Good Life Project - Scott Harrison: charity: water Founder on Hedonism, Redemption and Service.

Episode Date: September 25, 2018

Scott Harrison was living a life that was as close to pure hedonism as you could come. He was on top of the world, getting paid to party and living utterly (and destructively) in the moment...in the worst wayEventually, falling apart physically and emotionally, Harrison found himself wondering, "what is the exact opposite of the life I'm now living?" And, then, remarkably, he set about living that alternative path. Paying to serve on a floating hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, he reconnected with a deeper mission to help others, with water as his focus.Scott then founded and is the CEO of charity: water, (https://www.charitywater.org/thirst) one of the fast-growing non-profits in history, that has mobilized over one million donors around the world to fund over 28,000 water projects in 26 countries that will serve more than 8.2 million people. This journey is detailed in his powerful new book, THIRST: A Story of Redemption, Compassion and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World (https://amzn.to/2poKHUH).In today's conversation, we dive deep into his personal journey, and also his current vision for both charity: water and the world of philanthropy in general.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Charge time and actual results will vary. So about a dozen years ago, Scott Harrison, my guest today, was living about the most hedonistic life you could possibly imagine. He was a club promoter in New York City where he would stay out all hours of the evening doing drugs, rolling with the, quote, beautiful people, literally getting paid thousands of dollars a month to be seen drinking certain kinds of alcohol. And then he had a moment of awakening, a moment of reckoning that led to a profound personal transformation. And he found himself being a photographer on a floating hospital ship off the coast of Liberia. That led him to reconnect with something deeper, a voice of service, and then eventually found Charity Water, which has now raised more than $300 million and served a huge number of people in communities around the world by partnering with local organizations to provide fresh water. That remarkable journey,

how it's changed him, where he came from, how he kind of came full circle in a lot of different ways, and actually leveraged his skills as a world-class club promoter to build one of the most formidable foundations or charities in the world is where we go in today's conversation. It's also detailed along with a lot of incredible stories and really moving photos in his new book, Thirst.

Really excited to share Scott and his story with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Born in Philadelphia. My dad was a business guy. He was an accountant at the time, then kind of transitioning into an electrical engineering firm. Mom was a journalist and writer, and was born in the city, then moved to the Pennsylvania suburbs. And then when I was four, we moved to New Jersey to get closer to dad's new job, which was in Bordentown. And I remember the 22-minute commute. This was like gold for me.

Get there door to door in 22 minutes. And this was really where everything changed for our family. What we didn't know at the time, we'd moved into this gray drab house that wasn't my parents' perfect house by any stretch of the imagination. But it was close to the work, and there was a great school. It was on a little cul-de-sac. And what none of us knew was that there was a carbon monoxide gas leak in this house. So the gas company, PSE&G, had installed this defective furnace. And it was in the dead of winter. My mom begins fixing up the house.

And she's in the house 24 hours a day, just breathing in these invisible fumes. My dad and I start getting a little sick, but we were only sleeping in the house. And then on New Year's Day, this would be 1980. And this was kind of like before the day of the, where every house had a detector. They hadn't invented it yet.

I actually went and researched this for the book. Oh, no kidding. The portable detector that's now ubiquitous. You'd see it at Home Depot in four packs. Right. Was not on the market yet. So people died. Yeah.

Because unlike gas, which is scented so you can tell, like carbon monoxide, you don't know very often until it's too late. So what was interesting was my dad actually had a hunch and he called out the gas company a couple times. And they inspected everything and all the gas lines in the furnace and said, no, no, you're completely fine. So on New Year's Day, 1980, mom walks across their bedroom. She collapses unconscious on the floor. And after a long series of blood tests, they finally said, oh my gosh, like your carbon monoxide levels are off the charts. It was like, I think it was double or triple that of someone.

It was like as if she'd smoked like 100 packs a day or something. And my dad calls over a plumber friend who rips out the furnace and together they found the cracks. And, you know, it was really interesting. Later, I learned that my parents decided they had just become Christians. They were kind of non-denominational Christians, but my dad had been a hard-drinking Navy guy, you know, smoking two packs of Luckys a day and foul mouth. And so they had just gone through this, um, this faith conversion and life change. And they decided not to sue the gas

company, um, out of this new faith experience. So they, you know, they probably could have gotten millions of dollars. And I remember they took a check. I think it was 1250 bucks. Sorry, you know, ruined, ruined your whole life. So mom just, in short, mom never recovers. So she's never the same again. Her immune system shuts down in its ability to fight off anything chemical, anything toxic. So the most innocuous things for us,

it might be perfume or cologne or a scented soap, car fumes going by. Well, we live in New York City. So all this would just knock her dead. or a scented soap, car fumes going by. Well, we live in New York City, so all this would just knock her dead. Migraines, hypertension, vomiting, rashes. So she had to live in isolation from anything chemical. She would wear these gray charcoal masks.

She would be connected to oxygen. From this point on, we moved her into almost a safe room, which was a tile-covered bathroom upstairs in the house. And I remember the door was covered with aluminum foil because there was an old varnish and the varnish might've smelled. One of my earliest childhood memories was baking her books in the oven. So the print from books would make her sick if she smelled it or if she touched it and it got in her bloodstream. So dad print from books would make her sick if she smelled it or if she touched it and it got in her bloodstream. So dad and I would just bake her books like, you know, like,

like they were bread. And, you know, we would turn the oven on low and just over a long period of time, they would out gas. And then I would hike up to mom's safe room and I would hand her these, you know, slightly charred books sometimes. And she would wear these cotton gloves. And then she would put the book into a cellophane bag. And then with her mask on, she could read. So it was just bizarre. And it was a whole childhood of bizarre, just like that. Yeah, I mean, how does that affect you and your relationship with both your mom and your dad?

Because it's got to be profoundly altered. Yeah, well, I was an only child. So she miscarried and then family planning stopped. And, you know, in the early years, I was this really compassionate kid. You know, I felt bad for mom. I wanted to be a doctor so that I could cure mom. And I would play the piano for her. I would read books to her. I would do her cooking. You know, I would help with the cleaning. And then I think as those years morphed into teenage years, you know, I wanted my mom to be like the other moms. I wanted my mom to be fun and normal and healthy. And then all the rules just began to oppress me. The rules of, you know, the church, kind of with quotes on it. And then those chores really were getting in the

way of my life, my social life. So I really began to kind of kick against the, you know, the goads and begin to resent mom. She would live outside during the days. I remember a friend of ours built a lean-to out of scrap wood. And it was kind of this four cornered, uh, lean to. So wherever the wind was blowing, she could have a little bit of shelter. So she would have four positions to go to and I would come home after high school and she'd be yelling to me to get my attention. I would just ignore her. Yeah. I'd go straight in the house. Uh, so I, I definitely, I mean, I'm not proud of that, but, um, I, but I remember one time I read about this in the book that I thought that it was in mom's head. Because you couldn't really see this.

You couldn't really test for it outside of the initial exposure. And she would tell me that she was allergic to electromagnetic radiation. And I'm like, sorry, that means that you just don't want me to watch TV. So I couldn't have TV or radio on anywhere near her. So one night when she was sleeping, I take a radio and I crawl outside her room. It's in pitch black. I plug in the radio and I have the sound turned

all the way down and I point it right at her bed through the door. Yeah, I'm blasting her with waves all night long, right? And I'm expecting that she wakes up and she's completely fine. And I'm going to have this victorious moment. See, mom, it's in your head. I'm going to watch TV and listen to the radio all I want. And actually the opposite happened. She woke up scared, really, really ill, and just didn't know what could have gotten in her safe room, what could have possibly affected her so much when she was sleeping. So, you know, I really was a believer from that point on that this was very, very real. Yeah, I mean, at the same time all this is going on, as you said, like right around the time that this all happened,

your parents had their own faith conversion. So you're brought up in a household, which is a devout household. Yep. How does that sort of like interplay with this whole dynamic? Well, back then, when I was young, I loved it. I mean, I loved Sunday school. I loved playing in church. I would play the piano on Sundays. And it really wasn't until, I think, 18, where I just, I went hard the other way. And part of that was really the turn to New York City. So I, you know, my parents sent me to a Christian school,

where there were nine people in my class, in my freshman class. And we couldn't afford teachers. So the teachers were VHS cassettes. They would wheel in the TV cart, you know, with the gray kind of rubber ribbed mat mat and they'd pop in science. And I remember just thinking, this is awful. We had uniforms that's kind of, you know, puke, yellow shirts and green pants. It was just awful. So I told my parents that I was going to run away from home unless they put me in the high school. And my parents were terrified because I think they saw something in my personality that, you know, going into a secular environment with 4,000, you know, kids, something would go wrong. And they were right. It all went wrong.

