Pushkin, How did spend in your childhood in Southeast India?

Ef fact that we think about climate change.

The place where I grew up, you know, just had to have had their path.

When things got dry, they got really dry, and when things got wet, they got really wet.

You know, the monster's got more and more extreme.

The droughts got more and more extreme over time.

And it's a pretty normal thing to show up to school one day and your friend just like doesn't come to school for like six months at a time because they're helping their parents recover from a flood that happened in months ago.

And it's a pretty common thing for me.

You know, I didn't know it was climate change growing up, honestly, Like it was just like a thing that happened.

It was just climate.

That's what nature was, and things just got worse and worse every year, and that's just how things are.

As I grew up and started learning a lot more, and it started connecting the dots.

What I realized was that the folks who are facing the worst impacts of climate change are the ones who are least educated about it and then the most vulnerable to it already.

And I think That's what I think gives me a lot of motivation and drive that fundamentally, this problem is an unfair one where it's created and where the impacts are most felt.

People ask me like, how did you decide to work on climate?

How did you decide specifically to work on carbon removal?

But for me, it was a no brainer.

Of course I'm going to work on this, and of course this is the most scalable way to solve the problem.

Being an engineer myself, like building these cost models so forth, it's like it's actually possible.

So why didn't we actually go about doing it?

It was just a matter of putting together right team and right partners and going on the journey.

I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem?

The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.

My guest today is Shashank Samala Sschank is the co founder and CEO of Airloom.

Shashank's problem is this, can you use crushed up rocks, specifically limestone, to permanently suck carbon out of the atmosphere?

And crucially can you do it for one hundred dollars per ton of carbon?

To that end Heirloom has built a pilot plant in California near its headquarters, and is currently working on a much larger plant in Louisiana.

By the way, I learned about Shoshank from my conversation a few weeks ago with Nan Ransahoff.

If you missed that one and want to hear more about carbon removal, you might want to check that out.

Shachank began his career in manufacturing.

He wasn't an environmental scientist or a geologist, so to start I asked him about rocks.

We love rocks.

I've dedicated my life to rocks.

When did you discover rocks?

When I realized that carbon capture is like the thing to do, Not everyone has realized it yet, but like people will.

In that journey, I started just reading papers and books at night, and you know, it was basically, what are the natural things that I already doing this?

It's biomass and rocks.

Basically plants and rocks.

Yeah, exactly.

When you start looking at this, it does seem like there's sort of three very crudely kind of modes.

Right, people are using fans, plants, and rocks, right, Yeah, Why did you wind up ruling out fans and plants.

So that's a great question.

I think at the beginning, when I first got started, I wasn't married to any approach.

I come from a manufacturing background.

I was making electronics for satellites and robots and so forth, and you know, manufacturing is superkin margins and you have to understand where your costs are.

And for me, when I first started looking at this problem, it was very clear that at the end of the day, what matters has cost costs pertanos two.

You know, it's not like we're designing an amazingly beautiful car for people to drive around.

All the matters is how many molecules of CO two in the air are and how cost effectively you remove it, how.

Many molecules of CO two per dollar you can get exactly.

So I was just so obsessed about, like, you know, what is the absolute simplest way you can solve this problem.

And there's a bunch of other folks who are using synthetic ways to you know, using fans and so forth to pull carbon, And I think the best way to approach an engineering problem is just like what is the bare minimum you need and then add complexity from there.

So why does this idea of like cheapest absolute bare minimum, why does that lead you to rocks?

Rocks basically have a couple of principles, right, Like, if you start with the idea that you need CO two to be permanently sequestered so you know it doesn't decomposs back into the atmosphere, you need a sponge With rocks, it's the CO two only goes one way and it doesn't respire back you, so it doesn't decompos and they're super cheap.

Earth has already spent billions of years creating this sort of crystal instruction in this geochemical mineral that is thirsty for CO two, and it helped balance the CO two in the atmosphere, So it already paid this energy penalty to make this rock that is super abundant and cheap.

So the mineral the view using it's you know, thirty to forty bucks a ton, and we can reuse it over and over again.

So you know, if you can reuse it s a hundred cycles, you can get the cost per ton for the rock down to twenty thirty cents.

