The Secret AI Technology Behind Pollution-Free Smart Cities

Hello and welcome to this episode of Conscious Design Podcast. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and I help turn product ideas into sustainable 7-figure businesses. Join me for another episode where sustainability meets innovation and business savvy. Today, I'm really excited to have Janessa Olson. She is the co-founder and CEO of Ecologica, where they're creating healthy buildings for healthy lives. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Absolutely. Well, this is a very important topic, right? Buildings. We spend most of our lives in buildings, so it's a big thing to tackle. So let's go back to kind of the beginning, the roots of all this. What got you to decide, I want to, I want to tackle air quality in buildings as my, that's my life's work right now?

Yeah, it's a great question. People actually ask me all the time, they're like, how did you get into this It's so specific. But really, I think that, you know, this would be very similar for most founders, is it really starts with a personal story and my own health journey. So really where this all began and where I started learning about this concept called the environmental determinants of health is when I was about 12 years old, I started getting really, really sick about 2 to 3 times a year. It was seemingly out of nowhere. And more often than not, I would end up in the hospital. Crazy, crazy symptoms. Sometimes I would be down for 2, 3 weeks at a time. And there was a time where I was a professional athlete. I was a runner. And you're arguably at the peak of your health, fitness. You're sleeping well, you're eating well, you're kind of doing all things right and I was still getting knocked out. Yeah, it was a really crazy time for sure. And my mom is a psychotherapist, so we have this more holistic approach to health. We always have. It's not just, you know, body and taking medicine, but it's also what's going on in your mind emotionally, all that stuff. So with this kind of broadened perspective on health, We decided we were going to start trying to figure out what was going on with me. Also, my dad has an autoimmune disease, so we are hyper-aware of inflammation and the impact of external factors on your body. So we— Yeah, exactly. Everything is so interconnected. So we started going down this journey of trying to figure out what was going on. And through this process of elimination over about 10 years, we realized that I am extremely sensitive to air quality, both indoors and out. And these triggers were from pollutants, allergens, molds, whatever it could be. And there are even instances where I would walk into a restaurant or a lecture hall and know immediately, if I stay in here, I'm going to be in the hospital in 6 hours.

Wow. At least you learned that, I guess, learned that part of being able to know the room is going to knock you to the hospital.

So like, I guess that's the good part is you can Yeah, I mean, it was great, except sometimes you couldn't go for dinner with your friends, or sometimes you had to like skip class.

Yeah, that's—

Right. So a little bit limiting for sure. But yeah, very interesting to essentially be like a human canary. So that's really where it all started. And this concept of air quality and how it impacts your health in both like long-term situations and acute situations has been a part of my life for 20 years. And I had this like aha moment when I was working as a strategy consultant for a tech company in India and obviously not really known for great air quality there.

Right. That was my first thought right there is that sounds risky.

Definitely risky. So I did end up being hospitalized, which no surprise, but the moment that was You know, my light bulb moment was when my colleagues also were hospitalized. And I really realized the scale of this issue in terms of impact on people, environmental impact, just the fact that this is much more far-reaching than I thought it was. And clearly the systems that we have in place were not sufficient. And I really felt like I was getting like almost a picture of the future. if we didn't start doing something about our environments. And that's where Ecologica was born. So, it's been quite a journey to get to this point, but yeah, here we are now.

Yeah, that's a journey just for you to get to the part where you figured out this was something you could do. And it's funny you mentioned India, and I work with people all over the world. And there's— this isn't to pick on India, but there's many countries like them that have low air quality. And I've had team members and teammates that were working on very important projects and they go, I'm going to the hospital, I'm out. And they're like, yeah, today is a heavy smog today. And they are out. They're out for a day, maybe a couple days dealing with this. And there's Even if you just look at the more calloused financial model, that's a lot of work hours that just disappear. And that's not even considering if they're in a hospital, they're not seeing their family, they're not with their kids. There's additional stress on anybody that goes to the hospital. Nobody's looking to do that. So many layers on top of that. It's a big— once you start diving into it and you get to know people that experience that, it's a crazy large amount of people that we just— until you meet someone and they're like, oh, but they know like 100 other people. And you're like, oh no, this isn't just like a peanut butter allergy that happens one and whatever. Like, this is rather common, actually.

