#1326 Augustus Doricko | Bitcoiner Wants To Control The Weather

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/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  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 Doricko. 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,

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  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 DeRico.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:39Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:26Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:11Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:28Anthony Pompliano?

  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, like, what do you mean control the weather? And then what are other countries doing?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  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 and in the stages that rainmakers 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 host, right? Like, we'll have a Dust Bowl 2.0 situation. That's a big problem.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  But the conversation around how to solve the water scarcity problem in the West is either, you know, let's spend $100 billion on D-SAL. 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

• 5:11Speaker 02

  and make it such that we just have more rain than we have in the last 10 years and more rain than 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. 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? Simply put, there are some clouds that with radar or in C2 probes, you can detect the amount of water in.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  If they're above a threshold point, right? Where there's enough water that's below zero degrees Celsius, right? Because sometimes there's more water being conveated up into the cloud than is being frozen. 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. And so Rainmaker right now is seeding over farms in the Central Valley. We're deploying to ski resorts now, deploying to more farms

• 6:39Speaker 02

  and then potentially going to be doing some hail suppression in Texas later this year.

• 6:44Anthony Pompliano?

  When the cloud is there, you guys are literally driving a radar truck.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:49Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 6:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And then dropping off a chemical and that's making it rain.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Correct, correct.

• 7:04Anthony Pompliano?

  That's insane.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:12Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's maybe go through the drones themselves. Are these like off the shelf drones or 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?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  So we work really closely with one particular company for a boutique system. There's a lot of considerations that you have, like, can you get to the altitudes that are necessary? Sometimes it's as high as like 20,000 feet, right? Can you get into severe sub freezing conditions? Can you fly through the worst icing conditions imaginable, right? Cause the clouds with the most water that's below zero degrees Celsius are the worst for icing. Like commercial airliners avoid them altogether, but they're the best for seeding. 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, uh, retrofitted by car drones.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 8:33Anthony Pompliano?

  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 then all of a sudden it 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 of 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 dictate that?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Totally. So, so you can cover an area of about a 90, 90 mile radius circle. So pretty, pretty large coverage over like multiple municipalities. But the question of how precise the projection of rain falling is, 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, you know, 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, in the right regions of the cloud. Anything less than 10,000 acres though?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  You know, 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? But it becomes hard to project any onto, it's hard to project reliably onto any smaller target than 10,000 acres. So large scale, commercial farm, ski resorts, you know, municipal watersheds for their reservoirs, that kind of thing is all pretty precise. And I think that we can lever up over time to, 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

• 10:28Speaker 02

  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 was a great model for this. But, um, you know, if, if we can draw more of the best talent in both physics, chemistry, AI, then I think that we'll easily be able to, one, up the precision, but two, up the yields of our precipitation enhancement. And then probably develop some other, other products like hail suppression, et cetera.

• 10:59Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 11:07Speaker 02

  You think someone doesn't like my mullet?

• 11:10Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 11:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, what are the critics? What are they, uh?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:21Anthony Pompliano?

  What are they yelling about?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  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, is in the following manner. So silver iodide, um, that's what we use.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  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, um, 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. Um, we're significantly below, even after years of seeding over the same area,

• 12:49Speaker 02

  uh, the threshold amount of silver necessary to be, um, you know, undercutting watersheds, uh, natural bacteria. So there's, there's that consideration too. Nevertheless, Rainmaker's still engaged in research for even more, uh, robust, efficient and environmentally safe, uh, nucleation agents. So we've started experimenting with those. There's a handful of good candidates that I think we'll roll out by the end of the year. 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 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.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  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 smoke stacks 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.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  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, okay, you know, it is something to be wary of when you're playing with ecosystems.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  We should model out the consequences of our intervention to like a large and robust degree. 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. Now, the problem is, this is the frontier, right? There is a component of this that is as yet untested.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  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

• 15:43Speaker 02

  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? That one is the one, this, this third question that people have is the one that I like talking about most because it gets down to the crux of this really big issue of our time, which is, you know, growth versus degrowth, abundance versus scarcity. 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

• 16:26Speaker 02

  more value and produce more for other people in my nation and society. And so those are the questions that people generally ask.

