Smash Notes
How Humans are Artificially Manipulating Weather | KMP Ep.57
Speaker 1
What's your biggest holy shit moment that's actually works?
Speaker 2
We were up in Oregon, collaborating with the Oregon Department of Agriculture, and first two years of Rainmaker's existence, like, none of this shit worked, right? Like, we were trying, it was kind of working, maybe, not sure, but we flew, excuse me, we flew drones up, seeded, came down, a little bit of snow, followed 30 minutes after, we were like, oh, maybe, did again, snowed again.
Our radar meteorologists called us up and they were like, we actually see the streaks. And then, as he called us, you look up and it was this thin overcast cloud deck, and where we had seeded, the, the sky had opened up, the sun was shining through, where the snow had fallen on the ground. That was the most surreal holy shit moment. It is something that the technology will be increasingly available to wanton, negligent, or just malicious actors, and like, The very, very real thing.
I'm not like a war hawk personally. I will obviously like work at a conservation company, but to be very sober about this, like China is investing billions of dollars in modifying the weather. If we can stewardly and responsibly, this is really important because you can't just give any tech wackadoodle this kind of stuff, but if you can responsibly build technologies to better tend to creation, then we absolutely should do that.
I think God actually would want us to have more water via cloud seeding so that less people suffer from drought.
Speaker 1
Hi everyone, and welcome to the Katie Miller podcast. We're in Washington DC today with the Rainmaker.
Speaker 2
Thanks so much for having me. Hi, how
Speaker 1
are
Speaker 2
you? I'm blessed. I'm stoked to be here.
Speaker 1
Let's start with the obvious. You literally run a company that makes it rain. How does it work?
Speaker 2
Well, rain and snow. Despite the name Rainmaker, we mostly make snow these days. And at a high level, you have lots of clouds going over the United States that never naturally precipitate. So we fly drones into those clouds, they release, dust, silver iodide, small drops of water freeze onto the silver iodide into big snowflakes, and then they fall as snow or they melt back into rain.
Speaker 1
How often are you doing this now?
Speaker 2
well, across the world, we have basically constant operations during the colder months of the year. So from October to April, we're making snow and rain in the Pacific Northwest, in the Rocky Mountains, increasingly in the Sierras, farther south, and then in the Middle East as well.
Speaker 1
So when we saw that there was a lower than average snowpack in the West last year, were you helping to make it snow?
Speaker 2
That we were. That we were. And so the drier the year, the less snow we can make, because there's not as many clouds. The wetter the year, the more snow we can make. It's a real limitation on this technology, but you can bound the volatility of boom and bust El Nino, La Nina years with cloud seeding.
Speaker 1
So when you see a storm coming, what happens next?
Speaker 2
So we'll do like seven days in advance forecast. Then within 24 hours, if we're pretty confident that there's going to be cold, small drops of water in it, we'll deploy teams to the field. So guys in trucks from Salt Lake City or from, say, Santa Fe, New Mexico, they'll drive up into the mountains, deploy their radar, get ready to fly drones, and when the clouds are overhead, they'll actually launch the drones and then juggle them for as long as, like, 48, 72 hours, constantly seeding, constantly making more snowpack.
Our meteorologists and atmospheric scientists back in LA and Oklahoma, they're monitoring all of the atmospheric data to optimize where we're placing the snow, how much of it is getting down, and then we'll give our, operational report to the state or to the customer that we're working for.
Speaker 1
Okay. So now we're getting to the part where I'm a bit skeptical. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but, like, I could also be a conspiracy theorist in my full-time job. Forever. When I first started working in Congress, you get these phone calls, it's like they're spraying the clouds again, do you see the chemtrails? And it is a big conspiracy theory.
You're saying it's real. You guys have been doing this. Has anyone done it before you guys? And how long have you been modifying the weather for?
Speaker 2
Okay, well, huge point of clarification. Something is real. Cloud seeding is real. But the long streaks in the sky that you see, chemtrails people call them, those are condensation trails behind airplanes. I've looked into this like long and hard. I have a lot of respect for a lot of people that do believe they're chemtrails, but I could not disagree more.
If you like book a flight on Google Flights now, you can see, you know, this flight is going to make altitudinal adjustments so that the water vapor from it doesn't create contrails, right? Just to avoid that whole hoopla. Now that being said, chemtrails aside, conspiracy theories aside, There are like plenty of things to be concerned about in America, right? Like there is poison in our water, there is poison in our food, our medical system is busted.
