You get an XPRIZE, and YOU get an XPRIZE!

Quinn:

We can't build the future if we can't picture it. We can't build it if we don't imagine first. If we don't stop and let ourselves daydream and imagine these vast issues and problems as huge opportunities to build a better, healthier, cleaner world for everyone, what it looks like, what it feels like, how we live with and support one another. Then we get to ask how do we get there? What are the big shots we need to take? The moon shots, earth shots. For climate, it often means scaling existing tech beyond what we ever imagined. Solar everywhere, wind and geothermal everywhere. Next gen nuclear, transmission lines, batteries and more, mass land preservation and conservation, but also means inventing new tech in the classroom, in the lab, getting it out of the lab, getting it funded, testing the shit out of it, letting it fail and getting it into the real world if it doesn't.

Quinn:

Long duration batteries, Lithium free batteries, crops with more yields that handle heat better, that need less water. Vaccines for viruses, old and new, new antibiotics, vortex canons to fight wildfires. That one was new to me. CRISPR and more. At every turn, we have to seek to answer my favorite question, how can I help? Because that's not just the best question to ask at really any time of day, especially if you're married, you're welcome, but also when you've got to stop, say polluting and decarbonize your planet and economy stat or you've got to tamper down and inoculate the entire population of the planet against a virus. Reverse engineering from a clear outcome, like zero emissions from transportation by 2035, means every team and every process and decision has to answer to that outcome by asking how can I help? Do I help? Welcome to Important, Not Important.

Quinn:

My name is Quinn Emmett and this is science for people who give a shit. In our weekly conversations, I take a deep dive with an incredible human who's working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone. Along the way, we'll discover tips, strategies, and stories you can use to get involved and become more effective for yourself, your family, your city, your company, and our world. Throughout history, kings and queens and governments, churches, donors have funded contests, an awarded prizes for solving the most difficult problems of the day. For example, the longitude rewards, food spoilage in the Napoleonic Wars, Charles Lindbergh's flight to Paris. Maria Mitchell's comet, the unsorry XPRIZE.

Quinn:

Today, as we stand on the precipice of huge problems and opportunity with everyone looking around at each other going, "What the hell can I do about all this?" The utility in relative inclusivity of prizes like these remains compelling. There's one group that's driving them more than anyone, XPRIZE. My guest today is Dr. Marcius Extavour. Marcius is the chief scientist and executive vice president of climate and energy at XPRIZE. He moved to XPRIZE after over a decade working at the intersection of science, policy and education and technology development. Before joining XPRIZE, Marcius served as the director and government of corporate partnerships in the faculty of applied science and engineering at the University of Toronto. He's active in science and energy policy and he's held positions the US Senate on various committees and the same in Canada.

Quinn:

Dr. Extavour received a PhD and a master's in science at the physics from the University of Toronto where he explored the quantum mechanics of light and matter near absolute zero. Sure, he also holds a bachelor in science and engineering science from the University of Toronto where he built the pancake making robot and combined nano-materials with solar cells. Look, besides the one-to-one pancake robot relevance you're all distracted by and I'm deeply interested in exploring, I wanted to talk to Marcius because again, try to ignore our virtually identical resumes, I had inkling that maybe we think about big problems in the same way as big opportunities, but as opportunities that cannot fully be tackled without some pretty specific parameters in what we're working towards and how we get there and how we measure the progress along the way.

Quinn:

The beauty of a problem like climate change or COVID or antibiotics, that it affects everyone on the planet. We're all invested in the outcome, whether we're actively participating in getting there or not. The beauty of a contest like XPRIZE is the goal is clear and measurable, but how do we get there and how can I help, is not necessarily. It seeks active participants from likely players, but also the most unlikely of sources, dreamers of every kind who want to help in a very specific way in their way and to put a dent in the universe, odds be damned. Marcius' passion for bridge building and problem solving are super evident in our conversation and I'm incredibly inspired by his work and his team building. We have to imagine a better future and then take our best shot at it. I'm so glad Marcius is helping to lead the way.

Quinn:

Marcius, welcome to the show.

Marcius Extavour:

Hi, how's it going? Good to be here.

Quinn:

Good man. Good, good, good. Excited to have you. I'm excited to nerd out on this one a little bit. I think it'll be fun. I've been in a very farfetched, never going to happen imagining way, how I could contribute to an XPRIZE for a very long time and then usually by the end of the thought process it's like, buddy, you're a liberal arts major. What are we even talking about here? Come on, come on, but I know it's broader than that. We'll dig into it. I do like to start with one important question for this whole thing in instead of, hey, what's your whole life story? I like to ask Marcius, why are you vital to the survival of the species? I encourage you to be bold and honest. You're the 146th person I've asked that question to.

Marcius Extavour:

Okay, let's start with the good stuff. I love it. Why am I important to the survival of the species?

Quinn:

Vital, not important.

Marcius Extavour:

Vital.

Quinn:

Vital to the survival of species. A lot of people either cackle at me and then I get something beautiful or they say "I'm not", which is also awesome. I'm going to let you go. Go for it.

Marcius Extavour:

I've never been asked that question before, so I'm going to give my unfiltered honest answer, I guess. My first thought, I don't normally think of myself as vital to too many things outside of my, maybe, personal life, maybe my family but I think we're all a little vital. Maybe that's an oxymoron, a little vital to this thing because it affects all of us. To talk about me particularly, I think what I can bring is I think I'm uniquely interested at trying to bridge different communities and translate information from one to another so I can talk regular people talk. I'm a regular person. That's how I grew up. I can talk science, I can talk business, I can talk politics, I can talk tech.

Marcius Extavour:

I got into that because I think that's interesting and I've figured out over time that's really important for the climate and energy thing, so to the extent that it's going to take a village and it's going to take a lot of different pieces to come together, there's not one thing to solve this big problem, I'd say my vitality is in bringing different communities together and explaining the same thing in different ways to point out that there's actually an opportunity for all of us.

Quinn:

I love that. When did you discover that you were a bridge builder?

Marcius Extavour:

This is going to sound corny, but maybe in my 30s, I started to realize maybe this is something I'm good at and it's something I've been good at for a while, even though I didn't really know about it. As a kid, I always felt in between worlds in a lot of ways and, literally, just learning different languages, different cultures, learning how to flow in different communities to, first of all, just get along and get by and then to maybe make things happen and have fun. For a long time, I was down on myself for not having a super clear career trajectory because I would go here and then go there and follow my instinct and it never felt random, but it didn't feel that purposeful either.

Marcius Extavour:

Then I just started to think, I think this is part of something. This is really just a reflection of your personality. You're like a multi-interested person.

Quinn:

Sure.

Marcius Extavour:

You really like explaining stuff to this new community, that thing you learn from the other community in ways that they can understand in their language. Partly, as a graduate student, partly stuff I used to do as a kid, just casually and then it's something I've really leaned into, more as a working professional person is like, hey, I think I'm good at this. Let me try it to find opportunities to do it, or at least it's fun for me. Having fun and being good at stuff usually goes together for me. I think that's how I came to it.

