Scott Harrison Is Not Afraid Of Work Without End

From the outside looking in, he was living the dream. Killer SoHo loft. Private jets to exotic locales. Rolex, cover model girlfriend and cash. Lots of cash. But ten years living extravagantly as a decadent nightclub promoter in New York City took it's toll. By 28, Scott Harrison had become the worst person he knew. Morally bankrupt and desperate to rediscover his sense of purpose, Scott decided it was time for a drastic change. So he sold all his belongings and decamped NYC for a year spent volunteering aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, West Africa. Abroad, Harrison witnessed levels of poverty and illness he never knew existed. As one year turned into two, he came to understand that many of the diseases their group treated were waterborne, easily preventable with access to clean drinking water — a basic need sorely lacking across vast swaths of the undeveloped world. Upon returning to New York 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 $3000 million to bring clean drinking water to more than 8.4 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 — an astounding example of what can be achieved when a life pivots from self-serving to selfless service. Scott's story can be found in his riveting new memoir, Thirst, which vividly recounts Scott's redemptive tale of transformation and the twists and turns that built charity: water into one of the most trusted, disruptive, innovative and admired nonprofits in the world. Debuting at #7 on last week's NY Times bestseller list, it's a must read page-tuner, the profits of which funnel right back to (you guessed it) charity: water.** Picking up where left off in Scott's first appearance on the podcast (episode 305 from July 2017), today we dive deeper into previously unexplored aspects of Scott's personal evolution. We discuss progress made by his organization and the work that remains. We discuss the important role faith has played in his journey. He explains the true meaning of charity — and the sense of purpose and personal fulfillment that goes hand in hand with service. We end with a call to action. And a reminder that we all possess the power to make the world a better place. Because nobody should fear work that has no end. Here's my call to action: in celebration of my 52nd birthday, help me raise $100,000 by December 31, 2018 — 100% of which will be deployed to bring clean water projects to over 3,300 people for the very first time. Projects that will save lives for generations to come. Enjoy! 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?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  My environment had been clubs, excess drinking, debauchery, sex, drugs. And my environment changed to a group of humanitarian doctors, and nurses, and surgeons, who were giving the best of themselves in service to the poor. So I went into this completely healthy environment, where the new norm was selflessness. The new norm was virtue, and courage, and tenacity, and hard work in the direction of others, in the direction of serving others. And today, we're going to get 4,000 new people clean drinking water for the first time in their lives. And we're going to do it again tomorrow, and again the next day, and again the next

• 1:50Speaker 01

  day. Now, I want that number to be 40,000, but it's now significant. The eight and a half million people we've helped, it's more than the population of New York City and all the boroughs. Let's build a culture of giving. Let's give because we can, because we want to, because it's a blessing, not out of guilt or shame or debt or obligation, but because it is an amazing opportunity to share our blessing with others.

• 2:14Rich Roll?

  That's Scott Harrison, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:29Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. What's the word? How are you guys doing? What is happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is a podcast. It's my podcast. Welcome or welcome back. It is indeed an honor and a privilege to spend a little high-quality time with all of you guys today. Real quick up top, I wanted to let all of you know that due to popular demand and many, many, perhaps countless requests, the podcast is now finally available on Spotify. Spotify, yes, very exciting. You can find a link in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com or just search Rich Roll Podcast in the browse feature on that platform. For those of you that have been on this podcast ride with

• 3:14Rich Roll?

  me for a while now, you probably know that a little over a year ago, I sat down with Scott Harrison, the founder of an organization you might have heard of called Charity Water. That was episode 305 from last July. Please check it out. If you missed it, it is definitely one of my favorite episodes. And over the course of that two-hour exchange, Scott held me and most likely you, pretty much spellbound with his extraordinary yarn of personal and global transformation. This is a guy who, at 28, seemingly had everything, had it all. He was a top nightclub promoter in New York City, and his life was essentially this endless

• 3:57Rich Roll?

  cycle of parties, drugs, booze, models on repeat. And he was very successful in this regard. But about a decade in, he found himself broken, desperately unhappy, and essentially morally and spiritually bankrupt. And at his bottom, he asked himself a very simple question.

• 4:20Rich Roll?

  What would the exact opposite of my life look like? And he ended up walking away from everything. He sold everything that he owned and he spent the next 16 months on a hospital ship in West Africa. And that experience really delivered him to what I think is fair to say is his true calling. In 2006, with absolutely no money and zero experience, he founds this thing called Charity Water. And today, 12 years later, this organization has raised over $300 million to bring clean drinking water to more than 8.4 million people around the globe. It's truly extraordinary.

• 5:01Rich Roll?

  Along the way, on top of all of this, he essentially reimagines and reinvents giving altogether. He ditches the old antiquated model that basically feeds off guilt to get people to give and creates this new model and this brand that inspires people, that gets them excited, that prioritizes transparency, that fosters a deep, very real connection between the donor and the results of every donation, 100% of which is funneled directly to water projects. And not only has he been wildly successful with this organization, playing a huge part

• 5:41Rich Roll?

  in reducing those without clean water from about 1.1 billion down to 660 million, essentially halving this big problem that we have, he also essentially changes the entire landscape of giving and charity altogether. In any event, that was a very profound conversation for me and I would imagine for many of you as well. It was the beginning of a great friendship that I now have with Scott, as well as a partnership. Scott inspired me to donate a portion of my income to Charity Water every month via the Spring, their monthly subscription service, which is something I've been doing for over a year at this point, something I also encourage all of you guys to look into as well.

• 6:25Rich Roll?

  And on top of that, he inspired me to dedicate my 51st birthday. ...to raising funds for his organization. And the goal of that campaign was to raise $51,000. But together, we ended up raising $68,285, which was amazing. It was such a thrill, not to mention all the money that was raised by people listening to the podcast and signing up for the spring. I think the tally comes out to somewhere in the $200,000 range. So it is amazing and I thank you again for that. And yet, there's so much more to Scott's story and the story of Charity Water. So picking up where we left off last July, Scott today returns to the show for another incredibly moving conversation,

• 7:10Rich Roll?

  including a discussion of his new book, which is called Thirst. It's incredible. It's a must read. It debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List last week at number seven, which is amazing. Congrats. All proceeds of which go right back into Charity Water, of course, right? That's who Scott is. In fact, when you buy Thirst and forward your receipt to [email protected], you'll also unlock a $30 donation that will bring clean water to one person. So that is awesome. In addition, it just so happens serendipitously, honestly, I didn't plan it this way. But yesterday, today's Sunday, October 21st. But yesterday on October 20th, I turned 52.

• 7:52Rich Roll?

  I appreciate all the kind and gracious birthday wishes that I've been streaming in. I love it. I feel great. I feel strong. And you know, my life is an embarrassment of riches. I need for absolutely nothing. So once again, inspired by Scott's example, I am moved to leverage this occasion of my birth to do a little bit of good by helping bring clean water to those in need. But this time, the goal isn't $51,000 and it isn't $52,000 and it's not $68,000. It's $100,000, 100% of which will be deployed to provide clean water projects to over 3,300 people for the very first time.

• 8:35Rich Roll?

  Projects that will save lives for basically generations to come.

• 8:40Rich Roll?

  So specifically, this is my call to action and my request. I am asking that each of you donate $1 for every year that I have been drinking clean water, a pledge of $52. When the water projects are complete, Charity Water will then send all of those who donated photos and GPS coordinates so together we can experience up close and personal the exact community that we impact. And I can tell you that this experience is priceless. The goal, $100,000, is ambitious. I cannot do this alone, but with your help, I really do believe it's totally doable because together, this community that we have built alongside each other is very powerful.

• 9:24Rich Roll?

  Together, for basically the price of a night out at the movies, we really can save lives and positively change the world. So to find out more, please, please, visit my campaign page at my.charitywater.org/richroll. My.charitywater.org/richroll. The campaign will remain open through the end of December, and of course, I'll put a link up in the show notes so you can easily find it. And please consider a donation, whatever you can afford, and I thank you in advance.

• 10:06Rich Roll?

  All right. Thanks, you guys, for hanging tough. Scott Harrison. You know, Scott is, he really is one of my favorite people. He is an incredible example, perhaps the best example of anybody that I know of what can happen, the extraordinary things that can happen, the impact and the sense of purpose and fulfillment that one can have when life is redirected from self-serving to selfless service. So picking up where we left off last July, this conversation recaps previously unexplored aspects of Scott's amazing story. It's about the progress made by Charity Water in the last year. We discuss Scott's new book, Thirst, which recounts the

• 10:50Rich Roll?

  Twists and the turns that built Charity Water into one of the most trusted disruptive, disruptive in the best way, innovative and admired nonprofits in the world. We talk about the role that Scott's faith has played in his journey, what charity really means to him, the fulfillment and sense of purpose that goes hand in hand with service, the power we all have to make the world a better place, and perhaps most importantly, why none of us should fear work that has no end. I love this man. I love his mission. I'm proud to support the work of Charity Water. And my hope is that this conversation will both inspire and empower

• 11:32Rich Roll?

  you to do the same. So if that's the case, once again, please go to my.cheritywater.org/richroll and consider donating to my birthday campaign. So together, we can get clean water to as many people as possible who are most in need. Here's Scott.

• 11:59Rich Roll?

  Oh, whoa.

• 12:02Rich Roll?

  This is for San Francisco, right?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, 500 people. And then all the content is shot specifically in 360, just for the gala. So I'm doing a three hour screening tonight of all the content.

• 12:17Rich Roll?

  Whoa.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  But it should be really special.

• 12:19Rich Roll?

  What's the venue?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  It's the Armory. It's a 40,000 square foot huge.

• 12:23Rich Roll?

  I got the invite. I'm gonna make it happen.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Come with your talk again.

• 12:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think we're gonna do it.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  That'd be fun.

• 12:28Rich Roll?

  So cool.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Just top up and it's funny, this was actually the, this wasn't ours, was it? We sent an hourglass out as the invite to the well members.

• 12:37Rich Roll?

  Oh, cool.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  It was the, the whole gala concept is called the gift of time.

• 12:42Rich Roll?

  You're always like next level with like the marketing stuff, man.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Well, we're gonna track the, so we're gonna, um, I'll let you in just a little bit on the insight. Well, we're gonna fund, crowdfund a drilling rig for $700,000 in the room. We're gonna put everybody's names on it that donates anything, call it a hundred bucks. And then I'm gonna put up a calendar of the next four years and say, great, we have a rig. Now let's run it into the future. So every year is a million bucks.