I kind of really have grown tired of the chemtrail discourse, not just because I'm in it all the time, but like we got to solve real problems. And if we're just like pointing at clouds and saying like, oh my gosh, it's the Bill Gates nanobot super weapon, then like the actual conspiracies that are sort of destroying the United States, or at least like impeding the United States, don't get solved.
So all that caveat, all of that preamble aside, cloud seeding was invented in America 80 years, 81 years ago. General electric scientists, some of them sat out of the Manhattan Project to do weather modification to make snow in western New York and Massachusetts. The Department of Interior used to invest heavily in weather modification to make more snow for the Hoover Dam, which is critically depleted right now, and Mead and Powell.
We used to try to do hail suppression across the Midwest to help our farmers. But by the 80s and 90s, it kind of all disappeared because nobody could prove that it was working. If you fly into, if you fly crop duster into a cloud and like blast some magic beans and then it rains, it doesn't mean that you made it rain, right? Nobody could prove the causal chain.
That all changed just a few years ago. Rainmaker became, built on a lot of American national lab research. Rainmaker became the first and only company in history to unambiguously prove that the snow and rain is man-made, and we can differentiate it from natural precipitation.
Speaker 1
So if you look at Texas, I'm going to throw a very specific use case at you. And you say what happened to the river where it flooded by Camp Mystic, you guys at the same time were making it rain elsewhere in Texas.
Speaker 2
Not at the same time.
Speaker 1
That many have said contributed to the more than average rainfall that happened at that specific time that flooded that river on unusual levels. What would your answer be to say that a lot of people have made the connection between man-made water, man-made rain, and a larger than average rainfall that happened shortly thereafter, not the same time, that flooded the river?
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, first of all, what happened there was a tragedy, right? That was a natural disaster. That is something that, like, I cannot imagine the difficulty and pain of. However, it, it was a natural disaster, and it did not have anything to do with cloud seeding. So Rainmaker was contracted by, irrigation districts, by groundwater conservation agencies in Texas to make water for farms, for growers.
We were operating last year in 2025, about 200 miles south of where those floods occurred two days prior. we released like 70 grams of silver iodide at the time, which by the time those floods would have started, diffused over an area greater than the state of Texas, and, and that doesn't mean like, oh, it was affecting the weather everywhere.
It's like, that was less than a firework worth of material. we had an impact on the weather slightly greater than like what a firework would have done to those clouds two days prior. So, It's also worth touching on the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. In order to get a permit to do weather modification, you have to have suspension criteria, meaning if there is flash flood warning, if there is risk of severe and inclement weather, then you have to stop operating no matter whether the farmers want more water.
Our meteorologists stopped before even the National Weather Service provided notice of potential flash flood warnings. We were ahead of the curve. We stopped operating in order to do no harm there. Now, If you don't know what cloud seeding is, and you find out some mulleted tech guy from California was modifying the weather nearby, I'm very empathetic to how people would raise eyebrows, ask questions, make that association, but cloud seeding categorically had nothing to do with those floods, and also the tech simply isn't there yet.
Like, it is not at a place where you can make that much water. It was over a trillion gallons that fell in that flood, and Rainmaker, we're producing millions to, like, low tens of millions of gallons in our operation, so the scales are just wildly different as well.
Speaker 1
I had Michael Knowles on a couple weeks ago, and him and I were discussing IVF, and he is vehemently opposed to IVF in the sense that nothing that is man-made shall be used to alter nature. You can make the same argument about cloud seeding, weather modification, in the sense that nothing man-made should be used to Alter something that is natural.
What would be your argument to say that we absolutely need to do that, and what's the most dramatic change you've seen after you've done, you know, weather modification? Because if you say, well, the most dramatic change after IVF is someone gets pregnant with quadruplets or something where it's very hard to manage a pregnancy at that point, how would you compare that to weather modification?
Speaker 2
So I think that there's a lot of, like, in-the-weeds theology that you could get into. I'm a Christian. I got baptized, wow, five years ago now. That's crazy. But the first cut is mankind is unintentionally modifying the weather, like, constantly. How so? If you build Washington DC, with all of the streets and roads, with the, the buildings, the, the apartments, that creates a heat island locally that makes more air rise and changes precipitation patterns, as well as temperature locally.
If you look around, say, like Scottsdale, Arizona, or Buckeye, the golf courses that have been built, they are releasing so much humidity that you're increasing the severity and frequency of monsoons around, Arizona. If you look at, coal plants or, nat, natural gas plants or nuclear plants, the steam that goes through those turbines creates clouds, which then precipitate downwind.
