00:00:00
i'm emotionally bankrupt i'm morally bankrupt and this is not how i'd want it to end
00:00:06
the founder and ceo of charity water making a difference all over the world a new york times bestseller he's a
00:00:12
certifiable badass and his name is scott harrison the lifestyle of a promoter is one where you get lots of attention the
00:00:18
fun i had for 10 years in nightlife was a lot of cocaine mdma 40 to 60 cigarettes a day fun i realized what if
00:00:26
i did die what would i have to show for life so that started a process
00:00:33
10 of the world is drinking dirty water and i realized so many of my friends
00:00:38
didn't trust charities where does the money really go so i had a very simple idea promised the public that a hundred
00:00:44
percent of anything they would ever give to charity water would go directly to help people get clean water you know
00:00:50
nobody thought this business model was a good idea and i was hitting a point where i realized maybe they're right we
00:00:56
about to go out and build a hundred wells and we're about to miss payroll there's no miracle that can save us
00:01:03
so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the dire river ceo usa edition i hope
00:01:10
nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music]
00:01:21
scott four years old do you still remember
00:01:28
the day your mother collapsed i don't you don't i don't
00:01:35
when i read through your story that was a pretty significant um sort of catalystic 1980 right new year's day 19
00:01:41
1980 tell me about that day that week we had just moved into a new house
00:01:48
my dad wanted to get closer to his job we moved into this house in the dead of winter and
00:01:55
we all started experiencing some health symptoms headaches and
00:02:01
you know fatigue and you know nobody really knew what was going on i think my dad you know had a
00:02:07
couple people come and just check to make sure that the house was fine he probably checked the radon or you know maybe asbestos i'm not sure
00:02:15
and then on 19 uh new year's day 1980 my mom according to her and my father walked
00:02:21
across the master bedroom and then collapsed unconscious both of them uh she did
00:02:27
and so she was the canary in the coal mine you know that then led to uh eventually
00:02:33
a discovery of a carbon monoxide gas leak in the house there was a faulty heat exchanger that had been leaking
00:02:41
carbon monoxide she had been 24 7 in the house unpacking
00:02:46
boxes from the move you know putting pictures up on the wall my dad had been working i'd been at school
00:02:52
so we were you know we were spending the evenings in the house but not 24 7. and
00:02:58
blood tests revealed these massive amounts of carbon monoxide in her bloodstream and that was really the day that
00:03:04
everything changed for for our family uh mom never recovered from that you
00:03:10
know my dad and i both did but her life was irreparably damaged from that point on
00:03:15
her immune system just kind of fully shut down in its ability to process any chemicals
00:03:24
so anything that was unnatural to give you an example perfume would make her violently ill if
00:03:30
she smelled perfume soap would make her sick car fumes like
00:03:35
kryptonite would make her sick so over the next you know
00:03:41
period of years we would come up with hacks for all this stuff
00:03:46
um the hack for her living space eventually was a bedroom upstairs in the
00:03:52
house sorry it was a bathroom upstairs in the house near the bed the bedroom and the bathroom was washed down with a
00:03:58
special soap that didn't smell it was completely hypoallergenic the uh door
00:04:05
the wooden door that had a stain on it was then covered in sheets of aluminum foil to keep that stain smelling she
00:04:11
would sleep on an army cot that my dad had found somewhere that was washed in baking soda more than 10 times
00:04:18
so there'd be no odor and then my mom wore a mask her whole life so
00:04:24
i you know rarely saw my mother's face because she was wearing a an n95 or or
00:04:30
similar version now i see your face there are some people that are like i think this one was just
00:04:36
crazy right i mean there was an element growing up of
00:04:41
wondering of some level of doubt you know is this real
00:04:48
um you know the massive amounts of carbon monoxide were certainly real and discovered by the doctors in her body
00:04:54
but where all of these symptoms hypertension um
00:05:00
headaches you know a lot of the stuff you couldn't really see there were things where she would break out in terrible rashes and that was very real
00:05:07
but i do remember growing up with that you know that that edge of a little bit of doubt sometimes come
00:05:13
from that town from others i think i mean nobody knew how to process someone who's allergic to the world
00:05:20
and so among the things that made mom sick also radio waves telephones
00:05:27
and tv so as a young teenager you know i'm
00:05:32
thinking mom is just trying to rain on my parade we can't have a tv but i just didn't believe that invisible
00:05:39
electromagnetic waves were gonna make her that sick so i remember one night when she had you
00:05:46
know gone to bed i snuck up to the hallway and i took a boom box and i
00:05:52
turned the radio on with the sound all the way down and i aimed it through the door
00:05:58
which it did follow on the inside right and you know effectively trying an
00:06:04
experiment to say well if she doesn't know the radio is on well she's going to be fine
00:06:10
and she woke up the next morning very sick really so i remember as a kid
00:06:17
for me that was a big defining moment of you know mom's telling the truth
00:06:23
and unfortunately radio waves affect her and give her symptoms
00:06:30
how can you develop a relationship with your mother when she's trapped in a room alone behind tinfoil and
00:06:35
wearing gloves how do you have affection and yeah well there wasn't a lot of touch
00:06:40
um because i wasn't you know i wasn't really allowed to touch her i would always be
00:06:46
smelling of something from the outside world it was a weird childhood i was an only child because family planning
00:06:53
stopped after the accident and i just remember a lot of caregiving helping my mom doing
00:07:00
cooking doing cleaning uh helping my dad out with her and trying to be a cheerful
00:07:07
companion i would try to cheer her up i would play piano outside her you know like play a keyboard outside
00:07:13
her her door i had a gentleman sit here the other day that used to coach kobe bryant and he
00:07:19
talked about this concept of having a dark side and he his dark side is quite graphic
00:07:24
but he refers to the dark side as a concept where things that happen in our early years end up being both destructive and constructive
00:07:31
so and they when i sit here with people that are anomalies you tend to find these stories because so they had some kind of anomalous upbringing which led
00:07:38
to them being an anomaly in their early years for better or for worse when you reflect on your shall i call it dark
00:07:44
side yeah i think it's anger and i've been able to make that anger
00:07:51
useful by you know for the last what 17 years you know fighting against
00:07:58
people suffering in needless poverty or you know specifically people without access to clean water but
00:08:04
that's probably the darkest side that i have is you know i can lose my temper
00:08:11
you know i can i can get angry quick
00:08:16
i've i've gotten really good over the years at trying to harness that in in a really
00:08:24
constructive way the the you know the angst maybe you know maybe it's not even as much anger
00:08:30
um as just the the discontent with
00:08:36
the way things are and the the willingness to fight to make
00:08:41
them the way they should be is that it just con content with the external world and the and your internal
00:08:48
world so like your life and the what the situation you find the world in i am not
00:08:53
naturally reflective uh it was it was a really difficult journey for me to go
00:08:59
back into childhood to write the book and kind of go back into you know some really dark years
00:09:04
um of of addiction and and uh you know well just kind of
00:09:09
decadent advice it wasn't really fun growing up
00:09:15
and you know i think now i'm a parent of of two kids and i'm 46 years old and as i
00:09:21
think about the childhood i want to give my kids i actually think i'm over compensating for
00:09:26
fun my wife and i were just talking about this the other day you know it is all experience you know
00:09:32
it's let's go do roller coasters 50 times you know it's let's jump on a plane and you know
00:09:38
go to niagara falls why let's have all of these experiences because i think i'm making up for my lost childhood
00:09:44
you know i i want to i think i i also want to have fun i want
00:09:49
to do the things kind of vicariously through my kids at that age at these young ages that i
00:09:57
never got to do one of my fears when i come to have kids is my dark side will manifest in both ways
00:10:03
it will mean that for example in your case that because i was deprived of that childhood i will make sure we did go to
00:10:09
the the theme park all the time but there's got to be other ways where that dark side in us dark side is a bit of a
