My name is Lionel Mora. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Neoplans and I'm optimistic about the fact that nature is able to solve most of our problems if we start working with it. But I'm a bit pessimistic about the ability of our political systems to actually help us fight climate change in an appropriate manner. ♪♪♪ So in a nutshell, you'd say you believe it's possible to dig our way out of these problems that we're facing. You're just not entirely sure whether we'll do it. One thing to be clear is that I hear a lot of people saying, "Yeah, we're going to solve climate change. We're not going to solve climate change. It's too late." And I just want to be very clear about that. This is what I think. It's way too late. No one's going to solve that. I don't believe in it at all. What I believe in is that we do have the opportunity and the ability to adapt to what's going to happen and that it's not too late to do that and we have to do it. What I'm a bit pessimistic is that I think the general system is wrong and has put us in this exact place. So there's a lot of things we need to change to get there. In general, do you think I've heard people say there's doom and gloom about all of this? Some people say that everything is going to get worse in some ways, that we've reached our peak in terms of consumption and that we all have to get used to less. Obviously, the extreme of that is movies like Blade Runner where there's some sort of over polluted dystopian future where it's a barren wasteland. Here used to be Los Angeles and now it's just a desert that's polluted all the time and we have to just get used to living in conditions like that. To what degree do you think the future is going to be about us getting used to living with less than ideal circumstances? I really believe that there's no way we can maintain the way we consume in the future if we want the planet to be a livable place. I'm super convinced by that and this is actually why I believe that companies have to work on new ways of solving problems or new ways of building products that are sustainable by designing. If we look at what we do at neo-plants, we're building new types of products that put nature at the heart of innovation to solve problems that we normally solve with machines or chemistry. I think this is going to help. That actually brings up an interesting point. From the outset, and this is one of the reasons that I find so fascinating about what you're doing in neo-plants. Because on the one hand, it's like I'm being sold a plant in a subscription model which is a somewhat interesting thing. Do we need these things to be packaged in this way or is there something truly novel and original? I know and you know that you're talking about 30x more than a traditional plant. So what's the thought then of using a plant as a subscription model or explain to me a little bit about how we ended up here as your idea for helping contribute to this? Absolutely. So our first product, PX, is composed of three things. Number one is our bioengineered microbiome. So I don't know if you're familiar with the notion of microbiome, but generally speaking for the audience, we as humans, we have billions, sometimes trillions of good bacteria that live outside and inside our body that help us function. And so plants have the exact same thing. So what we did at neo-plants is that we selected and optimized this microbiome and engineered it to supercharge its ability to purify the air from specific pollutants. That's the first and the core sort of feature of our product. The second feature is the shell. It's a custom design planter that is here to maximize the air exchange between the room and the substrate. And three is a marble queen pothos, which is a common house plant, very robust, beautiful, that people have. I think I even have one in my house. I believe I have one. You could get one from Ikea, right? It's that common, I think. We have a lot here in the background. It's a common house plant. It's one of the best-selling house plants in North America. So the combination of those three things is what we sell, but the air purifying engine is really the engineered microbiome. So if you want to maintain the performance of this whole system at the maximum level over time, you have to review the power drops, so the microbiome, to keep the amount of good bacteria at the right level so that it can have a significant impact in your home. So this is why we have this renewal mechanism. We don't force it to people, so people are free to choose whether they want to decide whenever they want to renew those power drops, or they can choose to auto-renew it. A good comparison is a filter for an amplifier or a filter for a water jar, where you want to filter the water. Instead of having these, you don't have to throw away the filters or whatever. You just have to renew the microbiome. So it obviously greatly enhances the plants. If I just bought this plant by itself, would that be 30x less the same plant without the microbiome? The Pothos plant? Yes. So somehow, that's crazy. Probably more than that, because on top of that, you also have the shell that maximizes the air exchange. So if you were to compare that to the random Pothos or any random house plant, actually, because we test our products against what is described by NASA as the best air purifying plant, so we don't take random house plants to compare ourselves to. So yeah, you would find at least a 30x gap. That's