I'm really interested in technology, David. So for years, instead of reading the Chronicle of Philanthropy, or trade magazines in the charity world, I would read Wired. I would read Fast Company. I would read Inc. We have some really interesting sensor technology that was inspired by Nest when the Smart Home came out many years ago. I thought, well, if there's a Smart Home, why can't we have Smart Wells? If you want to ignite your creativity and develop great ideas, there's one skill that you can't afford to miss. But most leaders have never heard of it. Welcome to Howl Leaders Lead. I'm David Novak, and every week I have conversations with the very best leaders in the world to help you become the best leader you can be. My guest today is Scott Harrison, the founder and CEO of the Nonprofit Charity Water. Their mission is to bring clean, safe drinking water to the 703 million people in the world who still don't have access to it. And to do it, Scott has taken an out-of-the-box approach to running a nonprofit , and it has truly changed the game. You see, Scott is a great example of what I call a pattern thinker, someone who compared two seemingly different things that aren't obviously related and then create something new and exciting. It's been a key part of what's made charity water so effective. And it's a leadership superpower you've got to develop if you want to be more innovative. So let's dive in and see how it's done. Here's my conversation with my good friend, and send it to yours, Scott Harrison. I understand this is a big day for charity water. What happened today? It is, well, we were at $999 million raised yesterday. And this morning, a wonderful family from Dallas, Texas put us over the billion dollars raised since we started the movement. So I can't believe it took 18 years, but I tell my team, I think we're in the top of the second inning. We have a really long view here, and hopefully this is just a mile marker on the much, much bigger impact we hope to have in the future. 18 years, but you've built a billion dollar donation base, which is incredible, impacted thousands of people's lives. How does that make you feel? Like we haven't done enough, David, if I'm honest. I mean, isn't this what how most entrepreneurs are? They're a hard time celebrating successes. And it's always a fraction of what you imagined was possible. So I thought we would have done an order of magnitude more with all the blood, sweat, and tears of the last 18 years. But I remember seeing the 27-year stock chart of Amazon once. And it was a tweet back when it was Twitter. And the tweet said, "Things take time." And the guy said, "Had Jeff Bezos quit in year 20, he only had realized 7% of the company's value." So in the first two decades, 7% of market cap, right? I updated that number might even be smaller now. So that was really encouraging to me, you know, heading into year 18. And you learn a lot. You're building up trust with millions of supporters around the world. And I think if you play the long game, you know, our goal is to get every single human being on earth clean water. So today we're at 19.2 million people out of 700 million people who need help. So 137th is not enough. You know, I didn't sign up. I didn't sign up for 2.5% the goal. You're a go-getter for sure. I'm betting on you. You know, I can't wait to talk about how you're leading at charity water. But first, I want to take you back a little bit. And I want to start at the beginning. You know, tell us about your childhood and how that shaped you and the leader that you are today. Yeah, well, I had an unusual childhood, David. When I was four, we moved into a very ugly grey house in South Jersey at the end of a cul-de-sac. And the house that we had just purchased came with a carbon monoxide gas leak. And this is before they had invented the detectors that, you know, then now I can see on end caps at Home Depot. And we moved into this house in winter and we all start getting these strange symptoms, migraines, hypertension. And then on New Year's Day, 1980, my mom collapses unconscious on her bedroom floor. And she's the canary in the coal mine, so to speak. And this leads to massive amounts of carbon monoxide found in her bloodstream. It leads to the discovery of the leak in the basement, which was a faulty heat exchanger. And my dad rips this thing out with an HVAC friend and replaces it. But the damage was irreparable to my mom. And she became an invalid from that day on and never recovered. And what happened to her was her immune system just irreparably shut down and was unable to process anything chemical. So as long as she lived effectively in a bubble and she was exposed to no chemicals or toxins, she was OK. But as we all know, the world is a toxic place. And car fumes would make her sick. Fabric softener would make her sick. Her fume or soap would make her sick. She was so sensitive that the ink from a book would make her very sick, that smell of print. So she wound up living a huge part of her life really in isolation and special rooms that have been covered in tinfoil and in sleeping on cots that had been washed 20 times in baking soda to remove any sort of smell or impurity. So my mom wore a mask for 40 plus years. I never really saw her face again after this illness. So childhood was really growing up as a caregiver, as an only child, and really wanting to be a doctor when I grew up. I mean, if you'd come to me as a kid, I said, I'm going to be a doctor and I'm going to cure my mom and I'm going to cure all these sick people that I've met like her. So I was responsible for doing the cooking and the cleaning in the house. And later when I could drive taking her to doctor's appointments. But really, didn't have maybe the fun that my friends were having and just was saddled with a lot of responsibility. And I want to talk to you about that because you know, you start out, you're serving your mom, you want to be a doctor. And you know, you've been so dedicated. But then as I've learned about