Episode 230 – Riggs Eckelberry

 

[00:00:00] (Intro Clip) ​

[00:00:00] ​

[00:00:05] Richard Matthews: (Opening Sequence) [00:01:00] Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews, and I’m here today with Riggs Eckelberry Riggs, are you there?

[00:01:08] Riggs Eckelberry: Hi, and it’s a pleasure to be here, Richard.

[00:01:11] Richard Matthews: Awesome. Glad to have you here. So what I want to, for all the people who follow along with our show, we’re always traveling in different places.

[00:01:16] We’re currently in Kissimmee. Where are you at, Riggs?

[00:01:20] Riggs Eckelberry: I’m west of you in Clearwater, Florida, and we moved here in June 2020. From Los Angeles, it was a, escape from L. A. is what it was.

[00:01:30] Richard Matthews: Yeah. That’s actually funny. The reason we’re in Kissimmee in the summer is because we travel full time and in the summer of 2020, we got stuck in Kissimmee for 11 months.

[00:01:39] We were only supposed to be here for a week and we were like, when they canceled everything and closed the whole country down, we’re like, hey, can we stay for another week? Maybe we can, outlast the pandemic. And it was three weeks. Makes two months for 11 months. We were stuck here. So now we got friends. We come back every summer.

[00:01:53] Riggs Eckelberry: That’s cute. At least you were in a congenial place.

[00:01:56] Richard Matthews: Yes. And it’s nothing like I’m stuck in a second paradise, for the pandemic. [00:02:00] So what I want to do before we get too far into the interview is I want to just run through your biography just so people know who you are and then will dive into your story.

[00:02:08] So Riggs Eckelberry is a nationally renowned entrepreneur dedicated to revolutionizing the water industry, which has reached a critical breaking point in recent years, despite being essential to the planet’s survival.

[00:02:18] As the founding CEO of OriginClear, Riggs has developed innovative solutions to help businesses face rising water bills by tapping into new investment markets. He’s even pioneering the development of WaterStableCoins, a cryptocurrency back buy water assets, with diverse background in non profit management.

[00:02:32] Ocean going navigation, crew rowing, Riggs is uniquely qualified to bring change to the outdated and overrun water industry. Now this is actually really interesting for me at least. We have been discussing, my wife and I are actively working on that. Moving into a sailboat. I think water is important to us anyways for our whole lifestyle. Why don’t you start off and tell me a little bit about what you’re known for, what it is that your company does, like who you help, what you do.

[00:02:59] Riggs Eckelberry: [00:03:00] Okay. So my current assignment, and then I’ll zoom out a little bit, but the current thing I’m doing is really focusing on, I have this motto, “break to build”, which I stole from an Air Jordan commercial from 15 years ago, but what it really is about is, I realized when we started in the water industry 10 years ago, that it was this immovable force.

[00:03:20] The way it was the way it was going to be highly centralized. The government will take care of it for you. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. The problem is everything wasn’t fine, right? We have terrible problems in the world. 80% of the sewage is never treated at all. 80% of all the sewage just gets dumped in the ground and rivers and oceans.

[00:03:39] Now it’s better in the U. S. but we still have trouble in paradise. With, basically all the infrastructure, investment stopped soon after World War II. And since then, we’ve been spending more and more on maintaining what we’ve got, but not building fresh. And, it’s now being recognized at the mainstream media level that this is broken [00:04:00] and the money’s just not there to handle it.

[00:04:02] And, I’m in Pinellas County, which is super populated. Where are they going to put a sewage plant? It’s not going to happen. So there has to be another solution. And that’s what we started to really work on.

[00:04:14] And we went through different phases. The first phase was technology until we realized that the water industry is technology phobic. So yeah, okay. Yeah, what we know, that’s fine we emphasize that.

[00:04:24] And then we eventually fast forward it into the current thing. Which is to decentralize water treatment and have businesses take responsibility for their own water treatment. Unburdening the central system and enabling it to serve its natural constituency, which is people.

[00:04:43] Richard Matthews: Interesting. So what is it that you guys are actively. What’s the actual product or service that you guys are offering in the marketplace?

[00:04:51] Riggs Eckelberry: It’s very interesting. We have, two businesses. One we purchased in 2015 when we started phasing away from the technology licensing game, and [00:05:00] we purchased a company in McKinney, Texas that specializes in custom engineering solutions.

[00:05:05] So they have very large clients that do one at a time can’t talk about. A major automotive manufacturer american, a major wholesale distributor, various things like that, a major power plant and generally can’t talk about it, but they do wonderful work. One sit one, installation at a time.

[00:05:22] Very smart people. That was great, but it’s a slow growth business. Anything customs is slow growth business. In 2018, I was all fired up about this decentralization. And so we recruited the decentralization guru, than early, who’d been doing the laboring in the desert for 20 years. And we brought him in to create a division called modular water systems, which is drop in place water systems in a box that are perfect to deploy.

[00:05:53] At remote locations where you don’t have a lot of expertise, nor a lot of room, and you don’t want to spend six months building a [00:06:00] thing. So that has been our fastest growth business. It’s one of the most proud of, and it also has the most proprietary aspects. 60% of all the installations they do are, locked in.

[00:06:14] In other words, they’ve specified our technology to do that, and there’s no competition. So that is the operational side, and think of it as an inverse pyramid where the people we’re servicing are the people who desperately need their own water treatment, mobile home parks, freeway rest stops, RV campgrounds.

[00:06:38] People who are having, who are being harassed by their local utility like breweries that are being forced to ship their effluent to another county because they’re being told, no, we can’t take you. And also people who are being fined a lot.

[00:06:50] That’s right now. Our current constituency is doubling year over year, and it’s great where we’re going is the people who don’t need it, but will want it [00:07:00] for primarily economic reasons, and it turns out that water and sewage rates are inflating at the same rate.

[00:07:07] As college tuition, which we already know is terrible, and it’s going out of control, businesses don’t like out of control costs of having their own system enables them to lock that in, and they can recycle that water because they’re treating it themselves. And thirdly, they have freedom from the pesky regulatory stuff as long as they meet requirements.

[00:07:32] They’re left alone independence. Those three factors are the next phase, but what’s the big barrier? The big barrier, as we realized in 2020, right during COVID, was capital. The people who have to have it will somehow find the capital. The people who might want it, they don’t necessarily have a million dollars lying around for a water treatment system.

[00:07:53] That’s where we come in and we devise something called water on demand, which is water as a service and [00:08:00] you were paying on the meter with the city. Now you’ll pay on the meter with us. It’ll be our machine that we put in and you’ll just pay the for usage and it makes a lot of sense. People like it because it’s no muss no fuss. It’s fully maintained.

[00:08:13] All they have to have is a janitor on site to push buttons, whatever. And that’s it. Now, that water on demand is a great concept. It immediately begs the question of who is going to fund those machines that go out that nobody’s paying for? And that is where we created an investment opportunity.

