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

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atiyah Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah.

00:00:10.140 The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking,

00:00:15.600 along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with

00:00:19.840 some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast

00:00:23.600 is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality,

00:00:28.360 more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode

00:00:33.000 and other topics at peteratiyahmd.com.

00:00:41.420 Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. My guest this week is a gentleman by the

00:00:47.920 name of Scott Harrison, who I suspect many of you have not heard of, which is not uncommon for this

00:00:52.600 podcast. But my hope is certainly that by the end of this episode, you'll be glad you heard of him

00:00:57.320 and heard him. Scott's the founder and CEO of Charity Water, which we'll talk about in great

00:01:03.620 detail. Charity Water is a pretty unique charity, not just in that the work they're doing is remarkable,

00:01:09.380 but I think the efficiency with which they do it and the transparency with which they do it and the

00:01:13.620 sort of financial model that they've built is really interesting. But truthfully, the real reason

00:01:18.480 I had Scott on was not so much to talk about Charity Water. And we do get to it probably at the end of

00:01:23.100 the podcast, but it's more to actually talk about his personal story. And even though Scott, as you'll

00:01:28.680 learn in this podcast, is religious, and I don't find myself to be a religious person in any way,

00:01:32.940 shape or form, I'm really moved by not just his conviction, but this sort of incredible sense of

00:01:39.620 purpose he's found in life. And it's really his life's story and transformation that, you know,

00:01:44.260 really moved me the very first time we met, which was about four or five years ago. And to this day,

00:01:49.840 whenever I speak with Scott, I come away feeling on some level, like kind of a lousy person who's

00:01:55.400 not good enough, which is probably okay, but more importantly, just inspired. And I'm convinced

00:02:01.180 that you will, you'll come away also feeling inspired by Scott who never once is the kind

00:02:06.720 of person that leaves you feeling like, why aren't you doing more? But Scott has really dedicated his

00:02:11.440 life to helping people in a way that I think many of us can only dream of. I would go so far as to

00:02:17.680 say, honestly, that Scott is one of two people that I consider the most remarkable people in

00:02:22.420 the nonprofit space. The other one being a woman by the name of Catherine Hoke, who some of you may

00:02:27.640 have heard of, she's been on Tim Ferriss's podcast, and I'm sure to have her on here at some point as

00:02:32.340 well. But, you know, between Cat Hoke and Scott Harrison, I find them to be two of the most inspiring

00:02:37.120 people who have really chosen to dedicate their lives to the public sector in this way. Part of the

00:02:42.640 stuff we talk about in this episode has been covered in his book. So Scott is now a New York

00:02:47.600 Times bestselling author. That book is called Thirst. I don't know that he'd want me to publicly

00:02:52.260 disclose what the advance was, but it was a very sizable advance. And he gave every single penny of

00:02:57.300 that to his charity. And all of that goes directly to the work that they're doing. He's an amazing

00:03:02.800 speaker and he's just kind of a magnetic personality. So I would invite you to take a chance and listen to

00:03:08.600 this, even if it sounds like at the surface, this isn't what I'm really interested in. But I think

00:03:13.120 you will definitely get something out of this and you'll definitely get a sense as I did of how we

00:03:18.860 can get a glimpse of happiness and how Scott on one level, you know, in the first chapter of his adult

00:03:24.420 life seemed to be living what many of us might think, oh, that sounds pretty cool and interesting.

00:03:29.220 And I can see how that would make you happy, but how he ultimately found something totally

00:03:33.300 different. And now I think Scott's probably one of the happiest people I know. So without any

00:03:38.400 further delay, welcome to this episode with Scott Harris. Hey Scott, good to have you here, man.

00:03:46.920 Nice to be here. Thanks for slumming on the Upper East Side with me.

00:03:51.420 Took the train up. It was pretty quick. It's actually a nice day, so.

00:03:55.380 It's beautiful. It's the, fall is my favorite time.

00:03:58.140 Where do you live? You live in?

00:03:59.520 Tribeca. Okay.

00:04:00.300 Actually Battery Park City. So we had kids and moved across the highway.

00:04:04.100 Got it. So we met in kind of one of the funniest ways imaginable.

00:04:08.400 Um, and that's been what, three or four years ago.

00:04:11.400 Yeah. You going to tell them?

00:04:13.080 Well, no, no, it's just, it's, I mean, you can tell, I'll tell the story from my end and

00:04:16.800 you can tell the story from your end, but we'll not name the name of the person who we met through,

00:04:21.320 but we met through one of my patients and we were all at this meeting called Dialogue,

00:04:25.660 which I've enjoyed and I've gone to probably four of them. I didn't go this year. This is my first

00:04:29.820 year not going in a while. And it was a weird day, but I had arranged for my family to come to meet at

00:04:36.540 the airport and then we were going to fly together on his plane to New York. And as we were leaving

00:04:41.880 the hotel, he said, Hey, I met this really cool guy. He's going to hop on the flight with us. Do

00:04:46.780 you mind? To which I said, how can you ask me if I mind? It's your plane. Of course I don't mind,

00:04:51.960 but yeah. Awesome. And so we basically, you and I met in the, you know, for the first time in the

00:04:58.220 car ride on the way to the airport, because dialogue is big enough that it's easy to not

00:05:02.860 meet somebody there. So we didn't actually sit in any sessions together. So that's, that was how we

00:05:08.580 met. And wasn't it your birthday? It was, it was just by coincidence that happened to be my birthday.

00:05:13.600 And the funniest part is we got somehow got talking about watches and pretty early in the

00:05:20.180 conversation. You mentioned, look, I'm on a budget, man. I run a nonprofit. I can't,

00:05:24.420 I can't be rolling with the high level watches. And I think you said sort of, what is your best,

00:05:30.640 what's your favorite watch, you know, on a certain price point. And I said, Oh, this is a no brainer,

00:05:36.200 man. It's a Seiko. It's a Seiko cocktail. Yep. And I remember on my phone, I pulled up a picture and I

00:05:41.340 showed it to you and you like, wow, that's gorgeous. And then, and then we, you know, we spent seven

00:05:46.040 minutes talking about that and 23 minutes talking about your story, which was really captivating.

00:05:51.100 But then if I remember correctly, your wife had then surprised you at the end of a flight with that

00:05:58.220 specific watch. That's right. This is the only time my wife has bought me a watch because she

00:06:02.280 generally doesn't like to support my watch habit, but she also knew how much I loved the Seiko cocktail.

00:06:08.060 So when we're on the plane, she whips out the watch, which I couldn't believe it. Not only that she

00:06:14.680 had done this, even ordinarily, I would have been very surprised, but how could this have happened

00:06:19.060 a few hours after we had just talked about it? And then you gave the watch to me, which was,

00:06:24.740 which was a wonderful surprise and, and nice. And then I think that surprised your wife even more.

00:06:30.280 Well, I asked her, I said, you know, Hey, I know this is going to sound strange, but,

00:06:34.480 and I love the watch. So please don't assume that like, I'm asking you this because I don't love the

00:06:39.200 watch. But I think giving this watch to Scott would be like, it's almost, it's meant to be,

00:06:44.800 it's sort of, he's meant to have this watch because it's what we talked about. And I told

00:06:48.560 her the whole story and she was like, yeah, you're right. You gotta, you gotta give him the watch.

00:06:52.700 Which I'm, I'm very grateful for. I actually heard someone in California who's a family friend

00:06:57.580 say once that on his birthday, he would give gifts to everyone else. He would give gifts to his

00:07:03.820 children and then later his grandchildren. So he would look at his birthday as the time that he could

00:07:08.020 lavish extravagant gifts on all the loved ones around him, which I always thought was so nice.

00:07:12.980 Well, and you have kids. So I think you understand what all of us understand who have kids. And I'm

00:07:18.780 sure there are people who have come to appreciate this even before they have kids, which I guess in

00:07:23.080 some way I did as well, but it is really much more enjoyable to give than to receive. And it was

00:07:27.720 probably two years before I went out and finally bought myself a cocktail. And it was funny. I kind of

00:07:32.960 forgot that I'd given it to you. And then about a year ago, I remember somebody on Twitter said,

00:07:37.340 Peter, please tell me best watch to get under 500. And I said, Seiko cocktail, here you go.

00:07:42.340 And you just chimed in on Twitter and made a comment that nobody else would have known what

00:07:46.760 the context was. But I was like, Oh my God, I totally forgot about that.

00:07:50.900 That's fun. And birthdays have been significant for me and for the organization. So that was just a fun,

00:07:56.800 really fun thing. So thanks for that.

00:07:58.800 Well, more importantly, let's talk about the real stuff that we talked about. Cause we had,

00:08:03.340 you know, obviously that car ride. And then we had like a five hour flight to New York when we got

00:08:07.300 to really kind of talk about your story, which, which I was just blown away by. And at the time

00:08:13.240 my day job was running a nonprofit. And unfortunately for me, that was probably the single, it's been the

00:08:19.820 worst professional experience of my life. I really hated running a nonprofit. I probably vented to you

00:08:24.620 somewhat about how much I hated fundraising, which sort of became the only thing I was doing,

00:08:29.540 but I was really blown away by not just your work, but the efficiency with which you did it.

00:08:37.260 And once you're in the nonprofit space, you start to understand what metrics matter. And look, I mean,

00:08:43.960 a lot of nonprofits are doing great work, but some of them are doing it with staggering efficiency. And

00:08:49.240 you know, I'm going to want to hear all about that, but actually the part that really gripped me

00:08:55.260 was your background. So let's, if, if you don't mind, can we start at the beginning?

00:09:01.660 Sure.

00:09:02.400 Where'd you grow up?

00:09:03.240 I was born in Philadelphia and my dad was, he had been working for Arthur Anderson. He was kind of on

00:09:09.460 the big accounting career trajectory would, would hope to make partner one day had me and then

00:09:16.160 started traveling. He was traveling all the time and said, look, I'm actually going to jump off

00:09:20.840 that track. And I'm going to, I'm going to take a smaller job, which went out to be a transformer

00:09:27.720 company, you know, selling power supply to the Navy and to municipalities. So we moved to get closer

00:09:35.160 to his new job, which would have him not on the road and allowed to just be a dad. They wanted a

00:09:39.960 bigger family, he and my mom. And she was a writer. So she was working for the Philadelphia

00:09:45.180 Inquirer and the local newspaper. And at four, we, we pick up from outside of a suburb outside

00:09:52.380 Philly, moved to South Jersey into this. I remember it was a very gray drab four bedroom house,

00:09:59.020 not their dream house by any stretch of the imagination, but it was 22 minutes from his job,

00:10:04.300 which he just had 22 minute commute. I remember he just kept saying that and it was a good school.

00:10:08.860 It was on a cul-de-sac so I could walk to school, to elementary school. And what we didn't know

00:10:12.940 was that the gas company had installed a faulty heat exchanger in this house and there was a

00:10:19.340 carbon monoxide gas leak. So we move in in the dead of winter and it's an energy efficient house.

00:10:25.500 So the whole thing is just locked up tight and we all start breathing in these invisible fumes.

00:10:32.340 I get a little sick, you know, headaches and just some kind of allergy spring up. My dad gets a little

00:10:38.140 sick, but we were only doing nights in the house and we were doing it upstairs. My mom,

00:10:42.600 unfortunately, was doing all 24 hours in the house, unpacking boxes, fixing up the house,

00:10:48.540 fixing up the basement actually. And on New Year's day, 1980, she walks across the bedroom and she

00:10:55.000 collapses unconscious. And after a series of blood tests, they finally identify a massive amounts of

00:11:01.680 carboxyhemoglobin. But this took a while. It was a period of a couple months. Yeah. Yeah. There was a,

00:11:06.460 this was a real, I mean, I, in your book, which we're going to get to, cause obviously the listeners,

00:11:11.080 I think would really enjoy your book. This was something I didn't even know from meeting you.

00:11:15.680 This was something I knew only from reading the book, but that was a really, really complicated

00:11:20.680 diagnosis. I mean, that was not obvious to the doctors what was going on with your mom. And,

00:11:25.720 and I almost, it's not even clear you're representing in as much detail just how sick she became.

00:11:31.080 Yeah. And what happened again, from my, you know, non-medical perspective was my mom's immune system

00:11:37.240 died. So it was irreparably destroyed. And she went from flying around the world with my dad. I mean,

00:11:44.200 they, before they had me, they were flying to Paris and to, to Rome and, you know, vacationing in the

00:11:50.040 Bahamas and in Bermuda. They were, they were completely healthy. She was a tennis player, just as vibrant,

00:11:55.540 amazing wife and then later amazing mom. From this moment, effectively anything chemical begins to

00:12:02.980 make her sick, very sick. Perfume, soap, car fumes, the ink from books would make her sick. The print,

00:12:12.240 the smell from a new book. And, you know, she goes from clinic to clinic and they wind up isolating her

00:12:18.560 and they find that by isolating her from all toxins, she can be okay. So that the healthiest they can ever

00:12:24.320 get her is drinking spring water, eating one organic food on a rotation diet every six days. So

00:12:32.240 breakfast would be cashews, lunch would be lettuce, dinner would be a piece of cod because she had a

00:12:38.520 slew of food allergies that came along with this and bringing her back from the clinics with this

00:12:44.240 diagnosis of multiple chemical sensitivity, or they called it environmental illness at the time.

00:12:49.460 And at one point, if I recall, she did a five day fast. They put her on water only to try to sort

00:12:55.600 of detox her and, and then try foods one by one. And she reacted negatively to almost every food.

00:13:01.180 So I think she had, maybe it was 20 foods at the end after testing over a hundred. So what I remember

00:13:08.100 as a kid was there was a miscarriage that happened around this time and then family planning stopped.

00:13:13.240 So I was an only child growing up and I go very quickly into a caregiver role to help dad take

00:13:20.280 care of mom.

00:13:21.060 This started when you were four or five.

00:13:22.480 Four. It happened very quickly. We then prepared a special room for her that would be her safe room

00:13:29.320 in the house. And I remember it was a tile bathroom, you know, a little bathtub and we put an army cot in

00:13:36.060 there for her to sleep in. And then we washed, we used to wash everything in baking soda. Baking soda was

00:13:40.660 just, it was everywhere in the house. So we would wash our clothes 10 times in baking soda just to

00:13:45.360 get any odor out. We washed this army cot that was made out of cotton, you know, at least 10 times to

00:13:50.980 get all the smell out. And then I remember my dad covered the door with aluminum foil because there,

00:13:58.380 there might be this slight smell from the varnish stain used years ago. So this then became her room

00:14:04.520 and she always wore these charcoal masks, which would also help just filter out. There were years where

00:14:10.180 oxygen, you know, played a part and she'd be walking around with oxygen tanks.

00:14:13.740 Tell me how high her levels were. So the diagnosis of carbon monoxide needs to be made through blood

00:14:18.640 and you measure a by-product of it. And once you cross, so, so most of us walking around should

00:14:24.420 be at zero. Yeah. What was her level?

00:14:26.660 Funny. I actually wrote about it in the book. I don't remember. I remember it was way,

00:14:30.100 it was shockingly high.

00:14:31.020 I feel like it was 20 or 25 times than the upper limit of what we would consider toxic.

00:14:36.760 Yes. And, and way more than a smoker, you know, it was, it was in the upper room. We,

00:14:41.980 we never tested dad and I, it was interesting because we, we were also exposed and I remember

00:14:47.580 bouncing back. So the food allergies kind of went away. The headaches went away.

00:14:51.020 Oh, so you had food allergies as well.

00:14:52.420 I did too. And I would, I would have headaches. I would have nausea. My dad eventually ripped out

00:14:57.300 the heater. So he found the leak and then, you know, threw the thing on the driveway. It was a really sad

00:15:03.200 story because my dad had actually suspected that maybe something was wrong with the stove or the

00:15:08.980 heater. So he called the gas company out a couple of times. They checked everything, checked the hose

00:15:13.080 and said, no, everything's fine. So it was a plumber friend of his that said, Hey, let's go down in the

00:15:17.700 basement. And they ripped out the thing and they found it themselves. And this, you know, this really

00:15:23.540 destroyed our, our lives.

00:15:24.940 And the gas company wasn't terribly accommodating if I recall.

00:15:27.960 No. And, and I guess most people would have expected my parents to sue for negligence. I think

00:15:34.520 a couple of things happened. One, they, they had just become Christians. They'd become people of

00:15:39.580 faith right around this time. I think I was two and they had a doctor friend, you know, from their

00:15:44.460 church that said, Hey, I don't think you should sue. I don't think this would be good for your family

00:15:48.600 to be in a long protracted, angry, bitter battle. You've got healthcare and it was an accident. It

00:15:54.400 actually was an accident. It wasn't like the gas company was trying to kill my family.

00:15:57.940 This was an accident. This was a faulty piece of metal that was installed. So I think my

00:16:04.020 parents took a settlement check for $1,250 or $1,500 from the gas company and said, you know,

00:16:13.260 okay.

00:16:13.720 And I can relate to that. I had a really bad back injury in medical school, which I've

00:16:17.920 talked about in the past, but a lot of things went wrong with my care, including a surgeon

00:16:23.520 that operated on the wrong side. And I lived a different life for about a year, including three

00:16:29.340 months where I, uh, I couldn't even feed myself. And when it was all like, so now obviously I'm fine.

