122. Ecohacking the Planet: Daniel Goodwin of Homeworld Collective Brews Up Planetary-Scale Solutions

[00:00:00] Erum: All right. Dan Goodwin, home World Collective brother from another podcast that is the Climate Biotech Podcast. Thank you for coming on the Grow Everything podcast. How's it going?

[00:00:10] Daniel: Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you.

[00:00:13] Erum: Yay. Yeah. Yeah. we're friends. We've been collaborating. We published your episode where you interviewed George Church, which was amazing.

[00:00:21] Erum: And I believe you guys published our episode with Moji Kami of Sam Vita. So we're buddies in this world of podcasting, biotech, in all different forms. But you've known George Church for a while, you were taught by him. Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like to learn from George and be friends with him?

[00:00:41] Erum: He seems like a very interesting person, and if there's any secrets you can share, just let us know. We won't tell anybody.

[00:00:47] Daniel: Ha. Yeah, I'm happy to jump in and really has been such a wonderful friendship. when we were giving the, preamble for the podcast that we were boosting of emojis, I was reflecting on the great New York, biotech meetup that we did together. And that was really fun and Home world is huge fans of what you guys do. so what's it like to work with George? Well, I got, a little bit of context with who I was when I started my PhD. I was a 30-year-old ex software founder, tech pro. There's,

[00:01:14] Karl: Wow. I

[00:01:15] Karl: did

[00:01:15] Karl: know that.

[00:01:15] Daniel: there's there's no way around. It troll me away. I was basically every stereotype you can possibly imagine, I lived in a garage.

[00:01:22] Daniel: I dropped outta Stanford. all the bad tropes. and what took me to do my PhD, was that I dropped out of a first attempt at Stanford, which was in ai, and I got to work with the amazing Fe Fe Lee, who's a heroic figure many dimensions. and I was running a company that was beginning to do well, that was what Tech Pro version of Dan really wanted. And I just had this moment where it's like, one day I'm gonna be a dad, which I am now, And I want to be a heroic figure to my kids. where that took me was, I'm gonna go back want to earn my black belt in science What took me back was to work on neuroscience. what is heroic to me? Studying the brain, understanding that that is one of the biggest frontiers of humanity. what I was not expecting. Tech bro. Dan was taking the software view of biology So I wrote this thing, which is very cringey now.

[00:02:04] Daniel: And so just kinda making fun of younger version of me. But I wrote this piece in Scientific American. It's like neuroscience needs hackers, Congratulations. All we need is software people. We're gonna drop right in and we're gonna solve everything. And I looked back at that 10 years later and I cringe.

[00:02:17] Daniel: but I think that's the way things work, the reason I'm laughing at myself now is I didn't appreciate how hard it's to work with biology. it was computer science that got me into neuro, it was neuro that got me into synthetic biology and then getting into synthetic biology, got me to meet George Church.

[00:02:31] Daniel: And, there's that quip of never meet your heroes. I think that's actually wrong. if you meet your heroes and you're disappointed, get better heroes. so when I did my PhD, I got really lucky where I had three heroic figures. so, I did my PhD under Ed Boyden.

[00:02:44] Daniel: I can sing his phrase all day. Amazing. Superhuman. so he was my core advisor. And that's what we were building molecular tools to study the brain. His lab was called synthetic neurobiology and it's using syn bioo to study the brain. , working with that, I actually, backed into that to meet George.

[00:03:00] Daniel: So I think it's actually even funnier to say that tech row, Dan didn't even know who George Church was, Dan six months into biology, every road leads back to George Church. so what I'll say is that George is the real deal. I mean, he really is a fantastic force of nature for the field of biology.

[00:03:17] Daniel: I'm giving a lot of background here, but I think it's really gonna go into the way I do work now, the way Home World Collective tries to support the community. A lot of it is inspired by George, but if you wanna know a good one line punchy thing of what did I learn from George?

[00:03:29] Daniel: I'm gonna say it and it's gonna make it sound like he's manipulative, and that's totally wrong, I don't mean that. So I'm gonna say George has a trick of speaking. And a person might interpret that, like, oh, that means it's manipulative. No, no, no, no. I just think this is a wonderful way to be persuasive and communicate.

[00:03:43] Daniel: and I call this the churchian juxtaposition. And it would go like this. I'd say like, Hey George, I'm looking at some in situ sequencing chemistry and blah, blah, blah. And then George would, start by taking my idea and then going way deeper. Than I was technically way, way deeper.

[00:03:57] Daniel: He's like, oh, this reminds me of this mustard chemistry paper from 1970, and that was followed on by this paper by 73 and oh, then you're gonna get these star effects and blah, blah, blah. Okay. And then once you've gone way, way deeper technically thought, then George is gonna take you to the moon.

[00:04:11] Daniel: He is like, okay. And then when we're engineering panspermia to travel the cosmos using lasers, pushing around nucleic acids to take over planets, then we're gonna do this. And then your blind is blown like, wow, he has thought 500 years in the future on this idea. And then he'll titrate you back to, okay, so now the idea that you brought me today, here's the way you can think about it for the next year or two.

[00:04:30] Karl: Right. It's amazing. It is amazing.

[00:04:33] Daniel: what's so fun about that is I actually think it's a really great way of being persuasive.

[00:04:38] Daniel: in home world, we are a nonprofit whose job it is to grow the field of biotech. Well, you do that by empowering the community, so we think all the things that we do is how can you make a scientist more self-sufficient, better self-advocate, all those things.

[00:04:50] Daniel: you can take this George Church idea. First of all, you can't fake it, You have to be that technically good. To go back to some paper 40 years ago. and then draw the reference from that. And then you also have to have a big creativity and imagination to go to, engineered panspermia.

