Scott Harrison: From Nightclub Promoter to Charity Water Founder

0:00it turns out that the Red Cross is not looking for a nightclub promoter. Doctors Without Voters, they're looking for credible doctors, not DJs or promoters. So I remember being so dejected by the rejections. And then one organization wrote me back and said, if you are willing to pay us$500 a month to volunteer, and if you're willing to go live in the poorest country in the world, a country I'd never even heard of called Liberia, And it was at the bottom of the United Nations development chart because it had just come out of a 14-year civil war. And there was finally data on the country that they could stack rank it at the bottom of the world.

0:45And they said, we are taking a medical mission into this country and we'll take you if you pay us.

1:00What's up? I have Scott Harrison here. We've been, I don't know, maybe planning to do, at least in my head, I've been planning to do an episode like this for a long time. But I invited myself on. Let's be honest. You did invite yourself on, but that's something I love about you. That's because I like you. You are also kind of unashamed. You are unashamed at getting the right thing done. I met this guy once, and he said, if your intentions are good, you can get away with anything. And I don't know if that's 100 % true, but I do think it's a good motto. Don't be too shy. So yes, you invited yourself on, but I think it's going to be a good one.

1:37Well, the alternative was you want people to die of bad water. So I mean. Right. Yeah. Well, which one is it? Just kidding. Scott's a good friend. We met through a mutual friend, Michael Birch. And then I went on a trip to Africa with Scott and saw the work that he was doing. So that was kind of cool. So I'll say this. So a lot of people click on this podcast because they're schemers and dreamers. They're trying to figure out how to make money. And we don't shy away from the fact that we enjoy making money and we enjoy the game of business. I think for most people, here's their mindset coming in.

2:12It's going to be charity episode. Okay. You know, maybe if I'm in the mood, but I'm going to tell you this. So that person who's a little on the fence, let me tell you this right now. You're going to love this episode way more than the normal one for two reasons. The first is you're going to be inspired. Scott's story is very inspiring. I've heard him tell it many times. I'm going to give him the opportunity to tell it here because it's kind of one of these like real life movies in a way. And he started off as a not so do-gooder and turned into a very do-gooder. And I think the story is very good.

2:42And two, he's an entrepreneur. And he took an entrepreneurial approach to charity, which I think very few – I know personally of very few examples of that. And he's a very good storyteller. And for all of you people who reach out to me saying, oh, Sean, I love your stories. Well, the master is here. He's a much better storyteller than me. So if you take nothing else away from this, you'll pick up a lot on storytelling. That's what those are my promises to you. Scott, how did I do? Do you think that's a high bar properly? Yeah, I know. No pressure. Luckily, you've told this story once or twice before.

3:14Well, OK, I like schemers and dreamers. So I was definitely a schemer and dreamer at 18 years old. I was born in Philadelphia, raised in a conservative Christian family. And when I was four, my mom passed out on the bedroom floor due to a carbon monoxide gas leak in our house. So we just moved into this new house. My dad was excited because it was reducing his commute. He wanted to spend more time with me, have a big family. And she was the canary in the coal mine, which her unconsciousness led to the discovery of this gas leak. And life was never the same again. Mom never recovered. It affected her because she was at home all the time.

3:58You guys were at school or work. 24-7. That's right. She was unpacking boxes from the move, putting frames on the walls. Dad was working long hours at a job. I was at school playing with my friends at their houses. And she bore the brunt of it. And my dad actually got sick. So we had some weird food allergies, some migraines, but she got really sick. And this led to the discovery of the gas leak. My dad ripped out the furnace with his bare hands. He threw it out on the curb. And from that point on, her immune system was irreparably disabled. And unfortunately, I have 40 years of experience with the 3M family of masks.

4:40So my mom was always masked from that point on. charcoal masks, N95 masks, everything chemical made her sick. So she was able to survive by creating isolation rooms for herself. This sounds strange, but my mom lived in a tinfoil covered bathroom and she slept on an army cot that had been washed in baking soda 20 times. She was so sensitive that if she wanted to read a book, I would have to either bake her book in the oven or set it outside for a couple days in the sun to get that smell of print out. Then I would knock on the door. I would hear the tinfoil rustle. I would hand her the lightly baked book.

