Farewell and Welcome: Dan Goodwin Passes the Mic to Paul Reginato

In Dan Goodwin’s final episode as host, The Climate Biotech Podcast reflects on over 30 episodes of conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, and builders at the frontier of climate biotechnology, and marks the official handover of the podcast to Homeworld Collective's new Executive Director and co-founder, Paul Reginato.

Dan and Paul trace their partnership back to MIT, where they were both developing first-of-kind spatial genomics technologies in Ed Boyden and George Church's labs. What started as a shared drive to work on climate change grew into organic community building, and eventually into Homeworld Collective, an organization designed to connect climate biotech practitioners with high-leverage problems, collaborators, and funding.

The episode distills wisdom from the podcast's guests so far. When asked what shaped them as thinkers, guests overwhelmingly cited science fiction and art over technical papers. On mentor advice, the theme was self-advocacy: pick hard problems, learn to communicate your work, and trust your own intuition. And when asked where a magic wand of climate biotech should point, answers ranged from better field measurements for methane to the largely untapped interface between geology and biology.

At the end of the episode, Paul shares his vision for Homeworld's phase two: refinement and scaling of Homeworld’s methods through more community convenings, a new ambassador program, faster production of problem statements, and more focused grantmaking designed to nucleate productive research communities in underserved, high-impact problem spaces. Dan reflects on his framework for choosing what comes next and highlights the underappreciated connection between environmental pollutants and the 70-80% of human disease that remains sporadic and unexplained.

Listen for the best career advice for early-career scientists, like "nail your projects, don't pick your track,” what a tadpole losing its tail teaches us about growth, and why building friendships across disciplinary boundaries can unlock your own potential to impact some of the most important problems of our time. 

Transcript

Passing The Torch To Paul

Speaker 1 0:03

I just want say thank you for all the work you've done and for the partnership that we've had over the last, 10 years as friends and as collaborators. What's the word I'm looking for? I was about to say impressed by what we've built, but it is more like amazed by what we've built.

Speaker 0:15

Welcome to the Climate Biotech Podcast, where we explore the most important problems at the intersection of climate and biology, and most importantly, how we can solve them. I'm Dan Goodwin, a technologist who spent years transitioning from software and neuroscience to a career in climate biotechnology. As your host, I will interview our sector's most creative voices, from scientists and entrepreneurs to policymakers and investors.

Final Host Reflections And Plan

Speaker 0:41

Hey everyone, this is my last episode. This is emotional, this is exciting, and I hope this is going to be a really fun episode. It's going to be much more improvisational and personal, but this is going to be condensing all the learnings we've had from the past 30 episodes. And also it's going to be a pass-off to Homeworld's new executive director, Paul Reginato, who will be the host of this podcast moving forward. So let's just jump right into it. Paul, I'm going to put you in the hot spot of asking you the same question we ask all guests, the first two, and then from there we're going to go explore these things that we've learned from all the episodes. Paul Reginado, who are you and where did you grow up?

Speaker 1 1:20

Thanks, Dan. I grew up in Kitchener, Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. So I'm a Canadian boy, grew up playing street hockey every day, and as a kid was always super interested in both science and art. Actually started college in music, loved it, but then realized that I wanted a future in science. And so wound up switching over to physics and then eventually falling in love with the beauty and mystery of biology and just the this kind of biophilia and wonder at life. And wanted to be some kind of biologist. And wound up learning to appreciate the value of biotechnology for biology. And that's how I found myself in my PhD working with Ed Boyden and George

Paul’s Path From Art To Biology

Speaker 1 2:12

Church on measurement tools for advancing biology. And that's where I met you, Dan. In the first year of my PhD, which I think was also your first year, we were working on in situ sequencing technologies together. And for my part, I was working with some collaborators on figuring out ways to image the 3D organization of the genome in fixed cells and tissues. And that was sort of a first of kind in- situation genome sequencing technology. And in parallel, Dan was developing his first of kind RNA sequencing technology in situ. And I think partway through that had this kind of personal reckoning where I was asking myself, you know, what am I going to do about this love for life that sort of brought me into biology? And I'd always been motivated by, or at least concerned by, the threat to all of life on earth that is posed by climate change and ecosystem degradation and everything like that. But I I hadn't ever really made that a part of my professional work. And it was with Dan and some other friends at MIT where I realized, wow, I'm an expert in technology development now. Maybe I can actually work on this problem. And that's how Dan and I started on our journey together, which started with trying to figure out what we could do, led to some organic community building, and then put us in the position where we had the perspective to say, wow, this field of climate biotech really needs an organization to support it to help it build momentum. And that kind of brings me to the beginning of the story that I think a lot of people already know.

