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July 8, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:03
RAINMAKER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1120
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Coming up, I'll talk about the Trump administration's latest move against Harvard, Momdani's case against high-rise investment properties, and how Elon Musk plans to change the face of American politics.
Augustus DeRico, he's CEO of Rainmaker Technology Corporation, joins me.
We're going to talk about some concerns that weather tampering caused the recent flood in the hill country of Texas.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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As always, a lot of stuff happening on different fronts, and I'm going to talk about four or five things in this opening segment.
I'll start with Elon Musk.
We have a window into how he's thinking because he reposted something from Doge Designer.
Doge, of course, is Elon Musk's own kind of crypto coin.
And the post goes like this.
Elon Musk says the proposed America Party would only need to win two to three Senate seats and eight to ten House seats to hold major influence in Congress, acting as the deciding vote on key laws due to razor-thin legislative margins.
This is exactly what I've been saying in the last couple of days.
And I think I've been maybe the only guy saying it, namely that this is not just a case of Elon Musk is angry with Trump.
He wants to get his revenge.
He does have a strategy.
And his strategy is, when you've got two guys who are closely matched and neither of them can pull off a clear majority, what if I can hold the balance of power?
I think that's what Musk is going for.
Now, in a way, the weakness of the strategy, in my opinion, is that you're not going to get a whole lot of bargaining out of the Democrats, are you?
Because they just don't want to go in your direction at all.
Now, maybe you can say to them, if you give in to me on these things, I will go along with you on other issues that you care about.
But what are those issues?
The Democrats will say, okay, are you going to go along with us on the open border?
And Elon Musk is going to have to really say no.
Or he's going to have to say, well, I'll support an expansion of H-1B visas, but I'm not going to support the importation of 10 million more illegals.
I don't think he wants that or would go for that.
But this gives us an idea of what Elon is up to.
I just hope he loses interest in this enterprise, recognizes that it's not maybe the big play that he thought it was going to be, and focuses really on other things.
Alvarado, Texas.
10 Antifa guys, members of an Antifa cell.
In fact, a bunch of these people are evidently trans.
And who are they?
Trans terrorists.
Now, it's important to notice here that these people are, this is the most serious Antifa attack.
It's an attack, a militarized attack on a border patrol ICE facility.
They didn't do very successfully because they shot a police officer in the neck, but all of them got apprehended.
All of them got caught.
But look, they had AR rifles, pistols, ammunition, radios, body armor, not to mention electromagnetic blocking devices, and a bunch of propaganda.
We've long known that ISIS, well, our domestic ISIS, which is Antifa, is getting more and more dangerous, more and more militarized.
It used to be that they would just like block traffic.
Then they went to pulling people out of cars.
Then they went to a singular attack here, a singular attack there.
But now, 10 members of a cell operating in coordination.
By the way, law enforcement was very effective here.
They raided these guys at the home of one of the militants.
They found a stash of the Antifa plans, how to carry out these violent insurrections.
Ten of these people are charged with multiple counts of attempted murder of a federal officer, discharging firearms, and an 11th guy was charged separately just for trying to hide evidence.
I hope the Justice Department throws the book at these guys and that they are taught a lesson from which they won't recover very easily.
Let's turn to Mamdani.
I've been talking about how this guy has been identifying as an African American to get affirmative action benefits, and also about how you've got some of his defenders who say, well, technically, he is African.
He grew up in Uganda.
And all of this, of course, is an attempt to evade the simple fact that the whole idea of affirmative action, as of reparations, any of these race-based policies, is not to help people who are born in Africa.
It's to help people who are the descendants of slaves.
So whether you agree with it or not, and I've been a longtime critic of these racial and ethnic preferences, but we all know what they are and what they're meant for.
And so the case for affirmative action is, do we owe an obligation to the descendants of slavery and segregation?
Nobody claims that this applies to Mom Dani.
He's not even biracial.
He's got two Indian parents.
So isn't it interesting they say America is systematically racist?
And yet, you got this Indian guy who has to pretend to be black to get into college.
What does that tell you?
Where is the racial privilege exactly?
And where does it benefit you?
Does it benefit you to be white?
He could have pretended to be white.
He could have said, racially, I'm Caucasian.
He didn't do that.
He said, I'm African.
I'm from the geographical continent of Africa.
He's playing the black card to try to get benefits and basically take a seat away from some other disadvantaged, well, not other disadvantaged, because he's not disadvantaged, but from a disadvantaged black person.
