#207 Augustus Doricko - CEO of Rainmaker: Manipulating the Weather

Summary

Shawn Ryan Show - Episode #207: Augustus Doricko, CEO of Rainmaker: Manipulating the Weather

Host: Shawn Ryan
Guest: Augustus Doricko
Release Date: June 9, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode #207 of the "Shawn Ryan Show," host Shawn Ryan engages in a comprehensive discussion with Augustus Doricko, the CEO and Founder of Rainmaker, a pioneering company in weather manipulation and cloud seeding technology. The conversation delves into the science, history, applications, and regulatory aspects of weather modification, offering listeners an in-depth understanding of this emerging field.

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Background and Personal Journey

Timestamp: 01:05 - 13:23

Augustus Doricko introduces himself as the founder and CEO of Rainmaker, a next-generation cloud seeding company. A USC Berkeley dropout and a Thiel Fellowship recipient, Augustus shares his early interests in sailing, philosophy, and history, juxtaposed with his passion for terraforming and atmospheric engineering inspired by video games like Europa Universalis and Spore.

He recounts his high school achievement of having an experiment sent to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the Student Spaceflight Experiment Program, emphasizing his long-standing fascination with space and atmospheric sciences.

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Understanding Weather Manipulation

Timestamp: 01:28 - 25:00

Augustus provides a foundational understanding of weather manipulation, distinguishing it from various conspiracy theories such as chemtrails. He explains that Rainmaker utilizes cloud seeding—a scientifically grounded technique developed in the United States in 1946—to enhance precipitation. By dispersing materials like silver iodide into clouds, they facilitate the formation of larger snowflakes that result in increased rainfall or snowfall.

Notably, Augustus states at [02:33], "I run a weather manipulation company," highlighting his direct involvement and expertise in the field.

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Historical Context and Operation Popeye

Timestamp: 25:00 - 38:20

The discussion transitions to the historical applications of weather manipulation, notably Operation Popeye during the Vietnam War. Augustus explains that the U.S. military attempted to extend the monsoon season to disrupt Viet Cong supply lines by inducing more rainfall over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. However, due to limited technological capabilities at the time, proving the effectiveness of such operations remained challenging.

He emphasizes that significant advancements weren't achieved until 2017 when the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado provided unambiguous evidence of successful cloud seeding through improved radar technologies.

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Global Landscape and Competitors

Timestamp: 38:20 - 54:20

Augustus outlines the global landscape of weather manipulation, identifying key players:

• China: The Chinese Meteorological Administration boasts a substantial budget and workforce dedicated to weather modification. They collaborate internationally, exporting their technology to exert soft influence over other nations.

• Middle East and UAE: Countries like the UAE are actively engaged in cloud seeding to transform arid regions into green, habitable areas. In April 2024, despite cloud seeding efforts, Dubai experienced significant flooding due to natural precipitation, underscoring the challenges in predicting weather outcomes.

Augustus contrasts these efforts with the United States, noting that while cloud seeding has been practiced since the 1940s, regulatory frameworks remain fragmented at the state level, hindering nationwide implementation.

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Regulatory Challenges and Public Perception

Timestamp: 54:20 - 74:45

The conversation delves into the regulatory hurdles facing weather manipulation technologies in the U.S. Augustus highlights that while states like Utah and Colorado have established permits and guidelines through departments such as Natural Resources and Agriculture, federal regulations remain sparse. This lack of cohesive federal oversight has led to skepticism and misinformation among the public, fueling conspiracy theories like chemtrails.

Augustus remarks at [05:18]: "There are regulations right now throughout most states in America... And if we do don't adhere to those suspension criteria, then we would be held liable for any damage caused."

He advocates for more stringent federal regulations to ensure transparency and safety in weather modification practices.

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Technological Mechanisms and Operations

Timestamp: 74:45 - 102:12

Augustus provides a technical overview of Rainmaker's cloud seeding operations:

1. Detection: Utilizing dual-polarization radar to identify clouds with sufficient liquid water content.
2. Deployment: Launching weather-resistant drones equipped with aerosol dispersion systems to introduce precipitation-enhancing agents like silver iodide.
3. Impact Measurement: Using radar data to quantify the increase in precipitation downwind of the seeding operations.

He shares a milestone achievement from December of the previous year, where Rainmaker successfully induced precipitation over Pendleton, Oregon, resulting in a localized snow day for the community.

Notable Quote at [77:57]:
"Rainmaker has been like this and then that. Just like rapid, rapid, rapid growth trajectory since we were able to do it."

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Applications and Future Prospects

Timestamp: 102:12 - 123:25

Augustus outlines the multifaceted benefits of cloud seeding:

• Agricultural Support: Ensuring consistent water supply for farms to prevent crop failures and support food security.
• Aquifer Replenishment: Enhancing groundwater recharge to sustain water resources in arid regions.
• Hydroelectric Power: Maintaining river flows for consistent production of clean, baseload hydroelectric energy.
• Wildfire Prevention: Keeping soil moisture levels adequate to mitigate the risk and severity of wildfires.

Looking ahead, Augustus envisions scaling Rainmaker's operations to address global water scarcity, potentially transforming deserts into fertile agricultural lands and preventing conflicts over water resources.

Augustus states at [108:42]:
"The ultimate goal is to serve a lot more than 2.2 billion people. Right. Eventually, there will be 20 plus billion people on the planet and we need to figure out how to make water enough for all of them."

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Ethical Considerations and Playing God

Timestamp: 123:25 - End

In the concluding segment, the discussion touches upon the ethical dimensions of weather manipulation. Augustus aligns his work with his Christian faith, interpreting cloud seeding as stewardship of the Earth, as mandated in Genesis. He emphasizes the responsibility to use technology for the greater good while acknowledging the potential risks and unknowns.

Augustus reflects at [108:53]:
"I'm trying to serve God. And so what I mean by that is in Genesis 1:26 through 28... take dominion over and steward the earth, the seas, the skies, and everything therein."

He advocates for responsible regulation and expresses optimism that with proper oversight, weather manipulation can be harnessed to address critical environmental and societal challenges.

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Conclusion

Episode #207 of the "Shawn Ryan Show" offers a thorough exploration of weather manipulation through the lens of Augustus Doricko's expertise. From the historical context of Operation Popeye to the technological advancements and future aspirations of Rainmaker, the episode provides valuable insights into how cloud seeding can play a pivotal role in addressing global water scarcity, agricultural sustainability, and environmental conservation. Moreover, it underscores the necessity for cohesive regulatory frameworks to ensure the safe and ethical application of weather modification technologies.

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Notable Quotes:

• Augustus Doricko [02:33]: "I run a weather manipulation company."
• Augustus Doricko [05:18]: "There are regulations right now throughout most states in America... And if we do don't adhere to those suspension criteria, then we would be held liable for any damage caused."
• Augustus Doricko [77:57]: "Rainmaker has been like this and then that. Just like rapid, rapid, rapid growth trajectory since we were able to do it."
• Augustus Doricko [108:53]: "I'm trying to serve God. And so what I mean by that is in Genesis 1:26 through 28... take dominion over and steward the earth, the seas, the skies, and everything therein."
• Augustus Doricko [123:25]: "The ultimate goal is to serve a lot more than 2.2 billion people. Right. Eventually, there will be 20 plus billion people on the planet and we need to figure out how to make water enough for all of them."

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Key Topics Covered:

• Weather Manipulation Technology: Cloud seeding, silver iodide usage, drones, radar detection.
• Historical Operations: Operation Popeye during the Vietnam War.
• Global Competitors: China's Meteorological Administration, Middle Eastern programs.
• Regulatory Landscape: State-level permits, need for federal oversight.
• Applications: Agriculture, aquifer replenishment, hydroelectric power, wildfire prevention.
• Ethical Considerations: Stewardship, playing God, potential risks.
• Future Prospects: Scaling operations globally, addressing water scarcity, preventing conflicts over resources.

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the essence of the episode, providing a clear and engaging overview for listeners unfamiliar with the content.

Transcript

[Augustus Dorico]

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[Host]

You can Venmo this.

[Augustus Dorico]

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[Host]

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[Augustus Dorico]

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[Host]

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[Augustus Dorico]

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[Host]

Augustus Dorico, welcome to the show man.

[Augustus Dorico]

Thanks dude.

[Host]

So weather manipulation is on everybody's mind right now and you make it rain. So thought this would be a fascinating interview to be able to talk to somebody that knows actually what the hell's going on hopefully. So welcome.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. Yes, thank you. Something or other about it, right? I think about Weathermod most minutes of most hours of most days awake or not. And it rained in snow. Actually snow we're even better at than rain right now. It's slightly easier. So talk about the differences.

[Host]

How much have you looked into? You know the weather manipulation stuff. There's a lot of conspiracies out there on it.

[Augustus Dorico]

Dude. I run a weather manipulation company so. Yeah, I know. So on the one hand, I know a lot about the research that the United States is doing that China's doing that the Europeans are doing, that the Middle Easterners Saudi and the Emirates are doing. But then also I get letters in the mail about once or twice a week from guys that have just totally lost their mind that say if you repeat this activation phrase it will reign over you immediately because I've typed it into the code of the ether, someone that did too much DMT or something. So I've got the full spectrum of the actual science down to the most schizo thing theories and a lot of stuff in between.

[Host]

Nice. Did you see the thing that just happened in Switzerland?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah.

[Host]

That glacier that. Whatever happened, it just cracked off and like completely buried that entire village.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. It was like a town of 1300 people or something. I think that was a disaster. Is the suspicion that that was manipulated?

[Host]

Not yet, but I'm sure it's coming out.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably. It's funny, actually, a lot of what we do right now in the western US is snowpack enhancement. So trying to prevent the glaciers from, you know, melting away, cracking, becoming unstable and collapsing.

[Host]

What did you say? Snow melt.

[Augustus Dorico]

Snowpack enhancement. Yeah. So making more snow. Making more snow to protect the glaciers.

[Host]

Wow. Yeah, that's happening. Interesting. Well, I got a ton of questions. I know that, you know, we. There's a lot of. It's not conspiracy. It's real. Right, The Vietnam stuff. We were trying to prolong the monsoon season over there to give us some type of an advantage.

[Augustus Dorico]

Operation Popeye.

[Host]

We're gonna talk about that. You know about that, right? Yeah, Perfect. Well, everybody starts off with an intro here. So Augustus Dorico, founder and CEO of Rainmaker, a next generation cloud seeding company, a USC Berkeley dropout, Thiel Fellowship and member of El Segundo hard tech scene. Rainmaker uses weather resistant drones to increase precipitation in novel radar hardware to measure how much man made precise precipitation is created. Your first priority is reversing the desertification of America, of the American west, and ultimately to terraform deserts into abundant green arable land. And most importantly, you're a Christian.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yep, that I am. That I am. That's me.

[Host]

So. That I am. That I am. That's me. But a couple of things to go through here before we get started. So we're going to do a whole. We're into a life story on you and. But I have a Patreon account and it's community been with me here since the beginning. And they're the reason I get to be here sitting with you. And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. And so this is from Jason. Have there been discussions about who will be held responsible if a mistake occurs that results in harm to human life or property damage? Is it fair to say acts of God would become a thing of the past?