00:10:14
loaded term but that side of us that formed our greatness or forms our desire to overcompensate as a parents also has
00:10:20
a adverse impact which might be overworking or it could be well it could be too much fun it could be
00:10:26
you know i could wind up with kids who don't know the value of work see i learned the value of work growing
00:10:32
up i was doing yard work i was washing windows i was cleaning a four bedroom house i was
00:10:38
you know washing mom's sheets in special you know baking soda concoctions so one
00:10:43
of the one of the best things i got from my childhood was i was needed i was i was performing a
00:10:50
role that was essential to the family and that's you know that gave me a lot
00:10:56
of confidence the lifestyle of a promoter which you went on to become is one where you get
00:11:02
lots of attention from lots of people you get it from women you also have a ton of power you also have a ton of
00:11:08
control my brother my oldest brother actually his early story sounds has shades
00:11:15
of of the experience you had in terms of school and he went on to be a promoter he actually was a bouncer and a promoter
00:11:21
even though he is maybe this month the smartest academic person i've ever met in my life he was a bouncer and a
00:11:26
promoter in a nightclub and works in nightclubs and i when i fit reflected on that i think i think much of the reason
00:11:32
is because he was seeking attention and the way he felt psychologically in those
00:11:37
scenarios was filling some kind of void he had in his childhood and this is an assumption i'm making but i i don't know
00:11:43
how far off i am i mean if you asked me at 19 what i wanted to do it was open up for you too
00:11:49
i mean our band was gonna be instantly rich and famous uh and i was the band's manager and i was booking us
00:11:56
out and so i'm sure if i played that out it would be look at me on stage look at this band
00:12:03
a way of feeling validated when did the band dream end very quick very very soon after uh
00:12:12
the the piece the the connective tissue there which eventually led to a ten-year
00:12:18
career in nightclubs in nightlife was that when our band would play gigs
00:12:26
it was the promoters that were making the money we would bring a lot of people our
00:12:31
people our friends would pay the cover to see us and then the promoter would throw us a hundred bucks at the end of the night
00:12:37
and say split this five ways right i wouldn't even pay for gas let alone a guitar cable you know that
00:12:43
broke or you know an amp that broke so i befriended one of the promoters
00:12:50
that had booked the band in the immediate aftermath of us breaking up and said take me under your wing and teach me the ropes
00:12:57
teach me how to be on the other side of the velvet rope you know the other side of booking bands
00:13:05
and i jumped into that business at 19 years old now the funny thing is i wasn't even allowed to be in clubs
00:13:11
and you were by all accounts really successfully yeah yeah there were there were probably eight or ten of us that
00:13:16
were at the highest echelon in new york city what was it about your character
00:13:22
and about you that made you successful at that because that is a very specific i was i
00:13:28
was curating fun i was creating and curating fun my first
00:13:34
experience in new york city was with with somebody who was courting our band and he took me to a club called
00:13:41
club usa i had never been inside a nightclub in my life and here i am with you know 3 000 people
00:13:48
and this club had a slide and i remember he took me up to the balcony and
00:13:53
he's like go in the slide and i remember just you know you go in this long kind of like tunnel slide and
00:14:00
it dropped you in the dance floor and i loved it i mean there was just something so electric something so
00:14:08
illegal about it coming from my christian kind of rule-based
00:14:15
worldview and childhood i mean if my parents had seen me at that club my gosh
00:14:21
it's really interesting through line between you saying i said why are you really good at why were you really good at the nightlife scene and you said
00:14:27
because i'm good at curating fun and then like five minutes before we were talking about the fact that you create fun for your kids are you over indexed
00:14:34
there you're a superstar and charity water is you know we've been called externally i mean it's
00:14:40
a really fun brand um and you know this is a little bit of a joke but what are the first three
00:14:46
letters in fundraising oh yeah okay a lot of charities would
00:14:51
say shame raising oh yeah guilt-raising let's me make people feel terrible that
00:14:57
they have too much you know let's show pictures of kids with flies in africa you know on their face in slow
00:15:04
motion locking sad eyes with the camera so we we've very intentionally taken the opposite
00:15:10
view of building the charity water brand over 15 years and fun is a word in our culture
00:15:16
do you think fun has such a big importance for you and your work because it was something you were deprived of
00:15:22
i think so and i also think now the kind of fun really matters so the
00:15:27
fun i had for 10 years in nightlife was a lot of cocaine fun a lot of ecstasy mdma fun
00:15:34
you know 40 to 60 cigarettes a day fun uh gambling fun pornography fun strip
00:15:40
club fun well i'm i'm using fun loosely so it was a really unhealthy
00:15:47
search for fun in those places which were highly destructive for me
00:15:56
give me the symptoms of highly destructive psychologically physically
00:16:03
it all started with smoking you know it was like the first cigarette i did everything to such an extreme
00:16:12
like everything kind of with reckless abandon you know there's really this all in i mean if i'm not gonna be an
00:16:17
occasional smoker i'm gonna smoke two to three packs a day you know i'm not going to be
00:16:23
occasionally sleeping around i'm going to go and try and sleep with you know every beautiful girl in new york city so
00:16:29
i was brought up to save myself for marriage that's like medication isn't it
00:16:34
in a strange way well or playing things out to their end would be another way of you know you can't have this thing
00:16:42
okay so i was brought up you can't have sex you can't have smoking you can't have drinking you can't have drugs
00:16:49
i think a part of me really wanted to make sure that there wasn't happiness at the end of it
00:16:56
and to really play it through to the end so i actually never felt like an addict to
00:17:03
any of these things maybe smoking aside but i would do cocaine for two or three
00:17:08
years and then kind of get bored with it and i would do marijuana like i'm just gonna
00:17:13
smoke and get stoned every single day and then no i didn't find what i was looking for
00:17:18
there okay let me try and gamble let me go to vegas let me go to atlantic city let me you know learn craps and blackjack and
00:17:26
poker and okay i didn't find it there i just got a lot broker
00:17:31
so i think it was this exploration of you know i didn't know what i was
00:17:37
looking for i was trying to fill a hole and
00:17:43
i needed to make sure that i left no stone unturned down that path
00:17:49
are there days when you look back and go that was one of my lowest days then i know there's probably a sequence of them
00:17:55
i think about my own life there's a sequence of days i think that was a but what was the first day where you think this something's got to change
00:18:02
yeah this is towards the end so maybe i'm 26 couple years before i got out of the business and
00:18:08
a typical night would look like a fancy dinner at 10 o'clock we would then go to the club that we were promoting at
00:18:14
around 11 45. we'd stay at the club until three
00:18:20
we'd leave with a group of 20 people maybe and we'd go to an after hours and that might last till 11 a.m
00:18:27
after hours is gross i mean it's only drugs at after hours
00:18:33
and i just remember this one day coming back from after hours and i remember looking out the window on
00:18:39
houston street and people were on their lunch break
00:18:44
you know the people gotten up in the morning done yoga gone to the gym had a full like morning at work and now
00:18:50
they're on their lunch breaks and here i am taking ambien to come down i remember needing to block
00:18:57
out the light and taking a comforter that i would duct tape on the window
00:19:02
so that i could simulate darkness and then i would sleep till seven o'clock or eight o'clock and then wake up and do it
00:19:08
all over again you know it's not like i'm a doctor who works the er shift right i worked
00:19:13
the night shift i stitched up a bunch of patients i was really useful and you know i'm going to bed at noon
00:19:19
because i've i've been a contributing member to society like i had just gotten i don't know a thousand people wasted
00:19:25
the night before and then gotten wasted with my 20 friends it was a real it was a real darkness in
00:19:31
that and the thoughts start to creep in right at some point that i mean the feeling probably comes first in that case where
00:19:38
you start feeling something psychologically or emotionally yes
