100. The Genspace Genesis: How Bio Design Connects People and the Planet with Dan Grushkin

[00:00:00] Karl: All right, Dan Grushkin, welcome to the grow everything podcast. We're so happy to have you here because Number one Iram and I would have never met if it weren't for you and your previous efforts number two You're an all around great guy that we love you've been a big part of our community And by the way We tried for a really long time to get you on the podcast in like the first 10 episodes or 20 But here we are We're overjoyed to have you on the 100th episode.

[00:00:28] Karl: Congratulations and welcome to Grow Everything, Dan Grushkin.

[00:00:32] Dan: So glad to be here. 100. Congratulations. I am honored to be your 100th guest. I'm glad I held out.

[00:00:43] Karl: And for those of you who are watching this we're all using our northern lights background on thank you zoom, but What's amazing is that the northern lights were visible just a week ago in new york state and my son tomas who's at ithaca sent me some pictures from cornell where You could actually see the sky was glowy color We've got green in our backgrounds, but I thought it was just so amazing But dan let's kick it off.

[00:01:09] Karl: You've done journalism, you've done nonprofits, you started Genspace, which is where Iram and I, met, but how'd you get into biology? And what was the moment where you decided I need to do this thing called Genspace? What was the Genesis story of that? And I know we're going to talk about a bunch of other things, but let's get started there.

[00:01:28] Dan: we are going back 2008, 2009. exactly. or even earlier, I'm going to start in college. So in college, I was an English major, but I was, a bit masochistic and taking physics classes on the side. oh, I didn't realize it, but I was looking for two types of truth, more scientific, basic mathematical truth.

[00:01:51] Dan: And the more, I don't know, feely truth that is reading literature and thinking about the state of the world. and I didn't really know how to marry those two for a good. Solid couple of years. I started my career as a journalist in the Middle East. I was covering, the collapse of the peace process, which was devastating just to be there.

[00:02:12] Dan: when I finally came back to the United States, I was looking for news that was positive. And I dug around for a little while. I was writing about, travel journalism cause I'd been living abroad and it didn't really suit me. then I was writing for a magazine called National Geographic Adventure and they asked me to write about malaria and malaria.

[00:02:33] Dan: The subject, the parasite changed everything for me. I started to research the plasmodium and just how strange its life cycle is and how it travels from, the liver to the bloodstream, to the mosquito salivary gland, down to its gut. And it just lived this very, what I call Baroque life, Moving in an impossible. Possibly different locations, around people in the world. and I thought wow, this is the most deadly creature on earth. this bug I realized just on a microbial level on the micro scale, the world It's so rich, and so complex, and just so exciting, got me started into writing about science, from there it was synthetic biology, and from there I was, staying up all night watching iGem videos, in the early days of iGem.

[00:03:23] Dan: And I could not get enough. And the thought of somehow being able to work with, manipulate, engineer microorganisms, I mean, literally kept me up all night with excitement, so I started writing about it as a journalist and again, my quote, unquote, PhD was interviewing these top scientists and asking lots of dumb questions and occasionally smart ones.

[00:03:49] Dan: And eventually I got to the point where I could ask them questions that would stump them. And then I knew the article was ready, but, spending time with them spending time in their labs. just wanted to try it for someone who was early mid career in journalism, the idea of going back and getting a PhD just to do some basic with bacteria, it didn't make sense.

[00:04:12] Dan: it also didn't seem like a real option, really, was I going to spend 7 years to try my hand at something that I jammers were doing literally in freshman year of college? answer is no, but there was no. Venue for me. And so, at that time, D. I. Y. Bio was a message for going strong.

[00:04:29] Dan: There were a group of people saying, Hey, why can't regular people people who are non scientists jump into the science game get to work with synthetic biology at the same time? The science community and synthetic biology was saying, Hey. we want science to be, open to a wider audience. We want to make engineering biology easier.

