Rain Maker's Augustus Doricko on cloud seeding bans, water scarcity, and plans to buy desert land to terraform

your hair grew an inch you must be drinking a lot of like milk or whatever to to stimulate that uh hair growth I'm I'm drinking Justin May's bone broth bro there we go kevn fire shout out shout out former brother brother of the week former brother of the week Justin Mars uh can you give us just set the table for us for those who haven't been following the drama what's going on uh how do you wind up in this situation is it frustrating is it hilarious a little bit of both and it's great it's it's the same effect as like the sort of historical attempted hit pieces where it's like your attackers are like he is the most powerful man in Silicon Valley he controlling the weather we yeah yeah the hit pieces have gone direct now like you're getting the puff pieces in the in the mainstream media and then the decentralized media the citizen journalists are coming for you so break it down yeah yeah no dude what my favorite so far has been the guy that was like this is clearly a CIA scop to make weather modification cool he's backed by Peter and the same cck of the same cabal of VCS as all these things um the the state of the union is 29 States this year have proposed legislation to cart blanch all weather modification and Atmospheric engineering and so these bills they're essentially coming from a place of people being concerned about Chemtrails and people being concerned about solar radiation management um Chemtrails it's a suspicion that the government is like what you see is contrails long streaks in the sky they suspect that's just like poison probably not I haven't seen evidence of that yet but open to being convinced um and then solar radiation management is an attempt to dim the amount of sun that reaches the Earth to cool the planet down so it's this climate intervention um and then cloud seating kind of just gets lumped in cloud seating is what rain maker does and it's nothing like the other two things that people are describing but because nobody knows the difference they're trying to ban it because they think that people are either getting poisoned or that we're some sort of like agenda 2040 anti human globalist initiative um and so surreal as it's been um I'm both in the trenches in Twitter and in many state capitals throughout the union a lot of them I haven't testified at because I realize that actually drums up a lot more craziness than maybe is good um but we're in this we're in this public knife fight with uh the government of Florida and Tallahassee just trying to you know that tweet that that iconic tweet where Trump says like I just want to stop the world from killing itself um like I just want to bring people water that need it um and I think that if you ban cloud seeding you're basically Banning like rocketry or fision and so that's what we're trying to stop right now can you talk about water scarcity I think people it's hard for them to process because they turn on the tap or they turn on the shower and just water comes out and it's not that expensive yeah water comes comes from we're here in Los Angeles which is you know one of the most you know sort of Aid you know parts of the United States it's only possible because of some corrupt bargain that happened to like reroute the river like 50 years ago right yeah yeah uh well there's one the Owens Valley situation so LA County basically had to like send out agents posing as private people to buy up all the land between like the Owens River Valley and then redirect the water um and then there's a couple water Barons that like you can't even say the name of or you'll be like disappeared in California um but the the California state water supply strategy like from the Department of Natural Resources says that half a million Acres of Farmland have to turn into desert by 2030 in California in order to like maintain water supply for the cities like Phoenix Arizona is Banning new Housing Development because there's not enough water Salt Lake City people are getting respiratory problems because the Great Salt Lake is drying up and there's not enough water and then you know like the wildfires that go on all over the country that's because there's not enough water on the ground and in the case of Florida a lot of people have told me like you know what listen I'm convinced that cloud seeding is useful and beneficial for a state like California that is in a drought and that that is a desert but Florida we get plenty of rain like why do we need to bother modifying the weather here well 14 million Acres of Farmland in Florida is currently in a drought and then 30,000 Acres of Miami Dade County just burnt to the ground because there wasn't enough water because there was a drought so like if if mayor Suarez is listening um please save us we uh yeah we just want to bring people water and and drought is much more ubiquitous and consequential Than People realize like if you want to make America healthy again we have to to grow food domestically and if we don't have enough water to do that then it's going to be some Kookie GMO like Chinese stuff that get shipped over the ocean or like soilent green product not to I hear you deep cut yeah that's that's where we're at right now with respect a drought no no uh yeah a lot of dis what are these uh is there anybody besides you uh fighting to save uh you know uh the the private and public uh just private and public groups from being able to do uh cloud seaing like is it is are you the The Last Man Standing uh or do you have a team so well I've got a great team at rain maker and I'm really grateful for that and we've had a bunch of farmers um that are beneficiaries of our program go to bat for us because like they previously had to tear up their pistachio ranches or their pistachio Orchards because they didn't