Scott Harrison: From Nightclub Promoter to Charity Water Founder

Episode 443: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talks to Scott Harrison (@scottharrison), Founder and CEO of Charity Water, about life as a nightclub promoter to starting Charity Water. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Click here to sign up for our event in Austin, TX on Saturday April 29th: mfmpod.com/atx Vote for MFM to win a Webby: mfmpod.com/webby Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter ----- Links: *Charity Water *The Spring *Shaan's 35th Birthday donation * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Show Notes: (03:20) - Introduction to Scott (14:05) - Working in Liberia (20:55) - Start of Charity Water (28:20) - Scott's approach to marketing charity (37:05) - Michael Birch story (42:57) - Cost of giving water for 1 person (48:20) - Practice saying yes ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You know, it turns out that the Red Cross is not looking for a nightclub promoter. Doctors Without Borders are, they're looking for credible doctors, not, you know, DJs or promoters. So I remember being so dejected by the rejections. And then one organization wrote me back and said, if you are willing to pay us $500 a month to volunteer, and if you're willing to go live in the poorest country in the world, a country I'd never even heard of called Liberia. And it was at the bottom of the United Nations development chart because it had just come out of a 14 year civil war. And there was finally data on the country that they could stack rank it at the bottom of the world.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  And they said, we are taking a medical mission into this country and we'll take you if you pay us.

• 1:00Shaan Puri?

  What's up? I have Scott Harrison here. We've been, I don't know, maybe planning to do, at least in my head, I've been planning to do an episode like this for a long time.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  But I invited myself on, let's be honest.

• 1:11Shaan Puri?

  You did invite yourself on, but that's something I love about you.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  That's because I like you.

• 1:16Shaan Puri?

  You are, you're also like kind of unashamed. You are unashamed at like doing, getting the right thing done. I met this guy once and he said, if your intentions are good, you can get away with anything. And I don't know if that's, you know, I don't know if that's a hundred percent true, but I, but I do think it's a, it's, it's a good motto. Don't be, don't be too shy. So yes, you invited yourself on, but I think this is gonna be a good one.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Well, the alternative was you want people to die of bad water. So, I mean.

• 1:42Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. Well, which one is it?

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Just kidding.

• 1:46Shaan Puri?

  Scott's a good friend. We met through a mutual friend, Michael Birch. And then I went on a trip to Africa with Scott and saw the work that he was doing. So that was kind of cool. I'll say this. So a lot of people click on this podcast because they're schemers and dreamers. They're trying to figure out how to make money and we don't shy away from the fact that we enjoy making money and we enjoy the game of business. I think for most people, here's their mindset coming in. It's going to be charity episode. Ah, okay. You know, maybe if I'm in the mood, but I'm going to tell you this. So that person who's a little on the fence, let me tell you this right now. You're gonna love this episode way more than the normal one for two reasons. The first is you're gonna be inspired. Scott's story is very inspiring. I've heard him tell it many times.

• 2:30Shaan Puri?

  I'm giving, gonna give him the opportunity to tell it here because it's kind of one of these like real life movies in a way. And he started off as a not so do-gooder and turned into a very do-gooder. And I think the story is very good. And two, he's, he's an entrepreneur and he took an entrepreneurial approach to charity, which I think very few, I know, I know personally of very few examples of that. And he's a very good storyteller. And for all of you people who reach out to me saying, oh, Sean, I love your stories. Well, the master is here. He's a much better storyteller than me. So if you take nothing else away from this, you'll pick up a lot on storytelling. That's what, those are my promises to you. Scott, how did I, do you think?

• 3:07Speaker 00

  That's a high bar.

• 3:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I know. No pressure.

• 3:12Shaan Puri?

  Luckily, you've told this story once or twice before.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Well, I, okay, I like schemers and dreamers. So I was definitely a schemer and dreamer at 18 years old. I was born in Philadelphia, raised in a conservative Christian family. And when I was four, my mom passed out on the bedroom floor due to a carbon monoxide gas leak in our house. So we just moved into this new house. My dad was excited because it was reducing his commute. He wanted to spend more time with me, have a big family. And she was the canary in the coal mine, which her, her unconsciousness led to the discovery of this gas leak. And life was never the same again. Mom never recovered.

• 3:55Shaan Puri?

