All right, welcome everybody.
I'm with my friend Dave Harrison today.
Welcome to the Ocean Water Podcast.
This is the voice for indigenous water rights.
We'll talk a little bit more about that later today.
I have a very good friend on.
Dave worked at the same international water project company
for four decades.
That was 40 years at the same company.
And during his time there,
he did projects in six different countries
and personally managed some of those projects
were over a billion dollars.
And that's what the B like the word bicycle.
So we've got a lot,
we're really honored to have Dave on today.
Dave, thank you so much for being with us.
Great to be here, Ryan.
Yeah, and then on a personal note,
Dave is somebody who I look up to,
someone that I've learned from.
So I'm really glad to have him here today.
He's also someone that I ride bikes with frequently
throughout the month.
Usually once or twice,
we get on a really good ride together on a Saturday.
So it's an honor to have you, Dave.
Dave, you live here in San Clemente.
And so people get to know you a little bit.
What's one of your favorite places to go get food
and what do you get?
I'll give you two because they're on different ends
of the spectrum.
One is Avila's El Ranchito for Mexican food.
I'd go there eight days a week
for breakfast, lunch and dinner if I could.
I'll eat anything on their menu pretty much.
But if I just want my comfort level,
I get carnitas tacos.
Their carnitas are really great.
And then on the upper end of the spectrum, I love Vine.
Vine is a higher end kind of fine dining place,
but it's really accessible.
It's not very expensive.
People are great.
The food is amazing.
Chicken schnitzel, if you're really looking for something,
is off the charts.
Well, I've been to Avila's and Maria and I,
and Maria and I have been there
and we'll have to check out Vine.
It sounds amazing.
Yeah, awesome.
So what are you doing these days currently
and kind of how did you get where you are right now?
Okay, fair question.
It's crazy times in everybody's industry.
I actually was meeting with the head of the business unit
at this company I worked for.
I worked for the same company, as you said, for 40 years,
but we got acquired by a big company three years ago.
So this big company, the guy is meeting with me.
I tell him what I'm gonna do in 2020, says,
that's great, I'm gonna have somebody else do it.
I have a spot for you.
So just like that, I was out of a job.
36 hours later, I'd signed an offer letter
with a small company called Kennedy Jenks Consultants,
great little company, about 400 people across the US.
Who are really connected to their clients.
That's where I wanted to be,
is I wanted to be connected to clients,
working with clients and helping them solve problems.
And so I'm able to do that now.
And the interesting thing I'm working on
is reclaimed water projects,
projects that take treated wastewater and reclaim it
so that it can be used as drinking water.
And that's kind of the wave of the future.
Here in the first world where we have lots of water
and lots of wastewater, so we need a little more water
and it's a great way to get it.
So that's what I'm doing now and it's been fantastic.
So a little context for our listeners,
a smaller company that has three or 400 people,
that is smaller when you came from a company
that had, I think, 22,000.
That's correct, 22,000, yeah.
I got that right.
I pay attention when we ride bikes.
You do, man, that's good.
And so a smaller outlet and I know
you're really happy there now.
Thanks.
In fact, I'm looking forward to getting down
to San Diego with you soon with my friend, Mark Bell,
and meet some of the awesome people that you're working with.
Yeah, yeah.
So Dave, I know one of the things that really excites you now
and one of the things that drives you is passing along
a lot of the lessons that you've learned
from the school of hard knocks along the way
to people that are just starting out their career.
In fact, so much so that you've written a book.
And can you tell everyone the title of your book
and when it's gonna come out?
Sure, it's called The Right Start,
Building Your Brand to Survive and Thrive
in Corporate America.
It's coming out in three to four weeks.
It's just going through the final publishing stages
and I'm a newbie in this, so I'm thinking
it's three to four weeks.
I'm hoping that's all it takes.
Could be sooner, could be a little longer,
but it'll be out there.
And it really is, it's lessons that we've learned
through the years.
I wrote it with a friend of mine
and got knocked around a little bit.
We're experiential learners.
We're the kids who when mom and dad said,
hey, don't touch that, it's hot.
We said, I wonder what hot is and we touched it.
So we did that in the corporate world too,
got beat up a little bit, but learned our lessons
and have pretty successful careers.
We just wanna pass that knowledge on to others.
Well, that's exciting and I wanna let everyone know
that Dave's book will be a link on our Ocean Water website
and Dave has very graciously ahead of time
gonna donate the proceeds and some of the proceeds
of the sales of the book to Ocean Water.