00:19:43
sadness i think it's a sadness i think it's a an emptiness
00:19:49
and then you mentioned the health problems so about a year later half my body goes numb
00:19:55
and i just remember i couldn't feel my hand i was running it under hot water and i couldn't feel the hot water
00:20:00
and i'm like kind of tapping it was this kind of weird paresthesia and numbness and tingling so i'm now seeing doctors
00:20:09
and i'm getting mris and ct scans i'm convinced i have a
00:20:14
fatal disease i have a brain tumor you know there's just something when you the loss of feeling was really scary
00:20:21
i'm connected to ekgs none of the tests reveal anything
00:20:26
and that was such a that was a really clear moment for me
00:20:32
where i realized what if i did die in the next month
00:20:38
and what if i did have an inoperable brain tumor
00:20:44
would i be happy with the life that i lived hadn't done anything for others hadn't
00:20:49
mentored others hadn't given charitably um hadn't been a good friend particularly hadn't been a particularly
00:20:56
good boyfriend and i just realized wow uh i've i've really
00:21:03
gotten to the end i'm emotionally bankrupt i'm spiritually bankrupt i'm certainly morally bankrupt
00:21:10
and this is not how i'd want it to end so that started a process
00:21:17
when you when people face face you know that feeling in their life and sometimes it's just it's exactly that it's a
00:21:23
feeling that their job or the path they're on is not fulfilling them deeply and they almost arrive at this a
00:21:28
crossroads where they realize they've got to make a decision they don't know what's down there but they do know that if they go down there they're going to
00:21:34
have to shed a lot of things one of them is their identity one and everything that comes with their identity did you
00:21:40
feel a fear of having to shed pretty much everything you'd built for a decade friends and
00:21:46
all of that i don't know i didn't even know how to do that i mean at this point i just know things need to change
00:21:52
i start reading the bible again i start reading this book that my father had given me which it's interesting i've
00:21:58
tried to read it you know years since and i it doesn't hit me the same way that it did
00:22:04
then um the book was about finding god and
00:22:09
living a pure life and returning to the innocence of a child
00:22:15
here is a man's pursuit of righteousness honor integrity
00:22:23
peacemaking innocence uh virtue
00:22:30
and i am none of these things in fact
00:22:35
i am leading people to the opposite of those things so i think just what was happening here
00:22:41
was these extremes like worlds were colliding and i realized
00:22:47
i didn't need a pivot in my life a small course correction was not going
00:22:53
to be the answer i was somehow going to have to find the 180 degree opposite of
00:22:59
everything i said thought and did and that's what i didn't know how to do
00:23:04
what was the first step in doing that i came back and i tried to sleep with my girlfriend less uh
00:23:10
smoke less figure out how to you know forget how to get out of that relationship because she didn't love me and i didn't love her
00:23:15
smoke less drink less and knock it off with the drugs and then i was miserable with my failure in all
00:23:21
those things i'd quit smoking for a week and then i was back at it you know i wouldn't do coke for a couple weeks and then i was out at the party and like
00:23:27
some celebrity was there and offered it to me it's like well you know i mean i'm doing coke with so and so like you know
00:23:33
can't pass up this opportunity so for me it was a little bit of a process the process took um about
00:23:39
seven or eight months from the beginning of the health issues to eventually
00:23:46
the change and that the first significant step that
00:23:51
didn't feel like a pivot then was that when you applied started applying to humanitarian
00:23:57
causes and charities and organizations yeah well there was an event at a nightclub uh where i had fired somebody
00:24:04
you know interestingly i was actually offered a business interest in a new restaurant
00:24:10
so there was this kind of path that might be a little bit of a pivot out of nightlife into a more reputable
00:24:16
restaurant owner world where we'd be promoting a restaurant which also had a little club upstairs but anyway what
00:24:22
happens i'm i'm at a club that was there was not one that we worked at but i knew the owner very well
00:24:27
and i was with the new business partner of the restaurant and i actually still remember this this is
00:24:34
so many years ago but i came out of the bathroom i remember i was high that night and
00:24:40
i sit down back in a banquette with him and he says hey this bouncer just tried to shake me down
00:24:46
for money he's like you know the owner here right you know that's not cool bro you brought me to this club and this guy's
00:24:53
trying to hustle me for money and like you know pay pay me to stay in here i'm gonna throw you out or he didn't i was
00:24:58
in the bathroom so apparently didn't know he was with me so i remember you know going outside and
00:25:03
getting in this bouncer's face and saying like you know you picked on the wrong guy this is my new partner so
00:25:09
there's like a there's an element of loyalty and honor you know here for me and uh i remember stepping on the street
00:25:16
it was on 27th street between 10th and 11th and i called the owner to who wasn't there that night i left a message
00:25:22
um about what happened and left the club and then the next morning she woke up got the message then
00:25:28
she fired this guy the bouncer the next night i met the club that i was working at and i remember
00:25:34
leaving about 15 minutes early and then on my way home i get a text from our doorman saying hey bro there's like a
00:25:41
bouncer that just turned up and he said you know you cost him his job and he says he's going to kill you
00:25:48
now you have to understand in nightlife like we get threatened all the time and this would be like death threat
00:25:53
number 17. you don't let people in your party they're embarrassed you know they're
00:25:59
there's a there's a lot of animosity towards people working at the high end of nightlife
00:26:04
um but this felt not trivial you know to be quite honest and
00:26:12
i remember just saying well um i'm just gonna i remember going to my
00:26:18
girlfriend's house that night not going home and woke up the next day and said i'm just gonna get out of town for a couple weeks
00:26:24
and called my partner and said i need a break anyway you know you handled the clubs for a couple weeks i'm gonna i'm just gonna get out of town for a little
00:26:30
bit i wound up renting a cobalt blue ford mustang
00:26:36
and i think i did a month-long rental because it felt cheap and
00:26:42
wound up just driving north you know i was also like kind of just excited to get out of the
00:26:49
city and the idea of being alone away from this relationship that wasn't really healthy as well and i wound up
00:26:55
calling this guy on the phone the next day and saying hey man i'm really sorry like you know i was a little out of it
00:27:02
what you did wasn't cool but i'll try and get you another job you know here's a couple places that are
00:27:08
hiring and feel free to use me as a reference and you know he seemed like he accepted the
00:27:14
apology on the phone so maybe that maybe there was never any danger you know um
00:27:20
i'm not sure but i was heading north and i was gonna you know get out of town for a while and
00:27:25
i remember bringing a bible and a bottle of doers and a carton of marble reds so i start like reading the bible while
00:27:32
i'm drinking and smoking and i i wind up going through connecticut and through vermont
00:27:39
and i wind up in maine and you know an inner transformation is
00:27:45
really happening the farther i get away from new york city like the farther north i go the farther
00:27:52
into kind of you know deserted beauty the less i wanted to go back
00:27:58
to new york and it just kind of hits me i don't ever need to go back
00:28:06
what if i never went back what would i do and
00:28:11
you know call this a god-given idea or or whatever i got this idea to
00:28:18
that i said when i when i grew up in the church this there was this idea of a biblical tithe where like 10 of your
00:28:24
money goes to the church or to the poor and then you get to keep 90 well i got this idea to tithe my time
00:28:30
what if i gave one year of the 10 years that i've selfishly wasted back in service to god and and
00:28:37
the poor uh or people who who needed help could i be useful that was really the
00:28:43
question and putting action to that i remember being in a dial-up internet cafe with a bunch
00:28:50
of old dell computers in greenville maine on moosehead lake i'm staying in a little
00:28:55
motel and i started to fill out the applications for the famous humanitarian aid
00:29:02
organizations i'd heard of save the children doctors without borders red cross
00:29:08
world vision and i commit in my mind that i'm not going to go back to new york
00:29:14
and i'm going to actually change my life and i'm going to give a year back
00:29:20
