Big-ticket investments in carbon removal innovation are newsworthy, but perhaps nothing captures the public imagination quite like a cash prize. And the $100M purse associated with XPRIZE Carbon Removal happens to be the largest in history. So, how does an award of this magnitude translate to meaningful climate solutions?
Dr. Marcius Extavour is the Vice President of Energy and Climate at XPRIZE, a nonprofit using large-scale global competitions to crowdsource solutions to the world’s greatest challenges. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Dr. Extavour joins Ross to discuss XPRIZE Carbon Removal, explaining how Elon Musk got involved in funding the $100M prize purse and what it takes to win the $50M grand prize.
He describes how winning an XPRIZE gives a project momentum, offering insight on how the prize model complements traditional investments and sharing historic examples of awards that led to technological breakthroughs. Listen in for Dr. Extavour’s call to maintain a collaborative spirit in the carbon removal space as it evolves and find out how you can get involved in XPRIZE Carbon Removal.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
XPRIZE Carbon Removal Overview
XPRIZE Carbon Removal Guidelines
Email carbonremoval@xprize.org
CarbonCure on Reversing Climate Change S2EP16
Carbon Upcycling on Reversing Climate Change S2EP60
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
Dr. Extavour’s Keynote at the 2021 AirMiners Conference
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori’s Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Dr. Marcus Extivore, VP Energy and Climate at XPRIZE. Hey, Marcus. Hey, Ross. How you doing? I’m doing well. Thanks for coming on the show.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Cool, man. It’s great to be here. First time caller, long time listener type of situation.
Ross Kenyon: That’s nice. You’ve checked out the show before? I have. Yeah. I remember when you guys launched it and I’ve heard a couple of the episodes over time. So thrilled to be here. Thrilled to have you. Of course, it was only a matter of time since there is a carbon removal X prize that Elon Musk is in large part responsible for funding. So it makes perfect sense to have you here now. But why the decision to fund the award in Dogecoin?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: We’re starting off with the tough ones. You’re going to set the web on fire with that. Of course, I’ve been watching the Doge price this week like everybody else. That is an unconfirmed rumor. Let’s put it that way.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so sorry. Okay, that is not true. I didn’t mean to spread rumors on the podcast. But yes, how did this happen? How did Elon get involved? And we’re gonna dig into the history of the XPRIZE, but let’s start there since it’s such a grabby thing.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Sure, sure. Well, it’s sort of like, from my perspective, it’s one of those things like, you know, this is saying, it takes 10 years to be an overnight success or something like that. We’ve been, we had the idea to design a prize in carbon removal. A little over two years ago. In fact, I remember it was suggested that we sort of have an annual ideation jam at XPRIZE to try to get new ideas for possible future prizes. A lot of our ecosystem is there. And somebody, not me, said, oh, we should do something about extracting CO2.
And I remember at first kind of raising an eyebrow, being like, really? Why do we need to do this? It seems really similar to a prize we’re already doing. I think I even stood up and said that. Like, ah, are we sure we need this? Anyway, we’ve got a mandate to work on it. Long story short, we designed the prize over going through our kind of design cycle, talking to a lot of people, trying to figure out what’s the best way to do this, and been working on it for some time.
We were fundraising heavily for it in 2020. But of course, 2020 was when we learned about COVID-19. A lot of that sort of had to change and we were pivoting and we were really just trying to figure out how to take it forwards, engaging different people. And toward the end of the year and the beginning of early this year, we connected with the Musk Foundation. And really, that’s how it came together. So it came together pretty quickly with that group. But it’s also our fortune that we were kind of ready to go with a program that we had spent a good amount of time thinking about and designing.
And of course, we’ve like gone back to revisit it, but that’s really how it came together.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe it’s good to contrast it with the other prize that we’ve had a number of folks involved with on who we’ve had carbon cure on, we’ve had carbon upcycling technology on. How is that different from this new one?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Yeah, thanks. Well, the prize we just wrapped up and Congrats to UCLA Carbon Built and Carbon Cure for winning and really all the finalists for showing up and showing out. That was about CO2 conversion. The basic challenge was here’s some CO2 from a point source. We’d like you to turn it into something of economic value. That’s the whole premise. And now we call that Carbon Tech or Carbon Utilization or CCUS and it goes by other names. The prize we’ve just launched is about removal.
I think you know what that is, but our focus is Whether it’s converted into economic value or not, the bigger point is there’s CO2 in the air and in the oceans. We’d like you to get it out and sequester it durably, somehow, some way. Whatever method you can demonstrate, that’s what we’d like to see. So they’re cousins, but they’re going after two goals. One is, can you avoid emissions by turning it into stuff? And this one is, let’s just focus on this removal step, which we know we also need.
The award amounts are quite different too. This seems like a very large increase. It’s huge. This is the largest prize X Prize has ever done. And we think it’s the largest prize of any kind in history. So that’s a huge number. It’s funny. I mean, it’s such a big amount. It’s a pretty fun endeavor to be in a position to give that money away. We’re a nonprofit and the purpose is to pass that money on to people that are doing good stuff.
But also it’s funny to think that It’s also a small number in comparison to probably what we need. Climate and carbon are such big things. And so as huge as I think the prize amount is, it still, I think, is going to function like a prize should, which is it’s going to be a spark. It’s going to be a catalyst. It’s going to get people talking. It should be an exciting demonstration of what’s possible. Yes, the idea of winning... $50 million and like a wire transfer of undiluted capital is incredible.
That kind of opportunity just doesn’t exist. I’ve never heard about it in any other place. I’m excited to be part of this one. And nevermind the other awards that we can give out along the way, but it’s a huge number. We’re pretty thrilled they could come together. Thanks to Musk Foundation, obviously, for making that happen. But at the same time, I think of it as still something that’s got to be catalytic. And so just to get into some XPRIZE jargon, we want this to be a leverage prize, meaning we want to put up $100 million and have that $100 million and the prize exercise generate way more than $100 million into carbon removal.
If we can do that, then we can say we’ve done something successful, I think.