00:16:34.580 Right. And I was fine within a relatively short period of time within a year, I was completely

00:16:39.540 functional. And within, I would say three years, I was as good as before. And whenever I tell the

00:16:45.020 story, people are always like, Oh, you must've sued for a lot of money. And it's funny. It never

00:16:49.440 crossed my mind. And I always kind of joke about it and say, well, I think it's because I grew up in

00:16:52.640 Canada and we're simply not litigious people in Canada. I don't know. But I also realized that

00:16:58.460 in the moment, the only thing you want to do is get better. And a lawsuit generally doesn't

00:17:03.780 accelerate that. Now I'm not for a moment saying there shouldn't be litigious action and lawsuits

00:17:09.220 certainly have their place. But I think most people don't come to the conclusion that I think

00:17:14.160 your family friend came to, which is my brother's a lawyer. So I see what lawsuits look like. I understand

00:17:20.740 from friends and family, what that process is. It generally results in more pain before there is

00:17:27.520 a remedy. Certainly stress. Yes. And you know, I mean, we talk about it and it sounds touchy feely,

00:17:33.660 but stress really matters. And especially in the case of what your mom was going through,

00:17:37.820 I suspect stress would have been a far greater impediment to her recovery. The other thing about

00:17:44.700 your mom's story that blows my mind just as a doc is people like your mom often fall through the

00:17:52.720 cracks in medicine because they're viewed as crazy. So we have a bad habit in medicine of dismissing

00:18:00.400 patients when we don't know what's wrong and they don't fit into an obvious bucket. So you say,

00:18:06.480 well, look, she was totally healthy and now she's a wreck. It's got to be in her mind. You know,

00:18:11.880 she's got to be having a nervous breakdown. There's got to be something going on. And it's,

00:18:15.320 it's, you know, I see this a lot and I get approached a lot by people who are in that

00:18:21.140 situation and it breaks my heart because I don't know how to fix it. I mean, that's just, I don't,

00:18:24.980 you know, there's a real narrow lane that I play in, but deep down, I know, like, I just have a hard

00:18:30.000 time believing that there's that many people who are sort of crazy. And that in reality, I remember

00:18:36.840 something one of my med school professors said, which is we use this term in medicine, idiopathic,

00:18:40.960 idiopathic means we don't know what the cause is. So you have idiopathic fill in the blank,

00:18:45.140 idiopathic pain. And he says, you know, what it really means is probably idiotic, like,

00:18:49.240 but referring to the doctor, not the patient. So I guess you were not old enough to recall,

00:18:54.880 but in discussions with your mom since, I mean, did you get a sense of how difficult it was for

00:19:00.920 your mom and dad during the period of time when the diagnosis was unclear? And it was this huge

00:19:06.540 mystery of what the heck happened? Well, I remember when I read about this in the book,

00:19:11.320 people thought dad was crazy at work. So, or the mom was crazy. So they would say, oh, this is just

00:19:16.020 in her head. And, you know, I remember the, the term psychosomatic thrown around so, so much as a kid.

00:19:22.420 And, uh, I was never a suspect of that until I became a teenager. And then I joined that camp briefly,

00:19:29.480 just thinking it's just not possible. I mean, some of these things that she said made her sick,

00:19:35.740 just, just seem to defy logic to me, to a 13 or 14 year old boy. You know, there's this, uh,

00:19:43.120 remember there's this scene that I write about where there was a period of time where electromagnetic

00:19:46.880 radiation was making her sick, TVs and radio waves. And I thought she's just trying to rain on my parade

00:19:52.140 and make sure I don't watch TV or, you know, listen to the radio so that I'm reading all the time up in

00:19:58.280 my room. I got to try this with my kids. Anytime they spend more than 30 minutes on the iPad,

00:20:04.360 I got to get sick. Start twitching. So this, this one night, you know, I'm, I'm very, very clever.

00:20:11.560 And the little teenage boy, you know, climbs up the stairs and I've got a radio in my hand and all

00:20:16.860 the lights are out and I'm padding very softly. And there's an outlet right outside the door. So her

00:20:22.900 door is closed, the tinfoil door. And I turn the radio, I plug it in, but the volume's all the way

00:20:28.240 down. And I turn the speakers so that they're aiming right at the cot where she's sleeping on

00:20:33.900 the other side of the door. And I'm like, I'm just going to, I'm going to nuke you all night

00:20:37.360 with the radio waves. You're going to wake up fine. And I'm going to have a big aha. I mean,

00:20:44.460 I'm going to drop the mic on this and I'm going to listen to all the radio. I freaking want from

00:20:48.700 this point on. Well, the opposite happened. You know, the morning she woke up, she was terribly sick.

00:20:54.340 I don't remember the specific symptoms she had that day, but she was really scared because

00:20:58.380 what had gotten to her in her safe room? I mean, this is the room that she would go to recover

00:21:02.880 from exposure to things. And I actually don't remember feeling that much kind of shame or,

00:21:08.700 you know, feeling that bad as a kid, but it did cross that off the list. You know, I believed her.

00:21:13.300 And that was a really important moment for me to say, wow, okay, she's, you know, specifically with

00:21:18.980 this, she's not crazy. And that was one of the crazier ones. I mean, you can understand how

00:21:23.480 car fumes, you know, or a diesel truck going by is probably not great for our bodies. Well,

00:21:29.560 mom would have a migraine within 30 seconds of that exposure or often would even break out,

00:21:35.740 you know, her body would just start reacting. So it was weird. It was a weird childhood. I remember,

00:21:41.780 you know, you just have these glimpses in these scenes that the books was just this illustration

00:21:46.060 of how far she'd really gone. And mom being a writer, she was also an avid reader and she still

00:21:52.340 wanted to have books in her life. So my dad's and my solution to this was we would, we'd bake them.

00:21:59.560 We would open up the oven and we would just start baking over, you know, the period of a day or two

00:22:05.220 on low, you know, maybe 200, 250. And we'd be moving the pages just to try to outgas it, to get

00:22:11.280 that smell of new print out through the heat. We would also put them out in the sun. So I just

00:22:17.320 recently was home and I came across a family photo in an album of a hundred books out on the grass,

00:22:23.460 baking in the sun, just out, outgassing. So that was a, there were these words, you know, outgassing,

00:22:30.120 reacting, you know, these are words that getting pure that I would just hear, you know, countless

00:22:35.540 times growing up. So I wanted mom to be like other moms. Um, but I'd say in the first part of

00:22:42.700 childhood, I was really taking care of her. I felt bad for her. I would go sing her songs or I would

00:22:47.940 go and sit with her. I was always getting pure. So if I came in from the outside world, I would have

00:22:54.280 to wear special clothes that had been washed in baking soda. And there were closed trees out in the

00:22:58.960 garage where I'd take off the clothes that might have, I don't know, the whiff of smoke on them or,

00:23:04.660 you know, my dad was always giving me the sniff test, like a bloodhound, you know, I'd walk in

00:23:08.940 from the outside and, you know, you know, Oh, I smell this or I smell that. Cause I never wanted

00:23:14.460 to change my clothes. I'd say, I'm fine. I wasn't around anything. I went for a walk, you know,

00:23:18.460 there's, they would always smell something. So then, you know, I would, I would, I was constantly

00:23:23.100 getting pure so that I could be around her. And it was, it was, it was weird. I did a lot of the

00:23:29.720 cooking for her. I did the cleaning, did the washing up. And then I think as that

00:23:34.340 moved towards, uh, as it moved into teenage years, I just began to really resent it and

00:23:40.240 resent her. Last thing, just, um, going back a minute, you know, the, what was really helpful

00:23:45.100 for my, for my parents was finding other people like mom who had been sick. And I don't remember,

00:23:50.620 she was the only one I remember that had been sick because of a gas leak. But I do remember

00:23:56.280 a couple people in our family friends that had been completely normal. And then one day a pesticide

00:24:04.320 company came in and did all the lawns in the neighborhood. I think it was called chem lawn.

00:24:08.980 And then they just snapped and they were like, mom, the next day. So there was something in their

00:24:13.620 body that just couldn't take massive amounts of pesticides, you know, throughout the entire

00:24:19.360 neighborhood on their lawn and their front lawn in their backyard. And, you know, that made sense to

00:24:24.420 me. At least there was an event. Pesticides are probably not good for any of us, but your, you know,

00:24:29.940 your body and my body, we, we can fight that off. So I remember that really helped me too is saying,

00:24:36.800 mom is not alone. You know, there is a community of environmentally sensitive patients. And my dad

00:24:42.580 was just this hero through the whole thing. He doesn't leave her. Um, I mean, they slept in

00:24:48.420 separate beds for almost 10 years because there was a period of time, well, she needed to be in this

00:24:53.820 special room. And, um, there was a period of time where he would make her sick, the candida. I mean,

00:24:59.400 it was just always, always something making her sick. And he just stuck, stuck by her. I mean,

00:25:05.200 it was very loyal, tried to do the best he could with me and take me to baseball when he could and

00:25:08.660 soccer and give me the most normal life that he could. But it was far from normal, you know, you, uh,

00:25:15.980 and obviously there's many kids that go through variations of this, but in many ways you were sort of

00:25:21.320 what we would call enmeshed the, the enmeshment, meaning you, you were forced into an adult role

00:25:26.540 too soon. And I guess it's not surprising to me that as a teenager, you'd start to kind of rebel

00:25:31.780 against that because you sort of, you miss that period of life when you have absolutely no

00:25:36.540 responsibility and you had the responsibility. I mean, it's hard for me to imagine what you're

00:25:41.380 talking about based on a personal experience, but, but I can try to extrapolate that, you know,

00:25:46.480 look, you, uh, you were forced into a caregiver role. You were sharing care with your father

00:25:51.720 of your mom. And so do you remember when it started to sort of become frustrating to you? And,

00:25:59.380 you know, my guess is the combination of adolescence and puberty by themselves are enough

00:26:05.640 jarring, disruptive change coupled with the, you know, the soil of, of all you've experienced.

00:26:12.540 I think, you know, there was a hope as a child, maybe that this would end. And when you hit

00:26:18.060 adolescence and, you know, I realized this was never going to end, there was no cure.

00:26:21.860 And you like, could you bring friends over after school and hang out or was that just too

00:26:25.420 disruptive to the house?

00:26:26.540 Only if they stayed outside. So there were signs, keep out on all the doors, um, chemically

00:26:31.340 sensitive patient. So no, they couldn't come in. You know, there were periods of time later on in high

00:26:37.780 school where if they did get pure and mom was in a different part of the house, then, you know,

00:26:41.640 we could open up the windows and, you know, air out that room. So there were, there were some

00:26:45.960 exceptions, but the general rule was, you know, everything had, all life had to happen outside

00:26:50.520 of the house. You know, this is terrible for her too, to not be able to, you know, play video,

00:26:56.760 not video games, play board games, or, I mean, she'd be watching out a window as I played soccer

00:27:01.640 in the back, but she couldn't really meet my friends and see what they were like. She couldn't

00:27:05.260 invite them into the kitchen and bake brownies, all these things that she really wanted to do. So there

00:27:10.660 was a lot of pain for her feeling like she wasn't able to show up as a mother or as a

00:27:16.340 wife. How did your mom cope with that pain? Emotionally pain? Well, my parents, uh, there's,

00:27:22.880 there's one answer. She had this unwavering faith. She would read the Bible. She would,

00:27:28.180 she would try and stay positive. She would thank God for her symptoms and believe that through

00:27:35.060 these trials, she was getting closer to, you know, to, to serving, you know, closer to kind

00:27:40.420 of having this pure hearts. So really, I mean, just a remarkable, extreme version of Stoicism,

00:27:45.880 really, if you think about it. I mean, I, I think, you know, the Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca,

00:27:51.560 of course, they don't talk so much about religion, but there's still this belief that these,

00:27:55.880 these challenges make us better, these struggles, this pain without it, you know, you, you can't

00:28:00.440 sharpen the knife without a show, without, you know, a blunt object. And for mom, I think that

00:28:04.580 was, you know, it sounds like how she was describing it. Yeah. And in the picture of Jesus, he was

00:28:08.760 suffering and, you know, there, well, there's all these stories that she would find in the Bible

00:28:13.520 of people suffering and it being for a great purpose, you know, there being a, a reason for it

00:28:19.880 all. So I just remember she would, you know, she would walk around and, and, you know, she would say

00:28:25.660 like, praise God for the fabrics offener that just made her sick. You know, she was just trying to

00:28:29.740 stay positive throughout all of this. So, you know, kicking up into the teenage years too,

00:28:34.900 I start to rebel against the role of faith, the role of the church, the rules, the religiosity.

00:28:40.140 I didn't like going to church anymore. You know, it was more fun as a kid when they're

00:28:44.000 telling stories of Jonah and the whale and, you know, the flannel boards, but not as a, as a teenager

00:28:49.120 when you just realize you're not allowed to swear, you're not allowed to sleep around, you can't

00:28:52.580 drink, you can't smoke. It was, there are a lot of rules. There's a lot of can't do's.

00:28:56.440 And I remember I have this vivid memory of coming home after school and mom, there was a period of

00:29:04.640 time where mom then lived out in the yard, a friend built a lean to. So she found that in times where

00:29:11.980 the pollen wasn't too bad or the mold wasn't too bad, there were seasons where she would feel better

00:29:15.980 sitting outside than in her safe room. And she would have this little igloo cooler next to her.

00:29:22.020 She would have a chair, she would have her mask on and she would just protect herself from the wind.

00:29:28.660 So she would be on one of these four corners, depending on which way the wind was blowing.

00:29:32.700 And I would come home from school and she'd hear the car pull up into the driveway and she'd yell my

00:29:37.640 name and I would just pretend not to hear her. And I'd walk in the house, which, you know, that,

00:29:43.040 that to me feels like the kind of the picture of, of this just got old. This was tiring.

00:29:48.020 You know, I didn't want to go and find out what she wanted me to bring her.

00:29:51.760 And I can only imagine that on some level that produces some guilt and shame within you,

00:29:55.900 but at the same time, it's sort of a protective thing that you're doing because of all the sort of

00:30:02.800 the, the, the pain and the trauma that, that you've been, you know, it's been inflicted on

00:30:06.740 you since you're four years old. And so I've always find like stories like this to be so tragic in a

00:30:12.080 way. And I mean, I think in many ways your story has a happy ending, but for many people,

00:30:15.580 these don't have happy endings because nobody's at fault here. These, this isn't about like blame

00:30:20.760 or fault, right? People get sick, bad things happen. And yet families can get ripped apart

00:30:25.440 by these things in ways that aren't entirely obvious. Um, and I think what comes next in your

00:30:31.680 story to me is makes much more sense after I read your book than just knowing a couple of

00:30:37.840 snippets along the way. Now you're a pretty musical guy, right? I played piano growing up.

00:30:43.980 You know, I remember my grandpa taught me at four, taught me on an organ and I always played.

00:30:48.960 So then in high school, you, you transfer to a new school, if I recall.

00:30:53.020 Yeah. I got to talk about the first high school. So this was also part of the rebellion.

00:30:57.420 So I'd gone to public elementary school and then they put me in a Christian, uh, kind of Baptist

00:31:03.300 middle school, which I actually liked. But then ninth grade, freshman year of high school,

00:31:09.760 they put me in the basement of a church school and there were nine people in my freshman class

00:31:15.980 and they couldn't afford enough teachers. So we would be taught by VHS video. So they would wheel

00:31:23.480 in the cart. Remember those old gray metal carts and they had kind of the ribbed trays and they'd pop

00:31:30.260 in science and we'd sit there for 45 minutes, which felt like it was a hundred hours. Uh, and it was just

00:31:37.020 terrible. And we had to wear these ugly uniforms and it was just, everything was wrong for a 14 year

00:31:42.860 old kid going to school in the basement of a church by video. And, and I was surprised this

00:31:48.420 was accredited. How it's, it's amazing to me that they did their best. And, and it's, it's funny

00:31:54.260 because I know a bunch of people that came out of that school that did all four years and actually

00:31:57.580 became very successful. Um, I just, at that moment, I, I wanted to explore the public high school

00:32:03.780 and it couldn't be any more different. There were 4,000 people in the high school. I think my

00:32:09.800 parents saw something in something simmering maybe in my personality that really scared them, you

00:32:16.220 know, throwing me into this worldly high school where undoubtedly there would be drugs and sex and

00:32:22.960 drinking and ungodly things going on. And I remember just saying, look, I'm going to run away

00:32:29.240 from home or I'm not going back to this school. And they said, you know, and I, I was smart enough

00:32:35.860 to say, look, I'm not being challenged, academically challenged. I was an avid reader growing up. I

00:32:42.280 remember getting a job when I was, I think I was 14 writing or 14 or 15 writing for the local

00:32:47.580 county newspaper. So I was a pretty good writer. I was an avid reader. TV was just TV made mom sick.

00:32:53.640 So we did have a tiny TV, but it was in a, in a room that would, they made really uncomfortable.

00:32:58.300 And maybe I watched a couple hours of TV a week growing up. So reading was really my escape.

00:33:04.160 And I move into the big high school and exactly what they had feared happens almost immediately

00:33:10.680 fallen with the wrong crown. I fallen with a crowd who's older and is not really interested in

00:33:16.000 going to high school, but was in a band. So I then joined the band, which was a alternative rock

00:33:23.240 band. So it was kind of counting crows meets Pearl jam meets live. And I was going to be the

00:33:29.260 keyboard player. What was the name of the band? It's called Sunday river. Just random. It was like

00:33:34.100 a ski resort in New Hampshire we'd heard of and nobody'd even been to. So I joined this band and

00:33:39.400 I grow my hair. I just start growing my hair out. So it hits my shoulders and I become the band's

00:33:44.740 and I self appoint as the band's manager and I am going to get us a record deal. So you're the

00:33:49.660 keyboard guy and the manager. So I'm sending our demo tapes into New York city. And for some strange

00:33:56.600 reason, people listen to our tapes and say, Hey, we'll book you. So we start playing CBGBs,

00:34:03.240 the wetlands. This is like what? Mid eighties, late eighties. This would be, let's see. Yeah. 75,

00:34:10.320 93. Oh, okay. Okay. 93 to 95. Yeah. And we're driving my parents' Ford Taurus station wagon. You know,

00:34:19.280 I'm throwing all the gear, the keyboards and the guitars. We're driving into New York city. We're

00:34:23.020 driving into Philly. We're playing, not that interested in going to school. So I'm a C minus

00:34:29.320 student at best in this new high school. And I'm not jumping into the drugs that the band was doing,

00:34:36.120 and I'm not jumping into all the vices yet, but they made it look good and they made it look cool.

