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

0:00Misha Gurevich: 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 trial showing 90 % suppression of tuberculosis transmission in hospital wards.

0:50Misha Gurevich: 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 Secure Bio, 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. 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.

1:37Misha Gurevich: 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 And we've recently seen the first examples of autonomous cyber attacks. By many accounts, similar capabilities are soon coming to biology. And while the upside is undeniably incredible, I shudder to think about what accidents or attacks might transpire along the way.

2:19Misha Gurevich: 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, life-saving 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 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.

3:05Misha Gurevich: This is Patrick McKenzie with Misha Gurevich and Vivian Belenke, CEO and Chief Scientist of Aerolamp, from the Complex Systems Podcast.

3:18Patrick McKenzie: Welcome to Complex Systems, where we discuss the technical, organizational, and human factors underpinning why the world works the way it does.

3:33Patrick McKenzie: Hi to you, 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. 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.

4:11Patrick McKenzie: Thanks very much for coming on the program, guys. Yeah, good to meet you. 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 the sort of chemistry slash biology level and hopefully on the social slash technology level?

4:33Vivian Belenky: 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. So it's essentially like having an extremely strong air PR fire 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.

5:37Patrick McKenzie: 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?

5:45Vivian Belenky: No, actually. 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 because UVC is quite efficient at inactivating microbial life probably the surface of our planet would look very different if 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 so so much more sunlight than there is from any UVC lamp.

6:34Vivian Belenky: That even though sunlight is only mildly germicidal, you know, per photon, it can still do the job.

6:41Patrick McKenzie: The legal beagle in me has to say that Oliver Gwendo Holmes was empirically disproven by the science. Sunlight is, in fact, not the best disinfectant. But, okay, so this is an interesting wavelength of light. I personally have done a little bit of the reading and I'm 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?

7:26Vivian Belenky: Right. So this is actually much more of a mechanical story than a chemical or biological story. Okay. 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 sick 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 UBC, the wavelengths of 200 to 235 nanometers, principally 222 nanometers, which is what is most commercially viable right now. Longer UBC wavelengths, you know, 254 nanometers to 65 nanometers, which are used in water disinfection.

8:16Vivian Belenky: 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 absorbed in only the very upper layers of the skin. And those skin layers will generally slough off and become part of the stratum corneum within typically a couple of days.

9:03Vivian Belenky: So I've never seen a study that showed any significant biological activity down at the basal skin cell layer where you would worry about cancer if there was any damage to the DNA there 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 they are protected from sunlight. We have eyelids, eyelashes, eyebrows, brow ridge. And all of these things reduce the effective dose to the eye. So this does mean that, you know, despite these mechanical protections, the eye is more vulnerable.

9:52Vivian Belenky: There is the tear layer, which has some lipids and proteins, and that absorbs some of the fur 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. So any chance of long-term damage is, in my opinion, fairly low, although this technology hasn't been around for long enough to do extremely long-running studies.

10:40Vivian Belenky: There have been a few long-run eye safety studies, actually. There's one year one and one three-year one 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 industry practice. We're generally pretty conservative. But the good news is that it's sort of like looking into a bright light 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.

11:27Vivian Belenky: And this is very different from, say, infrared lasers, where you can get a blinding dose and feel nothing. So it is thankfully nothing at all like that.

11:39Patrick McKenzie: Yeah. If anyone has ever been in a lab that has lasers, the safety briefings are, one, terrifying. And two, if you feel anything, it's far too late.

11:49Vivian Belenky: Yes. Yes. But for UV, if you feel something, stop looking at it. 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.

12:14Misha Gurevich: 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 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?

12:35Vivian Belenky: Yes. So you need very little dose of this stuff to get a pretty rapid germicidal effect.

12:41Patrick McKenzie: 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 typical deployment of this would look like?

12:59Vivian Belenky: 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 broom, you want to maximize the path lengths of that beam, which means usually 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 think ultimately, we're looking at just kind of normal overhead ceiling lights, just a boring ceiling fixture, like a smoke alarm, or any number of random pieces of building infrastructure that are in drop ceilings in offices, hospitals, schools.