• 16:34Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Hmm. 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, that's a great, easy layup to reduce agricultural.

• 17:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain what that is for people.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  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 like, say that you have a row of pistachio trees, if you have a conventional sprinkler, you know, 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%, depending on the crop,

• 17:54Speaker 02

  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 a, a state subsidy for farmers to switch from conventional irrigation to drip. Totally in favor of this. Um, 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. Um, barring like 60 minute showers, I'm not giving that up.

• 18:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Why did the United States stop doing this? Because you mentioned that this technology's been around for 70 years or so.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  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 cool 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 hucking it out the back and induced the first manmade snowstorm. Um, crazy.

• 19:07Anthony Pompliano?

  No, wait, wait, wait, hold on. They literally did it in a lab first by accident.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  By total, total accident. Yeah.

• 19:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And then they literally got in a plane and just like opened up the door or something and started throwing it out?

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Exactly. Well, it was, it wasn't covered. It wasn't covered. It was like an open top, yeah, sort of like World War I style situation.

• 19:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And that created the world's first manmade snowstorm.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Correct. Correct.

• 19:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So that sounds cool.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Spectacular.

• 19:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Why did we stop?

• 19:33Speaker 02

  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 Skyfire. 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.

• 19:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain how that works.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, there's two considerations. So you have this, this hurricane in the Atlantic. 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. If you seed the hurricane, 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 area of the storm, which then reduces the velocities of the winds. 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 changing the direction of it.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  But that is a science that is even more frontier than yet Rainmaker is engaged in.

• 20:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about that science. 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.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:03Anthony Pompliano?

  If I remember correctly.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Yes, we did, we did, yeah.

• 21:05Anthony Pompliano?

  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, you know, be able to do this.

• 21:12Anthony Pompliano?

  But why would you want to turn it?

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Rather than break it up? Is there other use cases?

• 21:18Speaker 02

  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, too great, given the technology we have, to totally disperse it.

• 21:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So turning it is like the second best option rather than breaking it up?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then maybe still like you want the hurricane to deposit some of the water, like, like the Midwest gets a lot of water from hurricanes that flow inland. Now, they destroyed Louisiana and they destroyed Miami. But maybe if you can reduce its velocity, redirect it towards the central coast instead of Miami when it's at its, you know, 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.

• 22:11Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about the morality of like, the hurricane has a path, like, you know, God's path, let's call it. 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 gonna 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?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  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, burgeoning researching to cloud seeding. In the same way that any useful technology can be used for good or bad, in the same way that, you know, either the United States can steward AI, or the CCP can steward AI, this is true of weather modification. You can either have, you know, rogue nations, rogue powers that are exclusively taking, you know, bids from

• 23:29Speaker 02

  the highest bidder that motivate them to seed in this area or another, which, you know, might be wrought with ethical considerations. I don't think by any stretch, I'm a perfect man. I think that I'm, you know, a sinner before God, day in and day out, and I pray and repent for that. But I am grateful that with what limited moral ability I have, you know, my team and I can make decisions about where it is appropriate to seed and where it's not. And so, for example, 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 hurricane? The answer is like, hold on, no, that's not where we're at. We don't even have the capability

• 24:14Speaker 02

  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 confidants that I can lean on that can help me make better decisions about where we're operating.

• 24:49Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Well, so for one, you know, say we've had these, we had this atmospheric river recently in California, tons of water deposited from it. That was great.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  But the soil was saturated. A lot of the reservoirs became full. 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 water can't, the ground can't take any more water. And so we pass on opportunities like that. Or, you know, maybe a cloud is known or is strongly, very likely to precipitate over, say, town A, but you could induce precipitation in it prior in town B. 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.

• 25:54Anthony Pompliano?

  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, 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?

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, oh my God, I saw the big one, right? Like, is the same thing exists in clouds?

