30. Biotech for our Homeworld w/ Dan Goodwin and Paul Reginato

In this episode, we speak with Daniel Goodwin and Paul Reginato, the co-founders of Homeworld Collective, a non-profit working to support the social, intellectual, and funding infrastructure needed for climate biotech. Dan and Paul discuss the challenges in climate biotech, action-oriented optimism, their fast-grants program for climate research, how writing is a superpower, and so much more.

Later this year, Homeworld Collective will open a Garden Grants call for proposals on research in biotech and greenhouse gas removal. You can also learn about the latest in climate biotech by tuning into their podcast, the Climate Biotech Podcast, or by signing up for their newsletter through their website.

For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, fill out a membership application for graduate students and postdocs or for undergraduates and join today!

Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.

Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome back to EBRC in Translation. We're a group of graduate students and postdocs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. I'm Andrew Hunt, a postdoc in the Baker Lab at the University of Washington. I'm Heidi Klimpa, a postdoc in Mo Khalil and Mary Dunlops groups at Boston University. Today we're talking to Dan Goodwin and Paul Reginato, the co-founders of the Homeworld Collective, a nonprofit organization working to support the growth of community knowledge and action and climate biotech. We're excited to have you both on the podcast today. Thanks for joining us. Well, we're thrilled to be here. Thank you so much. Wonderful to be here. So just to get us started, could you both sort of introduce yourselves a little and share a bit about your journey leading up to founding Homeworld Collective? Sure. So I can start and then Paul and I, our journey has been intertwined since 2015. So I'll try to get us up to there and then him and I will pass it back and forth. Yeah. So look, thrilled to be here. Really love what y'all are doing for biology. I started in biology at age 30. I didn't touch a pipette until age 30. So it's past eight years have been quite rough. I think the important parts about my background is I'm really quite a mutt. Originally I was a machine learning grad student dropout from Stanford. I then went to go work as an entrepreneur in residence at a global design firm called IDEO. And so a lot of like the weirdness that I think I bring into science and just my work generally comes from being in the product design world where I worked in a toy lab. And so like I'm really intensive about always thinking iteratively. And that comes from time in the design world. Left there to start a company. That company ultimately co-founded with a mentor and hero of mine. Ultimately that company got acquired by Microsoft. But there's also this point where I realized like I was succeeding in the software world, but I really, really wanted to build myself as a hero. You know, and like I realized like at some point I was going to have a kid and I didn't want to pass on the art of iPhone programming to my children. And so the architecture I have is all my biggest heroes in life are the people who pick one thing and commit their whole life to it. So for me, it was neuroscience actually was originally what really got me into bio. So I went from machine learning into neuroscience and went to go do my PhD at the Boyden lab. And it was, I say computer science got me into neuroscience, neuroscience got me into synthetic biology. It was really synthetic biology that I fell in love with. So there's one of those things where like when you come up in bio in Boston, everything leads to therapeutics. But at the same time, we're really falling in love with just the incredible potential and what you can do with bioengineering now. And then we'll talk about this later, but I think if you really get look optimistically, you can look at bio as atomically precise tools and infinitely scalable. And if you think about that, well, then you can really start thinking about planetary scale challenges. And that's what took me away from the brain and took me into climate. And this is where Paul and I's journey really begins to start intertwining. And this is where I can toss it over to him. But I would say that what took me to Homeworld and took us to Homeworld was really trying to find things that you could do in synthetic biology that has planetary impact. And my arc in life is always I go in super arrogant, I get smashed to bits, and I come out a little bit wiser on the other side. And so on this side, I was like, well, I've already started a company, Microsoft bought it. I've already like I've got my black belt in bio supposedly. It's like obviously, I'm going to be able to create a company in climate biotech, right? Well, wrong. Years of failure. But in the process of me really trying to do that, and often collaborating with Paul, we realized that actually, like the reason I'm killing ideas, and he's killing ideas, and we're all killing ideas, it's actually very common across the whole community. And so it was really kind of stumbling into that, that realized that one day, wow, we really know a lot of people in the climate biotech world, a lot of people trying things, a lot of people having the same issues that we have. And that was one of those moments like, oh, my gosh, the right thing to do here is start a nonprofit to support everybody in the space, to help everybody get into problems faster and take better swings. So press pause there and I'll toss it over to Paul. Thanks, Dan. Yeah. So like Dan said, you know, we met in 2015, we were working together in the Boyden lab doing, doing research on toward neuroscience and really, I mean, each of us we had our own project, but developing foundational technology toward understanding cell biology, tissue biology, you know, my project was I was, you know, I was working on identifying a way to sequence and image DNA simultaneously so we could see it at spatial configuration inside the intact nucleus of, of fixed cells or tissues. And, you know, what, what led me down to the, what led me down that road was, was just a love for living things, a love for biology. And, you know, my undergrad was in biology and math. And I have just been fascinated by, you know, the way life works and also just existence and the existence of life and the fact that it can be in this world. And that has sort of become almost like a spiritual thing for me in a way, like reverence and love for life seems like the most sacred thing that there could be. And as I was, you know, partway through my PhD, I, I had this personal reckoning where, you know, I w I was like, I love what I'm doing. And I think the applications in human health are really important. But what got me into this was a love for all life. And I want life on this planet to thrive as much as possible. And I think I've always been most deeply motivated by problems in the world around protecting life and, you know, from the insults of human development and the externalities of our, of our economy and wanting life to thrive. And so, you know, I'm thankful that folks like Dan and also our former colleague, Sarah Sklarcik were in the lab with me who also wanted to work on these problems. And we formed, we formed a climate tech subgroup in the Boyden lab, which was, in hindsight, I'm so grateful that I was in an environment that, that allowed that kind of lateral thinking so that we were able to take, take opportunities that came up like the MIT climate grand challenge, which I think is something that has inspired Dan and I, Dan and I both a lot so that this was a, this is a funding opportunity at MIT that was, you know, trying to get teams from various departments to think about problems in climate tech and apply to, to work on these kind of new grand challenges. And Dan and I and Sarah and a whole bunch of other folks who we sort of met just by thinking about these problems, they're really strange smattering of folks, including folks outside of MIT, outside academia, folks in geobiology and geology and chemistry, thinking about how we could, how we could apply biology, chemistry and geology to problems in carbon mineralization. And that really was sort of an inflection point for both of us because it was where we had the opportunity to think about a new problem with a diverse set of thinkers and really launch into something. And, you know, that, that project has eventually received funding. Dan and I are not part of it anymore, but that was like our launch into, into climate tech. And Dan maybe can tell a little bit about the, you know, what, what, what led us then to create a homeworld collective based on those relationships and that growth. Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you both for sharing. I love the idea of a climate tech subgroup in a neuroscience lab. And I think it's funny to me, because it's one, I think it's really highlights one of the reasons I love engineering biology and synthetic biology is like that almost does still make sense, even though on the outside, it doesn't really, but Oh, I love that. I got a riff on that for a sec. I think we see in the climate biotech community, there's a lot of ex neuroscientists too, right? So I think it's these, these interesting motivations that take people into neuroscience, which is like, how do you do this multi-scale, multi-dimensional problem with all this nested complexity, trying to find the right angle of attack? Like, that's what we do in the brain. That's how Paul and I both made these molecularly precise tools, because we ended up going all the way down to the molecule scale, right? Where other people in neuroscience operate on like the whole brain scale. I think it's the same, like, it was that same spirit in the Boyden lab of just like, let's tackle big problems from first principles thinking. Once we talked to Ed about it, we're like, Hey, Ed, this is a big opportunity. We want to work on this. And I think, yeah, exactly as Paul said, we got a lot of gratitude for Ed Boyden saying, okay, that's great. Let's jump in. So we is actually very neuroscience level thinking, but applying it to the multi-scale, multi-dimensional challenges of climate. Yeah, that's awesome. I think that that brings us maybe to our next question about, can you describe sort of what Homeworld Collective is? And I guess anything else about what inspired its creation or what you wanted it to be? Yeah, I can take a quick pass on it and toss it over to Paul. I mean, one thing you guys are going to tell very quickly is like, we're very different humans, right? One of our running co-founder jokes is I'm loud and he's right. And so you'll also see that in the way we think we bring things and we look at kind of the same problem from very complimentary angles. So the big angle I will take into what Homeworld is and what we're trying to accomplish is I think a lot about communities and community scale productivity, right? And so this is just one little part of my background. It's worth saying is that I had these two very lucky moments in time in my career where I was at Stanford in the computer science department in 2009, right? This is my first tentative PhD. I'm definitely getting up there in age, right? But that's when iPhone came out, AWS came out, Facebook mini feed came out, all of the application came out. And I was there for this phase change where I was in the, you know, the basement of the computer science building and I was seeing students really turn into entrepreneurs, suddenly like stop talking about papers and start talking about applications. And you get these really cool hallway conversations of, oh, we could use this new part of computer vision for this market and this, and the language is created, the Y Com, Y Comilator came out. So there's this big change and like this really big like explosion of startup thinking. And to me, I look back at that and there's this one moment where I just saw this grad student who I knew a year before, you know, a year after this kind of big startupification, just get up on stage and just speak so smoothly. And like, regardless of like what the application where that went, there was this visually, like, for me, as a very visceral moment of empowerment, right? I think if you want to build a really vibrant community, that's what you want, right? You want the individual who's got the training, but also has like the skills and the language for empowerment, like, hey, I'm going to go do this thing. Fast forward six years later, I'm now a PhD student, 10 years later, I'm now a PhD student in bio at MIT in 2015, 2016. And this is right when, you know, CRISPR was really like out in the world and the genetic editing boom was hitting, right? All these companies are going public, like a series B equivalent, like, it's a really hot, vibrant moment in climate and in medical biotech. And to me, I saw the exact same thing where people that were formerly pipetting all the time and just talking about the next experiment are now in the hallway saying, hey, we could do this CRISPR fusion to go after this disease and do this, and this person will fund us. And it's great, right? Like, that's the exact same change that I saw in computer science is now happening in medical biotech. And so, not only is the, when you have the individual talking like that, you also have the money coming in, you have the top-down support from the government, and you get this really vibrant positive feedback loop. So I set that up to say, you take that energy, and then you look at climate biotech, and it's got none of that. I mean, this is like being a little intentionally harsh to be dramatic, but it's really true. We don't yet have the big problems that everyone agrees on, except maybe carbon dioxide removal, greenhouse gas removal. It's really fragmented. The big problems tend to be very siloed. Government-funded people don't really talk. The problems that people want to tackle tend to be buried inside big industry and not everyone knows about it, right? You don't have those hallway conversations. You don't have a hallway for climate biotech people to begin with to be having those conversations. And so, we learned this from ourselves, just trying ideas, killing ideas, trying ideas, killing ideas. And for us, it was the internet. For us, it was just creating a little online community of having a space and having friends that you can just bounce ideas off of. And it's kind of fun when I look back, the first ideas I personally had in climate biotech were so bad, like laughably horrible. We want to waste time on the podcast. We can just roast all dead ideas. But there's the other side of it, which is just being fearless to share ideas. And maybe that's the one thing that I think is a superpower that I've picked up throughout my career before going to bio that I'm trying to share with everyone else is just the power of being tangible with ideas. I would make these decks and I would just distribute them amongst email lists and these two-pagers and they would all get roasted, right? But that would create people communicating. That would create new friends. That would create new relationships. And so this is one of those things where this is engineerable, right? I think we can look at this thing that happened in 2009 at Stanford with computer science. We can look at this thing that happened in medical biotech in 2015 to 2018. And I think we can look at climate biotech and say, actually, we've got all the raw materials here, right? There's tons of money trying to be put into climate biotech, but it doesn't really know where to go. There's tons of people that want to be doing something for planetary impacts and they don't know where to start, right? And it was just one of those moments where it's like, well, we could continue trying to build individual projects. And I think we can talk a little bit about that, about what we do at Homeworld too. But there's also this moment of actually, there's kind of this meta-layer, which is just being the connective tissue of seeing, can you engineer the productivity of a space to recreate those magic moments? But in this case, instead of machine learning and genetic editing, you're talking about working towards these massive scale global challenges like greenhouse gas removal, carbon dioxide removal, metals transition, all those things. So that's what brings us to it. And so when people sometimes ask me, and I'll toss it over to Paul, they're like, Dan, what got you into Homeworld? If I always forget like a one word answer, it's failure. If you can do something as a startup, do it as a startup. Looked at a bunch of things. It took me two years, I would say, to really build a language for what are good problems in climate biotech. And then after that, it was really hard to find the way to tackle it. So for me, and my motivation is that shouldn't take the next person two years. Most people are probably smarter than me. Most people listening to podcasts will probably do it and faster anyway. But if we can play a role in accelerating people to get right into interesting problems, to get straight to having those same conversations, that might not be as loud as me, but can still find people to bounce ideas off of, that's Homeworld success. And so we'll go into the tangibles, but that's definitely the spiritual and the inspiration. So Paul, I'm sure, I'm curious what you've got to think there. Yeah. So I mean, Homeworld Collective for me really is about action oriented optimism, meaning we know things get better when we take action. And we believe in our own agency. And for these problems that are really serious problems that can really affect you emotionally too. It's easy to get depressed about the extinction of animal species and the destruction of ecosystems, the pollution of oceans and the impacts that has on human society. And we expect it to have over the coming decades. But what makes me most encouraged is when I see people caring and doing what they can and figuring out more that they can do. And what makes me the most sad is when I see people not caring and not