- Hey everybody, what's up?
It's your friend Chase.
Welcome to another episode of the Chase Jarvis Live Show
here on CreativeLive.
You all know this show.
This is where I sit down with amazing humans
and I do everything I can to unpack their brains,
their stories, their missions and visions,
with the goal of helping you live your dreams,
whether that's in career, in hobby, or in life.
My guest today, he's a two time podcaster.
I'm super happy to have him back.
He is the founder and CEO of Charity Water,
which is my favorite charity on the planet.
Humbled to be in your presence, my good man.
Welcome back, Mr. Scott Harrison.
- Thanks, dude!
(edgy rock music)
(applause)
- Yeah, I was joking with your team,
I invited myself back.
I was like, hey, Chase, can I come back on?
And then I think I realized
we're probably both wearing the same thing we were
the first we met.
- Almost identical.
- Black on black.
I'm like, wow, so I invite myself back
and I wear the same jeans and the same shirt.
I could've at least, you know--
- In the same hotel room.
- Same hotel.
But at least you're consistent, so.
- That's right, I'll take it, I'll take it.
Hey man, any time I can get an hour with you
is a great hour.
First of all, welcome back.
- Thanks man, thanks for having me.
- Second of all, holy smokes,
congratulations on your book.
- Thank you, thank you.
- I love it when my friends do things
and they say, hey, I wanna come back on the show!
To me, the second I heard that you got a book deal,
I knew that we would be doing this.
I'm super passionate about the cause,
we have a history together, we've hosted some events
on Charity Water's behalf on the other coast.
- I noticed you're in Seattle again.
- Yeah, it's been a minute.
But it seems like a lot has happened,
you've had a couple kids.
- When was the last time?
It was two years, year and a half?
Couple years ago, okay.
- Yeah, two years ago, I think.
- Kids, yeah.
- Yeah, you've had children since then,
obviously the Charity Water continues to grow.
Congratulations there.
I'm hoping to cover a fair bit of ground.
- Let's do it!
- I wanna focus on the book, of course,
but within the book, there are stories
and there's stories within the stories.
I wanna hear a little bit about the gala.
I have yet to make it across the country.
- I'm bringing it to you this year, closer,
it's in San Francisco.
- And to me, that makes me very joyful.
We also can talk about anything you wanna talk about,
'cause this is, you know, mi casa, su casa.
So, we're gonna go to the book,
and I'm gonna start this little,
first of all, kudos, incredible.
I'm gonna read sort of the back of the book,
'cause I think it does a nice job.
- Okay, then we get all that out of the way.
- Yeah, and again, but it goes like this:
"At 20 years old, Scott Harrison had it all.
"As a top nightclub promoter in New York City,
"his life was an endless cycle of drugs,
"booze, models, and repeat.
"But 10 years in and desperately unhappy
"and morally bankrupt, he asked himself,
"what would the exact opposite of my life look like?
"Walking away from everything, Harrison," that's you,
"spent the next 16 months on a hospital ship in West Africa
"discovering his true calling.
"In 2006, with no money and even less experience,
"he founded Charity Water.
"Today his organization has raised over $300 million
"to bring clean drinking water
"to more than 8 million people around the globe."
There's another two paragraphs I'm not gonna read,
but I think the story, why I wanted to read that
rather than unpack it, 'cause we have another,
we spent 90 minutes together on a previous podcast
and I think we talked a lot about
the initial formation of Charity Water.
To me, I wanna, because this book is really a memoir, right,
it's a story of redemption, compassion,
and a mission to bring clean drinking water to the world,
I wanna focus on the you part of this.
So, what I also remember is
your mother was very sick,
and that is one of the things that caused you to,
I think you cited, like, I wanted to go do
the opposite of taking care of my sick mother.
But give us early, early Scott.
Like, how did you decide that this life of
being a club promoter was something that you wanted,
incorporate your sick mother, if you would,
and then catapult us to, we don't need to go
too deep into the drugs and rock and roll.
I think that's a chapter that
we covered pretty deep last time.
But then start with Charity Water.
- Yeah, it's interesting, you know,
when you spend 18 months writing 100000 words,
which is really what, 150000 words
to get to 100000 words.
You know, it does give a little,
it gives a slightly different perspective.
In some way, it's cliche.
Like, my story is,
it almost feels like I lived out
the parable of the prodigal son, you know?
Or the rebellion, right?
It's like the movie, you know?
- Oh, it reads like--
- Somebody said, like, okay, regressive childhood,
religious childhood--
- Sick mother.
- Sick mom, right, I feel sorry for the kid,
then rebels and sex, drugs, rock and roll,
and then sees the light--
- Redemption.
- You know, redemption, right?
It's almost like that kind of, you know,
it was done on a whiteboard after a bunch of cocktails.
So, you know, of course it was my story and I lived it.
I was four, there was a carbon monoxide
gas leak in our house.
Our whole family got sick.
There were three of us, dad, mom, me,
and mom was the only one that didn't recover.
And she was an invalid, she was allergic to the world.
People thought she was crazy
'cause you can't really see what happens
when carbon monoxide destroys one's immune system,
and her body's ability to function normally in the world,
to fight off chemicals.
I was just at my parents', at my dad's house this weekend
reading letters, and there was this excoriating letter to me
because I came home and I didn't change my clothes,
and some aftershave had gotten on my clothes
and it made mom deathly ill.
So, my childhood was just this bizarre childhood
of keeping mom safe, keeping her pure.
We lived in a sterile environment, almost.
She actually lived, after the illness,
or after the carbon monoxide exposure,
any chemical made her sick,
from perfume, to car fumes,
to the ink from books.
