A Tsunami of Water Deals?
Water is the New Gold: Insider Briefing of 11 February, 2021
Helping You Thrive in the World’s ONLY Vital, Scarce and
Recession-Proof Market
Fellow strategist Ken Berenger joins CEO Eckelberry to report on how he is SLAMMED… With real estate investors who want to diversify into a new asset class: WATER! What’s behind the sudden rush? Is it possible there could be a SERIES of water funds? Find out why we believe we’re heading for an acceleration!
FEATURED OR COVERED IN THE BRIEFING — QUICK LINKS
- The walkthrough an OriginClear Fund investor got of our Texas based Progressive Water facility.
- Progressive Water’s containerized systems and what they offer and enable.
- The Oldsmar Florida water hack reported on by Krebs on Security and what it has to do with decentralization.
- Underfunded drinking water systems and its impact on water quality.
- Ken Berenger joins the show and reports on the sudden flood of real-estate-to-water opportunities.
- Speeding up slow water deals with Water Purchase Agreements (WPAs).
- How Dan Early’s Modular Water™ complements Water as a Career and is a game changer.
- Our new shortened cycle, Waterpreneurs and Water as a Career™ and how they connect.
- Building the OriginClear Fund and how real estate investors interest in diversifying is accelerating the process.
- The huge demand that is on our business development lines and why it’s a great problem to have!
- The incredible Philanthroinvestor® team and how they are helping us.
- CEO OriginClear drills down into the planned OriginClear Rental Investment Structure and the returns it offers investors.
- Our Series R investment offering and potential tax advantages to real estate divestment.
- Why a series of OriginClear Funds is not an unreal possibility!
- An asset-based uplift, how to get the details on these new developments and how you can participate.
- How opening the doors to funding and acquisition of water equipment is a rising tide and OriginClear is at the top of the pyramid.
Transcript from recording:
Introduction
Riggs Eckelberry:
Good evening everyone. Another exciting… This is becoming more and more and more exciting. I’m loving where it’s going; and tonight we have a special guest, Ken Berenger, who will join me shortly.
A New Asset Class
I’m going to be showing a few things in the meantime. So, let’s get right going with it. Lots of people here tonight. Super proud of y’all, and this is the Water is The New Gold, and it really is a new asset class. And tonight we’ll be discussing how that is so, and how it is the world’s only vital, scarce and recession-proof market.
Today’s the 11th. Thank you all for your fine birthday wishes last Monday, the 8th. It was a beautiful thing. And it reminds me that literally just before my birthday, last year, we had our first, Ken and I were in shock as we saw the oil prices burst and take a dive based on Wu Han having stopped production for a month.
And we went, “Oops”. And so literally, I think the second or third of February last year, we went into high gear to figure out what to do to take, really this problem, the slow water deals, and resolve it. And here we are a year later and things have changed so much. So we’ll be getting into that and the specifics.
Forward Looking Statements
As always, we have a Safe Harbor Statement that says, We do our very best to tell you what is going to happen but of course there are risks and uncertainties. All right.
A Brief Walk-Through
So now I’m going to play a little video that I think you’re going to enjoy and then I’ll tell you how come it is that I’m playing it, but let’s see what’s going on here. This is Texas.
Start of video presentation
Cliff: All right. So here’s our cutting area. We cut all our piping to length. That’s going to be needed on all the skids. And then it’s of course, adjacent to the welding area. So he doesn’t have to carry it a long distance.
So we get our drawings, we cut, we fab from the fab area we’ll take out to the skids. So after that pipe is cut, other components are added to the skids.
What you’re starting to see around here is partially finished and finished products of what happens in the process. So what we got going on right now in the big unit is a twin, 125 gallon per minute, RO system.
This is the actual RO and fabrication process. You see vessels loaded on it.
The membranes will go inside and that will do the filtration. You see the piping that has been cut, welded by the certified welder. Okay.