i don't go back to new york while i'm wait go ahead i was going to say it's just so i find it really interesting that the further away you
00:29:26
got from new york the more because people can relate to that in their lives in so many ways if you've ever taken a month off from a job yes
00:29:33
and you can finally feel it once you've stepped away from the thing and said another way the further i got away from
00:29:39
this destructive environment for me you know the the more clarity i think i got
00:29:46
um so i wound up going bypassing new york i went to the south of france a buddy had a house in the
00:29:53
mountains in the remote pyrenees mountains and i go there there was no internet so
00:29:59
i had to come down there was no phone and no internet so i had to come down into the town on a bike
00:30:05
just to you know check messages but i go there and it's it's time alone
00:30:10
it's solace it's time for prayer it's time for reading you know it's this kind of this cleansing reset you know there's no
00:30:16
drugs um i was probably smoking a little bit but you know no no gambling no point like just it's
00:30:23
kind of a reset moment and what happens is one by one the denials
00:30:29
from all these organizations come in so ten organizations reject my volunteer application
00:30:35
which makes sense because they're not looking for nightclub promoters in the same way that uh you know maybe
00:30:41
uh this is not uh hey we're you know doctors without borders looking for a
00:30:47
reformed high-end nightclub promoter to go to sudan maybe they should have been
00:30:52
in hindsight well so one day i remember i'm driving my bike
00:30:58
it's probably you know five miles you know down from this house through the little town
00:31:03
and there's a small patch of cell phone reception where i would stop and check messages
00:31:08
and as i'm actually on the bike riding through this area the phone rings and it's a group that hadn't rejected me
00:31:15
and they said hey we're called mercy ships we saw your application our ship right now our hospital ship is
00:31:22
in bremerhaven germany we haven't agreed to accept you but we will meet you
00:31:28
so can you be in germany and meet us and i'm like while i'm in france
00:31:33
i'll get right there and i got there maybe 18 hours later
00:31:40
and convinced these people these doctors that i was not going to throw any wild
00:31:47
parties on their hospital ship i was not going to corrupt any of the young nurses that i really was
00:31:52
reformed uh and wanted to change my life and
00:31:58
the the position i had applied for was photojournalist on the ship now i hadn't mentioned this
00:32:04
but i'd gone to new york university part-time when i was working at the clubs just to get a degree from my dad
00:32:09
right terrible student c-minus didn't even see the degree for 10 years they just mailed it directly to him
00:32:15
because he'd saved up for his only child to go to college and i felt like i owed that to him but i had gotten a communications degree there because it
00:32:22
was the easiest thing you know i was a pretty good writer and i was a hobby photographer
00:32:27
so i dust off this degree that i've never used with nightlife and i say i actually have a comms degree
00:32:33
from a decent university and i can do this job i also said to them i have 15 000 people on my club
00:32:40
email list so i have a built-in audience to be able to share the stories
00:32:46
of the amazing redemptive humanitarian work i'm sure you're doing so maybe maybe to set it another way let
00:32:52
me promote something different let me promote you and the unbelievable medical work that
00:32:59
you're going to be doing and i have a bunch of people that i could already promote to tell me about the emotional journey you
00:33:06
went on from there so you get on this ship it goes off to liberia yeah goes to benin west africa and then liberia well
00:33:14
this happens very quickly so i go back to france i pack up and three weeks later i'm on this hospital ship
00:33:20
and the night before i joined the ship i had this this moment of clear so this is a 522 foot ocean liner
00:33:29
so a huge cruise liner that had been gutted and turned into a state-of-the-art hospital and this
00:33:34
organization for 25 years had sailed up and down the coast of africa bringing volunteer doctors surgeons and
00:33:41
nurses on their vacation time to provide free medical services so the the ship would pull into a port
00:33:48
and then you know work there for a year and then sail off to the next place
00:33:54
so i have this moment of clarity that i really am going to need to quit all
00:33:59
the vices before i join this group of christian doctors and humanitarian on a
00:34:04
ship and there was something you know symbolic about the gangway
00:34:10
right like i'm gonna walk up the gangway of this ship they're gonna lift the gangway
00:34:16
i'm kind of trapped on it with 350 other volunteers and then i'm gonna sail away to a new continent and a new life
00:34:23
i better not bring any of that stuff with me so very intentionally the night before i got on the ship i remember smoking 60
00:34:30
cigarettes smoke three packs my last three packs of cigarettes i remember getting hammered
00:34:36
drinking eight or nine beers and just
00:34:41
knowing that i would have to go you know cold turkey or all in
00:34:47
to allow this new life to develop
00:34:53
and you know that was a clarifying moment i i drink a little bit now years later but i've never had another cigarette i've
00:34:59
never had a drag or you know 17 years now um never touch coke or any of those things
00:35:06
haven't looked at a pornographic image in 17 years never gambled again
00:35:12
and actually didn't sleep with anyone for the next five years until uh my wedding night with my wife
00:35:19
so i really went like full circle you know back home in the most extreme way
00:35:25
to allow this new life to unfold quick one we bring in eight people a
00:35:31
month to watch these conversations live here in the studio when we're here in the uk and when we're in la if you want
00:35:37
to be one of those people all you've got to do is hit subscribe i was reading through the book about
00:35:43
what you saw when you arrived yeah oh my gosh the horrific things there's actually a photo in here i believe
00:35:49
so let me set the scene so the ship is pulling into the port
00:35:56
a small advanced team for the previous three months had posted
00:36:01
flyers throughout the country advertising the coming of the hospital ship and we have 1500
00:36:07
available surgery slots to hand out so we're gonna make 1500 sick people healthy
00:36:13
those are the surgery slots we have so i'm so excited right this is like my new life i've got two nikon d1x cameras
00:36:21
uh and i learned that the name for what the first event is
00:36:28
the patient screening it's the big triage moment and the veterans on the ship called it the
00:36:35
screaming oh we're headed to the patient screaming you know which should have sounded ominous
00:36:41
so i remember thinking you know looking at these flyers which are advertising facial tumors
00:36:46
cleft lips cleft palates cleft faces flesh eating disease like people with
00:36:52
parts of their face completely missing with holes that you can look through to the back of their throats
00:36:58
burns many people had been burned during the war by rebel soldiers who would pour oil
00:37:03
on their bodies to disfigure them i remember thinking like are there 1500
00:37:09
people that are going to turn up with these conditions like really so get in a land rover a convoy of land
00:37:16
rovers at 5 30 in the morning this is my third day in africa so like the ship comes in everybody gets ready let's go
00:37:23
i learned the government has given us the football stadium in the center of the city to
00:37:30
do the the screening inside the football arena put on my hospital scrubs jump in
00:37:37
a convoy of land rovers we snake through the city we get to the stadium and there's more than 5 000 sick people
00:37:44
standing in the parking lot waiting for us to open the doors
00:37:50
i'll never forget that moment uh realizing wow
00:37:55
we're going to send 3 000 sick people home with no help
00:38:01
with no hope and i later learned many of those people had walked for more than a month from
00:38:07
neighboring countries the word had spread to sierra leone to guinea to cote d'ivoire many of them had
00:38:14
brought their children on a month-long journey just in the hopes of their child seeing
00:38:20
a doctor but we didn't have enough doctors we didn't have enough available slots
00:38:27
so then the door is open and you know everybody tries to there's a whole crew that's trying to put everybody into this line that just
00:38:34
kind of snakes back and forth and back and forth and the first child that so my job is going to be to photograph
00:38:41
all 1500 people up close for the medical library
00:38:47
and the first child i see is this 14 year old boy and he's suffocating to death with a volleyball sized tumor
00:38:54
this pink red tumor that is occupying his entire mouth and he's having a hard time breathing
00:39:01
he's terrified you know i just remember the fear in his eyes i'm terrified
00:39:08
you know i remember just weeping i'd never seen suffering like this before
00:39:15
