Rainmaker's Augustus Doricko: weather modification proven, 130 employees, and desalination coming in 2027

soon. Goodbye.

Up next, we have Augustus from Rain Maker, who's the CEO and founder. He's teal fellow and he's in the TBPN Ultra Dome live with us in studio in Hollywood. Welcome to the show. You're looking fantastic.

Oh, thank you. And not as good as Jordy in the Rain Maker green suit.

Yeah,

you did that just for me.

Yeah, the background everything fits. Give us the update. How are How's life? How are things going?

Uh, blessed. Better than ever. Uh, Rain Maker is the first company in human history to unambiguously, repeatably modify the weather and prove it.

Okay.

Yeah. This past year.

You break it down. When did this happen? Where?

So, you know, I've known you guys for a while. Um, it's pretty tough to be the mulleted kid running around saying that you're going to modify the weather for a few years without being able to prove it.

The mullet looks less mullety.

It's It's a little just

You're growing out the front, so now it's party in the front, party in the back.

I would say everywhere. I would say either party or just disheveled all around. Um,

but across our operations in Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and the Middle East,

we've been able to run these operations and in areas with otherwise no precipitation whatsoever,

see snow happen exclusively downwind where our measured and modeled air souls are going. And so for anybody that's not familiar with cloud seating,

it's this technology that's been around for 80 years. General Electric invented it in 194. I would actually be shocked if there's someone in tech that is not familiar with cloud settings just because just because you've been around the you've been you've been around the circuit for the last few years a couple times. Give it to us again in case someone anybody's been living under a data.

We'll start with what a cloud is.

Yeah. Yeah. Scientists don't actually know. That's a separate question. By the way, speaking of people not

this goes deeper than I

pe people uh that might not heard of Clive Scene before, I was talking to some big fancy show producers and we were like, "Hey, do you want this story?" And they're like, "Well, maybe if you go on TBNN first, then we would take it." Um, and so there's some other hits this week that it's all credited to you.

But, um, the long story short is there's lots of clouds that have small drops of liquid water in them, too small to naturally fall. If you can find those clouds, release the right material into them, those drops will freeze onto your dust and become big enough to fall. Problem is, if you blast a cloud and then it snows, who's to say whether you actually made it snow?

Attribution.

Attribution. Oh, he's reading the investor updates. Yeah. Yeah. It's uh Yeah. Yeah. It's it's just like uh brand marketing.

Yeah. But now uh the most like normie interpretable attribution we have is downwind of where we're seating. Uh sometimes you can see the water in the cloud in the entire portion that we seated freeze and then fall out and in an otherwise overcast day this hole will open up in the sky and you can see the blue sky and sun and snow falling downwind uh and otherwise it's totally overcast. So using data from our own proprietary radar, from the National Weather Service radar, even NASA satellites, um we're able to show exactly how much of the precipitation is man-made. Uh and then tell our customers, be they governments, hydroelectric utilities, insurers, ski resorts now, actually.

Yeah, I can imagine ski resorts being early adopters.

Yeah. Yeah.

Although isn't it very narrow?

Such a small target. When I think about like rainfall on a corn field, that seems like sort of spray and prey and you're good. But uh if you want that double black diamond to be hit perfectly, that feels like precision. Are we there yet on the technology?

Well, really what the ski resorts want is the off ped to get snow, right?

Like uh you got Yeah. Yeah. Off off peace. Off piece.

Um

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because your snowblowers, the conventional stuff, they can get the actual like trails, but if you want to do the backount,

cloud seating is best for that. Okay. Um, and so historically cloud seating has been no more precise than a few hundred square miles at a time. You're flying these planes at hundreds of miles an hour. The entire waterershed will get water.

We've gotten it down to because of the wind sensing that we're doing, the modeling that we're doing. We're like an AI company now. Sorry to say it. Um, uh, we're we've gotten it precise enough to land on about 8,000 acres at a time. Um, and doing all of like our snow zone research. That's what we're calling the area that we're hitting. Um, we can probably get it down from 8,000 to a little bit smaller, maybe a thousand acres at a time, which is easy for any mid to ultra large resort in the US.

