AI and the Future of Low-Carbon Buildings

This transcript was generated by an automated service. In some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Avi: [00:00:00] Welcome to Deep Green. I'm your host, Avi Rajagopal, the editor in chief of the architecture and interior design magazine, Metropolis. Buildings contribute to 40 percent of the world's carbon emissions. If you're an architect or a frequent listener to this podcast, you already know that. But I recently read something that had me thinking about buildings and carbon emissions in a totally different way.

In their new book, Build Like It's the End of the World, Sandeep Ahuja and Patrick Wright. Buildings offer some of the most cost efficient ways of reducing carbon emissions and combating climate change. This is because unlike carbon capture or more efficient cars, buildings have a lot of room for improvement in their design and construction, which is often not even simulated or cost optimized.

Sandeep and Patrick are co founders of COVE, an AI powered consulting and technology platform that helps building designers and owners do just that. Optimize buildings for both lower carbon emissions and lower costs. Now, every year, architects across the United States tell their professional association, the AIA, how far they've gotten with reducing carbon emissions on their projects.

And Cove was the number one tool used for these reports with a goal of hitting a 70 percent reduction in the building industry's emissions by 2030. You will hear from Sandeep and Patrick, who are on the podcast with me today, on how COVE works, why they think we ignore cost and profit to our own peril, and how AI will be critical to the future of climate action.

Okay, here are Sandeep and Patrick.

Sandeep, Patrick, tell me, how did COVE come to be? Like, how was it born?

Sandeep: I can kind of give you the, at least my 10, 000 foot view on that. Um, as you can tell, I'm ethnically Indian. So this is like, this for me starts a very long time ago. This is back when I was in India, in New Delhi. And Late professor, Godfrey Dagenborough of Georgia Tech, he was visiting there and he was giving a lecture there and at that time I was just a licensed architect just practicing architecture and I happened to go into this lecture and that was the time when I learned for the very first time that buildings are 40 percent of all carbon emissions.

And for me, I decided in that moment that I was going to change everything that I do in my life and put me on this path to fight climate action, brought me here, here to Georgia to be his student at Georgia Tech, become a sustainability expert. And for me, the journey, the true origin story starts with.

When I started, but perhaps the business in itself, I think Patrick, you might be able to give a, a slightly more, uh, I guess a better spin on it

Patrick: mean, like for me, I was like, at one point I was even like, didn't even think climate change was like a real thing.

Cause it's just my background. Uh, but as I started to like read and. Learn things. Uh, I realized that, uh, there's this book called the uninhabitable earth. And that one really kind of crystallized for me, like that it's not just about like running simulations or doing cool things, but there's like a, an overall bigger thing.

And I think like what that kind of led into is then when Sandy and I were thinking about starting a business together, it kind of like added that urgency and it kind of pushed me to get outside of Working for, you know, Perkins and will, which is the firm that we were both working at the time, uh, to try to make some, a bigger difference and kind of hack how the world works, I guess maybe is, is what I've always been trying to do.

And so code kind of comes out of that idea that we can use costs, um, to help drive better decision making around sustainable outcomes. And I think that was kind of the thing that really got me rolling. And I think for Santa we've always been our personal story overlaps with that. Um, just, you know, living here in Georgia, you start to see all the hurricanes.

I know other people are experiencing fires and whatnot. And it kind of just kind of reinforces, I think, every day.

Sandeep: And I mean, perhaps the only other thing I'd add to that is there's, I guess, multiple ways that we could have gone about doing it. Right. But I really think it was the, it was the goal of scale that was most necessary to have the carbon impact that we wanted to have.

That we knew we had to be a technology company, a tech company powered by tech companies. So we wouldn't have an impact on one building or [00:05:00]two buildings or five or 50 buildings so that we could have an impact on 50, 000 and eventually half a million and eventually 5 million and eventually every single building.

built from scratch or renovated because therein lies the carbon impact and therein lies the cost savings and therein lies the optimization. So it truly was the scale that made us do what we do.

Avi: For those of us who don't live and breathe carbon emissions day in and day out, and I'm sure there's at least some listeners on here who don't, Why is it so difficult to measure the carbon footprint of buildings?

Like, why do we need all this tech? Like, what makes it so complex?

Patrick: There's the saying that only God can watch all the sparrows, which is basically like, there's just too much detail of every single component to track the nutrition facts. You can say, oh, the carbon content of every single little thing as you draw.

