A (3:06)

And that part may be new for many people listening, which is the fact that cloud seeding is not some crazy new sci fi technology. Like it is actually something, as you said, that's been around since, I think, the 1940s maybe. Describe how it works, what you're actually doing to affect clouds and adjust the amount of rain or snow that they're able to generate totally.

B (3:28)

So most precipitation that occurs now, it occurs because clouds form and they have some liquid water in them and also aerosols that those liquid water drops either condense or freeze onto to grow into big enough particles such that they precipitate again either as snow or rain. In many clouds, though, in many portions of cloud systems, you have lots of liquid water, but you don't have the requisite aerosols for the water to freeze onto and grow into precipitation sized particles. So what cloud seeding does is it just mimics the natural precipitation process. When we disperse silver iodide particles into these clouds that freeze the water drops from being too small to naturally precipitate it into being large enough snowflakes to naturally precipitate and sometimes melt back into rain, but generally stay as snow.

A (4:15)

What is the natural aerosol that's in clouds that the water particles tend to form with?

B (4:21)

There's all kinds. I'll allude to a little bit of our tech tree in a little bit, but it can be just soil dust. There's lots of different, like mineral dusts that are very effective. Actually, a lot of biogenics get kicked up during harvests or from forests and fields. So bacteria and fungi and just cell walls from plants that have died. Those are some of the most effective ice nucleating particles in clouds that induce precipitation naturally. And then in more maritime systems, it's often salt from the ocean that actually condenses the drops into big enough ones to fall.

A (4:56)

And you said for current sort of cloud seeding operations, the typical aerosol is a silver iodine. Like, how in the world did we land on that as being kind of the standard recipe here?

B (5:07)

Yeah, I should have some on my desk to show you. It's this lime green powder. You would never think that that's what you should be dispersing into clouds to induce precipitation. So this kind of gets into the history of cloud seeing and we'll get into it deeper, probably, but we started off with dry ice.

A (5:26)

We Rainmaker or we humans?

B (5:28)

No, no, sorry. Let's just do like the proper history, I guess. So these three gents, Irving Langmuir, Vincent Schaefer, Bernard VONNEGUT they spilled ice into a cloud chamber that they had and they saw that the dry ice froze all of the supercooled liquid drops that were suspended into big enough snowflakes such that it fell to the bottom of the tank. After that they realized because it was 1946 and scientists were doing things very differently back then, that if they were to fly their plane into clouds over western New York and just throw dry ice out the back, then they could freeze the water in those clouds and induce the first man made snowstorm. And that's actually what they did. And they were able to precipitate the water out of the cloud and see the divot in the cloud in the track of where they had been throwing dry ice and the snow that they'd created subsequently. Now Vincent Schaefer, he who was very interested in operational cloud seeding, realized, okay, dry ice is really hard to store, especially with like 1940s refrigeration. It's not necessarily the most cost effective way to do cloud seeding to nucleate ice and cloud. Like it's mostly aerosols actually, it's not other ice that induces the first nucleation. So he as like a spectacular chemist, just looked through and it was 1940s, we didn't have any like AI material science stuff. He looked through a table of the bond angles of all these different materials and found that silver iodide had a bond angle that was almost identical to hexagonal ice. And subsequently tested it out, realized that that was a viable alternative to dry ice. And so because of its comparable bond angle to ice and some of the aspects of the fields induced by the silver and iodine item ion, it favorably attracts water and then freezes it onto it. That transition also happened in the mid century.

A (7:18)

So we're today in 2025 using the same technology base that basically has gone unchanged since call it the 1950s or.

B (7:27)

60S on the airsoft side, yes, but there's a lot of things that have changed since then. So the first and obvious question that any listener should ask that, you know, all investors ask that a lot of our employees ask, is okay, if cloud seeding has existed for 80 years, if they were doing it back in 46, why is it relevant now? Why hasn't it been around and deployed at scale? Obviously, if you can make it rain and snow more, then this should be everywhere. The reason why cloud seeding scaled up into the 60s, 70s and then kind of died by the 80s, 90s and 2003 is attribution if I fly a plane into a cloud and sprinkle some magic beans and then it rains or it snows, that doesn't mean that I induced that precipitation. Right? Maybe it would have precipitated naturally. And even if I did affect that precipitation, quantifying how much of it came from my intervention, that was impossible. One, because you couldn't prove causality. Two, because if you do like these target control studies where you say, well, here's a seeded mountain, here's an unseated mountain, did this mountain get more snow than this one? Well, even if it did, two different mountains aren't actually a good set for target control. The weather between one and the other vary wildly. And so your error bars would be enormous. So maybe you would say, well, this mountain got 5% more precipitation, but the error bar is plus or minus 7%.