Joined a band, grew my hair down to my shoulders, started drinking, started smoking, and really fell in with the wrong crowd. Barely graduated. I mean, I think up until the last minute, they weren't sure whether I actually had enough attendance days to graduate high school. And I was pursuing a record career in New York City. So I was like, I'm done with school. My band is driving into New York City. We were playing at CBGB's. We were playing at Wetlands. I mean, we were having the time of our lives

as these 18-year-old kids in New York City, you know, playing gigs for hundreds of people. So that, the minute I did actually barely graduate high school, I moved to the city, I moved to the village. And, you know, to make the band famous. And I was going to be the band's manager until I finally found one. And then the band, like every cliche you might imagine, breaks up. We hated each other.

You know, tons of drugs in the band. Nobody could get to gigs on time. You know, the singer was fighting with the bass player. We were all fighting with each other. And I, in that short period of time as we were breaking up, someone had taken me to a nightclub and it was a play called Club USA. It was in Times Square area then. And I had never been in a nightclub before. And I just couldn't, it was an assault on the senses. Yeah. Especially like New York and at that time in New York. Oh my gosh.

The dancing girls, the lights, the, you know, slicing through the, the air, the lasers. And they had this slide.

So you would walk up to the balcony and you would get into this slide at club USA. And you would just throw yourself down into the, the masses. And I, I did that and said, this is, this is the life that I want. I want to be a club promoter. I want to be the guy actually throwing this party. So a couple of years before I was even allowed to

frequent nightclubs, I was legally allowed to be in them, I began this career in New York City that lasted 10 years as a nightclub promoter. Yeah. So paint that story because I think unless you really understand what it means to be a club promoter in New York City, it sounds like, oh, okay, so you got people together and like they went and partied. Yeah, there's big money in this. Yeah.

In the highest end of clubs, you're charging somewhere between $18 and $22 for a cocktail. Okay, you know, it doesn't cost much to make a vodka tonic or a rum and Coke. Um, you're, you're marking up a bottle of champagne that costs 40 and you're selling it at a thousand. Uh, that's now back then maybe six, 700. So there's an astonishing amount of money to be made doing that at a volume. I mean, I remember guys would come in and spend $10,000 on champagne. There'd be four of them, be six of them sitting at a table and they would just pull out their American Express black and say, you know, give me 20 bottles.

Give me 10 bottles. Give me Cristal. Give me Dom Perignon. So our job as a nightclub promoter, first of all, it was great in that you're asset light. You don't need to open up the club. You don't need to deal with the liquor license and the, you know, the local cops and all the community boards who don't want your nightclub there. You are bringing, you're responsible for bringing the beautiful people and then the money and your guns for hire. And then you just take 15% of the

gross. So if you ring 50 grand, you know, you're walking with $7,500. If you ring a hundred grand, you know, you got 15 grand. And, you know, often there's a door. So people sometimes will pay at the door to come in. So there's that cash and you use that to pay the DJ or, you know, often there's, there's, there's extra money from that. But what that means is over the next 10 years, I worked at 40 different clubs. So you are not tied to anything. And the minute a club cools down, it becomes a place that's less hot, right? That where people don't want to go there. You just pick up your whole group and you send out an email or, or physical invitation saying the party moved. We're now at this new cool place.

Right. Cause you're the one with the list. You're the one with the list. Yeah. And you're the one who's like the quote known entity, not just the club. So what's your day-to-day life look like as a club promoter though? Late. It's more surgeon's hours or emergency room hours, except without any sort of social capital, I guess, in that. Dinner starts at 10. Then you head to the club around 12, 15. And again, this is many years ago. I've been out for a long time. So I think this is probably not so different as the scene. But we'd go to the club at 1230. You'd hang out till about 3.30. And then you'd head to an after hours

often. And you're stumbling home somewhere around 8 in the morning, often 9 in the morning. I remember days we'd be out till noon. And, you know, there's a lot of self-loathing that goes on in those moments. Where does that come from? Well, you realize what a degenerate you are if you went out at 10 and started drinking and you, you know, stopped doing cocaine around noon the next day, or ecstasy or MDMA or whatever the drug of choice was that kept you going.

I remember this one vivid moment. I was looking out over Houston Street. I was staying with my business partner. We'd just been partying all night at his place. And I looked out at people in suits going to lunch, lunch hour. And I'm trying to figure out how to get the apartment dark, grabbing duvet covers and trying to duct tape them around the windowsill because it's time to go to bed. And then I'm going to wake up at 7 p.m., the whole day gone, and then do it all over again. So it was pretty dark. And, you know, it looks glamorous on the outside. My girlfriends were often on the cover of fashion magazines and I drove a BMW and I had a Rolex watch

and I had a Labrador Retriever and I had a grand piano in my New York City apartment. You collect all of these markers of success, but at least for me, it left me rotting inside. I mean, the hedonism really took its toll. And I found myself spiritually bankrupt, morally bankrupt. I'd really rejected, you know, any shred of faith or morality that I'd been brought up with. And it just took me to a really, really dark place. Yeah. Did it affect you physically also? Because I mean, that's like, I mean, that is, for year after year after year, that's some pretty serious physical abuse in your body.

It is actually the first chapter in the book is called Numb. And there was this moment where my body starts going numb. I can't feel half my body. And I start going to neurologists. I start getting scans. I don't know what's going on. Is it two packs of cigarettes a day for 10 years? Is the drugs? Is the drinking? Is it the lack of sleep? Is it the the crazy sleep hours? No one could figure out what was actually wrong

with me. And, you know, so it was it was a really interesting time, there was this physical numbness, there was this spiritual and existential numbness. And it all kind of came to a head in South America. So we would go away for New Year's every year because New York belongs to the tourists, really, when it comes to New Year's and New Year's Eve. So we'd go to South America, Brazil. This year we'd gone to Uruguay, rented a big house and there were servants and, you know, of course all the champagne we wanted and we were spending over a thousand dollars on fireworks. And this was supposed to be, you know, a really restful time. And I think, I think it was, it was on this trip where it all came to a head and I just realized that

there would never be enough. I mean, I was, there was this insatiable lust for more, more girls, more money, more status, you know, more parties, and it would have no end. And it would, it would leave me completely burnt out if I even survived it. I mean, people die in the clubs, they overdose all the time and they check out way too early. And, you know, I just began thinking about legacy and realized, oh my gosh, like my tombstone might read, here lies a man who's gotten a million people wasted. You know, who wants that on their tombstone? And I'm doing nothing for the world, nothing for society. Like, how did I get in this place? In some ways, I felt a little bit like there's a parable in the Bible of the prodigal son, you know, who tells his dad, F you, give me my inheritance. You know, I'm gonna go have some fun. And he, you know, travels halfway across the world. And for a while, you know, it's good because he's blowing the money and the prostitutes and the girls and the drugs, you know, you get the sense of just total hedonist living. And then that comes to an end and the money runs out and he finds himself in a pig pen and says, you know, I want

to come home. You know, I, I, the thing, the thing that I'd run away from now I've come full cycle and, and I want to go back home. And I wonder if my father would ever take me back. What's beautiful about that story is the father, father, instead of scolding his son, instead of rebuking him, he just runs out and hugs him and embraces him and throws him a huge party. It's this sense of grace. So I kind of felt, I wasn't there yet. I just, in this trip in New Year's Eve, I wanted to come home and I wasn't sure how I would get home or what that would look like. It sounds like that was the moment where something inside of you was like, okay, so this, the future can't look like the past. But you'd still at that point, you had no clue what that

meant. No. And I didn't have many options because, you know, the, the skillset of being a nightclub promoter is a pretty narrow one. You know, you don't just become a doctor at 28 years old or a lawyer or. But in hindsight. Well, in hindsight. I mean, it's actually, it's doctor at 28 years old or a lawyer or. But in hindsight. Well, in hindsight, you know, it's a huge part of what you ended up doing. But yeah, I guess you like at that moment in time, you're like, OK, so what? Right.

