#4: Augustus Doricko - Weather-Modification Drones Are Coming Soon
Hey everybody, I'm Christian and this is First Principles. Today we're talking
to Augustus Dorico about the physics and economics of Rainmaker,
a cloud seeding drone startup. Basically, they'll have
their drones at a farm site or some other place where they want to literally make
it rain, and when they see a cloud overhead that has the right composition and
things inside of it, they'll fly the drone up there, drop their payload,
and it will literally make it rain. It's an unbelievable idea,
it sounds really ambitious and it is, but weather modification is
both too cool and too impactful to pass up. So I
think you'll enjoy this episode. This is Augustus Dorico with Rainmaker on
First Principles. Hey, Gus, thanks for joining us.
Happily, Christian. So I am, I'm building Rainmaker
Technology Corporation. We're an advanced next generation cloud
seeding company that's looking to enhance precipitation over agricultural
watersheds first, then ecosystems in the American West, eventually
terraforming all the deserts in the planet, relieving water scarcity and
ending hurricanes. Just all of it at once. Well,
no, indignation. A very fast baby step was actually the
plan. And then the background that led me to Rainmaker was
a blessed and circuitous route. Originally, I was studying physics at
UC Berkeley. The tongue-in-cheek thing that I like to say is like,
Neil deGrasse Tyson tricked me into studying physics. I love
it. And I loved it at the time, but the philosophical implications of
E&M were not those which the cosmos made them out to be, at
least not in the undergraduate level. And so
I started studying data science just to provide myself some optionality, figure
out what was going on. I was in the bay, so naturally the AI thing
was in the water. And then when the pandemic hit, I moved to Texas because
I had some family there while still doing school online. I became a
personal trainer because I like to work out and I wanted to meet
some people there. I ended up training the biggest water well
driller in Texas. And so he and I just became fast friends while
working out. I highly advise anybody work out. There's
lots of alpha at the gym, especially if you're thinking about starting a company. High
quality people. And so he told me about the water well drilling industry,
about water policy and groundwater policy in specific, and
that he was starting a consultancy in addition to the drilling company. So he had
this large drilling company that was punching holes in the ground, and
he started a consultancy to manage the regulatory compliance for people, drive
a truck out to the farm, read an analog flow meter, fill out a report manually,
and fax it in to regulators. And I said, like, OK, first of all,
why haven't you automated this? And then second of all, what
are groundwater regulations like in the American West? Why are we
regulating how much water you pump out of the ground? And so the answer to the
second question was, Well, all of the aquifers in
the American West, with a handful of rare exceptions, are either
in a state of managed depletion or are totally depleted already.
So if you look at Scottsdale, Arizona, the Rio Verde
housing development, they're banning people from moving in there, even
after some folks purchased homes, because the city is so depleted
of water, and groundwater in particular, that they can't service this new development
and are banning new housing outright. Thankfully, last year we had
outsized amounts of precipitation, ahistorical amounts of precipitation offsetting
this depletion, but that only replenishes the aquifer so much. And
regulators realized that if we do not solve the
problem of water scarcity, particularly groundwater scarcity, then
there will be total agricultural collapse in the American West. Cities like
Phoenix, Tucson, all of Arizona, Salt Lake City,
and Las Vegas are going to be uninhabitable between
like 30 and 80 years from now. And so they've started to take
better accounting of how much water is being pumped out of the aquifers, so
we know exactly what our budget is, and then have started imposing
regulations on how much people can use and penalizing them for using
more than their budget. And so what we ended up building at Teraseco, that
last company, which automated regulatory compliance with an
IoT flow meter and then a bunch of backend software that I wrote for the reporting, what
we ended up taking care of was just the inconvenience of
regulatory compliance for farms, HOAs, corporate campuses, and factories. And
so I worked on that company in school for a little bit, we iterated, we
grew it to the point where we had sufficient revenue for me to be confident to drop
out of college, which I did. And then I spent a few years working
at Teraseco, initially just in a technical position,
building out all the software, building out like the hardware. And
then eventually, osmotically learning about water policy and
water infrastructure. And what I realized was that there
is a dialectic about how to solve water scarcity in America. And
one camp says, sorry, no more agriculture, we hate
pistachios, we hate almonds, two minute showers only,
low flow toilets. And being
more efficient about the water that you use is great. We should be good stewards of
the resources that we're blessed to have. But if that's overindexed
on, then you end up wandering in these like degrowth premises and
quality of life reduction measures. And
so that's problematic. And I think that we're severely overindexed on that. Then
the pro-abundance camp says, you know, The
Sea of Cortez, the Pacific Ocean, that's all freshwater now,
if we will it to be so. Let's desalinate everything. Let's build
a $50 billion pipeline from the Sea of Cortez up into
Phoenix. Let's spend even more money desalinating on
the Pacific coast of California and sending that inland to Nevada. And
although I'm all for desalination, there's a couple of fundamental problems,
one of which is the Californian power grid cannot support
another, you know, 100 megawatts of desal,
let alone like the gigawatts necessary for large scale desal.
So that's a problem as it stands. Let's say that we solve that. Great.
The second problem is the California Coastal Commission and other regulatory bodies
keep blocking the construction of desal facilities. So I'm not
very bullish on our ability to quickly solve water scarcity with
them. Eventually, I think we'll cave just out of necessity. But that's another
problem. So say let's solve the energy problem. And then the regulatory problem will
still Water is so heavy, and
if you're talking about pumping it 300 miles inland over
two mountain ranges, then you're just not taking into account
any of the pipe maintenance, any of the energy requirements, any of
the pump maintenance necessary to service the operation
of pumping this inland. into the interior. So maybe in California, Los Angeles,
even the Central Valley, perhaps, you can justify the unit economics of
sending water inland. You can't do that for states
like Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, New
Mexico, and Colorado. And so I was distraught to
find out that the two solutions to water scarcity are
actually non-viable, and I started looking into all these other esoteric means
of water production. And I think that brackish groundwater desalination
is very promising. That's one technology that I thought about using in
the subsequent company. There's about 310 million acre feet of
brackish groundwater in the Western United States. An acre
foot, by the way, is if you cover an acre of land
Yes, yes, exactly. It's how a thumb is an inch, things like that.
