WTF Is Happening In Canada?! & Meet "The Rainmaker" | PIRATE WIRES EP#11 🏴‍☠️
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I just consider canada like amErica light. It's sort of IT is ours. Canada is like if you had a teenage son who is maybe a little fucked up and he lived in your backyard a tent and was like i'm living on my own, it's like, you sure you are, buddy, you sure are.

And it's like if we ever needed him to come inside, but you just make them come inside, but we don't need to make them come inside. You know, these are loser, but are loser. So we let them sort of exist happily out there for now. Welcome back to the pog guys today. We've got a gustus to re go with us, the founder and CEO of rainmaker, which is a company that is literally making the rain.

Um we are gonna talk about one of my favor topics, geo engineering, the big sort of exciting technology mitic progressive conversation but before we can get to that I am going to have to drag a justice into the mud with river brand and an eye um for a moment to talk about I guess what is increasingly just the failed experiment called canada. There are a lot of problems going on here and it's sort of weirdly the story is kind of like it's been weirdly bubbling up for a while and people keep dipping in for a second and being like, hey, like that kind of strange like what's going on in canada. We've got legislation that is essentially sort of pro suicide legislation.

You have all of these accounts of people who are just kind of like mentally depressed, mentally ill, depressed, going in to hospitals for help, in coming out with um in some cases, advice that perhaps suicide is the way you have the question of and are not saying it's true, the question of whether or not trudel is actually castro son, you have in the context of castro saying my god like will never let happen in canada what's happened in amErica I guess referring to um the sort of like anti tracing of the children thing that's happening in schools. I would like to just set a flash back to the trucker ation in canada in which the canadian government completely stripped political protesters of the right to bank. Uh you have this alarming new trend in D E I, which is D E I D literally diversity equity inclusion in decoding ization, which is being Normalized across canada.

Uh, just today I saw a note about Jordan Peterson having to submit to something called, just on, ironically, reeducation if he wants to keep a psychology license. But the least story for me, the one that I wrote about this week, is the canadian government forced google and facebook to basically pay local canadian, I mean, framed as local canadian news companies for linking to local canadian newsstands. This is a trend that we saw started in australia.

IT resulted in um really a couple of large corporations making a lot of money. Some sort of back back uh backroom deals are made. Facebook and google persist in linking and um and the sort of everything goes on as Normal.

But but the canadians are the past legislation. They're really serious about IT. Um we're now in middle of wildfire crisis in cana. I say we it's not we but I think IT is interesting sort of look up north and see what's going on over there.

And um instead of talking without the actual crisis, the politicians have taken to attacking facebook for not sharing news links about the wildfire crisis, which I think is just incredible because we've all forced the companies to do this, right? It's like you're saying there's no cap on the payments he essentially have to pay for people to share news about something that maybe mean not you can be news in this case, arrow case. That absolutely is what we have.

All these bizarre stories from the toronto, the toronto star, whatever the hell is just like completely use the stories about random celebrities changing their gender for the fourth time it's an actual story a shared by john k on twitter um and it's just like kind of a crazy concept that the intersection of of media and uh in politics and technology. I don't see a way actually that this doesn't come back to amErica and that's kind of one of the reasons I like to talk about canada as much as I do because it's sort of a bizarre world version of amErica where there are no checks on the actual crazy people alive and they get to just sort of run a country um sort of run a country. I mean, they don't have a military.

They're protected by america. We just can let them do whatever they want with our resources until you need them. But IT still is.

It's just interesting, like it's an interesting thought experiment of what would happen if, for example, california was its own country um so I never going to see this and uh I don't know. First write off the Better. I mean, what do you guys think about this? And then August, as I promise there is a link back to G O. engineering. We're going to get there. Subs.

good. I mean, if I can do, there are something interesting too right which is like, okay, there is a general anti tech sentiment um but then also like a lot of the time, like big tech has also been the proponents of these state narratives, right, like the mainstream narratives as well.

So there's a question of whether like we take as tech rows the side of like meta, right, just for the sake of being with our people, the tech nose, or also like if the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I was talking about this for the call little bit right. Like um if if meta also is suppressing stories that are relevant and then canada decides to suppress stories and the ability to share links.

4 meta on meta within that nation like IT， is that a net loss is a just a distraction? I don't know. I kind of wonder if we collectively feel like we have a horse in the race on that. And just because it's like how intimately do we work with either of these regimes, the regimes being like the biggest of big tech and then also like the canadian government.

well, so we have legislation in california that is on the table. We're going to be it'll be back up and uh, twenty twenty four, I think, the next legislative session. So does that mean brand in just the new year's? Does that february is twenty twenty four will be talking about this? I don't know .

the legislation stars.

but twenty, twenty four. So it's coming up. I take the point generally, I think you roughly correct and not a huge fan of facebook.

They are I think twitter gone most of the heat for censorship, which is crazy because of the big sort of like big tech speech platforms um under dorsey they did the least. They had IT for sure. IT was crazy.

I mean, i'm glad the twitter files came out at least the first few of them. Um we learned a lot. IT was really the important, but they were just kind of child's play compared to facebook. S perfection of the system IT still exists still in the Operation. But I think it's it's like any link between the government and the platforms is just scary to me. I what I don't want to be happening is like a direct function of money of any amount from facebook to just the sort of politically correct media sites, which is the only way they can survive. Now I just saw, uh, I think IT was the owner of the toronto one of the major toronto papers he was saying, you know, it's the government's responsibility to be making sure that journalism um thrive.

The government and big tech they had a bad a sort of responsibility this harkings back to their idea that like ah there's something almost suo secret about about the press, you know america, you have a freedom of the press um and we sort of lost side of that freedom and to focus more and more about like the nate goodness of the press and I don't think that there is any innate goodness of the press. It's like there's an nate goodness of your right to speak but it's like the concept of speech generally is being good is not something I agree with and certainly what they mean is not speech generally. They don't even believe in the concept of free speech in canada as we specifically in california also um but but in canada as you see with the uh with the Jordan Peterson thing where this man is being taken to court literally for things that he said about a sex binary um they don't care about that concept.

