Episode 22 Transcript: Floating Airships of the Past and Future

Molly Wood Voice-Over:Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy. We dive deep into the climate crisis and come up with solutions. I'm Molly Wood.

This week … we’re getting back to … invention … because like I keep saying … we need *everything … from the gift wrap to the water bottles to the toothpaste pellets and soap bars to … floating cargo containers that run on nothing but air.

I know, I love this job.

So this one actually starts with a little back-story. See, I do this other podcast called Futureverse … where my friend Ramanan Raghavendran and I interview climate fiction authors about how they imagine the world … responding to climate change … living through it … how it might LOOK and how we’ll react … and technologies we might invent to deal with it.

Recently we interviewed one of my favorite authors, Kim Stanley Robinson … and we asked for audience questions … and here’s what we got …

Molly Wood:

I'm gonna ask you one last really fun question because a subscriber, Diana Little, sent in several questions for you, and I love this one. She said, what do you think 

about the current airship renaissance since airships do come up in so many of your books?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, I love it. I wanna take a ride in one, and I hope they prosper. I look at the designs, I see the routes. I imagine sitting in the window seat, or they're like, a lot of them have windows underneath you, which is a little creepy. But airships are great. I'm very happy. I would like to take a sailing ship across an ocean. That's not easy these days. It's funny how carbon neutral travel across this planet, it's slower, but it's obvious that there's a desire for it, a need for it, and it would be beautiful. I'm surprised it isn't going faster than it is, to tell you the truth. Maybe it's an investment opportunity. The sailing crowd, they love my books because of sailing ships, and the airship crowd, all both of them, that's not such a big crowd. You see what I mean.

Ramanan:

Believe it or not, there is actually entrepreneurship going on in the airship sphere.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

It makes sense. Sign me up, I would like to be a passenger.

\Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Ok so turns out … there IS entrepreneurship going on in the airship sphere … and the person who asked that question … is one of the entrepreneurs!

Diana Little:

So I'm Diana Little. I'm from a Pneuma Aerospace. We're working on low energy lift for sustainable aviation.

Molly Wood:

What does THAT mean?

Diana Little:

What that means. Yeah. What that means, um, is a new form of lift for aerostats and airships. And usually the first question I ask people is, do they even know what an aerostat is or an airship? And there are three touch points that everyone knows. One is a Goodyear blimp. Everyone's seen the Goodyear Blimp. The second one is the Hindenburg Disaster. Um, and the third one is the Chinese weather balloon. That was, um, Over the United States and that the US military had to shoot down. Um, and all three of those give really good examples of what lighter than air is good for. And when you start thinking about what lighter than air is good for you, start wondering, why don't we have more of them?

Molly Wood:

Right.

Diana Little:

It's like takes Yeah. Very little energy to lift off. Um, which is something we need. We need sustainable aviation.

Molly Wood:

So let's sort of unpack this piece by piece. Um, first of all, as you pointed out, there exists the technology already for lighter than air aviation that has had actually a long history. Thank you for sending me that long history as far back as 1900.

Diana Little:

Yeah.

Molly Wood:

With mixed results. So I guess, you know, to answer the question of why don't we have this, why don't we have this?

Diana Little:

The main answer is helium. The second answer is hydrogen, but both of them actually have the same properties. I mean, you have these, these lighter than air gases that lift a vehicle or a balloon, um, up in the air, but they don't wanna come back down. Um, so you start having some issues with ballasting.

Molly Wood:

Right.

Diana Little:

How do you come back down?

Molly Wood:

How do you land? How do you taxi, like a regular airplane? How do you load an offload cargo in passengers? It's hard. Um, you have, back in the day when they were running hundreds of these trips across the Atlantic, they had these, uh, masks. You'll still see 'em on some skyscrapers.

Molly Wood:

Wait, let me back up even more. Who was running all of these trips across the Atlantic?

Diana Little:

Uh, the Zeppelin company,

Molly Wood:

Okay. Mm-hmm.

Diana Little

:I mean, the Hindenburg was not the only

Molly Wood:

Yep.

Diana Little

:It was not the only cruiser.

Molly Wood:

It wasn't the only airship.

Molly Wood:

Give us, if you would, for people who don't know, give us that brief history, like for a, a period of time after World War ii. Right. There was in fact commercial aviation in lighter than aircraft of which the Hindenburg was won.

