The Scientist Who Bet His Career on Bugs. 14 Years Later, He Was Right.

Welcome to Life Between Titles. I'm your host, Savan, and today I've got my friend, Dr. Aaron Dossi. Or Dossi, I apologize. Aaron, how are you?

It happens. At least you didn't add the invisible. There are silent letters in our language, but in my name, sometimes there's what I call an invisible letter, R. Many people say, Dr. Dorsey. I'm like, I'm not that level of Irish. There's not an R there. Why would you say that?

Yeah, mean, yeah, people butcher my name. They call me Savan all the time and I tell them I'm not French. And I have to correct them and say Savannah, like Savannah. usually still.

You could be a savant. You could be a savant. I'm like, I'm not that far on the spectrum.

Yeah, I've had that as well, my friend. I've had that as well. Aaron, today's conversation, like we were talking about a bit earlier, is fascinating to me because I don't know much about the space that you're in and I don't know much about the practice that you're specializing in. So we're going to dive into that today. But before we get into that, I'd like to ask all my guests to describe themselves if they were at a dinner party and they just met a stranger, how would you describe yourself?

I'm horrific at that. The one-liner, the elevator speech, never... And I'll get to my space and my specialized space in a minute, but I would describe myself just as a PhD scientist that likes nature and likes a lot of aspects of the natural world. And I kind of include travel and geography and culture into that, because we're all part of the natural world.

Yeah.

A short version of what I say, you said that you don't know much about my area of specialization and that's kind of my career, I guess, out of economic and curiosity necessity is pretty eclectic. Like one of the myths I sometimes often have to misspell is that for better or worse, I don't tend to be terribly specialized because

Mm.

in order to do the stuff I wanted to do and pursue the career track that I thought was available to us in the 90s when I grew up. then this century has kind of crapped on the science career through largely defunding and, you know, we can get into it or not, but basically wealth concentration. mean, you see like resources have shrunk, you know, my entire life from, you know, like elementary school on has been discussions about budget cuts. like things that we thought would be available were so like.

.

Yeah. Thank

I graduated with my PhD, thought I was gonna be a professor. Those weren't as common as they were five, 10 years before. And so I had to get grants, to form a company, had to do different things. I never thought I would, I know way more about food and food science than I ever thought I would have to do because that's where the funding was available. Pretty eclectic and we can get into it.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I definitely want to get into it for sure, but tell me a little bit about your growing up years. Like, how did you get into this space that you're in now? You said you're big into nature and travel and science. Was that always the case growing up?

Not so much travel. mean, kind of a no average family, no international travel, not a whole lot of travel, just some road trips. But I guess my interest in science and nature just kind of come from observation and maybe a little bit of tangentially related family experiences. So my grandparents

Yeah.

I mostly grew up with my grandparents. They garden, so I was outside, outdoors a lot. They had some land. did, you know, I sometimes I help my grandpa with things like land clearing and the things like that or planting gardens and planting trees. Just a lot of outdoor work. So I observed the outdoors a lot and really liked it. A lot of what I saw about nature, about the biggest road trips we would go to would be like Arkansas. We went to Tennessee and Florida like one time, I think, when I was young. But I always liked to go east and I liked to go to places with more humidity and more rainfall. To me, it's more nature. There were ferns and there were different kinds of animals and plants. It just felt like a more lush environment. So when I was young, I liked that. And so I just wanted to pursue it. In high school, I...

Yeah.

Thank

Yeah. Thank

kind of my career trajectory really became what it is more or less. had to do, I took honors biology and zoology and that teacher, same teacher for both made us do insect collections for class. And I liked it. I liked that I could go out and collect these things and observe them and study them. And I also liked that you could find some cool stuff like the big Saturn and moths, Luna moths and things that.

Mmm.

It's.

Oklahoma that most people, including me, didn't even really know that they would hear, were here until you know. Nature is kind of like people take for granted or people don't care about it and that kind of ties into the non-profit I wanted to talk about later. like until people take for granted or don't care or don't think it's interesting until they actually get to it and observe it. So when I was out collecting the books for the collection,

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm big into exotic fruits.

I was seeing walking sticks that I thought were super exotic. But if you go out to the right places, they can be pretty common. And I was just excited that you can see, if you go to the right places, you can see cool stuff. And that's even to recently, like if I've gone to parts of the world that have interesting fruits, now I'm kind of into exotic fruits. We'll get to talk about that later too. You can actually see the stuff. Yeah.

Aaron, so what, what state did you grow up in? you were in Oklahoma. Okay. Okay. I gotcha. I gotcha. And then, then you, you would travel east with the family to trips to like Florida and stuff like that.

in Oklahoma.

Just one time, mostly to see my grandpa's aunt in Arkansas and we just take road trips to Arkansas a few times. But yeah, kind of my trajectory has been so far outside of short-term travel. Oklahoma, Florida for grad school, a couple of years in Georgia, back to Oklahoma for certain reasons, family reasons, and then hopefully at some point making it back to Florida.

Yep.

Yeah, yeah, I always find it fascinating the people that continue to do the work they do in their adult lives that they were passionate about when they were in high school, because most times in high school, it's like, hey, I like to draw, but you know, I can't be an artist, right? It's not going to pay me anything or, you know, I like to do sculpture, but I can't sell my clay pots. But you you've managed to sort of keep that consistently over the years. How have you done that? Was it a conscious effort? After high school you said, I'm go to college and do these things, or did you just sort of stumble upon these opportunities?

Some stumbled upon and some intentional. my degree in biochemistry in high school, another thing that we did was we studied biochemistry that I didn't even know was anything. like one of our chapters in the honors biology class was about biochemistry. It was funny, everybody in the class failed the test, like everybody. And we had to retake it. We had to do that chapter over again. And I took it as kind of a challenge. then I had to do a book report about like Linus Pauling and his book on vitamin C. And I was just fascinated that you could.

Yeah. Yeah.

and study the structure of molecules and how structure of molecules tied to how they work, tied to how they function in biology and how the whole body, every living thing works. And I kind of go back to, I guess part of it, not to, like they say, toot my own horn, but if you don't, nobody else will. I guess I was kind of had some level of talents. I was good at math and good at science.

Yep.

Yep.

probably because I wasn't so good at reading and math and science, can pick up a lot by looking at pictures and symbols and learning about concepts that you can then carry forward and derive things from rather than having to read so many words that is slow for me. And so like one of the things I remember Chris Rock, you can see I'm a comedy fan up here with my buddy Sam. He says something that I kind of think.

Mm.

Yeah.

These are a lot of things that have a lot of reality, but like people tell you when you grow up, you can be anything you want to be. Like you said, I can be an artist. I can be a fire truck or at a certain age, like you can be, he says, that's not true. He said, you'd be anything you want to be as long as you're good at it and they're hiring. So that combination has worked out for my interests. think nature sucked me in and to understand more so I could immerse myself into more nature and understand it more.

You

Yep.

Yeah.

I gravitated to science, particularly the biological and chemical sciences, and did that as a career. And when I was looking at schools to go to for college, I was applying to Annapolis and some crazy places, but then I just, got a scholarship to OSU and went there. But I got the tour because it was close by and they had all the fancy toys. It was the nineties. There was so much NIH budget, so much.

Yeah.

