The Water Crisis Coming For America... | Scott Harrison | DSH #2016

Summary

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Digital Social Hour – Episode Summary

Episode Title:

The Water Crisis Coming For America... | Scott Harrison | DSH #2016
Podcast: Digital Social Hour
Host: Sean Kelly
Guest: Scott Harrison (Founder, Charity: Water)
Date: June 13, 2026

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Overview

In this compelling episode, Sean Kelly sits down with Scott Harrison, the visionary founder of Charity: Water, to explore the global water crisis, the transformative power of generosity, lessons from two decades of philanthropy, and why solving the world’s water problem is both technically possible and within financial reach—if only the will to do it existed. Scott candidly shares his personal journey from NYC nightclub promoter to global humanitarian, the innovative funding model that brought transparency to the nonprofit world, and thought-provoking insights on wealth, motivation, and the unique challenge of inspiring people in privileged societies to care.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Genesis of Charity: Water and Scott’s Transformation

• From Club Promoter to Philanthropist:
  Scott explains his origin as a NYC nightclub promoter, a lifestyle he now calls “selfish hedonistic darkness” (18:48), and his dramatic pivot after volunteering in West Africa.
• Personal Motivation:
  "If I died, the only thing I could imagine they'd put on my tombstone is ‘Here lies a selfish man who got a million people wasted.’ What a meaningless legacy." – Scott (19:03)

2. Charity: Water’s Model & Impact

• Unprecedented Transparency:
  All public donations fund water projects directly, with overhead covered by separate donors (11:13–14:08), a model rare in the charity sector.
  • "What if there was a new way? What if I could open up two separate bank accounts and promise the public that… 100% of their money would go directly to build these water projects?" – Scott (12:41)
• Tech-Driven Accountability:
  Use of Google Earth/Maps to map 220,000+ project locations, providing geo-verifiable proof to donors (14:07).
• Global Reach:
  21 million people served across 29 countries, using cost-effective, low-tech solutions—primarily wells, rainwater collection, and piped systems (02:09–03:10).
  • "It costs us about $40 to help one person. An entire village is helped for $10,000." – Scott (02:39)

3. Water Crisis: Scope and Solutions

• Staggering Need:
  700 million people currently live without access to clean water (02:21), risking diseases (28 total) and daily hardship.
• Engineering Approaches:
  Scott describes the drilling and rainwater harvesting methods, often using local knowledge and even divining rods (04:40–05:13).
• Technological Shifts:
  Solar panels have dropped in price by 97.5%, now powering the majority of new projects (07:54–09:36).
• Desalination:
  A possible (but energy-intensive and expensive) future solution, as seen in Dubai, but not yet practical for most needs (07:07–07:54).

4. The U.S. Context and Future Threats

• Water Access in America:
  Officially, the U.S. has 100% coverage, but isolated crises (e.g., Flint) exist and are usually addressed with government intervention (25:35–26:05).
• AI & Water Demand:
  Data centers may drive U.S. water costs up, but the nation’s risk is mainly financial, not existential (07:01–07:54).

5. Funding the Solution at Scale

• Not a Technical Problem, But a Financial One:
  The “cure” exists; the missing ingredient is collective will and funding.
  • “There are many other things that we are unsure we'll ever find a cure for... We have the cure for water. We just haven’t built the will to deliver the cure.” – Scott (27:06)
• The Cost to Solve It All:
  “$100 billion would give everybody clean water. Really.” – Scott (27:51).
  Compared to global spending, it is surprisingly achievable.
• Donor Stories:
  Daniel Ek (Spotify) has helped over a million people (32:15), and other entrepreneurs have made multimillion commitments—but no major philanthropist has made water their cause (31:11).
  • "If someone made a billion dollar gift, philanthropic commitment to water, they would be the largest in the history of the world. Which is kind of crazy." – Scott (31:52)

6. The Challenge of Mobilizing Privilege

• Empathy Gap:
  "Nobody really cares about the issue of water because everybody has water... Assume that zero people in the world woke up today and... said, 'Let me go make that possible for 700 million.'" – Scott (22:35–22:41)
• Social Media, Comparison, and Distrust:
  Overload of information and skepticism about charity make it difficult to engage donors (23:39–24:44).

7. The Power and Practice of Generosity

• Giving as a Source of Meaning:
  "You can't recreate that feeling through buying something." – Sean (35:40)
  • “Generosity is very, very good for you, dude.” – Scott (35:48)
  • “The more you give, the more you give. It’s almost like this muscle...” – Simon Sinek (as quoted by Scott at 00:00, 35:53)
• ‘Spring’ Monthly Giving Community:
  Modeled after subscription services, the Spring enables anyone to help regularly: "Every single month, someone gets clean water. If it's a college kid who can give 10 bucks a month, every four months you have changed a human's life." – Scott (25:10)

8. Reflections and Looking Ahead

• Long-Term Vision and Optimism:
  Despite 21 million lives changed, Scott sees the journey as just beginning, aiming for “hockey stick” growth and global mobilization (39:05–40:07).
• Continued Transparency and Storytelling:
  Encourages listeners to watch and share “The Spring” film and to consider recurring donations (40:32–40:57).

