Inside the most sophisticated plan for solar geoengineering

One of the biggest challenges with technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions is that they require mass adoption. Solar radiation management (SRM) has the opposite problem. By Stardust Solutions’ estimate, dispersing three million tons of reflective particles into the stratosphere could cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius for the relatively small price of $30 billion; that's less than the cost of a single hyperscale data center. Despite concerns about such an endeavor, the company is building a proprietary particle injection system with the goal of being deployment-ready this decade. While Stardust says they won’t deploy without the explicit authorization of multiple governments, questions nonetheless remain around the safety and ethics of SRM. In this episode, Shayle sits down with Yanai Yedvab, CEO and co-founder of Stardust, to unpack how the technology works, its potential risks, and when to deploy it. Shayle and Yanai discuss topics like: - Why Stardust is eschewing sulfur dioxide in favor of naturally occurring, biodegradable amorphous silica and calcite particles - How Stardust’s technology incorporates real-time and holistic testing - Stardust’s commitment to only deploying under strict international regulation - How the company balances the risk that solar geoengineering will reduce the economic incentive to decarbonize heavy industries with the imperative of an immediate climate solution - Why Stardust structured itself as a private company rather than an academic or non-profit lab - Catalyst: Making sense of solar engineering - Catalyst: Serving data center load with carbon captureCredits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. This episode of Catalyst is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn't just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what's next. Learn more at engieresources.com. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. Peak season puts every grid to the test — and the utilities that pass are the ones that built flexible capacity before they needed it. EnergyHub works with more than 170 utilities to coordinate 2.5 million devices and 3.4 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy fuel cells deliver affordable, ultra-reliable onsite power for hospitals, utilities, and data centers – at speed and at scale. Learn more by visiting BloomEnergy.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.

• 0:08Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shayle Khan. I invest in early-stage companies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst. So, the biggest issue with the whole suite of technologies that are needed to reduce or remove global greenhouse gas emissions is that they're kind of a collective action problem. Essentially, everybody has to act, or it barely works. Solar radiation management, or solar geoengineering, is kind of the mirror image of that. By one estimate, dispersing about 3 million tons of reflective particles into the stratosphere could cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius for around $30 billion. 1.5 degrees Celsius is a ton. And to put that in terms that we use a lot, that is less than the cost of a single hyperscale

• 0:50Shayle Kann?

  data center these days. But that number is exactly why a lot of pretty serious people are alarmed about the whole concept. If cooling the entire planet costs what one hyperscale campus costs, this stops being something that only a coalition of governments could possibly attempt. In theory, one country could do it alone, or one company, or one billionaire, or dare I say trillionaire. The economist Scott Barrett called climate change a free rider problem. Everyone has to wait for somebody else to pay. Solar geoengineering, he said, is a free driver problem. It only takes one. The cheapness isn't a footnote. It's the whole governance question. To say nothing of all the technical questions, does it work?

• 1:31Shayle Kann?

  And the side effect questions, what effects does it cause? Which is what makes my guest today unusual. Stardust is a private company, building a proprietary particle in the system to put it into the stratosphere, aiming to be ready this decade. They say they will not deploy without governments, plural. And the question is whether a technology this powerful, and really this cheap, should be built inside a company at all. And if so, what are the guardrails we should put around it? Yanai Yedvab is the CEO and co-founder of Stardust. How the tech works, what it might cause, and who gets to decide? That's coming up next.

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• 3:51Shayle Kann?

  You're not welcome.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Thanks. Excited to be here.

• 3:55Shayle Kann?

  All right, let's start with a walkthrough of the technology itself. What are you actually planning to do? And how's it going to work?