and i remember kind of just shutting down and going in the corner of the stadium
00:39:21
and one of the doctors came over and said you know hey you're the photojournalist guy right like
00:39:26
he said you gotta get back in there like basically do your job
00:39:32
you're gonna see way worse than this so kind of toughen up kid
00:39:37
and then he said focus on the hope you know focus on the 1500 people like this child that we're gonna be able to
00:39:43
help and that was two days of really grueling
00:39:50
every single person you see is sick leprosy clap you know some of the conditions that i that i mentioned sick
00:39:57
and scared and couple days later i got to scrub up
00:40:02
again and document this eight and a half hour surgery when alfred
00:40:07
the first child that i'd met had his tumor removed by this remarkable man
00:40:13
named dr gary parker and a couple weeks later i got to see
00:40:18
alfred go back to his village i asked whether i could drive him home in my mind i knew
00:40:25
there was going to be a party i knew that when the village had sent this
00:40:31
they'd written this boy off they had sent him to the witch doctor who you know cast spells and spread chicken blood on
00:40:40
his tumor i mean none of this worked so he had literally been written off for dead and i wanted to see what it was like
00:40:47
like when he came back to the village without his tumor healthy
00:40:52
so i remember driving him uh it was a few hours and just the whole
00:40:58
community kind of coming out and looking at him and touching his face and
00:41:03
and seeing you know celebrating you know a child that they thought was lost who who was found who was healed
00:41:10
and then over the next year i was able to witness 1500 of those transformations wow
00:41:18
now i'm blasting my club list all right the whole time so that was fun because
00:41:26
in a very short turn people were getting emails from me inviting them to the opening of the prada mega store
00:41:32
or cosmopolitan you know fashion week party and now they're getting pictures of 14
00:41:39
year olds with facial tumors and pictures of the operating
00:41:44
procedure and then pictures of of post-op and what are you asking them for
00:41:49
i'm just sharing my experience oh really okay and i'm promoting the work of the doctors like guys this is amazing these
00:41:55
doctors are here we're changing people's lives so when you drive that kid home and you see the reaction or even when you see
00:42:00
the before and after how did that can feel in comparison to the best club night you ever threw
00:42:05
so much better so much better and and and healthy and redemptive and
00:42:11
positive and life-giving uh it was joy
00:42:17
what i didn't realize until later was my invite for me to kind of step into this
00:42:24
new life or into this new calling or to find the 180 my environment also needed to
00:42:29
drastically change i was never going to be able to change my life working at the clubs
00:42:35
four nights a week surrounded by sex and drugs and alcohol
00:42:42
but my environment changed and here i am with a bunch of like you know christian humanitarian doctors
00:42:48
who are the most sacrificial people that i've ever met in my lives you know smoking is not cool on a hospital ship
00:42:54
right drinking is not cool there's no casino nobody's playing you know blackjack i
00:43:00
mean this is this is so missional and so purposeful and i
00:43:05
i loved the new environment i couldn't get enough of it i never wanted to leave
00:43:11
it was home it felt like coming back home this leads you ultimately to discovering
00:43:16
that there's a real issue out in africa with water yeah and i but that quote
00:43:22
you've got to be kidding me they drink this feels like quite um a powerful quote in hindsight when i look at the
00:43:27
work you've done from then on tell me about that moment where you said
00:43:33
those words maybe first just the doctor through line um when i was a kid
00:43:39
i wanted to be a doctor right to cure mom and sick people like hers i didn't do anything doctor-like
00:43:46
for 10 years in clubs doctors don't come to nightclubs and buy
00:43:51
bottles of crystal so i didn't know many doctors but now i'm with a bunch of doctors and there was one doctor this guy dr gary
00:43:58
parker who had been there 21 years and i made him a mentor i wanted to spend as much time as possible
00:44:06
he was one of the reasons why i went back for the second year because he had dedicated 21 years of his
00:44:11
life to this work and i'm like well i have at least another year right let me let me just not end with this year-long
00:44:17
tithe when the year was finished let me go back for a second tour in the second tour
00:44:23
i felt like i really understood the medical world and i still had to take all the pictures of the surgeries and the before and afters but i wanted to
00:44:28
get off of the ship and understand more of the context of how people were living in liberia this was a post-war country
00:44:35
14 years of brutal civil war led by charles taylor had torn torn apart the country
00:44:41
there was no electricity no running water no sewage system and no mail system so
00:44:47
just imagine like shambles like everything broke down in a decade
00:44:53
and a half of war i mean look how much destruction is happening just in a short time you know the what we're seeing now in
00:45:00
um in the ukraine 15 years of war tour the partner so that was the backdrop of which our doctors
00:45:07
came in at the time there was one physician for every 50 000 liberians
00:45:17
okay our ratio here in america is one for 300. so every 300 americans is a doctor
00:45:24
one for 50 000. there were two surgeons apparently in the country but nowhere for them to
00:45:29
operate no hospitals they were working as i got into the rural areas
00:45:36
i saw the water that people were drinking and there were swamps
00:45:42
or ponds you know or sometimes like a muddy river you know running near these villages or
00:45:48
in the center of these villages and i remember seeing kids come
00:45:53
and filling up their buckets and drinking unthinkable water
00:45:59
and i was like wait people drink this
00:46:04
to contrast that and i think why this resonated so deeply i used to sell voss water
00:46:10
for ten dollars a bottle in the clubs to people who would just order a hundred dollars of water to let it sit there
00:46:16
just in case anybody needed to hydrate but really they were drinking champagne or vodka instead
00:46:21
you know as i started to explore this the water issue in the country i learned two
00:46:26
things half the country was drinking dirty contaminated water every day
00:46:32
and half the disease in the country was because people were drinking dirty contaminated water and didn't have
00:46:38
access to sanitation or hygiene so i go back to dr gary and i'm showing him my photos like on the back of my camera
00:46:44
like you should see what people are drinking and he says i know
00:46:50
and you know i make this quick link i'm like well i wonder how many of the 5 000 people
00:46:56
needed to stand in the parking lot of a stadium to see doctors if they just had the most basic health
00:47:02
need you know learned there were 28 different diseases you could directly
00:47:08
track back to dirty water so it was really dr gary who took that information you know he sees this young
00:47:15
kid like on fire with this aha eureka realization
00:47:20
and he says why don't you go do that why don't you go make sure everybody in the world has clean water before you die
00:47:27
and he gave me the challenge and i remember you know he said something to the effect of you'd be the
00:47:33
greatest doctor the world had ever seen if you just gave people the most basic
00:47:39
need for health if you gave them clean water you would touch more people than i have
00:47:44
ever operated on by an order of magnitude and there was something so simple about
00:47:50
that i'm like well okay my second year ended i was 30 years old i went back to new york city and i tried to put action
00:47:57
to that very simple you know commission very simple commission well it was
00:48:02
simple i mean i mean simple missions bring clean water to everybody on the planet it's a few words but it's a big i
00:48:08
mean it's an impossible challenge right it's a tremendous tremendous challenge and you know you said it simple but
00:48:14
i'm sure there's lots of people who have been given similar kind of flippant mandates from people in their lives go
00:48:19
and fix that why don't you go and fix that and 99.9 of them will never attempt to to fix that which makes me answer ask
00:48:26
the question why did you believe that you could do that so i saw the small impact that i had made promoting the work of mercy ships
00:48:35
in between the two missions there was a little gap in between year one and year two and i came back to new york city
00:48:40
with my photos i got a gallery donated in chelsea i printed 108 of my photos
00:48:46
and i invited all my nightclub friends to come in and see the work that these doctors were doing
00:48:53
and i raised about a hundred thousand dollars for their work through that show
00:48:59
i remember people callous people that you know would come to the nightclub you know who were just kind of