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Notable Quotes

“If I died, the only thing I could imagine they'd put on my tombstone is ‘Here lies a selfish man who got a million people wasted.’ What a meaningless legacy.”
— Scott Harrison [19:03]

“There are many other things that we are unsure we'll ever find a cure for... We have the cure for water. We just haven’t built the will to deliver the cure.”
— Scott Harrison [27:06]

“[Solving water] is not a complex problem… No one is beyond help… It costs, you know, it could cost $20 to reach somebody and it might cost $80 to reach someone else, but it’s always possible.”
— Scott Harrison [27:06]

“The more you give, the more you give. It’s almost like this muscle… The more you want to use your position of being blessed and to help others, to bless others.”
— Simon Sinek (via Scott Harrison) [00:00; 35:53]

“How much is enough? … Just a little more.”
— Rockefeller/JP Morgan anecdote, recalled by Scott Harrison [37:13]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:00: Simon Sinek’s “muscle” theory of generosity
• 01:22–01:51: Founding story of accepting Bitcoin, Tony Hawk as first donor
• 02:09–03:10: Global scope: 21 million helped, $40 per person, 29 countries
• 07:01–07:54: Desalination and water use in data centers
• 11:13–14:08: Charity: Water’s 100% model and transparency through tech
• 19:03: Rock-bottom moment leading to life shift
• 22:35–23:39: Why Americans don’t “feel” the water crisis
• 27:06–27:51: $100 billion price tag to fix water for everyone
• 32:15: Major donors and impact
• 35:48: Benefits of generosity, “the more you give” philosophy
• 39:05–40:07: Charity: Water’s long game, hope for “hockey stick” growth
• 40:32–40:57: Where to learn more, how to help, the “Spring” film

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Memorable Moments

• Divining water by eucalyptus groves and 98% accurate “water witchers” (04:40–05:13)
• The paradox of dying of thirst atop vast aquifers for lack of a $10,000 well (03:51)
• Pitching donors on helping not just villages but a million lives, and hearing “I think I could do that in seven years” (32:31)
• The direct comparison: “You could buy a Bentley. You could also change 10,000 lives—and maybe you could do both.” (33:57)

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How to Engage, Learn, and Help

• Watch and share The Spring film – thespring.com
• Learn more and support — charitywater.org
• Consider joining The Spring monthly giving community

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This episode delivers rare insight into the intersection of technology, philanthropy, and human potential—and challenges listeners to “just give a little more.”

Transcript

[Scott Harrison]

I remember Simon Sinek, who's been a longtime friend and donor, he said to me in an elevator once, he said, you know, the more you give, the more you give. It's almost like this muscle, right? The more you do that, the more you want to do that. The more you want to find a homeless person, the more you want to lift somebody up, the more you want to use your position of just being blessed and to help others, to bless others. I remember coming across the anecdote. It was either Rockefeller or JP Morgan, one of the richest men in the world. They asked him, you know, so how much is enough? And he said, foreign.

[Sean]

Guys here at bitcoin conference with a former speaker. I just found out we got Scott here from Charity Walk. Charity Water.

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah.

[Sean]

You spoke here three years ago, you said, right.

[Scott Harrison]

20, 21.

[Sean]

Crazy.

[Scott Harrison]

It was a crazy year. We're just coming out of COVID And

[Sean]

what did they want to talk to you about?

[Scott Harrison]

Well, we were one of the first charities in the world to accept bitcoin at I think by 2016 or 2017, we had taken in 569 Bitcoin.

[Sean]

Wow, that's a lot.

[Scott Harrison]

We were really early. Our first bitcoin donor, I was saying, was Tony Hawk, came to shout out to. Tony came to a charity water gala, raised his hand and gave $1500. And he paid for it with five Bitcoin that we promptly sold for $314 each. And then we sent his money to work helping people get clean water.

[Sean]

Nice.

[Scott Harrison]

So what I was talking about at the bitcoin conference is we started a trust that would hold bitcoin and we, we got people to give us 100. And we just said we're going to lock them up for five years and forget about it instead of, instead of selling them.

[Sean]

Well done.

[Scott Harrison]

And that's been. It's going. It's going. Yeah, it's been up and down and some. Sometimes I look really smart. Sometimes, you know, my, my team are like, wow, you should have sold when it was. But I think we're either asymmetrically right. And we'll be able to do a lot more good in the future.

[Sean]

That's amazing. Let's talk about all the good you've got. You've raised over a billion dollars at this point, right? That's insane. All to water.

[Scott Harrison]

Clean water for humans.

[Sean]

I can't even picture how many lives that's affected.

[Scott Harrison]

21 million. 21.

[Sean]

Oh, 21 million. And then is that in mainly Africa or all over?

[Scott Harrison]

In 29 countries. So we Work throughout Africa, India, Southeast Asia, work in Bangladesh and Nepal. And it's, you know, the problem as it stands Today, there are 700 million people drinking dirty water.

[Sean]

That's a lot.

[Scott Harrison]

Which is kind of crazy, you know, with all the technology and the wealth in the world. We have 10% of the planet that is poisoning themselves every day. Drinking from swamps and from rivers and, you know, brown viscous water.

[Sean]

What's the most efficient way to clean it these days?

[Scott Harrison]

You know, we have about 14 technologies that we use, but it's not super high tech stuff like desalinization or, you know, membranes. It's wells, springs, rainwater harvesting systems, piped water systems. It's kind of low tech, cost effective solutions to move clean water to where people need it. Cost us about $40 to help one person. So it's, you know, an entire village is helped for $10,000.

[Sean]

Is that per day or four?

[Scott Harrison]

No, for the life of the project.

[Sean]

Oh, really?

[Scott Harrison]

These projects last a decade. Some of them last two decades.

[Sean]

Wow, only four.

[Scott Harrison]

We've been around now almost years and some of our very first projects are still producing clean water almost two decades later.

[Sean]

Dang, that's impressive. From wells or.

[Scott Harrison]

From wells and, and other, you know, spring protections or gravity fed systems.

