Augustus, thanks for joining. It's great to see you.

Nice to hang and talk with you, Eric. Thanks for having me on. I'm the CEO of Rainmaker. We're a next-generation cloud seeding company that uses novel anti-icing-capable drones, and then our own weatherized meteorological radar and radar processing algorithms to measure the amount of precipitation that we induce from our drone-based seeding operations, ultimately to make water abundant and end water scarcity.

Why does cloud seeding matter in 2025?

I think there are two angles that make it very relevant. First of all, everybody needs water. If you are a farmer in the Central Valley or in the Southwestern United States, then you need water just to continue operating the way that you historically have. We need more water if we're going to grow our agricultural base. We need water to prevent the Colorado River watershed from collapsing and to do ecological preservation and conservation. We need water for re-industrialization. If you want to build more TSMC plants or data centers or factories of any variety, then you need water as one of the fundamental primitives for industrial production. So there's all of that domestically focused internal rationale for why we should produce more water via cloud seeding.

But then there's also the geopolitical angle. China spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year on their cloud seeding program. They have 38,000 employees in their weather modification office. They're actively greening the deserts in Mongolia and filling up their reservoirs via cloud seeding, and they have two universities that offer weather engineering degrees. So the choice that we have to make is not just whether we want American farmers to have more water and American industry to have more water, but also whether we want to lose out in the race with our primary geopolitical rival on a technology that will ultimately govern the skies and the atmosphere all over the planet.

Cloud seeding is not new. It's been around since 1946. But I'm curious, from your perspective, what is different this time around, both from a technology point of view and from a business fundamentals point of view?

You hit the nail on the head. Attribution was the primary problem. Can you attribute specific volumes of precipitation to your intervention? If you fly a plane into a cloud and sprinkle some magic dust and then it rains, who's to say that cloud wouldn't have rained anyway? And even if you do accept that you induced precipitation anthropogenically, how much value did you create? How much water did you create? That was always very difficult to answer. Statistical evaluations, where you'd say that in the target region over the year you got 3% more rain, had huge error bars because the weather is naturally quite variable.

What changed in 2017, and then again in 2023, was that researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and then ETH Zurich realized that if you have the right kind of radar, you can track the freezing of droplets in clouds and the growth of those ice crystals into sufficiently large crystals that they precipitate and fall as snow or rain. You can track that process from immediately when you emit particulate in the cloud, in our case from drones, all the way to the point when it ends up as water on the ground. That fundamental innovation in remote sensing, and also satellite-based sensing products and in situ probes, that's how you can validate that precipitation is man-made. And that's the fundamental innovation upon which Rainmaker is built technologically.

With respect to the business model, right now we do cost-plus services. We will install our radar, bring our drones and bring our teams to states, municipal public works departments and federal governments, some of which are international, and we will sell our services. Then we'll measure and report on how much water we're producing. Once we've reached this critical threshold of transparency and academic acceptance in attribution, what we want to transition to is commodity sales. We want to sell water by the gallon, by the acre-foot. What should be done is success-based contracting. That's what I would prefer, because I can actually produce way more value via cloud seeding than I can currently capture in the cost-plus model. So that's the fundamental innovation and where we're headed.

What do you think is holding cloud seeding back from becoming commonplace? At this point, is it purely the skeptics and a cultural question, versus real-world feasibility?

I would say there are two primary components, the first of which is the conflation of cloud seeding with chemtrails or solar radiation modification. In short, cloud seeding is making existing clouds rain or snow more than they would naturally. You need to have a big, fluffy cloud in the first place. If you see a long streak in the sky, whether you think that's a contrail or a chemtrail, it's not cloud seeding. States like Florida recently passed legislation to ban all of it because they don't know the difference, and they don't know the safety data around cloud seeding, of which we have 80 years. Then there's solar radiation modification, dimming the sun that reaches the earth to cool the planet down. That also has nothing to do with cloud seeding, and that one is more controversial. Cloud seeding is just a water supply tool. So there's this cultural and political aspect, which I think is an opportunity for us to educate people, particularly legislators.

The second component that matters a lot is remote sensing data. Most of the Western United States does not have radar coverage, meaning that we couldn't even target and attribute precipitative outcomes to our intervention. That's why Rainmaker vertically integrated radar production, so that we can start installing these radars first across the rocky Western United States, and then throughout all of the rest of the world that does not have radar coverage.

