Transcription
How do you bring lights to billions of people, prevent millions of tons of pollution, and ensure clean water for everyone?
Watch. Every single one of us has the same basic needs: lights, health, water. Yet half the world lives without these fundamentals. We have come up with solutions for a billion people: new inventions that create pollution-free electricity, free fertilizer that gets a billion farmers out of poverty, and simple devices that turn dirty water into clean, drinkable water.
My name is Manoj Varga, and most people know me as the founder of 5-Hour Energy. After a few years, we became one of the largest consumer products in the world. Where does that song for money more problems come from? Success in business brought this problem on. Now we're doing really well, making all this money. What do we do with it?
I was taught that if you have wealth, the duty is to help those who don't. So we went out across the world and said, "Okay, let's do something for people that have less." We have this invention shop called Stage 2. The purpose of Stage 2 is to make useful things for those who are less privileged.
We get to work on some really cool projects here—things that can truly have a global footprint and really impact the world. Everybody in the company says, "Look, we're part of something a little bit bigger than just ourselves." For us to be able to do something that we really feel is going to make a change in the world on a huge level, it's exciting. It's really about the work, and the work is a great deal of fun.
The problem is we have so much stuff. What do you do first? You’ve got to do the really big stuff first. What has the most effect on the population? A couple of years ago, we came out with a documentary about some things that we were working on. Now some of this stuff is in the field, and it's actually picking up steam.
The last documentary was this story: what we've been doing. This is a story of what we've done. The word philanthropy, I'm sure some of you know, is made up of two Greek words: "philos" and "anthropos." It means service to humanity. Philanthropy is for what I call the unlucky third of the world—those who are without any resources.
What do they need? That's the big question. It was only because of my own arrogance that I couldn't come up with the answer until I went to visit. Then I realized, "My God, they need, they want, and they need exactly what we do, which is to make a living."
So we came up with the three fundamentals that define a person's well-being, and on those three, everything else is built. They were electricity, water, and health. If you have those three and you're not lazy, you'll be fine. You'll make a living.
The number of things that happen once you have electricity is unending. It's what created all the wealth in the world. Most people don't realize this in rich countries, but billions of people either have no electricity or electricity for two to three hours a day. If you can fix that, it makes a huge difference in a person's life.
A couple of years ago, we worked on this process to make electricity with this bike. You pedal for an hour, and you get electricity for 24 hours. The machine is called Free Electric, and the idea is that you can be off the grid completely and never get a bill again.
We went out with the bike and the basic battery to a bunch of houses in India. Lo and behold, we found out the bike itself was an accessory. What a person really needs in the villages is light. Think about it: from 7:00 in the evening until you go to sleep, it's just dark. You wouldn't get much done.
One lightbulb makes their whole evening productive. The other thing they need is to charge one cell phone. If you can just have those two things, you're really taking care of 85 to 90 percent of the requirements of a very ordinary home.
One of the things that our guys came up with was something I'd been against all this time. I don't know if they did it just to make fun of me, but it's very possible. Billy came up with all of this stuff after I told him that I really want nothing to do with solar. I've been bashing solar left and right.
Every perfect solar installation costs are ridiculous. Nobody's going to climb on the roof every day and clean it, so there are maintenance issues. If it breaks, nobody's going to fix it because you need a PhD to fix it. My guys took it as a challenge.
This is kind of what we came up with: to make sure that we had something that was portable, almost like your own little generator for producing power for anybody. Two years later, Free Electric has evolved from the bicycle itself to a self-contained electricity manufacturing machine.
We created the Hunts Power Pack for households that don't have reliable electricity. With this, they will never get an electric bill again. It's lightweight, has a built-in spotlight and room lights, and an entire house can run a fan, a TV, a computer, mobile phone, and lights for up to several hours.
It's built to last; that's why it has a 12-year warranty. Best of all, we have ways to charge it, so the electricity is totally free. You can use the built-in solar panel or connect it to the Hunts Free Electric bicycle. Both will give you free electricity.
You can also charge it off your standard wall socket, but that will cost you money. If ever we get to a point where there's a zombie apocalypse, you will have a cell phone, and you will have lights.
If you think you need more than this, you can take this along with something we came up with that's one of the coolest things you've ever seen. It looks like a little briefcase. If you want even more powerful free electricity, you can charge it with the Hunts Solar Briefcase.
It's easy to carry and really easy to use. Once you set it up, you can leave it be and go about your day. The Hunts Solar Briefcase will charge the Power Pack in just a few hours.
The biggest thing is that, unlike most solar panels, this is not made from glass, so it's tough and low-maintenance. With the Hunts Power Pack and the Hunts Solar Briefcase system, you can run a lot of things and never get an electric bill. You can use it for lights, a fan, a tablet, a computer, or a small TV.
