Innovative Geoengineering: How Reflective Clouds Could Buy Time Against Global Warming

Watching the news is a scary proposition these days. The evidence for climate change is all around us, and we continue to break new records every day. It just doesn't seem like we can move fast enough to solve the problem. Today we are talking to someone who can help.

Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt, here with Sandesh Patel. Welcome to another FUTR podcast.

Today we are talking with Andrew Song, co-founder of Make Sunsets. Make Sunsets is looking to buy us time by creating reflective clouds that would give us the time we need to reduce carbon emissions. So Andrew is here to tell us about how it works, and why it is so important.

Welcome Andrew

Make Sunsets: https://makesunsets.com

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Transcript

Watching the news is a scary proposition these days.

The evidence for climate change is all around us, and we continue to break new records every day.

It just doesn't seem like we can move fast enough to solve the problem.

Today we're talking to someone who can help.

Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with another FUTR Podcast.

Today we're talking with Andrew Song, co-founder of MakeSunsets.

MakeSunsets is looking to buy us time by creating reflective clouds that will give us the time we need to reduce carbon emissions.

So Andrew is here to tell us all about how it works and why it's so important.

Welcome Andrew.

Thank you, Chris.

I appreciate it.

Thanks for being on.

And I'm excited to talk to you because this is like, this is such a relevant topic right now.

I mean, like, you know, we were talking before about how the water temperatures around Florida are just like off the charts.

Like even one spot got- Yeah, a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Yeah, even one hit a hundred and one, I think too, which was the record.

And it's been going that way for a long time.

So there's this enormous energy stored up in the ocean.

We're seeing the effects, you know, like I'm under bad air quality because of basically Canada's burning to the ground at the moment, it seems like.

You know, so there's just so much happening right now.

I mean, it's just really evident, you know, that there's something going on.

You are looking, you're not the one, you're not solving that problem necessarily, but you're giving us time to solve that problem, right? So could you- Exactly.

Can you talk about like, what is the state of global warming and what's going on right now? If anyone who follows the news, who understands about these different types of barriers or tipping points, everyone says 1.5 C, which is about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

These are different types of tipping points, you know, that can cause irreversible damage to the planet.

And so, you know, there are estimates saying that in 10 years we'll hit 1.5 C, but we've already hit that before.

I mean, it's already happened like this year.

And so we're kind of not so much like ahead of schedule, but because I've been reading about scientists saying, like, this is what they predicted if, like business as usual, if we kept on emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or greenhouse gases.

So we're, but we're just a little bit ahead of schedule and it's, you're seeing it, you know, unfold in front of your eyes, which is really scary.

We're overachievers on destroying the planet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's something where we've, but we've done it at the price of, you know, we've been able to become like a developed country, a developed nation.

We've been able to, you know, lift ourselves out of poverty because of this progress of this access to cheap energy.

And so there are trade-offs, but we're starting to pay for some of those debts that we haven't paid yet.

And what we're trying to do is give you guys a little extension, if that makes sense.

Because right now these debts are coming in and we can't pay them off.

Clearly we don't have a way to control wildfires yet.

We haven't figured out a way to stop burning fossil fuels and make fusion cheaper.

You know, these technologies haven't scaled up yet and they're very promising technologies.

I mean, there was just a breakthrough that's trending on Twitter right now that there's this new compound, LK-99, that essentially makes room temperature superconductors, meaning that there's no resistance to electricity anymore.

Yeah.

I'm, the jury's still out on that one a little bit though.

I'm a little skeptical about that because I've heard that before.

Me too.

It'd be great if it's true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's great if it's true, but like, you know, we're on the precipice of a lot of amazing things.

Yeah, for sure.

You know, AI is starting to become something that's actually commercial viable.

Yeah.

You know, these are things that are happening in our lifetime and they're still selling very quickly.

It's going to need a lot of cheap energy or something to fuel this growth.

Right.