• 13:08Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  So we're gonna sell units of time.

• 13:11Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna sell a drilling day, a drilling hour, a drilling day, three drilling days, which is a well, a drilling week, a drilling month. And as you buy time, we're just gonna see this calendar, you know, start filling out.

• 13:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  And what we're also gonna do is we're gonna, we're actually quantifying the amount of time that you'll be saving women. So as you buy time, it's turning into a multiple, because we've got the data now. We've been interviewing in these villages.

• 13:40Rich Roll?

  It's a completely different way of thinking about the impact, right?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, not just dirty water's becoming clean, but the time that women are saving. What would you do with millions of hours?

• 13:51Rich Roll?

  Right. The whole, uh, um, gender aspect of the work that you do, I think is something that, that, that people don't realize until they become educated. The impact that the water has on education and female empowerment.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's real. It's real. Women and girls, really women and girls only when it comes to water.

• 14:14Rich Roll?

  Right, because, break that down a little bit. I mean, basically, traditionally, the women are responsible for collecting the water. And this involves hours and hours and hours of walking each way to a well that's.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yep. Well, it's not even a well, that's the problem. It's a swamp, it's a pond, it's a river, it's often brown, viscous, dirty water. And, you know, they're, they're at risk of animal attacks. You know, we hear stories of women getting attacked by hyenas. They're at risk of rape, you know, as they're far away from home. Um, if you're a woman and you're giving birth, you've gotta give birth away from home at the water hole. So you're, you're effectively camping out because you need the water.

• 14:54Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  And, you know, so not only, you know, when we're able to bring clean drinking water into a village, not only are we eliminating that walk, therefore reclaiming, you know, all these, these hours every day. Imagine getting five hours back in your day, every day, seven days a week.

• 15:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the downstream impact of that can't even be measured because it translates into education and John, you know, working and being productive in other ways.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's incredible. There was a UN report that was released that they track the economic impact of water. So, yeah, look, we've said we know water makes people healthier. Fifty-two percent of the disease throughout the developing world, or what some people would call the third world, is actually because of bad water and a lack of sanitation. But the UN wanted to see, you know, what about the economics behind this? So they found every dollar that you invested in clean water and sanitation yielded a four to eight dollar return.

• 15:52Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  So why are many people wealthier? And it was money not spent on medicine. So if you're not sick, you're not headed to the clinic. I remember one of the things that used to surprise me was learning that the impediment for so many of these people is actually getting to the clinic. When they get there, the drugs are often affordable and subsidized, but the taxi to the clinic could be a month's wages. So you don't have it. So your kid dies in the village of diarrhea, something completely preventable. So I just, I love the idea that by bringing clean drinking water and sanitation into villages, you're actually making, you're improving the local economy. You're measurably lifting people out of extreme poverty.

• 16:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it solves a battery of problems at the source. Speaking of the source, the last time we, I guess we got together, it was probably a year and a half ago, and that was right on the eve of you launching The Spring.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:47Rich Roll?

  And in that, this past year and a half.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Your community was so helpful.

• 16:51Rich Roll?

  It's gone on to become super successful. And during that period of time, you wrote this book that just came out there. So congratulations on that.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Thanks, Rich.

• 17:01Rich Roll?

  Super exciting.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me back.

• 17:03Rich Roll?

  I'm about, I'm about, I don't know, 50 or 60 pages into it. I'm right at the part where you hook up with that DJ that you used to employ at various nightclubs across Manhattan, who had found faith in a certain respect. And that guy kind of becomes your...

• 17:24Rich Roll?

  He becomes like this, not mentor, but kind of like, he ushers you into a new way of thinking about who you are and what you do.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:32Rich Roll?

  It's like a pivotal character.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are a couple of really important guides or mentors. I would have said at that time, he was a mentor, even though it was a brief, brief time of counseling that really moved me in the right direction.

• 17:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  It's funny, Dr. Gary, who you'll meet later in the book, becomes really my first guide when I go to Liberia in Africa. And, you know, his story was so amazing. He had, he was a surgeon from California, from this area, actually, and he had heard that there was this hospital ship that surgeons could join and they could operate for free on people without access to medical care. And he signs up for three months. All right, I can, I can leave my practice behind for three months. And when I volunteered and set foot on the ship, he'd been there 21 years.

• 18:23Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  They never left. He's still there.

• 18:26Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  I think he's on year 34 or 35. So there's a bunch of these characters, you know, throughout the book that just confirmed to me that I'm on the right path, that this is a life worth living, you know, a life of service. Imagine giving three and a half decades. He just never went back to his practice. He never went back to making money and, and, you know, buying the cars and...

• 18:48Rich Roll?

  Doing all the things that we've been told since youth are...

• 18:52Speaker 01

  The markers of success.

• 18:54Rich Roll?

  The recipe of not only success, but, but being happy and, and living a fulfilled life, which we know intellectually is not the case. And yet it's so difficult for us to wrap our heads around a different way of living. And I think of all the people that I've met, you are not just a shining example of...

• 19:17Rich Roll?

  The power of service to transform life. I mean, you might be the best example of anyone I've ever met of somebody who weathered a dark night of the soul and then was able to channel that experience into not only changing your own life, but having this monumental impact on millions of people across the world. Like, I was thinking, like, do I know anyone else who's had a more profound impact on the planet than you and the work that you do? And I don't think that I have. I don't think I do. I mean, it's really remarkable. And when you were last here, we tracked your whole story, and I don't want to spend too much time on that, because people can go and listen to that episode. We do it.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  It was like two hours.

• 20:00Rich Roll?

  It was. But the show has grown quite a bit, and not everyone's going to go back and listen to that. So I think it is worth kind of recapping, you know, some of the highlights there and contextualize what we're talking about.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Sure. You know, I think my, it's interesting. You get a little different perspective, too, when you write a book, when you spend two years, you know, and write 150,000 words, which became...

• 20:22Rich Roll?

  Well, you start to understand your story in a different way. And you're like, oh, wait, I forgot that thing was really important.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you find the threads that connect everything. So I think, you know, my story was three acts. There was act one, which was growing up in a very conservative Christian home. My mom became an invalid when I was four, after a carbon dioxide gas leak in our home. And this was a shock to our family. She almost dies. A faulty heat exchanger had caused the problem. And I'm instantly thrust into a caregiver role as a four-year-old. I take care of mom. I'm doing the cooking. I'm doing the cleaning. I play piano every Sunday in church. I don't cuss. I don't drink. I don't sleep around.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  I don't smoke. So that's act one. Act two, 18 happens. I discover New York City. It's actually probably most...

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Most close to the parable of the prodigal son, where I just flip everybody the bird. Flip my parents the bird, I flip the, you know, the church the bird and say, now it's my turn. Okay, I played by the rules. Now I'm going to explore the other side. And I moved to New York City. I felt like, well, if you want to rebel in style, I heard that there was this job called a nightclub promoter, where you can get paid to drink alcohol professionally. So the thought of being a professional drinker was, uh, was appealing. And, you know, at 18 years old, three, eight, three years before I'm even allowed to be inside nightclubs, I just start climbing up the social ladder of New York. I want to be the king of New York. I want to be the guy spraying the champagne over the crowd from the top of the mezzanine or the DJ booth.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  And work at 40 different nightclubs over the next 10 years, so 18 to 28 is kind of a blur. Start with smoking, then drinking, then the drugs, then the gambling, then the pornography, then the strip clubs, then this just kind of descent into hedonism and debauchery and, uh, degeneracy.

• 22:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and, and I'm going to interject from time to time, but apologies for that. But what I realized, like, I knew it was, I knew you were a baller nightclub owner, and I knew you were partying pretty hard, but, but what I gathered from, from the book was, was, uh, you know, as somebody, you know, who's explored that terrain myself,

• 22:43Rich Roll?

  it was, it was darker than I suspected, and you were, you were deeper in that hole than, than I thought. Like, you, you tend to kind of, you tell your story a lot and, and, you know, you don't shy away from some of these details, but in the book, you really drill down on the, like, what exactly you were doing. And it was, it was heavy usage.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was really heavy. It's funny, we have these conservative donors in Chicago who are a little older, and they just read the book and they reported back to our team and they said, "He was so much worse than we ever thought." I mean, I don't know if they had given, um, boy, it was, he wasn't, uh, he wasn't overselling the darkness. Yeah, I, I think, um, and that's one of the reasons I really wanted. To write the book was was to show people that there it's never too late. Right. Your past doesn't need to define you. And I think as you get in, you know, get through kind of section one or whatever, you're like, wow, that guy's way worse than me.

• 23:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 23:44Speaker 01

  He could be sitting on ritual, talking about, you know, clean drinking water for the world. I mean, my chances are good at turning the page. So, you know, I have this this section two of my life, this kind of dark period and and

• 23:57Rich Roll?

  Just hold on a second. All right. So

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Dude, you can go there.

• 24:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, there's the there's the part where, you know, your partner ODs on heroin. And then you've got this bouncer who is threatening your life and showing up at your house with a gun. You know, like this is it was, you know, it's very cinematic.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And and I had health issues. So I don't, you know, again, when you are able to write a book, this is a long form, you know, it's kind of like a 10 hour podcast, right? So I really remembered that part of one of the big things going on was just my half my body went numb.

• 24:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  So after 10 years of partying, I just I started to break down.

• 24:40Rich Roll?

  And what's what's so interesting and very literary about that is is how it symbolizes the numbness of the soul, right? Like, your body starts to go numb, but it's really this spiritual malaise that's come upon you.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in some ways, it was a betrayal. The true me, I think, was the caregiver, was the kid who wanted to be a doctor growing up to help sick people like my mom. It was the kid who had a faith and who had a deep sense of virtue and morality. So this was really the, you know, the and what I love in that prodigal son story, like the the prodigal son goes halfway across the world gambling prostitutes, and then he winds up, he runs out of money, and he winds up at the end of himself. And he says, I want to come home. The servants in my parents' house are treated better than the condition that I'm living in now. And you just get this sense, there's like a longing to return

• 25:41Speaker 01

  to like, he was wrong, you know, he the the exploration had led him to a really dark place. And and that's how I felt.

• 25:49Rich Roll?

  But but there the darkness is

• 25:54Rich Roll?

