Matt Damon and Gary White: Why the Global Water Crisis Is Really a Finance Problem

Matt Damon: If you suddenly unleash the potential of a quarter of the human species, we don't know what would happen. Women and girls do these water collections, girls aren't in school because of this. if their life revolves around just surviving to the next day and not getting an education and imagining the life of possibility in front of them and going and living to the fullest, we don't know what we've lost already and what we'll continue to lose.

Gary White, Water.org: nothing matters when you wake up in the morning until you get water. Nothing else matters.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader. I'm Linda Lacina and I am pleased to invite into our podcast booth today, Gary White and Matt Damon, the co-founders of Water.org.

That is a very special non-profit that has improved water access and sanitation for 85 million people all around the world. Eighty-five million.

They're going to talk to us today about how the heck they did that but also to breakdown what's really needed truly scale and also what they have learned from each other as leaders in the 17 years since they founded Water.org. Seventeen years, my goodness.

Matt Damon and Gary White, Water.org: We can almost vote.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: It is older than we bought a zoo.

Matt Damon and Gary White, Water.org: Yes, yeah, that's right.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Why don't we get started here? Can you guys give the world a grade? How are we doing on protecting water?

Matt Damon: Well, if you're talking about access for human beings around the world to clean water, 2.1 billion people still lack access, so one in four human beings do not have access to clean water, so I would probably say that's an F.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What about you, Gary, what grade?

Gary White, Water.org: Yeah, I think so. I think when you put it in the context that we need to put it in and that is where humanity overall is, it's definitely at F. I think that we do see a lot of people focusing on water as a natural resource and trying to make sure it's more equitably allocated. So I'm hoping that we're going to trend upward.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What things are contributing to this problem?

Gary White, Water.org: Well, I think one of the things that we see as contributing significantly to it is the lack of financial resources going into it.

When you think about water and safe water, in the United States, Western Europe, we've known how to make water safe for 100 years. So it's not necessarily that we need a silver bullet or we have to invent a new cure for this.

What we need to do is to ensure that we are allocating financial resources towards this, that the utilities that supply our water are well run, that people are billing and paying for water, so that the infrastructure can be maintained.

A lot of these things are systems failures and a lot of that is rooted back in finance and that's why everything we do at Water.org and WaterEquity is focused on driving financial resources to solving SDG no.6.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there a statistic on this topic that would completely shock people? Something that really speaks to you, like, gosh, when we say this to people, their eyes just widen.

Matt Damon: Well, certainly the 2.1 billion people, which is one in four, lacking access, that's pretty arresting.

I think also a million people dying a year because of lack of access to clean water and sanitation, that's incredibly alarming and unconscionable in 2026 – that we can expect that in 2026 – given that, as Gary said, we solved this for ourselves 100 years ago. I mean, imagine curing cancer and in 100 years, a million people a year were still dying from cancer. It would just be what our friend Bono refers to as stupid death. It's just entirely unnecessary and stupid and wrong.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You guys do a fair amount of imagining this but a lot of us maybe haven't had the chance: what does the world look like if we get water right?

Matt Damon: You know, it's impossible to say, because if you suddenly unleash the potential of a quarter of the human species, we don't know what would happen. I mean, it would all be good but we don't know because the loss of girls; women and girls do these water collections, girls aren't in school because of this.

So, you know, if their life revolves around just surviving to the next day and not getting an education and imagining the life of possibility in front of them and going and living to the fullest, we don't know what we've lost already and what we'll continue to lose.

Gary White, Water.org: Yeah, there's so much negative about this issue but then to flip it around, I think it's a great question: what's the upside that people do get water?

I think this was you know what Matt's talking about as a woman I met in Uganda a few years ago she was a grandmother in her 70s, and she just went by the name of Mama Florence. And what she had been doing is getting on her bike every day and riding with jerry cans to try to scavenge for water to find water to bring back for her family and her grandchildren. And what we do is we help women like her get access to small, affordable loans so that they can get the solutions that are best for them.

So you know she needed about $300 to sink a well and put a pump in there and once she had that, she was able to then start giving her family safe water but she also started growing vegetable gardens, so she had vegetables to improve the health of her family.

In the scraps from the vegetables she was then feeding to pigs to raise pigs for her family and for income. And then she figured out that the soil around her house was clay and that she could take the water and mix it and form bricks and start selling bricks.

And then, ultimately, she used the bricks to build some rooms on her plot of land, which she would then rent out.