To hopefully lift more people out of poverty and to, you know, having a better future for them.

Well, and that's an interesting point too.

The sort of the equity piece of it, you know, that you kind of are hinting at there is that, you know, we, as an, you know, like an advanced nation have, you know, used every dirty fuel there is out there, but there's a lot of developing nations that still have to go through that development cycle.

And you know, they're, they're, unfortunately the planet doesn't have a whole lot of room to absorb what it is they're going to produce the, using the cheap fuel sources that they have.

So it, we can't, it's, it's hard for us to say we can have it, but you can't.

Right.

Exactly.

And, and to be fair, like, you know, if you want to put the carbon counting and show who's the biggest spenders of, of, of carbon right now, it's, it's the U S it's, it's Europe, right? We're, we're the biggest ones.

Per capita, right? Per capita.

Yeah.

So it's, it's, you know, something that we have to then also own up to ourselves because, you know, our past, our past debts are, you know, have been going on for a while since, since we became a superpower.

I mean, it's, it's very clear.

Yeah.

I mean, I think U S carbon is the biggest, like, in terms of economy.

Yeah.

So what you're trying to do is, I guess the best way to call it is, is solar engineering, right? I mean, it's, it's, I mean, it's a kind of form of, I guess it would fall into the terraforming bucket even at some level, but what is solar engineering and why do we need it? Solar geoengineering is essentially, there's different types.

The one that we're focused on is stratospheric aerosol injection is essentially trying to limit limit 1% of the sunlight that reaches our earth.

That's that's all we need really to decrease some of the global temperature.

Yeah.

And so we use this technology because, or the reason why we're studying this technology, we're pursuing this type of technologies because it's been observed in mother nature.

Strata volcanoes in particular, there was this one back in 1991 called Mount Pinatubo injected 20 million tons of SO2, sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and it caused the world to cool for about over a year.

And so by 0.5 degrees Celsius.

So before, you know, I talked about like 1.5 C as a tipping point, literally one volcanic eruption cooled the earth to, you know, bring us back to a normal, normal state of affairs, essentially pre-industrial levels.

The reason why we say 1.5 C it's, it's essentially referring to what the temperature was before we started the industrial revolution, which is around the 1850s, 1870s.

And so essentially we want to bring it back to that, that state, because that's before humans started to, because what's causing all this global warming and global heating and climate change is the human element of all this carbon dioxide being released.

So one of the things you mentioned is that, you know, nature has sort of shown us how to do it with, with volcanoes.

You talk about injecting a lot of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.

And I know, you know, there's that, even that hair song, you know, it's sulfur dioxide, you know, so I mean like for a long time we've talked about sulfur dioxide and the idea of like you know, acid rain and things like that.

But really there's a big difference into where you apply it, right? I mean, if it's, if it's in the atmosphere, that's a problem, but if it's in the stratosphere, kind of like what volcanoes do, that's a whole different game, right? Exactly.

So it really depends on location as well as latitude and longitude and altitude .

So it's, you know, and also the particle size itself.

And so we deploy about 20 kilometers up, which is double the height of where commercial airliners usually coast.

And so we're way, we're above any rain clouds, we're above any type of atmospheric weather.

Most of all atmospheric weather happens in the troposphere.

So that's where we currently occupy space.

But then above that is the stratosphere.

So that's the next level up and that's where usually the ozone layer is occupied.

So that's how high we are.

And so we use balloons in order to disperse SO2 in about roughly 20 kilometers plus.

And what that does is there's this effect called the Brou-Dobson effect that then circulates the aerosol around the entire earth.

And so it's like applying sunscreen lotion, you know, on top of your skin.

I know scientists have long been talking about, you know, the possibility of injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to help with this.

You know, because we've seen, it's sort of a natural process that occurs on earth anyways with volcanoes and that.

And I think one of the things that's interesting about that is that it's not a permanent change.

It's a temporary change.