  This incredible, teachable moment, right? It's almost like, I mean, do you think that you could have created what you've created without exploring the dark side? Like, you had to test the boundaries of your faith to really understand who you are. You know? And so, when I see people who are venturing into that, like, we're like, oh, we gotta pull him out of that. We gotta, like, help him, you know? He's going wayward. And it's like, well, maybe not so fast. Maybe that person is on their journey and they need to explore what that's like in order to fully understand, you know, who they are. Like, it's, these are divine moments, I think. And we're quick to judge them, but they can ultimately be, I mean, you're an incredible example of how they can catalyze a life well-lived.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yep. I agree. You know, and I was lucky to get out, so not everybody gets out. You know, there were, there were people that, you know, had gone wayward and then overdosed and then died.

• 26:50Rich Roll?

  We've been to a lot of funerals.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't know that we should be, you know, encouraging. Like, I, I needed, I think I needed more of those positive voices. You know, it's interesting, so I, for those that don't know my story, I wind up quitting everything at 28 years old and walking away from that lifestyle and asking myself the question, what would the opposite of my life look like? Not a pivot, not a 20 or 50-degree shift, because I actually tried that for a few months, this kind of one foot in, one foot out. What would, what would the clean break look like? And, you know?

• 27:24Rich Roll?

  The guy with a gun chasing you is a perfect moment.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And it was, exactly. And the clean break looked like, go to the poorest country in the world, post-war Liberia, become a photojournalist on a humanitarian medical mission, and then quit all the vices in one go, in one fell swoop. And, you know, I, I, it's funny, somebody asked me recently, they said, so so many people are struggling with addiction and struggling with trying to, to change their life. What I realized, actually, just this week, was one of the, one of the really important things was I changed my environment so radically.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  My environment had been clubs, excess drinking, debauchery, sex, drugs. And my environment changed to a group of humanitarian doctors and nurses and surgeons who were giving the best of themselves in service to the poor. So I went into this completely healthy environment where the new norm was selflessness. The new norm was virtue and courage and tenacity and hard work, you know, in, in the direction of others, in the direction of serving others. And it just looked so good. I mean, I, I didn't want to do any of that stuff. I mean, I didn't want to go down off the ship and have a cigarette, you know, next to

• 28:46Speaker 01

  the, you know, with the engineers in the engine room. I, I wanted to really embrace this, this new lifestyle. It looked so much better. So I think that really helped me never go back. Cause it was, there was one night where I smoked three packs of cigarettes. I drank a ton and I just, I walked away from it. You know, I haven't had a drag in 15 years. I, um, I haven't touched coke or any of that stuff. I haven't gambled in 15 years. I haven't looked at a pornographic image in 15 years. Like I, I really made a clean break. And for me, I felt like I could turn the page and start over. I mean, it really felt like a do-over at 28. If I had, if I could actually get rid of the crap, if I could kind of leave the detritus.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  And there was something so beautifully symbolic about this ship, this 522 foot hospital ship, crammed full of amazing selfless people. And I would leave all of the, you know, the nasty crap on land. I would walk up the gangway and I would sail away to a new continent and into a new life.

• 29:51Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  There was just something so beautiful about that idea.

• 29:55Rich Roll?

  The cinematic aspect of this continues to unfold. These moments, I'm super interested in them and, and how they work. I mean, I think on some level, we're all, you know, all of us, everybody is visited with moments like these, moments of self-reflection that if we're aware enough and we have enough willingness can be transformative. But I think it's a fun, you know, it's like you were able to do it. For others, those moments may come and pass and they don't have the wherewithal or the the the the degree of presence of mind or whatever it is to actually activate

• 30:35Rich Roll?

  on them. Like, what do you think? I mean, was it just desperation? Like, what what was it about you in that frame of mind that that allowed you to really grab that rope and make that change?

• 30:50Speaker 01

  I think I just caught a vision for a new life, what it would look like. You know, I met, I mentioned Dr. Gary earlier, just just even hearing about someone who had changed his life, right? I mean, going on the plastic surgeon track to then twenty some years on a ship, that level of commitment, that level of dedication, I just found it so inspiring. So I had this role model. I had a new role model. So if the previous role model was maybe the richest club owner, right, with all the girls and all the drugs?

• 31:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  The new role model was a great humanitarian, right? Like, I met Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa. And so I think I got a picture of, I also got a picture of how my skills might be useful in a very different context. So what I was good at was promoting, promoting things, promoting parties, really. I mean, to be successful in nightlife, you have to get people to turn up at your club versus other people's.

• 31:55Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And you have to spin this story.

• 31:57Rich Roll?

  The right people.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  The right people, right? And that's that's often really beautiful girls and really rich, rich people, you know, rich guys, really, who want to hang out with the beautiful girls. And that was the whole scene. We called it models and bottles. Models and bottles were the two elements. And if you did those two things, you could sell $50,000 of alcohol in a couple hours.

• 32:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  And there would be, I remember people would come in and drop 10,000 on their MX. They wouldn't even open the champagne sometimes. They would just buy it. So to be successful at that, I was telling a story that if you got past the velvet rope, if you made your way into the right table and you sat with the right people and you spent all this money, you know, showing off your wealth, then your life had meaning. And that was the wrong story, but I think I realized in that moment, I'd be able to tell a redemptive story, a story about people like Dr. Gary Parker, a story about the people that he was operating on, that he was saving the lives of. And I could tell the story to the same people. You know, I had this club list of 15,000 emails.

• 32:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  And back then, you know, the open rates were like-

• 33:01Rich Roll?

  But the rich guy's like, well, what about the models?

• 33:04Speaker 01

  So, so I, I think I was surprised. Sure, I got, I got some of that because the, the, the list went from getting invited to an MTV party or the opening of the Prada megastore in Soho, to pictures of horrific facial tumors, cleft lips, cleft palates, flesh eating disease, leprosy. And, and then the, the answers to these maladies. And sure, some people say, hey, take me off the list. That's gross. I didn't sign up for, you know, Liberia 101. But I was surprised at how few people said that. I, I was, I think I was really struck by how people said, this is amazing. I want to help. How do I give money? How do I sponsor the next surgery? How do I become you?

• 33:47Speaker 01

  I remember this woman from Chanel wrote me once and she said, tears are just streaming down my face. It's, it's lunch hour. People think that I've lost a family member. And I just can't stop uncontrollably sobbing because I feel so moved by the suffering in these amazing doctors that are meeting that suffering. So I think I learned that, uh, that those same promoting skills could be redeemed in an instant.

• 34:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  And I could tell stories that mattered.

• 34:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So when you're, when you were a club promoter, you developed this email list. And then when you segue into the work that you now do, it was an interesting time where email marketing was just beginning, right? And so you were able to convert this list from- One interest to another and take advantage of the fact that at the time you could get essentially 100% open rates.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, your content was being read.

• 34:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  I mean, unless they unsubscribed, they were they were getting it. And it was such visual content, too. I I think I understood early on that I just heard something yesterday, which I think is one of the best quotes I've heard in a while. And it's from Carl Jung and it says, "Transformation is only possible in the presence of images." Transformation is only possible in the presence of images. And I didn't know this at the time, but my instinct was to show and not tell. So the emails were super visual. I took 50,000 photographs that first year on the mission. I was just running around with my camera saying, "Here's what I'm seeing. Here's what I'm seeing. Here's a little boy with a big tumor.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Here's the doctor in surgery operating on his face. Here's the little boy without the tumor being welcomed back into his village, surrounded by 100 friends and family who are celebrating his his return to life and to health." And the images, the stories that were going out were driven by these photos. The words were almost second. And I think this, it just, it really worked. You know, so many charities, I think, convey the problem through statistics. You know, if I tell you or anybody, Rich, 663 million people today are living without clean drinking water, you look at me with that face.

• 36:04Rich Roll?

  You just can't.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  It's like, I can't conceive of it.

• 36:07Rich Roll?

  What's the difference between 663 and a billion or 200 million or 20,000?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 36:14Rich Roll?

  It's hard for the human brain to really comprehend.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  So that's why these stories and these images, if I opened up my laptop and I said, "Hey, here's a child that I just met a few weeks ago in Malawi, and this is the water that she's drinking, and this is what her mom looks like, and this is her house, and this is her school, and this is how far her school is from the house. And actually, she can't go to school because she has to go get dirty water. She's been sick six times this year." Right? Then then you're immediately drawn into it. But, you know, I found that it was one thing to talk about dirty water, and it was another to show it. And it just moved people in a visceral way.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  So, you know, a lot of things were just happening at the, I was just exploring, could my email list be used for good? And so maybe those 10 years of debauched relationships weren't wasted after all. Maybe they could be redeemed. Maybe the skills of promoting, I could promote something completely different. I could promote something meaningful. I could promote radical generosity and compassion and empathy. I could promote clean drinking water for the world. So I was just making all of these discoveries without that much perspective at the time. It was just doing stuff. It was just a flurry of activity.

• 37:24Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, you have this light bulb moment that, that water is what's behind. You're, you're, you're with all these doctors that are treating all these horrible conditions and you, you begin to understand that these conditions are all downstream of one fundamental problem, which is that these people don't have access to clean water. If we can focus on the water problem, then we don't need stadiums full of people with tumors growing on their faces.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 37:49Rich Roll?

  And it begins really with, like, what I love about it is it just begins with one well, right? Like you take, you come back to New York, you throw a party, everybody's got like

• 37:59Speaker 01

  That's the only thing I knew how to do.

• 37:59Rich Roll?

  20 bucks in a lucite box and you build one well. It's almost like a, I don't know if you had a grand vision at the time as to what this could become, but just executing on like one task as proof of concept.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then you do your next, and then you do your next, and then you do next, and now there's 29,000.

• 38:18Rich Roll?

  I mean, did you have an idea at that time that this could be what, do you have perspective on what you've built? When you, when you think about Scott, you know, 15 years ago or 12 years ago?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  You may not like this answer, but at the beginning, and, and, and this almost, I don't want to over spiritualize this, but I felt like I had a vision and I could see the end, and the end was the day on earth when everyone has clean water. So I could see the problem.

• 38:46Rich Roll?

  I would not like that answer.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Well, because most people, so, so most people are saying, hey, one of the questions I get a lot is, hey, we're 12 years in, we've raised $330 million and we've helped 8 million people get clean water. And, and the question I most often get is, wow, charity water has been so successful. Did you ever think you'd do all this? Did you ever think you'd be so successful? And the real answer to that is, This, I thought we'd be infinitely more successful. This is a fraction of what I imagined at the beginning. We have done so much less than I think we should have by now. I really thought it'd be billions.

• 39:27Rich Roll?

