'charity: water' founders on Life Without Clean Water, Living in a Leprosy Colony & Risking Crocodile Attacks
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We've seen kids who had leeches stuck to the back of their throat in Ethiopia. We've heard stories of parents giving tiny amounts of diesel fuel to kill the leech inside their throat. Nick and I have both been in communities where the largest fear around the water source is crocodile attacks. You're kidding. I remember spending time in a leprosy colony. 400 people.

that all have leprosy. Were you worried about getting leprosy? A little. There was a little girl in the slum. It looked like chocolate milk and she would drink it and she would spit it back out onto her dress just to feel the feeling of water. We sat down with Scott and Vic Harrison, a couple on a mission to bring clean water to the world. After quitting his job as a nightclub promoter, Scott turned his life around, swore off drugs and alcohol, and went to live in some of the world's

poorest countries. There, he discovered that one out of 10 people don't have access to clean drinking water. And women and children are walking eight hours every day just to get water that resembles chocolate milk. His experiences inspired him to start a charity that has helped bring clean water to over 18 million people. Did you really force all your friends to pay $20 to come to your 31st birthday party? I did. That is how Charity Water started.

Now, I did give them open bar for free. Okay. So if you had two drinks, you kind of broke even. That's a really good deal, honestly. I mean, that's a steal. 20 bucks for an open bar? I was open bar for an hour. I wasn't that generous. Oh, okay. Yeah, I was 28, so this would go back about 18 years. And it was Fashion Week in New York City. Okay. New club was opening in the meatpacking district, and I got the club donated.

and all of those things coming together, Fashion Week, brand new club people hadn't seen, open bar for an hour, about 700 people turned up, and they put $20 in this big plexi box, and at the end of the night we had $15,000, and we built our very first well at Charity Water. - And how long after the whole incident of you being told you were gonna get killed by a guy, 'cause there was somebody that told you they were gonna kill you, right? How long after that incident

Did this... This is a couple years later. Okay, okay. I had gone to Liberia, West Africa for almost two years as a photojournalist with a group called Mercy Ships, which kind of led me to discover the problem of water and then want to throw this party and start Charity Water. That's crazy. Was that the only time that your life was threatened? That somebody was like, hey... No, no. I mean, you know, that...

Wow, we're jumping into that story. I mean, I was in clubs for 10 years. I worked at 40 different nightclubs in Manhattan from the age of 18 to 28. And unfortunately, you get your life threatened a lot in clubs because you're constantly turning people away. And people don't like to be rejected. Yeah. And they especially don't like to be rejected in front of, you know, their girlfriend. Yeah.

And either the club is full or they don't, I mean, they didn't look the part, right? This was the velvet rope and the, the one way glass often where we would stare out at the people and say, we're not going to let in any of those people except that girl or that celebrity. You're kidding. Yeah. So it was very, it was very exclusive. So often as you turn people away, they're like, well, I'm going to come back and shoot you. And they never do. Uh,

Until they do, I guess. Did that ever happen? Did anybody ever show up and actually... I had worked at clubs that had been shot up where you'd kind of look behind you in the door and see a couple bullet holes. Are you kidding? I had never been shot at and I probably had my life threatened at least 10 times. And Vic, the whole time that Scott was getting his life threatened... This is great. She was in some of the same clubs. We didn't know each other. Wait, what?

You should talk about that. Yeah, we were both in New York City at the same time. And I was just starting out my early 20s and my first job in marketing, running around nightclubs trying to meet hot guys. And he was running around nightclubs trying to meet hot girls. And we never met.

At any of these nightclubs. We were in the same places probably. At least 20 times. Oh, many times. And I actually would go to the nightclubs with these two guys who were sub-promoters who worked for Scott. And we still had never met. Yeah. Until way, way later. Were you also doing cocaine and drugs? Yeah.

There might have been a little bit of that. No way. But everybody like, I mean, there's always like some random person is like, do you want to go to the bathroom with me? And you know, it's not going to the bathroom. It's to do a line. It was, yeah, we definitely did a lot of stupid stuff. Okay. I'm so naive and so sheltered. So like walk me through what that looks like.

Oh my gosh. Wait, we're going here. I have never talked about this. If my kids listen to this sometime in the future. Holy moly. Well, I remember in high school, my dad would let me borrow his car and we would go into the city. I think I was like 16. I had my first chalked fake ID and we definitely did a lot of ecstasy. We would buy it like

from these guys in the corner of a giant nightclub and my friends and I would stay up until five in the morning tripping on E. That was a good two, three years of high school, end of high school. Somehow I had the wherewithal and so did you to eventually say like, if we keep going down this road, it is not going to end well. And yeah, it was a phase in our lives. I think a lot of people in New York City were...

Doing that at the time. Is there like a big high and then a big crash kind of like with alcohol, you know, where you like you feel good and then the next day you don't feel good. Like, is it the same way with those really crazy hard drugs? Yeah, for sure. I mean, he knows too, but ecstasy is like...

the reason people love it. It is a really clean high and then you feel like you're going to die the next day for a few hours and you sleep for like 12 to 16 hours and then you're kind of back to normal. But it is now so much more dangerous than what it used to be because...

I think we all know about like the lacing of fentanyl everywhere, right? So when you get a pill, you really need to just say no because it's absolutely laced with all kinds of crazy stuff. I mean, I don't even know. Don't do drugs. But I don't even know how I was safe during all of that because it was already back then being laced with like MDMA and all kinds of crazy stuff. So,

I am very fortunate that nothing really bad ever happened. I do remember though that if you take an ecstasy pill and if you have one drop of alcohol to drink, you will vomit your brains out. Oh gosh. Yeah. Oh gosh. They are not compatible. Learn that the hard way. And are people like intentionally trying to, I'm going to say unalive people because I don't want this video to get flagged. But are people like, is that like the goal? Like are there criminals out there putting fentanyl in the hard drugs with that intention? Or is it like an accident? Is it like...

Because I always hear about fentanyl, fentanyl, fentanyl. But I'm like, how is that ending up in the drugs? I know. You know? Gosh, I don't know. I am now... Now I listen to all this because my kids are going to be teenagers in like six years. That's crazy. So to be clear, like, haven't done drugs for 20 years. No.

I would never really, I wouldn't consider myself, you know, I would just, I was stupid being a teenager a long time ago. But yeah, I really don't know. But it is scary out there. So it was a different time culturally. I mean, the health. I mean, now nobody's drinking. Everybody's quitting drinking.

Well, I know, because I keep seeing articles. YouTube is filled with people talking about juicing cabbage, right? Juicing cabbage? Juicing cabbage. Cabbage is really good for your gut and your microbiome. See, I never even learned that. I need to watch more YouTube, apparently. Maybe I'm getting served up. The algorithm is serving...

Wait, I'm sorry. You take cabbage and you turn it into juice. I mean, think about today, right? There's Rich Roll. There's Huberman. There's Gundry. There's Dr. Mark Hyman. Like there's all these people now that are talking about health and longevity. Yeah. This was years ago.

20 plus years ago, people were just going out and getting wasted and doing drugs. And I mean, the scene in New York City was you were partying with models and celebrities and fashion was at a peak.

Nobody was really talking about what was in the drugs or there wasn't a sense of health consciousness. And we're over here in America where we have so much money that we're like, how high can I get? How much cocaine can I do? How can I juice cabbage to help my gut? And yet there's people in other parts of the world that can't even drink clean water. Yeah. Well, we started in an odd place, Matt. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. So that was a chapter in our lives that we closed over two decades ago. What I love about your story, though, is like, I am so, so inspired by you guys. And you lived this wild, crazy life where I think people see people like that and they're like, oh, they're going to add nothing to society. And it's like, I love...

I just think it's so cool what your mission is with Charity Water. I'm so inspired by it. I get tears watching the videos of these kids getting to drink clean water and just hearing the stories. I don't know. I didn't want to bring that up to in any way downplay you guys because honestly, I'm curious. I was such a sheltered kid. The craziest thing I did was I got drunk when I was 15 and rode my bicycle around with my buddies. That was my crazy rebellious phase. Wow.

And then I got married when I was 21. So like I was my younger years when people were partying, I spent like working at McDonald's and working as an intern. I worked at McDonald's. Oh, no way. Yeah. Okay. I once dressed up as the Hamburglar to get Time and a Half.

And I remember that my outfit would not fit through the doors. So I would have to tilt sideways to kind of get the hamburger vertical so I could get through the actual doors. I would hand out coupons in a mall and they paid me, I don't know, it was $6 an hour. I was getting $9 an hour. I was donating my plasma to save up for a wedding ring. And the summer that I proposed to Abby...

I ended up trying to work over 40 hours to get a time and a half at McDonald's. I got paid about $9.30 an hour. So if I could work over 40, then I would get paid like over $13 or 14 or whatever. So it was just like I know that life of like time and a half pay. Do you remember the grease? I can still feel the grease under my sneakers. Oh, my gosh.

That's so funny. Everybody should work at fast food. It's a really – it's a formative experience. I respect fast food workers so much. I didn't like that job. I mean, it was hard work. But, okay, hold up. Okay, so back to starting this charity, though. You went on – you said Mercy Ship, right? Which was – like, tell me a little bit more about that experience, which I think –

I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I think both of us had a phase of rebellion that came to an end. You know, Vic can tell her story. She wound up becoming a designer and working in an ad agency. Mine came to an end. Yeah. I think maybe the last thing I would say about the drugs is, yeah, it's great while you're high. And then it's this soul sucking, terrible, horrific point where it's all over.