  It affected her because she was at home all the time. You guys were at school or work.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  She was 24/7. That's right. She was unpacking boxes from the move, you know, putting frames on the walls. Dad was working, you know, long hours at a job. I was at school playing with my friends at their houses and she was, she, she bore the brunt of it. And my dad actually got sick, so we had some weird food allergies, some migraines. But she got really sick. And this led to the discovery of the gas leak. My dad whipped out the furnace with his bare hands. He threw it out on the curb. And from that point on, her immune system was irreparably disabled. And unfortunately, I have 40 years of experience with the 3M family of masks.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  So my mom was always masked from that point on. Charcoal masks, N95 masks. Everything chemical made her sick. So she was able to survive by creating isolation rooms for herself. This sounds strange, but my mom lived in a tinfoil-covered bathroom. And she slept on an army cot that had been washed in baking soda 20 times. She was so sensitive that if she wanted to read a book, I would have to either bake her book in the oven or set it outside for a couple of days in the sun to get that smell of print out. Then I would knock on the door. I would hear the tinfoil rustle. I would hand her the lightly baked book.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  And with her mask on and a pair of gloves, she would receive the book from me and shut the door. So all that to say, a very weird childhood in a caregiver role, doing the cooking, doing the cleaning, you know, helping my dad. My dad was an amazing loyal man, stuck by her, believed that one day God would make sense of all this. And, you know, my mom just lived with this for the rest of her life. So, you know, the first kind of chapter of my life, if you'd run into me as a young teenager, I was gonna be a doctor. I was gonna cure mom and everybody else sick with a condition like hers. Instead, I became a schemer and a dreamer. And at 18, yeah, I moved to New York City and just had that wake-up moment. Now it's my turn.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Now it's my turn to break the rules. I don't want to take care of anyone anymore. I want to take care of myself. And I want to have sex. And I want to do drugs. And I want to drink. And I want to be rich and famous. And I stumbled into this job as a New York City nightclub promoter, where you had a pretty good shot at achieving those markers of success. And I became really good at throwing parties at the high end. Selling thousand dollar bottles of Cristal, selling twenty five dollar vodka Red Bulls that cost us twenty five cents. And creating spaces for movie stars and actors and musicians and, you know, fashion moguls and designers to party.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  And, you know, it couldn't have been more opposite, maybe from the slightly repressed Christian upbringing. And, you know, a picture of my life ten years later was me in a DJ booth with a famous DJ. I'm spraying champagne down over the crowd. Puffy's at table one, Jay-Z's at table three, and I'm at table two, thinking I'm a rock star because we have prettier girls at our table than Jay-Z or Puffy. And, and this was, you know, it was dinner at ten, the nightclub at twelve, and then after hours at five AM, and to bed at noon, taking Ambien to come down with a whole lot of self-loathing, you know, if it, if it caught up to us, which it did, you know, far too

• 7:38Speaker 00

  often towards the end of that. So, uh, it was ten years for me to realize that I had made a mess in my life. I had come so far from the spirituality, from the morality that my parents had tried to instill in me, so far from wanting to become a doctor to help others. And one day, half my body went numb. And, uh, you know, maybe no surprise to anybody listening, as I just described what I was doing, but I just remember thinking like, I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. I've been living like, I'm gonna live forever, and now I'm gonna die in a week. I've got some brain tumor, I've got something very wrong with me because I can't feel half my body.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  And I went to doctors and had MRIs and CT scans and, you know, they hooked diodes up to me and electromagnetic pulsing, all that, and they couldn't figure out anything wrong with me. Uh, but it was a wake-up call, Sean, that if I did die, my tombstone, the best it could read would be, here lies a man who's gotten a million people wasted. It was the only thing I had to show for my career.

• 8:44Shaan Puri?

  When you were in the doctor's office and you fill out the little form where you're just like, yes, on all the questions, it's like, have you in the last six months consumed any drugs, alcohol?

• 8:53Speaker 00

  I remember being brutally honest, yeah, right? Because I think everybody kind of cheats a little, like, how many alcoholic drinks, right? You shave that by a half typically. I think I was honest. I'm like, how many alcoholic drinks? Like, 165 a week. You know, something just, yeah. How many packs of cigarettes? Two and a half a day. You know, anyway, they couldn't find anything wrong with me, but this led to, you know, a pretty radical life change and maybe the close of chapter two as this sycophantic, hedonistic nightclub promoter, living only for himself. And I wondered whether I could start life over at 28 and really asked myself, what would the opposite of my life look like?

• 9:35Speaker 00

  You know, I realized a pivot was not in order. You know, this was, this was not a small course correction that needed to happen. This was like, do and think and say the 180 degree opposite of everything you've done and thought and said for the last 10 years and see how that plays out.

• 9:54Shaan Puri?

  And I live for these kind of like, these moments, these self-talk moments. I think most of life is just in my own head. It's me, it's me with me and we're having a conversation. And so a lot of times it's small talk, it's surface level stuff. And then there are these times where I have the like, the real conversation with myself in my head. Do you, do you remember what that, like, well, those days or like, what made you really like have that, that, that conversation with yourself at that point?

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, there was a faith piece, so I started praying again and, you know, kind of going back and like, hey, what, do I believe any of that stuff from childhood? You know, there was a lot of religion, there was a lot of rules, you know, but, but there was a lot of good in there as well. So I sort of, you know, tried to kind of come back to faith again. So there was a lot of prayer, like, you know, God, are you there? And what should I be doing? And is there, is there anything else for me? And I remember the self-talk really saying, okay, well, if you're, if you're exploring the opposite of your life, what would that look like? And I thought, well, it would be volunteering. On a humanitarian mission in the poorest country in the world.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  That was the spec that would be the opposite of a nightclub, you know, bottles and models lifestyle. And I remember from a, I was, I'd taken some time driving just aimlessly north, trying to, you know, find myself. I wound up in Maine, in an internet cafe on Moosehead Lake with dial-up Dell computers. And I started applying to humanitarian aid organizations that I'd tangentially heard of over the decade. Certainly not that I had given any money to, but Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, Oxfam, World Vision, the Red Cross. And I, I was very clear that this is what I wanted to do.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Give one year of the 10 years that I had selfishly wasted or lived and see if I could be useful. Well, maybe no surprise, I was denied by the first 10 organizations. You know, it turns out that the Red Cross is not looking for a nightclub promoter. Doctors Without Borders are, they're looking for credible doctors, not, you know, DJs or promoters. So I remember being so dejected by the rejections. And then one organization wrote me back and said, if you are willing to pay us $500 a month to volunteer, and if you're willing to go live in the poorest country in the world, a country I'd never even heard of,

• 12:24Speaker 00

  called Liberia, and it was at the bottom of the United Nations development chart because it had just come out of a 14-year civil war, and there was finally data on the country that they could stack rank it at the bottom of the world. And they said, we are taking a medical mission into this country and we'll take you if you pay us every month. And the, the job or the volunteer role I signed up for was a photojournalist. So I was going to be taking pictures and writing, and I was always a pretty good writer and a pretty good hobby photographer, you know, through the club, club years. And I'd gotten a degree part-time at NYU for that because it was, it was the easiest degree.

