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Episode 9 - Sarah Richardson
122 Plays2 years ago
Sarah Richardson is a co-founder and CEO of MicroByre, a biotech company that specializes in domesticating bacteria. A computational and molecular biologist, Sarah earned a BS in Biology at the University of Maryland College Park and a PhD in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Sarah is, like, really, really smart. But she’s also really down to earth and she has a really unique story for how she got to where she is now. She had to take the road less traveled more than once. We talked kids, what it’s like to start a company that is breaking new ground, and how believing in yourself and your mission can be key to keeping you motivated when things get hard. You can find out more about the work of MicroByre by visiting their YouTube playlist.
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Transcript
Introduction to Sarah Richardson and Microbuyer
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to What's Next with Joel Krogman. That's me, I'm Joel Krogman. This is episode 9 and today on the show is my conversation with Sarah Richardson. Sarah Richardson is the co-founder and CEO of Microbuyer, which is a biotech company that specializes in domesticating bacteria.
00:00:30
Speaker
Sarah is a computational and molecular biologist. She earned a bachelor's of science in biology at the University of Maryland College Park and a PhD in human genetics and molecular biology from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
00:00:46
Speaker
Sarah is like way way smart way beyond my abilities to understand but she also is really down to earth and and what she's doing is really cool not just for the academic science nerds out there but for the lay person like myself
00:01:04
Speaker
I got to know Sarah last year while working on a project, documentary project featuring her as an innovator using science and data to fight climate change and the climate emergency that our planet is facing. While spending that time with her, I just got to know her as somebody who's incredibly talented and incredibly smart, but also very driven to have an impact. And it was really great to get the chance to talk to her for the podcast.
00:01:31
Speaker
So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Sarah Richardson.
Delegation and Personal Challenges
00:01:42
Speaker
Hey, Sarah. Oh, hi. How are you? I'm all right. How are you? I'm doing good. I'm doing really good. Thanks for agreeing to do this. Oh, no. No, thank you for arranging everything with Conwall. Oh, she was great. She helped out a lot.
00:01:59
Speaker
She is a massive get for me because I'm, I just drown in the email. And as soon as I let her, as I delegated to her, which is first time in my life, having somebody else look through my email, yeah, things started getting better. That's great. I remember when we were working with you last year, she was just starting, I think. Yep. That was August, right? Yep. Yep. She was brand new.
00:02:22
Speaker
She's taken over a lot of stuff. She jumps on grenades for me. I'm like, oh, I can do that for you. She's like, no, series, I'll do that. Why would you volunteer for that? She's perfect. That's great. That's great. Was that a hard transition delegating that level of detail in your life or that level of personal detail?
00:02:40
Speaker
Some of it was easy because it's stuff I know I'm bad at and wasn't paying enough attention to. Things like some of the budgets for the office, things like, you know, making sure there's snacks around and decorations. But some of it, yeah, it's not that I don't trust her. It's just I'm not used to apportioning my time where
00:03:01
Speaker
someone else is gonna go through my inbox and so when we sat down to delegate, we started going through my inbox so we could start talking about what has to happen with each kind of email and she's like, why are you subscribed to all these things? Maybe you shouldn't be getting these emails and you have control over that. Yeah, it's a process and she's gentle but firm about it. Yeah, she's really great. She's very professional. That's cool. I think for me, I would,
00:03:28
Speaker
The way that I typically go about solving my time management and the ways in which I manage all these different things that I'm trying to do would be I'd be like, I don't want anybody to know all the corners that I cut and the shortcuts I take.
00:03:46
Speaker
and how much I don't know what I'm doing. I still have my private space. So there's that, like all this stuff I have to do at home. Like we just bought a house and I have to take the house we're living in, which is a duplex and turn it into rental properties. Oh, nice. But the new house needs like asbestos and HVAC and wiring and everything.
00:04:07
Speaker
So my husband's handling that, but I have to handle the duplex and my mother died and I have to handle her house in Baltimore. Oh no, I'm so sorry to hear that. I could definitely use an executive assistant at home. Right. Especially with the 19 month old who is his own just special sphere of every day. What the hell? Taking over the expectation that they're the center of the universe.
00:04:31
Speaker
and very good at enforcing that too. He's like, you're gonna pay attention right now or stuff is bad stuff is about to happen. I remember that. Our youngest is five and he's still kind of that way. But hopefully a little easier to entertain himself right now, right? Yes. Yeah, no, definitely. And we almost lean into that a little too much. Like, there's certain things that work in a second, like a Nintendo game or whatever.
00:04:58
Speaker
No, we have these unboxing videos where it's just a dude playing with different brands of firetruck, ambulance, police, helicopter, airplane, whatever. He's got Duplo, he's got Revel, he's got Rotter, and there's no dialogue or anything. It's just, oh, no, somebody hit a pedestrian, and then the ambulance comes, and then he starts recreating those with his toys, but he doesn't have an ambulance, so that's a problem. He just goes, uh-oh, uh-oh. Oh, my gosh.
00:05:26
Speaker
That's great. Well, that's good that he's still like in the world of imaginative play and not just completely zoning out on a screen yet. No, no, he interacts with the TV for that. He's like tractor digger. He loves the diggers. So he tells us what's happening on the screen. He did just start cussing where I couldn't figure out what word it was. But he's trying to say bridge for one of his Duplo box. And he says, bitch, his frog. I figured it out as a frog. He goes, fuck.
00:05:53
Speaker
That's perfect. Our youngest right now thinks that the F word is bitter because he's not quite clear on his like letters and all that stuff yet. So he's just constantly saying bitter all the time. Dropping F bombs. He feels so grown up. We're like, no problem. No one else has
Mission of Microbuyer: Domestication of Bacteria
00:06:14
Speaker
any idea what you think you're saying. Nice hack. That's a good hack.
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Sarah, for joining me for this conversation. I've been looking forward to it for a while. No worries. I'm flattered. Okay. So just to provide a little context for the listener, you are the founder and CEO of Microbuyer. And Microbuyer is a biotech startup that is domesticating bacteria.
00:06:39
Speaker
Yes, I have two co-founders. Okay, great. So you are a co-founder and CEO of Microbuyer. Okay, great. It's safe to assume that the average listener has a higher intelligence than I do. But still, I think that what you do has a certain degree of complexity and nuance to it.
00:06:58
Speaker
deals in a realm that people just don't generally have a whole lot of knowledge about. So I'm just curious if you could give us, if we could start with you just giving us sort of like a high level, what does that actually mean, a biotech startup that is domesticating bacteria? Like what's the bigger vision that you're pursuing there? Sure. One of the reasons I like the analogy, domestication, which is not really analogy, it's actually what we're doing.
