The Peter Attia Drive - #25 - Scott Harrison: transformation, finding meaning, and taking on the global water crisis

Episode Date: October 22, 2018

We discuss: How Scott and Peter met [3:45]; Scott’s tragic family story that shaped his life and altered his trajectory [8:00]; High school years, rebellion, and music [30:30]; Life as a club promoter, drug use, soul-searching, and a change of heart [41:30]; Mercy Ships [1:15:00]; The amazing transformations of Mercy Ships and the parallels to his own transformation [1:28:00]; Leveraging the art of storytelling to raise money and awareness while fighting temptations to fall into his previous life [1:33:30]; Discovering the water crisis that lead to charity: water [1:46:45]; How the lack of trust in nonprofits can cripple charities [1:54:00]; The four pillars of charity: water that helped it overcome the stigma of nonprofits and become successful [2:01:00]; Where to learn more about Scott’s work and charity: water [2:12:30]; Scott’s book recommendations [2:14:30]; and More. Learn more at www.PeterAttiaMD.com Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atia. The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peteratia-md.com.

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. My guest this week is a gentleman by the name of Scott Harrison, who I suspect many of you have not heard of, which is not uncommon for this podcast, but my hope is certainly that by the end of this episode, you'll be glad you heard of him and heard him. Scott's the founder and CEO of Charity Water, which we'll talk about in great detail. Charity Water is a pretty unique charity, not just in that the work they're doing is remarkable, but I think the efficiency with which they do it and the transparency with which they do it and the sort of financial model that they've built is really interesting.

But truthfully, the real reason I had Scott on was not so much to talk about charity water and we do get to it probably at the end of the podcast, but it's more to actually talk about his personal story. And even though Scott, you'll learn in this podcast is religious and I don't find myself to be a religious person in any way, shape or form, I'm really moved by not just his conviction, but this sort of incredible sense of purpose

he's found in life. And it's really his life's story and transformation that really moved me the very first time we met, which was about four or five years ago, and to this day whenever I speak with Scott, I come away feeling on some level like kind of a lousy person who's not good enough, which is probably okay,

but more importantly, just inspired. And I'm convinced that you will, you'll come away also feeling inspired by Scott who never once is the kind of person that leaves you feeling like why aren't you doing more. But Scott has really dedicated his life to helping people in a way that I think many of us can only dream of. I would go so far as to say honestly that Scott is one of two people that I consider the most remarkable people in the non-profit space, the other one being a woman by the name of Catherine Hoke, who some of you may have heard of.

She's been on Tim Ferriss' podcast, and I'm sure to have her on here at some point as well. But, you know, between Kat Hoke and Scott Harrison, I find them to be two of the most inspiring people who have really chosen to dedicate their lives to the public sector in this way. Part of the stuff we talk about in this episode has been covered in his book. So Scott is now a New York Times best-selling author. That book is called Thirst. I don't know that he'd want me to publicly disclose what the advance was, but it was a very sizable advance. And he gave every single penny of that to his charity. And all of that goes directly to the work that they're doing. He's an amazing

speaker, and he's just kind of a magnetic personality. So I would invite you to take a chance and listen to this even if it sounds like at the surface. This isn't what I'm really interested in, but I think you will definitely get something out of this and you'll definitely get a sense as I did of how we can get a glimpse of happiness and how Scott on one level, you know, in the first chapter of his adult life seemed to be living what many of us might think, yeah, that sounds pretty cool and interesting, and I can see how that would make you happy, but how he ultimately found something totally different, and now I think Scott's probably one of the happiest people I know. So, without any further delay, welcome to this episode with Scott Harris. Hey Scott, good to have you here man.

Nice to be here. Thanks for slumming on the upper east side with me. Take the train off. It was pretty quick. It's actually a nice day so it's beautiful. It's the, it falls my favorite time. Where do you live? You live in Tribeca?

Okay, actually Battery Park City. So we had kids and moved across the highway. Got it. So we met in kind of one of the funniest ways imaginable. And that's been what three or four years ago. Yeah, you get a tell. Well, no, no, it's just, I mean, you can tell, I'll tell a story from my end and you can tell a story from your end, but we'll not name the name of the person who we met through, but we met through one of my patients and we were all at this meeting called dialogue, which I've enjoyed.

And I've gone to probably four of them. I didn't go this year. It was my first year not going in a while. And it was a weird day, but I had arranged for my family to come to meet at the airport. And then we were going to fly together on his plane to New York. And as we were leaving the hotel, he said, hey, I met this really cool guy. He's gonna hop on the flight with us, do you mind? To which I said, how can you ask me if I mind?

It's your plane, of course I don't mind. But yeah, awesome. And so we basically, you and I met in the, you know, for the first time in the car ride on the way to the airport because dialogue is big enough that it's easy to not meet somebody there. So we didn't actually sit in any sessions together. So that's how we met.

It wasn't your birthday. It was. It was just by coincidence that happened to be my birthday. And the funniest part is we somehow got talking about watches. And pretty early in the conversation, you mentioned, look, I'm on a budget, man, I run a non-profit. I can't be rolling with the high level watches. And I think you said sort of, what is your best, what's your favorite watch, you know, on

a certain price point? And I said, oh, this is a no-brainer, man. That's a say-go. It's a say-go cocktail. Yep. And I remember on my phone, I pulled up a picture and I showed it to you and you like, oh, that's gorgeous. And then, and then, we spent seven minutes talking about that

and 23 minutes talking about your story, which was really captivating. But then if I remember correctly, your wife had then surprised you at the end of a flight with that specific watch. That's right. It was the only time my wife has bought me a watch because she generally doesn't like to support my watch habit,

but she also knew how much I loved the Seiko cocktail. So when we're on the plane, she whips out the watch, which I couldn't believe it, not only that she had done this, even ordinarily I would have been very surprised, but how could this have happened a few hours after we had just talked about it? And then you gave the watch to me, which was a wonderful surprise and nice.

And then I think that surprised your wife even more. Well, I asked her. I said, you know, hey, I know this is gonna sound strange, but and I love the watch. So please don't assume that like I'm asking you this because I don't love the watch. But I think giving this watch to Scott would be, like it's almost, it's meant to be.

It's sort of, he's meant to have this watch because it's what we talked about. And I told her the whole story and she was like, yeah, you're right, you gotta give him the watch. Which I'm very grateful for. I actually heard someone in California who's a family friend say once that on his birthday, he would give gifts to everyone else.

He would give gifts to his children and then later his grandchildren. So he would look at his birthday as the time that he could lavish extravagant gifts on all the loved ones around him, which I always thought was so nice. Well, and you have kids, so I think you understand what all of us understand who have kids. And I'm sure there are people who have come to appreciate this even before they have kids, which I guess in some way I did as well, but it is really much more enjoyable to give them to receive. And it was probably two years before I went out

and finally bought myself a cocktail. And it was funny, I kind of forgot that I'd given it to you. And then about a year ago, I remember somebody on Twitter said, Peter, please tell me best watch to get under 500. And I said, say, co-c cocktail, here you go. And you just chimed in on Twitter and made a comment that nobody else would have known what the context was.

But I was like, oh my God, I totally forgot about that. That's fun. And birthdays have been significant for me and for the organization. So that was just a fun, really fun thing. So thanks for that. Well, more importantly, let's talk about the real stuff that we talked about,

because we had, you know, obviously that car ride, and then we had like a five-hour flight to New York when we got to really kind of talk about the real stuff that we talked about because we had, you know, obviously that car ride and then we had like a five hour flight to New York when we got to really kind of talk about your story, which, which I was just blown away by. And at the time, my day job was running a nonprofit. And unfortunately for me, that was probably the single, it's been the worst professional experience in my life. I really hated running a nonprofit. I probably vented to you somewhat about how much I hated fundraising, which sort of became the only

thing I was doing. But I was really blown away by not just your work, but the efficiency with which you did it. And once you're in the nonprofit space, you start to understand what metrics matter. And look, I mean, a lot of nonprofits are doing great work, but some of them are doing it with staggering efficiency. And, you know, I'm gonna wanna hear all about that. But actually, the part that really gripped me was your background. So, let's, if you don't mind, can we start at the beginning?

Sure. Where'd you grow up? I was born in Philadelphia, and my dad was, he had been working for Arthur Anderson. He was kind of on the big accounting career trajectory would hope to make partner one day. He had me and then started traveling all the time and said, look, I'm actually going to jump off that track. And I'm going to take a smaller job, which would not be

a transformer company, selling power supply to the Navy and to municipalities. So we moved to get closer to his new job, which would have him not on the road and allowed to just be a dad. They wanted a bigger family in my mom. And she was a writer, so she was working for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the local newspaper. And at four, we pick up from outside of a suburb outside. Philly moved to South Jersey into this. I remember it was a very gray drab for bedroom house, not their dream house by any stretch of the imagination, but it was 22 minutes from his job,

which he just had 22 minute commute. I remember he just kept saying imagination, but it was 22 minutes from his job, which he just had, 22 minute commute, I remember, he just kept saying, man. And it was a good school, it was on a cold to sack, so I could walk to school, tell a mentor school. And what we didn't know was that the gas company had installed a faulty heat exchanger in this house, and there was a carbon oxide gas leak. So we move in in the dead of winter,

and it's an energy efficient house. So the whole thing is just locked up tight and we all start breathing in these invisible fumes. I get a little sick, you know headaches and just some kind of allergy spring up. My dad gets a little sick, but we were only doing nights in the house and we were doing upstairs. My mom, unfortunately, was doing all 24 hours in the house, unpacking boxes, fixing up the house, fixing up the basement, actually. And on New Year's Day, 1980,

she walks across the bedroom and she collapses unconscious. And after a series of blood tests, they finally identify massive amounts of carboxy hemoglobin in the blood. But this took a while. It was a period of a couple of months. Yeah, yeah. This was a real, I mean, in your book,

which we're gonna get to, because obviously the listeners, I think, would really enjoy your book. This was something I didn't even know from meeting you. This is something I knew only from reading the book, but that was a really, really complicated diagnosis. I mean, that was not obvious to the doctors what was going on with your mom.

And I almost, it's not even clear you're representing in as much detail just how sick she became. Yeah. And what happened again from my, you know, non-medical perspective was my mom's immune system died. So it was irreparably destroyed. And she went from flying around the world with my dad. I mean, they, before they had me, they were flying to Paris and to Rome and, you know, vacationing in the Bahamas and in Permuda. They were, they were completely healthy. She was a tennis player, just as vibrant, amazing wife and then later amazing mom.

From this moment, effectively anything chemical begins to make her sick, very sick, perfume, soap, car fumes. The ink from books would make her sick, the print, the smell from a new book. And she goes from clinic to clinic and they wind up isolating her and they find that by isolating her from all toxins, she can be okay. So that the healthiest they can ever get her is drinking spring water, eating one organic food on a rotation diet every six days. So breakfast would

be cashews, lunch would be lettuce, dinner would be a piece of cod, because she had a slew of food allergies that came along with this. And bringing her back from the clinics with this diagnosis of multiple chemical sensitivity or they called it environmental illness at the time. And at one point, if I recall, she did a five day fast. They put her on water only to try to sort of detox her and then try foods one by one. And she reacted negatively to almost every food.

So I think she had maybe was 20 foods at the end after testing over 100. So what I remember as a kid was there was a miscarriage that happened around this time and then family planning stopped. So I was an only child growing up and I go very quickly into a caregiver role to help dad take care of mom. This started when you were four or five four. It happened very quickly. We then prepared a special room for her that would be her safe room in the house. I remember it was a tile bathroom, a little bathtub, and we put an army cot in there for her to sleep

in. And then we washed, we used to wash everything in baking soda. Baking soda was just, it was everywhere on the house. So we would wash our clothes 10 times in making soda, just to get any odor out. We watched this army cot that was made out of cotton, you know, at least 10 times to get all the smell out. And then I remember my dad covered the door with aluminum foil, because there might be the slight smell from the varnish stain used years ago.

So this then became her room and she always wore these charcoal masks, which would also help just filter out. They were years where oxygen played a part and she'd be walking in with oxygen tanks. Tell me how high her levels were. So the diagnosis of carbon monoxide needs to be made through blood and you measure a byproduct of it. And once you cross, so most of us walking around should be at zero.

Yeah. What was her level? Funny, I actually wrote about it in the book. I don't remember. I remember it was way, it was shocking. I feel like it was 20 or 25 times than the upper limit of what we would consider toxic. Yes.

And way more than a smoker. You know, it was, it was in the upper room. We never tested Dad and I. It was interesting because we were also exposed. And I remember bouncing back. So the food hour just kind of went away. The headaches went away. Oh, so you had food allergies as well?

I did too. And I would have headaches. I would have nausea. My dad eventually ripped out the heater. So he found the leak and then, you know, through the thing on the driveway. It was a really sad story because my dad had actually suspected that maybe something was wrong with the stove on the driveway. It was a really sad story because my dad had actually suspected that maybe something was wrong with the stove or the heater.

So he called the gas company out a couple times. They checked everything, checked the hose, and said, no, everything's fine. So it was a plumber friend of his that said, hey, let's go down on the basement. And they ripped out the thing and they found it themselves. And this really destroyed our lives. And the gas company wasn't terribly accommodating

if I recall. No, and I guess most people would have expected my parents to sue for negligence. I think a couple of things happened. One, they had just become Christians, they'd become people of faith right around this time. I think I was two. And they had a doctor, friends, you know,

from their church that said, hey, I don't think you should sue. I don't think this would be good for your family to be in a long, protracted, angry, bitter battle. You've got health care. And it was an accident. It actually wasn't accident. It wasn't like the gas company was trying to kill my family.

