Adam Conover on the myth of good billionaires and why YouTube isn’t going away anytime soon
Bestcasts asks podcasters to discuss the most memorable episodes of their podcast.
There is no shortage of podcasts with a similar logline to Factually! With Adam Conover: The comedian “talks to exceptional experts, revealing shocking truths and thought-provoking new perspectives.” Yet the secret sauce to Conover’s pitch is that he leads with urgency, not the performative curiosity of, say, The Daily (sorry, New York Times). These subjects matter deeply to him, and he’s cultivated a loyal following among those who recognize his passion.
Conover has been going beyond surface-level conversations with subject-matter experts since 2016, when the Adam Ruins Everything podcast launched as a long-form audio companion to the TruTV series of the same name. In 2019, after the cancellation of the TV show, the podcast was reconceptualized as Factually! while the premise remained largely the same. In his yearslong journey of becoming the eminent “explainer of how things actually work,” Conover has managed to keep that comedic persona compelling instead of grating; his approach is free of pedantry, arrogance, and nihilism, yet he doesn’t veer toward syrupy bright-side optimism, either. He is simply Adam Conover, an entertainer who knows how to translate comedy into a call to action, or perhaps vice versa.
We asked Conover to select the best episodes of Factually! and explain, as only he can, what makes each one great.
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