Afford Anything - How Scott Harrison Brought Clean Water to 7.3 Million People

Episode Date: December 11, 2017

#107: Scott Harrison spent 10 years as a New York City nightclub promoter, partying until sunrise every morning and ingesting almost every substance imaginable. But when he was 28, he realized his life lacked meaning. "My tombstone might say, 'here's the guy who got thousands of people drunk,'" Harrison said. Feeling lost, he decided to volunteer for a medical charity in Liberia. Harrison spent the next year-and-a-half in West Africa, where he encountered people with diseases he'd never seen before -- such as cholera, typhoid, dysentery, and fatal cases of diarrhea and dehydration. He smelled the yellow-brown parasitic dirty water that millions of people were drinking. He discovered that unsafe, unclean drinking water is the world's leading cause of death. When he returned to New York City, he couldn't bring himself to sell expensive bottled water at nightclubs anymore. Instead, Harrison moved into a tiny closet and launched a nonprofit, Charity: Water. Today, Charity: Water has funded more than 24,000 water projects that have brought safe, clean drinking water to more than 7.3 million people. That's the good news. The bad news? There are still 663 million people without access to clean water. That's around double the population of the U.S. And water-borne diseases kill about 16,000 people each week, almost half of whom are children under age 5. There's still a long way to go. Today, Scott joins me on the podcast to talk about how he started and grew a major charitable organization. - How does a nightclub promoter with zero business experience launch a massive nonprofit organization? - What mistakes did he make? - How did he differentiate his organization from the thousands of other charities out there? - Who did he first hire? - What advice would he offer to anyone who's goal is to create a nonprofit? Learn the answers to these questions and more in this excellent episode with Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity: Water. _____ Resources Mentioned: Charity Water -- Short Film http://charitywater.org/thespringfilm Charity Water - Projects https://www.charitywater.org/projects World Health Organization - Drinking water fact sheet http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs391/en Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that's true not just of your money but also your time, energy, attention, anything in your life that is a scarce or limited resource. So the questions become twofold. Number one, what matters most? And number two, how do you align your day-to-day actions to reflect those values? Answering those two questions is a lifetime practice. And that is what this podcast is here to explore.

My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. I want to say hello to all of the Clark Howard fans who have joined us. I know that Clark mentioned me on his show twice recently. And so I've heard from a lot of you that you're Clark fans. You've just come into this community. You're just discovering us for the first time. Hello.

Welcome. I'm so glad you're here. And check out Afford Anything podcast episode number 47. That's the episode in which I interviewed Clark. I sat down with him face to face. We spent about an hour, more than an hour talking. And he opened up. He shared a lot of great wisdom. I even got him to cuss on air. We've bleeped it out, but you can hear it. Check that out. That's podcast episode 47. But with that said, let's move on to today's show in which I have invited Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity Water, to join me on

today's episode. Scott used to be a nightclub promoter in New York City, where his job, as he puts it, was to get people drunk. He had no business experience, no management experience, no accounting experience, none of that. But after 10 years of being a nightclub promoter, he realized that he wanted more meaningful work. So he quit his job and living on the floor of a tiny closet in a New York apartment, he launched a charity that in fiscal year 2015 brought in 32 and a half million. million dollars to fund safe, clean drinking water projects worldwide. So what I want to know is, how did he grow his organization from an idea that was in his head to this massive, successful enterprise that it is today? And what lessons can he share with anybody who's listening who wants to start their own nonprofit organization or wants to start a socially responsible business or wants to launch any other major project? What lessons can he share for those of us who want to make as big of an impact as he has made? Or who, at a minimum, want to find more meaningful work and have a more meaningful existence.

What lessons can he share? So that's one of the two reasons I invited him on the show today. The other reason is because I have spent the last several months really researching charity water. I've been digging into their financials. I've been following them very closely, and I'm extremely impressed with their account. accountability, their transparency, the success that they've had, the innovative business model that they've created, and I would really like to support them. So I'm going to talk more about that in the closing of today's show. Right now, without any further delay, here is Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity Water. Hey, Scott. How you doing? I am excellent. How are you? I'm doing well. It's great to talk with you. Thank you. Thank you. So you were raised in Philadelphia. Your mom had carbon monoxide poisoning. Tell me a little bit of about the early you.

Yeah, the back start. Yeah, I mean, I was born in Philadelphia, moved to Jersey when I was four in the house that we moved into, I had a carbon monoxide gas leak, as you said. And my dad and I got a little sick and then immediately recovered. But my mom was irreparably damaged. Her immune system just shut down. And she became violently allergic to the world, basically. Anything chemical made her sick, whether it was television, whether it was perfume or soap.

or the ink from books or car fumes, fabric softener, wood stoves, you name it. The world became a very frightening place for her. So she saw a bunch of doctors and clinics. And after seeing many, many, many different doctors, the only answer for her really was to avoid exposure from anything chemical. So she effectively lived in a bubble. We created a room for her. We covered the room in tinfoil.

She slept on an army cot that. was washed in baking soda many, many times over. And I grew up as a caregiver, you know, helping to take care of mom and do the cooking and the cleaning and, you know, bring her her vitamins. And it was a, it was a bizarre childhood. I mean, that's all I can say, you know, my mom was not like other moms. My parents had a very deep Christian faith. It was authentic.

They didn't sue the gas company for millions of dollars. And my dad stuck by my mom, you know, even through what's now almost four decades of illness. and something happened. At 18, I just kind of woke up and said, look, I've been playing by the rules. You know, I play piano in church on Sundays, and I don't smoke and drink, and I'm not out there partying.

Let me explore what all that might be like. Let me break the rules. Let me see what it would look like to live for myself. And that's what this kind of led to the turn. So in some ways, I went rogue. I went prodigal. I told my parents, you know, flipped him the bird, basically, and moved to New York City.

to pursue sex drugs, gambling, you know, the lifestyle of debauchery and hedonism. One thing that intrigues me about your story is that you, well, don't exactly have a background from business school. Tell us a little bit about your background. Yeah, well, I guess a non-traditional path to enter the nonprofit world for sure. I was a club promoter for 10 years. So that basically means I got paid to get people wasted or drunk for a living. And I came to New York City at 18 years old. So that led to a 10-year mini-career, I suppose, filling up nightclubs and selling very expensive cocktails from what midnight till 4 in the morning. During these 10 years as a nightclub promoter, was there anything that you learned

during that time that has helped you now? You know, I think storytelling, right? Nightclub promoters have to be good storytellers. And we were competing against other venues. other groups of producers or putting people putting on events. So, you know, we had to be creative. We had to create this story that if you got into our club, if you got past our velvet rope, then your life had meaning, right? If you spent money at our club, it was the best place to be. And we would try to be creative and do dress up parties and get props inside the club and try to try to make it interesting, try to make it memorable. You know, the irony is, you know, in terms of of legacy or meeting, it wasn't very memorable at all.

