TED Talks Daily - Sunday Pick: Matt Damon on solving one of the planet’s biggest problems, in partnership with Gary White | from ReThinking with Adam Grant

Episode Date: March 1, 2026

Matt Damon is best known as the Hollywood icon from movies like Good Will Hunting and The Martian, but he has another passion offscreen: ensuring access to clean, safe water around the world. When he met social entrepreneur Gary White in 2008, they realized they could combine their efforts to reach more people and created water.org, which Gary leads as CEO. In this episode, Adam sits down with Matt and Gary at the World Economic Forum in Davos to talk about their innovative approach to problem-solving, handling rejection in high-stakes work environments, and Matt’s knack for forging strong partnerships. Adam also invites the two to office hours to tackle one of their ongoing challenges.Host & GuestAdam Grant (Instagram: @adamgrant | LinkedIn: @adammgrant | Website: https://adamgrant.net/)Matt Damon (Website: https://water.org/about-us/founders-board-team/matt-damon/)Gary White (Website: https://water.org/about-us/founders-board-team/gary-white/)Learn more about our flagship conference happening this April at attend.ted.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Happy Sunday, TED Talks Daily listeners. It's Elise Hugh, as we often do on Sundays. Today we're sharing a recent episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you. Matt Damon. He's someone most of us know as the Hollywood icon from movies like Goodwill Hunting and The Martian. But did you know he has another huge passion and life mission? It's ensuring access to clean safe water around the world. And when he met social entrepreneur Gary White in 2008, who was a lot of working on access to safe drinking water globally. They realized they could combine their efforts to reach more people.

This led to the creation of water.org, which Gary leads as CEO. In this episode of Rethinking with Adam Grant, Adam sits down with Matt and Gary at the January 26th World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to talk about their innovative approach to problem solving, handling rejection in high-stakes work environments, and Matt's knack for forging strong partnerships. Adam also invites the two to what he calls office hours where he lets guests ask him questions as if he was their professor to tackle a

current challenge they're facing in their work. To hear more deep conversations, you can find rethinking wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at AudioCollective.totendcom. Now on to the episode. It's the worst career advice you've ever gotten. Well, I don't know if it's the worst, but I do love telling the story about my father reading the script of Goodwill Hunting and telling me that the line, how do you like them apples, would never work. He told me to take it out of the script. Your father told you to cut the most iconic line of the movie? He rest in peace. And after the movie came out, he said, Matthew, don't ever give me a script to read again. That was a great rethinking moment for him. Yeah, yeah.

Hey, everyone, it's Adam Graham. Welcome back to rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. Matt Damon is a Hollywood icon. From the born identity in Ocean's 11 series to the talented Mr. Ripley, to the Martian and Interstellar, it's hard to pick a favorite performance,

though for me, nothing can top Goodwill hunting. But off-screen, Matt has another passion to ensure access to clean, safe water around the world. When he met social entrepreneur Gary White in 2008, they realized they could combine their influence and expertise to reach even more people. Their joint efforts created water.org, which Gary leads as CEO,

and the pair have been working together on this issue ever since. The saying I heard was, talent is distributed evenly around the world. Opportunity is not. And that's what water does. It brings a layer of opportunity so that people can realize their potential in so many ways. I met up with Matt and Gary

at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where we talked about their innovative approach to clean water access, providing microloans directly for those in need, and giving them full ownership of their water source after they pay it off. We also talked about handling rejection in their high-stakes work

and their approach to creative entrepreneurial partnerships. And like Matt, other long-term collaboration, you know, the one with Ben Affleck. His work with Gary has led to some exciting results. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about the relationship between the two of you. And Matt, I think your creative chemistry

with Ben is famous. We all, I think, fell in love with the two of you watching Goodwill Hunting a long time ago. You're continuing to work together today. What did that relationship teach you about how to build a collaboration with Gary? That's a great question, actually, because I think if I have a strength,

and it's not unique to me, but I think it is a strength for me, is a partner selection. And if I look at my life, actually, all of the things that I'm proud of and that give me true joy and kind of brought value to my life are in partnership with others.