[00:08:31] And for the very first time, people can invest in a water, a bundle of water properties, just like the oil and gas industry and get royalties. And equity upside and all that wonderful stuff and we call it water like an oil well because that’s what it is, but it’s water is not oil and people love it.

[00:08:51] And so that is a this water on demand is the next phase for us as we move. So custom [00:09:00] systems scalable modular systems that are perfect for decentralization. And now this, water is a service.

[00:09:07] Richard Matthews: Awesome. So you got three major lines of business there. And I said they all serve different markets and the ultimate goal then is to make it so that we are removing the municipalities as the central sort of controlling aspect of how water and sewage is taken care of?

[00:09:23] Riggs Eckelberry: Interestingly enough, okay. Let’s take it for granted there’s a problem, the infrastructure is inadequate, etc. 90% of all water demand, is by industry and agriculture. Only 10% is people. So right, that’s crazy. So we focus on getting industry and agriculture off the central system, which unburdens it.

[00:09:46] Ireland, in Ireland, the water is free. Why wouldn’t it be free here? Once we pull industry off of it, then the municipalities will be free to service the remaining 10%, which they can do easily and really well and [00:10:00] replace all the lead pipes and all that stuff. Take care of the people right now.

[00:10:04] There’s a hidden burden on municipalities, which is that 90%. Which is, by the way, very similar throughout the world. It’s 90% throughout the world, except that the ratio within that 90% varies. For example, Somalia. It’s mostly agriculture. Here it’s half and half roughly in the U. S. That’s our mission really is to work with commercial users. And as I was saying, it’s a really good proposition for them. They like it.

[00:10:30] Richard Matthews: This off of the centralized system, and then they control their own water, which I assume can lead to higher profits and better control over their margins on all of those, all of their, the water that they’re using.

[00:10:42] Riggs Eckelberry: To be clear, they generally still pipe in the water from the city because it’s easy. Now they have the option of building a well, but most people don’t. Because a water pipe from the city is this no big deal is the sewage. That’s the big deal.

[00:10:56] Because it generally requires if you change having a change of altitude or whatever, [00:11:00] it’s not a straight shot. It has to be pressurized. And then you’ve heard about water mains breaking was generally the pressurized ones that break. And so there’s reduced capacity to handle sewage. And that’s really what we’re looking for. We’re leaving.

[00:11:12] So with that in mind, they, by the businesses taking it over, it’s already happening at the high end. For example, PepsiCo just committed publicly to reusing 80% of their process water, which is normal. And a lot of other big players in key areas, pharma, food and beverage, energy and chips. Those four industries are heavy water users, and they’re already at the high end moving over to self sustaining water treatment.

[00:11:40] We’re handling the next level down the small to medium, which, of course, is many more of. And to do that, you got to scale up big time. You got to automate. You got to. It can’t be, a project of digging a foundation in the ground and all that stuff. Forget it. No, it’s a container. You drop on a pad and you’re done.

[00:11:57] Richard Matthews: Yeah, I was like, I was just watching Apple’s keynote [00:12:00] yesterday and they had a whole section dedicated to the reduction of water in their manufacturing stuff. They reduced their water usage like 80% this year, which is crazy.

[00:12:07] Riggs Eckelberry: And they know they have to because, there’s a tremendous amount, we have drought now, people keep pointing to desalination, but desalination generally is a problem because it’s highly expensive energy, very energy intensive, and it releases a lot of brackish, a lot of brine back into the ocean.

[00:12:26] And there’s very high risks. Look at, Huntington Beach a couple years ago. It was a 10 year DESAL project that got cancelled due to local pressures, NIMBY pressures. Who is going to invest in a DESAL project for 10 years and then it gets cancelled? So that’s the kind of thing that we should do. But first, let’s do the simple stuff like reuse the water, right?

[00:12:49] Richard Matthews: Yeah.

[00:12:50] Riggs Eckelberry: Hello.

[00:12:51] Richard Matthews: Didn’t take better care of what we got. That makes a lot of sense. What I want to get into then is, we got an idea of what it is that you do now, is, how did you get started, right? We talk on this show, [00:13:00] every good comic book hero has an origin story, something that made them into the hero they are today, and we want to hear that.

[00:13:04] Were you born a hero? Were you bit by a radioactive spider that was like, you know what, I’m gonna I’m going to go ahead and fix the water industry, right? Or did you start a job? How did you get started as an entrepreneur?

[00:13:13] Riggs Eckelberry: Early on, I was bit by the, save the world bug. I came out of, I was raised, as an international kid. So I have no home, but, and my dad was like, you should be a lawyer. I had no clue to this day. I don’t know what the heck he meant by that.

[00:13:25] And, cause. Lawyers, average lawyer pay is very low. People don’t realize that, but, anyway, so then I, then what I have various ideas, but then I got bit by. The nonprofit space and I worked in nonprofits for about 10 years, and in the middle of which, as the bio says, I became an ocean going master, even worked in, on trap steamers in the South Pacific. I had all kinds of adventures emerged from all that.

[00:13:53] Really wanting to, being at sea is wonderful, but being at sea professionally is a very slow life. And so [00:14:00] what I realized was I wanted to be around people, I wanted to work and with, I wanted to make change happen. But no longer non profit, more about technology. I felt in the early 80s that technology was going to transform everything, which it did. And I started in New York.

[00:14:18] And one of my flaws, which I can tell you ahead of time is that I tend to rush into things, relationships, businesses and so forth, get myself in trouble and my life has been defined by my ability to deal with that trouble rather than. My selectivity and so I was immediately jumped into a, for the first time putting businesses in the New York area onto computers from paper systems.

[00:14:45] And, I was, it was not, it didn’t go great. Got a lot of good stuff done, but. What I, didn’t fully realize was that the value of these customers was not in the immediate implementation, which generally is a loss leader. It’s in that ongoing [00:15:00] I. T. relationship, which is very profitable because generally it’s like the insurance business

[00:15:06] Richard Matthews: They hold business on.

[00:15:08] Riggs Eckelberry: Yeah. And so I gave the business to my best salesman, Juan, and to this day, he’s made a wonderful business out of the continuation of what I, and he started. Now, coming out of that, I licked my wounds, and by the way, I managed to get in a year of ski bumming at the age of 40.

[00:15:26] Because I just felt I had to do that. So I ski bummed. People, I’d be on the gondola in my chef’s uniform and people would look at me like, you’re 40 and you’re doing this. Are you crazy? I’m like, just let me do this. This is fun. And, after that, whatever, right?

[00:15:43] Because I may be impetuous, but I’m also able to reinvent myself, which is, I think, a good thing. I encountered, after that, in the early 90s, dot com, along with marriage, and a kid, the dot com. And that was my dot com was wonderful. It’s, Oh, this is [00:16:00] finally computers and up just being used as glorified adding machines, but as compute as communication devices.

