The Rich Roll Podcast - Scott Harrison On Why Clean Water Changes Everything

Episode Date: July 31, 2017

From the outside looking in, he was living the dream. Killer SoHo loft. Private jets to exotic locales. Rolex, cover model girlfriend and cash. Plenty of cash. But ten years living decadently and extravagantly as a nightclub promoter in New York City took it's toll. By 28, Scott Harrison had become the worst person he knew. Utterly lost, mired in a crisis of conscience and desperate to rediscover his sense of purpose, Scott decided it was time for a drastic change. So he left NYC to spend a year volunteering as a photojournalist aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, West Africa. During this time, Harrison witnessed and photographed levels of poverty and illness he never knew existed. As one year turned into two, he came to understand that many of the infections and diseases their group treated were waterborne, and could have been prevented if people had access to clean drinking water. Scott couldn't understand why nobody seemed to be focusing on solving this important problem at scale. So he decided to tackle it himself. Upon returning to NYC 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 $210 million to fund an astounding 20,000+ water projects that deliver clean water to more than 6.3 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. I'm thrilled to share it with you today. My hope is that this conversation inspires action. Because each and every one of us holds the power to positively impact the life of another. And because life is more fulfilling, meaningful and rewarding when we are persistently engaged in the pursuit of service and giving. My call to action? The Spring — charity: water's monthly subscription service. I signed up. And you should too. 100% of all Spring donations go directly to the field to bring clean water to those in need, and Spring members will get updates of the impact their donations have. Let's all pitch in together. As a community. Because even a simple $30 gift can provide one person with clean water. And because it's just cool and awesome to do generously for others. For more information and to sign up, visit our special url cwtr.org/richrollspring or click the banner ad below. This is a special one for me. I hope it is for you too. Peace + Plants, Rich

I wanted more people to have a redemptive experience of giving of their time and of their talent and of their money, you know, which I'd just done for the last two years, and seeing how rewarding that can be. I wanted to invite people to try unselfishness versus selfishness and share the transformative human experience I'd gone through with others through giving and generosity. The thing was birthed out of my personal faith, but the charity has had no religious affiliation. And that's been really exciting to me to see Jews and Christians and atheists and Muslims and Mormons and everybody kind of come together under this very big tent

of clean water. It's really one of those few things everybody can agree on. That's Scott Harrison, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. What's going on? How are you? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to my podcast. Today, everybody, what's going on? How are you? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to my podcast. Today, as you might imagine, we're coming at this from a little bit of a different angle. We are live here in Ireland, County Cork at Ballyvalon House. I'm here with the Plant Power Ireland camper. Say hello, everybody. We're on the last day of our uh seven day experience have you guys been having a good time yes amazing it's been an incredible experience uh connecting with

everybody over the course of the last several days we've had a great time running we got lost on our run today like trespassing across some farm. There might've been an electrical fence involved. Gladly, no dogs or police had to intervene. But it's been amazing. We've been doing tea ceremony. We've been eating together. We've been learning about cooking and nutrition. The happy pear guys came down.

It's been extraordinary. And I'm so blessed to have spent this time with you guys. So thank you for all coming together to cultivate community around these ideas that are certainly so important to Julie and I and obviously important to you guys. So I appreciate it. And I also appreciate you guys sitting down to do the introduction for this week's podcast with me. As I always say, recording these introductions is the most challenging,

difficult thing for me in this whole podcast experience because sitting down alone and talking into a microphone by myself, I don't know, I get all caught up in my head. So it's actually very helpful to have you guys here. So I appreciate it. Super fun. Everybody say hello one more time. To match this amazing week today, I'm excited to share with you an amazing conversation with the incredibly inspiring Scott Harrison. For those who don't know, Scott is the founder and CEO of Charity Water. He's a guy with quite a story. It's a story you're definitely not going to want to miss. It's truly one of the most extraordinary accounts I've ever heard. He's one of the most impressive people I've ever had the good fortune to meet. And I want to explain a little bit more about him and that and the why behind this conversation

and what you can expect in just a moment. But first... All right, Scott Harrison. This guy, holy cow, what a crazy, amazing story he has to tell. So this is a guy who spent essentially an entire decade in a decadent state of mind as a successful nightclub promoter in New York City until he has this crisis of conscience. And this crisis of conscience ultimately led Scott on this pilgrimage in search of purpose for his life. And it's a journey that ultimately led him to extended volunteer stints in Liberia, where he was exposed to levels of unimaginable poverty and illness. And over time, he came to understand that many of the infections and the diseases that he was seeing, that their group was treating, were

waterborne and could have been prevented if people had access to clean drinking water. could have been prevented if people had access to clean drinking water. And yet it seemed that nobody was really focused on solving this gigantic yet seemingly solvable problem. So upon returning to New York City in 2006, he turned his full attention to this global water crisis, to learning about it and trying to determine how he could begin to tackle it. about it and trying to determine how he could begin to tackle it. He found out that there were then, at that point in time, 1.1 billion people living without access to clean water, which is pretty shocking. And the manifestation of Scott's commitment to this cause is Charity Water,

which is a for-purpose endeavor that he founded, he currently runs that to date has raised over $210 million to fund over 20,000 water projects around the world and brings clean water to more than 6.3 million people. It's really quite something impressive. But even more than that, I think what's really interesting about Scott's story and the story of Charity Water is that he quite literally reimagined and reinvigorated and really reinvented how we give and how we think about giving by repairing public trust in charity and also modernizing the process, the branding, and really the connection between the giver and the results of giving. And Scott's story is really an extraordinary one. And this is just such a great conversation. It's a conversation about transformation. It's a conversation about the power of giving. And it's a conversation about the power I think we all hold to be agents of positive change, the power and the potential that we all carry to quite literally change the world. And this is really a special one for me. And I should say that we recorded

this conversation a couple months ago, but I just hung out with Scott two weeks ago at the World Domination Summit in Portland. That's Chris Guillebeau's event. If you haven't listened to my conversation with Chris on the podcast, I would check that out. In any event, I got to see Scott deliver his full keynote in person. And I have to say it was one of the most incredibly powerful, uh, public presentations, uh, I've ever had the privilege of seeing. I was just really moved by his story and his work, uh, and his example. And it's inspired me to, to be better, to do more and to give more. So on that note, I have an important announcement I'm going to make at the end of this conversation.

So please stick around to the very end. All right. Enough. You guys, did we do it? Introduction okay? Did I say anything about him him you guys ready to are you excited to hear uh the conversation with scott all right good let's talk to scott cool so awesome to meet you thanks for taking the time i'm really excited to

unpack your story the charity water story your personal story which is equally amazing and dovetails beautifully with the narrative behind how you built this amazing enterprise. So let's get into it, man. Where do we start? I know. Well, I think that, first of all, do you ever get tired of telling your story? My wife asks that all the time.

Because you're very good at it. She's tired of it. Well, I'm going to make you do it. I spoke last night at an event, and she just always goes in the other room now. Yeah, I don't need to hear this anymore. I feel like the only, not the only, but the best way to tell the story is really, we've got to go back to the beginning, right? I mean, that's how we can contextualize everything that follows.

So the beginning is really an event that happened when I was four years old. I was born in Philadelphia in a very middle-class family, and my dad was, I never really understood what he did, but he sold electrical type transformer power supply things. A businessman. My mom was a writer, and, you know, they had me, and, you know, they'd been trying to have kids for a while, had me. And when I was four, we moved from Philadelphia to get closer to my dad's new job to the suburbs of southern Jersey. And unbeknownst to us, we moved into this kind of beige, brown, gray house

that, you know, wasn't necessarily a dream house, but it was going to eliminate his commute down to 20 minutes. And we didn't know this, but the gas company, PSE&G, had installed a faulty furnace in the house that had pinhole cracks and carbon monoxide was leaking through this house. So we all start to get a little sick after moving in. My dad and I were only sleeping in the house. So he was working really long hours. I was at school. I was playing with my friends. And on January 1, a New Year's Day, my mom walks across her bedroom and she collapses unconscious on the floor. And it took us a while and a bunch of blood tests to find these massive

amounts of carbon monoxide, carboxyhemoglobin in her bloodstream. So she'd been exposed as she was fixing up the basement over time. And you were how old at this point? I was four. So I just started getting sick and weird allergies. And I bounced back very quickly. My dad wound up ripping the furnace out, finding the cracks himself. And what happened to my mom, she didn't die, thankfully. So a lot of people actually die from this prolonged exposure. But her immune system died forever. So it was irreparably destroyed. And from that moment, everything chemical, which would be normal to us, Anything chemical, which would be normal to us, started making her sick. Examples, car fumes would make her terribly sick.

Perfume or deodorant or any soap with a scent or perfume would make her incredibly sick. I remember vividly as a kid, the ink from books would make her sick. So her workaround was to give my dad and I a book that she wanted to read, and we would bake it in the oven to try to outgas the smell of the print. And then my mom at the time was living in almost a containment cell, a bathroom, a tile bathroom that had been scrubbed down with something called Basic H and ivory soap. And she slept on an army cot that had been washed maybe 30 times in baking soda. And I remember the door was covered completely in tinfoil. And she couldn't leave the room. She would be in the room when she was in the house. That was the only room in our, you know, 2000 square foot house that she could be in. Like having to live in a bubble. And then she would live outside. It was just like living in a bubble. And you're an only child. Yeah,

the boy in the bubble. Boy in the bubble and then there was a movie called safe with julianne moore yes that is very very close to it was a movie that just came out also like a teen like a teen movie about a girl who can't leave her house and i haven't heard about that but i yeah i don't know i'd love to see it so that was what it was like and i would march the you know slightly charred book up to my mom's room, the door would open, she was wearing cotton gloves, because she still couldn't touch the print, if it got in her bloodstream. And then she would wear these charcoal, really ugly masks, and then would often use oxygen. So it was just a really bizarre existence. Family planning stopped. After this illness, they wanted to have a big family, but she was just so sick.

And, you know, at a very young age, I went into this caregiver role. Mom was now, you know, not a mom. Mom was an invalid, a patient. And I did the cooking. I did the cleaning. We tried everything. We took her from doctor to clinic. I remember for a period of years, she was doing a rotation diet where she would eat one thing every

seven or eight days you know breakfast would be codfish you know lunch would be walnuts dinner would be uh I don't know kale and to be to be that young and have to transition from just being a kid into being a caregiver I mean that, that's traumatic. It's funny. That's a lot to ask of a young child. I'm writing a book right now with someone else, and she keeps feeling sorry for me. And I just didn't feel that way. This was just the reality. But she's like, man, as a kid, I mean, you had it really rough. I didn't feel like that.