They they care about propping up essentially state propaganda and you see that in some of the language that they used to talk about who they were going to prop up. So i'm i'm against IT um for separate from like principled pro tech business reasons. Um you know they're are right to Operate however they want. I mixed on that I am against IT for purposes of like it's going to make the information ecosystem harder for all of us. You know you're propping up people who don't have an audience generally to speak, you know for everybody, they have a huge advantage .

that that already. So so these two, these two bills are laws, the canadian, the canadian law now and the california bill are essentially based on the australian law that passed a few years ago. They are resulted in facebook and google paying news corp, which is revert murdoch news corp.

Over one hundred million dollars per year. So like basic, the australian law just funs facebook and google profits to I don't know if they're the biggest news company in the world, but it's certainly not here is not what you think about when you think about local news. You don't think Robert murdoch and news corp.

right? They think it's going to like the saskatoon free press or whatever and especially going to yeah the dogs like fox and whatever.

And what IT is just like as you creep closer and closer to that world in which all these things refused, the government, the giant corporations in the media, that's the one party state that you just don't want to be anywhere near that. And again, like the reason people like why do you and I don't know, I like to focus on amErica generally.

Um I just consider canada like amErica light it's sort of is our canada is like if you had a teenage son who was maybe a little fucked up and he lived in your backyard in a tent and was like i'm living on my own, it's you sure you are our study you sure are and it's like if we ever needed him to come inside, but you just make them come inside. But we don't need to make a common sight you know it's a these these are loser, but he's our loser so we let them sort of exist happily out there for now. Um but IT also is just like this interesting experiment that is worth looking at because again and again, I mean our left looks to canada this is like for years to canadians IT was like they have this credibility as.

Morally superior entirely because of healthcare stuff. That was the one thing they had. No one will tell you about how morally, how much morally superior they are to the average american than the average canadian, especially if you find yourselves abroad by some unfortunate happen stands.

But I I think it's like that is what we were battling against throughout the cover cures was the strange on hold the alliance between those three things. It's taken in america. It's taken a little bit of a back seat, uh, after the election of biden.

But that's that's right there. We saw what that looked like under cover. And I think there's almost no way we all get back there to that sort of alliance between those powers without some kind of new technological framework. Part of that is an illegal framework, but a lot of IT is just new technology. People keep saying cyp, I don't know when that's going to happen um but but I know that's a thing that I resist.

That's what I get worried about and that's why this is a relevant story to me because I just don't believe that this law is like this kind of law passes and then pie wires is getting money from facebook and I get to hire whatever reporters I want. Like there's no world in which that happens. It's like it's going to the washington post and they're going to write an entire tech shit. And that's just like that's .

the way it's going to be. So how does prior wires capture the institution and started folding state profits into the org? Well.

we've gotta build the institution. We we have to just be bigger than murdoch. So we're starting we're on the path.

We're on the journey. IT starts here um just one podcast at a time, but that's the only way. This is just a game of power among the most powerful people alive. And they're looking to maintain IT tech is a new font of power and looking to sort of bring IT into alignment.

I like, I mean, back when elan was taking over twitter in a december of twenty twenty two, like the end, the conclusion of that sort of six months long epic story, I wrote a piece called the fifth state where I talk a little bit about this, like the more dangerous, the most dangerous thing that that we can face the alliance of these things. But the tRicky thing about technology for any would be authoritarian dictator is IT IT, IT. The quality of technology is IT reverse.

It's like IT resets power because it's new. It's like it's it's constantly subverting power. Every new every really new technology thus far in american history has um ultimately subverted in the context of corporations. You've seen this um where new technology crashes and burns, especially in tech companies, these sort of old guard ah and you've seen this in you've see this in the press where now new different kinds of politicians in different sorts of writers are to uh capture attention or the way they could not have previously that's that's the saving Grace of this whole thing is that you see that again and again and again.

However, we are get into a place where you have technologies like artificial intelligence, which I mean I think that does one of the great dangers of A I I said it's IT seems to be a really um centralizing technology out of keeping, I would say, with what we've seen previously. And that alarming me. But that's a whole other podcast right now where you should talk in the media.

So we go back to your talking canada specifically.

I think I mean, before we move on to the g, we're going to get to the wild fires in the second. And what I think the whole entire canadian, you know, trudeau anti facebook this course was actually about. But I mean, let's maybe just hammer in for a moment longer on what really is just like, I mean, i'm torn, is IT like, is that the dumbest country on the planet? Or is IT the rise of an authoritarian? It's maybe it's .

in american love. Dorian gray portrait, just like riding in the added like, that's what it's like. Everything that gets voted here, like this was insane. That gets voted on the left here. That never happens or only happens like seven go or can happen because the first moment or whatever actually is happening in canada in real time and everyone is just kind of like watching IT from the outset and being completely horrified by IT.

I mean, it's not getting to the point now we're like good the doctor's office and they immediately just like a bird uh you ever thought of book killing yourself and it's just what here to get a moll checked out but fuck you talking about you and uh together they've gone completely insane um whether it's the this weird obsession they have with like the wrong ling that they did to the indians, which comparatively was not that big. They like want to be they're like we're hitler too and it's like, no, you're not like they want to be bad. They're like it's I don't know, it's like they just want to feel something maybe I don't know. It's this it's this weird thing.

The deterioration thing is special. So when you see, you know public universities doing D E I D sem adding decolonization to that list IT, it's weird. How do you because if you if that's a part of your diversity, equity, inclusion, these are all sufficient ambiguous terms that they can be used for pretty much anything, which is why they exist, right? They exist to sort of put everybody on the defensive.

But you don't exactly you don't know how exactly um and so really you can push whatever done policy that you want on behalf of whatever powerful person. But the cogan ization is much more specific and and like there's a there's a way to actually to colonize. I mean, you would just remove the people who colonized the sort of ancestors of them.

You would remove the structures that were built and you would lead the land as IT once was, sort of pristine as may be what they would say. Barren is the word that I would use. And um I mean, there's a there's a path to that.

So like how is the fountain of canadian power, which I know is a bit of an oxymoron, but like how is the founder of canadian power? Do you talk about the colonization seriously? Because there a way to do that um IT just requires leaving that just that wants war to me well.

and it's is leaving, right? Like it's the host population probably being scorned, but then also like the the rolling back of institutions of something that has happened as well, right? So like what western things do you want to d colonize and canada, like, oh, parliament.