Yeah, makes sense. Uh, where has demand been? You mentioned a few different geo locations, you mentioned a few different industries. Do you think that you will be narrowing down at some point? um

like finding a beach head, finding a product market fit and it's like

yeah, he's narrowed down already. Earth

I know I know I know there's a broad there's a broad uh vision but every company goes through a narrowing and a focusing point and then a broadening diversification. Do you see yourself going more narrow for a little bit and just being like the dominant main player in, you know, the Pacific Northwest in ski and then going other things or do you want to keep running in multiple places? Is there a benefit to that?

It's it's a super salient question, right? Because if you look at say Reflect orbital, right, the guys that are offering sunlight on demand,

yep,

infinite potential applications for that. uh rain or snow on demand.

A bunch of different uh demos could use that. For us, it's two things exclusively. Um it is municipal and state water agencies. So say like the Utah Department of Natural Resources, uh the California uh Department of Natural Resources, water for them. Um that's straightforward. We're very allegible to them. They understand the value of snowpack and how that relates to their water table. So that's one. And then just ski resorts. So all these other markets although eventually we'll play in them. I think insurance is really interesting for like crop insurance. Um I think that hydro

does that work?

So right now uh there's insurance against crop failure due to drought.

Sure.

Um so if you have like a parametric insurance play where you can structurally reduce the risk of drought killing your crops then you can more water down.

Exactly.

Makes sense.

Um although that'll all be interesting. It's really going to be uh Alpine, Rocky Mountain, Sierra Ski Resorts, and then just the governments that I mentioned before.

Makes sense.

What kind of advancements have you made on the hardware side, the actual drones? Like you guys are flying drones in probably more extreme conditions than like I would guess any other

company or organization on the planet.

Um,

is that is that is that accurate? There's some pretty cool defense uh companies that are building crazier drones than ours, but we have the only rotor wing vehicle that can fly in severe icing in in all of NATO. Um

rotor wing vehicle quad

quadcopter rather than fixed wing.

Sure.

Yeah. Um and so the advancements have been candidly last year our drones were basically like bottle rockets. Um they'd go up the icing was really severe. We had not perfected the system required to sustain flight through severe icing. But now in atmosphere

bottle rockets as in they would go up, they would deliver a payload and then they would just kind of fall.

I was kind of making a joke about them exploding.

Yeah.

So all of the the development that's that's been done in the last year is about reliability and precision. Um these vehicles,

you don't want to lose a drone every time. No,

it doesn't work.

Exactly. Um and so we're flying 3 to four miles above ground level. um that's being done pretty consistently up to 60 70 mph winds in these atmospheric rivers. Um that's the big development there. And then also another big thing is the aerosol sizing. So this was part of the big breakthrough that happened in January. We we realized we needed significantly smaller so like nanometer scale and then significantly more concentration of these particles to deliver the effect that we were intending. Before that, we were releasing like micron sized particles, but now um because we're releas releasing more and smaller particles, we're able to more reliably see our effect.

Wow.

How is the response been to just the vanilla push back of like dangerous chemical goes in the cloud? Like this this like the actual silver is it still silver iodide?

Silver iodide.

Is silver iodide something you can't just chug in a glass of water, right?

Did you see a dag video?

Yes. I want you to unpack that. That did not look very good. Like what's going on there?

Yeah. So, shout out to Daxon from Soon. Um,

great filmmaker.

Yep. Spectacular.

Potential investigative journalist going on. What's going on here?

Um, so so silver iodide is still what we're using. Yeah.

Uh, in this upcoming winter, we're going to have scaled operations with our alternative seating agent. It's this uh bio uh naturally occurring protein from like uh American soil.

So on brand for you.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We think that you know how like you're trying to make

it's like a naturally occurring white monster.

Exactly. So we're going to mix the protein into whey and then I'm going to that and it's going to play. Um but

no I mean putting salt in the atmosphere doesn't it it seems like that could be if it's a natural substance if it is something that you could drink that would be that would kind of close the loop. But uh are you thinking about moving away from silver iodide entirely and moving over to this new seating agent? So silver iodide because it's safe, because it's proven, because this problem's already inordinately complex, we'll continue to use in most of our commercial ops for the next two years. Um the reception is generally like there's two things happening at once. There's more awareness of cloud seating. Like in the last three years, there's 400 times more searches of cloud seating than there were before.

