going to be left with anywhere between 50 and 200 companies.

Is it really reasonable to expect that those companies can shoulder the 10 or so gigatons of carbon, of annual carbon removal that we need?

And I don't know, especially when a big chunk of them are biotchar companies that may be limited to thousands, 10s of thousands of tons per year.

So it's, it's sobering.

Like I look at the list and we actually look at the numbers.

I just, I also feel just a little bit worried across the board.

When I'm thinking about the go to market and commercial strategy for any project developer within carbon removal, there's a sense that if you're alone, like if you're at the bottom of this list and you're doing something that's truly unique, no one else is doing river alkalinity except for carbon run.

You're like, OK, that's.

That's cool, like you're the only person doing that and that puts you in a position of prominence.

But how valuable is that prominence relative to being a part of a solid cohort of solid sorbent DAC developers where you're able to, I'm sure there are places where they all come together or many of them come together to lobby or to increase the publicity and the reputation of their little niche.

And if it's just you doing river alkalinity, like how good is that relative to being a member of a of a tight knit little methodological community?

What?

How do you think about that?

Yeah, it's it's a great point, Ross.

I was thinking about this exact thing in in advance of our discussion today because it it really is this this wonderful pro in this horrible con.

Just like you alluded to, the Pro is that you're so unique, you have this pathway and and maybe you went into that pathway after I I would imagine these companies like if your Cinco Labs doing oceanic bio slurries or if you're yeah, a query doing Pitt lake alkalinity or you mentioned carbon run or river.

It's like, I mean that's you probably have a lot of conviction in that idea, in that space that, hey, this is an unexplored space.

This could be a wonderful opportunity and then you can seize on that.

You could potentially build quite an IP mode for yourself, because if you start a new cell absorbent dat company today, I mean you're going to really need some kind of fantastic breakthrough to be able to have meaningful IP.

Otherwise, I mean, you might discover some of the same stuff that Climbworks's fifty person chemistry team has probably already discovered and may have already patented.

And so how do you carve out a Moat for yourself?

And just this kind of pure commercial sense, like it's it's really challenging.

So that's that's a a wonderful benefit.

But as you alluded to, if you're alone and you don't have a trade group necessary necessarily to lean into, I mean, of course, if you're a company doing the rare kind of removal, you could still join a more general kind of carbon management trade group like Carbon Business Council and still have folks advocate for you.

But it's not just about trade groups and lobbying.

It's also about just the broader ecosystem that supports whatever your pathway might be.

And so for DAC, and you know, I can say this from from being at DOE, but we had huge multi year research programs trying to look into very fundamental problems facing solid sorbet DAC.

And we could partially justify such investments because we could say, hey, there's X number of American DAC companies.

And if we have this kind of breakthrough with our sorbents, then it could translate across a portfolio of American DAC to this amount of savings or whatever it might be.

But how can you necessarily make the same large scale investments or justifications if there's one company, one startup, not even a major corporation, one startup doing something you would, if you want to fund them, you may have to bundle that into a broader category.

And now with that said, I did advocate well at DOE for at times for some funding programs that may be covered like unconventional or new technologies in each removal pathway.

And there are some more frontier offices like ARPA E or the Office of Science that may investigate some of these more frontier approaches and models.

And it will be smaller kind of high risk, high reward type funding.

So there, there is space for them.

But yeah, if you're alone, you're the only one doing something.

I just think it's definitely much more difficult to have that entire ecosystem of support behind you.

And so it's, it's a potential huge benefit, but I think it's it's a big risk as well.

I imagine if you're AVC and you're looking to invest, there's a sense that OK, if you do solid sorbent DAC, you either have acquisition possible or just like a merger possible with many of your rivals.

Like there's some, there's something so you're not just going to die and the IP gets stranded somewhere.

And even on the truly unique groups at the very bottom of that list, they're all doing pretty well.

You know, it's like breakthrough energy fellows query just announced something I saw the other day.

Carbon Run has frontier support like they're.

It's not, it's not like.

You're but there's also cases like above ground storage has been, you know, flapping in the wind for a long time.