crazy that you can supercharge the same plant with what you surrounded by. That almost defies logic. How did you come up with that concept? I can't remember the name of the documentary on Netflix that talks about the human microbiome, and it shows you that those microorganisms that live outside and inside of your body can actually have an impact on crazy things, like your mood, the look of your skin, your creativity, and germs. And I mean, it's crazy to think that basically the good bacteria that live in your guts can actually dictate your mood, right? That's insane. And I think, and we know so much more about, well, we know very little about human microbiome in general in science, but we know more about this than we know in the plant realm. And the potential of engineering that is a huge, and it's a very new approach to a problem that in the past has been only tackled with chemistry and mechanical filters. Well, you bring up a good point, because some of this, the world seems to know. In some sense, people are always peddling you solutions for eat this, and you'll lose weight, or do this diet, don't do that diet. Only eat meat, never eat meat, do all of these things, because at some level, we believe that this is going to impact you and your physicality. But there's so much misinformation, and there are so many people who are trying to sell you essential oils and things that don't work or aren't backed by science. I think we live in a time where it's very hard to separate what is actually healthy for you from what is not healthy, and it's really hard to know what is an advancement and what is just somebody trying to sell me something. I know you've, you're big into science, so how did you set about finding something that you thought would actually move the needle in terms of human health, and why this of all of the many different approaches that you could have taken? So, we really start this company with this idea that nature is the best technology out there. I love it. It is much harder to work with it, because it's not made by humans, it's like alien technologies. The microfounder Patrick, he has a PhD in genetic engineering. He's the scientist of the duo. Today we're 30 people and we have 25 scientists, engineers and technicians, so we're a science heavy company. And when we met, the start of Neoplans is really this idea that it's time we start working with nature rather than just burning it and keep doing the exact same thing. That's what I'm talking about. So, that's how we started thinking about that. Patrick had this broad idea about, and then I'll come to how to build scientific credibility and so on, which is very important for us. But the original idea that Patrick had was building an organism with a function, adding functions to an organism. I love it. I think it's a mind-blowing idea. It really is. It's not an idea that I come from traditional tech. I spent four years and a half at Google before studying Neoplans. It's not an idea that would come to your mind if you haven't done a PhD in biology. No, not at all. But once you have this idea that maybe science has come to a point where you can engineer new features into an organism, then I think the range of possibilities is just incredible. And so we were in this room. There was a lot of plants around us. It was in a startup incubator. And I really took it as an example. I said, "Look, this organism is a universally loved thing, kind of iconic looking." Yes, yes. What kind of function could we give to that? And very naturally, very instinctively, we said the best possible function we could add is allow it to have a more positive impact on its direct environment. And we started looking at indoor air, outdoors, and we never went away from that conversation. And we released our first product three weeks ago. Congratulations. After five years and a half of research and development. Coming to the second point about how do you build credibility? There's so many people selling random off-the-shelf products that they went to the exact same sort of manufacturer that does the exact same thing for so many other people and just repackaging it and selling it to you. Well, there's a few things that we do to really create the trust with our community. The first one is that we try to communicate on the people that we have here. We're not like a sort of empty office with three people. We have 25 PhDs and engineers working on this for more than five years now. The second thing that we do, which we see resonate with our audience, is that we publish all our data on our website. And actually, we're working on updating that to make it even more accessible. But on our website, you can see a published white paper that we made as accessible as possible, but that has everything that we do. All the testing, all the experimental setups, all the data that we have, we publish it. First party, third party that we do with specialized universities, and we update it. So every quarter, when we get new batches of data, there'll be a new version of the white paper and people can see it, people can challenge it. There's even like a clear address where they can send their questions or comments, and we answer anyone within 48 hours. So we're really trying to build a trust like this, and obviously this is going to be a long way, right? We're trying to create a new category of product. It's not going to happen overnight. And we understand that we need to build this step by step, but we're here for the