00:07:25
Speaker
But it mirrors a process that people have been learning about since they were children. All of the animals we teach our children, what sounds they make, all the books and things, it's cows and pigs and ducks and dogs and cats. These are all domesticated animals. And we understand, all people understand that domesticated animals are descended from wild animals.
00:07:49
Speaker
And the process is sort of intuitive. We understand selection, where wolves were sort of over time selected for friendliness, for ability to work with people for their dietary preferences until we end up with a golden retriever.
00:08:05
Speaker
So people also understand that domesticates are safer than the wild animals. So this is a mind space people really truly understand, which is why I like to use it to segue into microbiology. So they understand that process. That is the same thing we're doing with bacteria. The
00:08:26
Speaker
domestication of our plant life, of our livestock. This is the best work, the biggest work of bioengineering that has happened in human history. Domestication means you say to an organism, I will take care of you. I will change the way my society works. I will change the way my life works. I will change my structures, how I build things, how I design my cities to accommodate you. And in return,
00:08:55
Speaker
you will shed your natural defenses. You don't need to color your coats anymore for camouflage. You don't need to grow horns anymore for defense. You don't have to make certain toxins to defend yourself anymore. So you're going to become more and more dependent on me and you're going to spend all of that energy you would have spent defending yourself on specializing in that trait I picked you for.
00:09:20
Speaker
You're gonna make more meat, you're gonna make more milk, you're gonna make more nutty flesh in your fruit, and I promise to protect you. That is the deal for domestication, and people get that. With bacteria, we're doing the same thing. We say, which bacteria are doing something that could be super useful? They're doing it for themselves. They have a lot of other stuff going on that distracts them from doing too much of it, from specializing in it, because in the wild, you have to be really good at a bunch of stuff.
00:09:49
Speaker
And we make a deal with them. We say, hey, come into the laboratory and we're going to protect you. We're going to make it so you don't have to compete with other bacteria for food. We're going to make it so you're not really predated on by viruses. And you are going to spend that extra energy with our guidance, specializing in that function that we liked you for. And over time and with genetic modifications that we do on purpose, they'll get better and better at it. And then they'll be eligible.
00:10:18
Speaker
to go into industry so that they can be grown at massive volumes and fermenters to do that function. It could be making a chemical. It could be fixing nitrogen in the soil for plants. It could be detoxifying contaminated soil. It could be helping with mining efforts. There's bacteria doing all of those things right now. And what microbiome does is intensify and make more rapid the process of them getting really good.
00:10:47
Speaker
You think that works as an explanation? Yeah, I do. I think that's awesome. That kind of leads me into my next question, which is, you're kind of at the forefront of this, right? There's not necessarily a whole lot of other organizations or entities going quite to the depth or to the degree that you are in terms of looking broadly at bacteria and what bacteria can do for us as humans. There aren't too many. A lot of focus has been on a couple bacteria.
00:11:16
Speaker
So there's a lot of industry that involves bacteria. You could call it domestication, how it's worked. For instance, cheese making, they use bacteria. They do selection, you know, over time it's, this is tastier than that one. So let's keep using that culture.
00:11:32
Speaker
What they're not doing is direct genetic modification. They don't add or remove DNA in a deliberate manner. They're doing what we would call artificial selection. There are massive chemical fermentations. Say, Archer Daniels Midland or a Genomoto, they make amino acids using a bacteria called Coronobacterium.
00:11:54
Speaker
A lot of our antibiotics and a lot of medicines, even immunosuppressants for organ transplant patients are made in bacteria, but those are not necessarily directly genetically edited. So a lot of companies are working with bacteria, care about bacteria, but yeah, they haven't brought together these tools or this focus on bringing new bacteria in because all the ones that you could
00:12:22
Speaker
sort of artificially select to be profitable, they've come in. The next step requires a little more. And yeah, micro buyer, we're not quite alone, but we think we are pretty far ahead. Okay. And the idea then is to replace some of these current systems that we use to get chemicals and things like that, right? That rely on petroleum and oil that ultimately kind of further down the chain have a more harmful effect on the environment.
Environmental Impact of Bacteria
00:12:50
Speaker
That's the idea with chemicals definitely trying to interrupt the petrochemical chain. We used to make most of our chemicals from biomass, but the availability of subsidized petroleum really changed the economics and encouraged us to switch. So there's places we can switch back. The rub here is no one pays a green premium.
00:13:13
Speaker
People are not going to pay more to save the planet unfortunately. So as we build up a biomanufacturing infrastructure that needs to be subsidized the way petroleum was subsidized to motivate that and in the meantime we have to pick chemicals bacteria can make that are cheaper than oil to provide that
00:13:34
Speaker
competitive advantage. I don't love that, but that is a fact of the world. So yes, petroleum replacement to reduce our dependence on oil. There's also ways we can reduce carbon emissions with bacteria. If you think about it, a lot of our anthropogenic, our man-made carbon emissions are actually bacteria made.
00:14:01
Speaker
A lot of them are actually bacteria made. So we grow many, many, many cows and the methane coming from the cows is not coming from the cows, it's coming from the bacteria in their guts. So our livestock, the reason we have so many is because we're doing it, but the real effect is caused by bacteria. Same with wastewater processing, same with agricultural remnants when they harvest, but they leave pieces of the plants on the field and they rot. Whenever something's rotting,
00:14:31
Speaker
Bacteria are eating it. We're just providing more opportunities for bacteria to produce methane and carbon dioxide. So something we can do is to gather that biomass, to have an incentive to gather that biomass, to do something else with it, to get the bacteria to eat it, to produce medicine, to produce chemicals, to produce the other things that we might need. We can redirect carbon emissions that way.
00:14:56
Speaker
and we can do bioremediation with them as well. So that's more of an environmental and less of a climate impact, but bacteria will break down things in oil spills. They will do things like pull metal. They're in great use in mining because bacteria are very good about changing the oxidation states of metal so they can make mining easier.
00:15:21
Speaker
bacteria run this planet. There are so many really important processes that keep us alive that they're involved in. Most of the oxygen on the planet comes from bacteria in the ocean. That should be a motivation to help people keep the oceans healthy. Right. Because people like to breathe.
00:15:40
Speaker
The trees are important, but they're not doing it all alone. So it's very important that we, one, become more aware of the importance of microbes, and two, that companies continue to broaden their efforts and bringing more of them on board in this effort to remediate climate change and have a better impact on our environment.