[Augustus Dorico]

It's a really good question. So we're definitely putting the cart before the horse a little bit here, but yes. So there are regulations right now throughout most states in America, particularly in the west, that require any weather modification. Operators have permits or licenses that are approved by the state Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Agriculture, Departments of Water Resources. And in order to get that permit or license, you have to use approved materials, you have to have certified meteorologists on staff, and you also have to have what are called suspension criteria. So if you make it rain or snow more. Right. Obviously one thing that people would be concerned about is if there were floods or avalanches. And what suspension criteria means is if there is already flood risk because a cloud is already naturally going to precipitate a lot, or if there's burn scars from wildfires that would cause really fast runoff and flooding, or if the soil moisture is already too high for the water to be absorbed into the soil and would cause flooding, or if there's too much snowpack and there's avalanche risk from having any more snow. Even if our customers want more water, we're regulated by the states in which we operate to not continue cloud seeding, to not continue making it rain or snow, to avoid causing any problems like that. And so if we do don't adhere to those suspension criteria, then we would be held liable for any damage caused. And I think that's appropriate. And I wish the federal government had regulations that enforce that as well, rather than it just being done on a state by state basis. Now, with respect to the last part of that question, would that make acts of God a thing of the past? You can't totally manipulate or modify the weather the way that you could the air conditioning in your house at this point in time. It's a super complicated, super energetic system. We'll trend towards more and more of that as time goes on. So right now, if you were to cause flooding, that wouldn't be considered an act of God. You would have caused it. As time goes on, my hope is that we live in a world that is more green and lush and abundant and symbiotically flourishing between creation and the environment and mankind, so that, you know, we've engineered weather related disasters away entirely.

[Host]

I'm just curious, I mean, how, how much do states actually know about this stuff? It's, I mean, it's, it's popped up, it's relatively new on the radar in a lot of people's minds. And so is this like when Zuckerberg's in front of, you know, having a congressional hearing and he's talking to 80 year old people that probably can't even open their email and they want to know how he's regulating Facebook or do these people actually know what the hell they're doing? Yeah, it seems to me like you'll be light years ahead of them.

[Augustus Dorico]

So one interesting part of all this is that it's not really like a partisan issue, right? It's not that, like, Republicans like it and Democrats don't, or vice versa, or that Republicans know about it and Democrats don't. It's really everything west of the Mississippi, people have some knowledge of this because those are the driest states in the Union. They've been cloud seeding for the longest amount of time, or they've experimented with. With it the most because they need the water most desperately. You know, so Colorado and California, Texas and Idaho, they all have weather modification programs that the state funds.

[Host]

How long have they been. How long have they had those programs?

[Augustus Dorico]

So cloud seeding was invented in the United States. It's an American technology that was done for the first time in New York in 1946. So the very first effective weather modification operations were done in the 40s, after World War II. Then there have been a series of programs that have popped up either domestically or abroad in the decades in between. But we've never actually been able to prove that it works until 2017. What changed in 2017 was this. So to give you the overview of what cloud Seeding is, about 93% of all of the liquid water that traverses liquid and ice water that traverses the lower atmosphere over the U.S. so the water in the clouds, right. About 93% of that doesn't precipitate over land. It just evaporates away or gets recycled by the oceans. That means that there's a ton of water up there that's just going to waste that you can bring down. So certain clouds that aren't naturally precipitating or that aren't very efficiently precipitating, you can identify those with radar. You can measure that there's liquid in them that isn't coming down. Fly a drone up into them, disperse a material that freezes the liquid in the cloud, and we can talk about what that material is later. But disperse a material that freezes the liquid in the cloud into big, heavy snowflakes that become heavy enough to fall down. And if it's warm beneath the cloud, melt into rain. If it's cold, stay as snow. And so if you just blast a cloud, right, that isn't and then it rains, that isn't necessarily proof that you caused it to rain. Right? Like, maybe you're just good at picking clouds that were going to rain anyway. And so nobody could really justify doing this at scale up until 2017. And what changed then was the national center of Atmospheric Research, an organization called NCAR out in Colorado. They realized if you have the right wavelength of radar, of dual polarization radar, which I'll talk about again in a sec too. But if you have the right kind of radar and you fly in a zigzag, right, or in a circle, or in your initials, and you only see precipitation on the radar in your flight track, then you can say, oh, that is definitively man made, because we flew in this zigzag or we flew in this spiral and there's only precipitation occurring in that shape. They did that in Idaho in 2017 multiple times. And that was the very first time that people were able to show one, that it was unambiguously working and two, that they can measure how much water they put on the ground. And so most folks, even in the scientific community are still catching up to speed with this tech. The regulatory community. Some people know about it, think it's cool, some people think that it doesn't exist. Some people don't know the difference between cloud seeding and geoengineering and a bunch of other stuff.

[Host]

But I'm in that category.

[Augustus Dorico]

We'll talk about that then.

[Host]

Yeah, everybody gets a gift. Starting off. Any guesses? Vigilance. Gummy bears. Made in the US legal in all 50 states. At least right now until RFK gets his way. But Warren's here. Yeah, but. Yeah, just a little gift here, so.

[Augustus Dorico]

Thanks, man.

[Host]

Let's move into your life story.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah.

[Host]

Where'd you grow up?

[Augustus Dorico]

I grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. So little suburban town outside of New York City and did a lot of running around on the beach and sailing, that kind of stuff growing up.

[Host]

What'd your parents do?

[Augustus Dorico]

So my dad was in data centers really early, so he was building and selling data centers, compute. First to the people in New York, then eventually to the tech companies like, you know, Google, Microsoft, the ones that you can think about. Then my mom, she was a pattern maker for fashion house in Europe before she moved back to America. Met my dad, had me and she was a stay at home mom. And she is both my parents are spectacular people. But my mom, for staying at home, I'm especially grateful for.

[Host]

How old are you?

[Augustus Dorico]

I'm 25.

[Host]

25 years old. Making it rain, huh?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yep. That's the goal though. That's the goal. Right.

[Host]

But that's awesome, man. Well, what were you into as a kid?

[Augustus Dorico]

Sailing. A lot of sailing. And then, you know, candidly, I was. I was a pretty big dork I was reading a lot of philosophy. I was into history. It sounds like super unrelatable. I played a lot of video games. There's this one video game called Europa Universalis. You know the board game Risk?

[Host]

Yeah, I used to play Risk.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. Okay, so Risk is great. Now imagine Risk, but you either have to be super autistic or have a spreadsheet open to play it. Well, because you're managing like, where your iron supply chain goes and where you get your spices and where the wheat's grown for the economy and all that kind of. So I played that and then another video game that I liked a lot was called Spore. And so Spore, basically the important part of the game is you're this like space faring civilization and you can, you know, trade with other civilizations out in space. You can fight wars, you can explore. But the thing that I really liked was always terraforming. So taking a planet that was totally uninhabitable and then actually engineering the atmosphere to like put colonies down there. Sort of like what we're gonna do to Mars.

[Host]

Wow.

[Augustus Dorico]

So I thought about that a lot as a kid too. But yeah, so space sailing, philosophy, what else did I like? Probably giving my mom heartburn, running around construction sites late at night, that kind of thing.

[Host]

Pretty bright kid, right?

[Augustus Dorico]

I was an ammo moron.

[Host]

Oh, right.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. But no, I mean, I like school. I like school.

[Host]

You dropped out of Berkeley?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, yeah. So I didn't like it that much, I guess. But I went to Berkeley because one, you know, my mom was whispering in my ear from the time I was a little kid, like, we have to go back to California cause she's from Huntington. And then that plus Berkeley having the best physics program that I got into. That's why I went there. And the reason why I wanted to study physics was I grew up an atheist. And there's this Heisenberg quote, like not the guy from Breaking Bad, but the physicist that says when you take your first drink from the cup, that is the natural sciences, you find atheism, but down at the bottom of the glass there's go staring back at you. And so I wanted to study physics because I wanted to see whether God was real or not. And turns out the physics part didn't help so much with figuring that question out. It was mostly the Bible, actually. But that's why I went and studied physics there.

[Host]

You made your determination.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. Yeah. So I got baptized April 10, 2021.

[Host]

Oh, congratulations.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, yeah, thanks, man. Glory to God. Jesus saved my life.

[Host]

Me too. Me too. But you dropped out of Berkeley.

[Augustus Dorico]

Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry. So I was studying there. Right. But then. And for what it's worth, just for people listening, because they're gonna hear that I went to Berkeley and think that I'm a Berkeley person, you know.

[Host]

What's a Berkeley person?

[Augustus Dorico]

Well, I mean, there's a bunch of like pretty smart physicists and cool guys and I have a lot of friends from there. But it's mostly people think of like the folks that like, burn.

[Host]

You don't have to go there.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. You know what I mean?

[Host]

I know exactly what you're talking about.

[Augustus Dorico]

I never dyed my hair blue, let's tell you. Right. And so what happened though was I was there when the pandemic started. And at the time I was like, well, you know, seems like the world's going to end. I was pretty spooked initially. And so I went back from Berkeley to Connecticut for a little bit and then realized pretty quick that I probably wasn't going to die from COVID and didn't really like being locked in my house. So I moved to Fort Worth, Texas. And while I was there I was doing school online. I was a data scientist full time, so just coding stuff. And then because I didn't know anybody, I became a personal trainer at a gym down the street from me. And interestingly, of those three things, Berkeley, Data science and the gym. The gym was like the most productive by far. One, because when I was a freshman in college, I got there And I was 150 pounds, right? So I was like skin and bones. Got up to like 185 and was lifting a lot. But two, while I was there, I met the biggest water well driller. So the guy that put holes in the grounds for farms and HOAs and factories. The biggest water well driller in DFW in Dallas, Fort Worth area. So he's the one that taught me all about water. He started a business in addition to his drilling company to handle the regulatory reporting for farmers. Mostly because all of the aquifers in the western US are being depleted, so all the groundwater is running out. So we're going to have something like unless Rainmaker does really well, a Dust Bowl 2.0. But this time it'll be way worse because once the aquifers run out, they're permanently empty. So anyway, the states are regulating how much water you're allowed to pump. He was doing the reporting for those people. He was reading how much water they used on their flow meter. And we co founded a company that automated the regulatory compliance for farmers. So IoT flow meter, some software that I wrote, just like TurboTax for groundwater users, made their life a little bit easier. And then when I told my friends back at Berkeley, like, hey, I've got this software thing on the side. They're like, well, a Berkeley student with a software company is supposed to drop out of college. And so that's what I did.

[Host]

Nice. Yeah, nice. How did you. So what. I mean, you met a driller?

[Augustus Dorico]

Mm.

[Host]

I mean, how old are you?

[Augustus Dorico]

I'm 25.

[Host]

No, what back then?

[Augustus Dorico]

Oh, 21. 21.

[Host]

21. So what was. I mean, what was the interest in water?

[Augustus Dorico]

I had none. Zero. I had no interest in water. I had no interest in atmospheric science, which eventually is like, you know, became the focus of my life. I just had nothing to do because I didn't have any friends there yet. And I, you know, school online was a bit of a joke.

[Host]

How'd you meet him?

[Augustus Dorico]

At the gym, dude.

[Host]

You met him at the gym?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, I was working out with him. So I was first, you know, like a cashier at the front and then started training people, and I met him through the gym manager. It was just like, hey, Gus, you know, honestly, Justin was the gym owner of Procore Fitness was the name of it. I owe him a lot because he made that introduction and we just got to talking, and then my old co founder, Jason is his name. Great guy. He was like, well, I'll take a chance on you and start running this business with you to handle the water. Stuff. The paperwork for it at least.