doing what they can. And I really believe that people care about this. I run into people who care about it. And sometimes you don't even know that it actually bothers someone. They're thinking about it. It's kind of buried and then it comes out. And I want Homeworld Collective to be a place where people can work together to actually work on the things they care about. And working as a collective means enabling each other with maximal agency to build the world that we all want and to use our agency in the way that we want. And going back to the story when I told about how Dan and I got into climate biotech, we were working with a group of people in the MIT climate grand challenge on carbon mineralization. We were working with a whole bunch of different people across a whole bunch of different topics, learning from each other and really enabling sharing, like Dan was saying, sharing our insights into problems and learning from each other and taking on problems that are new that none of us had the familiarity ourselves to take on. But because we chose to collaborate so interdisciplinaryly and share our expertise, we were able to make new progress. I see that happening through Homeworld and that's really what I believe in that makes me proud to be working on this stuff. I love that. So I think tied in with this, you all have a blog. Dan, specifically, you have a blog. Homeworld Collective also has a blog. You've written a bunch of great stuff there. Everyone listening should go check it out. But specifically, I wanted to dive into a post from maybe a year and a half ago. It was called, we wanted solar punk but instead got monoclonal antibodies. I think it's very tied to some of the reasons you just laid out for why you were interested in starting Homeworld. But it really resonated with me and others at the time I was thinking about transitioning from doing work focused on human health and medicine to climate and sustainability work and really galvanized that transition for me. So can you lay out a bit of what you talk about in that post and maybe highlight why you think climate biotech is so much less researched, funded, commercialized, etc.? Yeah, happy to. Well, it's so funny to say that it's a great time to be a mouse with cancer. That's the opening line of that essay. It really speaks truth and hits home. I go to a lot of bio dinners and when people go around and introduce themselves, I'm just open to that. It's a great time to be a mouse with cancer. Everyone laughs and then everyone thinks, oh, it's really true. Wait a second. Look, a lot of the medical biotech industry right now has a really good recipe for producing companies and a lot of times that focuses to say pretty rare subtypes of cancer that you can easily replicate in a mouse so you can raise billions of dollars to try to cure a cancer in a mouse. I don't use that to really disparage medical biotech at all. I actually use that as a positive to say, okay, well, what can we learn from that and apply it into climate biotech? That opening line that we wanted solar punk, but instead we got monoclonal antibodies, that's a direct ripoff of Peter Thiel who said that we wanted flying cars, but instead we got 250 characters. I think that was a very good call to action. It was a very good call for that point, the tech community, the software community to go for big problems and don't just go for the easy commercial wins. I think that's the spirit that I wanted to get in when I wrote that essay. My blog is called Punk Rock Bio and I started writing it right as I left MIT. The reason I call it Punk Rock is that I just want to say the things that I felt I couldn't say in academia. With all respect and appreciation to Ed Boyden for being an amazing PhD advisor, I would admit that I had the fear of saying something too salty there and it would come back and it would hurt the lab or it would hurt MIT. As soon as I was out, I just started publishing. The first thing I would say is if anyone is listening, I really encourage everyone to just capture their ideas and write their ideas. I think we'll talk about that a little bit later about what Homeworld has done to support that. Here's the big idea of why we wrote that thing. Medical biotech succeeds because it's hard in science, but it's fairly easy in business. If you have an approach that you can deploy to do some genetic target, if there's a well-defined druggable target or a clear DNA thing that you can modify, you've got the business to support you. You just need to make the science work. I use that to set up and climb the biotech. You've got to fight something that's hard in science and hard in business. That's super challenging. I think most people who are going into a startup in the first time don't appreciate that. When you come from the software industry, you always say, oh, you want a market risk or a tech risk, but I would say everyone who's lived in bio knows how hard it is. You hear me talk about the product design world too. I think it's worth speaking in one more metaphor here, which is that when I was in the product design world, I was making toys for kids. We ended up making an app with Elmo, which went wide. I wrote words that Elmo himself performed. It's a very funny little chapter in life. We would always prototype. We would prototype to let things grow. We would prototype to see, oh, let's make it in cardboard. If that makes people happy, then we'll increase the resolution, increase the resolution. I wanted to say that because in science, especially bio, we actually prototype to kill. If you're a really creative biologist and you've got an idea you're really excited about, you need to be protective of your time or a false positive in bio will cost you five years, 10 years, a whole career. I think in climate biotech, that's even more true, where not only do you have to worry about a false positive in your science, but then you need to worry about a false positive in the business. The goal of, we wanted solar punk, but instead, we got monoclonal antibodies, is one, shouting out the medical biotech world for being really productive. Then how can we take those things and start putting them into climate biotech? It comes back to saying, well, why do we even care about this at all? If you let us go to the max, you can say the bio can be atomically precise and infinitely scalable, but really why aren't we pushing it so far? Well, one of the big challenges is that even knowing what sub-problems to target. A great example of one space I think is super important is chemical manufacturing. I know, Andrew, you'd been looking into some self-free work before and I love it. The furthest extreme, I would love us to imagine chemical factories that fit in our hand. How can we reimagine these hundred million dollar or billion dollar factories that currently make to make chemicals to something that's so small that you can just click them together like a flow cell? That's really wild. The first thing you'd ask if you hear that idea is what the heck does Dan know about chemical manufacturing? The answer is nothing. I know nothing about the field. Very few people do, but if you can take, lots of people do, but they don't publish them like you do for a bio paper. This is part of the things of trying to surface these big problems, but big problems start with big opportunity areas. The big call out for, we wanted solar punk and instead we're getting monoclonal antibodies is let's figure out what it takes to start getting people excited about these big problems. There has been one example so far. I would actually say the carbon dioxide removal space is one of the first where we're beginning to get this energy. I would say for me personally, and maybe Paul agrees with this, carbon dioxide removal was my gateway drug into climate tech. It's the first time climate was reframed as looking at photos of dead polar bears and feeling sad about the world into, hey, there's a technology challenge here and if we can solve this technology challenge, we can make some positive impact. Technology challenges is what I do. That got me activated. What's the technology challenge in carbon dioxide removal? Try to get to a billion ton drawdown and get it cheap enough that it matters. The magic number that people throw around is $100 a ton. That's great. You now have two things. One, scale it as fast as you can. Two, make the science good enough that you can get the marginal cost down. Because of that, you've had hundreds of companies all spin up and because of that, you also have a billion dollar fund. The Frontier Advanced Market Commitment came in and offers a billion dollars to be the first customer. That's great. This is the first time you're seeing at least the business challenge of a climate problem be somewhat de-risked, allowing everyone to focus on the technology challenge. As we move forward, I think we need to mindfully consider what does it take to bring in that ambitious energy that actually has a landing place and a bridge to somewhere. I got to say, Andrew, it means so much to me that you read that essay and that it had some influence