I, I mean, I kind of always knew the world was polluted, right?
But I was really, really asleep about the extent of it until I
moved my child into, brought our home from the hospital to a
neighborhood where a lot of people were getting strange
brain and lung cancers. And this information came to me
informally. It's not like there is a
statistical, it's not like it's published in the New York Times
or something. And it's not really widely
known. None of them really are.
Welcome to the Environmental Transformation Podcast, where we
bring you interviews with industry leaders, climate
champions, sustainability practitioners, EHS and hazmat
professionals making an impact in their businesses today.
Each leader solving complex challenges and delivering
solutions within their areas of expertise.
I'm your host, Sean Grady, and thanks for joining us today.
Before we jump in, make sure to follow us on your devices and
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for our newsletter and e-mail announcements.
Now let's get started. Welcome to the Environmental
Transformation podcast. I'm your host, Sean Grady, and
today's guests are Deb Horton and Pete Seda.
Deb is the founder and CEO of Taxi Map and they're an
environmental intelligence platform that helps individuals
and professionals know which toxicants are present in the
area, water and soil near their addresses.
Many addresses across the across the United States.
So think of it as like the Carfax for environmental
surroundings in any location. So we're really happy to have
Deb on. She has a PhD in quantitative
sociology from Columbia University and has worked as a
researcher at Harvard Medical Schools, Department of
Healthcare policy. She has also been an
organizational and leadership consultant and lived and worked
all over the world. Man, she's been in Lima,
Istanbul, Milan, London, Dublin. Wow, you've been around.
That's awesome. Those are some beautiful.
Yeah, that's some beautiful places.
Oh, man. Her personal experience moving
her baby into two different communities with cancer clusters
awakened her to the hidden presence of environmental
toxicants in an unexpected locations.
And that critically and of critically knowing where
toxicants are to make informed decisions for her own and
everyone else is in the family and for a business and
organizational across the the board.
That's what's driven her to develop Toximap Peter Seda.
He's the chief environmental scientist at Taxi Map, and he's
an instructor at Duke University's School of of the
Environment. So he was formerly A contributor
to the EP as Enviro Atlas. And he's a seasoned
environmental consultant with a deep experience in managing high
visibility projects leveraging environmental analysis,
geospatial analysis and data management for government
agencies, educational institutions and private
consulting firms. He is a certified GIS
professional and he also has a Geographic Information System
Certification Institute accreditation as well.
So welcome to the show guys. Great to be here.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
We're really grateful. Deb, you and I got connected
through a personal connection that you're a friends with
another entrepreneur tech startup that we will probably
have on the show here soon as well for an application that's
really geared towards environmental education for kids
and gaming. So I'm looking forward to that
one. But it's amazing.
Yeah, so. But thanks for coming on the
show. And you know, I saw the
application and looked at it and I was like, wow, this has a lot
of applicability for the environmental field in the
environmental consulting space not let alone, I guess, you
know, from maybe the medical field as well.
But maybe talk a little bit about your origin, you know, the
mission that you have. What was the turning point that
made you want to start this? I think a little bit has to do
with this moving around with your child in the communities.
But why don't you share with us a little more on that?
Yeah, sure. I, I mean, I kind of always knew
the world was polluted, right? But I was really, really asleep
about the extent of it until I moved my child into, brought her
home from the hospital to a neighborhood where a lot of
people were getting strange brain and lung cancers.
And this information came to me informally.
It's not like there is a statistical, it's not like it's
published the New York Times or something.
And it's not really widely known.
None of them really are. And so immediately I was like,
oh man, I, I got to get out of here.
So I moved closer to the actually to the country
countryside. I had been in the city.
And within three months of that second move, I discovered
discovered that I had moved into the middle of a pediatric cancer
cluster. And this is not like, you know,
big waste industrial waste site. This is a beautiful part of the
seacoast region of the seacoast between Maine and New Hampshire
with lobster boating and lots of sailboats and access to the
forests and the mountains nearby and beautiful architecture,
expensive real estate, great schools.
Like it's not with your typical kind of waste site that you
would think. And then I read the New
Hampshire State report about this cancer cluster and
discovered all of the hypotheses about what the causes could be
were environmentally related. And through that, I came across
all these environmental environmental toxin maps that
I've never seen before. And it just profoundly shifted
my understanding of the environment in the world.
And I immediately moved from there thinking, Oh my God, I got
to get out of here. But I had no way of knowing that
the place I moved next to is going to be any different than
the first two I accidentally moved to because I didn't have
the tool that I've created in order to solve that problem,
right? So I began digging in EPA
websites and state cancer maps and slowly, slowly.
I'm not an environmental scientist like Peter is.
And I mean it just took me years to figure out what's going on
and I I would spend hours and hours just looking up 1 address
and sometimes days and weeks to get the full picture.