We're all wondering who responsible for this. Um, and then also on the like public sentiment side, as long as you can disambiguate like the sort of Bill Gates dimming the sun type stuff from cloud eating, which is localized precipitation enhancement,

people are pretty receptive and and silver iodide, if you back out the math for people, they're willing to talk 90% of the time. 10% less tractable, but we're we're always going to be open and transparent with them. Long term though, my primary interest in alternative seating agents, it's not just because I want to get away from like the PR of using silver iodide. It's that these proteins are about a thousand times more effective at nucleating ice.

Um, and the Chinese have that one primary advantage over our weather mod program. Um, so they're doing very advanced material science for different graphine particles um that much much more effectively manipulate the weather conditions. But that seems more problematic from a environmental perspective. Like if I if that falls on my corn, I eat it, I don't necessarily want graphine in my digestive tract.

Something like that.

That makes sense. Yeah.

But maybe in certain applications, you don't care about the chemicals in the water. I don't know. Uh like I mean, if you're skiing, you're not necessarily eating the snow. So there's potential for chemicals.

Lots of people eat the snow. So maybe that's not the maybe that's not the best example, but there there there must be some sort of there's probably some applications where uh you know you're not net polluting the environment potentially.

Yeah. And I think there's also always the like dilution is the solution angle. You say okay if you put down

50% more water then it's still an inconsequential amount of material in the soil. That's their angle right now.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Um Jordy, you have something else? Uh what's the team like today and where are you guys like where all over the map are you?

Yeah, so we were I don't know what we were last we spoke but this time last year we were about 30 people. Um we're a little bit over 130 now.

Wow.

Yeah,

it's huge. How is that divided up?

Um so there's about a third uh 40 or so in Los Angeles at any given time. Okay.

There's about 60 in Salt Lake. Sure.

Um shout out Utah, shout out Governor Cox. Shout out LDS church. Yeah, love them all. Um but uh then we have a smaller operational site in Pendleton, Oregon.

Yeah.

Um an operation in the Middle East, which we still cannot

sure

talk about the location of. Um and then our our DC team and shortly actually in Alaskan.

Oh. As well.

Alaska. Yeah.

Um are you still going to like local court hearings constantly? I feel like you were on a run there. Also, there was like a there was like a potential of like is this going to get completely banned in certain states or at the federal level? like what's the status of like the government push back? I know the government's doing a lot of different stuff, but

yeah. Um at the state level of the 31 bans that were proposed, uh only two went through in last session. Um

Florida,

Florida and then Louisiana.

Okay.

Um unsurprisingly, the discourse in everywhere east of the Mississippi where they don't need the water as badly is more uh liable to chemtrail conspiracy discourse. east or west of the Mississippi, people need the water and are willing to hear you out and dismbiguate. Sure.

Um

I think that uh in terms of federal involvement and potentially preeemption, President Trump brought up the necessity of saving the Great Salt Lake, right? Um we have operations for the Bear River, which is the primary tributary into the Great Salt Lake right now. And if we were to scale up our operations about 10 times, we could radically accelerate the timeline to reversing the eritification of and refilling the lake. And so we might get to see some participation at the federal level in cloud seating because um it's the only way to produce net new water for the lake. And and that's an interesting project. Not because not just because the lake is a piece of national American heritage. Not just because it's something that all of the ski industry is dependent on in Utah because that lake effect snow is what gives you the champagne powder. It's not just important because if the lake aridifies you end up with toxic arsenic getting kicked up like in the salt and sea.

Um but also uh it's the training wheels for what a interstate weather modification project would look like for the Colorado River, right? the the Bear River which flows through or the wershed which flows through Utah, Wyoming and Idaho. Um that is sort of the the precedent setting that we're looking for for the Colorado which is down to about 8.1 million acre feet through Lee's Ferry every year. That's the the place where they measure flow of the river so they figure out allocations. Um that's about half of where the water was measured to be or suspected to be when we made the Colorado River compact. Um, Rain Makaker's goal to call a shot publicly is to get the Colorado River back to its 1920 supply levels by 2031. Um, that will mean uh about 8 million more acre feet of water down. Um, and a lot of that will come from cloud seating and some of it will come from other technologies that we're looking at right now.

How do you structure uh your customer contracts?