you, Scott, you go from serving your mom into your 20s and start working in nightclubs, strip clubs, doing drugs, you know, I mean, you had a tough road. How in the hell did you go from having this idea of being a doctor and helping people like your mom to that industry? Yeah, it sounds so cliche, doesn't it? It's kind of like the prodigal son story from the Bible where, well, I don't know if it's cliche or not, but it is very unique. The kid who has a great upbringing decides to go spend all the money, gamble it away and winds up in a proverbial pigsty, wanting to get home. Well, that was kind of what happened to me. I think, look, I woke up one day and I said, I'm 18 and I was raised in the church, very conservative upbringing. We didn't smoke, we didn't swear, we didn't drink. We would never think of touching drugs or gambling or looking at a pornographic image. And then at 18, I'm like, I want to do all those things. That sounds amazing. And I was living an hour and a half from New York City. So I moved to New York City and said, I'm going to find my childhood. I didn't have fun growing up. I'm going to go have some fun now. And one thing led to another. So I didn't go all in on all the vices from day one, but it started with just a couple cigarettes and a couple drinks and I'll try Coke once and I'll try a little ecstasy, a little MDMA. Try and visit a strip club once and let's go to Vegas and gamble. And over 10 years, which is how long that, unfortunately, that season, that really selfish, debauched season of my life lasted, it was a slow decay, a slow descent into an unbelievable darkness that came with the assumption of all of those vices. And it was interesting because my life looked great on the outside. I'm jumping into the back of limousines or Mercedes S500s with girls on the cover of magazines and there are movie stars coming to our club. And I'm spraying Kristall Champagne from the DJ booth out over the throng of partiers. And then it looked a lot less glamorous at noon when you're trying to take Ambien to come down after 12 hours of partying, you're looking at your window at people on their lunch break with salads in their hands. Well, the good news is-- It just felt so unhealthy. The good news, Scott, is that you did have a major turnaround personally and we're going to get to that. But while we're on the subject of working in nightclubs, as I understand it, you were one of the top nightclub promoters in New York City. I got pretty good at it. You were really good at this job. You were knocking it out of the park. What did you learn in that job that you could share with people that was actually a positive that you've taken with you as you moved into the nonprofit world? Well, to be good at that, you've got to be good at relationships. So a nightclub promoter is an asset light job. You don't own the club. You don't have to build the club. You don't have to pay the mortgage on the club. You just get a percentage of the gross take on wherever you and your crowd of spenders and beautiful people go. So I mentioned I worked at 40 different nightclubs over a 10-year period. And we would bring the rich and beautiful famous people to a club and we'd keep them there for about a year. And then we would move on to the next club. And we would do that different nights a week. So we would have a Tuesday crew and a Thursday crew and a weekend crew. And you've got to keep it interesting, David, because it's pretty boring. I mean, when you really think about it, it could be the same DJ playing the exact same songs, the same conversations that you're yelling and spitting over the blasting music. And I think what we did at my partner and I at the time, and there were eight or 10 of us running New York Nightlife. There were these groups, really a lot of duos, and we would have different followings, and we'd go to different clubs. And sometimes we would overlap. We were all pretty friendly with each other. But we were always looking for ways to make our party stand out, to make them feel more exciting than the rest, to create a reason for people to queue up outside that velvet rope and want to be inside. And I think if I distill that, it was storytelling. We were telling a story that if you got past the velvet rope, if the guy on the inside of the one-way glass picked you and you entered, and then if you spent tons of money and you sat with the right people, your life had meaning. Your life had extraordinary meaning. You had arrived, you made it. And I remember doing pool parties where we would go buy a hundred beach balls and we'd hire lifeguards to sit in giant lifeguard stands inside, we would have dress up parties, we would have pajama parties, always just trying to come up with a new and interesting idea to bring people out and to keep it from being unbelievably boring. - So you were really good at it and really successful. Went after relationships and you break through marketing and storytelling. You know, what was it, Scott, that helped you get your life back on track? - Well, I woke up one day at 28 years old and I was in Punta de Lesta, which is a town in Uruguay and I was on vacation with the jet set. And I drove a BMW at that time, I wore a Rolex watch, I had a grand piano in my New York City loft and my girlfriend was in the cover of Fashion magazines and I really, by the external markers of success that I had been chasing or collecting, I had made it. And I realized just how deeply unhappy I was sitting there in Uruguay because we were just partying all the time. I remember we were in this beautiful compound, we were looking at the ocean, people were following us, picking up our towels and here we are doing drugs and partying until noon the next day. And I kind of remember, Dave, it was almost like the veil was lifted, you know, when you realize you're unhappy, you looked around, I'm like, I don't think these people are that happy either. We're all just stuck on this hamster wheel 'cause this is what we do. And I realized how far I had come from the