In this episode, Sunny Ray talks with Mitch, founder of Numanity, a digital eco-literacy platform designed to close the cognitive distance between people and nature. Mitch shares his path from a business and environmental studies degree in Wisconsin, through renewable energy policy advocacy and an early tech startup, to grad school in Colorado where he earned a master's in environmental management with a focus on environmental psychology. That research became the foundation for Numanity, which he now builds with co-founders he met in graduate school. They discuss why environmental thinking remains siloed from economics, business, and public health, and how fear-based media narratives push people away rather than toward action. Mitch explains Numanity's model of gamified, expert-led microlearning built with real environmental leaders, and how the platform plans to use AI as a support tool for content creation and messaging effectiveness while staying mindful of AI's own environmental costs. The conversation closes with Numanity's near-term milestones, including pilot partnerships and a public launch within six months.
Numanity founder Mitch explains how gamified, expert-led learning and mindful AI use can rewire our relationship with nature.
Can you give us a one-liner on what Numanity is?
We're building a digital eco-literacy platform launching soon. The whole idea is minimizing cognitive distance between people and nature, making nature less of an afterthought and more approachable, understandable, and actionable for people who want more control over environmental concerns and building a better world.
Tell us about your background and how you got here.
I'm from Wisconsin, did a business environmental studies degree, then worked in renewable energy policy advocacy and dipped into a startup around tech and social media's influence on behavior. I moved to Colorado, snowboarded, bartended in Aspen, coached freestyle snowboarding, then went to grad school for a master's in environmental management focused on environmental psychology, which led directly to creating Numanity with co-founders I met there.
What are most people missing when it comes to their relationship with nature?
Our education system treats environment as a silo instead of connecting it to business, economy, and public health, even though a healthy environment underpins all of them. Also, tech's engagement model rewards doom and gloom content because it spreads fast, even though it doesn't get people to look deeper. It's a red light instead of a green light to real opportunity.
How is Numanity actually addressing this challenge?
We're building a platform for environmental experts, effectively an army of environmental leaders, using a gamified microlearning format combined with social media style community learning. We partner with climate communicators, nonprofits, PhDs, and companies who create lessons and act as mentors. It's like a superhighway for people who've spent their lives in niche environmental areas to reach and guide others.
Are these courses paid, with revenue shared between creators and the company?
Yeah, pretty much. We're still figuring out all the back and forth since we're early stage, but the general idea is that experts create the lessons, our system gamifies and curates them, and revenue gets split between the creator and the company.
How are you thinking about using AI within Numanity?
We use it operationally for things like summarizing meetings, but in the product itself there are three main uses: helping experts build more effective lessons, automating conversion of existing materials into our format, and using messaging analytics tied to psychological distance to help experts communicate more effectively and drive real action instead of doom and gloom.
How do you balance AI's potential with its environmental cost?
We think the more you understand the impacts, the more it gets integrated into decision-making about whether AI use is really necessary in a given context. We're navigating a partnership with a decentralized AI model that's about 90 percent more efficient, and it shows how much carbon you save per prompt compared to other platforms, which itself changes behavior.
What milestones are you working toward this year?
We're entering pilot partnerships with enterprise and academic groups across the US and preparing for a public user launch. The next three months are about shaping everything, and about six months from now we expect to have a platform people can join and start learning on. It's been a long process, but it's finally coming together.
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