The Rich Roll Podcast - Scott Harrison Is Not Afraid Of Work Without End

Episode Date: October 22, 2018

From the outside looking in, he was living the dream. Killer SoHo loft. Private jets to exotic locales. Rolex, cover model girlfriend and cash. Lots of cash. But ten years living extravagantly as a decadent nightclub promoter in New York City took it's toll. By 28, Scott Harrison had become the worst person he knew. Morally bankrupt and desperate to rediscover his sense of purpose, Scott decided it was time for a drastic change. So he sold all his belongings and decamped NYC for a year spent volunteering aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, West Africa. Abroad, Harrison witnessed levels of poverty and illness he never knew existed. As one year turned into two, he came to understand that many of the diseases their group treated were waterborne, easily preventable with access to clean drinking water — a basic need sorely lacking across vast swaths of the undeveloped world. Upon returning to New York in 2006, Scott turned his full attention to the global water crisis and the (then) 1.1 billion people living without access to clean water. The manifestation of that commitment is charity: water — a revolutionary for-purpose endeavor that to date has raised over $3000 million to bring clean drinking water to more than 8.4 million people all across the world. Equally impressive is the extent to which Scott has quite literally reinvented and re-energized how we give and how we think about giving. He did it by creating an aspirational brand. He did it by restoring public trust in charity. And he did it by leveraging technology to deeply connect each and every giver with the gift's specific result and impact. Simply put, Scott Harrison is one of the most impressive people I have ever met. His inspiring story from lost to found is legend — an astounding example of what can be achieved when a life pivots from self-serving to selfless service. Scott's story can be found in his riveting new memoir, Thirst, which vividly recounts Scott's redemptive tale of transformation and the twists and turns that built charity: water into one of the most trusted, disruptive, innovative and admired nonprofits in the world. Debuting at #7 on last week's NY Times bestseller list, it's a must read page-tuner, the profits of which funnel right back to (you guessed it) charity: water.** Picking up where left off in Scott's first appearance on the podcast (episode 305 from July 2017), today we dive deeper into previously unexplored aspects of Scott's personal evolution. We discuss progress made by his organization and the work that remains. We discuss the important role faith has played in his journey. He explains the true meaning of charity — and the sense of purpose and personal fulfillment that goes hand in hand with service. We end with a call to action. And a reminder that we all possess the power to make the world a better place. Because nobody should fear work that has no end. Here's my call to action: in celebration of my 52nd birthday, help me raise $100,000 by December 31, 2018 — 100% of which will be deployed to bring clean water projects to over 3,300 people for the very first time. Projects that will save lives for generations to come. Enjoy! Rich

My environment had been clubs, excess drinking, debauchery, sex, drugs, and my environment changed to a group of humanitarian doctors and nurses and surgeons who were giving the best of themselves in service to the poor. So I went into this completely healthy environment where the new norm was selflessness. The new norm was virtue and courage and tenacity and hard work in the direction of others, in the direction of serving others. And today we're going to get 4,000 new people clean drinking water for the first time in their lives. And we do it again tomorrow and again the next day and again the next day. Now, I want that number to be 40,000, but it's now significant.

You know, the 8.5 million people we've helped, it's more than the population of New York City and all the boroughs. Let's build a culture of giving. Let's give because we can, because we want to, because it's a blessing, not out of guilt or shame or debt or obligation, but because it is an amazing opportunity to share our blessing with others. That's Scott Harrison, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast.

Hey, everybody. What's the word? How are you guys doing? What is happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is a podcast. It's my podcast.

Welcome or welcome back. It is indeed an honor and a privilege to spend a little high quality time with all of you guys today. Real quick up top, I wanted to let all of you know that due to popular demand and many, many, perhaps countless requests, the podcast is now finally available on Spotify. Spotify. Yes, very exciting. You can find a link in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com or just search Rich Roll Podcast in the browse feature on that platform. For those of you that have been on this podcast ride with me for a while now, you probably

know that a little over a year ago, I sat down with Scott Harrison, the founder of an organization you might have heard of called Charity Water. That was episode 305 from last July. Please check it out if you missed it. It is definitely one of my favorite episodes. And over the course of that two-hour exchange, Scott held me, and most likely you, pretty much spellbound with his extraordinary yarn of personal and global transformation. This is a guy who, at 28, seemingly had everything, had it all. He was a top nightclub promoter in New York City, and his life was essentially this endless cycle of parties,

drugs, booze, models on repeat. And he was very successful in this regard, but about a decade in, he found himself broken, desperately unhappy, and essentially morally and spiritually bankrupt. And at his bottom, he asked himself a very simple question. What would the exact opposite of my life look like? And he ended up walking away from everything. He sold everything that he owned and he spent the next 16 months on a hospital ship in West Africa. And that experience really delivered him to what I think is fair to say is his true calling. In 2006, with absolutely no money and zero experience,

he founds this thing called Charity Water. And today, 12 years later, this organization has raised over $300 million to bring clean drinking water to more than 8.4 million people around the globe. It's truly extraordinary. Along the way, on top of all of this, he essentially reimagines and reinvents giving altogether. He ditches the old antiquated model that basically feeds off guilt to get people to give and creates this new model and this brand that inspires people, that gets them excited, that prioritizes transparency, that fosters a deep, very real connection between the donor and the

results of every donation, 100% of which is funneled directly to water projects. And not only has he been wildly successful with this organization, playing a huge part in reducing those without clean water from about 1.1 billion down to $660 million, essentially halving this big problem that we have. He also essentially changes the entire landscape of giving and charity altogether. In any event, that was a very profound conversation for me, and I would imagine for many of you as well. It was the beginning of a great friendship that I now have with Scott, as well as a partnership. Scott inspired me to donate a

portion of my income to Charity Water every month via the spring, their monthly subscription service, which is something I've been doing for over a year at this point, something I also encourage all of you guys to look into as well. And on top of that, he inspired me to dedicate my 51st birthday to raising funds for his organization. And the goal of that campaign was to raise $51,000. But together, we ended up raising $68,285, which was amazing. It was such a thrill, not to mention all the money that was raised by people listening to the podcast and signing up for the spring. I think the tally comes out to somewhere in the $200,000 range. So it is amazing. And I thank you again for that. And yet there's so much more to Scott's story

and the story of Charity Water. So picking up where we left off last July, Scott today returns to the show for another incredibly moving conversation, including a discussion of his new book, which is called Thirst. It's incredible. It's a must read. It debuted on the New York Times bestseller list last week at number seven, which is amazing. Congrats. All proceeds of which go right back into Charity Water.

Of course, right? That's who Scott is. go right back into Charity Water. Of course, right? That's who Scott is. In fact, when you buy Thirst and forward your receipt to unlock at charitywater.org, you'll also unlock a $30 donation that will bring clean water to one person.

So that is awesome. In addition, it just so happens serendipitously, honestly, I didn't plan it this way, but yesterday, today's Sunday, October 21st, but yesterday on October 20th, I didn't plan it this way, but yesterday, today's Sunday, October 21st, but yesterday on October 20th, I turned 52. I appreciate all the kind and gracious birthday wishes that I've been streaming in. I love it.

I feel great. I feel strong. And, you know, my life is an embarrassment of riches. I need for absolutely nothing. So once again, inspired by Scott's example, I am moved to leverage this occasion of my birth to do a little bit of good by helping bring clean water to those in need.

But this time, the goal isn't $51,000 and it isn't $52,000 and it's not $68,000. It's $100,000, 100% of which will be deployed to provide clean water projects to over 3,300 people for the very first time. Projects that will save lives for basically generations to come. So specifically, this is my call to action and my request. I am asking that each of you donate $1 for every year that I've been drinking clean water, a pledge of $52. When the water projects are complete, Charity Water will then

send all of those who donated photos and GPS coordinates so together we can experience up close and personal the exact community that we impact. And I can tell you that this experience is priceless. The goal, $100,000 is ambitious. I cannot do this alone, but with your help, I really do believe it's totally doable because together, this community that we have built alongside each other is very powerful. Together, for basically the price of a night out at the movies, we really can

save lives and positively change the world. So to find out more, please, please visit my campaign page at my.charitywater.org forward slash richroll, my.charitywater.org forward slash richroll. The campaign will remain open through the end of December. And of course, I'll put a link up in the show notes so you can easily find it. And please consider a donation, whatever you can afford. And I thank you in advance. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. I've, in turn, helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus,

you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner

in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right. Thanks, you guys, for hanging tough. Scott Harrison. You know, Scott is, he really is one of my favorite people. He is an incredible example, perhaps the best example of anybody that I know of what can happen, the extraordinary things that can happen, the impact and the sense of purpose and fulfillment that one can have

when life is redirected from self-serving to selfless service. So picking up where we left off last July, this conversation recaps previously unexplored aspects of Scott's amazing story. It's about the progress made by Charity Water in the last year. We discuss Scott's new book, Thirst, which recounts the twists and the turns that built Charity Water into one of the most trusted, disruptive, disruptive in the best way, innovative and admired nonprofits in the world.

