The Bill Simmons Podcast - Ep. 101: Charity: Water's Scott Harrison

Episode Date: May 20, 2016

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons with charity: water's founder, Scott Harrison, on his foundation's goal of solving the global water crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get ready. Stuff is happening. Let's go. I'm here with a guy I met last night named Scott Harrison, who runs Charity Water, a charity that is great. And I heard all about it last night and i basically corralled him at the end of the podcast or the end of the night and said you're coming on my podcast tomorrow and you're gonna tell your story and people are gonna care so let's go we haven't really done a podcast like this um that i can remember um i think it's important I think it's an important cause. And I think the story is really great. So let's start. Where do you want to start?

How far do you want to go back? Let's go back to when you were a club promoter and you were just 18 in New York City as an act of utter rebellion against my very conservative upbringing. And I had a weird family situation growing up. My mom got super sick when I was four. She got carbon monoxide poisoning, which almost killed her. It didn't, but it knocked out her immune system. So she just was allergic to everything growing up and was an only child, you know, played by all the rules, helped to take care of her. But I always was looking at my friends and wished I had their lives and, you know, their normal moms. And I think I used to feel a little sorry for myself. So at 18, I said, look, now it's my turn. And I just couldn't believe that you could make money

drinking for free. I mean, if you're going to rebel, you might as well rebel in style. Yeah. Just fell in love with New York nightlife. I went down a slide at this place called Club USA, and I just fell in love with the music, with the scene. I spent the next 10 years really trying to climb up to the top of the food chain in nightlife to become king of New York.

Let's say I got to top eight. There were about four groups running, uh, fashion and nightlife. And it was a, it was a crazy life. I mean, so what, give us a year range for this. When is this happening? This is, uh, early 2000s to 2004. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So early 2000. So it was, uh, tunnel, the limelight life, Lotus, Lotus, Pangea, Halo. We probably worked at 30 different venues over the decade. And that was the unique thing about being a club promoter. You didn't have any equity in the place. So the minute it wasn't cool anymore, you just took all your people and you went to the next place.

Yeah. So you didn't have to kind of open up to the bridge and tunnel. You didn't have to see of open up to the bridge and tunnel or you didn't, you didn't have to see that sad decline as people said, Oh, well we did this. Let's move on to the next. You have to go to the next. So one of the problems I think with, with my life over those 10 years is I picked up every vice that you can imagine. Uh, started smoking two packs of Marlboro Reds at 18, started drinking heavily,

uh, gambling, pornography, strip clubs, pretty much any drug short of heroin. And although our lives look glamorous, we'd jump into cars with beautiful girls and fly around the world to Fashion Week. It was a kind of soul-sucking, you know, it was a soul-sucking life. And I remember this one moment at noon, I was on Houston street in New York city, looking out a window and I hadn't been to bed yet. So you, you know what it takes to stay up until noon. And I'm looking at people in suits on their lunch break. I realized I'm going to go to sleep and wake up at 8 PM, you know, and do this all over again. And, and something had to change. It wasn't a, it wasn't right. And I was, was very fortunate. I came to my senses. I was in South America on this opulent

New Year's Eve vacation. And, you know, with a decade in the business, I remember there was this party at the house and I wanted it to end. And two days later, the party was still going on. And here we were in this peaceful setting. There were horses, we'd rented servants and people would not get off of our property. The music was pounding. And I just have this vivid memory of wanting the music to stop, really wanting the music to stop in my life. And realize on this trip, I had become the worst person I knew. I'd, I'd betrayed the values, the morality, the spirituality of, of my, my childhood and was, you know, probably going to die before the age of 50. If I continued on this path. Well, you just laid out was like the first 20 minutes of a movie, right? Fast life, fast living, waking up at four in the afternoon. But it's real though. I mean, this was 10 years of your life. So you're only like 28 at this point, right? I was 28. Yeah. 18, 28. So,

you know, I have this cathartic moment and, um, you know, I start rediscovering a very lost faith as a kid and I, you know, I had, I was made to go to church and all that. I think, um, I was really interested as I, you know, picked it up again in what would a life look like that served others? And I kind of discovered this concept of serving the poor. I had done nothing for the poor. I mean, I served myself and myself alone for a decade. I remember this one party we threw where we attached the charity to the invitation for the big club party. And we said we would give a percentage of profits.

And then we gave 1%. Right. And that was kind of who I was. Yeah, you leveraged the charity name. To make more money and give the very minimum. And that was what my life was like. And I didn't want to live that way anymore. And, you know, I'm a pretty radical guy. So after coming back from Punta del Este from this vacation, um, I struggle for a few months trying to figure out what's next, but I wind up selling everything that I own in that, in the summer. Uh, I liquidate my DVD collection on eBay and a lot for like a thousand or so, 2000 DVDs, get rid of everything. And I'd rent a cobalt blue Ford Mustang, grab a bottle of Dewars. I grab a Bible and I start heading north and I have no idea where I'm going. I'm just getting out of the city. And I wind up in Maine in a dial-up internet cafe on

Moosehead Lake. And I remember in this internet cafe saying, I'm going to make my life look exactly the opposite. And I'm going to start applying to serve the poor and volunteer with a humanitarian organization. So over the next couple of days, I'm filling out applications for the, you know, UNICEFs of the world, Save the Children, World Vision, these big organizations. And I wanted to do a year, almost as penance or kind of a tithe for the 10 years that I'd selfishly wasted and, and see what it felt like to serve others. See if I actually had anything to offer. So what happens? Well, I'm denied by every organization because my resume, you have to pay to actually join. Well, that's it. So every organization that I apply to won't take me except one organization said

they would take me, but I had to pay them $500 every month that I was to won't take me except one organization said they would take me, but I had to pay them $500 every month that I was going to volunteer. Do you think they didn't trust you because of your background? They just figured you were going through a phase. They didn't want to bank on you. I think a lot of people do. I mean, on paper, right. I remember actually in this application, they asked, it was, it was a very conservative organization. They asked, do you drink? And I said, you know, excessively, do you smoke two packs a day? Then I wrote this, this long essay about, I really want to change my life. And you know, my, my heart is kind of turned in a different direction and I want this opportunity. So most people just wouldn't even touch me.

