Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Comedy for the Curious with Adam Conover

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

On today’s episode of Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, we hear from comedian Adam Conover. Sharon and Adam talk about the intersection of education and comedy. Oftentimes, when we’re ready to l...augh, we’re also ready to learn. It’s a philosophy Adam has relied on during his successful career as a comedian who shares interesting facts about the ways the world works. Follow along as the pair talk about their similar childhood experiences with always being “that kid” who asks questions for the sheer pleasure of learning how things work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:26 He actually goes to different government agencies and is like, what do y'all do here? Regardless, I think you're going to have a lot of fun with this conversation. Seems like Adam and I probably would have been friends as children. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon. Here's where it gets interesting. Super excited to be chatting with Adam Conover today. Thanks for being here. Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure and a delight.
Starting point is 00:02:07 Likewise. I have been a fan of yours for a long time. So many of your projects are just topics that I have found very interesting. I think I told you before in an email that one of your projects about baby formula, I have literally never forgotten that episode in which you talk about the history of baby formula, the impact it has had on the world, like the number of lives it has saved. Like I remember you saying something to the effect of it is perhaps the second greatest human invention besides antibiotics in terms of the number of lives it has saved. Yeah, probably. I mean, the number of women who are not able to breastfeed, if you look at it globally, right, or the number of people who have the baby has difficulty latching or et cetera, there's a million reasons. Throughout most of human history, those babies would die. And formula was a huge medical breakthrough. There's a way to feed babies
Starting point is 00:03:01 that doesn't rely on this very specific biological process that can sometimes go wrong. But it's also very memorable in that you actually are putting a ton of quality content. It's not just some jokes, ha-ha, I wrecked it for you, like the name of your show, Adam Ruins Everything. It's well-researched. Thank you. It's entertaining.
Starting point is 00:03:22 And the fact that I still vividly remember that episode five or six years later is a testament to that. Yeah. I mean, we research everything very carefully, but what I try to do on the show and on my podcast factually and in all my work is to give people that feeling of, oh my God, I learned something incredible that stuck with me. And it came from me throughout my life, reading articles, books, oh my God, I learned something incredible that stuck with me. And it came from me throughout my life, reading articles, books, listening to podcasts, and having that experience of learning something, being like, oh my God, that changed the way I saw the world. And I remember where I saw it. And I'm trying to replicate that same experience for other people through my work.
Starting point is 00:04:00 Well, you're doing well at it. I call those moments where you're just like, I did not know that. And I am so excited to know that. I call those brain tangle moments where just something lights up in your brain where you're like, I love knowing that. I imagine you know exactly what I'm talking about. I love knowing that. Sometimes I call them delicious ideas. You know, that you, you want to just, once you hear about it, you just want to roll it around in your mind for a little while and think about it and think about the implications and talk to other people about it. And that's what we go for in all of my work. Yes. It's the, like, I have to tell you this thing that I just learned.
Starting point is 00:04:36 Yeah. I have to tell somebody. Did you know? You had a number of very fantastic projects. Adam Ruins Everything is one of them. Earlier this year, you also had a Netflix series released called The G Word. Correct. So first of all, let's start at the beginning. What made you want to create a series for Netflix about how the government works, how we can change it, all that stuff. Well, frankly, the reason it came about is I had read this Michael Lewis book called The Fifth Risk, which is about, it's about a number of things. Michael Lewis is one of our very best journalists, and I always love to read anything new that he has out. And so it was partially about the Trump
Starting point is 00:05:19 transition and a look behind the scenes of how that went. But then it goes on to become a book about the government, about how vast it is, how difficult it is to manage and how many things it manages for us. You know, that our government is responsible for everything from predicting the weather to securing our nuclear stockpile to, you know, he talks about how the USDA has supported rural communities for decades in ways that those communities often aren't even aware of. You know, the USDA like builds power lines and funds schools in rural communities. And, you know, part of the implication is there's a lot of folks out there who say, oh, why do we need a government?
Starting point is 00:05:52 We want to radically defund the government. We want to have less of it. And those people usually don't understand what the government actually does. Famous example being, you know, like Rick Perry, who said in, you know, election a number of years ago, oh, I want to eliminate a number of departments, the education department, the energy department. Then he went on to become the head of the energy department in Donald Trump's cabinet. And I think he probably learned why you can't eliminate that department, which is that that department secures our nuclear stockpile, among other important duties. So I found the book very fascinating.