A (8:48)

It's hard to get paid for something if you can't prove that the thing you did actually resulted in the result that you're trying to show. I mean, it's the same problem for listeners of our show. I think, you know, when we feature a bunch of different carbon removal technologies, the measurement, reporting and verification, or mrv, is a very frequent thing that new carbon removal technologies have to figure out how to show so that they can prove that the amount of carbon removed will what they claimed it to be. Very similar problem.

B (9:14)

Essentially the same problem. It's mrv, we call it attribution in this specific niche. But yeah, it is mrv. Like, can you measure and verify that this precipitation is man made? What made Rainmaker viable, what made cloud seeding a commercially deployable technology was the Snowy campaign, which was this collaborative research campaign by the national center of Atmospheric Research at a bunch of American universities where they realized, okay, if we have the right kind of radar and can differentiate between liquid and icing cloud, I suppose I'll talk about how you do that. If you have something called dual polarization radar, meaning you emit two beams from the radar, one of which is vertically oriented, the other is horizontally oriented. If the same amount of light gets reflected from both of those beams, you probably hit a spherical target like a droplet. Whereas if a different amount of light gets reflected in one beam versus the other, you hit a more oblong or plate like target, which is probably ice. So if you can differentiate between liquid and ice and cloud to some extent with dual pole radar, and you can find a cloud that's entirely liquid, and then you fly in a specific pattern, so like a zigzag or a line or a circle, and you only see that liquid cloud turn into ice in your flight track, and then you only see the ice grow into sufficiently large hydrometeors such that they fall. Then you can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, that is anthropogenic precipitation. That happened for the very first time in 2017. They had three different operations that each unambiguously yielded hundreds of millions of gallons of additional water in the form of snow across Idaho. They did that in 2017, the Chinese replicated that in 2021, and the Swiss did it for the first time with drones in 2023. That set the table for Rainmaker to exist.

A (11:08)

So if companies already existed that were doing this, and I think they were still doing it in the 2000s, 2010s, et cetera, you know, many of them just kind of local mom and pop operations, as I understand it, what prevented them from just exploding their business the same way you imagine Rainmaker can explode its business going forward?

B (11:28)

In a certain sense, a lot of these companies just existed with small municipal contracts that have persisted for decades running plane based operations with exclusively human meteorology doing the forecasting. And they didn't aspire to do next gen super advanced cloud seeding and pour lots of dollars into research to get better at this. That's part of it. The other part of it though is Rainmaker is not just innovating on the radar and measurement side. Right. We do build our own radar so that we can target and validate better, and then we deploy that radar to our program areas. But also we've designed the first and only drone in the United States that can fly into these super severe meteorological conditions. So if you think about it, we're looking for cold liquid water in clouds. If you fly a plane or any drone into cold liquid water, that water will freeze onto the vehicle, you'll lose lift, and ultimately crash, fall out of the sky. So we had to engineer an anti icing system that could sustain us in flight, but we couldn't use chemical anti icing because we ran some experiments with that, and it turns out releasing the antifreeze onto the propellers actually had an order of magnitude greater inverse effect on glaciating the cloud than our silver iodide did. So we were actually preventing precipitation by releasing antifreeze into the cloud.

A (12:50)

Makes sense. You're putting antifreeze in a cloud, you're trying to freeze, there's some adverse reaction, right?

B (12:56)

Yeah, exactly. So that was kind of like a duh moment. What we ended up doing was we ended up designing a system that had heaters laid up into the propellers beneath the carbon fiber that could heat them up sufficiently to melt ice off, but not so much so that it delaminated the propellers. That system, pretty cool. It also enables us to measure how much supercooled liquid water is in the cloud, because the rate of ice accretion on the propellers, the rate at which you have to anti ice given a temperature, tells you how much supercooled liquid is freezing on. So why didn't these other companies do it? Maybe they just didn't want to do something really big. But also they weren't vertically integrating, building their own radar to target and validate and deploying this into the field. They were building their own drones that were significantly more capable than even manned aircraft for these operations and significantly lower cost relative to planes. They weren't building the software to ingest not just National Weather Service radar data, but also NASA satellite data and your drone data and your proprietary radar data to synthesize where you should be targeting and how much precipitation you've induced. And they weren't looking into alternative ice nucleation agents, and we haven't rolled any of those out of Rainmaker. But moving past silver iodide to materials that are even more effective and totally biodegradable is something that we're going to do in 2026.

A (14:16)

Interested to hear more about that, but maybe let's go back one, which is the drones versus manned aircraft. What are the advantages of having a drone? You talked a little bit about the sensors you're able to put on the drones and the heating elements you could put on the propellers. But unlocking just drone disbursement of these aerosols relative to manned aircraft and enables you to do what?