[00:05:04] Daniel: I mean, I don't know if George is actually pushing that idea, just giving a fun, playful example and then you have to be able to land it back of this is what's realistic to do. So you need the technical excellence, you need the creativity, and then you need the executive sense of what's worth doing and, and what's not.

[00:05:18] Daniel: I call it the churchy juxtaposition or whatever you wanna say. it always sits with me. and that's actually something I try to coach people is you have to be grounded technically do stuff that people wanna listen to in the first place. then once you've got people's attention, say something that's plausible.

[00:05:31] Daniel: Otherwise it's just idea porn.

[00:05:33] Erum: Yeah, the juxtaposition sounds like a great title for blog on a.

[00:05:39] Karl: There you go. Yeah. Yeah. it's super interesting that you say that because when John Ks and I interviewed him for, what's your bio strategy? It was like, we were going into it, I mean, I'd been around George and knew him, had seen him talk a number of times and was going into it as okay, we're gonna talk about synthetic biology.

[00:05:57] Karl: But George immediately, takes over the interview and he is talking about germline. Editing with CRISPR and what that is gonna look like from a progression point of view. first you're gonna go after these genetic diseases, then you're gonna go after performance, and it's gonna be these people who are gonna be the first ones who will do that.

[00:06:13] Karl: And I was just mind blown. You know? Even though every time I would see him speak and he. does his disclaimer slide that shows all the companies that he's a part of, you're just kind of like, whoa, what the hell dude? What do you do? Would you sleep?

[00:06:26] Karl: and he does. So, an amazing human being that I think, really happy to have had some interactions with. but let's bring it back and talk about Homeward Collective. You guys say, biology is the most powerful technology on earth, which we completely agree with, but what makes biology so uniquely vast and transformative compared to other tools or technologies?

[00:06:48] Karl: And I even hate to say biology is a technology. It is, it just is.

[00:06:53] Daniel: Yeah, it's a medium to technologies. So, my one sentence view on this is that biology is a medium to anatomically precise, infinitely scalable technologies. I think both are important. Both are very independent. So atomically precise, is that biology is filled with detecting the difference of one hydrogen present or not, level technologies, binding metals, adding electron here, removing electron there.

[00:07:19] Daniel: All these technologies are exquisitely. developed over, the lifetime of earth. , so I think there is a atomic precision that often we have to brute force with other mechanisms that biology has. the infinitely scalable comment. Is both necessary and probably the most controversial, Because infinitely scalable is uncontrolled growth. So, you could say, in engineering speak, I would say it's zero CapEx. You don't need to build a hundred million dollar factory, you just need a bug that takes over the world. now that's of course backing into, biosecurity issues and all those things, so what I think is true, provocation of that idea is that biology has the ability to do atomically precise mechanisms and, our operations today. it's infinitely scalable in terms of it's already everywhere on the planet. It can grow. You don't need a factory to develop it. But the truth is really, I've seen very few true open deployments. Nobody's really making use of zero CapEx bio yet. And I think there's a lot of good reasons for it, but I think if you look at where we're at with a lot of the industries and that are climate relevant, that, biology could potentially, take over or, change or modify. They are very CapEx intensive industries and we're not gonna change that, the next 10 years or so.

[00:08:31] Daniel: But a personal passion area or the thesis that I'm actively playing with, so I don't have a bulletproof answer today, is what are low opex solutions look like? the extreme of that, and this is a churchy way of viewing, is the extreme of that is you drop a seed or you drop a cell then it does everything from there.

[00:08:48] Erum: Yeah, that's incredible. That's how the earth works today, You don't spend a lot of money to have the earth continue to operate, ? It's doing it itself. at home world, you're looking at environmental issues and being able to create solutions and, it's interesting to see how the earth is already doing it, but maybe slowly, so how do you, make it faster?

[00:09:09] Erum: I just loved your hypothesis. I feel like that can be blown out a little bit. Maybe be. I'm sure you've dreamed on it a little bit. So, you have this extensive background, so rare. what do you see as the future of bioengineering to be able to reduce that CapEx or have none? You said the seed for what?

[00:09:26] Erum: Like what could it do?

[00:09:28] Daniel: Yeah, I'll start with a straw man and then we can go, into, I think areas that are important. the straw man is that it's really easy from a biologist perspective who spends all day at the bench. To read a paper or be doing some work and think, oh, one step above this, next I can do blah, and I've solved everything, Hey, I can do protein engineering. I can design a protein to bind lithium better. Oh my gosh, I can make the affinity, blah, blah, blah. Better. I've solved mining. I wanna roast that person because that was also me, That was me in 2019, That was actually almost literally me.

[00:10:01] Daniel: It was like, Hey, I'm, finally learning how to do some protein engineering. I really care about carbon capture. That seems like that was my gateway drug to thinking about, climate issues because it was the first time that climate was reframed from a problem to a solution. I was like, oh, okay, well great.

[00:10:14] Daniel: I can do protein engineering. We need a protein binder to bind carbon dioxide because that's how you bind CO2 and, atomic precision, We can bind CO2. We know like that's what the body does. That, of course is a very, very, very stupid idea. and it's a very, very stupid idea once you think one step past the lab to be, okay, well what's it gonna be deployed into?

[00:10:31] Daniel: Okay. It's gonna be deployed in air contact. Okay. What does the air contactor do? Well, it's gonna have either a solid or a liquids sorbent. Okay. How much does that as sorbent currently cost? What are the performance metrics of that sorbent and what would it take for anyone to care about my sorbent? So I got really lucky. I got to meet with Klaus Lachner. Who was one of the godfathers of, carbon dioxide removal. And he told me like basically we had a short conversation and in 15 minutes I was just like, okay, I'm so sorry I've wasted your time. I'm five orders of magnitude off of ever doing anything that would matter in your field.

[00:11:00] Daniel: and by the way, talk about another, gentle giant Klaus was just the nicest, most friendly, supportive human. so that's the straw man, it's really easy to immediately imagine something that you could do on the bench. This is what we do as biologists.