Like, if she held this book,
because this is new ink, it would make her sick.
- When you say sick, like what kind of sick?
- Migraines, hypertension, vomiting, nausea.
To read, as a child, I would bake her books,
so I would be these things in the oven
to try to get the smell of the printed ink out.
Or I would put them out on the back lawn.
So, I just found a childhood photo of 50 books
just lying out there in the sun,
baking them in the sun, in the oven.
And then I would take the book up to mom's bathroom,
where she lived.
She lived in a tile-covered bathroom
with aluminum foil surrounding the door.
She lived in an army cot that had been washed
20 times in baking soda
to get any smells out.
And she was nestled in between
the sink, and the toilet, and the tub.
And I would come up and I'd knock on her door
and I'd say, mom, I have a book, you know,
I think I got all the smell out,
and she would put on cotton gloves
because if she touched the ink,
it would get in her blood stream, and she'd get sick.
Then she would wear this crazy charcoal mask
that smelled like disease,
and then she could read the baked or burned,
you know, slightly charred book.
So that was just, that was what childhood was like.
It was weird, my friends thought mom was crazy.
Even my dad, we struggled with this.
Was it in her head?
Because there's just no, you know,
her carbon monoxide levels detected in the blood
were far, far above what anyone should ever have,
you know, 10 times a smoker's or something crazy.
But you couldn't see the symptoms.
- That's so hard.
And you know, you hear these fibromyalgia stories
where they don't know what the pain is,
and that's very, very real,
but the symptoms are so generic
and Western medicine hasn't,
it seems interesting to me that there was
a very clear event where--
- Yeah, we were lucky to have that.
I mean, we found the leak.
My dad ripped the furnace out,
found the little pinhole cracks
with an HVAC guy, and you know,
I write about this in the book,
but my parents had a deep, authentic Christian faith.
They were nondenominational Christians
and they decided not to sue the gas company
for gross negligence.
Probably could've gotten million and millions of dollars.
The gas company came up two or three times
and said everything's fine.
And then it was actually dad's HVAC friend
who ripped the thing out and said
everything's not fine, you got a carbon monoxide leak
in your house.
So, they didn't sue, and I grew up in the Church,
playing by the rules.
I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I didn't cuss,
I didn't sleep around, I played piano on Sunday mornings.
And then something happened at 18 and I said,
what would the opposite of that look like?
You know, what would it look like to drink,
smoke, and sleep around, and gamble,
and travel around the world,
and join a band, and grow my hair down to my shoulders?
What would all of those things
that I'm not allowed to do feel like?
- Let me stick a pin in this for a second.
So, how old were you when your mother's,
or the accident happened?
- Four.
- Wow, so four years old,
and from four, you probably,
there was a lot of caretaking,
from not just your father but from everyone.
- Yeah, it was the two of us.
- You talk about picking out and baking books.
And at 18, is this, are you fed up?
Like, what's the mental bit that you flipped in your head?
- Well, I changed--
- 'Cause it's more than what's the opposite of this,
'cause no 18-year-old says that.
- Yeah, that's actually fair,
and it's good that you questioned that.
I mean, I was this kind kid
who wanted to take care of mom,
who wanted to be a doctor when I grew up.
I would do the cooking for her,
I would help clean the house.
I had this depth of compassion.
As I aged into a teenager,
the compassion dwindled, the angst rose,
and you know, mom would sit outside most of the day
in a lawn chair in a lean-to
that a friend had built in the backyard,
and she'd yell to me, you know, yelling get me this.
I just started to resent that.
I would ignore her.
You know, that teenager, your world--
- Your world is like you.
- I've got a good example.
She would say that electromagnetic radiation made her sick,
so therefore no TV or radio, okay?
Well, as a teenager I'm like, you're crazy,
you just don't want me to watch TV.
You just don't want me to listen to the radio.
So it felt like rules.
So, there was a moment as a teenager where
I didn't believe her, and I take a radio
after she's gone to sleep,
and I sneak down the corridor,
and I face this boombox at her bed, through the door,
and I turn the volume all the way off
so she'd have no way of knowing.
And she wakes up the next morning scared,
incredibly sick, not knowing,
'cause I thought it was in her head,
I thought it was psychosomatic.
So, it was stuff like that, it was just starting to say
is this real, and I want my life.
In some ways I had sacrificed
so much of my childhood.
I wanted a normal mom, I wanted to do normal things.
And that lead me to New York City.
When I first came to New York, I joined a band
and we started playing the CBGB's, and the Wetlands
and all these amazing clubs at the time.
The band broke up, yet another cliche, because of drugs,
and because of the fact we couldn't get along.
And with the band breaking up,
I thought, well, I should probably go to college now,
at least part-time, because dad saved up,
and we didn't have money growing up, middle class.
But he had started saving by the time I was born,
and there was only one of me.
So, I reluctantly, like as if I'm doing my parents
this huge favor, I'm like, okay, I'll go to NYU.
- Take all your money and go to NYU.
- Take all your money, go to NYU.
Of course, no scholarship 'cause my grades sucked
and I barely graduated high school.
And you know, let me graduate with a communications degree,
'cause that's the easiest thing I could think of.
And you know, I maybe went to half the classes,
got Cs, barely graduated.
And then, early on at 19, fell into nightclub promotion,
and couldn't believe that there was this job that existed,
an actual job where people would pay you to consume alcohol.
People would pay you to drink!
It's like, what do you do for a living?
Oh, I drink!
And not only that--
- Your friends drink.
- Brands would pay you.
So, we went to 40 clubs, my business partner and I,
over the decade, and at the top of our game,
Bacardi was writing us a $4000 check every month
to be seen in public drinking Bacardi.
