Good Morning, John, it’s Friday. Oh shit. That’s no--fuck--
Hey there Shoddycast viewers, it’s me, Austin. The Rethinking guy. And the weird science guy.
Anyway, if you remember a couple of months ago we launched our Project Purity campaign and I wanted to give you an update.
Here’s a refresher: In January I hosted a marathon livestream event where I played through the entire
Fallout 4 campaign in an effort to raise money for Charity: Water. Link to the archive is in the description.
Most of you have probably heard of Charity: Water by now, since they’re the go-to option of most YouTubers who fundraise.
There’s a reason for this, of course. It’s easy, for one thing. They make it incredibly simple to set up a page for accepting donations.
But that’s not just it. Charity: Water is one of the highest ranked charities in the world. Why is that?
Well, for one thing, it’s not very controversial. Providing water to people who don’t have it is a universally good thing.
Also, every dollar you donate goes directly into providing water to people in communities. It doesn’t go to
overhead, staff salaries, or any operating costs. They’re funded entirely by large donations from corporate and wealthy backers,
so when you donate $1? That $1 goes directly to getting wells up and operating in communities
that have no water at all. Even cooler, if you donate money, they’ll update you throughout the next couple of years,
showing you what well your money helped build, attaching photos and GPS coordinates so you can literally see your money change lives.
Our relationship with water in developed nations is kinda funny when you think about it. It’s
probably one of the most fundamental needs of our body aside from oxygen. You’ll hear
this all the time: you can go x weeks without food, but you can only survive y days without
water. You...probably just tuned that out, it’s such an overused statistic, and, honestly,
water is magically teleported to our taps--drinking water is nearly as natural and easy to most
of us as breathing is. It’s only when safe water is taken away from us, like what’s
happening in Flint Michigan right now, that we even stop to consider how fortunate we
are to basically not even have to worry about this at all. And even residents of Flint,
who are trying to deal with the very real reality of having lead in their water supply,
aren’t very real to me here in Illinois. My water’s fine. I don’t know anybody
in Flint. Reading that 100,000 people in Flint are suffering from not having access to drinking
water is about as incorporeal to me as 100,000 people in Bolivia, or Cambodia, or Ethiopia,
or--well, you get the idea.
It’s incredibly difficult to try to imagine the struggles of someone else when their every
day reality is so fundamentally different from our own. Empathy isn’t exactly easy,
and numbers often only serve to further the gap of understanding the struggles of someone
else. It’s why you so frequently see those tv ads showing shots of individual children
looking miserable--it’s much, much easier to understand the struggle of one than it
is thousands.
But the unfortunate truth is that there are millions of children, men, women, old people,
and young who live every day without access to clean water. And I think it’s important
to keep that in mind--it’s not just a few people struggling, it’s a measurably huge
fraction of the entire human race--humans like you and me, with skin, eyes, brains,
memories, favorite foods, and thoughts and opinions.
In spite of all this difficulty with empathizing with the struggles of forgettable numbers,
incredibly we made our goal of $10,000 in just a week--and handily finished right before
the end of the livestream. That’s incredible. And YOU guys did that, not me. Sure, I was
playing video games, but you’re the ones who dug deep and contributed whatever you
could. Some as much as over $200, and others just a dollar. But that just showcases the
amazing capability we have as humans to network together to achieve feats that nobody could.
I don’t have $10,000. You probably don’t, either. But all of us, giving what little
we can amounts to something much greater than the sum of our parts. 352 people who didn’t
have access to water are going to get it now, and that’s fucking awesome.
Brian T. Delaney and Courtenay Taylor were incredibly generous and hung out with me to
boost visibility. Courtenay is pretty passionate about Charity:Water herself and actually hung
out with me for several hours and provided autographed memorabilia to help get people
to open their wallets, and I’d like to personally extend the warmest gratitude I can to them
for taking the time to help us out. It means a lot.
Those of you who have been paying attention probably remember that I said I would be getting
a tattoo if we made goal. I’m not backing out! I’m totally doing it. I’m just trying
to get a design finalized, and then y’all’ll get to see me get it. It’s going to take
time though, because, you know, it’s still a Tattoo and should be done with thought and
care.
So here’s the final thing: I’m utterly proud of us. I’m amazed and overwhelmed
by the response this campaign got. I’ve raised the goal to $20,000--twice what it
was originally. There’s a little under a week of time left, and I want to see if we
can repeat history right before the campaign finally closes down. I want to see the number
double. We have over 600,000 subscribers here--we’d make our goal if every person donated a little
over a penny. That’s a nearly-forgettable amount of money. Link to the donation page
is in the description, or you can go to bit.do/projectpurity and donate whatever you can to help us double
our goal.
Providing access to clean drinking water is one of the biggest assets to a community and
a nation. Clean water is directly tied to the Gross Domestic Product of a nation, with
each $1 invested in drinking water translating into $4-12 contributed to the local economy.
Less people sick, less people walking miles with gallons of water--that frees up a lot
of what economists call “opportunity costs,” or the effective financial cost of spending
time doing one thing when you could be doing another.
I believe in us. Let’s push this thing over the edge. Let’s do some good for the world.
I’m proud of you guys. See you next week.