So for me, yes, I remember going to dinner at 10 and there's a table of 20 set out and there's 15 models and a couple, we never paid for everything as promoters. We were just putting the whole thing together. So you'd have a couple guys that are dropping $17,000 on a dinner. Unreal. The best champagne and it was a life of private planes and opulence and wealth and people playing $10,000 hands of blackjack.

you know, in casinos and it looked great. And then at the end, when the music stops or when the lights come on in the club, it's a really sad place to be. And I remember, I just remember I would go to bed around noon and sometimes you're still high, but you don't want to be high. You want to go to sleep and you're looking at your window and other people are on their lunch break, you know, going to go get a salad.

And you've been doing drugs all night. You are taking Ambien to try to come down because you have to sleep seven hours because your next party that night starts at eight o'clock. As you start getting everybody ready to go to the 10 o'clock dinner, to go to the club at 12, to go to after hours at four. So I did that for 10 years and really reached a pretty miserable end. And

You said there was this kind of animating event where I was threatened again in nightlife and I just sold everything I owned and said, I'm going to start life over. I'm never going to smoke again. I'm never going to touch drugs again. I'm never going to gamble again. I'm never going to look at a pornographic image again. I'm going to completely change my life. And I wanted to go live in the poorest country in the world.

So that was my idea. I'd grown up in the Christian church. So in some ways this was an act of rebellion against my very conservative upbringing. So I play that out for 10 years and almost the cliche prodigal son story. Like I wind up covered in feces in some disgusting like pig pen, you know, so far from the foundation of spirituality and morality. Metaphorically speaking, the metaphorical pig pen.

Yes, yeah, there we go. In the parable, he leaves the son in the parable of... Good catch. Wait, so who poops on you? I'm sorry. Meta has been no... Yes, no, it didn't get that bad. The metaphorical...

kind of pig pen. And I wanted to just find my way back home to a very lost faith and morality and spirituality. So that was the big shift in my life. And it took me to the poorest country in the world at the time.

What were your parents, like, I'm curious with you too, Vic, like, what were your parents saying to you guys when you were in this stage of life where you were doing a lot of drugs and going to, you know, nightlife all the time? Yeah, I'm like, was your family worried about you? Did you have family that was present in your life? Did they cut you out because they thought you were being reckless and weren't taking care of yourself? Like, what, what?

Yeah, what were their thoughts? We had very different parents. Couldn't be more opposite. My parents were hippies who immigrated here from communist Russia and wanted the freedom of America. So I came here as an immigrant when I was nine years old. And Scott's parents were Christian to the core. Like, he played in the choir as a kid. And so they were praying for him to quit the nightclubs and...

redeem himself and do something amazing for God. My parents were like, here's a car, here's a fake ID, we're going to drop you off at your first nightclub at 16. You should go try some things and get it out of your system. What? Seriously. No joke. Funny story. So when I eventually go and ask...

her father for her hand in marriage. I meet him at the Jamba Juice in Times Square. And it was the most awkward conversation. He goes, why are you asking me this? Like, I don't know. Have you asked her? What do you think she thinks? Like, it was so foreign to him that I would ask for permission to marry his daughter. I mean, the concept just didn't even occur to him.

So I'll just say this. I mean, this is the craziest part of my life was when I met Scott. I mean, I was so attracted to what he wanted to start. I was so sick as well of my lifestyle of running around, trying to meet like guys from Wall Street, chasing...

In New York, this is a thing you do. If you're a young girl in New York City, I mean, this was coming off of like Sex and the City generation, right? So you're just running around looking for rich guys who have hot cars to date. And that's what me and my friends did for probably five years.

So when I met Scott and he was so sincere, he had already gone through his kind of like he was on the other side of that whole lifestyle. I was so attracted to his sincerity, to his desire to serve the poor. And he had just started Charity Water a month before I met him.

And so they come home and I'm like, mom, and I was still working in this kind of soul sucking marketing job, selling credit cards and fast cars, making commercials, essentially meet Scott. I'm like, my gosh, this guy's amazing. Mom, I want to quit my job. I want to go work for this guy who's starting a charity that's going to help Africa.

My parents didn't speak to me for a month after that because in their mind, they're like, "We brought you to this country so that you could make money, so that you could build a reputable career. Now you're going, and we paid, you just finished college, studying marketing, just started your first marketing job, and you're telling us you're gonna quit all that? And you're gonna go date some poor guy who's sleeping on someone's couch and he's gonna help people in Africa? What are you doing with your life?" So they got mad at me and literally wouldn't speak to me for a couple weeks. Do you remember that?

I do. And the irony is that we've been supporting said family for many, many, many years. So they have been on the payroll. Let's put it that way. Tell me a story about one of these hot guys in a hot rod car in New York City that you were trying to get the attention of. Oh, my goodness. Oh, wow. Jeez. I don't know. So many. So many. Where do I start? It doesn't have to be about you. It could be a friend. A story. A story.

a lot of really sad if I think about it it was a really sad time I think you're sort of like you're running around this big city everyone is it's lonely it's incredibly lonely so every night you go out you get dressed up you go out with your girlfriends you start at like 1130 at night which is ridiculous to me now what was

heck were we doing? I'm in bed long before that. Me too. Sidebar. This is a number years ago, but a friend of mine still works the door in a nightclub and the two of us go out and, you know, we're trying to kind of just stay up. So we have a late dinner. We get in the club around 1130. There's six people in a 2000 person club. We were too early. We were too early. We just left like 1130. We were so tired and people weren't arriving apparently until midnight or 1230. It's crazy.

crazy, but this was us. And you are in the most ridiculous outfits. Like, you are trying your hardest because everyone is. You're wearing four-inch stilettos, these short, like, dresses. You're with friends you don't even consider friends because they're your go-out friends, right? Like, your buddies, your girlfriends that make you look good. And then the whole night, like, you're not having any meaningful conversations. You're just...

drinking shots, guys are buying you drinks, you're getting drunk and you're going home often. Well, you're either going home with a guy who you don't even know, which leads to all kinds of really sad things, honestly, truly. And then like you wake up in the morning in their bed and a place you've never been before. And I wasn't raised with Christian values. And, um, I am a believer now. I became a believer when I met Scott, but, um, I definitely did a, uh,

a fair share of that. Like you wake up in some guy's bedroom in the morning and you don't even know which part of the city you're in. And then there is the dreaded walk of shame, which is so real. It's like it's a joke, but it's so real because I've done it and you have to leave their apartment at seven in the morning with the same outfit that you had on the night before.

Which is horrible. And then if you're a broke, like, 22-year-old, you don't have the money for, you know, an Uber. So you're taking a freaking subway. There was no Uber. There was no Uber. You can't even afford a cab. You're taking a subway. And everyone's like, we know what you did. And everybody's like, yep, we know where she's been. And people are. Like Scott said, they're going to work. They're in their, like, pantsuits.

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It's horrible. Okay, why isn't it that the guys do the walk of shame? Like, why don't the guys go to the girl's house that they have to be the ones do the walk of shame? Well, I was broke, remember? So I had roommates. Like, I lived in this little tiny closet of a room. So when you're chasing, like, rich guys, you go to their house because they have, like, a penthouse. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And, like, New York City is expensive. So if you got a penthouse in New York City, like, they must have some really nice cars. Yeah.

No. Well, you know what? I'll tell, I mean, like the one story, and I don't even know if Scott knows the story, but there was a guy I was dating. His name, I will not mention. He was, seemed like a really nice guy. We had a lot of things in common. And one night I came over, you know, he invited me back to his house. This wasn't the first time. We were sort of like interested in each other at that point. And I wouldn't sleep with him. And he said, well, then I don't want you to stay the night. And he kicked me out.

Yeah. He just like, well, if you're not going to do that, then why are you here? And I said, oh, well, okay. I guess I won't be seeing you again. Wow. That was the whole lifestyle. I mean, and that's why, I mean, honestly, that's why I got into this was to be one of those guys. I mean, you promoted clubs because you wanted to sleep with models.

or celebrities or actresses. So this was just this whole kind of scene that was fueled by a bunch of guys coming out. They would spend a huge amount of money to buy access to really pretty girls. And it was just this kind of, you know, rinse repeat cycle. And, you know, as Vic said, it was, I think it was just as lonely for the guys because none of these are meaningful relationships. The girls don't really like you. They wake up in the morning, not,

Nobody feels great about the whole thing. Often it's fueled by alcohol or some sort of drugs. You're not even sober. It's pretty sad and pretty depressing. But it looks great on the outside because you're jumping into limousines and $17,000 dinner tabs and you're jumping into private planes. We would fly to Brazil. Oh, you want to go to Brazil for the weekend? Let's call up 10 models, throw them on a plane. Oh, you want to go to Formula One in Montreal? Oh, we know a guy with a plane. Turn up at Teterboro Airport and

at nine in the morning. And the next thing you know, you're on a plane with, you know, gorgeous girls, rich guys, and you fly into Montreal and you're there for the F1, the Formula One race. And then Cirque du Soleil's premiere is that night. And,

You know the founder of Cirque du Soleil because you've been to his house in South America. So everybody's rolling in VIP to Cirque du Soleil. You're sitting in the front row for the never seen before opening of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal. And then you fly back on the private plane the next day and you've been up just for a 24-hour cycle. It looks great on the outside.

but terribly empty. None of the people really like each other. And we know how Vic's parents felt about you, you know, starting a charity, thinking that was a bad idea. What did...

Like all these people that you knew that were very wealthy, these models, these successful business owners, what did they think when you were like, hey guys, I'm not gonna do this anymore and I wanna go raise money to help build wells in Africa? - They were fascinated. - Really? - They were, it was the most odd and curious thing.

And one of the cool things was I had developed an email list, which doesn't sound that big today, but about 15,000 people, many of them VIPs over 10 years. So my transformation was so quick. It was, you know, at a party, uh,

And then a few weeks later, I'm in West Africa sending an email of 5,000 sick people waiting for our doctors outside of a stadium that the government has given us. And these 5,000 sick people are standing in a parking lot. So people were just fascinated. Like, wait a minute. I was just like partying with that guy at Lotus. And now he's in Liberia. Where's Liberia? What the heck is he doing? He's a photojournalist now?