• 13:03Shaan Puri?

  You basically did the real-life version. I don't even watch Seinfeld, but I know about this episode where George is like, Jerry, I'm doing the opposite now. Whatever I used to do, I do the opposite. You basically had the real-life version of that where you're like, go from New York City nightlife. You know, rich, famous, fast living to I'm gonna go to the poorest country on earth, pay to volunteer and and basically donate a year of my time just to kind of course correct and like break my own frame and shift. Just it just sounds like you didn't even have like a long term plan or like this grand vision for yourself. It's like, I just need to shift like where this direction I'm going now into some I need to swerve in a hard, hard turn.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  And then a couple of things happened. Yeah, that that's exactly right. I wouldn't have told you more than a year of line of sight. I met the chief medical officer. So I was gonna be living on a hospital ship, a 500 foot converted ocean liner that was 50 plus years old. So not, you know, not a nice cruise liner. And it had been gutted and turned into a state of the art hospital with a very simple idea for this charity. Let's sail a giant hospital ship with the best doctors in the world on their vacation time. And let's take it to people who can't afford medical care. And and because we can control the environment, let's bring them on the hospital ship, perform these life changing surgeries and then set them, you know, back on

• 14:22Speaker 00

  land with transformed lives and transformed health. So I met the guy who is running this whole thing. And his name was Dr. Gary Parker. And I learned that he was a plastic surgeon from California who had heard about this opportunity. And he signed up for three months. And when I walked up the gangway of this hospital ship to to surrender my passport, he had been there 21 years. So he never went back to his California plastic surgery practice. And he dedicated two decades of his life to this work. So I remember just thinking, what if that's me? What if it's not a year? And I wanted to know everything I could about him and what two decades of service

• 15:05Speaker 00

  would look like or feel like or the impact that a person could have. So my third day there is the patient screening. So the the ship's arrival has been announced by an advance team. Flyers have been posted throughout the country. And we have been given the football stadium in the center of town, the soccer stadium by the government, to triage the people who might come to visit our doctors. Now, I know we have 1,500 available surgery slots to fill. I remember thinking to myself, like, are there 1,500 sick people? With facial tumors, or cleft lips, or blind, or lame, with leprosy, like, you know, that sounds like a lot of people.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  And I remember at 5:15 or 5:30 a.m., putting on hospital scrubs, it was still pitch black out, jumping into this convoy of Land Rovers, with doctors and surgeons and nurses, and we kind of snaked through the city. And we came to the stadium, and there were 5,000 people, standing in the dark, in the parking lot, waiting for us to open the doors. And that was such a powerful moment for me, realizing, oh crap, we're gonna send 3,500 of these people home, without seeing a doctor, without any answer for their affliction. And I later learned-

• 16:28Shaan Puri?

  You're probably used to having a long line outside the door. That was a good thing before. This was a bad thing now.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  The parallels, you know, there have been some interesting ones. I later learned some of these people had walked for more than a month with their children from neighboring countries, just hoping that a doctor might save their child's life. So, I remember Dr. Gary said to me, focus on the hope. You know, don't focus on the 3,500 people we're gonna send home. Focus on the 1,500 people who are gonna help. And that's what I really did for that first year on the ship. And I was documenting every single one of them before surgery and after surgery for the medical library. And that, you know, mercy ships would be able to use those photos to raise money and spread awareness to the work. The other cool thing that happened was,

• 17:16Speaker 00

  I was blasting my club list of 15,000 emails.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  With pictures of facial tumors and flesh eating disease and leprosy, you know, being healed and, you know, or patients being operated on. And, you know, back then email open rates were like 100%. So there were definitely a lot of unsubscribes. You know, I signed up for that cool Prada party you threw once, but not like the tumor party. But then, you know, most people were intrigued. They were fascinated. I had no idea that there were doctors on a ship saving people's lives. How do I get a piece of this? How do I sponsor a surgery? How do I come on the ship like you? I remember somebody writing me from Chanel once. She's like, I sit here in a brightly lit cosmetic headquarters and I'm weeping.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  You know, because I want more. I want more than to sell makeup every day. I want more for my life. I want more purpose. So I learned that maybe the same gift of promoting, getting people to stand outside a velvet rope to queue, to hope to get into a nightclub, telling the story that if you came in my club and you spent thousands of dollars and you left with a cute boy or a cute girl, then your life had meaning. You know, that same maybe gift or skill of promoting could be used to promote something entirely different and redemptive and important for other people. So the year ended and I just signed up for a second year because I didn't know what was next.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  So let me go do this again for another year. And that was when I found water. So the second year I got off of the ship, I spent more and more time. I bought a motorcycle. So I'm driving around West Africa, Liberia, you know, with 14,000 United Nations peacekeepers and soldiers. And I've got this little press badge and I'm spending time in these rural areas and I see the water people are drinking. And they're drinking from swamps and ponds and rivers, brown, green, viscous water. And I learned two things. I learned half the country is drinking dirty water. And I learned half the disease in the country is because people are drinking dirty water.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  So, you know, for contrast, you know, a year previously, I'd been selling Voss water for $10 a bottle to people who would just order 20 bottles for the table and not open any of them because they were drinking vodka or champagne. So there was just something so profoundly contrastful of watching a human drink dirty water that was making them sick in real time and knowing the excess of my former life. And I remember showing these photos to Dr. Gary and I'm like, Dr. Gary, no wonder 5,000 sick people are standing outside a parking lot of a stadium. You should see what they're drinking. And he said, yeah, I know. And in fact, a billion people drink this water every day.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  One in six people alive on the planet. He said, why don't you go do something about it? Why don't you make this your mission? Instead of raising money for, you know, the next 1,500 surgeries on this ship, why don't you just go get everybody in the world clean water? He said, yeah, something like you'll be the greatest medical professional in the history of the world if you just brought people the most basic need for health, the most basic need for life. And I was 30 at the time and I'm like, well, okay, Dr. Gary, that sounds good. You know, and I came back to New York City and said, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to try to bring clean and safe drinking water to every single human on earth

