This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know what you think I don't know what you say

and that's all right

yeah that's okay

I don't know anything.

Hello, welcome to factually. I'm Adam Conover and look, if you've watched TV over the last four decades you've seen the

commercials you know the ones I'm talking about the commercials where a white person

walks through a village and some undefined but impoverished foreign country stares plaintively at the camera

and tells you how you can help.

Maybe there are some cute kids running around for extra sympathy, right?

Everybody loves cute kids.

Now, these calls for donations,

whether they're in a commercial or online, are usually focused around giving

things like food, or digging wells, or sponsoring medical procedures, or hey,

maybe giving livestock, cows cows or even lending money to

impoverished people so that they can invoke the secret of entrepreneurship and better

themselves.

Now the impulse behind these commercials is a good one I think we

should want to help it's good that these people are trying to help but that

doesn't mean that the help we give or the help these ads and these organizations are seeking to offer is guaranteed to work.

For instance, maybe you give an impoverished person a cow, well maybe that helps them or maybe they can't afford to

feed the cow or maybe it's not a great location for the cow to be in so maybe they

end up just selling the cow in order to get the money instead or if you give a family a micro loan

...