The Peter Attia Drive - Qualy #80 - The four pillars of charity: water that helped it overcome the stigma of nonprofits and become successful

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

Today's episode of The Qualys is from podcast #25 – Scott Harrison: transformation, finding meaning, and taking on the global water crisis. The Qualys is a subscriber-exclusive podcast, released Tuesday through Friday, and published exclusively on our private, subscriber-only podcast feed. Qualys is short-hand for “qualifying round,” which are typically the fastest laps driven in a race car—done before the race to determine starting position on the grid for race day. The Qualys are short (i.e., “fast”), typically less than ten minutes, and highlight the best questions, topics, and tactics discussed on The Drive. Occasionally, we will also release an episode on the main podcast feed for non-subscribers, which is what you are listening to now. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/qualys/   Subscribe to receive access to all episodes of The Qualys (and other exclusive subscriber-only content): https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/  Connect with Peter on Facebook.com/PeterAttiaMD | Twitter.com/PeterAttiaMD | Instagram.com/PeterAttiaMD

Welcome to the Qualies, a subscriber exclusive podcast. Qualies is just a shorthand slang for a qualification round, which is something you do prior to the race, just a little bit quicker. Qualies podcast features episodes that are short, and we're hoping for less than 10 minutes each, which highlight the best questions, topics, tactics, et cetera, discussed on previous episodes of the drive. We recognize many of you as new listeners to the podcast may not have the time to go back and listen to every episode, and those of you who have already listened may have forgotten. So the new episodes of the quality is going to be released Tuesday through Friday,

and they're going to be published exclusively on our private subscriber-only podcast feed. Now, occasionally, we're going to release quality episodes in the main feed which is what you're about to hear now. If you enjoy these episodes and if you're interested in hearing more as well as receiving all of the other subscriber exclusive content which is growing by the month you can visit us at pteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay I hope you enjoy today's quality. What I think is elegant about the way you've done it is you've literally separated the financial streams. Yeah, they get audited separately. Yeah, that is.

That is so brilliant. That is so brilliant. It's not fungible. No, that is so brilliant. And we took it a step farther than Robin Hood because I just, I love like black and white before and after. Like I just, I don't do well with gray. So I said, well, we we're gonna be out there,

that is the theme of your life. Scott, you do not, despite the fact that you're sitting there in a gray sweatshirt right now, you do not do well in gray. So you'll like this, I say, well, I can't be up there talking about 100%, unless we also pay back all the credit card fees. So from day one, and to this day,

if you went online right now, you pulled out your American Express, and you go to charity.com.com, you're gonna give a hundred bucks. MX gets 3%. You got it. So I get 97. But what did you give?

A hundred. So what do you expect? A hundred dollars to go to the field. So in the other bank accounts, and I can talk about how we do that later, and all the trials and that, but we actually pay back that three dollars, and we send your $100, your intended $100 to the field.

So that was pillar number one. Pillar number two was then, when you have two bank accounts, I just realized, okay, we've just created a non-fungible, non-black hole scenario. So why can't we use technology to track these dollars as they go out and just show people where they landed? So if we were going to build a well in Malawi, you know, we could say your money went here, or to Bangladesh, or to India, or to Cambodia, or to Bolivia. And, you know, I lucked into meeting the Google Earth founder when I was starting charity water. I met him at a conference and they were building

Google Earth and Google Maps and I just realized, I was gonna be able from day one to geolocate every water project using their free platform. And all it was gonna cost me was $50 handheld GPS devices. I think they were a Garmin device at the time. You could go buy a Best Buy. And we would be able to fund a water project

that help people get clean water. Turn on a GPS device, take a picture of the GPS, take a picture of the project, and then upload it, and say, this is proof, you'd be able to see a satellite image of your well. So if 100% was the first pillar, proof then became the second pillar, and proof would look very different in many different ways.

We would have hopefully myriad ways of being creative and connecting people to what their money did. The third thing that I wanted to do differently was I wanted to, I wanted the brand to feel unlike any other charity that I'd ever encountered. I wanted to build an epic brand, a beautiful brand, an imaginative, inspiring brand. And when I saw most charities, I saw marketing that I didn't want any part of. I saw shame and guilt and almost toxic marketing. And you may remember the commercials from the 80s

and the 90s with Sally Struthers and the flies that land on the kids' faces, it's slow motion as they look up and lock their sad eyes with the camera. And then the 800 number slowly creeps across the screen. And you give, and you give out of, yeah, and you give out of like shame often, or guilt for feeling that you're in your comfortable

living room and these kids in Africa flies crawling on their face. Dude, that is so amazing that you brought that image up. Like, I remember the commercial you're talking about. I would have never pulled that out of my, the recesses of my brain. Had you not mentioned that? That's literally 35, 40 years ago. Yeah, I just went and watched them recently to make sure that they were as bad as I remember.