little kid who wanted to be a doctor from the foundation of morality and spirituality that my parents had tried to instill in me. And honestly, I just wanted to come home. I wanted to try to find my way back to that. - Well, so what was it that then took you into this giving world that you're now in and caring world? - Well, maybe as you've come to realize, I'm sort of an extreme actor, I guess, or extreme being. So I realized that a pivot was not what was needed in my life. You know, this was not a small course correction. And I was really interested in exploring the radical exact opposite of what Scott Harrison's life looked like at 28 as a selfish, hedonistic, sycophantic nightclub promoter. So I really started to explore the 180. And I remember starting to, you know, rediscover a very lost Christian faith, but in a different way as an adult, you know, without the trappings of religion that were kind of force fed to me as a kid. And wanting to just be more moral, integrity was such a foreign concept to me over 10 years. Generosity was foreign to me. I hadn't done anything to serve. Had given no time, had given no money to others. I was just serving myself. So I kind of explore these different ideas. And I said, I have, I know what I'm gonna do. I am going to sell everything I own. And I am gonna go take one year and try to serve in the poorest country in the world. So that was my idea. That would be opposite. - Say so. - Kind of a 10% you know, tithe of time of, you know, to give back for nightclubs. And so I resolved that I'm going to do this. And then I start applying to the famous humanitarian organizations I've tangentially heard of over the years. So I apply to save the children in Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders and World Vision. And you know, no one will take me. David, I'm denied by every single organization because they have no idea what to do with a nightclub promoter. You know, turns out Doctors Without Doctors is looking for medical professionals to serve their humanitarian org, not close to price. - Surprise. - Surprise. So I was willing to do just about anything. And I was very fortunate that, you know, somewhere around the 11th organization wrote me back and said if I was willing to pay them $500 a month and if I was willing to go live in post-war Liberia, which had just come onto the United Nations development chart at the bottom after a 14 year civil war had just ended and it was finally data on the state of the country, if I was willing to join their mission, I could come along and I could be a photo journalist. Now this is kind of funny because I'm not technically a photo journalist, but I had put up a blog with a bunch of hobby photos I'd taken. I used to work for the newspaper when I was in high school. So I put up some stuff that I'd written and I dusted off a degree I'd gotten in New York University, barely gotten a degree. I mean, C minus student. And I got a degree in communications 'cause my dad had saved up and I went part time and that seemed like the easiest degree I could get. So I kind of cobbled these things together and I convinced this organization to take me and it happened very, very quickly, David. I leave New York and a couple weeks later, I am in West Africa, setting foot on the continent and I'm living on a 522 foot hospital ship with a crew of 400 volunteer surgeons, volunteer doctors, volunteer nurses who had come from all over the world, 40 some countries to operate for free. Now these doctors have given up their vacation time to serve people who had no access to medical care. And my job, I guess that I was gonna be paying $500 to do every month was gonna be to document all of the work that happened on this medical ship, all of the patients before their operations and then documenting them afterwards and that all these images and stories would be used for the medical library but also for the organization to raise awareness and money for their work. - Wow, and so you're on this ship, you see all these people that are just struggling, did you have somebody that really kind of took you under their wing and gave you the inspiration to take it even further? - I had learned about a man, a man named Dr. Gary Parker and he was kind of a legend, so in leading up to my joining this mission, oh, you gotta hear about Dr. Gary. Well, Dr. Gary was a California surgeon, I think it was a plastic surgeon, and he, like me, had heard of this hospital ship that would sail up and down the coast of Africa and help people and he signed up for three months. And when I walked up the gangway to serve my very first day, he had been there 21 years. - Wow. - He never went back to his plastic surgery practice and it spent two decades serving. So I remember wanting to know everything I could about what drove him, what an impact of two decades plus of service could look like on the world. And because he was the lead surgeon, I realized very quickly, he would also be a captive audience for these eight hour surgeries. So instead of just photographing all the patients before their operations and afterwards, I would scrub up and I would spend eight, nine hours with him in the operating theater asking questions, watching him heal people's faces and arms and bodies and remove cataracts and got to really know him over that first year. - Hey everyone, it's Kula. We'll get back to the interview in just a second. Before we do though, I have a question for you. Have you downloaded the How Leaders Lead app on your iPhone? If you haven't, take 20 seconds right now, go to the App Store, search for How Leaders Lead and download the How Leaders Lead app. In the app every day, you'll get a two minute video that'll give you a leadership insight from one of our amazing guests from our podcast to inspire you and to really get your mind in the right place before you start your work day. So go to the App Store, start How Leaders Lead, download the How Leaders Lead app and start your day every day with two minutes of leadership wisdom. It'll