Now we turn to judges.
A judge in Massachusetts has issued a restraining order on the Big Beautiful bill's suspension of funding for Planned Parenthood.
Now, this is so audacious, so out of line, so crazy.
It has zero chance of surviving appeal.
It has zero chance of the Supreme Court going along.
It is a pure case where a judge in Massachusetts says, I have the power to do it.
I'm going to do it.
What is this judge saying in effect?
Well, in effect, that Congress, Congress, does not have the power to do this.
So let's think about it.
Congress does not have the power to give money to a private entity that it has previously given money to.
Congress cannot change its mind and say, we used to give these guys funding.
We're going to stop giving them funding.
This is not a case that involves Planned Parenthood's free speech.
It's not a case that interferes.
Planned Parenthood can continue to operate and do abortions where it's legal to do them, hand out as much birth control as they want to.
So simply Planned Parenthood saying, hey, we're in financial distress.
Many of our clinics have to close down.
So what?
This is entirely within Congress's power.
Let's remember that what does Congress have the power to do?
Make laws.
So just as I've mentioned before, that you have judges striking out a Trump, even when he is acting completely inside the lanes of his executive authority.
He's not pushing the envelope.
We're not talking even about like birthright citizenship.
We're talking about Trump just doing something that he has the power to do.
Immigration enforcement, for example.
And here we have Congress doing what it has the power to do.
And yet, so this really shows you how lawless these judges are and how hypocritical all of the rule of law, rules-based order, saving democracy, all of that rhetoric is just bogus.
It's completely a sham.
In fact, take a phrase that you hear in the international context, rules-based order.
The first question that comes to mind is, well, who makes the rules?
I mean, I like all rules-based orders where I make the rules.
I don't like any rules-based orders where somebody else makes the rules.
So this pompous attempt to pretend like there is a neutral order when you're the one actively designing these rules, I think this kind of fraud, this kind of rhetorical phlimphlammery isn't really going to work anymore.
There is one thing, however, that Zoran Mamdani says that I think is something that needs to be taken more seriously, and that is his idea, he wants to confiscate or figure out some way to tax out of existence what he calls luxury investment condos.
Now, this is in some ways just sort of pure socialism.
I want to take over private property.
But here, Mamdani is touching on something that is a real problem.
His solution is horrible.
Property confiscation is the prelude to a socialist society.
It is a prelude to taking away what people have earned with their hard-earned money.
But when you look at a luxury condo or any kind of condo, it's owned by some guy who's not living in it.
There is something wrong with that picture.
What's wrong with that picture?
Well, what's wrong with that picture is that you've got a lot of people who are investing in real estate, sometimes detached homes, sometimes commercial properties, sometimes it's luxury condos.
I remember when Debbie and I did this getaway to the beach, we're walking along the sand and we look up at these beautiful oceanfront condos and we notice that there's no one in the balcony.
And then it hit me, it's not just because they aren't there, they live somewhere else, this is their second place.
That may be some of that.
But the other part of that, people own the condos as investments, not to live in.
And why do they do that?
The reason they do that is quite simply because the government is printing way too much money.
And by doing that, our dollars go down in value.
And one way to protect your dollars is to buy assets.
Why?
Because when you have inflation, when costs go up, when prices go up, the prices of assets go up too.
This is why people buy investment real estate.
They're Hoping to, in some ways, benefit from inflation or perhaps stay even because of inflation.
My point is: all of this is pathological behavior that is a response to what our government is doing to us with this promiscuous and irresponsible money printing.
So, that is Zoran Mamdani putting his finger on a genuine problem, even though his answer to it is customarily wrong and even idiotic.
I want to say a word about the Trump administration's ongoing fracas or battle with Harvard University.
They have now made an official finding through the Office of Civil Rights.
By the way, this is our friend Harmit Dylan doing excellent work here.
Essentially, they're finding Harvard guilty or more precisely, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or religion.
And the religion here is Jewishness, because Harvard has this kind of institutional anti-Semitism.
By the way, they had their own anti-Semitism task force, which identified some quite kind of disturbing examples of anti-Semitism.
Now, again, I'm not on board with people who say things like, you know, you can't, you know, denounce the Jews or you can't criticize Israel.
I'm close to a free speech absolutist on that kind of thing.
But we're talking about the kind of intimidation, the kind of physical threats, the kind of blocking of buildings and taking over of buildings, the surrounding of the Hillel Jewish organization.