And this is a guy that fills up clubs with drunk people for, for 10 years. And of course they were serious humanitarians doing serious work. And this one group says, yeah, if you pay us $500 a month, and this was actually the model where everybody paid, and this is how they raised money. So they actually raised money off of their volunteers. It was an interesting model.

And then they said, I would have to go live in Liberia. So I'd never heard of Liberia at the time. I was not up on Charles Taylor's 14-year civil war child soldiers. And, you know, I was up on vintages of champagne or, you know, whatever the hottest club in Paris fall of that year, I sail into West Africa for the first time on a huge hospital ship. And that was the mission. It was a 500-foot ship. Doctors from 40 countries would give up their vacation time. They would fly in, and then they would just operate for free on people who had no access to medical care. So there was a cap on the operations they could do,

right? And they were never enough. We never had enough doctors. We never had enough resources. So we would, if we were able to help 1500 people, 7,000 people would turn up. And that was incredibly difficult. I remember just weeping my third day there, staring at a sea of people that we had turned away. We'd shut the doors of the football stadium because we'd filled up every single surgery slot. The government had literally given us a football stadium to see the thousands of people that had come. And, you know, just give you a picture of Liberia at the time. There was one doctor for every 50,000 citizens. I think here in America, we have a doctor for every 180 citizens.

So if you got sick, you were done. And you had people walking like a month to get to this football stadium and they had what, a 20% chance of getting sick? They didn't know that at the time. They just heard that there were these doctors that could help them. So it was a really emotional experience. I was, my actual job, my volunteer job was to be the photojournalist and write stories of the impact in these lives. So the cool thing was that I went to Africa with a built-in audience because I had 15,000 people on my nightclub list. So they go, I mean, in what seemed like an instant for them, you know, from getting invited to fashion parties to pictures of tumors and leprosy and cleft lips and blindness and people that had been burned during the war and telling the stories of these doctors who were helping them. So I think I realized there that I had this power of a storyteller.

I'd been a promoter. I'd just been promoting the wrong thing. For 10 years I'd said, hey, get past the velvet rope, spend a couple grand on booze, and your life has meaning. Sit with the pretty girls or the pretty thing. For 10 years, I'd said, hey, get past the velvet rope, spend a couple grand on booze, and your life has meaning. Sit with the pretty girls or the pretty guys, and if the right celebs are in the club, you've arrived. And I was just faced with the opposite story, which is, you know, serve others, give the best of yourselves. Instead of taking your family to Mystique, these doctors would take their families to Liberia, and they would operate for free for a month and then go back to work.

So I was so inspired by the selflessness that I saw and was trying to communicate that to my club list. And as I was telling you last night, the club list got a little smaller. Right. There was a mass unsubscribe, you know, with that first wave of aggressive poverty. Well, people probably thought you'd lost your mind, right? You're like this fun promoter guy.

People thought I was trying to get girls. Oh, really? To be quite honest. They're like, oh, great. So Scott's turned into a humanitarian now. Oh, this is like

a new move for you. Wow. I mean, I think people were a little skeptical at first, right? I mean, this is a guy that they would party with at 5 or 6 a.m.

And now all of a sudden, you know, he's flying to Africa to, you know, go's flying to Africa to, you know, go serve the poor. I mean, there was definitely a, come on. Right. Um, but I stuck it out. And then a year later, um, I, I came back and I actually put on an exhibition for a lot of friends in nightlife in a gallery of the, some of the 50,000 photos that I'd taken. And I raised about a hundred thousand dollars from that nightclub community. And then I went back for another year to show my friends what I'd done, what we had done with their money and the impact

that it could make. So it was really in that second tour that I found my way to water, got off the ship, got out of the operating theaters and spent time in the rural areas and in these remote villages. And I just couldn't believe what people were drinking. You know, I had never seen people drink from swamps before. Never seen kids drink from rivers. And water for me was, I mean, I was born in a middle-class family in Philadelphia, and I had clean water my entire life. I used to sell Voss water in the clubs for $10.

People would come in, buy 10, 20 bottles, not even open them. Just leave them there on the table and then walk out of the club. The visuals, when you do your presentation of the water that some of the locals are holding, it's, you can't even believe it. We wouldn't give it to our dogs. Yeah. It's like a dark yellow. It almost looks like when there's a muddy puddle and that's what they drink. And it's like the animals are going to the bathroom in the water and they just, just don't have any other choice. It's shocking. And, you know, just on a human level, I mean, something inside you just breaks.

And it's, you know, there's a mixture of outrage with the injustice. How can human beings live like this? How is it possible that kids are dying of diarrhea because they are drinking bad water every single day? How is it possible that women are walking eight hours with 40 pounds of nasty water on their back, you know, and simply because of where they're born? And I think that's what struck me early on. I didn't choose to be born in Philadelphia. These women didn't choose to be born in Ethiopia or in rural India or in, you know, a village

in Cambodia with no access to clean water. So it was that second tour. I'm 29 at the time, and I'm like, oh, my gosh. Well, people are sick because of the water, and half of the people in this country don't have clean water to drink. So let's not send more doctors. Let's not go build more hospital ships. Let's go and address the root cause of so much of this sickness and nobody had really thought this way before about water right everyone was coming up with

all these more elaborate ways to and then it's like meanwhile the water would have been the easiest way to do it i mean you would have thought i mean the biggest kind of water organization was like a 12 million dollar a year charity i mean yeah and and there were a billion people at the time without access to water so i couldn't believe. None of my friends knew anything about a water crisis. Nobody was talking about this. And it just made sense to me. I mean, now 10 years later, you know, I know what water actually means and I can make the case for health and education and economic empowerment and the time that it gives back women and how that time turns into money. Back then, it was just, people shouldn't be drinking muddy, viscous, brown, nasty water. Yeah.

On a human level. Like, this isn't okay. Well, you had that. And then you also had, you had the locals walking, I mean, how many hours back and forth to get the disgusting water to bring back? So they're spending, what, eight hours round trip and the water's not even clean? You know, people that are listening, it's hard to imagine. And I feel sometimes I say that and, you know, eyes just glaze over eight hours.

What does that even mean? Yeah. I mean, it is true. We hear this. Women, you know, we hear the craziest stuff. These walks for water, women getting attacked by hyenas, women getting raped sometimes because they're so far from the villages. And, you know, a bunch of people have come with me. And one of the questions people ask is, well, why don't they just move?