Quinn:

I love that. I mean certainly, we are not all quite as privileged to be able to find something we're really good at and find fun in our work often increasingly in this country, but if you can, it's incredible how much that can empower both yourself and any team and any projects you're working on. I'm a pagan atheist monster, but I was a religious studies major. What am I doing here? I grew up reading Wired and Popular Science and I love this stuff. We started the newsletter and everyone started asking me opinions and I was like, "I don't know". I can't talk about water purification or desalination or insurance proposals, much less reinsurance, but I can ask questions of people, and I can be very annoying about that. I used to run fantasy sports. What am I doing with this? It's a ridiculous metaphor, but sports also applies across so many different cultures and values and missions and teamwork and all that shit.

Marcius Extavour:

I love sports, too, just real quick and I think it does cross a lot of boundaries in ways that sometimes people sniff at, but I think there's depth to it, too. Also, let me just say it's the curiosity. You talked about asking questions. I've never learned anything by not asking questions. It's like the key unlock to finding the hidden garden or finding a new path is just being humble and asking questions. I love questions and I appreciate you like to ask them.

Quinn:

Oh, I love it. How lucky am I, I've had 146 of these. It's incredible, so funny. I don't know if you're a parent at all, but I've got three children who they're relentless with their questions and it's wonderful because they're so curious and they want to know everything. It's a typical kid. Why, why, why? Until you're explaining sort how the universe started. All I want to do is indulge in it until I'm like, "I need you to go to sleep. I need you to please stop with the questions". I've got a six year old, he's great. It's like half fart jokes and half he'll be like, "One more question". Great, great, great. Yes. What's behind black holes? I'm like, "Buddy, we got to go to bed. Mom's going to kill me here".

Marcius Extavour:

That's right.

Quinn:

At the same time, I'm like, "Let's do this".

Marcius Extavour:

I know, I love it too. I do have kids and I just yesterday, just last night, I was thinking there's really interesting conversations that happen when you're putting your kids to bed and sometimes, they come up with really deep and perceptive questions for their age. On the other hand, I'm cranky because you should have been asleep 45 minutes ago and I just don't have time for this. Sometimes you're just going to get the, "Because I said so."

Quinn:

It's the worst because you're like, "I'm my parents". Yeah.

Marcius Extavour:

I know, exactly. It happens and the cycles and all that, but hey, that's real.

Quinn:

There was a meme online, which is a ridiculous statement unto itself, but it was just a picture of old Yoda pulling the blanket up and it says eventually, Luke Skywalker asked him many questions. Yoda just turned over and died and I'm like, yeah. I get it, man. I get it.

Marcius Extavour:

Love Star Wars. Yeah, those were the outtakes. They didn't show us those cuts.

Quinn:

Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. For sure. Let's dig into XPRIZE. This is really fun for me and I'm a history nut. I'm a science and public policy nut and all these things. I'm really excited to dig into this because I know the idea of prizes is not new. My children read books about the first person who figured out comets and latitude and longitude and what that race was like and the prizes for it and it's amazing and it spurred innovation for so long. Having worked in business and done philanthropy and all these things, something I'm very attached to is this idea of, and Mariana Mazzucato wrote a great book about this. I think it's called Mission-Based Economy, but it's basically outcome-based projects for economies.

Quinn:

So much of what we talk about here, I'm not just climate, we do COVID and antibiotics and food and water. They're all connected. They're all very systemic. There are unforced errors. We did these things to ourself over the industrial revolution, mostly. Online or offline, I'm constantly advocating in public and in private with business leaders and policy for, hey, we got to take these big shots, these ambitious goals and projects that affect the public good, that address a very specific need, but also multi-solve across these things that again, are very systemic, but the goal has to be crystal clear so that we can reverse it and engineer everything, your teams, your decisions, the people you hire against them. The example I always use, which is a little ridiculous, but it's true, is we're going to send a man to the moon. We're going to put them on the moon and we're going to bring them home. Pretty crystal clear. You screw any of those up and it's not happening. Everything you do up to that point has to be designed along the way.

Quinn:

We need transparent, near term indicators and measurements of long term impact. Is it going to work? We have to know along the way, but also these things affect the whole population. That's the COVID. You're like, we're all at home, everybody. Nobody's ready for this thing. Having worked with policy stuff, it matters because I mean, and Democrats always have this issue, it gives people something to run on. This is part of the reason I've always been so attracted to XPRIZE because you're like "Private space flight, first person to do this", or what you are working on right now.

Marcius Extavour:

Yeah.

Quinn:

It seems like you guys are really into this idea and maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree and sorry for starting off with a two-minute monologue about what the things that most excite me, but I've been excited for this idea for a long time.

Marcius Extavour:

Well, you have it exactly right. One of my favorite descriptions about what an XPRIZE is supposed to do is it's supposed to inspire and guide. The guiding part is pointing people in a direction and saying, "Let's go this way", like your example of let's put a person on the moon, bring them back safely. It's pointing into what we'd normally call a problem space or an opportunity space is a nice spin on that and saying, "There's something good in that direction", not because of hunch or a guess, but because of maybe some careful thought and consideration. That's the guiding part. The inspiring part is to point out to people that we can solve this problem. There's a solvable problem. This is achievable. This might seem huge and crazy and an audacious goal, but it's achievable, so inspiring and guiding. Then, there's a lot of details about that, crowding people in, encouraging people to develop solutions, but getting people talking about the opportunity, showing, not just telling, but showing that it is solvable.

Marcius Extavour:

That's where the innovators really come in to do their stuff, to show that spark, that demo that catches the world's imagination. That's the ultimate aspiration of any one of these prizes. You're right, XPRIZE is not the only organization to do prizes. We didn't invent these prizes. The whole organization, the origin story is a friend gives his friend a book about another famous prize and it inspires the creation of an organization. They hook up with third person who says, "I'll fund that." And the organization is born.

Marcius Extavour:

Inspiring and guiding, articulating goals, trying to not solve the problem because we're not pretending we know how to do it, but we're saying we think someone out there knows how to solve this problem and we think we can create a platform for that, not just solution, but the attempt and many attempts. We're going to celebrate that journey because we think it's going in the right direction for broad social benefit. I know that sounds corny and ambitious, but that is literally what this organization is trying to be about.

Quinn:

Your credentials, which I haven't recorded yet, but will in the intro, are fairly preposterous. Mine is barely graduated, host of a podcast. What attracted you most to XPRIZE? Was it the ambition of yes, unanswerable, solvable question, but going to require some heavy scientific and engineering lifting? Or was it that bridge building that you were like, "Oh, shit, actually I've been doing this my whole life and these are scientific problems, but that broadly affect everyone and maybe I should be leading these".

Marcius Extavour:

Yeah, thanks for that question. I think it was a little bit of both and a third thing.

Quinn:

Please.