And you're making great money. I mean, at one point we were being paid $4,000. This is my business partner and I, there were two of us. We were getting paid $4,000 by Bacardi every month just to publicly drink Bacardi's new vodka. And Budweiser paid us $4,000 a month to drink Bud in public. So we're like, this is amazing. I mean, we don't just drink for free. Our friends don't drink for free.

We get paid to be visibly drinking. So it's a tough thing to leave and then what, go take an entry-level marketing job for 80 or 90 grand? I mean, there was just, there was such a wide gap between the lifestyle we were living with this niche skill set. So what happens is you become club owners, if you make it, or restaurant owners. And, you know, you go from promoting to the actual bricks and mortar. And, you know, or you flame out and you go away. So where do you go from there? I mean, there, because you have to figure out, I mean, were you, you flame out and you go away. So where do you go from there? I mean, there, cause you have to figure out, I mean, were you at that point where you're

like, like I am a hundred percent done or were you just like, I feel like crap. I feel morally bankrupt. I just, I just don't know. Yeah. It was probably closer to that. So I did have this religious experience. So I did kind of come back to faith or want to come back to faith, but in a different way as an adult, a faith that wasn't force fed to me or maybe not the faith of my parents. But

I began to read the Bible again. I began to read deep theology and I was... What were you looking for? I think I was looking for virtue. I was looking for the nostalgia of, of really good people who cared about others and who, who wanted to make a difference. Um, in some ways, you know, I hadn't ever lost my faith. I had just put any shred of obedience or following that faith, you know, way off to the side. Um, I remember my, my father used to say, you know, way off to the side. I remember my father used to say, you know, Scott, your conscience is being seared. You know, I used to hate that, like it's a piece of tuna. But in some ways, like the more I descended into this debauchery, the quieter that voice got that this is wrong, that this is wrong,

you're on the wrong path. So that voice just started shouting in this moment. And I began reading the Bible again. I become really interested in service to the poor. And I think as a Christian, I've been brought up with Jesus, I think, maybe as more of the meek, nice teacher with kids sitting in his lap. And as an adult, I found much more of a rebel, of someone who was really saying kind of F you to the establishment.

And you're not doing and challenging people to look out for the poor and to look out for their neighbor and saying, look, you know, you guys are all hypocrites. You're saying one thing, you're doing the other. So I think I discovered a much less tame, you know, rock and roll Jesus, I guess, on a 28-year-old reading. And I just was so drawn to this message of serving the poor, of giving the cup of water, of visiting the, you know, the prisoners, of looking after the widows and the orphans. I remember coming across a verse in a book called James where it said, true religion is to look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep yourself from being polluted by the world. So I was clearly 0 for 2. I'd done nothing

for the poor in 10 years. I'd lived only for myself. And not only was I perhaps one of the most polluted persons, people just from a substance abuse and I mean, the pornography, like all the stuff that I was consuming, I actually polluted others. So I didn't just keep that to myself. I mean and smoke less and try and do less drugs. And, you know, I feel guilty about, you know, living and sleeping with a girlfriend that I didn't love and wasn't going to marry. And there's just this kind of, um, uh, it was a, it was a messy gray, miry kind of period of time. And I remember I'd been trying to visit churches again, but they were not that inspiring. I mean, they were meeting in the fluorescent lit basements of schools. And so it was just kind of a really frustrating period. And, you know, I write about this in the book, but there's this one night where I went out to a club and something really, something happened that was a little out of the ordinary and there was a gun involved. And that led me to

get out of New York City for a couple weeks. And I remember renting a cobalt blue Ford Mustang from Newark Airport. I think it was on a month rental. It might have just been a one-way rental. And just heading north, no idea where I was going. Driving through Connecticut and then Vermont and then Maine. And it dawned on me on this trip that this was it. Like, what if I never went back? What if I, like, you know, if I kept New York City or certainly New York City nightlife in the rear view mirror and found a new path. And, you know, I remember I was praying during this time and saying, like, I asked myself, what would the opposite of my life look like? That was the question that I remember. What would the exact opposite of the hedonist nightclub promoter's life look like? And I thought, well, what if I spent a year and I went and served

others? And what if I could find my way on a humanitarian mission as a volunteer and see where that would take me? So I remember exactly where I was. I was in a dial-up internet cafe on Moosehead Lake in Greenville, Maine. And I just start putting in applications for all of the famous humanitarian organizations that I'd heard of. You know, the Oxfams and Save the Children's and World Visions and the Red Cross as the Peace Corps. And just, hey, I'm Scott Harrison. I'm a nightclub promoter. And I am ready to be of service. And maybe not so welcome arms. Yeah, yeah. I don't think this surprises anyone.

I think I was surprised no one else except myself. But I'm in the next couple weeks. So I don't go back to New York City. I go visit my parents. And I go to the south of France. A friend had a little cabin in the Pyrenees Mountains. And the rejection letters just start coming in, you know, no, thanks, we're full. Don't need a nightclub promoter anywhere around our serious humanitarian mission.

So this was really frustrating to me. And I'm like, well, what am I going to do now? I'm in Europe. I mean, should I be a waiter? Like, should I, should I just start over and, and, um, you know learned, had just finished a 14-year civil war, brutal, brutal civil war led by Charles Taylor and child soldiers. And then I need to pay them $500 a month. So in some ways, it was the perfect offer. It was truly the opposite of my life. Go to the poorest country in the world at that time. And there was, I think it was 148. It had fallen off the UN development chart because there's just no data. You know, the country had gone dark for over a decade. And then pay for the pleasure of serving. So I was in, I said, yes, you know, I'm in. I dusted

off a journalism degree. I'd gotten an NYU, again, barely graduating, but just going to school kind of part-time through the nightclubs, you know, enough to get a degree because my dad had saved up. And yeah, and then that led to a big change. So I went from France, getting this call with Mercy Ships, and about a month later, I'm sailing into West Africa for the first time in my life. And I had this really important moment. I was going to be joining a medical mission that took place on a 522-foot hospital ship. There were 42 beds. There were a few operating theaters, an MRI machine. And it was a very simple idea for the charity.

Just sail this hospital ship up and down the coast of Africa, pull into port, and then help as many people as you can that don't have access to medical care with the most sophisticated surgeons and the best doctors in the world. So I had this moment before I joined the mission, before I surrendered my passport and became a part of this group where I realized, well, I'm going to have to quit all the vices because I still hadn't quit. You know, my heart was in the right direction, but I'm still smoking like a fiend, you know, two, three packs of Marlboro Reds a day. I'm still drinking. You know, I'd quit the drugs at that point, but, and I just, I, I had my last hurrah. I smoked every cigarette I had. I think I drank six or seven or eight beers and woke up the next morning with a hangover.

And that was it. You know, walked up the gangway of the ship. And it was almost like a prophetic kind of picture of the future for me, like where I would sail away from my old life. I would leave all of that crap, all the vices on the shore, almost wave goodbye on the deck.