• 26:19Speaker 02

  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. Our drone can only go so high, right? And we're only permitted by the FAA to go so high. But at night it gets colder. So the freezing layer descends. So, you know, delirious though we are from like 11:00 PM to like 6:00 AM every day out on the farm. Like we find some really, really juicy clouds. And I can explain what that means, but they're like come down at like two kilometers.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Are they teasing you?

• 27:16Speaker 02

  That's one that, yes, yes, exactly. You hear the whispers of the, of the drizzle in the wind. And then you can see on radar, you know, whether there's a freezing layer. The particulars don't matter. It's say, call it like a dendritic growth zone. Basically you have super cool liquid water and frozen ice crystals dendrites, right? Like the long, the long varieties of ice crystals. You can see when, when super cool liquid water is freezing into those. 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. And so we've seen some of those at really low altitudes that we've tried to hit. 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.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  And yeah, there, there's been many a Moby Dick sighting that the team and I have dealt with.

• 28:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What about like commercial flights? You and I have talked previously about like the icing, right? That like that should probably go away, but also could you stop the rain? So rather than make it rain, could you stop the rain so that flights could take off? It could be just sunnier and nicer for some people. Is there benefit from like a plane flying ahead of a commercial plane and kind of like clearing the path? Really like, what are the relationships to commercial flights?

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's this thing called the Toomey effect, right? So in, 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 100 aerosol particles,

• 29:15Speaker 02

  then you get 100 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 Tommy 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. Then like you can, you can pay for cloud seeding to mitigate that risk. Like I said, in Calgary and Alberta, people do this already for crops.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  In North Dakota, they do this as well. And, you know, blizzard suppression, that's definitely something to consider. Icing condition suppression, like sometimes it's not even precipitating, but you have clouds that are too dangerous to fly through in the vicinity of the airport. You could seed that locally or you could disperse fog locally. And definitely like keep airport uptime higher. So you're using drones right now. Could you use like, I don't know, mortar tubes? Or like 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.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  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, I'll see you in April. But when I was there. Is that run by like the CIA? Yeah, like what, what's going on there? No, it's strictly Bohemian Grove attendees that get to go. Got it. Yeah, robes chanting.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  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 a Romanian accent. I'm not gonna, they're like, yeah, we increased precipitation 30% with rockets. And we're like, what? And 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, no, we're blasting rockets into clouds. It's none of your business, American. Okay, like, trust me, it works. Yeah, yeah, it was awesome. So they're doing that all over Transylvania.

• 31:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So, and again, I'm going to get very quickly out of my technical depth here. But 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 it be exposed at the right time? Cause it, cause isn't it inside of like a, like the rocket shell?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's, it's like, it's like a warhead, actually, still of silver iodide.

• 32:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, it's just like on the front end almost. And so when it hits the cloud, that it kind of like gets activated and knows like it's party time.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, yeah, essentially.

• 32:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, interesting.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's, that's what they're doing.

• 32:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Are we going to try this?

• 32:27Speaker 02

  You know what's funny? Actually, the ATF regulations around model rockets are way more liberal than the FAA regulations around drones. Um, so yeah.

• 32:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you just want to do a model rocket?

• 32:38Speaker 02

  You can make a big model rocket bomb.

• 32:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I know somebody who has a howitzer.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  You, you, you do?

• 32:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Awesome. Okay, cool, cool. We'll talk.

• 32:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm pretty sure that's what they have.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  All right, sweet. Yeah, I, we should talk about that for sure. Cause cloud cannons.

• 32:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I didn't, I never even thought about this, but yeah, like a cloud.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  I haven't talked to you about this?

• 32:56Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Dude, so one of, one of my friends, um.

• 32:59Anthony Pompliano?

  A cloud cannon just sounds awesome.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  I know, yeah. Paint it white, put it up in the mountain. One of my friends, he, 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 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. 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.

• 33:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw the movie.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Exactly. So pass on the howitzer for now, but let's talk about your guy.

• 33:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so you think that is possible, though?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Entirely.

