About this episode
Dive into the wild ride that is the professional journey of Ross Kenyon—from disillusioned philosophy PhD dropout to Hollywood screenwriter to accidental climate entrepreneur. As co-founder of Nori, a pioneering carbon removal marketplace, Ross shattered the stuffy climate-tech mold with his irreverent approach and razor-sharp wit. He’s harnessed humor through viral carbon removal memes and built community by embracing vulnerability and self-deprecation in an industry often drowning in jargon, doom, and self-importance. Now an entrepreneur in residence at AirMiners and climate-tech mentor, Ross offers brutally honest insights about the rollercoaster of climate entrepreneurship—including the gut-punch of winding down a company and the unexpected liberation that followed. Whether you’re navigating your own climate career pivot or simply fascinated by how a philosophy-loving film buff became a carbon removal maverick, Ross delivers wisdom wrapped in laughter that will stick with you long after the episode ends.
Notes and resources
Full transcript
Michael Gold (00:01)
Ross Kenyon, welcome to Climate Swings. It’s great to have you here.
Ross (00:05)
Thanks for having me, Michael.
Michael Gold (00:07)
So let’s just start with a pretty high level introduction of yourself, a little bit about your professional background and your current work and what brought you to what you’re doing right now.
Ross (00:21)
Well, I usually start with, I was doing PhD coursework in political philosophy more than a decade ago. And I decided that was the wrong fit for me. I was in a seminar and we were reading a seven or 800 page book. I remember it was a big one. And I had all these questions about the ideas of the book as a whole, the trajectory of the human species essentially, and how we should live with one another and all of my colleagues wanted to focus on one small procedural paragraph about how it operated, this theory, in a very granular sense. And I felt very much out of sorts there. I’m like, if I have to be really good at this to compete with all of you in the job market, I’m not sure if I can care nearly enough about this particular part versus the whole that we ignored for a very long seminar, it was ignored.
And that kind of set me off on a different trajectory. I still liked working with ideas, so I went into filmmaking for several years. That was fun. I mostly ended up screenwriting and producing. And then I got pulled into the world of tech communications and a friend of mine from our undergraduate years invited me to co-found Nori, which was, depending on how you count, the first or maybe the second carbon removal marketplace. I usually say the first, unless I’m talking to the other marketplace, which quarreled with us, not really quarreled. We jockeyed for who was first. Being first doesn’t really matter, it turns out nearly as much as one might hope. In fact, it can be kind of bad in a way, being first to go. And so I did a bunch of things as a co-founder of Nori. Carbon removal was such a strange place in those early days where commercial carbon removal at the very beginning, nearly a decade ago, was more closely associated with geoengineering. Things that are scarily becoming more mainstream now not because they’re inherently bad things, but just they show that we’re in extreme circumstances. Things like refreezing ice sheets and glaciers and solar radiation management and spraying of aerosols to enhance the albedo of the planet things like that. Carbon removal used to be very closed over there. It no longer is. Now it’s very mainstream and cool and that’s a great thing for carbon removal and Nori wound down last summer and since then, I’ve done a number of things. I’m an entrepreneur in residence at Air Miners, which is the major community. Well, one of two, there’s also Open Air Collective, which is amazing too, but Air Miners is a hub of carbon removal activity and community. I’m an EIR there and I’ve worked with a couple of cohorts of their Launchpad Accelerator program, mentoring startups. I do a fair amount of advising and mentoring in several programs. I scout for some venture and debt deals and a bunch of other business development and commercial things I’m involved in. And still on the job hunt actually, in fact, depending on when this airs, hopefully I’ll have a full-time position, but I don’t know yet.
Michael Gold (03:26)
Maybe this will lead to your next full-time position, who knows?
Ross (03:29)
Yes, I’m excited to talk about the more, both the highly personal, but also the quite meta questions of how does one find a job in climate? I imagine people listening probably would like to know about that.
Michael Gold (03:39)
Yes, we will definitely get there, but let’s get deeper into the personal side. It sounds like you’ve had quite a few pivots, some pretty hard, some a little softer perhaps. Let’s go back to, I guess, the PhD. What was that in? Was there a climate or a sustainability connection?
Ross (04:02)
There were several scholars in the department working on this. It was at the University of Arizona, which that department for political philosophy at the time was the best ranked analytic political philosophy department in the English speaking world. It was the best out there for what I was trying to do. I think I would have been a better fit in a political theory department. There’s a distinction here, but people were working on various aspects of the environment and our relationship to it, but that was not my interest. I was interested in very fundamental questions of like, what do we owe one another? Do we just owe not to initiate aggressive action against them? Do we have more thorough going duties to one another beyond just don’t harm them? Is there some sort of foundational axiomatic truth that we can build up from that we know is just true that we don’t have to have some circular reasoning. We know like, okay, like this is true and everything that follows after this makes perfect logical sense. I ended up losing faith in that project actually. And my department was part of the reason why many of the ideas that they dealt with undermined that way of thinking and tried to reformulate it in a way that I didn’t find especially convincing. No fault of their own, very, very smart people that were there.
I didn’t connect with some of the answers that came out of it.
Michael Gold (05:33)
And so how long into the program did you decide it wasn’t for you?
Ross (05:39)
A year, I did a year of coursework there and I was working at a center there in the philosophy department to keep a roof over my head. And yeah, it was a good year, taught me a lot. I’m glad I got to see that the professorial life was maybe not what I wanted to do.