I was just getting people drunk every night and if anything, maybe helping them escape their lives or hook up. But I think we had to be great storytellers. We were promoters. You know, we were out there just out there hyping, hyping the party every night. Were there any other skills that you picked up at that time? You know, it's interesting because I think my world now is just so completely different than, you know, going to dinner at 10, a club.

12 and after hours at 5. I learned email marketing. I mean, we built an email list back then with, you know, almost 100% open rates. So, you know, built an early website. I picked up HTML for dummies and learned how to code. So I think there was a just an early understanding that the web was the place businesses needed to be. So we, you know, we were probably better digital marketers of our parties than anyone else.

the time. And this was, what, 94 through 2004? Yeah, exactly. And so what happened in 2004? What precipitated this turnaround? Well, I was put to Delesta, which is a party town in Uruguay, in South America, and I'd flown out with a jet set, and we were just going to party for two weeks and do lots of drugs. And I had this realization on this trip, you know, sort of removed from the the pounding of the New York City nightclubs, that there would just never be enough. The things that I was chasing would leave me empty forever. And I was surrounded by people who had more. And, you know, they had private planes and they were throwing down $10,000 on hands of blackjack

at casinos. And there was Dom Perrinom flowing. And my girlfriend at the time was on the cover of Vogue or L or some fashion magazine. And, you know, I drove a BMD. I had the Rolex watch. I had a grand piano in my New York City apartment. I had a nice dog. And just none of these things left me happy. None of them meant anything. I think I realized how far I had come from the spirituality, the faith, the morality of my childhood. I had really found myself in the kind of proverbial big pen covered in manure on a moral level. And if I

continued down this path, I was just leaving a meaningless legacy. My life would amount nothing. My tombstone might read, here lies a man who's gotten 10 million people wasted, and who wants that on their tombstone. So, you know, I began to rediscover a lost Christian faith. I think with new eyes as an adult, where it wasn't forced down my throat, I began to, you know, on this trip, actually, you know, read dense theology again while I'm, you know, drinking and doing cocaine. So this was an interesting time of kind of opposites and, you know, push, pull. And I came back to New York City just tried to find my way back to that the foundation of spirituality and morality that I've been brought up with. And it took me a few months. And in the summer of that year,

I just wound up selling everything I owned and asking myself the question, what would the exact opposite of my selfish, sycophantic hedonistic life look like? What would it look like to walk completely in the opposite direction? I began applying to the famous, humanitarian organizations that I'd heard of. I thought one year of service to the poor, not getting paid, might be the opposite. That led me to Liberia, a country I'd never heard of at the time, but a country that had just escaped a 14-year civil war led by Charles Taylor and child soldiers. And I joined a humanitarian mission. I actually paid them about $500 a month for the opportunity of volunteering.

And I began to document through photojournalism and through stories the unbelievable life-changing work of these volunteer doctors and surgeons were engaging in the transformation they were bringing to the people of Liberia. So the same guest list that was getting invitations for me to come out and get drunk and party in a period of about a month went from getting very, different stories, very different invitations to give, to join the work of these humanitarian doctors. And you said at first you got a whole bunch of unsubscribes when that happened. Yeah, of course, right? Some people were like, I didn't sign up for stories about leprosy or,

you know, massive facial tumors. But the most common responses were, this is amazing. How do I give? How do I get involved? I never knew that there were issues and sicknesses, you know, out there like this. I didn't know that there were doctors who cared enough who would give up their vacation time and and serve people for free. How do I get involved in this? So yeah, I think I learned that I could tell a very different story, a redemptive story and have an outcome to that that actually might change lives. Now, this email list that you had at the time, there were about 15,000 or so people on there. Yep. Yep. And this was yours. So were you an independent contractor as a nightclub promoter? Like, how was it that this was your, the email list was your property? Yeah, I mean, we,

That's the thing about nightclub promoters. Your asset light. So I worked at 30 different nightclubs over 10 years, maybe 40. So we would work at three or four every single year. And you effectively owned your people and not the actual real estate. So we'd work at a club for a year or two. And the minute it wasn't hot, we would move on to the new club, but we would take all the people with us.

So that was, yeah, that was people signing up for my partners and my website to go to the parties that we would throw. in New York City and then even other places around the world. How did you get them to sign up initially? Well, we just had a big sign up button. People were much less wary about giving their email address back then. Want to get invited to the hottest parties in New York City? You know, sign up here.

I don't think it was very sophisticated at the time. I don't think we had, you know, great CRM. You know, we would just blast the entire list with the different. parties and people would come up and then they would kind of get sorted at the velvet rope. And, you know, some people would say, oh, I came, but I couldn't get in. And we might delete them from the list saying, well, there's probably a reason they couldn't get in. So it wasn't very sophisticated, but, you know, this is, again, this is 20 years ago, 23 years ago. So it was very new at the time. Hmm, I see. All right, you ended up reaching out to that list to throw your

first charity event. Yes? I did. So that list then, you know, got, bombarded with pictures and videos and stories from Africa for the next two years as I was volunteering with mercy ships. And then when I came back to start Charity Water, I emailed them again and said, hey, you've been following my journey. If you're still along and you haven't unsubscribe, I'm going to focus now exclusively on bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in need around the world. Everything I'd seen in West Africa, the greatest need I thought to provide health and education and to lift people out of extreme poverty was the need for clean water. I just couldn't believe that so many people at the time of billion people were living without the most basic need

for life, the most basic need for health. And it took me two years to really discover my issue, the thing that I was most passionate about solving, you know, that kind of thing that was not okay on my watch. It just wasn't okay on my watch for a guy like me to sell bottled water in nightclubs for $10 to people who wouldn't open it and for a billion people to live without, you know, this basic need. So I came back. I had my issue and I invited people to be there day one as we launched charity water in a nightclub.

