Scott Harrison: From Nightclub Promoter to Charity Water Founder

know it turns out that the red cross is not looking for a club promoter doctors without borders are they're looking for credible doctors not you know cool dj or or promoter so i remember being so you d by the rejections and then one organization wrote me back and said if you are willing to pay us five hundred hours a month to volunteer and if you're willing to go live in the poorest country in the world a country had never even heard of called l liberia and it was at the bottom of the united nations development chart because it had just come out of a fourteen year civil war and there was finally data on the country that they could stack rank it at the bottom of the world and they said we are taking a medical mission into this country and we'll take you if you pay us what's up i have scott harrison here we've been i don't know maybe planning to do at least in my head i've been planning to do an episode like this for a long time so myself on let's be honest you did if i just yourself on but that's something i love about you that's because i like you you are you're also like kinda una unaware you you are una unaware at like doing getting the right thing done i met this guy once and he said if your intentions are good you can get away with anything and i don't know if that's you know i don't know if that's hundred is that true but i but i i do think it's a it's it's a good mod motto don't be don't be too shy so yes you invite yourself on but i think it's gonna be a good one well the alternative was you want people to die a bad water so i mean right yeah well which one is it just kidding scott's a good friend we met through mutual friend michael perch and then i went on a trip to africa with scott and saw the work that was doing so that was kinda cool i i'll say this so a lot of people click on this podcast because they're scheme and dreamers they're trying to figure out to make money and we don't shy away from the fact that we enjoy making money and we enjoy the game of business i think for most people here's their mindset coming in it's gonna be charity episode okay you know maybe if i'm in the mood i'm gonna tell you so that person who's a little on the fence let me tell you this right now you're gonna love this episode way more than the normal one for two reasons the first is you're gonna be inspired scott story is is very inspiring i've heard him tell it many times i'm giving gonna give him the opportunity to tell it here because it's kinda one of these like real life movies in a way and he started off as a not so do good and turned into a very do good and i think the story is very good and two he's he's an entrepreneur and he took an entrepreneur entrepreneurial approach to charity which i think very few i know i know personally a very few examples of that and he's a very good storyteller and for all of you people who reach out to me saying oh sean i love your stories well the master is here he's a much better storyteller than me so if you take nothing else away from this you'll pick up a lot on storytelling that's those are my promises to you scott how did i do do you think of that that's a high properly yeah i know you've got no pressure luckily you've told the story once or twice before well i okay i i like gamers and dreamers so i was definitely a scheme and dream at eighteen years old i was born in philadelphia raised in a conservative christian family and when i was four my mom passed out on the bedroom floor due to a carbon monoxide gas leak in our house so he just moved into this new house my dad was excited because it was reducing his commute he wanted to spend more time with me have a big family and she was the canary in the coal mine which her her unconscious led to the discovery of this gas leak and life was never the same again mom never did her because she was at home all the time and you twenty four seven that's right she was unpacking boxes from the move you know putting frames on the walls dad was working you know long hours at a job i was at school playing with my friends at their houses and she was she she bore the brunt of it and we my dad actually got sick so we had some weird food allergies some migraines but she got really sick and this led to the discovery of the gas leak my dad ripped out the furnace with his bare hands he threw it out of the curb and from that point on her immune system was irr disabled and unfortunately i have forty years of experience with the 3m m family of masks so my mom was always masked from that point on charcoal masks and ninety n95 masks everything chemical made her sick so she was able to survive by creating isolation rooms for herself this sounds strange but my mom lived in a tin foil covered bathroom and she slept on an army cut that had been washed in baking soda at twenty times she was so sensitive that if she wanted to read a book i would have to either bake her book in the oven or set it outside for a couple days in the sun to get that smell of print out then i would knock on the door i would hear the tin foil russell i would hand her the lightly bake book and with her mask on in a pair of gloves she would receive the book for me and shut the door so all that to say a very weird childhood in a caregiver role doing the cooking doing the cleaning you know helping my dad my dad was an amazing loyal man stock buyer believe that one day god would make sense of all this and you know my mom just lived with this for the rest of her life so you know the first kinda chapter my life if you'd run into me as a young teenager i was gonna be a doctor i was get a cure mom and everybody else sick with a condition like hers instead i became a scheme and a dream and at eighteen yeah i moved to new york city and just had that wake up moment now it's my turn now it's my turn to break the rules i don't wanna take care of anyone anymore i wanna take care of myself and i wanna have sex and i want to do drugs and i wanna drink and i wanna be rich and famous and i stumbled into this job as a new york city night nightclub promoter where you had a pretty good shot at achieving those markers of success and i i became really good at throwing parties at the high end selling thousand dollar bottles of