The Pomp Podcast - #1326 Augustus Doricko | Bitcoiner Wants To Control The Weather

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Augustus Doricko is the Founder & CEO of Rainmaker Technology. In this conversation, we talk about controlling the weather by sending precision drones up to the clouds, critics, United States role, weather modification, technology required, China, private companies, and more. ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Get the freshest price feeds free for 12 months. Join Supra’s early integration program for zero-cost access to the fastest oracles and dVRF across 50+ blockchains: https://supra.com/pomp. Earn $1,500 by referring Web3 projects to use Supra services. The projects get the fastest services for free, and you earn $1,500 for every referral. Learn more at the link above. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Augustus Dorico. He is the founder and CEO of Rainmaker Technologies. In this conversation, we talk about controlling the weather, how he could make it rain, literally, or how maybe we could make it not rain, how we

could move hurricanes, how we potentially could save lives and change weather patterns. This is all possible because Augustus and his team wants to send precision drones up into the cloud and make magic happen up there with science. I really enjoyed talking to him. I'm a big, big fan. I'm an investor in the business, and I hope that they are successful because this is the type of ambition that we need from technologists in America today. I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation. Here is my episode with Augustus Dorico. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a

specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. avoid costly transaction fees, get your payouts lightning fast, and do it all securely and anonymously with the highest deposit and withdrawal limits in the industry. If you want to get in on the action, do it the smart way with crypto at betonline.ag. Head to the website, sign up with promo code POMP100 to get 100% bonus on your crypto deposit today. If you go and you deposit, they'll give you 100% bonus if you use promo code POMP100. Bet online. The game starts here. BetOnline.ag. Go check them out today.

it's as good as having the first mover advantage on every price update supra is more secure easier to integrate and runs on up to 12x lower gas per feed than other oracles so you'll want to bank on this 12 months free offer as soon as possible if you're just listening and know any builders you can earn 1500 by letting them know about this deal they can get the fastest oracles for free for 12 months, and you get $1,500 for every referral. Visit supra.com slash pomp to learn more. That's S-U-P-R-A dot com slash pomp. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Augustus here with me. I thought a great place to start the conversation is you want to control the weather. That seems absurd, but other countries do this, and maybe the United States is actually behind.

So first of all, what do you mean control the weather, and then what do other countries do? Totally, totally. So not want to, but am and inevitably will more is the plan. What controlling the weather means practically in the steps that in the stages that Rainmaker's at now is precipitation enhancement. So you look anywhere in the American West, lots of places all over the world, but let's stick to say California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, we don't have enough fresh water for the populations that we have as it is. We don't have enough fresh water for the ecosystems that have existed there. Historically, we don't have enough fresh water for the agriculture that so much of the country relies on and so much of the nations that rely on our exports to rely on. And so if we don't produce more, we're hosed, right? Like we'll have a Dust Bowl 2.0 situation. That's a big problem. But the conversation around how to solve the water scarcity problem in the West is either, you know, let's spend $100 billion on desal, which is insane, or, and I'm all for like mega projects, right? But like, you need so much political capital, you need so much literal capital. It's just a very expensive way to move water around, right?

To take it from the ocean, desalinated, pump it over mountains, maintain the pumps, maintain the pipes. And then on the flip side, there's people that just say like, well, you know, the agriculture is gone. Sorry, guys. like no more Las Vegas, no more Tucson, no more Phoenix, Arizona. And so I found a way or I found some technology that's existed for 70 years in a very nascent and crude form to enhance precipitation in the form of rain or snow and make it such that we just have more rain that we have

in the last 10 years and more rain that we have had historically over the entire American West. So precipitation enhancement is a sort of weather mod that we're starting with. There's all sorts of varied applications that people, you know, sci-fi writers have written about for a long time that cloud seeding has been applied to. So, for instance, in Calgary, in Canada, and in Alberta, people suppress hail all the time via these cloud seeding operations. Um, and then, you know, practically what that means, how does this work is important. How do you make it rain more? How do you make it hail less? Um, simply put, there are some clouds that with radar or in situ probes, you can detect the amount of water in, um, if they're above a threshold point, right. Where there's enough water that's below zero degrees Celsius, right.

Cause sometimes there's more water being convected up into the cloud than is being frozen. Um, and you can detect that in radar. if you can find them then you can fly a drone up into them spray a mineral that has a crystalline structure that's similar to ice and then have that water freeze around the mineral if that happens then you can freeze the ice crystals into big enough heavy enough ones such that they fall and melt back down as rain and we're talking like infinitesimally small amounts of this mineral it's called silver iodide that's what's conventionally used um and so rainmaker right now is seeding over a farm in the central valley and we're deploying to ski resorts now um deploying

to more farms and then potentially going to be doing some hail suppression in texas later this year so when the cloud is there you guys are literally driving a radar truck yes out into like a field or a street you're saying hey where are the clouds where's the water in the clouds and then you're taking a drone and you're flying it into the cloud correct and then dropping off a chemical and that's making it rain correct correct that's insane it's a lot of fun yeah it's uh many have said it's like twister many are saying that it feels that way so let's maybe go through the drones themselves are these like off the shelf drones are these like commercial like industrial drones like what type of drone goes there can you just buy one off the shelf or do

you have to like modify them so we work really closely with one particular company for a boutique system um there's a lot of considerations that you have like can you get to the altitudes that are necessary sometimes that's as high as like 20 000 feet right can you get into severe sub freezing conditions um can you fly through the worst icing conditions imaginable right because the clouds with the most water that's below zero degrees celsius are the worst for icing like commercial airliners avoid them all together but they're the best for seating um so we we buy them from another company, but have a partnership with them to do some modifications as necessary. What other countries do is retrofit military drones, for example, right? So like retrofitted

by car drones, the Turkish military drones are used in the UAE for cloud seeding. I forget the name of the Chinese drone that's used, but it used to have rockets on it. They now put cloud seeding flares on it. And so you can do relatively small things. Ours is an eight foot wingspan drone. um if you want to seed over you know entire regional watersheds with one system rather than say 90 square miles then you have to transition to a bigger platform so when this drone i mean eight feet wide wingspan is pretty big right so when this is going up is it just hitting one cloud and you're like you know kind of a sniper and it all of a sudden rains everywhere or do you have to go cloud by cloud and like whichever cloud is right over this specific area it's going to rain

