This Week in Startups - Cloud Seeding, Conspiracies & the Texas Floods | BONUS EPISODE!

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Today’s show:Cloud seeding startup Rainmaker faced a viral backlash after deadly floods in Texas—so @Jason hosted an emergency X Spaces with founder Augustus Doricko to unpack what really happened. Did Rainmaker cause the floods? How much water can cloud seeding actually produce? Is it safe, and should we even be doing it? They dive into the science, conspiracy theories, regulation, and how cloud seeding compares to desalination as a tool to fight drought and preserve ecosystems. A fascinating, good-faith convo on the future of climate tech.Timestamps:(0:00) Cloud seeding controversy and its impact on Texas floods(2:24) Background and impact of the Texas flooding event(8:05) Comparing cloud seeding to other environmental solutions(10:20) Discussing population, water distribution, and environmental restoration(14:22) Cloud seeding timeline, feasibility, and solar panels on water canals(17:17) Ethics, concerns, and regulatory framework for cloud seeding(24:07) Public safety, ethical considerations, and social media interactions regarding cloud seeding(26:00) Closing remarks and future collaborationSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisGreat TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Hey, everybody. I thought I would start a spaces to talk about this whole cloud seeding brouhaha I happened to stumble into. So, Lon, you probably saw my tweet last night, like, and then the crazy response to it, which was kind of crazy. People are passionate about the idea of seeding clouds, especially, I guess, Santiago Pliego is this guy who got back to you. You know, there was actually, like, it's interesting. I didn't realize there was like a whole, I didn't realize the whole backstory on this, but I guess people are literally blaming this founder for causing the floods. Right. Augustus.

I didn't know they were like actually people thought, or there's like a whole conspiracy theory that Peter T.L. is flooding or attempting to flood and kill people. That's obviously insane and deranged. I just say people, no, that was not my intent with my tweet. I was just saying, hey, I wonder if we should do this. Right. You were speaking very generally as a layperson, and I think people maybe were assuming that you were speaking

as some sort of an insider you were trying to rely on, you know, is this is such a topic that is surrounded with conspirator? thinking, you know, weather machines and people controlling the climate and, you know, I think there's so much psychologically behind that idea. Okay. I just approved a bunch of folks. Hopefully, yeah, Augustus is. Hey, Jason.

Hey, hey. How are you doing? Nice. Dude, I'm blessed and well. Thanks for having me up. I appreciate getting to talk to you in good faith here. And for what it's worth, I think that you totally have engaged in good faith so far. And I appreciate that a lot.

And also, you know, I think that I'm really on the same page as you with respect to, like, doing this cautiously and with regulation. And I don't think it should be handled casually. So, like, I encourage people to be scruedness and skeptical of any notion of modifying the weather before we do it. Right. And so I totally am on the same page about that and think there should be more regulation around the space as it stands. Amazing. And I just wanted to let you know, like, I was like. taking care of my daughters last night, putting everybody in bed, and, you know, saw this,

I saw your tweet go by, I saw a little broula. I wasn't like super informed on it, but maybe you could fill us in on like what the last 48 hours have been like for you. I'm actually in Hill Country. People know I live in the Hill Country here in Texas. Obviously, it's like a huge tragedy. So when I saw you then go by, I was like, yeah, you know, I wonder about this stuff. And just to read my tweet one more time so people are clear. I never used the word ban. I never said like, And I'm literally retweeting Augustus's tweet where he explains what happens. And he says, you know, his prayers are with Texas, et cetera, and that rainmaker didn't operate

in the affected area. I was amplifying that because I literally wanted to defend you because I was like, that's kind of crazy to think that a cloud seating startup caused what was a rain event across, you know, the whole state, I think. And so I just said cloud seeding populated area seems risky. I do wonder if we shouldn't be doing this thing at all. I think it's a pretty reasonable statement. I think it's one you probably had to answer for your investors.

