Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Giving Cash Works with GiveDirectly’s Michael Faye

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

So many charities try to fix poverty by giving away goods, services, and training. But why not address the actual problem and give away… money? Michael Faye, President and co-founder of the charity GiveDirectly, joins Adam to explain the evidence behind direct cash giving, and wrestles with the question of whether philanthropy can ever create systemic change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. 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 in 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, or even lending money to impoverished people so that they can invoke the sacred spirit 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 microloan, it won't necessarily empower a new generation of female entrepreneurs. It might just put a poor woman into debt with a local lender. If you've been listening to this podcast for long enough, you've heard some of this story before. So here's a thought. If we want to address poverty, if we really want to fix it, why not address the issue directly and, you know, give people money? You know, the actual thing that they're lacking. Why is there this constant paternalistic need to give them tangentially related things instead? I mean, sure, give a man to fish, you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime, yada, yada, yada.

But you have to ask yourself, wait, why doesn't this person have enough fish? Is the problem really that they don't know how to fish or can they not afford bait? Can they not afford fishing lines? Are they maybe disabled in some way that prevents them from fishing or can they not afford bait? Can they not afford fishing lines? Are they maybe disabled in some way that prevents them from fishing? Do they not have access to the ocean, et cetera, et cetera? Maybe rather than trying to teach them some brand new fucking skill, you just give them the thing that they actually need. And come on, this makes sense. I mean, who understands exactly what an impoverished person needs better than the impoverished person themselves? Like, come on, when you're broke, you know what you need to buy

first, whether it's food, whether it's making a car payment, right? They know as well. Why can't we give them the basic respect of saying, yeah, they know what is in their best interest. When you look at it from this perspective, you start to see how weird and kind of paternalistic or condescending a lot of our approach to helping those living in extreme poverty has been. Just like with homelessness, where the best way to help unhoused people is just to give them homes. Well, we can address the problem of poverty by simply addressing the problem and giving

them money that they lack. But can it really be that simple? Are there potentially unintended consequences to giving money directly to the poor? You might be wondering. You also might be wondering, are there greater systemic issues at play in poverty that we also need to take care of beyond just transferring cash directly? Well, to help us understand these questions, we have the perfect guest on the show today. Michael Fay is one of the founders of the charity GiveDirectly, which, like the name

says, gives money directly to people in need all over the planet and also does the intense academic work necessary to see if that money is making an impact. They have pioneered this method of giving, and they have also pioneered the research that lets us know that it's working. I'm so excited. I have been following this organization for such a long time, and I find their work so fascinating. So please welcome Michael Fay. Michael, thank you so much for being here. Thanks a ton for having me. I have been a fan of GiveDirectly for a very long time and I followed your work. It's really a thrill to have

you on the show. Please, though, tell me in your own words what GiveDirectly does and how it differs from other forms of donation. Of course. So GiveDirectly is very simple. It lets people send money directly to other people. And that could be someone living in extreme poverty in Africa. That could be someone suffering from the COVID pandemic in the US. And what we are doing is a different take on philanthropy. So there is no intermediary making the decision on what the recipient gets. We are simply giving them the cash and letting them choose themselves. It's more efficient. I think it's more respectful. And it gets rid of a lot of the paternalism that I think has plagued the sector. Yeah. So as opposed to, you know, giving money to a big NGO that then sets up shop in a country or

impoverished area and says, OK, well, should we build schools or should we do this or that? Or are we going to? And, you know, it's sort of like managing all of that. This is you literally, I donate $10 to give directly, give directly transfers $10 to a person in need directly. That's the whole deal. Exactly. And when we get about 90 to 95%, depending on the project to the person. But, but if you think of the two things that you could give, one is the money and one is the choice. In traditional giving, a lot of that money goes to pay everything that sits between you, the donor, and the final recipient. And the second bit of traditional giving is the choice is made along the way. So maybe the organization has a mandate to only focus on food security or shelter or something else. And then maybe the specific organization picks, well, this is exactly how we're going to address food security. But by the time

you get all the way to the recipient, there's a lot less money left and you've lost the decision making ability. Now, so why do you take this approach? I mean, our sort of first impression would be, well, hey, if you just give people cash, they're going to spend it on things that they don't really need. They're going to waste the money, et cetera. Or, you know, isn't this sort of wasteful or naive to work this way? Wouldn't it be better to have those intermediaries? Clearly, you think not. Why not?

Yeah, it's an interesting thing to reflect on. Why is that? So many of our first reactions, they're going to waste it. They're going to stop working. You're not alone. I think a lot of us have that as the gut. When there's another first reaction, which is that when you give someone money, they become less poor.

There's that old Hemingway Fitzgerald exchange when I think Hemingway says, you know what the difference between the rich and us are? He says, no, tell me. He says, well, the rich have more money. And that's sort of the heart of it. Now, I think how we got started is I was a PhD economist. I was at Harvard. This was a time when economists were really trying to understand what worked and didn't work. And during a period, understand what worked and didn't work. And during a period, what was happening was economics was introducing randomized controlled trials, which is a very fancy word for something many of us heard of as an A-B test. It's the way tech companies test whether to put a button in the top left or the top right. It's the way drug companies test whether you can bring a drug to market, whether it's safe and effective. But we hadn't done this in development.

We had 50 years of experience under us when we were essentially going with our gut and some suggestive evidence of what worked. And our gut told us things like training programs would be effective or microfinance would be effective, things that felt right to us. As it turns out, those didn't work as well as we would have hoped. And we were starting to learn that at the time that I was in graduate school. And the other thing we were learning was that simply giving money worked surprisingly well. Now, out of that, we started GiveDirectly. And the academics that were leading the evaluation campaign, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Michael Kramer won a Nobel Prize.

So a lot's happened in the field in the last 20 years or so. And so and by the way, you mentioned microfinance. We talked about that in the intro to one of our podcasts a few months back that that's a practice of, for instance, giving small dollar loans to folks in need. Right. And saying, here's a loan for $500 or so, and you can use that to buy some chickens or to fix up your business or start a business or something like that. And then eventually it has to be paid back.

And that was a very, I think sort of before GiveDirectly, maybe 10 years ago, that was the hot model. That was the way that, hey, we can all contribute best and without even actually losing money because you get the money back at the end

if you're the quote donor. So but yeah, you're saying that approaches like that we now know from the evidence don't actually work that well. And yours does. Yeah. I mean, they certainly don't work as well as hoped. And maybe there is a form of microfinance that works better. But the broad literature has been that it hasn't been as successful as you would have liked to see. And the opposite is true of cash. Now, the fascinating thing about cash is that cash has been evaluated now probably about 200 times. That's, I don't know, five, six times more than the next most evaluated thing.

