Does culture eat strategy for breakfast? What does a successful carbon removal community look like? Who ordered the veal cutlet?
Join us in this episode of Reversing Climate Change featuring Jason Grillo, Director of Partnerships and Operations at AirMiners. Discover how culture takes center stage at AirMiners, one of the major communities empowering carbon removal startups.
Explore the Kiloton Fund, the Bootup program, and Launchpad, which has already graduated 95 teams in two years. Deadline for the next cohort closes on August 11th, 2023!
How does AirMiners embrace hope amidst an often challenging and doomerist climate landscape? Tune in to explore the role of levity and humor in building a strong carbon removal community. Discover how tackling an ambitious goal, such as removing 1 billion tons by 2030, can be approached with humility and by inviting people to the table.
Like AirMiners, this episode doesn’t have all the answers, but it does have some ideas of what would go in a carbon removal museum.
If you’re interested in being part of the carbon removal industry, this episode is for you!
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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
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori, which is a, what exactly do we, we’re a carbon removal marketplace in Seattle, Washington. We have a guest from Washington. Oh my God, we’re about to break the fourth wall for someone who’s been listening for so, so, so long. Was this the very first carbon removal thing ever in your life? I’m pretty sure. Anyways, Siobhan, introduce our guest. I’m so happy that we finally are doing this.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Hey, everybody. Today we have with us Jason Grillo, who is the Director of Partnerships and Operations at Airminers, an organization that is near and dear to our heart. Welcome, Jason.
Jason Grillo: Thank you. Thank you. It’s great to be here. It is, as you said, Ross, just kind of coming full circle to a podcast that was, you know, tracking back about four years ago was really important for me understanding carbon removal to begin with.
Ross Kenyon: I love that. It’s so nice. Every time I talk to you and it comes up, I’m always just like, wow, because podcasting, you never know. You’re just sort of talking, you’re released to the internet, unless someone tells you have numbers that are disembodied and who knows what good it’s doing. And someone’s like, Hey, I got really into carbon removal, at least partially due to your work. I’m just like, yes. And now you’re like, you’re like a pillar. There’s like not that many people. No kidding.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Tell us the story. Tell us the story because not to like be too congratulatory to the show, but tell us the story of how you got into air mining and how you got, how you found air miners. How I found air miners.
Jason Grillo: Oh, that it’s, it is, it is, it is, it is quite interesting. So, um, Let’s see. So I actually spent most of my career in biotech, biopharm, and healthcare with a stint in Cleantech 1. 0, and that time was pretty much in solar, but went to... Clean tech stuff, like I said, 2009, 10, 11, and then back into healthcare again from during kind of this nuclear winter-ish type time for the clean tech industry, during which time it morphed into climate tech.
Ross Kenyon: When the first bubble burst?
Jason Grillo: Exactly, exactly, exactly. So, you know, professional in marketing, market research in particular. And then I struck out and did my own LLC to do marketing projects for climate tech and solar companies starting in, renewable energy companies rather, in 2019. And then I just learned about carbon removal partly through your podcast and learned about air miners because I think you interviewed Tito at one point. I thought, oh, wow, what a cool community.
Ross Kenyon: Was that when you were doing the bracelet? Was that like?
Jason Grillo: Yes. Yes. Bracelet is an important part of the story, actually, because I wound up buying a bracelet on Tito’s Kickstarter or funding his operations through Kickstarter. And then I went to apply to air miners. And one of the things that we still ask on the forum is, what’s your interest in carbon removal? And it asks you one of several categories you’re in. And I didn’t have any experience in carbon removal. And I said, well, Let’s see, are you, and one of the items is funder or investor. Wait a minute, I funded Tito’s carbon removal startup.
I am therefore a funder, QED. And so.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like elevating at this application being like, oh, here comes money bags over here. And it’s just, it’s just you.
Jason Grillo: It’s just you. And that’s how I got into air miners in the fall of 2019. And then shortly after that, Tito put out a call to have people ask about what would the community want to have as its next step in the process. And I feel helped with Tito and Grant Faber actually field the first air miners user survey in January of 2020. Note, right before the pandemic loveliness started. And then... At that point, what bubbled up again prior to pandemic was, hey, let’s do virtual meetings because it’s such a widely geographically disparate group of people and also makes more sense from just a carbon neutrality standpoint, carbon negativity standpoint, I should say.
And so we set on doing a conference in May of 2020, just as we were heading into lockdown. And that’s how I got into carbon removal and how I started to do the event series and things have kind of grown from there.
Ross Kenyon: Asking how you got into carbon removal very much sounds like how I spent my summer vacation a prompt, Siobhan.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Well, I was really going for the juicy, like, well, this show changed my life because after hearing Tito, all the balls started rolling.
Jason Grillo: Well, it did kind of because I thought that, okay, great. There’s a community of people who specifically do this. And it’s such an early stage of developing an industry that I could have an effect there. I mean, again, I’m going to put on my...
Ross Kenyon: Way back when, back in the fall of 2019, Erdmeyer was only 400 people in the Slack community. It’s true, man. It is.
Jason Grillo: It is. And now we’re over 2,200. And so it’s grown quite a bit. And you guys curate that too.
Ross Kenyon: It’s not just like you get in, you have to apply for this. It demonstrates some sustained interest, I think, right?