And I just asked them to make a $20 donation on the way in, promising that 100% of all that money we collected would directly fund water projects. And then we would prove those water projects, sending them the photos and the GPS and video of the clean water flowing so they could see where their money was. went. And about 700 people came to that launch party. We raised $15,000 that night. And I remember some people saying it was the first charitable gift that they had ever made. And that was so exciting to me. You know, I wasn't trying to reach out to the believers, the people who were already giving generously. I was trying to reach out to the skeptics and the disenchanted, the selfish people like me,

you know, who were doing nothing with their money or their time or their talent to serve others. Now, you mentioned 100% of the funds that you raised from that initial fundraiser, that $20 door fee, went towards your projects. So do you have the space donated and the alcohol? What about the overhead for that initial party? Yeah, we got almost everything donated, the space, open bar volunteers to staff it. We got printing donated inside. You know, when I started Charity Water, the mission would be very clear. Bring clean drinking water to every single person on the planet and not stop until, everyone had clean water to drink in the world. But the bigger vision really was to try to reinvent charity, try to do it completely different,

try to imagine a new experience that as people experienced charity water, that it would feel different, it would act differently. It would be like no charity that they had ever come across before in almost every way. And, you know, I really sat down with a blank piece of paper and the advantage of being 30 with no institutional nonprofit experience and being surrounded by a bunch of cynics, people who said I would never give to the United Way or the Red Cross or people who would never give

to big institutional charities because they didn't believe the charities were doing the right thing or they didn't believe that their money would actually reach people in need. And I just sat down with a blank piece of paper and said, well, what would the perfect charity look like for these people, for my friends?

What would get you inspired to give? And, you know, four big ideas really came out of that that became the foundational pillars of the organization and the same four ideas that we're talking about now in our 11th year. The first was use 100 percent, find a way to use 100 percent of every donation, every penny, pound, euro that we would ever take anywhere in the world to directly fund water projects that we could then prove. So I opened up two separate bank accounts and I made this pledge and promised to raise all. all of the overhead for the organization separately from a small group of private donors, sophisticated donors who could get excited about paying for rent and copy machines and office salaries and benefits. So that was number one.

We would go so far and have to even pay back credit card fees. So if you go online right now and make a $100 donation on the American Express, I actually don't get $100. We get $96. But we make up the difference. So we send all $100, the $100. the $100 you intended to give goes out to the field. So 100% model was pillar number one.

Number two was using technology to prove where the money went. And at the time, we were fortunate charity water and Google Earth started at the same time. And I met the founder of Google Earth and realized that he was building this place where we would be able to geolocate every water point we'd ever fund. And we could build this hyper-transparent layer where if we had 1,000 wells in 10 countries, we could put up a thousand photos and GPS coordinates of those wells so people would know where the money had gone. The third thing I wanted to do was build an epic brand.

As I looked at the charitable sector, I saw a lot of charities that use shame and guilt to make people feel really bad and then try and take their money. I saw charities that bought physical mailing addresses and sent unsolicited paper expecting people to put checks and self-addressed stamped envelopes. I didn't see anything that looked like Nike or Apple or Virgin I didn't see inspiring, imaginative, creative charities out there.

And I thought, gosh, if we're going to be giving people clean and safe drinking water, the most basic need, you know, we would need an inspirational, emotional, a brand that valued excellence and integrity, opportunity, inspiration, hope, above all else. And, you know, I'd come across this provocative quote by Nick Khrasoff in the New York Times where he said that people are out there peddling toothpaste with more sophistication than all of the world's life-saving causes. It's true. I mean, junk food companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars, literally marketing things to us that kill us and our children.

And the most important causes that are out there literally saving lives, pulling people from the brink of death, have anemic brands. Some of them feel like they're marketing from another era. So that's what I wanted to do. And then the most important part of the business model would be we would work only through local partners. I believe that for our actual work, the work of delivering clean water and sanitation to be sustainable, it must be led by the indigenous people in the countries where we're working. Not Westerners like me parachuting in drilling wells, but Rwandans in Rwanda and Ethiopians in Ethiopia and Guatemalanans in Guatemala, you know, the locals taking our money and being empowered to improve the lives. of their country, of their communities. So we put all that together and we had charity water.

How did you learn how to build a brand? You mentioned that was pillar number three, was building a brand that was inspiring and evocative and hopeful. How did that begin? You know, I think we just had good taste. You know, maybe that was something. I mean, being around nightlife for 10 years, I mean, we were throwing fashion parties.

You know, we were surrounded by fashion, by people who valued excellence, you know, We would go to runway shows that would cost over a million dollars to produce and, you know, go to clubs that would cost millions and millions of dollars to decorate. We would mail out invitations at the time that were, you know, hand carved out of wood, or we would try to design with integrity and with an excellence to try to stand out. So I think, you know, maybe at 30, you know, starting charity weather, I just had a pretty good sense of taste of what design, what good design. felt like. So the other important thing was in the hiring sequence. So the first person I hired was someone to help actually go and find these local organizations to vet our water programs and go find people who could take our money and turn it into clean water. And the second person

I hired was a creative director, designer, to actually help me build that brand. A year later, I married her. So we actually worked together and I was married to my creative director for for nine years. And I remember so many times, you know, we would sit together and pixel pushing, you know, one or two in the morning on the website, you know, choosing colors or writing copy. So I think that was just this great care. Like we cared about every word. We cared about the pixels. We cared about mobile optimizing it. We cared about the user experience when they gave. We cared about the feedback loop. We didn't look at donors as a means to an end. I think so many charities, you know, if they never had to talk with another donor again, that'd be great.

If money just grew on trees, then they could just go do their good work. We love our donors. We love our supporters. We love taking people on this redemptive journey where they can see that through their sacrificial giving, they can actually transform lives. They can actually make a difference. So, you know, over 11 years, finding new ways to connect people, whether it's drilling live via satellite, connecting a group of donors to community.

where their money went or whether it's using virtual reality as we did a couple years ago, showing tens of thousands of people what it would look like to step into a village without clean water and what it would look like to walk for water. You know, we've just built this idea of connection and storytelling and feedback loops into the core value of the organization, really. How do we deliver an overwhelmingly inspiring positive experience to people? And you grew fairly quickly. Within that first year or a year and a half, you went from, what, zero to nine employees?

Is that right? Yeah, it went really quickly. I mean, we did $2 million our first year, $6 million, $9 million, $16,000, $23 million. From a cold start, I mean, I remember I was sleeping on a closet floor in Soho when I started. And, you know, we'd average 490% growth those first five years. And charitable giving was actually net negative over those five years. So, you know, we were actually bucking. a trend of declining giving.