And so there's tons of brackish groundwater that's ripe to be used. If
some battery guy, shout out Teddy Feldman, or Ethan Loosbrock
figures out how to use lithium, then like, great. But
nobody knows how to handle the brine yet, so that's non-viable, or at least I didn't think
it was. There is urban water recycling, which is great. You
know, I think a lot of people say like, ah, they're using toilet water
and gray water for other applications now, like in SF or LA.
I actually think that's a good thing. I think that there's reason to be skeptical of
it, but we probably should. think of our water
infrastructure as more of a closed loop, right? Like it's preposterous that we just spew
so much out into the ocean every day. And like
the Hyperion water plant in El Segundo actually does a great job of
recycling water, pumping it back into the grid, and also replenishing the
aquifers in the Los Angeles basin with this. So that's good, but The
lion's share of water use in the American West is agricultural, and
you cannot, no matter how much you recycle, offset the demand of agriculture with
urban recycling, so that was non-viable. Then, I, through
just perusing around on Wikipedia and places like that, found out about weather
modification. Which naturally, if you're an
aspirational technologist, if you want to see a sci-fi future, it's exciting,
right? Like, can you control clouds? Can you make it rain more? Can you bust hurricanes? This
kind of thing. This was all the promise of weather modification in
the, you know, 50s, 60s, 70s. And then it fell
off. And we can get into later why it did. But what I found out was by
all my independent reading and then going to something called the Weather Modification Association Conference,
that weather mod has largely not been
innovated in for 70 years, but one critical innovation occurred. Again,
we can talk about it more later, but we figured out how to precisely identify
the conditions necessary for effective cloud seeding to make
it rain more. And then also we found out how to measure very
precisely how much water was produced and how much was exclusively produced
by manmade intervention or anthropogenic intervention.
And subsequently, for the first time in history, we can quantify the
value and the value prop to farmers that makes this
a commercial, a commercializable endeavor. And so it
was after attending the Weather Modification Association Conference, where
I learned about the status quo of cloud seeding, where I learned about the areas that were
ripe for innovation and commercialization that I started Rainmaker for the sake
of producing more water at the entire scale of watersheds.
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dive into what Rainmaker does, but I think maybe, can you set the background first
of just the super basics, like what are clouds, what
is rain, what is groundwater? Let's start from the super basics and build
Yeah, yeah, sure. So if you ask atmospheric scientists what
a cloud is, you'll see a million different
answers, and sometimes people will short circuit because differentiating between
fog and clouds and ice phase clouds and liquid
phase clouds, It's a broad space, but simply, right,
it's a saturation of water content in the atmosphere, right? Like, you have so
much water that it begins to condense. It's not purely just vapor, but starts
to turn into liquid droplets in the atmosphere. The reason why
clouds hang up there is because there's convection pushing them up,
right? Like, you look at a cloud, first pass, you think, oh, it's a cloud.
Naturally, it's in the sky. The second pass is like, how is there water suspended
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But then the third thing you realize is there's there's convection
from the earth, there's heat that's naturally pushing them up and keeping
them suspended from pressure beneath it. And so, you
know, that's that's simply what a cloud is. They come in all shapes
and sizes. varied conditions, but the
way that precipitation enhancement works is in
one of two ways. There's hydroscopic seeding, which is where you take, say,
salt or calcium chloride, and you try to condense the
water droplets into larger ones, such that they become heavy enough to
fall and overcome the convection and pressure beneath them. And then
there's glaciogenic seeding. Glaciogenic, think glacier, freezing,
right? And so what you do is you introduce a catalyst into certain clouds
that freezes the water droplets, makes them into big enough and
heavy enough ice crystals such that they fall and generally melt back
down into rain by the time they reach the ground. And so the way that
it works, practically speaking, is this. In
certain clouds, you have a supersaturation of
supercooled liquid water. And so, like, what is supercooled liquid
water? It's water that's below zero degrees Celsius, below
32 degrees Fahrenheit. When you first find out about this, you think, that's
when water freezes. That's peculiar. Well, it turns out, actually, there's
like a exponential decay curve explaining how long it
takes for water at temperatures between zero Celsius and
negative 38 Celsius to freeze. At negative 38, it's almost instantaneous.
At zero, it almost never freezes. You can
see this in an experiment in your fridge where, like, if you put a glass
of water, or in your freezer, rather, without any particulate
in it, it won't freeze, and then you shake it, and that can induce homogeneous nucleation
of ice. Anyway, a bit of a tangent. If you have lots
of water that is between, say, zero degrees Celsius and
negative 20, right, and the reason why you have it is because more
of it's being convected up, more water vapor is being brought up to that altitude where
it's below zero, then can be frozen. So there's like a given rate
at how fast water can freeze in these conditions. You
That's like parts of the, there's only so much of the cloud that can be
freezing at a certain time or something, given that there's hot air going up
and it's super cold up there. And so basically it's like that layer of
Yeah, roughly. Like it's a meta stable condition. Like it can't last forever,
but because more water is being brought up, then like the ice crystals can
attach to and freeze naturally. You
have this super saturation of water that's below zero. And so the question
then is, if you're trying to freeze it together so
that it becomes heavy enough, so that the crystals or the
droplets become heavy enough to fall, how do you go about doing
that? And so, historically, people use something called silver iodide or
dry ice. And silver iodide works very well as a nucleation agent
because its crystal structure is almost
identical to ice. And so per every unit surface
area, you have the maximum potential for hydrogen bonds to
occur to that crystal. And then moreover, it's
in this Goldilocks zone of hydrophobicity. And what
that means is, if you have a super hydrophobic substance, water
won't be able to bind to it at all. It'll just wick off, right? If you have
a super hydrophilic substance, so much water will
accumulate on the surface, close to the surface, that
none of the ice will be able to freeze and establish,
like, it push up for, like, a greater contact angle. Like, you know how ice
is hexagonal? It won't be able to push up because the pressure
from that close water layer is too great. Silver
iodide is in that Goldilocks zone where it attracts enough
water that it can freeze to it at all, but not so
much that it prevents freezing. And so those two features of
silver iodide, the crystalline structure being identical or very close
to identical, and the hydrophobicity means that when you
deposit it in these super cool clouds, you
get aggregation of the water droplets onto them, and
then this runaway effect where you
have the primary isonucleation, you have the initial isonucleation
from the silver iodide, and then those crystals break apart, those
induce nucleation of other stuff, more water droplets freeze onto them, and eventually,
because you have a runaway effect of isonucleation of
heavy crystals, they begin to fall. They begin to precipitate as rain
or snow. And that's how it works at the microphysical
And that's, that's the, there's a surprisingly small amount of
actual material you need to do this in a lot of these clouds, right? Like it's really not that
No, no, it's astonishingly low. And so there's, there's two reasons why
that is. The first of all is, like, again, what is a cloud? It's
very diffuse, right? Like, you've been in fog before,
it's not like you're walking underwater. It's something to
the effect of like 80 liters of cloud
can be serviced by even like a single gram of the nucleation. Wow.
