Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) hosts Aerolamp CEO Misha Gurevich and Chief Scientist Vivian Belenky, a Columbia University researcher, for a Complex Systems conversation about far-UVC germicidal light at roughly 222 nanometers. Belenky explains why this wavelength can inactivate airborne pathogens while being absorbed by the dead outer layer of human skin, and why room-scale deployments may function like an extremely strong air purifier. The guests argue that the biggest barriers are awareness and adoption rather than cost or basic science, with fixtures around $500 and straightforward installation. The stakes are concentrated in schools, transport hubs, long-term care, and future respiratory pandemics, where making clean shared air into ordinary infrastructure could sharply reduce transmission. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/let-there-be-germicidal-light-this-500-fixture-could-stop-the-next-pandemic-from-complex-systems/ Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking Granola: Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr CHAPTERS: (00:00) About the Episode (03:19) Far-UVC science and safety (12:41) Deployment and economics (Part 1) (18:04) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Granola (20:04) Deployment and economics (Part 2) (27:11) Evidence and pandemics (Part 1) (32:43) Sponsor: Claude (34:13) Evidence and pandemics (Part 2) (38:14) Built environment strategy (47:27) Scaling and home use (56:06) Uncertainty and immunity (01:05:38) Risk and awareness (01:20:45) Episode Outro (01:24:26) Outro PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing SOCIAL LINKS: Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/ Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nathan Labenz?

  Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to share an episode of Complex Systems, a podcast on technology, finance, and systems thinking, hosted by internet legend Patrick McKenzie, also known as Patio11. This episode, which features Aerolamp CEO Misha Gurevich and Chief Scientist Vivian Belenke, offers a detailed primer on the use of 222 nanometer wavelength light to deactivate airborne pathogens and thus prevent the transmission of infectious diseases in shared spaces. As you'll hear, while the evidence of practical value is still coming in, the lab science is already quite well understood, and we do have preliminary results from a South African

• 0:44Nathan Labenz?

  trial showing 90% suppression of tuberculosis transmission in hospital wards. For additional credibility, I would highlight that Aerolamp specifically comes recommended by philanthropist Jeff Kaufman, who's now working full-time to prevent catastrophic pandemics at SecureBio, an organization that I've personally supported with a modest donation. At $500, the Aerolamp might feel a bit expensive, but I would argue that the expected ROI is outstanding. On the most basic level, getting sick sucks, and a single case of the common cold can easily cost individuals and companies well more than $500 in terms of lost productivity.

• 1:26Nathan Labenz?

  For the immunocompromised, the value is even higher, which is why my wife and I installed an Aerolamp directly over my son's bed every time he was in the hospital for cancer treatment last winter. Thankfully, he's now headed back to school, and I'm planning to put my money where my mouth is again by buying and installing a couple of Aerolamps for each of my son's classrooms. If we get anything like a 90% reduction in disease transmission, the social returns on this investment will be truly outstanding. And big picture, as we're all now well aware, AI systems are fast becoming extremely capable, and we've recently seen the first examples of autonomous cyberattacks. By many accounts, similar capabilities are soon coming to biology, and while the upside

• 2:11Nathan Labenz?

  is undeniably incredible, I shudder to think about what accidents or attacks might transpire along the way. Buying a 222 nanometer light now, from Aerolamp or otherwise, seems to me a great way to invest in one's own health and help expand the nascent market for what might soon prove to be a critical lifesaving technology. With that, I want to thank Patrick for creating and allowing me to cross-post this episode. I encourage all of you to subscribe to Complex Systems, where you can learn about all kinds of largely invisible but extremely interesting systems that support and in some cases govern modern life. And I hope you not only enjoy this conversation about the science and economics of antimicrobial

• 2:54Nathan Labenz?

  UVC, but find yourself compelled to make a small investment now in your and your community's health and in improved societal resilience to potential future pandemics. This is Patrick McKenzie with Misha Gurevich and Vivian Belenke, CEO and Chief Scientist of Aerolamp, from the Complex Systems Podcast.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Welcome to Complex Systems, where we discuss the technical, organizational, and human factors underpinning why the world works the way it does. Hi, everyone. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as Patio11 on the internet. As longtime listeners of Complex Systems will know, I think that FAR UVC is one of the sleeper picks for among the most important technologies getting developed today. FAR UVC is a wavelength of light that can deactivate viruses and other pathogens, and it is possible that we will be able to introduce this into our built environment, into our homes and offices via specially-made lamps for infection control.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I'm honored to be joined today by Misha, who is the CEO of Aerolamp, and Vivian Belenke, who is the Chief Scientist of Aerolamp and also researcher at Columbia University. Thanks very much for coming on the program, guys.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, good to meet you.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Good to meet you as well. So, just for folks who haven't heard the FAR UVC gospel yet, can we talk briefly about what this wavelength of light actually does, both on like the sort of chemistry slash biology level and hopefully on the social slash technology level?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  So, on a chemical-biological level, the special thing about FAR UVC is it is absorbed by the DNA and RNA of pathogens as well as by essentially all proteins. And this is very important because the fact that it's so heavily absorbed by proteins is a thing that makes it much safer than other germicidal UV wavelengths. So essentially, a pathogen or any microorganism, anything without significant protections like humans and animals, is going to be inactivated, so it's still in the air, but it can no longer replicate, and this works extremely fast.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  So it's essentially like having an extremely strong air purifier running in a space, except instead of maybe giving you an extra air change or two in your space, you can get the equivalent of 30 to 50.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  And this is just a wavelength of light which happens to be invisible, so it's something that we get in sunlight already presumably, right?

• 5:45Speaker 02

  No, actually. So, yeah, so sunlight is primarily UVA and UVB. UVB in particular is what we're most worried about when we're worrying about risk of skin cancer and cataracts, but UVC is actually completely blocked by the ozone layer. And this makes sense because UVC is quite efficient at inactivating microbial life. Probably the surface of our planet would look very different if, you know, it was present here on Earth. So there is no UVC in sunlight. Sunlight is germicidal, just like UVC, but to a much lesser extent. So it's true that while sunlight does kill germs, it does it because there's just so,

• 6:29Speaker 02

  so, so much more sunlight than there is from any UVC lamp, that even though sunlight is only mildly germicidal, you know, per photon, it can still do the job.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  The legal beagle in me has to say that Oliver Wendell Holmes was empirically disproven by the science. Sunlight is in fact not the best disinfectant. But, okay, so this is a interesting wavelength of light. I personally have done a little bit of the reading and am relatively well-informed by the safety story, but I think that the typical member of the audience probably isn't. So what is the sort of like chemical slash biological reason that this is safe for us? You've mentioned that it gets blocked by basically any proteins, so proteins in our skin and epidermis layer presumably, but how is it safe to, for example, look at?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Right. So, this is actually much more of a mechanical story than a chemical or biological story.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Essentially, you know, it's not good for living cells to be exposed to UVC of any wavelength, you know, but the difference is that humans have a 20-micron thick layer of dead skin cells that are chock full of proteins that essentially absorb all FAR UVC. And I should say this is unique to FAR UVC, the wavelengths of 200 to 235 nanometers, principally 222 nanometers, which is what is most commercially viable right now. Longer UVC wavelengths, you know, 254 nanometers, 265 nanometers, which are used in water disinfection,

