Pirate Wires - WTF Is Happening In Canada?! & Meet "The Rainmaker" | PIRATE WIRES EP#11 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

EPISODE ELEVEN: The Pirate Wires staff welcomes "Rainmaker" CEO Augustus Dorickoto to brainstorm possible reasons the entire country of Canada seems to have gone insane, why American culture is one of decline (and how to fix that), geo-engineering, and Augustus' cloud seeding company Rainmaker. Featuring Mike Solana , Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Augustus Doricko Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.theindustry.pw/p/pay-me-mark-zuckerberg https://www.whitepill.pw/p/the-rainmaker Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Augustus Twitter: https://twitter.com/ADoricko TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:30 - Welcome Augustus To The Pod! CEO of Rainmaker 1:00 - Blame Canada - WTH Is Going On?! 13:45 - The Dumbest Country On The Planet?? 21:40 - How The Rain Is Mishandled By Government 36:15 - No Progress 40:30 - How America Can Progress Forward - Give Us Back Our Moon! 42:30 - How We Can Control The Weather 48:50 - Cloud Seeding 1:04:45 - The Truth About Castro 1:05:05 - Check Out The Full Interview With Augustus On White Pill 1:05:25 - See You Next Week! Pirate Wires Podcast Every Friday!

I just consider Canada like America light. It sort of is ours. Canada is like if you had a teenage son who was maybe a little fucked up and he lived in your backyard in a tent and was like, I'm living on my own. It's like, you sure you are, buddy. You sure are. And it's like, if we ever needed him to come inside, we could just make him come inside, but we don't need to make him come inside. He's a loser, but he's our loser. So we let him exist happily out there for now. Welcome back to the pod, guys. Today, we've got Augustus Tirico with us, the founder and CEO of Rainmaker, which is a company that is literally making the rain. We are going to talk about one of my favorite topics, geoengineering. It's a big exciting,

techno-optimistic progressive conversation. But before we can get to that, I am going to have to drag Augustus into the mud with River, Brandon, and I for a moment to talk about, I guess, what is increasingly just the failed experiment called Canada. There are a lot of problems going on here and it's sort of weirdly the story is kind of like it's been weirdly bubbling up for a while and people keep dipping in for a second and being like hey like that's kind of strange like what's going on in canada we've got legislation that is essentially sort of pro-suicide legislation you have all these accounts of people who are just mentally depressed,

mentally ill, depressed, going into hospitals for help and coming out with, in some cases, advice that perhaps suicide is the way. You have the question of, and I'm not saying it's true, the question of whether or not Trudeau is actually Castro's son, you have in the context of Castro saying, my God, we'll never let happen in Canada what's happened in America. I guess referring to the sort of like anti-transiting of the children thing that's happening in schools. I would like to just sort of flash back to the trucker situation in Canada in which the Canadian government completely stripped political protesters of

the right to bank. You have this alarming new trend in DEI, which is DEID, literally diversity, equity, inclusion, and decolonization, which is being normalized across Canada. Just today, I saw a note about Jordan Peterson having to submit to something called just unironically re-education if he wants to keep his psychology license. But the lead story for me, the one that I wrote about this week is the Canadian government forced Google and Facebook to basically pay local Canadian, I mean, it's framed as local Canadian news companies for linking to local Canadian news companies. This is a trend that we saw started in Australia. It resulted in really a couple of large corporations

making a lot of money. Some sort of backroom deals are made. Facebook and Google persist in linking and sort of everything goes on as normal. But the Canadians are, you know, they passed this legislation. They're really serious about it. We're now in the middle of a wildfire crisis in Canada.

I say we, it's not we, but I think it is interesting to sort of look up north and see what's going on over there. And instead of talking about the actual crisis, the politicians have taken to attacking Facebook for not sharing news links about the wildfire crisis, which I think is just incredible because they've all but forced the companies to do this, right? It's like you're saying there's no cap on the payments. You essentially have to pay for people to share news about something that may or may not even be news. In this case, this narrow case, it absolutely is. We have all of these bizarre stories from the Toronto Star, whatever the hell it is, just completely useless stories about

random celebrities changing their gender for the fourth time. That's an actual story shared by John Kay on Twitter. And it's just a crazy concept at the intersection of media and politics and technology. I don't see a way, actually, that this doesn't come back to America. And that's one of the reasons I like to talk about Canada as much as I do, because it's sort of a bizarro world version of America where there are no checks on the actual craziest people alive and they get to just sort of run a country. Sort of run a country. I mean, they don't have a military and they're protected by America. We just kind of let them do whatever they want with our resources until we need them.

But it's an interesting thought experiment of what would happen if, for example, California was its own country. So I think we're going to see this. And I don't know, first, right off the bat, I mean, what do you guys think about this? And then Augustus, I promise there's a link back to geoengineering. We're going to get there. Sounds good. I mean, if I can jump in, there's something interesting too, right? Which is like, okay, there's a general anti-tech sentiment. But then also, like a lot of the time, like big tech has also been the proponents of these state narratives, right? Like the mainstream narratives as well. So there's a question of whether like we take as tech bros the side of like meta, right?

Just for the sake of being with our people, the tech bros, or also like if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I was thinking about this before the call a little bit, right? Like if meta also is suppressing stories that are relevant and then Canada decides to suppress stories and the ability to share links for meta on meta within that nation, like is that a net loss is it just a distraction um i i don't know i i kind of wonder if we collectively feel like we have a

horse in the race on that one just because it's like how intimately do we work with either of these regimes the regimes being like the biggest of big tech and then also like the canadian government well so we have legislation in california that is on the table. It'll be back up in 2024, I think, the next legislative session. So does that mean, Brandon, just a new year? Is that February-ish 2024 we'll be talking about this? I don't know when the legislative session starts, but definitely 2024. So it's coming up. I take the point generally, I think you're roughly correct. I'm not a huge fan of Facebook. I think Twitter's gotten most of the heat for censorship, which is crazy because of the big tech speech platforms.

Under Dorsey, they did the least. They had it for sure. It was crazy. I mean, I'm glad the Twitter files came out, at least the first few of them. We learned a lot. It was really important. But they were just kind of child's play compared to Facebook's perfection of the system. It still exists, still under operation. But I think it's like any link between the government and the platforms is just scary to me. What I don't want to be happening is a direct funnel of money of any amount from Facebook to just the politically correct media sites, which is the only way they can survive now. I just saw, I think it was the owner of one of the major Toronto papers. He was saying it's the government's responsibility to be making sure that journalism thrives, the government and big tech.