Yeah. And so what you'll end up seeing is single digit kilograms
of the nucleation agent dispersed over hundreds of thousands of acres. It's
astonishingly little how much you need. And in addition
to how diffused clouds are, the other reason is it's not just the silver iodide
based crystals that induce nucleation and
precipitation. All of the ice crystals that break off of those initial
Yeah. Okay. So we're going to, let's talk more about the, like the different agents
or whatever. Like I think, cause I think that you're not using silver iodide. Is that
right? You're using some other stuff or you're like experimenting with other stuff. Correct. Okay.
Well, let's talk about that in a second, but let's start with just sort of like the overview of
all of it. So the technical solution is like, you need to identify
where these clouds are and when they're in the right conditions. You need to
get that stuff up there. You need to get whatever agent it is up there. You
have to disperse the agent. It has to be the right chemistry. And
then probably the last step is you have to prove that you did it to your customer. That's
probably an important step too. So let's actually start with how you identify those
clouds in the first place. Like, can you just pull that from radar? Is it something you
Sure. So I think the best way to frame each of these is like, how
has it been done historically? How is Rainmaker doing it differently? Historically,
in the worst cases, people would just eyeball a cloud and
say like, hmm, that one looks good. And like, you
talk to meteorologists and you got to respect their
expertise because they are so lost
in the sauce and deeply familiar with these processes that
they can almost like intuit in an artistic way what
good conditions are. But obviously that's not scalable. That doesn't work the
lion's share of the time, of times. And
so eyeballing stuff is historically done. That's no good. Very
low resolution identification of clouds with radar. is also
no good. Basically just saying like, are there clouds? Is there water
in the clouds? Like that would be the threshold condition. That's
no good either. Rainmaker is different in that we're using very
high resolution radar, primarily just radar, to
identify when there is a super saturation of super cooled
liquid in cloud. And that's a pretty difficult problem because the If
you know anything about radar, right, like you send a beam out and then you get a
reflectivity back in, right, like a signal bounces
back. The reflectivity of supercooled water droplets,
so like a itty bitty tiny droplet of water that is negative 10 C,
is very similar to that of an itty bitty ice crystal that's
also negative 10 C. But because of a lot of research done
from the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Center
for Atmospheric Research, Um, we now know and rainmakers iterating
on this internally, how to differentiate with very high resolution radar
between super cool liquid water droplets and like ice.
It's very small ice crystals. So we identify when we have super
saturation in cloud. of supercooled water droplets between
negative 20 and 10 C. As
we're doing R&Ds, as we're validating our radar
results, we also have two different in
situ measurements of these conditions to validate the
radar. So first of all, we have a laser array attached to our research aircraft.
that can differentiate between ice and water. And
so that's pretty cool. It can tell you the size, concentration, and
shape of your ice crystals or droplets. The
primary way you differentiate between an ice crystal and a water droplet
is just whether it's spherical or not. If it's spherical, it's generally more
like water. Um, so we have that. And then we also have
this, uh, thing called the Rosemont icing probe, which is basically,
uh, this wire that vibrates at a given rate. Um,
and if it starts to freeze up, that means that there was super cold water that
can deposit onto it. It'll slow the rate of vibration, that kind of thing. So in
addition to the radar that we're using on site, um,
we have two other physical in situ observations to validate that.
And we're going to continue using those for. foreseeable future as
we validate all of our observations. So that's the way in which we sense
the conditions necessary. The next problem, right, is
bringing that nucleation agent up to the cloud. There's
two ways in which people have historically done this. The first of which is,
you know, Not a bad idea in principle,
but it bears out really over time. And so there's
something called a ground-based generators, right? And you can basically think
about this as like a smoke signal bonfire, where
you have a plume of smoke that contains the nucleation agent
in it, and you hope enough of that smoke gets up into the
cloud, you know, 3,000, 5,000, 20,000 feet above you. And so we
could do all the modeling to show you how that works, but you can probably intuit
that it doesn't work exceptionally well. Yeah,
yeah, correct. And again, you don't need a ton of material. But if
very, very little of it is actually getting to the portions of the cloud that
are supercooled, then you would need to disperse lots
more. And it's also worth saying, Part
of what's important about the high-resolution sensing is sometimes you'll have
mixed-phase clouds, meaning some of it is super-cold water, some
of it's ice, and sometimes you only have as much as, like, 100 cubic
meters of super-cold liquid, and so you need to very precisely
and granularly identify where in cloud—it's not anywhere
in the cloud, but where exactly it should be deposited. So the
first problem in historic delivery methods is like these
ground-based generators. They show promise, and
really they're kind of just an artifact of when we thought it would be a lot easier to conduct weather
modification, precipitation enhancement. So they're not great.
The alternative is better, but still not great, and that's using
planes, whether they're crop dusters or slightly more
sophisticated aircraft. You fly a plane up into the cloud, You
either fly above it and drop the nucleation agent into the cloud,
or you fly through. It's better to fly through, but there's a couple problems even
still with that. First of all, the latency to delivery is
pretty bad, right? Between when you identify conditions
that are viable for seeding, And when the plane gets tower
clearance, when the pilot's ready, when the plane transits
to the location, you can have hours in between identification and
actual delivery. And so that means you can miss the conditions because that ice
might have frozen or that water might have frozen. It might have dissipated in
another manner. So that's not great. The other thing is, You
know, you only need like a kilogram of the nucleation agent, and
taking an entire airplane up to carry
a one kilogram payload is a very frivolous way to use resources. And
so, because it's so expensive to have a plane on
call 24-7-3-6-5, people are priced out.