[Host]

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[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, well, so I met Peter for the first time. Let's see about when that was. So I was invited to a fundraiser for Blake Masters at Peter's house in la and that was the first time that I met him. That was before I became a Thiel Fellow. I think that was just about as I started Rainmaker. So I sold my interest in the last company. The order of events is I moved to Los Angeles partly to grow that last company, mostly because I was dating a girl in la, many such cases, and then sold my interest in that company. Tell you about how I started Rainmaker later and was trying to get more involved in the tech scene. Was trying to raise money for my crazy idea for Rainmaker. For Rainmaker, yeah. And then got connected to this guy, former former Navy guy, Josh Steinman. Probably seen him on Twitter and he's the one that got me to the Blake Masters fundraiser. And that's how I met Peter and then eventually got the Thiel Fellowship for Rainmaker.

[Host]

How did you get the Thiel Fellowship? The Thiel Fellowship.

[Augustus Dorico]

So the Thiel Fellowship. Have you ever met any other Thiel Fellows. So the premise is basically, college is unnecessary and a bit of a scam, and you can probably learn more and have a bigger impact if you just drop out altogether. Try to learn as much as you can independently and by talking to smart people and reading stuff on your own. And then if you are an exemplary person that could have a high impact on the world, that can inspire other people to drop out of college and have a high impact, then Peter will give you a grant to live your life, start that company. And he thought that Rainmaker was.

[Host]

A.

[Augustus Dorico]

Consequential enough idea to inspire other people and to have a big impact. And so that's why he gave me the grant.

[Host]

Interesting. So, I mean, how does he make the determination? How does he meet fellows?

[Augustus Dorico]

And it's a lot of crazy guys. It's a lot of. Yeah.

[Host]

I mean, is it a competition or you just get in front of him and if he likes what you're doing?

[Augustus Dorico]

No. So there's 20 that are selected every year, and there's probably tens of thousands of applications. Wow. And, you know, it's some mix of having. You ever read the book the Right Stuff?

[Host]

No.

[Augustus Dorico]

It's by Tom Wolfe. It's about the initial test pilots that became the first astronauts on the Gemini and Apollo missions. I think it's something to do with, like, having the right stuff, having proven that you can. Proving that you're capable enough to, like, start and run a company. And then, you know, he's a bit of an inscrutable man. So whatever other factors go into that decision, I'm not sure, but he seemed to like this one enough.

[Host]

What was your pitch?

[Augustus Dorico]

We're gonna turn all the deserts green. We're gonna end water scarcity and make Earth more habitable and green and lush and abundant than it ever has been. Before.

[Host]

Backtracking a little bit, I forgot something. You were. Weren't you developing something for the International Space Station or what were you doing there?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, so I. I was in high school. I mentioned that I was really into.

[Host]

Space in high school.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't build anything crazy. Well, I know I. I didn't build any. Anyway, long story short, there's something called the Student Spaceflight Experiment Program, where a bunch of high schools and universities compete to design experiments that'll be conducted on the iss. And my team and I in high school designed this experiment to study essentially just cell replication in space, to see if there was any difference between how organisms grow. And so we won that competition and then got our experiment launched on a Falcon 9 rocket up to the ISS and the astronauts there conducted it.

[Host]

Are you serious?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah.

[Host]

In high school you did that?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, yeah, Me and a team of other guys. But yeah.

[Host]

What does that feel like?

[Augustus Dorico]

That was the most, that was the most inspired and proud I had been in my life up until that point. And I would say roughly in order of something, like getting to know Jesus Christ, having made precipitation, and getting to send something to the ISS were like, biggest life accomplishments. Probably.

[Host]

That's pretty amazing. At age 25, that's, that's crazy. Did you follow that experiment?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, you know, unfortunately we broke one of the test tubes. So in one of the experiments there was a bunch of glass in it, which was bad for the cell replication. But yeah, man, the other results were, and other people have studied this, that things grow very differently in space. One, because of radiation, two, because, you know, gravity and the electromagnetic field of the Earth has a very poorly understood impact on how organisms evolve. So, like, there's this company right down the road from me in El Segundo called Varda, and they launch small orbital factories into space because if you don't have any gravity, you can synthesize all kinds of different materials that are too sensitive essentially to be made within Earth's, Earth's gravity. And so they're doing all types of new drug discovery. They're making much more efficient conductors. We should be making a lot more stuff in space just because of how much cleaner it is, how much more efficient it is. And I think that we'll see some really incredible stuff in the next 10, 20 years because of it.

[Host]

What do you think we should be making in space?

[Augustus Dorico]

Well, one, probably a lot of semiconductors, a lot of chips. So if you build a computer chip here on Earth, right, you have to make these insane clean rooms. Any amount of particulate can destroy millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of machinery and boards. And so if you just launch it up into the vacuum of space and manufacture it there, you have an infinitely sized clean room. So if SpaceX makes the cost of launch cheap enough, which they're doing, then chip manufacturing will become way more efficient in space. Now there's the inconvenience of having to get it up and down from space, obviously, but I think that'll be solved for with Starship. Otherwise there's a bunch of different medicines that have crystalline structures that are too hard to make in gravity. And so I think we'll be able to cure a lot of diseases with medicine that we synthesize up there too.

[Host]

Interesting. And you think that's going to happen within the next decade?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, Varda, that's the name of the company that's doing the. In space manufacturing. They've launched three capsules already, and their launch cadence is just increasing. So that'll definitely happen in the next decade.

[Host]

Interesting.

[Augustus Dorico]

Delian, actually, Delian is the name of the founder of that company. He's a teal fellow as well.

[Host]

Man, I got to get ahold of them. That sounds interesting. All right, let's move into. I know, you know about the, you know, weather manipulation stuff in Vietnam. And so, like I said, there's just so many conspiracies about weather manipulation. Was the Hawaii wildfires, was that part of. Did that play anything into that? There's the, you know, Helene. Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. Did that play anything into that?

[Augustus Dorico]

And Milton in Florida.

[Host]

Yeah, you know, all these things. And so let's just start in Vietnam and what we were doing there.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, so I mentioned off the jump, the first time that anybody successfully intentionally modified the weather was in 1946 in western New York. It was this guy, Irving Langmuir, Bernard Vonnegut and Vincent Schaefer. They were the scientists that did it. They made it snow over the Appalachians. Then by the time that Vietnam came.

[Host]

Around, why were they doing this? Do you have any idea?

[Augustus Dorico]

Cause you ever heard the expression dudes rock? Just like, guys are pretty cool. Back in the 40s, we were experimenting with a lot of cool stuff. Nuclear energy, weather modification, rocketry. Basically, people just believed in the future, they wanted to see a new world, Right? And not like a brave new world, like a better, more American, more free, more productive, abundant one. And so if you can modify the weather, then you can make more water for people, you can prevent flooding, you can prevent blizzards, that sort of stuff. Or at least in theory, when it becomes mature enough. What the idea was in Operation Popeye, which is what we did in Vietnam, was to extend the monsoon season, cause more precipitation over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, to impede the logistics of the Viet Cong. Right. So everybody knows about how we were secretly bombing Cambodia. That was a big no, no, not as many people know about Popeye. The problem with Popeye was we did not have much in the way of satellites at the time, and we also didn't have much radar. So if you look at the reports of troops on the ground and meteorologists on the ground, they say that they were able to extend the monsoon season. But we have very, very little data to prove that. Right. Like I said, it wasn't until 2017 that we really unambiguously proved that this was possible. But just for additional context for folks, the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron in the Air Force, their motto was make mud, not war. Because the idea was if you could flood out these supply chains, then you could prevent people, the Viet Cong, from getting to the lines and actually shooting bullets at people instead. So the idea was to drop rain.

[Host]

Interesting.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah.

[Host]

You know, what's. I mean, I think a lot of these, nobody trusts the government, you know, and was it. I have it in my notes here. It's. Was it. I think we went for what, three, three or four years of denials from the Secretary of Defense saying that we did any weather modification in Vietnam. And then a. A reporter actually uncovered it and then, and then. And then we were like, oh, yeah, we did do that. So I mean, it would probably be better if they just said no comment rather than, you know, than lying. Yeah, we didn't do it. I mean, I get, you know, we need to keep certain things classified, but it just creates this distrust in the government. And then. And then now you have all these people that think we did, you know.

[Augustus Dorico]

Well, yeah, I mean, Carolina, I don't blame people for not trusting the government. Right. They haven't had a great track record in the last five years or so. Right.

[Host]

I don't trust them. Do you trust them?

[Augustus Dorico]

No, no, no. Some people in the government I do, but writ large, not so much. Right. So one of the things that Rainmaker advocates for that doesn't exist right now is more intense regulatory scrutiny from the federal government into weather modification. Right. Like, technically, there's two big pieces of regulation on weather modification right now. There's all the state level stuff. So, like, state departments of natural resources will have your permitting and licensing, but then the federal government, you're required to tell noaa, you're required to notify them if you intend to do weather modification, and you're required to report on the results of it. But it's super open ended and NOAA doesn't really want to touch it because most of the time they just get calls from people that say, like, are you poisoning me? And like, the answer is no, probably not. But they don't really like it. And there's not much regulation at the federal level, which isn't good. Like, there should be more stringent reporting requirements so that people can have transparent understanding of the results. The other thing is, this is a consequence of Operation Popeye. There's something called NMOD which is this treaty from 1972, I think that in the international community. So how real international law is, I don't know up to you. But it technically bans the weaponization of weather modification. So it is, at least on the books, totally illegal to weaponize this tech.

[Host]

Who else is involved in weather modification? I mean we saw UAE flooded their. Was it Dubai? They flooded out. I saw, I think China's involved in it. Who else is involved in this?

[Augustus Dorico]

So the lay of the land is this, right? So first with respect to the uae, they do have a big weather modification program. They do want to make more water to turn their desert green, right, because it's this arid wasteland. The system that you're referring to In April of 2024, I think that flooded the city that was going to flood Dubai naturally, whether they cloud seeded or not. We know that because it had already rained in Saudi, it had already rained in Qatar, the system went on and precipitated in Iran and it caused flooding everywhere. And none of those cities have any drainage infrastructure because they didn't build the cities for that because they didn't expect rain or expected very rare rain. The soil also, it's just sand, so it can't retain much water. So whether the Emirates cloud seeded or not, it was going to flood the city anyway. So that's worth pointing out from the jump now with respect to who's doing this globally, it is really Rainmaker Technology Corporation US we're trying to take the best in class research from American researchers and European researchers. We're trying to operationalize all the stuff that they've been studying for the last decade. Then there is the Chinese Meteorological Administration. The Chinese Meteorological administration has a $300 million annual budget for this. They have 38,000 employees. There are two universities in China that offer bachelor's degrees in weather engineering. Not in meteorology, not in atmospheric science, not like predicting and forecasting. The we specifically in engineering the weather. They have a weather modification program in every province in China. They are retrofitting their highest grade military drones to conduct weather modification operations. More than double digit percentages of the water in the Three Gorges Dam, biggest dam in China, they attribute to precipitation enhancement operations. Inner Mongolia, right. The border with Mongolia and China, they are actively turning green by making it rain more there and planting trees.

[Host]

No kidding?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. And they're doing initial experiments on flood mitigation all over Canton as well. So they're the most sophisticated by far. And more so than that, they're collaborating with other governments around the world to export their technology and have control over the weather there. So, like, the Thai government has. This is actually a pretty cool thing. They have what's called a royal rainmaking department because they have a king. Right. I don't know. It's a cool name for an organization in the government. They collaborate with the Chinese Meteorological Administration. So China does a lot of their weather modification. Then in the Middle east, they have some researchers of their own, but it's really this sort of great power politics between the United States government, which is not super involved in weather mods. So really it's just me and my pals going there advocating for us versus all of the best Chinese researchers. And the Chinese researchers, not only are they using more sophisticated drones, more sophisticated radar to measure what the results of the operations are, they've designed different kinds of nanoparticles that are way more efficient at inducing precipitation than anything that we have stateside right now. So lay of the land is there's Rainmaker, which is probably the best in class in the world, maybe only next to the Chinese Meteorological Administration. There's the cma. There's all of the governments that basically we are bidding against the CMA for, like, market share in. And then there's kind of all the, like, snake oil salesmen, guys that are just flying a plane up, blasting something, and then saying, mission accomplished, we did it without any scientific backing.