I'm like, go ask the community yourself. And the common answer with a variation of themes is, where do you want us to move? You know, this is our land. This is where we grow our food. We don't know how to survive in a slum. You know, we have nowhere to go. So we walk to the water. And we're hoping that someday, you know, our government is able to help us or, you know, this problem existed, and yet we knew how to solve it. There's no magic cure. There's no silver bullet for water. A lot of different things work in a lot of different situations, but not a single person right now needs to drink dirty water. Not a single person needs to walk eight hours. Well, explain that there's six different ways you can clean up water, right? The easiest one is just drilling into the ground. Yeah, we drill a lot of wells. We can build mountain springs, gravity-fed systems,

rainwater systems, biosand filters, a bunch of different solutions. The irony in so many of these communities is that they are living on top of clean water. It's just way down there. They're living on top of the water that could save their lives. There was this story in Ethiopia once where our local partners had come in, they were drilling a well, you know, 500 people gather around to watch what happens. And there's a woman off to the side and she's weeping. She's literally sobbing. And they'd hit water. So the water's kind of gushing up and people are dancing and clapping. And this one woman is just in anguish. And our local partners walk up to her and say,

this is a happy day. Like, why are you, why are you sad? Did something happen? And she said, do you need to tell me that my entire life I was walking eight hours a day and there was water underneath my feet? and it was this horrible realization that you know the the thing that could have saved how many thousands ten thousand and fifty thousand hours um the thing that could have saved the lives of so many of those kids in the village was 250 feet beneath her feet and so how do they find out because you obviously you just don't get a drill and just drill into the ground. You have to have a general idea of where the water might be, right? It's not everywhere.

That's right. They're hydrologists on site and it's a mixture of shocking the ground. I mean, we've seen people use paddles almost like you would use to resuscitate people in the ground to understand rock formations and where the aquifers are. Others will look at eucalyptus trees. And if there's a huge clump of eucalyptus trees, there's water because those roots need a lot of water. Um, there's one guy in a central African Republic that runs around with the stick and he's right over 95% of the time. So it's a little, it's crazy watching him do that. that yeah but there is often water underground and the communities don't have access to a million dollars of drilling rigs and equipments and compressors and trucks and the the skilled hydrologists but they are willing to contribute

the labor and i have so many stories bill over the years of uh community members spending months to build roads to get the rigs in um hauling stone, hauling gravel, hauling rock, putting up all the drillers, feeding them, hosting them in the village. So there is a sense of so many people want to be involved. They want to help in the construction, but they don't have $10,000 to drill a well, and they don't have access to a million dollars of drilling equipment. And that's where we're able to help. And that's what you figured out is $10,000 basically to drill well

and get these people water. We don't have the video. Obviously, it's only an audio-only podcast. But when you drill and the water comes up, it's a little like in the inner cities when they let the fire hydrants go and the water's spraying around and everybody's kind of dancing underneath it. That's basically what happens every time they do this. It's amazing. It's this around, and everybody's kind of dancing underneath it. That's basically what happens every time you do this. It's amazing.

It's this dancing, singing, clapping, the kids splashing. People understand how their village will change, and we often hear that this is a moment in time. People describe before the water came and after the water came as this catalytic moment in the history of the village. Not too long ago, I was in Ethiopia, and I got to go to some of our oldest projects that were, it's eight years old now. And it's an amazing thing to see water flowing in the middle of nowhere eight years later. And I knew the donors who had sponsored those projects. And I was looking around

in this village at all of the kids eight and under, and I realized they never knew the nasty water their parents knew. They have never had dirty water if they were seven or six or five or four. So just the idea that this piece of infrastructure, this moment literally broke a cycle of despair and of poverty and of disease.

And the kids won't know that. So it's an amazing thing to be able to do, as you can imagine. Let's talk about the dirty water and some of the effects. Because one of the stories you told was you just grabbed a bottle from this one kid you saw that was disgusting, and you brought it back to New York, and you actually had it tested. Yeah, and it was alive. Like literally alive.

Literally alive. Literally moving and cells replicating. 53% of all the disease throughout the developing water is caused by bad water and a lack of sanitation. And everybody's heard of cholera. Everybody's heard of E. coli. There are all these diseases people haven't heard of. Bilharzia, I'd never heard of cholera. Everybody's heard of E. coli. There are all these diseases people haven't heard of. Bilharzia, I'd never heard of. Schistosomiasis, parasites, worms, amoebas that literally attack the liver. And it's terrible to see. I mean, sometimes even skin conditions, if you're not

able to wash, you wind up with these funguses we'll see because people aren't able to keep their bodies clean because there's so little water so it's a huge huge problem and the thought of being able to play doctor um without bringing in medicine just by providing the most basic health need was just such a compelling idea again i just couldn't believe people weren't talking about this 10 years ago and what about uh you have all these women you have have two sets of women that it destroys. One is the ones that hit puberty and go to school and now they don't want to go to school anymore because there's no water. And like explain that part.

Yeah, well, bringing water to schools is really important and not just bringing water, but also bringing toilets. So many girls, as you mentioned, will, will hit puberty. And if there's no toilet at their school, if there's no clean water, they stay home, you know, four or five days a month. They're ashamed. They're ashamed. And it culturally, um, well, you fall behind in your studies and the parents say, Oh, you shouldn't be in school getting educated anyway. Go collect the firewood, go get the water, go cook, go, you know, fix up the house. And we realized this is, this issue is so much about women and girls. Um, you know, I was telling a story last night, this horrible story from Ethiopia where this 13 year old girl was walking eight hours every day.

And one day she comes back into her village and right before she reaches the house, she spills her water. She just slips and falls. And she breaks this clay pot that the water's in. And instead of going back to the water, she hangs herself. It was it. That was her last walk for water. She couldn't do it anymore. And she felt, I actually lived in this village for a week and met the people that knew her. And they said she would have been overcome with shame that she'd let her family down. That water was so precious. They needed that for dinner. They needed a cook.

And her carelessness was going to cause her family to suffer, not getting the dirty water that she'd walked for. So it is incredibly extreme. It's a really human issue that affects women. It affects girls. And being able to bring clean water, it's been the most amazing thing. And then the second part is the grown-up woman, they spend the whole day just going back and forth. Just back and forth. And that's it. And we'll hear stories when women get this time back in the day.