Marcius Extavour:

Yes, I loved the big, bold, ambitious. I just like that. That's in my personality. I think it's cool. I think it's interesting. I think it's worthy. I think it's fun, so I was attracted to that right away. I knew of XPRIZE as a space organization. That's what I thought I knew. I'd seen the launch or the first prize winning rocket launch and I thought, wow, that's cool. The bridge building was a big factor for me because I thought, okay, this organization wants to do deeply technical stuff and that's my jam, but they want to do it in public and they intentionally are trying to draw people in. They are not doing a behind the closed doors, only the top 100 best engineers or whatever in the world on that topic can participate.

Marcius Extavour:

They're actively trying to do PR and marketing about the problems, about the opportunities, about the solvers, about the solutions. I thought that's a really good combination. I feel like that's where I want to go. I don't see a lot of people doing that. I see a lot of people doing one or the other and they're trying to mix them together. That's cool.

Marcius Extavour:

The third thing was I had personally just participated in a bunch of technology challenges and that meant a lot to me, personally. I'm having a memory right away of a design competition to build a dumb little car that works on rubber bands in my first year engineering class. That was the most fun time we all had in some sweaty dank classroom in an engineering building on some campus. We had a robotics challenge. In other words, moments where I got to work in a community of my peers on a small team with my close friends and we were trying to do something that we all thought was hard and we didn't really know how to do it, but we just thought, let's have fun doing it together and trying to win, just for glory, literally just for bragging rights over our classmates that we'd see the next day in chemistry 102 or whatever.

Marcius Extavour:

It would just be like, "Hey, my bridge was the strongest or my car blew up. Wasn't that funny?" Small things like that meant nothing at the time, aside from just good times, but I just thought there was something in this idea of inspiring collaboration and a competition that could bring out the positive side of wanting to pursue a goal. I just thought, I know that's personally cool. I don't really know how these big prizes work, but maybe something good will happen in that direction and I just tried to go there.

Quinn:

I have so many memories as you described those things. I'm not nearly as scientifically inclined, much less credentialed, but yeah, that feeling of look, whether it's sports or model UN or chemistry, like you said, what's the thing you got to build in Boy Scouts with the cars that go down the thing?

Marcius Extavour:

Soapbox racers, that kind of thing?

Quinn:

Yeah, soapbox. The point is you got to make it, make it work and how fundamental that feeling was and still can be as adults where, like you said, it can still be fun and still be like, we're feeling like Armageddon. We got three weeks to figure out how to drill the thing or Apollo 13 where they're like, "Put all the shit on the table. Here's what we've got". I mean, there's no better feeling in knowing that it's necessary, too. I'm curious how that part attracted you. Did they say, "Hey, do you want to come and do you want to do this specific thing or would you be interested in doing this? What do you want to do?"

Marcius Extavour:

It started out as there's a job opening to join a team that's doing a specific thing. We're going to launch a prize about turning carbon dioxide emissions into stuff and it somehow has to do with climate change or energy. I was like, "Okay, that's a weird topic, but I'm definitely into the idea of this kind of activity for climate or energy solutions, so this will be where I start". Let me just get smart about this and figure this stuff out and try to contribute. Then over time, it morphed into, okay, you've got a little more flexibility. You've got a little more free reign. What do you want to do? Help us shape this. How could we use this tool, this platform we have to do interesting stuff in the energy and climate world? That's where I'm at now.

Quinn:

Has it fulfilled your expectations and how much, I guess, autonomy do you have towards achieving those?

Marcius Extavour:

It definitely has, but also not completely, to be honest. It has in the sense that my not so secret, secret is I came in thinking, well I think these prizes are cool and energy is my thing and climate's my thing, but I don't really think they're going to work that well for energy and climate for all kinds of reasons. It's not that wide open. These fields are heavily regulated. If you and me invent an amazing box or solution or something today, you can't just get it into the market. There are many rules in place that mostly are about public safety. You can't just, hey, I invented a battery. Everybody buy 10 million of them.

Quinn:

Right, check out my mini reactor.

Marcius Extavour:

Yeah, great. We're trying to be responsible for accidents. There's the engineering safety culture that is very important. That's different in other fields. I came in a little suspicious or not totally sure that this would be a great fit for the topic, but I was like, well F it. Let me just go figure it out. I'll take a chance and I'll try to see what I can make happen. Has it fulfilled my expectations? Yes it has. The prizes work better than I thought in that field. I came in a little skeptical and then really crawling inside of it. I think I figured out, in part, how to help make them more effective, working with great people I've got to work with there. We've been able to tune our prizes to that market, that solution space. I think that's cool. I've definitely had opportunity to work on topics I never dreamed I would.

Marcius Extavour:

I don't actively work on all the topics across XPRIZE but it's very cool to work at an organization that works on healthcare and space and literacy and oceans and energy and climate, which is my corner and a couple other things. AI, that for me is just fun and interesting to get to be around those ideas. I love that. I'll admit to being greedy. I always want more. I always want better and further reaching. No organization is perfect ours. Ours isn't either. Has it met my expectations? It mostly has. I think a lot of people that work at mission driven organizations have this feeling, but I have it. It's like we're doing a lot of great stuff, but we could be doing more.

Marcius Extavour:

There's more opportunity and okay, there's only so many hours in the day. I'm not really a workaholic type of person. I like to see friends and family and have a life and you're limited by money and blah blah, blah blah. If I'm being honest, yeah, I always have this restless feeling of yeah, we could be doing more, but I also want to temper that with, okay, don't be a crazy person. That's a struggle I have.

Quinn:

I have a few siblings and it's three boys. I'm the second and then my sister who is, if you took all three of us and made us at a hundred times more impressive, that's the beginning of her. Basically, my parents were always just like, I'm like, "How come she got her own room?" They're like, "We like her more. She's better. Deal with it". You're like, "I mean it's fair, it's fair". Incredible. Started a school for children with AIDS in Africa when she's 18, built it with her bare hands. I'm like, "I'm running some fantasy sports here. I got a lot on my plate". Very upsetting. It's very frustrating, but she's always struggled in the most ambitious way, but framing ambition in a specific way. I think you'll appreciate, she has both done those things. She worked on both Obama campaigns and a number of others, strategized policy, but she's also worked as a teacher for low income children with disabilities.

Quinn:

She enjoys them both and finds frustration and empowerment in both, but there's this question of do I affect 12 children, no question and change the course of their life every day or do I work on policy that's much more vague that may never happen, but potentially affect a few million people?. It's a hard one and it really is one of those things, as I think about talking to my children of we're very obnoxious, my wife and I are, about instead of saying, "What do you want to be", we're like, "What problem do you want to solve? How do you want to help? That's the most important question". This and this.

Quinn:

It is always this question of one isn't necessarily better than other. I mean teachers should be paid 20 times what they are. We just talked about great ways to design things around problems and opportunities, but I'm curious how you framed your ambition as you were coming up and getting all of these school and your credentials and coming over to an organization like this and yet reaching for more?