there but let's say i had a couple acres you know if i'm on the west side of the acreage i gotta go to the east side to be able to hit those clouds as well or like how does it work in terms of the maybe the precision at which the rain falls and you're able to you know dictate that totally so so you can cover an area of about a 90 90 mile radius circle um so pretty pretty large coverage over like multiple municipalities but the question of how precise the projection of rain falling is this is interesting. So right now, nobody has done this before. Rainmaker is currently trying to get down to like 10,000 acres of precision. Historically, it's like tens of miles, right? Just because you have a plane flying 100 miles an hour up there, we fly 40, trying to be a little

bit more precise, disperse more of the chemical in the right regions of the cloud. Anything less than 10,000 acres though, if you have a cloud that's say 10,000 feet up, you have so much variation in the wind that's falling beneath that it's, it's hard to project. It's just a trigonometry problem, right? Like how far does it have to go down? How far does it have to go this way from the wind? Um, but it becomes hard to project, uh, any onto real, it's hard to project reliably onto any smaller target than 10,000 acres. So large scale commercial farm ski resorts, um, you know, municipal watersheds for, uh, their reservoirs, that kind of thing is all pretty precise. And I think that we can lever up over time to become better if we're modeling this

better, if we're identifying the appropriate conditions better. You know, nobody's applied like machine learning applications, or there's very little in the way of machine learning applied to meteorological considerations, just because meteorology hasn't been that sexy. And so the best talent has gone elsewhere. Now, Google made GraphCast just recently, which is a great model this but um you know if if we can draw more of the best talent in both physics chemistry ai then um i think that we'll easily be able to one up the precision but two up the yields of our precipitation enhancement um and then probably develop some other other products like hail suppression etc so the people who are the detractors the critics uh maybe they don't

like your mullet maybe they don't like other things but like what are their complaints you think someone doesn't like my mobile no i actually think that uh they're like see i told you i knew that that's the type of person that would be doing this right what is he really up to totally like what are the critics what are they uh yeah what are they yelling about so there's there's three there's three considerations um the first of which is like you know i removed my phone number from the website because i was getting phone calls that were saying like hey man i see the chemtrails over the airport man and it was like first of all not me second of all those are probably contrails probably not probably not the chemtrails you think they are so there's that

category of complaint which is just like you're you know uh polluting the skies or something like this that are more or less unbased um then there's a valid consideration which is okay you're admitting to spraying a mineral a chemical into clouds that are precipitating that mineral is then getting into the watershed? Should we be worried about this? The way to address that one is in the following manner. So silver iodide, that's what we use. That's the crystal that has the similar structure to ice. It's not fat soluble. It's not water soluble. So if it gets into your system, you expel it very quickly. That's the first consideration. The second thing is in the continental US, four parts per million of the soil is silver itself. After a seeding

operation, a relatively robust concentrated one, you add about 80 parts per trillion. So significant orders of magnitude less than what's already latent in the soil. Now, the reason why that's relevant is the primary concern about silver iodide is that it is silver, so it has antimicrobial properties. We're significantly below, even after years of seeding over the same area, the threshold amount of silver necessary to be undercutting watersheds, natural bacteria. So there's that consideration too. Nevertheless, Rainmaker is still engaged in research for even more robust, efficient, and environmentally safe nucleation agents. So we've started experimenting with those. There's a handful of good candidates that I think we'll roll out by

end of the year um but you know for the longest time silver iodide has been quite safe um then there's the third consideration so there's you know just like the general chemtrail angst there's the genuine and sophisticated angst about um particular minerals in the watershed and then there's the question of like this is god's domain you know not how to control the weather um and and they're worried about us modifying the weather in such a way that would have, you know, unforeseen second, third, nth order consequences. The first thing to think about there is like, well, one, we've been unintentionally modifying the weather for, I don't know, 100, 150 years, give or take, right? Like basically, since we've had the

industrial revolution, these smokestacks that we have are emitting particulate into the atmosphere all the time. There's this really cool study in Poland, observing on radar, the precipitation in the tracks downwind of a coal plant. And they just basically have a river in the sky all the time because they're emitting so much steam and coal there. So we're already modifying the weather unintentionally. So really, this is not so different than most human activity. But then the second consideration is, OK,

you know, it is something to be wary of when you're playing with ecosystems. We should model out the consequences of our intervention to like a large and robust degree. Um, and we should figure out like, okay, if this cloud is not going to be positive, some when seeded, like if we're not producing more water for everybody, then we should refrain from doing so. Um, now the problem is this is the frontier, right? There is a component of this that is as yet untested.

Um, and so we don't know what the nth order effects will be despite our best efforts to model them out. What we do know, though, is that in the status quo, on the track we're going, we're going to see ecological collapse in the entire Colorado River watershed and Delta. We're going to see the agricultural collapse of the Central Valley. All of our pistachios, all of our almonds, all of our citrus, all of the crops that the rest of the world relies on America exporting, they may see famine from not having any longer. And so if you want to continue to live in Salt Lake City, if you want to continue to live in Los Angeles, you know the status quo is non-viable. The question is then, do you prefer one where we know, a future where we know that we're all going to have less food and less biodiversity and lower population cities in the American West and lots of things and people are going to die? or do you want to take a calculated and cautious risk with a new technology that may have unintended

consequences but also has the promise of a potentially abundant future um that one is the one this this third question that people have is the one that i like talking about most because um it gets down to the crux of this really big issue of our time which is you know growth versus degrowth abundance versus scarcity um i don't want to have no possessions and be happy, right? Like I want to own space and grow things and give my children an inheritance and make more value and produce more

for other people in my nation and society. And so those are the questions that people generally ask. In the growth versus degrowth debate, are there potential solutions from a degrowth perspective for these problems? Like are the critiques complemented with suggestions or like potential other solutions? Or is it pretty much like, hey, this is a problem.