And starting obviously with Ben and my agent Patrick and everybody who I work with professionally kind of personally, those are all 30-plus years. relationships in my wife. And then into my 30s, this was the significant partnership, you know, when I looked at how I could maximize my impact philanthropically. And this was the smartest choice I could have made. What were you looking for in a partner? Well, the preeminent expert in the

field. And when they wouldn't take my call, I wound up with Gary. Gary, what was it that intrigued you about Matt? Well, first, his passion for this issue, because he had actually worked to create a nonprofit called H2O Africa. So I knew already that he had a passion for it. And then when I met Matt, it was, I guess, his curiosity and his digging and asking questions about the way that we were approaching this and trying to understand what was different about us and did it resonate with him. I love to be peppered with questions about what we do.

And I think I mostly answered them to Matt's satisfaction. And then that just led us to say, like, you know, we are strongly aligned. You know, we both have this curiosity that's bent towards innovation. And so that's when we decided to just merge the organizations. I had Water Partners. He had H2O Africa. I'd reserve the URL quite some time ago for $7.95. So we just rebranded as Water.org.

So it sounds like you survived and even enjoyed the interrogation by Matt. I love it. He loves a good interrogation. Do you have a take on Matt's most underrated skill from working with him that people can't see on screen? It's humility. I'm great at humility. And that just kind of is combined with being, you know, the real deal, too. You know, there's initially some skepticism about, you know, teaming up with anybody in Hollywood.

It's like, you know, is this going to blow up or whatever? and, you know, when I had the chance to meet Matt and just kind of get to know it, there was no concern about that. What you see is what you get, and I think that's key to it. You know, we talk about our ethos being boldness with humility. There's always so much more to learn in order to conquer this.

Matt exemplifies that, and that's the culture we're trying to build. Matt, I know the chemistry read is a standard part of the Hollywood casting process. Is there anything you took away from that that applied to how you would interrogate, a potential partner like Gary? Well, I was floored by just his knowledge and approach. He was doing things differently, and he already was on to this idea about what we call water credit, which was essentially repurposing the ideas pioneered by Muhammad Yunus at the Kramine Bank and applying it to water.

You know, in those early days, that was a huge thought leap for the microfinance institutions because it wasn't an income generating loan. Like what Gary had realized his insight and the brilliance of this idea was from spending much of his adult life in these communities and watching how everything worked and realizing that people were paying for water, right? And these are among the poorest people on the planet. And they're paying more than the middle class and more than people staying in the nice hotels because they're not connected to the system. And they don't have any savings, but they have the daily expenditure. and sometimes they're paying up to 25% of their income just to secure water for that day

or paying in other ways with their time and it's a massive issue for women and girls. It predominantly affects them because they're charged with the water collection and that means that girls aren't in school, right? And oftentimes women are leaving jobs to go stand in a water queue and wait and so then you imagine what they can expect for their outcomes and how it stifles their potential

to kind of live the low. life they deserve to live. And so he realized this payment was happening. And so a microloan could get paid off. In this case, it's what we call an income enhancing loan because you're actually buying their time back. And so it was a theory, this is a hypothesis that Gary had, and it's just worked better than we ever could have hoped. These loans that are taken out by the most economically vulnerable people on the planet, 90% of them are women, by the way, they pay back at 98%. Wow. And so the other kind of elegant thing about this strategy is that it actually drives the philanthropic costs per person reach down in a standard kind of well drilling system. It's $25 or more to get somebody clean water. With our programs, it's $5. It's been driven all the way down to $5 because the money goes out. It gets repaid and then it recycles and it goes out again. And so this system has worked, you know, to put it in perspective, in 2012, we reached. our first million people. We reach a million people every six weeks now, and we've now hit 85 million