I'll tell you my favorite story. It was from Northern Uganda. And a woman had been walking, this woman named Helen Appio had been walking hours every single day. And she had a husband and two kids. And she would take about 10 gallons of water. That was all she could carry on two trips. Now that's two toilet flushes for us. So kind of imagine, you know, hitting the toilet dinger twice. And that is the entire amount of water for a family of four. Yeah. So we were able, Charity Water was able to provide a well in her village,

and our team went in afterwards and just said, hey, Helen, how is your life different now? I mean, have we impacted your life, and how? And Helen says, I feel beautiful now. I said, okay, of course, you're a beautiful woman. Of course you're beautiful. What does that mean? She said, well, you don't understand.

Before the water came in, because I had so little water, I would have to make these choices every single day. Would I cook? Would I clean? Would I wash my kids' bodies? Would I wash their school uniforms? Would I wash my husband's body? Would I wash his clothes? And she said, as the woman of the house, I never use the water for myself.

I always put my family first. So I never felt clean and I couldn't wash my clothes or my body. And she said, now for the first time, I have enough water and I feel beautiful. And we'd never thought of that before, Bill. I mean, we talk about health and stats and the fact that something so many of us take for granted every single day, just by increasing the quantity could restore dignity to a beautiful woman, an amazing mom who cared deeply for her family and sacrificed her own cleanliness, her own looks so that her family could have the water. Being able to make her feel beautiful. I mean, it's a special thing.

So when you started this, how many people didn't have water? And what is the number right now? It was a billion and it has come down to 663 million. Wow. So a lot of great work has been done. The water now has its own Millennium Development Goal. So some of the awareness and the movement over the last 10 years, you know, you've heard about these Millennium Development Goals where the UN meets and says, these are all the things

the world needs, and we're going to make progress over the next 15 years. Believe it or not, water didn't have one. I mean, malaria, right? People were talking about hunger and malaria and some of these justice issues, but water didn't have one. I mean, malaria, right? People were talking about hunger and malaria and some of these justice issues, but water didn't have it. So it now has a global goal. A lot more energy is being put behind this. We're seeing governments step up as well and try to provide water for their own people. It's another question I get. Well, what are the governments doing? The governments are working on this project. They just, they have so little money. They do not have the resources to give everyone in their country clean water, to provide healthcare,

to provide great education. You know, the, the budgets, the GDP, it's, it's a fraction of what's needed. So that's why, um, you know, the, the generous people that have given to charity water over the years are able to kind of come in and supplement that and change people's lives. So how many countries are basically you guys targeting with this at this point? We've worked in 24 historically. We're now going deeper in 13. So it's a mix of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa

where the problem is extreme. Working throughout India and Southeast Asia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan. And it's different everywhere. So for instance, in Nepal, we can't drill wells, but there are mountain springs at the very top of these mountains. So we're able to go out, build kind of giant boxes around them.

We then run them through sand filters and we use gravity to take them down to the different communities. Oh, that's cool. In Cambodia, we're teaching women build kind of giant boxes around them. We then run them through sand filters and we use gravity to take them down to the different communities. And that's cool. In Cambodia, we're teaching women how to build bio sand filters, which costs about $65.

There's surface water everywhere, but it's contaminated. So they're then able to go collect the surface water, which is nearby the house, but clean it. So the idea of a solution agnostic approach has been very important to us. Whatever works in that context, the goal is to make sure that people get clean water. And we focused on the rural areas.

So we're not working in the big cities. We're not working in the peri-urban environments. We're working really in these remote villages where people need the most help. And what are the safety issues of the people that are doing there? Because some of these countries that you're in are not exactly democratic. Bill, I'm not going to lie. I've had armed guards and 50 Cal guns following us in pickup trucks in some places and getting up at 4 in the morning while it's dark

and driving four hours out to the villages and making sure we get back in time. But our safety in the, so this was a country called Niger in West Africa. And when I got out to the villages where we were doing the work, I met this amazing woman named Aisa. And I saw her drinking the most disgusting water I think I've ever seen in 10 years from this horrible open well. And through a translator, I learned her story. And she told me she'd lost eight children. She'd had 10 children, she'd lost eight. She knew all their names, she knew all their ages. If that wasn't bad enough, and I don't know how someone could get through that kind of grief or pain or suffering. She then falls into an open well

with one of her two remaining children. She saves her child from drowning. She's at the bottom. She lifts her child, basically holding her child out of the water until the village comes. They send down a rope. They pull up the child.

They pull her up, but she's in a coma at this point for three days. And she has to go back to that same water wow so she comes out of a coma and her child was alive and she has to go back to that same dirty water at that same well and you know you start to think a little less of your safety yeah when when you get a chance to you know advocate for someone like that and she actually has clean water now so So that story ended really well. I had done a birth campaign for my son and just realizing that he was going to be born into, you know, a middle class life of privilege. I wanted his birth to actually help people get clean water. And a bunch of people came, our friends and our family and, and donated as, as he was being born.

And that money actually went to her village. So kind of cool just knowing that that woman I met in the desert, you know, in the middle of nowhere, a little scared for where we were, now has clean water. And her life is different now. When we come back, Scott's going to explain how he grew the Charity Water organization over these last few years. You might be busy like me. You might be launching a TV show and a website in the same month and you don't have any time to shop. Whether it's for the office, the club, your daughter's two-day soccer tournament, a dinner event, it doesn't matter. You just don't have the time.

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All you really need is an internet connection, and you are ready to go. Start watching for seven days for free at sling.com slash bill Simmons and get sling TV on your favorite device restrictions do apply. And now back to Scott Harrison. All right. We're back with Scott Harrison from charity water. Um,

one of the things that I thought was really cool about what you, what last night was that you basically figured out a way for every single penny that gets donated to Charity Water to actually go into the water. And I know I'm probably not the only one who feels this way. Sometimes with charities, you never know how much goes and what the transparency is and things like that. I thought it was fascinating that you were able to build your website in like the highest class way possible for technology where people can not only follow the donations and where the money goes, but also if they donated a well, like the wells cost $10,000, you can find out where they're putting the well. You can track it. Explain all that stuff.