• 33:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And it would be probably more efficient, lower cost, and you probably could actually, well, maybe you wouldn't have as much coverage as a drone, because a drone could, you know, travel. But if you knew where you were going.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Well, generally, generally, what you have relatively predictable weather patterns year to year. Like, you're generally going to get the same sort of westerly flow from the Pacific over the Central Valley and then the 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 of year, this is where you're going to get your atmospheric rivers. You install those, those cloud cannons there, induce precipitation at the tops of the watersheds of the areas of interest. 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, or one-off project there, seeding through the season. Like, water's a public good.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Legislators, regulators, governors, they should be thinking about how to increase supply in their states. 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 in penalties for overdraft.

• 35:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  No, no, 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. 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. But that, that ratio is pretty David and Goliath, right?

• 35:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Eight, eight people. Thirty eight thousand.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I like our odds.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Me too, me too. Um, it's a, yeah, so it's a crazy consideration. Um, and there's some great researchers in addition to, to what Rainmaker is doing like at the, uh, universities across the country, but, um, why, why are we in this precarious situation now when control of the weather is something that probably should be within like the American scope of technological capability, but isn't at all now. 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. But clouds are super dynamic.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Can you prove really that your intervention created more rain that wouldn't than would have naturally occurred? Right? 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, um, you see it 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 supercooled water, uh, liquid water into ice and then watch that precipitate down to the ground. Um, and so we solved definitively like, okay,

• 37:03Speaker 02

  where, where are the tracks of precipitation that's exclusively anthropogenic? And how much did we precipitate? So solving that problem made this tech way more commercializable. The second problem is like, you know, planes are pretty expensive to have on call 24/7/365. The way we disperse the chemicals is pretty expensive. The yields were pretty low because we were kind of just like, like doing.

• 37:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Hope we get it.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, very like artisanal meteorology. So it was just too expensive for, you know, most states to justify paying for almost all municipalities, certainly all farms. 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, you know, what it should be. So those two practical reasons, like the technological and commercial aside, there's also just 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, in our institutions, in our ability to do great things. You know, Isaiah Taylor was on here, he's talking about his 10 year plan to make energy 10

• 38:08Speaker 02

  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. And so Rainmaker, sure, we're going to mitigate droughts, that's part of the plan. Sure, we're going 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. Doing the same with like the deserts in Australia, with the deserts in the Sahara, preventing hurricanes from doing unnecessary damage

• 38:53Speaker 02

  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 like technological backbone, and then like the grit to go stand out in the rain from 11pm to 6am for the sake of seeing it to fruition. Like, I think that that sort of vision is something that people don't have anymore. And, um, you know, some simple solutions are like, one, just do it, like, just believe that you can do it. Two, probably go to the gym. And this is like, dude, change my life, change 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

• 39:37Speaker 02

  God, rather than being purely grounded in scientific materialism and nihilism, that lends itself towards a higher vision for the future.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:57Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  In a certain sense, you know, have you watched Hamilton? Have you seen the musical Hamilton?

• 40:11Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  So there's a song in Hamilton called The Story of Tonight.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  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,

• 40:25Speaker 02

  here's a toast to the four of us, tomorrow there'll be more of us. It's like this 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. You know, in a certain sense, El Segundo has had iterations of this sort of like upstart, revolutionary, hard tech culture. SpaceX was there, you know,

• 40:52Speaker 02

  we're trying, no, I can't say that.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Other companies, prominent defense companies have been founded there. And, 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. There are people doing all sorts of technology in defense, loitering munitions, ISR platforms, advanced manufacturing, multiple different nuclear energy companies, weather modification, right? There's these guys that run a company called Shinkai Systems. Have you heard of this?

• 41:24Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Dude, auto fish killing robots. 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. 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.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  It's incredible technology. And so, you know, it's kind of just been like this 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. And it's just been accelerating where more and more people are showing up to build exclusively great companies. I think there's one software company in the gundo sadly, but you want to kick them out? No, they're fine, but like no more, no more, definitely not. They're good guys. Through the shift guys or sift, one of the two, I don't know, software.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's just like a group of extremely dedicated, extremely rigorous, hard tech folks that Bridget Mendler included in that. By the way, you saw this?

