The ALS ice bucket challenge is this kind of viral charity phenomenon meant to raise
awareness and raise money towards a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that
most people know better as Lou Gehrig's disease. It is a terrible degenerative disease. People
end up trapped in their bodies. They don't typically survive beyond 2 to 5 years. The
way this challenge began -- the way it really kicked off was with a guy named Peter Frates,
he was a Boston College athlete. He is living with ALS and he took this challenge. The idea
was that you would either get an ice bucket dumped on your head or you would donate $100,
but soon enough people just did both and they would name 3 more people. The challenge went
incredibly viral. You had Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates doing it. You've had celebrities
like Vin Diesel doing it. Vin Diesel was my favorite because he challenged Vladimir Putin
to do it next. And it's raised a tremendous amount of money for ALS research. How does
it work? You get challenged by somebody. So I got challenged by Nilay Patel, the editor
of the Verge, and then like what happens is you simply just like dump a bucket of ice
on your head and...
Are there any good criticisms of the challenge? There are. So what's happened
is that ALS, while a terrible disease, is not the only disease out there. Just since
the challenge began, the ALS Association has raised more than $23 million. That is incredible.
It's an incredible success. It's good for the world. But there are a lot of other worthy
charities out there as well. One of the ones that GiveWell, which rates charities, reccommends
is the Deworm the World Initiative, which is an incredibly cost-effective, incredibly
well-run charitiy to get rid of parasitic worms in developing countries which really
really really are hurtful, sometimes fatal, terrible for development. So I will be donating
both to the ALS Association and to the Deworm the World Initiative. Oh right, and who am
I challenging? I challenge Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post, Nate Silver of Fivethirtyeight,
and Sommer Mathis of CityLab. You all have 24 hours.
That is really cold.