Speaker 4:00

Yeah. What I tell people a lot actually is that you were the first person to ever show me how to hold it by pet. So it was the very first day I walked in, and I was very much the post-tech pro thinking I knew everything and software was going to solve every problem in biology. And I just remember the spread of three benches worth of gels you were doing, those really stinky DNAA gels. And it was this really cool mixture of one, wow, biology is so messy. And then also two, the choice of problem you did in your PhD was really cool. Like I would still say genome structure is one of those great, this is a bad pun, but unraveling mysteries of bio, because you just have this mental model of, yeah, it's like you draw a circle, then you draw a smaller circle, and the DNA is in that's a cell. But then to realize that there's these incredible like infrastructure, like nanoscale interactions between these long polymers of a meter and a half of DNA packed into a cubic micron, I think that's just one of the most beautiful problems. And the work you did. I get to say it, I get to sing your praises because this is my last five minutes of hosting this podcast before I turn it over to you, and then you can ask me questions. But I do just have to give the editorial that I can't underscore the quality of that work enough. So from street hockey to compacting genome noodles and without running homeworld collective. And so the second question that all guests get on this podcast is Did you always know you'd be hosting this podcast?

Speaker 1 5:22

I didn't know that I'd be hosting this podcast, although I have been a guest host in the past,

Lab Memories And Early Tools

Speaker 1 5:28

so I've been proximal to this role and really admired the job that you've done, Dan, on this podcast. And now that I'm in the position leading the organization and it's a natural thing for me to be on the podcast, I'm very excited. I love I love talking to scientists, I love nerding out, and so I think this is going to be really fun and I'm thrilled for the journey ahead.

Speaker 5:48

Yeah, and one of the gifts you really have is asking questions until you understand where the bottlenecks are. And in a big way, that's part of the DNA of Homeworld, right? We wrote the made the problem statement repository, which maybe a problem is an operationalized question. But I think that kind of the fearlessness to ask technical questions, one is both a skill I think that can be trained and we encourage it, but also I think there is an innate talent where some people just have a taste for rigor and won't stop digging until they're satisfied. And I think you have both the trained skill but also the inner aptitude. Thanks, Dan. And you have you have an aptitude for flattery. I I'm loud and you're right.

Becoming Host And Homeworld DNA

Speaker 6:28

But yeah, we have we have a lot to share about here, but I think this is a good point to turn over the reins. You are now the host of this podcast, and uh let's look back at what we've done so far. Thanks, Dan.

Speaker 1 6:37

Yeah, I'll take the the role of the of the questioner now and lead you through a discussion about what you've what you've done and and what you really what you've learned and perspectives on that throughout your work on this podcast. The conversation will focus on these, like you said, these four questions, which have done a great job of evoking wisdom out of the podcast guests. And before we jump into the specifics, I'm curious if there are any big takeaways for you from the process of hosting this podcast and hearing the answers to these questions from so many talented and interesting guests.

Speaker 7:18

Yeah. The the joy of building homeworld and running this podcast is that you get to just meet your heroes and you get to have conversations, and it's just a good excuse to have a one-hour deep conversation with someone, right? Both in their work, but then also their work in the context of their lives. And what emerged over the course of these 30 episodes is we converged to a structure, which I thought was very functional, but then also it helped me appreciate how weird and unique everyone is in the pool of people we got to select from. These are people

Four Questions That Shaped The Show

Speaker 7:52

that are the last authors on a bunch of famous papers. So you expect them to be big and scary and intimidating, and some of them can be, right? But then you start chipping away and you start asking them questions. Where'd you grow up? I played street hockey growing up. Awesome. That is humanizes people. And I think the biggest thing I took away was the power of doing things beyond just science. Everybody had an answer that was they did stuff beyond just science. Everyone had a very non-linear journey, and they brought their own learnings, I thought that which made them the scientists they were. So I think the one thing I just want to root on before turning back over is I really liked that we opened with the same two questions every time. Who are you? Where'd you grow up? And did you always know you'd be doing X? And I think those are really powerful questions because you hear someone say, Oh, I'm from Boise, Idaho, right? Oh, I know some somebody from Boise. Like, how'd you end how did a person from Boise end up at MIT? I think those stories are inspiring to people because if you listen to the Shugong episode, he grew up in a very remote part of China where nobody had ever left, 100 million person had never left that province, and he was the first one to leave. Right. And so I think if you're in a corner of the world, you want to hear a story like that. I think it's human and it's inspiring. And the second question we always open with is Did you always know you'd be doing X? And my favorite reason for answering asking that is most people like, no idea. You look you think about a Cesar who said he was a roadie for eight years in his 20s and did oil paintings, and then now he's running biotech in in South America and and growing, I think, some really fantastic orgs there. So I think it's also very cool, especially for the younger people, to hear that. I lived out of my car for nine months in my 20s, and I'm really proud of that because one, I can't do that now, but it was being willing to go that far on the edge that things aren't really working, and then sleeping in a car. And I that's the stuff you want to hear when a 20-year-old today is just like, how do I make sense of the world? Look at whatever this guy, Dan, he looks like he's on top of his stuff, and it's really important to say, no, I wasn't. I'm still figuring it out.

