Augustus Doricko: How to Terraform Earth, The History of Weather Control, and The Mandate of Heaven
Meet Augustus Doricko. He is on a mission to bring garden paradise to earth by using drones to create more rain.
Augustus is the CEO of Rainmaker, a cloud-seeding startup. Rainmaker is planning to fly drones into clouds to make it rain. There are many applications, and the most exciting long-term are large-scale terraforming projects.
Augustus and I discuss the story of Rainmaker, the bureaucratic hurdles they’re facing, and the new era of hard tech and transformative projects in the American West and beyond.
Links to Platforms:
Here’s what we explored in the episode:
Inspired by projects like China’s Green Wall, Rainmaker aims to terraform deserts into lush, habitable landscapes.
Water scarcity can be solved by creating more water rather than just conserving to stay in the existing limits.
There are already severely water-constrained communities and farms, especially in the American west and Southwest.
Rainmaker’s cloud seeding program uses custom drones, radar, and safe, common chemical compounds.
Cloud-seeding is decades-old tech. The breakthrough was a new radar to precisely measure the effectiveness of cloud-seeding efforts.
China has more than 40,000 working on weather modification projects. The U.S. can catch up by supporting private sector innovation.
Rainmaker is actively recruiting passionate engineers ready to work on cutting-edge tech.
Being close to the frontier of innovation naturally drives the creation of new technologies and opportunities. Lots of examples inside Rainmaker.
A commission in the book of Genesis in the Bible to steward the garden and take care of God’s creation is an intrinsic part of Rainmaker's purpose.
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Learn more about Augustus Doricko:
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Scaling Nuclear Energy, Saving The World – Bret Kugelmass of Last Energy
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Augustus, dude, I'm really excited to talk to you again. I can't wait to spread the good word about what you're doing and the vision that you have for the future.
Augustus Doricko: Likewise, brother. Yeah, it's a blessing to get to catch up and talk about the crazy year it's been since we've last spoken.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. A full year. A very full year.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, a year from, a year ago, I think that we had like just started to fly drones with payloads for the very first time and had one pilot project in the Central Valley. And we're in four different American states right now and one country outside of the US as well. Team's grown, it's been- everybody at Rainmaker says like a week kind of feels like a lifetime, so we've all lived like thousands of years at this company, which is a blessed thing to get to say.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean that's how you feel- that's when you feel like you're really getting some shit done. Like at the end of every week, you're like, fucking A, that was a week.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know the meme that's like, what a week, huh? And then the guy next to him goes like, Captain, it's only Monday, or like it's only Wednesday, or something like that. Routine sensation at the end of the day as well.
Eric Jorgenson: You getting some good tweets in?
Augustus Doricko: Just catching up with the boys. One of the guys, well, okay, won't yap randomly, but one of my friends is trying to hire somebody, and that guy is a former founder, and I generally counsel against hiring former founders because it's like, why'd they give up? But the other problem is this candidate rejected Teddy's offer and then tried to poach two of his employees for a new company, so.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh shit. Not cool. I was going to be like, it totally worked for PayPal to like recruit other founders. That's shady shit.
Augustus Doricko: I mean, there's no explicit rules, but maybe generalizations.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, there's cool and there's uncool. How's Teddy doing, by the way? Good?
Augustus Doricko: Dude, yeah, Teddy's an animal. He's a killer. He has a knack for negotiating with these gigascale, old-school mining conglomerates, which is a crazy thing to be doing as a college kid that just started a company, but I guess it's sort of like a Gundo, like a commonly done thing in El Segundo, so.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I feel like that's one of the superpowers is like charging directly into the middle of these crazy conflagrations of old industries that just feel impossibly tangled and stuck in their own ways, and just diving in and figuring it out and being surprisingly well-received, like over and over again.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, like one, you can just do things. But two, I think that one misconception that people have about the world is like Riva Tez, she has this one line, which is everything's a scam. You know that? And it's just like these companies purport to be like leviathans that are totally impenetrable and like are going to compete over everything. And actually, most people are not purely self-interested and like want to help other folks succeed. So yeah, it's been great. I mean, we do government contracting. So, it's like the most arcane imaginable sales cycle, and you would think like, oh, the bureaucrats are impossible to deal with. And like not the case whatsoever. They have been extraordinarily fun to get to know and do business with. And I think a lot of these problems are easy if you decide that they're going to be, in a certain sense.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, or even try, rather than just getting like turned off by the scale or the vibes or anything. You're probably the most exciting person and the most exciting vision that those politicians get to talk to any given year or month or week or day. They should be stoked to talk to you and solve problems for people.
Augustus Doricko: Well, and I think, one, yeah, like I'm happy that that's generally the case when Rainmaker employees or myself get to talk to anybody in government, but two, especially with respect to water resources and sustainability, water resource managers generally have a couple options. Either they can put flow meters on their existing infrastructure, which is super lame. It doesn't actually produce more water and is old school tech. They can maybe build a new reservoir, but good luck. It's almost impossible to do that because of NEPA and water rights. Maybe they can have slightly more efficient faucets installed in government buildings or something. And all of these are like Kafka-esque measures that a bureaucrat rightfully like wants to tear their hair out being responsible for. And so, when we come and we say like, hey, not only is this new, exciting, innovative technology available, but it's a way to produce net new water for your grid, it's like such a layup for them. And then with respect to sustainability, a lot of these projects are just like, well, let's plant more trees. And that's great and like an important aspect of long-term terraforming or at least environmental restoration. But it's super rote and there's not a lot of leverage in it. And producing more water via precipitation enhancement is also a layup for them, at least in the conversations that we've had.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, which gets to the fundamental thing, like you're trying to- it is the abundance oriented solution instead of the conservation oriented solution. And I feel like so many people are just like constrained in their thinking to only even approach problems from a conservation mindset. And I don't know what sort of dead end ideologically we all wandered down in the last decade, but it's so refreshing to see so many people tackling the abundance side, the supply side. Like, how do we solve the root function of this problem? Not just how can we make even lower flow faucets so that nothing is ever clean again, but how do we just get more water?