  So.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  So, so it's a, so I did have the vision at the beginning. And it did start with one well. I didn't know that it was gonna work, but, but the intention was I am going to give the rest of my life to try and end what I see on earth as the biggest problem facing people, which is the lack of access to clean water. And then I'm gonna start with one well. And then there's two wells and there's five wells. But I did kind of, you know, I'm moving towards this day when we all celebrate victory. It's a party, actually. It's a party at the end. It's the party when the entire world has clean water.

• 40:01Rich Roll?

  So when you started, it was 1.1 billion.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 40:04Rich Roll?

  And now it's at 616.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Sixty-three.

• 40:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:07Rich Roll?

  So.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  It's about halved.

• 40:09Rich Roll?

  You and other people, other organizations have essentially halved this.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Even as population growth has grown.

• 40:16Rich Roll?

  A decade plus.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  And there's a lot more awareness.

• 40:19Rich Roll?

  So, but you feel like you should be further along.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Yes. All right, good. You kidding?

• 40:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  It's clean drinking water. I mean, charity water gives away 100% of all donations, you know, to, so I, I'm just, I'm, I'm sometimes baffled at how we have been unable to move the trillions of dollars that are just sitting in bank accounts and donor-advised funds that are, that are helping no one. And we have not yet been able to tell compelling enough stories to move that money to helping people get clean drinking water.

• 40:52Rich Roll?

  And your, in your mind, is the biggest roadblock storytelling? What is, what is the impediment?

• 40:59Speaker 01

  It's moving people from paralyzing apathy that, that is so easy to embrace when it comes with these huge global issues. Into action, into hey, I could do something. And I think we have been pretty good at that by telling the stories of a nine year old who's donating their birthday to raise a couple hundred dollars and a few people get clean water. Or an eighty nine year old at the end of her life, you know, who's giving from her pension because, you know, she wants other people to live to be eighty nine and have that same chance.

• 41:32Rich Roll?

  I mean, I would say that you have been masterful in that. I mean, if you can just continue to scale what you're doing, the problem is inevitably going to be solved. And I think fundamentally, what Charity Water has done with your stewardship is not only completely revolutionize and change the face of what giving is and looks like and, and how it engages the donor, but it almost functions more like a studio, like a Hollywood studio than like UNICEF. Because what you trade in is storytelling. Like you're working on the emotional impact that you can have on, on the public by doing

• 42:14Rich Roll?

  this amazing job of telling the stories of the people that are impacted and engaging the donors on a level where they really feel like not only are they making, each individual is making a tangible difference, but they're engaged. They're engaged in the process and they're engaged in the results.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I think storytelling, you know, if we had to keep one thing and go back and do it all over again, I would take storytelling over the hundred percent model. I would take storytelling over, you know, photos and GPS and all the cool tracking stuff Charity Water does. I, I think that's what moves people. Yeah, that is the, that is kind of the, and that's what I, I teach other social entrepreneurs. You have to be able to go and tell true stories that matter. I think a lot of people want to help. And we talked about the last time we were together. So many people look at the suffering around the world and they say, I wish I could do something. But then there's this lack of trust. There's this, I don't trust the system. I don't know how much of my money would actually get to those people.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  You know, I, I don't know that it's going to make an impact. And there are all these barriers. So we have been through the Charity Water business model, trying to break down those barriers and say to the cynic, say to the skeptic, take another look. Because I actually believe people are depriving themselves of the blessing and the joy that comes with giving by all those excuses. So we just haven't done enough of it. I mean, yes, we've gotten over a million people and they've given generously from 100 countries. I really believe the best is yet to come. So I think in a year where we just finished 12 years of Charity Water, I actually do think the best is yet to come. I mean, today, we're going to get 4,000 new people clean drinking water for the first time in their lives.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  And we do it again tomorrow and again the next day and again the next day. Now, I want that number to be 40,000, but it's now significant. You know, the eight and a half million people we've helped, it's more than the population of New York City and all the boroughs. You know, we're starting to add up, you know, seven states worth of people in impact.

• 44:21Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  And it's 1/78th of the global problem. So you put eight and a half million into the current 663, and 1/78th, like, that sounds better than 1/1,000th, right? Like, let's do 78 times more. Let's invite 78 times more people to participate. Let's, you know, let's invite more people to the party.

• 44:42Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 44:50Rich Roll?

  Backtracking to how you kind of conceptualized this at the outset, I think what you said is very true, that there are so many, it's now changed in the last decade, but when you, at the outset of Charity Water, there's this tremendous distrust about charitable organizations.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  It hasn't changed that much, by the way. The data hasn't changed that much.

• 45:11Rich Roll?

  Really? I mean, you know, outside of-

• 45:14Speaker 01

  There are many better charities. Like, a lot of the young charities that have started have adopted these values of transparency.

• 45:19Rich Roll?

  Right, well, they've, yeah, they've basically, you know, mocked your value system and your model, maybe not the 100% model, but the idea of creating transparency between donor and results has certainly been implemented across the board with great success, and I think that's changed the face of how people give and how they think about giving. But your idea at the beginning was like, okay, let's not bombard people with statistics and guilt. Let's create an inspiring brand that gets people excited and want to participate, and let's inject them- With that feeling

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Enthusiasm.

• 45:55Rich Roll?

  That you have.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:57Rich Roll?

  Which is what it feels like when you're of service and you give. We're all walking around, you know, trying to keep up with the Joneses and, you know, get that salary bump so we can get the new car. And we're chasing the dragon on this illusion of the American dream when the truth of what we're actually seeking, which is fulfillment and purpose and happiness and joy, is available to us if we can just make that leap of faith into what it feels like to give, right? And it's almost like you rescued that away from a broken system that is almost predatory

• 46:37Rich Roll?

  in how it makes us feel badly about ourselves to one that inspires people and shares this sense of what it actually feels like when your life is in devotion to the betterment of others.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Well said. That's so articulated. I mean, that is the vision. You know, the mission of Charity Water is to bring clean water to people on earth. And that's a very clear mission. Mission is accomplished when no human being on earth is drinking dirty water. But the vision is actually much softer. It's some of the things that you just said. It's to bring people back to the true meaning of charity. Charity means love. It means to look after your neighbor in need and get nothing in return. And I was so upset that that word, that this, it's become tainted for so many people. And charity is a bad thing, not a good thing. Like, we need more love in this world. I mean, look around, right?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  We need more people agreeing to agree on serving others, on ending needless suffering, of using our time and our talent and our money to help people, to improve the world. And I just thought that the way most people, most charities approach this was wrong. Like you said, it was shame, it was guilt, it was, you have too much, you know, you should, even the language, giving back. I loathe this language, giving back. You hear it everywhere. It's in the lexicon now, right? Oh, I'm giving back. Our company's giving back. That makes it sound like we have pillaged and plundered to such extent that we should finally throw a few scraps down to the poor.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Let's give a little bit back. So if I snatch something, you know, if I take your phone out of your hand, you're gonna say, give it back. Right. Right? Why don't we drop the back? We should just, we should frame giving in the positive. We are just giving. Let's build a culture of giving in our family, in our company, maybe in our faith community. Let's give because we can, because we want to, because it's, it's a blessing, not out of opportunity, or sorry, not out of, you know, guilt, or shame, or debt, or obligation, but because it is a, an amazing opportunity to share our blessing with others. And I actually would love to get people addicted to giving. You know, it's funny, my, my, my ambition right now around money, and I'm forty-three.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  I've got, you know, beautiful wife and two kids, but my ambition around money is to give more away, is to personally give more away. Yeah. Someone, and I write about this, someone many years ago wrote a million dollar check that changed the game for Charity Water. It was an inflection point, and it took us from the brink of insolvency, because we hadn't yet worked out our... Last time, yeah. Yeah, we hadn't worked it out, but I want to do that for somebody else. Like, I, I just have this dream of one day, I don't know how I'm gonna do it, on a charity salary, but one day I would love to walk into someone else's office, a young social entrepreneur, and not just give them advice, okay? Because I can give a lot of people advice, but I would like to actually... So, so that's the ambition, not the house in the Hamptons, not the Mercedes or the Tesla, you know, not the vacation, you know, the Four Seasons.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  And that, that's really true, you know, and in some ways it's freeing, because I'm, I don't feel trapped by not have, you know, the next. Like, the minute I would get the Tesla, I'm sure I'd want a better car, you know, or the minute I went on that vacation, well, somebody went on an even nicer vacation, or stayed at the nicer hotel on the island, right? So there's, it, it's been so freeing twelve years ago to just step off of that rat race and... Think about, think about how I can be useful, how I can be a vessel.

• 50:12Rich Roll?

  I think people would think of you or who don't really understand you or what you do, or somebody similar to you as like martyrs, like, oh, you know, they're like, like you're, you're, you're, you're flogging yourself in your hair shirt every day.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yes, not like that, though. You know that.

• 50:31Rich Roll?

  Because, you know, you can't stand the suffering of others, but you're one of the happiest people that I know, right? Like, you're, you're a living example of how great you can feel and how good your life experience can be when you're, when you're in that mode, right?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we're doing fine.

• 50:51Rich Roll?

  And the fact that your driving ambition is to give, is to give more, like, you're in a place right now, you've, how much have you, you've got raised?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Three hundred thirty million.

• 50:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay, three hundred thirty million. I don't know what your salary is, but it's a charity salary. I would imagine that if the board of Charity Water came to you and said, listen, Scott, like, let's just double your salary. You're doing a great job, that the donor base would celebrate that. They're like, Scott should be, you know, getting paid more, but knowing you a little bit, I would imagine you would just like give that away, right? Like, you wouldn't even keep it.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Well, we give, you know, we give twenty percent of our income away.

• 51:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  I believe I have to be the biggest giver.

• 51:32Rich Roll?

  Right. So you're, even of the salary that they give you, when everything that you do is for the charity, you're still giving it. Does that, does that go back into Charity Water, or do you give to other organizations?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  It's funny, we, I had them pull the numbers recently, just, I was like, well, I might get some really hard questions about, like, do you give to your own organization? And since we started, we've given, my wife and I have given one hundred eighty-five thousand of our salary back to Charity Water.

• 51:56Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  And, you know, so that's eighteen wells, which is like a total joy to be able to do. So we give to our local church, we give to Charity Water, we give to other charities. There's probably twenty other organizations we support. But we're fine. It's not a martyr. I live in a, you know, in a twelve hundred square foot, two bedroom, you know, really nice apartment in New York City, seven minutes from my office in Battery Park City in Tribeca. I drive a Kia Sorento that's a lease. I love my Kia, right? It's got the two car seats installed in the back. Like, we, we, we have food on the table. We have, you know, I fly coach. That sucks. I'm, you know, forty-three and I'm six foot one. Fourteen hours on Air Ethiopian is, is not a fun experience. But you know, that's like, that's the worst of it. Like, that is the worst of it.