It's too much for an architect. It's too much for a contractor to keep track of as they're purchasing things. So we really need technology to allow us to track that complexity because people have tried to do it manually. And the result is that for most architecture firms, they might have not all of them, but many of them, they might only have one project they've ever done embodied carbon study for.

When they're maybe doing 500 projects a year or more, you know, so it's like or maybe they have it's a small firm They don't have enough staff to do it or like Requires a little bit of specialized knowledge and I don't think that to get to the outcome We want if we want it on a 20 year timeline, obviously, well, maybe we'll figure it out But we don't have 20 years to figure it out So, I mean this last year was like the first year we crossed the 1.

5 degrees Celsius 2024. So

Avi: yeah, unfortunately, I mean, we are actively running out of time. You know, it's really interesting because Metropolis's own first reporting about carbon footprints in buildings was in 2003. Um, we actually were the first to publish that. 40 percent number and within a few years, of course, the American Institute of Architects, the IA created the 2030 commitment, basically asking firms to say, okay, we're going to, we're going to try and hit a baseline reduction number by the time we hit 2030.

And, uh, yeah, 2030 is five years away now. Um, and it just feels like the sand has kind of slipped through our fingers. fingers on this. The good news though is that there's a lot of reporting at the moment and Cove is actually the most used tool for 2030 reporting this year, uh, which is amazing. So what is your glass half empty or glass half full take on where we are at this point, you know, five years from the 2030 deadline?

Um, and how does COVID make the reporting part easier?

Sandeep: The way that I think about it, when you say glass half empty or glass half full, I, I, I almost chuckle because it literally depends on the day. Uh, someday it feels like glass half empty and other days it absolutely feels like glass half full, but I really think that, I mean, yeah, it sucks that we're already past the 1.

5 degree future that we were trying to, Avoid or not get to or push off, but I really think it it's it's gonna get a whole lot worse Pretty pretty quickly if we don't get things under control, so it's not like okay. We're here. So no point doing anything else That's definitely not the case. We can avoid much worse outcomes in much worse circumstances.

It's funny. I think I I'm a coffee addict and I think that to me at least comes from like my architecture days and pulling those all nighters and you know, just Drinking more and more cups of coffee. So the simple non intense way that's not like oh my gosh mortal mortality Which is of course what?

Carbon emissions are related to that's the simple way that I bring it back to myself. Like, oh, I need to keep working really, really, really, really hard so I can continue to have the most awesome coffee beans in the world because they will, uh, they will continue to go, go extinct if we keep going at this pace.

So for me, that's my, uh, less intense way to, to kind of keep, keep myself on my toes and be like, you know, we're just going to do the best that we humanly can. And I will say there is a lot of. There is a lot of work that's happening. It's so, it's so hard to see it when you see the net net. Oh, we passed this.

We passed that. We've hit a whole new milestone and in climate change, like, it's really hard to see it on that level. But if you truly, uh, just go just a layer deeper, even, you know, within cities, or even just one more layer deeper within architecture firms, I will say that there is So much excitement and so much positivity that I'm seeing where the same firm that might have reported maybe 10 projects last year, maybe you did 20 or 25 or 30 this year.

Like I am [00:10:00] absolutely seeing folks feeling more and more empowered and truly understanding their importance and role in, you know, the ask that's being made of them. And that is, that is phenomenal to watch. And for me, those are my Glass half full days

Patrick: yeah. We've seen people go from like maybe 30 to 60 percent of their projects reporting to like a hundred percent, but they need help to get there.

But I do think that like the forcing factor won't be people's goodwill. It has to be, what we've seen is that. There's a lot of people that say a lot of things, but you have to look at what people do now, what they say when it comes to sustainability. And I think like one of the things that we see right now is that, uh, the climate risk equals the insurance risk.

And I think from what we're observing from many of our customers, we do talk to developers too. We don't talk just to architects. And one of the things that they're most concerned about is the financial risk from, uh, insurance. Increasing. So like from them, resiliency and sustainability are more so around reducing their exposure to the risk factors in their buildings location.

And I think that will ultimately be what drives architects to actually change because the developers will identify that as the source of risk that has to be mitigated rather than something where we have a commitment or we're trying to do something good for the world, we have to think about like, how do we.

Make it real for the people that we're working with. And I think insurance risk is a huge problem now.

Avi: You mentioned this Patrick in passing earlier as we were talking, but this idea that cost and carbon have some kind of relationship with each other, or at least should be considered in relationship with each other was one of your like early, early insights, right? Tell me a little bit more about that.