I think the NIH budget was tripled or something under Clinton and there was just a lot of biotech and the human genome was hot, like everything was hot about biological sciences. Kind of took a turn in this century. But they had all the fancy toys, like they were showing molecular models on a 3D computer and had like all the stuff you could purify. And I was just fascinated, like you can actually produce this stuff and modify it and look like it at the molecular level. So anyway, that's... That's what and like you said, finding being resourceful, unfortunately, you can like I told my wife the other day about an interest one way to get to know because she's from Honduras, so she's getting to know this area. There are two ways I know to get rid of to know the new area really well. One is I forgot number one, but number two is get lost. If you get lost by the time you work your way around to somewhere, it will be burned in your head.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah Yep.

And that's kind of what some of my career is that like when it wasn't, I thought I'd get my PhD, then I'd be a professor. And then I always thought I would invent something and then go into a line of research that would be applied. And then also maybe start a spin-off company or patent some stuff. And I always wanted to have a product that was on the shelf somewhere that I could tell people, to Walmart and look at that. And that's the thing that I invented. That's kind of like the coup de grace. It hasn't happened yet. But there weren't faculty jobs because of a lot of budget cuts. 2003 tax cuts for the rich. It's all math. It's, you know, really people say that's saying it politically, but it's just math. That's where the money went. And when you use money for one thing, it's not available for another thing. The pie doesn't grow as magically as they say. So it's all about resource allocation. So I was applying for grants to give myself an edge in the faculty job market because you can.

Yeah. Yeah.

There are various ways to get faculty jobs. One way is, or it can give you an advantage on more interviews is getting funded. So I got funded, still didn't get interviews, but I had to, in order to qualify, it was a Gates Foundation grant. And we can dig a little bit deeper, but I was looking for topics to propose that would be interesting and where could get hired as a faculty job. Because you have to do a research plan as part of that. Like if we hire you, what research are you going to do?

Right.

And I was proposing insect-based drug discovery, like looking at natural products. And insects and invertebrates are kind of an ignored group compared to marine oil and plants and fungi. So I said, I'm interested in those. I know how to grow them. I had a whole idea about growing them, displaying them, setting up an insect zoo, and then using it for research.

Yeah. Thank

And I went to this conference and they were talking about using insects as food, like a protein source. And I bred them as a hobby for years since high school. that's not just collecting them. I was always growing different kinds of moths and walking sticks and stuff. I'm like, I kind of know that they're tough. They grow in lot of invite almost every niche on earth, except the ocean. There's thousands of species, hundreds of thousands of species.

Yeah.

and

You don't some of them you don't have to feed much like mealworms. can keep in a box of oatmeal for a very long time and stuff like that. So this makes sense. And so it's a professor that was at that symposium circulated the Gates Foundation grant announcement that it came out recently back when they were a little bit more broad. I felt I feel like they used to be more broadly. They just do something to help malnourished children or proposing project that can lead to a solution or benefit to malnourished children in the world. So.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thank

The idea is use insects as a protein source because they're abundant in the field or if you're going to grow them, they're efficient. They can be grown low tech and kind of very in a small space with very little feed and water inputs. You could produce a protein, very nutritious. And even at that time, this was about 2010, there still wasn't a lot of literature and information about it. So I applied and actually got it. They called me and I was going to be unemployed in a few months because my two-year postdoc with the USDA was ending. There's the term position. I said, they said, what's your affiliation? Because I put down independent because I couldn't be a PI as a postdoc at the USDA or university. But I didn't have an affiliation. And they said, I said, well, nowhere right now. And they said, we can't fund an individual. We can't just give a dude money is what they said. We just can't give a random.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So I said, I said, wait a minute, let me, I said, let me think about this. Let me give me, I think I said, give me a couple of weeks to see if I get interviews at one of these faculty jobs applied for, or call some of the places to see if we're going to, if I'm going to get any offers soon or let them know that I might have funding. And then it occurred to me, maybe I just start a company. You know, I didn't know they would let me do that. Actually, I thought they, I thought they'd say, well, we can't give companies money or something. they said,

Mm-hmm, that's smart.

I mean, they took it back to their people and they said, yeah, if you'd file the paperwork, there's a certain tax form we want you to do so that they make sure that you're the right type of organization. But otherwise, so like they had, I had to wait a whole year and that's where I really did become unemployed. I was waiting for Gates and they couldn't promise it. They said, we can't guarantee it, but we'll roll you into next year's announcements. We already like your project. If the people want to wait. That was 2011.

Yeah.

What year is that, Aaron? What year is all this happening? Okay. Okay.

Yeah. So I got that and I had actually, interestingly, I had gone to a workshop that I paid like 50 bucks for at about the same time on writing grants, like SBIR grants, Small Business Innovation Research, which just came, were, Project 20 for 25 is alive. They weren't for the first time, I think the first time, it wasn't reauthorized by Congress because periodically it's one of those things that has to be renewed.

Yeah.

in October last year. So there were no servers until like, they're just coming online. I think a lot of agencies like USD still don't have theirs back. But like a few weeks ago, they reauthorized SBIR. But anyway, I went to a workshop how to write grants and they were focused on SBIRs. I thought, well, not that I have a company, that's a source. And the first one of those I wrote got funded. I'm like, damn, because I knew, you know, I knew that

Yeah. Thank you.

Everybody thought I was rich. was hilarious when I got the Gates Foundation. I was like, you got money from Gates money. I'm like, all dollars are the same, like money from certain sources. This is a big myth that I think some people think money from certain sources is better and more valuable than money from other sources. like a dollar's a dollar. And I had a hundred grand to do an 18 month project and I had to live on it at the time. Like I paid my, they let me pay myself a salary, you know, for your time, like any good, your budget personnel and stuff.

Yes.

Yeah.

So I said, if I'm to continue this, need other funding. And I was still applying for jobs because maybe this works out or maybe somebody finally calls me with an interview and I get hired somewhere. That didn't happen, but for 14 years I was continuously funded on SBIRs. that's like I said, and the topic was food. So mostly I didn't even know food science was a field when I got the grant. I want to do this research. I need a lab. I don't have a lab. I need equipment. I don't have equipment.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I really don't know that much about food processing, so I was calling food science departments, just Googling what kind of labs would I rent this place in. I was looking for collaborations, but then I found contract labs at a lot of these universities. You can pay them to help you with a project and use their facilities. So that's what...

Yeah, talk about building the plane while you're flying it, man. Like it's, you probably learned a shitload, right? Like during this time about business and the industry and the grant writing process. Like all three of those things are hard independently, let alone all at once.

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, it's harder to build a ship than it is to drive it or ride on it. And that's what that is. Fortunately, like I said earlier, I kind of had some skill sets and some experiences that helped me along. I was good at some things. I already went to some of these workshops recently. like, it's a good thing I know how to weld because being out on the wing of the plane, although those are rivets. So yeah, a lot of things kind of...

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

serendispositively worked out to keep me sustained in this. I even took Serve Safe, like the other podcast you sent me, the guy was talking about food safety and stuff. At this point, I know that, the thing that you take so you can be a manager at restaurants and stuff.

Yep.

So how long were you living off of the the the Sivers and the grants? So if this was 2011, did you do that for a decade or more than a decade?

wasn't until 2024. About 2022, because I was the first in the Western Hemisphere as far as I know doing insect protein for human consumption, certainly the first company in the US doing this, especially at the level that I was doing research, developing products, patents and things like that. And it was easy back then but after sorry, go ahead.

Wow.

The whole topic of it is crazy because like, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm no scientist, I don't know anything about this stuff, but I am an Asian man, so I know things about being Asian. So here's the thing that I know, in Cambodia, insects are a source of food, and I know in Japan, it's also a big source of food, like with crickets and stuff like that. Is America the only place where we don't? look at insects as a viable source of food? Or is that just a first world thing where, you know, maybe it's like a secondary source of food just in case of emergencies? Like, why is that?