They had a sort of responsibility. This harkens back to their idea that there's something almost pseudo-sacred about the press. In America, you have a freedom of the press. And we sort of have lost sight of that freedom and have focused more and more about the innate goodness of the press. And I don't think that there is any innate goodness of the press. And we sort of have lost sight of that freedom and have focused more and more about the innate goodness of the press. And I don't think that there is any innate goodness of the press. It's like there's an innate goodness of your right to speak, but the concept of speech generally as being good is not something I agree with. And certainly what they mean is not speech generally. They don't even believe in the concept of free speech in Canada, specifically in California also. But in Canada, as you see with the Jordan Peterson thing, where this man is being taken to court literally for things that he said about of the language that they use to talk about who they were going to prop up. So I'm against it for separate from like principled

pro tech business reasons, their right to operate however they want. I'm mixed on that. I am against it for purposes of like, it's going to make the information ecosystem harder for all of us. You know, you're propping up people who don't have an audience generally to speak for everybody. They have a huge advantage. That already... So these two bills or laws, the Canadian law now and the California bill are essentially based on the Australian law that passed a few years ago that resulted in Facebook and Google paying News Corp, which is Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, over $100 million per year. So, basically, the Australian law just funnels Facebook and Google profits to, I don't know if they're the biggest news company in the world, but it's certainly not.

It's not what you think about when you think about local news. You don't think Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Right. They think it's going to like the Saskatchewan Free Press or whatever. And it's actually going to, yeah, the Murdoch's, like Fox and whatever. Yeah. It's just like as you creep closer and closer to that world in which all of these things are fused, the government, the giant corporations and the media, that's the one

party state. Like you just don't want to be anywhere near that. And again, like the reason people are like, why do you, and I don't, you know, I like to focus on America generally. I just consider Canada like America light. It sort of is ours. Canada is like, if you had a teenage son who was maybe a little fucked up and he lived in your backyard in a tent and was like, I'm living on my own. It's like, you sure you are, buddy. You sure are. And it's like, if we ever needed him to come inside, we could just make him come inside.

But we don't need to make him come inside. You know, he's a loser, but he's our loser. So we let him sort of exist happily out there for now. But it also is just like this interesting experiment that is worth looking at because again and again, I mean, our left looks to Canada. This is like for years, the Canadians, it was like they had this credibility as morally superior entirely because of the healthcare stuff. That was the one thing they had. No one will tell you about how much morally superior they are to the average American than the average Canadian, especially if you find yourselves abroad by some unfortunate

happenstance. But I think it's like, that is what we were battling against throughout the COVID years, was this strange, unholy alliance between those three things. In America, it's taken a little bit of a backseat after the election of Biden, but that's right there. We saw what that looked like under COVID, and I think there's almost no way we don't get back there to that sort of alliance between those powers without some kind of new technological framework. Part of that is a legal framework, but a lot of it is just new technology. People keep saying crypto. I don't know when that's going to happen. But that's the thing that I resist. That's what I get worried about. And that's why this is a relevant story to me because I just don't believe that this law is

like this kind of law passes and then PirateWWire is getting money from Facebook and I get to hire whatever reporters I want. There's no world in which that happens. It's going to the Washington Post and they're going to write anti-tech shit. And that's the way it's going to be. So how does PirateWire capture the institution and start funneling state profits into the org? Well, we've got to build the institution. We have to just be bigger than Murdoch. So we're starting, you know, we're on the path. We're on the journey. It starts here. Just one podcast at a time, but that's the only way. This is just a game of power among the most powerful people alive. And they're looking to maintain it. Tech is a new fount of power, and they're just looking to sort of bring it into alignment. I mean, back when Elon was taking over Twitter in

December of 2022, the conclusion of that sort of six-month long epic story, I wrote a piece called The Fifth Estate, where I talked a little bit about this. The more dangerous, the most dangerous thing that we can face is the alliance of these things. But the tricky thing about technology for any would-be authoritarian dictator is the quality of technology is it rebirths. It resets power. Because it's new, it's constantly subverting power. Every really new technology thus far in American history has ultimately subverted. In the context of corporations. You've seen this where new technology crashes and burns, especially in tech companies, the old guard. And you've seen this in government. You've seen this in the press where now new different kinds

of politicians and different sorts of writers are able to capture attention in a way they could not have previously. That's the saving grace of this whole thing is that you see that again and again and again. However, we are getting to a place where you have technologies like artificial intelligence, which I think that's one of the great dangers of AI is that it seems to be a really centralizing technology out of keeping, I would say, with what we've seen previously. And that alarms me, but that's a whole other podcast. Right now, we're just shit-talking the media. Should we go back to shit-talking Canada specifically? I think, I mean, before we move on to the geo, we're going to get to the wildfires in a second

and what I think the whole entire Canadian Trudeau's anti-Facebook discourse was actually about. But I mean, let's maybe just hammer in for a moment longer on what really is just like, I mean, I'm torn. Is it the dumbest country on the planet, or is it the rise of an authoritarian lark? Maybe it's the American left's Dorian Gray portrait just rotting in the attic. That's what it is. It's like everything that gets floated here, like the most insane shit that gets floated on the left here that never happens or only happens like san francisco or can happen because the first movement or whatever actually is happening in canada in real time and everyone's just kind of like watching it from the outset and being completely horrified by it i mean it's like getting to the point now where you like go to

the doctor's office and they're immediately just like hey bud uh you ever thought about killing yourself and it's just like i'm here to get a mole checked out like what the fuck are you talking about you know and uh but yeah they're they've gone completely insane, whether it's this weird obsession they have with the wrong that they did to the Indians, which comparatively was not that bad. They want to be, they're like, we're Hitler too. And it's like, no, you're not. They want to be bad.

They're like, it's, I don't know. It's like they just want to feel something maybe. I don't know. It's this weird thing. The decolonization thing is specific. So when you see public universities doing DEID seminars, adding decolonization to that list, it's weird. Because if that's a part of your diversity, equity, inclusion, these are all sufficiently ambiguous terms that they can be used for pretty much anything, which is why they exist, right?