So it was working. It was working. And believe me, lots of challenges as well, you know, during those early years. We've walked through your very first fundraising event, which was a party at a nightclub with the $20 door fee. What happened next? How did this grow? Well, the second thing we did was we built this crazy outdoor exhibition and we took it to city parks to raise awareness and money. Who is we?

Uh, myself and a group of volunteers. I got some people, uh, that were set builders at MTV to get salvaged wood and I got a truck donated, a $100,000, 25 foot truck donated. And we just built this thing from scratch and we put dirty water from New York City ponds and rivers into these giant plexy tanks and, uh, juxtaposed with photos of people around the world actually drinking water from swamps and ponds and rivers. And we said to New Yorkers, would you drink this? And, you know, through this exhibition that moved around from Central Park to Union Square Park to Battery Park City to Washington Square Park. We talked to over 20,000 New Yorkers and raised a ton of awareness and another $20,000 for water projects. And then we went to Sundance and we got a gallery

donated on Main Street. And I think we raised another $20,000 there. We made a public service announcement. We got Terry George, the director of Hotel Rwanda, to donate his time. And Ellen Curris, the famous cinematographer who did Scorsese movies and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She donated her time and we got a volunteer crew of 40 people to show up. We got Jennifer Connolly and her children to donate their time and made this amazing public service announcement. And then we went to American Idol and we asked them if they would air it for free to 20 million people. And they did. We went to YouTube and we asked them if we could have the homepage and they gave us the homepage. So it's just all these scrappy grassroots activities where we were coming up with

cool new ideas and then weren't afraid to ask people to do outrageous things, you know, giving us space or billboards or buses or taxitops or, you know, donated media. Hmm. You sound like you're very good at pitching. How did you learn that? And what was your approach? What would you say? Like when you went to YouTube, for example, and asked for the space on that homepage, who do you approach and what do you say? Well, we found out the people who were running YouTube and through, I'd gone to TED, I'd met somebody that worked at Google at a bar at TED. I remember in a crowded bar actually asking him to put on headphones and look at my iPod touch and watch the 60 second PSA. He did. He thought it was amazing. And I said,

do you know people at YouTube that can help me get this scene? And the next day, I got an email This is a guy named Chris Saka, actually, that a lot of people know. Chris emailed Hunter Walk, who was at YouTube at the time, and the next thing we knew, we knew the right people at YouTube. They saw the content and said, hey, it's World Water Day coming up. We can use the homepage to give you exposure for this great piece of content and this movement of clean water. So that's how that one specifically happened. Terry George, I met in a restaurant, and I walked up to his table and he was a friend of a friend. and the friend did let me know that he was going to be at the restaurant.

And I just pitched him the idea for this public service announcement where New Yorkers, rich New Yorkers would go up to Central Park Pond. They would wait in line with their children. They would get the dirtiest, greenest, scummiest water than anybody had ever seen. And then they would go back to their nice lofts and they would serve the water to the children. I pitched him this standing over his table at a restaurant. And I think it was the craziest thing you'd ever heard. He had just made Hotel Rwanda.

And he'd come back from Rwanda. was passionate about helping people in Africa. And he agreed to donate his time, work on the script with me. Then he got Jennifer Connolly involved because they just shot Reservation Road. He got Ellen Curris involved because they had just worked on a film together. And then we got 40 volunteers and producers and music donated and catering donated. And we kind of did the rest. And I think we shot probably a couple hundred thousand dollar PSA for a few thousand dollars.

Wow. We'll come back to the show in just a second, but first, as creatives, we're in the business of turning our ideas into value for our customers. The thing is, we need time to cultivate fresh ideas, which is exactly where our sponsor, FreshBooks, can help. FreshBooks makes cloud accounting software for creative professionals. That's so straightforward to use, you'll save hours every week and have more time to let your creativity flourish. If that's not enough incentive, the FreshBooks Platt. has been rebuilt from the ground up. They have taken simplicity and speed to an entirely new level and added powerful new features. I can't cover them all, but sending a branded invoice in under 30 seconds and enabling online payments in two clicks is a good place to start. There's also a new projects feature where you can invite employees or contractors to collaborate and easily share information, files, and updates. If you're listening to this and not using FreshBooks yet, now would be the time to try it. offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial for all my listeners, no credit card required.

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which could be a lifesaver in the wake of the Equifax data breach. And if you need it, there's a live helpline where you can talk to identity restoration specialists also for free. And you can check your credit score for free. So check them out. It's great to know your credit score and to get personalized educational content. They're creditcesami.com. Creditcesami.com. Tell me about those first early hires. I mean, you were so new at this. How did you know how to hire and, you know, how to evaluate people? Well, we didn't. So at the beginning, everybody was a generalist. It was just, um, can you do everything for, very little money, you know, maybe $30,000 a year, $40,000 a year.

I mean, there were no benefits for the first few years. So in the case of the creative director, she actually took a pay cut and gave up all of her benefits to see if charity water would actually turn into something. So it was just collecting a group of passionate people who believed human beings on the planet should have clean water and they had something to bring. Some of these people would come out of speeches. They would self-identify. They'd walk up to me afterwards and say,

Hey, I was really moved by that. You know, can I have a job? You've mentioned a couple of the things that you learned during your 10 years as a nightclub promoter. What were some of the lessons that you learned during those early years about launching and growing a charity? I think in the early years, it was just so much hard work. I mean, there was no balance. You know, if I'm honest, it was 80 to 90 hour weeks. We were working seven days a week.

You know, we didn't have families. I mean, I remember leaving the office. on Saturday at midnight, you know, coming back Sunday morning at 9 a.m., just going at Saturdays and Sundays as if they were normal days. So it's just an extraordinary amount of effort of just, you know, the dial was on 11 all the time. And, you know, I told you about some of the yeses, believe me, there were a lot of no. I mean, we pitch people all the time and they would say no. You know, maybe it was, maybe our batting average was 10%. We'd have to ask 10 people to get one person to yes. And then certain things would, you know, would happen a little more organically. But it was

incredibly, incredibly difficult. But I had a story, you know, I had a personal story. I had lived it. So I'd spent over a year and a half in Africa. I had these photos, these powerful photos. There was kind of this, this eyewitness intensity, you know. I mean, I remember making, in the early days, I would probably make an average of 10, presentations a day. I would go around with my laptop meeting to meeting. I would do three breakfasts. I would do two lunches. And I'm just opening up a laptop saying, here's what I saw, here's what we're trying to do about it. Will you help? And you know, you do 10. You get one that says yes and you're encouraged and then you do another 10. And, you know, on a Tuesday, two people might

say yes. And those yeses lead to more yeses. Wow. How were you able to maintain focus and productivity through such long hours? I don't know that we were terribly productive. It was just, you know, just such a flurry of activity that enough energy and momentum was caused by that. It wasn't very strategic. You know, there was no business plan to Charity Water. You know, a few years ago, we used to do three-year strategic plans.