Augustus Doricko: I know. I spoke to one bureaucrat that, I was like, you don't just want low flow, low flush toilets installed everywhere. And they were like, actually, we're very proud of our low-flow toilet initiatives. And I was like, all right, great, well, whatever. But yeah, I think that there's a natural inclination that probably will exist for all of human history towards Malthusianism. I think that there's some sort of Nietzschean last man thing that comes up when people are either jealous or don't feel empowered or are envious where they say like, no, there's a fixed pie, we have to split up stuff, we have to divvy stuff up more finely and finely. And that'll always exist. But I think secondarily, maybe since the 60s or since the 90s or since the 2000s, depending on which way you cut it, like the proliferation of software, the lack of hard tech, the lack of futuristic technology begets an even greater lack of futuristic technology. The longer people go without seeing new things, the more entrenched their perspective on the world becomes and the more fixed they think the pie always will be. And that's why I've said publicly a couple times now, we have a four-year window to go as hard as possible with respect to tech development and pair it with the state's interests so that there is momentum built so that I hope that forever and always El Segundo is the seat of power for deep tech, hard tech technologists. But if in 30 years, there was some new hub in, I don't know, Austin or wherever, where another generation of kids were building warp drives, for example, I would love to see that and have my perspective shaken as well.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think there's something to that where like the generation before us lived through so many miracles of like physical changes in the world, electrification. Imagine living through electrification of America or the transition from Kitty Hawk to commercial flight over, what, a 20, 30 year period, that'd be fucking crazy. Your mind would be blown constantly. And as beautiful as it is, software is just very abstract. But I think we're having another, like a renaissance of true physical, tangible miracles. I think self-driving cars might be the next big one that people go through, where it's like, oh shit, and they interact with it on a daily basis and they remember when it felt impossible. But there's so many more to come.
Augustus Doricko: The one that I think- there's two that I think are going to be the most radical, not experiential changes for people, but visual changes in the lived environment and worlds. And one is with Rainmaker, precipitation enhancement and a suite of other technologies, like actually terraforming, like physically seeing a land that was once dry and a desert becoming more lush is going to be, I think, one of the greatest testaments to human innovation that we have ever before seen. And like the prelude to this or sort of the example for this is the Central Valley of California. Like, that was all a mix of swamp and desert before the Bureau of Reclamation came in and built the Central Valley Project and all the irrigation canals to turn that into America's breadbasket that produces like 54% of all of the fruit in the country. So, that level of terraforming, but seeing it in Utah, in the Mojave, in the Colorado River watershed writ large, that's going to be crazy. The second one is, this is stolen from a Vittorio tweet, interlectus, there was an image of, like a rendering of lights on the dark side of Mars, and he said like this is the worst technology is ever going to be actually. That, when people can see satellite imagery of lights on Mars, I think, will also probably set us up well for like a sensation of miraculous technology long into the future.
Eric Jorgenson: So, let's talk about the terraforming piece because I think that's ultimately what Rainmaker and what your team is working towards. There's a lot of really important problems to solve along the way in terms of solving water scarcity and improving crop yields and stuff like that. But is it true that the ultimate, the whatever, 20, 50 year mission here is like, no, we want to make beautiful, productive garden land paradise out of what is currently desert?
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, we're trying to make Earth habitable, which means terraforming all of the frontiers that are currently wastelands. It means turning deserts that are currently unproductive and not useful for either human or natural flourishing into like green oases. And part of the motivation to do that, one, is just like vibes, seems awesome. But two, we're given a commission in Genesis 1 to steward the garden, like to take care of God's creation and have dominion over it. And I think that part of, yeah, that is an intrinsic part of Rainmaker's motivation. It is to make the world resemble better the kingdom of heaven on earth. And first, that means just stability in our current agricultural and environmental regions, so like where we need as much water as we've had historically, keeping that baseline, then gradually working up towards terraforming projects. That is what I'm interested in seeing. And my magnum opus, like what I would die happy having accomplished, is extending the Great Plains from West Texas through New Mexico, Arizona, and then up into California. So turning all of that land, which is just like dry, dead mesa into productive land with more biomass is a good thing. Like this is a weird sort of bio-accelerationist take or something, it's like just more life is good. And so more water to sustain that is good as well. And also, China does this, by the way. I've said it before. And China has something called the Green Wall of China Project. They're actively reclaiming the Gobi Desert from Inner Mongolia. And they're doing it with a suite of advanced and more moderate technologies. But on the advanced side, it's their precipitation enhancement. So they're retrofitting these military-grade drones to do cloud seeding operations to make more rain over the deserts. And then they're taking advantage of that precipitation by planting trees all throughout the desert to, one, reduce the frequency of dust storms, two, retain more water in the soil, and three, some of these trees that they're planting are actually to make orchards out of the desert eventually as well. And so there's this heuristic that I use now, which is like, if a long-term thinking autocratic regime with billions of expendable dollars is investing heavily into some long-term project, and some deep tech project at that, then the parallel should exist in the United States private sector. Like there should be an American analog that is trying to do in the dynamic and exceptional American way what it takes a nation of a billion people to accomplish. And so the practical way in which this is the case at Rainmaker is like the Beijing weather modification office has 40,000 employees. They have a $300 million annual budget. They are putting double digit percentages of the water in the Three Gorges Dam there via precipitation enhancement and are actively terraforming the Gobi Desert. And Rainmaker doesn't yet have 30 employees, and we're trying to do the same thing.