We don't like your solution, but we don't have a better idea. There are a lot of ways to make water use more efficient that I'm entirely in favor of, right? So switching from flood to drip irrigation, for example, that's a great, easy layup to reduce agricultural. Explain what that is for people. Yeah, so flood irrigation, there's a handful of different ways to irrigate. But basically, you can just dump water over an entire field, right? Or you can have a conventional sprinkler that sprays it all over the place. A lot of that water then, say that you have a row of pistachio trees, if you have a conventional

sprinkler, a lot of that water is going to end up three feet away from the roots of the tree. That's not a very efficient way to irrigate. Drip irrigation is basically just the laying of these lines in the ground with holes punctured in them just at the base of the tree. So you get very, very targeted, slow drips of water. not lots of the water evaporates because it's coming out so slowly, you know, that can reduce agricultural water demand like 50 to 80 percent, depending on the crop, depending on the region.

So that is something that we should do. The trouble is in this conversation, like whether you launder quality of life reductions into the conversation. So if there was, say, a state subsidy for farmers to switch from conventional irrigation to drip? Totally in favor of this. Should we compel farmers that are already operating on a razor-thin margin to tear up all their irrigation, not be able to grow for a season, and then pay more to install new stuff? No, I'm not in favor of that. So yes, efficiency measures are good. Yes, I think we should adopt them, barring like 60-minute showers. I'm not giving that up. um why did the united states stop doing this because you mentioned that this technology's

been around for 70 years or so we invented it we invented cloud seeding yeah in 1946 1947 these guys you know were doing some unrelated cloud physics experiments in a cloud chamber spilled some dry ice and silver iodide in a box saw the super cooled liquid freeze and then precipitate to the bottom they're like well you know why don't we just try this in real life like so they got in their plane and flew over western new york and started hocking it out the back and induced the first man-made snowstorm um crazy right no wait wait hold on they literally did it in the lab first by accident total total accident yeah and then they literally got in a plane and just like opened up the door or something and started throwing it out exactly well it was it

wasn't covered it wasn't covered it was like an open top sort of like world war one style situation and that created the world's first man-made snowstorm correct correct okay so that sounds cool yeah spectacular why did we stop um so so like we ripped on cloud seeding from like 1940 to like the early 1980s like there were precipitation enhancement projects all over the country there was something called project sky fire by the way the names of cloud seeding projects are always awesome um project skyfire was trying to do wildfire suppression in california from cloud seeding um we had project storm fury trying to bust hurricanes over the atlantic before they broke against the eastern seaboard explain how that works yeah so um there's two considerations

so you have this this hurricane in the atlantic um freezing ice freezing is an exothermic reaction right so it releases heat because you have water with a given energy it releases that energy when it binds together um if you seed the hurricane um one thing that happens is water precipitates down out of it and so there's less flooding that could occur from the hurricane after it's been seeded but the second thing is because it's releasing this heat you expand the uh area of the storm um which then reduces the velocities of the wind so you get less damage from the hurricane winds when it breaks against the shore and also there's something to be said about potentially uh changing the direction of it um but that is uh a science that is even more frontier

than yet rainmaker is engaged in so let's talk about that science um if a hurricane is coming You're basically saying you could disperse it, right? Kind of kill the hurricane. That sounds interesting. I think that we had a former president who talked about throwing a nuclear bomb, if I remember correctly. Yes, we did. We did, yeah. And I don't know if he was joking or not, but like similar idea, but maybe we don't need the nuclear bomb to be able to do this.

But why would you want to turn it? Yeah, yeah. Rather than break it up. Is there other use cases? The first consideration is you can imagine other use cases. But no, the first consideration is maybe the requisite amount of energy that you can release from cloud seeding with a given storm, you know, Cat 5, whatever it may be, is too great given the technology we have to totally disperse it. So turning it is like the second best option rather than breaking it up. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. And then maybe still like you want the hurricane to deposit some of the water. Like the Midwest gets a lot of water from hurricanes that flow inland. Now, they destroy Louisiana, and they destroy Miami, but maybe if you can reduce its velocity, redirect it towards the central coast instead of Miami when it's at its absolute worst, this is very speculative, but that's something that you might want to do to ensure that you still get the precipitation inland. how do you think about the morality of like the hurricane has a path like you know god's path let's call it uh-huh if you turn it i think people would say hey it's going to hit humans now we're going to send it over the ocean it's going to disperse on its own like okay makes sense but like do we ever get into a situation where we're like picking and choosing who gets

hit with the hurricane right like like oh this city has better funding or something right they're going to turn it and this other city doesn't have a cloud seeding program or technology or something And so like they bear the brunt, but this city saved themselves. Like, do we get into a weird how we make these decisions? Well, so I think a lot about weather modification as an analog to like our AI discussion or our, you know, nuclear weapons discussion. I am extremely grateful to be responsible for Rainmaker, be responsible to some extent for like the burgeoning researching to cloud seeding. Um, in the same way that any useful technology can be used for good or bad, um, in the same way that, you know, either the United States can steward AI or the CCP can steward AI, um, this is true of weather modification. Uh, you can either have, you know, rogue nations, rogue powers, um, that are exclusively taking,

you know, bids from the highest bidder that motivate them to, uh, seed in this area or another, which, you know, might be wrought with ethical considerations. Um, I don't think by any stretch, I'm a perfect man. Um, I think that I'm, you know, a sinner before God day in and day out. And I pray and repent for that. Um, but I am grateful that with what limited moral ability I have, uh, you know, my team and I can make decisions about where it is appropriate to see and where it's not. And so, for example, um, if the question as it stands now, and it's something to be thought

about more is, you know, are we going to choose who gets hit by a hurricane? The answer is like, hold on. No, that's not where we're at. Um, we don't even have the capability to do that for one. But then another consideration is, you know, with respect to cloud seeding, is a cloud that we seed going to be purely positive sum? If the answer is no, then we don't engage in that right now because we exclusively want to provide more. We don't want to have to deal with making decisions about who gets what. And so, you know, the moral and ethical considerations around cloud seeding matter a lot.