But what has the last 48 hours been like? Because there are conspiracy theorists who, number one, hate Peter Thiel. He's an investor, and I think you're a teal fellow. And then number two, people do look for somebody to blame in the case of a natural disaster. So I think your last 48 hours have been particularly challenging. So tell us about it. Sure. So I guess for openers, I can talk about what's gone on in Texas, then talk about the desal,

question, right, and how this relates to desalination. Because I think that's an important piece of the puzzle as to like whether we should be doing it at all and whether we should regulate it and how we should regulate it. Sorry for the background noise. I'm in Boulder, Colorado right now talking to scientists outside of a cafe. But so first, the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry blew through Texas and induced about four trillion gallons of precipitation over the course of that event on the, you know, fourth and onwards, the third of the fourth and onwards.

And cloud seeding had nothing to do with that mesoscale global phenomenon blowing in, as much as I would like for my technology to be capable of producing lots of precipitation. Like, it cannot produce anywhere near that much. And also, to clarify things for people as well, like, we do have cloud seeding programs in Texas. So I understand why people ask whether we did anything to affect that system, whether we made it better or worse. We flew cloud-seating flights on July 2nd. We flew one flight specifically at 1 p.m. And seated two clouds.

And those clouds dissipated after about two hours, so by 3 p.m. on the second. We dispersed about 70 grams of silver iodide, which is like 10 skittles worth. And those air soles, because they were deposited directly into the clouds, beyond a shadow of a doubt, could not have contributed to enhancing the precipitation from the tropical storm just by virtue of how little there was in first place, but also because they nearly entirely dissipated from the atmosphere over the course of the 24 hours after seating before the flooding began. So that's the high level of what happened. Cloud Seating and Rainmaker bears no responsibility for the flooding.

And that said, my heart still goes out to the people of Texas and my prayers are with them and we're trying to aid in the relief as a company, but not because we contributed towards it at all. Now, that said, a lot of people have blamed us. Well, yeah, people look for somebody to blame in a disaster because it's horrible to think that children and people died in a flood. And yeah, your mind is like it would be very convenient to blame this on somebody. We see that with self-driving. We see that. I mean, I remember in the early days of Craigslist, people were like, somebody got murdered on Craigslist.

And I'm like, they were murdered on the website Craigslist, like on the server. And they're like, no, somebody met somebody on Craigslist. And then they got murdered. And it's like, okay, you realize that has nothing to do with Craigslist. So putting aside that phenomenon in people's minds, the amount of water that you're able to produce versus the amount of water that was produced by nature, maybe you could just give us some sort of way to visualize that or understand it in terms of what you're actually capable of. Because I thought what you said was like, hey, it would be amazing if we could send that much water somewhere, terraforming or a desert or a place with a drought. Like, yes, it would be amazing. if you could actually do that, there are second and third order effects, but maybe you could help us visualize that.

How much water can you drop from a cloud? How much water did you drop from the cloud at 1 p.m. on July, second or third? Yeah, yeah. So for context, like the most successful seeding missions that anybody, either Rainmaker or the National Center for Amospheric Research or other operations have induced in a single event is like 100 to 300 acre feet. And if you just do the quick math on how four trillion gallons maps to that many acre feet, it's like three, two, five, 80. Yeah, so there were about 12 million acre feet dropped in that event, and a single cloud seeding mission produces on the order of like hundreds. So it's that delta and order of magnitude there. Would that like fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, 10 Olympic-sized swimming pool?

if we were like trying to visualize this? Yeah, so a 100-acre feet is about 50 Olympic swimming pools. 50 Olympic swimming. So that's what you're capable of right now. And if you were to, or anybody with seating, if you were to drop that much water in an area, it would not cause a flood. Is it deployed upon wildfires, by the way?

So it is... Cloud seeding, I think, is a useful technology for wildfire prevention, but generally by the time a wildfire has broken out, There are very little clouds in the sky, and also the fire will dry out the sky further, reducing what clouds do exist. So for keeping soil moist such that it doesn't dry up and increase the probability of wildfire, it's great. Once a wildfire is broken out, we don't have any means to, with cloud seeding, diffuse it there.