Eric Jorgenson: Fuck yeah. I like your odds.
Augustus Doricko: I'm an American exceptionalist, man. I do too. I do too.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, absolutely. So, what is the- you sort of hinted at this, but I think it's an interesting conversation because a lot of times when I'm like pounding the table about some amazing futuristic technology that's going to terraform something or transform something, someone's like, but what about the environment? And I'm like, what is- let's define it. And then do you want to say that whatever the environment is in this exact moment is like inherently morally good and can't be improved upon in any way? Like, is that the claim here? So, I think it's worth going a little deeper on the morality of it. And I like the heuristic that like more life is good. More lushness is inherently good. If it's just dry sand and we can turn it into a forest, an orchard, a garden, why wouldn't we?
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, well, people are right to have concerns about the environment, and it should be like a bipartisan thing as well. I guess people don't realize that Richard Nixon started the EPA. Like caring about clean spaces and clean waters and like forests persisting, that's Teddy Roosevelt coded and Richard Nixon coded and is not inextricably tied to degrowth or anti-human policy. We have unintentionally, and in the past, we as in like America or civilization, has deforested areas. We have done damage to the environment via pollution. And so, people are right to care about it and scrutinize any deliberate or unintentional modification of the planet and our environments. But if you have the option to produce, if you have the option to impact the environment in a way that is both symbiotic with creation's own interests, like life and the well-being of the species within, and within the interests of humanity, that's like an obvious choice to make. I don't think that something being natural is necessarily good, and I don't think it's necessarily better that- in fact, I think if something is not serving humanity, it is a lesser good than if it were to serve humanity. Now, that being said, there's like one very interesting consideration with respect to terraforming that I think about often. So, if you were to green, say, the Mojave Desert, yes, then you would have more biodiversity, yes, you'd have more biomass, yes, you could have more productive agricultural land. So, that one makes sense. If you were to do this with the Sahara, though, yes, you'd have all these benefits that I mentioned before, but dust from the Sahara that traverses the Atlantic is a great cloud condensation nuclei and results in precipitation over the Amazon rainforest frequently. So if you were to green the Sahara and less dust was kicked up over the Atlantic, then you might get less precipitation in South America. So if we are to do these terraforming projects, they have to be done with care and caution because there are unintended consequences to all these things. But I would still prefer that we deliberately are making modifications like this rather than, like right now, coal plants used to make acid rain. Coal plants now are still emitting coal ash that acts as a cloud condensation nuclei that increases precipitation downwind of them as well. The ship tracks and the sulfur emitted from them creating more clouds over the oceans is another example. Like, we're doing all this unintentional modification. We might as well take a deliberate approach to it with caution. But it's going to happen one way or another. It's just a question of whether we're doing it deliberately or not.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, the second and third order effects are the really, both the really scary part and the really exciting part. And we certainly have the capability with effort to understand complex systems and manage them well. We've done it a number of times. And to your point, is there anything, any contention about whether the Central Valley in California was like a good idea long-term? Were there negative second, third order effects from that at all?
Augustus Doricko: I think that a lot of the land that was once grazed by like natural deer species is not any longer because of orchards and just human habitation. Was the trade worth it? Yeah, yes, certainly. But there was a trade, so it's fair to acknowledge that that was the case. I think something different about terraforming though is like it's not purely to serve agricultural interests, like I do actually just want more paradise as well.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I like that. Is that just a function of precipitation?
Augustus Doricko: Is it just a function of precipitation? Water availability is probably the root and the most consequential of any input factor, but there's a bunch. So, for example, like the amount of non-precipitating cloud cover is a great consequence because it acts as an insulator and also as a- well, yeah, it acts as an insulator. So if you have more clouds, then you probably have less severe heat during the summers, you may have less severe cold during the winters, depends on solar radiation, but that matters. The quality of the soil matters as well. Like if you were to increase precipitation over Saudi, for example, radically, you would not have the same trophic level as if you were to do it over New Mexico, just because the soils in Saudi Arabia have less of the nutrients necessary for bacteria and then subsequent higher forms of life to grow. So water I think is the fundamental building block, but everything else associated with it matters too. The thing though that I think about is this, if you have precipitation enhancement, and you make more water available, if you just do that over Saudi, it's desert, there's no organic material in the soil, it'll just evaporate off, not super productive. But if you have, this is a startup idea, somebody go build it, and if you don't, then like I'll figure out a way to do it in the next couple years. If you have automated tractors that are churning soil and adding hydro gels into the soil, then you can increase water retention by a few orders of magnitude. And so, if you make it rain more and then the soil retains the water, then bacteria will be able to live in the water, deposit their organic material, and eventually turn that into like soil that plants can live in. That's the long-term, I think this pairing is the long-term critical unlock for most desert terraforming.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's interesting. And you've got like a strong foundation where you've got some level of topography also. You need like the peaks and valleys, you need some level of existing biology to kind of kickstart the process of creating soil nutrients and give it something to grab onto.