And Budweiser said, well, we'll also pay you
four grand a month.
Can you just make sure when you're out at your clubs
you only drink Bud?
I'm like, yes we can!
- We can, funny thing.
- You know, four Gs a month, like yes,
we will drink Bud!
I mean, it tastes disgusting, but--
- Whatever it takes.
- We'll drink it to pay the rent.
So you know, everything that came with the territory,
the decline in morality.
It started with smoking, and I was doing
an off-off-Broadway play for fun
and my character smoked.
I'm like, well, I have to be a method actor, right?
I should start smoking.
So then, that led to two to three packs a day for 10 years,
and you know, starting to drink,
and starting to sleep around.
I was like, well, you know, might as well just--
- All-in now.
- Might as well go all-in, right?
I got nothing to lose.
And you know, pick a vice.
Drinking, cocaine, ecstasy, MDMA, gambling,
pornography, strip clubs.
I mean, everything short of heroin
would've been a vice I'd taken on in those 10 years.
And it just left me really soulless.
You know--
- What was the moment?
- Well, it's almost like, you know, the pot boiling.
You don't really know the moment is happening and then,
oh my gosh, my life sucks!
So, I think I was running from it.
I was running from the realization that things were wrong.
I had put conscience way off to the side.
I remember there was this churchy language growing up that,
you know, Scott, don't allow your conscience to be seared.
I'm like, oh my gosh, like it's in a frying pan,
like it's a piece of tuna.
But that's actually what happened!
I mean, the more stuff you do
and the more you don't own up to it,
the more you lie, the more you do drugs,
you're like, well that's just,
I don't wanna think about the morality of that.
So, I had this moment.
I was 28 years old and I was in South America,
and it was this amazing vacation,
and I had collected most of the markers
that I thought would lead to my happiness.
- The watch.
- I had the watch, I had the nice car, the Beemer,
I had the nice piano in my apartment,
and my girlfriend was the most beautiful girl
of everywhere we went, and she was
on the cover of fashion magazines, and doing runway.
And I had this, it was almost like
the game of musical chairs, where the music stopped
and I didn't have anywhere to sit down for the first time.
You know, I'd always been the first one in the chair,
pointing my finger, making fun of,
you know, whoever lost.
And it was just this strange, cathartic moment where
it's almost like the veil was lifted,
a moment of clarity.
Amidst the opulence, and the decadence,
and the mountains of Dom Perignon,
and the pure MDMA, and the yacht,
and the $1000 of fireworks that we blew up in our backyard,
that there'd never be enough,
that there would never be enough girls,
there would never be enough money,
somebody would always have a better watch,
and a better car, and a better this,
and it was this endless pursuit of selfishness and hedonism
that, you know, it would have no end,
it would have no good end.
And I guess I started coming up on 30.
I was 28, so with the 30 milestone,
I started thinking about legacy.
I said, my tombstone might actually read,
here lies a selfish SOB who spent his life
getting people wasted.
In fact, he got millions of people wasted.
And you know, who wants that on their tombstone?
- Was there some, so you talk about it as like a boiling pot
and all of a sudden you look around and it's like,
oh my god, it's boiling.
Does that, do you have that feeling
with other things in life?
I don't wanna pull you out of the journey here
because it's gonna drive the people at home
who are listening to this story crazy,
but it seems like that is very common,
not just with lifestyle, not just with drugs,
or any sort of addictant or addictive behavior.
Does that still, does that have
a place in your world anymore?
Do you realize, like, are you working,
do you go off the deep end with work?
Have you taken some of those vices
and redirected them towards work
in a good way, in a healthy way?
- Yeah, there's a moment where I almost burned out,
and I write about that.
And why I thought that was at least
interesting to write about was because
everybody told me I was gonna burn out for nine years,
and I was still going.
I just did 98 flights last year, 150 speeches.
Unstoppable!
And this is before kids.
But it was this frenetic pace of, again,
you know, when I did move over to Charity Water,
it was completely redirected.
Now I'm raising tens of millions of dollars
for the poorest people in the world.
You know, I mean, people are drinking,
they're just drinking clean water.
And it's the more you do, the more lives we save.
I was traveling to, I've been to 69 countries.
I've been to Ethiopia 30 times,
so I was seeing this, the reaction where
I would stand on a stage--
- Working, money comes in.
- Yeah, fly to Berlin, or fly to Phoenix
and you stand on a stage and you tell the story,
money comes in, and then a couple days later,
I'd be in Malawi, or Ethiopia, or Nepal,
and you'd see people drinking clean water.
You know, it was cause and effect in the best way possible,
not cause and effect, oh, we ran 60 Gs in booze tonight,
you know, in champagne, my cut's nine grand.
You know, it was very different.
So yeah, I did just hit that wall,
and that was kind of, you know, slow, slow, slow,
everything's fine, everything's fine, everything's fine,
oh my gosh, I'm really tired,
I don't wanna do this anymore!
- Okay, go back, and I think,
I knew that about you, I just didn't know how
we were gonna get there.
I didn't want it to be linear,
so put a pin in that,
now let's go back to you shift gears at 28.
Like, what's going on, and take me to West Africa.
- Well, I come back from this vacation,
and you know, a couple months of floundering because
I got a change of heart and a change of conscience.
I want my life to look different,
I want to find my way back to lost faith,
to lost morality, I wanna feel clean.
I felt dirty inside,
and I was morally bankrupt,
I was spiritually bankrupt.
It was hard.
And then there's an incident that I write about in the book
that was this great out.
Something happened at a club and gave me
a great reason to get out of town for a couple weeks,
and with that added perspective,
I said, well, what if I never went back?