00:34:42.960 So what prevented you from joining them?

00:34:44.880 I don't know. I think I was still holding on to, you know, the virtue. I was still trying to

00:34:50.380 stay pure, I guess you could say. So what was the, what was the best part for you in that moment

00:34:56.760 prior to going, you know, further into, you know, drugs or all these other things?

00:35:01.200 Was it just the sense of like community and tribe with these guys?

00:35:05.480 Yeah. And playing music was fun. I'm playing music in front of, you know, 300, 400 people

00:35:10.300 driving into New York city to the legendary CBGBs where, you know, I don't know, all these great

00:35:16.480 bands had been discovered and been, been found. And then talking with A&R people at labels that were

00:35:22.900 interested in being pursued by real managers. This was a moment in time that felt like we were,

00:35:28.220 we had a shot at getting a record deal and record deals back then they were the thing.

00:35:32.000 You know, there was Atlantic records and BMG and Virgin, you know, it was, it was a really exciting

00:35:38.440 possibility.

00:35:40.520 How close were you to the other guys in the band? Did they know about your story at home?

00:35:44.140 They did. They did. I wasn't that close. They were in a way they were, they were other,

00:35:50.480 they were more worldly. They hadn't been sheltered. They, you know, had been sleeping around for years.

00:35:56.240 They'd been smoking and experimenting with, with drinking and drugs for years.

00:35:59.800 They were older, maybe two to four years older. So I was the baby of the band, but it was, it was a

00:36:06.840 sense of community. It was, it was fun being together, playing music and driving to have these

00:36:12.560 experiences. It felt dangerous. It felt edgy. So I barely graduate high school. I remember up until

00:36:20.680 the very last day, neither my parents nor I knew whether I would actually have enough attendance credit

00:36:27.240 to get the high school diploma. I mean, I was on the brink. It was one day I thought shy of actually

00:36:36.100 passing and I would have to repeat the 12th grade. And I think I probably, oh, I probably got a doctor

00:36:41.660 or something to lie about, you know, something. I mean, I managed to pass, but certainly, you know,

00:36:46.500 high school was not a, a proud achievement.

00:36:48.300 When you were a senior, were you applying to college?

00:36:50.520 I wasn't because I was, I was delighted to announce to my parents that I would not be going

00:36:55.820 to college. I would not be pursuing further education because I would be getting a record

00:37:01.660 deal. Peter, that's what, that's what bands do, right? All bands, I went to New York city and we

00:37:06.280 get, I would be getting a multimillion dollar record deal. I announced to my parents. So

00:37:11.040 who would need a college education when you had a multimillion dollar record deal and you

00:37:15.900 were touring, not just the country, but the world. And your parents had worked pretty hard to put

00:37:21.900 money aside for you to go to college. They had, so there was a little over a hundred thousand

00:37:25.880 dollars sitting in an account since birth. You know, he'd been putting in probably a couple

00:37:30.640 hundred bucks a month or whatever he could. My dad was very middle-class. They, they didn't spend

00:37:36.420 money on things. They'd run their cars 15, 20 years and you know, they'd buy a Toyota Camry and

00:37:41.780 keep it for 20 years would go to, you know, the diner when it was two for one special.

00:37:46.540 So he was a saver and he'd save for college. So this was really an affront to them. And I think

00:37:51.460 what made it even more difficult was that when I was a child, I wanted to be a doctor. So I was

00:37:56.900 talking about Johns Hopkins medical school. That was, if you'd asked me probably up until 13, 14,

00:38:02.840 what I was going to do, it was doctor to help sick people like mom. I was going to be in the

00:38:08.740 medic, you know, and I obviously didn't have the grades to do that in high school and took a

00:38:12.720 different path. So yeah, I moved to New York city by myself. I'm the only band member that takes the

00:38:19.480 leap, but I said, well, the band's manager, me needs to be in the heart of things. So I moved to

00:38:24.380 an apartment in Greenwich village. I was paying $650 a month. It was on Christopher street and seventh.

00:38:30.180 And it wasn't too big. If I recall, it was, it was, it was hundreds of square feet. It was tiny. It was a

00:38:36.140 sixth floor walk up and it just felt amazing. I mean, I was living in the heart of the West

00:38:42.960 village alone. Yeah. It's the dream. It was the dream. And I start working at Sam. So you was at

00:38:49.700 96, 95. So this would be, were you here for the big snowstorm in January of 96? Do you remember that?

00:38:56.360 I was, yeah, this would have been 94. So I was 19 and you know, I, I start working at Sam

00:39:03.580 mash music. Cause I wanted some, some pocket money alongside, you know, the very little money

00:39:08.320 that our bands would, would make gigging. And, you know, I then realized that, so I actually met a

00:39:15.040 manager for our band who says, well, I'm, I'm actually a real band manager and I'll take you

00:39:19.700 guys on. And we, we signed a contract. And I remember him finding out that my dad had saved

00:39:24.760 for college. And he said, well, you're in New York city. You're crazy to squander that money. I mean,

00:39:30.280 he's not going to give it to you for anything else. So once you go to NYU part-time, you might

00:39:34.380 as well get a degree. And there's Tisch, you know, school of the arts. I mean, it's, it's you're in

00:39:39.380 the city. You might as well, you have the time. And he'd been an NYU grad. So I then call my parents

00:39:44.920 and say, okay, you can start paying NYU. Right. So I've got no scholarship. I mean, you know, I pick

00:39:52.760 one of the most expensive schools in the country and I do wind up getting a degree again, you know,

00:39:59.120 without any sort of colors. I mean, C student really just putting in the minimum amount of work

00:40:04.500 to make dad happy. And what did you study? Communications. Cause it was easy. I could write

00:40:09.560 and communicate. So the band breaks up. Which by the way, does, does come back to serve you well.

00:40:14.420 There's a lot of, there's a lot of this. It's so funny. I mean, I've now gotten several awards from

00:40:21.000 NYU. They invite me in to speak. I just made a video for the like commencement ceremony. So now I'm

00:40:27.160 like, you know, celebrated by NYU many years later. And every time they've interviewed me

00:40:31.980 probably six or seven interviews now, I'm like, okay, so here's what really happened. Don't ask

00:40:35.900 me these questions. Cause I can't lie. Okay. I can talk about the city being a great campus. I can

00:40:40.620 talk about, you know, the diversity of New York and the community, but don't ask me what it was like

00:40:45.920 for me. Cause I would, I was not your good student. So, okay. So I'm living in the village. I'm working

00:40:52.760 at Sam Ash. The band breaks up months later and there was a lot of drugs and we, we just didn't

00:40:59.560 like each other that much. I mean, it was, we, we didn't like each other outside of the time that

00:41:03.480 we were on stage, but I've already made the leap to New York. Um, I've got this NYU opportunity and

00:41:10.140 I'm, I'm making pretty good money selling high-end stereo gear. I remember one night Stevie Wonder came

00:41:15.940 in and I got to sell him $50,000 of gear and make a commission on that, you know, keyboards and,

00:41:21.780 um, modules and all this stuff. So I was, I won some favor with my managers that I would get to do

00:41:27.540 a lot of the big clients. I then almost immediately start dabbling in nightlife. So you've got all this

00:41:33.300 stuff going on. I'm at NYU part-time I'm working at Sam Ash. And then the guy that booked out my band

00:41:39.800 convinces me just by way of watching him that I was always on the wrong side of the equation

00:41:46.540 because our band would turn up. We'd bring a hundred people to the club paying customers

00:41:53.180 and they might throw us a 20th of that or a 30th of that and say, Hey, here's a couple hundred bucks,

00:41:59.480 go split it up six ways. You know, it wasn't even enough to pay for gas or, you know, the,

00:42:02.960 the guitar strings. But I, I love the idea of the nightclub owner, you know, the person on the

00:42:09.560 other side of the rope deciding who got in and who didn't. So I, I try my hand at that. And I

00:42:16.340 joined this guy and say, you know, he starts throwing me a hundred bucks a week or 200 bucks

00:42:21.300 a week. And I'm just his sidekick. And what's your actual job? The job is to fill the venue with

00:42:27.540 beautiful paying customers. And then you get a cut. And how do you go about figuring out who's

00:42:33.580 beautiful and paying and get them into said club? Is it literally going out to a lineup on the street

00:42:38.680 and trying to identify in the line who should jump up? That's a gray problem to have. No,

00:42:44.500 you got to actually, you got to get the line. You got to get the line. So the, a lot of that

00:42:48.080 is just networking. It's being out meeting people, getting their phone numbers, you know, later

00:42:52.980 getting their email addresses. But if you were a club promoter today, starting at zero, you'd have

00:42:56.880 to be out seven nights this week and you'd be striking up conversations. Hey, how are you? I'm Pete.

00:43:03.240 What do you do? Uh, you know, I'm in New York city and I'm living in a couple of different

00:43:07.160 places. Oh, Hey, would you want to, want to come to a party sometime? Oh, I've got this amazing

00:43:11.400 fashion party. We're going to be doing for Prada during fashion week. And you'd say,

00:43:15.980 that sounds great. I'd say, Oh, cool. I'll, I'll put you on the list or I'll, I'll email.

00:43:20.620 And you might say, well, I want to actually put together a group of friends. Great. I'll sell you

00:43:23.500 a table. You know, it's going to cost a couple thousand dollars, but I'll give you prime seating

00:43:27.840 in the club. And we have this amazing DJ flying in from Paris and you know, he throws parties at hotel

00:43:32.740 costs. Like you, you know, you may not have even heard of any of this stuff, but we make it

00:43:36.860 sound so great. It's a party that you have to be at. So we're promoting, we're constantly out

00:43:41.480 there promoting. And now I have Peter on the list and maybe you come and you bring a few friends.

00:43:45.640 So what did you do before email was around? Because this was phone, all just dialing,

00:43:50.940 but they don't even have cell phones. Like how are you home phones? It was office. It was voicemail.

00:43:55.980 It was beepers. We'd beat people. They'd call us back email. Believe me, the minute that took off,

00:44:02.260 we embraced though, right away. And then we started building, you know, one of the first email

00:44:07.300 lists in clubs and open rates were a hundred percent. I mean, it was, it was extraordinary.

00:44:12.340 Meaning everybody would open an email, even a form email like that. Whereas today, what would that

00:44:18.540 open rate be? Five percent maybe, you know, maybe, I don't know. So imagine the next time, you know,

00:44:23.240 Airbnb or, you know, Google sends out an email or app. Okay. Apple's a perfect example, right?

00:44:27.340 Apple sends an email, new event coming, new iPhones, maybe five to 8% would actually open it.

00:44:33.780 Yeah. You're, you'll delete it or I'll see it later. It just sits there. So back then, you know,

00:44:39.180 imagine Apple sends something and every single person is like, oh my gosh, I got an email.

00:44:43.700 I got an email. This is so cool. So we start a list and, you know, I just get good at this and

00:44:51.640 I leave my partner. I go start producing a live R&B open mic night at pretty legendary club called

00:45:00.040 Nell's on 14th street that, you know, is in Brett Easton Ellis books and, you know, place that Mick

00:45:04.780 Jagger used to always hang out. And so I'm, I, for somehow, you know, this, this skinny white kid

00:45:11.780 from Philadelphia, New Jersey winds up helming this really impressive R&B show. So Stevie Wonder would

00:45:21.400 come and perform. Chaka Khan would perform. Prince used to come in and perform for free.

00:45:27.220 You didn't meet Prince?

00:45:27.700 Yeah. I used to, I'll have some fun Prince stories. He used to always, this was a kind of dark lounge,

00:45:35.240 almost Victoria setting, Victorian era setting. So there were the old mirrors and the little sconces

00:45:40.940 on the wall, you know, with almost the candle lights. And whenever Prince came in, I would have to go

00:45:47.440 and unscrew the light bulbs. He liked to sit in a, in a very specific area, but he wanted it dark.

00:45:54.200 And, you know, then his bouncer would just, he would sit alone and then his bouncer would block

00:45:59.860 off. He would, he would sit backwards in a chair and kind of just tell everybody they couldn't see

00:46:06.020 him or couldn't talk to him. And he would just sit there taking in the music. And then sometimes he

00:46:10.340 would actually jump up and perform.

00:46:11.660 That's so interesting. So he really was there for the music. You know, you get the, you get the impression,

00:46:16.000 a lot of celebrities, like they like being there because they want to be the celebrity, but he was

00:46:20.340 the opposite. Yeah. And I remember we would say at the time, I don't even know that I was that

00:46:24.900 insightful as you were, you just were. We're like, why would the guy come to a club if he doesn't want

00:46:29.260 to talk to anyone, if he doesn't want to be seen and doesn't want to talk to anyone? Well, of course

00:46:33.520 it was the music because we had these unbelievably talented keyboard players and drummers. And a lot of

00:46:39.080 them had gigged with Brian McKnight and Stevie Wonder. So that's how the people were coming. You know,

00:46:45.420 if your drummer has a residency at Nell's every Tuesday night, your drummer's like, Hey, what are

00:46:51.000 you doing on Tuesday? And you'll come by and you recognize people and you just, it's fun to jump

00:46:55.640 up. So I got to actually play piano for Stevie Wonder on stage a couple of times. I remember I was

00:46:59.520 playing overjoyed and Stevie wasn't even playing. He was just standing up singing while I'm playing

00:47:04.260 keyboards. And it was a really, it was an amazing experience. It was called Voices at Nell's.

00:47:09.040 Just move from there over into the more fashion model scene of clubs because there's more money

00:47:17.400 to be made there. We would call it models and bottles. So this was the advent of bottle service

00:47:22.660 when I guess a few of us promoters and club owners realized that instead of charging people $18 at the

00:47:30.800 bar for a vodka soda, you could take the same $18 price point and charge them $500 for a bottle of

00:47:37.540 absolute vodka at their table. And they wouldn't have to keep going up and getting refills.

00:47:41.960 And Oh, by the way, the $500 bottle of absolute cost you what? $16.

00:47:48.000 Yeah. It's sort of amazing to me when you look at like the high-end clubs, like one Oak and things

00:47:53.260 like that, like what you'll pay for a bottle there relative to the wholesale cost. It's,

00:47:59.320 there can't be a bigger margin in any business in the history of civilization.

00:48:03.220 But, but the value, if you actually figured out how many drinks you could get out of a bottle of

00:48:08.260 Stoli, let's say, and then how much you'd have to pay at the bar, it's, it's commensurate,

00:48:12.780 right? Cause they're charging you 20 bucks for a vodka soda at the bar anyway.

00:48:16.920 So 30 drinks and you're at a $600 bottle. Yeah.

00:48:20.520 Wouldn't you rather have it at the comfort of your table? Yeah.

00:48:23.480 So yeah, the whole thing was just kind of crazy models and bottles. So the way that the scene worked

00:48:27.940 is we would have to figure out how to get beautiful girls inside the nightclub and then very wealthy

00:48:33.260 guys would pay for the pleasure of sitting around beautiful girls. So you'd have all your finance

00:48:38.260 guys, you know, the Goldman guys with their Amex black cards and they'd come, they'd, we'd off them

00:48:43.500 at the door, you know, we'd swipe the card for five or 10 G's and then try and they would buy tables.

00:48:49.480 And then we would populate the tables with cool people, you know, often models who would drink

00:48:56.540 for free and would party for free. And I mean, was there any interest in knowing or did it matter

00:49:03.840 if these were professional girls or meaning professional girls, meaning women that were

00:49:07.660 going to basically take, you know, money for sex versus. No, no, it wasn't like that. It actually

00:49:11.740 wasn't like that. Um, there was no official kind of process. It wasn't like that. No, we would.

00:49:17.340 Does that, cause I feel like today that's sort of pretty normal. I have a lot of friends who are

00:49:22.000 single and they talk about this. They're like. Where people get paid, where the women get paid.

00:49:25.420 Yeah, we never did. Yeah. The women are paid to be there. And you know, it's just understood that

00:49:29.560 like there's a way to plus up on what you're going to pay to go home with her. Yeah. That's, um,

00:49:34.280 that was foreign to us. I mean, this is many years ago. No, we, we would make friends with the

00:49:38.380 modeling bookers and the heads of the modeling agencies. We would give them a great experience and then

00:49:44.280 they would come out with the girls. So a booker from a modeling agency might take out 12 of his

00:49:49.900 models. We would make sure they had a great time. You know, everything was free from the food to the

00:49:55.520 booze, but now you have 12 beautiful girls in a club. So it's like their bait to get these guys in

00:50:01.960 who are basically like the sharks, right? For the, they're, they're chum for the guys who are sharks.

00:50:07.160 But a lot of these girls would love to date the Goldman guy living in the 12,000 square foot Soho

00:50:12.840 loft, you know, who, who might be a gentleman. Let's go with best case scenario. Right, right,

00:50:17.260 right. So you've got the, so everybody's potentially winning because this is a matchmaking service

00:50:22.640 basically where you're doing the first layer of screening based on wealth and beauty.

00:50:28.880 Exactly. But that's all we did. So then the rest would just happen. And if, and if you got a guy who

00:50:33.320 was a jerk or was too handsy, you just wouldn't let him in anymore. So we would be blacklisting

00:50:37.700 the bad actors all the time. And at the end, you wind up with a group of really cool, young,

00:50:46.260 rich guys who are fun. The girls love being around them. They're funny. They're spending money.

00:50:53.280 They might be even good looking, you know, I mean, they're, they're kind of the life of the party.

00:50:58.400 And the next thing you know, you know, you're in St. Barts with the same people, or you're in Milan

00:51:02.560 with the same people, or you're in Paris, like the party would travel around the world.

00:51:06.620 So the way we got paid as nightclub promoters, we would just, so the beauty of the business,

00:51:12.080 at least for a while, is that you're asset light. So you just take a cut of the total business of

00:51:18.460 the night. So it might be 15%, let's say, let's say it's 20%. So you walk into a nightclub and-

00:51:25.720 What were the best clubs back in? So we're now talking kind of late nineties, right?