And I'm grateful that, like, flawed man though I am, I'm in America. I have moral confidence that I can lean on that can help me make better decisions about where we're operating. What would be a negative consequence? So if it's not completely net positive, like what would be some of the other considerations as to, hey, we know that there is precipitation that potentially could come from this cloud, but we're going to stand down because of these other considerations? Well, so for one, you know, say we've had these, we had this atmospheric river recently in california um tons of water deposited from it that was great um but the soil was saturated a lot of the reservoirs became full uh if you

precipitate more water out of the residual clouds that aren't raining naturally after the atmospheric river then you may be liable for flooding right like because the the water can't there the ground can't take any more water um and so we pass on opportunities like that or you know maybe a cloud is known or is strongly very likely to precipitate over uh say town a but you could induce precipitation in it prior in town b um we're not choosing between one place and another to precipitate it's exclusively clouds that would not otherwise that are of interest to us so is there like a you know the big cloud that got away right like i kind of feel like you like lay in bed and you're like yeah like i can't wait to find the big cloud right like like how do you think about

the cloud and the quality and like how much water is there like something that you chase and i almost think of it like a tornado chaser yeah right like oh my god i saw the big one right like is the same thing exist in clouds yeah yeah so it does so um dude and the funny thing is uh in you know the central valley california like i said you need clouds that are below zero degrees celsius so below 32 fahrenheit um the higher the altitude you go generally speaking the colder it gets um our drone can only go so high right and we're only permitted by the fa to go so high um but uh at night it gets colder so the freezing layer descends so you know delirious though we are from like 11 p.m to like 6 a.m every day out on the farm um like we find some really really juicy

clouds. And I can explain what that means, but that like come down at like two kilometers. Usually these things are like up at three or four or five and, you know, they're out of reach of the drone. You couldn't even imagine getting them if you could, if you wanted to. But some will come down real low and then it's like, man, that's one that, yes, yes, exactly. You hear the whispers of the, of the drizzle and the wind. And then you can see on radar, you know, whether there's a freezing layer um the particulars don't matter it's say call it like a dendritic growth zone basically you have super cold liquid water and frozen ice crystals dendrites right like the long the long varieties of ice crystals um you can see when when super cold liquid water is freezing into

those uh because the variability in the particle shape you can detect on radar and so like that's when you know like this sucker's full um and so we've seen some of those at really low altitudes that we've tried to hit um and then like our atomizer the thing that sprayed the chemical clogged or something like this or like the battery died or something like this um and uh yeah there there's been many a moby dick sighting that the team and i have dealt with what about like commercial uh flights you and i have talked previously about like uh the icing all right that like that should probably go away but also um could you stop the rain so rather than make it rain could you stop the rain so that flights could take off uh it could be just sunny or nicer

So for some people, is there benefit from like a plane flying ahead of a commercial plane and kind of like clearing the path, right? Like what are the relationships to commercial flights? Yeah, so there's this thing called the Tuomi effect, right? So in the case of cloud seeding, you want to introduce a little bit more aerosol than what's naturally occurring so that the water can aggregate around and freeze around it and then become heavy enough to precipitate. if you spray lots and lots actually still like grams right but rather than you know hundredths of grams grams if you spray more aerosol then you can get the water to bind to those aerosols still but in such small forms right so like think of it if you have 100 water droplets and one aerosol then you get one really big water particle one really big ice crystal but if you have 100 water

droplets and a hundred aerosol particles, then you get a hundred really small ice crystals and they've never become heavy enough to fall. And so one thing that you can do is you can prevent precipitation in certain areas or like prevent hail, for example, by overseeding. So the Ptolemy effect is like, if you have lots and lots of aerosols, will that prevent large droplets from forming? So entirely possible to do hail suppression. So if you're an insurance company, right. That's worried about hail destroying, you know, 20 square miles of property in Houston or in anywhere in the Bible belt. Um, then like you can, you can pay for cloud seeding to mitigate that risk. Um, like I said, in Calgary and Alberta, people do this already for crops,

um, in North Dakota, they do this as well. Um, and, uh, you know, blizzard suppression, that's definitely something to consider icing condition suppression. Like sometimes it's not precipitating but you have clouds that are too dangerous to fly through in the vicinity of the airport um you could see that locally or you could disperse fog locally um and definitely like keep airport uptime uh higher so you're using drones right now could you use like i don't know uh mortar tubes or like uh some sort of like howitzer or something to like shoot with more precision rather than have to fly the drone this is this is a long-term dream of mine pump is it possible yeah yeah entirely entirely so when i was at the weather modification association conference

in april yeah i know i know it exists it's in las vegas this year if you want to meet me at the weather mod conference um i'll see you uh in april um but uh when i was there is that run by like the cia israel yeah like what what's going on there no it's strictly bohemian grove attendees that get to go got it yeah robes chanting um we uh dude there was this romanian company okay and like everybody presents like a bunch of different researchers companies they're like yes i don't know how to do it romanian i'm not gonna they're like yeah we increased precipitation 30 with rockets and we're like what they're like yeah we have these um huge soviet era warehouses full of rockets and we're just replacing the munitions on them with

silver iodide and we're blasting them into clouds and they're like what okay first of all can you show do you have any data like what were your methods and they're like no no no we're blasting rockets into clouds is none of your business american okay like trust me really yeah yeah it was awesome um so they're doing that all over transylvania so and again i'm gonna get very quickly out of my technical depth here but uh if you shoot the rocket you've taken out the ammunition you've put the silver iodide uh how do you get the silver iodide to kind of come out right and be exposed at the right time because it because isn't it inside of like a like the rocket shell yeah so it's it's like it's like a warhead actually still of silver iodide got it

so it's like on the front end almost and so when it hits the cloud that it kind of like gets activated it knows like it's party time uh yeah yeah essentially okay interesting yeah so that's that's what they're doing um are we gonna try this you know what's funny actually the atf regulations around model rockets are way more liberal than the fa regulations around drones um so yeah oh you just want to do a model rocket you can make a big model rocket pop i know somebody who has a howitzer you you you do yeah awesome okay cool cool we'll talk i'm pretty sure that's what they have all right sweet yeah i we should talk about that for sure because cloud cannons i didn't i never even thought about this but yeah like i can't talk to you about this