Augustus Doricko: And the American West is situated well to do this because we have these mesas, we have the Rocky Mountains, we have mountain ranges in New Mexico as well, some of the Rockies. And I released a thread the other day on Doug Burgum. Did you see that by chance?
Eric Jorgenson: I read that. It was awesome. Very exciting.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, yeah. Technology brothers in control. So that was cool to see. The thing that I'm most excited about with respect to his position in the Department of the Interior is that the Bureau of Reclamation, which is a body within the Department of the Interior, its responsibility, like its intention, was to reclaim the desert for productive American use. Like it was to produce water in the desert such that that land could be inhabited and produce food for us. The Bureau, it's done some good work, it's mostly maintained dams though over the course of the last 60, 70 years. What he has the potential to do is like projects on the scale of the Hoover Dam with respect to precipitation enhancement and soil amendments. And if we were to do that, then there are millions of acres immediately available to terraform. And like, wouldn't you rather have an agency that has a big win? Like when you think of the Department of the Interior, do you think of anything exciting? Like what does that generally consist of?
Eric Jorgenson: I pull up a blank on that brand. Like I've got nothing to credit them with. Yeah, exactly. My ignorance, but the Hoover Dam is a good one. But it's been a minute.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, if I were in government, I would be interested in like mega projects that could, one, benefit the American people, but two, bring honor to the work that you have done. Like there's another thing, too, which I think the Bureau should definitely look into, which is retrofitting these hydroelectric or retrofitting these dams that are not currently hydroelectric to produce more clean baseload. There are 450 or so dams that the Bureau is currently responsible for. I forget the number, but it's low double digits that are hydroelectric producing. In aggregate, we're talking about like tens of gigawatts of clean baseload that we get from that. So, it's not nuclear, and I'm still totally pro-nuclear, but in the timelines that we have to get nuclear versus just like slapping some turbines on some old dams, that's such a layup as well that would, one, be like beneficial for the economy, two, no more detrimental than having the dams already in the first place environmentally, and three, is a clean energy win as well. So, again, totally bipartisan support for this, that is something that I really, really hope Burgum and the Bureau looks into in the next four years.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, that's a really cool thing, to have somebody with that scale of vision. Maybe it's worth like for people who have not read your thread, which is probably most people, will you give a quick like background on him and...?
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, totally. Okay. Doug Burgum was just selected to become the next secretary of the Department of the Interior. What's his background? He grows up in North Dakota. He goes and studies at Stanford, meets Steve Ballmer there, becomes friends with him. Pretty cool intro to the tech world. He's from a farming family. He mortgaged his family farm to Angel Invest, which is crazy, but very cool. He buys a minority share in Great Plains Software, which is this small business accounting software that was just serving a bunch of flower shops and things to that effect in the Dakotas and in the Great Plains. Then he leads an SPV to buy out the majority stake of the company from the founder, so takes it over, like very, I said in the thread too, like very social network coded, like taking over the company that way. Once he does that, grows the company from like a pittance of revenue, inconsequential software company, to 300 million in revenue. So, like incredible operator, great sales.
Eric Jorgenson: In like the 90s.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, yeah, yeah, in the 90s, exactly, in the 90s. Decades ago when $300 million was radically different than it is now. Does that, IPOs in ’97, makes a bunch of money that way, sells the business to Microsoft, calls the top of the dot-com bubble when he does it, by the way, which was awesome. I think it was like February or March of 2000, so like literally peak, perfect instinct. Sells, works at Microsoft, I think until 2007. The only person that is capable of replacing him, because he wants to retire, but he's not willing to let his baby die, the only person capable of replacing him at his organization is Satya Nadella, which is awesome because he ends up going on to start Microsoft and is now working with OpenAI, so that's like the caliber of this guy that we're dealing with. When he leaves Microsoft, he starts a VC firm called Arthur Ventures, which has a billion under management, building up tech throughout the Midwest, builds a bunch of real estate, then becomes governor of North Dakota, his home state. Awesome. Wins with 75% of the vote, so like crushing victory, super popular guy, total chad, long hair, very cool. And then, while he's governor, North Dakota is an energy rich, or at least, energy resource rich state, but he is concerned about environmental implications of producing lots of energy, so he brings in billions of dollars of outside investment to sequester carbon and simultaneously builds out the nat gas pipelines there. So that was awesome. State runs a surplus for like I think 2017 on after he takes office. So, like immediately after he becomes governor, rides the ship there, and yeah, crushed it until he ran for president and then was selected for the Trump cabinet. So, like this is between JD Vance, between Elon Musk, between Vivek and Doug Burgum, like there are more technologists in the White House than there ever have been before. And I think the consequence of that is you have people that have built organizations that have produced value that are not careerist bureaucrats now stewarding the resources of the American people in a way that should map to producing more value than ever before. And like with some budgetary concerns because if you're a bureaucrat, you get your tax revenue every year, you're not really attached to like where that comes from or what the value of a dollar is or how hard it is to make money. These guys, I think, are going to understand that and run a much, much tighter ship, or at least that is my hope.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and I think that comes with some vision and scale. It's not just like, how can I divvy up what's here? How can I treat people fairly in my four years? But how do you set up a country for success over a 50, 100, 150 year timeline? Like the vision that it took to build the Hoover Dam, like in the original mission of the department, hopefully that spirit is back and builds some more things. So, and this is where we come back to Rainmaker because I think your- is your ultimate customer like the government, the US government, other countries? Like is that where this goes eventually? The biggest customer is people undertaking weather modification systems for the purpose of changing land or supporting farmers?