Like 200 different studies, you mean? 200 different robust studies. Now, why has cash been evaluated 200 times? I'm sure there are lots of reasons, but what I think is, is we're really skeptical. We're really skeptical that if you give someone money, they're going to spend it well. Because as we all know, they're probably going to spend it on drugs or alcohol and quit their job tomorrow. And it turns out it's not true. So what we've almost forced the extreme poor to do is to prove to us that they spend money well, which is why we've tested them 200 times. And they do. And the thing about cash that also comes out of these papers is that people are

different, which is not horribly surprising. And if you imagine someone living in extreme poverty, they're facing excruciating choices. It's not whether to buy the new iPhone or the new Android, that the choice that they're facing is, do I feed my newborn? Do I send my 13-year-old daughter to secondary school, which can be quite expensive? Or do I use whatever I have and invest it in my husband's business? And if I'm lucky, maybe I get to choose one of those three things. That's a really hard choice. And I shouldn't be the one making it for them, nor should I be the one telling them what's right or wrong. And I think what you see is even if you go to a village

where from a Westerner's perspective, it looks very similar, people are going to make the choice differently. Someone's going to decide to send their daughter to school. Someone's going to decide to invest the money. And the philosophy of cash is that is their choice. It's not my choice to go in and say, so you're all getting school uniforms. By the way, it's a funny story. I met a woman. It's not funny. It's sad in many ways. But I met a woman on my last trip to Kenya. And I said, well, what do you think about programs? She said, well, it's great. I said, why is it great? She said, well, about a year ago, an organization came and they were going to give us school uniforms. And they came to the schoolyard and they had one of those kind of big burlap sacks. And you'd get called and you'd kind

of reach in and you'd pick your uniform for your kid. And you'd have to pick the size, the appropriate size. And she said, and I got picked last, I was last in line or close to last. And by the time I got there, all that was left was double XL. And my daughter is not double XL. And she said, why didn't they just give us the money? I could have had the woman next door. So the uniform for me and they would have been employing her and they would have been paying her. so instead you ship these uniforms from who knows where yeah across they don't fit my daughter it just doesn't make sense yeah it at the end of the day like if you want to help someone like every individual person has so much more knowledge about what they need than any outsider does right like if you look

at your own life and like I need, what are the stressors in your life? You know, you know, okay, I need a car payment. I need help with that. I need a new roof for my house. I need whatever, or whatever. I need food for my kids.

We need to move to a better neighborhood. Whatever it is that you want to do, you know that. And so you have all this knowledge inside of you that someone else would have to study or research or understand or assign experts. And like if if that that seems to be the sort of context that this method unlocks, like you're really empowering us to make use of the knowledge the individual has themselves. It's makes sense.

Yeah. And there's a tradeoff and trade-off is a hard one for humans, including me. You have to shut down your judgment about what is right and wrong. And I have certainly myself been in people's houses and they say, this is what I spent the money on. And you have that first reaction of, is that really the most important thing? So you need to check your judgment. You need to check the desire to control things, right? I think just as people, we want to make the decision and control. So it's much better that I give you a voucher for a goat, or it's much better that I get you a cow. And then the third thing is we all, a lot of us, I think highly. And we think, but surely if we put our brains to this hard,

hard problem of poverty, we can find something better than just giving them money. I mean, isn't just giving someone money, giving up? Like, well, like there's gotta be something more clever than that. So I think a lot of it pushes in the opposite direction. But as we all learn in life, control is often just an illusion of control. I think to a story, there's a large NGO that had a program where they're giving people vouchers for goats. So a voucher is essentially a coupon. So you take the coupon to the store and the store gives you a goat. In many cases, people use it for beans or other things. So this was a program because the donor had decided that goats were great.

Goats was what people needed. Now I have nothing against goats. We'll go on the record and say I have nothing against goats. Goats are great. They got square eyes. I love that about them. They can melt down. They get a lot of babies. Goats can be great.

And they send an evaluator. And the evaluator stands outside these shops and watches what happens. And the program looks like it's going great. One person comes up, they hand a coupon, they get a goat. Next person comes up, coupon, goat. The program looks great. Several goats deep into this, the observer says, these goats just all look very familiar.

What's going on? Well, walked around the back of the shop, and what would happen is you'd get your goat in the front of the shop and you'd hand the coupon to the person. You'd walk around the back, and he would buy the goat back at a fraction of the shop and you'd hand the coupon to the person. You'd walk around the back and he would buy the goat back at a fraction of the coupon's price. You gave him a dollar coupon and then he gets it back for 50 cents. Turns out that there was exactly one goat in the village that had been refilled to everybody. So that is a classic case of the illusion of control.

We went through all the effort to make sure people got goats yeah and then they just undid it because they didn't need goats they wanted other things yeah i mean that's why they're selling the goat back is that like maybe they don't want a fucking goat right like and who are you to sit there and go no no no my plan is for you to have goats and like but once you expose that to the real world you go talk to real people and you know the first person who says to you well actually i don't want a goat i want like uh i need shoes i need a pair of shoes or something like that or whatever else they may need that's going to destroy your whole system like you that you painstakingly spent you know put

together over you know your years of fundraising in new y York City before you went to whatever country you're operating in. And the unfortunate reality is that goats sell better than dollar bills. Goats are cute. We have this illusion you have a goat. They sell better to donors. To donors. Yeah. And that's the challenge that you're facing. But again, people often underestimate the recipients. In Syria, we sent a lot of food aid to Syria, not we as GiveDirectly, but kind of we as the broad sector. Well, it turns out about 70% of people self-reported selling their food aid. So we go through so much effort and think about those shipping contracts and whatnot. It gets to Syria and then they just undo it. So tell me a little bit more about your program. Like, where do you operate and how specifically do you get money to folks in a way that isn't you being an intermediary? Right. And how do you choose which people to give money to?

And how do you choose which people to give money to? Yeah, we're in 11 countries now. And how you choose people is a question that always comes up with cash. And I think is relevant for every social intervention at the individual level, who gets and who doesn't get. And it's probably one of the hardest questions to answer. So what we do, and it depends, because we have done projects that have focused on refugees. We have done projects focused on people that were affected by Hurricane Maria or Hurricane Harvey, COVID, and so on.