on you. Because when I first started writing, it scared me. It really scared me that people would roast me, people would cancel me or something like that. But really, it's been super fun to have many conversations started because of being able to provoke these thoughts and these conversations. I really do think we can bring in more ambition and more big thinking into climate. It's going to be a holistic thing, like a holistic effort, but we really can. That's awesome, Dan. It's really inspiring to hear about. We're curious a little bit as well in terms of... I feel like you guys have done a lot of innovative things on the organization side or initiative side as a way to bring these things into focus. In particular, focusing around building community, sharing ideas and funding research. There were three things that we saw that Homeworld Collective is doing that we were curious about how you got the idea. For full disclosure, the first one I'm going to ask about is something actually I applied to, which was the garden grants, which really stuck out to me as unique in being very short, format and highly structured. I remember there were a lot of directions about how to do them correctly, but the parts clearly had a purpose. I felt like they were really pushing us to just give the most useful pieces of information. There was this interesting separation between a problem statement and a solution statement. It was explicit that the problem statement would be public, which was cool because I was like, basically, if people do a good job identifying a problem, other people will see it. Anyway, I was curious how you see the overall design of those applications, why you set them up that way, and if you felt it was successful at achieving what some of your objectives were. Yeah, happy to. What I can do is I can describe a little bit about the funding and the history that brought us to create the garden grants. When we get into problems, I think it'll be really great for Paul to explain the spirit of problem sharing. The big motivation that we had was seeing ourselves on the ground floor in the climate biotech community, seeing a lot of people have good ideas and having no funding. I visited labs where they're reusing pipette tips because there's so little funding. If you come from the Baker lab or the Elowitz lab or the Boyden lab, that is just inconceivable. You also need to understand that there's this funny gap where if you have someone who's got a lab and they're funded to study salmon, but they want to go study crabs next, where's their funding going to come from? They can't take their NSF money to study salmon and then go study crabs. You need sometimes a little bit of activation energy to let people take new efforts that they wouldn't have taken otherwise. When you go into the funding landscape, there's very little funding to fund the first experiment. A big inspiration for us was the 2020 Fast Grants Program that just came out so bold. A little bit of history there for people that don't know it is that when COVID came out and the NIH and everyone was scrambling to try to figure out what was going on, a bunch of philanthropists showed up, created a system. They said, if you apply with two pages, we will tell you in 24 hours. I think it was 48 hours. I think a little bit later, maybe it was a week, but that is blazingly fast, blazingly fast. When you look at the impacts of Fast Grants, it was amazing because it supported non-consensus efforts and made fantastic discoveries. The speed actually ends up having this kind of, I'm trying not to use the word emergent, but it ends up uncovering just how slow academic science can be. Derrick Thompson that did an amazing breakdown of it where the average professor now spends 40% of their time just writing grants. Every grant is this huge proposal and everything gets bloated, and so you have to pack things in. What's the better way? It comes back from, once again, coming from the startup world. In the startup world, it's really efficient with funding. You fund to get your first milestone and then your next milestone. You've got to start with a proof of concept somewhere. You combine all those things and you say, look, everyone wants to be working on climate. We want to have those hallway style conversations with people, and we also want to be able to fund people as efficiently as possible. Efficient here means, tell us what the first experiment you want to do is. We called it the garden grants out of the metaphor that a garden is a safe place for plants to grow, and so we want the garden grants to be a safe place for ideas to grow. We built this thing pretty much in a year and a half. We had a fantastic team, and we extended the fast grants program into eventually garden grants. Really got to give a big shout out to the founding Homeworld board. Tony Kolesa, I think, was the first person who's like, wait, why isn't there a fast grants for climate? Then Josh Moser, now CEO of Tezza, Judy Svetskaya, diligence lead at Frontier, Sarah Sklarczyk, she runs Voyager. This whole team, and then Paul, me, we all worked on this thing to create what ultimately became garden grants. We got 200 applications, a hundred of which were spam, and then we whittled down about 65 real applications that we thought had problems that were worth putting public. Heidi, I appreciate the disclaimer. I really want to say the project that you and your team proposed was really cool. And I remember it sparked a lot of very cool discussions, and so I encourage you guys to continue exploring the space there. And so the high level of it, and we've just written a huge debrief of not only the teams that we ended up funding, but the experiments that we learned along the way. And this is just the back end. We haven't even got to the front end of the problem discussions yet, but we did non-anonymous reviews. So you knew who was critical of your project, but we also told the technical reviewers to be friendly. It's the technical reviewers' job to help the people get their best ideas out there. We did this very simple two-page proposal, but we were very focused on, tell us what the experiment you're doing is and why it matters. How is it de-risking a bigger idea that needs to happen? And we can go into a lot of details there. I think if there's specific things that you guys are interested in, but I think really it's a good time to press pause on the back end, talking about the solution statement, the way people are talking about that. And I want to pass it over to Paul, talk about why it's so important to have problems as part of the public discourse. Yeah. So I think problems really are the center of all work that we do. We as innovators or technologists, we're always trying to solve a problem. And in different domains of science, those problems are well understood to different degrees and shared by the community to different degrees. So one of the benefits you have if you're working in a mature field like medical biotech is there's so much discourse and just infrastructure for addressing those problems. You have playbooks for how to identify and commercialize a pharmaceutical. You have custom VCs that are just for medical biotech. You've got a thriving community that even just by, if you look at the titles of all the talks that are happening in your department, even if they're attending them, you kind of know what the problem space is and how some of them interrelate. But in new spaces of innovation, that doesn't exist as much. And so we've noticed that it's very common for people to be saying, I want to work on problems in climate biotech, but what problems should I actually work on? And when I see a problem here, I mean, there are different resolutions of problems. Dan earlier referred to the carbon dioxide removal technology space surely has become kind of a movement with this goal of $100 a ton and gigascale capture. But $100 a ton and gigascale capture is not really an actionable problem in the sense that I don't go to work every day and work on pulling down 100 gigatons of CO2. I work on some subproblem that I can actually accomplish over some reasonable period of time, weeks, months, or years, that fits into a bigger network of problems and projects. And so we wanted to create a culture of problem-focused discourse in climate biotech. So we have something called the Problem Statement Repository, which is where we've been working to help the community articulate priority problems that are addressable by one person or a small team through an ambitious project. And this links to the garden grants because by providing these problems, we provide inspiration to people who would apply to garden grants. And we welcomed people to apply on a few different problems that we had articulated ourselves in the case of our first round of garden grants, which was focused on protein engineering. Those problems were focused on protein engineering and carbonic anhydrase to enable carbon capture and direct air capture of CO2. But we've been expanding the repository now. And really our goal with that is to have a protocol by which people can