It's failed to achieve any sort of political, diplomatic policy support and they don't have the like institutional power behind them to turn that into commercial success.

I see a lot of the people who are working on that.

It doesn't seem to be going very well, at least from where I'm sitting.

I think maybe that's a case where it's not working like it's working for carbon run.

It's they've just been probably abandoned, ignored by the broader carbon removal ecosystem.

I realize what I just said might get me some angry emails.

I'm trying to say it as neutrally as possible.

No judgement, just observing what it's been like for many of these companies.

Perhaps.

Yeah, totally.

It's it's challenging and I think a part of this could be the communications angle as well.

Like it's already an uphill battle to fight in terms of convincing people to do and fund carbon removal as opposed to reductions.

And then for each particular high level pathway, it's like it's an uphill battle to explain.

OK, how does bikers work?

How does enhanced mineralization or particularly ocean Cdr, how does it work?

And so that's yet another level that if you're trying to win support, you have to convince people to.

But then if you're doing a completely unique bespoke approach, now you have, you're just alone in trying to convince various stakeholders in the ecosystem and even the general public.

And like, how does this work and why should I care?

And that communication angle is, is just going to be very challenging if you're alone or can be.

It's it goes against the myth of entrepreneurship that's so powerful, which the entrepreneur is someone who is very future oriented visionary, can see things a decade before anyone else does.

But there's a pretty long valley of death with that vision of the entrepreneur.

If you're trying to operationalize it, you very well might get caught in it where you have the Cassandra effect working against you or your prophet that no one listens to.

And maybe eventually they catch up and they look at your tombstone in the carbon removal graveyard and say, wow, that was so smart seven years ago.

Maybe now it's time for this.

Now that that's especially consoling.

That just might be the way that it is.

And it's terrible.

But that is the potential curse of visionary people is to play the Cassandra.

Definitely there's a scene from Westworld that we may have spoken about before where then Android gets repeatedly created and tries to escape but dies most of the time.

And then like it piled of it's pile of dead bodies of its past self, like pile up and leave little symbols.

And then it when enough die, it allows, you know, the last one to get out.

I'm keeping that vague to to prevent any spoilers, but yeah, it's I view it as a similar idea, like even if a company does fail, it is still perhaps valuable in the as long as it didn't create, you know, horrible reputational damage to the space.

It's lessons can serve as a guidepost for others.

And in that sense, place I wanted to take the conversation was talking about some of the the failures that we've seen in some companies that did dissolve.

And I think I, I keep track of inactive or pivoted or, and acquired DAC companies explicitly in the DAC company list.

I chose not to do it for this list because the number was simply too large.

And I, I wanted to make sure whatever I put out there was comprehensive, but it was challenging because there were numerous, they're probably, I mean, there are about say 30 DAC companies that have, are in that category that keep track of the DAC list.

But there's many more, say, small biotech companies or other teams that maybe spun up, perhaps sometimes as part of the X Prize car removal competition as well, that are just simply not active.

But it's very challenging to find data about companies that no longer exist because there's not necessarily good centralized tracking, which is what I'm partially trying to resolve with this.

But I will note that there are several notable instances that can be valuable to discuss and assess.

And I think one of those they want to bring up is Alkali earth.

So they were a mineralization company trying to take steel slag and apply it as a replacement for gravel roads.

And then it would carbonate over time and they could track that they would be all above ground.

And they were actually one of my clients when I was consulting and it was fabulous Team I, I really liked their technology and their approach to things.

But unfortunately things didn't quite work out.

But they have started a sub stack where they are publishing lessons that they learned as part of that just to contribute to the space so other people can see those.

And I think that it's just a fantastic thing to do that I think a lot of people might be afraid or vote, feel vulnerable about.

But I think it is so valuable.

And I really wish everyone who has a, you know, quote UN quote, failed Cdr venture would do something similar because the lessons there are extremely valuable.

And that knowledge can be very helpful for all of the androids who who come in here.

Yeah, I like that series too.

Thanks for flagging it.

And yeah, I've talked with MAD for a while about Alkali Earth.

I always thought steel slide was such a fascinating thing to do.