Yeah, there are, I didn't know it was that common in Japan, that's kind of interesting. But there's theories that kind of go with a lot of how human cultures have developed. I'm not an anthropologist, but they're big. But since in 2013, the UNFAO came up with a book or a pamphlet about this that we should take insects seriously. So that's when it kind of exploded. A bunch of startups and student groups started little companies and our industry kind of take off at 2013. also interesting, although I haven't gotten investment like yet, like some of them, it's gone through a cycle. Like companies have gotten hundreds of million dollars and then last year several of them folded. And I'm like, hello, if you give me 10 million, maybe I think I could probably make this work. I can go into that later, what none of them ever did that needs to be done. yeah, what I've read is it could be a climate thing. That in the northern areas, it's less common because insects are not as common. I you have to get through winter. You can't go out and forage insects in the winter in the tropics you can. In Europe in particular, there's some people, I've read some things about

Yeah.

insects being associated with kind of filth and disease like the black plague and you know things you some things have happened in that part of the world that made them not as attractive plus they're just less species available you know in the northern climates to eat so it's just it it hasn't worked out in those places i haven't read about um i don't think it's as much as religious so like another cultural component is religion but in the bible it says

Right. Yeah.

For example, there are some insects like grasshoppers and, you locusts and things that you can eat. So I think there's just some kind of serendipitous and practical considerations that went into what places eat insects and what don't.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I find it all so fascinating because I wonder if there's a certain stigma culturally associated with it versus just the actual fact that it's a good source of protein and like I've had, I've had, what is it mealworms or larva, whatever. It tastes like nuts. And it tastes just fine. Like if you cook it right and put salt on it and it's one of those things that blows me away. in America, we don't see it as a viable source of protein or a viable source of food. And, you know, from your perspective, like you've been doing this for years and looking at this information, what what can we do here to maybe reverse how that looks? Because at the end of the day, the planet's not gonna be able to sustain how we're doing things the way we're doing things, like just in terms of whether or not people believe in the Earth is getting warm or whatnot, but like Savannah's hot take is it's probably not gonna last the way we're doing it now, and we need to start looking at alternatives. What's your hot take on it? What's your perspective, Aaron?

It's inevitable, unless there's a human population bottleneck, unless we lose a couple of billion people at least, it's inevitable. There have been some high level food executives, several of them at conferences and things have said publicly, I can't remember if it was the CEO of Nestle or PepsiCo or one of those kind of large companies have said in the past few years that this is, we're not gonna be the ones to do it because well.

Right.

The bigger, the wealthier human, or a human, that's a Freudian. The company gets the more conservative they seem to get, the only risk they want to take and stuff.

Yeah.

They're kind of, was kind of, from what I remember, it's like, we're not going to do it, but this is inevitable. This is coming and it's because it makes too much sense. Several of the people in the food industry at pretty high levels have said it just makes too much sense to avoid. So I think, and this is where I think those companies that got tremendous amounts of investment and spent it all and went up and went into debt and things. One in Canada, one in France, bunch of money.

you

Yeah.

They didn't do product development. They didn't give, and I've done science fairs, I've done public events and given people, like you said, roasted mealworms and crickets and cookies made with cricket powder and things like a more professional. goal is to get it, use it as a commodity, as an ingredient in basic foods, not like a cricket sitting on a cookie or like the media portrays it and stuff. Just the whole insect thing is, know, is always going to be a novelty in the niche because they don't, you have to chew on them.

Great.

you can't process them in a lot of different ways. There's like limited, you know, what you could do. I'm sure they're, I'm blanking, but there's many other food products that if you use them whole, they wouldn't make sense. But you grind it up and you put it in the hot dog, delicious, right? So I think it's just giving people,

Great. Yep.

with a little bit of information and education about we're not going out in the field and then, you know, within that collecting them for parking lots and stuff. They're not going to be covered in pesticides because if they were, they would be dead because. their pesticides are targeted to insects. They're in far and clean farms, cleaner than chicken and can cow and pig farms, tightly controlled, very little water, land and resource used to produce them. They can produce constantly all year around, you know, just they make a ton of sense. Plus we grind them up into powder and we can make a number of products with them. When people hear that, and plus the nutritional and some of the benefits that have come out in the past few years about

Yeah.

There's a couple of papers about they can be improved gut health and there's things, a good source of iron, for example, and stuff like that. People cycle this. This sounds like something I would be willing to try. I would say there's about 1 % early adapters that are just totally on board. They're into novel foods. They care about sustainability. They're bodybuilders. They're always looking for the next new protein. There's a group of people that for a number of reasons are probably totally into it right now, if they could buy it.

Yep.

And then there's like another 10 % of people that with a little education.

I'm

does you explain it to them? Oh no, this comes from a clean indoor facility. Oh, okay, cool. And then there's the like anything else, a new thing, rest of the population is word of mouth and for access over time, you start to see it in the store, it grows, it gets credibility, your friends and your family are eating it, eventually you pick it up too. I don't think there's anybody as it grows, that's gonna be tremendously opposed to it as it becomes a normal commodity. You can buy pasta, cereals, tortillas and stuff that don't exist. this now with it and you see them in the store every day. I think growth and access adds a lot of credibility. So I think giving people food products, the stuff we've developed like snacks, cereals, pastas, stuff like that, that none of the companies with all the investment, they were totally focused on scale and building a big, huge insect farm. That's what they all do. And they kind of got the cart before the horse there.

Yeah. Yeah.

because they were producing a commodity for which there wasn't an existing market and they weren't creating their own market for it. If anybody's out there wants to invest in this concept, can consult with you. I think I know the secret here.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, we'll throw all the links and your information in the written narrative that gets pushed out and in the descriptions here to get a hold of you. But before we get into that, Aaron, I do want to ask about your time between 2011 until maybe 2023, 2024. The thing that fascinates me that I'm intrigued in is how do people, especially scientists, How do they sustain the ability to live a life through these grants and through these programs? Are you essentially spending half your time working on the product and then the other half looking for the money? How does that work?

About, yeah, I mean, if you, there's some doing being good at it and writing a good, convincing document, spending on time on literature search, finding compelling, finding what's already out there and getting to know the field of proposing something good. And then there's just a lot of luck. And then there's, if, and then there's finding it, like I kind of found a novel area that there were very few people in. And then when it got more crowded, it's not that I wasn't able to compete, but it was just.

Yep.

The people like academics in particular that read grants, like to be entertained. It's all about entertainment, which I find a little bit. lot of things that are need to be done and that are important, but they're not cutting edge new technology don't tend to get funded because they're not exciting. But I think that's where the valley of death in technology is, right? It's not fun to support it anymore. So now we're just trying to scale or we're just trying to get our product prototype to the market or whatever it is.

stress.

Oh yeah.

It's not making a bunch of money so investors aren't interested in, then the government, the people that fund the cutting edge stuff aren't interested because it's old. So that's kind of the well I was hitting. But find something novel, find something that's not a lot of competition or find something, you know, but basically it's hard. I wouldn't say that it's a viable, it's an accessible career track. It's not something, especially now.

Yeah. So.

with so many government grants and even, and that trickles out to nonprofits not even having grants and foundations and stuff. There's been a big ripple. And again, wealth concentration, like there's less money circulating around. So it's less people have it. it's your. you hold into the topics that the few people that have it want money to go to. So you don't have this much diversity of activity when you don't have diversity of resources, of resource distribution. So I don't think it's something you can count on. Sadly, a lot of my colleagues just left science. They went to work for places like, I don't know, Netflix or...