[Sean]

How does the rain one work? I've seen videos on this. On a cigar.

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah. So in, in. Well, it's not what you've seen on Instagram, typically. Like the stuff that fast company, you know, throws in our feet of like a machine that pulls water from the sky.

[Sean]

Yeah. Some guy got arrested, I saw, for collecting rainwater, which is crazy.

[Scott Harrison]

I think that, that you can. Certain states or certain states, they don't like, they control the skies.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

But what we do is so, you know, a lot of times there's clean groundwater underneath the village. You know, so you have a terrible irony of people literally dying, dying of diarrhea. You know, there's 28 different diseases associated with bad water. And they are living on top of a lake of a resource that could save their lives and the lives of their children. But they don't have the equipment, meaning the drilling rig in this case, or the $10,000 to tap into that resource. So we do a lot of that. And it's, I mean, it's an amazing moment. Like a truck comes in, eight hydrogeologists jump out, they start putting a pipe in the ground. They find the aquifer, they calculate. Yeah, there's different ways of doing that. In some countries, they'll look at a grove of eucalyptus trees and say, we know there's water there.

[Sean]

Really?

[Scott Harrison]

Because the eucalyptus trees need to hue a magic water. Oh, okay. In other places, they'll have, like, paddles, like the sound the earth. And they will. They'll use technology to kind of measure the earth and the resistance. I take stuff. In one country, there's a guy that walks around with the stick, the divining rod, and he's right 98% of the time. No way finds water.

[Sean]

That's crazy.

[Scott Harrison]

Might not work for you and I, but he just, you know, he comes near an aquifer, and that thing just. Just bends. So, you know, then you have this kind of unbelievable moment where there's 300 people in a community, they're gathered around the drilling rig. The rig hits water, they flush. They put compressed air down and start flushing it. And you have this geyser of clean water in the center of the village that is shooting up in the ground.

[Sean]

Wow. Okay.

[Scott Harrison]

There's. There's tears, there's singing, there's rejoicing. I mean, it's an amazing thing to be a part of in. In Rajasthan, India. We work in a really poor area there. And it's too. The groundwater is too deep, too. So you. You could drill. If you brought in special machinery, you could go down hundreds of feet. But then it'd be really hard to bring it up from the water without using a lot of power.

[Sean]

Got it.

[Scott Harrison]

But there, the monsoon rains come a couple months of the year, and it rains like crazy. So what we do is we work with the communities, and they build, like, a giant underground cistern made of cement next to their home. That cistern is covered, and during those two months, it fills up through filters, and then they have a little pump, and they're effectively living off the grid ten months of the year from the rainwater they've collected two plus. Wow. That much.

[Sean]

Holy crap.

[Scott Harrison]

And what's cool, Sean, in some of these communities is people are spending so much income not even on clean water. So in those communities, in the height of the dry season, they would buy water from tanker trucks that's not even clean. So when they get to live off the grid and they get sometimes 40 to 45% of their income back, and then they start improving their homes and they start sending their kids to school. So again, this is so foreign for most people listening. You know, we. Water comes out of taps. We have all the water that we want. We have pools, and, um, we water our golf courses. But 10% of the world has just never had clean water.

[Sean]

Yeah. Do you Think we'll experience a water shortage with the rise of AI using all the water to power these data centers.

[Scott Harrison]

I think water will get more expensive. You know, we, we do have the ability to desalinate. We've got, you know, water on both of our coasts. It just gets expensive to move that water. You know, I, I fly through Dubai a lot on the way to Africa And I think 95% of the water that runs the Emirates is desalinization. They stick a straw in the Gulf, but it requires a lot of energy, which they have. And you're constantly changing out membranes and you're pushing brine back. So there's some environmental impact with desalinization. So we will have that as an option. It's just expensive to move water. So our water bills might go up, but I don't think we're not going to run out of water.

[Sean]

Yeah, desalinization is expensive too, right?

[Scott Harrison]

It's expensive, you know, just requires a

[Sean]

lot of energy there.

[Scott Harrison]

Well, I remember at the time, years ago, people would ask, and we priced it out and I think it was about 100 times more expensive than, you know, one of these unsexy solutions. Well, however, you know, a lot of technology is getting cheaper. So when we started out, we, people would say, why don't you use the sun in Africa and India to power your projects and move water around? We said, well, because solar is too expensive. The price of solar since I started charity water is down 97.5%. So now we're doing huge amounts of solar projects. So the panels are dirt cheap and up to 80% of our portfolio now would have some sort of solar component to use. So we're, we're agnostic, you know, whatever the right, most cost effective water technology is.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

That provides clean water in a sustainable way will adopt if, if desal at some point was viable, that makes for our work. We, we'd be able to adopt.

[Sean]

Right now, solar is really viable. Solar is those out wherever, right?

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah. I mean, the solar, basically you're, you're getting water out of the ground. The deeper you go often the more water you can, you can get. Then you got to bring it to the surface. So if the water is only maybe 100ft deep, you can pump it out by hand. And you've seen those traditional African wells. Water is a couple hundred feet deep. It's. The column of water is too heavy to bring it up by hand. So then you're putting in submersible pumps. Well, those need power. And then where's the water going. Well, normally you want to take it up to the top of a mountain or a hill to fill up giant reservoirs and then gravity will take it down to the villages. So you actually don't need any power coming down, you just need the power going up.

[Sean]

Got it.

[Scott Harrison]

So the solar is now powering these pumps, which have also come down in price.

[Sean]

Nice. How deep are you going typically on most of these?

[Scott Harrison]

Hundreds of feet.