Augustus Doricko: Yeah. So I'll answer that question with some context on Rainmaker as well. Maybe some of the people that are listening to this know what our company is. I can just give a quick overview as well that probably would help to anybody that doesn't know what we're up to because I'm talking about like modifying the weather. What does that mean exactly?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, when did when did you first realize you could control the weather?
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, March of 2023, I said a prayer and the heavens opened up. No.
Eric Jorgenson: A mullet sprouted, lightning struck and...
Augustus Doricko: Exactly. We originally had an idea to name a product Thor, but have instead opted for biblical prophets instead of pagan gods. But anyway, so yeah, we're a precipitation enhancement company. And so this tech has existed since 1946 in its most crude form. Americans invented it accidentally. They were doing some cloud chamber experiments, spilled dry ice into it, saw that all of the liquid water in their controlled cloud froze and precipitated at the bottom and realized that you could just go out into a plane, fly into a cloud, it was 1946, there were no regulations, huck dry ice out of the back, freeze the liquid in the cloud, make it snow. And so, the first man-made snow storms were made in like ’45, ’46, crazy. General Electric doubled down, did a lot of investment in it. And this technology, it showed so much promise because like the implications of weather are, I don't know, enormous across every industry. But it fell off in the 70s, 80s, and onward because nobody had the ability to, one, do it very cost-effectively, or two, attribute the precipitation to their interventions. So, what that means is like, if you spray some fairy dust in a cloud and then it rains, that doesn't mean that you caused it to rain. Even if you accept on whiteboard math that that precipitation wasn't natural, measuring how much precipitation you produced anthropogenically was impossible. You could do like a statistical analysis and say like, well, the seeded clouds precipitated a bit more than the untreated ones, but it wasn't robust. What changed was the SNOE project, which was this research effort between a lot of American universities, realized if you have high-resolution radar, then if you fly in, say, a zigzag pattern or in a spiral, if the precipitation enhancement is working, you should be able to co-locate the precipitation on radar with your flight track. And that's exactly what they observed between 2017 and 2021 when some of the last analyses came out. Then a lab in Zurich, ETH Zurich, recapitulated this, proved that it could be done again. That was in 2023. And when I had found that out, I was like, oh, this is now finally doable and you can transparently tell your end users how much water you're producing for them. So, this is an obvious thing that we should be investing in. So, that's when I started Rainmaker. And what we do is we take radar data and satellite data to try to measure the amount of supercooled liquid in clouds. If the droplets are sufficiently small that they're not naturally precipitating, we'll fly drones up into them, spray a compound called silver iodide, freeze the water in that cloud into snowflakes that become big enough and heavy enough to fall and then precipitate either as snow or stay as rain. And two other points that are of interest are like, one, yeah, Rainmaker does all of this radar processing. We're starting to build our own radar, which is an awesome and insane thing to undertake because RF is like the closest thing to magic that I think humanity has ever encountered. So, if you're an RF engineer or an EE that wants to build radar, we're hiring right now. Then in addition to the radar processing that we're doing, there's the drones. For a long time, I thought totally asininely that drones were all over the place and they were mature and you could just buy one off the shelf and do whatever you wanted with it. And in the warehouse in El Segundo that I'm in right now, I'm seated in a graveyard of drones that have not succeeded in their missions. And basically, what that boils down to is like, you're flying through severe icing that like Boeing 737s actively try to avoid because those are the best clouds because they have the most cold water in them. You're flying through severe updrafts and downdrafts, strong wind shear, you need long endurance in these systems to seed effectively. And so we just couldn't go with anything that was commercial off the shelf. We're now building our own drones totally from scratch that are specifically capable of withstanding icing. So we have special systems designed to do that. If you're a mechatronics guy, if you're a UAV engineer of any variety, we're hiring actively right now for those roles. So please come help us with that. If you're a forward deployed engineer or interested in becoming one, what that means is basically like living on top of a mountain for six months and flying drones, repairing them and maintaining them, we're hiring for that actively too. That whole suite of tech in the drone development is one huge category in addition to the radar processing and manufacture. And then the third thing that we're doing is developing alternative nucleation agents. So like I said, silver iodide is what we use now. It's what's been used historically. The reason why silver iodide is an effective compound for freezing water is its crystalline structure is almost identical to ice, so water freezes onto it favorably. There's a couple other material properties relevant. But it only works at like negative six Celsius and below. What that means is you're limited to say like November to April in relatively cold regions and even shorter windows in warmer regions. So, like if you want to operate in Arizona and produce a lot more water there, you need a compound that can nucleate ice at higher temperatures. And so, we've built out a bunch of instrumentation in our lab in Los Angeles and also are building out like a full cloud chamber now to do more testing on alternative compounds. That means Thermo guys, Mech Es, EEs, aerosol chemists, atmospheric scientists, also we're hiring. So go to makerain.com/careers if you're interested there. So that's all of what we're building and all of the people that we're hiring. Your question was, is government our primary customer? And to that question, our perspective, my perspective has changed. Originally, I thought like, okay, who needs more rain? Farmers. Well, it's not at a point yet, I don't think will be for a very long time, that you can induce precipitation over a region as targeted as like 500 acres. So like no small farms. And it's not even really 10,000 acres, it's like tens of thousands of acres that are the target area. There's not that many farms that are that big. So that segments the market down pretty radically from the jump. And then secondarily, even if it is positive sum, even if you are producing more water, the optics of like the richest, biggest farmer buying the rain when the little guys don't get any of that benefit, not great. So, the natural conclusion was to sell water for the public benefit. So now, it is the public works departments of multiple different cities and the departments of natural resources of multiple different states that we're selling to and long-term we're going to continue to sell to because it is in the public interest, it is in the interest of all the farmers, big and small, in the territories for which they are responsible to have more water. And that's going to continue to be the case for a long time. With the one caveat that is I think that public-private partnerships will make sense between these departments of natural resources and hyberscalers. There is a Google data center in northeastern Oregon that uses about 25% of all the water in the county. So yeah, all the farms of all the people, this singular data center is just sucking up so much water. And ChIPFABs in Arizona are doing similar things. We're just building more data centers and sucking dry even more of the water that we do have. If those entities were to fund programs in collaboration with the state to offset the water that they're consuming, that would make sense and help them be more sustainable as well. So, we're starting to explore that market.