Michael Gold (05:58)
Mm-hmm as a lot of people a lot of a conclusion that a lot of people will make
Ross (06:02)
Yeah, the rule that I’ve heard for it is that if you can imagine yourself doing literally anything else, you should do it. Because you really need to want that with your whole being, I think, to be very successful at it. Maybe that’s true of a lot of things, but the thing is to be a professor, you can go to an amazing school like that and still end up in some highly undesirable department. It could be like, I feel like any department I name is going to be offensive to people from— There’s no way.
Michael Gold (06:30)
Our audience can use their imagination.
Ross (06:31)
Southeast Western State College or whatever. And you’ll come from a great program where you spent a decade trying to get there and you’ve arrived and you know, there’s a Chili’s and that’s all you’ve got to eat at and it’s not really where you want to be. Yeah.
Michael Gold (06:34)
Exactly.
Right.
Yeah, but you decided to focus on messaging, narrative, and storytelling. What spurred that evolution and what sent you to Hollywood, actually?
Ross (07:01)
Well, I’m not sure if I ever sat down and made a conscious choice. I see people like that on LinkedIn sometimes and they will very conspicuously say things like, well, I was a brand strategist or someone gifted in brand marketing, but I don’t know how much choice was really in this. A lot of my career has been very intuitive and I think it’s a case of being opportunistic where things seem like a great fit or maybe it pulls you out of the doldrums. When I got sucked into tech work, I was in a screenwriting malaise because I wrote this script that I thought was really good. I was working with a manager and I kept getting asked for rewrites to the point where the rewrite I would get asked about would send me back to the first draft of the thing that I had written. I’m like, yeah, we already tried that. Remember you told me to rewrite that like four rewrites ago?
Michael Gold (07:56)
What was the script about?
Ross (07:58)
It was a satire of travel and travelers, which was, it was good. I thought it was like really funny, I hadn’t seen anything else quite like it yet. But there’s a good AV Club article from when Onion made newspapers. I think they probably still run stuff online like that. It was about why Portlandia was the perfect show for the Obama era where progressives were ascendant and could laugh at their foibles. And then once Trump was elected, that vibe.
Michael Gold (08:16)
Mm-hmm.
Ross (08:27)
was not present anymore, so Portlandia as a show no longer made sense and thus was shutting down. And that was kind how my script felt too. It’s like a great show for people who want to laugh about sort of kind of dopey left of center or like we’re all connected, travelers, man. And some of like the funny stuff that happens in hostels and on the road. And it just wasn’t funny at that point. It’s just.
Michael Gold (08:33)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, was that your main project in Hollywood? Did you have other gigs? What was that whole experience like? What was sort of the key takeaways?
Ross (09:06)
Several things. It wasn’t the main one. That was the last one. I had another project that I was working on for a long time that was about a Mexican man who was undocumented and crossed the border in Arizona and came across a car accident and ended up saving the kid out of the car and getting him help but found himself deported in the process and based on a true story. And that was cool. I took some meetings on that and that had various good things going for it, but I don’t know, it just never happened. I don’t even have a good reason for it. Just a lot of these things where there’s so many people trying to break in. I just did a little thing recently on this topic because do you use Descript for editing? No, no, you use DaVinci, right? Yeah, yeah.
Michael Gold (10:02)
I use DaVinci Resolve, yeah.
I know I listened to your episode about using Descript for AI generated videos. It was interesting.
Ross (10:13)
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think that video turned out to be anything special. It just kind of funny. But yeah, I tell the story in there about having friends who some of them were just like, miracled into amazing careers from college that are people that like, you’ve either seen their stuff or know them. And I have friends who are brilliant who they’ve been grinding for 10, 15 years and just just now. And I think I think I was in that stage to where I just didn’t grind long enough. And then I got pulled into
Michael Gold (10:30)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ross (10:41)
actually remunerative work that could be meaningful, that still is about ideas, that’s all about making creative combinations of things that other people haven’t seen yet. So I know it looks like discontinuity, but I actually think there’s a lot of continuity between the things that I’m interested in and they all connect in their own weird way. And you bring those experiences with you and ideally they should make you more robust and interesting and not just a disjointed dilettante.
Michael Gold (10:45)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and so from your kind of screenwriting storytelling life, you went into tech comms, is that right?
Ross (11:14)
I yeah, I got pulled into the world of blockchain there for a hot second in 2017.
Michael Gold (11:21)
What was that experience like?
Ross (11:24)
I don’t know. I look back on blockchain. Nori also originally had a strong blockchain and cryptocurrency underpinning. So we were trying to build a commodity market-style infrastructure for carbon removal markets. And that involved a digitally native token and a bunch of aspects of blockchain that would ideally improve carbon market operation. I found myself disappointed by a lot of blockchain. In fact, now we’re at a point too where, I don’t know if you saw that right before the inauguration, there was a Melania and a Donald Trump.
Michael Gold (12:04)
How could I have avoided it?
Ross (12:08)
And I’m still waiting for there to be like one, well, don’t know, remittances are cool and maybe just the speculative storing of value outside of more normal asset classes. But like besides those two things, and granted, those are actually pretty big things in a way. Just blockchain has had so much hype around it for so long and I’ve ended up just being like, is this anything but internet gambling at this point? I don’t really see.
Michael Gold (12:32)
Mm-hmm.
The vaporiest of vaporware, right?
Ross (12:40)
I know, it’s at least with AI, the joke for a long time for AI was that ML is written in Python and AI is written in PowerPoint. Have you ever heard that old joke? It’s a good joke. It’s no longer relevant though, because at this point now, like AI has delivered and there’s amazing use cases. But blockchain for the most part, I remember hearing all this stuff about the new web three economy and all of the things it was gonna enable and it never arrived. Is it going to arrive? I don’t know.
Michael Gold (12:50)
I have not, I have not.
Okay.
Alright.