Next to it is the pre-filter. Pre-filter will be the first thing the water from the customer or the client hits. It’s going to hit our pre-filter and it’s going to go through a pump and then it’s going to go to the RO so that’s the three components right now.
That’s what the main project we got in house right now. They use it for filtering out water for goldmines, for usage in their process.
We can use this for large lagoons and residential areas. As the water evaporates, solids fall into the water, water needs to be clean so people can swim in it, it can be chlorinated. So lots of uses for it.
Three skids, in this project. We have a cartridge filter skid. We have a pump skid, and we have the chem [chemical] feed skid. Those are used for a certain process.
What we’ve been prefabbing inside is going to eventually end up in this trailer. If you want to turn around and look inside, you can see it in the middle of construction.
So what we have here is the, where the finished product is going to end up. These come to us in just an empty 53 foot trailer. And we ended up putting the lighting, conduit, RO unit, electrical, pre-filtration, the whole system.
Where the customer comes in, hooks up hoses coming in, hoses, going out. And then you hook your electricity to our main disconnect. At that point, you simply push the button and you start filtration and making RO, reverse osmosis product water.
End of video presentation
Seeing and Touching
Riggs: Well, that was a very good little snapshot, sort of video logger style of Progressive Water Treatment™. Now, why do I play it? Because a gentleman was there yesterday in Texas, he’s Argentinian.
But he and his partners had property in Port St. Lucie, which is the North end of the whole Miami, West Palm corridor. And he signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding as we call it. Or basically an intent to invest in this fund. And now he was, wanted to see and touch.
And then this morning, Tom Marchesello and I, Tom, is our chief operating officer, we spent several hours with him in person. Whoa. Getting to know each other, answer questions as opposed to doing it all on zoom. So that was very, very productive and things are going along nicely.
Water System Hack
So I’m going to bring up another interesting topic before I get to the main story of the day. A lot of you have heard about this hack that took place. It was a Florida water system hack and Krebs on Security, and some of you may know that I came out of security software. The last company that I took onto the NASDAQ or prepared for the NASDAQ was a security company. I was the number two and Krebs on Security is a major newsletter in this space. And this got all the way there.
So, you know, what’s this all about? I wanted to show you a little bit of the story here and, here it is, Krebs on security. So, and what Krebs liked about this was that the county sheriff did a very good conference and was very open. This is Oldsmar, which is not far from Tampa and the North side of the Bay. There was a hack. Now the hack was stopped. A supervisor was watching the screen. So a human being stopped this hack.
Weakness of Centralizing
Now this is the weakness of centralized systems, right? Because look, it’s impossible to make a perfect system. Something will always be hacked. So, the more you centralize… You know, back in the fifties, we thought centralizing everything was wonderful. Look, make it all central, big central mainframes, big, central train systems, everything. But now everything is decentralized.
Underfunded
Well, this is a really good reason for water to be decentralized. And this is one of the reasons that there are 54,000 drinking water systems. Many of them very small. Only 15% of them handle 80% of the people. So there’s a lot of very small ones out there and they’re underfunded.
You know, there’s that story about Compton, ended up with brown water because a very small drinking water system that served So your Compton was underfunded and ended up, you know, failing and Compton, I think to this day has, a lot of people have brown water there. Not unhealthy, but it’s certainly not a situation they like very much.
That is a very interesting story because it says we need to have more stuff happening at the edge. So if somebody hacks into, you know, a trailer park lagoon water treatment system, whoop, whoop, you know, it’s not going to do a big deal. It’s very different from the hacking into a municipal system. I think that’s the point I’m trying to make here, and it certainly made the news. I think we’re going to see a lot more water stories make the news as we go forward.
Ken Berenger
Now, earlier today, I talked about the real estate to Water Tsunami, and today I’ve got Ken Berenger, my co-strategist, joining me. And, Ken, why don’t you say hi to the people?
Ken: Hi, people. How is everybody?