This was an accident. This was a faulty piece of metal that was installed. So I think my parents took a settlement check for $1,250 or $1,500 from the gas company. And it said, you know, okay. And I can relate to that. I had a really bad back injury in medical school, which I've talked about in the past,

but a lot of things went wrong with my care, including a surgeon that operate on the wrong side. And I lived a different life for about a year, including three months where I couldn't even feed myself. And when it was all, like so now obviously I'm fine, right? And I was fine. We were done a relatively short period of time. Within a year I was completely functional and within, I would say, three years I was

as good as before. And whenever I tell the story, people are always like, oh, you must have sued for a lot of money. And it's funny, it never crossed my mind. And I always kind of joke about it and say, well, I think it's because I grew up in Canada and we're simply not litigious people in Canada. I don't know. But I also realized that in the moment, the only thing you want to do is get better, and a lawsuit generally doesn't accelerate that.

Now, I'm not for a moment saying there shouldn't be litigious action and lawsuits certainly have their place. But I think most people don't come to the conclusion that I think your family friend came to, which is my brother's a lawyer. So I see what lawsuits look like. I understand from friends and family what that process is. It generally results in more pain before there is a remedy. Certainly stress. Yes, and, you know, I mean, we talk about it

and it sounds touchy-feely, but stress really matters. And especially in the case of what your mom was going through, I suspect stress would have been a far greater impediment to her recovery. The other thing about your story thing about your mom's story that blows my mind just as a doc is people like your mom often fall through the cracks in medicine because they're viewed as crazy.

So we have a bad habit in medicine of dismissing patients when we don't know what's wrong and they don't fit into an obvious bucket. So you say, well, look, she was totally healthy and now she's a wreck. It's gotta be in her mind. She's gotta be having a nervous breakdown. There's gotta be something going on.

And I see this a lot. And I get approached a lot by people who are in that situation and it breaks my heart because I don't know how to fix it. I mean, that's just, I don't, you know, there's a real narrow lane that I play in. But deep down, I know, like, I just have a hard time believing that

there's that many people who are sort of crazy and that in reality, I remember something one of my med school professors said, which is, we use this term in medicine idiopathic. Idiopathic means we don't know what the cause is. So you have idiopathic, fill in the blank, idiopathic pain. And he says, you know what it really means is probably idiotic, like referring to the doctor, not the patient. So I guess you were not old enough to recall, but in discussions with your mom since, I mean, did you get a sense of how difficult

it was for your mom and dad during the period of time when the diagnosis was unclear, and it was this huge mystery of what the heck happened. Well, I remember I read about this in the book, people thought dad was crazy at work. So, or the mom was crazy, so they would say, oh, this is just in her head. And, you know, I remember the term psychosomatic thrown around so much as a kid, and I was never a suspect of that until I became a teenager. And then I joined that camp briefly, just thinking, it's just not possible. I mean, some of these things that she said made her sick

just seem to defy logic to me, do it 13 or 14 year old boy. You know, there's this, remember this is seen that I write about where there was a period of time where electromagnetic radiation was making her sick. TVs and radio waves. And I thought she's just trying to rate on my parade and make sure I don't watch TV.

Or listen to the radio so that I'm reading all the time up in my room. I gotta try this with my kids. Anytime they spend more than 30 minutes on the iPad. Just get in the six. I gotta iPad. I got to get sick. I got to get sick. I got to get sick. So this one night, you know, I'm very, very clever

and the little teenage boy climbs up the stairs and I've got a radio in my hand and all the lights are out and I'm padding very softly. And there's an outlet right outside the door. So her door is closed, the tinfoil door. And I turn the radio, I plug it in, but the volume's all the way down. And I turn the speakers so that they're aiming right at

the cot where she's sleeping on the other side of the door. And I'm like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna nuke you all night with the radio waves. You're gonna wake up fine. And I'm gonna have a big aha. I'm gonna drop the mic on this. And I'm gonna listen a big aha. I'm gonna drop the mic on this and I'm gonna listen to all the radio I freaking what from this point on? Well the opposite happened, you know the morning she woke up. She was terribly sick

I don't remember the specific symptoms. She had that day, but she was really scared because What had gotten to her in her safe room? I mean this is the room that she would go to recover from exposure to things and or in her safe room. I mean, this is the room that she would go to recover from exposure to things. And I just don't remember feeling that much kind of shame or, you know, feeling that bad as a kid, but it did cross that off the list, you know, I believed her. And that was a really important moment for me to say, wow, okay, she's, you know, specifically with this, she's not crazy. And that was one of the the crazier ones. I mean, you can understand how car fumes are a diesel truck going by is probably not great for our bodies.

Well, mom would have a migraine within 30 seconds of that exposure, or often would even break out. Her body would just start reacting. It was a weird childhood. I remember you just have these glimpses and these scenes. The books was just this illustration of how far she'd really gone. And mom being a writer, she was also an avid reader. And she still wanted to have books in her life. So my dad's and my solution to this was we would, we'd bake them. We would open up the oven. And we would just start baking over,

you know, the period of a day or two on low, maybe 200 to 50. And we'd be moving the pages just to try to outgast it to get that smell of new print out through the heat. We would also put them out in the sun. So I just recently was home and I came across a family photo in an album of 100 books out on the grass baking in the sun, just out-out-gassing. So that was a...

There were these words, you know, out-gassing, reacting. These are words that are getting pure that I would just hear, you know, countless times growing up. So I wanted Mom to be like other moms, but I'd say in the first part of childhood, I was really taking care of her. I felt bad for her. I would go sing her childhood, I was really taking care of her. I felt bad for her. I would go sing her songs or I would go and sit with her. I was always getting pure.

So if I came in from the outside world, I would have to wear special clothes that had been washed in baking soda. And there were clothes trees out in the garage where I'd take off the clothes that might have, I don't know, the whiff of smoke on them, or my dad was always giving me the sniff test, like a blood out, I'd walk in from the outside, and you know, oh, I smell this, or I smell that, because I never wanted to change my clothes. I'd say, I'm fine, I wasn't around anything,

I went for a walk, you know, they would always smell something. So then, I would, I was constantly getting pure so that I could be around her. And it was, it was, it was weird. I did a lot of the cooking for her. I did the cleaning, did the washing up. And then I think is that moved towards, as it moved into teenage years, I began to really resent it and resent her. Last thing, just, I'm going back a minute, you know, the, what was really helpful for my parents was finding other people like mom, who had been sick.

And I don't remember, she was the only one I remember that had been sick because of a gas leak. But I do remember a couple people in our family friends that had been completely normal. And then one day, a pesticide company came in and did all the lawns in the neighborhood. I think it was called chem lawn. And then they just snapped and they were like, mom, the next day. So there was something in their body that just couldn't take massive amounts of pesticides, you know, throughout the entire neighborhood on their lawn and their front lawn

in their backyard. And you know, that made sense to me, at least there was an event. Pesticides are probably not good for any of us, but your body and my body, we can fight that off. So I remember that really helped me too, is saying, mom is not alone. There is a community of environmentally sensitive patients. And my dad was just this hero through the whole thing. He doesn't

lever. I mean, they slept in separate beds for almost 10 years because there was a period of time, but she needed to be in this special room. And there was a period of time where he would make her sick, the candida. I mean, there was just always, always something making her sick. And he just stuck by her. I mean, it was very loyal, tried to do the best he could with me and take me to baseball when he could and soccer and give me the most normal life that he could. But it was far from normal.

You know, you, and obviously there's many kids that go through variations of this. But in many ways, you were sort of what we would call enmeshed, the enmeshment meaning you were forced into an adult role too soon. And I guess it's not surprising to me that as a teenager, you'd start to kind of rebel against that, because you sort of, you miss that period of life

when you have absolutely no responsibility. And you had the responsibility. I mean, it's hard for me to imagine what you're talking about based on a personal experience. But I can try to extrapolate that, you know, look, you were forced into a caregiver role, you were sharing care with your father of your mom. And so, do you remember when it started to sort of become frustrating to you? And, you know, my guess is the combination of adolescence and puberty by themselves are enough jarring

disruptive change coupled with the, you know, the soil of all you've experienced. I think, you know, there was a hope as a child maybe that this would end. And when you hit adolescence and, you know, I realized this was never going to end. There was no cure. And you, like, could you bring friends over after school and hang out or was that just too disruptive to the house? Only if they stayed outside. So there were signs keep out on all the doors, chemically-saces sensitive patients.

So no, they couldn't come in. There were periods of time later on in high school where if they did get pure and mom was in a different part of the house, then we could open up the windows and air out that room. So there were some exceptions, but the general rule was, you know, everything had all life had to happen outside of the house. You know, this is terrible for her, too, to not be able to, you know, play video against

Playboard games or I mean, she'd be watching out of windows, I played soccer in the back, but she couldn't really meet my friends and see whether they were they actually couldn't invite them into the kitchen and bake brownies. All these things that she really wanted to do. So there was a lot of pain for her feeling like she wasn't able to show up as a mother or as a wife. How did your mom cope with that pain? Emotionally pain. Well, my parents, there's one answer. She had this unwavering faith. She would read the Bible. She would try and stay positive. She would thank God for her symptoms

and believe that through these trials, she was getting closer to serving, closer to kind of having this pure heart. So really, just a remarkable extreme version of stoicism, really. If you think about it, I mean, I think, you know, the Stoics, Marcus Rillius and Seneca, of course, they don't talk so much about religion,

but there's still this belief that these challenges make us better, these struggles, this pain, without it, you can't sharpen the knife without a blunt object. And from home, I think that was, it sounds like no she was describing it. And in the picture of Jesus, he was suffering. And there's all these stories that she would find

in the Bible with people suffering and it being for a great purpose. They're being a reason for it all. So I just remember she would walk around and she would say, praise God for the fabric's offener that just made her sick You know, she was just trying to stay positive throughout all of this So you know kicking up into the teenage years too I start to rebel against the role of faith the role of the church the rules the religiosity

I didn't like going to church anymore You know, it's more fun as a kid when they're Telling stories of Joan and the whale and the flannel boards, but not as a teenager. When you just realize you're not allowed to swear, you're not allowed to sleep around, you can't drink, you can't smoke. It was there a lot of rules.

There's a lot of can't do's. You know, remember, I have this vivid memory of coming home after school and mom, there was a period of time where mom then lived out in the yard, a friend built a lean-to. So she found that in times where the pollen wasn't too bad, the mold wasn't too bad. There were seasons where she would feel better sitting outside than in her safe room. And she would have this little egg-loo cooler next to her. She would have a chair, she would have a mask on,

and she would just protect herself from the wind, so she would be on one of these four corners, depending on which way the wind was blowing. And I would come home from school, and she'd hear the car pull up into the driveway, and she'd yell my name, and I would just pretend not to hear, and I'd walk in the house.

Which, you know, that to me feels like the, kind of the picture of, of this just got old. This was tiring. You know, I didn't want to go and find out what she wanted me to bring her. And I can only imagine that on some level that produces some guilt and shame within you, but at the same time, it's sort of a protective thing that you're doing because of all the sort of, the pain and the trauma that you've been, you know, it's been inflicted on you since you're four years old. And so I've always find like stories like this

to be so tragic in a way. And I mean, I think in many ways, your story has a happy ending, but for many people, these don't have happy endings because nobody's at fault here. This isn't about like blame or fault, right? People get sick, bad things happen. And yet families can get ripped apart by these things

in ways that aren't entirely obvious. And I think what comes next in your story to me is makes much more sense after I read your book than just knowing a couple of snippets along the way. Now, you're a pretty musical guy, right? I played piano, growing up, I remember my grandpa taught me at four, taught me on an organ, and I was played.

So then in high school, you transferred to a new school if I recall. Yeah, I gotta talk about the first high school. So this was also part of the rebellion. So I'd gone to public elementary school, and then they put me in a Christian, kind of Baptist middle school, which I actually liked.

But then ninth grade freshman year of high school, they put me in the basement of a church school and there were nine people in my freshman class and they couldn't afford enough teachers. So we would be taught by VHS video. So they would wheel in the cart. Remember those old gray metal carts and they would wheel in the cart. Remember those old gray metal carts and they had kind of the ribbed trays and they'd pop in science.

And we'd sit there for 45 minutes, which felt like it was 100 hours. And it was just terrible. And we had to wear these ugly uniforms and it was just everything was wrong for a 14 year old kid going to school in the basement of a church by video. And I was surprised this was accredited. It's amazing to me.

They did the best. And it's funny, because I know a bunch of people that came out of that school that did all four years and actually became very successful. I just at that moment, I wanted to explore the public high school. And it couldn't be any more different. There were 4,000 people in high school.

I think my parents saw something in, something simmering maybe in my personality that really scared them, throwing me into this worldly high school where undoubtedly there would be drugs and sex and drinking and ungodly things going on. And I remember just saying, look, I'm gonna run away from home or I'm not going back to school. And they said, you know, and I was smart enough to say,

look, I'm not being challenged, academically challenged. I was an avid reader growing up. I remember getting a job when I was, I think I was 14 writing or 14 to 15, writing for the local county newspaper. So I was a avid reader growing up. I remember getting a job when I was, I think I was 14, writing or 14 or 15, writing for the local county newspaper. So I was a pretty good writer. I was an avid reader. TV was just TV made mom sick. So we did have a tiny TV, but it was in a room that they made really uncomfortable. And maybe I watched a couple hours of TV a week growing up. So reading was really my escape. And I move into the big high school,

and exactly what they had feared happens almost immediately, fallen with the wrong crowd. I fallen with a crowd whose older and is not really interested in going to high school, but was in a band. So I then joined the band, which was an alternative rock band. So it was kind of counting crows, meets Pearl Jam, meets life. And I was going to be the keyboard player.