I actually felt needed. There was this sense of responsibility to take care of my mom, to do the cooking, to do the cleaning. But your behavior later on demonstrated, you know, sort of the backlash. I mean, that was in there, you know what I mean? This need to express yourself differently. Sure, sure. So, it was, my parents had a deep Christian faith. They would identify as non-denominational. So, you know, they wouldn't be Methodist or Presbyterian or Baptist or any of that. They would call themselves Christians.

And interestingly, they didn't sue the gas company for negligence. I think they took $1,200 as a, hey, we're really sorry for the carbon monoxide and the furnace we put in that had holes in it, but here's $1,200. And they just didn't want to become bitter. They didn't want to go through a prot know, a protracted legal engagement. And they believe that it wasn't the fault. It wasn't intentional. How do you feel about that decision? I actually have a lot of admiration for them. You know, they had healthcare and, you know, probably could have sued for millions of dollars. But, you know, my parents, you know, today,

if you fast forward, maybe they live on $40,000 a year and they probably give double that away. They live very modest lives. They're very, very generous. They really live to be able to give and support. How are they doing now? My mom has learned how to cope. Now we're almost 37 years later. And in some ways, she's much better. She can eat more normally. When I go home, I'll change clothes. So if I'll come from New York

City with my wife and my kids, there's a staging area in the garage, and we kind of strip down to our underwear, and we put on special clothes that we've left at the house that have been washed in baking soda and made pure. And then we're able to interact with my mom in a really normal way. So she's no longer confined to a room. She's sleeping in the same bedroom. We actually moved houses to the country, to a more pure environment. So I would say she's doing better, but still can't

come in to New York City and visit her grandkids. We have to go to them and then really get pure. So this childhood was just weird. What kind of kid were you? I was a good kid. I was the good Christian kid that didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't have sex, and didn't cuss. And played piano on on sundays in the church and i really played by the rules i felt a responsibility to take care of her if you'd ask me what i wanted to do growing up it was to become a doctor to help people to help sick people like my mom continue the caregiving yeah it didn't quite turn out that way

well it's caregiving in a different kind of way. Yeah, well, I mean the divergence around 18. Right. All right, so you get into NYU and you make your big move to the city. Well, that was interesting. NYU was really the afterthought. I thought I was going to go to, I don't know, medical school or be a doctor. And then around 16, 17, just this rebellious streak hit. My parents had me in a Christian school in the ninth grade with nine people in my class.

And the teacher was a VHS cassette on one of those video carts that would get rolled in. That was science class. So, it was in the basement of a church. And I just was like, I'm going to run away from home if this is going to be my education. So I convinced them to put me in the 4,000 person high school. And I think they just saw something about my personality that scared them. Which was what specifically? I would go nuts and fall in with the wrong crowd and take on some of the vices that the parents get afraid of. So I do... And what do you think... Let's put a pin in that. I mean, do you think that...

Was that a reaction to the kind of sort of constricted home life that you had? Or what was it like? What was the wild out all about? I've wondered that. I don't know. I mean, maybe it was not having, you know, the normal fun life. Maybe it was that religion felt a little oppressive to me and rules-based, you know, all about what you shouldn't be doing rather than what you should be doing. So, yeah, I moved to the high school and there's 4,000 people there.

And I immediately just find out, wow, everybody's drinking, everybody's having sex, everybody's smoking, everybody's cursing. This seems like a lot of fun. And I'd always played the piano from the age of four, joined a band, a band called Sunday River, named after a ski resort on the East Coast. And the next thing I know, we're driving into New York City playing these gigs at famous clubs, at CBGBs, at the Wetlands, at the Lion's Den. And we're getting booked, and people are turning up. It's like a punk band?

It was more, let's see if I go back to that time. It was sort of Counting Crows meets Pearl Jam meets the band Live. So... This is like 93 or something like that? Yeah, our lead singer sounded a little like Scott Whalen from Stone Temple, but then the piano had a different, or the keyboard had a different feel to it. So that was, I moved to New York City to really, I was the band's manager by default,

just because I was the more responsible one. And I was booking us out, I was trying to get us a record deal, which, you know, was a real thing at the time. And you could make money by selling records. And I managed to get us discovered by the Scorpions one night, who heard us play, and they invited us to meet their manager. And, you're on this on this track for a record deal and the band just falls apart i mean drugs uh unreliability we all really did we kind of hated each other by the end of it and that led me to say well i've already moved to new york city i don't have a viable band anymore um what else could i do to make money and oh by the way i should probably go to college now because my dad saved up uh and you know i was an only child

right but they had to be freaking out right like you had many times yes what happened we did everything correct we did everything right and and he just went astray. Well, it gets worse for them. I then go from playing in the band to becoming a nightclub promoter. So I realized that the people on the other side of the equation were the ones that were really making the money and having more fun. amps and guitars and in our Ford Taurus station wagon, you know, that was going to break down at any minute. And we would bring a bunch of people to the club, they would pay a cover. And I don't know, the promoters might throw us 200 bucks to split six ways. And I realized that the promoters were the ones that were making the money. So the minute the band broke up, I teamed up with one of them and in a very short time began producing an open mic night, an R&B open mic night at a legendary club called Nels in New York City. And a year later, Stevie Wonder is coming and playing and Chaka Khan and Brian McKnight and Whitney Houston

and Bobby Brown. I mean, it was the most incredible. Prince was in there often. He would always come in and he had this favorite corner in the back and he would unscrew all the light bulbs or his team would ask us to unscrew the light bulbs so he could sit there in darkness and would often jump up on stage. So, you know, imagine me as this 19-year-old kid, two years before I'm actually allowed to be in a nightclub promoting this open mic, this open mic where amazing R&B people are coming. That's crazy. I got to play piano on stage with Stevie Wonder. That's incredible.

That's amazing. And there's like underneath that, there's not only like this sort of hustle that obviously gets played into here, but also like you must be like this natural networker right like the the sort of social skills that allowed you to book the book the band you know originally into these clubs and meet all these people and get with the scorpions and then translating that into you know this versioning career as a club promoter and then later on like what you're doing now right i think i was just willing to ask people and i liked inviting people to things i liked inviting them into a party uh i'm an includer i remember doing that strengths finder once which kind of tells you

you know here are the things that you're really good at and one of them was uh was an includer you know if i see someone at a party who's's off to the side and nobody's talking to them, I'm going to drop the conversation I'm in and I'm going to go and try and bring them in or introduce them to someone. So I think that skill worked really well in nightlife. I mean, you're inviting people into a party and when you get past the velvet rope,

it's going to be amazing inside. All the right people, you know, the right DJs, the right celebrities. And then the better you get at that, the more you can charge for cocktails. Right, right, right. So what were the clubs that you were working with the most? Well, I worked at at least 45 venues over a decade. So this became a 10-year profession, I guess, or career. It started out in R&B, and then it moved over to fashion, what we would call models in bottles, as a club called Lotus opened up in New York City,

and someone dared me that I couldn't get a job there. So I just started calling the club, leaving a voicemail for the owners, I mean, daily, until finally they told me to stop harassing me. And again, I had this very successful R&B night a couple blocks away. I mean, daily, until finally they told me to stop harassing me. And again, I had this very successful R&B night a couple blocks away. I think they started paying me $150 a week. So I had to start completely over in a new scene and began to figure that out

and figure out how to get a different set of modeling agencies and bookers and celebrities and people from the music business to come. And how does it like, what is the logistics of that? Like you contact a club and you say, give me this one night and I'm going to throw this party and they just open it up for you and you've worked out some deal on how you're going to share the, share the, share the door.

Yeah. It's pretty, it's pretty simple. You know, clubs are, well, they would have their good nights and then they would have their slow nights. So you would typically, a club would hire a promoter and this is again 10 to 12 years ago right uh they would hire us for their you know their off nights and we would cut a pretty big deal we would cut you know maybe the full door that we would want and then 10 or 15 percent of all alcohol sales of all take but they're saying hey look we're only going to ring three or four thousand dollars if these guys can bring in 25 or 30 you know they're just splitting a piece of the upside go so you you're really incentivized to bring your crowd so that we would develop a following and the idea is that the people were coming to my parties

they they cared much less about the club so the minute we moved from one club to the next club, they would follow us. They wouldn't keep going to that club. People were there to see people. And you're not wed to the bricks and mortar once that club goes into decline as they all do at some point. Exactly, exactly.

So you're asset light. You really have no risk. You're almost mercenaries. We're kind of guns for hire. And club owners and promoters have uh fractious relationships and uh and and you know it's uh clubs do well very well i mean there's there's some clubs that have figured out how to be around for 10 years and make really really good money um did you ever uh did you uh this is an aside but did you ever work with uh jeff gossett at moomba i did i i didn ever work with Jeff Gossett at Moomba?

I didn't work with him, but I was at Moomba every Monday. You were, yeah. I was a fixture in the karaoke night. He's a friend and he sort of had an interesting trajectory in his, I don't know if you have stayed in touch with him. I never kept up with him afterwards. But like, because he was like, you know, Moomba was, that had a moment, right? Like that was the place.

And he's since become like a yogi and bought a property in Costa Rica and basically just lives there and has a retreat center. Like he went completely, he had a similar kind of, you know, moment of reckoning with that lifestyle and just completely shut the door on it and lives a completely different life now. It happens. I was walking my son to school the other day with another guy that I knew, you know, from this period of time, 12, 13 years ago. And he was just saying, you know, I woke up one morning and I looked in a mirror and I said, who is this man? Like, what have I become? You know, coked up from the night

before, you know, it's 10 a.m. or something. Didn't like his face, didn't like, you know, that feeling of drugs in his body. And he's like a banker now. He just, he completely checked out. So that's what happened for me. It was 10 years of very predictable models, bottles, 45 clubs flying around the world to chase fashion week in Milan and Paris and London, vacations in Búzios, Brazil and Punta del Este, South America.

