Scott Harrison On Why Clean Water Changes Everything

From the outside looking in, he was living the dream. Killer SoHo loft. Private jets to exotic locales. Rolex, cover model girlfriend and cash. Plenty of cash. But ten years living decadently and extravagantly as a nightclub promoter in New York City took it's toll. By 28, Scott Harrison had become the worst person he knew. Utterly lost, mired in a crisis of conscience and desperate to rediscover his sense of purpose, Scott decided it was time for a drastic change. So he left NYC to spend a year volunteering as a photojournalist aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, West Africa. During this time, Harrison witnessed and photographed levels of poverty and illness he never knew existed. As one year turned into two, he came to understand that many of the infections and diseases their group treated were waterborne, and could have been prevented if people had access to clean drinking water. Scott couldn't understand why nobody seemed to be focusing on solving this important problem at scale. So he decided to tackle it himself. Upon returning to NYC in 2006, Scott turned his full attention to the global water crisis and the (then) 1.1 billion people living without access to clean water. The manifestation of that commitment is charity:water — a revolutionary for-purpose endeavor that to date has raised over $210 million to fund an astounding 20,000+ water projects that deliver clean water to more than 6.3 million people all across the world. Equally impressive is the extent to which Scott has quite literally reinvented and re-energized how we give and how we think about giving. He did it by creating an aspirational brand. He did it by restoring public trust in charity. And he did it by leveraging technology to deeply connect each and every giver with the gift's specific result and impact. Simply put, Scott Harrison is one of the most impressive people I have ever met. His inspiring story from lost to found is legend. I'm thrilled to share it with you today. My hope is that this conversation inspires action. Because each and every one of us holds the power to positively impact the life of another. And because life is more fulfilling, meaningful and rewarding when we are persistently engaged in the pursuit of service and giving. My call to action? The Spring — charity: water's monthly subscription service. I signed up. And you should too. 100% of all Spring donations go directly to the field to bring clean water to those in need, and Spring members will get updates of the impact their donations have. Let's all pitch in together. As a community. Because even a simple $30 gift can provide one person with clean water. And because it's just cool and awesome to do generously for others. For more information and to sign up, visit our special url cwtr.org/richrollspring or click the banner ad below. This is a special one for me. I hope it is for you too. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  I wanted more people to have a redemptive experience of giving of their time, and of their talent, and of their money, which I'd just done for the last two years, and seeing how rewarding that can be. I wanted to invite people to try unselfishness versus selfishness, and share the transformative human experience I'd gone through with others through giving and generosity. The thing was birthed out of my personal faith, but the charity has had no religious affiliation, and that's been really exciting to me, to see Jews, and Christians, and atheists, and Muslims, and Mormons, and everybody kind of come together under this very big tent of clean water. It's really one of those few things everybody can agree on. That's Scott Harrison, and this...

• 1:50Speaker 01

  ...is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:02Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, what's going on? How are you? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to my podcast. Today, as you might imagine, we're coming at this from a little bit of a different angle. We are live here in Ireland, County Cork, at Ballyvilan House. I'm here with the Plant Power Ireland campers. Say hello, everybody.

• 2:28Rich Roll?

  We're on the last day of our seven day experience. Have you guys been having a good time? Yeah! Amazing. It's been an incredible experience connecting with everybody over the course of the last several days. We've had a great time running. We got lost on our run today, like trespassing across some farm. There might have been an electrical fence involved. Gladly, no dogs or police had to intervene. But it's been amazing. We've been doing tea ceremony. We've been eating together. We've been learning about cooking and nutrition. The Happy Pair guys came down. It's been extraordinary and I'm so blessed to have spent this time with you guys. So, thank you for all coming together to cultivate

• 3:11Rich Roll?

  community around these ideas that are certainly so important to Julie and I, and obviously important to you guys. So, I appreciate it. And I also appreciate you guys sitting down to do the introduction for this week's podcast with me. As I always say, recording these introductions is the most challenging, difficult thing for me in this whole podcast experience, because sitting down alone and talking into a microphone by myself, I don't know, I get all caught up in my head. So, it's actually very helpful to have you guys here. So, I appreciate it. Super fun. Everybody say hello one more time.

• 3:46Rich Roll?

  To match this amazing week today, I'm excited to share with you an amazing conversation with the incredibly inspiring Scott Harrison. For those who don't know, Scott is the founder and CEO of Charity Water. He's a guy with quite a story. It's a story you're definitely not going to want to miss. It's truly one of the most extraordinary accounts I've ever heard. He's one of the most impressive people I've ever had the good fortune to meet. And I want to explain a little bit more about him and that and the why behind this conversation and what you can expect in just a moment. But first.

• 4:34Rich Roll?

  All right, Scott Harrison. This guy, holy cow, what a crazy, amazing story he has to tell. So this is a guy who spent essentially an entire decade in a decadent state of mind as a successful nightclub promoter in New York City until he has this crisis of conscience. And this crisis of conscience ultimately led Scott on this pilgrimage in search of purpose for his life. And it's a journey that ultimately led him to extended volunteer stints in Liberia, where he was exposed to levels of unimaginable poverty and illness. And over time, he came to understand that many of the infections and the diseases that

• 5:19Rich Roll?

  he was seeing, that their group was treating, were waterborne and could have been prevented if people had access to clean drinking water. And yet, it seemed that nobody was really focused on solving this gigantic, yet seemingly solvable problem. So upon returning to New York City in 2006, he turned his full attention to this global water crisis, to learning about it and trying to determine how he could begin to tackle it. He found out that there were then, at that point in time, 1.1 billion people living without access to clean water, which is pretty shocking. And the manifestation of Scott's commitment to this cause is Charity

• 6:02Rich Roll?

  Water, which is a for-purpose endeavor that he founded, that he currently runs, that to date, has raised over $210 million to fund over 20,000 water projects around the world, and brings clean water to more than 6.3 million people. It's really quite something impressive. But even more than that, I think what's really interesting about Scott's story and the story of charity water is that he quite literally reimagined and reinvigorated and really reinvented how we give and how we think about giving by repairing public trust in charity and also modernizing

• 6:43Rich Roll?

  the process, the branding, and really the connection between the giver and the results of giving. And Scott's story is really an extraordinary one, and this is just such a great conversation. It's a conversation about transformation. It's a conversation about the power of giving, and it's a conversation about the power, I think, we all hold to be agents of positive change, the power and the potential that we all carry to quite literally change the world. And this is really a special one for me. And I should say that we recorded this conversation a couple of months ago, but I just hung out with Scott two weeks ago at the World Domination Summit in Portland. That's Chris Gilbo's event. If you haven't listened to my conversation with Chris on the podcast, I would check that

• 7:27Rich Roll?

  out. In any event, I got to see Scott deliver his full keynote in person. And I have to say, it was one of the most incredibly powerful public presentations I've ever had the privilege of seeing. I was just really moved by his story and his work and his example. And it's inspired me to be better, to do more, and to give more. So on that note, I have an important announcement I'm going to make at the end of this conversation. So please stick around to the very end. All right. Enough. You guys, did we do it?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:06Rich Roll?

  Introduction, okay. Did I say something about him? You guys ready? Are you excited to hear the conversation with Scott?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:12Rich Roll?

  All right, good. Let's talk to Scott.

• 8:18Rich Roll?

  Cool. So awesome to meet you. Thanks for taking the time. I'm really excited to unpack your story, the charity water story, your personal story, which is equally amazing and dovetails beautifully with, you know, the narrative behind, um, you know, how you built this amazing enterprise. So let's get into it, man.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Where do we start?

• 8:39Rich Roll?

  I know. Well, I think that, first of all, do you ever get tired of telling your story?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  My wife asks that all the time.

• 8:45Rich Roll?

  Cause you're, you're very good at it.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  She's tired of it.

• 8:49Rich Roll?

  Well, I'm gonna make you, I'm gonna make you do it.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  I spoke last night at an event and she just always goes in the other room now.

• 8:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I don't need to hear this anymore. Um, I feel like the only, not the only, but the best way to tell the story is really to, we gotta go back to the beginning, right? I mean, that's how we can contextualize everything that's all of, so.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  So the beginning is, uh, really an event that happened when I was four years old. I was born in Philadelphia in a very middle-class family and my dad was, I never really understood what he did, but he sold electrical type transformer, power supply things.

• 9:22Rich Roll?

  Business man.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  A businessman. Uh, my mom was a writer and, you know, they had me and, and, uh, you know, they'd been trying to have kids for a while, uh, had me. And when I was four, we moved from Philadelphia to get closer to my dad's new job, uh, to the suburbs of Southern Jersey. And unbeknownst to us, we moved into this kind of beige ground, brown, gray house, uh, that, you know, wasn't necessarily a dream house, but it was, it was going to eliminate his commute down to 20 minutes. And we didn't know this, but the gas company, PSENG, had installed a faulty furnace in the house that had pinhole cracks and carbon leaks, carbon

• 10:05Speaker 01

  monoxide was leaking through this house. So we all start to get a little sick after moving in. Uh, I, my dad and I were only sleeping in the house. So he was working really long hours. I was at school. I was playing with my friends. And on January 1, on New Year's Day, my mom walks across, uh, her bedroom and she collapses unconscious on the floor. And it took us a while and a bunch of blood tests to find these massive amounts of carbon monoxide, carboxyhemoglobin in her bloodstream. So she'd been exposed as she was fixing up the basement, uh, over time.

• 10:38Rich Roll?

  And you were how old at this point?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  I was four.

• 10:40Rich Roll?

  Four.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  So I just started getting sick and weird allergies and I bounced back very quickly. My dad wound up ripping the furnace out, finding the cracks himself. And what happened to my mom, she didn't die thankfully. So a lot of people actually die from this prolonged exposure. But her immune system died forever. So it was irreparably destroyed. And from that moment, everything chemical, which would be normal to us, started making her sick. Examples, car fumes would make her terribly sick. Perfume or deodorant or any soap with a scent or perfume would make her incredibly sick. I remember vividly as a kid, the ink from books would make her sick.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  So her workaround was to give my dad and I a book that she wanted to read. And we would bake it in the oven to try to out gas the smell of the print. And then my mom at the time was living in almost a containment cell, a bathroom, a tile bathroom that had been scrubbed down with something called Basic H and Ivory Soap. And she slept on an army cot that had been washed maybe 30 times in baking soda. And I remember the door was covered completely in tinfoil.

• 11:53Rich Roll?

  And she couldn't leave the room?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  She would, she would be in the room when she was in the house. That was the only room in our, you know, 2,000 square foot house that she could be in.

• 12:02Rich Roll?

  Like having to live in a bubble.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And then she would live outside. It was just like living in a bubble.

• 12:06Rich Roll?

  And you're an only, you're an only child, yeah, the boy in the bubble.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  The boy in the bubble. And then there was a movie called Safe with Julianne Moore. That is very, very close to my mom's condition.

• 12:14Rich Roll?