people that we've reached. Congratulations. And if we had stayed just drilling wells, which we were very good at, if we had kind of sat on our laurels and accepted our kind of best in class status, it would have taken us 600 years to reach the number of people that we've reached today. It's hard not to get fired up about it hearing you talk about it. It's not obvious to me, though, that that would be the the immediate route to go. I was in Slovenia recently, and they just passed a constitutional amendment giving everyone the right to clean water. It just seems like it should be a fundamental human right, right? You could have gone to lobby Congress or the UN for that matter. How did you decide on microfinance, Gary? Well, for me, I think, you know, I have engineering degrees. I thought this is all going to

be just an engineering problem, of course. It turns out it's much more about finance. There's already a lot of money sloshing around in this system. How do you redirect it in a way so that it works in favor of the poor. And for me, that was like, maybe the problem contains its own solution. Because the conventional wisdom was that anybody that didn't have water in the world was too poor to pay for it, and they were all equally poor. You know, on the face that, that's not true. And so how do you kind of figure out an offering for them so that those who are willing to

kind of step up and take out a loan have the ability to do that? You know, $7 billion in microloans have now churned through our network. work of financial partners around the world, right? That's $7 billion in philanthropy that didn't have to be raised. And it's also a signal to the market that because of the value that's created, it's a good deal. I just, you know, just one example of a woman that I met recently in Tanzania, Amina, she had taken out a loan so that she could put a well in her community and some water tanks. And so that was great for her household, but then she's like, I could sell water, right? So she took another tank, and now she's selling water to 150 of her neighbors.

And so it was amazing what she said. She said, I've taken the water buckets down from women's heads because now they can have a tap and come and get the water. So it also unleashes the entrepreneurial spirit of people once they have access to water, which makes complete sense. I mean, all of our economies are built on water. Nothing ever happened before you solve that for. first need, then you can be entrepreneurial, then you can launch businesses, then you can

scale up, then you can have an economy. And I think that's what underlies all of this and why it is bankable and why, you know, we can invest in this and provide financial returns to investors now in addition to giving social impact. It's, I mean, it's so compelling and at the same time, not at all obvious, I think, to the average person, right? I think people understand hunger more viscerally than they do thirst. Because people have been hungry. Exactly. And also you just look around and you assume water is everywhere, whereas food shortages are kind of easy to imagine, right? So you're describing the exact, I think the biggest problem we have,

which is just making this issue relatable, because if you grew up in the developed world, you were never more than five steps away from a clean drink of water. I mean, it's in our kitchen sink, it's in our bathroom sink. The water in our toilets is cleaner than 2 billion people have access to around the world, which is incredible, but it's very hard to relate to. And so that's kind of the first hurdle we have to, when we're explaining the scale of the problem.

People die every year completely pointlessly over things that, you know, from like diarrhea can be a death sentence. I mean, I could tell you the story of the very first water collection I went on because it was a big aha moment for me. I was in Zambia. This is 20 years ago. And I went on a water collection

with this girl. She came home from school. We were in a rural, very rural, very rural part of Zambia. And we go for this walk. And we travel, you know, Jerry can. And I'm talking to her through a translator. It's just the three of us. And I'm, you know, peppering her with questions. What's it like living here? And then finally I go, is this where, is this where you want to live when you grow up? And she looks at me and she's like, no. She's like, I'm getting out of here. She goes, I'm going to Lusaka. I'm going to be a nurse, right? And

the way she, like, she had this energy. It reminded me so much of me and Ben at that age, like, we're not staying here. We're going to New York. We're going to be actors. You know, it's like what every 14-year-old should be doing, right, dreaming about this. life. And it hit me later as I was driving away that had someone not had the foresight to sink a borewell near this kid's house, she wouldn't be in school. She would be spending all of her time trying to find water for her family and not, you know, dreaming of this wonderful life where she's a frontline healthcare worker and she's in the capital city and she's contributing to the economic engine of her country. And, you know, like, it just really straight. So it's not just the death and the

the pointlessness of that, but it's the stifled potential of human possibility, you know, and it's so, it's incalculable, it's just massive. And so that was my epiphany that, and nobody was talking about it for the reasons we just kind of laid out. It's so unrelatable. And that's what kind of got me hooked. So how do you, how are you thinking now about making this more vivid and more visceral? You can, you know, you can show a water shortage in the Martian. You can film the Odyssey around water. But what have you learned about how to get people to taste and feel how important this is? That is an ongoing struggle to be blunt. I mean, it's what we puzzle over. We've tried comedy skits. You know, it's it's an open question.

