#25 – Scott Harrison: transformation, finding meaning, and taking on the global water crisis

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  A childhood shaped by his mother's poisoning

  When Scott was four, his family moved to a tightly sealed, energy-efficient house in South Jersey. A faulty heat exchanger leaked carbon monoxide. His mother, who spent the most time indoors, collapsed on New Year's Day 1980. He recalls her carboxyhemoglobin being about 20 to 25 times the toxic threshold. Afterward, perfume, soap, car fumes and even ink from new books made her ill.

• 02

  Environmental illness meant extreme isolation

  She was diagnosed with what was then called multiple chemical sensitivity, or environmental illness. After a water-only fast and food-by-food testing, Scott says only about 20 of more than 100 foods were tolerable. She ate a six-day rotation of single organic foods and drank spring water, living in a tiled bathroom with a cotton army cot washed about ten times in baking soda. Scott became her caregiver as an only child.

• 03

  Peter on patients medicine dismisses

  Peter says people like Scott's mother often fall through the cracks because doctors label unexplained illness as psychological. He recalls a medical school professor's joke that 'idiopathic' really means the doctor is the idiot. The family took a settlement of about $1,250–$1,500 from the gas company rather than sue. Peter relates this to his own medical-school back injury, botched by a surgeon who operated on the wrong side, where he never considered suing.

• 04

  Rebellion took him from a band to the clubs

  In high school Scott quit being the dutiful son, grew his hair out and became the keyboard player and self-appointed manager of an alternative rock band, Sunday River. They played CBGB's and the Wetlands. He alone moved to New York, enrolled part-time at NYU in communications, and sold stereo gear at Sam Ash. When the band broke up he turned to promoting nightclubs.

• 05

  A decade of 'models and bottles'

  For about ten years Scott was a top promoter, helping pioneer bottle service: instead of charging $18 for a vodka soda at the bar, clubs sold bottles at tables. He courted modeling bookers so models would come out. He built one of the first club email lists, which he says had near-100% open rates. He smoked up to three packs a day and used cocaine and other drugs.

• 06

  The emptiness behind the 'markers of happiness'

  He had the model girlfriend, the money and the parties, but he says the top bottle buyers spending $10,000–$15,000 a night were often miserable and estranged from their families. Physically, he lost feeling in half his body and feared a brain tumor. On a New Year's trip to Punta del Este, after a weekend of $1,000 in fireworks and magnums of Dom Pérignon, he started reading A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God, a gift from his father.

• 07

  The flip: from party boy to volunteer photographer

  At 28, after a frightening night at a club involving a gun and a bouncer, he drove north alone with a Bible. He decided to spend a year serving others. Humanitarian groups turned down the 'party boy' until Mercy Ships accepted him as a photojournalist. He paid $500 a month to volunteer on a hospital ship of about 350 volunteers sailing to Benin and Liberia, which had just come out of a 14-year civil war.

• 08

  Mercy Ships showed medicine at its most transformative

  The ship focused on maxillofacial surgery: facial tumors, cleft lips and palates, burn reconstruction and cataracts. Scott recalls about 5,000 people at a triage day, a country of a few million with only a couple of surgeons, and children choking on four-pound benign tumors. He says he wept for 40% of that first day.

• 09

  Distrust of charities shaped charity: water's design

  Scott cites a USA Today poll finding 42% of Americans didn't trust charities. Inspired by Paul Tudor Jones covering the Robin Hood Foundation's overhead, he set up two separately audited bank accounts, one for public donations that go 100% to water projects and one for overhead funded by private backers. He even repays credit card fees so a $100 gift sends $100 to the field.