But broadly speaking, what we do is we try to find the poorest people in a location. The way we do that, and it's changed a bit over time, is we'll use census data, we'll do our own scoping trips. We will find a region and villages that are particularly poor. And what we do now is we then distribute to everybody within that village. Ten years ago, or even less than that, we tried to select individuals within the village. So even within an extremely poor village, we'd spend a bit of time and effort finding the poorest individuals within that village. Yeah. I mean, did that end up being kind of a fraught enterprise to try to figure that out?

There's no way to do it perfectly. So you spend a lot of effort and cost and you might do slightly better than just picking randomly or giving to everybody. But you're going to do two things. One, you're going to wind up excluding people that probably should have been included. And that's the toughest. So that's someone that's really poor and had a need and you just mismeasured and left out of the program. And then you may include people that might have, should have been excluded. So maybe instead of living on 70 cents a day, they're living on $1.50. I think where we came to is that the cost of doing that, and there's both a monetary cost, right?

It takes us more time, but there's also potentially an emotional cost to our staff. It's very hard to have to tell someone no to the villagers themselves. It wasn't worth it. And that it made sense to someone no to the to the villagers themselves uh wasn't worth it and that it made sense to just give to everyone in the village and sure you may give to someone that's living on a dollar fifty a day but to be honest like i feel great about giving people a hundred dollars living on a dollar fifty a day yeah i mean just just based on the difference between i imagine most of your donors are coming from the United States or maybe Europe and, you know, countries like those and like just the differential wealth between those societies means I mean, the money's flowing to folks from folks who have more to folks who have less, no matter what. Yeah, that's exactly right. So much of giving is often motivated by guilt. And I think that's the completely wrong approach. I think it should be motivated by opportunity. So if you look at a lot of the places we're working, the poverty line is quite low, $1.90 or so. And there'll be variants at the national level. But let's say for about 70 cents a day,

you could take somebody literally out of poverty. And that's just arithmetic. That's just their 70 cents below, you give them 71 cents, now they're above the poverty line. So to say there's a human being in this world that I personally can take out of poverty for $22 a month is really powerful as an opportunity. There aren't many cooler things that you can do with your money than that.

Yeah. I mean, that's incredibly powerful. How do you actually distribute the money? Like, are you literally walking around with rolls, a hundred dollar bills, the rubber band, or what are you doing? You used to be not that far off from that, but we do it digitally. So the money actually gets transferred digitally. What we are building off of is a complete revolution in finance across the emerging markets, but specifically Africa, which is the advent of mobile money. So yes, we have Venmo here, we have PayPal, but where Africa was is we're talking about a place where pretty much very few people were connected to a financial system in any way.

They didn't have a bank account. There was no local ATM. There was no way that they were plugging into the global financial system. And now everybody is plugged in based on the phone in their pocket. And the SIM card in their phone, which maybe it's 25 cents for a SIM card, is an ATM card that everybody now has. How is that? Are there literally ATMs that are using the cell phone as a identifier or? No, it's just that if you don't have a phone,

but you have a SIM card, I can send money to that SIM card and the person at the local shop will put that SIM card in their phone and cash you out. And what that cash out process is, it's taking digital currency and converting it to physical currency. And when I say digital, I don't mean crypto. I just mean on a phone. So what that means now is I could literally sit, I'm in a cabin upstate New York and send money to refugees living in Uganda or people living in Masari or a slum in Kenya. So you can just transfer money to a phone number, basically. Correct.

Got it. And so, yeah. So what does that what does that look like? So literally give directly what collects phone numbers and then transfers money to those folks' phones and then they can go cash it out. That's exactly right. And there's a bit of a process before we transfer. So the first step is figuring out where we're going to work, which we talked about, which is called targeting. The next step is actually going door to door to enroll people. So you're going to spend time with them. You're going to explain the program. You're going to get them plugged in, make sure they know how to use mobile money,

figure out who in the household will get the money. So there's a fair bit of complexity there. So you'll run into cases, what if someone is blind and can't use the phone? Well, of course, you still want to enroll them in the program. How do you do that? And there are so many of these edge cases that you need to navigate at that stage of enrollment. We then have a second team that goes back and back checks that people are who they say they are are and that they meet the criteria that we've set out. We then have a team that's called the audit team, which is completely separate from our operational team, which audits our other team. And it's amazing because they

haven't met. They work out of a separate office. It's completely separate. And I don't know many organizations that have a completely separate team to do it. Because the incentives in this space, most donors say, what happened with my money? How did it go? And you say, well, bad news, your money actually got stolen. Nobody wants to hear that. So you as a donor don't want to hear it. You as the NGO don't have an incentive to find out if there's fraud. So I think there's just a lot of under investigation and under reporting of it. But of course, there's fraud. Anyone that tells you there's zero, either isn't looking for it or is not being honest with you. So we do all that. Then we transfer the money. Then after we transfer the money, we call people. So we run call centers

across the continent. And we call and say, do you have any problems with it? Could we do better from a customer service perspective? What did you use it for? And we're really just trying to get better operationally there. And again, treating the recipient as a customer, treating them as someone that actually has the buying power. And that's the big difference between the normal private sector and the NGO sector. So think about the private sector. You buy an iPhone. You don't like it. You think it's getting slow. It's getting too expensive. You don't buy an iPhone next time. Yeah. And you switch. What happens is Apple then needs to innovate. They need to say, oh, shoot, we better start doing better. Otherwise, we're going to

lose Adam. We're going to lose lots of customers. Now, you don't have that same mechanism in the nonprofit space because the person receiving the service isn't paying for it. You, the donor, pay for it, but someone else receives it. So you don't have that feedback mechanism. You don't have that natural push towards innovation and improvement. And that's what separates the sector. So we do as much as we can to treat it as if they were our customer, that they were the one paying for things. Yeah. And so what do you find that people, what is the result that you found in your own auditing procedure? Like what are people doing with the money when people receive, how, like say, say I'm

an average recipient, how much money am I receiving? Like you say, I'm living on a dollar 50 a day. Uh, what kind of payment do I get? And then what am I likely to do with that based on what you've seen your recipients do? Your family will get about a thousand dollars, which is about one year's consumption. So about $200 a person, a little bit shy of the dollar a day mark. So it's a meaningful amount of money. And you see a real range. So you'll see some of it certainly goes towards food consumption. You'll see a number of people putting a tin roof over their heads. And we'll come back to the tin roof. You'll see a number of people putting a tin roof over their heads and we'll come back to the tin roof you'll see a number of people investing in their business you will see people spending it on

education and health care so if you're sick a lot of people will get the surgery they need or the drugs they need for the first time and so on and I'll say two things. So one, the tin roof is just fascinating to me still. So most people have that roofs in a lot of the area we work. And I think a lot of reactions I'll get from Westerners is one of skepticism, again, with a tin roof. Is that just the East Africa equivalent of the marble bathroom? Is that conspicuous consumption? Is that where I want my money going as a donor? And the answer is no. So when you talk to recipients, they'll say a few things. They'll say, look, that's roofs. They catch on fire. They fall down. I need to replace it multiple times a year. A tin roof is going to last me 15 years, 20 years. So if you do the math,