So you know, if you're trying to, you know, make corrections, you're not, you know, the possibility of overcorrection or, you know, doing something really bad isn't necessarily there because it dissipates after a time, right? Right, exactly.

And so it's a double-edged sword, right? I do want to be clear and be transparent that, you know, there's two sides to it, right? If we deploy so much, like say we do so much that, and then we keep on, we have to continue to keep doing that level of amount.

Because if we stop doing that, then there's this risk called termination shock.

So there is that, so once we start at scale, like we need to continue to do it until we decarbonize, until we stop burning phosphors, until we can remove that existing CO2 that we put up in the atmosphere since the 1870s.

So like, that's the big part of this entire thing.

It's once we get to scale, we have to keep continually going because it is temporary.

Right.

Because it only does last for about a year to three years.

And so once we start, and so that's what we're trying to do right now.

We're having these very small deployments.

We have about 120 customers.

Some of them are paying us monthly to essentially deploy a small amount of SO2 to offset their carbon footprint.

And essentially, we'll keep scaling up.

And as we do it, as we grow, as we scale, because right now we've only done roughly about like 15,000 in revenue, total lifetime sales.

It's a very small amount.

So it doesn't justify to fly satellite over our deployments.

Because that's when we start to have to get at scale.

And that's when there will be actual effects that you can actually notice via instrumentation.

And so we're starting with this low level deployments to one, just educate people on, "Hey, this is a thing that we can actually try." But as you mentioned, we're letting capitalism decide here.

If people don't want this, don't pay for it.

We have about three years of runway in order to figure it out, in order to get to the next stage where we feel validated enough to then scale this up even higher.

But right now we're just, we're a pre-seed company.

We're essentially trying to understand, if we offer this as a service, will anyone actually buy it? Because if no one buys it, then we die.

We go away.

And the thing that's really interesting about it is the economics of it work.

Because what you're doing is not super expensive.

I mean, when you talk about changing the global climate, you think of like, this is something that's going to cost trillions of dollars, right? But really you're using weather balloons and just cans of gas, right? Exactly.

Yeah.

And we're getting out of a welding supply store right now.

And so these things are very accessible as long as you have a place of business , a business license.

They'll give you these things and you can just go ahead and do it.

We started on Amazon.

Basically 99% of all of our things that we source, including the sulfur, that we made into a theatric moment when we did it in Nevada, where we burned it in a barbecue to turn it into sulfur dioxide.

But that was part of the theatrics to get people's attention of like, this is how easy it is.

Yeah.

Like it costs, we sell one ton, offsets the warming effect of one gram of SO2 deployed into the stratosphere, offsets the warming effect of one ton of CO2 for a year.

And that costs a dollar.

It's super cheap.

Like it's cheaper than planting a tree, right? Plus you don't have to hire a person to go out there and plant it.

Literally you have a balloon.

Like our balloons right now can offset the warming effect of a hundred tons, or I'm sorry, a thousand tons.

Wow.

A thousand tons of CO2 for a year.

So I bought, whatever, I guess 20 grams of it or something like that then.

You bought, well, so you bought the one-off product.

So we charged for that one for $10 per ton, essentially.

But if you go on the monthly plan, then it's a dollar a ton.

So I got to get on the monthly plan and really crank it up.

But so like by buying $20 worth of this stuff, I reduced, I took out two tons.

I took out the equivalent of two tons.

That's kind of cool.

Temporarily.

Temporarily.

Temporarily, but it helps, right? It's like planting a tree and letting it live for a year.

That's another way to put it.

I like trees.

But you plant it about, yeah.

But they only last for a year.

Because this is a temporary part of it.

It's the double-edged sword.

You have to keep doing it until humanity scales up carbon removal.

Because if we stop all of a sudden, all that CO2 that we're continually putting up, right? Because what this does is the moral hazard argument is that it's going to cause business as usual activities.

We're going to continue to burn fossil fuels.