Yeah. And I think that people, they don't even think about it. But even when There are all those wildfires last year that were impacting New York. California is hugely impacted by them. Apparently, according to like a UN statistic, the rate of global wildfires is going to be increasing by like 30% this decade. I actually know it's, it's sooner than that. And it's the impact is larger. But I know I'm getting that stat wrong. So we'll just leave it moderate.

Yeah, there you go.

But you even think about like allergies, so many of these other factors, asthma, it's super, super prevalent. And people don't always make the connection between the changes in their quality of life, their health, and air, even when they're experiencing like terrible allergies that are super distracting or things like that. They're just like, oh, I just got to live with it. This is just how it goes. But it doesn't actually have to be that way, especially within the built environment, because we can control it.

Right. Yeah, that's a good point. I had severe allergies when I was a kid, and they've tapered off more now, but reactive to, like, dust. And so if I'm in a building— I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Mold is everywhere. Everywhere in the walls. And you could tell like, oh, I had kids get sick because it's, oh, the mold is out now. We have to deal with it. And it's, there's so much of that, the maintenance part, right? And going to school and all of those, you're sitting in school and 8 hours a day. It's a moldy environment, dusty environment. You're going to get more sick or sick, right?

Yeah.

If that takes you down, you can get something else on top of just Whatever the first cause was.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, there are direct links between air quality and airborne allergens to absenteeism in schools. It impacts kids' grades. Yeah, when we started building out our data analytics program, the linkages you wouldn't even think of in some situations. There's a direct link between year-over-year changes in air quality and early onset Parkinson's disease. Suicide rates increase because of air quality, mental health, diagnosed depression, even aging, longevity, preterm birth, you name it. All of these things are so connected. And we don't necessarily put those pieces together. But they exist, and they've been studied.

It's the air. You're like, oh, the air is fine. I can't see it.

Yeah.

So it's fine.

Yeah. It's not great. Sure. It's great. Yeah.

There's not like coal just getting blown in my face and it's not smoke from a fire. We're good. It's invisible, I think. And that just to what you're talking about, it's invisible. We don't connect that stuff.

Yeah. And that has been such a challenge for us through the creation and growth of our company is how do we make the invisible visible? And how do we demonstrate to people that this is something that they should care about? And it's a piece of their— of every single person's journey on this planet because we all have to breathe constantly.

If we're alive, we're using it.

Yeah. And we're hyperfocused on what we put in our bodies in terms of food, sleeping properly, doing all of these things as preventative health measures. But Our food is impacted by air quality. Sleep is directly linked to air quality because if you can breathe, you can get into deeper sleep cycles. So when you talk about any kind of illness, if you can sleep better, you can heal better. You can be a better parent, you can be a better partner, you can be a better worker. You can just be better for yourself when you're not exhausted.

Right. That's like across the board.

Exactly. So that's a huge thing that we're always working on. And that's why we developed our entire data analytics strategy was how do we make this relevant to every single person and talk to them in their language? What do they care about? People care about their health. They care about their mom's health. They care about their kids' health. They care about their best friend. They care about themselves. So that's why we have developed this whole digital platform to accompany our hardware products as a way of Making the invisible visible.

Let's dive down that a little bit. So you have this, right? You have the physical product.

Yeah.

It does the work. Right. But then you have this digital— I'd love to dive down this data side because there's— I feel like it's when you get into data, right, it's very easy, especially someone like you. You've dived into it because the experts now in air quality data. You could show that to someone, an average person, and they'd go, what does that mean? What is— yeah, like, that's cool, there's lots of numbers and there's a bunch of words I don't know. Yeah, what does it mean? So how— you talk a little— how are you able to take all of that data? Because I know there's so many things you can measure in it. Like, I know enough to know that it's a whole thing, it's a whole field of data.

Yeah.

How are you able to Turn that into where you can have the conversation and you go, all right, this is how you— why you care about it. This is something that we can actually use.

Yeah. And with data, like you said, like sensors are a dime a dozen. They're everywhere. But when you look at something—

Almost free.

Yeah. But when you look at something and you're like, okay, air quality, like total air quality or AQI is 70, you're like, great.

That's good.

Yeah, that's yellow. So I guess like, maybe that's not the worst, but it's not the best. And we just, we found that like those types of communications, they just don't land. And if you're not like speaking the language of the person that you're communicating to, Then it doesn't really matter. And that's where we really started, like, baking in the individualized health and how it impacts people in a way that they care about. So, like, an example is we work with hotels, so we have our products in hotel rooms. They're on allergy floors, or if somebody is wanting, like, a healthier room, they're in those types of rooms. They're not necessarily everywhere, though, that they should be.