Jason Grillo: And now we have the boot up, plug for boot up, bootup. airminers.org, bootup. airminers.org. And that’s, I guess, part of the culture that we want to develop as well, that to have that place where people can Have a start in carbon removal, even if they don’t know anything about the principles of carbon removal methods, the underpinnings and where they see a place for themselves in the industry, which is still great to see the growth of the last three or four years here, but still very much in its early stages.
Ross Kenyon: And if you’re just starting out and you’re listening to this show, you clearly care about carbon removal, boot up. I mean, we, we ask new Nori knots to go to it, assuming they’re willing to, uh, because it’s like, it’s a, it’s a great onboarding experience. Oh, by the way, Siobhan Montoya Lavender of thanks a ton.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: And also long-term air miner. I think I was 600 people when I joined. And we also have a bunch of interns that come through thanks a ton. I think we’re on like intern 18 or something. And we tell them that they can bill intern hours to go to boot up if they want to learn about card removal.
Jason Grillo: No kidding. That’s awesome. Thank you for that. And thank you for thanks a ton as well, which we use quite frequently too.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yes, thank you. You’re our biggest supporters.
Jason Grillo: As gratitude for people who help out with things in our ideas, needs, and leads and in other pursuits that we’re engaging in.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I mean, that ties in really nicely to what we wanted to talk about here because you’re one of the people I know who cares a lot about culture, cares a lot about community. Siobhan and I both, I mean, we’re like communications weirdos here. It’s like we think it’s important to do. You’re also the only person who’s ever gotten my cultural victory civilization reference with regard to I do what I do.
Jason Grillo: Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, I go back to Peter Drucker’s old phrase that culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Ross Kenyon: Oh.
Jason Grillo: Peter Drucker is a management guru from quite a long time ago whose insights are still extraordinarily prescient and useful for my management ethos where, again, the purpose of any business is to create a customer. Yeah, thinking about culture, people don’t leave, or the other phrase that comes to mind, people don’t leave organizations, they leave cultures. I don’t like the way things are happening here. And we want to craft the community so that it’s, Accepting of others so that it’s inclusive, so that we have a way of getting to people who are in different geographies, in different methods of carbon removal from all sorts of different backgrounds.
And to have, again, to have that entry point, to have it be inclusive and permeable. The industry needs this. We don’t want to shove people away. No, you don’t have the workers at five years of carbon removal experience. Pro tip, no one does or virtually. Damn it. Virtually no one does. Yeah. I mean, Most people are extraordinarily new, which means, which is exciting because it means that there are all sorts of new ideas that we can cultivate in the community and make sure that they have a place and to grow and develop.
I mean, geez, I’m just thinking back to like, you know, it wasn’t even, you know, two years ago when we had our biomass burial event and now biomass burial has a methodology on Puro. Yeah.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah.
Jason Grillo: You know, that it can happen that quickly. You know, I think about, you had Octavia Carbon on and Octavia was, you know, plug here, a Launchpad team as was Sela. And they met in Launchpad and they were, they met together in Launchpad maybe at like 18 months ago. Again, recording this in August of 2023, but yeah, it was like 18 months ago or something when they were in Launchpad together. And now they’re, you know, going, In a partnership for Project Hummingbird, which is just fantastic. So again, it’s those kinds of connections that we really, really want to foster in air miners.
That’s why we do what we do. That it’s a small enough space that people can truly know each other, not just know of each other, if the semantic difference makes sense.
Ross Kenyon: It sounds so small. I’ve seen recently at TED Countdown, I saw Jonathan Foley talk about how carbon removal gets too much attention and too much funding. And then you say something like, the premier carbon removal community has 2,200 members. And then there’s Open Air Collective too, so a couple thousand on top of that. So there’s like several thousand people. And if you compare the amount of money that goes towards decarbonization, other types of climate tech versus carbon removal, it’s like nothing.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, I mean, I think culturally just captures the imagination, you know, the thought of.
Ross Kenyon: It owns more mind share than it deserves to in some cases, maybe.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, well, I mean, going back to maybe like four years ago when I started, you know, three and a half, four years ago when I started here is that you’re using a pollutant as a resource.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah.
Jason Grillo: And that To me, I just am continually amazed at how ingenious that framing is that was in place that I latched onto when I first started to learn about carbon removal. Taking something that is considered an externality, a bad thing, and you’re crafting it into a credit that can have economic benefit or that confers economic benefit or a product in the case of CO2 that goes into carbon.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah, I’m curious, Jason, I feel like this is going to be hard for me not to have a huge Air Miners Love Fest on this show because I love it so much. But I think it would be disingenuous for me to pretend that I don’t. And I think, is this your first time building a community, you and Tito? Because I have to say, We’re building a community, which I’m part of various climate communities. I think we all are. And I sometimes think there’s a lot of like pizzazz on the exterior, but you get inside and it’s kind of dead and there’s not a lot happening or there’s not a lot of earnest connections being made.
Yeah. It’s not the case at Airminers. Airminers, I feel like is flourishing to a certain degree. I’m sure there’s struggles that I want to hear about.
Jason Grillo: Yeah.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: But I also feel like everybody... I send air miners or I meet through air miners, love air miners and loves you to be honest. They say, well, you know, they’re just so welcoming. Jason and Tito always are like so genuine and kind and helpful. So how did you, how did you get into planning a community? Do you have a background in this at all?
Jason Grillo: Well, we drew up every single step of the way from the very get-go with detailed precision that we followed in lockstep. No, no, no. You’re snickering. And there’s a good reason to, because there was a lot of pivoting that happened along the way. I would say, I mean, for Tito, he had his experience at running the BioCurious community Northern California.