Like how how does that work? Right. Uh, I'm assuming um you have these different types different types of groups that you're working with, but but what does a typical contract look like? I'm assuming it's like annual contract. You're trying to deliver a certain amount of effect in that period, but but walk us through it.

So, there there's two modes depending on the customer. Um, with B2B, it is value based pricing. Um, we've recently hired on some guys from Palunteer. They've been instrumental in us figuring out how to set up those structures. It is some program standup fee and availability and like uh operations, maintenance, repair fee, and then being paid based on the inches of snow that we produce, the gallons of water that flow into the system of interest. People value the water from cloud seeding very differently. And so we we structure that outcomesbased pricing differently depending on the customer segment and what they actually want. Um, then on the B2B side, I'd prefer to do that sort of outcomes based pricing, but you wouldn't be surprised to find out that governments have a harder time paying for outcomes than they do for infrastructure services.

Um, and so that has looked like firm fixed fee for the most part. Yeah.

Um, so all of our operations priced into uh the initial contract standup.

Give me an update on the Gundo. Um, dude, uh,

feels like a bunch of companies have grown a ton, uh, potentially outgrowing the Gundo. Are there more What's net inflow like? You know, what's going on?

Well, I think the first

It's also just less noisy now. I feel like the meme like you kind of locked in wins and then locked in, right? Yeah.

Yeah. There was a pretty deliberate discussion that happened in the group chat after your piece came out. We were like radio silence like we all have to shut up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the most important thing is that uh it didn't blow up in like a fiery disaster. Um which it totally could have. Yeah.

Um but if you look at us, if you look at Valor, if you look at Nearos, um a lot of these companies are like at scale and and operating in size now. Um Valor

and the older guards doing well too. Radiant and Impulse and Varda, that crew, they're like the I feel like they're like the the

thes.

Yeah, they're the enks. They're like the juniors. So you guys are like the sophomores now and the seniors like the SpaceX's and the

Locked Mattel.

Mattel's there of course

classic Gundo company. Um

yeah uh so I think that our original like Gundo bro cohort having matured. That's something that's pretty cool. But yeah, every single one of these companies now has operations manufacturing namely outside of Gundo. Um R&D will stick in and around Gundo Torrance, the greater Gundo area. Um

the greater Gundo including Bair and Malibu. I consider these greater Gundo.

I think actually Greater Gundo extends all the way down to Costa Mesa

to include and

yeah, there's a prolific defense company in Gundo. Gater Gundo.

Throw throw San Diego in. Why not?

Yeah. Las Vegas. That's Greater Gundo.

No, we don't claim Vegas actually. But um but uh

right up until San Mateo, you get Nvidia maybe, but not not Facebook. You you stop at the chips.

Yeah. And uh the inflow um has been pretty consistent largely through Dipulus.

Yeah, that's right. Jacob.

Yeah, Jacob's been crushed last week, right?

Yeah. Yeah, that was really cool to see.

Give me a rundown. How'd it go?

Um well, I'm I'm personally investing uh in some of the companies from Dipulus. Um I think there's a few worth checking out. Uh, one just at the top of my mind is Western Chemical. Okay, Jared West.

He is the guy. I don't know if you saw the Jared West of Western Chem. It's so good.

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, he's doing uh water processing, taking um waste water, and then putting duckweed into it, harvesting and cleaning the water, and then uh uh taking the hydrocarbons out of the duckweed thereafter.

Yeah. So, that's one of the first processes that he's scaling up production of. Okay.

Yeah.

What? Yeah. What what were the other trends? I mean, I feel it feels like uh one interesting trait of the Gundo companies was that uh they were maybe more like pointed to specific solutions. There was already there were already like a big energy company generally or like big oil or like you know big a big defense tech company but then you'd get somebody like Nuros and Saurin who are like laser focused on this one application and still breaking through and um like it's not it's not like you were framed as like just like oh like dealing with water broadly. You weren't the water company. you were like cloud seating specifically and it was this sort of off the-beat technology and I feel like that's uh part of what made the Gundo experiment so interesting was that it felt like a science fair in some ways and there were a lot of people that were like bite they weren't biting off more than they could chew but they were taking on really ambitious projects that like if they scaled they'd work. Um, but is that is that culture alive and well? Like are and are there are there like the the decipulus thing? Are those are those companies like coming to the Gundo or there's new freshmen joining every year basically?

