Kumar The most interesting work on today's hardest problems can't always be distilled into just bullets and books. I'm Kumar Garg. In this podcast, I talk to some of my favorite operators about how they work and how today's biggest problems really get solved. This is Tacit Knowledge. 00:00:30.080 — Intro Kumar Hi everybody. Welcome back. So today we're going to be chatting with David Carel. David is a fellow here with us at Renaissance Philanthropy, which is a fancy word for saying that he's building a new program or fund with us. And the one that he's building is specifically focused on clean air in schools. At first listening, you might be like, what is a program focused on that? But you're going to learn a bunch about it. I think the thing that I found really interesting is when I was first introduced to David, you know, he was working on, you know, how do we stop pandemic risk and sort of pandemics, the next pandemic from flaring up. And he was in that mix. And then the thing he kept thinking about was actually how schools are a huge vector for where disease spreads, but also that, you know, if we can improve the air in schools, it could actually improve learning outcomes. So it's like a fascinating way to sort of actually think about kind of neglected but really powerful policy interventions and philanthropic interventions. So I'm excited to talk about how it's a mix of policy, technology and philanthropy, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. 00:01:53.850 — Origin Story Kumar David, do you think back to like, a hinge moment that sort of set you on your current career trajectory, you know? Is there something that you're like, something you nerded out on or a key decision or something you were somebody you worked with or something that you think had sort of an outsized influence to the work you're doing today? David Yeah, absolutely. There are many examples that come to mind. The first, I'd say, is when I was in college, I was lucky enough to get to know - he was a fellow student. He was a junior at the time, but he was about 49 years old. A guy, Gregg Gonsalves, who's now a leading public health thought leader and activist. But he was with us in college as a nontraditional student. And I worked very, very closely with him on global health activism, starting with HIV Aids activisim, with broader student, broader global health activism. And I'd say there were many reasons why that was a hinge moment. I'd say probably most importantly, it was helping to convey that to a bunch of kids - we were kids at the time working on this - that you can be the adults in the room, and you can change some of the most important parts of American policy if you want to. And I think being invited into a political activism conversation in that way was was easily one of the most influential moments of my entire undergrad life outside of class. Um, and also happens to be topically related to a lot of the things that I ended up working on, including airborne and disease, which we can get into. Kumar Yeah, I'm part of the whole point of this series of Tacit Knowledge is, you know, what's going to be scarce in the age of AI? What are we going to need more of? And I think a lot of it is like, how do we get things done? What inspires us? What builds, what things compound? Over time, you start going on something and you and I feel like your career has been one step. You know, they only make sense in retrospect. David Yeah, very much so. 00:03:55.780 — The Pitch Kumar The first thing we start with, after we do a little bit of the the starting point is what I call the pitch, which is one of the most important areas of Tacit Knowledge is how do we express our ideas in compelling and concise ways. So let's say you were at a dinner party in an elevator somewhere else. Somebody who could help you says, you know, David, tell me a little bit about your work. What is it that you're excited about working on? What would you tell them? What would be your how would you use that 90 second opportunity to most effect? David Fortunately for this issue, there's so many different, different ways of approaching an issue that touches on from health, education, environment, etc. that you can depends on the funder. Whoever I'm sitting with, I would tailor it to them, but just to to use my my 90 second elevator pitch right now, I'd probably say you don't have to look far, unfortunately, over the last few days, the last week to see the effects of poor air quality and a hundred million people over the last 4 or 5 days that have been exposed to air pollution levels in the US - just US alone - I imagine that is where we sitting for this hypothetical scenario - that is probably sent tons of people to the emergency room who wouldn't have wouldn't have gone otherwise for cardiovascular issues, pediatric asthma, E.R. visits, and disproportionately because kids are especially affected as their lungs are developing and their cardiovascular systems are developing. They're especially affected by by unclean air. And just as we we know, and we now all take for granted that the water we drink needs to be clean and needs to be safe. And it's national news, often when there's severe kind of water or food disease outbreaks like we're also seeing