Ross Kenyon: It’s such an interesting approach where I suppose the Musk Foundation or Elon Musk personally or his family office could have invested in a number of companies, sort of like maybe what Bill Gates does with Breakthrough Energy Ventures. But why the focus on a prize? And why does XPRIZE exist in this way? Do you think this is unlocking something different from more conventional investments?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s complementary. So it’s complementary in the following way. So it’s complementary to traditional investments because we have no interest the equity or the intellectual property of competitors. XPRIZE can’t develop technologies on our own. There’s no reason for us to hold IP and we don’t take equity positions and competitors. So in that sense, it’s the only time you kind of get non-dilutive capital, I think, in the venture world is, well, in the angel investing world. And that’s at the very, very early stage.
Now, it’s also complementary in contrast with a grant, which is another great source of funding that I think is crucial for our space. There, you usually are funded to pursue an idea, whereas in a prize, in the XPRIZE model, you are rewarded for accomplishing a task. So you demonstrate your carbon removal solution, you win a prize. Probably you needed some grant money, angel investment, venture investment to accomplish the task in the first place. So a prize on its own can’t achieve much if there isn’t a broader ecosystem that can help fund the actual work.
I think part of the theory of change for us is announcing a prize can help to grow and expand that funding ecosystem. And make even more room, in the language of venture, more deal flow for the breakthrough energy ventures of the world, more opportunities for granting agencies to come in. So one of the things we do during the prize, one of my jobs while competitors are getting busy doing their thing is calling up the breakthroughs of the world, calling up granting agencies and saying, hey, We’ve got 5, 10, 15, 500 people interested in the prize.
You should take a look at them too. Do they meet your funding criteria? Can we collaborate? Should we collaborate? How do we share what information we have? Because the point is, as I said, in leverage model, how do we drive more attention, creativity, people, dollars into this space to help grow it and enrich it?
Ross Kenyon: That’s great to understand. And it makes sense to me. This prize struck me as epic making in the same way that the IPCC 1.5 degrees Celsius report was talking about the necessity for carbon removal. Before that, carbon removal, I felt like it was much more niche. In some circles, it had sort of a fringier reputation where now it’s functionally mainstream as far as I can tell. But a prize like this seems like another one of these. I can’t even keep up with the space anymore.
I used to know seemingly everyone and I no longer do. Do you agree with that characterization?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: I definitely agree with the back half of it. I mean, I think I know what’s going on in carbon removal, but there’s plenty of things I don’t know about. And whenever I see one, I just think, wait a minute, why didn’t I know about this? Am I not working hard enough? But also, it’s a sign that the space is growing and maturing. That’s sort of good, right? I used to work a lot more in solar PV. I never asked myself things like, why haven’t I heard about this person that wrote that paper?
I just accepted the fact there were a sea of researchers out there doing solar cells because that’s the case because it’s much bigger. So even though it’s a little uncomfortable to feel like, wait a minute, what, there’s a new group? I can’t keep track. In the end, it’s a good thing, right? More people doing more things, challenging one another, helping to get better. And then in terms of being a moment, time will tell, but I certainly hope so. I think one of the directives we got from Elon Musk was, Something along the lines of just make sure this matters.
Don’t have this sort of sink into oblivion when the prize is over. And that’s, I think, his way of saying we’re doing this not just to have a winner, not just to see some demos, but to have those things mean something to take the space forward for actual carbon removal, for actual climate solutions. And let’s design the prize with always with that in mind. So that’s sort of one of our North Stars.
Ross Kenyon: I know Carbon Cure better than Carbon Built, which is somewhat newer to me, but it seems like they achieved a huge amount of momentum after being declared the winner. It seems like they are making the most of that announcement. It seems like it is a big push.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: I certainly hope so. And I’m really glad, in a respectful way, I’m proud of what they’ve achieved. And I’m very grateful that the prize winning has meant something to them and also the participation. That’s the goal. That’s really gratifying, somebody to help deliver that program. There’s another type of prize or challenge that you can do, which is where you kind of just write down a technical spec or a meaningful spec and say, whoever can hit it wins. And you do it in a more behind seat, closed doors, quiet way.
What I think is interesting about doing these prizes You get that exact effect. Winning it means something, not just to the expert community, but to other people. It’s a bit of a badge. UCLA Carbon Build can say, I saw them, Dr. Gaurav Sant, the team leader there, I saw him refer to their company as the Carbon X Prize winning. UCLA, Carbon Bill. And I just thought, okay, this is great. Whatever leverage they get out of this is good. If it’s good for them, then it’s good for the exercise.
And that’s, for us, it’s gratification that, yeah, okay, these prizes can mean something. They aren’t the only thing and they shouldn’t be thought of as like replacements for other interventions, but they can be additive and hopefully lensing or multiplying. If we see that, then that’s good evidence that, hey, it’s actually achieved something.
Ross Kenyon: I want to poke around a little bit on this award being the biggest award in human history. I’m trying to think of other examples of this leading to technological breakthroughs. One of my colleagues had mentioned that the British government had a prize for determining longitude back in the day. And that was a great example. But are there other examples of this being used to advance technology?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Yeah, there are. So Longitude Pride is a famous one. And actually, there’s a book, I think, called Longitude. I recommend it. I saw it on a coffee table. I don’t know if coffee table books still exist, but it’s a cool story. I just finished getting through the Netflix Pirates series, as in a random aside. Point is... Well, it should have. It was a myth. But think of like the early 1700s and before, think of seafaring and that time where the ocean was a true frontier in a way that it isn’t now.
I mean, it is, but in a different way. Anyway, that was a pressing problem of like navigation at the time. So it’s a cool read. The founding story, this is like the founding dogma of XPRIZE, but it was modeled after a prize called the Orteague Prize. I had never heard of that before I joined the organization. Short story, wealthy business person called Orteague, maybe Raymond Orteague, says, I would like someone to fly between New York and Paris. And it was responding to that prize.
I think he was a hotel operator maybe and put up $25,000 of the period dollars. And responding to that prize is what resulted in Charles Lindbergh’s first transatlantic flight. And so it didn’t invent aircraft. It didn’t invent flying, but it proved that you could actually fly across the ocean and that airplanes could be used for more than just, let’s say, crop dusting or military purposes. So it was a little bit like the four minute mile and since it broke a psychological barrier. And the story goes, it’s like there was a huge uptick in applications for pilots licenses after that because it made the front page.
It was a big news item of the day. So cool story of not a technology breakthrough per se. But a cultural breakthrough in how technology could be used or applied that led to a broader societal change, like commercial aviation started after that. And so I don’t know if that is, I’m not saying we’re going to see a cultural revolution in carbon removal per se, but that’s another example of how prizes were used. And there’s a few others. There’s a famous Napoleonic era prize for canning food preservation.