We're talking about making Jewish students feel unsafe, endangered in their own dorms and in their own classrooms and on their own campus.
This is, in fact, utterly unacceptable.
In fact, you can see that simply by taking the word Jew, crossing it out, and writing in the word black.
What if these exact same things were being done to blacks?
They would not be tolerated on any campus in the country.
So I think that the Trump administration here is doing quite the right thing, and Harvard is facing some very severe penalties that they have really brought on by themselves.
I suspect what's going to happen is that Harvard, after a lot of kind of thrashing around and indignant squeals and faculty resolutions and other humbug, will essentially start negotiating with the Trump administration because the Trump administration has shown we are not only able, we are quite willing to raise RAZE, which means kind of bring down this institution.
We'd rather have no institution than an institution that has, that is in a sense, an engine of indoctrination, of propaganda, and of course, of bigotry.
Hey, you've probably heard, but you don't have to take your shoes off anymore when you go to the airport.
This is a new TSA rule.
I call it the 25 years too late rule, which is to say that the TSA has its record on apprehending terrorists based on this rule so far is a very impressive zero.
They haven't caught a single person trying to, you know, smuggle some stuff inside his boot.
And all of this was based, I think, upon one kooky guy who took off his shoes on an air.
This really shows you how stupid government bureaucracy is.
One guy takes off his shoes, everybody freaks out, and then for 20 years, all the airlines across the country make tens of millions of people actually pull their shoes off.
Debbie's been, by the way, trying to get me to do TSA precheck for about five years.
I don't like to pay the $75, or maybe it's up to like $100.
$85, says Debbie.
But in any event, I haven't had TSA precheck, even though I travel a lot.
Finally, I get TSA pre-check, so I don't have to take off my shoes.
And now I don't have to take off my shoes.
Give me my $85 back.
All right.
Finally, the IRS has issued a new ruling saying that churches can openly endorse candidates from the pulpit.
Now, first of all, A, this has long been known.
B, there are churches all over the country, notably liberal churches, black churches, that engage in open political organizing.
But you've got all these conservative pastors.
And I think in some of the cases, there is genuine fear of the IRS.
So that fear is now removed.
But in other cases, it was just that these guys were, you know, they're timid.
They're not really, they talk a lot about the biblical virtues of courage and facing up to persecution.
Persecution?
I mean, these guys don't even like like three guys to go to leave the pew and walk out of the church because you've said something on moral issues that somehow made them uncomfortable.
So where's the Christian courage?
Where is the speaking truth to power?
Where's the bold proclamations?
So in a way, I think what's good about all this is that the IRS has now removed the excuse, removed the excuse for Catholic churches, Protestant churches, non-denominational churches, conservative churches to step up to the plate and recognize that, listen, moral issues don't stop at the pew.
They don't even stop with our personal life.
They have a lot to do with our civic culture, with the protection of the family, the distinction between men and women.
In other words, not just God's own laws, but God's creation, natural differences.
They have to do, of course, with the protection of life, not just in abortion, but in other contexts as well, the just war theory in the context of foreign policy.
So, look, you're allowed to do it.
You need to do it.
The country needs you to do it.
We, the church members, want to hear you do it.
And so stop with the excuses.
Let's have a Christianity That is applicable not only to our personal and private life, but also to the public sphere.
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These particles pass through the gut barrier.
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With all the flooding in Texas, there is a, well, I suppose we could call it a conspiracy theory going around, but a lot of people are jumping on it, saying, hey, forget about climate change.
This is all because of geoengineering and people messing with the climate and messing with the clouds.
And I thought I'd have on today a new guest who has been messing with the clouds, but I think not quite in that way.
His name is Augustus Dorico.
He's the CEO of Rainmaker Technology Corporation.
It's a cloud seeding geoengineering startup that aims to create water abundance in the United States.
You can follow him on X at A Dorico, D-O-R-I-C-K-O, the website rainmaker.com.
Augustus, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
Let's start by just talking about Rainmaker, and because I think to many people, this is something completely new.
The idea that you can, in any way, like alter the climate, produce rain, seems in one way, at least to me, kind of exhilarating because it suggests that you can solve problems that human beings haven't been able to solve for millennia.
On the other hand, it's like, whoa, isn't this something that we should think about?
Aren't there a lot of dangers in doing this and risks in doing it?
Why don't you start by just kind of illuminating how this works?
What does it mean to create water abundance?
How do you do it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, thank you so much for having me for one, Dinesh.