13:47Vivian Belenky: 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 space and get on with. And Misha, you can talk a little bit more about that.

14:04Misha Gurevich: Yeah, I basically sort of see the current lamps we're sending out as a very important existence proof that the technology is fundamentally ready to go. There's not any insurmountable technical difficulties. There's not any insurmountable logistical difficulties to deploying it. There are still many difficulties as they're in running any business, particularly any business that involves high-tech components. But it's not something that's like, you can only get this for$10 ,000, or you can only get this if you're a secret government lab. This is something that's pretty much ready to be deployed.

14:39Patrick McKenzie: One of the things that I like about this is 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 a production a bit. And so while many of our other medically oriented interventions are consistently high priced due to Balm's 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.

15:21Patrick McKenzie: 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. 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?

15:41Vivian Belenky: I think 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 FarUVC is sort of in this category of things that only weird people might get or think about. And 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 to some extent, we already know that people care about not getting sick. But not getting sick in this particular way, but with this particular product category.

16:27Vivian Belenky: I think it's some combination of social normalization of, you know, we should have, we should be treating our AR 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 a cost barrier? Is it a, you know, research barrier? And I think it's not that there's not room to do more research. I think there is definitely more room to do research and refine the recommended best practices. But for the most part, it's just, yeah, there's not really any good reason that it can't be everywhere.

17:11Patrick McKenzie: 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 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.

17:51Patrick McKenzie: And we don't necessarily need it in all the rooms, but we do need it in many 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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18:29Misha Gurevich: Visit deepgram.com slash keep talking. Terms apply. Today's episode is brought to you by Granola, the AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. Here's how it works. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. And the best part? Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup and no awkward bots. It's just your normal meeting with superpowers.

19:09Misha Gurevich: You get to actually listen instead of frantically typing every word and still walk away knowing exactly what was decided, who's doing what, and what comes next. When I had Granola co-founder Sam Stevenson on the show earlier this year, he explained how Granola aims to provide a calming experience for people with crazy work days. And as a user of the app myself, I have been struck by how streamlined, even minimalist, the Granola product experience is. That takes real discipline, but the result is a product that works not just for AI early adopters, but diverse teams of people who just want to get things done more efficiently and effectively.

19:46Misha Gurevich: Listen to my full episode with Granola co-founder Sam Stevenson for a master class in designing AI products for mass market adoption. And try Granola for free at granola.ai slash TCR.

19:59Patrick McKenzie: That's granola.ai slash TCR. Can you talk about what the research suggests with respect to, you know, as we're prioritizing the rollout, where should we prioritize? Right.

20:12Vivian Belenky: 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. and children are immunologically naive. So I mean, one issue with doing airborne disease transmission studies is that you're using healthy adult volunteers. It turns out that healthy adults just generally don't get the flu. You kind of need a lot of shots on goal to successfully catch the flu. Children are kind of a different story. It is just a bit trickier though in that I am convinced on the strength of the safety evidence.

21:01Vivian Belenky: I don't know that we have a large enough pile of safety evidence that a large enough fraction of parents of children would be thrilled to try and select relatively new technology in schools. I do expect schools to be relatively conservative, perhaps with the early rollouts happening in private or specialty schools. 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.

21:45Vivian Belenky: So any concern about photobiological risk is going to be more acceptable.

21:51Patrick McKenzie: Presumptively, like places that have a relatively transient population. So in a 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 immunical 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 human's dwell time in a space, the aggregate amount of dwell time in the waiting room is like quite substantial.

22:25Patrick McKenzie: 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. And one reason is that when I 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. Misha, can you talk a little bit about the economics of this, like a per room and per institution basis?

22:59Misha Gurevich: 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, you're looking into a lot of lamps, right?

23:30Misha Gurevich: You know, dozens for really big institutions. 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. 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 to five figures if you want to outfit the whole building.

24:05Misha Gurevich: 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 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 just doing it yourself, installation is basically free, right? It takes like, you know, 10 minutes to stick one in the wall and plug it into an outlet. 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?

