As a master's student at Johns Hopkins, Taylor Krause, A&S '21 (MS), was so taken with the promise of hydrogen as a major player in clean energy technology that she later had an image of the molecule tattooed onto her wrist.
Little did she know that her ink would put her in sync with Garrett Josemans, whose arm bears a tattoo of a quantum equation.
Krause and Josemans met as contestants on the Netflix reality series Love is Blind in 2023. On the show, contestants go on "dates" consisting of conversations held through a wall separating individual "pods." Couples only meet face to face if a marriage proposal is offered and accepted.
The two fan favorites made a quick connection as Season 7 of the show unfolded and—spoiler alert—married at its conclusion. The show aired in fall 2024 and today, the couple lives in Washington, D.C., where Krause, who earned an MS in energy policy and climate from the Krieger School's Advanced Academic Programs, is a government affairs and coalition management strategist working on federal climate and clean energy policy at the think tank RMI. We caught up with her to see what this very subjective experience was like for someone steeped in the scientific method.
How did you decide to apply for Love is Blind?
I figured that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try dating in a very different way. I did not think it would work out at all, like not even a little bit. You have a 1% hope. It actually does provide a lot of opportunity for success if you find the right person, because Netflix is going through thousands of different people that they do want to have some compatibility. But Garrett and I have been looking for this—and they can screen for some things—but there really isn't a scientific study that I know of showing a way that you can guarantee compatibility with a person. I think it's just really up to the universe, in some ways, if you guys end up working out.
You're a scientist, so I'm sure your usual thought process must lean objective, data-driven, and analytical. What was it like to navigate such an impulsive setting where you needed to trust your gut?
It really narrows your decision-making process because you have to just sit with yourself, where in real life you have a confluence of different factors that affect the process—work, travel schedules, even the process of planning dates, etc. Obviously, the most important decision you'll ever make is who you choose to share your life with, but I didn't realize everything that usually goes into what dating is. There's what your friends think, what your family thinks (you can't talk to anyone during filming), things on social media, how the person maybe has behavioral mannerisms. So I actually learned a lot more about what variables I didn't realize were influencing me. But the idea of not knowing what someone looks like was kind of the driving factor of being a really interesting experiment. I just consistently said, I'm a scientist at heart, and let's try an experiment.
What does a typical day on Love is Blind look like?
You are given a list of what to talk about. You don't have to talk about those things, but it's like Pre-Cana on steroids: What are your finances? What are your financial goals? What religion would you like to raise your children in? Every day you had a prompt that was founded in some tenet of what a serious relationship should talk about. The creator of the show would go through what that tenet was at the top of the day and then people could ask questions. It's really funny because we later found out that after he'd give his spiel, Garrett and I were asking very similar questions without knowing it.
One way the system works that has a questionable scientific method is the ranking system. Day one, you date everybody on the other side, usually a five- to 10-minute conversation, and then you rank people. That goes into an algorithm that makes your list shorter the next day. I was like, oh, this is kind of like sorority recruitment; I think it's fine. But Garrett was very questioning about what makes this algorithm. Is the algorithm accurate, or possibly people are maybe fiddling with who should be matched up with who? I guess I had a little bit more blind faith than he did.
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How did you prepare?
I didn't think it was going to happen, but I tongue-in-cheek told all the special people in my life that there might be a wedding in a couple of weeks. I journaled a lot going into the show. Thinking about it made me really sit down and figure out what I was looking for in a life partner. I defined what I was willing to share on camera so that I felt comfortable and wasn't affecting anyone else. We are an accumulation of lived experiences that are usually with other people, but some things aren't necessarily my story to tell.
My preparation allowed me to be more intentional with my time there, and then led to it being really successful. I don't think Garrett and I would have worked in the real world. We maybe would have gone on a date or two, but we wouldn't have had this boot camp that made us sit down and tease out these things that are important to us with both of us in the right headspace.
Please describe your work with clean energy.
I work at a nonprofit called RMI. It is a think tank, which is basically an organization that operates on grants to work on the world's problems that the market doesn't address. RMI specializes in clean energy commercialization, and the team I'm on focuses on federal policy for decarbonizing heavy industries. A main clean energy technology in decarbonizing heavy industries is hydrogen, so that's why I had a hydrogen tattoo. It's what I did my capstone about at Hopkins. It catalyzed my career.
I mostly spend my time identifying the policies that we want to influence that would have the biggest impact on hydrogen, and influencing decision-makers who inform and decide on those policies. Sometimes it involves getting a bunch of hydrogen developers together to say, what do you think is needed for your industry to utilize a production tax credit? A lot of what I do is looking at the policies that were passed in the Inflation Reduction Act that could help the hydrogen industry. Sometimes that involves coalition-building between different companies, or providing techno-economic analysis to inform decision-makers, though I don't personally generate that analysis.
Are there elements of your work that were useful on the show?
I do feel like what I do for work helped me be successful in the process. Talking about climate and clean energy—especially in a federal policy sense, when it could be very political—gave me really strong communication skills to talk to people that I might not see eye to eye with about a lot of things in life. But ultimately, I think people do want similar things. I think few would disagree if you said that you wanted to create a healthier and better environment for future generations.
How about the reverse? Are there elements of the show that you can apply to your work?
It made me a lot more empathetic. It's really easy to become frustrated with people, especially when we're talking about the climate crisis that feels so immense, imminent, and insurmountable at times. I was surprised that I dated guys on the other side of the aisle that all thought it was really great and important to be working on clean energy. Climate jobs are real jobs; we have the same frustrations and annoyances that go with having a day-to-day job, and I feel I've become a much kinder person from being on the show. I thought I was a pretty kind person before, but I think I'm a lot more understanding of what people are probably going through, and that just because someone is being rude or mean that day, there's a lot that goes into how people react to things.
It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where you get to experience a situation and then watch it back. I would get information from other people about their experience and create this perspective on it, and then you get to watch it back and you're like, oh, so that's really what happened. I think there are two, three, four, maybe even more sides to a story. I'm very lucky that it was a very positive experience for me, but that wasn't the same for a lot of my castmates, and to see how negative people were toward them online was really eye-opening for me. It makes me think a lot more about how we talk to each other, and how it's so easy for people to be very mean and toxic unnecessarily. I could see how someone maybe thought they were reacting in a good way and from a hurt place, but when you see it on TV, they kind of seem like a jerk, so it made me a lot more empathetic to how people react to things.
Were there any moments in the show where your Hopkins experience resonated for you?
Every professor and person that I met at Hopkins really wanted, ultimately, to make a difference in the world, and my time on the show has shown me that there's a lot of like-minded people like that. Both experiences have allowed me to know that a lot of people have this intrinsic nature of wanting to contribute to making the world a better place.
When it comes to climate and clean energy, a lot of people reach out to me about how to get into that field. Having a graduate degree in this is something that was super helpful for me, especially when it comes to policy; not everybody has the opportunity to go to D.C., work on the Hill, work in a federal office. Working in climate and clean energy is something that's given me a lot of purpose. Also job security—people don't really talk about the ability to work in a field that is going to be part of a huge transition. There was the Industrial Revolution, and now we're going to see the de-industrial revolution, in a lot of ways, and there are a lot of jobs and economies that go into that. So I think that it's just a fantastic program.
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