Beyond the Basics: Charity vs. Philanthropy - A Petrus Development Show Episode

12:34.86
AROB
Well, I would much rather focus our efforts in our fundraising on philanthropy because that's strategic. That's addressing the problem. Raising money for charity? Why would we be doing that?

12:45.93
AROB
That seems like a waste and almost kind of a less meaningful contribution to the world to raise money just for charity because those are problems that are here, but they'll go away. If we address the—if we're strategic about it, we'll address those needs. And then we don't even, you know, down the road, the charity isn't even necessary.

13:04.28
AROB
Would you agree with sort of my unpacking of your comments? And again, not judging you because I have the exact same thoughts, but would you agree with that sentiment?

13:13.92
Host
Yeah, I think so. I think there is... you feel, I don't know if better about yourself is the right way to describe it, but like you feel like you're making a bigger difference if you're investing in something that's going to make a change going forward for the long term, even though you might be doing that at the expense of the people who need help right this moment too.

13:35.28
AROB
Yep, so... and so I agree. And yet, what does Jesus explicitly, in the Gospels, explicitly tell his followers to do?

13:49.48
AROB
He tells his followers to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the sorrowful, which is in those two—in those two dynamics, which would that support fall into?

13:56.40
Host
Yeah.

14:03.25
Host
Definitely charity.

14:04.72
AROB
100% charity, right? And so I think as—and this is where this class was so fascinating, right? Because we started with charity and philanthropy. It just sort of like unlocked this in people's brains.

14:16.08
AROB
Like, oh my gosh, there is a difference. I didn't think about that. Then we moved right into the history of philanthropy. And if you look at just the American history of the history of philanthropy and or history of charity slash philanthropy in the United States, right... Just very simply, in colonial times when the Puritans came over, it was Cotton Mather, it was Benjamin Franklin who really emphasized this need of we as a community, as settlers to this new land...

14:50.84
AROB
We need to support the people among us that are struggling because if we don't, then A, we're putting our new sort of world in jeopardy. Number two, we're admitting to the British, to our—you know, to where we used to come from, that we can't do this.

15:06.48
AROB
And so it was a very practical spirit of charity, but it sort of laid the foundation for charity across all of the colonies, across everybody. We are Americans. We need to look out for each other.

15:20.96
AROB
We can't let people that are struggling fail. So that was where charity started. You fast forward a couple of hundred years and during the Civil War, you know the Civil War was just a disastrous situation for our country, right? Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, you know, millions of homes were destroyed.

15:40.93
AROB
And after the Civil War was over, really even before the Civil War was over... But after it was over, and people were recognizing this destruction and so many lives were ruined. And you had, you know, the slaves were now freed, but they didn't—you know there was this... The Freedmen's Bureau was established to really help the freed slaves to sort of integrate into life. And there was a lot of obstacles there just because of the history.

16:06.41
AROB
And so these organizations started to form up that started focusing on scientific charity, that—that's where they were like, hey, there's too many people for us to help all.

16:12.89
Host
Mmm.

16:16.98
AROB
We need to figure out how to help large groups of people. And we need to get strategic about how we're making these gifts. And so that then sort of shifted this idea of charity from let's help the people that are in our communities, that are in our churches, that are in our neighborhoods, because they're in need to let's... Let's look strategically at the bigger picture and address the systems and use our money smartly and strategically. And so it sort of shifted the mentality of charity is good because it helps. It makes a difference now to charity is no good because...

16:54.53
AROB
Because philanthropy is what's really going to make a difference in our country, in our world. And then from that, you know, the history of philanthropy, you know, sort of moved into, you know, foundations were started. Community foundations were started.

17:08.56
AROB
Wealthy individuals died and—or before they died, but they left... They created, you know, large foundations that are all about addressing root causes. And so now today modern—you know modern 2020s—there is a sentiment among fundraisers.

17:25.54
AROB
And again, some charities, you know when their emphasis is on helping the poor and and clothing the naked, right, they maintain this approach of supporting charity.

17:36.33
AROB
But most nonprofits, I would say, fall into this charity is bad, philanthropy is where we want to spend our time and our resources and our money.