00:49:06
it didn't seem like they would care about anything standing in front of some of my images weeping
00:49:12
as they read the caption as they learned you know hey this is someone just my age born in a different environment
00:49:18
you know with with a terrible affliction with no doctor to go to so i had a little bit of like wow that
00:49:25
you know success and and you know while my email list shrunk a little bit with some unsubscribes
00:49:30
at the beginning it actually began to grow as people would forward it to their friends and like oh my gosh there's like this guy that he's like i used to do
00:49:36
coke with this guy and he's like on this hospital ship in liberia i've never even heard of liberia and like look at these
00:49:41
photos i mean look at these doctors like blind people are are seeing and you know
00:49:47
faces are being fixed and yeah we would find a 65 year old woman in a village with a cleft lip food and water had
00:49:54
spilled out of her mouth her entire life and we provided a 280 surgery
00:50:01
and she could speak and she could eat and had her dignity in her life back so
00:50:07
you know this stuff was like it was it was um it was inspiring people the work of the
00:50:14
doctors and i was the promoter so instead of promoting the dj and the thousand dollar bottles of cristal and the you know celebrities that were going
00:50:20
to be in the club that night the special guests i was promoting something very different and i saw that that was
00:50:26
working and that that skill that i had you know potentially learned over 10 years or misused for 10 years
00:50:33
promoting something you know certainly less redemptive yeah or purposeful could
00:50:38
actually be translated and used to promote
00:50:43
the work of mercy ships the next step was i thought it'd be possible to promote
00:50:49
clean water for humans so and and in effect in an even more
00:50:55
simple way i mean it's it's what do you do we bring clean water to people around
00:51:00
the world everybody should have clean water to drink i thought it was a really promotable cause and what is what was
00:51:06
your business model though in terms of the model so how are you gonna bring water to all of these people well at
00:51:11
this moment i'm broke uh i am back from africa i have no savings i've given everything that i had to
00:51:16
mercy ships and the people i'd met so i crashed with my old club partner who lets me sleep on his closet floor
00:51:22
for free rent and i had the idea bring clean water to everybody on the planet and i had the
00:51:28
benefit of not having any institutional charitable knowledge outside of my experience with mercy ships
00:51:34
and i just was talking to people that worked at mtv or at fashion magazines or at sephora
00:51:39
and or or the local bank and i realized so many of my friends didn't trust charities they did not
00:51:45
trust the system almost all of their problems had to do with money
00:51:51
where does the money really go how much of the money actually gets to the people who need it you know how much
00:51:57
of the money actually goes to the cause and you know the term social entrepreneur
00:52:03
wasn't even around back then but you know i just took a very entrepreneurial approach to this and
00:52:08
said well i wonder if through a new business model i could speak
00:52:13
to those objections i could reach out to these cynical skeptical disenchanted
00:52:19
people and get them excited about giving in a new way so i had a very simple idea
00:52:26
separate the overhead from the money that people would give to the organization so open up two bank
00:52:32
accounts promise the public that a hundred percent of anything they would ever give to charity water
00:52:37
would go directly to help people get clean water and then in the other bank account
00:52:43
go and find a small group of business leaders and entrepreneurs to pay for those unsexy overhead costs
00:52:49
the staff salaries the office rent the flights the insurance the you know epson
00:52:54
toner for the copy machine so church and state two differently audited bank accounts
00:53:00
and i wasn't sure how i would fund the overhead but boy was it clean and i thought it was a really compelling story
00:53:06
that beyond just promoting clean water an inarguable common good for the world
00:53:12
that i thought everybody could get behind we would now have this hyper transparent business model that would
00:53:18
speak to the most common objection people have to giving to charity which is where does the money go
00:53:24
so i tried this out my only idea on day one was to get a club donated
00:53:29
it was september 7th it was my birthday i was turning 31 and i got a club in the meatpacking district donated during
00:53:37
fashion week i got open bar donated for an hour and then i invited everybody to
00:53:42
come to celebrate my 31st birthday but to get inside the club they had to put 20 in this big plexi box
00:53:50
and we were going to take 100 of whatever was in that box at the end of the night and we're going to go help our first person get access to
00:53:57
clean water and i printed up my photos so in the club you know it's kind of juxtaposed with people drinking dirty
00:54:03
water and and wells being drilled and people drinking clean water i'd also seen that when i was in africa i'd seen
00:54:09
the solution to the problem of wells being drilled and communities going from dirty to clean
00:54:15
so i put those photos up and 700 people came that night and i'll never forget a drug dealer came that night he was a
00:54:23
pretty high-end weed dealer and he put 500 in the box
00:54:28
and he looked at me and he said this is the first charitable gift i've ever made in my life really wow but i know where
00:54:33
this money is going and i trust you we raised fifteen thousand dollars i remember we counted it and double
00:54:39
counted and like we're taking pictures of the money and the stacks like you know because this is your first this is
00:54:45
day one of the organization and we took that money immediately to a refugee camp in northern uganda we built
00:54:52
our first water well and then we fixed a couple other broken wells and then the most important thing was we
00:54:58
sent the photo proof video of clean water flowing and then the satellite images
00:55:05
of where every single water project was and i emailed the 700 people that came and said you did this here's where 100
00:55:12
of your 20 went and because you came and gave people are drinking clean water and
00:55:18
here's the proof thank you for vodafone for sponsoring this podcast one of the greatest tips i
00:55:23
can give any small business owner listening right now is to take risks in fact the biggest risk to your business
00:55:29
will be taking two fewer risks complacency and comfort seeking will harm your success but taking risks can
00:55:37
be incredibly daunting that's why i've partnered with vodafone business and their vhub which offers free one-to-one
00:55:43
sessions with vhub digital advisors and you can call up and speak to one completely free of charge sharing your
00:55:49
ideas and getting input from someone who's knowledgeable on the topic and able to help you towards your next
00:55:55
business step to find out more search v-hub by vodafone as you might know my
00:56:00
energy are a sponsor of this podcast and they offer countless ways to make your life a little bit more sustainable and
00:56:06
make that transition from where you are now to a sustainable life 10 times easier their products are all about
00:56:13
energy independence allowing you to create a greener home through their cost-effective and super user-friendly
00:56:19
products and one of my favorite products right now is the zappy it's a smart ev
00:56:25
charger which simply allows you to charge your electric vehicle from solar all wind power so if you would like to
00:56:31
find out more about my energy then head to myenergy.com and if you've tried the zappy let me know how you got on with it
00:56:38
in the comments section below was there a time in that early startup phase where you genuinely considered
00:56:44
that you might fail every day really absolutely every day especially with this business model if i
00:56:50
couldn't raise the overhead it didn't matter how successful we were with the the public funding
00:56:58
so every day and in terms of difficulties with business with people with you know
00:57:04
everything else what was what was the most painful time of that early years the most
00:57:09
painful day event that you went through yeah well the charity started off very
00:57:16
quickly and people loved the 100 model um it just began to build a lot of momentum we raised two million dollars
00:57:22
in the first year through a flurry of activities gallery shows and events and people doing
00:57:28
concerts for us and people giving online and we were selling a 20 bottle of water
00:57:33
you know just as a symbolic gesture where all 20 would go and people would buy cases of the water so it was just it
00:57:39
was a year of a lot of success and then in the second year we were on track to raise six million
00:57:44
dollars but always a struggle for the overhead always a struggle to you know find a
00:57:51
donor to pay for employee number two or to pay for next month's office rent i