And it seems like they thought Grant, as it often does, comes back to additionality here.

And to what degree is is their work actually something different from what normally happens with Rd.

building?

And what a saga.

I think the way that Alkali Earth was financed made it more possible to speak openly about it.

Where I think there's in wind down or or closing, there's often times much more of you can say this but not that and or where we agree maybe not to reveal everything for various reasons, or the company gets acquired or partially acquired and there's the paperwork involved.

Such people tend to be cautious about it.

There's also probably some amount of shame too.

I don't want to under play that either.

I think people probably feel that way, although that's less because having a a failed tech company is a a mark of honor.

I don't feel like it's harmed me at all.

In fact, in some ways that maybe helps my career, funnily enough.

Josh from Noya, if you want to come hang out and talk about it, let's do it.

Matt, want to talk about your articles about Alkali Earth, Let's do it because I like that kind of transparency.

I think it's really important thing.

I think a lot of companies, it's like if one person says something, you imagine that 10 or 15 people are are thinking it.

I think it's a pretty common thing that I keep in mind.

And I know that there are companies out there, probably people listening right now are being like, Oh my God, my company's in a similar spot.

We're just six months away from that position here and maybe we'll see more of that.

So I would also encourage, hey, if you want to come out and tell the story and share as much as you can, share open invitation to the world of developers.

Definitely, yeah.

And there's an angle to this as well, if just general like on a sort of meta level, learning about technological innovation and something that Ryan Anderson from Parallel Carbon noted for the DAC list that I made.

Then he made a kind of companion like mega DAC database to start to try to track some of these tech like technical developments for DAC overtime.

And it's kind of like a wonderful natural experiment we find ourselves in if we're curious about how industries develop and how technologies advance and the interplay between the private and public sector.

And I feel like these kinds of initiatives of tracking companies, trying to see what's out there, but then seeing what's going well and what's not can be of tremendous value academically as well.

And there have been efforts to try to track many efforts that are very popular about tracking the decrease in solar PV costs over time or EV battery costs and these kinds of things.

And those cost reductions are fundamental to driving a lot of the advances we see in decarbonization today.

So yeah, if we can do more to wrap our hands around what drives innovation both at a like A at a low level technological scale, but also at an industry scale, like what drives innovation, cost decreases and just general success of of the technology.

And how can we maybe leverage those potentially somewhat natural phenomena to our advantage to try to cement the industry's place and help it scale and grow.

I think that's that's a tremendously valuable effort.

Without a doubt it is.

I also like seeing people freed up to think new thoughts.

One of the things that I'm pretty sure I saw this on the podcast before, where I imagine it's what it's like to be divorced, where you maybe have some negative feelings, you know, sadness, anger, resentment, but there's also a sense of liberation.

You're like, oh, I don't, I don't have to have that same argument anymore.

I can move on to new arguments with new people in the future.

And so seeing some of the people who were at companies that closed thinking about new types of carbon removal, see people get more into solar radiation management or other types of like frontier geoengineering tech that may be coming.

People, there's still new thoughts like life is going to continue.

There's still amazing things out there for you.

And your experience at a company trying to make carbon removal work will be valuable.

People will want to talk to you about it.

You will have good stories to tell future employers.

It may help inspire your next nonprofit or for profit enterprise.

Something, something good can still happen.

I think people will think that the end of a company is the end of their life and whatever is coming next couldn't possibly be as good as that one idea.

But these are pretty cheap.

New stuff is coming.

Like maybe you got unlucky, maybe it was a bad idea, maybe you executed poorly.

You could do better next time.

The world still needs your work on Climate 100.

Percent, yeah.

And anything that we get can be done to save IP, to save these kinds of lessons is valuable because like you said, there's a lot of exogenous reasons that things can go bad.

I mean running out of cash, bad investment environment, a bad an investor gives you bad advice, a poor key hire who leaves just a bit bad luck like you said it.

You know all of those things happen, yes.

Anything.

I love thinking about contingency in the role it plays in history, too.

We've talked a little bit about the Bob Woodward books about the presidencies, and you're just shocked by what a person being in the room or not being in the room will impact major policy decisions Or just was the president hungry that meeting?