[00:04:50] Erum: so I was watching the adjunct videos , and the synthetic biology community was putting forward this vision of, biotechnology for everyone In 2008, 2009, group of us got together and decided we were going to invite people off the internet into my house to try our first genetic engineering experiment.

[00:05:09] Dan: And I'd like to say there's two different experiments that happened there. one was, can you actually use a kitchen to do sophisticated biotechnology? Answer? Yes. But also who's going to show up to a thing like that? And that also turned out to be a big surprise. That was everyone. and that was the origin story for GenSpace.

[00:05:28] Dan: It went from there.

[00:05:29] Erum: Wow Yeah, that's incredible. when you say a group of us got together, were they just your friends? Were there your colleagues? How did you first, get them excited or tell them? Or how did you rally the folks?

[00:05:41] Dan: The founders of GenSpace were people who just met each other on the message we know each other from Adam. Ellen Jorgensen put out message on the D. I. Y. bio dot org message board saying, hey, who wants to meet up? And we agreed that we would meet in some burger joint in midtown and Manhattan.

[00:05:59] Dan: I showed up. Nuri Barshai showed up. Who's an artist. Ellen's a molecular biologist, I'm a journalist, and then, Russ Durrett and Sun Wong Lim, both undergraduates at NYU. So it was a hodgepodge group, and later we met Oliver Medvedic, another molecular biologist, but that first meeting was an artist, a journalist, a scientist, and two aspiring scientists, and in some ways, think that tells the story of genspace that there's a group of people who are creative in their own different ways, who are going to come together and, explore that technology in their own way.

[00:06:35] Erum: Yeah. we had interviewed Batak early on in podcast and we'll have to get Casey on at some point we can dig deep into what GenSpace is doing now and how it's evolving. You were there for some time as executive director, but then there was the biodesign challenge that came into your world.

[00:06:54] Erum: How did that happen? I mean, now that's a force, you're creating these forces for really bringing biology to the world to make it more accessible. What's the origin story of the biodesign challenge?

[00:07:07] Dan: Well, so seven years of genspace building it from scratch, learning how to run nonprofits as well as learning the science as well as learning what we were about, One of the things that I really struggled with as a journalist when I was writing about biotechnology often the people who were starting the companies coming up with the innovations were PhD students in biology programs.

[00:07:31] Dan: They didn't necessarily have the real world experience to come up with new applications for biotechnology because they had spent their entire careers within the lab. and in the early days I mean it continues now, at Gen Space, all these artists and designers and people from other backgrounds were showing up and they had completely different ideas for how we would use that technology, how we would use biology.

[00:07:53] Dan: it dawned on me as a journalist in the daytime and as a gen space founder at night, that in order to see a. Functional useful application of biotechnology. It was going to be all those voices talking to each other. then the other piece of that was that if we wanted to. Understand or really make a decision as a society about how we are going to, use these technologies.

[00:08:17] Dan: It had to be a diverse group of people who are sitting at the table, it had to be the scientists sitting with the rest of the population. And I was seeing that at gen space. so, on 1 hand, I wanted to get these folks to People working together, artists, designers, scientists working together.

[00:08:34] Dan: On the other hand, I want to have a deeper conversation about what we as a society want from our technologies. it just became clear that the best way to do that would be with undergraduates. and basically work with design biology students have design and biology professors work as their educators then see what the ideas that they would put forth into the world.

[00:08:57] Dan: there was sort of a trap door in that whole project, which was the scientists and design professors they're designers and scientists, they're both professionals, but they're also educators. so I thought by basically bringing them together as educators of those students, they would find commonalities and find partnerships.

[00:09:15] Dan: And that actually worked. So not only are we getting student projects that turn into companies, turn into social critiques, turn into art projects, we're also getting all these collaborations from the professors. And that's been really transformative as well.

[00:09:30] Karl: Yeah, I think it's amazing. I have very fond memories of the early gen space days on Flatbush Avenue. And of course, in the room and I talked about meeting there at like an event, least 10 years ago. and then just seeing the organization come to life and take a life of its own.