take 20 seconds, go to the App Store, download the app and you'll be able to watch every day, just like me, the leadership insight from How Leaders Lead. - So how'd you get the idea for charity water? Where'd that come from? - Well, the first year ended and I really didn't know what was next so I just signed up for a second year. As it basically, can I do a redo and I'll go back to Liberia and I'll keep taking pictures. Now, I will say that maybe in a fun kind of turn or a redemptive turn of events, I went to Liberia with a really big email list. All the people that I had met over 10 years of partying, I had been pretty good at capturing their emails. So they went from getting invited to fashion parties and in the period of a couple of weeks getting pictures of surgeries in Africa. And there were certainly some unsubscribes at first. So people were like, "Please do not send me a picture of a tumor "or flesh eating disease or cataracts." But others were so moved by the compassionate work of these doctors that they started forwarding my stories and my videos and my photos to friends and people started sponsoring surgeries. So I was able, and back then email open rates were like 100%. Now you would send an email and people would read it. So I was able to raise just in that first year a lot of awareness and a lot of money for Mercy Ships just through storytelling. And I wanted to just do more of that. So in the second year, I wanted to, beyond just taking pictures of the medical stuff happening, I wanted to get out into the villages and really see how people were living. And that is when I made this huge discovery, which is now powered the last 18 years of my life. I saw people drinking dirty water and I would go into the villages and I would see little girls walk out of there, huts or their small homes and they would drink swamp water. They would put brown viscous, poisonous, muddy, toxic water into their bodies because it was all that they had available. And I remember just, like I couldn't believe it. I mean, you're almost in shock. Clean water came out of taps my entire life. I used to sell Voss water in nightclubs for $10 a bottle. To people who would buy the water, they wouldn't even open it. They'd come into the club, order 20 bottles, let it sit there and drink champagne or vodka instead. And I learned two really important things. Half of the country was drinking dirty, contaminated toxic water and half of the disease in the country was because people were drinking dirty water and didn't have access to sanitation. So I remember going back to Dr. Gary in the operating theater with the photos that I was taking in these rural villages saying, "Dr. Gary, like, no wonder there's thousands "more sick people than we could ever treat. "The most basic need for human health "isn't being met. "People are dying of bad water." And I remember he just said to me very simply, "Great, why don't you make this your problem? "Why don't you go back to New York "and try to bring clean water to everybody in the world?" - So you mentioned this kind of at the top. You gave us a couple of statistics. But how big a problem is this Scott? And not only what happens when people drink the dirty water, but also the scale of the problem. - Yeah, I mean, it's unbelievable, David. Wherever we're sitting here in our offices recording a podcast very comfortably, I've got water that just came out of my refrigerator. - Me too. - 703 million people are drinking dirty water today. It's about one in 10 people alive on the planet. It's twice the population of the United States of America. And we have not solved this problem. We've made progress with a lot of other problems on planet Earth. But we've got the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, right? Is looking for water on Mars, 142 million miles away to sustain life. And 10% of our planet does not have the most basic need met. And if you don't have water, I cannot overstate how radically different your everyday human experience is. There are dramatic health implications. I mentioned half the disease in many of these countries is water-borne. There are 28 nasty diseases that we can track back to water. So if you don't have water, you don't have health. Now, when you have clean water, all those things change in an instant. When we provide clean water to a community, we'll often see, it will go to the health clinic a year later. We'll see 82% reduction in disease. 82% reduction in visits at some of these health clinics, just because everybody has clean water at home. - So you get really compelled for all these reasons to start charity water. And when people are asked to give to a charity, their guard comes up so many times. - Yes. - You have barriers you have to attack. Where's the money go, et cetera, et cetera. How did you solve just the problem of getting people to give? - So I just wondered, was there a different way? Could I start with a clean piece of paper? What would the perfect charity look like? How would it behave? How would it work with its supporters? And I thought, what if I could promise that 100% of any donation we would ever take in from anywhere in the world would go directly to build water projects that gave people clean water? And people said, well, that's a really dumb idea. How would you pay for staff? How are you gonna have an office one day? I didn't have any of those answers, but I knew that all that would have to happen in a separately audited bank account. So I went down to, I think it was commerce at the time on Broadway and Bond, and I opened up two distinctly numbered bank account with a couple hundred dollars in each and said 100% of the public's money is gonna go into this bank account. And so there's just the utmost integrity in the 100% model. We're even gonna pay back credit card fees. So if David Novak gave 100 bucks and Amex took three and we eventually got 97, we would pay back that 3% transaction fee and we would send David's $100 to Africa or India or Asia. And then somehow in the other bank