700 Scott Harrison: Live with Purpose or You’ll Live with Regret

DO NOT BE AFRAID OF WORK THAT HAS NO END. A life of ego is so unfulfilling. We can get caught up in the comparison game: who has the most money, the bigger house, the best car. It’s never-ending. At the end of the day, what kind of legacy does that leave? If we can have a cause that is greater than ourselves, we can find purpose. That’s why I’m so excited to share the powerful story of a nightclub promoter turned philanthropist: Scott Harrison. Scott Harrison was working as a nightclub promoter in New York when he became “morally bankrupt.” He sold all of his belongings and set sail to Africa in an effort to redeem himself. He returned to New York with one goal: to provide clean water to everyone on earth. Twelve years later, he’s raised over 320 million dollars and provided water to people in 26 countries with his nonprofit charity: water. Scott now finds worth in how much money he can raise for others, not for himself. Listen to Episode 700 to learn what makes a nonprofit successful and how anyone can turn their life around find meaning and fulfillment. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 700 with Charity Water founder Scott Harrison.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:32Lewis Howes?

  Edmund Mbakka said, no matter how disappointing you believe your life currently is, it's never too late to start reshaping it to become an amazing testimony. Welcome everyone to episode 700. Holy schnikes, I'm so pumped about this. I've been reflecting about this for the last couple of weeks as 700 has been coming up. And I've just been kind of overwhelmed with so much gratitude because there's been a lot happening in my life over the last two months. We launched a talk show. We went through some challenges in our business.

• 1:11Lewis Howes?

  But then things really started to take off after this talk show came out on Facebook called Inspiring Life. We had a massive interview with Kobe Bryant that it went viral all over the place. ESPN picked it up and about 35 other major platforms picked it up. We had Rachel Hollis on last week, which has been taking over. If you haven't listened to that episode, make sure to listen to it. We had Dr. Joe Dispenza, which has been going viral as well. We had Marissa Peer about how your thoughts will either heal you or kill you.

• 1:49Lewis Howes?

  We had some incredible episodes that came out over the last few weeks, which has skyrocketed this podcast. Literally in the last month, it has gone up so much, the traffic, the subscribers. So if you're here now and you're new, then I want to thank you for being here. We're currently number 25 in the world on all of podcasts, which is mind blowing. And I'm just so grateful that we're all here together. This is one of the most powerful and empowering movements. In the world where we bring together like-minded, conscious achievers to help you unlock your greatest potential, find that truth that you've been looking for, make an impact

• 2:33Lewis Howes?

  on the people around you, and really live a purposeful life. And I'm so excited about our episode today. It's a perfect timing, actually, for episode 700 to reflect on the purpose for your life and are you making the maximum impact in your personal life and the people around you. Well, Scott Harrison, after a decade of indulging his darkest vices as a nightclub promoter, he declared spiritual, moral, and emotional bankruptcy. He spent two years on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, saw the effects of dirty water firsthand, and came back to New York City on a mission to change the world. Upon returning

• 3:13Lewis Howes?

  to New York in 2006, having seen the effects of dirty water firsthand, he turned his full attention to the global water crisis and the then 1.1 billion people living without access to clean water. And in this interview, we talk about how at 28, Scott was living life of drugs, clubs, and was broken inside, and started to ask if it was the legacy he wanted to leave behind. Also, we talk about where most of the world's diseases come from. We discuss his mission of providing clean water to the world and how it can be accomplished, why it's okay to start working on something that has no end in sight, and

• 3:53Lewis Howes?

  why it's important for a company to tell a great story. And if you're not telling a great story in your life, in your business, in your career, you're not going to make the lasting change you want. We talked about this with Kobe Bryant. His answer to living a great life was really being a great storyteller. So this is going to shape you in a way that you might not think possible. Take a moment to listen throughout this entire time. Listen to the stories that Scott tells. Let it resonate on your heart, on your soul, and see how it impacts you. And let me know what you think. Send me a message on Instagram story. Send me a direct message. Tag me on your story while you post this to your friends.

• 4:36Lewis Howes?

  Let your friends know you're listening. It's LewisHowes.com/700. Tag myself and Scott Harrison. We'd love to hear from you throughout this interview. All right, my friends, I'm so excited about this one again, episode 700. Make sure to share with your friends, LewisHowes.com/700. Let me know what you think over on your Instagram story, tag me and Scott Harrison. And without further ado, let me introduce you to the one, the only Scott Harrison.

• 5:11Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness Podcast. We've got the legendary Scott Harrison.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  What's up, brother?

• 5:17Lewis Howes?

  Good to see you, man.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Good to see you. Thanks for coming, having me back.

• 5:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, man, I'm pumped you're here.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I invited myself back on.

• 5:22Lewis Howes?

  You did, it's all good. You're always welcome, man. You've got a new book out called Thirst.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 5:26Lewis Howes?

  Make sure you guys check this out. Powerful story of redemption, compassion, and a mission to bring clean water to the world. And you've been running this organization Charity Water for 12 years. You've raised how much money now total?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  320 million.

• 5:42Lewis Howes?

  320 million raised. That's incredible.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can't believe it sometimes.

• 5:48Lewis Howes?

  Over a quarter billion dollars donations.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, from a million people. So it's really been led by small donations, a million people over 100 countries.

• 5:57Lewis Howes?

  Five, 10, 20 buck donations.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  So many of those, so many of those.

• 6:01Lewis Howes?

  What's the biggest donation that you're allowed to talk about?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  There's one family that's given over 15 million on the overhead side.

• 6:08Lewis Howes?

  For the business?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so remember, we have, Charity Water has a unique business model where 12 years ago, we made a promise to the public and we said 100% of public donations, without exception, will only fund water projects that give people clean water. And in bank account number two, we will raise the overhead separately somehow. We had no idea how we do it at the beginning. That now looks like 130 families, entrepreneurs that support our 80 staff, our flights, our office, the, you know, the Epson copy machine and the toner.

• 6:39Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  So that over a million people can give in this pure way and know that whether they give a dollar or a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars, all that money is going straight to the project. So we have one family who over 11 years has given over 15 million bucks.

• 6:52Lewis Howes?

  15 million, because it costs you, you said around 10 plus million a year just to run the overhead, the office, the operations. You've got 80 employees in New York and then you've got 650 around the world.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that are working on the water projects.

• 7:05Lewis Howes?

  That are working on building the wells and everything else, right?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  It's not easy.

• 7:10Lewis Howes?

  Crazy, man. So is your time and energy more focused on reaching out to the public to get those micro donations? Or is it, I gotta cultivate these hundred relationships to make sure we've got the lights on every day?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  It's a great question. It's both. Someone told me once that a good CEO does three things. They set the vision for the company, hire amazing people, and then make sure the company doesn't run out of money.

• 7:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, right.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  So I'm really focused on that one because from a business model approach, we can become insolvent with a hundred million dollars in the bank of the public's money, right? So all of the money, all these micro donations, all the birthday campaigns that are coming in, the spring, the subscription, which we can talk about later, we can't touch any of that to pay our office rent or to pay...

• 7:56Lewis Howes?

  So you could have a billion dollars in the bank and go broke.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Bankrupt.

• 8:01Lewis Howes?

  Because you can't manage it.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  And everybody's checks would bounce.

• 8:03Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  It's a terrifying proposition when you get to scale. So that's why I spend so much time really on those 130 families. We've been blessed. I mean, it's the founders of Twitter, Facebook, key execs at Apple, like Johnny Ive and Angela Aron's. It's venture capitalists. It's a bunch of your friends. I mean, you know 40 people in that group. Probably 20 of them have been on here. And they love actually supporting the overhead. They love supporting our staff. They love their money going to a software engineer who's coding to save lives, or for a water hydrologist who's making sure our projects are of the highest quality. They love that. So in a way, it's hard, but it's not. Once you find

• 8:45Speaker 01

  those people. We hosted an event last night and someone immediately said, I want to be family 132.

• 8:51Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  So it grows. But I spend a lot of time there.

• 8:55Lewis Howes?

  What's the minimum someone can be a part of the family?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, how the business works in that bank account, people give on three-year commitments, between $60,000 a year up to a million a year. And that allows us to play, to basically to plan cash flow. And then our job is to give everybody such a good experience in those three years, develop that relationship, that not only do they sign up for the following three years...

