Juice Voices: Richard Garriott

Electricity is money. Video game designer, astronaut, and digital entrepreneur Richard Garriott explains how.

Poverty, women’s rights, climate change — indeed, most of the world’s most pressing challenges — can be explained by answering one question: Can you turn your lights on in the morning?

While electricity availability doesn’t guarantee wealth, its absence almost always means poverty. Juice takes viewers to Beirut, Reykjavik, Kolkata, San Juan, Manhattan, and Boulder to tell the human story of electricity and to explain why power equals power.

The defining inequality in the world today is the disparity between the electricity rich and the electricity poor. In fact, there are more than 3 billion people on the planet today who are using less electricity than what’s used by an average American refrigerator.

Electricity is the world’s most important and fastest-growing form of energy. To illuminate its importance, energy journalist and author Robert Bryce (Power Hungry, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper) and the Juice team traveled 60,000 miles to gather 40 on-camera interviews with people from seven countries on five continents. Juice shows how electricity explains everything from women’s rights and climate change to Bitcoin mining and indoor marijuana production. The punchline of the film is simple: darkness kills human potential. Electricity nourishes it.

Juice explains who has electricity, who’s getting it, and how developing countries all over the world are working to bring their people out of the dark and into the light.

Coming soon in 2019.