B (14:38)

First of all, I think safety is a really big advantage that we have. These icing conditions are super severe. And most of the supercooled liquid in the rockies is between 1500 and 4000 meters above sea level. The other thing that exists between 1500 and 4000 meters above sea level is the Rocky Mountains. And so the pilots that would have to fly these missions, they either couldn't precisely target where there was super cooled liquid because they wouldn't want to fly down low enough to these mountains and risk crashing, or they would crash into these mountains. Because you're flying through a cloud, you can't see where you are. And many cloud seeding pilots have died in the past because of risky flights in these conditions, or they've died because of icing on the aircraft. So first and Foremost, being able to use drones without a human pilot in the vehicle just de risks these ops. But then beyond that, you, you look at the planes that were capable of flying in these conditions, they're easily $3 million, sometimes as much as $20 million. Our drones are three orders of magnitude cheaper on the Capex side. And so the cost of operating is significantly lesser. And then lastly, because you're not blitzing through a cloud at 200 plus miles an hour, you can more precisely search and find the pockets of super cool liquid within the cloud that you wouldn't have been able to in a manned aircraft.

A (16:03)

I mean, what I'm hearing you say, and maybe this will change when you talk about some of the changes you might be making to your aerosol mix is this is more of an operations and sort of technology problem than it is a scientific problem. At least where you think there's a key to really unlocking significant advancement in the field.

B (16:26)

I think that most of the low hanging fruit is in operational optimization. Getting enough sensors, getting the right sensors out in the field and getting enough drones actually seeding in the right place. Now the point that diverges from that and makes this more of like a research problem is. Well, there's two. The first is what Snowy did was they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you could enhance precipitation and measure your effect. But they proved it in a relatively thin cloud that was entirely liquid, that was not naturally precipitating at all. Lots of clouds that do have additional precipitable water that are seatable are already precipitating a bit, or they're very thick, or they have some ice in them. And that means that the radar reading of that cloud, the reflectivity that you see prior to seeding it's significantly higher at the baseline before you seed it and subsequently your effect is proportionately lesser and your signal to noise ratio is lesser. And so it's much, much harder to attribute your effect in these, call them juicier clouds. That means that the majority of clouds actually still Rainmaker even probably is the most advanced cloud seeding operation in the US globally, what have you. We still cannot yet with 100% confidence validate our effect in these more complicated meteorological systems. That is an R and D problem that requires more in situ sensors and also more expand radar deployed on the ground. That's the first thing. Then the second thing is we know that if we find supercooled liquid water in cloud and we glaciate it, it'll generally grow into precipitation sized particles and Fall. But the question is, if you have locations 1, 2 and 3 with supercooled liquid, and you have time steps A, B and C, which within this matrix, and it's actually way more points than that, is the optimal point to seed to maximize precipitation that gets on the ground. That is also outstanding. We have an on and off switch, but we don't know how to turn the dial to get the specific amount of precipitation that we want. And that's also an R and D question.

A (18:32)

And then you mentioned as well, innovation on the specific aerosols that you're potentially piloting. Why would you need to do that?

B (18:40)

First and foremost, I'm interested in delivering the very most efficient technology because that will enable us to deliver as much water as efficiently as possible. Silver iodide only nucleates ice at negative 6 Celsius and below. Most people think water freezes at 0 Celsius. It doesn't actually instantaneously freeze until negative 38. Freezes at higher temperatures because of impurities in the water particulate that the water freezes onto. So if you can only use silver iodide in clouds that are negative 60 and below, that means that you can only operate for colder parts of the fall, winter, and the coldest, earliest parts of the spring. If we want to induce more clouds to precipitate during that window, and if we want to extend the window earlier into the fall, later into the spring, you want a nucleation agent that works at negative 2, negative 3 degrees Celsius. That's the first reason we want something that's more effective. We also want something that we can use less of because we want to reduce our cost and cost to customers. The additional reason is even if silver iodide is unequivocally safe to use, given how low the concentrations are that we're dispersing, you know, 50 grams over 400,000 acres, it results in a immeasurably low, like parts per quadrillion increase in silver in the soil. Even if that's true, and we have 80 years of cloud seeing data to prove that, it kind of just ruffles people's feathers to say that you're releasing heavy metal into clouds above them. And so if we can produce something biodegradable and finally put to rest the concerns about pollution, that also solves a lot of problems on the PR and customer side.

A (20:19)

So I'm hearing from a stack perspective, and you talked about it being a vertically integrated company, like you've innovated, and I don't know if you built your own drones completely from the ground up, but you've built the drones which are the dispersal mechanism, you have been working on the sensing networks and the radars, you are building the software and data modeling stack and doing all the measurement and verification and reporting around it. And it sounds like now you're actually also trying to innovate on the aerosol itself. So what's left in the stack that you're sort of needing to partner with somebody around?