Were they inked?

And you're like, wow, so much of history.

Not not even like the current president, like basically any big leader will often have.

At what moment do you catch your boss when you're asking them for a raise?

Imagine that, but at the heights of political power in other places.

And a lot of that is outside of your control.

You have no way of knowing.

Sometimes it's just the roll of the dice.

And it's scary to think about how much luck and contingency takes place in business and politics and everywhere else.

We like to think that the world is somewhat rationally ordered, but I'm sure you feel yourself manipulated by forces beyond your control and understanding on a regular basis as well.

You know both of those forces are in play, right?

100% I look back at the course of my whole life and I can trace it to these like individual moments where I made one decision rather than another, often due to arbitrary reasons.

But with that said, even though I hate living life by idioms because I think they reduce a lot of complexity in the world, fortune favors the bold And and that's hence I think it's like you, you can work to make it the case that maybe you can take more easily take advantage of luck when it comes or just put yourself in a position where you can be luckier or in some sense too, there's a lot of like random connections between people that maybe spark an idea on a conversation to lead to something.

But there are principles that we can all live by, like a having a pay it forward mindset in in community or a give first.

Like I think Brad Feld, the investors is a huge proponent of of this kind of give first mentality where it's like just connect people, give give your time, just be nice rather than trying to, you know, build a little motor on your stuff.

And I think if a critical mass of people uses such a principle, it just makes it increasingly likely that you there will be these random connections, random sparks that do fuel a lot of progress.

And so I wouldn't say that, you know, it's like completely out of our control, although of course there are, as we're talking about, there are many things that are totally, I mean, like a neutrino can come from outer space and like knock your brain cell one way and then, you know, you become a psychopath killer.

It can happen.

And so, yeah, there are truly random things, but I think there are ways that we can use certain principles, actions, behaviors that make it easier for us to take advantage of luck.

Besides giving 1st and trying to be a good connector and be patient with people who may not have immediate transactional value for you personally, are there other rules that you use to give the greatest amount of space possible for positive chaos to find you?

Being open minded.

Yeah, you're, you probably are the single most open minded person that I know.

You're up there, Grant.

And you feel like that's helping them?

Thanks, yeah I love changing my mind, probably almost too much.

But I'm also afraid because I think sometimes people who are really open minded and are really into it often become kind of close minded about their open mindedness and then it it kind of can go off the rails a little bit.

But yeah, I'd like to be reasonably open minded.

But the part that I don't like is that I've talked about this and we've talked about this personally before too, is I've, I've tried to recover some of that moral authority and not be so annoyingly charitable to everyone that I no longer make a lot of moral distinction.

I'm more curious than judgmental, which is good.

But the pathological version of it is the the meme of the guy with the brain who turns into a chair that you're sitting on and you're like, Oh, I'm so far above the world and it's probably I'm so wide.

And I think you get high on your own supply with that.

And I think it can be really distorting and cause you to lose track of, oh, actually this is just a bad thing.

And people who think this thing are thinking in ways that they probably wouldn't be proud of if an analog presented itself.

And unfortunately, I gave them some amount of cover by just being like, whoa, a reasonable person could think that.

How do you make sure you're not doing that?

Because I've done that.

I don't like that doing that anymore.

I try not to.

It's extremely difficult.

I think defaulting to rationality, examining your own biases, having other people help similar with a similar mindset help call you out is is beneficial.

But yeah, I find it analogous to the argument that it would be difficult for society to have all altruists or mostly altruists.

Because then if you introduce one psychopath into that system, if everybody's always giving them that, the benefit of the doubt and being nice and giving and that kind of stuff, then the psychopath just completely or the group of psychopaths completely takes over.

So like, you need some kind of accountability.

And I think open mindedness is the same.

If we were all just, oh, I'll entertain anything, I'll entertain anything, then very manipulative actors can come in and just, you know, run roughshod over you.

So it's like, yeah, there needs to be some kind of function.

So you, I think it's helpful to ask yourself too, is the other person arguing in good faith in this or do they have some kind of weird incentive that they're trying to get?