Yeah. Yeah. I sometimes I feel bad because the original cohort

feel bad for the hazing rituals.

No. In 2023, I assure you I'd have instituted something like that. But 2026, Augustus,

not so grown up.

Yeah. Yeah. Nobody even lives in the office anymore. Um. Wow.

I know. Fell off. There's no squat rack in the office.

Brutal.

It's brutal. Um but uh

gone corporate.

The Yeah, it's over. Um

these big cloud seating now.

Big cloud. But uh what's interesting about this most recent cohort is it's largely like uh chemical manufacturing. Um yeah. So I think that if we pumped out more um defense slop um or or energy slop

like that space is pretty

Well, it's hard. Yeah. Ander has a bet in almost every category and a lot of funding and a lot of talent. And so there's a big question about should you try and compete with Anderol or just go work at Anderol, right? Like you can you can certainly fulfill a mission if you want to work on some particular, you know, solution in defense by just going over to Ander. It's not some abstract company. Do you have any younger competitors as in like startups or are you or is your competition somebody deciding just

a newer hotter cloud sitting company with a longer mullet who's just logging

because I know I know you guys you guys acquired a company at one point right that was doing some some something in the space broadly uh but has anybody been crazy enough to to try to fast follow you? Um, so we did acquire one of the legacy cloud seating companies that was using planes ground generators and we're going to continue rolling those up um, just because it it's very simple to inject our tech, produce significantly more water, prove our yields, and then upsell accordingly. Um, no, I don't know of anybody uh, that's started a company um, that's competing with with Ray Maker.

Um, and I I think that um, they'd probably get bodied instantaneously uh, if they were to do so. be it would be a nightmare. No, I'm sure I'm sure there will come a point where people will be like, "Wow, he he figured it out." And and uh basically like once you once you hit a certain scale, then they'll be like, "Oh, that seems like a good idea." But it'll be it'll be too late. You'll already be getting dragged in front of Congress for uh for monopolizing cloud seating.

Yeah. I I think that I'm supposed to uh be magnanimous publicly about that sort of thing. Um, but I

Do you do you have to be magnanimous publicly about energy drinks

about energy drink? Oh,

the first time the first time we recorded uh anything together, we did a a tier list. I want you just a quick tier list of of rank all of these, please.

Can you rank every

Can you rank every uh

You got the Alani new up there.

This is This is the biggest tier list guy

for uh for the these are these are unranked. This is the beginning of a tier list where you have to sort these from absolute heaven S tier. A wonderful and amazing. B pretty damn good. C it's fine. D gets the job done. F. Why are you drinking this? Then instant kidney failure is the lowest possible tier. And then of course you can put things in never tried. There are a lot in here. I didn't even realize some of these existed.

Full throttle. That's pretty

full throttles in there. We got a lot. Anything standing out. anything make it in the Augustus rotation or the or the uh rain maker fridge more frequently than previous?

Um I think the I think the biggest one is not actually listed here. There's um

deep cut.

There's like a I think it's called like red tiger. It's this. It's called Jordanian. It's this Jordanian energy drink list ingredients. And so I would actually disagree with the premise and say instant kidney failure if it gives you the optimal neutropic effect is probably what we're optimizing for. We never got you to rank Diet Coke. Are you pro Diet Coke or are you a hater?

Stand on Diet Coke.

You know, I think unfortunately Diet Coke is SF coded.

Oh.

However, however, I'll offer I'll offer my olive branch to SF and say, um, we did the meme, we dogged on you guys for making nonsense for long enough. We can be friends now.

Yeah. Now they're they're shipping I don't know, semiconductors and hardware. There's a lot of companies up there. Uh, Ulisses. I don't know if you're buddies with Right. Yeah. And he's building real stuff up there.

Poseidon.

Yeah. There's a ton of uh also just like I feel like

both Ulisses and Poseidon.

Yeah.

That's hilarious. Uh there's also the uh there's also just a boom of like consumer hardware uh industrial robotics. Pretty cool.

There's a lot of stuff. And I feel like even even if it's like a consumer robot that does your laundry or something like that's a little bit more uh I don't know just like an more optimistic future than just more adtech. And I think it sort of checks the box. It's close to checking the box of the Gundo criticism which was fair.