And you're just kind of piggybacking on other people's money. So you're living at such a high, your lifestyle looks great, right? $10,000 dinners, but you're not paying. Right. And you're selling this idea of validation based upon the crowd of people that you're going to get to hang out. Yeah, you're selling cool. And there are girls around.

Right. There are beautiful girls around. So... And are you, when you're promoting these parties, are you, you're present cool and there are girls around. Right. There are beautiful girls around. And when you're promoting these parties, you're present at all of them. And are you getting loaded every night? You are. You're getting loaded, but in a way, not out of addiction, at least for me, but out of total boredom. It becomes the most banal, boring thing in the world.

Having the same conversation, shouting over a DJ who's playing the exact same songs, you know, and turning up at midnight, you know, to sit around for three or four hours. It's really painful after a while. So, yeah, I mean, I was getting loaded. You know, I went from, you know, not doing anything to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for 10 years, you know, heavy drinking problem, cocaine, ecstasy, MDMA, pretty much everything short of heroin. And then a serious gambling problem and a pornography problem and a strip club problem.

So it got dark in a hurry. Yeah. Do you think about what it would have been like had Instagram been around during that era for you? Because on the out, you could sort of paint this picture of it looking super sexy and fun and amazing and you know nightlife and girls and fancy cars and private jets and exotic you know foreign locations all of that well that's what our photos you know we have photo albums full of you know us standing next to private jets with six girls.

And that's, yeah, we weren't sharing it publicly. But you're selling that. You're selling that dream. I mean, I remember watching a guy play $10,000 hands of blackjack. And that's the dream, right? That rush of watching someone have a million dollars of chips on the table and not care whether he wins or loses. And he's surrounded by the jet set and six-foot models. I mean, the whole thing, gosh, it sounds so silly now.

But it was what I thought was important at the time. More money, more girls, more things, better vacations. And thankfully, I came to a realization and got out, like our friend Jeff. Was it a, I mean, I know it kind of all sort of came to a head in Punta del Este on this sort of, you know, party retreat that you helped produce. Was it a progressive sort of slide towards that realization? Or was it really just one moment where you're like, I gotta, I gotta get out of this?

It was, it was both. Uh, it was, I remember my partner and I were trying to actually make the switch to ownership and we were offered, uh, 10 or 15% of a restaurant to attach our names to it. So that was cool. We would still promote, but now we would be kind of, you know, official restauranteurs. And that's what happens at the most successful level. You know, you've got guys like Noah and Jason

who we were promoting with who then go on to, you know, run Towel Group, which is now a series of restaurants and clubs. Or Sean McPherson. Sean McPherson. It's funny, I biked by Sean on the West Side Highway last week. You'd become like a hotelier.

I was like, Sean! I mean, you could have graduated to that, sort of respectable. So that's what we were trying to do, right? That's what we were trying to do, as I guess we would, you know, my partner and I were both approaching 30. And really what happened on this trip to Punta del Este was, it was just one of those cathartic moments where you realize that your life is just so off balance. It's so not right. But in a way, it looked right.

You know, my girlfriend at the time was on the cover of Elle magazine. We were, there's a palatial estate we had rented. There were servants serving us there. There were horses. The right people were there. We spent $1,000 on fireworks. There were magnums of Dom Perignon. Just, this was what we were chasing.

And I remember the party on New Year's Eve just went on so long. I remember the party on New Year's Eve just went on so long and I remember waking up I probably went to bed at 10 a.m probably woke up around 3 or 4 and the party was still going on in our compound and what should have been this idyllic beautiful setting you know near the ocean

set in the trees and this beautiful kind of wooded area was just this kind of degenerate thrashing in a way. And it just all felt so unhealthy, like a game of musical chairs, you know, where the music stops and I'm standing. And I just realized, I think on this trip, that there would never be enough of the things

I was looking for to satisfy me. There would never be enough girls. there would never be enough of the things I was looking for to satisfy me. There would never be enough girls. There would never be enough money. Somebody would always have a better car and a better watch. There would never be an end to the self-serving, sycophantic nature of climbing up this social ladder. this social ladder it's also got to be confusing also when you're you've been sold this idea that these are the things that are going to make you you know make you happy and feel fulfilled and to play that game you know at the highest level and get to that point where this is where it's supposed to feel great and and realize like this is not what i thought it would be but i

realized the other people weren't happy they weren weren't happy. So it's almost like the veil was lifted. And I remember specifically one person, and this guy had all the money and the private jets, and he was dating girls younger than his daughter. And his daughter didn't want to talk to him. And there was just so much kind of sadness and wreckage, and the value system was just so off. Faith had a big part to play. So,

for 10 years, I hadn't been going to church. I hadn't been, obviously, living by any of the things, any of the moral codes that I'd been brought up with. And I remember, you know, deeply hungover on this trip, you know, beginning to read this piece of deep theology, a book called The Pursuit of God by this theologian named A.W. Tozer, who I think wrote the book in a day or two, just sat down and wrote it. And I felt like I was reading the opposite intention of my life. Here was a man who was trying to understand God, his creator, understand values of virtue and humility and compassion and righteousness and just all of this stuff that I wasn't. And I think, you know, I'm pretty extreme just being faced with the opposite. You know, what would the opposite of a hedonistic, self-serving life look like?

It might be this. It might be a life of serving others, a life of virtue, a life of purity. this. It might be a life of serving others, a life of virtue, a life of purity. So I won't say it was that quick of a transition, but I came back to New York City and now nightlife was ruined for me. I was having no more fun at the clubs. The restaurant thing was interesting, but it was kind of a trendy restaurant, you know, with a club in the top that we were trying to sell bottles, you know, after dinner. You know, I wasn't in love with my girlfriend at the time that I was kind of living with and I just, everything was wrong. And I remember trying to smoke less, trying to drink less, trying to, you know, cut out all the drugs and just kind of flailing a little bit and just not having that much success.

Right. Like one foot in, one foot out. What does that look like? How, you know, how's that going to feel like? I should just sort of try to clean up things a little bit and not getting any satisfaction out of like half measures. And I needed the money. So it wasn't like I could just stop working. I mean, nightclub promoters, you know, we make good money, but we're not savers, right?

We're kind of typically spending 5% more than we're making. That just goes along with the lifestyle. So this thing that I did for a living, the other thing is you don't easily jump professions. You're making so much money. You can't just go get a marketing job. Right. You know, it'd be a third of what you're making.

So it's a little bit of a, it was a little bit of a dilemma. Anyway, six months later, I'm out with, this event happens in a nightclub, and I'm out with my new partner of the restaurant, and we're at this kind of trendy members only club. And I get in some altercation with the bouncer who was harassing my friend, and I wind up getting this guy fired the next day. And the guy comes after me the next night, you know, threatening to kill me. And, you know, this kind of stuff happens in nightlife. I probably have my life threatened 50 times, you know, for not letting people in the door. You

know, you're standing on the inside of the velvet rope. They're on the outside. They're like, I am going to come by and just, you know, I'm going to shoot you so full of holes. So, you know, that certainly wasn't the first time that my life had been threatened. But this felt like a great opportunity to just take a little time off and just get out of town for a couple weeks. And I remember, you know, calling my business partner and saying, you handle the clubs for a couple weeks. Renting a cobalt blue Ford Mustang, grabbing a Bible and a bottle of Dewars, and just driving north. Right. That was the destination.

That's like out of a movie. North. And you have this, you know, this bifurcated soul, right? Like the Bible in the bottle. I'm telling you. I mean, it was really that extreme. These, you know, even reading the theology, you know, having done a plate of cocaine the night before. I mean, that was, I was really caught in these two worlds, the world of my childhood, the values and the spirituality that I've been brought up with, and then the hedonistic lifestyle in Maine and I'm trying to smoke less. Just imagine me

like reading through the Old Testament while chain smoking and, you know, sipping on scotch at night. With no destination, right? With no destination. Right, right. I really don't know where I'm going. And, you know, I start to pray and talk to God and, you know, not know if anyone's really listening and just begin to explore what could be next. And I get this idea to just explore the opposite of my life in a tangible way for one year. There's a principle.

Based on that book. Based on a lot of stuff. Or influenced by. Based on a lot of stuff. You know, reading the Bible again, just listening to some teaching. I mean, there's a Christian principle of tithing. I think it's actually a Jewish principle of tithing that the Christians have adopted. And it's just kind of giving a tenth back.

So, the idea was 10 years of hedonistic living. What would one unselfish year look like? Where I just changed my life and explored the 180 degree opposite. year look like, where I just changed my life and explored the 180 degree opposite. So at this time, I was in Maine, and I land in a little town called Greenville with my park, my Mustang, I go into a dial up internet cafe. And I begin to fill out applications to volunteer for as many humanitarian organizations as I could. I'm filling out applications to, you know, the United Nations, the Peace Corps, World Vision, Save the Children, Ox Family, anybody that I could find. Just filling out

these online applications saying I'm willing to volunteer, I'm willing to volunteer. I wanted to go for a year. So at this point, I never go back to New York City. And I drive around Maine a little more. I go visit my parents in New Jersey. I actually fly to the south of France. A club friend of mine had this beautiful cabin in the Pyrenees Mountains, a little forester's house. And I just went there to wait and to pray and to kind of cleanse my soul, if you will. And you're done with the drinking? Are you still in the body? I'm still drinking.

I'm still, you know, I'm done with the drugs. Smoking a little bit. I'm done with the drugs. I'm done with the pornography. I'm done with the drinking or are you still in the body? I'm still drinking. I'm still, you know, I'm done with the drugs. Smoking a little bit. I'm done with the drugs. I'm done with the pornography. I'm done with the gambling. Interestingly, I'm almost done with the gambling. That's another story. So they're starting to fall off.

But again, nothing extreme. There's a little email cafe that I had to go down the mountain to check emails. And long story short, I'm denied by all these organizations that I've applied to. Because of course, who wants a freaking nightclub promoter on a humanitarian mission? But all you're looking to do is volunteer. You'd think they would just enlist anybody who's willing to travel over there and give of themselves.

Well, they're not. They're not. I think they have a much higher bar. And I was also, I felt compelled to be honest on the application. So some of them say, do you smoke? Do you drink? And I'm like, yeah, I want to stop. So I was just, I was an easy rejection nightclub promoter.