And because we have the right to the access to this information,
I decided to create the tool I needed and what I think every
human being needs to know to make smart, informed decisions
about their life. And so that is the personal
story. But of course, the data set we,
Peter has created, he is an absolute environmental toxin
data ninja. And he's been, we've, he's
integrated over 60 environmental toxin geospatial data sets into
a harmonized layer on our map with we're tracking 1500
different environmental toxins. And it has, we have this data
asset, right? It's this and then an asset
around the interactive map in the tool so that people can
easily visualize, understand digest the information as
opposed to what I found when I started digging around, you
know, state data databases and and EPA because that's like in
tables and with, you know, lat logs.
And I mean, it was impossible for me to digest.
This allows anybody at any level, whether it be complete,
you know, newbie like I was to a very sophisticated environmental
scientist like Peter or yourself, to digest instantly
and utilize in whatever way they need to.
Right. Yeah.
No, that's great. I mean, and I think there's
always been a desire for some, some tool like this available
to, to to individuals. I mean, because, you know,
you've got the ECHO database for the EPA and it largely has a lot
of good stuff in there. But there are some gaps
obviously from state to state and industry to, to, you know,
even if you look at the military.
So there's still, like a lot of, you know, gaps.
And so, you know, Peter, how did you get plugged into this
opportunity to help Dev? Yeah, great question.
And you know to to speak to your thing about the ECHO data set,
right, Like that's where we kind of start.
We as environmental professionals, that's where we
start. But we are like, you know, it's
a rabbit hole. It's multiple rabbit holes.
You have trouble, you like, oh great, now I see the sites, but
not what's at each site and what's the deal and when and all
that stuff. So definitely a tough user
interface to for the, the layperson I was.
So I've been out for after getting my masters and doing all
that GIS learning all that stuff.
I've been out consulting for almost 20 years and in the 1st
batch company I worked for supported EPA quite a bit, both
at the national level, state levels, some state governments
as well. One of them was what used to be
called the Office of Research and Development, which had a
group that dealt with landscape level data sort of management
analysis and visualization. And it grew into the EPA's
Enviro Atlas, which while the organization AKAORD no longer
exists on paper in our government, the Enviro Atlas
still doesn't. Many of the folks that are that
that supported and are working are still there.
So I worked on Enviro Atlas and help them with hundreds of
foundational data sets for that and really helped get them sort
of developed and then help them prop it up tested.
That sort of stuff is a great, great project.
Loved it. Great people too, just amazing
stuff. Really challenged me as a
geospatial professional. And so I had that and being so
excited about it. I had it on on my sort of CV
resume there and on one of the business professional social
media websites. I could certainly say it, Deb,
shoot me a text. And I was like, hey, she's like,
hey, this is an environment, this thing, What do you know
about it? I'm like, well, I know a lot
actually. So we started.
I haunted him down. I haunted him down and found.
His. Research.
Skills paid off. Yeah, no.
He's really weird. It was so I'm like, OK, this is
great. I'm not completed.
He has an elite skill set that's really hard to find, and he has
been navigating the data with incredible accuracy and and
rigor and finesse and really showing incredible thought
leadership. That's great.
I mean you guys sounds like a good match there.
You know the solution for a first time user.
You walk us through like, you know, how does Toximap translate
raw environmental data into a simple user interface that
includes interactive map, you know, maybe mapping your
neighborhood. So you've got this toxic
neighborhood intensity score type thing.
Help us understand how this works if you could.
And maybe what we could do is screen share and you can walk us
through it that way. I don't know if that's the best
way to to discuss it, but it might be I'm I've got a hunch.
Yeah, no, that's that's great. So I will absolutely do that.
So let's see here. Not sure that button is.
I'll give you the high level while she's doing it.
So you know, for me, I'm and, and you know, you've probably
done this as well as you, you've taken a lot of data for, for
clients and had to summarize it or rank it, rank it or put it in
some sort of order of such. So essentially that sort of
skill set. And with the geospatial analysis
part, we take the sort of universe of potentials across
the United States and say, OK, let's divvy them up
statistically within each media and within each database and get
sort of an independent score for each of those sets of data.
And then roll it up into a overall toxin intensity score
for a given address with all those sort of calculations on
the fly, right? Like you type the address in
and, and now we're seeing it. Basically it zooms into a, a
location or an address and, and at that point, we'll then
produce both the Max, I'm sorry, the map.
And then those scores sort of you can see there by air, water
and land. And then within the different
data sources, under air, water and land and then overall toxin
intensity score. Yeah.
So he, he had to download and harmonize and we have spatially
aligned, you know, over 60 data sets into 111 CSV file.
And then we layer it on to to map box.
And then he has a, you know, a special patent pending algorithm
that takes into account toxin intensity of each area, I mean
of each medium. And so this is where I was
living when I learned about the cancer cluster and notice that
it's, it's, it's not even a, an extreme toxin toxicity score.
It's moderate. So this was my address and each,
this is an interactive map. So each symbol on the map has a
meaning. And this is basically my address
at the time. And this is a Superfund site.
