The Wolf Of All Streets - From Bitcoin To Clean Water | Scott Harrison, Founder Of The Bitcoin Water Trust

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

After a decade in the club scene promoting expensive alcohols, models, and music, Scott Harrison faced an existential crisis about the legacy he was leaving behind. Years of selling good times transformed into a burning passion to deliver and provide clean water to developing nations around the world through his Bitcoin Water Trust. We don’t choose the privilege we are born into, and for this reason, Scott Harrison has made it his mission to build an even playing ground around the world so men, women, and children can live healthy, wealthy, and prosperous lives with access to clean water.   In this episode, Scott Harrison and Scott Melker explore: Unsettling statistics The solution to inaccessible clean water The pace of the problem Finding purpose in water From serving vodka to water Fighting distrust in donating Reinventing the donation process The dollar cost to providing clean water A problem everyone can agree on The needs matrix Bitcoin in Africa Sustaining the water models How can you help? The paradox of giving --- Cosmos:  Visit https://thewolfofallstreets.link/cosmos to learn about the Cosmos Hub and how the $ATOM can connect every blockchain. Cosmos is the port city connecting chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum to ensure your liquidity on any chain can be used anywhere.  Find new staking opportunities, applications, or build your own parachain at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/cosmos  --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Cosmos. Stay tuned for more information on them later in this episode. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Now, there was a particularly compelling talk at the Bitcoin conference in Miami that didn't focus on the history of money, the lightning network, Bitcoin, or the banks. It was about water. I learned that

nearly one in 10 people worldwide live without clean water, about twice the size of the population of the US. This is heartbreaking. Today's guest has dedicated himself to solving this problem by reducing that number to zero through his organization, Charity Water. To help make clean water accessible to everyone, today's guest conceived the Bitcoin Water Trust. I personally donated one Bitcoin immediately after his speech and committed to becoming an advocate for the organization and a founding member of that trust. I can't wait for Scott Harrison, today's guest, to share his thoughts on the water crisis and how Bitcoin can help solve it. Scott, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. And thank you for all that you do. Hey, Scott.

Two Scotts. This is fun. I know. We're like the Spider-Man meme, you know, pointing back and forth at each other. We even have the same kind of grizzle. I'm a lot grayer than you. Your hair looks a lot better. A lot of grizzle, black shirts.

It's the uniform for podcasting in the crypto space. Absolutely. So again, today's episode, I alluded to some of the numbers in the intro. I've actually heard up to 30, 40% of the world doesn't have clean water. Can you talk about how serious of a problem clean water is for the world? So kind of officially the UN stat is that 785 million people, about one in 10 people, like you said, are drinking dirty, contaminated water right now, water that could kill them. It's killing children around the world. Kids are simply dying of diarrhea. And 82% of those people live in rural communities. So kind of think 18% cities and towns and slums and 82% in the more remote communities throughout Africa, throughout India, throughout

Southeast Asia. And, you know, look, we think that number should be zero, right? And, you know, you mentioned we're at a Bitcoin conference, right? There's 10,000 plus people there. We're talking about, you know, the future of money and like the future of human beings, basic needs, right? It was a little existential, mind blowing, you know, coming out of pandemic to kind of the opulence and the exuberance and the party and the drinking and the, you know, the Ferraris and Lamborghinis are running down, you know, Miami streets and just thinking that while we still haven't provided the basic need for 10% of the world. So yeah, that's kind of where this idea was formed.

I've been at Charity Water now for 14 years. We've raised about $550 million. So we've raised quite a bunch of money from a global community of donors that spans 150 countries. We have turned that money into access to clean water for 12.7 million people. So it's not nothing. You know, it's 700 stadiums full of people. But it kind of is nothing because it's one 65th of the problem stop. 1.6% of the work that needs to be done.

And it's taken us a decade and a half to get that impact. So, you know, I mean, maybe just a second on water. I mean, probably everybody listening to this took it for granted. You know, this morning when you woke up, you made your coffee, you had your shower, you brushed your teeth, you know, your dishwasher's running, you're running a load of laundry. I mean, this is just something that we have and most of us have always had. But if you don't have clean water, it's a huge problem in your life. There's up to 50% of the sickness, according to some sources, throughout the developing world is caused because of bad water. When I started out, I don't know the latest step, but women just in Africa, Scott, were

walking 40 billion collective hours. OK, 40 billion hours to get water that's not even clean. So you talk about the time wasted. You know, I've been to 69 countries now. And women will often tell me that they are walking seven hours a day, seven days a week to get water. So you just imagine lighting 50 hours of potentially productive time on fire, getting, you know, something that you obviously need, but then it's not even beneficial to your family. So, you know, water impacts health and education. I'm sure there's lots of people that are passionate about education. One out of three schools in the world doesn't have clean water. Imagine sending your kid to a school with no water, with no toilets as well. And this is one of the top

reasons teenage girls drop out of school, because they're not going to a school with no water and sanitation facilities, because it's their role to go and get the water as an upcoming woman in the family. So it's a huge problem. And the great thing is it's also a solvable problem. That we're not looking for a cure for the water crisis in a lab or through a vaccine or some miracle drug. We know definitively how to help every human being alive. We just haven't done it.

We haven't created the will to do it. We haven't built the movement, the awareness. We haven't created the will to do it we haven't built the movement the awareness we haven't allocated the capital to make this happen so that's probably one of the most exciting things that keeps me going you know a decade and a half later is we know how to help the people get water and we haven't done enough so how do you do that like what are the brass tacks obviously is it a well is it uh know, some sort of cleansing of the water supply? What are the methods that you actually use if you go in? Yes and yes. So we're solution agnostic. So there's no one size fits all water solution, right? There's no silver bullet. We now employ about 14 different technologies across 29 countries.