This isn't rehab. Like this is, you know, you're going to have to actually work. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I just remember praying like god what is up i mean i've left i've stepped out in faith and now no one will take me you know i'm in this limbo and one day i'm writing that's an you know that's a really beautiful test of faith right there right like how committed are you really you know let's throw this obstacle up in front of you and see if you're gonna back back down or whether you're going to find a way through it. And, you know, the gift came

kind of through the cloud. I was driving my bike down from this little Pyrenee mountain shack, and there's no cell phone reception for five miles. And then as I went through this little town, La Pradelle-Puy-Laron, there's a couple bars. And I remember as I'm riding my bike through the town, my Nokia phone rings, that tiny little Nokia that we all had many years ago. And it's one organization called Mercy Ships. And they said, we initially rejected your application, but we're about to start a mission without this position that you applied for. And we need to fill it. We've agreed to meet you. And I said, well, where are you guys? And they said, well, we're actually, it's a huge hospital ship organization. We're docked in Bremerhaven, Germany.

So I said, well, I'm in the South of France. I'll be there in two days. So I jumped on a train and headed up to Bremerhaven, Germany. And I convinced them that I was not crazy. I was not going to throw wild parties or raves on their hospital ship. And then I really, my heart had been changed. I really wanted to serve. I dusted off the NYU degree that I'd gotten, which was in communications journalism, and said, the position I was applying for was a photojournalist. So, that just, that it happened very, very quickly. They said, well, great. We need you to be on this mission in three weeks.

So I went shopping. I bought a bunch of stuff for Africa. And three weeks later, I had this moment where I'm staring at a 522-foot hospital ship. I'm about to walk up the gangway and sail to West Africa to a place called Liberia. And I'd never even heard of Liberia before. I thought Africa was a country not made up of 40 something at the time. And then I just quit everything in that moment.

I realized that the smoking would have to go, the drinking would have to go, the cursing would have to go, the gambling would have to go. The drugs certainly were gone at that point. And that I really, it was almost this prophetic moment that I could walk and sail away from my old life, kind of leave it on the shore and sail. It was 10 days across the ocean to this new adventure. Wow. And that was, what year was that?

That was 2004 in the adventure. Wow. And that was, what year was that? That was 2004 in the fall. Right. All right, so you sail to Liberia and you have this experience with these doctors, right? Trying to treat these acute cases of, you know, people that are just in really bad shape and only able to really make a dent in what's really required and needed in that region. Yeah, that's right. Amazing group of doctors who sailed this hospital ship up and down the coast of Africa for 25 years, and they would pull into the port and thousands and thousands of

people would be waiting. People with tumors, people who had been blind, people with leprosy, people who had been burned badly during the war. Liberia at the time had just come out of Charles Taylor's 14-year civil war with child soldiers. It had no electricity in the country, no running water, no sewage system, and one doctor for every 50,000 citizens. So if you got sick in this country, you're just out of luck. For comparison in America, I think it's one per 180 of us is a doctor. So the stuff we saw was in such extremis. I saw people with missing faces, missing ears and noses and people who had been burned so badly, you couldn't even recognize that there

was a person, many of them by the rebels who were pouring hot oil over them. And it was just, it was incredibly traumatic. And I'm documenting, my job is to take pictures of every single person up close, two, three feet from their face to document them for the medical library, both before and after. And, you know, it was moving as well. I mean, I saw people get their sight back. I saw people who were suffocating to death. Many who had had tumors for eight or nine years

get their entire face back after a five-hour surgery. Right, you think, yeah, there's this story of this guy, Alfred, right? Yeah, he was a giant tumor on his face. 14-year-old kid, and he had a volleyball-sized tumor. I'm not exaggerating. And he couldn't eat anymore. And he was starting to starve to death. And I watched these amazing doctors who could be on vacation.

These doctors and surgeons had money. And they could be in the Maldives. And instead, they decided to fly to West Africa and use their talents in the service of others for free, all at their own expense. They even paid to get there. So I watched these doctors just cut out Alfred's tumor, throw it in the bin, sew him back up. And I got to take him home to his family and his village. And they looked at him. I mean, he'd been written off for dead many years ago. So it was an incredible experience. I took 50,000 photos that first year and just so deeply moved by the stories

of the people that I met. The cool thing was that I had gone to Africa with a built-in audience because I had a guest list of 15,000 people that I'd built up over 10 years, people from fashion, some celebrities. So they went from getting email invitations to the Prada party or a cosmopolitan party,

you know, or whatever we were doing at the time to, you know, in the space of four weeks, here's Alfred and he's 14 and suffocating to death on his face with a pink fleshy benign tumor. And I'm just telling it like I see it. I'm sending photos and videos. So some people are like, take me to freak off this list right now. Unsubscribe, unsubscribe. I didn't sign up for tumors. But really, the most typical response from my friends was of intrigue, of, oh my gosh,

like, where are you? I never knew these conditions existed. Who are these doctors? What is this organization? How can I help? How can I give money? How can I give time? So I realized there the power that I had in kind of redeeming the relationships that I'd built for 10 years, the people that effectively I'd been getting drunk and wasted. And I could just tell them a very different story, a redemptive story, a story of hope and courage and compassion of these doctors, and the people began to respond. So I just did that over and over again for the first year.

And that year ended. I came back to New York for a couple months. Hold on one second. Sorry to interrupt. But at some point, does Adam Braun end up on that boat with you? I don't think adam was ever on the ship i when i did the podcast with him i could have sworn he said i forget i should have gone back and listened to it but i think weren't you guys like he was on another ship actually

that almost shipwrecked that's funny he said that he met you while he was on his you know version of your adventure he did he did i forget the name of it but he did another uh ship it wasn't a mercy ship but yeah he but yeah, he almost lost his life. Our ship actually caught on fire once at sea off the coast of Ghana, which is another story. But we all thought we were going to die in a blazing fire in the middle of a Ghanaian night. Both Adam and I managed to survive.

So the year ends. Long story short, I put an exhibition together. I raised about $100,000 through my photos for Mercy Ships. And then I just go back for another year to follow the money and to show my friends that this work is continuing. And then more people get involved and more people give. So it was a two-year stint with the organization. The second year that I was there, I came across the water issue. And I bought a motorcycle and started traveling off the ship into the deep bush, into the deep rural areas of Liberia. And I saw people drinking dirty water for the first time. And I've just never seen human beings drink from swamps before. And I mean, green infested, crawling with bugs and worms and parasites, children drinking

water that we wouldn't let our dogs drink. So these two things are going on now. I'm in the villages exploring, I'm back scrubbed up for surgery, documenting these medical procedures. And I'm telling the surgeons what I'm seeing out there. And they begin to just start preaching about water. You know, we know so much disease comes from bad water and sanitation and hygiene. And, you know, we wish somebody was working on this issue because it'd be less work for us to do. Right. Getting at the root cause of what's leading to so many of these, you know, acute conditions that these surgeons have to then deal with at the very end of that process, right? Like, why not go to the root cause? That's true. And in fact, 52% of all disease in the developing world, in all these countries that we were

working in, is caused by bad water and a lack of toilets. 52%. World Health Organization stat. So you think about that. Half of the sick people don't need to be sick. They just had this basic need, man. So I was so compelled by water. Maybe this was the question behind the question.

Maybe 7,000 people wouldn't turn up outside a football stadium with stuff growing on their face if they were drinking clean water and not bathing and washing with brown, viscous river water. And why do you think nobody had really looked at that in a serious way? Well, there was no public awareness. So this is now 10 years ago. At the time, there were a billion people living without clean water. The largest water-only organization in America was a $12 million a year organization out of Texas. So no sense of scale. Water was buried under environment.

Clean drinking water was buried in environment, you know, clean drinking water was buried in the Millennium Development Goals. And there just wasn't a movement of people talking about it, caring about it. Mercy Ships had given one guy a little bit of money to go dig five wells every year. So they were, there was this huge medical operation. So they kind of got the importance, it just wasn't resourced. It wasn't their core competency. So I followed this well digger and saw him make an outsized impact, providing thousands of people with clean water. More people even than we were touching through surgeries, through these expensive surgeries. So that's how I became interested in water. Closed the chapter with Mercy Ships,

came back to New York City, I was 30, and said, you know, now it's time to, you know, to focus on this issue and see what kind of an impact I can make. Right. And so, it began really as one-offs though, right? Like, I'm going to build a well in this village, raise money through your friends and your contacts back in New York City and sort of do it out in piecemeal fashion. Is that how it began? It did, but I spent months really thinking through the structure of the organization and what I wanted to do different. I don't talk about this a lot, but when I came back, the core, my vision was really more about reinventing charity

than helping the world get clean water. I wanted more people to have a redemptive experience of giving of their time and of their talent and of their money, which I had just done for the last two years, and seeing how rewarding that can be. I wanted to invite people to try unselfishness versus selfishness and do that through clean water. So it was really marrying the passion for

more charity. Charity means love. In Latin, it was caritas. I remember a dictionary definition that says, just to help your neighbor in need with nothing in return. So I really wanted to promulgate that. I wanted to spread that in the world and share the transformative human experience I'd gone through with others through giving and generosity. And then I wanted that generosity that hopefully I could inspire to help as many humans in a basic needs way, help improve as many human lives in a tangible way as possible. And I thought, there's nothing better to do than water. And oh, by the way, there are a billion people out there. So huge problem, no one meeting it,

no one talking about it in the general public. None of my friends knew anything about the water crisis. I mean, the water crisis to them was the fact that Voss Water was, we were charging $10 a bottle. And in order to kind of confront this and generate the level of interest that you were looking to garner you have to combat traditional ideas of distrust with charities and you know kind of these this idea that like uh you know like i give money to this where is it really going i don't know these bloated you know organizations

they're yeah like i i don't know anybody who works there. And also kind of leveraging your skill set as a people person, as a networker, and as somebody who's known for creating quote-unquote cool events to make this cool, make this interesting, create a brand around it that inspires excitement. Yeah, you got it. I mean, the first thing was just trying to deal with the money. Many people are surprised when they hear this stat, but 42% of Americans distrust charities. Who is more generous than Americans, right?