Like, sorry, the west gave you parliament. So like we'll get rid of that one. And then all the universities, and like modern health care, no more of those.

Those were western institutions. We d prefer not to have that like talk about the bear in wasteland, right? Like the cities is the urbandale not just that we're going to a return to nature or something, right? It's like return to like pre civilization and pre history is what they're advocating for.

right? And if you even scratched the surface of canadian history, everything just becomes infinitely more complicated because the the cap, especially improvement all french's canadian and feel that they were colonized by the english. And like that was like there's and they had terrorist groups back in like the seventies and eighties. There is a huge they're still like keep quite like nationalist a parties and government. Uh, john trudeau dad, actually peer trudeau .

s start off.

I'll get to that. Peer trudeau start off as a chemical nationalist um and this is like big we're part of their politics but and like the indians of course with them like all the french colonized but then you score just a little a bit more and you realize that most of the slaves were in canada weren't actually black. They were native americans, like from the great lakes region that canadian indians had kidnapped and taken with them. So it's like what we're doing, this decoy zia um are the indians who are in canada because they were taking a slaves from the amErica s are going to be deported as well or they the colonisers, or they the colonized, like there's like so much like going on there, like they they have a even more complicated history than I think like united states. And some ways when to consider .

this I wonder if the worst thing about all of this this whole conversation um the topic of of decoding ization and you know who oppressed who is just the endless looking the the endless looking backwards thing that happens you you you're always looking back into the past and to think about the passes, none of us were there.

We have records and we can study the records and we can you know correct records when people um you know to speak about them, whatever. But at the end of the day, we really were not. We can never be entirely sure of what happened and what didn't and what was said and what wasn't um and that makes IT just this really ripe area for talking about your own kind of present day philosophical anxieties or personal grievances rather than the much more important question of like what do we want to be building?

What do we want this country to look like? You know, bringing you back home in san Francisco. I don't care who lived on the san Francesco, uh, seven by a lot of land five hundred years ago.

I care about the question of like how we get to start track version of go, how do we get to like epic, amazing, futuristic, europiu m 3 Frances， go, how do you build that? I would actually at this point settle for like how do you build enough beds for all the homeless people? Like, like to start on the ground floor.

But even that is that a future oriented question? And I want to get back to just like that kind of thinking in general, which is really what bothers me the most about the the antioch zocor berg. Uh, you know, mark docker g is the reason the wildfires are putting canadians and dangerous thing.

It's like that's so stupid, it's obviously not true. You could just fuck and go on twitter, which by the way, you are still allowed to post links to twitter in canada. And I think river mentioned to me like a weird number of canadians are actually on twitter, unlike in amErica where it's a much smaller number um of just crazy to online people like us.

where my percent or something.

So it's a lot right, like they obviously access to that. The thing that's really happening there is you have someone creating attack bogyman to get away from the question of like, hey, IT seems like there's more you could have done to prevent these fires.

And how do we get to a world in which people are less at risk of wildfires? Generally now here, often in the case of california, this conversation falls back to global warming again and again and again. It's like, oh, well, these fires happen because of global warming. Well, there are two things there, uh, one that still doesn't make IT impossible to present A A fire or to prepare for a fire. In the case of a why, there are all sorts of examples.

Now um of we talk a little bit about this last week, anything from the water management to uh the uh checking up on the safety precautions and what not of the a power infrastructure but this is broader question of like， okay, well if global warming is the problem, how do you reverse IT? How do you how do you cool the planet down and um and why isn't that? The number one thing that we're talking about um August is you had actually brain and friendship for me. You know the real problem is just state level mismanagement of our national resources in the case of amErica specifically, lets bring IT back home um and you had some interesting thoughts about just our chronic misuse of water. Uh can you just come to walk us through that?

Yeah so it's a man of it's a multifaceted far away that the most like examples, example of mismanagement of water in the notist states like in the last century is what happened just earlier this year, right? So everybody remembers IT was just dumping rain, dumping snow. We had unprecedented levels of aquifers being filled, the reservoir being filled, snow pack and the result, this water running out to sea.

And so people were saying mostly to the news of administration, but then in elsewhere in the country, like, hey, what are we going to do with all this run off can we capture can we fill up reservoir? Can we install pumps that will start actively pumping into owner fers right um and the newsom administration said, I should say how onion said, um well, we're going to do instead I know we have all these pumps, that technology that spent around for hundreds of years at this point, we could pump hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of gallons permitted into the octopus directly to replenish them so we never have worry about drought ever again like there's all this success war. We could do that instead.

How do I make IT way, way easier for the state of california to buy and least lander farmers? And then we just flood IT, and then we just like to ball the excess water there. And so there's policy this this program called flood manage, occupy, recharge, where we literally say, okay, there's too much water.

Should we do something like the heroes of like california infrastructure in the sixty dead and built like a new canal and reservoir system? No, we should just use like the most archaic means of storing this water by destroying american and californian agriculture, just dumping water on IT for a dubious rate of percolation into the, all right, like the hydrology studies that are done on flood mental shock for recharge projects are like super, super h hand wave where they say, like, well, maybe there's a clay layer here, maybe this much water will get down. We don't really know.

And so it's it's one sort of this aversion to building new things that causes our problems with water to its our inability to innovate. And then three, like know you said earlier, like there's this endless looking back and and I want to look forward. I think part of the problem is so many people are looking forward, but they're desire.

I think this is because of like the nature of man and are broken and fAllen condition. But like, I think that people desire worse conditions. Sometimes I give you, if you fall far enough away from, I can say the good, i'd say god. But but 啊， yeah, we just desire, or some people desire deep growth. And so we we dump water on farms for the sake of destroying them rather than building occupiers, rather than clouds eating more to get precipitation where we need IT. Um so yet those are some huge dropped and it's taken us like the site's rezai biggest rezai r that we build california, that we planned to build long time, like three decades in to trying to build this thing, are trying to build this thing um and very little progress has been made.