Starting point is 00:06:24 And a number of the stories lodged in my head as like, you know, oh, my God, So I found the book very fascinating. And a number of the stories lodged in my head as like, you know, oh, my God, I can't believe this is true. A couple months later, like six months later, I got a call from my manager. He said, oh, you know, maybe you're going to be interested in this. Obama's production company, Higher Ground Productions, has optioned this book, The Fifth Risk, and they want to make a comedy show, but they don't know what else to do with it. So they want to know if you want to go in and pitch. And I said, well, yes, I would like to go pitch on that because I love that book and I have some ideas for it. And I went in and pitched it. They liked my angle and we made the show. That's how it came about. People are always very curious about
Starting point is 00:06:55 behind the scenes. I don't know if your audience is, but mine always is. I want to know like the behind the scenes of how does stuff happen? Like we know, okay, yeah, he made a TV show. Great. The specifics and nitty gritty of how somebody actually pitches and makes a television show about a book that had an impact on them. What is the next thing that happens? Is it research and scripting? Is it 5,000 meetings? Like what is the next step? It's both of those things at once. It's 5,000 meetings all day long. You have to staff up the show. You have to hire your people. Yes, we start with research and writing.
Starting point is 00:07:31 So I brought on, you know, my research and writing team, people who I've worked with before and some new people. And we start what is called breaking the show. It's a funny term for it because what you're really doing is building the show. But you outline, here are the stories we'd like to cover. So I say to my research staff, you know, go find what are the most fascinating stories about the government. You know, here are some that I know I want to do. So let's start beating those out. But please bring
Starting point is 00:07:53 me some pitches. If it makes all of us go, that's incredible. Then we start to outline it. We do have to pitch it to the network and say, hey, this is going to be episode two. And they say, we have some questions. Okay, okay, go ahead, go ahead. And then we start, you know, we do a research outline, we script it, we spend, in this case, a year and a half revising the scripts. Again, because of COVID, we just had a lot of time to sit around and stress out over them, which is my job as the showrunner, is to just be an anxiety ball and go, oh, is this good enough? And then shooting. And in this case, shooting was, we both had scripted style shooting on sets and locations around Los Angeles. And then we did remote shooting where I went and visited folks who actually make the government work, government
Starting point is 00:08:35 employees, people who are affected by the government's actions for better or for worse. And then we edit it, you know, which is its own very intense creative process. And then it comes out. Hopefully, if you're lucky, at the end of it, it'll come out. I mean, here's what really surprised me, to be quite honest. The people who work for our government, you know, a lot of them have been beaten down and sort of disillusioned over the past decade or so, or even longer than that, because both parties have pursued a policy of not supporting our government in the ways that it needs over the last few decades.
Starting point is 00:09:09 Every step of the way, I met civil servants who really do care about their jobs and really want to make the world a better place. They really care about the mission in a real way. I went to go meet people at the NIH who are curing sickle cell disease. They are coming up with a cure for sickle cell disease, which is a disease that is not prevalent enough for any private business to work on. And I met a woman who's been cured by one of their experimental therapies. I went to meet the folks at the Air Force who fly planes through hurricanes in order
Starting point is 00:09:38 to, and by the way, I tagged along on one of those flights. It was very nauseating. We flew through a hurricane. I tagged along on one of those flights. It was very nauseating. We flew through a hurricane. I went to meet the folks at the FDIC who keep your money safe in the bank by shutting down a bank. If a bank fails, they go and swoop in and make sure everyone's money is safe. And all of these people could be making more money elsewhere, right? The NIH people could go work for a pharmaceutical company. The FDIC people can make a lot more money working for Goldman Sachs. But Air Force people,
Starting point is 00:10:05 I mean, these are the best pilots in the world. There's probably a private jet somewhere that wants to have them, you know, they could fly Jeff Bezos around, right. And not have to go through, through a storm. They could go around instead, but they do that job because they are energized by the mission. They really care. I mean, and you can see it on their faces when I'm talking to them, they are so proud about it and, and what they get to do, you know, that they get to actually they get to actually do work to make people's lives better and they can feel that impact daily. And it is casting. I mean, like this idea that somehow literally every government employee is out to try to ruin people's lives. These are real Americans who could make more money in the private sector,
Starting point is 00:10:47 but who very often care deeply about impacting the lives of ordinary citizens in ways that working in the private sector can never do. Yep. Something like, we say this stat in the show, and unfortunately we filmed it a year ago, so I'm gonna go slightly wrong, but it's something like one in 14,
Starting point is 00:11:03 one in 15 Americans work for the federal government. That doesn't even count state and local governments, which are obviously even more employees. So it depends on how you count, if you're counting military or what. These are like regular Americans who are making a living working for all of our benefit and doing jobs that we desperately need done. Like if you don't really, we walk you through why the FDIC, almost nobody thinks about it, right? But those, you see those letters, maybe when you go to your bank, it says FDIC insured, maybe you're financially literate enough to know what FDIC insurance is, which is that, you know, if the bank fails up to $250,000 of your deposits per person, per account are protected by the FDIC.