no dude so one of one of my friends um a cloud cannon just sounds awesome yeah paint it white put it up in the mountain one of my friends he did a bunch of like war dog contracting um and when i was first starting this company i was like well the unit economics actually make more sense for like a howitzer but i don't know how to get one so like i'll probably do drones and he was like oh like let me connect you to the army corps of engineers and uh he did and the army corps was like what what are you talking about get out of here like who are you how'd you get an introduction to us and then then i went back to my friend i was like yeah they weren't into it um and he goes okay i know a guy in turkey like do you want to go to turkey to go get some artillery and i was like

really and he was like yeah like you might have to go to syria to pick it up and i was like i don't need that right now i saw the movie exactly so passed on the howitzer for now but let's talk about your guy so so you think that as possible though entirely yeah and it would be probably more efficient lower cost and you probably could actually well maybe you wouldn't have as much coverage uh as a drone because a drone could you know travel but uh if you knew where you were going generally generally what you have relatively predictable weather patterns year to year like you're you're generally going to get the same sort of westerly flow from the pacific over the central valley and then this

sierras right and so what you could do for like real large-scale weather mod infrastructure is in the vicinity of your areas of interest where you know that like on a 10th through 90th percentile year this is where you're going to get your atmospheric rivers um you install those those cloud cannons there induce precipitation at the tops of the watersheds of the areas of interest um and then just have this as like a constant water supply strategy rather than you know right now rainmaker we're doing a one-off project here one-off project they're seeding through the season like water is a public good legislators regulators governors they should be thinking about how to increase supply in their states um and that in part probably means weather modification to increase

the supply in the watershed right especially in the west where you know there's no groundwater left and everybody's paying through the nose and penalties for overdraft yeah um now this said by the way we didn't circle back to why we stopped why we stopped cloud seeding because like the state of california used to sponsor tons of it idaho used to sponsor tons of it they're actually still pretty good um but like why is it that china spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year and has 38 000 people employed in the beijing weather modification office when we have like and listen dudes rock i've got eight guys on my team we're killing it um but that that ratio is pretty david and goliath right eight um eight people versus 38 000 yeah i like our odds yeah me too me too um

So it's a crazy consideration. And there's some great researchers in addition to what Rainmaker is doing at universities across the country. But why are we in this precarious situation now when control of the weather is something that probably should be within the American scope of technological capability, but isn't at all now? um the first thing is you know practically speaking nobody had solved the attribution problem meaning you know we know that in a cloud chamber if you sprinkle some of these magic beans then it precipitates water out um but clouds are super dynamic um can you prove really that your intervention created more rain that wouldn't then what would have naturally occurred right um nobody had been able to do that statistical analyses of like rain gauges here rain gauges there. They're not great because maybe you'd get more rain in the next valley, but you seeded in this one, et cetera, et cetera. So it was just kind of rough. In 2017 through 2021 though,

there's still research coming out from this project. There was a project in Idaho where they realized if you take really high resolution radar and follow the path of your plane, in our case drone, you can measure the phase change of super cooled water, liquid water into ice, and then watch that precipitate down to the ground. And so we solved definitively like okay where where are the tracks of precipitation that's exclusively anthropogenic and how much should we precipitate so solving that problem made this tech way more commercializable um the second problem is like you know planes uh are pretty expensive to have on call 24 7365 the way we disperse the chemical is pretty expensive um the yields were pretty low because

we were kind of just like like doing hope we get it yeah very like artisanal meteorology um so it's just too expensive for you know most states to justify paying for almost all municipalities certainly all farms um and so you need to lower the cost curve like one or two orders of magnitude and increase the yields two or three orders of magnitude to make this um you know what it should be um so those two practical reasons like the technological and commercial aside there's also just the the philosophical one which is um you know i think that as a nation as a civilization we've lost faith we've lost faith in ourselves um in our institutions and our ability to do great things um you know isaiah taylor was on here he's talking about his 10-year

plan to make energy 10 times cheaper right like that is the sort of vision that i think people used to have that people need to have if we're going to you know right the ship so to speak um and so rainmaker sure we're going to mitigate droughts that's part of the plan sure we're to provide precipitation to farms but really like making earth habitable in a way that it never before has been for humanity and symbiotically all of nature is the vision right like terraforming the deserts on the planet extending the great plains through west texas new mexico arizona and california so that all of that land is more biodiverse and arable um doing the same with like the deserts in australia with the deserts in the sahara preventing hurricanes from doing

unnecessary damage to our coasts. This is the sort of future that you have to envision, dream up, and then drag into a very practical reality with technological backbone and then the grit to go stand out in the rain from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. for the sake of seeing it to fruition. I think that that sort of vision is something that people don't have anymore. And, you know, some simple solutions are like, one, just do it, like, just believe that you can do it to probably go to the gym. And this is like, dude, changed my life, changed my life to actually do that, because you can see the linear relationship between effort and output, going to church, right? Like, I think that having faith in God rather than being purely grounded in scientific materialism and nihilism, that lends itself towards a higher vision for the future. And then, you know, like get a gang together, get a gang of people that also have the same ambition and vision. And like you will, as we have in the Gundo, like feed off one another's energy to do great things.