We talk about the role that Scott's faith has played in his journey, what charity really means to him, the fulfillment and sense of purpose that goes hand in hand with service, the fulfillment and sense of purpose that goes hand in hand with service, the power we all have to make the world a better place, and perhaps most importantly, why none of us should fear work that has no end. I love this man. I love his mission. I'm proud to support the work of Charity Water, and my hope is that this conversation will both inspire and empower you to do the same. So if that's the case, once again, please go to my.charitywater.org forward slash ritual

and consider donating to my birthday campaign. So together we can get clean water to as many people as possible who are most in need. Here's Scott. Oh, whoa. This is for San Francisco, right? Yeah. And then all the content is shot specifically in 360 just for the gala so we i'm i'm doing a three-hour screening tonight of all the content whoa but it should be really special what's the venue it's the armory it's a 40,000

square foot huge i got the invite i'm gonna make it happen come with your dog again yeah i think we're gonna do it that'd be fun so cool just top up and it's funny. This was actually the, this wasn't ours, was it? We sent an hourglass out as the invite to the well members. Oh, cool. The whole Gala concept is called the gift of time. You're always like next level with like the marketing stuff, man. Well, we're going to track the, so we're going to, I'll let you in just a little bit on the insight. We're going to crowdfund a drilling rig for $700,000 in the room. We're going to put everybody's names on it that donates

anything, call it a hundred bucks. And then I'm going to put up a calendar of the next four years and say, great, we have a rig. Now let's run it into the future. So every year is a million bucks. So we're going to sell units of time. So I'm going to sell a drilling day, a drilling hour, a drilling day, three drilling days, which is a well, a drilling week, a drilling month. And as you buy time, we're just going to see this calendar, you know, start filling out. Right. And what we're also going to do is we're going to, we're actually quantifying the amount of time that you'll be saving women. So as you buy time, it's turning into a multiple because we've got the data now.

We've been interviewing in these villages. It's a completely different way of thinking about the impact, right? Yeah. Not just dirty water is becoming clean, but the time that women are saving, what would you do with millions of hours? Right. saving? What would you do with millions of hours? Right. The whole gender aspect of the work that you do, I think is something that people don't realize until they become educated. The impact that the water has on education and female empowerment. Yeah. It's real. It's real. Women and girls. Really women and girls only when it comes to water.

Right, because break that down a little bit. I mean, basically, traditionally, the women are responsible for collecting the water. And this involves hours and hours and hours of walking each way to a well. Well, it's not even a well. That's the problem. It's a swamp. It's a pond. It's a river.

It's often brown, viscous, dirty water. And they're at risk of animal attacks. We hear stories of women getting attacked by hyenas. They're at risk of rape as they're far away from home. If you're a woman and you're giving birth, you've got to give birth away from home at the waterhole. So you're effectively camping out because you need the water. And so when we're able to bring clean drinking water into a village, not only are we eliminating that walk, therefore reclaiming all these hours every day. Imagine getting five hours

back in your day, every day, seven days a week. So it's transformative. Yeah, the downstream impact of that can't even be measured because it translates into education and working and being productive in other ways. Yeah, it's incredible. There was a UN report that was released that they tracked the economic impact of water. So, you know, like we've said, we know water makes people healthier. 52% of the disease throughout the developing world, or what some people would call the third world, is actually because of bad water and a lack of sanitation. But the UN wanted to see, you know, what about the economics behind this? So they found every dollar that you invested in clean water and sanitation yielded a $4 to $8 return. Wow.

So water made people wealthier. And it was money not spent on medicine. So if you're not sick, you're not headed to the clinic. I remember one of the things that used to surprise me was learning that the impediment for so many of these people is actually getting to the clinic. When they get there, the drugs are often affordable and subsidized, but the taxi to the clinic could be a month's wages. So you don't have it. So your kid dies in the village of diarrhea, something completely preventable.

So I just, I love the idea that by, by bringing clean drinking water and sanitation into villages, you're actually making, you're improving the local economy. You're, you're measurably lifting people out of extreme poverty. Yeah.

It solves a battery of problems at the source. Speaking of the source, the last time I guess we got together was probably a year and a half ago. And that was right on the eve of you launching The Spring. Yep. And in this past year and a half,. It has gone on to become super successful. And during that period of time, you wrote this book that just came out there. So congratulations on that. Thanks, Rich. Super exciting. Thanks for having me back. I'm about, I don't know, 50 or 60 pages into it. I'm right at the part where you hook up with that DJ that you used to employ at various nightclubs across Manhattan who had found faith in a certain respect.

And that guy kind of becomes your, he becomes like this, not mentor, but kind of like he ushers you into a new way of thinking about who you are and what you do. It's like a pivotal character. Yeah, there are a couple of really important guides or mentors. I would have said at that time he was a mentor, even though it was a brief time of counseling that really moved me in the right direction. It's funny, Dr. Gary, who you'll meet later in the book, becomes really my first guide when I go to Liberia in Africa. And, you know, his story was so amazing. He was a surgeon from California, from this area, actually. And he had heard that there was this hospital ship that surgeons could join and they could operate for free on people without access to medical care.

And he signs up for three months. I can leave my practice behind for three months. And when I volunteered and set foot on the ship, he'd been there 21 years. Wow. They never left. He's still there. Wow. I think he's on year 34 or 35.

So there's a bunch of these characters throughout the book that just confirm to me that I'm on the right path, that this is a life worth living, a life of service. Imagine giving three and a half decades. He just never went back to his practice. He never went back to making money and buying the cars and doing all the things that we've been told since youth are the recipe of not only success, but being happy and living a fulfilled life, which we know intellectually is not the case. And yet it's so difficult for us to wrap our heads around a different way of living. And I think of all the people that I've met, you are not just a shining example of the power of service to transform life. I mean, you might be the best example of anyone I've ever met of somebody who weathered a dark night of the soul and then was able to channel that experience

into not only changing your own life, but having this monumental impact on millions of people across the world. Like I was thinking like, do I know anyone else who's had a more profound impact on the planet than you and the work that you do? And I don't think that I have. I don't think I do. I mean, it's really remarkable.

And when you were last here, we tracked your whole story and I don't want to spend too much time on that because people can go and listen to that episode. We do it at one. And it was like two hours. It was. But the show has grown quite a bit and not everyone's going to go back and listen to that. So I think it is worth kind of recapping some of the highlights there to contextualize what we're talking about. Sure. You know, I think my, it's interesting, you get a little different perspective too when you write a book, when you spend two years and write 150,000 words, which became 100 at the end.

Well, you start to understand your story in a different way. You do. Oh, wait, I forgot that thing was really important. Yeah. And you find the threads that connect everything. So I think my story was three acts. Find the threads that connect everything. So I think my story was three acts. There was act one, which was growing up in a very conservative Christian home. My mom became an invalid when I was four after a carbon monoxide gas leak in our home.

And this was a shock to our family. She almost dies. A faulty heat exchanger had caused the problem. And I'm instantly thrust into a caregiver role as a four-year-old. I take care of mom. I'm doing the cooking. I'm doing the cleaning. I play piano every Sunday in church. I don't cuss. I don't drink. I don't sleep around. I don't smoke.. It's actually probably most close to the parable of the prodigal son, where I just flip everybody the bird. I flip my parents the bird. I flip the church the bird and say, now it's my turn. I played by the rules. Now I'm going to explore the other side. And I moved to New York City. I felt like, well, if you want to rebel in style,

I heard that there was this job called a nightclub promoter where you can get paid to drink alcohol professionally. So the thought of being a professional drinker was appealing. And at 18 years old, three years before I'm even allowed to be inside nightclubs, I just start climbing up the social ladder of New York. I want to be the king of New York. I want to be the guy spraying the champagne over the crowd from the top of the mezzanine or the DJ booth. And work at 40 different nightclubs over the next 10 years. So 18 to 28 is kind of a blur. Start with smoking, then drinking, then the drugs, then the gambling, then the pornography,

then the strip clubs, then this just kind of descent into hedonism and debauchery and degeneracy. Yeah. And I'm going to interject from time to time, but apologies for that. But what I realized, like I knew it was, I knew you were a ball or nightclub owner and I knew you were partying pretty hard, but what I gathered from the book was, as somebody who's explored that terrain myself, it was darker than I suspected. And you were deeper in that hole than I thought. than I thought. Like you tend to kind of, you tell your story a lot and, you know, you don't shy away from some of these details, but in the book you really drilled down on the, like, what exactly you were doing and it was heavy usage. Yeah. It was really heavy. It's funny. We have these conservative donors in Chicago who are a little older and they just read the book and

they reported back to our team and they said, he was so much worse than we ever thought. I mean, I don't know if they had given it. Boy, it was, he wasn't, he wasn't overselling the darkness. Yeah. I think, and that's one of the reasons I really wanted to write the book was, was to show people that there, it's never too late, right? Your past doesn't need to define you. And I think as you get in, you know, get through kind of section one or whatever, you're like, wow, that guy's way worse than me. Yeah. I mean, you could be sitting on Rich Roll talking about, you know,

clean drinking water for the world. I mean, my chances are good at turning the page. So, you know, I have this, this section two of my life, this kind of dark period and, and, and just hold on a second. All right. So you can go there. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's the, there's the part where, uh, you know, your partner ODs on heroin, and then you've got this bouncer who is threatening your life and showing up at your house with a gun, you know, like this is, it was, you know, it's very cinematic. Yes. Yes. And, and I had health issues. So I don't, you know, again, when, when you are able to write a book, there's just a long

form, you know, it's kind of like a 10 hour podcast. Right. So I, I, I really remembered that part of the, one of the big things going on was just half my body went numb. Yeah. So after 10 years of partying, I started to break down. And what's so interesting and very literary about that is how it symbolizes the numbness of the soul, right? Like your body starts to go numb, but it's really this spiritual malaise that's come upon you. Yeah. And in some ways, it was a betrayal. The true me, I think, was the caregiver, was the kid who wanted to be a doctor growing up to help sick people like my mom.