Ross Kenyon: All organizations. It should be pun-based, by the way. Yes.
Jason Grillo: Well, again, happiness is a worn pun, as they say.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a feature, not a bug. It’s a feature, not a bug. Okay, okay. All right, back to the thread here.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, so Tito has experience from working in biotech in his own DIY biotech community. And for me, I actually have a origin in the biopharma community as well. Only a shade earlier, you know, back in the late nineties and early two thousands, I was working in biotech in Boston and It just seems like everybody kind of knew everybody else. There were three or four major biopharmaceutical companies in the Kendall Square area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. And they’re in line of sight of each other. If you are familiar with that place and just walk around, you can see these major biotech firm, another major biotech firm, another major biotech firm.
They’ve got lab space. They have an office building space. And, you know, like someone is a director at some company and they go on to become vice president of a smaller company and then build it. So there’s kind of these trees from like three or four seminal biopharmaceutical companies in the area. And it just seemed like everyone could develop a good reputation of working with someone, for someone, under someone. And that kind of carried forward into my thinking about my own thinking about How to build a community, that it’s, carbon rule is certainly small enough that people just know each other, you know, extraordinarily well.
2,200 people, yes, it’s growing, but, you know, it’s still small enough that you can’t have an effect. You know, I’ve talked to someone recently about what we do in Iran, because at the end of the day, It’s about hope. And, you know, so much of the climate, we found a lot of the climate discourse is, you know, is, you know, talks about, you know, kind of doomerism here, the, you know, we’re in trouble. I mean, not saying we’re not in trouble, you know, newsflash, we kind of are. That said, The ability to choose how you react to it is something that we wanted to give to people in the community.
To have people feel like they have agency is a great way of alleviating that climate anxiety. Peter Olivier had a tweet about this maybe a week or so ago that 80% of climate anxiety disappears when you start actually working in climate. It doesn’t always disappear. Not all the way, but we wanted to build a community where people can have a voice. And that’s why we built stuff like Buda, like Launchpad. By the way, speaking of Launchpad, applications due August 11th, August 11th, August 11th for Launchpad.
Ross Kenyon: What is Launchpad for those listening who don’t know?
Jason Grillo: Yeah, Launchpad is our accelerator program for teams who are... On the early stage of their journey in carbon removal so that people can grow and develop their early stage company, work with them for six weeks over the course of the program, and then have the teams graduate and then get to two demo days, one for investors, the other one for carbon removal credit buyers. And you get one shot at each of them, guaranteed. You don’t have to go immediately, but you’re always guaranteed one shot at each. And program’s free to participate in.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: And how many teams have you had so far?
Jason Grillo: We’ve graduated 95 teams so far over the course of two years.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: That’s wild. That’s wild.
Jason Grillo: And yeah, I mean, in terms of culture, like again, Launchpad is kind of the crystallization of the culture of air miners. And we want to have this collaborative process. Light, fun, and breezy thing going. We want to have people able to interact with each other. That’s why we have them buddy up with another team and just learn about what that other team is doing. And that carries forward to some stuff we like to do in the main community as well. That’s why we designed Ideas, Needs, and Leads, our new program, where people can talk about a particular topic, bring an idea that they have in mind, share what they need to have that idea, get The next step, and then hopefully other people on that meeting will have a lead to share with them.
Ross Kenyon: How important is goopiness to air miners? Is that just you and Tita? Adina, I don’t know well enough at this point. I want to. I want to see the goopiness. I don’t think I’ve seen it yet. Is that just the mix of us or is that part of air miners?
Jason Grillo: No, it’s part of Air Miners. I mean, like I said, the puns are a feature, not a bug. But no, I mean, look, we deliberately want to keep it light, fun, and breezy, as I said before. I mean, because otherwise the anxiety about climate can just weigh things down.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: I mean, it’s a monumental task. What we’re trying to do at Air Miners is a monumental task.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, we want to remove a billion tonnes of CO2 and its equivalent from the atmosphere by the end of 2030. That’s a lot. As we say, I mean, if we emit 40 billion tonnes into the atmosphere every year, a billion tonnes goes up every nine days. And we want to have that cumulative billion tonnes removed by the end of 2030. And even that’s a lot. But that’s going to be the most difficult billion tonnes. The best antidote to just feeling so fraught about that is to...
Just chill out and go and understand that this can be daunting. But you know what? We’re going to choose how we react to that challenge and be damned we’re going to do it. And my personal view is I think we’re going to get there sooner than anyone ever thinks or really do.
Ross Kenyon: Nice to hear that because this summer has been discouraging. And then I think by the time this airs, the Jeff Goodall show that I just did on The Heat Will Kill You First will be out. And that bug is not optimistic. Good timing for Jeff, though. I mean, this summer has been nuts. So I think the reality of climate change is starting to be apparent even to people who may not have intellectually realized it. They can see it in their bodies and their direct environment now.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, and certainly wildfires where Ross, you and I live in Washington State is reality, has been reality for years. It’s terrible. Same with Oregon and California. Now we’re seeing wildfire smoke effect. Checking notes here. The East Coast, Boston, New York, Washington, D. C. , the Midwest, Detroit, Chicago, Indiana. Unusual. Yes, yes, yes. On the other hand, You know, that can motivate action. And we’re seeing, you know, I do some side work with the Open Air Collective and we are seeing, you know, greater interest in state level policies for carbon rule in particular and climate more generally.