B (20:53)

Many a satellite data startup exist and whoever can actually get a constellation up quickly, they're going to be wildly successful. There's already planet for like hyperspectral and that's interesting, but for microwave data, for IR data that would be instrumental and I really do not want to build satellites. But if you can get a sufficient resolution revisit rate, that's going to be game changing because it is a little bit insane to have to deploy these radar systems across every single mountain range that we're trying to operate in. And if we could use satellite, that would be huge. Then I think also there's something to be said about like Rainmaker does some modeling, some ML work, but whether it's Google or Microsoft or some startup that does really well on like the actual prediction and forecasting side, we're really good at nowcasting and targeting, but predicting farther into the future, that'll be pretty useful. We're partnered with a company called Atmo AI. They're in San Francisco. They're doing extraordinarily performant weather models right now and have been a great partner to us. And we're not vertically integrating that part of the stack.

A (22:08)

Hey everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at mcj, here to take a quick minute to tell you about the MCJ Collective membership. Globally, startups are rewriting industries to be cleaner, more profitable and more secure. And at mcj we recognize that a rapidly changing business landscape requires a workforce that can adapt. MCJ Collective is a vetted member network for tech and industry leaders who are building, working for or advising on solutions that can address the transition of energy and industry. MCJ Collective connects members with one another via with MCJ's portfolio and our broader network. We do this through a powerful member hub, timely introductions, curated events and a unique talent matchmaking system and opportunities to learn from peers and podcast guests. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. If you want to learn more, head over to MCJ VC and click the membership tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show. So we dove right into the tech, which is great, but maybe taking a step back, you know, today what people are hiring you for, the job to be done is we either need more rain or we need more snow in a given area. And I think you started more with snow than rain, if I'm not mistaken. Can you also prevent rain? You know, I know there was some early cloud seeding work to be done around hurricane prevention, for example. Is that an area that you see as a pathway for you also, or is it all about driving more precipitation?

B (23:41)

There's not that much discourse about weather modification and cloud seeding right now. And when people hear Rainmaker weather modification, they sort of think that, you know, surely if you can enhance precipitation, you can also suppress it. Maybe you can get into hail suppression, maybe you can stop hurricanes. The thing is, though, cloud seeding to enhance snowfall versus enhance warm rain versus suppress hail versus suppress a hurricane, they are all as similar to one another as like a train, a plane, a bicycle, and a tank. They all are automotives of sorts, but they have pretty different mechanisms at their core. All those forms of cloud seeding, they are better informed by the atmospheric sensing and intervention stack that Rainmaker is developing right now, but we're developing exclusively for wintertime precipitation enhancement. More snow, more rain. My thinking on that is the TRL of that technology is wildly more mature than all those other modes of weather modification. And the reason for that is like, let's just take cold rain and snow versus warm rain. In a glaciogenic and like a cold seatable cloud, you have phase change from liquid to ice in the cloud, which is detectable on radar. And also you have a relatively stratiform cloud. It's not mixing a ton. So if you fly in a specific pattern, you can see it, you can see that phase change in a pattern. But in a summertime cloud, like one of these big convective cells, like big mixing towers, not only are you going from small drop to big drop, which is not as distinguishable on radar, but also there's so much mixing that you can't create a geometric signal as clearly. That alone, which is probably the next most solvable problem in weather modification, is inordinately difficult. That is why our customers right now, state governments, municipal governments, ski resorts, to some extent like farming collectives, they're interested in cold rain and snowpack. And that snowpack, it melts and runs off over the course of the year and benefits all of these water users in the spring, summer, and fall.

A (25:58)

Let's keep going there around your customers. So we established that cloud seeding has been around for quite some time. When you originally felt our technology is ready, what was your initial go to market? How did you take advantage of the fact that there were certain customer types who are already doing this? And did you try to go after them or are you trying to open the market up to new participants?

B (26:23)

I'll tell you, my first attempt was like totally fraught and mistaken and a failure. My initial thinking was because I'd been working in water prior to take my Rolodex of farmers that I've been selling to at my prior company and sell a precipitation enhancement to farms. But one cloud seeding is not precise enough to make it rain on a specific hundred acre plot, let alone even a specific 50,000 acre plot. It is hundreds of thousands or millions of acres that you can precisely deliver precipitation to. And so that means there are very, very few farms that large in the United States. And even so the farmers don't want to pay for precipitation if there is even the possibility that it benefits their non paying neighbor.

A (27:09)

Yeah, I was going to say if the challenge has been MRV or. I forgot what your industry's term for it is.

B (27:15)

Attribution.

A (27:15)

Attribution. You're trying to prove that you even made it happen in the first place. Trying to prove that you made it happen in the first place and that you made it happen on this one 100 acre farm feels very, very hard.

B (27:25)

Yeah, it was a non starter.

A (27:27)

And as you said, you also don't want to have made it happen on your competitors 100 acre farm.