• 8:16Speaker 02

  these do not have so significant protein absorption. So they are, I'm not going to say they'll give you cancer. Relative to UVB, they're thought to be less carcinogenic, but they are not pleasant to be exposed to. So it's really something that is unique to the shorter wavelengths in the FAR UVC. So this high protein absorbance, it is due to the stratum corneum, the outer layer of the skin. It absorbs almost everything, and what is not absorbed is only, is absorbed in only the very upper layers of the skin. And those, those skin layers tend to generally slough off and, you know, become part of

• 8:59Speaker 02

  the stratum corneum within typically a couple of days. So I've never seen a study that showed any significant, you know, biological activity down at the basal skin cell layer, where you would just worry about cancer if there was any damage to the DNA there. Now, the story with the eyes is a little bit more complicated, and this is because there isn't a convenient dead skin cell layer or dead eye cell layer, whatever that might mean, to protect us, but eyes are protected in the same way that are, they are protected from sunlight. We have eyelids, eyelashes, eyebrows, brow ridge, and all of these things reduce the

• 9:43Speaker 02

  effective dose to the eye. So this does mean that, you know, despite these mechanical protections, the eye is more vulnerable. There is the tear layer, which has some lipids and proteins, and that absorbs some of the FAR UVC, but actually only about 15%. The rest of the incident dose would be absorbed in the epithelium, and this is a, you know, so a relatively lower dose might produce eye pain or discomfort. The positive story there, though, is that this is still, even though these are living cells, they're still full of proteins, and the absorption is not to essentially totally stop after the first few cell layers.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  So any chance of long-term damage is, in my opinion, fairly low, although we haven't, you know, this technology hasn't been around for long enough to do extremely long-running studies. There have been a few long-run eye safety studies. Actually, there's one, one-year one and one three-year one.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Going on in, I think, Japan. But it does mean that the safe effective eye dose is lower than the safe effective skin dose. We're still figuring out exactly what that is and exactly how to translate that into, you know, industry practice. We're generally pretty conservative. But the good news is, is that it, it's sort of like looking into a bright light where, and not like looking into an infrared laser where if you feel any pain, that means that you flinch away and then you're not really worrying about long-term damage.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  And this is a very different from, say, infrared lasers where you could get a blinding dose and feel nothing. So it's, it is thankfully nothing at all like that.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, if anyone has ever been in the lab that has lasers, the safety briefings are, one, terrifying, and two, if you feel anything, it's far too late.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. For you, if you, if you feel something, stop looking at it, you know? And just to clarify, it's not where you might be kind of just ambiently sitting in the room and suddenly your eye starts hurting. It's more like, did you accidentally climb up and stare right into it for a couple of minutes without turning it off? So we're talking more about accidents of that nature.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  One of the big benefits of it being more effective than sunlight as a disinfectant is that you can actually use it at pretty low power levels. So the, the emitters we're using, they're putting out like 100 milliwatts, right? Which is really not a lot. So over the course, like over a distance of a room, it basically decreases to like around zero, especially if you're like, you know, further and further away, right?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Yes. So you need, you need very little dose of this stuff to get a pretty rapid dermalicidal effect.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  So we're starting to see these emitters in the corners of rooms in, or let's say, tech forward places in the San Francisco Bay area. And I see your branded emitters more than most. But can you describe what the like typical deployment of this would look like?

• 12:59Speaker 02

  So for now, we are doing these corner mounted units, mostly just because it's a little bit more cost effective to mount them in the corner. This is because these lamps have a fairly narrow beam angle. And that means that to maximize the average dose in the room, you want to maximize the pass lengths of that beam, which means usually you're pointing your, you mount it in a corner and you point it to the opposite corner. And that gets you a larger average dose over the space. In the future, I, I think ultimately we're looking at just kind of normal overhead ceiling lights, you know, just a boring ceiling fixture, you know, like a smoke alarm or any number

• 13:40Speaker 02

  of, you know, random pieces of building infrastructure that are in drop ceilings in like offices, hospitals, schools. And yeah, so we're doing it right now this way just because it's a little bit easier to install. You know, we wanted to emphasize that, hey, this is something that you could just buy for your, for your space and get on with. And Misha, you can talk a little bit more about that.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. I basically sort of see our, like the current lamps we're sending out as like a very important existence proof that the technology is fundamentally ready to go. There's not any like insurmountable technical difficulties. There's not any insurmountable logistical difficulties to deploying it. There's, you know, there are still many difficulties as there in running any business, particularly like any business that involves, you know, high-tech components. But it's not something that's like, you know, you can only get this for $10,000 or you can only get this if you're like, you know, a secret government lab. This is something that's like pretty much ready to be deployed.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  One of the things that I like about this is that, that as you mentioned, the tech is basically proven. We've done extensive lab studies about this, et cetera, et cetera. And it is something that bluntly fits on a shipping container from China. And one of my theories about the world is that everything that fits on a shipping container from without loss of generality to China, craters in price over time, particularly as you scale up production of it. And so while many of our other, you know, medically oriented interventions are consistently high priced due to almost cost disease and other reasons, this is something that we should eventually be able to buy for not much more than the price of lighting.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  And there's very few people or institutions that go, you know, darn, we're building out a hospital, but we just can't afford the lights in it. And so it's largely, you know, a matter of will, I think, for deploying it. Although you've probably had this conversation many more times than I have. Why does it not exist already in all of the hospitals?

• 15:42Speaker 02

  I think you, you completely hit the nail on the head that it's just a matter of will and it's a matter of people even knowing that this is a thing that they might do. So right now, I think for UVC is sort of in this category of things that only weird people might get or think about. And, you know, it's like, it's like wearing a respirator everywhere. And what it needs to be is more like having hand sanitizer stations around or having just normal ventilation in your building. So I think there is, there is some, to some extent, we already care, know that, you know, people care about not getting sick, but not getting sick in this particular way, but with this particular product category.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  I think it's some combination of social normalization of, you know, we should have, we should be treating our air at all and knowing that there is a way to do it cheaply and effectively. And yeah, as you said, will, you know, I got started in this field, looking at what are the bottlenecks to deployment? Like, is it, is it a cost barrier? Is it a, you know, research barrier? And I think it's not that there's no, not room to do more research. I think there is definitely more room to do research and refine the recommended practice, best practices.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  But for the most part, it's just, yeah, there's not really any good reason that it can't be everywhere.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  I think when we look at the history of improvements in sanitization practices, sanitizing water is helpful in one way and that it isn't in fact the case that there is a single choke point in the water delivery system, but it is largely centralized in the typical deployments. And so you only need to convince one organization. When we were trying to convince doctors to wash their hands before surgery, that was an intensely difficult conversation, which is still ongoing in some places because you have to convince, you know, all the doctors to do it consistently every single time. This is sort of a one-time intervention, but it's a room by room intervention. And we don't necessarily need it in all the rooms, but we do need it in, you know, many

• 17:56Speaker 01

  of the rooms in areas that people congregate. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

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• 18:33Nathan Labenz?

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• 19:19Nathan Labenz?