Speaker 1 9:50

I love that answer, and I agree that it can be really comforting for people to hear that sort of thing. And it was really comforting for me to switch my view to that sort of thing. The advice I always give to people who are trying to figure out what to do with their life is that life proceeds, at least my life, has proceeded as a series of projects, not a track that I'm on. And I think we're trained early in life to think of our life as a track. And so when you're going to think about what you're gonna study in college, you're you're thinking, oh, do I want to be an electrical engineer? Do I want to be a musician? Do I want to be an economist? Do I want to be a chemist? And because those are the different majors you can choose, and we envision that once

Human Stories Behind Big Science

Speaker 1 10:36

you choose that major, that's just what you are and what you're gonna be forever. And that's not really how it works for many people. For many people, including myself, it's just you you find a thing that you want to do and you have reasons for that. You have motivations and you make a sophisticated decision based on the information you have at the time. And then when you complete that, projects always come to a natural conclusion. A project could be as small as a few weeks, and then you have something to show for it, or it could be five to ten years, but there's always this natural arc, and then at the end, you've done something and you've learned things along the way, you've developed as a person, and then you get to make new choices about new projects that you want to do that you probably wouldn't have been able to imagine previously because you didn't have the knowledge and experience. And I think you're a great example of that, Dan. We started Homeworld three years ago, and you have done an amazing job at getting Homeworld through a first phase where a legitimate organization now, and and now you're you're handing over leadership to me and you're going on to new new projects, and that's just that's how life is. So my advice to people is less less to pick your track and more to nail your projects.

Speaker 11:50

That's a great way to put it. Nail your projects, don't pick your track. Yeah. I like that. I uh yeah, my meta version of just saying that is to think of life as more of a continual growth process, not this artificial discretization of like then middle school, then high school, then college, then it's just it's a continuous growth, and then they're just there's labels around it. But pick your projects, I think is that's a great way to put it.

Speaker 1 12:13

Now let's go into some of the specifics. I think there's been some amazing nuggets that you've gotten out of these projects, these conversations. In each episode, you know, we'll go through the four

Mind-Blowing Ideas: Sci-Fi And Science

Speaker 1 12:24

questions. So in each episode, you ask the guest to start with what's a single book or paper or art piece or idea that blew your mind and shaped your development as a scientist? Any favorite answers or trends or impressions from that one?

Speaker 12:40

I love this question. And uh, it's actually motivated by when we lived together in Boston, we would have dinner parties and just a bunch of geeks around a table, and this thing just emerged from one of your credit one of your roommates, Alex, for starting this thing of just sharing nerd nuggets, and everyone would go around and everyone would be put on the spot at one point over dinner, and they'd have to just say one random thing they've learned, and then to kind of move it on. It's kind of like a it's a geek toast. It's it's just a reference. Hey, I heard there's this weird new LLM paper. Here you go. Okay, did you know that some bees sleep together in petals? Here's a photo I saw. It's just it was very fun to have people share, and so we adapted that for the podcast to take these people that are really heroic from the work we know they do, and then find that there's this thing that is the top of their mind. For me, when I asked this question, I'm thinking about the Peter Mitchell and the ox phosphores. Like the story about showing that the the missing metabolite in in the way mitochondria produce ATP was not actually a chemical, but a spatial answer in the mitochondria. I thought is just one of the most beautiful answers. And he had he got ostracized, he got kicked out of Cambridge, right? And ended up getting the Nobel Prize for this. And I just think it's a really motivating story of rigor, sticking to your guns, being willing to be thrown out. Anyway, and it is funny enough, I learned about that from Shugong's at the class when I took it. So when I asked that question, I'm hoping to get that answer from somebody else of this kind of mystery thing that motivated them. What came back was overwhelmingly meta. I was expecting people to tell me, like, oh, a Peter Mitchell and Oxfoss war story, but it's actually not. I would say a few people gave really concrete scientific papers. So Chris Iben, for example, for people who know Chris, he's now right, he's now CEO of a company called uh Gigacrop. Chris is a wizard. I think he's one of my favorite people to brainstorm with. He's so incredibly rigorous, so incredibly funny and creative. But you also have to get he's one of the few people that can do extremely rigorous and extremely warm at the in the same package. And he opened up with oh, the RNA world paper, where there was a very, very theoretical paper that changed his view on how life developed. And so that was a good example of a very specific RNA world origins paper, specifically. Elliot Roth, who runs community biolabs all around the world, he gave a specific reference of a paper called The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research. And that's a pretty famous paper that a lot of people have read. But really, the rest of them are much more like sci-fi. Hyperion by Dan Simmons is a great sci-fi book, and Benjamin Scott suggested that one as what's something that changed the way you think about how you do biotech? Sci-fi book, right? And so that's a very fun one. Michael Crichton, Ahmed Badran, said that my Michael Crichton's books change the way he thinks, and also strong plus one to that from Aziz from Columbia. She said the X-files, so sci-fi gets people excited. Arthur Clark, James Welt from Cascade, same thing. He like had a sci-fi book. And so it was very interesting for me to see the power of sci-fi and for motivating people. And so while I was expecting a very technical answer, like the Oxfast thing, I actually really loved that most people had a meta thing. And yeah, for one last example of that is Cesar, Cesar from Chile said pointalism, like a whole art movement for was for him the most inspiring thing.