Riggs: So, Ken, welcome aboard. And, the reason you’re here, really, is because you are at the front line getting a huge amount of traffic on this. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to do a little recap of the business model for everyone. And then we’re going to talk about what you’re running into and what we’re doing about it.
Slow Water Deals
Speaking of water deals, this is a slideshow some of you’ve seen before. It’s worth redoing. How funding is the key. The problem is slow water deals. Why? The capital cycle. CapEx requires major approvals because it’s a big investment. People tend to go, like they used to say in the eighties, “You can’t get fired if you take IBM.” Well that changed. But back then, it was very hard for anybody else to get in. For example, even in antivirus right now. We have a problem with Norton being the King, right? And it’s very hard to get in.
The other thing is that customers are not in the water business themselves. So you’re a brewery, you’re a trailer park, you’re whatever. You’re not in the water business. Why are you paying for it? And you may not have the money.
Here’s the other big thing for us that we’ve seen is that it takes months and months, sometimes years to do a deal. And this kills profitability. And, the last minute, some big company will come swooping in, offer 5% less, grab the deal that you have spent months on. So what’s the solution is to offer pre-funded systems and, also, systems that can’t be stolen. I’ll show you that too.
WPAs
All right. So we’re talking about water purchase agreements. That is a commitment that is just like if you’re paying the city, you’re paying a water company it’s on the regular… It’s like paying rent. Rent and utilities, right? It even gets paid for by the PVP program. You can even get it. It’s that routine. And levels the playing field is, why would anybody worry about a machine that’s delivered for free?
Modular Water
Now, Here’s the big edge that we’ve got. So, we invested since 2018, June, 2018, we brought in Modular Water Systems™ and these systems are roll-in, roll-out. Well, then all of a sudden you can rent systems. They’re not in the ground. You can take them away.
It means you don’t need a 15 year commitment. You can make it much shorter, and it’s a major barrier to entry because other people, they have big old concrete systems that go into the ground, et cetera. So having a mobile system is key. And in fact, I’m going to show you a page from our forecast from Modular Water Systems to give you an idea what goes on here.
Major Differentiation
So Dan has five patents, which we have licensed with the trade secrets, and he’s got this incredible software that builds these automatic systems. He’s an industry guru. I’m going to have him record one of his webinars. They’re broad and technical, but we’ll do a little excerpt. You’ll love it. But people are demanding that he tell them what’s going on.
So, we’re the licensee. We have this master license, but here’s the thing. Look on the right-hand side there, and you’ll see that you’ve got basis of design. A bunch of them are, “Yes.” Right? And this is very, very interesting. These are basically descriptions of the applications and where it says, “Yes,” it means that the client has committed to our design and has specified it in the requirement. Okay? So that is a major differentiation. Okay.
Shortened Cycle
Now, if we take a look at how this WPA works well then, of course, just like a solar deal, bang, they sign the water purchase agreement, just like a power purchase agreement in the solar. And we build it, deliver it, and pay on the meter. And that’s a done deal.
Water as a Career
And I’ve also told you about how last year we developed the Water as a Career™ program. We now have a whole career building site. People are logging in, getting training right now, as I speak. I watched them login.
You send out a waterpreneur. This waterpreneur can win by selling systems that are already, pre-funded. Let’s say, for example, this hotel system that we sold, that’s now going in. They convinced a hotel to have better water. Said, “Well, sign here and 60 days, whatever it is, you’ll get a system or maybe less.” So, that’s really, really exciting.
Diversifying Real Estate Investments
Now here’s where it’s starting to get really interesting. Real estate investors are freaked out in this marketplace, and they want to diversify. Tell me what you’re running into.
Ken: So, you know the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for.” I made a, it was a very innocent inquiry of a couple of folks that I know that are in the commercial real estate business. And the inquiry was, “Hey, do you know anybody in the transaction side of the business that is kind of contending with or fielding a lot of calls and activity on folks that are getting a little skittish, getting a little nervous.”