This guy was just spraying champagne from the DJ booth over. Yeah. So I think people were fascinated. And back then, email open rates were basically 100%. So every email I would send of this new experience were the photos of the people I was meeting. My whole club list would get it and were just curious. I was watching an interview with you and you were talking about

seeing thousands of people show up to the shift needing to get surgery and you had to turn people away. How did, how did that affect your, your soul? I mean, going from all this fun and exciting nightlife and now you see all these people that just lack basic needs. How did that affect you? Yeah. Back then we used to use the term culture shock, which I'd never use anymore cause it's just so overused and overplayed. But yeah,

It was shocking to go from a lifestyle of opulence and $25 cocktails and $1,000 bottles of champagne to then live in a country where there's no electricity, no running water, no sewage system, no mail system. There was one doctor for every 50,000 people. Here we have a doctor for every 280 people. So it was absolutely shocking. And my third day in Africa, this moment...

that I wrote about extensively and have talked about, our doctors had 1,500 available surgery slots to fill. And we were operating on this huge hospital ship. So imagine this 522-foot kind of ocean liner pulls into the port at Liberia, filled with doctors from 40 countries who have all given up their vacation time. And this was advertised. So the ships coming had been spread throughout the country

And what we specialized in was huge facial tumors, cleft lips, cleft palates, flesh-eating disease, which I'd never heard of, and burns. A lot of people who had been burned by rebel soldiers during the war. So I remember thinking, is it possible that there's 1,500 people with these unbelievably aggressive conditions? And then that third day that I was there in Africa, there were 5,000 people. And the need was so great, people had walked for more than a month.

from different parts deep in the country. Some people had even walked from different countries. So we sent 3,500 sick people home because we didn't have enough resources. There weren't enough doctors. How do you decide? How do you decide which sick people you treat? Just the most severe cases first.

People that are like, death is imminent. And some people had cancer too. So we would do kind of on the spot biopsies of some of these fleshy tumors and say, oh wow, that's cancerous. This cancer would have metastasized and then they would be moved to palliative care. Gosh. What's a story from that that people need to hear? So we would see a lot of kids die.

And we saw a lot of cleft lips. So if you're born with a cleft lip in one of these countries, it goes unrepaired. And this is a very simple procedure. Yeah. It could take 20 minutes, cost a couple hundred dollars. And I remember once finding a 58-year-old woman in a remote village. She had a cleft lip and a cleft palate.

And, you know, I realized that medically knowing about this procedure at the time, for her entire life, food and water would spill out of her mouth.

So she would have to kind of, you know, eat holding your head back. I've never thought about that. I've always thought of it as like a visual thing. It's not a visual thing. Absolutely not. And it's embarrassing. Yeah. Your food kind of dribbles out and water dribbles out. So for her whole life, she'd never had access. And I remember saying, oh my gosh, come on the ship. I think we can make an exception for you. It's a pretty simple surgery. So I was going to get an extra slot for her and she wouldn't come. So I went back to the village and I had to bring photos of,

of other people who looked like her before and then had had the procedure and looked like us. And how are you talking to them? Because you probably didn't speak to her. Through translators. Okay. Through translators or French. I spoke a little French depending on how deep the village was. Okay. French is the official language of, this was Benin at the time, which was a neighboring country. So eventually I showed her these photos and she came with us and she had the surgery. And that was just a kind of shocking realization that most of her life-

was lived without the most simplest intervention that could have just changed her dignity, changed the way people saw her. I mean, she lived kind of cloaked in shame, covering her face. You know, this was embarrassing to look like this. It was a deformity. Many people in West Africa thought people were cursed. She was just born. It's a very common condition. I think it's one out of 350 of us is born with a cleft lip. We just keep the kid in the hospital and

And sometimes, I think Joaquin Phoenix, people know he's had one, it's a very imperceptible scar. But if you're born with this condition in West Africa, you can live to be 58 years old. - Seeing all of that, how did you decide, okay, I care about these people, I wanna help these people. How did that lead you to water? What's the story of going from being on this hospital ship to, hey, we need to help solve the clean water crisis? - It was pretty simple. I was with doctors.

The need in the country for medical intervention was far greater than we could meet. And I saw...

of medical problems. I remember spending time in a leprosy colony. I'd never known anything about leprosy and here are 400 people that I'm living with that all have leprosy. Were you worried about getting leprosy? A little. A little. How does that happen? So I've actually... Leprosy is fascinating. I didn't know anything about it. I thought it was spread by touch. If you have a strong immune system, it's very, very unlikely you would get leprosy even if you're surrounded by people with leprosy. Really? It also...

Oh, the deformity comes because leprosy kills nerves. Okay. So there's a fantastic book called The Gift of Pain that was written by the foremost leprosy doctor. And what happens is leprosy kills your nerve endings so you don't feel pain. And you hear these horrible stories of people who have a hand chewed off because a rat will come in the middle of the night and will start nibbling and they don't feel it.

You see with many leprosy patients, their feet are deformed because they keep hitting it on the exact same spot. And the minute we get sore, we imperceptibly, our body just shifts our balance to another part of the foot. They did a study once where they put

This is a little bit of a detour, but they put like 100 bubbles in a shoe and they ran people around tracks and you start off by, you know, breaking the bubbles in one part of the shoe and then you move to the other side and then you move to the front, you move to the back.

Because your body just says, little sore there, let me adjust. So a leprosy patient doesn't have those nerve endings, doesn't adjust, and therefore just injures it. A lot of the injury is due to fire. You would hold something that's hot, and you don't feel yourself being burned. And the next thing you know, you've got a third degree burn. Is there a cure for leprosy?

There are drugs that can stop or slow it, but not reverse it. What about a vaccine? Like, do we all have like a leprosy vaccine that we got when we were babies? I don't think there's a vaccine for leprosy. Okay. It's just very rare. I've never. Anyway, so just to kind of show. I thought that was so interesting though. To go to water. Anyway, the book is so interesting because it kind of says pain is a gift.

when you think of it in that context and it's a really interesting kind of much more expose on life. The pain is keeping our bodies intact and healthy and without pain we become disfigured. Crazy. Anyway, so all that to say I saw a lot of stuff with these doctors and it was really the second tour there when I went back to Liberia for a second year that I would go into the rural areas

And I would see the sources of water in these communities and they were open swamps.

Green ponds, you know, brown, viscous, muddy rivers. It's inconceivable that you would think, you know, you or I or Vic would drink water like this. It's so absolutely disgusting looking. And then you see a child come out of the village with a bucket and dip it in and start drinking from this water that you wouldn't let your dog drink. You know,

You wouldn't let an animal drink. - Our toilet water in the United States is cleaner than the water these people are drinking. - 1000%, that's a great analogy.

So I just stumbled upon the water that people were drinking and then I learned two very simple things. I learned that half the country was drinking disgusting, contaminated, diseased water. And I learned that half of the disease and sickness in the country was because people were drinking dirty water and didn't have access to sanitation and hygiene.

So for me, you have on the one hand, the need is far greater than our doctors can service. And this is the bandaid. We are solving problems that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Okay. And then half the country doesn't have the most basic need for health met. Yeah.

So I remember taking these photos to the chief medical officer, Dr. Gary Parker, and saying, Dr. Gary, no wonder there's 5,000 people standing in a parking lot waiting to be seen by our doctors with things growing on their face, with flesh-eating disease, with trachoma. There are 28 different diseases that you can directly track to bad water. No wonder you should see what they're drinking in the villages. And he just pretty simply said to me,

at the end of this second tour, why don't you make this your problem? Really? There's a billion people globally living without access to clean water. Why don't you go and try and get them water? And you said, okay, all right, I'll try. And that was really the start. I'm going to throw myself a party in a nightclub. So was this, he was my hero. So were you 30 when this happened? Yeah, I was 30. So his story was amazing. He was a plastic surgeon in California that had heard of this hospital ship.

where doctors and surgeons like him could volunteer their time. And he had signed up for three month tour, right? You take a little sabbatical from your practice and you put a clothes sign up or gone to Italy for the summer, right? Instead, he was going to West Africa for the summer. And he fell so in love with the work and service that he was there 21 years when I joined the ship.

So he never went back to his California practice. He has now been there 40 years on the ship. So as Vic said, he's still there. So this was kind of a larger than life hero to me. Here I'm this club rat that's just finished a decade, you know, filling up 40 nightclubs and doing drugs and partying. And now I step on this hospital ship with this venerable doctor, this chief medical officer who spent two decades pouring out his life for no money.

He actually, you don't get paid. So he would have to raise his support from other people who would pay for his flights and pay for his food. That's crazy. So...

Vic, I guess back to your parents being upset with you about wanting to date and potentially marry this guy who is starting a charity. Tell them how you heard about us. Oh, yeah. Let's go there. So Scott and I met because I was experiencing a much lighter version of his journey where, like I said, I was in marketing in my first big job. I had gone to college for graphic design, learned art.

marketing advertising was doing that and thought like this is if I when I get my first job in marketing I'm gonna be so happy and instead I was completely miserable and just kind of saw like I don't I don't want to sell crap to people that is meaningless like I don't want to market lipstick I don't want to market credit cards or cars or fancy you know shoes and I was very idealistic in my early 20s and thought like there's got to be more to life than sitting in a nice office you know uh

designing marketing campaigns that make companies rich but don't help the world. So wasn't sure what my life could look like other than volunteering. Like I tried to volunteer at a local soup kitchen, at a homeless shelter. So I was already kind of exploring some of these things.