long run. That's amazing. Historically, people have grown up with the advice that if your house is getting stuffy, open a window, get some fresh air, and they're clear it out. Open all the windows in the first day of spring, get some fresh air is good for you. We increasingly live in a society where that is no longer the case. There are many parts of the world where the air outside is toxic, and I've been to some of those parts, obviously large parts of China are like that, large parts of India are like that. Where if you open the window, what's coming from outside is actually worse than what's inside, and we have this generation of people who have air filters inside that are mechanical. I have an air filter inside that's a mechanical device. What role and what is the problem with these air filters inside, and what is the problem with indoor air quality in a world where, again, outdoor might not necessarily be better than what's indoors? Basically, the outdoor air is your base. If it's bad, it's bad. Unfortunately, you start from a pretty bad place, which is going to be the case for most people who live in big cities in the US or elsewhere. Now, in addition to this, and this is where indoor air quality is a very tricky problem, is that on top of this baseline, you have a lot of pollutants which are constantly emitted from the top of things we have indoors. Paint some of the walls, piece of furniture, household products that we use on the daily basis. And so, these pollutants are constantly emitted by the products that we have, and they emit these pollutants for years, sometimes decades, in a very unpredictable manner. Sometimes, two degrees more at some of those pollutants are going to be released. Sometimes, a bit more humidity, and they're going to be stuck to the walls or to the surfaces, so you can't even measure them. So, those are very hard pollutants to deal with, and they're very hard to eliminate as well. So, indoor air pollution, because we spend so much time indoors, 90% of our time, actually. Indoor air pollution is up to five times higher than outdoors due to these specific pollutants that come from what we have in our, in what seems like a safe space, usually your home. So, basically, whatever your baseline is outside, is it safe to say that indoor is almost always worse because it's always baseline plus some additional stuff, no matter what it's like? Yes, obviously, there's an infinity of variables, so it's very hard to say. But as a general rule of thumb, it is right to say that indoor air pollution is much worse than outdoors, because in addition to the pollutants you have, you're going to have this layer of indoor air specific pollutants. So, some of the pollutants that we target are emitted from, as I mentioned, typically, household products. Some of them are going to be emitted by just the factor of cooking typically. He's going to say, that's a big debate right now, the gas stove. There's been a big thing about gas stove, so one of those pollutants is benzene, and it's exactly one of the pollutants that we target, one of the main pollutants we target with our products. One is a very nasty compound that leads to asthma, allergies, cancers. At very low concentration, it's already toxic and chronic exposure. So, these are the kind of pollutants that we target. That's insane. Now, we're talking about the comparison with other houseplants, but what about the comparison to a typical household, the HEPA filter? Are those useful? Should most people be investing in some sort of air filtration, or is it that just doesn't work? So, air purifiers are a very good thing at tackling a first family of pollutants, which are particulate matter, which mostly come from outdoors and can be trapped into a mechanical filter, because the particulate are big enough, if you will, to be captured by those filters. Now, when you look at the second family, you have two families of indoor air pollution. You have particulate matter, which I think air purifiers are doing a very good job. As long as you change the filters, if you don't, then it's counter-productive. On the second family, which is the Earth's volatile organic compounds, which are the pollutants that we target, first, most of the air purifiers cannot address these. And if you go on technical specifications about that, you're going to see some claims. If you look down into the data, you won't find any convincing experiments showing you that. You won't find any details about them, which is why the EPA, by the way, in the U.S. is not recommending the use of any air purifiers on their website. Yeah, if you go on the EPA, you have many studies actually done in the U.S. that show you that a majority of air purifiers pollute more than they purify the air, especially when it comes to volatile organic compounds. Why? Because some of the technologies that are being used, for example, photochatalysis, which is a pretty common one and pretty tech that is being used by some of the air purifiers, if you look at it in the lab, it's perfect, because it is based on light. So if you put the exact perfect light system, 100% of the chemical reactions are going to happen. But in real life, the light setup is so different. If your chemical reaction is based on light, you're going to have byproducts. And so the byproducts are sometimes way more harmful than what you try to remove in the first place, typically photochatalysis will produce ozone. I was going to say that one I've heard of. Yeah, exactly. So when it comes to air purifiers, they're pretty good at particulate matter. They're not good at tackling VOCs. And this is where we step in. This is where we believe we can have an impact. So we don't position ourselves as a, yeah, we're going to end air purifiers. That is not today. But we're here to say, hey, there's half the problem that is not being addressed properly, and we're trying to address it in a radically new way, which is based on nature. So in reality, somebody like me, I might be best served by keeping the air filter I have and just adding neoplants as well. And that combination should do better than nothing, right? Or either one by itself, maybe. 