What then would be next and what would
the 180 turn look like?
And the most extreme opposite I could think of
was serving the poor in the poorest country in the world.
Right, if I was serving the rich $1000 bottles of Cristal
in one of the top cities in the world, New York City,
in the clubs that were running 60 Gs a night.
We were selling vodka and Redbull for $25.
I mean, it was amazing what people would pay for something,
yeah, 30 cent drink, right?
Cheap vodka, even.
So, that was the idea, serve on a humanitarian mission,
volunteer, don't get paid for it,
and tithe back, tithing being a very kind of
Christian thing from my childhood,
give one of the 10 years that I selfishly wasted back.
So, I applied to all these organizations that I'd heard of,
you know, the Oxfams, and Save the Children,
and UNICEF, and of course, no one will take me,
so I'm shocked, right?
I'm this club guy in New York.
I can get 1000 people to stand outside a velvet rope
and get excited about ripping them off for cocktails,
and I can't even volunteer my services for free.
And as, you know, as it would turn out,
only one organization finally accepted me
under the conditions that I would pay them $500 a month
and actually go live in the poorest country in the world
on a mission to Liberia, which had just escaped
a 14 year civil war.
So, I went looking for the opposite of my life,
and there's probably nothing more opposite
than selling $1000 bottles of Cristal
to then paying to go serve in post-war Liberia,
a country with no electricity, no running water,
no sewage, no mail system.
It was completely ruined.
It was actually, I remember at the time, it was actually,
it had fallen off the UN development chart.
It wasn't last, it was like off.
They're like, we just don't have any data.
You know, it was definitely last,
but so far between last and second to last.
And long story short, I joined a medical mission
as a photojournalist.
I actually dusted off the NYU degree,
some more irony there.
The degree that I never used, that I didn't wanna get,
doing my parents this huge favor,
well, it turned out they did me a favor
because I actually was qualified to do this
humanitarian job as a photojournalist.
I'd always taken pretty good photos,
I'd always been a decent writer,
and I just start storytelling from Liberia, West Africa,
to the 15000 people on my club list
that I'd been getting drunk for 10 years.
And I mean, it was an abrupt change.
I mean, if you were on my email list,
you would've gotten invited--
- It's like cockroaches, like, flip on the light, right?
- Yeah, it was like, come to the Prada opening,
you know, the Prada store opening in Soho.
Two months later it's like, I don't know,
you're getting photos of leprosy,
of hey, I'm in a leprosy colony,
and here are the patients that I'm meeting,
or here's a kid suffocating to death on his own face
with a giant facial tumor.
So, there were definitely some unsubscribes,
like take me off, not what I signed up for.
But I learned in that moment, A,
the power of the personal transformation
was interesting to people who had partied with me,
who knew me as one thing,
not as the guy who would care about the poor in Liberia,
not as a guy who would be pouring my heart out
writing these stories as I would meet people
and learn about their hardship and their sickness
and their disease.
So, there was a personal interest.
And then, there was this, it's so hard
to find the right word for this,
but almost like a wistfulness.
So, I would write these stories and people would say,
how do I go do that?
Like, how would I find my way to
an opposite experience like that?
I remember once, I had sent out a post about
somebody maybe blind with cataracts,
and we'd give them eye surgery,
and the email comes back and this woman says,
you know, I'm sitting here at my desk in Chanel,
it's brightly lit, and I have tears streaming down my face.
People are wondering what is wrong with me,
but I just had no idea that these problems existed,
that these, there were solutions,
that people could be helped like this.
So, I was getting really positive feedback
outside of the unsubscribes.
People said, how do I help, how do I give,
how do I volunteer like you, how do I change my life?
I feel stuck as well.
I don't wanna sell $5000 purses, or $1000 shoes,
and I want my life to have meaning.
So, that was quite, I did that for 16 months,
almost two years, with the in betweens.
And, you know, among everything that I'd seen
in West Africa and my travels around Africa,
it was just the need for clean water.
That was just the one thing that rose.
- So, it was obvious?
- It just felt like the one thing
that wasn't okay on my watch.
And maybe it was because I had sold Voss Water
for $10 in clubs to people who
wouldn't even open the water.
Just come in and you raise your hand,
hi, give me 10 bottles of water!
And $100 of water just sits there unopened
'cause they're drinking champagne and vodka.
Maybe it was because I just intuitively thought that
if you wanted to make people healthy,
'cause I was with doctors who were
doing expensive surgeries,
why not go to the root cause of so much sickness,
which as it turned out, was 52% of all disease
throughout the developing world,
water and sanitation, water and toilets.
You could make half the sick people well
by just gifting them clean water and toilets.
So, I stumbled into that.
Of all the things I saw, it was just
water is gonna be my thing.
It's crazy that, at the time, it was a sixth of the world,
one out of every six human beings alive don't have water,
yeah, it was a billion people when we first met.
And I just wanted to see that number
come down to zero, and that became the mission.
I came back to New York City at 30
to try to make that a reality.
- So, you've, that arc, you call it the prodigal son.
- I quit everything.
I should say this, that I did the hard work of
going cold turkey.
I drink a little bit, but I never smoked again,
you know, and I went out with a bang.
There was a moment--
- This is my last party!
- There was the last hurray, Chase.
I kid you not, I was about to board
the hospital ship the next morning and sail to Africa
with a group of doctors and humanitarians and I'm like,
I am going out with a bang.
I think I had eight beers,
three packs of Marlboro reds.
I boarded the ship the next day
with blister packs of nicotine gum and a patch.
I'm like, I gotta quit.
But I never smoked again,
and I never looked at a pornographic image,
and this is, what, 13 or 14 years ago.