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Okay, so first of all, let's start by saying, Shell, this is not a new concept, right? I know that you had several episodes discussing it. We didn't invent the concept. So maybe taking one step back, I'll walk through the concept very quickly. And then what we believe is unique about our technology and our approach. So.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  The idea essentially is to create a shielding layer. I often like to think about it, kind of, you know, the ozone layer, which is protecting air and composed of ozone molecules and protecting us from malicious sun rays. So to add one additional layer, which we plan that will be composed by status particles and will protect us from overeating by reflecting a tiny portion of incoming sunlight. Less than 1% is enough to essentially stabilize temperature and you can even take temperature down a little bit. So this is the fundamental concept.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  And when we came across it the first time, it was like four years ago. First of all, we were very curious. At that time, the option that people were discussing was sulfuric acid. And the reason is that this is what volcanoes emit whenever there is a volcanic eruption, which is powerful enough, it creates a similar effect naturally. These tiny particles go above the weather layer, create a shielding layer and this way stabilize temperature. And I think the first question that we're asking ourselves is can we do better? Because, you know, sulfuric acid comes where

• 5:55Speaker 03

  it is known to do the effect we want to do, but it comes with a very long list of unintended consequences. It's toxic, it induces acid rain, it impacts ozone layer and also the uncertainties are very high. And we were asking ourselves, maybe there is a better approach. And I think that the way we looked at it is kind, I would say, to look it from the end backward. We were asking ourselves, you know, a question back then, which we didn't know the answer, but let's say we will be successful in developing this technology. What will be questions that people ask you,

• 6:37Speaker 03

  that policymakers, that the general public will come and ask us? Right? How can we make sure that this is safe? What happens when when these particles eventually fall on the ground? How sure are we that we are not solving one problem, but then bringing two or three other problems that weren't where to begin with to the to the table?

• 6:59Shayle Kann?

  Okay, so where did you land? What's the what's the new what's better than sulfur?

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so so we believe there is a better a solution than than sulfur. And essentially, we came up, we designed two kinds of of particles, which which one of them is composed of of amorphosilica. Just to give you a sense, amorphosilica of the type that we're using is used in toothpaste, is food additive, is naturally occurring. And the other one is a composite particle composed of a core of amorphosilica, surrounded by a shell of calcite. Calcite is a material that you can find in limestone, in eggshells.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  And so the idea was to develop particles that are composed of materials that are naturally occurring, that are known to be safe. And a few additional features that they have is that they are much better than sulfur in making sure that you don't negatively impact the ozone layer. They are much more inert and they are biodegradable, which means that once these particles fall on the ground, essentially, they recycle back into the natural cycle, becoming again structure material for for these natural creatures. Because one of the things you want to make sure

• 8:29Speaker 03

  is that you don't end up with bioaccumulation, you know, after 50 years, understanding that these things piled up and you have no good way to to get rid of it. So so we believe that having something that naturally biodegrades is is very important.

• 8:49Shayle Kann?

  What do we know about effectiveness? Obviously, we won't know until you do it at scale entirely, but in principle, relative to sulfur, should you be able to get the same amount of reflection with more particles, less particles? How should we think about that?

• 9:03Speaker 03

  So the short answer is that this is pretty similar. Our particle, to be very straightforward, is not much better than sulfate with respect to the effectiveness and not much worse than sulfate. So up to it's a few tenths of percent, which is not, it's kind of similar. One feature which is different in terms of the optical properties is that one of these particles, what we call this core shell particle, is much better in the sense that it does not hit the stratosphere. One of the features that you have with sulfate is that while it cools air, it hits the stratosphere

• 9:45Speaker 03

  because, to say it in a simple manner, it act itself as kind of an absorbing material to the infrared radiation that is outgoing from earth. So the reason we came with the more, I'd say sophisticated core shell particle is to avoid this phenomenon, which enables you, if needed, to go to a higher level of cooling. We believe that for, I would say, to provide cooling, which is comparable to the heating of the last 50 years, our simpler particle, the one which is composed of amorphous silica

• 10:29Speaker 03

  by itself, is enough, but if you need to go higher, the second, more complex particle is favorable.

• 10:37Shayle Kann?

  Okay, so you mentioned that the reason everybody has been pursuing sulfur is because we have this natural analog, which is that volcanoes erupt and they put sulfur in the stratosphere. It has cooled the planet multiple times. There are a bunch of eruptions in history that have been measured, Mount Pinatubo. 45 years ago, Mount Tambora in 1815 in Indonesia, which famously resulted in Mary Shelley writing Bride of Frankenstein the following year on a summer vacation that was gloomy in Europe.