And Dave, we're really, really honored by that.
Not only are you gonna give back a lot of the stuff
that you've learned along the way,
but we'll be able to leverage anything
that comes in from that and multiply it in the spaces
where we are working internationally.
So for people who are starting out, what do you wish,
what are some of the things you wish you had known
when you started your career?
Like if Dave can talk to younger Dave,
what would he be saying these days?
Oh man, well, there's lots of things.
I'll give you a couple things.
One is to do the difficult things, to take the challenges.
There's a great quote by a guy named Lou Pennella
who was a baseball manager for years.
The toughest competitors know how to be comfortable
being uncomfortable.
So I would say get uncomfortable fast.
It's the only way you're gonna get better.
And it's hard to do because nobody likes that.
Nobody likes to be uncomfortable.
That might mean learning to be a public speaker.
That might mean learning to write better.
I know early in my career, I was not a good writer
and I got hammered for it.
And I decided I don't wanna be hammered like this.
That was awful.
I'm gonna learn to write better.
And I found ways to learn to write better
because it was important for my personal career.
So that's one thing.
And I think the second thing I would say
is find a way to work at peace with others.
The working world can be such a crazy place.
It can be super competitive.
It can be kind of weird.
I mean, the guy in the cubicle next to you
can be spitting sunflower seeds over the cubicle wall.
That's uncomfortable.
The receptionist might be a medium on the side
who wants to do your palm reading.
I mean, there's weird stuff that goes on in the world
because there is no normal.
There is a Ward Cleaver, June Cleaver.
They don't work.
They're TV families.
So find a way to be peaceful with all of this.
Kind of come to grips with all of it
because it exists and it's not bad.
It's just, it's interesting.
If you, it can either be weird and off-putting
or it's like, all right,
the dude is into multi-level marketing.
I'm gonna ask him how many people he sucked in this week
because I'm not gonna be one of them,
but obviously there are others or he wouldn't be doing it.
So, it's just a way to have conversations with people
and learn about others.
Be at peace with the world around you.
That's what I would say.
Because I know early in my career
that stuff irritated the living daylights out of me.
And it was a lot of stomach acid burnt
for no reason at all.
That's awesome.
So what are you interested in now?
What are you curious about?
What's something that interests you currently?
I love 20th century history.
I like a lot of different aspects of history.
I like 20th century history.
So I read lots about weird stuff.
Like I read a book about Calvin Coolidge,
who I don't recommend that book.
He was a strange dude and not really all that interesting.
And definitely not somebody who would go have a beer with.
But I like learning about history.
So I'll read, I've read a lot about water history
because that's interesting to me.
It's what I do for a living.
So I wanna know, for example,
when did we learn that there was a link
between water and bacteria in virology and diseases?
And it was discovered by a guy named John Snow in London
at something like the Broad Street pump station
in like the 1850s or 1840s.
Oh, that's what I'm interested in.
I'd spend time doing that.
Yeah, in fact, I remember one of the rides that we did,
we actually talked about the early 20th century history
of Los Angeles and how it actually is
and how it's actually directly tied to water.
Absolutely, yeah.
Maybe people don't know this, but William Mulholland,
if you go back a hundred years,
if it wasn't for his 227 mile aqua project
from where they hoodwinked the people
at the bottom of the Sierra Nevadas to build,
at that time, the largest public works project
in the nation's history,
you and I literally wouldn't be standing
or sitting here in San Clemente
because San Clemente has been the downward growth
of the population from LA if you go back and you track it.
And I'm fascinated by history as well.
In fact, I remember we had both learned a lot
about William Mulholland.
You can't be in the water space too much
and not know his name.
If you're curious, yeah.
So I also just finished a book by Winston Churchill.
Nice.
And that was a really good read, his leadership
from like 1941 to 45 when they were in the war.
That was super interesting.
What is something, what are one or two or three things
that you feel like you've failed at?
I ask people that question and they're like,
you want me to pick one?
But it's a good question to ask
because people that are driven
and people that are successful,
people think that it's just been this endless string
of victories and nothing could be further from the truth.
So what are a couple things that just jump out to you?
Gosh, oh, yeah, it's more than a handful.
It's a giant bucket full.
Might even have to bring in a pickup truck to move it.
I'll give you a couple.