I mean, it's like Joseph Campbell's crossing the threshold, right? Like you're leaving that world, which for you, wasn't the ordinary world. I mean, it was extraordinary in a lot of ways, but it was into this like unknown,

completely unknown sailing into Africa, the countries I'd never heard of. And it was, and it's like, that was the old identity behind it. Actually it, it stuck. It wasn't easy,

but you know, I've never had a cigarette. So that was 13 years ago. I've never gambled again. I've never 13 years ago. I've never gambled again. I've never looked at pornography. I mean, I really quit. Never touched Coke or any of that stuff. Again, I like to drink IPAs and red wine and sometimes a little too much, which gets harder when you're 43 now.

I have like two glasses of wine. I wake up with a freaking headache sometimes. So you end up on this floating hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, which also, by the way, can make full circle to the beginning of our conversation, is where you end up with our mutual friend, Chris Gilbo and Jolie, and become friends with them. He was the COO of the ship. Crazy, right? He had volunteered as well. So Chris and Jolie were paying, just like I was, about 500 bucks a month.

And he was really running the thing. Yeah, I remember him telling me stories about being driven out to these areas to sort of have these conversations and negotiations. And he's like completely, he's like, what am I doing? Like 100% over his head. But somehow he's like, you know, you're in that scenario, you figure it out. Yeah, you rise to the challenge so but you're on the ship as a photographer slash journalist like in your mind what are you doing like how what is your service so before the ship had arrived at the port and i think chris was actually a part of this team The advanced team would go and they would market the ship's arrival. And they would post these flyers with, um,

pictures of people with giant facial tumors, flesh eating disease, leprosy, you know, um, cleft lips, cleft palates, people who had been badly deformed and burned by rebels who poured oil on them during the war. And they would, they would post these pictures and say, a ship is coming. Doctors are coming. If you have any one of these conditions, turn up on this day, you know, in this field or outside this foot, it actually turned out to be a football stadium,

a soccer stadium that the government had given us to triage the patients. So the advanced team did this work. My job was gonna be to then document pretty much everything that happened on and off the ship, but specifically every patient before intervention and after intervention. So before surgery and after surgery. And Mercy Ships would use those images to raise awareness, go back to their donors and say, look, we're changing lives here. Look how amazing this work is.

The cool thing is, and I don't think I understood how powerful this would be, but I also came with my own list. So I had 15,000 emails and, you know, open rates were almost a hundred percent back then for us. So I had amassed 15,000 pretty cool, trendy people that I'd gotten drunk for 10 years. And I think Mick Jagger was on our email list and you know, there were, there were fashion models and the owners of agencies and, um, of, of huge fashion brands. So I begin, um, sharing these photos of what I'm seeing and sharing the stories, both with the Mercy Ships cohort, but then also my list, people at Chanel and Gucci and Prada and MTV. And, you know, the stuff we were seeing, Jonathan was Chanel and Gucci and Prada and MTV. And, you know, the stuff we were seeing, Jonathan, was just, it was so over the top.

I mean, we're seeing kids with six-pound facial tumors. Yeah, I mean, actually, in your book, you actually, there's a whole section with photographs, which are, on mean, it really shows you how real this was and how profoundly life-altering the things that they were dealing with were. Yeah. So these benign, well, Liberia, just let me give an example. There was at the time one doctor for every 50,000 people. I believe our number here is one for 280 of us. So there were also no hospitals in the country where I think there were two surgeons in a country of a few million people, but nowhere for the surgeons to actually operate

because there was no power in any of the hospitals. So if you got sick, you were out of luck. And if something started growing on your face that was a benign tumor, it would grow and grow and grow and grow. And we'd hear about people taking their kids to witch doctors who would cut them with knives and spread paste and, you know, cast spells. But, you know, these were medical issues.

So in some ways, many of the same conditions would happen here. Like cleft lips and cleft palates are no more necessarily common there than they are here. But, you know, if our kid is born with a cleft lip, they just stay in the hospital. We do the surgery at a couple of weeks and there might be an imperceptible scar or barely imperceptible scar. But there, you're 65 years old and you've got a cleft lip.

I mean, I met a woman once. I found a woman in a village who was 65. She'd lived her entire life with food and water spilling out of her mouth because she didn't have access to a $250 surgery. So we were seeing stuff that was just so far beyond our wildest imaginations of how people could suffer. And, and I mean, people with missing faces, I mean, as the flesh had rotted, I mean, Jonathan, there's like,

there's, there's stuff I can't even, it's hard to even go back there. And, you know, the smell of, of, yeah, there was a, there was a woman I remember that I had the pleasure of photographing and her name was Marguerite. I think she was in her early twenties and she was born with sight, but then went blind with these massive cataracts, completely blind exposure to the equatorial sun, you know, Liberia sits right on the equator. No, you know, Ray bands, no UV sun somewhere. And, you know, you could see it. So you look at her eyes and you just see these, these white, um, not even translucent, like opaque discs of cataracts. So she had seen her child, but then couldn't see anymore. So imagine, I mean, it must've been a terrible thing to see and then lose your sight as an adult.

So yeah, this was a surgery that I felt like I could have done. I mean, I remember documenting her surgery. It was maybe 10 minutes, just a little incision, you know, pop the cataract out, put in, I guess, a new lens in both eyes and then patch her up. And I was there with my camera the minute they removed the patches. I think this was two days later. And I saw her see for the first time and she saw me

and started screaming and she saw the nurse and she saw her sister and she started tackling us, just screaming at the top of her lungs. And, you know, I'm just snapping away. So I have these, you know, all these, these stills of, of her seeing, you know, and this was a, oh, I think the surgery might've been 150 bucks, you know, 175 bucks. So this was half a bottle of champagne. And, and all of this is going through my mind is, oh my gosh. I mean, I had a table in the nightclub that could spend 10 grand that could help 30 people get surgery. Right. You're making these cross comparisons. of the befores and then these amazing afters as the doctors have fixed these conditions. And,

you know, the list kind of goes a little haywire, right? Some people are like, take me off the list, bro. Don't, you know, you can't send me a picture of a fleshy facial tumor or leprosy. I signed up to go to that cool Prada party. You know, where's the fashion party, bro? Some people obviously said, I'm not interested in this, but others began to be so moved and write me back with these emotional responses saying, I need to do something about this. How do I send money? How do I help these doctors? How do I go and volunteer? You know, I'll do anything. I'll clean the toilets on that ship. You know, I'll cook food in the kitchen. So I think I learned there that the same gift for storytelling or really promoting maybe that could fill nightclubs and get the right people there could be used to get people really interested in a cause, could be used to get people interested in ending the suffering of others. And a lot of the same people too, which is interesting.

A lot of the same people. Okay, so you were in relationship with these people around the pursuit of hedonism, right? Which is a part of who they are, but those very same people have inside of them this other part, which is they recognize and want to in some way serve humanity and be of service, but maybe they just didn't know how or they didn't realize what was actually out there

where they could help. Yep. So you go from playing this role on the hospital ship. What is the switch that flips that takes you from playing this role to saying, huh, there's a problem and the problem is water and it's solvable. And this is what I want to devote myself to. Yeah. So it was really the second tour. So I wound up doing two tours for Mercy Ships that

ended almost two years in total. And on the second tour, when we went back to Liberia, I really got off the ship and into the rural areas. Most of my time initially had been in Monrovia and in the city and in the ship and in the medical wing and in and out of the operating theater. As I got into these villages, I saw the conditions that people were living in, and I saw the water. And the water source was either a swamp or a pond or a dirty, brown, viscous river.