Marcius Extavour:

I can definitely relate to some of those feelings. I haven't been exactly in those positions, but I think I can relate to it from afar. Oh, by the way, I also have a superstar sister, so I can relate to that part, too.

Quinn:

Just, come on.

Marcius Extavour:

I have three sisters.

Quinn:

Oh boy.

Marcius Extavour:

They're all fantastic, but one of them is especially fantastic, at least in a professional life and her personal life and it's ridiculous.

Quinn:

It's very annoying. I know.

Marcius Extavour:

I love my family. That's what I'm trying to say.

Quinn:

I get it.

Marcius Extavour:

For me personally, it's been a balance of I'll get worked up about like, oh yeah, yeah, should I do this or should I do that? Then I come into another phase, which is you're being a little ridiculous. It's nice that you have the luxury of some kind of choice. Focus on things that you actually care about that you think are fun and interesting. Look for other fun and interesting people. Make sure you're just try to contribute something meaningful. It's trite to say it like that, but it's helpful for me because it curbs my most ridiculous instincts about I need to do more, I need to do this, I need to do that. It's like, well, you framed it as a really interesting thing. Does she have the opportunity to shape and influence a small group of individuals deeply and concretely or the opportunity to maybe shape a much broader swat of society?

Marcius Extavour:

I don't think there's a right answer. Our culture definitely will celebrate one of those more than the other, so the legislator is going to be memorialized in a plaque that signs such and such pieces of legislation.

Quinn:

They'll literally name the bill after you.

Marcius Extavour:

Impacted millions of lives. I don't want to belittle that or take away from it. I think that's real and some of those people are some of my heroes. At the end of the day, what's that person going to think about when they're in their quiet moments alone reflecting on their life, whether they're early in their life or later in life? Are they going to think about the accolades? Are they going to think about financial benefits or adoring fans or whatever? They're probably going to think about, I think, what meant something to them? What touched them and try to pursue that, I think is always probably good advice. I'm great at giving advice, not good at taking advice, but that's the kind of advice I've been given and it sounds real and it sounds right to me.

Quinn:

Seems great.

Marcius Extavour:

Maybe I'll put a bow on this by saying I think sometimes overly ambitious people are driven by a fear of having regrets in life because people that have that personality trait tend to be overachievers and they tend to be perfectionist. That's what I've observed. I see those tendencies in myself, too. I try to curb them because I don't think they're always healthy. Rather than trying to focus on some kind of score or maximizing something, thinking more about what will really be gratifying to me, being clear about let's put the external gratification aside and think about what I really care about, what I would be proud to tell a friend about. What would I want to tell my mother or my wife or somebody close to me about at the end of the day? That helps me not always make decisions, but at least help me put things in perspective.

Quinn:

Let me ask you this, we're having this series of conversations. I mean talk about people that just make me want either do much more or just retire altogether, Alexis Ohanian started Reddit, a few other things left has his own fund and then started his own foundation called the 776 Foundation. They just named their first climate fellows who were having a series of conversations with all those and publishing them. I've talked to a couple young women so far, and one of them, it's not apple to apples, but seems to be a similar position as you so grew up. She was like, "I'm going to be a genetic engineer". I'm like, "That's great. I'm so glad you understand what that is at the seventh grade".

Quinn:

This entire generation, it's wild, it's so incredible. She said it was predicated when she thinks, she said she was going to the doctor with her mom when she was younger and she saw a sign something about, hey, we think we know how to cure blindness through some sort of genetic engineering. She wasn't like, "Oh, I have someone who's blind in my life and I'm going to solve that for them. I'm going to do this thing". I've talked to those people before. Some of them are incredible. She went through the experience of trying to participate in and build her own genetic engineering clubs in high school and in college and things like that and she realized the bottleneck is, actually, how much time is spent in the lab, literally filling test tubes and shaking them and things like that. She said, "No, that's what I'm going to fix".

Quinn:

Now, her reward for the fellowship was she's building lower cost, more adaptable robot arms to do the grunt work in the lab to unlock more science. It's interesting, right? Because as she says, to be clear, robot arms is amazing and sexy, but she was like, "This isn't the sexy science. I'm not the one who's curing blindness or I'm not working on CRISPR all day. but I have to understand it to understand what these people need and to iterate on it". She's a facilitator. It seems like, and I didn't mean to turn this into an Oprah interview, but do you think you can realize that ambition that you sometimes have to temper by being a facilitator or do you sometimes wish, I really wish I was working on one of those prizes?

Marcius Extavour:

Oh, I see what you mean. I am comfortable being a facilitator. I've had the opportunity to of be that more innovative voice or working on a discrete project. I like the facilitation thing because partly, it's just the teacher in me a little bit. My wife is a teacher. She's a real teacher. I'm somebody that likes teaching and dabbles in teaching.

Quinn:

Right.

Marcius Extavour:

The thing I love about teaching is so corny, but after I've learned something the hard way, just by being confused forever and then finally getting it, I just love the idea of helping somebody else learn it a little faster than I did. I just always liked that. That's why I like being a TA. That's how I like wording it.

Quinn:

Those were the best professors in college, not just like, oh, this guy's the smartest, it was he's able to translate this for students so they go, "Oh shit".

Marcius Extavour:

Exactly. I was never the smartest kid in my class. I figured that out real quick when I got to college, but I was always good at explaining. I was good at helping other kids get through their problem sets and then I could learn from them while doing that. That's part of it. Then the other part of it is in this kind of role, and there are a lot of parallel roles to this, I get to see a lot of different projects and so I'm not just working on one. For me, that scratches the restlessness part of me because I get to do a lot of things at once. For me, it's been a way to be involved in a lot of things or at least observe a lot of things without having to actually try to have six jobs, which is not actually fun. It sounds intellectually fun, but in real life.

Quinn:

No, no, no. Been there, not so great. I have two ridiculous analogies to that, not that we're old, we're old. Clearly, everything hurts all the time. I often think about, to bring it back to sports, the players who just can't retire, even though everyone's like, "You would make a fantastic coach. How does it feel to stand on the sideline or in the dugout, wherever it is, and be calling the shots and managing the players and understanding ego's inhibition and things like that?" You have to temper the part that's like, just let me get in there. Let me take the shot. Right?

Quinn:

I also think about, my wife is a incredibly hard working. She's the greatest person alive. She's a screenwriter in Los Angeles and producer and we have a good friend who is incredibly prolific and successful producer. I remember asking him once, Why don't you direct? He was like, "Oh no, no, I don't want to work on one thing for four years. He's like, "I want to have my hands in a bunch of different stuff, not too many". It is a little bit of the six jobs at once, but he was like, "It's just more fun". I'm going to get tired of it. Of course, he was like, "I want to put my stamp on something". But he is like, "I get to do that in so many different ways".

Marcius Extavour:

Yeah, I can totally relate to that. It's fun. You get to meet people. You're challenged with different ideas. Sometimes, it's frustrating that you can't go maybe as deep as you'd like, but it's like sacrificing depth for breath sometimes or sacrificing focus for experience, maybe. I don't know.