And it's as simple sometimes as a purifier, like you mentioned, a bio sand filter in Cambodia that would cost about $65. Often it's a well that costs about $12,000. And, you know, what the community doesn't have access to is the million dollar drilling rig, the compressors, the heavy machinery, the trucks, the skilled hydro geologists that know how to find that water underground and make it useful. But, you know, for the cost of $12,000, imagine giving 250 people a lasting source of clean water. Then we funded $1.7 million gravity fed systems with solar that connect networks of villages through pipes in Uganda and in Madagascar and in Rwanda. So a lot of different things work. Sometimes you're cleaning water. Sometimes you're finding it underground. Sometimes you're harvesting the rain. Sometimes you're moving water. But again, we know how to do it. Is this a problem that's outpacing the solutions?

I mean, obviously it's a fixed number now, but we know that populations expand. So is that number getting greater or you actually feel like charities like yourself or organizations are making a dent? Yeah. We're making a dent. When I started 15 years ago,

the number was over a billion, 1.1 or 1.2 billion on a 6 billion world's population. Now we're down to 785 million on a 7 billion plus world population. I will say COVID set a lot of these communities back. And there's data coming out that saying, you know, in some countries have lost 10 years of economic development gains, just through this year, it was so traumatic, right? There's no government to print money, and keep people afloat with with lifelines across many of these countries. So the support that many Americans or Europeans or people throughout Asia have received is non-existent in the most marginalized places in the world. So yeah, I think that the best way

to sum it up is we're not going fast enough. In a world awash in capital, in a world where what 150 billion dollars is sitting in donor advised funds for charitable purposes. Not enough is going out and solving these real world problems. So why water for you? What's the background? When did you become passionate about it? Was there a light bulb moment where you said, wow, this is the thing I want to dedicate my entire life to because you could obviously be doing a lot of other things? Yeah. Well, I was a club promoter for 10 years. So my first career couldn't look any different. Well, I did. I was I was selling liquid. But, you know, I was raised in a very conservative Christian family. My mom was an

invalid growing up. I was an only child taking care of her, raised in the church, good kid, didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't have sex, didn't curse. And then at 18, bro, I went nuts. I moved to New York City and I did all of that. I've worked at 40 different nightclubs over a decade, selling $1,000 bottles of champagne, you know, spraying them from DJ booze,

controlling the velvet roof, you know, trying to date famous models and flying around to Paris and Milan and driving my BMW, flashing my Rolex watch. I mean, I was a total sycophant. I just became this kind of selfish, degenerate hedonist. And at 28 years old, I maybe, maybe no surprise, half my body went numb, unexplainably. Wow. And my business partner is like, bro, you've smoked two to three packs of cigarettes for 10 years. You come home at noon and take Ambien to go to sleep. I mean, no wonder your body is just trying to tell you something. And it was this wake up call for me. I wound up getting a bunch of tests and they couldn't find anything wrong with me.

And, you know, I had this existential moment. Like, what if I died? Like, you know, first of all, did I believe that the faith stuff that I was brought up with, like in heaven and hell and like, and if I did, I certainly would not be going to the heaven side after my behavior. And then I started thinking about like purpose and legacy and like, what would my tombstone read? My tombstone would read here lies a guy who got a million people drunk and high. Full stop. Like there was nothing else. There was no positive impact or legacy. And you know what, I wound up writing a book that there's a lot more to that

kind of cathartic change. But, you know, to sum it up, I sold everything I owned at 28. I said, I'm going to start life over. I'm going to reimagine a completely different life of purpose and meaning. And I'm going to try to find my way back home to the lost spirituality, to the lost morality and see if I could be useful. Would any of my skills be useful? So that led me to a humanitarian volunteer opportunity in post-war Liberia on a hospital ship. Now, I'd never heard of Liberia before, but it had just come out of a 14-year civil war led by a terrible warlord named Charles Taylor. He put guns in the hands of kids, forced them to kill family members, and it was a horrible, horrible context. And I was going in with a group of doctors after the war ended to pick up

the pieces. And, you know, interestingly, Scott, talking about the opposite of a life, I actually had to pay $500 a month just so that they would take me to volunteer. So, you know, forget about selling, you know, $10,000 tables and nightclubs. Like I'm paying for the privilege of trying to be useful in service. And I was a pretty good photographer and a pretty good writer. So I became the photojournalist for this mission. And I saw so much, Scott. I mean, there was no electricity in the country. There was no running water in the country. There was no sewage in the country. And there was one doctor for every 50,000 people living in the country,

but with no hospitals that had power. In America, we have a doctor for every 180 of us. One of us is a doctor out of 180 people. So it was a broken country, a broken healthcare system. And, you know, I spent time in leprosy camps. I traveled with the doctors. I saw all myriad medical conditions, but then I saw a 13 year old girl drink from a swamp. And I had never seen human beings drink viscous contaminated water before. In fact, I had sold Voss water for $10 a bottle in nightclubs to people who would often just buy a bunch of water and leave it there. They wouldn't even open it. They'd drink champagne or vodka instead. And there was just something about water.