I had never seen human beings drink dirty water before in my life. And when you watch a child drink something that you wouldn't let an animal drink, you wouldn't let your dog drink water that looked anything like what the child is bringing to their lips, just stopped me in my tracks. And I learned that 50% of the country was drinking dirty water, unsafe, dirty, contaminated water. So I just didn't have to be that smart to make the connection

between much of the disease and suffering that we were seeing and the lack of the most basic need for health being met across 50% of the population. So I was telling the doctors what I was seeing. So again, I would be scrubbed up in a lot of these surgeries and I'm snapping pictures of them changing people's faces and operating eight hour operations or eight minute operations. And the doctors really begin, the surgeons really begin to encourage me to go work on that issue. And they said, man, if you really cared about health, if you really wanted to help become an advocate for water, you know, the most, perhaps the most important thing you could do is to make sure people have clean water. You know, if, if, if Liberia had a hundred percent water coverage, you know,

we're not turning away thousands of people. And that was another really difficult thing about the job is more people would respond to those flyers than we could ever help. Many more people would show up. So we're turning thousands of people who wanted help away because we just didn't have enough doctors. We didn't have enough surgeons. We didn't have enough surgery slots. So the other contrast was water for me was called Voss. It was like what, Swedish, I guess, like artesian well water in a stylish glass bottle. And we would sell it for $10 a bottle in the clubs. And I remember a lot of people would come in and they would just order a ton of bottles, not even open them. Just as a sign of show, they were drinking the champagne and the vodka instead. So watching kids get sick, learning about dysentery and diarrhea and bilharzia and trachoma and cholera, all the different waterborne diseases, I said, well, look, I guess I could help Mercy Ships fund more hospital ships or pay for more medical supplies. But what if I were just to go and eliminate the need for a lot of these patients? What if we could go to the root cause of so much

of this sickness? Later learned, according to the World Health Organization, that 52% of all disease throughout the developing world is water and sanitation related. So lack of clean water, lack of toilets. So imagine that half the sick people you could make well by providing, you know, sanitation, hygiene, and clean water. So that's, that really led me to, to this issue. Oh, and by the way, uh, there were a billion people worldwide that live without this. So when I started, it was one out of every six people alive on the planet was drinking bad water. Just impossible to imagine. Yeah. I mean, especially in the context, like you said, you know, you're contrasting it with your past life in the clubs where people are paying $10 for a boss.

But even sitting here right now, I mean, we're both in a studio in New York City and we've got a glass of what there's like, it's not even something that I think in Western culture and US culture and sort of like, quote, develop the world. It's not even part of your thought process. No. It's just assume that, well, I must have this, you know, like we live in modern times and you know, most of the world must have this too. So the notion that a billion people would be completely without that.

Less than 200 years ago, there was a huge cholera outbreak in New York City. We had water issues. So, you know, we solved it, but it's not thousands of years old. You know, I think it was 1830s at Union Square, like tons and tons of people were dying of cholera because the water was contaminated.

And people were all coming to the fountain to get their water. Tribeca was a swamp. People were getting water from a swamp in early New Amsterdam. So yeah, I think that, again, for most people, and I think issues like Flint and now Detroit and there's a little more awareness. But the think that, again, for most people, and I think, you know, issues like Flint and, you know, now Detroit. There's more awareness.

There's a little more awareness. But the reality is, Jonathan, I mean, the people where we're working, they would walk weeks to drink out of the Flint toilets. You know, I mean, the level of contamination would so blow people's mind. I mean, if you saw this water, it looks like chocolate milk. I mean, the water is often brown, viscous. It's got animal feces in it. And you're literally watching cows and donkeys poop into the water source that children are drinking. It's just all they have. There's just no other option. Where do you go from there? Because you have, you know, okay, so you know how to market, you know how to tell stories, you're doing this amazing work on the ship, you identify this one problem, but you're not a guy who's built a company or a foundation or charity.

And it's not like you have a background in solving the water problem. No, nor any background in charity whatsoever. I mean, I'm uniquely on paper unqualified to ever make any sort of impact, you know, especially in starting anything. I'm also $30,000 in debt. So I come back and find out that my business partner never dissolved our company. There's back taxes to pay. I'd given all my money to Mercy Ships and the people that I'd met along the way. And nightclub promoters aren't great savers anyway.

You can imagine, you know, it goes with the lifestyle. So it was, it was a really bad time to start something, you know, both personally in debt, unwinding a company. I was living on a closet floor in Soho at Spring and Mercer in New York City. My buddy took me in and said, yeah, you can sleep in my walk-in closet floor. I've got a big, big closet. And I could just see it, Jonathan. I'm like, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. I'm going to bring clean drinking water to a billion people. I am going to make as big of an impact and help as many people get clean water so they don't need to have giant things growing on their face, so they don't need to die of diarrhea and cholera and go blind with trachoma. So I was running around telling anybody that would listen,

making, you know, eight to 10 presentations a day on a laptop, just showing my photos saying, here's what I saw. Here's what I saw. Will you help? And I remember getting kicked out of DJ booths at two in the morning. Nobody wants somebody, some pious ex-party boy killing their buzz at two in the morning. But I was taking these photos out to the hottest clubs because those are the only people that I knew and saying, will you help? Will you give money? Will you help me start this thing? And that was what was really foundational about that time period was, or of that period of exploration is, I learned that there was this huge distrust of charities. There was an epic cynicism out there.

My friends, and then later turned out Americans in general, don't trust charities. So I would hear expressions like, ah, charities are black holes. You know, you don't really know where your money's going. It's not going to get to actually help the people. Everybody seemed to have a scandal that they could pull out of their back pocket of a charity who had sat on, you know, a billion dollars of funds, you know, 10 years post a disaster or, you know, some charity CEO who paid himself millions of dollars and hired his cousins and aunts and nephews and, you know, put them all on the payroll. I remember Anderson Cooper used to do those specials where, you know,

rolls up to the charity founders, McMansion, right? And the door slams in his face and he's left there out in the stoop and America throws their hands up and says, this is why I don't give. See, this is why I don't give my money. So I heard that out there. And I realized that if I was going to make any substantial dent in the actual water crisis, if I was gonna get people to care about this issue, I would need to completely reimagine

the giving experience. I would need to reinvent charity. the giving experience. I would need to reinvent charity. So the vision actually became way bigger than the mission. So if the mission was, hey, let's give people clean drinking water, the vision was let's get these disenchanted people back to the table. Let's find a business model where they can feel proud of giving. I remember reading in USA Today that 42% of Americans don't trust charity. So that was the data. 70% of Americans recently pulled by NYU Stern said they believe charities, 70%, Jonathan, believe charities either waste money or badly

waste money. Still, and that's recent. Yeah, a couple years ago. 30% believe charities either waste money or badly waste money. Still, and that's recent. Yeah, a couple years ago. 30% believe charities do the right thing with money. So I thought, this is an opportunity, right? I don't want to steal Mercy Ships donors. I don't want to steal Save the Children or Oxfam's donors. I want to reach out to these people who aren't giving and create a business model for them. So as I talked to them, I realized the biggest problem and all the objections primarily were around the flow of

money. And the fundamental question, will my money get there? Will I do anything and how much of it? So I said, well, what if we could just give away a hundred percent of everybody's money? What if we could answer the question around overhead or how much would reach it? What if we could say 100% every time without exception? Was that being done anywhere at that time? The only guy that I'd come across doing it was a multi-billionaire named Paul Tudor Jones. He started the Robin Hood Foundation. Now, luckily for him, he was rich enough to actually pay for the overhead if he wanted to, probably for the rest of his life. I actually wrote him a letter. He didn't write me back. But I said, well, I'm going to borrow that model and bootstrap it. You know, could we do this

with a couple hundred dollars? And it was really just separating the bank accounts. You start a charity, you have two bank accounts, and you promise that every public donation will only go into the bank account that can only be used, in our case, to directly fund water projects that would give people clean water. The separate bank account, the overhead account, we had no idea what that would actually look like. But we would raise that money separately, hopefully from a small group of visionary business leaders or entrepreneurs or people who wouldn't mind paying the salaries, the office rent, the flights, who wouldn't mind coming in support of the organization. Maybe, you know, corporations or foundations one day, I had no idea what it would look like. So that was the promise, the a hundred percent promise. And then the second thing was, you know, and these things

almost just cascaded into each other. So, well, okay, well, if we did that, then, you know, money will never be fungible at our charity. We're never going to step on it, not even a penny. So let's use technology and just show people where these dollars eventually end. And let's build this core pillar around proof. So the first pillar was 100% model. The second was let's just prove to people what we did with their money. And what that initially looked like for us was just putting

up every charity water project on Google Earth and Google Maps. So we just trained our partners out there who were drilling the wells to turn on GPS devices that cost 100 bucks, take photos of the GPS coordinates, take photos of the completed project, and then upload that data. So, you know, Jonathan Fields wrote a check for, you know, an entire well, you would get the photo and the GPS and the satellite image of your well, you would know that it was built. If you actually turned up, you wouldn't find an empty field, you'd find your well there. So that that proof thing, I mean, it sounds so basic, but people just weren't doing this. Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting, right?