100%. Yes, actually, we have, today we see that 30% of our community is people who already have an air purifier set up and want to add this as a complementary solution. That they like why, because it doesn't make any noise, doesn't consume any electricity. And it covers pollutants that are not well covered by their machines. That's brilliant. So if we take a typical department, or let's say like a thousand square foot home, how many of these plants would I need? What we're targeting, and again, it's our first product and we'll have more to share on this from next year, but we're targeting a bedroom space. So today, the type of spaces that we're looking at is anywhere between 130 to 160 square feet. So you might have one in each bedroom, maybe a couple in the kitchen, or a place where you know there's going to be more stuff. If you've got a gas stove, you might need five or six in there. We have people who order six, seven products. What we say is that the bedroom is where you spend most of your time. Spend one third of your time in your bedroom, which is also where a lot of these pollutants can accumulate, because while you're sleeping, most people at least don't have their window open, or it's just going to be pretty static and accumulate. So this is the target space. So we recommend one in your PX for a bedroom. So it sounds to me, then, like you would recommend that most people do sleep with a window open or have windows open. You still advise that all things being equal. Should we have windows open all day? You know, if you ask our indoor equity scientist here, he's going to tell you, well, it depends. It depends what the air is looking like outside. The problem is if you like typically if I open the door at my place, I will have to make a trade off. So if I first, there'll be a lot of noise. Second, the pollutants that are going to come in are just different from the pollutants that accumulate indoors. Volatile organic compounds, as their names say, are very volatile. So if you open the window, very likely that most of them are going to just go outside. But when I open, I can look at my air quality monitor, and I can see the particulate matter is going to go up and up. Yeah, it's almost like you can't win. It's a dilemma. Yeah, it's almost there's nothing you can do. You can if you have a good setup, that's number one, and you can if you have good habits. So typically, what I will do is, you know, I stop the day by opening everything in my apartment. But I know that when I'm at home, I usually live with my with my windows closed. And in a lot of the new buildings, you can't even open the way because they build, they try to build energy efficient. They're very airtight, which is great because there's less sort of energy waste. But they know, and we talk a lot to real estate stakeholders, and they say, we solved this problem because we have to. But we know we're creating another one, which is that it's airtight, and so the pollution that is indoor accumulates, and it's much harder to remove that. So yeah, that's that's a problem that is not going anywhere. We're bombarded. We've come so far away from that idyllic vision of the past, a little home on a field with the sun and animals and birds chirping. We're living in these increasingly urban areas where it's getting tougher and tougher, and I'm faced with that. I love having a window open in theory at night. It actually does help me sleep better. But if I open the window by my bedroom, pretty big road, not too far away, and idiots are racing their car down that road all night every night. So if I open that window, that noise pollution keeps me awake. So I shut the window so that I don't get woken up by these dang cars, but then I miss the fresh air, which I love. So I feel like the modern world and the world of the future is just a series of trade-offs like that. What's worse? The noise pollution, the air pollution, the indoor pollution, the efficiency? So many things to think about that mean that just living your life and doing nothing is no longer really a good option. We can't just ignore all of these problems, can we? Yeah, and the air pollution is really tricky because it's something you can't see. And yet, it's something that surrounds us. But if you think about how many times you breathe in and breathe out during the day, and if you think about the kind of stuff that we breathe in and breathe out every day, we should care as much about this as we care about the food we eat or the water we drink. This is something that I think there's more and more awareness about that when we started the pre-COVID era when we started the year. Obviously, COVID has changed a lot of things because suddenly, you know, people have realized that even in the safe space, indoors, in your arm, there's this invisible. We