If you have one of these, you never get an electric bill. But that's the idea of what Free Electric means. The machine is still called Free Electric. We went out there and gave it to a few people, and what we found out was that it was used all the time.
The Power Pack is light enough where you can hang it off one finger, and it's built so if you drop it from several feet onto concrete, it'll still work. If you've got it, get on the road, and it's dark out there, it's a flashlight for a household.
You have this as your entire electricity source. You can turn a light on just to have enough light to walk around, press another button, and it gets you enough light to read. Press another button, and it lights up the room.
What you really want is diffuse lighting. You can turn it so the lighting will go up a lot. A lot of people are working now; you can work in the evenings or on a dark day. You can be productive, where before it was like, "Okay, you're done."
If you have electricity in a school and the internet, the curriculum becomes unlimited. One USB—that's your entire elementary school or high school or electronics degree. If you want to do education, you still have to have electricity because without it, you're not going to get anywhere.
The kids are reading or studying—all of those things we saw in the villages were being done off this one thing. This is how you're supposed to use solar. Portability changed the whole game. We think that this is the answer to electricity for a billion people.
The way we make decisions for product changes is you have to be able to walk in the shoes of the customer. Asking him only is this much; walking in their shoes is that much. You have to look at what they're doing with it.
People say, "Okay, do you now believe in solar?" I believe in a solution. If something works, I'm there. If it doesn't work, it's out. I wish I was smart enough to go right to the end; it would save a lot of money.
But unfortunately, we have to go through all the stuff that didn't work, all the stuff that was marginal, and then finally get to something that we said, "Yes, we have it."
There's a word that people use a lot: it's passion. Passion is one of those things. After you get hit in the face a few times, you're saying, "Let me go be passionate about something else." What you really need is determination.
Determination is an old-fashioned word. What it means is no matter how many times you fall on your face, you get up and you do it again. That is the definition of somebody who wants to start a business. If you can't do that, you know there's an old saying in the United States: they say, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."
The same thing here. If you cannot tolerate falling on your face a few times, choose a different profession. To work for a large corporation, you can get assimilated there, and you really may not have to produce anything forever.
The question is, how do we save a billion lives? Well, there are more than a billion rural poor. What we are about is providing opportunity for them.
To tell them that we're going to educate you so you can write computer code is not practical. What you really need to give them is help in what they were already doing. We found out the biggest thing that they knew how to do was farming.
The largest costs for a farmer are fertilizer, urea, and other chemicals. Then there are seeds, pesticides, and diesel. They end up giving 98% of the money to these four things, so now they're living on 2%, barely able to survive.
Actually, there are tens of thousands of farmers every year who commit suicide because they can't survive. If you can just take the fertilizer cost down by twenty percent, they went from two to twenty-two percent.
So they upped their amount of the money they were making by ten times just by doing that. It was a pinch at multi-hand with a big palooka. There's a way that we discovered that you can make your own fertilizer in 18 days.
It's a layering system we're calling Shivan CH. This fertilizer costs nothing; it's made from stuff that's lying around. You take just a couple of things: basically agricultural waste and then green material like leaves.
The third big material that's used is cow dung. You have this big pile, and you have to turn it every couple of days so that it doesn't sort of eat itself. You'll have different piles at different days, and they'll look different.
The material that's in it gets really hot, and that creates this reaction. Slowly, it turns all of that into this incredible fertilizer that actually smells almost like fresh tea.
We went out to the farmers and said, "Let's take 50 farms and let's test it." Some of the people, their land is just dust. What they found out is when they put this fertilizer on their land, they get amazing amounts of produce.
So you're making fertile land, and then the next round actually gets better because the soil is improved. The produce that comes from it is just better; it tastes better. Everything is better about it.
It's actually a really simple thing. If you eat food that isn't compromised, you're going to feel better. When you replace urea and other chemicals with this fertilizer, we found out that the water requirements were lowered.
What urea and the chemical fertilizers do is they don't allow the soil to absorb water, so the water stays on top, and then the sun just evaporates it out. You need more water because very little is going to the plant itself.
If you can cut that down by any amount, it has a huge impact across the world. Another side effect of our fertilizer technology is that instead of burning farm waste, it'll be used to make fertilizer.
So all of a sudden, all of that pollution is prevented. It's not only just prevented as in, "Well, we didn't do bad things." It actually is used for something good.
Like I've said before, nature is always smarter than we are. Nature said, "Well, if you have any brains at all, please use this." And we said, "No, we have no brains; we're going to use chemicals."