Yeah, agreed.

One colleague in particular, they just did stuff to survive. Some of my colleagues got faculty jobs, a few. yeah, I don't have any, I wish I kind of had secrets. Because like I said, my company, or I didn't get to that part, my company ran out of money in 2024. The grants evaporated in 2025. I didn't have an income.

Yeah.

and I was living on debt and stuff until just about a month ago I got a new job to pay the bills but 2025 was a scary time and the government liquidated a huge number of science positions and you cut the grants and you cut the science jobs at the government and the market was flooded with some people like me.

Yeah, I feel that 100%. I mean, did the same thing with the federal workers. Living that life right now, my friend. Living that life right now.

Yeah, I mean, to be positive about it, though, it's tough out there is what I'd say. So I don't know any great secrets, but some people say persistence works. mean, there are many people in the graveyard out there that are waiting for their ship to come in. we are moral. So persistence is not always a solution. But that's an unpopular opinion alert.

yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Practical in a in a finite world the in a biological Natural law driven world, but I'd say just Find a fine find the money first find something find the money before you even take a step in a direction figure out how you're gonna pay for it or start selling a product and I hate I hate the mantra of start small, but some

Yeah.

If you like, like somebody in the tech accelerator I talked to recently that I'm kind of working with on the side consulting and so he said, tells us as a startup entrepreneurs don't quit your day job. said, have an income, secure that. And once that whose whose companies aren't making money and stuff, they're not far along their early stage and stuff.

Right.

Find a way to pay yourself, stabilize your personal finances in a way, and then carve out your time to continue to pursue your other thing if you're really passionate and you really do it, then find a team, find people to work with, like Excel, like this guy at this accelerator and stuff. They're not always available. Many of those want you to require that you have $500 million a year annual revenue before they'll work with you.

Yeah. Yeah.

right. Yeah, I mean, I think like this, there's so many challenges nowadays. And Aaron, if you were to, you know, take a look back, would there be anything you'd change? You know, be looking back at the high school, Aaron, and have some time to reflect now, would there be anything you would change?

play football and go to law school. Focus more on the money. I mean, that's jaded. think that's, I mean, that's, that's really if, and sadly that's kind of where we are. Cause most people kind of do that. They migrated, you know, early on toward, you know, financially oriented career tracks. And, that's not really a great recipe for long-term human existence or civilization. Cause somebody has to do, somebody has to contribute the value, create the value.

Hahaha Me too.

And that's kind where I get back to. It's a drum I beat a lot, but I think it's important. It's the bass drum that keeps the beat. It's resource allocation. are, brics are out straw is very difficult. And... Yeah, think somebody has to do the research. Somebody has to do all of these things, do the work and all of these company billion dollar companies with billion billion are owners like the value is being created by the innovators and the workers. And I think there's like Nobel Prize winning economists and stuff. I don't know if it was Paul Krugman or somebody I read of something years ago about that they calculated at what stage like a founder.

Mm-hmm.

is kind of out of the game, is not really running the company anymore. Or even the single or any way, where it becomes no longer a one man show. I think it was something like even 50 employees, once you get to a 50 or 100 employees, it's really grown beyond one person being able to take credit for all of this.

Right.

Right.

Right, right, you can't scale it. You can't scale it efficiently. Um, Aaron...

No, need other stuff. And you probably get to points where, like, you don't even have the expertise to do x, or z.

Mm Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. Aaron, I want to maybe pivot a little bit and talk about the area of specialty for you. And then we can dive into all things bugs, which I actually absolutely love that that name. But I want you to give me an elevator pitch for the importance of bugs in the world. Like if you had to summarize it for a fifth grader, like how would you do that?

I would say that life on Earth, largely, particularly human life on Earth, is nearly impossible without a thriving ecosystem and insects are the glue that keeps the entire ecosystem together. So, in all of the species working together. We can't pick our favorite ones. We can't say like a lot of conservation efforts that focus on megafauna or pretty animals and stuff. they're all important, they're all keeping things in balance. And that goes to everything from like the stability of the climate, you know, to our clean water resources, to just it being a decent place to live. They are the glue that keeps everything together and we need all of the biodiversity working together. Frankly, we badly need to rewild like half of the planet.

Yeah.

It's that we're getting biodiversity loss and exponentially now that many, you know, every written in the past decade about that we're in like the third extinction. Like some people call it the Anthropocene or something. We're in an extinction event right now that's driven by humans. Climate change is very important, but I think people should take a very hard look at the amount of land that's What we've been talking about largely has been all things bugged.

Yeah.

Yeah, agreed. agree.

Insect protein, insects is an industrial resource. I didn't go into something like I had DARPA funding. One of my SBIRs was DARPA. They were doing genetic engineering. I still have mealworms in my office. It's hard that they're hard to see on a camera or something, but they glow green when you shine blue light on them with green fluorescent. You put that in as a marker to know that your gene got in. We're doing genomics and gene editing on the yellow mealworm and the house cricket. We published some of that work already a couple of years ago before.

Yeah Wow Yeah

the company ran out of money and I'm onto this new job here. we haven't talked about the Vertebrate Studies Institute, the nonprofit. I still felt like my board members want to move forward.

Yeah, yeah, we could definitely talk about that. Yeah, we could definitely talk about that as well. So tell me what it is. Give me the elevator pitch.

So the elevator pitch of that is, and it's a nonprofit that I have other colleagues. So I have a new job. I'm priming colleagues because I've been kind of a leader of it for a long time. My other board members, I'm getting kind of tied into the giving of files and stuff to try to do some fundraising and kind of grow it, even in my absence and things. But it's still, we still have a pretty, solid outreach network that we've done that my colleagues are building on. Everybody I tell about it is fascinating vision that we have that's critical and timely. So the elevator speech, I'm not good at that word, but is that...

Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

A majority of animal life on earth are insects.

Mm-hmm. What is that? Give me a percentage if you can. What is it? Like 59%, 80 %?

I should know that number, I'd have to look it up. I think more than half of animals for sure, by number of species. And the large amount by number of individuals, because there are so many of them. they lay so many eggs and things of that nature, and they're small. So here's the elevator pitch. I had to think about the evolution of the organization. I kind of went back to the beginning for a minute. But what the organization, the real vision is,

All

a facility kind of like Jurassic Park, but for real, for immersion of people deeply into biodiversity, large amounts of biodiversity and biotechnology working together. So if you remember in the movie, there was the dinosaurs and stuff, the animals out here to see, which didn't follow the schedules like Jeff Goldblum would remind us. But then in part of it, there was a little theater that would turn around and you would see a lab open up.

Okay.

And were people that were doing cutting edge biotechnology that had medical, agriculture, all kinds of potential applications in the process of creating these dinosaurs, kind of like NASA in the early days. was, why do we care about going to the moon? Well, we might not care about the go to the moon, but all of these tangential technologies in order to achieve that have Earth applications. I think that's getting people exposed because the thesis of the organization is

Mm-hmm.

Right.

that people don't care about what they don't see and they don't see often. They don't care about species around the world and biodiversity because a lot of these things don't even Like if they could hold one of these, and I've done this at science fairs, you go into a crowd with like a...

Yep.

Thank

a walking stick like this big, like the size of three cigars or something, a big green thing with wings or something, and people will just mob you. They'll just go crazy. I have a friend that does shows for a living at schools and stuff, and he does just tarantulas. He can go to a crowd with a tarantula.

