Our next guest is a grad student from Philadelphia
who's raised over $30,000 for charity
since the start of the pandemic by dropping pizzas
from his second story apartment window.
You heard me.
Please welcome Ben Berman.
Hi, Ellen.
Hello, Ben.
So nice to meet you.
I am so excited to be here, a lot of weird things
have happened in my life.
But right now, I'm on The Ellen Show.
I didn't even tell my grandmother until today,
because I didn't really think it was real.
So I'm so excited, so nervous to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Oh, Ben.
I'm so happy to have you on.
Your story is crazy.
OK, so tell everybody how you came up
with this idea of doing the pizza drops?
I have always loved to cook, and it's
been a way for me to connect to friends.
I say to people that I'm most comfortable around a dinner
table sort of food's always been my love language.
And I've been working on a pizza recipe in my apartment
for about a year and a half.
When the pandemic started in March,
I had a big batch of dough that I
was ready to make pizza with for friends.
And it was that week that the pandemic started,
and we didn't really know what it was yet.
But we knew it was a bad idea to have friends
over for a big dinner party, and so I bought 40 feet of string
on Amazon.
And I told my friends that if they came over,
I would lower slice of pizza to them out of my second story
window.
In that way, no one would have to come inside.
It sort of built up over the summer,
and now I have $34,000 raised.
I've made about 500 pizzas, and I'm absolutely loving it.
So how do you make this?
Do you have a pizza oven?
Or do you make it in a regular oven?
Yeah, I have just an electric oven
in my one bedroom apartment.
What people don't know is I basically wake up every Sunday
morning terrified that for some reason
my oven is not going to work, or I messed up the dough
that week.
Because I don't really know what I'm doing.
But it's a recipe that I've been working
on for a year and a half, and it's all baked
in my electric oven on steel.
And hopefully, people like it.
Well, obviously they like it.
I heard that it's really good and so good
that you're getting so many requests that you have
to do like a pizza lottery.
How does the pizza lottery work?
Yeah, as part of this my friends have been really confused,
because I have Instagram followers now which
I have no business having.
And so as part of this sort of thing that's happened,
people now are excited for the pizza.
So pizza is always free and two days before a pizza drop,
I post on Instagram, and people can enter a lottery.
All that we ask is for their email address.
And then the day before, I randomly select 20 winners,
and they get email where they can pick their time
to come pick up a pizza to be dropped out of my second story
apartment window to them.
That is so fun.
Just that alone is worth it.
So your pizzas are free, but you've raised
over $30,000 in donations.
So you basically just ask for-- you say,
here's a slice of pizza or a whole pizza,
but just make a donation.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean I started it, because I wanted to make my friend smile.
I wanted to stay connected to friends
at the beginning of a pandemic.
And now, obviously, it's grown well beyond that.
And so over the summer, I started asking for donations
that people felt inspired by what I was doing anyway,
if they felt like they saw us on Instagram,
and it made their day a little bit better.
And one of the coolest parts about this
has been not only some people put $5 in the box,
and they come pick up their pizza.
Or some people donate $100 on Venmo,
but we've also had people from around the world sending Venmo
donations just saying we saw what
you're doing on Instagram, sending love from Ireland,
here's $200.
People that will never actually get to try the pizza.
A few weeks ago, two of the 76ers players
came to my apartment.
And we had pizza out on the street together,
and they donated $5,000.
So for me, it's been just an opportunity to gather people.
Hopefully, make people smile.
And I never expected it to be anything like this,
and I'm so glad that people have seemed to enjoy it.
And so thankful that they've supported it.
It's incredible.
So OK, you get all this money.
You're donating it to charities.
But you still-- you said, you've made like 500 pizzas.
The ingredients each week must be like how much are you
spending on the ingredients?
I haven't calculated it.
Probably a little bit out of fear.
I mean what I will say is this has been such a fun
experience for me.
It's been such a crappy year for so many people.
I miss so many things about my life before the pandemic,
and this endeavor has given me something
to look forward to every day.
It's given me an opportunity to work
a little harder, to make people smile,
to give back a little bit.
And so I spend a bunch of money on flour
and the pizza boxes, and everything else
that goes into it.
But for me, it's an opportunity to give back,
and I'm fortunate to be a student.
And I didn't lose a job this year like so many people.
I had my budget set, and this is just my avenue
for giving back for the--
Wow, what a sweet guy.
OK, Ben, we're taking a break.
And we'll come back, we'll talk more with Ben after this.
You're in grad school.
You already have a job lined up after you graduate.
So how much longer do you plan on making pizzas?
My answer is I didn't expect for this ever to be anything.
It was just something, because I like to make food.
I like to make pizza.
I wanted to make my friends laugh by lowering pizza
out my window.
And now I have this platform that
would make people smile on one of the reasons
that I was so excited to come on your show,
because I feel like that's your goal every day too
is just to make people's day a little bit brighter.
And my apartment is a lot smaller than that,
but I'm having so much fun just doing this for the community,
giving back a little bit.
I'm getting a lot of joy out of it.
And so I'm telling people, I'm just
going to keep making pizza until the 900 people that usually
sign up for our 20 winner lottery
right now until I feed all of those people.
So until the lottery is no longer necessary,
I'm planning to continue to make pizza.
Wow, so you're going to be making pizza a long time.
I think you're going to have to forget your job.
But see, and that's what I love, because I
get this platform to show people what's going on out there.
And you didn't know you'd get attention for this.
You were doing it just because you were making people happy.
And now, I get to say look at this guy,
and maybe there's lots of other people out there
that are doing things just to make people happy
and feel good.
And that's what we have to focus on in the world right now.
There's so many people just being
good just because you know so--
we notice your pulley system could use a little upgrade,
so we're going to give you this.
Here's a pulley system that we're going to hand to you.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, no.
Yeah, this one holds like three or four boxes,
like three boxes easily, OK?
And this one right here is from my friends at Shutterfly,
because they love what you're doing.
And they want to help you get closer to your donation goal,
so they want to give you $10,000.
Ellen, it's going to make such a big difference,
every single penny that we bring in we
give the hunger relief organizations in the area.
We give to an amazing organization
called Project Home that's working to end
the cycle of homelessness.
Every penny of that will go to them.
I can't wait to use that new box, but thank you.
This is a dream come true.
Thank you.
Thank you Thank you.
I'm waiting for my pizza too, Ben.
I would enjoy a nice pizza from you.
Well deal.