And if we click on any of these sites, actually it will give you
a list of what the what the toxins are present in that site
to the degree that we have that information.
So arsenic, benzene and five more.
And you won't click on area summary summary to see what five
other ones. So arsenic, benzene, cadmium,
lead, mercury, PHSPCBS, just in that one site.
If we come back to the map, we can click on, let's just do this
one. This is a brown.
Go ahead. So that's a great example of a
specific location where there is a contaminated site.
Is there any information that you also provide related to like
is there sounds like the exposure for the site is maybe
it's on site, but is there off site exposure challenges or
concerns are those identified in the the discovery of the
information? Or is it just say, hey, here's
the parameters of toxin that we know of that are here?
Is it, is it, you know, limiting to some of it?
I mean, maybe you can explain that a little bit.
Yeah. Do you want to do it or do you
want me to? Sure.
Sure, we've talked about this somewhat.
Yeah, a lot. And not just the two of us,
we've got other folks that help support us, including a board
certified toxicologist too. So the reality is there's a
difference between a hazard and a risk.
And it's subtle. We shouldn't get into it because
I'll mess it up. But all of what we're trying to
do here is say, hey, these things are here.
And of course, the time that these things were placed or
became into existence, the intensity, the longevity, your
own role in being around that, you know, all those things are
just, they're too much variables for us to say this is your
exposure. What we do is a risk of
exposure, right? It's just to say this is all
here, right? And this is so much more than
you can get from any other place.
And you know from Echo that you can click on the points and it
tells you the name and address and it gives you their unique
UEPAID for their facility, their facility registration number,
but that's it. They don't easily.
You have to click three more websites to even get a list of
what they do. And maybe you get a list of
chemicals. Maybe you don't right.
You have to do that for each individual site and you can't
even do it for some of these data sets like the Tri sites
that we've got. I had to do a some serious
transformation and sort of a special request from E pay to do
a data dump for me to then use to then harmonize with our data
sets. So there's a definitely a couple
steps to go in there that make this sort of a boom within 3
miles. Just how many of sites each of
the things you got? This is a list of toxins in the
different media. Boom, easy button, right?
Yeah, yeah, exposure. Is really dependent on how each
individual interacts with those points.
And it's it's actually a point of empowerment because people
can radically reduce their exposure risk and their actual
exposure if they simply abstain from interacting with the sites
that are toxic. And they can't do that unless
they know where they are at the same time there is spread,
right? They're spread through storm
waters, they're spread through wind over time, they're spread
through groundwaters to the degree to which something's not
contained. And so it's kind of like a
little bit of a soup, right. We kind of live in A to some, to
greater or lesser degrees, and if we know what we're being
exposed to or what's present, yeah, for any other purpose, not
only health, but also all kinds of decisions, financial
decisions, real estate decisions, investment decisions,
insurance decisions. You know what the risk set is to
begin with or you have the data are incomplete like the EPA is
not tested every single square inch of soil and water in the
US. So our map is kind of an under
representation. It's an underestimate, we'll
say. It's a good indication of what
your potential concerns are in the neighborhood.
So you can actually have an idea of if you think you have
symptoms that might be related to something like that.
Well, maybe there is a 'cause that's the 'cause that could be
the 'cause. We never know.
But I mean, at least you have a good indication of what areas
that you maybe live in that have, you know, have had some
exposure to. Yeah, I mean, it's it gives you
a huge leg up, right. Yeah.
And the reality is, it all boils down to knowledge is power,
right? Yeah, absolutely.
I know. I get you.
You know when you when you guys track your guys are tracking
over 150 different toxins. What specific public and private
data sources aside from maybe like the EPA, you know, echo
site are you guys using to aggregate to bring all this
together? I mean, are you talk a little
bit about some of the types of sources you guys are pulling?
Sure. Yeah.
So in the current version that was just shown by by Deb there
we we have about almost 1000 toxins from essentially five
different major data sources there.
We are in the process of pulling in not just the five major data
sets but and Deb has said this already 60 data sets.
So what we are socially doing is we start with the low hanging
fruit that's EP as databases etcetera.
And I see low hanging fruit still requires a lot of work and
massaging and then starting to look at state data sets because
we know that there's a lot of state data sets that sometimes
roll up to the feds. Sometimes it takes a while to
roll up to the feds. Sometimes it never goes.
Up never goes up there. Yeah, because they don't have
money to do it, but they just track their own state, State
lead sites, voluntary remediation sites, USD sites
that don't go all the way up to the feds.
There's, I mean, and of course, as with everything you go from
one state to another, it can be drastically different.
So our next version of release, we're going to essentially
double the amount of unique toxicants in the land, air and
water. We're going to get around, we're
actually going to get close to 1900.
It says 1500, but it's when we, when I get all done and said
with this, this effort I'm currently under way on we're,
we're going to have 1900 different toxins.
We're going to drastically improve the number and ability
for folks to understand not drinking water.
But the other one, the the contact surface water, lakes,
ponds, rivers, streams, we're going to drastically improve
that data set quite a bit in terms of detail.