[00:11:10] Daniel: It's really important to dream. So I don't want to disparate that at all. It then needs to be matched with the things at the frontier scale. Which is okay, this would matter. And that also is a place where you have traps, and I guess part of my job as a community builder now is roasting both sides to bring people together, the roast of the people who just spend all day at the policy level or the, a hundred million dollar fund level. especially in the philanthropy or science funding, they just spend time at the problem. Oh, we need a gigaton of carbon capture. and let's write a big white paper on, carbon capture and how important it's to get to the gigaton.

[00:11:42] Daniel: But there's no actual technical insights there. There's nothing actionable when people write those things, it's just $1 billion pile of money talking to another billion. Dollar pile of money. And that's also dumb, somewhere between, you need to start drawing that line between the frontier goal that matters, the technical work that could be done, And I think that's really where Home World sits. the way you do that is you have to start picking verticals that matter. and I feel of funny saying this to you guys because you guys know this better than anyone and the way we've done this at Home World is we've gone vertical to vertical and this was not the way we started.

[00:12:12] Daniel: By the way, part of this is retroactive and impression, but we started with it. We just wanna grow the field of climate, biotech. Then we go into the, okay, well climate, biotech, there's a lot there. But to really help people on specific things, you really have to start knowing the vertical.

[00:12:26] Daniel: so we started with carbon capture. that was a gateway drug. we broaden that to greenhouse gas removal. what started with CDR that, broadens into methane removal? today is the submission deadline for our second round of, grants, for greenhouse gas removal. so for the people listening to this, sorry, this was last week. We still want to talk if you're doing cool work. where we're expanding now is to geo biotechnology and to pollution. all of those topics have, frontier goals that matter that working backwards.

[00:12:55] Daniel: You start asking, okay, well what are the teams or entities that currently operate at a scale that matters? you're gonna talk about mining, tell me about what it's like to run a mine. Show me the financial model of what it means to make a mine go all the way down, and then eventually you find the technical work that needs to be done.

[00:13:10] Daniel: it's a long rant, cause I think we've all seen these failure modes where people say, I've got this really, really fancy thing I could do with biology. And then you see them a year later, they're like, yeah, no one cared.

[00:13:20] Karl: Right. I think at the beginning when I don't know how to say this the right way, but I'm gonna say when you're younger, let's put it that way. And you're still, and. Listen, I love ideas. the people I like hanging around with are idea people.

[00:13:34] Karl: that's what really gets me going. But then, on the business side, I know, the ideas don't matter. What matters is do you got a good story? Is it gonna scale? is there a market for what you're doing? And then at the end of the day, are you gonna be able to do something good with it?

[00:13:49] Karl: So I hear you and love this idea of, taking verticals and applying that. 'cause we're doing Something similar, but again, I think this is the reason why we get along so well is like we're looking at it from this idea of you're building this ecosystem so that you can make a difference.

[00:14:01] Karl: And you guys are taking the climate approach, which we're taking it from a, okay, There's big companies that need these problems solved. How do we put them in with these, innovators that also have a different problem? And their problem is they've got the technical excellence.

[00:14:15] Karl: They maybe are starting to learn how to tell a story, but they have no idea how to get to that scale. so I think with us collectively, home or old messaging lab, we are gonna enable these things.

[00:14:27] Daniel: I love can I tell just like one sentence on that, which is my phrase is idea porn

[00:14:32] Karl: I love that.

[00:14:32] Daniel: and, I use it in a technical way, Which is if porn is a fantasy that you never actually want to act on. Right. and I think idea porn is this space of ideas like, oh, wouldn't it be cool I'm gonna let myself not think about how I would act on, I'm just gonna go down into idea porn.

[00:14:46] Daniel: And I actually think it's great. I think our, program on pollution started from my idea porn hole in 20 21, 20 22. gosh, that was a bad sentence, but hopefully we're, on the same page

[00:14:56] Karl: Yeah.

[00:14:56] Daniel: Right.

[00:14:57] Erum: leave it.

[00:14:59] Daniel: but I think the failure mode I've seen is that people go into idea porn and don't know it's idea porn.

[00:15:04] Daniel: I. They're fooling themselves of actually like, Hey, this is a really cool idea. I'm gonna enjoy that. But deep down they know that they're never gonna act on it and they don't. but then there's this gross self-deception. If you say, I'm going into an idea porn cause I think this is really cool and I'm just gonna explore it.

[00:15:18] Daniel: that's actually where I think some really great ideas can come from. But it's about setting expectations of I'm gonna let myself differentiate, separate from reality for a little bit to explore a passion area. 'cause my gosh, if you're doing something that you think is the coolest thing on the planet.

[00:15:31] Daniel: Then you're unstoppable

[00:15:32] Erum: Yeah.

[00:15:32] Karl: I want to add to that because I love this idea of going down the idea of porn hole.

[00:15:37] Erum: Oh my God. Can't

[00:15:38] Erum: say.

[00:15:38] Karl: it just, it sounds wrong, but,

[00:15:43] Erum: Yeah.

[00:15:43] Karl: the idea of porn rabbit hole, anyway. I'm gonna go on my soapbox for a minute because one of the things that I'm seeing, and I really enjoy seeing this, is I'm seeing some people and people who've been on this podcast who are now starting to write fiction with, Biotech front and center. And I think that's really super important because it allows us to use this idea porn and turn it into a story that maybe someone is gonna read or someone is gonna think about and it's maybe gonna spark another idea. And I think that it's super important because.

[00:16:14] Karl: this culture that we have of biologists and people doing biotech, doing synthetic biology. We have this echo chamber that we live in and we all promote each other and love each other, but we don't do enough of getting out there. And I mean, the people in this room right now, we do it.