It was the kid who had a faith and who had a deep sense of virtue and morality. So this was really the, you know, the, and what I love in that prodigal son story, like the, the prodigal son goes halfway across the world, gambling prostitutes. And then he winds up, he runs out of money and he winds up at the end of himself. And he says, I want to come home. The servants in my parents' house are treated better than the condition that I'm living in now. And you just get this sense there's like a longing to return to, like he was wrong. You know, the exploration had led him to a really dark place. And that's how I felt. But the darkness is this incredible teachable moment, right?

It's almost like, I mean, do you think that you could have created what you've created without exploring the dark side? Like you had to test the boundaries of your faith to really understand who you are, you know? And so when I see people who are venturing into that, like, we're like, oh, we got to pull them out of that. We gotta like help him. You know, he's going wayward.

And it's like, well, maybe not so fast. Maybe that person is on their journey and they need to explore what that's like in order to fully understand, you know, who they are. These are divine moments, I think, and we're quick to judge them, but they can ultimately be, I mean, you're an incredible example of how they can catalyze a life well lived. Yep.

I agree. You know, and I was lucky to get out, so not everybody gets out. You know, there were people that, you know, had gone wayward and then overdosed and then died. We've been to a lot of funerals. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know I don't, uh, I don't know that we should be, you know, encouraging. Like I needed, I think I needed more of those positive voices. You know, it's interesting. So I, for those that don't know my story,

I wind up quitting everything at 28 years old and walking away from that lifestyle and asking myself the question, what would the opposite of my life look like? Not a pivot, not a 20 or 50 degree shift. Cause I actually tried that for a few months, this kind of one foot in one foot out. What would it, what would the clean break look like? And yeah, the guy with a gun chasing you, right. And perfect moment. And it was exactly. And the clean break looked like go to the poorest country in the world, post-war Liberia, become a photojournalist on a humanitarian medical mission, and then quit all the vices in one go, in one fell swoop. And it's funny. Somebody asked me recently, they said, so many people are struggling with addiction

and struggling with trying to change their life. What I realized actually just this week was one of the really important things was I changed my environment so radically. My environment had been clubs, excess drinking, debauchery, sex, drugs, and my environment changed to a group of humanitarian doctors and nurses and surgeons who were giving the best of themselves in service to the poor. So I went into this completely healthy environment where the new norm was selflessness. The new norm was virtue and courage and tenacity and hard work, you know, in, in the direction of others, in the direction of serving others. And it just looks so good. I mean, I didn't want to do any of that stuff. I mean, I didn't want to go down off the ship and have a cigarette, you know,

next to the, you know, with the engineers in the engine room. I wanted to really embrace this, this new lifestyle. It looked so much better. So I think that really helped me never go back. Because there was one night where I smoked three packs of cigarettes, I drank a ton, and I just walked away from it. I haven't had a drag in 15 years. I haven't touched Coke or any of that stuff. I haven't gambled in 15 years. I haven't looked at a pornographic image in 15 years. Like I really made a clean break. And for me, I felt like I could turn the page and start over. I mean, it really felt like a do-over at 28.

If I could actually get rid of the crap, if I could kind of leave the detritus. And there was something so beautifully symbolic about this ship, this 522 foot hospital ship, crammed full of amazing selfless people. And I would leave all of the, you know, the nasty crap on land. I would walk up the gangway and I would sail away to a new continent and into a new life. There was just something so beautiful about that idea. The cinematic aspect of this continues to unfold. These moments, I'm super interested in them and how they work. I mean, I think on some level, we're all, you know, all of us, everybody is visited with moments like these, moments of self-reflection that if we're aware enough and we have enough willingness can be transformative. But I think it's like you were able to do it for others, those moments may come and pass and they don't have the wherewithal or the

the degree of presence of mind or whatever it is to actually activate on them? Like, what do you think? I mean, was it just desperation? Like, what was it about you in that frame of mind that allowed you to really grab that rope and make that change? I think I just caught a vision for a new life, what it would look like. I mentioned Dr. Gary earlier, just even hearing about someone who had changed his life, right? Going on the plastic surgeon track to then hit 20 some years on a ship, that level of commitment, some years on a ship, that level of commitment, that level of dedication, I just found it so inspiring. So I had this role model. I had a new role model. So if the previous role model was

maybe the richest club owner, right, with all the girls and all the drugs, the new role model was a great humanitarian, right? Like I met Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa. And so I think I got a picture of, I also got a picture of how my skills might be useful in a very different context. So what I was good at was promoting, promoting things, promoting parties, really. I mean, to be successful in nightlife, you have to get people to turn up at your club versus other people's. And you have to spin this story. The right people, right? And that's often really beautiful girls and really rich people.

Rich guys, really, who want to hang out with the beautiful girls. And that was the whole scene. We called it models and bottles. Models and bottles were the two elements. And if you did those two things, you could sell $50,000 of alcohol in a couple hours. And there would be, I remember people would come in and drop 10,000 on their Amex. They wouldn't even open the champagne sometimes. They would just buy it. So to be successful at that, I was telling a story that if you got past the velvet rope, if you made your way into the right table and you sat with the right people

and you spent all this money, you know, showing off your wealth, then your life had meaning. And that was the wrong story. But I think I realized in that moment, I'd be able to tell a redemptive story, a story about people like Dr. Gary Parker, a story about the people that he was operating on, that he was saving the lives of. And I could tell the story to the same people. You know, I had this club list of 15,000 emails. Yeah. And back then, you know, the open rates were like- But the rich guy's like, well, what about the models?

So I think I was surprised. Sure. I got some of that because the list went from getting invited to an MTV party or the opening of the Prada megastore in Soho to pictures of horrific facial tumors, cleft lips, cleft palates, flesh-eating disease, leprosy, and then the answers to these maladies. And sure, some people said, hey, take me off the list. That's gross. I didn't sign up for Liberia 101. But I was surprised at how few people said that. I think I was really struck by how people said, this is amazing. I want to help. How do I give money? How do I sponsor the next surgery? How do I become you? I remember this woman from Chanel wrote me once, and she said, tears are just streaming down my face. It's lunch hour.

People think that I've lost a family member and I just can't stop uncontrollably sobbing because I feel so moved by the suffering and these amazing doctors that are meeting that suffering. So I think I learned that those same promoting skills could be redeemed in an instant. Yeah. And I could tell stories that mattered. Yeah. So when you were a club promoter, you developed this email list. And then when you segue into the work that you now do, it was an interesting time where email marketing was just beginning, right? And so you were able to convert this list from one interest to another

and take advantage of the fact that at the time you could get essentially 100% open rates. Yeah, your content was being read. Yeah. I mean, unless they unsubscribed, they were getting it. And it was such a visual content too. I think I understood early on that I just heard something yesterday, which I think it's one of the best quotes I've heard in a while. And it's from Carl Jung and it says, transformation is only possible in the presence of images. Transformation is only possible in the presence of images. And I didn't know this at the time, but my instinct was to show and not tell. So the emails were super visual. I took 50,000 photographs that first year on the mission. I was just running around with my camera saying, here's what I'm seeing. Here's

what I'm seeing. Here's a little boy with a big tumor. Here's the doctor in surgery operating on his face. Here's the little boy without the tumor being welcomed back into his village, surrounded by 100 friends and family who are celebrating his return to life and to health. And the images, the stories that were going out were driven by these photos. The words were almost second. And I think this, it just, it really worked. So many charities, I think, convey the problem through statistics. You know, if I tell you or anybody, Rich, 663 million people today are living

without clean drinking water. You look at me with that face. It's like, I can't conceive of it. What's the difference between 663 and a billion or 200 million or 20,000? Exactly. It's hard. It's just hard for the billion or 200 million or 20,000. Exactly. It's hard for the human brain to really comprehend. So that's why these stories and these images, if I open up my laptop and I said, hey, here's a child that I just met a few weeks ago in Malawi. And this is the water that she's drinking. And this is what her mom looks like. And this is her house.

And this is her school. And this is how far her school is from the house. And actually, she can't go to school because she has to go get dirty water. And she's been sick six times this year, right? Then you're immediately drawn into it. But, you know, I found that it was one thing to talk about dirty water and it was another to show it. And it just moved people in a visceral way. So, you know, a lot of things were just happening. I was just exploring, could my email list be used for good? And so maybe those 10 years of debauched relationships weren't wasted after all. Maybe they could be redeemed. Maybe the skills of promoting,

I could promote something completely different. I could promote something meaningful. I could promote radical generosity and compassion and empathy. I could promote something meaningful. I could promote radical generosity and compassion and empathy. I could promote clean drinking water for the world. So I was just making all of these discoveries without that much perspective at the time. It was just doing stuff. It was just a flurry of activity. Right. I mean, you have this light bulb moment that water is what's behind. You're with all these doctors that are treating all these horrible conditions. And you begin to understand that these conditions are all downstream of one fundamental problem,

which is that these people don't have access to clean water. If we can focus on the water problem, then we don't need stadiums full of people with tumors growing on their faces. That's right, that's right. And it begins really with, like what I love about it is it just begins with one well right like you take you come back to new york you throw a party everybody's the only thing i knew

how to do 20 bucks in a lucite box and you build one well it's almost like a i don't know if you had a grand vision at the time as to what this could become but just executing on like one task as proof of concept. Yeah. And then you do your next, and then you do your next, and then you do next. And now there's 29,000. I mean, did you have an idea at that time that this could be what, do you have perspective on what you've built? When you think about Scott, you know, 15 years ago or 12 years ago. You may not like this answer, but at the beginning, and this almost, I don't want to over-spiritualize this, but I felt like I had a vision and I could see the end. And the end was the day on earth when everyone has clean water.