How do you make that connection?

Patrick: Yeah, well, I mean like the one thing that's interesting is that like the same exercise we do to get a carbon takeoff Which is like we get the quantities of all the materials And when we apply how much, uh, carbon is in each material, that's the exact same exercise you have to do for a detailed cost quantity takeoff.

Uh, it's the same thing. It's just a different, different numbers that you're applying. Like one's a carbon and the other one's cost. So a lot of times you can make things significantly cheaper if you know the exact cost of your building. And a lot of times low carbon materials actually don't cost more, or they sometimes cost less than a high carbon material, just because, you know, electricity that goes into making something if you use a lot of electricity and it ends up costing more so it's like There's like a relationship between low carbon and lower cost materials.

And so like people think that carbon is expensive. It's just, they just don't know how to do it. So they don't do it.

Avi: That's so interesting. So, okay, let's come back to that second part of the question. I was asking for, for somebody who has never seen a cove interface in their life, what makes cove so easy to use?

What, how does it help with this process?

Sandeep: I mean, I really think that the product piece of it, Patrick, you have to talk about as the product leader. What I will talk about it as the, as the, as the business model. I think that what we learned in a decade of supporting architects and engineers and others in the industry, you know, to be able to do carbon modeling and reporting and all of all, all such activities is that no one software is the Is the secret sauce.

There's like, there's no one button. There's no easy button where you push the button and bam, everyone in the firm has the compliance and has the answer. What we did learn is that great software, incredible software paired with experts and knowledge from the experts that are available to you. Also on your fingertips, just as much as you have the software available on your fingertips.

That's what really helps make change happen. And that's really what I think we have innovated with in our business model is that we don't give you a piece of technology and we're like, great, we'll take a few thousand dollars. You can take this technology, but they'll put this license on some, some shelf and a year later, we'll come back for a renewal.

We'll ask you for a month, more money. And you know, we'll, we'll keep doing that. And well, The, the climate change, we'll worry about that later. That's not the approach that we've followed. Instead, it's like, all right, we're going to be partners. As partners, it is in our best interest, because that's why we exist, that all of your projects are modeled.

So let's learn about your goals and let's craft a plan to make sure that we're working together. You're accomplishing your goals and let's make sure that we're having, you know, reasonable milestones to make sure that you're actually achieving these goals. So it's one to one comparable. It's not like some future state that, Oh gosh, a year later, I'll know if I got some [00:15:00] value or not, but it literally is that, okay, here's the expert.

Maybe you needed some expert in embodied carbon. We have a PhD of embodied carbon on the team. Come talk to you. Or maybe you needed some expert in daylight modeling. We have our daylight. Modeling expert come pop and talk to your team. So it's really understanding what your team needs and supporting that in addition to the innovative tech that I think has been the superpower.

Patrick: Yeah. Like one of the things we, we found is that you need to create hybrid workflows rather than just software. I think this is kind of the, the points that you're kind of alluding to, which is like, you can't just hand people's stuff, you need people to interpret it. And so one of the big unlocks for us was applying AI to the people that work on our team.

So that they can actually talk to a lot more projects than just what they would do if they were working just as a regular kind of traditional consultant. And that's been a big thing, like for example, analyzing codes and standards and particular locations. So you can figure out what are the opportunities, maybe grabbing the actual cost numbers and thinking about them in a logical way and not having to do all that research, you know, you can actually just use AI to help, help you find the information that you need to be able to like, make a better choice.

And so I think like taking the human process, you know, sometimes people try to bolt technology onto it, whereas you can actually build a technology process and then attach the people as the interface to that has been the big unlock, and that's happening in every industry right now, not just sustainability, but like from legal consulting to like coding to everywhere.

There's there, we're kind of rethinking the relationship between how. The interface is people, the technology is the thing that we're, that they're working with. So there's like this layer of humanity and technology working together, I think that's really cool. an exciting development, I guess.

Avi: As you said, it's about knowing what every Sparrow is doing, right?

And there's just no possible way that each individual team or each individual expert is going to be able to kind of tackle those problems one on one. So I, you've been talking about scale both of you throughout this conversation. I, I totally get that. Um, if you had to pick like the parts of your job that are still really tough, like things that you're, that, you know, teams are.