Also the air quality right now we went for the low hanging
fruit air quality. You know, people know AQI,
right? There's 66 sort of measured
chemicals that go into that. We've got those six, but.
There's hundreds that they're actually measuring, so we're
going to bring those in too. Yeah, well, you know the the
likelihood now too of well, not the likelihood the emergence of
P Foss in the industry. I mean that one should be, I
would think, a big hot topic for Toxie map to start tracking.
It. Oh yeah.
Well, yeah, you saw it on that list, right there was the list
she had of Yeah. It's.
In there. Already it's in there.
It is in there so and so. There's a difference between
measuring it and a different difference between addressing it
as a standard. And that's the hot topic right
now is how much is too much, right?
And you're getting different values associated from EPA and
different state level. I live in North Carolina, and so
you know. You got some contamination there
for sure. What are the?
PFAS. PFAS crucibles, if you will.
Although you know. 1st in flight, first in PFAS, no.
The. The reality is it was just the
first time people really noticed it, right?
And of course, yeah, we have a lot.
And so the states are coming up with their own guidelines and
roles and all of that is is just so such new science, right?
Like, I'm training individuals that I'm learning from that are
in my classes that are learning with the toxicologist at Duke
about how to deal with this PFS thing.
I mean, it's just crazy. I feel lucky to be sort of in
the room, if you will, with these folks because it's really
neat to watch these smart people go at it.
It's it's certainly it's not going to be something that goes
away anytime soon in the market in our lifetime basically.
And yeah, so there's always going to be an interesting and
where the exposure is, where the concentrations are highest,
what's going on with drinking water, you know, facilities
where's, where's the watersheds that are, are mostly impacted.
I mean, so you know, when you mentioned you're going to start
adding, you know, surface water type stuff to it too, that's
that's going to be pretty interesting if there's a lot of
data in there. I know for some recent
conversations we've had with some state agencies that yeah,
they've done some mapping, they've done the the sampling of
where P Foss is kind of high in surface water.
And they doing that because they're trying to figure out
where the public intakes are from the drinking water
facilities and should they go upstream and who's the
environment, who's the industrial dischargers and
things like that. So.
Yeah, and this is The thing is we're learning that PFAS, not to
stay stuck on it, you know, it's using a lot of different things
and in some cases it's used in very important things like
firefighting foam, which. OK, great, Well, OK, great.
What if we use it once on an airplane or a fire, a Firehouse
or firehouses, store it, whatever, right?
Like all these things that aren't just necessarily
industrial producers of Teflon, but just like plastic.
What do we use that has plastic in it?
Everything. Almost everything.
Everything. Yeah.
There's an article recently that came out that indicated research
has found PFAS in the bloodstream of polar bears in
Greenland. So it is ubiquitous.
It's not just like, you know, in our drinking water, It's been
spread all over the world. Our assumption is that it's
ubiquitous. And, you know, where do we go
from there? What are we going to do about
it? What, how can we manage that and
what protect our bodies from it? And there are techniques, there
are things that can actually pull PFAS out of drinking water.
So which is a really good? News yeah, there's a lot of
really good technology for that and and that's great.
And and finally, you know, there's there is some, you know,
I think some security down the road for a lot of people who are
concerned about exposure. But it definitely is going to
come at a cost, unfortunately for the ratepayers of a lot of
drinking water facilities who weren't the cause of the
contamination, unfortunately. And they're paying the the cost
and it's it's unfortunately not really a fair proposition.
But what are you going to do? Are you going to have bad water
or are you going to, you know, so that's the crux that we're in
with a lot of these communities that are highly impacted.
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schedule a demo today. You know, when you look at this
technology stack you guys are working on, talk about building
a platform that geolocates toxins with the three mile
radius and you know this massive data challenge, you know, what
core technologies are you using to power this visualization?
Yeah. You know, Peter has his GIS, you
know his amazing, his technology there in his office, but we also
have a CTO and he's working on that.
He's using a number of different technologies.
I'll just mention a few. He we are using map box for the,
the, it's the kind of the very user friendly kind of a simple
interactive map program that's out there.
We're using super base for the data and React for some of the
coding and it's on AWS so it's it's a.
Cloud system. Yeah, it's a very big data set
with obviously backed up many times.
And we also have a lot of security, you know,
cybersecurity measures in place that in fact we have one of the
top cybersecurity experts on the board and she's advising us on
that matter often. So we had, it's a very complex
but very manageable stack and we have a really capable, we're
blessed with the capable technology, yeah.
He's straight. Keeping it fast is important,
right? Yeah.
Right, that is the the the trick right?
And and curious, is AI playing a role in this?
I don't know this stack for you guys as well.
Well, we are not predicting anything, OK?
We are. We are presenting reality.
So we're not doing any predictive modeling.
We're not. We, our CTO may use AI in some
of the code creation process, but that's it.
All the data are real life, real world accurate.