So I could see the problem. Why wouldn't I like that answer? So most people are saying, hey, one of the questions I get a lot is, hey, we're 12 years in, we've raised $330 million, and we've helped 8 million people get clean water. And the question I most often get is, wow, Charity Water has been so successful. Did you ever think you'd do all this? Did you ever think you'd be so successful? And the real answer to that is, I thought we'd be infinitely more successful. This is a fraction of what I imagined at the beginning. We have done so much less than I think we should have by now. I really thought it'd be billions. So, so, so it's

a, so I did have the vision at the beginning and it it did start with one well. I didn't know that it was going to work, but the intention was, I am going to give the rest of my life to try and end what I see on earth as the biggest problem facing people, which is the lack of access to clean water. And then I'm going to start with one well. And then there's two wells, and there's five wells. But I did kind of, you know, I'm moving towards this day when we all celebrate victory. It's a party, actually. It's a party at the end. It's the party when the entire world has clean water. So when you started, it was 1.1 billion. Yep. And now it's at 663. Right.

Yeah. So it's about halved. You and other people, other organizations have essentially halved this. Even as population growth has grown. A decade plus. Right. And there's a lot more awareness. But you feel like you should be further along. Yes. All right, good.

Are you kidding? Yeah. It's clean drinking water. I mean, charity water gives away 100% of all donations. So I'm just, I'm sometimes baffled at how we have been unable to move the trillions of dollars that are just sitting in bank accounts and donor advised funds that are helping no one. And we have not yet been able to tell compelling enough stories to move that money to helping people get clean drinking water. In your mind, is the biggest roadblock storytelling?

What is the impediment? It's moving people from paralyzing apathy that is so easy to embrace when it comes with these huge global issues into action, into, hey, I could do something. And I think we have been pretty good at that by telling the stories of a nine-year-old who's donating their birthday to raise a couple hundred dollars and a few people get clean water. Or an 89-year-old at the end of her life who's giving from her pension because she wants other people to live to be 89 and have that same chance. I mean, I would say that you have been masterful

in that. I mean, if you can just continue to scale what you're doing, the problem is inevitably going to be solved. And I think fundamentally what Charity Water has done with your stewardship is not only completely revolutionize and change the face of what giving is and looks like and how it engages the donor. But it almost functions more like a Hollywood studio than like UNICEF because what you trade in is storytelling. You're working on the emotional impact that you can have on the public by doing this amazing job of telling the stories of the people that are impacted and engaging the donors on a level where they really feel like not only are they making each individual is making a tangible difference, but they're engaged. They're engaged in the process and they're engaged in the results. Yeah. engaged. They're engaged in the process and they're engaged in the results.

Yeah. I think storytelling, you know, if we had to keep one thing and go back and do it all over again, I would take storytelling over the a hundred percent model. I would take storytelling over, you know, the photos and GPS and all the cool tracking stuff charity water does. I think that's what moves people. You know, that is the, that is kind of the, and that's what I teach other social entrepreneurs. You have to be able to go and tell true stories that matter. I think a lot of people want to help. And we talked about the last time we were together. So many people look at the suffering around the world

and they say, I wish I could do something. But then there's this lack of trust. There's this, I don't trust the system. I don't know how much of my money would actually get to those people. I don't know that it's going to make an impact. And there are all these barriers. So we have been, through the Charity Water Business Model, trying to break down those barriers and say to the cynic, say to the skeptic, take another look. Because I actually believe people are depriving themselves of the blessing and the joy that comes with giving, um, by, by all those excuses. So I, we just haven't done

enough of it. I mean, yes, we've gotten over a million people and they've given generously from a hundred countries. I really believe the best is yet to come. So I think in, in year where we, we just finished 12 years of charity water, I actually do think the best is yet to come. I mean, today we're going to get 4,000 new people clean drinking water for the first time in their lives. And we do it again tomorrow and again the next day and again the next day. Now, I want that number to be 40,000, but it's now significant. The 8.5 million people we've helped, it's more than the population of New York City and all the boroughs. We're starting to add up seven states' worth of people in impact.

And it's 178th of the global problem. So you put 8.5 million into the current 663. And 178, that sounds better than 1,000th, right? Let's do 78 times more. Let's invite 78 times more people to participate. Let's, you know, let's invite more people to the party. Uh-huh. Backtracking to how you kind of conceptualize this at the outset i think what

you said is is is very true that there are so many it's it's now changed in the last decade but when you at the outset of charity water there's this tremendous distrust about charitable organizations it hasn't changed that much by the way the data hasn't changed really data hasn't changed that much. I mean, you know, outside of- There are many better charities. Like a lot of the young charities that have started have adopted these values of transparency. Yeah, they basically, you know, mocked your value system and your model, maybe not the 100% model, but the idea of creating transparency between donor and results has certainly been implemented across the board with great success. And I think that's changed the face of how people give

and how they think about giving. But your idea at the beginning was like, okay, let's not bombard people with statistics and guilt. Let's create an inspiring brand that gets people excited and want to participate. And let's inject them with that feeling that you have, which is what it feels like when you're of service and you give. We're all walking around, trying to keep up with the Joneses and get that salary bump so we can get the new car.

And we're chasing the dragon on this illusion of the American dream when the truth of what we're actually seeking, which is fulfillment and purpose and happiness and joy is available to us if we can just make that leap of faith into what it feels like to give, right? And it's almost like you rescued that away from a broken system that is almost predatory in how it makes us feel badly about ourselves to one that inspires people and shares this sense of what it actually feels like when your life is in devotion to the betterment of others. Well said. That's so well articulated. I mean, that is the vision.

The mission of Charity Water is to bring clean water to people on earth. And that's a very clear mission. Mission is accomplished when no human being on earth is drinking dirty water. But the vision is actually much softer. It's some of the things that you just said. It's to bring people back to the true meaning of charity. Charity means love. It means to look after your neighbor in need and get nothing in return.

And I was so upset that that word, that it's become tainted for so many people. And charity is a bad thing, not a good thing. Like we need more love in this world. I mean, look around, right? We need more people agreeing to agree on serving others, on ending needless suffering, of using our time and our talent and our money to help people, to improve the world. And I just thought that the way most people, most charities approach this was wrong. Like you said, it was shame. It was guilt. It was, you have too much. Even the language, giving back. I loathe this language, giving back. You hear it everywhere. It's in the lexicon now. Oh, I'm giving back. Oh, our company's giving back. That makes it sound like we have pillaged and plundered to such extent that we should

finally throw a few scraps down to the poor. Let's give a little bit back. If I snatch something, if I take your phone out of your hand, you're going to say, give it back. Why don't we drop the back? We should frame giving in the positive. We are just giving. Let's build a culture of giving in our family, in our company, maybe in our faith community. Let's give because we can,

because we want to, because it's a blessing, not out of opportunity, or sorry, not out of guilt or shame or debt or obligation, but because it is an amazing opportunity to share our blessing with others. And I actually would love to get people addicted to giving. You know, it's funny, my, my, my ambition right now around money, and I'm 43, I've got, you know, beautiful wife and two kids, but my ambition around money is to give more away, is to personally give more away. Someone, and I read about this, someone many years ago wrote a million dollar check that changed the game for Charity Water. It was an inflection point and it took us from the brink of insolvency because we hadn't yet worked out our- We talked about that last time. Yeah, we hadn't worked it out. But I want to do that for somebody else. I just have this dream

of one day, I don't know how I'm going to do it on a charity salary, but one day I would love to walk into someone else's office, a young social entrepreneur, and not just give them advice, okay? Because I can give a lot of people advice, but I would like to actually, so, so that's the ambition, not the house in the Hamptons, not the Mercedes or the Tesla, you know, not the vacation, you know, the four seasons. And that, that's really true. You know, I, and in some ways it's freeing because I'm, I don't feel trapped by not having, you know, the next, like the minute I would get the Tesla, I'm sure I'd want a better car, you know, or the minute I went on that vacation, well, somebody went on an even nicer vacation or stayed at the nicer hotel on the island. Right. So there's, it's been so freeing

12 years ago to just step off of that rat race and think about, think about how I can be useful, how I can be a vessel. I think, uh, people would think of you or who don't really understand you or what you do or somebody similar to you as like martyrs. Like, oh, you know, they're like, you're flogging yourself in your hair shirt every day. Yes, not like that though. You know that. Because, you know, you can't stand the suffering of others, but you're one of the happiest people that I know, right? You're a living example of how great you can feel and how good your life experience can be

when you're in that mode, right? And the fact that you're driving ambition is to give more. Like, you're in a place right now, how much have you raised? $330 million. Yeah, okay, $330 million. I don't know what your salary is, but it's a charity salary. I would imagine that if the board of Charity Water came to you and said, listen, Scott, like, let's just double your salary. You're doing a great job. That the donor base would celebrate that. They're like, Scott should be, you know, getting paid more. But knowing you a little bit, I would imagine you would just like give that away, right? Like you wouldn't even keep it.

Well, we give, you know, we give 20% of our income away. Right. I believe I have to be the biggest giver. Right. So you're, even of the salary that they give you, when everything that you do is for the charity, you're still giving it. Does that go back into Charity Water or do you give to other organizations? It's funny. I had them pull the numbers recently.

Just, I was like, well, I might get some really hard questions about like, do you give to your own organization? And since we started, we've given, my wife and I have $185,000 of our salary back to Charity Water. And so that's 18 wells, which is like a total joy to be able to do. So we give to our local church. We give to Charity Water. We give to other charities. There's probably 20 other organizations we support.

