#4 - Augustus Doricko, Founder of Rainmaker

Podcast: Relentless
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 4746s
URL: https://anchor.fm/s/e402cdc8/podcast/play/83724685/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2024-2-7%2F370126560-44100-2-107c407e986fa.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-03 01:51:55

The answer should always be, have a bunch of good ideas, test them immediately, get real-world feedback, because if you're lost in the sauce of whiteboard math or programmatic modeling, you're not getting real-world feedback. Hello, I'm Ty Morse. Welcome to Real Oneless. This is my conversation with my friend Augustus Jericho, the founder of Rainmaker Technology Corporation. Rainmaker is a cloud-seating startup located here in El Segundo. I hope you enjoy the conversation. In high school, you worked on a East Breeding experiment that ended up on the International Space Station. What's the story behind that? So that was the Student Space Flight Experiment Program. And so college kids from all over the country and world, actually, there are a bunch of Brazilian teams and places from all over. High school students across the country were allowed to design an experiment which, if rigorously designed and conducted, would be selected for, in competition, one of few slots to be launched up on a Falcon 9 and then conducted on the International Space Station. And so I had just read Scott Kelly's endurance when I found out about the, it's a great book, by the way, when I found out about the Student Space Flight Experiment Program. And I basically spent my whole senior year ditching class and going to small, unoccupied rooms all over the school to design this experiment with my friends to see how yeast would, and varieties of this experiment had been conducted at the time. It wasn't the most cutting edge science ever done, but we were designing the experiment to see how yeast could be cultivated in space and sort of how cell wall reproduction and formation occurred in zero G. Now, that being said, we were towards the end of the experimental setup, right? Because we had to set everything in motion. We had to design everything so it was ready made for the astronauts to conduct in 15 minutes or less. We ended up having a really hard time getting the yeast that we had cultured out off the agger and into the vials that we had to send. And so what ultimately ended up happening was we, I think I took my boot and one of the glass vials with the yeast in it and smashed it and had glass bits all over the floor, and probably a little bit too much contaminating the actual vials that we sent to the International Space Station, which may or may not be best to share publicly, but it's been years now, so the statute of restraint of appeals is probably passed. But we got some data back on and got to observe how the cell walls had multiplied. And it was relatively different than what occurred on Earth. But yeah, it was because of my obsession with space from a super early age that I was so excited to participate in this. So we got to go to DC. We were at the air and space Smithsonian watching the launch occur, I think like four in the morning or something. And that was a super seminal experience for me for two reasons. One, you know, it was the first time that I had burned the candle at both ends for months at a time. And I associated the sensation of tiredness from doing so with the deep meaning and excitement of the Student Space Flight Experiment Program. So fell in love with that sensation and working exorbitantly hard. And then the other thing was, you know, I met astronauts, I met physicists that I admired, a bunch of cool people in DC and other aspirational kids that wanted to do great things through that experiment. And so it opened up the world in a way and made me aware of possibilities that I hadn't yet thought as accessible. So that was a great, great experiment and a great year of my life. And was the fundraising part of it, I noticed that there was like a GoFundMe with like $8,500 and the goal was like 24,000. How did you guys get the funds to actually make it happen? At that point, it was both me and a woman by the name of Susan Dirty that did a lot of work at NASA Glenn and was also a special ed teacher at my high school. So we did the cap and hand run around town, each and every one of us asking our parents, friends, family, just to chip in a little bit to raise a pre-seed round of sorts, if you will, to fund this experiment. But then also, Susan Dirty, she was a great woman and I learned a lot from her. She went to, you know, Mitsubishi America and a bunch of other large industrials asking for sponsorship for this. And she got a ton of money that way. I think through some local banks too. So we did raise money for that. It is not perfectly analogous to raising money first startup but was an important part of the process for sure. Becoming an astronaut seems to have been a driving like force behind some of your decisions. Why is space exciting to you? Yeah. So for a long time, I was of the opinion that I think many people now share, which is that we don't have all the answers to life's deepest questions. We don't know what the meaning of life is, we don't know whether we're alone in the universe. And what I had decided was that if I could go to the frontiers of space and if I could extend human life and perhaps longevity of the species and collect more knowledge and data from the great beyond, then I could contribute towards maybe not in my own lifetime getting anything answered, but contribute towards humanity ultimately resolving these big questions about like, what is the meaning of life, what's our purpose in the universe? And so the best way I thought I could do that was to become an astronaut. I was an atheist at the time and I desperately wanted to know definitively whether God was real or not and settle the debate once and for all, right? And so my first choice for school was to go to the Naval Academy because the highest, the most commonly selected demographic of people that get into astronaut school are Naval test pilots. And so again, I read Scott Kelly's endurance, I was obsessed, I wanted to go to the ISS. But because I'm deaf in this year, I was not permitted to be a test pilot. And so the next best option was to go to school at UC Berkeley and become a physicist because that was the best physics program I got into. But that aside, why I wanted to become an astronaut and how I intended to become an astronaut aside, I think that space is important, both for answering these deep questions, right? Like seeing humanity out in the great beyond and thinking more deeply about these deep problems, that can be done in space and with more information from space. But my concern now, as you can see and as we've talked about, is making Earth habitable, right? There are effectively infinite swaths of uninhabitable desert as it stands. There are areas of the world that are being lost to desert with their biodiversity being destroyed. Now as I've come to faith, I'm a Christian, we've talked about this. My interest in space is no less than before. I think that it's critical that humanity has a frontier. There's some book, I forget what it's called, but it talks about how the frontier in the American West was always sort of this pressure release valve, right? Where in Europe, because everybody was bunched together, there was no positive some opportunity because people weren't really innovating. You had wars, right? Whenever there was overpopulation or some sort of tension, you couldn't take all of the vigorous young men and just ship them off into the middle of nowhere. In space, you can do that because it is a frontier. There's infinite space for us to occupy. But on Earth, we also have great frontiers that are as yet uninhabited and can be terraformed to be made habitable to both humanity and more species. And so space is still important, but I'm more concerned about Earth now because I think that we have a great opportunity to make ourselves a type one civilization before even we become multi-stellar. And can you explain what a type one civilization is? Yeah, yeah, so there's this thing called the Kardashev scale. A type one civilization where I think type 0.6 or something like that. A type one civilization is one that harnesses all of the energy on their planet, their singular planet for productive ends, right? So that means using all of the kinetic energy and potential energy in the weather to power systems. So maybe that means some sort of absurd like John Galt generator that just uses the flow of air to produce electricity, but also practically it might mean using all of the water in clouds to power hydroelectric dams or more. And it means using geothermal energy from the core of the Earth to power things. It means using more of the solar. And certainly uranium that we have access to on the planet. Shout out Isaiah Taylor. And so that's what a type one civilization is. It's one that uses all the energy it possibly can on its planet. And I'm concerned about doing that because the more energy you consume, the more rich and prosperous the civilization generally becomes. Uh-huh. Before you founded Rainmaker, you founded a company called Teraseco with someone you met at a gym. And I understand as you were a personal trainer there. Yes. We're like helping them out, I assume, training them. Yeah, how