Speaker 1 16:04

Wow. That is so cool. Pointalism as an answer to that question is it's amazing to see where people derive inspiration. And when you see something for the first time, it can really it can really change your your perspective on the whole world.

Best Mentor Advice: Pick Hard Problems

Speaker 1 16:20

So that's very cool. So m moving on to your next question. The next question you you would always ask is what's the best advice line that a mentor gave you? And this is such a good question. Props to you for thinking of putting this in here. It's a great way to just directly dig up nuggets of wisdom. So I'd I'd love to hear your reflections on this question and and the guest answers to that.

Speaker 16:43

There's I've got my own answers to this question, and that's what I'm hoping to hear from others. And so if people are interested, that the two that I have that always stick to my mind is Ed Boyden, our professor at MIT, I think, world-class mentor, and has a huge cadre of people that have been trained by him or that are changing the world. And he would always yell at us or encourage us firmly to work backwards from the problem, right? And it's one of those like really easy one-liners to hear, and it can go in one ear out the other. But once you really understand what he means by that, it can be world-changing. And so that I think really changed mine. I always recite that to others. And then the other big mentor advice that I got was the right things for the right reasons by my friend and mentor Dan. That's another one I just use on a daily basis. Do I go left or right here? It's gotta be the right thing and the right reason. And pairing those together, I think, has often been the right, like the right compass for me. So those are the things that I would answer that. And so what do other people say? The big themes are really centered around self-advocacy. And for example, our friend Lauren Luger, his best mentor advice was ignore. Like is I'll just tell you the best mentor advice I ignored and I did great. But that's very Lauren Luger's style of being, I think, very individual driven and like impact, like not needing to listen to others, I think is very Lauren. But a lot of people, I would say, focus more on learn to sell, right? You can think about Carl and Iram from Grow Everything podcast, right? We're really pushing people on being able to communicate what you work on. And I think that's a very important part of self-advocacy, especially in science, right? Everyone knows the world is changing. Sometimes it's in some ways it's changing for the worse, other ways it's changing for the better. I take a very stoic view of it's changing the way it's changing and we learn. And so the self-advocacy, I think, is the main thing that people need to learn to be better at. Communication is one of them. Picking hard problems is another one that came up a lot. And I think that's very important in self-advocacy, especially for younger people. It's very easy to go in as a first or second year PhD student. The P the PI will have some grant they need to finish, and it's on year four or five, and just kind of like grind the stuff out, get some mid-authors in. To be able to say no, right? And say no, no, I actually I want to go the Hamming way and I want to pick the important problems and not work on anything else, I think is very easy to listen to and very hard to do. Ahmed, who does really, really cool work on Rubisco engineering, he that's what he opened with. Pick hard problems is the best thing. Pick hard problems and his words, they take the same effort as easy ones, but you'll be more satisfied when you solve them. I think is a I think is a very good one. Buzz Barstow has another good answer to this, which is also exploring the problem space. His line was this some problems are impossible in theory, are actually soluble in practice. And I believe he got that from his PhD mentor when he was doing physics at Harvard. And there's I think there's kind of a a couple other ones, but really like James Weltz from Cascade also had the same thing. Fall in love with a problem, that's the only thing that matters. But the big theme, I really think, is uh if I was to just put it in one big bucket, it's the idea of self-advocacy. And mentors are giving all sorts of different ways of pick your problem, stand your ground, ask the questions that you need to answer. I think like it's very similar to pick your projects exactly to what you say, Paul. Love it, love it.

Speaker 1 20:11

So maybe I'll give my answer to that question now as well. Because I I was actually gonna give the same answer you gave from Ed Boyden, think backward from the problem. That is some advice that has really changed my life. But since you already covered that one, I'll go to a combination of two quotes that I think fit together really

Hamming, Mary Oliver, And Inversion

Speaker 1 20:34

beautifully from an unlikely perhaps pair of people. So the the first is from Mary Oliver, who is uh a really famous poet, I think one of the most successful poets in the history of American poetry. She died just a few years ago, but she she had all this beautiful poetry that came from her engagement with nature, and she would see she would she had a beautiful way of relating nature to meaning in the human life. And her poetry can feel a little bit Pollyanish or something, but then when you learn that she was a real no bullshit person and spent her days walking around in the forest smoking cigarettes, writing poetry in her notebook, it it changes the picture of her. And the other but the other person is Richard Hamming, who is a very, very famous technologist and mathematician who has some really good comments on problems. Mary Oliver's quote is there's only one question, how to love this world. And I think that for me is just really centering because when I ask what I should do, it's how do I love this world? And then Richard Hamming has this quote. He says, If you don't work on important problems, it's unlikely you'll do important work. And that's a snarky quote. So I like to rephrase it as in the positive, if you work on good problems, it's likely you'll do Do good. And so when Mary Oliver says there's only one question, how to love this world, and then Richard Hamming says, if you work on good problems, it's likely you'll do good. When you're asking yourself, How can I do good for this world? Pick a good problem to work on to make the world better. And I think that really captures a lot of my personal philosophy and I think a lot of the spirit of home world. We want to have a thriving planet. And the way that we do that is we identify the problems that we can solve, that we can apply our agency to move us closer to the world that we envision.