But, you know, there's nothing really written down. You know, innovation has been a core value of the organization. So we're constantly trying to adapt. We're constantly trying to change. We're constantly trying to learn from our mistakes, seize new opportunities. So I don't, you know, I didn't come out of it with an MBA or I didn't come out of it with any institutional knowledge. So I managed to hire very, very smart people. You know, it only gets better, which is one of the great things. The deeper you get into the organization, the more impressed people are because people are more charismatic than me and they're smarter and they're, they're, they're, they're, They work harder. They're more passionate. They're more dedicated. It's a really amazing group of people that we've been able to collect to work on this issue now. What are some of the, you mentioned learning from your mistakes.

What are some of the mistakes that you have made that you've learned from? Well, we almost right out of money. I mean, the 100% model sounds great, but we'd raise millions of dollars just in the first couple of years, first year and a half for clean water projects. But I actually couldn't raise money enough, fast enough for the overhead side. And as you said, there was this moment where we had nine employees. And again, these people have made huge sacrifices to follow this crazy dream of a world where human beings have clean water to drink, all human beings, no matter where they're born

or what situations they're born into. And we're faced with this terrible moment that it looked like we were going to go bankrupt and have to shut down the charity in a way because we'd become victims of our own success. We'd grown so fast on the water project side. we hadn't figured out how to tell the overhead story, how to make a compelling case, you know, why you should give to pay for our nine staff members. And I remember being so frustrated at that moment because we had $881,000 in the Water Project bank account that we couldn't touch. That was nine months of funding. We could have kept, you know, everything going payroll or crappy office.

We could have kept going for nine months, but we were about to go run out of cash in a few weeks because the other bank account had very little money. It was almost dry. And it was an important moment for the organization. I think we were clear about our values. And the core value, if I had to pick one value of charity water, is integrity above all else. We make every decision based on that. If your mission or your vision, I should say, is to reinvent charities, to win back the trust of people who are cynical, who are skeptical, then integrity is the, you know, integrity is the the most important thing. So, you know, the advice I was getting for people was, hey, go borrow from that $881,000. Make your payroll. Pay your landlord. You know, write yourself an I owe you.

You'll pay it back. This is all good faith. And I just believe that if we touched one penny, if we borrowed literally one cent from the money for water projects, then, you know, there'd be a crack in the foundation. We might as well all resign in shame because we had broken our promise. So I was beginning to talk to lawyers and figure out how to wind the organization down. And at that moment, a complete stranger walked in the office and had a two-hour meeting with me, learned the situation that we were in and wired a million dollars into the overhead account. And we went from bankrupt to over a year of funding. And he said, I believe in what you're doing. You just need more time. And we were able to use that time to go find a lot more people like him

to actually believe in the overhead side. And never came close to that again. And the way we do it today, there are actually 128 families that pay for all the overhead so that a million donors and growing have been able to get a pure experience. And in those 128 families,

it's the founders of Facebook and Twitter and Spotify and WordPress and it's musicians, it's actors, it's venture capitalists. It's a very small group of families who say, behind you and your AD staff, we will pay for those credit card fees, we'll pay for your office so that people out there who don't trust can get this pure experience and see where the money goes. That first donor, the one that saved you from collapsing, are you still in touch with him?

Oh yeah. He and his family have given $15 million since. Wow. I've had the joy of taking him and his three children to nine, he and his wife and his three children in nine different countries now. So they're dear, dear friends of our families. Oh, congratulations. When you're working locally, two questions. One is, well, I'll ask them one at a time, I suppose. The first question is, how do you ensure against or protect yourself against graft at the local level, you know, where on the ground in Nepal, the jobs are going to somebody's cousin? Yeah, well, we, you know, gosh, now being, again, 11 years in and over a quarter billion

dollars raised, we have a pretty amazing team and just systems for that now. So we have 19 people that work on nothing but that, 19 people in the organization whose full-time jobs are flying around the world to the 24 different countries where we've got over 23,000 water projects now for over 7 million people. About half the group is working on quality, making sure that the work is being done properly, the work's being done on time. And then the other half is working on the financial auditing, really. Just like you said, so imagine we buy 10,000 bags of cement. That group will go and buy cement on the local market comparing the prices with what we're paying. We also use external auditors, which costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars

flying around. And again, this is the overhead money paying for this, flying around auditing our programs. I remember one of our local partners was upset because our auditors went into the fuel depot and they started sticking dipsticks in the giant fuel containers and matching up the leader levels with the logbooks. And that was completely unrelated actually to our grant. But the auditors wanted to know the actual overall systems of the local organization. So we spend a lot of money to make sure that the money is is being spent properly, I guess is the way of saying it. Interesting. I liked your example about buying cement on the local market to see how it compares to what your supplier is charging you. Well, yeah, I mean, think about it, right? I mean, we're in such

volume. We buy 10,000 bags of cement at 20 bucks and we get to the local market and it cost 10 bucks. Right. You know, we just got ripped off. You do the math. It's a huge number. So the interesting thing is what we normally find is the exact opposite. We find that we're paying less than we would buy it on the open market because our partners have done a bulk deal using their status as a nonprofit to get a favorable rate. So it's often good news when we go into these audits. Do you primarily partner with established non-profits that are operating locally? We do, yeah. So they'd be a mix of indigenous organizations that you've never heard of. For example, the Relief Society of Tigray is our largest partner in Ethiopia. We've done over

$50 million with them in a state called Tigray in northern Ethiopia. That organization is completely led by Ethiopians. There are over 1,500 people on staff now, not a single expat, not a single Westerner. And the organization is over 30 years old, led by an amazing visionary named Teclowani Acefa, who during the famine and the war actually marched a couple hundred thousand people in the middle of the night to Sudan to then fight to feed them raising money from international donors. Then he marched him back when the war was over. So extraordinary organization. We've helped them increase their capacity, you know, growing their water department alone from about 100 local

staff to about 600 staff today that are working on charity water programs. At the other end of the spectrum would be a huge international and nonprofit like the IRC. And we would be funding one of their programs, let's say, in the south of or eastern Kenya, where we would work with them on how we could provide stable funding, how we could increase the capacity, increase the impact in a region. But again, on the ground in eastern Kenya, you'd have all locals actually out there drilling the wells or building the rainwater harvesting systems or the spring systems or the filtration, whatever the proper intervention might be. And you have a solution agnostic approach. Yeah, we do. So we've funded about 11 different solutions across the portfolio.