You know, I learned half the country was drinking bad water and half the disease in the country. And our doctors couldn't keep up. We were turning away thousands of people because more sick people would water was the root cause of so much of the disease, the sickness, the suffering. And maybe rather than just treat the symptom, could I work with the rest of my life to address the root cause? And that led me to water. And again, it's just a simple thing. Like if you met me 15 years ago and I would have told you, I'm going to try to bring clean drinking water to the world. And it's the same message,

you know, a decade and a half later with a little progress made. Incredible story. And so I'm curious, you know, obviously being a crypto-focused podcast, where Bitcoin- People are like, why am I listening to this guy? What does this have to do with-

No, not at all. They'll be really interested to find that you were extremely early, right? And I know that you've been taking Bitcoin since 2014. It's just the nature of what you do with it that's changing. So maybe just one word on the org structure. So when I started Charity Water, I was 30. I didn't know any better.

I had this big vision of what I wanted to do in the world. But I realized most of my friends were cynical and skeptical when it came to giving. And they're like, I don't give. It's just a black hole. I don't know where my money is going to go. Probably all gets eaten up in overheads. And I came across data. USA Today did a poll that found 42% of Americans didn't trust charities. And more recently, New York University did a study found 70% of Americans believe charities wasted their money. Wasted their money. You have one job as a charity to turn the money into effective impact. So I had this big idea. I'm like, I want those people to give. I want the cynics, the skeptics. This is a big opportunity. So very simply, I opened up two separate bank

accounts and said, I'm going to raise all of the overhead separately from a very small group of entrepreneurs and business leaders who get that need, right, for the staff salaries, for the costs, for the toner, for the Epson copy machine. And then in the other bank account, that's where all the public's money goes. And it's going to go straight to build these water projects 100% to directly help people get clean water. We're going to audit these, we're going to treat them like, audit them separately, treat them like church and state. And we've done that for 15 years, which has allowed millions of donors to give in the purest way. So that's then kind of led to this innovative, you know, brew line of Charity Water. Because we have a non-fungible business model,

we could actually track a $6 donation to a well in Malawi that costs $11,924 and say, hey, Scott, you know, or your kid's $6 from the birthday party or from the bar mitzvah, the bat mitzvah went straight to this project in Malawi or India or Cambodia. So we were the first charity to just simply put all of our completed projects on Google Earth, proving where the money was going, proving that impact so people could see the satellite images. We then took it a step farther, putting trackers on our drilling rigs and putting our rigs on Twitter

so people could see where the drilling rigs were in real time. Recently, we've now been connecting our wells to the cloud. So we've got 7,000 connected villages where after we leave, after the well is built, four years later, we know exactly how much clean water is continuing to flow every single day. And when it breaks, that sensor technology can inform maintenance calls. Imagine like, you know, if AppleCare turned up in your village because they knew that you dropped your phone and shattered the glass

and they were there to make that repair. So, you know, when, again, Bitcoin was really interesting to us. And like you said, in 2014, we started taking Bitcoin. Tony Hawk came to one of our events. He's a good friend of mine. He's come to Ethiopia with me

and has funded water projects in the one of our events. He's a good friend of mine. He's come to Ethiopia with me and has funded water projects in the name of his daughter. And he was at a gala and he raised his hand and he gave $1,500 at some sort of ask. And he paid the $1,500 in Bitcoin. So we sold his Bitcoin for $312 each. And that's what charities do. So just the best practice, anything you give me, whether you give me Apple stock or Tesla or a piece of land in Florida, a condo in Miami, I'm going to try to sell it and put that money, fiat, immediately to work for the mission. So this is just the best practice of the industry since the beginning of time, which is just to take in assets, you know, give out a tax receipt. So long story short, we took in a lot of Bitcoin, Scott.

We took in 569 Bitcoin. And we sold them all for exactly 4.4 million. Okay? And I'm not saying that's no impact. That's enough to help 110,000 people get clean water. Okay. So, you know, people that are out there saying Bitcoin is completely useless, has no utility, you know, why is it using all this energy? Okay. Well, we have already used Bitcoin to fill up five stadiums worth of people who now have clean and safe drinking water.

And that was kind of the past model. So, you know, the more I learned about the technology, the more I started to meet people like yourself, influencers in the space, you know, I learned that a lot of people would never give a charity a Bitcoin knowing it was going to be immediately turned to fiat because people were holding, they were hodling their Bitcoin

because they believed this was a store of value. They believed that this was going to increase in value significantly over time. So, you know, the big question was, could we take a big swing? Could we break from the norm? Could we offer a paradigm shift or an alternative and say, hey, look, we do want your Bitcoin as donations, but instead of selling them right now for $36,000 or $39,000 or $31,000 or wherever, we're actually going to hodl them for a full cycle until at least 2025. And we're going to let your Bitcoin appreciate over time. So it was a simple idea, right? A charitable total fund where we get

past the next halving in May 2024. And I believe, you know, in other words, we take the short-term volatility out of it. You know, should we have sold at 39? Should we have sold at 41 or 36 or 31? That's not how people think about this asset. So it was really a way of saying, hey, we believe too. Will you give us some Bitcoin now and trust us to let it appreciate over time? And we came up with this idea of looking for 100 people to do one Bitcoin. Cameron and Tyler at Gemini said they would match the first 50, which is, again, a significant donation, 50 Bitcoin. And so far, thanks to your generosity, a bunch of others, we're at 49 founding members that have committed. So we're one Bitcoin committed away from unlocking that 50 match. And then we're going to have 100, you know, within the next week, hopefully.