What's going on there? Explain, like, how did this all come together? And people see the memes on the internet, but like what's actually happening? Yeah. Yeah. Um, in a certain sense, you know, uh, have you watched Hamilton? Have you seen the musical Hamilton? No. So there's a song in Hamilton called the story of tonight. Okay. Um, I think that that whole musical soundtrack is really resonant with Gen Z people, but it's like the story of tonight, which is like, um, here's a toast to the four of us tomorrow. there'll be more of us it's like the song of a bunch of guys that are in the revolutionary war that met at a bar and like what were the chances that they'd all revolutionaries that they were meet at the bar and they're toasting to more of them tomorrow um you know in a certain sense el segundo has had iterations of this sort of like upstart revolutionary hard tech culture

um spacex was there you know um we're trying no i can't say that um other companies prominent defense companies have been founded there um and uh and so it's natural that because of that ecosystem of talent that other startups you know kind of have come and went but in the last year it's blown up um there are people doing all sorts of technology in defense loitering munitions isr platforms advanced manufacturing multiple different nuclear energy companies um weather modification right there's these guys that run a company called shinkai systems have you heard of this no dude auto fish killing robots um so like if you have a fishing ship they have like a hungry hungry hippos machine that like sort of drags the fish off deck orients them stabs them in the brain

kills them very precipitously so that you get like one a more humane death for the fish and then two like higher quality meat um but all these people oh kappa one crazy company these guys are making stratospheric soaring drones so like they go up to 60 000 feet and then have a map of the convection that's going on in the stratosphere and they can find thermal updrafts and then stay up in the air for days and weeks. Um, it's incredible technology. And so, you know, it's kind of just been like this gravity, gravity well, where, you know, one guy showed up and then he started building something awesome and we all had a good time at the bar afterwards or something. And then in the morning at the lab again, um, and, and it's just been accelerating where more and more people are

showing up to build exclusively great companies um i think there's one software company in the gundo sadly um but uh you want to kick them out no they're fine but like no more no more definitely not um uh they're good guys um through the shift guys uh or sift one of the two i don't know software um but uh yeah it's it's just like a group of extremely dedicated extremely rigorous uh hard tech folks that um bridget mendler included in that by the way you saw this yeah i saw yeah big big um that are uh relentlessly trying to have a good time building like 22nd century technology are the drones with explosives that company's in there yeah yeah that was crazy yeah it's pretty crazy yeah um i saw it do you see the video uh i don't think it's them i think it was

a different company but the guy uh who's like hiding under a tank running around the tank and then all of a sudden he sees the drone and he's like oh shit i've been found and he runs around the tank and the drone comes and blows him up yes like that is 21st century modern warfare totally totally yeah yeah pretty nuts um all right so what is china doing 38 000 people in weather modification i'm suspect right right peculiar what are they doing what are they up to dude i mean in in a certain sense it's it's uh hard to say because they're so opaque about their research and data like american universities national labs we basically just like give everybody everything for free um what we do know that the big debate in the ai world right now should be open sourcing

some of this stuff i see many people that i respect and like on the internet all getting in tizzies with each other over should be open sources should it not especially with you know the two feuding kings sam and elon yeah right well open or closed ai yeah rename it and he'll drop the suit sam uh i have no allegiance to either of them um but spacex was started in el segundo uh so so yeah what china's doing with 38 000 people they um they explicitly and openly are one like for their sporting events oh this is another crazy application of weather modification you know the phrase like don't rain on my parade yeah it doesn't rain on parades in china like it doesn't

rain on parades because they just disperse all the precipitation beforehand like this is an obvious awesome application that's what i meant about like could you make it not rain yeah yeah you just make it rain before i guess you make it rain before or if you wait over to see the cloud you could you could uh reduce the probability of precipitation during interesting so either way so yeah like the the 2008 olympics everybody talks about this they precipitated all the water out before the olympic games um you can do that they do that russia does that um russia also has much smaller but like a large weather mod program um they're also doing hydroelectric and agricultural watershed supplementation so like on the yangtze river tons and tons of rice production um hydroelectric water

production too they were experiencing droughts though um they since have been experiencing far less because they're producing more water at the top of that watershed in the river um they're also engaged in an attempt to terraform more of the like inner mongolian gobi desert um so they're planting lots of monoculture trees there they're cloud seeding over it for the sake of supplying more water to the flora that they're planting um there's uh some storm mitigation that's going on in the south like in canton um multiple applications all of which seem to have outsize positive economic yield for the country. It's the government that's doing this.

Yes. Yeah. It's the state. Yeah. It's the state. Is there a lesson in there for us, like private company versus the government? Or is the United States at a position where the government couldn't even get it out of their own way to do this? And so we need a private company to do it. You know, like I've said this before in a lot of different contexts. I think that for some reason, the 2000s and even early 2010s tech companies decided for some reason to be adversarial with the state and DC. Um, I think that if we're going to in, you know, this now multipolar moment, um, have a thriving tech ecosystem that can support the nation's interests, we need to collaborate

in an unprecedented manner, or at least in a way that I have never seen in my lifetime. Um, I think that part of what makes America great and what's critical is the fact that private industry can innovate and that the private sector can produce great products, but, um, you know, the Manhattan Project, a lot of the stuff that the DOD has produced or that NASA has produced that was then commercialized, that's evidence of the strong state supplying research and funding for these Napoleonic projects. I think that the lesson for us is, one, there should be a private sector for cloud seeding because more innovation is going to occur that way. And we don't want like total centralized control in any industry. But it should be in collaboration with states and

federal regulators and legislators and governors so that like water which is a public good right is something that they can one tell their constituents they're providing for them um and to uh you know ensure that like not just anybody with an airplane and some chemicals is cloud seeding um and so i'm not one to suggest like pulling up the ladder behind you or anything like this um but like it is something that probably legislators should be thinking about There is right now almost nothing that you have to do for permitting for modifying the weather. Like you have to go through NOAA,

you have to go through some EPA stuff, you have to go through some FAA stuff, but it's really lightweight. That obviously makes it easier to start a company in the space, but probably makes people more wary about like whether or not the state's being as litigious about permitting. How much of that goes away if you use a howitzer versus a drone? You probably get more of it with a howitzer.