Yeah.

and people just mob him and want to look at it. People are attracted to these things and biodiversity. There's exotic, like I mentioned earlier, there are cool fruits around, there are delicious, amazing fruits and spices and things around the world that people like in the United States, for example, don't get to access or have never seen or tried. There's so much biodiversity, species that we can totally display and show people, but it's not being done at zoos, it's not being done anywhere. So we want to give the biodiversity that is exciting.

Mm.

and a thousand species of insects and a thousand species of plants on display to immerse people in this biodiversity. And also at the same facility, the scientists interacting with the people in displays back and forth, we're doing genome sequencing, using the data for AI and drug discovery, discovering new... compounds, potential drug lead compounds, and antimicrobial peptides, and anti-cancer compounds, a host of things, new genetic tools and stuff you can discover from invertebrates because they've been largely unexplored. Very little study has been done on the compared to the biodiversity. If I was on the elevator with a billionaire, my speech would be, because it depends on your audience, right? I think this is kind of sad, unless the numbers are totally off. I've read is

Right.

Yeah.

I would say, look, probably the greatest contribution to science for all time, or at least in history to date, would be for somebody to fund a project similar to ours to sequence all of life on Earth, all species of life on Earth. We're focused on all the insects, which is will be a big chunk of it, a majority of the animal life on Earth. once you have the biological blueprint, like Neil deGrasse Tyson would tell you about life, is there life in other places? And speculate, what would it be? What would it look like? And they're trying to figure out what we only know about life on Earth, because it's the only life we've ever seen. So if we had the biological blueprint of life on Earth, that's the best guess, at least that's the best toolbox we could ever create to begin to, you know, I'm kind of extrapolating to space as a field of interest, but

Right. Right.

Even if we want to know everything about life on Earth or have our best chances of curing diseases, having the most efficient crops, know, stabilizing our ecosystem, whatever it is we want to do here on Earth, the best toolbox we could possibly have is the GNA genetic blueprint, deep genome sequences of all the species of life on Earth. And so I'd say in their publications, there are people working on this. I'll wrap it up in this sentence that.

Yeah, I mean,

There's places like the Sanger Institute and some professors publishing about this doing estimations that technology has gotten way better in the past five to 10 years and the price has gone way down on this. is people are proposing that all species of life on earth could be sequenced for like about $3 billion, which if you look at things like Twitter, was 44 billion, right? NFL, I don't follow sports. have no idea, but I assume many of them are in the billions. It's not an interesting, it's really in the grand scheme of things, a small amount of money for

Right. Yep.

quite a very valuable, and this is where money and value are not the same thing, for quite a valuable thing that would be contributed to. So if you were a billionaire that gave three billion or five billion dollars to sequence everything on earth, that's probably the best legacy that anybody could ever spend money on.

Yeah, I mean, Aaron, take it back for me, because I'm no scientist, clearly. But what's the importance of getting all of that stuff sequenced? Because I've heard it too throughout my years, high school, college. But I never really understood the why. Why invest in something like that? What's the output for humanity?

So first I'll kind of get started at the beginning or at the end of the book. With the AI revolution right now, almost everything in biotech will go at lightning speed on discovering and optimizing therapies, things like vaccines and cancer vaccines.

Okay.

and your, what do they call it, immunotherapy for cancer and some of the cutting it, know, crops, improving crops to be, know, maybe a cold hardy tropical fruit like it. Maybe you could be growing citrus in Kansas with the machine learning and getting to the right answer because if your hypothesis is somewhere, if it's possible at all. to engineer these things, to create these therapies and crops and solutions for a better life, more stable life on Earth, for protection of space and all these things, then this machine learning is accelerating everything, getting to the answer more quickly than we ever could. But it needs real world data. It doesn't know anything until we tell it. And so that's where you can get jobs like for 20 bucks an hour talking to a computer because it wants to know what would a chemical engineer say about this topic.

.

Yep.

How would a cumulonator speak? What is your thought process? It's really minding human brain, you know, all of human brains to get to the, use machines to, to arrive at answers faster and, and multiplying the number of humans as I understand it. That what if, there were, if there were a trillion humans working, you know, on this project, how, how fast could we, you know, arrive at the answer? But so that's kind of the, the new stuff that's come along. You get, you get more and more data to these machine learnings.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it's real world and it's based on, for us, insects are some of the oldest, most successful, optimized animals on earth. They live in all these niches, they're tough, they've been around forever. So like you can imagine at the scale of the gene, their genes have been very, very optimized to fuck very, very well. Enzymes, their exoskeleton, all of these things. So like their biological pathways are very refined. The hypothesis is. So your best answers are the closest to you're going to get from the nature is the insect genes. And then you use the machine learning to get that, to take that for a little. Plants are little different, but still you can learn a lot from insects and their microbes for plants. But historically and without AI, you think of again, a majority of a big chunk of life on earth. don't know.

I see. I see.

I need to look up those numbers of insects or more than half a species on earth, certainly for animals. if you think in their internal microbes, all the bacteria is and things that live in sites symbiotically or otherwise inside of insects have genes that function and they're producing antimicrobial peptides, they're producing compounds to use as venoms and pheromones and all these biological functions that there's a huge diversity in this group. that's all rooted in their genomes, right? All the instructions on how to produce all this stuff is in their gene, just like we were watching a fifth element the other day, and then the 3D printer that printed up the woman, and it all came down to what was in the sequence. So all of these things can be derived from knowing those sequences.

Yeah. Yeah.

predicting synchidermic tabulae, like what kind of steroids would the species make? Might be kind of hard, but again, know, AI filling in gaps in biological pathways, you you can use insect, you know, 20, 30, 40,000 insect genome can probably help find the function of some unknown genes in humans, for example, or in pigs or something.

Right. I mean, how far away are we from mapping the entire sequence that you have envisioned in your brain? Are we like 100 years out, 50 years, 20 years?

Well, it's like a construction project, right? You can see this in cities, on university campuses. I've watched this project, one project of a similar size building that had $5 million behind it took about five or six years to build. Another one had a $100 million endowment and was built in about two years. The building just went up. with the resources right now,

Yeah.

It's super slow. This could be 50 years or 100 years. And that assumes a stable world, which is a question right now. Is everything going to kind of stay the same? Can we continue to do this with our infrastructure and how everything from governments to society, for our food security, climate, social stability, entertainment, everything kind of goes into

Yeah.

Can we keep doing this the way we're doing it now? But the other people have published with a few billion bucks behind it, probably not even that. One professor told me he thought the estimates at some conferences he went to recently were probably more like a billion dollars you could get all the species on Earth. There's some logistical challenges.

Yeah Yeah Yeah

It's less about the technology. The machines exist. This is doable in the land. It's just a matter of collecting the samples. Something 1,000 feet in the ocean or 10,000 feet in the ocean, you might have to send a diver or submarine or something to collect those. So some samples might get hard to get. And again, this is a human thing that limits us. Geopolitics. Countries like to own their genetic resources and all the resources, no matter what it is.

Yeah. Yeah.

Humans want to own it. So if you wanted to sequence all the species in Colombia, for example, you would need the permission of the government. You would need to make deals. That, think, is rather easy because All of the things that people think they're going to miss out on, like they're scared of, and some places rightly so, like what if the gringo comes and discovers a blood buster drug from some local model, or just from a tree that nobody even knew that there was anything valuable in that tree, but they sequence the genome, they discover drug, and then somebody becomes a billionaire. Well, that rarely happens, and it takes decades. I think maybe the pipeline is 10 years from first clinical trials, so it's about 30 years from compound to drug with AI with some things.

yeah.