Several prizes from the 19th century. I kind of professionally grew up in engineering and physics, so I was always like getting distracted and reading the margins of my textbooks where there are always famous prizes about mathematicians in history. So a mathematician writes down an unsolvable equation, sends it to their buddies. They correspond by mail over some extremely slow number and long number of years. But a lot of different examples of different types of prizes, not all exactly the same, but XPRIZE didn’t invent prizes. But I think what the organization did is adapt them into the modern context and then try to deploy this model.
In different topic areas to see if we can use that to rally people together and push technology and communities forward. I love all of that. It’s pretty funny to think about, I think. We used to have this great prize wall in the office, which I have basically not been to for a year, but at our XPRIZE office, it was sort of like things XPRIZE has done over time. But also, here’s something that we know about the history of different prizes that kind of inspired the organization to say, hey, what if we used prizes in a modern way and structured them in this following way, so.
It’s pretty neat. I do recommend that book, Longitude. That’s a pretty good one.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ll check that out. Do you think that more people in a position to engage in philanthropy should be looking at this model? Do you think this is a good way to go and underutilize? I can also imagine if there’s too many prizes, it might be too diffuse.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Well... You know, great question. I think in some contexts, perhaps, but at the risk of kind of getting fired from XPRIZE, a prize isn’t always, I think, appropriate. I think it’s very important to think carefully about, not necessarily is a prize the best intervention, but will it achieve anything? So examples of areas where I don’t think prizes work well are, one, where there’s already a ton of innovation and capital flowing. And there isn’t really an obvious barrier. It’s just a question of doing more and doing more and doing more to advance the technology or solve a problem.
So for instance, probably different people have views on this, but solar PV, for instance, something I used to work more on. Are there different types of solar PV we could get into? Yes. Do we need a prize to bring down the cost of solar PV? Yes. I don’t think so. I think it’s coming down on its own. By people outside the super narrow field of expertise, then it won’t really have any cultural or broader resonance. Like the media won’t care. Therefore, saying that you want a prize in public won’t really matter.
And that’s not necessarily bad, but maybe it means a big public prize isn’t as helpful. So an example here is, what does a breakthrough in battery storage look like? It probably looks like, I mean, there have been many, it probably looks like a material that has an incredible energy density capacity. Okay, great. When that happens, it’s going to be probably a small flake of material and it’ll be published in Science Magazine or something. It was a breakthrough, but it’s not culturally resonant the same way that watching a rocket fly or watching Charles Lindbergh fly or observing a huge carbon removal installation or whatever might be.
So thinking about whether it will matter publicly is another way of saying this. So this is a long-winded answer to your question. Is it more philanthropies doing this? I think it’s worth considering that But I would never say prizes are the only way to go. And I believe strongly prizes won’t work well if there aren’t other interventions in the space. Jan Mazarek from Climate Works has a great stat that something like less than 2% of climate philanthropy goes to carbon removal, this prize notwithstanding. And that’s an indication that actually a lot more philanthropy is needed in carbon removal.
And just because there happens to be a big splashy prize doesn’t replace the work of things like Funding basic studies, funding other demonstrations, training students, all the actual infrastructure building that still needs to happen to grow the space. So I think there are plenty of opportunities outside prizes. And of course, look, I work at XPRIZE. I think prizes are great, but I think there are a lot of other avenues too.
Ross Kenyon: All very much appreciated that level of nuance. Yeah, the most famous prize is of course the Nobel, but there’s a number of them and many of them are not splashy in this way. And I feel like I quickly skim over who wins. I’m like, Cool. I know some of those words. That sounds fun. I haven’t read that novel, but I bet it’s good.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: You know, I did a PhD in physics and usually I have to really think hard to understand what the Nobel Prize in physics winner was that year because maybe it’s outside my field or I’m sort of like, well, I maybe understand those words, but I don’t know exactly why that was transformational. Because it’s awarded in a different way, right? It’s usually that seminal moment, that key insight that has led to things and it’s awarded much after the fact. So yeah, all kinds of different prizes out there.
Maybe one analogy is what’s good about Nobels is at least once a year, it’s in the news and people are like, oh yeah, science, right? Oh, some incredible science thing is being awarded. Of course, it means a lot more to people right in the community, but yeah. It’s at least gets it on the public consciousness and people thinking about that. So that’s interesting.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, your framing of this makes me think that maybe the way that the Nobel prizes are awarded is not the most efficient way to do so. In some ways, it feels more like a lifetime achievement award. Yes. Or it’s not like, yeah, a rocket or amazing carbon removal facility that has been built that’s getting to gigaton scale or is projected to do so. So I think maybe thinking of it that way is maybe better. Yeah.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: I like that. Lifetime achievement. And I think that’s often how it is, right? At least in the physical sciences, it’s for work done 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. And I think the wisdom is, well, it’s hard to see a breakthrough in the moment sometimes. Over time, the breakthrough becomes apparent. Like, oh, wow, that really was a key idea that put us on a new path. But yeah, lifetime achievement. I like that. I’ll say too, just to unnecessarily slag on the Nobels for a second.
Maybe I’m just thinking about it, but I don’t understand the process of selection. And I understand that there is, I guess, a nomination process, but I believe it’s fairly secretive how these things are selected. I may be misspeaking, so, you know, somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s something to be said for a prize in which the selection criteria are public. I don’t think that means you can’t have private prizes or things like that, but it’s just a different model, different style. Well, fair enough.
Unnecessary slag or necessary slag. Nobel Committee, I would love a Nobel Prize. Too late. You’ve ruined it. I will happily accept my fake Nobel Prize. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a number of X prizes, aren’t there? Y’all are trying to get this going for a number of different disciplines, at least as far as I can tell.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Like that was one of the things I first thought was interesting about XPRIZE. When I joined, I knew them as the space people because the first prize, probably the most famous one was the space, space-related prize. But then I learned, oh yeah, XPRIZE is trying to apply the model to education, to energy, to the oceans, to literacy. We try to organize our work into environment, equity, and exploration these days. So three big buckets. I believe we’ve executed 16 or 17 prizes total, like in the history of the foundation.