00:16:03
Speaker
One of the things I'd really like to get into I'm really curious about with your story is you're taking a position sort of with your work and what you're doing as a
00:16:11
Speaker
disrupting or kind of going against the grain of what is conventional ways of doing things. And history is made by people who think that way. There was no conventional path to getting to what you're doing now. And you had to take a position of really believing that what was inside of you, this vision of what you thought could be possible and what you thought was right and should be done and investigated was worth pursuing and worth risking some things for.
00:16:41
Speaker
So I'm really curious about where that comes from. I think a lot of my obstreperousness can go back to a thing my father said to me constantly while I was growing up. And he said, why do you always have to learn the hard way?
00:16:55
Speaker
His phrase for me, why do you always have to learn the hard way? And I think that ends up with me just needing it proved. I just needed to see it for myself. Not everything. There are things where, yes, I can accept other people's answer for it. But when people don't have an answer or their explanation ends up being, well, that's how it's always been.
00:17:20
Speaker
that's just how we do it. If that is as deep as we can get to why something is happening, that bothers me. That means there's a broken link somewhere where we haven't, we've lost some thread of information about why things are the way they are and therefore there might be a chance that they shouldn't be this way.
00:17:42
Speaker
Or there is a chance to improve it because we've forgotten something about the optimum or what's possible. So it's worth checking. But I grew up in West Baltimore. So I went to a school in Baltimore, University of Maryland College Park. So I didn't stray very far. About an hour down 95 is where I went to school.
00:18:07
Speaker
I majored in cell biology and molecular genetics. So that was, I think, a surprise to some people because they thought I was going to major in computer science. Where did your interest in science come from in general? Well, it probably is Star Trek, science fiction, not gonna lie. Very basic. Yeah, yeah. I remember watching the original series. You know, when you're a kid, it doesn't look cheesy at all. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I remember asking my father if they can explain how a dilithium
00:18:35
Speaker
you know, warp engine works. Why can't we just build one? Why don't we have it now? And he tells me a science fiction. They're making it up. Yeah. They're making up science. But that didn't turn me off from it. I just really loved the, especially in Star Trek, the hopefulness of it, that they were actually not going out for war. They were going out to find new things and to be at the frontier, pioneer and bring it back and try to be peaceful everywhere. I mean, now it does sound a little
00:19:03
Speaker
cheesy, campy. I mean, Star Trek was really a political show. It was not really a science or adventure show, but it was a political show where the centerpieces and motivations were about diplomacy and science discovery. So I really liked that. And I love the idea of meeting aliens because there's so many ways for them to be different. And yeah, no, I'm never going to meet an alien, but you couldn't tell me that then.
00:19:27
Speaker
Yeah. I didn't want to be an astronaut though. The real heroes on Star Trek, the heroes. It was not Captain Kirk. It was not Captain Picard, who was much calmer. It was not Cisco or Janeway. I'm dating myself. Those are my Star Trek. I remember all those characters. It was their scientists. It was their doctors. It was McCoy figuring out the cure at the last minute.
00:19:50
Speaker
It was Jordy LaForge fixing the engines. It was Scotty getting it done, you know, under budget in a much shorter time than he promised. Yes. They are the ones who pulled the bacon out of the fire every single time. They had to figure out something on the fly. They had to make something work. Taping stuff together, yeah. Yes. They were my heroes. I didn't really want to be the captain. That seemed like a lot of work, a lot of responsibility, but also nowhere near as much glamor or acclaim as being the one who figured out the alien virus.
00:20:19
Speaker
who fixed the engine with just that much time to spare. So the captain got them into trouble and the scientists and engineers got them out. That was what was cool to me as well. You said that just accepting because I say that's the answer and that wasn't satisfactory for you. It's never satisfactory. Did you have some experiences as a kid where their authority figures or whatever just said, you have to listen to what I'm saying and it didn't make sense to you? Or where did that come from for you?
00:20:48
Speaker
what you were born with, or did you have some experiences that really solidified that viewpoint? It wasn't my parents, to be clear. My father, he was a stay-at-home dad for a lot of the time, and that was just his joy to indulge my siblings and I with as many books as we could take, discussions. So he would never, in the end, say, oh, that's just how it is, or he would say, I don't know.
00:21:14
Speaker
And I respect that. I still respect it. And everybody just saying, I don't know. I try to say it to people. I can't know everything. I believe in ecosystems. We all have to know different things in order to make this work. So my father would just say, I don't know. But yeah, you go to school and
00:21:30
Speaker
teachers may just not have time for you. They might not know, but they don't want to dilute their authority by admitting that they can't be an authority on everything. So I, I don't remember doing this, but I'm told, my parents told me in grade school, uh, they'd get called in because I was demanding more or a one, one egregious thing that I started kindergarten at five, but my father had already taught me to read. I'd been reading for a couple of years. Oh, wow.
00:21:59
Speaker
and he didn't realize that was gonna be a problem or that that was unusual. So my classmates in kindergarten would always ask me to read things for them and I would read them anything, anything. They'd point at it and I would read it. This was a problem for the teacher because she would read us a book and you know how it is. You read to children, you don't necessarily read everything, but you show them the pictures. She would turn the book around to show the pictures and I would say that's not what that said.
00:22:27
Speaker
So that I still have trouble with not being precise. Let's be accurate, let's be both precise and accurate. And sometimes that's not a smooth way to interact with people. So that started young too. I have that experience now with my youngest can't read, but my oldest can. We read books together and I'll often skip words that I don't really want in my youngest vocabulary. And then my oldest will quickly point out the words that I'm not saying.
00:22:56
Speaker
It's a joy to be able to read, but their solution for that was to skip me up a couple grades. So I ended up in the second grade. Oh, wow. Like you went, you went to second grade during your kindergarten year. Yeah. Yeah. I was five in the second grade. That's crazy. And you, so did you maintain that two year? Well, I switched schools after that year. Okay. And, uh, the new school, they were going to start me in the third grade and my father said, no.
00:23:22
Speaker
She's too small, physically small. She can probably keep up with the academics, but socially that's not where she is. So I did the second grade at the new school. So I was sixth in the second grade and then just stacked from there. So yeah, I graduated high school at like 15 and I remember I was in college and I was the only one in my friend group who was not legal to drink.
00:23:47
Speaker
But that didn't stop you, I'm sure. It did for a while. I was kind of lawful good. I was lawful good for a while. I was a good kid. I respected that. Well, I don't know if I was a good kid, but I was not a curfew breaker. I didn't drive until grad school. I didn't have a license.
Building Confidence and Collaboration in Science
00:24:05
Speaker
Oh, until grad school. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. But you, you expected the authorities. For some things I think I understood there's public good, there's public safety, there's, you know, personal safety. Those were not rules I tended to question. It seemed obvious why you don't run red lights or, you know, once it's explained like, yeah, I don't need to test that one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That one makes sense.