So here's this woman who, you know, it took her in her 70s to have her kind of entrepreneurial spirit unleashed and the reason it was is because of water. And that's the thing.

You know, nothing matters when you wake up in the morning until you get water. Nothing else matters. And so if you are always kind of behind the curve because you're spending so much of your energy, time and resources just getting water, it's never going to let you move on and develop economically.

And so, yes, we have some sense of what that would look like but if we can unleash the potential of those 2.1 billion people, I think the planet would look very different and look prosperous.

Matt Damon: And it's a beautiful story because of what she did but think of it the other way. What if she had had access from the time she was seven rather than 70? What would she have done with that life? And so that's what we're talking about right now for young women all over the world.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You guys make the point in the book that you co-wrote, The Worth of Water, that ultimately, the water crisis is a finance problem. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Matt Damon: That's kind of our origin story. You know, we partnered and we were doing direct impact work like most people in the water space. The direct impact is well drilling. We were very good at that, actually. Half of all water projects fail within five years. Ours did not. Because of Gary, because of a lot of trial and error that Gary went through, he started this in 1990.

And so, from what he learned and how to implement these systems, he was doing it very successfully. But when we partnered, he had kind of had this epiphany that, a) there was never going to be enough charity in the world to get this done.

If you look at the scale of the problem and the numbers that the charity could reach, you were faced with just a sad truth and as he said to me, we can continue to be like ostriches with our head in the sand or we can innovate. And he had already started to do that.

And he pioneered this idea that we call water credit, which is essentially taking what Muhammad Yunus pioneered at the Grameen Bank and micro-loaning and redirecting it towards the water space.

That was a whole journey to bring the microfinance institutions along, because they did not believe and they did not have faith that loans would be repaid for water, because they're not standard income-generating loans.

They're income-enhancing loans because you're buying somebody's time back, the time that they're wasting going and collecting water, the time they're going and queuing up at a water point, which is terribly inefficient.

Also, the insight that he had was people were actually already paying for water in these communities and sometimes 25% of their income. They had no savings but day in and day out, they would pay.

His hypothesis was that if you could front a loan to these people, they would pay it back. Because also nobody takes out a loan for something they don't want. So this would be a sustainable solution that worked locally for this person in that community.

And that idea, that hypothesis has just turned out, you know, it was unproven when we started and it's been just such a success story. I mean, it's beyond anything we could have hoped. I mean, it's what we did hope, I guess.

But you know 98% of these loans pay back and that's astonishing when you realize that these are the most economically vulnerable people on the planet, mostly women by the way, 90% of our borrowers are women because this is an issue that disproportionately affects women and girls.

And it turns out if you just nudge the market and get out of their way, they will solve their own problems and that is what we've seen. We've done over 15 million of these ones and they pay back at 98%, so that's a very real number. And that success led us into the next stage of our journey.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And generally, what is the overall impact that water credit has had?

Gary White, Water.org: Water Credit has basically taken the model that Matt has talked about, where we have these financial partners around the world that are making household-level loans.

We have over 200 financial partners that now are making loans. That's because we've used our philanthropic capital in a way that nudges the market, you know, de-risk some of these portfolios, provides technical assistance to MFIs, these microfinance banks, so that they can market the loans.

And what happened was that the demand for these loans really blew up in a way that a lot of these financial partners needed more capital. And so Matt and I were in India in 2015, quizzing all of our partners about what's holding you back? And they said, we need more capital, more affordable access to capital.

And so that's where we kind of hatched this idea in the back of a jeep to start a fund to actually provide debt to some of those partners. And that worked really well. And then we decided, let's blow this up.

And so we launched an asset manager that's now been named WaterEquity. WaterEquity raises debt and equity in the US and Europe in a way that we can connect it to those financial institutions. They connect it the women who need water and toilets. And then the funds come back up the chain so that we can provide financial returns to investors. And they get tremendous social impact with that as well.

And so we've now done six funds and we've brought in about half a billion dollars in committed capital to be able to scale this up. To me, that's the evolution. That's what we do at Water.org is we evolve, we innovate and talk about getting the head out of the sand - what we see is the only way we're going to solve this crisis in the long term is if we can connect women who need water with the capital markets through water equity and that's exactly what we've done.

