Josh Cliffords

Catch Josh on Do Radio: Where To Next? with Mike Warwick and Dan Kieran, 9th - 15th November 2026

Josh Cliffords is a Los Angeles-born entrepreneur and author whose work explores what becomes possible when a product doesn’t just become free, but pays you - or a good cause - every time you use it.

After selling his first business, a gym for athletes, in his twenties, he spent eighteen months crossing America in a 1980s camper van and six months in South America. Then he joined the US Army, chasing a place in the Green Berets until an injury from a parachute jump ended his military career. Pulling himself out of the depression that followed, he set off on his thirtieth birthday to see a hundred countries.

He made it to around twenty-five, repeatedly ripped off along the way by taxi drivers who hiked the fare the moment they spotted a foreigner. Then, in Budapest in 2015, an Uber driver pulled a knife and tried to rob him. Josh vowed to take the price out of the equation altogether with a free taxi service of his own. He soon realised that free wasn’t enough, because any big company could match it. To stay ahead, a service would have to go further and pay its users or give to charity. Weeks later, volunteering with refugees in the Balkans, he met people who had fled their homes for lack of water or food. Two years on, filming a commercial for his taxi idea in Times Square, he spotted a carton of boxed water and realised the packaging could carry advertising, just as American milk cartons once carried photos of missing people. Launching free taxis would take the kind of money he didn’t have, but water was something he could make, and it spoke directly to what he’d seen in the Balkans. Turned away by investors in London and Berlin, he returned to the US and launched FreeWater in 2021.

Its formula is simple: free product plus charity equals profit. The water is free because the packaging is the ad space, and every bottle funds charities building water wells. Rather than guard the idea, Josh gives it away. His book How to Make a Free Product Company is free online and has inspired projects in more than twenty-five countries. Its follow-up, Abundance Engineering, takes his “number line” framework - scarcity to the right of zero, abundance to the left - into economics and physics, and towards the world’s first free supermarket.

In conversation with Mike, Josh ranges from olive trees that pay for themselves for centuries to delivery routes that stop at every house on the street, taking in “honest data” and why he’d choose universal basic sharing over universal basic income. Above all, he explains why, in a world racing to get richer, he’d rather we competed to see who could give the most away.