did that happen? And why did you eventually decide to move on? Sure. So Teraseco, my last company I co-founded with this guy I met at a gym in Texas, that reason why I was there, very serendipitous, I would encourage you and anybody else to serendipity max because the, well, I guess that you are. You flew down on a Twitter DM. But generally, that's done very well for me in life. I moved to Texas from Berkeley during the pandemic. Berkeley was extremely locked down. Couldn't go to restaurants, grocery stores, anything really. Texas was a little bit more lax. And so I moved to Texas, I had some family there. And I just wanted to explore. Plus school was totally online. So I wasn't losing anything by not being in Berkeley. And I didn't know anybody besides my immediate family. And I wanted to meet people. And I also wanted a job just something to do. Get out of the house, right? Because if you're just doing a school online, I was also a data scientist at the time. And I was doing work online, losing my mind. In part, because I was doing like the nine to five thing, which I think would just destroy my soul. Which isn't to say that it would destroy the soul of everybody, by the way. I don't think that we should have like a all-out war on the nine to five, just for the sake of it. I think it's very invoked right now to say that the nine to five is a bad structure. I think there's better structures for higher agency people, but that aside, different rant. I wanted a job just to get out of the house and I thought that being a personal trainer would be fun because it sort of wrote its social. You can just meet people easily that way, have a good time doing it. And I met a lot of really, really great people, really big energy people, really big insurance folks. And then also the biggest water well driller in the state of Texas. And so he and I just got to talking, he told me about his industry, drilling. And then additionally about this idea he had to handle regulatory compliance for his current customers. And so I asked, what does that mean? What does regulatory compliance for groundwater wells mean? And why are there regulations around groundwater well consumption? Turns out that most of the aquifers west of the Mississippi are either totally depleted or are in a state of managed depletion. Totally depleted meaning they don't pump water, maybe they pump sand and you can't irrigate with them. They'll destroy all your pipes if you're trying to use that water for urban or suburban use. In the case of the managed depletion of some aquifers, were 30 to 60 years away from a dust bowl squared event that will destroy most all hospitable land in the American West, most all agriculture in the American West. All of the ecology is dependent on water. So the Colorado River watershed, most of the American river, other places like that. The regulatory response to this depletion of aquifers has been to dictate on a state and municipal level how much water people are permitted to consume. The penalties that they incur if they go over their allocation of water and then how frequently they have to report on their consumption. So one angle there is penalties aside, we just want accurate accounting of what's coming out of our aquifers. We don't have any clue right now. They're only just starting to install meters in the American West on these wells. Now on the one hand, dude's rock, we should have an abundance mindset. We shouldn't be concerned about how much we're consuming. On the other hand, and this is an important point to make, even if we should have an abundance mindset, being good stewards of our resources, I think is like our God-given duty. And so knowing what we're consuming so that we can use it more efficiently and then figure out how much more rain we need to make, that's important. All that to say, he had the idea to start this consultancy, drive a guy out in a truck to a water well in the middle of a field that read the analog flow meter on it, fill out a report by hand and submit it. We got to talking about tech, Berkeley, all this kind of stuff. And we concluded that this was an automatable problem. I was the Berkeley kid. I had the tech expertise to write up some code. He knew of some vendors of IoT, LTE endpoints and ultrasonic flow meters. And so we came together after talking about this for a couple of months to start Teraseco, which was the company that automated the regulatory compliance by using those IoT endpoints flow meters and then a bunch of back-end software that I wrote. So that's how we started the company. After we ended up doing sufficiently well, I dropped out a college for it, and we did we did solid. However, towards like my last year there, I originally didn't have much in the way of entrepreneurial aspiration. Like I sort of fell into making this company. I did some things in high school that I think were perhaps precursors and indicative of it, but I certainly wasn't an entrepreneur in search of a problem or with a solution that I wanted to apply to a problem. It was very much circumstance-driven. And so I wasn't aware of tech. I didn't have any aspirations of raising venture or scaling a business extremely quickly, but then my last year I'd become aware of it. I went to a couple LA Tech Week events. I met a bunch of people in tech, and I realized that you could do hyper growth. You could scale a company extremely quickly and provide a lot of good and value to a lot of people. And we just didn't have the opportunity to do that at Teraseco. It was sort of an unconventional business. It was sort of an unconventional founding team. It didn't really pattern match to VCs very well. And so we were constrained with how many meters we could buy. So we had this really spiky, semi-linear growth curve. And I wanted to, one, blow the top off any business that I was building at that point. And something that could scale. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And two, like I wanted to have a higher impact immediately. And part of that came from having been in water for like two, three years, knowing that we needed to increase the water supply or the American West would collapse and being anxious about the fact that what I was working on was only contributing towards the slowing of the decay of the American West. And so I, one, had the financial motivation to try to build something as big as possible, as soon as possible. But two, had the sort of existential angst about not being able to live in Los Angeles and seeing this dust bowl 2.0 event coming and wanting to work on increasing water supply. So that's ultimately why I sold my interest in the business. So you said that you were studying it basically for like two or three years, you were studying the water industry. What initially turned you on to the water industry and what was like the best story, the thing that you learned about through studying this industry that no one knows about? It's a good question. So it was starting this company that led me to being client towards water at all, right? I was a physics guy, maybe a data science guy, maybe like a brain computer interface guy before this. I did a little bit of work with the guys that ended up starting Lash Bio. We were thinking about starting a company of sorts together as well. Great dudes in SF that you should probably meet at some point. But it was not inclined towards water at that point. It's water at that point in my life at all. Now get into some retrospective in a sec. But why I was into it was simply because every day I would read more about these problems than I would talk to my co-founder more about these problems that nobody else seemed to be thinking about, right? We talk about CO2 all the time. We talk about energy all the time. We talk about endangered species all the time and defense a lot now. Nobody is talking about water and nobody's considering that water is decreasing in supply in the American West. And lots of regions all over the globe for that matter. But we just take for granted that because we're a developed country, we have as much water as we could possibly need. But it's a scarce resource for now. And the fact that nobody else was talking about water supply sort of gave me the inclination. Saiyan Vanister talks about how when everybody else disagrees with her on something or everybody else is ignoring something that she cares about, it's like a great bull signal for her to pursue it. The fact that nobody else was talking about this really concerned and excited me. So it was like I have found some true alpha in the world. That's what led me down the path just to reading random regulatory documents on groundwater consumption and say the Central Valley. And boy oh boy, there are perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions of pages of regulatory documents on water in the Central Valley, groundwater specifically, impressive sum. Now what I learned that was something most people didn't know or don't know, I think one thing, and maybe you can get this from talking to like Chris Parrott Hadrian or some other industries that are trying to, or some other companies that are trying to bring their industries up into the 21st or 22nd century is, there is just incredible opportunity out there because most things are being done the way they always have been done. I met guys that are called witchers, which basically walk around a property, they're hired by the property