[00:16:06] And that was a massive transformation. And I just fell in love with it had some, great career in there doing primarily marketing, going up the org chart and eventually ending up at sea level. As a disruptor and in high tech disruption is a you take it for granted this model of mind break to build is taken for granted that things are going to be just creatively destroyed and something is going to come it’s just part of the ongoing process.

[00:16:33] The non-tech world doesn’t think that way but guess what. It’s becoming that way. So fast forward to, 2006, 2007, I was getting a software company out of the NASDAQ, which happened, after I left them. But I had this. Ambition to be a CEO and, that was granted me, but the people I was working with you’re not going to do software.

[00:16:58] You’re going to do [00:17:00] green. I’m like, okay, fine. I’m green. I’m good. And they said green, we want you to create a public company. That’s going to go algae for biofuels. And we launched that with my inventor brother who had a technology for algae extraction. And we had a wonderful time until all prices crashed to below $50.

[00:17:22] And suddenly algae was a science experiment. This time I did not give up this time. I pivoted and we took our algae extraction technology and turned that into a sewage extraction technology, which was our tech phase. So that’s the sort of the big picture. Now, in other words, what I was learning was to be, I think it’s good to move fast, but to move fast, knowing, being able to contain the consequences of your path, let’s say I decide I’m going around the coast of Papua New Guinea, and I want to take a [00:18:00] shortcut through the Louisiana Archipelago.

[00:18:02] I should look at the reefs in the Louisiana Archipelago before I do that shortcut, right? And if I do the shortcut, I better be ready to cope with that. And that’s where I’ve progressed in my career is still having that, easily bored, want to get things, big things done, but at the same time being able to contain that and do something that scales it.

[00:18:26] Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. I know one of the things that I’ve been working on the last couple of years, as we took our company from doing a lot of different things in the marketing space to we focus on just one thing now, and that’s all we do and narrowing it down to hey, we’re just doing this one thing.

[00:18:38] Which we work in the podcasting world. And that’s all we do now. And it’s, we’ve five X our business in the last couple of years because of that focus on just, we’re gonna do this one thing and we’re gonna do it really well.

[00:18:49] And it sounds like you guys are in that same way, but we’re going to work on water and we’re going to fix the water problem and we’re going to see the make that happen.

[00:18:57] Riggs Eckelberry: It’s look, everybody agrees. My [00:19:00] history for the last 10 years in water has been mostly people already saying water is really important, but not wanting to hear about it. Like it’s sewage. That’s that sewage plant on the Hudson River. I’m not interested. But now people are because it’s more and more about, localizing water treatment, making businesses responsible for it.

[00:19:20] And it’s starting to strike a chord with people, so it’s more and more becoming part of the awareness of the culture, there’s a cultural lag with everything, and now, self reliance is the thing of the day, and of course we have growth ideas, okay, now we make water on demand, Work for the North American Area.

[00:19:38] Now we want to clone it to other regions with partners and that eventually leads, I think, to a market. Why? Because every gallon in water on demand is monetized roughly at the same cost. Whereas just water alone has widely divergent prices, depending [00:20:00] on mostly, what rights you have, do you have rights dating back to Civil War, with the Colorado River, then you have very cheap water.

[00:20:08] That’s completely, you can’t make a market out of, water that’s based on all these tremendously variable factors, but you can if you have a stabilized price. And that led us to think of doing a crypto as well.

[00:20:20] Richard Matthews: Interesting so out of curiosity you talked about this the cultural sort of like desire for decentralization and being not dependent on other things you think the pandemic and the sort of the realization in the U. S. a lot of our supply chain was dependent on international stuff and sort of that shift here to start seeing how can we be more self sufficient is starting to move into the business community.

[00:20:44] And realizing like, Hey, if we’re dependent on, these municipalities or whatever’s going on with the water stuff that like, it’s just part of that same conversation that’s been happening globally.

[00:20:55] Riggs Eckelberry: Two major trends. The first one, of course, as we saw during COVID was [00:21:00] movement towards exurbia and rural areas, which there’s a heat map that I showed on my weekly briefing, which showed how, what, who lost people who gained them. And of course, it was these, New York, Chicago, LA, etc were these red spots that lost people and around them and down in Florida were blue, which is where people went.

[00:21:20] Texas, Florida, the Carolinas, etc. That was a massive movement of people going, Whoa, this is what we used to be able to live in New York, which I loved. I was in the 80s and I loved it. And depend upon all kinds of interlocking factors. Those interlocking factors fell apart.

[00:21:37] And we’re like, wait, this is the end of tomorrow. So people moved away. In businesses like we do, we did, but also, their homes, etc. Into areas that were, didn’t have the infrastructure. For example, right now there’s a land boom going on between Dallas and the Oklahoma border at Northern Texas that is far outpacing water infrastructure.

[00:21:59] And so [00:22:00] we are being called on to do these drop in place water systems for housing developments. We have a YouTube on our OriginClear channel, which is, munson point. This is one case study we did right on the, in Denison on the lake there, border of Oklahoma. And they it’s just a little container dropped in and it works and so you’re right that there was the pent up demand.

[00:22:23] I go. What do we do now? Because these developers need to respond to demand and people have realized that real estate is the only durable asset. Most people have access to. And so there’s this, the more inflation and reduction of value we have in the dollar, the more people will go for it.

[00:22:43] And so it creates a constant land boom. In my opinion, second major factor, as you said, is reshoring. It’s already happening now. I’m a big fan of Peter Zeihan. Yes, he is a langley insider. I agree, but he also is a realist and he sees a [00:23:00] deglobalization happening where, by far the most favored region will be North America.

[00:23:05] Because Mexico has both resources and people. We have economics, etc. Canada has, people, not so much people, but they have wonderful resources. And so that combination is very self sufficient. And it’s already happening. I’m hearing about how there’s already a shortage. Of, Tijuana area of about a million square feet of, not enough warehouse space is negative unemployment in northern Mexico skilled labor is at a premium.

[00:23:34] That’s going to continue. And as that happens, these factories are going to come are going to be installed in mostly in South Texas, Northern Mexico, etc. That are highly automated require very few people. They’re very state of the art and they’ll have integrated water treatment because they’ll be arriving in weight way too fast. And so that is another major opportunity as you pointed out, yeah.

[00:23:57] Richard Matthews: Yeah, it’s really interesting. There’s just so many shifts happening right now. [00:24:00] And you seem your company and like what you guys are offering seems really primed to ride this wave. If you’re not creating part of it yourself.

[00:24:10] Riggs Eckelberry: We are. I think we’re responding to a need. We’re also, I think, facilitating it because, most water companies try and do expensive stuff because it’s easier, the real boom, for example, in real estate was Postwar Levittown. These were not expensive houses. But it was a huge boom.