So you land on limestone.

Right, you haven't said limestone, but you're talking about limes.

Ztone, tell me about limestone.

Yeah, So limestone is this amazingly beautiful chemical.

It's a naturally occurring mineral.

There is four percent of the Earth's crust is made up of limestone, and the chemical formula for it is calcium carbonate, and Earth produced a lot of this over you know, billions of years to partly to help balance the CO two in the atmosphere.

It's like if you're a rock climber, it's a chalk that is, it's a carbonate limestone.

It's it's incredibly abundant, basically looks like white powder.

So that's limestone.

It has carbon dioxide in it already, so it's already done the thing you want to do Exactly when you're figuring out what's going to be your play for air capture, like how do you get to where you wind up?

Like you see that limestone has already done this thing.

Limestone already has the carbon, but that's not what you want, Like you want to capture more carbon exactly.

I think carbon removal and directory capture.

It's all a energy optimization play.

Yeah, how do you spend as little energy as possible to remove a bunch of cooto molecules from the air, and you know, and there's a lot of different directions, a lot of different philosophies on how you approach this problem.

And our thesis was, you need a sponge to remove the CO two, and there's an energy that goes into capturing the YOU two, and there's an energy that goes into releasing that CO two so that we can capture more CO two with that sponge.

Right, you got to capture the CO two from the air, and then you've got to do something with it to basically stick it in the ground for ten thousand years exactly.

So it's a two step process.

There's capture and storage.

Right.

All the different angles are doing some version of that, right, those two step process exactly.

It's a capture and a release, capture and regeneration.

And the whole play is how do you minimize energy in both of those steps.

Yeah, because the energy basically winds up being cost, right, like the cost the key input ends up being energy.

Exactly right, exactly right.

It's you know, whether it's in the form of capital equipment, whether it's in the form of literal electrons going in, it's energy.

At the end of the day.

Is the thing to optimize around, and so for us when we looked around, that was not a PhD in material science when I started this, right, like, I come from a manufacturing background, and I literally just like picked up my chemistry books from high school and reread them to you know, first getting started and basically like, if this is the framework and you're trying to optimize energy on both sides, first you start with the capture step.

Okay, well what already does this naturally?

Right?

And there's a bunch of carbonates, calcin carbonate, machnicin carbonate, and so forth.

And we ended up with calcin carbonate limestone because it needs the lowest amount of energy to capture CO two, okay, just thermodynamically, and it's thermodynamically favored.

It's so thirsty for COO two, Like if you figure out a way to break it to release that COO two and you put that on your desk, it just starts gobbling up COO two molecules whether you like it or not.

So it's very energy favorable for step one exactly capture, but it doesn't want to release it once it has it right as you put it out.

There's two steps.

There's two steps.

Now you've got this limestone full of carbon, but you got to get it to release it.

And it does seem like for you that's the hard part.

That's certainly the energy intensive part.

That is certainly the energy intensive part.

Not just for us, it's actually basically everyone else.

Oh you mean, for all of the carbon capture and removal.

It's actually the release is the hard part.

The release is the most energy intensive part.

And when we first picked limestone, we liked the way of releasing CO two in the second step because cement industry already does this, cement and lime industry.

They take limestone, they break it into calcium oxide CO two put the cootwo into the air, but they take the calcium oxide, put a bunch of other stuff to it, and turn it into cement.

And just to be clear, like let's just pause there, because this is a giant global industry that in fact is a huge emitter for this reason, right fact, the key input to cement is limestone.

And the basic thing you do when you're making cement is you put limestone in a kiln, make it very hot, and you just burn off the CO two and then you're left with lime, which is whatever, it's calcium oxide something.

Yeah, So there is a question I have there, which is like, there's already a giant global industry of people doing this.

Yes, would it not be more efficient to just capture that CO two that they're already releasing literally today in great quantities and stick that in the ground.

We should absolutely do that, And there's many companies already doing that as well.

And that's that's called points source capture, So where you're essentially avoiding emissions from a cement plant or national gas power plan fitting the CO two into.

The air, and then you get to sell the cement, right.

I feel like the economics there are much more favorable.

Well, you're selling cement, but it's actually an added cost to capture that CO two.