B (27:33)

Exactly. So subsequently we realized, okay, maybe it's utilities, maybe it's ski resorts, but water is a public good. Even if it precipitates on one singular farm, that water to some extent percolates into the aquifer, benefits other people, runs off into streams. The government is a pretty natural customer. The government and utilities are pretty natural customers for water from cloud seeding. But at the time I'm a 24 year old college dropout that runs a company with an insane technology in Los Angeles working out of a sort of dungeon warehouse. No government official initially takes it seriously. But there are other companies, these old mom and pop type operations that do have long standing contracts and good relationships with the government.

A (28:21)

These are the people flying planes up into clouds at a local level that we talked about.

B (28:27)

Exactly. And so what our thesis then changed to was we should buy one of these old school cloud seeding companies, take over the operations, inject our tech, produce precipitation more efficiently than before. And then use that platform and credibility and relationship that we've inherited to leapfrog into other geos. And that's what we did. And so In October of 2024, we purchased North American Weather Consultants, which was based out of Salt Lake City, and then integrated our tech upsold and have since won other contracts elsewhere ultimately. Biggest deal though is we, through the relationship with the state of Utah, the Utah Department of Natural Resources specifically, we started the biggest weather modification program in the United States in the last 50 years to enhance precipitation over the Bear river basin, which is the primary tributary for the Great Salt Lake. That is the program that I think I am most proud of and feel the most responsibility to fulfill our obligation on. Because the Great Salt Lake is. It evaporates.

A (29:30)

That's an environmental disaster.

B (29:32)

Exactly. So we're working pretty tirelessly to make more snow there.

A (29:36)

I actually want to dive into some of the actual deployments you're doing. But before we do that, just thinking back to your very first one, North American Weather Consultants. And you know, this is, I assume, a business that's been doing this for many years, decades even, and had some long standing contracts. Those contracts were used to these planes flying up into the clouds. And then one day this 24 year old kid shows up with some drones. Like, how did that go? What was the conversation?

B (30:07)

There was some skepticism initially because who are you? How'd you get here? And also, you know, surely drones cannot fulfill the mission that these planes can. And so we started with a pilot of our drones in January of 2025, before actually transitioning fully from aerial operations to drones, like plane based operations to drones, admittedly, to give credit where credit is due. Jonathan Jennings, the director of the state's cloud seeding program, and then Joel Ferry, the director of the state's Natural resources in Utah, extraordinarily technophilic, interested in trying new things and were open minded, provided that our pilot actually succeeded and we could actually fly drones in these conditions to make a transition for the efficiency gains from cloud seeding. And so it took the spring to show that the tech was capable enough of being deployed. And then after that we made the bigger transition starting in October of this year.

A (31:02)

And have the types of contracts changed? Is the business model different for Rainmaker versus the company you acquired? Are you actually charging in a different way? You're a venture backed company. Is there a sort of recurring revenue model of some sort that you've been able to archetype like describe the actual business model that you inherited and how you are looking to change it.

B (31:27)

The business that we inherited, believe it or not, even though it was a weather modification company, was kind of like a set it and forget it lifestyle business. And subsequently that meant it was just like charge for availability, charge a fee here for uptime, charge a fee here for blah blah, blah. It was like just a list of small fees that would accrue over the course of the season. We've standardized and templatized our contracting so it's just infrastructure upfront and then a service based model after that. So paying for the radar, paying for the drones, and then paying for our operators out in the field, that's what it looks like now. What we want to transition to in the next year is, is more autonomous operations. So we will still have humans in the field, but we won't have visual observers any longer because we'll have a detect and avoid system.

A (32:17)

So it's currently a cost and delivery model. It's not paid on results yet.

B (32:21)

Yes. And so this gets into the ultimate transition. Like we can do all these efficiency gains in the service based model and that's great. But why wouldn't we just sell water? Nobody wants cloud seeding. They want the water from cloud seeding. And there's two reasons for that.

A (32:37)

One of my favorite things is what are you selling versus what are they buying? Nobody's buying cloud seeding, they're buying more precipitation. What you're selling right now is cloud seeding. But that's maybe not what ultimately you should be selling. That's a mechanism.

B (32:51)

Totally. And there's two primary reasons why we're not doing volumetric water sales. And I would love to be like a climate tech minded version of Glencore or something and produce water as a commodity. But one, governments do not frequently do variable appropriation. There's some mechanisms for this, but unlike a diesel plant or like a reservoir where you produce the same amount of water every day, we have to work with what clouds exist. And that means that day to day, week to week, month to month, we produce pretty wildly different amounts of precipitation. And so how the legislature appropriates something maybe into escrow that then pays out variably, we nor our government partners have yet innovated on that side. But the second reason is a technical one. It's to do with attribution and validation. And it's that in this bottom 20 to 30% of clouds that are not naturally precipitating, that aren't very complicated, it's easy to see what our effect is. But in the majority of, of seeable Clouds. Although the physics all makes sense, although we have clearly demonstrated in some cases that we are inducing precipitation in many of those, we cannot yet rubber stamp in good faith what our yields are, what the anthropogenic portion of those yields are. And so until we deploy the requisite sensors and actually solve for high background reflectivity validation, it's hard to say exactly how much we've produced subsequently. We can't price that way.