And with respect to what cloud seeding is and how it works, it's a technology that mimics the natural precipitation processes that occur all over the world.
In lots of clouds, there is liquid water in drops that are too small to ever naturally precipitate.
And if you introduce into those clouds, particulate aerosol, for those droplets to freeze onto or to condense onto, you can create large enough snowflakes or drops such that they precipitate more than they otherwise would have.
And this is a technology that's fundamentally American.
It was invented in the United States in 1945.
And we used to have large-scale cloud seeding programs throughout the United States between the mid-40s, 60s, and 70s, and only dialed them back as of the last few decades because without the advance in radar technology that Rainmaker has access to, that places like the National Center of Atmospheric Research have access to, it was too difficult to see what our effect was on these clouds.
But now, because we have next generation radar, not only can we enhance precipitation, but we can measure how much additional precipitation we induce for farms, ecosystem conservation, industrial applications, or residential reservoirs to ensure that cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas continue to exist and grow with as much water as they need.
I was going to say, when I lived in California, you know, they were always putting out bulletins about the fact that you could only take a three-minute shower and you shouldn't be watering your lawn too much.
And before that, when I first came to America, I lived in Arizona, kind of the same thing.
You know, don't stand in the shower for too long.
And all of this, I think, has to do with the fact that certain places in the country just get very little rain.
We happen to live in a place in Texas that gets a lot of rain.
But what you're saying is you have a company that can Produce some rain.
Now, do you worry that if you go too far, it's going to produce flooding?
Or, in other words, you know, we've just had, of course, this terrible catastrophe in Texas, the overflowing river, people being swept away, a hundred some casualties.
There are some people, I think people who don't know better, who just say, well, you know, basically this 25-year-old kid from California did it.
Let's talk about that.
What caused the overflowing of the river and how can we be confident that it has nothing to do with any of this geoengineering?
Yeah, absolutely.
So first with respect to Texas, the flooding that occurred there is not something without precedent, right?
That's often called Flash Flood Alley.
There have been flash floods there historically, and that event had 4 trillion gallons of precipitation over just that small region of the hill country over the course of two days.
That we saw on forecasts was something that was liable to occur because it was the coincidence of two mesoscale, essentially global weather systems.
Cloud seeding, in the very best research that we've conducted both at Rainmaker and that we've seen from universities like Colorado Boulder or ETH Zurich, cloud seeding produces something on the order of 10 million gallons of precipitation from a given event.
And that 10 million gallons is distributed over hundreds of square miles.
Rainmaker, and this gets into your point about concerns as to whether Rainmaker was involved.
And I can say unequivocally we were not.
My heart and prayers go out to all the people affected by this.
But Rainmaker has to adhere to suspension criteria, regulations given to us by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
In all of our operations throughout the United States, be it Utah, California, Colorado, Texas, or otherwise, if there is ever risk of severe flooding, if the reservoirs are already too full, if the ground is already so saturated with water that any additional precipitation could risk flooding, then we have to suspend operations.
And not only did Rainmakers suspend operations in accordance with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulations criteria, we actually did so a day prior.
So it was on the 2nd that we did, admittedly, fly a cloud seeding flight for 20 minutes into two clouds that dissipated over the course of the ensuing two hours.
But there's no way in which the 70 grams of material, essentially 10 Skittles worth, could have affected the precipitation that ensued on the third, fourth, and fifth.
I mean, just to put these numbers in perspective, you said 10 million gallons of water versus, I think you said 10 trillion.
So that's a factor of a million times more, right?
So I think what you're saying is not only did we not do it, we couldn't.
The amount of rain that you produce is a tiny, tiny fraction of what we saw in Texas.
Now, is the reporting right that blames tropical storm Barry for having produced all this excess water?
I mean, there were a lot of people who said, well, wow, for the river to swell in just a short time this much is, quote, an unnatural event.
And I think it was that idea of an unnatural event that got certain people thinking, well, maybe some people have been messing with the climate.
Yeah, I think that in the case of natural disasters, which this was, people often want to find a scapegoat or hold someone responsible because in so doing, if they are able to hold someone responsible, then theoretically they could prevent something from happening in the future.
And that world is one that's less tragic than the world that we actually inhabit, which is one where natural disasters and tragedies do ensue.
Now, that being said, cloud seeding currently is used exclusively for precipitation enhancement at Rainmaker.
But I think that in the future, doing something to mitigate severe weather is something that we should aspire to do.