And I think paradoxically, in this age of AI mania, it's a
strength of ours to be grounded and rooted in the real world.
Yeah, they're, you know, we, we've had discussions about oh,
no, OK, wouldn't it be great if there was a sort of site based
agentic or agent AI to help someone explore this explore
Toxie map or explore the data that comes out of their St.
search. So it's definitely on our
horizon, but we're not, we're certainly not.
We're just using, we're using cloud storage, right?
Like I joke, we're using server farms as opposed to corn farms.
We're using server farms and so does everybody else.
Basically we see if we, you know, we have an amazing road
map. There's so much on our road map
that's exciting. And one of the things not only
having sort of like a chat bot or something to help somebody
through the massive amount of information, but also we
envision a future where maybe there is a pollution copilot,
you know, for, for every person on their iPhone or their, their
Android. And that's definitely going to
be have an AI component. So we're we're using AI for some
features, but not around the data in the building, but not
around the data itself. Now some road map features.
Let's talk a little bit about some of your features.
You kind of think I mean because I can think of 1 right away that
seems to be like an ideal fit for this solution.
What is that? Well, say I'm a concerned
citizen and I'm looking for, you know, impacts in my
neighborhood. And I want to know once I figure
out that I've got contaminated sites that let right around my
my home and do I have any exposure that I need to worry
about whether that air, water, those types of things.
Maybe there's a way to kind of link up and partner with a, a
company that could offer, you know, a drop ship sampling prop,
you know, program to sample your water, you know, type thing and
you use that data, start building further data sets into
this rate. That's right.
Kind of Crowdsource other things, right, Right.
Yeah, Crowdsourcing is actually on our road map for sure, not
just people that use Toxie map to then get a sample.
But the reality is a lot of people have information already
right, one way or another. And so we're going to build that
in as part of a road map is to think, how do we really get the
community involved? Because this is this is all of
us, right? Like we care about this.
We all do. And the the more we care, the
more benefit we get to each other.
You know, another, another one. And just so, I mean, I think
Deb, I told you this before, but I've, I've, I used to operate
and manage a software product too.
And so we had sprints and road map planning and you know, all
the, you know, I had a good scrum master and you know, it
was a lot of fun. But here's another thought, you
know, like where's the recycling center, my closest recycling
center to my property so I can recycle those toxins that are,
you know, maybe getting in the system because not everyone, you
know, usually knows where they can find that data.
Another little interesting tidbit.
Or where's the landfill, right? I mean, there.
So those are things I think, you know, just kind of thinking out
loud maybe, you know, helping you kind of build out this
future view of this program. Since I've been in the
environmental field a long time myself, former consultant for 23
years myself and a regulator for aid, I kind of kind of know the
the mindset of these guys. And so yeah, that's another one
that would be really good. But when you talk about your
target audience a little bit, let's talk through that.
I mean, you partner with networks like the Mosaic
Diagnostics, maybe talk a little bit about who they are, what
they are with it, what's their the relationship with them?
How does that product help them? Yeah.
So we have sort of AB to B to C model right now as well as AB to
C model. And we are working with and
through healthcare practitioners and Mosaic Diagnostics is a
reference lab and they have three tests that assess the bio
accumulation of environmental toxins, you know in our body.
And so that's a really important partner because that gives our
our B to C consumers users point of, you know, an action that
they can take that has very, you know, that has great potential
for healing. Also, we are in the process of
supporting integrative naturopathic and functional
doctors to really profoundly change the standard of care
around every touch point with a patient to include a Toximap
report for each patient. So that not only are we talking
about symptoms or diagnosis or medications or whatever, but
also what are your potential exposures and which tests should
we be ordering for you? And then we can build a plan to
create detoxification for your body if you have stuff that's in
the body, which most of us have. And then how not to re toxify
because when we are there and there are great technique for
detox, but if we're constantly being retoxed at the same time,
it's kind of a race between detox and Retox.
And if people the interventions not going to to be sustainable
if they're just everyone's just being retoxified.
And so Toximap helps detox win that race because people can
they're incredible mitigating actions patients or people can
take. If they are aware of what toxins
are in their environment, they can avoid the points of
potential contact. They can test their soil and
maybe use garden raised beds or something if they're going to do
gardening or flowering. So they're not interacting with
the soil that much. Water filters, air filters, you
know, avoid the locations. I'll tell you what, I do not
allow my child to swim in any water body that I haven't toxi
mapped. And that lesson was hard one,
because there was a public town pond in Massachusetts where we
used to live that everyone went to.
Very sweet, you think this world sweet little pond, great beach
and she I would let, I would unknowingly let her swim there.
And after I create a Toxie map, turns out it had elevated levels
of mercury and that actually was confirmed in her and some of her
lab work. That is a very powerful action I
as a parent can take to protect my child and myself.