• 42:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I saw.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, big, big, that are relentlessly trying to have a good time building like 22nd century technology.

• 42:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Are the drones with explosives that companies in there?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that was crazy.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

• 43:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I saw it. Do you see the video? I don't think it's them. I think it was a different company, but the guy who's like hiding under a tank.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Running around the tank.

• 43:12Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Like that is 21st century modern warfare.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Totally, totally.

• 43:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah. Pretty nuts. Um, all right. So what is China doing? 38,000 people in weather modification?

• 43:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm suspect.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Peculiar.

• 43:36Anthony Pompliano?

  What are they doing? What are they up to?

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Dude, I mean, in a certain sense, it's, it's 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. What we do know that they're.

• 43:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Big debate in the AI world right now. Should we 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 we open source or should it not?

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Especially with, you know, the two feuding kings, Sam and Elon.

• 44:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Right?

• 44:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Open or closed AI?

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Rename it and he'll drop the suit, Sam.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  I have no allegiance to either of them. But SpaceX was started in El Segundo. So, so yeah, what China's doing with 38,000 people, they, 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?

• 44:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:44Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what I meant about like, could you make it not rain?

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Basically, you could just make it rain before, I guess.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Make it rain before, or if you way over to see the cloud, you could, you could reduce the probability of precipitation during.

• 44:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  So either way, so yeah, like the, the 2008 Olympics, everybody talks about this. They precipitated all the water out before the Olympic Games. You can do that. They do that. Russia does that. Russia also has much smaller, but like a large weather mod program. They're also doing hydroelectric and agricultural watershed supplementation. So like on the Yangtze River, tons and tons of rice production, hydroelectric water production too. They were experiencing droughts though. They since have been experiencing far less because they're producing more water at the top of that watershed in the river. They're also engaged in an attempt to terraform more of the like Inner Mongolian Gobi Desert. So they're planting lots of monoculture trees there. They're cloud seeding over it for the sake of supplying

• 45:39Speaker 02

  more water to the flora that they're planting. There's some storm mitigation that's going on in the south, like in Canton. Multiple applications, all of which seem to have outsized positive economic yield for the country.

• 45:56Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the government that's doing this.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, it's the state. Yeah.

• 45:59Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the state. Is there a lesson in there for us? Like private company versus the government? Or is the United States in 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?

• 46:09Speaker 02

  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 in DC. I think that if we're going to, in, you know, this now multipolar moment, 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. 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, you know, the Manhattan Project, a lot of the stuff that the DOD has produced

• 46:51Speaker 02

  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. And two, you know, ensure that like, not just anybody with an airplane and some

• 47:34Speaker 02

  chemicals is cloud seeding. And so I'm not one to suggest like pulling up the ladder behind you or anything like this. 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.

• 48:07Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of that goes away if you use a how it server as a drone? You'd probably get more of it with the house or but with with rockets, you get way less rockets. It's rockets. It's like nothing. Yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 48:18Anthony Pompliano?

  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. The store sells like model rockets now, but.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  So you could you could do it with solid solid rocket engines for the lower clouds. So like, say, 3,000, maybe like 7,000 feet you could hit with like.

• 48:35Anthony Pompliano?

  That's still pretty high.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally, dude.

• 48:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm thinking like 1,000 feet times seven. That's a lot. Okay.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  I mean, it's like, what is it? 5,280 a mile?

• 48:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  So you're you're going in excess of a mile with some of these things with like a real payload. So.

• 48:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So you would probably need something more than just like an off the shelf model rocket.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Oh, there's some really big ones that you can buy there. Okay.

• 48:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Like, how much do you think they cost?

• 49:00Speaker 02

  A couple hundred dollars to like a couple grand.

• 49:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, that's pretty cheap.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Rocket barrage to make it rain. That'd be a cool aesthetic, right?

• 49:09Anthony Pompliano?