crystal selling twenty five dollar bud red bulls that cost us twenty five cents and creating spaces for movie stars and actors and musicians and you know fashion mo and designers to party and you know it couldn't have been more opposite maybe from the the slightly repressed christian upbringing and you know a picture of my life ten years later was me and a dj booth with a famous dj i'm spring champagne down over the crowd puppies at table one jay z at table three and i'm at table two thinking i'm a rockstar star because we had prettier girls at our table ben jay z or puppy and and this was you know it it was dinner at ten the night nightclub at twelve and then after hours at five am and to bed at noon taking ambient to come down with a whole lot of self loa you know if it if it caught up to us which it it did you know far too often towards the end of that so it was ten years for me to realize that i had made a mess of my life i had come so far from the spirituality from the morality that my parents had tried to instill in me so far from wanting to become a doctor to help others and one day half my body went numb and you know maybe no surprise anybody listening as i just described what i was doing but i just remember thinking like i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i've been living like i'm gonna live forever and now i'm die in a week i've got some brain tumor i've got something very wrong with me because i can't feel half my body and i went to doctors and had mris and ct scans and you know they hooked diodes up to me and electromagnetic pulsing all that they couldn't figure out anything wrong with me but it was a wake up call sean that if i did die my tombstone the best it could read would be here lies a man who's gotten a million people wasted is the only thing i had to show for when we were in the doctor's office did you fill out the little form where you're just like yes on all the questions it's like have you in the last six months consuming drugs i remember being brutally honest yeah right because because i think everybody kinda cheat a little like how many alcoholic drinks right you you shave that by half typically i think i was honest i'm like how many alcoholic drinks like a hundred and sixty five a week you know something to yeah how many packs of cigarettes two and a half a day you know anyway they they couldn't find anything wrong with me but this led to you know a pretty radical life change and and maybe the close of chapter two as this sick of he night nightclub promoter living only for himself and i i wondered whether i could start life over at twenty eight and really asked myself what would the opposite of my life look like you know i realized a pivot was not in order yeah know this was this was not a small course correction that needed to happen this was like do and think and say the hundred and eighty degree opposite of everything you've and done and thought and said for the last ten years and see how that plays out and i live for these kinda like these moments the self talk moments i think most of life is just in my own head it's me it's me with me and we're having a conversation and so a lot of times it's small talk at surface level stuff and then there are these times where i have like the real conversation with myself in my head do you do you remember what that like well those days or like what made you really like have that that that conversation with yourself at that time yeah well there was a faith piece so i started praying again and you know kind of going back and like hey what do i believe any of that stuff from childhood you know there was a lot of religion there was a lot of rules you know but but there was a lot of good in there as well so i sort of you know tried to kind of come back to faith again so there was a lot of prayer like you know god are you there and what should i be doing and is there is there anything else for me and i remember the self talk really say okay well if you're if you're exploring the opposite of your life what would that look like and i thought well it would be volunteering on a humanitarian mission in the poorest country in the world that was the spec that would be the opposite of a nightclub you know bottles and models lifestyle and i remember it from a i i was i'd taken some time driving just aim north trying to you know find myself i went up in maine in an internet cafe on moose head lake with dial up dell computers and i started applying to humanitarian aid organizations that i'd tangent heard of over the decade certainly not that i'd had given any money to but doctors without borders saved the children ox fam world vision the red cross and i i was very clear that this is what i wanted to do give one year of the ten years that i had selfish wasted or lived and see if i could be useful well maybe no surprise i was denied by the first ten organizations you know it turns out that the red cross is not looking for a club promoter doctors without borders are they're looking for credible doctors not you know cool dj or or promoter so i remember being so d by the rejections and then one organization wrote me back and said if you are willing to pay us five hundred dollars a month to volunteer and if you're willing to go live in the poorest country in the world a country had never even heard of called ib liberia and it was at the bottom of the united nations development chart because it had just come out of a fourteen year civil war and it was finally data on the country that they could stack rank it at the bottom of the world and they said we are taking a medical mission into this country and we'll take you if you pay us every month and the the job where the the volunteer role i signed up for was a photo journalist so i was gonna be taking pictures in writing and i was always a pretty good writer and a pretty good hobby photographer you know through the club club years and i'd gotten a degree part time at nyu for that because it was it was the easiest degree you basically did the real life version i don't even watch seinfeld but i know about this episode where george's just like jerry i'm doing the opposite now whatever i used to do i do the opposite you basically had the real life version of that where you're like go from new york