Right, sure, So I mean ideally you could sell the cement and sell the carbon capture and removal.

Yeah, it's a different technical method.

It's it's points source capture, and there's a bunch of folks already working on it.

What we're focused on is removing COEO two that's already in the air.

Are you assuming that like in X years ten or something, everybody making cement's going to do that?

Anyways?

And you want to do a marginal benefit.

So if you look across four thousands CEM in plants that already exist on the planet, there's a bunch of other infrastructure that needs to be in place for points source capture to happen.

There's a bunch of cemen plants that are close to where energy is cheap and underground storage is available, where they can do points source capture, and we should absolutely do it.

But there's also many many cimon plants, thousands of cimon plants that are not near where a COE to underground storage is available or energy is not available.

To actually capture that CO two from from the flue gas that it would be very expensive.

You would have to transport that CO two hundreds of miles away and that costs a lot of money, and effectively it becomes a cost benefit analysis where it could actually be cheaper to remove the CO two than putting a point source capture on top of it.

So okay, so that's why not do it with cement or not just do it with cement exactly.

So you have this idea, what are the obvious problems with it?

When you come up with the idea, what are the like, oh, here's why it's going to be difficult.

Here's why it's going to be difficult.

So I think at the beginning, you know, when before the start started, and I think people knew that rocks can capture CO two, but the problem was it was too slow.

You know, geochemically, naturally, it would take maybe six months or a year to fully saturate itself with CO two in the air.

So if you put that on your desk, it would take that long.

And if you put that into a cost model, you pretty quickly realize that there's just no way this can get to one hundred bucks a ton long term.

Just because you've got to have like essentially a factory, and all that's happening at your factory is rock is sitting there for a year exactly.

You need gobs and gobs of limestone, yea, And I mean think of you know, thousands of scure kilometers to capture you.

Know, not gonna work.

It's not gonna work.

So, you know, it was pretty clear from the beginning that this thing needs to be at least ten times faster, if not more.

And at the beginning, we're not sure whether this is even possible.

And you know, we just had a few scientists just playing around with a few different things, and they figured out how to basically give it superpowers to pull carbon from the air faster.

And over the last been seven years, where you know, we started at six months, and we first went to you know, three months, and then you know, it went down to a month, and then it went down to two weeks and five days and four days.

We're way down below that today.

And what's been interesting is people will always ask me, why is this so important for you to cycle time?

And it's so important because the difference between ten days and five days is for the same amount of capital equipment, I can get two x to through put right, and the costs come down just dramatically.

So that's been our biggest lever and it's been amazing.

Every twelve to eighteen months we figured out a way to make it about two ks faster.

I think that's where a lot of optimism comes from for cost reduction.

Is there one particular improvement that would be interesting to talk about, one particular thing you figured out or your team figured out to go faster.

There's about fifteen to twenty different parameters internally, you know, there's like particle size, particle size distribution, the porosity of the particle, the surface area of each particle.

So these are just physical traits.

You sort of mash up the rock in different ways, grind it up one way or grind it up another way.

Yeah, so we actually grind it up only once at the beginning, when we first get the feed stock from the mine.

But how you run the process, you know what temperature and what residents time you have in the oven.

You know, it's sort of like when you're baking cookies in an oven, right, Like there's a few levers you have, and it actually turns out they have a big implication on how the physical properties of these things are.

But it's not chemical.

You're not like adding chemical inputs.

You're just monking with the limestone in different ways to get you know, a magnitude of it's.

Pretty insane, Like it's the science is a lot more complicated.

But there's a specific parameter space that the nature really loves limestone to be in, and we're constantly experimenting with how you get into that tight space.

When you say nature loves that, you mean that makes it particularly eager to absorb carbon dioxide.

Exactly Yeah, humidity.

For example, we love humidity.

It actually forms a thin layer of water on top of lime and it makes it even more thirsty for COO two, And all these things kind of work together.

And our technology is all about how do you keep this rock in that tight space so we can capture you know, CO two about one hundred times faster.

That tight possibility space, that tight space of possible, and.

As cheaply as possible.

Right, Like, we're not adding chemicals, we're not adding catalysts, just a bunch of rocks sitting on trace.