24:32Vivian Belenky: 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 of estimate.

25:10Patrick McKenzie: And so at the moment, it's something like$500 a lamp. So if you need two of them for a room, that's$1 ,000 and$1 ,000 for installation, and then multiply by number of rooms that are 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?

25:39Misha Gurevich: 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 level of expertise is like you said, any electrician can do it instead of needing like an expert UV installer.

26:18Patrick McKenzie: I'm familiar with standard lamps that 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 average lifetime of these installations?

26:29Vivian Belenky: Yeah, we think that the bulbs that we're using right now You know, the manufacturer 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 to 14 ,000 hours. If you are only using it in an occupational setting for eight hours a day during the 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 scenario that would be most desirable in, but that would be just about a year and a half.

27:10Patrick McKenzie: I could imagine maybe a transportation sort of scenario where you had them in, for example, a train station or airport 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 than you win in terms of the amount of sick days you have and the clinical consequences?

27:43Vivian Belenky: 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 trial. But in principle, you should expect that this will roughly follow a sigmoidal shape. So the first few adopters are going to see sublinear benefits because 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.

28:27So there's going to be some critical coverage point within a community where the suppression really takes off. And we have modeling on this, but yeah, I think it's really, really uncertain.

28:45Misha Gurevich: 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.

29:22Misha Gurevich: And I think those places will see, for example, like pretty noticeable drops in transmission fairly fast, and like pretty reliably. 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.

29:52Vivian Belenky: 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 seeing 90 % transmission suppression in these TB wards. This is an animal study. So 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 FIUBC at all. It's relatively resistant. And I would say it's about maybe 10 times more resistant than your typical respiratory virus like flu or coronavirus.

30:40Vivian Belenky: So is our flu and coronavirus transmitted through the air in the exact same way as tuberculosis? No, probably not. But there is, in fact, a lot of reason to be optimistic. I think Misha's totally right about long-term care centers probably seeing much more immediate benefits than the school or office case. Or perhaps boarding schools. I think boarding schools could be a relatively more immediate example.

31:08Patrick McKenzie: 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, etc., etc. 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 a case like a long-term care center. Regardless of who owns it, PE firm or otherwise, they would strongly prefer that the residents not die and that is both the humanitarian mission for them plus also they get paid based on how many residents are still living at the moment.

31:55Patrick McKenzie: 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 and the one where we installed this, we had three. And then make the obvious decision very quickly after that. So knock on wood. And I hope that we will see evidence of the obvious decision getting made all over the place, you know, on a time frame of like months to short number of years from now, followed by the broader societal rollout that this will likely take.

32:38Patrick McKenzie: Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

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34:09Patrick McKenzie: That's claude.ai slash tcr. 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 math that we were unfortunately all forced to become experts on back in 2020 and what this does to the potential factors of virality and similar?

34:44Vivian Belenky: 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 uh because yeah people do not do not want to hear it um i think we're all sort of you know collectively traumatized and we just don't want to talk about it uh so we're 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, which is just not very contagious.

35:24Vivian Belenky: And probably if you're getting someone's cold, it's because you spent, you know, an extended period of time interacting with them quite close. Can we prevent some colds in, you know, immunocompromised people and in some situation? Yeah, I think so. But I'm actually much more confident that we could decap a future respiratory pandemic like COVID-19 or worse, just because paradoxically, the more contagious something is, the more surface area there is to keep it from getting as bad as it could get. In fact, one of the earlier use cases for traditional Peru UVC, which uses a different, more dangerous wavelength as the 254 nanometer wavelengths.

36:11Vivian Belenky: That was used to control measles. And measles is just absurdly contagious. It is probably the extrema 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 believe that COVID-19 at its worst had a reproduction number of like one point something so so uvc was able to successfully control measles outbreaks and i think that makes me really optimistic that a relatively low level of coverage in key areas uh 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.

37:13Patrick McKenzie: Yeah, the math that is common to epidemiologists and people who market video games for a living is that the difference between the reproduction number, it's called R0 in epidemiology, and the K factor in marketing. But 1.08 means that something goes exponential because 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 have to keep dumping in marketing budget and the viruses just don't have a marketing budget. So the hope is that for what in absolute numbers is a relatively small impairment, in a COVID-19 or something.