Diana Little:

That's right. Yeah. Um, hundreds of journeys, uh, generally from New York to Germany. This is between the wars, so there was no conflict at that point. And they were like cruises, but there were also, these were also people, business people going back and forth. Um, there weren't, uh, airplanes at that point, so this was an excellent alternative to the surface ship travel, which is the only other way to go. And they took about four days. Um, they were excellent rides. There are stories about people, it being so stable that they could like set a pencil on end. And walk away from it and come back and it would still be there. You know, big windows, beautiful, beautiful air travel. And there are actually some companies out there right now trying to make that kind of cruise, um, travel, uh, available again.

Molly Wood:

Using airships, which is cool.

Molly Wood:

Fascinating. Okay, so go back to Ballast. So there they were floating along, but they had this minor physics issue.

Diana Little:

They have, yes, a pretty big physics issue.

So, um, there are a lot of, of methods that airship companies have come up with to try to deal with this physics problem. And how do you, how do you land safely? Um, back in the day it was masks which, um, and in fact that's still in use today. You have these big kind of stationary things that you steer the ship towards and then you hook on. Um, and then you have a crew, a ground crew that you drop lines and, and they hold it and they lash it. Again, it's very similar to like a ship ship, right? A, a, a water ship. Um, you come into dock and you have to throw lines and, and all of that, but that's where a lot of the accidents happen is near the ground. Um, that's where the weather is very very unpredictable. You get weird gusts. So having a bunch of people holding onto this really, really large vehicle can cause problems. Um, landing it is sometimes a problem, but they, you know, they figure it out. So one of the things that airship companies have done is, um, create hybrid airships.

Molly Wood:

So that's one.

Diana Little:

That's one way they've addressed it, which is it's actually more aerodynamic, uh, more like an airplane, but uses that helium to give it an edge. Right? Um, but they have to be pushing to stay up in the sky, just like, um, just like a plane does. But that way they can kind of point the ship at the ground and go.

Molly Wood:

And so that's

Diana Little:

Um,

Molly Wood:

A little, closer to like a sailboat with an engine.

Diana Little:

Yes.

Molly Wood:

Got

Diana Little:

That's a good analogy. Um, another thing, there's one company that, um, has proposed this kind of giant suction cup. To land on the ground Um, and then ballasting also is often, um, they'll, they'll pick up water. Um, they'll bring along sand, but, but it's, it's tricky. It's, uh, it's complicated. So what we came up with was, um, vacuum lift using vacuum, partial vacuum in a, um, in a cell, in a, in a big spherical, um, empty frame. And the cool thing about partial vacuum is that you pull vacuum, you go up, you let some air in, you go down and it's like a submarine in an ocean of air. 'Cause you have, that's how they do it with submarines. They fill their, their ballast tanks with water to go down and they expel the water to go up.

Molly Wood:

Um, and, and had that been done before? Had that been experimented with? Did you perfect it? You just, you invented it. You're being so modest here.

Diana Little:

We didn't invent the idea. The idea was actually proposed by a monk in the late 16 hundreds.

Molly Wood:

I mean, I love this interview so much already. Like this , have like cruises across the sky before airplanes. We have monk inventions. Just keep it coming.

Diana Little:

Yes. Yeah, this guy's actually considered to be the father of aeronautics. Um, there's a picture of this invention in the Smithsonian Museum that's out at Dulles. We, we went and saw it a couple of years ago and we're like, I'm very excited. Um, this was one of the early inventions for the idea of how humans could leave the planet. Um, this was before they'd even discovered helium.

Molly Wood:

Wow.

Diana Little:

Or hydrogen. I think maybe they, maybe they did. I don't, and I'm not sure about that. But definitely helium had not been discovered. Um, so he proposed that you could make these vacuum cells and put 'em on a ship. The picture's beautiful. It's this old drawing it and, and lift it up in the air. And then, um, a fellow named Leibnitz, who was one of the, uh, about a hundred years later, he was one of the co-inventors of calculus, along with the. With , oh God, I've lost his name. The other big one, the one that we really think about.

Molly Wood:

Isaac Newton.

Diana Little:

Isaac Newton, of course.

Molly Wood:

The guy, you know,

Diana Little:

I was like, Newton. Um, so Leibnitz was fascinated by this idea. Like I said, it was, it was It was in the 17 hundreds and he did a mathematical proof since he now had calculus, um, and proved that it was impossible. So then no one has even looked into it since then for the most part. A couple of other people have. Um, the interesting thing about the impossibility is that there are certain parameters. I mean, anytime you do a, a mathematical proof, you have, you have assumptions that you make. His assumptions were that it was going to be made of steel.