[Sean]

Hundreds, Hundreds of feet?

[Scott Harrison]

Sometimes 100ft. So it could be, it could be like a 10 story building underground. You know, I tell people, imagine turning up in a village, you know, getting into an elevator and going to the negative 10th floor and there's a massive aquifer. Yeah. Or maybe 30 forts.

[Sean]

Dang, that's deep. So you need some serious equipment.

[Scott Harrison]

And the deeper you go, the more, you know, energy it requires to bring that column. Because the water's heavy.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

Up out of the earth.

[Sean]

And you've been doing this for a while now, right?

[Scott Harrison]

I've been doing it for almost 20 years. 20 years in September.

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[Sean]

Beautiful. Yeah. I did a lot of research on your charity. I like that. I believe 100% of public donations go directly towards the product, which I feel like is rare for charity.

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah. You know, when I. So I was a former club promoter for 10 years in New York City, so I didn't have any backgrounds in, you know, starting a charity or even running a charity. And I started when I was 30 years old. I. I had left the, the clubs and I'D gone to volunteer in West Africa on humanitarian mission. I was actually with a group of doctors and surgeons. And over the two years that I spent in, in West Africa, the biggest problem I saw was that there were more sick people than we had doctors.

[Sean]

Wow.

[Scott Harrison]

So we would turn thousands and thousands of sick people away. And then I learned, well, the reason that half of them were sick is because they were drinking dirty water. So I kind of had my, you know, eureka moment by realizing, well, if half the country is drinking disgusting water, and if half of the disease in the country is because people are drinking dirty water, why is no one working on this problem at scale?

[Sean]

Right.

[Scott Harrison]

So I had kind of the thing that I wanted to do at 30 years old when I came back to New York. But I was talking to everyday people who worked at MTV or Chase bank or Seoul, you know, or, or magazine, and I realized they just didn't trust charities. You know, they wanted to help, they had extra money to give, but they just didn't believe that their money would actually reach the people.

[Sean]

Yep.

[Scott Harrison]

That the charities were marketing. And I thought, well, what if there was a new way? What if there was a new model? What if I could open up two separate bank accounts and promise the public that whether they gave a dollar or a million dollars, 100% of their money would go directly to build these water projects. And then in the other bank account, I would somehow convince entrepreneurs and business owners to pay for the overhead, the staff salaries, the flights, the, you know, Epson toner copy machine. And I believe that if I could run a really efficient, effective organization, you know, entrepreneurs would pay those costs because they'd get an ROI on it. So that model was incredibly difficult. It did differentiate us between 99.99% of the charities in the world. But what I think we then almost fell into was the ability to use technology to prove where the money went. So because we would use all $61 of a donation to build a project, we built tech to track the six $1,61 to that end. Village Smart. So we were the first charity genre in the world to post every single completed project, first on Google Earth and then on Google Maps. And so we have over 220,000 published locations so people can see the satellite images of the projects that their money went to.

[Sean]

Beautiful.

[Scott Harrison]

Because 100% of the money went there. And, you know, it's always a little more difficult to get people to pay for the staff and the behind the scenes costs. But we found great entrepreneurs, a lot of them, in technology, who said Like I built a business. I know your business is only as good as your people, as the people you can recruit and retain. So we'll help you pay for that.

[Sean]

Beautiful. The transparency is unheard of in the charity space.

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah, I mean that was, that was the, the idea. Let's build the, the world's most transparent charity, therefore restoring people's faith in giving. I think giving makes people's lives better. You know, when you're generous and you can share your resources to end needless suffering in the world and then actually be connected to that, like, wow, my money did make a difference. I think we're, we're making the donors lives better as well. We're allowing them to, to use their resources to improve the, the human condition, literally save lives. And water is like an inarguable common good. You know, it's not political, it's not Republicans and Democrats can agree that people need water for sure. You know, if you're a person of deep faith or you're an atheist, you could probably agree that humans need water to, to thrive.

[Sean]

It is crazy. In America, we're in a bubble. Right. We don't even think about this being an issue.

[Scott Harrison]

Water, food, we don't. And I mean, you know, I, I say sometimes I'm like, you know, it's, it's kind of crazy that we're, we're looking for water on Mars.

[Sean]

Really.

[Scott Harrison]

92 Elon is, needs water on Mars.

[Sean]

Wow.

[Scott Harrison]

That's extra planetary life 92 million miles away. Right. It's like when we go up into space and we look down at this blue planet. 10 of the planet doesn't have the most basic need for human life met. And we just haven't solved the problem because we don't experience the problem.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

You know, we experience pancreatic cancer and Alzheimer's and als and Parkinson's and.

[Sean]

Right.

[Scott Harrison]

We, we give to a lot of these causes because they've affected people that we know or that we love. You know, I, I doubt there's anybody listening or watching that has walked eight hours to a dirty water source or has been, you know, a woman who has been raped or attacked by a hyena or dragged off by an alligator. You're a crocodile in Africa, you know, at one of these water holes, you know, people haven't lost children to diarrhea.

[Sean]

Yeah, I didn't even know you could die from that.

[Scott Harrison]

That's one of the leading causes of death around the world, diarrhea. Kids under five, you, you basically die of dehydration.

[Sean]

Wow.

[Scott Harrison]

So I've got four kids. If my kids get sick, you know, in fact, this just happened a few weeks ago. My two and a half year old got sick. I go to the Duane Reade and I buy Pedialyte and I bought Pedialyte Popsicles because you need to rehydrate. A kid who had food poisoning with clean water and electrolytes. Well, what happens in one of these villages is a child gets sick with diarrhea. Right. All of the fluid leaves their body. The only way to make them well is to give them clean water, but they're still getting the same river water that made them sick in the first place. And they literally die of dehydration. It's terrible because the thing that would save them and make them well is clean water is not available.