17:46.07
Host
That is definitely true. Like I could see—I mean, you think, I don't know the history as well as you do. But from my impression is that in the early days of the country, I mean, going back in history, it was common to care for the widows and the orphans in your local town. Right. That doesn't—like these days you think, oh, there should be an organization that takes care of those things.

18:11.00
Host
Don't bother me with that. It kind of shifted the whole mindset of the country over time. And at least in my experience, maybe that's just me and locally.

18:17.43
AROB
Yes.

18:20.07
AROB
No, you're absolutely right.

18:20.21
Host
Not... and yeah.

18:21.58
AROB
And sorry, the name of that book, I just remembered, Jeremy Beer, "The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity." So I definitely recommend reading that. It was a great resource for us. But no, you're 100% right.

18:35.50
AROB
And this is sort of common language and a common sentiment among—you know when we're Americans or we're Catholics or, you know, we're Christians or whatever. And we're like, "Oh, don't you remember our country used to be where, you know, somebody was in need and the neighbors stepped up and they helped and somebody was in need they went to the church and they gave them what they needed right then."

18:51.75
Host
Yeah. Yeah.

18:54.65
AROB
Now you have to fill out forms and you have to go through all these processes. And some of that I would say is sort of become more prevalent because of the changes that were put in place back in the 1930s after the—during the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, and that became, you know, sort of, we built in the social—what do they call it, like the social net, right?

19:20.35
AROB
The social support system of, you know...

19:20.89
Host
Yeah.

19:25.56
AROB
Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security and other things, right? I'm not here to say those are good, bad, or otherwise, but I'm saying that as a part of this conversation of, well, we don't help our neighbors anymore because, you know, some other group should.

19:42.56
AROB
But some of that is just this shift in mentality that has happened over the last 400 years of well, if we want to be smart, if we want to use our money to the most impact and to the most efficiency, the most effectiveness, we can't be helping just handing out money here and there or handing out food here and there.

20:01.75
AROB
We need to get strategic and figure out what the root cause of that problem is and address it through philanthropy.

20:09.56
Host
Hmm. So, sorry.

20:12.76
AROB
No. Yeah, go ahead. Ask your question.

20:17.86
Host
Um, is there any, I guess as long as we're stepping aside here for a second, is there anything specific you want me to ask or to lead you toward?

20:26.19
AROB
So I need to transition because I'm like sort of poo-pooing philanthropy now in this conversation. And so I think the question that you're going to ask that you could ask right now would be what sounds like from your standpoint, you're saying philanthropy is now not the way that we should do it, but that's what we do as fundraisers. Something along those lines, right?

20:47.77
AROB
So I need to like level the playing field a little bit.

20:47.89
Host
Makes sense. Yeah. Okay, so that all makes sense. Are you saying that maybe we should be shifting our focus away from philanthropy toward charity?

21:01.05
AROB
Okay, so that's a good question. And that's where I think that during my class, you know people were like, oh my gosh, I'm questioning everything that I do. And I'm questioning the work that I do because, you know, everything around our organization is built on being strategic and around making a difference and then having impact. And that impact is not helping people in need, but in making a bigger difference... So let me tell you a story and I can't remember if it was in the Jeremy Beer's book or if it was somewhere else but there was a story about a large international foundation, right? And this international foundation gave away millions or billions of dollars every year across the world to help, you know, issues with, you know...

21:45.12
AROB
Disease management and I mean, just, you know, climate change and everything. And their leadership put out a memo one time to the workers because they worked in like an urban downtown.

22:00.72
AROB
And they said to the workers, please don't hand out money to the homeless people that are sitting outside on our doorstep because that reinforces the idea that homelessness is a problem that we can address. And that's what our entire ethos of our foundation is built on, is making sure that people aren't homeless anymore. So when you come in through the front doors, please don't hand out money or anything to the homeless.

22:28.22
AROB
Come inside, do your work and make a difference that affects—that helps those people upstream.

22:33.20
Host
Wow.

22:34.53
AROB
Right. That's a crazy—like that's a crazy story, right? And we can blow that out of proportion. We can make fun of that foundation. But that reinforces this idea that, or it goes back to this idea that philanthropy is good, but...

22:49.77
AROB
We can't just focus on philanthropy. We have to be mindful of our brothers and sisters and people in need now and be willing to invest money in charity to, again, like Jesus said, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the sorrowful.