Ross (13:09)
Maybe I’ll eat my words though, maybe a year or five years or 10 years from now, I’ll be like, yeah, the world is just powered by this now, it’s in the back of everything. But yeah, no.
Michael Gold (13:16)
Not yet, not yet.
Yeah, and so Obviously the reason I’m talking to you today is because of your role with Nori your presence in the climate space. Talk about the swing that you made and kind of I guess even earlier What was your thinking about climate and did you want to do something to? To engage with it somehow even during your sort of Hollywood and tech comms life?
Ross (13:46)
No, I think I’m likely an unusual one. Well, the story I usually tell is that I got pulled into Nori because one of my friends from my undergraduate years got really into carbon removal, obsessed with it. And what attracted him to it was that it was a way to not just make climate change less bad, but actually reverse it. And I came up…
Michael Gold (14:14)
Mm-hmm.
Ross (14:15)
during a time period with Al Gore, it seemed like a lot of planting trees and cutting consumption and things that are not necessarily as inspiring as what if we just entirely reversed it through novel technology? And so I got really into that too. I’m like, this is great. But before that, no, I didn’t. In fact, this was one founder, he’s told this story publicly too. I knew him because he was in college Republicans and I was in college Libertarians and we used to have debates.
So I’m like one of the.
Michael Gold (14:45)
This is your co-founder,
your Nori co-founder. That’s great.
Ross (14:48)
Yeah, so we always had a strange intellectual heritage where we did have some of that market friendliness coming from a center or center right perspective or depending however you want to map it. I don’t even know how I identify these days. I definitely do not like what is happening right now. But that always made us unusual figures in climate tech and carbon removal. And I think that made us think differently about several things. But I always thought that climate action, the kinds of people that get involved in climate action were going to do that and it wouldn’t be that effective. And I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. And I’ve softened on that view a lot over time and can now recognize there’s a reason why a lot of that conventional wisdom is conventional.
But no, didn’t intend to get into carbon removal. It’s entirely a historical accident. That was my dog sneezing. It was because, it was just, yeah. It just happened because I knew someone who believed in me and it was a, do you know Coach K? know, famously the Duke basketball coach, but the way that he would recruit would.
Michael Gold (15:50)
Good live podcast.
I don’t know.
Ross (16:11)
be rather than hiring for, need a center or power forward, he would find a player whose character he liked and then sort of build a team around that sort of like anchor player. And so Paul tapped me on the shoulder and said, come do Nori with me. And we don’t know exactly what you’re gonna do, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out. I feel like I did. So again, accident contingency from several directions there that led to me even getting involved in climate.
Michael Gold (16:19)
Mm-hmm.
So it was just a relation, sort of a serendipitous relationship, an accident of a relationship that kind of brought you into the space.
Ross (16:43)
Yeah, and in the same way where I didn’t really intend to get into blockchain stuff, just, had friends that were involved in it and I had a job that I could take on and I was like, great, it’s better than being a very broke aspiring screenwriter. And then also come found this company with me. I’m like, cool, I’ve done like early stage stuff before and I’d love to actually do this and then give this a go. And all of these things just felt like, it’s better than what I’m doing now. And sometimes you just throw yourself into something and you discover that you actually really love it.
Michael Gold (17:13)
Can you give a high level about what Nori was all about basically?
Ross (17:19)
Nori was, I don’t really use the past tense so often, pulling the heartstrings. It’s okay. Yeah, I’m not sure if you’ve had the experience of having a company close that you were involved in, especially when you found it. No, it produces all of the emotions. It’s sad, it’s disappointing. Sometimes you can maybe even feel a little angry at points. And then there’s also the feeling of like liberation. Oh, I can move on. I don’t have to.
Michael Gold (17:23)
Sorry, sorry, but just have to get used to it, I guess, right?
not, I’m sure.
poignant.
Ross (17:47)
talk about this thing anymore. I can focus elsewhere and that’s a really great thing. And sometimes those feelings even overlap, but Nori was a carbon removal marketplace and we very much wanted there to be commodity style infrastructure for moving carbon out of the atmosphere and into more durable forms of storage. We were looking at things like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and commodity markets as that’s where enormous amounts of atoms and money change hands. And if we could copy that and have it happen for carbon, that would be amazing. But I don’t even think we’re any closer to that now. Nearly eight years later, the big deals in carbon still tend to be bilateral and over the counter. They don’t transact through a marketplace in that kind of way. Carbon removal, definitely not. Carbon removal is much smaller and those deals are still all handshakey and outside of marketplaces. But at some point we need to figure out a way to standardize carbon and trade it at scale. But I don’t know, Nori was always its virtue and its vice was that we are very visionary and being visionary isn’t necessarily a good thing. It’s the opposite of being empirical. And in that way, like, like, okay, like, we know that the world needs to go this direction, we’re going to build it. But we’re also taking a step out into space and doing it. And sometimes you’re right. And you’re really right about that. And when you’re wrong, you Wile E. Coyote and you look down and you’re actually falling off the cliff.
Michael Gold (19:15)
Right.
Ross (19:16)
I’m exaggerating here for the sake of Nori. That isn’t really what happened at Nori.
Michael Gold (19:22)
There are a lot of colorful metaphors that we could use. The Chinese phrase of, the tallest piece of grass is always the first one to get lopped off, Something like that.
Ross (19:30)
That’s true. think it’s kind of a little bit about it’s really like tall poppy syndrome or arrogance or being thinking, you know, puffing up too much. Or it’s also maybe about going first too, where going first is also not always the advantage people think it is.
Michael Gold (19:41)
Mm-hmm.