Quinn:

Sure.

Marcius Extavour:

Something like that.

Quinn:

I mean, you're asking a guy with a podcast who just talks about the make or break stuff. My friends are like, "Go deeper". I'm like, "No, thank you".

Marcius Extavour:

I bet you'd like to have a bunch of different guests on because you get to jump into a bunch of different conversations and stretch out. That sounds really fun.

Quinn:

This is why my wife is, I mean it's fair, she's always like, "Oh, it's climate change podcast". I'm like, "No, it is, but first of all, that covers 55 different things". Anyways, how lucky are we to be able to do these things?

Marcius Extavour:

Very lucky.

Quinn:

I want to focus a little bit on your abilities and maybe what you've learned along the way as a facilitator and a bridge builder because how we spend the next 20, 27 years to 2050, is among those of us thinking on and working on climate and a variety of capacities for a very long time and are new to the game, whatever it is, there's a fair amount of disagreement about how we should spend both the next 27 years, but also how we spend the resources and allocate them towards those times, not that there are technical questions, right?

Quinn:

Number one goal, stop emitting, right now. That's very clear. Electrify everything. It's pretty straightforward. A lot of low hanging fruit, super easy. We've got the batteries, we scaled solar, we scaled wind, we can do it all. We just got to put the money. Now, we're doing that, great. Solar, I think they said this week is now 30% cheaper than gas in the US. Of course, there's war, but great, let's do it. There's harder stuff, right? Geothermal, everywhere. Long duration batteries, which clearly we need in situations like Florida, green steel, more difficult, smart people working on it. The hard one is carbon removal and offsets, which everybody knows deep inside, and the IPCC has made very clear, we do have to remove quite a lot because we've done some damage.

Quinn:

Of course, the global north should be responsible for these things, but there's a lot of folks who feel, again objectively and understandably, that the offset side or capture and storage or sequestration gives polluters in industry, whether it's scope one or two or three, reasons and the ability to keep putting water in the boat, to abuse a metaphor. I think the answer is, I mean simple and argument, but obviously incredibly difficult in practice or we would've done it, which is fund the shit out of all that stuff. We got to figure it out, clearly. XPRIZE legislatively, VC, whatever it takes. Family offices, I don't care, but also employ every carrot and stick that we have to stop emitting entirely, right?

Marcius Extavour:

Yeah, yeah.

Quinn:

At the same time, we've never really had a global ticking clock, except for maybe a year ago with vaccines. I wonder how much this great big ticking clock in the sky, increasingly driving projects like yours, how much does that affect things and how much do you guys listen to the, hey, we shouldn't be doing this. All we should be doing is focusing on drawing down emissions, et cetera, et cetera.

Marcius Extavour:

Sure thing. Well, let's go from most recent. How much do we think about it? I'd say quite a bit. I mean we all at XPRIZE that are working on the carbon removal project, it's a handful of people that are really focused on it full time. We're very aware of the broader conversation and I think we're actually quite sensitive to it. We spent, I don't know, a good year designing this program before it launched. Then we got it funded, then we launched it, and now we're about a year and a half into it. I mean, can't believe I'm saying this, but it's almost been four years since we started thinking really carefully about this. It's been a while. COVID, who knows how long that was. I think we take it very seriously. We think really carefully about it.

Marcius Extavour:

One of the big questions we have to ask when we launch any project is do we actually need this? Is this just it'd be cool if, or is this actually solving a real problem? We decided it was. I think the risk that you're pointing out, is it going to be used as a delay tactic? Is it going to be a shield? Is it distracting? Does it take resources away from something else that's more urgent or worthy or practical or insert your favorite adjective? I think those are real questions. Reasonable people might disagree with the answers, but I can tell you what I think. It's a risk that we have to watch continually. It's very possible. There are many actors in the world that want to use the idea of an offset or the idea of a carbon removal or carbon management in general as an excuse.

Marcius Extavour:

I think the only way we guard against that is always asking ourselves, do we have the right cost benefit? Do we have the right allocation of resources? We keep an eye on it, but if I just had to give one answer, I would say, no, no, it's not a waste of time to be focusing on carbon removal. The reason is carbon removal is a distinct climate action. It's not really mitigation and it's not really adaptation. It's a third thing.

Quinn:

Sure.

Marcius Extavour:

I don't know what to call it, aside from carbon removal or maybe there's a broader category of those three things. The third thing is needed and it's not going to happen on its own. The other thing, the other reason I think it's important to focus on now, although I would never say let's put all our eggs in this basket, is it's going to take a while to develop. This is not a one or two year thing. Frankly, no amount of ticking clocks or hype or enthusiasm is going to change the fact that even to get to, let's say one billion tons of removed CO2 per year, all things considered, all solutions counting, nevermind five or 10 or possibly more, that doesn't happen in one or two years. It's going to take a long time, maybe decades.

Marcius Extavour:

There's so many variables. Even if you put carbon removal, let's say down your list of priorities and you do a ton of emissions mitigation now and you do a ton of adaptation now to preserve life, preserve quality of life, preserve biodiversity, which I obviously support, or let me just say I support that and you say, "We don't need carbon removal until 2050. Let's do that as the last thing". Fine. Even I'll grant that argument. You don't start working on it in 2050 because it won't be ready. You got to start working on it early. A small bet, early seems reasonable to me.

Quinn:

I fully understand. It's not quite the sunk cost fallacy, but I fully empathize. I have such gratitude to the people, scientists, engineers, people who have been working on climate for so long, whether we're talking farming or oceans, acidification, whatever it might be, but two things. The fact that the US actually passed any legislation was literally a surprise to 99% of us who are all crying into our cereal a week before, but also increasingly, it's clear that we're obviously not there. It would be nice to be. The resources aren't quite as limited as they have been in the past 25 years. The checkbooks are opening and both VC side institutionally, whatever it might be, there's far more resources to go around and, of course, they're not all going to be perfectly allocated over time. This is the goal of measuring these things over time.

Quinn:

At the same time, I think, again, thankful for their time, but it's a little strange to say, "No, we got to use solar. It's like the cheapest energy it's ever existed". It's like, well, how do you think we got here? We took bets and we scaled it over 20 years. Same thing as batteries. Batteries aren't perfect where they are. Solar may never become more efficient than it is right now, but it's the cheapest energy of all time and batteries are the cheapest. Well, I mean they're cheaper a couple years ago, but the point is, we had to do the work to get there. It's this idea of you look back a hundred years ago and you're like, "Holy shit". Everyone's like, "Oh, it's hard right now". It's like, yes it is and we're on the precipice of some not great stuff.

Quinn:

You look back a hundred years and you go, biggest difference between World War I and World War II is antibiotics and penicillin and we used to do surgery in the dark and without anesthesia and all these things, but we don't just jump to today. You have to do the work to get us there. It's the same thing with solar. Like you said, all these opportunities and wind turbines are five times bigger than they were 10 years ago because we just keep innovating on them, but we have to do that. Like you said, you don't go 2050, all right, we can start carbon removal and then figure it out. Clocks up. That's it.