So there's... Farmers primarily are priced out of hiring a plane
to conduct this operation for them. So there's a high latency problem. There's
a price problem associated with having planes on call all the time. And
then also, you know, the turning radius of planes is only so
great. You don't have like an F-35 conducting nucleation. That
would be cool. It would be awesome. And in the future that we hope to build,
we will have F-35s or Predator drones or something like that. China actually
is retrofitting their military aircraft for this. We
can talk about that maybe. The
obvious solution is to use UAVs and UAS, right? So
what Rainmaker is doing is using very cheap drones
that can carry these, you know, one to three kilogram payloads up
to cloud that are installed on our customers' farms,
on our customers' properties. And so you solve the latency problem because
you have very quick response times. You can launch, immediately ascend
to the cloud, fly through. precision
in the delivery because you can turn much more quickly you can fly
through, you know, given hundred cubic meter chunks, and
then they're way more cost effective because it's literally
one drone without like a pilot on board. And
also as we're saying. You're flying through icing conditions, right?
And so they're not really safe operations to have manned aircraft
fly through. Having a drone do that, provided that you engineer it
in such a manner that it can withstand said icing conditions, is also safer. So
our delivery mechanism is cheaper, more precise, faster, and
But the drones are flying themselves. So like you might not even
be in the loop to say, OK, now go do it or
So initially we have pilots on site. The FAA
is gradually becoming more lenient and favorable towards
UAV applications. But for now, we have a pilot on
site on the customer's property. Eventually, and what we're building out
internally already, is a means to port over the
coordinates that our radar identifies the highest concentrations
of super liquid into a flight path plan for the drones. So
they're totally free from humans in the loop. So
another consideration, right, is the means by which you disperse the
nucleation agent. So you need to aerosolize it so that it's very
fine, right? Like if you just drop a brick, that'll fall out of the cloud very quickly.
Even large particles will fall out of the cloud very quickly, and you want them there
as long as possible to induce as much nucleation as possible. Historically, people
use flares to aerosolize the chemicals. The
problem with flares is twofold. First
of all, The ratio of the total
mass of the flare to the amount of nucleation agent in it is
terrible. Like 95 to 99 plus percent of the mass
of each of these flares is made up of the metal casing and then the pyrotechnic. So
for every flare you take up, you get very little of the actual nucleation
agent, so you need tons of flares. That is not
great. And then the other problem is, in burning these flares, you're
introducing all of this exogenous particulate that doesn't facilitate ice
nucleation. And also you're introducing heat to
the supercooled conditions, which you don't necessarily want because
that can interfere with the precipitation enhancement. So what RainMaker is doing is
directly emitting the nucleation agent from an atomizer that
we've designed. You can basically just think of it as like a fancy spray paint
can. This sprays plume of the nucleation agent with a much
higher ratio of INA, ice
nucleation agent, to total payload mass. And so that makes our
operation radically more efficient, drives down the cost because you don't need
all this additional hardware as flares. So that's the different
dispersion mechanism. And then the last thing is
alternative nucleation agent. Right. So traditionally we use
silver iodide and silver iodide works. And in the quantities that
you're dispersing this over huge areas.
Right. So like a kilogram a couple times per season over hundreds of
thousands of acres is totally inconsequential. Right.
But the problems with silver iodide are this. One, you
know, it's literally silver, right? And spraying silver in
the air is an expensive way to make rain. It can be justified in
certain cost profiles, but it's still very expensive. The second problem
is it only works at negative six degrees Celsius and
below, right? And so what that means is You
have limited seasonal and geographic operability where you
can use silver iodide, maybe, you know, five times ish
or fewer per season where you can see it over Phoenix and using glaciogenic agents.
That's not great because some of the most water depleted regions of the country are
the hottest and so you have the fewest supercooled clouds,
or at least fewest clouds that are below negative C, although maybe you have
them between negative 6C and negative 2C.
The last problem is, in sufficiently great quantities, silver
iodide becomes antibacterial. And if we're going to engage
in the level of weather modification that we need to, to save
agricultural watersheds from being aridified, save the
Colorado River Delta and its ecosystem from drying up entirely, and
then maybe eventually engage in exciting projects like terraforming deserts
to make more land arable and ecologically flourishing,
biodiverse. You're going to need to upscale the amount
of nucleation you're dispersing. So Rainmaker is working on some
mineral-based and some biologically-based nucleation agent alternatives. Won't
share exactly what those are. Eventually, we'll talk about them. But we're trying to
make them cheaper, more eco-friendly, and more
seasonally and geographically operable because of their hyofreeze. Sure.
So really, the sensing to the diagnostic of
conditions, or the diagnosis of conditions, the delivery
of the nucleation agent, the dispersion of the nucleation agent, and then the nucleation
agent themselves are things that we're all innovating
on relative to the state of the industry. And then also, because of our
high-resolution radar, We can measure the density
of precipitation that's in the path of our drone
and the density and volume and subsequently tell farmers exactly
how much water we produced for them. And that makes it
much, much easier to establish the value prop
rather than just, you know, do some whiteboard math and say like, well, we project about
this much based on the micro physics. And instead we
So let's talk about the attribution thing just because we're right on it now.
Do you want to talk a little bit about like, I forget there's some like fancy name, but
like the zigzag pattern that people fly to attribute. You want to talk about
Yeah, yeah, totally. So historically, right, the biggest problem to
commercializing cloud seeding was that nobody knew
whether or not you were actually causing it to rain, and
also nobody knew how much rain you were producing. Just because, you
know, I fly up into a cloud, I sprinkle some magic beans, and
then it rains, like, that doesn't mean that I caused it to rain, right? Like, it might have
precipitated naturally. And then even if you accept the microphysics,
and we say that we understand that the process by which this induces precipitation
how much more we got than we would have received naturally, how much more rain
we got from our intervention was impossible to say. The
innovation from some folks at NCAR and CU Boulder
and Idaho Power was, one, just
using higher-resolution radar in the first place, but, two, having the procedural
insight to say, okay, if we fly
back and forth, if we strafe back and forth perpendicular to the direction
of the wind in the area over which we're seating, What you should
see what they hypothesized they would see and what they did see was
a track of increased nucleation and precipitation that
was clearly and definitively man-made because there was uniform
spacing between each precipitation line and
that was exactly in accordance with the you
know, trajectory of the drone. And so, that attribution, proving
out, okay, this is how much rain was produced that was exclusively man-made,
it was exclusively man-made at all, that is a critical input, right?