  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. Have you seen the video of SpaceX where it's like the time series and so, you know, back in like, yeah, it's just launching. Then all of a sudden, it's just like rapid fire.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 49:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Like I'm just imagining them just, you know, have little launch pads all over their farm.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Inevitable. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 49:29Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 49:36Speaker 02

  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, like over.

• 49:49Anthony Pompliano?

  You and your boys.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Just you and the homies modify the weather locally for the sake of your crop, you know?

• 49:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then everyone has their own rocket and.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 49:57Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. How much you guys get paid for this?

• 50:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you allowed to say?

• 50:02Speaker 02

  I can talk about the way in which like we've justified pricing.

• 50:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Justified pricing. Okay.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So like, how much value are you producing is the question?

• 50:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It's actually probably a pretty hard thing to. Show across different customers.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Across different customer segments, for sure. Because the ski resort is altogether different than the farm.

• 50:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  In all of central California, there are what are called high priority groundwater basins. 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's 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 going to, 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

• 51:07Anthony Pompliano?

  An acre foot.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  The unit that people use.

• 51:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So one foot deep of water.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Over an entire acre.

• 51:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. That, that's just part of the, yeah, farming.

• 51:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I, I'm not in the weather modification industry, so I have no opinion. That just seems hard to keep track of, but okay.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it's intuitive now. 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 $10 per acre foot, you can exceed your budget and it can jump up to like 7,000. And so

• 51:38Anthony Pompliano?

  $10 to 7,000?

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow, that's a big range.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. In some cases it's two to 500. But you, you, you get like a two order of magnitude delta in almost every case. 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, 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. Cause your rain recharges the, the aquifer too. So we're going to up your supply.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  And so we'll save you roughly half of the penalties that you pay every year in the, the, the water that we provide and, 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. And so

• 52:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what you could basically say, hey, you're going to save, let's say 50% of that. It's a couple hundred thousand dollars and then we want a percentage of what we save you or something.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So on, on the, in the course of a year, it's like eight million dollars that they'd pay in penalties. And then if we save them half, then we charge like 30% total on the eight million.

• 53:09Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not a bad business.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  No.

• 53:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I'm an investor, by the way. I don't know if I said that earlier. I probably should disclose that.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm a big, big, big fan. Even more, even more excited now. All right. So what about the ski resorts? Like, I'm assuming if they just have more snow, more people come?

• 53:29Speaker 02

  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. You will get super cold clouds in, say, like the San Juan Mountains in Colorado in September, 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 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, so you have like a particularly warm spell. How much, how much money do we save from not running our snow blowers? Right? Because

• 54:14Speaker 02

  actual snow is higher quality. It's dispersed more uniformly over the mountains. So you don't have certain tracks that have it, certain tracks that don't. These are sort of the three things that go into consideration when we're negotiating with ski resorts.

• 54:26Anthony Pompliano?

  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 just kind of feeds into one of my questions I've been dying to ask you. I don't know. I've never asked you this before. Why are meteorologists wrong all the time?

• 54:39Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 54:57Speaker 02

  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, different water content therein. It's complicated thing and we don't have like infinite compute to do that sort of modeling. So there's just the systemic problem that it is literally just really complicated. And then it's part of what makes it hard is we're pretty good at microphysical 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,

• 55:39Speaker 02

  how over the entire globe is this one particular weather pattern gonna move? But nobody's ever done a good job of connecting these two. So you have no mesoscale, you have no mapping 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 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?

• 56:21Speaker 02

  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 the 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 the science itself sort of left unaddressed just because there hasn't been a clear mission

• 57:03Speaker 02

  to justify and clear like value prop to justify deeper research.

• 57:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's going to change.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 57:09Anthony Pompliano?

  But I might think of it for different reasons than you. Fox, News Corp, they made a big investment in weather. And my guess is that climate change is obviously a hotly debated political topic. And you're going to see both political parties and like their kind of ensuing media 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.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  This tracks.

• 57:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, on one hand, that's probably great in terms of like, there'll be more coverage. On the other hand, like, if it's politicized, that might not actually be the best.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  No.

• 57:55Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Dude, yeah, same data science at Cal. One of the biggest takeaways is like, you can make data say almost whatever you want.