[Sean]

Wow.

[Scott Harrison]

And then they just continue to poison themselves. Yeah.

[Sean]

That's crazy. If you never took that trip to Africa, you probably never would have started this crazy thing.

[Scott Harrison]

I used to sell Voss water in my nightclubs for $10 a bottle. Sean. I remember people would come in and, you know, we. I was running clubs at the high end and people would come in and they'd buy a couple thousand dollar bottles of crystal and, you know, some top shelf vodka and, oh, let's just buy 20 bottles of water. They would just sit there. The water would even be unopened at $10 a bottle because people were drinking the booze instead.

[Sean]

That's nuts. A lot has changed right from those days. Night and day difference. Honestly, going from that, I feel like that's the other side of the world. Right. Midlife and seeing all the worst in people.

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think. I think it's just the story that I was telling for 10 years when I was running 40 nightclubs.

[Sean]

Was 40 nightclubs.

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah. Over a decade, 18 to 28. It was a long period. I would tell a story that if you got past the velvet rope and you got into the club and you were sitting with a pretty boy or a pretty girl, and you spent thousands of dollars on the top shelf, you know, alcohol, your life had profound meaning. You had arrived in the world and maybe the famous DJ was there that night.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

So, you know, I think for the last 20 years I've been telling a very different story. Promoting, but just something different. Like if you are generous, if you look around the world and say, how can I help? How can I use what I've been blessed with to help people in my local community, to help people in the global community? It's a different way of keeping score.

[Sean]

Yeah. How tough was that transition? I'd imagine it was pretty difficult going from top of the.

[Scott Harrison]

I was pretty burned out. I mean, I had a two pack a day Marlboro red habit, a drug habit, a coke habit, a gambling habit, a pornography habit. I just, I'd kind of descended into, you know, the, the selfish hedonistic darkness.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

Of, of that culture over 10 years. And I kind of hated my life. I mean, I woke up one day and said, I'm 28. I mean, I might die. Like I might sniff the wrong thing. And if I died, the only thing I could imagine they'd put on my tombstone is here lies a selfish man who got a million people wasted. It'd be 2 million people. And you know, I thought like, what a meaningless legacy. You know, if I don't make a dramatic change, my life will not have only had no impact. I've actually had a negative impact on the world.

[Sean]

Wow.

[Scott Harrison]

So I tried to make up for lost time.

[Sponsor Representative]

I think you've done it tenfold.

[Scott Harrison]

And it was, you know, I was born into a conservative Christian family. My mom became an invalid when I was 4. I was in Holy Child. An invalid. She got carbon monoxide poisoning.

[Sean]

Oh geez.

[Scott Harrison]

And almost died, but was sick for the rest of her life. Was. Was immunocompromised. So, you know, I think my childhood was this kind of. I was in a bubble.

[Sponsor Representative]

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[Scott Harrison]

I was only child. I was taking care of mom. I was her caregiver and I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up. And in a sense the nightlife was just an act of rebellion. You know, f you to care and no fun and religion and the rules. Like, I'm gonna go show you the better life. And after 10 years, like, it wasn't a better life because I was always surrounded by people who had a little more. And I realized even though I had a Rolex, somebody had a nicer watch. Even though I had a BMW, somebody had a Bentley. You know, I could have a plane someday and somebody would have a bigger plane. You know, my girlfriend was on the COVID of Elle magazine, somebody was on the COVID of Vogue, and I just, I wanted to get out. I wanted to kind of. The music stopped and I wanted, I wanted to leave. Leah Hardy.

[Sean]

Yeah. Social media makes it easy to be in that comparative mindset. How did you get out of that?

[Scott Harrison]

Well, you know, this is, this is 20 years ago. So social media, Social media wasn't the same, um, back then. It wasn't even around back then. But I think, you know, we tried to use social media for good. We were the first charity to get a million Twitter followers. We were the first charity in the world to use Instagram. So Charity Water has tried to, you know, maybe compete against, you know, the algorithm which just says, you know, what do you want? Let me just give you more of what you want and try and sell you more things. You know, we've tried to tell stories of people impacting the world around them through their kindness, through their unselfishness, through their generosity.

[Sean]

Yeah, you're doing good things. Have you ever done anything with Mr. Beast?

[Scott Harrison]

We haven't. He did some, some stuff with water. He raised some awareness. He, he used a different organization. But I did, did some great work and got some young people to, to care about the issue.

[Sean]

Yeah. Which is good. Right? I see it as a net positive.

[Scott Harrison]

Oh, for sure.

[Sean]

Multiple.

[Scott Harrison]

I mean, that's the problem. Nobody, nobody really cares about the issue of water because everybody has water.

[Sean]

Right.

[Scott Harrison]

So it's, you know, I tell my team, just assume that zero people in the world woke up today and took the clean water out of their refrigerator and cold filtered as they pressed the little lever, looked at their pool in the backyard, brushed their teeth, took their long shower, you know, pressed go on their dishwasher for the three hour cycle and said, you know what? I'm so grateful for the clean water that, that I enjoy every day. Let me go make that possible for 700 million. Let me go find a water. You know who. I can just bless others with that clean water. Yeah. Nobody comes to us, so, so we have to interrupt them. And I'd say it's harder than any time before in our 20 years to interrupt people, to get them to care because there's just so much noise coming. There's so much coming at us. I mean, you've never gotten more emails than you have at this point in history. You've never gotten more dms. There's never more things coming at you.