00:24:25
Speaker
So no, I was pretty chill as a kid and no, I wasn't drinking, especially I wanted to go to graduate school and I didn't want to get in trouble for underage drinking. It didn't seem like a good bet. I'm not going to say I didn't have some, but I was not out there with a fake ID. I was so boring. It wasn't your main scene. Okay. No. The sense I'm getting is you had a pretty good sense of who you were and the self-confidence that comes along with that.
00:24:52
Speaker
I don't want to give the impression I was all self-confident. What was your sense of yourself as you grew up? I get that impression from you now that there's a belief in who you are and what you're doing and that you get energy from and helps you as you do what you have to do. I believe in this mission, yes, the reason I'm doing it because starting a company isn't necessarily easier fun or it wasn't for me. Yeah, you're the captain now.
00:25:22
Speaker
And I have a great crew, just really passionate, competent people that are taking a chance on this because they also believe in the vision. So yes, I have had to believe in adopt a position of confidence. It's forced me to be confident about the things that I believe. But getting to that spot, especially going through graduate school, graduate school can be a really drudging experience of realizing how little you know about everything.
00:25:52
Speaker
And being in an environment where people have a great need to be an authority on everything. So there's the way you're supposed to be, which is a humble supplicant to the pursuit of knowledge, and the way you have to be as a more senior academic, which is professing.
00:26:15
Speaker
And not every professor will admit when they don't know something or will expand their horizons. Sometimes they can't, you know, the structure of academia is very weird and nothing is, is guaranteed to instill in you a sense of imposter syndrome.
00:26:32
Speaker
than academia. Yeah. It is just, it's really tough. So I didn't get a good dose of that in undergrad and undergrad you tend to be, yeah, that's the stereotype is you don't know what you don't know. And you're like, I can do anything. You enter graduate school and they'll slap that out of you real quick. You're surrounded by very smart people of varying degrees of self-confidence themselves, whether or not they are expressing that self-confidence in a healthy way or lack of self-confidence, it varies.
00:27:00
Speaker
but you're surrounded by very smart very motivated people and it's tough it can be tough so yeah beginning to think that i had a different idea than my advisors about what was important to do that process of going from so i'd started working for one of my advisors when i was in high school i got lucky
00:27:21
Speaker
Found the one professor in town who was willing to take on high school students, you know Very very lucky there but that meant that I had started working with him when I was like 13 14 and I wasn't when I When I was in graduate school now
00:27:39
Speaker
I had a long history of thinking of him as an inviolate sense of authority, right? I needed him. He was so smart. He was brilliant. He ran this whole lab and he was, he was all of those things, but now I started to disagree with him. So who's wrong here, him or me, and this is supposed to be a part of the process of being an apprentice is being able to stand up and have your own domain to start to
00:28:06
Speaker
own and professing. But it's not necessarily something professors are good at is letting people split off gracefully. It's not something they necessarily expect. They have to have that own sense of confidence, which will butt up against yours. They're like, no, no, I'm right. I know what to do. And then I'm going, wait a minute. I've really focused on this one little thing and now I have a different idea. That will also sap your confidence. This person is so successful. They know so much. They've been doing it so much longer than you.
00:28:33
Speaker
So I had to sit on that for a year or two going, am I crazy? You were talking about disrupting or doing something very different. I found it terrifying because you'll think you're crazy and people will tell you that you're crazy. They will not hesitate to tell you that you're wrong. And the only thing that got me through it is me going, okay, prove it to me or let me prove it. It's not enough to say I'm wrong because no one's done it. It's not enough to say I'm wrong
00:29:02
Speaker
because you've never seen anyone do it or you don't think it can be done. That's not enough. We're supposed to be engineers. We're supposed to be scientists. We can set up tests. We can seek a minimum viable product. We can test this. So telling me, no one's ever done it. That's not enough. Telling me it can't be done.
00:29:19
Speaker
And you can't then provide a reason, a falsifiable reason or an evidence trail. That's what kept me going despite people going, this is crazy, or you can't do it, or no one can do it. Yeah.
00:29:33
Speaker
Well, that's so important that you had that because I, you know, just knowing myself and knowing lots of other people, you could just as easily have just accepted it. I guess I'm focused on the wrong thing here and I'm going to adjust and do what aligns more with what those who have gone before me think. I always had to learn the hard way. Yeah.
00:29:55
Speaker
I'm not always right. You know, I've busted out in some area and then gotten proven wrong. So I try to incorporate that as well, that it's not about me being right all the time. It is about falsifying something. I think the Silicon Valley phrases fail early, fail often. It's a good philosophy. I don't love to hand Silicon Valley a lot, but that one's good in engineering in particular. So I go looking, I ask people to help me
00:30:22
Speaker
prove to myself that I am wasting my time. That I ask them, has this been done before? Have you seen someone fail at it already? So I don't necessarily waste resources proving to myself that it can't be done. Yeah. When you approach it that way, your ego is out of the equation because you're not like, I need this to be proved right so that I can feel like I was right and be validated. I actually want to prove that this is wrong so that I can move on to the next thing.
00:30:51
Speaker
Everyone on the planet has limited resources and limited time. And we deserve to be spending our time and resources as best we can, as best as we can afford on the things that move our lives on the tracks that we want them to be on. And so I want to have an impact on climate. I believe that that's really, this is the only thing I can do with the way I've trained up. I can't say that climate was always my goal when I trained up this way, but the climate emergency,
00:31:19
Speaker
requires every hand on deck. We all have to be paying attention. We all have to be voting. We all have to be spending. We all have to be allocating resources to it in some way. We all have to pitch in.
00:31:31
Speaker
and I felt that the most important way I can pitch in, the most impactful way is to push on these bacteria. I really believe that. Everything else has to be done too. We need to electrify, we need to get better at recycling, wastewater, all kinds of things need to be done. This is what I can do. And therefore it's even more important that I don't get an ego about doing it my way, about not cooperating or about doing something just because I think it's right even if no one else has done it.
00:31:58
Speaker
It's not going to help us get to our goals if I get that involved. I'm not going to say I don't have ego about it. I love being right. I try to culture here. I try to have the culture be admitting when we're wrong. And I try to set that example for all my people. I will tell them, oh, I was wrong. You were right. Or let's test this. And as soon as we know which one is wrong or right, we will admit that and move on.
00:32:26
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. When you were in your graduate program working towards your PhD, you had a couple of experiences where you kind of had to say, like, I disagree with you and it sort of caused you to have to break paths and go a different direction, right? And find something new. But like, that's a big deal to decide to leave your PhD program and do something else. I wish it wasn't such a big deal, you know? Yeah.