Right. In those early days, how did you learn about climate? You didn’t have a professional background, you didn’t really have an academic background in it. You were brought into this carbon removal startup, especially at a time when carbon removal was like, what the hell is that? Right. How did you, how did you learn? How did you get started?
Ross (20:06)
Probably no different than many. I think one thing that we did was a little bit more unique is that one of my colleagues, Christophe, he had worked at various nonprofits and had been involved in carbon removal for a couple of years at that point. I can’t remember exactly how long, but we started a podcast. It’s still going now called Reversing Climate Change. And I built the format of that show around, there’s a, hold on one second.
So many dog noises. So many dog noises. There was a podcast I liked called Rex Factor. Have you ever heard of this show? Okay, I don’t even know if it’s still going at this point, but it, I mean, the conceit of it was that it was like X Factor, but what is for all the kings and queens of England. And later they moved on to Scotland and, but they would determine not only if this ruler was a good ruler, but also if they had that ineffable special something, the Rex Factor. And so.
Michael Gold (20:37)
Dealing with the dog.
No, I haven’t.
Alright.
Okay.
Ross (21:06)
One of the co-hosts knew seemingly everything about British history, just amazingly gifted at it, and the other guy knew nothing. And I’m sure he hammed it up so the audience could feel like.
Michael Gold (21:17)
Bit of an odd couple vibe, I guess.
Ross (21:19)
Big odd couple vibe and just a way to learn through this person who was asking the basic questions that the audience probably was coming in. And odd couple mismatch here made it a really fun dynamic. We copied that and I was just the doofus and Christophe was the erudite one. They called me Vox Populi. That implies that Christophe was Vox Dei, but I don’t know that I wanna give him that much credit. But that’s what we did. And so like a lot of the learning was done in public and that was also one of Nori’s
Michael Gold (21:43)
Fair enough.
Ross (21:49)
more forward looking things that we are very content forward company and doing that learning in public allowed us to drive huge numbers for podcasting and get a lot of attention. People were always surprised at how small of a company we were given our footprint in the space. And I think that, then just, I’m a big reader. just hurled myself at the library basically and was podcasting and interviewing people and studying up and that was a big part of it.
Michael Gold (22:04)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
What was the impetus to make it so public and to put all of your ignorance, I guess, out there for the world to see? I mean, it is very unconventional. It’s not something you hear in this space or in a lot of startup spaces at all.
Ross (22:34)
I think we had the inkling at the time, it’s so long ago, but I mean, I don’t think corporate communications has gotten less boring over time. You’re a comms person, but there’s strong tendency for anodyne communications where, like, well, we don’t wanna offend anyone, we don’t really wanna like show weakness or look like we don’t know what we’re talking about, but it actually presents a lot of strength to show the limits of your knowledge. And I think if you can do it in a thoughtful way, it actually encourages a lot of trust and people want to be with you, they’re learning in the process. And I think it makes it much easier to have good open conversations and have some laughs about it where we aren’t all trying to pretend like we know everything all the time. yeah, think that was just a, it’s counterintuitive, but it makes perfect sense to me. And I wonder if it even makes sense to you.
Michael Gold (23:20)
Mm hmm. Yeah.
No, it totally does. I mean, what I was thinking of is, you know, anodyne and also very repetitive, especially in the climate space where like a lot of it is the same kind of messaging, the same kind of imagery, the same feeling. So leaning into ignorance, I mean, like, why not try it? Right? Like, it’s different.
Ross (23:46)
I kind of like that too. I think also in the way that I described my political philosophy orientation, I was very first principles driven. And I think being able to just be like, hey, here’s brick by brick. This is how I’m building up the knowledge and learning. And I think it just makes sense to me. And I think it doesn’t necessarily have to come across as weak or amateur to do it in that way. I wonder what it would look like for a whole company to do something like that.
Michael Gold (24:10)
Well, and also just being very transparent about your own limitations is, I think, a way to avoid the accusations of greenwashing a lot of the time. Because you see a lot of companies that use very highfalutin language and the actual reality behind it, it’s really hard to say, right?
Ross (24:30)
I think that’s definitely true. And I think there are cases where you could say this carbon credit is good for these circumstances and these are the risks and you should use it to negate a land use change emission, but probably not a fossil emission. But I think that’s not that common. Those details are really hard for people to absorb. We spent a long time teaching people that buying an avoided deforestation credit is the same as one emitted fossil emission and having to go back on that now and be like, actually, there’s like a number of scientific and temporal conditions that you need to keep in mind. This is too much. I have like, this is like one duty of 50 and like now you’re making this, are you selling me the product that I need or not? And if not, I’m going to go to the person who’s not doing it in this weird way.
Michael Gold (25:16)
Well, a lot of people aren’t philosophy PhDs, right, is the problem. You know, like, or even one year into it, or even have one year of a philosophy PhD. So a lot of people want what they want, they want it now, they want it simple, right?
Ross (25:30)
It turns out that that is not the case for quite a lot in carbon removal or climate change. There’s all these cool methodologies that are coming online for carbon removal and they all have trade-offs and they have some conditions under which they could be terrible. They have some conditions under which they might be life-saving, much falls in like the middle range here. But I think if you can’t play with some of those nuances there, you’re really not understanding it. But then the job for people who work in comms or go to market or marcomm or commercial just generally is trying to figure out a way to do this in a way that is not alienating to potential customers because a lot of nuance just looks like a good reason not to act at all.
Michael Gold (26:11)
Well, the idea of play, and you said play with some of the nuance and stuff, but also just kind of like having a bit more of a playful attitude toward things in general and kind of being able to laugh at yourself, right? And being able to be a little self-deprecating because a lot of people who, even so-called experts, there’s a lot that they don’t know either, right?