00:51:31.540 So I can only speak to my experience. The first night I went out was at Club USA and there was

00:51:36.820 this famous slide there. The earliest clubs I worked at, there was the Limelight. I worked for

00:51:42.640 Peter Gation. There was the Tunnel. There was the Roxy. There was Twilo. Lotus was a big club for us.

00:51:49.660 I was there for many years. Pangea, Halo. I mean, you know, some of the names I know, people will say

00:51:55.580 them and I'm like, oh my gosh, I actually worked there. So I worked at 40 different venues

00:51:58.860 over this almost 10 year period. How many of those clubs are still around today?

00:52:03.140 None.

00:52:04.500 So what's the half-life of a hot New York club?

00:52:07.100 Maybe five years. Now, some of the clubs exist because the liquor license is so valuable,

00:52:12.240 but they'll just get re-skinned or repurposed. So some of the same actual venues-

00:52:17.140 Some of the same liquor licenses are there in the same building, but it's now just a new look,

00:52:20.880 new feel, new name.

00:52:21.760 And there might've been six of those since I left. Six change of brand or even ownership.

00:52:29.300 So that's kind of a blurry time to be quite honest.

00:52:32.840 Yeah. So we've gone, what we've skipped over is band in high school. You're still not doing drugs.

00:52:39.020 You're not drinking. You're not debauching. By this point as a nightclub promoter, have we slipped

00:52:45.780 into some of that?

00:52:47.520 For sure. Smoking was first, then drinking, then lots of sex, then gambling, then Coke.

00:52:57.100 Started with Coke, then marijuana, then ecstasy, special K, MDMA, anything short of heroin that we

00:53:03.560 could get our hands on as pure as we could.

00:53:05.480 Why did you decide to draw the line at heroin?

00:53:07.400 We'd seen people OD and die. And I'd seen it firsthand. My business partner snorted heroin

00:53:13.940 once by mistake and almost died. Emergency room, he was out cold, unconscious on a floor inside

00:53:21.740 the kitchen of a nightclub. So I'd seen really bad heroin trips. Coke, I'd never seen anyone die

00:53:29.560 of Coke or die from ecstasy. So I pick up all the dark habits of what you might imagine would come

00:53:38.740 with the territory. I mean, our lifestyle wasn't a picture of health. We'd go to dinner at 10,

00:53:42.640 you know, so the very late dinner at the trendy restaurant. We'd head over to the club around

00:53:47.280 midnight, 12, 15.

00:53:48.700 And do the restaurants comp you guys as well?

00:53:50.720 Yeah. Because we're bringing beautiful people. So it made the restaurants look like a scene.

00:53:57.000 I mean, it was, it was the beautiful, and they, they would do this for a few tables. I mean,

00:54:00.560 it's the, it's the eye candy. Sometimes we'd bring in guys who would, who would just sponsor

00:54:04.800 the whole dinner. It depended on the model.

00:54:06.640 Well, the point is you never had to buy a dinner.

00:54:09.220 I wasn't paying for dinner. No.

00:54:11.060 During this period of time, how often were you going home to check on mom

00:54:13.900 and dad for that matter?

00:54:16.080 Every couple months, every couple months. And I would do a quick 48 hour trip. And I'd,

00:54:22.280 same as always, I'd turn up with my clothes. I'd walk into the garage. I would strip down naked.

00:54:27.940 I'd put on the clothes that they'd left out for me. There was a period of years where it was

00:54:32.260 medical coats or these gowns that they had gotten from, you know, a hospital that were sanitary and

00:54:38.700 people walking around like lab coats, you know, hospital scrubs in the house. You know, my parents,

00:54:45.300 Were your parents concerned?

00:54:46.580 They were. I mean, I, I was living out their worst nightmare. I was the prodigal son that had

00:54:53.500 flipped them and church and, you know, all shred of morality, virtue, the bird and said,

00:55:00.780 go into New York city. I'm going to make it rich and famous. Okay. The band didn't work. Well,

00:55:04.940 I'm going to be the biggest nightclub promoter in New York city. And I'm going to sleep with every

00:55:08.640 hot girl that I can get my hands on. I'm going to do every good drug I can get my hands on and

00:55:14.060 I'm going to live it up. I'm going to party. I mean, it was so opposite of the, if you think

00:55:19.360 about the basement of the Christian school with nine people and the uniform, right? This was living.

00:55:26.280 I'm on, I'm out on my own. I'm flying to Paris for fashion week. I'm dating girls that are walking

00:55:32.800 in the shows. I'm staying at the nicest hotels, you know, drinking the best wine, going to Paris

00:55:40.940 nightclubs that, that are, I mean, it was just, it felt amazing. Were you happy? I thought I was for

00:55:47.640 a while because I was collecting the markers of happiness. So, you know, I'll just take most promoters,

00:55:55.680 you know, one of the first things you need to do is you need to get the top model girlfriend.

00:56:00.040 So you just have to figure out how to do that. So, you know, collected that. So kind of check

00:56:04.380 bar. Then, you know, I got the car, the BMW and, you know, then I got the Rolex and then I got a nice

00:56:11.580 loft and rented a grand piano and the great speaker system. And so I was kind of, you know, as,

00:56:17.500 as we would have a little more success, I would buy the things that I thought came with success.

00:56:23.760 And there was always an emptiness in that. I think the more, it just got really old,

00:56:30.740 the, the banality of having to do the same thing over and over again. And I guess what I mean by

00:56:37.540 that is you would change clubs, but there were periods where we would hate emailing and then

00:56:44.900 getting on the phone because the email was one way to get people to turn up. But if you called them,

00:56:49.760 you had a much better shot, right? If I actually say, Hey Peter, you got to come tonight. It's going

00:56:55.440 to be amazing. We would still have to call hundreds of people to every week to invite them to the

00:57:01.440 parties. And I remember just hating. So what was it? So did you do that? Was, was, is basically

00:57:04.980 seven nights a week. You're trying to get people working three nights a week. And then you're out

00:57:08.600 networking the other, you know, three or four. So you're almost, you're, you're out most nights a

00:57:13.840 week, but I would only be doing three parties, maybe a Tuesday night, a Thursday night,

00:57:18.900 and then a weekend, a bridge and tunnel kind of Saturday night party, let's say.

00:57:22.960 And you, you got to this a moment ago before I interrupted you, but dinner's at 10. So by the

00:57:27.300 time I'm going to bed, you're having dinner. Yep. Then what? Then the club at 1215 till three 30.

00:57:35.420 And then maybe home by four and then half the nights you're at after hours. Well, Hey, let's keep

00:57:41.980 going. Let's go back to somebody's loft with a bunch of Coke to stay up. Cause then you need that to,

00:57:47.360 you're tired cause it's four in the morning. And Coke's not good for sleeping is my recollection.

00:57:52.740 Correct. Not from personal use. Actually, I've never used Coke, but, uh, just from the

00:57:58.240 pharmacology of it, I reckon it probably isn't too good for sleep. That's right. So then,

00:58:02.420 but if you start doing cocaine or if you were doing it all night, you're amped up so high that at some

00:58:08.220 point you will, you have to come down. So then you might take an Ambien, you know, again, so it's not

00:58:14.500 also not actually good for sleep, believe it or not, despite the fact that the FDA seems to think

00:58:19.380 so. Yeah. And you might be trying to go to sleep, you know, on a, on a hard raging night that included

00:58:24.820 after hours or a party at somebody's loft, you're, you're stumbling home and you really are stumbling

00:58:30.000 home because you've been drinking all night and it might be vodka Red Bull. If you're trying to stay

00:58:34.460 up, it might be Coke. It might be, you might be on ecstasy, which would have a, you know, maybe a

00:58:39.040 three to five hour run, maybe even longer. And you know, it's 10 or 11 and you're walking home

00:58:45.800 in broad daylight. You've been up since, you know, dinner at 10 was, was your starting point.

00:58:51.540 And you're looking at all these healthy people just going about their business in suits.

00:58:55.240 You're watching the runners at seven in the morning.

00:58:57.780 It feels disgusting actually. It feels, and you know, you're not a doctor or a surgeon on a midnight

00:59:02.240 shift doing noble work. You know, you've just been trashing your body and the bodies of all those

00:59:07.940 around you. So it really started to take its toll on me emotionally, on me physically.

00:59:14.700 I write about this actually in the first chapter in the book. I just go numb half my body. I lose

00:59:20.820 feeling in it inexplicably. And I start seeing neurologists and getting MRIs and tons of diagnostics

00:59:27.260 and they can't find anything actually wrong with me. It's sort of interesting too.

00:59:30.780 Yeah. The irony of this after all your mother's gone through.

00:59:33.480 And you know, my business partner says, well, why don't you lay off the three packs of

00:59:37.680 cigarettes? I mean, I was, I was such a fiend when it came to smoking. I smoked Marlboro Reds

00:59:42.240 two was the baseline, but if it was a long night, I'd smoke 60 cigarettes in a day. It's amazing.

00:59:47.600 I'm even here. And I start trying to knock back, um, all this stuff. And, and then now this leads

00:59:54.660 into really the, the epiphany and the change. So the first thing that happens is I have a physical

00:59:58.920 full on numbness, um, that is not diagnosed. And I remember running my left hand under boiling hot

01:00:07.220 water. I remember exactly where I was in my loft and I couldn't feel it. It was terrifying.

01:00:11.840 You know, I thought something was very, very wrong with me. This then leads to a internal,

01:00:17.440 to an internal conversation about my mortality and my belief system and the life that I'm living.

01:00:24.140 So I imagine that I have a brain tumor and, you know, or some, some horrible disease because why

01:00:31.040 else would half my, you know, have my body, the paresthesia was, it's never good. You know,

01:00:37.240 if you go online and start looking at, you know, half or full body paresthesia, like it's bad stuff.

01:00:44.000 So interesting, you know, now with perspective, perhaps this was more, I don't know if spiritual

01:00:49.060 is the right word, but I think there was more going on than just the physicality of, you know,

01:00:53.360 maybe the drugs had caught up with me. I don't know the smoking, the drinking

01:00:56.200 around this time, a couple months later, I go to Punta de Lesta for new year's Eve. And we would

01:01:03.040 always spend about two weeks every new year's fleeing New York city. We hated New York around

01:01:08.600 new year's. It's just the whole, you just didn't like the tourists, the time square, the tourists,

01:01:13.100 everything was wrong. I mean, anybody that was fun or interesting got the heck out of town.

01:01:18.420 They went to the Caribbean. They went to, you know, they would go anywhere warm.

01:01:21.200 So warm for us was typically in Brazil. We'd go to a place called Buzios. We'd go to Argentina.

01:01:27.640 This year we went to Uruguay, to Punta de Lesta. And we rented this amazing house. And I remember

01:01:34.040 the house came with servants who would cook and follow after us, picking up our towels. And

01:01:38.780 my girlfriend came down who I was sure was the most beautiful girl on the compound. She was on the

01:01:44.280 cover of fashion magazines in Europe at the time. And, you know, it was 6'1 and Danish,

01:01:48.760 just beautiful. And I just remember we said, all right, let's go to the firework store. Let's

01:01:55.900 spend a thousand dollars on fireworks. And then we blew them up next to the pool and let's buy all

01:02:00.340 the magnets of Dom Perignon that we can. And then there's just champagne flowing. And then there was

01:02:05.220 a party that wouldn't end. And it started on New Year's Eve.

01:02:09.740 This is what, 2003, 2002?

01:02:12.180 This is, yeah, 2004. January 2004. So it's the turn between 03 and 04. We have a New Year's Eve party.

01:02:25.260 So this will be the last day of 2003. And, you know, there's a DJ that's come in and it's going

01:02:30.660 to be on our compound. So we rented the sound system and people from the town, people from other

01:02:35.680 houses that we knew were going to party on our pool. And, you know, I remember just getting lit

01:02:40.680 that night and taking, actually went to sleep for a few hours, woke up, popped an ecstasy pill,

01:02:46.080 you know, at nine or 10 in the morning. And sometime in the afternoon, I really wanted the party to stop.

01:02:53.340 I wanted all these people to leave. It's not a good look when a party goes on for a day.

01:02:58.300 People look pretty ragged, including myself. And it just, you know, I started having these

01:03:05.060 realizations that this is not how life was to be lived. This actually wasn't how a beautiful

01:03:10.980 compound like this was supposed to be enjoyed. I mean, we had wrecked the serenity of the place.

01:03:16.780 You know, the furniture was strewn all over, you know, glass bottles broken by the side of the pool.

01:03:21.740 I mean, this was just kind of, this is gross. And I just started doing some, when everybody

01:03:28.520 eventually did leave, I started doing some soul searching. I realized that I, you know, I certainly

01:03:34.380 wasn't in love with my girlfriend and I don't think she was in love with me. This was almost a

01:03:38.160 relationship of convenience. You know, my, I started reading a deep theological book called

01:03:45.500 The Pursuit of God that my father had given me at Christmas. And, you know, my parents for 10 years

01:03:50.380 had been trying to get me back in church, get me back on the right track, preaching at me,

01:03:56.340 sending me different translations of the Bible. I mean, this was all just falling on deaf ears, but

01:04:00.880 there was something about this moment, the paresthesia that just really caused me to take

01:04:06.560 stock of my life, both spiritually and morally, and just begin to kind of say, where am I? And

01:04:14.680 what have I done in a way? And I realized that there would never be enough. As I looked around,

01:04:22.680 the interesting thing was almost everybody at the compound was richer. They were older. They had the

01:04:28.000 plane, they, you know, had the better car, they, they had more money and they, they weren't that happy

01:04:34.860 either, Peter. I mean, this was, there was so much brokenness. There was so much wreckage. I mean,

01:04:39.800 many of our top bottle buyers, the guys who would spend 10 or $15,000 paying for the booze, you know,

01:04:46.440 they'd run off on their wife. Sometimes their kids didn't talk to them because they were, they

01:04:50.500 were dating models younger than their kids. And there was a lot of brokenness. So this week for me,

01:04:59.820 I remember just having a change of heart saying, I'm not on the right path. And I want to find my way

01:05:07.140 back to the, the spirituality, the virtue, kind of my heritage, you know, the, the moral foundation

01:05:12.260 of, of the way that I grew up. This isn't working anymore. This sucks. This feeling sucks. I feel

01:05:17.560 dirty. I feel degenerate. I feel like a, like a hedonist and something needs to change.

01:05:24.780 Did you think of that in sort of a moral way or did you think of that more in just an absolute way?

01:05:30.520 And I don't even know if that's the right way to describe it, but because, you know, I think you

01:05:35.460 could objectively say all those things without applying a moral judgment too, right?

01:05:39.780 Yeah. I mean, I think it was through a spiritual lens. You know, I, I was trying to find my way

01:05:44.340 back to, to God or what I believed that meant for me. And that was, that was virtue. That was purity.

01:05:52.140 That was blessed are the peacemakers, you know, blessed are those who look after the poor and who

01:05:57.320 give of themselves in the service of others, you know, loving your neighbor. I mean, I wasn't doing

01:06:02.600 any of this stuff. So that was, that was the sacred text that I'd been brought up with. And I think

01:06:07.100 I started looking at it. Which isn't really the way a lot of, you know, a lot of religion has lost

01:06:11.080 that, right? A lot of religion has, you know, I mean, we don't want to go down that rabbit hole

01:06:16.000 because that we could spend another four hours on that. But, you know, the virtues you mentioned

01:06:20.760 are sort of the virtues that I think people would uniformly agree are wonderful with or without

01:06:26.660 religion, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we were talking about this. I mean,

01:06:29.920 I guess as a 28 year old adult at the end of myself, I came to see Jesus very differently,

01:06:37.060 actually, as someone who was challenging the establishment, who was fighting against the

01:06:42.320 religiosity and the oppression of the leaders of the, you know, the church in quotes, I guess,

01:06:46.820 at the time and preaching a very different message of purity, of service to the poor, of absolute love.

01:06:53.580 I mean, I remember he called basically all the church leaders, the worst names that you could

01:06:58.540 ever call anybody at that time. So I, I just, um, I rediscover kind of my faith or softly.

01:07:05.260 Now this is still, so, so you get back to New York in January, still partying at the clubs.

01:07:09.440 Yeah. So, yeah. So that's what I was going to ask. So you come back to New York, you're,

01:07:12.520 you're back to day job.

01:07:14.060 But I really have a heart change. So I start trying to go to church again and I start trying

01:07:18.680 to do less of it all. So I quit Coke for a while, for example, and I'm, you know, I try and cut

01:07:24.480 down to one pack a day. And then there's times where I just, okay, I'm going to quit smoking.

01:07:28.620 And, you know, I go into the Nicorette and, you know, or the patch. And so there's a,

01:07:32.960 my heart has really changed. The intention has changed. I know that I'm going to have to break

01:07:37.820 up with my girlfriend and, you know, have the heart. Like there's.

01:07:40.120 Who were you able to talk with about this? This is a huge internal struggle.

01:07:45.000 No one. I didn't have a best friend.

01:07:47.040 Yeah. I was just about to say, you don't sound like you have real friends.

01:07:50.000 You have a lot of acquaintances, but they're not, they're not part of your soul, right? In the way

01:07:55.040 that a great friend would be. And I wasn't going to give my parents the satisfaction of letting them

01:07:59.440 know that I might be turning back around. Having a change of heart. Or, you know, God forbid that I

01:08:03.540 read dad's book on theology that he sent me, you know, I mean, that would just be, I had too much ego

01:08:09.360 at the time. So this is a really solitary experience. I'm going, you know, at 10 o'clock on a Sunday

01:08:16.220 morning and sitting at the very back pew of a church on my own, not telling anyone that I went

01:08:22.280 to church. I'm wrestling with all these demons myself. What's interesting is coming back from

01:08:28.580 that trip. Even your girlfriend doesn't realize what you're going through. We had a really shallow

01:08:32.680 relationship. We didn't talk about real things. We didn't talk about hopes and dreams or, or

01:08:37.220 suffering. So around this time, I remember it was interesting coming back a couple months later,

01:08:42.460 the incidents of numbness. They just stopped. They stopped as quickly as they started. And that

01:08:48.720 was great. I didn't have anything to directly correlate them to. I mean, I had ratcheted back

01:08:54.180 all the partying, but I was still drinking and, you know, still smoking just less of everything.