So, you know, you have a perturbation to a system, you see a reaction to it. And the reaction is we’re going to roll up our sleeves and do something. And that’s really the ethos we want to infuse into air miners.
Ross Kenyon: What’s the relationship between Air Miners and Open Air Collective? Because they’re peer organizations. Distinction is maybe harder to pin down.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say we are focused more on particular startup teams and getting them off the ground and moving. Open Air Collective has kind of distinct missions. One is the DIY DAC system, the Cyan system, C-Y-A-N system in particular, and also policy advocacy at the local, state, and national level. Airminers doesn’t play so much in that area, nor do we have our own collective technology that we’re building as a community. Instead, we see the connections that people foster among themselves as the product that we put out there.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Huge overlap, though, I would say.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you said there’s like 2,200 people in air miners, a couple thousand people in open air collective newsflash. There’s a lot of overlap between those two. Surprise, surprise.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, wow. I didn’t even consider that possible. So the number is even smaller.
Jason Grillo: It’s even a smaller group of carbon removal people.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Wow. What an obvious thing to overlook. Wow. Okay, so it’s even less of us dominating the climate story.
Jason Grillo: Dominating the story. Yeah, but like I said, I think, again, it captures the imagination. Again, carbon removal can capture the imagination because it’s a way of turning the narrative on its head.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. As opposed to like making incremental changes in the cost curve of renewables over like, yeah, electrifying the grid, electrifying. Yeah. There’s a lot of sexy stories.
Jason Grillo: Well, actually, it depends on who you talk to. I mean, I mean, I would say that I’m... Amazed that like the solar cost curves now are, I think we’re like 30 years ahead of where people anticipated we would be only like six or seven years ago. And part of the reason for my statement earlier about how we’re going to get there sooner than people think is owing Efficiencies of scale as we deploy based on, you know, curves like that. You know, Greg Nemet at University of Wisconsin has done some amazing work on this.
But what I see is that, like, we’ve only really scratched the surface of what carbon removal could be, what the industry could be. And, yeah, I see a way of expanding it and opening it.
Ross Kenyon: I’m not dissing it just for the record, just that for the average person who’s maybe not already into climate change, thinking like, well, we could reverse climate change versus we’re going to like adapt and also slow it down. Like one of those stories is better than the other two. And it’s definitely that we can reverse it. Optimistic, like the optimism built in there is like really powerful.
Jason Grillo: To be honest, that’s coming full circle to what you started off with. That’s what drew me to the podcast. Like, wow, we can reverse this. No kidding. Oh, and you as an individual can have a hand in that at a very early stage. Well, yes, you can. Okay, let’s do this.
Ross Kenyon: It’s not even that hard to get involved at this point either. Like there’s not that, like there’s a lot of interest, VC funding, there’s corporate interest in these things. There seems like the Killton Fund, like you guys are doing, there’s more opportunities than there’s ever been, but it’s also not. So like if I wanted to break into AI at this point, I’d be like, oh God, I’m way behind. I just can’t do it. There’s like enough openings for all sorts of different career types within carbon removal. So like it feels open and accessible to me in a way that many other nascent fields do not.
You agree?
Jason Grillo: Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. And that’s, again, part of the culture that we want to build, that there’s ways of people getting into the field that, again, we owe it to the industry to make it easy for people to get that, again, boot up in particular, to have that grounding of knowledge before they start to embark. Yeah, critical. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Critical. And I also think you definitely put out there at Airminers that you... Like, AirMinders has an ethos of, we want you here. Like, please come, you know? And I think that’s not true of every community, Slack community and real-life communities. And, for example, I really got into AirMinders. I’d heard of AirMinders because I knew Tito personally.
Jason Grillo: Right.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: But then Tito put out a call on his newsletter, which I happen to have been subscribed to, or I’m still subscribed to. And... Said, hey, we have a gender problem and we want to fix it. And he wasn’t like, I have all the answers or I know what I’m going to do about this. But he said, I recognize there’s a problem. Do people want to help me fix this? And myself and I know Anjali Underwood and some other women reached out and were like, yeah, we could help with that. And that’s one example.
But then I think there’s other examples where it’s like, well, we need to focus on environmental justice. Does somebody want to help with that? And people just kind of step forward. And so I do think there’s this proactiveness at Air Miners. Saying, like, we want you to be here, and we recognize that it’s imperfect, and we’re not, you know, we’re not saying everything’s figured out. Come help us figure it out, which I think is really powerful as an invite to people.
Jason Grillo: Yes, yes, yes. I mean, look, we’re also open to, as you mentioned, Siobhan, starting new channels, like the Women Plus Air Miners channel, the Environmental Justice channel. We started a Methane channel. Again, because we’re air miners, not carbon miners, mind you. So... So there are all sorts of ways. If you feel like there’s something that’s underrepresented in the atmospheric greenhouse gas removal discourse, we want to hear about it. And plus one to your statement, look, gender diversity is something that we want to work on and have an effect on because, again, there’s numerous studies out there that McKinsey did study not too long ago that And more teams with more diverse backgrounds have better outcomes.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah. And I think you see that at the launchpad, though. I think you have a pretty geographically disparate bunch of teams. And I would say that, you know, again, not perfect, but every time there is an imperfection, I think the energy is like, okay, let’s solve it then. Let’s come together and fix it as opposed to being like, well, you know, that’s not really a problem or we won’t deal with that later. It’s kind of like, no, deal with this now. Come, come here, all hands on deck, let’s do this.