And as I think social media distorts this very much so because we have foreign adversaries operating bot accounts that are trying to sway American public opinion for particular outcomes.

And that's like a very dangerous area where, yeah, it's probably not great to give every random tweet or Reddit post or whatever you see just the benefit of the doubt that all these persons operating in good faith, I think.

So perhaps end the conversation on a bit of a more hopeful note.

I thought it would be interesting to talk about some of the really interesting companies that I stumbled across in, in making the list and what kind of company either one of us would start today in carpet removal.

If if we had to start like a tech or project developer company, not like an ecosystem at player like what, what that would be.

So before I jump into it, what, what's your thought on that?

If you had to start a tech or slash project developer company in Cdr today, what, what would it be?

What?

What would it look like and why?

Oh goodness, can I just keep the money and wait for a better opportunity?

I don't think, I think you got to start something today.

You can maybe like on that idea for a while, but you have to like come up with the idea today and it can morph but not fundamentally.

One thing I keep coming back to is how much I like dedicated project development.

I would probably seek out people with a lot of experience building energy and infrastructure projects of sufficient scale, use what they know about actually how deals like that get done with major corporates and find ways to engineer projects that are likely to be recipients of off takes and of insurance.

And people are thinking this way too.

And I think it's a great model and there are various ways to do it.

I like the way that Deep Sky has a bunch of different tech developers configured at the same site and is focused on scaling.

And that's really interesting.

I like what residuals doing.

I bet there's a bunch of other people that are doing things that don't even necessarily know about.

I like how CO280 is thinking about project development.

I think all of those ways of doing it just leverage lots and lots of experience of people far beyond my own in terms of a business and getting these really big complex deals over the finish line and just finding ways to do that.

I think whatever I did, I wouldn't come about it from an idea first.

I don't think I would be like, oh, I've never thought about insert new zero people have done this thing on your list of tech here.

I don't think I would do that.

I think I would try to take something from one to two essentially and do it in a big way with the learnings of from what it's like working with startups.

A lot of them are like the people who start projects are not necessarily the ones who are best at growing them either.

And I think I would want to find something that was the innovation was taking place more on the business, commercial, financial, legal layers rather than something that was purely on the science layer.

And I like that people are taking off the shelf technology to commercialize it in that way.

So that's the methodology I would use to determine which possibility I would want to do.

But also I'm like, do I have, do I have another founder experience in me right now?

I don't know.

It's, it's crazy, Grant, I guess now you're, you're at a startup right now, you're living it.

You worked at startups, you feel it not as a founder, but you're close enough where you have founder trauma by proxy, I think.

Bit yeah, from yeah, all the sort of stuff over the years into the engagement.

But yeah, that's, that's really interesting.

And that gets me to thinking a little bit about this question of will there even be fundamentally new Cdr technologies or have we more or less like found like are the companies that are going to be responsible for moving gigatons of CO2 in 2050 on this list today?

Are there are the technologies that are going to be in use or are there like fundamentally new things that we can't even really imagine?

Robert, Robert Hoagland say like, no, we actually don't even know which ones they are yet, or they may not have even been even been invented yet.

But probably maybe you disagree.

Yeah, I'd my intuition would would say the opposite.

I kind of like RM is framing that all carbon removal is fundamentally a transformation of either biomass minerals or heat and energy.

And if you look, I mean, it's kind of difficult to find something that goes against that, that framework.

And if that is the framework we're working from, I mean, I think a lot of the fruits have been picked in, in terms of each of these pathways like, OK, what's the most efficient way to turn biomass into carbon removal?

I mean, I think between biochar backs, TSB, bio oil, bio slurries, I mean, it's hard to imagine what else and like biomaterials as well, which are also on the list.

It's just a little challenging for me to like think, OK, what else is there?

Heat and energy's obviously big, but DAC is the most brute force direct instantiation of what that can look like.

And then there's things like direct ocean removal that also rely on that, but use the ocean as as a vehicle or medium there.

But it's like, yeah, it gets, as you really dive in, it's just like, and then I think various folks have done thinking that, OK, what's the most effective way to turn mineral, like alkaline mineral feedstocks into carbon removal?