[Sean]

Right.

[Scott Harrison]

If it's, you know, visual, you sit in a cab now and there's three screens asking you to play video games. Right. We're just kind of being bombarded with marketing, and I think that really pushes out that, that part for a lot of people that feels like they have the bandwidth to care about others.

[Sean]

Yeah. That mixed with the distrust of charity, mixed with the current economy and the

[Scott Harrison]

fear of missing out and whatever that is, you know, the, the, the sense that we're not doing well enough. I, I just turned 50 and had a, had a kid, and it was my fourth kid. It was a, A divine surprise. But I'm like, I need to start working out again. Well, my entire feed now is like creatine trts. Peptides. Right. It's, it's. And I'm not doing well enough. Everybody else looks better at 50. Everybody else is going to the gym more. You know, it's this whole kind of sense of, you know, it just pushes out a little bit that, that part that says, actually, I'm doing great, like, I'm blessed. I have four healthy kids and, and a house and, and, and two cars that I can get my kids places. Like, I can actually help others who don't have the most basic needs for life met.

[Sean]

Yeah. You said $40 helps one person.

[Scott Harrison]

People do that every month. You know, we have a program, a community called the Spring, where we ask people in the same way they sign up for Netflix or Hulu or Spotify and, and enjoy the movies and the content. Like, why don't you just give. Every single month. And every month someone gets clean water. If it's a college kid who can give 10 bucks a month. Well, every four months, you have changed a human's life.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

Like an actual person went from drinking dirty water to clean water. You have, you have provided an inarguable good, a common good for a human.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

And, and we've tried to design the systems and that technology to make those connections and to show people where their $40 went. It went to mal. To this village where these people live.

[Sean]

That's beautiful. Have you done anything in the U.S. domestically?

[Scott Harrison]

We haven't done anything in the U.S. there's a couple charities who work on Native American lands and then a little bit in Appalachia. But what we're seeing, you know, America officially has 100% water coverage.

[Sean]

What does that mean?

[Scott Harrison]

It means that everybody in America is supposed to have clean water. So if you find some pockets, it's an aberration. Got it. You know, when, when Flint happened, what was actually needed to remedy that was about a billion dollars of infrastructure to be dug up and replaced.

[Sean]

Wow.

[Scott Harrison]

So it wasn't. And FEMA and the government actually took care of that. So there was a gap there where we were sending people to local charities in Michigan who were providing water and in that stop there. But you know, the situations we've heard about in Appalachia, you know, it's. People might not have running water in their home, but they're not going to a swamp. They're not walking eight hours to a river. They're going to the 711 and they're filling up a bucket with a hose. You know, it's, it's inconvenient, but they're not, they're not dying. A bad water.

[Sean]

That makes sense. Which countries are the worst right now for water?

[Scott Harrison]

About a third of the problem is in Africa, about a third of the problem is in India and about a third of the problem is in Southeast Asia. Central and South America have made huge gains. There's a little bit there. But you know, the Perus and Honduras and you know, Guatemala's have made huge progress.

[Sean]

How did they pull it off?

[Scott Harrison]

So effectively the governments are investing foreign aid. You know, these countries are richer than many of these countries in Africa.

[Sean]

So money.

[Scott Harrison]

Money, yeah, it's a problem. It is not a complex problem. You know, it's, you know, as I say often there's not a single person alive right now who we cannot definitively bring clean water to. And no one is beyond help. You know, we're not scratching our head. They're saying, well, they're living in too remote of a village. Now. It costs, you know, it could cost $20 to reach somebody and it might cost $80 to reach someone else, but it's always possible. There are many other things that we are, we're unsure we'll ever find a cure for that. You know, we spend billions of dollars of research and looking for, for cures in labs and test tubes and in centrifuges. We have the cure for water. We just haven't built the will to deliver the cure.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

To solve the problem.

[Sean]

Have you done the ballpark math on

[Scott Harrison]

how are you 100 billion to solve 100 billion. We'd give everybody clean water. Really?

[Sean]

100 billion.

[Scott Harrison]

Now, you remember during stimulus, we printed a trillion dollars a couple times.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

Somebody told me the other day, we've sent over a hundred billion dollars of aid to Ukraine. Not a political statement, but, like, you know, I don't know that we'll get exactly what we wanted. You know, are we happy with that hundred billion dollars to date? Probably not. So there's, you know, there's so much capital that's out there. But again, there was a reason for, for spending that money.

[Sean]

Right.

[Scott Harrison]

There was a reason for printing, you know, trillion dollars of stimulus.

[Sean]

We.

[Scott Harrison]

We haven't really mobilized people around the reason for giving the poorest 10% of the world water.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

Which is, which is our mission. Every day you're 11 people to care.

[Sean]

Yeah. So in 20 years, you did one out of 100. A billion.

[Scott Harrison]

Well, now, now if you take the 700 million people that don't have water and our 21 million, it's about 1 33rd. Oh, about three, three and a half percent.

[Sean]

Nice. Well, 3% of the way, there's one company, you know that one or you guys did that. I'm sure there's others, right? There are. I don't think they're big, but yeah,

[Scott Harrison]

there's a bunch of other, you know, great orgs out there. And like you said, you know, we want everybody to succeed. So if they're working with churches or if they're working with synagogues or faith communities, where a lot of these organizations have a different niche, we want them all to grow.

[Sean]

There was a viral thing on Twitter. I don't know if you saw with Elon, some guy was like, how much would it cost to solve world hunger?

[Scott Harrison]

David Beasley, World Food Program was years ago.