[Host]

Interesting, Interesting. How many countries is China working with on this? Do you have any idea?

[Augustus Dorico]

No, I don't know how many exactly. You wouldn't be surprised to find out. They're pretty obtuse about it, but they have explicitly said. There's a blog post I can send you after this that they published where by 2030, they want to export this tech not to be explicitly part of Belt and Road, but to be a means of exerting soft influence over all these countries. Right. Because if China owns all the shipping infrastructure, so like shipping and receiving energy infrastructure, that's already huge leverage over East Africa, Europe, the Middle East. But if you control the water supply, that's a much more consequential thing to have leverage over.

[Host]

Yeah, that's. Wow. They're smart, man. They're smart.

[Augustus Dorico]

They are. But I believe in American exceptionalism. I think that. I mean, for one, what it's worth saying is, like, I am not a pacifist, but I really do not think that war is good. I think a lot of the time when technology companies talk about China, they saber rattle and sort of froth at the mouth at the idea of War, because practically speaking, you can get your bags pump by the US Government funding you to do weaponization stuff. I don't like that. I really wish that we had a rivalry with China, but were less anxious to fight with them. All of that said, though, I think.

[Host]

A lot of that comes from the stuff going on in Taiwan right now.

[Augustus Dorico]

Totally. Right. And we need the chips in Taiwan. I get that. But I don't know. I would prefer that we're inspired to action and get really serious about weather modification and all these other strategic technologies, because we do want to be the strongest power in the world, and we do want an American vision for the world and for space in the future, but not one that is on a collision course with China in World War three.

[Host]

Well, a lot of people are really skeptical of weather modification, me being one of them. And so let's talk about the difference between geoengineering, chemtrails, and cloud seeding.

[Augustus Dorico]

Totally. So let's open with cloud seeding. Right. Cloud seeding was a technology invented in the United States by American scientists in 1946. It is super localized in its effect both in space and time. Meaning you can make it rain or snow more over an individual city over 100 square miles at a time. Precipitation happens, you know, 15 minutes to a couple hours after your intervention. And if you stop operating, right, if you stop cloud seeding, then you stop affecting the weather, it stops changing. Right. So. So you can turn it off whenever you want. Also, because we were doing all of these experiments over the course of the last 80 years, we have data on its safety, right? We have data on the materials that we use. So people have typically used material called silver iodide to freeze the liquid in the cloud into these big snowflakes that eventually precipitate, melt into rain or stay as snow. Silver iodide, its toxicity is like 10 times less than aspirin, for one. But more than that, more importantly than that, after decades of operations in Utah and Idaho and Colorado and California, because there were all these old programs, like I mentioned, they only added 8 parts per trillion more soil or more silver to the soil. And there's already 2 parts per million silver in American soil as it stands. So they added a million times less than what's naturally there. No adverse ecological consequences, agricultural consequences, consequences to human health. Like, it's way below the threshold where you'd start to see anything like that. So cloud seeding is just a way to make more water. It's super local in its effect. It's pretty well characterized and we know that it doesn't have any adverse ecological consequences.

[Host]

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[Augustus Dorico]

On the other hand, there is geoengineering, particularly solar radiation modification. That is a pretty new technology. The way that it is proposed to work is dispersing particles in the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet down. Totally unlike cloud seeding. In order for cloud seeding to work, you need a big fluffy cloud that's already there. Solar radiation modification. You just put it up at like 60,000ft. It's an interesting technology, but it's one that is like almost entirely untested. And we should be way more scrutinous of and skeptical of before we deploy to scale because like, well, we don't really know what's going to happen yet. If we cool the planet down by a degree Celsius, we don't even know if we Want to do that, Right? So that's the main geoengineering technology that exists. And then there's chemtrails or contrails. Right? So that's the streaky things in the sky that people see behind airplanes. The first and most important thing to say is if you see those long streaks in the sky, that's not cloud seeding. Whether it's contrails or chemtrails or anything else, it is not cloud seeding. For cloud seeding to work, you have to have a big fluffy cloud with natural water. Those long streaky things, they can't make rain. They don't turn into big puffier clouds that eventually make rain. That doesn't have to do with weather modification. There are such a thing as contrails, right? So the turbulence from planes and the vapor from the jet engines will freeze behind the plane and that'll turn into condensation. What people have suggested to be chemtrails are like the nefarious. Is the nefarious addition of either some sort of neurotoxin or goodness knows what to those contrails to poison people. I have not yet seen enough compelling evidence to believe that that's happening.

[Host]

Have you seen any evidence?

[Augustus Dorico]

Here's what is the most compelling point of information that I'm not totally over the line on. There are different additives in jet fuel for efficiency. There's different residues or impurities in jet fuel that can end up in condensation that probably wouldn't be healthy to eat hand over fist, but is probably way too diffuse to cause any sort of serious toxicity. So, like, really? No. And I say that as a guy that, like, would want to know about it and talks to people about it all the time. Solar radiation modification. Yes, people are doing that. There is a ton of evidence for that. Like, we know lots of people that are doing that, but chemtrails themselves, Like, I guess a question for you would be, if that was happening, who would be doing it and why would they be doing it?

[Host]

Yeah, I think about that all the time. I have no idea, you know, But I do look out and I see it all and I'm like, well, that probably is not good, but that's about the extent of it. I don't know why they would be doing it or. But I don't know why they do a lot of things.

[Augustus Dorico]

Well, okay, fair enough. Right. One interesting thing about condensation trails, because we do know what those are, is they actually do have an effect on the weather to some extent in that, like, you're essentially Making this blanket right in. In the atmosphere around, like, 30,000ft. And so if you create a condensation trail in the morning, then you are de facto blocking some of the sunlight from getting down to the Earth and warming the planet up. So you can sort of locally cool things down if you create a condensation trail at night. And on the flip side, if you create condensation trails at the end of the day, like right before sunset, the blanket sort of acts as an insulator so it keeps more of the infrared in, so it keeps things warmer locally beneath where they are, if you make a lot of them. So, like, maybe there's some reason to do that. But, you know, like, I love the idea of getting microplastics out of the water and having, you know, about how birth control's in all water now.

[Host]

I didn't know that.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, so what? Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff that's poisoning us that we should be really concerned about right now.

[Host]

There's birth control in the water.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So right now, lots of women use hormonal birth control, Right? And then we recycle a lot of that water. We don't actively filter out for the hormones that are in it. And so when that gets recycled, it gets put back in the water supply, and then dudes end up drinking it, too. So, one, Alex Jones was right about the atrazine and what it does to frogs. Two, there's a bunch of other stuff that's probably androgenizing us. That's not good. So, like, are there a lot of toxins in our environment? Yeah, totally. I would prefer that we focus, like, making America healthy again on getting rid of those things that we do know exist, rather than, like, speculating about the World Economic Forum, like spraying mind control viruses over us or something.

[Host]

If nothing nefarious is going on with the chem and contrails, why do you think all these states are making it illegal? I mean, I know Tennessee just did it, I think maybe a year or two years ago.

[Augustus Dorico]

Year ago? Yeah. Yeah. So Tennessee did it a year ago. Florida did it just this year. It's actually a Class 2 felony in Florida now. So I would go to prison for five years if I conducted business in Tennessee in Florida. I think the reason why they're doing it is. Well, first of all, the western states aren't doing this. They're not doing it because they're so desperate for water that they're seriously willing to hear out the case for cloud seeding. Right. Like, Montana proposed legislation to Ban all weather modification and geoengineering. They still banned geoengineering, but they carved out cloud seeding because they know it'll be good for their cattle and for their farms and for their municipal water supplies and for their aquifers. Texas did the same thing. The eastern states, you know, most people think of them as pretty wet, like you don't need a ton of water. But actually, Florida sometimes doesn't have enough. Like 30,000 acres of Miami Dade county burnt down in April from wildfire because there was a drought. The cattlemen and the orange orchards don't have enough water there either. So, like. Like sometimes, actually, even in the wetter states, they do need it, but they don't feel the pain as acutely of water scarcity as the West. So it is basically people rightfully not trusting the government and thinking that something fishy is going on, nobody knowing what cloud seeding is or the difference between cloud seeding, chemtrails, and solar radiation modification and thinking, holy smokes, any of this would be really consequential. We should just ban it so that nothing goes wrong and sort of take the brute force, blunt approach to it and not reaping any of the rewards of what cloud seeding could offer. And then RFK said that chemtrails should be a crime for which people should be arrested. So he definitely catalyzed a lot of that too. And also, last thing, I think Rainmaker made enough of A splash in 2023, 2024 to confirmed to people that weather modification was real and it was measurable, and we know it's happening. So we put enough information out there to tell people it was happening and probably actually scare them because we didn't give them enough context and reiterate the point enough. And so that's the origin of these bans, I think. And then Dubai flooding was a horrible look as well.

[Host]

How many states have banned it?

[Augustus Dorico]

So 31 states proposed legislation to ban.

[Host]

31 states.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, me and my team have been to most of them. The only states that have banned it are Tennessee and Florida.

[Host]

Interesting.

[Augustus Dorico]

And I mean, you think about it this way, right? Like, I was listening to another one of your podcasts with the retired two star, the guy that runs the space manufacturing company, Steve Quast. Yeah, Steve Quast.

[Host]

See, that's. I was gonna bring. I don't want to cut you off. Go ahead.

[Augustus Dorico]

Well, no, no, please.

[Host]

I was gonna bring that up because in his interview, and I don't remember the chemical or whatever it is that they're using to he was talking about how Elon Musk wanted to use this thing where basically he put some type of additive in a sponge like substance and you run fans on it and it produces all this water and that Elon wanted to use it to cool his rocket pads down there and got denied because Texas was like, we don't know how to tax you on this.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, yeah.

[Host]

So then he had to use all of the regular water, which seemed like a huge misstep on Texas for not allowing him to do that and sucking up all that water in a dry state. But yeah, that's where I was going with that.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, yeah, well, I mean that's exactly the point that I was bringing up too. Right. Like China and other countries around the world. The United States back in the 60s was like this. Like they are investing in things and they are permitting things and they are regulating things smartly that like make more abundance, that make more energy, that make more water, that make everybody's lives better. The United States for whatever reason just like bans and regulates stuff out of existence that makes one all of our lives worse and us as a country less competitive. And so do I fault people for being scrutinous and skeptical of weather modification and wanting to know what's going on? No, totally. This tech is going to be maybe the most consequential, if not the second or third most consequential technology in the 21st century. I think the first is going to be. Well, I mean maybe there's four. It's really like AI, nuclear energy, rocketry and weather modification. Those are the things that are going to make our descendants lives look like fundamentally totally different from anything that any other human has experienced. But if we regulate it in a smart way and permit it to happen in a way that benefits people, that's like a no brainer, having the most cost effective way to produce more water when you want it. Why would you pass up on that if you can prove that it's safe?