They're worse. So to me, the vestiges of shame and guilt and even the language, by the way, this is still pervasive today. The language giving back, this is unhelpful. If I snatch the mic from in front of you, you'd say give it back, as if I've taken it from you. And the language implies we've pillaged and plundered

to such extent, we should probably throw a few scraps back to the poor. Let's give a little back that we've taken. And it implies giving out of debt or obligation, all unhealthy things without it. And I come across a quote by Nick Kristoff in the New York Times and he said, toothpaste is being peddled with far more sophistication than all the world's life-saving causes.

Charity brands suck. Doritos will spend hundreds of millions of dollars cleverly marketing and a stuff that kills us in our children. But the most important life-saving humanitarian efforts often have an anemic brands Or they guilt and shame people into giving to them and by the way this comes back in some way to the overhead problem And this is sort of one of the challenges in the nonprofit world that I think is really toxic Which is we have this belief that we shouldn't be able to pay people in a nonprofit Talent should be free people should be willing to work for under market the reason Doritos can sell Doritos like you can't imagine, the reason they can push these things on you is not just because they taste great.

It's because they can afford the best talent to figure out how to A, B test all of these different things. And I think a lot of nonprofits haven't really figured out that there is a bit of a war for talent, and nonprofits are generally losing it in a big age demographic. And my experience, nonprofits can do a really good job getting really young people, fresh out of college, who want some experience before going to grad school, and they can do a pretty good job getting really talented sort of graybeards that are at the end of their careers and looking to, quote unquote, give back with respect to time. But it's pretty tough to get an ultra-talented 40-year old to go into a nonprofit when the alternative for many people, even those who are mission-driven,

is to go and serve a mission in a for-profit setting versus a not-for-profit setting. Absolutely. And that is a real challenge even to this day. You know, give me an example that we had posted a job for receptionists at a charity water recently, 1,300 people applied. So that's great. Yeah, young. It's a really young talent pool. But you're right, the executive hires have been much harder. People like their charity people poor.

And Dan has been fighting this for a long time. You know I joke all the time that even now you know I'm 43 years old I've got a wife I've got kids. I could drive a $60,000 Toyota and not a $20,000 Mercedes because of the perception. Forget about the cost of the car. Right. Right. Right. People are totally happy with me and you know what's the big the Toyota Highlander right? I got to like load that thing up. I could probably have a $70,000 Toyota SUV or a GMC, but not a $24,000 BMW. Oh, he's reaching.

That's why we were even talking about the watch. I mean, I'm not wearing a watch today. All this stuff matters. You know, the perception becomes reality. So, okay, let me go back just to that bit. So the brand, so our brand would feel different. It would be imaginative, it would inspire, to be hope-based.

The last analogy I just wanna make, I think Nike is such a great analogy. If Nike were a bad old charity, their marketing might go like this. Hey Peter, you're fat and you're lazy. Turn off the TV, put away the junk food. Once you go for a run, once you exercise. Now. Instead of just doing run, once you exercise. Now.

Instead of just doing our, by our stuff. Yeah, yeah. No, so Nike for years has been telling inspirational stories of people overcoming adversity, overcoming impossible odds. Right, Nike believes that if you've lost your legs, you can complete a marathon. You can get over the finish line, you know,

you've lost your arm, you can still be a shot-putter. Right? I mean, they kind of, for years have said, we believe there's greatness within you, right? And then you want to buy the shoes. And then you want that symbol next to your heart that says, you know, just do it. Because the company believes that about you in their marketing. So charities, you know, don't do that. So we want it ours to be like,

we believe you have a mind blowing capacity for compassion, for empathy. We believe your capacity to be deeply generous and to extend your arm across an ocean and help people, you don't have to help. You don't have a debt or an obligation to help, but you can end the suffering because you choose to and you'll be blessed in the process. You might even find yourself redeemed in the process of moving from selfishness and accumulation

to helping others. So, there was a lot of soft stuff. I mean, now I have language to it years later, but I just, I want to share what I feel very different. I want it to feel like Apple to it years later, but I just, I want to share to you what I feel very different. I wanted to feel like Apple or Virgin and have a personality and have a brand. And then the fourth pillar was, I was not gonna send anybody that looked like

some white guy from New York City to Africa to go drill a well, or to India or to Southeast Asia. I believed in my travels, just what I'd seen in Benin and Liberia and then Uganda and Kenya as I traveled around looking for water partners. I just believed that for the work to be sustainable and culturally appropriate, it had to be

led by the locals. So our job would be to find the local organizations who could go and build these water projects. Our job would be to scale them, maybe buy them more drilling rigs or trucks or help them hire the hydrologist they need. But they would be the ones getting the credit. I just love that idea that our role could be, let's raise awareness for this important issue. Let's build a movement of people who say, we can and will bring clean drinking water to

everybody on the planet. Let's raise money as efficiently as possible and as transparently as possible. And then let's have all the work be done by the locals leading their communities and their countries forward. I hope you enjoyed today's quality. Now sit tight for that legal disclaimer. This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of

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