And they’ve all been quite different. The carbon removal prize following on the heels of the NRG COSEA carbon prize for CO2 conversion is one of the only times, maybe one or two other times this has happened, where kind of a follow-on prize on a related topic has happened. We have Feeding the Next Billion, which is about synthetic protein. We have Rainforest XPRIZE. We have Carbon Removal. We have an AI prize that’s just closing. We have a handful of others that are in the pipeline.
So you can see they’re all quite different. And these are prizes that run simultaneously with their own schedule. So yeah, we are working in a few areas at once. Not to put you too much on the spot, but do you feel that some of the prizes have led to better outcomes than others? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it’s fair to say that every prize is trying to accomplish something inside of that community and some are just more successful than others. Sometimes the prize is too ahead of its time in the sense that it’s not ready to really accelerate the space because there isn’t sort of enough material to push forward.
Other times it’s too late. If you have a prize that’s a little too late, then the field will kind of pass it by and it won’t really mean anything. And winning the prize will just sort of be like, An interesting footnote rather than something that, or the prize itself will just be sort of a, oh, that’s interesting, but there’s also a million other things going on. Something I’ve learned is I think it’s very easy to design a bad prize, but it’s actually quite difficult to get it just right.
It’s a bit of art and science. The right incentives, the right timing, the right duration, attracting the people that, you know, encouraging people to actually do it and having them want to do it to pursue the prize. A lot of things have to break right. But when it does break right, I think it can be great.
Ross Kenyon: I was inspired to ask that question and thinking, if I were in your shoes, how would I design a prize for some of those categories that led to the same level of splashiness that was epic making? And some of them struck me as harder than others, like literacy or the rainforest. It doesn’t have that rocket launch kind of flashiness to it that maybe a prize is best enabled to support. But maybe my understanding is lacking. Am I missing something on that?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: No, I think you’re right. And I think you’re picking up on something that there’s no question that the understandability sort of the win, how digestible it is, that can really matter. Whether you love space or you think it’s a distraction, everyone can understand a rocket launch. And everyone can understand something simple like the first group to do X, the first group to launch a rocket wins. That’s a very clear and simple construction. Some of the prizes that we do these days, we’re getting a little more nuanced.
We’re also branching it into different fields. And a prize that will move the needle in, let’s say, synthetic proteins is going to look quite different than a prize that might move the needle in carbon removal that might look different in education. Everything from the prize dollar amount that it will take to get people’s attention can be different. Let’s say relative to how much money actually you need to spend to do the thing. Another consideration is the duration, what the rules are. Is it the first to achieve something or is it like a relative kind of competition?
All those things have to come into it. So again, it’s art and science, I think, to design prizes. They can look quite different depending on different communities. If you go to our website and make it as far as finding the guidelines for the different prizes, you’ll see that the structure can be quite different for different prizes, even though they’re all called XPRIZE and they’re all basically competition of some kind. It would seem undue if all the guidelines were the same for the sake of consistency. That would be a terrible mistake.
It doesn’t sound like it would make sense. I mean, there’s some similarities, but yeah, the thing you need to incentivize the community of researchers working on synthetic fish protein has nothing to do with what you might need for renewable electricity. And that’s okay. That’s appropriate. Part of our job is to know that and figure it out, consult the right experts that know it better than we do, and then try to shape a program that way.
Ross Kenyon: How has the carbon removal community received this news? You gave the opening keynote at the Air Miners Conference recently, which was terrific. I very much agree with your sentiment, but the space right now feels pretty collaborative to me. It feels good. Has it felt that way for you?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: It has. I mean, the Air Miners community in particular, some other groups, it is collaborative. I think I get the sense of people becoming intrigued by carbon removal, which is becoming more of a mainstream topic, but hasn’t been for a long time, like you said. And there’s a certain feeling you get when you discover other people that maybe you thought you were kind of the only nerd in the corner, you know, interested in the topic. And then you realize, oh, there’s actually a few other people out here.
And then you kind of find some camaraderie. So I see a lot of that happening. There is a real can-do spirit that this can be done. I think the successes of some of the corporate purchasers, I mean, we saw Stripe release the material this week. We saw Shopify release material. All these things add positive momentum. I mean, they’re doing it directly. We see some of the Earliest entrepreneurs actually growing and scaling their projects, you know, the Carbon Engineering, the Climeworks, the GTs of the world, Charm I saw on the news, Pachama, like so many groups doing great stuff, I think inspires others to take it on as well.
You know, thanks for a compliment about the air miners. And I, you know, I made those remarks, not thinking like, oh, we have to fundamentally change something and go in this direction, but more as a reminder to like, let’s keep it this way. That’s probably how we grow fastest is by supporting one another. Like, of course, you know, not all ideas are going to work as well as some others, but I’m supporting one another. That’s how we grow up quickly. People want to work on this topic.
So many people approach me and say, I’m interested in working on climate things. How do I get started? This is good. We want people to be interested. We want people to find these communities. And I do feel it’s collaborative. And if we can keep it that way, all the better.
Ross Kenyon: It resonated with me. And it’s a big part of why we do this show and trying to I think so long as it’s ethical and credible, I want carbon removal to be broad. I try not to fall into any potential partisan debates that might come up or like rival camps within carbon removal. And I think a big part of your speech dealt with this, right? You had some line there that I really love. It was like, don’t start a fight over zero. Was that what you said?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Yes. Yeah, of course. I feel this one pretty strongly. And this happens all the time. I think in early stage technology communities, we’re fighting over or we can get caught into fighting over a share of a pie that, first of all, doesn’t really exist. And second of all, We’re thinking of it as a zero-sum type of situation as if there’s like a finite amount of resources. Look, I get the world is made of finite resources, money, people, time, and talent. But we are so far from, I think, hitting those resource boundaries right now that’s not our focus.
I think what I meant by that specifically was it’s really easy to get cliquey. It’s really easy to get out of the framework of let’s solve this problem and let me be open to different solutions. It’s a hard frame of mind to maintain. It’s a lot easier to maintain a frame of mind of let’s solve this problem, but do it in my preferred way. Or let’s solve it using my solution. Because guess what? If you’re working on a technology or a solution, you probably think it’s great.
And you probably chose it for a reason. And you think it has potential. That’s great. I think with carbon removal in particular, we have some early indications, but it’s not yet obvious which solutions really can win out and hit full scale and really be meaningful and which ones can’t. There’s a lot of speculation about Obviously, for instance, the nature-based solutions have their pros and cons. The engineered solutions have their pros and cons. Those are apparent, whether it’s cost or scalability, social license, whatever. All those need to be addressed.