01:09:00.100 So, you know, I remember throughout this whole period of time, you know, I was clearly, I mean,

01:09:06.180 I was praying. So I was like, God, I need to get out of nightlife. This sucks. You know, it's,

01:09:10.720 it's not, it's not for me anymore. And, you know, I remember just hating the fact,

01:09:17.300 I remember feeling like I couldn't, my day job kept me in the way of the life that I wanted to

01:09:24.120 build for myself. So it almost be like, if you wanted to stop gambling, you probably need to

01:09:29.540 stop working in a casino, right? You probably can't be a blackjack dealer if you're also a

01:09:34.200 degenerate gambler, even though you could do your job, right? And you're around gambling all day.

01:09:39.140 And maybe you don't go to the sports book that night, but it's just like the environment

01:09:42.540 was, was still so unhealthy if you're struggling with that. So that's how it felt for me. And,

01:09:48.580 you know, I remember there was just like this cry for help. And the only person was to God,

01:09:52.840 like, God, get me out of this. Show me what I'm supposed to do. Show me how I'm supposed to,

01:09:56.360 to live differently. There's a scene I read about in length of the book, but something happened one

01:10:00.840 night at a club and it involved a gun and involved a bouncer and a threat. And I have this,

01:10:06.300 you know, really clear opportunity to take a couple of weeks off. And I remember renting a

01:10:12.620 cobalt blue Ford Mustang telling my business partner, look, I'm out of here for a couple of

01:10:17.200 weeks. You handle the clubs. And I remember riding North. Like that's where I was going. He's like,

01:10:22.400 where are you going? I'm like North. I mean, maybe I wind up in Canada, you know, in Montreal

01:10:26.280 or Toronto. I grab on that trip. I pack my, you know, iPod, I bring a bottle of Dewars and I bring

01:10:33.780 a Bible. And in some ways, you know, there's just, I was kind of wrestling like with the faith

01:10:39.840 and virtue piece, but I'm still drinking and smoking. And I start just driving North. I wind up

01:10:46.560 in Vermont and New Hampshire. I eventually wind up on Maine and I'm having this conversation

01:10:51.160 with myself. Again, there's just me. And I'm saying, what would it look like never to go back?

01:10:56.980 What might the opposite of my life look like? What's the clean break look like? Like, what could

01:11:03.520 I do? And it almost like hit me. The opposite of your life would be to walk away from all of these

01:11:11.940 vices and go serve others instead of yourself. Go serve the poor, you know, which is something

01:11:19.200 that I'd never even, never even conceived of before. I hadn't given a single gift to a charity. I wasn't a

01:11:26.360 giver. I wasn't throwing parties for charities. Something compels me from an internet cafe on

01:11:33.200 Greenville, Greenville, Maine on Moosehead Lake. It was a dial up internet cafe. I remember there were

01:11:37.400 a bunch of gray Dell computers there. And I start filling out applications to volunteer at all the

01:11:44.640 humanitarian organizations I'd heard of. And I just, you know, they're 10 page applications and I'm

01:11:50.420 willing to consider going anywhere, doing anything to completely change my life. So it's UNICEF, it's

01:11:58.200 the Peace Corps, it's World Vision, it's anybody I'd heard of. And I go from there back to my parents

01:12:06.280 to tell them that I'm going to do a year of humanitarian service. And there's a, there's a

01:12:11.440 kind of biblical concept that I've been brought up with of a tithe where, you know, my parents had

01:12:15.480 always given 10% of their money to the church and to charity growing up. And for me, I saw this

01:12:20.860 almost as a time tithe. Like I spent 10 years living for myself. What does it look like to give

01:12:25.940 one back and completely give it to others? So to donate 10% back. So I go to my parents and I tell

01:12:32.180 them this. And then there's this place in one of my first club partners was a British guy that had a

01:12:39.140 very popular band in the eighties. And he took all the money that he made. They were called Transvision

01:12:44.480 Vamp. And he bought this beautiful Maison Forestier, a house in the Pyrenees Mountains of

01:12:50.880 France in a little village, maybe of 60 people. And I had been there over the club years, maybe 15

01:12:56.540 times. I'd taken girlfriends there. It was just like my happy place. And I knew where the key was,

01:13:01.860 you know, I wouldn't even need him to be there. I knew how to open up the house and lock the house

01:13:05.920 and deal with all the water and the electricity and all that stuff. So I asked him around this time,

01:13:11.760 hey, can I just go hang out in France while I'm waiting for these applications to be processed

01:13:16.480 and figuring out my next move? And he says, of course, you know, you know where the key is,

01:13:21.200 which was in this little rusty saucepan in and out building. So I go to this town,

01:13:27.540 it's called Laper del Puileron. It's near Jincla. And I'm alone again. And the rejection letters start

01:13:35.960 coming in. So maybe this isn't a surprise, but no one will take me. Actually, it is a surprise to

01:13:41.560 me. I mean, I can't imagine either that many people that are lining up to offer a year of

01:13:47.240 their life free of service. I think the resume scared him, Peter. I mean, what had I done for

01:13:53.100 the last 10 years? I'd gotten people drunk. So basically they're worried that one, this is not

01:13:58.140 real. And two, you're going to show up in two weeks leave and you're going to have taken a spot from

01:14:02.520 somebody who could have stuck it out. Sure. Like who wants a party boy on their mission? You know,

01:14:06.860 I wasn't a serious person. Serious people don't promote nightclubs for 10 years, do they?

01:14:11.580 Right. I mean, if you're, if you're the person reviewing the application at HQ,

01:14:15.180 so nobody has a spot for me or anything good to do. And, you know, never forget, I actually didn't

01:14:23.660 have, I didn't write about this in the book, but I'll never forget this one moment where there's no

01:14:29.360 cell phone reception in this village. And I was riding my bike, maybe 10 miles down the mountain

01:14:35.060 from where the, this little house was. And I'm, I'm going through the main town and my, my Nokia phone

01:14:42.220 rings, which kind of dates this. And I pick it up. The brick. I was like the little one. Yeah. Yeah.

01:14:48.000 The junior brick, junior brick, little LCD screen on the top square. Oh, I love that phone.

01:14:53.840 They were kind of contoured. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Indestructible. I mean, the QWERTY. Yeah.

01:14:59.560 Just great phones. So I, I specifically remember, you know, this thing was in my pocket and I almost

01:15:04.280 fell off my bike. Cause I, nobody had called me and oh my gosh, my phone is ringing. And it was one

01:15:09.180 of the organizations called Mercy Ships. And they said, Hey, we've got your application here. And I'd

01:15:14.260 applied to be their photojournalist. And this is kind of wonderful how this does come full circle

01:15:18.540 because I dust off for this one. I dust off my NYU degree. And I'm like, I have a communications

01:15:24.020 degree from New York university and let me come on your ship. I will write stories about the amazing

01:15:30.740 work that you're doing. It was a hospital ship and I'll take really good pictures. So I put up

01:15:34.440 pictures on my blog of like my girlfriends over the years and beautiful buildings and in Prague,

01:15:40.260 like my Labrador retriever. And yeah, they're, they're like decent photos. You know, my travels around

01:15:45.100 the world. So they call me on the phone and I'm in this village and they say, well, we're a little

01:15:50.040 worried. You might not be a culture fit for us, but we've agreed to meet you. And I said, where are

01:15:54.880 you guys? And they said, well, the ship is in Germany. I'm like, well, I'm in France. I'll see

01:15:59.920 you tomorrow or the next day. So the ship was in Bremerhaven quite a while. It took me two days to get

01:16:04.300 there on the train. But I said, I'm in, this is amazing. So I take the train all the way up. And I

01:16:10.740 remember walking aboard this 522 foot hospital ship, this huge hulking white ocean liner that

01:16:18.880 had been converted, gutted effectively and turned into a state of the art hospital. And I have a

01:16:25.080 meeting with what would be my future bosses. And I convinced them that I'm in this for all the wrong

01:16:31.800 reasons. I believe I'm talented. I believe I can do this job. I am not going to throw wild raves and

01:16:37.620 corrupt the rest of the humanitarian staff. Like I'm, I'm in this. I've had the life change.

01:16:43.040 I've always been pretty good at getting people to like me. That's a, that's a skill in nightlife.

01:16:47.540 You, you know, if you're building a list, I was a good host. I was, I was always trying to make

01:16:52.080 people feel comfortable inside the club. And who do you want to meet, Peter? Oh, no problem. Come with

01:16:57.020 me. You know, Hey, is everything okay? Is your drink okay? You know, I would know people's names. I was,

01:17:01.800 so I was turning on all the charm, basically what I'm saying. So I'm up in Bremerhaven on the ship saying,

01:17:06.240 I will be your best photojournalist that you've ever had. Oh, and by the way, guys, I also come

01:17:12.760 with a built-in list. I've got 15,000 emails. You know, I have a list of 15,000 people. I've been

01:17:18.020 getting drunk for 10 years. 15,000 wealthy people. Some of them were influential. I mean,

01:17:22.120 Mick Jagger was on the list, president of Chanel, right? Or, or people in fashion and publishing and

01:17:27.140 entertainment. So they say, okay, they say, we'll take you. And I said, when does the mission start?

01:17:32.260 Three weeks, you report for duty. So I go back. I remember going to the decathlon in France and

01:17:39.140 buying flashlights and, you know, whatever I thought I would need for Africa. Cause we were

01:17:44.360 sailing into a country called Benin. And then shortly we'd be going to Liberia, which was a

01:17:50.400 country I'd never heard of. Actually, I'd never heard of either of these countries, if I'm honest,

01:17:53.720 but I'd learned that Liberia had just finished a brutal civil war that had lasted 14 years and was led

01:18:00.060 by the evil, evil dictator and warlord Charles Taylor, who had used children for a decade and a

01:18:06.020 half to slaughter an extraordinary amount of people. So I report for duty actually on the island

01:18:11.900 of Tenerife. So the ship was going from Germany to pick up people in Tenerife, an island off the

01:18:18.640 coast of Africa. And then we would sail into West Africa. So I joined the ship a couple of weeks later

01:18:24.240 in Tenerife. I get there first. I know that the ship is sailing in the next morning and I'm going to

01:18:28.700 walk up the gangway. I'm going to surrender my passport and I'm going to officially join this

01:18:33.360 mission. I mean, I'm going to have a boss, you know, I'm going to effectively lose my independence

01:18:37.860 because I've been self-employed, you know, for this whole time, I guess, outside of the, you know,

01:18:42.780 the music store 10 years previous. And, you know, I just was thinking about the ship and this idea

01:18:50.840 of sailing, I guess it was five days to Africa, sailing away to a new continent that I'd never been on

01:18:56.920 sailing away into a new life. And I realized that the best way to do that would be to go all in and

01:19:04.340 just try and quit everything in one go to figure out how to quit gambling. And I imagine you didn't

01:19:10.140 have a choice. You weren't going to be able to gamble, drink, smoke, and drink. You know, I probably

01:19:14.440 wasn't going to get, you know, illicit drugs. Well, I mean, I could always gamble online, which I used to

01:19:19.680 do. I mean, I used to gamble on women's soccer games in, you know, Czechoslovakia that I couldn't even

01:19:26.260 see televised just because I needed the rush of winning or losing. So I have this moment. I was,

01:19:33.060 I was staying at the Sheraton in, I think it was Santa Cruz, the town of Tenerife and the night

01:19:38.560 before. And I just sat in my hotel room alone and I drank seven or eight beers, Amstel lights,

01:19:45.620 smoked well over two packs of Marlboro Reds. And I'm like, this is it. I'm just going to go out

01:19:50.660 with a bang. And I woke up the next day with a brutal hangover and I walked up the gangway of

01:19:57.400 the ship. And it's funny in doing some of the interviews for the book, people actually remember

01:20:02.920 me reeking of alcohol. They're like, did this guy just come from a bar at 7 30 AM?

01:20:10.220 And I actually didn't have the awareness of that. It was just so funny. You know,

01:20:15.280 I'm sure they were saying, did we make a mistake? And, and that was it. Like there was something

01:20:21.500 about, you know, the gangway was going to come up and I was going to leave all of this stuff on land

01:20:26.120 and sail away, away from it. And, and it was a clean break. So from that moment, this is now 14 years

01:20:32.960 ago. I've never had another cigarette. I've never touched Coke or X or any of that stuff.

01:20:38.720 I've never gambled again. I haven't looked in a pornographic image in 15 years. Like I walked so

01:20:44.260 far away from my former life. I drink a little bit. I like craft IPAs and, you know, red wine.

01:20:50.260 What was the withdrawal like from the nicotine in particular?

01:20:53.280 So hard, so hard. And I'd had failed attempts at smoking. I mean, there was, there was, I think,

01:20:58.180 a certain grace of being around medical professionals, which probably made it feel like

01:21:03.000 the new norm was not smoking. The new norm was being healthy and helping people. I used a bunch

01:21:08.880 of the gum at the time. And I think I used the patch and, but I just did it. And there were,

01:21:14.680 by the way, there were the engineers that would smoke. Yeah. I was going to say, I'm guessing there

01:21:18.840 were, you could have got a cigarette. Sure, sure, sure. There was still a ship subculture of the people

01:21:23.420 that worked in the engine room and, and, and they'd all be, you know, having a cigarette on the deck or

01:21:27.280 there were authorized smoking places for them. But that was it for me. And that allowed me to,

01:21:33.980 it really felt like a do-over. It felt like 28 years, you know, I could close that book. And I was

01:21:40.600 starting on page one of a, of a new blank book. And I got to really create a completely new life

01:21:47.860 and a new story for myself as a humanitarian of all things. So what was that, what was that year

01:21:52.860 like? I mean, in terms of, did you develop relationships or friendships that, where you

01:21:57.820 could start to share the stuff that had been previously just completely an internal monologue?

01:22:03.280 Yeah. It was an amazing place, Peter. And someone asked me recently during an interview,

01:22:07.760 they said, look, so many people, you know, struggle with these addictions and they can't get out of it.

01:22:11.560 What do you think it was that allowed you to walk so cleanly? I think the environment had a lot to do

01:22:17.240 with it. I went from an environment where all that was the norm to an environment of like Christian

01:22:22.260 doctors, you know, who were helping people get well, the best surgeons and nurses in the world

01:22:28.440 that had given up their vacation time to use their skills in the service of others. So that really

01:22:34.360 helped. And I love the new norm. Like I embraced the new norm. The new norm was healthy. It was up early.

01:22:39.880 It was saving people's lives. I mean, it was in the most profound and visually evident way possible.

01:22:49.440 So we max, we specialized in max low facial surgery. So these doctors would look for people

01:22:58.160 with tumors, with cleft lips, with cleft palates. We did a lot of cataracts and people who were

01:23:02.840 completely blind and, you know, we could remove the cataracts and put it in. You had an OR on the

01:23:07.820 actual ship. 42 beds. Yep. There were, I think there were three or four operating theaters. I

01:23:12.260 remember when we sailed into Liberia, it was the only, we had the only CT scan in four neighboring

01:23:17.340 countries. The only working CT scanner. What an amazing organization. So you had these, and even

01:23:23.680 better, the quality of the medical staff was so extraordinary because you'd have these doctors

01:23:29.220 flying in from London or Berlin or New York or Los Angeles who would do, I don't know, three weeks,

01:23:35.720 often three months. And they would just say, I can do this. You know, I could go to the Maldives

01:23:40.180 and stay at the Four Seasons, or I could fly to Liberia and I could operate on 46 cleft patients

01:23:46.880 and give 46 people their lives back. So it was, and my job, the amazing thing is that I have the best

01:23:54.080 job on a ship of 350 volunteers. I would say my job is better than the chief medical officer or the

01:24:00.020 surgeons because I get to document all of the life-saving wonder that is happening. It is my job

01:24:07.260 to photograph every single person that goes through the operating theater and document that

01:24:13.120 transformation. So the way that we would find patients was in some ways, not unlike how some

01:24:19.480 club promoters would fill clubs. We flyered the country. We made thousands of flyers. The flyers had

01:24:26.020 the pictures of the facial tumors, the cleft lips, a lot of the burn reconstructions that we were doing

01:24:32.380 and seeing after the war, stuff like flesh eating disease, canker morris, enoma, these really horrible

01:24:38.500 diseases, which I later learned some of them were caused by water. And it was like a casting call.

01:24:43.720 We'd say, if you look like one of the people in these pictures, or if you know someone with these

01:24:47.700 afflictions, turn up on this day and our doctors will see you and we'll triage you.

01:24:51.840 So the profound moment for me was my third, and this happens quickly. So we sail in to port at

01:24:58.700 Benin, patient screening, the triage day is three days later. So everybody's prepping. And I learned

01:25:04.700 that the government has given us a football stadium, the soccer arena in the center of the city. And it

01:25:11.200 was called Les Halles des Arts. And I know also that we have 1500 surgery slots to fill. So in a best

01:25:18.820 case scenario, we are going to hand out 1500, hey, come on this day at this time, and we'll run 1500

01:25:24.100 people through our surgery hospital over four months, and then we'll pick up and we'll sail to

01:25:29.240 Liberia, where we'll spend eight months in Liberia. So actually, we'll spend a year. Third day there,

01:25:35.160 I remembered very vividly, it was five in the morning, you know, I couldn't sleep the night before

01:25:39.700 I was so excited to see who's going to turn up. I mean, is it possible that there's 1500 people in

01:25:45.280 this country with these radical, crazy afflictions, and conditions. And I grabbed my two Nikon cameras,

01:25:54.880 you know, my wide angle lens, my portrait lens, all my batteries, and I put on hospital scrubs,

01:26:02.160 and I jump in this convoy of Land Rovers, maybe 20 Land Rovers, all heading towards the stadium.