Wells are great. If there's groundwater, it's a great solution. You can often get clean groundwater right, you know, 150, 200 feet underneath the community. Other times, there is no groundwater. And we can build piped water systems or we can harvest the rain. In Cambodia, we fund the largest bio-sand filter program in the world. And that's making. about a $65 $65 filtration box using locally sourced material, sand, gravel, rock, and you pour dirty surface water in the top of the filter, which is prevalent,

it's everywhere, and you get clean water out that removes 99.9% of all the contaminants, clean water for the you and I could drink for about 65 bucks, and the communities actually contribute $5 of that.

So it's anything from a quarter of a million dollar gravity-fed system connecting networks of villages to a $65 personal household filtration. In the areas where you have to dig wells, do you also fund the infrastructure to get the equipment out there, the heavy equipment? Yeah, we do. We've gotten in that business as we've scaled up our partners.

So we've crowdsourced a couple drilling rigs. So we put some $1.1 million drilling rig comprucks or trucks solutions on the ground. We started an initiative called Pipeline, which allowed us to work on sustainability of these projects through a new innovation fund and also capacity building. So I think we've probably bought 50 trucks just for one, for the partner I mentioned, the Relief Society of Tigray, 50 support trucks as we scaled up. We've helped set up local mechanics businesses buying the motorcycles and tools so they can go out and make repairs on networks of systems. and then those repairs are actually paid for. The repair costs themselves are paid for by the communities, but we've been involved in the setup costs.

So, yeah, it's been exciting, you know, funding a lot of different solutions, you know, as you can imagine, across 24 different countries. Have there been any local partners that you've had to break relations with because they haven't performed as expected? Or local partners who have dissolved in the middle of the night? Yeah, none that have dissolved, but certainly somewhere will and, you know, I'm not going to throw anyone under the bus, but where we've worked with someone and we went back, we did the audit, we looked at their work and said, you know, this just isn't the level of quality that we expect. Sometimes that'll end with a chance to remediate. We've had partners kind of that, you know, almost were on a probation and then have come back.

And we've had others that just said, go take a hike. We don't want your money then. if we have to, you know, if you're applying these high standards to us. So, yeah, I mean, it's a complex business. And again, having 19 incredibly smart and accomplished people, you know, they wake up every single day with that as their sole job managing the portfolio. If anyone's actually interested, there's a, it's kind of a hidden website called partner. Dot charitywater.org where you can find a lot of this stuff, how we work with partners, more about each of them. kind of the behind-the-scenes stuff. You mentioned there's 19 people and you're in 24 countries.

Do you have certain people assigned to particular countries or are they all spread out in terms of the people who are doing the quality control and the audits and the local partner? Yeah, so they work in pools with a bunch of countries. So there'll be a Southeast Asia pool. There'll be an East Africa pool, a West Africa pool, an India pool. So different people will come together in groups. to then work on those different regions. Of the 24, we're actually only active in 14 countries.

So some of them are legacy projects, some of our first ones from 10 or 11 years ago. So this year, we'll deploy about $37 million across 14 different countries. And the 19 people will be basically involved in both the deployment of that capital and then making sure that we're getting the results that we're paying for. How do you ensure maintenance on the wells that you build or any other water solutions that you create? So that also looks different in every country. I'll give you an example. In Ethiopia, we dropped 3,000 remote sensors as part of a pilot there.

And this was thanks to a very generous grant from Google, a $5 million grant that allowed us to develop and open source a remote sensor that works for the Afrodev pump. In Africa, there are over a million Afrodevs. It's kind of the typical African pump that you would imagine seeing the gray steel pump in these remote villages. So, you know, with so many projects out there, you know, we know that all of our projects were working on day one. We actually geolocated each of those. But, you know, we didn't have real-time status. And unless we drove out to each of those projects, we wouldn't know that they were working five years later, seven years later, ten years later. So this was the whole goal behind this grant.

So we launched 3,000. We dropped, I think it was 3,500 sensors in Ethiopia and the pilot a little over a year ago. The minute we did that, we actually amassed the largest data set of rural water supply in the history of the world. Because nobody's bothered to do this before. Typically, you know, the status quo has been you drill a well and then you leave. Well, you drill a well. You train the community. You hand it over officially and then you leave.

and the responsibility is gone. And we said, well, we think we have a longer responsibility to these communities. And if the project ceased to function, well, then we should figure out what went wrong in the first place, remediate, and then, you know, try to take that learning forward. So the 3,000 sensors, interesting, once we dropped them, we then knew our functionality was about 91% across this portfolio. So, you know, better than some of the stats we'd heard about the sector, which was that, you know, up to half of the world's wells could be broken at any time, but still not 100%, which is obviously our goal. So we dug a little deeper. We learned that about half of those 9% are just in the process of being repaired. So imagine kind of the cars right now that are at the Minikki or the Midas shop, you know, having repairs made, but we'll be back on the road.

And then the other half of that, about four, four and a half percent, had some serious problems and would need to be, you know, remediated or redrilled. So that's what it looks like there. And we've got a team that we call Wahaz Mai, which is, I think it's 16 or 17 local staff on motorcycles that go out responding to the sensor failure rates and then going and making those repairs and then logging the more serious ones so they could be scheduled for a redrilled. In the Central African Republic, it looks a little different. It looks like a bunch of people on pickup trucks manually and physically going to over a thousand water points four times a year. So once a quarter turning up almost in the same way that somebody might come to check your energy meter or check your water meter.

We subsidize about 70% of that program because Central African Republic is just going through an incredibly difficult time right now. It is literally the poorest country in the entire world. And many of the communities will try to pay for repairs with one egg, a little bit of salt, a chicken. So we're committed to spending pipeline money, which is our maintenance money, you know, continuing to serve these communities and keeping these projects running. And I think we basically are effectively running a water utility for over 25% of the entire. country. And it only costs a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. So this is not, you know, we think there's extreme, extreme value. You're talking about the cost of a dollar ahead or so.