00:32:50
Speaker
In academia, the number of people who can become a professor shrinks every year. So everyone entering, especially in STEM, but I think maybe especially in the English. It is so bone-crushingly, heart-destroyingly hard to become a professor.
00:33:13
Speaker
that there should be more normalization for them of either not finishing a PhD and going on to be worthy somewhere else or finishing the PhD and then not pursuing a professorship. And that's just, in my experience, not the reality. It depends on your program. Some programs are very much like, hey, we are putting out PhDs and master students and they're going to go into industry. But some of the very fancy programs and very fancy
00:33:42
Speaker
places that think very highly of themselves. That's not necessarily the expectation and it's very, very hard on people. But yeah, I was in disagreement enough. Here's my version of the story. I'm sure everyone who touched it might have a different way of the story, but I was just, I got in a lot of feedback too that what I was doing, they're like, oh, this isn't science.
Graduate School and Career Challenges
00:34:06
Speaker
And so I think grad school was a little harder for me because I wasn't really doing basic research.
00:34:11
Speaker
I was building tools, and they were tools that didn't exist anywhere else. They were tools for other people to do design and to pursue basic research, but I didn't have a hypothesis. I was leveraging other people's basic research to make tools, and I'm okay with that. I like being a tool builder. I think of myself as a bioengineer. I have a very different definition of what bioengineering is than an electrical engineer or a physicist might have about what bioengineering is.
00:34:41
Speaker
I didn't, I thought there were other places to use the tool than where my lab was using it. And I couldn't do that in that lab because appropriately they were focused on where they were going. Yeah. That's fine. That means it's time to go. But you know, I don't have that many social braces or politics or a bigger picture, right? That's the other thing I don't like about academia or life. You figure out how you should have done it after you've
00:35:08
Speaker
gone through it and burned a bridge or whatever. You learn the hard way, I learned the hard way. So I kind of walked into my advisor's office and basically was like, I quit and you can keep the PhD. And he was like, no, no, no, okay, it's time for you to go. Here's your PhD. That's how that happened. And I still tell grad students today that you can't necessarily rely on your advisor to be a mentor.
00:35:31
Speaker
A lot of them try and can be, but for them, there's a dissonance there where they need you to do stuff and they want you to be independent, but it's hard. It's hard. He let me go with the PhD, which I was prepared to walk away without. He said, you should be a professor. I said, never will never happen. We'll never do it. You can't make it.
00:35:56
Speaker
And I was invited to do a postdoctoral fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. So that's what I did. I moved out to California. I brought my dog and my guitars, two of my guitars, and I left my husband back in Baltimore. I didn't know you played guitar. That's cool. I brought two. I brought the one my father left me, and I brought a band guitar.
00:36:22
Speaker
So that's a funny story because my husband's always like, Oh, if you're going to get another guitar, two guitars must leave. Okay. You can't fill the house with two guitars. I entered a book collecting contest and the prize was a thousand bucks. And I told him, if I win, I am buying a banjo tar. It's a six string banjo. So it's tuned like a guitar. You play it like a guitar. You don't have to learn how to do banjo fingering, but it looks like a banjo. It sounds like a banjo. Neil Young has one. So I was going into stores like, Hey, can I buy a banjo? They're like a six string guitars.
00:36:52
Speaker
But Banjo was like, Neil Young has one. What other credentials do we need? So I did win the contest. What was the contest? I did get to banjo. It was a book collecting contest. I don't even know what that is. So this particular contest was collegiate book collecting contest. So they let all the grad students, all the college students submit a collection of books that they had and did not need to be like rare books in beautiful condition.
00:37:16
Speaker
it's about the theme. So you had to have, I think, 30 books or more in a theme, write an essay explaining the theme, then have a list of 10 books that you wanted to add to the theme. And there was some other list. It was like three parts. So I won first place in the graduate division. I think I was the only person whose book collection was not what they were studying. Okay.
00:37:41
Speaker
And my collection was oral histories of wars of the 20th century of American involvement. So oral histories of World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and all oral histories, only oral histories, so compilations of people telling their story in their own words. Are you especially interested in US history?
00:38:03
Speaker
I really, I do like history, but the oral histories were particularly compelling to me because it is like sitting at someone's knee and learning from their experience. But also both my grandfathers fought in World War II, or both of them were in the Pacific theater, but one was a black man and one was a white man. They had very different experiences and neither of them came home and talked about them.
00:38:29
Speaker
So my mother's father had came home with pictures and things, would not talk, especially to her as a girl child about it. And my father's father came home, pictures, different experience, but also would not talk to his son about it and then expected his son to go to Vietnam. And that was a very contentious experience.
00:38:51
Speaker
Experience for my father and his father. Yeah, but that means that you know I got curious World War two and I used to build the model airplanes of the Fighter jets for World War two or they weren't Jets yet That's right because I didn't care about the Jets Jets are an amazing engineering But I was very much captivated by the spit leather and rope just putting the bombers like the consolidated B-24 Liberator That was my jam
00:39:17
Speaker
Ploiesta. There's a book called Ploiesta. It's amazing. But I couldn't get from my parents or from their parents any description of what went on. So those oral histories, it's almost like having a grandfather who's willing to tell you how awful the war was. Yeah. Yeah. My grandfather is from Holland. He's Dutch. He passed away now and my grandmother as well. But they lived through occupation and my grandfather was captured by the Germans and
00:39:44
Speaker
was he was in the underground army in Holland and was being taken back to work camps and escaped off the train and and hid and lived in farmers fields for months and months and months making his way back to Holland and it's it's such so crazy that that history is not that far away and
00:39:59
Speaker
It is, and they don't owe it to tell us that, right? The trauma, the everything. It's really valuable when they're willing to share that with us. And so I'm grateful for everyone in those histories, because I would not, I think as an adult, especially as a kid, you know, you might be too ignorant.
00:40:16
Speaker
But I would never presume that it's anyone's job to educate us about the horrors of war or their experiences. So we have to be extra grateful when people are willing to commit those to the narrative so that we can try to learn from it. Yeah. And especially now that we know so much more about mental health and it's just so much more of an integrated conversation. Yeah. Right. Right.
00:40:40
Speaker
Yeah, my grandfather would ask him questions and when we were kids and he would just say, I can't answer that question for you or give you nightmares. That kind of stuff. They're trying to protect us too. But that's the emotional labor I've become a lot more aware of that. Society is advancing. They're getting better about integrating the experiences of many people.
00:41:03
Speaker
But one of the things that can happen is, and we ask people to perform for us for our own education. We're like, hey, can you tell us about times you've been discriminated against? Can you tell us about times where, you know, your identity was, and so we can be educated. It's like, no, you're asking them to do emotional labor for something that doesn't need to be re-explained. And when you ask them, well, what can we do to make your life better or to stop discrimination?