[00:24:28] So I believe very strongly in the low to middle class of users. If you can scale and be efficient, otherwise you get buried in the transactional costs. And that’s really what we’re focusing on right now.

[00:24:40] Richard Matthews: Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

[00:24:42] The hero show will be right back.

[00:24:45] Commercial: Hey there, fellow podcaster. Having a weekly audio and video show on all the major online networks that builds your brand, creates fame and drive sales for your business. Doesn’t have to be hard. I know it feels that way because you’ve tried managing your show internally and realized how [00:25:00] resource of intensive it can be.

[00:25:01] You felt the pain of pouring eight to 10 hours of work into just. Getting one hour of content published and promoted all over the place. You see the drain on your resources, but you do it anyways cuz you know how powerful it is. Heck, you’ve probably even tried some of those automated solutions and ended up with stuff that makes your brand look cheesy and cheap.

[00:25:17] That’s not helping grow your business. Don’t give up though. The struggle ends. Now. Introducing Push Button Podcasts, a done for you service that will help you get your show out every single week without you lifting a finger. After you’ve pushed that stop record button, we handle everything else.

[00:25:30] Uploading, editing, transcribing, writing, research, graphics, publication, and promotion. All done by real humans who know, understand, and care about your brand. Almost as much as you do empowered by our own proprietary technology, our team will let you get back to doing what you love while we handle the rest.

[00:25:47] Check us out at PushButtonPodcast.com/hero for 10% off the lifetime of your service with us and see the power of having an audio and video podcast growing and driving micro-celebrity status and business in your niche without [00:26:00] you having to lift more than a finger to push that stop record button.

[00:26:03] Again, that’s PushButtonPodcast.com/hero. See you there. (Commercial)

[00:26:10] You’re listening to The Hero Show, unlocking the power of influence and success.

[00:26:15]

[00:26:15] Richard Matthews: That’s one of the things that, for our podcasting agency, we’ve been talking about that a lot in our mastermind group is we’ve got our pricing set really low. Because we’re going for a volume play, and the volume play is as long as we can nail all of our efficiencies, we can do that really well and compete in an area that we have we don’t really have a lot of competition.

[00:26:33] Because of our pricing structure and people are like, you should raise your, I’m like, listen, our pricing is part of a competitive advantage, because we have the systems and the efficiencies to make it so that other people can’t compete with us here, which that’s always fun.

[00:26:46] Riggs Eckelberry: No, and our modular water systems division, achieved. For example, in what we call pump stations, which are these, basically, it’s a hole in the ground. It’s a well with a pump at the bottom, right? And it’s a way to change levels for [00:27:00] water, clean or dirty water to change levels.

[00:27:02] A very simple product but when they’re built with concrete steel or fiberglass, they tend to degrade, and so there’s a tremendous number of leaking pump stations in, throughout, there’s millions of pump stations and they’re leaking. We have these, high density polyurethane or polypropylene, materials as part of our patent asset and that’s a makes, you can retrofit these things or slide a sleeve in.

[00:27:28] And we’ve just fixed the whole leakage problem and we used to be more expensive, but say, Hey, but it’s just, if it’s a hundred year product, like now it’s at or less than the other guys. And it’s still a hundred year product. And so you’re right that when you can be better than the other guys and beat them on price, you start really cleaning up.

[00:27:47] Richard Matthews: Yeah. And you create your own blue ocean. Which is fascinating. So I want to talk a little bit then about your superpowers as the CEO of this company, right? Every iconic hero has a superpower, which is, it could be a fancy flying [00:28:00] suit, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky or super strength.

[00:28:02] In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius. Which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or you developed over the course of your career. And the way I like my guests to think about this is if you look at all the skills that you’ve developed over your career, there’s probably a common thread that sort of ties all of those skills together.

[00:28:18] What do you think that common thread is? Or what’s your superpower and how do you bring that to bear in your company?

[00:28:24] Riggs Eckelberry: I would call it. “Why not?” In other words, questioning the way things are and how they could be different. So you have, an existing situation, which I’m always looking at. How to think unconventionally about it, how to as I keep saying, break to build, in other words, break the existing to build something new.

[00:28:44] I do think that’s necessary. I don’t, it’s very hard to evolve something disruptive. You’re going to have to accept that there’s going to be discontinuities. And so I think my strength is first of all, to be willing to visualize.

[00:28:58] Get, like I got [00:29:00] excited in 2016 about decentralization and get that. Wow, that is a complete change from the way things are. It’s a totally different paradigm. How do we get there? And then getting there, consists of a lot of experimentation, a lot of mistakes, but a lot, finding a path that eventually adds up to getting to that goal.

[00:29:21] Number one is thinking outside the box. And number two is, taking what will work. You know there’s a wonderful book by Clayton Christensen which is the innovators dilemma and in that book he talks he takes case studies and one of them is this drive industry and this drive industry went from 28 inch platters to 14 inch platters to 7 inch to 3 and a quarter down to a chip at every single generation they did the succeeding company destroyed the previous one.

[00:29:51] Why? Because the previous company, let’s say quantum could not get away from their sales model because they couldn’t break their own sales model. We’re [00:30:00] making $14,000 per drive. We can’t go to 3,000. Can’t do it. And because they couldn’t their own insurgent engineers who had developed the next tech went and created the company that destroyed them, right?

[00:30:14] I want to be the company. It destroys me, right? I want to evolve that way. I’m obviously not destroying it, but adapting the financial and so forth.

[00:30:23] Richard Matthews: In other words, break to build that. I love that quote.

[00:30:28] Riggs Eckelberry: Yeah. I think it tells it wonderfully, I first saw it on a t-shirt I was at in a crew I was doing master’s crew which is competitive rowing and I was doing it at Loyola Maramount in LA, LMU.

[00:30:42] And a new coach came along and he got everybody a t-shirt said break to build and he’s you know what all your bad habits. We’re just going to destroy them and we’re going to start fresh like you were doing it for the very first time And that’s very healthy. It’s very healthy get rid of assumptions and just go.

[00:30:59] Okay, [00:31:00] sweep it clear. What do we got here? All right. Let’s break it down and literally started these rowers from the very basics. Okay, holding the, or this, that, and the other thing, and then gradually moving up into the fully synchronized crew, which is such a wonderful thing once it is to get there, it’s not instantaneous.

[00:31:18] So you. First, you break up all the assumptions now you build, and that’s, I think my strength is being willing to break. And then over, over the years, I’ve acquired the ability to stick with it and actually get there.

[00:31:34] Richard Matthews: I recall a story of one of the, I forget which coach it is, but one of the famous basketball coaches that did something similar where it’s like he took over coaching one of the big basketball teams and the first thing he started with was teaching them how to tie their shoes.