in the US right now, we haven't yet gotten to the point where we see it as a total no brainer that, of course, the air we breathe has to be clean as well. And cleaning the air and filtering the air is a super low cost way of not only getting the benefits I mentioned around reducing our exposure to air pollution, it also turns out that it cuts absenteeism in schools by 10 to 20%, depending on the context, boost test scores because kids are not only there longer because of reduced absenteeism, but also you see improved cognitive performance when air quality is better. There's a reason why JPMorgan, in their $3 billion headquarters, um, uh, doubled the ventilation relative to what code required, because they learned through a number of studies over the last decade that cognitive performance improves pretty dramatically for, uh, dollars per person. Um, even though it's worth as much as $7,000 per employee for them if you improve air quality. And so if the top, you know, financial institutions in the world are realizing this, um, it might be a bit of a wake up call that we should be doing this for kids, too, especially during the most formative years of their development. If we improve the quality of the air the kids are breathing we get sick less often, kids get sick less often, their parents do. Which as the parent of two very, very young children, I. I am already aware of how acutely often we get sick. And I would love to live in a world where we get sick less, less often from our children when they pick things up at school. And that also means we can reduce the risk of new airborne diseases and pandemics if and when they emerge, like a Covid 19 or others in the future. And so it's one of the few interventions that for very, very, very cheap, can influence all of these different issues simultaneously, from biosecurity to public health to education and cognitive performance and development. Kumar Some of the things that I find interesting in that pitch are. One is when people think about air quality, they think about outside air quality, you know, David Of course. Kumar …like, hey, we need to do better forest management so we have less fires or the smog clouds that used to exist over LA, or farmers burning their crops outside Delhi, and sort of the huge amounts of air pollution, or sometimes even people talk about the asthma belt, cars and everything else. I think one thing that I think people don't spend as much time thinking about is that we actually spend a lot of time indoors, and whereas there might be huge things we have to do to solve air quality outside, and that we should do like one place where we could get huge improvements in air is the air we spend most of our time breathing. David Mm-hmm. Kumar And actually that even if you held everything about the outside world constant, which we should work on, and you just improved the quality of the air that we breathe when we're indoors, the amount, like a big chunk of the health benefits of cleaner air kick in. David Exactly. Kumar That's one. Two is the things that clean our air indoors are relatively simple. I'm sure people live through the Covid period was like air filters and others. Lots of those things work no matter what. Three that in most settings where we might care about this, like our schools, like, you know, in our homes and others, if you actually had air quality monitors just sitting there tracking, you would be surprised that we are sitting in what is dirty air. That would be taken away if we had like some sort of air filtration, and that this is then therefore a pretty big opportunity when it comes to areas to, to build our effort. Because, as you just said, it decreases the chance that you'll get sick. So how often does a young parent, you send your kids to a daycare and then you're like, oh, everybody's sick. How often have you ever asked that daycare? Oh, do you have a really high quality air filter that tolls? You know, so for me, what was really interesting about your wanting to work in this is none of these things were obvious to me until you and I started chatting, which is like indoor air matters a lot. Indoor air is quite malleable. The tools might exist, and it is kind of a weird blind spot that we don't spend that much time, even though we love - we lived through a global pandemic. We don't spend that much time actually working on this. And then there's then a raft of things from a technology policy, activism or other things you could do that could have a big impact. So what did I miss? David I appreciate you sharing those. And, um, and those are part of - the parts of the story that really struck you, because that's exactly right. We spent 90, specifically 90 ish percent of our time, in many cases more than 90% of our time indoors. It's not just most of our time, it's almost all of our time. So of the 2000 gallons of air that we breathe every day, roughly, the vast, vast, vast majority of those are taking place inside. And so just to go one layer deeper on that, it's part of why we were missing a key detail over this last week when lots of city mayors were saying, um, go inside. Like, don't you know, to avoid the wildfire smoke. What they're missing is you can go inside, but that you were breathing outside air, you