You are still trying to figure out, you know, if people had to understand, okay, well, we've gotten so far like we know roughly, you know, how to project what energy this building is going to use, um, for example, um, right. And we know that to a fair degree of accuracy. And, you know, we're okay with that. Now, as we, you know, kind of get better.

at doing each task. I know there's always new ones ahead. So what's ahead for you? You know, what are some of the pieces of reporting and accounting that are still really, really tough?

Sandeep: I think for us, the thing that we're currently spending the most of our time on Is most definitely the cost estimating piece as it relates, um, to, to building design and truly building our proprietary AI models to be able to do real time, accurate cost estimating.

The thing that I know is a barrier to most designs. Ever coming to life or gosh, I think we've all heard in some conversation Well, the thing was over budget by I don't know 40 percent or something and I think that when things are over budget or things are Not designed in a way that they're fitting within, you know, what is actually going on Buildable.

It really throws the carbon agenda and the sustainability agenda out the window because a lot of times those are the absolute first things that get VE'd out. So we're continuing to innovate and have now built that we use internally and test internally our proprietary AI for building cost estimating and we continue to improve upon it.

And we have created a public facing taste of this technology. It's called Betras AI. Where it's free so everyone can log in and like create real time cost estimates of their project all the way from conception to construction and it continues to upgrade in the level of accuracy. But again, what's available for folks to try is.

But a sliver of all that is available to us. So there's just a lot of behind the scenes work that we're doing as it relates to AI and solving the key problems in the architecture building design space as it relates to the climate agenda that we're after.

Patrick: Yeah. It's even more interesting too, because like to be able to build AI tools to deliver things, you have to almost, you have to do it yourself too.

You have to like, you know, use it in your own workflows and your own processes. Like, you know, what does it mean to be a software engineer in this new era? What does it mean to be a product person? What does it mean to be a sustainability consultant? You have to ask that question. How's marketing? Are they, how should they be using?

[00:20:00] What's the responsible way of doing it? How do you make sure that the answers that you get are validated? How do you train people? Because AI puts a higher premium on expertise of the person who's using it. So the more training you have to almost. Do more training for people so that they can be smarter about using it.

And then they unlock the benefits of using AI in their workflows. And then you can take those lessons and then apply that back to the delivery of sustainability consulting. You kind of start to see like, okay, well, we solved it for to do the software thing, but that's the same problem that we need to solve for our customer, you know, to help them get the value or for us to be able to deliver that service and 10 hours instead of 30 hours, now we have the ability to offer that service that I.

Reduced costs relative to what, you know, to make more projects accessible to sustainability consulting, you can't, it can't be a million dollars or whatever, you know, like a really high percentage of the project fee forever. It needs to be like, we need to find ways to lower that, that fee over time. And so I think that's been an exciting.

Way of like trying to just create that scale

Avi: when we're talking about the carbon footprint of buildings again for listeners who Are not living and breathing the stuff as we do Uh, there's really two kind of distinct categories. We've created in the inr industry Right, we talk about operating emissions or operating carbon, which is basically the carbon I like to say that carbon emissions associated with using buildings You And then there's embodied carbon, which is broadly speaking, for the most part, the carbon associated with making buildings, um, and for the longest part, we've been trying to use our buildings more efficiently, and we've gotten better and better at that for the most part, um, you know, a lot of even local building code in major jurisdictions in the U.

S. Now have just very good energy efficiency built into the code. Um, and you know, that's great. Then there's this piece you've been talking about with a lot of your responses today, which is, you know, the carbon associated with the materials that actually make up our buildings. And that's very hard to pin down because you know, supply chain solve that.

So tell me about cove and embodied carbon, what has been your approach on that? How have you been helping address that part of the problem?

Patrick: Yeah, I think one of the things that's been really helpful is we got a PhD and an embodied carbon, uh, on our team. Um, who's like, cause you, a lot of the embodied carbon of your building is in the structure.

Cause that's where the high intensity energy uses to make concrete and steel and things like that. And so I think like figuring out how to solve the structural optimization. So it's like a lot of times people, when they have a conceptual design, You obviously don't have a structural system that you've selected and detailed.

And so how do you like estimate the carbon based on the span distances and the loading of the building, this and that. So we've written a lot of code for us to be able to help people estimate that carbon. And so I think that's been like the big unlock, but then integrating that with databases like the EC3 database for embodied carbon, uh, which is from building transparency and then like.

You know, figuring out how we kind of combine all that information with costs so that, cause you know, carbon on its own, obviously you can, you know, it's like granola, you can have a really fancy dancy kind of like green attitude, or you can say like, Hey, we need to show people how this makes sense economically.