owner with a divining rod to tap the ground to figure out where the water is. Here's the crazy thing, most farmers swear by them. Most farmers swear by them. So perhaps there's something mystical about how they work, but there's like no sophisticated hydrology done on where people drill wells. There's the same equipment and rigs that have been used for the last more or last hundred years for drilling the wells. The pumps largely the same efficiencies over the last 50 years. The guys doing the operations are older aging out. They're not young, innovative types largely. My biggest takeaway was about sort of market inefficiency in general, like the market is not efficient. Things generally speaking are full of opportunity just because nobody's bothering to think about how to change it. That's extremely true in the water well drilling industry, but is applicable beyond that. Now, something else that I think I learned that was interesting was that there's 310 million acre feet of brackish groundwater aquifers in the American West, and so to context set, what is an acre foot? Very obscure imperial measurement. If you cover an acre of water, one foot deep in water, it's about 325,000 gallons, 325, 851 gallons, I believe. There's 310 million acre feet of this brackish groundwater to context set. Again, California, for all of its environmental, agricultural, urban and suburban use, is about 39 million acre feet. So there's over 10 times more water available in the ground that we've never tapped into before because it's too salient to irrigate with or it'll corrode typical pipes. There is no shortage of water. If only somebody figures out what incarnation we can do with brine from desalinating it. That was a huge thing to find out because one, there's just water sitting under our feet we've never tapped into, and we could use that to alleviate a lot of our concerns. But two, the fact that it is sitting under our feet rather than being in the ocean is a really big deal because one of the biggest costs associated with large-scale desal projects is the conveyance and for structure to get it from point A to point B. If you're in Nevada, you can't build a desal rig, right? You can't get water from the Pacific all the way inland. It's just too expensive to pump water over the sierra's, but there's so much water right beneath you. If you could tap into that, which I think somebody totally should, and if you could use the brine afterwards that's super corrosive right now, nobody knows what to do with it. Then you could increase the American water supply, many orders of magnitude. That was something fascinating to learn about because again, market and efficiency, nobody's doing that, somebody should. Yeah. So I think Bezos, in like 1994, he comes across this stat that says the internet is growing at 2300% a year and this causes him to decide to start Amazon. And I was listening to a podcast that you did where you said you came across a paper, I think it's called the snowy project where you said you would not have done, you would not have tried to build a raidenmaker without reading this paper. And so it kind of reminded me of that. What is the snowy project? Why did it have that impact? Yeah, yeah. So when I was looking at what I was going to do next after Terraceco, I knew that it had to be in water and specifically water production because not enough water is being produced. I found brackish groundwater desalination but there's just huge capital constraints associated. You have to figure out what to do with brine or how to stop producing brine, really difficult problems to solve. And the unit economics of it still don't shake out so spectacularly afterwards because of how much you have to invest in a small diesel rig. So I started looking into other technologies, pretty exhaustive search of atmosphere water vapor condensation, right? Like a lot of what Israel does, a lot of what forward deployed military bases do is they just take water vapor out of the air, they condense it, and then turn that into drinkable water or water for whatever portable use you desire. The problem with that is if you do it at scale, so if you're sucking all the water vapor out of the air and condensing it, you can actually increase the evapotranspiration rate, meaning the rate at which water evaporates and is emitted out of plants. And so you'll increase the rate of erudification even if you're producing more water. So I looked into that trying to solve like the agricultural scale water issues. That was a bad idea. Nobody should do that and like military bases maybe but like not for large scale production. kept looking into different technologies because I was like we have to produce more water if we're gonna keep the American West habitable. And then I found cloud seeding, right? Just online rabbit holes reading about stuff. And immediately I wanted it to be real, right? It was one of these 60s Renaissance technologies that's fallen away. It's about controlling the weather, right? This is like a very type one civilization a undiscussed vector for human civilization and growth. But if you Google cloud seeding online, it is just burdened with exhaustive and gargantuan amounts of scientific criticism that's appropriately do, right? Like just because the technology would be cool doesn't mean that we should invest in it because it would be cool and there's like no path forward with it like fusion or something. Although it's possible, although it's possible, it's just that's a different conversation. What excited me about cloud seeding was that there was something called the Weather Modification Association and they have a conference every year and they're doing a lot of research. And so I decided, okay, even though there's all of these critics online, some of which are academic, some of which are just journalists, I should do my due diligence and make sure that this technology isn't real before starting a business in it because gosh, do I want it to be real? And the reason why it's criticized is attribution. We figured out in like the 40s, 50s, 60s how particular minerals can interact with watering cloud to freeze them and then in a cloud chamber in a simulated cloud, how freezing that water would result in it precipitating down to the bottom of the tank. So we understand at some level how the microphysics work. But clouds, real clouds, real weather systems are way more dynamic and unpredictable and chaotic than a controlled cloud chamber. And so when you emit this mineral, silver iodide is what's conventionally used into a cloud even though we know what should happen, proving what does happen was impossible. So you could take a plane, fly through, emit some silver iodide and you should see precipitation. Now that said, our meteorological models and our sensing has been atrocious in the past. So like in many cases, nothing should happen. But let's say you take a face value that the microphysics work. Proving that you induce precipitation at all, very hard to do like with rain gauges that's a really crude measurement. Rain gauges are just little like sticks in the ground that measure how much water's falling. That's not statistically significant. The system's too chaotic. There's no control variables. That's not a proof, a sufficient proof. And then even if you did induce precipitation, proving one that you induce precipitation that would not have otherwise occurred elsewhere. So like proving that it's positive some, nobody could do that. And then two, proving that you induce more precipitation than what would have naturally occurred in the cloud, that was also impossible. Because maybe you sprayed your stuff, but it just so happened to coincide with a natural rain event. So attributing precipitation to human intervention was totally undone, or de facto undone in the 60, 70s, 80s, 90s when this technology was ripping. But I went to the Weather Modification Association Conference for the sake of investigating whether anybody had solved that problem, whether there was any cool innovation in the space, and what the snowy project researchers hypothesized was, if you have really high power, high resolution radar, and you track the flight path of your plane, in our case, drone, what you should see, if it's working, is an increase in reflectivity on the radar, indicative of one, the phase change of super-cooled liquid water in the cloud to ice, like if you're actually freezing it, and then precipitation thereafter, you should be able to track the band of rain falling down, or snow falling down. And through 2017 through 2021, when they conducted the experiment and did all the analysis on it, they validated their hypothesis. So you can see these tracks of precipitation in this zigzag pattern where the plane flow. And as soon as I saw the animation of those tracks, of those radar returns, I was like, we gotta do that. We gotta do it. Yeah, it works, it actually works. We have to do it. And so immediately after I just read Michael Gibson, he's one of the GPs at 1517, I just read his book, and at the back of the book, there's like an appendix that says 100 technologies to build a future, and one of them is cloud-seating weather modification. So I DMed Michael on Twitter, and I was like, hey, hey, I figured it out. I'm at the Weather Mod conference. I loved your book, and he was like, all right, this kid seems like a bit of a skits, but I'll give him a shot. And we talked the last