01:26:08.100 And as we turn the corner to actually see the stadium, I see the parking lot, and there's 5000

01:26:13.680 people waiting to get in. In the early morning, 5000 people have gathered in this mass. And you

01:26:20.700 know, it just hits me, look, we're going to turn 1000s of people away. You know, the need is so

01:26:24.780 much greater than than our response. We don't have enough doctors, we don't have enough money.

01:26:29.860 Are there local doctors there that could be trained?

01:26:32.160 They are. And that's that's something that the organization has done. But there aren't the

01:26:35.760 medical facilities of the quantity. So I'll give you an example in Liberia. Liberia has one doctor

01:26:42.280 for every 50,000 of its citizens at the time. I believe our number here is one for 300. So for

01:26:49.480 every 300 Americans, there's a there's a doctor for every 50,000. Liberians, there were two surgeons

01:26:56.860 that we'd heard of in a country of a few million people, but nowhere to operate. So the surgeon,

01:27:03.300 you know, even if you were a surgeon, like you'd have to operate on the bush, there was no

01:27:07.100 working medical facility or operating theater. So we had the best hospital going, you know,

01:27:13.420 on our ship. So just that was a really, really hard moment for me. Throughout that first triage

01:27:20.140 day, I felt like I wept 40% of the day. Because the stuff that I saw, I just wasn't prepared for

01:27:27.480 kids choking to death on four pound, benign, fleshy tumors, people with their faces completely

01:27:33.800 rotting from disease, people who had been burned so badly by rebel soldiers often who had poured,

01:27:40.440 you know, oil over their bodies or the bodies of their children. It was that I was in no way

01:27:45.160 prepared to see it like to smell rotting flesh and have to take a photo of someone six inches from

01:27:51.480 their face. I mean, it felt like I was violating them. But these were the medical photos. These were

01:27:55.120 the befores that hopefully would have amazing after stories. So my first friend who I write about in

01:28:01.000 the book was a little boy named Alfred, and he was choking to death on his face with an amelioblastoma,

01:28:07.800 big, fleshy pink tumor that had just grown and grown and grown and grown over four years. And

01:28:13.680 his mom had actually taken him to witch doctors, and they had cut him with knives and with sharp

01:28:19.520 stones, they put pastes and concoctions on the tumor, they had chanted to, you know, spirits,

01:28:26.900 and the tumor just keeps growing. That's what tumors do. How did you guys triage was the if you

01:28:32.260 only had 1500 slots for 5000 people? Was it based on medical need? Nurses were just rolling through

01:28:39.080 the line. I will say some people came with conditions that we couldn't treat. Some people

01:28:43.040 just came to see a doctor, they heard the doctors were coming. Some people came with broken feet.

01:28:48.040 Some people came with terrible cancer that had metastasized all throughout their body. And we were,

01:28:53.020 we weren't able to help. There was a, I remember there were some boys that came with Burkett's

01:28:58.200 lymphoma. You know, we didn't have a good way to treat that you can't operate.

01:29:01.720 Yeah, you need medical treatment. Yeah. You know, we weren't in the business of chemotherapy. We were

01:29:05.520 in the business of operating, you know, on the benign stuff. So, you know, poor Alfred, you know,

01:29:10.580 is just this terrified little boy. And I just determined that he's going to be my first friend.

01:29:15.580 And I'm going to see his story all the way through. And he's going to be the first story that I

01:29:20.000 share with the 15,000 people from my former life of what we're really doing here. So thankfully for

01:29:26.580 me, he was, I think he was first in line that day and he gets a surgery date three days later.

01:29:31.160 So we just get to work triage two days. And then the next day surgery starts and people start turning

01:29:38.220 up and the operating theaters are just scheduled out. And then the recovery ward had 42 beds. This is,

01:29:44.420 you know, this is a proper hospital. So I'm there as Alfred walks up on the ship, you know,

01:29:49.160 his father Besson brings him and I'm documenting his surgery. So I'm in the operating theater all

01:29:54.480 the time. I just love, I love the blood. I loved like just the visceral, like change, you know,

01:30:00.840 seeing someone, seeing a surgeon open up someone's face and then fix it and then put it back together.

01:30:05.380 I just thought it was the most fascinating thing. So I probably documented 50 surgeries in scrubs,

01:30:12.240 you know, with my cameras right there, they would, they would allow me to get sterile and then

01:30:15.700 just be there documenting it. So Alfred's was my first and they just take this giant tumor and they

01:30:21.400 cut it out and they put in a titanium plate because his jaw had been completely moved, blown out really

01:30:27.660 by the tumor. And a couple of weeks later, I got to take him home to his village and I'm following

01:30:34.300 behind him with my camera and he's in, you know, his best clothes and I'm watching the village surround

01:30:39.980 this little boy that they thought was cursed, that they thought was written off for, for dead.

01:30:45.260 And they're looking at him and they're touching his face. And you know, he's, he's like a celebrity

01:30:49.540 in the village. And that was my first kind of all the way through, oh, wow, we're going to be able to

01:30:56.480 do that 1500 times. We're going to, we're going to so transform people's lives. When you write a book

01:31:02.580 after two years, you see some of these little parallels, you know, as radical as my life change was,

01:31:07.640 you know, from the dirty degenerate, you know, drug addict to, you know, now this like humanitarian

01:31:14.100 photographer trying to tell stories of these incredible doctors and patients, you know, we

01:31:18.520 were, I remember a woman soon after named Marguerite and she had gone blind in her twenties. So she,

01:31:26.060 she could see her whole life and then exposure to the equatorial sun with no UV. She had these huge

01:31:32.280 cataracts. I mean, you could see them. They were giant, opaque, white cataracts.

01:31:37.640 And so she'd gone completely blind. She couldn't see her family, couldn't see her kids.

01:31:43.040 So I remember being in the operating theater as, as this, uh, one of the surgeons, a guy named Glenn

01:31:47.760 Price makes a little slit from what I remember. He like just sticks tweezers in and he pulls out the

01:31:52.440 cataract and then he pops in the new lens. The thing took like 15 minutes, right? I remember

01:31:56.820 thinking I could totally do that. Like you could train me to be a cataract surgeon right now.

01:32:01.760 I mean, it just seems so simple, you know, scalpel, make the slit, pop it out, pop it in

01:32:07.520 and then put a bandage on. And did this, there's probably some surgeons now that are like, if

01:32:12.780 there's way more to it than that, but it felt so simple as a, as a document, you know, tarion.

01:32:17.820 Did this sort of rekindle that thing that you had when you were 13 and you wanted to go to

01:32:21.960 Johns Hopkins and you wanted to become a doctor? Did you now find yourself saying, wait a minute,

01:32:26.160 I'm definitely, I don't want to go back to being a club promoter. I want to be a doctor.

01:32:30.920 Well, I, I almost got to be a doctor. I was living vicariously through all the doctors all the time.

01:32:36.420 You know, in a way I felt like I was a part of all these patient stories and the doctors would

01:32:42.500 come and go. And I was the constant. This one woman made such an impression on me because I think

01:32:48.420 it was actually, it might've been two days later, we were going to remove the bandages and, you know,

01:32:55.000 there was a little bit of healing that took place. So I just, I saw the moment that I wanted to

01:33:00.200 capture because I'd, I'd met her blind. I'd interviewed her. I'd, I'd seen the surgery and

01:33:04.640 documented that. So I go down there when they start taking off the bandages and I'm, I'm just

01:33:11.120 snapping stills like click, click, click, click, click, click, click. And she starts screaming.

01:33:15.840 Just the flash.

01:33:17.320 She tackles me dancing, screaming, you know, glory, glory, like tackles her sister that she can now

01:33:24.680 see. And it was just this euphoric moment. I mean, there's, you, you know, going from being

01:33:31.240 blind to being able to see, um,

01:33:33.900 Yeah. It's hard to imagine.

01:33:35.100 It's hard to imagine.

01:33:35.840 I can't imagine what that would be like.

01:33:37.760 Like I can still, I can put myself in that tiny little room where it all happened. And I think,

01:33:43.320 Peter, I wanted to share these stories with people in the same way that, you know, there was a

01:33:48.660 period of time where I wanted to share a story that if you got past my velvet rope and spent thousands of

01:33:54.100 dollars on booze and you were seen with the beautiful people, or maybe you went home with

01:33:57.380 the right beautiful people, then your life had meaning. This was real meaning. I mean, this was

01:34:02.520 life transformation. This was real sacrifice and generosity by these doctors, by the donors that

01:34:09.040 were paying for these surgeries. And I think I wanted to, I just wanted to share every story.

01:34:13.920 So I just start blasting my club list with Alfred story, with Marguerite story, with the picture of

01:34:20.400 the five or the 3000 people that we told turned away when we closed the doors of the stadium and

01:34:25.620 the triage was finished.

01:34:26.760 And these people who are getting these emails, they don't know what's happened. The last thing

01:34:30.940 they remember is Scott was our hookup. And then Scott kind of vanished. Cause it's, I don't,

01:34:34.980 I don't imagine you sent a retirement.

01:34:36.540 I actually did. I sent a, I did send a retirement letter. I went back and saw it recently. It was,

01:34:42.120 you know, it was a little high and mighty. Like I'm leaving nightclubs behind to go

01:34:46.740 explore a humanitarian journey. You know, I mean, definitely some eye rolling now looking back on

01:34:53.100 an email, but I did announce what I was doing. And I said, you know, you are all going to come

01:34:56.820 along for the ride. I mean, I, I teased that you're going to come on the journey with me and

01:35:01.620 what I see you're going to see. So what they started seeing was giant fleshy tumors and some,

01:35:08.980 you know, leprosy and just some crazy stuff. And, you know, of course there's a few unsubscribes and

01:35:14.220 people said, take me off this list. I enjoyed the Prada party that you threw once, but I'm not

01:35:18.480 down with the tumor party or like, don't need to see someone's face eaten by leprosy. But the

01:35:23.840 response that I got from most people was, this is amazing. I didn't know that this ship existed.

01:35:29.980 I didn't know that there were doctors who cared so much that they would, they would even do this.

01:35:35.420 How do I get on the ship? How do I give money? How much did the surgery cost? About $400.

01:35:40.900 How do I send in $400? Well, here's how you do that. So I remember this one woman writes me and

01:35:46.780 she says, it's the middle of the day. I'm sitting here at Chanel headquarters. I'm in a brightly lit

01:35:52.640 office and tears are streaming down my face. I can't believe what I've just seen and what I've

01:35:57.820 read. I need to do something. I need to be a part of this. And so I have this immediate feedback loop

01:36:05.780 that my stories are moving people. The photos, the images are moving people. I think what I've

01:36:11.980 learned there that it wasn't just the writing, it was actually the images. I saw, I came across a

01:36:16.680 quote this week that I love so much that I have never, I'd never heard of before until this week,

01:36:22.200 but it's from Carl Jung and it says, transformation can only take place in the presence of images.

01:36:28.820 And I think there was something so arresting or disrupting about these photos, perhaps the

01:36:37.340 extremity of a huge tumor. And then the tumor is gone of cataracts, like saucers that you can see

01:36:44.220 and then gone that really worked along with the stories that I was writing. If I just said, Hey,

01:36:48.720 Alfred's this 14 year old boy and he's been suffocating on his face with a big pink fleshy tumor.

01:36:53.700 There's one way to do it. But when you see it, when people saw it, um, it really, it moved them.

01:36:59.980 So I do this for a year and I'm just telling story after story. My list actually starts to grow a

01:37:05.360 little bit. The other thing I forgot to mention is that I had to pay $500 every month to volunteer.

01:37:11.020 So this was, you talk about the, if the dream or the prayer was to create the opposite of my life,

01:37:17.020 I actually wound up in the poorest country in the world paying money to volunteer. And this was

01:37:23.420 how mercy ships helped support the organization. They got all the crew to raise their own support

01:37:28.160 for room and board and, you know, for food. And that was a big income stream for them.

01:37:34.000 So I'm, I'm basically going broke on the ship. Not only am I not earning an income,

01:37:38.760 it costs me money to be there.

01:37:40.620 And you're learning back to a point we had earlier, you're learning about what a really

01:37:45.240 efficient nonprofit can do.

01:37:47.560 Sort of pieces, both on the positive on the negative side.

01:37:51.660 Sure. Sure. I'm getting an inside look at a, at a nonprofit and, and for sure the medical work

01:37:57.440 was amazing and transformative, but I also got to look at a little bureaucracy, you know,

01:38:02.280 how a big charity, you know, might work and some of the blockers. And one of the, one of the amazing

01:38:07.860 things for me was that my boss on the ship, he didn't know how to handle me. He didn't know how

01:38:12.960 to handle this New York city, crazy guns blazing 80 hour a week worker. So he just gave me an

01:38:20.980 incredible amount of rope. I mean, I took over a photo office and I made that my own. And I was,

01:38:28.300 I was really like this lone ranger, you know, he would initially assign me to take the photos and

01:38:32.740 then someone else to write the story. I'm like, no, I'm doing it all myself. I have to be a one-stop

01:38:37.100 shop. And, you know, I think, gosh, that drove me. I think he just knew that I needed some element

01:38:43.780 of autonomy to feel like I could own the whole experience. And I worked around the clock. I mean,

01:38:51.880 there was nothing else. There was no dating. There was no, it was just all work.

01:38:56.400 When did the pangs start to go away? I'm sure at some point initially, when you got on that ship,

01:39:01.300 you were still missing the, the sex, the girlfriend, the booze, the drugs, the cigarettes.

01:39:08.100 I mean, was there a day when you sort of woke up and realized like, actually, I'm, I'm happier now

01:39:14.520 than I was back then. It felt almost instant. Wow. Because I was so busy in a different direction.

01:39:21.960 Every single intention, every single task, every, you know, everything I was reading, it was

01:39:27.620 the whole community, everything changed. You know, it's like, I went from being on the death star

01:39:34.200 to, I don't know, being around the people of light. Well, it's a very good point you

01:39:39.480 brought up earlier. I used to have a slightly different way of explaining that to patients.

01:39:44.320 When I was at Hopkins, we would see a lot of folks in the ER who were using IV drugs. So heroin was a

01:39:49.580 pretty rampant in Baltimore at the time. It might still be actually. And whenever we'd get a patient in

01:39:54.900 there, usually it was to debris to, you know, an abscess or something like that, you sort of had to

01:40:00.380 explain to them, look, you don't get an infinite number of shots on goal here. This is going to kill

01:40:04.380 you really soon. You're going to get endocarditis. You're going to get an infection. That's not going

01:40:08.100 to be, it's going to kill you before we get to it. You can't just go back to where you came from.

01:40:14.500 Like to kick a heroin habit, you need a new life. You need a new group of friends. You need a new

01:40:20.220 place to live. And so it's a year later. Do you come back to New York?

01:40:25.280 So I do come back to New York. And that was probably the hardest part because then all the

01:40:29.980 temptations are there. Exactly.

01:40:31.580 The old girlfriend was still around and hadn't moved on yet. The party was still there. I would say,

01:40:38.380 look, I felt during, so when I come back, I put on an exhibition of my photos in order to raise

01:40:46.720 money for Mercy Ships. And I get a gallery. And you're gamefully unemployed at this point.

01:40:51.800 Oh, I'm crashing with my old club partner and kindness of strangers really at this point.

01:40:59.040 Because nightclub promoters, okay, I can only speak for myself. I was not good at saving money.

01:41:03.480 I was fantastic at spending a little more than I made every single year.

01:41:08.400 So I came back broke. I'd been giving all my money to Mercy Ships, the people that I met along the way.

01:41:13.620 And many of these patients, you know, I'd wind up supporting afterwards. I mean,

01:41:17.220 Alfred, I'm actually still supporting 15 years later because, you know, I've helped him become

01:41:22.420 a plumber and it's been a joy to be able to do. But yeah, I was definitely broke. So I come back

01:41:28.720 and I said, well, what could I do that would be useful? I could put on, I can bring people into

01:41:34.200 the story in a space. We got a gallery donated in Chelsea. It was a milky white gallery. So it felt

01:41:41.200 like a hospital and I hung up these sheets and created different rooms, almost like operating

01:41:46.680 theaters or the ward. And then I put a hundred, I think it was 108 images together, creating light

01:41:51.900 boxes and TV installations of patients morphing back and forth. And at the end of the gallery show,

01:41:59.000 I asked people to donate the cost of one surgery if they could. It was 380 bucks or whatever they

01:42:04.740 could. So my goal was to raise as much money for Mercy Ships as possible and then go back and follow

01:42:10.380 the money. So I actually come back to New York on a mission, which is great, right? The mission is

01:42:15.040 continuing. It's just the venue has changed. The context has changed. And I remember my friends

01:42:21.500 thought that I wasn't as much fun. You know, I'm not doing coke with them. I'm not staying out

01:42:26.100 late, but I still was in the clubs trying to raise money and trying to get people to donate catering

01:42:32.900 for the exhibition or donate printing. I'm still working the network. And I guess I just felt like,

01:42:41.060 look, there are going to be all these opportunities for me to slip back into my former life, especially

01:42:45.260 now. And there would be grace for that. But what if I didn't? In some ways, the analogy of, so I love,

01:42:54.980 personally love this parable, the prodigal son from the New Testament, where the son basically,

01:42:59.480 you know, flips everybody off, takes his inheritance, goes very, very far away and winds

01:43:04.980 up gambling, drinking, sleeping with prostitutes. And he kind of winds up in a bad place at the end

01:43:09.800 of himself. And he says, I want to come home. And he says, actually, that the servants in my father's

01:43:15.580 house are living a better life than I am now. So he comes home. And what I love about that is the

01:43:21.840 father in the story sees his son across the distance and runs out towards the son. And in

01:43:29.520 that culture, like a man would actually never run and reveal his ankles in that way. So it just shows

01:43:34.160 the passion. And he throws his arms around his son. And there's no admonishment. You know, imagine the

01:43:42.680 lecture that's been 10 years in the making. Prostitutes, really? Drugs? Three packs of cigarettes?