And I think like connecting the economic piece with the carbon piece. Again, I'll just keep kind of probably going back to that is like the number one thing that I've. Thing holds us back is like we don't everyone just assumes it's going to cost more but it won't

Avi: You know when we're talking energy efficiency, we're really we're really convincing people on future Savings, right? Like oh your bills are going to come down. You're going to save money as this building runs, right? But the problem with embodied carbon is that that's money. You got to spend today before you even know You know You know, before the building is done, it's very hard to get people to put money in places they're not used to putting money.

And I think that's a really interesting conundrum with embodied carbon. Um, and so as you were saying, early concept stage, right? Like even presenting concepts, you have some, some fair sense of that relationship between cost and carbon is absolutely fantastic. How do you see teams kind of leveraging that on their projects?

Um, you know, how are they currently using code really to drive their projects forward?

Sandeep: I think the best way to think about it is truly in terms of a, of a project. So a project comes to mind where we were brought on as the, as the consultants, which is again, a pretty standard way [00:25:00] in, in the way that we engage with teams.

And it was, um, the student center over here at Georgia tax. It was really fun for, for us because. for both Patrick and myself, it's, it's our, it's our alma mater. And for this roughly a hundred million dollar project, um, the campus had set out some fairly, you know, stringent carbon goals and they wanted to do the best by the world, but of course, you know, make sure that they were able to built 300, 000 square foot for 100 million, which is actually, um, not very expensive.

If you look at cost per square foot for a higher ed building type, the only way that we were able to accomplish that was that we were partnering very closely with the contractors on the team, which was, uh, Gilbane and, uh, Working on this real time cost estimating and looking through various scenario modeling to be able to understand and showcase to everyone with data and with clarity that the only way to.

design the building for the carbon and the budget goals that they had in mind. It was not going to be a demo and a new build, but it was going to be a renovation with a giant addition. And that would kind of satisfy all of the different things that the university wanted to do. So to me, what was meaningful about that project and that journey, which is what I find most meaningful across most of the projects that we work on, is the, is the outcome based approach and truly understanding what is the outcome that this project is after.

I mean, sure, lowest carbon possible, lowest budget possible on surface. Yeah, sure. That sounds straightforward enough, but truly digging into understand what are the constraints within that project? What is that site? What does this project need? I think it's that level of nuance paired in with our AI power technology that I think kind of really sets, set some of our approach apart.

I will say that because. You have mentioned it now a couple of times that there may be folks on the call who may have never heard much about carbon or the differences between carbon type. So I, I am going to do a shameless plug for our new book, uh, that Patrick and myself have written. It's published by Wiley.

It's called build like it's end of the world. It's really your end to end guide from I don't know if you've never heard of it, or if you're an expert in carbon with point of views from leadership, from carbon leadership forum, from others within the space, from developers, investors, architects, engineers, to make sure that.

We truly are thinking about it in a holistic way, because that is the problem that we're facing and overcoming.

Patrick: Yeah. And even Sandeep on that project that was really cool is when the data was presented to Cooper Carey. And when those teams saw Sandeep's analysis, what they did was they recognized that the existing student center.

Didn't need to be torn down. So they decided to preserve the maximum amount of that structure that ended up also driving the cost savings for that allowed them to build a really beautiful new student center. But it's actually like built kind of like on the skeleton, I guess, of the old student center.

Sandeep: And that's really the point right that we keep making is that yes operational carbon. Yes embodied carbon. It's not the The case doesn't need to be a future case the case a lot of times can be present scenario Like you'll save money now and you'll leave with a better building If folks are just running the analysis and the optimization, because more often than not, we're leaving hundreds and thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars on the table.

And that's what we make sure we don't.

Avi: Yeah, I'm glad y'all brought up the book, uh, like it's a little world because um, despite the title, you know It is a very kind of hopeful pragmatic Guide to how we can get this right and to unlock some of those You know kind of win win situations like the one you just laid out for the student center.

So and i'm sure Even though you knew all these people and you're all in the same network, getting all those thoughts together and putting it in order for a book probably helped you distill a thing or two yourself. So for my last question here, what do we need to get better at doing? Like what should we be getting better at so that we don't end up designing ourselves to extinction?

Patrick: Yeah, I don't know. That's a, that's a tough one. Yeah, I think like, honestly, like I think everyone needs to take a long look at what has been done. As you mentioned, 2003, you know, you guys published the first thing about it. You know, there's obviously what we've been doing isn't working. I think that that ought to be a thing.