So we're already unintentionally modifying the weather all the time, and nobody bats an eye at that. In, in a certain sense, we're just trying to be intentional. That's the first point. The second point is, I think there's precedent to modify creation in a manner that is for both God's glorification, mankind's benefit, And also creation's benefit, like building the Hoover Dam, right? That was a testament to American engineering, American ingenuity.
It created unprecedented and unimaginable abundance for the Mojave Desert. You wouldn't have cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix and Tucson and Vegas if not for that sort of deliberate modification of where God put water in the river, right? And it's created like the Las Vegas Wash, which is now super biodiverse and green. That's good. And then, so one, we're modifying the weather unintentionally all the time.
Rainmaker just wants to be intentional. Two, there are ways that we do modify God's creation where God put water already that cloud seeding is similar to. We're just modifying the hydrological cycle. But then three, and I think this is the thing that Michael Knowles would probably take most interest in, I do believe in a, a dominion theology.
I do believe that if we serve a good and righteous God, if you take seriously Genesis one and two, where we're told to tend to the garden, where we're told that we're made in the image of God and have these generative and creative aspects, then we should build technologies that enable us to steward the earth and the seas and the skies, because this planet that we were blessed with, it, it is a blessing.
It, it is something that we have a responsibility to protect for our own sake and its. And so if we can stewardly and responsibly, those are really important because you can't just give any tech wackadoodle this kind of stuff, but if you can responsibly build technologies to better tend to creation, then we absolutely should do that. I think God actually would want us to have more water via cloud seeding so that less people suffer from drought.
Speaker 1
I grew up in South Florida, where we're very used to hurricanes. At this point, could you create enough precipitation to create a hurricane?
Speaker 2
No, at this point, not, not even close. however, Americans have tried in the past. have you ever heard of Project Storm Fury?
Speaker 1
Yes.
Speaker 2
Yeah. So, the US Weather Bureau, the, the Air Force, they jointly collaborated back in the 20th century to try to modulate the severity of hurricanes in the Atlantic. the Japanese and the Chinese, you know, President Xi, he's in, he's in DC right now. He's made it a stated priority for China to become a weather superpower. when Rainmaker goes abroad talking to these governments in the Middle East about bringing them more water, it's like our ragtag, now slightly larger, but ragtag American startup versus like 12 Chinese engineers and bureaucrats that specifically work for the 40,000 person staff weather mod department.
China and their enormous weather mod department, and even Japan, are actively doing typhoon modulation research. So it's not possible today to make hurricanes bigger or smaller, but in the future, it, it will be. The question is not whether this happens, but whether Americans have the tech or somebody else does.
Speaker 1
When you say you're releasing silver iodide into the clouds, what exactly is that?
Speaker 2
So, silver iodide, it, it's, it sounds like a metal. It is technically a salt, but it has silver in it, and that raises eyebrows. Totally understand why.
Speaker 1
I wouldn't want, like, silver being spread on my children.
Speaker 2
yeah, but, if you, if you are, I don't know, driving in a city, there's actually more heavy metals being emitted into the air that you're breathing by orders of magnitude just because of cars, and because of the debris from buildings.
Speaker 1
Sure, but I would, I mean, I'd push back a little bit to say that, like, in my own home, I am unique, but I know there's a lot of other moms who are watching this who probably do something very similar to me, which is I have IQ air filters in all of my children's rooms. I have, like, three in our common spaces. I keep one in the kitchen while cooking.
We keep doors and windows open throughout the day to make sure there's correct airflow in the house because houses trap air. And I do everything within my power to clean the air my children breathe because studies have shown that if you can clean the air, you know, children's lungs are healthier, live longer, et cetera, because of all the pollution that is diseases of civilization, diseases of urbanization from living in a city, say, like Washington, D.C., versus living further out in the country.
If I can do more and prevent my children from being exposed to harmful chemicals, I'm going to make that choice. But when you're going to choose, somebody else will choose to do weather modification that is beyond my control. You know, why would I want that my children to be subjected to that?
Speaker 2
Well, first of all, We only operate in areas where we have the consent of local people. And I think a great example, if you care about clean air, like there's millions of people around Utah that are going to get respiratory illnesses, that are going to get lung cancer, if not for more water from cloud seeding with silver iodide. Like as the Great Salt Lake recedes, as that lake bed gets exposed, because there's not enough water and there's no way to bring new water to the basin besides cloud seeding, that toxic arsenic, that particulate matter from the lake bed is getting kicked up.
And we've seen areas in the world... How do you make
Speaker 1
sure it's clean water that's being dumped back in? Because not all water is clean.