city nightlife you know rich famous fast living to gonna go to the poorest country on earth pay to volunteer and and basically donate a year of my time just to kind of course correct and like break my own frame and shift just it sounds like you didn't even have like a long term plan or like this grand vision for you i was like i just need to shift like where this direction i'm going out into some i need a sw in a in a hard hard turn and then a couple of things happened yeah that that's exactly right i wouldn't have told you more than a year of line of sight i met the cheap medical officer so i was gonna be living on a hospital ship five hundred foot converted ocean liner that was fifty plus years old so not you know not a nice cruise liner and it had been gutted and turned into a state of the art hospital with a very simple idea for this charity let's sail a giant hospital ship with the best doctors in the world on their vacation time and let's take it to people who can't afford medical care and and because we can control the environment let's bring them on the hospital ship perform these life changing surgeries and then set them you know back on land with transformed lives and transformed health so i met the guy who is running this whole thing and his name with doctor gary parker and i learned that he was a plastic surgeon from california who had heard about this opportunity and he signed up for three months and when i walked up the gang of this hospital ship to to surrender my passport he had been there twenty one years so he never went back to his california plastic surgery practice and he dedicated two decades of his life to this work so i remember just thinking what if that's me what if it's not a year and i wanted to know everything i could about him and what two decades of service would look like or feel like or the imp impact that a person could have so my third day there is the patient screening so the the ship's arrival has been announced by an advanced team flyers have been posted throughout the country and we have been given the football stadium in the center of town the the soccer stadium by the government to triage the people who might come to visit our doctors now i know we have fifteen hundred available surgery slots to fill i remember thinking to myself like are there fifteen hundred sick people with facial tumors or clef lips or blind or lame with leprosy like you know that sounds like a lot of people and i remember at five fifteen or five thirty a am i'm putting on hospital scrubs it was still pitch black out jumping into this con of land rover with doctors and surgeons and nurses and we kinda snake through the city and we came to the stadium and there were five thousand people standing in the dark in the parking lot waiting for us to open the doors and that was such a powerful moment for me realizing oh crap we're gonna send three thousand five hundred of these people home without seeing a doctor without any answer for their a affection and i later learned you probably used to having a long line outside the door that was a different this was a bad thing now the the parallels you know there there have been some interesting ones i later learned some of these people had walked from more than a month with their children from neighboring countries just hoping that a doctor might save their child's life so i remember doctor gary said to me focusing on the hope you don't focus on thirty five hundred people we're gonna send home focus on the fifteen hundred people who were gonna help and that's what i really did for that first year on the ship and i was documenting every single one of them before surgery and after surgery for the medical library and that you know mercy ships would be able to use those photos to raise money and spread awareness to the work the other cool thing that happened was i was blasting my club list of fifteen thousand emails with pictures of facial tumors and flesh eating disease and leprosy you know being healed and you know or or patients being operated on and you know back then email open rates were like a hundred percent so there were definitely a lot of unsubscribe you know i signed up for that cool prada party you threw once but not like the tumor party but then you know most people were intrigued they were fascinated i had no idea that they were doctors on a ship saving people's lives how do i get a piece of this how do i sponsor a surgery how do i come on the ship like you i remember somebody writing me from chanel once she's like i sit here in a brightly lit cosmetic headquarters and i'm weeping you know because i want more like i want more than to sell makeup every day i want more for my life i want more purpose so i i learned that maybe the same gift of promoting getting people to stand outside of velvet rope to queue to hope to get into a nightclub telling the story that if you came in my club and you spent thousands of dollars and you left with a cute boy or a cute girl then your life had meaning you know that same maybe gift or skill of of promoting could be used to promote something entirely different and red and important for other people so the year ended and i just sign up for a second year because i didn't know what was next so well let me go do this again for another year and that was when i found water so the second year i got off of the ship i spent more and more time i i bought a motorcycle so i'm driving around west africa liberia you know with fourteen thousand united nations peace and soldiers and i've got this little press badge and i'm spending time in these rural areas and i see the water people are drinking and they're drinking from swamps and ponds and rivers round green vis water and i learned two things i learned half the country is drinking dirty water and i learned half the disease in the country is because we were drinking dirty water so you know for contrast you know a year previously i'd been selling v water for ten dollars a bottle to people who would just order twenty bottles for the table and not open any of them because they were drinking vodka champagne so there was just something so you know profoundly contrast of watching a human drink dirty water that was making them sick in real time and knowing the excess of my former