You know, if I just don't interact with these points of
potential exposure, it really supports the healing process
that that's happening. Well, maybe Peter, you can maybe
kind of talk a little bit about some of the environmental
consulting community type use cases or any EHS professional
and you know some of the other potential personas of A use case
that could help out and maybe give us an idea of what you see
there. Yeah, sure.
Yeah. So Deb's already kind of
mentioned how we've got functional doctors, we've got
mosaics. So the, the company that
provides the test to test the human part and, or other
companies that have the test kits for the soil and water,
right? So, you know, taking, taking the
knowledge that we give you and go to the next level.
And that's what we tend to do in environmental consulting, right?
We, we are helping investigate, summarize and visualize and then
make a recommendation. So a lot of what we do and, and
I still do in the environmental consulting world is we do a like
a landscape level analysis. And then you start identifying
sites of interest, whether they're sites that are good or
sites or that are bad, and then you start to rank them, right?
That's what we do for all sorts of things as environmental
profession. And so the environmental
consulting community, what Toximap can do is provide a
short, a short circuit, right, a shortcut.
And in in the consulting world, you are billable to a project.
You take time, you take money, it takes budget.
If you can do something in 30 minutes and QA it as opposed to
6 to 8 hours while you save a lot of money and time, right.
And then you roll that up over time.
It saves a lot of money and time for the company and the clients.
Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a lot
of work on the environmental side.
So just for instance, all appropriate inquiries related
to, you know, a phase one kind of due diligence type project.
You know, we've typically will go through an EDR request and
and pull the data and see what sites you see there.
It's not always identifying the containment concern, but you,
you see a site, if you're doing NEPA work, you've got to
identify what are potential concerns out there there.
So I think you guys got a nice niche here that you can get in
front of the consulting community and, and use this as
an additional layer or additional, you know, source of
information for them to actually grab this data quickly included
in their report that you've done, you know, this additional
taxi map level, you know, reviewed identifying these
containments of concern. Because you know, you're always
trying to educate or, you know, I guess not educate, but to, you
know, inform the, the clients what the concerns are in, in, in
their area where they're looking at whether it's a brownfield
site or, you know, IPA projects, you know, so, so if there's a
way that I, I see a pathway where you guys could get, you
know, more in front of that aspect of the environmental
assessment phase and use it as a tool for that, that would be
really, I think powerful. Yeah, absolutely.
I mean I used to do Phase 1 Esas and and I know all that goes
into them and Toximap is of course not going to replace
that. But I can certainly in a big
way, like I said, short, short circuit or supplement that any
even, you know, the same thing applies.
And and Deb can talk more about the relationship we have with a
National Association of home inspectors, right?
Like home inspectors rely on databases and things and, and
put them into their report to you, right, If you're going to
buy a piece of property. And so you get a home inspection
right through that due diligence period of of home buying.
And so we we're in conversation with them about that to supply
sort of a plug in add in add on thing as well, right.
So this huge database has a lot of great applications just like
you, you identified for environmental consultants for
home inspector. Yeah, insurance, yeah.
I mean, yeah, there's so much there.
I think. Yeah, I think you guys are on to
something really cool. Like I like where you're going
with this, the maps very interactive.
I think the data is very insightful.
I do kind of like the, the scoring metrics that you pulled
together, although I think maybe do you guys do any, do you kind
of summarize how you derive these scores for the user when
they use it, they kind of have a little peek behind like how they
come up with this rating. You know, what's the the
process, because you probably I can envision some engineers or
some other scientists going, hey, you know, what does this
even mean? And they're going to challenge
at least the rating. So I'm.
Scared. We welcome the challenge, We
absolutely welcome any challenge, any feedback to.
The you, you know where I'm coming from because that's just
the nature of the nature of scientific community, yeah.
Yeah, let's, let's open the hood and take a look at this thing.
Yeah, right. And so we want to open the hood
appropriately. So it's not.
It's patent pending. So we we have a few patents on
this, but you can talk a little bit about it it.
Really, it really is true to to what it says.
It's an intensity, right? And intensity has to do with the
number and the density, spatial density, right.
So what we've done is and to inform why did I get a moderate
or OK, I've got a moderate, but this one's really high.
Like, that's why we give you those sort of broken out levels
of intensity by media. Yeah.
Because maybe you never go swimming.
Yeah, you're right. Yeah.
So it's not a big problem for me if I'm not going swimming,
right. You know, it's like I don't have
that exposure. I don't eat fish, I'm not
fishing, I'm not going to get in the water, that sort of thing.
But maybe, you know, we have some colleagues that they love
going swimming. Yeah, well, I mean, you're
right. So it says, I got a question.
How does toximat bridge the gap between identifying a risk and
taking action through healthcare or mitigation?
Yeah. So we provide our users with
mitigating in you know mitigating steps that they can
take like for instance if there is has been some water drinking
water contamination identified. So we'll provide them
information about how to which water filters might be
appropriate for the particular contaminants in the drinking
water. So water filters either
centrally through the house or at each tap point in the house,
which water bodies to avoid Mosaic diagnostics, we give them
a lot of resources for toxicologist, functional
doctors, naturopathic doctors, chelation.
