Rain Maker's Augustus Doricko on China's 38,000-person weather modification army and the race to control global water supply

that's in Augustus wake, you know, whenever he goes anywhere. Uh it's great to have you. Yeah. Thanks, man. That and size gongs. That and size gongs. Um update soon. Wait, you got to listen to this one. journalists on the horizon. Stand by. Great. Nice.

Who Who was the guy that was responsible for posting the uh stay tried to stay focused on the mission gif a while back when I got that text? I got like a hard eyes text about like, "Oh, I liked your appearance on TVPN. " Good social media intern there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the team's growing over here.

We We got a good crew coming together. Uh there's vibe coding happening over in this in that part of the studio. There's a lot of production stuff going on. Uh it's been a fun time. Um, sweet. So, uh, yeah, break it down. I'm I'm here to ring the alarm bell.

Um, totally transparently, uh, there are really big problems on the horizon both with China's domestic weather modification program and then their international one. Um, the article that you read or that you're referencing talks about how China is actively retrofitting their Wing Long Twos, right?

Um, talk about like nominative determinism. Cool name for a drone. Um, but it is the uh essentially Chinese equivalent of the MQ9 Reaper. Um, and they're using it for cloud seating and weather modification operations all across the country.

A lot of that is to fill up the snowpack in Tibet and then use that as a natural water tower for runoff for all of their urban, industrial, agricultural, and environmental assets in China. So that's that unto itself is insane.

To recontextualize people, the Chinese Meteorological Administration has about a $300 million budget for weather modification. They have 38,000 employees exclusively working on weather modification.

And they have two universities that offer bachelor's degrees in weather engineering, not meteorology, not atmospheric science, specifically engineering the weather.

Um, so they are driving extraordinarily hard on this domestically just for their own water supply, just to green deserts, just to keep their cities and industry humming. The problem is uh the international implications of this, right?

We are in a and like I critique people all the time for saber rattling with China needlessly, but the Wing Wong 2 has been sold and is being operated in countries across the world, namely Saudi Arabia and Egypt for defense applications, right? So that has problems for defense, but also for weather modification.

The CMA has explicitly said they want to export cloud seating as a means of soft power to control water supply and weather across the world. They already collaborate very closely with the Thai Royal Rainmaking Department. Um, and they can easily retrofit these drones that they've sold for defense applications.

Royal Rainmaking Department. Wow, great name. Great name. Um, but they can easily retrofit these drones for weather mod as well across the world. And then not only control the shipping and receiving and these ports, not just the energy infrastructure. Nice. Um, but also the water supply and weather.

And, uh, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, uh, whoever controls the weather controls the world. Um, and right now we're trending towards a world where China controls the weather and subsequently the world. Um, and it's really Rain Maker Technology Corporation representing the United States against the CMA.

Um, so President Donald Trump, if you can hear us, uh, Secretary Rubio, if you can hear us, uh, the State Department should be involved in this soft power conflict on weather modification internationally. H how are you thinking about the the current pitch for weather modification?

Because it feels like this uh this news out of China has a few different hooks. uh as well as agriculture and drinking water. Much of China is reliant on hydro power for electricity. Uh Sichuan in the southwest gets 80% of its power from dams, meaning that droughts can lead to electricity shortages.

I I mean I know we have the Hoover Dam, but is hydro electric power important in America? Obviously power is top of mind for everyone, but in America it feels like the narrative has shifted to nuclear and solar.

Um, but is there a world where we could be getting more out of our existing hydroelect electric assets and there's maybe a narrative there or not? 100%. Right. Nuclear is awesome and I'm super excited for Valor Atomics to turn a thousand reactors online in their gigasytes and produce the world's energy.

But it's going to take at least a year for that to start and it'll probably take years longer still until that's our main form of stable base load. Solar's great, but we have nighttime still and reflect orbital hasn't solved for that problem.