• 21:01Speaker 00

  before I die because that seems like a good idea. And it'd be great if 5,000 people didn't have to stand outside a stadium if 3,500 people didn't have to get turned away because they had clean water in their villages. And that was really the start of Charity Water, you know, now 17 years ago.

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  And you, um, this story, I would say two things. One is your story is so good that the first time I heard it, I thought, that sounds almost too good, like too good to be true. Like the story is almost like Hollywood in that, in that sense.

• 21:36Shaan Puri?

  As I got to know you, I learned that you're the real deal. I went with you to Africa. I saw the wells that you guys have created. I saw the drinking water. We did the water carry of, you know, how far the women and children have to carry water. That's not even that clean, but the cleaner water back to back home, just so that they have water. Uh, you know, we saw the schools that were like, you know, now could function because they had this. We saw so much stuff. So I've seen the impact of it on that side.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:02Shaan Puri?

  I remember thinking this, this almost sounds too good to be true. It, it, it turned out to be the real deal. That's the first thing I want to say. The second thing is when you have that moment where you're like, all right, here's what I should do with my life. I know I've felt this. I'm sure other people have felt this too. The difference between what you feel like you should do and what you actually do is often held back by some sort of fear or limitation. Did you like, once you left Africa and you get back to the, to, to New York? Did doubt creep in or did you have any second thoughts of like, yeah, well, maybe I'll just send the check and go get a job somewhere like, you know? Or were you really, are you just wired differently where you were just sort of gung ho like, no, I'm doing this?

• 22:43Speaker 00

  I think what helped was that I had lived there for almost a year. You know, you hear about a lot of people that go on a mission trip with their church and they spend five days in Guatemala or in Africa. Five days is not enough to change.

• 22:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  You change everything about your life for, for most people. Um, a year of immersive proximity to an issue was. So there was a responsibility to do something about what I'd seen that, that took more than a week or even a month.

• 23:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Um, so I, I remember coming home. Um, in fact, the ship was sailing to South Africa while it was going to be dry docked every year. So they would kind of make repairs on the ship and everybody went on vacation to wine region for a month. I'm like, I don't want to waste my time doing that. I'm going to go back to New York city and I'm going to put on a gallery exhibition of all the photos that I've taken. And I'm going to invite all my club friends in and I'm going to ask them for money. And I did that. I got a gallery donated in Chelsea. I got a bunch of, you know, printers to donate, you know, high-res giant photographs and I put together 108 of my before and afters in a gallery and I invited everybody from the clubs to come in and we raised about a hundred thousand dollars. And then I went back on the ship to show people what we had done with

• 23:59Speaker 00

  their money, uh, to kind of follow the donation.

• 24:03Shaan Puri?

  And so let's talk about the approach that you used to build Charity Water. So first, let's zoom out. At this point, Charity Water's been around for how many years and how much money has been donated and how many people have been given clean drinking water since that, since this moment?

• 24:18Speaker 00

  We're in year 17, just started year 17. We've raised $750 million and we've helped 16.8 million people get clean water.

• 24:29Shaan Puri?

  Amazing.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  And, and in the world, there are 770 million people without water. So it's now one in 10 people alive as we record this are drinking dirty water. 82% of them live in rural areas. So.

• 24:42Shaan Puri?

  Seventeen years later, now, back to year one of that, your approach. So you took a very interesting approach to this. I want to start with a quote that I had heard you say once. It's like this toothpaste quote. Uh, you'll, you'll tell it better than me, but I remember, I still remember this. You first told me this like eight years ago or something. And that one stood out to me. It stuck with me ever since then. You want to say the quotes?

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, toothpaste. This was Nick Kristof in the New York Times. Toothpaste is peddled with far more sophistication than all the world's lifesaving causes.

• 25:16Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Colgate is better than Doctors Without Borders at telling their story.

• 25:22Shaan Puri?