I actually wind up saving a fair bit of money by putting a tin roof on. That makes sense. They say beyond that, I can collect water during the rainy season right off my roof. I don't need to walk two miles to get water, which is probably not even clean. I said, oh my goodness, we're doing clean water now. And they say, and you know, the roof doesn't have bugs living in it and mosquitoes. Now, I don't know what the evidence is on whether that translates to malaria, but who wants to be living with a roof infested by mosquitoes? And then the thing which I think is so easy as a Westerner to take for granted is they'll say but i also don't like watching my child get rained on every night and when people say that i always just step back like of course yeah like

yeah like we always go to the dollars and the cents and what's the roi on the metal roof and is it a good ROI? Yeah. How awful is it to not be able to put a roof over your children's head and watch them huddle in the rain during the night? Yeah. And you forget that part. And that's the power of choice, is it's so easy as an outsider to judge and come in with our own preconceptions of good and bad. Yeah. That we impose those. The other thing to your question of how does the money get spent? And this took me a long time to realize, but it's a very obvious point. Which unless people are having a bonfire with the money, which I have thus far found no evidence of,

then the money is getting spent somewhere locally, which means that the chain doesn't end when you give it to the first person. They go and get a haircut or they go and buy something at the market. That money goes into someone else's hands locally. And then it goes into someone else's hands. And there's a paper that we worked with academics on that got released last year, which is really the biggest ever look at what's the impact of cash on the people that don't get it. And as it turns out, the impact is almost as big on many dimensions as on the people that got it yeah the the tin roof the guys who install the tin roofs they're probably doing a lot better once you uh drop all the cash because oh suddenly we're installing 20 new tin roofs in town and we're flush and now we can put tin roofs on our houses. Exactly.

And compare that to the opposite. Compare that to we're going to ship grain from the U.S. abroad. So we're going to spend a lot of money on the grain. We're going to spend a lot of money on the ships. We're then going to spend a lot of money on the trucks. And then we're going to drop the grain in a village. Well well how do you think that affects the farmers that were selling grain locally yeah not going to help them yeah no not at all we talked about our i mean the example we talked about in our very first episode of adam ruins everything where we talked about direct cash

giving as one as the finale so i've been thinking about this issue for a while but we talked about like uh you know the tom shoes model of like hey let's let's donate a lot of shoes uh well what does that do to the cobbler the local the local folks are making shoes it it uh hurts their business at the very least oh yeah there's um and if you spend time traveling around you'll see the used t-shirt markets are are flush with some fascinating American T-shirts from 30 years ago. They're still circulating locally. Well, you know, that's a really complex subject. We just had a fellow on to talk about, you know, the secondhand market and, you know, what really happens to American secondhand goods. And, you know, I'm not trying to encourage the moral panic about like, oh, you know, we're because there's a healthy version of that market.

Right. But I think what you're saying, I think what you're saying is that just like, oh, hey, let's ship a lot of goods over is, yeah, has a downside. If we're just giving them for free and also those don't go on to the next person giving someone grain even. OK, great. They're going to eat the grain that doesn't keep circulating around in the community. Like cash does, as you just said. And it's the, it's the power of cash in many ways that it provokes these questions. So when you start giving cash, people say, well, how does it affect the people that didn't get the cash? And my answer is similar to before. That's a great question. We should be asking that about every development intervention. So we've started to do all this rigorous research. Most of it is focused on the direct impact. Let's make sure to also ask about the indirect impacts to other people.

Now, do you find, I really love that you're rigorous in your examination of the impacts. in your examination of the impacts. Are there folks who in, you know, when you have your judgmental mind on, right, who, well, actually forget about the judgmental mind. Are there folks who do use the money in a way that is not to their benefit, right? And if so, I mean, I imagine there must be at least a vanishingly small percentage of people

who, you know, are not for one reason or another able to make use of it. But I'm curious what you found. If I'm being the biggest cynic about it, how do you answer that? Yeah, I would say of course. At this point, we've reached hundreds of thousands of people. hundreds of thousands of people. The likelihood that somebody used the money in a way that you would disagree with or that wasn't great is high. Of course there is. And that sort of highlights also the problem of marketing. If you said, Michael, go find me an example of a recipient that did X, I would contend that it would be hard to define something that I couldn't

find someone that did. I am sure there is someone that used some of the money to drink. I am sure there are people that did things. And there are some really sad stories that you'll hear. Someone came home, they put the money in a mattress, and then the husband thought he was doing a good thing and bought a new mattress and got rid of the old mattress. And these are tremendously sad stories, but they're real. And what we've done is we've tried to, at its core, we're disintermediating on the financial side, but we're also trying to disintermediate on the communication side and just have a little bit more of an authentic take on the recipient experience. So what we've done, it's at live.givedirectly.org.