So.

Thank

with the kind of a return to people caring about science. And this is again back to ISI where I want to create a place where it emerged, get people involved, show people in real time, like how a PCR machine works, how the pipeline works from sequence to drug discovery, in a space where you can show people.

Yep.

Yeah. Thank you.

the machines and talk to them about how it works. think people get very excited when they have access and the same with the biodiversity and showing the poor. But I think some of this could go could go faster, but the chances that that's going to happen is very slim. put it in their lawyers that do this for living every hour of our day, right of a contract like cost sharing or cost sharing is one thing, but you know, revenue sharing. If there's profit to be made here, it will be shared with the people of that country. Period, full stop. This seems like a pretty easy treaty to write. So I don't see that as...

Yeah, anytime you get humans involved in anything we always make it harder than it should be.

But if you can get the samples, this is probably about it. From what I've heard, this is about a 10-year endeavor. The sequencing itself with the samples would be about 10 years.

Yeah.

What do you say to people that tell you things like, well, maybe getting 50 % of the sequencing done is good enough or 60 or 90. Like at what point do we get that critical mass of being able to then do these things with the sequencing so we can make these drugs or make the world a better place? Like at what point do we hit that tip?

Yeah, we're not there yet. It's there, you know, a tiny fraction of them sequenced to date. But I would kind of throw Jeff Goblin back out there. Nature finds a way. I think it's it's I I I too many times, maybe sometimes I have a fear of missing out. But I think there's a risk in not wanting to do all of it and not aspiring to do all of it. That said, and I was trying to write a grant a couple of years ago when things were getting

Yeah.

know, finance of the company were getting scary and I didn't get a chance to submit this anywhere, but you could do a pilot study. I wanted to work with an AI company. If there's any out there, I would love to work with you on this. There could be, like if you do 30 genomes, if you do 100, if you do a thousand, you could do a pilot project that based on, and it depends on the application and probably the machine learning and the software that you use, probably depends on a lot of factors as how much is enough.

Thank

Right.

But you just start out picking a good, one of the better, the best AI biotech protein folding, whatever your target is. When you want to do synthetic biology, want to fill in pathway gaps or something, find out what your target goal is, what you're trying to achieve, and start sequencing, inputting genomes. Put in 10, put in 30, and then also diversity is very important.

Okay.

So if you put in 100 mushroom genomes, you're probably going to hit a wall pretty quick because they're all mushroom genomes. But then you start to put a walking stick genomes or moth genomes or fish genomes or something, you're probably going to get a little exponential curve of progress and then hit an asymptote. I think if you wanted to do a project, and I think there are some folks that have talked about this doing a certain slice.

Yeah.

Right, Okay.

like certain number of species from all families on Earth, families of organisms. The diversity, catching every taxidonic group at a certain level would probably get you a very long way. 25 to 50%, I'm just spitballing here, but you could probably make a lot of progress on less than half of the species if you were catching all the taxidomic groups.

Right.

Right, right. Aaron, I want to go back to ISI a little bit and you talked about educating the masses, the public about the importance of these things. What do you envision as the perfect audience for you? you talking about like college level students, kids? professionals, businesses, and how does your approach to getting people's information change based on who that audience is?

Yeah, I mean, at a basic level, I would say the audience is everybody, but particularly adults. Of course, I think we want to reach people, adults, in positions where they can make an impact, whether it's by the amount of money they have access to or their position in government or the position at a corporation or with their network. that they could meet with executives or people quickly because they do this all the people that can have influence quickly on how things are done. Everything from recycling to decisions about food laws to decisions about scientific funding, for example, people in politics and managing campaigns and such. think nature and science gets an embarrassingly low amount of airtime on

Thanks.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

in our political discourse and there's an embarrassingly small number of scientists in Congress. And I think that's problematic. They all don't need to be scientists because they have advisors in them. There is a pipeline to get them information, but I think it's been woefully lacking for a couple of decades now. And so I think, of course, we want people, we want to reach people that can have an impact. But kind of the goal is also reaching everybody.

Right.

because they vote, they spend money. people can make changes in their lives. There are some things that the daily life can access. I think we just wanted people to get people in the door. I have a vision for the facility. I think I made a very essential document. want to have a biodome, maybe the world's largest biodome, because there's not a lot of big biodomes out there. it would probably be easy to create the world's largest in the shape of a beetle, maybe as a kind of an homage to the beetles or like the largest group of animals on earth. Yeah. Kind of like that. The Eden Project in Cornwall, UK is a plant conservatory that's very big. They held the, I mean, talking about audience, they held the G8 Con convention there a couple of years ago.

Like the Amazon sphere over here in downtown Seattle, they've got those two massive spheres, trees in them, which is pretty cool. and

So you have all these world leaders walking around this wonderful ambiance of plants and biodiversity, probably reading some signage and learning about it there, access to the staff maybe. So yeah, we wanna host events like that, maybe reaching out to the film industry and hosting some kind of, what we wanna create could be a spectacular place for films.

Yeah.

Thank you.

working with other companies, all the lab space, because we're going to need a large amount of growth chambers and stuff. And the type of facility we need will be unique and accessible to a lot of researchers that probably want to come in and use some of the companies, know, Bayer Biosciences and some of the Malsantos and some of the companies doing biotech and ag tech and stuff probably would benefit from some of the facilities we will know what to build for, like again, growth chambers with the biotech center down the hall, analytical chemistry,

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

and genomic center in the same facility. But we want people getting them in the door. And so in addition to the structure of the biodome and the world's largest insect zoo, which is a very low bar, we want to have 500 to 1,000 species on display. This is a big hobby in Europe, or kind of big. I mean, know hundreds of people that breed insects. They have like 200 species of walking sticks in the garage or something. So this is doable. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean it's a huge thing Not even like in Europe, but on YouTube, know, like it's a huge thing I think one of the biggest channels right now is the terrarium guy in Canada, like he's got this massive three I'll send you the link after it's like he's got three floors in his house. He's got this whole sort of ecosystem of different things with rainforest climates and all these things. And I feel like there's definitely an interest from the public in the importance of.

definitely. Yeah. We want to, one of the things, we already kind of have a location in mind, although again, somebody's writing a check. We're open to many locations. Orlando, Florida makes so much sense to me because of the climate. You don't have to worry about ice storms damaging the structure. You can grow some of the plants outside, like mango trees or something. You can kind of grow them outside and then pick ones and bring them into the facility as needed. There's a lot you can do outdoors there. But the tourist traffic is one of the hottest, most active tourist places on earth. Plus it has several universities. That's something that a lot of people don't realize about Florida. There are a lot of universities kind of. in the state doing pretty solid research like biosciences and everything from medical to ag is kind of happening in Florida. I think we could reach a lot of people in that location. Disney, know, Universal Studios, there's some, you know, there even some film happening there that we could collaborate with.

Yeah, yeah

Yeah, Aaron, I want to spend maybe the last 15, 20 minutes and talk about the reflection, your personal reflection. You've had encounters with influential people throughout your years when you're writing these grants and talking to individuals to, you know, hopefully get money to support a lot of these initiatives. Based on your experience working and being around influential people, What has that really told you about the state of the science that you're interested in now? Like, is there some sort of reflection that you'd like to give based on your engagement or the funding that you've had? Like, what does that look like to you?

And I haven't had nearly cut part of my goal of being on podcasts. And I would like to be on more is reaching more in not just a broader audience, that there's people who knows where they could be interested in this and might call us up and want to volunteer at how about in certain ways. There's a donation link on the site. And for example, but on the invertebrate studies Institute site. But I'd say we haven't, haven't, I'm actually in my career haven't.