Yeah. Okay, well, now let's go back to the founding moment. So I've run around getting drunk for 10 years. I go to West Africa. I volunteer for two years. I quit everything, I should say. So, I mean, I really had this cold turkey moment where I believe that I just needed to shed the vices. I had to kind of live out a new story, and just needed to shed the vices. I had to kind of live out a new story and I had to leave the baggage behind. So I never smoked again. I never gambled

again. I never touched Coke again. I never looked at porn or set foot in a strip club. I just dropped everything over those two years. So when I came back, I was really unrecognizable to my friends. Yeah. And, you know, they didn't think I was doing it to get girls anymore because I wasn't partying with them and I was asking them to give money. I was showing them pictures of dirty water and saying, will you help? You know, this is on fire and it's emergency. Help me help people. So at the, as I was talking to my friends, I mean, I, the mission really, I wanted to work to see a world where no one drank dirty water simply because of where they're born. I just couldn't believe it. It happened. I believed that that was the future I wanted to create for my children and my grandchildren one day, where no guy like me, you know,

they're listening to a podcast, where some guy like me is talking about women who are losing eight kids or walking eight hours or kids who can't go to school. So that's the mission, bring clean drinking water to every single person on earth. However, as I was talking to my friends, there's this huge distrust for charities out there. With reason. With reason. 42% of Americans don't trust charities.

Now we have this amazing heart to give. We have this cultural heritage of generosity, and Americans are known for being incredibly generous. But yet almost half the people don't trust the system. Biggest problem is around money. Where does my money go? And how much will actually reach these people? And, you know, you said with good reason.

Yes, some charities have really screwed the public. They have, in the fine print, taken money elsewhere. You know, high expenses. Charity CEOs making millions and millions of dollars, hiring cousins and nieces and nephews. And Anderson Cooper used to do that week-long special where he would chase the bad charity CEOs and they would slam the door in his face. And all of America throws up their hands and says, this is why I don't give. And the celebrities, too, who have their cousin running it and the cousins stealing money from it.

And yeah, you have all those stories. Or paying themselves to perform at their own charity events. Yeah, I make $290,000 a year to run my cousin's charity. There are enough of these stories that people seem to have them in the back pocket. And I thought, OK, well, the only way we're going to start, we're going to solve a problem as big as the water crisis is to get some of these disenchanted people back to the table and get them to take another look. So the big idea was, could we find a way to use 100% of public donations and just take that excuse off the table? How much of my money goes? 100%.

Right. Not 90, not 90, 500. Every time. Without exception. And to do that, we would have to go figure out how to pay for overhead as we built this organization. So the overhead is the organization itself, plus if somebody uses Amex, you got the Amex fees and flights, everything. Well, that came later. But the first idea was just two bank accounts.

Publix money goes in one bank account, only goes out to directly build Water Project. Somehow, second bank account, I'm going to run around and convince people it's cool to pay for the overhead and build the organization. But they would know what they were getting. There would just be no fungible money, no big pot, two separate accounts. Then I thought, well, if we're going to say 100%, it has to be a real 100%. So we actually need to pay back credit card fees. Because if I walked out of your office, you went on our website, you pulled out your Amex, you dropped 10 grand for a water project. Unfortunately, I don't get $10,000. I get 9,750 or 9,700. So we agreed to actually make up the difference and send $10,000.

So I'm actually putting money I didn't even get from your donation into the field so that we could say 100% with integrity. So that's where you find some rich people to help out cover your overhead. That's the idea. But it was very difficult at the beginning. Yeah. I mean, I'm living on a closet floor in Soho at the time, running around telling people that I want to solve the water crisis in my lifetime. Oh, and by the way, use 100% of public donations.

I mean, people thought I was crazy. Yeah. They're like, this is the stupidest thing we have ever heard of. You're going to be living on a couch forever. Yeah. 90%, 80%. Um, but anyway, I was resolute in that. And the second thing was, could we just use technology to connect donors to the impact that their gifts had had? And I thought charities just did such a bad job. You give money to a charity, they send you a tax receipt, then they just ask you for more money. Yeah. It wasn't, here's what I did with your money, Bill. Thank you so much. Here are the people that you helped. And in the age of social media tools like Google Earth and Google Maps, we were moving towards a

more transparent society. And if we adapted those technology tools, we could use them to connect donors. So the first moment of Charity Water, day one, was actually a party in a nightclub for my 31st birthday. And I got 700 people to come. I gave them an open bar for an hour to get them there. And then I charged them $20 on the way in. Instead of pocketing $15,000 cash, we took every single penny and we did our first few water projects. That would have been great.

But then we sent the photos and the GPS back to those 700 people. And they just couldn't believe it. I mean, you know, imagine going to a party throwing 20 bucks in a bin, and then you get a report on where your money went, you get to see video of these, these projects with clean water flowing and meet the people that you impacted. So we literally baked that into the business model, we got so excited about showing supporters their impact that we said, let's just look for a million different ways to do that. And I think the most important thing about the business model was not sending Westerners to Africa or to India or to Asia to go and dig wells. As I traveled, I'd seen these amazing local organizations who were great at well drilling or

building springs or building these rainwater systems or any of these different solutions. They were all locals that understood the context and understood how to make this work sustainable. However, they were terrible at raising money or telling their story. We worked with an organization once in Ethiopia that had 500 people in the water department. They had one email address.

You just send one email to the organization. I'm like, I don't even know how, like, did 500 people in the water department, they had one email address. You just send one email to the organization. And like, I don't even know how, like, did 500 people get it? I mean, that wasn't their skill set, but they're extraordinary in going out and providing clean water for people. So we were going to give away 100% of the money. We were going to always just tell donors what we did with their money, look for ways to take disenfranchised people and restore their faith in giving, restore their faith in the system.