So so that may be a reason that it's not so rational to expect us to try a new pump p thing or build some huge project like you could just look at california over the past forty years, let's say, and assume not incorrectly, that we are not capable of doing stuff like that anymore. There is something that could be uh, it's probably a combination of things that could be, uh, just whatever the weird union situation is, whatever the labor regulations are could be a lack of talent IT could be a lack of of well, maybe a compounds, but but certainly you look at something like our high split rail situation, which is famously a joke. It's been so long and so much money and nothing has been built um and you can help wonder like is IT even worth trying to do something like this in this state until something changes in a in a meaningful way that until there's some sign of hope that that these people in charge are capable of doing something more complex?

Do I don't believe in the macro like I don't think that the labor conditions matter. I don't think that the regulatory regime matters. I mean, it's kind of hyperbole like in the sense that obviously, they they play a role, but all this really comes down to you like the most scarce resource is, is will.

It's just it's just people with the will to do great, like fasten things no matter how difficult that is, no matter how many regulatory rules you have to run through. Like so bea, if the region can't handle IT, like we just have to believe that we'll fix IT ourselves, right? And we just need enough guys to agree on that.

So August, is so you implying that the problem over the past thirty years or so with with them, the lack of great engineering projects that we're seeing is just fewer super awesome .

goods yet dudes rock. And we need to reinforce the fact the dudes rock and then, you know, glamor ized, the ones that do, like in china, for example, they have battle bots competitions with stadiums the size of like nfl super bowl at the packs, like all of the size of the super ball um watching.

So if we had uh a culture that like venerated engineers and people trying to do spectacular things um which like I think we can do by having you know more conversations like this, by having you know more factories in the south bet L A there are super vibe and that make the esthetic school and exciting for people rather than just like pleaded kaki rathee contractors representing defense attacker like card tech. If we had more bureaucrats that we're like autobath bismark rather than like whoever the unnamed paper pushers are that exist now, like that would make all these things way, mark. So yeah, I I think we just need more great man.

This this is reminding of Robert mosses. And there is this, uh, so a famous city planner from, I think the I want to say fifties even able to do a lot um we're talking like the city of bridges and tunnels and um he sort of remembered uh in fairly at this point I was an extremely negative light for um building bridges through neighborhoods and um urban blight and things like this but he was sort of the last guy who was able to do enormous infrastructural things in in.

In in a metropolitan area, I think it's really necessary. You look like a you look at a place like the bay area where um you have multiple small little regions with a lot of power that are all fighting with each other. So on everything from zoning in terms of housing versus commercial zoning to like public transit and things like this.

Um you are not even capable of blending those areas into a single region. So you could do those structures little and actually doing them right now. It's sort of uni maginness to think about a whole new rail system budding up around the bay area that's getting people where they need to go.

But but he is like something about him. I I go back to him because as you said, no, we don't have to wall. I think that's true. Um and and it's like we need more guys to stand up and be excited about the stuff also true. Uh elan mosque is that person he's that I would say, and let's table all the free speech, all the twitter stuff.

I think it's really like a major distraction from the major work that he has done, which is demonstrated that you can build huge crazy new influential things in the physical world um and that is what he was charged for in silicon of valley and throw the tech industry up until the last last year or so um and that is really, I think, the most remarkable thing that any entrepreneurs done in our life. But even before twitter, he was attacked sort of relentless lesly. It's been building for a while.

And I think it's like on some level, it's because of this when you see bernie and understand up go after him specifically for the space stuff was a few years ago. It's like it's like some kind of status st d growth antibody pops up to to take care of what they perceive as a like growth based um utopian cancer like they they go after IT. Uh, I don't know.

I want to I want to believe that we can you beat the stuff back with Better stories and people keep trying. Um I haven't seen the story yet and I don't know how you get there. I don't know how you penetrate that IT seems like they're so much uh, standing against you and the the draw back to status is our i'm started stasis or even just decline is just it's like too strong. It's like the gravitational of IT.

You know I think um there's this guide to buy a huber that has satelloid. Al, oh yeah yeah you know N E says that like he he key compares like technology at to salvation in the religious context, right and says that like only a god can see that was like only these um I I don't think it's gonna like you know big E X guy, right but I don't think it's onna be E X that provides the narrative that saves us like I think that IT has to be like a transcendental message where you you have homes that are literally trying to act out what they hopefully are correctly perceived to be the wild like when they are are working on these missions um and and so yeah I think that elan has H A transiently view of getting us to mars and and just making up like what what's your pen tweet like I just wanted to be fucking them isn't right like this is a transient title spin on exactly that idea and so I think that like returning to say is probably one way and not like return return right like not like return v like let's go to the fifties and have like, you know, apple pie on the window.

So are anything like that right? But like, let's let's reconstitute our view of the world, blend in the reality of majority ity with like these old transcended truths, and then try to construct technologies that will pull us into like a spectacular, heavily future, right? Like the guys worked on the polo project were super religious.

A lot of the guys that worked on in the adam bombs or super religious, I think that that definitely is one way to to help. So like kudos to Jordan Peterson for sort of injecting that back into the conversation. I think right .

was that in the Peter till interview that we just publish that he kind of implied that turn from the culture, respecting and aspiring to be great engineers and to do great, great things actually was in large part because of the adam bomb like that. That specific thing kind of changed the story for a lot of people.

He does credit when you he doesn't like .

to give A A firm answer on .

when because Peter famous decline person, I think he's the number. Yes, he's hip hop la heating in I think he was a king tire iron people talked about this but he certainly the reason with in tech that the idea of decline is pop theriere ed and that's an idea where um I think there's this default assumption in amErica or there has been until very recently that we are progressing, no matter what, every year is Better than the year before.

And he was like waiting in IT. Actually, if you look at th Epace o f t echnology a cceleration, um IT seems to be way down. And and in fact, I think we're on a state of decline rather than progress and um his whole things are key to be progressing.

Um so the question is often asked to him, when did IT IT? When did IT? When did IT actually start? When when the progress stall out? When did decline begin and and here he'll give you sure of a rough.

There are roughness of getting at this. You look at the one thousand nine hundred and fifteen and the types of science fiction that we consumed, as opposed to the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. It's like very clear that you left the world of photo pia and entered the world of disturbia.