What what is the TBPN uh like public policy on on prediction markets by the way?

Public policy state we we we don't uh engage in them. We don't trade on them. They're sometimes useful to pull up uh like like the Elon Sam Alman lawsuits going on right now. I think it's sitting at exactly 50%. So bad example because that tells you nothing. Uh but but but uh in terms of like the midterms flipping, I find that really useful. Um but but I generally I generally hear your criticism about like we don't need more sports betting. So uh we've had Sager and Jetty from Breaking Points on. I think you agree with him and I think we're like in loose agreement with that.

Okay. that uh that uh the the sports betting is like zero sum, negative sum.

Did you hear about the uh what was it the SF guy that not San Francisco but special forces guy that bet on the uh Maduro extraction?

Yes. Bet on himself.

Yeah, he's betting on himself, but obviously a violation of the job, I imagine. So, not good. I mean, it's crazy because it puts it puts you and your team in insane harm's way because you have to like Maduro and his government have access to the data source.

That's a I hadn't even thought about that. That's crazy.

And so you're basically telling the enemy

Yeah.

indirectly like when you are going to

Yeah. Because they can see a spike in the chart.

Yeah. It's a signal. And so yeah, the more the more I sat with that, I was like,

Trump Trump's reaction when that somebody mentioned it to him was he was like comparing it to like betting on yourself in baseball.

That's the joke. That's not the real thing.

Yeah. But this was like a, you know, putting I I I I think that guy should probably go to prison for like

Yeah.

20 years or something.

Rough,

but not based in SF. I think both companies are in New York.

True. So

true. Yeah. Finance.

Stick it with the finance prize. Uh, we haven't yet made money off of uh snow prediction markets.

Well, you saw you saw about the hairdryer, right? So, there was a Paris weather market and this guy gets caught on video pulling a haird dryer up to the to the to the to the meter. And uh

I mean, the other thing that's uh that was sort of irksome was uh we got to a point where there were prediction markets around what people would say during their TVN appearance.

Oh. And and so so so that creates this weird thing with the chat where the chat will chime in and be like

ask them about Bitcoin

and and sometimes that's like a reasonable thing like maybe we do want to know is there a crypto integration to this thing or you know they might want to ask you about uh oh ask him about like Abu Dhabi specific or ask him about you know Spain specifically.

Is there anybody's bag we right now?

Yeah exactly. And so it creates this weird dynamic where it sort of like degrades the quality of the questions that are getting asked in the chat which is annoying because the chat is very useful for us to you know bring an extra character in. And then we had a very weird interaction where at one point we had uh prediction markets scrolling across the bottom and a guest actually Sam Alman uh was looking at them because he could see them and one of them was like Sam Alman declares AGI and he's like running this weird thing like this is weird like people are gambling on what if I say this word right now this triggers this thing and it's just like distracting. Yeah. And so there's been like a back and forth there, but uh still some cool intelligence and some cool like metaanalysis for like understanding what is going on and just synthesizing a bunch of like polling data. That's still pretty interesting to me. Yeah. But

yeah. No, I uh I think they should be illegal. Um

even the even the even the uh political ones like who's going to win the next presidential election.

I so I well yes. Um but like I heard one person say you could uh self-und a campaign. You ever read this article where it was like bet on yourself? Yeah, exactly. Um,

all that to say though, uh, like

Gundo still all the changes it's gone through, corporatization, not like sleeping in the office anymore.

Like everybody does hate the get-richqu cash out slop stuff. Um, and if only for the sake of some moral fortitude and like the mitigation of the degrading mental quality of everybody across the country and also like the middle and lower classes just being utterly bodied by uh people that are doing deacto insider trading on these things like

yeah they should probably be illegal. Yeah, that was a Sagger's point about just gambling broadly. Uh that like the inaccessibility of like Las Vegas is like a feature, not a bug and should not be worked out and you should need to like explain to your friends and family like why you're going to Las Vegas and then like maybe you're only there for a weekend. You come back and you're like not just like stepping away from the gambling but also probably hung over and being like I don't need to do that for a couple years as opposed to like push notification. It's available now.

Yeah.

Yeah. Very tricky. Very tricky. But stay safe out there. Uh I don't know

any any more shots you want to call for this year.