And I like that energy a lot. It invites a lot of people in.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, really, time’s the one non-renewable resource that we have. And so the quicker we can get to solving these problems, the better. And that’s why we, to your point, we have a geographically diverse set of teams in Launchpad from India, from Brazil, from And that’s just enhanced rock weathering companies. We’ve seen biochar all over the planet, from Latin America, in Africa, in Sri Lanka, in North America, Europe, and direct air capture companies. All the different methods of carbon removal are well represented. All the different geographies are well represented.
I mean, we even had a team, you know, we’ve graduated a team from New Zealand and a team from Australia who got up at some ungodly hour in the morning.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Oh, poor, poor people.
Jason Grillo: I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, we hold the, for those listening, we hold the Sessions at nine in the morning US Pacific time. So you can do the math as to when that would be for certain people in certain areas of the world. But people come and do it. People do, people show up. And we’re thankful for it. It must be the music that we play at the start. At least I like to think. Definitely that.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Jason’s a great DJ, people. Jason’s a great DJ. And surprising, too. Like, he drops surprises in there.
Jason Grillo: Well, yeah. I mean, some of them are obvious. Like, when we did Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, we, you know, led in with Meghan Trainor all about the bass.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah. Oh, it’s so bad.
Ross Kenyon: Because it’s all about the base.
Jason Grillo: Yeah. Yeah. With the MRV for seaweed sinking, we said, you know, we had an octopus’s garden by the beetles. I like to be under the sea.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s about time to start wrapping this up. What do you think?
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Have we gone off the deep end? No, it’s OK. We’re also appropriate for ocean stuff. Oh, hey. Unintentional time. I think, though, but that’s coming back to the idea of like Airminers being kind of just like a fun, lighthearted space. Like you, you, you initiated the memes channel or like Tito and Asa, some combination. Oh, sure. But that’s like the whole reason we make memes at Thanksgiving. That was a big start for sure. For sure. You know, it’s just like bringing that levity into this space.
Jason Grillo: Yeah. And it showed up in our, in our kiloton fund FAQ event yesterday, which you can see the recording of on our YouTube channel.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm.
Jason Grillo: With, you know, with Timo’s, Thomas Morgan’s graphic of diver being eaten by shark, about to be eaten by shark, about to be eaten by, you know, ginormous shark, you know, with CO2 being eaten by kiloton fund, being eaten by megaton fund.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, he’s just sucking up real hard, huh? I think of him as Timo too, by the way. Yeah, I know.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, but look, their memes are important because they, again, they show a levity, they show a willingness to accept new ideas that you don’t often see elsewhere. And it shows that, you know, we’re willing to be vulnerable. We’re willing to try new things. We’re willing to go out there and do something new and interesting, different, despite all the odds, and to dedicate ourselves to that end.
Ross Kenyon: Faces without humor are dead, in my opinion.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: I think we’re a biased audience, Ross, but yes, I’m with you.
Ross Kenyon: I carry that with me everywhere, and I prefer to be having fun and joking. Everything can be funny if done in the right kind of spirits. I think many or at least many things can be with the right kind of spirit. And I feel like that is taking yourself less seriously. Yes. Work easier, even when the work is really hard and really serious. Yes. Like it’s an adaptation strategy that works.
Jason Grillo: Yes. Yes. At some level, it is a it is a bit of a coping mechanism. But like I said, but it also can get creative juices firing in a way that In the way that they wouldn’t otherwise.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s talk about our families of origin now. What was it like for you and why is humor so important to you and the way that you grew up and how your parents treated you or neglected you?
Jason Grillo: Okay, should I get a couch now so I can light up?
Ross Kenyon: Tell me about your mother and other classic cigars, not a cigar, blah, blah, blah. Okay, we’ve exhausted all of the classics, Jason. Now answer the damn question.
Jason Grillo: So where did I grow up? So I grew up in the state of Massachusetts in the North Shore.
Ross Kenyon: You better be getting to some real stuff here real fast. Okay, let’s move past that.
Jason Grillo: Well, look, I always was the, you know, me and my friends growing up were always the oddballs with like this, you know, strange like Monty Python sense of humor and stuff like that. But if people have known me even from like first and second grade know that the puns are part of the whole, that the sense of humor is part of the whole, is part of the whole thing. It’s me, it’s authentically genuine.
Ross Kenyon: What’s your favorite Python though? Not just film, but like either sketch or joke. What’s the one that remains with you? I know it’s hard. There’s so many. I grew up watching Flying Circus and the movies too. Siobhan, did you like Python?
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah, I do, yeah. It’s on, they don’t grab it.
Jason Grillo: That’s a tough question. I didn’t expect a sort of Spanish Inquisition here.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, there you go. I mean, that’s great for sure.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Well done, well done.
Ross Kenyon: Very smart and the very stupid at the same time. Like whenever we talk in meme lab, I’m always looking for the combination of the very smart and the very stupid. And when a joke hits that, that for me is sublime. Python is like the best at it. They’re all like Oxbridge people, right?
Jason Grillo: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: And they’re doing very stupid things. Very, very stupid things. That combination.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Sorry to go on a rant, but Python.
