This is the second of our conversations recorded at the SIMB Natural Products conference, which took place last January 2020 in San Diego. San Diego, of course is the “home turf” of my post-doctoral mentor, Brad Moore, who has join appointments at UC San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Alison and I were lucky to get some time to sit down and have a great chat with him. I kind of lost count of how many times Brad used the words “fun” and “magical” when describing his science, which is kind of the hallmark or the philosophy of his group and I think in hearing him talk about natural products you’ll get a good sense of what it’s like working with him. We talk about his father, the legendary marine natural products chemist, Richard Moore, and get into seaweed, robots, algae, and biocatalysis — and he makes fun of me a lot, though I actually edited most of that out.