38:01Patrick McKenzie: Do you 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'll be able to avoid some pandemics at the margin.

38:14Misha Gurevich: 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?

38:47Yeah.

38:48Vivian Belenky: 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, these interventions just get built into buildings on a 10-year 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 ASHRAE 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 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 for 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.

40:02Patrick McKenzie: 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 plop the light in the corner and then you're done.

40:41Vivian Belenky: I mean, another comparison technology might be portable air filters, actually not necessarily HEPA, but a lower rating can actually be just as effective and much quieter. So just a MERV 13 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, we call them portable filters, but we can also install them in the room. We can we can broadly call these in-room air cleaners. I think these are some of the most cost-effective options. And for filter-based in-room air cleaners, you're going to want them alongside UVC anyway, because pathogens are not the only airborne pollutant.

41:37Vivian Belenky: And there's also chemical pollutants. There's particulate matter. There's dust. There's allergens. And far UVC actually does have a modest effect on allergens by the same protein absorbance pathway. But it's much smaller than just conventional filtration. So we should be doing all of these things. But for a pathogen specifically, just moving the air tends to be really, really 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.

42:26Patrick McKenzie: 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 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. 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, it requires less sort of coordination among people.

43:11Patrick McKenzie: 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 needles deployed all over the place. It makes all of our existing and future technologies better for having this deployed alongside them.

43:33Vivian Belenky: Yeah, I think that's definitely true.

43:35Patrick McKenzie: I once made a bet with someone that we would have broad deployment to 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 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? And maybe an optimistic scenario and then sort of a baseline scenario. Yeah, so I think we're not,

44:02Vivian Belenky: you might say that we're not exactly even on the curve. I think worldwide, maybe a couple thousand of these lamps 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 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? 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. 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 renovation 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 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 super critical where it's like, oh, we just need to know this and then we can get going.

45:45Vivian Belenky: And there's not really any regulatory barrier either. It's maybe just like a social diffusion question. It's like, do we need just like a global awareness campaign? How do we get this out there? And, you know, I have been in research for my entire career. 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 really which I was.

46:15Patrick McKenzie: Calling back to something that you said earlier, we're all somewhat traumatized by the pandemic, but implicitly we are erasing the next pandemic. And hopefully we have it up and running in as many spaces as possible prior to the sort 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.

46:57Patrick McKenzie: I guess we'll say a few words on the scaling. So this is presumptively, again, 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?

47:26Misha Gurevich: I mean, there's a few reasons, but they're not that major, right? But the current manufacturing is like of the best emitters, which we think are the most cost effective of the best lifespan, are only manufactured by one company that's from Japan. And they're generally in the business of 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.

48:04Misha Gurevich: 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. It's not something that's like, you know, on first principles, not scalable. It's just like, this is something that's

48:16Vivian Belenky: not as easy as leds yeah i mean i would push back that it's um 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 And if there is enough of a market, that makes sense to do. So right now, these krypton chloride XMR 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 some solid state chip based solutions for fire UV emission.

49:04I just think that we're looking sufficiently far out that we are just nowhere near the cost floor for even what we have here.

49:13Vivian Belenky: And I think once we are in this beautiful unicorn world where we're selling tens of millions 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 get those online? I would love to have that problem. I would be so joyful if we had that problem.

49:38Patrick McKenzie: 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 model 50 % of the cost as being labored 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 function of reducing cost, it seems to me.

50:07Misha Gurevich: The existing industry is just so small. And like I said, it's kind of high margin 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.

50:41Misha Gurevich: 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. 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.

51:05Patrick McKenzie: 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 debt. The cost per unit goes down pretty aggressively.

51:20Misha Gurevich: Well, I mean, 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.

51:27Vivian Belenky: I guess this was sort of our theory for like, we're offering a$500 lamp on the theory that there is this inflection point and our goal is to drop that even further. I don't think there's any reason that in the near future, next couple of years or so, or even sooner, that the price couldn't be on the order of a hundred bucks per lamp. and that's with zero technological innovation of any sort.

