How Humans are Artificially Manipulating Weather | KMP Ep.57

0:00Katie Miller:What's your biggest holy shit moment this actually works? We were up in Oregon, collaborating with the Oregon Department of Agriculture. And the first two years of Rainmakers' existence, none of this shit worked. We were trying. It was kind of working, maybe. Not sure. But we flew drones up, seeded, came down. A little bit of snow followed 30 minutes after. We were like, oh, maybe. It did 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 look up and it was this thin overcast cloud deck. and where we had seated, the sky had opened up, the sun was shining through, where the snow had fallen on the ground.

0:33That 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 Warhawk 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.

1:09I think God actually would want us to have more water via cloud seeding so that less people suffer from drought.

1:25Katie Miller:Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Katie Miller podcast. We're in Washington, D.C. today with The Rainmaker. Thanks so much for having me, Katie. Hi, Destas. How are you? I'm blessed. I'm stoked to be here. Let's start with the obvious. You literally run a company that makes it rain. How does it work? 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.

1:59Katie Miller:How often are you doing this now? 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. So when we saw that there was a lower than average snowpack in the West last year, were you helping to make it snow? 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.

2:37But you can bound the volatility of boom and bust El Niño, La Niña years with cloud seeding.

2:44Katie Miller:So when you see a storm coming, what happens next? 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 L.A.

3:22and 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.

3:34Katie Miller:Okay. So now we're getting into the part where I'm a bit skeptical. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but 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? OK, well, huge point of clarification. Something is real. Cloud seating is real. But the long streaks in the sky that you see, chemtrails, people call them.

4:11Those are condensation trails behind airplanes. I've looked into this 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.

4:45Our 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 we got to solve real problems. And if we're just pointing at clouds and saying, oh my gosh, it's the Bill Gates nanobot super weapon, then the actual conspiracies that are sort of destroying the United States, or at least impeding the United States, don't get solved. So all that caveat, all of that preamble aside, cloud seeding was invented in America 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.

5:26The 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 a 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.

6:12Katie Miller: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. Not at the same time. 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?

6:52Yeah. I mean, first of all, what happened there was a tragedy, right? That was a natural disaster. disaster, that is something that I cannot imagine the difficulty and pain of. However, 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.

7:42And that doesn't mean like, oh, it was affecting the weather everywhere. It's like that was less than a firework worth of material. real, we had an impact on the weather slightly greater than 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 warning.

8:21So 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. 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 low tens of millions of gallons in our operation.

8:59So the scales are just wildly different as well.

9:01Katie Miller: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 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.

9:39Katie Miller:How would you compare that to weather modification? So I think that there's a lot of like in the weeds theology that you can 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, D.C. with all of the streets and roads, with the buildings and 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.

10:36If you look at coal plants or 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 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.

11:15It 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.

11:52But then three, and I think this is the thing that Michael Knowles would probably take most interest in, I do believe in a dominion theology. I do believe that if we serve a good and righteous God, if you take seriously Genesis 1 and 2 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 is a blessing. It is something that we have a responsibility to protect for our own sake and its.

12:31And 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 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.

12:54Katie Miller: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? No. At this point, not even close. However, Americans have tried in the past. Have you ever heard of Project Storm Fury? Yes. Yeah. So the U.S. Weather Bureau, 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 D.C. 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 staffed weather mod department.

13:53China 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, smaller, but in the future, it will be. The question is not whether this happens, but whether Americans have the tech or somebody else does.

14:12Katie Miller:When you say you're releasing silver iodide into the clouds, what exactly is that? So silver iodide, it sounds like a metal. It is technically a salt, but it has silver in it and that raises eyebrows. Totally understand why. I wouldn't want like silver being sprayed on my children. Yeah, but 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. Sure, but I would, I mean, I'd push back a little bit to say that like in my own home, and 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.

15:00Katie Miller:I have like three inner 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.

15:33Katie Miller:But when you're going to choose, somebody else will choose to do weather modification that is beyond my control. Why would I want my children to be subjected to that? 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. 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. 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.

16:15And we've seen areas of the

16:16Katie Miller:world - How do you make sure it's clean water that's being dumped back in? Because not all water is clean? 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 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 way less - Sure. But a lot of people weren't fine with the fireworks. There was a lot of pushback to how much particulate matter was spread.

16:49Katie Miller:Lots of ink was spread over how much particulate matter was in the air post-fireworks, not only here in Washington, D.C., but across the country. And I personally wouldn't want that to be done every day. That's why it's like once a year. Slash once every 250 years was there that much fireworks. Totally. But cloud seeding is billions of 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 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 the soil over these areas where we see cloud seeding.

17:29We 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 at the concentrations it's being used, it's actually keeping the air and the ecosystems cleaner because we have water that's not causing or that's not allowing wildfires to burn throughout these states or at least mitigating the severity of them.

17:58Katie Miller: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 for the lakes. But what happens if we just didn't do it and let nature run its course? Yeah. I mean, I think that for generations, we didn't have electricity. For generations, we didn't have rocketry. For generations, we didn't have the sort of textiles that we do now. And I'm very pro-living a more vital and natural life, wearing plastic all the time, drinking plastic all the time, drinking or eating manufactured foods rather than just normal grown foods, that's not good.

18:46But 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 and future if you very deliberately and stewardly build new tools to help make the world richer.

19:15Katie Miller:Is silver iodide the forever technology or are you working towards something different? So we are doing research on alternative materials. Silver iodide, we know that it's safe. We're going to 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.

19:50Katie Miller:You use drones for cloud seeding. How autonomous are they? Um, 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 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 flying it, that's grounding the drone, that's replacing the batteries and so on.

20:30Katie Miller:How soon from after there's a drone in the sky does it snow or rain? Depends on how high the cloud is and it depends on how much wind there is, but it's like 30 to 90 minutes. Oh, 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. But 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? So I think 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.

21:10Now, that's important because if this was just like giving Utah 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 policy and thought about that.

21:47So 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 water runs off to everybody downstream.

22:20Katie Miller: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? It's an order of magnitude thing. So the atmosphere— But as this gets better is what I'm talking about. No. So 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 affect the salinity. But then secondly, it still does end up cycling through the oceans eventually too. Do you think somebody living underneath a seeded cloud has a right to know that it was a seeded cloud?