[Sean]

Yeah. And then Elon said, I would do it, but no one can actually execute it or something like that.

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah. Well, it's, There's. It always starts. I think that's a little bit of a cop out. It always starts with the order. You know, let's say your business was building $3 billion stadiums. Football stadiums. Yeah. And you could do one a year, let's just say with your whole team in the infrastructure. Okay, well, if I place an order for 10, you're gonna build them.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Scott Harrison]

You're gonna figure out how to do them as fast as possible. So you're gonna have to scale up your team and your operation. You're gonna probably fly to Peoria and meet with the CEO of Caterpillar and put in a, you know, billion dollar heavy equipment order. And you're not going to do them in a year, you're not going to do them in two years, but you're probably going to do them in four or five years. You're going to ramp up your organization. But that's because the order came in, hi, I'll buy 10 of your stadiums. So, you know, I think had Elon put the order in for ending world hunger, the organizations would have scaled over 3, 5, 7, 10 years to deploy that capital. No, they can't take it right now. You know, you can't build 10 right now. You just don't have the teams and the equipment and the infrastructure.

[Sean]

Right.

[Scott Harrison]

So it's always now, now to liken, to use that analogy. Where we are today is like we have the ability to build a stadium a year and it takes us about five years to get the funding to do the one stadium. So we are under capacitated as a sector. We can do more work if we add more money. So you have the, the money is the challenge.

[Sean]

Oh, interesting. So you have the team, the, the

[Scott Harrison]

tech now not 10x but 2 or 3x for sure.

[Sean]

Okay.

[Scott Harrison]

If you doubled or tripled the money that we were able to raise every year, we could easily put that into our network. We have 55 local partners, 7,000 local staff.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Scott Harrison]

And if you, and if it was a 10 or 20x commitment, if we all got that $100 billion commitment over a period of 10 years, we'd solve the problem in a decade.

[Sean]

So this might be solved within our lifetime.

[Scott Harrison]

I hope so. You know, there's not a single philanthropist of note in the world that has made water their costs.

[Sean]

Why do you think that is?

[Scott Harrison]

Because they've never experienced a problem. They can't relate. I think they think about, you know, we have climate people, we have malaria, you know, I mean, you know, gates in the day I think could have been a good candidate. Yeah, they picked sanitation. They actually picked toilets as kind of the lane.

[Sean]

Really?

[Scott Harrison]

Well, gates, gates. People said, look, there's, you know, 700 million people without water, but there's 2 billion people without a toilet. We think the institutional harder challenge is sanitation. Today we're running toilet campaigns.

[Sean]

Interesting.

[Scott Harrison]

Made some progress there.

[Sean]

But toilets you could live without. But water, that's the iconic.

[Scott Harrison]

I mean if someone made a billion dollar gift, philanthropic commitment to water, they would be the largest in the history of the world. Which is kind of crazy.

[Sean]

That is pretty nuts.

[Scott Harrison]

You know, people make these huge multi hundred million Dollar gifts to the Stanfords and Princetons and the Harvards. You know, so we're used to these kind of huge legacy gifts, but just not in the space that, that helps humans.

[Sean]

Who's been the biggest water donor so far?

[Scott Harrison]

Founder of Spotify. Oh yeah, one of our biggest donors, Daniel. Daniel has been a friend for 15 years and has personally is on the road to help 1 million, actually over a million people.

[Sean]

Wow.

[Scott Harrison]

So, you know, one entrepreneur will bring clean water to over 1 million humans.

[Sean]

That's crazy, right?

[Scott Harrison]

Which bro, is like 50 Stadium, it's 50 Madison Square Gardens.

[Sean]

One guy helped a million people either save or improve their lives. Must feel good.

[Scott Harrison]

So that's like, you know, that's divide the money. I want to do that. Like, yeah, you know, I'm doing it indirectly. Let's move to what we, we've helped 21 million people. Being that, that conduit kind of being the, you know, the way to do that. But yeah, I pitch that. You know, when I get to people like, you know, there was, there was actually a donor. 65 year old entrepreneur, amazing guy, Built hotels and water parks and conference centers. And he, he had offered to do 100 communities with clean water, which is a million dollars. And I asked him, you know, instead of making a million dollar gift to consider helping a million people instead of. And he said, how much is that? I said, well it's $50 million. And you know, he thought about it and a couple of days later he said, hey, I think I could do that in seven years. And you know, it's been an amazing journey with him and his family and his grandkids and his businesses and getting the whole company involved. And at the end, you know, seven years from now or so, they will have absolutely transformed 1 million lives on planet earth for the better. Like, I want to run that kind of, I want to work at that kind of company for sure that, that cares about people. Well, you know, there's a lot of

[Sean]

wins there because you're helping people. Obviously you get the tax write off. You know, there's a lot of. It's not.

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah, nobody has to do that. Right. You didn't even have to help 100 villages. So I think that's, we don't, I think a lot of charity founders, they walk around with a chip on their shoulder because, you know, how could people be driving Ferrari and not giving or you know, how could you have four houses? How could you fly private in the face of so much suffering? And I think nobody has to give a single dollar to water. We are trying to inspire people to tell stories that inspire people to give. We almost want to compete with the Bentley and say, you could buy a Bentley. You could also change 10,000 human lives, and maybe you could do both. But I. I kind of need to make the 10,000 human lives as epic, if not more epic than the tangible car that they can drive around and be admired by their friends.

[Sean]

Yeah, yeah. You got to reframe the mindset. Right. Because we're in a very materialistic society these days, especially with social media.