  There was a movie that just came out also, like a teen, like a teen movie about a girl who can't leave her house and.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  I haven't heard about that, but I'd love to see it. So that was what it was like. And I would march the, you know, slightly charred book up to my mom's room. The door would open. She was wearing cotton gloves because she still couldn't touch the print. It forgot in her bloodstream. And then she would wear these charcoal, really ugly masks and then would often use oxygen. So it was just a really bizarre existence. Family planning stopped after this illness. They wanted to have a big family, but she was just so sick and, you know, at a very young age. I went into this caregiver role. Mom was now, you know, not a mom. Mom was an invalid, a patient. And I did the cooking. I did the cleaning. We tried everything. We took her from doctor to clinic.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I remember for a period of years, she was doing a rotation diet. Where she would eat one thing every seven or eight days. You know, breakfast would be codfish. You know, lunch would be walnuts. Dinner would be, I don't know, kale.

• 13:19Rich Roll?

  And to be, to be that young and have to transition from just being a kid into being a caregiver. I mean, that's traumatic. That's a lot to ask of a young child.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  I'm writing a book right now with, with someone else and she, she keeps feeling sorry for me. And I just didn't feel that way. This was just the reality. But she's like, man, as a kid, I mean, you, you know, you, you had it really rough. I didn't feel like that. I actually felt needed. There was this sense of responsibility to take care of my mom.

• 13:49Rich Roll?

  But your behavior later on demonstrated, you know, the backlash, you know, I mean, that was in there. You know what I mean? This need to, you know, to express yourself differently.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So it was, my parents had a deep Christian faith. They would, they would identify as nondenominational. So, you know, they wouldn't be Methodist or Presbyterian or Baptist or any of that. They just, they were, they would call themselves Christians. And interestingly, they didn't sue the gas company for negligence. I think they took $1,200 as a, hey, we're really sorry for the carbon monoxide. And the, you know, the furnace we put in that had holes in it. But here's $1,200. And they just didn't want to become bitter. They didn't want to go through, you know, a protracted legal engagement. And they believed that it wasn't the fault. It wasn't intentional.

• 14:35Rich Roll?

  How do you feel about that decision?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  I actually have a lot of admiration for them. You know, they had healthcare and, you know, probably could have sued for millions of dollars. But, you know, my parents, you know, today, if you fast forward. Maybe they live on $40,000 a year and they probably give double that away. They live very modest lives. They've, they're very, very generous. You know, they, they really live to be able to give and support.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  How they do it now.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  My mom has.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  She has learned how to cope. Now we're, we're almost thirty seven years later. And in some ways, she's, she's much better. She can eat more normally. When I go home, I'll change clothes. So if I'll come from New York City with my wife and my kids, we, there's a staging area in the garage and we kind of strip down to our underwear. And we put on special clothes that we've left at the house that have been washed in baking soda and made pure. And then we're able to interact with my mom in a really normal way. So she's no longer confined to a room. She's sleeping in the same bedroom. We actually moved houses to, to the, the country, to a more pure environment.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  So I would say she's doing better, but still can't come in to New York City and visit her grandkids. You know, we, we have to go to them and then really get pure. So this, uh, childhood was just weird.

• 16:00Rich Roll?

  And what kind of kid were you?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  I was a good kid. I was the good Christian kid that didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't have sex and didn't cuss. And I played piano on, on Sundays in the church. And I, I really played by the rules. I felt a responsibility to take care of her. If you'd asked me what I wanted to do growing up, uh, it was to become a doctor, to help people, uh, to help sick people like my mom.

• 16:19Rich Roll?

  Continue the caregiving.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. It didn't quite turn out that way.

• 16:23Rich Roll?

  Well, it's caregiving in a different kind of way.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I, I mean, the, the divergence around eighteen.

• 16:29Rich Roll?

  Right. All right. So, so you get into NYU and you make your big move to the city.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Well, that was interesting. Uh, I, NYU was really the afterthought. I, you know, I thought I was gonna go to, I don't know, medical school or, or be a doctor. And then, you know, around sixteen, seventeen, just this rebellious streak hit. They, my parents had me in a Christian school in the ninth grade with nine people in my class. And the, the teacher was a VHS cassette on one of those video cards that would get rolled in. That was science class. So it was in the basement of a church. And I just was like, I'm gonna run away from home if this is gonna be my education. So they, I convinced them to put me in the four thousand person high school.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  And I think they just saw something about my personality that scared, you know, that scared them.

• 17:22Rich Roll?

  Which was what specifically?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  I would go nuts. And and fall in with the wrong crowd and and you know, take on some of the vices that the parents get afraid of. So I

• 17:33Rich Roll?

  And what do you think? Let's just like, let's put a pin in that. I mean, do you think that it was that a reaction to the kind of sort of constricted home life that you had? Or what was it like? What was the wild out all about?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  I've I've wondered that. I I don't know. I mean, maybe, maybe it was not having, you know, the normal fun life. Maybe it was that religion felt a little oppressive to me and and rules based, you know, all about what you shouldn't be doing rather than what you should be doing. So, yeah, I moved to the high school and there's 4,000 people there. And I immediately just find out, wow, everybody's drinking, everybody's having sex, everybody's smoking, everybody's cursing. This seems like a lot of fun. And I'd always played the piano from the age of four, joined a band, a band called Sunday River, named

• 18:26Speaker 01

  after a ski resort in the East Coast. And, you know, the next thing I know, we're driving into New York City, playing these gigs at at famous clubs, at CBGB's, at the Wetlands, at the Lions Den. And we're getting booked and people are turning up.

• 18:42Rich Roll?

  Like a punk band?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  It was, it was more, let's see if I go back to that time. It was, it was sort of Counting Crows meets Pearl Jam meets the band Live. So

• 18:53Rich Roll?

  This is like 93 or something like that?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, our lead singer sounded a little like Scott Whelan from Stone Temple. But then the piano had a different, or the keyboard had a different feel to it. So that was, I moved to New York City to really, I was the band's manager by default, just because I was the more responsible one. And I was booking us out. I was trying to get us a record deal, which, you know, was a real thing at the time. And you could make money by selling records. And I managed to get us discovered by The Scorpions one night, who heard us play. And they invited us to meet their manager. And, you know, we're on this, on this track for a record deal. And the band just falls apart. I mean, drugs, unreliability, we all

• 19:37Speaker 01

  really did, we kind of hated each other by the end of it. And that led me to say, well, I've already moved to New York City. I don't have a viable band anymore. What else could I do to make money? And oh, by the way, I should probably go to college now because my dad saved up. And, you know, I was an only child.

• 19:56Rich Roll?

  Right, but they had to be freaking out, right? Like you.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Many times, yes.

• 20:02Rich Roll?

  What happened? We did everything correctly.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  We did everything right and, and he just went astray. Well, it gets worse for them. Uh, I, I then go from playing in the band to becoming a nightclub promoter. So I realized that the people on the other side of the equation were the ones that were really making the money and having more fun. So our band would turn up, we would be schlepping amps and guitars and, uh, in, in our Ford Taurus station wagon, you know, that was going to break down at any minute. And we would bring a bunch of people to the club, they would pay a cover. And I don't know, the promoters might throw us 200 bucks to split six ways. Uh, and I realized that the promoters were the ones that were making the money.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  So the minute the band broke up, I, I teamed up with one of them and in a very short time began producing an open mic night, an R and B open mic night, uh, at a legendary club called Nell's in New York City. And a year later, you know, Stevie Wonder is coming and playing and Shaka Khan and Brian McKnight and Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown. I mean, it was the most incredible Prince was in there, uh, often. He would always come in and, uh, he had this favorite corner in the back and he would unscrew all the light bulbs. Or his team would ask us to unscrew the light bulb so he could sit there in darkness. And would often jump up on stage.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  So, uh, you know, imagine me as this 19 year old kid, uh, two years before I'm actually allowed to be in a nightclub, promoting this, uh, this open mic, this open mic, um, where amazing R and B people are coming. I mean, I got to play piano on stage with Stevie Wonder. It was incredible.

• 21:39Rich Roll?

  That's amazing. And, and there's like, uh, underneath that, there's not only like this sort of hustle that obviously gets played into here, but also like, you, you must be like this natural networker, right? Like the, the sort of social skills that allowed you to book the, book the band, you know, originally into these clubs and meet all these people and get with the scorpions and then translating that into, you know, this versioning career as a, as a club promoter. And then later on, like what you're doing now. Right?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  I think I was just willing to ask people and I liked inviting people to things. I liked inviting them into a party. I'm an incluter. I remember doing that StrengthsFinder once, which kind of tells you, you know, here are the things that you're really good at. And one of them was, was an incluter. You know, if I see someone at a party who's off to the side and nobody's talking to them, I'm gonna drop the conversation I'm in and I'm gonna go and try and bring them in or introduce them to someone. So I think that, that skill worked really well in nightlife. I mean, you're inviting people into a party and when you get past the velvet rope, it's gonna be amazing inside. All the right people, you know, the right DJs, the right celebrities. And then, you know, the better you get at that, the more you can charge for cocktails.

• 22:54Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. So what were the clubs that you were working with the most?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Well, I worked at at least 45 venues over a decade. So this, this became a 10-year profession, I guess, or career. Started out in R&B and then it moved over to fashion, what we would call Models in Bottles, as, as a club called Lotus opened up in New York City. And someone dared me that I couldn't get a job there. So I just started calling the club, leaving a voicemail for the owners. I mean, daily, until finally they told me to stop harassing me. And they, you know, again, I had this very successful R&B night a couple of blocks away. I think they started paying me $150 a week. So I had to start completely over in a new scene and began to figure that out

• 23:42Speaker 01

  and figure out how to get a different set of modeling agencies and bookers and celebrities and people from the music business to come.

• 23:50Rich Roll?

  And how does it, like, what is the logistics of that? Like, you contact a club and you say, give me this one night and I'm gonna throw this party and they just open it up for you and you work out some deal on how you're gonna share the, share the, share the door?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty simple. You know, clubs are, well, they would have their good nights and then they would have their slow nights. So you would typically, a club would hire a promoter, and this is again 10, 12 years ago, but they would hire us for their, you know, their off nights. And we would cut a pretty big deal. We would cut, you know, maybe the full door that we would want and then 10 or 15% of all alcohol sales of all take. But they're saying, hey, look, we're only gonna ring $3,000 or $4,000. If these guys can bring in 25 or 30, you know, they're just splitting a piece of the upside. So you were really incentivized to bring your crowd so that we would develop a following. And the idea is that the people were coming to my parties. They cared much less about the club.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  So the minute we moved from one club to the next club, they would follow us. They wouldn't keep going to that club.

• 24:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  People are there to see people.

• 24:54Rich Roll?

  And you're not wed to the bricks and mortar. Once that club goes into decline, as they all do at some point.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So you're asset light. You really have no risk. You're almost mercenaries or kind of guns for hire. And, you know, club owners and promoters have fractious relationships. And, you know, it's, uh, clubs do well, very well. I mean, there's, there's some clubs that have figured out how to be around for 10 years and make really, really good money.

• 25:22Rich Roll?

  Did you ever, uh, did you, this is an aside, but did you ever work with Jeff Gossett at Mumba?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  I didn't work with him, but I was at Mumba every Monday.

• 25:31Rich Roll?

  You were, yeah.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  I was a fixture in the karaoke night.

• 25:35Rich Roll?

  He's a friend and he sort of had a interesting trajectory in his, I don't know if you have.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  I never kept up with him afterwards.

• 25:40Rich Roll?