5:24And with her mask on and a pair of gloves, she would receive the book from me and shut the door. So all that to say, a very weird childhood in a caregiver role, doing the cooking, doing the cleaning, you know, helping my dad. My dad was an amazing, loyal man, stuck by her, believe that one day God would make sense of all this. And, you know, my mom just lived with this for the rest of her life. So, you know, the first kind of chapter of my life, if you'd run into me as a young teenager, I was going to be a doctor. I was going to cure mom and everybody else sick with a condition like hers. Instead, I became a schemer and a dreamer.

6:01And at 18, I moved to New York City and just had that wake up moment. Now it's my turn. Now it's my turn to break the rules. I don't want to take care of anyone anymore. I want to take care of myself. And I want to have sex. And I want to do drugs. And I want to drink. And I want to be rich and famous. And I stumbled into this job as a New York City nightclub promoter, where you had a pretty good shot at achieving those markers of success. And I became really good at throwing parties at the high end, selling$1 ,000 bottles of Cristal, selling$25 vodka Red Bulls that cost us 25 cents and creating spaces for movie stars and actors and musicians and, you know, fashion moguls and designers to party.

6:54And, you know, it couldn't have been more opposite, maybe from the slightly repressed Christian upbringing. And, you know, a picture of my life 10 years later was me and a DJ booth with a famous DJ. I'm spraying champagne down over the crowd. Puffy's at table one, Jay-Z's at table three, and I'm at table two thinking I'm a rock star because we have prettier girls at our table than Jay-Z or Puffy. And this was, you know, it was dinner at 10, the nightclub at 12, and then after hours at 5 a.m. and to bed at noon, taking Ambien to come down with a whole lot of self-loathing, you know, if it caught up to us, which it did, you know, far too often towards the end of that.

7:40So it was 10 years for me to realize that I had made a mess of my life. I had come so far from the spirituality, from the morality that my parents had tried to instill in me, so far from wanting to become a doctor to help others. And one day, half my body went numb. and uh you know maybe no surprise to anybody listening as i just described what i was doing but i just remember thinking like i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i've been living like i'm gonna live forever and now i'm gonna die in a week i've got some brain tumor i've got something very wrong with me because i can't feel half my body and i went to doctors and had mris and ct scans and you know they hooked diodes up to me and electromagnetic pulsing all that they couldn't figure out anything wrong with me.

8:30But it was a wake up call, Sean, that if I did die, my tombstone, the best it could read would be here lies a man who's gotten a million people wasted. It was the only thing I had to show for when you were in the doctor's office and you fill out the little form where you're just like, yes, on all the questions. It's like, have you in the last six months consumed any drugs? I remember being brutally honest. Yeah. Right. Because I think everybody kind of cheats a little, like how many alcoholic drinks, right? You shave that by half typically. I think I was honest. I'm like, how many alcoholic drinks?

9:04Like 165 a week. How many packs of cigarettes? Two and a half a day. You know, anyway, they couldn't find anything wrong with me, but this led to, you know, a pretty radical life change and maybe the close of chapter two as this sycophantic, hedonistic nightclub promoter living only for himself. And I wondered whether I could start life over at 28 and really asked myself, what would the opposite of my life look like? You know, I realized a pivot was not in order. You know, this was not a small course correction that needed to happen. This was like, do and think and say the 180 degree opposite of everything you've done and thought and said for the last 10 years and see how that plays out.

9:53And I live for these moments, these self-talk moments. I think most of life is just in my own head. It's me with me, and we're having a conversation. And a lot of times it's small talk, it's surface level stuff. And then there are these times where I have the real conversation with myself in my head. Do you remember those days or what made you really have that conversation with yourself at that point? Yeah. Well, there was a faith piece. So I started praying again and, you know, kind of going back and like, hey, what do I believe any of that stuff from childhood? You know, there was a lot of religion.