have enough water for them and now they're better able to farm because of the production of water that were doing um but you know that that part where or that like famous Stanford speech where teal says um you know you should go after a really small market like if there's lots of people involved and it's already too late well I'm not like the last man standing I'm kind of like the first man standing um so it's other than the farmers that we're helping and the other great team members I have at rain maker running around the country um it's it's uh Augustus dco v a couple States 30 States yeah um and and and what is that yeah like how do you even balance this sort of simultaneously you have uh you know your you're a company you generate Revenue you have expenses you're sort of planning timelines and you're also potentially fighting like legal battles and you're also dealing with like technical risk in the business like right like what what you're doing is very hard it can be done but like that's also a challenge like as you know as an entrepreneur you know how do you kind of balance all those things and it feels to me like you know the the sort of legal risk is like the most asymmetric you know risk you know you can always launch an you know create a new prototype you know take another flight Etc but then if there's sort of these like blanket bands uh that that feels like is that like taking up 60% of your time now just making sure that you're going to be able to do this in five years well so not not quite I mean it's definitely like a large double- digit percentage the interesting thing with respect to the political Dynamic though is this it's not really like a right left issue so much as it is like an east west west issue because the West doesn't have water so Democrats and Republicans alike on the western half of the US are like oh this is sick I would love to have water and the people that have as much water as they have conventionally needed and aren't as subject to Drought they're the ones more wary of it um so I'm not worried about rain maker domestically um at a state level uh just because there's a lot of states that we haven't gotten into yet like Nevada or Arizona Iona or New Mexico um I do think that the Domino Theory thing holds true to some extent so yes we do have to focus on it um the super like uh funny crazy outcome is that I just like if rain maker was totally banned from the US then we just double down on Riad and then we like camp out there for five years and come back weathered and and you know wearing desert Garb um but uh Ira lawence of Arabia Mode Mya my Dune my Dune they're going to send you to I watched I watched Dune 2 in theaters five times bro a religious zealot comes to turn the desert Planet I love it yeah it's great yeah so no I trust my team a lot I have really can you talk a little bit about um just like the general fear around cloud seating I think that right now with health and Maha there's just this general idea that like anything new is risky fertilizer are having a Heyday yeah market and lism for sure uh but I mean at the same time like you know you eat too much salt your doctor will tell you that's going to hurt your heart and there's a million different things where even if it's safe at a certain level you take it up by 100x and it gets bad and there's just all these balancing and then also we do the mice studies but does that really transfer and you know what happens when someone's like you know vaping pink liquid for you know 50 years like we we don't really know and we're kind of figuring it out right now um H how what what gives you confidence about the the low impact of this so you know I I really sympathize with people that are worried about this because it sounds on his face like crazy to be modifying the weather and to be dispersing chemicals but um to your point about like vaping stuff for 50 years and not having longitudinal data on the health outcomes like cloud seating even though rain maker is very Innovative even though a lot of new things have been done in academ I that we're implementing in from like the last five years cloud seating is 80 years old dude this was invented in the United States in 1945 GE has the first patent from 1946 people have done 80 or 30 or 50 years depending on the Watershed studies on the concentration of silver iodide that ends up in the water and the soil and after Decades of operation you only see parts per trillion of this stuff like you need Super sophisticated instrumentation to even detect it in the first place um and so there there's been no negligible Health impacts found to either people or agriculture or the environment um and those studies they've been done and like should rain maker replicate those should we continue to do it just to prove it out further totally agree but like it's totally safe and if you think about the like ld50 like the the lethal dose of Sil it's less than Salt it's less than table salt it's milligrams per kilogram uh with salt and then it's 2,800 for silver iodide so this is this is like a resoundingly safe material um to be using and and the data from decade shows that can you talk about uh a little of the history of I feel like when it's easy to look at the Chemtrails thing and be like okay well like the most aggressive conspiracy theory there is that it's like literally like mind control and it's like we're such we're so divided in America I don't know the Mind Control drugs clearly aren't working because what are they mind controlling us to do um but there is a legitimate criticism that like when you fly a bunch of planes around those contrails are emitting pollution and your your skies get dirtier and I remember after 911 all the planes were grounded it was the clearest day in the skies ever and there is some sort of like lowkey harm and and there's always these like uh KnockOn effects