And maybe something that you'll resonate with is core to our mission at Rainmaker, which is fulfilling the dominion mandate and the stewardship mandate that we were given by God at the beginning of time, right?
In Genesis 1, 26 through 28, and then again throughout the Psalms, God gives man a commandment to take dominion over and steward the earth, the seas, the skies, and everything therein.
And I think that Rainmaker is an act of faith and a lived work insofar as by producing more water for people that are suffering from droughts, or maybe someday mitigating severe weather that is causing tragic damage like this, that seems something not only that we should aspire to do for the sake of our countrymen and for the sake of making God's creation as beautiful and lush and abundant as possible,
but also I think we should aspire to it because it's a world with less tragedy should we be able to do that.
Let me put what you just said a slightly different way because I think it's a critical point, particularly for our audience, which would be pretty heavily Christian.
I think what you're saying is that there are many people who have the wrong idea that if something is, quote, natural, therefore God made it like that and he wants us to leave it like that.
Now, we know that that can't be true because in so many other domains, I mean, for example, I obviously have defective eyesight.
I have myopia.
Now, that's natural, right?
That's the way my eyes are.
But I've got perched on my nose a pair of glasses which are rectifying this natural defect.
And I think what you're saying is that not only is that okay, but in a broader sense, right going back to Genesis, God wants us, we too are part of nature, and God is giving us a mandate to kind of take care of the world, but also not to hesitate to put the world to good use for the positive purposes of mankind.
And to the degree that we have droughts, we have suffering, we have people who are starving because they can't grow crops because there's not enough water.
If you can find a Safe way to harness the powers of nature.
Maybe one of the issues you just raised, which I'd like you to talk about, is the potential in future to reduce the severity of maybe hurricanes, ameliorate droughts.
Do you think that this is where all this technology is headed, where there might be a way with appropriate safeguards to prevent some of these natural disasters?
Yeah, so with respect to your first point, we already do modify creation.
We modify the world that God gave us for the sake of our benefit and creation's itself, right?
Like God made the rivers and the specific flow of the rivers, but we build dams to prevent flooding that destroys farms and cities and ecosystems.
We pump water out of the ground where God placed it so that we can irrigate our farms and so that we can take showers, right?
And though I am sympathetic to the notion that the skies above might look something like the heavens, and so we insinuate that or we associate that with God's domain, cloud seeding is really just another mode of modifying the water cycle as we already do and as we already have for hundreds of years.
With respect to your second question, it wouldn't be without precedent in the United States to attempt to mitigate severe weather.
So this isn't something that Rainmaker is engaged in now or will be in the immediate or near future, but there was something called Project Storm Fury that was conducted in the last century, where the U.S. Weather Bureau, in conjunction with the American Air Force, flew cloud seeding missions over the Atlantic into hurricanes to try to seed them, dissipate the rain from them, and also reduce the wind speeds from them before they broke against the eastern seaboard.
And again, without the appropriate radar and satellite imagery, it was too difficult to measure what the effect of that was.
But is it something that we should aspire to?
Absolutely.
And insofar as the weather is just a physical system and we could design physical systems to make it work better for us in creation, I think we'd actually be abdicating our responsibility to God to take care of the world he made for us if we didn't pursue that in earnest.
Provided, of course, we do so with humility, with appropriate regulation, with stewardship at the forefront of all of these pursuits.
Let me ask you a question, which I ask with some hesitation, in part because it relies on sort of scientific ideas that I don't myself fully understand, but I've read in the scientific literature about this idea of, I don't know if it's part of chaos theory or ecosystem theory, but you've probably heard it, a butterfly flaps its wings like in Ecuador, and that produces effects like in Mumbai, India.
Now, leaving aside that, that this defies intuition, the question behind it, I think, is something like this, and that is that could it be that there is such a delicate balance in our ecosystem that we might with all good intentions try to produce these results?
And no one denies that locally they're beneficial.
Let's just say you're able to produce more rain in Phoenix, but you don't know what the effect of that is going to be in, let's say, Brazil or is going to be somewhere else in Asia.
Is it even possible for us to have enough of a detailed compass of the entire planet to be able to accurately gauge what these long-term effects are?
It's a great question.
I think one way to frame this that's probably useful is in the context of all the ways that civilization already unintentionally modifies the weather without any care for the local or global consequences of it, right?
By building cities and creating heat islands, we change precipitation patterns in the vicinity of those cities themselves, around Austin, around Houston, and that may have some effect on the other side of the planet.