Relative to just saying, you know, here's our calculation, here's how
much water we detected would roughly be in there, here's how much we project came
down. Solving the attribution problem is probably
the foremost consideration of Rainmaker because
we need to do something different than cloud seeding companies have done
historically, which is not overpromise and
not be vague in the results
that we offer, but say definitively, this is the upper
bound of how much we could produce, this is how much we did produce. And
so, yeah, attribution is of critical import to us. And that's something,
Very cool. Yeah, I think I read that Aspen Skiing
and some other folks actually did experiment with this back in the 70s and 80s,
but it was the attribution problem. It was they didn't know if it was actually causing more snow
for their people, for their customers. That was why they didn't continue doing it.
Yeah, dude. I mean, cloud seeding ripped from the 50s through the 70s
because we were so excited about its prospects, right? And we should be because the
weather is something that ought to be controlled to the extent that we can
with all of the second order effects modeled and mitigated. why
there should not be more rain or snow when we have the technology to
produce it is a question that I don't think anybody's
given a good answer to. And granted, should
we play God? People ask that a lot. Isn't that
the domain of the sky gods? Or is that
really the domain of man? And the answer to that, I think, is one,
we shouldn't play God. We should do everything that we need to do model
out the risks and be cautious about this. And thankfully, like, our
team of atmospheric scientists and the people in academia that we're collaborating
with are very cautious and very concerned about those second-order effects.
But, like, I think that we should
acknowledge the fact that the trajectory that we're on without intervention will
result in the aridification and depopulation of the American West
and other regions in the world. And so if we
can take a risk-adjusted If
we can take a cautious risk and say this is an intervention
with these potential outcomes that would be for better, some
of our R&D, some of our water infrastructure spend should
be dedicated to this because we'll either die a
whimpering death or have a glorious future if we decide
to cautiously move forward with weather modification. So
yeah, agreed, man. And there was this thing called Project Storm Theory too.
So unfortunate. It was Uber based. It was trying to
break hurricane, the Atlantic. Yeah. is trying to break
hurricanes over the Atlantic before they hit the eastern seaboard. And we didn't
have high enough resolution radar to attribute the results to
our interventions. But it's something that we should be thinking about, right? Because
hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage and insurance
claims come from every hurricane. And
if we can stop them, then we obviously ought to. So
That's an area for future product development. Killing hurricanes and
nuking hurricanes with drones. Not nuking them.
Making it rain earlier. On the topic
of really epic names for these things, did you originally think
about calling the company Thor? Or is that still a product name
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We were thinking about calling
the product, like the full initial cloud seeding suite, Thor, because it
was triggering hail and orographic rain was
the idea. Because by introducing the nucleation agent, you can either
do hail suppression or induce precipitation rain
in the right conditions. So Yeah, we're trying to baptize all
of these pagan rain gods and
storm gods into the Christian ethos and generally base
There we go. Slowly and surely. I love it. Okay,
let's talk a little bit more about the
agents. So you mentioned that silver
iodide is obviously what they're using today. And you're doing
some cool, like you don't have to talk about specifically what they are, like what the chemistries are,
but you're doing a cool set of experiments, I think, to like figure out
in like a pretty ingenious way to figure out whether there's actually like
the ice that's forming and how much is forming and stuff from these different things you're
doing. Can you talk a little bit about that? Also, maybe tell the
Yeah, yeah, sure. So I'll speak to the history first. We have a poster actually
of the good old boys that discovered it. The
analog that I like to share is like the Powerpuff
Girls. So the professor, right, he's
mixing sugar, spice, everything nice into this vat to create the
Powerpuff Girls, but then he spills Agent X into the vat, and
that's what gives them their superpowers. So these three guys, Vincent
Schaefer, Irving Langmuir, and Bernard Vonnegut, they were
conducting some totally unrelated cloud physics experiments in their cloud
chamber. and spilled some dry
ice and silver iodide into the tank. And they saw increased
plumes of nucleation of ice in their simulated cloud.
And so what they realized was, well, if this works in our
little simulation, why wouldn't it work in real life out in the
field? And because it was 1946 and 1947, and you
could do whatever you want, and dudes rocked, they just took up
their own private plane and started emitting silver iodide over Western
New York and induced the first man-made snowstorm. So that
was incredible. That's how we realized that
weather modification was possible at all and that silver iodide and dry
ice should promise as nucleation agents. Now the
question is, you know, because of those aforementioned reasons, we're
transitioning away from silver iodide. we
need to ask, how do we identify new nucleations, right? How do we identify
things that perform well at freezing, and how do we ensure that
they're eco-friendly? And so you can do pretty simple tests
on eco-friendliness, just traditional measures of toxicity, but how
you measure the viability of an INA, we're
doing in three ways. The first of all is really high-throughput, low-resolution
data, but pretty clever, and that's from the
University of Alberta, or it was inspired from some folks at the University
of Alberta. My friend Jesse Lee was responsible for
designing this. It's essentially a control-break freezer,
right? You can even use a traditional freezer if you want to do this experiment at home.
You use a control brick freezer with an array of vials
in it, and those vials are filled with an oil that
is denser than ice, but less dense than water. Then
you put a droplet of your nucleation agent in that,
like a droplet of water with the INA, into said vial, and it sinks
to the bottom. What happens then, as
it's undergoing cooling in the freezer, is when
it freezes, it floats to the top. So you can put a camera
in your freezer and then measure how quickly things freeze in different
temperature conditions and cooling rates to assess how
functional they are as an INA. So our first-pass approach, sort
of like our throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, is
with this freeze-float system, that's what we're calling it. That's the
first way in which we assess how well something performs in
immersion freezing. There's all these different ways that freezing can occur, but that's like our first
pass. Then there's two other instruments that
we're building out. One's called an ice spectrometer. That
I won't talk about too much, but then the coolest thing is like a cloud chamber.