00:57:57
mean we were in a really crappy office like covered in grease floors it was an old printing press
00:58:02
so i was doing all that work trying to convince people to help me build the actual organization because
00:58:08
the 100 model was so resonant we got to a point uh about a year and a
00:58:13
half in where we had almost a million dollars in the
00:58:19
water bank account about to go out and build a hundred wells and we were about to miss payroll
00:58:26
and we had nine people at the time and i remember just thinking and and by
00:58:31
the way people had been warning me that this model would fail you know nobody thought this business model was a good idea i mean effectively
00:58:38
you can't use any of the money you raised from the public to actually run the company to run the organization but
00:58:44
i just had such faith in it and i had tapped out all the people that i knew for the overheads
00:58:50
and i was hitting a point where i realized maybe they're right you know maybe this is a really dumb
00:58:57
business model so i start calling lawyers about shutting down the charity it's a year and a half in even though
00:59:02
we've raised you know millions of dollars i remember praying you know with very
00:59:08
little faith and you know and i didn't start a religious charity so i was still kind of animated by my personal faith
00:59:13
and um you know a belief in in prayer but i remember like praying for a miracle but
00:59:19
i'm like there's no miracle that can save us at this moment and
00:59:25
the advice i was getting was to borrow from the million dollars in the water
00:59:30
account to make payroll so that was the kind of conventional wisdom hey write yourself an iou
00:59:36
you know you're not bankrupt if you have a million dollars but for me if we borrowed one penny
00:59:43
one dollar one pound from that bank account and we used it
00:59:49
on anything overhead related our integrity would be forever compromised
00:59:54
you know in such an extreme way i'm like there's a crack at the foundation i would never even want to build on top of
00:59:59
that i'd much rather shut it down and have my integrity and at that moment
01:00:05
uh i'd written a cold email to a british internet entrepreneur um
01:00:11
actually about something completely different not even about funding about uh trying to get exposure on his
01:00:17
social media network it was called bebo at the time and uh everyone knows bibo that listens to this
01:00:23
so he writes me back and says man i love this idea like what a what a cool idea getting everybody clean water checked
01:00:30
out your website you know really good design and branding but it's a bad time for me to help so i don't think anything of it i was
01:00:36
just happy that you know somebody responded to a cold email well around this time of near insolvency
01:00:43
or bankruptcy at least on the overhead account um he writes me he says hey i'm going to be
01:00:49
in town um i'd love to meet you and learn a little more about what you're doing he comes in
01:00:55
i remember i pull out my laptop i take him through a hundred photos and my whole story he's working in this we're
01:01:01
in this crappy office there's nine other people there's a couple volunteers around and
01:01:06
i remember just thinking boy this is the worst pitch i've done he is not into it he's not really laughing at the
01:01:13
jokes he's just doesn't seem very compelled by this
01:01:19
he leaves and you know says well you know give me your bank account details and you know i'll
01:01:25
see how i can help and uh two days later it's around midnight
01:01:32
again i'm i'm almost at this point just relinquished the fact that i'm over
01:01:38
i'm gonna shut down the charity maybe i'll try with a different business model or maybe i'll just try with the traditional business model
01:01:44
and i get an email from him and he says hey it was great meeting you um i just wired a million dollars into
01:01:49
your overhead account and we went from bankrupt to 13 months
01:01:55
of funding he said i believe in your idea you just need more time
01:02:02
and that was 700 million dollars ago and this year we'll raise over 130
01:02:08
million dollars and that entrepreneur was michael birch
01:02:14
that was michael burch he's a mutual friend of us he was a mutual friend and and an amazing guy um and really you
01:02:21
know saved the organization um and i think even more you know michael and i have been
01:02:27
become really good friends over the years and even more than the money was that somebody believed in me
01:02:35
he believed that i could do it with the right amount of time we never look back uh today there are 131 unbelievably
01:02:44
um accomplished entrepreneurs and business leaders who pay all the overhead 20 of them in the uk
01:02:49
um you know it's the founders of spotify and shopify and wordpress and
01:02:55
linkedin and you know an unbelievable group of
01:03:00
of really a lot of tech entrepreneurs who love paying for the software engineers and
01:03:06
the ui ux designers and the actual core organization of charity water so that
01:03:12
now millions and millions of people around the world are donating and have the purest way to give knowing that 100
01:03:18
of the money goes but that was really a key moment of it was almost all over
01:03:25
but you know if i were to go back and the money was not going to come in i still would shut down the charity i wouldn't
01:03:31
have borrowed really it was that important for you to is that important to keep good on that
01:03:37
promise it's funny because that defining promise is definitely really one of the
01:03:42
fundamental things that has made charity water so successful in a landscape of charities where trust as you you
01:03:48
identified very early on is a central issue with people giving their money and
01:03:54
hindsight's a wonderful thing but it's definitely proven you right to hold your integrity there yeah
01:04:00
how many people have you now reached i read it was like 15 million people yeah we just crossed 15 million people
01:04:05
uh in the last few weeks of the year in december in our 15th year so we closed our 15th
01:04:12
year we got to the 15 million person milestone um you know
01:04:18
it's 1 50th of the 771 million people who need our help so as we record this
01:04:25
ten percent of the world is drinking dirty water it's crazy ten percent of the world
01:04:31
one out of ten people 771 million humans and we've helped 15 million of them
01:04:39
so we're at the very beginning of this journey so we're in year 16 and
01:04:45
you know it really to quote my my friend daniel at spotify who uses this a lot like it really feels like we are in the
01:04:51
second inning of impact the second inning of the movement the second inning of raising
01:04:56
the capital we need to go faster and accelerate last year we helped two million people get water so it's over
01:05:02
5000 people every day so we're at kind of peak velocity over the 15-year journey
01:05:08
and in a time where i think we can really exponentially scale
01:05:15
as an entrepreneur would you describe yourself as obsessed
01:05:20
because you you said earlier but you have no you now driven committed
01:05:27
not obsessed what's your work-life balance like if that's even a thing you you sort of espouse you sign up to yeah
01:05:33
yeah i don't love the balance idea i think there are seasons when there's an emphasis um the year before cobit i did
01:05:39
90 flights and 100 speeches um then i dropped to you know very little
01:05:46
and you know what the zooms with the rest of the world and i spent an extraordinarily more time with my kids
01:05:52
you know during covet so i think there there are different seasons of life when something different is required of me to
01:05:58
move the mission forward i mean in some ways i feel really lucky
01:06:05
to have put in the hundred hour weeks because there really were 100 hour weeks at the beginning and everybody knows that
01:06:12
you are just when you're trying to birth something you know whether it's a company or a
01:06:17
non-profit or a you know a for good company there's an extraordinary amount
01:06:22
of work that is required in those early days and years because you really could kind of die at
01:06:29
any moment like you know the thing could die um you could go bankrupt like you're
01:06:35
only as good as your last sale or your last donor you know that believes in you so i'm lucky that i got
01:06:42
that really hard work in early and built the organization to you know now there's
01:06:47
there's 2 000 people around the world that are working on charity water projects every day you know there's a
01:06:52
hundred people uh here in the states and in london you know who are working on you know the fundraising and the campaigns and
01:06:59
um and and managing all these these water projects so i work differently but less you know i'm really
01:07:06
present with my kids i take my kids to school every morning when i'm home and i pick them up from school
01:07:11
having tasted a lot of ingredients of life what do you think is the the recipe
01:07:18
for in your view for yourself because i guess that's any perspective you can talk from but for yourself for a
01:07:24
fulfilled life having been in the clubs and this the planes the private jets and yep what would you now say is the recipe