It's just a real-time feed. When we talk to recipients, the surveys go up online immediately and you'll find everything. You'll find these kind of life changing stories that just are inspiring. And then you'll find some sadder ones where the money either wasn't enough or they spent it on a eucalyptus farm and the eucalyptus farm didn't work out. And that's more the reality than a lot of the traditional ads that you see a lot of folks running. Well, because certainly there must be a lot of ngos that uh go in and try to do some great intervention that sounds good and that doesn't work out but um but they're not studying it they're not reporting on that um and like any effort like this is going to have some amount of inefficiency and you or some, some suboptimal outcomes are going to come up in any

plan. The question is like, are you going to be honest about that? And are you going to be okay with it? But it strikes me that like what you're, what you're doing is really about if we're real, if, if as a person who wants to help another person. Right. That's my goal. I'm going to give directly. I'm donating one hundred dollars is because I believe there's someone in need out there. I want to help. Right. How do I help them? Well, it does seem to me like the best way to help them is to empower them to do whatever the fuck they want to do. You know what I mean? Like like because because in my own life, no one's looking over my shoulder saying, Hey man, what are you spending your money on? Is it the optimal thing? Like, are you spending

money on the thing that's exactly going to make your life better? Or like, is it okay if I buy too many video games once, you know, every once in a while or, or buy a car that's too expensive or whatever. We have the freedom to make those choices, right? That's a freedom that we have. And so improving someone else's life means making sure they have that freedom to like not standing over behind them with a ruler, like telling them what to do and acknowledging that freedom, accepting that freedom means, hey, sometimes the choices aren't going to be what you want. And it's not every case is going to work out. But we hope that on balance, people know what's best for themselves.

That's right. And that's why you do the evidence. And that's why you look at the overall impact. You don't cherry pick good stories and you don't cherry pick bad stories. And I think part of what we're doing in that is hopefully pushing the sector towards a more honest place. It's very easy to get caught up into this vicious cycle of promises. If you give me a dollar, I'll take a person completely out of poverty. Well, the dollar doesn't go that far for a year. But if we're so used to the NGO saying, of course, we have zero fraud and the dollar is going to change everything and that,

you don't want to be the first NGO to say, hang on, guys, actually there is a bit of fraud. There are a bunch of people that may buy video games. Yeah. There's people selling goats. Yeah. It's a lot messier than we may want to think and it's not a dollar. You're going to have to spend maybe $22 a month. And we're trying to open up a more honest conversation about that. Now, don't get me wrong. I am not saying cash is the only thing either. We live in a country where there are public goods. So I went to a public school. I drive on the public interstate. There's

public funding into vaccine research. These are important things that are solving a kind of collective action problem. So cash is certainly not going to replace government, nor should it, nor is it going to replace a lot of these public good investments. But a lot of what we're doing in philanthropy is direct. So we're sending someone a bar of soap with a course on how to use it. That, I think, can be replaced by cash. A lot of things can be replaced by cash, and we should at least empower people. And what I've been saying, people always say, well, why should we do cash? And I think that's the wrong question. I think the question should be, why should we not do cash? Why should we do anything else? Yeah. Don't put the burden of proof on the extreme poor. We've treated them

poorly enough. They've had a terrible PR agent. We all think that they just drink and don't want to work. So let's give them a break. And why don't we assume the burden as the sector? And you know what? If there's something that we really think is worth it over direct cash, let's make that decision, but be able to justify and articulate it. Let's not put that burden of proof on the extreme poor and the recipients. Well, I got to ask you about your specific new initiative about COVID-19 here in the U.S. And I have some big picture questions about what philanthropy is in general, what this means for our society. But we got to take a really quick break.

We'll be right back with more Michael Fay. I don't know anything. This is even more specific for folks who have lost income, et cetera. Tell me about that program, because I mean, you started as only working in Africa, extremely poor places like that. And what led you to do this in America as well? Well, it's as straightforward as the African programs. We let people send money directly to other Americans that are not well off and are in need and are in places where COVID has impacted them particularly hard. Direct giving, I think we're running at about 98% efficiency. So for every dollar donated, we're getting about 98 cents of that into the hands of the recipient. And that's what we're doing. And COVID the the support has has been tremendous I think we'll even in the first six months I think we have raised now close to 180 million or so

to hand out to people and I think it begs the question of why like what is it about COVID that has motivated such generosity and such generosity specifically targeted towards cash? And I think there are a few things. I think there's a natural arc, right? First, the idea is introduced. Then there's the evidence collection. Then the policymakers and technocrats come on board. Andrew Yang brings it into center stage. People realize this is a bipartisan issue, right? This is something that appeals to both the left and the right. The government puts in place the U.S. cash relief program. But I think there's also something a bit philosophical about it, which is that

it is a universal crisis. We're all in this crisis. And when we're all in a crisis together, we're all in this crisis and when we're all in a crisis together we stop othering other people oh the other person the poor the person affected by the hurricane and start asking the question of how would we like to be treated how do we want to treat our neighbor or the person and our nanny or the person that takes care of our house whoever the person is what should we do for them and the answer for a lot of people is oh of, of course I support that person. I say, how do you support them? So I just gave them some money. I said, well, how would you like to be supported? Well, I want money. And I think when you have a crisis that is so universal, people start to reflect. And I think it's almost become like the

world's biggest lesson in the golden rule of do unto others as you would want done to yourself. And that's now applying to philanthropy, which is, I'm still, I'm yet to meet anyone that said, you know, this person in my life, less well off than me, I've helped them. Well, how'd you help them? Well, I gave them a bunch of powdered milk and my daughter's old toys. Like I'm yet to hear that. What people are doing is they're giving money. So anyway, so I think COVID has changed and I don't know how much it changed, whether it's a one-time thing or whether it changes the way we all think about philanthropy more broadly, but I do think it has changed. It is interesting how it's affected all. I mean, I'm very lucky to still be working. I'm running a writer's room from my,

from my home and happy to be doing that still. But I know so many people who have lost work, but they're still in my circle here in LA and, and, you know, no one is truly, truly suffering, but I start to realize, well, hold on a second. If, if, you know, no one is truly, truly suffering. But I start to realize, well, hold on a second.

If if, you know, it's this bad here. Right. Like how bad is it for the other folks in my community who who are already on a, you know, from from a lower starting point? And so I think it's raised that awareness for us like it's it's given me uh a really acute sense of my own luck and privilege and position um in a way that makes me well i fucking need to help out other people yeah um well we know them they're the they're their corner store that's closed down it's we all know people let me ask you this about amer, though, because one of the I know one of the selling points when I read, you know, evaluations to give directly part of it is like, hey, you're one dollar donated by an American goes so much further overseas, right, that you said, you know, people

are living on seventy five cents, a dollar fifty a day. So, hey, a dollar is a day's wages. You said a thousand dollars is a year's consumption for a family of four. That's obviously not the case in the U.S., right? The U.S., I'm not sure what the poverty line is, but we're talking like low five figures, very low five figures income. Yeah, I think it's about twelve thousand a person or thereabouts, I think. Yeah. So that so that's about on a dollar per dollar basis. It's about a twelfth as efficient just off the top of my head right now to give money in the U.S. How do you think about that when you're does that change your approach at all?