We're kind of like financial plumbers that connect that capital with people who need access to water so that along that value chain, everybody benefits and then when you can use charity to then use it as a springboard to the financial markets, that's when you can really solve big humanitarian issues.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You guys have kind of gone from, in the very beginning, thinking about, hey, is it just about getting more wells, to doing things like de-risking loan portfolios.

Matt Damon: Right, right. That's what we love saying because it's not where we saw ourselves ending up and it's where we did end up. But I will say that there's another statistic I love, which is had we just stayed drilling wells, which again, we were kind of best in class there, it would have taken us 600 years just to get to where we are right now. And we're accelerating. We're reaching a million people every six weeks.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: So many well-meaning projects, as you know, we're mentioning about the wells, good, good things, very difficult to scale, right? And we've seen this in the sustainability space.

In your experience, from what you've seen, are there maybe two or three elements or ingredients that an idea or a concept needs to make sure that it can scale?

Gary White, Water.org: Well, I think that I'll just kind of level set a little bit in terms of there is a need for kind of this direct impact in wells and wells can be done in a way that are sustainable. And the problem is the financial resources for that. And I think if we really want to scale to solve the problem, what we see is solutions like water credit and financial innovation.

That recognizes that everyone in the world isn't too poor and they're not equally poor but they all need charity. So let's carve that off and figure out how can we reach hundreds of millions of people with access to finance so that the government resources are then freed up to be directed to having really good well-drilling programmes and really sustainable programmes.

Because if you can put the resources behind that to make sure the communities are in charge of those projects, to make sure that they know how to maintain those projects and put all of that into place, then I think we can have a scaled solution that meets some of the needs of the most destitute who are in rural areas of Ethiopia, who maybe water credit doesn't work for but there's enough subsidy coming in now because so many people are served through the market mechanism.

That's kind of the classic applying capitalism in a way that is serving everybody from the base of the pyramid on up.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And so basically what you're saying is that we have to build that flywheel by sort of making sure that we're part of the market. Is that what you are saying?

Matt Damon: Exactly.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You have a special initiative that just launched at Davos. Can you talk a little bit about Get Blue?

Matt Damon: Sure, yeah, we're very excited about this. We came here to announce it. It's a partnership. So the Get Blue initiative is inspired by RED, by the incredible success of the RED campaign, which is still ongoing but that's a way to contextualize it.

So it'll be a consumer-facing initiative that's going to allow our partners like Gap, like Starbucks, like Amazon and Ecolab to engage with their customers in the case of the first three and imagine going into Starbucks and instead of buying a cup of coffee with you know the green siren on it, you buy a cup coffee with a blue siren.

And they'll put us up on on their their app, which tens of millions of people engage with every single day. It's a way to try to move this you know on the awareness front into the public consciousnes as well as a way to raise money that will be directed to Water.org directly into these programmes that we're talking about, which will allow us to keep scaling.

So it's very exciting. These are the first four major companies. Formula E has already come along as well and come on board and we're here recruiting other corporate partners because we really need as much support and leverage as we can as we can gather for this for what we want to be a movement you know but if we can connect a consumer.

Right now, there's a 13-year old girl in the developing world who is gathering water every day rather than being in school and what if you can connect a 13-year-old girl who buys a Get Blue sweatshirt or a certain blue drink at Starbucks, basically, directly to that person.

In our programmes, we've driven the philanthropic cost of capital to reach each person. The standard in the water space is $25 to get somebody water for life. In our programmes, it's $5 because of the nature of the programme, because it's a loan that goes out and as it's repaid, it goes out again.

And so every time it goes, the cost to reach each person goes down. And so it's $5. And so that's a number that we can all wrap our head around. For just $5, you're getting somebody on the other side of the earth clean water for life.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And how does this help maybe bridge this awareness gap that people have, where probably a lot of people in the rich world don't really think very much about water at all? How does it help bridge that gap?

Matt Damon: Well, I mean, this is our number one, this is the first hurdle we always have to clear, is awareness, right? Because it's such an unrelatable problem for those of us who grew up in, as you call it, the rich world, right?

You know, you're never that far from a drink of water. And as such, you can't really relate to this problem. If you were to raise money for AIDS or cancer research, everybody's been touched personally by these things, through their family or their friends. And so we all can relate to that; it really resonates with us on an emotional level.

Whereas this just feels more like an intellectual concern because even if you hear the magnitude of the problem, it seems so overwhelming and also so distant that it's hard to get engagement.