I don’t mean to say the limitations don’t matter and it’s all kumbaya. They all have to be interrogated and we have to ask those questions. But if we jump too soon into a mentality of only this solution can progress and the others should stop because they’re distracting from that winning solution... That I think is counterproductive to actually having a growing and healthy space. I personally don’t believe there is a single winning solution. But I also, even if I did, I would still think it’s probably premature.
Let’s face the fact that very few carbon removal solutions have been deployed at any appreciable scale. Some certainly have, but very few have. Time will have to tell. And let’s, you know, the sooner we can figure that out, the better. But let’s not sort of undercut ourselves before we even see how these solutions can scale.
Ross Kenyon: Very sympathetic to this view. The corresponding weakness of it is that I sometimes am not as rigorous as maybe I should be. How do I know when I should be critical and when I should be supportive and how? God, that’s a gigantic question. Can you help me?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Yeah. Okay. That is a biggie. I don’t know if I have the answer, but I think critical feedback is necessary. I mean, it doesn’t help to You can think about this in personal life or professional or you’re trying to grow a solution. You kind of need that critical feedback and you need someone to tell you, this part doesn’t work or there’s a fundamental flaw here that needs to be addressed. I think the difference between critical feedback and hating is, do you say, there’s a fundamental flaw here, let’s work together to solve it.
And if you really have tried to solve it and realize it is insurmountable, then you reconsider the project. That’s different from saying, The solution’s not perfect, so you should stop because this other solution is perfect. So I think sometimes that type of thinking can leak in. And I’m not just talking about carbon, but I think in general. So I think it’s sometimes it’s almost the way you approach it. I think it’s okay to be critical, ask hard questions. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that.
I mean, XPRIZE is going to do that. We have these criteria and the judges, we want to ask hard questions before we advance people and select the winners. But... If you do it with the spirit of we’re trying to advance the best solutions here and promote their growth versus we’re trying to sort of block others out. And again, I don’t perceive too much of that, but I’ve seen it happen in other communities too. And so I think if we can keep it on the constructive feedback, that will actually help us grow faster.
And if we can espouse and nurture a culture where we’re okay to accept critical feedback, easier said than done, but if we think of that as actually helpful and if we can do it in a respectful way, Then I think that goes a long way to helping with that problem. What do you think of that?
Ross Kenyon: I like it. I oftentimes seek out some of the critics I know who are critical of carbon markets. Yeah. I oftentimes get some of the best notes that, I mean, I feel like if I can earn their begrudging respect, if they’re like, at least this is good faith, you’re trying, you’re not just like brushing everything aside. It makes me learn and keep growing. And also I want them to be I think they probably want to be wrong, too. They want them to be like, okay, they took this criticism seriously, and now we figured out how to do this.
But I don’t just do that with anyone, either. There needs to be some level of trust and reciprocity involved. It’s not fun. If it’s not fun, I’m not going to want to have a long conversation that spans weeks or months.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: I’m with you on that. I think there isn’t a formula to tell you how to find that type of person. But somebody, as you said, is going to engage with you in good faith. And, you know, give you maybe harsh but respectful criticism. And at the same time, you know, it’s hard to, but we’ve got to ask for critical feedback. You know, hey, can you tell me where my stuff is weak? Can I run my presentation by you and you can tell me which parts suck, you know, and I won’t hate you and I promise to think about them carefully.
And look, it always stings to hear that. We don’t, we all know that, but it does improve your project or your process or whatever you’re working on. I think there is a way to do it. We should all be so lucky to have people in our lives that can actually call us on RBS and give us that feedback. And if you don’t have anybody, I think it’s okay to, somebody gave me this advice once. It’s like, asks people. If you meet someone that you just sort of feel like, maybe I don’t know you, but you might be somebody, ask them, find the way to ask them, hey, listen, I’m really looking for some helpful advice.
Critical feedback. Do you think you might be able to give that to me? You know, could I send you my document? Could I read or could I have a conversation with you? Could I run an idea by you? Like, would you sort of enter that frame of mind with me and give me some feedback? I’ve tried that a few times. Look, sometimes it’s blown up in my face, but it has worked a couple of times. I think it’s worth trying more. I’ll try it more for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Mostly been pretty, I think sometimes when I’ve done it, it’s been unexpected for the person who received this message from me. They’re like, oh, really? You care? You’re not just like, screw this guy. I don’t want to talk to you. That’s right. But I’ve often been like, hey, I’ve been thinking about your criticisms and what do you think about something like this? Oftentimes the conversation is much better than someone who’s like, I love it. It’s not really that helpful.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: I love it is great, but it doesn’t give you a lot of information. If you’re looking to make a change, like, you know, because it tells you either, you know, well, maybe your thing is perfect, but probably not. And that’s why that’s why sometimes it’s helpful to say to people to take the extra step and say, I am asking for critical feedback, or like, tell me what the weakest aspect of this was, rather than just saying, what do you think? Or do you like it? It kind of invites people to say, okay, well, since you And you know, it’s a cultural thing.
Like I was on a, I was on a phone call last week and somebody was presenting a slide deck and they want, it was, they want revisions. And there’s like a whole bunch of sort of advisory type people. And everyone’s being kind of pretty polite and like making remarks around the edges. It took several rounds of the presenter asking in different ways. I want critical feedback. And finally at the end, she said something like, everyone’s being so polite. Who’s going to be rude? And then I finally like kind of Unbit my tongue and was like, okay, fine.
Here’s what I think. I think this slide sucked. Ha ha ha. And I was just asking myself, should you have just said that earlier? Why did she have to ask six or seven times? And just didn’t feel right in the meeting. I didn’t really know these other people to just say, blurt out, hey, here’s my critical feedback. So it’s a tricky thing, but I think asking for it is always helpful or can be helpful. How can they win? How does this actually work?
Yeah. Yeah. How do you win? So here’s how you win. Four years from now, or three plus years from now, you win this prize by demonstrating your real working carbon removal solution, wherever it is in the world, however it operates, whatever it takes to do the carbon removal. You have that working. You have it working at a scale of at least a thousand tonnes of CO2 removed per year. Bigger is better, but you’re at least that big, whatever that implementation looks like to you.