Because it sounds like everyone was trying to innovate on the delivery of service side. How do we do a better job of this, of this, of this? Which, okay, you understand. Like if you go into this world and say, like my job is to serve these people, you get it, right? But by you uncovering that there's a massive, there's a universe of people who are completely open to and probably even motivated and want to give. But the thing that's stopping them is.

Lack of trust. Yeah. So, yes, there's innovation that needs to happen on the service delivery side, but also. You can only do that if you have the money and you have the donors and you have the support. of an existing pie. But what your model does, it allows you to expand the pie of potential donors because all of a sudden, you've got the 70% of people who wouldn't give to these other things because they don't trust.

And all of a sudden, with your model, like, huh. I'll try that. Yeah. So I'll do the, let me just do the last pillars and I'll say this great story about Open9. So the third was really trying to build a beautiful brand. And as I looked at the charities at the time, I saw anemic brands. I saw poverty mentality around their marketing, their websites. You know, they, they were direct mailing Jonathan. They were buying our physical mailing addresses and sending us paper, strangers

sending us paper, asking us to put checks in self-addressed stamped envelopes. Okay. That was not the future. And that wasn't going to work for me. It wasn't going to work for any of my friends. And it certainly wasn't going to work for our kids one day. So I think I was enough of a futurist to say like direct mail is going to zero at some point. I don't know when it's going to happen, but it's going to be replaced by digital money by, you know, the Apple pays of, of the world. Um, But people will not be giving in that way in the future. And as I looked at the way that charities typically told their story, there was so much shame and guilt used to manipulate people into feeling really awful and manipulate people into giving money. And we, you and I are, you know, both old enough to

remember the Sally Struthers commercials, right? And, you know, are, you know, both old enough to remember the Sally Struthers commercials, right? And, you know, for all I know, Sally did amazing, impactful work. But what I remember from those commercials was the kids with the sad eyes, they were dirty, right? The flies were landing on their face in slow motion as they locked eyes with the camera. And then the 800 number started striping across the bottom of the screen. And, you know, the thing is nobody wants, it actually works.

So you do give when you see that, but nobody wants to wear the t-shirt. Yeah. Charity. Nobody wants to tell their friends. Right. Nobody wants to share, like tell the story of me participating in this other thing.

I saw a shameful, you know, I felt disgustingly shameful about how much I had. And you should go and check out this ad. Go watch this video. It's interesting. I use the example in the book of Nike. Imagine if Nike marketed like that.

That would be as if they told people, you're really fat and lazy. You're a little ugly too. So why don't you turn off the TV and stop eating junk food and go out and exercise? They told people, you're really fat and lazy. You know, you're a little ugly too, right? So why don't you turn off the TV and stop eating junk food and go out and exercise? You can go for a run. It just wouldn't work, right? Oh, and by the way, buy our clothes.

You know, and so many charities actually, you know, there is that leftover. And again, things have gotten a lot better. This is, I'm kind of taking you back a decade. But you know, what Nike has said for years is the opposite. There's greatness with inside you. You can run farther and faster than you ever thought possible. You can overcome adversity.

If you don't have legs, you can still run a marathon. If you lost an arm, you can still play basketball. And people rise to that greatness and you do want to wear the t-shirt i mean that's all about association yeah and a company who believes that about you that you can do it that you really have that greatness within you so i think um we tried to just do that by telling stories around hope and opportunity and fun. You know,

the word fundraising, you know, what are the first three letters? You know, it's not down raising. It's not shame raising. You know, it should be an amazing opportunity,

Jonathan, to use our gifts, to use our talent, to use our time, to use our money, to end the needless suffering of others. You know, this is a joyful thing. You know, we hear so much about giving back now, you know, every company seems to be giving back, right? That language makes it sound like, you know, they've plundered and

pillaged to such a degree that it's finally time to throw some scraps to the poor, right? Let's just give a little back. You know, it's like if I just grab your phone from you and, you know, you say, give it back, right? I think people should just drop back altogether. Let's just talk about giving. Let's frame it in the positive. Let's talk about the culture of giving time and money at our company and using our services for good.

Let's talk about giving as a joy and a blessing as an opportunity, not out of debt, not as some sort of obligation, but really framing in the positive. So we've tried to do that through all of our storytelling, through all of our marketing. I look at it almost as this grand invitation. We are creating a world where every single person alive is going to have clean water to drink. They can have their most basic need met. Do you want to come? Do you want to be a part of that?

Do you want to add your voice to that? And this is where all the club promoter stuff really kicks in. But I was inviting people to a party, right? This is like the evolution of that. And it's going to be awesome inside. The DJ is going to be the best, right? We're going to have the best drinks and the best DJ and the best decor. So this is just a different party. And it pulls on, I mean, when you look at the quote brand that you created with Charity Water also, I mean,

visually, like the imagery, the language, the storytelling, what you put into designing the quote brand for this charity, at least in my experience, it was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. And it was like, you were telling the story of like, it was all the sex appeal, the, all the association,

the aspiration of participating in something bigger than yourself. But instead of that being, you know, utterly self-serving hedonistic, it was, and we were going to, right. Like we don't get to touch a penny of that.

That was the beauty of it. So it's really interesting. Yeah, so it's like these two worlds merged together to create this. The last thing was just making sure that the work was done by local partners. And that again sounds simple, but that was something I just got early on.

Africa didn't need anybody that looked like me digging a well, drilling a well, you know, going to India or Bangladesh or Cambodia to actually construct water projects. That wasn't what, you know, Westerners were needed for. I really just intuitively believed early on for any of the work we would fund to be sustainable, for it to be culturally appropriated, had to be led by the locals in each of these countries. So our job would be raise awareness, get people to care about an issue that does not affect them hard, right? Then raise money as efficiently as possible, and then go out and vet and grow the capacity of

the local organizations to actually deploy that capital and lead their communities and their countries forward. So early on, the vision was that they would be the heroes, right? Charity Water would not be the heroes in Ethiopia or Malawi or Kenya. It would be the local Ethiopian team that would take our community's money and turn that into clean water. They would be the ones getting all the credit. So, you know, when you put together 100% and proof

and this way of thinking about brand differently and working with locals, again, that sounds, even when I say it, it just sounds so common sense-like. But it just wasn't. It was so unique at the time. And we started the day one, which actually the anniversary is tomorrow.

I kicked it off with my 31st birthday party in a nightclub because it was the only idea I had at the time. And I got 700 people to turn up because I gave them open bar. And on their way in, I said, I just need you to give $20 to Charity Water on the way in. And 100% is going to go build a few water projects. And I'm going to prove them to you. So we raised $15,000 that night. And what I remember, Jonathan, is that a drug dealer,

a guy who was selling marijuana at the time, came to the party, put $500 in the, it was a plexi box. And he said, this is the first charitable gift I've made in my life. But I know where this is going. And, you know, not that that was going to be my market, but it was this immediate proof of the concept on day one.