I'm sure with the solar radiation management same thing uh we we have been experiencing global warming but we've also been experiencing global dimming and those have been kind of counteracting each other in some way can you just talk about some of the history of these things and and how you think about worrying about the the second and third order effects of cloud seating yeah yeah totally so um with respect to weather modification and climate engineering um like the the thing that I think everybody needs to realize is that we've been doing it unintentionally for hundreds of years yeah like you build a city then you have a heat island that affects cloud formation precipitation patterns if you have a a coal plant or a steel plant or a Nat gas plant the Steam and the air Soo you emit reliably creates more more clouds and precipitation like tens of miles down wind as well um the EM the emissions from our cars right like those have pollutants in them um apart from just like CO2 considerations so we we do modify the weather unintentionally all the time yeah rain maker thesis is that like we should be modifying it intentionally to either like unfuck the Earth as it stands or make it more Lush and abundant once we've done the former um when it comes to knock on effects um the common question is like you know if you're making it rain more here is that reducing precipitation downwind there y totally reasonable question like I think on its face that that logic makes sense unfortunately the system is pretty complicated um it turns out that only 9% of all of the water that traverses the atmosphere in the United States precipitates over it the vast majority is either recycled by the oceans precipitates over the oceans evaporates away and never condenses again over the US so um if you just increase the utilized water in the atmosphere then it's purely positive sum and you can select to some extent for which clouds aren't naturally going to precipitate with the appropriate radar and probes um the evidence of downwind drought is totally uncompelling nobody's provided reliable data there but are people concerned about it are they rightfully concerned about it sure totally um and then the last thing I'll say with respect to contrails um you know there's this funny thing that people realized where if you fly a bunch of planes early in the morning um and then develop contrails you'll actually cool that area locally in the planet to some extent because it'll reflect sunlight before it warms the planet up with the light of day and if you fly bunch of planes at Sun set then that will retain the Heat and kind of act like an insulating layer um and and keep the Earth warmer so like just plane flights you know American Airlines Delta whoever they are doing weather modification unintentionally apart from any chemtrail um I'm just hoping to give a little bit more sanity to the ways in went for modifying the weather uh earlier this week there was a video that went viral of a uh very cinematic desert in China that has been reforested uh do you think you'd have an easier time in the public eye if you were just planting trees or is is any modification of our terrain just a hot button issue regardless and do they have to do cloud seating in addition to that or are they just using traditional irrigation like how does that I wanted to talk to you about that that Chinese uh video that went viral because it was so striking and it was like for me it was like I want that here for sure um but I don't know how other people took it yeah it looks like you get like a thatch roof in the middle of the GOI totally yeah it felt like this idyllic like little preserve you put a ranch house on that the golden retriever's running outside you're taking the horse down to the local uh golden retri R mode yeah to the local uh Saloon and it just seems like like it's the it's the West right again you have new land that people can go live in and that's just like a land of opportunity and I think that'd be so cool but uh yeah what's your take on it dude I mean that's what the Central Valley was the Central Valley used to be deserts and swamps and now it is the most productive agricultural region on the planet it produces like 30% of all of the fruits and then the majority of like the red fruits in the United States um we used to terraform all the time like the Hoover Dam was an attempt to terraform the West yeah I think that like people that you know like maybe it's a last man problem maybe it's lism um maybe it's just like General like well no I won't say that um but like we've just lost the desire to be great I think in the United States we've lost the desire to like build the future and see the future through um if I was just planting trees yeah for sure it would be easier um you need the water though so unless you're setting up enormous conveyance systems which China largely is and cloud seaing in addition to that it's non-starter um there's a couple Technologies you know I mentioned last time like soil amendments that can get soil to retain more water that would be good um but uh you know trees they emit dust that creates like a a majority of our clouds in some regions and induces precipitation cloud seing like it mimics that natural process it's just with the material that works a little bit better um so uh yeah man like I I plan to plant trees in the future um I plan to make as many things green as possible I hope that people like get on board with the vision to make deserts green and great but um it's gonna take a minute uh I had a funny experience at hereticon there was a guy talking about terraforming I'm blanking on his name but he put out this like amazing Thomas quero Thomas huero uh made this amazing presentation it was like 40 minutes long showing all the different places around the world that we could terraform and how amazing it would be and one