• 11:13Shayle Kann?

  But one thing I've always wondered about it is when I've heard about the stories of those volcanoes erupting and the effects that they've caused. The effects seem to be regional. They can be pretty big, obviously. You can see an effect that crosses from one region of the world to another. But in practice, for you, if you want to create this global cooling effect, do you need to be injecting at a series of locations simultaneously around the world to get the global blanket? Is that actually how it would work in practice?

• 11:43Speaker 03

  So, yes, you're right. The short answer is that it's preferable to, if at some point we do deployment, and again, we'll probably talk later on who decides on deployment, who performs deployment, but you'll probably want to do it from, I would say, more than one location. Exactly for the point that you're making, to get a more optimal coverage. In fact, ideally, Shelley would like to cancel as accurately as you can the warming effect of greenhouse gases. Because if you're doing this, you are, I would say, restoring past conditions

• 12:27Speaker 03

  and this is a very good way to either eliminate or mitigate some of the unintended consequences. So, bottom line, yeah, you'd like, you don't need many places or many points of injections. You'd probably like a few in the northern hemisphere, a few in the southern hemisphere. I would say two or three on each hemisphere and maybe one around the equator should be enough. There is another point which I think is worth mentioning, which has to do with it. One of the problems with with sulfates, apart from what we've been discussing,

• 13:10Speaker 03

  is the fact that you cannot do testing at small scale of sulfates. And the reason for this, and this is something sometimes people overlook, is the very high background that you have currently at the stratosphere, you have like few hundred thousand tons of sulfates and it's fluctuating, which means if you think about it for a second, that the smallest scale experiment you can do is more or less one million ton, which is not an experiment, it's deployment. Right? I think one of the things which is unique about our technology is the fact that you

• 13:49Speaker 03

  can start very low and do this ramp up process, kind of similar to how you do clinical trials with new, I would say, life-saving drugs or vaccines, where you start with a very small ensemble, you test for safety, you have very clear success criteria, only when you meet them, you go higher and you do it stepwise. So I think that this is something which is critical, because if you're thinking about realistically, going to whoever decision-maker there will be and asking a permission to start with putting million tons of anything, let alone toxic material, will be a very high bar.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  Saying we want to start low, gain confidence by collecting data and doing it stepwise, seem to us as a much more reasonable approach.

• 14:42Shayle Kann?

  That's related to, I guess, my next question, which is, I think we should head on. The reason that SRM has been controversial is that there's a whole host of potential and somewhat unknown side effects that people are concerned about. I'm sure there are other reasons it's controversial too, but that seems like the one that, to me, is legitimate. And those side effects can range from impacts on vegetation, to impacts on carbon stores that we already have, might you see some kind of a rebound effect, to toxicity, to weather and livestock, I mean, any number of things you can imagine if you're doing this at scale are concerning. Which of those do you view as the...

• 15:28Shayle Kann?

  The biggest deal, which are the ones that we really do need to watch out for, that you're the most concerned with, and relatedly, how are you planning to address and avoid those as you consider deployment? We'll get back to what it would take to actually deploy. But what should we be worried about?

• 15:45Speaker 03

  The short answer is that all of them. I think that only if you're able to eliminate or significantly mitigate all these side effects and that you've mentioned and few others, this should be worth the consideration of policymakers. And elaborate with your permission a little bit. We just released one of the, we released a series of eight papers. The first one had to do exactly with the question you're asking. What is the set of requirements or what is the set of concerns you need to address in order to be able to establish the safety of this technology? And going to your list, I think it falls in three buckets.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  The first one, you've mentioned toxicity. I'd say more generally impacts on on human health and the biosphere. And there are a bunch of them. The good news about them is that we have well-established criteria for other use cases and protocol how to establish safety. So you don't need to invent new criteria. You can use the existing one. The second one is, I would say, impact on the chemistry or the composition of the stratosphere. You don't want to deplete the ozone layer. You don't want to end up with the stratosphere that is composed of other gases than you started with, and few other considerations.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  And the third one, as you've mentioned, is climatic impacts. And you've mentioned some of the impacts on crops, changes in precipitation patterns and other. We argue that in order for this technology to be seriously evaluated by policymakers, you need to make sure that you check all these boxes. And in terms of where we are in this process, so. As for the first bucket of human health, I would say that when you're looking at existing regulation for other use cases, it will need to be, I would say, maybe there will be changes to this use case,