Speaker 2
So from cloud seeding, for example, we use like 20 grams of silver iodide when we're flying these operations, and that gets distributed over hundreds of square miles. So like, if you were here for America 250, that firework show emitted millions, if not billions of times more heavy metal particulate everywhere. So if you're fine with fireworks, cloud seeding is like way less impactful.
Sure, but a lot of
Speaker 1
people weren't fine with the fireworks. There was a lot of push Back to how much, you know, particulate matter was spread. Lots of ink was spread over how much, you know, particulate matter was in the air post-fireworks. Not only, not only here in Washington, D.C., but across the country. And I personally wouldn't want that to be done every day.
Why it's like once a year, slash once every 250 years was there that much fireworks.
Speaker 2
Totally. But cloud seeding is billions and times less material. And so a good point of reference, right? If it was like one part per million silver in the water from cloud seeding, like, okay, that, that wouldn't be good. That's higher than the EPA clean water threshold. But because we're releasing 20 grams over such a large area, it's like parts per quadrillion additional silver iodide in the water that lands on the ground, in, in the soil over these areas where we see cloud seeding.
We have 80 years of data. Even though nobody could prove cloud seeding worked until recently, states like Utah and Colorado, they have the data from their long running programs on silver iodide safety. And so you have to continue to prove the null hypothesis. You have to continue to prove that it's safe. But we Know that the, the concentrations it's being used is actually keeping the air and the ecosystems cleaner because we have water that's not causing, that's not allowing wildfires to burn throughout these states, or at least mitigating the severity of them.
Speaker 1
But for generations, we did not have cloud seeding, and civilization continued. You talk about, you know, lakes being drier than they've ever been and needing cloud seeding from the lakes, but what happens if we just didn't do it and let nature run its course?
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, I think that, like, for generations, we didn't have electricity, for generations, we didn't have rocketry, for, for generations, we didn't have, the sort of textiles that we do now, and, and I'm very pro living, like, a more vital and natural life, like wearing plastic all the time, drinking plastic all the time, drinking or eating, like, manufactured foods rather than just normal grown foods.
That's not good. but at the same time, I do believe that part of what it means to be an American, and also just a human in general, is to innovate in a generative way that makes the world more abundant than before. we could decide to become Amish, but I think that you can actually do more good, you can have a more prosperous nation in future if you very deliberately and stewardly build new tools to help make the world richer.
Speaker 1
Is silver iodide the forever technology, or are you working towards something different?
Speaker 2
So we are doing research on alternative materials. silver iodide, we know that it's safe, we're gonna continue testing to assure that, but If you could make a material that was slightly more effective, that was totally biodegradable, not biodegradable because silver iodide is unsafe, but biodegradable because it's a bit of a PR hoopla sometimes, then that would be a good thing.
So we're working on alternative biodegradable materials right now. we don't use them commercially. It's still silver iodide in the field for the most part.
Speaker 1
You use drones for cloud seeding. How autonomous are they?
Speaker 2
well, so we need to deploy our forward operating specialists. They're mostly veterans, wildcat firefighters, a lot of like, ski patrol guys. they'll deploy out into the mountains. They'll actually unpack the drones. They'll fly the vehicles. with all of the sensor data that we're collecting, radar, satellite, et cetera, The drones are able to, or we're, we're increasingly autonomously finding the right position in the cloud to get the most snow on the ground.
but you still have the human on the loop, human in the loop that's, that's flying it, that's grounding the drone, that's replacing the batteries and so on.
Speaker 1
How soon from after there's a drone in the sky does it snow or rain?
Speaker 2
Depends on how high the cloud is and it depends on how much wind there is, but it's like 30 to 90 minutes.
Speaker 1
Oh, that's pretty, that's pretty quick. Who owns the rain? So you say that it's done in conjunction with the people who live there, work there, want to do this. Let's say it's a local government or say it's Vail, Colorado, the ski town, like who's owning the fact that they want to create it?
Speaker 2
So I think there's, there's two cuts to this, right? The first one is, It's important to observe the majority of the water that passes over the United States atmosphere doesn't precipitate over land. Now that's important because if this was just like giving Utah more, more water from Colorado, like that wouldn't be good. but because the majority of the water just gets recycled by the oceans, you can actually seed and cloud seed and add more water to the water table than would have naturally been there.
Now that's true for the time being. At some point, if you have enormous cloud seeding operations, and they're way more efficient than even ours, I think it'll happen within 10 years, then you're going to have way more water, positive sum seeding, but also, you'll get into this zero sum regime, and we have to have like policy and thought about that.