of the places that he highlighted was the salt and sea and how you could like theoretically like divert the Colorado River been there with Augustus we went out there and and Ben and then I went up to him afterwards and I was like this is an amazing project I would love to make the salt and sea like Dubai with just like you know it's it's a it's a Jordy comes up how do we make money off this uh no but I asked him I was like how how we actually do this you know I was thinking like the way to do it is through a hyper commercial project that says all this land is worthless right now because it's toxic surrounding this sort of evaporating sea like if somebody were to come in and buy up all the land around the salt and sea that's now very depressed and then start lobbying to actually make this stuff happen like it feels like you need like like he I asked him how how does this get done he was like I have no idea like somebody should try it but like I don't know how they would actually get it done um is it is it really just like one person caring that that sort of like makes these kind of projects possible Right like in in the case right now there's like a good chance that weather you know weather modification cloud seating Etc just would get banned if you weren't like flying to Florida frequently great man theory of History great man theory of History um but but but yeah like like it feels like in this ER in this sort of Doge era like if we do enter a period of like deregulation in some areas like some of these projects you might be possible but um yeah how how do you think about the salt and sea opportunity and then just like you know if we're even capable of doing projects at that scale anymore so um a related thing interestingly enough is like I think that there should be way more alternative finance that startups employ um I promise this are related um I'm going to wait until q1 or Q2 to do this but um we're just going to stand up a land fund and we're just going to start buying up the land that currently isn't aable primarily in Arizona and California because the same acre of land that's worth like six grand in either of those places uh has the same soil quality that the Central Valley does that would sell for like 70 to 500,000 um like we we'll set up a subsidiary that we sell some equity and to get LPS involved so that we can terraform that and then flip the land or keep it as an AG asset that is only made viable because of the water that we bring um it has to be a commercial interest I don't think that we you know may maybe America at one point had like maybe there's this idic previous America that existed I'm not sure where people did things just for the public benefit um or because it was cool um now yes it has to be cool but moreover like there has to be commercial interest and um yeah I'm going to do exactly that and I hope that somebody beats me to it for the sake of all the benefit that'll come from it but um if they don't I'll make a lot more money because of them this is hilarious because uh you're going to be duking it out when you're buying that land because Casey Hanmer we had him on the show earlier he wants to put solar panels all over it and turn it into a parking lot and you're gonna be like no like I I'll pay a dollar more per square foot but uh I I I I do we can have the auction we'll have the we'll do the auction yeah Au he $5 $5 have $6 have $6 uh I I do have a question about uh the cloud seating stuff it feels like I mean it all of this stuff has somewhat Zero Sum like we're not really creating new water we're kind of moving it around uh but desalination seems awesome I was looking at it pretty intensely a year ago and it seemed really difficult honestly but uh desalination like what is your take there and it just feels like we have you know I would expect a a gundo company to be doing this like we have people working on nuclear now we have people working working on solar you're working on cloud seating like like desalination if I heard like oh yeah there's some hot guy hot startup who's working on um on desalination I wouldn't be like oh this is breaking my mind right now I'd be like of course that's the next thing that the guys will go after in the Elsa gundo because like they've kind of checked the Box on everything else uh what's the state of desalination and what's your take yeah um diesel is great I'm not anti- Dell I don't think that we step on each other's toes um it is a modification of the water cycle right like whereas whereas they are taking salt water out of the ocean making it fresh and usable we're taking Cloud water out of the sky and bringing it down to make it fresh and usable um it's it's relatively efficient right now I think there's a lot of Promise in um catalytic desalination um I'm not enough of an electrical engineer to come up with something sufficiently Innovative in the space but I think that probably shows more promise than R um it's it's relatively efficient as it is the the problem with desalination for gigascale American projects for a lot of the world that is currently under supplied with respect to water is conveyance um we can set up a huge diesel project in La sweet no dice for Colorado doesn't matter for Nevada barely even matters for the Central Valley because you have to St hundreds of miles of huge pipes and then maintain those pipes for as long as the project exists um and it's doable like the California state Water Project is evidence of conveyance working but it is crazy infrastructure and crazy eminent domain that goes into shipping that water so should California be more reliant on it totally um could we like with tariffs or something strong armed Mexico into giving us like the Sea of Cortez to desalinate for Arizona maybe um but if you're in the interior of the United States the only way that you can make more water is if you bring it down