[00:31:47] Riggs Eckelberry: Wow. That’s good. That’s very good.

[00:31:49] Richard Matthews: Yeah, and it’s like the, you have to get the basics right and break all the bad habits. But anyways, my thought on the break to build my own sort of like personal I guess mantra for that [00:32:00] is I’ve always called entrepreneurs people who do what you do or do what I do in our industry is we’re parachute builders.

[00:32:06] You jump off the cliff first, then you learn how to build the parachute on the way down. And you have the pressure of if we don’t do this, the company is going to crash and burn. Like we have to figure this out. And that’s where the risk and reward comes as an entrepreneur is you’re like we’re going to disrupt this industry.

[00:32:20] We’re going to make something different. We’re going to make something better and improve the world in some way. And it requires breaking things and it requires being willing to do things differently and, to break your revenue model or to change the way that you’re thinking about things and, it’s fascinating to see that no matter what industry you’re in or what level your business is in.

[00:32:38] Because we’ve got a small agency, right? When we’re doing the same kind of things that you guys are doing on a huge multinational level, right? It’s entrepreneurship is all the same kind of drive and goal is to like, how do we make this better?

[00:32:51] Riggs Eckelberry: Yeah, but I would revise your analogy a little bit saying on the way down, you’re doing progressively better parachutes, right? Which each parachute, although it’s [00:33:00] lame, it slows down your rate of fall. So you’re gaining more time as you iterate better and better. So it’s not going to be like fall fall parachute. No, it’s going to be as you’re falling a little, a handkerchief umbrella, did it. Each time, buying you more time until you finally get to the shoot, that’s going to save your life.

[00:33:21] That I think is workable because it enables this sort of iterative process. And what you got to do of course, is keep the company alive throughout that. That’s the big challenge. And I have to tell you, I have a fatal flaw.

[00:33:34] Richard Matthews: That’s actually the next question. Fatal flaw.

[00:33:38] Riggs Eckelberry: It’s one that I figured out recently this year, which is that I have tended, whether I was a captain of a ship or heading some nonprofit development or running a software company, whatever, is that it tended to be the heat role.

[00:33:55] I can glow it I can make it happen and I was not thinking league [00:34:00] of avengers I was thinking superman, right? And when I realized that I went wait a minute no one can ever do it alone this BS must talent is that he does attract wonderful talent so that. I own a Tesla and I see this Tesla being constantly improved.

[00:34:17] It’s not Elon doing it, but he attracted amazing people, who he set the standard for sure. And he’s the animating genius, but it’s a league of Avengers. And the minute I realized that I shifted from being the domineering leader to a training officer, I remember the day that I came back to my desk from having had that realization, and somebody, one of my CFO had put something up that was completely not the right thing to send to legal.

[00:34:50] Normally I would just have rewritten it, sent it okay, fine, fix it, send it over, but how does that improve him, right? So I literally did a training exercise with him [00:35:00] this is what you should do, and he then did it, and I realized, okay, that’s my function.

[00:35:07] Obviously I’ve got to do certain things to get things going, but as soon as possible I have to bring people in. And that I think was a huge handicap for me was being this sort of this lone hero thing. Very toxic in my opinion.

[00:35:21] Richard Matthews: Yeah. It’s actually really fascinating because we recently just learned that in my own company. And I know what was fascinating to me was there’s a quote that’s pretty famous that says if you want to go fast, go alone.

[00:35:33] If you want to go far, go with the team. And what I’ve realized is that’s bullshit. Not to be too colorful, but it’s if you want to go fast. Go with the team. If you want to go far, go with the team. You need the team for both of them. And I’ve been coming to the realization that I would do the same thing.

[00:35:46] People would bring something to me, and I’d be like, oh, there’s something incorrect here. And I would just fix it. And I realized what I need to be doing is I need to be, I don’t know what, how you’d say, but imparting the way I think. And why I think the way that I do into my team [00:36:00] members so that they can go forth and not just do these things because this is the way that I do them, but here’s how I think about these things and teach them how to think that way.

[00:36:06] And how to communicate the way that I want, the way that’s effective, not necessarily the way that I want, but how to communicate with each other, how to communicate with our clients, how to communicate in different ways. And realizing that like my, the thing that’s holding me back was trying to be the person who does it all.

[00:36:22] And realizing that what I need to do is I need to just put the people in place and then give them the opportunities to grow and to become better themselves. And that’s really our role as the CEO is to build other people up because that’s what allows you to do so much more.

[00:36:37] Riggs Eckelberry: Yeah, and, with this idea of going fast there’s an analogy there in education where my wife’s a teacher and what. When she finds a kid who doesn’t like to read and so forth, she doesn’t try, she doesn’t just make them read more. She goes back to basic literacy, okay, this kid needs missing some something got missed along the way. So go back and you’re spending more time [00:37:00] fixing the literacy and getting them so that they’re, slowly starting to like books and then she can rev them up and now they will start reading a lot of books, right?

[00:37:09] So the willingness, I think you and I agree on this, is to take that time. Be slow in the beginning because it’ll create speed much later because you’ve dealt with the underlying issue.

[00:37:21] Richard Matthews: Yeah, and you have to, what’s interesting is you mentioned earlier, you have to keep the company alive while you’re doing all of this, right? And I know one of my fears early on was like, if we do something wrong if we only do it 80% as good as it could be done, that it’s going to kill the company. And you realize that hey, if we if that’s actually not true and your company can afford To take the time to train your people and to teach them well and to build the systems that are going to help uplift everything.

[00:37:48] And you can iterate right you can make things a little bit better You don’t have to go from jumping off the cliff to building the perfect parachute the right the first time you can like you know what the little you know, the little army soldier guy with the The Walmart [00:38:00] bag, it’ll actually flaw.

[00:38:00] It’ll work pretty well. It’s not as cool as like an actual parachute, but you can have minimal viable product, and get to market and move and iterate and make things better as you go. And I used to let that hold me back a lot where you’re like, it’s okay actually to ship and then iterate.

[00:38:16] Riggs Eckelberry: We see it in communications. I was just talking to, I had a meeting with my chief engineer and his operations manager and we were talking about a particular development, housing development, which is tiny homes which is fascinating because for the homeless, tiny homes for the homeless and it’s solution to so much and it’s actually happening.

[00:38:33] With this particular project we’re working on. And I said, okay, they’re going to support us talking about it publicly. Yeah, we’ll get it done. No, I don’t want to have the talk, start talking about it after it’s commissioned. I want to start talking about it now when we’re, I want to have releases about how they’re doing this and this is their ambition and what they’re solving with it and some stories with homeless people and tell the story along the way.

[00:38:58] People tend to [00:39:00] wait for the payoff at the end. So it’s like a business cycle. The narrative is like a business cycle. You’ve got to be doing it continuously.