You're absolutely right that a dollar does go further abroad. But a lot of people want to give locally. And I think there are different ethical and moral frameworks that could compel you to do that. You could feel like there is a social fabric or an obligation to help your specific community and otherwise. And the view that we eventually came to was there are enough people that want to do that, that we should give them the option to give directly. And many of them do both, right? There's so many donors that I know that were give directly donors that spend most of their money in the emerging market, but also say, I also need to do something for my local community. And it's as if there are two mental

accounts and people do mental accounting, which is this behavioral econ term where we have different kind of mental buckets of funds. And I think this is a very classic example of that, which is I do think people have very different buckets. And you look, some of our funders who are so core to the EA movement have also given locally. And I think we should give them the opportunity to do so. Now, the power of it, and this is kind of the unfortunate reality of a lot of press, is that the U.S. dominates the U.S. press. So if you want to change people's ideas on giving and philanthropy more broadly, doing it in the U.S. kind of elevates the conversation and forces a debate that may not have happened if we had just restricted ourselves

to Liberia and Malawi or Kenya or wherever. So I think it's forced a much bigger discussion on philanthropy that hopefully helps not just the U.S., but actually has knock on impacts on the emerging market and extreme poverty. It also occurs to me that like, you know, there are folks in the United States who are as poor as anyone overseas. You know, we have extreme poverty in the United States. It has a different form. And, you know, I'm certain to a different degree. But, you know, there are folks here who are in just as bad a state. And in a way, that's there are there are disadvantages to being that poor in the United States, because, hey, if you're in a country that does have that differential, right? Which American money goes a lot further. Well, hey, that means that there's a, there's almost a bigger tap heading out to East Africa, right?

Than there is to, you know, an extremely poor person in Chicago, for example. And so it's like, you can be very poor and also have this added disadvantage of living in one of the wealthiest societies in the world that tends to focus its philanthropy overseas. So me it makes sense that like this is a this is something we would want to address as well well you'd be surprised it actually goes quite the other way i don't know the exact numbers but i think u.s philanthropy internationally maybe 20 billion or thereabouts, private philanthropy,

and multiples, multiples of that domestically. And even in our programming, I'll get these numbers wrong, but I think of the 180 or so, maybe it's 110, 20, like the majority of that is going to the US. I think people do have a tendency to give locally much more than they give internationally. No, that's fair. But I mean, that giving that you're talking about, that's not direct cash giving as you're describing. That's like to institutions and organizations and things like that, right? That's right. Broadly, in the GiveDirectly case, like we have both projects up on the website

now that we've been trying to raise about a hundred million for each and the U S project is complete and we raised it. Uh, and we're a long ways away from doing it internationally. It's just funny when, you know, I, I look at give directly and I do, I do give to the organization, uh, uh, from time to time. And I look at the website and it says, okay, well you can donate to someone overseas. You can donate it to the U S like look at the website and it says, okay, well you can donate to someone overseas. You can donate it to the U S like you can sort of target it that way. And I look at it and I start thinking, and this, and thank you by the way for correcting me, but this is sort of what I'm trying to get at, uh, is that I look at it and I say, well, if I donate overseas,

my money goes further, right? Maybe I should do that. That'll help more people. Right. And then I, and then I think, hold on a second, second i'm gonna not help someone in my community because my money doesn't go as far because i'm not getting as good a deal on my dollar like and i'm never gonna donate locally for that reason i'm never gonna devote any dollars to uh someone in the united states well that sucks for that person the united states they need help too like i it's not it shouldn't about money. It should be about these people need help. Right. And so that's, that's sort of what I'm trying to get at. Yeah. It's exceptionally complicated. And I think if you are kind of true effective altruist, where does my dollar go further? You're going to pick that international bucket. And as far as the effective altruist movement

has come and as much good as they've done, it is still very, very small part of philanthropy. This is the thing that we forget. Cash, it's changing and it has changed. But you go back, it's a very, very small part of philanthropy. Like effective giving, a very small part of philanthropy. I think there's this stat, and I'll misquote this, but I think it's about if you ask people what fraction of people have done no research on their giving before they picked the charity that they gave to, I think it's about 90% of people have done nothing. Yeah. So we, we've got a long ways to go. Yeah. Well, let me ask about this.

You mentioned Andrew Yang, and I've heard GiveDirectly talked about as being sort of a trial run for universal basic income, which is a topic people are always asking me to do more episodes on. I'm curious, yeah, how do you think about universal basic income? Obviously, it's, you know, he brought it to real prominence. It's a really interesting idea. What is its interaction with GiveDirectly? We can spend years. We could probably spend years. We can certainly spend hours talking about universal basic income.

But let me give you the quick highlights. So universal basic income is a specific form of cash program. And what do I mean by specific form? So for better or worse, cash has become the moniker. Well, there are lots of questions. Who gets the money? How much money do they get? How frequently do they get the money?

And so on and so forth. So universal basic income answers those questions in a very specific form. So it's universal. So we don't try to find the poorest people. We give it to everyone. So it's the universal bit. It's basic. So it's not a large thousand dollar transfer to a family in Kenya. It's enough to meet your basic needs. So in the case of Kenya, that's about $22 a month. And it's an income. So it's not a one-time transfer. It's an income, so monthly, which is when most people get their income, for the rest of your life. So it's universal, everyone, basic, not that much, but enough to

get by, and long term. That's different than a lot of cash programs that exist out there. So much so that we have never really done a universal basic income in the world. that we have never really done a universal basic income in the world. So GiveDirectly is doing the closest in the sense that it is universal in a region. It is basic. It's only $22 a month. And it's long-term, so it's 12 years, which is what we had funding to do. So we will see. There's a question of will people spend the money well? I think that question,

I would be surprised if the answer in this specific case was no. So I'm not, I don't think that will happen. But there's a deeper question, which is how does that design compare to just giving people all the money once upfront, right? So if you have a big investment you need to make, wouldn't you just rather the money up front? How does universality affect things? And so on. So that's how it differs. Now, there are two other debates you can have on universal basic income. There's kind of an intervention level debate. Is cash good? Is it not good? Is UBI good? Not good. And then there's a policy debate. How do you fund it? What does it look like in a specific country? And that's really country by country. You have to look at fiscal policy. You have to look at the other social programs. From an intervention perspective, I think cash can and should replace a lot of what we're doing. Whether UBI is the exact right form,

I think we'll learn more on. But I think there's a lot that's really appealing about it. The universality, I think, lets people talk about how they're going to spend the money. There's one story that just always stuck with me on the universality. I asked them, when I go to Kenya, I ask a lot of people in the UBI villages, what do you think of the universality? Don't you think it's unfair? Because the poorest people in the community are getting the same amount as the wealthiest. This is radio. I put wealthiest in quotes because wealthy is $1.50. It's not anything that we would consider wealthy. And the woman said to me, she said, you know, I do prefer this because before UBI, there was John who had this mount and there was Sue who had this and we all kept to ourselves.