• 9:20Lewis Howes?

  They give more.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  But they give more if they can, if they have the ability. So we'll have some people who will start at the entry level, even though they might have a much higher capacity. And then we have other people who are really reaching to that lowest level. And they'll say, this is the biggest charitable gift I've ever given in my life, but I really want to support the overhead. I believe in this model. So it's a little bit of a dance. You know, you have to run these things in perfect balance. And right now, the water side is growing faster than that side. So I'm spending more attention over here.

• 9:50Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  But there have been times in the past where we got an infusion of cash on the overhead side. And they're like, okay, now we have to go figure out how to leverage that and become even more efficient.

• 10:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I guess you could always take a loan out. If you had a hundred million dollars in the bank, you could kind of take a loan out on.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  You can't really take a loan against that, though, because you could never use that money to pay it back. I mean, that's, people don't know this, Louis, but we actually, you know, we talked about this hundred percent model. We actually pay back credit card fees, which sounded like a great idea 10 years ago, right?

• 10:22Lewis Howes?

  Now you're like, three percent is a lot.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Dude, it's like $350,000 a year back to Amex, Visa, and MasterCard. So if somebody won on our website and gave a hundred dollars with their American Express, we get 97. You could argue, nobody would expect us to send more than $97 to the field.

• 10:39Lewis Howes?

  You said a hundred percent, yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  So we repay the three bucks that we didn't even get from their donation. And then we send out the hundred and we track it.

• 10:47Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  So it actually costs us money to raise money. So it's a fascinating, I talk most other social entrepreneurs out of the hundred percent model. I'm like, this was right for us. It was unique to the problem we were trying to solve. But steer clear. I think that the value that I really most believe in is that people want to know where their money's going. So I just tell people, look, just be transparent with their donors. Donors, as we've proved, are open to many different value propositions. If I told you right now that the biggest challenge for the organization was a broken copier machine, right? And I needed 1,350 bucks to fix it, you would write a $1,350 check.

• 11:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Like, you want to solve a problem. And you would say, well, what do you need the copy machine for? And I'd say, well, we need it to produce these documents for our local partners, anything, whatever it is. So people are open to a lot of value propositions. But I think what's been wrong with charity in the past is it feels like a black hole to so many people. You know, your money goes into this pot.

• 11:45Lewis Howes?

  You don't know where it's going.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  You don't know where it's going. You don't even know if it's been deployed. I mean, people have. Come up to me, you know, with the horror stories of the disaster relief. And, you know, they find out 10 years after the hurricane or the tsunami. There's a billion dollars still sitting there.

• 12:00Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  From their 10s and 20s and 50 texts donation, so.

• 12:05Lewis Howes?

  Knowing where your money goes is the most important thing. I help a lot with Pensil Promise.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:09Lewis Howes?

  And, you know, when you build a school and you know that all your money went towards that school and you have your name there and they do a whole video where you're like, "Okay, I know my money is going towards this community and towards these kids and this family."

• 12:22Speaker 01

  But I'd argue you'd also be willing to pay for the office rent for a month if you knew where your money was going. "Hey, I'm paying for the New York office and there's a bunch of people working their butts off here to provide education around the world."

• 12:34Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  It's just, it's the clarity that I think people really want.

• 12:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's it. You guys do a great job with that. You track it all.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  We try.

• 12:40Lewis Howes?

  Track it all, yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  We try.

• 12:41Lewis Howes?

  Now, I'm curious. You've got this fancy New York City office.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Can I tell you the office story?

• 12:48Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Okay, so our first office was an apartment. And I was living on the closet floor at 109 Spring. It was a loft. My old club partner had taken me back in when I came back from Liberia. And I said, you know, "You can use my couch to run your cute little charity thing that you want to do. And you can sleep on the walk-in closet floor." Because he had somebody else in the bedroom. So that was the first office. And I remember just like, man, first of all, he was doing a lot of drugs. So this was, this was the, you know, if you talk about how not to start a charity, and I write about this in the book, and, you know, people are like, "Do you really want to tell people that Charity Water started in a drug den?" I'm like, "Well, it was true."

• 13:29Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  So we had to get out of there and we couldn't afford an office. And then finally, I remember like, you know, praying for some sort of miracle. And wouldn't you know, somebody sends me an email and says, "There's a space you could sublet." It's a couple of blocks from where we were. And it was a greasy printing press. And we walked in, I remember my feet were sticking on the floors. You know, you kind of like.

• 13:50Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  It would make the sound, like the sticking sound from the grease. So I'm like, "It's perfect because it's not the couch."

• 13:56Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  And it's not a place where people are having, you know, late night parties. So we worked there, we outgrew that, and then. I meet this landlord and he takes me into this beautiful space in Soho. It's completely unfinished. It was maybe 6,000 square feet. And he says, "How much do you think you could pay for this space?" And it should have been 25 a month. 25,000 a month. And I said, "I think I can pay five grand a month." Wow. And he says, "Sure." And then he said, "It's gonna cost about hundreds of thousands of dollars to build this space out. You know, do you have a budget?" And I said, "Okay, I'll do it for you." Wow. So, we wound up at $8 a square foot. In New York City. In New York City. What's the normal? Oh, 60, 70. Wow.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  And then he didn't change our rent for five years. We outgrew that space. I since had taken him to Ethiopia. So I'm like, "This guy's gotta catch the vision," right? Because he's been so generous. What's even amazing, more amazing about it is he didn't get a tax deduction. Right? So this was just pure giving. Wow. Because the IRS would say, "Well, how do we know you would have rented the space?" Right. Right? So he was just discounting. So I take him to Ethiopia. It was an amazing trip. As we outgrow it, we go back on the market because he said, "I got nothing else for you." I'm at 99.9% occupancy. All my other buildings are full. So I go out into like 65 market. Imagine going from 8 to like 65 in bad neighborhoods. I mean, not even, and then they were all gonna require build-out.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  So this was so far from where we were. Because you outgrew the space. We just outgrew the space. So we wound up meeting the WeWork guys and they were gonna give me a, you know, a pretty good deal doing a build-out in a new WeWork. And right before this happened, I was in Rwanda and I'm on my BlackBerry. I'm like, "Before I sign the WeWork deal, I should just check with our landlord one more time." So I email him from the back of a Land Rover in like the Rolando district of Rwanda. And he writes me back. He said, "Great timing. An entire floor opened up in my Tribeca building." No way. "You can have it." So he gives it to us for less than half-market. So now, this is 23,000 square feet. And it's gonna be a really big build-out, like 1.8 million bucks. This is the one I went to and visited?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  This is, um, this might be, uh, we've been there a couple of years. Okay. No, I think this is, this is the new one. Yeah. Anyway, so he says, "Well, I'll tell you what. I know you're not gonna wanna pay 1.8 million, so why don't I start bringing in the contractors and the plumbers? And you do your thing. You know, show them the photos of your work. Let's see if you can make them cry.

• 16:27Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  And we'll see if they'll donate too. So then there's this parade of, you know, plumbers. I mean, these guys have hands that are three size the size, you know, three times the size of mine. And I remember this one moment where I've got, you know, a bunch of kinda misty-eyed contractors, and I'm just like selling the dream, you know. Look, 100% of the money goes. The way that we built this organization is by generosity from people just like you, who can donate your plumbing or donate your contract. The architect gave his entire feedback.

• 16:58Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Samsung gave us $50,000 of TVs. WeWork gave us furniture from their warehouses. So we wound up getting 1.3 million donated.

• 17:05Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  So you walk into the office now, and people immediately say, "Wow, this is nicer than Facebook's office." I mean, it's gorgeous. And we hand everyone a card that says, "Here are the 30 vendors that donated to make this space possible."

• 17:19Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  You immediately then kinda go to the wrong.

• 17:21Lewis Howes?

  Where's my money going?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Because if someone walks in, there is, you know, it's too nice.

• 17:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  And that actually is another issue I have. There is a poverty mentality, I think, with nonprofits. And I don't think it's helpful. I mean, we are, it is hard enough. We're competing against Facebook and Google and Twitter and Square to hire talent.

• 17:42Lewis Howes?