What was the name of the band? It's called Sunday River. Just random. It was like a ski resort in New Hampshire we'd heard of and nobody'd even been to. So I joined this band and I grew my hair. I just started growing my hair out. So it hits my shoulders. And I become the band's, and I self-appoint as the band's manager.

And I am going to get us a record deal. So you're the keyboard guy. And the manager. And the manager. So I'm sending our demo tapes into New York City. And for some strange reason, people listen to our tapes and say, hey, we'll book you. So we start playing CBGB's, the wetlands.

This is like what, mid- 80s, late 80s. This would be, let's see, you know, 75, 93. Okay, okay. 93 to 95. And we're driving my parents forward Taurus station wagon, you know, I'm the throwing all the gear, the keyboards and the guitar. So we're driving in New York City, we're driving into Philly. We're playing, not that interested in going to school. So I'm a C minus student at best in this new high school. And I'm not jumping into the drugs that the band was doing. And I'm not jumping into all the vices yet, but they made it look good and they made it look cool.

So what prevented you from joining them? I don't know. I think I was still holding on to the virtue. I was still trying to stay pure, I guess you could say. So what was the best part for you in that moment? Prior to going further into drugs, or all these other things, was it just a sense of community and tribe with these guys?

Yeah, and play music was fun. Playing music in front of 300, 400 people, driving into New York City to the legendary CBGBs, where I don't know, all these great bands had been discovered, had been found, and then talking with A&R people at labels that were interested in being pursued by real managers. This was a moment in time that felt like we were,

we had a shot at getting a record deal. And a record deal back then, they were the thing. You know, there was Atlantic records and BMG and Virgin, you know, it was a really exciting possibility. How close were you to the other guys in the band? They know about your story at home? They did. They did. They did.

It wasn't that close. They were, in a way, they were, they were other. They were more worldly. They hadn't been sheltered. They, you know, had been sleeping around for years. They'd been smoking and experimenting with drinking and drugs for years. They were older, maybe two to four years older, so I was the baby of the band. But it was a sense of community.

It was fun being together, playing music, and driving to have these experiences. It felt dangerous. It felt edgy. So I barely graduate high school. I remember up until the very last day, neither my parents nor I knew whether I would actually have enough attendance credits to get the high school diploma. I mean, I was on the brink. It was one day, I thought shy of actually passing. And I would have to repeat the 12th grade. And I think I probably, oh, I probably got a doctor or something to lie about, you know, something. I mean,

I managed to pass, but certainly, you know, high school was not a pro-agenda. So, when you were a senior, were you applying to college? I wasn't, because I was delighted to announce to my parents that I would not be going to college. I would not be pursuing further education, because I would be getting a record deal. Peter, that's what bands do, right? All bands in New York City, and we get, I would be getting a record deal. Peter, that's what bands do, right? All bands.

All bands in New York City, and we get, I would be getting a multi-million dollar record deal. I announced my parents, so who would need a college education when you had a multi-million dollar record deal, and you were touring not just the country, but the world? And your parents had worked pretty hard to put money aside for you to go to college. They had, so there was a little over $100,000 sitting in an account.

Since birth, you know, he'd been putting in probably a couple hundred bucks a month or whatever he could. My dad was very middle class. They didn't spend money on things. They'd run their cars 15, 20 years and you know, they'd buy a Toyota Camry and keep it for 20 years. Would go to, you know, the diner when it was two for one special. So he was a saver. I need to say it for college. So this was really in a front to them. And I think what made it even more difficult

was that when I was a child, I wanted to be a doctor. So I was talking about Johns Hopkins Medical School. That was, if you'd asked me probably up until 13, 14, what I was going to do, it was a doctor to help sick people like mom. I was going to be in the meta, you know what I'm obviously going to have the grades to do that in high school and took a different path. So yeah, I moved to New York City by myself.

I'm the only band member that takes the leap, but I said, well, the band's manager, me, needs to be in the heart of things. I moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village. I was paying $650 a month. It was on Christopher Street in the seventh. And it wasn't too big if I recall. It was hundreds of square feet. It was tiny.

It was a sixth floor walkup. And it just felt amazing. I mean, I was living in the heart of the West Village alone. Yeah, that's the dream of the West Village alone. Yeah, that's the dream. It was the dream. And I start working at Sam Asch. So was that 96, 95?

So this would be... Were you here for the big snowstorm in January of 96? Do you remember that? I was, yeah. This would have been 94. So I was 19. And, you know, I start working at Sam Asch music because I wanted some pocket money alongside, you know, the start working at Sam Ash music, because I wanted some pocket money alongside,

you know, the very little money that our bands would make gigging. And, you know, I then realized that, so I actually met a manager for our band, who says, well, I'm actually a real band manager, and I'll take you guys on, and we signed a contract. And I remember him finding out that my dad had saved for college.

And he said, well, you're in New York City, you're crazy to squander that money. He's not gonna give it to you for anything else. So once you go to NYU part-time, you might as well get a degree. And there's Tish, you know, school of the arts. I mean, you're in the city, you might as well. You have the time.

And he'd been in NYU grad. So I then call my parents and say, okay, you can start paying NYU. Right, so I've got no scholarship. I mean, I picked one of the most expensive schools in the country. And I do wind up getting a degree, again, without any sort of color, so I mean, C student, really just putting in the minimum amount of work

to make dad happy. And what did you study? Communications, because it was easy. I could write and communicate. So the band breaks up. Which by the way, does come back to searching well. Well, I know there's a lot of this. It's so funny.

I mean, I've now gotten several awards from NYU. They invite me into speak. I just made a video for the commencement ceremony. So now I'm like, you know, celebrated by NYU. Many years later, and every time they've interviewed me, probably six or seven interviews now, I'm like, okay, so here's what really happened. Don't ask me this question, because I can't lie.

I can talk about the city being a great campus. I can talk about, you know, the diversity of New York and the community, but don't ask me what it was like for me, because I would, yeah. I was not your good student. So, okay, so I'm living in the village. I'm working in Sam Asch. The band breaks up months later,

and there was a lot of drugs, and we just didn't like each other that much. I mean, it was, we didn't like each other outside of the time that we were on stage. But I've already made the leap to New York. I've got this NYU opportunity and I'm making pretty good money selling high-end stereo gear. I remember one night's TB Wonder came in and I got to sell him $50,000 of gear and make a commission on that, you know, keywords and modules and all this stuff. So I was, I won some favor with my managers that I would get to do a lot of the big clients. I then almost immediately

start dabbling in nightlife. So you've got all this stuff going on. I'm at NYU part-time. I'm working at Sam Asch and then the guy that booked out my band convinces me just by way of watching him that I was always on the wrong side of the equation because our band would turn up we'd bring 100 people to the club paying customers and they might throw us a 20th of that or a 30th of that and say hey, here's a couple hundred bucks go split it up six ways You know, it wasn't even up to pay for gas or you know the guitar strings But I I love the idea of the nightclub owner, the person on the other side of the rope deciding who got in and who didn't.

So I try my hand at that and I join this guy and say, he starts throwing me a hundred bucks a week or two hundred bucks a week and I'm just his sidekick in the club. And what's your actual job? The job is to fill the venue with beautiful paying customers. And then you get a cut. And how do you go about figuring out who's beautiful and paying and get them into a club? Is it literally going out to a lineup on the street and trying to identify in the line who should jump up? That's a gray problem to have.

Now, you got to actually, you got to get the line. You got to get the line. So, a. That's a gray problem to have. Now you gotta actually, you gotta get the line. You gotta get the line. So a lot of that is just networking. It's being out, meeting people, getting their phone numbers, you know, later getting their email addresses. But if you were a club promoter today, starting at zero, you'd have to be out seven nights this week, and you'd be striking up conversations, hey, how are you?

I'm Pete, what do you do? You know, I'm in New York City and I'm living in a couple of different places. Oh, hey, would you want to come to a party sometime? I've got this amazing fashion party. We're going to be doing for Prada during Fashion Week. And you'd say, that sounds great. I'd say, oh, cool. I'll put you on the list, or I'll email.

And you might say, why won't I actually put together a group of friends? Great, I'll sell you a table. It's going to cost a group of friends. Great. I'll sell you a table. It's going to cost a couple thousand dollars, but I'll give you prime seating in the club. And oh, he has this amazing DJ flying in from Paris. And he throws parties at hotel costs. You may not have even heard of any of this stuff, but we make it sound so great.

It's a party that you have to be at. So we're promoting. We're constantly out there promoting. And now I have Peter on the list. And maybe you come and you bring a few friends So what did you do before email was around because this was phone all phone all just dialing But I don't have cell phones like how was home phones? It was office. It was voicemail. It was beepers We'd beat people they'd call us back

Email believe me the minute that took off we we embraced though right away, and then we started building one of the first email lists in clubs and open rates were 100%. I mean, it was extraordinary. Meaning everybody opened emails. Everybody would open an email, even a form email, like shut, or a short day, what would that open rate be? Five percent of you.

You know, maybe, I don't know. So imagine the next time, you know, Airbnb or, you know, Google sends out an email or app, okay, Apple's a perfect example, right? Apple sends an email, new event coming, new iPhones, maybe five to eight percent, would actually open it. Yeah, you'll delete it or I'll see it later or it just sits there. So back then, you know, imagine Apple sends something

and every single person is like, oh my gosh, I got an email. I got an email. This is so cool. So we start a list. And, you know, I just get good at this. And I leave my partner. I go start producing a live R&B open mic night at pretty legendary club called Nell's on 14th Street that, you know, is in Brett Easton Ellis books and in a place that Mick Jagger used to always hang out. So I'm somehow, you know, this skinny white kid from Philadelphia, New Jersey, winds up

helming this really impressive R&B show. So Stevie Wonder would come and perform. Shaka Khan would perform Prince used to come in and perform. It would be very. Prince? Yeah. I used to have some fun print stories. He used to, always, this was a kind of dark lounge,

almost Victoria setting, Victoria and Aera setting. So they're the old mirrors and the little sconces on the wall, you know, with almost the candle lights. And whenever Prince came in, I would have to go and unscrew the light bulbs. He liked to sit in a very specific area, but he wanted it dark. And then his bouncer would just, he would sit alone,

and then his bouncer would block off, he would sit backwards in a chair and kind of just tell everybody they couldn't say him or couldn't dock to him. And he would just sit there taking in the music. And then sometimes he would actually jump up and perform. That's so interesting. So he really was there for the music. You know, you get the impression a lot of celebrities like they like being there because they want to be the celebrity. But it was the opposite.

Yeah. And I remember we would say at the time, I don't even know that I was that insightful as you would, you just were. We're like, why would the guy come to a club if he doesn't want to talk to anyone? If he doesn't want to be seen and doesn't want to talk to anyone, well, of course, it was the music. Because we had these unbelievably talented keyboard players and drummers. And a lot of them had gig with Brian McKnight and Stevie Wonder.

So that's how the people were coming. You know, if your drummer has a residency at Nell's every Tuesday night, your drummer's like, hey, what are you doing on Tuesday? And you'll come by and you recognize people and you just, it's fun to jump up. So I got to actually play piano for Stevie Wonder on stage a couple times.

I remember I was playing overjoyed and Stevie wasn't even playing. He was just standing up singing while I'm playing keyboard. And it was an amazing experience. It was called Voices at Nells. Move from there over into the more fashion model scene of clubs because there's more money to be made there. We would call it models and bottles.

So this was the advent of bottle service when I guess a few of us promoters and club owners realized that instead of charging people $18 at the bar for a vodka soda, you could take the same $18 price point and charge them $500 for a bottle of absolute vodka at their table. And they wouldn't have to keep going up and getting refills. And oh, by the way, the $500 bottle of absolute cost to you, what, $16? Yeah, wholesale.

Sort of amazing to me when you look at the high end clubs, like 1.0 and things like that, what you'll pay for a bottle there, relative to the wholesale cost, it's, there can't be a bigger margin in any business in a history of civilization. But the value, if you actually figured out how many drinks you could get out of a bottle of stole, let's say, and then how much you'd have to pay at the bar, it's commensurate.

Because it's charging you 20 bucks for a vodka soda at the bar anyway. So 30 drinks and you're at a $600 bottle, wouldn't you rather have it at the comfort of your table? Yeah. So, yeah, the whole thing was just kind of crazy, models and bottles. So the way that the scene worked is we would have to figure out how to get beautiful girls inside the nightclub and then very wealthy guys would pay for the pleasure of sitting around beautiful girls.

So you'd have all your finance guys, the Goldman guys, with their AMX black cards and they'd come, we'd offer them at the door, we'd swipe the card for five or 10 Gs, and then try and they would buy tables, and then we would populate the tables with cool people, often models who would drink for free, and we'd party for free. And was there any interest in knowing or did it matter if these were professional girls or meaning professional girls, meaning women that we're gonna basically take money for sex for a series?

No, no, it wasn't like that. It actually wasn't like that. There was no official kind of process. It wasn't like that. No, we would, because I feel like today that's sort of pretty normal. I have a lot of friends who are single and they talk about this.

They're like, we're gonna get paid, with a woman, get paid. Yeah, we never did that. Yeah, the women are paid to be there. And, you know, it's just understood that like, there's a way to plus up on what you're gonna pay to go home with her. Yeah, that was far into us. I mean, this is many years ago.

No, we would make friends with the modeling bookers in the heads of the modeling agencies. We would give them a great experience and then they would come out with the girls. So a booker from a modeling agency might take out 12 of his models. We would make sure they had a great time. Everything was free from the food to the booze, but now you have 12 beautiful girls in a club. So it's like they're bait to get these guys in who are basically like the sharks, right?