And that's significant. And then right now, that's enough to get 100,000 people clean water. But in 2025, I believe it's going to get a lot more than 100,000 people access to clean water. Guys, this is so cool. For the first time in history, rather than a company or project sponsoring the podcast and newsletter, a grassroots community is doing it. The Cosmos community is extremely passionate and active. And because of that, cool things like this sponsorship can happen. Their Atom token has been absolutely on fire and solidified itself as a top 50 coin by market cap. And the Cosmos platform has so much in store.

Now, if you don't know about them, Cosmos is effectively the port city connecting chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum to ensure your liquidity on any chain can be used anywhere. One of the things I'm most excited about is their new DEX, which is coming out, which will connect to any blockchain. So you can swap ETH, ERC20, BSC or any other token with Atom. Plus this DEX will have order books just like any centralized exchange. So it'll feel familiar trading just like you do anywhere that you've traded before. This is a first. It's never existed until now. You need to absolutely check them out at the wolfofallstreets.link slash Cosmos, C-O-S-M-O-S and see everything they have going on.

I mean, personally, when I heard about it, I immediately was excited because who knows if I'll be able to give you a million dollars in four years, but I can give you 40,000 today. Right. And so I think that you totally nailed it as far as understanding that, you know, we have this sort of compounding and exponential ability to have our donation grow alongside. So I think it's incredible. And it's transparent. And the website, it's charitywater.org, charitywater.org slash Bitcoin.

But you can see and you will be able to see how much we're holding, how much that's worth at any given day against the dollar and the yen and the euro and, you know, different currencies. And then how many people could be served upon unlock. And then there's a leaderboard where people can give anonymously, suit anonymously, they can use their real names to inspire others to give, like you were generous to do. So, you know, we also wanted to, gamify is not the right word, but we also wanted to turn this kind of into a, you know, we also wanted to, gamify is not the right word, but we also wanted to turn this kind of into a, you know, a public vehicle. This isn't something that, you know, just kind of goes away. We want this to gain momentum and gain energy.

And we also wanted to encourage small donations. I mean, there's people listening that might be able to give 0.001 Bitcoin. Okay? We'll take it. You know, this isn't just for the whales. This isn't just for kind of the, you know, the massive Bitcoin holders. This is for someone that could say, I've got a hundred bucks right now. I could put that on my American Express card, or I could give a hundred dollars, you know, from one of my wallets in Bitcoin.

And that might be worth a thousand in the future. You know, that gift, well, actually a hundred is becomes worth 200 with the match and then could be worth a lot more in the future. So, you know, really this is, I think, encouraging people maybe to even make their first Bitcoin gift. They're, you know, use Bitcoin for the first time philanthropically. And again, hope to prove out a use case for this really making an impact, healing the world, right? Ending needless suffering specifically through clean water, and then tracking all that impact in the future. I mean, you got a hell of a list of people that immediately donated. I mean, I saw on the leaderboard before I was even able to donate like Tony Hawk, Bill Miller, Barry Silbert, obviously the Winklevi twins. Winklevi, I still love that term. I know that you've received commitments from a lot of other people. Why do you, I've heard a lot of their frustration. Oh, I made a gift to my alma mater or university or donor advised fund, and they sold my Bitcoin. And it was $1,000,

you know, and now it's $35,000 or $40,000. So I've heard this frustration. And, you know, I think people would love to see Bitcoin be useful and go out and, you know, not just maybe be a store of value, but an actual change agent. You know, a way to go and transform people's lives, to go and meet basic needs. But, you know, not if it's converted right now. So I think the timing is really, really important. And I just believe, you know, we'll be in such a different range in 2025 that I'm hoping, I mean, there's a chance that this little fund off to the side at the moment of our core business could dwarf the core business in impact. The US dollar, you know, pound, euro business that, you know, we're still running every single day, trying to help as many people get clean water. How much money would it take to solve a clean water problem for the entire world right now? You know, it's a lot of money. You know,

it's hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. But that money's out there. We print that every day. I mean, you know, it is available. And, you know, it's a little bit of the chicken and the egg because you need to build the capacity of these organizations to go and, you know, the money comes first, then that drives capacity building, more rigs, the ability to do more work, and then more money. So, you know, if you dropped $500 billion in the water sector right now, we couldn't absorb half a trillion dollars. But we can take billions. And when we take billions and billions, then more people are employed. You know, we move these countries forward. We

capacitate the local organizations who are just doing remarkable, inspiring, heroic, courageous work in many of these countries. So I guess that was my next question. So you touched on it earlier, obviously, the amount of disease that comes as a result of it. It's not just a matter of hydration, right? It's not a matter of just of diarrhea. There's all these secondary effects. Children have to drop out of school. If a village that did not or a city that did not have clean water all of a sudden does not have that issue, what are the secondary effects positively of that occurring? Yeah. I mean, well, you know, we hear amazing stories of women using that reclaimed, redeemed time to start small businesses, to be better, to be social entrepreneurs,

sell rice at the market, sell peanuts at the market, to spend more time with their families, to lead their community groups forward. So the time savings is a really big one. When schools have clean water and access to sanitation, the teenage girls go back to school, we'll see the rates of boys and girls level. It's The teenage girls go back to school. We'll see the rates of boys and girls level. You know, it's not uncommon to go to a school in Africa and find 70% boys, 30% girls. You know, that's not the future that we want to see. So it makes an impact on education. You know, money not spent on healthcare costs is another really big one. And Scott, one of the craziest kind of, you know, unlocks for me just understanding how economics work in so many of these places.