Marcius Extavour:

That's right. One of the first really great engineering jobs I had was working on solar stuff and semiconductors. I know the history of that, the innovation in that technology really well, from the science to the devices to now, the development took a long time. Took a long time. The first scientific effect that led to solar panels was pointed out by Albert Einstein in 1905. Okay. The first devices were developed in the '30s. The first real solar cell in the 70s, and then it just languished. A few extremely wealthy people were installing it. It was in space. Anyway, you got to invest early. Your point, which I take very seriously when there's a new thing that looks technological and looks like a get at a jail free card, there will be temptation to overinvest in it as a oh great, thank God I don't have to change shit about what I do.

Marcius Extavour:

Those people over there are going to bring a lifeboat and I'll just throw money at you and then I'll jump in it when the boat's ready. That approach probably won't work. Frankly, I'll take some of that lifeboat money and put it to good use, but generally, I think that approach will fail. A really good way to test that approach, if you're in this hypothetical conversation created with the person that's like, "Yeah, yeah, I'll throw some pennies and you're going to make a lifeboat". You can ask them a really good question, which is, "Okay, cool, so here's the lifeboat money, but now I'd love to see your budget for what you're actually doing to reduce your emissions today". What are you actually doing? In other words, separate targets. That's what I'm getting at. This, I think, is a way out of the conundrum that we find ourselves in with how to allocate resources is if I said carbon removal is, let's say the third or fourth most important thing, fine, let's pretend it's a fourth most important thing we can do.

Marcius Extavour:

If you're only focused on the fourth most important thing and not one, two, and three, whatever you think those are, you're probably not real. Whereas, the person that is real, the group that is real will say, "Oh yeah, I have a plan for number one and number two and three and or number three, we don't know how to do, but we're trying hard and number one and two is what we're going to do. Maybe it works, maybe won't, but we're focused on it and then we're also doing number four". To me, that's the correct answer. It's a nice question, if this makes sense, to test whether people have their priorities in the right place. Yeah, we got to take early bets. It can't all be magical technology over the horizon that's going to come save us. Because traditionally that hasn't worked, so it's got to be focused on the things we can do now.

Marcius Extavour:

It's not like we don't know what to do now. We do, like you said. We can do those things. There's no excuse for not doing them. We got to get busy and just do them, do them, do them. At the same time, we got to set ourselves up for the medium term and the long term. The climate thing is very much a marathon, not a sprint and I think about it as waves of solutions, waves of action. I know there's no central planning to make all this happen, but that's how I think about it and I think a messy approach that roughly follows that path can be successful.

Quinn:

It can be, and again, I think it's going to take a lot of carrots and sticks in a huge variety of, whether it's the SEC or the Bank of England with pensions or it's legislation or whatever it might be, or just good capitalism. Transitions are always messy, clearly. Obviously, the past couple years, every month you saw some airline being like, "We're going to be net zero by 2040". You're like, "That's so great for you. Please enlighten me on your plan." What does that mean to you and what does it mean in effect, and what does it mean along the way? What are those near term indicators of progress against this measurable goal you haven't totally defined in any way? By the way, part of that is because we haven't defined it and part of the reason is it's actually really difficult to.

Quinn:

Whether we're talking about offsets, like you said, lifeboats, everyone threw money at a bunch of California forests they burned down. Now that's worse or you have the nature conservancy fiascos, but some of these are more measurable than others. The three tent poles of removal or offsets are the removals permanent? Some of that is going to be easier to measure. That might be the easiest one, frankly. Additionality, was this forest going to be protected anyways before you threw a bunch of money at it or these mangroves, whatever it might be? Maybe the third one, especially when it comes to soil or the ocean or what's running tied to it, sinking kelp is how do we measure and certify these things? Because holy shit is that hard and does it matter? Soil is not just soil, it's different everywhere. In fact, pulling it out of the air with a big fan might be the single most simple way of looking at this entire thing, but we have to do them all.

Quinn:

On the one hand, I empathize with folks who are like, "We're net zero, we're going to do it all and buy these offsets" because it really is the wild west, but we do have to do the work to really standardize these things along the way. Some of these things, it's easy to say, electrify everything. Steel's going to be very difficult and concrete is going to be very difficult and steel's relatively huge chunk. That's going to take a long time. Along the way, we do have to give them ways to throw money at certified measurable additional removal, but they can't do that until we know what the hell we're actually talking about.

Marcius Extavour:

A hundred percent. I mean, stick on steel for a second, right?

Quinn:

Sure.

Marcius Extavour:

Steel making is emissive, partly because of the low-grade fossil fuels that are used to run the smelters. You got to melt a bunch of metal at high temperature. That takes a lot of energy. Where do you get that energy? The cheapest source? Where do you get it? Low grade like peat, crummy coal, but then there's also some chemistry that may result in emissions. Concrete is very much this way, too. On the one hand, you got to heat up a bunch of limestone that takes a lot of energy. On the other hand, some CO2 just comes out, so the steel makers, the cement makers, they've got to be thinking about how can I reduce my energy footprint? How can I increase efficiency? Are there other fuels I can use? Can I use biodiesel to run my smelter? Can I use right solar? Look, I know these are hypothetical. I know they're good reasons why they don't work today, so for the steel makers out there, don't get at me.

Quinn:

Please don't write in.

Marcius Extavour:

The point is, that's job number one. Can I reduce my own operational emissions? The harsh reality is, guess what, unless we're going to give up concrete, glass, textiles, farming, all metals, we are going to be stuck with some hardcore of emissions. It's a great use case for a proper offset, a non-BS offset, the so-called hard to abate sectors. That's not a get at a jail free pass. We're trying to shrink your footprint and that's job number one, but there's probably going to be some residual just in the net zero conversation.

Marcius Extavour:

Just one other thing I want to say is, yeah, first it was like governments making loose pledges that weren't really adhered to. That was Kyoto. That was Paris, to some extent. Then, it was the private sector saying, "Ah, we're going to get net zero" and a competition. "Oh, we're going to get narrowed zero by 2080". "We're going to do it by 2075". "We're going to do it by 2050". We all knew 99% of these announcements have no meat behind them. At best, people are scrambling, trying to figure out how we're going to do what the boss said we just are going to do on TV or worse, they were like, "We don't even care. It's just a dodge. We just said it to get us off our back. Now we're going to go to sleep for another year".

Marcius Extavour:

Now, I think we're in the era of shareholders, the public, governments actually saying, "Wait a minute, we've got the receipt on that plan. You said you were going to do this thing and you haven't done anything". It comes back to follow the money. If your favorite company's made a net zero pledge, dig up their annual report and figure out what are they actually doing? Do they have an inventory of their emissions? Do they know what the big drivers are? Are they putting people and money and partnerships against those things? Or are they just talking? Maybe they're confused and they need help. Opportunity, jump in, help them. Maybe they're intentionally dodging it. Go after them in whatever way you think is appropriate. Call them out. Make sure that's not okay.