Just to sort of offset my feeling of emptiness, that was probably definitely piled on top of all of those club days of already feeling lonely and empty in New York City. So one day I was on the corner of my street in the East Village talking to a neighbor and telling him all this, saying, I want to volunteer. I don't really know what I'm doing yet, but miserable at my job. Thought I wanted to be a marketer and I don't.

And he goes, you know, I got this friend. He just got back from living in Africa for two years. His name is Scott. He used to be a nightclub guy. And he's starting this thing called Charity Water. Did you know that there's people in the world who don't have clean water? And I was like, what? I had no idea. What do you mean people don't have clean water? I literally didn't know that this problem or this issue existed. And...

Two weeks later, Scott was putting on his very first outdoor exhibition showing the photos that he had taken over the last two years. He was taking it to New York City's public parks, about nine or ten parks.

And I showed up as a volunteer. I volunteered all day. He kind of like said hi to me and then didn't speak to me for eight hours because you were super busy. You had all these friends coming through. It was a big, fun, exciting production. And I was just kind of in the sidelines, in the corner, doing my little job that I was assigned. And at the end of that whole day, I walked up to him and I said, hey, what you're doing is really amazing. And it looked so legit, so professional. I had no idea that he had just started the nonprofit literally four weeks ago. Okay.

He had gotten all of his artist friends. Four weeks after the 31st birthday party. Yeah, so I just missed that party. And so I walked up to him at the end of the day and said, thanks so much for allowing me to be a part of this. I'd love to sign up and help.

you know, help you in any way I can in the future. And he's like, okay, well, what do you do? I said, I'm a graphic designer. And he goes, okay, cool. Well, I'm actually looking for one of those. And I gave him my number that night and I thought, walked away thinking like, this guy's never going to call me. He's so busy. Get a call from him the next morning. This episode is sponsored by one of our all-time favorite baby

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What are you doing tomorrow? I want to tell you about what I'm trying to build at Charity Water. And gives me an address to show up at. The next two days later, I show up at 109 Spring Street thinking I'm going to an office. Turns out it's the apartment of his ex-nightclub partner.

He's crashing on his couch. We start working out of the living room apartment, building charity water. So I start coming by every day after my full-time job. I close my laptop at work at 6 o'clock. I walk from Midtown down to Soho. I walk up the steps to this guy's...

frigging dude loft and we start working around his kitchen table building the Charity Water website like building all of the materials and creating this brand new non-profit brand and dreaming up what we could do together and how we could fundraise and launch campaigns sometimes we would be working until midnight and you're

would walk in, your ex-nightclub partner would walk in with like a bunch of hot models and start doing drugs on the coffee table. So your nightclub friends doing cocaine on the table next to you and you're starting a charity. Yeah, yeah.

Literally, that is exactly what happened. That's wonderful. No, I'm so curious. Was it love at first sight, seeing Scott? Yes. For me, I was very much, he looked nothing like he looks now. Let's just go. I mean, I wish he looked like he had just come off of the most remote freaking village in Africa. Like he had the, we call it like the humanitarian attire, the sad humanitarian attire, and

Like, he had these bedraggled jeans that dragged on the ground with holes in them. Very unkempt hair and dirty old shoes. And you just didn't care. But I thought you were really cute. Yeah. But I also was really... He was so passionate about Charity Water. He would, like, open his laptop everywhere he went. Like, you'd be in a restaurant with him. You'd be at a juice bar. And he'd be like, you want to hear my whole story? It would take him, like, an hour. He would just go through all the images and the photos. And people were...

so, um, enamored with your story and who you were and you were so like, your passion was so big and loud. And I think that's what I fell in love with. And, and, um, also just really like, that's what I was looking for. It's crazy. Cause that's where God was already pointing me when I was trying to find like my little ways of volunteering. And, um, that's where I was meant to be all along was to help him with charity water. And, um, the, the,

He didn't have any feelings towards me for about a year, which was miserable for me because I was like, okay, I'm in love with my boss. I love my job. He doesn't even know I exist most of the time. Like he just gives me tasks and then he runs off. He would like be gone for two weeks in Liberia or in Ethiopia or in Malawi or Kenya. And I'm just still at his apartment by myself, like working on Charity Water. And.

And he would come back and he had all these meetings. And so we had very little alone time together. And I was just passionate about helping him build this thing. But I was definitely in love with him. And it was a year before he got on board with this feeling. Scott, I'm curious, man. So, yeah. I wasn't even open. I mean, I was just working so hard. Okay. So I wasn't dating. I wasn't that part of my life. Yeah.

I mean, when you start something, and maybe there's people listening that this resonates with, it is existential in the early days. Oh, it's all you do. It is going to die. Like the thing that you're trying to create is going to run out of money, go bankrupt. People aren't going to like it. It is just...

It is so much work to create something and try to get it to any sort of critical mass where it can sustain itself. It feels like many, many years. Yeah. So we were really working a hundred hour weeks, you know, I did the math the other day and you know, you think about you leave the office at one in the morning and you come back at eight and

And you're there. Like from eight in the morning until one. Such a different story. But like I, and this still happens from time. Well, yeah, it still happens, but not as much. But like in the early stages of like grinding on social media, I would just wake up and my brain thinks about content. Like while I'm up at night going to the bathroom because I like I don't sleep the best. And it's like my brain literally didn't shut off.

I thought about the job from the second I woke up to the, till I went to bed and then I wake up in the night going pee, like still thinking about work. So I know, yeah. And that, you know, unfortunately is still a problem I have. 18 years in and almost 50 years old. In fact, it happened last night. Nice. But in the early days, you're actually working. Yeah.

You're not waking up in the middle of the night at your house. You're waking up at the office. Yeah. So, yeah, for me, it wasn't... I just wasn't open to that. And then, yeah, I kind of woke up one day and said...

wow, there's this beautiful girl and she wants to serve God. She wants to serve the poor. She's an unbelievable designer and creative. And we were a great combination because the things that I did well, she didn't want to do. And I didn't know anything about her world. I mean, I couldn't open up Photoshop or design or, you know, she would make all of my ideas better and was very creative. And I always...

When I started Charity Water, I very much wanted to create the apple of charities. As I looked at the sector, I saw no brand excellence, no design excellence. Websites were terrible. This is many years ago. Charities would put up PDFs that nobody would read.

Or they would speak in the language of data, not in stories or visual images. Or they would use shame and guilt to peddle their wares. So the old commercials from the 80s and 90s where the flies would land on the African kid's face and then it would be in slow motion. And then the kid would lock eyes and the 800 number would...

Right? Like that was Jared. So I wanted to make me think about the dog commercials for this, the sad music with the dogs. It works. It works. Yeah. That's not brand building. So I wanted to build a Nike or a Virgin or an Apple and, and Vic,

was very much not only qualified to do that, but aligned that a cause this important or this noble required an epic, imaginative, inspiring brand. And we would create that together. That's cool. And I guess I need to put this on the record. I mean, there was no organizational structure. So I was the boss, but it was like four of us sitting around a room, five of us sitting around a room at the time. There was no HR department.

It was really an early partnership. Do you allow for people that work at Charity Water to marry each other? We do, but not in the same department. Can they date? You can't if there's any reporting structure. Oh, gotcha. And people declare it to HR. It's very funny. You can't date your boss.

Ah, that makes sense because that can be a common interest, right? I don't even think you can date within your department. Oh, really? We have much smarter legal and HR people now at Charity Water who make all those policies, but...

I do know that we've had people who have worked across different segments of the organization who have met at Charity Water, gotten married, had babies, and are still leading very different divisions. So we've had some Charity Water marriages. One of the ways I first heard about you, Scott, was there was this YouTuber that one

I want to say interviewed you or had you on. Casey Neistat maybe? I don't know. Wait, did you... Have you done like... Well, he was our neighbor in New York. So we used to... No way. Our kids are like best friends. That's so sick. That's so cool. That's actually like how I first got... His daughter Franny and our son Jackson were buddies. So we would do like...

Sunday morning Starbucks dates together with our kids. That's so cool. That's how I first kind of like got introduced into the world of vlogging because my brother would watch Casey all the time. He's fantastic. What's the biggest misconception about Casey? I just know him as like a normal dad. So we would just hang out in the park with our kids and we never really talked shop. I would just ask him like, hey, what'd you do last weekend? And apparently like 20 million people knew what he did last weekend. Oh,

He was like, I don't know. He was like Burma, you know, last weekend, like with, with monks, you know, that is so, I know that life too. Cause yeah. Social media, like, yeah, people, people can all see everything that you're doing, but I really didn't know. And I, every once in a while, you know, somebody would tell me, Oh, Casey did this cool thing. And then I would ask him and say, did you know him pre YouTube? I knew him at the very early, like the whole YouTube scene was kind of developing.

I think he had just gotten a million followers. Was he, was he a part of his neighbors? So we just knew each other as like he lived in that building over there and our kids were the same age and we would hang out in the park and he would come by the charity water office and I would go to his office and his studio and see all of his crazy stuff. And, um, he would tell me ideas for things that he was going to shoot and, um,

I would tell them ideas for things at Charity Water we're doing. Thank you to DoorDash for sponsoring today's episode. Guys, I literally DoorDashed food a couple days ago. It's so convenient. Especially when you're like stuck at the house and you can't get out. It's like, if only there was a way to get the food I want delivered to my doorstep. But there is. Exactly. Like when you, I call it like you're kind of baby locked. Like if you have a kid asleep or like about to go to sleep, you can't really leave to go get food. And if you're looking to save on delivery, Dash Pass

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So we've grown global population and we've decreased the amount of people who are drinking dirty water. That said, it's twice the population of America. Unreal. So two Americas full of people globally are drinking dirty water. 80% of those people live in rural areas. So think, you know, small towns and villages, cities.