51:59Patrick McKenzie: And for the benefit of people who haven't seen your website, not to find a point on it, this is a thing that you can literally go over to AeroLamp's 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.

52:13Vivian Belenky: Actually, even easier. It's sort of just you stick it on a tripod, put it on top of your bookshelf or just use a drywall anchor and stick it on your wall. But for typical overhead, overhead lights can be quite a bit more annoying to install. I've done it in my home a couple of times.

52:32Patrick McKenzie: 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 the San Francisco Bay Area, among others.

52:43Misha Gurevich: Well, so this is actually one of the things that we get asked this question all the time. Oh, should I get an AeroLamp? 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 think the benefits are gonna 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.

53:13Misha Gurevich: 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.

53:24Vivian Belenky: I don't know. I would actually maybe push back on that. I think there's quite a lot of families. 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 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 think it is for individual homes, it's less something that you might maybe have on all the time, but maybe something, you know, it's sort of like the ventilator in your kitchen.

54:17Vivian Belenky: It is something that you quite like to have for home health reasons, maybe not at the$500 price point. So that's maybe, I think if you actually monetized the potential health benefits, it would actually look quite a bit better. Getting sick is very, very costly. So you don't need to prevent that many episodes of illness, especially in tiny babies, where if a tiny baby gets a fever, you're looking at an emergency hospital trip, hospitalization, and potentially a spinal tap, and it's all deeply upsetting 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 uh where i think schools transport hubs um you know you know that sort of thing is where you will see much more broad social suppression.

55:36Patrick McKenzie: 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-aged children, is not that great yet, except for the aesthetic benefit. You know, putting your chip on the table is 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 absolute number is probably not that big of a barrier.

56:15But be that as it may,

56:17Patrick McKenzie: there is a 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?

56:39Vivian Belenky: 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 think 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 technology.

57:21Vivian Belenky: But now there's not really, you know, a clear business case for deploying it because, you 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 you know 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 you know that 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 real life under what circumstances for what sort of people?

58:06Vivian Belenky: I think that's our biggest question mark. And it's very challenging to study. Yeah.

58:10Misha Gurevich: I mean, this is to say we're pretty optimistic, but if it fails, it'll be like for reasons like that, right?

58:17Vivian Belenky: Yeah. Like you could imagine that say, so we think that for a typical for UVC installation, you're looking at an equivalent of one air change happening every two minutes. So that translates to 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 you will, after, you know, 30 minutes, after an hour, you have inhaled enough of infected air to, you know, on average produce an infection, RUV will totally cut down on that.

59:10Vivian Belenky: 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 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 airstream between people at the social distance. but you're it's definitely going to be more challenging you might still maybe you know reduce the severity of 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 if you get less virus than you you're going to have a less severe infection and uh probably quite a lot of diseases work this way as well but i think it would be quite unlikely that we would see no benefit at all.

1:00:07Vivian Belenky: Whether the benefits are relatively marginal, probably still worth it, especially at a lower price point, or whether the benefits are truly socially transformational, that we can just see vastly less vertices, that's sort of the uncertainty. But I think no benefit at all is quite unlikely. I would be very surprised by that.

1:00:33Patrick McKenzie: One hopes that given 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 and infants being immunonaive, and the way you get not immunonaive is to have time in the world and get exposed to pathogens and have your immune system built up.

1:01:14Patrick McKenzie: Is it possibly the case that, you know, decreasing people's contact with pathogens is a net a bad thing?

1:01:23Vivian Belenky: 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 environment with environmental and commensal bacteria the microorganisms there doesn't actually seem to be any benefit to having a clinical episode of illness. I was actually just looking at a couple of studies on this the other day. But yeah, for example, there was one, the effect of a child having RSV, it was a neutral to negative effect on the future illness.

1:02:11Vivian Belenky: It was, in an 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 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 5 and i'd rather it happen at 5 than at 1 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 um and with just you know the world is just teeming with microorganisms there is absolutely no lack of immune training.