  Right. The marketing, the sophistication, the photography, the storytelling, all of it that goes into selling random commodity products, deodorant, toothpaste. Um, and I, what I, what stood out to me when I kind of encountered what you guys were doing at Charity Water was, it was like best-in-class marketing, best-in-class product, best-in-class storytelling, like you would find with the way that, you know. Traditional consumer packaged goods brands are run, but you were doing it with charity. And I had never seen that. I was used to going to a charity website that was some old and crusty Craigslist looking site. And I push a button and it asked me for money through some old payment method that I don't even know how to use.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Six pages long, right?

• 26:01Shaan Puri?

  And then I'm like clicking accept, accept, accept. I have no idea where this money is going. Never hear from them again. You know, and that was my charity experience. And then Charity Water is very, very different. So talk about how you decided to approach it from like first principles and what were those like core tenets that you built on top of?

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Well, I had the advantage of not knowing what I was doing with many entrepreneurs that start, you know, anything that becomes a going concern.

• 26:26Shaan Puri?

  That is the entrepreneurial advantage. I didn't know any better.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  I didn't come from the establishment. So I knew nothing about traditional philanthropy, how to set up a charity. Actually went and bought the Yellow Dummies book, you know, nonprofits for dummies. Okay. And then I bought HTML for dummies because I'm like, well, I don't have money for a web designer. So I need to also, you know, build our website. So I was living on a closet floor at the time in Soho, New York. My old club partner took me in for free rent and I was sleeping on his walk-in closet. And, but I had a very clear mission. So if you'd run into me 17 years ago, I'm going to bring Clean Water to everybody in the world. Same thing I'm, I'm saying, you know, now.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  The, as I talked to everyday people who worked at MTV or VH1 at the time, who worked at Sephora, who worked at Chase Bank. I realized they were cynical and skeptical about charities. They just didn't trust charities writ large. And I remember coming across a USA Today poll found 42% of Americans just flat out said distrustful of charities. 70% of Americans in a more recent poll said they believe charities waste their money. So seven out of 10 potentially generous people think charities are wasting their donations.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  So I thought this was a huge opportunity and a new business model could solve some of this skepticism or speak to the skeptic. So I thought, well, what if we could open up two separate bank accounts? And in one bank account, I would raise all of that nasty overhead. The staff salaries, the office costs, the toner for the Epson copy machine, the flights to Africa and Indian Asian where we'd eventually build our projects. What if I could raise that in a separate bank account? And then in the main bank account, 100% of every donation, whether it was a dollar or a pound or a euro or a million dollars or a million pounds or a million euros could

• 28:27Speaker 00

  go directly to build water projects that saves people's lives. And, you know, nobody was doing this at the time. I mean, this would have, you know, made us different than 99.99% of charities in the world because it's very difficult to do. But I just thought this would be clear. I could say to a six-year-old, go sell lemonade, turn in 75 cents and all 75 cents will go directly to help people get clean water. So that was kind of number one idea. Number two was then kind of realizing, wow, money's not fungible. So we can build technology tools to track these small amounts of money down to the project that they funded.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  And I remember meeting the founder of Google Earth and he pressed this medallion into my palm. So Charity Water started right before Google Earth and Google Maps. And he says, you know, I'm building a place where you can put every single well, every water point, and you can show people where their money went. So I'm like, great, we're going to be the first charity to geolocate every completed project and we're going to build the most transparent charity the world has ever seen. So proof became this second pillar. And then the third thing was this idea of building an epic brand. Charities so often use shame and guilt to peddle their wares. Where would the Apple of charities? Where was the Nike?

• 29:50Speaker 00

  You know, Nike doesn't sell shoes by telling people they're fat and lazy. You know, Nike sells shoes by telling inspirational stories of people overcoming adversity. Nike believes if you have one leg, you can win a marathon. You know, if you have one arm, you can win the shot put competition at the Olympics with your other arm. And Nike believes greatness is inside you, and that's the way that they market. And someone's like, maybe I should turn off the TV and stop eating Cheetos and try and go run a quarter of a mile. So I wanted Charity Water to be modeled on the whimsy of Virgin, the kind of beautiful design of Apple, and then this opportunity or inspiration of Nike. And I just didn't see it out there.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  So brand was kind of the third thing, the third pillar. And then to actually get the work done, I believed as we built wells and built gravity-fed systems and filtration systems, and it would need to be led by the locals in each of these countries to be culturally appropriate and sustainable. When you came with me to Ethiopia, there were 350 local staff working on the Charity Water projects, running eight different drilling rigs. There wasn't a single person who looked like you or me in that entire program of 350 people. And we just believed that we would create thousands of local jobs as we scaled. And our role would be to get people to care about this issue, get people to say, "It's not okay on my watch

• 31:19Speaker 00

  that we are looking for water on a planet over 100 million miles away, and 770 million people are risking their life every day because they don't have clean water here on our planet." So our job would be to get people to reject the apathy that is easy to assume with any of these paralyzing global issues and say, "Let's do something about this. Let's get everybody on Earth clean water." Like, we can all agree on that. Republicans can agree on that. Democrats and independents and libertarians and Jews and Christians and Muslims and atheists and Mormons, like, everybody can think that clean drinking water is a good idea.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  So it started in a nightclub. I mean, the only idea I had 17 years ago was to throw my 31st birthday party. I got the club donated. I got open bar donated. And then I charged everybody 20 bucks to get in as a donation. And at the end of that night, we collected $15,000 in this big Plexi box. And we counted it. And then we counted it again. And then we photographed everybody counting it. And then we took 100% of the money to Uganda and we built our first well. And then we sent the photos and the GPS coordinates of that well back to the 700 people. And we say, you did this. Here's where your $20 went. And that sounds so simple, but that was so revolutionary. People never expected to hear from the charity again. I mean, they went to some

• 32:42Speaker 00

  party in a club for some dude's 31st birthday and they threw 20 bucks in a bin. And that idea, we said, let's just put that at the core of charity water. And in everything we do, let's try to connect people to what their money accomplished, to the people who they helped.