01:43:49.620 Like there was no lecture. And he puts on a robe. And I love that detail in the story. He gives his

01:43:55.740 son one of the finest robes in the house. And then he throws him a party. I love that. Like he says,

01:44:01.480 my son is home. My son who was lost has been found. Let's throw a party. I love the idea of the change

01:44:06.860 of clothes. So you got a sense of this kid who had just soiled his clothes far away, you know, like with

01:44:12.500 the pigs. And in some ways I felt like I had changed my clothes. And I almost had on like,

01:44:19.220 like imagine if the robe was white. I didn't want to get it dirty. I could get it dirty. I could stain

01:44:24.600 it. And then, you know, I'd go to the dry cleaners or, you know, and maybe I, maybe I couldn't get it

01:44:28.340 all the way clean, but I had gotten a new set of clothes and why not keep them clean? So I just kept

01:44:35.620 coming back to that idea that what if I did keep him clean? Like how would the story continue to play

01:44:40.800 out? What if I didn't, you know, get back in a relationship and start sleeping with my old

01:44:45.180 girlfriend? What if I never, you know, what if I just stayed completely pure or clean? So I was,

01:44:51.200 I was actually able to do that. So how did you decide to start your own charity, which is really

01:44:58.780 the cherry on this story, right? Which is, it's one thing to realize that you can do amazing work for

01:45:06.280 an organization that's already up and running. It's quite another thing to say, I'm actually going

01:45:11.840 to take all that I've learned and create an organization to affect change.

01:45:17.880 Sure. So the next part of the story goes, I learned something because my exhibition is effective and I

01:45:24.580 raised about a hundred thousand dollars for Mercy Ships. Wow. So I tap into all my old relationships.

01:45:30.220 PR companies are donating. Jeffrey Chowderow is donating the food. I mean, I just went,

01:45:34.980 you know, Prada and Gucci are donating handbags that we auctioned off and we raised a hundred

01:45:39.240 thousand dollars through the gallery and through an event for the closing night. All that money goes

01:45:43.820 to Mercy Ships. And I then go back and follow the money because what I realized was that a lot of my

01:45:50.120 friends were really skeptical when it came to charities. And I was, I could be this guide. They,

01:45:55.560 they had trusted me, certainly not before, but through all of the communications and the photos and

01:46:02.120 the stories. I was so prolific over that year. You felt like you were living in my head. If you

01:46:07.320 were reading it and you were taking it, I mean, I wrote, Oh, maybe 50,000 words. I was just churning

01:46:13.800 out content, like meet the patient of the day. She's amazing. Let me tell you her story, you know,

01:46:19.160 or, or I'd be going into these villages and staying overnight and documenting video snippets of

01:46:24.840 the welcomings. So you, I think a lot of people felt like they were really along the journey. So I raised

01:46:30.300 the money and I'm like, okay, wow, I can actually raise money for the cause, not just be a passive

01:46:34.720 documentarian. It's a very strange thing. I mean, most photojournalists would only, they would never

01:46:39.480 get involved, right? You're just telling the story. I'm like, I'm going to get involved. I'm going to

01:46:43.240 take pictures and I'm going to use those photos to raise money to affect change. So I realized that I

01:46:48.980 have a gift for that. And then I go back for another eight months to Liberia. So this is year number

01:46:54.420 two, still volunteering. So we're now into like middle to late Oh five. Yep, exactly. And I come

01:47:01.640 across the water crisis. So which you alluded to a little earlier. Yeah. This time, this time I got

01:47:07.620 off the ship and I, you know, back in Liberia, you know, most of my time had been the first time

01:47:12.340 it had been spent in Monrovia, you know, on the ward. Now I said, I want to understand a little more

01:47:17.540 of the context of this country. And I bought a motorcycle from a deckhand and, you know, that bought

01:47:22.300 me some autonomy and some freedom. Again, my boss was great. He would let me stay in the bush,

01:47:27.240 you know, overnight I would have to sign, you know, kind of permission slips. So I started exploring the

01:47:31.740 country. I mean, going up to the Guinea border and the Sierra Leone border. And the more time I spend in

01:47:37.660 these villages, I see the water that people are drinking. And I had never, it just never occurred

01:47:43.800 to me that people would drink out of swamps or brown, viscous, muddy rivers. And I learned that

01:47:52.780 50% of the people living in Liberia didn't have clean water to drink. So half the country was

01:47:58.960 drinking contaminated, filthy water. And I started taking pictures of it, you know, children drinking

01:48:06.120 from swamps with algae and bugs. And that means you could actually see, you know, fish and worms in

01:48:13.560 some of these swamps. And like little kids are just drinking straight from them. And my mentor on the

01:48:19.580 ship was a guy named Dr. Gary Parker. And I just started sharing some of the images with him. Like,

01:48:24.480 look at the pictures that I'm taking out there. You see what's going on out there? Like the war zone,

01:48:27.860 you know, it's a water war zone. And the doctors and the surgeons that I show these photos to

01:48:33.240 all just start saying, like, duh, kid. Water makes people sick. You know, we know that so much of the

01:48:40.360 disease that we're seeing is caused by unsafe water and a lack of sanitation and hygiene. And I get

01:48:47.300 encouraged by the doctor that I most respected, this guy named Dr. Gary Parker, who had a personal

01:48:55.060 backstory. If I pause for one second, just to tell his, he was a California surgeon that had signed up

01:49:00.460 for three months, just like many. And when I walked up the gangway of the ship for the first time,

01:49:05.240 he'd been there 21 years. He became a lifer. He just never went back to his practice.

01:49:11.360 So another real piece. So I now have a guide mentor that kind of like me, right? I'm going to tie the

01:49:17.340 one of the 10 years, but he never went back to his former life. So what might that look like for me?

01:49:23.620 So he encourages me. He says, well, you seem pretty passionate about this water thing. And if you

01:49:29.340 really wanted to bring health to the world, if you really cared about impacting the health of

01:49:36.180 millions or at the time, a billion people, you would make sure everybody had clean water. And that

01:49:41.300 would be a great issue. You know, you want to play doctor to the world. Don't help raise money for

01:49:46.880 another $60 million hospital ship that can do a few thousand very effective surgeries. Go make sure

01:49:52.920 everybody in this country is clean water. Maybe we wouldn't even need to pull into port here.

01:49:56.600 So I started thinking about this. And at the time I actually wanted to continue working for mercy

01:50:02.940 ships. So I'm thinking about water and what I might do on my own, but I finished the second year

01:50:08.720 and I try and work for them. I'm like, Hey, what if I did my exhibition model all around the world,

01:50:14.720 Berlin and Prague and in Paris and in London. And, you know, let's raise huge awareness. Let's make

01:50:20.920 your organization and your doctors famous. Let's raise millions of dollars. And they basically said,

01:50:25.720 no, thanks. Which I don't blame them. I mean, this was a very conservative organization based out of

01:50:32.060 a dry town in Texas, Lindale, Texas. And some New York club promoter wants huge budgets

01:50:37.860 to fly around the world, putting on huge exhibitions of tumors and light boxes. And I, you know,

01:50:44.620 the stuff, the ideas I had were just crazy. So the door closes and they say, thanks,

01:50:50.420 but no, thanks. You know, you've, you've really helped us. It's, it's amazing. I think I helped

01:50:53.780 them get 20 or 30 media items. You know, I got my photos published in the wall street journal and

01:50:58.740 the independent in London. So I thought I brought a lot of awareness and money to them, but that door

01:51:03.680 shut. And I said, all right, well, I'm not going back to my former life two years in. What if I just

01:51:09.220 take everything I've learned and start the water thing? Let me go work on water. And what would it look

01:51:16.500 like if I dedicated 20, 30, maybe the rest of my life to helping people get clean drinking water?

01:51:21.800 What kind of impact could I make? So I just started. And that was, I had my issue. I'm like,

01:51:26.700 let me try it. People need clean water. So I was living at that time on a walk-in closet floor

01:51:33.160 on Spring and Mercer in Soho, New York. My club partner had taken me in. It was an unideal situation

01:51:39.800 because he was doing heroin at the time with his friends, but it was the only place I had to live and

01:51:43.760 it was free. And he says, well, you know, you can use my living room and my couch as your office.

01:51:49.540 And I did have, you know, a spare bedroom and then the closet floor when I got bounced from

01:51:53.880 the little bedroom in the back. And, uh, I was on a mission, Peter, like from, from day one, I'm like,

01:52:00.460 I'm going to be the clean water fighter. I'm going to fight for clean water. And therefore I'm going to

01:52:05.040 be potentially the most effective doctor that the world has ever seen. If I could get millions,

01:52:11.480 tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people, the most basic need for health.

01:52:15.900 And I'd be working right alongside mercy ships and eliminating the need for, you know, a lot of

01:52:21.400 those, um, conditions that we were treating. So how did you get smart on this topic? Like there's,

01:52:27.200 it's one thing to take sort of what I would call the first order observation, which is these people

01:52:32.480 are drinking a bunch of dirty water. Dirty water is making them sick. That's bad. But then there's

01:52:36.640 like the second, third, fourth order insights that are necessary, which is like, what's at the root

01:52:41.500 cause of this? What are the nonlinear implications of this? How do you actually fix this problem in

01:52:47.680 the most leveraged way, in the most scalable way? Like, I mean, obviously today, you know, the answer

01:52:52.100 to all of those things, but that's an overwhelming task for some guy sitting in a closet in Soho to

01:52:58.820 figure out. Thankfully, it didn't feel like that at the, at the time I started flying around meeting

01:53:04.540 with water organizations, started reading everything I could on the global water crisis.

01:53:10.960 Then I started traveling around to Africa.

01:53:13.460 But on what dime? You don't have any money.

01:53:15.760 So I, I file for a 501c3 and I'm raising money then on the idea that our organization is.

01:53:25.940 So this is sort of like, you're taking angel slash VC early dollars in your charity.

01:53:30.900 You got it. It wasn't even tax deductible. And a lot of those early dollars were buying

01:53:35.140 me a $872 coach flight to Ethiopia where it was very inexpensive to, you know, run around

01:53:41.280 for two weeks. And often I'd be hosted by the local partner, you know, who's covering room

01:53:46.260 and board and food. So I'm both trying to fundraise for my organization, which has a very clear

01:53:52.640 mission. We're going to bring clean drinking water to everybody on the planet. Okay. We're

01:53:56.980 going to figure out how to do this as we go along, but we are getting clean drinking water

01:54:01.380 to everybody in need. I have a huge observation at this time. And I realized that this isn't

01:54:08.880 going to be easy because the lack of trust that I had sniffed out a little bit during

01:54:13.900 that first exhibition, when my club friends were coming in and giving surgery money to

01:54:17.740 mercy ships, it was real.

01:54:19.920 Meaning the lack of trust amongst the donors.

01:54:21.960 Yeah. People don't trust the donor, the donor faith that you're actually doing what you say

01:54:25.800 you're doing, or at least you're doing it reasonably well.

01:54:29.000 People didn't trust charities. I would hear stories of, um, I don't know where my money

01:54:32.820 goes. Charities are big black holes that eat money. You would hear stories of high overheads.

01:54:39.260 I don't know the impact, you know, charity CEO is probably paying himself millions of dollars.

01:54:44.080 I mean, everybody seemed to have a scandal that they could readily pull out of their back pocket

01:54:47.480 to say, this is why I don't trust, you know, the, the big philanthropy, the big charities.

01:54:52.640 And I actually found data behind that. So, uh, USA today had polled Americans and, uh, found 42%

01:54:59.740 of people said they didn't trust charities. And this is, this is probably actually shocking to some

01:55:04.740 people that are listening because who is more generous or philanthropic than Americans, right?

01:55:10.160 We have this heritage, this cultural reputation of being some of those generous people on earth,

01:55:15.520 if not the most generous. Certainly my research when I was, uh, in the business of fundraising was

01:55:20.200 that not only were Americans the most generous, but New Yorkers were the most generous amongst all

01:55:24.220 Americans. People always ask me, why am I in New York now? And I say in many ways they could trace

01:55:29.300 it back to my days of fundraising. There's a Willie Sutton quote, right? Why do you rob banks? That's

01:55:34.420 where the money is. Where, why do you raise money in New York? Cause that's not just where the money is.

01:55:38.800 It's where the people are, who are the most generous. And I, I remember being really surprised

01:55:46.180 by that, but also felt like, you know, New Yorkers really get a bad rap. Sometimes people sort of

01:55:51.280 think of all these, uh, sort of wealthy people in New York or even, you know, whatever, just the

01:55:55.420 average person in New York is sort of a hard person and, you know, sort of fast living and blah,

01:56:00.080 blah, blah. But in many ways I, again, I don't want to take knocks at people, but I, I just would

01:56:06.220 have expected at the outset that other parts of the country would have been much more generous.

01:56:10.300 And I was constantly amazed at the generosity of New Yorkers.

01:56:14.100 Well, there you go. So I, and, and that's where we started really from, you know, that closet floor

01:56:19.840 and from the couch of the drug den in Soho, you know, not ideal conditions, I guess, but

01:56:23.960 so to combat that cynicism or that skepticism, I'd come across a guy called Paul Tudor Jones,

01:56:31.100 who was a hedge fund billionaire and he'd started the Robin Hood foundation.

01:56:34.760 And co-founded Robin Hood.

01:56:36.040 Yep. Robin Hood foundation. And, you know, in, in what I understood from his story,

01:56:40.720 he also realized that donors didn't trust charities. And he said, cool, tell you what,

01:56:45.860 I'm rich enough. I'll pay for all the overhead of the charity so that a hundred percent of anything

01:56:50.360 you give to my charity goes directly to the programs, which was education in, um, in the

01:56:56.040 inner city.

01:56:57.160 And to this day, the entire board of Robin Hood does just now it's him and his board, right?

01:57:01.600 It's, it's gotten too much probably for him, but you know, initially you can imagine that

01:57:04.560 idea of that impulse. I'll fund it. Okay. Now what's your excuse? What's, what's your next

01:57:08.920 excuse of why you wouldn't give to help the poor here in New York city if you knew that

01:57:12.880 all your money was going. So I write him a letter. He doesn't write me back. Um, and I guess

01:57:16.880 why would he, but I wondered, it just felt so clean, so extreme, so elegant to bank accounts.

01:57:25.500 What if I opened up to bank accounts and I promised the public that all of the money they would ever

01:57:31.220 give to charity water. And I had, I wasn't very creative in the beginning, the charity that helps

01:57:36.180 people get water, charity water. What if all the money that they give goes directly to fund water

01:57:42.540 projects that directly help people get clean water? And in bank account number two, somehow I'm going

01:57:47.500 to figure out how to raise all the overhead separately. No idea at the beginning, but I love

01:57:51.900 the model. Two bank accounts audited separately. And this, this public promise that whether someone

01:57:58.580 gave a dollar or a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars or a million dollars, it would all reach

01:58:02.360 a hundred percent programmatic. A hundred percent.

01:58:04.860 So can I interject one thing on my high horse here? I applaud you for doing that, but I also

01:58:10.440 want a listener to understand something. Overhead is not a dirty term.

01:58:14.700 Absolutely not.

01:58:15.340 And there's a great Ted talk.

01:58:17.460 Dan Pallotta. Unsharitable.

01:58:19.020 That's right. And we'll leave everything he's saying.

01:58:20.740 Yeah. And after two things, one, his talk really impacted me, which was probably five,

01:58:26.700 six years ago. And then my own experience of realizing the same thing you did that what my wife

01:58:32.760 and I have decided going forward, we support only 100% overhead. So every dollar we give,

01:58:40.000 we give directly to salary supportive people we believe in doing charity. And we do that because

01:58:47.280 we know it's much easier to raise money on the programmatic side. It's much easier to say,

01:58:51.100 give me a thousand bucks to go and build a well. But my interest is, well, who's paying Scott's

01:58:57.780 salary? Cause I'd much rather pay Scott's salary.

01:59:00.200 We do the same thing. You know, we, maybe seven years ago, my wife and I just decided, Hey,

01:59:05.040 we're going to write on the check, you know, use this under overhead.

01:59:08.900 Yes. Use this for the, you know, or even use it for what nobody else wants to pay for.

01:59:13.040 That's what we say. That's what we say. We'll write a note and say, you know, I mean,

01:59:16.000 go fix the roof of the building, go pay the phone bill, go take the extra trip home from the orphanage

01:59:21.320 to go be with your family around the holidays, right? Don't have the orphan write me letters.

01:59:27.020 That's the easy thing. You're going to go get somebody else who doesn't trust to do that.

01:59:30.780 Yeah. So, okay. So I'm totally with you and I know Dan Plata and really like what he's saying.

01:59:37.140 However, it's been an uphill battle. You know, he's been preaching that message for 10 years

01:59:41.340 and the data hasn't showed that it's moving people. So I was like, I'm going to fight a

01:59:47.140 different battle. I'm going to go and raise all the overhead separately. I'm going to go find

01:59:50.140 Peter and his wife, a different set of donor, a builder, an innovator, you know, who actually gets

01:59:57.840 or could get excited about the salaries, the office rent.

02:00:01.080 You know, in many ways, what it comes down to, in my opinion, which you've already figured out is

02:00:04.840 you have to find people who believe in you versus the mission. And those are two slightly different

02:00:10.720 things. They can often go hand in hand, but in the end of the day, when I think about the sort of

02:00:15.460 salary support that we provide to people, it's because like, yeah, I believe in that individual and

02:00:21.620 I trust that individual. And all I want is their life to be easier because indirectly what you

02:00:26.800 realize is their life is easier. They're doing better work. And what I think is elegant about

02:00:31.020 the way you've done it is you've literally separated the financial streams.