We wrote a book. We wrote a book. You know, I'm thinking a little bit about, there's a whole body of research on the baby Jessica effect. You remember back in the late 80s, right, when the baby girl fell of the well and donations poured in that really were not needed. And that single identifiable victim is so much more motivating than the statistical problem. I know. So that, I mean, that seems like one way to humanize this issue is to pick the particular girl in Zambia and show both the need and also the impact. Is there a particular story that you found especially powerful in that way? I mean, I remember being in Haiti 15 years ago. And, we were christening a water system in this small village and there was this girl and I remember she was 13 years old because my oldest daughter at the time was 13 years old and I said you know hey how many hours a day did you spend collecting water and she said four and I said wow four hours a day but I go you got a lot of time on your hands now they said what are you going to you have more time for homework and she looked at me and kind of scoffed and she goes I don't need more time for homework

I'm the smartest kid in my class and I go, okay, hot shot, what are you going to do with all this extra time? And she looked at me and goes, I'm going to play. And it was like, it just absolutely nailed me. So that's what's at stake. That's what $5 gives you. You know, imagine the change in that kid's life. One story that sticks with me was from Uganda. There was an elderly woman. She was a grandmother. She went by the name of Mama Florence. And Mama Florence would get on her bike every day with these jerry cans and go try to find water for her family and her grandchildren. And she had taken out a loan from one of our local partners, about $300. And again, she had a small pump that she had in a well

that she could then draw from for their family needs. And then she started using it to water a garden. And so they're growing vegetables for their family. Then they would take the scraps from the vegetable garden and feed it to pigs. And so they were raising pigs and have that as an income source. And then she recognized that the clay soil and the area where her house was, she could make bricks out of it. So clay plus water equals bricks. And so she was selling bricks. And then she decided that she would start building some small rooms on her property that she could then rent out to people to generate more income. And it's just like, it just blew me away. Like, you know, this all was because she could have access to water and not have that, spend that time, you know,

riding her bike every day. And it just, it just, and it shows you getting back to water credit, why people take out these loans, because it creates incredible value for them and in their lives. And it makes you realize that there's two billion people out there who could be entrepreneurs in this world if they had access to water. Let's talk a little bit about the challenges you're facing right now. So we're trying a new segment on rethinking where we invite our guests to office hours. And I'm going to try to help you think through a problem. Do you have one? We do. We have a good one for you. Yeah, I think our problem, our challenge, and it's a good one, right? It's that we've kind of come about this in a very disruptive way. And so we don't really have, you know, competition to compare

ourselves to in this space because our model is unique. And so, yes, we're reaching a million people every six weeks, but could we be doing more? Like, how do we, how do we raise the bar? Where should the bar be? you know, because it's a massive problem. And again, our goal is to solve the crisis, to be a catalyst for that solution. And so... And also, we don't have standard signals, right? Yeah, we don't have, you don't have profitability

to give you a signal with how you're doing with your capital. You don't have a stock price, you know. So how do you then kind of internally ensure that you are, you know, maximizing or optimizing your resources against a particular challenge? It's a great question. You came to the right office. Good, good, good. So, yeah, I think the biggest mistake that I see organizations make on this is they just anchor on the past. And they take last year's budget and goals, and then they make an adjustment by 10% usually