So uh we need stable base load and we need clean base load and hydroelectric power across hundreds of dams in the American West produces hundreds of gig gigawatt hours and we can refill our own dams to increase more stable clean base load with cloud seating where these dams are drying up right now.

we we can increase supply. You know, 80% of uh you mentioned Sichuan, 80% of Colombia's power comes from hydroelectric as well and they're going through a drought right now and so they have rolling blackouts because there's not enough power there both domestically for our own energy production.

We could use cloud seating to produce more hydroelectric and then internationally again as a means of collaborating with other countries, let's call it, and ensuring that like they have American interests in mind. We can produce more water and hydro for them.

Can you talk about the Chinese approach to cloud seating versus what you're doing in the American approach?

I feel like um a lot of times when we see a competitive dynamic emerge between China and America, there's only a small tweak between the way Instagram reels are served versus Tik Tok or, you know, DJI drones versus GoPros.

It's usually just the scale and efficiency and reliability of of Chinese technology, but there isn't usually that much of a of a shift in the underlying strategy. Um, are they using the same chemicals? Do you think we should be using different chemicals from their mix?

Uh, are they using different drones or are they shelling this stuff into the into the into the atmosphere with howitzers? Like, are there is there anything that we can learn that might not be IP protected that we could safely port back? Is there anything that we should change based on what we're hearing from over there?

Um, China is throwing the kitchen sink at weather modification research. Um, so they're doing drone based aerial cloud seating. They're doing ground generator based cloud seating.

They're doing uh acoustic uh cloud seating research, meaning they have these huge 130 decel uh speaker systems where they just blasted up clouds. They put them all in Tibet. Uh so even though it's like destroying the ears of Tibetan villagers, they're trying to shake water out of the clouds.

Um so that they have a bunch of other photonic stuff. Um they're doing a ton of research, but really the the big and important aspect of this is their sophisticated uh military retrofit of drones for long endurance missions. Um their radar research for detecting phase change in cloud.

Um, and then lastly, I think the thing that they have like the most serious edge on the United States and anybody else in the world in is their uh ice nucleation agent and their particulate. Um, they're doing a bunch of uh nanoparticle design. So, super super small scale particle coating.

It's titanium dioxide on top of these salt crystals among other things that are way more efficient at nucleating ice and subsequently creating snow or condensing stuff in cloud.

Um, Raymakaker is doing research into that right now, but that's where China far and away has the the biggest lead on on the nanoparticles that they're using. How about your challenges at home with various states and regulators? What's the update there?

Um, so uh 31 states proposed legislation to ban all forms of weather modification this year. Um almost all of them dropped that legislation. Uh because one um because of you because of you. Was it did you We did Me and the Rain Maker team did a lot of work around state capitals.

I've got like a regular barber shop in Tallahassee and a few other state capitals um to to tune the mullet mullet up before I testify. Um but uh the one state that did ban it was Florida. Um, Florida made weather modification a class two felony. Um, so if I were to work there, I'd go to prison for five years. Wow.

Um, and that I think unto itself is not a huge problem. Fine. Sure, you're depriving Floridaian cattle ranchers and orchards uh from having as much water as they want and they do have wildfires and droughts. So, it hurts the state of Florida.

Um, but the real problem is the canary in the coal mine uh in terms of American political sentiment, particularly Republican political sentiment. Right?

There's this whole conversation around the tech right and who is pro- innovation and who's not is the Trump administration pro- innovation seems so for the most part but um unless we have clear federal regulation on weather modification and a public stance in favor of this then we're going to lose control of the weather to China yeah what about um what about desalination so it's something that we were doing in America we kind of fell off it feels like the nuclear story and it just feels like I'm gonna hear a story in the next few years of like, "Oh yeah, China just figured it out and now they have like a bunch of deselination plants and we're behind on that too.

" Mhm. Tracking it at all. So desalination is largely held up by the California Coastal Commission. Um and then like HOAs basically that block the construction of del. Um an interesting stat that because it smells bad. No, just because it looks ugly. Diesel smells fine.

It's just like a big Well, it looks I should It looks industrial, right? It looks It looks like a big beautiful oil refinery, which I happen to be a big fan of personally. Um, but you know, folks in Newport Beach less so. Um, diesel is great.