account, I was gonna have to convince entrepreneurs and business leaders to pay for those unsexy staff and overhead costs. The Epson toner for the copy machine, the phone bills, the staff salaries and the insurance. So that was kind of a really big deal. And that would also distinguish us from 99.99% of charities in the world if we could make that model work. The second kind of simple idea was really a fall under that. Well, if money's not fungible, why don't we build technology to prove to people where their donation goes? And I remember meeting the founder of Google Earth and he's telling me what he's building. And I said, can I put up every single water project I build on Google Earth so people could see the satellite images of where their money went? And he said, yes, you could do that all for free. So we were the first charity in the world just to prove out every project. And then later on Google Maps when that was developed. And then the third, like if I gave $20, you would get back to me and say, here's where when here's the picture of the well in Malawi that costs $11,629. And here are all the other donors who made that project possible. Here's the name of the community, the GPS coordinates and the satellite image of it. Yeah, it was that kind of transparency. And then the third thing you mentioned marketing, it was really to build an epic, imaginative, inspiring brand, a brand. As I looked at charities, I said, where's the Apple? Where's the Nike? Where's the Virgin? Where, you know, Nick Kristoff had written in the New York Times that toothpaste was peddled with far more sophistication than all of the world's life-saving causes. You know, why is Colgate better at marketing than Save the Children? Who is saving children? And I just remember thinking, you know, I see so much shame and guilt with charities marketing. You know, some people might remember those Sally Struthers commercials back in the '80s. And, you know, the children in Africa flies landing on their face in slow motion and then the 800 number comes. And you feel terrible and you give. But that's not how you build a brand. You don't want to tell your friends about that experience. So I put these three things together, give away 100% forever, prove where the money goes, build an inspiring creative brand. And then day one, the only idea I had, David, to start this thing was to throw a party in a nightclub. So charity water started in a nightclub on my 31st birthday. I invited everybody I knew. I gave them open bar for one hour, all donated, and said, on your way in, you have to put $20 in this giant plexi box at the door. That's your entry. And 100% of the money is going to help get clean water. And at the end of the night, we'd collected $15,000. We took it all every penny of it to northern Uganda. We built our very first well. We fixed a couple of adjacent ones. And then we sent the proof back to those 700 people and said, you came, you gave $20. Here's exactly where your $20 went. And here are people drinking clean water because of you. And we realized if we could build that feedback loop into the DNA of the organization, we would be able to build a movement of people who would raise their hands for clean water. - Well, you have, and then you have on the other side, you got this operational issue of like, how do you pay the people that you're going to get behind this? How do you do, you mentioned some of the things that cost the operating costs? You know, how did you deal with that? I mean-- - We went to people like you. We went to CEOs. We went to entrepreneurs. We went to people who had built businesses or run businesses and said to them, you know, an organization is only as great as the talent they're able to recruit and retain. Will you help us do that? We promise to treat you like investors. We promise to be transparent. But you get to be really the fuel that ignites a global movement of people. And there are 131 families. So there are 131 people who raise their hand. They give starting at about $100,000 a year. Some give more. And they all give on three year terms. So we know if we bring on a new team member, we have their salary covered for the next three years. And it's the founders of companies like LinkedIn or Pinterest or Twitter or Shopify. It's senior executives at American Express or at Apple. Or it's people in finance, it's private equity. It's CEOs of Fortune 100 companies who said, we will help you with that. As long as you run a transparent, efficient organization, we would love to pay for, you know, Sally in engineering because we know she could be working at Google and making a whole lot more. And we know the impact of that work on this movement. - How do you get people to feel the impact of dirty water, unclean water when, like you said, you picked up your bottle of that you're drinking and I've got mine right here. You know, this is not a problem that's easy to feel. How do you get people to feel this problem? - Well, we've made over a thousand videos. So video is one, when you see it. It's one thing for me to describe brown viscous water. When you see a child hold a bottle that looks like chocolate milk up to her lips that came from a source and you see a bunch of kids lined up behind her, ready to do the same thing. It hits home in a different visceral way. And a lot of people will say, not on my watch, not if I can do something. Interestingly, kids bring so many of their parents to charity water. Kids get this is such an intuitive level. I have a 10 year old and eight year old and a one year old. My kids got to go to Africa for the first time last year and just kind of are in disbelief that we live in a world and everything that they've experienced. And there are human beings living in this condition. What can they do about it? Well, they can go and sell lemonade. They can donate their birthdays. So I think it's visual storytelling is one. We've made virtual reality films where people can put on a headset and you're in the water. You're in that community without