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• 20:04Speaker 01

  Can you talk about what the research suggests with respect to, you know, as we're prioritizing the rollout, where should we prioritize?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Right. So this is a tough one. If I had to say, where do I think there would be the most benefit? I would say elementary schools, maybe middle schools, because they are often extremely poorly ventilated. So they, and children are immunologically naive.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  So I mean, like one issue with doing airborne disease transmission studies is that you're using healthy adult volunteers. Turns out that like healthy adults are, just generally don't get the flu. You kind of need a lot of shots on goal to successfully catch the flu. Children are a kind of a different story. It is just a bit trickier though, in that, you know, I am convinced on the strength of the, of the safety evidence. I don't know that we have a large enough pile of safety evidence that, you know, a large enough fraction of parents of children would be, you know, thrilled to try and cycle relatively new technology in schools.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  I do expect schools to be relatively conservative, perhaps with the early rollouts happening in private or specialty schools.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  So I think ultimately, you know, occupational settings of some sort are going to see it earlier, even though I don't necessarily think that's where the very largest benefit is. I think long-term care centers and, you know, hospital waiting rooms are big ones where the benefit is high. And so any concern about sort of biological risk is going to be more acceptable.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Presumptively, like places that have a relatively transient population. So in a, you know, hospital bedroom, you might have a patient there for a relatively long time. But presumptively, people do not spend plural days in the hospital waiting room. And so if you have some worry that there is some dose level that would be potentially imminical to a person, they are less likely to get that dose level in the waiting room than they are in other spaces. Conversely, like when you're not counting an individual, humans dwell time in a space. The aggregate amount of dwell time in the waiting room is like quite substantial. It's just spread over hundreds of patients. So I do think that it is likely to happen in private schools, maybe faster than public schools.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  And one reason is that when I, you know, do the back of the envelope numbers for it, it's something that a single parent could probably fund just by deciding to do it. If they get the school on board and indeed a few of my tech friends have discussed potentially doing that for the schools their children attend. And Misha, can you talk a little bit about the economics of this, like a per room and per institution basis?

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we usually say something like 250 square feet per lamp is like how much coverage you would get. So for like a standard classroom, so this is sort of, I guess a standard classroom is a tough question because there's like the standard classrooms as they actually exist. And if you look into say like California, you know, guidelines for a standard classroom, they're actually much bigger than standard classrooms tend to be. But that would be like two to three lamps per classroom, maybe four for a bigger one. And so for a lot of schools, this is you're looking into a lot of lamps, right? You know, dozens for really big institutions, like if you're talking to university, you're probably looking at hundreds of lamps. But if you're talking for like, you know, middle, I also think, so universities are kind of a front runner.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  Cause again, because it's not children, it's like older students, it's a little easier to get installs set up. One of our competitors recently set up a big installation in a Florida university. I haven't heard any details yet, but they're apparently collecting a lot of good data that way. But so this is sort of the kind of thing where on most small buildings, you're looking to spend maybe four, four to five figures if you want to outfit the whole building. And then once you're getting bigger, you're looking to spend maybe six figures on purely just on lamps and then installation also, because so usually we say installation will cost you probably about what the lamps will cost you if you're hiring professionals to do it. If you're, if you're just doing it yourself, installation is basically free, right? It takes like, you know, 10 minutes to stick one in the wall and plug into an outlet.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  But if you're doing permanent installations, you're going to want to run wiring, you know, through the ceiling, that kind of thing, right?

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the budget as much for the installation as for the lamp itself, that's kind of just like a rule of sum, you know, on average across all possible electrical systems and, you know, ceiling types. I, even if you're, even if this were happening on a mass level and we were hiring professionals to do all of it, I think for many typical scenarios, it could be quite a bit cheaper. But just on average, when we're talking about like mass social modeling, I think, you know, roughly double the cost for installation is a reasonable conservative estimate.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  And so at the moment, it's something like $500 a lamp. So if you need two of them for a room, that's a thousand dollars and a thousand for installation. And then multiply by number of rooms that are at top of their priority list. And useful to point out that this is something electricians are very qualified to do already. You just say, hey, there is a weird light fixture that goes in the corner. And they say, okay, I have done light fixtures before. That isn't an unsolved problem in material science.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  One of the reasons that UV has not really been adopted more generally, even though it's sort of been a known technology since, you know, the 40s and 50s, is that older wavelengths are more dangerous. So they have to be installed a lot more carefully, right? Like you need expert installation. You can install UV in the upper part of a room where it's safe for people. But if they mess up an upper room install, then people are getting, you know, eye damage very quickly. Whereas you can't really mess up a 222 installation that badly because it's just innately a lot safer. And so the, the level of expertise is like you said, any electrician can do it instead of needing like an expert UV installer.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  I'm familiar with standard lamps, although it changed a little bit in the LED era, where you have to go and replace the bulb every once in a while. What's the like average lifetime of these installations?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, we think that the bulbs that we're using right now, you know, the manufacturer will, will admit like it'll last at least 10,000 hours maintaining 70% output. I've seen some data that suggests it's actually a bit longer than that, maybe more like 13,000 to 14,000 hours. If you are only using it, you know, in an occupational setting for eight hours a day during your work week, that's about five, six years of usage before you need to do any replacements. And if you're running them 24/7, which I don't know what's in a scenario that would be most desirable in, but that would be just about a year and a half.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  I could imagine maybe a transportation sort of scenario where you had them in, for example, a train station or airports where they would want to run them 24/7 or something pretty close to it. And then I guess the big $64,000 question or more now that a dollar is worth less than it used to be, is when will we start seeing like the actual results in the physical universe? When does the data start getting sort of undeniable? That's like, if you install this, then you win in terms of the amount of sick days you have and the clinical consequences.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think this is a really, really tough question. There's a number of reasons that these sorts of, you know, a randomized controlled trial for an environmental disease transmission intervention is quite hard to do. We're not entirely sure that we know how to design such a trial. But in principle, you should expect that this will roughly follow a sick moilage shape. You know, so the first few adopters are going to see, you know, sublinear benefits because, you know, you, maybe you install it in your office and nobody gives each other the flu in your office. But then your kid's school doesn't install it, and the flu goes around there and then you just catch the flu from your kid.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  So there's going to be some critical, you know, coverage point within a community where, you know, the suppression really takes off. And we have modeling on this, but yeah, I think it's really, really uncertain.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  I think I'm actually a lot more optimistic than that. I think a lot of specialized use cases are going to see fairly strong evidence a lot faster and a lot more easily. Basically situations where people are not as social, not as mixed, or for pathogens that are particularly susceptible. So there's been really good results on tuberculosis, for example. And this is not really something we think about day to day in America, but there's a lot of institutions and places that are like tuberculosis hotspots that are also not doing a ton of social mixing. This is a big problem in a lot of countries as well that are not America. But also even in America, there's like places that have a lot of tuberculosis. And I think those places will see, for example, like pretty noticeable drops in transmission fairly fast and like pretty reliably.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  And I think that kind of thing will be like forthcoming relatively quickly compared to, you know, if you put this in a school in a community, we don't really know that, that fast. I also think long-term care centers and, you know, basically senior centers are another place where we're probably going to see results relatively faster because there's just not as much social mixing there, right? With the rest of society.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  I would agree with that. And also I should point out that we have some really encouraging results on tuberculosis specifically. There's a trial going on in South Africa that already has preliminary results. And they're, they're seeing 90% transmission suppression in these, in these TB wards. This is an animal study, so the, the way it's set up is that there's guinea pigs, which are exposed to the humans only through the air. And they're monitoring what percent of the guinea pigs get tuberculosis. But tuberculosis is actually not very sensitive to far UVC at all. It's relatively resistant.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  And I would say it's about maybe 10 times more resistant than your typical respiratory virus like flu or coronavirus. So in, is our flu and coronavirus transmitted through the air in the exact same way as tuberculosis? No, probably not. But there is, there is in fact a lot of reason to be optimistic. I think Misha is totally right about long-term care centers probably seeing much more immediate benefits than, you know, the school or office case. Or perhaps boarding schools, I think boarding schools could be a relatively more immediate example.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  I think this is going to be interesting because, you know, there are some institutions that require, we're going to need a stack of academic papers on this that have confidence intervals, et cetera, et cetera. But when you're talking about 90% decreases in infections, for example, the anecdotal evidence will pile up in certain communities extremely quickly. And it is just nakedly and obviously incentive compatible for, you know, a case like a long-term care center. Regardless of who owns it, P for him or otherwise, they would strongly prefer that the residents not die. And that is both like the humanitarian mission for them. Plus also they get paid based on how many residents are still living at the moment.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  And so you could imagine it, you know, having a happy viral coefficient in that community of practice as soon as a chain installs it in one location and then is able to check at the end of the month. Well, we had, you know, 34 infections in the median. One of our locations on the one where we installed this, we had three. And then make the obvious decision very quickly after that. So knock on wood, I hope that we will see evidence of the obvious decision getting made all over the place, you know, on a timeframe of like months to short number of years from now, followed by the broader societal rollout that this will likely take.