[00:09:47] Karl: and same thing with by design challenge. I mean, you were there for seven years, it's taken on a life of its own. You've got, design schools from all over the world participating in the challenge. I remember when, we wrote what's your bio strategy, Suzanne Lee hits at the hardest position in the world to fill was the designer biotechnologist or the biotechnologist who, understands design.

[00:10:10] Karl: And I'd like to think that that effort has really helped with that. what do you think? Do you think that's made a difference

[00:10:16] Dan: it depends on the day. know, former journalist, you're always a skeptic. You're a skeptic about everything, and you always question everything. So, on good days, I'm like, wow, this has really made a major impact. And I see it in the universities colleges that they're adding on biodesign classes and biodesign, minors and majors.

[00:10:36] Dan: So, know, we're starting to see the beginning of departments that focus on this, or labs and design departments. so that really makes me feel good, we're doing the work, it's happening out in the world. as a journalist, want to see the actual stuff, you want to see the application take off and be used widely.

[00:10:55] Dan: for example, I've been writing about biomaterials for, 15 years or so. and I only see it now starting to become a real thing in the world. That's a long time to wait.

[00:11:07] Karl: years and a hundred million dollars to what it

[00:11:09] Dan: exactly.

[00:11:11] Erum: Yeah,

[00:11:11] Erum: I would think you could also point to some successes that have come from Genspace and Biodesign Challenge. You really helped a lot of, perhaps, founders or people that are now in industry rethink their work. it wasn't for Genspace or Biodesign Challenge, they might just be spinning in the wheel, they got out of just business as usual and, we're able to come to their work and to their ideas and to their companies from a biology perspective, any success stories that you would like to share that's on top of your mind.

[00:11:45] Dan: I have to mention, so I, went eventually to work for one of our students. So I right now work at Tomtex as their chief strategist. and Tomtex is a materials company that's doing really amazing stuff in the leather space. But, let's start at the beginning.

[00:11:59] Dan: At Genspace, Genspace had its first unicorn with Opentrons. that was a miracle. I mean, that's a story of a scientist, an engineer sitting down together with a design student and coming up with a new technology that has, not only raised a lot of money, but was really instrumental in testing over the last, Five years. So that's, been amazing. Four years. so that's one. other one I think about is the winners of the first year's design challenge. We're a group of students from fashion Institute of technology here in New York. think there was a men's knitwear specialist. Their expertise had nothing to do with.

[00:12:38] Dan: biotechnology. but they joined the bio design challenge. They wanted to see, how do we get ourselves out of this toxic, polluting fashion industry and make fashion that is actually better for the environment. they came up with a company called Keel Labs. Keel Labs makes, yarn material from kelp.

[00:12:58] Dan: from seaweed, their first prototype when they presented on stage in 2016, looked like, piece of ramen. it did not look like a proper material at all. It looked like spaghetti And it, you know, just literally a week ago, they just put out a product with Stella McCartney.

[00:13:19] Dan: You can buy your tanks and t shirts and sweaters with Keel Labs material. That's amazing. I

[00:13:26] Karl: is amazing.

[00:13:27] Karl: But that took less than 10 years.

[00:13:30] Dan: So, I think we're accelerating the wheel in terms of getting these new materials out there, but it took a long time to get that rolling. but Keelabs is a great one. Tomtex is a great one. Most recently, Electric Skin. this is a group of students that came through the Biodesign Challenge Sprint, five different women from four different continents.

[00:13:50] Dan: we put them together as what we call the Franken team. They didn't know each other. when we introduced them to each other and we said, you guys seem all great. why don't you innovate together? and just recently, Nada, one of them, was on

[00:14:03] Erum: a show Stars of Science, and she's one of the finalists. I have a feeling they're gonna go home with a prize and a lot of money to turn their idea into a reality. And that's amazing.