02:00:34.720 Yeah, they get audited separately.

02:00:35.780 Yeah, that is different numbers.

02:00:37.780 That is so brilliant.

02:00:38.720 It's not fungible.

02:00:39.220 No, that is so brilliant.

02:00:40.540 And we took it a step farther than Robin Hood because I just, I love like black and white

02:00:45.580 before and after. Like I just, I don't do well with gray. So I said, well, if we're going to be

02:00:50.280 out there talking about-

02:00:51.160 That is the theme of your life, Scott. You do not, despite the fact that you're sitting there in a

02:00:54.920 gray sweatshirt right now, you do not do well in gray.

02:00:59.080 So you'll, you'll like this. I say, well, I can't be up there talking about a hundred percent

02:01:03.480 unless we also pay back all the credit card fees. So from day one and to this day, if you went online

02:01:09.860 right now, you pulled out your American express and you go to charitywater.org and you give a hundred

02:01:13.820 bucks.

02:01:14.740 MX gets 3% of that.

02:01:16.260 You got it. So I get 97. But what did you give?

02:01:20.300 You gave a hundred.

02:01:20.920 So what do you expect? A hundred dollars to go to the field. So in the other bank accounts,

02:01:25.900 and I can talk about how we do that later and all the trials and that, but we actually pay back that

02:01:30.160 $3 and we send your a hundred dollars, your intended a hundred dollars to the field. So that was pillar

02:01:34.200 number one. Pillar number two was then when you have two bank accounts, I just realized, okay,

02:01:41.640 we've just created a non-fungible, non-black hole scenario. So why can't we use technology to track

02:01:49.380 these dollars as they go out and just show people where they landed? So if we were going to build a

02:01:53.920 well in Malawi, you know, we could say your money went here or to Bangladesh or to India or to Cambodia

02:01:59.060 or to Bolivia. And, you know, I lucked into meeting the Google earth founder when I was starting

02:02:06.280 charity water. I met him at a conference and they were building Google earth and Google maps. And I

02:02:11.100 just realized I was going to be able from day one to geolocate every water project using their free

02:02:18.720 platform. And all it was going to cost me was $50 handheld GPS devices. I think they were Garmin

02:02:24.760 devices at the time. You could go buy a Best Buy and we would be able to fund a water project that

02:02:29.860 helped people get clean water, turn on a GPS device, take a picture of the GPS, take a picture of the

02:02:34.540 project and then upload it and say, this is proof that you'd be able to see a satellite image of your

02:02:41.040 well. So if a hundred percent was the first pillar proof then became the second pillar and proof would

02:02:48.060 look very different in many different ways. We would have hopefully myriad ways of being creative

02:02:53.140 and connecting people to what their money did. The third thing that I wanted to do differently

02:02:58.360 was I wanted to, I wanted the brand to feel unlike any other charity that I'd ever encountered.

02:03:05.900 I wanted to build an epic brand, a beautiful brand and an imaginative, inspiring brand.

02:03:12.860 And when I saw most charities, I saw marketing that I didn't want any part of. I saw shame and guilt

02:03:19.880 and almost toxic marketing. And you may remember the commercials from the eighties and the nineties with

02:03:26.380 Sally Struthers and the flies that land on the kids' faces in slow motion as they look up and lock

02:03:33.560 their sad eyes with the camera. And then the 800 number slowly creeps across the screen and you give

02:03:39.440 and you give out of, and you give out of like shame often or guilt for feeling that you're in your

02:03:46.040 comfortable living room and these kids in Africa have flies crawling on their face.

02:03:49.340 Dude, that is so amazing that you brought that image up. Like I remember the commercial you're

02:03:53.380 talking about. I would have, I would have never pulled that out of my, the recesses of my brain.

02:03:58.800 Had you not mentioned that that's literally 35, 40 years ago. I just went and watched them recently

02:04:03.520 to make sure that they were as bad as I remember. And they they're worse. So to me, the vestiges of

02:04:09.840 shame and guilt, and even the, the language, by the way, this, this is still pervasive today,

02:04:16.020 the language giving back. This is unhelpful. If I snatch the mic from in front of you, you know,

02:04:23.400 you'd say, give it back as if I've taken it from you. And the language implies we have, you know,

02:04:30.820 we've pillaged and plundered to such extent, we should probably throw a few scraps back to the

02:04:36.920 poor. Let's give a little back that we've taken. And it implies giving out of debt or obligation,

02:04:44.520 all unhealthy things without. And I come across a quote by Nick Kristof in the New York times.

02:04:49.860 And he said, toothpaste is being peddled with far more sophistication than all the world's

02:04:55.460 life-saving causes. Charity brands suck. Doritos will spend hundreds of millions of dollars cleverly

02:05:02.180 marketing, you know, stuff that kills us and our children. But the most important life-saving

02:05:06.700 humanitarian efforts often have an anemic brands where they guilt and shame people into giving to them.

02:05:12.600 And by the way, this comes back in some way to the overhead problem. And this is sort of one of

02:05:16.540 the challenges in the nonprofit world that I think is really toxic, which is we have this belief that

02:05:21.840 we shouldn't be able to pay people in a nonprofit. Talent should be free. People should be willing to

02:05:27.180 work for under market. The reason Doritos can sell Doritos like you can't imagine, the reason they

02:05:34.260 can push these things on you is not just because, well, they taste great. It's because they can afford

02:05:38.400 the best talent to figure out how to A-B test all of these different things. And I think a lot of

02:05:45.760 nonprofits haven't really figured out that there is a bit of a war for talent and nonprofits are

02:05:51.220 generally losing it in a big age demographic. In my experience, nonprofits can do a really good job

02:05:57.400 getting really young people fresh out of college who want some experience before going to grad school,

02:06:02.420 and they can do a pretty good job getting really talented sort of graybeards that are at the end

02:06:07.520 of their careers and looking to, quote unquote, give back with respect to time. But it's pretty

02:06:12.620 tough to get an ultra talented 40-year-old to go into a nonprofit when the alternative for many people,

02:06:18.780 even those who are mission driven, is to go and serve a mission in a for-profit setting versus a

02:06:23.280 not-for-profit setting.

02:06:24.280 Absolutely. And that is a real challenge, even to this day. I'll give you an example of that,

02:06:30.060 though. We had posted a job for receptionists at Charity Water recently, and 1,300 people applied.

02:06:36.080 So that's great. Young, right? It's a really young talent pool. But you're right, the executive

02:06:41.180 hires have been much harder. People like their charity people poor. And Dan has been fighting this

02:06:48.320 for a long time. I joke all the time that even now, I'm 43 years old, I've got a wife,

02:06:53.540 I've got kids. I could drive a $60,000 Toyota and not a $20,000 Mercedes because of the perception.

02:07:01.960 Forget about the cost of the car. People are totally happy with me in a, you know, what's

02:07:05.540 the big, the Toyota Highlander, right? I got to have like load that thing up. I could probably

02:07:08.820 have a $70,000 Toyota SUV or a GMC, but not a $24,000 BMW. Oh, he's reaching. That's why we were

02:07:17.500 even talking about the watch. I mean, I'm not wearing a watch today. All this stuff matters. You know,

02:07:21.080 the perception becomes reality. So, okay, let me go back just to that bit. So the brand,

02:07:25.360 so our brand would feel different. It would be imagined if it had been inspired, be hope-based.

02:07:29.960 The last analogy I just want to make, I think Nike is such a great analogy. If Nike were a bad old

02:07:36.560 charity, their marketing might go like this. Hey, Peter, you're fat and you're lazy. Turn off the TV,

02:07:45.120 put away the junk food. Why don't you go for a run? Why don't you exercise?

02:07:50.780 Now, instead of just do our, buy our stuff. Yeah. Yeah. No. So Nike for years has been telling

02:07:56.740 inspirational stories of people overcoming adversity, overcoming impossible odds,

02:08:01.640 right? Nike believes that if you've lost your legs, you can complete a marathon and get over

02:08:06.840 the finish line. You know, you, you lost your arm. You can still be a shot putter, right? I mean,

02:08:11.120 they, they kind of for years have said, we believe there's greatness within you, right? And then you

02:08:18.280 want to buy the shoes. And then you want that symbol next to your heart that says, you know,

02:08:23.320 just do it because the company believes that about you in their marketing. So charities, you know,

02:08:29.620 don't do that. So we wanted ours to be like, we believe you have a mind blowing capacity for

02:08:37.020 compassion, for empathy. We believe your capacity to be deeply generous and to extend your arm across

02:08:44.980 an ocean and help people. You don't have to help. You don't have a debt or an obligation to help,

02:08:50.380 but you can end the suffering because you choose to, and you'll be blessed in the process. And,

02:08:56.760 you know, you might even find yourself redeemed in the process of moving from selfishness and

02:09:01.020 accumulation to helping others. So there were, there was a lot of soft stuff. I mean, now I have

02:09:06.200 language to it years later, but I just, I want a charity water to feel very different. I want it

02:09:10.180 to feel like Apple or Virgin and have a personality and have a brand. And then the fourth pillar was,

02:09:16.280 I was not going to send anybody that looked like some white guy from New York city to Africa to go

02:09:21.220 drill a well or to India or to Southeast Asia. I believed in my travels, just what I'd seen in

02:09:27.720 Benin and Liberia and then Uganda and Kenya as I traveled around looking for water partners.

02:09:31.860 I just believe that for the work to be sustainable and culturally appropriate,

02:09:36.440 it had to be led by the locals. So our job would be to find the local organizations who could go and

02:09:43.200 build these water projects. Our job would be to scale them, maybe buy them more drilling rigs or

02:09:48.020 trucks or help them hire the hydrologists they need, but they would be the ones getting the credit.

02:09:52.940 I just, I love that idea that our role could be, let's raise awareness for this important issue.

02:09:58.040 Let's build a movement of people who say we can and will bring clean drinking water to everybody

02:10:03.660 on the planet. Let's raise money as efficiently as possible and as transparently as possible.

02:10:08.560 And then let's have all the work be done by the locals leading their communities and their

02:10:13.620 countries forward. Yeah. And the irony of that is when you understand these problems as you do,

02:10:19.980 you realize that is the better solution. That's the sustainable solution. Of course, on the flip side of

02:10:25.640 that, it potentially deprives someone of the experience that you were so fortunate to have,

02:10:32.220 which is your volunteers. I assume you don't have that same body of volunteers.

02:10:36.860 We don't. And people ask me all the time, can I go drill a well in Africa? Now I didn't drill a well.

02:10:41.340 So I wasn't the doctor, you know, working in the rural area or the well driller. I was the

02:10:46.860 documentarian. I was the storyteller. So when I do take donors and I've taken about 350 people,

02:10:52.360 including 50 kids over the last 12 years, they are there to learn. They're there to listen and

02:10:59.520 then come back and become advocates, not to drill a well. I just don't need them in the ground. You

02:11:04.500 know, I don't need them standing on the drilling rig, you know, pretending like they're doing

02:11:08.060 something that the local does that. Being a liability potentially. Yeah. Exactly. So yeah,

02:11:13.200 we are not a good volunteer organization if you want to go and get your hands dirty. So, you know,

02:11:18.260 it's funny when I say this stuff, like give away a hundred percent and just build a hyper transparent

02:11:22.380 money flow, you know, prove to people what you do with their money and show impact,

02:11:26.480 build a, an inspiring, hopeful brand, and then work through locals. It's all sounds like common

02:11:32.260 sense. I mean, you know, but this was so unique 12 years ago that we exploded. I mean, people were

02:11:40.840 throwing money at us. You know, I think we raised $2 million in our first year from that couch. I mean,

02:11:46.420 it was just, it was just working and there was a flurry of activity. We were shooting public

02:11:52.340 service announcements. We were convincing luxury retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue to give us their

02:11:57.020 windows for a week and get their employees involved and their vendors involved and their

02:12:01.040 customers involved. Um, we were doing outdoor exhibitions, showing, putting dirty water from

02:12:06.420 the East river and the Hudson river and ponds in these big plexi tanks and getting people to sponsor

02:12:11.960 these exhibitions and getting MTV set builders to donate it with their time. And it was just,

02:12:16.420 it was startup. What could we do to get people to care about this issue, to know about it and

02:12:20.980 then raise money? You know, Scott, I know we both decided before we got on this, uh, this doing this

02:12:26.660 interview that we, we sort of had to stop at a certain point in time, which I know we've now

02:12:30.600 gone past. Uh, there's so many more questions I want to ask you about charity water for the

02:12:35.320 listener. Let's wrap this thing up in the following way. If somebody wants to learn all of these

02:12:40.700 details about charity water, besides going to charity water.org, are there other talks that you've

02:12:46.060 given that we can be linking to other places where they can learn? Obviously you've got a book

02:12:50.880 that just came out. Yeah. And there's so many amazing stories of, um, you know, the a hundred

02:12:55.680 percent model, uh, definitely came under trial and there were moments of, you know, almost insolvency

02:13:00.840 and, you know, the organizations now raised $330 million from over a million people around the world.

02:13:07.080 And there's so many stories of, um, of heroism and courage from the community and failure. And yeah,

02:13:14.260 so there's, I think that's, that's one place to start. Yeah. There certainly are some talks online

02:13:17.940 that we could, we could link to. All right. So we're going to make sure we have lots of links.

02:13:21.500 You've given a Ted talk as well. Not specifically a Ted, but similar. Oh, okay. I thought was it

02:13:26.860 Ted X or no, it wasn't. I might, I might do Ted X this year. Yeah. Well you should be giving a Ted

02:13:31.860 talk. That's for sure. So we'll link to that. So your book is called thirsty. Just thirst thirst.

02:13:38.200 Yep. A little double entendre there maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And all the proceeds,

02:13:42.400 all my proceeds go to the organization. So I won't make a penny off it. And I was telling you,

02:13:46.800 I just found out yesterday, it's a New York times bestseller in the first week. So that's cool.

02:13:50.420 That's fantastic. Congratulations. My wife was, you know, planning on that money to go towards

02:13:55.120 our kids college funds, but, uh, like, Oh, this is, this is not the right thing to keep. And I want this

02:14:00.040 book to go out and, and really spread the story and hopefully inspire, inspire a lot of people,

02:14:04.900 maybe to start their own causes, maybe to join us, maybe to give them the courage and the

02:14:09.200 inspiration that no matter what they have done in their past, they're probably not as bad as me.

02:14:14.900 Where can people find you on social media? I'm just my name, Scott Harrison and charity water.

02:14:19.800 Any books that you recommend when you talk about your journey, not just maybe what you went through,

02:14:26.700 you know, 15 years ago, but even today, like what, give me three books that have been not necessarily

02:14:32.540 transformative, but, but have, have moved the needle for you in some way in terms of how you've

02:14:37.140 thought about either what you're doing today or how you got here. There's a interesting book, um,

02:14:42.060 on the subject of poverty and approach called white man's burden guy named bill Easterly at NYU,

02:14:48.020 that kind of talks about approaches to aid, you know, and good aid and bad aid. And that's,

02:14:54.300 that's one of the beauties of doing clean water is nobody tells you to stop. I mean, no one is saying

02:14:59.300 that taking a human being from a swamp or a dirty river, you know, to providing a sustainable source

02:15:04.760 of clean water is, is harmful in any way, but that's, that was a really good read for me.

02:15:09.680 You know, on a personal level, you know, when I got on the ship, I was reading this tiny little

02:15:13.720 book written by a monk called practicing the presence of God, which was just, um, this kind of

02:15:18.880 idea of surrendering yourself to others and trying to live a pure and virtuous life. This guy lived a

02:15:24.640 very simple life. He was cutting carrots in the kitchen and was just talking about that really

02:15:29.700 a life of virtue. You know, with kids now there's a book I really love. The name escapes me right now.

02:15:35.840 I just, I'm on my second time around. Um, I think it's letters to a God son by this guy,

02:15:42.160 Stanley where of us. And he talks about, he writes a letter to his God son every single year,

02:15:48.300 teaching him a different virtue. So I'm trying to build character about teaching about kindness,

02:15:53.140 teaching about generosity, teaching about integrity. And it's a really, it's a really

02:15:57.980 beautiful thing as a father, as I just think about how I want my kids to grow up.

02:16:01.300 And it's a book more for us as the parents than the kids.

02:16:03.660 More for us as the parents. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

02:16:05.740 But just thinking about how he conveys this and, you know, knowing that the child will age

02:16:11.640 into these letters. I think this is called letters to a God son.

02:16:15.020 Scott, you're one of the people that, um, I think even, I remember by the time we got to the

02:16:20.740 airplane, you know, that on that drive back that day, which again, it was only a 30 minute drive

02:16:25.540 of which we wasted seven minutes talking about watches. I remember thinking, my God, this,

02:16:31.320 this is not a normal dude. And dialogue's a pretty impressive crowd of people. I mean,

02:16:36.300 by definition, everybody at dialogue is kind of cool, kind of interesting has done, you know,

02:16:40.380 they're not just selecting the smartest or the richest or the most, whatever they're,

02:16:44.540 they're trying to select people. They're trying to curate people who are really,

02:16:47.400 really interesting. And so even after three days of being around those people,

02:16:52.060 I remember thinking this guy stands out. You're a real inspiration. So thank you for what you're

02:16:57.200 doing. Thanks for having me. Time, time flew. Oh my gosh. We didn't even, we didn't talk about

02:17:02.360 probably half the stuff we wanted to. I, it's funny. Cause I read most of your book before we

02:17:06.740 spoke and it was like, I remember thinking, yeah, we're never going to get through all this. So,

02:17:10.740 but look, I want people to read the book too. So we gotta, we gotta leave some stuff out.

02:17:15.020 Cool. Thanks for coming by. Thanks for having me.

02:17:19.680 You can find all of this information and more at peteratiamd.com forward slash podcast.

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The Peter Attia Drive - October 22, 2018

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

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