Ross (26:31)
Yeah, I think the reason why those people become attractive comedic targets is because they get high on their own supply a little bit. I think once you’re far enough up into the status games of any industry that you’re a part of, you start to believe your own hype in that way. And I think that’s bad, both because I’ve had people with high status be mean to me sometimes, and I’m just like, I’m going to remember that.
Michael Gold (27:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also you think we are all supposed to be working together to ostensibly save the planet. Can’t we at least be nice to each other as a prerequisite?
Ross (27:12)
I’ve never really understood that, because my first recourse has always been to be as collaborative as possible. And there are some times when you, for business interests or some other reason, you can’t be as open-handed as you might like. But I think the open-handed, kind, fun, self-deprecating strategy, because carbon removal, especially right now, is a sideshow. It is not climatically relevant. And the, the aim though is that over time it needs to keep scaling because we’re going to have residual emissions, we’re going to have hard-to-abate emissions, we need to deal with them with carbon removal and we need to be growing capacity year over year to do so. But one of the expressions that I often think about when it comes up is the knives are so sharp because the stakes are so small. You’re like for a sideshow over here, sometimes you’re just like, do we really need the status games or the, I’m this is not unique to carbon removal and carbon removal probably isn’t even that bad overall relative to some places you can go but yeah people people like feeling that way I’m not sure if it’s always helpful.
Michael Gold (28:17)
I guess on the flip side, the stakes are so big when it comes to climate as a whole, right? Like the entire climate problem. I mean, my take on it is just I don’t feel like I can wake up and be in despair every day, right? I need to have a little bit of fun with this or else, like, I’m gonna tear my hair out every day.
Ross (28:26)
yeah. I think that’s a great way to put it. I think, I mean, one of the things that Nori’s done for several years or did see even the getting the right tense at this point is still kind of tricky for me. But we had a Carbon Removal Memes page that I’ve since continued since Nori wound down. And I love being able to laugh about this stuff. It’s funny, carbon removal can be funny, climate change can be funny. It doesn’t have to be so serious. I think being able to laugh about it and also being able to to take some kind of meaningful action that’s meaningful to you is a great antidote to despair. Although I’m sure there’s some days when you wake up though and you probably still feel it and I have some of those days too.
Michael Gold (29:12)
Absolutely, yeah.
If I read too much just everyday news headlines, that’s when I start to feel it. But the more I have these kinds of conversations, the less I feel it.
Ross (29:25)
Am I uplifting you dramatically right now?
Michael Gold (29:28)
Well, you and all my other guests. And you are not the first guest that I’ve had who advocated for humor as a climate tech marketing strategy.
Ross (29:37)
I must have missed that one. Who said that? I gotta go back and listen to that one.
Michael Gold (29:39)
Mel, Mel Adamson, one of my first few episodes, I want to say like episode three or four, way back there, or five, yeah. The co-founder of Alder and Co, yeah. Actually, I’m curious, like, how did you get into some of these more humorous climate organizations, like you have Climate Karen, you have the Carbon Removal Memes. Can you talk a little bit about those experiences?
Ross (30:07)
I probably started with Reversing Climate Change has, we had a lot of laughs on this show and I found that to be, I gotta just, I think I my dog away for.
Michael Gold (30:23)
No, it’s fine.
Talk about diffusing the tension and leaning into the humor. It’s all good.
Ross (30:29)
That’s okay, you probably have to edit some of that a little bit. Maybe you want, it’s fascinating for listeners. I’m sure Ross putting her dog in his crate, switching the pronouns too. Humor, yeah, Reversing Climate Change was just a lot of laughs. We had a great time with it. There are many guests that I had that had…
Michael Gold (30:33)
Or maybe I won’t.
Exactly, exactly.
Ross (30:57)
humoristic orientation to the first episode I can think of is I did an early show with, do you know, J. Maarten Troost?
Michael Gold (31:05)
Mm-mm. No.
Ross (31:07)
his wife was a development worker who moved them to Kiribati in the Western Pacific. And he wrote a series of books. They all have very silly quasi Victorian titles like the sex lives of cannibals. And, and they just, they’re travel logs about his experiences living in Oceania. And I had him on talking about climate change in the region. And, I’ve always been a humor freak too. I also just grew up loving.
Michael Gold (31:24)
All right.
Ross (31:36)
Mel Brooks and Monty Python and SNL reruns and stuff like that. So I’ve always valued humor just for my own sake. As a writer, I would write about serious things sometimes, but I was primarily a comedy writer. I very much like finding the joke. I like telling stories that are funny. A lot of them are pretty dark. I just like humor in that way. And then everything that came after that as a result of, I just letting my freak flag fly essentially and being like, I am here for memes. And sometimes there’s some swearing in them. And also they’re pretty goofy and we’re going to make fun of our very, very niche community here. And it’s going to be fun. And you can come do it with me if you want. And there are some people for whom that’s anathema and they just are like, that is not, I’m a serious scientist. I I don’t like that as much. And then there are some people who are a lot of times I was just on a job interview earlier in the morning. It’s like you.
Michael Gold (32:10)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ross (32:33)
you do those memes, right? And they’re like, we love those. I see them, our team posts them in Slack when we see them just like, that is fantastic. I’m like trying to put a little wind in the sails of this is hard. Carbon removal is not easy. You’re like trying to separate very small particles at low concentrations from ambient air. It’s like inherently a crazy thing to do. It’s fun to be to laugh about it a little bit. And so just attract people to me that like that are trying to build on that work in their own way and
Michael Gold (32:55)
Yeah.
Ross (33:03)
I just like supporting people who are funny.
