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

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Happy Sunday Ted Talks daily listeners.

Zelise Hue, 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 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,

2026 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 NAC for forging strong partnerships.

Adam also invites the due 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.ted.com.

Now onto the episode.

The worst career advice you've ever gotten.

Well, I don't know if it's the worst,

but I do love telling this 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.

Hey, 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 Grant.

Welcome back to rethinking.

I podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick.

I'm an organizational psychologist.

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

to CEO, and the pair have been working together

on this issue ever since.

This saying I heard was talent is distributed even

lay 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 micro loans 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

and 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 year relationships in my wife,

and then into my 30s,

this was the significant partnership.

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 didn't resonate with him.

I love to be peppered with questions about what we do,

and I think I mostly answered to them to Matt's satisfaction,

and then that just led us to say like,

we are strongly aligned.

We both have this curiosity that's been towards innovation,

and so that's when we decided to just merge the organizations.

I had water partners, he had H2O Africa.

I'd reserved 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.

That just kind of is combined with being the real deal, too.

There's initially some skepticism about teaming up

with anybody in Hollywood as like,

is this going to blow up or whatever,

and when I add 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.

We talk about, are you just 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 Crameen Bank

and applying it to water.

In those early days, that was a huge thought leap

for the microfinance institutions,

because it wasn't in income generating loan.

Like what Gary had realized, his insight

and the brilliance of this idea was from spending,

you know, much of his adult life in these communities

and watching how everything worked,

in 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, you know, 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 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, it's 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, right?

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 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 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?

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 gonna be just an engineering problem.

Of course, it turns out as 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,

and they were all equally poor.

You know, on the face, 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, seven billion dollars in micro loans

have now churned through our network

of financial partners around the world, right?

That's seven billion dollars in philanthropy

that didn't have to be raised.

And it's also a signal to the market

that because of the value it's created, it's a good deal.

I just, you know, one example of a woman

that I met recently in Tanzania,

I mean, she had taken out a loan

so that she could put a well in 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 out another loan sink, 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 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,

but 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 two 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 clear

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 part of Zambia.

And we go for this walk

and we each have a, you know, a 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?

Oh, seven.

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,

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 bore well 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, it just really stri-

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, then.

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 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, right?

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 beat blunt.

I mean, it's what we puzzle over.

We've tried comedy skits.

We, you know, it's an open question.

We wrote a book.

And 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 down 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.

I said, well, you're 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, we 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 alone 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

in 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, this all was because she could have access to water

and not have that spend that time riding her bike every day.

And it just, 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.

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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 gonna try to help you think through a problem.

Do you have one?

We do, and we have a good one for you.

Yeah, I think our problem or 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 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 raise the bar?

Where should the bar be?

Well, you know, because it's a massive problem.

And again, our goal is to solve the crisis

or to be a catalyst for that solution.

And so we don't have standard signals, right?

Yeah, we don't have, you don't have profitability

to give you a signal 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 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 the 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 we just blew our minds, by the way,

because we were driving around India in a Jeep,

go 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's 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 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 gonna 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 gonna 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.

Have you done any of those before?

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 wanna 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 US dollars per year.

I was blown away by that because most of these creative ideas

did not come from people who were 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 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 non-profit yet.

In the corporate world, usually get a stake in your idea

or you're asked to lead it,

which could be a blessing or a curse.

And whether 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.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And come and present it on a global stage somewhere.

I wonder where you get to then.

Yeah.

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 another one.

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 they 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 poets society.

Right?

That was heartbreaking, by the way.

Wasn't it?

Well, yeah, of course.

Any, all those rejections hurt, but.

Do they still hurt?

Well, I don't get rejected anymore.

No, no, 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 pre-jected.

But it was, you know, it was 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 scale 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 a nerd 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,

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.

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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, just a household one.

We had four dogs, and now we have five.

I was not part of that decision, and I was against it.

Was 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 and that film.

All right, I'm going to nominate one back.

Okay.

Scotty doesn't know in your own trip.

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.

It's 20, three 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, who do they want?

That's going to amplify the work that they're doing.

Who do they think are the best people in this 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 two 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 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.

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 I 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.

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 Polar Simpson.

Our technical director is Jacob Winnick

and our fact checker is Paul Durbin.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Highlash,

Ben Ben Cheng, Julia Dickerson,

Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

Original music by Hans Dale 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 and 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 micro-lones

so that turned into water for people throughout Peru

and now the bond holders are getting repaid.

I've never been excited about a bond before.

Didn't know that was possible.

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