1:03:09Vivian Belenky: So if we just totally ended viral infections, I think that that is just overwhelmingly good, no downside.

1:03:19Patrick McKenzie: 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 the perfectly tweaked immune system, we can always intentionally infect ourselves in the future. It's just like, oh man, My child just hasn't gotten sick enough in the last nine years.

1:03:36Vivian Belenky: You know, I think this is actually called vaccines. I think intentionally exposing people to viruses. We have a technology for that.

1:03:43Patrick McKenzie: Exactly true. You know, we deal with, I think, on 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 level if it turns out that we ever go below the optimal level of illness, where 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.

1:04:15Misha Gurevich: 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.

1:04:32Vivian Belenky: Yeah, and I think there is just gathering evidence that increased our allergies and asthma. That's just certainly has nothing to do with viral infections. There might be some questions of, is widely deployed for ABC going to mess with the indoor microbiome in a way that affects us? And I think, yeah, 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 uh much less effective on surfaces than in the air so this has not been explicitly studied you know what are the effects on the indoor microbiome but my bet is that if there's a cost it's like relatively minor and in the event that there there is a substantive effect um you know you go you go outside there's going to be germs there.

1:05:31Vivian Belenky: There's dirt, there's bugs, there's no lack of potential exposures. Yeah.

1:05:37Patrick McKenzie: 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 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 in where there is a line in the history books, pre-ending a flu and post-ending of flu, that will be a, you know, world historical achievement.

1:06:26Patrick McKenzie: And again, we're not necessarily 100 % expecting that to happen as a result of fire UVC. But that is something that is like possible in the solution set or possible in the, you know, outcome set given employment 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.

1:06:55Vivian Belenky: Absolutely. I mean, I'm saying we should study it. We should absolutely study it. I think the space of things that we don't yet know and would really like to know is huge. But I think 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, 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.

1:07:36Vivian Belenky: But that is, you know, just massively underrating the risks from infectious disease. I think there's 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. I mentioned measles has a long-term impact on immunological memory. And there's lots of stuff like this, like MHV virus. I might be saying that completely wrong. But we are not necessarily fully capturing the downside of an episode of clinical illness, even a relatively mild clinical illness.

1:08:23Patrick McKenzie: 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 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. Yeah.

1:08:53Vivian Belenky: You know, some viruses 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 just like beyond flu, we don't even fully know everything 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.

1:09:21Patrick McKenzie: 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 of which are dead, etc, etc. And after you stop getting doses, you stop getting doses.

1:10:01Vivian Belenky: Yeah, I mean, you could imagine that maybe there's some crazy edge case where getting a sufficient dose to the upper layers of skin causes some protein structural change. It diffuses down through the lower skin layer. You sort of have to struggle to think of them. And yeah, this is at a certain point, reasoning about under uncertainty, reasoning about risk, it just gets kind of nuts. Yeah.

1:10:31Patrick McKenzie: 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 FireUVC or Aerolamp in particular?

1:10:41Misha Gurevich: There's a lot of interest in clean air recently. There's 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.

1:11:14Misha Gurevich: Most people you meet, to begin with, most people have never even heard of UV for disinfection. But like, even among people who have heard of UV for 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 it make it more common how can i enable the world to get better faster i think just information is the main bottleneck yeah and

1:11:49Vivian Belenky: we're talking about um you know let me mention clean air i i think you know r ubc is only one part of the solution you know air filtration ventilation it's also part of that and if you are a parent of a kid uh you have you can lean on your kid's school on their daycare on on your workplace on any community centers or 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 RUVC with Aerolamp or with a different company, you know, we are very cheap. So we think that's attractive, but we're also an open source company.

1:12:33Vivian Belenky: 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 a thing i mean there are these groups you know like a lot of these still coveting groups and they're fighting the good fight and it's um 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.

1:13:09Patrick McKenzie: So for your finger 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, a social media marketing campaign to get Taylor Swift or someone to adopt this and achieve an option that way. I'm saying something that's kind of absurd, but are we more limited on the formal evidence at this point, or are we more limited on just getting more people to know about it?