They're chum for the guys who are sharks. But a lot of these girls would love to date the Goldman guy, living in the 12,000 square foot Soho Loft, you know, who might be a gentleman? Let's go with best case scenario. Right, right, right. So you've got the... So everybody's potentially winning

because this is a matchmaking service basically where you're doing the first layer of screening based on wealth and beauty. Exactly. But that's all we did. So then the rest would just happen. And if you got a guy who was a jerk or was too handsy, you just wouldn't let him in anymore.

So we would be blacklisting the bad actors all the time. And at the end, you wind up with a group of really cool young rich guys who are fun. The girls love being around them. They're funny. They're spending money. They might be even good looking. I mean, they're kind of the life of the party. And the next thing you know, you're in the same parts with the same people, you're in

Milan with the same people, you're in Paris. Like the party would travel around the world. So the way we got paid as nightclub promoters, we would just, so the beauty of the business, at least for a while, is that you're asset light. So you just take a cut of the total business of the night. So it might be 15%. Let's say, let's say it's 20%.

So you walk into a nightclub and... What were the best clubs back in? So we're now talking kind of late 90s, right? So I can only speak to my experience. The first night I went out was at Club USA and there was this famous slide there. The earliest clubs I worked at, there was the limelight. I worked for Peter Gation, there was the tunnel,

there was the rock sea, there was twilow. Lotus was a big club for us. I was there for many years. Pangea, Halo. I mean, some of the names, people will say them, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I actually worked there. So I worked at 40 different venues over this almost 10 year period.

How many of those clubs are still around today? None. So what's the half-life of a pot New York club? Maybe five years. Now some of the clubs exist because the liquor license is so valuable, but they'll just get re-skinned or repurposed. So some of the same liquor licenses are there in the same building, but it's now just a new look, new feel, new name. And there might have been six of those since I left. Six change of brand or even ownership. So that's kind of a blurry time to be quite honest.

Yeah, so what we've skipped over is band in high school, you're still not doing drugs, you're not drinking, you're not debatching. By this point, as a nightclub promoter, have we slipped into some of that? For sure. Smoking was first, then drinking, then lots of sex, then gambling, then coke. Started with coke, then marijuana, then ecstasy, special K, MDMA, you know, anything short of heroin that we could get our hands on as pure as we could. Why did you decide to draw the line in heroin?

We'd seen people out of D&D. You know, that was, and I'd seen it firsthand, my business partner, snorted heroin once by mistake and almost died. You know, emergency room, he was out cold unconscious on a floor inside the kitchen of a nightclub. So I'd just, I'd seen really bad heroin trips. Coke, you know, I'd never seen anyone die of Coke or die from, you know, ecstasy. So I pick up all the dark habits of,

you know, what you might imagine would come with a territory. I mean, our lifestyle wasn't a picture of health. We'd go to dinner at 10, you know, so the very late dinner at the trendy restaurant, we'd head over to the club around midnight, 12.50. And to the restaurant's comp, you guys as well? Yeah. Because we're bringing beautiful people.

So it made the restaurants look like a scene, and it was the beautiful. And they would do this for a few tables. I mean, it's the eye candy. Sometimes we'd bring in guys who would just sponsor the whole dinner. It depended on the model. And the question, you never had to buy a dinner. I wasn't paid for dinner.

No. During this period of time, how often were you going home to check on mom and dad for that matter? Every couple months. Every couple months. And I would do a quick 48 hour trip. And I'd, same as always, I'd turn up with my clothes.

I'd walk into the garage. I would strip my clothes. I'd walk into the garage. I would strip down naked. I'd put on the clothes that they'd left out for me. That was a period of years where it was medical coats or these gowns that they had gotten from you know a hospital that were sanitary and people walking around like lab coats, you know, hospital scrubs in the house. You know, my parents concerned? They were. I mean, I was living out their worst nightmare.

I was the prodigal son that had flipped them in church and all shred of morality virtue, the bird, and said, go into New York City, I'm gonna make it rich and famous. Okay, the band didn't work. Well, I'm gonna be the biggest nightclub promoter in New York City. And I'm gonna sleep with every hot girl that I can get my hands on. I'm gonna do every good drug, get my hands on, and I'm gonna live it up.

I'm gonna party. I mean, it was so opposite of the, if you think about the basement of the Christian school with nine people and the uniform, right? This was living. I'm out of my own. I'm flying to Paris for fashion week. I'm dating girls that are walking in the shows. I'm staying at the nicest hotels,

drinking the best wine, going to Paris nightclubs. I mean, it was just, it felt amazing. Were you happy? I thought I was for a while because I was collecting the markers of happiness. So, I'll just take most promoters, one of the first things you need to do is you need to get the top model girlfriend.

So you just have to figure out how to do that. So, you know, collected that. So kind of check bar. Then, you know, I got the car, the BMW, and, you know, then I got the Rolex, and then I got a nice loft, and rented a grand piano, and the great speaker system. And so I was kind of, you know,

as we would have a little more success, I would buy the things that I thought came with success. And there was always an emptiness in that. I think the more it just got really old, the banality of having to do the same thing over and over again. And I guess what I mean by that is you would change clubs, but there were periods where we would hate emailing

and then getting on the phone because the email was one way to get people to turn off. But if you called them in a much better shot, right? If I actually say, hey Peter, you got to come tonight. It's gonna be amazing. We would still have to call hundreds of people to every week to invite them to the parties. And I remember just hating.

So what was it, so did you do, was was basically seven nights a week? You're trying to get people to work.. And I remember just hating it. So what was it? So did you do, was, was, was basically seven nights a week, you're trying to get people working three nights a week, and then you're out networking the other, you know, three or four. So you're almost, you're, you're out most nights a week, but I would only be doing three parties, maybe a Tuesday night, a Thursday night, and then a weekend, a bridge and tunnel, kind of Saturday night party.

Let's say, and you, you've got to this a moment ago, before I interrupted you, but dinners at 10, so by the time I'm going to bed, you're having dinner. Yep. Then what? Then the club at 12.15. Till 3.30.

And then maybe home by 4. And then half the night's here at after hours. Well, hey, let's keep going. Let's go back to somebody's loft with a bunch of Coke to stay up, because you need that to, you're tired, because it's for the morning. And Coke's not good for sleeping is my recollection. Correct.

Not some personal use actually, I've never used Coke, but just from the pharmacology of it, I reckon it probably isn't too good for sleep. That's right. But if you start doing cocaine, or if you were doing it all night, you're amped up so high that at some point, you have to come down. Then you might take an ambient.

Again, it's not exactly how I'd actually do. Also not actually good for sleep, believe it or not, despite the fact that the FDA seems to think so. Yeah. And you might be trying to go to sleep on a hard-raging night that included after-hours or a party at somebody's loft. You're stumbling home and you really are stumbling home because you've been drinking all night and it might be vodka, red bull if you're trying to stay up.

It might be Coke, it might be, you might be on XC, which would have maybe a three to five hour run, maybe even longer. And it's 10 or 11 and you're walking home in broad daylight. You've been up since dinner at 10 was your starting point and you're looking at all these healthy people just going about their business and seeing their runners at seven in the morning. It feels disgusting actually. It feels, and you know, you're not a doctor or a surgeon on a midnight shift doing noble work. You've just been trashing your body

and the bodies of all those around you. So it really started to take its toll on me emotionally, on me physically. I write about this actually in the first chapter in the book, I just go numb. Half my body, I lose feeling in it inexplicably. And I start seeing neurologists and getting in my eyes and tons of diagnostics, and they can't find anything

actually wrong with me. It's sort of interesting. Yeah, the irony of this after all your mother's gone through. And my business partner says, well, why don't you lay off the three packs of cigarettes? I mean, I was such a fiend when he came to smoking. I smoked Marble Reds, two was the baseline, but if it was a long night, I'd smoke 60

cigarettes in a day. It's amazing. I'm even here. And I start trying to knock back all this stuff. And then now this leads into really the epiphany and the change. So the first thing that happens is I have a physical full-on numbness that is not diagnosed. And I remember running my left hand under boiling hot water. I remember exactly where I was in my loft,

and I couldn't feel it. I was terrifying. You know, I thought something was very wrong with me. This then leads to an internal conversation about my mortality and my belief system and the life that I'm living. So I imagine that I have a brain tumor and you know, or some horrible disease

because why else would half my, you know, have my body, the parasthesia was, it's never good. You know, if you go online and start looking at, you know, half or full body parasthesia, like it's bad stuff. So interesting, you know, now with perspective, perhaps this was more, I don't know, spiritual is the right word, but I think there was more going on than just the physicality of, you know, maybe the drugs had caught up with me. I don't know, the smoking, the drinking.

Around this time, a couple months later, I go to point to the Leicester for New Year's Eve, and we would always spend about two weeks every New Year's fleeing New York City. We hated New York around New Year's. It's just the whole. You just didn't like the tourists. All the time. Square, the tourists, everything was wrong.

I mean, anybody that was fun or interesting got the heck out of town. They went to the Caribbean. They went to, you know, they would go anywhere warm. So warm for us was typically in Brazil. We'd go to a place called Buzios. We'd go to Argentina. This year we went to Uruguay to put to the Lecester.

We rented this amazing house. And I remember the house came with servants who would cook and follow after us picking up our towels. And my girlfriend came down who I was sure was the most beautiful girl on the compound. She was on the cover of Fashion Magazine in Europe at the time. It was 6-1 and Danish, just beautiful. And I just remember we said, all right, let's go to the firework store. Let's spend $1,000 on fireworks. And then we blew them up next to the pool. And let's buy all the magnums of

Dom Paranjorn that we can. And then there's just champagne flowing. And then there was a party that wouldn't end. And it started on New Year's Eve. This is what it is. 2003, 2002. This is, yeah, 2004, January 2004. So it's the turn between 03 and 04. We have a New Year's Eve party. This is the be the last day at 2003.

There's a DJ that's come in and it's going to be on our compound. So we rented the sound system and people from the town, people from other houses that we knew were going to party on our pool. And I remember just getting lit that night and actually went to sleep for a few hours, woke up, popped an ex to see pill, nine or 10 in the morning. And sometime in the afternoon, I really wanted the party to stop.

I wanted all these people to leave. It's not a good luck. When a party goes on for a day, people look pretty ragged, including myself. And it just, I started having these realizations. This is not how life was to be lived. This actually wasn't how a beautiful compound like this was supposed to be enjoyed. I mean, we had wrecked the serenity of the place. You know, the furniture was strewn all over, you know, glass bottles broken by the side of the pool. I mean, this was just kind of, just gross.

broken by the side of the pool. I mean, this was just kind of just gross. And I just started doing some, when everybody eventually did leave, I started doing some soul searching. I realized that I, you know, I certainly wasn't in love with my girlfriend, and I don't think she was in love with me. This was almost a relationship of convenience. You know, my, I started reading a deep theological book called The Pursuit of God that my father had given me at Christmas and, you know, my parents for 10 years had been trying to get me back in church, get me back on the right track, preaching at me, sending me different translations of the Bible. I mean, this was all just falling on deaf ears, but there was something about this moment, the paresthesia, that just really caused me to take stock of my life, both spiritually and morally, and just begin to kind of say,

where am I? And what have I done? In a way. And I realized that there would never be enough, as I looked around, the interesting thing was almost everybody at the compound was richer. They were older. They had the plane. They had the better car. They had more money. And they weren't that happy either, Peter. I mean, this was, there was so much brokenness. There was so much wreckage. I mean, many of our top bottle buyers, the guys

who would spend $10,000 or $15,000 paying for the booze. You know, they'd run off on their wife. Sometimes their kids didn't talk to them because they were dating models younger than their kids. And there was a lot of brokenness. So this week for me, I remember just having a change of heart saying, I'm not on the right path,

and I wanna find my way back to the spirituality, the virtue, kind of my heritage, the moral foundation of the way that I grew up. This isn't working anymore, this sucks, this feeling sucks. I feel dirty, I feel degenerate, I feel like a hedonist, and something needs to change. Did you think of that in sort of a moral way, or did you think of that more in just an absolute way?

And I don't even know if that's the right way to describe it, but because I think you could objectively say all those things without applying a moral judgment too, right? Yeah, I mean, I think it was through a spiritual lens. I was trying to find my way back to God or what I believed that meant for me. And that was virtue, that was purity,

that was blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who look after the poor and who give of themselves in the service of others, loving your neighbor. I mean, I wasn't doing any of this stuff. So that was the sacred text that I'd been brought up with. And I think I started to look at it. Which is a really a lot of religion has lost that.

A lot of religion has... I mean, we don't want to go down that rabbit hole because we could spend another four hours on that. But the virtues you mention are sort of the virtues that I think people would uniformly agree are wonderful with or without religion, right? Yeah. And we were talking about this.

I guess as a 28-year-old adult at the end of myself, I came to see Jesus very differently, actually as someone who was challenging the establishment, who was fighting against the religiosity and the oppression of the leaders of the church and quotes, I guess, at the time, and preaching a very different message of purity, of service to the poor, of absolute love. I mean, I remember he called basically

all the church leaders the worst names that you could ever call anybody at that time. So I just, I rediscover kind of my faith or softly. Now this is still, so you get back to New York in January. You're still parting at the clubs. Yeah, so yeah, so that's what's gonna happen. So you come back to New York, you're back to day job. But I really have a heart change.

So I start trying to go to church again and I start trying to do less of it all. So I quit Coke for a while, for example. And I'm, you know, I try and cut down to one pack a day. And then there's times where I just, okay, I'm in a quit smoking. And you know, I go into the Nicarats and, you know, or the patch. And so there's a, my heart has really changed. The intention has changed. I know that I'm going to have to break up with my girlfriend and, you know, have the heart. Like, there's, who were you able to talk with about this? This is a huge internal struggle. No one. So, you're not that...