[00:14:13] Karl: is amazing, especially if you consider that they did it over the course of less than a year. I think that program was a month. They came up with a concept in a month

[00:14:22] Dan: they've been working on it since, 2022.

[00:14:26] Karl: Amazing. with some of our guests, we talk a lot about, biotech and the culture. we were to go to just a mainstream media, it still is relatively negative and people perceiving it, but we all know we're doing great things with it.

[00:14:38] Karl: But how do you see biotech shaping cultural perceptions and how does, creativity play into bridging science in everyday life.

[00:14:46] Dan: really good question. think it goes both ways. I think popular culture informs how we apply our technologies and then vice versa. maybe I'm wrong, but at least I don't hear about it as much. The debate has sort of died down. on occasion, we'll see scary reports about do it yourself biologists slash biohackers doing creepy stuff, but I don't see it nearly as much anymore.

[00:15:12] Dan: I think that technologies insinuate themselves in subtle ways. And so they become part of our culture before we even realize it. I think we all experience the fundamental shift that happened with cell phones and computers and silicon technology and, life has never been the same after.

[00:15:31] Dan: It's continually changing. and I think about a before time and an after time. I remember when, I was logging into and you got to hear modem sounds.

[00:15:43] Erum: Yeah, I

[00:15:44] Dan: I think about how everything changed after that. And I think biotech is going to do the same. And I argue even more so.

[00:15:51] Dan: we're not just changing silicon. We're not just changing the way we receive and broadcast information. We're changing living substance. And that's us. that's the living things around us. I don't know how it's going to go. I spent a lot of, time reading science fiction to get ideas and projections on what might happen.

[00:16:11] Dan: but I think that, the types of things that we're doing, I think the types of programming that genspace by design challenge, you guys are doing is really, really important for us to think about what it is we want from this technology, because ultimately. we, the users, we, the inventors, innovators, are the ones who decide I think a program like Biodesign Challenge, where you get to see possible applications before they're actually created, I that's a great way to have those conversations.

[00:16:38] Dan: What does it look like? How does it feel? How will it change, the way we live, the first thing I look at in the morning, is my cell phone, for better or worse, that's something when biotechnology becomes ubiquitous in the way that we imagine it might be that we're looking at something else.

[00:16:54] Erum: Yeah, since we're on the topic, is centered around communicating biotech to the public and that has, Been a challenge in the past as Carl mentioned, and, you know, we've been talking about this, but we're changing the game. We have this podcast and making it exciting.

[00:17:07] Erum: You've done all of your efforts and you've done very specific projects. So you talked about getting ideas inspired from not only by design challenge, but from science fiction from other efforts from videos you, We're behind one of the most amazing biology experiences that I have experienced.

[00:17:25] Erum: Um, and this was during Sin Biobated this year. you titled it the parables of the biotech age, and it was a series of different performances and video, and it was so deep and profound. I couldn't even sleep that night. I had to process so much after seeing that, but.

[00:17:42] Erum: first of all, what inspired you to do that? you just seeing all of this and you're like, okay, let's put this together and share it with this community. and then how do you think that, this helps demystify science? how do you make this relevant to people in their daily lives?

[00:17:56] Dan: Yeah, parables for the biotech age happened by, happenstance. we were invited to send bio beta in San Jose, California. John Converse asked me to chair the bio design track. They'd never done a bio design track. I happen to know people who run, the biology program at the tech museum, which is literally across the street from the convention center.

[00:18:20] Dan: so I called them up and I said, let's do something together. we had no script. We had no idea. They basically said, hey, do you want to use our IMAX? It's the largest IMAX west of the Mississippi, and it's basically this enormous four story dome screen. Here, it's yours. Do something with it. And, In some ways, it's the product of a month and a half of intense freaking out.

[00:18:45] Dan: in some ways it's the product of 15 years of, work in this space. when you look at the videos, when you look at the performances, these are the videos and performances that, we've been collecting from the very beginning. These are artists, these are scientists, thinking about. One question, which is, how does biotechnology feel? how will it feel to us when it's ubiquitous? How will it change the way that we relate with each other? How will it change the way that we think about the living things around us? How will it change the way we think about ourselves?