[00:39:08] Richard Matthews: Absolutely. So I want to talk a little bit about your common enemy then, right? So every superhero has an archnemesis, right? It’s the thing that they have to constantly fight against in their world.

[00:39:17] In the business, it’s a lot of times it’s in the context of your clients. I’m not sure exactly how we would put it in for your business, but it’s a mindset or it’s a flaw that you’re constantly have to fight against in order so that you can actually help people get the result that they want. What do you think your common enemy is for your water company?

[00:39:34] Riggs Eckelberry: I think it’s been visibility. In other words I remember being a few years ago in the headquarters of fast company in Manhattan, beautiful office, 34 floors up talking to the editor and she was trying not to yawn as I was talking about water.

[00:39:49] She was like, this is, she was not interested in the slightest. Because it wasn’t seen as something A that was broken and B that could be subject to rapid [00:40:00] change, right? That could be as exciting as Facebook coming to life, right? Or something like that. There’s a bunch of things that are super exciting in our world that distract from something as pedestrian as water, but so my challenge has been to both on the substance.

[00:40:19] And the perception to make it exciting. So on the substance side, make it something that’s like completely radically different, like this modular stuff and on the perception side, get people excited about it and on board with it and interested in investing in water and all that good stuff. And we’re not there, we’re starting to get there. But we’re, that’s the big challenge to this day is getting mass visibility.

[00:40:45] Richard Matthews: I think you’re already starting on. I know when you’re talking about, Hey, we have to start telling this story, the story of, Hey, we’re building this tiny home project. And it’s, people are going to get interested in the stories that go along with the water because I said, water pedestrian. So you have to get the human [00:41:00] stories that go along with the water. And you guys, it sounds like you’re already working that direction, but that’s. Yeah, that’s gonna be tough because it’s water.

[00:41:09] And as far as we’re concerned, every time I turn on the tap, water happens, right? I flush the toilet, it goes away. I don’t have a problem with water. Not that it affects my day to day life. But the reality is if we don’t change the way that we’re doing some of this stuff, our grandkids might not have that same ability.

[00:41:24] Riggs Eckelberry: And even now, there’s toxins in the water that are not being pulled out, and it especially affects the poor who can’t afford a reverse osmosis system in their home. And they’re drinking the tap water. Their, pets are typically given tap water, and they suffer. There’s a lot of bad stuff in that water.

[00:41:41] There’s a site, EnvironmentalWorkingGroup.org, EWG.org. slash tap water where you can look up your zip code and find out what you got in your water. And it’s whoa, it’s a severe reality adjustment definitely is.

[00:41:54] Richard Matthews: Yeah, yeah. And so part of your goal is to learn how to tell that story really well and get people interested [00:42:00] in it. So you’ve talked about this a little bit, there’s just there’s flip side of superpower and fatal flaw flip side of the common enemy is your driving force, right?

[00:42:07] So just like spiderman fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it that you fight for? What’s your mission?

[00:42:16] Riggs Eckelberry: Frankly to make you know the in my nonprofit years. I was working a lot, and with human potential and quote unquote saving the world and so forth. My goal is to make what I’m doing even remotely approach that in terms of potential impact. So it’s more than just a business success, which of course it needs to be for my shareholders, but I wanted to have an effect, a legacy, right?

[00:42:46] I want it to make a big difference in the world. And I’ve had taste of that over the years where I’ve created software products that millions have consumed and so forth. And it’s a wonderful feeling. And, Doing this with water, I think, is even more [00:43:00] primary in terms of importance. I tremendously admire Elon because he’s managed to do this in multiple spaces is make a difference for people in a big way. And, one of the things about Elon Musk is he’s very debonair about it. He’s yeah, what am I doing today? Oh, I think I’ll do this.

[00:43:15] Richard Matthews: We just changed electric cars. We just changed payment systems. We just changed, just change the satellite internet industry, no big deal.

[00:43:24] Riggs Eckelberry: I love it. That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for that. I want to make my mark in an area that really is going to change human conditions on a broad basis over time. And that’s why to, I’m not planning to retire anytime soon because I got this mission right now.

[00:43:42] Richard Matthews: You got work to do, right? You got a legacy to make. And, yeah, the thing that I wanted to pull out there was you said water is even more primal than human potential, right? It’s because we can’t see our potential if we don’t have water taken care of, right?

[00:43:54] It’s one of our baseline things. That’s a, it’s a huge sort of it affects everyone. It affects the whole planet. [00:44:00]

[00:44:00] Riggs Eckelberry: Correct. Now, the goal here is to actually make the difference enough to what I was working before was working a lot with human potential and doing so effectively. How do we do that in water. And you’re right that it has that potential impact, but now we got to make the impact real. And that’s what drives me.

[00:44:20] Richard Matthews: Yeah, that’s really cool. So I want to talk something about something really practical as the CEO of a public company, right? The every superhero has their tool belts, right?

[00:44:29] Awesome gadgets, batarangs, web slingers, laser shooters, big magical hammers. They can throw around. I’m going to talk about top one or maybe two tools you couldn’t live without to actually do your day to day work, right? Could be anything from your notepad, your calendar, something you use for marketing.

[00:44:43] Like what is something that you couldn’t live without to do? What you do is the CEO of a company that’s trying to make massive disruptions.

[00:44:50] Riggs Eckelberry: Starting in the mid 90s, I really started using email as my weapon of choice. And to this day, it’s something that I spend a lot of time on. It’s a very [00:45:00] powerful weapon. Obviously as things have evolved and deliverability issues have come up and blah, blah, blah. We sometimes fall back on text and chat, but email is still, I think the gorilla.

[00:45:11] And I use that. I live in email, most of us do, and I think my strength is really to achieve consensus through the email process, and how I do it is by lapping people, being faster. And so they’ll see a response at 11 P.M and so already I’ve teed things up for the next day where I have initiated the next phase stay ahead of the pack as a communicator using primarily email.

[00:45:38] Richard Matthews: Interesting, so email is the tool but the hack is the communication and the speed that you’re wrapping the email in.

[00:45:45] Riggs Eckelberry: Speed of particle flow and so you know and what it does. Like for example when you’re playing tennis. Speed of the return is proportional to the speed at which you hit it. You hit it [00:46:00] really hard, the other person is going to hit it hard because it came at them so hard. Boom! And so if I create speed, then everything else speeds up, right?

[00:46:08] So by just being really fast. Okay, let’s do this, and people get into the they get into the spirit of it. Oh yeah. And what about this? What about this? What about this? They get excited. And so you can literally drive a lot of adoption through electronic communications. Absolutely.

[00:46:25] Richard Matthews: That’s really interesting. And I like that. That thought on how you look at because email today is considered a slow communication method, right? Because it compared to things like slack or twist or, instant messaging or SMS, email is like the dinosaur.