[00:16:28] Karl: And that is the mission of our podcast. But I think that if our culture is not set up to help people think What it's gonna be like in a hundred, 200, 500 years, then we're missing a huge opportunity. And I hate to bring it up, but I think when we look at Elon Musk, I mean, Elon Musk was not reading, scientific papers growing up.

[00:16:45] Karl: He was reading Ring World and Asimov and these kinds of big thinking, science fiction ideas. And we don't really have that much of that in our culture or, telling our cultural story. and we definitely need. Of that. So, if it requires going down the.

[00:17:00] Karl: Idea poured rabbit hole. I'm all for it. and for those of you who are listening, I'm always ready to read a good biotech fiction story no matter what state is in. 'cause I, like the ideas. so let's get back to the interview. a lot of people see, biology as something to control or extract value from.

[00:17:21] Karl: And I know we've had long conversations with Christina aga about this You guys at home World, you're taking a different stance. You see it as a collaborator. What does that mean to collaborate with biology and, how does collaborating with biology, shift the way you think about innovation?

[00:17:35] Daniel: there's a good metaphor with rivers. my dad hero number one in life, he spent his whole life on the eco hydraulic engineering. So how does engineering river systems or studying river systems help us understand when we clean up oil spills or what the impacts of dams are?

[00:17:49] Daniel: and his whole career had a, really good collaboration back and forth with the Corps of Engineers. And there was a joke that I just remember seeing some kind of environmentalists, roasting the Corps of Engineers. 'cause they were making fun of the Corps of Engineers saying, ah, the river's curving when it should run straight. Right. river's curve because of physical processes, depositing sediment, differentially on the speed of the water. So that's gonna make curves happen over time. It actually creates positive feedback loop of, cart curves in the river that happens, When you're the Corps of Engineers. You want it to run straight. then you have the Los Angeles River and, all that, magnificence. I don't think it's bad to think that way. I just think that we see these things in, uh, biology where I think we try to force it a little bit too early.

[00:18:29] Daniel: and I think, it's a big open question about how we're gonna solve this and for things like Biomanufacturing, I think putting things into a tank and growing them. Is the straight river of biology. and I think that, there's a lot that's wrong in that comment.

[00:18:42] Daniel: and what, what's wrong is I think we're all friends with the masters of Biomanufacturing. , there's really cool companies that are coming outta stealth now doing new ways of doing biomanufacturing. Continuous fermentation. There's all this stuff that is cool.

[00:18:53] Daniel: And I wanna say one more thing about this is that I am not an expert, if someone hasn't done something at Leader Scale minimum, they have no opinion that matters on, Biomanufacturing. I have no opinion that matters on Biomanufacturing. do think there's this idea of how do you start doing what biology's best at?

[00:19:06] Daniel: it's very possible that things that we've tried to do in fermentation in the past just have not worked. not because the science wasn't cool, but because the business just didn't pan out. When you're trying to do something at scale. we're currently seeing a huge death of, companies that were 2020 vintage, funded on the hopes and dreams.

[00:19:21] Daniel: now, the whole field has changed everything from the fermentation stacks to that. Now enough dumping on bio manufacturing because we do need it. I think there are things that are really important and for certain new molecules, that is where you can use atomic precision of biology to the best of its capacity, But then at the same time, we start wondering, okay, well how do you start? if we wanna go beyond the tank, what are ways that look

[00:19:43] Daniel: viable? a great example of this is, some of the early conversations we were doing with carbon capture. it doesn't take you many Google clicks to start caring about my tailings, so.

[00:19:53] Daniel: mines grind up rocks, dump 'em in a plague, place those rocks over time, weather, and they create carbonates, which is effective drawdown of carbon dioxide. can biology make it go faster? so there's really great peaceful that have researched this. So Ian Powers, and he is now a professor.

[00:20:08] Daniel: His PhD advisor was Greg Dipple. Janine McCutchen. There's a whole great crop of researchers that have worked on this. it's their work. I'm pretty sure it's all in their public material. When they do these experiments, they find something where they say, look, we create an inoculant.

[00:20:21] Daniel: we culture something up, we drop it on these rocks and then we leave. what they find, and I'm saying they as in scientists in general, is that normally when you engineer a bug, it goes away within like a day. it just gets way out, competed knocked down.

[00:20:34] Daniel: but what they still find I think the, larger space of the field is that some effect is still there, right? Even though your inoculates long gone and that little gene that you dropped in actually doesn't make compete naturally, you still have some net effect where things are working a little bit better, capturing a little bit more carbon rock, withering a little bit faster. And I think that's the foundation of all the crazy work that we're doing now. that work was 10 years old, that I remember reading five years ago. So also put big air bars on, Dan's memory. but think there's gonna be this fine line of what does it look like to start letting things go naturally.

[00:21:05] Daniel: that can be engineered crops that can be engineered bugs and lakes. I think the more we can let biology do biology's thing, the better I want to acknowledge that as there's a lot of open questions there. a lot of, lot, lot. And, I'm intentionally stepping over the ethical arguments.

[00:21:20] Karl: and the security issue. And I'm gonna give a shout out to, Tess Alexian, who does a lot of biosecurity research. And her and I were having this debate. And I was playing the role of why do security, why talk about biosafety and all this? And she looks at me and she quotes, Renee,yeah, risen of, darpa arpa H. Yeah.

[00:21:36] Daniel: Yeah. And the quote I've been unable to find the line for, but I'm sure she said it, is that you don't put brakes on a car to go slow. You put brakes on a car to go fast. and I was like, okay, Tessa, you sold me. bringing this back to this idea of we have to allow biology to make rivers the curve.

[00:21:51] Daniel: To do that, we need accept the fact that there's gonna be some sort of open deployments. Let's start taking that seriously. And I think my provocation is, I've seen a lot of safety is like, oh, we just shouldn't do it at all. And the only people that do real biosafety stuff, like what are molecular tools that we can build are the George Churches of the world, Pam Silver, Kevin Fel, and a bunch of other research that have a certain amount of professional safety already.

