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273 episodes
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Factually! with Adam Conover Headgum
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- Comedy
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4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
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Comedian Adam Conover talks to exceptional experts, revealing shocking truths and thought-provoking new perspectives. It’s an investigative comedy podcast for curious people who never stop asking questions.
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How Bankruptcy Shields Capitalists from Consequences with Melissa Jacoby
Bankruptcy can mean totally different things depending on your wealth. For the rich, it’s a shield; for the poor, it’s a punishment. Despite this debilitating divide, in a country where we need to take on debt for homes, transportation, and medical care, we still rely on the bankruptcy system to keep the economy from collapsing. This week, Adam sits with Melissa Jacoby, a law professor at UNC Chapel Hill and author of Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal. Together they discuss how a system designed as an economic safeguard has turned into a major divider of wealth in America
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The "Food Barons" Jacking Up Your Grocery Bill with Austin Frerick
Whether you're at the grocery store or a restaurant, food is becoming obscenely expensive. It's easy to point to inflation as the sole culprit, but that's only a narrow view of a much bigger picture. For years, the food industry has been falling to monopolists who have been edging out independent farmers. Food quality has gone down, prices have gone up, and it has been a shocking disaster for the environment. This week, Adam speaks with Austin Frerick, an expert on agriculture and antitrust policy, a fellow at Yale, and author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.
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WTF did the Supreme Court Just Do with Leah Litman and Kate Shaw of Strict Scrutiny
The latest round of Supreme Court decisions will radically reshape America as we know it. From overturning the Chevron decision and stripping federal agencies of their ability to do their jobs, to giving presidents broad immunity for actions that would otherwise be considered criminal, it can be hard to fully grasp the impact of these rulings, both immediately and in the future. This week, Adam speaks with Leah Litman and Kate Shaw, law professors and hosts of the podcast "Strict Scrutiny," to make sense of how the Supreme Court has sold out our future and what, if anything, can be done to restore the court to its proper function.
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The A.I. Bubble is Bursting with Ed Zitron
Big tech is betting tens of billions of dollars on AI being the next big thing, but what if it isn't? ChatGPT burns obscene amounts of cash daily with little return, Google's AI dispenses useless and sometimes dangerous advice, and a recent study showed that tech companies will soon run out of new training data to improve their AI models. If AI is really so costly, unreliable, and limited, what happens to the industry that has bet so big on it? This week, Adam talks with journalist and influential tech critic Ed Zitron of wheresyoured.at to discuss the impending burst of the AI bubble, the hubris of Silicon Valley, and how we suffer under big tech's "Rot Economy."
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How Contrapoints Reinvented Philosophy for YouTube with Natalie Wynn
Since 2016, Natalie Wynn has been making wildly popular video essays on YouTube under the name ContraPoints. Her videos, which cover everything from politics, to gender, to society's obsession with the apocalypse, gracefully distill academia-level research into insightful and highly digestible packages. Despite winning a Peabody award and holding a master’s degree in philosophy, Natalie proudly calls herself a YouTuber. Is this a new form of media? One that eschews the conventional structure of academia to bring university level discourse to anyone with an internet connection. This week, Adam chats with Natalie Wynn about gender, conspiracies, and the evolving role of academia in the digital age.
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Your Brain is Hardwired to Love Games with Kelly Clancy
Games often get a bad rap as mere distractions, the frivolous filler between so-called "important things." But research into the connection between people and games reveals that they’re not just beneficial—they're essential. This week, Adam is joined by bioscientist and neurophysicist Kelly Clancy, author of Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, to explore the pivotal role games play in our development, history, and even in the natural world beyond humans.
Customer Reviews
Nice work
Love the show
Still Fascinating
Loved Adam’s show and love this podcast. Listeners who rate it low should read the summaries and pick the topics that interest them. Although occasionally I’ll listen to one I didn’t think I’d like and it keeps me interested.
Irony?
Everybody gotta get paid, right? But do we seriously need four minutes of ads before every episode and endless pandering for Patreon subs? My finger hurts from skipping. Then we get the lecture about how frivolity and capitalism are destroying the structure of human existence.
Sigh.