Where what I really mean is folks that are working twice as hard to make half as much, right? In collecting rents and with tenants moving out, office buildings. He kind of chuckled. I spoke to two folks, and the first guy just kind of chuckled. He said, “Well, you just described everybody.”
Huge Demand
I said, “Okay, let me give you an overview of what I’m looking at.” And I got lit up. I got a phone call, I told you Riggs, I got a call at quarter to 12. I’m falling asleep. I got Will on the phone, “Hey, Ken, can you talk to Chris?” “Yeah, I guess I can talk to Chris.” And, literally, the conversation went through past midnight.
He hit me up first thing in the morning, he’s having a meeting with us next week. And in that timeframe, that same fellow sent two other transactions into the business. These folks were commercial mortgage lenders. He was a mortgage broker. And then a second feller I had sent me two. So I literally spent the entire day explaining how we could take these folks that are in kind of a tough spot, a little bit of… They see a little smoke on horizon, and we can essentially help.
Superior Asset
The way I shortened it, because without getting into the nitty gritty is, we can help your clients diversify into a far superior asset. And there’s a very strong potential for a huge tax benefit here. And they said, “So what’s the downside?” I said, “Nothing we’ve seen so far.”
Good Properties
So, my whole calendar next week is lit up with speaking with these folks. And it’s going to become a very pleasant problem of just literally singling out those perfect properties for us.
Riggs: Right, so obviously we’re not talking here about bringing in, we don’t want a lot of crash truck, crash tests.
Ken: Right, nothing radioactive, right?
Riggs: But we want people who have good properties, but they would like to diversify. You used to be okay to do nothing but real estate. Well, in the current marketplace, that’s not brilliant. You should at least have some Bitcoin right? Not going to get into that.
Ken: I bought some. Okay. All right.
Great Returns and Protections
Riggs: But what’s great is that when you do the proforma on this, and I’ll go through it, it’s got some great, great returns, and it’s got some very good protections. We’ll talk about that.
All right. So, as I mentioned, we have this $3 million now in place for preliminary commitments, 2 million from the people we were speaking to the last couple of days. And then one from one of your people that you were talking to, Ken, and then more in the offing.
Now, currently, Progressive Water Treatment only builds a unit, sells it, moves on. Well, now, because it’s a service contract, we’re going to be operating the system for the investor. We’re going to be providing the service contract and OriginClear gets management fees in the fund. This is very, very powerful.
Great Team
I need to mention that we’re getting a tremendous amount of help from our Ivan Anz and Arte Maren. Ivan and his wife, Bella, decided to invest themselves personally. And that was part of the show last week. And their rule of thumb is that a hundred thousand dollars invested purifies 1 million liters per month. So this is very, very powerful.
I call it a concept right now because we haven’t yet implemented it. So I don’t call anything real that I haven’t implemented, but in fact, what I should do is actually share the screen, so you can see what that I’m showing you. Here it is. [slide above] So, we have this great team.
Rental Investment Structure
Now, what I wanted to do was go over to the spreadsheet and just show you a little bit about what this is. At the core of all, this is what we call the Rental Investment Structure. If we imagine that a machine is being rented out to an investor. An investor is going in on financing equipment, which is not what’s happening currently. This is a future model.
Company Store
We’re doing this for ourselves, we’re being the company store. So we’re being the “investor”, right? But you can see that all these things are built out where there’s a rental, there’s a piece for the investor, percentage for the operator, which is again, Progressive Water. There is a percentage for service, for downtime, etc.
Rate of Return
And at the end of the day, you end up with a very nice internal rate of return, 17% over five years, if you factor in tax, taxation is 34%, but that’s not the case here since we’re doing our own fund.