• 58:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Right?

• 58:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so, 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.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 58:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? They were like, it would like, it would like hold the heat or whatever the thing was. And I was being like, how y'all going to do that? You know, like lay down like boards and like paint them white or something, you know, like, whatever. And so, yeah, I think it's just going to become more politicized.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Are you, are you into like mega projects? Like, do you think about mega projects like painting the Sahara white or like?

• 58:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I'm probably more up to date on like some of the ones that people are already attempting. So for example, like Palm Islands or whatever, right? Or the line. Yes, like those, I mean, I think they're interesting. Like we'll see, you know, how hard it is to get built. I think in the United States, like, I don't know, we should like fix the bridges and roads.

• 59:19Anthony Pompliano?

  We haven't earned the right yet to do the mega projects like, cause we're not doing the, you know, blocking and tackling of like the basics. 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.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, one of my favorite data points around infrastructure is that the Bright Line in 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 mid 2000s or something.

• 59:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's like the idea of a rail line being profitable in America was like

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Impossible.

• 1:00:00Anthony Pompliano?

  folklore, right? Like, just like, oh, back in the day, they used to be profitable.

• 1:00:05Anthony Pompliano?

  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? And it's probably, yeah, we do need private companies.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, you know, 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 NOAA shouldn't necessarily conduct all of their weather mod themselves, but like contracting that makes sense.

• 1:00:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What are you most looking forward to? Like you're building a company, so you have to be excited about what you're doing. You've recruited people to come work with you. So you have to be enthusiastic and, you know,

• 1:00:49Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of compelling to get them to come work with you. But what are you most excited about?

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  You know, I, yeah, I talk to my friends about this a lot. Like I do not think that there's anything.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds trite to say. I think that like, I've talked about this before, Genesis 128, right? Like, God giving man dominion over the earth, seas and the skies. 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 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.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  That I'm really excited about in long term. I think in the short term, though, and this was evident on the Dude Bus, if you followed the infamous Dude Bus.

• 1:02:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I followed. Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  In real time. Couldn't help it. It was just stuffed down my feed of photos. Sorry, not sorry. I loved it. Like, what I'm, on the very short horizon, optimistic about and excited about is like, tech is something that we're excited to be participating in again. We're optimistic about the prospects of it. Everybody wants to take huge bets. I'm excited to see like Gen Z and Gen Alpha more aggressively pursue like their vision for the future than I think previous generations have. I think, you know, I don't think that we're not motivated by money. I don't think that we're not rebelling from the status quo. Like, every generation kind

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  of does that. It's trite to say that we're different. I think, though, the pendulum has swung in such a way that like, 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. The summer, I want to go back to Muscle Beach and lift there when it's warm.

• 1:03:15Anthony Pompliano?

  It is cool. Yeah, yeah, it is cool.

• 1:03:20Anthony Pompliano?

  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 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?

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Like a garden planet is what it looks like. An earth that is more habitable and more biodiverse and more lush than it ever has been, as long as humanity's been on the face of it. 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. Mexico, et cetera. The European climate is actually pretty solid. Like, they don't need a whole

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  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. 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, which I won't do, but it's funny to talk about. So it looks like, it looks like weather mod over the entire United States and then everywhere in the world. 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. So will China let us modify the

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  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 terraform planet, one that is free from inclement weather and is as abundant as ever before.

• 1:05:38Anthony Pompliano?

  My last question for you is, is there gonna be a day where you have like a bat phone? And like 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.

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  Uh, I would be blessed to have the opportunity to do that for, say, Mayor Francis Suarez or something. I'll happily share my number with him if ever Miami's in need of aid.

• 1:06:09Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? You're not hard to find, but where should we send?

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  On Twitter, I'm A D O R I C K O. And then the website for the company is make rain.com.

• 1:06:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Make rain. What a wild world we live in.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  Exciting times, man.

• 1:06:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm betting on you. Don't, don't fuck this up. All right. We'll do it again soon.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Cool. Thanks, brother.