But we're fine. It's not a martyr. I live in a 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom, really nice apartment in New York city, seven minutes from my office in battery park city in Tribeca. Um, I drive a Kia Sorento. That's a lease. I love my Kia, right? It's got the two car seats installed in the back. Like we, we, we have food on the table. We have, um, you know, I fly coach that sucks. I'm 43 and I'm six foot one. 14 hours on Air Ethiopian is not a fun experience. But that's the worst of it. That is the worst of it. So we have these amazing, I mean, it's just an amazing life. I get to, I've been to 69 countries. I've been to Ethiopia 30 times. I get to preach a message of generosity, of trying to invite people into

something really beautiful for them, invite them into transformation through selflessness. One of the things I talk about at the end of the book is this idea of work that has no end. And if you can, for me, it was selfishness with no end. It was accumulation with no end. It was more girls, more drugs, more cars, things, watches, better clothes. And for the last 12 years, it's been more for others, more resources, more time, and more energy spent to try to make the world a better place, to try to help people who have nothing, you know, who are truly suffering. And that is a never ending work, but I've just come to embrace that.

And I think that, you know, I love the one well idea that you brought up because it did start with one and then there were five and then there were 10. And it's like that Nietzsche quote of, you know, the long obedience in the same direction. One day, if you just keep showing up, you turn around and you're like, oh, there's 29,000 wells. And, and, you know, check in, like maybe I come back on three years and like, who knows what that is? Or maybe some other amazing things have happened because you just keep showing up. And, you know, that I, I think we're at the beginning. You know, I think like, this is, this think we're at the beginning. You know, I think like this is, this is the beginning of the journey. I hope that I would be able to put in 30 years like Dr. Gary

Parker and look back. I mean, think of how many surgeries he's done now. And you probably signed up for a few surgeries. I'm going to go, I'm going to fix a couple of cleft lips and cleft palates. And I'm going to go back to my practice in California and I'm gonna make a lot of money. And, you know, has it been tens of thousands of people he's operated on now who never would have gotten an operation had he not said yes, had he not answered the call? Do not fear work that has no end. It's a rabbinical. It is. It comes from an obscure rabbinic text. Somebody took a picture of that quote outside of Bodega 10 years ago in New York City.

And I just, I love that. It's like the call to, you know, infinite giving, I think. Along the way, there's been these amazing kindized examples of that are kind of how you went from office space to office space, where at the last minute, somebody would come in and like these problems would get, these seemingly impossible problems would get solved through the generosity of people inspired by the work that you guys are doing. And there's stuff I couldn't even write about in the book because it would feel too creepy. I mean, you know, my editor's like, because I would, I mean, I, look, the, we talked about this last time.

The organization is not a religious organization. It never has been. I, you know, pray. I have a, just a, I guess a non-denominational kind of Christian faith. And I have seen so many direct, clear answers to prayer. I mean, we had to take it out of the book because it just felt, some of this stuff just felt like too over the top. But there was a moment when we didn't have an office space.

We were working out of the Soho loft. My old club partner was just raging all the time. And he would bring people back that would do drugs. And I was sleeping on a closet floor when Charity Water started. And I go up on the roof. And I'm just praying. I'm like, God, we need to get out of here. Like, we need to get out of here.

We didn't have money. We could barely afford an office. And I finished praying. And at that moment, I check my BlackBerry. And someone has just sent an email about an office space that they'd heard we were looking. And no lie, Rich, I can see it from the roof. I can see our new office building. It's five blocks away.

So there are all these just crazy stories where we have had, when we're on the brink of bankruptcy in year two, and the organization is going to become insolvent, and I'm shutting down Charity Water, and there is no more Charity Water, I'm praying for some sort of miracle. And, you know, an atheist, as it would happen, walks into my office, sits with me and writes a million dollar check. Complete stranger. It's insane.

You know, and like, so it's just, it's been really cool to see. And these little confirmations, I think, have just said you're on the right path. You're on the right path. Keep showing up. Like, this is what you're supposed to be doing. You found your purpose, your calling, or just don't give up. Don't quit. And don't compromise your values. And that's one of the lessons in that story in the book. Before that million-dollar miracle gift, we could have done the wrong thing. We could have borrowed a huge amount of money that was in the account for the water projects that we'd promised the public we would never touch. Right. Like the fidelity to the value system and the integrity.

And I would imagine as you grow larger, there's perhaps temptations to divert from your core values because of this, that, or the other sort of compromise that you could make. And even perhaps justifiable in that the end would justify the means. But how do you maintain that focus on the principles that launched it from the get-go? We've made it cultural. I mean, it's so black and white. So you're absolutely right. There will be a decision. It's like, hey, well, so part of the money coming in from the spring

is also able to be used to repair projects and bring them back online. Like a rehabilitation of a well is the same as a new well for us in our mind. But somebody said once, well, hey, we need to go and build some sensors, which are going to help us track the sustainability of these projects. And we said, no, we can't use that money. Got to go raise it separately. Because the 10-year-old girl who's doing five lemonade stands wants to give new people clean water, not work on a technology that's a little more abstract. Now you could argue that sensor is going to let us know when the well breaks, we're going to send a mechanic. Like it is all in the service of clean drinking water flowing. But we just said,

oh, let's just go raise that separate. Writing that letter to that little girl saying. And it actually might be okay. The little girl might be like, hey, great. You know, I paid for a sustainability program, but we just, back to, let's try and make the hard decisions. I mean, credit card fees. It's insane that we pay back credit card fees. I mean, this does not make sense. If you give $100 a month on your Amex and I get 97 a month, which is what we get, we pay back the $3 every single month and we send your intended hundred. Now you wouldn't expect us to send more money than we actually got from your donation. But we said, well, we don't feel like we can say a hundred percent if it's 97%. Just running a perpetual deficit then.

Yeah. So those, the 130 families that pay for the overhead pay back those credit card transaction fees. It's hundreds of thousands of dollars now just to make up the difference. But we wanted to be able to just stand up there and say 100% means 100%. Yeah. Faith is a huge part of who you are, and it informs the work that you do. And it's an interesting arc coming from, you know, a relatively evangelical upbringing to, you know, losing your way and finding your way back. And you're relatively open about that aspect of your life, although you're always careful to kind of... Not preach.

Yeah, like not preach and just make sure that, you know, your message is non-denominational in every regard. But I appreciated the fact that in the book, you go into a little bit more depth about that and how important it is to you. So I'm interested in how you think about faith and that aspect of, you know, how you came to become this person and how it does inform your work and continue to kind of propel you forward? Yeah. Well, I think at 28, I rediscovered the teachings of Jesus or the personhood of Jesus in a very different way. And he was a lot more exciting with fresh eyes. He was a radical, he was a rebel. He was more like me in that he was, you know, rejecting the oppressive religious establishment of the day and saying, hey, let's serve the poor. Hey, let's be pure. I mean, you know, he was calling the religious

leaders, you know, whitewashed tombs, snakes, you know, all these horrors. I mean, he was just constantly offending them. And I think that's what I had taken the most umbrage to growing up was the kind of the religiosity. You know, it felt oppressive. It felt rules-based. It just felt like all the things I wasn't allowed to do. Like, you guys are just, you're putting me into this box. So I think having then done all those things found certainly nothing but heartache or brokenness in those. Coming back, I was so taken by the purity of Jesus. I mean, he was above reproach. He

just refused to play into the system of the world. I mean, he had no earthly possessions. He was living from place to place. And speaking truth to power in this kind of very, you know, like as Rob Bell talks about it, like it's very punk rock. It's very like rage against the machine. Yes. Have you seen his Christmas show that he does? The new one? No, we were just together recently and he was talking about it.

It's super awesome. I heard it's awesome. Yeah, but it's all about kind of the things that you were just mentioning. Yeah. But Jesus spends so much time talking about the poor. were just mentioning. Yeah. And then, but Jesus spends so much time talking about the poor and he spends so much time with, you know, the, the outcasts, the people that know that would walk by his parables, you know, these, the parable of like the good Samaritan just spoke to me. The, you know, I was the guy walking by, I was the guy that never had time. And, you know,

Jesus is celebrating the person who stops and who picks up the person lying in the street and checks them into the hotel and puts down the Amex and says, I'll just cover all the expenses until they get well. So I just found the opposite of my life, the opposite intention of my life, so compelling. And I guess I have such a pattern now of praying, expecting an answer, and then getting an answer that my prayer life is just, I don't know. I mean, I believe somebody's listening. I believe I'm talking to somebody and they are hearing.

I mean, there was a story we couldn't write about in the book. I remember we were in the middle of northern Ethiopia. And I don't think I've ever told this story before. Um, I was with Vic, we weren't married, uh, at the time. And we were in this, this really kind of bad hotel at the top of the hill. And we were all, it was New Year's Eve in Ethiopia and there on the Julian calendar, which is fascinating. So it doesn't line up with December 31st. And we, we got for pizza the night before at a restaurant, get up in the morning, and we're about to fly back and Vic can't find her passport. And actually she can't find her bag. And it turns out her bag was stolen. So I send the rest of the group, there were 10 other people back home. I

cancel my flight and we are looking for her passport. Now our local partner is kind of, light and we are looking for her passport. Now our local partner is kind of, he's the man in Mekelle, Ethiopia. So he gets all the cops to turn up. They start knocking on the doors of the known criminals in this town, you know, hustling them, searching, you know, cause this is a huge offense when a foreigner comes in and has their possession stolen. It was her wallet, her camera, and her passport. And so I just start praying and I'm like, God, show me where the passport would be. I kid you not. I, I, I feel like I can just see where it is. And, um, I, I feel like God says it's under the bushes behind the hotel. Oh, come on. behind the hotel.