[00:22:13] Daniel: Whereas for a young professor or like a young research org, that is a huge hot button topic. that oftentimes people would be, ostracized for even talking about. I think with the community building that you do and that we do at Home World, I hope we can start saying that actually, if we accept that this is needed, we can start having adult conversations about it.

[00:22:31] Daniel: And I'll give one more shout out to a team. Daniel Zel runs a company called Liquid Trees. and he had a great thesis. His thesis was, if you wanna do carbon capture, it's any scale that matters. All this idea of these big air conditioning machines suck. And the reason they suck is because you're trading off the volume for the observability, When you run your own machine and you catch things in the liquid sorbent, and then you extract and you put it in a tank, you bury it. You can have a full observability of all the stuff you're drawing, but that's never, ever, ever, ever gonna get to a scale that I think matters. And that's my take, This is me speaking as Dan Goodwin, not home world, not for the CDR community. Daniel has a salty, contrarian tech bro energy too, and he is like, we need to drop this observability if we want any scale that matters.

[00:23:15] Daniel: So what did he do is like, okay, well where's a place that you can deploy biology today? How about really polluted rivers in the third world? And how about finding stuff that can just capture carbon and then sink and die? so salty, like none of the CDR funders would touch it. Because they're like, oh, it's reputation risk and this guy doesn't know anything about biology and all that.

[00:23:33] Daniel: And I've been meeting with Daniel for two years and every time he shows me what I'm doing, I'm like, my God, dude. you've got tanks, you're doing experiments, you've operated in seven countries, you shut down five of them because the data wasn't there. you are doing more, faster, more openly than a lot of people have seen and comes from a totally different angle.

[00:23:49] Daniel: And I think that's an example of maybe now we're shifting into accepting that, the rivers of biology have to curve. but there's definitely a culture change.

[00:23:57] Erum: Yeah, there's so much that you said that is incredible and I wanna touch on a couple things. One is the analogy of, river systems. I've heard, not in the same way that you've mentioned it, but I'm reading the book, A Natural History of the Future by Rob Dunn, and he starts off the whole novel about river systems and how his grandfather was witness to the Mississippi River.

[00:24:20] Erum: flooding towns because they were levied. and they built towns near the river, but the river couldn't be controlled it had to break. And he uses this nice, beautiful, elegant analogy to rivers and biology too. So when you were saying that, I'm like, oh, you should definitely read that if you haven't already.

[00:24:37] Daniel: I haven't,

[00:24:37] Erum: yeah.

[00:24:38] Erum: I love the fact that you talk about yourself in the third person. I think that's really cool. but also you bring people to the table, these concepts are created by people and you just have this running rol decks of you're dropping names. And I love that because then we can really be like, this isn't just a theory.

[00:24:55] Erum: These are people that are observing, they're pontificating, they're doing, I think it's super, super, super helpful. and we'll have to. link those things in the show notes.

[00:25:05] Erum: I will say this concept of. the in-situ bio manufacturing orapplying a bio solution to it is so interesting. Carl and I actually talked about that, I don't know Carl, months ago and I was like, what? And you said lake engineering. And I was like, did we have a hive line?

[00:25:20] Erum: 'cause that's something that we were talking about. why not allow. Nature to help with the ferment, Everyone's like, it must be sterile. Well, sterile. it's good for something depending on what you're trying to make, of course. But it's also so challenging and can be limiting too, because maybe there are other microbes that can Appear and if they work they have their microbiome dynamics, maybe it's actually more helpful and less energy intensive to be able to, create that bio process. And again, I also did not create a leader of product, so I can't speak to too much biomanufacturing besides reiterating what some of our guests have been talking about who are in that

[00:26:00] Erum: space.

[00:26:01] Karl: I think we all need to just brew beer so that we can say that we've have at least experience with one liter of fermentation. Otherwise,

[00:26:10] Erum: Actually, I did take a beer making class one yeah, I have a kit in the basement that I've never used. I hate to admit it,

[00:26:16] Karl: Alejandro, if you're listening.

[00:26:18] Erum: Yeah,

[00:26:19] Daniel: maybe we just fund climate biotech by making GFP beer.

[00:26:22] Karl: Yeah.

[00:26:23] Daniel: So, I mean, surely someone's done that, but I don't know how, immunogenic, GFE is, but if you could just throw it in yeast, grow it, and then have beer that fluoresces at 48, I drink it

[00:26:33] Erum: Yeah.

[00:26:34] Karl: that is one of the, tropes I guess, or one of the scenes in that terrible hacker series. It's a German series that takes place in Freberg and they have a party in the beer glows.

[00:26:44] Erum: Yeah. Yeah. and then you also had mentioned, about biosecurity and we had Alexander Titus on the podcast when he was talking about bio, policy and people think that, oh, policies and regulations prevent innovation, but it's actually there to help accelerate it because you don't wanna have a situation where something goes wrong and you have to backtrack and it sets a whole entry back years, whereas the policies would have helped.

[00:27:07] Erum: Continue the progress so a lot of what you said resonated with what we've been talking about and hearing. And this is why we wanted to bring you on 'cause you

[00:27:15] Erum: are our friend

[00:27:17] Erum: and we

[00:27:17] Erum: love talking to you

[00:27:18] Erum: about this.

[00:27:19] Daniel: thing, just to add briefly to that is that, part of the origin of home world, was a blog post, which is why I, really encourage all biologists to practice the art of writing. Write a blog, nobody's gonna read it, get used to it. but the second essay I ever wrote was about why are some fields more productive than others?