life and i remember showing these photos to doctor gary and i'm like doctor gary no wonder five thousand sick people are standing outside of parking lot of a stadium you should see what they're drinking and he said yeah i know and in fact a billion people drink this water every day one in six people alive on the planet he said why don't you go do something about it why don't you make this your mission instead of raising money for you know the next fifteen hundred surgeries on this ship why don't you just go get everybody in the world clean water he said yeah something like you'll be the give be the greatest medical professional in the the history of the world if you just brought people the most basic need for health the most basic need for life and i was thirty at the time i'm like a well okay doctor gary that sounds good you know like i came back to new york city and said that's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna try to bring clean and save drinking water to every single human on earth before i die because that seems like a good idea and it'd be great if five thousand people didn't have to stand outside a stadium if three thousand five hundred people didn't have to get turned away because they had clean water in their villages and that was really the start of charity water you know now seventeen years ago and you this story i would say two things one is your story is so good that the first time i heard it i thought that sounds almost too good like too good to be true like the story is almost like hollywood in that in that sense as i got to know you i learned that you're the real deal i went with you to africa i saw the wells that you guys have created i saw the drinking water we did their water carry of you know how far the women and children have to carry water that's not even that clean but the cleaner water back back home just so they have water you know we saw the schools that were like you know now could function because they had this we saw so much stuff so i've seen the impact of it on that side yeah i remember thinking this this almost sounds too be true it it it it it turned out to me the real deal that's the first i wanna say the second thing is when you have that moment or you're like alright here's what i should do with my life i know i've felt this i'm sure other people felt this too the difference between what you feel like you should do and what you actually do is often held back by some sort of fear or limitation did you like once you left africa and you get back to the to to new york did doubt creep in or did you have any second thoughts of like well maybe i'll just send the check and go get a job somewhere like you know or were you really are you just wired differently where you were just sort of gun hold like no i'm doing this i think what helped was that i had lived there for almost a year you know you hear about a lot of people that go on a mission trip with their church and they spent five days in guatemala or in africa five days is not enough to change right you change everything about your life for for most people a year of immersive proximity to an issue was so there was a responsibility to do something about what i'd seen that that took more than a week or even a month right so i i remember coming home in fact the ship was sailing to south africa while it was gonna be dry docked every year so they would kind of make repairs on the ship and everybody went on vacation to wine region for a month i'm like i don't wanna waste my time doing that i'm gonna go back to new york city and i'm gonna put on a gallery exhibition of all the photos that i've taken and i'm gonna invite all my club friends in and i'm gonna ask him for money and i did that i got a gallery donated in chelsea i got a bunch of you know the printers to donate you know high res giant photographs and i put together a hundred and eight of my before and after in a gallery and i invited everybody from the clubs to come in and we raised about a hundred thousand dollars and then i went back on the ship to show people what we had done with their money right to kinda follow the donation and so let's talk about the approach that you used to build shared order so first let's zoom out at this point charity water's has been around for how many years and how much money has been donated and how many people have been given clean drinking water since far since work at this moment we're in year seventeen just start of year seventeen we've raised seven hundred and fifty million dollars and we've helped sixteen point eight million people get clean water amazing about and and in the world there are seven hundred and seventy million people without water so it's now one in ten people alive as we record this for drinking dirty water eighty two percent of them live in rural areas so seven years later now back to your one of that your approach so you took a very interesting approach to this i wanna start with a quote that i'd had heard you say once it's like this toothpaste quote you'll you'll tell it better than me but i remember i still remember this i you first told me this like eight years ago or something and that one stood out to me it's stuck with me ever since then you you wanna say the quote yet but this was nick microsoft in the new york times toothpaste is pedal with far more sophistication than all the world's life saving causes exactly so is better than doctors without borders at telling their story right the marketing the sophistication the photography the store storytelling all of it that goes into selling random commodity products the order in toothpaste and i i what i what's out to be when i kind of encountered what you guys were doing at shared what it was it was like best in class marketing best in class product best in class storytelling like you would find with the way that you know traditional consumer packaged good brands are run but you were doing it with charity and i had never seen that i was used to go to a charity website there was some old and crusty craigslist look site and i push a button and it asked me to for money through some old payment method that i don't even know how to use pages long right then i'm like clicking except except except i have no idea where this money is going