Mm-hmm.

been able to interact with influential people nearly as much as I think would be helpful to careful how it phrases I guess. I think if I could reach some more influential people, they would be fascinated by some of the stuff that I've learned in the past 30 years and that's coming on now. And I think they would be willing to use some of their

Right. Right.

of influence and bandwidth to move some of this forward. think, and generally there is a lack of interaction of people in power and influence with scientists and biologists. And there's a lot that could go into that, time, energy, making assumptions. I've seen where there's made by, we don't want... depending on certain politicians, maybe your political people might say, oh, they're a bunch of liberals. Biologists are all a bunch of fruity liberals that just want to live on nuts and fruits in the wild and want to stay ever. Yeah, never build a building and never drive a car. But that's a dumb assumption. That's lazy, intellectually lazy and just incorrect. So you don't want to base your decisions on incorrect and for me, assumptions, whatever it is. If it's how you spend your credit card or whatever.

Right Yeah, we're now left Yeah.

Right.

I'd say that I wish people like me could interact with more influential people. There's a need for it. There really is a need. We've seen this since the pandemic and last year, the cutting and the damage and the reputation of science and the distrust of experts, for example. I think it's lack of access. Folks in the media, for example, if CNN is listening, Mr. Berman, Mr. Glitzer, Mr. Anderson, would love to come on.

Right.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, there you go. Give us a holler. Yeah, give us a holler.

I think there needs to be a bigger, scientists and biologists need a bigger audience and the world needs us to have a bigger audience right now.

Yeah. Aaron, you wrote the bill establishing the National Postdoc Appreciation Week. Tell me about that.

you know, in midst of the same thing.

that was when I got my PhD and I was kind of learning some sad realities about wanting to have a career in science. When I was ready, like I'm ready to go, here I am.

Yeah.

Yo, what hit you first? when you talk reality, what was the first thing you said? You were like, what the fuck did I just get myself into? Or was it more like, man, I've got a long road ahead of me.

Okay. both kind of at the same time. Both are happening at the same time like forest woods. I, I mean, there are little things that are not small, but like, I don't know, there's one, there's one thing universities do called dual fiber. I have to throw that out there. I know I'd probably make, you know, make people mad about this, but it's called like when you have a couple and I think it could be other relatives. could go beyond just married couples, but it's like,

Yeah.

What is that? I don't know what that is.

When they're trying to recruit a professor and then they have a spouse that's also an academic, they say, we can only move if both of you hire both of us. like they give jobs to people based on their relatives versus having a competitive, you know, announcement for a faculty job. if all the positions are competitive and they're so few and far between, I feel like they really, I mean, they're morally obligated because they're using public funds to have all of the positions be competitive. But that's

Mmm. Got it.

right Mm.

That's one of the things that I was just never I didn't think that would exist. I it was more merit and academia than that. But I think it's the lack of position and kind of the lack of academia being interested in growing the club. Like there's a lot of there are some things.

What is that? I never understood that. I would imagine the diversity of thinking would be what they would want, but that seems counter-intuitive to me.

On the surface, if you're coffee with somebody, I think philosophically they would like that, but practically competition for grants. I think in the past 20 or so years, with all the budget cuts and stuff, it's become a crab in a box situation where one starts to curl up and then the rest of them kind of pull them back down like a postdoc or like me, graduate.

Yeah.

you

a PhD graduate or a postdoc in a lab wants to enter the field. Actually, I had a friend that told me his PhD advisor literally told him he wanted that letters of recommendation for some faculty jobs he's applying for. And she. I guess was annoyed at how many letters he was asking for or something. he said, which it is an obligation of a PhD mentor to give referral letter unless you think the person is just horrible. It's like because your mentor's letter is very critical in finding a faculty job. But or used to be maybe things have changed. But he's she literally said, well, I don't feel like I'm in the business of training my competition or helping my competition. I'm like, what?

Right.

There's some of that. It's a human thing. It's just kind of a human competitive nature thing that exists in academia like everywhere else in the world. But I'd say just kind of the lack of opportunity and the lack of things that I heard about and people advise you say, well, if you want to do this, you need to do X, Y, and Z. Look for this program. Look for this grant. Apply for this. these things. You to do all the things on the list that people give you and still there's nothing there. And then you find out, you pull the curtain and there's the wizard. And you see that, well, none of this was never there, or at least in the past number of years, it hasn't been there because of lack of funding or because of, and when there's lack of resources, people do things like to reduce competition, hire friends and relatives, hire people that they trust, the people that are,

Right.

close to them that aren't going to burn them or not help them get their promotion or they can collaborate with them grants and things. I'm not bashing it. In a lot of ways, it's survival tactic with cuts and stuff. But those are some of the things I think that are unhelpful and have made science an unattractive.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, to that point, Aaron, like, I'm just looking at your career so far, and you and I have just met, so I don't know a ton about you. But I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that even if you didn't get your PhD, you'd probably be doing very similar things because your passion for this space comes across very clearly. Do you think if you didn't get your PhD that One, you would be doing what you're doing now, but two, do you think that the PhD has helped you in any way or has it been a hindrance?

I would say the years that I invested in it, I probably could have, if I knew more, if I was from a geography or background where I knew how the world worked more, if I grew up in New York or something, I would have been around people that I would know how to do more things in building a career and building connections and stuff. I would say the PhD,

Yeah. Yeah. Because you've got the business. Right.

Yeah.

The years I invested in it probably held me back because I could have been doing some other things if I knew about them. But it did open some doors. There are some things that I think some of the grants I got, for example, had I not been a PhD, I might not have been taken serious by reviewers and might not have. And plus, the experiences being in the environment, then this is where I think a big part of education where I like

Right.

I know, is unpopular opinion, but I don't like private schools. I like community schools. like the school like everybody goes to the same school system so that everybody in the whole country is invested in that system. You can't buy your way out of it. So one of the benefits other than just people caring and voting certain ways to preserve it and make it better, instead of buying their way out of it.

Better. Thank

is I think you get a mix of people from different backgrounds and walks of life so kids have exposure. So maybe their parents work at a factory, but maybe somebody, their best friend in schools, dad is an executive or mom is an executive or a very successful lawyer or something. So they go to their house and they learn stuff from that. Like the community level learning, think I'm off on a little tangent here, but I think that's...

Yeah. Yeah.

That's important. But I think in my case, I would have probably been doing some version of it, because I'm very passionate about nature, just whatever it was. I did something where I made enough money, I probably would have located to a mild climate like Florida or Southern California, because this is what I like. And I would still be growing stuff. At the end of the day, it kind of comes down to the core passion I have is growing stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's.

and seeing as much nature as I can. And I think I would always be doing that.

Yeah, it's clear based on our conversation here just within the last maybe like hour 15 minutes that that is your passion. And I want to spend maybe the last 10 minutes Aaron of our our conversation asking you about forward facing things, things that, you know, hasn't happened yet. But I want to get your projections on it, your hot takes on it. What do you think is the biggest detriment now to to the the insect population? Is it and it could be anything from like policy economy people whatever what is what is your opinion on what that looks like?

Well, yeah, policy influences everything, right? If you're going to have a civilization, and this is unpopular opinion alert, all civilizations and stable, comfortable lifestyles have governments. People are going to do things in collective. There's not really been any examples of history of a totally individualistic collection of humans growing or achieving a comfortable lifestyle.