I never set foot in a strip club,
I never touched coke or any of that stuff again,
I never gambled again, you know,
and I speak in Vegas all the time.
I loved gambling, but I really just said
I need to do the hard work, shed all these vices
in order to allow a new story for my life.
And I didn't wanna just kind of have
one foot in both worlds, the old world, and like,
I like beer and wine too much.
That's probably my one last vice.
I never trust anyone with no vices.
- Fair.
- That's a lot harder in the 40s now
with two kids, you know?
You have three glasses of wine
and you wake up at 5:30 with the kids
and you're in pain.
That used to be the preamble to the night.
- Right, that's getting started.
So, without, I think, without reinventing charity,
the giving part of charity,
I think it's fair to say that
you reinvented how charities could be.
For me, that's one of the reasons
that I connected with you and Charity Water,
aside from mutual friends is, it just,
it looked and felt like the thing
I wanna contribute to.
So, in large part, you created a mission and a vision,
something that was so foundational, like,
I always like to go back to first principles.
Water is sort of an equivalent of first principle,
and you did it with simplicity, with elegance.
It's the equivalent, I feel like,
I'm gonna laud some compliments on you here,
it's the equivalent of what Tesla is to cars,
or Apple is to technology.
And you made it contemporary--
- It's okay to say cool.
Giving and generosity and compassion and empathy
should be cool and fun.
- It should be, and so, did you set out with that in mind,
or was that a key principle, a core value
that it was gonna be all those things,
or did that just emanate from you as a cool person,
an empathetic, kind, understanding person?
'Cause there's sort of a brand associated,
you've built a brand, which is required,
and I think it's one of the things
that differentiates you.
- I talk about this a lot in the book,
'cause I think this part could actually help people.
You mentioned mission and vision,
so the mission was to bring clean drinking water
to everyone on the planet.
So, the mission is accomplished when
no human being alive is drinking bad water,
putting their life at risk.
However, the vision is actually
very, very different from that.
The vision, as you said, was to reinvent charity,
was to reimagine the giving experience.
And, you know, let me riff on that a little bit.
So, I had the unique advantage
of starting the organization at 30
with no charitable experience
and no circle of friends who--
- Gave money.
- Did anything charitable, really.
So, as I go and tell everyday 30-year-old party people,
hey, I'm gonna bring clean drinking water
to the entire world, they look at me
like I have six heads.
And in conversations, I realized that
they weren't giving.
There was a huge cynicism, and skepticism,
and a lack of trust with charity,
and some of it was very, very well-founded.
Other wasn't, but you know,
everybody would have a horror story
they could pull out of their back pocket and say,
oh, the charity didn't raise $2 billion for X disaster?
And it's still sitting on a billion 10 years later, right?
Or the CEO who's paying himself
millions and millions of dollars
and hiring his cousins and nephews for his charity
and they don't actually do anything,
or the high overheads,
or everybody seemed to have an excuse.
And I learned there was data behind this.
42% of Americans said they just didn't trust charities.
And this shocks people because
no one is more generous than Americans, right?
Of all the countries in the world,
we have this philanthropic heritage.
I mean, Americans give money.
But yet, almost half the country
doesn't trust the system.
70% of Americans, interestingly polled by NYU,
when asked about how charities handled money,
70% said they believed charities
either waste money or badly waste money.
30% of people thought charities were good stewards
and did the right thing with money.
So, for me, that was the big problem
I was gonna have to solve to make
any meaningful impact on the water crisis,
to move the needle in any substantial way,
helping humans get clean water,
we would have to address the cynicism, the skepticism,
and build a completely new construct.
So, I just started trying to address those objections
through the business model.
Okay, well, the number one objection was
I don't know where my money's going,
I don't know how much is actually gonna reach the people
that you're saying you wanted me to help.
Okay, well, what if it was 100%?
Then you couldn't use that excuse!
So what if I said 100% of whatever you give,
whether it's a dollar or a million dollars,
will directly help get people clean water?
- As in not fund operations--
- No overhead, no staff, not my salary,
not my flights, not the office, not the copy machine,
not the phone bill, not the, you know, insurance.
What if 100% could go to the field?
And I didn't actually know how we would make that work,
but I just opened up two bank accounts and said
one bank account is where I'm gonna put
all the public's money.
This second bank account's gonna be for overhead,
and somehow we're gonna figure out how to fill it
so we can eventually hire an employee one day,
and then a second employee if it works.
So that was the 100% model.
The second thing was, okay,
well money is actually not fungible
with this organization if you put that stake in the ground.
So, we can do really cool things,
tracking the dollars coming in,
and where 100% of it went.
So, we can say, okay, $6 came in
from this girl who sent in her allowance,
here's where it went out,
and it wound up in Malawi,
or it wound up in this village in Orissa, India.
So, that was the proof pillar, or the second pillar was,
okay, give away 100% of the public's money,
take that objection off the table.
Two, just show them what you did with it.
- Transparency.
- Yeah, transparency and showing impact.
If you give money and you could see that
it actually changed somebody's life,
you're more inclined to giving it.
- For what it's worth, like photographs of wells--
- Yeah, doing this visually.
Photos, GPS, visual.
We have drilling rigs now that have Twitter accounts
and they tweet their location.
Just, we found 20 ways to do that that have been,
I think, interesting. - Totally creative, yeah.
- But the core principle was proof,
show people where their money goes.
Let them see their impact.
The third thing, third pillar was brand,
and as I looked at the charitable sector,
I just saw bad, anemic brands.
I saw latent charities.
There was a poverty mentality in their branding,
or just a lack of talent, a lack of taste.