Yeah, I was just about to say, you don't sound like you have real friends. No. You have a lot of acquaintances, but they're not... They're not part of your soul, right? And the way that a great friend would be. And I wasn't going to give my parents the satisfaction of letting them know that I might be turning back around. Of a change of heart.

Or, you know, God forbid that I read Dad's book on theology that he sent me. I mean, that would just be, I had too much ego at the time. So this is a really solitary experience. I'm going at 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning and sitting at the very back pew of a church on my own, not telling anyone that I went to church. I'm wrestling with all these demons myself.

What's interesting is coming back from that trip, even your girlfriend doesn't realize what you're going through. We had a really shallow relationship. We didn't talk about real things. We didn't talk about hopes and dreams or suffering. So around this time, I remember it was interesting coming back a couple months later,

the incidents of numbness, they just stopped they just stopped as quickly as they started. And that was great. I didn't have anything to directly correlate them to. I had ratcheted back all the partying, but I was still drinking and I was still smoking, just less of everything. So I remember throughout this whole period of time, I was clearly, I mean, I was praying, so I was like, God, I need to get out of nightlife, this sucks. You know, it's not for me anymore.

And, you know, I remember just hating the fact, I remember feeling like I couldn't, my day job kept me in the way of the life that I wanted to build for myself. So it almost be like, that I wanted to build for myself. So it almost be like, if you wanted to stop gambling, you probably need to stop working in a casino. You probably can't be a blackjack dealer if you're also a degenerate gambler, even though you could do your job, right, and you're around gambling all day. And maybe you don't go to the sports book that night.

But it's just like the environment was still so unhealthy if you're struggling with that. So that's how it felt for me. And I remember there was just like this cry for help and the only person was to God, like God, get me out of this, show me what I'm supposed to do, show me how I'm supposed to live differently. There's a scene I read about in length of the book,

but something happened one night at a club and it involved a gun and it involved a bouncer and a threat. And have this you know really clear opportunity to take a couple weeks off and I remember renting a cobalt blue Ford Mustang telling my business partner look I'm out of here for a couple weeks you handle the clubs and I remember riding North like that's where I was going it's like where are you going I'm like North I mean maybe I wind up in Canada, you know, in Montreal or Toronto.

I grab on that trip, I pack my, you know, I pod, I bring a bottle of duers, and I bring a Bible. And in some ways, you know, there's just, I was kind of wrestling like, with the faith and virtue piece, but I'm still drinking and smoking. And I start to driving north. I wind up in Vermont, a new Hampshire. I eventually wind up on Maine. And I'm having

this conversation with myself. Again, this is just me. And I'm saying, what would it look like never to go back? What might the opposite of my life look like? What's the clean break look like? Like, what could I do? And it almost like hit me, the opposite of your life would be to walk away from all of these vices and go serve others instead of yourself, go serve the poor, you know, which is something that I'd never even conceived of before I hadn't given a single gift to a charity.

I wasn't a giver. I wasn't throwing parties for charities. Something compels me from an internet cafe on Greenville, Greenville main on Moose Head Lake. It was a dial-up internet cafe. I remember there were a bunch of gray Dell computers there. And I start filling out applications to volunteer at all the humanitarian organizations I'd heard of.

And I just, you know, they're 10 page applications and I'm willing to consider going anywhere, doing anything to completely change my life. So it's UNICEF, it's the Peace Corps, it's World Vision, it's anybody I'd heard of. And I go from there, back to my parents, to tell them that I'm gonna do a year of humanitarian service.

And there's a kind of biblical concept that I've been brought up with of a tithe, where my parents had always given 10% of their money to the church and to charity, growing up. And for me, I saw this almost as a time tithe. Like I'd spend 10 years living for myself, What does it look like to give one back? And completely give it to others. So to donate 10% back.

So I go to my parents and I tell them this. And then there's this place in one of my first club partners was a British guy that had a very popular band in the 80s. And he took all the money that he made. They were called Transvision Vamp. And he bought this beautiful Mesaum Forestier a house in the Peerney Mountains of France in a little village, maybe of 60 people.

And I had been there over the club years, maybe 15 times, I'd take in girlfriends there. It was just like my happy place. And I knew where the key was, I wouldn't even need him to be there. I knew how to open up the house and lock the house and deal with all the water and the electricity and all that stuff. So I asked him around this time, hey, can I just go hang out in France while I'm waiting

for these applications to be processed and figure out my next move. And he says, of course, you know, you know, where the key is, which was in this little rusty saucepan in an out building. So I go to this town, it's called La Prada, Puyloron, it's near Jinkla, and I'm alone again, and the rejection letters start coming in. So maybe this isn't a surprise, but no one will take me. Actually, it is a surprise to me. I mean, I can't imagine either that many people that are lining up to offer a year of their life free of service.

I think the resume scared him, Peter. I mean, what had I done for the last 10 years? I'd gotten people drunk. So basically, they're worried that, one, this is not real, and two, you're gonna show up in two weeks leave, and you're gonna have taken a spot from somebody who could have stuck it out. Sure, like who wants a party boy on their mission? You know, I wasn't a serious person.

Serious people don't promote nightclubs for 10 years, do they? Right? I mean, if you're the person reviewing the application at HQ, so nobody has a spot for me or anything good to do and, you know, never forget, I actually didn't have, I didn't write about this in the book, but I'll never forget this one moment where there's no cell phone reception in this village. And I was riding my bike, maybe 10 miles down the mountain from where this little house was, and I'm going through the main town, and my Nokia phone rings, which kind of dates this. And I pick it up.

The brick? I was like the little one. Yeah, yeah. The junior brick. Junior brick, little LCD screen on the top, square. Oh, I love that phone. They were kind of contoured. Right, yeah, yeah.

Indestructible. I mean, the Quarty, yeah. Just great phone. So I specifically remember, this thing was in my pocket, and I almost fell off my bike because nobody had called me and, oh my gosh, my phone is ringing and it was one of the organizations called Mercy Ships

and they said, hey, we've got your application here and I'd applied to be their photojournalist and this is kind of wonderful how this does come full circle because I dust off for this one, I dust off my NYU degree and like I have a communications degree from New York University. And let me come on your ship.

I will write stories about the amazing work that you're doing with a hospital ship and I'll take really good pictures. So I put up pictures on my blog of like my girlfriends over the years and beautiful buildings and in Prague like my Labrador Retriever and you know, they're like decent photos. You know, my travels around the world. So they call me on the phone, I'm in this village and they say, well, we're a little worried you might not be a culture fit for us,

but we've agreed to meet you. And I said, where are you guys? And they said, well, the ship is in Germany. I'm like, well, I'm in France. I'll see you tomorrow or the next day. This ship was in Bremerhoven, quite a while. It took me two days to get there on the train. But I said, quite a while. It took me two days to get there on the train.

But I said, I'm, this is amazing. So I take the train all the way up and I remember walking aboard this 522-foot hospital ship, this huge hulking white ocean liner that had been converted, gutted effectively, and turned into a state-of-the-art hospital. And I have a meeting with what would be my future bosses. And I convince them that I'm in this for all the wrong reasons. I believe I'm talented. I believe I can do this job. I am not going to throw wild raves and corrupt the rest of the humanitarian staff. Like I'm in this.

I've had the life change. I've always been pretty good at getting people to like me. That's a skill in night life. If you're building a list, I was a good host. I was always trying to make people feel comfortable inside the club. And who do you want to meet, Peter? No problem.

Come with me. He has everything OK. He's a drink OK. I would know people's names. So I was turning on all the charm. Basically what I'm saying. So I'm up in Bremmermerhavan on this ship saying, I will be your best photo journalist that you've ever had.

Oh, and by the way, guys, I also come with a built-in list. I've got 15,000 emails. I have a list of 15,000 people. I have been getting a drunk for 10 years. 15,000 wealthy people. Some of them were influential. I mean, Mick Jagger was on the list, President of Chanel, right, or people in fashion

and publishing and entertainment. So they say, okay, they say, we'll take you. And I said, when does the mission start? You know, three weeks, you report for duty. So I go back, I remember going to the de-Cathalon in France and buying flashlights, and you know, whatever I thought I would need for Africa, because we were sailing into a country called Benin

and then shortly we'd be going to Liberia, which was a country I'd never heard of. Actually, I'd never heard of either of these countries, if I'm honest, but I'd learned that Liberia had just finished a brutal civil war that had lasted 14 years and was led by the evil, evil dictator and warlord Charles Taylor, who had used children for a decade

and a half to slaughter an extraordinary amount of people. So I report for duty actually on the island of Tenerife. So the ship was going from Germany to pick up people in Tenerife and island off the coast of Africa and then we would sail into West Africa. So I joined the ship a couple weeks later on Tenerife. I get there first. I know that the ship is sailing in weeks later on, in Tenerife, I get there first. I know that the ship is sailing in the next morning and I'm gonna walk up the gangway,

I'm gonna surrender my passport, and I'm gonna officially join this mission. I mean, I'm gonna have a boss. I'm gonna effectively lose my independence because I've been self-employed for this whole time. I guess outside of the music store, 10 years previous. And I just was thinking about the ship and this idea of sailing, I guess it was five days to Africa,

sailing away to a new continent that I'd never been on, sailing away into a new life. And I realized that the best way to do that would be to go all in and just try and quit everything in one go, to figure out how to quit gambling. And I imagine you didn't have a choice. You weren't gonna be able to gamble drinking smoke on a drink.

I probably wasn't gonna get illicit drugs. Well, I mean, I could always gamble online, which I used to do. I mean, I used to gamble on women's soccer games in Czechoslovakia that I couldn't even see televised, just because I needed the rush of waiting or losing. So I have this moment, I was staying at the Sheraton in, I think it was Santa Cruz, the town of Tenerife, and the night before, and I just sat in my hotel room alone, and I drank seven or eight beers, am still lights, smoked well over two

packs of marble reds. And I'm like, this is it. I'm just going to go out with a bang. And I woke up the next day with a brutal hangover and I walked up the gangway of the ship and it's funny in doing some of the interviews for the book, people actually remember me wreaking of alcohol. Did this guy just come from a bar at 7.30 a.m.? And I didn't actually know the awareness of that. It was so funny.

I'm sure they were saying, did we make a mistake? And that was it. There was something about the gangway was going to come up and I was going to leave all of this stuff on land and sail away from it. And it was a clean break. So from that moment, this is now 14 years ago, I've never had another cigarette. I've never touched Coke or X or any of that stuff. I've never gambled again. I haven't looked in a pornographic image in 15 years.

I walked so far away from my former life. I drink a little bit. I like craft IPAs and red wine. What was the withdrawal from the nicotine in particular? So hard. So hard. And I had had failed attempts at smoking. I think a certain grace of being around medical professionals,

which probably made it feel like the new norm was not smoking. The new norm was being healthy and helping people. I used a bunch of the gum at the time and I think I used the patch. But I just did it. And there were, by the way, there were the engineers that would smoke. Yeah, I was going to say I'm guessing there were, you could have got a sugar rep. Sure, sure, sure. There was still a ship-salt culture of the people that worked in the engine room and they'd all be having to cigarette on the deck or they were authorized smoking places for them.

But that was it for me. And that allowed me to, it really felt like a do-over. It felt like 28 years, you know, I could close that book. And I was starting on page one of a new blank book, and I got to really create a completely new life and a new story for myself as a humanitarian of all things. So what was that, what was that you're like? I mean, in terms of, did you develop relationships or friendships that where you could start to share

the stuff that had been previously just completely an internal monologue? Yeah, it was an amazing place, Peter, and someone asked me recently during an interview, they said, look, so many people struggle with these addictions and they can't get out of it. What do you think it was that allowed you to walk so cleanly? I think the environment had a lot to do with it.

I went from an environment where all that was the norm to an environment of like Christian doctors, who were helping people get well. The best surgeons and nurses in the world that had given up their vacation time to use their skills in the service of others. So that really helps. And I love the new norm.