  Cause he was like, you know, Mumba was, that had a moment, right? Like that was the place. And he's since become like a yogi and bought a property in Costa Rica and basically just lives there and has a retreat center. Like he went completely, he had a similar kind of, you know, moment of reckoning with that lifestyle and just completely shut the door on it. And lives a completely different life now.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  It happens. I was walking my son to school the other day with another guy that I knew, you know, from this period of time, 12, 13 years ago. And he was just saying, you know, I woke up one morning and I looked in a mirror and I said, who is this man? What have I become, you know, coked up from the night before, you know, it's 10 a.m. or something. Didn't like his face, didn't like, you know, that feeling of drugs in his body. And he's like a banker now. He just, he completely checked out. So that's what happened for me. It was 10 years of very predictable models, bottles, 45 clubs, flying around the world to chase Fashion Week in Milan and Paris and London. Vacations in Buenos, Brazil and Punta de Lesta, South America.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  And you're, you're just kind of piggybacking on other people's money. So you're living at such a high, your lifestyle looks great, right? $10,000 dinners, but you're not paying.

• 26:57Rich Roll?

  Right. And you're selling this idea of validation based upon the crowd of people that you're gonna get to hang out.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're selling cool and, and there are girls around.

• 27:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  There are beautiful girls around, so.

• 27:08Rich Roll?

  And are you, when you're promoting these parties, are you, you're present at all of them? And are you getting loaded every, every night?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  You are. You're getting loaded, but, but in a way, not out of addiction, at least for me, but out of total boredom. It becomes the most banal boring thing in the world. Having the same conversation, shouting over a DJ who's playing the exact same songs. You know, and turning up at midnight, you know, to sit around for three or four hours. Uh, it, it's really painful after a while. So, yeah, I mean, I was getting loaded. Uh, you know, I went from, you know, not doing anything to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for 10 years. You know, heavy drinking problem, uh, cocaine ecstasy MDMA, pretty much everything short of heroin. Uh, and then a serious gambling problem and, and pornography problem and a strip club problem. So we, it, it got dark in a hurry.

• 27:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Do you think about what it would have been like had Instagram been around during that era for you? Cause, cause on the out, you could paint that, you could sort of paint this picture of it looking super sexy and fun and amazing. And, you know, nightlife and girls and fancy cars and private jets and exotic, you know, foreign locations, all of that.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Well, that's what our photos, you know, we have photo albums full of, you know, us standing next to private jets with six girls, you know? Uh, and that, that's, uh, yeah, we were sharing it publicly.

• 28:33Rich Roll?

  But you're selling that.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Selling that dream. I mean, I remember, you know, watching a guy play $10,000 hands of blackjack. And that's the dream, right? That rush of watching someone, you know, have a million dollars of chips on the table and not care whether he wins or loses. And he's surrounded by, you know, the jet set and, and, you know, six foot models. I mean, the whole thing, gosh, it sounds so silly now, but it's, it was what, uh, it was what I thought was important at the time. More money, more girls, more things, um, better vacations.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  And thankfully, I came to a realization and got out like our friend Jeff.

• 29:14Rich Roll?

  Was it a, I mean, I know it kind of all sort of came to a head in Punta del Este on this sort of, you know, party retreat that you helped produce. Was it a progressive sort of slide towards that realization? Or was it really just one moment where you're like, I gotta, I gotta get out of this?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  It was. It was both. It was, I remember my partner and I were trying to actually make the switch to ownership and we were offered 10 or 15% of a restaurant to attach our names to it. So that was cool. We would still promote, but now we would be kind of, you know, official restaurateurs. And that's, that's what happens at the most successful level. You've got guys like Noah and Jason, who we were promoting, promoting with, who then go on to, you know, run Tao Group, which is now a series of restaurants and clubs.

• 30:02Rich Roll?

  Or Sean McPherson or Brent Full House.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  It's funny, I biked by Sean on the West Side Highway last week.

• 30:09Rich Roll?

  You'd become like a hotelier.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  I was like, Sean!

• 30:13Rich Roll?

  I mean, you could have graduated to that, sort of respectable.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  So that's what we were trying to do, right? That's what we were trying to do. And as I guess, we would, you know, my partner and I were both approaching 30. Really, what happened on this trip to Punta del Este was, it was, it was just one of those cathartic moments where you realize that your life is just so off balance. It's so not right. But in a way, it looked right. You know, my, my girlfriend at the time was on the cover of Elle Magazine. I, we were, this palatial estate we had rented. There were servants serving us there. There were horses. The right people were there. We spent a thousand dollars on fireworks.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  There were magnates of Dom Perignon. Just, this was what we were chasing. And I remember the party on New Year's Eve just went on so long. And I remember waking up, I probably went to bed at 10 a.m., probably woke up around three or four, and the party was still going on in our compound. And what should have been this idyllic, beautiful setting, you know, near the ocean, set in the, the trees and this beautiful kind of wooded area, was just this kind of degenerate thrashing.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  In a way, and it just all felt so unhealthy, like a game of musical chairs, you know, where the music stops and I'm standing. And I just realized, I think on this trip, that there would never be enough of the things I was looking for to satisfy me. There would never be enough girls, there'd never be enough money. Somebody would always have a better car and a better watch. And, you know, there would never be an end to the self-serving, you know, sycophantic nature of, you know, climbing up this social ladder.

• 32:05Rich Roll?

  It's also got to be confusing also when you've been sold this idea that these are the things that are going to make you, you know, make you happy and feel fulfilled. And to play that game, you know, at the highest level and get to that point where this is where it's supposed to feel great and realize like, this is not what I thought it would be.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  But I realized the other people weren't happy. They weren't happy. So it's almost like the veil was lifted. And I remember, you know, specifically one person, and this guy had all the money and the private jets. And he was dating girls younger than his daughter. And his daughters didn't want to talk to him. And there was just so much kind of sadness and wreckage. And the value system was just so off. You know, faith had a big part to play. So for 10 years, I hadn't been going to church. I hadn't been, obviously, living by any of the things, any of the moral codes that I'd been brought up with. And I remember, you know, deeply hungover on this trip, you know, beginning to read this piece of

• 33:05Speaker 01

  deep theology, a book called The Pursuit of God, by this theologian named A.W. Tozer, who I think wrote the book in a day or two, just sat down and wrote it. And I felt like I was reading the opposite intention of my life. Here was a man who was trying to understand God, his Creator, understand values of virtue and humility and compassion and righteousness and just all of this stuff that I wasn't. And I think, you know, I'm pretty extreme, just being faced with the opposite. You know, what would the opposite of a hedonistic, self-serving? Life look like it might be this, it might be a life of serving others, a life of virtue,

• 33:47Speaker 01

  a life of purity. So I won't say it was that quick of a transition, but I came back to New York City and now nightlife was ruined for me. I was having no more fun at the clubs. The restaurant thing was interesting, but it was kind of a trendy restaurant, you know, with a club in the top that we were trying to sell bottles, you know, after dinner.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  You know, I wasn't in love with my girlfriend at the time that I was kind of living with and I just, everything was wrong. And I remember trying to smoke less, trying to drink less, trying to, you know, cut out all the drugs and just kind of flailing a little bit. And just not having that much success.

• 34:24Rich Roll?

  Right, like one foot in, one foot out. What does that look like? How, you know, how's that?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  What does it look like?

• 34:29Rich Roll?

  I should just sort of try to clean up things a little bit and not getting any satisfaction out of like half measures.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  And I needed the money. So it wasn't like I could just stop working. I mean nightclub promoters, you know, we make good money, but we're not savers, right? We're, we're kind of typically spending 5% more than we're making. That just goes along with the lifestyle. So this thing that I did for a living, the other thing is you don't easily jump professions. You're making so much money, you can't just go get a marketing job.

• 34:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  You know, it'd be a third of what you're making. So it's a, it's a little bit of a, it was a little bit of a dilemma. Anyway, six months later, I'm out with, this, this event happens in a nightclub and I'm out with my new partner of the restaurant and we're at this, this kind of trendy members only club and I get in some altercation with the bouncer who was harassing my friend and I wind up getting this guy fired the next day. And the guy comes after me the next night, you know, threatening to kill me. And, you know, this, this kind of stuff happens in nightlife. I probably have my life threatened 50 times, you know, for not letting people in the door. You know, you're, you're standing on the inside of the velvet rope. They're on the outside. They're like, I am gonna come by and just, you know,

• 35:44Speaker 01

  I'm gonna shoot you so full of holes. So, you know, that certainly wasn't the first time that my life had been threatened, but. This felt like a great opportunity to just take a little time off and just get out of town for a couple of weeks. And I remember calling my business partner and saying, you handle the clubs for a couple of weeks, renting a cobalt blue Ford Mustang, grabbing a Bible and a bottle of Dewar's and just driving north.

• 36:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  That was the destination.

• 36:12Rich Roll?

  That's like out of a movie.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  North.

• 36:14Rich Roll?

  And you have this, you know, this bifurcated soul, right? Like the Bible in the bottle.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  I'm telling you, I mean, it was really that extreme. These, you know, even, even reading the theology, you know, having done a plate of cocaine the night before. I mean, that was, I was really caught in these two worlds, the world of my childhood, the values and the spirituality that I've been brought up with, and then the hedonistic lifestyle that I'd embraced for 10 years. So even, you know, I'm driving, I mean, I drove up to Connecticut and then Vermont, I wind up in Maine, and I'm trying to smoke less. Just imagine me like reading through the Old Testament while chain smoking and, you know, sipping on scotch at night.

• 36:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah. With no destination, right?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  No destination.

• 37:00Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  I really don't know where I'm going. And, you know, I start to pray and talk to God and, you know, not know if anyone's really listening and just begin to explore what could be next. And I get this idea to just explore the opposite of my life in a tangible way for one year. There's a principle.

• 37:21Rich Roll?

  Based on that book.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Based on a lot of stuff.

• 37:24Rich Roll?

  Influence by.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Based on a lot of stuff. Reading the Bible again, just listening to some, some teaching. I mean, it's a, there's a, there's a Christian principle of tithing. I think it's actually a Jewish principle of tithing that the Christians have adopted. And it's just kind of giving a tenth back. So the idea was 10 years of hedonistic living. What would one unselfish year look like? Where I just changed my life and explored the 180 degree opposite. So at this time I was in Maine and I landed in a little town called Greenville with my, parked my Mustang. I go into a dial-up internet cafe and I begin to fill out applications to volunteer for as many humanitarian organizations as I could. I'm filling out applications to, you know, the United Nations, the Peace Corps,

• 38:09Speaker 01

  World Vision, Save the Children, Oxfam, like anybody that I could find, just filling out these online applications, saying, I'm willing to volunteer, I'm willing to volunteer. I wanted to go for a year. So at this point, I never go back to New York City. And I drive around Maine a little more. I go visit my parents in New Jersey. I actually fly to the south of France. A club friend of mine had this beautiful cabin in the Peony Mountains, a little forester's house. And I just went there to wait and to pray and to kind of cleanse my soul, if you will.

• 38:43Rich Roll?

  And you're done with the drinking? Are you still?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  I'm still drinking. I'm still, you know, I'm done with the drugs. I'm done with the drugs. I'm done with the pornography. I'm done with the gambling. Interestingly, I'm almost done with the gambling. That's another story. So they're starting to fall off, but again, nothing extreme. The, there's a little email cafe that I had to go down the mountain to check emails. And long story short, I'm denied by all these organizations that I've applied to. Because of course, who wants a freaking nightclub promoter on a humanitarian mission?