And so we essentially have, well,
essentially are building a controlled box where you
can induce very specific humidity,
temperature, and pressure conditions, right, because the pressure is radically different at the ground
than it is 5,000, 20,000 feet up. And
you can simulate what would happen if you introduce your INA
to, you know, say, the top of the cloud, and then it flows through, like,
a slightly warmer layer, see how survivable the ice crystal is
that you produce up there, and measure the
conditions as though it were in situ. And so the
cloud chamber that we're building is inspired from some research at the University
of Michigan. So, big thanks to those guys for figuring out how to
make cheap cloud chambers. That's cool. How big is
that thing going to be? It's about three meters by three meters
That's pretty big, actually. It is, it is. You wouldn't want
You would suffocate and freeze and
A bad way to go out. That's super cool. And so
for the first experiments you're going to do for the first times, or even for the first products
you actually deliver for this farm, and we'll talk about that in a bit, but
for those first experiments, are you going to use silver iodide, or are you going to use some other
So there's two seminal cloud seeding experiments in America, the
ASCII experiment and the Snowy experiment. What
we're interested in doing first is just baselining our results against academia.
If we can reproduce that, then we know at the very least, like, organizationally
Rainmaker's capable of this and everything
that Snowy produced is valid and can be reviewed by us because
sometimes there's doctored results. We trust
the folks that did those two projects, they're great people. But we want to baseline
first with silver iodide. Again, in extremely low quantities over
an extremely large area for an extremely large
area, mind you, that nobody lives in, for the sake of
baselining. So what we're going to do in our first campaign is use... Well,
actually, we're going to first use water, and then eventually we're going to use silver iodide. And
then after that, we're going to start later in the year using
Very cool. Okay, well, with that, let's move and talk
about the sort of more business side of things, which is, you know, who are you selling
this to, and how are they buying it? I mean, maybe it would help to
start with just who is your first customer, and how did you meet
Yeah, so our first customer, and all of our
first customers are large-scale commercial farms.
And they're large-scale commercial farms in one of two regimes,
either people that have already experienced the
total depletion of the aquifer and surface water near them. So
they're farmers that have no water and cannot operate
because they have no water, or they're farmers that
are in a sufficiently litigious and
penalizing regulatory regime such that because
they're pumping more than they're budgeted, they're paying hundreds of
thousands or millions of dollars per month in overdraft penalties. And so
our first customers are all one of the They're
one of these types. And so I won't say where
our first customer is or who they are, but they have tens
of thousands of acres and they are paying about
three quarters of a million dollars every month in overdraft penalties during
the growing season. And so what we're trying to do for them is
not, you know, help them purely stay alive, but
to some extent, increase their margins, prevent them from going under, from spending too
much on penalties. And then what's
interesting, too, is if you can increase the amount
of precipitation that occurs over a 10-year span, then
you can increase the amount of water that a farm has budgeted, right?
Because the allocation is determined in part by how much precipitation naturally
occurs. So not only are we offsetting the penalties that
our customers are receiving, but we're enabling them to draw more groundwater
as well. So that's our first customer. They do nuts
Huh, that's sort of counterintuitive. I guess, I mean like, the simple way I
thought of it was, oh that just means the rich are getting richer. Like people that have more rainwater are
just able to get more groundwater as well. But like the
reason for that is that because that's like the replenishment rate sort of
how you can think about it. Like you're not gonna deplete the aquifer as long, okay.
Exactly. Wow, interesting. So, I mean, I guess this
is a fine time to talk about this. I mean, you are actually able
to get non-zero-sum, right? Like, if you
can just make it rain and you can't make new clouds, then it
would seem on the surface of it like, okay, you're just taking rain from here
and moving it there. It's not actually increasing the net amount of rain that we
have in California, for instance. But I know from what we've talked
about before that there actually maybe are ways that it's not zero-sum. Do you want to talk
Yeah, so there's three ways in which cloud seeding is
not zero-sum. So there's one that is definitively and
exclusively positive-sum, not like semantically positive-sum.
The first is if you have like the marine
cloud layer or the water vapor in California that
blows from the coasts to the interior and then recedes back
in the evenings or burns off in the evenings, that water is not being
deposited or it's not precipitating over most of the coast. And
so what we can do is just seed those clouds
that would not otherwise, that would instead just go back over the ocean and
be recycled into the ocean to do exclusively positive
sum seeding. So there's hundreds of millions
of acre feet of water vapor from the coasts that are
not precipitating in California. And
that is extremely important both for California and everybody
else in the Western United States because California draws
water from the Colorado River, right? If we produce more
water in California, and exclusively at positive sum
manners, then we reduce the extent to which California is dependent on
the Colorado River watershed, meaning that Colorado, Utah, Nevada,
Arizona, and New Mexico get more of their rights to the water,
to the river back. And so that's one positive sum
means for producing water. The next is, a
net positive some sense of producing more precipitation. And
so what this would look like is, say you have some cloud
that's bound to precipitate over, say, Sacramento.
It's an easterly. Sometimes this occurs, not always, but sometimes. It's
bound to precipitate over Sacramento or, say, it's bound to precipitate over
the lower Central
Valley at the bottom of a watershed, right? What
you can do is you can instead induce precipitation in
those clouds at the top of a watershed, and subsequently get
more turns on capital, so to speak, of that water. Meaning, if
you induce the precipitation at the top of the watershed, everybody there
immediately benefits from it. But then the runoff and the percolation
of that water back into the aquifers and streams is
usable from everybody downstream of you, rather than just immediately running
off into the ocean. And so that's one reason why increased precipitation
at the top of the Colorado River watershed would be
huge for everybody beneath them. So
that's one consideration. And there's actually some incidents of states
in the lower basin paying for cloud seeding, again, in very inefficient
old methods, paying for cloud seeding at the top of the watershed. So
first of all, you can see the marine cloud layer to induce positive sun
precipitation. Two, if you Induced precipitation
at the top of the watershed everybody can benefit from that because it doesn't run off
into the ocean so quickly. And then this is the third and the most
exciting long term prospect for atmospheric river generation and
radical positive some precipitation in the American West
and so. Atmospheric rivers are
essentially a huge stream of
water vapor flowing from the western United States over
to the east. These occur, you know, dozens of times
per year, and the flux of water through them,
right, again, as water vapor and as clouds, not literal,
like, streams of water in the sky, the
flux of water through them is multiples greater than the
mouth of the Nile River. Right? So these are enormous amounts
of water that are traversing the country. Some of it makes it
all the way to the Atlantic. Some of it's deposited in the Great Lakes. Some
of it does precipitate naturally over the western United States. And
that's a really important mechanism for precipitation over the whole country. But
what you can do is the following. And this needs to be modeled
out much more robustly before we test anything to this effect. But if
you have sort of a speckled pattern of clouds over
the western U.S., right? And then you induce precipitation in
them. You can reduce the pressure sufficiently in
that line from the coast to establish
a pressure gradient where water, so to speak, flows downhill from
the really high-pressure area of the coast and then into the interior
of the country. And so what that would result in is increased
convection from the coast to the interior as
far as you can establish that pressure differential. And
that increased convection would result in more evaporation from the
coasts and essentially the establishment of nearly
like an Atlantean level of technology where you have multiple
times of the Nile River, Mississippi River flowing west to
east in the United States. And so that's something that probably in conjunction
with hurricane busting, we're going to try to do in the coming years.