[Host]

I think people, it's new. People don't like new. And then what are the implications of weather modification that we don't know about? And how does it manipulate the rest of the weather? By changing the ecosystem. So for example, I don't even know if this is true, but I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. Very dry in a lot of Afghanistan it's a desert. In the north it's not. But it was rumored that they had chopped so many trees down to keep themselves warm. There's no trees in the southern part anymore and it Actually changed their whole ecosystem and turned it into. Turned it into a desert because they had chopped all the damp trees down. And so, I mean, I think people are really concerned, as, you know, what are the effects that we don't know about, and we will not know until this comes to fruition and everybody's cloud seeding.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. And it's worth asking that question. Right. But one, we have 80 years of data on its safety and on its efficacy to reason by analogy. Right. Like California's Central Valley, it used to be a mix of desert and swamp. It was a wasteland at the beginning of the 1900s. And because we built new infrastructure, had new technologies for pumping water and desalinating water, we turned that into the most productive agricultural region in the United States. It feeds tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people around the world and produces, like, what, 40% of all of our fruit? We changed that ecosystem, and it was way better for everybody else. So should we regulate these things? Should we be cautious and, like, do it maybe with relatively slowly or with just caution, at least totally. But every day that goes by that people don't have enough water, I view it to some extent as guilt on me for not having made enough water to feed more people to make everyone's lives better. Yeah. And that weighs on me a lot. So should we be scrutinous? Yes. To your point as well. You said, well, what if you totally change the ecosystem? Could something bad happen? I was talking to was it will earlier in here? Wyatt. Patron Wyatt. One thing to think about that is actually sort of a fun thought experiment is like greening the Sahara, right? Sahara Desert, huge wasteland. If you turn the Sahara Desert green, that actually would not be very good, because the dust from the Sahara that goes over the ocean, over the Amazon results in a lot of the cloud condensation and the precipitation. So if you turn all that green and the dust stops getting kicked up, you might actually reduce the precipitation over the Amazon. So, like, when Rainmaker gets to the scale in a decade or so of, like, actively terraforming the planet, making it more lush and green and symbiotic than it ever has been before, we're going to have questions that we have to answer about what the consequences will be globally. But I think that humans are pretty good at engineering solutions and building new technology and building new systems to make the world better.

[Host]

I mean, I guess the counter to that would be. I guess you would just cloud seed more over the Amazon, right?

[Augustus Dorico]

Bingo. Yeah, exactly.

[Host]

But, you know, is there any Is there any talk of how this would, you know, maybe intensify hurricanes or tornadoes or any other, you know, natural disasters that may not be natural disasters anymore?

[Augustus Dorico]

Have you heard of Project Storm Fury?

[Host]

No.

[Augustus Dorico]

So about the same time period as Popeye, the U.S. air Force, in collaboration with the U.S. weather Bureau, which eventually became like NOAA and the National Weather Service, they were flying into the Atlantic Ocean to seed hurricanes to try to prevent the amount of dam or mitigate the amount of damage that they did before they broke against the Eastern seaboard. And so the idea was, one, precipitate water out of the storm so that there's less flooding that occurs from it before it reaches land. And then two, if you freeze the liquid in the cloud, that releases a little bit of heat. Freezing is exothermic. And so if you seed the storm and it releases heat, you have the same amount of energy, but you expand the storm. Like the heat advects it out. And so the wind speeds will be less on the exterior as well. So you get less damage from flooding, less damage from severe winds. We tried doing that. The problem then, though, was we didn't have anything in the way of satellites. We had no radar over the oceans. And so we couldn't even measure what the results were really. So we gave it a go. Nobody really knows whether it was effective or not. But I think that the thing to consider is like, Rainmaker right now is just making more water for farms, utilities. That's our bag. That is what people immediately need. We can do it at small scales. It is worthwhile, and people really want that. We operate all over the western US Someday. Like, I don't think drought is the only thing that we should solve. If you could engineer away severe weather flooding, if you can mitigate hurricanes, if you can mitigate hail, you know, you'd have to do a lot of experiments to prove it was safe first. But why would we let the Eastern seaboard of the United States keep getting blasted with hurricanes if we could build a solution for it?

[Host]

Makes sense. And then going back to what if this does intensify hurricanes or take the rain away from the Amazon and create a drought once it's happened? I mean, I guess what I'm saying is how many people would pay the price, you know, by making the Sahara green, takes the dust down, eliminates the rain in the Amazon, then we gotta figure something out immediately because it's gonna affect all those people.

[Augustus Dorico]

No, we wouldn't. Because, you know, it would take decades to make this Aragu green. You'd have to do that step by step, piece by piece. It'd be a very slow process. And with cloud seeding, you could turn it off whenever you want. So in that long process of trying to do large scale terraforming, you would be able to stop at any point if you didn't like what was happening from producing more water in one place versus the other. So I don't think we would have to have a solution at the drop of a hat. And also on the flip, even if we did. And I think that we don't. Right. Because it would take so long to deploy this tech to cause these things. Like there is suffering now. There's $140 billion in damage done by hurricanes every year in the U.S. there's hundreds of billions of dollars in crop failures every year in the US from lack of water. So it's not, it's not that like this tech is without risk, but like there is a horrible problem right now because there isn't enough water and because we have severe weather. And like we, I guess in principle.

[Host]

Right, like you're saying you're concentrating on the need.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, exactly.

[Host]

Versus, you know, what could happen. You want to fill the immediate need.

[Augustus Dorico]

I think about both. Right. Cause I don't, I don't think that the unknown unknowns are that great. Like I said, we have 80 years of data on this stuff. We know pretty well how it works and we haven't seen any of this sort of adverse consequence. I mean, at the very least, right, we have less and less water every year in the American west than we did before. So like, maybe we only get this far, but let's just get back to baseline, right? Like, let's just get back to the amount of water that we had 40 years ago because we knew that it was safe and stable then. So like, let's make sure that Lake Powell is full. Let's make sure that the Great Salt Lake isn't evaporating. Let's make sure that Phoenix and Tucson and Salt Lake City and Las Vegas and Dallas and Denver and all the cities in the Central Valley and California writ large have enough water, the same amount of water that they used to even. Let's start with that because that's going to take a lot of my time for the next five years or so. And then after that we can get into the more pie in the sky stuff. But for now, more water on the ground so that we get back to baseline is the number one priority.

[Host]

Roger that. Let's take a quick break. When we come Back, we'll talk about how this all works. At True Classic, the mission goes far beyond just great materials and a good fit. It's about helping men show up with purpose and feel sure of themselves. Their clothes are designed to fit right in price so that any guy can feel confident without overspending. True Classic was founded to make a real difference and that's what makes them stand out. They're driven by purpose, whether it's helping men feel their best day to day or giving back to communities in need. I've been wearing True Classic for a while now. Whether it's working out, going out to dinner, running to meetings, you can feel the difference the moment you throw one on. Tailored where you want it, relaxed where you need it. No bunching, no stiff fabric. Just a clean, effortless fit that actually works for real life. Forget overpriced designer brands. Ditch the disposable fast fashion. True Classic is built for comfort, built to last, and built to give back. You can grab them at Target, Costco or head to truclassic.com SRS and get hooked up today. You've heard me talk about Patriot Mobile. For a while now, they've stood in the gap for Americans who believe that faith, family and freedom are worth fighting for. And they're the real deal. They've got cutting edge technology and switching is easy. Keep your number, keep your phone or upgrade. Their 100% US based team can activate you in minutes right over the phone. They're one of the few carriers with access to all three major US Networks. That means exceptional nationwide coverage. They can even put a second number on a different network on the phone. It's like carrying two phones in one. They have unlimited data plans, mobile hotspots, international roaming, Internet on the go devices, and home Internet backup. Make the switch today and experience the difference. Go to patriotmobile.com SRS or call 972 Patriot. And right now, use the promo code SRS for a free month of service. When you sign up, switch to Patriot Mobile and defend freedom with every call and text you make. That's patriotmobile.com SRS or call 972 Patriot. All right, we're back from the break. We had a little discussion about the grids. People walk outside, they see the grids with the cloud seating. What? What is that?

[Augustus Dorico]

It's not grids. With grids.

[Host]

I mean, I'm sorry. With the chemtrails.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. Listen, man, there's an email. Contactainainmaker.com if anybody has credible scientific evidence of deliberate contrail. Chemtrail manipulation of the weather or poisoning. Send it there. I want to see it. My chief of staff is gonna kill me for saying that. Cause he's gonna get a bazillion.

[Host]

You're about to get bombarded.

[Augustus Dorico]

But like the crisscrossing thing that people see in the sky, there's just a lot of airlines, man. There's a lot of planes that fly in different directions. And so the ones that go east and west and north and south happen to intersect and sometimes it looks like a grid. And humans are really good at recognizing patterns. So we see that pattern and think something's going on. Nothing yet, man.

[Host]

It is what it is.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Host]

Very. Yeah. It's just people don't like the boring answer. Huh.

[Augustus Dorico]

There's a lot of crazy stuff that is actually happening. So, like, let's talk about that. You know, like all of our kids minds are being melted by TikTok. And there's birth control in the water and there's plastic in everything that we touch. And China is stealing all of our IP and all of our actual critical industries. And actually my company can manipulate the weather. So, like, those things are all real. That's more interesting to me than making stuff up.

[Host]

What was the birth control thing again?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. So women are, you know, women take hormonal birth control. They then, you know, urinate. That goes into the water system. A lot of cities recycle their water, but we don't have any specific filtration mechanism for those hormones. So they just get recycled and pumped back into the municipal water supply.

[Host]

So is this like a significant amount of birth control in the water?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yes.

[Host]

And there's an infertility problem.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yes.

[Host]

How's it affect males? Do you know?

[Augustus Dorico]

It makes you more asexual. Yeah. So it makes you less of a guy and more of a sort of, I don't know, like the way that most guys are now.

[Host]

The way that most guys are now, yeah. You know, I've heard there's so many conspiracies about the chemtrails, and I've heard that they're spraying estrogen in the air to.

[Augustus Dorico]

Well, let me tell you something though.

[Host]

Oh, shit, here we go.

[Augustus Dorico]

So the material that we use, it freezes the liquid in cloud into snowflakes that fall. Right. Pure testosterone. It's not as effective, but it's almost as effective as silver iodide. So if we really want to make.

[Host]

America healthy again, we'll all be showered in testosterone.

[Augustus Dorico]

I can make that happen.

[Host]

Oh, man, that's. That's. Have you ever heard. Have you ever heard of soulbearer? I interviewed them about, I don't know, two, three years ago, and they basically had come up with this formula where they would, they would chemtrail it with a plane and, and spray this, this solution over trees. And basically what the solution supposedly does is it's like, it's almost like a tanning lotion that you put on the trees and it keeps the. It. It allows them to. How do I. It allows them. It allows plants to do photosynthesis a lot longer than normal. Because. Because I think it has to be like 72 degrees or something for that to occur. And so this enables it to do. Do more, which would clean the air and all this other stuff. I didn't know if you had heard, heard of them or not.

[Augustus Dorico]

No, I haven't.

[Host]

But basically, it helps trees grow a lot faster.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, I don't. I don't know whether that is healthy or not or what it's made of, but, like, if it is helping green stuff, it works.

[Host]

They gave me a bunch of samples, I sprayed it all over a bunch of trees and they blew up. No way. Yeah, 100% it works.

[Augustus Dorico]

That's fascinating, because long term, Rainmaker has to do more than just like, making it rain more, right? Like, we have to automate tree planting and we have to figure out how to make the trees grow faster or we have to make sure that the soil retains more water. So that tech sounds super, super interesting.