Eric Jorgenson: That's super cool. There's so many interesting things in all the stuff that you've shared. I think it's super interesting that there's like the fundamental breakthrough that made you start this company isn't like the mechanism of the cloud seeding itself, but it's actually like closing the feedback loop of resolution and observing the effects that you're having so that you can iterate and now you're working on the drone tech and then you're working on the precipitating actual catalyst. It's so interesting how you think, as you get close to the frontier, as you're like, oh, we'll just implement that technology, you're like, oh, but actually, we need this new technology and this new technology and this new technology and this new technology and just being close to the frontier induces you to create more and more and more and get further and further ahead and push those frontiers out. That's so awesome.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, and it's strange too. Because I think every technologist wants to in some form or another use Elon as a benchmark of some kind. And with respect to SpaceX, like the rocket either lands or it doesn't. Like very clear, demonstrable effects. And in our case, yeah, fine, if you have a clear blue sky and one cloud and you blast and then it rains, that is relatively obvious. But the quantification of results means that we're going to be a R&D-focused and scientifically inclined company for a long time, just to make sure that everybody's on the same page. Because like, yeah, it is new tech, trust needs to be built in it from the public. A lot of people don't even know about it in the first place. And so that is going to continue to be one of our primary considerations. And then all the hardware around it, like the drones, like our own in-house radar, like our own in-house LIDAR that will help with the validation too.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, these jobs all sound so fascinating to get to keep moving all these things forward. Living on a mountaintop, fixing drones, piling them in the clouds, inducing precipitation, pretty fucking rad.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, it's a cool gig. And I think one indication of how- I mean, really what this indicates is just like that the team at Rainmaker are people to which I will be indebted for the rest of my life and I'm extremely grateful to get to spend any time with, like exceptional people across the board, technically, spiritually, and with respect to their character. But we- how much to say? Anyway, we are based in Los Angeles. This new market became available for us, this deregulated FAA zone that was going to let us test drones way more rapidly than we would have been able to otherwise. And it also had great conditions for weather modification. And I sort of sat down with the team one day, and I said, you know guys, just to make the iteration loop a lot faster, I think it makes sense that we all move about a thousand miles away. And so, all of the team has moved from Los Angeles for the quarter to this other state, and they brought their families with them, and we have a small little tribal commune of some sort that- I guess that sounds pretty cultish, but I guess good companies are. Yeah, like that, in addition to all the work itself, I think is indicative of like what a special place it has been to be at.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, when you have a mission as big as this and you know that the potential impact can be so huge for so many people. I mean, the problems, I think we should spend a minute on like, we started with how cool will it be when we terraform the American West, which really skips over some really dark stuff that we could be headed towards if we don't come up with some technologies like this. And conservation is not going to get us over the gap that we have. And there's a lot of people suffering a lot, even in America, increasingly so, let alone anywhere else in the world, from lack of clean water that your technology's going to help develop. So, I think for people who are maybe less close to the problems, like highlighting, talking about some of those, like are we really short on clean water in America today?
Augustus Doricko: Yes, surprisingly yes. So, here's some exemplary cases. The Department of Water Resources in California, the entity that's responsible for managing this collective resource, their state water supply strategy, so like their plan to make sure that everybody has enough water, explicitly accounts for, by 2030, half a million acres of land becoming desert, farmland becoming desert in the Central Valley. Like, they just say, the only way for us to have any water at all and for everybody not to run out is for us to let 500,000 acres just get deleted and turn into desert.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh my God.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, and that's the government estimate, which means it's actually way worse than that. So, there's that problem. There's the housing development in Phoenix. In multiple cities, they have banned new development because there's not enough water to supply to new houses. So, okay, whether or not immigration is a thing, how do we even supply new housing for growth in new cities if there's not enough water in Phoenix? And that's a pretty severe case. Tucson is similar. Las Vegas is similar. We had two years of unprecedented, ahistorical atmospheric rivers that refilled a lot of reservoirs and it sort of makes for like a, I don't know, a funny analysis of Rainmaker in that the tech is finally ready now, but it was sort of the worst time to start the company because we have a lot of water for like once in the last 20 years. But that's not going to be the case in the next couple decades. In states like Texas, there's historic aquifer drawdown. And so what the problem with that is, so the aquifers, they're the groundwater sort of reservoirs that are naturally occurring, they're being drawn down so much that some farmers' wells are running dry, so they're just not able to irrigate anymore. These farms will die. And the more nefarious long-term consequence of that is if the aquifers are drawn down sufficiently, then the pressure in the sediment is reduced because there's not water filling in the gaps. So the sediment compresses. So one, the foundations of all the buildings atop them are going to crack and fall into the earth. And two, because the sediment compresses, the carrying capacity, the storage capacity of the aquifers goes down. So permanently you lose the ability to store water in the ground. So, if these aquifers don't get recharged in the next couple decades before they run out, then like there's no ability to store water in the ground anymore.