Michael Gold (33:05)
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, everyone has a sense of humor, right? It’s just a natural human instinct. And if you can tap into that, that’s a, that’s a real superpower.
Ross (33:14)
I think so. I think it’s a good disarming thing to do where if you can laugh with someone and I don’t know, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how to go about this new Trump two era, but I think being able to laugh and if in so far as we do want to come together or change minds or some combination of both of those things, I think some amount of laughter is probably going to be necessary to break the logjam.
Michael Gold (33:36)
Yeah.
At Nori, did you hire for humor? I mean, did you have like a mood board for your potential employees and like, you know, they had to fill the humor bucket? How did that go with your staff?
Ross (33:51)
It wasn’t the main criterion by which we judge, but I never hired for oh, this person. Actually, I think someone sent me a meme once before we interviewed them, but it was bad. It was maybe one of the worst memes I’ve seen. It was like, oof. At least they tried. But I never hired specifically for that. I think a willingness to laugh though.
Michael Gold (34:10)
Well, at least they tried, right?
Ross (34:20)
There’s a good line from, I must have read this book 15 years ago at this point, but Bossy Pants, Tina Fey, you ever read that?
Michael Gold (34:27)
yeah, I have not read it but I know.
Ross (34:30)
That’s good. She has some line in there about, I’ve said this so many times, I always come back to it where when she was head writer at SNL, if she didn’t wanna see someone at three in the morning on an all-nighter, didn’t matter how brilliant they were, didn’t matter how funny they were, she just didn’t wanna hire them. And a willingness to laugh and to be easy in the right kinds of ways, I think is something that I do value and select for for people in my life to some extent, even though that probably wasn’t the overriding concern for any of the hiring decisions at Nori.
Michael Gold (35:03)
Yeah, to be able to be a little disarmed by somebody, right? Like, you’re not coming with all your professional kind of pretences up all the time.
Ross (35:14)
Those people are exhausting. I start retreating from people like that pretty quickly. Like my demeanor change, I’m not even very good at hiding it. like, I am trying to end this as quickly as possible.
Michael Gold (35:16)
Absolutely.
Yeah, you know that it’s a successful working relationship when you start exchanging emails or Slack messages about books,
Ross (35:33)
I think so. I think being able to connect in that way is really important. Although I’ve also been really chummy in the past and I think sometimes in the workplace that can also be a little bit of a wrong turn too. Especially as a manager, I’ve actually been trying to think more about how to relate to people in this way and be friendly, but you’re also not meant to be friends in this way either. And that can also send you down some wrong turns. So there’s probably a lot to say about that. I’m not sure if that’s out of scope for this.
Michael Gold (35:59)
Well, actually, no. I mean, I want to ask, what are some of the key learnings, key takeaways of being a manager in the climate tech space?
Ross (36:09)
I think the main one for managing specifically is probably what I would just say is I think when, I think probably all startups do this. It’s also the archetypal story of childhood into adolescence into adulthood. But when you start a company, you think we’re gonna do it entirely different. However Ernst & Young or Deloitte or Ford or whatever, however they do it, that’s the man. We’re gonna do things in a much nicer, cooler way.
You’re like, we’re not even gonna have any hierarchy at all. We’re all just gonna be peers and it’s all gonna be great. And then like five years later, you’re like, okay, I’ve been in enough leadership meetings now where it’s like, we have to decide this HR principle for this one case while knowing that it will be used in several related but different cases two years from now. And we need to make a consistent ruling that will make sure everything works. And you’re like, I understand why Ernst & Young and Deloitte and Ford operate the way that they do. I’m so sorry I was mean to you. I was so sorry I judged you. There’s a good reason for a lot of this structure here. And I think I would probably just default to like some amount of hierarchy is good. Some of this structure here that may seem conservative or not as flexible as you might like is fine for a company of 10. But when you’re a company of 50, it starts making your administrators go gray in the hair. And I think a lot of those lessons were very useful.
Plenty of lessons too for Nori and more things overall than that, but for management, that’s probably what I would say.
Michael Gold (37:40)
How big was your team at Nori?
Ross (37:42)
We were 30 at the high water mark.
Michael Gold (37:48)
And what were some of the key takeaways that you got after the company went under?
Ross (37:58)
Much of it relates to the earlier insight I gave about the difference between being visionary and empirical, where Nori was very far in the future. And there are several lines about being visionary that, they have the benefit of being said by people who are visionary and who were very successful at it. Like Steve Jobs saying that no one knew they wanted an iPhone until I built one or Henry Ford saying if I asked people what they had wanted, they would have said a faster horse. And of course those worked out tremendously well for everyone involved. that’s true, but there’s also plenty of times where that actually is not being customer driven or empirical in a way that you really want it to be. I think one of the challenges for Nori is that we were carbon removal people from the start, both in terms of who we attracted to the early company and what we wanted to be. We wanted to grow the carbon removal industry. And we chose soil as our first credit type because soil had the makings of having enough volume to build that commodity style infrastructure and like build out the market with enough depth to make that work. And it turned out, I think it’s fair to say that soil organic carbon turned out to be a poor fit for carbon removal. It’s not durable enough. We only ever felt comfortable guaranteeing it for 10 years of storage. And we need temporary carbon sinks in biogenic environments. Like we need it to buy us time.
We don’t want to lose those environments and the ecological health that comes along with them. But carbon removal is principally about negating fossil fuel emissions and temporary removals are not appropriate for that. There’s some theoretical cases about maybe enough of them at the same time could potentially equal a fossil emission, but it’s controversial and it’s certainly not in consensus mode right now. But I think a lot of it was confusion over which market we are competing in because as we went on, think we both grew more into carbon removal and one of the last big projects that we did is that we launched a direct air capture and storage methodology and also created an asset that included a soil credit that had been produced with the future delivery of a durable carbon removal at the same time. And so that 10 year period would last you until the durable carbon removal credit was delivered.