Like I embraced the new norm. The new norm was healthy. It was up early. It was saving people's lives. I mean, it was in the most profound and visually evident way possible. So we specialized in max-low facial surgery. So these doctors would look for people with tumors

with clef lips, with clef palates. We did a lot of cataracts and people who were completely blind and we could remove the cataracts and put it in our beds. And you had an OR on the actual beds. Yep, there were three or four operating theaters. I remember when we sailed into Liberia, it was the only the only CT scan in four neighboring countries, the only working CT scanner. What are the major organizations? So you had these and even better, the quality of the medical staff was so extraordinary because you'd have these doctors flying in from London or Berlin or New York or Los Angeles who would do, I don't know, three weeks, often three months, and they would just say,

I can do this. I could go to the Maldives and stay at the Four Seasons, or I could fly to Liberia, and I could operate on 46 cleft patients and get 46 people their lives back. So, and my job, the amazing thing is that I have the best job on a ship of 350 volunteers. I would say my job is better than the chief medical officer or the surgeons, because I get to document

all of the life-saving wonder that is happening. It is my job to photograph every single person that goes through the operating theater and document that transformation. So the way that we would find patients in some ways, not unlike how some club promoters would fill clubs, we flired the country. We made thousands of flyers. The flyers had the pictures of the facial tumors, the cleft lips, a lot of the burn reconstructions that we were doing and seeing after the war, stuff like flesh eating disease, cancrimoris, noma,

these really horrible diseases, which I later learned some of them were caused by water. And it was like a casting call. We'd say, if you look like one of the people in these pictures, or if you know someone with these afflictions, turn up on this day and our doctors will see you and we'll triage you. So the profound moment for me was my, and this happens quickly. So we sail in to Port,

have been in, patients screening the triage day is three days later. So everybody's prepping and I learned that the government has given us a football stadium, the soccer arena in the center of the city. And it was called Lizzaldi Desart. And I know also that we have 1500 surgery slots to fill. So in a best-case scenario, we are gonna hand out 1500,

hey come on this day at this time and we'll run 1500 people through our surgery hospital. Over four months and then we'll pick up and we'll sail to Liberia where we'll spend eight months in Liberia. So actually we'll spend a year. Third day there, I remember it very vividly. It was five in the morning, you know, I couldn't sleep the night before I was so excited to see who's going to turn up. I mean, is it possible that there's 1500 people in this country with these radical, crazy afflictions and conditions? And I grabbed my two Nikon cameras, you know, my wide-angle lens, my portrait lens, all my batteries, and I put on hospital scrubs,

and I jump in this convoy of Land rovers, maybe 20 land rovers, all heading towards the stadium. And as we turn the corner to actually see the stadium, I see the parking lot and there's 5,000 people waiting to get in. In the early morning, 5,000 people have gathered in this mess. And you know, it just hits me, look, we're going to turn thousands of people away. You know, the need is so much greater than our response. We don't have enough doctors, we don't have enough money. Are there local doctors there that could be trained? They are, and that's something that the organization has done,

but there aren't the medical facilities of the quant, so I'll give you an example in Liberia. Liberia has one doctor for every 50,000 of its citizens at the time. I believe our number here is one for 300. So for every 300 Americans, there's a doctor. For every 50,000 librarians, there were two surgeons that we'd heard of in a country of a few million people, but no, we're not operating. So the surgeon, even if you were a surgeon, like you'd have to operate on the

bush, there was no working medical facility or operating theater. So we had the best hospital going, you know, on our ship. So it just, that was a really, really hard moment for me. Throughout that first triage day, I felt like I wept 40% of the day because the stuff that I saw I just wasn't prepared for. Kids choking to death on four pound benign, fleshy tumors. People with their faces completely rotting

from disease, people who had been burned so badly by rebel soldiers often who had poured, you know, oil over their bodies or the bodies of their children. It was, I was in no way prepared to see it way prepared to smell rotting flesh and have to take a photo of someone six inches from their face. I mean, it felt like I was violating them, but these were the medical photos. These were the beforas that hopefully would have amazing after-story. So, my first friend, who I write about in the book, was a little boy named Alfred, and

he was joking to death on his face with an Amelia Blastoma big Fleshy pink tumor that had just grown and grown and grown and grown over four years and His mom had actually taken him to witch doctors and they had cut him with knives and with sharp stones They'd put pastes and Concoctions on the tumor. They had chanted to, you know, spirits. And the tumor just keeps growing. That's what tumors do. How did you guys triage?

Was the, if you only had 1500 slots for 5,000 people, was it based on medical need? Nurses were just rolling through the line. I will say some people came with conditions that we couldn't treat. Some people just came to see a doctor. They heard the doctors were coming. Some people came with conditions that we couldn't treat. Some people just came to see a doctor. They heard the doctors were coming. Some people came with broken feet. Some people came with terrible cancer that had metastasized all throughout their body.

And we weren't able to help. There was a, I remember there were some boys that came with them, Burkets, lymphoma. We didn't have a good way to treat. You can't operate. They're either eye-sacral treatment. We weren't in the business of chemotherapy. We were in the business of operating, you know, on the benign stuff. So you know, poor Alfred, you know, is just this terrified little boy and I just determined

that he's going to be my first friend. And I'm going to see his story all the way through. And he's going to be the first story that I share with the 15,000 people for my former life of what we're really doing here. So thankfully for me, he was, I think he was first in line that day and he gets a surgery date three days later. So we just get to work.

Triage, two days, and then the next day surgery starts and people start turning up and the operating theaters are just scheduled out. And then the recovery ward had 42 beds. This is, you know, this is a proper hospital. So I'm there as Alfred walks up on the ship. His father, Besan, brings him and I'm documenting his surgery. So I'm in the operating theater all the time. I just love, I love the blood. I loved like just the visceral like change, you know, seeing someone, seeing a surgeon open up

someone's face and then fix it and then put it back together I just was the most fascinating thing. So I probably Documented 50 surgeries in scrubs, you know with my cameras right there They would they would allow me to get sterile and then just be there documenting it So Alfred's was my first and they just take this giant tumor and they cut it out and they put an titanium plate because his jaw had been completely moved blown out really by the tumor and they cut it out and they put it in a titanium plate because his jaw had been completely moved, blown out really by the tumor. And a couple weeks later, I got to take him home to his village and I'm falling behind him with my camera.

And he's in his best clothes and I'm watching the village surround this little boy that they thought was cursed, that they thought was written off for dead. And they're looking at him and they're touching his face and he's like a celebrity in the village. And that was my first kind of all the way through. Oh wow, we're going to be able to do that 1,500 times. We're going to so transform people's lives. When you write a book after two years, you see some of these little parallels.

As radical as my life changed was from the dirty degenerate drug addict to now this humanitarian photographer trying to tell stories of these incredible doctors and patients. I remember a woman soon after named Margarit and she had gone blind in her 20s. So she could see her whole life and then exposure to the equatorial sun with no UV. She had these huge cataracts. I mean, you could see them. They were shunned.

Oh, hey. Yeah, they have these huge capacities over their eye. And so she'd gone completely blind. So she couldn't see her family, couldn't see her kids. So I remember being in the operating theater as this one of the surgeons, getting a Glenn Price, makes a little slit from what I remember,

he just sticks tweezers in and he pulls out the cataract and then he pops in the new lens. He think took like 15 minutes. Right, I remember thinking I could totally do that. Like you could train me to be a cataract surgeon right now. I mean, it just seems so simple. You know, a scalpel, make the slit, pop it out, pop it in, and then put a bandage on.

And there's probably some surgeons now that are like, if there's way more to it than that, but it felt so simple as a documentarian. Did this sort of rekindle that thing that you had when you were 13 and you wanted to go to Johns Hopkins and you wanted to become a doctor? Did you now find yourself saying, wait a minute, I'm definitely, I don't wanna go back

to being a club promoter, I wanna be a doctor. Well, I almost got to be a doctor. I was living vicariously through all the doctors all the time. You know, in a way I felt like I was a part of all these patient stories. And the doctors would come and go, and I was the constant. This one woman made such an impression on me, stories and the doctors would come and go and I was the constant. This one woman made such an impression on me because I think it was actually

a, it might have been two days later, we were going to remove the bandages and there's a little bit of healing that took place. So I just, I saw the moment that I wanted to capture because I'd met her blind, I'd interviewed her, I'd seen the surgery and documented that. So I go down there when they start taking off the bandages and I'm just snapping stills, like click, click, click, click, click, click. And she starts screaming. Just the flash. She tackles me, dancing, screaming, glory, glory, like tackles her sister that she can now see. And it was just this euphoric moment.

I mean, there's, you know, going from being blind to being able to see. It's hard to imagine that. It's hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine what that would be like. Like, I can still, I can just put myself in that tiny little room where it all happened. And I think Peter, I wanted to share these stories with people. In the same way that, you know, there was a period of time where I wanted to share a story that if you got past my velvet rope and spent thousands of dollars on booze and you were seen with the

beautiful people or maybe you went home with the right beautiful people, then your life had meaning. This was real meaning. I mean, this was life transformation. This was real sacrifice and generosity by these doctors, by the donors that were paying for these surgeries. And I think I wanted to, I just wanted to share every story. So I just start blasting my club list with Alfred's story, with Marguerite's story, with the picture of the 5,

or the 3,000 people that we turned away when we closed the doors of the stadium and the triage was finished. And these people who are getting these emails, they don't know what's happened. The last thing they remember is Scott was our hookup and then Scott kind of vanished because I don't imagine you sent a retirement letter.

I actually did. I sent a retirement letter. I went back and saw it recently. It was a little hindmighty. Like I'm leaving nightclubs behind to go explore humanitarian journey. Definitely some eye rolling now, back on the email. But I did announce what I was doing

and I said, you are all gonna come along for the ride. I teased that you're gonna come on the journey with me and what I see you're gonna see. So what they started seeing was giant, fleshy tumors and some, you know, leprosy and just some crazy stuff. And you know, of course, there's a few unsubscribe. Some people said, take me off this list. I enjoyed the Prada Party, you threw ones, but I'm not down with the tumor party.

You know, like don't need to see someone's face eaten by leprosy. But the response that I got from most people was, this is amazing. I didn't know that this ship existed. I didn't know that there were doctors who cared so much that they would even do this. How do I get on the ship? How do I give money?

How much did the surgery cost? About $400. How do I send in $400? Well, here's how you do that. So I remember this one woman writes me and she says, it's the middle of the day. I'm sitting here at Chanel headquarters. I'm in a brightly lit office

and tears are streaming down my face. I can't believe what I've just seen and what I've read. I need to do something. I need to be a part of this. And so I have this immediate feedback loop that my stories are moving people. The photos, the images are moving people. I think what I learned there, that it wasn't just a writing, it was actually the images. I came across a quote this week that I love so much that I have never, I'd never heard of before until this week, but it's from Carl Young and it says, transformation can only take place in the presence of images.

And I think there was something so arresting or disrupting about these photos, perhaps the extremity of a huge tumor and then the tumor's gone, of cataracts, like saucers that you can see and then gone that really worked along with the stories that I was writing. If I just said, hey Alfred's this 14 year boy and he's spins up and getting on his you know face with a big pink, fleshy tumor, there's one way to do it. But when you see it, when people saw it, it really, it moved them. So I do this

for a year and I'm just telling story after story. My list actually starts to grow a little bit. The other thing I forgot to mention is that I had to pay $500 every month to volunteer. So this was, you talk about the dream or the prayer was to create the opposite of my life. I actually wound up in the poorest country in the world paying money to volunteer. And this was how Mercy Ships helped support the organization. They got all the crew to raise their own support for room and board and, you know, for food. And that was a big income stream for them.

So I'm basically going broke on the ship. Not only am I not earning an income, it cost me money to be there. And you're learning back to a point we had earlier, you're learning about what a really efficient nonprofit can do. Sort of. Pieces. But I'm learning. I'm learning.

I'm getting an inside look at a nonprofit. And for sure, the medical work was amazing and transformative. But I also got to look at a little bureaucracy. Yeah. How a big charity might work and some of the blockers. One of the amazing things for me was that my boss on the ship, he didn't know how to handle me. He didn't know how to handle this New York City, crazy guns blazing 80 hour a week worker.

So he just gave me an incredible amount of rope. I mean, I took over a photo office and I made that my own. And I was really like this lone ranger. You know, he would initially assign me to take the photos and then someone else to write the story. I'm like, no, I'm doing it all myself. I have to be a one-stop shop. And, you know, I think, gosh, that drove me.

I think you just knew that I needed some element of autonomy to feel like I could own the whole experience. And I worked around the clock. I mean, there was nothing else. There was no dating. There was no, it was just all work. When did the pangs start to go away? I'm sure at some point initially,

when you got on that ship, you were still missing the sex, the girlfriend, the booze, the drugs, the cigarettes. I mean, was there a day when you sort of woke up and realized like, actually, I'm happier now than I was back then? It felt almost instant. Wow.

Because I was so busy in a different direction. Every single intention, every single task, every, you know, everything I was reading, it was the whole community. Everything changed. It's like I went from being on the death star to being around the people of light. Well, it's a very good point you brought up earlier. I used to have a slightly different way of explaining that to patients. When I was at Hopkins, we would see a lot of folks in the ER who were using IV drugs. So heroin was a pretty rampant in Baltimore at the time.

It might still be, actually. And whenever we'd get a patient in there, usually it was to debris to an abscess or something like that. You sort of had to explain to them, look, you don't get an infinite number of shots on goal here. This is going to kill you really soon. You're going to get endocarditis. You're going to get an infection that's not going to be, it's going to kill you before

we get to it. You can't just go back to where you came from. To kick a heroin habit, you need a new life. You need a new group of friends. You need a new place to live. And so it's a year later. Do you come back to New York?, do you come back to New York? So I do come back to New York. And that was probably the hardest part. Because then all the

temptations are there. Exactly. The old girlfriend was still around and hadn't moved on yet. The party was still there. I would say, look, I felt during, so when I come back, I put on an exhibition of my photos in order to raise money from Mercy Ships and I You're gamefully unemployed at this point. I'm crashing with my old club partner and You know kindness of strangers really at this point because nightclub promoters Okay, I can only speak for myself. I was not good at saving money. I was fantastic at spending a little more than I made every single year. So I came back, broke, I'd been giving all my money to Mercy Sheps, the people that I

met along the way. Many of these patients, you know, I'd wind up supporting afterwards. I mean, Alfred, I'm actually still supporting 15 years later because, you know, I've helped him become a plumber and it's been a joy to be able to do. But yeah, I was definitely broke. So I come back and I said, well, what can I do that would be useful? I could put on, I could bring people into the story in a space. Got a gallery donated in Chelsea.

It was a milky white gallery, so it felt like a hospital. And I hung up these sheets and created different rooms, almost like operating theaters or the ward. And then I put a hundred, I think it was 108 images together, creating light boxes and TV installations of patients morphing back and forth. And at the end of the gallery show, I asked people to donate the cost of one surgery, if they could, it was $380 or whatever they could. So my goal was to raise as much money from earthy ships as possible

and then go back and follow the money. So I actually come back to New York on a mission, which is great, right? The mission is continuing. It's just the venue has changed. The context has changed. And I remember my friends thought that I wasn't as much fun. You know, I'm not doing coke with them.

I'm not staying out late, but I still was in the clubs, trying to raise money and trying to get people to donate catering for the exhibition or donate printing. I'm still working the network. And I guess I just felt like, look, they're gonna be all these opportunities for me to slip back into my former life, especially now. And there would be grace for that.