[00:19:20] Dan: It's already changed so much in such fundamental ways. a normal conversation is to bring up your 23andMe profile, RIP, but, um,

[00:19:30] Karl: Yeah, maybe not these days

[00:19:33] Dan: it still comes up ranchistry. com or whatever it is like, Oh, I'm going to go to get a spit test and discover something about my personal history.

[00:19:41] Dan: Well, what does that change about your sense of identity? I don't know the answer. I've been one of the people who are like, I don't want to do it. I don't know how they're using that data. have enough points of evidence to understand a personal history, but other people like it really identifies to themselves who they are.

[00:19:58] Dan: so going back to parables, I wanted to create an experience for the audience where they could literally feel in their chest what it would be like to live in the biotech age. we mixed together all these performances, and hoped and hoped that it wasn't too weird or too out there, for audience just literally inhabit it for that 90 minutes.

[00:20:22] Dan: We're actually doing it again, by the way, on November 9th, here in New York City.

[00:20:25] Erum: Oh, nice. You heard folks. If you hear this before then, you got to get your ticket because it's going to

[00:20:31] Erum: sell

[00:20:31] Dan: your tickets.

[00:20:32] Karl: where and where and we're at in new york dan.

[00:20:35] Dan: so we're doing it in partnership with, an organization called Media Art Exploration. So check out their website, mediaartexploration. com. The name of the festival is Max Live. they support artists who are doing, artistic performances related to the sciences.

[00:20:54] Karl: Oh nice.

[00:20:55] Dan: we're doing it in conjunction with them, but I see this beyond the individual performances.

[00:21:00] Dan: I see this as a way to really explore, the emotional aspect of technology, something that, when you think about pointy headed scientists, the emotional aspect is not something you consider. And yet I think so much of this is emotional.

[00:21:14] Erum: Oh, yeah. I definitely felt all the emotions during the parables. I laughed. I

[00:21:19] Dan: I throw question back at you the 100th, podcast, you've been encountering the people who are actually doing the innovation, and they have their very personal reasons why they've devoted their lives to whatever that innovation might be. what did you learn?

[00:21:34] Dan: can you tell the audience about their motivations and who they are and why they do the things they do? what are some of the lessons you've learned along these hundred episodes?

[00:21:44] Erum: so all sorts of different people and there's Two camps, there's those that went to school for biology or some deep science field, and they have stayed course and decided to commercialize their innovation, but then there are people that come from different disciplines into biology.

[00:22:03] Erum: And I think those are very interesting people as well. They all are interesting people, but to be able to See the forest through the trees, the trees being the complexity of biology, but saying, hey, look, I can see that vision. Those people you can tell who they are.

[00:22:18] Erum: I for example, we just had a gentleman named Yuji Suzuki, from BitBiome, gentleman who comes from the world of international relations and economics and just saw the economic value of biology from history and also from how innovation is taking it and has done an amazing job with his team to create a platform for single cell sequencing as well as bioinformatics and he is fan of the pod.

[00:22:46] Erum: I know he's listened to all episodes. He's probably listening now. and when he was on the podcast and even offline, it's like the conversations very similar to the conversations that we have, Dan, like, what is the design? What does the future look like? What can you do with these things.

[00:23:00] Erum: So I think that's very exciting. but then there's a camp of people that are just copying, pasting things, Like venture capital from software into venture capital into biotech. And they're just trying to gun it and force it. trying to get that MVP out there or create a platform just like Amazon has a platform.

[00:23:19] Erum: And that sends to be, interesting to see how their attitudes are different. Some are successful or becoming successful. Some have faltered and have learned. And moving on. the people that come that are really entrepreneurial, they, I feel like are having.