10:28There was a lot of rules, you know, but there was a lot of good in there as well. So I started, you know, try to kind of come back to faith again. So there was a lot of prayer like, you know, God, are you there? And what should I be doing? And is there is there anything else for me? And I remember the self-talk really saying, okay, well, if you're exploring the opposite of your life, what would that look like? And I thought, well, it would be volunteering on a humanitarian mission in the poorest country in the world. That was the spec that would be the opposite of a nightclub, you know, bottles and models lifestyle.

11:05out. And I remember from a, I was, I'd taken some time driving just aimlessly North trying to, you know, find myself. I wound up in Maine in an internet cafe on Moosehead Lake with dial-up Dell computers. And I started applying to humanitarian aid organizations that I'd tangentially heard of over the decade. Certainly not that I'd given any money to, But Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, Oxfam, World Vision, the Red Cross. And I was very clear that this is what I wanted to do. Give one year of the 10 years that I had selfishly wasted or lived and see if I could be useful. Well, maybe no surprise, I was denied by the first 10 organizations.

11:52You know, it turns out that the Red Cross is not looking for a nightclub promoter. Doctors Without Borders, they're looking for credible doctors, not DJs or promoters. So I remember being so dejected by the rejections. And then one organization wrote me back and said, if you are willing to pay us$500 a month to volunteer, and if you're willing to go live in the poorest country in the world, a country I'd never even heard of called Liberia, and it was at the bottom of the United Nations development chart because it had just come out of a 14-year civil war and there was finally data on the country that they could stack rank it at the bottom of the world.

12:37And they said, we are taking a medical mission into this country and we'll take you if you pay us every month. And the job or the volunteer role I signed up for was a photojournalist. So I was going to be taking pictures and writing And I was always a pretty good writer and a pretty good hobby photographer, you know, through the club years. And I'd gotten a degree part-time at NYU for that because it was the easiest degree. I love that you basically did the real-life version. I don't even watch Seinfeld, but I know about this episode where George is like, Jerry, I'm doing the opposite now. Whatever I used to do, I'd do the opposite.

13:12You basically had the real-life version of that where you're like, go from New York City, nightlife, you know, rich, famous, fast living, to, I'm going to go to the poorest country on earth, pay to volunteer and, uh, and basically donate a year of my time just to kind of course correct and like break my own frame and shift. Just, it sounds like you didn't even have like a long-term plan or like this grand vision for yourself. It was like, I just need to shift like where this direction I'm going now into some, I need a swerve in a hard, hard turn. And then a couple of things happen. Yeah, that that's exactly right.

13:44I wouldn't have told you more than a year of line of sight. I met the chief medical officer. So I was going to be living on a hospital ship, a 500-foot converted ocean liner that was 50-plus years old, so not a nice cruise liner. And it had been gutted and turned into a state-of-the-art hospital with a very simple idea for this charity. Let's sail a giant hospital ship with the best doctors in the world on their vacation time, and let's take it to people who can't afford medical care. And because we can control the environment, Let's bring them on the hospital ship, perform these life-changing surgeries, and then set them, you know, back on land with transformed lives and transformed health.

14:26So I met the guy who was running this whole thing, and his name was Dr. Gary Parker. And I learned that he was a plastic surgeon from California who had heard about this opportunity, and he signed up for three months. And when I walked up the gangway of this hospital ship to surrender my passport, he had been there 21 years. So he never went back to his California plastic surgery practice. And he dedicated two decades of his life to this work. So I remember just thinking, what if that's me? What if it's not a year? And I wanted to know everything I could about him and what two decades of service would look like or feel like or the impact that a person could have.

15:08So my third day there is the patient screening. So the ship's arrival has been announced. by an advanced team. Flyers have been posted throughout the country. And we have been given the football stadium in the center of town, the soccer stadium by the government to triage the people who might come to visit our doctors. Now, I know we have 1 ,500 available surgery slots to fill. I remember thinking to myself, like, are there 1 ,500 sick people with facial tumors or cleft lips or blind or lame with leprosy. Like, you know, that sounds like a lot of people. And I remember at 5.15 or 5.30 a.m. putting on hospital scrubs, it was still pitch black out, jumping into this convoy of Land Rovers with doctors and surgeons and nurses.