And I guess, if you don't mind, Jason, do you want to talk about desalination now? Yeah, I mean, this is, I think, a really interesting one because I have looked at DeSalle companies. I've done a ton of research on this. And Israel obviously is, you know, the whole country is power. Overwhelming the majority comes from DeSal. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I think it's 70 or 80 percent last time I checked. Somebody can look it up here and correct us. And it's really just an energy issue. You know, if you have the energy and then there's pipes. And as you and how we're going back and forth, it's like, we've run a lot of pipes in this country, by the way, folks. And running water through a pipe is a lot less.

than like Keystone Pipelines, like running oil through places. So while it is expensive, it is completely doable. And there are many societies with tens of millions of people that are majority desal. So I think it's like a really interesting debate. And let's have it. Yeah. Just did I get anything wrong in my overview there? Anything wrong in my overview. Yeah. So I think that desalination is great, and we should absolutely do it. And California would benefit for more of it, and Texas would benefit for more of it. And with respect to Saudi and Israel, they do benefit from it greatly.

Like those countries would not exist in the way they do now if it wasn't for desal. But if you look at the population distributions of those countries, just first in terms of like the residential and industrial applications of water, the vast majority of Saudis live in the hedges, right, on the coast with the Red Sea, very close to where you can desalinate, and then also on the Persian Gulf, right? There's a large population in Riyadh. A lot of their water comes from the ground, from aquifer pumping, and they're depleting their aquifers that way. In the case of the U.S., yeah, most of our population is on the coast as well, right?

But then there are these cities like Dallas or Austin or Fort Worth or Phoenix or, or Las Vegas or Salt Lake or Denver, the list goes on, where those desal pipelines that you're talking about potentially building, while theoretically possible, would cost tens of billions of dollars to build. And then the maintenance is the bigger issue because I agree the energy costs are going to go down precipitously with more solar and nuclear. But it's the maintenance on pumps and pipes that makes this prohibitive beyond just the cap expend and beyond just the eminent domain that would be required to build such big pipes.

And one additional point on that, right, is not only that cloud seeding can produce water in these inland areas for significantly less CAPEX and OPEX than these desal pipes would, but also it's a question of like scale and distribution of water, right? Because I'm not just interested in residential and industrial applications, but I'm interested in ecological and agricultural ones. And if you think about it that way, yeah, maybe we could build some thousand mile desalination. pipeline, right, from Houston all the way up to Boise or something to that effect or Salt Lake. But then you have to distribute that water in order to prevent the aridification of, say, like the Great Salt Lake, or of all of the grasslands in Colorado or the forests in Colorado. And in order to take a desalinated water from the coast and then distribute it over all of the environmental land that we want to sustain and provide enough water, you'd have to lay small

irrigation pipes over every square foot of that area. That's what makes it prohibitive for environmental restoration. And you can look at Saudi as the analog, right? They have enough water for their cities and for their industries, but all of the ground is still dry. That's all still barren wasteland and desert. And if we want to keep places like the Great Salt Lake and all of the ecosystems in the Western United States from turning into desert, then we need to produce water distribute over really, really large areas. And cloud seating is situated to do that very well. well, because these precipitation events occur over tens to hundreds of square miles, and you don't need an irrigation pipe over every square foot to facilitate that.

And I think you're correct in the distance issue. If you look at the United States, 70, 80 percent of the country lives within 100, 200 miles of the coast. And so, I guess the counter, and we've got many water pipelines, aqueduct systems that are low hundreds of miles long, you know, California, three or four hundred miles, New York State, hundreds of miles, going from the Catskill Reservoirs where I used to go Boy Scout camping to the city. And these things aren't cheap, but super doable, especially if we had metered water. It wouldn't be like that difficult to do these. And so it is maybe a thousand miles to the center of the country.

I guess my counter argument would be if we, in earnest started creating more desal plants. And they did, over the drought in California, take ones that were mothballed and unmothballed them and tried to turn them back on. I'm trying to remember if it was Santa Barbara. Somewhere down in San Diego, where the two of them, we could pretty easily, you know, take the load off of the Colorado River,

other water systems in the Rockies and other places. by just using desal for the coastal cities. So you do agree with that. I think that that would be great. Now, there's one more caveat. I think the point about environmental restoration and sustainment still totally stands. But then in addition to that, right, it's a timeline question. And what I mean by that is cloud seeding, like desal, is entirely doable,

but whereas desal would take the approval of the California Coastal commission of the permitting, the construction, the allocation of billions of dollars of capital. In the status quo, cloud seeding programs can be spun up over the course of a year rather than, you know, built out like a desal plant and the canals over the course of multiple years. And do I think that like construction should happen faster and permitting for desalination should happen faster? Totally. But cloud seeding can solve our water scarcity issues right now, whereas desal will take a long time. And then lastly, you know, the, Colorado River is kind of a conveyance system the way that a pipeline is already, right?

