My guests tonight are helping millions of people
in developing countries gain access
to safe water and sanitation
through the non-profits they cofounded
called water.org and WaterEquity.
Please welcome Matt Damon and Gary White.
(cheers and applause)
-Welcome to the show, gentlemen. -DAMON/WHITE: Thank you.
I'm gonna get into the water shortly,
but I have to tackle the pressing news
with you right now, Matt.
Um, when did you break up with Ben Affleck?
When did that friendship end?
Are you guys not friends anymore?
Unfortunately, I can't seem to shake him.
Uh, no. It's-- I've known him since, uh, since I was ten,
so it's 37 years I've known him.
-Wait. So you guys are still friends? -Unfortunately, yes.
-Yeah. Yeah. -Y-You see, you say that,
but m-my-- I don't believe a friend
would allow a friend to get a back tattoo
of a colorful dragon.
Have you seen this tattoo?
Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, uh, it's not, it's not one man's job
to tell another man what he can do to his back.
Uh, uh, you know. I... I support him
in all of his... artistic expression.
(laughter)
Fair enough. That's a good friend answer, actually.
-Uh, welcome to the show. -Thank you.
Welcome, Gary, welcome, Matt.
Um, you have a project that you started together
that really came from two separate projects
in and around water, getting water to people.
Gary, a lot of people don't realize
how pervasive this issue is.
Why is water such a big deal? It sounds like
a simple question, but why is it such a big deal?
Well, it's a huge deal
for more than 800 million people around the world who don't know
where their water's gonna come from on any given day.
So if you think about it, uh, when anybody wakes up
in the world tomorrow, nothing else matters to them
until they get their water.
You know, we get it at the turn of the tap,
but for hundreds of millions of people that's not the case.
You know, so women, tomorrow, will spend 200 million hours
walking to collect water.
Kids won't be in school.
They'll lose 443 million school days this year alone,
because they're scavenging for water,
because of water-related illness.
So that's why it's such a huge deal.
It holds families and communities back
from economic development and building a better life.
It is the basic building block that people need to put in place
if they're gonna move forward.
And it's interesting, you say that, because the numbers
are so high. I-I was honestly shocked at how many people
around the world don't have access to water.
And then you find out how much this actually costs them,
'cause I just think of it in-in a convenience way.
Oh, you don't get it from the tap, and you don't get
to wash when you want to, you don't have these things.
But it actually costs them a lot of money to live this way.
Yeah. And in fact, in a lot of these communities,
they're-- one of Gary's great insights years ago,
was in spending so much time
in these communities in the developing world--
was that the poorest of the poor
are paying for their water because they're alive,
-they're clearly getting water somehow, -Right,
and in-in many cases, they're paying 25%
of their income in order to secure water.
So they're paying ten to 15 times what the middle-class
in some, in some of these countries are paying.
So it's-- we always say, it's expensive to be poor.
You know, this burden falls
on women and girls disproportionately,
and, as Gary was saying, all these millions of girls
are not in school because their job for the family
is to scavenge for water day in and day out.
And so you can only imagine what the outcome of their life,
you know, these are just millions of people
not living up to their potential.
You see a problem like this.
For many people, it seems farfetched.
-I know as a South African, -Yeah.
it came to the fore with Cape Town.
So in Cape Town, we're watching
a looming Day Zero, as they call it,
where water's going to run out.
And then at that point, people start understanding,
oh, there may not be anything.
Your way of life. No sanitation.
People are preparing for riots in the streets.
People understanding that you can't live without water.
And yet, people do live like this.
So, when you started this program...
You-you had separate programs, correct?
-Mm-hmm. Yes. -Yes. Yeah. -And then you decided
to team up. Why and how?
Well, I... Yeah, I mean, I-I realized
that I could really maximize my impact
if I partnered with, you know,
the preeminent expert in the space,
and when that person wouldn't take my calls,
-I found Gary. -(laughter)
He doesn't know I called Ben first, myself, so...
(laughter)
-But, like, you-you... -Good to have a plan "B."
Yes, but you've been... you've been involved in water
-and access to water for a very long time. -Yeah.
How is this even a-an issue that you stumbled upon?
Because everyone would think of education,
which is very important.
Everyone would think of food,
-which is really important. -Yeah.
But water. W-Why water?
Well, for me it was traveling to Guatemala
when I was an undergraduate in university
and saw the problem firsthand
and then came back and started learning about it
and how massive it was, to your point.
But I think the redeeming factor about this
is that the problem actually contains its own solution.
-Right. -As Matt mentioned,
you know, there's lots of money
that the poor are already expending to cope with this.
Costs actually hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
And so what we did was we created WaterCredit
so folks could get a small loan.
Because the reason they have to pay these water vendors
is because they can't get connected to the utility.
-Right. -That costs, like, a couple of hundred bucks.
So we give them a loan so that they can get connected,
and they can buy their time back and work at a paying job
and get access to water.
This is really part of the story that fascinated me.
Well, a lot of people may not know this,
but you live in a village
or in a place where you don't have access to running water.
I read one of the stories from your organization
where there was a woman who was paying $60 a month
-Yeah. -to get bottled water delivered to her -Right.
-so that she could have something to drink. -Mm-hmm.
Through your program, she got a loan
-to have her own water source -Yeah.
and then pays back the loan
-at five or six dollars a month. -Exactly. -Right.
W-Which is a simple and yet insane concept
that nobody has thought of that.
Is-is it that simple?
-Yes. Yes. -Giving access to money
-to make their own water source? -Yes.
And then they participate in their own solution.
They give themselves... They fix their own problem.
It's-it's... Gary's being humble.
I mean, this was an insight that he had,
was basically taking the concepts of microfinance
that Muhammad Yunus pioneered
and just moving them towards water.