[Host]

So that's an interesting point, because when you were talking about, you know, greening the Sahara, I mean, where does this, where would the soil come from?

[Augustus Dorico]

So rather than the Sahara, right? Let's like take Arizona as an example. Kingston, Arizona. A lot of that soil is the same mineral content as the Central Valley. It's just not productive because there's not enough water, right? So there's a ton of areas in the world where it's like, ready to farm, if only for water supply. So, like, you can start with those and you don't need to change the soil too much. Now, in the case of a lot more arid regions, you know, how do you get the amount of nutrients and water to stay in the soil for actual plants to grow? Because if you plant a seed in sand, like, probably no dice, right? There's these things called hydrogels or biochar or just like manure that you can till into the soil to one, put nutrients there and two, allow the soil to retain more water. So if you just have an automated tractor combine or something, that grates the soil, mixes in, you know, this, this water retaining material, then that instantly becomes much, much, much more arable.

[Host]

Interesting. Let's talk about how this all works. Okay, how does it work?

[Augustus Dorico]

You have watering clouds, right? But I'll walk you through the form of the tech that we understand very well. And then a proposed alternative way. You have water and clouds. 80% of precipitation ish that occurs on the planet happens because you have water and clouds. And then you have natural dust, or you have bacteria that gets kicked up from the soil. All natural stuff that the water freezes onto turns into big, heavy snowflakes, and then falls, either stays as snow or melts into rain. Right. Rainmaker and cloud seeding mimics this natural process where you have water in the clouds, but the droplets aren't big enough and heavy enough to naturally precipitate. If you put material in the cloud that has a crystal structure similar to ice, then the water will flow, freeze onto it, grow into those big snowflakes, and fall. That's sort of like the high level. But the system that Rainmaker uses has a few other important components. So first of all, you have to be able to detect whether a cloud has enough liquid, because if the cloud is mostly ice, then you can't freeze much more. But we use radar to measure how much liquid is in the cloud. The way that we do that is one wave of the radar moves vertically, right? And then the other is oriented horizontally. So you get the amount of the beam that is reflected in both directions. And so if you have about an equal amount of the horizontal and vertical beam reflected, then you have a spherical target. So it's probably a water drop, Right. If you get more of one versus the other, then it's probably more oblong and like a snowflake or like an ice crystal. So we can use the radar to measure where the liquid water is in the cloud. If we find that, then we'll launch our drones up into it. The drones that we've built are the only ones in NATO that are under 55 pounds that can survive in severe icing conditions. This is really cold water, right? So we have these resistors inlaid onto the vehicle that melt the ice off as it accretes onto the drone. Drone. So you find the water with the radar. You fly your drone up into these conditions, hope that it survives, you disperse the material. So we have this aerosol dispersion system that basically just emits individual particles that the water freezes onto. And then with the same radar, you found the water with you can now see it freezing, growing into bigger snowflakes and then eventually bigger drops and measure how much precipitates downwind.

[Host]

So you're essentially introducing some type of an agent that has weight to it and that's pulling the water down.

[Augustus Dorico]

You're introducing an agent that the water freezes onto, and then it's just the weight of the water that pulls it down. So for every pound of this that you put up, you get in excess of £40 million down on the ground. £40 million of water.

[Host]

40 million. Wow.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah.

[Host]

How many drones does it take to do this?

[Augustus Dorico]

Like three.

[Host]

That's it.

[Augustus Dorico]

So what we do is we juggle them. So one drone will go up. Once that reaches altitude, the next drone will go up. The first drone, after dispersing its full payload, will come down, and you'll just cycle that as long as the conditions persist. So sometimes that means you're out there for two hours. Our forward operations specialists, though it's a lot of former vets, national forest service guys, oil roughnecks, people that are willing just to live out on a mountain for nine months at a time. Speaking of which, apply to rainmaker.comcareers to become a forward operations specialist. Because we need like 50 dudes in the next three months, but they can stay out there for like four days at a time just taking shifts, operating day and night. Cause you can have an atmospheric river that will last for days.

[Host]

How big of a. I mean, how exact can you pick a location to have it rain on?

[Augustus Dorico]

So I cannot make it rain over the house of your enemies. We are not precise enough to target some individual person's house or something like that. We're not even precise enough to target an individual farm. So we're talking about 100 to 500 square miles at a time. In certain cases, up to like a thousand square miles at a time.

[Host]

Sorry, go back. So the smallest would be.

[Augustus Dorico]

The smallest would basically be like an average sized city.

[Host]

Okay.

[Augustus Dorico]

An average size city. The watershed of a hydroelectric dam, something like that. So the smallest would be that sort of scale, like municipal sizes.

[Host]

Let's talk about the first time you did this where you made it rain.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yep.

[Host]

Just walk me through that scenario, that experience.

[Augustus Dorico]

Well, I'll tell you, first of all, we failed way more times before we actually accomplished it. We crashed a lot of drones. We did not have the system to actually target liquids. We were flying into clouds that were just ice, so we couldn't affect them at all. You know, it was a pretty everybody that's on the rainmaker team is pretty tough for having stuck out that period. It's sort of like, you know, all startups think about how Elon blew up three rockets before he actually launched one into space. Like, we had a lot of drones crash before we actually were able to make it precipitate. And so we were up in northeastern Oregon in a town called Pendleton. It's where Pendleton Wool is from, if you know it. It's a town of 16,000 people, 2,000 of which are in a prison. Most of the rest are farmers. So super, super small spot. We have a team of forecasters that saw that there was an atmospheric river coming in. The clouds were about 2 kilometers thick, almost all liquid. We were able to, one, finally get the radar system functional enough to measure that water, and then launch weather balloons to take in cloud measurements of the water there. And then we were just flying drones for hours and hours, and we didn't have the processing capability live yet to take live measurements. So we were just out there operating flying drones for a few hours. And then we pack up, go back to the warehouse that we were all living out of, look at the radar data, and then saw, from the time that we started operating about 15 minutes afterwards, this plume on the radar, exclusively downwind. So this whole big cloud system wasn't precipitating. And only on the radar do you see downwind, where our particle plume was, an increase in precipitation. And another thing that I guess this is an opportune time to share is there was a snow day at the local school district 15 miles north of where we were, where the wind was going. So that was a pretty cool thing to have done for the kids there locally. Yeah, that was back in. That was December. December 12th of last year.

[Host]

Wow. So you just got it done within the last six months?

[Augustus Dorico]

Six months. Rainmaker has kind of been like this and then that. Just like rapid, rapid, rapid growth trajectory since we were able to do it.

[Host]

Have you been in your own rain?

[Augustus Dorico]

Snow. Snow, yeah. Yeah, our own snow. It's actually way easier to make snow than it is rain.

[Host]

Why is that?

[Augustus Dorico]

So you know how the material freezes the liquid in the cloud.

[Host]

Mm.

[Augustus Dorico]

That means that the cloud has to be cold enough for you to freeze it in the first place, which generally means that it's cold beneath the cloud, too. Now, with respect to rain, we're operating in Utah, Colorado, Oregon, California, and Texas. It's all rain in Texas, so we've been in our own rain there. Out in West Texas, in the Trans Peaks, the Panhandle. That's been pretty cool.

[Host]

Yeah. That's gotta be pretty. It's got to be a weird feeling knowing that that's your reign.

[Augustus Dorico]

Like I said, that's the second most important thing that I've ever done in my life.

[Host]

What is the agent?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, so silver iodide. That is what has been used in one form or another for the last 60 years. Its crystal structure is almost identical to ice. So that plus a couple other material properties, make the water freeze onto it very well. We use so little of it, about 50 grams per 100,000 plus acres, that there's no accumulation, no measurable or consequential accumulation in the soil for humans or for farms or for ecosystems. All that being said, though. Well, actually, the first point is most cloud seeding operations in the past have used flares. So they'll burn a flare that aerosolizes the silver iodide. But in the flare, there's a bunch of other junk materials. Right. People get concerned about aluminum or stuff like that in the flares. So we don't use that because we don't want any additional additives beyond what is explicitly and exclusively for rainmaking. So our aerosol dispersion system just uses silveride. Something that we're working on right now is totally organic material found in American soil that is biodegradable, that is more effective and actually costs less per gram than silver iodide. We have a bunch of lab testing to do before we roll that out to the field. And then we need to do all the regulatory permissions with the EPA and otherwise. But silver iodide is what we've used for the last seven months.

[Host]

When do you think you'll. When do you think you'll introduce the other agent?

[Augustus Dorico]

January 2026.

[Host]

Coming up another six months. Nice. Nice. Let's talk about, you know, some of the benefits of this, other than the obvious, you know, what are some of the other benefits that this could bring to the world?

[Augustus Dorico]

We'll start just with precipitation enhancement, making it rain and snow more. Right. First of all, it's going to prevent. It already is preventing farms from running dry. Right. So farms that need more water, we can produce more water for all the aquifers. I said at the very beginning of our discussion in the American west, are running out. And so once those aquifers run out, not only are they empty, which is bad because we can't pump more, but also because there's less pressure in the aquifer, the sediment will compress, and then you lose storage capacity permanently. So the longer there's not enough water in there. The less you can store in the future. So making it rain and snow more so that more water percolates into the aquifer. That is also super important so that we have storage capacity in the future. Hydroelectric. Right. It's clean, stable, baseload power. I think that eventually nuclear is going to be like the primary way that we produce energy. But while we're getting towards that, making sure that there's as much water flowing through our rivers as possible so that we have as much clean hydroelectric energy. That's a huge one. And then also data centers and manufacturing facilities and specifically chip plants that use a lot of water. Like Google. Cloud compute uses 25% of all of the water in northeastern Oregon. Yeah, yeah. So in the, in the northeastern quarter of the state, they use a quarter of all the water and then. And it's all farmland. Right. So you would think that the farmers would use like 99%, but Google uses a ton. So if we want to keep using the Internet and if we want to invest in AI, then we need to produce more water as well.

[Host]

Is there a timeline on when these aquifers will be depleted?

[Augustus Dorico]

Somewhere between the 2000s and 2000s.

[Host]

So not long.

[Augustus Dorico]

No, no. And we're not reversing the trend right now. We're slowing it down, but it's still being drawn down. Interestingly enough, Nebraska and Orange county are the two places in the US that have great aquifers. Unfortunately, Orange County's aquifer is full of plastic and Nebraska's aquifer is full of, you know, pesticides. So not great, but at least they have the water. So yeah, without, without cloud seeding, we run out of water. That's, that's number one. And then with respect to other stuff, like people propose means of doing hail suppression, so targeting a storm before it dumps golf ball or baseball sized hail. If you can freeze the liquid in the cloud into really, really small snowflakes before they freeze onto bigger stones and grow into bigger stones, then you can reduce the amount of damage done by that as well. That's another huge application that I think about.

[Host]

Interesting. What about wildfires?

[Augustus Dorico]

This is a very. I live in Los Angeles. It's a very near and dear thing to my heart. When there is a wildfire raging, generally the heat from that will dry up the atmosphere above it. You very rarely get enough clouds over a wildfire to conduct cloud seeding to make it rain directly over the fire. So can you actively stop a wildfire with this? Not in most cases, which is unfortunate. However, in the months preceding the LA fires, there were tons of clouds that could have precipitated that didn't precipitate. And because they didn't rain, the ground became drier and drier and drier and created more fuel that fed those fires. And so for wildfire prevention, cloud seeding is absolutely something that you can do. And an interesting part about that is, you know, desalination is one way to make water desalination. You can produce about a cubic meter of water for 40 cents. Cloud seeding is about a tenth of a cent. So it's way, way cheaper. But if you're doing desal, you can't really use that water to do wildfire prevention because you need a pipe to move it over every square inch of the land that you're trying to make wet. Well, with cloud seeding, you actually naturally distribute it over the entire area so you can keep that soil moist, you can keep those plants green, and then reduce the risk of wildfire going forward. So I think that really it's going to be keeping farms alive, keeping industrial capacity alive, keeping southwestern cities from running out of water so that people have to move out of them, and then wildfire prevention as like the main cases for us.

