It’s unusual to be involved in something we’ve podcasted on. We’ve done a podcast on Muppets, and while both of us know live-hand puppets like Ernie from Sesame Street are operated, neither one of us have ever had our hand in one. We know from our podcast that there are about 120 dead bodies on Mt. Everest, but we’ve never seen them. We know that Einstein’s brain was kept in a jar for decades, the ins and outs of mortgage-backed securities, that the FDA doesn’t regulate herbs and that there are some decent theories explaining spontaneous human combustion, but none of these things mean what microlending has to Stuff You Should Know.

We remember the first time we came across Mohammad Yunus. It was when we recorded a podcast based on an article on microlending Josh wrote for HowStuffWorks. Awesome, we thought; this story has a hero. If you haven’t read the article (you can here, if you like), Mohammed Yunus is a Bangladeshi economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his work establishing nontraditional lending programs to serve nontraditional borrowers: women, the rural poor, the illiterate — exactly the people mainstream banks overlooked because they were too high-risk or the amount they borrowed was too paltry.