And therefore it would have this sort of like wrap around benefit of temporary and durable carbon removal. And that was a really cool thing to do. So we both got like further into carbon removal and also just further into soil carbon. We were working on improving the ways of measuring and monitoring soil as time was going on. But soil has also become much more prominent in scope three and insetting with agribusiness than anything else these days, every time I see someone working on soil, it’s almost always for something like that. So it really ended up becoming more polarized, but I think we had a little bit of a identity trickiness because we were kind of pulled in both directions from the middle.
Michael Gold (41:21)
Yeah, and I mean, when you get to a point in your company, you were with them and the company was around for what, seven years, I think? Seven years, and you build up a team and then you kind of have to wind it all down. How do you kind of deal with those, I guess, the emotions, the interactions, especially kind of as a boss in climate, which is such a mission-driven space?
Ross (41:30)
Seven years, yeah.
I don’t know. It’s okay. I think it’s important to know that companies do fail and that doesn’t mean that you’re personally a failure or you can’t try again or even that what you did didn’t have an impact. A lot of people that I know have either said that Nori itself or listening to the podcast played a constitutive part of why they’re in carbon removal today as either capturing their imagination or telling people that there’s commercial possibilities here, you should come build a company and do this. So even if the company wasn’t successful in the conventional sense, they can still have a big impact. And also there’s plenty to do outside of a company and I’m still in carbon removal, I’m still obsessed with carbon removal, there’s a lot of stuff here to do. And it’s not like it had to be Nori do or die. In fact, in some ways, I feel like I’ve grown a lot being outside of Nori, being inside of a startup like that I’ve heard described as being in a submarine. And it’s nice to come up for air, like, okay, I need to map this out and get a better sense of it. But like I mentioned earlier, it’s all of the emotions. I think you cycle through all of them. Probably the stages of grief can be applied pretty easily here.
Michael Gold (43:07)
Right.
So what have you been up to since Nori ended?
Ross (43:14)
Like many unemployed people, I got further into podcasting.
Michael Gold (43:22)
Very nice. I mean, and quasi-employed people too.
Ross (43:26)
It was like, what people yeah. That’s been really fun. Podcasting at Nori was always more of a way to bring people in. So we didn’t want to do a lot of things that added barriers to it. But I’ve been trying to find ways to make Reversing Climate Change more financially viable, which has been really fun. But really, a lot of it has been contracting, looking for other full time positions.
I do a fair amount of advising of companies. I mentor in several programs, that entrepreneur residence program with Air Miners. I don’t know, I keep pretty busy, mostly carbon removal, but climate tech broadly, trying to learn and figure out where the puck is going so I can skate to it basically. So I have some thoughts on that, but I’m still working out my grand theory.
Michael Gold (44:18)
Well, let’s talk about some of the, I guess, the mentoring and the kind of landscape surveying that you do. What are you seeing in the climate tech workforce, the carbon removal workforce? What’s the makeup of the type of people that you’re talking to now?
Ross (44:36)
I have lot of conversations with people that are STEM oriented and I’m attractive to them because I’m bringing other parts of this to them, which is experience in commercial strategy and how a company can and should operate in carbon removal. And having had a founder experience in my past, even one that ultimately closed is still something that other founders say like, that represents transferable skills and a familiarity with being able to roll switch frequently because founding something, you’re in everything. You have to knit all the pieces together. So that’s been pretty fun for me. I’m seeing a lot of lower tech carbon removal approaches. That’s been fun. A lot of biochar. It’s good seeing just how much biochar there is around the world because I think that’s going to survive relatively well where I don’t know what’s going to happen with the voluntary carbon markets, especially for carbon removal and federal policy is, as you know, is not in a good place, especially for carbon removal. So I have been seeing companies that are focused much more on how do we survive during this time outside of those two primary supports that may be less present or fully absent at this point.
Michael Gold (45:58)
Would you say that carbon removal is now your life’s work essentially?
Ross (46:04)
I don’t know exactly.
Michael Gold (46:05)
Or do not like that term, life’s work? A little too limiting.
Ross (46:08)
Life’s work. Yeah, I’ve heard you often on your shows and it’s a good question. I think so. I think in carbon removal, I think I know where I stand and I have a good map of the ecosystem and I’m very passionate about it and I love being here. I guess you could say it’s my life’s work. Yeah, I’ve looked in the jobs in other sectors too and I always wonder how I appear to them. Like I put in a job for like a battery company and like nuclear is interesting to me and a couple of things like that. And I wonder if, I don’t know that they necessarily see clean tech transferable skills. I think they might just be like, this guy’s a carbon removal weirdo. Who is this person? He has an inscrutable resume. I struggled with characterizing myself. This is maybe something that relates to the job seeking, but I think I was really confusing to many employers.
Michael Gold (47:07)
And I guess it must be interesting to have been a founder and then to be applying for jobs not necessarily as a founder or wanting to start your own thing again. Would you, do you think you’d want to start your own thing again? I mean, do you have ideas for other companies that you might spearhead?