love hearing about that. Man, that's good. Like, I'm screwed everywhere, so there's nowhere I can go that's like, maybe not at all. You know what? Yeah, what we're trying to do, you know, is something that we're working on is saying bring the air of mountains in your bedroom, where we see a hope and optimism. And optimism is that we're trying to bring a solution in people's homes that doesn't make noise, doesn't consume energy, is good looking, and improves in a significant matter, the quality of the air they can breathe, taking out to these pollutants. And one of the interesting things as well is that we don't store anything. And that's a major difference compared to existing traditional technologies like a filter. We talked about particulate matter, which comes from outdoors. It's easily trapped into a filter. And then you need to change and throw the filter in the bin. And that's made of plastic and fossil fuels and all that other stuff that goes into it, of course. Yeah, that's the crazy things, which they fly from the other side of the world. It's crazy when you think too much about it. We produce everything in the US. We produce everything with biodegradable material made of agricultural waste, which was very hard to do. Because apparently no one cares, at least on the manufacturing side. Our customers love it, right? When we tell them, this is made from US agricultural waste. They're like, wow, okay, this is crazy new material. But coming back to the filters, we don't have filters. Our solution doesn't store pollutants. It metabolizes them, so it risks those pollutants into useful matter, sugar, water, oxygen, and amino acids. There is no storage of that in any way, which is the beauty of nature. That's absolutely brilliant. And we always talk about wind winds on the show, and that sounds, especially when you're taking waste products and building it into something new. That's awesome. So talk to me about, obviously, you may have raised more, but you raised at least 20 million in funding. What has been the most effective strategy for selling your idea to other people? How have you gotten other people on board? What have they resonated with? Was it a very difficult challenge to get funding for something? Like we said at the beginning of the show, which seems almost too simple to even be an idea, and maybe that's the brilliance of it. So yeah, talk to me about that process. So what I can tell you, the idea, entrepreneurs or future entrepreneurs in your audience, it looks much easier from the outside than it is from the inside. And when you go out five years and a half ago with a project like Neoplans and start pitching to VCs, we started in Europe. First, you don't fit any bucks. No. What are you? Are you a tech company or are you a consumer company? In fact, we're both. And yeah, sorry, it's unusual, but at the same time, if you look at the top 10 companies in the world, they are both tech and consumers, for most of them. So that was a starting point. You don't fit any bucks. Second, there's this we're trying to bring a radical solution to the world, something that doesn't exist. So there's no playbook for it. The level of uncertainty, the level of risk is very high. And when you start and you have a bunch of slides and Patrick has a PhD, but it's still two guys and a slight deck, basically. So moving from this to more tangible things is an insane sort of amount of difficulties and challenges to go through. And so getting the funding for that in the first place wasn't easy and I can't make this very clear. Now what helped us, there's a few things that really helped us and that we managed to build over time so that we ended up fundraising very successfully with, you know, incredible investors. Number one is that I think the general vision of what this company could be has always resonated with people. And with Patrick, with Michael founder, we've always been very clear about this idea that our ambition is to build one of the greatest synthetic biology companies out there. And we are going to be, we are today one of the only companies in the world to work both on plant engineering and microbiome engineering combined, which we believe is the way to go. And the possibilities of being able to engineer an organism, and in this case, a combination of plant and microbiome for specific features, open wild perspectives for the world. You know, when you look at climate change, if you look at agriculture, for example, we can imagine coding features for resisting to extreme weather conditions. We could imagine plants that don't need fertilizers to grow, and this kind of things, which is literally changing the world. I think the vision was number one is that, okay, these guys are here for the long run, and they're here to build the foundational technology that is going to allow them to have a very big impact in this world in the longer term. So that, I think that was one. The second one is that they also saw that we had this product vision, not just for the technology, but for the product as well, and not willing to sit in the lab for 10 years, and then maybe do something. I mean, we're about a year late on the very early sort of amount that we have, which for biotech is not so much, I would say, and we're in market, we're selling a problem. And I think this, investors liked it. Some investors really loved it. The fact that, okay, they're deeply technical, but they actually want to ship things to the market. I think this helped