• 32:38Nathan Labenz?

  Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

• 32:43Nathan Labenz?

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• 34:12Speaker 01

  So we've talked about sort of like the decreasing infections locally case, but I think that a huge societal upside here might be like decreasing like the total load of infections and in particular kneecapping future pandemics before they start. Can you talk about some of the pandemic masks that we were unfortunately all forced to become experts on back in 2020 and what this does to, you know, the potential factors of high reality and similar?

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think actually the pandemic prevention case is by far the most exciting element here. You know, I think when you're trying to market something to ordinary people in non-pandemic times, and you know, when I talk to people about this, I really avoid mentioning the pandemic because yeah, people do not, do not want to hear it. I think we're all sort of, you know, collectively traumatized and we just don't want to talk about it. So were you, you know, we're talking about like, oh, we're preventing colds and flus. My, my honest assessment is that I'm much more uncertain about our ability to prevent, you know, the average cold where, which is just not very contagious. And probably if you're getting someone's cold, it's because you spent, you know, an

• 35:28Speaker 02

  extended period of time interacting with them quite close. Can we prevent some colds in, you know, compromised people and in some situation? Yeah, I think so. But I'm actually much more confident that we could kneecap a future respiratory pandemic like COVID-19 or worse, just because, you know, paradoxically, the more contagious something is, the more surface area there is to keep it from getting as bad as it, as it could get. In fact, one of the earlier use cases for traditional Peru UVC, which uses a different,

• 36:08Speaker 02

  more dangerous wavelength as the 254 nanometer wavelength, that was used to control measles. And measles is just absurdly contagious. It is probably the extreme of how contagious a pathogen can even be. I think it has a reproduction number of 20, so each person who has it will on average infect 20 others. And I, I believe that COVID-19 at its worst had a reproduction number of like 1. something. So, so UVC was able to successfully control measles outbreaks.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  And I think that makes me really optimistic that a relatively low level of coverage in key areas, transport hubs, for example, and other gathering places where people who aren't actually in communities together are, are missing is where we can do pandemic suppression for relatively low cost.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, the math that is common to epidemiologists and people who markets video games for a living is that the difference between the reproduction number, it's called R0 in epidemiology and the K factor in, in marketing, but 1.08 means that something goes exponential because, you know, for every person that is exposed to the thing, you get more than one people down the line. And 0.99 fails to go exponential. You, you have to keep dumping in marketing budget and the viruses just don't have a marketing budget.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  So the, the hope is that, you know, for a, you know, what in absolute numbers is relatively small impairment in a COVID-19 or something, to just get it from slightly above one to slightly below one is the difference between having a pandemic and not. And knock on wood, hopefully we will be able to avoid some pandemics at the margin.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  No, I definitely think that's a huge benefit. I also think because it's part of the built environment, you need a lot fewer people to be involved in the prevention process, right? This is like one of the big problems with COVID is vaccination requires a lot of people to opt into vaccination. Masking requires a lot of people to opt into masking. If you have, you know, whoever owns a building can decide unilaterally, sometimes it's just one person, sometimes it's, you know, a board of directors or something, but that takes way fewer people to reduce the infections in an area than previous like prevention methods, right?

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. And if this, if a certain amount of infection prevention gets written into building codes, and then these are broadly adopted in like whatever the authority having jurisdiction is, that might be on the state level or on the county level, this means that, you know, the, these interventions just get built into buildings on a 10-year renovation, renovation cycle. And so I think there is some potential here in going through building codes because, and right now we only have one infection prevention standard, that's ASHRAI 241, and it is an amazing standard that was put together very quickly, but it's still under construction and it's not yet broadly adopted by any authorities having jurisdiction.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  But that could, you know, if the standard says you need this much infection prevention in your building to be compliant, and UVC is the cheapest, easiest way to do that, I mean, people are going to do that. And I, I do think that one really, really major advantage, maybe the advantage of our UVC and UVC generally is just, it is such a cost-effective way to get the required amount of infection prevention into an air treatment space.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  The sort of competing technologies there, they're not quite competing, presumably this is something that you could deploy in parallel, but your other options might include a huge upgrade to the HVAC system to cause more changes in the actual physical air in the room per hour, which requires upgrading both like the central HVAC and also presumably all the vents, et cetera, et cetera. And might, you know, be either impossible or extremely cost ineffective for buildings that already physically exist, where this is again, just plapp the light in the corner and then you're done.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  I mean, the, another comparison technology might be portable air filters, actually not necessarily HEPA, but you know, a lower rating can actually be just as effective and much quieter. So just a MERV 13 portable, portable air filter. And I do think these things are additive. I mean, yes, we should be absolutely upgrading ventilation. We should be getting more outdoor air, more cycled filtered air. We should be using, you know, we call them portable filters, but you can also install them kind of in the room, you know, we can, we can broadly call these in-room air cleaners. I think these are some of the most cost-effective options.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  And for filter-based in-room air cleaners, you want, you're going to want them alongside UVC anyway, because you know, this pathogens are not the only airborne pollutant. And there's also chemical pollutants, there's particulate matter, there's dust, there's allergens. Our UVC actually does have a modest effect on allergens by the same, you know, protein absorbance pathway, but it's, it's much smaller than, you know, just conventional filtration. So we should, we should be doing all of these things. But for a pathogen specifically, that just moving the air tends to be really, really