00:41:30
Speaker
Well, we already told you that. We told you that back in the movie Philadelphia, right? This has been going on for yonks. And so that continuing to ask the people who are being oppressed about to do emotional labor, that's something I've become a lot more aware of. Yeah, I won't do those kinds of discussions. Yeah, yeah. I won't sit on those kinds of panels.
00:41:56
Speaker
It's not more, but you do have to relive some things or it's just not, it's not okay to ask people to do that.
00:42:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So you went to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. You're still kind of finding your path about what you want to do. But there's many more roadblocks ahead for you. There's always this opportunity to quit, right? Yeah. The question of when does something become too hard? No one can answer that question for you. For you, the answer was not yet. Well. Or was it?
00:42:29
Speaker
I might flip that. So as a postdoctoral fellow, you still have an advisor. You're still part of a lab, and that lab has a greater mission. And when I went, I told them I don't want to work on X and Y.
00:42:46
Speaker
I don't believe in that. I believe we need to expand and I won't come if that's what you're expecting. So let's be clear. Let's not waste each other's time." And they're like, no, no, no, no. You can come. But when I got there, that isn't the trajectory it was taking. And what was happening was it wasn't
00:43:09
Speaker
I was getting ill doing work I hated. That's what was happening. And so I quit the first post-doc, at least. It was a high-pressure environment, too. So there was a lot of, I think, some unreasonable expectations. And some of it was not very healthy for me or other people. So quitting Spree, I just quit. I walked into his office and said, I'm out.
00:43:39
Speaker
We had that conversation. He did not take it as well as my graduate school professor anywhere near as well. And then his boss called me and said, oh, come to my lab. And I said, to be clear, I will not be working on X and Y. And he's like, yeah, yeah, that's fine. So I went to that lab. I quit that one two years later. So what I had wanted to do was be a government scientist. I wanted to be an engineer and build tools.
00:44:06
Speaker
But I guess I'm not a mindless tool builder or I really needed the tools to be working towards something. I wanted to be part of an ecosystem where people were using the tools to fight climate change, to improve medicine, to remediate the environment. And what I saw them using the tools for or the tools they were asking me to make were not on that path. I couldn't see them being on that path. I saw no evidence that it was going to help.
00:44:33
Speaker
It was to use the other term of the phrase, it was academic. It was not going to have an impact in our lifetime is my opinion. So yeah, I quit both postdocs because I just, and that was when I was, I guess I can't do science. I guess I'm not going to have a path affecting technology here because I tried academia, it's not going to work. Can't be a professor. I tried the government and they are
00:45:00
Speaker
set this particular laboratory was set in a different path and I could not get the leverage or the experience to shift it. So I was like, I guess it's over. I tried. I'm going to have to find something else to do with my time. Cyber security. You kind of hit the end of your rope or what you've knew, knew what to do in order to explore what was next. Yeah, I thought I knew it was next and I kept thinking that we were all on the same page, but we just weren't. So there was a lot of currents above me, above my pay grade. There were just,
00:45:30
Speaker
Even at my pay grade or just with my advisors, I couldn't get them on board with it. They were still, as my first advisor was, going in different directions, needed to go in different directions, had a lot of momentum, and didn't have a lot of patience for me trying to branch out. And that I found a little upsetting in academia. It's not just them. Let me be clear. It wasn't like, these guys are the worst.
00:45:57
Speaker
It's more that it's difficult to test things that are risky. Academics are supposed to be rewarded for taking on risk, but structurally, in order to survive, you have to minimize your risk. Academia does not reward people for failing. There's no publication for, oh yeah, we tried this and it didn't work.
00:46:17
Speaker
So they tend to be very risk averse. And, you know, venture capitalists also tend to be risk averse. So in terms of innovating, it gets to be really hard to find the right mix of timing and people who are willing to say, OK, we might fail, but we got to try anyway. And I felt I naively was like, no, no, that's not how scientists work. They're like, let's falsify this. Let's do it. And absolutely the ones who are surviving, the ones who are
00:46:43
Speaker
getting a lot of grit, they are minimizing some of this risk. What you wanted to do is inherently risky because it was new and expensive.
00:46:53
Speaker
I didn't think it was, it's not very expensive. Like the lab we've set up here is basically the same lab other people have. We did put a lot more in robots. We put a lot more in codeys and people who write software and do data science and machine learning. So in terms of a molecular biology lab, it's got, it's weighted weirdly towards automation and software.
00:47:17
Speaker
But otherwise no it's more about discarding some biases that are built in and that's where you know i might be labeled disruptive is. I look at the field and where most of the academic effort is put in and where a lot of the industrial effort is put in and i say there's a lot of bias built in to guide them to make the decision to focus there.
00:47:41
Speaker
And what if we discard some of that bias? What is possible? And I was finding just headwinds where I was that the bias was basically taken as just obvious. It's not a bias, it's truth. That was their foundation that they stood on and they were not questioning
00:48:02
Speaker
the foundation and I, once I saw it, once I saw that there was no answer there for why that was the foundation or how it got there and people couldn't tell me how they picked it, that's when I knew somebody had to at least crack, try, we had to look. And in all the years since I left my postdoc, I have not, despite looking, been able to be dissuaded. There's been no evidence
00:48:30
Speaker
that what we're trying can't technically work. We're still facing risk. We're doing our business development. We're finding partners to commercialize what we're doing. There's always risk with the company. But my number one engine, the thing driving me was that, hey, the tech makes sense.
00:48:51
Speaker
There's always that risk when you're commercializing technology that you miss the market or the number, that there's lots of risk. But the technology, the technology is not crazy. So that's why that sort of gave you the confidence to continue moving forward.
00:49:07
Speaker
Yes. And when we recruited our first people, you know, I got co-founders, I recruited co-founders, the first people who go, okay, you're not totally crazy, but you need our help.
Building a Diverse Team at Microbuyer
00:49:17
Speaker
That's the first rule of starting a company is don't do it. The second rule of starting a company is co-found. Find co-founders as soon as possible and they need to have different skills than you. So don't co-found with your grad school classmates and you're all the same majors and you all have to know. Right, right.
00:49:34
Speaker
bring them into the company, but you need to elevate people who have disparate skill sets. So my co-founders, the first one in, she's chemistry and the second one in, he's a lawyer.
00:49:46
Speaker
and lots of practical experience in places I don't have, so lots of coverage. And then when we raised our first money, we immediately recruited, just so lucky, the best crew. We were seven people until February of 2022. We have a molecular biologist who, that's my core training, but she's better than me. She's actually really good at the bench, and I never was, because I'm a theorist.