01:07:30
for a fulfilled life service you think that's central to yeah i fulfilled service um generosity
01:07:37
yeah it's the only game in town i mean there's so many people that i've seen you know i've gotten to spend i've been
01:07:42
to 70 countries now i've been to the continent of africa more than 55 times
01:07:47
i have seen some of the most marginalized um
01:07:53
suffering people living in in in conditions that that are shocking
01:07:58
i've been with moms that have lost seven kids to diarrhea and water-borne diseases
01:08:03
um i've i've seen horrible horrible things around the
01:08:09
world and then i've been with you know dozens and dozens of billionaires and i've seen the top echelon of private
01:08:16
planes and 40 cars and 70 million dollar houses and
01:08:22
i'll tell you that you know the houses and the cars and the watches and the planes and the you know the out market
01:08:27
capping you know your competitors is not where purpose lies um it's really in service
01:08:35
and asking how for me how can i use my time and my
01:08:41
talent and my my resources my money in the service of others how can i look around and
01:08:48
see who is needlessly suffering in my local community in the global community
01:08:54
and how can i contribute to stop that suffering and it's kind of a never-ending work
01:08:59
there's no finish line to that there is no you know while i'm trying to get to the unicorn billion dollar evaluation and
01:09:06
then you know this is a life of service or a life trained uh or kind of pointed at being
01:09:14
useful and loving others doesn't there's no there's no endpoint
01:09:19
there's no finish line there's always going to be someone who could use your help and i found
01:09:25
the more you give and let's just say you know some people don't have money to give they could have time to give or they could have mentorship to give the
01:09:31
more you give the more you give it's like this muscle you know you need to use it like if you exercise the
01:09:37
generosity muscle instead of saying no you know to all the incoming requests
01:09:43
the most generous people i know they love giving to 50 or 60 different causes a year they're not saying oh i just get
01:09:49
hit up all the time they love being useful and and
01:09:54
you know it's a it's a privilege for them to be asked for money for a noble cause
01:10:00
because they get to contribute interesting reframing but a very significant one so i hate the i hate the
01:10:06
word giving back that we use a lot here in the states and um
01:10:11
you know oh my company gives back right you hear about these giving back programs what almost implies that we
01:10:17
have you know pillaged and plundered to such extent to throw some scraps to the port yeah
01:10:23
let's throw a few scraps back right so we feel better about ourselves so i encourage companies just drop the back
01:10:29
language just giving let's build a culture of giving in our families let's build a culture of giving
01:10:36
in our companies giving not because we've taken giving because we can give because it's a joy
01:10:41
to give it's a blessing to be able to give people listening to this now how can they
01:10:47
if they're driving up and down the country washing their dishes whatever how can they support what is a very very worthy cause
01:10:54
like charity water we have an amazing community uh of of people who show up every month giving a
01:11:00
little bit whatever they can for clean water it's called the spring uh uk is our big is our second biggest
01:11:06
market to the us but we now have people in 150 countries we have people in africa that give a little bit every
01:11:12
single month for for clean water costs about 30 pounds or 40 to get one
01:11:19
person clean water so there's a lot of people that just do that every month and they don't get music or
01:11:25
movies or you know hour next hour shipping from amazon you know for more stuff but 100 of whatever they
01:11:33
they give every month goes directly to help people get clean water and we're really good at proving where that money
01:11:38
goes and sharing stories of of impact so um people can learn more at charitywater.org or just thespring.com
01:11:46
and you i guess you're always looking forward for individuals that are also willing to do yeah the the well members of course i mean if there may be some
01:11:53
entrepreneurs who love building you know businesses or organizations so those 131 families are the lifeblood
01:12:00
of the organization and we're always looking to to grow that really incredible group that then allows millions of people to give in a in a
01:12:07
transparent and um effective way
01:12:12
scott the work you do is i mean i don't really know the words to describe i sometimes think of like nice adjectives and stuff but it's like a
01:12:18
really deeply profoundly inspiring journey story book cause
01:12:23
um [Music] and future that you're creating and it's really made me question a lot of things
01:12:29
about myself i'm in that phase of my life now where i'm also asking myself serious questions about
01:12:36
that part of me the purposeful service part of me and so meeting you today feels like it was meant to be in many
01:12:41
respects reading the book felt like it was meant to be but um i'm sure the conversation we'll have will continue
01:12:47
off to come with me come with me on a trip i'd love to we work in 29 countries now
01:12:53
so i'd love to i'd love to i think you love seeing the work for yourself and um water is just so basic you know it's
01:13:00
when when you when you hear what it means to people you know in their own words it's you
01:13:05
know we just step back and it's it's very powerful well if you'll have me i definitely will yeah i see that's being
01:13:11
a very kind gesture um to allow me to we do have a closing tradition on this podcast which is
01:13:17
the last guest writes a question for the next guest the question was when was the last time
01:13:23
you got badly rejected i won't use the donor's name but
01:13:28
um it was it was definitely you know someone who just kind of pretended to be really
01:13:34
interested and you know felt like was really stringing me along and then just
01:13:40
i don't know inexplicably never gave never engaged and felt like a
01:13:46
huge waste of time and you committed a lot of time i just lit a lot of time and energy and and was
01:13:51
really you know maybe expectancy and it was just uh it was a big disappointment
01:13:57
it normally doesn't happen i mean i'm i'm uh we're really blessed by you know being surrounded with with an amazing
01:14:03
group of people and an amazing community um i just had i just had maybe to end on a more positive note i had a situation
01:14:12
very very accomplished uh on internet entrepreneur um
01:14:17
recently and i asked him for a very very large sum of money
01:14:23
and we caught up afterwards after he'd had time to consider with his wife and he
01:14:29
said why'd you ask for so little and then he gave four times more
01:14:35
wow swings him round of vows why did you ask for so little
01:14:40
so i was like wow my mind like absolutely expanded and am i asking for
01:14:46
too little am i think 15 years in 700 million dollars raised you know like a global movement am i thinking too small
01:14:55
there's more there's more generosity there's more goodwill out there so i focus on that
01:15:01
not the rejections it's very easy for me to kind of you know brush that off and and
01:15:07
and just not carry that around and find the the generosity and really let that fuel
01:15:13
me so that's been fueling me now for weeks it's like okay maybe i really need to go for it
01:15:21
scott thank you just an amazing conversation on one that's going to stay with me for some time i can feel that certainly so um and
01:15:28
your book if nobody's i mean there's two things there was a couple of catalysts that really brought me to you i said to you earlier my manager had seen you
01:15:33
speak and insisted that we had this conversation and i read your book then i saw that famous video which anyone can
01:15:38
watch which kind of summarizes your story in about 20 odd minutes which has done some 25 million views on youtube
01:15:45
that that had me completely scott thank you thanks for having me
01:15:51
i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast my girlfriend came upstairs yesterday when i was having a shower and she said to me that
01:15:57
she tried the heel protein shake which lives on my fridge over there and she said it's amazing low calories you get
01:16:02
your 20 odd grams of protein you get your 26 vitamins and minerals and it's nutritionally complete in the protein
01:16:08
space there's lots of things but it's hard to find something that is nice especially when consumed just with water
01:16:13
and that is nutritionally complete the salted caramel one if you put some ice cubes in it and you put it in a blender
01:16:20
and you try it is as good as pretty much any milkshake on the market just mixed with water it's been a game changer for
01:16:27
me because i'm trying to drop my calorie intake and i'm trying to be a little bit more healthy with my diet so this is
01:16:32
where heel fits in my life thank you for making a product that i actually like [Music]