day of the Weather Modification Association conference, and he gave me a shot. He gave me a shot. We did our pre-seed with 1517, and that's when Rainmaker became a real company. Can you give me a, so I really love Elon's idea of an idiot index for the inefficiency of turning atoms into a product, or whatever? And I think that the idiot index for this business is probably quite high. And can you give me an overview of the history of what was originally used for cloud-seating, and then the gradual technology change or evolution, and then where the future looks like? There's been almost no gradual technology change. It's been almost no technology change. Again, getting into this thing about water well drilling, just market inefficiency, man. I think that people in tech and particularly venture capitalists really like to have a clean answer to the question, why now? What's different about today than yesterday that justifies building a company and building a technology stack? And that's an important question in some respects, no doubt. And there are a lot of conditions that justify a cloud-seating startup's existence now that did in the past. For example, the snowy project validating that it works. For example, the unprecedented water scarcity that we're suffering from and that's going to get worse on the current trajectory, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, drone technology being ubiquitous. The problem is, though, it's actually not a question of why now? It's a question of who's willing to do it. The biggest leaps forward, we talked about this a couple of nights ago. The biggest leaps forward in civilization and in technology are just from one guy saying, I'm going to do it. I'm going to work until my fingernails fall off and my hands bleed. And I'm not quite, I don't know, look, my fingernails aren't bleeding, so I'm clearly not working hard enough yet. But it's just a question of, are you the guy to build the company? And I think a lot of people probably need to think long and hard about what about their character would make them the guy. Are you relentless, so to speak? And if you're not, how do you become relentless? Go work out more, probably. Go pray and journal and reflect on how to become the person that you're meant to be. Now, all this said, what are the technologies that are historically used in cloud seating? Meteorology, I have found out since starting Rainmaker, is largely an art rather than not to disparage it. There's some spectacular science that goes on in meteorology. But operational forecasting is kind of looking at plots and like guessing where clouds are going to go and where precipitation is going to occur just by like different lines on a screen. It's not really quantitative. It's kind of like a way of doing science in operational situations at least. So the first problem is diagnosis and validation. How do you decide when to see to cloud? How do you prove that a cloud precipitated more because of your intervention? Right now, there's some weather models that are used. There's some radar based observations that are interpreted qualitatively. That's not good, because you can't really discern whether an opportunity is seatable from such qualitative human in the loop decision-making. So it's some modeling at some radar, but really nothing sophisticated. Then the other problem is validation. Like I said before, rain gauges, snow gauges. You basically have a bunch of sticks all over the ground in your area of interest and then in a control area in like a valley over there where you're not cloud-seating. And you just measure how much precipitation fell. But like maybe five times more precipitation will fall in the control region just because the conditions of the cloud are far better, you'll get way more water vapor convected up and then precipitated down in that region. So proving that you produce more where you seated with physical evidence is really important and nobody's done that or very few people have done that. It's basically just snowy researchers, some people, universities in Switzerland. So the first big problem is the sensing. The diagnosis and validation stack is pretty poor. The next problem is the way in which you deliver the nucleation agent, the mineral two clouds. Option one, historically is ground-based generators, which is basically like a bonfire that emits a smoke signal of your nucleation agent and you hope enough of it gets five, 10, 15,000 feet up into the cloud just through your plume of smoke. Surprise, you don't need to do much modeling to say that's a horrifically inefficient way of delivering your nucleation agent to cloud. The alternative is, and those are sort of like artifacts of when we thought it would be a lot easier to modify the weather in the 60s because everybody was super optimistic. The alternative is planes. You can fly a plane into clouds, spray, silver iodide out via flares, burn flares. The problem with planes is one, like they're super expensive to have on call 24, 7, 3, 6, 5. So if you want to hit every seatable opportunity, you just can't justify the cost if you're a small meanest palli, certainly not if you're a farm, almost definitely not if you're a ski resort. And so that's kept the market really small in the past and has prevented clouds from growing. The other problem with planes is it's super dangerous to fly through these clouds. The best clouds for seating have the highest density of sub-zero liquid water. Meaning if you fly through it, you will accrete ice onto your wings and maybe fall out of the sky. Like commercial airliners specifically avoid these conditions. So the delivery mechanisms are pretty inefficient. So it's the sensing that's bad. It's the delivery mechanisms that don't make sense. The dispersion doesn't make sense. Conventionally people use flares. Why would you use flares to spray silver iodide out? Well, to keep the particles suspended in the cloud for a really long time, you need them to be, you know, at the scale of one micron give or take, maybe smaller than that. And if you burn them, you can aerosolize them into smoke pretty well in small forms. The problems with flares are one, 95 plus percent of the mass in flares that are currently developed are the metal casing and the pyrotechnic. So the ratio of the efficiency, so the ratio of nucleation agent to total payload mass is terrible. You need hundreds of flares or dozens of flares at the very least to get any yield. That's not good. And then also, you know, you're emitting heat into the cloud when you're burning something in it. That makes it less efficient. Yeah, exactly. Which also makes it less efficient. So that's not useful. And the last thing is the nucleation agents. Silver iodide again is what's been used for the last 70 years because we know that it works. Problems with silver iodide are it's literally silver. So you're spraying jewelry into clouds to make it rain. That's expensive. And then the other thing is it only works at negative six degrees Celsius. And so in certain regions, excuse me, in the Rockies, for example, you get sub-zero clouds with liquid water in them sometimes, right, like maybe 30 times a year, generally a little less. But if you can develop a compound that is capable of nucleating ice at higher temperatures, say negative two Celsius, negative one Celsius, then you're not constrained just to say October through February. And you're not constrained just to like the Sierra mountains and the Rocky mountains where you have these cloud conditions that are really cold. You could extend your seasonal and geographic operability to the full continental US, like even in Arizona, even in New Mexico, even in like the high deserts there. And then also you could widen the seedable season from like September to May instead of just that short window where you have exceptionally cold clouds. And so that's the full stack of problems. It's the sensing that's no good, it's the delivery mechanism, it's the dispersion mechanism, and then it's the nucleation agents. And can you actually explain what the process, like what does an ice nucleation agent do? Yeah, totally. That's not work, totally. It's almost black magic. So the conventional wisdom's the following. And I think that we need to do a lot more material science research to get like extremely precise robust mechanistic explanations, but silver iodide, what does it work? There's two primary material components that make it good at freezing water in the cloud. So first thing to understand is water doesn't freeze at zero degrees Celsius. It turns out it takes almost an infinite amount of time for water to freeze at zero degrees Celsius at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It only instantaneously freezes at negative 38 degrees Celsius, which is really cold. You have this sort of decay curve that explains how over time at given temperatures, how long it takes for water to freeze. So you can have certain conditions in cloud where more water is being convicted up into it than can be frozen at that temperature. So you have, you know, water at negative seven degrees Celsius liquid water. If you introduce an air saw into the cloud that has say a crystalline structure that's almost identical to ice, then you get really, really good hydrogen bond formation on the surface of that crystal. And the water molecules can aggregate freeze all around that air saw. Because of its crystalline