23:05.76
AROB
But if we're not—if that's all we're doing, so like... I don't remember the year, you can tell me the year, but Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum, which is really kind of where this idea of modern Catholic social teaching came from, right?

23:20.59
AROB
But in that encyclical, he urged us to care for the poor, but also to reform unjust systems and...

23:21.37
Host
Yeah.

23:28.24
AROB
And uphold dignity from the margins to the marble halls. Right? So what Pope Leo XIII was trying to say there is, look, we still as Catholics are called to care for the poor.

23:41.49
AROB
That's important. But we're also here to reform unjust systems, to address the systemic problems that lead to the poor being in the situation they are, and uphold dignity through the workplace, right—the preference for the poor and the worker, the subsidiarity, which is looking at not just the larger systems handling all the problems, but issues being addressed at the lowest—that the—at the point closest to the problem, solidarity, right?

24:09.23
Host
Thank you.

24:13.45
AROB
All working together. The people that are doing strategic—making a strategic difference to people that are helping today. So like Pope Leo—I don't know if he saw this coming or just sort of recognized this, but was like, hey, we don't pick one or the other. Like we as Catholics are called to do all of this.

24:33.87
AROB
And I think that it's really important to keep that in mind that we've moved, you know going back to circle back to what we said earlier, we've moved as a culture and a society to start thinking, well, charity is bad. It's wasteful.

24:49.49
AROB
Like I don't want to do that. I want to make a difference strategically to have a bigger impact and that's what Pope Leo XIII was saying in his encyclical was it's not an either or it's a both and as Catholics we are called to make a difference with the poor and the vulnerable today and look at the systems that create those scenarios where the poor and the vulnerable are suffering and address those as well.

25:19.97
AROB
So from a fundraising standpoint, I think that it's just helpful to understand the difference so that you can orient your work and help influence the work of the nonprofits that you're working for and the causes that you're supporting to make sure that you don't... You don't go all in on one and not the other, but you look holistically at problems and solve the immediate today needs and look at ways to transform the systems.

25:48.21
Host
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that is interesting. I think there is—I mean when right before you brought up that example of giving money to the homeless, like that's the example that kind of comes to mind immediately is that's what you hear when you see homeless on the side of the street. Oh, if you give them money, they're going to go buy alcohol. So don't do that. Give it to some other charity. But there is a need both for that immediate and that long-term investment.

26:13.34
AROB
Yeah, I mean, I've read a lot of books this year and last couple years, and I've kind of ended up in this like memoir genre a couple of times. And there's so many really powerful memoirs from people like J.D. Vance with "Hillbilly Elegy," with Jeannette Walls, with "The Glass Castle."

26:31.30
AROB
Now I'm reading Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." I mean, reading those books...

26:42.60
AROB
Has helped me to just sort of have a glimpse into the life of the really, really ultra poor in our community that are literally living within our own borders, our own towns, our own cities.

26:58.53
AROB
And, um it's, it's, I mean, it's like, it's amazing to me to see the poverty that exists today that, you know, with the—in the case of "Angela's Ashes," you know, that was in Ireland and the U.S. years ago, but...

27:12.49
Host
Thank you.

27:12.86
AROB
You know Jeannette Wall's story, "The Glass Castle," I'd encourage everybody to read it. That's like—that's like real life West Virginia modern day. And J.D. Vance, you know "Hillbilly Elegy." That's like Appalachia, Ohio, modern day.

27:24.93
AROB
And there's still a need to help people that are in trouble because they have families, right? You can, you know, you see the... I, anyways, I'm, I don't know where I'm going with this. I've been very convicted both from reading some of these memoirs about some of these people and their stories and...

27:46.14
AROB
And in every one of these situations, the parents are making bad choices that the kids are suffering from. And so when you, so you know, you go back to that story of you don't give money to the guy on the street because he's just going to go use it to buy alcohol, right?

27:58.45
AROB
Like actually maybe his kids haven't eaten in three days and the money that you give him would be spent to buy a loaf of bread for his kids.

28:02.20
Host
Yeah.