We have this culture of generosity and philanthropy, but yet almost half of the people in the country don't trust the system. 70% of Americans polled by NYU said charities waste or badly waste money. So there's just this sense, as you said, of the black hole, where does my money go? How much actually reaches the people? I want to help, but I don't trust the system. So I wanted to combat that through just a new business model. And this you know, this was crazy at the time. But I said, what if we could give away 100% of every donation we ever get from the public to only directly fund water projects that would improve human lives, water projects that we could prove that would be tangible, and somehow figure out how to go raise all the overhead dollars,

the staff, the salaries, the office, the flights separately from a small group of people. And I remember opening up two bank accounts with $100 each on Broadway and Bond Commerce at the time, and just making this bold promise and saying, look, we can take the number one excuse people have about not giving completely off the table. It's moot. What's your next excuse? And as you said, the second real vision was wanting to build a beautiful, inspirational, hopeful brand. I was, as I looked at the charitable sector,

I saw shame and guilt-based marketing. Some people might remember those Sally Struthers commercials on TV late night, the kids, the flies landing on their face, the slow motion look as they lock eyes with camera, and then the 800 number comes. They work. I mean, you feel so bad, you get your wallet out, but you don't want to wear the t-shirt of that charity. People do want to wear the t-shirts of Nike, you know, that tells you that there's greatness within you and if you don't have arms you can win the shot put competition if you don't have legs

you can run a marathon and i really was looking for you know i was looking to build something that would feel more like apple or nike or tesla or virgin that would be fun and inspirational and imaginative and uh who wouldn't want to jump on the bandwagon to help people get clean water and not guilt people into it? Right. And sell that idea, like that aspirational idea that each individual is empowered enough to actually make a difference. I heard you say this on, I don't know who, I can't remember who you were talking to, but you were talking about Nike and saying, yeah, Nike sells shoes, but really they're selling an ethos. They're selling an idea of self-empowerment. Like you can do it.

Like you can tackle this challenge and see your way through it. And to kind of take that idea and translate it into this nonprofit sector and re-energize it. That's true. I mean, Nike's not telling you, you're fat and lazy. Stop eating the Cheetos and get off the couch. Right? They're not doing that. You're not going to wear that

t-shirt and you're probably not going to go run if they do that. So yeah, that was it. And, you know, we also made a bet on hyper-transparency early on. We just, charities aren't great at telling people the result of their dollars or the results of the work. And we said from day one, we're going to put every single water point we fund publicly on Google Earth and Google Maps. So anybody could go buy a $50 GPS device from Best Buy and hike around the world to see that these projects actually exist. And people at the time said, that's so crazy. Why would you tell donors? What if a donor turned up on their well

and it wasn't working? We're like, well, we freaking want to know that it's not working. And why do you think we're doing this? Not to get rich. The job pays like crap. Sort of respect for the donor, as opposed to looking at the donor

as a fungible sort of means to an end, but actually celebrating the donor for making that decision and including them and sort of creating that emotional connection with the end result of the giving. You said, oh, you're speaking my language. So many charities wish money grew on trees and think donors are stupid, talk down to them.

They're just a means to an end. We celebrate, like we're in the business of encouraging people to explore radical generosity uh that even if you have ten dollars you know we we have kids that you know will send us two dollars in in dimes that two dollars can actually make a difference i mean it really can um it'll be pooled with another 28 dollars and one person could get clean water so i I think it was different. It just felt different, you know, giving away 100%, proving where the money went, leading with hope and inspiration and imagination and creativity, and then working through local partners, not sending

Westerners to Africa or India or Asia to drill wells. Our job would be to find and identify the local partners we believe for work to be sustainable. It had to be led by Rwandans in Rwanda or Ethiopians in Ethiopia and Cambodians in Cambodia. So this idea, though, of 100% of the funds are going to go directly towards building these wells, serving these communities. I mean, you had to get pushback at the time. Like, that's insane. Like, you have overhead. Yeah, you'll go bankrupt with the pushback.

Like, how are you going to work this out? How are you going to convince anyone to invest in your overhead, you know, without, that's not sexy, right? And keeping these things bifurcated had to be a really hard road. It was. And in every conversation, I'm trying to size up a potential donor and saying, hey, does this person want to help pay for employee number three? Or is this person disenchanted with charity and really excited about the 100% model? So I was constantly really selling two very distinct ideas and money that would drop into two differently numbered bank accounts. So actually, the one was much easier, as people would imagine. So out of the

gate, we come out and raise millions of dollars. Everything works. We did events. We did exhibitions. We were just trying to be creative. And we put dirty water in huge plexi tanks from the East River and the Hudson River and ponds in Long Island and New Jersey. And we showed New Yorkers, hey, if you had to drink out of a swamp, this is what it would look like. And then we asked them to give, just did all of this stuff, water walks, PSAs that we got donated space

and ran on TV to over 20 million people. It was just awesome at the beginning and people began to give and we raised so much money for the water projects. Year and a half in, I've got $881,000 on its way out in the water bank account. And I'm about to miss payroll because we've just run out of money on the overhead side. And we had nine employees at the time. Everybody's making, I don't know, 40 or 50 grand. There's no healthcare. I mean, it's not a real thing yet,

but we funded a couple million dollars of water projects. And, you know, it was really, I wouldn't say it was a hard choice or a dilemma. I was just going to shut the charity down. But people were saying, listen, it's not an issue. Just borrow against it, right? Yeah, money's fungible. You can write an IOU and pay it back later. But we made this promise. And you weren't going to do that, right.

We made the promise. If we borrowed one penny from the public's money. That trust is betrayed. Yeah, there's a crack at the foundation. And this is another test of faith, really. Like, can you hold that line and see it through? Yeah, there were a lot of these. So we were going to die on our principles of integrity.

And this amazing thing happens. You know, a guy walks into our office, a British man who had started an internet company and he takes a two-hour meeting with me and I just remember thinking, this guy doesn't like me. He's not laughing at any of the jokes. He's just giving me nothing. He leaves the meeting

and a couple of days later, uh, it's midnight. I remember working. I remember exactly where I was. I'm working on the computer. I was probably in a spreadsheet figuring out how many hours we had left. And he, he sends an email and says, Hey Scott, it was really great meeting you. Uh, I've wired a million dollars into your overhead account. And I logged onto the bank account and there it was one comma zero, zero, zero, zero, zero,

zero. and I logged onto the bank account, and there it was, 1,000,000. So we went from bankrupt to over a year of funding, of oxygen. And we stewarded that time. We stewarded that time to actually build what's now a pretty sophisticated multi-year and multi-tier giving program where 117 families from all over the world pay for all the overhead, which has made it possible for over a million donors to have this pure giving experience. Wow. And along the way, you know, the way that I sort of see it, and please correct me if

I'm wrong, but you really have ushered in this new wave, this new sort of means for giving. Like there's a whole sort of new generation of charities and nonprofits who have, you know, sort of taken a tip out of your playbook and created similar models that give the donor that level of trust and that transparency and that emotional connection with where the dollars and the effort is going. I hope so. And I'm not out there preaching the 100% model. It's incredibly difficult. It's not right for everybody. It was unique to us and the problem we were trying to solve. I was trying to reach out to the 42%, not steel donors who are loyal to other organizations. But the transparency and the sort of really, really like adept use of social media to

storytell, right? I mean, that's the huge part of this whole thing as well. Yeah. I think people are open to a lot of different value propositions. They just want to know where their money goes. You know, if I told your listeners that our biggest challenge at the moment was a broken window in the office and someone had thrown a rock through it, it was going to cost $1,700 to fix it, right? There's no worse cost than that, but I bet people would come up with $1,700 to help us fix a broken window or a broken copier.

It's just knowing, that's what I just preached. You know, just tell people where their money's going. Our overhead donors are so excited that their money is going to flights and salaries and insurance and phone bills, because they are the kind of people that want to serve the organization. They don't need their names on buildings or wells. They really are investors. They're kind of like our backers. They're our heroes. And the million people are then able to get a really, I mean, we have a guy that gave $2.7 million, 100% of it going to water projects at one time, just not interested in paying for overhead.

The reason he was giving that money, the reason he was interested in helping so many people was because of that. So that's new money. Those are new people that got clean water. Very cool. So let's talk about the water problem specifically. So a billion people, when you began this journey, lacking clean water, most of that is sub-Saharan Africa. Is that correct? Right. And now that

number's down to like 660, right? Yeah. 663 million. So it's, it's a sub-Saharan Africa. It's India, it's Southeast Asia, very little bit in Central and South America. Yeah, so the state of the crisis today, it's a 10th of the world. So one out of every 10 people alive today is drinking bad water today, because of the circumstances they were born in. And, you know, this is kind of a profound concept that we've, you know, we've just wrestled with over the last decade now of charity water. And I was born in a middle class family in Philadelphia. Water for me comes out of the tap. It's in bottles that we can afford. And in the places that we're working, women are often walking, you know, five, six hours a day to get dirty water from a swamp or a river, often risking their lives to do it.

You know, I'll talk about the crisis. So if you don't have clean water, it makes you sick. 52% of the disease is because of bad water and sanitation. It's incredibly harmful to kids under five. So about 1,000 kids will die today and every day just of drinking bad water. And you actually die of dehydration so you know unheard of here in the west diarrhea that's right because the way that you cure diarrhea

is with clean water uh we've all seen the pedialyte right the kind of blue stuff at the walgreens uh well you don't have that so if your child gets diarrhea you give them the same bad water and they actually get so dehydrated that they just die. So huge health implications, worms, parasites, leeches, a trachoma, people go blind from water, huge education implications. So at the time when we started, I don't know the updated staff, but when we started Charity Water, 50% of the world's schools didn't have clean water or toilets. So I'm sure there are people listening that education is their number one cause. How can you imagine going to a school where there's no clean water or toilets and you've

got to bring dirty river water with you? And what was interesting was learning about how that has a disproportionate impact on young girls. On girls. And the toilets even more than the water, because the girls will hit puberty and will stay home, you know, those four or five days every month, fall behind in their studies, you know, missing a week a month. And, you know, culturally, there's already resistance against them

because they are the workhorse. You know, they're the ones getting the firewood, doing the cooking, getting the water. Doing those eight-hour walks. Doing those eight-hour walks. Doing the eight-hour walks. And it really is. For someone listening, it's just such a disconnect. It's so hard for us to fathom.