20% of those people live in cities. Okay. So Charity Water is only focused on the rural areas because those are the areas of greatest need. And that's also where the government funding hits last. Okay. So this is a story from Ethiopia. Vic has been there many times. I've been to Ethiopia 31 times now. So it's a country that I love. It's one of the countries of our greatest investment at Charity Water. Okay.

And there's a huge need there. There are 40 million people plus in Ethiopia right now in one country drinking dirty water. 40 million is more people than like the greater New York City area, right? Like four times more. I live in Arizona and I think there's like 10 million people in Arizona. That's like four Arizonas of people. There you go. So, you know, I was in Ethiopia. We've been working there for a while. And I remember I was in this town in the north and...

Kind of crappy. All the hotels are kind of crappy. $5 a night. You go into a hotel out in the rural area and you turn on the tap and it comes off in your hand. No shower curtains. If the water works, maybe. So I was in a place like that and the hotel owner recognized me and he comes and he sits down and he says, hey, you're the charity water guy. The work you're doing here is really important. He goes, let me tell you a story. So he says, I come from a rural village. It was called Meda.

And he said, all the women in my village growing up, they used to walk eight hours a day to down to this ravine and the water wasn't clean. And he said, there was this one woman at the end of one of these walks one day before she reaches her house, she slips and she falls and she spills all the water. So she's just wasted eight hours.

And he said, she took a rope and she hung herself from a tree. And I remember he saw the effect that that had on me in the little group. And he said, the work you're doing here is important. And I just walked off. So I remember thinking at first, that's probably not true. You know, that's some sort of exaggerated story that you tell a humanitarian aid worker who comes into your rural part of the country. But it really, and I remember calling Vic and telling her, and it really nagged at me.

And I wound up sending our local well drilling partner out to that village, which is really hard to get to. And then they sent me an email a couple weeks later saying, hey, this is true. There was a suicide in this village. And I, it was at a time, I think we were 10 years into Charity Water. I really wanted to reconnect. I was feeling burned out. You know, the problem feels so big sometimes that,

It could feel unsolvable or just so daunting. And I wanted to kind of connect with why are we doing this, the urgency. So I wound up living in the village for almost a week. And I remember it was so hard to get to. I flew to Addis and then I flew up to the north to Mekelle. And then I drove four hours and then the road ended. And then I rented a camel and a donkey for like 100 bucks. And then I put my tent in my sleeping bag. And then I walked nine hours to get to this village.

Oh, so you literally rode on camelback to this village? No, I walked. My stuff was on the camel and the donkey. Oh. Wait, why did you not ride the camel? I don't know. Nobody invited me to ride the camel. It was another farmer's. Maybe it was not a riding camel. Really? I was not invited to ride the camel. I think the camel had provisions for some of the other group. Maybe the camel didn't like to be ridden. It was an ornery camel. I mean, I've heard camels are not very nice. Okay.

I've never ridden a camel or been around camels. So I wouldn't know. I would not be the guy to ask. The camel, I just remember my tent was on the camel. Okay. And my little solar backpack. Okay. So we, you know, we reached the, this village, you know, gosh, like it took us two, two or three days to get there. And I remember the first, so I camped out next to the, the chief's kind of very small hut. And I remember meeting the mom who told me about her daughter and,

and said, you know, many people that know about Charity Water are familiar with these yellow cans. They're kind of like the fuel cans that you would imagine putting diesel in your, you know, or fuel in the riding mower, you know, your gasoline. So that's kind of the symbol of water in Africa. And they're ubiquitous now, but when at the time of this incident, people were using clay pots,

which are very heavy. So the water is heavy. Five pounds of water weighs 40 pounds. One of the things at Charity Water we've done for years is, sorry, five gallons of water weighs 40 pounds.

A clay pot weighs another 10 pounds. As I was in the village, they were showing me the old clay pots that they'd used that were now replaced by these jerry cans. And you would see a clay pot sitting there and it would have a kind of a rope tied around the neck of it. Anyway, I walked with the women down to the source and it was hours to get down. It was kind of this treacherous walk.

skinny little path down the side of a mountain. You get to the bottom of the source, which is this little trickle of water kind of coming out of the rocks that then turns to mud because so many people are standing there. And there's so little water that there's all these pots and jerry cans lined up because the yield is so low that you have to wait.

So all that to say, you know, I'm going in to this village and people are walking hours. They're waiting for dirty water. So I walked in her footsteps and what I didn't at the end of my trip, after kind of learning about the plight of everybody there, they took me to the spot where she died. And it was this very small tree with kind of frail branches and

And there was this path that was next to the tree. And they said, you know, this is where we found this woman's body many years ago. And what I didn't know going into this was that she was 13 years old when she killed herself. I had kind of imagined a much older woman, you know, maybe who had been walking and was just tired with life. It was a 13-year-old girl. Her name was Leta Kiros.

And she had broken the clay pot, which was a valuable asset to the family. She had spilled all the water. And her friend, her best friend, who was still walking for dirty water, said she probably was just overcome with shame that she had so carelessly slipped and fallen and let her family down and broken the pot. And they would go without water. So she took her own life. So it was a really intense experience for me.

And I remember just coming back angry. How is it possible we live in a world where a guy like me can sell $1,000 bottles of champagne or bottles of water in a nightclub for $10 a pop to people who don't even open the water? Yet on the other side of the world, here's a 13-year-old girl who's walking eight hours a day for dirty water and then feels like she has to take her life in despair because she slipped and she tripped.

And I think for me, just being able to put a single, I mean, I've done this so many times now, I've been to Africa over 50 times, but being able to put these individual faces to a 700 million person problem and then trying to go solve it for those individual people has kept me going or has maybe kept the fire alive 18 years later. Vic, I'm curious, what's a story that you've

that you've experienced with the trips to Africa and with your work with Charity Water that's really struck you? I mean, Scott and I, we were in Kenya together, and he tells this story often, but I also remember being there with him. We were in a slum next to a hospital, and we were looking to put a water system into this hospital. Because it had dirty water.

Yeah, there was a hospital that was washing... A hospital with dirty water. They were showing us the sheets that they would put on the hospital beds. And all of the sheets were like a tinted brown color because they were like, this is the water we have to wash all of our equipment in. And across this hospital was a slum. Can they not...

Like, I'm so naive. I'm like, what if they boil the dirty water? Here's the thing. I don't know. It takes a lot of energy to boil water. So if you think about like a woman in a village, people always ask us this question. Why are the moms not boiling this water? Because A, in countries, very many countries, especially in Ethiopia, it's not always legal to gather firewood because of soil erosion and different ecological problems. Oh, okay.

But then if you can get firewood, enough firewood to boil water, you have to get the fire so hot to boil a small amount of water that it's just not practical to do all the time. And they don't have stoves. It's not like they have electricity. They're living in a tiny hut. They don't have electricity. There was a time where we didn't have hot water and Abby loves taking hot baths. So I boiled water so that she could take...

I forget when this happened so random. But it's like... It takes a lot of boiling to heat up that much water. So I can't imagine if you need to cook and clean and drink and wash hospital sheets. It just...

That makes sense. I feel like the boiling thing, it seems like, why would they not just boil it? But now that you say that. My oven, like my water, I boil a pot of water in five minutes to make pasta in my house. But when you have to go gather branches and then start a small fire to make those branches burn hot enough to boil water, like that's a whole different ballgame. It takes a really long time. Anyway, so there was a little girl in the slum and she was probably like three years old.

And we just noticed her walking down through the houses in this kind of mud area. And she had this water bottle that was clearly from... I don't know if it was from... Well, she had a plastic water bottle. But she had gone to the river behind this community to fill it up with water from the river. And she...

It looked like chocolate milk, literally. It was like she was drinking a water bottle filled with chocolate milk. And she would drink it and she would kind of spit it back out onto her dress. And then she would take another sip and spit it back out. And we actually heard this from people in Ethiopia as well. I remember seeing a bunch of kids huddled around this little, like...

and sometimes they say we're so thirsty that we just need to wash our mouth. We know this water is too bad for us to drink, but we're so thirsty during the day, we can sometimes just walk up to a puddle, scoop up some water and put it in our mouth just to feel the feeling of water, and then we'll spit it back out. Thank you to Proz for sponsoring this portion of today's episode. I am wanting to grow my hair out long again. I'm talking like to my butt maybe. Seriously? Yeah, remember when I used to, I have

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We've seen kids who have had leeches stuck to the back of their throat in Ethiopia because they'll drink water that has leeches in it. Tiny little baby, tiny worms. And then those leeches will get stuck in their throat. And the parents tell us that they have to use a stick to try to get the leech off of the inside of the child's throat or sometimes...

We've heard stories of parents giving tiny amounts of gasoline or diesel fuel to their children to gargle with to kill the leech that's stuck inside their throat. Children are gargling diesel fuel to kill a leech in their throat. Yes. I mean, rare, but happens. Specifically, we've heard of it in Ethiopia. Yeah.

Because there's no clinic you can go to. There's no medicine you can take. And the worst thing is you don't want that parasite to go down further into your stomach and make a home there. So you got to get it out. But yeah, the leech problem is a big one. I think we had the same level of incredulity with that. And you hear that story time and time again. And the parents say, well, listen, we'll try to use a stick first. But if we don't actually kill the leech...

with the stick, it'll just crawl back up again. So if we dislodge it. So diesel fuel is a way to kill a small leech. And to them, it's like, yeah, we know that's not good, but we know that our child will survive drinking a little bit of fuel or gargling with some fuel. And the leech, if it's left alone, will just continue to suck blood, get larger and larger, and then will block the throat. So that's a greater risk.