[00:27:37] Daniel: and I just took my experience of being in the startup world, working in the design world, starting my PhD in basically around genetic engineering in 2015. Seeing that place go hyperbolic, , makes me wonder, can you find what made machine learning go exponential and what made it genetic engineering go exponential?

[00:27:53] Daniel: Can you engineer that anywhere? And, just riffing on the idea of what Titus is doing. There are times where, maybe you can actually cultivate the conditions. And I don't mean to hawk, my own book from 2022. , but I would just say I think there are six elements and a big part of that is freedom to operate.

[00:28:08] Daniel: freedom to experiment and, there has to be moment of scale and I'm gonna cut myself off, otherwise I'm gonna talk about old topics.

[00:28:16] Erum: Yes, we absolutely are, because that is the next question. well, it's because I didn't know this. we talk about the work we're doing in the now. I didn't know about the company that you co-founded and that it was acquired by Microsoft, and that's a huge, huge win in Congratulations on that.

[00:28:33] Erum: and you were saying took your tech bro world and you brought it to bio and you realize, okay, There's a little bit of similarities and there's differences, so can you dig into a little bit more, maybe a specific story of a lesson that you learned from building and scaling a software startup and how that translates into building a company at the intersection of biology and climate tech?

[00:28:53] Daniel: Yeah, there's a lot to

[00:28:54] Daniel: say. I'm gonna start with, why software is so ideal, And then I hope that informs what we want to build, and then I can tell a little bit of insight on how we think about developing software products and how that can inform science and biology. So I got really lucky, right place, right time, I started my PhD at Stanford in 2009. Facebook mini Feeded came out. AWS came out, iPhone came out, And so it was this golden era where suddenly you have the ability to instantly scale things it just became so baked into the culture of Silicon Valley that we just took it for granted.

[00:29:25] Daniel: and I think that's one of the reasons I was such a bad biologist for so many years because I just assumed that, Hey, if I can write a little iPhone widget on my laptop, then I can scale it to a million people overnight. Done. That doesn't work in bio, that doesn't work in really any other field where you've got actual CapEx, My IQ sold subscriptions, which was a one bit that I would change on a database when people would pay us, that's the easiest thing in the world you could possibly sell. but I think what's also really important about that era is that it was this explosion of empowerment.

[00:29:55] Daniel: So I worked in a windowless office in the basement of the computer science building at Stanford, And I saw this transformation of everyone around me by a year later we were all standing on stages picking, pitching, product market fit, pitching this new target of what people expected to hear from a 10 page startup deck.

[00:30:12] Daniel: can absolutely troll it, I'll be the first one to laugh about younger me, as well as older and present me. but there's also a lot of wonderful things about that too, There's this matching of expectations and there was the hallway conversations you had at ERA were just beautiful.

[00:30:25] Daniel: You had these people in a, computer vision lab, so it's like, oh, we could use cameras to recognize, addresses and that can create. Recommendations, and you could do this and you could match it to a medical device. It was this huge, matching of technologies to markets.

[00:30:38] Daniel: what that took me to do is I worked on a bunch of dumb startups and they all failed, but I went to go to the design world One thing that I think surprises people is the two biggest cultural drivers for me? And the way I operate and the way I think about doing science, it was working in a toy lab and it's getting choked out in pajamas and juujitsu on a regular basis.

[00:30:54] Daniel: Right? and I actually think both, have a lot of beauty to them, and importance. so it's very funny to think about, working in a toy lab the modus opera operandi, there was rapid prototyping. And the spirit was good ideas, float bad ideas sink.

[00:31:09] Daniel: So you, focus on the things that float. You don't need to beat a bad idea to death. we made one app with Elmo that went, to number one in four categories and it was there for many years. So , we built a really successful product. , that was the result of a year of 50 different, we started with potty training and we just kept building things, putting in front of kids and families.

[00:31:28] Daniel: Then kept burning it to the ground, starting back up. So in the product design world, you build to grow, it was a free prototype that gave us the insight to make something. Same thing with my iq by the way. We had a really clear idea. We're gonna use the telemetry data on phones to track mileage that people are driving super unsexy topic it really matched people's need.

[00:31:46] Daniel: It took us six iterations before we found the real way of matching people and then taking it off so we need to take for granted, what made computer science so good is that you have the ability to scale things overnight instantly. what does this mean for biology and operating in, biology? Well, one, I think there's a playfulness, I hope there's a playfulness that you hear that I took from my IDEO days and my toy lab days of just trying stuff, The really great biologists that I've met are also super playful, Hey, let's just try this, do this. I was taking this idea of prototyping from the design world and I was trying to understand how I mapped that into experimental biology. so Sam Rodriguez, who now runs Future House and is just a super mega genius. runs one of the coolest hubs of AI and science I've seen.

[00:32:28] Daniel: it was him who this conversation, in a hallway outside the lab, where we were of sharing our knowledge where I was like, ah, I'm this arrogant, quasi successful tech bro. And he is this physics guy getting into biology. But he was really good, really, really good at prototyping.

[00:32:42] Daniel: And what I realized is that he prototypes to kill, right? I love that in the design world, you prototype to grow and in science you prototype to kill. and I had this moment I really credit Sam for coaching me into this and seeing this.

[00:32:55] Daniel: And there was this one day where I thought, oh, I've got this idea that we can, barcode brains using ribosomes and we're gonna engineer ribosomal RNA and it's gonna go everywhere. comes Sam's voice in my head, like, what is the cheapest way? To possibly check this. And so for a $50 probe, dumped it on some cells, saw that it was never gonna spread well enough.

[00:33:13] Daniel: I was like, okay, done a $50 experiment, just saving six months. Thank you, Sam. so I think with science, you start as a junior scientist with no ideas or you start with really dumb ideas and then you burn them to the ground. ' cause all of your first ideas are dumb, And then when you get on the other side of it, like your next phase is you have too many ideas.