Molly Wood:

Because that was what they had.

Diana Little:

Another assumption was that it was a homogeneous sphere, so it was like, um, uh, a, a marble, right? It's all just one beautiful smooth sphere. Very thin shelled because this has to be light in order to, to actually overcome the weight of itself. Um, and then he assumed full vacuum that you would actually completely evacuate this sphere. And the math proved that it would go right?

Molly Wood:

Collapse. Yeah.

Diana Little:

Absolutely true.

Molly Wood:

Absolutely true. You're like, we've done.

Diana Little:

It's proven. Yes. We've actually seen it happen. Um, yes, we have, we have tested spheres to, um, Unplanned, uh, destruction or, or actually planned destruction. We, we wanted to make 'em and yes, they do. They collapse. Um, but we're not doing that.

We're doing a, um, geodesic, tensity structure. Uh, so a lot like the Epcot Center is a good, good kind of touchpoint for most people. Um, a Bucky Ball.

Molly Wood:

Yep.

Diana Little:It's a little bit more complicated than that, but, but it's pretty much what it is. And so, it's a near sphere and it's using carbon fiber, which is very light and a lot stronger than steel. And then it's surrounded by a, a multi-layer membrane of tension and then air permeability. And we're not doing full vacuum. We're going to about 70% will actually produce lift. If you get it big enough, and 85% is equivalent to helium, you go up to like 92%. It's equivalent to hydrogen. Um, going beyond that is pointless.

You, it actually doesn't give, give you that much more lift, and it puts so much strain on the structure that you start getting into the failure modes.

Molly Wood:

Right. And then let's talk about what this, I was gonna say contraption, but that sounds so dismissive. This invention is going to power, right? Is the idea. Contraption is kind of a fun word. Um, you're creating airships for the idea is to create airships for cargo, right?

Diana Little:

That's our, that's our mission. Um, yeah, because we've looked at, we got into this because of decarbonization.

We got into this, um, because we wanted to make an impact on the emissions in our world. And, um, cargo has the biggest impact. It also is something we really can't get rid of. I mean, you know, personal action.

Molly Wood:

We can't decide not to ship things around the globe.

Diana Little:

It's not gonna work. We need it for a civilization. We need actually even more access to the ability to send and receive goods to places in the world that currently can't of the far north of Canada. Is one really good example. They're having huge issues.

Their ice roads are not working right now because of climate change.

Um, and it is terribly expensive to get anything up there and back. Um, the, the midst of Africa with where they don't have coastal access, that's a, that's a difficult place to get. But even the places we can get to, the coasts that we can get to right now, the airports that we can get to are often disrupted. Um, so this was where we thought that we could make the biggest carbon impact and societal impact and, and you know, we're capitalists. So also it's, there's a lot of money involved.

Molly Wood:

Business. Yep.

Diana Little:

Yeah. Yeah, so that's our end goal.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

The “we” that Diana keeps talking about here .. is her and her wife Jamie Little … and the two of them are the kind of people who just have … way smarter breakfast conversations than I do.

Molly Wood:Tell, give me the origin story. How, so you were interested in decarbonization and students of history and science it sounds like.

Diana Little:

Yeah. Yeah. Both of us are, um, Jamie especially, um, was has been fascinated by aerospace in general since a very small child. She's been designing rocket ships and, and has written a couple of, uh, papers for the Mars Society and, um, went to school for aerospace engineering. Did not end up graduating in aerospace engineering just because of, actually part of it was she got into it and it just seemed so wasteful in some ways. I think at that point she was already kind of becoming very ecologically minded and ended up graduating in, um, uh, environmental science and anthropology, sort of a, an interesting dual major. But she's an engineer. She's been doing that kind of stuff for a very long time. I'm a software engineer. Um, I'm a, uh, a systems thinker and you know, part of our partnership is just talking about what we read, what we listen to, what we're seeing about the world. Um, you know, we, we do have children as a blended family and, um, but even if we didn't, I mean, I care.

Molly Wood:

Right, so, so this came up, um, Jamie was actually working for another startup and they were used, they were working on a, um, water desalination.

Molly Wood:Okay. Yep.