[00:23:36] Erum: maybe a harder time when it comes to thinking of biology in a larger scale to having a hard time reconciling. The economics of venture capitalism and how biology can permeate products and then thus the shelves and, society. So I think it's been very interesting, to see,

[00:23:58] Dan: Carl, do you want to throw something in there?

[00:23:59] Karl: Yeah, totally agree with you. I think I would describe it a little bit differently. and I'm going to pull from my punk rock roots because I feel like there's a punk rock element to this that. Most of these entrepreneurs don't even realize, it was very common for people to start bands.

[00:24:16] Karl: Hey, the three of us are going to start a band. We're going to do this thing and we're going to, make our impact on the world. there's two camps when it comes to. Sim bio or just biotech in general, there is the camp where they're like, okay, we've got this disease or this problem that we want to go after.

[00:24:32] Karl: And we've got this technology that, will leverage to use that. So you Dan talked about the, genesis of gen space with this different group of people coming together. And I think, on the therapeutic side, when we talk to founders that are in that space, they tend to be very academically focused.

[00:24:50] Karl: They've got problem that they're going after a disease state. Whereas I think the other people. And I think this is where the punk rock comes in are like, you know what, I don't really like the way the system works and here's this technology that enables us to basically reprogram life at the atomic level.

[00:25:07] Karl: Here's this nanotech that actually works. How do we take that and turn it into good? That's going to make the world a better place. we see both of those and I think there is benefits to both sides of those approaches and I think that on one level everyone's playing this game and there's different ways to play the game.

[00:25:26] Karl: Yeah, we're going to raise capital and we're going to do xyz That's a great game to play and to figure out how to play it and win it out But then there's the other game where it's like hey We're going to bootstrap this thing and we're going to transform the way this industry works And that's another way to play the game.

[00:25:40] Karl: So that's my long winded answer in terms of how I see the founders that we talked to and how I find them to be super impressive and I find them to also be willing to look at their weaknesses and strengths and leverage those in ways that other people have not Yeah,

[00:25:56] Dan: think personally, I've been spending 15 years trying to find the North star or the North stars for biotechnology, when I think about it, there's this gut wrenching question at the center of it, which is, one, does a technology cause a social revolution or does a social state basically shape the technology?

[00:26:19] Dan: and where is their wiggle room where can you move things? I think I said a little bit in the punk rock camp, because I'm like, oh, the technology can change the way that we literally spend our days and nights and change the things that we eat, change our economic system, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:26:35] Dan: And then I try to imagine what that other state would look like, or what society might look like, and that's where my fantasy starts to crash because I can't quite see it, or the visions that I have seen for it don't seem realistic, so much of what we're trying to do in the world of industry is try to.

[00:26:55] Dan: Take biology and turn it into something you literally can pass down an assembly line, and stamp, into, the same thing over and over again. And that's just not the way biology works. and yet design is based industrial process, industrial design is about making that thing over and over again, making those surfaces, shine like plastic.

[00:27:17] Dan: And that's not biology. So what are we working towards, or is there a way that we can work towards something that's other than this? And I know I'm moving into realm of science fiction, ultimately I think we're all looking for some sort of social transformation. I just don't know what that is.

[00:27:34] Dan: I don't think it's just like, I want to make big bucks with biology because then you'd go find another profession.

[00:27:40] Erum: hmm.

[00:27:40] Karl: technology can have an impact on society and society can have an impact on technology. And the question is a chicken and egg question, which which is going to have the bigger impact here. because if we just basically apply biotechnology to the previous modes of production, number one, it probably won't work, or not well, and you're missing a lot of what biology offers. mean that in a broader sense. I don't mean just like offers in the material sense. I mean, offers in a spiritual sense, even

[00:28:11] Erum: Mm hmm.

[00:28:12] Dan: emotional, the way that we connect with other things. , and I don't want us to miss that.

[00:28:17] Dan: so how do we introduce these technologies in a way that is transformative in a positive way? You know, one of the visions for gen space was that. It provided the community labs, a window for people to see the living world around them in ways that they could never see.