And so if all of a sudden we stop putting on the sunscreen, what will happen is the sun rays will come down into the greenhouse gas layer that we've been building up more and more and uncontrollably heat up the atmosphere.

And that's what actually happened.

There's been some observations happening in the North Atlantic right now.

The shipping lanes have been increasing heat because we stopped putting sulfur in our marine fuel.

Well, it's interesting because you mentioned taking the sulfur out of the fuel that the tankers run, or well, the large ships run.

Yeah, shipping carrier ships.

And so that amount of sulfur is disappearing from the North Atlantic.

Actually, you could see a difference in the climate, which is unfortunate because we need the climate to be better, but we also don't want that sulfur in the atmosphere right there.

So it's good that they took it out.

Now we just got to need to get it up higher to get the benefit.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

It was close.

It was accurate, but it just was not on the right target, right? We have to readjust.

It's something that we've just badly been accidentally geoengineering the planet.

And now we have to be more purposeful about it.

And so that's what we're trying to figure out.

And so, I know there's a lot of controversy.

I don't want to say, there's just some concerns and potential controversies around doing this.

And we kind of talked about one, is sort of the idea, people of a certain generation, like myself, we heard all about, oh my gosh, sulfur dioxide and acid rain.

But that's kind of a different problem we talked about.

But there's a couple other ones that in some ways are kind of give or take.

When you're up there, there's a potential for some ozone depletion, correct? Yep.

And so that's, how much do we want to accept of that to get the planet cooled down? You mentioned the moral hazard aspect of it.

There's a political angle to this.

I mean, could you kind of speak to some of these things? The ozone layer, yes, that has been observed, actually through the volcanic eruptions.

But we also observed that it wasn't catastrophic, right? Humanity has done a really good job of banning all ozone-depleting aerosols back in the '90s, which was great.

And so it has been repairing.

And it has been getting tougher.

That's something that will be, obviously, we know that it is a thing that we need to monitor and we can, which is great.

I think the more concerning factor is the unknowns, right? All the things that we've already discussed before, there are ways around it.

Moral hazard's another one, right? That's something that we can address as well.

Like, okay, fine, let's make laws or rules that if you do start to buy sulfur dioxide credits, cooling credits from us, you have to also have some kind of plan that you need to be accountable for to also decrease your greenhouse gas emissions, right? Your scope one, two, and three emissions, right? This isn't something where you get to take methadone and heroin at the same time, right? Right, right.

But that's a great point.

You gotta pick one.

Yeah, it's a great point.

We do have to take some responsibility at some point.

I mean, this is like, hey, I've got a tourniquet around your arm, but you still need to go to the hospital.

Right, exactly, exactly, exactly.

And so, you know, the funny thing is, I think the people who are making these types of criticisms are saying, these are future problems that if we're at that stage, we're making billions at that point, right? We're not there yet.

Right, right.

We haven't even gotten started.

All we've done is been able to maybe just open up the back door just a little bit, but there's nothing.

We've just been in the news.

That's about it.

In terms of actual scientific rigor, there hasn't been a lot that happened.

Most of it's been provocation.

So, will we ever get there? I don't know.

This is the whole point.

This is the exercise of this entire company is to figure out, can we even get there to having those actual discussions about, should we do this at scale or not? But we're not even close.

So, people who say like- That's why we're talking here, so that we can help the market know about you so the market can actually decide about this.

Exactly, exactly.

Hopefully, hopefully.

Well, who knows? Or maybe some kid or some person out there who's looking at this saying, "Man, this guy's an idiot.

I can do this way better." And figure this out faster, like, great.

Actually, I want more people who want to focus on this because maybe there's a better solution out there.

We just don't know yet.

I have to think, it seems like we have gotten to the point that every time we say, "If we get to this point, it's going to be really bad," and then we get to that point 10, 20, 30, 50 years earlier than we thought we were going to get to it.

So, we're not going to need less energy anytime soon, is my thinking.

Right.