[Host]

So wildfire prevention would be. It would. It would be proactive. It wouldn't be a immediate response to a. It wouldn't be a course of action for. As an immediate response to a wildfire.

[Augustus Dorico]

Correct.

[Host]

How long would it take to. I mean, I would think it wouldn't take very long to prevent wildfires.

[Augustus Dorico]

Dude, you get precipitation like 15 to 45 minutes after you start seeding.

[Host]

15 to 45 minutes?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, it is super, super fast, provided you have the liquid in the cloud. But, yeah, yeah, it's super straightforward. You can see the effect of it in real time.

[Host]

Do you have an idea of how much it's actually going to rain?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, yeah.

[Host]

So what I'm getting at is preventing flooding.

[Augustus Dorico]

And you know, it's funny when people say, like, they're making hurricanes or something. Right? Cause it's like we can do like less than an inch of rain or snow right now, given the tech. And sometimes it's like less than a centimeter. Right. So it is a lot of water over a large area. Taken in that context, especially if you keep operating for a long time, but like, you cannot make it dump, or at least we don't know how to make it dump yet, then you can also make some inference about, like, well, depending on whether there's depending on how much water is in the cloud, you can, you can make some projections about how much it'll rain as well.

[Host]

And so if you do, if you, it also sounds like you're prematurely getting a cloud to brain. And so if you enhance the.

[Augustus Dorico]

If.

[Host]

You enhance it and it dumps before it gets to where it's going, I mean, who, who would you be pulling water away from?

[Augustus Dorico]

Question. Also, Mr. Ryan, in the industry that's called stealing from Peter to pay. Paul, if you make it rain more in one place, will it rain less downwind? So I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation too, you can think of the water in the sky, the atmospheric rivers, kind of like how you would think about a normal river, the Colorado River. All of its water is allocated already. Right. Everybody already draws down from that. It is 100% utilized, which is why by the time it gets to Mexico, there's not much there. There is about 10x more water in the atmosphere over the US that isn't precipitating. So, so there's 10 times more that we could tap into before we even get into a question of whether it's going to reduce precipitation downwind. That's really important because I want to play a positive sum game, right. There's not scientific publication at this point in time to suggest that there's going to be less precipitation downwind. But I think that as we scale this operation a lot, you're going to see, you know the movie Chinatown?

[Host]

Yeah.

[Augustus Dorico]

You're going to see, you're going to see people fighting over cloud water rights for sure. I think we're probably like three to five years away from that. But at some point people will have to start thinking about, hopefully the federal government, how to distribute that water appropriately. For the time being, it's exclusively positive sum more water than what would come down otherwise.

[Host]

What other questions should I be asking you?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, well, can you prevent flooding? Right. Can you make a system precipitate less? You heard about the 2008 Olympic Games in China? So they did cloud seeding in the preceding days to precipitate all the water out locally so that you had sunshine during the Games itself. They also are seeding some clouds to make the droplet sizes smaller so that they're less likely to rain. That's way harder to prove the effect of because if you see the water change from liquid to ice exclusively in your flight track, then like it's pretty easy to say, okay, that's man made, that was where you were flying. But if you only See the droplet sizes change. Anyway, it's kind of like a hard radar problem. Indonesia, though, India, China, they're all spending a lot of money on researching how to make it rain less to prevent flooding too. So that's another domain that matters.

[Host]

Where are you starting with your company?

[Augustus Dorico]

Are you starting with, sorry, geographically or technologically?

[Host]

Geographically.

[Augustus Dorico]

So we're based in Los Angeles, which I win no points in Tennessee for being based in Los Angeles or Florida for that matter. Mullet man, Tech bro does not play very well in the state legislature here. But we operate in Utah with their Department of Natural Resources. Colorado with their Department of Natural Resources. We're about to begin in Idaho and Wyoming, Oregon, California, Texas. We just started this week, our first deployment in Latin America. So we're down in Tierra de la Fuego, Argentina, and then one country in the Middle East. That's where we are right now, really. The majority of our business is going to be in the western United States. The Middle east because it's dry, and then Latin America because it's dry and fairly deregulated. Southern Latin America, that is.

[Host]

So let's talk about western United States. What does that look like? Is this experimental still or.

[Augustus Dorico]

No, no, we're making water. So the state of Utah. I might be a little bit more conservative than this, but the state of Utah Department of Natural Resources measured that we produced 186,000 acre feet of water in the state this past year. It's about 6% of all the water that's consumed by the state of Utah. And that's all in the form of snowpack that melts and runs off into these cities, watersheds.

[Host]

And so why do they want you to do this? I mean, is it the aquifers or is it farming or there's no water?

[Augustus Dorico]

It's all of the above. So yeah, the aquifers are running out. The farms. You know, the states actually pay to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year, and then at the federal level, hundreds of millions. They pay farmers not to farm. They pay them not to farm because they don't want them to use the water.

[Host]

No kidding.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. So what we've provided as an option for them is a way to make more water so that the farmers can keep farming and you still have enough water. So it's a win win there. And then in Utah in particular, the Great Salt Lake is depleting every year. And as that body of water gets smaller and smaller, all of the arsenic at the bottom of it gets kicked up. And so you have These respiratory issues that are coming. And so one of the biggest priorities of the state of Utah is to make more water for the Great Salt Lake. And so something that I want Rainmaker to participate in in the next two years is preventing the evaporation of the lake.

[Host]

When you do that, I mean, how big of an area do they want you to cover?

[Augustus Dorico]

The Bear river basin. So there's really one primary river that flows into the Great Salt Lake. And so we're still finalizing this, but we're negotiating an interstate compact between Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho right now to cloud seed with about 30 people distributed over a few thousand square miles as the river flows from Utah into Wyoming, into Idaho, and then back down into the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

[Host]

Do you ever miss the target?

[Augustus Dorico]

No, the target's. The target is the whole watershed. So as long as it ends up between these huge mountain ranges, then you're square. So that's not an issue.

[Host]

Right on.

[Augustus Dorico]

Sometimes we crash drones, though, that. That still happens.

[Host]

How do you see this getting implemented throughout the world as time goes on and more people open up to the idea?

[Augustus Dorico]

I think that. So our goal for the operations between October 2025 and April 2026 is to produce 10 billion gallons of water unambiguously, just in this one project in northern Utah. If we do that and have all the radar data to back it up, that puts us at parity with the production of the biggest desalination plant in the United States. If we succeed in that mission, then I think we're about two years away from becoming the biggest water utility in the western United States. I think that people will think about water utilities and water production as something that cloud seeders do rather than like dam operators do. Yeah, we'll be a huge utility first, and then as time goes on, as we get into all the other sorts of applications, we'll probably work with crop insurers and farmers to help prevent crop failure. We'll probably turn a lot more hydroelectric power online. And then the fun terraforming stuff is kind of like five, 10 years away.

[Host]

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[Augustus Dorico]

There's something called a cloud microburst. So when you have a ton of convection and these clouds kind of collapse very suddenly, this happens in nature already. You can make it rain over, you know, tens of acres at a time. There are theories about how to do that. I'm mostly focused on getting the current tech to scale. But yeah, there's a world where that happens before 2030.

[Host]

How far out does the cloud need to be seeded before it rains?

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, so like I said, it's like 15 to 45 minutes before you get that beginning of precipitation. So if a cloud is moving at 10 miles an hour, maybe you want to see it at five Miles upwind.

[Host]

That's it.

[Augustus Dorico]

Mm.

[Host]

Wow. Go into. I mean, this could also, you know, fix starvation crises all over the world.

[Augustus Dorico]

Have you heard of. I think it's Mark Twain who said it, Whiskey's for drinking and water's for fighting over. Sorry, I know we were just talking about sobriety earlier. But, you know, right now, if you look at, like, the border of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. Ethiopia just built a dam on the Nile River. Egypt will collapse if they do not have enough water. They will go to war with Ethiopia over water. If they do not get enough from the Nile. The Jordan river, which flows through and supplies water to and gets water from Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. That's a real hotspot for water rights. Right. If there's not enough water there, tensions will rise. China is building dams in Tibet to prevent water from flowing into India. If eastern India doesn't get enough water and those people are at risk of starvation, India will go to war with China to destroy those dams. Can you prevent someone from building a dam in their own territory? No. Maybe you can negotiate that diplomatically. But even if they do build a dam, if you can make it rain more on your side of the border, then you can provide water supply to mitigate the risk of conflict like this breaking out. So I think that for the sake of, one, preventing wars by ensuring that people have access to enough water, and two, feeding people so that you don't have mass famine. That's absolutely necessary. And something that people don't think about, right, is like, okay, in the US Everybody can more or less go buy like a bag of chips or something at the store. Like, there are people that are hungry. There are not that many people that are starving in the United States. But the less we farm, the more people around the world will starve because our agricultural exports feed hundreds of millions. If we run out of water, yeah, fine. Maybe folks in Sacramento won't have any issues. But the people that are eating the pistachios or wheat that we produce, they will have real life threatening problems. Water supply. I think the only thing more important than that is probably oxygen. And then after that, energy. We need those three things to have a civilization at all and to keep people from starving. We should be cloud seeding.

[Host]

So if we're talking about bringing all this water to Arizona, California, the western United States, Africa, Middle east, and anywhere else in the world that is a barren desert. I mean, how long? You had mentioned decades, but how long does it take and what's the process look like to take Somebody that is in a desert environment and turn into a farming community is what I'm getting at.

[Augustus Dorico]

So it's easier in places that have good soil mineral content. Right. So like a lot of Arizona is going to be easier than a lot of Sudan. Right. Because they have the Sahara. So that's just wasteland Arizona. I think that if we, we don't do any clouds eating there right now, if we stood up a program, I think that you could start farming in previously in arable land in the course of years. I mean first things first, you gotta meet all of the deficits. So like there's a lot of farms that are already running dry. So if you make enough water first from a cloud seeding program to make sure that they're taken care of, then how much more can you produce for other communities? You can probably do that in the course of a couple years. So maybe like three, three. Then that land starts to come online. And then with respect to the real wastelands, right, like the Bolivian Salt flats, the Sahara desert, the Australian outback, that's going to be multi decadal. Like what I think about happening is this while Elon sends rockets to Mars to set up the first civilization there, we will get really good at atmospheric engineering here to make the carrying capacity of Earth higher. And by the time you have like a bubble city on Mars that's self sufficient and they start melting the ice caps on Mars to create an atmosphere, there's we will be good enough at atmospheric engineering here on Earth such that we can start to distribute the water the way that we want to on other on Mars. Now that's like really towards the end of my life, my son will probably be the one responsible for that rather than me. But, but that's the timescale that I'm thinking about.

[Host]

Wow, you've really played this out. You're thinking real long term.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. You know, I think that people used to think more like that. Like there's that old adage something like a city grows great when men plant trees under the shade of which they will never sit, or something like that. Right. I think that if you are a Christian and you think about helping build the kingdom of God, if you are a patriot and you want your nation to survive and persist and for future Americans to be better off than any previous generation, like you should sort of sacrifice your life, not necessarily like die. Right. But you should probably live your life in service to those future people. That's what I'm trying to do.