By deforesting areas of the Amazon, we see less precipitation occurring there.
From emissions, it's very difficult to model what the consequences of either CO2 or other aerosol emissions are.
And I'm sure that we could talk about this at length.
But it's abundantly clear that we are unintentionally modifying the weather for all of our other interests right now.
And what I would hope for is a regulatory regime and an aspiration to modify the weather with intentionality so that we could get the best from it, both on a local and global scale.
So I think what you're saying is that if we're more conscious about it, we're likely to have better results.
And that this is something that, I mean, one of the things I think we know from technology is that when you have capabilities to do something, you can rail about it all you want, but those things are going to be done.
I mean, a really good example is, hey, you know, let's convince everybody to stay off their phones.
Well, yeah, but as long as your phones take really good photographs and music comes out of them and you can communicate with people all over the world instantaneously, you know, it's pretty hard to stop it because it's delivering something of concrete benefit.
And seems to me something similar is going on here.
Let's dive a little bit more into the process because I think it's really fascinating.
I think what you said earlier on is the whole idea here is to kind of go inside the cloud.
The cloud itself already has the water.
You're not, quote, adding water.
You're going into the cloud where there's water already and you're producing a sort of a chemical reaction which causes these water molecules to coalesce, to become large enough droplets, and then basically to come down in the form of snow or rain.
Is that a correct summary of how this technology works?
Yeah, Dinesh, you could do my job for me.
You understand it very, very well.
I think the only thing that I would add to that is that because we now have what's called dual polarization radar, which is essentially just a kind of radar that allows you to discriminate between liquid and ice in cloud, we can see where our particles have been emitted, an increase in freezing, and then growth of the snowflakes, which become big enough to precipitate And melt back down as rain.
Tell us a little bit about yourself, because I'm just curious.
You're a 20-something, you're running a technology company, I think, with remarkable potential.
Where did you grow up?
What did you study?
Where did you go to school?
How did you get involved in something so, well, outlandish, maybe not the wrong word, as creating water abundance?
Yeah, well, thank you for asking.
Despite what some people on the internet have claimed, at least I'm not aware of myself to be any sort of deep state plant from Bill Gates or Clinton or otherwise, but it's been suggested.
I grew up in Stanford, Connecticut.
I'm grateful for the childhood that I had.
I grew up an atheist, actually.
And then when I went to school at UC Berkeley for physics, I realized that without some objective moral frame, without some meaning in the world, it would be really difficult to orient yourself towards doing anything good because it would be hard to define what good is.
And so while I was at Berkeley, actually in the depths of depravity, you might say, the pandemic happened.
I was consulting with two different rabbis, two different priests, a pastor at a non-denominational church, a Sunni Imam, actually, and then had moved to Texas to escape Berkeley from the pandemic.
And while I was in Texas, read the book by Lee Strobel called The Case for Christ.
Have you read this?
I have.
I know Lee Strobel.
That's a good book.
It's a spectacular book.
And so the interesting thing is, before I knew God personally, before I really believed in any of the Christian theology, I was just convinced that it was more plausible than not that Jesus Christ did in fact live, did in fact die on the cross, and then was resurrected.
And so two days before I turned 21, while I was in Texas, I got baptized.
And I'm very grateful for that.
It's also worth noting that while I was in Texas, I met one of the biggest water well drillers in the state.
He took me under his wing.
I dropped out of college to co-found a groundwater monitoring company with him, scaled that up, sold my interest in it in the beginning of 2023.
And every single customer that we had said, it's great that they know how much water they're using, but fundamentally they just want more water.
And so I started Rainmaker as a solution to that problem, to water scarcity, and from the very beginning, have tried to operate this company with a mindset of stewardship.
And that isn't to say every single employee at the company is Christian.
There's a lot of diversity of opinion, but everybody knows that that's where my heart is at in building this.
Amazing stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to Augustus DeRico, CEO of Rainmaker Technology Corporation.
Follow him on X at ADARICO, the website rainmaker.com.
Hey, Augustus, what a pleasure.
Interesting topic.
And thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you so much, Dinesh.
I really appreciate it.
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Guys, our friend Philip Patrick, who's a precious metal specialist at Birch Gold, is in Rio.
I've been talking about the Rio reset, and I want to ask Philip Patrick to give us a kind of on-the-ground report.
Philip Patrick was born in London.
He got a politics and international relations degree at the University of Reading in Berkshire, England.