Right? We don't need it anymore.

Yeah.

And to switch to cleaner energy sources is time-consuming, it's expensive, it's not adaptable for every environment.

So we're going to have to kind of deal with cleaning this problem up over a period of time.

And something that gives us a little bit of play in there so that, you know, because look, the coral in Florida is destroyed.

You know, we're seeing like— Yeah, it's happening now.

Right now, we're seeing catastrophic events happening all the time.

And there's a price for that, too.

People my age are not having kids because they're afraid of the future of their unborn children.

Like, it's sad, right? And so, I'm trying to—like, one thing that we get a lot of feedback from our customers is like, "You're giving people hope.

Like, at least you're trying something, do something instead of just being paralyzed." And I was that person like, you know, three, four years ago.

I was like, "Damn, like, what are we going to do here?" Like, I just learned that like, recycling was a scam.

Plastics do not go back—go to China anymore to be recycled, to be used to, you know, new shoes or iPhones or whatever.

They're literally just being thrown away.

So, you know, I was a Boy Scout.

Like, you know, I wanted to leave, you know, come to a place and leave it better than I left it, right? That's one of the mottos.

And so, it was just shocking to me to see that like, how we've progressed so far and nothing's—I mean, I'm not saying nothing is done.

There just hasn't been any kind of reversal.

Like, we haven't been winning this war.

Yeah, it's a war of attrition and we're losing at the moment.

And so, it's like, we have to do something a little bit more drastic here.

Otherwise, like, we're playing chicken with Mother Nature.

Like, she's gonna win.

Yeah, and that's not good.

And I think, you know, one of the things that's interesting about what you do is, you know, you talk about offsetting like, a ton of carbon in the atmosphere, but it's not necessarily—like, you can't be in the business of trading carbon credits because you're not actually taking carbon out.

These are just offsets, right? So how does that play into things? That's the thing.

I mean, I think we can, you know, sell it in the offset market.

And so, like, one idea we have is that we blend it with, like, more permanent offsets.

And so, it's almost like an EFT or like a mutual fund where a lot of these carbon offsets cost like, the ones that are actually permanent, like direct air capture or bio oil or biochar.

Like, these are all things that have more permanent basis of capturing carbon and putting it somewhere else, usually below ground.

They cost anywhere from $300 to $800 per ton.

And so, it's really expensive.

So if you want, like, say, a Pepsi Cola, who emits about 4 million tons per year or something like that—hopefully they're not sponsors, but they emit roughly like 4 million tons per year—you know, that's going to cost them, like, billions of dollars to offset their current carbon offset.

Plus there's just no supply for it, period, right? And so, we can maybe have some kind of, like, a mutual fund where every dollar that you spend, like, 50 cents, 20 cents, I don't know what, some kind of percentage, goes towards these carbon, more permanent solutions.

But you're front-loading it with cooling credits so then you can actually cool the earth in the meantime.

Those technologists could scale up by actually giving them dollars to actually, you know, create that supply.

Yeah, that's super cool.

I mean, I like the idea of, you know, having this broader thing.

Maybe when the balloons go up, you could have, like, a little thing on the bottom that starts spilling seeds, tree seeds out.

So, while it's going up to protect us, it's planting trees at the same time.

You get the carbon offsets with that.

The tree people would not be happy with that.

No, I know, I know, I know.

You know, what about the politics of it? I mean, you know, it's one thing to, you know, get America to agree to do this, but, I mean, this is kind of a global impact kind of thing.

Getting everybody to kind of agree on it at scale, you know, how do you see that playing out? What the experts say is, hopefully what will happen is that we'll have some governing body like the UN that has some teeth that can, you know, get the entire world to sing Kumbaya and hold hands and do this together.

But we've got a land war happening in Europe right now.

We thought it'd be over in six weeks.

I don't think we're going to do that anytime soon.

And so, in, you know, the US and the EU have looked into this already too as well.