Mm-hmm.

farmers, the advent of agriculture is probably the first example of people collaborating to make it. But I'd say that the detriment to insects is land clearing, I think habitat loss. And people are starting to start to say that out loud. It's been pesticides and

Yeah.

Why is it taking us so long? I don't understand that.

I think some of the stuff reflexively seems like it makes more sense, like pesticides use. that's a big contributor. A lot of data is showing that pesticide use has really killed a lot of nature. you kill one species and there's a ripple effect. And the thing that pollinates that. But in climate change, just a very, very hot topic.

Right, absolutely.

very hot. can change how we use our energy sources theoretically. People don't talk about as much about rewilding the earth and building the forest up to stabilize the atmosphere. that's, I think there are people that pushed climate change with the goal of also, you know, maybe, you know,

I think you're right.

benefiting the natural ecosystems and throw that in the conversation with the site. Oh, by the way, that's a system. That's a way we can, we don't all have to drive electric cars if we have healthier forest or something. There's schools and people with kind of a side mission riding along with the climate change and stuff. But I think land clearing is probably one of the least convenient things. Human population and land clearing are probably the two of the least convenient things to talk about because

Right.

We like to eat. We like our space. don't like, humans don't like to have limits. And so if we said, hey, we need to kind of take half of the land on earth and give it back to nature. Like take all of the stuff, anything that might pollute like tanks of chemicals or stuff that humans have built, take it off the land, let it grow back. Maybe teams of biologists can help repopulate some stuff, can do some plannings, or maybe we just leave it alone and let it rebuild itself, which probably happens. Very unpopular because we've cleared.

Yeah.

almost like a majority of the land on earth is used for agriculture and like a majority of that land is used for livestock and people like meat and as people as populations get more excellent they like more meat because part of it and we talked about that earlier stigmas about

Mm hmm. Yeah.

vegetarian diets or eating insects and things are a lot of that happens when you know the Western the cultures that don't do it have come into those communities like this has happened in Africa a lot I've read some papers and talked to some researchers there that yeah it's the places influenced by Western culture that they say we don't want to eat insects anymore whereas the people where the places for Western and the culture isn't influenced they're still eating Katie they're still eating the insects that they are that they've always eaten

Right. Yeah, I wonder, I don't know if there's any studies.

I think it's convenient to think about land clearing for people without technology to make it. But the good news in that, I think that's a solvable thing with indoor agriculture, with more efficient agriculture. If we can be more efficient about our food production, which there's insects in our solution, indoor vertical farming, there's a ton of

it.

Yeah.

stuff that we can do more targeted eating less meat more plant. There's a lot of stuff that we can do to reduce the land and still have delicious food accessible.

Yeah, Aaron, I want to ask you, and this is the, as we wrap up here, are there any studies that have either correlation or causation of the diversity of consumption of foods, eating insects, eating plants, with the health of the countries or the cities, is there any link between the two or is there not? How does that work?

There are some, I haven't seen an article purely focused on that, doing any statistics behind it, but I can send you some articles after this that have looked at the health of a population and diet or health of the ecosystem and diet. There's definitely a lot of correlations, studies correlating our food system to the health of the environment and to the people's health.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, I think I just watched a Netflix special on I can't remember the title. It's like blue certain like blue places like, yeah, the Blue Zones, right? Like, exactly. And I wonder, you know, I don't I don't have I haven't read enough about the Blue Zones to know much about it besides what I saw there. But is that something that

Blue zone. More people live to 100 years, yeah.

You know, with the work that you're doing with at ISI and your background, is that something that you are trying to help push or is that a different narrative altogether?

Bye.

Yes, in fact, in certain conversations, we dream big, but we've even thought about if the biodome that we want to do is successful, it could be franchised to different locations because access to nature and I think in Tokyo, for example, in Japan, there's a lot of programs around this concept is in the blue zones, one of the unifying factors is stress, having healthy social life.

Yeah.

having a low stress environment, walking a lot, like in nature a lot is connected with longevity. And what we want to do is get people into nature. And so there's definitely, definitely a tie and we're not the only ones, know, thinking about this link to longevity and better health and access to nature.

Yep.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. All right, my friend, last question for you, Aaron, and I appreciate you coming on. This has been very educational for me. This is a hypothetical question, so I don't, there's no right or wrong answer, but if you were given the opportunity to populate a new planet, a new world, let's just say Mars or whatever, right? Like come up with a planet. Where would you start and how would you start it?

Is Elon going to call after this? He wants to probably like, that's exactly what he wants to do. We can talk. Yeah, Grant Aaron.

No, no, this is just you. This is just you. This is... This planet... This is planet Aaron. Like, this is where...

I there's practical considerations, which I'm already thinking like I'm talking to some people about projects of food production on the moon and Mars, for example. So that's a thing that my company was doing that I'm still these conversations. We're still looking at some funding sources of new grants that are coming up and stuff. said the first thing is figure out how you're going to grow food in those places. So there's practical considerations. If I was going to do, think they need to build infrastructure, use robots and automation and build like send containers, send structures up until there's a critical mass of infrastructure for people to live. Cause I think going up there and just like sending 10 people up in a little pod and thinking they're going to do well for a year or something or six months is. is kind of crazy. think they need to send some stuff up and just pop them down like shipping containers or something with high-tech stuff to living quarters inside and resources before they send any humans. But are you thinking philosophically what I think it would be like?

Yeah, like what would be your approach like generally we don't have to go into like the exact species of things you'd populate it with or the plant but like how would you approach something like that because I would imagine as I'm as we're having this conversation the thing that strike that strikes me is the theme of interconnectedness and how things are built upon each other and and as much as we want to believe that we are independent of all these other things

Yeah.

we're very much connected. And so like from a scientific point of view, from a business point of view, if you had that opportunity to populate a new place, how would you even start having those conversations? Where would you start?

I mean, if I was creating a new culture, for example, so there's, you know, structurally, infrastructure and food and living quarters and things like that's kind of what would be my approach. Send the stuff until there's enough of it so people can live comfortably and you're sure what's there can sustain people. Some medicines and some things that they might send the stuff before you send the people as much as you can. But...

Yeah.

designing the society, example, designing a new society for a place, is to kind of keep people grounded, keep people as close to each other as, know, is design the system, the economy, the educational system, the employment, the career, the access to things because I think, oh, I forgot. Fran Leibowitz is a and New York writer. You're probably familiar. One of the things she says and the thing she did with Martin Scorsese on Netflix, I think it was hilarious. It's a spectacular. It's called Pretend It's a City. It's one of my favorite things. But she said,

Yeah.

The thing she likes about talent, for example, is that it's equally distributed in the population. You can't predict where talent is going to be resourced. He said there are many people that are very talented and that they had no opportunity to express it. you know, poverty or the times are wrong, a number of factors go into whether you can express your talent. I think it's important to keep in mind that the solution, the things you need to solve your problem or make your, you know, your world better.

Yeah.

could be anywhere and anybody could have them in their head or in their notebook or whatever. Make sure that people have access and resource access and that don't get too far ahead of any other people because you kind of need everybody on the train.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, love it, love it. All right, that was Planet, Aaron and everybody. And with that, Aaron, I want to say this has been a highly educational conversation, especially for me. I don't know about anybody else, but I've really enjoyed this conversation. I'm going to link all of your things that you've sent me into the description, and it's going to be in the written narrative going out on Substack in the newsletter. So I appreciate you coming on. I wish you well, my friend.

Alright. There you go. you go. Alright, Internet, you heard the man. Alright, Aaron, we'll see you later.