Speaker 22:37

I love that. I just have to plus one Hamming's you and your research essay or speech, I think is one of the most important things. And I've one of my big principles in life is the fuck shoulds. Like I'm really against the word should. So I will, I think it's a judgy middle ground of could and must. So I will tell people that you must read Richard Hamming's essay. And it is like he's a salty old mathematician, and like it comes across and he owns it, but his messages are really important. The corollary to that is the other one that I read also, I think maybe later than I could have, which is poor Charlie poor Charlie's almanac. So Charlie Munger, one of the most famous investors of all time, also a really deep thinker. And the way he he talks about his mental models is that he does complex seeming thinking, but it's really based on a bunch of simple models. And so poor Charlie's almanac is basically just like his 50 mental models, and they're very simple. And his main one that he always comes back to is invert, always invert, which he got from Jacobi, the mathematician. And so it's based on the example he gives is that if I wanted the GDP of India to increase 10%, what would I do to not make it increase 10%? And then oftentimes it has insights. And so I think

Magic Wands: GeoBio And Measurements

Speaker 23:46

there's a really big idea. I would strongly for people looking for mental models to navigate the world, you can't do much better than Hamming and Charlie Munger. Beautiful.

Speaker 1 23:54

There's so much wisdom from so many different domains of I love seeing a mathematician informing a like a kind of a pure mathematician informing an economist or a poet connecting to a technologist, which sort of just speaks to the the power of this this life that has many different stages and steps, right? If all you ever do is one thing and you only pay attention in that one thing, you're not going to be able to learn and get inspiration that can be very rich from elsewhere. Okay, let's move on to the next question. And this is also a great question. If you had a magic wand to get more attention or resources into one part of biology, what would it be? And this is a great question for bringing us into more tangible like research topics after going meta and inspirational with some of the earlier questions, and a great way to find out what's important to people. So, what were some of the highlights that you found through asking all these different experts this question?

Speaker 24:56

It's funny, the answer for this is obviously the motivation for why we built Homeworld in the first place. And we just looked at all the amazing things biotech could be doing relative to climate and all the things it's not being able to do for various reasons. And so we tried to be that magic wand to bring in areas, like bring in funding to the areas that we thought were the highest leverage. Areas where with a little bit of funding, you have a phase change in that environment, and then now a lot more money comes flowing in. So that was that's kind of what we're thinking with this question. And clearly, like at homeworld, I would say our magic wand areas were the areas we focused on. So protein engineering, greenhouse gas removal, critical minerals, and pollution. Where people shared it with, it was it was interesting because sometimes we had to push people away from their direct domain, but also they would just embody things that were so cool that actually could answer the question for it. So immediately I think of Samuel Thompson from Stanford, who does, I think some of my favorite work just for the sheer aesthetics of it, which is trying to engineer proteins to work in non-aqueous environments, right? Which is that everyone who does protein folding always assuming that the protein sits in water, so you can do the hydrogen bond for the structure, blah, blah, blah. And he's what if that's none of that's true? Right? That is such a weird question, because a lot of people wonder if that's even possible. But if it is possible, you can start thinking about deploying proteins in uh in lithium-ion batteries in weird chemical synthesis steps. And I think that's actually one of the big unlock areas. And so you might look back at the questions, like he actually did not answer the question of I think there should be more funding in my area, which is very humble of them. He's saying what in his answer was I want more angstrom-level whole cell imaging, which I thought was cool, very much like kind of a subtle grand challenge in biology. I think one of the areas that we also just strongly believe is underinvested in is the interface of geology and biology. And that's an area that I until we got into thinking about climate scale problems, I really never touched. I think everyone maybe kind of walks by the geology department who ends up in biotech and like, oh, kind of cool, I like rocks. But when you start going into it, it's very, very cool. And so we had Esteban Gazelle and Buzz Barstow come in and talk. And Esteban is a professor of geology in the geology department at Cornell. And that was his answer, basically, is that we want more kind of molecular scale models of the geology-biology interface. Silicate rocks, crystal structure, life grows on it. What does that mean? I think maybe the third answer I would give that I think really stuck with me as very important, is, and this is the magic wand formulation, is measurements. So I think about Sam Abernethy from Spark, who when he asked him, like, if you had one area to have a magic wand, what we'd say immediately. He said, better field measurements for methane. And I think that's actually very important. It's very easy to send money out. It is very hard to get results back. And I think, especially in the methane challenges, where the North Star is trying to stop the positive feedback loops as soon as possible, we really need better measurements. And so I think that's one of those nice, like nice tip of the iceberg ways to think. And I think also when you, Paul, said this, I think you're talking about foundational questions on atmospheric methane oxidizers. It's like they're two sides of the same coin, right? There's a lot of things that we could be doing, but there has to be the way of measuring it. And that also touches with our Vince Gauci episode where we're talking about tree bark with methane. So if we're gonna do planetary scale interventions, we need planetary scale readout back. And I thought that was a very interesting answer.