know, where did that air come from? Initially it's in some form or another coming from the outside. And so it's to, to then you have to you have to pair it with your second point, which most people, many people unfortunately didn't this past week, which is you can't just go inside, you have to then clean the air that is inside. And thankfully, to your point, even though historically we mostly thought about cleaning outside air in some way, mostly around source control, mostly around, as you said, preventing air pollution from being created – one, unfortunately, even though we need to continue that work and I'm I'm we should all be remarkably grateful for the heroes of that world over the last several decades who've enabled us in the US, for instance, to breathe much, much cleaner air than our parents did, and that while that work must continue, we one, we know that there's no safe level of air pollution across fine particulate matter and also a wide range of gases that we're often exposed to, both from outside emissions, but also from, um, from from the indoors. So that's another piece I'd add is, um, a lot of the pollution we experience is actually produced indoors too, including from, uh, much of the manufactured furniture and engineered woods that we are sitting in front of me, and probably you too. You can think of human aerosols as its own form of indoor air pollution, or from an indoor source, not from the outside that we are emitting when we are sick and infecting other people with. And to your point, its its to clean the volume of the air that we see indoors in a room, in a classroom, for instance, that's about, you know, 1000ft² is much, much, much, much simpler and easier than cleaning the total volume of our outside air. There are some interesting startups who are trying to achieve that too. To your point earlier, I think we're getting closer. We're on this cusp of a moment where I think people might see that as a total no brainer. But like you and many others who lived through pandemic, I think for the most part it was seen as critical in the moment that people have sort of moved on, moved past that and and also didn't pair it with the insight that, oh, if you clean the air of infectious disease, you could also - not for every tool, but for a lot of technologies, you could also simultaneously be cleaning the air of these other pollutants. And if you pair up globally, the burden of disease from pollution, from air pollution and from airborne infectious disease. Depending on how you run the numbers, it might just be that the air is the single largest determinant of health and morbidity mortality globally. And the fact that there are some there are some technologies like filtration, that can address both of those simultaneously, I derive an incredible amount of inspiration from, but I think we often miss because we during the pandemic, we're just thinking pretty narrowly about Covid 19, specifically as an airborne, mostly, mostly transmitted, airborne transmitted virus. And a lot of the world hasn't been subsequently, not only to your point concluded, we should be doing this on an ongoing basis. A lot of us, the world hasn't paired that up with the insight: We can all benefit from the pollution reduction side of of those technologies. The combination of them is what's most powerful, and both are super important. Kumar I feel like it's like this problem happens at every level of it, which is that, you know, when I was in the government, we had a department sitting within the Department of Education that focused on education research. So it was like, oh, how do we improve learning outcomes? And I would often ask them, I would say, oh, do you also think about the health dimensions of learning? You know, like, David Yeah. Kumar You know, you'd see some study come out that says when classrooms are really hot, students don't learn. You know, I also came across research that I would come across. I would say, oh, you know, air quality. You know, kids are sitting in poor air. You will see, like, oh, certain schools that are sitting near a highway, you know, and these sort of things. And of course, we have things like lead that could be in the water in a school. And I was always curious, like, are you funding some of these studies? You're the education research agency. And they would say, oh, that's health. David Totally. Kumar That's actually not, you know. Like… David We don't do that. Kumar We don't do that. And you know, in my mind, like the goal is, are our kids learning - learning outcomes. So just like we might say, oh the teenage brain wakes up a little bit later. So school times should shift a little bit later in the day to, you know, classroom quality. So in my mind, like, I think one of the interesting things about indoor air quality is that it's always sort of left out of whatever topic it shows up in. You know, it's like, well, it's not really a school learning play. You know, that's education research around how to teach kids to learn or something else. So that's someone else's... Well, it's also not, you know, the thing that you would usually think about if you're thinking about, well, how do we stop a pandemic from spreading? But actually. David Exactly. Kumar Maybe it is. So