[Scott Harrison]

But I think people know that it doesn't make them happy. You know, we've all bought that thing,

[Sean]

but I still feel like people got experience at first.

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah, but. But we've all had that experience where the thing we thought we would never get, we finally got, and it didn't feel like we thought it would 100%. And then there was the next thing to get, and then there was the next thing to get. Right. So I think we've all. We all know that there is more. There's more than just the rat race of keeping up with, you know, the person we saw on social media who has a little more. The person in our sector who's got a bigger company or more employees or better EBITDA or, you know, or the better lifestyle. Yeah.

[Sean]

When I give a homeless person food or help someone in need with whatever, you can't recreate that feeling through buying something. I noticed. You know what I mean?

[Scott Harrison]

It's. It's generosity is very, very good for you, dude.

[Sean]

Little butterflies in my stomach when I do y' all like that.

[Scott Harrison]

And. And I remember Simon Sinek, who's been a longtime friend and donor, said to me in an elevator once, he said, you know, the more you give, the more you give. It's almost like this muscle. Right. The more you do that, the more you want to do that. The more you want to find a homeless person, the more you want to lift somebody up, the more you want to use your. Your position of. Of just being blessed and to. To help others, to bless others.

[Sean]

Karma, right?

[Scott Harrison]

Just. Yeah. Helping. You know, how. How can we help? How can we use what we've been given to help others? This is kind of a simple question to ask versus how much can we accumulate?

[Sean]

For sure.

[Scott Harrison]

And. And I think, you know, a lot of people just find themselves. I was certainly just almost enslaved to the constant desire for more. And there's no finish line. Like, there's no end point. Someone's always going to have more, even if you're the richest person in the world, someone has more on another family or you know, kids who love them more or you know, something that you want. So there's no, I remember coming across the anecdote, it was either Rockefeller or JP Morgan, one of the richest men in the world of like, you know, the robber barons. And they asked him, you know, so how much is enough? And he said just a little more, just a little more.

[Sean]

That's powerful.

[Scott Harrison]

And I, you know, I would love to hear that with a giving, you know, hey, how much is enough to give, Sean? And I want you to say just give a little more. Just give a little more and, and it would completely transform your life. I've seen it transform. I've seen generosity transform people's lives.

[Sean]

I think it always comes back. Sometimes it's not immediate, but I think the universe works in mysterious ways. Like, you know, what's the latest thing you're focused on with the company? Are you partnering?

[Scott Harrison]

We turned 20 in September, so they're, we're doing some fun look backs like going and finding people who benefited from the very first water project and how their lives changed over two decades. I'm excited about that. I think I'm, I'm, you know, we kind of have three ways people engage with us. There's the monthly giving that the spring community. You know, in a perfect world, I mean there's, you know, there's hundreds of millions of people that are paying for music every single month. There's hundreds of millions of people paying for TV. You know, we have 50,000 people that are, that are paying for clean water for humans. So I guess I'm so excited about everyday people giving 10, 20, 20, $40 a month because I just have to believe like there's, there's so much possible like the TAM on humans who could believe in clean water and give a little something consistently is huge. So I'm spending a lot of time talking about this spring and inviting people into that. Then we have people who give 10 grand and they knock out a community and then we have people who actually want to help us build the organization. And, and that's a third program as well. So I'm really just, I'm, I'm trying to grow. If you told me that, you know, we would have only helped 21 million people in 20 years, I would have said we're going to have a much bigger impact than that. I mean we're going to be, you know, at a billion wouldn't have solved the problem by now.

[Sean]

It's a million A year, still really good.

[Scott Harrison]

Not enough, not enough, not enough. So I hope we're in the second inning. You know, I hope that the best is yet to come. And there is a compounding interest. I remember looking, this is, this is years ago, but I looked at the 27 year chart of Amazon in the first 20 years. It was literally a straight line. Nothing happened. That a company never made any money. You know, Jeff's letters were famous. He's like, we're, we're just investing back in the business. We're not profitable. We're investing, we're investing. And then you see this absolute hockey stick had in year 27. Had he quit in year 20, he would have left 97% of the value unrealized, created 3% of the company's value in the first two decades, 97% in the subsequent seven years. So, you know, I, I don't know that Charity Water will have that hockey stick growth, but I, I love the idea that if you keep showing up, you stay true to your values, you keep telling the story, you keep inviting people in. You never freaking know.

[Sean]

Playing the long game out here. 20 years. Not a lot of companies make it that long too, you know.

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah, well, the goal was to bring everybody on earth clean water. Not to, you know, drop the mic at, at any sort of milestone, 10 or 20 million or even 100 million. So we got to keep fighting until, until everybody on earth has clean Water. It seems like such common sense, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Well, you got, got a new donor in me.

[Sean]

Awesome. Donate some money for sure. Awesome. And how else can people keep up?

[Scott Harrison]

Yeah, people can, people can go to. We actually have an amazing film that's gotten 150 million views. So that's something people can watch and then share. We have a tiny marketing budget, so it's really word of mouth. That's so helpful.

[Sean]

Is it on?

[Scott Harrison]

That's@the spring.com and the film is called the Spring. And then we're just Charity water dot org. Oh, we'd love, love people to learn more, share, share the movie, you know, join. Join us if you can.

[Sean]

Yeah, well, I'll donate, I'll post. And thanks for your time today. I appreciate what you have in the world. Check them out, guys.

[Podcast Host]

If you learned anything from this episode or got any value at all, please share this episode with a friend. It helps us grow the channel, it

[Sean]

helps us grow the podcast, and it

[Podcast Host]

means a lot to us. Thank you so much.