There's a huge amount of amount of resources on the site that we
can provide. Of course, the diagnostic
testing as well, we're also about to bring on the course
from EMEI, which is Environmental Medicine Education
Institute that actually trains doctors, but they have a course
for the general public about how to thrive in the polluted world
or toxic environment. And so they'll have lots of
tricks and information there. We also provide limited
information about like opening the detoxification pathways.
We're not, we're not medical doctors.
We are not prescribing or diagnosing or giving any sort of
medical advice, but there's some really simple things that people
can do like dry brushing or taking NAC or taking vitamin C
and, you know, certain kinds of detoxifying foods for infrared
sauna, that kind of thing. So that people feel like they're
not just dumped with all this information and know, you know,
test the soil, test the water, come up with there are
solutions. You know, I'm even hearing about
people are inventing ways to clean up.
There's this new the mush, this kind of mushroom that can eat
certain types of toxins. So I can imagine a world in
which we're spawning a whole new set of industries for cleanup.
So but that that's down the road.
What right now we're focusing on is informing people and making
them feel empowered around this information.
No, that's great. That's really good.
I mean, yeah, you, you, you just kind of touched on some stuff
and it just hit me in the my mind too.
It's like you guys could do a plug in with web MD or something
like that. You know, where they, you know,
oh, you've got this. Just go right here and look it
up, right? I mean, there's some cool stuff
there that you're you're the possibilities of this
application are pretty endless. I mean, I guess yeah, you guys
are got. I like it.
So let's talk about funding.
Let's talk about funding and growth.
Funding and growth. You guys are an emerging leader
in the environmental with environmental health.
So where do you currently stand with your funding?
You know your seed, your Series A, you know what kind of key
milestones are you aiming to hit to attract your next round of
investors. Yeah.
So we would really love to get a few more partners on board and
we are in conversation with five different potential partners or
more. So we are in the process of
engaging these partners. And once that is, they're sort
of like B to B to C partners, B to B partners who can really
amplify our reach to the general public and also to the
professional professionals who are connected to our product.
So we are hoping to get those partners on board and and start,
you know go around with the next funding which would be seed A.
Seed all right, So still trying to get the private investors to
kind of jump on board and partner with you now before you
go into the next round of seed fund.
Is that, well, our priority right now is Angel investors,
individuals who are, you know, they're passionate about this
topic or any organizations that are strategically connected to
the value chain in this space. And yeah, individuals, we're,
we're not, we're not ready to really crowdfund yet, but we
will. We're open to the different
sources. Yeah.
No, I think there's a lot of venture capital or investment
venture, you know, investment type companies that be very
interested in this product and learning more about it would be
really great. And maybe they can hear about it
through this podcast, and that'll be great.
Well, take your call for sure. Yeah, No, exactly.
So I mean, there's a lot of VCs out there that probably would
say this sounds like a great opportunity to help you help you
guys. You know, the biotech industry's
huge. I'm surprised they wouldn't be
jumping on this to help support the, you know, the, the medicine
diagnosis of, you know, exposure to their patients that come in.
Yeah, I, you know, there's that would be a huge one, I would
think. Absolutely.
Talk a little bit about privacy and ethics a little bit like
environmental data can sometimes impact property values and local
reputations. How do you balance the ethical
responsibility of transparency with potential sensitive
sensitivities of the communities that you map?
Yeah, that's a really good question and an important
question, So thank you for asking it.
We do not share toxicant source information like private company
names or addresses. We don't attribute pollution
presence to anyone or any entity.
We just really focus on on what's present.
We don't other organizations are focusing on that and our primary
ethical commitment is around data accuracy and accessibility.
So we feel obligated to represent the data that is
available in the most rigorous, you know, accurate manner.
And it's possible that property values could be disrupted or
shift slightly as we become our information is more widely
spread out there. It's not too unlike what's
happening in climate risk. I'm not sure if you're, you
know, 1st St. let's just say they have some really
interesting predictive models about heat and flood and wind
risk around different locations in the US And of course our
coastlines are shifting. So, you know, the properties and
coastlines are definitely going to be valued differently.
And so there's a possibility that that may happen.
But our ethical commitment is really towards information
symmetry creating, you know, making this information
ubiquitously available to people, businesses,
organizations who are making decisions that this to which
this data would contribute. No, that's really good.
I mean, yeah, I can see it is a can be a challenge, but I think
the the good outweighs the bad in these scenarios.
People need to know that they are have the potential exposure.
They, a lot of people probably have been living in the
surrounding areas for decades and don't even know that there's
an issue or they're the, that the property that's 2 miles from
them or a mile from them. And, and you know, all along it
hasn't really affected their property value anyways.
So they're probably. A.
Big issue with it, but you know, I think it's, it's a good, good
question and, and I'm glad you are concerned about it.
When you look ahead, you know, what's the future vision here?