give me like, your sense of like how you got into this area, given that it's missing in most areas. So was it like how did you stumble into a topic that feels obvious for the people who, once they start to really think this way, which is like cleaner air solves a lot of different problems? David Yeah… Kumar …but it is not like… David The front of mind thing for any one of those. Kumar Yeah. People's on top three list. David Yeah. And I would just say at that point, like just as their market failures in the private sector, I think you can also think of market failures in philanthropy and policy. And one kind of hallmark characteristic is things that that bridge multiple different verticals, because our philanthropy is traditionally often, as you know as well as anyone, are divided into very, very clear verticals. And the thing needs to, like, meet a certain bar in that vertical. And it doesn't. We're not usually analyzing it across the various issue areas that it touches. I happen to believe that this one actually does meet that bar for many, many, many philanthropies for it's in each individual vertical, whether it's health, education, environment, etc..Child development. But to your point, generally speaking, it's not the front of mind. It's not top of the of the list for people in each of those. And understandably, because there's so many critical issues in education. To your question about how I got into this personally, I was one of the people who a decade ago, if you had asked me what I think about education - and if this is even though I was someone who cared a lot about public health and colleges, I briefly mentioned, if you had showed me those studies, I would have said, oh, that's. I hope someone works on that. That's amazing. I don't do that. I think about pedagogy and I think about what's happening, you know, between students and teachers in the classroom and how can we… And one very common failure mode is to be drawn into the things that you find in your field to be most interesting, but not necessarily the most important. And I just kept reading these, these the types of studies you're mentioning, including things like, wow, you kids lose IQ points if they're exposed to even surprisingly low levels of fine particulate matter over time, that these just remarkable and pretty harrowing studies showing that if pregnant women get influenza, that not only are they at much greater risk of various mental health issues, but their kids are at greater risk that infant is, then the child is then at greater risk of schizophrenia. And the list goes on and on. And I started to think through, wow, it's it's it's not just an ancillary thing. It's not just around the edges that it's it's like a minor improvement in education and health, etc. but in each of these domains, it's actually pretty remarkably important. I'd say that plus, fairly personally, I when I was in college, related to that time, I mentioned right at the outset, I worked as a volunteer, as a research assistant for a study on tuberculosis infection control at a hospital, a hospital in South Africa in a place called Tugela Ferry, where we're extensively drug resistant Tuberculosis XDR, TB was first discovered, and I remember being told as I walked into the the lobby that TB is is an airborne disease. What does that mean? You look around and they're probably in such a high TB instance, place bits of TB just floating around through the air. And someone who passed through hours ago who was infected could still could infect someone hours, hours later, even in a different part of the hospital because of weird airflow patterns. And it blew my mind. And I'd say during Covid, as you may or may not remember in early, early, early on in the pandemic, the W.H.O. famously tweets out that Covid 19 is not airborne. It's like trying to get rid of all the the fear around it. And it turns out. Long story short, and Carl Zimmer from The New York Times wrote a whole book about this. So I'll just give the two sentence version for now that – we essentially rejected the fact over the last century that diseases were airborne, except for TB and measles, essentially. And I have personally just found in just a lot of inspiration and urgency in the fact that we actually now know that lots of respiratory infections have an airborne component to them, which we really genuinely didn't – It's not that we didn't know there were some signed a few scientists who were beating that drum for decades, but were just pummeled by the public health establishment and an existing medical establishment into into essentially saying, nope, it's all large droplets. And that's why we were one of the reasons we were so unprepared and underprepared during Covid. So to answer your question, when you combine all these different pieces together of just how important it is for kids cognitive development and performance in school. The fact that we're living through this incredible paradigm shift in the theory of disease transmission. Like, what a moment for us to be engaged in this work and trying to figure out how we can play some small role, like the pioneers of clean water movement in the late 1800s in the US, and much of the developed world to, in that case, dramatically almost