1:13:51Misha Gurevich: I think the latter, but you could easily argue the other way around.

1:13:56Vivian Belenky: Yeah, I mean, I think I would say the former just because I think that might just be a more robust way to get word out relative to, you know, if Taylor Swift does it. I do think that we are maybe early enough that too much attention could have something of an IFSR in effect. So we want to scale responsibly. I'm a fan of trial deployments. And I think we've already kind of started seeing effects with AeroLamps just kind of around in SF and Berkeley venues. you know also also here in dc you know increasing numbers of you know some of these roof 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 um can can function on its own yeah i i think taylor swift talking about before you be right now like it could be very good, it could be very bad, or it could have no effect at all.

1:15:01Misha Gurevich: 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 high-end hotel brands get associated with clean air, I think that would be pretty valuable.

1:15:13Patrick McKenzie: 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.

1:15:38Misha Gurevich: Well, so I think the political angle here is, it is tough, but I think there's a completely non-political capitalist angle that's 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?

1:15:54Vivian Belenky: Or if they're, 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. Yeah.

1:16:21Misha Gurevich: 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 Google is big enough and have enough things going on that they have someone who's in charge of like 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

1:16:55Vivian Belenky: 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 high quality for our UBC was not brought the available then, but high levels of ventilation and filtration, companies absolutely saw the business case there. Obviously, now we're in a different situation. 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.

1:17:30Patrick McKenzie: Generally speaking, an optimist, but the thing that I worry about a little bit is that could turn into a situation where there's something of a heckler's veto and 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.

1:17:52Vivian Belenky: What we've seen is this is a huge problem in trying to formally run a study. If you're trying to, I want to run a study on clean air effectiveness or far UVC effectiveness, 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 the IRB will never let you do it. It's actually quite a bit easier if a building owner decides, you know what, we want this, we're installing it. Generally, in offices, we find that the employees are usually much more on board and it's the building manager who's like, And do we really want to spend this money?

1:18:35We find that it is often substantively driven by employee demands for the office case.

1:18:44Vivian Belenky: But I think the vulnerability for just kind of like normal technology diffusion deployment is substantially less vulnerable. And the nice thing about that is if somebody has decided to install this technology because they think it's good, they want to benefit from it, there's nothing stopping you from later on studying the effects of it. So we can still get good evidence without rendering ourselves super vulnerable to the heckler's veto.

1:19:16Patrick McKenzie: and just playing out the, I don't know, micropolitics 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, which is more unpleasant than it needs to be. It's amazing to me that we haven't made ShotGuard or similar standard of care everywhere, but be that as it may, 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 the rest of time.

1:19:56But hoping that we successfully get this deployed

1:20:01Patrick McKenzie: and that it performs to our expectations or outperforms our expectations and the amount of actual impact it has on lived experience. So where can people find Aerolamp?

1:20:12Misha Gurevich: Aerolamp.net? L-A-M-P dot net.

1:20:16Patrick McKenzie: 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. Yeah, it's great to be on here.

1:20:26Vivian Belenky: Yeah, great to talk.

1:20:27Patrick McKenzie: Thanks for tuning in to 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.

1:21:00We'll be right back.

1:21:13Vivian Belenky: But it shines on everyone

1:21:17Misha Gurevich: It asks for nothing, makes no sound While you lay your worries down Breathe easy, love Breathe easy tonight

1:21:33Vivian Belenky: Some love you can hold in your hands And some love is light

1:21:40Misha Gurevich: 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 fog 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. 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 Sunday in some warm room A child we'll never meet We'll sleep the whole night through With roses in her cheeks No one counts the sorrows That never came to call Nobody thinks the light It shines on after all Breathe easy, love

1:23:33Vivian Belenky: Breathe easy tonight Some love you can hold in your hands And some love is light Oh, you don't have to see

1:23:50Misha Gurevich: What holds the dark in vain Breathe easy, love Breathe easy today Breathe easy Some love is light Breathe easy Oh, breathe easy Oh, breathe easy now Some love is light

1:24:23Misha Gurevich: If you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it 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.

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