Ross (47:23)
Yeah, I mean, I’m a family man and I can’t just go and start another thing right now where you might not be able to pay yourself for a year or two. I need a break from that. But yeah, I think I would just go and start something again. I have friends starting companies and I’m always looking for like if there’s, I think I’m best when the pirate ship is still a pirate ship. I think early on knowing like I wanna be flipping between roles and solving problems that, you know, I think I have a, I’ve put in for the jobs at the big companies that do carbon removal or clean energy or stuff like that. And I think to them, it doesn’t look like, well, this person, you got an MBA and there’s then modeling here, here and here. I’m just like, my resume is really, yeah, it’s illegible. But I think to the right kind of person, they’re like, okay, this person has done a lot with either mentoring and advising and working with and consulting with early stage startups. He co-founded one of his own. He’s been through this process.
Michael Gold (48:06)
Mm-hmm.
Ross (48:21)
go ahead, yeah.
Michael Gold (48:23)
No, no, no. I was going to say, sounds like you’ve done a lot of ecosystem building and that’s something that you’re really engaged in. Is that something that you think you want to carry with you going forward?
Ross (48:36)
We’ve been thinking about that a lot with regard to one project I’ve been working on. It’s hard though, I think even if it is ecosystem building, it’s hard for companies to justify it on that alone because it faces strong free rider problems. It’s like, okay, one person builds the ecosystem, but everyone gets the benefit from it. So you paid for it and everyone else gets to cruise along and scoop up the benefit.
I think a lot of those open-handed things get noticed by people. And I think when people do things that are ostensibly for the benefit of all, but you can tell it wasn’t done for the totally right spirit, I feel like that’s kind of transparent too. I’m sure you see stuff like that sometimes where you’re like, this didn’t feel as generous as maybe you’re framing it to be. I like when companies act a little bit irrational in that way and showing that amount of goodwill can often be a good investment. It depends though.
Michael Gold (49:22)
Maybe, yeah.
Ross (49:34)
It takes the right kind of visionary to do something bizarre like that. I like doing it on my own because I care about carbon removal I’m concerned for what’s going to happen to it. And I want to make sure that all of the companies that can survive do survive. And part of that is being in a position where you’re not at one company focused on maximizing that one company’s value and opportunity means you can zoom out a little bit and be like, cool, I can pretty much help everyone. And pretty much everyone deserves helping. So that’s good.
Michael Gold (50:03)
Yeah. And getting a little meta for a second, the podcasting landscape and the kind of the thought leadership, voices, landscape in climate has really exploded in the last couple of years. What are your thoughts on how it looks and kind of your role sort of in an early stage and also what you might want to do going forward?
Ross (50:23)
I think it’s great fun. I’m sure it’s been rewarding for you, I imagine too. I think if you enjoy doing it for its own sake, that’s reason enough. And I’ve also gotten to spend time with people that I never otherwise would have gotten to spend time with in a million years, authors or filmmakers whose work I love. I can’t believe I was able to talk you into this and now I get to
Michael Gold (50:29)
Absolutely.
Ross (50:51)
hang with you in this kind of way. Yeah, you’re at my mercy, my interrogative mercy. I think that’s been great. I think it’s good for, I mean, it certainly helps the thought leadership. One of the reasons I like this over writing is that I come from a writing background, but write and video is maybe even worse for this, but there’s a tendency to endlessly edit and just like fine tune and tweak everything and podcasting is pretty much like
Michael Gold (50:53)
and ask you whatever I want, right? Yeah. Exactly.
Ross (51:20)
you recorded what you got and you can kind of do a little bit with it. But if you sound kind of foolish in a sentence, you can cut the sentence or you can leave it in, but probably not gonna be recorded. I think there’s like three or four, my dog is making a lot of noise.
Michael Gold (51:28)
We’re going to leave the dog part in, I’ve decided. We’re going to leave all the dog content in.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, just from my own perspective, I think that when you’re sitting in writing and you’re sort of trapped in your own head, it can be easy to start to sink into despair, right? And I think that this work and maintaining a level head and having a little bit of fun requires more engagement with people, you know, requires being in community and being in communion with others.
Ross (52:02)
I think that’s true. And we connected through 9Zero where we’re both members. And that’s why I got involved over there too, is that sitting at home is just, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel good. Even if you’re doing things that are connecting, I like to be around people in physical meet space and not just digital spaces forever.
Michael Gold (52:09)
Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
So a couple of questions I like to ask all my guests just to kind of wrap things up. Looking back, what would you tell your younger self just getting started, maybe at the point where you are getting into Nori, maybe even earlier than that? Like are there a couple things that you might want to just go back and say, be sure to keep your eye on X, Y, Z or something like that.
Ross (52:45)
I think I would go back to me in high school where I was a sort of emo artsy kid and I cared about art and literature and music a lot. Be like, hey, there’s gonna be a period, you’re not gonna be able to see it now, but in the future, you’re gonna actually get really into math and science and do not sleep on this now. Like it will come back to you. Turns out the more you know about everything, the better off you are, the more resilient you are. Don’t act like all you need is beauty.
Michael Gold (53:11)
Yeah, and you’re gonna have to learn the hard stuff by osmosis basically.
Ross (53:15)
Yeah, and he’s gonna be really late and you’re be like, crap, like everyone already knows this. Now I have to learn biogeochemistry right now? Like I’m busy.
Michael Gold (53:21)
Yeah, yeah. And if you could, I guess, cast your mind to the end of your career, of course, that’s, you know, we’re nowhere near that. But what would you want your epitaph to be about your contribution to carbon removal or climate or just, you know, the things you care about in general?
Ross (53:38)
I think it would be, I knew you were gonna ask this because it was a question that you repeatedly asked. I think it would want to be something about how I helped more than I strictly had to and I made people laugh along the way.
Michael Gold (53:43)
I ask all my guests. Yeah, exactly.
All right, well, I think that’s a great place to wrap up. Ross Kenyon, thank you so much for appearing on Climate Swings. This was wonderful.
Ross (54:04)
Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me, Michael.