A (34:21)

I've seen broad sort of industry estimates. Again, it's a small industry, it's a mom and pop industry today. Right. You guys are looking to change that. But that industry estimates remain that precipitation impacts for cloud seeding broadly are somewhere between 0 to 20% precipitation increase. That's a pretty broad range. Do you feel like you fit within that band somewhere or do you have a much more finite band that you feel confident you're able to deliver in.

B (34:48)

The spirit of trying to drive towards success based contracting and in the spirit of trying to actually deliver specific effect rather than a service? The way that I always talk about it is volumetric yields from an operation rather than percent wise gains in the year. And from one you can extrapolate to the other. But what we've seen is any given operation producing tens to hundreds of acre feet of water, that means millions to hundreds of millions of gallons of precipitation on the ground. Now if you have a hundred events over the course of a season, that means that you could get into like low 10 billion-ish territory in a given program area. I really prefer to think about the specific volume of water that we produce because that maps to a specific value rather than like a percent wise increase.

A (35:39)

It's going to be hard to prove. I mean, you have to prove a counterfactual there, right? Like in order to shift your business model to be able to charge for that success, I think, don't you?

B (35:48)

Yeah. There was a FastCo article that came out recently that says something like, I think the title was the hardest startup in America.

A (35:55)

Congratulations.

B (35:58)

Thanks. It's complicated. All right.

A (36:01)

And so I think today there are what, in the US there's something like nine or 10 states that have an active cloud seeding program. How many of them are you working in today? You obviously mentioned Utah has been your initial customer. What does that look like Overall?

B (36:14)

There's six states domestically that we're working in. Well, so there's nine total, but we're in six. So our primary operations are in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Texas and Colorado. Then we have some municipal level programs in California with Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Public Works. Those are the places in which we're operating domestically. We have operations in the Middle east that I can't be specific about which country in which we're operating. I can say it's definitively not the Emirates because if I don't clarify that, then people will ask whether I caused the floods back in April of 24. We didn't, we weren't there, but that's where we're operating now. Very notably, a lot of large states are not participating in any capacity at the state level. California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. And so we're talking to stakeholders in all of those places trying to stand up programs to bring new water. There's.

A (37:09)

And there are some states that have banned cloud seeding.

B (37:12)

Yes. So three states have outright and totally banned cloud seeding. That's Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee. Interestingly enough, the Attorney general of Florida, on about a monthly basis sends me a letter reminding me that it is illegal to cloud seed in Florida. And we respond and say we are not. Thank you for the reminder. The motivation for that is interesting. It's a mix of not knowing per se, the difference between cloud seeding, solar geoengineering and chemtrails. And to be totally honest, I think there's a certain segment of right wing legislators, Republican legislators, that are afraid of being primaried by more radical portions of their base that will vote on the basis of whether they outlaw what they believe to be chemtrails outright. The thing that I am reassured by is There were originally 31 states that proposed bans on weather modification, geoengineering, chemtrails. But after Hearing us out, 28 of those 31 states dropped the legislation or amended it to exempt cloud seeding or in some cases actually appropriated money for cloud seeding because they realized that no matter what they feel about SRM or chemtrails, cloud seeding is a technology that they actually can benefit from. And so that open mindedness, like I am and will be for the rest of my life very grateful for, because they didn't have to hear us out.

A (38:40)

We started this very conversation with you clarifying that Rainmaker does weather modification, not geoengineering. And we haven't talked about this yet, but you've kind of danced around it. You all have had a few controversies related to the business today, I think. Notably, you know, there was a Wall Street Journal article just a couple of weeks ago trying to tie you to this chemtrails controversy, which I don't even.

B (39:02)

Know what that is.

A (39:03)

So maybe you can explain what that is in a minute. And then there was also some controversy around the Texas floods and your activity in the area near the time of those floods. I mean, we can spend a little time on the specifics of those controversies because it's probably helpful for people to understand them. But I'm actually more interested in hearing what it's been like as the CEO leading a company through those controversies, specifically.

B (39:26)

On chemtrails and then Texas. There's been a longstanding suspicion that the contrails, the condensation trails behind commercial airliners that fly overhead are in fact some sort of deliberate attempt by a sort of nondescript, deep state Illuminati, what have you, to poison the population, destroy the planet. It is an interesting sort of like right wing conspiratorial twist on the more earth cultish, Gaia worshiping portion of extreme left environmentalism. And as yet, and I have met with and talked to a lot of people that believe in chemtrails. I have not yet found any compelling evidence to suggest that anybody, be it, you know, commercial airliner pilots, knowingly or unknowingly, are spraying either toxins or nanobots or vaccines on people. But that often comes up. So what I generally tell them is if you see a long streak in the sky, if you see a cloud being formed, that is not cloud seeding, whether it is chemtrails or not, cloud seeding relies on big natural clouds.