28:08.50
AROB
Like we don't know that, but those are the situations that are actually happening today. And so being mindful of that and living out our call, our Christian call and our call from Jesus to feed the poor, clothe the naked is important while we're also working in our nonprofits to make systemic transformative changes to the systems that lead to those problems in the first place.

28:33.75
Host
Yeah. And maybe to give it a different example, this is a very different example. But you never know where things are on the journey to in terms of kind of the overall strategy of lifting people out of whatever the situation is.

28:47.07
Host
I think of early a few years ago in my local area here, we had a giant storm, seven inches of rain in one night. And there's a particular road that's just one big hill that goes down, kind of runs into another road. And this hill just got totally washed out by that big rainstorm.

29:03.39
Host
And kind of just annihilated that road at the bottom, flooded all the houses down there. And they've been fixing it for the last several years. Earlier this summer in June, they did one final big project to fix it all up, get the water all routed correctly so it wouldn't affect houses.

29:20.49
Host
And then in July, we got another big storm, four inches in one night, washed out that road again, flooded all the houses at the bottom, destroyed the road at the bottom of the hill. Right? And so it's something that they had invested in over years, tried to fix up.

29:33.91
Host
And now the—you know the all of the talk about it—we got to change things up, try a new strategy, find a way to fix this. It doesn't happen again in the future. But still, that road is ruined at the bottom. All those houses are flooded and they still need immediate help. They need kind of the charity version of fixing it up, kind of the insurance.

29:51.35
Host
But the charity version of help now and the philanthropy version of help in the long term, even though it has been in progress for years. Right?

30:01.38
Host
So it's sometimes that's a process of trial and error.

30:04.01
AROB
It is 100%. And if we, you know going back to this foundation that said, don't give money to the homeless at the front door because we're trying to address the problems that put them on the street in the first place, that's an extreme example of ignoring the need that exists right now, right?

30:23.57
AROB
Saying, you know, to the people whose homes are washed out, hey, good luck.

30:23.64
Host
Yeah.

30:28.96
AROB
But in 10 years, we think we'll have this problem solved and your home won't flood.

30:32.16
Host
Yeah.

30:33.23
AROB
But good luck with you rebuilding your home now and, you know, going to work and having, you know, having transportation and all these other needs. That's a very dangerous position to put yourself in mentally and yet I think again looking at myself in my own life I think that it is a trap that many Christians, Catholics, and nonprofit workers, people with really good hearts and intentions actually end up in more times than we would admit.

31:05.14
Host
Yeah. Any last words on this topic, on this discussion here?

31:09.97
AROB
I think that it's easy to hear everything that we're talking about here. This started with, you know what's the difference between charity and philanthropy? Right? Sounds like a pretty simple question. And then here we are, you know, like pretty deep in this conversation.

31:22.94
AROB
I think that it's important not to hear anything that I've said today as a judgment of, well, now I have to go quit my job at the nonprofit that I work at because look, all we do is, you know, try to make systemic change.

31:42.73
AROB
And that's not the case. I'm not saying that. You know, there's—you look at, you know, some of the changes, you know, systemic changes, you know, over the years that have been really good for our culture and our society.

31:55.79
AROB
And those are because nonprofits and people that were passionate about a cause...

32:07.07
AROB
Invested their time, energy, money, resources, all of that into making a difference. So I'm not saying to go quit your job and, you know, give all your money to the poor, right? Although Jesus did say that in the Gospels to the rich man.

32:20.20
AROB
You know... That's not what I'm saying. So don't take any of this as judgment. What I am saying is when you consider the history of our country, when you consider the history of philanthropy, when you consider our call as Catholics to live out Catholic social teaching...

32:40.94
AROB
There is a need, I think, for us to say, are we focused too much in one area? And can we—are we evaluating our work and our lives in a way that we're serving both sides of these problems?

33:03.32
AROB
And if we're not, what are some incremental changes, adjustments that we can do to get in a better place?

33:11.15
Host
I love it.

33:12.59
AROB
Isn't that crazy?

33:12.93
Host
It's a very philosophical episode for us, yeah.

33:15.15
AROB
Yeah. I mean, this is not—again, like you know my—the class that I've taught for four years at UMary is, you know, how do you write a case for support and, you know, how do you structure your development calendar?