• 39:15Rich Roll?

  But all you're looking to do is volunteer. You'd think they would just, you know, enlist anybody who's willing to, you know, travel over there and give of themselves.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Well, they're not. They're not. I think they have a much higher bar. And, you know, I, I was also, I felt compelled to be honest on the application. So some of them say, do you smoke? Do you drink? I'm like, yeah, I want to stop. But, so I, I was just, I was an easy rejection nightclub promoter.

• 39:41Rich Roll?

  They're like, this isn't rehab. Like this is, you know, you're gonna have to actually work.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And I'm, I just remember praying like, God, what is up? I mean, I've left. I've stepped out in faith and now no one will take me? You know, I'm in this limbo. And one day I'm writing.

• 39:59Rich Roll?

  That's, you know, that's a really beautiful test of faith right there, right? Like, how committed are you really? You know, let's throw this obstacle up in front of you and see if you're gonna back down or whether you're gonna find a way through it.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  And the gift came kind of through the cloud. I was, I was driving my bike down from this little Pyrenee mountain shack and there's no cell phone reception for five miles. And then as I went through this little town, L'Appart de Puy-Lorong, there's a couple of bars. And I remember as I'm riding my bike through the town, my Nokia phone rings, that tiny little Nokia that we all had many years ago. And it's one organization called Mercy Ships. And they said, "We initially rejected your application, but we're about to start a mission without this position that you applied for, and we need to fill it. We've agreed to meet you." Hmm. And I said, "Well, where are you guys?" And they said, "Well, we're actually, it's a huge hospital ship organization.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  We're docked in Bremerhaven, Germany." So I said, "Well, I'm in the south of France. I'll be there in two days." So I jumped on a train and headed up to Bremerhaven, Germany. And I convinced them that I was not crazy. I was not going to throw wild parties or raves on their hospital ship. And then I really, my heart had been changed. I really wanted to serve. I dusted off the NYU degree that I'd gotten, which was in communications journalism, and said, "The position I was applying for was a photojournalist." So that just, that, it happened very, very quickly. They said, "Well, great. We need you to be on this mission in three weeks." So I went shopping. I bought a bunch of stuff for Africa.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  And three weeks later, I had this moment where I'm staring at a 522-foot hospital ship. I'm about to walk up the gangway and sail to West Africa, to a place called Liberia. And I'd never even heard of Liberia before. I thought Africa was a country, not made up of 40-something at the time. And then I just quit everything in that moment. I realized that the smoking would have to go, the drinking would have to go, the cursing would have to go, the gambling would have to go, the drugs certainly, you know, were gone at that point. And that I really, it was almost this prophetic moment that I could walk and sail away from my old life. Right. Kind of leave it on the shore and sail.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  It was 10 days across the ocean to, to this new adventure. Wow. And that was, what year was that? That was 2004, in the fall. Right.

• 42:39Rich Roll?

  All right, so you sailed to Liberia and you have this experience with these doctors, right, trying to treat these acute cases of, you know, people that are just in really bad shape and only able to really make a dent in what's really required and needed in that region.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Amazing group of doctors who sailed this hospital ship up and down the coast of Africa for 25 years and they would pull into the port and thousands and thousands of people would be waiting. People with tumors, people who'd been blind, people with leprosy, people who had been burned badly during the war. Liberia at the time had just come out of Charles Taylor's 14-year civil war with child soldiers. It had no electricity in the country, no running water, no sewage system, and one doctor for every 50,000 citizens. So if you got sick in this country, you're just out of luck. For comparison, in America, I think it's 1 for 180 of us is a doctor. So the stuff we saw was in such extremis.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  I saw people with missing faces, missing ears and noses, and people who'd been burned so badly you couldn't even recognize that there was a person, many of them by the rebels who were pouring hot oil over them. And it was just, it was incredibly traumatic. And I'm documenting, my job is to take pictures of every single person up close, two, three feet from their face, to document them for the medical library, both before and after. And, you know, it was moving as well. I mean, I saw people get their sight back. I saw people who were suffocating to death, many who had had tumors for eight or nine years, get their entire face back after a five-hour surgery.

• 44:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's this story of this guy Alfred, right? He had a giant tumor on his face.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  14-year-old kid, and he had a volleyball-sized tumor. I'm not exaggerating.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  He couldn't eat anymore and he was starting to starve to death. And I watched these amazing doctors who could be on vacation. You know, these, these doctors and surgeons had money and they could be in the Maldives. And instead they decided to fly to West Africa and use their talents in the service of others for free, all with their own expense, even paid to get there. So I watched these doctors just cut out Alfred's tumor, throw it in the bin, sew him back up. And I got to take him home to his family and his village. And they looked at him, I mean, he'd been written off for dead many years ago. So it was, it was an incredible experience. I took 50,000 photos that first year and just so deeply moved by the, the stories of the people that I met.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  The cool thing was that I had, I'd gone to Africa with a built in audience because I had a guest list of 15,000 people that I'd built up over 10 years, people from fashion, some celebrities. So they went from getting email invitations to the Prada party or a cosmopolitan party, you know, or whatever we were doing at the time to, you know, in the space of four weeks, here's Alfred and he's 14 and suffocating to death on his face with a pink, fleshy benign tumor. Uh, and I'm just, I'm just telling it like I see it. I'm sending photos and videos. So some people were like, take me the freak off this list right now. Unsubscribe, unsubscribe. Uh, this is, I didn't sign up for tumors.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Uh, but, but really the, the, the most typical response from my friends was of intrigue of, oh my gosh, like where are you? I never knew these conditions existed. Who are these doctors? What is this organization? How can I help? How can I give money? How can I give time? So I realized there the power that I had in kind of redeeming the relationships that I'd built for 10 years. The people that effectively I'd been getting drunk and wasted. And I could just tell them a very different story, a redemptive story, a story of, of hope and courage and compassion of these doctors. And the people began to respond. So I just did that over and over again for the first year. And that year ended, I came back to New York for a couple of months.

• 46:41Rich Roll?

  Hold on one second. Sorry to interrupt, but at some point, does Adam Braun end up on that boat with you?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  I don't think Adam was ever on the ship.

• 46:49Rich Roll?

  When I did the podcast with him, I could have sworn he said, I forget, I should have gone back and listened to it, but I think, weren't you guys like?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  He was on another ship actually that almost shipwrecked.

• 46:57Rich Roll?

  Cause he said that he met you while he was on his, you know, version of your adventure.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  He did, he did, I forget the name of it, but he did another ship. It wasn't a mercy ship, but yeah, he, they almost, he almost lost his life. Our ship actually caught on fire once at sea off the coast of Ghana, which is another story, but we all thought we were going to die in a blazing fire in the middle of a Ghanaian night. Both, both Adam and I managed to survive. So the year ends, long story short, I, I put an exhibition together. I raised about a hundred thousand dollars through my photos for mercy ships. And then I just go back for another year to follow the money and to show my friends that, that this, this work is continuing. And then more people get involved and more people give. So it was a two-year stint with the organization. The second year that I

• 47:46Speaker 01

  was there, I came across the water issue and I bought a motorcycle and started traveling off the ship into the deep bush, into the deep rural areas of Liberia. And I saw people drinking dirty water for the first time. And I'd just never seen human beings drink from swamps before. And I mean, green infested, crawling with bugs and worms and parasites. Children drinking water that we wouldn't let our dogs drink. So these two things are going on now. I'm in the villages, exploring, I'm back scrubbed up for surgery, documenting these, these medical procedures. And I'm telling the surgeons what I'm seeing out there. And they begin to just start preaching about water. You know, we know so much disease

• 48:31Speaker 01

  comes from bad water and sanitation and hygiene. And, you know, we wish somebody was working on this issue because it'd be less work for us to do.

• 48:38Rich Roll?

  Right, getting at the root cause of what's leading to so many of these, you know, acute conditions that these surgeons have to then deal with at the very end of that process, right? Like, why not go to the root cause?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  That's true. And in fact, 52% of all disease in the developing world, in all these countries that we were working in, is caused by bad water or lack of toilets.

• 48:59Rich Roll?

  52%.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  World Health Organization stat. So you think about that. Half of the sick people don't need to be sick. They just had this basic need met. So I was so compelled by water. Maybe this was the question behind the question. Maybe 7,000 people wouldn't turn up outside a football stadium with stuff growing on their face if they were drinking clean water and not bathing and washing with, you know, brown viscous river water.

• 49:23Rich Roll?

  And why, why do you think nobody had really looked at that in a serious way?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Well, there was no public awareness. So this is now 10 years ago. At the time, there were a billion people living without clean water. The largest water-only organization in America was a $12 million a year organization out of Texas. So no sense of scale. Water was buried under environment. You know, clean drinking water was buried in the Millennium Development Goals. And there just wasn't a movement of people talking about it, caring about it. Mercy ships had given one guy a little bit of money to go dig five wells every year. So they were, there was this huge medical operation. So they kind of got the importance. It just wasn't resourced. It wasn't their core competency. So I followed this well digger and saw him make an outsized impact, providing thousands of people with

• 50:14Speaker 01

  clean water. More people even than we were touching through surgeries, through these expensive surgeries. So that's how I became interested in water, closed the chapter with Mercy Ships, came back to New York City, I was 30, and said, you know, now it's time

• 50:30Speaker 01

  to, you know, to focus on this issue and see what kind of an impact I can make.

• 50:34Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and so it began really as one offs though, right? Like, I'm going to build a well in this village, raise money through your friends and your contacts back in New York City, and sort of do it in piecemeal fashion? Is that how it began?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  It did, but the, I spent months really thinking through the structure of the organization and what I wanted to do different. And I don't talk about this a lot, but when I came back, the core, my, my vision was really more about reinventing charity than helping the world get clean water. I wanted more people to have a redemptive experience of giving of their time and of their talent and of their money, you know, which I'd just done for the last two years and seeing how rewarding that can be. I wanted to invite people to try unselfishness versus selfishness and do that through clean water. So it was really marrying the passion

• 51:30Speaker 01

  for more charity. Charity means love. In Latin, it was caritas. I remember a dictionary definition that says, "Just to help your neighbor in need with nothing in return." So I really wanted to promulgate that. I wanted to spread that in the world, in the world and share the transformative human experience I'd gone through with others through giving and generosity. And then I wanted that generosity that hopefully I could inspire to help as many humans in a basic needs way, you know, help improve as many human lives in a tangible way as possible. And I thought, there's nothing better to do than water. And oh, by the way, there are a billion people out there. So, you know,

• 52:13Speaker 01

  huge problem, no one meeting it, no one talking about it in the general public. None of my friends knew anything about the water crisis. I mean, the water crisis to them was the fact that Voss Water was, you know, we were charging $10 a bottle.

• 52:25Rich Roll?

  Right. And in order, in order to kind of confront this and generate the level of interest that you were looking to garner, you have to combat traditional ideas of distrust with charities and, you know, kind of these, this idea that like, ah, you know, like I give money to this, where is it really going?

• 52:44Speaker 01

  The black hole.

• 52:45Rich Roll?