• 42:07Speaker 02

  insufficient, especially for very large spaces that are relatively densely occupied. So auditoriums, lecture halls, gyms, it would be really, really difficult to meet the clean air standard for these spaces without UVC, essentially cost prohibitive for most buildings.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  And so this is, you know, one of a panoply of options we have with regards to infection control in our built spaces, but it's a kind of, I guess, I was about to say additive, but it's probably multiplicative for better if one actually does the math with regards to other non-pharmaceutical interventions, so, or pharmaceutical interventions for that matter. So if we have vaccines, they have some penetration rate in the community, et cetera, et cetera. The vaccine definitely, well, almost certainly doesn't become less effective just because there is less of the virus circulating around. But given that this is easier to deploy, requires less sort of coordination among people.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Also, there is a political economy question here, which is dancing in the background, where hopefully there will be less opposition to simply having light in the corner than, you know, needles deployed all over the place. It makes all of our existing and future technologies better for having this deployed alongside them.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's definitely true.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  I once made a bet with someone that we would have a broad deployment of this in the United States by 2030, and I think I'm going to lose that bet unfortunately, because we're not moving at quite that, at that speed. But if you were to put finger to the wind, what does the curve look like for deployment of this over the next couple of years in maybe an optimistic scenario and then sort of a baseline scenario?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think we're not, you might say that we're not exactly even on the curve. I think worldwide, maybe a couple thousand of these lamps are are sold. No, I don't think it's even that high. It might be as low as just a couple of hundred a year worldwide. And I I don't even have a great sense for whether this is going up. But I think essentially it's a matter of like, does this idea go viral? Har har. You know, if this, if it takes off, if it kind of becomes like a, hey, this is a thing you can and should do.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  And then I think, you know, we can maybe look at the speed of deployment of LED lighting as a case. I mean, we're still looking at at least a decade, like after it really takes off to get to get truly wide deployment. But, you know, and like I said, that 10 year renovations cycle for commercial buildings is going to play a role here. So so it's really just a matter of like, when do we get to that tipping point? And how do we get there? And this is something that really keeps me up at night because, you know, you know, I talk to people and they and people think that like, oh, there must be some good reason that like this isn't getting going. There must be a regulatory barrier, there must be a cost barrier.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  And there's there's a critical piece of like, safety research missing. And like I said, not that there isn't lots of safety research and other kinds of research still to do. But there's nothing, you know, super critical where it's like, oh, we just need to know this and then we can get going. And there's not really any regulatory barrier either. It's, you know, it's maybe just like a social diffusion question. It's like, do we need just like a global awareness campaign? You know, how do we get this out there? And, you know, I have been in research for my entire career.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  So I am not an expert in how to run a global awareness campaign or how to make one actually effective. You know, and I started, I really wish I was.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Calling back to something that you said earlier, we're all somewhat traumatized by the pandemic. But implicitly, we are racing the next pandemic. And hopefully, we have it, you know, up and running in as many spaces as possible prior to the somewhat inevitable crash efforts to, again, improve our physical spaces and other resilience that would be sort of activated in the ordinary course during pandemic times. Ordinary course to the extent that anything is ordinary during pandemic times. But it is a combination of frustrating and intellectually interesting that there is no barrier at the moment. It is a product that is commercially available. I guess we'll say a few words on the scaling.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  So this is presumptively, again, you know, manufactured in without loss of generality, China. And one thing that we've learned from LEDs, among many other technologies, is that China and the industrial ecosystem there is very good at scaling up production of things for which there is a demand. But is there any particular reason why this would be harder to scale than, for example, LED was?

• 47:26Speaker 03

  I mean, there's a few reasons, but it's not, they're not that major, right? But the current manufacturing is like, of the best emitters, which we think are the most cost effective and the best lifespan, are only manufactured by one company that's from Japan. And they're they're they're generally in the business of like making high end, high margin products. So even if we cut down all of their margin, we're still looking at a per unit cost of like 15, 20 bucks per emitter, which puts them at like, they're just like sort of a different category than LEDs. They're not sort of as easy to scale. They require, you know, hydrogen fluoride gas as part of the manufacturing process. This is something that's technically not, like, just a lot less simple than LEDs. It's still something that's very feasible to scale up.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  It's it's not something that's like, you know, on first principles, not scalable. It's just like, this is something that's not as easy as LEDs.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I would push back that it's more complex than LEDs. I mean, the thing about LEDs is that it is extremely complex and capital intensive to produce LED chips. But once you have made that capital investment, you can scale it like very, very effectively. In that, like, you know, you like, put in tens of billions of dollars into the capital. And if there is enough of a market, that makes sense to do. So right now, these krypton chloride excimer lamps are on a different, less aggressive cost curve. I don't think they could get as cheap as the white LED. But there are hopes for, you know, some solid state chip based solutions for UV emission.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  I just think that we're looking sufficiently far out that, you know, we are just nowhere near the cost floor for even what we have here. And I think, you know, once we are in this like beautiful unicorn world where we're, you know, selling tens of billions of lamps and really rolling this out, how do we push the cost floor of a krypton chloride lamp even lower? And how do we get solid state chip based scalable technologies to to get those online? You know, I would love to have that problem. I would be so joyful if we had that problem.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  And given that the cost doesn't seem to be the major barrier to deployment right now and that at least in the United States, you modeled 50% of the cost as being labor where that is very difficult to compress. I would assume that the cost drops as we scale production of things. That's generally how it goes in manufacturing. But there isn't a radical step change in the likelihood of deployment or the ease of deployment as a as a function of reducing cost, it seems to me.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  The existing industry is just so small. And like I said, it's kind of high margin as as a business model. So I think there is, I don't know if I would call it a radical step change, but I think there's probably a pretty big inflection point at some point. Because a lot of the lamps in this market are being sold for like 2,000. I recently heard someone sell their lamps for 3,500 each, right? So I think once we're talking for like installations, like, well, you need 100 for your building. That adds up really fast if you're spending $3,000 a lamp, right? So I do think that cost is probably a barrier in a lot of deployments. And I think like, that but that but that cost is not fundamental to the industry. That cost is just sort of like an artifact of the fact that these are tiny companies that like, you know, need to have high margins to survive.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  And this is sort of a, I think this is a very tractable thing. If you're looking at it from a like, can can the world throw money at this to get deployments a lot faster and cheaper? I think this is very feasible.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  As we're talking about a total addressable market at the moment of hundreds of lamps per year, transitioning to tens of millions or hundreds of millions. Yeah, our prior should heavily be on that, the cost per unit goes down pretty aggressively.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the the cost per unit is really like that. I'm saying the cost per unit is not the cost, right? That's like the price per unit.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  I guess the, you know, this is this was sort of our our theory for like, I know, we're offering a $500 lamp kind of on the theory that there is this inflection point and our goal is to drop that even further.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  You know, if we get like, I don't think there's any reason that in the, you know, near future, next couple of years or so, or even sooner, that the price couldn't be, you know, on the order of 100 bucks per lamp. And that's, you know, with zero technological innovation of any sort.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  And for the benefit of people who haven't seen your website, like this, not to put too fine a point on it. This is a thing that you can literally go over to Aerolamps website and buy right now. And it comes in a box to your home or office. And then it is as easy to install as any other lighting fixture.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Actually, even even easier. It's sort of just, you stick it on a tripod, put it on top of your bookshelf. Or just, you know, use a drywall anchor and stick it on your wall, you know, for typical overhead. Overhead lights can be quite a bit more annoying to install. Done it in my home a couple of times.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  And full disclosure, I don't have it in my house yet, but I have considered it and it exists in several commercial spaces I've been in, in the San Francisco area, among others.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Well, so this is actually one of the things that we get asked this question all the time. Oh, should I get an air lamp? But I think most private homes don't like the cost benefit analysis is not really in the favor of getting one, just because there's not that much disease transmission. Most people don't live in like a big house with like 20 people or anything, right? If this is like you and your family, I don't, I don't think the benefits are going to be that high. Although obviously this sort of changes based on your own personal cost benefit analysis, right? Like if you're particularly rich, particularly value not getting sick, if you're immunocompromised, this sort of changes the balance. But I think for like most people, having it in their home for like 500 bucks is not actually like, it doesn't actually price out very effectively. Maybe once they're down to 100 bucks, then yes.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know. I would actually maybe push back on that. I think there's quite a lot of families. I think, I think the societal benefits are not particularly concentrated for individual homes. I think for individuals in quite a lot of situations, I mean, for example, I had a baby two months ago and babies do not have immune systems essentially. But yeah, I quite valued having people over and around to help out postpartum. And I was using my, my lamps, I have two in my living room and turning them on when I accompany, you know, I turn them on when I host events and gatherings. I, I think is for individual