[00:33:31] Daniel: There's all these things you could do. And I think that's where this idea of prototyping really fast to kill is what separates people from being good to great. what we do now, I would say how that now takes into what we do at Home World is I take this idea of how do you prototype rapidly?

[00:33:45] Daniel: And for a lot of stuff that is one day gonna scale to anything that matters. You can do a paper prototype before you even start, And a paper prototype is if you want to build something from mining. Just to pick up that example, which, 'cause I think it's a good one because mines are so complex.

[00:33:59] Daniel: if you can't tell me where in the mine industry that your thing's gonna slot into, just stop

[00:34:04] Daniel: or pause,

[00:34:05] Daniel: right? it's an Excel prototype. It's a paper prototype. you don't even need to order jeans. but not just to whine about this, this is actually something we're doing at home world, Which is that everyone feels the need and the urgency to figure out onshore metals in America, So a lot of people are looking at it, a lot of people reading, DARPA RFPs and all that stuff. our way of helping is we are making the scaffold for that paper prototype. So maybe by the time this comes out, or maybe a week later, we've been working on open source financial models for biology in copper.

[00:34:34] Daniel: this is the difference between a rare earth mine and a copper. Mine is night and day, so we can't make it. the everything for everyone is the nothing for nobody. So we're starting really, really small quote unquote. Jamie and Jesse are working on this.

[00:34:45] Daniel: Please don't kill me for calling it small. but we're making a financial model and the idea of that is that you can make a paper prototype of your tech today because the worst thing you could do is make something really, really hard that has

[00:34:57] Daniel: zero value.

[00:34:57] Erum: Yeah.

[00:34:58] Karl: Yeah. And,

[00:34:58] Karl: just so our listeners know, copper mining traditionally involves a fair amount of biology. So it's not like, we're gonna go into copper mines and suddenly introduce something that isn't already there. potentially what we're looking at is making the biological processes more efficient.

[00:35:12] Erum: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's like 20% right now is a bio leach and I know there's a company that's spinning out a Rio Tinto called Newton, N-U-T-O-N, that's looking to have 50% of their copper come from bio leaching, and they're just focusing on the biology of it, which is really interesting. but I love this idea of prototype to kill.

[00:35:32] Erum: I had, met with Glen Mera, she's the director of Bio Labs at NYU Langone. and we were set an event and she was talking about it would be so cool to have, shared data sets of failure. ' cause, there's culture of success, success, this is the data that made the successful outcome.

[00:35:47] Erum: But that failed data set is equally as valuable for people that might be going down that same path, but maybe they would not because they knew that experiment would fail anyway. So it's, if anyone out there is working on failure, we want you on the

[00:36:01] Erum: pod.

[00:36:02] Karl: Yeah, history of failure I think we should do an episode. This is like, symbio fails or biotech fails. So if you're an expert and you can give us a long list of 'em, we wanna talk to you because I think it would

[00:36:15] Karl: make for a great episode.

[00:36:17] Erum: Yeah.

[00:36:17] Daniel: There's a very good essay written by Devon Stork called When to Quit,

[00:36:21] Erum: Yeah.

[00:36:22] Daniel: I think is a good marching order, especially for younger, biologists.

[00:36:27] Karl: I know we're getting close to the hour, so I wanna be very mindful of your time, our time. I feel like we keep talking all day. you're supporting these really interesting climate positive technologies what are some of the more exciting things that you can share, in your network or outside of it that could fundamentally change how we interact with the planet?

[00:36:46] Karl: I mean, you gave such an elegant way of us thinking about how to work with biology and not confining it to, steel reactors.

[00:36:54] Daniel: so a couple things immediately come to mind. one, I think there's this frontier work that's coming.

[00:36:58] Daniel: one of my early provocations in starting home world was to rethink chemical manufacturing that can fit in your hand, right? And this actually goes all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, It's like you can do atomically precise, infinitely scalable. What is the chemical manufacturing plant to the future look like?

[00:37:12] Daniel: It could fit in your hand. You maybe you have the arithmetic logical unit, which is the A l, the A LU that sits inside computers. Could you just have things that they click together and tiny little things and have flow cells doing chemistry and all that. but a lot of the things that you do that are relevant for chemistry, manufacturing.

[00:37:28] Daniel: Operate in regimes that life would never exist in. ? so the term here is organic solvents, which is if you drop a cell in it, it shreds the cell immediately. , and one of our, recipients of our first round of garden grants, is a wonderful human named Samuel Thompson. , don't mean to pitch our own book, but we had a, really fun, podcast with him. and he is got this whole beautiful, view of the way he does science is like identity driven science. he puts his queerness and his identity into the work and it's so awesome. But when we got a grant proposal, media's like, we're gonna fill that.

[00:37:57] Daniel: It's just so well, and it's basically how do you make proteins operate where life can't, so it turns out this is an idea that's been around biology since the eighties. can you make proteins fold where there's not water? Or there's very, very little water and, this is what his work is doing, and it's had to make foundational tools to do it.

[00:38:13] Daniel: This is one of those coolest situations where now you're taking atomically precise tools from biology and you're putting it in inhospitable places where there is no life. maybe this is a spot where the river can run straight. so really, really excited by that. another recipient of garden grants is, uh, Nu uh. Ah, I'm talking my own book. I don't mean to also had her on the podcast, but she's this, protein engineering leader, who had this wild idea that she can express sweet proteins, , on yeast and so can you make yeast multiple flavors. And it's this really cool example of cutting, cutting, cutting edge.

[00:38:43] Daniel: Approach engineering done in a really fun, playful way. If you hear her story, she's like, I was making my husband eat this yeast outta a Falcon tube. And, that's what we want. so I think those are some of the examples there. I think the provocation that I would really push on is the importance of thinking about the pollution space too, because there's things that we try to force biology to solve that maybe they're not best for.