And We'll get them there.

Yeah, we'll get them there. So, what they would do is a guest could come in, there's a QR code on our product, you know, what's this? So, then we will display to them, like, you know, this is what's going on in the city, this is what's going on in the room, because those 2 things are super linked. And that's real-time data that you can be collecting all the time, so you know it's accurate, because you need to have strong— if you have garbage in, garbage out, right, with data collection. So, Has to be accurate, has to be correct. So we give them this information about what's going on in that room, and then we tell them a story of improvement. So we say, this hotel that we work with— we work with a whole bunch of big hotels, you know, Fairmonts, Marriotts, Saunders. We're in many locations. And we say, you know, Saunders cares so much about you having a healthy stay and having a consistent stay everywhere that you travel. They have our products in this room, and this is the impact on you. So we will One of the big things that we measure for them is sleep data. And there's a direct correlation between changes in indoor air quality and outdoor air quality and the minutes of worst sleep that you get. So by improving the air quality in their space, we show them, you know, this is what it was, this is what it is now. And because of this, you got up to— in some cases it can be even up to 25 minutes of deeper sleep last night.

Wow.

Because this product was running in your room. And we talk about reduction of asthma symptoms. We get so many— we get a lot of testimonials from these customers that are then used as qualitative data to further our understanding of these reports that we pull from in order to give them this information about the impact on their health. So we do all these different layers of data collection. We have a proprietary AI model that creates all these algorithms, and we can basically spit out anything that they care about in terms of the impact on their health and make sure that we communicate it to them in a way that is telling the story of improvement, because you don't want to scare people. We're, we're not about telling people like, everything is terrible and you're going to die 3 years earlier. Like, that's horrible.

No, especially as a hotel experience that can't be attached. Like, I went to this hotel, they told me I'm going to die early.

So great. No, we make it all always about a positive experience and make it as actionable for them as possible in terms of, you know, here are the things that you can do by learning more about air quality so that you can do— take action in your, in your personal life and really just improve your overall health.

And so you're able to— you're pulling live data from city and whatever, right? Because we all know that that's tracked, that green to red color that we can all see the air quality on. And then you're pairing that with the data that you have on your actual machines that you're using then.

Yeah. And then we have a couple other— we have what we call like the 4 pillars of data. So micro and macro, environmental and health. So macro environmental data is data on cities, outdoor air. Microenvironmental data is anything we gather on a specific space. That's through integrations with other sensing companies. That's if we deploy sensors ourselves. It doesn't matter how we do it. We're very much about partnership, so we're cool to like share. But those are the 2 layers of environmental data. And then our macro health data is all validated, peer-reviewed, medical journals and reports. And then we get into personal health data and we layer all of these 4 layers together so that they can sharpen one another. Essentially, we want to make sure that the data that we have is strong, correct, our algorithms are strong and correct, and it's also relevant. So we have these geographic focuses and it essentially creates— we call it an ecosystem. And we can then communicate how our environments are impacting our health.

That's amazing. That's a lot of data to blend together. Yes.

Do you—

because you're layering, right, all of these down to the personal level.

Yeah.

Is this— do you run studies? Like, have you been— like, how are you able to get to that personal level? Of data?

Yeah, it's mostly— I mean, I guess technically, yeah, it's running studies. It's collecting information through voluntary integrations with existing health apps. So there are over 1,000 health apps that we've identified that we can plug into on people's phones, just the stuff that they're already using. So they don't have to get a whole bunch of new apps. They don't have to strap something to their chest. It's just their personal data that they're willing to share with us, obviously anonymized. And then we tap into electronic health records, different types of information that's available to us through memberships and licensing and those sorts of things, so that we can have quite a breadth of data that can then validate and invalidate the research that we gather to make our algorithms stronger and stronger and stronger.

Yeah, well, it's awesome. Yeah, I feel like it's 1,000 apps. I feel like that sounds accurate for the health apps out there. I have too many on my phone already, and I just try to do a few things. But it's great at the same time. Like, I also really like that because I go, oh, well, I have all this data. What can I do? I can collect so many points of data about myself. But how do I even turn that into usable information or knowing, hey, I bought this new thing, I'm trying this new therapy, right? How do I actually track and get useful information of did it work? Did something improve? When I bought it, did I get better sleep right away? Did it take a little bit? But now I forgot about it and then a month later I'm like, wow, that's actually I feel better and I can prove that it's actually happening. It's not just in my head. It's— I can verify it, basically.