Jason Grillo: Look, it’s all good. I even have a rabbit. It’s not just any ordinary rabbit, mind you. It’s got nasty big pointy teeth. So, yes.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: What do you think the vulnerability aspect is? When you talk about carbon removal, it’s such a burgeoning industry. We know a lot, but we know so little. I think coming back to the vulnerability and the humility within carbon removal is pretty crucial. I think Airminers does a good job about that. How do you think about approaching what you know versus what you don’t know? How do you share that with the world?
Jason Grillo: I would say that We don’t, again, if we approach the community with this thought that, look, we know a lot of the other people in the community, but we don’t have all the answers ourselves. And, you know, oftentimes, like I feel questions, do you know someone who knows about this or that or the other thing? And, you know, I, and, you know, if I know someone who can directly, who’s a direct connection for that, sure. But a lot of the time, I just don’t know the answer. If they’re looking for something that’s a little bit more detailed or obscure.
So I’ll say, look, you can ask me or you can put it in the general channel. You can ask one person. You can ask 2,200 people. Get 2,200 sets of eyes on this. And I think the one long-term thing that we’re cognizant of is that As the community grows, that it’s going to be a little bit more challenging for people to put themselves out there.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Totally.
Jason Grillo: It’s easier to have that dynamic when there’s only 400 people. It’s more difficult when there’s five times as many, six times as many people as when you started, because there’s so many different eyeballs on the screen. And we want to, you know, we want to You know, have people know that this is a safe space. We have a code of conduct, for instance, that we share with everybody when they join. We have a kind of this email drip campaign that goes out that, you know, one week after they join, they get an email, two weeks after they join, they get another email, three weeks after they join, they get another email with like little nuggets, like here’s our member list, here’s our code of conduct, here’s our, here’s our, where the list of all the channels are, you know, that sort of thing.
Getting people into that engaged mindset is crucial at the start. We talked to people who were involved in other communities elsewhere when we started, maybe it’s like three years ago now, when we started to really lean into the community aspect of it. And what was apparent then is that getting people On board and engage within that first 30 days or even, you know, or as soon as you get in, that’s important. And that’s why whenever anyone joins, I always send them a message. Hey, you know, hit me up if you want to have a one-on-one, you know, here’s, you know, feel free to introduce yourself in, in there to have that little bit of nudge, that little bit of encouragement is a way to get people out of there.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Yeah, exactly. The other thing that is quite interesting about the community, I find, is that the vast majority of the traffic in the Slack itself is not public. That, you know, so, you know, really drawing back the veil here is that, you know, after, you know, I went in, I go in and every month I look at how many messages were exchanged in Slack. And then I exclude all the ones between Tito and me and Deborah and Deborah Graywolf, our operations assistant and, and, and Adina.
And of the non-administrative Slack messages, something like only 20, 25% of them are public in the public channels. So there’s a lot of DMing out there among people. And we want to keep that up because it suggests that there’s a lot of activity, a lot of sharing happening. And look, all we know is that there’s messages happening. We can’t, you know, obviously we can’t read it. But the But we just see the traffic levels of people who are sharing stuff underneath the surface.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Kind of makes sense, though, because I’m not going to email somebody who’s in Air Miners. I’m just going to DM them. So I think there’s a lot of that. Yeah, it makes sense. Now that you say that out loud, I’m like, oh, yeah, because I do that a lot. I’m DMing people a lot, but maybe not necessarily posting a question, unless it’s something that I didn’t get via email. Answered via DMs. I’m like, okay, I’ll just pose this to the general public. But that’s interesting.
Jason Grillo: Yeah.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah.
Jason Grillo: Yeah. So again, people are willing to share, especially in a direct messaging format, but also the channels. I mean, there’s smaller audiences in the channels. So if you were interested in, say, Ocean CDR or DAC or Environmental Justice or Women Plus Air Miners, you can have that. Corner of the Slack, which is tailored to that discussion. By the way, when Tito and I think about community, Slack is a tool, to be very clear. Slack is one of the many things that we do. We consider the events to be a major community activity because it’s a convening of people.
By the way, they’re not webinars. We don’t term them as webinars. They are events. And there’s a reason we have them on Zoom meeting instead of Zoom webinar so that we can engage. I mean, subtle things like that we feel can go a long way to improving the feeling of engagement and the ability to have people share their stories with others.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: How have those meetings changed now that you’re getting such high volumes? I feel like sometimes crowd control can be challenging in the questions and whatnot. You get some characters within the community. Actually, yeah. How has that changed for you?
Jason Grillo: Yeah, so we’ve only noticed any problems early on before Zoom improved its security settings. So to date, yeah, I mean, if people have background noise in the audience, we’ll go in and mute them. But that doesn’t happen that often, to be honest. Are happy to see a flourishing chat that goes on in the middle of the presentation, in the middle of the discussions. By the way, there’s a reason why we focus on the discussion because the community is there to hear what the people have to say, not necessarily to see slides that are being presented because that can just turn people off and you can get slides anywhere and also, you know, Logistically makes for a little bit of a challenge because people are always going to ask, can I see the slides?
I want to see the slides. I want to see the slides. Where are the slides? You know, afterwards. Anyway, but yeah, the focus is on the discussion. We feel like having a lively conversation among the panelists and moderator is what keeps people focused on that rather than just going off into the ether and I just feel like the chat is almost like most conferences.