• 54:06Speaker 02

  homes, it's less something that you might maybe have on all the time. But maybe something, you know, it's, it's sort of like the ventilator in your, you know, your, your kitchen. It is something that you quite like might to have for, you know, home health reasons, you know, maybe not at the $500 price point, though that's maybe, I think if you actually monetized the potential health benefits, it would, it would actually look quite a bit better. You know, getting sick is like very, very costly. So you don't need to prevent that many episodes of illness, you know, especially in, in, you know, tiny babies where if a tiny

• 54:46Speaker 02

  baby gets a fever, you know, you're looking at a emergency hospital trip, hospitalization, and potentially a spinal tap. And it's all, you know, deeply setting for everyone involved. So I think you should rationally be extremely willing to pay to lower the probability of, you know, small babies, other immunocompromised people getting infections. It's, but the, you know, societal benefits is where homes are just kind of like, you know, meh. It's not where I am most going to be pushing for, for this to like go out, where I think schools,

• 55:27Speaker 02

  transport hubs, you know, you know, that, that sort of thing is where you will see much more broad social suppression.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  When I was doing the back of the envelope math, and I have not devoted the last couple of years to researching this, my thought was that the case for a home shaped like mine, where there are four occupants, two of whom are school age children, is not that great yet, except for like the aesthetic benefit. You know, saying you're putting your chip on the table, it's something that I hope gets deployed widely in the future. But for special circumstances, sure. And also, given that most people who listen to complex systems are like employed tech professionals or similar, the, the absolute number is probably not that big of a barrier. But be that as it may, there, there is a

• 56:18Speaker 01

  question that we sometimes ask in investing, which I think is a clarifying one. If it fails to work, if this doesn't achieve the societal level benefits that we expected to, why? Like, what is the thing that we don't have confidence on that we could potentially learn more in the next couple of years in a way that would disappoint us negatively?

• 56:39Speaker 02

  For my part, it would be that it turns out that just like a huge chunk of airborne disease transmission is strongly short range, and that there is actually very little long range transmission of, you know, common pathogens, like, you know, your typical cold, your typical flu. I think for, when it comes to pandemics, for something to be like that contagious, it does sort of need to be more long range. So I, I think there, it is imaginable to me that we end up in this uncomfortable world where we can't do very much for, you know, quote, normal disease transmission, but it still is like totally crucial anti-pandemic

• 57:20Speaker 02

  technology. But now there's not really, you know, a clear business case for, for deploying it because, you know, people hate paying for prevention. It's a lot easier to sell someone something if you can tell them like, you're going to benefit from this in the next year. And, you know, get like, see your money back through prevented illnesses and prevented absences and so on, versus, hey, this is something that you install just, you know, in the event that there's going to be a, another mass pandemic in the next decade or two. Um, that's, that's just a much tougher sell. But, but I think it's, it's the transmission dynamics and, you know, how actually do any of these diseases, you know, transmit in

• 58:03Speaker 02

  real life, under what circumstances, for what sort of people? I think that's our biggest question mark, and it's very challenging to study.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, this is to say, we're pretty optimistic. But, but if it fails, it'll, it'll be like for reasons like that, right?

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, like you could imagine that, say, so we think that for a typical, for UV C installation, you're looking at, you know, the, an equivalent of one air change happening every two minutes. So that translates to, um, you know, 90% of coronavirus or influenza virus being reduced in about eight minutes and double that to get to 99. So about 15 minutes for 99% reduction. If the transmission dynamic is, you know, you're sharing air with somebody who is ill and, and you will, after, you know, 30 minutes after an hour,

• 59:00Speaker 02

  you have inhaled enough of infected air to, you know, on average, produce an infection, Faruv will total, totally cut, cut down on that. If instead, the transmission dynamic is, you know, you talk to an infected person from two feet away, and you get a massive dose, and you just are definitely for sure getting whatever it is that they have, then that's not really enough room for, for UV to do much or any kind of environmental intervention to do much. You can, you know, improve that a little bit by mixing the air and interrupting the air stream between people at the social distance. But you're, it, it's definitely going to be more challenging. You might still maybe, you know, reduce the severity of

• 59:45Speaker 02

  an infection just by reducing the viral, viral dose. You know, we saw, we saw this with COVID is that even if you don't fully prevent an infection, you might, you get less virus in you, you're going to have a less severe infection. And probably quite a lot of diseases work this way as well. But I, I think it would be quite unlikely that we would see no benefit at all. Whether, whether the benefits are relatively, you know, marginal, like, you know, probably still worth it, especially at a lower price point, or they are, whether the benefits are like truly socially transformational, you know, that we can just see like vastly less airborne disease. That's the, you know,

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  where that's sort of the uncertainty. But I think, I think no benefit at all is quite unlikely. I would be very surprised by that.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  One hopes that, given, you know, the numbers like 90% deactivation of pathogens, that in an idealistic case, the amount of evidence, both like formal evidence and anecdotal evidence will pile up very, very quickly and lead to a high rate of diffusion in the built environment. I have heard one objection from people, and I think this is interlocutors sort of overemphasizing the precautionary principle. But ask the experts, we talked about children, infants being immunonaive, and the way you get not immune naive is to have time in the world and get exposed to pathogens and have your immune system built

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  up. Is it possibly the case that, you know, decreasing people's contact with pathogens is a net a bad thing?

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Uh, so actually, I think I would push back on that quite strongly. So the modern formulation of the hygiene hypothesis does not actually posit that you need to be exposed to pathogens to train your immune system. We now think that the primary immune system training that you get as you're growing up is for envi, with environmental and commensal bacteria, the microorganisms. There doesn't actually seem to be any benefit to having a clinical episode of illness. You know, I was actually just looking at a couple of studies on this the other day. But, um, yeah, like the, for example, like there was one,

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  the effect of a child having RSV, it was a neutral to negative effect on the future illness. It was, you know, and in the extreme case, catching measles is, it wrecks total havoc on your immunological memory. It's purely bad for you. And I think the emerging understanding is that all viruses are like this, like it is purely just bad to catch a virus and get sick. You know, you might not be able to prevent it, but you would still, you would rather it not happen to you at all. And you would, and if it has to happen, you would rather it happen to you older. So I would much rather, you know, my kid catch, you know, whatever it is that's going around at 10 than at five. And I'd