16:00And we kind of snaked through the city and we came to the stadium and there were 5 ,000 people standing in the dark in the parking lot waiting for us to open the doors. And that was such a powerful moment for me realizing, oh crap, we're going to send 3 ,500 of these people home without seeing a doctor, without any answer for their affliction. And I later learned - You're probably used to having a long line outside the door. That was a good thing before. This was a bad thing now. The parallels, you know, there have been some interesting ones. I later learned some of these people had walked for more than a month with their children from neighboring countries, just hoping that a doctor might save their child's life.

16:48So I remember Dr. Gary said to me, focus on the hope. You know, don't focus on the 3 ,500 people we're going to send home. Focus on the 1 ,500 people who are going to help. And that's what I really did for that first year on the ship. And I was documenting every single one of them before surgery and after surgery for the medical library. And that, you know, Mercy Ships would be able to use those photos to raise money and spread awareness of the work. The other cool thing that happened was I was blasting my club list of 15 ,000 emails with pictures of facial tumors and flesh eating disease and leprosy, you know, being healed.

17:26And, you know, or patients being operated on. and you know back then email open rates were like 100 so there were definitely a lot of unsubscribes you know i signed up for that cool prada party you threw once but not like the tumor party but then you know most people were intrigued they were fascinated i had no idea that there were doctors on a ship saving people's lives how do i get a piece of this how do i sponsor a surgery how do i come on the ship like you i remember somebody writing me from chanel once she's like I sit here in a brightly lit cosmetic headquarters and I'm weeping because I want more.

18:08I want more than to sell makeup every day. I want more for my life. I want more purpose. So I learned that maybe the same gift of promoting, getting people to stand outside a velvet rope, to queue, to hope to get into a nightclub, telling the story that if you came in my club and you spent thousands of dollars and you left with a cute boy or a cute girl, then your life had meaning. You know, that same maybe gift or skill of promoting could be used to promote something entirely different and redemptive and important for other people. So the year ended and I just signed up for a second year because I didn't know what was next.

18:50So let me go do this again for another year. And that was when I found water. So the second year I got off of the ship, I spent more and more time. I bought a motorcycle. So I'm driving around West Africa, Liberia, you know, with 14 ,000 United Nations peacekeepers and soldiers. And I've got this little press badge. And I'm spending time in these rural areas. And I see the water people are drinking. And they're drinking from swamps and ponds and rivers, brown, green, viscous water. And I learned two things. I learned half the country is drinking dirty water. And I learned half the disease in the country is because people are drinking dirty water.

19:33So, you know, for contrast, you know, a year previously, I'd been selling Voss water for$10 a bottle to people who would just order 20 bottles for the table and not open any of them because they were drinking vodka or champagne. So there was just something so profoundly contrastful of watching a human drink dirty water that was making them sick in real time and knowing the excess of my former life. And I remember showing these photos to Dr. Gary and I'm like, Dr. Gary, no wonder 5 ,000 sick people are standing outside a parking lot of a stadium. You should see what they're drinking. And he said, yeah, I know.

20:13And in fact, a billion people drink this water every day. one in six people alive on the planet. He said, why don't you go do something about it? Why don't you make this your mission? Instead of raising money for, you know, the next 1 ,500 surgeries on this ship, why don't you just go get everybody in the world clean water? He said, yeah, something like you'll be the greatest medical professional in the history of the world if you just brought people the most basic need for health, the most basic need for life. And I was 30 at the time. I'm like, well, okay, Dr. Gary, that sounds good. You know, and I came back to New York City and said, that's what I'm going to do.

20:56I'm going to try to bring clean and safe drinking water to every single human on earth before I die. Because that seems like a good idea. And it'd be great if 5 ,000 people didn't have to stand outside a stadium, if 3 ,500 people didn't have to get turned away because they had clean water in their villages. And that was really the start of Charity Water, you know, now 17 years ago. And you, um, this story, I would say two things. One is your story is so good that the first time I heard it, I thought that sounds almost too good, like too good to be true. Like the story is almost like Hollywood in that, in that sense.

