Factually! with Adam Conover - 5 Star Reviews Are Ruining Your Life

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

(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!)A one star review of the five star review system. Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. The new McCrispy Strip is here. Dip approved by ketchup, tangy barbecue, honey, mustard, honey mustard, Sprite, McFlurry, Big Mac sauce, double dipped in Buffalo and ranch, more ranch, and creamy chili McCrispy Strip dip. Now at McDonald's. So a couple weeks back, I was lucky enough to go to Amsterdam. I was there as part of my stand-up tour.

We had an absolute blast, sold out the show. Thank you to everybody who came and made the show special. But the best part was the next day because I had an entire day off in the city. So I spent it on a bike, exploring and getting super stoned in the sunshine. I actually even strapped my iPhone to the front of my bike just so I could record how beautiful the city was. I mean look at this footage. You know the Dutch really did colonialism right? I strapped my iPhone to the front of my bike just so I could record how beautiful the city was. I mean, look at this footage.

You know, the Dutch really did colonialism right? They pillaged the world, built one nice city, and then tapped out. Going to Amsterdam is like visiting a rich friend's house. Man, the stuff in here is really nice. Don't ask where the money came from. So after a full day of exploring, I was exhausted, I was hungry. It was finally time for dinner. And since I was on vacation in a city I knew I wouldn't be back to for a while,

I wanted to make sure I got the best food in Amsterdam. So I opened up my phone and I started scrolling through the ratings. There was one restaurant that had a 4.9 average. Gold standard! But it was all the way across town. There was a closer restaurant that had 3.8 stars, but of course I couldn't eat there. Puh! Under 4 stars? I'm not putting trash in my body! But the closest 4 star spot nearby had no reservations available, so I spent an hour

like this standing on the sidewalk, stuck on my phone, trying to find the perfect place to eat using the power of the internet, and by the time I looked up from my review vortex, the sun had gone down, my stomach was grumbling, and I gave up, and I walked into a restaurant right in front of me without even looking up its rating. I just had to f***ing eat. And you know what? It was delicious. It was actually the best meal I had on my entire trip. And a few days later, I happened to walk past that 4.9 star place across town I didn't make it to,

and you know what it was a boring ass Tourist trap, but I almost schlepped across town to get to it because the ratings said it was the best like most of us these days I rely on online ratings a lot I check Rotten Tomatoes before I see a movie. I look up my doctor on health grades I didn't spend hours digging through customer ratings for a goddamn toothbrush to make sure I buy the perfect one. And just when I think I'm off the rating roller coaster, I step out of an Uber and the app prompts me to rate the driver or I get an email from my dentist begging me for five stars after my root canal and I start to wonder are these ratings actually helping

me have better experiences or buy better products? Or are they just ruining my f**king life? Well, before I dive into the answer to that question, if you want to support this channel directly, I'm not going to ask you for a rating, but I will ask that you consider supporting us at patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And if you want to come see me live on the road, coming up soon, I'm headed to Oklahoma, Washington State, La Brea, California, and we're going to add a bunch of new cities soon. You can always get my tour dates and tickets at AdamConover.net.

So in the days before the internet, if you wanted to find the best restaurant or movie or experience, you had to ask a friend, look it up in a guidebook, or look in these really old fashioned things called newspapers. The reviews in those books and newspapers would be written by professionals whose entire job it was to be an expert in the thing they were reviewing. There were travel guides like Rick Steves, restaurant books like The Michelin Guide and Zagat and film critics whose reviews were so famous they literally affected the culture. Siskel and Ebert literally coined the phrase, Two Thumbs Up.

These dudes were just two newspaper writers from Chicago, but their opinions on movies were so finely honed and influential that everyone listened to them. But now, all those people and all of their thumbs are dead. Kaput, RIP. Okay, Rick Steves is still alive. Now he does documentaries that teach boomers about fascism. That's cool shit, Rick. Two thumbs up.

But think about this, back in those old days, if there wasn't an expert who had written about the particular thing you wanted to buy You just kind of had to wing it you were raw dog in retail baby. Just straight up purchasing something sight unseen Whoa, that's living baby. Sometimes the thing you bought was great And sometimes it sucked and when you got something that well hell, you wanted to tell other people about it so they didn't make the same mistake, right? Humans have a natural need to share information like this. So when the internet was born, a bunch of companies came up with the idea of monetizing that need.