I really thought that I was going to be the CEO someday.
I had people whispering in my ear,
you could be the CEO of this company that I loved
and I'd worked for and I was a part owner of.
So we moved our family to Colorado
from Southern California in 2003.
I had a kid and a son in middle school,
a son in high school and two in college
and the two in college stayed behind.
And I never got there.
In a way, that's a failure.
I mean, I uprooted my family, we all moved.
It was very hard for my wife.
And I look back on that and think,
well, what did I do wrong?
And what did I, but at the end of the day,
I look back on that now 17 years in the past and think,
I'm really happy I didn't make that.
I'm really happy I didn't get to that position.
I don't know if I would have been successful there.
I don't know if I would have been happy there.
So I think that's, I mean, that's a failure
that I look back on and say, yeah, man,
I'm glad I failed at that, to be honest.
I think I've failed in not being able
to have difficult conversations with people
early in my career, especially when I was
in a leadership position, managing projects, managing people.
I was fine managing projects.
I could tell the structural engineer
that he couldn't build a certain kind of footing
and he had to build piles and rather than a spread footing.
I was totally fine with that.
But I was very uncomfortable talking to people
about their work performance
and some of the things that they did
that weren't the right things.
And I needed to get way better at that,
but those early failures actually cost me a little bit
in my career in terms of positions
where somebody would say, look, you just didn't cut it here.
I'm gonna move you to this other job.
And I knew the reason why,
because I didn't get out in front of it with people.
Had to learn how to do that.
Had to get comfortable being uncomfortable,
because that is uncomfortable.
Yeah, tell everybody about some of the projects
that you managed overseas and what their function was.
Sure, one thing that I think was a success,
we had a project, so in England,
there are 14 water companies.
Margaret Thatcher basically privatized the water
and wastewater industry.
Here in the US, they're mostly publicly owned agencies.
So the Metropolitan Water District is a public agency
that's owned for the benefit of all,
and is a nonprofit.
In England, they're for profit.
And so we were working in Manchester,
it was called Northwest Water,
now it's called United Utilities,
helping them build through what they called
their five-year asset management program.
They get the government to give them approval
on a plan for five years,
and then they build all this stuff.
I would like to think I still am,
but at that time, I certainly was a sludge expert.
I knew about biosolids, or they're called residuals,
but sludge is a term of art as well.
And we were coming up with a plan
to rationalize their sludge processing facilities
across this large area with 7 million population.
And so I worked on it with a couple of guys,
came to, was working there for several weeks
outside of Manchester, made a presentation,
big presentation to all the big dogs in this organization.
And they were British.
I don't know how to say it.
Everything we said was, well, I don't know, maybe.
Yeah, I don't, well, we'll think about it.
And I hired a facilitator for the meeting,
and he said, oh, you were brilliant.
I said, what are you talking about, man?
They didn't like anything.
I didn't hear one amen to anything.
He said, don't worry about it.
They just don't wanna give you credit.
When you come back in four months,
they'll have sorted through everything you said,
and they'll do everything you said.
And he was pretty much right.
I mean, they did about 90% of what we said,
building these big facilities.
So that was a lot of fun.
It was a lesson in kind of sociology.
We didn't take sociology classes as engineers.
So that was interesting.
On the lower end side,
I had an opportunity to go with an NGO to Uganda,
and work with a team to build drainage systems
at this orphanage and school that this NGO was supporting.
And it was a team of, I don't know,
there were probably 15 people,
and 13 of them were like strong type As.
Like they were large and in charge,
every one of those 13, me included.
I was in that.
And it was one other engineer,
and there were two other engineers, sorry,
in that group, and the rest were attorneys,
school teachers, various occupations.
And so we got there,
and we kind of looked at what was going on.
And we laid out a plan,
and one of the guys said,
"'Nah, that's not how it works.
"'That's not how drainage works.
"'I think we should do this.'"
And I looked at him and said,
"'Where did you get your engineering degree?'
"'There's an Esquire at the end of your name,
"'not professional engineer, not PE.'"
He says, "'No, this is how it's gonna work.
"'So, okay, you work on that side,
"'I'll work on this other side.'"
Anyway, they built this drainage channel.
They just dug out this drainage channel on this road,
and it rained, a biblical rainstorm in Africa.
They're amazing, actually.
I mean, I put my coat on and went out in the rain.
I've never been in rain like this, ever.
May never again.