So in the future, where we do have a lot more water from cloud seeding, you'll start to need regulations that deal with that question more specifically, but in the interim, because it's positive sum, the states, so Colorado, Utah, Idaho, even like Oregon, Montana, Texas, they have frameworks that say, we treat the rain, because it is additional water supply, as though it were natural precipitation, it flies through prior appropriations in the same way, and then that, that water runs off to everybody downstream.
Speaker 1
Is there concern that as you're growing this, that it will have some negative effects on our ocean, ocean climate, of the rain that was supposed to go there is now going elsewhere?
Speaker 2
It's an order of magnitude thing. So the, the atmosphere... But as
Speaker 1
this gets better is what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2
No. So the, the water that makes it to the ground via cloud seeding, first of all, it's like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the water that's in the ocean, so you can't, like, affect the salinity. but then secondly, it still does end up cycling through the, the oceans eventually too.
Speaker 1
Do you think somebody living underneath a seeded cloud has a right to know that it was a seeded cloud?
Speaker 2
well, they have, they, they have a right to know that there are weather modification programs going on in the vicinity of them, and that's why in every state that we operate, we do public notice, we engage with the, the state government.
Speaker 1
But what's a public notice look like? Let's say you seed it in Washington, D.C., like, how would I go find that? I have to go to your website? Like, I don't even know you existed, you know, prior to a month ago. So, like, forgive me, but I'm like, most people, what I say, would go back to saying, weather modifications and conspiracy theory, it's not actually happening.
There's not a guy who wearing a make it rain hat who's, like, actually making it rain, right? So now I'm saying, well, not only does it exist, you guys are doing it intentionally, and it's happening in the United States, so do I go to their website? Like, where am I going?
Speaker 2
So I think this is actually something that we're super aligned on. Like, it is absurd that the only federal regulations on weather modification are from 1972, and they require that you fill out a form that goes to NOAA, and probably from their printer into a paper shredder, and, and nobody actually knows that these reports are getting filed.
So there are federal reports notifying people about intentions to do weather mod, but it's not transparent, it's not modern, the reports don't really make sense. I would love if that 1972 weather modification reporting act actually had more stringent reporting requirements so that people were notified.
Speaker 1
But could you just do that yourself? Could you make it more of an effort for your own company to make people aware? You don't have to rely on the government to just do the right thing.
Speaker 2
totally, but first of all, I mean, people should not default, trust me. Like, I think that I'm a trustworthy guy, I'm a patriot, I'm a Christian, I'm a sinner, but, like, we were here having this conversation. No, I'm saying it's the same
Speaker 1
argument we're making with AI companies right now, right? Like, we're saying, why do you guys need to ask us to do the right thing if you're going to make this incredible technology, do the right thing yourself, right? If you're saying, help, help, we need help making it safe, Then like, you can just have, you can just do things, you can just make it safe, right? Like, it's the same argument I took back to you.
Speaker 2
Totally. So, boy oh boy, I pray to God that I never act similar to the AI labs. But that being said, we're here right now, we're talking because, you know, we're on Good Morning America, we're on Fox Business, we're super public because we're trying to get this message out. Everywhere that we operate, we do local notice in local papers. We do town halls in some of these regions as well, we notify the state DNR or the state Department of Ag, and we're gonna keep doing that.
We can do even more community engagement with local schools. I think though the reason why that reporting act from the seventies is interesting, and I don't want like Crazy over-the-top draconian NEPA style regulations per se, I just think that people would probably trust it more if the federal government said like, hey, we're tracking who this is.
We know what this technology is.
Speaker 1
You think it would give you legitimacy?
Speaker 2
I think it would make people feel confident that the government knew what was, they, they knew what was going on with this technology.
Speaker 1
What's your endgame for Rainmaker?
Speaker 2
well, first and foremost, I'm concerned about water abundance and preventing the collapse of the Colorado River and Great Salt Lake. that's the first real mega project, right? But in the same way that we built the Hoover Dam and created unfettered abundance, we now have the opportunity to create even more abundance in the Colorado River so that we don't have to make this fake trade between pristine, beautiful ecosystems and building up our industry and, and housing.
we should have enough water to do both in the Colorado River basin, in the Great Salt Lake, in the Columbia, in the Snake Rivers across America. That's, that's step one. But then step two, a little bit zanier, a little bit more, California, El Segundo guy, then DC perhaps, is, like, I'm interested in terraforming. I think that in the same way that we've built dams and groundwater wells and we've learned how to farm in places like Israel that were previously totally unfarmable, but with technology we can make abundant, with weather modification, if it's used stewardly, can make more areas greener and more lush and productive, and that doesn't mean you should turn every
desert into a rainforest, but we should at least have the capacity, we should at least have the option as humanity to alleviate these physical constraints like drought and hail and wildfire with weather modification.