Oh, come on. So I'm like, I'll be right back. And I take one of the guys with me, and I crawl kind of over this fenced-in area, and there's a big bush, and I walk behind it, and her bag has been hidden under the tree. Oh, my God. And we got on the next plane. And what had happened was they think one of the workers

had stolen it, had then gotten scared to be caught with the contraband as the cops flood this hotel. So they ditch it in their bush. So what do you make of this? I don't know. I don't know. You have a direct channel to God? No.

Believe me. And so many prayers have gone unanswered. I just lost my mom to pancreatic cancer four months ago. And I was praying until the end. I was praying for a miracle. I had pastors, people in my faith community around the world praying, and God took her. I mean, she died in hospice and four months from diagnosis to death. So believe me, as great as that is, like to find a wallet under a bush or, and I mean, there are just so many examples over the years

that again, I didn't want to like put into the book because I don't want to freak people out and think that, you know, I'm completely nuts. Yeah, or make it like a religious text that becomes inaccessible for somebody. They lose sight of what it is that you're actually trying to say here. But I think there is something really compelling about this idea of looking to the example of Jesus, who was this amazing badass, who was able to

embody these ideals that we all aspire to, but fall so short of, and to say, well, what would it be like if I actually tried to model my life after his behavior? Like, forget about all the trappings of religion. It's just like, well, this guy did this, this, this, and this, and this is how he behaved, and this is how he interacted with people. Like, what would it actually be like if I tried to do that? And then you really have done that. And your life has changed dramatically and impacted people all over the world. And you're not like walking around barefoot, you know, in a beggar's robe. Like you're a modern guy living in the modern world in New York City. But I think there's a lot of inspiration that we can take from that example of what it's like to just be, like I keep going back to this, but like to be in this mode of

giving and service and exuding love and approaching situations from a perspective of how can I contribute to make this better, as opposed to what can I extract out of this to accumulate for my own, you know, to account for my own inadequacies or insecurities. Well, the last thing I'd say about faith was just, Jesus always talked about the kingdom, like the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God. There's just this language all through, like bringing the kingdom of God to earth. And the nice thing about the last 12 years of my work with Charity Water is that even though it's a completely secular and non-religious organization,

I feel like I get to bring what I imagine the kingdom would look like to earth through clean water. Because I know that in heaven, right, everybody might have a different opinion of what that might look like. But I know pretty much everybody would agree in heaven, no one's drinking dirty water. Dirty is illegal in everyone's version of heaven. A girl walking eight hours with 40 pounds of disgusting river water on her back, getting raped during that walk, illegal. It's not happening. So in the most basic theology, I get through my work,

through my non-evangelical work, really, that involves Muslims and Jews and atheists and Hindus and Buddhists and Mormons. Like I get to, you know, people of all faiths, people of no faiths, Republicans, Democrats, independents. I get to create this huge tent, but my theology of helping people get clean drinking water is in line with the work, which is a really freeing thing. And I think because you don't have to do what I do on a Sunday or pray to the God I pray to, to work at the organization or give to the organization. And in fact, most people don't. That's almost given me a freedom to say, well, this is what I believe. And this is my story. And it's been funny just reading the reviews on Amazon of the book. So many people are like, I would never read a religious book and I'm Jewish

or I'm an atheist, but it was okay. It was okay. He didn't try and convert me. He didn't try and preach. But it's not a religious book. It isn't at all. It isn't at all. But you know, for anybody, like, I mean, I talk about prayer and some of these, you know, some of these moments of answer to prayer or how I tried to re-experience faith. And, you know, some people like anything having to do with faith is just completely taboo. But it was just interesting seeing people like, it was okay. Give him a pass because he didn't preach. Normally.

And normally, no, I'm telling you, if you read the reviews, it's funny. It's like, normally I would never read anything with any religious overtone. But, you know, there's a big but. religious overtone, but, you know, there's a big but. Well, I think that speaks to, in the same way that we, you know, we have this crisis around giving and charity, the same can be said for our religious institutions. You know, if you were to say, you know, oh, you need to give back or, you know, UNICEF is knocking on the door, you're like, ugh, really? Similarly, for a lot of people, just saying the word religion or Christianity or G-O-D or any of these things- Conjures.

Yeah. Provokes an emotional reaction that's wed to some childhood experience or something like that. And, and in many ways, you know, the best of what faith-based organizations have to offer, you know, could use a little Scott Harrison rebranding in certain respects, you know? Well, certainly the transparency would be foreign for a lot of them, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So where are we at right now? We're at 663, still in need. Still in need. How often are you? And the spring has grown.

Yeah. So your community was so amazing. It's been a year and a half since that started. There are now 29,000 people from 104 countries, um, including countries in Africa, which makes me so happy. So there are people that are given monthly to the spring from Africa that have heard about it. Um, it's interesting to say spring is your monthly subscription. So Netflix for clean water or Spotify for clean water, a hundred percent of, of what people give monthly goes straight out the door,

provides clean water. We're then able to share stories of impact. And that's the future for us because the drive-by one-time gift or the one-time birthday doesn't help you solve the water crisis. Someone listening and says, oh, I'm going to give $100 once. I've got to go find the next person the next year. So getting someone who says, well, I think I could maybe sign up for this idea for a while. Like I could sign up for the idea of a world where everyone has clean drinking water and I can trust this organization. And that's again why I would hope, you know, so many of our values are in that book. So you will get a sense

at the end of it of who we are, what animates us, what values we really care about. And we're hoping to just build, keep growing a community of people who, you know, who keep showing up like month in, month out in the same way that we show up for our content, you know, in the same way we show up for Dropbox when we want to, you know, access our photos. Can we get people to show up for others, for clean water? So that's now grown 29,000 people in 100 countries. The fascinating thing is the average across the community is exactly $30 a month, which is what it costs us to give one person clean water. Then we have kids giving it $10.

We have people giving it $100. But it's just amazing to see that organic average is 29,000 people every month are getting 29,000 new people clean drinking water. And that's the number I want to add a zero to. It's a great model for a lot of reasons, but also because it solves a dilemma that I know that you have historically faced every year, which is that no matter how much money you raise in a year, you got to start over from zero. January 1 was a dark day, Rich. Ten years of doing this, at some point, working 80-hour weeks, it's going to catch up to you and you're going to burn out, right? So I know you've kind of butted up against the edges of what that feels like. Yeah, I mean, I wrote about that, too.

For years, people were saying that I like. Yeah. I mean, I wrote about that too. I, I, for, for years, people were saying that I would burn out and I'd be like, I'm still here. Just did 98 flights last year, 150 speeches. Look at me not burned out yet. And it, it took, uh, it took about nine years and, and there was a really dark moment where, um, I did, I did want to quit and, um, I And I managed to come out of it. And I actually hope that writing about that experience, in fact, other social entrepreneurs have told me, other entrepreneurs in general have said, hey, I felt there. I've been there. The way that I came out of it was realizing that I had put so much of my personal identity in the success of the organization. So when Charity Water was doing well, I was doing well.

And Charity Water had done well for eight consecutive years. And then the ninth year, when we didn't do so well, when our donations dipped for the first time, Scott didn't do well. And I became depressed. And it's all my fault. And I'm letting people down. I actually felt like I'd let hundreds of thousands of people down because we hadn't repeated the success of the previous year.

We hadn't grown. And there was a really important time and lesson that I learned, which was, OK, I am more than my organization. I'm a father of two. I'm a husband. And actually, in that year, outside of the money that we raised, it was our best year. We didn't compromise our values or our integrity. We pushed sustainability forward. Our team had a great year. We hired some extraordinary people that we onboarded.

It's just we didn't raise as much money. So that, um, that kind of led to me saying, all right, I'm not going to quit. Um, I'm going to come back and, um, I'm going to try and launch the spring and actually solve this problem, which is we are too big to start at zero every January one and just, and invite people to show up with us on a, on a longer term basis. Yeah. And your, your community again was so helpful. I think, um, yeah, I don't know, I forget how much, but I think they joined at like over $100,000 a month, just the Rich Roll community. Well, this is a renewed call to action to the community out there. I think you still have a link up. I think I do, but I'm going to end this with another call to action.

But for now, I will say that if you're new to the show and you're listening to this and you're not a member of the spring, that you should sign up immediately. I think I do have a link. I'll put links up in the show notes to all of that. And, you know, you guys can dig deeper in the I'll put a bunch of other links about Scott and the work that he does and certainly pick up his book where you can learn more about the amazing work that this organization is doing, but I can tell you, it's been a delight and a pleasure to be a spring member and to see the engagement of the listenership of this show to engage in the work that you do. So I want to enhance that, man. So how many times are you going to, are you traveling now overseas to oversee the work that's going on there? Three times next year. It's now overseas to oversee the work that's going on there? Three times next year. It's not really overseeing the work anymore. So we have an amazing

team that does that. There are 19 people at Charity Water whose full-time jobs are flying around. Think of them out there with clipboards, making sure the work is being done with high quality, working with our partners, and then auditing, making sure the money's being spent well. So I'm typically out telling stories or trying to recruit more overhead donors because that's a challenge. We have a million people that have given on the water side, but I need to make sure that I can continue to pay for our staff and our office costs and our flights. What's the annual budget just for managing overhead? About 14 and a half million this year, and we'll raise a total

of $70. So we're very efficient. We might spend 85% of our money on programs and 15% to run it, but still the money has to come separately. So that's not a trivial undertaking. So that's like 60% of your time is focused on raising money for that. Yeah. And it's an amazing community. You know, those 131 families and entrepreneurs that are supporting the overhead, it's the founders of Facebook and Twitter and Spotify and WordPress and Pandora. And it's, you know, Apple executives, it's people like Rob Bell, our friend, and people like Depeche Mode. So it's a really kind of, and football quarterbacks. I mean, it's a motley crew of 131 families that said, we got your back. We don't need our name on a well.