I mean, I've been to Africa 55 times now. I've been to Ethiopia 31 times alone. Is that it's actually not the money for the drugs when your kid gets sick of dysentery or, you know, let's say cholera. It's often the cab ride to the clinic that could be a month's wages. A lot of the drugs are subsidized. So you have kids dying in remote villages that shouldn't be dying in remote villages, but they can't get the ride to the clinic because people are living on a dollar or $2 a day. And that's just, it's too expensive.

So, you know, health benefits, education benefits, time as a benefit. There was an 88-page paper that came out of the United Nations that found every dollar invested, we could say every Bitcoin invested in water and sanitation yielded a 4 to 8x return. So imagine that, right? A Bitcoin put into a bunch of communities into clean water turns into 4 to 8 when it comes to economic benefit. So water makes

people healthier, but it also makes them wealthier. That's an incredible stat. And then especially when you consider the water trust and it compounding for another, you know, five years before that happens, how large that impact can really be. Why do you think that there's so little general awareness of how big of a problem water is? Do you think people are just sort of have blinders on or they live very insular lives where they're focused on what they see day to day? We take it for granted. I mean, Scott, I remember speaking once at a big business conference.

There were 10,000 people in the room. And before me, the founder of a big charity, a cancer charity gets up and he says, all right, audience, raise your hand if you've had cancer. So a bunch of hands goes up. He says, raise your hand if you've got a friend or a family, if you have a family member that's had cancer. He's got about half the room now.

He said, now what about a friend or a loved one? He has every single hand in a 10,000 person. And then he begins his speech about cancer research and the importance. If I get up in front of a room and says, okay, how many people have had to walk seven hours for dirty water? How many of you have gotten dysentery or cholera or have gone blind with trachoma because of bad water, right? It's, you know, actually there's always a couple

people, cause I've done this before that grew up in rural India, in Africa, in Southeast Asia, in Central South America. And they'll come up afterwards and said, I used to walk for water. I was that girl. I went to that school that didn't have clean water. But you know, for 99.9% of the audience, it's just not something we experience. We experience cancer. We experience homelessness. We experience needs in our local communities, but not this one. So that's why the storytelling, the awareness, we've made over a thousand videos that are on the Charity Water website, trying to tell these stories, trying to shrink the world a little bit and just shine a light on this problem.

Because one of the best things about this, Scott, is that when people understand, everybody thinks it's a good idea. I mean, nobody's told me to stop in 15 years. I don't come off a stage and have people say, Scott, this is harmful aid. Let them die of bad water. Let the women get raped, you know, on a seven-hour walk to the jungle so that they can, you know, kill their kids with bad water. You know,

no one, so whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or a Libertarian or an Independent, you know, whether you are a person of faith, whether you find faith, you know, anathema to you, right? Everybody can agree to agree on clean water. It is a universal common good. So that's allowed us to build a really big and diverse tent of people with very disparate views who can actually agree on this. Well, that's a rare thing. It is a rare thing. We actually need more of that in the world. We do. And I mean, we need more people coming together in compassion and a spirit of generosity, a spirit of service to others and less of this, you know, contentiousness, I think. I mean, so I hope

that, you know, Charity Water can be a convener often of common ground, of common good. So obviously you talk about third world largely being the biggest issue for clean water, but then we hear stories like Flint, Michigan, right, where we had contaminated water supplies and people put a flame underneath their spigot or their faucet, and it sparks a fire. How much of a problem is this in the, I guess, industrialized world, if that's still a term? And are there ways to address that in cities as well? Are you primarily focused on? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're focused on the developing. We looked at Flint, Michigan, and the short answer was our organization from New York with history and expertise across 29 rural countries just had no business kind of flying into Michigan, taking donations. And what was needed was over a billion dollars of infrastructure repair, government grants,

state grants, FEMA. It was, so we wound up telling our supporters to give to a bunch of local charities who'd been working in that community for many, many years, who had credibility, who had local context. And we're meeting those needs, you know, often through bottled water in the short term, you know, until the remediation was made. I will say there are pockets of places in America and Appalachia on some of the, uh, some of the reservations to native American communities. And, you know, if somebody is listening and is really passionate about that, there's a group called dig deep, dig deep.org. And they exclusively focus on the continental U S and, and, and, uh, communities without access there. So we're kind of focused on rest of the world. You know, America officially has a hundred% water coverage, but we know that that's not true. Many of the countries where we're

working, 40% water coverage, you know, and even that might be generous or over-reporting. So how do you identify where you want to go next, right? I mean, obviously there's a problem that's around the world and it seems it's most likely a problem in places that don't have direct access to you to tell you that it's a problem. Yeah, it's a great question. And so there's a matrix. First of all, we know where the 785 million people live. So there's pretty universally agreed upon data. Our first pass is rural, not urban. We see most of the government money, most of the big grant money hitting the cities and the towns. High population density. The voters are there. It's the rural families that get left behind because there's no bundling. You can't just drop a $10 million water system in a city. You have to

go dot the countryside with the appropriate solution for that community. So our first pass is rural. So that kind of takes 100 million people out that we're not looking at. And then we eliminate conflict zones. We're after long-term sustainable work. So while perhaps the greatest water crisis in the world would be in a country like Yemen, we just don't have a proficiency of working in a war zone. There's great orgs that do that. So we kind of then take out conflict zones. Then we take out maybe the easiest way to say that is despotic governments who don't want any intervention or would actually meddle outside. So there's a few countries there that they just don't want any foreigners doing anything. So then that leaves like, I don't know, 45 or 50 countries.