And nobody had thought to do that
because in a standard microfinance situation,
it's an income-generating loan.
-Right. -I-I loan you $200. You buy a sewing machine.
-You can now have a sewing business. -Right, right, right.
This is an income-enhancing loan, right,
because you're buying somebody's time back.
There's no... So, people...
It-it took the microfinance institutions a little time
to kind of get comfortable with that idea.
-Right, right, right. -But what Gary had realized
from all of his years doing this
was that they have the money.
They're paying for water.
It's just they don't have the reserve
to-to connect to the system.
So if we can front them the money to loan it,
they can pay it back.
And the great news is that these loans pay back
at over 97%. I mean, it's an unbel...
This has worked so much better than we could have ever hoped.
And it's-it's these people that--
these heroic people,
the poorest of the poor who are doing this.
Yeah, over half the people that we've loaned to,
the ten million,
-uh, live on less than two dollars a day. -Yeah.
So this is a solution that works for the poor.
-And they've managed to pay it back. -Yes, yes, yes.
-And come out ahead because they're not spending -Right.
-that $60 anymore... -And now they have that in extra income.
-Right. -Because the thing is, we can never work our way out
of this problem with just straight charity.
There's never gonna be enough charity in the world
to reach hundreds of millions of people.
So we took a more direct approach and said,
"Let's-let's do it this way and-and use the-the markets
and the leverage that we can get to help people get water."
And, fundamentally, it's a bottom-up approach,
instead of the kind of classic, paternalistic, kind of handout,
-right... -Right. Dropping the water to the people. -Yes.
Having the water create the water for thems...
Having the people create the water for themselves.
It's funny, because that's part of the story
that connected with me the most.
When I was growing up, it was quite normal.
We didn't have a flushing toilet, uh,
and I would go visit my cousins in the homelands in South Africa
and we would, like, push a wheelbarrow to go to the place
that had a tap and then we would get all the water--
you've seen this in villages-- and then we would take it back
and that's how you'd have the thing.
And I remember the day,
I remember the day we got the tap in the house.
It was a party.
Like, it was nonstop people losing their shit.
Like, wet T-shirt contest for guys.
-Hopefully you got a toilet then as well. -Like...
No, but it changes people's lives.
-People take this for granted. -Yeah, and that's...
and that's... one of the hardest things for us
is to try to just explain it here in the West,
because we can't relate.
-It's not like cancer or AIDS, -Right.
where people go, "Well, I have a family member
-or a friend who's been touched by this." -Right.
You know, this is a... such a problem for so many people,
but we... but nobody that we know, right, and so it's...
that's kind of the first hurdle we have to clear,
-is just... is just... -Yeah.
But the-the transformative effect
of-of getting somebody that connection is...
we've seen it, you know, you know, thousands of times.
-Right. -And-and just the conversations you have
with these kids, particularly these little girls
who suddenly don't have to do this water collection anymore.
I talked to a girl in Haiti six, seven years ago,
and-and I said, "What are you gonna do with all this time?"
Like, she was spending four hours a day collecting water,
and she would... She was lucky--
she was in school, but she would go after school.
And I said, "Well, are you gonna do homework now?"
And she looked at me and she was like,
"I'm the smartest kid in my class. I'm not..."
You know, and-and she said it in that way where I was like, "Oh,
-"she is the smartest kid in her class." -Right, right, right.
I said, "All right, well, you know,
well, what are you gonna do with all this time?"
And she looked at me and she goes, "I'm gonna play."
-Wow. -And it was just... dropped me.
I mean, I didn't lose it in front of her, but I was like,
"Okay, thanks." And I walked away.
I like that you were... you were Jason Bourne in front of her,
and then you went around the corner and you're like...
-(bawling) -Yeah. L-Literally.
And she was... but she was the... she was 13, and I had...
my-my oldest was 13. And, you know, it's like...
So leaving aside the-the meaningless d...
the million kids who are dying a year totally preventably
-from this, right, they're... -Right.
it's just about-about, you know, giving people hope,
giving people a chance to live up to their potential,
letting a kid, a 13-year-old kid, play,
because shouldn't every 13-year-old kid be allowed
-to play? -Most definitely. And-and you guys
are doing things. Like, people have seen the ads on TV,
um, where, for instance, Stella has these chalices
-that you can buy and if you buy one of these, -Yeah.
then they-they provide... is... (stammers) did-did they say
-five years? -Five years of water for somebody
-in the developing world, yeah. -Five years of water if you buy
one of these. And if-if people want
to contribute directly to your organizations,
-what-what can they do? -Water.org.
-Yeah. -Yeah. Right there, you can purchase a chalice
or you can just make a straight donation there.
Right. And if-if someone wanted an idea--
'cause people like knowing that, people want to know, like,
how many dollars a day can help somebody--
-like, how much would an average "water" project take? -Mm-hmm.
Like, what-what does it cost the average person?
The average is about $25,
if you look at it from that perspective.
And-and if you look at the-the chalice,
what we're doing is it takes only about three dollars
-in donation to leverage that $25 through loans. -Wow.
And so that's why we can reach so many more people.
For every-every dollar that we raise, we're leveraging that up,
because people are getting loans. Those loans get repaid
and get recycled and-and more people can get some water
-with the same investment. -And it also drives
the philanthropic cost of capital per person reached down,
right, as that money keeps circulating and coming back
-and going out again and coming back and going out. -Yeah, yeah.
It's an amazing cause. You guys are doing amazing things.
World Water Day is tomorrow. So thank you so much
-for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. -Thank you.
-(cheering and applause) -To learn more
about their important work and how you can help,
go to water.org. Matt Damon, Gary White, everybody.