And it washed out what they did.
It felt bad.
But I said, you gotta listen to me.
Actually, kinda know what I'm doing.
This is what I do for a living.
But it was a lot of fun.
It was great to get back.
What we ended up doing was going a little bit beyond
just drainage.
We put in rain barrels for them.
They have tons of water.
It's just not clean.
Even the groundwater has got contamination.
And so we ended up being able to put in,
capture some water off the roofs,
put in some rain barrels.
Say, clean water for cooking and for cleaning,
to wash their clothes, wash their dishes.
So those are some of the things I've done internationally.
It's wonderful.
So what would you describe as kind of the current
water situation in the world?
You are as much of a specialist in this field as anybody
for four decades, exclusively working on
water engineering projects,
both domestically and internationally.
So if you could describe to people,
kind of what do you see as the current
water situation in the world?
Well, the first world has water.
We have systems.
We have regulations.
What comes out of your tap is amazing.
I'm amazed during this COVID crisis
that people are going to the grocery stores,
in Costco and big box stores,
and buying pallets of water.
That's fine.
But nobody's gonna serve you water
that's not literally perfect.
And that's what comes out of the tap.
Their service level is 100% basically.
I can't think of a time in recent memory,
or even I can't think of a time where we had to boil water
to have clean water.
So first world is good.
Yeah, every once in a while,
there's a boil water order issue somewhere,
but for the most part, it's good.
The issue in the first world is that people tend to live
on the coasts or in the more temperate zones
where there is less water.
And so we have to be more careful about how we use it.
And we have to be smart about how we use it.
So we do reclamation and things like that.
But if you look in California,
essentially, and these numbers aren't exact,
but 10% of the water is used for residential use,
10% for commercial and industrial,
and 80% for agriculture.
So, and that makes sense.
I mean, that's fine.
You go to the third world and you have a spectrum.
And the spectrum is anywhere from very arid areas
of the world that essentially have almost no water
to very wet areas like Uganda and Africa
that has plenty of water, but most of it has contamination.
And so they have to find a way to basically kill bacteria
and viruses or get rid of it.
Where there is a dearth of water,
it's a lot harder because what you're doing
with ocean water and bringing in seawater desalination,
that's usually been for them.
That's usually been for the big boys.
I mean, the big boys like the government of Oman or Abu Dhabi,
they have big seawater desal plants.
The US Army has seawater desal trucks.
You just don't see it that often.
What you see in the third world is somebody like USAID
or some NGO coming in and building, drilling a well
so that they can pump out groundwater.
We've talked about this either by hand,
which they're more than happy to do,
or if it gets deep enough, they gotta have a pump,
but they don't have power, so they have a diesel pump.
There's plenty of water out there.
It's an issue of contamination really.
And in some places, the smartest thing is,
again, what you're doing, putting in a seawater desal facility.
People get water, they don't need a ton.
In other words, in the US, roundabout numbers,
an individual might use 50 to 60 gallons per day.
So when we would plan for a new development,
we might even plan for 100 gallons per person per day.
That would include light commercial
and industrial uses as well.
In the third world, if you can get five to 10 gallons a day,
you're rocking, that's not bad.
And folks know how to use it and they're careful with it,
but it makes their life so much easier
because so much of their time
had been spent collecting water.
I mean, you see the pictures in the African villages
of people around the water pump with the yellow,
they look like gas cans, they call them jerry cans,
that they're using these big plastic things
to carry this modestly contaminated water
to their homes three miles away so they can cook and clean.
And that's one of the reasons those folks can't move forward.
They just can't get access to water in a reasonable way.
They spend three hours a day doing that.
So, yeah.
Yep, and one of the things that I wrestled with,
I have a background in public health
and then I'm also a pastor.
The thing that I really wrestled with was,
what was my moral responsibility to help make a platform
that the wealthiest people in the world have access to
and take that platform and utilize that platform
for people that don't have a voice.
So when we say that our podcast is the voice
for indigenous water rights,
what that means is that we're taking that platform
that they use in Oman, that the US military uses,
that the most advanced and most monetary blessed economies
in the world already have, and we're taking that
and we're doing small scale projects.
It's the same technology, but we're dispersing it
for marginalized and forgotten groups of people.
So for example, like in Palmecito, there are 38 families
and a lot of people say, well, would you do a project
for 38 families?
That's roughly 300 people in Palmecito,
literally just on the west side of the main road
toward the ocean, and my answer is yes, of course.