Diana Little:

A really interesting one, which is another big problem, right? We like impactful problems. Um, and at the point they were, they were experimenting with using vacuum to separate the solids from the water, the, the salts. It wasn't working,

Molly Wood:

Mm-hmm.

Diana Little:

But that was, that was when the idea kind of went off in Jamie's head and she was like, oh my goodness. I mean, we should be using lighter than air vehicles. Why aren't we using lighter than air vehicles? Because helium, because ballast, this could solve it. Um, so then she kind of worked on it for several years. I sort of knew what she was working on. I really didn't very much. She was very secretive about it. And then she submitted the patent and then handed it to me.

Molly Wood:

Aw.

Diana Little:

Yeah.

Molly Wood:

And was like, this is what I've been doing.

Diana Little:

This is what I've been doing all this time, just this sort of like a Newton esque adventure.

Molly Wood:

Exactly.

Diana Little:

And like I said, not the first time. She's a, she's an inventor. She, she does amazing things. Um, she's a brilliant, brilliant person. I read the patent and even though it's very technical, again, I'm an engineer as well, and I, I, I looked at, I'm like, this could change the world. What are you doing about it? What are you gonna do? How are you gonna make it a company, so then there was a little bit of nagging.

For, um, for a few months. And the more we talked about it, the more I was like, this has to happen. This is so important. Um, what can I do to help? And what came up with that is that, um, she's not thrilled with this kind of public interaction and I have a very long career with a lot of really interesting, you know, entrepreneurs and just amazingly interesting people like, well, I can do this so how about I help you out? And I'll do the, I'll do the kind of business side of things and the software side and, and we can make it happen. So I brought in some advisors who've been amazing. And we keep on bringing on more. I think we're done now,

Molly Wood:

Mm-hmm.

Diana Little:

A bunch of, a bunch of ex CEOs and leaders in aerospace, and we've got a top gun aviator on our team, and I mean, it's just, it's really fun.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about how real this is … and where it’s going next … because it’s real … and apparently it’s going!

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Diana Little of Anuma Aerospace … about lighter-than-air ships … invented by 17th century monks … disproven by Leibnitz … RE-PROVEN by Jamie … and how we make this a reality … today.

Molly Wood:

So tell me, what, where are you now? What is the, the status of Anuma now?

Diana Little:

Okay. Um, so, our status right now is that we built a few of these half meter diameters. Um, we tested them. We tested them to, to a point where we were like, okay, we know this is gonna work, and then we moved away. So we're t r l three four is why is like lapse scale.

We can't demonstrate lift until we build something that's 12 meters in diameter, and that's something that we need to raise money for.

So we're about to start a major fundraising. Um, we have a NOAA grant. Uh, we have a grant to do a weather balloon because while our end goal is cargo, we have an r and d runway. And each one of these stages kind of adds a capability, but also has its own meaningful mission and market.

And weather is another piece that we realized.

Um, this actually came up because people were asking us how we were gonna pilot our, our airships if we didn't have the weather data. And I was like, what do you mean why we have weather data? I have that on my phone. I mean, what's and what turns out there's hardly any, there's hardly any information about the atmospheric boundary layer, which is surface to about 4,000, 5,000 feet.

Molly Wood:

Is that because there just aren't that many weather balloons or.

Diana Little:

Right? There aren't there are.

Molly Wood:

Isn't that where.

Diana Little:

That's it.

Molly Wood:

Seems like.

Diana Little:

Uh, planes have, yeah, and planes actually do have sensors on them, some of them, but they don't, you know, they avoid bad weather.

Molly Wood:

They try.

Diana Little:

Right? They try. Um, but mainly weather balloons are, they're two a day set off from almost a thousand points on the planet. And they're actually set off in concert. It's twice a day. They go up, they pop, the helium says goodbye to the planet, the parachutes come down. So they get about four hours worth of data, but it's only a thousand points. The whole planet, the, the oceans especially, are not very well covered. Um, and it's a vertical column. So what we're designing for Noah, sorry, what we're designing for Noah is a, um, persistent weather balloon, one that actually will surf the winds in a, in a sort of circular pattern. However they can find the winds. This is something that Loon proved that they.

Molly Wood:

Could do.

Diana Little:

Yep. And, uh, Loon has, has been wonderful about publishing all their data. Um, it's pretty amazing.

Molly Wood:

Loon for those who are not familiar, was a weather balloon initiative that spun out of Google X, now just known as X.