Love it, cool. Okay, let's go back to the farms. So we
were talking about how your first customers are farms, they're folks that basically just
want more rain to fall over their farm. And
so the basic value prop for them is they get greater yield,
they stop having to basically spend
all this money buying the illicit overdraft fees
on their groundwater. Is that the basic model? That's
Yeah, so there's two reasons, right? One, rainwater is
more valuable in certain contexts than groundwater, just because there's less
sediments, for example, and it percolates and
it is absorbed better by plants. Now,
you still need irrigation for fertigation, right? Like, one of the best ways
to distribute fertilizer to your plants is through these distributed irrigation
networks that you already have established that you can just mix the fertilizer into. But
in some contexts, rain is more valuable because it is more
readily absorbed by crops. So there's that, first of all. Then the second thing
is cheaper water. And so in
most cases in California and other states in
the West, water is still very cheap because of the old
grandfather rights and like the negotiation about pricing that occurs
between farmers and irrigation districts. you can pay something
between like a dollar and like $10 per acre foot. And
again, an acre foot is 300,000 gallons, a little over that. But
it's kind of funny to think about like you buy a jug of
water from the grocery store for like three bucks and you're
getting hundreds of thousands of times cheaper water if you're an
agriculturalist. So being cost
competitive with that price point of water isn't something that we're aiming to do anytime
soon. But what is really important to consider is when
you get to your allocation, right? So when a farmer has pumped as
much water out of the ground as they're permitted to over the course of a
year, the price of water spikes from, say,
$2 or $10 to hundreds or thousands of dollars per
acre foot. So some of our customers are paying $7,000 per acre feet.
Some of them are paying $500 per acre foot. And so by
offering them water at a price that is between the going
rate of irrigation water below allocation and the penalty
rate above allocation, we get a healthy
Very cool. And then, so it's, it's farms, it's like
ski resorts. That's actually like another type of customer that wants this. And
their, their basic incentive is just increase the amount of
snow that they have, extend the ski season. Uh, not,
is it make it better skiing during the season? I don't know. Like, I don't know how they would quantify
that. Dude, do you ski? I historically
have skied, like my wife got hurt really bad skiing, so she's out
for the foreseeable future. I haven't been able to convince her to get back after
That has put a damper on the ski plans, but. Fair enough. Well,
I got a couple dozen stitches last skiing season in my
shins. Uh-oh. Got right back out, so highly recommend.
Great sport. It's snowboarding, actually. Yeah,
I mean, if you've ever skied before, then you know, like the artificial snow that's produced
is much finer, icier. It's not like the fresh pow-pow that's
fun to shred on. And so, yeah, more snow throughout the
season so that you have either year-long opens, like
what we were hoping for at Mammoth last year, or at the very least
extended seasons and higher quality snow. That's all something important. Those
are all things that are important. It's
very easy to, I think, because of the level
of sci-finess that our technology is, think of all the varied applications,
right? Like ski resorts, hail suppression, wildfire fighting,
hydroelectric watershed supplementation, hurricane busting, logistics
facilitation, right? Like preventing storms from interfering with planes
or cargo ships. But Uh, I'm
a big, I'm a big proponent of the Tealian advice that you like nail an
initial market before you go out to all of these varied
places. And so we're strictly for the foreseeable future,
sticking to farms that either do not have water or that are paying excess
penalties for their water consumption. And, um, once we,
once we blow it out of the park, once we solve agricultural water scarcity, and
at the very least California, but hopefully the rest of the Southwest
and Mountain West, then we'll go out and start talking to people about these varied
Interesting. I don't know how far along you are
in thinking about this, but are you going to have an
installation fee to put the thing out there, and then a
monitoring fee per month, and then a mission fee or
something? Have you thought about how you're actually going to price this on an ongoing basis
Yeah, yeah, totally. And so the way that we've constructed everything
so far is either an annual or a multi-year servicing
agreement, meaning it's either
paid monthly or annually. And the way that we price the contracts
is the following. We do a climatology of our customer's farm, right?
And we say, okay, super cold liquid water occurs this
frequently and in this concentration over your farm in
the last 40 years. Here's the trend that we expect. Here
are the amount of opportunities for seeding that we anticipate. And
we anticipate this much water from each of our operations to be produced.
There's a probability distribution of, you know, the 90th
percentile year where there's, you know, two feet of rain and the
10th percentile year where there's three inches, just because we're getting started. We're
going to begin with the 30th percentile years and say, OK, you
know, in a 30th percentile year, you would get this much precipitation from our
intervention. And then it's a really simple calculus between
how much water we produce times the mean of
the penalty rate and irrigation district rate of water. And
we sell them annual water at that price. And
No, I mean, you're giving them, effectively, 50% off
on what they would otherwise have to get from the
groundwater overcharge thing. Precisely. Very cool.
And then what about government? So, I mean, I totally understand the advice and I
agree with the advice of just crush one thing, make it clear to customers who
you are, get those referrals from this first guy for the
next folks. I totally get that. But it sounds like governments are
actually spending money on this today. There's a lot of governments, maybe not this
specifically, but definitely a lot of water scarcity stuff. So how
do you think about that? Do they have tax credits or something that
these farmers could take advantage of? Because government seems like
Yeah, so Nevada has a $1.6 million bounty right
now out for cloud seeding contracts. Wyoming spends
for cloud seeding in their watershed improvement
or restoration program. Idaho Power
and Electric pays for this. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District pays
for this. Colorado and Utah have
paid for cloud seeding historically. So there's plenty of instances of state-level intervention.