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  rather it happen at five than at one. But, but I'd really rather it just not happen. You know, there's just no, there's no benefit. The immune training comes from, you know, contact with the environment and with.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  Just, you know, the world is just teeming with microorganisms. There is absolutely no lack of immune training. So if we just totally ended viral infections, I think that that is just overwhelmingly good, no downside.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  That is great to hear. And a thing that I've told people is if it turns out that there is some optimal level of viral infections that we have to have to have like the, you know, the perfectly tweaked immune system, we can always intentionally infect ourselves in the future. And it's just like, oh, man, my, my child just hasn't gotten sick enough in the last nine years.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  You know, I think this is actually called vaccines. I think intentionally exposing people to viruses. We have a technology for that.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Exactly true. You know, we deal with, I think, a net less disease load than we had in historical environments and haven't seen major impacts as a result of that. But we have, you know, engineering and pharmaceutical options to raise up and down the, the level if it turns out that we ever go below the optimal level of illness, where I, I think just finger to the wind on how things likely are. It's very likely that we are above the optimal level, if there is indeed an optimal level.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think people go too far in the hygiene hypothesis, just because we can really look at the data or just like our lived experience of what it's like to be a human living in our society. And we can say, oh, asthma is up, allergies are up. The thing is, those are relatively trivial compared to childhood mortality, which is way down.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think there, there is just gathering evidence that increased our, like, you know, allergies and asthma. That's just, certainly has nothing to do with, with viral infections. There, there might be some questions of, you know, is widely deployed far UVC going to mess with the indoor microbiome in a way that affects us? And I think, yeah, my, my answer is mostly no, just because microorganisms, bacteria, especially those living on surfaces and not in the air, they're extremely hardy. And for like, UVC is generally much less effective on surfaces than in the air. So this has not been explicitly studied, you

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  know, what are the effects on the indoor microbiome. But my, my bet is that if there's a cost, it's like relatively minor. And in, in the event that there, there is a substantive effect, you know, you go, you go outside, there's going to be germs there, you know, there's dirt, there's bugs, there's no lack of potential exposures.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And not to say something spicy for the podcast, for the sake of spiciness, but I think that the precautionary principle ends up just being a really rough way to live life, where you can always argue that, oh, there is a, you know, in the multiple million dimension space that we live, there is at least one dimension where a given technology would disimprove you. And therefore precautionary principle says, never do anything, where like, we know what the numbers are from infectious diseases in terms of deaths caused per year. They're horrific. If there is hypothetically a future and where there is a, you know, line

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  in the history books, pre-ending of flu and post-ending of flu, that will be a, you know, world historical achievement. And again, we're not necessarily 100% expecting that to happen as a result of our UVC. But that is something that is like possible in the solution set or possible in the, you know, outcome set, given deployment of this. And then when you compare like, you know, some percentage of that to some percentage of, well, it might subtly tweak the indoor microbiomes. Those are two very different numbers in terms of their impact on the human experience.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, I'm saying we should study it. We should absolutely study it. I think the, you know, space of things that we don't yet know and would really like to know is huge. But I think the, just, you always have to reason under uncertainty and reason about different risks. And this is what I talk to people when I talk about, you know, sort of centrally photobiological safety. And that, yes, we don't have long-term data. Yes, it is reasonable to be cautious about these kinds of exposures. You know, we haven't studied this in this specific population. Yes, there are unknown unknowns, and I cannot fully characterize this risk. But that is, you know, just massively underrating the

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  risks from infectious disease. I think there is also quite a lot of unknown unknowns with how bad exactly are episodes of viral illness. I mean, there's increasingly, you know, I have a strong suspicion that long COVID, for example, is not special. In that, like, quite a lot of viruses have long-term sequelae. You know, I mentioned measles has a long-term impact on immunological memory. And there's lots of stuff, like this, like MHB virus, I might be saying that completely wrong. But where you, we don't necessarily, we are not necessarily fully capturing the downside of, you know, an episode of clinical illness, even a relatively mild clinical illness.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  It is possible that basically the entire population for all of human history, or at least all of human history post-dead, say, the move to cities is suffering under the effects of long flu. And we don't have a word for it because we assume that getting the flu was just, you know, something you were priced into. But in a future where hypothetically we are less priced into that, there might just be far less long-term health impacts than there were previously.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, some viruses, viruses can cause, can cause cancers. You know, me personally, anytime I get a bad cold in the winter, half the time I'll be coughing like, you know, like crazy for two months after that. Even, even just like, not beyond flu, we don't even fully know how I think that we're constantly passing to each other. So I think, you know, unknown unknown downsides. I think there are some, you know, unknown unknown upsides as well.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  And I will say, relative to other sort of infection prevention measures, this one is relatively easy to desist. If we decide that the math doesn't work out in favor of it, and, you know, you turn the lamp off and people stop getting doses. Where it is sort of difficult to desist from, say, vaccines. Well, obviously you can stop giving them in the future, but, you know, tough to remove a chemical change from people after they've been exposed to the chemical change. Whereas, you know, structurally, this is only affecting the top layers of your skin cells, most wish are dead, et cetera, et cetera. And after you stop getting doses, you stop getting doses.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, there's, you could imagine that, like, maybe there's some crazy edge case where, you know, getting a sufficient dose to the upper layers of skin causes like, causes some protein structural change, you know, it diffuses down through the lower skin layer. Like, these are, you know, you sort of have to struggle to, to think of them. And, and yeah, this is the, at a certain point, you know, reasoning about under uncertainty, reasoning about risk, it just gets kind of nuts.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, this has been a very informative conversation for me. Are there any thoughts that you would like to leave the audience with with respect to far UVC or Aerolamp in particular?

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  There's a lot of interest in clean air. Recently, there's a big foundations that are putting a lot of money into it. I think sort of, there's, speaking as a capitalist and as a guy who runs a company, it'd be great if people bought a lot of Aerolamps. But I think in the industry and for the world in general, the really important thing is awareness. So I think, you know, some sort of global awareness program, some sort of marketing informational campaign, some sort of thing like that could easily benefit the world more than almost anything else you can do. Right? There's just so little knowledge about this as a technology. Most people you meet, to begin with, most people had never even heard of UV for disinfection. But like, even among people who have heard of UV for

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  disinfection, almost no one has heard of 222. This is just such a like, the pitch is really easy. It's a cool science fiction technology where you're using, you know, special wavelengths to decrease the risk of getting sick. Everyone is eager once they know about it, but almost nobody knows about it. And I think that's sort of like, if you're thinking, how can I make this more widespread? How can I think and make it more common? How can I enable the world to get better faster? I think just information is the main bottleneck.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we're talking about, you know, I mean, you mentioned clean air. I, I think, you know, far UVC is only one part of the solution. You know, air filtration, ventilation is also part of that. And if you are a parent of a kid, you have, you can lean on your kid's school, on their daycare, on, on your workplace, on any community centers, social events that you participate in of like, hey, what is, you know, how clean is the air in this building? Can we make it cleaner? Can I help? Whether that is far UVC with Aerolamp or with a different company, you know, we are very cheap. So we think that's attractive.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  But, you know, we're also an open source company. So in principle, you know, anyone can just take the CAD files published on our GitHub and, you know, make their own in principle. But it needs to be, clean air needs to be just much more of, of a thing. I mean, there are these groups, you know, like a lot of these still COVIDing groups, and they're fighting the good fight. And it's, yeah, it's just not enough. It needs to be much more of a, like, there needs to be a social movement for, for this. And there needs to be, you know, a broad coalition for upgrading our buildings so that they're not making us sick all the time.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  So for your fingers to the wind here, when, you know, if the end goal is a social movement and widespread deployment of this into many of the built environments, if there were hypothetically a well-resourced capitalist listening to this and thinking, okay, but where do I spend the first million dollars? Would you want it at this point on like a trial deployment and some papers about that? Or would you want it and I don't know, social media marketing campaign to get Taylor Swift or someone to adapt this and achieve adoption that way? Or I'm saying something that's kind of absurd, but are we more limited on like the formal evidence at this point? Or are we more limited on just getting more people to know about it?