Ross Kenyon: The main value is not the presentation, but the hallway conversations. And I’ve often had a lot of fun. And it’s almost like when you doodle, you’re more engaged. It’s not like your teacher is scolding you, saying you’re not paying attention in some ways that, like, Discussing it real time often helps retain information. Whenever I go to events, I’m always in the chat too, like, oh, that’s an interesting idea. Oh, that’s a good point.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, because you’re not just sitting there listening and processing, you’re thinking about What you would want to add into the conversation. There’s some statistics out there that we only retain a small fraction of the things that we hear or a small fraction of the things that we see, but the things that we contribute to and the things that we especially teach others about, that’s where you retain the most memory of a particular topic.
Ross Kenyon: It’s definitely true. I’ve listened to thousands of books and sometimes it ends up being like, after thousands of pages being like, wow, Hannah Arendt thinks evil is bad. And you’re like, surely there’s more to it than that. I don’t know at all. It was great listening.
Jason Grillo: There is more to it than that. Don’t call me Shirley. Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Had to go there. Yeah, but yeah, I would agree with that as well. And there’s something about, if you want to talk about literary preferences, I mean, there’s something about like a work of fiction. Like if you read something in like chapter one or two, you never know if it’s going to pop up in like chapter 14 later. You know, whereas... We’re, you know, look, I’m a history, you know, I have a history degree as do you, Ross.
So, sorry, I’ve read my share of, you know, certainly my share of nonfiction. But yeah, whereas in a history book of that, the narrative just kind of builds from event one to event two, to event three, to event four. It’s more of a cumulative thing that you see along the way, arriving at a conclusion at the end.
Ross Kenyon: It’s funny how history, especially when you read it, the sense of contingency is often lost too. I think we talked a little bit before, but it’s like, oh, this obviously led, there’s like a one-to-one relationship of causality here when actually it’s chaos and it’s storytelling and historiography has people fighting over how to actually practice history in the first place. Yes. Yes.
Jason Grillo: Yes. Well, the great thing about history is people are always making more of it. But, you know, I, but I, yeah. But yeah, I mean, you don’t know if something’s a blip, you know, when you’re in it, in the moment, you don’t know if it’s, if it’s an anomaly, if it’s the start of a trend, if it’s the end of a trend.
Ross Kenyon: Say the Zhu Enlai quote that everyone always says when this topic comes up.
Jason Grillo: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What’s the impact of the French Revolution? It was asked in the, like, what, the 1970s, 1980s, and as Zhu Enlai, the Premier of China, like, what’s the impact of the French Revolution? At that point, he said, yeah, it’s too soon to tell. Cryptic.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a great, like, kind of gnomic statement to make that everyone’s like, genius. That’s such a smart thing to say. One can only hope to utter such a nomic excellent statement like that.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, it comes up in terms of culture as well. I mean, Grant Faber posed an air minus like a couple of years ago. What would be in the carbon removal museum based on what we’re seeing now? And I’m curious about- That’s a great question. Yeah, it is. It is. Because we are writing kind of the history of an early stage Industry as it unfolds. And it’s one of my side projects for at least 20 years from now when I’m doing goodness knows what, but I would be interested in putting my undergraduate degree to good use and writing something about the early history of a potentially world-changing industry.
Because I feel like the carbon removal unicorns are being formed now, and we have a front row seat to seeing it happen and learning from them and maybe imparting that knowledge and insight to future people who might find it useful in their own pursuits.
Ross Kenyon: How could you even start? Because we don’t know. I mean, certainly we have frontrunners of the carbon removal industry that we now think are going to be the future unicorns. But I mean, many a slip between the cup and the lip kind of deal. Like, who knows what’s going to happen? Like, it wouldn’t surprise me if something in like the dark horse now all of a sudden pulls ahead and something that everyone’s missing on is like, oh, this is actually the most scalable, cheapest, most just option that we overlooked the entire time.
Jason Grillo: Right. Just to say, to save nothing. Well, look, I don’t think it’s going to be just one method that rules them all. I highly doubt that.
Ross Kenyon: This statement might go in the museum as a greatest wrong prediction of early carbon removal. Right.
Jason Grillo: Well, yeah, it was the IBM executive’s statement in like the 50s or something that, yeah, I think there’s a space for like a thousand computers in the whole world ever. Yeah. We don’t know. 100 years ago, there were dozens and dozens and dozens of automotive companies. Now, at least in Detroit, there’s the big three. There’s major Asian and European manufacturers, and now Tesla grew up. Also, 100 years ago, Charles Lindbergh hadn’t even flown over the Atlantic Ocean. And I actually looked this up the other day. Apparently, like, get this, like sliced bread didn’t even happen until like 1928 or 1930.
So, you know, when people say it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, maybe sliced bread hasn’t been developed yet.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, in 100 years, that’s the most important invention that we’ve had in 100 years. Right. Right. That sounds like a great ironic overstatement. Yeah, but like sitting here now, like what would be the most important, I think the stock photo of DAC, that’s going in.
Jason Grillo: Oh yeah, the Henway, you know, shiny DAC plant on a hill. Yeah, that’s, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That’s like, that’s our reserve joke. The South Park, when they can’t come up with ideas, they’re like, we’ve always got crab people. We can always go to the crab people. That’s like our DAC image. We’ve always got the DAC image. Just throw it in there.
Jason Grillo: Yeah. Well, I mean, it is actually from a public relations standpoint, I mean, you know, CDR, If you want to talk nomenclature, just about every week I’m on a call when people equate CDR with direct air capture only. And look, this is not to diss on direct air capture in any way, shape, or form. What Climeworks has achieved in any way, shape, or form. Because we love what Climeworks is doing. We love its direct air capture segment of carbon removal is doing. But oftentimes, for people who are newer to carbon removal, they equate, well, carbon removal is just direct air capture.