How much do you think about cloud seeding as a geopolitical arrow in the quiver of the US, versus just a commercially interesting, helpful application for states, counties, you name it, across the country?

Those two things are intertwined. Economic well-being and progress within the United States build up the industrial base writ large, which then bleeds into geopolitical negotiations, because if we can produce more, then we're more well-situated globally.

However, very acutely, China has publicly stated that they plan to have the best-in-class global weather modification system and then export it throughout the rest of the world. And though they have never explicitly looped into Belt and Road, think about the scenario where African nations, Middle Eastern nations and Latin American nations need more water. Choosing between an American company and a Chinese state entity for where they get their water gives you huge geopolitical leverage over those countries, or an opportunity to collaborate with them. So if I'm going to choose between a world where Saudi and the Emirates and the new government in Syria and all of the Horn of Africa get their water from China, and China can turn it on and off, versus one where it's an American company that specific states are able to contract with at their leisure, I will choose the latter 100 times out of 100.

For Rainmaker, but also the industry writ large, what does success look like?

When you speak in terms of decadal plans, it's really more visionary than it is a specific outcome, because things are subject to move up and down by a few years. But success case number one, the first thing that we have to do, is produce enough water to stabilize our agricultural, ecological and industrial consumption. Right now, the city of Phoenix is banning new housing development and turning off water in some of their housing developments because there's not enough there. The Central Valley of California explicitly anticipates half a million acres of farmland turning into desert by 2030 (2040). That's the first thing that we have to avoid, and I think it's something that we can do in the next five years.

Then in the next 10 years, but really over the course of my life, the winning condition for Rainmaker and for cloud seeding is to have extended the Great Plains from West Texas through New Mexico and Arizona, and then connected them to Southern California, so that it all becomes a vibrant, lush breadbasket like it never was before. And number three is tuning the weather to our liking for symbiotic flourishing between both human civilization and creation writ large. That gets into other modes of atmospheric engineering, like hail suppression, for example.

The work that you and the team are doing is really focused on unlocking the next wave of economic growth within the US, by allowing land that historically might not have been arable to flourish and thrive. Is that a good way to put it, or how would you put it?

You're on the money. I think there are a few fundamental primitives in all industrial production and economic activity, and those boil down to something like human capital, intelligence, energy, water and critical minerals. Water is one that nobody ever talks about, because historically there's been no means to produce more of it. Cloud seeding is the way that you can produce more of it in all of these inland areas where desalination is not an option.

Cloud seeding is not necessarily a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul situation, right? Or is it?

Ah, you've read up on the matter, because that's a very common turn of phrase in cloud seeding debates. There are a few points of scrutiny or skepticism that I think are appropriate to give cloud seeding and that conventionally come up. The first one is, are you robbing Peter to pay Paul? If you make it rain more over here, will it rain less over there? If you seed clouds in California, will it rain less in Nevada? And the answer is, if you target the right clouds, then resoundingly, no. Over 90% of all of the liquid and ice phase water that traverses the United States atmosphere just gets recycled by the oceans. So we are not tapping even 10% of all the water right over our heads that we could bring down, which would be purely positive-sum if you select for the right cloud conditions. Atmospheric rivers are these huge phenomena that blow in from the Pacific, with 10 times the flux of the Mississippi River, over the entire interior of the country, the Rocky Mountains, the Midwest, et cetera, and you're not even getting 20% of that water that's immediately over your head. Cloud seeding is the way that we can tap into those and get positive-sum water production in the Western United States and elsewhere. So are you robbing Peter to pay Paul? No, no evidence to suggest that. We're specifically targeting clouds to do positive-sum water production.

But another conventional point of scrutiny is, what are you dispersing over my head? What is silver iodide? Is this stuff even safe? Silver iodide is the material that we use in cloud seeding. Its crystalline structure is almost identical to ice, which is why water favorably freezes onto it into big snowflakes that then fall. We use about 50 grams per operation over about a million acres at a time, if not more. The concentrations that exist in the soil or in the water are in the parts per trillion, so about a million times less than what's even naturally occurring in American soil. There have never been found any adverse ecological consequences, agricultural consequences or human health consequences from cloud seeding with silver iodide. So it's resoundingly safe to use this material.