Speaker 1
What's the ethics of this, though? You can't just go, say, take your drones outside in Washington, DC today, throw it up and say, I'm going to go make it rain today. You could. I mean, I don't know anyone Is there someone who would know what you're doing because you have drones in the sky? Because there's a lot of drones, maybe say outside of Washington DC, let's take it where it's not like federally controlled airspace, for example.
Okay, let's just go to like, I'm going to say Palm Beach, but let's go to like, like Tampa, Florida, right? You're going to throw up a drone in the sky, a lot of people have drones in the sky. They would never know if you're cloud seeding or not because you could just have drones in the sky.
Speaker 2
Well, if they did know I was cloud seeding, I would get tackled and arrested because I think it's a felony crime there. And the AG of Florida sent me a letter reminding me that we don't do any weather mod in Florida. If you...
Speaker 1
Sounds like him.
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. Good man. I'd love to meet him at some point. But would people know what's going on?
Speaker 1
Yeah. Like, could you just do it yourself? If someone was a bad actor, got a hold of your technology, could you just... Make it rain and therefore do something that's awful, like interfere in a war, interfere in something where you're, you know, causing harm to somebody's business, causing too much precipitation.
Speaker 2
I think that's exactly why states like Utah and Colorado have regulations on what's going on. It, it is something that the technology will be increasingly available to wanton, negligent, or just malicious actors, and like the very, very real thing. I'm not like a, a, a war hawk personally. I will obviously like work at a conservation company, but to be very sober about this, like China is investing billions of dollars in modifying the weather.
We have no infrastructure today to detect malicious weather modification domestically or abroad. That will be an increasing problem for not just the United States, but the world over in time. And not just because of China. They're like the most obvious one, but other people in time could do this as well. And so, yeah, I don't want like the governments to be my, be my parent and like swaddle me in regulation, but I do think that the American public deserves some context from our legislators and representatives on like how we're going to handle this in an increasingly safe manner.
Speaker 1
What's your biggest holy shit moment this actually works?
Speaker 2
well, I mean, so, so cloud seeding, people have been trying to do this for, for decades, and it's mostly been like Fugazi snake oil nonsense. but in January this year, we were up in Oregon, collaborating with the Oregon Department of Agriculture, and first two years of Rainmaker's existence, like, none of this shit worked, right? Like, we were trying, it was kind of working, maybe, not sure, but we flew, excuse me, we flew drones up Seated, came down, little bit of snow, followed 30 minutes after, we were like, oh, maybe.
Did it again, snowed again. Our radar meteorologist called us up and they were like, we actually see the streaks. And then, as he called us, you looked up and it was this thin overcast cloud deck and where we had seated, the, the sky had opened up, the sun was shining through where the snow had fallen on the ground. That was the most surreal holy shit moment, for the company.
Seeing, first proving, being the first to ever prove that, that this thing is working and seeing the fruits of our labor both on radar and, and in, in, overcast skies cleared up.
Speaker 1
I think one of my biggest irritations as a parent is weather forecasts being woefully incorrect. Says it's gonna rain, there's no rain. It says it is going to storm this morning so you make plans to do something inside and it's a beautiful sunny day. Is there some time you're thinking, wow, we could do this better, forecast the weather?
Speaker 2
Well, I mean, forecast, we should be able to, in time, not tomorrow, but in time, like, make the weather. now, Rainmaker, we're getting better at forecasting, but we're not getting better at, like, any kind of forecasting. We're looking for one very specific thing, which is cold winter clouds with additionally precipitable water, but, like, yeah, it's absurd that we don't actually have good weather forecasts.
Hopefully, we can help with that, but also, I think that a lot of the compute that we're building today will help with better forecasting, too.
Speaker 1
We're gonna play a quick game of Would You Rather.
Speaker 2
All right.
Speaker 1
Would you rather have the perfect weather everywhere you go, but everybody hates you, or terrible weather everywhere, but everyone loves you?
Speaker 2
Everybody already hates me, so I'll go with, perfect weather.
Speaker 1
Would you rather shovel three feet of snow or mow five acres of grass?
Speaker 2
snow. I grew up in Connecticut, so I, I really love the snow.
Speaker 1
Would you rather have a lie detector attached to you at all times, or a screen above your head showing exactly what you're thinking about?
Speaker 2
Lie detector.
Speaker 1
Would you rather be on a plane that flies directly into a thunderstorm, or have one of your drones disappear into a cloud and never find out what happened to it?