When did 300 people quit being important?
Yeah, that's exactly right, and I think what is great
about what you're doing is that you have,
you've trained a local guy, you understand that it's not
just putting the hardware there, it's learning how
to operate it, it's learning how to maintain it,
it's getting spare parts, so when bearings go out on a pump
or one of the membranes fails in the RO system,
it has access to spare parts, because this is a long-term
deal, that stuff should last a long time.
Yes, yeah, and thank you for, we're gonna continue
to talk some more, but one of the reasons I felt compelled
to start to have these conversations with my friends
is not because I need another thing to do.
You know, my passion for this was to start to have
one conversation at a time with one person at a time
to help really raise minds on this issue,
and we really want to be, I saw that there was really
no one speaking into this space, and so I thought,
well, if no one's speaking into this space,
and this is such important, and the people that need
the platform don't have the voice to speak into the space,
so let's lean into that and do as much good,
as good as possible.
For those of you who are listening, you can see why
Dave's like a mentor of mine, you can see why I like
to ride bicycles with Dave when he's a wonderful human
being, but I always come with tons of questions,
I probably talk the entire time,
except when we go up hills.
That's true.
That's not cool, but I always learn so much from you,
so what do you think, help our listeners,
what do you think about what ocean water does?
Oh, I think it's fantastic, I mean, there's an opportunity,
because a couple things, Ryan, one I think is scale, right?
You can overscale these things, you can make them too big,
and it becomes very hard to do, hard to raise the funds,
hard to deliver the equipment, I mean, you have,
you found something, I think this is one of the things
I find very clever, and whenever I talk about ocean water,
I mention this to people, Ryan found this equipment
that he can put in suitcases that are 50 pounds,
and he can put on a plane and take with him.
Now, one of the great advantages of that is,
you don't have to source equipment in another country,
you don't have to run it through customs, you don't have to,
so I think that's one thing.
I think the other thing is you found places that want it,
and are willing to step in, and I mean, step in and run it,
and get it going, and make sure that it's available to all,
because that's what water should be, available to all,
and so I really like those two aspects of it,
I think it's the right scale, maybe it'll get bigger,
but it could be modular too, instead of packing
350 gallons per day treatment system in three suitcases,
you make a 700 gallon a day system,
and you bring six suitcases, right?
So I like the modularity of it as well,
so yeah, I think those are really great aspects of it, Ryan.
Those people don't have a voice, they don't have water,
I don't know how they get along, how they survive,
I've been in places and I just wonder, how do you get,
I mean, I've been in Afghanistan drinking tea
with the tribal elders in a refugee village,
thinking to myself, where did this come from?
Where did the water come from?
Where did the milk come from, and when will I die?
I didn't die, so I was all right.
Well, the backdrop that I'm using, I'm trying to use,
it's a little fuzzy here today,
but is actually of our site in El Salvador,
and that was strategic, and also,
I didn't know you were gonna use an ocean,
so this is tying together really well,
because you're right, we don't have a quantity problem,
we have a contaminant problem that can be solved
if we disperse an easily usable platform.
And so how are you involved in ocean water?
Besides being an advisor and helping me?
You know, like a lot of things in my life,
I'm a peripheral supporter.
I'm certainly giving to it,
praying for you and what you're doing.
And I'm available to fund stuff when the time is right,
and we kind of both know when the time is right.
And so I've been able to do that, which is great.
Love doing that, supporting what you're doing.
Haven't been on a trip, but again,
when the time is right, I'll be there.
Yeah, that's wonderful.
Well, I think I speak for everybody
who's gonna listen to this,
in that I hope you have so much to say,
and so if I could ask a favor of you,
if you'll come on again in the next 30 to 60 days,
and we'll pick another couple set of questions.
Some of the people that I'm having on here
just have so much to offer.
I would love to, yeah, thank you.
Oh, you're welcome, you're welcome.
So Dave, thank you for your time today.
I just wanna say thanks on behalf of everybody
who's gonna get something out of this.
And there are a lot, I'm getting a lot of great feedback,
so that's really encouraging.
And just thank you so much for your time,
and I hope we ride Saturday,
and I owe you two goose from last week.
Don't worry about the goose, look forward to the ride.
All right, Dave, thanks.
Bye, brother.
All right, have a great day, my friend.
Thanks, you too, cheers.
Yep.