He spent a number of years as a wealth manager at Citigroup on Lombard Street in London.
He joined Birch Gold in 2012.
By the way, if you want to reach Birch Gold, the way to do it, text my name, Dinesh, to 989898.
Philip, thanks for joining me.
How's the weather in Rio?
And more importantly, how's it looking at this conference that we're loosely calling the Rio Reset, the BRICS group?
Well, the weather, as I think we can see for a winter day in Rio, is not too bad.
The sun is shining.
And honestly, I've been very impressed by the city itself.
It is vibrant.
It's full of life.
And you can see the opportunity.
The summit itself has been interesting.
What struck me initially was the tone of the conference.
It wasn't confrontational.
It was really about sort of mutual progression, moving forward together as a group until the end, right?
Obviously, President Trump sent a warning via Truth Social to BRICS Nation saying a 10% tariff on any nation if they continued plans to bypass the dollar.
And the response was Swift and unusually direct.
Lula came out and said, and this is a direct quote: he said, The world has changed.
We don't want an emperor.
We're sovereign countries.
There is no going back.
Reducing dependence on the dollar will happen step by step until it's consolidated.
So, you know, up until then, they hadn't mentioned de-dollarization as such.
They were talking more about bilateral trade deals in local currencies.
Ultimately, that is de-dollarization.
But the tone now has changed.
And from what I can garner here, the BRICS are dead set on a move forward.
And de-dollarization for them is on the horizon.
What's up with the kind of big players of BRICS?
I mean, I assume that this is, even though it's got a bunch of countries, they don't have equal weight.
You have China is, of course, a big boy.
And I understand Xi Jinping is not there, but he did send one of his other top officials.
Putin is not there either, although apparently he sort of connected remotely.
Iran is in a peculiar place after the U.S. strikes on the Iran nuclear facilities.
What is the texture of the talk in the hallways, if you will, about these kind of big players and their presence or absence?
Yeah, a great question.
And, you know, that's always, so first of all, China are leading the way.
Look at the new development bank.
It's essentially all Chinese money, right?
So China are pushing this.
When it comes to sort of motivations to de-dollarize, everyone has different motivations, right?
China are playing a cautious game, right?
They have a lot to lose, a lot of trade with the West in general.
However, they see themselves as a global player, as a world leader.
Longer term, we know they have aspirations for Taiwan, right?
How much do they want tied up in dollar reserves when they make that move?
So I think longer term, China are committed strategically to de-dollarization.
For Russia, it's simple, right?
They want protection from Western sanctions.
In fact, intra-BRICS trade for Russia today, 90% of that is already outside of US dollars.
We spoke to a Brazilian professor here, very involved in BRICS.
Brazil's position is a little more nuanced, right?
They see themselves as sort of the bridge between the global south and the west.
They still have a bad taste in their mouth.
They got a lot of sore deals from the IMF back in the 80s.
From Brazil's perspective, this is just about creating more options globally.
So motivations are different for the BRICS.
Politically, they're not aligned, but we have to understand they're not a political unit, right?
They don't have a chairman, a CEO.
They don't vote on issues.
This is a group of countries coming together with a collective idea.
But where they are unified is de-dollarization.
And I think it'll be hard to stop that train, if you will.
We have Brazil, we have Russia.
The third player in BRICS is India.
And it seems from Modi's presence in America, from his comments that he routinely puts out, he is not eager to have any kind of break with America or with the West.
Is India the weak link in that BRICS chain in the sense that the Indians want to maintain trade relationships with Russia?
They get oil from Russia and other things.
They are also closer physically to China than they are to the United States.
But on the other hand, you also have a lot of pro-American sentiment in India, not to mention the fact that the Indian government is not too hot on Iran or on the Islamic radicals.
And that naturally inclines India more toward Israel and toward the United States.
What is the role of India in this mix?
Look, India is a big powerhouse, right?
You have China, probably India next, and then Brazil.
And India are playing a very cautious game, as you say.
They rejected the idea of a BRICS common currency, and they're sort of walking the line very cautiously.
On top of that, India and China as geopolitical allies, that's problematic as well long term.
However, the BRICS don't need that, right?
What I've always said, it's not a case of July 8th, they flick a switch and the world changes.
What this is about, the approach that the BRICS are taking, is to create trade partnerships.
And there's two things that they're doing.
One is they're using gold as a means to de-dollarize, right?
Central bank gold buying is at all-time highs at the moment, right?