So what we're hoping with Get Blue is that it really moves it into the public consciousness because of the ubiquity of the campaign and it just becomes something that everybody in the developed world starts to become aware of, particularly the younger generations, who the data shows that they really purchase with purpose. And so that's the hope behind this movement.

Gary White, Water.org: Yeah, I think the power of the platforms are the partners that we've signed up so far. I mean, we're talking about reaching millions and millions of people through these platforms. They're really great at communicating with their communities and knowing what sparks their communities, in terms of products but also in terms of culture and lifestyle and what's important to them as humans.

And what we have is, you can tell from Matt's telling of both what holds people back for water, which is a very powerful, gripping, kind of gut-wrenching story but also the upside, the mom of Florence and the positive stories that come out.

So we can use Get Blue for the symmetry of that, where, yes, we do need to grab people's attention and we also want to point to the solutions and point to how elegant the solution can be if you can, as simple as buying a coffee or buying a sweatshirt and actually participate in that story and joining those two pieces together.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: How does this campaign, how does this build on what you have learned about scale? So if I'm listening to this and I'm a leader and I want to build my own solutions and I wanted to evaluate and kind of do a little checkbox in my mind, you know, ‘yeah, this could work.’

What are these characteristics that this campaign has that this has got it, this is going to help us get the widest reach. How does it build on what you've already learned?

Matt Damon: Well, we know that the solutions that we have in place work. We've proven that. So the more capital we get into the system, the more people we can reach quicker.

So our belief is that we can create a movement. And that's why we're trying to recruit corporate partners here. And we want them to know that, don't take our word for it, talk to Gap, talk to Amazon, talk to Starbucks, talk to Ecolab, talk to your peers and see why they're involved with us.

Because they really evangelize this work because it's so successful, because it's so effective. And so they're troubleshooting with us how we maximize impact. So for any other corporate coming in, what they really need to know is that there's not a playbook in terms of participation. Like, it will be tailored to their needs and their company's needs.

They can participate and join Get Blue, you know, in any creative way they want, right? It's important to us that it works for them and it works for the people we're trying to serve and so that it's a win-win.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Absolutely. There's a lot of talk about how to really have solutions for the future, especially sustainable solutions. We need to have new types of partnerships, right? Ones that maybe are pre-competitive, ones that maybe people wouldn't have thought about maybe 20 years ago or something like that.

When you're kind of looking at campaigns like this or maybe other things that you guys have put together, what's important for the private sector to be considering when it comes to being creative on how they can tackle sustainability? What are your thoughts?

Gary White, Water.org: Well, I think the private sector is interested in solutions at work. I think the private sector recognizes, yes, they do want to be philanthropic but they know that it doesn't end there. And so I think they're looking for solutions that resonate with them, with business and with the markets.

I think that's what we're trying to do by building those partnerships. And, you know, we've worked with dozens of corporates through the years. And so, Get Blue is just a culmination of taking those relationships to a whole different level that goes beyond just their philanthropy and into their communities.

So those are the types of partnerships that we want to continue building because those partnerships have partnerships with their consumers and then we're all about partnership on the impact side, too.

We don't go out and do the load directly ourselves or build projects directly ourselves. We work through local talent, local experts, local institutions and we partner with them and help them get the resources that they need to develop these loan portfolios and to have impact.

Our most recent funds that we developed, we can now actually invest in entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises around the world. There are so many entrepreneurs out there that want to solve this crisis but they lack the capital, so there are lots of startups out there.

And so we're able to invest debt and equity into some of those enterprises so that they can start scaling their efforts, so that we can reach even more communities with water and sanitation solutions.

So it's all about partnerships and trying to figure out how do you position yourself as a catalyst to put all these things together so it sparks from top to bottom.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Absolutely. You talked a little bit about partnership. So water.org, now correct me if my numbers are wrong here. Water.org is more than 30 years old? Is that correct? Yeah.

Gary White, Water.org: Well, Matt and I started Water.org by merging our organizations in 2009. I started Water Partners back in 1990 and Matt has started in...

Matt Damon: I started in 2006 but then joined with Gary in 2009.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And Gary, tell us a little bit about your background so people understand.

Gary White, Water.org: Well, I have a background in engineering and I first learned about this crisis when I was an undergrad in engineering. I was looking for this intersection between engineering and social justice and once I discovered the water crisis, it's like, that's what I'm going to do.

I started an organization at my university that would allow engineers to travel and volunteer. And as Matt has talked about our well drilling, I got three engineering degrees, right? I would trade in at least two of those for a finance degree because this is a completely different playing field than what I thought it was going to be.