Eric Jorgenson: That's not good.
Augustus Doricko: No.
Eric Jorgenson: That'd be really, really bad. Really, really bad. So how much control do we have? Maybe where the tech is today and the theoretical limits of it, how much can we really, I'm going to use the phrase even though I know it's probably not correct, like pull out of the sky? And then where does that take us?
Augustus Doricko: That's a fine way to think about it. So, there's two metrics that are relevant to be a little bit reductive. Clouds that precipitate over the continental US, they're generally about 30 percent efficient, which means that of all the water in them, when they do precipitate, only about 30 percent of the water goes from the cloud onto the ground, without even getting into evaporation, which I will in a sec. Those clouds can be juiced for more. Only about 9% of all of the water that traverses the atmosphere in the United States, so including water vapor, liquid water in clouds, ice in clouds, only about 9% of that actually precipitates over the United States. The rest either evaporates away and is recycled in the atmosphere or precipitates over the oceans. So if you were to take just a sliver more, just a percent more of that, then you're talking about tens of millions of acre feet over the United States. And so for context, like all of California uses about 40 million acre feet per year. So you can- by a double digit percentage, increase the amount of precipitation over these areas such that, like I said before, regions of Nevada, regions of Arizona, regions of Utah that are currently not arable can become arable, but even before that, you can at least sustain the historic agricultural profile that you have and the urban development profile that you have.
Eric Jorgenson: And that level of change is like well within the technological capabilities of today?
Augustus Doricko: That is a logistical problem. So the seeding of individual, like the treating of individual clouds and individual events can produce tens of thousands of acre feet. So, for context, that's like, if you produce 10,000 acre feet in one event, which is well within the realm of possibility, then that's like 5,000 Olympic swimming pools of precipitation that you get. You're going to see sort of like a parallel distribution. Most clouds, you're going to get hundreds to thousands of acre feet from. But yeah, like you can do that now. The problem is we need operations across all of the American West. Like there should be no mountaintops without a drone in the box that can be deployed as soon as radar and LIDAR detects that the conditions are viable. Until we get FAA approval to deploy these totally remote systems and like you've seen a zip line, like it is a monster to get these things approved for totally autonomous operations. We need forward deployed engineers to fly these drones in these locations. So, if we were to distribute thousands of drones across the Sierra Nevada range in California, then we could easily produce hundreds of- not easily, it's going to be extremely difficult actually. It's going to...
Eric Jorgenson: The man's an optimist.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, everything is easy in a certain- I don't know, there's like the Elon quote, which is like, I'm not an optimist or a pessimist, like I'm just going to get the job done. That's sort of our perspective here. Like, we're going to get the job done. But if we were to deploy thousands of drones across all these mountaintops in the Sierras in California, then producing hundreds of thousands, millions of acre feet of water per year is well within the capacity of what current precipitation enhancement can do and what a Rainmaker system can do.
Eric Jorgenson: Do you get a break from the FAA by doing remote piloted instead of shooting for autonomous, or is that not a thing, really?
Augustus Doricko: Yep, yep. So in terms of gradations, there's visual observers on the ground, then there's remotely piloted systems, then there's fully autonomous operations. And so we'll walk through that over the course of years. Maybe in this administration, Sean Duffy, I think, was just appointed to the DOT, so shout out to my boy. Would love to work more closely with you on waivers. But over the course of the next four years, I think there is potential to maybe do our first, well, I think that we will be able to do our first totally autonomous operations. I'm hoping that within the next year and a half to two and a half years, we can do remote piloted operations.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. That's crazy. And knowing that it's a logistics problem, not a deep, not some massive leap, and that the technology as it exists today is capable of having a tremendous impact on the actual amount of rainfall we have. And I've heard, I mean, I'm following you a long time, so I'm like learning secondhand all of these things that come in from what you've shared. One of the most exciting parts of this to me, I think a lot of people's first reaction is going to be like, but that's not fair. We need the clouds. We need the water. And the notion that as soon as you induce precipitation, you actually induce more clouds to be created. It's not a zero something. It's not like there's a fixed amount of clouds. You're not robbing the acreage next door of clouds. But it's a water cycle, and it's self-balancing. So if we pull that water out of the atmosphere, it's clean water, and will create more evaporation somewhere else that will then create more clouds. We're just getting the water where we need it through this like quite elegant system actually.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, I mean, the atmosphere as it stands works exceptionally well. To clarify something, whether precipitation enhancement is positive sum depends on the clouds. So like if a cloud is naturally going to precipitate already, then it is not treated by RainMaker because you could induce more precipitation over the target area rather than downwind. And so we select now for clouds that are not naturally precipitating that are purely positive sum for this reason. Now, that being said, to your point, the freezing of liquid is exothermic. So when you freeze the water in the cloud, you release heat. That can drive these clouds to grow, which will drive convection of more water vapor into them, which then can allow the clouds to persist even longer than they would downwind. It's a dynamic system and it depends how you see them and which ones you seed as to whether it's purely positive sum. We're only selecting for that right now. But there is some caution that has to be applied to this in order to make it cooth for everybody involved.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it gets back to like the second and third order effects are just hard. It's hard to figure out. But we've got to, the only way to figure it out is to kind of keep taking steps in that direction and observe carefully and responsibly and sometimes figure out how to mitigate them, sometimes figure out how to avoid them. Like, we want to keep staying close to the frontier and pushing it forward.