overnight, cut the rates of typhoid also just in half to a quarter to eventually the point where typhoid was no longer an issue in this country. How, how inspiring to be to play hopefully be some part of the conversation right now where we get to advance a set of very, very inexpensive and effective solutions that address multiple issues that are not just ancillary. Kumar Yeah. I mean, what I like about that is there's obviously the this particular topic, which I think is very prime for it, but I also think there's, um, I don't know, this idea of just noticing, you know, you're, like, actually working on public education reform. Yeah. You're coming across this thing that feels important. But, you know, there's a part of us that's like, well, that's not my job. Like, maybe that's someone else's job, or maybe I'm sure someone else is on it. David I'm sure someone else is taking care of that. Kumar And then saying, like, you know, so much of life is like no one else is coming. I want to pull, I'm going to pull on this thread. And so then you from that, like I'm actually working on education to then being like, oh, I'm going to follow this thing. I'm going to end up at a R&D organization that actually thinks a lot about clean air to like, I'm going to keep pulling on this thread all the way to actually schools and under leveraged area. And we can be doing more. I mean, I think there's something powerful about that, because, you know, the whole point of this conversation and Tacit Knowledge is, you know, all the things we are trained to do that we have to kind of sometimes we have to unlearn, right. Which is like sometimes it is the like - this feels important. Is someone actually working on it? I mean, that sounds sort of obvious, but the biggest mistake I think people make is – if it was so obvious or so important or so clear. Surely the reason no one is working on it is not that thing. Maybe it is not important. Maybe it is not clear exactly. But just take it as a given. Like the world is complex. David Yeah Kumar And there's lots of important things that look like a million, you know, $1 billion, uh, upside just sitting there on the ground for someone to pick up. So, um, say a little bit more about that, which is just like the pivoting your trajectory and just following and pulling and, like, what sense of agency that has given you as you figure it out, you know, because now you you're in this mode of like, well, I'm just going to figure it out, you know, which. David Definitely. Kumar Probably gives you a lot of agency but is borne by these decisions? David Yeah, well, I'd say so. One piece I forgot to mention in the last answer, but it touches on this is the other thing is like education reform is hard and it is hard to sustainably improve things in the classroom. And that doesn't make it any less important. But I would say one very motivating factor for me has been, wow, there's this thing that even if you just narrow the aperture to education for relatively not just low cost, we've we've I've emphasized so far, but also relatively low administrative effort because I think a lot about what is it? It's not just what the effect sizes are that you see in a given RCT, a randomized controlled trial on some given intervention. But what is it? What's the burden going to be on the system itself? And does that make it more or less likely? It happens. And so one reason I've continued to like tease like pull that thread is, is for sure just saying - Oh, there's it's not there are lots and lots of really, really important things we can and should be doing in the Ed world to improve educational outcomes. But how incredible to find something that actually might be relatively simple and straightforward administratively. But to your broader question about agency. It's part of I guess it's it's fitting that I showed a little just a quick snapshot of those memories from college and why I'm so grateful to Gregg and just really a few other people over the course of my career who have both very directly conveyed but also modeled incredibly high agency in, in cultivating the sense that there, to your point, there may or may not be an adult in the room who's handling this. And even if it seems totally obvious, um, well, one, it can seem totally obvious. That's surely if it's that important, someone else would have done it. But two if your point if it's not happening either, as you said, that means it must. I must be missing something. It must be, you know, not important enough, etc. but I think the other much, much bigger thing which every entrepreneur in some form faces private sector, nonprofit, etc. is incredible gear and uncertainty and doubt about it and and multiple points along the way that there isn't a clear, well-worn path to solve that thing. If there had been, someone would have done it, and at best, you might be able to find a well-worn path from something analogous that you can draw from and learn on and learn from and draw on. And I'd say for me, that journey for this issue in particular has been it's been exactly that. It's been moments of incredible inspiration and optimism, moments of much more just honestly, just much more doubt. Are we going to do it? Is it too big? Is it too hard? And trying to remember