33:28.54
AROB
I mean, like very practical. That's the world that's... But switching over into this foundations of Catholic philanthropy, I remember looking at the syllabus from Corey's class and I remember looking at the course—I was like...

33:41.44
AROB
Oh man, I do not feel equipped to be teaching this, leading these discussions. And yet, you know diving in, learning about it, educating myself a little bit more just how to use this language.

33:55.43
Host
Thank you.

33:57.03
AROB
It was a very powerful experience for me. It was a very powerful, I was told by my students, it was a very powerful experience for them. And it's just considering the words that we use, considering the meaning behind what we do is just something that we don't do on a regular basis.

34:17.85
AROB
And I think that it's valuable to step back and do that on occasion. So I was really encouraged by our—by this conversation and hopefully this, you know, our 30 minute conversation here on the podcast, at least...

34:33.48
AROB
It stimulates those questions in our listeners' minds to think, all right, where am I on this journey, on this spectrum?

34:43.94
AROB
And are there some ways that I can better orient myself?

34:49.38
Host
Excellent. Good. Well like I said this is philosophical deep thinking episode. Do you want to wrap it up with a game? Coming out of this philosophical discussion, would you like a more practical game or a more silly game?

34:57.40
AROB
Absolutely. I do.

35:05.39
AROB
Man, I don't even know.

35:09.29
Host
I would say more—I guess more practical kind of nuts and bolts fundraising topic or kind of a silly topic? One I... something about each. All right, great. You remember blind ranking?

35:12.51
AROB
Okay. Let's go silly.

35:19.46
AROB
I do.

35:19.44
Host
I'm going to give you five different options.

35:20.55
AROB
I'm so bad at this.

35:21.62
Host
Yeah, I think one of the last times we did it, you chose green tea as your favorite thing to be served by donors.

35:26.42
AROB
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

35:29.21
Host
I've never seen you drink green tea in the decade that I've known you.

35:32.95
AROB
Nah.

35:34.78
Host
So today we'll go with a topic I know is close to your heart. We're going to go with reality TV shows.

35:40.35
AROB
Oh, yes, I definitely love some reality TV shows.

35:44.57
Host
And the question is, which ones did I put on?

35:47.78
AROB
Oh, man, I do not... This is a dangerous thing that I'm walking into because I can just imagine where I'm going to end up with my favorite reality TV show of all time.

35:51.67
Host
Yeah.

36:00.85
AROB
That's...

36:01.00
Host
We will see. We will see. I've got five reality TV shows. I Googled a list of the most popular reality TV shows and chose some from there.

36:04.32
AROB
Something I do with Housewives.

36:14.21
Host
And I'm going to give them to you one at a time. You don't know what's coming next. You got to rank them one through five.

36:19.38
AROB
OK, one is the best.

36:19.52
Host
Are you ready? One is the best, five is the worst. And you might back yourself into a corner here, so we'll see where things go.

36:27.92
AROB
OK. 100% doing that.

36:29.72
Host
Number one—some of these, like I said, I Googled the list of the most popular reality TV shows. Some of these don't really feel totally like reality TV show to me, but we're going to go with it because it's what was on the list.

36:40.68
Host
Shark Tank.

36:42.52
AROB
Oh, Shark Tank. Gosh. My wife loves Shark Tank. I enjoy it. I like it. I'm going to go with three because I feel like I could like it more or I could like it less depending on what the other ones are.

36:58.87
Host
It's a very safe choice to start out with here.

36:58.97
AROB
So I'm going to go three. Yeah.

37:02.44
Host
Before Shark Tank was a thing, when I was in college, we got the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on public TV here.

37:08.17
AROB
Okay.

37:11.92
Host
And they had a show called Dragon's Den, which I think eventually turned into Shark Tank, which I was kind of—yeah, it was the same exact thing.

37:17.53
AROB
The same thing, same concept.

37:19.73
Host
They just changed the name for the US version, I guess.

37:21.50
AROB
So instead of being—so instead of being a wealthy investor and being a shark, you're a wealthy investor and you're a dragon.

37:27.65
Host
Apparently that's... that's just what I remember watching when I was in college.

37:28.27
AROB
I don't like that at all.

37:32.43
Host
So there you go.