share action-oriented problem statements that are in sort of a different kind of literature from what you normally see. Like a lot of the scientific literature really is, it's either written to describe a unit of research and how impactful that unit of research is, or it sort of reviews the state of knowledge on a topic. And you will certainly find papers out there that are really trying to lay out problems and requests that people work on them, but that's a minority of how we discourse about science, even though every science project is really just existing to solve a problem. So I think that whole relationship between the problem statements and the public nature of garden grants, coming back to garden grants, we ask people to share their problem statement publicly. This allows people to be open about what problems they're interested in, which hopefully can connect them to other researchers that might have complementary points of view, especially in such an interdisciplinary and emerging set of application spaces. And it also allows for problem statements to be exchanged in the general discourse and then slot directly into a grant application. I really love all that's happened with that. I know people who applied for garden grants who got it to different labs and who are now collaborating on the same problem because they applied for a similar area and are trying to work together on it. So I think a lot of this is really successful and the no problem statement literature too really resonates with me. I love having that out there, just this well-vetted set of problems that people can come to and riff on and help try and solve. That just makes us so happy to hear that. And we should say that we're always open to collaborate. So we're figuring out how to grow the problem statement repository. And there's one big idea here, which is that, and it sounds obvious, but a good project is a problem and a solution. And you can talk about the problem publicly. Those are the hallway conversations that we love so much in science. And so as Homeworld figures out how we make problems internally, you'll also see that there's a lot of co-authors. And we're also at the spot now where we get people sending problems into us. And so we just say that if there's people that listen to this and they're deep in the weeds on a problem they think is overlooked, we want this problem statement repository to be a platform to amplify these. So we have funders reading that. We have doers reading these problems. And so we want this to be an everybody wins situation for when you talk about a problem and it gets in the problem statement repository, it means that this is a quality thing that needs more attention. Yeah. So beyond this, one of the other things we loved that we saw you all doing was this. You had hosted a speculative fiction writing contest. Could you share a bit more about that, why it was important for Homeworld Collective to do that and maybe a bit about the outcomes of it? Yeah, happy to do so. This is something we had said earlier, but it's so important just to say again, it's that writing, and I'll speak personally here, so it's like writing has completely transformed my career and I'm really grateful for it. And so I encourage and would love to see more writing by individuals in the community. And so we created this really kind of with a fun provocation with our friend Niko McCarty, who's the editor-in-chief now of Asimov Press. And it started kind of as a challenge from him. He's like, yeah, we came up with this language, we'd always say writing is manifesting, writing manifest ideas. Everyone needs to write more. It's just like, it's a skill, it's a superpower. Writing is manifesting. And so one day I think it was Niko just saying, well, let's put the money where the mouth is, let's go. Let's do a real prize that makes people take it seriously. So, okay, well, like what's a real prize? $10,000, bang, $10,000 out there. That should get people taking writing seriously. And so I don't think we even explicitly said it had to be fiction. I think it was more just, give us a big speculative piece. Just give us your best effort. And this is kind of where I think we do need to be critical of the status quo. The status quo, nobody teaches writing. How many bio people do you know that took like a creative writing class in undergrad or grad school or writes a blog? Nobody. So, so few. And when we do write, when we're taught to write, we write reviews, we write book reports, we write things just to show people what they want us to know. But that sucks. It's fine. Check the boxes. That's all, by the way, completely commoditized with GPT now. So we're teaching people the wrong skills. We want people to think of writing as a way to land ideas. And so I kind of say in salty ways, I use the word idea porn a lot, right? There's a lot of ideas that are just like kind of fun to think about, right? And then you walk away, you're like, Oh, I'm going to think about blah, blah, blah. Like, great. Like, but really, like, when you start writing ideas, and you start landing them, like, all right, write that up, like, put some rigor to it, see how far you can go see, a lot of those idea porn ideas just kind of vaporize, or they don't vaporize. And there's actually something there, right? And so a lot of the ideas that I personally am most excited about started as idea porn, I wrote them down, kind of wrote like white papers to nowhere, right? And then end up like, kind of having my own ideas of like, now, I think like beginning to get some impact, but it's because I was writing, right? So the thing is, when we talk out in the world, and we go spend time in the climate biotech community, we tell our story, you know, like, I think a big part of Homeworld getting funded was the punk rock bio blog was us putting stuff out in the world. So we go talk to the climate biotech community, say, Hey, we support you writing more. And everyone says, Okay, why? Right? So when we when we put out this real price, $10,000, give us your best, we got 130 applications, and 60% ish said they would not have written if it wasn't for this challenge. And so for us, like, that is the big impact of that, like, think about that's what 70 things that got written. And a lot of people said it was the first creative thing they've ever written. So like that, like that is success. The other thing that I really love is how permissionless being a writer is, right? Meaning, like, I think we funded some people, I think one or two people were like, ultimately were nones, I think they're young, I think they might have been high schoolers, right? But writing magnificent pieces, big thing, creative, check out the poem that's on there. I love the poem. It's like got the eyes little like hidden cast nine jokes inside it. Right. And then the two pieces that like, we, and I don't like ties, I'm a very competitive person. But the two like pieces that we ended up calling first place were both so good for such different ways, both end up being fiction, but both end up being kind of rooted in interesting science. I think we, when we saw is like, obviously, like, this is great, got the winners. But we think what we leave from that is that, hey, this is something we need to do more of, right? It's the same thing with what we're doing with garden grants is sometimes a little bit of cash helps bump people in like adds that activation energy. And we hope that, you know, following up and helping there to be more writing, I think is a contribution we can do to strengthen the individuals in the community. So I'll say kind of one more follow up from that is that when we looked at these applications come in and read these really fun pieces, we also realized that there's a big impact potential here to help teach people to write. So Nico and Homeworld and then Pillar with led by Tony Colessa, we said, okay, let's build a fellowship to help teach writing. So the follow up from the ideas matter, sorry, the ideas writing challenge was the ideas matter writing fellowship, where we said, okay, we'll give you eight weeks free. But if you're serious about writing and you love biology, come apply for this. We got 550 applications from all around the world for people who are rooted in biology, trying to become better writers. And that was 550 applications for 14 slots. And so we leave that thinking that, okay, there's this idea of like ideas influencers. So this is a Tony Colessa phrase. I think it's absolutely brilliant, right? Can you get ideas that are interesting and convincing and influential to do that? You have to be a writer, right? Today, like you have to learn how to present things clearly and tangibly and push through the vagueness of like what started as idea porn ends up on being like a really punchy, like kind of aggressive view to like, let's make the world better in some way. And so anyway, it's a long way of saying that was an experiment, right? Like doing the ideas writing challenge was an experiment we think was a huge success. We did the ideas, matter writing fellowship. We feel that was a real success. And so