• 18:00Speaker 03

  but it's a good starting point to see if this is considered a safe material. So the short answer is that yes, we are meeting these criteria. And as I was saying, these similar particles are used in a variety of use cases, from toothpaste to food additives and do care naturally. And we went through the process formally. As to the other part of, essentially, when you're looking at the composition of the atmosphere, you'd like ideally an inert particle. Sulfate, by the way, is very uninert, right? It's very reactive, it changes with time. I would say that lab tests that we've done

• 18:41Speaker 03

  show that our particle is, I'd say, at a very high level of inert, but definitely better than any other alternative that was provided so far. So again, there is more testing to be done, I'd say, on all aspects. But definitely here, you want to go from lab tests to doing tests in the field. But we feel that we are on a promising path. With respect to climatic impacts, there you cannot do lab testing, because as you said, this is required large-scale testing. I think that there, the method that we are proposing is combined of, I would say, three pillars.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  One is this clinical trial approach, saying you start orders of magnitude below the level that brings any climatic or environmental effect. This is one. The other thing is the ability to monitor the particles in terms of how they move around and what are the effect they're creating. We have developed a unique tagging technology.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Which enable us to to track in real time each batch of particles as they move across the globe. Think about it conceptually, Shayle is similar to a constellation of satellites. Where we have this global dashboard and you can see how its satellite is moving around. Essentially, we have this ability, we have a unique fingerprint for each batch of particles. You've mentioned that there will be different injection locations. So each one of them will have a unique fingerprint or QR code that you can actually track as they move across the globe. And the ability also to track the the the radiation balance and few other to to monitor it.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  And and the third aspect is that we believe that we will be able to tailor the shielding layer much better than what you can do with sulfites. So the bottom line, when we are discussing, we are still in the process. The testing is not done yet. We've we've just released a series of papers which essentially goes through all this process and provide all the information that we have so far for people to understand where we are in this process. And the idea is to allow the scientific community to review them, to do external validation, which we think is critical. But the bottom line is that we believe that for the first time,

• 21:20Speaker 03

  you have a foundation for what may be a safe and controllable option for for a a solar geoengineering. This is the reason we started Stardust. And again, still a lot of work to do. And and I would say ideally in two or three years, you'll have also three or four other entities, either universities or companies or or hybrid that will develop their own option. Because you want to make sure that whenever governments will come to the point they'll need to seriously consider options to stabilize temperature, they have more than one option, that they have safe options.

• 22:07Speaker 00

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• 24:17Shayle Kann?

  Well, we'll get back in a moment to governments and who makes decisions and the governance of this whole thing. But just before we do that, I want to talk about costs. What is your estimate as to how much it will cost to get how much of a cooling effect?

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. So in terms of giving orders of magnitude or estimates, then we have a very detailed breakdown. For every million tons of particles that will be dispersed, the cost will be roughly $10 billion, and you'll get half a degree of cooling. This is like a, you know, figure of merit of how much this will cost. By the way, we are not claiming that our technology is the cheapest. We are not competing for cost. We are, we believe that you may get with sulfur, I would say, a little bit cheaper price. We argue

• 25:16Speaker 03

  that it's much more important that technology is exactly as you were saying, will be safe, and with very low side effects, it's much more important than whether it costs $10 billion or $8 or $7 billion.

• 25:29Shayle Kann?

  I mean, there's an argument that you could be an order of magnitude more expensive and it wouldn't really matter, right? Like, just in the context of what, if we are going to need to solve climate change, you know, any other intervention, whether it's decarbonizing, whether it's carbon removal, if you're trying to get a half a degree of Celsius of cooling effect, it's going to be at least an order of magnitude more than that, right? So, and I mean, to be fair, that is annual, right? Like, you would have to do that annually because the particles will fall.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is annual, right, right. Essentially, just to give you another, first of all, I couldn't agree more, you know, essentially at current level to, to, to stop war, to stabilize temperature, to stop warming at the current level. And again, the level is changing all the time, but essentially you'll need, or let's say, it's a two, two million tons of our particles, just to give you-

• 26:25Shayle Kann?