Charities would put up white papers and say,
Chase, I'd really like you to read 121 page paper
about the water crisis, written by some academic,
and you wouldn't even get past page one.
There was a study the New York Times,
a New York Times article that cited this study done on
a huge charity website, which I will not name,
and the charity put lots of PDFs and documents up.
They found that 70% of the PDFs
had received not one download, zero downloads!
Okay, so that's an extreme case,
but if that's the old way,
the other thing that it would say
is that there was pervasive shame and guilt-based marketing.
Charities would, say--
- Show you a picture of kids with flies on his face.
- We talked about the Sally Struthers commercials
from the 80s, leftovers of that.
The sad eyes, and the flies landing on the face,
and the slow motion as the 800 number strikes,
and it says please give, you know,
this kid's gonna die if you don't give.
And it works, people give, they pull out their wallet.
But nobody tells their friends about that charity,
nobody wears that T-shirt.
There's no, you know, word of mouth dies
when a charity makes you feel shameful or guilty
about what you have.
And you know, I thought early on,
I said the great brands don't do this.
Apple doesn't do this, Nike doesn't do this.
Imagine if Nike told you you're fat,
and ugly, and lazy, turn off the television
and go for a run.
- Would you like some shoes?
- Yeah, and by the way, please buy our shoes.
Nobody would wanna go for a run.
Nobody likes to be talked down to or shamed.
Nike's brilliant.
They say there's greatness within you, Chase.
If you've lost a leg, we believe you can
complete a marathon in record time.
You don't have an arm?
You can still shotput or play basketball.
Like, there's greatness within you,
you can overcome adversity.
And they just storytell and storytell about
all these people, and you kind of say, yes,
someone believes in me!
I am gonna turn the TV off, I'm gonna try and eat better,
I'm gonna try and run,
I wanna wear the symbol of someone the believes
there's greatness withinside me
and I can actually do it.
And then I wear their clothes.
And charities just don't do that.
There wasn't this fun, and joy, and inspiration.
You've heard give back, and oh my gosh,
I throw up inside my mouth every time
I hear a company talking about giving back.
The language makes it seem as if
the company or the individual
has pillaged and plundered to such a degree
that it's finally time to throw some scraps
back to the poor.
And you know, if I, here, hold this bucket,
take this from me, giving back, right?
Or, you know, I'd like to give something to you.
So, giving should, I think, should be framed as positive.
I just say drop the language with that.
Just talk about our giving program!
Talk about our family's philosophy of giving,
frame giving in the positive
because it's a joy, and an honor, and a blessing
to give out of the abundance,
to give our time, to give our talent,
to give our money, to be of service to others,
not as a sense of repaying a debt,
not out of shame, not out of obligation.
So, we just nailed this stuff early on and said
let's make this about hope,
let's make it about opportunity, let's make it fun.
We are inviting people to a party
where the whole world gets clean water.
You wanna come?
Do you wanna come with your dollar, or your million dollars,
do you wanna come with your birthday
or come with your fundraising campaign?
Do you wanna come with your volunteer hours?
You're invited, you're invited!
Like, we've literally been saying
you're invited for 11 years.
Not you have to, not you need to,
not you really should because you're so rich,
but hey, do you wanna come along?
We're doing this really cool thing
and this community of people is just
inspiring us every day
and they're going above and beyond.
So, that's the kind of, I guess,
that's how we think about brand.
And then, the fourth, those are the three pillars,
and then the fourth, you know, corner, I guess,
of the house would be working with local partners.
Nobody like me should be drilling wells in Africa or India.
I do not have a role as a hydrologist,
I do not have a role rowing into, you know,
a rural village in Bangladesh to try to train the community
on water, and sanitation, and hygiene.
I have a role in becoming an advocate for this issue,
getting everyday people to care and act,
but for the work to be impactful, and sustainable,
and culturally appropriate,
it has to be lead by the locals.
So, we just got that right early on.
We said, we'll raise the awareness and the money,
but all the work across the world
has to be lead by the local heroes.
They are the ones that are gonna be
celebrated as heroes.
And you know, to us, success is spending
$50 million in Ethiopia, me rolling into Ethiopia
and having no idea who we are, Charity Water.
But our local partners, celebrated.
The local heroes, the people that are
actually making it happen on the ground.
So, those four things, you know,
giving away 100%, and proving where people's money goes,
and just building an imaginative
and inspirational brand,
and working with local partners,
that sounds like common sense.
It doesn't sound like we did anything that innovative,
it just wasn't really how things were done 10 years ago.
- So, I think that the framework
that you've put in the book here
and that you built Charity Water on,
to me, that's beautiful because, you know,
that exists in so many areas of the world,
the same opportunity to grow and invent or reinvent
a thing that had been broken.
This charity didn't invent charity,
they just reinvented it, and using technology.
And I think, I feel like we talked about that
in our other conversation,
but you've built an amazing technology platform
that allows you to give for your birthday.
It's beautiful, you should go check it out.
Let's, if we can pivot for just a second from,
your personal narrative is incredibly inspiring,
and to watch what you've built with Charity Water,
you know, high five and all of the accolades,
because you've earned it, and it's impressive,
and it's incredible.
What I'm trying to get out of the next couple minutes is
what are some do's and don'ts,
'cause there's a lot of folks who listen
who want to have impact, and I think
most of the people I know, if you're a creator
and what you wanna do is you wanna go and
create a new charity.
So, I see a lot of that,
and I have sent some people your way and said,
you know, here's my friend Scott,
you know, if you wanna get involved,
you should talk to him first,
'cause he built his from the ground up.
So, there's a lot of people at home
watching and listening saying I wanna give.