Mineral Evolution And Biomining Potential

Speaker 1 28:32

Very cool. I'm gonna double down on one of your answers, because I've also just been increasingly fascinated with this interface between biology and geology. And there's a paper that I was considering sharing actually for as one that influenced my thinking by Robert Hazen, who has done a ton of work on mineral evolution. And this this concept of mineral evolution is like in the history of a planet, what is the mineral composition at different times as it goes through the different stages of development? And the stage of development on Earth that involved life caused a huge expansion of the diversity of minerals on the planet. Before we had life, we had something around like 1,500 different mineral species, they estimate. And then once we had the great oxidation event, we had a jump to over 4,000 different minerals. And then hundreds of more minerals started to get added as life continued to evolve and change the planet. And life is constantly influencing minerals, and this can be useful for so many different applications in like minerals synthesis, material synthesis, also in mining. And we have our critical minerals program going right now. And Jamie, our critical minerals program lead, was telling me just yesterday that apparently there's something like 20 different microbes that are used in in biomining right now. And when you think of that number, like that's so much smaller. 20 is so much smaller than the number of different minerals, the number of different environments, the number of different mineralogies that might be associated with your target mineral. And it it really illustrates how much potential there is for tapping those interactions of microbes with minerals, in this case to help dissolve them to extract critical metals. And another really fascinating area of this topic, which warrants more money, is the fact that geobiology has historically been a pure science. It has not it has, to only a very small extent, been involved in technology. And we're getting to a point now where we're we're we need new innovations in mining. We also are looking at all sorts of different ways to influence landscape scale processes for the

Personal Growth: Trust Taste And Data

Speaker 1 31:08

sake of preserving stability of the of the biosphere and of the climate system and the earth system, making that in investing in helping geobiologists think like technologists and think like industry, I think, holds enormous potential. Still agree. Okay, the last question, Dan, that you have asked every guest is what is one aspect of personal development that you think biologists, biotechnologists need to spend more time on? Any reflections here that you think might be of particular value to our listeners?

Speaker 31:43

Once again, my answer on when I think about this is thinking about things beyond just the bench, right? And I think um for me, and this is very personal to my own development, is one developing rigor. That's one thing. Oftentimes I just have an effort, do it, charge forward. But we learn in biology that a false positive can cost you five years of your whole career. So biologists learn to be very salty with their rigor, and I think that goes beyond just the lab. That was like the one for me is I was kind of expecting more people to say rigor, and nobody said it, which I thought was really interesting. And then the other one that I just is very similar to what mentors say is like learning to self-advocate, learning to take up space, learning to get people to listen to you. A lot of that can be trained. I would say maybe 80 or 90 percent of that can be trained, depending on personality types, depending on raw materials, depending on language barriers. I was expecting to hear on that too. What we got back, I thought, was maybe exactly what we hoped from this, right? These are very interesting people and they had very interesting responses. I think about Anum's Annum Glasgow's from Columbia. Her answer was look at data with your eyeballs and trust your chemical intuition, which I liked actually. I thought it was learning to look at data yourself and build your own conclusions. Sounds obvious, but man, groupthink can really take over, right? And learning to trust yourself and your executive function, I think, is very understated, especially in science. So in general, I really like her answer. I also think about Esteban Gazelle's answer, which I thought was really beautiful, which is that he pushed for people to not like your personal development advice was to yes, you do science, but science serves society. So always be thinking about what your impact is on society. And this is a topic I think is really it's exciting to me. On my blog, I wrote an essay on seriousness, which is trying to align efforts to being a positive impact to the system of humanity that we live in. I think my if I was to say a single favorite answer though, my favorite answer goes to Chris Iben. And I know I've mentioned him a few times. I think he's just a fountain of of wisdom, but his answer just nailed me between the eyes. And his answer was personal development edge is growth, is painful. A tadpole can't become a frog without losing its tail. And I really like he's just god, it's so good. Because exactly as you're saying, to be able to hop between projects or change directions, sometimes you have to cut things loose, right? And and some people aren't gonna get that, and sometimes you're not gonna get that, right? Or you want to kind of stick with where you're safe. And there's just his metaphor, I thought was perfect is that growth is painful. If you want to go from a tadpole to a frog, you've got to lose your tail. And I think that's something very, very important is that you have to work the dardest you can at each project, but then also to live light and change as needed. So I thought that was very good.