The thing that strikes me from hearing you talk are two things. Number one is that you have learned particularly from the beginning to think big. And number two, it sounds like you're self-taught, not just in business, but also a little bit in civil engineering. Well, not me. No, I've hired those people. Yeah, exactly. But you have to know enough to be. be able to hire them and evaluate them and give them a scope of work? You know, I think a lot of it has just been putting in the time and in the field. You know, I've been to 66 countries now.

I have personally, you know, flown coached Ethiopia 30 separate times in the last 11 years. So, you know, I'm averaging three times a year in just one country in East Africa. So when you go out with the local hydrologists, when you go out with the local leaders, you know, when you, you've been in thousands of communities, you learn on the ground. You know, you learn on the job. You start to see patterns. You start to ask questions. You know, while I was involved in the nightclubs, I got a journalism degree, you know, part-time going to New York University. And, you know, I think I've, I'm curious. So I just learned a lot of it on the job and then knew who to hire who could actually, you know, go run the department. So our chief global water officer is an amazing guy called Christoph Gordor, you know, who has 15 years of humanitarian experience and has managed the procurement and delivery of building. billions and billions of dollars of donated drugs at his previous organization. So, you know, has lived abroad, grew up in Africa. You know, we have really amazing players on the team.

Has there ever been a time where in which technically or logistically or administratively, everything that you were trying to do felt a bit overwhelming? And if so, how did you push past that? I mean, I think it always does in a way. I mean, you know, and maybe, you know, founders that are listening to. thing, you know, in some ways you go, you teeter between abundance and scarcity. You know, I've had days where I thought we raised our very last dollar. You know, why is anyone ever going to give another dollar to help strangers suffering across

an ocean, you know, to fight a problem that they've simply never experienced before? I mean, that, to be honest, is one of the great challenges. You know, I remember speaking once at a huge couple thousand person conference with the CEO of of Livstrong, guy named Doug Olman at the time. And, you know, he gets up on stage and says, how many people have had cancer? You know, maybe a huge part of the audience is the hands go up. How about a friend or a loved one?

You know, and now he's got the whole audiences with their hands up, and he starts his speech about his organization and what they're doing. You know, that's not true for us. I get out on stage and say, how many people have walked eight hours for brown, viscous water? Now, how many people have watched their child die in their arms, of diarrhea or dysentery or Bill Hartzia. You know, how many people have gone blind with trachoma because of the water you've used

to, you know, to wash your face? I mean, it's zero in the audience. So that is, that has always been a challenge. On the other hand, you know, you have these days and moments where we believe we're going to raise billions and billions of dollars. I got a call this morning out of the blue where someone is committing $5 million over the next six years. So you have these extraordinary moments of joy and of people getting it and people, I mean, it is clean water, right? It's one of the few things in the world that every single

person can agree on, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or a, you know, regardless of your religious backgrounds or beliefs, everybody can come together and fight for clean water. So I think, yeah, I've had 11 years of, you know, we're not going to raise any more money and, you know, wow, we should go raise $100 billion this year. Well, final question, is there any advice that you would give to somebody who's listening who wants to be the next Scott Harrison, who wants to create something in the next 11 years that is as big and life-changing as what you've done? What would you say to them?

Or what would you have said to yourself 11 years ago? I don't know. I probably would have prepared myself for how excruciatingly hard it would be and just how, you know, how truly difficult. I mean, I think a lot of, you know, a lot of times it looks easy on the outside, but it's really difficult. It requires full commitment. I mean, I think I try to discourage people who are starting, you know, part-time

nonprofits, you know, these things that they do on the side, I would probably say to that person, you know, go find someone who's doing it full time and get behind them, put your money, you know, your influence behind them. You know, if it's someone that's going to go for broke, I guess I would say, you know, find that thing that you could stay passionate about for a decade or two decades or three decades and then go become an authority on it. And I think that's what's lacking some days. I mean, if you're bouncing around to five jobs in a decade, you know, you don't really become a master at anything. You know, you don't have any depth or knowledge or great authority. And I think

there's a real power that comes with, you know, having walked the talk. You know, and coming back, starting Charity Water, you know, leaving on a closet floor, making 10 presentations a day, I did have the authority that I had spent a year and a half in Africa. These were my pictures. These were my stories. These were the people that I'd met. They had names. I knew their names. They had told me about their problems and their challenges and their hopes and their dreams for their children. And it was specific and it was tangible and it was real. And, you know, I wasn't telling other people's stories. I was telling my own and I had a point of view and, you know, there was an emotion and a gravity to that. I think that lent itself to, to credibility.

So I would say, you know, go find a way to become an authority, to become credible, to really put in the time and then just be prepared for a really, really hard road. But it's rewarding as well. You know, I was, you know, now we've, we've helped 7.3 million people. The The global water crisis is 663 million people today. So we've got over 1% of the people on the planet who need clean water, access to clean water. And, you know, that can sound depressing, right? Only 1% of the problem solved. But I was with my wife at Madison Square Garden, which is our big arena in New York City a couple weeks ago.

And we're going to give a million people clean water this year alone, thanks to the amazing charity water community of donors around the world. and people who are sacrificially giving, you know, it works out to 20,000 people a week. And, you know, I quickly Googled the capacity of Madison Square Garden, which is about 19,000, and it was a sellout that night. And I looked at my wife and said, you know, honey, look around. Like, Charity Water is helping this amount of people every seven days go from drinking water that's killing them to clean water. You know, that happens every seven days.

One person every 30 seconds, 2,800 people today will get clean water for the the very first time in their life. So, you know, if you show up for 11 years, you get to take phone calls where, you know, someone can give $5 million. And I mean, that was more than the entire budget, right? We wouldn't have even dreamed about it. We were framing $10,000 checks that came in years ago. We were buying cakes and, you know, popping bottles of champagne when our first $10,000 came in. So I think if you're really willing to put in the time and And the hours, you know, it's a rewarding thing to look back on, you know, over a decade later. And I'm just as excited about coming to work today as I was 10 years ago.

That's beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Scott. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Scott, thank you so much for coming on to today's show. What are some of the key takeaways? First and foremost, and I realize that this is going to sound like a cliche, but I am stunned by how much one person can make a difference.

Scott got fed up with his life, decided he wanted to do something. more meaningful. And because of that and because of the efforts of all of the other people who he's inspired and motivated and encouraged to join him along the way, he has now created an organization that has funded 24,000 water projects around the world and has brought clean drinking water to 7.3 million people. That's like bringing clean drinking water to the entire population of the state of Virginia. That is a lot of people. So that's takeaway number one is don't doubt your own abilities because you are probably more powerful than you think. Takeaway number two is that it's never too late to have a second act.