We want to help you hire the next hydrologist, the next accountant, the next person to greet people at Charity Water HQ. We'll pay for the toner for the Epson copy machine. So I'm spending a lot of time growing that community from 131 to 135 to 140. And one of the ways I do that is by taking them over there. So I'll do three trips next year. I'm trying to get you there. You know, I keep inviting you.

I know. Well, you have the open innovation. Well, this is actually, let me air this out with you, because I had an opportunity to go on one of these trips and it looked like I could do it. And then I was like, I just, I had so much going on and I just, I couldn't, I couldn't justify breaking away to go on this trip, but I'm committed to, to doing this. Like I really do want to do this. And I'm at my own kind of moment right now where I wouldn't say I'm, I'm teetering on burning out, but I'm the bottleneck in so many things that I'm doing that I'm finally embracing this idea that the things that I've done that have got me to where I am right now are not the things that are going to take me to the next level. And I need to make some fundamental changes in how I'm running this. It's a very micro version of what you're doing,

but it has its own challenges. And I need to let go of certain things and bring more people on to allow me to better scale what I'm doing and also allow me to focus on the things that are most important, not just professionally, but personally. So I can have the experience of going on one of these trips with you. Next March, I'm going to hit you hard. We've got enough time to plan it. It's far enough away that I can plan next March. I'm going to hit you. I'm going to hit your heart. We got enough time. It's far enough away that I can plan it. And I am committing to that now. Yeah. It'd be, it'd be great. I think I know you, and you would get so much life from the trip, not just from, you know,

community of like-minded givers, you know, who, who also join them. There'll be 25 people. But just meeting the, you know, for me, I just put you guys into it and then I get out of the way. It's so great. Like I just sat back. The job does itself. And you're talking with the local drillers. You know, when you meet the team running an Ethiopian drilling rig of eight guys and you say, Hey, you know, what's, what's your, what's your work week like? And like, what's our work month? Like we work 29 out of 30 days. We take one day off a month. Okay.

Because there's an eight month dry season in Ethiopia and they want to maximize it because when it rains for four months, they can't drill. So they leave their family. So then, you know, you're asking questions, right?

You're interviewing him. And every once in a while, someone will come into the village and say, well, why don't the people just move closer to the water? I'm like, why don't you ask the women? So I just sat back and, you know, through translators saying, hey, how come you don't move closer to the water? And the women say, where do you, who owns that land? We don't own that land. This is our farm. This is where we grew up. So I just love being a part of these, you know, these trips as people explore as they,

they're inspired. I mean, there's definitely some tears. If you're there at the moment when 1,000 people are getting clean water for the first time in their life, and you watch clean water shoot out of the ground under pressure as they flush the well, and you see the dancing and tears streaming down people's faces, it's really emotional. It's like a picture of heaven, whatever heaven looks like to you. But it's an extraordinary thing to be a part of. What's one of your favorite stories from these experiences that you could share?

You know, there's one, you know, I think I told a couple sad ones the last time. There's one story that I didn't get to write about in the book. And it's not super happy, but I think it puts a point on the urgency of the work. So I was just talking about the celebrations. When you drill a well and you get water, it's just awesome. It's just awesome. And communities will talk about their community often as before the water and after the water. It's just awesome. It's just awesome. And communities will talk about their community often as before the water and after the water. Another theme that I tease out in the book is this before

and after. That's what I was doing with Mercy Ship. It was this black and white. So my life was before and after, you know, before the cocaine, you know, smoking, you know, crackhead basically running around. And now after like a husband, a father, you know, a guy who's able to lead an organization, the Dr. Gary was doing before and after, right? Suffocating to death with a facial tumor. And now you're fine, you know, blind with a cataract. Now you can see, and it's the same thing with water. You're able to take it before the water, um, all the problems that we discussed to after the water. So there was one of these celebrations and it was in Ethiopia.

And normally everybody is happy. There's music, there's lolling, which is the women just shouting at the top of their lungs. And there was one woman off to the side who was weeping during this. And our partners go over to this, she's an older woman. And they say, you know, why are you crying? Like, this is a joyful moment. Like, look around you. And she's just like almost like consumed with rage.

And she says, do you mean to tell me that the water was underneath our feet the whole time? And that I spent my life walking hours for dirty water to a faraway source, and that it was right there all along. And that struck me, just that picture of a thousand people celebrating, a woman on a ridge off to the side, grieving decades of suffering. And then one day a truck pulls in, a bunch of guys jump out, start sticking a, you know, a drilling bit into the ground. And 48 hours later, they find clean water and everything's fine. So that picture, you know, we don't want her to suffer for 20 or 30 years.

We don't want her kids to suffer. And I think when you hear something like that, now I can better understand why you feel like you should be further along. Yeah. If it really is that simple, why can't we accelerate this and avoid those kinds of situations of that woman when the problem is so incredibly solvable? And we're going to try and do that. We were just talking before about our gala and trying to fund more drilling rigs. Every drilling rig, specifically in Ethiopia, can drill about 85 wells a year. So we're actually limited right now by capacity. We have eight drilling rigs. They're going full time.

So eight times eight, you got about 640 villages. But you add a new rig, you get a new 85 villages. How much does a rig cost? About 750 grand. Wow. So it's all fun. How do you make a decision? I'm getting fired up now thinking about it.

How do you decide like, okay, here's the next well we're going to do. Have you identified every place that needs them? And then how do you prioritize the pecking order? So now being at scale, in the beginning, it was just, hey, we got money for 10 wells, drill them wherever you want. Now, when you're more at scale, there are plans. There are often three to five-year plans for different districts in all these countries we work in. I think we're active in 17 or 18 countries this year. So there would be, there's a plan for the Chikwawa district in Malawi. There's a plan for the Rolindo district in Rwanda. There's the plan for Tigray. We know what a hundred percent coverage looks like.

Sometimes it's 60 million to go. Sometimes it's 200 million to go. Sometimes it's 14 million to go. And we're working towards that a hundred percent coverage. So it's not a random haphazard, let's just drill a few wells. It's a clustered approach. So you bring a new well in, a new rig in, you get a new cluster in action. I see. So it's really exciting. I mean, I'm really optimistic. And what are the sort of political hurdles that you have to jump over? I mean, are you dealing with like, you know, village politics and lots of personalities? And have you had pushback and issues where you have to really figure out how to grace people in a certain way to make it happen?

Yeah, that's surprised me. And I think it surprised a lot of people that when it comes to water, we're not encountering resistance. Now, we have said we're not working in conflict zones. So we're not working in Yemen. We're not working in Darfur, Sudan said we're not working in conflict zones, so we're not working in Yemen. We're not working in Darfur, Sudan. We're not working in these places where there's active war going on. We're not working

in despotic countries where the government actually doesn't want any NGOs to come in. That could foment a revolution. Right, but that leaves us like 50 countries that we can work in where the government is saying, we're doing our part, will you come and help? So that's the amazing thing about water.

I mean, we're making them look good. Like, you know, do you think when we come in and take one district in Rwanda alongside, the Rwandan government is so interesting, they actually match our money 90 cents on the dollar. Yeah, I was going to ask, like, can't these governments give you some part of their tax base for you to then fulfill on, you know? They are, but the money that they're spending

is a fraction of what's needed. That tax base is being, first of all, it's a small amount. It's being split among roads, among healthcare, among energy, you know, power lines, cell towers, water. There are all these different things they have to do. So we are seeing governments spend money, but in certain cases, they are matching our dollars. So we've done about $12 million in Rwanda, in the Rolindo district. It's a tongue tie. And the government has put $11 million alongside ours. So it was really a $22 million program over seven years. And we started at, I think, around 20% water coverage. We're at 99%, Rich.

Like, we're almost there. This district has nobody, you know, in a couple months, we'll have nobody drinking dirty water. Now we're moving on to the districts to the side, and we're going to start over again. So it's really hopeful seeing that we're not seeing resistance. You know, every once in a while, you know, a mayor will come and take credit, right? Oh my good people, you know, I have brought in the water. Um, but, but we don't want the

credit. We actually don't want the credit. The whole beauty of the business model is that Charity Water is getting everyday people to care, to act, to engage, to join this community. But the actual work is always done by the locals. For the work to be sustainable, for it to be culturally sensitive and appropriate, it has to be led by the locals. So they get the credit. So it's amazing rolling into Ethiopia. And people don't know who Charity Water is, but they know and celebrate our local partner who's running those eight drilling rigs. One of the things that I thought was most touching at the gala in New York last winter was that you had a bunch of those people, a bunch of the locals there.

And you made such a point of celebrating these individuals who are actually doing the work, you know, boots on the ground. Yeah. And allowing people to really like, they're the heroes. Understand who these people are and like the sacrifice that they're making to be away from their family for such extended periods of time. And you'll be, when you come in March, you'll be so inspired by them. I mean, you'll really see, we'll get out of the way. We'll just say, Hey, go, go, go ask them. them. Tekelani, tell everybody why you do what you do. So many people are living their lives feeling incredibly disenfranchised. They're disconnected from the fruits of their labor, from anything that provides them with passion.

You know, they're just trying to get through the day and pay the bills. And there's this malaise, this sense that one person really can't make a difference. Like, yeah, I can put a quarter in the little box from whoever when I'm walking into Walmart, but is that really doing anything? And so I love how a big part of the ethos of Charity Water is helping people to really reframe that and to really understand that one person can make a difference, a very tangible, impactful difference. And with that comes this sense of purpose that can overcome one. And in doing that, you tell amazing stories about everyone from the girl at the lemonade stand to whoever. So I thought it would be nice if you could tell one of those stories for somebody who's listening to this who feels like, yeah, I'm hearing everything Scott's saying. But I don't know how I could have that kind of feeling in my own life. First, let me just... I know you haven't gotten there yet, but you basically just delivered the end of the book.