Yeah. And it's making that data available to people. You know, if they look at the apps and they look at these things all the time or they look at our dashboards and the information that's available to them, great. If they don't look at it, it's always there and you can make decisions about how you want it to impact your life or not impact your life. Like even when we were doing product development early days, We got a ton of feedback from our customers that they didn't want to see the numbers on the machine because it just freaked them out. I don't want it in my face. I don't want something beeping. I don't want a red light. I don't want any of that stuff because—

I'm with them.

Yeah, big time. Because it makes you feel helpless, especially if you don't have control even over the unit itself. And if it's in a work environment or you're out somewhere, you don't want to know sometimes. So We always try to know that it's improving the situation, not how bad it is. Exactly. We want to talk about the good story. We want to always be telling a good story because especially when it comes to health, you don't want to just be told, oh, you're dying 3 years early. Like, you know, it's an arbitrary number, but like, you don't want to hear that. You want to hear the things that we've done as steps to improve your health and your life.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. Right. Yeah, I think that's a great point that you brought up and that you found out during your product development. It's so— because it is also a little bit of information overload too. I mean, we have— we were just talking about, I have so much data on myself. I don't look at all of it. There's just too much for me to even deal with and try to figure out what to do about it. So it's nice when there's these options where it's more of, hey, it's going to sit here, it's going to take care of a problem for you or improve the situation, and you don't have to think about it. You don't actually have to do anything actionable. I was just saying it's nice to have something that does something that fixes the problem without you having to do it and having to— there's stuff you're like, oh, I want to manage that. I want to know. There's gamified or there's something that you can do to make it interesting or it's a specific goal. But things like air, like, what am I going to do? What am I going to do with the air, right? There's nothing. It's nice to have those things just run in the background and you just know, hey, it's like a water filter. Like, I don't want to know how gross the water is coming out of the pipe. I just want it to be clean when I touch it. That's it. I want it to look nice. I don't want to know how much it's filtered out. Like, it's— I know it's doing it. I know, I know that's happening. I don't want to know exactly. I just want, I want the results without the stress of—

Yeah, exactly. Big time. And even within the development of our company, there have been many times where people say, your data analytics is super strong. Why don't you just ditch your hardware product and just do data analytics? Because we're starting to do Predictive health modeling, predictive environmental modeling, things along those lines so that we can start to— right now we call it, we say that we're building the foundation of the environmental determinants of health in association with air quality, because currently that does not really exist. And we work or we're associated with the National Institute of Health and they identify this constantly. They're like, we don't know anything about air quality and health and this is going to be affecting policy in the future. This is a huge black box and that's a box that we are like bringing light to. But for me, I feel like I have such a strong personal conviction. My co-founder feels the same way, where, yeah, we could just do the data analytics company and we could be like super lean and have really quick scalability and all of that kind of stuff. But if you are just telling someone that there's a problem and you don't give them any tools to fix it, it's such a negative story. And we so strongly believe in not having that negativity associated with our company, with our brand. We just want to be giving people sustainable solutions that improve their lives. They help with even like energy efficiency, carbon reduction, actually carbon avoidance as well. And it's all through using the science of clean air. Yeah. And it's impactful.

To your point, right, the, you know, you focusing on the good story. There's been— we've tried doom and gloom marketing for health and for sustainability and ecology, right? We've used the doom and gloom for at least most of my life, if not longer. And it hasn't really— it clearly hasn't really, really worked. It's gotten us to a point, but I think it's— we're on the other side and we need to really focus on the The positive, because at this point, doom and gloom is, you can go really doomy and really gloomy really fast, and that's, nobody operates really well under those conditions. And so pointing out like, here's the improvement, here's the good part, here's what we're doing. And your hardware thing, I keep finding this. There's actually a company I just did an interview with that they're building out an infrastructure system for being able to properly bring in and utilize like fallen trees from cities. They're like not harvested, but right now they just get chipped and thrown away.

Right.