never hear from them again you know and that was my charity experience and then trade water's is very very different so talk about how you decided to approach it from like first principles and what were those like court tenants that you you you've built on top of well i had the advantage of not knowing what i was doing with with many entrepreneurs that start you know anything that becomes entrepreneurial advantage i didn't know any better i didn't come from the established so i knew nothing about traditional phil how to set up a charity actually went and bought the yellow dummies book you know non profits for dummies okay and then i bought html for dummies because i'm like i don't have money for a designer so i need to also you know build our website so i was living on a closet floor at the time in soho new york my old club partner took me in for free rent and i was leaving on his you know walk in closet and but i had a very clear mission so if you'd run into me seventeen years ago i'm gonna bring clean wanted to everybody in the world same thing i'm i'm saying you know now the as i talked to everyday people who worked to mtv or v one at the time who worked at sephora who worked at chase bank i realized they were cynical and skeptical about charities they just didn't trust charities writ large and i remember coming across a usa today poll found forty two percent of americans just flat out said dis trust of charities seventy percent of americans in a more recent poll said they believe charities waste their money so seven out of ten potentially generous people think charities are wasting their donations so i thought this was a huge opportunity and a new business model could solve some of this skepticism or speak to the skeptic so i thought well what if we could open up two separate bank accounts and in one bank account i would raise all of that nasty overhead the staff salaries the office cost the toner for the eps and copy machine the flights to african and indian asian where we'd eventually build our projects what if i could raise that in a separate bank account and then in the main bank account a hundred percent of every donation whether it was a dollar or a pound or a euro or a million dollars or a million pounds or a million euros could go directly to build water projects that saves people's lives and you know nobody was doing this at the time i mean this would have you know made us different than ninety nine point nine nine percent of charities in the world because it's very difficult to do but i just thought this would be clear i could say to a six year old go sell lemonade turn in seventy five cents it all seventy five cents will go directly to help people get clean water so that was kind of number one idea number two was then kind of realizing wow money's is not fungi so we can build technology tools to track these small amounts of money down to the project that they funded and i remember meeting the the founder of google earth and he pressed this medallion into my palm so charity water started right before google earth and google maps and he says you know i'm building a place where you can put every single well every water point and you can show people where their money went founder so i'm like great we're gonna be the first charity to geo locate every completed project and we're gonna build the most transparent charity the world has ever seen so proof became the second pillar and then the third thing was this idea of building an epic brand charity so often you shame and guilt to pedal their ware where would the apple of charities where was the nike you know nike doesn't sell shoes by telling people they're fat and lazy you know nike sells shoes by telling inspirational stories of people overcoming adversity your nike believes if you have one leg you can win a marathon you know if you have one arm you can win the shot put competition at the olympics with your other arm and you know nike believed greatness is inside you and that's the way that they market and someone's like maybe i should turn off the tv and stop eating cheetos and try and go run a quarter a mile so i i wanted charity water to be modeled on you know the whim of virgin the kind of beautiful design of apple and then this you know this opportunity or inspiration of of nike i just didn't see it out there so brand was kind of the third thing the third pillar and then to actually get the work done i believed you know as we built wells and built gravity fed systems and filtration systems and in it would need to be led by the locals in each of these countries to be culturally appropriate and sustainable when you came with me to ethiopia they were three hundred and fifty local staff working on the charity water projects running eight different drilling rigs there wasn't a single person who look like you or me right in that entire program of three hundred fifty people and we just believe that we would create thousands of local jobs as we scaled and our our role would be to get people to care about this issue get people to say it's not okay on my watch that we are looking for water on a planet over a hundred million miles away and seven hundred seventy million people are risking their life every day because they don't have clean water here in our planet so our job would be to get people to reject the apa that you know it is is easy to assume with any of these paralyzing global issues and say let's do something about this let's get everybody on earth clean water like we can all agree on that republicans can agree on that democrats and independents and libertarian and jews and christians and muslims and atheists and mormons like everybody can think to clean drinking water is a good idea so it started in an club i mean the only idea i had seventeen years ago was to throw my thirty first birthday party i got the club donated i got open bar donated and then i charged everybody twenty bucks to get in as a donation and at the end of that night we collected fifteen thousand dollars in this big p box and we counted it and then we counted it again and that we photographed everybody counting it and then we took a hundred percent of the money to uganda and we built our first well and then we sent the photos and the gps coordinates of that well back