You Can Be The Adult In The Room

About this Episode

In this episode, host Kumar talks to David Carel, Director of the Inspired Air Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy. David has spent a decade working on the most pressing problems in health and education, and his latest project aims to boost student health and learning outcomes by improving air quality in classrooms.

David discusses the transformative potential of improving the air we breathe indoors, where we spend about 90% of our time, and the surprising things we’re learning about airborne illness. He also shares how he stays motivated in his work to sustainably improve conditions in the classroom, even when the going gets tough.

David talks about the mentors throughout his career who have taught him to be the adult in the room when no one else is tackling an issue, and the power of using emotional intelligence to push through the self-doubt that affects all founders.

Tacit Knowledge

Hosted by Kumar Garg
Presented by Renaissance Philanthropy
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Produced by All Together Now

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KEY QUESTIONS AND TAKEAWAYS

What is the Inspired Air Fund (formerly the Clean Air for Schools Fund)?

A new fund at Renaissance Philanthropy, led by David Carel, focused on improving indoor air quality in schools — both to reduce airborne disease transmission and to improve learning outcomes. It sits at the intersection of health, education, and biosecurity policy.

Why does indoor air quality matter more than most people assume?

People spend roughly 90% of their time indoors, so indoor air quality — not just outdoor pollution — determines most of a person's actual exposure. Wildfire smoke advisories that tell people to "go inside" miss this: outdoor air gets drawn inside buildings too, and indoor spaces also generate their own pollution, from manufactured furniture, engineered wood, and even human aerosols from people who are sick.

What's the evidence that clean air improves learning, not just health?

Air filtration has been shown to cut school absenteeism by 10–20%, and lower carbon dioxide and VOC levels have been linked to measurably better cognitive performance. JPMorgan Chase's new $3 billion Park Avenue headquarters doubled its ventilation rate above code specifically because Harvard research found doing so yields a return worth thousands of dollars per employee per year in productivity.

Why has indoor air quality remained a blind spot despite living through a pandemic?

David argues it falls into a structural gap: philanthropy and policy are organized into verticals like health, education, and environment, and indoor air quality doesn't fully belong to any one of them, so it rarely becomes anyone's top priority even when it would meet the bar for impact in each vertical individually.

Why did public health take so long to accept that diseases could spread through the air?

For most of the 20th century, airborne transmission was accepted only for tuberculosis and measles; other respiratory illnesses were assumed to spread via large droplets or surfaces. The WHO initially stated early in the Covid-19 pandemic that the virus was not airborne. Science journalist Carl Zimmer's book Air-Borne traces this history and argues it left the world underprepared for Covid.

What historical precedent does David point to for solving this at scale?

The late-19th-century clean water movement, which built modern water infrastructure and dramatically cut typhoid rates within a generation. David frames indoor air as a comparable infrastructure opportunity: a relatively low-cost, low-administrative-burden intervention that could address multiple problems — disease transmission, pandemic preparedness, and cognitive development — at once.

What is the Fund currently building?

A cities competition focused on clean air in schools, designed to learn from the successes and failures of past municipal competitions and challenges. David's ask is for input from people with experience designing these kinds of competitions, and from people with insight into how to coordinate across the health departments, environmental agencies, school systems, and mayor's offices a program like this would need to touch.

On agency, uncertainty, and following the thread

• David traces part of his drive back to working as an undergraduate with Gregg Gonsalves, then a nontraditional student and HIV/AIDS activist, which he says taught him that you don't have to wait for "the adults in the room" to act on something you believe matters.
• His path ran from co-founding Panorama Education (school data analytics) to running early literacy programs in South Africa to pandemic prevention work at Blueprint Biosecurity before arriving at indoor air — each step following a thread rather than a plan.
• A formative moment: at 19, volunteering on a tuberculosis study in Tugela Ferry, South Africa — where extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) was first identified — he learned that TB is airborne, meaning a person could be infected by someone who had left the room hours earlier.
• His tacit knowledge: recognizing the specific emotional pattern of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that entrepreneurs experience, and not trying to think your way out of it — instead noticing it, holding it lightly, and finding ways to re-engage rather than letting a bad week become a decision to quit.
• He credits community, specifically joining Renaissance Philanthropy rather than building in isolation, as a concrete tool for getting through those low moments.
• Kumar's framing, echoing Lindsey Graham's widely circulated remark that "there is no they" — you are the ones in the room — as a model for the mindset this kind of work requires.

Episode Links

• David Carel — Director at Renaissance Philanthropy, leading the Inspired Air Fund (formerly the Clean Air for Schools Fund). Co-founded Panorama Education in 2012; later helped build Funda Wande, a South African early-literacy nonprofit; most recently Managing Director at Blueprint Biosecurity before joining RenPhil.
• Renaissance Philanthropy — The organization producing the Tacit Knowledge podcast and housing the Inspired Air Fund (formerly the Clean Air for Schools Fund).
• Gregg Gonsalves — Epidemiologist and longtime HIV/AIDS activist, now an associate professor at Yale School of Public Health and Yale Law School; a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. David worked closely with him as an undergraduate on global health activism.
• Panorama Education — The Y Combinator-backed school data analytics company David co-founded in 2012, used by public schools across all 50 states.
• Funda Wande — The South African nonprofit David helped create, working with the national government to design and scale early-grade literacy and math interventions.
• Blueprint Biosecurity — A nonprofit focused on ending airborne pandemics, where David served as Managing Director before joining Renaissance Philanthropy.
• Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe — Science journalist Carl Zimmer's book tracing the history of airborne disease science, including the slow, belated acceptance that Covid-19 spread through the air.
• COGfx Study (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) — Research led by Joseph Allen's Healthy Buildings Program finding that doubling office ventilation rates significantly improves cognitive performance, at a cost far smaller than the productivity benefit — the study behind the JPMorgan example David cites.
• 270 Park Avenue (JPMorgan Chase headquarters) — JPMorgan Chase's new $3B Manhattan headquarters, built with double the standard ventilation rate specifically in response to Harvard's cognitive-function research.