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  I think the latter, but you could easily argue the other way around.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think I would, I would say the former, just because I think that might just be a more robust way to get out relative to, you know, if Taylor Swift does it. I do think that we are maybe early enough that too, like too much attention could be, you know, have, have something of an IFASARON effect. So we want to like scale responsibly. Um, you know, I'm a fan of trial deployments. And, you know, I think we've already kind of started seeing effects, you know, with Aerolamps just kind of around in staff and work we use, you know, also, also here in DC, you know, increasing numbers of, you

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  know, some of these goof houses and event spaces are having these. And just the more that they're kind of around and people are like, oh yeah, that's just like a normal piece of infrastructure. I think that can, can function on its own. Yeah, I, I think Taylor Swift talking about, for you right now, like, it could be very good, it could be very bad, or it could have no effect at all.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, honestly, if I was going to pick a celebrity, it wouldn't be Taylor Swift. I think it would be Paris Hilton, because if, if high-end hotel brands get associated with clean air, I think that would be pretty valuable.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, boy, we will be paying for the sort of political economy consequences of the pandemic for a long time, unfortunately. But one of them is that there is in some quarters, some skepticism with regards to the actions of anything broadly associated with public health. And much one could say about that.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Well, so I think their political angle here is, it is tough, but I think there's a completely non-political capitalist angle that's like pretty feasible. Whereas if you run a business that employs people that are highly paid, you're kind of internalizing the costs of sickness there yourself, right?

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Or if they're, yeah, whether it's in your office, or if, you know, someone's kid gets sick and then they're out taking care of their kid. I was doing some economic analysis on this a couple of years back and a significant part of the economic costs of, you know, just colds are actually, you know, caregiver absenteeism rather than direct absenteeism, just because, you know, kids get sick a lot more, they're more vulnerable.

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this is something we saw a lot during COVID is a lot of private companies had interventions that were not state level mandated, right? So it's something like, like this is something we've been trying to do, which is like get in contact with people at Google, because they, Google is big enough and have enough things going on that they have someone who's in charge of like the, the average health of Google employees, right? And if we can get someone like that on board, they don't need to do any sort of, you know, they don't need to have a campaign that's like convincing the average person about these interventions. They just need to do the math and say, oh, we think this will benefit Google on the bottom line, right? And that's like a very different sort of calculation.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  A lot of finance firms during COVID, um, you know, quite early on, saw the writing on the wall and implemented clean air interventions in their offices like, like quite quickly. I mean, this was, you know, high quality, for UBC was not probably available then, but high levels of intuition and filtration, you know, companies absolutely saw the business case there. You know, obviously now we are in a different situation, you know, post pandemic, things are tougher, but I think not impossible. I think there's, at a certain price point, the business case is quite good.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Generally speaking, an optimist, but the thing that I worry about a little bit is that it could turn into a situation where there's something of a heckler's veto and the, the one person in an organization that is most opposed to public health measures might decide to fixate on this as a thing that they definitely don't want. But hopefully that doesn't happen.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  What, what we've seen is, um, this is a huge problem in trying to formally run a study. If you're, you know, if you're trying to, you know, I want to run a study on, you know, clean air effect of this, or for UBC effect of this, uh, we would like to install these in this space for the study. That is extremely vulnerable to the heckler's veto. You just need one person who is just not totally comfortable with it and IRB will never let you do it. It's actually quite a bit easier, you know, if a building owner decides, you know what, we want this, we're installing it. Generally, we, in offices, we found that like, the employees are usually much more on board and it's the building manager that's

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  like, eh, do we really like, want to spend this money? We find that it is often substantively driven by employee demands for, for the office case. But, you know, I think the vulnerability for just like, kind of like normal, you know, normal technology diffusion deployment is, it's substantially less vulnerable. And the nice thing about that is if somebody has, you know, decided to install this technology because they, you know, they think it's good, they hear they want to benefit from it, there's nothing stopping you from later on studying the effects of it. So we can still get, you know, good evidence without rendering ourselves super vulnerable to the heckler's veto.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, just playing out the, I don't know, micro-politics of this sort of thing. The vaccines have a great individual cost. You have to take time out of your day, go out, get jabbed, and it's a very unpleasant experience and which is more unpleasant than it needs to be. It's amazing to me that we haven't made shot guard or similar standard of care everywhere. But be that as it may, uh, you know, there's a visceral unpleasantness to vaccines in a way that there isn't a visceral unpleasantness to, there is a box in the corner, it doesn't emit anything visible, and it will simply stand there for hopefully

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  the rest of time. But hoping that we successfully get this deployed and that it performs to our expectations or outperforms our expectations and the amount of actual impacted health and lived experience. So where can people find Aerolamp?

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  Aerolamp.net?

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  L A M P dot net.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  And thanks very much, Misha and Vivian, for being on the program today. And we will follow along with interest as this diffuses into society.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's great to be on here.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, great to talk.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of Complex Systems. If you have comments, drop me an email or hit me up at Patty11 on Twitter. Ratings and reviews are the lifeblood of new podcasts for SEO reasons and also because they let me know what you like.

• 1:21:01Speaker 06

  I hung a quiet sun, no brighter than a prayer. You swear there's nothing there, but it shines on everyone. It asks for nothing, makes no sound while you lay your worries down. Breathe easy, love, breathe easy tonight. Some love you can hold in your hands, and some love is light.

• 1:21:41Speaker 06

  You don't have to see what holds the dark at bay. Breathe easy, love, breathe easy today. Oh, I like the crowded places, the far rooms I'll never know. So whatever, rise the weather, dies a hundred doors ago. The air is just a river, running slow from you to me.

• 1:22:23Speaker 06

  Your breath was mine this morning, that's how close we'll always be. They say the fever's catching, it runs from door to door. Well, a candle lights a candle, and burns just like before. And love is catching faster, it's already at your door.

• 1:22:57Speaker 06

  Someday in some warm room, a child we'll never meet, will sleep the whole night through with roses in her cheeks. No one counts the sorrows that never came to call. Nobody thanks the light, it shines on after all. Breathe easy, love, breathe easy tonight.

• 1:23:38Speaker 06

  Some love you can hold in your hands, and some love is light. Oh, you don't have to see what holds the dark at bay. Breathe easy, love, breathe easy today. Breathe easy. Some love is light. Oh, breathe easy.

• 1:24:17Speaker 06

  Some love is light.

• 1:24:24Nathan Labenz?

  If you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share with friends, post online, write a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just leave us a comment on YouTube. Of course, we always welcome your feedback, guest and topic suggestions, and sponsorship inquiries, either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. The Cognitive Revolution is part of the Turpentine Network, a network of podcasts, which is now part of A16Z, where experts talk technology, business, economics, geopolitics, culture, and more. We're produced by AI Podcasting. If you're looking for podcast production help for everything from the moment you stop recording to the moment your audience starts listening, check them out and see my endorsement at ai podcast dot I N G.

• 1:25:08Nathan Labenz?

  And thank you to everyone who listens for being part of the Cognitive Revolution.