to the seven hundred people and we say you did this here's where your twenty dollars went and that sounds so simple but that was so revolutionary people never expected to hear from the charity again i mean they went to some party in a club for some dudes thirty first birthday and they threw twenty bucks in a bin and that idea we said let's just put that at the core of charity water and in everything we do let's try to connect people to what their money accomplished to the people who they helped and so you you kick it off like that with a night club go back you go back to the to to your kind of roots as as far as what do i know how to do okay i can throw out a great party but this time i'll i'll i'll do it with a twist and then tell the story about mark zuckerberg and michael birch and trying to scale this up because i thought this is an amazing story yeah and this is where at some point your your genius business model of not so over using all the overhead separate and letting all the donations one hundred percent of the donations go to the cause sounds good in theory but there's a reason why charities don't do this yeah because it's hard to cover the overheads so talk about how you got into a little bit of a pickle and then what happened from there yeah so about a year and a half in well let's just say the hundred percent model was working and we'd raised a few million dollars just right out of the gate people love that idea in the other bank account a lot harder to raise that overhead so we had a moment where we at eight hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars ready to go out to build water projects and we were about to miss payroll and the overhead bank account and it was interesting the advice i was getting from people was hey go borrow from that eight hundred eighty seven right i mean you gotta pay your people right like you'll pay it back later write a little io owe you in that account and i remember thinking if we borrow one penny we've compromised our integrity there's a crack at the foundation and i don't wanna work here and nobody will wanna work here again so i'm just gonna shut the charity down and say that this business model didn't work and i started calling lawyers to say like how do you wind down a charity eighteen months in because all the nay were right it's too hard getting people excited about overhead at the same time i had just come up with this idea of trying to scale the birthday party but not a birthday party in a night nightclub taking it online and for year two or the the the one year anniversary your charity water i donated my thirty second birthday and instead of throwing a party i just asked everyone to give thirty two dollars for my thirty second birthday and i wanted raising sixty grand four x because a lot of people had thirty two dollars to give especially if they could see exactly where it went right so i had googled you know top three social networks and you know my myspace was number one at the time so i emailed tom facebook was number two emailed z it's i called be that i hadn't heard of was number three so i remember scraping michael bur birch name from the domain registry you know who is dot net and i emailed him and i said hey i'm this kid i'm trying to bring clean water to the world and i'd like everybody on your social network to donate their birthdays to my cost it's your agent dollars a hundred percent goes you know this a great idea well luck didn't write me back tom didn't write me back michael did and he said i actually love this idea and on the side i have the site called birthday alarm which reminds people of their birthdays and he said you know the timing for me is terrible right now but you know keep up the great work and by the way the website design looks awesome so this was six months before the bankruptcy moment and around this time when we're about to wind down you know i remember praying i'm like on my knees like god i thought you gave me this dream now where's the money like show me the money yeah you you show me the money in the wrong bank account and i've i was praying i had no faith that anything would happen and at this time michael birch time turns up me and he says hey i'm gonna be in new york i've got an hour you know can i stop and and see your office and i remember sitting with him and taking him through a presentation on my laptop and just being really honest about how hard it was to raise money for overhead and i remember thinking he didn't like me i mean he was british you know he wasn't smiling not not a lot of warmth or encouragement but two days later he emails me at midnight and he says hey i really enjoyed meeting you i just wired a million dollars in your overhead account and i remember logging on to the bank and i saw it one comma zero zero zero it was thirteen months of overhead funding so we went from ins and he said i think he said keep rocking just you just need more time love the idea you just need more time and again that was seven hundred and fifty million dollars ago and today we have a hundred and thirty one entrepreneurs and and families that pay all the overhead and we have never been close to the line since and and you know we grow that group by selecting twenty new entrepreneurs and twenty new families or so every single year as the organization grows and you know michael and z had been very generous given over twenty million dollars they've come and come to fourteen or fifteen countries with me now bringing their kids all over the world to see the impact that they've they've made but that was and that was that was same moment i've asked michael i was like you know you've done all these different projects so he did multiple internet companies he he did the battery did the battery so he's got this member's club like you know a physical building a giant beautiful sixty thousand square foot building he's done you know hundred investments whatever as i was like you know what's your favorite what's the best thing you've done and instantly he just goes charity water he goes yeah he goes the most fulfilling work that i have done is basically help you know donating and then helping helping scott and taking my family my kids to africa like i think they go like almost every year every other year or