Starting point is 00:11:45 And you'll just get that money back. What you don't often think about is if that agency didn't exist, the entire economy would cease to function, which is what happened in the 30s when they instituted the FDIC. But also what protects us are those employees who are at the FDIC every single day monitoring the banks. They literally investigate the banks like a restaurant inspection. They go in and just double check, okay, is this bank sufficiently capitalized? Is it in danger of collapsing? And then if it does collapse, they have a crack team that swoops in and takes over the bank. And part of the point of the show was to show people, hey, this is what your government does and you need somebody to do it. hey, this is what your government does, and you need somebody to do it.
Starting point is 00:12:30 If you look at an organization like NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency Association, it's one of those. That's what the National Weather Service is under. They safeguard our oceans, et cetera. This is an incredible agency. The people there, they don't have a mandate to make a lot of money or a mandate to, you know, make stockholders happy or to look good on the news. Their mandate is very simple. Let's just focus on the National Weather Service. Their mandate is to analyze and predict the weather and advance the science of doing so and, you know, make all that data freely available to the public. AccuWeather and the Weather Channel, those are corporations. Their job is to make money. They also predict the weather. That's how they try to make money. But the National Weather Service doesn't have to do that, right? The job is just to predict the weather. And so everybody there,
Starting point is 00:13:11 whether or not they keep their jobs is dependent on how good of a job they do predicting the weather. And as a result for the last, let's see, I'm going to say it's been 70 years since that the agency has been in its current position and organization. They've become extraordinarily good at that. Weather prediction has improved like 10 times since the eighties. Weather predictions are way better than they used to be, all this stuff. And it's because they've been able to like organizationally, they have that mandate and they don't change their mandate every time a new president comes in and says, wait, I want the national weather service to, you know, walk dogs now. No, they have, they're in it for the long term. And that's a very good
Starting point is 00:13:50 thing. Literally, our society couldn't function without accurate weather prediction. No plane could take off without the work that the National Weather Service does. Let's talk about shipping, freight ships at sea, right? Want to talk about the supply chain. They need to be able to avoid storms, not just hurricanes, but like just your average storms. If you're a gigantic container ship carrying tens of thousands of toys for Christmas, you need to know where the big swells are going to be. Loss of life, absolutely. Flooding. I mean, the list goes on.
Starting point is 00:14:19 The National Weather Service has hundreds of weather observation posts, which are buildings full of government workers who work for you, who are in your area. If you go wherever you are in the United States, there is a weather observation post within, I'm going to say a couple hundred miles of you, where there are scientists in there who are monitoring the weather where you are and making custom predictions for where you live. And you can just go access those on weather.gov if you feel like. You can literally read, here's a little blog post they wrote, an actual weather scientist. And literally, when you turn on the local news and you watch the local news guy do the prediction, what that guy is doing is going to weather.gov and getting the prediction
Starting point is 00:14:56 and putting his own little special spice on it or her special spice on it and then reading it on the news. But if that weather – they're not at the weather observation post. No. They're not releasing the weather balloons. They don't have the satellites in the sky. They're getting it from the National Weather Service. And that's how it's supposed to work. What do Ontario dairy farmers bring to the table?
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Starting point is 00:16:10 and fashion like slippers to mistle their toes. Shop great deals on Amazon. I want to talk a little bit more about what is an important or innate desire to communicate factual information in a way that is entertaining. It's not a space that a lot of people exist in. Most people are either comedians or they're educators. There are not a lot of people working in this sort of space producing edutainment or entertaining education or however you would like to phrase it. And I would love to hear more about what is that like burning desire? What's the force behind all of this? Honestly, it's just what I love to do.