  I don't know, these bloated, you know, organizations, they're, yeah, like I don't know anybody who works there. And also kind of leveraging your skillset as a, you know, people person, as a networker, and as somebody who's known for creating, you know, quote unquote, "cool" events to like, make this cool, like make this interesting, like create a brand around it that inspires excitement.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got it. I mean, the first thing was just trying to deal with the money. Many people are surprised when they hear this stat, but 42% of Americans distrust charities. Who is more generous than Americans, right? We have this culture of generosity and philanthropy, but yet almost half of the people in the country don't trust the system. 70% of Americans polled by NYU said charities waste or badly waste money. So there's just this sense, as you said, of the black hole, where does my money go? How much actually reaches the people? I want to help, but I don't trust the system. So I wanted to combat that through just a new business model. And, you know, this was crazy at the time, but I said, what if we could give away 100%

• 53:52Speaker 01

  of every donation we ever get from the public to only directly fund water projects that would improve human lives, water projects that we could prove that would be tangible, and somehow figure out how to go raise all the overhead dollars, the staff, the salaries, the office, the flights separately from a small group of people. And I remember opening up two bank accounts with $100 each on Broadway and Bond Commerce at the time, and just making this bold promise and saying, look, we can take the number one excuse people have about not giving completely off the table. It's moot. What's your next excuse? And as you said, you know, the second real vision was wanting to build a beautiful,

• 54:35Speaker 01

  inspirational, hopeful brand. I was, as I looked at the charitable sector, I saw shame and guilt-based marketing. Some people might remember those Sally Struthers commercials on TV late night, the kids, the flies landing on their face, the slow motion look as they lock eyes with camera, and then the 800 number comes. They work. I mean, you feel so bad, you get your wallet out, but you don't want to wear the T-shirt of that charity. People do want to wear the T-shirts of Nike. You know, that tells you that there's greatness within you. And if you don't have arms, you can win the shot put competition. If you don't have legs, you can run a marathon. And I really was looking for, you know, I was looking to build something that would feel

• 55:18Speaker 01

  more like Apple or Nike or Tesla or Virgin, that would be fun and inspirational and imaginative. And who wouldn't want to jump on the bandwagon to help people get clean water and not guilt people into it?

• 55:31Rich Roll?

  Right. And sell that idea, like that aspirational idea that, that each individual is empowered enough to actually make a difference. I heard you say this on, I don't know who, I can't remember who you were talking to, but you, you were talking about Nike and saying, yeah, Nike sells shoes, but really they, they're selling an ethos, they're selling an idea of self empowerment, like you can do it, like you can tackle this challenge and see your way through it. And to kind of take, you know, take that idea and translate it into this nonprofit sector and re-energize it.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  That's true. I mean, Nike's not telling you, you're fat and lazy, stop eating the Cheetos and get off the couch.

• 56:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  They're not doing that. You're not going to wear that T-shirt and you're probably not going to go run if they do that. So, yeah, that was it. And, and, you know, we, we also made a bet on hyper transparency early on. We just, charities aren't great at telling people the result of their, their dollars or the results of the work. And we said from day one, we're going to put every single water point we fund publicly on Google Earth and Google Maps. So anybody could go buy a $50 GPS device from Best Buy and hike around the world to see that these projects actually exist. And people at the time said, that's so crazy. Why would you tell donors? What if a donor turned up on their well and it wasn't working? We're like, well, we freaking want to know that it's not working. And why

• 56:55Speaker 01

  do you think we're doing this? Not to get rich, the job pays like crap.

• 56:59Rich Roll?

  Sort of respect for the donor, as opposed to looking at the donor as a fungible sort of means to an end, but actually celebrating, you know, the donor for making that decision and including them and sort of creating that emotional connection with the end result of, of the giving.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Oh, you're speaking my language. So many charities, you know, wish money grew on trees and think donors are stupid, talk down to them, you know, they're just a means to an end. We celebrate like we're in the business of encouraging people to explore radical generosity. That even if you have $10, you know, we have kids that, you know, will send us $2 in dimes. That $2 can actually make a difference. I mean, it really can. It'll be pooled with another $28 and one person can get clean water. So I think it was different. It just felt different, you know, giving away 100% proving where the money went, leading with hope and inspiration and imagination and creativity, and then working through local partners, not sending Westerners

• 58:01Speaker 01

  to Africa or India or Asia to drill wells. Our job would be to find and identify the local partners, we believe, for work to be sustainable. It had to be led by Rwandans in Rwanda or Ethiopians in Ethiopia and Cambodians in Cambodia.

• 58:17Rich Roll?

  So this idea, though, of 100% of the funds are going to go directly towards building these wells, serving these communities. I mean, you had to get pushback at the time. Like, that's insane. Like, you have overhead. You're going to separate this. Like, how are you going to work this out? How are you going to convince anyone to invest in your overhead, you know, without, that's not sexy, right? And keeping these things bifurcated had to be a really hard road.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  It was. And in every conversation, I'm trying to size up a potential donor and saying, hey, does this one person want to help pay for employee number three? Or is this person disenchanted with charity and really excited about the 100% model? So I was constantly really selling two very distinct ideas and money that would drop into two differently numbered bank accounts. So actually, the one was much easier, as people would imagine. So out of the gate, we come out and raise millions of dollars. Everything works. We did events, we did exhibitions, we were just trying to be creative, and we put dirty water in huge Plexi tanks from the East River and the Hudson River and ponds in Long Island and New Jersey.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  We showed New Yorkers, hey, if you had to drink out of a swamp, this is what it would look like. And then we asked them to give, just did all of this stuff, water walks, PSAs that we got donated space and ran on TV to over 20 million people. It was, it was just awesome at the beginning and people began to give and we raised so much money for the water projects. A year and a half in, I've got $881,000 on its way out in the Water Bank account and I'm about to miss payroll because we've just run out of money on the overhead side. And we had nine employees at the time. Everybody's making, I don't know, 40 or 50 grand. There's no healthcare. I mean, it's not a real thing yet, but we funded a couple million dollars of water projects.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  And, you know, it was really, I wouldn't say it was a hard choice or a dilemma. The, I was just gonna shut the charity down.

• 1:00:16Rich Roll?

  But people were saying, listen, it's not, it's not an issue. Just borrow against it, right?

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, money's fungible. You can write an IOU and pay it back later, but we made this promise. We made the promise if we, if we borrowed one penny from the public's money.

• 1:00:31Rich Roll?

  That trust is betrayed.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a crack at the foundation.

• 1:00:33Rich Roll?

  And this is another test of faith, really. Like, are you gonna, can you hold that line and see it through?

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were a lot of these. So we were gonna, we were gonna die on our principles of integrity and, and this amazing thing happens. You know, a guy walks into our office, a British man who had started an internet company and he takes a two-hour meeting with me. And I just remember thinking, this guy doesn't like me. He's not laughing at any of the jokes. He's just giving me nothing. He leaves the meeting and a couple of days later, it's midnight. I remember working, I remember exactly where I was. I'm working on the computer. I was probably in a spreadsheet figuring out how many hours we had left. And he sends an email and says, hey, Scott, it was really great meeting you.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  I've wired a million dollars into your overhead account. And I logged on to the bank account and there it was. 1,000,000, 0,000, 0,000. So we went from bankrupt to over a year of funding, of oxygen. And we stewarded that time, we stewarded that time to actually build what's now a pretty sophisticated multi-year and multi-tier giving program where 117 families from all over the world pay for all the overhead, which has made it possible for over a million donors to have this pure giving experience.

• 1:01:54Rich Roll?

  Wow. And along the way, you know, the way that I sort of see it, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but you really have ushered in this new wave, this new sort of means for giving. Like, there's a whole sort of new generation of charities and nonprofits who have, you know, sort of taken a tip out of your playbook and created similar models that give the donor that level of trust and that transparency and that emotional connection with where the dollars and the effort is going.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  I hope so. And I'm not out there preaching the 100% model. It's incredibly difficult. It's not right for everybody. It was unique to us and the problem we were trying to solve. I was trying to reach out to the 42%, not steal donors, you know, who are loyal to other organizations.

• 1:02:43Rich Roll?

  But the transparency and the sort of really, really like adept use of social media to storytell, right? I mean, that's a huge part of this whole thing as well.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think people are open to a lot of different value propositions. They just want to know where their money goes. You know, if I told your listeners that our biggest challenge at the moment was a broken window in the office and someone had thrown a rock through it and it was going to cost $1,700 to fix it, right? There's no worse cost than that, but I bet people would come up with $1,700 to help us fix a broken window or a broken copier. It's just knowing, that's what I just preached, you know, just tell people where their money's going. Our overhead donors are so excited that their money is going to flights and salaries and insurance and phone bills because they are the kind of people that want to serve the organization. They don't need their names on buildings

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  or wells. The, you know, they, they are, they're really, our investors are kind of like our backers. They're our heroes. And the, the million people are then able to get a really, I mean, we have a guy that gave 3.27 million dollars, 100% of it going to water projects at one time, but just not interested in paying for overhead. The reason he was giving that money, the reason he was interested in helping so many people was because of that. So that's new money. Those are new people that got clean water.

• 1:04:07Rich Roll?

  Very cool. So let's talk about the water problem specifically. So a billion people, when you began this journey, lacking clean water. Most of that is Sub-Saharan Africa. Is that correct, right? And now that number's down to like

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Six sixty.

• 1:04:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Yep, six hundred and sixty-three million. So it's Sub-Saharan Africa, it's India, it's Southeast Asia, very little bit in Central and South America. Yeah, so the state of the crisis today, it's a tenth of the world. So one out of every ten people alive today is drinking bad water today.

• 1:04:39Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Because of the circumstance that they were born in. And this is kind of a profound concept that we've, you know, we've just wrestled with over the last decade now of charity water. And I was born in a middle-class family in Philadelphia. Water for me comes out of the tap. It's in bottles that we can afford. And in the places that we're working, women are often walking, you know, five, six hours a day to get dirty water from a swamp or a river, often risking their lives to do it. You know, I'll talk about the crisis. So if you don't have clean water, it makes you sick. Fifty-two percent of the disease is because of bad water and sanitation. It's incredibly harmful to kids under five.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  So about a thousand kids will die today and every day just of drinking bad water. And you actually die of dehydration. So, you know, unheard of here in the West.

• 1:05:32Rich Roll?

  Dysentery and diarrhea.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  That's right, because the way that you cure diarrhea is with clean water. We've all seen the Pedialyte, right? The kind of blue stuff at the Walgreens. Well, you don't have that. So if your child gets diarrhea, you give them the same bad water, and they actually get so dehydrated that they just die.

• 1:05:49Rich Roll?

  Makes it worse.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  So huge health implications, worms, parasites, leeches. You'll hardly see a trachoma, people go blind from water. Huge education implications. So at the time when we started, and I don't know the updated staff, but when we started charity water, fifty percent of the world's schools didn't have clean water. Or toilets. So I'm sure there are people listening that education is their number one cause. How can you imagine going to a school where there's no clean water or toilets? And you've got to bring dirty river water with you.

• 1:06:22Rich Roll?

  And what was interesting was learning about how that that has a disproportionate impact on on young girls.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  On girls. And the toilets even more than the water, because the girls will hit puberty and will stay home, you know, those four or five days every month, fall behind in their studies, you know, missing a week a month. And, you know, culturally, there's already resistance against them, because they are the workhorse. They're the ones getting the firewood, doing the cooking, getting the water.