clean water. And then you see a drilling rig roll in and you see eight amazing Rwandan drillers jump out and you see them fine water and clean water shoot out into the ground. And you see 500 people surrounding this drilling rig, dancing and crying and yelling and clapping. And then you watch that community drink clean water for the very first time. We've had people watch our VR film and they're just weeping at the end of it. They're so moved. We've had people write unbelievably enormous checks after watching an eight minute film because they can feel it. They want to be a part of that transformation, of that joy, of improving the human condition in such an inarguably common good way. I say all the time, like Republicans think this is a good idea and Democrats think this is a good idea and independence and libertarians and faith communities and agnostics and atheists. Like everybody can come together and say, yeah, people should have clean water. Scott Harrison, per president, we're going to get you out there. And I have no interest, my gosh. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Scott Harrison in just a moment. I'm so sad to say that earlier this month, my good friend and home depot co-founder Bernie Marcus passed away at the age of 95. His episode of How Leaders Lead will always be one of my favorites. It's full of funny stories and great insights, like this one on the dangers of bureaucracy. bureaucracy kills the company. Your author and I had a bathroom between the two offices and we would meet in that little car under and we will make a monumental multimillion dollar decision in 20 minutes. We didn't go to committees, we didn't have any of those things. And we learned from the people like Sears Robot that that's what killed them. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Bernie and whatever you do, don't miss the bathtub story. It's episode 119 here on How Leaders Lead. Say more about this birthday party program. Yeah. So we kind of stumbled onto this. So my birthday raised $15,000 in a club. And a year later I said, man, I don't want to do another party in a nightclub. It doesn't scale, nobody needs to go to another party. And I thought, well, what if, I don't need gifts anyway, right? I don't need a wallet, I don't need a party, I don't need to celebrate me. What if I donated my birthday? And then I thought the sticky marketing message would be, what if I asked for my age in dollars? And pretty much everybody I knew David had $32 that they could donate to charity water, knowing that 100% of that money would go straight to the product. So I wound up online just emailing everybody I'd ever met, donate $32 my 32nd birthday. And I promised to fly to Africa and drill a well live on my birthday via satellite so they could see where their money was going. So I wound up raising $60,000, enough for multiple projects. And then there was this seven year old kid in Austin, Texas. And he hears about this idea and he says, well, I could give up my seventh birthday. And he starts knocking on doors. I'm not gonna lie, it was a very nice neighborhood, but Max gives up his birthday and he raises $22,000. And this just starts to spread. I mean, Jack Dorsey gives up three birthdays. Daniel Eckett Spotify gives up a birthday. Tony Hawk Will Smith. All these people just start donating their birthdays. Angela Arrens, who was a Burberry at the time, just extraordinary leaders start giving up their birthdays and seven year olds and nine year olds and 89 year olds start donating their birthdays. I'll never forget, no no ween, 89 years old, writes on our website. I'm turning 89 and I want more people to live to 89. And she knew that clean water was essential. And she was double the life expectancy in so many of these countries where people didn't have water. And if her birthday could help people have more birthdays, that's what she, so we wound up raising over $100 million as people donated their birthdays, as they ran marathons and climbed mountains and walked across America holding yellow jerry cans full of water. Really it was the stuff of movements. And that was really kind of the fuel that led the early years of charity water was people would donate their birthdays. And 100% of the money would go straight there. - You're such an innovator. And you bring such breakthrough thinking to this particular industry. And you were also the first in the charity world to join Instagram, the first to get 1 million ex followers or used to be Twitter followers. What is it about your leadership, Scott, that allows you or keeps you out front because you don't wait for things to happen. I mean, you're trying to meet. - Yeah, I get easily bored and I am deeply dissatisfied with how little we've done. So there's really a growth mindset. And it's scale because humans benefit. My salary has been the same for seven years. I, if we raise 100 million this year or 500 million, it just means I got more people clean water. So in some ways when the personal incentive is taken off of the table, it can make you even hungrier. And I'm hungrier to help more humans get clean water. It's really that simple. I'm really interested in technology, David. So for years instead of reading the Chronicle of Philanthropy or trade magazines in the charity world, I would read Wired. I would read Fast Company. I would read Inc. We have some really interesting sensor technology that was inspired by Nest when the Smart Home came out many years ago. I thought, well, if there's a Smart Home, why can't we have Smart Wells? Why can't we connect our rural water projects around the world to the cloud to monitor ongoing sustainability and inform better implementation? And can't we spin up Geek Squad's or AppleCare type programs? - That's a great example of what I call pattern thinking. Where you look at two seemingly different things and apply it to your particular business. - Sure, just association. Somebody showed me Nest and they changed the temperature of their vacation home, maybe at Yellowstone