Let's talk about the facility.

So you built this facility in Tracy, California, right east of San Francisco.

That's sort of a pilot plant.

Let's talk about that as a way to understand the process.

What does it look like if I drive up there?

Like, how big is it?

What does it look like?

So you drive up there and the first thing you see is that there's a big box and the box is basically, you know, it's a semi open building.

Like the size of Costco or something.

When you say big box, like how big are you talking?

Yeah, it's this specific one is probably a quarter size of a Costco.

And once you go in, you will see these tall stocks of trays.

Imagine very large baking trays, stock multiple stories.

How many stories?

How tall?

So this specific one is about forty feet tall, a couple hundred trays stacked all the way to the top.

And if you come closer to each tray, you'll start seeing kind of like a large white cookie crumbled sitting on a tray, and.

It looks like it's just sitting there, but actually it's absorbing carbon dioxide out of the air exactly.

And what's cool is when you so you start out with, you know, a bunch of white powder, and there's a small amount of water that basically makes it cohesive, and over time it's actually growing, just like growing like a cookie, right, And as it's growing, it forms all these cracks and it crumbles and so forth, and all that extra mass is COO two.

The only thing that captures is CO two from the air.

And so at this point, how long does that process take?

It takes a day or something.

It takes a few days.

The ones upcoming are much faster, So I'll keep that under the rest.

So then you have your big cookie full of carbon dioxide.

What do you do with it?

After a few days.

We don't wait until one hundred percent saturation.

We wait until eighty five ninety percent, and then we bring it over to a hot kiln.

And this kiln is running.

You know, it's electric, it's renewable energy powered, so.

It's super high, right, what is it like, nine hundred degrees celsius or exactly right?

Wildly hot?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Basically, you're exposing this material for ten to fifteen seconds to very high temperature, and it's decomposing.

It's releasing the CO two that it captured from the air, and now you essentially have high purity CO two coming out of the kiln.

We compress it and in the case of the Tracy facility, we store it in concrete, but in the future facilities it's either going underground or it's used for synthetic fuels and so forth.

The line that comes off of it, it's ready to capture more CO two.

So we're sending it back into the tray, expose it to the air, capture more CO two, Wait a few days, put it back in the kilnt and the cycle repeats over and over and over again.

Heating get kiln to nine hundred degrees See is wildly energy intensive, right, And obviously for your project, you're not going to burn fossil fuel to do that.

But is that in terms of the cost of the whole thing, Is that the expensive part?

That's the expensive part, Yes, And I think the one thing to realize is that the cement industry does this incredibly efficiently.

Obviously they use cold natural gas and so forth, and you know, they've had decades of learning around how to do this efficiently so that you know, there's all sorts of heat exchange and heat recovery, and what we're doing right now is basically learning from that industry to incorporate that heat recovery so that the energy is as low as possible.

I often think about, you know, what is the energy that's required for us to hit one hundred dollars per ton And we will talk about why hundred dollars per ton in a minute for that project, about two mega wat hours pertennaco two And if we adopted everything the cement industry alreadopted like, we could be a lot lower than two mega what hours.

So you're not breaking physics in terms of the energy required to get to that.

So you know, for us, the main goal is to make it as energy efficient as possible, recover heat, reuse the heat, and so forth, so that you're not losing that heat to the atmosphere.

So you're saying you just have to be as efficient as a industrial cement plant.

Is that what you're saying exactly?

I feel like it's harder than that.

Sound Well, it's harder because folks have not done this yet for an electric kiln.

I see, there's a reason fossil fuel is awesome, right, Like, it's incredibly efficient way to generate heat.

It has one notable downside which you're trying to fix.

How many mega wade hours per ton does it take you?

Now?

It takes us maybe I want to say three ish mega white hours.

Okay, you got to get a third out of that.

Yeah, A lot of it is just heat recovery, right, Like how the cement kilns have done it is they have, you know, multiple decades of experience just figuring out how to reuse the heat.

And for us just doing that with an electrical system with fossil fuel, you know, what you're doing is you're spending a bunch of energy burning that fuel that you don't get back with electrical it's renewable, right, Like once you put in the energy, you can actually use those electrical heating elements over and over again, so overall thermal efficiency is actually higher.