Speaker 1 34:39

Right on. Yeah, I I think I I was thinking about this, the answer to this question as you were answering, and I I had an answer prepared, but I think I'm gonna go with some different ones off the cuff. So when it comes to picking problems and like changing projects, like you were just talking about, I think people shouldn't be afraid to go into a topic that isn't popular yet. Because I think that can actually be helpful because if there are very few people working on something, and it's like if you if you have the perspective to see something that you think is important, that you think is really cool, and you are able to trust your own taste, but the world hasn't yet realized, it's very easy for you to make an important contribution to that area, especially if it's an area that's new and very few people are expert on it. Whereas if you look at what's really popular, what's everyone talking about, what's super established and safe, and you try to break into that, then you're trying to break into something that already has all the experts. A lot of the low-hanging

Dan’s Next Chapter And Framework

Speaker 1 35:52

fruit is gone, it has an established paradigm, and it's harder for you to come in and do a new thing. And so I I think I think trusting your taste on recognizing up-and-coming things is really, really powerful. And another thing I would say is for for that biotechnologists and biologists should be thinking about is a complex systems view of biology and life. Complex systems is a framing that is very substrate agnostic. It thinks more about the behavior of large numbers of interacting objects or the different phase behaviors when akin to the way that water changes phases from gas to ice to liquid, networks of interactors can change phases from one regime of behavior into another regime of behavior. And this relates to what we would call emergence and is also framed from a perspective that that draws on information theory a lot. And the reason I think that's so important is because it it illustrates or like it helps to appreciate why we get such different behavior and dynamics out of biological systems compared to chemical systems. You'll you'll often hear like a trivialization of more abstract forms of phenomena by saying, okay, we have physics and chemistry is just applied physics, and biology is just applied chemistry, and physiology is just applied biology, and cognition is just applied physiology. And but and you know that that sounds true because sure, biology is made of is made of chemicals, but it doesn't capture the different kinds of dynamics that are qualitatively different that you can get in these systems when you when you introduce more abstract forms and you get different types of complex systems dynamics. And when I started thinking that way, it really, really changed my perspective on on biology and sort of filled, sort of humbled me a lot, but also um enabled me to be more creative. So let's move on now to talk about the future. We're at a really exciting point in this podcast, also in the world, also for homeworld, where for this podcast and at homeworld, Dan, you have been our leader fearlessly building momentum, taking us from zero to one, doing new, new of kind activities and figuring out what works and what doesn't work. You're handing the leadership of Homeworld off to me. I'm super excited. And so maybe now we can talk a little bit about what we see on the horizon. You've you've spent much of the last five years, at least, helping the climate biotech community build momentum, three of which were spent leading Homeworld through its first phase of growth. So, what's on the horizon for you now?

Speaker 39:01

This is a period of transition for me. So I can I can give you the philosophical answer about how I choose projects and and and what I think good impact is. And it's gonna be, it's gonna be, you have to excuse me, this is gonna be extremely meta and referential. But I I hope I hope it's it's moderately interesting, which is that I took this view of feeling very macro scale changes happening in the world. Big wheels have been turning, and then there's solutions that people put out and actions that people do that sometimes are just like knee-jerk saying, Oh, that's dumb, or that's silly, or that's that's conserve, that's too liberal, that's too conservative. And I found all that language to be really frustrating. So, what I wanted to do when I was choosing what I was gonna do next is I wanted my own framework of what is a positive contribution. And that's where I came up with the structure of seriousness, wondering how does life grow in the face of chaos? Cells, as soon as a tree is no longer growing and metabolizing energy, fungus eats it. We know from second law of dynamics entropy always increases. So why do forests grow? And the answer is that forests metabolize energy, right, to fight chaos. And so I taking that lens took me to kind of just doing a little bit of paperwork and then finding that you can back out, I would say, three main dimensions that a system does to not only beat the pull of entropy, which turns out entropic force is a thing. It's actually like the dimensions work out, which I thought was interesting. But uh the thing that a system does to beat entropy and thrive is to increase the amount of resources they have, increase the infrastructure by which they can capture that energy. Think about a tree canopy, it becomes infrastructure, right? It doesn't cost the tree any energy to hold its leaves up. And then the third thing is managing internal order. The more complex a system is, think about a rose, it's gonna rot much faster than a cube of tungsten. And for many reasons, but one way you could just say it is the complexity of the rose is so much more than a bunch of key tungsten atoms sitting in a lattice. So as I choose or pick projects and you know, I'm kind of consulting around and helping right now, that's my lens of am I being well, how am I operating in congruence with one of those

Homeworld’s Next Phase: Scale What Works

Speaker 41:20

three dimensions or more? And then for those dimensions where you step forward, are you actually taking a serious step about it? And by that, if I tried to go to the moon today, it wouldn't be a serious effort. And this is actually an Ed Boyden thing. I think this is one of my favorite quotes of his when he was at a Davos talk where he just said that a moonshot in 1600 was would have been stupid. So we need to be careful with what we call moonshots. And so for me, it's like thinking about serious efforts, both in the magnitude of how hard I push, but then also aligning any effort I do to be am I increasing energy to the system? Am I improving infrastructure to use that energy, or am I contributing positively to social order? And you can map that to what we've done with climate biotech. I think we've succeeded in bringing money into a system. So we've brought resources in. We've created infrastructure of the problem statement repository and our gatherings and supporting grantees, that's infrastructure. And then the social order is giving people like giving people a space to come out and collaborate in their own natural way. And so I think that's as I move forward, I don't have any formal announcements today, but I'm very much aligned with kind of those three. And I would just underscore there's one problem area that people I would like people to be more excited by. It's to s to break down these silly barriers between in what is environmentalism and what is climate, because I think that's a really false dichotomy. And to realize that the anthropogenic chemicals beyond just methane and CO2, I'm thinking about the long tail of the PFAS and the air pollution and all that, I think that is the most actionable area. And I think it goes through the lever of healing humans to price the harms and change the behavior. And shout out to Sarah Daniels, our pollution lead at Homeworld, has done really important work there. We've got some primary research happening now, and I would just can't even, yeah, I would underscore people more people thinking about that. And maybe as like a quick teaser on that, when we think about human health, we only focus on about 20% of it. And what I mean by that is that 80%, depending on how you measure it, 70, 80% of disease is sporadic, which means we don't know what causes it. We just know that something you bump into something in your life and you get sick. And if it's genetic, great. If it's bacterial, great. But what if it's some weird pesticide? There's no bucket for thinking about that right now. And I think that's really important to think about. It's a beautiful framework. And I get to now just I'll toss it back to you though. You, Paul, are now at the home the helm of homeworld. And so I want to toss it over to you. What are you excited about? What are you looking forward to for the next two years?