663 million anything, an eight-hour walk. But that's what's happening. The women are getting up at four or five in the morning. They do the eight-hour walk, and then they come back for the second day of their work. Cooking, cleaning, gardening, getting firewood. Yeah, it's just it's really difficult to imagine that. So that's the third one, really, it's just time, just the amount of time wasted, there's health, there's education, 40 billion hours are wasted in Africa every year, just collecting water. So you think of the potential there

to turn that wasted time into productive time, whether it's family time, whether it's small business or entrepreneurial endeavors. We hear incredible stories when people get clean water. Probably the most, I've really seen a lot now over the years. I've been to 66 countries. I've been to Ethiopia 29 times since starting Charity Water. So a lot of my job is on the road, you know, stuck in, I don't know, seat 62H on a 14-hour flight. But it's the story probably that for me best personifies the water crisis or the emergency that is facing people is a story from Ethiopia of a woman named Leta Kiros. And I'd heard this story, let's say on my 24th or 25th trip to Ethiopia, staying in a crappy $5 a night hotel room with some donors. And the owner of the

hotel recognized me, comes in the lobby or this little restaurant that we were sitting in and says, Hey, you know, I'm from a really remote village. Before I came into this town to run this hotel, there was this woman in my village and she used to walk eight hours with the other women. But one day she gets home and she slips and falls and she spills her water and she breaks her clay pot. So her whole eight hour walk is now undone. He's like, she hung herself from a tree and we found her body swinging there. And maybe he paused

and he kind of watched the shock on our face and said, the work you guys are doing is important. He walks back into the kitchen. I remember thinking, definitely not true. Tell the white international donor a sad story that makes them feel really good about the work. But it just nagged and gnawed at me. And is it possible that someone had committed suicide

because they slipped on a rock and spilled their water? And I got a pass from my wife to go and explore this for myself and live in this village completely off the grid. I had to fly to Addis, fly up to the north, drive five hours and then rent a donkey and hike nine hours with a little solar backpack and a sleeping mat. And I found out it was true.

I found 2,800 people living in this man's village called Meda. And they were walking eight hours to horrible sources. And, you know, I met her mom. I met her friend. I walked in her footsteps. I saw the tree where they'd found and cut her down. I saw the little pile of rocks behind the church where her grave was.

And I didn't know this at the time, but when I got to the village, I learned that she was only 13 when she died. She was a little girl. This wasn't a woman who'd walked her whole life and said, enough. This was a 13-year-old girl brimming with aspirations of wanting to get out of the village and wanting to be a doctor. And what was even more shocking was when I tried to figure out what the motivation was, her best friend said, well, she would have killed herself because of shame. You know, she, she had screwed up. She'd spilled the water that the family needed to cook dinner. She'd broken the clay pot, which is a $3 asset. Um, so it would have just been too much for her

to face her family because her carelessness would set them back. So, you know, you have an experience like that, and you just, you're pissed off. I mean, you're fired up, and I don't think there's anyone listening that thinks 13-year-old girls should be hanging themselves from trees because they spilled their water after an eight-hour walk. And, you know, the terrible irony is that in so many of these communities, the solutions are simple. They're living on top of massive amounts of clean water. You know, we're often able to drill 200 feet deep and get 10 liters per second

of spring water. What the communities don't have access to is the $10,000 required to drill the well. They don't have access to a million dollar drilling rig and compressors and trucks and hydrologists, which is what our community is able to provide. But the community will contribute stone and gravel and sweat equity. Many of them will build roads over periods of months just to get the drilling rig into their village. They just don't have the money for the capital expense. Yeah, $10,000. And the transformation for the entire community is, you know, undefinable. Like, I heard you tell a story about a woman who said she feels beautiful now, you know, because she always had to make that decision. Where is this clay pot of water going to go? Is it going to go to, you know, my kids? Is it going gonna go to my husband to wash the clothes and never

there of course never being enough to just sort of attend you know attend to her personal hygiene yeah it's incredible and we never even thought of that that water could restore a woman's dignity you know we think of it typically in practical terms but I was just in her village a few weeks ago, Helen Appio, and the women were all saying, we look so smart now, looking so neat, because they had the water to, as you said, wash their clothes, wash their face, feel beautiful. is the well drilling process i would imagine it's not always the same right you're going to be in certain regions where you're not going to be i mean first of all how do you how do you how are you sure there's water underneath there how do you locate it what's the procedure and the process for the best you know means for getting that water to a particular village? It's a great question. It's not always the same. So we've worked in 24 countries now around the world

and about 13 different solutions. So drilling a well would be one of the 13. Stuff like rainwater harvesting or gravity-fed systems or biosand filters would be others. Drilling a well, our partners will do different things. Some of them will shock the ground. They've got kind of those, uh, almost EKG machines that will look for the fissures and determine where the water is.

Others will look at eucalyptus trees and say, ah, I see that grove of eucalyptus trees. I know that the roots need a lot of water. There's going to be water there. Um, we're about 90% successful. So for every 10 wells we drill, we get nine good ones. So it's not a perfect science. And there are some communities that we just can't help that we'll either have to pipe water in, uh, or, or, you know, look to rainwater harvesting, or in some cases, you know, as,

as the problem really gets solved, there'll be a few communities. They'll just have to move and it will have to be relocated. How do you deal with local governments and corruption and the dangers inherent with traveling across these treacherous regions? We've set a couple rules for ourselves early on. We've said no conflict zones and no governments that don't want us. Just as a young organization, now we're 10 years old, but we just didn't have a proficiency in dodging bullets or working in those environments. So that left us 50 countries that we could work in,

so a huge amount of places of need. So we haven't really dealt with the military, the warlords. We're not in South Sudan. We're not in the warlords. We're not in South Sudan. We're not in DRC Congo. We're not in Myanmar. We're not in a place like Zimbabwe where we don't know that we could get our goods in. We worked in Haiti early on and then just pulled out and allocated the resources to other places because we were just having a hard time getting the materials in the port and getting the work done well.

having a hard time getting the materials in the port and getting the work done well. So there's an amazing team at Charity Water of 19 people who just live, eat, breathe the functionality of our water projects, the locations, the vetting, the auditing, making sure the money is being spent well. That's not trivial. You know, we've raised a quarter of a billion dollars now. So knowing if we're buying 10,000 bags of cement, we need to know how much it costs on the local market. So our auditors would go in and say,

okay, well, Charity Water paid $16.23. How much does it cost locally? If it's 10 bucks, we have a serious problem. Often we'll find it's $20, and our partners have negotiated such a good discount because of the work that they're doing and the bulk that they're buying that we would actually pay a lot more than they are. So there's a lot of complexity, finding the right solution, finding water,

and then there's a lot of complexity in just keeping that clean water flowing over time and sustainability. There's probably people that are listening and they're like, well, what about the broken wells in Africa? And how do you know your wells are working five years from now? The answer is we don't, or we didn't. And five years into the organization, we began to work on solving that problem. So our first, I guess, pillar of transparency was just saying, we know where they all are. And we know that on day one, clean water was flowing when we posted the picture and the GPS to the internet. And five years on, we said, well, we want to know, are they working five years later? So we pitched Google this crazy idea and I walked into Google and with a couple of people and said, we have an idea.

What if we could develop a remote sensor? We would have to design it where it could withstand temperatures of 60 degrees to 130 degrees. And it would have to be gray and nondescript. So it didn't look like an item of value. And it needed a 10 year power source. And oh, by the way, we want to make it for $100 and open source the whole thing. And we think this would provide greater transparency. And we'd know not only that our water projects are working and potentially others, but how much water is actually flowing. So Google granted $5 million. It was the largest check they'd ever written to a nonprofit in the history of the company at that time. And we began to work with 20 different labs.

We made a lot of crappy sensors. A lot of things didn't work. And then about a year and a half ago, we did our first pilot and we dropped 3,000 sensors in Ethiopia. So we retrofitted 3,000 of our earliest projects. And in that moment, accumulated the largest data set of rural water supply in the history of the world. Because nobody bothered to do this. I mean, these are people making a dollar a day living in communities of 250 or 300. So now we're monitoring billions of liters coming from these communities. We're about to drop sensor to another version in Nepal and drop a thousand there, which is a pipe sensor. So now we know that our functionality in Ethiopia is 91%, which means we have 9% that are issues.

We've also trained mechanics who are now going out and responding to the sensor data when it shows that a project fails with the tools to be able to help the community and make those major repairs. And the communities will pay for the repairs. So that's the great thing. They just don't always have the expertise. So those 9% are in the process of being repaired at any given time. Amazing. So how many wells to date? A little over 23,000. 23,000.

For 7 million people. And so there's still a ways to go here. 1% of the problem. And that's depressing, right? But I mean, that's what I want to get into. Like, you know, you're an optimistic guy and you've made a major dent in this problem there's still a long way to go like how do you sort of conceptualize the road forward right now what's a little frustrating is there's a 3x delta between

the amount of people that we know how to help and the money that we're raising so that i want to get there um we will struggle to help a million people this year, get clean water for the first time in their life. And while a million sounds small to me, you know, people remind me it's an average of 2,800 people a day. So that's kind of cool, right? 2,800 people today are going to drink clean water for the first time in their life because of the charity water community, because of our donors and our supporters. It's one person every 30 seconds. So if we talk for an hour, that means, you know, 120 people got clean water just while we were having this conversation. That's the KPI. So I want that number to be 3 million people a year, 5 million

people a year. I want to go faster. We're also using, looking for ways to use our technology beyond just charity water. We're trying to now sell in the sensor isn't the right word. It's $100. We're not trying to make any money off it. But we're hoping to get a country to actually adopt it and go fully transparent. So imagine if a country like Rwanda installed a sensor on every single water point in Rwanda and made that data public. People, I think, would come flocking to bring Rwanda as

close to 100% water coverage as possible. So we're looking for ways to just grow our impact, help more people every single day. We know how to do it. We have an amazing team now. We have 10 years of getting the bumps and the successes and the failures and learning from our mistakes. And we just, we really have a best in class team and best in class water programs now across the world. So that's what I'm thinking about a lot. You know, from a business sense, one of the biggest regrets is that, you know, a million donors gave once, well over a million donors gave once, but every year at January 1, we found ourselves starting over. And no matter how hard we worked, you know, I was making 150 speeches a year. I'll probably make 200 this year. I did 96 flights before my son was born. I mean,

we couldn't work any harder. And we would, you know, we would raise all this money, we'd help a million people. And then January 1, we'd start with a big fat zero. We would look at ourselves. I remember looking at my wife saying, how did we do that? How would we ever do that again? And how would we grow? And as we celebrated our 10th year, we said, we need to do something different to grow

over the next 10 years. And we launched a brand new campaign and a giving community called The Spring. And the idea was very simple. It was just taking a subscription, which people are very familiar with. The average person listening would have 11 subscriptions. You know, the likes of Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Dropbox, maybe a newspaper or magazine or a cable company trying to create a subscription program for good where instead of

us getting the benefit watching movies or consuming content 100% of the benefit would be passed on to people who don't have clean water and we just started inviting people into that it's called The Spring every $30 can give one person clean water.