They exist to sort of put everybody on the defensive, but you don't know how exactly. And so really, you can push whatever dumb policy that you want on behalf of whatever powerful person. But decolonization is much more specific. And there's a way to actually decolonize. You would just remove the people who colonized, the ancestors of them. You would remove the structures that were built, and you would leave the land as it once was. Pristine is maybe what they would say. Barren is the word that I would use. barren is the word that i would use and uh i mean there's a there's a path to that so like how is the fount of of canadian power which i know is a bit of an oxymoron but like how is the fount of canadian power do you talk about decolonization seriously because there's a way to do that um it just requires leaving that's just i that one's wild to me well and and it's it's leaving right

like it's the host population probably being scorned. But then also like the rolling back of institutions is something that has to happen as well, right? So like what Western things do you want to decolonize in Canada, right? Like, oh, parliaments? Like, sorry, the West gave you parliament. So like, we'll get rid of that one. And then all the universities and like modern healthcare,

no more of those. Those were Western institutions. We'd prefer not to have that. Like talk about barren wasteland, right? universities and like modern health care no more of those those were western institutions we'd prefer not to have that like talk about barren wasteland right like the cities the urbanity it's not just that you know we're going to return to nature or something right it's like return to like pre-civilization and pre-history is what they're advocating for right well and if you even like scratch the surface of canadian history everything just becomes infinitely more complicated because the the quebecois especially they implement all french canadians feel that they

were colonized by the english but then the and like that was like there was and they had terrorist groups back in like the 70s and 80s there was a huge there's still like quebecois like nationalist uh parties and government uh jason trudeau's dad actually peter pierre trudeau started off do you mean um i'll get to that pierre trudeau started off as a quebecois nationalist um it's this like big weird part of their politics but and then like the indians of course are then like oh well the french colonized us but then you scratch the surface a little bit more and you realize that most of the slaves who are in canada weren't actually black they were

native americans like from the great lakes region that canadian indians had kidnapped and taken with them so it's like when we're doing this decolonization um are the indians who are in canada because they were taken as slaves from the americas uh going to be deported as well are they the colonizers are they the colonized like there's like so much like going on there like they they have an even more complicated history than i think like the united states does in some ways when it comes to this. I wonder if the worst thing about all of this, this whole conversation, the topic of decolonization and who oppressed who is just the endless looking backwards thing that happens.

You're always looking back into the past. And the thing about the past is none of us were there. We have records and we can study the records and we can correct records when people misspeak about them or whatever. But at the end of the day, we really were not, we can never be entirely sure of what happened and what didn't and what was said and what wasn't. And that makes it just this really ripe area for talking about your own kind of present day philosophical anxieties or personal grievances, rather than the much more important question of like, what do we want to be building? What do we want this country to look like? Bringing it back home in San Francisco, I don't care who lived on the San Francisco

seven by seven plot of land 500 years ago. I care about the question of how we get to Star Trek version of San Francisco. How do we get to epic, amazing, futuristic, utopia San Francisco? How do you build that? I would actually, at this point, settle for how do you build enough beds for all of the homeless people? Let's just start there on the ground floor. But even that, that's a future-oriented question. And I want to get back to just that kind of thinking in general, which is really what bothers me the most about the anti-Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg is the reason the wildfires are putting Canadians in danger thing. It's like, that's so stupid. It's obviously not true. You could just fucking go on Twitter, which by the way, you're still allowed

to post links to Twitter in Canada. And I think River mentioned to me, a weird number of Canadians are actually on Twitter, unlike in America, where it's a much smaller number of just crazy to online people like us. It's like 45% or something. So it's a lot, right? They obviously have access to that. The thing that's really happening there is you have someone creating a tech bogeyman to get away from the question of like, hey, it seems like there's more you could have done to prevent these fires. And how do we get to a world in which people are less at risk of wildfires generally? Now here, often in the case of California, this conversation falls back to global warming. Again and again and again, it's like, oh, well, these fires happened because of global warming. Well, there are two things there. One, that still

doesn't make it impossible to prevent a fire or to prepare for a fire. In the case of Hawaii, there are all sorts of examples now of, we talked a little bit about this last week, anything from the water management to the checking up on the safety precautions and whatnot of the power infrastructure. But there's this broader question of like, okay, well, if global warming is the problem, how do you reverse it? How do you cool the planet down? And why isn't that the number one thing that we're talking about? Augustus, you had actually, Brandon, to frame this for me, the real problem is just state level mismanagement of our national resources in the case of, you know, America specifically, let's bring it back home. And you had some interesting thoughts about

just our chronic misuse of water. Can you just kind of walk us through that? Yeah. So it's a multifaceted problem, but far and away the most like exemplary example of mismanagement of water in the United States in the last century is what happened just earlier this year. So everybody remembers, it was just dumping rain, dumping snow. We had unprecedented levels of aquifers being filled, the reservoirs being filled, snowpack, and there was all this water running out to sea. And so people were saying, mostly to the Newsom administration, but then elsewhere in the country, like, hey, what are we going to do with all this runoff? Can we capture it? Can we fill up reservoirs? Can we install pumps that will start actively

pumping into aquifers, right? And the Newsom administration said, I should just say California, said, well, what we're going to do instead, I know we have all these pumps, it's technology that's been around for hundreds of years at this point. We could pump hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of gallons per minute into the aquifers directly to replenish them. So we never have to worry about drought ever again. There's all this excess water. We could do that. Instead, how about I make it way, way easier for the state of California to buy and lease land from farmers, and then we just flood it. And then we just dump all the excess water there. And so there's policy, this program called Flood Managed Aquifer Recharge, where we literally say,

okay, there's too much water. Should we do something like the heroes of California infrastructure in the 60s did and build a new canal and reservoir system? No, we should just use the most archaic means of storing this water by destroying American and Californian agriculture, just dumping water on it for a dubious rate of percolation into the aquifers, right? Like the hydrology studies that are done on flood managed aquifer recharge projects are like super, super hand wavy where they say like, well, maybe there's a clay layer here. Maybe this much water will get down. We don't really know. And so it's, it's, you know, one sort of this aversion to building new things that causes our problems with water to it's our inability to innovate. And then three, like, you know, you said earlier, like there's this endless looking back and I want to look forward. I think part of the problem is so many people are looking forward, but they're desiring, I think this is because of the nature of man and our broken and fallen