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, well, I mean, sometimes when a starship lands, it has a risk of hitting a shark or something. Which is probably a little bit too flippant, but it's a reasonable analogy insofar as like the potential is- like if you're faced with the choice between not developing this technology and allowing the Central Valley to collapse and allowing us to lose all of our aquifers and not be able to develop more housing and allow the Colorado River Delta ecosystem to collapse, or trying something with potential for unforeseen consequences, but trying it with caution and with discretion where the potential good outcome is one where we have more water than we ever had before, I radically prefer that. And something worth saying too is like there is a difference between cloud seeding and solar radiation management that's worth touching on real quick, which is that like precipitation enhancement, you can stop it whenever you want. Like, it is as targeted as an individual watershed. You can choose to seed a given system and then stop operations altogether afterwards if you find it to be unproductive. The minerals that we're using, like I said, they're 10 times safer than aspirin right now, and the quantities result in like a parts per trillion accumulation in the soil, which you need like really fancy chemical assays to even measure, like they're almost undetectable. So the environmental and health implications are negligible. But like if we were to find out it is no good, we could stop at any point. Solar radiation management on the other hand, like I'm a technologist, I'm interested in it for that reason. It's the emission of reflective air soles into the upper atmosphere to cool the planet down. And maybe you could more selectively do it such that if you emitted them in a slightly lower altitude, then they would fall faster, so it wouldn't impact the entire globe's climate. Anyway, the difference between precipitation enhancement and solar radiation management is that if you emit these aerosols into the stratosphere, then they will stay there for years. Those consequences you cannot stop at any point. Like if you launch those, if you launch those aerosols, then they're there, and you have to deal with the consequences long term. And some people are building counteractive systems to take the sulfur out of the atmosphere atmosphere if there were negative implications, but like way more convoluted system with a lot less experimental results to demonstrate its efficacy and safety than precipitation enhancement. And so, we're trying to delineate between that because I think that there are some concerns around that variety of geoengineering that are rightfully placed that have nothing to do with weather modification on the small scale that we're doing it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, those are weird things to conflate because one is such a one-way door and one is such a sort of gentle, high leverage intervention that's so selective and careful and, to your point, changeable, plausible, stoppable. Yeah, I feel like you spend a lot of time detangling aerosols and chemtrails from like a very basic drone silver iodide individual cloud system.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, I do and I will continue to. And to be fair, there's not that many people or companies or entities doing atmospheric engineering of any variety. So inflating them when you've never heard of either of them before is not unreasonable. Like most people aren't talking about weather modification or climate interventions of this variety at all. So we'll continue to. I think it's important though because like in- Sorry, real quick. Do you still have video for me?
Eric Jorgenson: You're a little choppy, but I think we're okay. I can still hear you fine.
Augustus Doricko: Okay, cool. The Tennessee legislature last year, I gave this testimony at it, they banned all forms of deliberate weather modification because they were afraid of the implications of solar radiation management.
Eric Jorgenson: Unfortunate.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, and they did so without knowing what precipitation enhancement was, but did the wholesale ban because they were, yeah, they did the wholesale ban just because they were afraid of it writ large. And so, what we have to do now is go back to flip that legislation so that farmers in Tennessee and so that hydroelectric providers in Tennessee have this tech and can benefit from it and we have to do so in a way that that differentiates from SRM as well. So that's part of the plan for what the next six months includes. So, you can anticipate me in a tan suit in a small state General Assembly chatting up legislators again sometime soon.
Eric Jorgenson: Dude, the last one went viral, so I'm excited for part two.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, likewise, dawg.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, you're truly great at it. I mean, you are a great, patient, gracious educator, which I think you need to be when you're doing something so adventurous and so bold. There's a lot of interesting things on the other side of some initial fear and initial caution. I appreciate how balanced your approach is and how thoughtful you are in thinking long-term about this. I mean, the energy you bring to the space, the problem space and just broader, the sort of abundant technology space is, I mean, I've admired it since the first tweet of yours I saw. So, I appreciate all you're doing and all you're bringing and the community that you create around you I think it's so cool. And I mean, we're only a few years in and we got decades to come. It's going to be very exciting to see what happens.
Augustus Doricko: Not even a few years yet. We're at a year, a year and a half now. But I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, I mean, I love people. So, I'm happy to talk to them about technology that I love as well.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and the crew that you've assembled over there and all the fellows far and wide building incredible things. We're going to end this four years in a very different place than we started it, and I can't wait to see where that goes.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, thanks dude, likewise.
Eric Jorgenson: Thank you for taking the time to teach and share. And I hope people reach out if they want some rain, if they want to make some rain, if they want to be a part of an incredible team, building some truly mind-blowing stuff. Sounds like working at Rainmaker is a real adventure. True adventurers should apply today.
Augustus Doricko: Yes, totally agree, totally agree, dawg. Apply at makerain.com/careers is my final plug.
Eric Jorgenson: Do it now. Uncle Augustus wants you.
Augustus Doricko: Yeah, yeah, exactly.