us build a relationship with investors. Then, I would say the last thing, the two last thing maybe was scientific credibility. Building scientific credibility in the company years over the years was very important, and for that, we tried to hire the top talents, and we tried to surround ourselves with the best possible scientific advisory board. We have the directors of some of the best synthetic biology labs in the world, who are not just on the website, they're not on the website actually, but too, we have deep relationships with and work with us on a quarterly basis to really dig into the science and how to make this better. So this really helped us raise funds when you have someone doing a tech division that wants to invest with their own money after that. It's generally a good indicator that you're doing serious science. And the last part, I think, was that we delivered on what we set out to do, which I think is very rare for tech companies, and there's always a part of luck in that, because you work with very hard stuff and you cannot plan everything, but we've put in the work to deliver milestone after milestone, no matter the challenges that we faced. So the combination of all that, and a good process for fundraising, that's another topic, I think helped us really fundraise. That's awesome. And certainly for my own journey, talking with so many brilliant and inspiring people such as yourself, I never realized the types of solutions that might be possible in this future world. For example, I've talked to somebody who has turned soy into pork at a molecular level. That's something I would have never said would be possible. I've talked to people who have said we could maybe use yeast to build more fossil fuels. There are so many crazy mind-bending things that are happening right now that I had no idea about. I think the general public has very little idea about this. When we have thought of the future, we've always thought of flying cars and cities and all of these things, but who has thought of these types of categories of innovation? I don't think there's much precedent for it, but I share your vision that I think the future is nature as technology, and I love the idea, instead of just saying we have this man-made cityscape where everything is a square, everything is a box, everything is a device, having nature be a much larger part of our daily lives, that's my personal vision. If I think of a utopian world or a better future, that's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about plants everywhere, something like what you've got behind you, just plants green. Nothing scares me more than looking at those images of, say, Tokyo, for example, from a bird's-eye view where there's not a patch of green in sight, every square inch has been developed by humans. That is what scares me. When I look at a rainforest, I feel peace, I feel calm, I feel good. When I look at a plant inside, it fills me with a sense of spiritual peace, and I would love to see the combination of those two things, so I think it's super sick, what you're doing. I'm curious, since part of my mission is to find out what I don't know, are there three companies or people, who are you most excited about other than neo plants? Is there anybody out there that you think this is somebody that you should talk to, or that's doing something just truly awesome that you believe in that's blowing your mind right now? So many things happening right now, I think it's such a very exciting time to start a company and just to live, actually, very optimistic. A few companies come to mind. I'll try to give you, name them in different fields. There's a very interesting one that we're pretty close to here in France called Gourmet. They do lab-grown foie gras, but more generally speaking, lab-grown fine meat. They're very science-driven company, very mission-driven as well, which is, if we want to keep eating, we can't keep the same sort of agricultural system just doesn't work. So I think they're a very interesting company, they did a very solid round of funding. That's one company that I would think about. A second company that I find, are you looking for companies and funding teams? Yeah, I just like following the rabbit hole where it leads me, if that makes sense. But you are obviously very plugged in, so I'm curious what's motivating you and who's inspiring you these days. Another company that I really like and I came across recently is a very young, very early-stage company called Altro. And what they do is they use a combination of AI and robotics to discover and create new rare materials, which I think is opening wide perspective. Because we are very limited by some rare materials that are so important for a lot of the things that we have around us. And we're so dependent on them that sometimes it leads to nasty consequences. And if we have an ability to replace those with new materials that have same or even better properties, I mean the perspectives are just mind-blowing. In terms of anything that we know from computation to medicine and robotics, architecture, it can change everything. So I think this is a very interesting field as well, advanced materials. So I talked a little bit about cell-based meat. I talked a little bit about advanced materials, which are two fields that I'm very interested in. Those are the two main things that sort of come to mind immediately when I think about it. There's a last one which I always find pretty crazy. It's called