And I think the conversation is too early for them.

The way that I think that the politics will play out is how AI is currently playing out in politics.

It wasn't a big deal.

I was working in AI myself personally back in 2018, and I saw this happening.

But it all came to a front this year, where now they're talking in front of Congress members, right? Doing an entire song and dance because it's becoming a critical part of, it's going to become a critical part of our economy.

And so, I think it's the same way here.

We're just too early for stratospheric air assault injection, but you're starting to see the beginning stages of it because it is such a, it is a solution that will affect us all.

And I think it's important that people know what's happening right now.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's one of those things.

Until you get to a certain critical density, you know, people aren't going to pay much attention.

But once you start hitting that and you can start to see some differences, everybody's going to be talking about it very quickly, I imagine.

For sure.

For sure.

The way you're monetizing this is, you've got on your website, you've got the ability for people to make donations, you've got the one-off kind of things, you've got subscriptions.

Is that sort of the ultimate plan for this? Or how do you look at financing all this? We are VC-backed.

We've raised about $1.2 million so far.

We've burned through about $200K of that, so we've still got about a million left in the bank.

There's only two of us.

So we've got runway for about three years to try to figure this out.

So it's just been a lot of experimentation.

Right now, our focus is on consumers.

And so people have just come into our website and, you know, buying those products, as you mentioned.

And we've got roughly about 120 customers, but we're also focused on trying to do outreach to enterprise customers as well.

Because we know that they are the biggest emitters.

They're the ones that need the biggest help.

And so they have all these net zero goals that they need to meet by 2030, 2050.

It's not happening.

They're not reaching them, period.

Just because there hasn't been this explosion of carbon offsets that everyone thought there would be.

Because it turns out 90% are fraudulent.

That's not good.

That's not what we want to hear.

It's stuff that you just don't want to hear.

And so right now, their heads are kind of buried in the sand right now, unfortunately, as they probably focus more on AI, because that's the hot trending thing.

ESG has kind of taken a backseat this year, I think, in my opinion.

But obviously, it's just something that still becomes more to your forefront as the world turns, as it's happening now.

Well, I've heard so much more about ESG this year than at any point in the past .

I mean, it just feels like, you know, I'm sure you who've been kind of paying close attention to this problem are like, "God, this is moving so slow." But all of a sudden, I am seeing a lot of talk around ESG.

So I think that's at least a little encouraging.

You know, you talk about market viability.

Again, we're still very early.

We started this company back in October 2022.

The first couple of months was just to figure out if we would get arrested for this.

And did you? It really was.

No, we didn't.

We didn't.

Yeah, we got some calls from the FBI.

Okay, my name is James Peek.

I'm a special agent with the FBI in Los Angeles.

I had a question we want to run by you.

I believe that you're the founder of Make Sunset.

You know, happy to share a recording of that.

If you want to see it, listen to the voicemail.

We talked to the FAA, who controls airspace around the US as well, or doesn't control it, but, you know, governs it, as well as, you know, NOAA, which helps with weather predictions.

So it was one of their big things, but also huge in climate change related matters.

So has any F-22s recently shot down any of your balloons? That's just a big question.

No, no.

We can't confirm or deny, but I don't think it has.

Because once it's into the stratosphere, we can't see it anymore.

There hasn't been any charred remains, the balloons that we have been able to recover.

So that's probably a better way to put it.

We did launch during the height of those, like that whole pandemonium.

It was because our first launch in the US was on February 13th, I believe.

That was Super Bowl Sunday.

And the morning of, that's when they actually scrambled F-22s in Canadian air space to shoot down a balloon.

And so the morning of, we're calling the FAA, we're like, "We're launching three balloons.

Is that cool?" And they're like, "Yeah, sure, whatever." And then like, that was it.

And we're reading in the news that they're shooting down these Chinese balloons .

So the difference is that these balloons that you've been reading in the news, I mean, you've also read about our balloons, but the balloons that get shot down usually fly for about 100 days.