condition. I think that people desire worse conditions sometimes. If you've fallen far enough away from, I'll say the good, I'd say God. But yeah, we just desire, or some people desire degrowth, and so we dump water on farms for the sake of destroying them rather than building aquifers, rather than cloud seeding more to get precipitation where we need it. So yeah, those are some huge problems. And it's taken us like the Sites Reservoir, biggest reservoir that we built in California

or that we planned to build in a long time. We're like three decades into trying to build this thing and very little progress has been made. So California is a mess. That's maybe a reason that it's not so rational to expect us to try a new pump thing or build some huge project. You could just look at California over the past 40 years, let's say, and assume not incorrectly that we are not capable of doing stuff like that anymore. It's probably a combination of things. It could be just whatever the weird union situation is, whatever labor regulations are. It could be a lack of talent. It could be a lack of will. Maybe it compounds, but certainly you look at something like our high-speed rail situation,

which is famously a joke. It's been so long and so much money and nothing has been built. And you can't help but wonder, is it even worth trying to do something like this in this state until something changes in a meaningful way, until there's some sign of hope that these people in charge are capable of doing something more complex. Dude, I don't believe in the macro. I don't think that the labor conditions matter. I don't think that the regulatory regime matters. I mean, it's kind of hyperbolic in the sense that obviously they play a role, but all it really comes down to, the most scarce resource is will. It's just people with the will to do great, like Faustian things, no matter how difficult it is, no matter how many regulatory hurdles you have to run through,

like, so be it. If the regime can't handle it, like we, we just have to believe that we'll fix it ourselves. Right. And we just need enough guys to agree on that. So Augustus, are you kind of implying that the problem over the past 30 years or so with the lack of great engineering projects that we're seeing is just fewer super awesome dudes? Yeah, dudes rock. And we need to reinforce the fact that dudes rock and then, you know, they have BattleBots competitions with stadiums the size of like NFL Super Bowl packs, like a lot of the size of the Super Bowl watching. which like I think we can do by having you know more conversations like this by having you know more factories in the South Bay of LA that are super vibey and make the aesthetics cool and exciting for people rather than just like

pleaded khaki Raytheon contractors representing defense tech or like hard tech if we had more bureaucrats that were like Audubon Bismarck rather than like whoever the unnamed paper pushers are that exist now like that would make all these things way more capable so yeah i i think we just need more great men this this is

reminding me of robert moses and there is this uh so famous city planner from i think the i want to say the 50s but he was able to do a lot um we're talking like the establishment of bridges and tunnels and um he sort of remembered uh in fairly at this point i would say extremely negative light for um building bridges through neighborhoods and um urban blight and things like this but he was sort of the last guy who was able to do enormous infrastructural things in a metropolitan area, something that's really necessary. You look at a place like the Bay Area where you have multiple small little regions with a lot of power that are all fighting with each other. So on everything from zoning in

terms of housing versus commercial zoning to public transit and things like this, you are not even capable of blending those areas into a single region. So you could do those structures, let alone actually doing them right now. It's sort of unimaginable to think about a whole new rail system budding up around the Bay Area that's getting people where they need to go. But it's like something about him, I go back to him because as you said, we don't have the will. I think that's true. And it's like, well, we need more guys to stand up and be excited about this stuff. Also true. Elon Musk is that person. He's the, I would say, and let's table all the free speech and all the Twitter stuff. Because I think it's really a major distraction from the major work that he has done, which is demonstrated that you can

build huge, crazy new infrastructural things in the physical world. And that is what he was cherished for in Silicon Valley and throughout the tech industry up until the last year or so. And that is really, I think, the most remarkable thing that any entrepreneur has done in our life. But even before Twitter, he was attacked sort of relentlessly. It's been building for a while. And I think it's like on some level, it's because of this. When you see Bernie Sanders stand up and go after him specifically for the space stuff, this was a few years ago. It's like some kind of status degrowth antibody pops up to to take care of what they perceive as a like growth-based um utopian cancer like they go after it uh i don't know i wanted i want to believe that

we can you know beat this stuff back with better stories and people keep trying. Um, I haven't seen the story yet and I don't know how you get there. I don't know how you penetrate that. It seems like there's so much, uh, standing against you and the, the drawback to status is, or I'm sorry, stasis or even just decline is just, it's like too strong. It's like the gravitational pull of it. You know, I think, um, there's this guy, Tobias H tobias huber that uh has has said a lot of cool stuff oh yeah yeah you know um and he says that like he he compares like technology at to salvation in the religious context right and says that like only a god can save us like only these um i don't think it's going to be like i you know big eac guy right but i don't think it's going to be like a big EAC guy, right? But I don't think it's going to be EAC that provides the narrative that saves us. I think that it has to be like a transcendental message where you have homies that are literally trying to act out what they hopefully are correctly perceived to be the will of God when they are working on these missions um and and so you know i think that elon has a transcendental view of of

getting us to mars and and just making it like what's your pin tweet like i just want us to be fucking amazing yeah he has a transcendental spin on exactly that idea and so um i i think that like returning to faith is probably one way and not like return return right like not like return v like let's go to the 50s and have like you know apple pies on the windowsill or anything like that right but like let's let's reconstitute our view of the world blend in the reality of modernity with like these old transcendent truths and then try to construct technologies that will pull us into like a spectacular heavenly future, right? Like the guys that worked on the Apollo project were super religious.

A lot of the guys that worked on, you know, the atom bomb were super religious. I think that that definitely is one way to help. So like kudos to Jordan Peterson for sort of injecting that back into the conversation, I think, right? back into the conversation, I think, right? Was it in the Peter Thiel interview that we just published that he kind of implied that turn from the culture respecting and aspiring to be great engineers and to do great things actually was in large part because of the atom bomb? Like that specific thing kind of changed the story for a lot of people. He does credit when you, he doesn't like to give a, a firm answer on when, cause Peter famous decline person. I think he's the number he is. He's he popped, like he didn't invent, I think it was like him and Tyler Cameron,

people talked about this, but he certainly is the reason within tech that the idea of decline is popularized. And that's an idea where, um, I think there's this default assumption in America, or there has been until very recently, that we're progressing no matter what. Every year is better than the year before. And he was like, wait a minute, actually, if you look at the pace of technological acceleration, it seems to be way down. And in fact, I think we're on a state of decline rather than progress. And his whole thing is like, you need to be progressing. his whole thing is like, you need to be progressing. So the question is often asked of him, when did it actually start? When did progress stall out? When did decline begin? And he'll give you sort of rough, there are rough ways of getting at this. So you look at the 1950s and the types of science fiction that we consumed, as opposed to the 1980s and 1990s. It's very clear that you've