structure being almost identical, it's really easy for the water molecules to construct more ice crystal on top of it. And then grow into sufficiently large ice crystal such that they fall, they're heavy enough to fall. So it's the crystalline structure that's pretty critical to water binding onto it, but not all crystals that are almost identical perform well, which gets into the second material property that's important. You're sort of in whistle ride at this Goldilocks zone of hydrophobicity, meaning if something, if a material is really hydrophobic, water just like won't bind onto it, right? It won't adhere to it. But if you're super, super hydrophilic, you can get so much liquid water on the surface of the aerosol and we're talking like molecular scale dynamics here. You can get so much liquid water on the surface that the first contact angle of frozen ice, the first water molecule can't push up all of the water above it because it's too dense on the surface and so it can't even freeze very well. So it's primarily those two things, it's the crystalline structure and the unique hydrophobicity of silver iodide that makes it capable of freezing water and cloud into big enough heavy enough ice crystals, still pretty small, that then fall either a snow or rain. Okay, the one thing I noticed is, it seems like the government of El Segundo is kind of backing you guys and we're not like backing, but they want you to succeed. That's a, I mean, that shouldn't be rare, but it seems rare. It sounds like you and the other tech founders down here seem to really like the government. What makes El Segundo special in that way? Yeah, it's the government work. Salute to the government of El Segundo. They have been more helpful than I could have possibly imagined. So Drew Boyle is the mayor. Chris Pimentel is the mayor of Pro Tem. George, I don't remember his last name is the fire chief. All great people. They have been super supportive with organizing events for us with helping us understand the regulatory framework around building use with bringing other capital and resources into the city. I think it's, I think it's two things. One, the legacy of El Segundo is one that is spectacularly innovative and spectacularly industrial. So we have LAX in the north, we have the primes just to the east, we have the biggest in one of the best water treatment plants in the country, the Hyperion Water Treatment Plant, just to the west, then to the south, obviously, El Segundo, the second standard oil refinery, just a total glut of talent in industry. And that legacy, like SpaceX being founded here, it has made the community and the government in particular appreciative of the value of new technology in industry. So there's a longstanding good relationship between the city and industry. But then also, like, we met Drew, the mayor, the dozen of us fellows that have startups here, more now, yes. And he was just elated to see the energy of all of these young guys building cool companies. And so I think the lesson to be learned is unlike the big tech companies from the 2000s and 2010s, government shouldn't and doesn't have to be an adversary. If you can provide jobs, if you can provide technology that's gonna make the city better and the community's better, if you can have a net positive impact on the city, rather than inclining yourself towards an adversarial one, where it's like, well, we just need to fight regulators. You can work alongside them. And people generally want everybody to prosper, I would say, right? Most people can intuit how that's a good thing. And so the mayor's office and the city here has been great at intuiting that and acting out that principle. Yeah, I hope that the people in San Francisco kind of gradually shift towards the El Secondo vibe. It's inevitable, dude. It's inevitable. We're going to win. We're going to make California what it's meant to be. I found a book last night called California, the Great Exception. This state has the capacity, and to some extent still is meeting the capacity of the greatest state in the union, perhaps the greatest region on the planet because we have the most natural beauty, almost infinite natural resources. We have the legacy of all the great tech that was built in the Valley and in LA. It's just a matter again of will. Are we willing to work to make it more hospitable for business? And are we willing to work to ensure that the agriculture and the ecosystems that we're relying on in the state can persist? So yes, you have to be of the disposition that it is inevitable that we will make San Francisco better too. Yeah. One thing I really like about you that I haven't, I haven't noticed a whole lot of founders do this, but you are constantly reiterating your mission. And you actually talked about how Steve Jobs did this. Elon is constantly doing it to a point where it's almost hard to listen to it. Like I love his interviews, but it's hard to listen to it because it's the same interview again and again, same with Brian Chesky. Why is reiterating the mission so important? And what's the impact? Yeah, you know, I talked to you about this. Talk to some other people about this. If you're laying brick to build a cathedral and the reason, the raison d'etre that you have for living, for working, for building that cathedral is just to build a cathedral. You're not gonna be as zealous in your work, right? Like if it's not a religious conviction that you have motivating you, if it's not a transcendent, if it's not a transcendent mission that you have, ah, you know, it's a material question. Like maybe the bricks a little bit off, maybe the nucleation agent research we do isn't super precise, but whatever, right? Like we're just, we're building a thing. If you to your team into the world can articulate the fact that like you are trying to bring down heaven to earth, you will get zealots. Like you yourself will become a zealot for your cause and your team and people that wanna join your team will feel similarly and they'll be willing to burn them in night oil, they'll be willing to think in their free time. Like I have one of my engineers, he has dreams about how to build new hardware for us. Like perhaps implanted in him from his prayer book on the place of, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. Reiterating the mission so that, you know, you understand and everybody around you understands that what you're doing is not for the sake of, you know, building a billion dollar business or even a trillion dollar business. It's for the sake of doing something quasi-divine or adjacent to divine. That gives you a sort of fear of God and a love of the world that can get you to, what's the expression like two glass and staring to the abyss? Yeah, yeah, the start-ups, building a start-up was like two in class and staring to the abyss. I think that's originally from like Billy or something, like Elon's friend, whatever. Yeah, Steve Jobs talked about only hiring A players because A player is only A wanna work with A players, B players will hire C players, et cetera. You do seem to have only A players on your team, but not only that, they also seem to really give a shit about what you're doing here versus anything else. Like I talked, I think I talked with Jackson for a few hours and he is completely convinced that this is going to be a huge company and what you're doing here is extremely important. And I think that's really powerful that you have employees like that. How do you think about hiring so that you don't dilute your culture over time? First thing that I'll reiterate is my team, the team at Rainmaker is small as we are, seven people. Perhaps the most dense, stupid people. The talent density of my team and the dedication of this team has exceeded my expectations every day for the last two months since we moved into this lab. And the progress that we've made because of them blows me away every day. Like I have a tech roadmap for the company, right? Yeah. And like I'll start every day realizing that the tech map has been condensed and accelerated and then not only that, but like new things have been added to it that I've sort of had as like a peripheral idea or that I haven't thought of at all that is already being built, like the cloud chamber design that we're doing, like the wind tunnel design that we're doing, totally novel ideas, like new modeling capabilities and new instrumentation like the eye spectrometer that we have right here. It is spectacular to see these people work and I'm inordinately grateful to them. Really, really. Like Caitlin, Dave, Jackson, Schultz, Harry. Oh yeah, Darian and we just hired like really, really impressive people. We have a couple interns coming this summer that I'm super excited to work with. So like it's spectacular to see them work and one of my friends, forget who it was, one of my friends that an important principle is like everyone being a recruiter. If you hire a players from the jump and they only wanna work with a players, as you said and they have the network from the experience that they have in the past, be it in school or in industry or in academia, they will seek out their best friends, their most esteemed colleagues to integrate them into this crazy culture that we have. That notion of everybody being a recruiter, I think at the end of the day, I probably have to do more recruiting than everybody else. But like I am given great candidate and bound from