• 1:06:48Rich Roll?

  Doing those eight hour walks.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Doing the eight hour walks. And it really is, you know, for someone listening, it's it's sounds, it's just such a disconnect. It's so hard for us to fathom, you know, 663 million anything, you know, an eight hour walk. But that's what's happening. The women are getting up at four or five in the morning. They do the eight hour walk and then they come back for the second day of their work, cooking, cleaning, gardening, getting firewood.

• 1:07:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's just, it's really difficult to imagine that.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  So that's the third one, really, is just time, just the amount of time wasted. There's health, there's education. Forty billion hours are wasted in Africa every year, just collecting water. So you think of the the potential there to turn that wasted time into productive time, whether it's family time, whether it's small business or entrepreneurial endeavors. We hear incredible stories when people get clean water. Probably the the most, I've really seen a lot now over the years. I've been to 66 countries, I've been to Ethiopia 29 times since starting Charity Water. So a lot of my job is on the road,

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  you know, stuck in, I don't know, seat 62H on a 14 hour flight. But it's, the story probably that's that's that for me best personifies the water crisis or the emergency that is facing people is a story from Ethiopia of a woman named Leta Kiroz. And I'd heard this story, let's say, on my 24th or 25th trip to Ethiopia, staying in a crappy $5 night hotel room with some donors. And the owner of the hotel recognized me, comes in the lobby. Or this little restaurant that we were sitting in and says, hey, you know, I'm from a really remote village before I came into this town to run this hotel. There was this woman in my village and she used to walk eight hours with the other women.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  But one day she gets home and she slips and falls and she spills her water and she breaks her clay pot. So her whole eight hour walk is now undone. He's like, she hung herself from a tree and we found her body swinging there. And maybe he paused and he kind of watched the shock on our face and said, the work you guys are doing is important. He walks back into the kitchen. I remember thinking, definitely not true. Tell the, you know, white international donor, a sad story that, you know, makes them feel really good about the work. But I just, it just nagged and gnawed at me and, you know, is it possible that someone had committed suicide because they slipped on a rock and spilled their water?

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  And I got a pass from my wife to go and explore this myself and live in this village completely off the grid. I had to fly to Addis, fly up to the north, drive five hours and then rent a donkey and hike nine hours, a little solar backpack and a sleeping mat. And I found out it was true. I found 2,800 people living in this man's village called Meida and they were walking eight hours to horrible sources. And, you know, I met her mom, I met her friend, I walked in her footsteps, I saw the tree where they'd found and cut her down. I saw the little pile of rocks behind the church where her grave was.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  And I didn't know this at the time, but when I, when I got to the village, I learned that she was only 13 when she died. She was a little girl. And this wasn't a woman who'd walked her whole life and said enough. This was a 13 year old girl brimming with aspirations of wanting to get out of the village and wanting to be a doctor. And what was even more shocking was when I tried to figure out what the motivation was, her best friend said, well, she would have killed herself because of shame. You know, she, she had screwed up. She'd spilled the water that the family needed to cook dinner. She'd broken the clay pot, which is a $3 asset. So it would have just been too much for her to face her family because her carelessness would set them back. So,

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  you know, you, you have an experience like that and you just, you're pissed off. I mean, you're fired up and I don't think there's anyone listening that thinks 13 year old girls should be hanging themselves from trees because they spilled their water after an eight hour walk. And, and, and, you know, the, the terrible irony is that in so many of these communities, the solutions are simple. They're living on top of massive amounts of clean water. You know, we're often able to drill 200 feet deep and get, you know, 10 liters per second of spring water. What the communities don't have access to is the $10,000 required to drill the well. They don't have access to a million dollar drilling rig and compressors and trucks and hydrologists, which is what, you know, our community is

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  able to provide. But the community will contribute stone and gravel and sweat equity. Many of them will build roads over periods of months just to get the drilling rig into their village. They just don't have the money for the, the capital expense.

• 1:11:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, $10,000 and the, the transformation for the entire community is, you know, undefinable. Like I, I heard you tell a story about a woman who said she feels beautiful now, you know, because she always had to make that decision, where is this clay pot of water going to go? Is it going to go to, you know, my kids? Is it going to go to my husband to wash the clothes and never, there of course, never being enough to just sort of, you know, attend to her personal hygiene.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's incredible. And we never even thought of that, that water could restore a woman's dignity. You know, we think of it typically in practical terms, but I was just in her village a few weeks ago, Helen Appio. And the women were all saying, we look so smart now, looking so neat. Because they, they had the water to, as you said, wash their clothes, wash their face, feel, feel beautiful.

• 1:12:49Rich Roll?

  Is the well drilling process, I would imagine it's not always the same, right? You're going to be in certain regions where you're not going to be, I mean, first of all, how do you, how are you sure there's water underneath there? How do you locate it? What's the procedure and the process for the best, you know, means for getting that water to a particular village?

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  It's a great question. It's not always the same. So we've worked in 24 countries now around the world and about 13 different solutions. So drilling a well would be one of the 13. Stuff like rainwater harvesting or gravity fed systems or bio sand filters would be others. Drilling a well, you know, our partners will do different things. Some of them will shock the ground. They've got kind of those almost EKG machines that will look for the fissures and determine where the water is. Others will look at eucalyptus trees and say, ah, I see that grove of eucalyptus trees. I know that the roots need a lot of water. There's going to be water there. We're about 90% successful. So for every 10 wells we drill, we get nine good ones.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  And so it's not a perfect science and there are some communities that we just can't help that will either have to pipe water in or, you know, look to rainwater harvesting or in some cases, you know, as the problem really gets solved, there'll be a few communities that'll just have to move. It will have to be relocated.

• 1:14:06Rich Roll?

  How do you deal with local governments and corruption and, you know, the dangers inherent with, you know, sort of traveling across these, you know, sort of treacherous regions?

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  We've set a couple of rules for ourselves early on. We've said no conflict zones and no governments that don't want us. Just as a young organization, look, we're, you know, we're, now we're 10 years old, but, you know, we just didn't have a proficiency in dodging bullets or, or working in those environments. So that left us 50 countries that we could work in. So a huge amount of places of need. So we haven't, we haven't really dealt with the military, you know, the warlords. You know, we're not in South Sudan. We're not in DRC Congo. We're not in Myanmar. We're not in a place like Zimbabwe where we don't know that we could get our goods in. We worked in Haiti early on and then just pulled out and allocated the resources to other places

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  because we were just having a hard time getting the materials in the port and getting the work done well. So there's an amazing team at Charity Water of 19 people who just live, eat, breathe. The functionality of our water projects, the locations, the vetting, the auditing, making sure the money is being spent well, that's not trivial. We've raised a quarter of a billion dollars now. So knowing if we're buying 10,000 bags of cement, we need to know how much it costs on the local market. So our auditors would go in and say, okay, well Charity Water paid $16.23. How much does it cost locally? If it's 10 bucks, we have a serious problem. Often we'll find it's $20 and our partners have negotiated such a good discount

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  because of the work that they're doing and the bulk that they're buying, that we would actually pay a lot more than they are. So there's a lot of complexity, finding the right solution, finding water. And then there's a lot of complexity in just keeping that clean water flowing over time and sustainability. There's probably people that are, they're listening, they're like, well, what about the broken wells in Africa? And how do you know your wells are working five years from now? The answer is we don't or we didn't. And five years into the organization, we began to work on solving that problem. So our first, I guess, pillar of transparency was just saying, we know where they all are.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  And we know that on day one, clean water was flowing when we posted the picture and the GPS to the internet. And five years on, we said, well, we want to know, are they working five years later? So we pitched Google this crazy idea and walked into Google and with a couple of people and said, we have an idea, what if we could develop a remote sensor? We would have to design it where it could withstand temperatures of 60 degrees to 130 degrees. It would have to be gray and nondescript, so it didn't look like an item of value. And it needed a 10-year power source. I know, by the way, we want to make it for a hundred dollars and open source the whole thing. And we think this would provide greater transparency and we'd know not only

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  that our water projects are working and potentially others, but how much water is actually flowing. So Google granted $5 million. It was the largest check they'd ever written to a nonprofit in the history of the company at that time. And we began to work with 20 different labs. We made a lot of crappy sensors. A lot of things didn't work. And then about a year and a half ago, we did our first pilot and we dropped 3,000 sensors in Ethiopia. So we retrofitted 3,000 of our earliest projects and in that moment accumulated the largest data set of rural water supply in the history of the world. Because nobody bothered to do this. I mean, these are people making a dollar a day, living in communities of 250 or 300. So now we're monitoring billions of liters coming from these communities.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  We're about to drop sensor two, another version in Nepal and drop a thousand there, which is a pipe sensor. So now, you know, we know that our functionality in Ethiopia is 91%, which means we have 9% that are issues. We've also trained mechanics who are now going out and responding to the sensor data when it shows that a project fails with the tools to be able to help the community and make those major repairs. And the communities will pay for the repairs. So that's the great thing. They just don't always have the expertise. So those 9% are in the process of being repaired at any given time.

• 1:18:31Rich Roll?

  Amazing. So how many wells to date?

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  A little over 23,000.

• 1:18:35Rich Roll?

  23,000.

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  For 7 million people.

• 1:18:37Rich Roll?

  And, and so there's still a ways to go here.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  1% of the problem. And that's depressing, right?

• 1:18:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But I mean, that's what I want to get into. Like, you know, you're an optimistic guy and you've made a major dent in this problem. There's still a long way to go. Like, how do you sort of conceptualize the road forward?

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  Right now, what's a little frustrating is there's a 3X delta between the amount of people that we know how to help and the money that we're raising. So that, I want to get there. We will struggle to help a million people this year get clean water for the first time in their life. And while a million sounds small to me, you know, people remind me, it's an average of 2,800 people a day. So that's kind of cool. My 2,800 people today are going to drink clean water for the first time in their life because of the charity water community, because of our donors and our supporters. It's one person every 30 seconds. So if we talk for an hour, that means, you know, 120 people got clean water just while we were having this conversation. That's the KPI. So I want that number to be 3 million people a year, 5 million people a year. I want to go faster.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  We're also using, looking for ways to use our technology beyond just charity water. We're trying to now sell in, the sensor isn't the right word, it's a hundred dollars. We're not trying to make any money off it. But we're, we're hoping to get a country to actually adopt it and go full, fully transparent. So imagine if a country like Rwanda, you know, installed a sensor on every single water point in Rwanda and made that data public. People, I think, would come flocking. Right. To, you know, bring Rwanda as close to 100% water coverage as possible. So, you know, we're looking for ways to just grow our impact, help more people every single day. We know how to do it. We have an amazing team now. We have 10 years of, of getting the bumps and, and the successes and the failures and

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  learning from our mistakes. And we just, we really have a best-in-class team and best-in-class water programs now across the world. So, so that's what I'm, I'm thinking about a lot. You know, from a, from a business sense, one of the biggest regrets is that, you know, a million donors gave once, well over a million donors gave once. But every year at January 1, we found ourselves starting over. And no matter how hard we worked, you know, I was making 150 speeches a year. I'll probably make 200 this year. I did 96 flights before my son was born. I mean, we couldn't, we couldn't work any harder. And we would, you know, we would raise all this money, we'd help a million people, and then January 1, we'd start with a big fat zero.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  We would look at ourselves, I remember looking at my wife saying, you know, how did we do that? How would we ever do that again? And how would we grow? And as we celebrated our 10th year, we said, you know, we need to do something different to grow over the next 10 years. And we launched a brand-new campaign in a giving community called The Spring. And the idea was very simple. It was just taking a subscription, which people are very familiar with. The average person listening would have 11 subscriptions. You know, the likes of Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Dropbox, maybe a newspaper or magazine, or a cable company. I'm trying to create a subscription program for good, where instead of us getting the benefit, watching movies, or, you know, consuming

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  content, 100% of the benefit would be passed on to people who don't have clean water. And we just started inviting people into that. It's called The Spring. Every $30 can give one person clean water. So, we kind of said, "Look, if somebody can give $30 a month, it's a dollar a day. You don't get anything. Okay, I'm not going to send you swag. You're not getting like, a tote bag, or a mug, or a thermos. We will send you stories of impact every single month, so you know what your money's doing." But that's what we're really trying to build. And, you know, anyone listening that wants to check that out, or learn, that is literally the number-one way that people can help. We're at 8,100 people in that community. I'm looking kind of for 10,000 in the pilots. And then

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  we'll keep going. So-

• 1:22:43Rich Roll?

