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? This week, Adam sits with Osita Nwanevu, a columnist at The Guardian and Contributing Editor at New R...
Feb 04, 2026•1 hr 18 min
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 know it could go up in smoke. Find Annie's book at factuallypod.com/books -- SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PAT...
Jan 28, 2026•1 hr 24 min
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 factuallypod.com/books -- SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconover SEE ADAM ON...
Jan 21, 2026•1 hr 33 min
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 the spokespeople of ATTENSITY!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. This week, Adam sit...
Jan 14, 2026•1 hr 25 min
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 PLAN: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America. Find David's book at factuallypod.com/books --...
Jan 07, 2026•1 hr 27 min
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 -- SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconover SEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.a...
Dec 31, 2025•1 hr 29 min
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 safety at OpenAI, about the dangers of AI and our best prospects for living alongside this technology. ...
Dec 24, 2025•1 hr 35 min
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 for her incredible social media account Depths of Wikipedia. Today, she joins Adam to give an insider ...
Dec 17, 2025•1 hr 27 min
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 Judith Enck, a former EPA official under President Obama, and the author of the new book The Problem...
Dec 10, 2025•1 hr 5 min
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 professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Together with Daniel Kelly, they wrote the new book So...
Dec 03, 2025•1 hr 40 min
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 world for the affected people, as well as what came next. This week, Adam sits with Lizzie to talk a...
Nov 26, 2025•1 hr 16 min
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 Bloomberg Business Week reporter Max Chafkin, who recently authored the book The Contrarian: Peter ...
Nov 19, 2025•1 hr 18 min
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 We're in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership . Find Amanda’s book at factuallypod.com...
Nov 12, 2025•1 hr 12 min
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 an entry point for devastating impingements on civil liberties. SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https:...
Nov 05, 2025•1 hr 48 min
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 defend average Americans from unethical and predatory business practices. So what happens now, and how...
Oct 29, 2025•1 hr 9 min
While we think of automobiles as an integral part of American life, the fact is that they’re just objectively a bad form of transportation. They’re costly, they don’t scale well, and they’re a leading cause of death in the country. The oil and automobile lobbies have done a lot of work to make it feel like there’s no way we could live without cars, but the fact remains that it’s very possible to take significant steps to diminish the relevance of cars in everyday life. This week, Adam sits with ...
Oct 22, 2025•1 hr 31 min
Benny Feldman is one of the funniest new comics working today. He also has Tourette Syndrome, a neurological condition characterized by involuntary vocalizations and tics. Not only does this give Benny a unique rhythm to his performances, it also has helped him develop a fascinating personal understanding of how humor even works. This week, Adam talks with Benny about Tourette’s, comedy, and the power that comes with understanding yourself. -- SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com...
Oct 15, 2025•1 hr 40 min
The internet is getting shittier. Hell, the whole world is getting shittier. The thing is, it’s no accident—it’s by design. The tech giants who run the internet have figured out how to make bank off of making our everyday experience with the internet worse, and this process is bleeding over into the physical world. This process is called “enshittification”, a term coined by the massively influential tech writer Cory Doctorow. In this episode, Adam sits with Cory to discuss where everything went ...
Oct 08, 2025•1 hr 46 min
Trump despises the average worker and has spent the past several months doing everything he can to demolish the labor protections that Americans of previous generations fought and died to win. We’re at an inflection point for the future of American labor, with our very livelihoods in the balance. Julie Su has been a civil rights attorney, California’s Labor Commissioner, and then acting Secretary of Labor in the last Biden Administration. Few people in America are better equipped to describe the...
Oct 01, 2025•1 hr 20 min
A.I. slop is competing for space all across the web, and it’s starting to edge out actual human creators. The internet, once rife with possibility, is rapidly turning into a depressing wasteland of mind numbing garbage. Despite the massive volume of brain-waste being sludged out every day, there are still some brilliant human minds trying to turn the tides of the battle. 404media is a worker-owned tech journalism outlet, and they use their real human minds to investigate and report on stories—ev...
Sep 24, 2025•1 hr 27 min
Comedy has changed as an art form. On top of social media fundamentally reconfiguring the expectations of the audience for what the role of a comedian is meant to be, we live in deeply unfunny times. Despite these challenges, we still all need to laugh. This week, Adam talks with comedian Gianmarco Soresi about how to adapt to the times without compromising integrity. -- SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconover SEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/ SUBS...
Sep 17, 2025•1 hr 53 min
(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!) Our future is also a blind box. Visit USAFacts.org for unbiased, nonpartisan data that unpacks topics that shape American life, and subscribe here h...
Sep 15, 2025•13 min
The Palestinian people are being killed en masse, they are being starved, and many are dying of preventable disease. More and more people are beginning to understand that it’s Israel’s intention to eliminate the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. Yet as untold thousands are dying, there are still people who insist that this is not “genocide” despite every bit of evidence to the contrary. This week, Adam speaks with Omer Bartov, a professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown Universit...
Sep 10, 2025•1 hr 33 min
Being in “good shape” doesn’t just mean changing your diet in pursuit of unrealistic standards of thinness; it means challenging your body to be more capable today than it was yesterday. In recent years, weight lifting has been catching on as a primary exercise focus for both men and women who are trying to live healthier lifestyles. This week, Adam sits with Casey Johnston, author of A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting, to talk about the gains that c...
Sep 03, 2025•1 hr 19 min
The world is getting less funny. Not just out there in the geopolitical hellscape of every day life, but at the movie theater as well. While comedy films once dominated the box office, in recent years there’s been a sharp drop-off in theatrical comedies. The communal experience of sitting in a room with people and sharing one of the most fundamental human emotions has quietly evaporated, and been replaced by vague joke-shaped gestures at humor in your average Marvel movie. That all might be abou...
Aug 27, 2025•1 hr 34 min
One of Elon Musk’s most insightful critics is his own daughter. Vivian Wilson came into the limelight last year after her father deadnamed her in an interview with Jordan Peterson, and she responded by systematically dismantling Musk in a now infamous post. Having publicly rejected her father, Wilson suddenly found herself as an icon of trans visibility in America—something she had never expected. This week, Adam invites Vivian to a chaotic conversation about fame, identity, dodgeball, and RuPau...
Aug 20, 2025•1 hr 10 min
Pyramid schemes have been a comedic punchline for ages now, but they’ve never been more relevant. Not only is there still a thriving culture of multi-level exploitation in this country, but the dark spirit of pyramid schemes has wormed its way into countless aspects of American life. This week, Adam speaks with Bridget Read, writer at New York Magazine and the author of Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, to discuss how our country became one big pyramid scheme. Find...
Aug 13, 2025•1 hr 26 min
While we’re certainly in a uniquely bad time for our capitalist society, we’re definitely not the first people to be having the thought, “what if things weren’t quite so terrible for 99% of people?” From the beginning, capitalism has justifiably had critics. Today Adam is joined by John Cassidy, New Yorker writer and author of Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, to discuss the history of how this broken system became so embedded in our psyches that we’ve ...
Aug 06, 2025•1 hr 16 min
(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!) Zohran Mamdani is writing a new blueprint for the left to actually win. Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through b...
Aug 04, 2025•17 min
It’s no secret that Spotify pays artists extremely poorly, but it turns out they don’t treat their customers much better. Author and journalist Liz Pelly’s new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, investigates how Spotify has accelerated the collapse of the music industry, along with their shady practices such as filling playlists with stock music—fooling customers into listening to artists who don’t actually exist. This week, Adam sits with Liz to talk ...
Jul 30, 2025•1 hr 24 min