We love saying what we think so much. These companies realized they didn't need to pay an expert to share their opinion. Our dumbasses would log on and do that valuable work for free. So companies like Yelp and Goodreads and IMDB sprung up to aggregate your reviews into ratings and profit off of them. And as these ratings became more and more normalized, we started rating everything. Suddenly we don't bat an eye at being asked to rate everything from a paper towel to a poop knife. You know one guy gave this poop knife one star because according to him it's a sad day when you're reviewing poop knives. Man

that's not a one-star review of the poop knife that's a one-star review of your own life choices. Frankly I give myself one star too because here I am reading all the reviews on a poop knife so I can make a joke in a YouTube video. I don't even know what a poop knife is that I'm doing this shit reviews on a poop knife so I can make a joke in a YouTube video. I don't even know what a poop knife is that I'm doing this shit. So ratings like this are everywhere now. And looking at the average star reviews of a product can feel helpful when we're trying to make a buying decision.

But you know, the problem with the wisdom of the crowds is that sometimes the crowd is dumb as shit. Like, if you wanna find a book to read, you might hit up the Amazon-owned Goodreads list of best books ever. But you know what you won to find a book to read, you might hit up the Amazon-owned Goodreads list of best books ever. But you know what you won't find on that list? Moby Dick, which clocks in at an average of three and a half measly stars. And look, I'll admit, Moby Dick is not for everyone.

I love Florida's poetic description of whale dissection, but not everyone does. But no matter what you think about it, Moby Dick is a significant piece of American literature, and love it or not, it has a value and a meaning that cannot be captured in a single average star rating, especially when that average is partially created by some truly insane one-star reviews. Like if you click through to the actual reviews of Moby Dick on Goodreads, you will see a 13 paragraph one-star treatise by someone named Fonch, who is apparently the 78th best reviewer on Goodreads, but who insists that Moby Dick is

difficult to read in such a way that each page is hell. That's funny, that's exactly how I felt reading paragraph 11 of Fonch's review. I don't give a Fonch what somebody who can't edit their own review has to say about a book's editing, so why would I let this person's opinion affect my own? I don't know. And yet I do. All of us do. Because when it comes to stars, you get to affect the average no matter how dumb your

opinion is. And that brings me to another big problem with online ratings. They're easily manipulated by bad actors. Or in other words, assholes. IMDb for movies, Steam for video games, Goodreads for books, all of them struggle with a practice called review bombing. Review bombing is when a bunch of people coordinate leaving negative reviews in order to tank a creative product they don't like,

oftentimes for political reasons, before even watching it or reading it. This happened to Cecilia Rabess on her debut novel, Everything's Fine. This novel was about a, quote, black woman working at Goldman Sachs who falls in love with a conservative white co-worker with bigoted views. Now, six months before this book even came out, someone posted a summary of it online and suddenly the Goodreads page for Everything's Fine was flooded with one-star reviews calling the book racist. But none of these people even knew if the book actually was racist because none of them

had read the fucking book. Instead, they tanked this author's debut novel just because they didn't like the blurb on the back. They literally judged the book by its cover. And you know, it's not just triggered right-wingers who do this. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, had to pull an upcoming novel from publication literally judge the book by its cover. And you know, it's not just triggered right wingers who do this. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, had to pull an upcoming novel from publication after it was review bombed because, get this, it was set in Russia.

Yeah, this was a year after Russia's war on Ukraine had begun, and some of the reviewers thought it was, I really shit you not, insensitive to set a story in Russia. It wasn't like she wrote a puff piece about Putin, okay? This was a novel about a family in the mid-20th century trying to escape the Soviets. It had nothing to do with the modern geopolitical climate. But that didn't matter to the crowd of reviewers. They brought down the star rating and Gilbert responded by shelving the book entirely. And to me, this is crazy.

She started writing this book before the war even began. Are we that sure that there is no value in any story set in one of the biggest countries in the world? I'm not even sure that this book was controversial in any way because no one ever got to read it. But even if it was, books, at least some books, are supposed to be about difficult subject matter. And this is why I also think it's so weird when books like

Moby Dick have low star averages because they're difficult. Yeah, books are supposed to be difficult sometimes. They're supposed to challenge you. They're supposed to open up a new world. They're not always supposed to be fun or be set in exactly the place you want them to be or tie up neatly with relatable characters in exactly the way you want them to. A book is not a Chipotle that's supposed to make it your way or else you complain to the manager. It's f***ing art. Sometimes it's not supposed to give you an experience that is exactly what you wanted. It's supposed to give you an experience that is complicated and difficult that cannot be captured along an axis of five f***ing stars. Even if it could, another huge problem with average star ratings is whose reviews actually get counted. Sure, on IMDb

any user can review a movie, but in order for that rating to count towards the top lists, that reviewer has to be a regular voter, and IMDb won't even disclose what it takes to become a regular voter. But you know what? We can guess that most of those regular voters are men, because while it's not obvious to most users on the site, on IMDb reviews from men outnumber reviews from women on 90% of films. And that might be why The Hangover has a 7.7 average, but beloved turn of the century classic Legally Blonde only has a 6.5.