As Scott himself said, he spent 10 years doing the type of work that didn't carry any sort of meaning for him. I mean, the way that he describes it, he essentially wasted 10 years of his life, frittered away in meaningless activities. And yet, he didn't beat himself up about those 10 years. He decided to make a change. And that change not only brought more meaning and satisfaction to his own life, but also, no pun intended, created massive ripples. So takeaway number two is that no matter what has happened in your past, it is never too late to turn things around and begin a second act.

Takeaway number three, learn as you go. Scott had no background, no experience. He didn't work in the nonprofit sector. He had no business background. He didn't know what he was doing. And yet he didn't let that stop him. He just dove in head first. Wow, all of the analogies I'm using are water-related, aren't they?

He just dove in head first. And stayed open and stayed curious and figured it out along the way. And you can do the same. Regardless of whether your goal is to start a non-profit, start your own business, begin investing in rental properties, you're not going to know everything at the beginning. That's fine. You'll figure it out as you go. And chief takeaway number four, anything that is worth doing is going to be tough.

You heard Scott talk about how he worked around the clock for the first couple of years. He would work until midnight on a Saturday and then be back in the office at 8 a.m. 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning. He was obsessed. He was dedicated and he was going to make it happen. And if you have a big, hairy, audacious goal, that's what it takes. You don't have to do it forever, but putting in even one or two years of incredibly passionate, almost single-minded obsession can give you that initial momentum that you need in order to radically alter the course of history or the course of your own life. I saw this great quote on Twitter the other day that said, never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway. So that is the fourth takeaway that I got from this interview with Scott is there are many things that are absolutely worth doing and they are hard.

But the fact that they are hard does not make them any less worth doing. In fact, it may be the case that everything that is worthwhile, whether it's your relationships or getting out of debt or pursuing financial independence. It may be the case that everything that's worthwhile is tough. embrace it embrace the tough so those are the four takeaways that i got from this conversation with Scott now with that said i also want to talk about really my own desire to to bring this community into supporting a major project with charity water so i first heard scott speak at the royal domination summit in portland back in july and ever since then i've been following charity water very closely i've spent a lot of time on their website i've spent a lot of time reading about the

projects that they've done. I've Googled articles that are critical of them, and I've read through those articles very carefully. I have looked at their ratings on Charity Navigator, where, by the way, they have a four-star rating. I've read through their financials. I've spent a lot of time looking very closely at this charity and listening to the critics, and I'm very impressed with the work that they do. They have incredible financial transparency, and I like their business model of having two separate buckets, one that goes to overhead and one that goes purely to water projects and water projects alone. I'm also a big believer in the cause. I mean, as Scott himself said, no matter what your political orientation, no matter what your religious affiliation,

no matter who you are or where you come from, I think that something we can all agree on is that at a minimum, every child under the age of five should have access to safe, clean drinking water. and the fact that lack of access to clean drinking water is the number one killer worldwide, responsible for the deaths of 16,000 people every week, about half of whom are kids under five. That to me is not a world that I want to live in, not if we can do something about it. And supporting a human need that is this basic and this fundamental keeps our own problems in perspective, keeps our own needs in perspective. I'd feel a little silly saying like, oh, darn, my appliances are white instead of stainless steel when there are so many people in this world who don't even have water to drink.

In that regard, giving is actually, in some ways, giving is actually a way to inspire yourself to be more frugal. Insofar as your actions influence your thoughts, and so the act of giving influences you to have the thought of being grateful. And gratitude is the antidote to wanting more. So with all that said, I'd like to tell you about my plan for next year. My goal for the year 2018 is to have the Afford Anything community sponsor a water project through Charity Water. I would like us to raise $10,000 at least, which will pay for one entire water project. It'll be a specific project somewhere in the world. And once we've sponsored it, Charity Water will send us the GPS coordinates.

We'll be able to look at Google Earth mappings of it. We'll be able to track exactly what the outcome of our efforts are. So we're still working out some of the logistical details, but we will be launching the Afford Anything store next year, where we'll be selling T-shirts, hoodies, hopefully booty shorts, coffee mugs. We'll have all of this Afford- Anything merchandise, and 100% of the profits will go directly to Charity Water. I've already looked up the numbers based on the Amazon merch program, the cost of manufacturing and delivering a T-shirt through Amazon merch.

I don't know if that's the program we'll be using or not. But if we do, we have an expected profit of about $5 per t-shirt, and that $5 would go directly to Charity Water. So next year, 2018, we need to sell 2,000 shirts with a profit of $5 per shirt in order to raise the $10,000 needed to sponsor a water project somewhere in the world so that us, we, we, as the Afford Anything community can know that we have made this impact. That's what's brewing behind the scenes. Again, the store is not launched yet. I will let you know when it does,

but for right now, I'm planting that seed in your mind, so I will let you know when that launches. Thank you so much for tuning in. Coming up on next week's episode, my friend and former financial advisor, Joe Saul See-high, joins me to answer audience questions about investing strategies, early retirement, and tax planning.

We talk about the 4% withdrawal rule. We talk about traditional IRAs versus Roth IRAs. We talk about how to learn about investing if you're new to this topic. We cover all of that in next week's episode. On Christmas Day, I'm airing an interview with Will Bowen, the author of the book A Complaint Free World and the founder of a movement to get us all to complain a little bit less. That's what's coming up on future episodes of the Afford Anything podcast.

If you enjoy today's episode, please go to your favorite podcast player, whether it's Apple, Stitcher Overcast, whatever it is, and hit the subscribe button. My name is Paula Pant. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. I'll catch you next week. Hey, guys, it's Paula. I do not have my microphone with me, so sorry for the terrible audio quality, but I wanted to let you know. We have, even though the store is not yet launched, we have started a campaign for Charity Water, and you can gift.

to that, I have kicked it off with the first donation of $101.1. You can give to that by going to afford anything.com slash water. Again, that's afford anything.com slash water. That will redirect you to a page on the charity water website where you can support this really amazing cause. So please head to that. Don't forget, 100% of everything you give, every single penny goes directly to bringing water to people who do not have it. Again, that's afford anything.com slash water. Head there. That's where we are giving our money,

and I have kicked it off with that first donation. Thank you so much. You guys are awesome. I'll catch you next week.