• 52:40Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  So, we have these amazing, I mean, it's just an amazing life. Like, I get to, I've been to sixty-nine countries, I've been to Ethiopia thirty times. I get to, I get to, I get to preach a message of generosity, of trying to invite people into something really beautiful for them. You know, invite them into transformation through selflessness. You know, one of the things I talk about, you know, at the end of the book, is this idea of work that has no end. And if, and if you can, for me, it was selfishness with no end. It was accumulation with no end. You know, it was more girls, more drugs, more, you know, cars, things, watches, better clothes.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  And for the last twelve years, it's been more for others. More, more resources, more time and more energy spent to try to make the world a better place, to try to help people who have nothing, you know, who are truly suffering. And that is a never-ending work, but I've just come to embrace that.

• 53:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  And I think that, you know, I love the one well idea that you brought up because it did start with one, and then there were five, and then there were ten. And it's, it's like that Nietzsche quote of, you know, the long obedience in the same direction. One day, if you just keep showing up, you turn around and you're like, oh, there's twenty-nine thousand wells. And, and, you know, check in, like, maybe I come back on three years, and like, who knows what that is, or maybe some other amazing things have happened, because you just keep showing up. And, you know, I, I think we're at the beginning. You know, I think like, this is, this is the beginning of the journey. I hope that I would be able to put in thirty years, like Dr. Gary Parker, and look back, I mean, think of how many surgeries he's done now.

• 54:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  And he probably signed up for a few surgeries. So, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna fix a couple cleft lips and cleft palates, and I'm gonna go back to my practice in, in California, and I'm gonna make a lot of money. And, you know, has it been tens of thousands of people he's operated on now, who never would have gotten an operation, had he not said yes, had he not answered the call?

• 54:43Rich Roll?

  Do not fear work that has no end.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that.

• 54:46Rich Roll?

  It's a rabbinical.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  It is. It comes from an obscure rabbinic text. Somebody took a picture of that quote outside of Bodega ten years ago in New York City. And I just, I love that. It's like the call to, you know, infinite giving, I think.

• 55:02Rich Roll?

  Along the way, there's been these amazing kind of examples of, of almost divine providence. And I, I think that the most sort of crystallized examples of that are kind of how you went from office space to office space, where at the last minute, somebody would come in and, and like these problems would get, these seemingly impossible problems would get solved through the generosity of people inspired by the work that you guys are doing.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  And there's stuff I couldn't even write about in the book because it would feel too creepy. I mean, you know, my editor is like, because I would, I mean, I, look, the, we talked about this last time, the organization is not a religious organization. It never has been. I, I, you know, pray. I have a, just a, I guess, a non-denominational kind of Christian faith. And I have seen so many direct, clear answers to prayer. I mean, we had to take it out of the book because it just felt, some of this stuff just felt like too over the top. But there was a moment when we didn't have an office space. We were working out of the Soho loft. My old club partner was just raging all the time. And he would bring people back that would do drugs. And I was sleeping on a closet floor

• 56:11Speaker 01

  when Charity Water started. And I go up on the roof and, you know, I'm, I'm just praying. I'm like, God, we need to get out of here. Like, we need to get out of here. We didn't have money. We, we could barely afford an office. And I finished praying. And at that moment, I checked my BlackBerry and someone has just sent an email about an office space that they'd heard we were looking. And no lie, Rich, I can see it from the roof. I can see our new office building. It's five blocks away. So there are all these just crazy stories.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Where, you know, we have had, when we're on the brink of bankruptcy in year two, and the organization is going to become insolvent, and I'm shutting down Charity Water, and there is no more Charity Water, I'm praying for some sort of miracle, and, you know, an atheist, as it would happen, walks into my office, sits with me, and writes a million-dollar check. Complete stranger.

• 57:03Rich Roll?

  It's insane.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  You know, and like, so it's just, it's been really cool to see, and these little confirmations, I think, have just said, "You're on the right path. You're on the right path. Keep showing up." Like, this is what you're supposed to be doing. You've found your purpose, your calling, or just don't give up, don't quit.

• 57:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  And don't compromise, you know, your values. And that's one of the lessons, you know, in that story in the book. You know, before that million-dollar miracle gift, we could have done the wrong thing. We could have borrowed a huge amount of money that was in the account for the water projects that we'd promised the public we would never touch.

• 57:41Rich Roll?

  Right, like the fidelity to the value system and the integrity. And I would imagine as you grow larger, there's perhaps temptations to divert from your core values because of this, that, or the other sort of compromise that you could make. And even perhaps justifiable in that, you know, the end would justify the means. But how do you, you know, maintain that, like, focus on the principles that launched it from the get-go?

• 58:10Speaker 01

  We've made it cultural. I mean, this, it's so black and white. So you're absolutely right, there will be a decision. It's like, hey, well, so we had, so part of the money, you know, coming in from the spring is also able to be used to repair projects and bring them back online, right? Like, a rehabilitation of a well is the same as a new well for us in our mind. But, you know, somebody said once, "Well, hey, we need to go and build some sensors, which are going to help us track the sustainability of these projects." And we said, "No, we can't use that money. Got to go raise it separately." Because the 10-year-old girl who's doing five lemonade stands wants to give new people clean water, not work on a technology that's a little more-

• 58:52Speaker 01

  More abstract. Now, you could argue that sensor is going to let us know when the well breaks. We're going to send a mechanic like it is all in the service of clean drinking water flowing. But we just said, oh, let's just go raise that several.

• 59:05Rich Roll?

  Writing that letter to that little girl saying.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  And it actually might be okay. The little girl might be like, hey, great. You know, I paid for a sustainability program. But we just, we keep coming back to, you know, let's, let's try and make the hard decisions. I mean, credit card fees, like it's insane that we pay back credit card fees. I mean, this does not make sense. If you give a hundred dollars a month on your Amex and I get 97 a month, which is what we get. We pay back the three dollars every single month and we send your intended hundred. Now, you wouldn't expect us to send more money than we actually got from your donation. But we said, well, we don't feel like we can say a hundred percent if it's 97%.

• 59:46Rich Roll?

  Just running a perpetual deficit then.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So those, the, the 130 families that pay for the overhead, pay back those credit card transaction fees. It's hundreds of thousands of dollars now just to make up the difference. But we wanted to be able to just stand up there and say a hundred percent means a hundred percent.

• 1:00:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Rich Roll?

  Faith is a huge part of, of who you are and it informs the work that you do. And it's an interesting arc coming from, you know, a relatively evangelical upbringing to, you know, losing your way and finding your way back and, and you're relatively open about that aspect of your life. Although you're, you're, you're always careful to kind of.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Not preach.

• 1:00:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like not, not preach and, and just make sure that, you know, your message is nondenominational in every regard. But I appreciated the fact that in the book you, you, you go into a little bit more depth about that and how important it is to you. So I'm interested in, in how you think of like, how you think about faith and that aspect of, of, you know, how you came to become this person and, and how it, how it does, you know, inform your work and continue to kind of propel you.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think at twenty-eight, I rediscovered, you know, the teachings of Jesus or the the personhood of Jesus in a very different way. And he was a lot more exciting with fresh eyes. He was a radical. He was a rebel. He was more like me in that he was, you know, rejecting the oppressive religious establishment of the day and saying, hey, let's serve the poor. Hey, let's be pure. I mean, you know, he was calling the religious leaders, you know, whitewashed tombs, snakes, you know, all these horrors. I mean, he was just constantly offending them. And I think that's what I had taken the most umbrage to growing up was the kind of the religiosity. You know, it felt oppressive. It felt rules-based.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  It just felt like all the things I wasn't allowed to do, like, you guys are just, you're putting me into this box. So I think having then done all those things, found certainly nothing but heartache or brokenness in those. Coming back, I was so taken by the purity of Jesus. I mean, he was above reproach. He not, he just refused to play into the system of the world. I mean, he had no earthly possessions. He was living from place to place.

• 1:02:09Rich Roll?

  And speaking truth to power in this kind of very, you know, like as Rob Bell talks about it, like, it's very punk rock. It's very like Rage Against the Machine.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:18Rich Roll?

  Have you been to, have you seen his, um, his Christmas show that he, that he does?

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  The new one? No, he was just, we were just together recently and he was talking about it. I heard it's awesome.

• 1:02:27Rich Roll?

  But it's all about kind of the things that you were just mentioning.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, but Jesus spends so much time talking about the poor. And he spends so much time with, you know, the outcast, the people that know, that would walk by his parables. You know, these, the parable of like the Good Samaritan just spoke to me. The, you know, I was the guy walking by. I was the guy that never had time. And, you know, Jesus is celebrating the person who stops and who picks up, you know, the person lying in the street and checks them into the hotel and puts down the MX and says, I'll just cover all the expenses, you know, until they get well. So I just found the opposite of my life, the opposite intention of my life so compelling. And, you know, I, I am, I have a

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  I guess I have such a pattern now of praying, expecting an answer and then getting an answer that like my prayer life is just, I don't know. I mean, I believe somebody is listening. I believe I'm talking to somebody and they are hearing. I mean, there was a story we couldn't write about in the book. I just, I remember we were in the middle of northern Ethiopia and I don't think I've ever told this story before. I was with Vic. We weren't married at the time and we were in this, this really kind of bad hotel at the top of the hill and we were all, it was New Year's Eve in Ethiopia, there on the Julian calendar, which is fascinating. So it doesn't line up with December 31st. And we got for pizza the night before at a restaurant, get up in the morning and we're about to

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  fly back and Vic can't find her passport. And actually she can't find her bag and it turns out her bag was stolen. So I send the rest of the group, there were 10 other people, back home. I cancel my flight and we are looking for her passport. Now, our local partner is kind of, he's the man in Mekelle, Ethiopia. So he gets all the cops to turn up. They start knocking on the doors of the known criminals in this town, you know, hustling, searching, you know, because this is a huge offense when a foreigner comes in and has their possessions stolen. It was her wallet, her camera and her passport. And so I just start praying and I'm like, God, show me where the passport would be. I kid you not.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  I feel like I can just see where it is. And I feel like God says it's under the bushes behind the hotel.

• 1:04:50Rich Roll?

  Oh, come on.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  So I'm like, I'll be right back. And I take one of the guys with me and I crawl kind of over this fenced in area and there's a big bush and I walk behind it and her bag has been hidden under the tree.