And then we start at the bottom of the development chart and we work with the poorest countries. And then we started the bottom of the development chart and we worked with the poorest countries. So Malawi over Peru, Madagascar over Brazil, right? Which would have a much smaller population and would be much more of a middle income country. You know, one of the countries we're working on in Rwanda, just the entire budget of the country. So think roads and electricity and water and education and government is far less than the New York City school district budget. So those are the kind of places where we're working. And Rwanda is actually a bright spot in our portfolio because the limited capital that the government has to invest in water, they match our dollars, 90 cents on the

dollar. So if Charity Water puts a million dollars into Rwanda, we get 900,000, 45% from the local government and 45% from the federal. So together we have $1.9 million. So you actually see some good actors here, Scott, who are saying, we care $1.9 million. So you actually see some good actors here, Scott, who are saying, we care about this issue. We want to help our people get access to clean water, but we just don't have the resources. Most people in Rwanda are subsistence farmers. So there's not a tax base that can go to all these social services. What I find interesting is the point that you made about the economic impact of it, right? You give a dollar and it becomes four or five secondarily because of that impact. So outside of charity, you would think that there'd be some capitalists out there who would find a way to either donate or build these systems and then take advantage of that new human capital and unlocking that potential. Is that something that happens or is it still primarily charity driven? Yeah, there's some great organizations doing investments in Africa that are kind of, I mean, a lot of people think this is going to be the next greatest

economy. There's a lot of growth potential. There's one group I work with called Verdant out of Austin, Texas, and they're investing in agriculture, in housing, employing thousands and thousands. It's kind of an impact investing for-profit model, and they're doing really, really well. There's entrepreneurs that have kind of a version of a Y Combinator in Kenya, in Ghana, working on startups, you know, many of them trying to solve the social issues and some of the, you know, the endemic problems in their own country. So yeah, I'm hopeful about it. There's some incredibly smart, incredibly talented people throughout, you know, specifically the African country, the African continent, in India,

in Southeast Asia. It's really just getting that capital there, whether it's philanthropic dollars or whether it's investment dollars to move those organizations, to move their visions forward. And that's one of the best things that I love about Charity Water's model. You know, we have only about 100 people in New York and in London, but we employ over 1,500 locals in each of these countries. So there's 300 people alone in Ethiopia. They're all Ethiopian, Scott. So this is local job creation. And they're also getting the credit. So when they're taking our Bitcoin, when they're taking our money and they're turning that into clean water, they're operating the drilling rates. They are the ones being celebrated. They are doing it in a culturally appropriate

and sustainable way with that local dynamic. It's not a bunch of people from the West parachuting in, you know, throwing on hard hats and barking orders, not understanding the context. So that's worked really well about our model, both the 100% and this ability to be transparent and track dollars, but also just growing these local organizations and us not needing to get the credit. Yeah, I had a guest not long ago who I've become friendly with named Ray Youssef, who is Paxful. And they're very passionate about using Bitcoin in Africa. And he's made the claim that especially in Nigeria, where he goes often that it's the most brilliant people and entrepreneurs that he's ever met anywhere.

Basically, it sounds like everyone there is like financial MacGyver. You know, they can take little things and throw things together and create these incredible businesses. And as a result, Bitcoin is almost being used as its own monetary system in Nigeria by the youth of the country.

Being there, have you seen any of this sort of Bitcoin penetration into Africa? Or do you think that that's just not something that you've come across? Well, I haven't been in a year. Well, of course, right. That's when it would have happened, really. Our whole business moved to Zoom. You know, Charity Water team members have just started traveling, you know, out of New York and out of Europe. So I've heard it's happening. And I think, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of experimentation. I was just talking with some of the people at Luno. I know

they've got a lot of adoption now with their wallets throughout a bunch of the countries. And, you know, with the Bitcoin Water Trust, that's another thing we didn't mention. You know, we intend to keep this charitable fund, this charity water fund, Bitcoin native. So I'm not imagining just turning it to US dollars in 2025. I'm going to try to spend it in Bitcoin. And at worst, that's probably going from Bitcoin to the local currency, the Rwandan franc, the Ethiopian burr. But it might be buying drilling materials, constructing water projects in Bitcoin in 2025 and beyond. And I think we might be able to help with some of the experimentation and the adoption there as well. That's so incredibly cool. So I'm curious. I mean, this can't be easy, right? No matter how much of a formula,

no matter how much of a formula. Asking people for money, asking people for Bitcoin. No, it's, it's. Not even that part is very hard, but I was actually speaking logistically. Like, you know, just, yeah. Like if you identify a place, how does this actually work? How do you go in there? How do you identify the problem? How do you identify the solution? Because as you said, it sort of seems like it's unique to each situation. It's not a one solution fits all, clearly. Well, and even the countries, there's a wide range of environments and solutions. So we work with

five different local partners in Uganda, in five different regions of Uganda, and the solutions are all different. So a rainwater harvesting unit might be appropriate in a rainier area, and a deep well appropriate in another, or a filtration system appropriate in another. So, you know, look, Scott, I mean, we've now 15 years of experience, half a billion dollars. We have an amazing team. I mean, there are people that are water experts, that the charity water programs team, you know, pre-COVID was like flying to the moon and back two or three times every year, just with the amount of boots on the ground travel as we work with our local partners. And then we have this amazing network that we built up over 15 years where the local expertise

is there. So it's not haphazard anymore. They have three and five year plans. They know where they're going to be working three years from now, which regions they've gone out and done baseline studies. They, they know what those solutions are. So, you know, maybe in the early days, 15 years ago, it's like, I have Scott, I have money for 10 wells. He just goes, you know, now it's like, okay, 400, and bundling is strategic and concentric circles, making sure the rigs are efficient and they're not just driving out and back. So there's, again, at scale, we're able to take a much more maybe sophisticated approach to the future of this. But again, I just, I can't say enough about the local