Speaker 2
thunderstorm. Plane in a thunderstorm, I think.
Speaker 1
Would you rather always have a dead phone battery, or always wear wet socks?
Speaker 2
Oh, that's awful.
Speaker 1
It's terrible, Ashley.
Speaker 2
I guess wet socks. I'm gonna get trench foot, but yeah.
Speaker 1
So, that one's so mean.
Speaker 2
I guess wet socks, yeah.
Speaker 1
What's a conspiracy theory that you believe in?
Speaker 2
There is atrazine and birth control metabolites in a lot of American water, specifically in the vicinity of college towns, and that is androgenizing and lightly sterilizing a lot of the United States.
Speaker 1
What do you mean? Like sterilizing animals, sterilizing? People,
Speaker 2
people, people. In our drinking water, because we don't actually actively filter out these hormonal metabolites, you see less and less fertility. There's many causes, microplastics are one, but this is something that nobody talks about. Everybody takes super casually, and we just let it exist in the ecosystem, and nobody's actively cleaning it or preventing it from getting in there, because when you use the bathroom, you flush it down the toilet, the water filtration systems don't get rid of it.
It's just in the ecosystem forever. That's really bad.
Speaker 1
So you would say the number one harm to humanity was the invention of birth control?
Speaker 2
No, no, I wouldn't say that.
Speaker 1
I agree with that for what it's worth.
Speaker 2
I bet you do. I don't think it was the number one by any stretch. but, I think that it, it, the consequence of hormonal interventions is not well characterized or appreciated by most folks.
Speaker 1
What's something that sounds insane, like weather conspiracy today, if you think what could legitimately be technology and technological possible, technologically possible in 50 years from now?
Speaker 2
50 years, 50 years, I think, Yeah, this is, this is a good one. I'm friends with some guys that are putting mirrors in space to make sunshine during the night. that's a pretty crazy one. It's this company called Reflect Orbital, but they're putting a constellation of mirrors in space so that you can, say, if you need to do search and rescue during, an earthquake, or in a more gimmicky sense, like if you want a cool effect at night during a concert, you can create sunshine because you can reflect the, the sun around to the dark side of the planet at night.
Speaker 1
Sounds really scary. I do not want that in my future. You should talk to those
Speaker 2
guys. I do not want that
Speaker 1
in my future. What's your daily routine?
Speaker 2
Oh my goodness, I wish that I had one. I mean, I generally wake up, slam a bunch of caffeine, run to the office, Meetings, meetings, meetings. Towards the end of the day, I will try to do like some heavy compound lifts and then get dinner with my fiance. We'll pray and read a little bit together, maybe watch a show, something like that.
Speaker 1
Do you use AI personally?
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, totally. it's a pretty good search engine alternative. Grok has really come out of the woodwork as a pretty capable machine. I think it'll get, I think it'll get better in time.
Speaker 1
Do you use AI for Rainmaker?
Speaker 2
so we use, we use a bunch of machine learning to get better at our forecasting, get better at flying the drones, increasingly weather modeling to predict stuff. we'll use it as well just for like research. you can ask it questions. Do you use AI in your daily life?
Speaker 1
I use a lot of AI in my daily life.
Speaker 2
Okay. What's the preferred, do you have a flavor of model that you like?
Speaker 1
So I actually use, I will say this, I use all the models, I use Grok most frequently. I'm a big fan of Grokbot these days. If you have not used it, it's absolutely life-changing.
Speaker 2
Really? Okay.
Speaker 1
Life-changing, and I don't say that lightly. But you have to connect your emails, and so another, like, people do not like that. I connect my emails, it alerts me when, like, there's an important email I need to see and respond to. It purchases things for me, it finishes things. So a lot of my life you get stuck, right? Like, decision paralysis, or you don't press send.
There was an email the other day that I needed to, like, get a refund on, and I had to go back and forth through email with somebody, and I don't like doing that. It did it for me. I got a nice $5,000 refund. I've been procrastinating on it. Thank you, Grokbot.
Speaker 2
Wow, okay, well, so that's, I will try it. That sounds cool. But if you're, if you're giving access to, say, like, your email and some of your data, more extreme case, but what do you think about, how do you think about Neuralink in the future?
Speaker 1
Neuralink is, I know Elon has said this, it's Jesus level technology, the ability for someone to use their mind when they're previously incapable, they have a brain, they're able to use it, but they're not able to communicate. I think giving somebody that freedom back, being able to erase somebody's pain is very empowering to them.
Speaker 2
Medically, but would you ever like want to be able to see your email from like inside your eyelids?