from the sky um and that's that's who were primarily trying to serf this was uh Blake Master's point that I really enjoyed he said um you know how do we get water into the interior States Nevada Arizona New Mexico well we're going to reroute all the water from California into those States and then California the future of water in California is nuclear power desalination and he said that like 10 years ago haven't heard anyone try and build it maybe he should have stuck with venture capital and and and back that company because I want it to happen uh but maybe it'll happen soon that'd be great no diesel no cloud seating boiling the ocean nuclear boil on the surface of the ocean to make big enough clouds to fly Inland oh interesting okay so you just make the clouds and then float them over the river atmospheric Rivers right many people have wanted to boil the ocean but not literally so we need more literal ocean boilers sure uh I I have a more personal question how how are you doing with all this uh I care about you know I'm lucky to be an investor in Rain Maker but I care about you you know even more on a on a personal level I think your prefrontal cortex is like you know about to maybe fully develop right but like you're under a lot of pressure for being like you know in your mid 20s like I I you know anybody who's had a post go viral or sort of break containment knows what happens like your your message requests on every platform are probably like you know very dark um and uh you know are you are you uh you know you seem like you're handling it incredibly well but uh does it ever does it ever get to you that's really that's really caring thanks for asking man um you know like I uh I view rain maker as the best means by which I can serve God in my lifetime um and I owe everything in my life to Jesus Christ because of all that he's done for me in this life and then hopefully in next um so this this situation that I'm going through uh no big deal at all like if if it ends up on the other side with you know ideally me having um gotten to educate and convince some people and bring them more water in places where they need it I am happy to take the punches and the death threats and the in and um even if it didn't work out uh you know I'm GNA give it my all and I was a high school debate kid so I I live for this kind of dorky do not mess with the high school debate kids they will go to war with you on the timeline yeah I we kind of predicted like uh like the rise was so quick the mood would shift but I didn't expect that this was the instantiation of that mood the shift around the vibe of the company right yeah and I just have to say like there's so many people rooting for you right like you really are uh you know you're your critics that call you an industry plant uh you know in many ways like you are uh you know you are a product of of of of our industry and and uh there's just a lot of people uh you know rooting for for your success so uh proud of you for for not not letting the uh Never Back Down Never Back Down always claim victory always claim victory don't let the haters get to you and uh I would say you know like have a good rest of your Friday but I'm sure today is basically a Monday for the rain maker rain maker team job's not finished uh yeah I I I'm so sorry that the squat rack had to go uh how are you getting Fitness in these days then that was that was tragic dude um I I am walking to and from the office cuz I live four blocks away in gundell and um otherwise I'm going hard skinny priest mode I'm Big Skinny Prest skinny priest mode you've been the muscular Warrior I I look forward to when you exit this and become a portly Merchant it's gonna happen you're gonna you're gonna IPO the company sell it all and become a private Equity guy rolling up the rest of the farmland or something yeah the poor Merchant is the future for sure no I'm excited to uh I'm excited to have you back on when when when you're doing some of the land stuff CU like that that does feel like you know verticalized and like capturing the full value that that you guys can create over time is just like very obviously like you should own the land that you're raining water down on and and you know gain uh you know the full economic benefit of the work so uh it's fantastic having you on yeah this is great as always thanks guys our WEA our weatherman our weather man we needed a weatherman we got it start forecasting for tppn yeah yeah you should it's it's you can't do for like forecasting would just be too easy for you because like yeah there's going to be rain like in that square mile over there yeah we need the the zoom background like the green screen and it's you and like the map of uh next time you're on fake Zoom background with the with the map of La and you can tell us where it's going to rain uh this weekend I'll have you on Friday hang out be fun anyway great hanging we'll talk to you soon talk soon that's great and so uh next up we have uh Mike nup uh from uh he founded zapier he also founded uh uh Ark prize which we've talked about in the show before so Arc prize I highly recommend everyone go and check it out and try and do them so Arc prize is a uh AGI eval an evaluation that is designed to be hard for AI but trivial for human beings and so uh they look like Puzzles and there's a grid of squares that are different colors and your goal is to is to uh recreate the pattern or understand the pattern it gives you a whole bunch of references and then you are tasked with uh creating the solution to the puzzle and it's been very very difficult uh for ai ai has struggled with this even though it looks like something should be uh able to be one shot um and Mike is in the studio now welcome Mike how you doing hi guys thanks having me I'm doing good how's your Friday going uh it's great how's yours uh quite excellent spent a lot of