teams, the hydrogeologists, they're out there working with the communities. I mean, they're negotiating sometimes where to put the well, the land needs to be donated back into the community. So that needs to become neutral ground. So if the best place to put a well is on Scott Melker's property, right? The local partner has to go in and convince you to give that 10th of an acre back to the community and let people trample through your cabbage or through your corn or figure out what that path is. uh you know drilling a well sometimes is the easiest part it's the fixed community meetings meetings that came before that determining the location who's going to be on the water committee who are we trusting with the money because in your village uh you need to pay a little bit to use that well so that that money can go into a maintenance account so when the well breaks you know you're not calling charity water but everybody has in the corpus has a little bit of

money to call the well mechanic to go make that repair. A well, just again, is one of our many technologies. It's just like a car. You know, your car needs an oil change. It needs the brakes checked. It needs new tires eventually. And if you take care of it, you can have a car that 20 years old that you put a quarter of a million miles on. If you don't take care of it, you got a car that's busted after five years and isn't worth fixing anymore. So a lot of time and energy is spent on that aftercare, the sustainability models to make sure that these are not stranded assets in the future. It's really interesting that when I said that this is challenging, obviously the first thought in your mind was, yeah,

raising money is really hard. And, and in my experience, I've seen that raising money from the Bitcoin community is very hard, not because they don't want to give, because like you said, they don't want to hold their Bitcoin and not give it. I've actually been down this road before and people obviously were more willing to just make a cash donation than to actually give their Bitcoin. right? Yeah. Well, what's been fun, Scott, actually, is a lot of people have given to this fund and then re-bought the Bitcoin. Yeah, exactly. And actually established, as US taxpayers,

established a new cost basis at 40K. So a lot of people will give us an early Bitcoin that they, because there's a real, and I'm not giving tax advice, but, you know, I've been told there's a massive tax advantage to actually do this, to give a Bitcoin, not pay any capital gains on that, take the full deduction against ordinary income. And then a bunch of people are like, well, I didn't have a Bitcoin to spare.

So now I'm going to go buy it back with another asset I want to be out of or with cash to replace it. So that's just been kind of fun seeing how people have been doing. And of course, some people have one to spare or a tenth of one to spare or half of one to spare. in this fund following the story and then following the story of impact in the years to come is hopefully going to get some people to do this for the first time. Yeah, the funny thing is- So everybody's invited.

Yeah, with charity, people always like, I've got a little I can give or I've got something to give. Nobody ever feels like they have any Bitcoin to spare. So I'm not surprised to hear that people buy it back immediately if they don't. And we had to come up for the founding 100. We had to come up with a way where people could send cash and we would buy it for them. And that has been what a couple of people ask. They're like, I'm happy to do it. Can I send you money in cash?

Can I send you money for my donor advice fund? Will you buy the Bitcoin for me? So we had to talk to KPMG. And say, what headache is that for you? That's got to be a huge headache. For a Bitcoin, it's worth doing. It's worth doing. If it's a 10th of one or... So if that's something you're interested in, in contributing one Bitcoin, but doing it in cash, we do have a way to do that. Just get in touch with us. There's a form on the website.

So I'm curious, there's a lot of people out there probably who are now listening to this conversation or recently said water is a really big problem and are understanding this, but maybe don't have money to give to an organization. What can your average person do to help solve this problem without just throwing money at it? Get informed. I mean, there's some great videos on our website. You can help just tell your friends, tell your neighbor.

A lot of parents watch our content with their kids. You know, they really want their kids to grow up understanding that, you know, it's a big world and not everybody has access to these basic needs that, you know, I was born in a middle class family in Philadelphia. You know, I was born into privilege. Like I've always had a roof over my head. You know, there's, there's a fallback for me. I could go sleep on somebody's couch. I've never had to drink dirty water. That safety net that most of us were, were simply just born into by, by no choice of our own, by nothing that we did to deserve that is simply not how the 10% of the world we're trying to help the situations they found themselves in. So really, you know, I think it's an encouragement to use what we've been blessed with, our time, our talent, our money, our Bitcoin, our resources, to look out and say, how can we make those useful? How can we end needless suffering around the world? And, you know, I believe the

more you give, the more you give, you know, this, this is almost like a muscle sometimes that, you know, the more generous you are, the more generous you want to be, the more stingy you are, the more you want to hold on. And like, you know, I was having a conversation with someone, you know, just a Bitcoin accumulation, like it's never enough. It's never enough. You know, I think getting people to think about what is enough, you know, what could I share? Do I have enough to share with others who don't even have water, you know, don't even have water. I mean, look, we're like, you know, we're using face ID and, you know, right. Like logging on, people are probably checking their, you know, their Coinbase or Gemini wallets, you know, 10 times a day. I mean, just think about people that are not

drinking water and how we, how this community, I really believe the greatest philanthropists of the future are going to come from this community. You know, some of the biggest acts of healing the world, of improving people's lives are going to come from this community. You know, some of the biggest acts of healing the world, of improving people's lives are going to come from this community. So I think we're hoping to start that conversation, to start that relationship, to allow people to give a little bit now, follow the story, learn about water. There's a volunteer button on the website. You know, we're not doing any events at the moment, but we're getting back into that as the world reopens and I'd say learn more share the content volunteer give lots of different ways to to get involved just charitywater.org