You have a cost model at a scale of a million tonnes a year. That the judges believe. So you’ve done the calculation that says, okay, if I’m not at a million tonnes a year, when I get to a million tonnes a year using economies of scale, this is what my approximate cost will be. And the third thing you have is you have a pathway written out on how you’re going to achieve gigaton scale. Does that mean I do what I just did a hundred thousand times?
Does that mean I do this, but just make it bigger and bigger? Does it mean getting granular? Do I look for a strategic partnership with a company to buy my technology and deploy it? Do I strike a deal with six regional governments? Whatever the deployment strategy is, the idea is, do you understand a possible pathway to gigaton scale? Two, can you get to gigaton scale? In other words, can you get large enough to really be significant from a climate perspective? And three, is that plan credible?
In the eyes of the judges. There’s detail in each of those three categories, but that’s what the winning team will do. And the judges will select that winning team from everyone in the running roughly four years from now. Are there various stages that entrants need to go through? Yes. So that was sort of like we started with the end in mind. The first thing to think about is the obvious thing is go to the website because if you want to register, read the documents, The entry fee is 250 bucks or 25 bucks if you’re a student team and you sign up.
So there’s kind of three phases to this competition, which you can almost think about as three competitions in one. And I’ll just make this brief. The first one is a student competition. This is for students or student-led teams. Okay, student means age 35 and under, in school or recent grad. And student team means half the team members are students. That means students. You can have a faculty advisor. You can have somebody that’s non-students. You can have a few non-student members. We just want this to be sort of initiated and led by students, graduate students, post-grads, undergrads, high school students, if you find someone over 18 to sign up with you.
We’re looking for proposals. You don’t have to have anything demonstrated yet, just proposals. And the proposals are due October 1st. And there’s a $5 million pool of awards that judges are going to give out to the best proposals. So calling all students, think on it, tell your friends, consider submitting a proposal. The second phase is what we call the milestone awards. Those are going to be awarded about a year from now, next Earth Day, Earth Day 2022. That’s up to 15 $1 million checks.
The registration deadline for that is December 1st. What you have to submit in February is actually not just a proposal, but we want to see some data of not a whole system, but like your core innovation. Whatever you tell us is the core Kernel of your solution, we want to see some evidence that actually works. So show us some data, send us a video of the prototype, send us validation by some kind of third party that shows the judges that basically you didn’t just make this up.
And then the third phase of the competition is what we call the grand prizes. And that’s the thing I’ve just described. The evaluation will take place about three and a half years from now. XPRIZE will conduct a third party site visit to check your setup, make sure it performs the way you claim it does. The point here is all the evaluations will be made based on performance, based on data that you collect as a competitor. And the other thing I want to say, so I’ve outlined these three stages, the student competition, which is just for students, the milestones, which anyone can apply for, and the grand prizes, which anyone can apply for, is that the enrollment, this is not a funnel.
You can register at any time. You’re gonna see a lot of stuff from us about register, register, which I think is important if you wanna compete for the milestones. Whether you get a milestone or not, you can still compete for the grand prize. Whether you register for the milestones or not, you can still compete for the grand prize. If you’re a student team and you get a student award, you can still do the milestones. They’re interchangeable. You can compete in one or both or all three and you can enter at any time.
So for instance, if it doesn’t fit your business plan to compete for the milestones, Register within two years and try to win the grand prize. If you try to get a milestone and you don’t get one, it has nothing to do with whether you can win the grand prize or not. We haven’t done this quite this way before in a competition. The idea was keep it as open as possible. Give people as many chances to enter as possible. Give as many on ramps for people that do want to participate to participate for as long as possible through the prize.
Typically, what we do is say register by this date and we’re just going to whittle down from there over time. But this one we’re leaving more open.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for all the details on that. Very attractive. I’m going to make it all about me because I’m a podcaster. Do it. Would Nori qualify for something like this? Should we bother entering? We’re basically an enabling technology, but we’re not directly pulling anything out of the atmosphere. Is it more for tech like that?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: It is more about people moving the actual molecules, but there is one exception and that’s the student competition. So, you know, Nori, I know you’re not sort of a student group per se, but you might have a collab with some students going on, or if you had a piece of your business that would benefit from a student collab, that collaboration could enter the student competition. And I bring it up just because the scope of the student competition is twofold. The first is Actual carbon removal direct sort of moving of molecules.
But the second one is for enabling technologies. So this is a little bit buried kind of in the fine print, but some of that $5 million purse is dedicated to enabling technologies. We put it in the student competition. And so that’s something to think about too. We recognize that there are a lot of enabling technologies that are going to be needed to make carbon removal reach its potential. We’ve chosen to focus the prize on sort of the direct removals, but that’s not to say the other things aren’t important.
And there might, you know, there might be something to consider there in that portion the student competition for Nori and, you know, for others, because we know there’s other people out there with different, you can read the details online, but there may be something in there for you.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so glad I asked. I imagine there’s a number of people listening that are working on remote imaging and sensing, and there’s some cool handheld spectrometry projects for soil. Stuff like that might qualify. That’s more on the verification side than strictly removals.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Yes, exactly. Again, have a look at the specs for the student competition. The other thing I will say too, though, is if you were in a position to be doing, like you said, satellite or remote verification or MRV type of work, we would also still love to hear from you. Perhaps you’re not going to compete for the prize, but one of the things we have to do as XPRIZE is conduct these validations. In the first phase, I said, you know, we’re asking teams to validate themselves and sort of tell us how they did it.
It’s a bit of trust, but verify. In the second round, XPRIZE is going to execute these validations. So you tell us where you’re set up and we will send a third party to your site. We are going to have to figure out between now and then exactly what methods and what techniques we use to do the validation. We think the prize can be a way to push the state of the art forward there because we have a practical use case. We’re not talking hypothetically about soil sampling.
We’re going to have some teams that want to do soil carbon sequestration and we are going to have to be ready to give them a fair and accurate third party assessment. And we’re going to be looking, frankly, for the most innovative and practical ways to do that. So we’d love to hear from people doing that work anyway, because we need to learn, but also we are actively now crafting kind of our execution strategy for that part of our job as XPRIZE on this prize while the innovators are doing their thing.
That make sense?
Ross Kenyon: Makes sense. I’m glad you’re doing it that way. That’s really nice. If there are people who do not fall neatly inside of those buckets, but still want to be involved, are there other partnership opportunities?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Yes, absolutely. So write to us at carbonremovalatxprize.org or check out our website. But yes, so one of the things we, you know, we meaning like the XPRIZE staff get busy doing while teams are doing their thing is we look to build partnerships that will bring resources to the competitors, funding, help with permitting. Ideas on where to site their projects if they’re looking for that. We’ll try to work on mechanisms for teams to collaborate with one another. It’s often the case that two groups might join forces to execute a project.