As someone who's been in the system for so long,
and you've seen the ups and downs,
you've built it from the ground up,
what do you recommend?
- I think most people should find something and join it.
You know, it's a very long, hard road.
And, you know, I talk about
some of the struggles in the book,
and burning out, and wanting to quit,
and the moments of near insolvency.
- Just a couple of those,
and these are teasers for the book,
you were within moments of insolvency,
and then a very generous gentleman--
- A stranger walked in and gave me a million dollars,
complete stranger.
I mean, there have really been some miracle moments.
But had that not happened, we're not sitting here,
and I'm not back in nightclubs,
but I'm not running an organization
that's helping people get clean water.
So, it's very difficult,
so I normally try to talk most people out of it,
because they haven't counted the costs.
Or a lot of people try and do it part-time.
That's great, but you're just not gonna make
that kind of an impact.
This has been all-in.
This is year 12, and you know,
maybe I'm down to 50 hours a week now
with a couple young kids at home,
but it was 100 hours a week.
It was all-consuming, you're all-in, trying to build it,
and you're gonna die at any moment.
Like, you are never, you know, people say
at somewhere around year four or five,
oh, you should write a book.
I'm like, I don't even know if this organization
would be around by the pub date, you know?
Like, we may be insolvent in three weeks or three months.
So, I do think, you know, that said,
there may be people that say
there's just this problem and I just can't shake it,
it's not okay on my watch.
Maybe it's a justice issue, maybe it's hunger,
maybe it's the fact that people are going to bed
without a roof over their head,
or they're sleeping in water,
and they're cold, and they're huddling.
I would say we also need more social entrepreneurs
who are willing to count the cost and go all-in
and make a life of this.
Not do it for a year or three years,
but do it for decades.
You know, some of the great organizations,
I mean, you look at the Salvation Army,
these are multi-decade commitments by a founder.
This isn't kind of a, oh, I'm gonna do some charity,
or I'm gonna give back.
You know, I hear that all the time.
Someone will approach us about a job,
and they worked at Facebook and Google,
you know, made a bunch of money
and they wanna do a year to give back.
That's okay, and sometimes they can
find ways to be useful,
but we also are in need of people
who will become advocates for causes, go deep.
I literally feel like we are
just now getting good at what we do in year 12.
We're just now getting.
It takes the 10000 hours.
We did so many boneheaded things.
I mean, I write about some of the failed water projects,
and we just, we screwed up a lot in the beginning.
- Rather than failed water projects,
'cause I think you do a nice job of capturing that,
let's talk about some big missteps you did
in building the charity.
There weren't that many.
As you said earlier, you got a lot right,
but I know you got a couple wrong.
What would those be?
- The model's incredibly difficult.
I mean, I talk everyone out of the 100% model.
I mean, you basically have to do two things at once
and run them in perfect balance,
and from a business, so we've now raised about
$320 million, and all of the money
that we raised from the public,
we can't ever touch to pay the now
80 staff in New York City, the office, the flights.
We can, from a business model approach,
go bankrupt with $100 million in the bank.
We couldn't touch it, we would not make payroll.
Like, 80 checks or whatever, direct debits,
80 direct debits would bounce,
but yet we'd have $100 million for water projects
on its way out to go help three million humans.
So, that's been challenging,
and the way that we fund the overhead,
there are 130 generous families,
many of them entrepreneurs who you know,
the founders of Twitter, and Facebook,
and Spotify, and executives at Apple,
these 130 families are paying for our 80 staff,
and our office, and our flights,
but it's incredibly difficult.
We didn't count the cost early on.
That million dollar gift allowed us
enough of a reprieve to go out
and build that second business,
but had that not happened, we would've flamed.
- I wanna find a way to hear some
really, really good news.
Talk to me about progress in attacking the problem.
- Well, the cool thing now is
we're helping about 3500 people a day, this year.
So, today, I woke up and I went to work
and I had some meetings today and did a podcast
and now I got to see you,
and by the time I go to work tomorrow,
3500 humans will have gone from
drinking dirty water to clean water.
So, we're on a run rate of about
a million and a half people a year.
So, I was at Madison Square Garden
recently with my wife--
- For the Drake show?
- No, it was Depeche Mode.
They just raised a couple million dollars for us.
- Incredible. - It was pretty cool.
But I looked around and I said,
honey, we're doing this every four days,
like the volume of people.
So, you have these moments of,
like, we are filling MSG at capacity for a concert
every four days, like Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
All the people with dirty water
walked into a stadium
and moved from dirty water to clean water,
and then Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday,
we just did it again.
So, that's exciting.
It's taken us 12 years to get to that point,
and we've done I think 8.49 million people.
I know it exactly, it's 8.49 million people
across 29 and a half thousand villages,
so that's 1/80th of the global problem.
The problem's down from a billion people
without water to 670.
So, eight and a half million against 670 million,
okay, 1/80th, 1.2%, little more depressing way
to look at it.
1/80th sounds better. - Yeah, I like the other one.
- But you kinda think, like, oh wow,
I could imagine this problem being solved
if we just did 80 times more.
And it's not just us.
There's all these other great water groups
that are starting up, and are also growing,
and the awareness of this issue is growing.
So, that's the good news.
It's harder now than it was at any point,
so the bigger your scale is,
the more challenges you have.
Raising the overhead is actually
a big challenge at the moment
because the water growth is outpacing
the 130 families, so I'm spending
a lot more of my time going out and finding
family number 131, family number 132,
hey, could you please help us on the other side,
on the ops and overhead side.
- Do you still call it the Well?
- Still call it the Well, and it's an amazing group
of unselfish givers that trust us.