But now we're all just UBI recipients getting $22. So I can go to the market and I can have a conversation with my neighbors about how am I going to spend my $22 this month? And it's given us a common ground to come together around. And we'll see if that plays out in the data, but I just thought it was a very powerful idea. And that's something I've heard about a lot of social programs that like, you know, one of the reasons social security is so successful and beloved in the United States.

I mean, it has its issues, but, you know, it's a very long-lived program. one of the reasons social security is so successful and beloved in the United States. I mean, it has its issues, but, you know, it's a very long lived program. And part of the reason is like billionaires get it, too. And that's good for our psychic connection to it. It makes people feel more positively about it. And it makes it more, I don't know, accepted in a community. It makes it unstigmatized. It destigmatizes it. I think that's really important

given the history of welfare, certainly in this country. Yeah. We had an example of this in Texas. Like if everybody got food stamps in America, maybe they wouldn't be trying to cut food stamps so much if every single person

got our monthly food stamps. Exactly. And we had this, we responded to Hurricane Harvey in Houston. And I remember we were in one village and we were this we responded to hurricane harvey in houston and i remember we were in one village and we were doing what we often do which is trying to find the poorest people and in the u.s it should be easier because you can say who's on the various social programs we're going to give to them and the community together came together and said please don't do that what do you mean like Like, this is great.

We're going to get to the poorest people. They said, we'd rather you didn't. And this included the people that were on the various social programs. They said, we would rather you pull names out of a hat. That will destigmatize it. So we'll see. But I think there is something quite powerful there. That is really powerful.

And you're doing a basically as best can be done control trial of UBI right now. That's what you were describing. And so we'll hopefully learn a lot more if that holds up from your work, which is really cool. So this sort of leads me to my last question, because I've followed the the effective altruism movement for a little while. We've referred to it for folks who haven't heard of it. It's a movement, I would say, founded by Peter Singer. Does that sound right? Yeah, there's a lot of folks here. I should know who coined the term. I think Will McCaskill. There's so many. Well, Peter, the philosopher Peter Singer has written a lot about this.

It's grown to a large degree, and it's the idea of, you know, really using, you know, hard-nosed research and evidence to figure out what the best place to donate is. And if you do that, you can, you know, find, you know, as you said, hey, for a couple dollars a month, I can lift someone out of poverty. Why wouldn't I do that, right? And I think that's a really powerful movement. But the more that I think about it, I have questions about how it interacts with wealth. Right. Right. In in the United States, especially. And I've realized how much, you know, I've looked at some of the organizations that are prominent in effective altruism. And I'll realize drilling down, oh, this was an organization that was started by a tech billionaire who's trying to figure out how to give their money away. How do I give my money away most effectively? And that's a good thing to do if you have that. A lot of billionaires don't ask that question.

And so it's better to ask that question than to ask it. It's better to give the money away. But it still raises the question of like, wait, hold on a second. Isn't part of the cause of poverty the fact that the system that gave you all this money in the first place? Right. That like, yeah, I mean, poverty is money is, you know, a human created fiction. Right. It's something it's something that we created amongst ourselves. Um, poverty is a, is to some extent a human cause problem. And to the extent that, you know, we have a system that means that some people have billions and billions of dollars and other people are surviving on 75 cents a day, that would seem to be the issue. And donating money, uh, in this way is perhaps a bandaid approach. Um, that's what I wrestle with a little bit,

even as I am, you know, uh, you know, donating money myself when I have more money than others, right. I'm engaging in this system, but I still have questions about, uh, about it. And I wonder if you ever grapple with that question yourself. Oh yeah. Um, I've got lots of thoughts. My first is, so what does it mean? So you say it's a band-aid, and I think a band-aid is small. It's not a band-aid for the recipient, right? It's taking someone out of poverty. Yeah. So that's a big deal. And you may not take all billion people in poverty out of poverty, but it is a human being who you're elevating to that level. And I don't think we should discount that or refer to it as a bandit. which is we should absolutely address systemic issues, right? Systemic racism, systemic inequality, the policies that support that. Of course we should address that.

But we can also, if you're a billionaire, you can also help a tremendous number of people. And I don't know why you need to make that choice. I think you can do both. I would agree. I would agree that you can do both things. And look, I'm not a billionaire, right? But I work in TV. I'm much more fortunate than most other people. And I am also, you know, I'm engaged in that mission, right. Like, how do I how do I make the world better around me with the resources that I have? Right. And I do try to do both things. I try to support, you know, direct direct giving in this direct way. And I try to figure out how can I help contribute to systemic change as well. change as well. But I don't know. Do you ever worry that like there are so there are billionaires out there who are donating no money, right? And they're holding onto the money, right? Then there are billionaires out there who are let's say there's a couple who are trying to like really get engaged with systemic change and really change things. And they're like, I want to

eradicate billion. I want there to be no more billionaires. And I'm trying to try the other. They're far on the end of the spectrum. On the other hand, do you ever worry that there are folks out there who are saying like, hey, all right, I'll donate to give directly. And that's all I need to do. Right. The way to end extreme poverty is to, you know, for every billionaire and millionaire and other person in a fortunate position to individually contribute money to organizations like this, and we're going to end poverty. To me, it seems like that wouldn't do the trick, right? We would need to examine those deeper systems that result in such deep inequality in the first place. But yeah, and so that's what I meant by, I don't mean a bandaid to give money to an individual person. I mean like, hey, we can, is give directly is perhaps addressing the effects rather than the causes of that of that inequality.