Marcius Extavour:

Then there are some groups that are actually starting to move into action. I think we want to celebrate and raise those up as examples for other people to follow. Can always ask, what are you actually doing? Announcements are cool, but what are actually doing?

Quinn:

I think the difference is, and again, it's both predictable, inevitable, and of course, unfortunate is my two favorite questions to ask people or how can I help? Also, when again, I talk to offline to policy makers at every level or whatever it is, it's COVID, office space, whatever it might be is, what are you exposed to? You have to really do the math on those externalities. Good news, it's not good news is that question's becoming much easier to answer because what you are exposed to in your company or your industry or your investments, whatever it might be, your scope three emissions, your scope two emissions, those are becoming more real every day.

Quinn:

The climate impacts are doing the math for people and they're very public. Now, whether it's the insurance in real estate markets in Florida or Los Angeles, my home insurance effectively overnight became completely unaffordable and we hadn't even had a fire yet. They were just like, "But you will, so we're not going to have any part of that". You go, "Well, I get it. I get it". Yes, we have to hold them all to task and we have to continue doing that and there's some unfortunate players. There's all the private equity that's buying up the stranded assets and the fossil fuel infrastructure, but it's getting more real every day, so I think the math is becoming a little more transparent and a little easier. Like you said, some of these things are going to be really tough to crack and they're going to take a long time. I'm excited about things like XPRIZE for steel, XPRIZE for concrete. We can get there. They are solvable, but they're going to acquire such a huge variety of perspectives and inputs to get there.

Quinn:

I guess to bring it back around, that's why I'm into that. Now, let's take us, killing the segueways, to action steps where people can actually get involved and support these things. Because there's going to be a lot of people that are like, "Oh shit, maybe I'm going to work on that in my lab tomorrow. Let me write about this, Whatever it might be".

Marcius Extavour:

Totally.

Quinn:

There's also a lot of folks, young folks, again, whether they're marketing or designers or students who are going, "Right, but how could I actually support or participate in an XPRIZE? That seems crazy. They flew the people to space". Tell me about that. Why is there such a wide net and how can folks support your specific project or just in general and get involved?

Marcius Extavour:

Two things. First thing, this carbon removal prize has been the most subscribed prize we've ever launched.

Quinn:

That's awesome.

Marcius Extavour:

There's more than a thousand teams that have signed up and said, "Yeah, we're going to try to compete for that". That's a huge number for us. Usually, we're in the dozens or maybe low hundreds, so we're thrilled about that. It shows as a groundswell of interest. That means there are a thousand entities in the world that are probably small startups, university groups, small student groups, whatever they are, who are trying to work on this problem. That's more than we even thought existed. One way to get involved is to try to just hook up with them. They're all hiring. They're all fundraising. They all need resources. You can go to our website and find a map of who they are. You can reach out to us, we'll share contact info, that kind of thing.

Marcius Extavour:

Frankly, even if it's not to do with the prize, there are a lot of new projects that are fomenting out there, forming up. I think that's the word, so it's actually a good time to be getting into the space. Second thing I would say, and this is more general, is I like the climate thing. I like the energy thing because I like big messy problems that are crosscutting. There's something for everybody in this, no matter what your background or interest is, whether you're a creative person, an artist, a builder, a plumber, an installer, an accountant, a marketing expert, there's actually room for you. You've got to find your place, but there's room and that space is growing.

Marcius Extavour:

Everybody's got to pay the bills. I can relate to that. Not everybody has a privilege of saying, "Ah, what startup do I want to work for, for no money?" if you have a job, there might be opportunities for you in your current job to have influence inside your existing organization or company. Look for those opportunities because I'm telling you, they will be looking for people like you that are motivated and to become the future leaders. I'm thinking about young people here, but that applies really to anybody. I mean, I'm kind of a mid-career person. I'm in my forties. I hope to keep doing this for a long time and I still think that way. How can I get busy wherever I am and wherever I end up to help steer the organization?

Marcius Extavour:

Sometimes it's creating your own thing, but it doesn't have to be that way. Those are some generic things. Then maybe a third thing that anybody can do from wherever you are is, I really mean this, so I want to emphasize it. Just keep thinking about this. This climate thing is not going to get solved by a small number of people coming up with some whiz bang that spreads. It also relies on the idea that there's a problem that we don't want us to crush our psyches, but that is a long term thing that we got to think about. We can think about efficiency, we can think about sustainability. We can lean towards biodiversity, not away from it. If that idea permeates our culture more and more, I think it just creates more support for those more specific solutions that do emerge, whether it's policy, whether it's social community based, technology based, whatever.

Marcius Extavour:

Even if you're into it, keep thinking about it. I know that's not action, but maybe the action is, don't forget, don't forget. Bring it up in conversation. Ask whomever is in power in your community or that you may interact with about it. Don't be afraid to strike up a little conversation, even in a casual way because I actually think that that kind of thing adds up and is extremely influential in our communities over time.

Quinn:

It seems so effective. I come back to queens of the whole movement, Dr. Katherine Kayhoe and she is a climate scientist. She is a Christian. She speaks to her church and others and evangelicals, trying to get everyone on board and help them understand where they can be most impactful and why they need to be. I think about what you were just saying. Her big thing is what's the most important thing you can do? Talk to people. Talk about it. Make it a part of the conversation. Make it normalized among yourself and your family and your community and with your investor or your university or your office because like you said, you can be impactful from the inside. These places are going to be scrambling at some point going, "Fuck, what do we do about this?"

Marcius Extavour:

Totally.

Quinn:

Does anyone know what they're doing? You can say, "Yeah, I've been looking into this". It's funny because it comes back to, and I was lucky to briefly do some thinking with one of my favorite places on the planet, Sesame Street, about how do we talk to kids, young kids and they change their model a little while back. Again, time has no meaning from four to five-year-olds to two to three-year-olds and when someone says, "How do you talk to two or three-year-olds about climate change?" I'm like, "I don't know, I'm trying to just get them to eat avocado right now". I always come back to, and it really makes me think about your role in all this and how you see yourself. It is about relationships. It is about our relationships with each other in the workplace, community, but also, like you said, walk around and don't forget it.

Quinn:

It's your relationships with these trees that we might need to pay someone to protect with the air you breathe. People are always like, "What the hell do I do about the jet stream?" I'm like, "You can't do anything about the jet stream, but climate change is the air you breathe". It's the heat you feel on your back if you're in a red line neighborhood. It is the water you drink. You can affect those things and you can do that on the daily by painting roofs and streets white in your community or electrifying your municipal cars, whatever it might be, but also taking shots at things like this and going, yeah, maybe my student group is the one that figures out Apollo 13 style, how to make this more efficient than any of the big companies ever have.

Quinn:

I just always come back to relationships and just looking around going, "We are in this thing together and that's what makes it systemic and affecting everyone".