my team as it stands. And so that's really, really cool to see. How then further to dilute that? Like one example that I can give on how to filter for zeal is we're interviewing all these people that I met on X. And some of them for our mech e-roll right now. Some of them just designed like this entire atomizer test stand right there. So there's like a pump pressure vessel way to measure differential pressure with two transducers there. And then we can iterate on different nozzle designs to spray the nucleation agent out. Some of these people that I'm talking to just without any prompting are willing to build systems like this. And we give them a little bit of like, here's how we're thinking about these problems. And then they'll just text me. They start all over. Yeah, yeah, that's wild. And then some people, for example, will give them some sort of prompt on how to think about the problems that we're solving. And then we'll ask to get on the phone with them and they'll say like, oh, I'm at a super bowl party. And it's like, and what do you mean? So you can sort of infer whether someone's going to be capable of burning the midnight oil and working for this transcendent mission just based on whether they're self-starting themselves. I think that to some extent, you can't ask people to do tons of work for you. You can't ask people to do work for you that's uncompensated, right? But like, if people because of their own curiosity and zeal are building something either conceptually or literally before they even start work here, that's a great indicator that they'll be able to perform and be autonomous into the future. I don't think if there's anything else that's like an obvious way to filter for people bench squat deadlift numbers for those able. That's a good thing. This is actually kind of interesting. The only other company that I've ever really heard talk about fitness is Zimada, which is a food delivery company in India. And they actually have their stock-based comp based on like, it's somewhat weighted to fitness. Oh, yeah. We're working out because they just think that if you work out, you're going to perform better. Yeah. So you guys are extremely good at iterating and making things better quickly, rapid iteration. You did, I believe, 300 different tests on, was it like the agent or the like? So we have a little over 300 candidate agents that we're going to be testing over the next two quarters. We've done a couple dozen iterations of the atomizer the way we're dispersing the nucleation agent. We've made probably dozens of iterations on our atmospheric modeling already. Probably, I guess, probably almost coming up on 100 now. I think we've done like 61. So yeah, we iterate a lot for sure. But how do you like create a culture of just like getting things done? Because you talked about preparing versus actually action and how do you get people to take more action blowing up your thumb is one of those. Maybe, maybe, prepare a little bit more, but there is some perfect zone in there. Totally. Totally, that. Jeff Bezos, king that he is and admirer that I am. He talks about how there are unalterable decisions you can make and unalterable decisions you can make correctable ones, not correctable ones. And those like really grand strategic questions maybe you should prepare more for and think about more deeply. But the vast majority of decisions you can correct immediately. And so when it comes down to modeling versus experimentation, both in a scientific sense and also in like a practical product design, sales sense, hiring sense, corporate culture, instilling sense, we'll have conversations that are very behind the sky about how one mode of dispersion will be performance or non-performance because of say the moisture that gets into the tank of our atomizer beforehand. And what I've aired on the side of in all of these decisions is just, well, let's test it. Let's just test it and find out. Let's just not muse over or do any CFD modeling for Pete's sake about whether this system will perform in the way that we suspect. And at some point, we'll have to do more modeling like that for more complex systems. But the answer should always be have a bunch of good ideas, test them immediately, get real-world feedback. Because if you're lost in the sauce of whiteboard math or programmatic modeling, you're not getting real-world feedback. And so in the same way that you can game out a pitch to a customer beforehand. And great, you should do that. There was just this founder's podcast episode on the art dealer, what was his name? I forget. I forgot his name too. He sent it to them. D, I think, yeah. Yeah, anyway. Yeah. You can game out all these situations. And to some extent, it's valuable to do so. But if you just pitch 100 customers instead, or if you just pitch 100 VCs, or if you just design 100 atomizers, you'll get way more intuitive understanding of what's breaking, what's really functional. I have this friend, Phil Aaronstein. His whole company is about taking CAD files and turning them into work instructions so that you can automate the generation of assembly of work instructions. So technicians on the shop floor that are building things know how to build them more quickly. When you have a really large delta between, say, design and manufacturability, which you can end up doing if you're stuck in CAD land or stuck in modeling land, you don't get that real-world feedback, which is integral to decision-making. And so I think that maybe there's some companies that do a really good job of just narrowly and steadily adjusting their trajectory, whereas we're oscillating really hard. But I think that because of the speed of those oscillations, we're converging on the right solution way, way faster. Yeah, how do you deal with, you had this tweet a few days ago where you said, I love winning. And I know that's kind of funny, but I've heard too many people talk about it, where Mr. Beast, he's all about, I love winning. When you say that, what do you mean? And then also, how do you deal with failure and setbacks on the other side? Yeah. I'll start with the failure question. I've told everybody on my team that I love and we all have to love the taste of blood in our mouth. If you are a boxer that's afraid of getting punched, you're not going to open up, you're not going to take any swings, you got to be willing to get punched in the head. And you shouldn't want to get punched in the head. But if you are the disposition that like failure is scary, one thing that I think you're failing to account for is there is so much more opportunity in the world and in just one company space to fail. And then if you can get back up and iterate and learn from it, then you're going to be great. You can fail catastrophically. We were flying our drone. We launched our drone a couple of weeks ago and in front of a bunch of friends of mine crashed it immediately. And it was like, hell yeah, we learned. We had a center of gravity issue just a run. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you can dispose yourself towards liking the sensation of, I try to love, and I think to some extent, I succeed in loving every experience that I'm privileged to have. And so by loving is sort of like a jock of willing good thing, and a lot of people make fun of that because it's like, my wife just died. Good, now you're going to be more emotionally robust or something like this. And obviously failure is not as good as winning, but if you fall in love with the sensation of failure for the sake of learning and for the sake of iterating and for the sake of becoming stronger, great. That's what I try to do myself. And that's what our team tries to do in general. And then like winning, your question was like, what does it mean to love winning and what does it mean to win? Yeah, I almost kind of feel like with you, and I guess with maybe A players, I feel like they're more willing to lose short-term with the long-term vision in mind, right? Totally. So that's kind of what you're thinking about. You're like, OK, I'll eat shit too. Chew glass staring at the abyss. Oh, we've got this vision and we're executing faster than anyone else can. Oh, yeah, yeah, totally, totally. I mean, again, getting back to the tech road map acceleration and the deployment acceleration, even on the short-term, the wins have been disorienting, which is great. And we're trying to bank up all of the good sentiment from that should times which inevitably they will become really dark and difficult. But I think that this works in the gym, for example, where every successive personal record should be exhilarating to you because it's not just like, again, this gets back to the cathedral thing. It's not just that you put more weight up. It's that you physically and mentally and spiritually are stronger, more capable, individual after the fact. And you have to understand that every win is a brick laid on the stairway to heaven rather than just a material gain. And so understanding wins in that context make them so much more significant no matter how small they are. And then in the long term, the long term vision is new Jerusalem. It's a world that's closer to heaven on Earth than not. And so for my love of others, for my love of the world, for my love of God, winning is one mode in which we can worship. And so that's how I think about winning. I'm kind of interested in this idea of, we talked about this a little bit, where there's these people that create step changes for humanity. And I would consider, I think you'd call them like great men. What does it mean to be a great man? How do we make more of them? An age-old inquiry. My hunch is that you give more examples, like Elon's a great person and it inspires those. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the difficult thing is it seems as though frequently severe hardship is like a precondition. And you don't necessarily want artificially induced severe hardship. You don't want genuinely induced severe hardship. I think what it means is what it means, I think, actually best articulated is to have people that make the decision to bury your cross. And what that means in the Christian sense is like, OK, Christ, our savior, perfect man that he was, despite being perfect, was punished, humiliated, tortured. And nevertheless, took this huge, like a literal crucifix, big, big wooden structure, and carried it up a mountain to be sacrificed on. Any Christian that supposes themselves to be capable of or doing a good job at burying their own cross is to self aggrandizing. I fail every day. And I fail in catastrophic ways that I prayerfully repent for. But if you can contextualize the work that you're doing in that self-sacrificial context, if you can say like, I choose to for the sake of my love of others in the world, pick up the biggest, heaviest weight, the most burdensome weight that I can. And I will do that again for the sake of others and for the sake of the world. I think that you will become greater. I think that you'll fulfill more of your divine image within you. And so to be great, I think, means chewing glass during the abyss, not for the sake of creating shareholder value, but for the sake of lovingly sacrificing for the world. And if you can internalize that and if you can pray about that, if you can pray about what it means to pick up the heaviest weight and the most responsibility you possibly can to say, like, save the world, that perhaps will catalyze greatness within individuals. Very bad at doing that. And I hope to get better. How do you make more people like that go to church? Probably go to church. Repent and believe in Jesus Christ as our savior. That's probably a good starting place. Beyond that, yeah, I think that there's like the really deep theological motivation, and then I think there's the practical things. Go to church, go to the gym, find other extremely aspirational people to surround yourself with very tried advice. People have said it before, but it's probably we're saying again, because I had to hear it a thousand times before I made any moves towards doing it. That's, I think, how you produce more people like that. And provide examples. Sure, sure. Like the fact that Elon is someone that we can look to, the fact that Bezos is someone that we can look to, Palmer Lucky, those examples, I think, have inspired you and me and other generations Warren Buffett, right? Yeah. Getting tapped into those folks and mentorship too. I think Gen Z is really bad at finding mentors and receiving mentorships. It seems like the entire, like, even like, apprenticeships have kind of gone out. They just don't really happen anymore. And I kind of feel like this is a very, getting your hands dirty and building in a place like this with, like, internships or whatever. They're going to learn so much more in three months or whatever than you could possibly expect to learn in years at most companies. I say this every week and every, every month feels like a thousand years here. And if you, I mean, what's crazy to me is that, like, with you guys, you set this audacious roadmap or goals what you want to accomplish. And suddenly you're accomplishing it in less time. And with Elon, I know that, you know, he'll set this audacious goal. And then when people start hitting targets, he'll just, like, increase. He'll say, this is the new baseline. And then we'll just increase the difficulty and tell, you know, we can't do it anymore, which is awesome. So who, like, you know, thinking about your biggest influences, you set in high school, you weren't very, like, you did a few things that were entrepreneurial, but you didn't really have entrepreneurial aspirations. Who, who have been the people that have, like, influenced you the most? You know, for me, it's, you know, Buffett, Charlie Munger, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs. And, like, what have you learned from them? Jordan Peterson. I owe my life, too. Hadn't it been for him, I don't think I'd have ever become Christian for one. I don't think I'd have ever adopted a disposition of, like, radical ownership and responsibility. He taught me that there is meaning and objectivity in the world that can justify great efforts, or even day-to-day life. So his biblical lecture series, he's not really a Christian, even, right? Or I wouldn't say, I don't believe that he claims to be Christian himself. His influence has been integral on me. No question. More than that, you know, my mom is French. I read, you know, a few biographies of Napoleon. I think that his relentlessness, his obsession, his speed, as well, has been very influential, and also his aspirations, right? Like, this expression I really don't like is, like, shoot for the moon, and if you end up amongst the stars anyway, then, like, that's like a good outcome, or however it goes. That actually doesn't make any sense on, like, a super logistical level, like, I mean, the stars are higher than the moon, so that would actually be a better outcome. So it should be like, shoot for the stars, and if you end up on the moon, anyway, like, that level of ambition, I think, is something that's important to internalize. I'll also say, and this is a funny one, the video game Spore was very influential on me. What's that? So it's this game where, I think it was like released in 2007 or eight or nine, and you start off as a eukaryotic cell in the ocean of some planet, right? And then, you gradually evolve, you become a fish, then you become a land mammal, or a ptillion, then you become like a tribal group of people competing with other tribes, then, like, industrial civilization, and then eventually a space-faring civilization. One of the feature of the game that I loved so much, 80% of the game is not space-faring. I ended up liking the space-faring phase most, no surprise. But then it wasn't like the intergalactic discovery. It wasn't the colonization of new worlds. It wasn't the trade or warfare or online galactic scales that was most interesting. This is one of my favorite things to reflect on. It was terraforming planets that I would spend hours per week engaged in, because what you would do is you'd go to a planet, you'd have to either adjust the magnetic field of the planet or produce these atmospheric generators to make the preconditions for the initial plant life to survive, and then you could put different species there. I would make trades while playing that game between, I could save one planet from being invaded by some enemy empire, or there was, like, an infection on one of the species in one of my planets that would reduce, like the trophic potential or trophic level of the planet. If I didn't go cure the disease and so I'd go there, and so it's a funny thing to look back on there. It's not role models or mentors, but something that I think was sort of a seed of influence on my inclination to start a terraforming company. That was interesting, too. Yeah, it's fascinating to think like what I love is learning about the stories of the people that went on to start great companies, and then you look at what were they doing in their teenage years and stuff like that. I talked with Jackson, and I asked him, Jackson is one of the people that works here, and I talked with him and I asked him, what is a question that I should ask you? And he said, ask him about the right stuff, like what is the right stuff in the context of a founder or a very early, you know, before 10 people start up employee? So inspired by the Tom Wolf book, the right stuff, right, on the early astronauts and test pilots. Some of it is almost like, definitionally, inarticulable. But the context from the book is, you know, you have these really early test pilots, piloting never before flown machines that were at the absolute cutting edge of mechanical design, of fluid design, of propulsion. And you'd have horrible survivorship rates, right? Like many, many pilots would blow up and die in one way or the other and be charred to death. But every single time the other test pilots, you know, got together, saying to him, mourn the loss of one of their brothers and arms, it wasn't that there was a mechanical failure that caused those guys to die and that it was like the engineers problem and the result of bad manufacturing. It wasn't some peculiar, you know, weather conditions that led it to happen. It wasn't that the lieutenants and the, you know, commanders of their group that were giving them totally inoperable and reasonable flight parameters that they had to meet. It was that the pilots didn't have the right stuff, right? You know, like no matter how they crashed, the onus was on the pilots to identify what was happening and fix it and, you know, weasel their way out of it or eject from the plane or just handle it to the ground despite all the odds. Make the right decision in a tough