• 33:01Shaan Puri?

  And so you you kick it off like that with a nightclub, go back, you go back to the to your kind of roots as far as what do I know how to do? Okay, I can throw a great party, but this time I'll do it with a twist. And then tell the story about Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Birch and trying to scale this up because I thought this was an amazing story.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:22Shaan Puri?

  And this is where, at some point, your genius business model of

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Not so genius.

• 33:29Shaan Puri?

  Keeping all the overheads separate and letting all the donations, 100% of the donations, go to the cause. Sounds good in theory, but there's a reason why charities don't do this.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:38Shaan Puri?

  Because it's hard to cover the overheads. So talk about how you got into a little bit of a pickle and then what happened from there.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So about a year and a half in, well, let's just say the 100% model was working. And we'd raised a few million dollars just right out of the gate. People love that idea. In the other bank account, a lot harder to raise that overhead. So we had a moment where we had $887,000, ready to go out to build water projects. And we were about to miss payroll in the overhead bank account. And it was interesting, the advice I was getting from people was, hey, go borrow from that 887, right? I mean, you gotta pay your people.

• 34:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  Like, you'll pay it back later, right? A little IOU in that account. And I remember thinking, if we borrow one penny, we've compromised our integrity. There's a crack at the foundation and I don't want to work here and nobody will want to work here again. So I'm just going to shut the charity down and say that this business model didn't work. And I started calling lawyers to say, like, how do you wind down a charity 18 months in? Because all the naysayers were right. It's too hard getting people excited about overhead. At the same time, I had just come up with this idea of trying to scale the birthday party, but not a birthday party in a nightclub, taking it online. And for year two, or the one year anniversary of Charity Water,

• 35:01Speaker 00

  I donated my 32nd birthday. And instead of throwing a party, I just asked everyone to give $32 for my 32nd birthday. And I wound up raising 60 grand. For X, because a lot of people had $32 to give, especially if they could see exactly where it went. So I had Googled, you know, top three social networks. And, you know, MySpace was number one at the time. So I emailed Tom. Facebook was number two, emailed Zuck. A site called Bebo that I hadn't heard of was number three. So I remember scraping Michael Birch's name from the domain registry, you know, whois.net. And I emailed him and I said, hey, I'm this kid. I'm trying to bring clean water to the world. And I'd like everybody on your social network to donate their birthdays to my cause.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  It's your Asian dollars, 100% goes. You know, this is a great idea. Well, Duck didn't write me back. Tom didn't write me back. Michael did. And he said, I actually love this idea. And on the side, I have this site called Birthday Alarm, which reminds people of their birthdays. And he said, you know, the timing for me is terrible right now, but, you know, keep up the great work. And by the way, the website design looks awesome. So this was six months before the bankruptcy moment. And around this time, when we're about to wind down, you know, I remember praying, I'm like on my knees, like, God, I thought you gave me this dream. Where's the money? Like, show me the money. You showed me the money in the wrong bank account. And I was praying, I had no faith that anything would happen.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  And at this time, Michael Birchstein turns up and he says, hey, I'm going to be in New York. I've got an hour, you know, can I stop by and see your office? And I remember sitting with him and taking him through a presentation on my laptop and just being really honest about how hard it was to raise money for overhead. And I remember thinking he just didn't like me. I mean, he was British, you know, he wasn't smiling, not, not a lot of warmth or encouragement. But two days later, he emails me at midnight and he says, hey, I really enjoyed meeting you. I just wired a million dollars into your overhead account. And I remember logging on to the bank and I saw it, one comma, zero, zero, zero. It was 13 months of overhead funding. So we went from insolvent and he said, I think he said, keep rocking.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  Just, you just need more time. Love the idea. You just need more time. And again, that was 750 million dollars ago. And today we have 131 entrepreneurs and, and families that pay all the overhead. And we have never been close to the line since. Uh, and, and you know, we grow that group by selecting 20 new entrepreneurs and 20 new families or so every single year as the organization grows. And you know, Michael and Zochi have been very generous. They've given over 20 million dollars. They've come and come to 14 or 15 countries with me now, bringing their kids all over the world to see the impact that they've, they've made. But that was, that was, that was a moment.

• 37:54Shaan Puri?

  I've asked Michael, I was like, you know, you've done all these different projects. So he did multiple internet companies. He, uh,

• 38:01Speaker 00

  Did the battery.

• 38:02Shaan Puri?

  Did the battery. So he's got this members club, like a physical building, a giant, beautiful 60,000 square foot building. He's done, you know, hundreds of investments, whatever. I asked, I was like, you know, what's your favorite? What's the best thing you've done?

• 38:18Shaan Puri?

  And instantly he just goes, charity water. He goes, uh, yeah, he goes, the most fulfilling work that I have done is basically help, you know, donating and then helping, helping Scott and, and taking my family, my kids to Africa. They, I think they go like almost every year, every other year or something like that to go and see the work and the projects. And he's like, I love those trips with my family. My kids love it. It's taught them so much. And, uh, you know, he's like, that's the best thing I've done, hands down. And I thought that was pretty impressive. Here's a guy who's made like a billion dollars and built social networks with, you know, whatever, millions and millions of users and all that good stuff. And, and I thought that was pretty, uh, pretty remarkable. And it sounds like, because when I met you,

• 39:01Shaan Puri?