So that's actually what makes me so excited that like we're getting closer and closer to what's actually possible.

We'll be back in just a minute.

Tell me what you're working on in Louisiana.

We're building Project Cypress and this is a director capture hub that is funded by the Department of Energy and US along with our partner Client Works and BTEL.

We're building a hub.

Clim Works is fans, right, using fans to do air capture.

They've they've been working in Iceland, right.

And Battel is like a big what are they like an oil field services coming to their big like industrial firm.

Am I thinking of the right company.

Battel is a engineering and procurement and their government contractor they're the hub owner and they're the ones interfacing with the government because this is a public private partnership.

So how big is the thing you're building there, Like, what's it going to look like?

It's multiple phases and it's going to scale up to about a megaton one million tons of CO two removed over the multiple phases of the project.

What you said about a million tons per year, right, that's per year, and so that's like a big natural gas power plant.

That's about what that is, right, order of magnitude.

In terms of coog omitted, it's about it's a very large national gas.

Power maybe two maybe two x.

Or are there something like a thousand of those in the country five hundred one thousand.

Right now, depending on you.

Yeah, at least a thousand across the world.

There's yeah, multiple thousands.

When I was sort of figuring out that math, I was praying for the interview, like I got disheartened, to be honest, Like I was like, Oh, here's the great, big one, and the government is supporting it and putting in hundreds of millions of dollars.

Right, that's the order of magnitude for this project.

And it's like, oh my god, it's just like one two little power plants and there's like a thousand of them.

I don't know, it just felt so small when I did that math.

Do you feel that way?

Like how does it play for you if you just take a step back and think about the climate problem?

Right?

Like it's you know, if you're emitting fifty billion tons of CO two into the air every year, you know, agriculture, automotive, shipping, airplanes, all sorts of things are emitting SEO two oil and gas.

Plants fifty billion, fifty thousand million, we're talking about one million and then this is fifty thousand million.

Yeah, and you know us about one hundred hundred and fifty years of infrastructure.

So, you know, I think when we think about building a carbon and mobile industry, that is essentially reversing that and removing that.

You know, right now, what we're focused on is creating a blueprint, creating a template that we can emulate.

We can if you make this so cheap, right, if you make this so cheap such that it's an economic no brainer and it uses materials that are very abundant and scalable, and you can emulate this all across the world, then I think making this a blueprint and showing that it is scalable, that's really the first goal of what we're trying to do.

And this is not dissimilar to the first utility solar plant that was built in two thousand and nine twenty ten in the US where it took us multiple years and lots of government subsidies.

But once we build that, now we're building them every week.

Yeah, solar is a good model of like an incredibly fast ramp, right.

And it is amazing when you look at those estimates from like big credible government organizations over the last fifteen years of how big is solar going to be?

Like every year they underestimate what's going to happen the next year.

Right, The line keeps getting steeper, So I guess that's a good model.

Right, And that is a model of just like it just got so cheap, right, because it's so simple.

Yeah, it's just so simple.

There's so many things we can learn from solar.

One is the cost floor and the abundance of materials that went into making these solar panels and silicon basically sand is the raw material for making those solar panels.

And the cost floor for the solar panel is so cheap that the more you make them, the cheaper it got.

And the second thing that we can learn from it is the adoption really started taking off in ways that humans found it very hard to predict.

Is grid parity.

Once the cost became as cheap or cheaper than the cost of electricity from other sources in the grid.

It was an economic no brainer to all of his deploy because it was always the cheapest thing for us.

How do you translate that into a director capture one, you know, use abandoned materials, use cheap materials.

Whereas you the more you deploy, the more you learn, the cheaper it gets.

So if you're doing that with limestone and you're seeing those learning rates every year, And the second thing is, you know what is that cost?

Where does that real adoption come in?

And you know, for us, we think that's probably around two fifty three hundred dollars per ton.

And that's where it really starts to say, okay, like removing carbon starts to be an economically cheaper thing to do than say other types of hard to decarbonized methods.

And that's when you start turning the flywheel to further reduce the costs down to one hundred dollars per ton.