21:35Um, as I got to know you, I learned that you're the real deal. I went with you to Africa. I saw the wells that you guys have created. I saw the drinking water. We did the water carry of, you The women and children have to carry water. That's not even that clean, but the cleaner water back home just so that they have water. We saw the schools that were like now could function because they had this. We saw so much stuff. So I've seen the impact of it on that side. I remember thinking this almost sounds too good to be true. It turned out to be the real deal. That's the first thing I want to say. The second thing is when you have that moment where you're like, all right, here's what I should do with my life.

22:15I know I've felt this. I'm sure other people have felt this too. The difference between what you feel like you should do and what you actually do is often held back by some sort of fear or limitation. Did you, like, once you left Africa and you get back to New York, did doubt creep in or did you have any second thoughts of like, well, maybe I'll just send the check and go get a job somewhere? Or were you really, are you just wired differently where you were just sort of gung-ho like, no, I'm doing this? I think what helped was that I had lived there for almost a year. You know, you hear about a lot of people that go on a mission trip with their church and they spend five days in Guatemala or in Africa.

22:53Five days is not enough to change. Right. You change everything about your life for most people. A year of immersive proximity to an issue was. So there was a responsibility to do something about what I'd seen that took more than a week or even a month. Right. So I remember coming home. In fact, the ship was sailing to South Africa while it was going to be dry docked every year. So they would kind of make repairs on the ship and everybody went on vacation to Wine Region for a month. I'm like, I don't want to waste my time doing that. I'm going to go back to New York City and I'm going to put on a gallery exhibition of all the photos that I've taken and I'm going to invite all my club friends in and I'm going to ask them for money.

23:38And I did that. I got a gallery donated in Chelsea. I got a bunch of, you know, printers to donate, you know, high res giant photographs. And I put together 108 of my before and afters in a gallery. And I invited everybody from the clubs to come in. And we raised about$100 ,000. And then I went back on the ship to show people what we had done with their money to kind of follow the donation. And so let's talk about the approach that you use to build Charity Water. So first, let's zoom out. at this point, Charity Water has been around for how many years and how much money has been donated and how many people have been given clean drinking water since this moment?

24:18We're in year 17, just started year 17. We've raised$750 million and we've helped 16.8 million people get clean water. And in the world, there are 770 million people without water. So it's now one in 10 people alive, as we record this, are drinking dirty water. 82 % of them live in rural areas. So 17 years later, now back to year one of that, your approach. So you took a very interesting approach to this. I want to start with a quote that I had heard you say once. It's like this toothpaste quote. You'll tell it better than me, but I still remember this. You first told me this like eight years ago or something, and that one stood out to me.

25:02It's stuck with me ever since then. You want to say the quotes? I don't butcher the exact wording. This was Nick Kristoff from the New York Times. Toothpaste is peddled with far more sophistication than all the world's life-saving causes. Colgate is better than Doctors Without Borders at telling their story. Right. The marketing, the sophistication, the photography, the storytelling, all of it that goes into selling random commodity products, deodorant, toothpaste. And what stood out to me when I kind of encountered what you guys were doing at Charity Water was it was like best-in-class marketing, best-in-class product, best-in-class storytelling, like you would find with the way that traditional consumer packaged good brands are run.

25:48But you were doing it with charity, and I had never seen that. I was used to going to a charity website that was some old and crusty Craigslist-looking site, and I push a button, and it asks me for money through some old payment method that I don't even know how to use. Like six pages long, right? And then I'm like clicking accept, accept, accept. I have no idea where this money is going. Never hear from them again. And that was my charity experience. And then Charity Water is very, very different. So talk about how you decided to approach it from like first principles and what were those like core tenets that you built on top of?

26:19Well, I had the advantage of not knowing what I was doing with many entrepreneurs that start anything that becomes a going concern. That is the entrepreneurial advantage. I didn't know any better. I didn't come from the established. So I knew nothing about traditional philanthropy, how to set up a charity, actually went and bought the yellow dummies book, you know, nonprofits for dummies. OK, and then I bought HTML for dummies because I'm like, well, I don't have money for a web designer. So I need to also, you know, build our website. So I was living on a closet floor at the time in Soho, New York.