Speaker 1 43:54

So I think w where we are at in homeworld is it's a shift. In a shift from like experimentation and figuring out what works, figuring out what doesn't work, learning our relationship to the community, going from zero to one, which is a process that that you led us through chiefly. We both founded Homeworld together, but you were really the one making sure, bottomlining the decisions and setting the course for going from zero to one. And we're now entering a place where we have that information from all of those experiments, and we know a lot about what we can do and what works and what what and what doesn't work. And our goal now is to refine and scale what we've prototyped. And uh people going people can expect more community convenings. We've learned that bringing people together locally really helps to cultivate a warm, friendly sense of connection that goes beyond transactional collaboration. And Dan, you always say that human connection is the bedrock of innovation, and we're definitely going to be leaning into that more. As part of that, we're planning to do an ambassador program to empower community leaders in a more decentralized way so that homeworld doesn't have to be present and be at the center of all of our community work. We'll also continue with problem statements, but we want to produce a larger number of problem statements more quickly so that we can just get information out into the world about how people can connect their talents to important problems. We'll be continuing to do grant making, but we are planning to do more focused topics. So in the past, we've done a topic like greenhouse gas removal was really, really broad. And in the future, we want our grantees to be working on something that can be where they can synergize more so that as we support them, we're supporting their research success and also nucleating productive communities in more incisive subdomains of emerging technologies. So that's what we have on the horizon right now in terms of specifics, but it the time is really to to refine and scale.

Speaker 46:23

Very exciting.

Gratitude, Handoff, And Closing

Speaker 1 46:25

So, Dan, this I think we've reached the end of our discussion here, and so that means we've we've reached the end of of your last episode here on the Climate Biotech podcast, which is an emotional moment because you've just done s you've just done such a good job and such creative work leading homeworld and and generating interesting content and inspiring content on this podcast. So I just want to say thank you for all the work you've done and for the partnership that we've had over the last 10 years as friends and as collaborators. What's the word I'm looking for? I was about to say impressed by what we've built, but it's more like amazed by what we've built and amazed at what I've been able to do with the partnership of you. You've been a wonderful collaborator all these years. Thank you, Dan. And I I know that the framework you described for what comes next, I think is a wonderful way to think about things. And I I know I've always known you to work on very cool things that are very worth doing. And I'm very excited for you that and I'm honored to be able to take on leadership at Homeworld so that you can go off and continue pursuing your dreams and new projects, knowing that Homeworld is in good hands is and is going to continue growing.

Speaker 47:52

That's awesome. And if you just let me reciprocate there, it's it's been a really wonderful partnership for 10 years, and I am undoubtedly better for it and very grateful for it. I think it's I I really want to celebrate that caring is one of the most important things. And when you care, it lets you go through ups and downs in a different way. Because you and I have cared so much about this work, it means we've had some pretty big arguments. In the ways that but I mean that in a good way, right? Because there's other things and other relationships that if I didn't care, right, the same way, then it wouldn't those those conversations wouldn't have happened. And so it's actually a really I mean that in a venerative, a venerative way, right? Like it's really, it's really awesome. And I think there's no way that uh either of us could have built homeworld into what it is in a vacuum, right? And so it's definitely the combination of us. And so I'm not going far. I'll be cheering loudly for it. Homeworld is in very, very good hands. You are fully prepared to crush it as a leader and as a podcast host. And I hope that people listening to this are listening, excited for what homeworld is going to become. I hope they are gonna listen, thinking, gosh, one day if I work hard, maybe I could be on the podcast with Paul.

Speaker 1 49:05

Thanks so much, Dan. And to our listeners, I'm excited to talk to you more and to talk to all of the guests that I'll have the privilege of interviewing in the future of this podcast. So I'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 49:19

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Climate Biotech Podcast. We hope this has been educational, inspirational, and fun for you as you navigate your own journey and bring the best of biotech into planetary scale solutions. We'll be back with another one soon. And in the meantime, stay in touch with Homeworld Collective on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Blue Sky. Links are all on the show notes. Huge thanks to our producer Dave Clark and Operations Lead Paul Himmelstein for making these episodes happen. Catch you on the next one.