A (40:36)

Got it. So this is a fear that the government is injecting something in the atmosphere, and then you can visibly see it. Right. When you see a white streak behind an airplane. And so there's some concern that that's happening. And Rainmaker gets caught up in that concern because similarly, you are actually injecting things into clouds. But it is a different thing and a different place that you're putting them than what gets left behind when an airplane flies over.

B (41:02)

Correct. And so that's the dynamic with respect to chemtrails, often conflated with cloud seeding, generally in conversation, delineated easily. Then there were the Texan floods. And so on the 4th of July, there was a flood in Texas that was caused by the convergence of this Pacific and Gulf system that dumped over a trillion gallons of precipitation in the course of less than two days. And over 100 people, namely children at Cam mystic, died.

A (41:31)

Terrible, terrible, terrible tragedy.

B (41:34)

It was a disaster. Now, Rainmaker has contracts in Texas with local soil and water conservation districts. One of them was about 100 miles south of Kerrville. And we had an operation two days prior, where we released about 70 grams of silver iodide. That's about as much as can fit into your hand into two clouds. The accusation was that because we had been cloud seeding two days prior, we contributed to or caused those floods in reality. First of all, in order to have a license to operate a weather modification program in Texas, you have to adhere to what are called suspension criteria, which means if the National Weather Service or a local state entity says there is a flash flood warning, if there is risk of torrential downpours, if there is any sort of soil moisture excess that would result in precipitation causing flooding, then we have to suspend operations. We didn't even have that notification. The National Weather Service hadn't even forecasted severe weather until the third. We suspended operations on the second out of an abundance of caution. And that 70 grams of silver iodide could not have persisted in the atmosphere for the two days hence and subsequently enhanced precipitation in the storm. And even if it had, the best cloud seeding operations that we've seen to date in history have produced hundreds of millions of gallons of precipitation. That storm dumped in excess of a trillion. And so physically, it was impossible for us to have influenced it. And also, had we influenced it, it was far in excess, naturally, than anything cloud seeding has ever done. So we didn't. And nevertheless, because people didn't know what cloud seeding was or what we were doing exactly, they accused us of having caused those floods.

A (43:18)

It's a natural conclusion I could see people jump to in that regard. I'm curious if part of what you need to be able to do to be effective is understand when is the right time to perform cloud seeding. Were the meteorological markers not there, that there was already going to be a large storm in the area such that maybe now is not the time to do this because we're not going to foment any additional rain. It's already going to rain by the second.

B (43:45)

When we had suspended operations, that had become clear. And that was clear to rainmakers, meteorologists, even before the flash flood warnings were given by the National Weather Service. So I appreciate them being excellent at their jobs and forecasting that as quickly as they had and as early as they had. So, yes, as soon as that was evident in the weather models, we suspended ops.

A (44:08)

Because it seems like that's going to be a tricky thing for your business in general, which is you may have a contract to do cloud seeding, but like, now's not the time to do it here because there's already enough Natural precipitation, like let's wait and do it next month. And if it gets too far out of the winter season, you know, maybe this contract goes unfulfilled this year. Does that tend to happen for you? If a given area is rainier than anticipated over the course of March, April.

B (44:35)

May, timeframe, there's definitely a dynamic wherein if you have a boom year, El Nino, El Nino, certain regions get a lot more precipitation and subsequently a lot of stakeholders forget about the persistent droughts that they're in and feel less urgency to produce more water. The reality is snowpack rather than rain is something that's bankable over the course of months and seasons and is more appealing generally no matter what the state of reservoirs is. But we do multi year contracting right now for the sake of amortizing over periods when we are needed more versus needed less, because that is going to vary pretty wildly.

A (45:17)

That totally makes sense on why you might want to even focus more on. Even though the name rain is in the company's name, focusing more on the snowpack ultimately might be where you're able to be more effective.

B (45:29)

Yeah, to be honest, called that shot Wrong Snowmaker made more sense in retrospect.

A (45:33)

Not quite as catchy.

B (45:35)

Yeah.

A (45:36)

Bringing this back to the current market and then I just want to talk about the scale that you hope to achieve in this business. I think the current market today is in the multiple hundreds of millions, give or take, globally. That includes the Middle East. That includes, I think China. It's a market, it's not a massively obvious venture scale market. First of all, is that right? And second of all, then how do you see that changing?