But with rockets, you get way less. rockets it's rockets it's like nothing yeah yeah yeah so like could you go to i don't know toys r us or like a like radio shack or you know like what i don't know what store sells like model rockets now but so you could you could do it with solid solid rocket engines um for the lower clouds so like say 3 000 maybe like 7 000 feet you could hit um with like that's still pretty high oh yeah yeah totally dude i don't think like a thousand feet times seven yeah that's a lot okay i mean it's like what is it 5,280 is a mile yeah so you're you're going in excess of a mile with some of these things yeah it's like a real payload so um so you would probably need something more

than just like an off-the-shelf model rocket oh there's some really big ones that you can buy there okay yeah like how much do you think they cost a couple hundred dollars to like a couple grand oh man that's pretty cheap yeah yeah yeah rocket barrage to make it rain that'd be a cool aesthetic right i mean i'm just imagining a farmer like waking up in the morning looking at the crops being like i need water and just like press a button you just rocket like have you seen the video of spacex where it's like uh the time series and so you know uh back in like yeah it's just launching then all of a sudden it's just like rapid fire yeah like i'm just imagining them just you know have little launch pads all over their farm inevitable yeah yeah exactly i mean think

about it right if it's a couple hundred bucks per rocket would you spend 10k to make it rain you know oh yeah yeah totally totally for a large-scale farm and there's another consideration too which is like you know maybe you've only got 100 acres it's too hard to make it rain just over there but there's irrigation districts and like farming collectives that cover tens of thousands yeah like over you and your boys yeah exactly just you and the homies modify the weather locally for the sake of your crop you know yeah and then everyone has their own rocket and yep all right how much you guys get paid for this um are you about to say i can talk about the way in which like we've justified pricing all right um justified pricing okay yeah yeah yeah so like

how much value are you producing is the question yeah um it's actually probably a pretty hard thing to show across different customers across different customer segments for sure because the ski resort is altogether different than the farm yeah um in the case of the farm let's just talk about this it's like the one that we've been working with longest that we know the most about um in all of central california there are what are called high priority groundwater basins um these are ones where like people are having a hard time getting any water out in the areas where they can get water out the basin is being depleted year over year so the state stepped in and said you know you're only allowed to pump so much per year if you exceed your budget then we're gonna

instead of charging you like do you know what an acre foot is have i told you what an acre foot is so if you covered an acre of water one foot deep in water if you've covered an acre of land one foot deep in water that'd be about 325,851 gallons that is an acre unit that people use okay um so one foot deep of water over an entire acre okay yeah um that that's just part of the yeah farming i i'm not uh in the weather modification industry so i have no opinion that just seems hard to keep track of but okay oh yeah it's intuitive now um but uh if so so the going rate of water in one of these high priority basins when you're below your budget say like ten dollars per acre foot you can exceed your budget and it can jump up to like seven thousand

and so ten dollars to seven thousand yeah wow that's a big range yeah yeah in some cases it's two to five hundred um but you you get like a two order of magnitude delta in almost every case um And then if you need water to farm, because say you have like an orchard of permanent crops, it's not a choice as to whether you're going to pay for the overdraft fees, like your crops will die otherwise, or you have to cut them down. So what Rainmaker does is we step in, we say, okay, you're paying this much in penalties every month. We can produce this much precipitation, which one, will reduce your consumption from the aquifer. So you're going to pay less in penalties that way. But two, the way that they justify your allocation in part depends on how much rain you get because your rain recharges the aquifer too. So we're going to up your supply.

And so we'll save you roughly half of the penalties that you pay every year in the water that we provide and we'll charge the difference. In the case of like our first customer, they paid about three quarters of a million dollars every month in overdraft penalties before they started using cloud seeding services instead. Um, and so, and so what you could basically say, Hey, you're going to save, let's say 50% of that, um, it's a couple hundred thousand dollars. And then we want a percentage of what we save you or something. Uh, yeah. So on, on the, in the course of a year, it's like $8 million that they'd pay in penalties. Um, and then if we save them half, um, then we charge like 30% total on the 8 million. That's not a bad business. No. Yeah. I'm an investor by the way. I don't know said that earlier i probably should disclose that yeah i'm a big big fan even more even more excited

now um all right so what about the ski resorts like i'm assuming if they just have more snow more people come well so it's not just a question of more snow it's a question of when does the snow fall right so like say that generally you'd have to open in october um you will get super cold clouds in say like the san juan mountains in colorado in september um particularly late september that could precipitate if only they had more aerosol in them so it's a question of how much earlier in the season can you get the resort open how much later in the season can you extend the the uh slopes viability and then how many tickets do you sell in that delta of time right that's that's the foremost consideration and then also say you have like a particularly warm spell

um how much how much money do we save from not running our snow blowers right because actual snow is higher quality it's dispersed more uniformly over the mountain so you don't have certain tracks that have it certain tracks that don't um these are sort of the three things that go into consideration when we're negotiating with ski resorts so not only with these ski resorts with the farms but then what about like the government could the government come to you and like it kind of feeds into one of my questions i've been dying to ask you i don't know why i've never asked you this before why are meteorologists wrong all the time i love meteorologists they're awesome it's a hard job i get it but like the joke especially in like small towns right is like

hey you said it was gonna rain today it hadn't rained in a month right like type thing like so maybe talk a little bit as to you know why is that a hard job and then is the government potentially a customer as well yeah totally so um like fluid fluid modeling fluids is a complicated business the atmosphere is a fluid there's multiple different viscosities between different clouds um different water content they're in um it's it's complicated thing and we don't have like infinite compute to do that sort of modeling um so there's just the the systemic problem that it is literally just really complicated um and then it's it's part of what makes it hard is we're pretty good at micro physical models meaning like okay how does every

particle interact in a system. And we're pretty okay at like dynamic scale models, like synoptic scale models of, okay, how over the entire globe is this one particular weather pattern going to move? But nobody's ever done a good job of connecting these two. So you have no mesoscale, you have no mapping of, of micro to macro scale and the mesoscale. And that's kind of why you get Like a low quality forecast generally. And it's getting better with time, but mapping like how do these particles interact to how does the entire globe's atmosphere interact?