  I love that. I mean, that's great, because then you're continually engaged. It's not a one-off thing, like, "Oh, I did my thing, and now I'm moving on with my life."

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  And it's not even about the money, too. That's it. It's about the engagement. So, we have kids that are giving $5 a month. But we get to talk to them every single month. We get to talk about water. We get to talk about our partners, and our beneficiaries, and the amazing work. So, you know, that's the typical response would, you know, somebody might listen to this and say, "Well, that's cool what those guys are doing. I'll go and give 100 bucks." You know, that's useful, and we could help three people get clean water. But we're really trying to build a community of people that will say, "We will see an end to this. You know, we'll give what we can." You know, some people, you know, giving $100 a month. Some people are giving 500 a month. Some people are giving 10. Less about the amount, it's just people saying, you know, we're in this like, we don't think people should drink dirty water because of where they're born.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  We believe in a day where every single man and woman and child is drinking clean water. That has this basic need for health and happiness and to thrive met. So that's what we're building right now. It's just charitywater.org/the spring. And then the other way that the people have helped and we're continuing to grow this movement is just by giving up their birthday.

• 1:23:57Rich Roll?

  Their birthdays.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  This is, this is one of those surprising things and it's, I love it so much because it's, it again, it speaks back to the vision of reinventing charity. The idea is very simple. On my 32nd birthday, I just said, look, I don't want to throw a birthday party. I don't want to get a single thing for my birthday. I don't want a tie or a wallet or a iTunes gift card or, you know, Crate and Barrel, whatever was that people were giving at the time.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  I would love for my birthday to help other human beings. And I thought kind of the sticky marketing idea would be to ask for my age in dollars. Cause everyone I knew had $32 they could give to charity. If a hundred percent of the money would help others and they could track where that money went. So I just emailed every single person I knew. And then this spread from, they started emailing their friends, hey, this guy's giving up his birthday for clean water. Wound up raising $59,000 to help a lot of people. And right after I did that, a seven-year-old kid in Austin, Texas said, well, I'm going to donate my seventh birthday. He's six at the time, so he donates his seventh and he starts knocking on doors in Austin, asking for $7 donations. And yeah, he lived in a nice neighborhood, but he raised $22,000.

• 1:25:10Rich Roll?

  Crazy.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  And an 89-year-old donated her birthday. And Nona Ween wrote this beautiful mission statement saying, you know, I'd like my birthday to make birthdays possible for other people, you know, realizing she's double the life expectancy because of the privilege she was born into. She got to live to 89 and some people get to live to 35 or 40. So this was just this beautiful idea of our birthdays could help people have more birthdays and, you know, nobody really wants to buy us more crap anyway. My friends would much rather be involved in something redemptive and something generous and bringing, you know, addressing a human need and ending the suffering of others across an ocean. So people have done this and other fundraising campaigns have raised over $50

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  million and helped almost 2 million people get clean water. And it's just a simple thing to do.

• 1:26:01Rich Roll?

  Right. You gotta tell the story about Rachel, though.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  Oh, it's an exhausting one.

• 1:26:08Rich Roll?

  Well, you could, you know, you don't have to tell the whole thing, but it's so powerful.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  It's mentally exhausting. So there was this, most of the birthdays are just happy stories. You know, we've gotten, I mean, Will and Jada Smith gave up their birthdays and Jack Dorsey from Twitter did three birthdays and, you know, 16 year olds in the middle of the country. It's just a really joyful, amazing thing. This girl in Seattle, Rachel, who you just mentioned, had seen me speak and she was eight and she donated her birthday and said, I'm gonna cancel my party. I don't want any gifts from her family. And she just asked for $9. And she wound up raising $220. Now, this was shy of her $300 goal. So she is actually bummed. She told her mom, I'm gonna try harder next year. She felt like

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  she'd let people down because she hadn't helped 10 people get clean water. I was in Central African Republic with our team at the time that this happened. So I didn't know about her or her responding to my talk or her birthday. I land in New York. I turned my phone on. I hadn't had service for a while. And I get a text from the pastor of her church saying, hey, Rachel, this little girl in my congregation was just killed in a car crash. So there was a 20 car pileup in Seattle. She was the only fatality. A tractor trailer had come, it just spun out of control and crashed into the back of her car where she was sitting. Her mom was driving. Her sister was in the front. They were banged up, but Rachel lost her life.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  And he said, you know, Rachel's last wish was to help your charity. And she was asking for $9 and she wanted to raise 300 bucks. And he said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have my church try and blow this campaign out of the water. $9 at a, at a time. I remember sitting there with my wife on the couch, just tears streaming down my eyes. And I made the $80 donation to bring her from 220 to 300. And over the next, um, really period of hours and then days and then weeks, uh, it just began to spread and people through her church community, through the Seattle community, uh, spread to the morning shows, the Today Show, CBS Early Morning, the New York Times, started spreading through Europe to Russia, um, and then through Africa. And people in Africa started donating $9.

• 1:28:28Rich Roll?

  So insane.

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  To this little girl in Seattle, um, to, in, in her honor. She raised over 1.3 million dollars. So almost 40,000 strangers were so moved by the heart and the compassion and the values of this little girl who should want Barbies or, or other gifts, um, who should want a party. And instead, once kids she's never met across an ocean to have clean water. We had the honor of taking her mother and her grandparents to Ethiopia on the exact one year anniversary of her death. And they went village to village to village, meeting thousands of the people who had clean water because of Rachel. And I remember it was just so emotional. We just, we were just like in tears for four days.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  Community members would come out, they would draw, the kids would draw pictures of what they thought Rachel looked like. The Ethiopians named a huge, huge valley after Rachel. We went into a church once and the priests had been praying, uh, that God would take care of Rachel's soul since midnight. And they had a picture up her, on the altar. And it was just really, really moving. Women walked up to Rachel's mom, threw themselves prostate at, at her feet and said, you know, we have lost children too. We know your pain, we know your grief, but your daughter's death brought us life and we thank you for that. I mean, it was incredibly emotional and

• 1:29:48Rich Roll?

  That's beautiful.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Even cooler, you know, this is, this is years ago. That this happened. So many people that donated nine dollars to her campaign then went on to donate their birthdays. And she inspired over $2 million. So her impact now, this girl who raised $220 while alive. She's raised over $3 million, impacted 100,000 people's lives. And it's cool because now we have a bunch of censors on Rachel's wells. And I could tell you, you know, yesterday, just find a well and say, you know, yesterday, one of Rachel's wells pumped 1,765 liters of clean water five years later. So her impact is in the tens and tens of millions of gallons of clean water.

• 1:30:30Rich Roll?

  It's unbelievable. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's so easy to be cynical and sarcastic. And feel disempowered in our culture, like, I can't make a difference, you know, I'm just going to live my life. I'm going to get what's mine.

• 1:30:49Rich Roll?

  And what you present is such a very, you know, tangible, real, accessible way to, for each individual to actually have a profound difference, make a profound difference in somebody else's life. And, you know, it's amazing what you've built and the impact that it's had. And I'm interested in like how that has kind of framed your or reshaped your worldview and kind of how you feel about yourself. Because it's this amazing arc from kind of really self-serving to serving others. And, and, you know, the recipe that's baked into that is, you know, a life of meaning is a life of service, right?

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  And we kind of know that intellectually and so few people actually find their way towards actually embodying that. And can be living examples and, you know, proof positive that this is really true. If you want to be happy, if you want to live a fulfilling, meaningful life, then give of yourself.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  I mean, you're speaking my language. I really believe that. I think there's a real freedom that comes with service. And so many people are enslaved in the service of themselves, or just in, I mean, I was for so many years. I remember coming across a verse in the Bible many years ago that said, "True religion is to look after widows and orphans in their distress, and to keep yourself from being polluted." And I mean, I'd been 0 for 2 in those categories for many years. And just remember thinking, you know, a life of service to others and personal integrity, you know, a life of values. So I've really, I've tried to do that. I mean, the thing was birthed out of my personal faith, but the charity has had no religious affiliation.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  And that's been really exciting to me, to see Jews, and Christians, and atheists, and Muslims, and Mormons, and everybody kind of come together under this very big tent of clean water, from, you know, the most crazy Republicans, to the crazy Democrats, to the independents, and the moderates. It's really one of those few things everybody can agree on. And I wanted to build a very, very big, a very big tent. I wanted to kind of build something that was incredibly inclusive, where anybody could contribute. You know, if you had a dollar, if you had 10 cents, you know, you would feel honored. And we would be a good steward of that. It's also really hard. You know, it's hard. The travel is tough, being away from

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  the family, you know, the environments that we travel in, the stuff that we see. You know, I've done 28 flights this year, and we're in May. So a lot of, a lot of the job is on the road, and it's tough, but...

• 1:33:32Rich Roll?

  And how does, how does being a father now, you know, shape how you do what you do, other than the logistical aspect of like, how much you're going to travel or not travel, just sort of philosophically, like how you approach the work?

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  I think I just have a greater compassion for what it what it means to be a father or a mother and lose a child. I remember years ago, sitting with a woman in Niger, Africa, who told me that eight of her children died. And she named them all, and she gave me all their ages through a translator. She had two left. So she'd had 10 and eight had passed. And I was almost numb to that. You know, I mean, I just couldn't relate, really. And now, I mean, my kid, you know, last night was actually sick and was throwing up. And we came home from it. We rushed home from an event. And, you know, I thought I saw blood on the table. It was just berries. But, you know, just this like sheer terror,

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  like, what if what if I would lose a child, one child? And I don't know, I think it's just given a greater sense of urgency to fight for the thousand kids that are going to die today, and to fight for their moms and dads, and fight for a more equitable world, a world where people have a roof over their heads, and clean water to drink, and they're not going to bed starving and hungry. So, you know, I think if we solve the water crisis in our lifetime, which I really, really believe we will. And I think as long as we continue to invite people into it, and everyday people, as you said, reject the apathy and the cynicism that is so easy to embrace, and say, I can do something.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  I could give $30 a month. I could give up a birthday. I could get my company involved. Who knows, whatever that action is. I think we can see an end to the water crisis. But, you know, I don't see myself dropping the mic and going to work at a bank.