00:50:11
Speaker
And we got an amazing laboratory manager, a research associate, and a bioinformaticist who, you know, better at really the statistics than I was. My job at the company was to be like the second best is as much as possible. The first best as little as possible. And now with 27 people, my job is to be the fourth best to ask about almost anything. And they remind me of that. They remind me of that, which is good.
00:50:35
Speaker
How do you keep yourself healthy in your mind? How do you keep yourself straight? How do you, cause you're doing a lot. You have, you're breaking new ground with the company. You're a mom. You have, you know, there's like all these things that are coming at the same time. For me, I feel just with the, with what I do is like, it's, it's hard to keep a mental health practice. So for you, how do you keep yourself focused? How do you keep yourself on track?
00:51:04
Speaker
Happy. What do you do? Well, one of the things I do, it's a real privilege to love what you work or love your work or to be happy at work. That's a privilege. I recognize that. And so people tend to assume that when you, say, have an advanced degree or when you're paid really well,
00:51:26
Speaker
that you might, you must love what you work because you could go do something else. And that's not necessarily true. I don't necessarily love my job. I love the people I work with. I love the mission, but the job's hard. And I just want to acknowledge that because I don't want that cognitive dissonance of why don't you love your job when it's hard and unpleasant and difficult. I need to have the gas to do the stuff anyway, but I don't want to,
00:51:55
Speaker
Set up the cognitive pain of you're supposed to love this. This is what you're supposed to be doing Yeah, so the reason I'm doing it is what motivates me not necessarily what I'm doing
00:52:08
Speaker
So you expect it to be painful? I do. I expect there to be unpleasant conversations. I expect there to be a lot of no's. You go raise money and not everyone throws it at you. And they all have different reasons, some of which they'll share and some of which you're like, ah, that doesn't make sense and that feels bad. But you just get the door closed in your face 999 times and you have to keep doing it for that one thousandth time and you have to do it harder because now you've
00:52:32
Speaker
had money, you have people, you know, you're doing it for not just the planet, but for all of them, more proximally, there's a little bit more at stake. Yeah. Yep. And so you have to have the, the gas, you have to have the reserves to keep doing it. And so you don't want to lie to yourself.
00:52:49
Speaker
about when it's unpleasant or when it's good. You just have to respect yourself enough to go, you know what, this is unpleasant. You have to change this poopy diaper. There's poop literally everywhere. But the reason we're doing that is because the baby needs to stay healthy.
00:53:07
Speaker
And so you don't, oh, I love changing diapers, or why don't I love changing diapers? Why don't I love taking care of this screaming dirty thing right now? This is necessary, and there will be points that are more fun, and we're getting there. And I think that's largely my philosophy. The end goal is important.
00:53:26
Speaker
There's a lot of great stuff along the way and also remembering to highlight those for my people, for my husband, for my staff when they get wins to make them their wins and to make sure that I recognize their wins and that my satisfaction is that I gave them the resources and the space to realize those wins and then get back to the, not exactly the misery, but the difficulty of making sure they continue to have the space and the resources to do that because it's an ecosystem
00:53:56
Speaker
all of us have got to pull together and I'm really honored that I'm honored that my husband joined me on this journey. He's watching a lot of this crazy stuff go down and he's been so helpful, could not do it without his support and his patience. And my staff just all bought in and they're all in with their whole hearts and just given a hundred percent
00:54:22
Speaker
making sure they don't burn themselves out, that's actually a fun part of my job, is sending people on vacation. Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, that's cool. I think there's a humility that I sense in how you talk about your company and the people that you work with, and I think that really is reflected in the way that you lead and how you approach it, which I think is really cool. I still learn that the hard way.
00:54:46
Speaker
you still mess up and then you have to apologize and admit you were wrong. But even just that, having that approach of this is a lesson I've learned rather than a reflection on who I am as a person. Like I'm somebody who has failed, I'm not a failure. Yeah, that's something I'm hoping I can instill in my kid is the difference between how you're feeling and what reality is. So you can feel stupid.
00:55:12
Speaker
But are you stupid and being able to question that and have that reflex when you go ahead and have your feeling, but then let's question reality as well. Let's just check, which is I think part of the, you know, I'm doing something crazy or something other people said couldn't be done. So the question is, am I crazy? Let's check. Yeah. Like I might feel crazy or it's crazy making to have a bunch of people around.
00:55:36
Speaker
questioning or telling you is wrong, but let's do the reality check. And I think that is one of the comforting things about life is we can make sure we leave ourselves the opportunity to grow and not be the person you were in high school. So yeah, being able to change and I appreciate that in the people around me too. Yeah.
00:55:58
Speaker
I think the microbiome culture, definitely. I love using the word culture. It's a bacteria culture, people culture. Nice, nice one. But that the culture is we are all giving ourselves space to make mistakes and grow because we have a big challenge ahead of us and we're not currently equal to it, but we can get there. Yeah. What do you think is achievable in your lifetime or what do you think is going to be when you look back? What do you think is the thing that is the marker of success for you when you, when you think about your work?
00:56:26
Speaker
For us, for the technology, my hope is that it is adopted broadly, that people start addressing their symbiosis with bacteria on this planet in a much more direct fashion. Right now, we are symbiotic with them. They make vitamins for us. They help us digest our food. They make medicines for us in our livestock. And we kind of take that for granted. A lot of us don't think about it. We're not aware of it.
00:56:53
Speaker
And therefore we don't know where it can be pushed, where it can be leveraged. And we might not have the patience for it either. So one branch of it is sound so dorky to say awareness. I'm hoping that, you know, within my lifetime.
00:57:09
Speaker
everybody is as aware of bacteria as they are of dogs and cows and cherry trees. But they are just, they're something we teach our children a lot more frequently. Like, oh yeah, this is streptococcus. Yeah, this one's Escherichia. You know, there's no reason they can't get nicknames or be known or recognized for the efforts they make on this planet.
00:57:31
Speaker
And then on a more practical commercial level that they have come into the stable fully, and that their companies have shifted their practices, new companies have spun up and that we have a subsidized biomanufacturing infrastructure.
Future of Bacteria in Everyday Life
00:57:46
Speaker
The same way we have a subsidized petroleum infrastructure that is viewed as a matter of national security.
00:57:51
Speaker
that is viewed as a matter of climate security, that is viewed as just the new technology we need to really be able to have everyone live happier, cleaner, healthier lives is becoming one with the planet. That sounds so dorky, but that we are biological organisms. We live on a big biological incubator. The earth is a Petri dish and we're not alone. We can't act like we're alone and succeed.