Pro Forma
Now, what does that look like when we turn it into a fund? Now, let’s say we got $10 million. We’ve got various expenses. We’ve put units in into operation and we get out to month 13, and this imagines that we’ve done 74 systems in a year, which is probably ridiculous, but it’s, it’s basically my way of saying, look, we’re going to spend the money as fast as we can, and then basically collect rents.
So we start generating positive rents in month 13 . You know, 25% for the investors, and that goes on for quite a while. We get five years out, we’ve paid out $3 million in net profits on $18 million of rents and everybody’s a happy camper. I do believe by the way, these expenses can be dramatically reduced.
We’ve been very conservative about expenses, management fees and so forth, but it works. We’ve, we’ve blown it out to 25 years. So this one fund, which just operated actively for one year now has generated a $100 million in rent over 25 years and $8 million in net profits. Okay. Now, how does this pencil out for the investor?
Investor is Protected
Well, the investor million dollars plus goes in on a subsidiary of the company that we’re creating right now. Two days ago, I met with actually, it was yesterday, I met with the lawyers in a long conference, putting this together. We’re creating a wholly owned subsidiary with firewalls for the investors, so that their money is protected no matter what. Nobody can come in.
And also there is a person, not me, making the payment decisions so that an external person is named to actually do. So it’s not an OriginClear piggy bank. It’s very, very important. It has to be a lot of confidence.
So let’s say a million dollars invested and it goes over five years. Obviously they convert a hundred percent whenever they want, when they do convert, then the dividend stops, obviously. Also the dividend stops when the net profits start. We’re not going to pay dividends and their profits both.
3-5X Return on Investment?
I’m not going to get into crazy out there, stock prices, it’s, it’s better to say, look, let’s just assume that we’re not going to have a $4 stock price because there’re things like, like as we, as we grow, assuming our stock price grows, which I believe it will, that there will be, recapitalization and so forth. Okay. But as you can see the potential profit for the investor on a million dollars is about triple his money, right? He’s quadrupled his money actually, more than quadrupled, almost five times as money in five years.
And even if you look at a much shorter timeline, let’s say just 12 months, well, it’s still three and a half million dollars. So the dividends is a very small piece of the picture because it’s also, part of it is also that there is a warrant; warrant is a right to buy stock at a discount to the market price. And this is a double a warrant. And so that factors in nicely.
Investment is Secured
So this is a very nice package, but remember that the investor’s security is really that they have that, their investment is in a, you might call it a bank or a finance company that is, that is walled off, that has its own protections. He’s a senior secured creditor for his investment, his or her investment. And as equipment goes out, that person has a security agreement where they are able to file a lien, should anything happen. So this is very, very important.
Series R Offering More Aggressive
Now, I’m not going to go into it on screen now, but at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see Series R private where there’s a preferred series R offering, which is much more aggressive than this in terms of upside, but it is not secured in the same way.
So for example, an investor might want to invest, 800,000 here, and 200,000 on the series R and spice up their returns. And, there’re some risks on the 200,000, but there’s very good security protections on the 800,000. So very interesting ways to do it.
Real Estate Exit — Problem Solved
Now, here’s why this is important. When investor, real estate investors try to get out of real estate, they have a problem. They have a tax problem. They are looking at the fact they can’t do this roll over 1031 exchange anymore. So how do they get out? And this is why they stay in.
Well, we can offer this tax formula that allows us to essentially absorb their, their gains or defer them. There’s a couple of different ways to do it, am not getting into the details of it because it’s really a taxation thing, but we’ve worked it out. And so here’s, I think Ken, what you’re running into is real estate investors going, wow, I can make uncle Sam pay for my exit. I can get into a high performance, new asset class. And it’s protected and it’s got great yields and it’s fast growth.
New Asset Class
And it hasn’t crashed, not likely to crash like real estate, oil and gas, etc, because water, even in fact, when things get worse, water gets more expensive. So it’s actually a counter cyclic asset, right? It’s against the economics cycle.