And a really bad use for some really nice trees. Like they can make great lumber, but the system isn't there. And they've spent a long time building the data, proving that it was a solvable thing. They actually created A manufacturing— they were manufacturing products with it, all to prove, yeah, we have the data to prove it's a problem. Now we've proven that there can be a solution that's profitable, and now other people can come in and start doing similar things. It can be solved. There can be multiple, multiple people solving that problem because it's a— that's a big problem too. Um, and I feel like there's more and more We've had such focus on data, which is great, but the companies that go, yeah, the data and we can do something about it, you get so much more traction because it's so much more believable. Like, we have the data to prove that global warming has been happening.

Yeah.

Until you get to the part where it's a practical solution or a practical thing that you can show somebody and it's not just this etheric idea, it's really hard to convince anybody to really make any changes or really invest or really do things.

Mm-hmm.

I always applaud because it is a challenge. Physical, you know, it's called hardware. It's right in the name. It's hard. It is difficult to do. You're able to really push forward that data a lot more when you have that. And you guys now have the devices sitting in people's homes. You have— you are able to collect data that I don't— I can't think of any real good device that I could find that would even tell me if I want. I mean, I could go buy some scientific equipment and I have no idea where they buy that, but I could maybe find that and buy it. But the average person, like, is not going to set up an air quality sensing system in their home just because.

Yeah, they're motivated by something else, and it's usually because they're experiencing a problem with their health. And it's important to just, yeah, make it relevant and make it accessible. That's one thing we really focus on is the ROI. So we actually very accidentally stumbled into this, as you know, just had a bit of founder luck. But we learned that this— so we create this sustainable particle, it's called a hydroxyl, and that's what really makes our products different. So we don't just circulate air and catch it in a filter like an HVAC system does, or like any air purifier that's on the market. We actually create this little particle. It is what is responsible for fresh air when you go outside. There's actually a molecular equation for fresh air. So we create fresh air inside, and it changes the molecular composition of the air, and it takes out many of these different types of toxins. It's completely agnostic. So it'll attack mold, it'll attack viruses, bacteria, really, you name it, it'll go for it.

It just takes out everything.

Yeah, yeah. There was a study recently that hydroxyls were proven to reduce the spread of COVID by 73%. It's been tested against everything because it is Mother Nature's formula. But we don't get it when we're inside because our buildings are so airtight. So we don't get any of this outdoor air. And honestly, in most cities, the air is so polluted that you wouldn't want more of it inside anyways.

You at least need the filter just to breathe it. Yeah.

Yeah. And we like make this analogy that kind of differentiates our products with other products where we say breathing recycled air, which is HVAC air, air purifier air is like sharing a toothbrush with everyone that's ever been in the room. Yes, it's clean, but it's still been in everyone's mouth.

That's a good analogy. I like it.

Yeah. You're like, oh, I don't want that. So when you introduce these sustainable particles that change the air, it's actually completely new air in the space. And really what was super interesting when we, you know, thinking about ROI and thinking about ways that we can make the product impactful, not just on health, but make it adoptable. That's when we learned that hydroxyls and creating smart and optimized buildings through deploying sensors and having data, understanding occupancy, understanding airflow, you can reduce your associated energy by like 30% just by having a home or an office or a building that has sensors in it. That's it. Because most of our buildings are not ventilated appropriately. And by knowing what's going on, like knowledge is power, right? So just by knowing what's going on in your building, you can reduce your associated energy consumption by up to 30%. It's insane. So, it ends up being financially viable when you start going down that road. It helps businesses meet their goals that are around sustainability, carbon reduction, all of those things by making one teeny tiny small change. And then, when we start to talk about regulations that are coming in around making buildings healthier because we all learned through COVID that people were passing illness inside. Nobody was really getting sick outside. There are hydroxides out there, but we were all getting sick inside. And it's because our buildings are too stuffy. So there are new regulations that are passed, they're mandatory, and they are passed, they're coming through starting January 2025.

Oh, wow. Okay.

Right around the corner. Where buildings are required to increase their ventilation and track their indoor air to reduce the spread of infectious aerosols, is the words. And the problem with that is that in some cases, for instance, in a lobby of a building in downtown New York, the required ventilation increase is 11 times So, you've got the financial issue associated with increasing your ventilation 11 times.

That's a lot.

Yeah, sensitivity analysis on it. It's like an additional $200,000 a year for just your lobby. And that's completely unfeasible. People are not going to do it. So, then we're going to have people that are not compliant with regulations. not willing to adopt, but it also figuratively and literally blows your energy efficiency goals out the window by requiring all of this increased HVAC. So there's this issue that it's butting up against one another, and this solution is using a formula that's literally created in nature, making it inside, improving energy efficiency easily while also attacking these infectious aerosols that are making us sick. So, it's finding these things that people care about, and we really stumbled into that just by trying to speak the same language as our customer and understand how we can demonstrate to them that having a healthier space benefits them. And there are huge financial gains that can be can be achieved, which is fantastic. So that's great. And health. Right.