So I'm going to read the last line. You didn't even know where I was going to end, but that's it. So it says, at last count, Charity Water has funded more than 28,000 water projects. It'll help 8.5 million people get clean water, people who will never have to experience what it was like before the water ever again. We still have so much work to do, yet every day I wake up hopeful that we will solve this problem in my lifetime. I believe that together we can bring life's most basic necessity to the 663 million people who still don't have it. I'm just one guy who built one charity, but it's made a little dent in the water crisis. Next year, we'll make a bigger dent.

And this is how the problems of the world get solved, one by one, by me and you and us. I really believe that. It's beautiful. As we all join our voice together. So I'll end on a story. It's a new story. It's not in the book. We were about to launch our big World Water Day campaign March 22nd at the organization.

We had a whole campaign lined up. And then somebody opening up the mail at HQ gets a note, a little picture, and $8.15. And we learn it's from a six-year-old named Nora. And the note says, Dear Charity Water, I saw your video and I'm sending in $8.15 because I want kids to stop dying of bad water. I want kids to stop dying of bad water. And she draws a picture of herself next to a well in Africa, what she thinks a well looks like with clean water coming out. So Charity Water, you know, we're storytellers, like stop the presses, cancel the campaign. Let's see if Nora

will let us put her on camera and tell her story. So we have a camera crew down in Virginia a week later and Nora opens up her house, this six year old girl and on camera, she's this precocious girl that says, well, I saw the video and I went up to my room that night and I just, I, I asked myself the question, should I give my money or should I keep my money? Should I give my money? Should I keep my money? And she's back and forth, and it's so cute to hear it.

And she says, so I came down in the morning, and I said, I would give my money. So she drops $8.15 from her allowance, and she mails it in. And, ah, there's so much there, right? The purity of heart. And by the way, we're all asking ourselves the same question, right? Should I give? Should I not? Should I trust? Should I not? So she comes out on the right side for her. And we launched a campaign around this three-minute video. And she's just, she's beautiful. She has this heart to serve others. And when you see her on camera, you just melt. You're like, I want to be that

pure. I want to, like the simplicity, you know, back to the Bible, like, you know, Jesus said, let little children come to me, right? We will be led by children, the simplicity of children to teach adults these values of generosity and compassion and purity. So we just told her story and we asked everyone just to give $8 and 15 cents. And how much was raised? We raised 80 grand in a day. So that's the... It's like eight wells. Yeah. And so her seed, her vision of $8 and 15 cents turned into a thousand times more. And what does she think of all this?

She loved it. And hopefully we'll get to take her there. Hopefully she can go and see some of that impact one day. We do think about that. Like, how do we close the loop? But I would hope that even Nora might live her life a little differently. That the feedback loop, that seeing people respond,

might even encourage her to give $18. Of course it will. Imagine being that age and then suddenly you're the seed that germinates this amazing flower that has to impact her and make her think. I mean, it had to be an amazing feeling for her. It was an amazing feeling for us. Understand it. Yeah. That is incredible. And I think it does speak perfectly to this idea that one person really can make a change. And I love this idea of, you know, I'm like back to this literary thing, like this symbology of like purity. Is there anything more pure than water? Like taking it back to its biblical roots and the way that we all cleanse ourselves,

our bodies and our souls through clean water, right? And that's essentially what this is all about, the clarity of purpose and the simplicity of what water represents and how powerful it is. It's really amazing. So great. Let's close this down. So, great. Let's close this down. If you could just leave us with a thought about what it means to live a life of service and how you think about that. And, you know, without repeating what we've already talked about, what you think it would mean for another person to extend themselves in service and, and, and the kind of downstream impact of that. Freedom is the first word that comes to mind. I mean, for me, I can only speak for me. I just found such a freedom in redirecting the intention of my life

away from accumulation and selfishness and status and, you know and all the things that we see on TV and on social media that we're supposed to want, that we're supposed to climb higher for. And it was just freeing to say, I'm not going to play that game. And I'm going to look at the resources that I've been blessed with, both the resources and the talents been blessed with, both, you know, the resources and the talents maybe around promoting or storytelling, the money that I have, and how can I use those to be a blessing to others? And I think it can start small. It can start with $8 and 15 cents. It could start with a birthday party where the first well was built. And, you know, for me, I just wanted more and

more and more. And the more I gave, the more I wanted to give, you know, I, I, I love that. The more you give, the more you give. And I would encourage people just to step out and, you know, set the cynicism aside, give your time and you're going to want to give more time. You know, maybe it's a local charity. Maybe it's something in your neighborhood. But dig in. Give your money. And give it to an organization where you actually feel like you're going to see the impact, and it's not just going to go into a black hole.

But I would hope that that would feel good, and you'd want to do more of it and more of it and more of it. And the next thing you know, you look back and you say, wow, I just was preparing a donor report recently for a family who'd been with us for eight years. And we said, here's your total eight years of giving. Here's your impact all around the world. And they wrote back and they said, we had no idea it was that much. We had no idea.

We had given over a half a million dollars. I think they felt like it was less than half of that. And that's the experience, right? When you just, they were just showing up every year, giving as they could, they're giving some profits to their business. And then, you know, we're like, hey, here's your summary. You're like, oh my gosh,

it's kind of like screen time just popped up. And I was like, oh my gosh, I spent that much phone on my, I spent that much time on my iPhone last week. How's that possible? So I would hope in the positive, as you give your time, as you give your talent, as you give your money in the service of others, you do get to look back and say, wow, that's a significant impact. I really have transformed people's lives and transformed my own life in the process. Well, you have transformed my life,

and it's been a blessing and an honor to be able to contribute to your incredible organization, man. And you inspire me in more ways than you know. So I thank you for your service. Thanks for doing this here today. And I wanted to kind of end this by saying that this podcast, I believe, is going up on October 21. My birthday is October 20th. So happy birthday. Because I am the bottleneck in everything that I do

and I've been spread so thin, I didn't have my act together in time to launch a birthday campaign well in advance of my birthday. So can I still launch a birthday campaign on my birthday and leave it open until perhaps the end of the year or something like that? All right. So when this goes up, this will serve as the official announcement that I'm dedicating my 52nd birthday to Charity Water. So I'll put

up links and all the information on how you can contribute to that because I don't want anything for my birthday other than for all of you to experience what I've experienced and what Scott is speaking about, that feeling that you get when you contribute to the betterment of others. I'll be your first donor. You got 152 bucks from me right now. That's a few people with clean water. Thank you, sir. Back in your organization. And, of course, the spring.

If people want to learn more about the spring, I mean, you can go to charitywater.org. There you go. I think that link is still live. Yeah. So, charitywater.org slash richroll. I'll make sure it's live before this goes up. And everybody pick up Thirst, available everywhere you buy books. It's a fantastic read. It's a huge accomplishment. I'm super excited for you, man. And more will be revealed. Come back and talk to me again. Cool.

Maybe we'll do one from Ethiopia in March. That would be cool. Let's do like a 30-minute pod from a well opening, okay? Only 30 minutes? Well, like from a well opening. We could interview some local people with translators. Come on, let's do that. That would actually be amazing.

I would love to do that. And we'll see, we might even be able to get to one of your birthday wells. Okay. I'm going to work on it. All right. Thanks, Scott. Peace. Clean water. Amazing human, that's Scott Harrison, an extraordinary mission and really an outstanding example of a life well lived. I simply just cannot say enough good things about that guy. Hope you guys enjoyed it. I hope it inspired you to give more freely of yourself.

And if so, a great way to start is to donate to my birthday campaign. Again, the goal is to raise $100,000 by the end of the year. And you can do this. $100,000 by the end of the year. And you can do this. You can assist by going to my.charitywater.org forward slash richroll, link in the show notes on the episode page. Beyond that, you can donate monthly via the spring. You can set up your own birthday campaign and please make sure you pick up Scott's new book, Thirst. It is a page turner. And final reminder that when you do buy it forward your receipt to unlock at charitywater.org and you will unlock a $30 donation that will bring clean water to one person speaking of resources as always check out the show notes in the episode page there you will

find links to everything mentioned today my charity water fundraiser page how to get the podcast on spot, the YouTube version of the show, Scott's new book, Thirst, and a ton more info on Scott and Charity Water. If you're looking for a little additional nutritional guidance, check out our meal planner at meals.richroll.com. There you will find thousands of plant-based recipes, literally thousands, all customized based on your personal preferences. We have incredible customer support 24-7. We have unlimited grocery lists. based recipes, literally thousands, all customized based on your personal preferences.

We have incredible customer support 24 seven. We have unlimited grocery lists. We have grocery delivery integrated into the system in most metropolitan areas. And it's all available for just a dollar 90 a week. When you sign up for a year again, meals.richroll.com or click on meal planner on the top menu on my website, richroll.com. If you would like to support our work here on the podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify now, Stitcher, or on whatever platform you enjoy this content. Leave a review, tell your friends, and share it on your favorite social media platform.

You can also support the show on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for graphics, for video, for editing, all the visual content that accompanies this audio podcast. My man DK, David Kahn for sponsored relationships

and theme music as always by analemma thanks for the love you guys see you back here in a couple days with yet another anticipated installment of guru corner with the always sagacious guru sing until then give of yourself freely and watch your universe expand in magical ways. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.