  $20 billion. Plus or minus.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:27Shayle Kann?

  Right.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  And again, you you you want to say you want more cooling, but again, this would be for government. But this this gives you the orders of magnitude.

• 26:35Shayle Kann?

  It's like a small data center.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Cost, yeah, yeah, cost is not the prime concern.

• 26:40Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, OK, so then let's talk about governance. This is this is the the double edged sword of solar geoengineering is that it is so cheap in principle, which means that there is some risk that anyone could do it, any government, any very wealthy individual, it possibly, you know, the the challenge with this is you have this tragedy of the commons thing. How do you think the governance should proceed? Who should dictate whether you are able to both test? And as you said, you're going to try to test in a manner that is responsible and starts at small scale, et cetera. But so who should be setting your path, first of all?

• 27:21Shayle Kann?

  And second of all, who should be determining whether we inject at the million ton scale at some point?

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, the short answer for both is governments in plural. I think that all decision making, but exactly as you're saying, both with respect to the R and D and testing phase and with respect to deployment should be done by governments. I don't believe there is any other way this could work. We would definitely not participate in any endeavor that won't be conducted under, I would say, clear and strict regulation and adequate governance by governments. This is stated at our website, I keep saying it, every interview, our our investors are aligned with this.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  This is a very, like, as much as it is important to us to develop a safe technology, it is important to us to make sure that this will be done the right way. By the way, I think it's also the prudent way to run this company. But also on on the value perspective, I think this is the right way to do. I I want to mention something short with respect to the beginning of your question, saying it's very cheap. Anyone, not anyone, but any, many players can do it. I'd say there are many ways you can deploy this technology the wrong way. We started Stardust because we believed.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  That governments need good options, right? Like if you want to start a dispersing toxic material in the sky, you don't need stardust, you don't need all the sophistication, you don't need governance. So I believe that having a safe option essentially lowers the risk that people will go the wrong way because there is an alternative. Or to say it otherwise, if we didn't have options, I would say that the likelihood that someone would go the wrong way would be much higher.

• 29:33Shayle Kann?

  From a, you said a plural governments. That seems obviously correct to me as well. Is there an obvious governing body? Is this a UN sub body or something like that? Does something new need to be spun up? Like what are we actually talking about?

• 29:49Speaker 03

  So a couple of comments. One is, I'm not sure what should be this governing body. I will say also that it's not our, we are technology enablers, right? It's our role to educate policymakers, to push them to build this regulatory framework. But we should be very careful not to try to to shape it one way or the other because this will be something which will be bad for for any number of reasons. So I would say again, we are speaking to policymakers in the US, in Europe, in our region, in other places of the world. But eventually, I'll say, Shell, for this to work,

• 30:34Speaker 03

  it should be an all ends effort. And our role is to develop the best technology we can, to provide the toolkit, to provide the information. Other smart people or smarter people need to figure this out. I will say that there are good precedents that you can look up to. One of the precedents, which I think is very relevant, is the way the world dealt with another global environmental problem, which was the oil in the ozone layer back in the late eighties.

• 31:08Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, Montreal Protocol. I was just thinking about that as well.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Which, by the way, was the US-led process. Not everyone knows it. It was essentially a nexus of US Academy, obviously, discovering the problem and researching it. US industry developing the substitute. It was DuPont in that case. And the US government, which within three or four years was able to consolidate this multilateral coalition, which eventually, as you were saying, signed the Montreal Protocol, which on one hand banned the use of these malicious refrigerator cars, but at the same time put criteria to your question about governance for what should be an adequate substitute.