But what if I didn't? In some ways, the analogy of, so I love, personally, I love this parable, the prodigal son from the New Testament, where the sun basically flips everybody off, takes his inheritance, goes very, very far away and winds up gambling, drinking, sleeping with prostitutes, and he kind of winds up in a bad place at the end of himself. And he says, I wanna come home. And he says, actually, that the servants

in my father's house are living a better life than I am now. So he comes home and what I love about that is the father in the story sees his son across the distance and runs out towards the sun. And in that culture, a man would actually never run and reveal his ankles in that way. So it just shows the passion.

And he throws his arms around his son. And there's no admonishment. Imagine the lecture that's been 10 years in the making. It prostitutes really drugs, three packs of cigarettes. Like, there was no lecture. And he puts on a robe. And I love that detail in the story. He gives his son one of the finest robes in the house.

And then he throws him a party. I love that. Like, he says, my son is home. My son who was lost has been found. Let's throw a party. I love the idea of says, my son is home. My son who was lost has been found. Let's throw a party. I love the idea of the change of clothes. So you got a sense of this kid who had just soiled his clothes far away, with the pigs. In some ways, I felt like I had changed my clothes. And I almost had on like imagine if the robe was white. I didn't want to get a dirty.

I could get a dirty, I could stain it, and then I'd go to the dry cleaners, and maybe I couldn't get it all the way clean, but I had gotten a new set of clothes, and why not keep them clean? So I just kept coming back to that idea that what if I did keep them clean? Like how would the story continue to play out?

What if I didn't get back in a relationship and start sleeping with my old girlfriend? What if I never, you know, what if I just stayed completely pure or clean? So I was actually able to do that. So how did you decide to start your own charity, which is really the cherry on this story, which is it's one thing to realize that you can do amazing work for an organization that's already up and running. It's quite another thing to say, I'm actually going to take all that I've learned and create an organization to affect change. Sure.

The next part of the story goes, I learned something because my exhibition is effective, and I raised about $100,000 for Mercy Ships. Wow. So I tap into all my exhibition is effective and I raised about a hundred thousand dollars for mercy ships. Wow. So I tap into all my own relationships. PR companies are donating, Jeffrey Chowderals donating the food. I just went, you know, Prada and Gucci are donating handbags that we auctioned off and we raised a hundred thousand dollars through the gallery and through an event for the closing

night. All that money goes to mercy ships. And I then go back and follow the money. Because what I realized was that a lot of my friends were really skeptical when it came to charities. And I could be this guide. They had trusted me certainly not before, but through all of the communications

and the photos and the stories, I was so prolific over that year, you felt like you were living in my head. If you were reading it and you were taking it in, I mean, I wrote, I'll, maybe 50,000 words. I was just turning out content, like meet the patient of the day. She's amazing.

Let me tell you her story, you know, or I'd be going into these villages and staying overnight and documenting video snippets of the welcomeings. So, I think a lot of people felt like they were really along the journey. So, I raised the money and I'm like, okay, well, I can actually raise money for the cause, not just be a passive documentarian.

It's a very strange thing. My most photojournalists would only, they would never get involved, right? You're just telling the story. I'm like, I'm going to get involved. I'm going to take pictures and I'm going gonna use those photos to raise money to affect change. So I realized that I have a gift for that and then I go back for another eight months to Liberia. So this is year number two. Still volunteering. So we're now into like middle to late O5. Yep. Exactly. And I come across the water crisis. So

And I come across the water crisis. So, this time. Would you alluded to a little earlier? Some of the times. Yeah, this time I got off the ship. And I, you know, back in Liberia, you know, most of my time, it had been the first time I've been spent in Manrovia, you know, on the ward. Now I said, I want to understand a little more

of the context of this country. And I bought a motorcycle from a deck hand, and you know, that bought me some autonomy and some freedom. Again, my boss was great. He would let me stay in the bush overnight. I would have to sign permission slabs. So I started exploring the country. I mean, going up to the Guinea border and the Sierra Leone border and the more time I spend in these villages, I see the water that people are drinking. And it just never occurred to me that people would drink out of swamps

or brown viscous muddy rivers. And I learned that 50% of the people living in Liberia didn't have clean water to drink. So half the country was drinking contaminated filthy water. And I started taking pictures of it. You know, children drinking from swamps with algae and bugs and that made you get actually see, you know, fish and worms and some of these swamps and like little kids are just drinking straight from them.

And my mentor on the ship was a guy named Dr. Gary Parker and I just started sharing some of the images with him. Like, look at the pictures that I'm taking out there. You see what's going on out there? Like the war zone, you know, it's a water war zone. And the doctors and the surgeons that I show these photos to all just start saying, you're like, duh, kid. Water makes people sick.

Dirty, you know, we know that so much of the disease that we're seeing is, is caused by unsafe water and a lack of sanitation and hygiene. And I get encouraged by the doctor that I most respected. This guy named Dr. Gary Parker who had a personal back. Sorry if I paused for one second just to tell his he was a California surgeon that had signed up for three months just like many. And when I walked up the gangway the ship for the first time, he'd been there 21 years. He became a lifer. He just never went back to his practice.

So, another real piece, so I now have a guide mentor that kind of like me, right, I'm gonna tie the one of the 10 years, but he never went back to his former life. So what might that look like for me? So he encourages me. He says, well, you seem pretty passionate about this water thing. And if you really wanted to bring health to the world,

if you really cared about impacting the health of millions or at the time of billion people, you would make sure everybody had clean water. And that would be a great issue. You know, you want to play doctor to the world. Don't help raise money for another $60 million hospital ship that can do a few thousand very effective surgeries. Go make sure everybody in this country has clean water. Maybe we wouldn't even need to pull into port here. So I start thinking about this and at the time I actually wanted to continue working for mercy ships. So I'm thinking about water and what I might do on my own,

that I finished the second year, and I try and work for them. I'm like, hey, what if I did my exhibition model all around the world, Berlin and Prague and in Paris and in London and, you know, let's raise huge awareness, let's make your organization and your doctor's famous. Let's raise millions of dollars. And they basically said, no, thanks. Which I don't blame them. I mean, this was a very conservative

organization based set of a dry town in Texas, in Lindeil, Texas. And some New York club promoter wants huge budgets to fly around the world, putting on huge exhibitions of tumors and light boxes. And I, you know, the stuff, the ideas I had were just crazy. So the door closes and they say, thanks, but no thanks. You know, you've really helped us. It's amazing. I think I helped them get 20 or 30 media items. You know, I got my photos published in the Wall Street Journal and the Independent in London.

So I thought I brought a lot of awareness and money to them. But that door is shut and I said, all right, well, I'm not going back to my former life two years in. What if I just take everything I've learned and start the water thing? Let me go work on water. And what would it look like if I dedicated 20, 30, maybe the rest of my life to helping people get clean drinking water? What kind of been back can I made?

So I just started. And that was, I have my issue. Like, let me try it. People clean drinking water. What kind of been back could I made? So I just started and that was, I had my issue. Like, let me try it. People need clean water. So I was living at that time on a walk-in closet floor on spring and mercer in Soho, New York. My club partner had taken me in. It was an unideal situation because he was doing heroin

at the time with his friends, but it was the only place I had to live and it was free. And he says, well, you know, you can use my living room and my couch is your office. And I did have a spare bedroom and then the closet floor when I got bounced from the little bedroom in the back. And I was on a mission, Peter, like from day one,

I'm like, I'm gonna be the clean water fighter. I'm gonna fight for clean water. And therefore, I'm gonna be the clean water fighter. I'm gonna fight for clean water. And therefore, I'm gonna be potentially the most effective doctor that the world has ever seen. If I could get millions, 10 to millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people, the most basic need for health. And I'd be working right alongside Mercy Ships

and eliminating the need for a lot of those conditions that we were treating. So how did you get smart on this topic? Like there's, it's one thing to take sort of what I would call the first order observation, which is, people are drinking a bunch of dirty water, dirty water's making them sick, that's bad. But then there's like the second, third, fourth order insights

that are necessary, which is like, what's at the root cause of this? What are the non-linear implications of this? How do you actually fix this problem in the most leveraged way and the most scale of the way? I mean, obviously today you know the answer to all of those things, but that's an overwhelming task

for some guy sitting in a closet and so how to figure out. Thankfully, it didn't feel like that at the time. I started flying around meeting with water organizations, started reading everything I could on the global water crisis. Then I started traveling around to Africa. And on one dime, you don't have any money. So I file for a 501C3 and I'm raising money then on the idea that our organization is-

So this is sort of like you're taking angel- Slice- V.C. early dollars- You got it. You got it. You got it. It wasn't even tax deductible. And a lot of those early dollars were buying me a $872

Coach flight to Ethiopia, where I was very inexpensive to, you know, run around for two weeks and often I'd be hosted by the local partner, who's covering room and bored and food. So I'm both trying to fundraise for my organization, which has a very clear mission. We're going to bring clean drinking water to everybody on the planet. We're going to figure out how to do this as we go along, but we are getting clean drinking water to everybody in need. I have a huge observation at this time,

and I realized that this isn't gonna be easy because the lack of trust that I had sniffed out a little bit during that first exhibition when my club friends were coming in and giving surgery, money, to mercy ships, it was real. Meaning the lack of trust amongst the donors. The donors. The donor faith that you're actually doing what you say you're doing, or at least you're

doing it reasonably well. People didn't trust charities. I would hear stories of, I don't know where my money goes. Charities are big black holes that eat money. You would hear stories of high overheads. I don't know the impact. Charity CEOs probably paying themselves millions of dollars. I mean, everybody seemed to have a scandal that they could readily pull out of their back pocket

to say, this is why I don't trust, you know, the big philanthropy, the big charities. And I actually found data behind that. So USA Today had pulled Americans and found 42% of people said they didn't trust charities. And this is, this is probably actually shocking to some people that are listening because who is more generous or philanthropic than Americans, right? We have this heritage as cultural reputation of being some of those generous people in Earth, if not the most generous.

Certainly my research when I was in the business of fundraising was that not only were Americans the most generous, but New Yorkers were the most generous amongst all Americans. People always ask me why am I in New York now? And I say in many ways, they could trace it back to my days of fundraising. There's a Willie Sutton quote, right? Why do you rob banks? That's where the money is. Why do you raise money in New York? Because that's not just where the money is. It's where the people are who are the most generous. And I, I remember being really surprised by that,

but also felt like, you know, New Yorkers really get a bad wrap sometimes. People sort of think of all these sort of wealthy people in New York, or even, you know, whatever, just the average person in New York is sort of a hard person and, you know, sort of fast living in blah, blah, blah. But in many ways, I, again, I don't want to take knocks at people, but I

just would have expected at the outset that other parts of the country would have been much more generous. And I was constantly amazed at the generosity of New Yorkers. Well, there you go. So I, and that's where we started really from, you know, that closet floor and from the couch of the drug dead and soho, you know, not ideal conditions, I guess. But to combat that cynicism or that skepticism, I'd come across a guy called Paul Tudor Jones who was a hedge fund billionaire and he'd started the Robin Hood. I should call that Robin Hood. Yeah, Robin Hood Foundation. And you know, in what I understood from his story, he also realized that donors didn't

trust charities. And he said, cool, tell you what, I'm rich enough, I'll pay for all the overhead of the charity. So that 100% of anything you give to my charity goes directly to the programs, which was education in the inner city. And to this day, the entire board of Rob and Hood, right? Right. So now it's him and his board, right?

It's gotten too much probably for him. But you know, initially you can imagine the idea, that impulse, I'll fund it. Okay, now what's your excuse? What's your next excuse of why you wouldn't give to help the poor here in New York City? If you knew that all your money was going, so I write him the letter, he doesn't write me back. I'm in, I guess, why would he?

But I wondered, it just felt so clean, so extreme. So elegant, two bank accounts. What if I open up two bank accounts? And I promised the public that all of the money they would ever give to charity water. And I wasn't very creative in the beginning, the charity that helps people get water, charity water. What if all the money that they give

goes directly to fund water projects that directly help people get clean water? And in bank account number two, somehow I'm gonna figure out how to raise all the overhead separately. No idea at the beginning, but I love the model. Two bank accounts audited separately and this public promise that whether someone gave a dollar

or a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars or a million dollars, it would all reach to a hundred percent programmatic. 100 percent. So now I interject one thing on my high horse here. I applaud you for doing that, $1,000 or $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, things, one, his talk really impacted me, which was probably five, six years ago, and then my own experience of realizing the same thing you did, that what my wife and I have decided going forward, we support only 100% overhead. So every dollar we give, we give directly to salary support of people we believe in doing charity. we give directly to salary support of people we believe in doing charity. And we do that because we know it's much easier to raise money on the program at

exciting. It's much easier to say, give me a thousand bucks to go and build a well. But my interest is, well, who's paying Scott salary? Because I'd much rather pay Scott salary. Yeah, we do the same thing. You know, we maybe seven years ago. My wife and I just decided, hey, we're gonna write on the check. You know, use this on overhead. Yes, use this for the, you know, or even use sometimes what nobody else wants to pay for.

That's what we say. That's what we say. We'll write a note and say, you know, I mean, go fix the roof of the building, go pay the foam bill, go take the extra trip home from the orphanage to go be with your family around the holidays. Right, don't have the orphan write me letters.

That's the easy thing. You're going to go get somebody else who doesn't trust to do that. Okay, so I'm totally with you and I know Dan Plata and really like what he's saying. However, it's been an uphill battle. He's been preaching that message for taking years. The data hasn't showed that it's moving people. So I was like, I'm gonna fight a different battle. I'm gonna go and raise all the overhead separately.