[00:46:39] And you see all the time that we were in the marketing world. One of the things that comes up all the time is email marketing is dead, which it’s not, obviously. But people talk about all the time and it’s considered a communication dinosaur in the internet age.

[00:46:50] And here you’re saying that It actually helps us or helps you be both fast and disruptive in your industry because of the way you look at it and the way you approach it. [00:47:00]

[00:47:00] Riggs Eckelberry: Correct. And speed is the key. I’m not discounting the, we’re in my company. We have signal a lot. That’s just the tool we use. And, but the problem with signal is a very noisy. People tend to let people post something and then something else gets posted. The thing was posted before it gets forgotten. It’s like email at least has discrete threads.

[00:47:21] Richard Matthews: Yeah.

[00:47:22] Riggs Eckelberry: And it doesn’t get buried like that. So it’s still strong. I’m it’s like, is Coca Cola dead? No, Coca Cola is not dead, right? It’s going to be around probably, for it’ll be there with the cockroaches, Coca Cola.

[00:47:35] Richard Matthews: So my question just on that with email is one of the problems that I know we struggle with email communications is two things. One is email can tend to get overwhelmed with things that are not essential communications.

[00:47:49] That’s one thing. And then the other one is trying to train your team and your staff and everyone to be like, because you mentioned discrete threads, is one topic per thread so things don’t get [00:48:00] lost. How do you manage those two things?

[00:48:03] Riggs Eckelberry: You know what, I just bring it up all the time. Dude, one topic, one email, one topic, one email, one topic. Or people take an existing subject line, And hit reply all with a totally different topic like dude, is it too hard for you to say change the subject line? Hello, because now we’re talking about something completely different. The original thread is lost, right? I just do a lot of persuasive communication, repetition works very well.

[00:48:32] The key is, I think as an exec, is to be repetitive without getting annoyed. Okay, here, this is what we’re going to do. This is what we’re going to do. This is what we’re going to do. This is what we’re going to do. As opposed to, God damn it! No. Because when I was a rowing coach, I noticed that when I was training novices and I’d be on the chase boat, on the chase boat, and I’d be showing the movement.

[00:48:59] And at some point, [00:49:00] something I said or did, that rower started doing it right, 18 times. And something there, something clicked. They didn’t hear that it wasn’t, didn’t show it right. Or they, the 16 times they didn’t hear me, whatever. So rapid creative repetition, I think is a serious management tool. Absolutely.

[00:49:20] Richard Matthews: It reminds me of my son and I are in martial arts right now and we’re learning Taekwondo. And so we started that in March and we’re at like September now. And it was only like just this last week that it finally dawned on me, like how we’re supposed to have our fist position for the fighting stance.

[00:49:33] And when you switch to the other side, I was doing it wrong for months. And it finally just clicked and I was like, Oh, I see how we’re supposed to be making this move. And it was just because he very, he just every time, every single class, he just repeated it. Here’s how you should do it. Here’s how you should do it. Here’s how you should do it. Here’s how you should do it. And finally it clicked and you’re like, Oh, okay, I get it now.

[00:49:51] So yeah, it’s the same kind of thing as the, how do you do that? How do you act like a coach. To coach people like, Hey, this is how we need to communicate. This is how we need to communicate. Cause it’ll actually, [00:50:00] help everyone, work better and more efficiently.

[00:50:02] Riggs Eckelberry: If you lose your temper, then. You’ve lost the game, so reactivity has no place in management.

[00:50:08] Richard Matthews: Yeah. So I’ve got only a couple more questions for you. One is your own personal heroes, right? So every hero has their mentors, like Frodo had Gandalf, Luke had Obi Wan, Robert Kiyosaki had his rich dad, Spider Man has Uncle Ben. I want to know who were some of your heroes. Were they real life mentors, speakers, authors, peers who were a couple years ahead of you? And how important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far in your career?

[00:50:29] Riggs Eckelberry: First of all, I’m going to say that my childhood hero was the Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was the man who first worked on building the Panama canal, where he built the Suez canal. And then he then tried to build a Panama canal and failed, but he was a tremendous innovator. He was that person who was the, this dramatic visionary and also very good at execution, his enemy that did him in was, of course. The mosquitoes in Panama, which destroyed[00:51:00] 10s of thousands of people.

[00:51:02] And that’s what the Americans later figured out and fixed and finally built. That was my hero. And then also as other childhood here, I had was Antoine Exupéry who wrote a “Little Prince”, but he also wrote a book called “Land of Men” down as and in that book, he says.

[00:51:19] There’s only one true wealth and that is human relations. And it’s true. When you really think about it, all that matters is. Us between us, right? We are the animators of this world, and that’s all that matters. We get stuck on a big mansion or whatever, but the big mansion is just an opportunity for us to be together in a big mansion.

[00:51:44] Who cares about the mansion? So those are the two. Now, later in my high tech years, I fell in love with Geoffrey Moore, who wrote “Inside the Tornado”, a seminal book for me. That describes the high tech life cycle. [00:52:00] And more recently, I Clayton Christensen was an amazing thinker. He was very influential people who listened to him like Andy Grove.

[00:52:10] At Intel did well. Those who did not, nothing happened. These are people who really reduced the whole high tech, the whole the change. They’re not high tech, but the whole change factor to process that I felt I could understand. In the case of Geoffrey Moore, his high tech life cycle really made it clear to me that. At each stage of a product life cycle, you need a different company, you need to go from being wacko crazy to very whole product focused to very dynamic tornado to very conservative and you have to shift the, your company’s I could say positioning.

[00:52:48] I could also say just it’s style shift style. And that is very important, we are hoping to get to the NASDAQ as a company. That’s one of our plans, nothing guaranteed, but that’s what we’re working on. The [00:53:00] day we got a NASDAQ, I’m going to have to be a different kind of CEO. Very different world. So that’s, I think what it’s about is that ability to shift what you are to audiences to remain credible and to communicate.

[00:53:14] Richard Matthews: Yeah, it’s a really poignant point. And I know one of the things that I follow a lot of the history of Apple because I’ve always found their history really fascinating the tech space and Steve Jobs died and passed on the business to Tim Cook, whatever.

[00:53:28] And that’s the same kind of life cycle where Tim Cook is an operations guy, right? And he runs the company very differently. And it’s like they’re in a different stage of their business now than they were when Steve Jobs was, innovating a lot of the stuff they were creating back then.

[00:53:40] And it’s a very just poignant point that as you get from one point in your business to the next point in your business. Whether you bring in a new CEO or not, like if you are the CEO, you have to reshape the company culture and reshape how you show up in the world for the next like stage of the business’s life.

[00:53:57] Riggs Eckelberry: That’s very true. So that makes [00:54:00] things exciting, doesn’t it? That’s the important part.