Ken: It takes a minute, but then you can hear that you can kind of hear it click when they finally understand, when they understand the paradigm that this is still an asset investment. It’s just one that will get better as things get worse, literally right.
A Series of $10M Funds
Riggs: Ken, what is coming up here is that I don’t think we’re talking about a $10 million fund, we’re talking about a series of $10 million funds, which is great because, we execute on this, of course, our revenue explodes, we have great assets, we end up on the NASDAQ, all kinds of things happen.
But also, each fund will be somewhat less generous, right? We won’t quite, well maybe the dividends aren’t quite as much, whatever, the things that will, it will become more and more routine. We’re going to reward people for being pioneers and jumping in first.
Like Airbnb
Ken: It’s like the Airbnb early rounds, right? If you look at the returns on the, on the round one and round two, they were phenomenal. The ones just prior to the IPO where, maybe three to one.
Riggs: Oh yeah. Well, the, the, the whole Airbnb model was a beautiful thing. And, and of course, that’s where we’re going to go with when we eventually go to do, I’m going to, in fact, I’m going to pull this up on screen, right now.
Airbnb Funding Rounds
Ken: I think the early investors were 50000% return and the most recent ones were 9%. So that’s not that great.
Riggs: Well, here’s people like Ashton Kutcher invested in November 2010, a series A and they got 10% of the company for $7 million. And they had a total return on investment of 157,000%. Oh my God. And you know, factually because of the very high valuation post IPO, even the debt rounds that were done, or the series F for example, they still got 255% total return on investment. So they tripled their money.
The point I’m making is that if you can make these things work, it’s a beautiful thing. Now, Airbnb, that’s the model we want to do down the road. In other words, what we’re doing is we’re practicing with our own fund.
$Billion Model?
We believe that the home run is to set up a marketplace so that people can go directly from investor to water company. And we open it up to all investors and all water companies in the world. And I think, that’s my personal opinion, that is a billion dollar model, but it’s not going to happen overnight. We want to spend time doing it for ourselves. Learn the lessons, really understand, how strong of a model this is and so forth.
Asset Based Up-list
So that kind of gives you guys a quick look. And, there is a plan for an asset based up list, which is what this is all about. And if you’re interested in looking at this MOU and, and to see what, what you’d be getting into, please talk to Ken. So Ken, your ears must be burning because you’re the, you’re the master. Anyway, there is a way for people!
Ken:My phone is pinging, actually.
Contact Ken
Riggs: Nice! But anybody wants to talk to Ken about this, or, or just plain old investing. If you want to do less than a million dollars, just type oc.gold/ken in your browser. Grab a slot. His days are filling up massively.
The Conference
I wanted to also mention something very important, and that is that Ken and Devin are working on the trusted investor conference. Anybody who’s invested more than once in one of our private placements, and why do we say that is because they invested once and they were brave enough to invest again, and anybody who’s a trusted investor will tell you that we have bent over backwards so they could win, so they could be positioned for the exit of the company.
People who have stayed with us, have been taken care of in a very fair way. Most people who hear about what we do to keep our angels from being crammed are pretty amazed. Now, there’s also, if you’re one of our investors and you’re worried about locking in your price, because we were locking people in on the downside price protection, but what about locking on the upside? So they don’t feel they have to convert fast fast fast as the stock price goes up.
Stock Doing Well
Because a little birdie tells me, and I never check the stock price that our stock price is doing pretty well, and I would have no idea why, because I only deal with fundamentals.
You can tell when a CEO is lying, when he claims that he has nothing to do with the stock price, right. But nonetheless, we do focus on the fundamentals and Darryl tells us it’s nine cents per share. Well, thank you very much Sir. In fact, I’m looking at, it closed at nine and a quarter per share, and volume was half a million shares, not bad.
Chats
Now, is it Makoe? Makoe Seawright? I hope I’m not misspelling M-A-K-O-E, Makoe Seawright says ,”I’m thinking of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and how it would work in that area of the world.” Very interesting question.
