Factually! with Adam Conover

Trump’s assault on immigrants is ongoing. ICE continues to raid neighborhoods, kidnap people, and commit the occasional murder. Time and again, it’s been proven that standing together with the community is the most effective response. Memo Torres is a multimedia journalist with the esteemed L.A. Taco, which had roots as a local food scene blog before becoming an award-winning journalism outlet. Th...

For nearly two decades, prospects for college graduates have been dwindling. The worth of a degree has suffered greatly, and it’s become increasingly clear that college grads suffer many of the same hardships as those seeking employment without degrees. With this change, there’s been a push to the left as well as a new level of organization in industries that previously had been without unions. Th...

Will AI obliterate all of humanity? Will it destroy all of our jobs? There are so many questions swirling around the existential threat that AI poses, and even more completely hypothetical answers. This week, Adam brings back past guests Arvind Narayanan, professor of Computer Science at Princeton, and Princeton PhD student Sayash Kapoor to give expert perspective on our current moment. Their newe...

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!) Timothee Chalamet needs to be looking at his own...

The news is relentless in pace as well as issues, isn’t it? This week we’re trying something a bit different: Adam sits with previous guests Jason Koebler, tech journalist from 404 Media, and comedian Dylan McKeever to wade through the muck of this week’s biggest stories. The trio talks about the government’s stiffy for AI-powered war machines, the whoever-wins-we-lose Warner Bros. Discovery merge...

What are we doing in Iran? No, seriously. Why? Call it what you will, but we’ve just gone to war for seemingly no reason whatsoever. In a bonus episode, Adam invites past guest Reza Aslan back on the show to make sense of what’s happening, how this will affect the people of Iran, and what this means on the world stage. -- SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconover SEE ADAM ON...

Actor and comedian Joel McHale isn’t just one of the nicest people working in entertainment; he’s also got a unique, firsthand perspective on the massive shifts that have occurred in the television industry over the past twenty years. From the TV-skewering comedy of The Soup to the metatextual self-awareness of Community, Joel’s career has served to comment on the evolution of the medium of televi...

Why is it that the anti-trans movement is so ferociously set on upending the livelihood of people who are simply trying to live their lives? As it turns out, it’s because it’s part of a larger playbook to dismantle civil rights as we know them. Paisley Currah is a Professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, the author of Sex Is as...

The tech industry no longer serves human needs. According to legal scholar and writer Tim Wu, the tech industry has shifted away from providing services and now only exist to extract our money, data, and time. This week, Adam sits with Tim to talk about his new book, Age of Extraction. Together, they chart exactly how we came to find ourselves in this mess and what it might take for us to dig our...

The scoring mechanics of video games are ostensibly how the player is directed to have fun. Scores put interesting bounds on the experience of play, lead to creative solutions, and even inspire entirely new models of play, like speed running a video game. But when systems of metrics are applied to our actual lives, it’s… not as nice. “Gamification” is just one symptom of our society’s obsession wi...

After the madness of the past decade, it can feel impossible to tell where we’re at in our political story as a country. Between Trump kidnapping the president of Venezuela, his ludicrous threats toward Greenland, and the ICE murders in Minneapolis, are we seeing the literal death of American democracy, or are we seeing the last gasps of a dying reactionary movement that has overextended itself? T...

For decades, the threat of total nuclear annihilation cast a long shadow on everyday life. Nowadays, it almost seems like an old-fashioned kind of fear. Unfortunately, the possibility of human civilization ending at the touch of a button is more real than we think. Journalist Annie Jacobsen’s book NUCLEAR WAR: A Scenario outlines an excruciating and fascinating play-by-play of how the world as we...

Susan Orlean is one of the greatest living nonfiction writers. She has an uncanny ability to find stories in mundane, unexpected places, and approach them with such a level of authentic fascination that the reader can’t help but become fascinated too. This week, Adam sits with Susan to talk not just about her work, but the very idea of what a storyteller is. Find Susan’s new memoir, Joyride, at fa...

