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What's up, moneymakers? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast. Today I'm giving you a sneak peek of this week's episode of my main show, Travis Makes Friends, a podcast all about the most valuable asset that we have in our lives, our relationships. So whether we're talking about your network, your marriage, your friendships, or even your relationship with yourself, these conversations are designed to help you grow, connect and level up in all areas. I've sat down in person with everyone from world class athletes and entertainers to bestselling authors, entrepreneurs, and even former presidents. And you're going to love the snippet from this week's episode. So take a listen and if you're feeling it, go check out the full conversation over on Travis Makes Friends. Let's get into it. So to date now, you've raised over a billion dollars. What does that mean for the volume of people you'll be able to help get access to clean water?
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So we've helped 21.6 million people in about 230,000 villages in 29 countries. The problem today is down to 700 million people without water. So the whole sector has made a lot of progress. And you know, you take what we've done into the problem, it's about 1/30 of the way there. So it is a completely solvable problem. The problem is the trajectory. Okay, we are 60 to 100 years out from actually bringing the world clean
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water because of the way that it's currently, the way that you're currently delivering
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the solution and all the other water charities out there. There's so little funding.
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Is there is, is funding the main constraint, do you think?
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It didn't used to be, but now it is. It's about capital and organizing that capital. I think it was more complex in the early days. The water, what are the right water technologies? How do you make projects sustainable? Over time, we've gotten really, really good at the ongoing maintenance, at the sustainability at water quality. We're solution agnostic. We have about 14 technologies that we use now across the portfolio. So sometimes it's a rainwater harvesting system or a well or a solar powered gravity fed system or a bio sand filter, whatever. The right technology that's sustainable for that area, that's cost effective as well. So yeah, you know, I kind of say it's the, the interest is just not there. Here's the biggest problem, Travis. You know, I tell our team, no one woke up today in America and walked over to their refrigerator and pressed the lever and got their cold filtered Water. Right. Put in their roofs. Usable bottle on the way to the yoga studio, maybe glanced at their pool in the background, took a shower, brushed their teeth and said, man, I am just so grateful for the clean water I have in my life. Let me go figure out a way to provide that to the world's 700 million people.
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Yeah. Well it's one of those problems that like we have solved it for so long.
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Yeah.
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That it's not even, we've never experienced. You don't even think about it as being something that oh, that exists now, today, currently in our world, there's people that still don't have access to this like this life giving source that we all have to have in order to be able to live. Like we. You just don't even think about it, don't even realize that it's there. So, so in your mind if you, if you could estimate like this is like the total volume of, of cash
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that needs to be about $100 billion gets everybody clean water.
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And is there a timeline constraint there? Like theoretically tomorrow you have a hundred billion dollars. Is this like 20 years out?
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No, we, oh, it'd be 10 years. You get it done in 10 years. It's kind of like, let's say you could build a $3 billion stadium every year. Right. You've got a team and you just, you can build a soccer stadium every year. Right. Now we kind of have the money to build one $3 billion stadium every four years.
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Right.
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So we would like collect the money and it takes us four years. But let's say you can do one a year. If I place an order for 10, you are going to figure it out. You're not going to do it in two years.
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Right.
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But you're going to call the head of Caterpillar, you're going to fly out to Peoria and you're going to order a bunch of heavy equipment. You are going to scale up your operation to fulfill the order and you're going to deliver ten $3 to $4 billion stadiums right. In the shortest timeline that you can without sacrificing quality. So it always starts with the interest and the order. Here's the capital. The crazy thing is it's just such a deeply underfunded sector because no one has experienced the problem. When I can make the case to a set of donors. Just think about all of the benefits that you get with water. Water directly impacts health. It is. If you poison yourself, you're not healthy, it's the first thing that goes into your mouth every day. In fact, we see in many of these villages where we'll deliver a water project, we'll see an 80% reduction in disease.
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80%.
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80%. And we can go take the data at the health clinic before and after. When it comes to education, I remember when I started, a third of the world's schools didn't have clean water. They also didn't have toilets. So we learned this is the top reason why girls are dropping out of school. They get their period, they stay home four or five days a month because there's no water. There's no toilets at the school. And then the social pressure kicks in. It's time for them to go walk for water. They're becoming a woman. And they then spend 6, 7 hours a day walking with 40 pounds of dirty water on their backs to bring home to poison their families. Not getting a chance to be educated. So water means health, water means education. It's always the women and the girls. I mean I've been to Africa 55 times now. I've been to 72 countries. Never seen men in any culture get water. It is the role of the women and the girls.
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Wow.
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And just today, women will spend over 200 million hours walking for dirty water.
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In Africa, as in one continent, the
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important distinction is the dirty water. Like it's not even work and it's still not even the thing. Like it's not even useful. Yeah, right, right.
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But I mean, you need it or you die.
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Right?