as we look forward, we want to create more of this and also just to encourage people to capture their ideas and then use us to be friends. We got hello at homeworld.bio. We even have a blog post on how to write two pages. We have a two pager on how to write two pages. And these are just the skills that nobody teaches, right? And it's even more, it's hard. It's necessary in medical biotech. It's necessary if you do in quantum computer or something. I think it's super necessary in climate because you need to justify the problem as well as your solution. That makes a ton of sense. I was thinking of applying myself and hope it happens again so that I get the opportunity to. Oh, well now that we heard that, we definitely will. As you can see, I'm very passionate about it. The other thing I'll say about this, I was a terrible writer. I think I still am a pretty bad writer. I was like, I tried to get into accelerated English three times as a 10th grader and I failed every time. Like I'm really, I was always really bad at that. But once I started seeing writing as part of just kind of the entrepreneurial journey or like part of like manifesting ideas you want to see in the world, I started taking it really seriously. And there's a few little things that people can learn that just totally level it up. And it all starts with just doing. So yeah, Andrew, if, if doing it again, it'll get you to write. I would love to know what's in your head. And so let's just do what we're going to do. That sounds great. I just wanted to say that actually, because Asimov Press is located in Boston, they hosted a creative writing night. So I also started writing my first science fiction story in like a long time because of like all these little like runoffs. So it's been, been really fun. But I guess I'm going to be transitioning a bit more to the science. Yeah. I was curious what in your view are some of the unique advantages and limitations of using biological systems to address climate issues. And sort of one thing that's like kind of a pet thing for me that I've been trying to understand more is like using biology to break down plastics. And that's interesting because there's a lot of good chemical approaches as well. And there have been interesting solutions where people sort of meld these two together. But again, I'm curious, what are you think are like things where biology has like a great advantage and maybe some places where it might be limited? Sure. Yeah, we can start with me. And I'd love to hear Dan talk a bit about chemicals manufacturing as well. So I can start by talking about the, I mean, so, you know, biology really is, is the mediator of most of the major, elemental fluxes on our planet, right? Of course, the carbon cycle with CO2, you know, turning into biological matter and then turning back into CO2. And on the way through that, there's also methane, you know, and so we have, methane is a huge problem, mostly from biological sources. And the, and the, the sink of methane is also primarily biological. You know, you have organisms that are, that eat the, the methane in the atmosphere. And of course the nitrogen cycle too. So N2O emissions are huge, are a huge problem. And that's, that's also mostly a biological issue. And then you have also the, the, the cycles, cycling of the metals, right? Iron and copper, and it's turning out many of the, the lanthanides or rare earth elements that we need for, to mine for the critical energy transition, or sorry, for the critical metals that we need to mine for the energy transition, they also are, are cycled largely by biological processes. And you have, you know, in the case of the metals, you have organisms that are dissolving minerals and selectively binding metals that are difficult for chemical technologies to discriminate. They're already mediating the cycles of the crucial materials that humans need to modify and adjust in order to make our world sustainable at the large level. And then, you know, get some of the challenges with, with, with using those, those capabilities of biology though, or, you know, for one thing, a lot of the processes that are occurring in these organisms are, are things that we haven't studied as much in biotech, right? We haven't, we're not used to studying using biotechnology how organisms selectively isolate minerals from metals from, from minerals. And we're not used to, to working with, you know, nitrate, nitrous oxide emissions and, and methane oxidation. And so these processes are, are occurring in organisms that like, we need to develop new scientific understanding of even how these processes work and how to work with these organisms. And so that's, that is certainly a, a big limitation. And I think, you know, it's, it's, it's important that we're, that we're brave to go into those new areas and look at those new, those, you know, that weird, that weird methane oxidation process or that weird organism that, you know, lives in mine tailings, which is sort of living at the intersection of a bunch of disciplines and, and hasn't been explored with the same vigor, you know, often lacking platform technologies that would enable the technology to go faster. I think another, another area that is really interesting is any issue involving biological populations and ecosystems, like invasive species, adaptation to changing environmental conditions, you know, degradation and regeneration of land. And these are all biological processes. And, you know, these are big challenges for which we don't currently have many deployable solutions, but these are also biological problems that if anything is going to address these things, it has to be biological. So it's really important that we develop those capabilities and that we're willing to do the biological science that would underlie being able to, you know, make interventions in those kinds of, kind of systems and organizations like Revive and Restore or the American Chestnut Foundation are doing pioneering work in those kinds of areas. And I'm really excited to see where that grows in the, in the coming decades. Yeah, those are, those are a couple of things and I'll hand it over over to Dan. Yeah. One of the big views I have is that you can split efforts into offensive versus defensive formulations. And so what I mean by that is that like my, my dad is my hero number one in life and a lot of his life's work was kind of defensive formulation sometimes with, you know, protecting like wetlands from dams or oil spills. And so I think when a lot of times you think about climate issues, we think about defensive things about trying to protect one more species from going extinct or trying to like, you know, like remediate an oil spill or other sort of toxic event. I think there's the other side of it, which is you can start thinking about offensive formulations, meaning like, how do we go from where we are and get better? And I use this a lot because I think it's easier to sell excitement around offensive formulations. And the best example of this in biology is longevity, right? Laura Deming in 2012 came out and she said, we're not going to just try to cure one disease of aging. We're going to live for freaking ever. And it got a lot of excitement and a lot of ambition and a lot of people working in the space. And so to me, like I bring this up to say, like when Paul is talking about greenhouse gas removal and mitigation, there's an, there's like an inherently like offensive, there's a pun here, right? But it's an inherently offensive formulation, like, okay, like there's things happening. We can attack this, right? There are tools here and there's levers here inside bio. And while there has been a lot of kind of like individual efforts and some small hubs, generally around funders, there's an opportunity to get more people talking about it. I use this set up because I think some of the areas that I personally am getting most excited about are like, are pretty fringe right now. And I'm framing them intentionally as kind of like offensive formulations. And so a big one, I would say is like bio resilience. So engineering bio resilience is a very interesting thing because just Heidi, just like you mentioned plastics, a lot of the organisms, a lot of life on earth was not made to have microplastics wedged in the system or PFAS like floating around. And so you can look at it for the ecosystems and there's many, many sad stories there. And so there's the defensive formulation and there's also the offensive formulation of how do we go beyond where we're currently at? I'm going to give one quick example of a very specific science that I really admire. And it just shows how complicated the ecosystem challenges, which is that there was a question in Puget Sound in, which is why do baby salmon die when it rains? And it was this heroic bit of experimentation done where the answer was six fractionation experiments later for people who are experienced with like very like with mass spec, they found out that there is a tire chemical. There's a preservative on car tires that runs off on the road. It bakes in the sun. It degrades into something