Would you rather that your attention were a resource freely directed toward your interests, or a measure of how many ads can be propelled into your eyeballs in a single session? Our attention has been commodified, and an entire industry is trying to wring out every possible instance of it. D. Graham Burnett, a professor of history at Princeton, and experiential organizer Peter Schmidt are two of t...

It kind of seems like political corruption should be illegal, doesn’t it? Whether it’s happening on the right or the left, the whole filthy ordeal has made our government more dysfunctional for everyone. How did we get to this place where corruption isn’t just allowed but expected? This week, Adam talks with investigative journalist David Sirota about his new book, based on his podcast, MASTER PLA...

Even if the AI bubble bursts, the technology won’t just disappear. We’re going to live alongside some version of AI, so we have to ask: what does our future with AI look like? This week, Adam invites Ethan Mollick, AI expert and professor at Wharton School of Business, to challenge his skeptical view on AI and look at how it might impact our daily lives. Find Ethan's book at factuallypod.com/books...

Why should we assume that AI is safe? As the technology has grown at an alarming rate, companies like OpenAI have seen wrongful death lawsuits begin to stack up as their product drives users to suicide. With the mental health risks, the societal risks, and the unknown risks, we have to ask, can AI ever really be safe? This week, Adam speaks with Steven Adler, an A.I. researcher who led product saf...

While it feels like the very concept of an accepted collective reality has crumbled around us, Wikipedia has gradually revealed itself to be our accepted arbiter of truth. How did this social project, built on the backs of countless volunteers, come to be the one site on the internet that we all pretty much agree to be “true”? Or mostly true, at least. Annie Rauwerda is a Wikipedia editor known fo...

Plastic is everywhere. Over the past century, we’ve stuffed our landfills, lined the bottom of the ocean floor, and even managed to get microscopic particles floating through our blood and bodies. Topping things off, the industry is only growing. Plastics simply do not go away, and neither will this problem unless we do something about it. This week, Adam talks about ending plastic pollution with...

The rumors are true: our world is a dumpster fire, and it feels like it’s growing hotter and stinkier by the day. If it feels hopeless, like it’s useless for one person to even try, perhaps it’s a change in perspective. This week, Adam sits with two philosophers to explain why change is ALWAYS possible. Alex Madva is a professor of philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona, and Michael Brownstein is a pr...

Do you have the not-so-creeping feeling that the world is ending? You might be right. The world’s ended before, and the world will end again—just not in the way we see in TV and movies. Lizzie Wade’s new book, Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, explores how events like the colonial extermination of indigenous peoples or the Black Death were the end of the...

You’ve almost certainly heard Peter Thiel’s name. You very likely even have an opinion about him. But how much do you actually know about him? One of the most powerful people in America is also one of the most secretive, because that lack of public visibility gives him much more room to exercise a scary amount of control over our country. This week, Adam gets the in-depth scoop on Peter Thiel with...

Our politicians are too f*#&ing old. We’ve covered the state of our dismal, sleepy, cranky gerontocracy before—but how do we actually get power into the hands of people who are not Boomers? Waiting for a mass die-off isn’t an option. This week, Adam speaks with Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run For Something, a PAC that recruits young progressive candidates, and the author of When...

Half the states in the US have passed age verification laws that put pornography under threat. Not only does this compromise a vital industry, it puts all of free speech in danger as well. Today, Adam is joined by Siri Dahl, an adult performer and outspoken critic of age verification laws, and Noelle Purdue, a writer and internet porn historian. Together, they discuss how attacks on porn have been...

Everyone in their right mind already knows the gift: Trump ran on helping working people, then immediately threw working Americans to the wolves in favor of helping the ultra-wealthy. But it’s not just Trump who is screwing us; he’s made it easier for businesses to exploit the average American as well. He recently eviscerated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has stood in place to de...