You know, that was success, getting someone, winning back that trust, right? He wasn't a donor to Oxfam, right? I wasn't poaching anybody else's donor. I was giving someone a chance to participate in, you know, in being generous in using that capital, um, to actually help others. So we raised 15,000 that night. Uh, we immediately took it to a refugee camp in Northern Uganda where 31,000 people were registered. Um, they had one working well, um, by UN standards, they should have had 125 in the camp. So we were able to fix a bunch of broken ones to do a couple of new ones, I think. And we got six out of it. But then we

sent the photos and the GPS coordinates and a video back to those 700 people that came to the nightclub party. And we said, this is what you did. Remember throwing 20 bucks in that big plexi bin? This is the result of that. Here are the satellite images, here are the pictures, and here are the people drinking clean water because you came and you gave. And people were blown away, Jonathan. I mean, the emails and the responses, I never expected to hear from a charity. This is amazing. When's the next party? When can we do this again? How can I go see it? It was this proof of concept. And we said, well, let's just keep doing this. You know, let's just keep giving away 100% of people's money,

telling them the impact and creating this virtuous cycle of winning back trust and, and redemptive generosity. Yeah. And what's interesting also is, so you started this, I mean, you've now sitting here today, and you can tell me that the latest numbers from what I know, you have raised over $300 million. You have affected millions and started charity water also at a time in U.S. economic history, which is about the darkest time since the Great Depression. And from what I know, most other, I mean, one of the first things that people cut was their giving. So a lot of other charities and foundations, existing ones really suffered suffered. I remember, Jonathan, I think it was the first three-year period, we were up 490%. Which is insane. In those three years.

And charitable giving in the country was net negative 8%. Wow. In the aggregate over three years. So it was just working. It was really working. So as we sit here today, your life has also changed. I mean, you've built this incredible organization. You will continue to do great work. I know you have huge aspirations too. You're far from being done. On a personal level, you're also married,

you're a dad, two beautiful kids. How has that changed your lens on what you're doing and who you are in the world? Yeah. Well, I married my second employee. So that's a story for the book that I was really kind of excited to unpack. And I worked with my wife then for nine years. She was the creative director and really kind of the design force behind Charity Water. And then we started having kids and, you know, gosh, first of all, I mean, I had no idea that I had this much capacity to love anything. You know, you have your first child and it just completely rocked my world. And then, you know, there was

almost a fear with the second child, like, can I ever love my second kid as much as the first? And then of course, you know, there's this whole new capacity that you find in yourself to love. I think it made the work feel really important, and not just from a legacy standpoint. Like, oh, Dad's helped get 8.5 million people get clean water, or 10 million people, or 20 million, or 30 million. Who knows when we're done, hopefully. I really want the global water crisis solved in my lifetime. You know, I go speak at schools, like I don't want anybody like me turning up in my, you know, my kid's high school, showing pictures of people drinking dirty water. And, you know, the number has come down over the

last 12 years from a billion people to 663 million. So a lot of progress has been made. We're moving in the right direction. It was one out of six people on the planet when we started. Now it's one out of 10. You can argue one out of 10 is astonishing in an age of technology and drones and, you know, artificial intelligence. One out of every 10 humans is drinking bad water. You know, people are drinking bad water that have internet, you know, in some of these countries because they're flying internet over them. But I think, you know, it's made me, you know, I'll just give you one example. I was in Niger, West Africa. I was in the Sahel Aisa Maru, and I was standing outside her very simple kind of straw hut. And she was very close to one of the worst water sources I've ever seen in my life. Brown, almost like gravy. Just all the dust and the sand and the silt in her water. And she told me that she had lost and buried eight children, eight kids. And she starts to name them and tell me the ages that they all died, from childbirth up to the teens. And she had two children survive. And I remember just, that's so different as a parent, you can relate in a different way. I mean, I imagine losing your daughter, you know, I can imagine losing a child and doing that eight times.

It, it, it would just, I can't even imagine how she would have moved past that. And, um, it was really cool because when my son was born to celebrate his birth, we did a charity water campaign and, um, we were surprised, but donors gave just from all over the world, gave a lot of money to, to honor him. And, um, he actually gave like, he got like 7,000 people clean water just by coming into the world. And she was one of the people. So his birthday campaign went and helped this woman who had lost eight children and hopefully, um, you know, you know, wouldn't lose any more children to bad water. So I think it's really given me a greater capacity to feel what parents,

the pain that parents must feel losing a child. It's really children that are the most vulnerable to this. So it's one of the leading causes of death for kids under five. Their immune systems are just too weak to fight off bad water. I mean, if you and I drink bad water, we're going to be sick. You know, we're going to, we might have diarrhea for weeks or we might vomit. But if we drink from a river, it's probably not going to kill us. If our three-year-olds drink from rivers, it's going to kill them. And they're just going to die of dysentery. They're going to, they're effectively going to die of dehydration.

That's what's killing kids. You drink bad water, your body can't process it. And then to cure diarrhea, right? We go get Pedialyte at the Duane Reade. You know, we rehydrate our children or ourselves whenever we get food poisoning or when sick. But if you're just going back to the same river water that made the kid sick,

the kid just basically dies of dehydration. They die of diarrhea, which would be so unthinkable for us. And when I started, it was 4,500 kids every day dying of bad water. Water even today is killing more people than all of the violence across the planet, including war. I mean, it's a huge, huge problem. So I think it's made being, being a parent, being a husband, um, has made me just, it's made the work more important. Um, there's a story I tell in the book of, of living in this village in Ethiopia where, um, I had heard the story and didn't think it was true, but as the story went, there was a 13 year old girl who was doing her eight hour walk for water. And, you know, you always just say,

really, like who's walking eight hours for water? I mean, that's an entire day, right? Why wouldn't they move closer to the water? I mean, you hear some of these things just in disbelief until you actually go to the village and walk eight hours and it took you nine, you know, and there was your whole day just on a one way trip. So, you know, as the story goes, she's walking eight hours for water every day. And she had this clay pot that she would use. And one day at the end of her journey, before she gets home and gives her parents the water, she slips and falls, busts her clay pot, and spills all of her water. And as the story was told to me, instead of going back for more water, she takes kind of the rope that she was using to tie the clay pot to her back.

And she ties it around her neck and she climbs a tree and she jumps. And she hangs herself next to her broken pot. And I remember thinking, maybe just an Ethiopian wives tale, you know, not true. But I wound up actually living in this village for a week and I wound up standing next to that tree where the elders found this 13 year old girl's body. And I visited her grave and I walked in her footsteps and I saw where she got water. And I met her best friend that walked with her that day and met her mom and learned about her story. And I mean, you know, I'm sure that people listening with teenagers, you know, no

13 year old girl should be hanging herself from a tree because she spilled her water. Her best friend thought she did it because she was just too ashamed to face her parents because she'd let them down. You know, she'd not only come home empty handed without water that they needed, but she'd also broken the clay pot, which was a valuable asset would have cost them, you know, four days wages maybe. So I think the, you know, four days wages maybe. So I think the, you know, being a parent, all of this stuff is just the, you turn up the dial a little more on the urgency

and on the emergency. And I remember coming back just angry. I mean, I was filled with rage that, you know, the injustice of it all. You know, this child wanted to be a nurse one day and help her village. She wanted to be a nurse one day and help her, her village. She wanted to bring a health clinic to her village and, you know, Leta Kiros never got that chance because of the situation she was born into. And, you know, my kids were born into a, you know,

middle-class family. You know, we live in a 1200 square foot apartment in New York city and, you know, I dropped them off at public school today, but there's water at the public school and their toilets. And, you know, Leta Kirios was born in a village with 2,800 people. There was no clean water. And that was her lot. So I think if we can, I really just believe if we can use our resources, if we can use what we have been blessed with, that we really didn't do anything to deserve. You know, we did not earn, you know, our, our luck in, in where we came out, um, and where we were born. You know, if we can use that position of power and influence and, um, and blessing to end the needless suffering of others, then it's really worth doing. I'm not going to say we have to do it because I think that's some of the old language, but what an amazing thing to be able to do. To be able to impact people's lives, to be able to fight for justice, to fight for basic needs, whether it's water or hunger or shelter or helping refugees. I mean, this is a gift that we are not a refugee, that we are not living without food or clean water. So I just, you know, we've been able to, I think, get, you know, well over a million people from 100 countries excited about Charity Water's mission and being a part of the community.