Club. And I thought, well, they can do that from New York to Montana, what about New York to Ethiopia? Why can't we control a well through that same technology? And that was hard. Google gave us $5 million. We wound up blowing through $5 million of R&D. We wound up getting another 500 from them and actually coming up with a pilot that we was viable and we installed 3500 sensors. And now we've got R&D going on four different sensors that work all across the portfolio. So I'm not saying it was an easy journey. Making hardware in China, it turns out, is very hard. They call it hardware for a reason. But I think that is just the discipline. I saw VR for the first time in a Marriott demo. And Marriott took me to a penthouse in Dubai. And I've got these goggles on. And I'm standing looking at the city of Dubai in a glass penthouse. And I thought, well, if Marriott can take me to Dubai, why can't I take David Novak to Ethiopia to drill a well? And then instead of asking him to rent the penthouse in Dubai, ask him to go build a well and help 300 people have the same experience that he just went through. So I think time and time again, we've done that. We're actually opening up a retail store in Nashville, Tennessee in a couple months. And this is patterned on the immersive experience that I've been chasing around the world, from the color factory, the ice cream museum, or Meow Wolf in Las Vegas, or the Van Gogh experience. A little bit of that, plus the Apple store, when Angela Arrens went over there, she was really modeling these stores to educate people. So we're building a place which is sort of inspired by the Apple store. It's a lot of glass, beautiful LED screens, education spaces for children, and then immersive experiences where we hope to make people feel something intense, and then they will exit through the gift shop. Little not the Banksy there. - You're building the brand. Now that takes a lot of courage to make that kind of investment. You've got all these people that need water, and yet you're building this incredible retail establishment. You've got to have half the people going to you. You know, what are you doing? - More than half, David. - More than half. - More than half. More than half. And by the way, like you could, I don't know that it's going to work. I think it's going to work because it's taking different elements of things that have worked over 18 years. We put it in a very high foot traffic, kind of almost like a mall. So it's basically in a Chelsea market type space where 55,000 people come through every single month. So for me, it's got all of the elements of success. But yes, people think we're crazy. Like why wouldn't you just go put all of that money directly and go build a couple hundred wells? And I'm like, well, because we're going to build thousands of wells. - You've raised a billion and you're on, you're at that tipping point where it could really take off now as you go. - But this is a small, you know, I think this is a fraction of what is needed. You know, this year we're going to help a little less than two million new people get clean water. Now, you know, on my bad days, I'm dividing that. It's about 5,000 people a day. So I'm like, that's great. You know, I look at my wife and kids and like, today was a really hard day. You know, a bunch of people said no. Things went wrong, but 5,000 new people got clean water today because of what we've built. That's the KPI. I want to add a zero to that. You know, I want the organization and the movement to grow where it's 50,000 people a day. It's 500,000 people a day. And then we can finally see the day when you don't have me on this podcast talking about fricking 700 million people without water or I don't come to your kids school and you know, show a bunch of photos of school kids, their exact same age, Malawi or India or Bangladesh or Nepal drinking poisonous water. - Yeah, well, that's a, it's a really, I mean, it's an incredibly serious topic and you're really taking it seriously and bringing some major league brand building, innovation, just hard work, execution to the whole thing. So I admire you so much. And I want to thank you for everything that you're doing. But now I want to shift gears a little bit, even though this is a serious topic and I want to have a little fun. - Okay. - And I want to have-- - Hey, the first three letters in fundraising, fun. - There you go, okay. And I want to have a lightning round of questions with you. Sorry, are you ready for this? - Okay. - The three words that best describe you. - Generous, high integrity and fun. - That's four, but I'll let you get away with it. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be? - Oh, this is easy. Attenborough. - What's your biggest pet peeve? - People being late. - Who would play you in a movie? - I forget his name. - I know who it is. - One of the Spider-Man. - It's Leonardo. - Leonardo, Leonardo. Leonardo, the Caprio. - It's not Leonardo. - You're a spitting image. New York City or Nashville? - Both. - What's something about water most people would be surprised to know? - The average American uses 150 gallons a day. - You get two tickets to anything you want. Where would you go and what would you see? - I think I would go to the opera in Vienna. - What's your go-to way to unwind after a long day? - I love going to the movies by myself. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? - Jazz. - What's something about you few people would know? - I was once in a subway ad where I had to kiss an ex-girlfriend and then we wound up getting back together. (laughing) - You must be a good kisser. - I also, hang on, this is the second one is good. I also did actually work at McDonald's and I dressed up as the hamburger once because they paid me time and a half and I remember that I would have to tilt this giant bun kind of vertically to get through doorways. (laughing) - Last question. What's one of your daily rituals, something that you never miss? - Prayer and gratitude. - That's a great lightning round there. I really appreciate that one. Now you and your wife, Victoria, have three kids. How do you raise kids who are externally focused? - Well, I have the advantage of bringing my kids with me to see how it all works. They get to go both to really, really nice places in the world and visit the islands of some of our donors. They also get to go to some of the poorest places in the world and fly coach, seven flights in seven days to Madagascar or to Uganda. So I think it's just really the practice of gratitude and exposing them to just how different people live and how they get to use what they've been blessed with to improve the lives of others. - You know, you've had so much exposure, Scott, to large corporations and great entrepreneurs. You've mentioned a number of fantastic leaders and great companies. What do you see in the best companies that, what do they do to build into their culture, to really make it a giving culture? How do they do it? - I think humility is really important in the leader. Not thinking you're the smartest person in the room and being open for other people to submit ideas. Learning, being curious is really important. I think knowing what you're good at and knowing what you're not. So I hired a president recently after a very long search and it was really prompted by a conversation I had with Angela Arance once who for people to don't know, she led Burberry with great success and then she took over Apple Retail, had 65,000 employees or something at one point. I remember asking Angela in the back of a Land Rover in Rwanda about leadership and she said, "I just wake up every single day and I just wanna make my team better. How do I unblock them? How do I just get the most out of them?" And I remember kind of laughing and saying, "Angela, that's the most unnatural thought to me. It's probably time to go find an Angela for my team." You know, I'm thinking about the future, I'm thinking about innovation, I'm thinking about storytelling and ideas. So I think, you know, over the years, I've always made sure I had that COO or that head of HR, you know, that now a president, you know, to really fill in the gaps for the weaknesses and blind spots which I have, which are myriad. - You know, I've heard you use this quote which is, "Do not be afraid of work that has no end. Say more." - Yeah, I love this. A friend sent me this picture from a New York City deli over 15 years ago he was passing and that was what the quote said, "Do not be afraid of work with no ends." And it came from an ancient rabbinic text. And, you know, I remember just thinking, "Oh, I really love that because I immediately put it into our context." And sometimes the problem feels so big and so insurmountable and it feels like we're doing far too little. But it's really about the positioning. It's about the intention of your life. And if you're asking yourself the question of how you can serve, how do you use your time, your talent, your money in the service of others? It is endless work. It is an endless pursuit with no finish line. There is no drop the mic moment I have given enough. I have served enough. And, you know, I've also seen and lived that endless pursuit of more with stuff, with status, with things that I could buy. And that led me to a really dark and empty place. And I think it's just really helped me. I've kind of embraced the idea of endless work. If that work is work in the service of others, in the service of humanity. - Yeah, last question here. What's one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who wants to be a better leader? - Be curious and really listen. - You know, that's two pieces of advice. - Oh, my God, I keep breaking your rules. I'm so sorry to you. - I love getting the rules. - I love it, but I love catching you in a couple of these things. You know, when you're as articulate as you are, you know, I gotta kind of give you that little gig every now and then. But I have to tell you, Scott, you are an incredible leader, incredible leader. And in the preparation of this podcast, you know, I watched a YouTube video that you put together. And I watched it on a Sunday morning. And I have to tell you, I literally started crying like a baby. And I encourage everybody to go on YouTube and look at the video that you did for charity water. And I wanna thank you for making a world a better place and for doing everything you can as a human being to be as giving as you are. - Well, thank you for having me and let me share the story. (silence) Believe it or not, I owe the idea of cool ransterritos to my habit of pattern thinking. It's a skill I've developed and relied on a lot. And it's in Scott's DNA too. He always has his antenna up and he's constantly looking outside his industry at what's working and then finding ways to bring those ideas into the nonprofit space. When you tap into the power of pattern thinking, you can turn one plus one into three or more. Two seemingly unrelated things become something new, something bigger, something that can change the world just like Scott and his team are doing a charity water. This week I want you to give pattern thinking a try. I recently wrote about six ways you can use pattern thinking to level up your leadership. We'll put a link to that article in the show notes where you can find it in our weekly email newsletter. Read that article, pick an idea and put pattern thinking to work for you. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is the great leaders tap into the power of pattern thinking. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Jenny Britton, founder of Jenny's Ice Creams. - Get to know your feeling, your instinct. Our brains work really well, but actually our brains are interpreting what's happening in our body and our feelings. A sense of feeling. And you almost always know the way. If you listen to your gut, listen to your instinct. - So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How leaders lead. Where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] .