  Right, high-quality talent.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Right, and we have no equity. There's no stock to give out. Our comp is a lot lower. There's no masseuse at Charity Water. You know, there's no two-star Michelin chef, like, you know, doing breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So we at least need an awesome workspace.

• 17:58Lewis Howes?

  An environment. If you're gonna be spending all your time.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  It's so important.

• 18:01Lewis Howes?

  You need to have an abundance mentality, I'm assuming, too. You need to be thinking like, we need to be raising a lot more, and I wanna feel good when I'm out reaching out to people. I wanna feel good when I'm designing something or editing a video.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:12Lewis Howes?

  Feel good about the work. Not feel crummy, right?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  That's right, and we're doing tours, so people are constantly coming through the office. And that's a reflection of our excellence value. It's all glass, there's not a single, actually the only private space in the office is the maternity room, but everybody can see everything and it's, the office is built around our value of transparency. So it's, anyway, so it is, it is a nice office, but it's a fraction of the cost.

• 18:38Lewis Howes?

  That's amazing. Do you think you would be able to raise as much money as you've raised being in a different city?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  No way. New York is so important to us. It's important for two reasons. One, everybody stops by. I mean, people from Singapore are flying through New York, people from Sweden and Denmark, you know, our donors there are flying through New York. The connection to London, to the West Coast, to, it's just this place where everybody's coming through. And being downtown, it's funny, so many people's favorite hotels are the hotels that are right near the office.

• 19:12Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  You know, the Greenwich and the Crosby and, so it's been really instrumental. The other thing for us is, our work is in 26 countries. So there's no better airport than JFK, outside of Europe.

• 19:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  To fly. So if we had, if we were flying out of a regional city, it would add so much extra time and money to our programs team. There, we calculated it one year, I think they're flying to the moon and back like three times. And this is the team of 18 people who are monitoring Charity Waters partners and auditing and, so, New York is, New York has been really important for us, because it's a, it's a long way to go to these places.

• 19:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like two days to get to Ethiopia sometimes.

• 19:53Lewis Howes?

  Imagine you were in the Midwest for the last 12 years, how much money do you think you would have raised in Oklahoma City?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know.

• 20:00Lewis Howes?

  You think you could have still had the impact?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't know. I think it would have been more difficult. I think New York, LA, San Francisco, I think some of these, you know, Austin, I think would be, would be a good city to, to raise money, but the great thing about New York is you've got finance, you've got arts, you've got entertainment, and then you have everybody just constantly coming through. So the office is just, there are, you know, there are 25 visitors a day, it feels like, just people coming through that have connected. And we have people coming through, Louis, who give 10 bucks a month.

• 20:32Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  They just turn up. They wanna see it. Like, is it real? I've been given ten bucks a month for, you know, for two and a half years.

• 20:38Lewis Howes?

  You let anyone come in?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we have tours. We actually have tours and we do a lot of tours for kids where we'll give kids a passport and they go to seven different stations within the office. They pump a well with a sensor, they put on virtual reality headsets, they go to Ethiopia, they watch movies, they answer questions, and at the end, they complete their passport and it unlocks a thirty dollar donation in their name.

• 21:02Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  So it's really been important for us, I think, to be there.

• 21:05Lewis Howes?

  That's powerful. Now-

• 21:07Speaker 01

  You gotta come check out the new space the next time you're there.

• 21:09Lewis Howes?

  I'm gonna be there in a few weeks, so I'm gonna hit you up.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:11Lewis Howes?

  Can you tell the story of how you got into Charity Water in the first place?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it wasn't the most traditional path. It was by way of drinking drugs and nightlife. So I'd been raised-

• 21:22Lewis Howes?

  Lot of clubbing?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Lot of clubbing. I've been raised in a conservative Christian family. Um, in, I was born in Philadelphia, raised in New Jersey. Uh, when I was four, my mom becomes an invalid as there was a carbon oxide gas leak in our house. And unbeknownst to us, we all start getting sick, effectively dying from these fumes that we, we couldn't see, couldn't smell. And this was before that carbon oxide detector had been invented. So, you know, you couldn't go buy them in blister packs at Home Depot. And my mom, on New Year's Day, passes out unconscious on her bedroom floor. We rush her to the hospital and after a long series of blood tests, find the massive amounts of carbon oxide.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Dad rips the heater out, finds the default himself in the heater, and mom, from this point, is never the same again. So her immune system is irreparably compromised. She's allergic to anything chemical at this point. She's wearing masks and connected to oxygen. So childhood was just weird. Dad and I bounced back to normal health. We were only being exposed at night when we were sleeping in the house, and she was exposed twenty-four hours as she was fixing it up. So, childhood was, you know, church childhood, taking care of mom. Not really feeling sorry for myself, but certainly wanting a more normal life.

• 22:39Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  And then at eighteen, dude, I just went berserk. Grew my hair down at my shoulders, joined a rock band, moved to New York City. The band eventually, and very quickly, broke up, um, for drugs and just the fact that we hated each other.

• 22:51Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Uh, and then I became a club promoter for ten years, and I spent the next- A decade working at forty different venues.

• 22:58Lewis Howes?

  In New York.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  In New York City. As we called it, we invented models and bottles. This high-end Fashion Week parties where people would spend twenty bucks on a vodka soda and we'd sell champagne for, you know, eight hundred or a thousand dollars. Champagne that cost us fifty bucks to buy.

• 23:14Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  And.

• 23:15Lewis Howes?

  Selling the lifestyle, selling.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, the dream, the velvet rope, you know, your life has meaning if you get past the five hundred people waiting outside, if you spend thousands of dollars on booze, you know, if you go home with a pretty guy or the pretty girl, you've arrived. I had picked up every vice that you imagine might come with the territory. So I'd been smoking two packs of cigarettes for ten years, I had a gambling problem, I had a drinking problem, cocaine, ecstasy, MDMA, I mean pornography, strip clubs, like everything short of heroin, pretty much. And my life looked so glamorous on the outside because I'd be jumping into black Mercedes with beautiful models during Fashion Week in Milan or Paris. But I was this rotten human being on the inside.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  And I had this moment of catharsis at twenty-eight years old. I was in South America on this, the perfect vacation, and just realized that I was broken. I was emotionally bankrupt, I was spiritually bankrupt. I had come so far, I'd betrayed, you know, any shred of morality from my childhood. And my legacy, if I actually continued down this path, if I didn't die by the time, you know, I was thirty-five or forty, my legacy would be perhaps one of the most meaningless legacies, you know, on the planet. My tombstone was gonna read, here lies, you know, Scott Harrison, the nightclub promoter, who has gotten ten million people wasted. You know, who wants that on their tombstone?

• 24:41Lewis Howes?

  No one.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  I had a real change of heart and rediscovered faith in a much different way, I think, as an adult, and became so interested in the idea of virtue and purity and service to others, and then wound up selling everything I owned. And said, "Look, what would the opposite of my life look like?" I actually asked the question, "What would the exact 180-degree opposite of my life look like?" And the only thing I could think was, "Quit everything, sell everything I own, and go serve the poor for a year." Take one year, almost as a tie, they're a tenth of the 10 years that you decadently and heathen and selfishly wasted, and go see where that leads me. So I do, I sell everything.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  I start applying to the famous humanitarian organizations that I've heard of over the years. I probably put in 10 or 15 applications, and then I'm denied by all of them. Like, no one will take me. No, they're like, "We're serious humanitarians here. You're some club rat drunk kid." How would I in any way be useful to them? So I'm turned down by Save the Children and, you know, I don't think the Peace Corps turned me down, bro.

• 25:50Lewis Howes?