No, it’s a lot more than that. And it’s our job to better educate. So what goes in the museum?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, what goes in the museum? You’re like a professional dodger of my questions. I’m asking you about your relationship, your parents, what goes in the museum, talking about- What goes in the museum?
Jason Grillo: Sure. How about the first Air Miners event recording? How about- Or from the first Air Miners conference.
Ross Kenyon: He’s even in there. There’s probably really like, like just out of your cohorts, the number of people there who are going to be like very rich, powerful, influential people five, 10 years from now, probably pretty high.
Jason Grillo: Oh, and from our first conference?
Ross Kenyon: First conference or just like your ongoing events though. Like there are future like world changers in there. Like almost scary.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Launchpad teams. Sure, sure.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, yeah.
Jason Grillo: I’d like to think so, crossing fingers. You know, one never knows. I mean, that’s the beauty of being at an early stage, being able to help people out in a way as being kind of the gatekeeper that, you know, to have an influence that carries forward and giving people a leg up at the start.
Ross Kenyon: What if we put you in there? Did you like Lenin being preserved where people could visit his body? What if we stuck you in there?
Jason Grillo: Well, I’m a capitalist, so no. Are there any capitalists who have done that?
Ross Kenyon: I guess Mao and Lenin are the only people who have been embalmed for public, except maybe saints. Are you a saint? Do you feel saintly?
Jason Grillo: Oh, goodness, no.
Ross Kenyon: No, you don’t want your bones in the reliquary?
Jason Grillo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. You go to Hungary and they’ve got the hand of St. Stephen that they cut off and is on display because St. Stephen is, I think, the patron saint of Hungary or something like that. No, I would not want for that.
Ross Kenyon: Podcast got weird. What do you think, Siobhan? What should go in the time capsule or into the museums?
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Going off the rails here, I think it would be interesting to have a museum for carbon removal because something we struggle with in the industry is the lack of visual, tangible, museum quality items. We struggle with that, I think, as an industry in doing this very tangible service. It’s physically being done and the mechanics of it are very real. The end product is so ephemeral.
Jason Grillo: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the reasons why We need something more tangible. It would be tough to get the first pyrolyzer out there because Biochar has been around for just so darn long. I know what would be good.
Ross Kenyon: Your very first Nori podcast This is all just bait for praise, and I’m glad you took it. Thank you. I accept.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Good to see Ross’s voice droning on at the museum.
Jason Grillo: I think it was Ross and Paul in their very first podcast, if I remember correctly.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think all of the people we did our first hackathon with that we came out of. Several co-founders who weren’t and decided to go a different direction. Right.
Jason Grillo: Maybe first email we sent out for our very first conference, something from each of the different methods, like something from a DAC plant, something from a biochar, something from ocean alkalinity stuff, something from...
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: A rock. What’s that? Yeah, rock weathering. In the fall.
Jason Grillo: Yes, exactly. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Something from, yeah, Olavine from Project Vesta would be interesting.
Ross Kenyon: One of the first things I saw was touring Klaus Lackner’s research lab and his moisture swing. That could be fun. That’s pretty early. Oh, yeah.
Jason Grillo: Well, Klaus, I mean, look, the Open Air Collective makes t-shirts with Klaus on them, so.
Ross Kenyon: Are they sainted? Does he have, does he have the halo behind him?
Jason Grillo: I don’t, I don’t know. You’d have to ask the Opener Collective folks. But yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Patron Saint of Carbon Removers. That’s what we need. I think we need our own. Okay. Yeah. I’m also thinking. Okay.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: It’s going off the rails now.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Ross always tells me that we should end the podcast one question before the stupidest question we have.
Ross Kenyon: I have not yet begun.
Jason Grillo: Well, there are no stupid questions. So in theory, we could go on forever.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: We could go on forever. We could. I would love to talk to you forever, Jason. It’s such an enjoyable conversation.
Jason Grillo: Thanks. Thanks. No, I enjoyed being on with you both and hope this was helpful to other people in car removal. Again, final reminder that we’d love to hear more from you if you’re in the community or if you’re not in the community, feel free to contact me at jason at airminers.org.
Ross Kenyon: Always the biggest promoter or one of them for air miners, you should do boot up. It’s really great. I probably like to just go back through and do it because I feel like there’s stuff that I’ve forgotten over time or lost sight of or there’s just so much new information.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Or that’s changed. Yeah, I feel like I didn’t even do I did boot up when it was just like a list of articles that John Bunches had put together like before it actually became those days too.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: And so I’m like, I actually never got to go through boot up and chat with people. And so I’m like, maybe I should do it just like, you know.
Jason Grillo: Yeah. And look, it’s a constantly evolving process as well. I mean, look, we’re never done. We’re always iterating on ways to make boot up better. We’re always iterating to make our other programs better. And to even with that, find new programs. And, you know, I’m just really, you know, grateful to have had some small part in You know, what I hope is going to be world changing. So thank you all for and thank you to everyone in the community for everything you do every single day. Really appreciate it.
Ross Kenyon: Be sure to check out boot up if you haven’t and Airminer’s Launchpad if you’re ready to go through an accelerator with your carbon.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: August 11th, deadline coming up.
Ross Kenyon: Sneaking up on you. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