And then we would work through locals because we believed for it to be culturally relevant, for it to be sustainable, it had to be led by the locals. So everything goes great. The party goes. We start raising millions of dollars because this 100% model is very powerful. And then about a year and a half into the org,

we almost go bankrupt. And everybody is going to be right. I have $880,000 in the bank account for the water projects. And I'm about to miss the next payroll and not be able to pay our nine employees at the time. And I'd just been scrapping so hard to get people excited about paying for salaries, right? It's not that sexy. So it was interesting. The advice I was getting Bill from my friends was, Hey dude, borrow from the $880,000. Like write a little IOU. You got to make payroll. You got to pay the people that are working on this project. Yeah. And I remember being so offended by that idea that we would betray the public's trust by

taking one penny from that account. The whole thing would be over. The foundation would be cracked. We might as well all go home in shame if that happened. So I was actually going to shut the organization down, send all $800,000, build as many water projects as possible, and say this business model didn't work. And I was very fortunate. I remember praying at the time with very little faith,

like praying for some sort of miracle, and I meet a complete stranger. I meet a guy from technology. He came in the office. We had a two-hour meeting. I thought he actually didn't like me. I thought the meeting went terribly, and I just laid out the vision.

I said, look, this 100% model, it's working. It's powerful. People are making their first gift to charity. People that have never given before are saying, wow, I can try that. I think I can trust that. But yet I'm about to go bankrupt over here because I haven't figured out the business model.

So after this terrible two-hour meeting where I think this guy doesn't like me, he leaves. Two days later, I get an email from him saying, hey, I wired a million dollars into your overhead account. And we go from almost shutting the organization down to over 13 months of salaries paid for. And he said, I believe in you. You just need more time.

And, you know, at the time, I thought it was the money. Now, 10 years, it was really the belief. It was that someone believed in, you know, my crazy vision as this, you know, social entrepreneur, I guess at the time and wanted to give me more time to work it out. And in that year, um, we found other people and now there are 110 people, 110 families from all over the world that pay for the staff and the overhead. Why do you think it's resonated with so many people in the tech community? I think it's the way that we do things. I mean, we have... Is it because you were basically a startup and they appreciate the mentality? It feels like a startup. It totally feels like a startup. If you walk through our office, everything is glass. We actually got over a million dollars

of stuff donated for our headquarters. Do you have a ping pong table? We have a ping pong table, pool table. We actually have a giant regulation shuffleboard table. Oh, nice. thing but listen to this story so we love getting stuff for free player in the world we love getting stuff for free i actually there's a there's a legendary company in manhattan called blat billiards and i said i bet no charity has ever asked blat billiards to donate a ping pong table a pool table and a regulation shuffleboard table. So we pitch them. Yeah. And they're like, we can't do it completely for free, but we'll build it at absolute cost.

So they come in and they gave us this amazing, amazing ping pong table, pool table, and shuffleboard at cost. And that's the spirit of the organization. Samsung donated $50,000 of TVs for headquarters. WeWork pulled stuff out of their warehouses and gave us furniture. People donated light fixtures, rugs. It's really this idea of using that 100% model. The money that we raise, we really want to pay our people.

And we'd love to get everything else for free, from our web hosting to our computers, everything we can. So this model works. We have more life. The organization kind of starts to take off. And we realized there were people who wanted to come in and pay for the overhead. They wanted to serve the organization. If they knew that that's where their money was going, they were open to that value proposition. So you're at 663 million. Where are you in two years? So we're helping a million people a year now.

So our piece over the last, um, nine and a half years, we turned 10 in September. We've given 6.1 million people clean water. So we're about, we're going to be at seven by the end of the year. So we'll actually be, we'll have solved more than 1% of the global problem,

which there's other people helping to like, do you think we can get to 500 million by the end of the decade? Is that realistic? I think we can. I absolutely think we can. I think there's so much more energy and passion and support for water now than there ever was. And I think we want to keep that. It's really the easiest thing to fix.

Like all these diseases that we have, sometimes there's not even a cure you're giving money to to research for a cure and research and all that stuff which is equally admirable but there's no guarantee with this it's like yeah once the water comes and here's how we do it and then it fixes this this this and this it seems like the cleanest simplest way to help people it really is i remember getting a call once from a random call out of the blue from a celebrity who had been working in HIV AIDS for years. And she calls and says, I'm changing my issue because I've been fighting for ARV treatment, but I've learned the kids are dying of diarrhea.

Right. We're literally giving them medicine with river water. And, you know, I think it just makes... I didn't know that till last night that somebody could actually just die from having diarrhea. So you die of dehydration. Yeah. So that's it. You,

if, I mean, I guess I did know that, but I never really thought about it. Yeah. Right. If you think about like going to the Duane Reade or whatever, and there's that blue bottle of like electrolyte and yeah,

that's, that's when you're, that's what you do. You rehydrate, which gets you out of the cycle. So it's a terrible cycle of river water, diarrhea, more river water, more diarrhea, death by dehydration if you're under five. Thousands of kids every day die under five. So I think, you know, yes, we're making progress.

Charity Water, thanks to our, we've had a million supporters to the organization now. They've given about $210 million towards this. And we're able to help an average about 2,700 people a day. So we're on a clip every 30 seconds. Our community is stepping up in different ways and helping one person get clean water. We want to go faster. I mean, that's why I'm on the road making 150 talks a year,

trying to invite six-year-old kids to go do lemonade stands. But some of this has been successful. Like your Twitter account, the Charity Water Twitter account, is like one and a half million people now? Yeah. And your Facebook, what do you have for that? I think 300,000. You use social media really well, yeah.

Yeah, we're actually the first charity to use Instagram. There's a guy in my office now doing Snapchat, and I don't really understand it that well, but he just puts it in my face and says, say something. You could do Snapchat stories when you go, like when you're building a well, like that could easily be a whole. And that's just, we're always looking for that. I mean, we're looking to Periscope from the field, you know, live drilling. At our gala this year, I'm trying to patch a 400 people in black tie in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in to a village at dawn in Ethiopia. So 10pm in New York City is dawn.

And I would love to kind of connect these two communities of people. Yeah, 400 people getting water, 400 people who are making that possible. So we think like that we think about what can we give back to our community? And, you know, we were talking about this last night. One of the crazy things that has taken off is people donating their birthdays. I was going to ask you about that. Well, can you explain the story? I think her name was Rachel. Explain the story about Rachel. Oh, you're going to start there, right? That's the saddest story. Yeah, but that's a good one. We got to talk about that one.