Obviously, we've changed the way that we think about things like technology generally um and he'll also talk about people like Robert moses, right just the way that we think about that guy is totally different now than IT was back then um and uh and the idea of like huge infrastructural change to our cities right something that used to be really inspiring announce its considered um with dread and in fact you can't do IT in almost any city because people rise against IT and try and stop IT so he has offered if you push him he'll suggest maybe I don't know, maybe the adam bomb like maybe at that point the people who are working on pure research type stuff, like they got to this point where something really just because the horrifying was built and um and if there if they are sort of progress type work was going to be used for that, what was the point? Why would you keep going? How could you not be a little bit turned off?

And and it's a really powerful like the bomb persists today as this really powerful meme that is hard to to it's hard to chAllenge you even see. And like some of the more famous blind optimist type people, the pinker of the world to IT is like, actually, you know, you think everything's bad, but everything's good if you just break IT down and look at the data like, oh, you can buy a house and you can build an any new and your salaries are city and there's a ton of inequality more than ever in history um well, you're wrong and here is why you're wrong and it's like, look at you p and look at he goes down all this shit um the thing that he will and we can have that conversation, what to bring on someone to be you to lay that down and we can have a conversation. But ah the thing that he completely avoided, I read his one of his most recent super um you would say like indeterminate optimistic books, is maybe where Peter would put that type of thinking a he completely avoided the adam bomb because what do you say to that? It's it's a really hard thing to tell.

You can say what we also have nuclear power, but of course we don't really like we have IT. IT exists but we're not allowed to use IT. We do have or you know a shit ton of nuclear bombs and we've never been so close to extinction um as as a species um since I don't even no sense when I mean I guess there were meals around at the time that the dinos s dinosaurs all been extinct.

Like I guess I could have turned out like the different for respect then, but this seems pretty bad. Um and and they both exist you know the utopia a thing exists concurrently, sort of a long side of of the autopsy. But something happened on our culture where we are just clinging to that, destroy an story and is hard to get past that. But yeah, he does he does look back at that and speculate you know maybe maybe that was IT um and maybe I was yeah but how can you have progress if .

there's no goal, there is nothing to progress towards? I I think the reason that amErica grew toward IT became as because there was always throughout history, there were like goals. First, who was manifest destiny, and then after that I was like, we're going beyond manifest esty.

We're going to the pacific. We're going, we're getting why we're getting well, we're getting the Philippines, whatever made like this, sort of like some, I like period od and then that ended and then I was like, okay, we had the new dealer which think about IT what you like. But IT was like a sort of radical vision of like what the state could be and how the state could transform um the economy and transform people's lives.

And they did a lot of good things. There is a lot of like infrastructure that still standing that was built during the new deal period that brought you know basic communities to places of the country where there were no electricity, no running water, never anything like that. Um and then after they get the cold board and you know, we put a man on the moon, we did, you know, all of these like incredible things to prove that, you know, american capitalism, the superior to commission, and then we'd be the communist. And then we'd spent the next thirty years treating the country like a garage cell.

And now it's like, what are we even what's live in the point of america? And I think like that. And I get, like some people, this order libertarian perspective of, you know, like the state is evil and state is whatever, but you have to add something that gives up something for people to rally around like and that thing has to like the state has to have an I dig I just hold you like just desperate h individuals all coming together, humanity as a whole um you know progressing. I don't know if that's really ever going to that's too big. I think ism.

I'm glad you brought IT up. I was a libertarian for a really long tight I would say I was the most extreme ge of libertarian was a narrow ical capitalist. I read all the books.

I was very um radicalized, I would say. And libertarians have to do this thing when they look back at our founding intellectuals, they they frame malls, libertarians, but they were not. They all believed in something.

They all had a very concrete plans for what the country could look like and should look like. And they're out there in voting you know ancient rome and uh and the empire and things like this. You see that in our in our early architecture um once we have enough money to our building, shit, look at dc, right? Like that's role.

That's what the influence was. I A I think the other thing they get really so they get history wrong because they have to believe in this myth of like there is this world, this ideal world that could exist in which nobody has any vision whatsoever and it's just like pure freedom sort of just um progress happens magically and everything is just magically Better. It's like market fundamentals ism.

I love a market I love. I love a free market, but I don't believe that things just happen. And that is truly their belief. IT is IT is the idea that you can exist in a state with no ideas and beautiful things can happen. But in fact, if you're coming with with no ideas, and that's what you're fighting for, all that really guarantees is that people with bad ideas are going to win because bad idea is always going to win over over no idea whatsoever.

Uh and you really see this in sort of like every election cycle when um someone's talking about uh it's usually with the with sort of far left talking about some kind of new welfare program and and the response typically when you oh you can do that because if X, Y, N, Z is so well, why are the republicans ever come up with a solution to the problem? The average person wants the government to do something they do. And like you, you can wish that wasn't the case as much as you forever, but all that means you're gonna lose forever.

The average person wants that. We have a democracy, republic. But the democratic piece is very, very important, has gotten much more important over the years as we become more of democracy than the republic. You have to, you have to do something that corresponds with that innate sense the average person has, that our leaders should be building something Better um and that starts with, I think, ambition for that.

My father thing downtown tromp ever did was flow the idea of buying Greenland fucking loved IT like a lit my whole world on fire um because my first reaction was like, oh my god, you can do that and then I asked myself, like, waited. When did I when did I pick up the idea? where? Where was that? That I I internalized the idea that amErica can't grow and shouldn't grow.

And like the idea of IT actually is dirty in some way um that's a crazy cancer that seeps in and i'm someone who talks about this should a lot and if it's even hitting me, that must be a pervasive idea and you can see that mean the way people react to that was extreme um the idea of that was really IT was like one of his like scary effect some people thought was just funny. I think most people probably did. There are people that really hated IT and then there were a few who were like, wait minute, this is the way, this is like the only way we have to.

I want, I want Greenland. I want cuba. I want the moon. I people, I feel like I maybe expected to be excited about the inDiana's landing on the moon.

And it's like, you know, the russians are going up there, are entering this period where the whole plan is excited about space again or something. I'm not I that's our moon. Get off moon where moon? Well, I think he also waited.