or charitywater.org slash bitcoin I'm sure you'll put it in the show notes. Yeah. I'm actually curious just because you're out there doing this and you're fundraising constantly. Do you think that your average person is giving, or do you think that most people sort of are selfish and live in their own bubble and go about their day? Because I hear something like this and it's so compelling, right? How can you not feel sympathy for someone without water? But maybe someone's reaction is, I don't have it that great either. So whatever. I'm just curious, you know, if you see a trend or, you know, obviously I'm not asking for

a judgment on all of humanity, but I'm just curious. One observation, Scott, is that I see sometimes the people who you might think have the least give the most so some of the less fortunate donors in our communities are the people who might live the most modestly or even be worried about paying their electric bill will be giving to charity water every single month We're faithfully giving through the pandemic. Maybe some of the richest, most, you know, the people you might think would give the most or have the most to give, right, which would look like obvious extra, you know, to be quite honest. So I think, look, I'm an optimist. I don't have a chip on my shoulder. It's our job to tell the story and to invite people to give,

to invite people to explore generosity, to get involved in this issue, in other issues, to get involved in their local community, to exercise that generous muscle that, how can I help? I have a four and a half and a six-year-old. My family motto, the thing I'm trying to teach their kids, it's funny, I didn't even know this was a thing in the Bitcoin community. I've been doing this for a long time, is just teaching my kids to say, how can I help? So my four and a half-year-old walked down the other morning, I'm in the kitchen making breakfast. She said, Daddy, how can I help? So my, you know, four and a half year old walked down the other morning, I'm in the kitchen making breakfast. She said, daddy, how can I help? Right. Oh, you can unload the dishes. So I, you know, I think I love that. Like, I love that the simplicity of that phrase. How can I be useful? How can I bring what I have to the table. And, you know, there's a real blessing. I mean, I will say just, I have

received more and more blessings from giving than from taking, than from accumulating, than from, you know, I don't know. I mean, putting more and more into cold storage and treasure drives and safes. I just think, you know, it's a different intention, right? It's an expression that looks to serve others. And I'm trying to invite as many people to be a part of that as possible. I agree. I love that. How can I help?

I'm going to definitely utilize that on my six-year-old. It really is brilliant. If I heard those words the first thing every single day, I would be a very, very happy dad. Yeah. It happens every once in a while. Try it out, Scott. I'm going to. So, you know, it's funny. I know we're kind of going to run out of time, but you and I have never. By the way, you can do the same thing back. Hang on. You can do the same thing back to him. I do. You're like sitting at the art table, but for them to actually hear those words, it's great. It's like, Hey,

you might be my kid's name is Jackson. It's like, Hey Jackson, how can I help? Oh, you can go get this for me. Everyone's going to send me out of the garage to get something. Yeah. I definitely get that. That I get a lot of, I get sent around. That's not a problem. Right. So you know that we never somehow dug into our history, but you know, I was DJing in clubs in New York city for that entire stretch while you were promoting oh my gosh which ones i mean literally everywhere i was lotus every friday night uh i did thursdays greenhouse uh gold bar uh yeah i was everywhere everywhere one oak

you know uh 10 june yeah the whole uh thing Charity Water launched at 10 June a week before they opened. So our origin party, September 7th, 8th, was at 10 June. And they donated the club. They gave open bar and we raised $15,000 in cash that night. And we built our first few projects in Uganda. And now there's, you know, 60,000 projects around the world. So that was, that was kind of a cool turn of events. And, you know, now we don't do anything with, with clubs really, but it was familiar.

And I'm sure that you've rejected me at the rope one or two times. No, no, no. Come on, DJ. We always love the DJs. DJs went everywhere. But I'm sure we have all the same friends, you know, and I'm sure that we cross paths, which is just a very kind of funny thing. It's absolutely amazing. And there's a lot of those people are Bitcoiners now. A lot of those people are Bitcoiners now, I've found, especially the DJs.

How cool. Awesome. So listen, I know we're here. So where can everybody find you? How can everybody sign up? How can everybody give? And what can we all do to make this fund, this Bitcoin trust? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, tell people about it. I think, you know,

we've got about 140 people have given so far. You know, like I said, we're going to be close to unlocking that 50 Bitcoin match. So we need help. We do need your participation. Maybe if it's not you, you know, someone else who would love this. So send them the podcast, send them a link to the website, charitywater.org slash Bitcoin, or just charity hodl, but we'll take anything. I mean, you know, you want to give us a car and turn into clean drinking water. We'll figure out how to do that. So we're really, we're just so focused on this mission, being transparent, running, you know, high integrity organization. And again, we believe the best is yet to come. And, you know, I would just invite people to learn more about this issue.

It's solvable. I mean, it's like the basic thing you need to have a good life to thrive. You need clean water. And yet a staggering amount of people simply don't have it. And we know how to help. So thanks for the, just allowing me to share the story and to invite people to be a part of this. And I'm just, I'm just Scott Harrison on Twitter and Instagram, although Instagram is more family kids stuff. I heard so many times at the conference in Miami that yours was the best speech that people had heard,

which was so surprising because there was so much Bitcoin content and this wasn't. And like I said, you had me immediately. So, and I think a lot of people had that. Thank you for your generosity and for participating. And I know you just deeply care, you know, and you deeply care about this stuff. So I appreciate your help. I'm coming to Uganda with you next year.

We're doing that. Awesome. Yep. You're invited. Awesome. Thank you again. And we will follow up soon and I'm going to keep pushing this through the community. But I think that this is going to be just exceptionally well-received and people

are going to be excited to hear it. Awesome. Thanks for the opportunity.