B (46:01)

The only exception is it is a low nine figure scale market globally, but within China it is a $1.4 billion annual spend by the Chinese Meteorological Administration. So they're investing pretty heavily in this generally. Kind of seems like a good heuristic for deep tech. If authoritarian governments are dumping tons of money into something, maybe it's interesting. But you're right, the market for cloud seeding explicitly is de minimis small. You can be cute and say something like, what's the Henry Ford quote? If I had built what people wanted, I would have given them a faster horse and buggy. I think that one we know that the market for just opex like water production globally is about $600 billion. That's for pumping water, desalinating water, pumping it out of the ground. So there is a lot of demand for water. I think the demand for water is actually far greater than what the market Reflects because in a lot of places you can't even buy. In a lot of places in Arizona, in the Middle east, people would buy water, they would spend on more water if they could, but they can't right now. And I think that what Rainmaker's job is is to convince people that of these existing budgets where people are paying inordinate amounts for desalinated water or for new infrastructure for reservoirs, some of it could be made available to cloud seeding, which is significantly less capex intensive and can produce water much more quickly than these sorts of like NEPA reviewed infrastructure projects. But secondarily, I think that the double edged sword is it's a problem that there's no market now. It's a great boon that we get to create and subsequently own the market.

A (47:41)

Do you see the market growing out of environmental necessity? Meaning with climate change, with greater droughts, it starts to hit people harder and they're forced to spend where they weren't. Or do you see the market growing out of technical innovation where as you can measure and verify and have attribution, as we talked about, you start to make people confident to spend greater amounts? Or is it a little bit of both?

B (48:08)

I think it's a lot of both, to be honest. And I'm super proud of like the innovation that Rainmaker is conducting to make this a more commercializable technology. Super grateful for the researchers that made it possible before Rainmaker. And obviously though I'm excited for my business to grow, I think it'd be in really bad taste to say that I was like grateful that environmental dynamics necessitated we induce more precipitation artificially because Utah, the Colorado river, the Great Salt Lake, they're all suffering from the lack of natural precipitation that they're getting.

A (48:40)

Well, I mean, it's a case study in adaptation technology. Right. It seems like what you're building is more adaptation than resilience. Right. Like this is a technology that humans are directly creating to change the way the earth works to solve for these environmental problems.

B (48:58)

Yeah. Bingo. I think adaptation is the coolest form of climate tech. And Alex Laplaza, who used to work at Lower Carbon, he really opened my mind up to all of the interesting modes of adaptation that exist that are not as aggressively pursued as I think they ought to, but are increasingly so.

A (49:15)

In the last couple of years you mentioned Lower Carbon. Maybe describe a little bit about how you've capitalized the business so far and then we'll wrap up after that.

B (49:24)

Sweet. So we raised our precede round from 1517 and Starship Michael and Danielle from 1517 they co founded the Thiel Fellowship with Peter. They've been instrumental advisors and supporters at Rainmaker.

A (49:39)

Teal Fellow, which you are. We haven't even mentioned that. But you are a Teal Fellow.

B (49:42)

Yes. Thanks for checking the box. Super grateful for that opportunity too. Obviously the Fellowship is full of some wicked smart people that I'm grateful to be in the company of. We raised our seed round subsequently with Long Journey, so that's Lee Jacobs and Cyan Bannister, extraordinary supporters of Rainmaker. So we did a $1.3 million pre seed, $5 million seed. We raised $25 million for our series A. That was with Lower Carbon, the Vault, Ravikant, some other funds that are great, Drover Ventures, Sovereign's Capital, and then maybe something else.

A (50:17)

But yeah, we don't need to talk about the future funding stuff, but maybe just talk about where you believe the company is going in the next what does five years from now look like for Rainmaker, for example?

B (50:27)

Five years. We've got some pretty big goals. I think that over the course of six years, if we do our jobs correctly, we will have altogether arrested the eridification of the Great Salt Lake and will have meaningfully if not wholly done so for the sake of the Colorado River. And that's like an insane shot to call, but I do think that it is possible. I think that Rainmaker will be the biggest producer of water in the western United States and will be doing so at a better margin and price than any other company is capable of doing so ultimately beyond five years in the future. My aspiration is to make like the people responsible for the state water project in California and take portions of land that currently are not arable and do it with a stewardly mindset. Like I don't think that you can wantonly modify the environment, but to take portions of land that are not currently arable, that have very little biomass or biodiversity, and produce water for them such that they are green and lush in a way that they haven't been in our lifetimes.

A (51:31)

Augustus, anything else that we should have covered here?

B (51:35)

Great Engineering interns and atmospheric science interns are welcome to apply@rainmaker.com careers we got the summer coming up and we love more fresh blood.

A (51:44)

I really appreciate you making the time. Thanks for sharing what you're doing and I learned a ton. Super fascinating conversation, Cody.

B (51:51)

It was great. And if you're in la, I'd love to hang out in person. Man.

A (51:54)

Let's do it. Inevitable is an MCJ podcast at MCJ we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about mcj, visit us at MCJ VC and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Newsletter MCJ vc. Thanks and see you next episode.