Diana Little:

Yeah, they shut it down because what they were trying to do was communications, which is another great actually use case for this. Um, and they were doing it in very, um, economically disadvantaged areas of the world and they couldn't make it work. Um, the business plan, they couldn't make the business plan work, but they did an incredible amount of engineering and they, they proved that two things. They, well actually approved more than that, but one that they could, that they could use the winds to do navigation using ballasting inside the balloon. They had an interesting ballasting, um, system and that they were trying to use external weather forecasts to do that, and they weren't working because they were wrong, but they could use the onboard sensor data and heal the forecast. And those are two important points to what we're, we're like, okay, well guess what we have. We have something that you can build and you can set up there for years.

Molly Wood:

Right.

Diana Little:

And which really fixes the economics.

Molly Wood:

Yeah, it's like the

Diana Little:

Exactly. You spend more on the initial craft. But the time that it spends and the data that it can collect and how valuable that data is, it absolutely makes the business case work. So we have a NOAA grant. We've started working on that. We have, our patent has been issued, which is a huge deal.

Molly Wood:

That's a huge deal.

Diana Little:

Um, yeah, we have another one in progress, but this one's been issued and, um, we're in an incubator. We have an M O U with a aerostat communications company. So we've, we've got traction.

We've got some, some revenue if you call a grant revenue, and we're about to start fundraising.

Um, but we do need to fundraise to lift that demonstrator and then start building weather balloons.

Molly Wood:

Yep. , um, talk to me about the opportunity, the, like, you know, give me, give us sort of us the baseline knowledge about how much cargo is moved by air, the carbon impact of that. Like what you hope this market will be, what this market actually is. Yeah.

Diana Little:

That's so big. Um, it's almost $200 billion, uh, market in terms. And that's, that's the, the calculation for that is not just air. It is actually long haul trucking and ships. And cargo airplanes. Those are the new, new of those done per year.

Molly Wood:Okay.

Diana Little:Per year. That's how much they build. Um, and the reason why I say it's all three is because airships can actually take load off of all of those, those lanes is what they call them, the, the kind of lanes of travel because, um, what we would take is generally high value. Cargo or very bulky and very big. So you think about like the, um, the propeller blades for the wind turbines. I don't know if you've ever seen a picture.

Molly Wood:Of one of those on a truck.

Diana Little:

It's absurd. It's hilarious.

Molly Wood:

It's absurd.

Diana Little:

Like comical.

Molly Wood:

It's ridiculous.

Diana Little:

Or, you know, logging or mining.

Molly Wood:

Yeah.

Diana Little:

You know, things that, you know, those, especially mining for high value, um, high value minerals that are in very hard to reach places.

Molly Wood:

Right.

Diana Little:

Like the north of Canada.

Molly Wood:

Yeah.

Molly Wood:

And then talk to me about the carbon impact of all of that shipping.

Diana Little:

Yes. If you get to scale, it is over eight gigatons by 2050. So, and that, that is, it's over eight gigatons. If we start.

Molly Wood:

Now.

Diana Little:

Now, you know, the first one probably be about 10 years out before we fly it, but if we start now and then get to scale by 2050, it's over eight gigatons. And then from there it just gets bigger.

And I, I know, you know, that is a very large number.

Molly Wood:

It's a very large number. If we, a 50 50 is what is emitted every year, right? 50 gigatons like we keep talking about, we wanna get from 50 to zero, and so if we're talking about eight, that is a significant chunk of the 50.

Molly Wood:

So then talk to me about the, like what does it take energy-wise to create a partial vacuum and, and are there any emissions then from an airship once it's up there?

Diana Little:

Right? Um, you know, we use electric pumps. Um, I am not sure if we quantify the energy requirements to, um, to lift it. And that's a, that's a gap on my side. So thanks for that question. Um, it is not anywhere near the, you know, the energy requirements for putting a plane up in the air, but it is certainly more than helium, right?

Molly Wood:

Because.

Diana Little:

Helium's, nothing, hydrogen has the, has the embodied emissions of what it took to make the hydrogen. Um, and we will have the embodied emissions of what it will take to run the pump.

Right. Um, um, we do have, so our, sorry, our second, but this is an interesting, an interesting segue. Um, our second patent, which has been published is actually for using liquid air energy storage as opposed to batteries because we don't love the idea of putting batteries on our, on our long haul airships, actually we're using solar cells. Um, this liquid air energy storage system would use carbon capture. And filter that into liquid air. And then the, the carbon byproducts and the nitrogen, um, you can turn that captured carbon into carbon nano tubes. We have some contact with a company that does that, which can then actually be spun into the carbon fiber that we can put in the cells.