And I think that like architects and especially, and just the end of the billion industry, generally speaking, needs to ask themselves, like, we'll continue to do the thing we've been doing [00:30:00] using the current very human centric way of working. Will that be enough? And the answer is obviously no. So then like, right now people are banning AI in their firms, they're banning AI, like in the construction process, you know, and I think that's like a really misguided, like, um, you know, attitude because the opportunity exists to still turn back a great deal of carbon from just like analyzing the nutrition facts of the things that we're putting into the building.

And if AI and other tools are the key to doing that, I think it's, Extremely short sighted for us to like do that. So I think I had to say if I had to wave a magic wand, I would say that like architects need to get serious about using AI in their workflows if they want to like actually affect the climate problem.

Um, contractors and everyone else needs to start thinking about it. Like that you can't just like sit there and say, well, we'll just keep doing what we're doing. That won't change anything. Even with good intentions. I know Sandy, what's your, what your take is?

Sandeep: I'm not entirely in a totally different point of view.

And I can almost see Avi on your face too. Like for anyone that's like one of us, right? Like who's read enough and heard enough and talked to enough people about climate action. I would say that all of us. Have a very clear understanding, not patting ourselves on the back for, I don't know, good, good job.

We, we did well, like, you know, like I am so excited and grateful that we are the most used software, you know, for 2030, like not, don't, don't take it as me not being appreciative and grateful to the community around us, but there's so much to be done. I, it's not enough for me to be like, Oh, good, good job.

Me, me, we did so good. Um, there's just so much that needs to still be done. I think we, we don't, if we all feel, if anyone feels like it's time to stop and pat our back, let's, let's not, because we're not there yet. There's not enough impact that we've made yet. And I really think that the thing that we need to do more of is absolutely lean on each other.

I still very much see, you know, even within our industry, a lot more, even when it comes to like, You know, the, the carbon modeling or emission modeling or what have you, while I have seen some openness in terms of data and some openness in terms of process and workflow on what's working and what's not working, there is so much, um, of like wall around the information that firms are guarding, you know, as their trade secrets, which, okay, fair enough.

If you invested the R and D it's your trade secret, but I truly wonder what's going to happen up as trade secret. You know when there's not much of a world to celebrate that in. Um, so I really just challenge us to Share as much as one can while looking out for your stakeholder interest and business interest.

I mean, I'm a, of course, a business oriented person. I'm not saying give, give everything away for free because we wouldn't do that. Gosh, we don't do that, right? We have proprietary tech, but I will say that there's absolutely things that are worth sharing that will help everyone, but not detract from your business.

And. Things that are not. So the things that you can, let's, let's keep sharing those out.

Patrick: And also too, I think the one last piece that's the big hurdle is that I think people tend to let perfect be the enemy of good. Like they forget that running any analysis Is better than no analysis and but because certain people I think, you know, the knowledge around carbon sometimes is lower just generally speaking they want to kind of like justify why they are an expert and sometimes they can let that Uh, not allow them to see when, uh, you know, regular person or architect just needs like a guideline.

They just need like rules of thumb that help them avoid 20%. Yes. We may not get to 40 percent reduction without analysis, but you could still give someone at least a checklist and then maybe they can get 50 percent of the way there. That's still something. And I think like people are like, well, unless we have the perfect software, then we can't do it.

If we don't have this and we can't do it. It's like, instead of finding problems, we should find solutions. Ways to like do something. And I think that's like do something's my, my motto, I guess, for the last few years.

Avi: Do something and then keep getting better at it. Right. That's, that's the important thing.

Absolutely. You know, I thank you so much Sandeep and Patrick for spending this time with us. You're absolutely right. We should use every tool we can. We need to be generous and smart about sharing information that's going to lift all of us up. And, you know, we can't let perfect be the enemy of good. We got to lower the barriers to entry and make this really mainstream.

So thank you. Thank you so much. Both of you for spending this time with me today.

Sandeep: Of course. Thank you. This has been a pleasure.

Patrick: Yeah. Thanks so much.

Avi: Deep green is produced by the surround podcast network. This episode was produced and edited by Rob [00:35:00] Schulte with support from Rachel Senatore and Lauren Volker. We're talking to the biggest experts on sustainable architecture and design all this season, and a new episode will drop every month. So catch the next episode of Deep Green in just a few weeks, wherever you get your podcasts.