Like moon is a state like not the moon, but just moon yeah I agree. IT should be a state. I don't know what what is IT like fifty thousand people that have to be there to vote in in the constitution.

Like, let's get them up there. Agree, agree. yeah. So I think I think the plan from this episode, right, is like, we need to reopen the frontier. We need a vision.

So I see manifest destiny up to none of IT, right? When ade, canada recovery, zed, that against the D, I D folks there, take canada, use Justin trude's claim to make him like the puppy king of cuba. Make that like american protect IT. And then with all the resources in oil from sketch wan and Alberta, where ever else we power our our gas power rockets to moon and colonize that as well, I think that that doesn't I take away and they were close.

We do have to figure out global warming, which brings me to the question of sulfur emission. This is like one of these endlessly fascinating um m policy moments policy. It's like the intersection of policy culture of politics and a you have this actually branded one. You just break down the story for us or was IT branded or river one of you guys looked this up. I think he was branded.

Um so in twenty twenty the united nations international maritime organization called I M O um they Mandated that um translate inc. Shipping uh freres had to cut their sofa emissions by eighty percent and that happened was so basically these these traders their sulfur emission to would actually create um something called uh shift tracks. You I guess this maybe you from with this since you are cloud guy, um the ship tracks are actually just software clouds and those software clouds reflect sunlight, are ended up reflecting a lot of sunlight um and because of the united nations Mandate um for the fraters to reduce their their software emissions by eighty percent um all of those um software clouds have gone away and IT basically increase the amount of light that hitting the ocean by fifty percent previous to to that Mandate. And so what you have at this point is that the atlantic is is warming up and limit is warming up a little .

bit and rapid. And to the point where I mean you want to, there's a lot of sort of global global warming is not happening to stuff. And this is I not global with the world planet seems to be worrying to me.

There's a question of how much is natural and how much as men made, but it's sort of impossible to deny that I completely and also believe what I do, which is we should be changing the planet, like obviously we can have an impact on the planet that I think we have had an impact. We should have an impact. But this was one of these moments where I looked at that warming water.

I was just in miami, I mean, miami now, but I wish at the beach last weekend and I went to that water and IT is hot, uh, like bath water, which happened. But just the numbers are dictating that are demonstrating that we're much warmer than typically. There are all these cyclone forming right now um in the atlantic tropical storms right now.

I think it's going to be a really bad storm season. And um this is we sort of I mean, I don't know that we know this for sure this point, these are interesting facts and we're sort of hypothesize, but there is a chance that like we have actually just been beating back the effects of global warming, this sort of the al gore um argument for the ment. We've been beating IT back with geo engineering by accident for, you know, decades. And if that's the case, like one, we need to get that sofa back to fuck up in the atmosphere is hap. And we need to do IT a little more aggressively, because not only do we want to stem the effects of this, but we wanted call the planet down a bit.

Yeah, I agreed. My friend casey handwork, um he has this blow us an idea about like mining down an entire mountain into nothing, just harvesting all the sulfur and then dumping that all together in the ocean.

And like maybe you get something from that, that looks more like like terraforming by creating islands, but also that that software defusing throughout the ocean is one way to do like a variety things yeah like call the planet down into producing new clouds. That sounds great. Another awesome thing is just cloud production like anthrax, icc cloud generation, we could use more clouds now, software class in particular rate for like precipitation. But like we have all of this airline in the american west, we have all these deserts like the sahara urban desert, the goby desert, if we can produce more clouds, even if they're not perfect because of the software content in them for preciptation, we can just add additional particulate, actively geoengineer in such a way that we get more clouds and then more precipitation from t right? Like you also want .

to be targeting where the precipitation is falling, right? The way the current. I always get this word is that a hydrology cycles, or hydrology gic cycles. Talking the right guy, right?

Which one is IT hydra hydraulic? It's hydro logic.

the hydrogen gic cycle. So there that doesn't exist as a hair desert because there's no water in the middle, a hairy desert. What you need to do right is build a giant fucking canal and just dumped the ocean water into the lake chat.

And we gotta revive lake mega chat at those two things. One, IT built the cycle out in the sahara, and you replaying the sahara. awesome.

Love that bread basket of the world. Now, uh, number two, lower the sea level. So like the it's a win win.

Miami is got a lot more beach front t beach front property at this point. And we don't have to worry about flooding any longer of manhattan or what not like. These are problems of the past.

But why can't it's like we can even, we can even build a new bridge at this point in. I was california, uh, when the bridge to big sir went down, I was actually in big for the time. We had to take a different track all the way around, had to cancel a trip we were hosting seven months later because the bridge wasn't up IT. IT took like a full year, I think, to rebuild that bridge. So IT seems like it's gona be tough to get people on board with lake mega chat.

Okay, so i'll leave the bridge fixing to somebody else. But with respect to fixing shade and g engineering, I got ta covered. Um there is a handful of terrible ign technologies though just beyond like sea flooding, which is super basting great beyond just cloud seating right where you like released particular into clouds and can do slaw paper makes the rain.

Beyond cloud brightening where you dump uh, software and either the atmosphere or the ocean, which then produces more clouds. Another thing that people are modelling out now are the assets of controls, right? Controls not came trails. When a plane flies very high and the water is ejected out of IT that Crystallizes and create those like long stringy clouds I think you're called control series the way up in the atmosphere.

Um those can be used as well to either increase the albedo of the atmosphere, right, increase the reflectivity of IT, drive the temperature down, or depending on the time of day when you use them, you can super precisely retain he as well, right? Let's say that amErica buys Greenland and we decide, you know, we'd have to figure out some particulars. We want to melt all the ice and we want to, you know, make IT in agricultural hub.

So we're going to fix this sahara. I make that a bread basket. We're going to fix screen land, make that a bread basket if you fly plants up and create these controls, uh, in the afternoons because there's no sun hitting the planet at that point.

They act as this sort of blanket and they retain heat a locally in in one point, the atmosphere. So that's another piece of the tech that we can use with respected desert geo engineering. You can grind up biochar and other like a hydrocarbons into the soil and then increase the water attention.