[00:54:03] Richard Matthews: Absolutely. And it all comes back to your point earlier. It’s about the people. And I, one of the things my mastermind group that we talk about regularly is, going the business life cycle from being a baby business to being like a toddler and a child and a teenage business to an adult business and like how the managerial and the operational sides changes you go, right?

[00:54:22] As you build your products and your services and your team and everything you take on different roles. You take on different, like your job as the CEO changes dramatically as you go through those phases of growth until you eventually become an adult business, start maturing.

[00:54:37] Riggs Eckelberry: And then hopefully you keep reinventing yourself, which is in this market you cannot sit on your laurels, no way.

[00:54:45] Richard Matthews: Yeah, it’s awesome. So one last question for you. And it’s your guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever puts him in Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview, I want to talk about top one, maybe two principles that you live your life by. [00:55:00] Maybe something you wish you had first known you’d know when you first started out on your own entrepreneurial journey.

[00:55:05] Riggs Eckelberry: I tended to in my earlier, my journey, I tended to take the shortcuts and not really attend to the, how it needed to be done. And I think that was, a problem early on. So what I’ve learned since then is to encompass the entirety. Of what needs to happen. I can’t claim to do instantaneously. I still takes me a while to figure things out. But hey so there’s that. And then the other thing I think is working on ethics. I think that I’ve tended to be polluted.

[00:55:36] Because of my own weaknesses by other people who were less than honest and so forth. And as a result, I caused me grief at many times in my career. What I’ve learned is to ethics, high ethics carries its own survival potential, right? And even though, you know what, we [00:56:00] can’t do this. I just can’t go down that road.

[00:56:01] No, I just can’t do it. Yeah. It’s attractive. It’ll, shorten things a lot, but no, just can’t do it. We have investors who have stuck with us through thick and thin. And one of the reasons why is. They know we will always do the right thing by them. We will make sure they are okay, even if it causes problems that we have to deal with. And they know that without a shadow of a doubt, so they have a high confidence level. That’s an asset beyond price.

[00:56:27] Richard Matthews: Yeah, that’s one of the things that has surprised me the most about doing this show is we’re some 250 episodes into The Hero Show. And probably 90/95% of our guests, when I ask that question, some variation of integrity, honesty, ethics is the answer to that question is like, how do you run a company, right?

[00:56:47] The principle that it all comes back to is some form of integrity. And it has, it’s really struck me and that as I continue to do this show and talk to businesses all over the world and everything from like small coffee shops in the [00:57:00] Philippines to Silicon Valley tech startups, people who are trying to disrupt the water industry.

[00:57:04] It all comes back to ethics and integrity. And my goal for The Hero Show, like our stated goal is to change the cultural narrative around entrepreneurship because the cultural narrative is entrepreneurs are villains, right? And every TV show and every movie and every kid’s thing that you watch, it’s always the bad guy is some variation of, we entrepreneur spills oil on ducks for money, right?

[00:57:26] That’s the story. I think it’s not true. The reality is entrepreneurs, people like you, people like me, we’re looking at how do we make the world a better place? How do we create more value than we consume? And anyways, I just wanted to share that with you. Let you know that I’m excited to know that you guys are doing that and you guys are in your company that way and that you’re a part of, making the world a better place.

[00:57:47] Riggs Eckelberry: Oh, certainly trying everyday. And I can tell you again and again, we have been rescued at critical points because we were honest. And I think that’s key.

[00:57:57] Richard Matthews: Yeah, I think that’s a great thing, [00:58:00] great note to wrap our interview on. I do finish every interview with a simple challenge. I call it The Hero’s Challenge, and I do this to get access to stories that we might not find on our own because not everyone’s out doing the podcast rounds like you and I might do.

[00:58:10] So the question is, do you have someone in your network that you think has a cool story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story with us here on The Hero Show?

[00:58:19] Riggs Eckelberry: I thought right away of my good friend, Ivan, Ivan Anz, who launched a venture called philanthro investors. And he’s done a great job. He they’ve been super supportive for us, brought investors to us and also all kinds of best practices. And he built going towards that, he built something called equity and help, which is a way for people who could not afford to buy a home to get into a first home at a price per month, lower than they would be paying in rent.

[00:58:49] And that ended up on the inc 500, very successful. And he then took that and went into other sectors. I would recommend, and I’ll be happy to make the introduction, that you interview [00:59:00] Ivan. He’s a fascinating guy much younger than I am. He’s, figured it out long before I did, but he’s a cool dude.

[00:59:07] Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll email you afterwards, see if we can get an introduction. We don’t always get them to say yes, but when they do, we get cool stories out of it. So I appreciate that. And in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are, cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism.

[00:59:18] So as we close, I want to know where can people find you if they want your help, right? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak? And, I think more importantly is who are the right types of people, who might be listening to this, who might be interested in either your water investments or the drop in systems or the custom systems, where, who are the right types of people for those and where can they find out more?

[00:59:39] Riggs Eckelberry: Thank you. And the first thing I got to tell you is that every week I do my own show every Thursday night CEO briefing on zoom. We started it. It’s, we started long ago, but it became zoom when zoom became the COVID thing. So we’re about 225 episodes in and I encourage people when they go to OriginClear.com they’ll get an invitation [01:00:00] to sign up, join my briefing.

[01:00:02] It’s, we are the, we think we’re the most transparent public company in America. We say everything we can possibly can legally and and we comment on trends and so forth. It’s very, it’s a lot of fun. So I recommend that. Also currently, if you’re interested in making a investment in water as an asset, just go to OriginClear.com.

[01:00:23] It’s the green invest now button. Currently you have to be accredited but periodically we do offerings, crowdfunding offerings for the not accredited. And we expect to start one again very soon. So either way, get on our radar. We’d love to have you jump onto this whole new trend. Somebody said that water and Forbes the other day, they said water is going to generate the first trillionaire.

[01:00:44] It’s no, we don’t want a trillionaire. We want a million millionaires. We want this to be for everyone. No more Bill Gates. This is enough. Water is going to be the people’s asset. That’s where we’re going.

[01:00:55] Richard Matthews: That is a wonderful story and it’s OriginClear.com to either get on your [01:01:00] briefings or to check out the investments in water. Again, thank you so much for coming on, Riggs. Appreciate your time today and look forward to speaking with you again. Do you have any final words of wisdom here before I push this little stop record button?

[01:01:11] Riggs Eckelberry: All I can say is that I love what you’re doing. I think it’s making, definitely making the world a better place. So keep it up. That’s I’m really an admiration of what you’re doing. So thank you for this opportunity and for what you’re doing.

[01:01:24] Richard Matthews: Thank you very much, Riggs. And same with you. I’m fascinated to know that people are tackling problems as big as what you’re talking about, because that never even is on my radar is like a problem I could solve and here you are solving it. So that’s it’s really cool.

[01:01:37] Riggs Eckelberry: Thank you, my friend.

[01:01:38] ​

[01:01:38] [01:02:00]