I mean, both of these movies were massive hits that had a huge effect on American culture. Everyone remembers Zach Galifianakis holding that baby-bjorn, but the phrase bend and snap was so iconic they turned it into a song in a Broadway musical. But The Hangover is a movie for men and Legally Blonde is a movie for women and since more IMDB reviewers are men, it looks like a worse movie. When you look at IMDB ratings, you assume that you're seeing what movies average people like best, but what you're actually seeing is movies certain people measured by a hidden criteria like best. And I don't want to shape my viewing patterns on what one tiny part of the global population thinks of something.

That's a recipe for making all of our art more boring and more one-dimensional. But okay, what about restaurant ratings? Sometimes you're not trying to evoke a deeper understanding of human consciousness, you just want a damn burrito. But restaurant ratings are really weird too. First of all, when it comes to restaurants, we all know that a full-blown 5-star average has got to be fake, right? The real rating system is a lot more narrow. It goes from 4.5 stars, an absolute rave, to 3.5 stars, a devastating pan.

4.5 stars, best meal of your life, 3.5 stars I will die if I eat there. Isn't it weird though that I treat that rating as so important when so many of the people who leave the ratings base them on things I don't give a s*** about? Like how about people who complain about the service? Complaining about the service is for Lucille Bluth looking old rich people who only care about how polite their servants are. I don't care if the waiter throws the plate at my head as long as the food that's on the plate is good. And I cannot tell you how many reviews I've seen of dive bars where people complained that the bartender was rude. Of course they were rude. A dive bar is like a theme bar where the theme is, everything is s*** in here. And also, you were doing coke in the bathroom with your friends and you didn't tip on your

Long Island iced teas. Of course they were rude. You were being an asshole. But the user base of apps like Yelp care about the service so much that the places with the highest average star ratings don't wind up being the restaurants where you can get the most delicious or interesting meal. No. The restaurants with the highest average ratings are the ones that serve the largest number of normies adequately without making Stephanie mad. Average ratings reward mediocrity. The same food made the exact same way, the same decor, the same perfect service. But what if I don't want an inoffensive mimosa and eggs Benny served quickly with a smile? What if I want an interesting restaurant that takes risks, serves interesting food made with care in a way that I've never had it made before?

Well, Yelp can't give me that because if it did, Stephanie would rate it one star, the server was rude, and I couldn't understand the menu. But you know who could? The real life restaurant reviewer who understood food and culture, but who Stephanie replaced. But the urge to distill everything about life into just one dimension, to quantify and reduce every part of human experience

into an average star rating, has infected so many parts of daily life that we are now often being asked to review other human beings. And that is where this sh** gets really dystopian. You know, nowadays, it feels like every time you have an interaction with somebody, you are asked to review them. After a customer service call, after a visit to the gynecologist, and most famously, in

the gig economy, after you use an Airbnb or an Uber. And this is the worst. I mean, how am I supposed to give an accurate review of another person's behavior on a five-star rating system when I can't even review Moby Dick correctly? You know, a lot of the time these ratings feel like the app is holding a gun to the worker's head and then handing me the gun because we know that the worker will get fired if we give them anything less than 5 stars. Like, no, I didn't love that my driver was smoking a blunt and hitting 95 on a surface street, but I don't want to decide whether Giovanni M can feed his family, so I give him 5 stars. At least he offered me a puff. I don't want to review Giovanni. He's just trying to make a living

Okay, you know who I'd rather review? Uber itself because they gouged me with surge pricing their customer service is notoriously terrible and they treat their workers like They misclassify them to avoid paying benefits. They short their drivers They even use AI algorithms to pay certain workers less than others. But you know who I can't review? The CEOs who created that bullsh**. Huh. Maybe if there was a way to rate, review, and hold CEOs accountable, the UnitedHealthcare guy wouldn't have gotten a three-bullet rating. Now real quick, I just want to let you know that that headline came from this video's sponsor,

Ground News. You know, Ground News's ratings are actually really useful because instead of just a user average, they do an objective study of each news source to give them factuality and bias ratings. For instance, if you look at this story about prosecutors trying to give Luigi the death penalty, it's being reported almost twice as often by left-leaning publications.