• 1:05:06Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  And we got on the next plane. And what had happened was they think one of the workers had stolen it, had then gotten scared, right, to be caught with the contraband as the cops flood this hotel. So they ditch it under a bush.

• 1:05:20Rich Roll?

  So what do you make of this?

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:05:23Rich Roll?

  You have a direct channel to God?

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  No, believe me, and so many prayers have have gone unanswered. I just I just lost my mom to pancreatic cancer four months ago. And I was I was praying until the end. I was praying for a miracle. I had pastors, you know, people in my faith community around the world praying. And God took her, you know? I mean, it was she died in hospice in four months from diagnosis to death. So believe me, as great as that is, like to find a, you know, to find a wallet under a bush. Or, and I mean, there are just so many examples over the years that, again, I didn't want to like, put into the book because I don't want to freak people out and and think that, you know, I'm completely nuts.

• 1:06:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, or make it like a religious text that becomes inaccessible for somebody.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  I absolutely didn't want that.

• 1:06:16Rich Roll?

  And they lose they lose the they lose sight of what it is that you're actually trying to say here.

• 1:06:26Rich Roll?

  But I think there is something really compelling about this idea of looking to the example of Jesus, who was this amazing badass, who was able to like embody these ideals that we all aspire to, but fall so short of. And to say, well, what would it be like if I actually tried to model my life after his behavior? Like, forget about all the trappings of religion or of religion. It's just like, well, this guy did this, this, this, and this. And this is how he behaved, and this is how he interacted with people. Like, what would it actually be like if I tried to do that? And then you really have done that. And your life has changed dramatically and impacted people all over the world.

• 1:07:08Rich Roll?

  And you're not like walking around barefoot, you know, you know, in a beggar's robe. Like, you're living, you're a modern guy living in the modern world in New York City. But I think there's a lot of inspiration that we can take from that example of what it's like to just be like, I keep going back to this, but like to be in this mode of giving and service and exuding love and approaching situations from a perspective of how can I contribute to make this better as opposed to what can I extract out of this to accumulate for my own, you know, to account for my own inadequacies or insecurities.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Well, the last thing I'd say about faith was just, you know, Jesus always talked about the kingdom, like the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God. There's just this language all through, like bringing the kingdom of God to earth. And the nice thing about the last 12 years of my work with Charity Water is that even though it's a completely secular and nonreligious organization, I feel like I get to bring what I imagine the kingdom would look like to earth through clean water. Because I know that in heaven, right, everybody might have a different opinion of what that might look like, but I know pretty much everybody would agree in heaven, no one's drinking dirty water. Dirty is illegal in everyone's version of heaven. A girl walking eight hours with 40 pounds of disgusting river water

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  on her back, getting raped during that walk, illegal. It's not happening. So in like the in the most basic theology, I get through my work, through my, you know, non evangelical work, really, that involves Muslims and Jews and atheists and Hindus and Buddhists and Mormons, like I get to, you know, people of all faiths, people of no faith, Republicans, Democrats, independents, I get to create this huge tent, but my theology of helping people get clean drinking water is in line with the work, which is a really freeing thing. And I think because you don't have to do what I do on a Sunday or pray to the God I pray to, to work at the organization or give to the organization, and in fact,

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  most people don't, that's almost given me a freedom to say, well, this is what I believe, and this is my story. And it's been funny, just reading the reviews on Amazon of the book. Many people are like, I would never read a religious book. And I'm Jewish, or I'm an atheist, but it was okay. It was okay. He didn't try and convert me. He didn't try and preach.

• 1:09:39Rich Roll?

  But it's not a religious book.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  It isn't at all. It isn't at all. But you know, for anybody, like, I mean, I talk about prayer and, and some of these, you know, some of these moments of answer to prayer, or, or how I tried to re-experience faith. And, you know, some people, like, anything having to do with faith is just completely taboo. But it was just interesting of seeing people like, it was okay. I'll give him a pass because he didn't preach.

• 1:10:01Rich Roll?

  Normally.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  And normally, no, I'm telling you, if you read the reviews, it's funny. It's like, normally I would never read anything with any religious overtone. But, you know, there's a big but.

• 1:10:12Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that, that speaks to, in the same way that we, you know, we have this crisis around giving and charity, the same can be said for our religious institutions.

• 1:10:26Rich Roll?

  You know, if you were to say, you know, oh, you need to give back, or, you know, UNICEF is knocking on the door, you're like, ugh, you know, really? Similarly, for a lot of people, just saying the, the word religion, or Christianity, or G O D, or any of the, these things.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Conjured.

• 1:10:45Rich Roll?

  Provokes, yeah, you know, provokes a, a, an emotional reaction that's wed to some childhood experience, or, or something like that. And, and i- in many ways, you know, the best of what faith-based organizations have to offer, you know, could use a little Scott Harrison rebranding in certain respects, you know?

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Well, certainly the transparency would be foreign for, for a lot of them, right?

• 1:11:12Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so, uh, where are we at right now? We, we're, we're at six hundred and sixty-three, still in need.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Still in need.

• 1:11:24Rich Roll?

  How often are you?

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Spring has grown to, so your, your community was so amazing.

• 1:11:27Rich Roll?

  Year and a half since, since that started.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  There are now thirty, twenty-nine thousand people from a hundred and four countries, um, including countries in Africa, which makes me so happy. So there are people that are given monthly to the. Spring from Africa that have heard about it. It's interesting.

• 1:11:44Rich Roll?

  And we should just say, spring is your monthly subscription.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Netflix for clean water or Spotify for clean water. Hundred percent of what people give monthly goes straight out the door, provides clean water. We're then able to share stories of impact. And that that has been, that's the future for us because the drive by one time gift or the one time birthday doesn't help you solve the water crisis. Right? Someone listening and says, oh, I'm gonna give a hundred bucks once. I gotta go find the next person the next year. So getting someone who says, wow, I think I could maybe sign up for this idea for a while. Like, I could sign up for the idea of a world where everyone has clean drinking water and I can trust this organization. And that's again, why I would hope, you know, so many of our values are in that book.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  So you will get a sense at the end of it of who we are, what animates us, what values we really care about. And we're hoping to just build, keep growing a community of people who, you know, who will keep showing up like every month in, month out, in the same way that we show up for our content. You know, in the same way we show up for Dropbox and we wanna, you know, access our photos. Can we get people to show up for for others, for clean water? So that's now grown 29,000 people in 100 countries. The fascinating thing is the average across the community is exactly $30 a month, which is what it, which is what it costs us to give one person clean water. Then we have kids giving at 10, we have people giving at 100. But it's just amazing to see that organic average is 29,000 people.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Every month are getting 29,000 new people clean drinking water. And that's the number I want to add a zero to.

• 1:13:19Rich Roll?

  It's a great model for for a lot of reasons. But also because it solves a dilemma that I know that that you have historically faced every year, which is that no matter how much money you raise in a year, you gotta start over from zero.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  January 1 was a dark day, Rich.

• 1:13:38Rich Roll?

  Ten years of doing this, at some point, you know, working 80 hour weeks, like, it's gonna catch up to you and you're gonna burn out, right? Like, so I know you've kind of butted up against the edges of what that feels like.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I wrote about that, too. I, for years, people were saying that I would burn out. And I'd be like, I'm still here, did 98 flights last year, 150 speeches. Look at me, not burned out yet. And it took, it took about nine years. And there was a really dark moment where I did want to quit. And I managed to come out of it and I actually hope that writing about that experience, in fact, other social entrepreneurs have told me, other entrepreneurs in general have said, hey, I felt there, I've been there. The way that I came out of it was realizing that I had put so much in my personal identity in the success of the organization. So when Charity Water was doing well, I was doing well.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  And Charity Water had done well for eight consecutive years. And then the ninth year, when we didn't do so well, when our donations dipped for the first time, Scott didn't do well. And I became depressed and it's all my fault and I'm letting people down. I actually felt like I'd let hundreds of thousands of people down because we hadn't repeated the success of the previous year. We hadn't grown. And there was a really important time and lesson that I learned, which was, okay, I am more than my organization. You know, I'm a father of two, I'm a husband. And actually, in that year, outside of the money that we raised, it was our best year.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  We didn't compromise our values or our integrity. We pushed sustainability forward. Our team had a great year. We hired some extraordinary people that we onboarded. It's just we didn't raise as much money. So that kind of led to me saying, all right, I'm not going to quit. I'm going to come back and I'm going to try and launch The Spring and actually solve this problem, which is we are too big to start at zero every January 1 and invite people to show up with us on a longer-term basis.

• 1:15:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  And your community, again, was so helpful. I think, I don't know, I forget how much, but I think they joined at like over $100,000 a month, just the rich, raw community.

• 1:15:59Rich Roll?

  This is a renewed call to action to the community out there.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  I think you still have a link up.

• 1:16:04Rich Roll?

  I think I do, but I'm going to end this with another call to action. But for now, I will say that if you're new to the show and you're listening to this and you're not a member of The Spring, that you should sign up immediately. I think I do have a link up. I'll put links up at the show notes to all of that and you know you guys can dig deeper in the I'll put a bunch of other links about Scott and the work that he does and certainly pick up his book where you can learn more about the amazing work that this organization is doing but I can tell you it's been a delight and a pleasure to be a spring member and to see the engagement of the listenership of this show to engage in the work that you do.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  You have an amazing community.

• 1:16:45Rich Roll?

  So how many times are you going to are you traveling now overseas to oversee the work that's going on there?

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  Three times next year. It's not really overseeing the work anymore so we have an amazing team that does that. There are 19 people at Charity Water whose full-time jobs are flying around you know think of them out there with clipboards making sure the work is being done with high quality working with our partners and then auditing making sure the money's being spent well. So I'm typically out telling stories or trying to recruit more overhead donors because that's the challenge. We have a million people that have given on the water side but I need to make sure that I can continue to pay for our staff and our office costs and our flights.

• 1:17:27Rich Roll?

  What's the annual budget just for managing overhead?

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  About 14 and a half million this year and we'll raise a total of 70. So we're very efficient you know we might spend 85% of our money on programs and 15% to run it but still that money has to come separately. So that's not a trivial undertaking.

• 1:17:47Rich Roll?

