Katie Spotz is Concerned with Clean Water

What's your Rogan experience? When you were thinking about doing this, what made clean water, what made that the thing you chose to have as your main charitable organization? So I was living in Australia and they were experiencing a pretty significant drought. And Australia is very developed and to see the major headlines, to see the rules like, oh, you can't water your grass right now, you can't wash your car right now. And just to see that happening in somewhere so developed, it had it in the back of my mind like, wow, water isn't something that should be taken for granted and it isn't just this unlimited resource. And so I was studying environmental science and I remember one of my professors mentioned that the wars of the future would be on water. And in some countries it's already the case. And to me, that was kind of like that one sentence that I couldn't unlearn, I couldn't stop thinking about. And it just hit me at a core of like, that is so wrong. And I was 19 or 20 and at that point I felt like I had a little bit, because of traveling, I had a little bit of a sense of what was going on in the world. But to know at that point, one in six people didn't have clean water. I was like, wow, I didn't even know about one sixth of our planet and what their daily struggle is. And like, the fact that it's a problem that has a solution and it's something that, like, I don't know what cause could have as big an impact as water because you think like, what can you live without? You can't even survive three days without water. And just like thinking about health, half of the hospital beds are filled because of unsafe drinking water if you think about environment, if you think about education. Half of the hospital beds in the world, is that what you mean? Really? Half. Like, for children in the world, the greatest killer is diarrheal disease and that is because of unsafe drinking water and that is like, there's this documentary that came out recently, well within the last year called, I think it's Brave Blue World and Matt Damon shared something at the beginning about like, imagine that right now we find the cure for all childhood cancers and then imagine in 50 years from now, these kids are still dying from this very cancer that we have a cure for and that is what's happening with clean water. And I mean, if you, it just, I don't know, it still boils my blood just like thinking about like how wrong it is. And when you see how wrong it is, I mean, I feel like, of course, I would want to support that and do something and like, when I first started learning about it, I was, the first water project I was able to fund was in Haiti and I was learning about how some places they don't even name, give their kids a name until they're five years old because, okay, so who is affected by the water crisis? Women and children, children, their bodies aren't strong enough to withstand and to fight back all the bacteria and viruses and all the things. Yeah, exactly. So they won't even give their kids names until they think they'll be able to live, right? So like just thinking about that is like, these are real people. These are, I don't know. The real people today. Yeah, exactly. This is not real people 5,000 years ago. And like just the idea of not even giving your child a name because of that fear of like they might not even live so you don't even want to get like. My friend Lex, Lex Friedman, he's a scientist that works with artificial intelligence. He posted something on his Instagram. It's yesterday. It's a crazy statistic about children and infant mortality from I believe was 200 years ago. Look at this. In 1840 years ago, I was 43% died before the age of five. Today it's 4%. Just imagine that. And that was all over the world. 43%. But that's not the case everywhere. Obviously. If you're not naming your kids, that's probably where the gap is because it's not 5% of American children die before that age. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on Spotify. You can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch it. You can download free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan experience.