Bill Gates tricked Jimmy Fallon into drinking “poop water” on Wednesday night’s show, introducing the talk show host to a machine called the Omniprocessor that cleans sewage water to make it drinkable.
The machine, designed and built by Janicke Bioenergy, is part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s focus on making significant changes to better the life of people in underprivileged countries.
In a story on his blog about the Omniprocessor,
Gates wrote about his November 2014 visit to a plant that employs the technology to clean water: “I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin. They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water. The water tasted as good as any I’ve had out of a bottle. And having studied the engineering behind it, I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
On “The Tonight Show,” though, it seemed as if Fallon might take a little more convincing than Gates’ knowledge of the science behind the Omniprocessor. As Fallon set two water glasses on his desk, one filled with bottled water and the other with water from the Omniprocessor, he tried to figure out which one contained which.
Joking about the fact the glasses were labeled “1” and “2,” and that might be indicative of their contents, Fallon and Gates finally gulped their glasses empty. Fallon said, “I’m pretty confident that that was, that this was the bottled water.”
And Gates announced, “That was rigged. It was all poop water.”
After displaying his shock, Fallon said, “It tasted really good.”
“It was good poop,” Gates responded.
In his blog, Gates said diseases caused by poor sanitation kill 700,000 children every year, and that 2 billion people use latrines that aren’t adequately or properly drained.