situation. Make the right decision and have radical ownership over it and have courage in the face of, you know, this frontier tech that you were piloting into the heavens above. I think it's, I think it's radical ownership. I think it's first and foremost saying like, I am going to be responsible for myself and every single problem that comes my way is one that's solvable. There's some prayer that goes like, uh, Lord grant me the discernment to identify problems that I can't solve, to have the courage to solve problems that I can solve and then the wisdom to know the difference. I think actually the answer is not this sort of stoic disposition where you say like, your locus of control is here and the world outside is, you know, something that you're not to be concerned with. The real answer is, um, and this goes back to bearing your cross, right? Like your ambition to make the world better and your ambition to solve problems should know no bounds. Like we have the divine image within us, the creative capabilities of our father in heaven, um, every single problem that exists that this is part of why I started Rainmaker 2, right? Like droughts exist because I am currently failing at preventing them from occurring. Like hurricanes currently exist because humanity has up until this point. And I have because they're still going on, we've abdicated the responsibility that we have to our brothers and sisters in the world to prevent these unnecessary disasters from occurring. And so if you can take up the disposition that every single problem that exists in the world is a consequence of your failure to solve it, um, you know, I think that that might be burdensome for a lot of people. I think that maybe it is a bit of a stressor to me, but, um, that is part of what's built into the right stuff. Yeah, that's, that's interesting. So it's like when there's a hurricane or something that's going to destroy stuff. And every day that you don't solve the problem, and actually, would you talk about, uh, would you talk about the hurricane, like mitigation stuff? But like every, every day that you haven't solved the problem of mitigating these hurricanes is actually on you, which I imagine that that's like a huge, uh, force pushing you forward and saying, like, why aren't we moving faster? Yes, right? Yeah, exactly. They've seen in the right light. And can you talk about, can you talk about how clouds seating can mitigate hurricanes? Yeah, sure. So, um, for now, we're a water supply company. We produce more water for farms that need it, for municipalities that need it, snow, for ski resorts that need it. Long-term were the full-stack terraforming company. Um, one thing that we have to do is reduce the damage done by hurricanes, right? And so to totally disperse the hurricane is a pretty difficult problem. There's a lot of energy there. But, um, can you mitigate the damage done by a hurricane or can you divert its path? Seems so. Um, the way in which you can do that is, one, by precipitating water out, you reduce the amount of flooding that, um, hurricanes cause overland once they break against land. But two, um, because the freezing of water in cloud is exothermic, it releases heat. You can widen the hurricane such that the wind velocities lower, um, and then the amount of damage done from the wind will be reduced as well. Um, and so if you can do that over the Atlantic before anything breaks against shore, you can reduce the damage done to the coasts, right? There's hundreds of millions of dollars in claims, insurance, insurance claims every single time a hurricane breaks against shore and does damage. Um, I expect more honestly. Well, yeah, in, in the worst cases, yeah, you get into the orders of billions. And then there's a second order effects of shipping delays, of people having to like go move other places of rebuilding infrastructure, um, of industry being closed. Um, it's, it's, it's in its second and third order effects on, on the order of billions that are spent every time there's one of these. Um, and that's, that's my fault. Um, the, the, the most wild thing to me is that you can say this is a solvable problem with this technology that you're building. And I guarantee you that no one is, no one is out there thinking about this other than you. Like, I mean, I, I think that there's probably, maybe there's a handful, but I doubt that it's very many and people are willing to spend billions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars instead of actually thinking about this problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Such a weird situation. Which is like, so, so my, my dad works in the data center industry, right? And in all of his contracts, there's clauses that say, you know, we are not responsible for acts of God events. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, no, that's also a solvable problem. Like, there's not mother nature, which defines the way in which the climate has to be. We're all, we're already modifying the climate unintentionally. Like, let's just do it intentionally now. Yeah. Uh, okay. You also talked about, you're going to be trying, I mean, I know that this maybe is a far off idea, but you're thinking about trying to create the Nile River in the sky. How does that work? What, what, what, what is the effect of doing that? Very far off and aspirational. Yeah. Again, we're a water supply company at the time. Um, there are atmospheric rivers that exist, right? There is a flux. Basically, what that means is you have these currents of water vapor and liquid water in clouds over the Pacific that then flow westerly over California and the entire continental United States. And the flux of water through these generally is like 10x greater than the flux of water through the Nile. There's incredible amounts of fresh water accessible right above our heads. What you could do rather than purely relying on these atmospheric rivers occurring naturally is again, frontier frontier frontier tech. But if you could create a pressure gradient, um, where it was very high pressure over the Pacific and then gradually lower pressure towards the interior of the country, one way you could produce these low pressure systems as if you had say a line of clouds, um, and precipitated the water out of them, the pressure would be reduced locally. You'd have sort of this like downstream flow effect where the higher pressure water vapor, uh, in the Pacific would then flow downstream to fill that gap. Um, you could induce an atmospheric river theoretically. This is like Neil Stevenson type sci-fi stuff, but you could induce an atmospheric river to flow, uh, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of acre feet into the interior of the country. That's why isn't this just by like lowering the pressure in one area, causing things to. Correct. Okay. Uh, this is the final question. How can we get more founders to take on ambitious problems instead of like SaaS? Uh, you keep, you keep doing what we're doing in El Segundo. Um, you one have to take the social status away from these purely speculative financial pursuits. Um, there's honor in doing good work, but there's no honor in the ruthless pursuit of capital for its own sake. Um, I'm, I'm in favor of capitalism, of course, and I'm trying to produce value and currency, but, um, it cannot be through reshuffling a fourth order derivative on corn futures, right? Like, yeah, it's also like the people that, the people that make the most money, and I think like have the most, uh, drive to, I mean, eventually they make the most money, but they don't have a drive to make money. Like that's, that's an idea. Everyone wants to be, most people want to be rich, even the people that say that they don't, you know, they want to be, everyone to be equal, that's kind of a lie. Um, but having a different goal that's like actually gets you up out of bed in the morning, is, is what drives you. Like, you can't, it can't be just purely monetary. It can't be purely monetary. Yeah, it can't be, it can't be purely monetary. It has to be like something else. Um, what do you, what do you, what do you think about that other than, you know, financial stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Um, you, you have to have this religious mission. No doubt. Um, you have to be trying to do something transcendent. Um, and I think that all of the, the folks building here do, um, the question then getting back to, like, how do you get more people to take on ambitious projects? Um, um, perhaps it's a, it's a macro scale thing we're like, if times becomes sufficiently hard, you will get great men to meet the challenge, right? And perhaps times are growing sufficiently hard like we're, we're over the Cold War abundance and like the Cold War stability that we had before. So it might just be at a macro level that this is going to happen naturally. But then also, um, you, you have to confer social status on to harder problems rather than like ruthless decadent gluttony. Um, and, uh, you also have to make it cool and fun to solve hard problems, right? Like, no one here is tearing their hair out because of the burdens of building a much harder company. If anything, it's the opposite. Yeah. We're having a great time. Yeah. It's awesome. Um, you should come to the bonfire tonight by the will. Okay. Great. Yeah. Anyway. Okay. I guess just thank you so much. I appreciate you coming on. It's quite a road.