Our entire flight time is about roughly three to four hours.

That's good.

Well, I think you need to paint a big logo on it so that people know it's not aliens.

An American balloon.

Yeah, for science research only, really.

I mean, that's what every- Or maybe you do paint alien symbols on it and just really mess with people.

People definitely, like when we were recovering some of the balloons, we were definitely in some back country areas and people definitely thought we were not, they thought we were the government or something.

I don't know exactly what, but- Area 51 coming.

Yeah, yeah.

So do your balloons have GPS on them? Is that how you locate them when they come down? Exactly.

So GPS also has a flight computer, cameras, basically any instrumentation that could verify that one, we've deployed it at the correct altitude that we were aiming for, and then two, to recover it, as well as visual confirmation.

That's why we have the cameras, to see the curvature of the earth, which is really cool to look at, but also where it is in location.

Can you reuse these balloons? We can reuse the instrumentation, but not the actual balloon itself, because that's made out of latex.

And so that's our current delivery mechanism.

It's both the feature, it's the feature that it actually explodes at the height of where we're trying to deploy it.

The great thing is balloon science has been pretty much solved.

That's a fairly well-known science.

Ever since the golden age of ballooning back in the 1800s.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So it's a technology that's been around for a while.

And so as long as you know the size of the balloon, how much lift gas you put in it, all these different other variables that you put into a calculator, you can actually determine, depending on what balloon it is and what the material is, where it actually terminates its flight.

And then does it have a parachute that brings it down, or how does it come down ? Exactly.

Exactly.

And so we're currently trying to develop steerable parachutes, actually, as well, because sometimes we have to go out into the boonies, into the wilderness, essentially, to recover some of these things.

Yeah, I got to imagine it can actually get a little weird.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, we're developing technology that can actually steer it back closer to the launch site than having to drive three or four miles out.

So what's next for MakeSunsets? Where do you go from here? Just educating more people that this is a viable solution until we can figure out better ones.

Right.

Yes, we'll find more customers.

Yes, we'll try to close a large oil and gas company to try to offset some of their carbon footprint.

But right now, it's just trying to figure out how do we get there.

I guess that's what the next step is, right? Trying to find product-market fit, because we're pre-seed.

Well, anything I can do to help you get this going, because while I am enjoying the warmer winters and less shoveling in Chicago, it's probably not a great thing for the planet that I'm enjoying the winter so much.

That's the thing, right? Hopefully in the future, we can actually control that, right? If everyone wants 70-degree weather with minimal humidity, then what's so wrong with that, as long as there's no negative consequences that hurts other people? I do like a little bit of winter.

So if you could give me maybe a month or two of just abrupt winter, and then it stops and starts and goes away, and I don't have to deal with slushy snow and stuff, I'm all good.

Yeah, like 100 years from now, right? Maybe that's something that would be possible.

But right now, we're just trying to figure out what the down thermostat is, right? We've figured out how to crank up the thermostat, but we haven't figured out how to push it down within our control.

It's super cool.

How can people contribute to this project? Just check out our website.

Go to makesunsets.com and buy a cooling credit.

You click on the launch button up in the upper right, I believe.

Is that where you go? Exactly.

Thank you.

Well, that's incredibly cool.

I'm excited for what you're doing.

I know this is very early stage, and you're just getting going, but I think this is something that people want something they can do that actually could have a real impact on global warming.

So this is something to give people a chance to participate in saving the planet in a faster way.

That matches the kind of urgency that we need, I guess is the best way to put it.

That's a great way to put it.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for being on.

Really interested in what you're doing.

I'm going to keep, you know, buy me some more credits and offsets, more tons of carbon in the atmosphere, and hopefully other people will do that as well.

So thanks so much for doing what you're doing.

Thank you, Chris.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me on the show.

Thanks for watching.

I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

And if you could give us a like, subscribe if you haven't already, and I will see you in the next one.