So we kind of said, look, if somebody can give $30 a month, it's a dollar a day. You don't get anything. I'm not going to send you swag. You're not getting like a tote bag or a mug or a thermos. We will send you stories of impact every single month so you know what your money is doing. But that's what we're really trying to build and um you know any anyone listening that wants to check that out or or learn that is that is literally the number one way that people can help we're at 8100 people in that community um i'm looking kind of

for 10 000 in the pilots um and then we'll keep going so i love that i mean that's great because then you're you're continually engaged It's not a one-off thing like, oh, I did my thing and now I'm moving on with my life. And it's not even about the money too. That's it. It's about the engagement. So, we have kids that are giving $5 a month, but we get to talk to them every single month. We get to talk about water. We get to talk about our partners and our beneficiaries and the amazing work. So, that's the typical response. Somebody might listen to this and say you know, that's the typical response would, you know, somebody might listen to this and say, well, that's cool what those guys are doing. I'll go and give a hundred bucks.

You know, that's useful. And we can help three people get clean water, but we're really trying to build a community of people that will say, we will see an end to this. You know, we'll give what we can, you know, some people, you know, giving a hundred dollars a month. Some people are giving 500 a month. Some people are giving 10, you know. Some people are giving $10. It's less about the amount. It's just people saying, we're in this. We don't think people should drink dirty water because of where they're born. We believe in a day where every single man and woman and child is drinking clean water that has this basic need for health and happiness and to thrive met.

So that's what we're building right now. It's just charitywater.org slash the spring. And then the other way that people have helped and we're continuing to grow this movement is just by giving up their birthdays. The birthdays. This is one of those surprising things. I love it so much because it's, again, it speaks back to the vision of reinventing charity. The idea is very simple.

On my 32nd birthday, I just said, look, I don't want to throw a birthday party. I don't want to get a single thing for my birthday. I don't want a tie or a wallet or a iTunes gift card or, you know, Crate and Barrel, whatever it was that people were giving at the time. I would love for my birthday to help other human beings. And I thought kind of the sticky marketing idea would be to ask for my agent dollars because everyone I knew had $32 they could give to charity

if 100% of the money would help others and they could track where that money went. So I just emailed every single person I knew. And then this spread from, they started emailing their friends. Hey, this guy's giving up his birthday for clean water. Why not raising $59,000 to help a lot of people. And right after I did that, a seven-year-old kid in Austin, Texas said, well, I'm going to donate my seventh birthday.

We were six at the time. So, he donates his seventh and he starts knocking on doors in Austin asking for $7 donations. And yeah, he lived in a nice neighborhood, but he raised $22,000. That's crazy. And an 89-year-old donated her birthday. And Nona Wien wrote this beautiful mission statement saying, I'd like my birthday to make birthdays possible for other people. Realizing she's double the life expectancy

because of the privilege she was born into. She got to live to 89 and some people get to live to 35 or 40. So this was just this beautiful idea of our birthdays could help people have more birthdays. And, you know, nobody really wants to buy us more crap anyway. My, my friends would much rather be involved in something redemptive and something generous and, and, and bringing, you know, addressing a human need and ending the suffering of others across an ocean.

So people have done this and other fundraising campaigns have raised over $50 million and helped almost 2 million people get clean water. And it's just a simple thing to do. So, you know, there's probably... You got to tell the story about Rachel though. Oh, it's an exhausting one. Well, you can... No, no, I'd love I, I, I love to tell the whole thing, but it's so powerful. It's mentally exhausting. So there

was this, most of the birthdays are just happy stories. Um, you know, we've, we've gotten, I mean, Will and Jada Smith gave up their birthdays and Jack Dorsey from Twitter did three birthdays and, um, you know, 16 year olds in the middle of the country. It's just a really joyful, amazing thing. This girl in Seattle, Rachel, who you just mentioned, had seen me speak and she was eight and she donated her birthday and said, I'm going to cancel my party. I don't want any gifts from her family. And she just asked for $9 and she wound up raising $220. nine dollars and she wound up raising 220 now this was shy of her 300 goal so she is actually bummed she told her mom uh i'm gonna try harder next year you know she felt like she'd let people down because she hadn't helped 10 people get clean water uh i was in central african republic with our team at the time that this happened so I didn't know about her or her responding to my talk or her birthday.

I land in New York. I turn my phone on. I hadn't had service for a while. And I get a text from the pastor of her church saying, hey, Rachel, this little girl in my congregation was just killed in a car crash. So there was a 20 car pileup in Seattle. She was the only fatality. A tractor trailer had come,

it just spun out of control and crashed into the back of her car where she was sitting. Her mom was driving, her sister was in the front. They were banged up, but Rachel lost her life. And he said, you know, Rachel's last wish was to help your charity. And she was asking for $9

and she wanted to raise 300 bucks. And he said, I'm going to have my church try and blow this campaign out of the water, $9 at a time. I remember sitting there with my wife on the couch, just tears streaming down my eyes. And I made the $80 donation to bring her from 220 to 300. And over the next really period of hours and then days and then weeks, it just began to spread. And people through her church community, through the Seattle community, spread to the morning shows, the Today Show, CBS Early Morning, the New York Times, started spreading through Europe to Russia, and then through Africa. And people in Africa

started donating $9 to this little girl in Seattle to in, in her honor she raised over $1.3 million. So almost 40,000 strangers were so moved by the heart and the compassion and the values of this little girl who should want Barbies or, or other gifts who should want a party. And instead once kids kids she's never met across an ocean to have clean water. We had the honor of taking her mother and her grandparents

to Ethiopia on the exact one year anniversary of her death. And they went village to village to village meeting thousands of the people who had clean water because of Rachel. And I remember it was just so emotional. We were just like in tears for four days. Community members would come out. They would draw, the kids would draw pictures of what they thought Rachel looked like. The Ethiopians named a huge, huge valley after Rachel. We went into a church once and the priests had been praying that God would take care of Rachel's soul since

midnight. And they had a picture of her on the altar. And it was just really, really moving. Women walked up to Rachel's mom, threw themselves prostate at her feet and said, you know, we have lost children too. We know your pain, we know your grief, but your daughter's death brought us life. And we thank you for that. I mean, it was incredibly emotional. That's beautiful. Even cooler, you know, this is years ago that this happened. So many people that donated $9 to her campaign then went on to donate their birthdays. And she inspired over $2 million. So her impact now, this girl who raised $220 while alive, she's raised over $3 million,

impacted 100,000 people's lives. And it's cool because now we have a bunch of censors on Rachel's Wells. And I could tell you, you know, yesterday, just find a well and say, you know, yesterday, one of Rachel's Wells pumped 1,765 liters of clean water five years later. So her impact is in the tens and tens of millions

of gallons of clean water. It's unbelievable. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's so easy to be cynical and sarcastic and feel disempowered in our culture. Like, I can't make a difference. You know, I'm just going to live my life. I'm going to get what's mine. You know, I'm just going to live my life. I'm going to get what's mine. And what you present is such a very, you know, tangible, real, accessible way to for each individual to actually have a profound difference, make a profound difference impact that it's had. And I'm interested in like how that has kind of framed your or reshaped your worldview and kind of how you feel about yourself, because it's this amazing arc from kind of really self-serving to serving others.

And, you know, the recipe that's baked into that is, you know, a life of meaning is a life of service, right? And we kind of know that intellectually, and so few people actually find their way towards actually embodying that and can be living examples and prove positive that this is really true. If you want to be happy, if you want to live a fulfilling, meaningful life, then give of yourself. I mean, you're speaking my language. I really believe that. I think there's a real freedom that comes with service. And so many people are enslaved in the service of themselves or just in, I mean, I was for

so many years. I remember coming across a verse in the Bible many years ago that said, true religion is to look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep yourself from being polluted. And I mean, I had been 0 for 2 in those categories for many years. And just remember thinking, you know, a life of service to others and personal integrity, you know, a life of values. So I've really, I've tried to do that. I mean, the thing was birthed out of my personal faith, but the charity has had no religious affiliation. And that's been really exciting to me to see Jews and Christians and atheists and Muslims and Mormons, and everybody kind of come together under this very big tent of clean water. From, you know,

the most crazy Republicans to the crazy Democrats to the independents and the moderates. It's really one of those few things everybody can agree on. And I wanted to build a very, very big, a very big tent, I wanted to kind of build something that was incredibly inclusive, where anybody could contribute, you know, if you had a dollar, um, if you had 10 cents, you know, you would feel honored you and we would be a good steward of that. Um, it's also really hard, you know, it's, it's, it's hard. The travel is tough being away from the family, you know, the environments that we travel in the stuff that we see. Um, you know, I've done 28 flights this year and we're in may. Uh, so a lot of, uh, a a lot of the job is is on the road and it's it's tough but and how does how does being a father now um you know shape how you do what you do other than

the logistical aspect of like how much you're going to travel or not travel just sort of philosophically like how you approach the work i think I just have a greater compassion for what it means to be a father or a mother and lose a child. I remember years ago, sitting with a woman in Niger, Africa, who told me that eight of her children died. And she named them all, and she gave me all their ages through a translator.