else. And when it rains, it washes in and it selectively kills coho salmon. And you think about that and you're like, wow, I think the first response for like, we know nothing about biology. Shouldn't we be able to predict those sorts of toxic events? Shouldn't we be able to predict what things degrade into what and then what things get wedged into certain parts of, you know, young but kind of vulnerable organisms, right? That's the very offensive way of looking at like we could do all these things and we're just not right. And so the big thing is like, how do you start mobilizing lots of efforts bigger than what we're already doing? I think even like more ambitiously beyond kind of where we're at. So when I talk about this, I talk about in the human sense, which is the human pollution. So part one of the entries in punk rock bio was saying that we need to build the field of pollution therapeutics. Yes, all life on earth is important. Right now, there's an existing economy for healing humans. And so maybe by healing humans, we can find tricks to heal other organisms. And so I talk a lot about pollution therapeutics as an underappreciated part of climate biotech. And there's more to talk about, you know, just for time, but I will say like what Paul was saying about metals, I think is very, very interesting. And biology is very good with controlling metals, solubilizing metals. And there is like, I think a big opportunity there. So there's a lot of topics and that's, I think, a big part that we're always trying to explore and share. And we would definitely encourage the listeners. I mean, EBRC has done some of the absolute best work in road mapping and community driven road mapping and making these documents. And so I think the EBRC method of getting lots of people to talk, combined with the Homeworld method of trying to really be rigorous when we call a problem statement, a formal problem statement has a lot of fruitful efforts ahead. Well, building off of this, we were thinking about sort of what goes on in research and climate biotech. And it seemed like there's some unique and interesting challenges related to trying to de-risk solutions in these areas. So we're hoping maybe you all could touch on that as well. Yeah. So this is a really strange thing that I wish it was more baked into science, this idea of de-risking to kill, right? So we go all the way back to the beginning of the conversation. We say, well, as in the design world, we prototype to let things grow, right? Or like if you put down the cardboard experiment, that's fine. But in science, we often prototype to kill, especially bio, we prototype to kill because it costs so long. This is something where that's the spirit of de-risking, right? What is the best shot you could take on goal? That if it works, you want to keep going, right? And so this is what was based in our garden grants proposals, like tell us what big problem, what frontier goal you want to get to and tell us very clearly what your first experiment is, that if it's true, takes you to the next stage in that process. For people who've created companies and gone through funding milestones, this is baked in, right? And I'll beat this to death in one very funny saying, this is a blog we have upcoming on Homeworld, is it? If somebody came to me and they're like, Dan, I want a million dollars for my startup. I need a year and a half. I would say, get out of here. I don't care how long it takes, right? That's not the thing you lead with. You say like, Dan, I need a million dollars because there's this thing that if I can show it's true, is a proof of concept of something big, right? And so building this culture around this kind of de-risking moment or like with our garden, we ended up funding 16 teams for $1.3 million. And I've been talking and these are amazing scientists that we admire so much. We've been finding our own language with them, saying like, what's your phase change moment where like, once you've de-risked this, it's a totally different kind of ballpark. That didn't quite make sense yet. So it's all right, let's de-risk. That's also kind of like that language doesn't quite make sense. And so there is kind of this like Homeworld sits in this weird third arc, where you can do startups, you can do university science. And then there's the kind of the other side, which is what we've been calling here, like the problem centric founder, right? Where what matters is not the entity that you're doing it in, it's the problem that you're trying to solve. And if you really build the language of working on problems, baked into that is, okay, what are the sub milestones inside each one? And so I think this is a big opportunity for culture shift in bio. And a big part of that, there's a lot of angles to it, is there's the language and there's the way people think. But then there's also the support, right? Because I think a lot of academic science right now doesn't want to de-risk because it just doesn't, the incentives don't align, right? People don't want to write about negative outcomes. They want to, even if they're working on something, it's fine. And then it turns out not being like the big dream, they still have to continue doing it anyway and publish some paper to tell this. And so especially if you raise a $5 million grant and you figure out on the first experiment that it sucks, we still have to pound it out for the next five years. Whereas if you take 50 grand or 100 grand and it sucks, kill it. Move on with your life, right? And so I think there's a lot of cultural things of celebrating good deaths, celebrating true negatives, funding quickly and efficiently so you don't have to do 40% of professor's times. And then if it does work, make sure that there is the funding ready to jump in and to support that. And so we can land this in a couple of very tangible ways, which is that Homeworld's job is that now that we've funded 16 teams, it's our job to help them get to either true negative or if there is something there, it is our job to help them find the next downstream funder. Because when we're funding people at relatively such a small amount, like the median is like 80K, right? That is such a small amount that that gets overlooked by other philanthropies, NSF, NIH. But if there's evidence that they produce from that, from that 80K that we can fund them, that six months of a postdoc's work, and that can be foundation for later, well, then that is our success. So that's kind of the big thing is like we want to build a culture of de-risking and finding good milestones. And we could spend the next 30 minutes, hour, just talking about what it means to make good milestones, but it's totally up to you where you want to go with this. Well, sadly, I don't think we have another hour left. Sort of curious, you've talked a bunch about where things are going for you all, but I wanted to touch on some challenges you've faced that you haven't touched on yet. Just give you a chance to talk about like what have been the hard things working and sort of like pivoting into climate biotech, trying to work in climate biotech that we haven't touched on yet and that Homeworld is working on. Well, I think one of the biggest challenges that people face in climate biotech is the fact that climate work is really in the commodity space. And most biotech that we've seen before is not in the commodity space. It's in the specialty space. So the playbook that you're used to in pharma is you find the right cellular pathway and you find the right molecule that interacts with it, which could be an antibody or a drug. And then you produce your product, which you set the price for, and it's addressing a very niche problem. And in anything climate, it's the opposite of that. You're competing at scale to produce things like food and materials. If you have your carbon-free concrete, let's say, and it's 10% more expensive than the existing concrete, then in the absence of some other financial incentive for carbon or whatever that's going to dip you below the competing price, your material just won't get sold because it won't get purchased, because it won't be competitive in the commodity market. And this all relates to understanding in advance whether the problem you're trying to solve is actually unlocking the capability that will take you to cost competitiveness. It's a really hard thing to know in advance. And we're not used to asking that question in advance in biology. That's what led to the whole biofuels boom and bust, where we were really excited about the potential to make these chemicals using biology. And it turned out we couldn't do it cheap enough to compete with the commodity market, especially when the oil prices went down. And so that then comes back to what's called techno-economic analysis, which is the art of modeling a technological process at scale to get a sense for how much it will cost. And you can build these models for really clear, detailed models for existing technologies to understand where the pain points are. And the even bigger superpowers when you're doing these models for speculative technologies that don't really exist yet, and you're trying to understand how cheap could this process become? What are the pain points that really are limiting the overall efficiency? Is the pain point even some biological thing that you can work on in the lab, or is it some other downstream process, like gas diffusion or something like that, that is a chemical engineering challenge? And we really need more of that. We really need to teach people how to do that kind of thinking so they can ask those questions themselves. And we also need to share the results of those analyses with the broader community to show people where innovation is needed. Because like Dan mentioned before, a lot of the knowledge about things like chemicals manufacturing at scale, that exists inside companies, and it doesn't exist in the academic public literature. And so we need more of this discourse in the public, in the academic world, so that when we're looking for problems, we can actually look at benchmark targets for a problem we're trying to solve to really understand how well it has to perform in order to make a difference. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think maybe then, like as a final question, we're curious what advice maybe you would give to somebody who's interested in entering the field of climate biotech. And I don't know if it's possible if you think about this way to segment your advice between different types of people. I mean, it's interesting, I think, the way you guys talk about funders and doers and these other types of categories, people inside biology, outside biology, people who write, people who hold pipettes. I'm curious what you think. Yeah, one way to do this is that we could just talk. I think both Paul and I, like I said, we're very different humans. I think we've had very different journeys. And I think that's actually a great way to answer this. So for me, I'll say the biggest advice I have with people is go do something. Get out of your head as quickly as possible. And what I mean by that is that everything Paul just said about the skills gap in bio is 100%. And my silence is just like people listening this won't be able to see all the nodding I was doing when he was saying that. I think that's exactly right. The other thing that people need to understand is there's this knowledge gap too, where if you're just reading papers all day, you're finding stuff that's 10 years old. Or if you're reading a brand new paper, you need to realize that a lot of this commodity industry is 15 years or more beyond what the published numbers are. So what that means is that if you are sitting at home reading papers all day, you're screwed. And so this is kind of coming from a bitterness that I have, which is that I think for two years of my transition into climate, first I was just reading papers and doing nothing. I've got nothing to show for that period of just reading. And especially when you really want to work on climate and you have this anxiety, the world's going bad, it's so easy just to chase your tail. So for me, the big ways of doing is write something. If you're going into an idea, go deep in it. Dig in. And then the first and easiest way to make it tangible is start writing about it. The second thing is meet people and connect as quickly as possible. Go to a meetup, go talk to somebody. If you're interested in mining, you're no longer in the climate industry, you're in the mining industry, which is great. You're actually doing something. Go to a mining meetup. Go visit a mine. And this is stuff that we really want to help facilitate at Homeworld. So that's my biggest advice to people is that if you are interested in this, start doing something as quickly as possible. And if you want help trying to get connected around, just reach out to us at Homeworld. And this is literally our day job to help people. Awesome. Yeah. And I would say, I think my biggest advice is to love the problem, which is a quote. I forget where I heard that quote. I was actually just trying to Google where that came from, but it didn't come up in time for me to give proper credit. But I think, yeah, love the problem and understand what the problem is. And that's going to take you outside of your background. It's going to take you outside of your expertise, because any of these big problems are, unless you've been thinking about that problem space for a long time, they're full of all sorts of different aspects that are not what we learn in our biology education. And so if your chosen problem is in mining, learn about mining. If it's carbon dioxide removal, learn about carbon dioxide removal. If it's pollution in oceans, learn about pollution in oceans. And as you learn about these problems, you'll see sub-problems. And as you approach it that way, you'll naturally be directed to the things that matter, the sub-problems that matter. And eventually you'll find something that looks like something that you can address, either using your core skills or using a new solution that you think you can pull off or through a collaboration with others. And I would say at the same time, and this is really getting back to what Dan said, talk to everyone you can on all the different intersecting parts of the problem that you're looking at. And then that is a much better way to make progress than reading papers. I think reading papers is really important, but without the ingredient of actually talking to people who have the right experience, who, when you ask their question, are going to tell you exactly what you need to know because they're kind of putting it all into context. And then they're going to be your connections as you continue to think about these problems. That's what will enable you the most to actually make progress in a new space where you know so little. And those collaborations are what will enable you to access new problems that are different from what you've worked on before. And don't be afraid of the intersections between biotech and other areas of biology and science because that's where new opportunities lie. Be willing to work with that weird organism or weird material, I think, like I said before. And as you're doing it, that's going to be hard. Don't be alone. Also, don't be the one grad student working on that one weird project that no one else in the lab works on who never talks to anybody and who suffers. If you're going to work on weird stuff, you've got to be connecting with other people who are relevant to that. So yeah, I think that's my advice. Well, thank you both. Great advice. As we wrap up here, is there anything you'd like to promote or upcoming Homeworld initiatives, et cetera, you'd like to share with our audience before we finish up? We've got some pretty cool blog posts and some research to share soon, but we don't have definitive data on it yet. But I can just tease quickly that we've got a blog post on techno-economic analysis coming out. So we've been working on automating techno-economic analysis with the large language model suite that's coming out. And so exactly trying to address the skills gap that Paul was describing. On the note of talk to people, we're really thrilled to have a translational climate biotech fellow named Monica Sessinger, who's currently at UC Berkeley. And so she has done the extreme version of talking to people. She's talked to 100 people in the bio mining space. And so we're going to be writing something up and publishing that. But the biggest thing I would leave on to just point people to Homeworld, homeworld.bio, we have a Twitter and a LinkedIn, sorry, an X and a LinkedIn. And also just look, it is literally our day job to help people transition into climate and to help find their problems. And also to learn what things we were probably missing, right? This is a community driven organization. So we want to listen to everybody. So just reach out and we're really, we're here to help. Awesome. Yeah. So also our focus right now is on greenhouse gas removal and we'll be sharing more problem statements and hosting some public discussions about greenhouse gas removal. And we'll have a funding opportunity on greenhouse gas removal coming up in biotech and greenhouse gas removal. So keep an eye out for all that stuff that we'll be rolling out. Awesome. Well, thank you both for coming on the podcast today. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Absolute pleasure guys. Thank you so much. Great. This has been another episode of EBRC in Translation, a production of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium Student and Postdoc Association. For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you're a student or a postdoc and you're interested in getting involved with the Student and Postdoc Association, you can find our membership application linked in the episode description. A big thanks to the entire podcast team, Andrew Hunt, Ross Jones, David Mai, Heidi Kumpa, Rana Saeed, Will Groobie, Matt Williams, and Ice Chandpasit Kiatasui. Thanks to EBRC for their support and of course to you for tuning in. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you soon.