  Everyone. They want to take your free labor, yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  So finally, one organization writes me back and says, "Scott, if you're willing to go live in post-war Liberia, and if you're willing to pay us $500 a month, you can volunteer." I'm like, "This is great." I mean, what's more opposite than paying to go to the poorest country in the world at the time? Liberia had just come out of a 14-year civil war. So I was all in. I gave my credit card details, and weeks later, I sailed in on a giant hospital ship, a 522-foot converted ocean liner that they'd turned into a 42-bed hospital with state-of-the-art operating theaters. And we sailed in with doctors and surgeons to West Africa to help people who had no access to medical care. I thought, nobody believes this,

• 26:37Speaker 01

  but I actually thought Africa was a country, okay? Not made of like 54. I mean, I just, I couldn't be more ignorant about the developing world. And when I saw extreme poverty for the first time in my life, it really broke my heart. I mean, I was in a country with no electricity, no running water, no sewage. I was watching children with four-pound tumors suffocate to death on their face. I was seeing 60-year-old women who had cleft lips and cleft palates, and food and water was spilling out of their mouth because they didn't have access to a $200 surgery. You know, people who were blind with cataracts, who needed a $150 simple procedure to give them their sight back. So I spent two years volunteering.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  And one of the cool things was I was immediately able to redeem the decade in nightlife because I took my list with me. So I rolled into West Africa on this humanitarian gig with 15,000 emails of some pretty influential people in New York. Wow. And, you know, open rates back then were almost 100%. So everybody just got your emails. And I turned on a dime and they went from getting emails from me about, you know, the Prada store opening in Soho, New York, to pictures of leprosy and pictures of extreme suffering. And I realized that the stories and the images actually had the ability to move people to action, to greater compassion and empathy. People would write me back and say like, I'm sitting here at my desk at Chanel

• 28:07Speaker 01

  in bright lights, tears are streaming down my face. And I had no idea that this kind of suffering existed. How do I give money? How do I help? So that was a two-year journey. And among all of the things that I'd seen, the one thing that just didn't sit right with me, the one thing that wasn't okay on my watch was the fact that people were drinking dirty water. And I learned that 50% of Liberia was drinking from swamps and from ponds and from rivers. And I learned that the health implications of this, that many times our doctors would turn up and there would be more sick people than we could help. And we turned thousands away. Imagine like the feeding the 5,000 or something, right?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Like, we'd be like, we only have a little bit of food, so you guys all have to go. And that was what it felt like. And just constantly turning people away. And I learned that so many of these people were sick because of the water that they had to drink. So I found my issue, came back at 30. The root was water. The root cause of so much sickness, and in fact, 52% of all sickness throughout the developing world is because of bad water and a lack of sanitation. It's water and toilets. Half of the sick people could be made well. In all of these countries where people are suffering if they just had the most basic need. So the problem at the time was 1.1 billion. People didn't have clean water. One out of six, Louis. Wow.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  One out of six. I found some of our early artwork and you know, we would have six humans and one of them, you know, we would fill up with dirty water and the other five figures would have clean water. It was such a staggering problem, but I'm like, I'm gonna solve this in my lifetime. Like, I'm gonna come back and work to make sure that a billion people get access to clean water and that we see a day on earth when, when everyone has clean water. I think the, the contrast for me around water was so stark because I vividly remember in our clubs, we would sell Voss water, you know, those tall bottles of water. For like 12 bucks. Yeah, 10, 15 bucks. And people would come into the club and they would order bottles and not even open them. Bro, they'd order $250 of water. Pour out or something. It would just sit there. They'd drink champagne or vodka.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  So the fact that, you know, like we live in a $12 bottle world and a billion humans, simply because of where they're born, are drinking from swamps and risking their lives and children are dying of diarrhea. Bro, like, you know, our kids get Pedialyte, you know, the Duane Reade. It's just so far into that the children would be dying of diarrhea in their mother's arms. So when I saw this, I just wanted to do something about it. So that was kind of the big idea. The mission was gonna be clean water for everyone in my lifetime. Wow, billion people. Billion at the time. What's it at now? 663. 663 million people. Yep. Don't have clean water. Yeah, 1 in 10. So we've made a lot of progress. You're getting there.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Not just me, you know, I mean, gosh, there's so many people. You're getting there. There's a lot of organizations. So many people are working on this and, and there's actually been more awareness. 12 years ago when I started, people would look at me like I had 17 heads when I would tell them about the water crisis, right? Well, America's always had 100% water coverage for as long as they can remember. And I think this issue has become more important to people. You know, and you have issues like Flint, Michigan and it's a little more top of mind now. Oh wow, maybe everyone's water isn't clean all the time. Maybe this isn't something that we should just take for granted. So a lot of, a lot of progress has been made, but still, bro, 1 in 10. It's a lot. Too many. But it's been how many years now? 12 years? 12 years. 300 million? Is that 400 million almost? Like 500. 500 million, so. 1 to.

• 31:48Lewis Howes?

  Six point, six hundred something.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, four, you're right.

• 31:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow. I mean, how, a billion people was the original vision, right?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  It's just everybody. Like, just make sure that no one on earth is drinking dirty water.

• 31:57Lewis Howes?

  It was a billion, one point one billion people. What did you say to people when you said, "I want to impact one point one billion people's lives"?

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Well, you gotta start somewhere.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  So, we started with, with our first, you know, your first well, really. You started with your first water project. Let's do one well.

• 32:16Lewis Howes?

  Start small.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 32:18Lewis Howes?

  And how much does a well cost to fund or build?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Ten grand.

• 32:21Lewis Howes?

  Ten grand to fully develop a well, build a well.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  In a community. And now, it's thirteen different technologies. So now, it's wells and springs and rainwater systems and gravity fit systems and solar systems. And wells are still a big part of what we do, drilling wells. When there is groundwater, it's an amazing solution. But yeah, it started with a party and we're like, "Let's do one." Actually, there were party in a nightclub for my birthday. That was day one of Charity Water, my thirty-first birthday. I got seven hundred people to come out because I lured them with open bar. And then I said, "On your way in, though, you have to donate twenty dollars." In this, I remember there was a Plexi bucket there. And, you know, people would just walk in, drop twenty bucks in. And we raised the fifteen thousand dollars and we took it to Uganda.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  And then we sent, you know, the photo and the GPS of where that money had gone to all the people that came to the party and said, "You did this. People are drinking clean water in a refugee camp in Uganda because you came to a party and gave twenty bucks. And here's where a hundred percent of that money went."

• 33:21Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  And we had this proof of concept within hours. And the emails coming back, "This is amazing. I never expected to hear from a charity." Charities normally take money and just ask for more money. You know, "How can we do this again? How do we do more?" And, you know, twelve years later, it's now twenty-nine thousand water projects. So the one is now twenty-nine thousand, you know, for eight and a half million people from that first village.

• 33:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's funny, I just got to go see the first well recently.

• 33:50Lewis Howes?

  But you did.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  In northern Uganda. Yeah, for my birthday. I saw my thirty-first birthday. I'm forty, I just turned forty-three. On Friday. So it was twelve years old. It was still pumping water. So over a decade later.

• 34:03Lewis Howes?

  People are still using it?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Dude, it was ugly. I mean, it was all banged up. It was, you know, it was gnarly, like the metal was a little sheared and.

• 34:10Lewis Howes?

  Are people using it still?

• 34:11Speaker 01

  They are. And what's cool is the refugee camp that had thirty one thousand, six hundred and thirty eight people at the time is now down to about five, six hundred people. And they're still using that well.

• 34:22Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  So they've been resettled, but there's still a group there around it. And we, our water program guy that was with me said, you know, we think that well has been pumped fifty million times.

• 34:33Lewis Howes?

  Holy.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  That handle has been up and down. So that was really cool. That was a really special moment. I read about that in the book, just being able to go back and, and, and see it.

• 34:43Lewis Howes?

  And you talk about in the book, your first kind of section is about getting pure. As you said, you wanted to become pure, purified of everything that you've done for the last ten years in your life. What does that mean to be pure, though? And I love how it's like pure water, pure life, but.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm pretty extreme, so I had to just quit it. I had to never smoke again and never touch coke or any of that again. And, and, you know, never gamble again. Like, I had to have the off switch for all of that. There was something, it's funny, I remember going out with a bang. Like before I got on the ship and before I surrendered my passport and became a part of the mission. The night before, where I had like eight beers, smoked three packs of cigarettes. I knew that I had to walk away from it. And there was something almost, you know, prophetic or symbolic about walking up a gangway of a ship. Right? Imagining the gangway being pulled up and then sailing away to my new life. And leaving all of the crap, all the detritus, like on the shore.

• 35:40Lewis Howes?

  In New York City?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  No, this was in, I, I actually met the ship in, in Tenerife, which was an island off the coast of Africa, and then sailed into West Africa.

• 35:50Lewis Howes?