So there's a high awareness that this is not great. - Yeah. - You know, the stuff that we've seen, I mean, Vic and I have both been in communities where the largest fear around the water source is crocodile attacks. - You're kidding, crocodiles? Freaking crocodiles. - Because they're sharing the river that crocodiles are using and crocodiles will drag people who are at the shore, the banks of a river into the river as food.

Are these kids? Are these adults? Well, they don't let the kids. And, you know, again, so the first time you hear that, you're like, aha, no way. It sounds made up. Somebody committed suicide because they dropped their water. You hear dozens and dozens of different communities, different rivers, different countries, crocodile attacks. And they start naming, oh, yeah, Sarah, right?

Or, uh, me Dom, you know, came here and was dragged off. They specifically will name the women who were dragged off by crocodiles. And then in a lot of these sources, they'll, they'll drag a bunch of kind of light branches to the side and try to create a little area and an early warning system. So like a little Cove that the women will walk into the river. And if any of those branches start moving, they know there's a croc in the water and then they run out.

Are the men like the ones not getting... Great question. Because you keep mentioning women. You talk about a 13-year-old girl. So it's always the women in the 72 countries that I have been to around the world. I have never experienced men culturally getting water. It is always the role of the women and girls. The men at best are farming or they're working with livestock or they're working in a factory. They're trying to provide income for food.

And it's always the women, whether I'm in Africa or India or Southeast Asia or Central and South America, it's the women's role to go get the water. So this puts women and girls at risk, risk of crocodile attack, risk of hyena and lion attack, risk of rape. We hear many stories of gender violence, of violence.

13 year old girl who's walking five or six hours sometimes you know through the forest sometimes out in a desert and will be will be raped on that walk because she's far away from home so you know the women are typically always trying to walk in at least pairs you know again this is this is an issue I mean you know Vic was

I think represents a lot of people. You don't really think about this issue. I mean, we're born in a world where we clean water comes out of taps. It's like air, right? Like when I think about water to me, it's like, oh, it's just kind of, everyone has clean water. Just like I have air to breathe. It just seems like a, to think about somebody that doesn't have that. It just blows my mind. It always has. Here's a fun exercise for everybody listening. Count your taps. So in your house. So we had a guy who works with me and he went to Africa and he lives in not, not far from here. Three bedroom house.

Call it a 1600 square foot, very modest house. He came back and he counted 17 taps, 17 places in his small three bedroom where clean water comes out. And if you really think about it, right, we have the refrigerator, we have the dishwasher, we have the washing machine. We have a couple of garden hoses, every bathroom, you've got your sink, your shower, your toilet. We just have clean water, you know, running everywhere. Yeah. Bigger homes, a hundred taps and a 10th of the world, 700 million people don't have one.

And that's, that's, you line up, you take 10 people, 10, 10 people on average in the world. I want to do a campaign someday called like count your taps and then donate that every month. You know, you've got 17 taps. Oh, that's good. I probably got 20. I probably got 20. I should donate 20 bucks. You can join the spring and you can donate your taps every single month in appreciation for, you know, the world of privilege that we've been born into. But yet these 700 million people were just born. They didn't choose. A woman didn't choose to be born in Kenya. Yeah.

you know, next to the chocolate milk water. How does that change things now that you guys are parents? You have three kids, you're married. Um, you know, when charity water started, you, you weren't married, you didn't have kids. So now that you're parents, how does that affect the work that you're doing? What I always think about is, well, we talked about this right before, you know, you push record is that,

I think people look at Scott specifically or sometimes me and think, oh my gosh, if I was born again and I could start my life over again, I could maybe do something really noble. Almost they look at him like Mother Teresa, right? He started a charity. He's helping all these people get clean water. But at the same time, we...

our lawn yesterday and changed a bunch of diapers and woke up three times with a seven-month-old and we're parenting a family and dealing with, you know, like regular life stuff and he's coaching Little League for our nine-year-old and so... That's awesome. I don't know if this is specifically answering your question but I...

if I had to say to anybody, like you don't have to put your life on hold to do something really good for the world, um, to make a difference if it's in your community or if it's somewhere halfway across the world. So many people I work with start nonprofits and have families and have lives and are taking care of

aging parents and so I think that's what I you know what I want to say to people who are watching is like everybody could do we're not special we're not even that great all the time at life like we mess up we have fights and we are messy and you

human and still, you know, chose to do this job and Scott's committed his whole life to it. And I think we could all do something for sure to fix these problems. I think what she's saying is not really like having kids just, you know, this issue. And I think for me, maybe a little bit of now I will see my daughter.

who's the same age, you know, in place of a little girl in Malawi or in India or in Bangladesh. You know, there's a little bit of a replacement sometimes where you can imagine, I know how much I love my daughter. And I never really understood how much the parents loved their kids before, before I had kids. So the heart for children, I think goes up a little bit.

We were serving kids before without water, but not knowing what it was like to be a parent. And what's the biggest need now? You just named somewhere in India and Bangladesh. Where is a place in the world where you're saying, oh my gosh, we need to change something now because of the clean water issue?

Sub-Saharan Africa is still falling behind. And a lot of this is just because the resources aren't there to solve these problems at scale. Outside philanthropic intervention is really needed. You know, I get asked a lot, what are the governments doing about the problem? Why is Charity Water asking me to get involved? Isn't this their problem?

And if you just take a country like Rwanda, which a lot of people know, I remember when I learned that the entire GDP, the entire global economy of Rwanda, this is a country with millions and millions of people, was less than New York City's public school budget. So I think the scale sometimes, so New York City has more money to run the New York City public schools than the country runs.

of Rwanda, the nation of Rwanda. Now Rwanda has to take that limited amount of money and build roads and build clinics and build power plants and the tax revenue. So people are like, why does it have so little money? Well, 90% 90 some percent of the country are subsistence farmers. They're not paying taxes like you and I. Yeah. That revenue they're, they're, they're farming a small plot of land next to their home. They're walking for water, you know, from an open source. Um,

So the government of Rwanda is investing in water infrastructure. It just doesn't have the resources to solve the problem fast enough. And that's why Charity Water has now gotten a couple million people around the world engaged in helping accelerate this problem being solved and helping move us closer to a day where everybody has clean water to drink. One time I heard the story of...

some village in Africa where people came in and they're like, we're going to build you wells and they built wells, but like they didn't really do it locally. And I guess it hurt people. I probably told that story. Maybe it was you. Maybe it was you. Maybe I heard you. Maybe. Yeah. So like how does charity water? Yeah. What's the old way and what's the new way? The old way. And I think the sector has, has vastly improved. You know, again, I've been doing this almost two decades now.

In the beginning, I remember people from, you know, let's say the Midwest or from Texas who knew how to drill oil wells and they would fly over to Africa and they would drill some water wells and then they would leave. You're right. When that well breaks, the people in that village are saying, oh, those nice white people from Texas, you know, probably going to come back and fix their well that they drilled. So, you know, from the very first day of Charity Water, one of the principal things

pillars was we would always exclusively work with local partners in

in these countries. We believe that for the work to be culturally appropriate, for it to be sustainable, it had to be led by Ethiopians in Ethiopia, Malawians in Malawi, Hondurans in Honduras. So today, we employ over 2,000 local employees. So today, over 2,000 people across 21 countries are taking the money that Charity Water is raising through this very generous community.

And they are turning it into clean water by drilling and by building rainwater harvesting systems and biosyn filters and gravity fence systems. We've got about 10 technologies now across the portfolio. But you wouldn't see anybody that looks like me across any of our country projects. And that's actually really cool. I mean, we're also creating local jobs. These people, these well drillers are providing for their families.

And their jobs mean that other people get access to clean water. So they're heroes. They're seen as heroes by their local communities. I love that. I love that so much. We kind of get to sit in the background. When I take donors over there, there's nothing for us to do. My donors don't have jackhammers. They're not drilling. They're just learning. And they're really in awe of the commitment and the dedication. I'll just give one example here.

In Ethiopia, we have a bunch of drilling rigs. And a drilling rig costs about a million dollars for the rig and the compressors and the trucks. And it can drill 90 wells a year. The teams there, about 10 people or so working on a drilling team. So you've got your hydrogeologists and your technicians and all the people who are making it happen. It takes about three days. So you can drill a well in three days. They will work 29 out of 30 days a month.

during the eight-month dry season. So there's four months where it rains. It's just too muddy to move the rig around. So they take one day off a month. That's how committed they are because if they took eight days off a month, they would drill less wells and they would help less people. So people come with us and we come back. We're like, we're not working hard enough. Yeah. We're inspired by our local partners who make us want to be better and make us want to

to work harder and more passionately. So what's the cost? Like if we're talking about one, well, about 10 G's, about $10,000 can build a water project. And that's like, that's the cost of the equipment. That's the cost of the people. The training is really important. The sustainability, um, where we've got sensors on some projects, we've got mechanics teams who will take care of the aftercare, um,

Because if a well breaks, we want to make sure that we have a mechanism in place to go and repair that and to go and make sure that that clean water keeps flowing for many years to come. So it's about $10,000 for a solution. And we have a lot of people do that. We have a lot of small businesses that call up and say, you know, I've got 10 grand. Where's an area of greatest need? People can pick the country. Sometimes somebody will donate. Sometimes people will adopt a kid.

from Cambodia or from Malawi and say or Uganda like I want to build a well in Uganda because I adopted from there so there's this there's an element of choice as well and you've mentioned to something about ending the crisis like is that actually gonna be something that happens I freaking hope so because completely solvable okay I don't know I just I was watching your documentary in it and you talked about yeah the moon landing and then like you know getting yeah man on the moon for the first time how that was like this global victory like will that

be something that we see in our lifetime when it's like everyone in the world has clean water like do you think that's something that we can solve in the next 50 years we started out at 1.1 billion people without water on a 6 billion world population now we're down to 700 million people without water on a almost 8 billion population so we've made a lot of progress i looked at data recently that said if

all of the funding stays kind of the same charity water raises the same and all the other great water orgs out there raising the same and the governments are doing about the same. It would be 2060 when the problem is solved. So 36 years from now. Wait, that's actually really exciting. Yeah. Well I'm 80 so I don't want to be 80 when I see this done. I just like, but it is possible. So what we're trying to do is massively change that trajectory because the UN goal is 2030. Oh,

Oh, the UN has a goal of getting clean water. Oh, five and a half years from now, we're supposed to have everybody on Earth clean water. Has the UN planned to do that before and it didn't work? The UN comes up with all these global goals for, you know, very aspirational goals against hunger and, you know, a bunch of different poverty metrics. So water is goal six at the UN. So another one, yes, the Millennium Development Goals, which are now called the Global Goals. They rebranded it.