  I went to one of your events and then I went to the Ethiopia trip with you and the Ethiopia trip, you know, it was like the who's who was like, you know, famous tech founders, actors, actresses, people from Hollywood, people from the music industry.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Tim Ferriss was on that trip, I think. Fun group of people.

• 39:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it was an amazing group and, um, you know, just like the kind of bus ride conversations were, were, were just incredible for the group. And then, um, then I played Wonderwall at the fire and people saw that, people saw that I only know three of the four chords of Wonderwall. And, uh, and so then we, we go there and I'm like, this is an incredible way to like, you know, the best products in the world are products where you can either show somebody a before and after photo, even better, you just put a product in their hands, or even better, what you were doing was just if I let you see it, you're going to believe. And so what have you learned in that process of like going from almost, almost bankruptcy to now raising $750 million for charity?

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Which by the way, is a fraction of what we need to raise to make the impact that we want to make. So, you know, 17 million people, that's great. That's 1/47 of the way there. So, you know, we are, we believe we're in like the second inning of this.

• 40:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  I looked at the 27 stock, 27 year, Justin Khan tweeted this a couple of years ago, 27 year stock chart of Amazon. 7% of the value was created in the first 20 years. 93% of the value, years 21 through 27. So, you know, things take time, you know, and we believe that, you know, this is just a mile marker on, you know, hopefully the expansiveness of the charity water community and the generosity that is yet untapped as we, again, try to get everybody clean water. I mean, there's probably nobody listening that thinks people should die by drinking bad water, simply because of where they were born.

• 40:56Shaan Puri?

  Right, we all agree. And what is the cost to give someone clean drinking water, Ruff? I, I know you, I remember there was a number and then, and then I remember you were like, hey, that number's outdated, doesn't take into account these other things, let's raise it. And I remember being like, well, I don't know that, do we want it, should we just round the number? And you're like, no, we don't round the number. We just say what the actual cost is like, I really appreciated the integrity of it.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  And I think last year was, it's $40 to give one person clean water. On average, we work across 22 countries. I think last year's actual was 39.67.

• 41:27Shaan Puri?

  And so forty dollars and that's for a year or that's for a lifetime?

• 41:30Speaker 00

  No, that's for ten, ten plus years, you know, for the life of the project. Some of these projects last more than twenty years.

• 41:35Shaan Puri?

  Forty bucks, you can change, you can absolutely change somebody's life.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  I know.

• 41:38Shaan Puri?

  Forty bucks. And talk about some of the things that you've tried. So now let's kind of go into the slightly entrepreneurial section of like, you know, stories of stuff you've tried or opportunities that you see more in the spirit of kind of how we typically brainstorm things around here.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we've, you know, innovation has been a real core of the organization. As you say, trying new things. We made one of the first virtual reality films seven years ago. This is before they had VR cameras that you could buy. We got GoPros donated, made a modified rig and shot a six day journey where a thirteen year old girl gets clean water for the first time in her life. We debuted that at a gala where we put headsets on four hundred people in black tie. We pressed play in synchronicity. We took them all to Ethiopia for this week of, you know, water magic. And then the minute the film ended, we just asked them for money and raised a couple million dollars. So, you know, that was a fun one. You know, a couple of years ago, we got into the Bitcoin space and we started a trust

• 42:41Speaker 00

  called the Bitcoin Water Trust where we raised a hundred Bitcoin to start. And we said, we're going to lock them all up in cold storage until at least 2025. So we're not going to sell it. Charity water charities typically when you give them stock, you know, they immediately liquidate. Who are we to ever take a position on any asset, right?

• 42:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  And we said, we're going to take a position on this. And we think, you know, there will be people who would only give us a Bitcoin donation, you know, to hold past, you know, the next halving and maybe even longer, but would never give us a Bitcoin, you know, to immediately liquidate. They'd rather give us cash or some other asset. So we raised over a hundred there and that's, that, that campaign is open, is still going with that same promise that a hundred percent will then, you know, get unlocked at some point, 2025 and beyond, and then go to have as much impact as, as possible. Um, gosh, I mean, we, you know, the birthday idea raised over a hundred million dollars by getting over a million people involved just in that simple idea. And that's now been taken by lots of other charities.

• 43:44Shaan Puri?

  And what's the best way to do it?

• 43:45Speaker 00

  We're about to open up a physical space.

• 43:46Shaan Puri?

  My birthday is in two weeks. I want to give up my birthday.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  Oh, do it. I'll be your first donor. All right. It's at least worth it to set up the page in 30 seconds.

• 43:53Shaan Puri?

  Is it still at mycharitywater.com? Or where do I go now to do that?

• 43:56Speaker 00

  I think it's probably on the homepage now.

• 43:59Shaan Puri?