But that engineering background also put in me this fierce problem-solving that kind of activated that gene in me. And that's what the success of this is about. It's about finding solutions. It's about throwing off conventional wisdom – conventional wisdom like all poor people are too poor to pay for water.

It's like, well, that doesn't make sense. Let's figure out how to work with that and get the capital as opposed to charity.

So it's that background and kind of problem-solving and iterating and innovating, and that's what we're about. That's, you know, you think about, we were a water NGO. Now we're a global financial institution with an asset manager.

I mean, how crazy is that? But you know it works because more and more people are coming in with the philanthropy and then that's catalyzing the investment and so we'll be up to billions of dollars of assets under management in a few years to be able to tackle this problem.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And Matt, you had your own water organization. Tell us briefly about the work you were doing.

Matt Damon: Well, when I first learned about the crisis, I started with a few other people, something called H2O Africa. Our plan at the time, even though we knew, okay, this isn't going to be enough. But as a stopgap measure, it's doing something. And I know I can use my platform to raise money, to funnel it to NGOs that we identify that are doing really good work across Africa.

And so that's what we did for a few years, until it felt meaningful. It made me feel good that we were reaching thousands of people with clean water but I knew and I just made the decision that I needed to find the pre-eminent partner in the space who was just the absolute expert in the space and that's led me very quickly to Gary and that when we met in 2008 and we realized how aligned we were with our mission and so we joined forces in 09 and rebranded ourselves as Water.org.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What did you both see in each other's capabilities and maybe interests and maybe that you felt like gosh, I'll be able to scale my impact if I partner with this individual. What did both see in each other?

Gary White, Water.org: Well, what I saw in Matt when I first met him was his curiosity and the questions and the probing. And I could tell just by the questions he was asking about our model and what we're doing.

And then listening to the answers and then asking different questions. That just demonstrated to me that the intellect was there. And it already demonstrated the passion and putting his time into it by starting another nonprofit.

So, to me, once we started to kind of connect at that passion level and that intellectual level. Then it was just a matter of how do we work together.

Matt Damon: Yeah, for me, Gary came exactly as advertised as the expert in this space and I think there were a number of things. I mean, I did ask him every question I could think of and he had an answer for everything. He'd already been doing this for a couple decades. He had a huge wealth of experience and he talked really openly about failures.

He actually led with those. Because he explained because of the lesson that would come out of each one, well, I did this and this didn't work and here's why. And I did and I was just and then he started to talk about market-based solutions. And now that is, that's a thought lead for somebody coming into this and going, well, wait a minute, we're talking about the poorest people in the world.

You want them, you want to give them a loan? You know and very quickly, he just explained. People in these communities are paying already. This loan is going to be the loan that they pay off is going to be less than they're actually already paying for water.

And within two years, once the loan is complete, they're connected to the system and they're completely free and clear of this daily expense that's burdening them right now. And so it was counterintuitive until he told me that and then it made total sense. And then there was the whole journey of proving it, right? And that was a very, that took a lot of time.

And it wasn't until 2012 that we hit our first million people, which was a big celebration for us, a million people. But he had started in 1990, so it was 22 years in the making. And now, like we said, it's every six weeks that we had a million.

So it's been this wonderful, wonderful partnership and it's one of the greatest decisions I ever made in my life was partnering with Gary because I was looking to maximize the impact that I personally could have and nobody could have done it more.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I love this idea of leading with failure when it comes to considering innovation. Why is that so important?

Gary White, Water.org: Well, because if you're not failing sometimes, you're not experimenting. You're not probing. So yeah, we could have kept with the direct impact in drilling wells. And we wouldn't have failed probably very often at all, because that becomes kind of like making widgets. You just stamp one more out and you kind of go on.

But you can see the pieces of the puzzle. You can understand when you sit with the woman and talk to her about how did she get water today. And that's a humbling experience. Like, okay, am I really an expert? No, she's the expert because somehow, every day she finds water for her family and it's hard. And then you understand, you start to peel back the layers. Like, how far did you have to walk? And it's like, what would you do if you didn't have to walk? Well, I would go to work over here because I have a friend who's doing this job.

I could do that too. And then you can talk to, I met an elderly woman who was in her 80s and she had taken out a loan from a loan shark that was paying 125% interest just so she could build a toilet and have privacy of that toilet in her home.