So all that to say we're 30 years behind. Okay. But it's possible. And there is an end point. We're just not going fast enough. So there are people that will, there are tens of millions of people that will die because we are not going fast enough.

Just to give one crazy stat, when I started Charity Water, 4,500 kids were dying every day under the age of five. So I'm sure there's some parents. You've got little kids. I've got my two little boys. I'm just thinking of them like that. They would die of diarrhea because the dirty water would give them diarrhea. And how do you cure diarrhea? Hydration. Hydration.

So we would go down to the Duane Reade and we would buy the purple stuff, right? Like the hydration, like Pedialyte. What's the Duane Reade? I've never heard of that. Oh, it's a New York thing. Walgreens. Oh, it's Walgreens in New York. Okay. Walgreens in New York. Duane Reade. Like who is Duane? I don't know. The Rock? Is that The Rock? Yes.

So we would hydrate our child to health. Yeah. This is the killer because if you don't, if it's the same dirty water that made them sick with diarrhea and that's all that you can give them, they die of dehydration. The child doesn't have enough liquid in their body to live. And it's the kids that are under five. Once you get past five, six, you become less vulnerable. Then you're just sick your whole life.

So we'll talk to adults. Four months of the year, they've got parasites. They're missing work. They're in serious gut pain. The dirty water is not killing the adults. It is killing the kids. But you just imagine that. It's like jumbo jets, like what, 10 huge A380s just crashing every day full of little kids under five. And that's the scale of the problem. What's crazy to me is like you hear all these big numbers and they don't,

The numbers don't impact me as much as hearing the story you told of that 13-year-old girl or hearing the story of... You talked about in your documentary with the guy who had the tumor so big he was about to not be able to breathe. And it's crazy because I think we throw out all these big numbers and people are like, oh, it's just a number. But then when you really think about these individuals, these children, these young girls who...

are like being raped on their way to go get water for the family because they don't have clean water in their village. I think that's where it like really, that's where it really strikes me. And I think about my kids. I think about my wife. I think about like people close to me and that's just something we never even have to deal with here, you know? Yeah. Well, I actually wanted to speak to that. You know, you asked the question earlier, how has this work affected us as parents now that we're parents? And I think every parent knows the feeling of like, you know, you, you,

Put your kids to sleep and you can just never imagine something happening to them, right? Like, it would break your heart. It would...

Flip your world upside down if, God forbid, you lost one of your kids. And here in the U.S., I mean, we've all heard of stories or we probably know someone who's lost a child. And we do big campaigns for their families and we bring them food and we raise money for them and it becomes this big story, right? And what we've seen in so many countries where we go is literally almost every mom you talk to in the most far-flung villages will be like, yeah, I lost –

Two, three babies. Two, three babies. We met a woman in Sudan named Aisa. She lost how many? Three.

Eight children. Eight babies? And she thinks most of it was because of the water that they were drinking. They had this horrible water source. I think one of them fell down the well, and several of them basically just died from dehydration and diarrhea. And that's what happens when a child is drinking, taking in so many parasites. And what happens in these big open wells, which is what you see everywhere across Africa, is...

The rains come, they wash all the cow feces down into that well. And so, especially after rains, the water is so disgusting, but that's all you have. And so you're giving your kids this water. And yes, you can boil it, but sometimes you don't have time. Sometimes your baby will walk up to a bucket and just take a swig of the water because you can't watch everybody all the time, right? And so these women who casually will say, and not casually, but they don't talk about the grief. And it's like,

I know as a mom that they have gone through immense grief and there's no campaign coming for them. There's nobody raising money for her family that, you know, after she's lost her six month old and watched the baby literally take his last breath because, um, it doesn't have any nutrients in his body. And that's, that's, that's what I, I, I've learned a lot from having kids. You know, myself is like, um, the,

Yeah.

And that is, um, yeah, that breaks my heart. And that makes us want to work forever to solve this problem. What, like when you talk to these women in these remote villages, how many would you say of them? You know, you talked to five women. How many of the five would, would there be that? Honestly, almost everybody. I don't know statistically, but I would say like 80% of the women will always say, yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. I lost a baby. I lost a baby. And is that like, uh,

They don't know the cosmos.

They'll guess. Yeah. But a lot of women will say it's diarrhea because what happens, yeah, the babies will drink, you know, little kids under five. Babies are usually breastfed, so they're protected, right? The mama's giving them breast milk. But then once they're toddlers, they're drinking the same water that the adults are drinking. And that's where you really, that's where it's super dangerous. And the baby's body just can't, like little kids' bodies cannot handle the amount of pathogens that are in that water, the amount of...

bacteria. They just get overwhelmed. Their body gets overwhelmed and they start to, what happens is like they, they, it goes through them. It runs through their body. They have so much diarrhea and then they can't rehydrate. So they die literally of dehydration and starvation. And it's because all the nutrients are washed out of their body.

So when these new wells are built, what's the sentiment like in the village? When they have clean water, it's running, they can go. Huge party. Like insane celebration. So much party, like three days of partying. Really? Yeah, it's awesome. People just have a huge feast and they come and they meet the drillers who are all locals. Like if you're in a Rwandan village and there's a bunch of Rwandan awesome looking guys like showing up with a giant rig and they know what they're doing and they're like baffling

pushing all these levers and pressing buttons and water shooting out of the ground. The kids are glued. Like, they've never seen anything more exciting in their entire lives. They just stand there. They skip school. Everyone stops what they're doing and they just watch this process of... I mean, this is the most exciting thing that's ever happened in many of these villages is, like, locals came with this machinery and for... Because someone in a different country gave 10 grand, like, their whole lives are being changed right in front of their eyes and now these mamas can walk...

five minutes from their home, grab clean water many times throughout the day, as many times as they want. So what we talk about a lot that no one really realizes so much time is giving back to these moms. I'm a mom, like time is so precious. So not only are these moms able to spend more time with their kids, but sometimes they can start a little small garden right next to their house. They can nourish their family. They can grow vegetables using the water that they can get from the well.

Do they build schools? Because all these girls were spending all of their time going to the river or whatever to get water. So now is there this new thing? It's like, what if we put our girls in school? Is that what's happening? Girls go back to school. Okay. We took our kids for the first time last year to Uganda and we were at a primary school that Charity Water had done, both water and toilets. So the sanitation at schools is very important. And I think 155 girls...

had enrolled at that school after the water point was put in. So this was a young, this was like an elementary school, a primary school. So that is proven by data that water immediately begins to educate, specifically girls' education the most. The boys are, they're in school more, they get better grades when they're not sick.

when they're not staying home. Water makes a huge, huge difference. It impacts health. Obviously, it impacts education. It impacts women and girls. It impacts the local economy and even climate. We see that we have seen more droughts and more floods just over the 20 years or so, almost 20 years that we've been working at this. These are the most vulnerable communities. So giving them a source of clean water just makes them more resilient.

you know, a drier season, less food being grown. It gives them the ability to withstand a drought a lot easier than not having a source of clean water. So I have something to admit to you. So I...

I'm a bit of a skeptic. I'm a bit of a guy where I always look into the story a little bit deeper. If there's a new charity and I'm like, oh, I want to look at their numbers. I want to see how they fund the charity. There was a charity I used to give to, which I ended up finding out it was almost like 40% of the money I was giving to the charity was going to, I think, their marketing budget. And as a donor, I was so bummed because I was like, okay, that's like...

almost half of what I'm giving to this charity. And so the first thing I do now when I look up charities, I go on Charity Navigator. - Nice. - And I look up like the financials and the ratings and I looked you guys up and it looked good. Like it looked really good and-- - Well you know our model too, right? We give away 100% so it's a very unique model. - I wanted to bring that up. - We were those skeptics which is why

Scott created the model that he did because we did the same thing. And we think it's not okay that charities spend 40% of their budget on marketing. And Scott had a really great solution for that. My wife, Abby, is like... She is so... She's compassionate. And I don't know. I feel like when she listens to this interview, which I feel like... I'm going to tell her to listen to this one because I feel like she'll really enjoy this. But...

Something she'll say sometimes is like, we'll see a family in need or something. She's like, I just want to give them everything. I feel for them. And at this point, talking about Charity Water, I'm just like, man, I just want to give all my money to Charity Water because I believe in this and I want to help these people.

But I want to speak to the skeptic out there that's like, oh, how can I trust them? How do I know they're really doing the most good with the donations that are being given? So I guess speak to that. Maybe speak to that 100% model that you developed with Charity Water. Yeah. I'll just say, I'll let you...