Marcius Extavour:

People make the world go around. That's what they say, right?

Quinn:

That's the idea, man. Listen, last few questions. I'm going to get you out of here. I ask everyone these and then you have a world to save. Marcius, first time in your life when you realized you had the power of change or the power to do something meaningful and it could be solo, as part of a team, as a student, whatever it might be, as a TA?

Marcius Extavour:

When I was a boy, my parents made me memorize famous Martin Luther King speeches and recite them on stage and I hated it because I was so nervous to be on stage, but that was the first time that I realized, wow, one in this case boy, could address a room of people. First of all, they listen to me, even if it's a gimmick and second of all, I was reciting somebody else's words, but they find it interesting. I was like, "Wow, people care what I think". I didn't think people even saw me, so that was a spark and then definitely grew into teamwork from there.

Quinn:

I need more specifics. Did they build a stage? Are we talking about at school? Is this Jackson Five where they made you perform in front of their friends?

Marcius Extavour:

We're going deep.

Quinn:

What are we talking about?

Marcius Extavour:

My father, one of his lives was as a community organizer.

Quinn:

Awesome though, this makes so much sense.

Marcius Extavour:

He worked for an organization that was dedicated to bringing a Martin Luther King Memorial holiday to Canada where it doesn't exist. Following the movement to make it a holiday in the United States, led by Stevie Wonder, a lot of other activists. He was doing that thing in Toronto and it never became a holiday, but it became a day where people would talk about nonviolence, talk about the legacy of MLK, talk about civil rights, et cetera. Part of that was like, "And my son memorized this speech, he's going to deliver it now for five minutes". It was just, yes kids, you have to do this. Everyone's going to do a thing and we were a performing family, but I mean cut to the present day, I love giving presentations to a group on topics I care about. I just love the connection with the audience. That was the first time I really experienced that as a young kid.

Quinn:

As a pawn in your father's great event?

Marcius Extavour:

A total pawn. In retrospect, it was worth it, I guess.

Quinn:

Now look, you're saving the world. I love that. Marcius, someone in your life, someone specific who has positively impacted your work in the past six months?

Marcius Extavour:

I'll say my wife, Janine. She and I bitch about work in the exact same way, but it's because we're in the same mindset about the opportunity to solve problems and have influence where we are. Usually, our professional lives don't intersect. We connect on different levels, but lately we have, and I'm grateful for that.

Quinn:

I love that. I would be warming my hands over a trash can if it wasn't for my wife, most incredible human. Three tools that help you do your job could be mantras, could be a piece of software, three things every day where you're just like, yeah, this makes it work.

Marcius Extavour:

Easy one, but I got to give it up to the computer. I mean I basically type for a living, so that's a big one. Another one is my notebook. I'm an obsessive notebook keeper and I keep my to-do list, which is handwritten in my notebook.

Quinn:

Wow.

Marcius Extavour:

It's not the most efficient thing, but that works for me. I'm looking at my notebook right now.

Quinn:

Sure.

Marcius Extavour:

A third thing is, and I don't really have a method for this, but I'm always thinking about priority and when I engage with other people, this is a really anal trick that I use. I, literally, count the number of people and count the number of person hours and say, "Is it worth it for me to have a meeting with these eight people?" Because that's eight hours of people's time and I should think of it as eight hours instead of just, aw we're just having a meeting with eight people. It's a very specific thing, but I think about that all the time.

Quinn:

That's fascinating. Sure.

Marcius Extavour:

I better come correct if I'm going to have a meeting with 10 other people because that's 10 hours of time.

Quinn:

It's a lot of responsibility.

Marcius Extavour:

Whereas a 15 minute conversation with somebody is a little different.

Quinn:

Interesting. I like that.

Marcius Extavour:

I don't always succeed, but I think about it that way.

Quinn:

Sure. No, but that's helpful. I mean, time is all we got, man. I get it every day. Like I said, my body hurts more and more every day and my children are enormous. It's very upsetting. Last one, a book you've read this year that's opened your mind to a topic you hadn't considered before or it's actually changed your thinking in some way. We got a whole list up on Bookshop for everybody.

Marcius Extavour:

I'm being honest and nerdy, but I've been working my way through the Dune series.

Quinn:

Oh, there we go.

Marcius Extavour:

I've always loved Sci-Fi but never took it.

Quinn:

Oh, how far into it are you?

Marcius Extavour:

I've just finished book four and I just started book five. After the second book, I was like, "I'm done with this. I can't read these crazy books and then I read the other one. I'm still there and now I have to finish it.

Quinn:

I'm not sure how much most folks who haven't read them certainly haven't read beyond one and two, realize how off the rails shit really is.

Marcius Extavour:

It's wild. I was motivated to read them because the film was coming out. I loved Dennis Villeneuve movies.

Quinn:

Sure.

Marcius Extavour:

It looked amazing. I was like, I need to go watch this. I'm just a nerd about it. If we're going into some high fantasy something or other, I just need to read the book first. I just have to.

Quinn:

Sure.

Marcius Extavour:

I've just committed to doing that, but what it made me think about was terraforming, another totally weird and wacky idea that I never really messed with, aside from watching a couple Star Trek episodes, but maybe zooming out from terraforming, human impacts on environments, how we can shape environments, how environments can shape us, and that interplay, that's not something I'm used to thinking about that much. Dune and this crazy story really brought my mind to that place.

Quinn:

I love it. Marcius, where can everybody follow you online, should you so choose?

Marcius Extavour:

You mostly find me on Twitter. My handle is Xtempo. Find me there. Talk to me there. I'd love to hear what you all are up to. Sometimes I'm on LinkedIn, but that's really it. I've minimized my social situation, but you can find me there.

Quinn:

I mean, good for you, man. All the XPRIZE credentials, where do you want people to go?

Marcius Extavour:

Xprize.org, all the stuff's there. You can find all of our work, The carbon removal stuff, any other stuff there.

Quinn:

Rock and roll, my friend. I can't thank you enough for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Marcius Extavour:

My pleasure. This has been really fun.

Quinn:

That's it for our show today. Big thanks to Marcius for joining us. Important, Not Important is hosted by me, Quinn Emmett. It is produced by Willow Beck. It is edited by Anthony Luciani and music is by Tim Blaine. You can read our critically acclaimed newsletter and get notified of new podcast combos at importantnotimportant.com. We've got fantastic t-shirts, hoodies, it's getting chilly out coffee mugs and more at importantnotimportant.com/store. I'm on Twitter at Quinn Emmett or at Important Not Imp because we don't have enough characters. I'm also on LinkedIn. You can search my name or Important, Not Important. You can send feedback or questions or guest suggestions to me on Twitter or at questions@importantnotimportant.com and of course, if you are interested in sponsoring the show, we have a pretty high bar for who we work with, but if you fit the bill, we'd love to partner up. Go to Importantnotimportant.com/sponsors for more information. Thanks for watching and listening and thanks for giving a shit. Have a great week.