raising their goals and then also trying to shrink their budget. And the problem with that is the world doesn't look the same. This year as it did last year, you have different people, you have different problems. And so I become a pretty big fan of zero-based budgeting where you just start from scratch and you say, okay, if we were taking over this or organization for the first time. What would be our moonshots? What would be the resources that we need? And you don't always stick to what you come up with there, but the freedom to blue sky that, I think, is a great starting point. Have you done that already? We do to a certain extent. So we have taken a step back with our philanthropic capital and say,

what could we be doing more with that? And that's actually led us to launch an asset manager. So this grew out of a site visit that Matt and I were doing in India, where our partners there were making loans for households. But our question to them was like, what's holding you back from doing even more? And they said, we need more consistent access to affordable capital. And so... Which blew our minds, by the way, because we were driving around India in a Jeep, going visiting all these different places and informally polling them independent of one another. And they all came back with the same answer. It was like the demand is there. We need more money in the system, which was great to hear in one sense that it was working so well. But then it gave

us that problem of, okay, how do we get more money into the system? That is now resulted in an asset manager. We've launched six funds. We've raised about a half a billion dollars in committed capital that's out there having impact, but it also now, through management fees, can become a revenue generating model. Fascinating. Okay, so the other element of your question, that is, where should we set our goals? How do we know what's possible? How high should we aim? I think there's there's a pretty long-standing body of evidence that shows that leaders are reluctant to let their teams participate in the goal-setting process because you think your job is to stretch people and they're probably going to aim too low. And the reality is the opposite, that if people are committed and passionate, they will set their own goals higher than the people above them tend to.

And so I wonder if it would be interesting to take small teams and say, what do you think is possible? And then see where they set their targets and use that to inform where you are. Is that something you've already experimented with? So not in a blue sky kind of way. All of our international offices are made up of local nationals of those countries, and we rely on them to kind of bubble up what they think they're going to be able to do. But it's mostly in the context of what they're doing right now. I think the insight here from you might be that let's challenge them to think about different types of initiatives

within their countries that aren't necessarily as part of that template and then see how that can be multiplied up. Bingo. I would run that as an innovation tournament. Yeah. Have you done any of those before? No. No. All right, so the most boring innovation tournament I've ever seen was at Dow Chemical. They said, we're looking for ideas to save energy and reduce waste. And I'm like, yeah, that's what motivates me in the morning.

But they said, we want to put some parameters around this so you know what we're looking for. We'll take any idea that costs no more than $200,000 US dollars and has the potential to pay for itself within a year if it's successful. And they end up running that tournament for 10 years. they bet on 575 ideas, and it saves the company on average 110 million U.S. dollars per year. I was blown away by that because most of these creative ideas did not come from people who are doing innovation. It was somebody on a factory floor who saw something broken and didn't know where to take the idea until they had this, oh, okay, now I have guidelines and guardrails around, you know, what's worth submitting. And it's also a great way to engage people who don't get to do creative work every day in the creative process.

And so I wonder if you could roll out a little tournament where people, get to submit ideas. Yeah. No, that's certainly something that we could do. What's the payoff, you think, for people who have the best ideas? Oh, that's a good question. So I actually haven't seen a good innovation tournament in a nonprofit yet. In the corporate world, you usually get a stake in your idea or you're asked to lead it,

which could be a blessing or a curse. You want the work. I think in your case, it would be really interesting to then say, okay, if you win the tournament, you get to run the next one. Yeah. Ah, yeah, yeah. And come and present it on a global stage somewhere. I wonder where you could do that.

Again, is that a positive or a negative? No. Don't know, but you could give them a cameo in a movie. That's true. That's true. Okay, so talk to me about, when you think about your international teams on the ground, I think they really probably feel the weight of falling short of their goals in a way that can be very difficult.

I'd love to hear you talk about how you think about building and maintaining the resilience of those teams. I imagine it's a little different from, oh, man, I didn't get dead poet society. That was heartbreaking, by the way. Was it? Well, yeah, of course. All those rejections hurt, but. Do they still hurt?