I mean, there is a problem that you have that director capture has that solar doesn't, right, which is people are paying for electric power already, and if I pay for electricity, I get electricity.

And there is this basic public goods problem with direct air capture, which is I pay for direct air capture, everybody gets the benefit of it, and I get literally like one five billionth of the benefit of it.

Right, So that is a profound problem.

How does that look to you?

How are we going to deal with that one?

So the way to think about public goods generally, and at the end of the day, there needs to be a price on carbon in some way, shape or another, and different economies approach the problem differently.

A price on carbon imposed by the gum Like the government has to pass a law that says if you emit, you have to pay a tax, or there's a cap and trade or something exactly.

Yeah, and you're seeing this.

United Kingdom's emissions trading scheme just started to incorporate carbon removal into their cap and trade scheme.

Is that good for you?

Does that mean companies in the UK can come to you and pay you to stick carbon in the ground and get the credit they need.

That's a direction that they're going.

So economies across the world are coming up with schemes where carbon removal is integrated into how they think about broader climate mitigation.

Carbon will be priced one wayship or another.

And for us, what that means is that while those markets are coming online and getting more robust, or do we get off the ground.

And you know that's where Frontier and Microsoft.

You know, these folks have been incredibly catalytic.

Basically companies, companies that are paying for director capture now exactly.

I often compare them to you know what Germany did to solar in two thousand and six.

You know, they essentially, you know, catalyzed the demand and helped bring down the cost.

They created a subsidy, right, the government created a big subsidy that was sort of the birth of the modern solar power movement.

Exactly.

Tell me about what's happening politically in the US for a director capture.

Director capture is an interesting one politically because we've generally found pretty good bipartisan support for it.

I think the best way to put is forty five Q.

Forty five Q is a tax credit.

It's one hundred and eighty dollars per ton that the government payss for every time a CO two vise a questor underground.

Which is a lot.

That's a really significant subsidy.

Essentially, it's huge, it's essentially the US putting a price on carbon for director capture.

Right, So before the IRA it was fifty and IRA increased to one eighty.

And the most recent one, Big Beautiful Bill has preserved it and it actually enhanced it.

That is surprising, I think on a certain level.

Right.

I mean, clearly many of the sort of energy transition climate change subsidies from the IRA were reduced or eliminated in the Big Beautiful Bill and the bill that just passed.

Why did director capture subsidies survive when others got eliminated?

I think generally the way to think about DAK is you're producing COEOTO molecules from the air and you can use THEOTO molecules support underground for removals, or you can use THEOTO molecules to make synthetic fuels for ships and planes.

You can also use them to get more oil out of the ground.

Right, this is the thing some people do with them.

This is a thing that some people do.

Yeah.

So I think what the technology is a platform.

What it gave for boths in the aisle are it's both a climate and mitigation tool, and it contributes to us being able to produce a lot more energy.

Uh, huh.

You know, in this case, you know synthetic fuels like clean energy, so you.

Can tell the sort of energy dominance story.

It's kind of a drill baby, drill story if you want it to be well.

In this case, I think there are ways to make low carbon synthetic fuels.

And as you know, you've signed a partnership with United.

Well talk about that with United Airlines.

So talk about that partnership.

It's a strategic partnership where they're both investor in the company and an off take agreement for the future.

It's five hundred thousand tons of CO two that they have an option to either choose to store underground or utilize it to make low carbon synthetic fuels, sustainable aviation fuels to run their planes.

And so in that ladder universe, it's sort of turning airplane fuel into a circular economy.

Like they fly the plane and that emits CO two and then you capture CO two and turn it into more fuel.

That's the model there.

I mean, the political valance of director capture is really interesting.

An oil company owns the biggest director capture facility in the US, right, and then on this sort of relatively far left, you have director capture skepticism, right, People who are like it just will give people permission to keep burning fossil fuels and not transition fast enough.

As you know, the problem is just so so massive that I think the argument of this will only continue what we're doing.

It's hard to see much of many lakes to it because at the end of the day, we need to reduce as much as possible, Like you know, first we need to reduce emissions in all sorts of different things, and anything that we cannot reduce we should remove.

And unfortunately, the slower we reduce, the slower we decarbonize, the bigger and the bigger gap that we have.