• 1:35:29Rich Roll?

  Right. I don't see that happening.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, I think we would take, we would turn the attention of our community, of our team, on another basic human need. Maybe we would attack shelter, maybe we would attack hunger. I mean, we're really all in on the service to others. And it's fun. You know, I

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  My wife and I live in a 950 square foot, one bedroom in New York City. And that's a choice because I walk eight minutes to work. And when I'm in this, when I'm home, I want to see my kids in the morning and at night and not commute, you know, an hour to the suburbs. But, you know, we, we recently calculated our like very meager net worth with our, our 401ks. And, you know, we realized that in the, the eight years we've been married, we gave away three times that amount. You know, so we're, we're kind of on the, you know, 75, 25. And, and, you know, the more money, I mean, every once in a while, someone will do nice for me. And I, my first instinct is just immediately to give that away, whatever they've given me, to someone who needs it more.

• 1:36:30Rich Roll?

  There is a weird sort of spiritual truth to this idea that when you give, you get back, you know, a tenfold or fivefold or whatever it is. And, you know, just the idea that like you give so freely, look how large your life has become, look at the impact that you've been able to have. We hold on so tightly, we're so afraid of losing what we have or not getting what we think we deserve because of the cultural messaging that we're surrounded by, that we're constantly inundated with. And it's all backwards, right? It's all backwards. And like to see you give so much, and yet your life just continues to grow and expand. And, you know, the, the sense of purpose and meaning that infuses everything that you

• 1:37:13Rich Roll?

  do, you know, when you put your head down on the pillow at night, that's got to be a great feeling, even knowing there's still, you know, bigger problems to tackle and, you know, work to be done and all of that, to know that like, that commitment to service on such a fundamental level and the principles that, you know, kind of direct your decision making and how you allocate your resources, um, you know, has, has really given your life meaning that extends far beyond your own little, you know, myopic sort of existence or perspective, right?

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  My favorite quote in the last 10 years, a guy was, a guy that worked with us was passing a bodega and he snapped a photo and emailed it to me. And it said, "Do not be afraid of work that has no end." And I really look at our, our work, our vision, our mission like that. I mean, it will have no end. I think that's good. Like in, in service, if you're really looking to pour yourself out in the service of others, if you're looking to give of your time, of your money, of your talent, you know, there's no end in sight. There's no drop the mic moment. There's no like exit, you know, hey, I sold my company and now I'm gonna go, you know, buy a bunch of houses and cars and planes. Like it's just, it's a very different, countercultural lifestyle in a way.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. People are always telling me that I should go start a company and make a lot of money so that I can give it away. And like, you know, even if, even if that was a good option, um, you know, by the end of this year, we'll have raised about $300 million for the poor. I don't know that many people that have given away $300 million. Right? I mean, you know, I would have to be, you know, the unicorn of the unicorn of the unicorn. Even if I was gonna give away 95% of, of the exit, right? It's not that easy. And I would hope that, you know, if we were doing this five years from now, that number is a billion, you know, and continuing to grow. So I really see that as the role, um, kind of as a guide in a way to invite people in,

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  ask them to potentially put aside their cynicism because we've created something that is integrous and transparent. And, you know, there, there are 80 people in New York City, you know, who are working every day, who have taken pay cuts. Nobody's in it for the money. Um, you know, people are leaving Google, Twitter, Adobe, Zynga. I mean, a lot of these people will take 50% of their pay. They'll walk away from stock options to use their skills in the service of others.

• 1:39:36Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's beautiful.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  So it's, it's a, it's kind of a fun work with no end because you're helping people every day. And, and you know, and we get to see the tangible impact of that.

• 1:39:47Rich Roll?

  I think that's a good place to wrap it up. Um, but I think I would like to, I always like to leave people with, you know, there's a lot of people that are listening that. That maybe don't feel so great about their profession, their career, their job. They're stuck in a situation, you know, or a relationship, or, you know, some scenario that is making them unhappy. And, and, and for a lot of people, it's really hard to see their way through that, see their way out of it. I mean, you were able to kind of, you know, transform your circumstances. You know, how do you communicate with that person who does feel stuck? And maybe can't see how, uh, you know, giving or being of service is going to be the path forward?

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  Oh, I think, I, I just keep thinking of my friend that looks at himself in the mirror and said, like, who have I become? And then just changed everything and is now a dad with a job. I, I just keep coming back to values. I mean, being clear about, who do you want to be? You know, are you a person that is generous and compassionate? And, you know, what's stopping you from, from that? You know, is it, uh, so often people will have a number, you know, when it comes to wealth and they'll hit that number and then they'll change the number. And then they'll change the number again.

• 1:41:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because it's, it's a moving target because they don't, that, that hole inside them has not been filled. And that idea that that number is going to solve that equation for them is an illusion.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think it's a heart condition. You know, I would really examine, you know, what is it deep down? Is it greed? Is it, um, like, what, what are the things that you might want to deal with and work on? Um, and challenge yourself in. Uh, you know, I, I, I used to use the phrase, just addicted to giving. Like, in some ways, like, my family's addicted to giving. We love to give. Anyone that asks, I mean, I don't really care about the cause. People are always thinking that I'm vetting all of these causes. My wife and I will give to 30 or 40 things, just to anybody who asks. Um, if it's, if it's a cause that doesn't offend our sensibilities, because we just love giving. And the more, the more you give, the more you give. I just introduced our biggest donor. To a competitive nonprofit the other day.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  People think I'm crazy to do that. And he's gonna go and give them a bunch of money, which is great. You know, I have an abundance mentality. It's not a scarcity mentality. The more he gives, the more his family gives, the more they will give, the more they'll want to give. So, you know, pick any sort of virtue if it's, I don't know. I'm not gonna preach anymore, but it's, you know, I don't regret any of that stuff. I mean, I don't regret the nightlife and the, I just look back on some of those videos and pictures. I'm like, what a clown. I mean, what an absolute just waste of space.

• 1:42:30Rich Roll?

  That's the experience that you had to have in order to be where you're at right now.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  For sure. I think if I'd started Charity Water at 20, you know, right out of NYU, it would be a very different story. And I was fortunate that, I guess that's the last thing I would say to anybody is you can redeem anything. I mean, I'm kind of proof of that. There was nobody worse. I was, I was really, my wife doesn't believe this and she's now talked to enough people from nightlife. And, you know, every once in a while she'll say, wow, you were such an a-hole. Like, I just heard another story about something you did, or someone I yelled at, or, you know, lied to, or stole from at the time. So, you know, no one is really past redemption. And I think if you, if you're trying to address the heart condition, you know, there's a lot of hope. And maybe it doesn't need to be as extreme as, as mine was.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  I just, it was easier for me to quit everything in one go and walk in the other direction.

• 1:43:22Rich Roll?

  Thanks for talking to me, man. That, it's amazing what you're doing. I have so much respect and admiration for the work that you do. It's inspiring and I will publicly commit to my 51st birthday, which is this fall. I will use that as a platform to-

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  I'll be your first 51 bucks.

• 1:43:40Rich Roll?

  -charity water. I'll say that right now. I've never done anything like that before either, you know, so I'm excited about that. And it's really cool, kind of tracking your progress and being able to see in real time the impact of the work that you're doing, man. And I just, I just wish you much luck and continued success with all of it.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  Cool, man. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:44:03Rich Roll?

  So, if you wanna learn more, the best place to go, obviously, charitywater.org. And Scott's pretty visible on social media. Scott Harrison on, on both Instagram and Twitter, right? Those are the main places?

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, Instagram's all kid pictures. Beware.

• 1:44:22Rich Roll?

  And of course, if you want to participate in the Spring or do the birthday thing, you can find out all the information that you need to learn about that right on the website, right? Yep. Anything else? That's it, man. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Peace.

• 1:44:46Rich Roll?

  All right, we did it. I hope you guys enjoyed that. More importantly, I hope that you were impacted by that. I don't know how you could listen to that conversation and not feel inspired to think about giving in a new and important way. And in the wake of that conversation, I've been doing that myself. And I think it's really astounding to realize that even a $30 donation can give one person clean water. So here's the thing. This is the announcement that I want to make. I know there are many of you out there listening who can afford to provide a monthly donation to Charity Water, to give a little bit, maybe $30, maybe a little bit more, a small gift that can make a huge difference in another

• 1:45:29Rich Roll?

  person's life. And as you heard at the end of the conversation, I am going to be raising money for Charity Water for my 51st birthday coming up in October. But more importantly, I'm a new member of the Spring. I'm personally donating $50 a month out of my own pocket. And in the wake of this conversation, I'm going to be creating an additional account to divert a portion of corporate receipts as a result of the work that I do to Charity Water as well. And I'll keep you posted on that. And my announcement is really a call to action. Life is better. It's bigger. It's more fulfilling. It's more purposeful. And it's more rewarding when we give, when we are in the persistent spirit of giving. So

• 1:46:11Rich Roll?

  on that note, I want to encourage all of you to check out and sign up for the Spring, which is Charity Water's monthly subscription service. 100% of all donations go directly to the field to bring clean water to those in need. And Spring members will get updates on the impact their donations have. We have a special URL that we set up for this purpose. So get out pen and paper. You're going to want to write this down. It is cwt r.org/richrollspring. C W T R dot org slash richrollspring. Can you guys do it?

• 1:46:50Rich Roll?

  Dot org. No, no, no. C W T R dot org forward slash Rich Roll Spring. That's a mouthful, but we got it. All right, cool. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production and help with the show notes and the scripts. He's doing a tremendous job. It's been kind of tricky with the time change and being in Ireland. Jason's had to be very patient with me, so let's all thank Jason together. One, two, three.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  Thanks, Jason.

• 1:47:21Rich Roll?

  And Sean Patterson for all his wizardry on the graphics. Those motion graphics with the moving text and all that cool stuff that I put up on Instagram, that's Sean's work. So thanks, Sean. Everybody say thanks, Sean. Thanks, Sean. I want to thank Chris Swan, who is my assistant and colleague, who takes care of a lot of my BS behind the scenes. Thank you, Chris.

• 1:47:41Speaker 01

  Thank you, Chris.

• 1:47:43Rich Roll?

  And theme music, as always, by Anna Lima. You guys have heard, you heard Trapper and Tyler play music the other day, right? How'd it sound?

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was great.

• 1:47:51Rich Roll?

  Good stuff, right? All right. Thanks for the love, you guys. And I want to thank everybody here at Bally the Lawn House, including Jenny and Justin, the proprietors, and the staff. They've been amazing. The food has been incredible. The hospitality has been extraordinary. It is a week that I will, I will never forget. And I'll never forget all of you guys. So thank you for sharing this experience. It's been incredible. What a gift and a blessing to, to be able to commune with like-minded souls. And I hope that you guys all go back home and don't forget the experience that we had and become your own agents of positive change for yourselves and for your community. And until then, I will see everybody back

• 1:48:34Rich Roll?

  here in a couple of days. Want to say peace and plants together? Ready?

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  Peace and plants.

• 1:48:41Rich Roll?

  And as Julie would say, namaste. All right.

• 1:48:50Rich Roll?

  Thank you, guys. That was awesome.