Explain it. But I'll say that that was us. That's why we created Charity Water was kind of two reasons. We didn't think charities told stories that honored people in developing countries well enough. And they didn't tell stories beautifully. And there was not enough transparency in nonprofits. And nonprofits didn't spend money well. So that is why two of the biggest reasons why Charity Water was created.

created the way it was created. So you can tell that. Yeah, I can just say pretty simply 42% of Americans distrust charities and 70% of Americans believe charities waste their money. So you are, you're in the majority at least when it comes to wasting money. So when I started, I was 30 and I had no business starting a charity. I had no experience starting a charity and all these things worked to my advantage eventually because I was just talking to everyday people. I'd come back from the ship,

I'd been two years on this mercy ship. And I knew people who partied in nightclubs and worked at Chase Bank or Sephora or MTV, VH1 at the time. And as I talked to these people about my vision to try to create a world where everybody would have clean and safe water to drink, people could sign up for that idea or that vision. But, oh, I don't really trust charities. I mean, these things, they have gotten so fat and nepotism. I mean, everybody had a story. The biggest...

I continued to hear was all around where does my money go and how much of my money will actually reach it? So 60 cents on the dollar, you know? Okay. So for some people that might be okay for others, it's not.

Sometimes it's far worse. There were charities where 10 cents of the dollar would actually reach the people in need and 90 cents was spent on marketing and salaries and fundraising. So I had come across this billionaire in New York who was so rich, he started a charity and he said, I'm a billionaire. I will pay for all of the overhead and marketing and all those nasty costs of my charity so that 100%

of whatever you would give to his charity would go directly to the people in need. That's cool. He was doing education in New York City schools. So I wrote this billionaire letter. He never wrote me back, but I thought like he solved it. Yeah. And I remember when I started Charity Water, I went down to the Commerce Bank on Broadway and Bond in Manhattan and I opened up two separate bank accounts. I said 100% of every donation Charity Water ever takes in from the public will go directly to

to build water projects in Africa and then later India and Southeast Asia and Central and South America. And then in the second bank account, I'm gonna go find people who don't mind paying for those unsexy overhead costs. The staff salaries, the flights, the Epson copy machine. - The videographer that needs to go take a video of the village so people can see the work that's being done. - I wrote a book called Thirst. There's chapters in that which talks about how that model almost didn't work, all of the challenges early on.

We have never wavered. We have never taken one penny of the public's money and used it for overhead. We have never borrowed from that account. And today, 130 entrepreneurs and families pay all the overhead. No way. And they're from all around the world. And it's the founders of Spotify, Shopify, Pinterest, Twitter.

early employees at Uber, it's people who have built businesses who actually love paying staff salaries and they love paying for efficient marketing campaigns. They would not mind buying the cameras that are in this room for us to go and tell our stories because it's a visionary donor. So those 130 families, and by the way, we're always looking for more families. We try to add 10 or 15 to that group every single year.

Those 130 families and entrepreneurs have now made it possible for 2 million people to donate. We're 100% in the other bank account. We're 100% of their money goes straight to the field. That's cool. And we even pay back credit card fees, which is crazy. So if you were to go online and let's say you made $100 donation on your Amex. Sadly, I get 96 because Amex takes their cut. Amex takes 4%.

Maybe three and a half now. Okay. I'm like, that is robbery. We go and separately raise that money that Amex took.

And we put it back together. Let's say it's $97.50. We put that $3.50 back and then we send your $100 to the field. This sounded like a great idea in the beginning. Now I think it's $800,000 I have to raise this year just to pay back people's Amex Visa and MasterCard fees. But for us, the integrity of that 100% model was really important in the early days and even today to say 100% means 100%.

That's cool. I love that. I love that. Because then, yeah, as a donor, you don't have to worry about like, okay, well, there are two bank accounts. We publish, we actually have forced now for a decade, KPMG, our auditors, they need to audit the 100% model and we force them to publish an opinion that they have audited the 100% model. And every donation that we use for overhead or staff salaries or flights or marketing has a paper trail attached with it.

- Wow. - And we force them to make us prove it to them every year. - I love that, I love that so much. - We're pretty extreme. - Yeah, that is extreme. How did it almost fail? 'Cause you said it almost didn't work. - We just almost ran out of money. There was a moment where we had $881,000 in the water bank account that was about to go do 80 wells and we were about to, the other bank account was dry. We had a couple weeks, couldn't pay our salaries. We had a couple weeks left in payroll and rent and

I just couldn't find enough people to get passionate about the overhead side, but I found a whole lot of people to get passionate about the water side. Yeah. And it was an amazing moment. I, if I was honest, I was praying for a miracle with no faith and I was calling lawyers and I was going to unwind charity water and shut the charity down because this a hundred percent model just wasn't working. How long ago was this? Was this, this was in year two, year two early on. And at that point,

where of almost insolvency. I was determined not to borrow from the $881,000. Okay. Like that to me felt like if we crossed the line of those two bank accounts, there would be a crack in the integrity of the organization to be a crack of the foundation. Like I didn't want to work there. Because you told all those people that 100% of the money was going. Because the advice I was getting at the time was,

just borrow to make your payroll. You have like a million dollars. Like pay it back later. Write a little IOU. So I refused to do that. And at that moment, a complete stranger, an entrepreneur from San Francisco walked in the office and

And as Vic said, I would just, I would make 15 presentations a day. I would just click through on a laptop, like here are the photos I took and here's what I want to do. So I did this presentation for him. And I remember thinking this guy doesn't like me and he was British. He wasn't laughing at any of my jokes, just very kind of dry and somber. And he said, well, thank you for sharing the presentation. And he left. And a couple of days later, he sent me an email. It was after midnight. We were up working and he said,

I just wired a million dollars into your overhead account. Let's go. And I remember logging onto that bank account and, you know, yeah, I was, I was like weeping. And there was, you know, incoming one comma zero, zero, zero comma zero, zero, zero. So that was kind of, we were on the precipice, but we stayed true to our, you know, our values and integrity. And then we've never been close, close again.

Wow. Well, I definitely, Abby and I are definitely, you know, donating to charity water. Um, I think something we've, we've done this before. We actually did an interview with some cancer survivors from St. Jude last year and did a fundraiser from, for St. Jude. And, uh,

This year, I want to do that for Charity Water. Let's do it around Giving Tuesday, like at the end of November. Can we do it twice? Yeah, yeah. We can do it now. All right. If everyone listening to this podcast gave a dollar, we would literally raise $100,000 in a day, if not more, depending on how many people you share this episode with. And we have just one more plug. We have a community called The Spring, which is...

which is really how it's kind of how we see the future of the organization. So this is like, you know, Netflix or Spotify for clean water, except we don't give you movies and we don't give you any music. We just take your money every month. And I think the key of the program is a hundred percent goes straight to build water projects. And then we're really good at sharing with the community what their $10 or $20 a month led to. So that now we call it the spring. And that now is people from 149 countries, uh,

that are giving something every single month consistently. The average person subscribes to like 13 different things this year. Sometimes we have people go and cancel a subscription. You know what's so funny is like Starbucks is so expensive now. What's the donation you guys were asked for? I was in Vegas yesterday. I have to say, I was in Vegas and I got a cappuccino and it was $9.75. That's the Vegas tax.

It was a conference, but I got a $10 freaking cappuccino at Starbucks. My wife loves Starbucks and I'll go and get her, her special drink. And it's $7. Yeah. There you go. Give that every month. You count your taps. You could do that every month. I know. So, and also you mentioned this video. We do have a video. If you go to the spring.com, that's the one you saw. It's been, it's gotten over a hundred million views and it's a great way just for people to,

see some of the visuals that we've been talking about. If you want to see what it looks like for water to shoot out of the ground and hundreds of people to dance. That's really cool. Um, so that's, that's a great way to help is either to, to join the spring or to tell people about it or to share, share this podcast, um,

Share the spring video with people. Is there a way we could have like a trackable link? Yeah, we can get you that. I'll get you a spring link. I'll tell you what. I'll get you an unplanned. We will build charitywater.org slash unplanned. Okay. I'm going to say that now and then I'm going to make it happen. And then people can go. And we can put it in the show notes. Yeah, it'll be in the show notes. It'll be in the description. And that's really cool. So if somebody could give 10 or 20 bucks a month. I really like this count the taps idea. Maybe we could try it. Yeah. I've never had a community try it.

So somebody says, hey, I counted. I've got 11 taps and they give $11 a month. That'd be really fun. And again, like if you're someone who's going through like a really tough time, you could literally, you could just maybe share this episode with like three friends and then maybe they can get, let's do a trackable link. And then you can see forever really the power of the community because every single month more people get clean water. Yeah. We've done this. I mean, this is, I think that really speaks to, you know, how we see this problem being solved is through everyday people.

who can resist the apathy that is so easy to accept with any of these paralyzing global issues, right? Or what could I do about the water crisis? What could I do about 700 million people? What costs about $40 to give one person clean water? So, you know, you think about that, like if 700 million people kind of said, I'll do one person or I'll do one person every month or I'll do one person every few months. That's how we're about to serve 20 million people now.

So we've been at this for 18 years. This year we'll cross 20 million people served. So out of 700 million, it's only about 137th of the problem. Okay. But it's 137th of the problem. Like we just need to do 37 times more and get this done. So, you know, that money, you know, the 20 million people served has not been because of

you know, people dropping million dollar checks or billionaires. It's really this movement of people who are saying I could do a little something and I could, you know, I could do nothing or I could do a little something. Yeah. I love that so much. And something I wanted to do with this episode is to make every single ad that we usually have in the episode, like a sponsorship for you guys, like me just talking to the camera, being like, go get

your money to charity water. I love it. All right. But I didn't plan. I'm like, you know, this is the unplanned podcast. I didn't plan that far in advance and we already have sponsors. So what we're going to do instead, you guys, we're going to donate all the money that we're getting paid from the sponsors. Oh, that's awesome. So we believe in charity water a lot. I think you guys are so amazing and I just, I love what you're doing. And so if you guys would come alongside us and donate. We'll get you a link and then you can come and then you can report back to the community on what you've seen. That's so cool. Go donate to the spring. Click the link.

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