  That's like 60% of your time is focused on raising money for that?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah and it's an amazing community you know those 131 families and entrepreneurs that are supporting the overhead it's the founders of Facebook and Twitter and Spotify and WordPress and Pandora and it's you know Apple executives it's people like Rob Bell, our friend and people like Depeche Mode so it's a really kind of and football quarterbacks. I mean it's a motley crew of 131 families that said we got your back. We don't need our name on a well. We want to help you hire the next hydrologist, the next accountant, the next you know person to greet people at Charity Water HQ. We'll pay for the toner for the Epson copy machine. So I'm spending a lot of time growing that community from one hundred and thirty one to one hundred and thirty five to one hundred and forty.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  And one of the ways I do that is by taking them over there. So I'll do three trips next year. I I'm I'm trying to get you there. You know, I keep inviting you.

• 1:18:40Rich Roll?

  I know. Well, you I almost went on that one trip. Well, this is actually, let me air this out with you because I had an opportunity to go on one of these trips and it looked like I could do it. And then I was like, I just I had so much going on. And I just I couldn't I couldn't justify breaking away to go on this trip, but I'm committed to to doing this. Like, I really do want to do this. And I'm at my own kind of moment right now where I wouldn't say I'm I'm teetering on burning out, but I'm the bottleneck in so many things that that I that I'm doing that I'm finally embracing this idea that the things that I've done that have got me to where I am right now are not the things that are going to take me to the next level.

• 1:19:23Rich Roll?

  And I need to make some fundamental changes in how I'm running this. You know, it's a it's a very micro version of what you're doing, but it has its own challenges and I need to let go of certain things and bring more people on to allow me to better scale what I'm doing and also allow me to focus on the things that are most important, not just professionally, but personally. So I can you know, have the experience of of going on one of these trips with you.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Next March, I'm gonna hit I'm gonna hit you hard. We got enough time to plan it.

• 1:19:53Rich Roll?

  It's far enough away that I can plan it and I I am committing to that now.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'd be it'd be great. I think I know you and you would get so much life from the trip, not just from, you know, a community of like minded givers, you know, who who will also join them. There'll be twenty five people. But just meeting the, you know, for me, I just put you guys into it and then I get out of the way. It's so great. Like, I just set back.

• 1:20:18Rich Roll?

  Job does itself.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  And you're talking with the local drillers. You know, when you meet the team running an Ethiopian drilling rig of eight guys and you say, hey, you know, what's what's your what's your work week like? They're like, what's our work month like? We work twenty nine out of thirty days. Take one day off a month. Okay, because there's an eight month dry Season in Ethiopia and they want to maximize it because when it rains for four months, they can't drill. So they leave their family. So then, you know, you're asking questions, right? You're interviewing him and um, every once in a while, um, someone will come into the village and say, well, why don't the people just move closer to the water? I'm like, why don't you ask the women? So I just sat back and, you know, through translators saying, hey, how come you don't move closer to the water?

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  And the women say, where do you, who owns that land? We don't own that land. This is our farm. This is where we grew up. So I just love being a part of these, you know, these trips as people explore as they they're inspired. I mean, you know, there's definitely some tears, you know, if you're, if you're there at the moment when a thousand people are getting clean water for the first time in their life and you watch clean water shoot out of the ground under pressure as they flush the well. And you see the dancing and tears streaming down people's faces. It's uh, it's really emotional. It's like a, it's like a picture of heaven. Yeah. Whatever heaven looks like to you, but it's, it's an extraordinary thing to be a part of.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  What's one of your favorite stories from these experiences that you could share?

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  You know, there's, there's one, you know, I think I told a couple sad ones the last time. There's one story that I didn't get to write about in the book and it's not super happy, um, but I think it's, it puts a point on the urgency of the work. So I was just talking about the celebrations. When you drill a well and you get water, it's just awesome. It's just awesome. And communities will talk about their community often as before the water and after the water. Another theme that I tease out in the book is this before and after. That's what I was doing with Mercyship. It was this black and white. So my life was before and after, you know, before the cocaine, you know, smoking, you know, crackhead basically running around.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  And now after like a husband, a father, you know, a guy who's able to lead an organization. The Dr. Gary was doing before and after, right? Suffocating to death with a facial tumor. And now you're fine, you know, blind with a cataract. Now you can see. And it's the same thing with water. You're able to take it before the water. Um, all the problems that we discussed to after the water. So there was one of these celebrations and it was in Ethiopia. And normally, everybody is happy. There's music, there's lolling, which is the women just shouting at the top of their lungs. And there was one woman off to the side who was weeping during this. And our, our partners go over to this, she's an older woman. And they say, you know, why are you crying? Like, this is a, this is a joyful moment.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  Like, look around you. And she's just like, almost, like, consumed with rage. And she says, do you mean to tell me that the water was underneath our feet the whole time?

• 1:23:27Rich Roll?

  Ah.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  And that I spent my life walking hours for dirty water to a faraway source? And then it was right there all along? And that struck me, just that picture of a thousand people celebrating, a woman, you know, on a ridge off to the side, grieving decades of suffering. And then one day, a truck pulls in, a bunch of guys jump out, start sticking a, you know, a drilling bit into the ground. And 48 hours later, they find clean water and everything's, everything's fine. So that, um, that, that picture, um, you know, we, we don't want her to suffer for 20 or 30 years. We don't want her kids to suffer.

• 1:24:09Rich Roll?

  And I think when you hear something like that, now I can better understand why you feel like you should be further along.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17Rich Roll?

  If it really is that simple, why can't we, why can't we accelerate this? And avoid those kinds of situations of that woman when the problem is so incredibly solvable.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  And we're gonna try and do that. We were just talking before, um, about our, our gala and trying to fund more drilling rigs. Every drilling rig, um, specifically in Ethiopia, can drill about 85 wells a year. So we're actually limited right now by capacity. We have eight drilling rigs, they're going full time. So eight times eight, you got about 640 villages, but you add a new rig, you get a new 85 villages.

• 1:24:53Rich Roll?

  How much does a rig cost?

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Um, about 750 grand.

• 1:24:56Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:58Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:24:59Rich Roll?

  And how do you, how do you, how do you make a decision about?

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  I'm getting fired up now thinking about it.

• 1:25:04Rich Roll?

  How, how do you decide like, okay, here's the next well we're gonna, have you identified every place that needs them? And then how do you prioritize the pecking order?

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  So now being at, at scale, in the beginning, it was just, hey, we got money for 10 wells, drill them wherever you want. Now, you know, when you're more at scale, there are plans, there are often three to five year plans for different districts in, in all these countries we work in. I think we're active in 17 or 18 countries this year. So there would be, there's a plan for the Chikwawa district in Malawi, there's a plan for the Rolindo district in Rwanda, there's the plan for Tegre. We know what 100% coverage looks like. Sometimes it's 60 million to go, sometimes it's 200 million to go, sometimes it's 14 million to go. And we're working towards that 100% coverage. So it's not a random, haphazard, let's just drill a few wells. It's a clustered approach. So you bring a new well, a new rig in, you get a new cluster in action.

• 1:25:59Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  So it's really, it's really exciting. I mean, I'm really optimistic.

• 1:26:03Rich Roll?

  And what are the, what are the sort of political hurdles that you have to jump over? I mean, are you dealing with like, you know, village politics and lots of personalities? And have you had pushback and issues where you have to really figure out how to grace people in a certain way to make it happen?

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, people, that's, that's surprised me, and I think it surprised a lot of people, that when it comes to water, we're not, we're not encountering resistance. Now, we, we have said, we're not working in conflict zones, so we're not working in Yemen, we're not working in Darfur, Sudan, you know, we're not working in these places where there's, there's active war going on. We're not working in despotic countries where the government actually doesn't want any NGOs to come in.

• 1:26:48Rich Roll?

  That could foment a revolution.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  Right. But that leaves us like 50 countries that we can work in where the government is saying, we're doing our, we're, we're doing our part, will you come and help? So that's the amazing thing about water. I mean, we're making them look good. Like, you know, do you think, when we come in and take one district in Rwanda? Alongside, the Rwandan government is so interesting. They actually match our money 90 cents on the dollar.

• 1:27:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask, like, can't these governments give you some part of their tax base to, for you then fulfill on, you know?

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  They are, but the money that they're spending is a fraction of what's needed. That tax base is being, first of all, it's a small amount. It's being split among roads, among healthcare, among energy, you know, power lines, cell towers, water. There are all these different things they have to do. So we are seeing governments spend money, but in certain cases, they are matching our dollars. So we've done about 12 million, 12 million in Rwanda, 12 million dollars in Rwanda in the Rolando district, it's a tongue tie. And the government has put 11 million alongside ours. So it was really a 22 million dollar program over seven years. And we started it, I think around 20% water coverage. We're at 99% rich. Like, we're, like, we're almost there.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  This district has nobody, you know, in a couple of months, we'll have nobody drinking dirty water. Now we're moving on to the districts to the side, and we're gonna start over again. So it's, it's really hopeful seeing that. We're not seeing resistance. You know, every once in a while, you know, a mayor will come and take credit, right? "Oh, my good people, you know, I have brought in the water." But, but we don't want the credit. We actually don't want the credit. The whole beauty of the business model is that Charity Water is getting everyday people to care, to act, to engage, to join this community. But the actual work is always done by the locals. You know, for the work to be sustainable, for it to be culturally sensitive and appropriate, it has to be led by the locals.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  So they get the credit. So it's amazing rolling into Ethiopia. And people don't know who Charity Water is, but they know and celebrate our local partner who's running those A drilling rigs.

• 1:28:56Rich Roll?

  One of the things that I thought was, was most touching at the gala in New York last winter was, was that you had a bunch of those people, a bunch of the locals there. And you, and you made such a, a point of, you know, celebrating these individuals who are actually doing the work, you know, boots on the ground.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:15Rich Roll?

  And, and allowing people to really, like,

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  They're the heroes. That's why it's fun.

• 1:29:19Rich Roll?

  Understand who these people are and like the sacrifice that they're making to be away from their family for such extended periods of time.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  And you'll be, when you come in March, you'll be so inspired by them. I mean, you'll really see. We'll get out of the way. We'll just say, "Hey, go, go, go ask them. Tekelwani, tell, tell everybody why you do what you do."

• 1:29:36Rich Roll?