  But it's something about a ceremony like that, that allows you to leave one part of your life behind and move forward.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  And there were times, believe me, where, you know, it was easy to slip back into some of those bad habits. And I always felt like there would be grace and there would be forgiveness. But why mess it up? Why stop the roll? Right? The new story of my life was so much more joyful. I mean, I was, I was a slave to myself. I was, I was a slave to the pursuit of money, the pursuit of girls, the pursuit of status. And, and I just realized this is a never ending pursuit of more that ends. That, you know, it doesn't end well. It ends in a bad way because someone always has a better. Car, someone always has a better watch. You know, someone always has more money, or the plane, or, you know, it is, it truly never ends.

• 36:37Lewis Howes?

  Comparison game is a, is a bad game to play.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  So now the work is, you know, is in, how do we help as many people as possible? That's also a never-ending work.

• 36:47Lewis Howes?

  1.1 billion people is a lot of people.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  It's a lot of people, and I think my favorite quote these days, you know, that I've been ending some of my talks on stage with is, I found it from like an old rabbinic text, and someone had sent me a picture of this, passing a deli in New York. And it says, "Do not be afraid of work that has no end." Don't be afraid of work that has no end. And I, in the context of our work, our work is to end the needless suffering of people right now with water. It's to serve people, it's to, to build a movement of generosity and compassion and love and giving, right? That never ends. When we solve the water crisis, when we actually see a day when no human is drinking dirty water, we're not just gonna drop our mic and go become millionaires, right?

• 37:34Speaker 01

  We're gonna then take our community, which might be 100 million people at that time. We're gonna take everything we've learned and focus on another issue. Maybe it's the fact that nobody should go to bed hungry. Maybe it's the fact that nobody should go to bed without shelter, you know, without a roof. Maybe it's, it's education, the fact that everybody should have access to an education. So it's really a never-ending pursuit. But if the pursuit is not in selfishness, if the pursuit is, is a pursuit of the, the benefit of others, it feels different. You can find a real joy and a release in that.

• 38:06Lewis Howes?

  What's the biggest lesson you've learned in the last 12 years, giving your life to service? And, and being on this mission to end suffering with, with the water crisis?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  It's been, a lot of people feel...

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Like, it's a big sacrifice. Bro, I know you got offered that big job at Facebook. Like, you know, do you ever think you should have taken it? Like, you know, bro, you're driving a Kia Sorento. You know, like, you can't pay for piano lessons for your kid. You know, like, there's this, there's this empathy that a lot of people will have. Because I haven't tried to get rich, right? I haven't gone after the money. And, and they feel like, you know, sometimes like I've made this great sacrifice. And I'm like, I haven't made the sacrifice at all. Like, think about it. Today, we will raise enough money to get thirty eight hundred humans clean water for the first time. Just in one day. Today. And then we'll do it again tomorrow, and we'll do it again the next day. So we're filling, you know, stadiums about every four to five days.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  So from Monday to Friday, you know, Madison Square Garden, we've just filled with people that are getting clean water for the first time and then emptied it out. And Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we just did it again. That's an amazing thing to be able to do. One person every fifteen seconds, you know, as we sit here because, not because of me, because of the community, because of a million people around the world that have joined Charity Water, that have rejected the apathy that would be so easy to embrace with a paralyzing global issue like this. And said, I can do something. I can donate my birthday. I can give thirty bucks a month. I can build one well. You know, our family can give up holiday gifts. I mean, we have kids doing lemonade stands like all over the country. I love the lemonade stands.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  There was a little girl in Vancouver, Louis, who did twelve. She, she came across one of our videos online, was so offended by the fact that people are drinking dirty water. The kids don't have clean water to drink. So she does twelve lemonade stands, one of them in the rain, just undeterred. At her last lemonade stand, she convinces a local band to perform on the sidewalk next to the lemonade stand. To attract an audience. To attract an audience. She sells fifty six hundred dollars of lemonade. Builds half a well.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  So these stories keep us going. There was a little girl named Nora who was six. Again, saw one of our videos and goes up to her room that night and she's, she, she says, you know, should I give or should I not give? Should I keep my allowance? Should I give my allowance, right? And it's like this internal bait. She comes down in the morning and she drops eight dollars and 15 cents on the kitchen counter and draws a picture of herself next to a well in Africa with clean water coming out. Wow. And writes us a note and says, dear Charity Water, here's, my name is Nora. Here's my eight dollars and 15 cents and I don't want kids to die of dirty water. So, you know, this arrives in the mail and we were so inspired. We actually sent a camera crew down, interviewed this astonishing little girl.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  And on World Water Day, we, we asked everyone we knew to give eight dollars and 15 cents and raise like 80 grand. Wow. You know, in her honor to build eight wells. So these, you know, it's an amazing thing to be able to do. Did she go to Africa? She hasn't yet, but, but we should totally take her when she gets a little older. To see where that goes. And, you know, I guess the way that I would love for billions and billions of dollars to flow through, you know, my hands, our hands. I mean, the, the way of keeping score is money for others, not money for ourself. My greatest ambition really about money is to actually write a million dollar check personally to a charity someday. Cause someone did it for me at a really, really important time and it changed the game for us. It was way too much money, right?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  It's normally what happens with charities is there's an amount that people are giving, right? Like this is a charity that people give 10 grand to. Right. Or this is a charity that people give a hundred dollars to. Well, this person came in when we were a charity that gave, people gave 10 grand to and they gave us a million dollars. What was the biggest donation before that? Maybe. Fifty maybe or something. Yeah, something like that. They gave a million? A million. It's almost too overwhelming. It's almost like. It was a year. It was a year of capital. I, I tell the story in the book, so I won't ruin the, the drama, but it was, it was at a moment of desperation and this was, this saved the organization from insolvency. You needed, you needed a payment in the next couple of weeks, probably. We were running, we were not, we weren't unable to pay our staff, but we had 881,000 dollars in the bank we couldn't touch.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  And we were unwilling to compromise by either borrowing against it or borrowing one penny. So I was gonna shut the organization down and say Charity Water didn't work.

• 42:40Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  This is three hundred and twenty million dollars ago. But this is three hundred and eighteen million dollars ago. I mean, this is.

• 42:47Lewis Howes?

  This is year one, year two?

• 42:48Speaker 01

  This is a year and a half in. We had raised a couple million dollars for water projects. Couldn't keep the lights on on the overhead account. Just couldn't tell our story. And I I'd been I'd been praying, if I'm honest, with very little faith, with no faith, that anything would happen for a miracle. I'd been like, God, I need a miracle. Like, you know, would the sky part? Something needs to happen here. And a complete stranger walked in off the street, sat with me for two hours and said, cool, I'll give a million dollars into the overhead account.

• 43:20Lewis Howes?

  Crazy. You're like, there's the miracle.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  So so I want to do that for somebody at some point. So that, you know, the ambition is not a house in the Hamptons or, you know, to drive a Mercedes or anything like that. But I'd love to be able to actually give more generously. I I.

• 43:35Lewis Howes?

  You're not making a big enough salary to do that yet. Because you make a a charity salary, right?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we're benchmarked and.

• 43:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, for years, the board has always tried to pay me more because the the benchmark in New York is higher than I've taken. And I'm like, yeah, but I'm just gonna give more away. So anyway, at some point, it'd be fun to maybe it's a side hustle.

• 43:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  The the charity side hustle.

• 43:59Lewis Howes?

  You talked about story. You weren't telling your story that well. How how important is it for any business owner or charity to be able to tell a story really well? And what is the the key principle of telling a great story?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. I would say the one if if I had to pick one factor for our success, it would surprise people. A lot of people think it would be brand and design. Others would would think it's the hundred percent model or transparency or proof or technology or all this stuff. It's storytelling. We are a culture of we we built a culture of storytellers. And people don't respond to facts and statistics.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  If you know, somebody watching or listening to this thinks of the number 663 million humans. It's just like a numbing, nothing number, right? We can't imagine 663 million units of anything, let alone people without clean water. But if I tell a story of a 13-year-old girl who was walking eight hours every day with a clay pot of water on her back, and one day she slips and falls and she breaks her pot and she spills her water, and instead of going back for more water, she hangs herself from a tree.