And then no matter what the temperature conditions are, where the preciptation is, if the water can retain more, or if the soil can retain more water, then organics can start to grow there, and then del limit particulate, which will create more clouds. Like there is a whole sweet of options that we have to terraform the entire planet. Every single desert can be moved from a wasteland into a bread basket or a forest, or whatever we desire IT be.

And we can do that sibiu dally with nature, and we should. But all we have to do is exercise that will, like the technologies, has been around for decades. We just have to get good and and decide to work on IT.

Tell me about cloud seating because this is something, I mean, we're approaching this at the end of the episode at this point and uh, this is the amazing science picture, seeing things that you are working on now I think the average person does believe is just totally fake, right? They can't possibly be true that you can make IT rain.

Um this is since the earliest, earliest recorded history on caves and shit like people painting on caves, people have wanted in to rain. It's like this. Like how do you how do you make sure that you are recipes ation so you can grow food or so that there is foods? Like, how is that real? Tell tell us how IT works, tell us what you're doing. Tell us words in uh, practice right now.

Give us the story totally, totally. So um the tech was sort of stumbled upon in the fifties by the guy Vincent shafer and then uh, not heard one of get but some other grand vin and they basically had a cloud chAmber. They are conducting some tests in IT.

And then the uh analogy I loved you is like if you know power, of course, if you watch that show, like the professor spills agent x and then like creates the power poles um but Vincent shafer spill dry ice and soft identity cloud chAmber and realized that ice ristal for like if I just take this is how, okay, another intense of dudes rock and how much cooler science wasn't the fifties? He spilled this in the his cloud chAmber, noticed that there were more ice Crystals, and then decided, why got a plane? I'm just going to start hugin this out of the back.

My plane over a local cloud. And he did. And a snowed in northern new york, our western new york. So the technology was was figured out in its cruise form and fifties and then gradually improved.

In the sixties and seventies we started doing hail suppression over crops, although at the interior of the united states, we did precipitation enhancement in areas that needed more rain um and and we even did something which shot was incredible called uh product storm fury where we took all of our leftovers bonus and we had something called the U. S. Weather modification.

And in collaboration with the air force, we fly out over the atlantic, release this chemical age and i'll get into the mechanics of our works, release this chemical condemns the water vapor in the clouds and get that water out of the clouds, uh, increase the late and heat, or release the late heat in the water, expand the radius of the hurricane and then uh ultimately like mitigate the damage done by them on the eastern sea world. So we used to bomb hurricanes to be a cloud seating tech to reduce the damage. Talk about like awesome to engineering.

So, so there was a long history of us doing spectacular things, are starting to do spectacular things with IT. And then in the same way that, you know, in the seven bees, we gave up on space travel. We gave up on decision. We gave up on you engineering in cloud seating. And so I really fell away.

We gave up on paris psychology research. But that's a different topic.

Can um so so then there are these like hold out projects. Um so there was a couple of people that kept performing cloud eating in north dakota. There were a couple of people that kept researching yet at sea bolder in the university of y um and you know, the progress made was you, not negligible, but not spectacular.

All the while, the chinese, the C, C P, and then the U A E. And then the sauces were like, oh, this is obviously a spectacular technology tree. Let's pursue a full board.

So where is cloud seat and going on now? Well, there is a handful of really small Operations that are sort of these artifacts of yesterday year in the united states. Um but china is killing they're trying to terraform the entire goby desert. They're causing preciptation over the goby so that as they plant more trees, those trees can be given the water that's necessary to forest all the area. They are close seating over the anz river to supplement the the agricultural demands and the hydroelectric demands on that river water shed and in the U A, E.

And salty, they're trying to terreforte their deserts, right? They're already doing this is totally real um and and so I guess that sort of the lay of the land, how does this work is relevant right in in the simplest sense, clouds or water vapor, right? Um precipitation occurs when the droplets in those clouds become either big enough, heavy enough droplets to fall in spider of the convective forces, or you, uh, get Crystal ice crustal snow Crystals that are big enough and heavy defaults but of conductive forces.

So what do we do? What is cloud seating is using a drawn or a rocket or a plan to fly up into a cloud, release a chemical, and accused something like saying, for soba died, condense the waterval, or in that cloud, or catalyze the freezing of IT. So you get big enough droppers and such that are rents, and you can do this with precision over individual farms. You can do IT over entire watershed. Um there is one hundred and one use cases for this tech for control in the weather.

What are the largest barriers? I I imagine I can see A A few um one would just be popular will IT seems a little bit scary. All new things are a little bit scary, especially now seems like people have an aversion to this kind of thing um to government for whatever reason doesn't element things happen.

Uh and in technological maybe there are some technological hermes. You're not you haven't laid out. Are there any glitch of me? obvious. I see. When you google this stuff, you read reports on IT IT seems difficult to be certain that IT was the seating that did whatever right? You can't run experiments twice. So you know you can do the seating and it's running and like, well doesn't work all the time and was I going to rain you know or not? So uh IT is a cultural, technological, political, which is the onest the bigger hurdle for you right now?

Um so the technological sult tor um there is a lot of innovation that we can do to get Better yields. And so let let me speak to that real way and just say, um you're right, like a lot of this studies and a lot of literature on class, you can have had like dubious conclusions on.

The reason for that too for one we've just done is so improve sely in the past like we're ether like literally burning a flair on the ground and hoping that the particulate and the smoke and the flair gets twenty thousand feet up to the precise and and to the precise location in the club that you need um that doesn't work. So if you exclude those papers from the lit reviews, it's way more problem. And that beyond that um the other thing that was necessary to get the attribution problems solved right to determine exactly how much water we produce every time we conduct on these Operations that was all four by something called the snowy project in uh, idaho.

And so this a people see older idaho and electrics. They all collaborated and realized that if you have really high precision rate are and really high frequency sampling rate are in three dimensions, and then you fly your plane as you're sitting in his exact in a way that is totally anthropogenic. Ic would never occur in nature.

You can measure in three dimensions how big the plume of uh, new droplets are behind your plane and then you can, with the radar, measure the concentration of those dropouts and subsequently how much water you produce. Traditionally, that's totally anthropogenic. So the tech it's all for now, we're trying to do more precise delivery.