Well, I don't get rejected anymore. No, no, not. No, I think the rejection is just that somebody that I might want to work with never calls me. I don't audition anymore. So it's a different form of rejection. I'm silently rejected. You're projected. But it was, you know, as every actor knows, going into those rooms and, you know, pouring your heart out and then being told, okay, thanks.

That's a slightly soul-destroying experience. But definitely builds resilience. Is there a particular skill that you learn from that that's applicable now to when you face a disappointment or failure in the water space? Yeah, you just become inured to it. You just become really comfortable being rejected. And that's been a huge help to me in my life. You know, you don't take things so personally. you just, it's so standard when you're starting out and so constant that it's not, you know,

you learn to let it just kind of roll off your shoulders and kind of get on with it. It's also, you know, a great lesson in not being afraid of failure, which I know that's like every commencement speech, but it is really true and it is really a big part of Gary's, one of the things that attracted me to him, the first thing you wanted to talk about were all the ways in which he'd failed because those failures are really, that's how you, you know, you gain the hard-earned wisdom to kind of do things better and more efficiently. And if we were afraid of, if we were stuck to an idea that it had to be one way or another, and we didn't have the flexibility to kind of go where the work took us, we'd be in a really different place. I think it's time for

a lightning round. You guys ready for some rapid fire questions? Sure. Tell me something you've changed your mind about lately. Either of you or both of you. I'll give you a little one to a household one. We had four dogs, and now we have five. I was not part of that decision, and I was against it. Is that a daughter? No, it was a wife move. It was just a brute force move, and I love this dog so much now, and I've totally changed my mind, and she was right. That's great. Okay, Matt, what's your most underrated performance? I don't, it's tough for me to know how people rate the performance from where I sit. So I really don't know.

There was a movie I did called The Informant, which I don't think a lot of people saw, but I really love that performance in that film. All right. I'm going to nominate one back. Okay. Scotty doesn't know in EuroTrap. Yes, yes.

Yeah, I think that's a lot of people have seen that one. I know only that because walking down the street, like probably once a month, somebody screams out of a car that's passing. Scotty doesn't know. So I think that one went over okay. I love that that's still following you all these years. 23 years ago.

Yeah. Impressive. If you could assemble any team to solve the water crisis, you could draft anybody alive or dead. Who are you putting on your team, Gary? Ah, wow. I think I'd start with my core team right now, and I'd ask them, you know, who do they want that's going to amplify the work that they're doing? Who do they think are the best people in the space?

And I would source it from the bottom up. But at another level, I would like to have some of the top bankers in the country really dig into our model and help us understand how do we take this from reaching 85 million people to reaching 2 billion people. And how do we bring the capital markets to bear from the top down on this? So I think that bottom up talent meshed together with the top down financial engineering would make for a lot. lot of impact. Top bankers. Jane, Brian, Jamie, Anna, if you're listening, Gary would like a meeting with you. We know Brian. Brian's already been a great champion, and so we're just building off of that. Good. Okay. So as we wrap, what's the one thing that our listeners can do to help solve the water crisis? Well, you can certainly start to learn more about our work if you're interested. Like we said,

it's $5 to get somebody clean water. So that's a very direct way you can impact. So to, I guess, guess engage would be the advice or the ask. You know, we've conquered other diseases. We've conquered other big humanitarian issues. A lot of the resources have been drained from international development. We think this is a moment for water. Well, I think if that doesn't move people, the only other thing we can offer is go dehydrate yourself and experience real thirst and you will care.

Right, for sure. Gary, Matt, thank you. This has been a blast. Thanks so much, Adam. Appreciate it. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer.

Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick. And our fact checkers, Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Highlash, Ban Ben-Benzhen, Julia Dickerson, Tonsica sung Monivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

Original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Layton Brown. We worked with the Development Bank of Peru to develop a blue bond, first blue bond that's focused on water in low-income countries. And the cool thing about it is the money that was raised by the bond went into this network of partners that were already making microloans, so that turned into water for people throughout Peru, and now the bondholders are getting repaid. I've never been excited about a bond before.

Didn't know that was possible.