That’s great. If we can help with that, that’s something we want to do. If you have other specific needs, we’d love to hear from people that are considering participating in the prize that you think XPRIZE could help with, let us know because we might be able to help with that. That’s a big part of What we try to do while the prize is running is help bring some additional resources to support competitors. So we’re really open. We’re definitely in idea gathering mode now. So please feel free to write to us and there may be ways to participate.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. And I know there is also some cool work happening with air miners and trying to prepare competitors, right?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: This is really great. The Airminers Launchpad program just kicking off right now. It’s a great way to support an early stage group or a new stage project in carbon removal or even, you know, somebody that is an early stage. We’re thrilled that they’re offering it. Airminers is awesome. I noticed they passed their thousandth member the other day.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I got a good laugh out of that. That guy came in and we fetted him so hard. Didn’t know what he was in for.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: It was great. I see you, Brian. Brian 1000. So yeah, that’s a fantastic, I think, service and one that we look forward to growing and flourishing and helping people. And helping it flourish, hopefully, by directing people that are participating in the prize. I think of it as something that’s symbiotic, right? It’ll help the community grow. This prize is going to generate a lot of inbound interest. That’s great. If we can bring other resources to those folks, encourage other people to observe the competition, see who’s participating, other funders, other supporters, that’s the kind of thing that we want to do.
We try to use all the attention that the prize gets, this is an analogy I like, and then try to reflect it back onto the competitors. Companies call us and say, how can I get involved? We say, you should invest in these companies. Can we send you the list? Can we introduce you to them? Which ones do you want to speak to? That’s what you should be doing. You should do what Stripe did. I’m being a little crass, but the inbound that we get as a result of the prize, we try to find ways to redirect at the competitor.
And it’s not perfect. It doesn’t always work out perfectly, but that’s part of our mission. And we try to do that through partnerships. Love it. Where do you think the sector will be by the time the final winner is announced? I don’t know. I really don’t know. Sometimes I think, is the prize too early? Will people be able to do it? Sometimes I think, will it be surpassed because the community will grow so quickly that it won’t seem so relevant three or four years from now?
That maybe would be a nice problem to have, but we will see. I think what I’ve seen happen in the last two years is There’s so much interest in carbon removal. I think there’s going to be a very massive ongoing sort of figuring out about what carbon removal actually is and what it can be used for and what the capacity is and what the challenges are. I think then there’ll be a, I might’ve mentioned this in my air miners talk. And then I think there might be a bit of a lull when the enthusiasm meets the reality of, you know, this is actually quite difficult or even if it’s not difficult, it can take some time to scale up a solution.
You know, a gigaton is a very big number. Getting to one is huge, nevermind getting to three or four or 10. But then I think that will be followed by hopefully kind of doubling down on, okay, let’s roll up our sleeves and get active and do this hard work. And I think some people are already on that trajectory. You know, the corporate purchasers out there, I was just reading Shopify’s slide deck they put out this week. But I suspect that three or four years from now, we’re going to see more people asking not what is carbon removal, but there’ll be more of how can I do this or what is the right carbon removal project for me, whether you’re a government or a region or a company or some other group.
Whereas I think still now the conversation is largely what is carbon removal and is this a distraction? Should we be doing this at all? Sort of where does carbon removal fit in the landscape of climate solutions? And does it fit? I think we’re still there. But for me, this sort of that 2.0 idea means, no, we tip over into, yeah, it’s there. It’s a question of finding the right fit and figuring out which solutions will make sense where. The last thing I’ll say too is I think we’ll know a lot more about some of these questions about scalability, durability, land use, cost.
I think we’ll have a lot more data from real projects. Two, three, four years from now. So that’s something I look forward to in 2025, I guess.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to ask. Maybe it violates your neutrality, but do you have a sense on which direction the sector is going to go? Do you think ecological or industrial methodologies are, I don’t know, first out the gate or?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Yeah, I think that is a good question. I’ll try to answer. I mean, so my disclaimer is that, well, I don’t even, I don’t pick who wins the prize. That’s the thing that protects me. Independent judges select the winners of the prize. I can’t say that enough. I’m more like the convener, me and the whole team at XPRIZE. But I think it’s clear that direct air capture is very popular. I think it’s a very simple idea to understand. And I think it’s very attractive for that reason.
And then, of course, there are practical examples. And we have companies that are really scaling out. I think that’s great. So I think we’re going to see more of that from the players that we know about. And I think we’ll probably see more technologies come online. And start to scale as well. So I’m going to estimate that there’s going to be more contracting in that area. I think we already see that. The thing that direct air capture has going for it too is it produces pure CO2, which is very flexible.
It has to be, you have to do something with it and direct air capture on its own sort of only gets you half the way, but it’s flexible in that way. I think the nature-based solutions, specifically reforestation, forest management, I think that is going to continue to grow. I think what may have been called traditional forest offsets are now being called carbon removal credits. I think we’ll see more of that. I think there’s also going to be a lot more scrutiny paid to those things. I think sort of the word is out that not all forestry credits are created equal.
Some of them might even not be very effective. So I think there’s such a cultural and other interest in nature-based solutions because of, I think, the multiplying effect, like the carbon sequestration is only one aspect of, let’s say, maintaining forests. There’s so many other advantages that a lot of people, for practical reasons, but also I think, frankly, for sort of philosophical reasons, are going to gravitate in that direction. So I think we’re going to see more interest and more demand for projects that way. Just like we’re going to see more scrutiny on energy intensity of direct air capture, we’re going to see more scrutiny on durability and actual sequestration potential of nature-based solutions.
So I think that’ll be interesting. For me, the oceans are the big dark horse. Massive potential, probably some of the least well-known solutions more broadly, some very early stage and underdeveloped solutions, but I think tremendous potential there. Just to sort of speak on mineralization a little bit, I think that one is a bit of hybrid of a couple of them. It’s land area, but maybe energetically favorable, but also maybe expensive because of crushing and grinding. I think each implementation depends so much. But I think that one is, I’ll just say, one of the ones that’s most industrially relevant, I think.