And that's really, you know, I'm flying up to Boston right after this to speak at a marketing conference that you and I both know well. And I'm just going to invite people at the end of the talk, like, hey, you want to join us? We're in year 12. We're getting actually over 3,500 new people clean water every day. So by the time I go to sleep tonight and wake up and have my day and go to sleep tomorrow night, another 3,500 people will get clean water. And isn't that fun to do? And that's because of the community. That's because six-year-old kids are donating their birthday and nine-year-olds are doing lemonade stands and 89-year-olds are fundraising for charity water. We had an amazing story, I think that I told it in Portland, we were together, you know,

this couple, the guy saved up 10 grand for a wedding ring, and he decides not to buy his wife a wedding ring. And they're both from India. And he said, let's buy a well in India and kick off our marriage with an act of radical generosity. You know, that's more important than a diamond. And let's make sure that, you know, people benefit from our union. So, I mean, it's so inspiring to be able to just hear these stories of people rejecting the apathy that is so easy to embrace when it comes with a paralyzing global issue like the water crisis and saying, hey, I can do something. I can have my voice. You know, I could sell a ring. I could, you know, a guy once was going to go buy a BMW and he bought a Prius instead. And he gave us the rest of the money and the difference.

You know, so you hear all of these creative ways that people contribute. Yeah. I mean, it's so powerful to hear all of those stories and to see the work that's been done. I mean, on all of the obvious levels. And also at the same time, because I feel like we are in a moment in sort of like popular society and culture and politics, where there's a lot of other happening. There's a lot of dehumanization happening. There's a lot of, well, I got to look out for me. It's me first. And if you're not me, deal. You know, I have no sense of, I don't want to use the word obligation for reasons similar to what you just said, but there's a sense of life is entirely about defining me and like who is just, you know, matters to me and only me. And devoting myself only to elevating like that person. I did that for 10 years. Didn't work out well for me.

And I think a lot, a lot of us have sort of like bought into that. And I only think what's happening culturally now is, is, is making that worse and worse and worse. So to know that, you know, there are these opportunities,

these invitations to take a moment and just hit pause and look out into the world and know that they're, but for God's grace go I. That there are people out there who are suffering in a huge way and that in a moment, I can very easily take a simple action that recognizes the humanity of somebody who I don't know, will likely never know, yet in some way I am gifted with the capacity to participate in something that makes their lives easier, maybe better, maybe healthier, maybe helps keep them alive.

I think the more that we have invitations and opportunities to reconnect with that, especially at this moment in time, I think the better off we all are as just like a human society. And that's where the org is going at the moment. For our 10th anniversary, we just launched this community called The Spring. And, you know, a lot of people have known Charity Water for the years, over the years of the donated birthdays and the fundraising campaigns. And that was amazing. People have donated over 50,000 birthdays and raised over $50 million through fundraising campaigns of all kinds. But what we found is that people only did one. It was this one action. It was almost like a drive-by.

I did my birthday. That was cool. And then they move on. So as we hit 10 years, we said, to make a really big impact, to get to 100 million people served, to get to a couple hundred million people, we're going to need to really build a community of people who are committed, kind of seeing this thing through. And we just looked at all the models out there. We looked at Netflix and Spotify and Dropbox. And we came across a stat that the average person now has 11 subscriptions. We're like, well, let's create a subscription program for pure good.

We're a hundred percent of the money goes directly to help people get clean water. People don't know this. We actually pay back the credit card fee transactions. So if someone gives a hundred bucks and we get 98, we make up the $2 difference. Our overhead donors actually pay Amex back so that we can send the full $100. And we launched this community called The Spring and we just invited people in. We said, look,

will you show up every month for clean water? It costs 30 bucks to give one person clean water, to move them from the river to a clean water source. It's $30 on average across all the countries where we work in. And that idea just started spreading. And it started in one country and two countries and three countries. And a couple of weeks ago, we just added our hundredth country into this community called The Spring. And it's interesting, we have people giving 10 bucks a month and college students will write us and say, I just canceled some gaming subscription so that I could give to this. We've had people cancel HBO and say, look, I feel like clean water is more important

than entertainment. We've been really blown away by this. And some people give a hundred bucks, some people give 30 bucks. It's really- And I feel like we want those opportunities, but I think a lot of us just don't want to have to do the work to figure out how to make it happen. So when you show up and you're like- yeah, we have a team that's ready. There's 650 people standing by around the world to take that money every month and turn it into clean

water for others. So that's the real focus for us is, you know, it's, it's up that community. I think it's up 220% year over year. I mean, we're seeing Charity Water grew 39% last year, you know, again, in a pretty flat sector. We're seeing people want to make a difference. And I think in this hyper political, almost toxic, caustic time, it's been really nice finding something that people can agree on. You know, we, you know, I mean, I guess I should say this because I talked about my faith, but Charity Water has never been a religious organization. And I get to live out my faith through my work. But, you know, it would be ridiculous that people would have to do what I do on a Sunday to work at the charity or contribute to the charity or volunteer.

So it's been a really big tent. We've been able to cast and, you know, Muslims and Jewish communities, we've had synagogues. I remember a synagogue sent us in a check once and said, this is the first non-Jewish organization we've ever given to in the history of our synagogue. But the values are too compelling and water is too important. You know, Muslim school kids from Dubai sending $40,000, you know, during Ramadan. So it's just been this, it's been really cool. Our biggest donor who's given over $15 million is an atheist thinks I am absolutely crazy. God is a figment of my imagination, but has come with me to 11 countries with his three children

and his wife. And it's been really cool to work with people of, you know, all faiths, of no faith in this redemptive work that, you know, I'm pretty sure, you know, I have a vision of what I think heaven looks like. And I know that kids are not hanging themselves from trees. I know that no woman is standing next to brown, viscous, dirty water watching a child die. No one's walking five hours. So in that, you know, that we can all build community and agree on something, you know, we have people on both ends of the political spectrum. I mean, I'm afraid sometimes of getting our donors in the same room together, you know, because of where they might be.

But that's actually the beautiful thing is that they both agree on clean water. So it's been, it's just been an amazing thing just been an amazing thing to vote more than a decade to and really no plans to stop. I mean, I think in some ways we're just getting good. It feels like we're at the very beginning of this journey, eight and a half million people down, 663 million to go. That's 178th of the problem solved.

There is a lot of work left to be done, but it also feels solvable. So if we kind of the problem solved, right? There is a lot of work left to be done, but it also feels solvable. So if we kind of come full circle, as we hang out here having this conversation, Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase after the full suite of experiences that you've had in your life,

to live a good life, what comes up? You know, this saying, do not be afraid of work that has no end, is one of my favorites lately. It's from an ancient rabbinic text. Somebody sent me a picture of this hanging outside a bodega 10 years ago. And this idea of positioning your life to be unselfish, to care about others, to use what you have to end needless suffering, I think ends up with a very, very good life. You know, for me, for so many years, it was all the pursuit of selfishness. It was the pursuit of me. And as I've been able to really redirect that energy into serving others, you know, I found such happiness. I found such freedom. I've really found

such a good life. You know, as you said, I mean, such freedom. I've really found such a good life. You know, as you said, I mean, I have an amazing wife. I have two beautiful kids and I don't, I don't have the aspirations of a really big house or a nice car. You know, I drive a Kia Sorento. I love it. You know, the, the real positional aspiration, you know, I would love to have more money so that I could give more money away. know, I would love to have more money so that I could give more money away. Personally, I give away a lot of advice now to other charities.

I'd love to write a million dollar check to a charity at some point and change the game for them like somebody did for me many, many years ago. So I think it's a life of service to others. I believe that the more you give, the more you give. So if you can get yourself in the practice of giving you almost become addicted to that giving rather than

I think the old saying is it's more blessed to give than to receive all those things are true there's a real joy in giving in serving others thank you thanks for having me thank you so much for having me. button in your listening app so you never miss an episode and then share the Good Life Project love with friends. When ideas become conversations that lead to action,

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