And it's really useful to know that. You can also click on the bias comparison button to learn more about how each group covers the story. And it's really useful to know that. You can also click on the bias comparison button to learn more about how each group covers the story. And it's really helpful to understand the biases in the news, especially when the reporters are talking about real people whose lives are affected by public perception. So if you wanna understand how bias affects your news,

check out Ground News. You can get 40% off if you use my special code, FACTUALLY. Go to groundnews.com slash factually. Now, rating workers really sucks, but you know what makes the system even more f***ed up? They rate you right back. And that makes these ratings even more useless because it means that we, the customers,

are terrified to leave accurate reviews. Like, let me tell you a little story. One time, couple years back, I went to an Airbnb with some friends. Our plan was to swim in the pool, do some mushrooms, and take a walk in the mountains. But when we got to the Airbnb, we realized that without mentioning it on the listing, our host was a born-again Christian who had turned his entire house into some kind of conversion experience. There were giant crucifixes everywhere, the house was blasting with Christian music,

and I was pretty sure I was going to go to the bathroom and find Jesus Christ himself on the toilet. And again, I have to be really clear, none of this was on the listing. The man had kept all of this a secret probably because he knew people wouldn't like it, and we did not like it. A few of the people in our group were Jewish, the rest were atheists, and none would have agreed to stay the night at a Christian camp for 30 year olds. Was our mushroom trip really f**king weird and awesome as a result of all this? Yes.

But did it still suck as an Airbnb experience? Abso-f**king-lutely. But you know what? When I told my friend who booked the place that he needed to leave a bad review to warn other people, he said he wasn't going to because he knew the Airbnb host was going to review him right back. That's right, he was scared of retribution. Which is probably how we wound up at that Airbnb in the first place, because none of

the people who went before us felt they could be honest in their ratings. The truth is, you simply cannot trust star ratings. They are left by people who live in fear of the business or of Jesus smiting them or both. But you know, the biggest reason I hate star ratings is that I think this constant chase for perfection is actually making us f**king miserable. When we check online ratings, we find ourselves always questing for the best experience, the best Airbnb, the best restaurant, the best goddamn toothbrush. And that leaves us constantly dissatisfied. Or worse, unable to choose. Worried that if we don't pick exactly the best thing, we'll be committing some massive mistake.

In our desperate search for the best, we wind up paralyzed by choice. Just like I was on that street corner in Amsterdam. And let me tell you, I've struggled with that paralysis a lot lately. But you know what's finally cured me of it? When I started wondering, why do we need to have the best experience at all? I mean, isn't there something to be said for a solid three-star meal or a two-star movie? So much joy in life is found in the mediocre. I mean think back to being a kid at Chuck E. Cheese. The food is shit, the place is too loud, someone pissed in

the ball pit, and yet here you are with your family. Your mom and dad let you eat an entire disgusting pizza and watch a horrifying animatronic rat show. You go home fulfilled. Three beautiful, perfect, transcendent, mediocre stars. I mean, even bad experiences can make our lives better. The movie Cats, did you guys see this shit? It was objectively the worst movie I have ever seen. And yet when I watched Skimbleshanks the railway cat do a jig on that CGI train track while a bunch of stone teenagers made cat noises in the seats around me?

Objectively that was an incredible movie going experience And then there's the restaurant that you pop into not because it was the best in the city Not because it had a five-star rating But just because it was the one that was right in front of you the restaurant that was memorable Because it was your choice and no one else's. When you let these less-than-perfect experiences back into your life, you start to have the interesting life you were trying to get from reading reviews and chasing perfection in the first place. Now, sometimes we really do need a recommendation to make a decision, and when we do, I have a little suggestion. What if you asked a

human being? You could ask your friends. You could ask the hotel concierge. Even better, you could ask a professional critic what they think. You know, critics used to get a lot of shit for ragging on movies and restaurants and you know, being fucking nerds.

But you know what? It's good to have nerds who are able to make a living because they know so much about a particular subject They can point you to a restaurant or a movie or a video game You never would have heard of otherwise that is what they are F***ing for and yeah sure Siskel and Ebert may be giving the thumbs up to heaven and the thumbs down to hell right now But there are tons of critics who are doing great work in Newsletters on YouTube YouTube, and yes,

even on goddamn websites. You know, the ones that still exist. So my advice to you is find a critic out there who you like and support them. And again, I really want to emphasize that. One that you like. Because you know what? The rest of humanity's ratings of perfection are not the point. You are.

Your life is not supposed to be five stars all the time. It's supposed to be yours, filled with experiences that only you will have, things that only you will own, moments where you notice life's tiny joys, the small things that may resonate only with you. And if you start paying attention to what those things are, well, that is when you will begin to develop a taste all your own for a life that belongs only to you and that cannot be contained in five measly stars. never do. We talked to people who have broken records on slacklines suspended by hot air balloons. We're talking to people who have done multiple flips on trampolines. You'll have to tune in to find out how many flips they did.

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