And then we embody that carbon.

We can actually do a negative carbon. Uh, negative emissions, total transport system.

Molly Wood:Tell me about the kind of current level of interest in airships, because there does seem to be, you know, we talk in our, we exchanged emails about how it shows up in Kim Stanley Robinson's book.

Diana Little:

Right.

Molly Wood:

Like is this, are airships considered a significant part of the solutions mix right now, or are you having to do a lot of storytelling? Because anytime you're replacing right, existing infrastructure, it's a lift. Again, no pun intended.

Diana Little:

Yes. Yeah. I love puns. So how open, I guess, the short version of this question is how open are people to this idea?

Actually I've had a lot of interest. Um, we haven't started our fundraising again yet, but about a year and a half ago we did sort of a oh a, a dip into the, the VC pool. Um, and sent about about 40, um, you know, would you like to talk about this? Would you like to be pitched to? And about 10 of them said yes.

Molly Wood:

That's actually a pretty high, um, response.

Diana Little:

Yeah. Um, and then really where I'm seeing a ton of interest is actually in the d o d.

Um, and I am a firm believer that defense is important. Um, so I've been spending a lot of time with the d o d. Um, they've actually used aerostats and airships for all sorts of things over the past decades. The Chinese weather balloon being, uh, they have them um, for intelligence surveillance, reconnaissance for communications for, um, missile defense. Actually, Israel has, um, some aerostats over them for missile defense. It's really good at seeing things that are, you know, sort of the lower rockets satellites aren't gonna catch 'em in time, but an aerostat can for, um, for sensing over the Pacific. That's definitely, I, I've, um, have been talking to d o D people a lot, so there's a lot of interest in that, which is sort of that second stage that dual cell propelled aerostat, which would be a drone. Um, which is, again, that's impact as well.

Molly Wood:

Yeah. Yeah.

Diana Little:

It's also taking, um, because the alternative of what they're using right now is, um, you know, drones, airplanes, helicopters, um, all of those are highly emissive and, um, kind of, you know, they, they can't stay up as long.

We've, we've got a persistent solution. Um, the other interest, so I'm in a bit of a bubble, so I can't necessarily. You know, I see a ton of Airship News.

Molly Wood:

Right. Totally.

Diana Little:

But that's me. I mean, it seems like.

Molly Wood:

Captured some imagination for sure. I mean, we're, you know, like, like we're saying, we're in this moment now where we're looking for everything.

Molly Wood:

Great. Diana Little thank you so much for coming on the show. Good luck with the fundraise. If you are an investor listening to this, just you know, pinging me and I'll put you guys in touch.

Diana Little:

Okay. Thanks so much, Molly. I love your podcast. I, I've, I've been following you for a long time. I really enjoy how you dig into things and your perspective.

Molly Wood:

Thank you. Thank you for emailing me. I mean, this is wonderful. It's so, uh, the dream is to be able to have conversations about real life sci-fi, which is because we can, only can we all do this, but we can literally imagine a better future. Like there is no reason that we have to keep doing things. The way that we've always been doing them.

Diana Little:

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood:

Then saying, yeah, that's, that's possible. Let's do it.

Diana Little:

I love it. Thanks for all you're doing.

Molly Wood:

Thank you.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

Before we go and on a much more down-to-earth … har har … note … -I want to tell you about a little daily decarb … as in decarbonization … that I’ve been doing recently! You heard me briefly mention toothpaste pellets at the top there and it turns out that’s a thing! So instead of a big plastic tube filled with toothpaste … that you then throw away when you’re done with it … and it’s heavy because it’s full of water …

They make these little … tablets! No water, they come in a glass jar … in my case I can refill my jar at the little bulk goods store that opened near my house … you just chew it up a little … and brush! It’s embarrassing … but I’ll put a video of it up on Instagram.

Somehow I’m finding it almost easier … than toothpaste? Which is weird? I don’t know. I like it. And I got some bamboo toothbrushes, too … because man, once you start looking around … boy. Plastic everywhere, am I right?

Anyway check it out … it’s a little drop in the ocean … but you know they all count.

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Thank you to those of you who already have. See you next week.