[00:39:04] Daniel: I think it's really worth owning that, if you can do a thermo chemistry, do a thermo chemistry. you can't just shove bio 'cause it's cool. When are the situations where you're inherently in a biological problem, so a biological solution might actually be best.

[00:39:17] Daniel: the idea porn, to take us back into that cringey phrase that we were using earlier, for me was every animal, every single cell organism in in the planet has some sort of thing that life didn't make inside it now, We've got some PFAS, we've got some microplasty, we've got some of that.

[00:39:31] Daniel: so can you engineer the resilience. To these things. I think this has importance. So we have a pollution program now, and the woman who's running it is Sarah Daniels. She's amazing. She worked, she did her PhD in this space. And because it was such an underfunded, underappreciated spot at the time, there's no work to continue that on, A lot happens in the past few years. This is what Home World tries to do, is to try rally the support. I almost created a company in this space in 2022, but then I realized that it just wasn't gonna work on a VC timeline. so now we get to support it from the nonprofit, from institute level thinking.

[00:40:00] Daniel: so that's one area where how can you start really creating the field to think about, hey, all these things in the world are either attackable, we can either get rid of them in C or we can engineer the resilience against 'em. And I love that space. I'm gonna throttle myself here. Happy to go to

[00:40:15] Erum: Yeah,

[00:40:15] Daniel: if that topic is interesting.

[00:40:17] Erum: I love that concept, the institute just thinking of it that way versus separate from the actual problem. but since we're wrapping up, I do have one question that's gonna be a nice wrap up question and you touched on a little bit, but. If you were to start a company, let's say down the line, I know you thought about this one you just mentioned, but what would it be?

[00:40:34] Erum: And then the second part of the question is, how can people engage with home world? we know that there's a variety of ways, but let's collect our audiences, let's collect our community together because we all need to be

[00:40:44] Erum: working together.

[00:40:46] Daniel: Yeah. the two spaces, that I'm most interested in is platforms that can treat diseases caused by pollution, as an engineerable task. current read is it is not a VC backable concept yet. I think the space of this subclinical toxicology is probably the buzzword for it.

[00:41:07] Daniel: it's just missing the foundations that gave us immuno onc. what's missing, the foundations that gave us this, neuroscience and the cancer atlas, all those things. They were based on huge open data sets. The tumor atlas, the Allen brain atlas, like all these things.

[00:41:20] Daniel: so I think to really treat molecular up tools for biological resilience and curing disease by pollution, it's missing a lot of data sets. that is one thing I'm hoping home world can do and in the future, yeah, I would love to be. Healing people, that have been made sick by chemicals.

[00:41:37] Daniel: the other side of the human health is the brownfield. So there's a lot of mines in the US The people will not take a single atom off that site because as soon as you do, you assume the liability of a bunch of environmental disaster. so to be able to be that person who's like, I'm not afraid of that.

[00:41:52] Daniel: I'll take an A off that. I think is gonna be really exciting. something we're working on at Home World last year was helping people do the economic thinking around your science early was something that we worked on using AI for techno economic analysis.

[00:42:05] Daniel: So the vision there was that you can read any paper and immediately create an at the scaffold for how somebody would write the economic model of what it would look like in a pilot. we did that for a year, actually, finally, that blog post is coming out in the work. And then the result of that was one of the people that worked on that project, created a company.

[00:42:23] Daniel: so that's Jesse Lou created a company called Conductor. using artificial intelligence to do techno economic analysis, thinking for early stage startups. think the provocation is that if AI can do something for free. Can you just do it preemptively for all the idea space in bio?

[00:42:39] Daniel: and the short answer is kind of, that's gonna be low quality, and I think that's useful. But then there's also people who have something in hand and need to think about what that might be to deploy. And I think that's what Jesse's doing so well at, conductor Labs.

[00:42:51] Karl: I love that. Yeah, I love that. Okay. I think we wanna check it out because that's something our clients are looking for.

[00:42:56] Erum: Yeah.

[00:42:56] Karl: of our clients.

[00:42:57] Erum: Yeah. I sat in on, your recording with, , Jesse, when you guys are doing your client biotech podcast, which we'll put that in the show notes when that goes live. But it was incredible. He's so smart. I've met him a couple times it was so thorough, but also so grounded.

[00:43:12] Erum: the reality of entrepreneurship when it comes to developing, biological applications that people miss. But even if it's not perfect, it's a start and it helps you start thinking of whether the economics behind the biology. And then that's the thing with ai, it's not gonna tell you everything perfectly, but it could help you get there.

[00:43:29] Erum: And you have to also, participate, you have to give it some information, take some information out. That's the two-way street. and when you have that iterative cycle, then you'll get something, pretty decent. but. can we do like a Joe Rogan two hour episode? Do you guys have like

[00:43:43] Karl: Hi, Lex Friedman. Three and a half, four hours.

[00:43:46] Erum: let's do it.

[00:43:47] Erum: but

[00:43:47] Erum: thank you so

[00:43:48] Erum: much, Dan.

[00:43:49] Karl: Yeah, we've, we've never, we've never done it. Daniel. You might be the one where we're like, welcome to this special episode of Grow Everything. We've got Daniel Goodwin

[00:43:58] Erum: yeah. Cozy up. Grab your tea. This is gonna be a wonderful evening.

[00:44:02] Daniel: we hope you hit some

[00:44:03] Erum: Yeah.

[00:44:03] Erum: Or if you're running, you're doing a marathon practice, you know? Awesome. Well thanks so much for coming on the Grow Everything podcast. This has been a real treat. so much information. We loved having you on.

[00:44:15] Karl: Absolutely.

[00:44:17] Daniel: you.

[00:44:18] Karl: Yeah.

[00:44:18] Erum: Nice.

[00:44:18] Karl: We're gonna have you on

[00:44:19] Karl: again. You will become a regular. Thank you so.