• 45:09Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  And the village elders find a 13-year-old girl's body swinging from a fragile tree, right? That is a different resonance, right? And that's, sorry, Letakeros was one of the 663 people. Or if I talk about all the statistics of the benefits of water and 52% of disease, and water makes people healthier and wealthier, and $1 invested in water and sanitation yields $4 to $8. I could throw more data around water than than people could even handle. But if I tell a story of a woman named Helen Appio in northern Uganda, who, for the first time in her life, gets clean water close to her house and doesn't have to walk hours anymore, and tells us that, for the first time in her life, she feels beautiful

• 45:55Speaker 01

  because she has enough water to wash her face and her clothes and her body and keep clean. We learn after talking to her that she'd been making sacrifices in putting her children and her husband first. So all the water she would walk and collect, she would use for them because she thought it was more important to keep her kids clean and her husband clean and their clothes clean. So she sacrificed her own sense of beauty and wellness. We're a culture of, of just, we love telling stories. One of, one of, um, one of my favorites is, one of the things that we also do is, is we tell unlikely stories. So for me, the stories have to always speak to the values. What are the values that you're trying to, um, to convey

• 46:40Speaker 01

  or to personify or to put out in the world? So I'll give you an example. We crowdfunded a drilling rig for $1 million six years ago. And about 10,000 people gave $100 on average. And we called it Yellow Thunder. We painted the thing Charity Water Yellow. We put a GPS tracker on this rig and we gave it a Twitter account. And it started driving around Ethiopia, just drawing lines on a map.

• 47:04Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Four years later, I learned that our rig crashed.

• 47:08Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Okay, and it's wheels up somewhere. You know, just imagine, I mean, this is a huge, huge.

• 47:14Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  You know, machine, the wheels are up in the air. And our partner had crashed the rig. And it was gonna take them about a month to just fix it and then put it back in operation. So it wasn't totaled. But, you know, they were kind of sheepish. Sure, the word gets to me through the grapevine. It's one of those things where, you know, you crashed your dad's car. You fix it first and then you tell him you crashed the car. You're like, by the way, dad, I crashed it, but I used my money and I did the right thing. And, right, and then it's okay. But you don't tell them when the car's crashed. So anyway, I hear about this and I'm like, story, story, story. I try and send a camera crew to capture photos and videos of the crashed rig. And I am gonna send the pictures and the video back to the 10,000 people that funded it.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  And said, we crashed your rig. That was gonna be the headline. We crashed your rig. And I knew and deeply believed that this would be one of the best pieces of communication to them. And if I peel back the layer a little bit, what actually happened was our partner was trying to reach some of the most remote villages.

• 48:18Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Okay, they were on roads they shouldn't have been. But the story of that would speak to the value of tenacity in our partners. Our local partners are not drilling wells by the highways. Okay, they're not just rolling on the paved roads. They're trying to reach the most marginalized people. They are taking risks. And you know what? They miscalculated that road.

• 48:41Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Right, and we've all been in accidents, right? We've all screwed up.

• 48:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  So I think that just speaks to the vulnerability of the human condition. Anyway, they had fixed it by the time, you know, we made it happen. So I never got to send the email. But sharing failures is something, I talk a lot about this in the book. I mean, there are stories of guns and lawsuits and failed drilling. There was a time once where we raised money very publicly for a well. And we just kept drilling dry holes. And we broadcast the story via satellite to all the people and say like, We blew your money. Like, we didn't get a result here. We left this community no better than we found it. Because it was true. It was just true. It wasn't good news. Nobody wants to hear.

• 49:27Lewis Howes?

  How do you spin a story that's not good news?

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Well, you don't spin it. You just tell the story and say, we'll be back. We're gonna keep trying. If somebody was building a school and ran into local pressures, you would just, you wouldn't want them to lie to you. You would want to say, here's it, it's delayed. Or, you know, we, we went over budget. Or, we had a problem. So I think we've told hundreds and hundreds of stories over the last 12 years. And, and that's one of the things that I think, you know, what is a good story? Story has to take you there. You have to feel it. You have to, you have to visualize, you know, the emotions of, of the moment.

• 50:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  What would it be like to be the, the head welder? Or, looking at your crashed rig, is it shame? Is it terror? Is it, oh my gosh, I'm in trouble? You know, all that stuff would just make that, that moment really rich.

• 50:14Lewis Howes?

  Sure. Wow.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Are you arguing with a guy in the cabs like, I told you this road was not big enough for this rig. And the other guy's, no, but we have to get to this village because have you seen the water that they're drinking?

• 50:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So tell that story.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. You've had incredible success over the last decade plus two years. What's been the biggest challenge? Once you kind of hit critical mass and it started building this momentum and getting all this attention? And Will Smith's doing videos and celebrities and billionaires, everyone's getting involved. What's been the biggest challenge since you kind of hit that growth spurt?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:49Lewis Howes?

  Which was probably around like year four, five, six. It really started to kind of grow.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I write about this in the book, but I burned out. I burned out in year nine.

• 50:58Lewis Howes?

  Three years ago.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Three years ago.

• 51:00Lewis Howes?

  Burned out, just like.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  I was done. I was gonna give the keys to somebody else.

• 51:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, how do you, how do you?

• 51:06Speaker 01

  But what was funny, Louis, is that everybody was saying, they started warning, warning me of burnout in year three. They're like, nobody can work 80 hour weeks. And, and at the beginning, you know, I was single. We were all, it was a startup. You're fighting for your life. I'm not advocating 80 hour weeks. I mean, I probably work 50, you know, now. And, you know, I've got young kids and it's a very, very different flow. But in the beginning, it was all seven days a week. You're working all the time. You're birthing this thing. You know, you're, you're fighting for oxygen. I was, I was just, I was flying around like a maniac. I mean, ninety-six flights in Coach. You know, another thing, we've, dude, we've never bought a business class ticket in twelve years for myself or any other executive. We have never bought, used donor money. Now, the company wants to fly you out.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Oh, if Google's, if Google's flying me to London to speak, absolutely. I'll, I'll take it and I'll take the free upgrades from, from Delta. But a lot of it was just really brutal. I mean, doing fourteen-hour flights to Ethiopia and then internal flights. So I was, I was going really hard. People started to worry about me and I'm like, still here. Year five, year six, haven't burned out. Year seven, haven't burned out. And what happened is we had eight years of consecutive growth. So the line was just up and to the right. So it's exciting. Yeah, like two, six, nine, sixteen, twenty-three, twenty-eight, thirty-three, thirty-five, forty-five. Like it was just, we were just, it was growth like crazy. And what was, what was cool was at this time of growth, charitable giving was net negative.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  So giving in America was actually declining. We started, I remember there was a three-year period where we were up four-hundred-and-ninety percent and giving was net negative eight percent, negative eight. So we're like, we're crushing it, right? The value of the hundred percent model is working, transparency's working, charity in a digital age. I mean, we, you know, we were the first charity to get a million Twitter followers and the first charity to use Instagram and like, it felt really good. We were getting people clean water. We had a year where we got one million people clean water in a single year. And it just felt awesome. Our ninth year, we have our first down year. By how much? Twenty, twenty-five percent. So you were at? We went forty-five to thirty-six. Thirty-six million in donations.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  And what happened was in our forty-five million dollar year, there were two huge gifts, one for five million from a company and one for three million on the water side. For stock market and business reasons, both of them paused the second year. Interestingly, both of them have been back four million since. But we had a year where it was like, okay, we're just gonna, you know, our, our stock, our company, the one donor stock was down forty percent or so, and just said, we love you, we're gonna pause. So we couldn't replace those. That eight million. That eight million. And that we basically ended there, down eight and a half or so. So. I am like, I have failed. We gave 800,000 people clean water that year. So imagine going from A million eight hundred. All you know is growth. And growth is not money for me.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  It's not the bigger house. It's not the nice, you know, third car or the vacation. Growth means human beings are not dying. Right? So growth is always good when there are other people on the line. So I actually felt like I'd let down 200,000 people personally as the leader. I go into, I start calling my board and said, it's time for a CEO. Time for a professional CEO. I'll stay with the organization. I'll fundraise, I'll speak, but you know, let's, let's find a real leader. Right? Who can take this to the next level? And it's funny because I tried to do this in Q4. I mean, I talk about some of the stuff, so many unwise things I've done over the years. But I try and do this in Q4 of the down year.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Like, okay, so I saw the writing on the wall. There was nothing we could do to save this. And my team's like, bro, you're not starting a CEO search in like November in the fundraising season. Why don't you take a month off? You've had no sabbatical or anything like that. Take January off, go with your family out to, we went out to California and see how you feel about everything. And just pause it. If you come back, then we'll, we'll go through a process. So I take the month off. Donor gives us this house on Shasta Lake outside of Redding. And it's this beautiful house up on a cliff. It's like a retreat center, maybe eight bedrooms. And you're looking down at this extraordinary lake and mountains and pine trees.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  So I go out with my wife and my, he would have been almost two at the time, son, my first son. And we roll in to the beginning of January and it's, it's not, it's not raining, Louis. It's hailing. Like ice balls just coming. So that, that month for my sabbatical at the house on the cliff gets more rain than I think 25 years in this area in California. The house starts leaking. So we're in this gorgeous house. We got like buckets everywhere. It's hailing all of the, you know, the pool is just all. All the, um, the, uh, what, like the umbrellas are just down, getting blown off the mountain. It was like a symbol of my life. We find out we're pregnant with our second on day two.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  My wife goes into full grumpy mode because at least we are going to be drinking good wine in this cabin. Right. If we have to like winter, you know, so she's like, well, now I can't drink for a month and the two year old is running around breaking stuff in the house. So it's like this awful. You're supposed to be relaxed, enjoy it. And, and I had a lot of time to think, you know, I was going to church. I was praying. I was trying to kind of meditate on, you know, what would be next. You're calling Rob Bell out for advice. You know, I was, I instantly, I called my dad and, you know, we were talking about business. He'd just been a a middle-class business guy for 30 years, worked at the same company for 25 or so. And he's like, Scott, not everything goes up and to the right. Like, you know,