Fabrics. And what they do is they build textile with CO2. Oh, yeah. I got a touch from here. The episode that airs tomorrow is somebody who's taking a diet cycle. David Wakerley is cool. Oh, yeah. Okay. We're literally five minutes away from each other. Oh, nice. Yes. That was a very cool mind-blowing. That's a win for sure. Talking with him was deeply inspiring. It's just, yes. Turning waste into something. How cool is that? Because we have so much of it. We have so much garbage and pollution and waste. And to capture even a small percentage of that, I find that very exciting. That's cool. Yes. Fabrics. I'll look into that. Thank you for the great, great suggestions. So you're hot on the heels of launching your first product. What has been the most effective tool for letting the public know? Obviously, if I may say so, I love your website. I think it's beautiful. You've done a very nice job. It looks really great. The 3D plant. I love it. What's been the most effective tool for reaching the public and letting them know, "Hey, we're here and we got something you should check out." For now, because we're still a tiny team and PR has been very effective for us because I think our story resonates a lot. It's pretty new and unusual and going in the right direction. Absolutely. It's been picked up quite a lot here and there. So this has helped us a lot to spread the news. We have a very engaged community and try to build relationships with people. So we do that through our Instagram account and through our mailing to emailing. We have huge engagement on those two channels. And so we try to ask for the help of our community to spread the world. I think that's been very effective because we see a lot of the traffic coming on our websites actually comes from word of mouth. And we haven't started, barely started, two days ago, starting to experiment with some other acquisition channels. The one that seems to help us a lot is actually podcasting. We haven't done so much podcast for now. Or appearing as a guest in other podcasts? No, no, appearing in other podcasts because we can basically meet with new audiences. They have never heard about the kind of stuff that we do. And it seems to resonate quite well. I think it's a highly qualitative channel where people can, they're pretty focused. And so they are interested in learning new things and discovering new areas. So I think when they hear about us, it probably, you know, amazing. But we have yet to uncover a lot of the channels in terms of communication to see where we meet some of the key audiences that we have in our community. Yeah. Well, like you said, you're facing the challenge of inventing an entirely new category, which is both what makes it so hard, but also what makes it so exciting. And that's obviously why I'm just so inspired to talk with you to learn and expand my own concepts. And I think as more and more people become aware of this type of thing, they're going to want it, obviously. If I could do 30x what another plant could, if I could have one plant that replaces 30 other ones, that's pretty cool. That's a very exciting possibility. We all know people who are, I hate to say it, dying of cancer left and right. And certainly it's ubiquitous. And is it related to the water that we drink, the food that we eat, the air that we breathe? What is contributing to this? The pesticides on the food that we eat. There's so many different angles into this very complicated problem. And I think those of us who are trying to maximize our little experience on this pale blue dot are trying to look holistically at how do we attack this from every possible angle? What should I be eating? What should I be drinking? What should I be breathing? Is there anything I can do to change my circumstance? Well, for those who are listening, the new products out, check out the website is neoplants.com. I wish you tons of luck and success with the product launch. I hope your commercialization of this goes very well. I hope you continue to get the funding and I hope you reach your very ambitious goal of developing an entirely new category with this. I think it's just awesome. Is there any last thing you want to say before you wrap it up here? I really want to thank you for having me Ross. It's my pleasure. I really invite everyone to look at the field of synthetic biology. We're not alone. There's a lot of young companies out there trying to do incredible things in this area, which is really about starting to work with nature. I know I repeat myself, but I like it. It's a paradigm shift where at some point we're going to be able to start replacing a lot of the chemistry, a lot of machines with nature. That's very powerful because it's sustainable by design. Next year, we're going to start having more and more updates about a lot of the background work that we do here at Neoplants, not only on indoor space, but also outdoors. And everything that we build today, the products that people buy, they are contributing to that as well. So we're going to be very vocal, very transparent about the progress that we make on the longer term vision. And it is very exciting and I think it will give optimism to a lot of people. And that's the best we could possibly hope for. What a great way to end it. So again, the website Neoplants.com. Lionel Mora, thank you so much. It's been absolute pleasure. And with that, the official podcast. It's over. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] [MUSIC PLAYING]