There's some NOAA pilot agreements that fund cloud seeding, again,
in these And so
long-term, it makes sense for the state to become
a purchaser of cloud-seeking services because, one, you know, it's
in the interest of the entire state and, like, the entire nation
that we produce more water for our watersheds. To some extent, it's, like,
a multi-state endeavor, so it's natural that it would be, like, a federal contracting
program. Um, and I would even say beyond just
like governments domestically, um, the
pace car for our operation is
the CCP. Um, so right now China is
far and away the biggest, uh, weather modifier of
any country or organization in the world. They have the, uh, a
multi-hundred million dollar annual budget for weather modification operations.
They employ a small town of people in their weather
modification bureau. It's 30,000 plus folks. And they're
trying to do clouds. Yo, it's huge. And so they're trying to do cloud seeding
for a variety of things, one of which being agricultural watershed supplementation, so
like the Yangtze River, hydroelectric watershed supplementation, again
on the Yangtze and other places. And then for terraforming, right?
They're trying to reclaim a lot of the Gobi Desert and Inner Mongolia. and
then reduce flooding in other areas by inducing precipitation
outside of floodplains and at other places in the watershed. So, you
know, the CCP has a huge budget for this annually. They're
using retrofitted military drones for seeding. They
have extremely innovative LIDAR and radar-based approaches
to identifying seeding conditions and validating results. And
And so that's a big deal because controlling
the weather obviously has implications beyond just agriculture, right? So I'll
just say that. And we at Rainmaker are very, very
aware of that and have an American flag hung up in the laboratory as
motivation. So there's that consideration. And then there's a couple other countries that
are notable. Thailand has a Royal Rainmaking Department, super
base. So they try to do hurricane or monsoon mitigation,
flood mitigation with that. The UAE and
Saudi are actively trying to terraform their deserts by
inducing precipitation over them. Interesting thing about the
UAE, a lot of their roads were built under
the assumption that there would be like a millimeter of precipitation annually. So
there's no grade in the center of the road that leaves water
to run off. So when they conduct these experiments, sometimes they
end up flooding the city just because they haven't built their
infrastructure to account for rain. But they have a
decamillion-dollar annual program. Saudi spends even more than them. And
Israel used to do lots of this, but for geopolitical reasons, it was pressure
to stop. But yeah, governments around the
world are paying for this. It's actually, in some sense, astonishing.
In some sense, no surprise at all that the United States is not as actively engaged
in weather modification. And I think part of that has to do with, like, the
way in which we've constructed our environmental ethos in the country. For
some reason, environmentalism thus far has been joined
at the hip to degrowth and to like an anti-human
perspective, one wherein we have minimal interventions and reduce the
human footprint on the world. And I
think that this is something that's shared by Zoomers and increasingly just people that
are bullish on technology in general. Um, like
Rainmaker wants to be part of the clique of people that
are responsible for terrapunk, solarpunk, um...
climate engineering that is pro-human, pro-environment, and
not, like, on the side of, say, you know, big oil
and crazy industrialists that are actively destroying the environment or something like that.
And certainly not on the side of de-growthers, but people saying, like, we should have
a symbiotic relationship with nature where both humanity and
ecology thrives because of our intervention. And so hopefully
that message is something that resonates with people and results in more
Totally. Are there other companies that you think are on that
I think that Casey Hammer and Terraform Industries is totally
there. I think that Isaiah Taylor and
Valor Atomics, totally there. You
know, really care about cheap, free, clean
energy. So there's there's those guys. Those are some great companies. You
know, I think that Make Sunsets is very interested in
like seeing human thriving. So those are those are some examples. And
That's right. Oh no, we can't get into that.
Cut it. No, I love it,
dude. So this is a huge technical and business puzzle,
right? There's so many different pieces. There's lots of stuff that you're doing uniquely. There's
lots of stuff that has been done before. So which pieces of that
puzzle do you feel are most like easy
handled done and which of the pieces where you feel like like
okay we really have a chance to really move the needle and like significantly advance
Yeah, sure. So the way that I break it down is
essentially the systems integration piece of the
product, and then the, like, deep
tech, deep science of the alternative nucleation agent development, right?
So the Snowy folks, in an academic
context, at the very least, figured out what sort of radar you need, what
sort of radar processing you need, what sort of patterns you
ought to be seeding in, and what the minimum viable albeit
crude, means of dispersing the nucleation agent is to induce precipitation.
So, pairing our, you know, existing
radar truck with, you know, the radar processing that they
used, and with our drone, with the dispersion mechanism, that
is a systems integration problem. That's logistics, that's operations, that's engineering, but
it's something that can totally be done. I will say, interpolating
lower resolution radar that's publicly available, like from NEXRAD, NOAA's
operating, radar installations, that
is going to be like a serious machine learning problem and something that we're super excited
about and will take some serious development because having radar
that's not on site, but that's just covering the entire continental US, if
we can get it down to a sufficiently low resolution, that will
be a huge unlock for the capital intensiveness of
any of our operations. So it's largely systems integration on
that side with a little bit of R&D into how to do better radar
processing. Then there's the alternative ice
nucleation agent development. And so that's some
serious chemistry that we need to engage in. That's something
that would, if we succeed as
we plan to, we would be able to induce glaciogenic
precipitation, and we'd be able to glaciogenically seed over
tens of millions of more acres every year across the Western United
States, and we'd be able to produce tens
of millions more acre-feet of water. So that would radically
change the extent to which we can modify our watersheds, our
Very cool, and then how would, so let's say that there's a
brilliant young engineer out there, a college student, maybe
he's about to choose his major, what would you advise? How does someone
learn to participate in this kind of thing? What do they have to know in
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, probably don't go to college is
what I would say first. Step one, drop out. Step one,
drop out of college. But what I would say is, Familiarize
yourself with cloud dynamics, with thermodynamics,
with baseline level chemistry, and then maybe
a little bit of radar processing if you're interested in EE. It's a
pretty varied space. Any one of these skill sets that I mentioned
would be extremely useful and is what we're hiring for at Rainmaker. Cloud
seeding as an industry is super nascent, so there's very few people that have synthesized all
that together, but if you want to, by all means. And
then after you've established your baseline context in,
you know, chemistry, signal processing, and
physics, I would say just read the Snowy research
paper, read the ASCII research paper, read all
of the papers that have been published or the amount
of papers that you can possibly read on cloud, on
weather modification. because there's a ton of work that's been done between the
70s and now that's super relevant, between the 40s and now even. Start
with like Irving Langmuir's paper and get
your baseline context from there. And once you've done that or
once you've decided to be sufficiently autodidactic, email me at