US dollar holdings by central banks are at 30-year lows.
So gold is being used as the tool for nations to de-dollarize in terms of national savings accounts, if you will.
The big concern for us is the more transactions, the more bilateral trade agreements that are signed bypassing the dollar, ultimately that reduces the dollar's share longer term.
The more that happens, the weaker the dollar becomes, and then the weaker the longer term argument starts to become for the dollar as the global reserve.
So I think countries like India are playing it smart at the moment.
They're not pushing too much in one direction or the other, but rather taking a seat back and watching it unfold.
My concern is, though, the more time goes on, the less dollars are used in national savings and national checking accounts, the argument, our power weakens.
Maybe that will be the tilt point for countries like India to start moving more in that direction.
So they're playing a cautious game at the moment, but as this unfolds, that might change.
I mean, isn't it the case, Philip, that these countries, which have been sort of contemplating a rival currency or maybe some sort of a basket of rival currencies, would do a lot better to stick with gold?
And I say that because, you know, who exactly trusts the government of China or the government of Brazil or the government of India for that matter?
So if you're worried that the dollars are being depreciated because of central bank printing, well, I mean, the Indian government has a printing press and so does the Brazilian government.
So you would think that these people who want us to say to the world, we've got something better than the dollar, would look to a neutral type of currency that cannot be so easily printed.
Doesn't that logic hold up?
Absolutely.
And the reality is, when it comes to currency, there is no rival to the dollar in terms of liquidity, in terms of accessibility.
There is no rival.
The BRICS don't have it, but they understand that.
And you can see that understanding in the mechanism of what they've created.
So you're absolutely right.
In terms of gold buying, I believe that will continue, right?
The reality is, as much as China want to de-dollarize, they don't want to hold rupees or rubles instead, right?
They're far too volatile.
So that's what I'm saying.
Gold becomes the national savings account, right?
But they also want to eat up at the dollar's share of global transactions.
Up until recently, the dollar accounted for 85% of total transactions.
That gives a lot of power to us in the West, right?
So what they're touting is this idea of local currencies for trade, right?
And then settlement in gold.
And you can see it in the system that they've created.
Enbridge, for example, right, is a digital payment system that allows them to communicate.
It allows for settlement in gold at the end of the year.
So you're absolutely correct in your assertion.
This isn't necessarily about creating a rival for the dollar as global reserve.
It's about ultimately diminishing the power of the West.
And, you know, working on the currency side is the first step in doing that.
I mean, this is pretty fascinating because while I think it is unrealistic, I mean, probably never going to happen that the West or really anybody will go to a gold standard of the old type.
Nevertheless, even under the gold standard of, say, the 19th century or the early 20th century, people didn't, in fact, transact in gold.
They transacted in certificates that reflected or were, quote, backed by gold.
And part of what you're saying is that in a modified form, we're beginning to see something similar happen.
So not a return to the gold standard, but these central banks realizing, guess what?
People sort of trust the yellow stuff a little bit more than they trust us.
It's exactly right.
Listen, global reserve currency status is all about trust, right?
That's what cemented the dollar's position.
It's been trust and stability, right?
And the trust has been broken.
There's many reasons, right?
We've been speaking to people.
Some cited the 2014 Russians invasion of Crimea.
Others went back to the great financial crisis of 2008 or the IMF deals of the 1980s.
The drivers are all different, like I said, but the desire is the same.
The problem that the BRICS have, though, is they amongst themselves don't have trust, right?
And we've sort of touched on this.
They don't trust each other's currencies.
They don't trust each other's markets.
And that's where gold comes in.
Gold creates universal trust and stability.
And like I said, from there, bilateral trade deals happen in local currencies.
They work at the dollar share and gold becomes the security.
It's what we've been seeing.
I saw Nicholas Taleb on Bloomberg a few weeks ago, and he was talking to the presenter.
He said, listen, the dollar is losing its global reserve currency status.
And the Bloomberg presenter sort of looked back shocked and said, what evidence do you have for this?
And Taleb said, look at central bank gold buying and look at gold's performance.
That's all the evidence you need.
And he was absolutely right.
I mean, gold is up, what, 40%, I think, roughly over the past year.
So it's been doing a lot better than a lot of other investments.
Guys, I've been talking to Philip Patrick of Birch Gold.
He's in Rio.
By the way, you can reach out to Birch Gold very easily.
Text my name, Dinesh, to 989898.
They'll send you free information that you can check out and learn for yourself.
Philip, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
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