• 56:56Speaker 01

  I hate to break this to you, but not all growth curves are up and to the right forever. And he said, did you compromise your values in any way last year? I'm like, no. So did you do anything you weren't proud of? No. I said, well, Dad, actually outside of the revenue in, in so many ways, it was the very best year. We innovated in sustainability and we put sensors on our wells and we had the best employee retention, just on all of these other metrics. It was great, except the top line fundraising and the people with water. Long story short, I basically said, it's year 10. I can't quit in year 10. Right. I gotta come and finish out the decade. And rather than whining about it, why don't I actually try and solve the problem?

• 57:38Speaker 01

  What's the problem? The freaking problem is the charity water starts over at zero every January 1. So great. We raised $45 million. But the ticker starts at zero. You gotta go re-climb the $45 million hill and then grow, which we didn't do. And, you know, I started looking at some of the other business models. Spotify doesn't start at zero on January 1st. I called Daniel Ek and was like, hey, can you help me think through a subscription model? Netflix doesn't start at zero, right? Dropbox doesn't start at zero. HBO doesn't start at zero. New York Times, you know, magazine doesn't start at zero. So, um, I just said, well, what if we could create a subscription program for pure good?

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Where we get a bunch of people to commit not just to the one-time gift, not to the one-time birthday. I mean, you're a perfect example. You did one very successful birthday campaign, right? And you've done them for other causes. But I have to keep finding new Lewis's. Right. Right? And then I have to find like Lewis and a half next year. Because it's... So we saw the birthday campaigns and the fundraising campaigns raised over $50 million, but nobody repeated. It was like I ticked that box. So I would have much rather had you give 30 bucks like from the time I met you, right? 10 years ago. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So we came back and I concepted this program called The Spring. And I like the name. It's the double entendre between clean water and just the sense of new birth.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  And spring's just a time that makes people smile. And I said, let's make a 10-year anniversary video. Let's kind of run the greatest hits of the 10 years. Say, here's what we've been able to do. The first quarter of a million, the first 6.5 million people with clean water. And here's our vision for the future. And our vision for the future, we need more than drive-by philanthropy. We need more than your one-time gift. We really need to sign you up for a commitment to see the end of the water crisis. So you'll appreciate this. I come to my team and like, okay, I have an idea. We're going to do a 20-minute internet video. People were like, dude, no one's going to watch more than two minutes. You know, have you seen the data? People's attention spans are less than bumblebees, you know, or insects at this point. So I'm like, well, we can't tell our story in three minutes.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  We can't take anyone on any emotional journey. I think my first bid was 30-minute video. Sure. So I wind up, for the first time ever, and Charity Waters made over 1,000 videos in-house. I wind up hiring Jason Russell from Invisible Children and his wife to kind of consult on, how would we tell the 10-year story? A movie. Yeah, like a cinematic, you know, a short film. And we wound up making this thing. It's 19 or 20 minutes. We put it out on the internet. And wouldn't you know, I think 17% of people that watch the whole thing...

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Joined the spring.

• 1:00:27Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  And became subscribers.

• 1:00:29Lewis Howes?

  It's pretty big.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  And it starts spreading and we we hit our goal. I think we wanted a thousand members like within a few weeks. We get there, the thing starts growing.

• 1:00:38Lewis Howes?

  And thirty bucks a month, right?

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Well, it's an average, so thirty dollars gives one person clean water.

• 1:00:43Lewis Howes?

  You can give whatever you want.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have people giving a hundred a month. We have people giving three hundred a month. We have college kids giving ten bucks a month. We have kids giving the ten of their allowance to their parents.

• 1:00:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  So so it's kind of anchored around if people can give thirty dollars a month with that, every month we can give someone clean water. So this thing starts to take off. The video now has ten million views.

• 1:01:05Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  So I'm like, OK, guys, you know.

• 1:01:08Lewis Howes?

  That's good, man.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  It's as long as it needs to be, right? If the content is good. And now, you know, we were just talking about this before we started, but now we've got thirty thousand members in a hundred countries giving actually an average of thirty dollars a month, so.

• 1:01:22Lewis Howes?

  Thirty thousand paid members.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and now.

• 1:01:25Lewis Howes?

  It's huge.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  You know, it's it's it's coming up on a million dollars a month now. So we're not starting. So it's still, you know, it's still a small part of the whole.

• 1:01:34Lewis Howes?

  It's twelve million, that's a fourth or right, a fourth.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's.

• 1:01:38Lewis Howes?

  Top of the waterfalls.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's.

• 1:01:40Lewis Howes?

  Huge.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's huge. And and we have pensioners, like people are writing these amazing stories. We have people in their nineties giving their pension. We have people canceling HBO, canceling other subscriptions, saying, you know what, I'd rather have people get clean water, you know, or I'll I'll take ad based content instead of instead of the ad free content and give that difference. So it's been amazing to see what the spring is doing. And then what what we've been doing is promising that a hundred percent of those donations go to the field. We pay back the credit card fees. And then we've been sending stories of impact. We've been doing unique video content and locked video series just for those spring members. So they can see where their money's going. They can see the people around the world that are are being impacted.

• 1:02:22Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  I'm super bullish on on the spring and, you know, what if we could get a million people.

• 1:02:28Lewis Howes?

  Huge.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Giving every single month. We'd be giving if if a million people around the world were giving thirty bucks a month. We'd be getting a million people clean water a month instead of, you know, a million and a half a year.

• 1:02:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  So that's really the vision, I think.

• 1:02:41Lewis Howes?

  The goal.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  So that led to 40% growth last year.

• 1:02:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  So imagine going to the down year, right? That next year, we rebounded, built the spring.

• 1:02:51Lewis Howes?

  11th year, right?

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  That was a, the 11th year was like 12% growth as we, we only got Q4 of the spring because we launched it in September. Last year was 40% growth, this year's up 40% again.

• 1:03:02Lewis Howes?

  Holy cow.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  So I Googled S-curves once on the internet and like this is what happens to a lot of businesses. What takes you there, you have to reinvent, right? And then that can get you to the next level. So we just realized what got us, what worked for the first 10 years, the birthdays, the fundraising campaigns, it had also become commoditized. I mean, every other charity bro is asking for the birthday now.

• 1:03:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  You know, Heifer International wrote me an email asking whether I, Scott Harrison, would donate my birthday to Heifer. I'm like, I invented that 11 years ago. Like, you know, would I give my age in dollars or something?