We're using gones. We're trying to do more precise identification of the locations in the clouds um where the higher density of super liquid water. Is that a software problem, a sensing problem? We're also using or looking to use different nucleation agents um to get Better back for a book that the bigger thing than the tech, which we're working on we're working on is the the regulatory hurdles, right?

Um anybody trying to do anything with jhones, first of all tries to work in the united states first and if that doesn't work, they pull as the blind right, like the company that went to rWanda to do blood delivery and organ delivery for hospitals, you know, would love to work in the united states first, would love to make you know this country's geo engineering progress. You would love to make our geo engineering sector great and competitive with china and competitive with the middle of the nations um but we need buy in front folks like the F A A, folks at neba, folks at noa, folks at NASA. So that's the biggest a hurdle for us right .

now are the are the chinese and um those countries that you mentioned currently at the four front. Of cloud seating. Are they using these technologies that you're describing? Or or does rainmakers specifically have A A novel approach to to cloud seating?

Yeah so um there both the hero, rather sad. The U A in china they're all using drones. Um so this is this is like a novel way to drive the cost down, increase the precision of delivery. They are not experimenting very heavily with alternative chemicals, not going to speak to wish ones we're talking about for the sake of whatever I pad type sof soak.

So we're using novel chemicals, reading novel ways to disperse the chemicals so that the amount of of paying for a box, so to speak, for the the amount of rain that we get for Operation is is higher. So so this is novel. This is stuff that to my knowledge, there not they're not working on yet um initial law, they won't be anytime soon and and we can catch up because there about, i'd say, two decades ahead of us on .

this texture in terms of the politics IT seems where is back to you? Policy is not your biggest problem that that would be culture, if you can if if you can, alive culture with the goal of progress, real progress. And by the way, that's a word that we just really need to take back.

Um the politics are down's room of that like you will you'll get the politics but they're just doing what people are responding to, right? People are scared of the stuff. They don't want you to fuck with the planet.

Um I think he probably doesn't help that like the really popular ideas. I mean people want to go up there and talk about in case of terms of your engineering specifically, let's talk about like people really love to talk about the giant solar shield and things like this. And it's like we don't have to do that.

We don't have to talk about a giant death star looking can't like structure in the sky like we could just talk about things like um ocean seating and we could talk about things like, uh was IT is at sea flooding I was get the word wrong when we're right so uh, we can talk about lake mckagan. We can talk about the desert. We could talk about cloud seating like these are the things that .

I think are really exciting.

They are really possible there. Here we have IT. We can do IT. And I think most people like you'll get the average person on board. If you tell the average person like, listen, the water is too warm and these deserts are fucked up and there's a way to change that. I think they're like listening, you know provided IT doesn't seem like there's this chance of global capital ms, or by accident in the case of the giant solar shield.

Yeah well, you know, like the the the fork in the road that we have now, is this right? Like the west, basically every like desert ology, the american west in particular is going to be depopulated. Like everybody in the status quo is going to have to move out of los Angeles, probably sanfords o phenix two sun lost biggest everywhere else around there like select city and so on um because they're just not enough water to go around in the that sport, right. Like our infrastructure cannot support this much agriculture and this many people um based off the current trends.

So so up option one is everybody leaves the west, which would be a disaster and even beyond that, like the ecologies in the west, like every bit of life in the colorado river and color river delta is destroyed, right? So that is what's on the table for us in the statistics, like bad outcome for humans, bad outcome for nature. The alternative is like, yeah, less certain.

We can do some modeling. We can do some predictions. We can, with our best effort and good faith, try to change the path of of this like horrible warble statistical by cloud seating by using other, as yet not like widely used and scaled tech. And so if I have to choose between certain doom and like a slow whipper ing death, or what could be a glorious future with some risk associated with that, um I would choose the lighter.

There's a something I wrote about few years ago. I went down to sutton sea in california. So in the it's just south of palm springs. It's like a midi, like an hour away.

And the slency used to be a really popular tourist destination in like the one thousand fifties, I believe in one thousand and four days, uh, giant salt water sea in the desert, beautiful ecosystem all around of IT, all around IT. And it's a total mistake, like he was flooded by accident. I think the chicago river, like a lady broke or something at the area.

And so you have this this giant um you've all this water hit the salt beds, you create a salt water, massive salt water lake, those this hydrologic cycle you have like animals plans all around there and then you build up an economy around IT um and then slowly little by little um because there's not supposed to be a lake there. It's just been drawing up over the years and as IT dries, the switch increases, the water becomes more toxic, all of the animals die and and now you're going into this really nauseous point where um you have his giant sand clouds h that that just super toxic and I just like a kind of west waste dump down there. And uh really the all you have to do is flooded again, not even with fresh water.

You could do with salt water. I checked ceLinda. The ocean water is like a way less sault than assault, and sea IT would really help if you just did that.

That's that's like dual. It's manageable. We don't have the will for some reason. We got got to get there.

But I guess just I think about the sultan's Y A lot because I was this, we accidentally terraform. It's right there. We did IT. We know how IT works. We can do IT again.

And I guess the the future that I want to see and what i'm so excited about, just kind of not only your company but you like you what you represent sort of uh less gated and pessimistic, right? Like you just only see the possibility and that's important. Like you haven't yet been beaten down by um rejection from the stifles in politics and culture, like you just see the thing and you want to do IT.

Like I am excited about that vision and I think it's really the way for I wanted get to a place where the sultan season just happening by accident. We're doing IT on purpose. And like I just think that's the way.

So uh, that's IT. Uh thank you guys. Uh thank you guesses for joining us and um thank you river in brand in for a joining as well brain and using to enjoy the river. We didn't talk as much about canada as I think you would have liked, but we will get back to the next come. Sure yeah.

it's so oh too I because I said, tell you later ah yeah ah it's just castle is not a thing.

just get sorry so it's not I refused to believe that.

but we later can let me plug also we did an interview with the cost us on the White pill that you can read so be sure check that out .

yeah check that out and on the industry, which is our new newsletter um you really need to be responding to that just like a hello oh hi as something because, uh, it's being sent to your span box. Don't know why. Let's fix the problem.

Check your spam box to get out. Keep us in your box. Talk you guys later. It's been real.