That's like a compute problem for one, a modeling problem for two. And then it's just generally complicated. Now, that being said, meteorology being unsexy, right? For the last, I don't know, 80 years ish, or, well, actually I think one of the few things meteorology is, is actually probably sexy, right. Given the weather channel and whatever, but it not attracting like tons of investment and stuff to this effect that has just resulted in like a

dearth of interest and resource being allocated to these problems. Because, you know, like what's benefit of better forecasting like in the case of hedge funds it's very clear so some of the best quants end up at hedge funds to do like commodities trading based on weather forecasts but um the science itself sort of left unaddressed just because uh there hasn't been a clear mission to justify and clear like value prop to justify deeper research i think it's going to change i agree but i might think of it for different reasons than you fox uh news corp they made a big investment in weather and my guess is that uh climate change is obviously a hotly debated political topic and uh you're going to see both political parties and like

they're kind of ensuing media uh outlets that lean different ways all heavily investing in weather because it actually feeds into news coverage in politics more than it did 15 years ago this tracks um and like on one hand that's probably great in terms like there'll be more coverage uh on the other hand like if it's politicized that might not actually be the best no right it's probably so like you know you could easily see the incentives taking us down a you know bad route of like actually if you measure over here temperature of the earth is a little bit different than over here just had to be a little bit of shade but dude yeah same data science at cal one of the biggest takeaways is like you can make data say almost whatever you want yeah right

yeah and so uh i mean i remember seeing at one point somebody was like you could cool the earth if you painted half of like i don't know the sahara desert white or something yeah that's cool right they were like yeah like that it like hold the heat or whatever the thing was and i was being like how y'all gonna do that you know i lay down like boards and like paint them white or something you know like uh whatever and so uh yeah i think it's just gonna become more politicized are you are you into like mega projects like do you think about mega projects like painting the sahara what or like uh well uh i'm probably more up to date on like some of the ones that uh people are already attempting so for example like uh the palm islands or whatever right or uh the line neon yeah it's

like those uh i mean i think they're interesting like we'll see you know how hard it is to get built um i think in the united states like i don't know we should like fix the bridges and roads right like like we haven't earned the right yet to do the mega projects like because we're not doing the you know blocking and tackling of like the basics um and so yeah i mean maybe it's just like cooler to see everyone else like be super aspirational but you're like we don't even have like high-speed rail yeah you know one of my favorite data points around infrastructure is that uh the bright line in uh florida is the first profitable rail line in all of america i think and it's privately owned the guys at fortress bought it like back in the mid-2000s or something

um and it's like the idea of a rail line being profitable in america was like impossible folklore right like just like you oh back in the day they used to be profitable uh but like that shows that it's possible right and so it's kind of why i asked earlier like could the government do this or do we actually need private companies to go do it it's probably yeah we do need private companies yeah i you know i i think that there's public interest in you know in the same way that like i don't know the dod doesn't manufacture all their munitions right like noah shouldn't necessarily conduct all of their weather mod themselves but like contracting that makes sense yeah um what are you most looking forward to like you're building a company so you have to be

excited about what you're doing. Uh, you've recruited people to come work with you. So you have to be enthusiastic and, you know, uh, uh, kind of compelling to get them to come work with you. But what are you most excited about? You know, I, yeah, I talked to my friends about this a lot. Like I do not think that there's anything. Yeah. It sounds tried to say, um, i think that like i've talked about this before genesis 128 right like god giving man dominion over the earth seas and and the skies um i hope that by the end of my life the world that i grew up in looks more like the kingdom of heaven on earth um than you know it did when i was born so practically people being less famished people starving less having more biodiversity not having

to worry about the sort of like ecological and climatological collapse that all of gen z is poisoned by like that's really the end state that i want to see i want to see the great plains you know a few million acres larger by the end of my life in west texas and new mexico and so on um that i'm really excited about in the long term i think in the short term though um and this this was evident on the dude bus if you followed the infamous dude bus oh i followed yeah in real time i couldn't help it it was just stuff down my feed of photos uh sorry not sorry um i loved it like what i'm on the very short horizon optimistic about and excited about is like um tech is something that we're excited to be participating in again um we're optimistic about

the prospects of it everybody wants to take huge bets um i'm excited to see like gen z and gen alpha more aggressively pursue their vision for the future than I think previous generations have. I don't think that we're not motivated by money. I don't think that we're not rebelling from the status quo. Every generation kind of does that. It's trite to say that we're different. I think, though, the pendulum has swung in such a way

that we're sick of doomerism in a way that is compelling action way more manifestly than it has in previous generations so that I'm excited to see like all of my friends are zealots for a better future so that I'm excited about this summer I want to go back to Muscle Beach and lift there when it's warm it is cool good yeah yeah it is cool and then if you're successful can you do this like all over the United States all over the world can you compete against china or you know any other country will they let you modify their weather like how do you think about what is the upper limit of success for rainmaker uh uh like a garden planet is what it looks like uh an earth that is more habitable and

more biodiverse and more lush than it ever has been as long as humanity has been on the face of it um you can do weather mod for the benefit of environments and people all over the united states all over the world and so what it looks like first is probably as we have started watershed supplementation in the west then severe storm mitigation over the rest of the country as necessary then you know in canada they have hail suppression contracts that we'll probably try to look into and work with um mexico etc uh the european climate is actually pretty solid like they don't need a whole lot of modification there especially in the med maybe more rain in some areas actually there's some vineyards in the south of france that look awesome um if you

never if i fall off the face of the earth nobody ever hears from me again it's because rainmaker became a lifestyle business and i just started hanging out in vineyards in marseille um which i won't do but it's funny to talk about um so it looks like it looks like weather mod over the entire united states and then everywhere in the world um i think that you know this is a political question a geopolitical one there are reasons why certain countries want to protect strategic industries of national interest um so will china let us modify the weather there I think that if it, I would, I would, I hope for a future where we can collaborate with our current rivals and adversaries so tightly that we can export our business into their nations. That I do, I do hope for.

In the interim, though, yeah, everywhere that is aligned in the world, we hope to make more abundant and lush, ultimately resulting in like a more habitable planet, a terraformed planet, one that is free from inclement weather and is as abundant as ever before. My last question for you is, is there going to be a day where you have like a bat phone and governors of Florida, Alabama, Louisiana are calling you and like the hurricane's coming? like come save us right i mean like it sounds crazy but there is a path where that could be a thing uh i i would be blessed to have the opportunity to do that for uh say mayor francis suarez or something i'll happily share my number with him if ever miami's in need of aid um all right where can we send people to find you uh on the internet you're not hard to find but where should we send uh on on twitter i'm a dorico at a d-o-r-i-c-k-o um and then uh the website for the company is make rain.com make rain what a wild world we live in exciting times man

i'm betting on you don't don't fuck this up all right we'll do it again soon cool thanks brother