something like that to go and see the work and the projects and he's like i love those trips with my family my kids love it it's taught them so much and you know he he's like that's the best thing i've done hands down and i thought that was pretty impressive here's the guy who's made like a billion dollars and built social networks with you know whatever millions of millions of users and all that good stuff and and i thought that was pretty pretty remarkable and it sounds like because when i met you i went to one of your events and then i went to the ethiopia trip with you and the ethiopia trip you it was like the who's who was like you know famous tech founders actors actresses people from hollywood people from the music industry was on that trip by think fun group of people cool yeah i was kinda an amazing group and you know just like the kind of bus ride conversations were were were just incredible for the group and then then i played wonder at the fire and keep cool people saw that i i only know three of the four cords of wonder and and so they we we go there and i'm like this is an incredible way to like even the best products in the world are products where you can either show somebody up before and after photo even better you just put a product in their hands or even better what you were doing which was if i let you see it you're gonna believe and so what have you learned in that process of like going from almost almost bankruptcy to down raising seven hundred fifty million dollars for charity which by the way is a fraction of what we need to raise to make the impact that we wanna make so you know seventeen million people that's great that's one forty seventh of the way there so you know we are we believe we're in like the second inning of this right i looked the twenty seven stock twenty seven year justin con tweeted this a couple of years ago twenty seven year stock chart of amazon seven percent of the value was created in the first twenty years ninety three percent of the value years twenty one through twenty seven so you know things take time you know and we believe that yeah this is just a mile marker on you know hopefully the expansive ness of the charity water community and the generosity that is yet untapped as we again try to get everybody clean water i mean there's probably nobody listening that thinks people should die by drinking bad water simply because of where they were born right we all create an what is the cost to give someone clean drinking water rough i i know you've i remember what number and that and then i remember you were like hey that number's is out outdated doesn't take into account these other things let's raise it and i remember being like well i don't know that do we wanna you should we just round the number and you're like no we don't round the number we just say what the actual cost is like yeah i i really appreciate integrity of it this year was it's forty dollars to give one personally clean water on average we work across twenty two countries i think last year's actual was thirty nine sixty seven so so forty dollar and that's for a year or that's for a life lifetime that's for ten ten plus years you know for the life lifetime projects some of these projects forty twenty years you can change you can absolutely change somebody's life i forty bucks i know and talk about some of the things that you've tried so now let's kinda go into the the slightly entrepreneurial section of like you know stories of stuff you've tried or or opportunities that you see more of the spirit of kind of how we typically brainstorm things around here yeah i mean we've you know innovation has been a real core of the organization as you say trying new things we made one of the worst virtual reality films seven years ago this is before they had vr cameras that you could buy we got gopro pros donated made a modified rig and shot a six day journey where a thirty year old girl gets clean water for the first time in your life we debut that at a gala where we put headsets on four people in black tie we price press play in sync we took them all to ethiopia for this week of you know water magic and then the minute of the film ended we just test them for money and raised a couple million dollars so you know that that was a fun one you know couple years ago we got into the bitcoin space and we started a trust called the bitcoin water trust where we raised a hundred bitcoin to start and we said we're gonna lock them all up in cold storage until at least twenty twenty five so we're not gonna sell it charity water eat charity typically when you give them stock and they immediately liquidate who are we to ever take a position on any asset right right and we said we're gonna take a position on this and we think you know there will be people who would only give us a bitcoin donation you know to hold past you know the next having and and and and maybe even longer but we'd never give us a bitcoin you know to immediately liquidate they'd rather give us cash for some other asset so we raised over a hundred there and that's that that campaign is open is still going with that same promise that a hundred percent will then you know get unlocked at some point twenty twenty five and beyond and then go to have as much impact as as possible gosh i mean we you know the birthday idea raised over a hundred million dollars by getting over a million people involved just in that simple idea and that's now been taken by lots of other charities and what's about open a physical my birth birthday is in two weeks i wanna give up my birthday do i'll be your first owner alright it's it's at least worth it to set up the page in thirty seconds is it still at my maturity water dot com or where where do i go out to i think you just i think it's probably on the page now okay wonderful yeah so that's another way people get and then we have we have an amazing subscription community called the spring which is that has really helped the organization triple over the last five years and it's yeah i remember being an land rover with daniel from spotify and he's like scott your business model sucks every january one all that money you raised last year your ticket starts at zero you gotta go raise all that and then grow he said why don't you