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And the great thing is like when we can build a water project in the village, some of these women get 49 hours back instantly and forever. Cause you don't walk for water Monday through Friday, there's no weekend off. Right, exactly, exactly. And we just hear unbelievable stories actually of entrepreneurship. Women will take the time, like 50 hours a week and they'll start small businesses, they'll sell rice, they start market stalls, they start brick building businesses. Then you use that money to buy school uniforms, to put their kids to improve their roofs, to go from a thatched roof to a tin roof which keeps the rain out. So you get economic benefit with water, you get health benefit, you get education benefit. It's kind of like this amazing thing that is so transformative to human life. But the disconnect is we've always had it. So it's just, you know, it's so basic.
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Like it's not even in the zeitgeist, you know, of thinking that this is something that still plagues people in 2020.
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I mean, if you told me that we would have only helped 21 million people in 20 years. I mean, it's so much smaller of, of an impact than I would have hoped or would have imagined.
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Yeah, but you go back to that, like what that doctor told you at the Focus on the. Yeah.
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Daniel Ek from Spotify, who's a friend, a longtime supporter, said something like, I think Spotify was 15 years old. And he's like, we're at the top of the second inning. The best is yet to come. And I think we do take that view that even though 20 years is a long time, a billion dollars is a fraction of what's needed and a fraction of what's possible. I mean, there might be people listening that know about a daf, like a donor advised fund. Right now in America, there are $350 billion of parked philanthropic capital. People have already taken the tax donation, they've stuck it in a fund, and they don't have to give from that fund. And a lot of these just go up 8 to 13% every year. So about a quarter of that money would give everybody on earth clean water.
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Wow.
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One of the most exciting things about charity water recently is that we have this program called the Spring, which is kind of the monthly subscription. So instead of getting movies with Netflix or music with Spotify, people sign up every month. And 100% of that money gets people clean water, and then they see where it goes. So we're actually seeing a huge amount of kind of energy in just a lot of people that can give 20, 30, 40 bucks a month philanthropically. So I'm almost more excited about that. And then we try and push all the major donors on the overhead side to, to help us grow the organization.
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How much research have you done into, like, desalinization?
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Yeah, desal. Desal's super viable. It requires a lot of energy, and it's very expensive.
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Okay.
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So in most of the places where we work, it would be 50 to 100 times more expensive than the simple solution, the. Well, the filtration system. Yeah. It also requires memory. I mean, you're, you're cleaning. You know, if you're using like reverse osmosis. Right. You've got to change the membranes, so you've got a maintenance and you've got energy consumption. It's great for Dubai. Who has lots of oil. Right. And can desalinate 95% of, you know, the water. A landlocked country like in Ethiopia or Uganda, just not really viable.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Solar has come down. We're doing more and more solar. Solar prices. The price of solar panels has come down 97 and a half percent since I started.
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Crazy.
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So completely non viable when we started. Now 80% of our projects today have some sort of solar component. Wow. Where we're using the solar to actually move water to different distribution points and then using gravity to take it to more villages.
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Wow.
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So we're doing more pipe systems now than the small wells.
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Yeah. It's crazy, man. Like you said, it's. It seems like you've been doing this for so long because it is a long time for a human life, but also the volume of time that humans have existed and had this problem is like tens of thousands of years. You know what I mean? So like you said, like, it, it, it legitimately is just the, the, the tip of, of what you've been able to do so far. So I appreciate you, man, and all the work that you've been able to do on this, on this project. What. What's. What's next for you guys now is it just can. Like, is there a certain project you have in mind? Is there a certain milestone you're really excited about?
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Yeah, it's been fun. I got to go see the. Well on the 10th anniversary, the one for my birthday, my 31st birthday. And I look back at those photos. I had no gray hair back then, you know, like this idealistic kid that's gonna, like, bring the whole world clean water in, like, two years, you know, but it was really cool standing in that village 10 years later. And now as we turn 20 in September, we found a few people who actually benefited from that well 20 years ago. And we're gonna go tell some cool stories about just kind arc of how water, you know, can transform decades of. Of human life.
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Yeah.
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So I'm really excited about that and. And just, you know, continuing to invite people to learn more about the organization to kind of add water to their pool of worries. I know it feels difficult. Right. We've got a war, and we've got $9 eggs and, you know, $4 gas. And I. I really believe that, you know, we. We can use our money and our. Our talent and we can end needless suffering. We can do it in our local community. We can also do it in the global community. And money goes so far. I mean, it's $40 to give one person clean water. It's $10,000 to help a whole village. You know, my wife and I try and do one, you know, as a family at least every year. Like one village.
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Yeah.
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And just know that, you know, we have solved the problem for 250 people.
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Yeah. For a long time.
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And that feels significant. Yeah. For 10 plus years.
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Yeah. Yeah. This is. I mean, so. So, like you said, so much work to be done, but also, you guys have done such incredible work for so long. Appreciate the work that you're doing in the world, man. Where. Where can people go to get more from you?
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Yeah, just charitywater.org or there's a. There's a film if you want to see some of the images, called the spring. It's thespring.com I think it's had like 150 million views. And you can see some of the doctors and some of the photos from back then. But yeah, we'd love for people to learn more about the issue and, you know, just. Just start talking and, and, and thinking about, you know, water. This thing that we really take for. For granted, it's just not a shared resource.
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There's no faster way to be immediately appreciative for everything that you have than realizing that not everybody gets the stuff that we take for granted.