left the world of utopia and entered the world of dystopia. Obviously, we've changed the way that we think about things like technology generally. And he'll also talk about people like Robert Moses. Just the way that we think about that guy is totally different now than it was back then. And the idea of huge infrastructural change to our cities, right? Something that used to be really inspiring and now it's something that's considered with dread. And in fact, you can't do it in almost any city because people rise up against it and try and stop it. So he has offered, if you push him, he'll suggest maybe, I don't know, maybe the atom bomb. Maybe at that point, the people who were working on pure research type stuff, they got to this point where something really just viscerally horrifying

was built. And if their progress type work was going to be used for that, what was the point? Why would you keep going? How could you not be a little bit turned off? And it's a really powerful, like the bomb persists today as this really powerful meme that is hard to challenge. You even see in some of the more famous blind optimist type people, the pinkers of the world, who are just like, actually, you think everything's bad, but everything's good. If you just break it down and look at the data, like, oh, you can't buy a house and you can't build anything new and your salaries are shitty and there's a ton of inequality more than ever in history. Well, you're wrong. And here is why you're wrong. And it's like, look at GDP and look and he goes down all this shit. The thing that he

will, and we can have that conversation, we'll have to bring on someone to lay that down and we can have that conversation. But the thing that he completely avoids, I read one of his most recent super, you would say, indeterminate optimistic books is maybe where Peter would put that type of thinking. He completely avoids the atom bomb. Because what do you say to that? It's a really hard thing to challenge. You can say, well, we also have nuclear power, but of course we don't really. We have it, it exists, but we're not allowed to use it. What we do have are a shit ton of nuclear bombs. And we've never been so close to extinction as a species since, I don't even know since when. I mean, I guess there were mammals around at the time that the dinosaurs all went extinct. I guess it could have turned out slightly different for us back then,

but this seems pretty bad. And they both exist. The utopia thing exists concurrently, sort of alongside of the dystopia thing. But something happened in our culture where we are just clinging to that dystopian story and it's hard to get past that. But he does he does look back at that and and and speculate you know maybe maybe that was it um and maybe it was yeah but how can you have progress if there's no goal like there's nothing to progress towards like i think the reason that america grew to what it became is because there was always throughout history there were like goals the first was manifest destiny and then after that it was like we're going beyond manifest destiny we're going to the pacific we're going we're getting hawaii we're

getting guam um we're getting the philippines whatever we have like this sort of like semi like imperial period and then that ended and then it was like okay we have the new deal era which think about it what you like but it was like a sort of radical vision of like what the state could be and how the state could transform the economy and transform people's lives. And they did a lot of good things. There was a lot of like infrastructure that's still standing that was built during the new deal period that brought, you know,

basic amenities to places of the country where there were never electricity, never running water, never anything like that. And then after that, you had the Cold War. And, you know, we put a man on the moon. We did, you know, all of these, like, incredible things to prove that, you know, American capitalism was superior to communism. And then we beat the communists. And then we spent the next 30 years treating the country like a garage sale.

And now it's like well what do we even what's even the point of america and i think like that's and i i get like some people the sort of libertarian perspective of you know like the state is evil and state is whatever but you have to have something like you have to have something for people to rally around like and that thing has to like the state has to have an idea they i this whole idea of like just desperate uh individuals all coming together humanity as a whole um you know progressing i don't know if that's really ever going to that's too big i think libertarianism i'm glad you brought it up i was a libertarian and for a really long. I would say I was the most extreme version of libertarian. I was an anarcho-capitalist. I read all the books. I was very radicalized, I would say.

And libertarians tend to do this thing where they look back at our founding intellectuals and they frame them all as libertarians, but they were not. They all believed in something. They all had very concrete plans for what the country could look like and should look like. And they're out there evoking ancient Rome and the empire and things like this. You see that in our early architecture once we have enough money to start building shit and look at DC, right? That's Rome. That's what the influence was. I think the other thing they get really... So they get history wrong because they have to believe in this myth of there is this world, this ideal world that could exist in which nobody has any vision whatsoever. And it's this like pure freedom sort of just progress happens magically and everything is just magically better.

It's like market fundamentalism. I love a market. I love a free market, but I don't believe that things just happen. And that is truly their belief. It is the idea that you can exist in a state with no ideas and beautiful things can happen. But in fact, if you're coming with no ideas and that's what you're fighting for, all that really guarantees is that people with bad ideas are going to win because a bad idea is always going to win over no idea whatsoever. And you really see this in sort of like every election cycle when someone's talking about, it's usually with the sort of far left talking about some kind of new welfare program. And the response is typically when you're like, oh, you can't do that because of X, Y, and Z.

Why don't the Republicans ever come up with a solution to the problem? The average person wants the government to do something. They do. And you can wish that wasn't the case as much as forever, but all that means is you're going to lose forever. The average person wants that. We have a democracy, we're a republic, but the democratic piece is very, very important. And it has gotten much more important over the years as we've become more of a democracy than a republic. You have to do something that corresponds with that innate sense the average person has that our leaders should be building something better. And that starts with, I think, a vision for that. My favorite thing Donald Trump ever did was float the idea of buying greenland

fucking loved it like lit my whole world on fire um because my first reaction was like oh my god you can't do that and then i asked myself like wait when did i when did i pick up that idea where where was it that i i internalized the idea idea that America can't grow and shouldn't grow? And the idea of it actually is dirty in some way. That's a crazy cancer that seeps in. And I'm someone who talks about this shit a lot. And if it's even hitting me, that must be a pervasive idea. And you can see that. I mean, the way people react to that was extreme. The idea of that was really, it was like one of his scarier things. Some people thought to that was extreme. The idea of that was really, it was like one of his like scarier things. Some people thought it was just funny. I think most people

probably did. There are people that really hated it. And then there were a few who were like, wait a minute, this is the way. This is like the only way. We have to, I want Greenland. I want Cuba. I want the moon. I feel like I'm maybe expected to be excited about the Indians landing on the moon. And it's like, you know, the Russians are going up there. We're entering this period where the whole planet's excited about space again or something. That's our moon. Get off our moon. Why are they on our moon?