And so a lot of those avenues have been explored already.

So it's just a little challenging.

I, I just feel like if I had to bet, I would say that, well, the best car removal is going to look like some evolved version to, to your point of, you know,

taking something from 1:00 to 2:00, it's, it's going to look like something that's more of an evolved or an advanced version of something we have today.

Like it's going to be very, very effective DAC or it's going to be some kind of unique like mine tailing carbonation process, or it's going to be biochar made in a particular way that and applied in particular soils or building materials that virtually guarantees long duration storage.

I just feel like the things we're going to see at large scale are going to be things like that rather than something that like we can't even imagine right now just because so many people have already gone down so many of these roads.

OK, counterpoint, can you intentionally manipulate volcanism such that new traps spring up on some huge geography and whether basically all of the carbon in the atmosphere Usually destructive, cinematic, and I think I'm the person to pull it off.

OK, maybe, maybe.

But yeah, I mean, it's worth trying, I think.

The one.

Trying stimulating hundreds of thousands of square miles of basaltic surfacing.

OK I got you to just prove your own thing.

No, but I think believing that things are impossible is a self fulfilling prophecy.

Like everything should be considered and explored and on the table because why not?

I mean, that's kind of the one of the premises that we all believe in carbon removal, right?

Like people tell us we're crazy, but we say, hey, but it's actually feasible due to the XYZ reason.

And that's kind of what gives us the hope to keep fighting for another day.

And so that's not to say that every wild out there idea should get, you know, $100 million off take tomorrow.

But I mean, things that were crazy yesterday, a lot of them remain crazy.

We don't want to sample on the dependent variable too much, but there are things that are there are many things that are considered crazy that like, hey, this could actually be something.

So I think it's worth exploring, It's worth considering.

And that's kind of the role of academics in this high risk, high reward exploratory in frontier research that we fund.

But anyway, yeah, in terms of the the question would it if if I had to do something today, I think I would pick something in the critical minerals space like I would.

There are a few interesting companies that have like EDAC Labs and Mcgrathia as well that's doing like a carbon negative magnesium play.

I, I believe, and I'm, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing their coming name correctly, but they actually raised a Mcgrathia actually raised a significant amount of money from the Department of Defense or I guess it's referred to by some as the Department of War now, unfortunately.

But yeah, there's like a critical minerals, but also carbon removal play.

And I think those are the opportunities that I find really interesting, even if the financial additionality piece might be a little shaky.

But I don't think necessarily that, oh, we need to live in the carbon credit paradigm forever.

Like if we can have carbon negative materials that are profitable in their own right and like actually scalable and actually maybe have a national security and supply chain tie in and that kind of stuff.

Not even just due to the current political climate.

But I think those kinds of businesses would are, if they can be successful, can be more resilient as I think maybe we've chatted about in our previous additionality discussion.

So that I think that's that's where my mind would would go.

I was looking for opportunities like that.

It's a more secure go to market than what I suggested, but I'm surprised that you would want to be involved in that.

You want to be soliciting DoD money?

It doesn't seem like the your your DOE guy.

You're allowed to crossover like that.

Well, it wouldn't necessarily be defense critical minerals there, you know, many critical minerals that are valuable for decarbonization applications as well that aren't necessarily like gallium for 6th generation fighter jets and and things of that nature.

So.

Magnesium helps people stay asleep.

Not to go to sleep, but just stay asleep, yeah.

Yeah.

You would be helping them with that.

Hey, you know, if you help people, it doesn't matter.

I I love helping people, creating utility in the world.

So if it's helping people more easily than also removing carbon, sign me up.

Well, OK, that's clearly going in the bumper for the show.

Thanks, Grant.

That was weird, but I appreciate your kindness.

Thanks for being here, Grant.

Good to have you back.

Yeah, thank you so much for us grabbing me back on.

It's been fun.

Yeah, it's always great fun having you here.

I'll put links in the show notes to your great database.

It provokes some interesting thoughts in in my mind just rolling through it.

So thanks for doing that to imagine quite a laborious task.

So thank you for taking it on for the good of everyone here.