I wanna pay for the software engineer,
'cause your software engineer
could be at Google making double.
I wanna pay for the accountant's salary,
the water programs engineer, hydrologist's salary.
So, it's good.
We're gonna get 10 million people clean water,
and we're gonna be there in 14 months.
You know, 10 million, that feels like something.
And just more, we did a business pivot at year 10
from the birthday idea,
and I know you've been a part of,
and a lot of people have heard about.
And we said the birthdays are great,
and people giving up their birthdays for Charity Water,
and the fundraising campaigns,
we raised up $50 million that way,
but no one's doing a second birthday,
so we just have to keep finding new people.
This is exhausting.
Right, I can't make more than 100 flights a year.
I can't make more than 150 speeches or whatever.
It's just, you can't do that,
so we said, what if we moved to subscription model?
What if we tried to build
a Netflix or Spotify of charities?
And the same people say, can you show up every month please?
$10 a month, $30 a month, $100 a month,
whatever you can give.
But we were pretty practical about it.
We said, this one time, we had a million givers give once.
January one, we started at zero,
we'd go raise $50 million, and you know,
wow, it's amazing, it's a million dollars a week,
all these people gave,
and then January one, it goes all the way back to zero.
- Starting over, it's crazy.
- Yeah, go to Jail, do not pass Go.
And we said, well, Netflix's business isn't like that,
and HBO's business isn't like that,
and Spotify's business isn't like that,
and DropBox's business isn't like that.
They just have a lot of people who are showing up
month in and month out, getting value from the content,
from the storage, whatnot,
and we said what if we create
a subscription program for pure good,
where 100% of that value every month
is getting passed onto the poorest people in the world,
called it the Spring.
I thought that'd be a nice name.
- Well played, nice brand, good job.
- You know, double entendre, right?
Beautiful spring water, and water from the Earth,
and a time of new beginnings for people.
Many of these communities will talk about
the history of their community before the water
and after the water.
Like, it's how they tell the story,
before it came and after it came.
So, we called it the Spring and we said,
hey look, we're gonna anchor $30 a month.
We think there's a lot of people out there
that could give $30 a month, it's a dollar a day,
and that's what it costs us to get
one human being clean water.
So, every $30, I can move someone
from dirty water to clean water.
And this launched, what, about--
- 3000 a day, that's 9000.
That's a lot of money.
I just did the rough math there, that's big money.
- And that's just on the water side too.
So, that now is an amazing community.
Ti's grown to 100 countries.
Interestingly, the average is 29 and a half dollars,
so we have a lot of university kids giving $10,
we have people giving their allowance,
we have people, you know, I don't wanna say this,
but we have people canceling HBO,
and people canceling some of these subscription services
to actually be a part of the Spring.
And then we have people giving $100 a month,
and $300, and $500 a month.
So, the Spring is now, is the fasted growing
part of the business, almost 30000 people
from 100 countries.
It's up 220% year over year.
It's just growing as the story spreads,
but in the best way possible
because I don't have to start January one at zero,
I start with 30000 people who are like,
we're in this!
You keep doing your part, you keep being transparent,
keep telling us stories of impact
and where our money's going,
and we'll keep giving,
and the impact just grows, and grows,
and grows, and grows.
- That is an incredible story.
You've done a masterful job of capturing it in your book.
Congratulations on writing 150000 words about yourself
and your life story.
- I worked with an amazing writer as well.
Her name is Lisa.
She helped to get a lot of it out on the page,
and she came to Africa with me,
and we talked a lot.
She became a third member of the family
for about a year and a half.
- Truly remarkable.
Thirst by Mr. Scott Harrison.
It's always a pleasure to sit with you.
- We should say I'm not making a penny off the book.
- Yeah, you've donated your entire advance.
- All the proceeds go to Charity Water,
the advance, the proceeds, so I really would hope this book
goes and actually helps people get clean water,
besides maybe inspiring some people that
it's never too late.
You know, I guess that's the theme
for people out there on a personal level.
It is never too late to change.
You know, if a scumbag like me
can kind of find redemption and purpose
in service to others, you know,
you'll read this, you are not as bad as me.
I can guarantee you, I can guarantee
you'd be hard pressed to find yourself
in any lower predicament than I was.
And you know, I have a beautiful wife,
and a beautiful family.
I get to help 3500 people get clean water,
and I'm surrounded by amazing team members,
and volunteers, and partners,
and you know, it's an incredible thing to do.
I still kind of pinch myself.
As hard as it is, you know, what did you do today?
I'm like, we got 3500 humans clean water.
- But that's why, whether the folks at home are listening
and they're interested in charitable giving
or building a business,
I think what's at the core of your story,
which is super resonant, is the story of transformation.
Transformation of the human,
transformation of an industry,
of a model, of a problem.
The fact that it's gone from a billion to 670000--
- 670 million.
We've taken off a third of the problem,
collectively, the world.
- Pick up the book, all the proceeds
are going to Charity Water.
Congratulations.
Huge, huge win on the book,
and I promise to get you out of here,
and I'm six minutes late.
- Thanks, buddy.
- See you.
Thank you for being on the show!
- Everybody, we could've talked forever!
- We could, we could.
And thank you so much, man.
- I'll invite myself back,
and then we could do two hours.
We should do one in Africa one time.
You should totally, like you should come on a trip
and we should bring some 5Ds and rock it out in a,
I don't know, Ethiopia.
- We've got some people who might wanna come along.
- CreativeLive Ethiopia, come on!
- Thank you so much, bud.
Hey everybody, pay attention to Scott
@charitywater pretty much everywhere, @scottharrison also.
And thanks again for being part of the show.
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