Uh, and if we come up with some really sophisticated new reverse osmosis membranes or catalytic desalination methods with good electrical engineering, um, we can make it more efficient. But the problem with del still is that we have to move that water from the coasts.

like it's a non-starter for Nevada or Colorado or Utah to get desalinated water. Um what you can do though is cloud seed obviously, right? You could produce water anywhere where there are clouds uh with our tech.

Yeah, I remember Blake Masters was saying when he was he was running in Arizona, he was saying like the future of California is nuclear power del and then we need to uh reroute the Colorado River to hydrate the the inner the the inner states.

Um is there a world where you could build I mean you mentioned it looks like an oil and gas refinery. Could you build a like an offshore oil rig essentially or is it just like it's not economically dense enough? Water is not the same as oil.

So, you're not going to be able to pay to put it on a truck and then bring it in. It just doesn't make sense to do it that way. Yeah, exactly. It must flow. I was I was talking to some commodities traders the other day and I was trying to like come up with some crazy derivatives for water. Water right there yet.

You know, it's it's it's it's cents for a barrel, right? And it's just as it's almost as heavy as oil. So, you you can't convey this. You know, 13% of all of the electricity in California is used just moving water around. What? That's crazy. Wow. Yeah.

Like the Central Valley exists just because we pump all of that stuff from the Sacramento Delta and American River down into the valley and elsewhere.

Like there's this huge huge unnown problem which is like because we don't have enough water, we have to dedicate so much of our energy resources just to moving it around where we could just be producing in the Sierras. Um and that's what rain maker's doing. Interesting. Any anything else you're tracking from China?

Um so I guess one one thing that I will say in terms of like this soft conflict is we had a customer meeting um in the Middle East um and a day before we had the scheduled meeting they said hey sorry we have to go do a last minute trip to China um to go talk about the uh Winglong 2 um so uh we're trying to qualify rain makaker vehicles in the Middle East right now um so that we are clearly at par with their system capabilities and then can selected for the Chinese.

Um but yeah, the challenge if you if you look at the precedent for sort of statebacked companies out of China, they're willing to sell at a loss for years.

And so how you know the you know I I have no insight into whether they would try to attempt that in in cloud seating, but it wouldn't exactly be surprising, which I'm sure is a competitive dynamic that you're thinking about.

every single international office that we go into to talk about our work, we see a stack this high of purchase orders from China, um, and then one that's like two pages thin, uh, that's that's from American companies. So, yeah, it's absolutely a problem. Wow.

Uh, part of this article highlights this idea that, uh, uh, grain growing regions in China have been parched this month for or four months. Are we in a particular like global drought? Is this unique to China? Are we experiencing drought in America? Like what is the state of drought generally?

You mentioned that there are different pockets around the globe. But um is this a particularly bad year? Are the trend lines bad overall or I mean we saw the fires and that felt in a it felt very visceral in in California and Los Angeles, but you never really know when you zoom out where we are on the trend line.

So we we had we had out of distribution high amounts of precipitation this past year in California and yeah um and even still we had the wildfires right um you know the the thing that I think is a good reference point is the California Department of Natural Resources water supply strategy they explicitly plan for half a million to a million acres of farmland in the central valley to turn into desert in the next 5 years just because there's not enough water.

So even when we have boom years and the reservoirs are all full and there's tons of snowpack and everybody gets to go skiing in Tahoe, there's not enough water for current demand. And that's in part just because population is growing, right?

Like we built the Central Valley Water Project to turn the Central Valley from a desert and swamp into the most productive agricultural region in the world and and we wouldn't have the US population that we do now if it weren't for that water project.

And so we we just need to produce more if we want to maintain agricultural and economic growth. Makes a ton of sense. Well, good luck out there. We hope you can uh strike some big deals on the back of this news. Uh, you know, we got to be competitive. Thank you for fighting on America's behalf. We'll talk to you soon.

Come back soon. Later. Cheers. See you. Bye. Next up, we have Brad from Cobbot coming in the studio talking about collaborative robots. I'm very interested to talk about the the sim toreal gap which we covered yesterday. Uh, we will welcome Brad to the studio. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.