those moments from from college, trying to remember a few other mentors along the way who've helped really, again, both directly share it, but more importantly, model that it takes incredibly hard work and persistence really for anything that matters just about. And I kind of wake up every day reminded and not not just when there's wildfires crossing in the US, but when I read - I I'll read my my news on a new study coming out about the, again, the bizarre and really important effects of infectious disease that we really don't take seriously when we just brush aside that someone get that we get sick and we get sick often, or, um, or I read the news on just how bad the air quality is in a huge percentage of a percentage of the of the global population that most of us in the US just never think about, and mostly use that as just motivation and drive, just to keep keep on pulling the thread even and especially in those moments of fear or doubt about whether or not we're going to be able to pull this off. I guess the last thing I'd add is, as you may have seen, there was this set of quotes from Lindsey Graham circulating after his death a few days ago and him saying, someone in his level, you know, before getting to Congress thinking, surely there's, there's the they there's someone there's out there. Kumar Some room. David Some room, there's the they in some room, they are taking care of it. And he gets to Congress and he looks around and there's no they and it's and he gets these. Oh surely it's them in the White House and it's in the Oval Office. They are taking care of this. And he gets the Oval Office. And the conclusion is there is no they - you are the ones in the room. And most of us who are, who are in the, in the proverbial room. In his case, he's like most of us, have no idea what we're doing. Which I love was an ancillary conclusion. And I - same thing. I derive a lot of inspiration from stories like that, of even people of that level, in that level of power. Kind of realizing that if you want to change things in the world, you often have to be the one to take it upon yourself, whether or not the path is clear. 00:27:23.080 — Tacit Knowledge Kumar So is there a piece of tacit knowledge that, you know you carry forward when people are asking you for advice or something you want to get better at? David I think one is, um, the emotional awareness of when you're experiencing certain kinds of fear, uncertainty and doubt. That phrase is, I've mostly heard in the kind of for profit startup world that I was a part of many, many years ago. I haven't heard it as much. Especially in the nonprofit profit and philanthropic world. But I think it's extremely valuable insight. And so having being very, very attuned to your own psychology, when you start to notice, to notice that pattern, you. I was feeling so confident yesterday, the day before, the month before, and now am. You hear yourself having thoughts of like, oh, maybe I should maybe, like maybe, maybe, maybe like I gave it a, I gave it a whirl and maybe it's time to step away before you, like, fully indulge that thought like that, that pattern of thought, just to notice and observe that that's a super common pattern that that entrepreneurs the world over have experienced. And there's something maybe, maybe the piece of Tacit Knowledge is having a bit of emotional awareness and pattern recognition for yourself that that pattern is going to keep. It's going to keep rearing its head in different ways. And if and when it does happen to notice it, observe it and hold it lightly and be able to like, breathe through it and do what you need to do to kind of re-energize. Sometimes that's talking to someone you find really inspiring in your field. Sometimes that's reading a book or watching a documentary or watching a movie about something totally different. It could be about like 90s Bulls, and you just find such inspiration in watching that team. Like, but it doesn't have to be just about your work. But whatever it takes for you to like, reengage and find that sense of agency again in the sense that you can do it. It doesn't mean to go in blindly into your work, but quite the opposite. It's like these are also invitations to like, think super critically about what you might be missing, but not in the not in a way that will pull you out of it, but instead that will help you double down. Kumar Yeah, I really like that, partly because I think people, especially people who are who can be good at being analytical sometimes, then try to like.,, David Analyze their way out of it. Kumar Just think their way, think their way through it. But you're like you. You are feeling the uncertainty of, I'm really putting myself out there, or this feels new and hard or just, you know, like we work with donors. People say no, like there's all the things that, uh, happen and the wins come, but the wins come over time, you know, and a lot of things that keep us motivated is like the theory of small wins. What are the things that sustain us along the way? David Absolutely. And community, I mean, I think that's a big part of why I was compelled in our conversations way back when to join Renaissance Philanthropy is the idea of building in community as opposed to in