What, what you know, look, five years from now, what do you
think Toximax going to become? You think it'll become a
standard part of real estate transactions or mandatory
diagnostic tools in the medical field or, you know, for primary
care? What do you, what do you, what
do you see this going? Yeah, that's a beautiful
question, So thank you for that one as well.
Our vision is really to provide the environmental intelligence
infrastructure that can be used across all industries wherever
it's it's needed. You know, that could be health
insurance, could be risk insurance, underwriting
medicine, healthcare, real estate.
We're really democratizing access to this information to
the general population and and across all industries.
So we don't limit it just to real estate or healthcare.
It's data that's pertinent to all kinds of business and
municipal government decision making.
So we are providing that we have the infrastructure that the data
asset itself and we hope to make it ubiquitous.
That's pretty awesome. You know, I think, I think you
guys are on track the feature wise.
I think you've got so much in the road map that you could
deploy on, and I think that your biggest challenge is going to be
what do I prioritize? Yeah, 100%.
Yeah. We talk about a lot of things.
Really. Yeah.
Wouldn't it be great if you had a Toximap app on your phone so
that you got just like you get a lightning, a lightning strike
proximity alert, you're like, hey, you're, you're within 1/4
mile of a Superfund site. Yeah, OK.
That's good to know. Another really interesting use
case could be institutional investors, you know,
mortgage-backed securities and even financial market data
platforms, you know, having this data feed, you know, as a
decision part of their regression models or whatever.
The data are so pertinent to so many levels of society and
business. So it's it's really exciting.
No, no. OK.
So one thing we didn't cover though was how much does it cost
to be a user? We got to go through there.
I mean, we can't end the program without that.
So, yeah, yeah, sure. We for right now the pricing
model is very simple. And for now the cert the to
search 1 address is about 1999 and we have bundles for
organizations or individuals depending on what the purpose is
to have higher volume searches at a lower price.
So it goes up. And of course we'll we also have
licensing kind of options as well that will be individually
priced according to the the partnership.
So that's the basic right now. And yeah.
Well, I think there's a few lab contacts I want to connect you
with that could be good for you that, you know, you might be
able to use them as plug insurance at some point to offer
the service. I mean, unless you already have
them, but there's some people that are probably interested in
that. Yeah, environmental consultants,
I mean, if there is a consulting firm that feels they're going to
use our data or platform to I know with Peter, he, you know,
using one address search on Toxie map could save him 4 to 8
hours and searching for that data for a client.
So you know, if there's a consulting firm that needs, you
know, just a lot high volume of address searches for sure that
could save them, you know, save them a lot of money on their
back on their PNL. So we come up with deals that
benefit everybody, right? We want to help our B to B
customers really benefit from the product.
Have you started to attend any conferences, environmental
conferences, to present this product anywhere?
Because that's where your audience is going to be going
for the most part to. I mean, Peter, you know this as
well as I do, but you know these guys, they, they go to a lot of
conferences, they listen and see presentations.
You know, the sale cycle of a lot of this takes time, but you
know that could be a really good venue for you expanding into the
environmental market. Yeah, it's on the, it's in the
plans as well as healthcare conferences.
Yeah. So you're right.
So I know there's, you know, there's an annual brownfields
conference that we were looking at going to, you know, this sort
of functional functional medicine and, and other unique
ways of of sort of holistically addressing health issues.
There's some great conferences about that.
Of course, we hear it in the news about people thinking about
PFAS, if you think about healthiness, all sorts of
things, right. So I think the sort of ground
level consciousness of these things is really is rising and
we're here for it. Well, this is great.
You know, Deb, Peter, thanks for coming on to the show.
We really appreciate your time today.
And, and I like what you guys are doing with Toxie Map and you
know, hopefully the listeners will dive into this and and take
a look at the the application. We welcome your or any of their
feedback. If any of your listeners want to
test it out and ask, ask questions or share ideas and
feedback, they find some bugs. We welcome it all. 100%, yeah,
yeah, absolutely. Well, that.
That's great. Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean it does. It takes, it takes a lot to go
through and identify, you know, workflows and user experience
and you know, all that good stuff.
So. Yeah, we have an exciting
version 3 coming out in the next few weeks, which is really,
we're adding landfills where we're making the UUX way simpler
and you basically get a whole dashboard on one screen instead
of having to click back and forth.
That has a lot of very exciting to us features.
So we'll let you know when that comes out.
Please do and, and maybe tag me when you hit a release and we'll
push it out to to our audience as well.
But you know, this is great. I, I wish you guys the best of
luck on this. And you guys are got something
here that I don't know. I haven't come across another
product like it yet. So, and I've been seeing, I see
a lot of technology, you know, and tools and, but this is a
good one that caught my eye and, and thanks for meeting with me
today. Thank you and thank you for your
great work with this podcast. It's a great.
Thanks so much. Yeah.
Well, thank you very much, Dad. Appreciate that.
OK, we'll talk to you guys soon. Thank you.
All right. Thanks for listening and
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