Technology Applications
We’re talking about really a product line. You know, we have a product line, we’ve been playing with things like the Pool Preserver™, but that’s only, that was a test of Water as a Career as you saw and Progressive Water, that was very cool that Stephen put together a little explainer on what RO [Reverse Osmosis] is, how RO works, because a lot of people just don’t know that your pushing stuff between these incredibly thin layers, and so forth. Or, that we’re building things like for example, pond treatment systems [Pondster™].
In Wisconsin, you’ve got a huge amount of dairy farms and they all have problems with manure. That’s often just being trucked off-site. So that is a perfect application of our technology.
Rising Tide
It’s been really interesting, but what I think we’ve got here is a channel to raise a lot of money, that is going to be used in a very direct way, and this morning the investor was asking us, “Well, what are you, I just visited your Texas operation, nice guys, but they’re going to get overwhelmed by all this business.”
We tell them that, no, no, no worries. OriginClear is at the top of the pyramid, and if Progressive Water can’t handle it, we’ll give it to other great companies we know. Like AdEdge in Atlanta and so forth. These are great companies that we know very closely and we’ll go ahead and farm out the business.
So all of a sudden it’ll become a rising tide, floats all boats, where we have a fund that’s not necessarily putting the business through Progressive Water Treatment, and of course we’d like it to, because we get to keep the profits for OriginClear, but it’s more important to rev it up as this thing goes into the tornado.
Cracking the Nut
So I’m excited as you can tell, in a way that I haven’t been for a long time about the waters industry, because we feel that we’re finally cracking the nut here and changing conditions in the industry. That we’re finally coming around to having a real accelerant, and this is going to be so much fun. I’m blown away.
So Ken thank you very much for being all over it. I’m going to be adding more personnel to help with these deals. If any of you know, of a good associate level investment banker person, that’s kind of who we’re looking for, who could basically stay up all night, stay up all night.
I love investment bankers, but I would not want to be one, because it’s a very punishing job. So we are recruiting, because we’ll be doing a lot. Imagine, oh, somebody wants to get rid of a piece of real estate and invest, well, we’re going to have to go do due diligence and evaluations and this, that and the other thing, lots of details.
Acknowledgements
So I’m excited. We’re going to… I feel that we’re well on the way to building a capital fund, and with that I’m going to tell you that it’s been wonderful talking to you all. Thank you for being on board.
Many, many people joined us tonight, and I couldn’t be happier with the way things are going with the help of Ken here, Tom Marchesello, as Chief Operating Officer, Ivan Anz’ and Arte Maren’s Philanthroinvestors, helping us build Water Philanthroinvesting and the entire rest of the team.
Toxic Sites and Decentralization
Gina Lowe asks. “Have you been invited to help in Flint, Michigan?” Here’s the problem with places like Flint, Michigan. They’re municipal disasters. You’re being invited to help for free. Why? Because, Elon Musk threw a bunch of money at it and so forth. We would love to help in Flint, Michigan, but realize this: a lot of people have been trying to help.
At the end of the day we are not there to do, we’re just not able to do large scale, $100 million dollar projects for free just not in that position. But having said that, do you realize that South Bend, Indiana is far worse than Flint? Because of all the, what they had like, refrigerator factories there? Something like that. Tremendous amount of ground pollution there, much worse than Flint. Nobody’s talking about it.
So there’s many, many, many bad sites. These will have to be cleaned up. Our job is to pull away the work from the municipals. Imagine that Flint, Michigan didn’t do the work, because somebody else did. Now we have ability to improve condition ourselves by decentralizing the water industry in the same way that computers, cell phones, etcetera, self-driving car, solar energy are all decentralizing.
Thank You!
So, that’s where water is going. Thank you for being with us. It’s been amazing. Have a great evening. Ken, thank you for joining. Good night.
Register for next week’s Insider Briefing: HERE