The solution was already just sitting there: take this stuff that's the waste product from agriculture and use it again to grow more. Sometimes what happens is when you make a change at the very base, the fundamental level, everything works above it.
This fertilizer affects all of the things that we were trying to address. You're affecting water shortages, you're affecting incredible amounts of smoke pollution, and you're getting healthier food.
The farmers are making a living. People started finding out, "I got this." The results are amazing, so it started to go viral. We went from fifty to forty thousand farms.
I already have interest from Africa, Indonesia, and a bunch of other places that can use it. So it'll go worldwide. We have a booklet that we've made—just a picture book. If you follow the instructions, you can make it yourself, and we'll give out millions of these.
We're actually going to put it on the Internet, every piece of it, for free to everyone. So we expect in the next 10 years, maybe 15 years, to be in millions of farms. Those farms will no longer have to buy fertilizer because this process is completely free.
It'll affect a billion people with this basic and simple technology. Asking the right question is the biggest issue. You have to know what to do. If you don't know what to do, you can't do it.
The thing that everybody has to learn how to do is make sure that the questions are correct. For example, if somebody says, "What's the most efficient way to dig this hole?" You say, "Is it shovels? Is it a bulldozer? What is it?"
The real thing you should ask is, "Why do we need a hole?" Or, "Is there a better way to get what you're trying to do first?" Then go to the question. So really going backwards into finding out what the question is—the real way to do it.
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I'm Lu GU Hara bhara harlot cases Udrih Yuko hot for you to not be a. If in a village the only water you have is water that's not really fit to drink, you can't say, "I'm not gonna drink water." You gotta get clean water.
It's not really a choice, or you're gonna be sick. More than half the population of hospitals around the world are people that are sick from bad water. Unclean water is the epidemic.
All other health initiatives have marginal value. Water is healthcare. That's simple. What we were working on two years ago was Rainmaker, which was the big unit that converted seawater to fresh water.
We're still working on it, and we made huge strides. We reduced it down in size by 75%. Even though it looks really complicated, this is after years of making it simple.
A couple of years ago, they thought turning ocean water to fresh water was really critical. Then came along something else. There are huge pockets of people—tens of millions, hundreds of millions—that have tons of brackish water, but they have a really hard time getting fresh water.
What brackish water is, is this: in a huge part of the world, when you dig a well, what you'll get is this water, which is slightly salty and filled with minerals. It's not for drinking, and you can't use it for agriculture.
That's what the brackish water is—sort of like seawater light. Amazingly, it's all over the world. We've figured out a way to turn brackish water into fresh water, both for drinking and for agriculture.
We call it the Rainmaker for brackish water. It's basically a water filtration system we've developed for use at the village level. The whole unit is pretty small, completely self-contained, and requires very little power—pretty much the amount you need to run a hairdryer.
It works really fast; it can process twenty to forty liters of water per minute. The filters can last for years, and the biggest thing is that you can use this machine immediately. You just attach it to the well, and it's ready to go.
The brackish water project leaped ahead of the ocean water because you just have a well. All you do at the end of the well is put this machine on, and you're done.
Some real tangible benefit that people can get immediately, whereas ocean water—the amount of permitting required is huge. That's why it's a more practical solution in a shorter term.
Then the other stuff that we're doing is called the greywater machine. Greywater is basically dirty water, bacteria-filled water, sewage water—anything that's just nasty but not salt.
The Rainmaker for greywater is small, self-contained, and uses a series of filters just like our other water invention. But instead, this one purifies greywater and requires even less energy to operate.
It also works super fast and is low maintenance. If you don't have electricity, that's no problem. This version can be used with a manual hand or bike pump.
The biggest thing is that this can be used immediately, and it can have a direct impact on the health of millions and millions of people right away. We've taken the brackish water machine and the greywater machine to India and deployed them to make sure that at the level of the villages, everything works.
So it's three levels of water. The brackish water seems to be the big one. If you can get enough brackish water turned to fresh, it delays the problem of shortage of water by several years.
If you look at a non-profit, the problem is since nobody has to produce anything, it's not very efficient. Then a for-profit model—well, I'm not interested. We have enough money.
So we came up with this model: you run it as efficiently as if it's a real business, but then you subsidize the price to the level where you have zero profit. Well, if I can make this at zero profit, I can make an unlimited amount.
The ultimate goal of these products is to get it rolling across the world. That's what we need to do: getting these fertilizers out there, getting electricity out there, getting water out there. That's all that matters.
It's not something we're still in the invention shop and we're working on it. It's in the field. All of the projects that we're doing here—inventing them and making them—are going to be deployed by the Hunts Foundation in India.
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With all of these inventions, the next job is to roll them out across the world, and for that, we're gonna need help. Everybody can help if they want. Let's do something really great.