A Bigger Crusade

You're doing some lobbying work on clean water issues. Why is that so important to you?

So I found out a lot about water over the last 14 years and in developing Hint, and what I realized along the way is that there's a lot of restrictions thankfully that the FDA puts on our product prior to it actually being sold or ultimately getting into the consumers' hands. So things like lead and arsenic and PFAS and copper all need to be removed from water. When I found out that the EPA does not put the same restrictions at a federal level on our drinking water, I was shocked. I actually thought that that was wrong and that I must not be looking in the right places for these answers. And so it ends up today that our EPA actually has a suggestion on lead but they leave it up to the states to ultimately do the, not only the analysis but what they're ultimately going to do to fix it. So today in the U.S. 24 of the 50 states actually do testing around lead as an example. That's one of the only things that we're actually testing for in our water supply.

But that's still less than half.

Less than half and my hope is to ultimately take this before Congress to say that it's not enough. We need federal mandates to actually say that, first of all you have to test. I want to see all 50 states actually testing for lead and other things like PFAS in our water that are really not that great, and according to the Center for Disease Control, cancer-causing, but in addition to that, when we find that there's a problem with our water supply there needs to be a process to actually alert consumers.

Do you think CEOs and founders should do more to use their leadership skills on social issues like this? Is there responsibility and obligation to do that?

I believe that I have a responsibility to do that. I would like to see other CEOs doing that whether or not they will do it I I can't say, but I see CEOs that are getting involved in lots of other issues. In fact, many issues outside of the U.S. to make different societies better. Again, that's their decision but there's a lot of problems here in the U.S. and including fixing the lead in the water but also just infrastructure as a whole, and I mean, what if, for example, we could get different companies that are setting up customer service centers in some of these states to actually foot the bill for some of these things, maybe it's not even permanently but maybe it's a loan just to give cities enough money to actually get started on these issues. I think that that's really where we need to go with it and unfortunately the legislation is not in place right now to allow these states or cities to even accept private donations. So that's what's so scary about it. So that is the change that I'm trying to really push forward.