It's crazy. You also tweeted like moon is a state. Like not the moon, but just moon. Yeah, I agree. It should be a state. I don't know. What is it? Like 50,000

people that have to be there to to vote in in the constitution like let's get them up there agreed agreed yeah so i think i think the plan from this episode right is like we need to reopen the frontier we need a vision so i say manifest destiny up to none of it right we'll invade canada recolonize that against the deid folks there, take Canada, use Justin Trudeau's claim to make him like the puppet king of Cuba, make that like an American protectorate. And then with all the resources and oil from Saskatchewan and Alberta and wherever else, we power our gas powered rockets to moon and colonize that as well. I think that that is my takeaway. I think we're close we do

have to figure out global warming which brings me to the question of sulfur emissions this is like one of these endlessly fascinating um policy moments policy it's like the intersection of policy culture uh politics and uh you have this i mean actually brandon why don't you just break down the story for us or was it brandon or river? Why don't you guys look this up? I think it was Brandon. So in 2020, the United Nations International Maritime Organization, it's called IMO, they mandated that transatlantic shipping freighters had to cut their sulfur emissions by 80%. And that happened. So basically, these freighters, their sulfur emissions would actually create something called ship tracks. I guess maybe you're familiar with this since you're a cloud guy. The ship tracks are actually just sulfur clouds.

And those sulfur clouds reflect sunlight or ended up reflecting a lot of sunlight. sunlight or ended up reflecting a lot of sunlight. And because of this United Nations mandate for the freighters to reduce their sulfur emissions by 80%, all of those sulfur clouds have gone away. And it's basically increased the amount of light that's hitting the ocean by 50% previous to that mandate. And so what you have at this point is that the Atlantic is warming up. I see on the chart. And the climate is warming up a little bit.

It looks rapid. And to the point where, I mean, there's a lot of sort of man-made global warming is not happening type stuff. And this is, I'm not, global planet seems to be warming to me. There's a question of how much is natural and how much is manmade, but it's sort of impossible to deny that completely. And also believe what I do, which is we should be changing the planet. Like, obviously we can have an impact on the planet. I think we have had an impact. We should have an impact, but this was one of these moments where I looked at that warming water. I was just in Miami. I'm in Miami

now, but I was just at the beach last weekend. And I went into that water, man. It is hot, like bathwater, which happens, but just the numbers are dictating that are demonstrating that we're much warmer than typically. There are all these cyclones forming right now in the Atlantic or tropical storms right now. I think it's going to be a really bad storm season. And this is, we sort of, I mean, I don't know that we know this for sure at this point. These are interesting facts and we're sort of hypothesizing,

but there is a chance that like we have actually just been beating back the effects of global warming and the sort of the Al Gore argument for global warming. We've been beating it back with geoengineering by accident for decades. And if that's the case, one, we need to get that sulfur back the fuck up in the atmosphere ASAP. And we need to do it a little more aggressively because not only do we want to stem the effects of this, but we want to cool the planet down a bit. Yeah, I agreed. My friend Casey Hanmer, he has this blog post and idea about like mining down an entire mountain into nothing, just harvesting all the sulfur and then dumping that all together in the ocean. And like maybe

you get something from that that looks more like terraforming by creating islands, but also that sulfur diffusing throughout the ocean is one way to do like a variety of things. Yeah, like cool the planet down if you're producing new clouds, that sounds great. Another awesome thing is just cloud production, like anthropogenic cloud generation. We could use more clouds now, now sulfur clouds in particular, aren't great for like precipitation, but like, you know, we have all of this arid land in the American West. We have all these deserts, like the Sahara, the Arabian desert, the Gobi desert. If we can produce more clouds, even if they're not perfect because of the sulfur content in them for precipitation, we can just add additional particulate, actively geoengineer in such a way that we get more clouds

and then more precipitation from them, right? You also want to be targeting where the precipitation is falling, right? And the way the current, I always get this word, is it hydraulic cycles or hydrologic cycles? I'm talking to the right guy, right? Which one is it? Hydrology. Hydrology. It's hydrologic. So the hydrologic cycle. So that doesn't exist in the Sahara Desert because there's no water in the middle of the Sahara Desert. What you need to do, right, is build a giant fucking canal and just dump the ocean water into the Lake Chad. And we got to revive Lake Mega Chad. That does two things. One, it builds the cycle out in the Sahara and you

replanes the Sahara. Awesome. Love that. Breadbasket of the world now. Number two, it lowers the sea level. So it's a win-win. Miami has got a lot more beachfront beachfront property at this point um and we don't have to worry about flooding uh any longer of manhattan or whatnot like these are problems of the past but why can't it's like we can't even we can't even build a new bridge at this point and i was in california uh when the bridge to big sur went down i was actually in big sur at the time, we had to take a different trek all the way around. We had to cancel a trip we were hosting seven months later because the bridge wasn't up. It took like a full year, I think, to rebuild that

bridge. So it seems like it's going to be tough to get people on board with Lake Mega Chat. Okay. So I'll leave the bridge fixing to somebody else. But with respect to fixing Chad and geoengineering, I got it covered. There's a handful of terraforming technologies, though, just beyond sea flooding, which is super based and great, beyond just cloud seeding, right, where you release particulate into clouds, it condenses the water vapor and makes the rain,

beyond cloud brightening, where you dump sulfur in either the atmosphere or the ocean, which then produces more clouds. Another thing that people are modeling out now are the effects of contrails, right? Contrails, not chemtrails. When a plane flies very high and the water is ejected out of it, that crystallizes and creates those long, stringy clouds. I think they're called contrail cirrus. They're way up in the atmosphere. Those can be used as well to either increase the albedo of the atmosphere, right? Increase the reflectivity of it, drive the temperature down, or depending on the time of day when you use them, you can super precisely retain heat as well,

right? So let's say that America buys Greenland and we decide, you know, we'd have to figure out some particulars. We want to melt all the ice and we want to make it an agricultural hub. So we're going to fix the Sahara, make that a breadbasket. We're going to fix Greenland, make that a breadbasket. If you fly planes up and create these contrails in the afternoons, because there's no sun hitting the planet at that point, they act as this sort of blanket and they retain heat locally in one point in the atmosphere. So that's another piece of the tech that we can use. With respect to desert geoengineering, you can grind up biochar and other hydrocarbons into the soil and then increase the water retention. And then no matter