[00:28:35] Dan: Otherwise, Here's a suite of tools in their neighborhood to understand the living world around them in such. Complicated, interesting ways, and not only to examine, the glory and breath of what a living thing can do, but also explore what our connection to those living things are and see how similar we are in a lot of ways and understand that, we're made of the same stuff. Which is profound. mean, when I go back to my beginning of my career at GenSpace, what was the most profound experience? The most profound experience was still looking at, a droplet of pond water under the microscope

[00:29:11] Dan: just seeing that, every Ounce of this planet is teeming with life.

[00:29:16] Dan: it's just this beautiful, complicated zoo of, organisms that we barely, we don't see on our level of, exploration like that. When you start to think about that, you go through your day, seeing the world through that scale, it's so profound. It's so much more profound than sitting down to write that next email you have to send.

[00:29:35] Erum: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah.

[00:29:36] Dan: Like, I want to live in that.

[00:29:37] Erum: Yeah. absolutely. this whole idea of taking or existing industrial processes that have been designed to Maybe extract plants and wood or, create steel and make non living products, but then to use it to make living products, there is a big disconnect, And from the Biodesign Challenge point of view, what are those first principles of biology and then how do you rethink industrial processes? Based on how the biology is evolving and moving and growing. are companies that are looking at that. when we're talking about the people that we've spoken with, there's one technology I'm really excited about is this concept of continuous batch fermentation, Instead of just Making something and then stopping it and then processing it. what does that look like for it to continue to be made? And then that also jives well with an industrial process of scaling up.

[00:30:37] Erum: like, I think that company based in Australia, it's called Cauldron Fern. is it really interesting, idea and again, coming from a different part of the world. That's why I do love the fact that we have been speaking with different people from. All parts of the globe because they all have different perspectives, but I think, we need to rethink how we operate.

[00:30:56] Erum: industrial society because that hasn't been working in some regard. Let me just say that I don't want to be like, climate change. not just about climate change and sustainability, but it's also just about what are good functioning products?

[00:31:07] Erum: it's 2024. Why are we still using the methodologies made from, in the 1900s, Let's level up,

[00:31:13] Karl: Dan, what you're saying, resonates really deeply because the beauty of biology is like, okay, yeah, we can do all this transformation of industrial processes, which is great. many industrial processes should be, change in our relationship to the.

[00:31:28] Karl: World should change, from being, this extractive species to something that lives more in harmony with our planet, which I think is going to be a leap for many of us. But then the other side of it is, how do you leverage biology to create, these very custom bespoke products that maybe only exist.

[00:31:49] Karl: in Namibia, and the rest of the world doesn't get it, but that's okay. We don't have to have mass produced products for everything. and maybe that's one of the things that we can learn from biology biotech, is that, maybe my Adidas shoes are produced locally. They're very different from the ones that I would buy if I was in Vietnam.

[00:32:07] Karl: They don't have to be the same.

[00:32:09] Dan: Yeah, I don't think the VC model is the only way to go, don't have to, start and seed round, get your investors, et cetera, et cetera. There are a lot of ways to do this. and I think we should be exploring them. one of my former students reached out and asked for advice.

[00:32:24] Dan: And I don't know if this was good advice, but he basically was saying he wanted to create something new in the world. And I said, well, you don't need to create a startup to transform the world. There are other ways to do this. if you really want to see change, you can also start a movement.

[00:32:39] Dan: You can start a. Community biology, lab, you can start up the next, whatever that is, community biology lab, you can create a movement. There's more you can do here, than raise capital for our company. like to think of all of this as part of a larger ecosystem, but again, The challenge here is what is the North star? what are we all aiming towards? And if we can envision that, then how do we get there? how do we align ourselves so that we get to that next step? think right now, we should be thinking about species survival. We should thinking about climate change.