We have the natural infrastructure to distribute water. And if we just produce more snowpack in the Rockies, then it'll run off down into all of these other cities as well. So I think it should be a joint approach. I think we should have more desal and build it faster and probably try to make energy cheaper faster to facilitate that. And also while we're waiting on all of that, do cloud seating to produce water now and for the environments that desalination can't solve for.

Listen, if you're going to put more snow into the water, if you're going to put more snow into the Rockies, like as a skier, I'm here for it. I think an extra 100 inches of powder would be absolutely perfect if you can do that during my ski week. Well, Snowbird is one of our customers if you ever get out to Utah. I'm excited. I mean, and there's really interesting projects. If you've ever driven up and down the five in California, you'll see like these, water canals. And they're baking in the sun, sending water down to cattle and, you know, the famous

almonds and all this kind of controversial stuff. They're talking about covering them with solar panels, which are obviously at scale getting very cheap. And if you cover those canals, you get rid of evaporation, which is a major runoff, a major reason why, you know, the water gets wasted. So you could actually do that program as well. And they're piloting it as we speak, or they have been for the last year covering up those canals. I guess the question everybody has on their mind is kind of the Jurassic Park question. We know that we can seed clouds, but should we do it? And what are the second and third order effects? When we talk about desalitization, that is not a cost-free effort. There's cost to it, as you pointed out. It's not cheap. And it takes right

of way, so there are issues. And also you have salt. And I guess, Brian, might be the more correct term. That comes out of it. You might scoop up some fish on the margins. That would be a reason not to do it. We scoop up fish all day long, so it's not a showstopper there. What concerns you? What issues are there with seeding clouds? What do we know?

What do we don't know? Yeah. Yeah. So there's usually three questions that come up, right? One is, is the material that you're using even safe, right? Are you polluting? That's the first one. And the second one is, well, if you cloud seed here and make it rain more there, will it precipitate less somewhere else?

And then the third one is just, are you playing God, should you even be concerned with trying to engineer a system as complicated as the weather? So with respect to the first question, whether cloud seeding is polluting, the answer is resoundingly no. And we know this because cloud seeding isn't a brand new technology. Cloud seeding has existed in the U.S., it was invented by Americans in the 40s. So it's been here for 80 years, and we have longitudinal data on the accumulation of the material that people seed with in the seeded areas after decades. And so what we've seen in areas like Utah, Colorado, Idaho, is that, you know, you're using about 50 grams per each operation. And that's being distributed over hundreds of square miles at a time. In these areas, people have seen an increase in about eight parts per trillion of silver species

in the soil and the water. There's already about two parts per million of silver species in American soil as it stands. And so after decades of operating, less than a million times of what's naturally occurring has been added to the soil. And that has been shown to have no adverse ecological, agricultural, or human health effects. And even so, like, the notion of using silver or any material, like any metal material, into soil or letting that get into the soil kind of spooks people. And so rainmakers looking into even more biodegradable, even more organic agents that,

I think less importantly for the sake of the environment itself, but for the sake of people's peace of mind would be more eco-friendly. So that's the first thing. The second thing is whether cloud seeding in one area reduces precipitation in another. And the resounding answer to that, again, is no, not for, the long foreseeable future. And so it's correct to identify that there's a finite amount of water in the atmosphere above us, right? But only 7% of all of the, somewhere between like 5 and 10%,

only 5 to 10% of all of the water that traverses the U.S.'s atmosphere precipitates over it. The rest gets recycled by the oceans. And so there's about 10 times more water up there that could be coming down that isn't currently before we get into a question of finite supply and who gets what. I think about it in terms of like the allocation of the Colorado River. Like in 1880, there's plenty of water there because nobody had tapped into it. And in the Colorado, there's about 20,000 cubic feet per second flux of water through it. A single atmospheric river, and we get like 10 per year, has like 2 to 10 million cubic feet per second of water flux through it.