what the temperature conditions are or the precipitation is, if the soil can retain more water, then organics can start to grow there and then they'll emit particulate which will create more clouds like there is a whole suite of options that we have to terraform the entire planet every single desert can be moved from a wasteland into a breadbasket or a forest or whatever we desire it be and we can do that symbiotically with nature and we should um. But all we have to do is exercise the will. Like the technology has been around for decades. We just have to get good and decide to work on it. Tell me about cloud seeding, because this is something, I mean, we're approaching sort

of the end of the episode at this point. And this is the amazing science fiction seeming thing that you are working on that I think the average person does believe is just totally fake right it can't possibly be true that you can make it rain um this is since the earliest earliest recorded history on cave caves and shit it's like people painting on caves people have wanted it to rain it's like this is like how do you how do you make sure that you have precipitation so you can grow food or so that there is foods like how is that real tell us how it works tell us what you're doing tell us where it's in uh practice right now give us the whole story totally totally so um the tech was sort of stumbled upon in the 50s by this guy uh vincent schaefer and then uh not kurt vonnegut but some other guy named vonnegut and they basically had a cloud chamber

they were conducting some tests in it and then the uh analogy I love to use is like if you know Powerpuff Girls if you watch that show like the professor spills Agent X and then like creates the Powerpuff Girls um like Vincent Schaefer spilled dry ice and silver iodide into his cloud chamber and realized that ice crystals form he was like whoa if I just take this is, another instance of dude's rock and how much cooler science was in the 50s. He spilled this into his cloud chamber, noticed that there were more ice crystals and then decided, well, I got a plane. I'm just going to start hucking this out of the back of my plane over a local cloud. And he did, and it snowed in Northern New York or Western New York. So the technology was figured out in its crudest form in the 50s and then gradually improved in the 60s and 70s.

We started doing hail suppression over props all throughout the interior of the United States. We did precipitation enhancement in areas that needed more rain. And we even did something which was incredible called Project Storm Fury, where we took all of our leftover bombers and we had something called the U.S. Weather Modification Bureau. And in collaboration with the Air Force, we'd fly out over the Atlantic, release this chemical agent, and I'll get into the mechanics of how it works, release this chemical, condense the water vapor in the clouds, and get that water out of the clouds, increase the latent heat or release the latent heat in the water, expand the radius of the

hurricane, and then ultimately like mitigate the damage done by them on the Eastern seaboard. So we used to bomb hurricanes to, you know, via cloud seeding tech to reduce the damage. Talk about like awesome geoengineering. So there was this long history of us doing spectacular things or starting to do spectacular things with it. And then in the same way that in the 70s, we gave up on space travel, we gave up on fission, we gave up on geoengineering and cloud seeding. And so it really fell away. We gave up on parapsychology research, but that's a different topic. Okay.

So then there were these like holdout projects. So there was a couple of people that kept performing cloud seeding in North Dakota. There were a couple of people that kept researching it at CU Boulder and the University of Wyoming. And, you know, the progress made was, you know, not negligible, but not spectacular. All the while, the Chinese, the CCP, and then the UAE, and then the Saudis were like, oh, this is obviously a spectacular technology tree. Let's pursue it full board. So where is cloud seeding going on now? Well, there's a handful of really small operations that are sort of these artifacts of yesteryear

in the United States. But China is killing it. They're trying to terraform the entire Gobi desert. They're causing precipitation over the Gobi so that as they plant more trees, those trees can be given the water that's necessary to forest all the area. They're cloud seeding over the Yangtze River to supplement the agricultural demands and the hydroelectric demands on that river's watershed. And then the UAE and Saudi, they're trying to terraform their deserts, right? They're already doing this. It's totally real. And so I guess that's sort of the lay of the land. How does this work is relevant, right? In the simplest sense, clouds are water vapor, right? Precipitation occurs when the droplets in those clouds become either big enough, heavy enough droplets to fall in spite of the convective forces, or you get crystals, ice crystals, snow crystals that are big enough and heavy enough to fall in spite of convective forces. So what do we do? What is cloud seeding? It's using a drone or a rocket or a plane to fly up into a cloud, release a chemical, innocuous something like zinc or silver iodide, condense

the water vapor in that cloud or catalyze the freezing of it so you get big enough droplets and crystals such that it rains. And you can do this with precision over individual farms. You can do it over entire watersheds. There's 101 use cases for this tech for controlling the weather. What are the largest barriers? I imagine I can see a few. One would just be popular will. It seems a little bit scary. All new things are a little bit scary, especially now. It seems like people have an aversion to this kind of thing. Two, government, for whatever reason, doesn't like when things happen. And then technological. Maybe there's some technological hurdles you haven't laid out. Are there any glitches? I mean, obviously,

I see when you Google this stuff, you read reports on it, it seems difficult to be certain that it was the seeding that did whatever, right? You can't run experiments twice. So you can do the seeding and then it's raining and it's like, well, it doesn't work all the time. And was it going to rain or not? So it is a cultural, technological, political, which is the one that's the biggest hurdle for you right now um so the technological is solved for um there's a lot of innovation that we can do to get better yields um and so let me speak to that real quick and just say um you're right like a lot of the studies and a lot of the literature on cloud seeding have had like dubious conclusions um the reason for that's twofold one we've just

done it so imprecisely in the past. We're either literally burning a flare on the ground and hoping that the particulate and the smoke in the flare gets 20,000 feet up to the precise location in the cloud that you need. That doesn't work. So if you exclude those papers from the lit reviews, it's way more promising. And then beyond that, the other thing that was necessary to get the attribution problem solved, right, to determine exactly how much water we produce every time we conduct one of these operations, that was solved for by something called the Snowy Project in Idaho. realized that if you have really high precision radar and really high frequency sampling radar in three dimensions, and then you fly your plane as you're seating in a zigzag in a way that is totally anthropogenic, would never occur in nature, you can measure in three dimensions how big the plume of new droplets are behind your plane. And then you can, with the radar, measure the concentration of those droplets and subsequently how much water you produce additionally.