• 31:54Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, I think that is the obvious analog. Unfortunately, that also has been the obvious analog for all of the other climate change efforts that we've seen, like Kyoto Protocol was sort of like the next generation Montreal Protocol as well. And I think that one, though it hasn't been entirely unsuccessful, clearly hasn't done the trick, hence the need to have the conversation about solar geoengineering in the first place. But that does seem right to me. If you get recognition, broad recognition of the need, then something like that has to be the answer.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  And to be, again, not trying to dictate anything or trying to, but I would assume that it will start from, I would say, individual governments starting to look into this technology, starting to evaluate technologies, and then hopefully, kind of similar to what happened back in the late 80s, something will come out in terms of consolidation. But I believe that, I would guess that in the near future, you'll start seeing different governments starting to ask themselves, okay, so what are the pros and the cons of this technology?

• 33:11Speaker 03

  We should get better in terms of understanding. And as you were saying, also start thinking seriously, how do we regulate, first of all, the R and D and the testing, and then think about the next stages.

• 33:26Shayle Kann?

  How do you address the concern that I know some people have, which is as we, if we start to seriously pursue solar geoengineering, even from an R and D perspective, and it becomes increasingly clear that it is possible and that the costs are roughly what we think that they will be, that it creates sort of a disincentive to take the other actions to decarbonize that are necessary. Why would we figure out a new way to make steel or cement if we can just get a half a degree of cooling for $10 billion? Like, how do you frame that?

• 33:58Speaker 03

  First of all, I think it's a very valid concern to state it out loud and clear. I will add to it, this is the moral hazard, right? If we do this, the incentive to do other things, it goes down. I will add to this, there is also a moral imperative. The moral imperative, and they want to balance both concepts, but the moral imperative essentially says, how do I make sure that if governments need to evaluate options, say in five or 10 years, they have good options on the table, right? And you need to balance this too.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  This is the real world. You need to deal with the moral hazard, and I'm not saying it's an easy problem. I know that people are working about ideas, you know, providing technology only to governments who are actually following, you know, emission reduction

• 35:00Speaker 03

  goals or other options of combining the two technologies, one way or the other, in a bucket. But I would say you always need to, it's always a game of alternatives. And you need to balance this moral hazard, which is a serious concern, with the moral imperative, making sure, you know, that when our kids are at our age, right, they have a world which is more or less as good as the one we got from our parents. I would argue that, you know, Having no option is not a good balance for this. You need to have options.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  You want to make sure that you are not stuck in a position that in 10 years from now, people are saying, why no one worked on giving us option? And at the same time, I believe that governments and regulators and NGOs, as you were saying, this is an all ends effort. It's not a need to find ways to balance also the risks of moral hazard.

• 36:07Shayle Kann?

  All right, final question for you, one that I'm sure you've gotten many times. Why is this a company? Or why should this be a company? You know, you could imagine pursuing the exact same path that you're pursuing right now via a university, or a nonprofit, or a government lab, or something like that. Why do it as a private commercial enterprise?

• 36:27Speaker 03

  So first of all, when people started working on this concept, they started doing basic research in academia. This is how it always worked, right? This is how it works in medicine. This is how it worked in genome sequencing. Everything starts with basic research in academia. However, when you're moving past this stage, to the point that you need to actually build system and develop technologies, and again, all these precedents are relevant, right? With life-saving drugs, with genome sequencing, with space, then you combine academia and private sector.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  And the reason for this is that there are two things private sector is doing better. One is the ability to pool resources. The other one is the ability to incentivize top talent to work on this problem. And you know, to me, it's like asking why the COVID vaccine was developed by Moderna and Beyond Tech, right? It started with basic research. It always starts with basic research. But when you're working on a very multidisciplinary project and you need to build technology. The way it usually works is that the party which is developing the technology are

• 37:55Speaker 03

  companies. And again, there is a major role, definitely for academia, for non-for-profit, to do advocacy, to do education, and eventually for governments. All of them need to work together. But developing technology, not but, developing technology is something that usually companies do.

• 38:14Shayle Kann?

  Yanai, this was fascinating. Thank you so much for the time.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Thanks a lot. Really enjoyed it.

• 38:23Shayle Kann?

  Yanai Yadvab is the CEO and co-founder of Stardust. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. This episode is produced by Max Savage Levenson, mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Anne Bailey edits the video version of the show. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shayle Khan, and this is Catalyst.