isolation. It's invaluable for so, so many reasons, but including and especially, I think, for those moments of, of greater uncertainty or greater doubt to have others who are also building and have gone through it. And, um, I think there's a reason why you often hear about founders again, both in the private sector and the philanthropic world, who, uh, who have people they can lean on, who've been through it, who know that this very specific challenges and emotional experience they might be going through. And I think that's extremely underrated in the, in the nonprofit world. Kumar Yeah. And certainly something that people will struggle to get out of their (AI) agents. Uh, you know, like, you keep going, you know, because it's like there's something very human about, like, uh, common suffering, you know, of, like, trying new things out. 00:31:05.220 — Asks and Offers Kumar So we always close with Asks & Offers. So is there either something that, you know, you've already been putting out there in the world that folks can benefit from, or something you love for people to reach out and offer help on as you're building out your work? David On the first I, I've spent my entire career in the like first few years, for several years of building things for profit companies and nonprofits and adore it. And and I think I've gotten very good at parts of those, like parts of that process and so would be thrilled. I love spending time with especially kind of first time founders of various ambitious, mission driven efforts, and so would be more than happy to to advise and support those who are in that, in that, in that moment of trying to figure out how do you build something, especially out of thin air for something really, really important in the world? So would be more than happy to help out. Um, uh, and in terms of my asks, one of the main things that we're working on at the Clean Air for Schools Fund Fund within Renaissance Philanthropy is a cities competition around clean air and learn both learning from the mistakes of lots of cities, competitions and challenges over the last couple of decades, and to be as thoughtful as possible about what pitfalls to avoid and how to structure it in a way that that leads is most likely to lead to to success, in this case to cleaner air for kids across the country and then eventually globally over the next several years. And would - we have an amazing team now working on this day in and out to to to, uh, to stitch together the right design and process? Um, um, But would be thrilled to to hear from people who have thoughts about both how you design, run, implement these kinds of of systems and processes, but also separate from the mechanism, I would love to hear from people who have really strong insights and unique insights into how cities operate, especially to our earlier conversation in kind of cross agency and bureaucratic morass of wading through a health department plus the environment, some some from an environmental agency, plus the school system and someone from the mayor's office. There's a lot of really exciting and potentially high impact work we could do, can do in this competition to foster and facilitate that collaboration. But it's also really challenging. So anyone who has helpful insights into how we might set this competition up for success, I would love to hear from you. Kumar Amazing. Well, David, thank you so much for joining us. David Thanks for having me. 00:33:36.790 — Outro Kumar All right everybody. So that was David Carel. And you can tell David is working on something super important. Um, I love this as a topic because whenever somebody is working on something that's important but that you encounter it such, you know, I had not thought that much about the importance of clean air indoors until I started talking to David, even though I had lived through Covid. I mean, the fact that, like I, we had gone through all of this work and yet still it was a blind spot on how much policy, technology, philanthropy and others could contribute to this. It just kind of shows how much of a hidden problem it is. And I totally agree with David that similar to what happened at the start of the 20th century, where we actually took all the water, we drink seriously and suddenly built the modern water infrastructure, which now is way cleaner and has stopped lots of disease. We can do the same thing with air. The number of different things that this body of work could go into is just surprising. And so I love both David's story of how he, like, started an education, but then ended up in this much more adjacent area and then just kept pulling on it. And now, you know, he's one of the leading people working on this. And I think it's just a great story for both the work itself, but also how do we find our own sense of agency and getting work done? Of course, I hope you'll continue to follow us and listen along, and then hopefully take inspiration into your own work in the days ahead. Thanks again for joining Tacit Knowledge. Thanks for listening to this latest episode of Tacit Knowledge, hosted by me, Kumar Garg and produced by All Together Now for Renaissance Philanthropy. Find out more about our guest and all of our work at renaissancephilanthropy.org. Until next time.