Well, you're talking about, you know, 30% increase in efficiency. I'm thinking of like, how bad is your work efficiency when you're sick? How many sick days do people take that you wouldn't have to take? I mean, it's not like people really want to take them, but if you have to, you're gonna, you're gonna opt out from— if you have the ability to, right? So it's There's so many— there's just so many layers to that. The financial model sounds complicated and like your cost benefit is really good.

Yeah, it really like just makes it like black and white for people. And it was interesting, the Harvard School of Public Health, they did this analysis where they did an impact analysis on these 9 areas that impact wellness in buildings. that are environmental factors. So, air, security, lighting, acoustics, there's these 9 things that they found. And by improving these 9 things, businesses can add 6% to their bottom line, which is a huge number. And even when I say it, I'm like, that seems too good to be true, but I trust the people at Harvard. 6%.

There's not much that gets like anything over 1 or 2% and it's, it should be an immediate yes. Usually like that's a big jump.

Yeah. Huge jump. And obviously air quality only addresses, well, 3 of the 9. So it's not like we can make the claim that we're like, you're going to have 6% of your bottom line if you use our products. It's not that.

What is 1/3? You can, you could claim 2%.

We could try it. We're very cautious with things like that.

Because people do some more. I'm just saying my math, it's a third. Like, it seems logical. Like, we could do maybe that.

Yeah, we're always really careful to not be, you know, the next snake oil salesman. Don't do that.

Don't do that.

But the financial gains, the environmental gains, the health benefits, they are well documented. This research exists. It's validated. And it's available. So these are actionable things that people can do.

And now seems like a good time too. I think I just saw Amazon is pretty much making everybody go back to full 5. All of their hybrids are getting forced into the office, or I'm sure some of them will escape it, but majority is going to be stuck doing 5 days a week.

Yeah.

In an office. And that's going to mean probably more kids and more after-school care. That's more kids. More kids in any kind of thing is more germs. That's more sick time for everybody.

Yeah.

When that happens.

Yeah, for sure.

It's just downhill, really. So it's a good time for your product to be out there and as a solution for everyone. I'm curious, because of how your system works as kind of an out-there thing, but right where NASA is looking at going into space more, and that's a very confined— there is no— can't even pull a frame here. When you're out there, are you— I just feel like there's so many other applications and things that we build. Are you looking at stepping outside of just buildings specifically? Is there more applications?

Yeah, there are so, so, so many applications. And interesting that you actually bring up NASA because NASA already does use hydroxyls on the International Space Station. That's how they create fresh air up there. So we essentially took this astronaut technology and brought it to the average person, average building. I know that there are some initiatives in that space for sure. It's something that we're loosely associated with through a partnership that we have, and it's on our radar. But right now we're like, okay, we gotta fix things on Earth first. And yeah, and we look at the outdoor environment as well, and obviously there are huge challenges there, and it's just going to get worse. But that's really where the importance of this foundational data model comes. Because as, you know, climate continues to change, we will be able to predict what health issues are coming based on a changing climate, which doesn't currently exist, that we have no vision into that at all. So we need to start preparing. And then thankfully, we also have products that can do something about it. So it's providing the knowledge to We are trying to position ourselves or are positioning ourselves as a public health advisor. We'll give you the data, we'll analyze it, we'll show you what's coming, and then enabling other institutions to go out and solve more problems. We don't need to be the ones that solve everything, but if we can help other people be enabled, we can do so much more.

Well, if you have the data model, right, that, I mean, It's one of the biggest hurdles is do you have the data to know what to even try to fix? Where are the main things?

Yeah. Where do we look?

Yeah. Yeah. Where do we actually look? And, you know, I'm thinking of this, like, I'm sure there's airplanes could use this and some cruise ships, some of those, the giant— there was just one that just came back from a year-long cruise. Like, that's a long time to be out. Not necessarily great weather, great air quality. Like, there's so many, so many applications to this. And there's— buildings is a good— I feel like there's a lot more buildings, but I think there's so many more things too that this kind of technology would really help. And the data, really, because it's— again, we don't have air quality sensors in cars. I don't have those in airplanes or boats that I know of, other than like— Is there gas leak? Like, there's, you know, there's emergency things like you're gonna die today if it's caught.