Um for this upcoming year um I think

ASI yes or no

ASI.

Are you are you a AGI pled?

Um I would have said two months ago no absolutely not. But um some of our smartest uh philosophy graduate like super super AI native young kids rebuilt some of the most sophisticated weather models in the world with uh LLM this year. So yeah, I would say actually you have to AGI harden your company. So we're doing all of this

that feels like AGI pill, not AI godp.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Not not

but also you you

like useful tool pled.

Yeah.

Not not slop. Oh, it's a bubble. It's nothing. It's not even useful. Like it is useful.

No. Super super useful. I think the weird take though is like most of the economy is faked already. So everybody's jobs getting automated is like ostensibly. No.

You've seen those you've seen those Instagram reals, right? It's like AI is going to take my job. What job? And it's like a guy like you know skateboarding or something.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Too many examples. So yeah, I think it'll probably like revolutionize a bunch of stuff now. Um I think on the water thing, I brought this up before the water critique of data centers. Um yes, sure. We'll talk my own book all the time, but like they don't actually use that much water.

No, I think all of Google used 50 golf courses worth or something like that. Like crazy.

50 golf courses just around.

Google controls like 20% of compute or something like that. Maybe more. Like it's like absolutely insane. It's not a water issue. It is a power issue. Uh, are you bullish on desalination?

Uh, yeah. Yeah. I think DAL is going to be pretty instrumental. Um,

I mean, are is there a bit of you where you're looking at what Isaiah is doing and you're like, mega project, DAL, like this feels like you could crush that. And it's I don't know like it's it's a different it's a different shape of company. Like what you're doing right now is maybe more innovative than just being like there's a desalination plant that works here. I'm gonna build another one. Copy paste. But what's really involved in that is like what Isaiah is doing, which is like marshalling the capital, marshalling the political will, getting stakeholders aligned. Like it's this very soft, messy thing that's

all things that you're quite good at.

You're good at this. And I feel like I feel like if you know, isn't there a plant right down from your office?

Uh yeah. Well,

it's off, right?

The the del plant. Well, are you thinking Carl's bad down in San Diego?

I thought there was one like in Elsagundo. Is that not right?

There's the water treatment plant. Hyperion. Yeah, um they do a ton of recycling. No, I think a shot that I will call is by Q1 of next year, uh Rain Maker is going to be doing some del.

Let's go.

And and yeah, a lot of that is a lot of that is um like marshalling political will and stakeholder engagement. It's also you got to take the perspective of modular manufacturing of units, right? Like that's what Valor's big thing is.

Nuclear.

We talked to somebody who was doing a uh del at the scale of like a cooler. So, you know, you're going camping, you can fill it up with just swamp water and you can get clean water, battery powered. It's a smaller unit, you know, but you can kind of scale up.

Yeah. Sorry, I'm I'm laughing to myself. I uh I realize I haven't told any of my investors yet. So,

don't worry, it's not like it's live.

Um

we'll review this before we post it.

No, no, no. Um but, uh yeah, stay tuned for stay tuned for del. I think the del um really the the road map is

Yeah. really good at snowtime uh precipitation enhancement. Um then come next year, we're going to be doing operational summertime like warm cloud precipitation enhancement alongside hail suppression.

Um that's the same period when an arm of the company will start doing this del work. Um and then thereafter the the third thing that you have to do

is automated tractor tilling of uh biochar or hydrogels into soil. Um because we make a ton of water right now via cloud seating, but if you do that in say Moab in southern Utah, um your effective precipitation is about 10%. Most of it evaporates away before it actually percolates into aquifers or runs off into streams. If you start to till the soil with these absorptive materials that increase the amount of organic matter there, you can change the trophic potential of the soil such that it's not just sand anymore, but grasses can start to live there. Uh biota can start to survive in the soil. And then you you retain more water year over year because of that. That's more of like a 20 28 arm that we're going to stand up. Um but snowpack now, rain and hail next year, del towards the end of that. Um and then automated tractor tilling thereafter.

Very cool.

Yeah.

Thanks for coming on the show.

Fantastic to get the update. Thanks.

Great hanging out. We'll see you soon.

We have our next guest Rick Caruso joining the What you got? Look at these