And so that may bring a lot of deployment. I mean, again, if I’m sounding like I’m trying to be intentionally cagey, maybe I am a little bit. But also, I really don’t think there is going to be one carbon removal solution that wins out. Even if one proves to be technically superior, I just don’t believe that everyone is going to deploy solutions according to The technical benchmarks alone, because they’re going to be of all other factors. As long as it actually works, I think it can be effective.
And I think the reason I think that is we see that from so many other types of technologies. It’s really rare for one to just take over. Often you see regional instances of different versions of a similar technology or even quite different versions. So I think we’ll see a little bit more of that in the next couple of years.
Ross Kenyon: I really appreciate your framing of this as each of these sets has trade-offs facing them. We’ve started with soil. We by no means want to end with soil, but we also are fond of saying that anyone who tells you that soil is easy, you should run very far very fast because it is not. If it was any easier though, we probably wouldn’t be doing it. That’s why anyone working in carbon removal, it’s fun because it’s hard. It’s important and it’s challenging and it keeps us stimulated.
But all of those solutions too, I like them all. And they all face their own challenges too.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: Yeah, I think that’s right. I’m very much that type of person too. It’s fun because it’s hard. That resonates with me for better or for worse. I tend to find hard things to work on, but I just like it. Back to what you’re asking me earlier, like, I truly believe each of these solutions, as I understand them, do have trade-offs. I think that’s where we have to lean in and that’s where we have to sort of interrogate. We tried to structure the prize a little bit that way, like, hey, any solution can compete.
Basically, you have to be ready to showcase your strengths and work on your weaknesses. And if you can do that, you can have a good shot. And that’s what it’s going to take to make it work in the real world. I think we do have to be prepared a little bit for some of these solutions really not to pan out or not to turn out to be as useful as we hoped. I can’t say which one They may be or which ones. But for me, that’s sort of a call to action for all of us to really don’t forget the weaknesses of these solutions.
Don’t dismiss the critiques as just sort of haters or people try to slowly. That’s where the critical feedback comes in. You know, hey, how are you going to prove durability? You know, tree planters. Hey, that’s a real question. You know, can you make this last for decades? How do we know that the trees aren’t going to burn up in a climate induced forest fire in 75 years? That’s kind of a brutal question to ask. We have to address it. Or, hey, direct air capture.
How are you not going to consume a quarter of the Earth’s electricity? Okay, great. You know, if we consider these questions now, then we have a chance of actually addressing them. What we don’t want is to have a situation where we have a mature technology that is not a cultural or technical fit. And then we’re sort of stuck arguing about we should do it. And other people say we shouldn’t do it. What we’re trying to do is can we address these weaknesses now? How do we work together to do that so that we actually can have a suite of deployable solutions as soon as possible?
Ross Kenyon: Love it. We should start wrapping up, but we’ve mentioned it and I want to unpack it a tiny bit. Carbon removal 1.0, carbon removal 2.0. What is this framing? What does that mean?
Dr. Marcius Extavour: So this is something I mentioned in the Airminers talk. I’m thinking in terms of, this is me sort of reading the tea leaves of how I see the topic of carbon removal being received and how the community is kind of starting to see me to organize. For me, 1.0 was The recognition that carbon removal is not some weirdo, maybe in the future we might have to think about this topic, but probably a need to have. You spoke about the IPCC 1.5 degree report. That was the first piece of analysis that I think a lot of us noticed that said, wait a minute, all the 1.
5 scenarios have some form of carbon removal. And look, that’s been critiqued as relying on imaginary technologies that don’t exist to save us. And I think, okay, fair critique. The other way to read that is reducing emissions is not enough. We are past the point of only reducing emissions. That means we have to consider removal in some form. The question is, what is the way to do carbon removal? Not do we need it? So that for me, it was the 1.0 era.
We need this. How are we going to do it? Not we don’t need this. 2.0, for me, my thinking is this is where people start to think, not they go from we need this to I’m going to do this. I am now organizing a project. I’ve signed up. Or air miners. Nori, you’re doing it. Many others are doing it. There’s a podcast where we’re talking about carbon removal. Who was doing that five years ago? More organizations beyond the core scientific experts are working on the topic, and it’s starting to broaden out into a community, not just 20, 30, 50, 100 scientists saying, we need to do this.
We need to have businesses. We need to have policy. There are people saying, I’m a policy person. I want to work on removal. Thanks for that.
Ross Kenyon: It’s good to have that laid out. Mark is if someone wants to follow your work or get involved, XPRIZE.org. That’s the place to go.
Dr. Marcius Extavour: XPRIZE.org. If you want to get cute, you go to XPRIZE.org slash carbon removal. I think that’s the right link. Our guidelines for the competition are online. We welcome input, feedback, questions. If you’re thinking of registering a team, you can do that on the website. All the specs about what the student competition is, what these milestones are about, how to win the grand prize, that’s all written in a document. We’re going to start sending around email newsletters to folks that have registered just to sort of keep them updated on topics and news as it comes together.
We’re going to be issuing a bit more detailed guidance on exactly what you have to do to compete as the months go on. And we’re also holding a lot of kind of listening and Q&A sessions. We’re going to be on Twitter Spaces. We’re going to be on Clubhouse doing live audio Q&A. We’re going to start to schedule webinars. We just want to hear from folks. We want to hear where they’re at, questions they have. Our competitor agreement is long and looks legalistic, but we want any and all questions related to that, how the prize is structured.
We’re just really going to be here listening and trying to answer questions the next few months. And as I said, open to that critical feedback too, which is important to make sure the prize is actually serving the community.
Ross Kenyon: Links to all those things are in the show notes. Would definitely appreciate people getting involved here. Really, my dream is that someone listening right now wins the XPRIZE and they heard about it here. And then I can wear that. The podcast, that’s the mic drop moment. We’ll never do better than that. So that’s my goal. Thanks for being here, Marcus. Listen, thanks a lot for having me. I’m here representing the whole prize crew and we appreciate it. I do as well.
And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. It means a lot. Tell a friend who is a brilliant entrepreneur, scientist, someone that should participate in this. And thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.
You can keep up with Nori at nori.com where there is a newsletter. That’s nori.com slash subscribe. There’s podcast. There’s a whole bunch else. Or you can send us an email at podcast at nori.com. We are also now on Patreon at patreon.com slash Nori Podcasts if you’d like more content, engagement, and community. And thank you so much for your support.