And I don't mean that at all to impugn the work that you are doing. I'm asking about the deeper dynamics in wealth and philanthropy. I know it's a very big question to ask you. Yeah, I'm not offended. I think I think you can do both. And I think, look, I run multiple companies. I think it is easy to get caught up in defining what is best and spending all your time figuring out,

is this option or this option the best? And often you just need to decide and start acting on one of them. Yeah. And I think this problem sort of risks that as well, which is do both, pick one. They're both probably pretty important. But on the topic of addressing poverty, I'll give you a stat that gives me a lot of pause.

So there are two graphs that I look at that I find very powerful. The first graph is the amount of international aid. So this is money that governments give internationally over time. And that graph, if you look back 30 years, has pretty much been steadily increasing, which is good news. The other graph is the cost of eliminating the poverty gap. It's the poverty gap. So what that means is if someone's 70 cents under the poverty line, that's 70 cents. And then you add up all the people living under poverty and that comes to the total poverty gap. Well, that number has been coming down over time. So internationally going up, poverty gap coming down. And about 15 years or so ago, something very powerful happened, which was the first time in history those two lines crossed. And we now send more aid than is required to close the poverty gap.

I can't just magically know where everybody is and exactly what their income is, nor can I magically distribute money. But we're now living in a world where the aid is about twice the poverty gap, the international aid poverty gap, 60, 70 billion. That's an intimately solvable problem. So we're now spending twice as much. So if I could move that money, and even though it's half as effective, I could eliminate poverty, even if I needed to move that money every year, as we do. It's internationally, it is not one time, it's every year. And I think that provokes the question of how much we can do and how much better we can be doing today to eliminate poverty. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate, look, I really appreciate your like ruthlessly practical approach, right? That's what I that's what has always appealed to me about give directly and effective altruism in general, that it's like, hey, and systemic inequality, that that risks building

the exact same castles in the air as, you know, any NGO that says, oh, we're going to give out school uniforms and, you know, that sort of thing, right? I entirely get that argument, and I would never advocate, hey, let's not try to, you know, use GiveDirectly's approach. Instead, let's just try to uproot capitalism or something along those lines. Right. Because I think we could end up reproducing a lot of the same problems. It's just yeah, that's just like the numbers that you're talking about. Yeah, those are those are stunning. And that would be really powerful. On the other hand, part of my brain goes, great. Then we've eliminated the poverty gap. We still have incredibly massive inequality after the poverty gap is eliminated. We have improved many lives. And this is ruthlessly practical. I think the teams would hopefully agree with you on that. But mapping that to the tactical. So what does that mean practically? that to the tactical. So what does that mean practically? Does it mean that I'm going to pick some political candidates that I think are particularly aligned and may help bring about that systemic change and I'm going to fund them? Great. Does it mean I'm going to change careers

and go work in DC and try to help? But taking those really hairy problems and at least trying to map it to practical approaches makes a lot of sense. And one thing I tell a lot of people is in giving, I encourage people to take a portfolio approach. Now, it may be a one in a million shot. You bring about that systemic change and you may not even know the path. You may say, look, I want to allocate 20% of my giving to taking a chance

on that. And I also want to make sure I'm having the direct impact because I do have the ability to do that. And I think that's great. And I think that portfolio is a systemic portfolio approach makes a lot of sense. I think there's a risk in all of this. and the risk happens in the technocratic conversations in podcasts with a highly engaged educated audience for example which is we wind up spending i'll exaggerate here 99 of our time debating whether the number one or number two option is the best option when the other 98% of options don't make a lot of sense. And we should be spending our time shifting that thinking. Like if everybody was thinking like you and saying, should I be spending my time on the systemic issues or direct giving and what's the right

portfolio, 80, 20 or 60, 40. I said, we won. Good news, Adam, you've graduated. Let's go, let's go figure out how to change other people's hearts and minds and bring some of that thinking about effective giving to them. Yeah. I mean that you're honestly describing what I do wrestle with. Like what my, my own giving approach is I do a percentage of my income every year. And so once a year, I try to figure out how to allocate. Right. And I'm like, all right, I want to give some money to give directly.

I want to do a little for malaria. And then but political, you know, there are political causes I care about. And those aren't quantifiable. Right. Nice thing about give directly is it's quantifiable. We know how much good it does. You guys are able to study it you can't uh no one is doing any you know peer-reviewed analyses of the effectiveness of donating to a political climate change organization right that's fighting climate

change but the the difference could be so massive right that it makes and so i spent a lot of time wrestling with this uh that's helpful to hear from you that it's like if if i'm on that point of wrestling with that and trying to serve both of those goals and I am serving them to some extent, that's an improvement. Yeah, my advice would be stop wrestling. We're never going to know if you got it perfectly right. And go try to find one of those 90% that is doing no research and convince them. Or go and find, so right now I think we spend about 120 billion on global aid a year. The fraction of that that is evidence-based is small.

The U S government spends. That's global. That's not just. Oh, okay. Sorry. That's all international donor governments. I think it's one 20 billion plus now. Let's make more of that evidence-based. Let's go convince people that aren't doing any of the research. So let's spend some of the time that we're going to sit and wrestle ourselves on that perfect allocation and bring a few people. So maybe

that's the ruthlessly practical side of me, but we're never going to know what is perfect. Well, I really appreciate you coming on to tell us that. we're never going to know what is perfect. Well, I really appreciate you coming on to tell us that we're never going to know what is perfect. And so what, let's just do what's practical right now. That seems to be your philosophy. Let's do things that work. Let's get to the bar. Let's get to a bar where we're evidence-based, we're thoughtful, we know how much things cost, we're not paternalistic, we're respectful of recipients. Yeah. And let's bring other people over that bar.

Yeah. And worry less about what does perfect mean. It's a really humanist approach that you have. That's what shines through to me. Like and it's it's an approach that I feel like we can take beyond just philanthropy when we're talking about, say, a thorny political issue. And what are the values that we want to hold up there? Right. Values of self-determination and respect and empathy and and evidence.

Those are those are all the guidelines. Yeah. Those are the guidelines we'd want to use to help us solve any issue, including systemic issues. So that's what really appeals to me about what you do. I appreciate that.

Well, thanks so much for being here, Michael. Thanks so much, Adam. This is fun. Well, thank you so much to Michael Fay again for coming on the show. I hope you got as much out of that conversation as I did. My name is Adam Conover. This has been Factually. If you want to give us some feedback, ask us some questions, email factually at adamconover.net. That's factually at adamconover.net.

I want to thank our producers, Dana Wickens and Sam Roudman, our engineers, Ryan Connor and Brett Morris, Thanks so much for listening. that was a hate gun podcast