I'm gonna go find Peter and his wife, a different set of donor, a builder, an innovator who actually gets, or could get excited about the salaries. The office, many ways. And many ways what it comes down to, in my opinion, which you've already figured out is, you have to find people who believe in you versus the salaries. You know, in many ways, what it comes down to in my opinion, which you've already figured out is you have to find people who believe in you versus the mission. And those are two slightly different things. They can often go hand in hand, but in the end of the day, when I think about the

sort of salary support that we provide to people, it's because like, yeah, I believe in that individual and I trust that individual and all I want is their life to be easier because indirectly what you realize is their life is easier, they're doing better work. And what I think is elegant about the way you've done it is you've literally separated the financial streams. Yeah, they get audited separately. Yeah, that is so brilliant. No, that is so brilliant. And we took it a step farther than Robin Hood because I just, I love like black and white before and after. Like I just I don't do well with gray. So I said, well, if we're going to be out

there, that is the theme of your life. Scott, you do not despite the fact that you're sitting there in a gray sweatshirt right now, you do not do well in gray. So you'll you'll like this. I say, well, I can't be up there talking about 100% unless we also pay back all the credit card fees. So from day one, and to this day, if you went online right now, you pulled out your American Express and you go to charity, what, or you need to give a hundred bucks. MX gets 3%. You got it. So I get 97. But what did you give? You have 100. So what do you expect? $100 to go to the field. So in the other bank accounts, and I can talk about how we do that later and all the trials and that, but we actually pay back that three dollars and we send your hundred dollars,

your intended hundred dollars to the field. So that was pillar number one. Pillar number two was then when you have two bank accounts, I just realized, okay, we've just created a non-fungible, non-black hole scenario. So, why can't we use technology to track these dollars as they go out and just show people where they landed? So, if we were going to build a well in Malawi, we could say your money went here, or to Bangladesh, or to India, or to Cambodia, or to Bolivia. And, you know, I lucked into meeting the Google Earth founder when I was starting charity water.

I met him in a conference and they were building Google Earth and Google Maps. And I just realized I was going to be able from day one to geolocate every water project using their free platform. And all it was going to cost me was $50 handheld GPS devices. I think they were a Gar garment device at the time. You could go buy a Best Buy. And we would be able to fund a water project that help people get clean water. Turn on a GPS device, take a picture of the GPS,

take a picture of the project, and then upload it, and say, this is proof, but you'd be able to see a satellite image of your well. So if 100% was the first pillar, proof then became the second pillar, and proof would look very different in many different ways. We would have hopefully myriad ways of being creative and connecting people to what their money did.

The third thing that I wanted to do differently was I wanted the brand to feel unlike any other charity that I'd ever encountered. I wanted to build an epic brand, a beautiful brand, an imaginative, inspiring brand. And when I saw most charities, I saw marketing that I didn't want any part of. I saw shame and guilt and almost toxic marketing.

And you may remember the commercials from the 80s and the 90s with Sally Struthers and the flies that land on the kids' faces, it's slow motion as they look up and lock their sad eyes with the camera. And then the 800 number of slowly creeps across the screen and you give. And you give out of, yeah. And you give out of like shame often or guilt for feeling that you're in your comfortable living room

and these kids in Africa flies crawling on their face. Dude, that is so amazing that you brought that image up. Like, I remember the commercial you're talking about. I would have never pulled that out of my, the recesses of my brain. Had you not mentioned that? That's literally 35, 40 years ago. Yeah, I just went and watched them recently

to make sure that they were as bad as I remember. They're worse. So to me, the vestiges of shame and guilt and even the language, by the way, this is still pervasive today. The language giving back, this is unhelpful. If I snatch the mic from in front of you, you'd say give it back as if I've taken it from

you. And the language implies we have pillaged and plundered to such extent. We should probably throw a few scraps back to the poor. Let's give a little back that we've taken. And it implies giving out of debt or obligation, all unhealthy things without it. And I come across a quote by Nick Kristoff in the New York Times and he said,

toothpaste is being peddled with far more sophistication than all the world's life-saving causes. Charity brands suck. Doritos will spend hundreds of millions of dollars cleverly marketing stuff that kills us and our children. But the most important life-saving humanitarian efforts often have an anemic brands, where they guilt and shame people into giving to them. And by the way, this comes back in some way to the overhead problem,

and this is sort of one of the challenges in the nonprofit world that I think is really toxic, which is we have this belief that we shouldn't be able to pay people in a nonprofit. Talent should be free. People should be willing to work for under market. The reason Doritos can sell Doritos like you can't imagine the reason they can push these things on you is not just because well, they taste great. It's because they can afford the best talent to figure out how to A, B, test all of these different things.

And I think a lot of nonprofits haven't really figured out that there is a bit of a war for talent and nonprofits are generally losing it in a big age demographic. And my experience nonprofits can do a really good job getting really young people, fresh out of college who wants some experience before we're going to grad school, and they can do a pretty good job getting

really talented sort of gray beards that are, you know, at the end of their careers and looking to quote unquote give back with respect to time. But it's pretty tough to get an ultra-talented 40-year-old to go into a nonprofit when the alternative for many people, even those who are mission-driven is to go and serve a mission in a for-profit setting

versus a not-for-profit setting. Absolutely, and that is a real challenge even to this day. You know, give me an example that that we had posted a job for receptionists at a charity water recently, 1,300 people applied. So that's great. Yeah, young. Yeah. It's a really young talent pool. But you're right, the executive hires have been much harder. People like their charity people poor. And Dan has been fighting this for a long time. You know, I joke all the time that even now, you know, I'm 43 years old, I've got a wife,

I've got kids. I could drive a $60,000 Toyota and not a $20,000 Mercedes, because of the perception. Forget about the cost of the car. People are totally happy with me and what's the big, the Toyota Highlander, right? I gotta load that thing up. I could probably have a $70,000 Toyota SUV or a GMC,

but not a $24,000 BMW. Oh, he's reaching. That's why we were even talking about the watch, I mean, I'm not wearing a watch today. All this stuff matters. The perception becomes reality. So, okay, let me go back just to that bit. So our brand would feel different.

It would be imaginative, it would inspire, it would be hope-based. The last analogy I just want to make, I think Nike is such a great analogy. If Nike were a bad old charity, their marketing might go like this. Hey, Peter, you're fat and you're lazy. Turn off the TV, put away the junk food. Once you go for a run, once you exercise. Now. Instead of just doing our, by our stuff.

Yeah, yeah. So Nike for years has been telling inspirational stories of people overcoming adversity, overcoming impossible odds. Right, Nike believes that if you've lost your legs, you can complete a marathon. You can get over the finish line. You've lost your arm, you can still be a shot-putter.

They kind of, for years have said, we believe there's greatness within you. And then you want to buy the shoes, and then you want that symbol next to your heart that says, just do do it because the company believes that about you in their marketing. So charities, you know, don't do that. So we want it ours to be like, we believe you have a mind blowing capacity for compassion,

for empathy. We believe your capacity to be deeply generous and to extend your arm across an ocean and help people, you don't have to help. You don't have a debt or an obligation to help, but you can end the suffering because you choose to and you'll be blessed in the process. And you might even find yourself redeemed in the process of moving from selfishness and accumulation to helping others. So there was a lot of soft stuff.

I mean, now I have language to it years later, but I just, I want to share what it would feel very different. I wanted to feel like Apple or Virgin would have a personality and have a brand. And then the fourth pillar was, I was not going to send anybody that looked like some white guy from New York City to Africa to go drill a well or to India or to Southeast Asia. I believed in my travels, just what I'd seen in Benin and Liberia and then Uganda and Kenya as I traveled around looking for water partners. I just believe that for the work to be sustainable and culturally appropriate, it had to be

led by the locals. So our job would be to find the local organizations who could go and build these water projects. Our job would be to scale them, maybe buy them more drilling rigs or trucks or help them hire the hydrologist they need. But they would be the ones getting the credit. I just, I love that idea that our role could be, let's raise awareness for this important issue. Let's build a movement of people who say, we can and will bring clean drinking water to everybody on the planet. Let's raise money as efficiently as possible and as transparently as possible. And then let's have all the work be done by the locals leading their communities and their countries forward. Yeah, and the irony of that is, when you understand these problems, as you do, you realize that

is the better solution. That's the sustainable solution. Of course, on the flip side of that, it potentially deprives someone of the experience that you were so fortunate to have, which is your volunteers, I assume, you don't have that same body of volunteers. You don't have people ask me all the time, can I go drill a well in Africa?

Now, I didn't drill a well. So I wasn't the doctor, working in the rural area or the well drawer. I was the documentarian. I was the storyteller. So when I do take donors and I've taken about 350 people, including 50 kids, over the last 12 years, they are there to learn, they're there to listen,

and then come back and become advocates. Not to drill a well. I just don't need them in the ground. I don't need them standing on the drilling rig, you know, pretending like they're doing something that the local does have any. Be a liability potentially, you know. Exactly. So, yeah, we are not a good volunteer organization

if you want to go and get your hands dirty. So, you know, it's funny when I say this stuff, like give away 100% and just build a hyper-transparent money flow, you know, prove to people what you do with their money and show impact, build an inspiring, hopeful brand, and then work through locals. It all sounds like common sense.

I mean, but this was so unique 12 years ago that we exploded. I mean, people were throwing money at us. I think we raised $2 million in our first year from that couch. I mean, it were throwing money at us. You know, I think we were $2 million in our first year from that couch. I mean, it was just, it was just working. And there was a flurry of activity. We were shooting public service announcements.

We were convincing luxury retailers like Sax Fifth Avenue to give us their windows for a week and get their employees involved and their vendors involved and their customers involved. We were doing outdoor exhibitions showing, putting dirty water from the East River and the Hudson River in Ponds in these big plexi tanks and getting people to sponsor these exhibitions and getting MTV set builders to donate it with their time.

And it was just, it was startup. What could we do to get people to care about this issue to know about it and then raise money? You know, Scott, I know we both decided before we got on this, this doing this interview that we sort of had to stop at a certain point in time, which I know we've now gone past. There are so many more questions I want to ask you about charity water for the listener. Let's wrap this thing up in the following way.

If somebody wants to learn all of these details about charity water, besides going to charitywater.org or there are other talks that you've given that we can be linking to other places where they can learn? Obviously, you've got a book that just came out. Yeah, and there's so many amazing stories of, you know, the 100% model definitely came under trial, and there were moments of, you know, almost insolvency.

And, you know, the organizations now raised $330 million from over a million people around the world. And there are so many stories of heroism and courage from the community and failure. And yeah, so I think that's one place to start. There certainly are some talks online that we could link to. All right, so we're going to make sure we have lots of links. You've given a TED talk as well. Not specifically a TED, but similar.

Oh, okay, I thought. Was it TEDx or no, why isn't it? I might do TEDx this year. Yeah, well, you should be giving a TED talk, that's for sure. So, we'll link to that. So your book is called Thirsty? Just Thirsty. Thirsty. Yep, a little double entendre there, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all the proceeds, all my proceeds go to the organization,

so I won't make a penny off it. And I was telling you, I just found out yesterday it's a New York Times bestseller in the first weeks. That's cool. Yeah, it's fantastic. Congratulations. My wife was, you know, planning on that money to go towards our kids college funds. But like, oh, this is this is not the right thing to keep. You know, what this book to go out and really spread the story and hopefully inspire. Inspire a lot of people. maybe to start their own causes, maybe to join us, maybe to give them the courage and the inspiration that no matter what they have done in their past, they're probably not as bad as me.

Where can people find you on social media? I'm just my name, Scott Harrison, and charity water. Any books that you recommend when you talk about your journey, not just maybe what you went through 15 years ago, but even today, give me three books that have been not necessarily transformative, but have moved the needle for you in some way, in terms of how you've thought about either what you're doing today or how you got here.

There's an interesting book on the subject of poverty and approach called Whiteman's Burton, a guy named Bill Easterly at NYU that kind of talks about approaches to aid, you know, and good aid and bad aid. And that's one of the beauties of doing clean water is nobody tells you to stop. I mean, no one is saying that taking a human being from a swamp or a dirty river, you know, to providing a sustainable source of clean water is harmful in any way. But that was a really good read for me.

On a personal level, when I got on the ship, I was reading this tiny little book written by a monk called Practicing the Presence of God, which was just this kind of idea of surrendering yourself to others and trying to live a pure and virtuous life. This guy lived a very simple life he was cutting carrots in the kitchen and was just talking about really a life of virtue. You know, with kids now there's a book I really love the name escapes me right now. I just I'm on my second time around. I think it's letters to a god son by this guy Stanley Huervas. And he talks about he writes a letter to his God son

every single year teaching a different virtue. So I'm trying to build character about teaching about kindness, teaching about generosity, teaching about integrity. And it's a really, it's a really beautiful thing as a father as I just think about. And it's a book more for us as the parents, the best parents, for sure. Yeah.

But just thinking about how he conveys this and knowing the child will age into these letters. I think this is called letters to a godson. Scott, you're one of the people that I think even, I remember by the time we got to the airplane, you know, on that drive back that day, which again, it was like a 30 minute drive of which we wasted seven minutes talking about watches. I remember thinking, my God, this is not a normal dude. And dialogues are pretty impressive crowd of people. I mean, by definition, everybody at dialogues

kind of cool, kind of interesting. It's done, you know, they're not just selecting the smartest or the richest or the most whatever. They're trying to select people, they're trying to cur the smartest or the richest or the most whatever. They're trying to select people. They're trying to curate people who are really, really interesting. And so even after three days of being around those people, I remember thinking, this guy stands out. You're a real inspiration.

So thank you for what you're doing. Thanks for having me. Time flew. Oh my gosh. We didn't even, we didn't talk about probably half the stuff we wanted to. It's funny because I read most of your book before we spoke and it was like I remember thinking yeah we're never going to get through all this so but look I want people to read the book too so we got to leave some stuff out. Cool. Thanks for coming by. Thanks for having me.

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