[Host]

That's interesting, you know, being a Christian, do you feel that you are playing God in any sense to create weather conditions?

[Augustus Dorico]

I'm trying to serve God. And so what I mean by that is in Genesis 1:26 through 28, right? Very beginning of time, Garden of Eden, pre fall, God gives us the mandate, like, he commands us to take dominion over and steward the earth, the seas, the skies, and everything therein. Right? And so what that meant then was tending to the garden, right? Like, taking care of the plants, taking care of the animals. The way that we've done that more and more over time is with technology and engineering, right? Like, we have lights so that we can work safely at night. We have fire, which, like, is a technology so that we can cook our food or defend ourselves from, like, wild animals. We built dams so that we could redirect the natural flow of rivers, like the ones that God designed for the sake of storing water to live in cities and feed people. And so I think that even though cloud seeding does have to do with the sky, which feels like heaven and thus feels closer to God, for some reason, it really just is another instantiation of, like, the mandate that God gave us to be good stewards of the planet. And so do I think I'm playing God? No. Do I think the technology's sick? Yeah. But I think that this is, like, an act of service. And, I mean, I say that with the understanding that I am a sinner and that I am a faulty man and that I will fall short. And so I look to the guidance of my peers and mentors and other people all around me and hope that the US Government regulates this appropriately. But so far, I think we've done pretty good at managing that.

[Host]

You know, that's what I was getting at earlier, the government stepping in, appropriately, regulating appropriately. I mean, that's what I was getting at when I was talking about Zuckerberg in front of Congress with a bunch of dinosaurs. I mean, they just. They don't understand tech at all. Half of them probably can't even open their own email. And so that's kind of what I was alluding to is when somebody like you comes along that knows everything about the. Or everything that we know today about this, how are they gonna regulate it? Just doesn't seem like there's that many people that know about this.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah.

[Host]

Who do they look for to regulate it?

[Augustus Dorico]

You know, so Doge, Super. A lot of stuff has been said about doge, about the Department of Government Efficiency, but one of the guys in doge, one of the first picks for it, is Another teal fellow from my class named Luke Ferriter. He is like 10 out of 10 brilliant, 140 through 160 IQ or something. Super faithful kid, grew up in Oklahoma or, excuse me, in Nebraska. And he's the kind of guy that I am happy to see in government. I think that if we have more patriotism, maybe we have to pay bureaucrats more and set up term limits or something. I think that there's a world where we have good enough people in government to manage and regulate these things. We did in World War II. Right. We were able to set up a clear, safe nuclear energy regulatory structure and built a lot of energy that way. So it's possible, right? Like even though things are bad now, it doesn't mean that they have to be. It's not a fact of a decaying empire. Like I think that we can come back from that.

[Host]

I mean the knowledge, I'm not talking about, we'll get into the corruption and all that kind of shit.

[Augustus Dorico]

Sure, but just like how do you.

[Host]

I just mean the knowledge, you know, that's what I'm getting at and that's what I'm talking about with Zuck and, and the government is you have a tech genius talking to 80 year old people who didn't. Do you see what I'm saying? They don't even have the knowledge to even hold the conversation with him.

[Augustus Dorico]

How would you do it? How would you regulate it? Well, how would you get them up to speed?

[Host]

How would I do it? I would probably. I don't know how I would do it. I would have to set up some kind of new agency or something inside Noah, you know that I would have to put a lot of money towards researching this. And then, you know, I mean, I think they can't use you to set up the regulations because it would probably.

[Augustus Dorico]

Be a little biased, wouldn't it?

[Host]

Yeah, but I guess that's how I would do it. How would you do it?

[Augustus Dorico]

Well, Rainmaker's work is built off the work of scientists from the last couple decades at the national center for Atmospheric Research, in particular at the University of Utah, at Utah State University, at CU Boulder, at Colorado State University, at mit. Probably one. Not deleting like all the National Science foundation budgets to like keep those organizations alive. So there are objective third parties that have done research on it, like that's important. And then using them as gangs of experts, you know, like I've been running around state capitals testifying and if the departments of Environmental Protection were able to call on expert witnesses from the scientific community, that would be good. I don't even know if people really trust scientists anymore though. So, yeah, it's probably something to the effect of a new agency that, you know what you could do copy China's regulation. Maybe not exactly that, but at least take some inspiration from them, given that they are benefiting the lives of Chinese people through their programs.

[Host]

What's the now diving into the corruption. I mean, lobbying firms, I don't know who you would be pissing off. I would imagine you're pissing off the utility companies because somebody's making money pulling water out of those aquifers and they've been making money for a long time. And sure, they're very powerful people. I mean, I would imagine in generally my outlook is those people do not have the best interest of, of the population. They have the most interest in, you know, their estate, their assets, the money they're making. And so do you. Are you working against them, do you think? Well, do they have lobbying firms going out and talking to the governments and talking about all of the, you know, I think reasons why you can't do this because it's going to affect their bank account, their bottom line.

[Augustus Dorico]

I think we're early enough that that hasn't happened yet. I think the. A convenient thing about us, you know, like, unlike nuclear, where like oil and gas advocate against nuclear to some extent. Right. Like that's a real trade. Water. Very few people have enough of it, so I think most everyone wants more. It's pretty bipartisan. Like, it's pretty hard to say, like, no, we shouldn't have more water. But I think the bad outcome is one where weather traders that trade on futures that are betting on severe weather or droughts or crop failures don't want to see this through because you can make money off of those trades. I think there's that situation, but I haven't yet encountered anybody that seems to be knowingly, maliciously trying to prevent like a good technology from coming to market.

[Host]

What could go wrong? What could go wrong in doing this? The only thing that comes to my mind, you know, is, is floods and then, and then, you know, not knowing the effects of who you're stealing the rain from where the wind's blowing. But I mean, if there was a miscalculation and it dumped on what are name, insert city.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, I mean, so they don't have.

[Host]

I mean, you just mentioned, you know, Dubai didn't have the drainage. They weren't able to take on that amount of water. I mean, it could be devastating.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, I think.

[Host]

I think the mudslides.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah. The simple way to get around that is you just don't operate in highly populated areas. Right. So, like the Rocky Mountains, relatively unpopulated, but all of the snow and rain that goes there runs off into the cities that. Into the reservoirs and rivers that do benefit the cities, but tens or hundreds or thousands of miles away. So you can mitigate for that risk by operating in more remote areas. You know, what could go wrong beyond that? Yeah, I think that you covered most of the bases there. It is. If someone was totally irresponsible and totally irregulated, operating over a highly populated area, that you could run the risk of avalanches. But in order. Avalanches are floods, but in order to do that, like I said, you'd have to be operating totally irresponsibly. You'd have to have either bad science or malicious intent. You would have to skirt around the existing regulations that require you suspend operations if there is any risk. So we have a pretty solid framework to prevent any sort of disasters from happening there. You know, like, what if. Yeah, I don't know. I think those are probably the big ones.

[Host]

I mean, when you talk about malicious intent, do you think that this could be weaponized?

[Augustus Dorico]

We know that it can be weaponized, so we know that it was weaponized in Vietnam. I would be surpri. Let me pose this hypothetical, right. There's a limited window of time in the Straits of Taiwan during which landing craft can easily traverse the Straits because the weather is not so severe that, you know, there's not a lot of rain coming down. There's not really rough seas. If you can modify the weather and you can extend or shorten that window, then the strategic situation around that island changes meaningfully. Similarly, if. If you're trying to move personnel or material and it's wet on the ground. Right. Like, a lot of Operation Barbarossa failed because tanks got stuck, armor got stuck in Russia during the spring. If you could make it more wet on the ground, then that would. That would have some tactical consequence as well. So. Yeah, absolutely. Possible. Rainmaker doesn't do that. For whatever it's worth, I don't think people will believe me, but, I mean.

[Host]

It seems like Taiwan would have a major interest in this just to mitigate that situation.

[Augustus Dorico]

Have you heard of the fake windmills that Taiwan's building?

[Host]

No.

[Augustus Dorico]

So nominally, they want more clean power. Right. And so what's one thing you can do? You can build windmills off in the ocean, actually, though, also you can build something that looks like a windmill that isn't even connected to grid power. And then station you know, underwater drones or boats or helicopters or aircraft on the pads that are for the windmill and then be 30, 50 kilometers farther out to sea as like a first line of defense.

[Host]

Interesting.

[Augustus Dorico]

Now at the same time China is building windmills like right next to Taiwan's windmills. So there's a bit of a chess game happening right there with fake energy resources.

[Host]

I think China's just building islands.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they are. What's it called, the nine dash line or something? Seven dash line? Yeah, I mean they're building islands. They're sending their coast guard boats after like fishing ships and stuff. Their fishing ships are harassing other navies. There's Chinese fishing boats if you look out at the ocean from El Salvador or Costa Rica or I think Guatemala too. If you look at it at the ocean at night, it looks like you're looking at a city because of all the lights. Those are just enormous Chinese fishing boats that are tearing fish out of the ocean. Same problem in Argentina, their fisheries are getting destroyed. And up in Alaska even too to some extent, like they are harvesting so much fish so unsustainably in other countries waters and we don't even do anything about it.

[Host]

Geez. Yeah, geez. You know, we're wrapping up the interview here, but I think that the UN reported there are approximately 2.2 billion people without water or with a very limited supply. I mean if you work the metrics on that, on how big of an impact you would have on putting a den on that 2.2 billion.

[Augustus Dorico]

The ultimate goal is to serve a lot more than 2.2 billion people. Right. Eventually there will be 20 plus billion people on the planet and we need to figure out how to make water enough for all of them. And it's not just going to be cloud seeding. We should build more D cell. But the plan is to make Earth unrecognizably lush and green and abundant and prosperous. And we need a lot of water to do that. And so we're going to have to get one, the system that we have scaled and deployed throughout all of the world. And then two, the system will have to be more sophisticated and efficient than it is now so that we can produce water for the next 10 billion people that live. We'll start with the people that are in water stress regions right now. Like we're operating in one of the most water stressed countries in the world, in the Middle East I mentioned. And that's probably what the next three years will look like and then after that, like getting above baseline is going to be the next problem.

[Host]

Well, man, it's a fascinating conversation. Very innovative, very innovative. I love talking to innovators.

[Augustus Dorico]

Well then I'll say in closing here, there's a town in Los Angeles called El Segundo. It is named after the second standard oil refinery that was ever built in California, El Segundo ii. Half the town is just an oil refinery. The other half the town is small warehouses that are just full of deep tech startups, hardware startups. There's three fission companies, there's a weather modification company, there's the guys that are building almost all of the drones that are going to Ukraine. There's a bunch of different advanced manufacturing people and roboticists. It's the highest density of deep tech and hard tech in the United States. And it's a bunch of guys that are having competitions about who has the bigger flag in their office. I would say that if ever you're in la, you're welcome to stop by and tour around there and you'll probably bump into a couple of my friends from the city as well over the next year or so.

[Host]

I'd love to do that. I'd love to do that. I'd love to get you back too as things develop.

[Augustus Dorico]

Yeah, so.

[Host]

Well, best love. Thanks man. Americans love using their credit cards, the most secure and hassle free way to pay. But D.C. politicians want to change that with the Durbin Marshall credit card bill. This bill lets corporate megastores pick how your credit card is processed, allowing them to use untested payment networks that jeopardize your data security and rewards. Corporate megastores will make more money and you pay the price. Tell Congress to guard your card because Americans lose when politicians choose. Learn [e-mail].