Yeah, that we're you know, the removal gap just gets bigger and bigger.

And that's what's happening right now.

Why did you get into the director capture business?

I think a couple of reasons.

One is the size of the problem was so massive, and the number of people working on it as rigorously and with the right approach that I thought was right was just limited.

When first Guards started.

You looked at what people were doing in carbon removal, and what did you think.

I thought either they were not as scalable or they would be too expensive.

You thought you could do better.

I could do better.

So I mean, at the end of the day, like hopefully there will be fifty hundred companies, massive companies, just like there's fifty two hundred basket of oil and companies that remove carbon.

Each have a different approach.

And I think what attracted me to director capture also is just the level of impact you can have.

I mean technically, you know, because the abundance of limestone is so hi, the impact is infinitively scalable.

Right, There's not many solutions you can say you can scale it up to hundreds of gigatons.

Hundreds of gigatons would be carbon negative as a world if it were.

That big, right, right, And we need to do that this century.

First, the goal is to get to net zero as a society, hopefully by twenty fifty.

Yeah, and IPCC predicts that from twenty fifty to twenty one hundred we are in the negative territory.

So we're net negative, sucking more carbon dioxide out of the air than we are emitting.

Yeah, do you think that'll happen?

Yeah?

I mean I think I take my cues from solar and wind.

You want solar more than wind, right, yeah.

Yeah, you want solar more than wind for sure.

I think once you get to a cost that is societally acceptable and affordable, it will take a life of its own in terms of its scale.

And obviously you want the you know, carbon markets, compliance markets to incorporate the price of carbon across the world as well.

But I think there's a flywheel there as well.

You know, as you deploy more, it gets cheaper.

And I think that it will happen because you know, there is a future that we can create, a future of abundance where you know, we can have all the intelligence we want, we can have, you know, all the things that we want, and we can take care of the planet provided that it is affordable.

That's why this one hundred dollars per ten I think is so important.

Where I do think at that point, the closer we get there, the faster it scales up.

We'll be back in a minute with the liking round.

Okay, I want to ask you some lightning round questions.

Now, what was one thing that was really striking to you when you were in eighth grade and you moved from Southeast India to Maine.

Man, so many things.

Let me think about that for a sec.

Yeah, there was a lot of culture shock, academic shock, language shock for a twelve year old kid to be dropped into bangor Maine coming from India.

It was very interesting.

To make it simple, but I think, you know, one thing that I found, which I'm actually grateful for, the way that the education system in India grew up was very much like memory based.

I think what I really appreciated moving to the US at that age is sort of that flip in to thinking of being a lot more analytical, a lot more vigorous, which I just found a lot more natural.

I heard you say in another interview that companies fail because they stop having difficult conversations, and so I'm curious, what is a recent difficult conversation that you had at work?

Yeah.

You know, one of our main principles is radical honesty.

It's one of our three main principles, and for so many reasons, it's the right thing to do.

Right.

It's you know, pursuing physics, pursuing truth, pursuing merit, and you know, how do you create a culture where it's vulnerable and open and safe to have honest and difficult conversations and once you get it, it's it's really amazing.

For example, yesterday I was given feedback by one of my reports around asking a individual contributor for their time working on a project without working with the manager on exactly the scope of it.

So somebody who was like, hey, don't ask this person to do this thing without asking their manager if they have time in surance?

Right, pretty straightforward, right, you know, because the manager has understanding of the fool and doing the scope and a lot of the times, like this type of feedback is like, ah, I don't know if this is worth talking to the CEO out right, but like this person fall safe enough to share with me, and I was so proud of it that it's like, man, thank you for sharing this.

I could have just spent an extra minute thinking about how to approach that conversation and then this person fell safe enough to do it.

And one thing I'd tell other founders is, you know there isn't inherently that power dynamic.

You know, the emperor has no clothes, right, Like, how do you create a culture, how do you create a bi directional feedback loop between leaders and folks working on the problem at the core every day.

Shashank Samala is the co founder and CEO of Airloom.

Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm.

We are always looking for new guests for the show.

Today's show was produced by Trinomanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang.

It was edited by Alexander Garretton and engineered by Sarah Bruguerrett.

I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem

MHM.