And so I met a woman in the Philippines who was paying $2 a day to a water vendor. Because she didn't have a connection to the water system in her slum. She didn't have the $300 it cost to connect. She had $2 every day to buy water. So she was paying $60 a month for that.

She took out a loan and her loan payments were $5 a month. Her water bill now is $5 per month. So you basically absorb these lessons from people who are living in water poverty and then that's when you start to experiment.

Now, it's not a straight line. When I remember that the first time we made a foray into this, we were trying to make loans to water NGOs in Kenya, who were very much accustomed to just getting grants.

So we made loans to them and they were going to work with communities and the communities weren't well-trained. So half the loans had to be written off and we're like, okay, we're not going to be a bank. That was a dumb idea, basically.

What we're going to do is piggyback onto those financial institutions that already have banking relationships with these individuals and with these communities but that was a hard slog because those microfinance banks would make a loan for a cow, for instance.

They would do that because you're milking the cow by the end of the week and you're selling milk. you've got cash flow and you repaid a loan and these MFIs would say, there's no way going to loan for a water connection because it's not income generating and that's where we had to kind of provide this nudge and basically share a risk with them to then experiment to develop new loan portfolios that would target all of these different water and sanitation solutions. And then that's what it took.

It took us de-risking financial institutions instead of trying to be one. And that's when it really sparked and took off.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What is maybe one way that you guys work differently, maybe make decisions differently, ask questions differently, since working together? Is there one thing that each one of you have like, you know, “gosh, I do that only because I work with Gary. Only because I work with Matt.”

Matt Damon: Sure, yeah, Gary, from the time we started Water.org, Gary insisted on a new ventures fund for exactly what he's just talked about. This idea of pushing the envelope, knowing that not all of these things are going to work but had he not had that idea, that innovative drive, water credit never would have come to be. And we wouldn't have reached all these people and so there was built into our whole plan, was a new ventures fund to pilot things and see what the next water credit might be. It's always about exploring ways in which we can maximize impact.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there a way of working that you've learned from Matt?

Gary White, Water.org: Well, what I've learned is you can't just be a wonky engineer and move people's hearts and minds. And of course, that's what Matt does in spades. And so I learned from him as I sit back and listen to him, filter this work through his ability to reach audiences, to tell stories and to move people.

And he's certainly pretty much a great water expert now but I don't think I'm much more of an actor.

Matt Damon, Co-Founder, Water.org: Don't sell yourself short.

Gary White, Water.org: Yeah.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: We're going to do some rapid response questions, some very quick ones. So first thing you guys do in the morning?

Matt Damon: Feed my dogs.

Gary White, Water.org: Wake up and meditate.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Best thing you've stopped doing?

Matt Damon: I can't wait to get to that point where I have time to meditate in the morning. It's like getting fired out of a cannon. Sorry, what was the second one?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Best thing you've stopped doing.

Matt Damon: Procrastinating.

Gary White, Water.org: I gave up sugar at the start of the year, so that's top of mind because I really want something sweet right now.

Matt Damon: Oh yeah, I stopped eating gluten, actually and that was a game-changer for me.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Habit you can't work without.

Gary White, Water.org: Coffee.

Matt Damon: Yeah, yeah, that's it. I agree. Coffee. I really tried, doesn't work.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: The biggest challenge you see for the rest of 2026.

Matt Damon: Well, the biggest challenge, I mean, the one that's going to take up all our time, is Get Blue and really launching it, you know, as powerfully as we can. You know, in success, it can really have a profound impact on the water crisis and so that's, I think, what we're focused on.

Gary White, Water.org: Yeah, focusing on what is still positive in the world.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And leaders listening to this, what is the one thing they should be prioritizing? Is there one thing that has to move forward this year to kind of set us up for where we need to be, maybe 2030, 2040? What's one thing they should prioritize this year?

Matt Damon: The 2.1 billion people who don't have access to water and the 3.4 billion who lack access to adequate sanitation.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What about you, Gary?

Gary White, Water.org: Yeah, because I think they should be paying attention to what are good investments for their countries and their communities. And certainly investing in water has multiple returns on the capital, both economically for their countries but also from a humanity perspective.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Unfortunately, that is all the time that we have today. Thanks so much to our very amazing guests, Gary and Matt. And thanks to you for listening. For more video podcasts, please check out our World Economic Forum YouTube page. And for more podcasts and podcast transcripts, go to wef.ch/podcasts.