Right away.

Like, yeah, like the immediate you're gonna die now. We got those sensors covered, but there's not anything that we build that we're in— I don't know of any of these other sensors of just like general air quality of, yeah, it's not good for you long term. And that kind of that missing piece that we just don't, we don't know.

Yeah, we don't know. And so it's very interesting to be in this position where we had somebody recently tell us, you guys are building the foundation of this. And that's really cool. But it's also so hard.

Yeah, there's nobody can help you. It's you.

Yeah. So you figure out Any way you can to collaborate, anyone that can kind of come alongside and add to this mission. But it's very interesting to be at the phase where the work that we do today will hopefully impact people at a huge scale in the future and give us more opportunities to improve our lives long term while also improving the environment, which is important. Yeah, it just in a new way. It's new thinking and a new perspective on the possibilities of life in the future.

Right. Kind of the last thing I want to touch on here is the products you have now. And we've touched a little bit going into right now. It's easy to go, okay, here's a building, here's our product, put it in the room. And that's kind of the, oh, we didn't build this building the way— the smartest way when we did it. Now we have to retrofit it with this device. But then you touched on like new buildings, new construction. This, this is happening. We're putting up buildings everywhere. I was just in Austin and I was in Austin like 3 years ago. They seem to have the same 20 cranes still going, just new spots. Like it's built environment is going up in a big way everywhere. How are you able to help with this? Is this because with your data, I would imagine that There's this potential as someone who's building a new building that they could actually address it right away and not necessarily have a room, actually build it into the system so that everything is actually taken care of and not, not this piecemeal like, oh, we have some safe allergy rooms and the rest of the building is not good, but these rooms are safe.

Yeah, working with builders is definitely something that we're starting to get into and We had, like, like I was saying, when you're building essentially an industry from the foundation, you have to work with people that, again, speak your language. So, we went through this for so long where we were telling people all of these things and they're like, I kind of get it. Like, that seems to make sense, but I don't really understand. And there's a lot of education that, like, the burden falls on you to bear. So, what we started doing was working with professionals in design, architecture, all of those kinds of things within the built environment that have a focus on sustainability or have a focus on health, and joining into their projects as a piece of the solution that they offer to their customer. Because if their customer is coming to them, They're already sold on the whole concept of either a sustainable space or a healthy space. So, a lot of the work around that is already done. Then, these professionals who are passionate about it and do it all the time and put it into practical use for their customers, they can do so much of the education because they're already educated and their customer is already educated. So, it's Working with these people that can kind of be boots on the ground, enabling them, providing them with everything that they need in order to be successful so that we don't have to go and go to every builder and try to figure it all out ourselves. We're like, let the architects go, the designers go, let all of these different people go. And then yeah, ideally we will be at a place where when new builds go in, These systems are just a part of it.

Awesome. Well, I'm excited to see when that happens. That'll be installed next to the HVAC, just integrated. So you're like, yes, it's built in. There's good air everywhere.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Amazing. Well, it's been eye-opening. There's a— I've known that this is a thing, but just talking with you, it's even bigger than I was thinking of it as a topic, which is Part of why I love doing this is it's so important to open up these areas and go, yes, this is a big issue. There's a lot that can be done and that it's not doom and gloom. There's a solution. It actually works. This can be addressed. I think it's great to come in at this point and go, yes, there's a story here. There's a success. You can fix it. It's doable. Yeah, I really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

For people that want to learn more, Hopefully a ton of architects and designers, but individuals even want to— we'll have on the show notes for everyone, we'll have all the links, but is there a better way, best way to reach out to you and your team?

Yeah. I mean, go to the website, learn if this is something that you're interested in. Our contact information is on there, email addresses, all that stuff. Reach out to us on LinkedIn. We're pretty active. and responsive on there. But we're always interested in having more conversations with more people and growing our base of strategic partners and customers and really anybody that we can make an impact with. So we are available for sure.

Amazing. Well, this has been great. I appreciate you taking the time to dive into this topic, explain some more for people what this is, what is the solution. All of that. So it's been great. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design Podcast. If today's episode inspired you to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a sustainable 7-figure business, visit petermanfirm.com or click the link below. Your ideas have the power to change the world, and we're here to help make that happen. Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next episode.