That's totally anthropogenic. So the tech is solved for, you know, we're trying to do more precise delivery. We're using drones. We're trying to do more precise identification of the locations in the clouds where the highest density of superfluid liquid water is. That's a software problem, a sensing problem. of super pooled liquid water is. That's a software problem, a sensing problem. We're also using or looking to use different nucleation agents to get better bang for our buck. The bigger thing than the tech, which we're working on, we're cooking on, is the regulatory hurdles, right? Anybody trying to do anything with drones, first of all, tries to work in the United States first. And if that doesn't work,

they pull a zip line, right? Like the company that went to Rwanda to do blood delivery and organ delivery for hospitals. You know, would love to work in the United States first, would love to make, you know, this country's geoengineering progress. We would love to make our geoengineering sector great and competitive with China and competitive with the Middle Eastern nations. But we need buy-in from folks like the FAA, folks at Niba, folks at NOAA, folks at NASA. So that's the biggest hurdle for us right now. Are the Chinese and those countries that you mentioned currently at the forefront, I guess, of cloud seeding, are they using these technologies that you're describing? Or does Rainmaker specifically have a novel approach to cloud seeding?

Yeah. So they're both the – or so rather, Saudi, the UAE, and China, they're all using drones. So this is like a novel way to drive the UAE, and China, they're all using drones. So this is like a novel way to drive the cost down, increase the precision of delivery. They are not experimenting very heavily with alternative chemicals. I'm not going to speak to which ones we're talking about for the sake of whatever IP type of stuff. So we're using novel chemicals. type of stuff. So we're using novel chemicals. We're using novel ways to disperse the chemicals so that the amount of bang for our buck, so to speak, for the amount of rain that we get per operation is higher. So this is novel. This is stuff that to my knowledge, they're not working

on yet. Inshallah, they won't be anytime soon and we can catch up because they're about, I'd say two decades ahead of us on this tech tree. In terms of the politics, it seems we're just back to, you know, policy is not your biggest problem, then it would be culture. If you can align culture with the goal of progress, real progress, and by the way, that's a word that we just really need to take back um the politics are downstream of that like you you'll you'll get the politics but they're just doing what people are responding to right people are scared of this stuff they don't want you to with the planet um i think it probably doesn't help that like the really popular ideas i mean people want to go up there and and talk about case of, in terms of geoengineering specifically, let's talk about like, people really love to talk about the giant

solar shield and things like this. And it's like, we don't got to do that. Like we don't have to talk about a giant death star looking like structure in the sky. Like we could just talk about things like ocean seeding and we could talk about things like what is it? Is it sea flooding? seeding. And we could talk about things like, what is it? Is it sea flooding? I always get the word wrong when we're talking, right? So we could talk about Lake Mecachad. We could talk about the deserts. We could talk about cloud seeding. These are the things that I think are really exciting. They are really possible. They're here. We have it. We can do it. And I think most people, you'll get the average person on board. If you tell the average person, listen, the water is too warm and these deserts are fucked up and there's a way to

change that. I think they're listening, provided it doesn't seem like there's this chance of global cataclysm sort of by accident in the case of the giant solar shield. global cataclysm sort of by accident in the case of the giant solar shield. Yeah. Well, you know, like the fork in the road that we have now is this, right? Like the West, basically every like desert ecology, the American West in particular is going to be depopulated. Like everybody in the status quo is going to have to move out of Los Angeles, probably San Francisco, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, everywhere else around there, like Salt Lake City and so on, because there's just not enough water to go around in the status quo, right? Our infrastructure cannot support this much agriculture and this many people based off

the current trends. So option one is everybody leaves the West, which would be a disaster. And even beyond that, the ecologies in the West, every bit of life in the Colorado River and Colorado River Delta is destroyed. So that is what's on the table for us in the status quo. Bad outcome for humans, bad outcome for nature. The alternative is like, yeah, less certain. We can do some modeling. We can do some predictions. We can, with our best effort and good faith, try to change the path of this like horrible, horrible status quo by cloud seeding, by using other as yet not like widely used and scaled tech. And so if I have to choose between

certain doom and like a slow whimpering death, or what could be a glorious future with some risks associated with it, I would choose the latter. There's something I wrote about a few years ago, I went down to Salton Sea in California. So it's just south of Palm Springs. It's maybe like an hour away. And the Salton Sea used to be a really popular tourist destination in the 1950s, I believe, in 1940s. Giant saltwater sea in the desert, beautiful ecosystem all around it. And it's a total mistake like it was flooded by accident from i think the chicago another the colorado river like a levee broke or something and flooded the area and so you have this this giant uh you have all this water hit these salt

beds you create a salt water massive salt water lake it builds this hydrologic cycle you have like like animals plants all around there and then you build up an economy around it. And then slowly, little by little, because there's not supposed to be a lake there, it's just been drying up over the years. And as it dries, the salinity increases, the water becomes more toxic, all of the animals die. And now you're getting to this really noxious point where you have these giant sand clouds that are just super toxic. And it's just like a kind of waste dump down there. And really all you have to do is flood it again. Not even with fresh water. You could do it with salt water. I checked the salinity.

The ocean water is way less salty than the salt and sea. It would really help if you just did that. That's doable. It's manageable. We don't have the will for some reason. We got to get there. That's doable. It's manageable. We don't have the will for some reason. We got to get there. But I guess just, I think about the Salton Sea a lot because it was this, we accidentally terraformed. It's right there. We did it. We know how it works. We can do it again. And I guess the future that I want to see, and this is what I'm so excited about, just kind of not only your company, but what you represent, sort of less jaded and pessimistic, right? You just only see the possibility and that's important. You haven't yet been beaten down by rejection from the stiffs in politics and culture. You just see the thing and you want

to do it. I am excited about that vision and I think it's really the way forward. I want to get to a place where the Salton season just happening by accident. We're doing it on purpose. And like, I just think that's the way. So, uh, that's it. Uh, thank you guys. Uh, thank you, Augustus for joining us. And, um, thank you River and Brandon for, uh, joining as well. Brandon, you seem to enjoy it. River, we didn't talk as much about Canada as I think you would have liked, but we'll get back to it next week, I'm sure. Oh, because I said I would tell it later. Yeah, Justin Castro is not a thing.

Oh, Justin Castro. Sorry, so he's not. I refuse to believe that, but we can look it down later. Let me plug. Also, we did an interview with Augustus on the white pill that you can read. So be sure to check that out. Yeah, check that out. And on the industry, which is our new newsletter, you really need to be responding to that just with like a hello, a hi, a something because it's being sent to your spam box. Don't know why. Let's fix the problem. Check your spam box. Dig it out. Keep us in your inbox. Talk to you guys later. It's been real.