  Okay, wonderful.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's another way people can get. And then we have, we have an amazing subscription community called The Spring, which is, that has really helped the organization triple over the last five years. And it's, I remember being in a Land Rover with Daniel Ek from Spotify, and he's like, Scott, your business model sucks. Every January 1, all that money you raised last year, your ticker starts at zero. You gotta go re-raise all that and then grow. He said, why don't you build a community of people who will sign up every single month to give what they can. And that's The Spring. That now has members from 149 countries, and is really the core of so much of our growth. The average is about 30 bucks a month.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  So it's a little less than one person getting clean water. But there are a lot of people that can give one person clean water every single month and not even miss it, not even think about it. You know, it's two Netflix's and a Spotify, right? Or two HBO Max's. And instead of, you know, getting content that you probably don't even need to watch more of anyway, you know, humans are getting clean water as 100% of that goes. So that's, people could learn more about that at thespring.com. And there's also a video there that's gotten over 100 million views, which is a, is a short telling of our story with some of the visuals that you mentioned.

• 45:17Shaan Puri?

  And I'm going to ask you one impossible question, which is, kind of like, you know, you asked Michael Jordan, how do you do, how do you do it? Right? It's like, you've told me little things in passing around, because I kind of admire your brand building, your storytelling, and your event thing also. Like, we didn't even talk about the events that you guys throw, and how those drum up so much interest and passion and donations. And you had told me one thing about the events that I shared on the podcast that a lot of people liked, which was, when I asked you, why are your events so good? Why, why do people rave about the events? And you said, I got this from Vic, my wife, she says,

• 45:49Shaan Puri?

  You know, it's about the moments between the moments. Um, and you gave me that little philosophy and I don't even think I understand 80% of that. But

• 45:57Speaker 00

  I don't know either. We should get my wife in here.

• 45:59Shaan Puri?

  It's provocative, right? It gave me something to think about. I'm curious, do you feel like, is there anything that you've kind of, is your, your personal philosophies or isms? Or sort of like life hacks when it comes to either the storytelling, the sales, the marketing side, the brand building? Like, do you have any other moments between the moments that I can, I could take with me this time?

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Well, I, I think the more you give, the more you give. So I think it's like a muscle and practicing generosity, practicing saying yes, just makes you want to say yes more. It makes you want to help more people.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  You know, I think a lot of people just they have the walls up. Oh my gosh, if I say yes to this charity, I'm going to have to say next to the next one. Yes to the next one. And like, everybody's going to be asking me like, that's okay. Try that, you know? And, and, and if, yeah, if you have to take the amount that you're giving down to all of them. So you can say yes to more, try encouraging a social entrepreneur. Try encouraging someone who has mustered the courage to ask you to support their run. Or, you know, their son's leukemia treatment, or the food pantry, or a cause like water around the world. Like, say yes, and it's a joy to give. It, it's, it's a blessing to give. You know, the first three letters in the word fundraising, it's fun.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  Like, it should be fun to raise money for important causes, to raise money, uh, to give money, to end needless suffering around the world. And I think the more you do it, the more you want to do it. Um, and the more you say no, the more you're inclined to say no and miss out.

• 47:29Shaan Puri?

  Right. Well, I will, uh, I will take your challenge. I will say yes. So I'm going to set up a birthday. My birthday is in a couple of weeks. I'm going to set up a birthday campaign right now. I'm going to put the link in the description of this podcast.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Awesome. I love it.

• 47:41Shaan Puri?

  So. If you, if you love this podcast, if you love me, normally that we have this thing called the gentleman's agreement or the ladies understanding, which is basically says, go subscribe to our channel. Today it's a little bit of a different gentleman's agreement.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  Donate your Asian dollars. How old are you going to be?

• 47:54Shaan Puri?

  Thirty-five. So if you want to give me a gift, thirty-five bucks towards Charity Water, I'm going to put the link in the description and then I will donate thirty-five thousand dollars on top of whatever gets donated from people to, to Charity Water as well. And so that will be my, my, my gift. And Scott, thanks for coming on. I promised you I'd get you out of here on time. So I gotta, I gotta wrap it here, but thanks for coming on.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  So generous. That's, that's really incredible. That means so much to me.

• 48:21Shaan Puri?

  And thank you for kind of showing, I don't know, I've learned a lot from you. That's a little bit of my education from you on, on brand building, storytelling and doing things, you know, like, I don't know, you, you have, you have a lot of courage. You, you chose to spend your life doing something that matters. Like you, you didn't care about this stuff, but I remember when I went to Ethiopia with you and we went to one of the schools where a well had been built. And literally when we were coming in, I was like, are the Beatles behind us? What is this giant crowd? Huge crowd. Like the whole town was there lined up. And literally I was like, Scott is like Jesus to them. Like there were signs with your name. And I was like, of course there should be because of the impact. And you know, for somebody who you work on the internet, like I'm sitting here in my

• 49:04Shaan Puri?

  boxers right now doing a podcast, like we live a pretty charmed life. We get to do things that are pretty, pretty, you know, easy in the grand history of the world. I think it's pretty easy to be disconnected from, from reality and what's going on for billions of people out there. And so, you know, I thank you for, for giving me that experience. And, you know, if, if anybody has the opportunity to kind of turn a little bit of your attention away from kind of the Twitter and the TikToks of the world and take a look at what's going on in the world. I think it will, it'll help you and kind of make an impact for them the same way it did for me.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  Well, man, I appreciate the chance to tell the story. And thanks again for your generosity. That means a lot to me and more importantly, the people who will be on the receiving end of it.

• 49:45Shaan Puri?

  And if people want to go learn more about you, the charity, shout out where you want to send people to.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  I would just say charitywater.org and thespring.com.

• 49:54Shaan Puri?

  Okay, awesome. Thanks, Scott.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.