• 1:03:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  So that actually felt great for the, the birthday idea that I think we'd shown could be really successful to spread to the pencils of the world and the world visions and, you know, the Save the Children's and the Yox fans. Like, everybody's doing it now. Facebook is now taking this

• 1:03:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  across the entire platform and it's raising, um, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 1:03:53Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  For a lot of great causes.

• 1:03:56Lewis Howes?

  What took you here won't get you there.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you won't hear me talk about birthdays now. So I'm, you know, even in the book, you know,

• 1:04:02Lewis Howes?

  It's a good way of starting out.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  It's a good way of starting out and some people will still, will still actually come across that and they'll do it. But then when they end their birthday, we want them to join the spring. So that we can build that long-term relationship with them.

• 1:04:14Lewis Howes?

  Where can people go to join the spring?

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Charitywater.org/spring.

• 1:04:18Lewis Howes?

  And you can make any donation you want there.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  10 bucks a month up to, up to anything.

• 1:04:22Lewis Howes?

  Up to anything, there you go.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we started at 10 just because of the fees and we want it to be enough percentage.

• 1:04:26Lewis Howes?

  Charitywater.org/spring, go sign up. I'm signing up today, so.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Awesome, I'm a member as well.

• 1:04:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  My wife's a member.

• 1:04:34Lewis Howes?

  We'll all be members, go join it today. This is powerful, man. Make, make sure you guys go get the book as well. It's called Thirst. This is 100% donated to Charity Water. As well, I believe, right?

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Yep, I'm not making a penny, gave it all away.

• 1:04:47Lewis Howes?

  All the royalties, the advance of this book, so go get a copy. You're gonna learn some powerful stories about Charity Water, about Scott's life and about really how you can take your vision to a whole nother level and make a bigger impact in the world. So make sure you guys take a look at this book. Get a copy for a friend as well, give it away as a gift. And again, you're just giving back to helping people with clean water. Go to the springcharitywater.org/spring. Make sure you give a donation monthly. It's gonna be a powerful donation that you're gonna feel really good about.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  You gotta come with me.

• 1:05:18Lewis Howes?

  I wanna come, man.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  I wanna take you to Ethiopia.

• 1:05:21Lewis Howes?

  Let me know. Send me the email list, man.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  That's the next trip.

• 1:05:24Lewis Howes?

  Get me on the list.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  It's the next trip.

• 1:05:25Lewis Howes?

  I wanna come, I went to Ghana.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  I want you to see it. I think you actually have some birthday wells in Ethiopia. It'd be cool to get you to see it five years later.

• 1:05:31Lewis Howes?

  I'd love to, man. I'm in. Couple of questions left for you. One is called the three truths.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:38Lewis Howes?

  So imagine it's your last day on earth many years from now and you get to choose the day.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:43Lewis Howes?

  You've done everything you want. You've ended the water crisis. Everyone has clean water. You've supported other charities. You've given a million dollars to another charity. You've done it all.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:55Lewis Howes?

  Seen your kids do whatever they wanna do. Live the life.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  This sounds amazing.

• 1:05:58Lewis Howes?

  It's amazing, right? You've lived the life.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Just speak it, I'll receive that, Lewis.

• 1:06:02Lewis Howes?

  I see it, I already see it happening. And it's the last day. But for whatever reason, your book and all of your work, you've gotta bring with you. You've gotta take it with you, so it's not available for anyone else. All the things you've said, speeches, they've gotta go with you. But you get to write down three things you know to be true about your life. The three lessons that you've learned that this would be the only thing people could really have access to are these three truths or your lessons.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  And all of our minds are racing during your law.

• 1:06:29Lewis Howes?

  What would you say are your three truths?

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  My three truths? Faith has been a really important part in my life personally. And the organization is not a religious organization, never has been. But for me, a huge part of my new story has been coming back to faith, to a life of prayer and virtue and believing that the greatest way I can serve God is by serving others. So I would say for me, it was back to a Christian model which led to a life of service. And really, That other than myself. So faith was a big part for me and just encouraging people to explore that. I mean, I just rejected it and I was the god of my life and it just didn't work. Wow. I think second, I would say.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  I think so much more important than what anyone does is how they do it. So I think doing things with integrity, doing things with honor, being willing to make the hard decisions that allow you to sleep well at night. I would really hope to teach, you know, my kids that. There were so many opportunities we had to to cut corners, to take the easy way out. And, you know, I mean, I write about some of these in the book and I'm really glad we didn't. I think the thing of all the values, I think I put integrity above all else as a value. So I would say, you know, a life of faith, a life of integrity. And then just to find the radical bleeding edge of giving.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  You know, I believe the more you give, the more you give. And I want people to get caught up in the idea of giving their time, giving their talent, giving their money and just more, wanting to do more. And giving because it's a blessing and it's a joy, not out of shame or debt or obligation. You know, I hate the language giving back, giving back. It's like, take something from you, you're like, give it back. You know, why don't we just frame it in the positive, you know? Not giving because we've finally done so well. We've, you know, pillaged and plundered to such a degree. It's finally time to throw some scraps to the poor. But giving out of abundance, giving out of our privilege.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  I mean, we didn't choose to be born, you know, into a world where, you know, you and I have never had dirty water. Right. Right? I traveled to Africa, I can afford to to buy a water filter. You know, I can afford to bring it. So how do we, how do we give using our influence, using our privilege, using our gifts to end the needless suffering around the world? And then how do we teach that to those around it? How do we instill that culture in our companies, in our families? So that the the giving becomes contagious.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  So I would say faith, integrity, and then radical generosity, radical giving.

• 1:09:25Lewis Howes?

  That's powerful. I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Scott, for your ability to recognize that a life of ego and service to only one human being was not the life to live, and to actually reflect, go on a journey, and create something that is impacting millions of people, and hundreds of millions of people now, and hopefully a billion point one very soon. So I acknowledge you for your consistency. You know, 12 years in this is not easy. Two years is not easy. And the fact that you're continually re-inspired, at least still after 12 years, is really inspiring for me to see, because people can get burned out very easily after a couple of years of working hard. So your foundation,

• 1:10:08Lewis Howes?

  your sense of gratitude, your sense of family and faith, I think, is really powerful to see, because I know that's what's supporting you and continuing everything. So I acknowledge you for everything, man.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Thanks, friend.

• 1:10:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, this is awesome. Make sure you guys get the book, sign up for the spring as well. And the final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  A life lived in the service of others.

• 1:10:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's a good one. My man, I appreciate you very much.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 1:10:34Lewis Howes?

  Thanks, brother.

• 1:10:40Lewis Howes?

  There you have it, my friends, 700 episodes. Oh my goodness, I am so grateful, so humbled, and so appreciative of all of you listening right now and your support over the last almost six years. But 700 episodes, it's amazing what you can create in your life, in your business, in your career, when you do something consistently every single week, and you work to improve it every single week as well. And again, I want to thank you guys for all that you do to help me get this message out to more people. Without you listening, without you texting a few of your friends every time you listen, or posting it on Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, this community would not be...

• 1:11:26Lewis Howes?

  As large and expansive as it is, we would not be changing the world together. And I love seeing the messages over on Instagram or on email of people telling me something specific about an individual episode that has transformed their life. So if there has been a moment that you've heard a podcast that has transformed your life, brought you healing, brought you peace, brought you freedom, brought you wealth, brought you relationship, gotten you in better health, then please let me know. You can send me a direct message, you can email us anytime over on the contact page at lewishouse.com. We love to hear from you as we always appreciate you for listening. Again, a big thank you to our sponsors and a big thank you to you.

• 1:12:09Lewis Howes?

  As Edmund and Bianca said, no matter how disappointing you believe your life currently is, it is never too late to start reshaping it to become an amazing testimony. Right now, ask yourself, am I living a purposeful life? Am I doing something in my life, in my career, that brings me joy and helps those around me? Ask yourself the question, what could you be doing more of that would make yourself proud, looking back at your life, that I did something more meaningful with my life? It doesn't mean you have to change everything right now, but what's one little change you could do that would make a bigger change to the people around you? Think about that, let me know.

• 1:12:54Lewis Howes?

  As always, I love you so very much. And you know what time it is, it's time to go out there and do something great.