37:32.88
AROB
Oh, those silly Canadians.

37:33.19
Host
A little factoid. The next one, the second choice—you've already taken number three. Second choice is The Voice.

37:43.04
AROB
Oh, well, you know that this has a special place in my heart because I auditioned for The Voice years ago.

37:48.48
Host
Did you really? I did not know this.

37:48.68
AROB
Yeah. Really? Yeah. Me and my buddy David. David is a very good singer, and he actually has vocal ability, and he wanted to audition for The Voice mostly. The way he said it was, I talk about auditioning so much.

38:12.99
AROB
Then my wife said, put up or shut up, go try it. And so he said, all right, fine, I will. So he said, but I don't want to go... he's like, it feels silly to go by myself. So would you want to go with me?

38:24.55
AROB
So we went to Chicago in like January like somewhere in there.

38:30.25
Host
Wow.

38:31.40
AROB
And yeah, and we went to the Rosemont Convention Center and I stood in line and sang for the talent agent.

38:43.09
AROB
And she did not care for any of our singing. None of us made it to the next round.

38:47.58
Host
Ah.

38:48.46
AROB
But like, it's funny, you start off in like, just a long line. And then eventually they just sort of keep breaking you down. So at the end of it, we ended up in a room with 10 of us and one judge.

38:58.75
AROB
And then there's, you know, rooms all along the convention center with all these rooms and you sing. And then they say, okay, some of you get a call back and some of you don't. So, yeah, so it was fun.

39:07.24
Host
Hm.

39:09.35
AROB
So, outside of that experience, it is not one of my favorites.

39:15.44
Host
Okay.

39:16.25
AROB
So I'm going to go four, 'cause I would rank it below Shark Tank.

39:17.80
Host
All right. Excellent. I did not ever hear this story. I'm kind of surprised by that.

39:22.65
AROB
Yeah. Yeah.

39:24.10
Host
I will say that is one show that my wife and I watched for a few years before we had kids. We only ever watched the first episode or two when everybody's kind of doing the blind audition part. After that, it kind of loses its luster, but...

39:34.87
AROB
Yeah, you have to—I mean, you know have to get into the characters or the people. And yeah, that's not my—my wife does watch The Voice. She's one of those ones that still watches American Idol.

39:46.64
AROB
I was like, what?

39:46.79
Host
Wow.

39:47.28
AROB
I don't think she still does now, but like up until probably two or three years ago, like what? I didn't know the show was still on.

39:52.97
Host
Hmm.

39:54.73
AROB
Whatever.

39:55.37
Host
Well, speaking of shows that are still on, that have made—some of us may not have guessed, but I know you've heard of this one. You've used spots three and four, so you got one, two, and five left.

40:06.05
AROB
Yes.

40:06.30
Host
I have—I think I have an idea of where this one's going. Next one is Survivor.

40:10.73
AROB
Oh, number one, 100%.

40:12.11
Host
Not even close.

40:12.41
AROB
Number one.

40:13.03
Host
I knew that.

40:13.54
AROB
Yeah. My wife and I have watched almost nearly all 40... Well, there's more than 40 seasons, but during COVID, they paused it. And that was when we were watching it and we made it all the way to season 40.

40:28.13
AROB
And there are a couple of the old, old seasons that are just not—like, I don't even know where you find them anymore. We would even like try to buy them on Prime, but we've watched almost all 40 seasons and I love it.

40:38.67
Host
Wow.

40:39.73
AROB
It's an amazing show.

40:41.32
Host
It's a commitment.

40:41.44
AROB
Yeah. Our intern, Josh, who was with us over the summer, he's also a huge Survivor fan.

40:42.84
Host
It's a club, right? Yeah.

40:48.82
AROB
And he actually participates in the Survivor Challenge on the campus of Notre Dame, which is like a real game.

40:56.16
Host
It's a club right?

40:57.19
AROB
Yeah, it's a club.

40:57.27
Host
Yeah.

40:57.79
AROB
And so he goes and part of his duties—I learned this the other day—is that he goes and he hides idols around campus.

41:08.88
AROB
It's part of the game.

41:10.47
Host
I saw that at the beginning of the summer, he told me that. I was like, you gotta tell Andrew that right away. You guys are gonna have a long conversation about this.