[00:33:14] Dan: but, How do we level up as the room said, I'm like struggling. I just feel myself emotionally mentally trying to see what that path forward is. And I realized, so much of work that has happened over the last 15 years is about that struggle is about that search for what is next. What is the world we want to live in? I think we're very lucky. We have a pretty good here. I'm in nice hotel room in Seattle, I just had my little vacation. that's not true for everyone on that. Won't be true for everyone going into the future. So how do we move forward together?

[00:33:47] Dan: Not individually.

[00:33:49] Erum: I mean, I would say The past 15 years for you have been a consistent leveling up on a massive scale, with gen space, with by design challenge, with Tom text, with parables, with some new projects you have coming up. If you would like to share that, we would love to learn about that.

[00:34:04] Erum: and also, know that you're reconciling, what has happened in the past and how do we bring it into the future? But if you do have a crystal ball looking at what has happened and some of what you're looking at now, what are you most hopeful about in biotech?

[00:34:18] Erum: what do you see that could transpire in the next decade to help us think about that, and maybe apply it to what we're doing today. We meaning, Carl, myself, the audience, you as well, you have to be thinking of a plan because you have been executing on some great projects.

[00:34:32] Erum: so tell us.

[00:34:33] Dan: I can speak to it in the material space, I think fashion materials have been the tip of the spearhead for introducing these technologies to the public. And as a journalist, I was writing about it, very excitedly. and then it took forever to see the first products and then the first products were like 10, 000 for a hat or a tie or whatever it was.

[00:34:56] Dan: And it just seemed like totally not what, what my fantasy was, But I think that we're this really interesting, critical moment where we could start to introduce these technologies to the public as a real alternative, as a Different way of business as usual, when we talk about clothes I'm really excited about getting into that dialogue and engaging general public about what this. Literally a fashion revolution, materials revolution means for everything else. so, yeah, I'm now working on a company that's literally making materials for the fashion industry. Largely because I think that dialogue is so important, like if this works, then there'll be the next industry that will transform and then the next and the next and the next, and we'll get to see that domino effect.

[00:35:46] Dan: hopefully in our lifetimes, and hopefully that domino effect will be the thing that averts the climate crisis that literally we're living through right now.

[00:35:54] Karl: yeah,

[00:35:54] Dan: I don't want to go dark, but I'm scared of the alternative and I, and very much when you look at, Asheville, and other places, you see what the alternative is and it's terrifying.

[00:36:04] Karl: yeah, yeah, let's end with a hope for the future,

[00:36:09] Dan: Sorry,

[00:36:09] Karl: not end on a, on a dark note, Dan,

[00:36:13] Erum: Let's say your, dystopian novel. This is a grow everything podcast. We're really optimistic on this podcast.

[00:36:18] Dan: I'm

[00:36:19] Dan: I am optimistic. I think more and more people realize the alternative is not palatable. so we have no choice but to go down this path. So, yeah, let's start with fashion materials. It's low stakes, but has a huge impact in terms of, climate. and we'll go from there.

[00:36:35] Dan: what that future looks like, kind of want to just promote. November 9th, come to our event and you'll get to feel it out. it's not just one thing. It's a lot of things.

[00:36:46] Karl: yeah,

[00:36:47] Dan: and, let's embrace that complexity because That's our present and that will absolutely be our future.

[00:36:52] Karl: yeah, I think that's great. I love that. I think we should end with that.

[00:36:58] Dan: Dan Gresham, thank you so much for coming on the grow everything podcast. It's a joy. We'll have you back on. You just are friendly. Like I just a hundred episodes. I know you held out, but don't hold out on us again,

[00:37:08] Erum: because I know that there's so much coming up for you and we need you back on.

[00:37:12] Erum: We need your thinking. You bring us down to earth. You make us think a lot on a, greater, more creative scale. And so we always love speaking with you.

[00:37:21] Dan: I love being here and I love working with you guys. I love seeing you guys perform the podcast live, please do that again And another hundred episodes. I can't wait and i'll certainly be here before 200. I promise

[00:37:35] Karl: Okay, do it. Let's make sure that happens. Awesome.