And we can tap into that and get 10x more water from it that way. So yes, at some point we're going to have to regulate cloud water rights. Crazy idea, but inevitable in the course of like five to ten years. For the time being, it's just positive sun. So one, are we polluting? No. Two, is it stealing from Peter to pay Paul? No, not yet, but the government absolutely should play a role in regulating this so that

that never happens in the future. And then three, with respect to playing God, I think there's like a very grounded material answer and then a much more like personal and theological one. And the material answer is, you know, right now, we modify the environment in ways that benefit us and the environment itself in all kinds of ways. Specifically, we modify the water cycle, right? Like, when you build a dam, you're modifying the flow of a river that God put there for the sake of our farming interests and for the sake of preventing floods that destroy ecology, right? We've actually pumped so much groundwater out of the ground that the axis of the earth has changed. and that has been beneficial for our environments and for our farms and cities.

And desalination is taking salt water that, you know, say like God put there that's in nature and accelerating that part of the water cycle to turn it fresh faster. And so cloud seeding, in a very simple sense, is just another mode of changing the water cycle such that we have more water for our interests, both for civilization and the environment's sake. And then at a theological level, you know, I think that like it's, it's, it's, in mankind's nature to be good stewards and to change the environment for both our own sake and the environment and for the sake of honoring God. And at the very beginning of the Bible in Genesis 126 through 28, one of the first commandments we're given is to take dominion over and steward

the earth, the seas, the skies, and everything they're in. And so provided we're doing it cautiously and with a mindset of stewardship, it is absolutely within our divine mandate to try to make the world better, make more water for it via cloud seeding and other things like desalination. And you are not operating outside of any framework. You have to go state by state. And there are existing regulations around seeding of clouds, correct? Yeah, yeah. There are. There's both the Federal Weather Modification Reporting Act of 1972. where NOAA requires that you report on your activities and the results of them. And then every state has a permitting and licensing process to make sure that you have

approved materials, approved concepts of operation, and most importantly, suspension criteria, right? Because cloud seeding does produce more precipitation, right? A relatively de minimis amount relative to like three trillion or four trillion gallons in a day. But you obviously shouldn't cloud seed more if there already has been a flood. or if there is an avalanche risk and you're making snow. And so in all of our operations, we're required by like the state of Utah or the state of Texas to suspend operations if there is risk of any additional flooding or avalanche or something to that effect.

Did they ask you to stop seating last week? So we suspended operations a day before the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation suspension criteria would have required us to because our meteorologist identified the inflow of moisture there. And so we've suspended operations. You were ahead of the game. You were well aware of it. You're thoughtful. You're thinking this through.

You understand if the ground is already wet. You probably don't want to dump more water on it. You understand which areas have risks. And you don't, just to be clear here to state the obvious, you don't want to do anything that would ever put anybody at risk, obviously. Yep, 100%. Yeah. I think this is like one of the things that,

You know, doesn't come across on social media. I'm really glad you did this because I think we're aligned like 98%. I think probably the only place we differ is just wondering, should we be doing this? And maybe you're a little more educated than I am or believe that God gives us dominion to do this. And I'm an atheist who believes, you know, hey, be careful when, you know, dipping your human hand into the steering wheel of things that this God's spaghetti

Munster might have created. So we're probably like have a deep theological discussion we can have over a barbecue and a cigar when you're in Austin where I reside. And I look forward to hosting you for some barbecue if you're ever in town. And oh yeah, and just in closing, there was a tweet where you dunked on us about the tequila, which I was aware of because I saw that it was retweeted by Sacks at some point making a joke about it. But I didn't actually take it in. a bad way. And I didn't actually make the connection between your cloud seating company and the dunking tweet, to be totally honest. And lest anybody think I got an axe to grind here with you over tequila, which is going to sell out and is delicious and is, you know,

just fine for you to have an opinion that we shouldn't watch one. I'm actually thankful that you retweeted it and dunked on us because it just sells more bottles. also yeah yeah no totally well did i the agenda here either i don't think i i appreciate you guys taking that in stride sax was his response is pretty funny and and y'all were a good sport about it so whenever i'm in austin i would love to do barbecue and maybe tequila and uh i'll text you about jumping on the pod sometime we'd love to chat again awesome take care brother and i'll talk to you soon bye bye everybody