build a community of people who will sign up every single month to give what they can and that's the spring that now has members from a hundred and forty nine countries and is really the core of so much of our growth the average is about thirty bucks a month so it's it's a little less than one person getting clean water but there are a lot of people that can give one person clean water every single month and not even miss it not even think about it you know it's two netflix in a spotify right or two hbo max and and instead of you know getting content that you probably don't even need to watch more of anyway you know humans are getting clean water as a hundred percent of that goes so that's people could learn more about that at the spring dot com and there's also a video there that's gotten over a hundred million views which is a is a short telling of our story with some of the visuals that you mentioned and i'm gonna ask you one impossible question which is kinda like you know you asked ask michael jordan how do you do how do you do it right it's like you've told me little things in passing around because i i kind of admire your brand building your storytelling and your event thing also like we didn't even talk about the events that you guys throw and how those drum up so much interest and passionate and and donations and you you had told me one thing about the events that i shared on the podcast that a lot of people liked which was when i asked you why are your events so good why why do people rave about the events and you said oh i got this from from vic my wife she she says you know it's about the moments between the moments and you gave me that little philosophy i i don't even think i understand eighty percent of that but it either we you get my wife in here it's provocative right it it gave me something to think about i'm curious do you feel like is there anything that you've kind of is your your personal philosophies or ism or so i don't sort of like life hacks when it comes to either the storytelling the sales the marketing side the brand building like do you have any other moments between the moments that i can i can take with me this time well i i think the more you give the more you give so i think it's like a muscle and practicing generosity practicing saying yes just makes you wanna say yes more it makes you wanna help more people you know i think a lot of people just they have the walls up oh my gosh if i say yes to this charity i'm gonna say next to the next one right yes to the next one and like everybody is gonna be asking me like that's okay try that you know and and and if yeah if you have to take the amount that you're giving down to all of them so you can say yes to more try encouraging a social entrepreneur try encouraging someone who has mustard the courage ask you to support their run or you know their son's leukemia treatment or the food pantry or a cause like water around the world like say yes and it's a joy to give it it's it's a blessing to give you know the first three letters in the word fundraising it's fun like it should be fun to raise money for important causes to raise money to give money to end needless suffering around the world and i think the more you do it the more you wanna do it and the more you say no the more you're inclined to say no and miss out right well i will i will take your challenge i will say yes so i'm gonna set up a a birthday my birthday is in a couple weeks i'm gonna set up a birthday campaign right now i'm gonna put the link in the description of this podcast awesome i love it so if you if you love this podcast if you love me normally that we have this thing called the gentleman's agreement the or the ladies understanding which is basically says go subscribe to our channel today it's a little bit of a different gentleman's agreement your agent dollars how old you gonna be thirty five so so if you wanna give me a gift thirty five bucks towards charity water i'm gonna put the link of the description and then i will donate thirty five thousand dollars on top of whatever gets donated from people to to charity water as well man and so that will be my yeah my my gift and and scott thanks for coming on i promise you i'd get you out of here on time so i gotta i gotta wrap it here here but thanks for coming on so generous that's that's really incredible that means so much to me and and thank you for kind of showing i i don't know i've learned a lot from you that's a little bit of my education from you on on brand building storytelling and doing thing you know like i don't know you you have the you have a lot of courage you you chose to spend your life doing something that matters like you you didn't care about this stuff but i remember when i went to ethiopia with you and we went to one of the schools where a well had been built and literally when we were coming in i was like are the beatles behind us what is this giant crowd huge crowd like the whole town was there lined up and literally i was like scott is like jesus to them like there were signs with your name and i was like of course there should be because of the impact and you know for somebody who you work on the internet like i'm sitting here in my box was right now i'm doing a podcast like we live a pretty charmed life we get to do things that are are are pretty pretty you know easy in the grand history of the world i think it's pretty easy just to be disconnected from from reality and what's going on for billions of people out there and so you know i thank you for for giving me that experience and you know if anybody has the opportunity to kind of turn a little bit of your attention away from kind of the twitter and the tiktok of the world and take a look at what's going on in the world i think it will it'll help you and kind of make an impact for them the same way it did for me oh man i i appreciate the the chance to to tell the story and thanks again for your generosity that means that means a lot to me and more more importantly the people who be on the receiving end of it and if people wanna go learn more about you the charity we're shout out where you wanna send people to i would just say charity water dot org and the spring dot com okay awesome thanks scott thanks man thanks for having