Well, the birthday idea happened on our one year anniversary because I was turning 32 and I realized that I didn't want to go back to the club. We did that. We launched it in the club. It was kind of fun to redeem what I'd done for 10 years and start Charity Water there, but really wanted to move on and said, look, you know, I'm turning 32. I have everything I need. Like all of my needs are met. And for my birthday, I get crap that I don't want. I mean, ties, socks, you know, I don't know, gift cards, my dad's shirts. Yeah. What if I could do something different? What if I could turn my birthday into a giving moment? And instead of making it about me, about my gifts and my party and celebrating me, what if I made my birthday about others? And I thought kind of the sticky marketing idea was, let me ask for my age in dollars. Everyone I knew had 32 bucks they could give to Charity Water,

especially if 100% of the money was going to go and they could actually see photos and GPS of the projects where that money went. So I email everyone. I said, the party's off. I'm not doing anything this year. Just go online, donate $32 for my 32nd birthday. I actually promised that I would live drill from Kenya on my birthday if I raised, I think, $20,000.

Yeah. I wound up raising $59,000. Wow. Almost all of it, $32 at a time. That's six wells. So I realized, yeah, I'm like, wow, okay. I'm not the only guy with a birthday. A lot of people have birthdays.

And you know what? Nobody needs any more crap for their birthday. And people don't really need parties. Everyone could donate one birthday. So this seven-year-old kid in Texas hears about the idea, and he starts knocking on doors asking for $7 donations. Cute kid, lived in a nice neighborhood. He raises $22,000.

16-year-olds in the middle of the country start donating their birthday. We have this 89 year old donate her 89th birthday. And she writes on our fundraising site, I'm turning 89 and I'd like to make that possible for more people. And we realized this is a kind of beautiful nuanced idea. Our birthdays for other people so they can actually have more birthdays. It's actually the opposite of the MTV show, My Super Sweet 16. It's the complete opposite of this. Yeah. It's turning the birthday into a giving moment, into a moment of generosity that also involves your community, your friends, your family, your loved ones, and connects them to a cause. So this idea takes off. Tens of thousands of people start giving up their birthday. A nine, an eight year old in Seattle named Rachel Beckwith, and this

is the story that you'd mentioned, hears me talk. And at the end of the talk, you know, I typically tell the audience, look, you know, you could write a check. That's great. You could give monthly, some of you could sponsor an entire water project, but every single person here could donate a birthday. So she donates her ninth birthday. She raises $220. Right after her birthday, she's killed in a car crash. And there's this horrible 20 car pileup. She's actually the only fatality. A tractor trailer had smashed into the car that her mom was driving. Her sister was in the front. She's in the back. And I was in Central African Republic at the time when she died. The minute I landed, I turned on my phone, and I'm getting texts from the pastor of her church and her family saying,

we want to open up that campaign, and we want to honor Rachel's legacy by donating $9. And we think people will be inspired by this little girl who thought the party wasn't important. The gifts weren't important and kids that she'd never met drinking dirty water was more important. So, uh, people, this starts spreading through the Seattle community. People start donating $9. Then it starts spreading through the country. New York times gets ahold of it. Oh, the morning shows. The morning shows. And Rachel's mom is talking about this extraordinary little girl who just had a heart that was so big

and a deep compassion and empathy for others. Starts spreading around the world to Europe and then to Africa. Bill, I'll never forget when I was reading comments from people in Africa donating to this nine-year-old's campaign that cared about, I mean, it was amazing. 60,000 people give. She goes from a handful of donors to 60,000 people giving $9 or more. She winds up raising $1.2 million. So her campaign, her vision that she realized alive of $220 wound up helping 143 communities get water, 37,000 people in Ethiopia. And we had this amazing experience on the one year anniversary of her actual death.

I took Rachel's mother. I took her grandparents village to village, to village, to village. And the family got to meet thousands and thousands of people that had clean water because of Rachel. And they knew who she was, right? We were crying for days. I mean, it was the most emotional thing going in these villages, seeing kids that are drinking clean water because of Rachel who's lying underground. But I remember some of the women would come up to Rachel's mom and they would fall prostrate at her feet.

They were weeping, kind of pulling their hair and saying through translators, we have lost children too. We know your pain. We know the pain of a mom losing a child. But your daughter's death has given us all life and has given our children life. And it was an incredibly, incredibly profound experience. Rachel, beyond raising $1.2 million to help 37,000 people get clean water,

also inspired thousands of other people to give up their birthday. And so that was inspiring people today. Yeah, that was the catalyst you needed. And then, I mean, I know a couple people whose kids did that. Yeah. And it seems like that's becoming more.

You've done seven? I've done seven birthdays. And now we're seeing people will do a birthday for Charity Water and then they'll do their next birthday for another cause, which is great. I mean, we want these ideas that we might stumble upon to be generous and help all of humanity. Great, help people get water,

but go pick a charity that works in shelter or in hunger or in health or HIV or malaria. So we think it's a great idea. Everybody listening could donate their next birthday, whether you're 50 or you're 90 or whether you're two. We just did the birth of our kids. We're seeing that. What a great way to welcome a child into the world and create an instantaneous legacy and say, look, this child is going to care about giving. This is going to be a child whose life is actually impacting others, you know, from the moment they were born into this privilege. Was there a celebrity early on that really helped you spread the message in a unique

way? Yeah, I think... Because you need somebody with a platform at some point. A lot of people in technology give up birthdays. Jack Dorsey had done three birthdays, raised almost $20,000. PewDiePie wound up raising over, I think, $450,000. Wow. Will and Jada Smith not only gave up their birthdays, because they were both born in September, they then asked their fans to do the same thing. I think they raised about a quarter of a million dollars. And then they came with me to actually see the impact, flew into Ethiopia to,

to see the impact of those birthdays. So we, we have, you know, we're, we've had amazing celebrities support it. You know, there's no spokespeople for the organization. It's really, I think it's the stories of six-year-olds that no one's ever heard of and 16-year-olds and 89-year-olds that really is the core of who we are. But we've been really lucky to have people that have a lot of influence on social media donate a birthday. I mean, we're pitching the Pope at the moment. What better birthday to get, right? Mike Francesa? No.

Oh, the actual Pope. So how much traveling are you doing? You're on the road, like 200 days a year, 150. My record a few years ago was 96 flights. Oh my Lord. And Bill, it's in coach. Yeah. Well, the organization has raised over $200 million. We have never bought a business class ticket. So, you know, we care so much about the stewardship. Um, so it's, it's, yeah, it's a lot of travel. I had my first son 20 months ago. We have another, we have a girl due in a few months. So I've cut that back maybe to 60.