She had two left. So she'd had 10 and eight had passed. And I was almost numb to that, you know, I mean, I just couldn't relate really. And now, I mean, my kid, you know, last night was actually sick and was throwing up and we came home from it. We rushed home from an event and, you know, I thought I saw blood on the table. It was just berries. Um, but you know, But just this sheer terror,

like what if I would lose a child, one child? And I don't know, I think it's just given a greater sense of urgency to fight for the thousand kids that are gonna die today and to fight for their moms and dads and fight for a more equitable world, a world where people have a roof over their heads and clean water to drink, and they're not going to bed starving and hungry. So, you know, I think if

we solve the water crisis in our lifetime, which I really, really believe we will. And I think as long as we continue to invite people into it and everyday people, as you said, reject the apathy and the cynicism that is so easy to embrace and say, I can do something. I could give $30 a month. I could give up a birthday. I could get my company involved. Who knows? Whatever that action is. I think we can see an end of the water crisis, but I don't see myself dropping the mic and going to work at a bank. I don't see that happening. Right? I mean, I don't see myself dropping the mic and going to work at a bank. I don't see that happening. Right? I mean, I think we would take, we would turn the attention of our community, of our team

on another basic human need. Maybe we would attack shelter, maybe we would attack hunger. I mean, we're really all in on the service to others. And it's fun. You know, I, my wife and I live in a 950 square foot, one bedroom in New York City and that's a choice because I walk eight minutes to work and when I'm home, I want to see my kids in the morning and at night

and not commute an hour to the suburbs. But we recently calculated our very meager net worth with our 401ks. And, you know, we realized that in the eight years we've been married, we gave away three times that amount.

Yeah. So we're, we're kind of on the, you know, 75, 25 and, and, you know,

the more money, I mean, every once in a while, someone will do nice for me. And I, my first instinct is just immediately to give that away, whatever they've given me to someone who needs it more. There is a weird sort of spiritual truth to this idea that when you give, you get back tenfold or fivefold or whatever it is. And just the idea that you give

so freely, look how large your life has become. Look at the impact that you've been able to have. We hold on so tightly. We're so afraid of losing what we have or not getting what we think we deserve because of the cultural messaging that we're surrounded by, that we're constantly inundated with. And it's all backwards, right? It's all backwards. And to see you give so much and yet your life just continues to grow and expand. And, you know, the, the,

the sense of purpose and meaning that infuses everything that you do, you know, when you put your head down on the pillow at night, that's gotta be a great feeling. Even knowing there's still, you know, bigger problems to tackle and, you know,

work to be done and all of that, to know that like that commitment to service on such a fundamental level and the principles that kind of direct your decision-making and how you allocate your resources has really given your life meaning that extends far beyond your own little myopic sort of existence. Yeah. Perspective, right?

My favorite quote in the last 10 years, a guy that worked with us was passing a bodega and he snapped a photo and emailed it to me. And it said, do not be afraid of work that has no end. And I really look at our work, our vision, our mission like that. I mean, it will have no end. I think that's good. Like in service, if you're really looking to pour yourself out in the service of others, if you're looking to give of your time, of your money, of your talent, you know, there's no end in sight. There's no drop the mic moment. There's no like

exit, you know, Hey, I sold my company and now I'm going to go, you know, buy a bunch of houses and cars and planes. Like it's just, it's a very different counter-cultural lifestyle in a way. Yeah. It's funny. People are always telling me that I should go start a company and make a lot of money so that I can give it away. I'm like, even if that was a good option, by the end of this year, we'll have raised about $300 million for the poor.

I don't know that many people that have given away $300 million. million for the poor. I don't know that many people that have given away $300 million, right? I mean, I would have to be, you know, the unicorn of the unicorn of the unicorn, even if I was going to give away 95% of the exit, right? It's not that easy. And I would hope that, you know, if we were doing this five years from now, that number is a billion, you know, and continuing to grow. So I really see that as the role, kind of as a guide in a way to invite people in, ask them to potentially put aside their cynicism, because we've created something that is integrous and transparent. And, you know, there are 80 people in New York City, you know, who are working every day who have taken pay cuts, nobody's in it for the money. cuts. Nobody's in it for the money. You know, people are leaving Google, Twitter, Adobe, Zynga. I mean, a lot of these people will take 50% of their pay. They'll walk away from stock options to use their skills in the service of others. Wow. That's beautiful. So it's, it's a, it's kind of a fun work with no end because you're helping people every day and, and, you know, and we get

to see the tangible impact of that. I think that's a good place to wrap it up. But I think I would like to, I always like to leave people with, you know, there's a lot of people that are listening that maybe don't feel so great about their profession, their career, their job. They're stuck in a situation or a relationship, some scenario that is making them unhappy. And for a lot of people, it's really hard to see their way through that, see their way out of it. I mean, you were able to kind of, you know, transform your circumstances. You know, how do you communicate with that person who does feel stuck and maybe can't see how, you know, giving or being of service is going to be the path forward.

Oh, I think I'm just keep thinking of my friend that looks at himself in the mirror and said, like, who have I become? And then just changed everything and is now a dad with a job. I just keep coming back to values. I mean, being clear about you, who do you want to be? You know, you're a person that is generous and compassionate? And, you know, what's stopping you from that? You know, is it so often people will have a number, you know, when it comes to wealth, and they'll hit that number, and then they'll change the number. And then they'll change the number again.

Because it's a moving target because that hole inside them has not been filled. And that idea that that number is going to solve that equation for them is an illusion. Yeah. So I think it's a heart condition. I would really examine what is it deep down? Is it greed? Is it like what are the things that you might want to deal with and work on and challenge yourself in?

You know, I used to use the phrase just addicted to giving. Like in some ways, like my family's addicted to giving. We love to give. Anyone that asks, I mean, I don't really care about the cause. People are always thinking that I'm vetting all of these causes. My wife and I will give to 30 or 40 things

just to anybody who asks. If it's a cause that doesn't offend our sensibilities because we just love giving. And the more you give, the more you give. I just introduced our biggest donor to a competitive nonprofit the other day. People think I'm crazy to do that. And he's gonna go and give them a bunch of money,

which is great. You know, I have an abundance mentality. It's not a scarcity mentality. The more he gives, the more his family gives, the more they will give, the more they'll want to give. So, you know, pick any sort of virtue. If it's, I don't know, I'm not going to preach anymore, but it's, you know, I don't regret any of that stuff. I mean, I don't regret the nightlife and the, I just look back on some of those videos and pictures. I'm like, what a clown. I mean, what an absolute just waste of space.

That's the experience that you had to have in order to be where you're at right now. For sure. I think if I'd started Charity Water at 20, you know, right out of NYU, it would be a very different story. And I was fortunate that, I guess that's the last thing I would say to anybody is, you can redeem anything. I mean, I'm kind of proof of that. There was nobody worse.

You can redeem anything. I mean, I'm kind of proof of that. There was nobody worse. I was really, my wife doesn't believe this, and she's now talked to enough people from nightlife, and every once in a while she'll say, wow, you were such an a-hole. Like, I just heard another story about something you did or someone I yelled at or lied to or stole from at the time. So no one has really passed redemption. And I think if you

try and address the heart condition, you know, there's a lot of hope. And maybe it doesn't need to be as extreme as mine was. I just, it was easier for me to quit everything in one go and walk in the other direction. Thanks for talking to me, man. It's amazing what you're doing. I have so much respect and admiration uh for the work that you do it's inspiring and i will publicly commit to uh my 51st birthday which is this fall i will use that as a platform to i'll be your first 51 bucks charity water i'll say that right now i've never done anything like that before either you know so i'm excited about that and uh it's really cool kind of um tracking your progress and and um being able to see in real time uh the impact of the work that

you're doing man and i i just i just wish you much luck and continued success with all of it cool man thanks for having me so uh if you want to uh learn, the best place to go, obviously, charitywater.org. And Scott's pretty visible on social media. Scott Harrison on both Instagram and Twitter, right? Those are the main places. Yeah, although Instagram's all kid pictures. Beware. And, of course, if you want to participate in the spring or do the birthday thing,

you can find out all the information that you need to learn about that right on the website, right? Yep. Anything else? That's it, man. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Peace.

Alliance. All right, we did it. I hope you guys enjoyed that more importantly i hope that you were impacted by that i don't know how you could listen to that conversation and not feel inspired to think about giving in a new and important way and in the wake of that conversation i've been doing that myself and i think it's really astounding to realize that even a $30 donation can give one person clean water. So here's the thing. This is the announcement that I want to make. I know there are many of you out there listening who can afford to provide a monthly

donation to Charity Water to give a little bit, maybe $30, maybe a little bit more, a small gift that can make a huge difference in another person's life. And as you heard at the end of the conversation, I am going to be raising money for Charity Water for my 51st birthday coming up in October. But more importantly, I'm a new member of The Spring. I'm personally donating $50 a month out of my own pocket. a month out of my own pocket. And in the wake of this conversation, I'm going to be creating an additional account to divert a portion of corporate receipts as a result of the work that I do to Charity Water as well. And I'll keep you posted on that. And my announcement is really a call to action. Life is better, it's bigger, it's more fulfilling, it's more purposeful,

and it's more rewarding when we give give when we are in the persistent spirit of giving so on that note i want to encourage all of you to check out and sign up for the spring which is charity waters monthly subscription service 100 of all donations go directly to the field to bring clean water to those in need and spring members will get updates on the impact their donations have. We have a special URL that we set up for this purpose. So get out pen and paper. You're going to want to write this down. It is cwtr.org slash richrollspring.

cwtr.org slash richrollspring. Can you guys do it? CWTR.org. No, no, no. CWTR.org forward slash Rich Roll Spring. That's a mouthful, but we got it. All right, cool. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today.

Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production and help with the show notes and the scripts. He's doing a tremendous job. It's been kind of tricky with the time change and being in Ireland. Jason's had to be very patient with me. So let's all thank Jason together. One, two, three. Thanks, Jason. And Sean Patterson for all his wizardry on the graphics. Those motion graphics with the moving text and all that cool stuff that I put up on Instagram. That's Sean's work.

So thanks, Sean. Everybody say thanks, Sean. I want to thank Chris Swan, who is my assistant and colleague who takes care of a lot of my BS behind the scenes. Thank you,

Chris. And theme music as always by Anna Lemma. You guys have heard, you heard a trapper and Tyler play music the other day right how did it sound good stuff right all right thanks for the love you guys and I want to thank everybody here at Ballet Valon house

including Jenny and Justin the proprietors and the staff they've been amazing the food has been incredible the hospitality has been extraordinary it is a week that I will I will never forget. And I'll never forget all of you guys. So thank you for sharing this experience.

It's been incredible. What a gift and a blessing to be able to commune with like-minded souls. And I hope that you guys all go back home and don't forget the experience that we had and become your own agents of positive change for yourselves and for your community. And until then, I will see everybody back here in a couple days. I want to say peace and plants together. Ready? Peace and plants.

And as Julie would say, namaste. All right. Thanks, you guys guys that was awesome Thank you.