Speaker 1
Personally, no. Personally, no. I'm not also buying meta glasses. Like I'm not getting the snap glasses. I think maybe my children will want to do that, right? As they adhere to the new normal.
Speaker 2
You wear an aura ring?
Speaker 1
I do not have an aura ring on. Normally I wear a whoop.
Speaker 2
Okay. I'm
Speaker 1
not wearing my whoop today. I stopped, I took my whoop off when my sleep data took a nosedive because I have a newborn. Yeah. And it just made me feel really bad every morning that I slept like trash because the baby slept like trash. I have a booster tag I call on the baby. I have an outlet on the baby that tells me the baby's sleep. And so if like, the baby's only doing seven hours, I'm not doing more than that.
Speaker 2
Yeah. So
Speaker 1
like, I don't need the whoop to tell me you slept like crap last night. Like, I know I slept like crap last night. I feel like I slept like crap last night.
Speaker 2
Yep.
Speaker 1
I had a friend call me this morning and says, how did the baby do last night? And I said, great, we only woke at three, five, and six. And she goes, wow, that sounds terrible. I said, no, that was a great night for us.
Speaker 2
Nice. So,
Speaker 1
I don't need a whoop to tell me I slept like trash.
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. I slept, I slept wearing my aura ring too because it was just like, you're going to die. Stop everything, which is not helpful.
Speaker 1
I love my whoop. I should say this. I put it on when I work out. I cannot wear it for sleep right now. It messes with my brain.
Speaker 2
No, it makes sense. It makes sense.
Speaker 1
What's your most cancelable opinion?
Speaker 2
Not what I'm saying here. not what I'm telling anybody. I don't know. What's a really good one? well, I guess actually, this one's not too beyond the pale, but I don't think said seriously that often. I do love everybody. I do have a lot of respect for, for different perspectives around the world. I do believe that like religious claims are exclusionary and like fundamentally exclusionary.
And so that means like if you're a Christian or a particular denomination of Christian, it means like everybody else actually is wrong. Like universalism, tolerance to some extent, yeah, great, totally. But like if you have a religious opinion, everybody else actually has to be wrong about different opinions. So I think that's probably, that's probably a big one that I'm pretty open about.
Speaker 1
I like religion in a sense that it builds community. It makes people more bonded to one another, and I think as you get away from religion, you get away from the bonds that unite, and it becomes more divisive society.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, look around, right? Like, so few people are having families, so few people are getting married now, nobody knows anybody anymore, and that's also on the flip side, like, it's
Speaker 1
immigration.
Speaker 2
That, that is probably related, yeah. But this is even true in more modernist countries in Europe still, like the ones that haven't seen a lot of immigration, like the people my age are just like super atomized. Europe has
Speaker 1
seen a ton of immigration.
Speaker 2
Depends where, so like Switzerland though even, which has seen significantly less, you do have the same sort of atomization that I think is a product of like the social media and the lack of religion and so on too.
Speaker 1
Where's your favorite place to travel?
Speaker 2
I mean, the most beautiful country I've ever been to is Alaska. or like countries and land. I really thought that was spectacular. and then increasingly Jordan and the Middle East, some of the most weird, crazy, like have you been to Wadi Rum? So it's, it's where they shot like the scenes from, I mean, you watched Dune, assume? You know, like the big crazy, like ret.
They shot a lot of Dune there. that's just like super, super surreal to see on Earth. So that's up there as well.
Speaker 1
And you're gonna make it rain there?
Speaker 2
Do you
Speaker 1
think it disrupts the natural ecosystem?
Speaker 2
Well, I think that the natural ecosystem is disrupted by everything else that we're doing right now. So we're just trying to get back to the baseline of the water that we had. That's the first aspiration.
Speaker 1
The last question of the pod. If you could host a dinner party with three people dead or alive, who's at the table and what are you eating?
Speaker 2
Great question. Napoleon, Augustus Caesar.
Speaker 1
Is that because you share a name?
Speaker 2
O.G., yeah, yeah, I'm named after him. and then probably Andrew Carnegie, spectacular American industrialist, immigrant, but, great American industrialist, and then, I'm not really picky, probably, probably steak.
Speaker 1
Medium, medium well, medium rare?
Speaker 2
My grandfather was French, and he used to, bust my chops if we didn't order blue, so, we'll do that, yeah. Still
Speaker 1
bleeding? Yeah,
Speaker 2
yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1
Thank you for doing this.
Speaker 2
It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1
Thank you so much for watching this episode of the Katie Miller Podcast. We'll see you next Tuesday night, 6 p.m. everywhere your podcasts. See you then.