00:58:21
Speaker
So I really hope that that is a consequence of our success, that we shift the view the entire world holds of our position and the tree of life. In terms of you and your personal role in that, what is important for you and the role you play in it? The number one thing I think I am able to contribute, I have this whole amazing team behind me.
00:58:45
Speaker
We have a business development team who are enlightening and drawing out opportunities for us to have a good impact on potential partners, that we can improve their margins, that we can open up new markets for them, that we can do things for them that they were only doing with petroleum before. I have an amazing team of, we call them CODIs, the people doing our machine learning, our automation, our software engineering, so we can
00:59:13
Speaker
turn these over even more quickly. I've got an amazing team of benchies who are actually working with the chemicals, working with the bacteria. I love all these nicknames. I know. I think they like them too. The Busy's, the Benchy's and the Cody's. That makes me a bossy. I try not to be too bossy. Nice. But my role here is to give them the resources to actually affect the technical and commercial change. And so I think one of the best things I can do is to talk to you.
00:59:41
Speaker
Talk to your audience, talk to all the audiences I can get to inspire that sense of wonder and a sense of hope that there is an alternative. And to be frank with them, it takes investment and it takes partnership and it takes patience. We need companies to come to us and say, okay, let's work together on another way. We need the regulators to come to us or to go to the regulators and say, yes, there is another way and how do we make it safe and how do we protect every component of it?
01:00:09
Speaker
And we need to go to the government and say, how do we foresee this going? What are we going to need in terms of grants and academic work and just the direction, the visioning? And I need to go to the laypeople, to the taxpayers and say, here's what you need to support the entire infrastructure doing. Here's questions to be asking your your elected representative about
01:00:33
Speaker
their commitment to biomanufacturing, their commitment to climate change. It's not just bacteria. I need to also use any audience I can get to say, look, we're having a climate emergency.
01:00:43
Speaker
you should be doing these things. You should be asking yourself about the patronage you give to companies, about your personal habits. Although let's be clear, a lot of this stuff is bigger than us. We just have to vote with our dollars and our vote. So I think my role is to run my mouth. I run my mouth. I bring the resources back to the people who are actually doing the work and I
01:01:09
Speaker
plant that seed and it might be a really slowly germinating seed, but it better today than tomorrow that we can have this change.
01:01:21
Speaker
That's awesome. Well, you definitely are, you have tons of energy and your commitment to the mission really comes through. And I love that. I have one more question. It's a totally selfish question. I have not been able to find a satisfactory answer to this anywhere. So I'm, so I'm looking, I'm looking everywhere and you seem to be a good person to ask. MSG. Yeah. The flavor enhancer MSG. I know that that comes from like a, that's like a bacteria by-product, right? Or it's made out, made in some part from that.
01:01:51
Speaker
Corinobacterium glutamicum is the classic bacteria that's used to produce the glutamate that is the part of monosodium glutamate. So it just means one sodium ion attached to a glutamate. Okay, so you being the bacteria expert, I have an allergic reaction to MSG, but it's only when it's in the form of barbecue chips
01:02:15
Speaker
that are flavored with MSG or like that pub mix, you know, and it's, it gives me like, I go, I basically go blind in my left eye. Then I get the worst headache. Like I feel like I'm going to die. And then I throw, I just throw up like crazy. And the whole thing, the whole thing lasts about four hours and then it's over and I'm back to normal. But I, it doesn't happen when I have MSG and other forms. Like if it's in a sauce or whatever, it's only that kind of.
01:02:41
Speaker
I am not a doctor. That was actually my email address in graduate school, was not a doctor at jhmi.edu. That's funny. But I would have to, as part of the scientific process, I would have to look at the other ingredients in those two triggers that you have. Right. Because I firmly believe you're having a nasty reaction to something. Yeah, yeah. But it's really unlikely to be the MSG, especially if you can tolerate it in other forms. Right. There's something else going on there.
01:03:10
Speaker
It's like some kind of combination or something. Yeah, I doubt it's even a combination. I think there's probably something else in there that you're having a nasty reaction to. Um, but I'm not a doctor, but a glutamate is one of the 20 amino acids that, you know, everybody learns in high school biology and the monosodium glutamate is safe. It's got such a bad rep. Yeah, it does have a bad rep. Um, but it doesn't, yeah, it's just got a bad rep, but I would go look at the ingredients.
01:03:39
Speaker
Uh-huh. Everything else in those things that you just listed and see if there's maybe something else.
01:03:46
Speaker
That's how I would do it. And if you narrow it down and it's just like the concentration of MSG, I doubt that, but I'll bet there's something else in there. And man, I wish you luck. Because that sounds like a really unpleasant reaction. Yeah, I mean, I just avoid it now as much as I can. But I know that I've eaten it in other things and it doesn't have that reaction. Yeah, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. People go to restaurants and they wonder why everything's so tasty. It's definitely... Yeah, it's very ubiquitous. It's butter and MSG. Yeah.
01:04:15
Speaker
Those are secrets in home cooking that people be surprised how much salt, butter, and MSG really spice up, kick it up a notch to both a chef. Cool. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah, for doing this and for sharing your wisdom and your experience with me. It was really great to see you again. It's nice to see you again. Stay in touch and thank you for the opportunity to go plant that seed of hope
01:04:41
Speaker
and other minds. Yeah. Is there anywhere besides your website, anything that anywhere people can go to learn more about what you're up to? So, yeah, there's a bunch of videos on our YouTube page, Microbuyer's YouTube page. We have a Twitter account of Twitter still around. I have a Twitter account. I've been very bad about updating it. So my company is trying to make sure I update that more. But our Twitter account is active.
01:05:10
Speaker
And I think those are the best places to go. OK, cool. All right, thank you. Bye. Thanks. Bye.
01:05:28
Speaker
You can learn more about Sarah and the work that Microbuyer is doing by visiting their website microbuyer.com. And you can also visit Microbuyer's YouTube channel and see a bunch of videos that feature Sarah giving various talks and lectures on the work of Microbuyer and the role that bacteria can play in being part of the solution to the climate crisis that our planet is experiencing.
01:05:55
Speaker
Both of those links can be found on the episode description. I'm just really grateful that people like Sarah and her team are working on things like this that break new ground into what the future might look like. So it's encouraging and it is hopeful, like she said. So yeah, I'm grateful for Sarah and the work that she's doing.
01:06:15
Speaker
So that was episode 9. Again, it's crazy to think about it. It feels like I've been doing this for so long. I can't believe that it's only 9. And yet in some ways I'm like 9. Wow, I've gotten to 9 episodes. And I'm just really, really grateful. So, thanks to all of you for listening and I hope you have a great week.