But so much of the work is on the road. First year of my son's life, he did 20 flights. So we just took him everywhere. Second year of his life, and you know, this is apparent, zero flights. That's a rough year for traveling. The second one, yeah, he wasn't going anywhere uh we were yes uh so give me give me your goal for the next 12 months next 12 months uh we want to help more

so this is our 10th year it's our 10th anniversary we want to help more than a million people we've been doing some really cool stuff with sustainability and sensors so we're now going back and retrofitting some of these wells putting remote sensors in it so we know that they're now going back and retrofitting some of these wells, putting remote sensors in it. So we know that they're working over time and we know how much water is flowing. So the purpose of that is just in case something gets screwed up, you'll have a heads up on it that you can fix anytime? Yeah, there's probably people listening that are like, oh, well, yeah, you build a well, but what happens in five years? What if the well breaks? So we want to know that. And we've started putting these sensors in. So we're getting flow rate in New York.

And we're actually able to see that they're working. We also have local teams of mechanics back there. So the goals for us is to help more people. A million people a year is great. There's 660 million people. We want to be helping 2 million people a year, 3 million people. And it's just getting the word out. It's getting more people involved. It's getting more people to

care about water. Um, there's a couple of ways people can give, you know, they can obviously donate a birthday just at charitywater.org slash birthdays. And we're building a really, uh, cool monthly, uh, giving program at the moment. One of the, one of the key, key needs for the organization to be quite honest, as we go forward is to get people who will partner with us for a longer period of time. You know, not just the one and done, not the, oh, I heard a podcast and, oh, that's cool, dropped 100 bucks. But someone who might be able to give 30 bucks a month and help one person get clean water every single month. I mean, it costs us $30 to change someone's life with water. Imagine if a million people stepped up and said every month we're going to give 30 bucks and we're able to give a million people a month, not a year.

So that's, that's a huge push for us as we turn 10 to say, all right, for the next 10 years, we're looking for this group of people to fight with us until everyone on earth has clean water. We believe it's possible. We believe it can be done in our lifetime. So it's charitywater.org. I have good news for you. I haven't even told you this. So we're selling t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, all this stuff for the ringer because we're launching next month.

Okay. We're going to have a whole bunch of swag. And we wanted to find the right charity to give a cut of that stuff. So we're giving five bucks for every single t-shirt every single sweatshirt every single hoodie we sell oh my gosh that's amazing charity water so i think if we get what two thousand twenty two hundred something like that per if it's five so it'll be you sell two thousand shirts like two thousand or something at a time um that's amazing man thank you so much yeah it'll be cool.

And we'll keep it going. It's not going to be something where we do it for two months and we stop. That's cool. And when is the gala thing? We have our gala in December. So I'll make sure you get an invite.

And that's in New York City? It's in New York City. Yeah, it's last year we did virtual reality at the gala. In May of last year, we were just, again, we're trying to get people closer. We're trying to get them inside the issue. So we shot a beautiful story of the six actual days where a 13-year-old girl's life changed through water. And you put on the headset, the VR headset, and you step into Ethiopia, into this rural area.

And it's Monday, and you were there with Salam, who's the hero of this. And you're watching her drink dirty water. On Tuesday, you're in her house. You learn how hard her life is. She lost her mom. She's taking care of her kids, trying to go to school, trying to get the water, trying to just manage this entire household. On Wednesday, you're standing high up on a ridge,

and you see the million-dollar rig and compressors and trucks roll by. On Thursday, you're standing high up on a ridge and you see the million dollar rig and compressors and trucks roll by. On Thursday, you're in the middle of the drilling. On Friday, you're there. And there's this moment where they hit water and Salam's father picks her up and starts spinning her around with this huge smile. And then the last day you watch her drink clean water for the first time in her life. So we did that at last year's gala. We strapped headsets on 400 people. We pressed play at the same time uh and they were like all sobbing when it was over right people were pretty emotional and then uh they gave enough to help 250 more communities in that region uh so it's it was pretty special so this year if we can pull it off

we're going to try and get a broadband uplink and see if we can connect the people in the room with the community in real time to just show, look, it's working. You know, I think there's such a tendency to be overwhelmed with apathy, almost a paralysis, right? There's just bad news on TV all the time. And, you know, how can I ever make a dent? And, but if I think we've shown that a million everyday ordinary people over the last 10 years came together and impacted 6 million lives and 19,000 communities right now have clean water, 19,000 communities have kids growing up healthier, able to go to school because people didn't do nothing. They did something. They gave 30 bucks or a hundred bucks, or they sponsored a community or they donated their birthday.

I think that's the invitation. We're just inviting more people to join us. We believe it's possible. We believe in a world where everyone has clean water to drink. So it's donate.charitywater.org. Just charitywater.org. And I would encourage people, go look at some of the media. Go look at some of the videos.

It's one thing to hear us talk about it. It's another to see it. It's another to see a community getting clean water for the first time. It's another to see a child drinking water that looks like chocolate milk. It's a really visceral experience. And I'm sure there's so many parents listening. Imagine, you know, imagine if you had to give your water kid, if you had to give your kid water every day that you knew could kill them. It's disgusting. You knew could kill them. And you're just playing Russian roulette every single day.

Um, it's a, it's a horrible thing and it, no one should have to suffer like that. And what's it? It's charity water.org slash birthday. Yeah. If you want to pledge your birthday, charity, what out org slash birthdays, birthdays. Okay. And even if your birthday is a year from now, you can pledge and we'll send you a reminder a month before the birthday. Bill, this is crazy, but the average person raises a thousand dollars from their birthday from 15

friends and family. So just imagine the power of that. Imagine a million people worldwide giving up their birthdays. You raise a billion dollars for clean water. So it is, it is truly one of the most kind of scalable ideas, um, that we're just trying to spread and we don't have marketing dollars and we're not buying ads or taking over billboards. You won't see us, you know, at the beginning of a CNN clip because, um, you know, you'll, you'll see me here talking to you trying to spread, spread the, the ideas. So I think that's a really simple one. Charity water.org birthdays slash birthdays. Or people could just go to Charitywater.org

and learn more. I hope people listened to this and thought about it and go check out your website. Thanks so much for having me and using the platform to help others. All right, congratulations on everything. You're doing a good thing. Thanks, man.

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