41:16.98
AROB
Yeah. Tara's daughters also—definitely Carolina. I don't know if Mary-Kate does, but they also love Survivor. And in fact, I remember Tara early on, she had to buy a birthday gift or Christmas gift for her kids.

41:31.11
AROB
And she bought them personalized buffs, which is what they wear on the show.

41:35.70
Host
Okay. Wow.

41:37.36
AROB
That's cool.

41:37.56
Host
Interesting.

41:38.45
AROB
Yeah, great show.

41:39.01
Host
All right, so you've got spots two and five left. Two shows remaining on the list.

41:44.61
AROB
Now is where it gets dicey because I don't know.

41:46.27
Host
Yeah. Yeah.

41:46.90
AROB
Do I want to give the number two spot to something that—and then stick with the dud or my favorite at five or anyways, go ahead.

41:53.93
Host
We're going to find out. Next one up, The Bachelor.

41:57.96
AROB
Oh, can I go lower than five?

42:03.36
Host
I feel like I made this too easy for you.

42:05.42
AROB
I feel like I feel pretty good about putting Bachelor at number five.

42:05.79
Host
Yeah.

42:09.32
Host
Yeah, I've never watched it, but from what I've seen, I think I probably agree with you there.

42:14.33
AROB
Not my jam. My wife does like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and I don't—not as much as some other people but they get really into it—but not my thing.

42:24.81
Host
All right, your final selection, which is going to go in number two, Alone.

42:30.14
AROB
Oh, and this is—wow I like nailed this! Yeah, yeah.

42:31.23
Host
Yeah, pretty good list. Exactly. I mean, I would definitely put Alone above Survivor personally. I don't think there's any show as good as Alone out there, but pretty solid the way that that played out. I think that was probably a pretty true to life list for you there.

42:46.28
AROB
Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. What was four? Oh—

42:49.22
Host
So number one was Survivor, two was Alone, three was Shark Tank, four was The Voice, five was The Bachelor.

42:56.26
AROB
Oh my God, perfect. I would even—I possibly would have been fine with Alone at one and Survivor at two. I really like Survivor the game as the seasons went on.

43:07.75
AROB
It got very less survivory and much more the game, which I enjoyed. Alone is, for those of you who don't—there's a lot of people have never heard of Alone.

43:19.49
Host
That's true.

43:19.81
AROB
And it's a great show. They use... 10 or 12 participants and they drop them off all in the same region, but completely isolated from each other.

43:32.66
AROB
And they get 10 survival items and a giant box of camera and audio recording equipment.

43:32.74
Host
Yeah.

43:40.05
AROB
And they say, call us when you want to go home, basically. And then whoever lasts the longest, whoever survives alone the longest wins the money, which usually is half a million dollars.

43:44.28
Host
Yeah.

43:52.49
Host
And they don't know who—who else is still left out there.

43:52.74
AROB
But—

43:54.49
Host
If there's still nine others or one other.

43:54.89
AROB
They don't know. Yeah.

43:56.49
Host
I am not a reality TV person and you and Matt Bond and some others kept telling me, you gotta watch Alone. Gotta watch Alone. I was like, ah, fine. Then I started watching it and it doesn't have the drama, the interpersonal drama, right?

44:09.33
AROB
Impossible to have the drama.

44:09.70
Host
Because they're all alone. And man, it's such a good show.

44:12.98
AROB
Yeah, yeah.

44:13.08
Host
Oh, so good.

44:15.02
AROB
Yeah. So I would, again, I haven't watched Survivor in a while. We haven't watched the season since COVID, but Alone is amazing. But Survivor is great as well. So I would go one or two for those.

44:29.44
Host
Good list. Well, that was a kind of a nice lighthearted way to end a deeper episode.

44:32.67
AROB
I didn't end up with Green Tea as number one. That's good.

44:34.73
Host
Yeah. Sometimes you hit it. Sometimes you don't on these blind ranking games. So worked out.

44:41.99
AROB
Good.

44:42.82
Host
Excellent. Well, thank you, Andrew. It's been great, and we'll see you back in a couple weeks.

44:47.51
AROB
Sounds good, Rhen.