  So many people are living their lives feeling incredibly disenfranchised. They're disconnected from the fruits of their labor, from anything that provides them with passion. You know, they're just trying to get through the day and pay the bills. And there's this malaise, this sense that one person really can't make a difference. Like, yeah, I can put a quarter in the little box from whoever when I'm walking into Walmart, but like, is that really doing anything? And so I love how a big part of the ethos of Charity Water is helping people to really

• 1:30:20Rich Roll?

  reframe that and to really understand that one person can make a difference, a very tangible impactful difference. And with that comes this sense of purpose that can overcome one. And in doing that, you tell amazing stories about, you know, everyone from the girl at the lemonade stand to whoever. So I thought it would be nice if you could tell one of those stories for somebody who's listening to this who feels like, yeah, I'm hearing everything Scott's saying, but like, you know, I don't know how I could have that kind of feeling in my own life.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  First, let me just, I know you haven't gotten there yet, but you basically just delivered the end of the book. So I'm going to read the last, the last line. You didn't even know where I was going to end, but that's it. So it says, you know, "At last's count, Charity Water's funded more than 28,000 water projects that'll help eight and a half million people get clean water, people who will never have to experience what it was like before the water ever again. We still have so much work to do, yet every day I wake up hopeful that we will solve this problem in my lifetime. I believe that together we can bring life's most basic necessity to the 663 million people who still don't have it. I'm just one guy who built one charity, but it's made a little dent in the water crisis. Next year, we'll make a bigger dent.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  And this is how the problems of the world get solved, one by one, by me and you and us." I really believe that. Beautiful. Like as we, you know, as we all join our voices together. So I'll end on a, on a story. It's a, it's a new story. Uh, it's not in the book. Um, we were about to launch our big World Water Day campaign, March 22nd at the organization. We had a whole campaign lined up and then somebody opening up the mail at HQ gets a note, little picture, um, and $8.15. And we learn it's from a six-year-old named Nora and the note says, Dear Charity Water, I saw your video and I'm sending in $8.15 because I want kids to stop bad, dying of bad water.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  I want kids to stop dying of bad water. And she draws a picture of herself next to a well in Africa, what she thinks a well looks like with clean water coming out. So Charity Water, you know, we're storytellers, like, stop the presses, cancel the campaign. Let's see if Nora will let us put her on camera and tell her story. So we have a camera crew down in Virginia a week later and Nora opens up her house, this six-year-old girl. And on camera, she's this precocious girl that says, well, I saw the video and I went up to my room that night and I just, I, I asked myself the question, should I give my money or should I keep my money? Should I give my money? Should I keep my money? And she's back and forth and it's so cute to hear. And she says, so I came down in the morning and I said, I would give my money.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  So she drops $8.15 from her allowance and she mails it in and, ah, there's so much there, right? The purity of heart. And by the way, we're all asking ourselves the sex, the same question, right? Should I give? Should I not? Should I trust? Should I not? So she, she comes out on the right side for her and we launched a campaign, um, around this three-minute video and she's just, she's beautiful. She has this heart to serve others. And, um, when you see her on camera, you just melt. You're like, I want to be that pure. I want to, like the simplicity, you know, back to the Bible, like, you know, Jesus said, let little children come to me, right? We will be led by children, the simplicity of children to teach adults these, these

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  values of generosity and compassion and purity. So, um, we just told her story and we asked everyone just to give $8.15. And how much was raised? We raised 80 grand in a day. So that's the

• 1:34:02Rich Roll?

  It's like eight wells.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And she, so her seed, her vision of eight dollars and 15 cents turned into a thousand times more.

• 1:34:10Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And what does she think of all this?

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  She loved it. And hopefully we'll get to take her there.

• 1:34:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  Hopefully she can go and see some of that impact one day. You know, we, we do think about that. Like, how do we close the loop? But I would hope that even Nora might live her life a little differently. That, that the feedback loop, that seeing people respond, you know, might even encourage her to give eighteen dollars.

• 1:34:35Rich Roll?

  Imagine being that age and then suddenly you're the seed that, that, that germinates this amazing flower. That has to impact her and make her think, I mean, it had to be an amazing feeling for her.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Rich Roll?

  Even if she's too young to really understand it. Yeah. That is incredible. And I think it does speak perfectly to this idea that one person really can make a change. And I love this idea of, of, you know, I'm like, back to this literary thing, like, this symbology of like purity. Is there anything more pure than water? Like, taking it back to its biblical roots and the, the way that we all cleanse ourselves, our bodies and our souls through clean water. Right? And that's essentially what this is all about. The clarity of purpose. And, and the simplicity of what water represents and how powerful it is. It's really amazing.

• 1:35:30Rich Roll?

  So, great, let's close this down. If you could just leave us with a thought about what it means to, to live a life of service and, and how you think about that. And, and, you know, without repeating what we've already talked about, what you think it would mean for another person to extend themselves in service and, and the kind of downstream impact of that?

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  Freedom is the first word that comes to mind. I mean, for me, and I can only speak for me. I just found such a freedom in redirecting the intention of my life away from accumulation and selfishness and status and, you know, all the things that we see on TV and on social media that we're supposed to want, that we're supposed to climb higher for. And it was just freeing to say, I'm not going to play that game. And I'm going to look at the resources that I've been blessed with, both, you know, the resources and the talents maybe around

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  promoting or storytelling, the money that I have, and how can I use those to be a blessing to others? And I think it can start small. It can start with eight dollars and fifteen cents. It could start with a birthday party where the first well was built. And, you know, for me, I just wanted more and more and more. And the more I gave, the more I wanted to give. You know, I love that. The more you give, the more you give. And I would encourage people just to step out and, you know, set the cynicism aside, give your time, and you're going to want to give more time. You know, maybe it's a local charity, maybe it's a, you know, something in your neighborhood, but dig in, you know, give your money and give it to an organization where you actually feel like you're going to see the impact,

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  and it's not just going to go into a, you know, into a black hole. But I would hope that that would feel good, and you'd want to do more of it and more of it and more of it. And the next thing you know, you look back and you say, wow. I just was preparing a donor report recently for a family who'd been with us for eight years. And the, you know, we said, here's your total eight years of giving, here's your impact all around the world. And they wrote back and they said, we had no idea it was that much. We had no idea we had given over a half a million dollars. I think they felt like it was less than half of that. And that's the experience, right? When you just, they were just showing up every year, giving as they could, they're giving some profits to their business. And then, you know, we're like, hey, here's your summary. You're like, oh, my gosh, kind of like screen time

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  just popped up. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I spent that much phone on my, I spent that much time on my iPhone last week? How's that possible? So I would hope, you know, in, in the positive, as you give your time, as you give your talent, as you give your money in the service of others, you do get to look back and say, wow, that's, that's a significant impact. I really have transformed people's lives and, and transformed my own life in the process.

• 1:38:29Rich Roll?

  Well, you have transformed my life and it's been a blessing and an honor to be able to contribute to your incredible organization, man. And you inspire me in more ways than you know. So I thank you for your service. Thanks for doing this here today. And I wanted to kind of end this by saying that this podcast, I believe, is going up on October 21. My birthday is October 20.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Haha, happy birthday.

• 1:38:57Rich Roll?

  Because I am the bottleneck in everything that I do, and I've been spread so thin, I didn't have my act together in time to launch a birthday campaign well in advance of my birthday. So can I still launch a birthday campaign on my birthday and leave it open until perhaps the end of the year or something like that? All right. So when this goes up, this will serve as the official announcement that I'm dedicating my 52nd birthday to Charity Water. So I'll put up links and all the information on how you can contribute to that, because I don't want anything for my birthday, other than for all of you to experience what I've experienced and what Scott is speaking about, that feeling that you get when you contribute to the betterment of others and.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  I'll be your first donor. You got 152 bucks from me right now.

• 1:39:44Rich Roll?

  And.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  That's a few people with clean water.

• 1:39:46Rich Roll?

  Thank you, sir. Back into your organization. And of course, the spring. If people want to learn more about the spring, I mean, you can go to charitywater.org.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  Slash Rich Roll.

• 1:39:57Rich Roll?

  There, there you go.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:39:59Rich Roll?

  I think that link is still live.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:40:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So charitywater.org/ richroll. I'll make sure it's live before this goes up. And everybody pick up Thirst, available everywhere you buy books. It's a fantastic read. It's a huge accomplishment. Super excited for you, man. And more will be revealed. Come back and talk to me again.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  Cool. Well, maybe we'll do one from Ethiopia in March.

• 1:40:21Rich Roll?

  That would be cool.

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  Let's do like a 30 minute pod from a well opening, okay?

• 1:40:25Rich Roll?

  Only 30 minutes?

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  Well, like from a well opening, we could interview some local people with translators. Come on, let's do that.

• 1:40:31Rich Roll?

  That would actually be amazing. I would love to do that.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  And we'll see, we might even be able to get to one of your birthday wells. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna work on it.

• 1:40:37Rich Roll?

  All right. Thanks, Scott. Peace. Clean water.

• 1:40:45Rich Roll?

  Amazing human, that's Scott Harrison, an extraordinary mission, and really, an outstanding example of a life well-lived. I simply just cannot say enough good things about that guy. Hope you guys enjoyed it. I hope it inspired you to give more freely of yourself. And if so, a great way to start is to donate to my birthday campaign. Again, the goal is to raise $100,000 by the end of the year. And you can do this, you can assist by going to my.charitywater.org/ richroll. Link in the show notes on the episode page. Beyond that, you can donate monthly via the spring. You can set up your own birthday campaign.

• 1:41:25Rich Roll?

  And please make sure you pick up Scott's new book, Thirst. It is a page turner. And final reminder that when you do buy it, forward your receipt to [email protected] and you will unlock a $30 donation that will bring clean water to one person. Speaking of resources, as always, check out the show notes in the episode page. There you will find links to everything mentioned today, my Charity Water fundraiser page, how to get the podcast on Spotify, the YouTube version of the show, Scott's new book, Thirst, and a ton more info on Scott and Charity Water. If you're looking for a little additional nutritional guidance, check out our meal planner at meals.richroll.com. There you will find thousands of plant-based recipes, literally

• 1:42:09Rich Roll?

  thousands, all customized based on your personal preferences. We have incredible customer support 24/7. We have unlimited grocery lists. We have grocery delivery integrated into the system in most metropolitan areas. And it's all available for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. Again, meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website, richroll.com. If you would like to support our work here on the podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify now, Stitcher, or on whatever platform you enjoy this content. Leave a review, tell your friends, and share it on your favorite social media platform. You can also support the show on Patreon

• 1:42:52Rich Roll?

  at richroll.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for graphics, for video, for editing, all the visual content that accompanies this audio podcast. My man DK David Kahn for sponsor relationships. And theme music, as always, by Anna Lima. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here in a couple days with yet another anticipated installment of Guru Corner with the always sagacious Guru Singh. Until then, give of yourself freely and watch your universe expand in magical ways. Peace. Plants. Damasday.