Starting point is 00:16:56 I've always been an information sponge my whole life. I love learning. I'm the kind of person I listen to audio books and podcasts instead of music. I've read every issue of The New Yorker for the past like 20 years. You know, I'm just like that kind of, I love sucking that kind of thing up. And I get a lot of joy from telling other people about it. Like when, when you are infected with a new piece of knowledge, there's an innate desire just to spread it to somebody else. And I realized in my mid twenties, I was a comedian in New York. I was doing open mics. I was doing bar shows around the city. And after a while, you learn how to make people laugh.
Starting point is 00:17:32 It takes a lot of practice, but you can do it reliably. Then the question becomes, how do I make them remember me? How do I make them want to come see me again? And when I first started doing comedy that combined what I had learned, oh, my God, I learned this thing. This is crazy. Can you believe that? That's the sort of tone I was working in. People really started responding to it. And they started to lean forward in their seats a little bit. They started to perk up. They started to like come up to me after the show and be like, oh my God, is that true?
Starting point is 00:17:57 Or come to my next show and be like, oh my God, look that up. That is true. I can't believe it. And so I just realized how powerful it was as a means of communication. And it's genuinely what I enjoy doing. I think that comedy and education have a lot in common, where you get a new perspective on the world that makes you see things differently. That is what they both do at their best, and so I think they're perfectly aligned in that way. It is true that if you just have one without the other,
Starting point is 00:18:21 it is more difficult to remember. That is absolutely true. I've seen many standup comedians. I can tell you approximately three bits from that, from comedians. You know what I mean? And they're probably bits that they have done in a million shows. And the same is true of education. Like most of it, you're like, I saw the graphic, but when you are able to combine both, I feel like it just does something different in your brain because maybe it's lighting up multiple portions of your brain at the same time. Like that part that kind of tickles you, makes you want to laugh. And then the part that is
Starting point is 00:18:53 like wants to be that sponge absorbing new information. There's a quote from George Carlin in his posthumous book that I think he was writing before he died and came out right after he did that always stuck with me. It was something along the lines of when people are laughing, their defenses are down. And that's when they're most truly themselves. And you can plant a little seed at that moment and it'll grow in the future. And I think that that is what the best comedy does. But a lot of comedy doesn't plant the seed, right? You're just laughing and nothing happened.
Starting point is 00:19:25 I have to ask about, first, I love the title of your podcast, Factually. Thank you. Were you the fifth grade Adam who was like, actually, the earth is tilted 23 and a half degrees on its axis. Were you that boy? Reese on its axis. Were you that boy? Of course I was. Of course I was. I mean, like literally the character that I play on Adam Ruins Everything. So people always ask about this, like on Adam Ruins Everything, I play a character. It's not literally me. It's a heightened version of myself. And it's based on me as a kid that I was the person always saying, oh, actually, I know this or that's not true. And other people were like, why are you telling me this right now?
Starting point is 00:20:06 Like, we don't need to hear this. It was a little bit of me mining my own faults for comedy and putting that on screen. You know, we used to say Adam Conover on the show is always factually correct, but socially incorrect. He's always true on the merits of the facts, but he's always bothering other people. He's always piping up at the wrong time. He's always being irritating. And yeah, that's literally how I was.
Starting point is 00:20:29 The other kids were like, Adam, go away. Why are you here? Shut up. Literally no one cares that snails breathe through their skin, Adam. No one. Yep. And as a result, a lot of kids really relate to the character because they feel that way too. Especially something that I really found interesting is a lot of folks in the know, really relate to the character because they feel that way too. Especially something that I really found interesting is, is a lot of folks in the
Starting point is 00:20:47 autism spectrum really love the show and love the character and say, Oh my God, that's just like me. And sometimes people come to my shows and they're like, are you on the autism spectrum? I'm like, not that I know of. I mean, maybe, maybe I'm on 0.5 out of 10 or I don't know how the scale works, but you know, like maybe I've got a little bit of that in there. I think it's a relatable way that a lot of us feel where your, your enthusiasms are not always reciprocated by everybody in the outside world, you know? Yeah. That is very relatable. I have many enthusiasms that my friends are like, oh my God, if you tell us about one more article that you read, there's this long running joke about like, let me guess, you read an article.
Starting point is 00:21:27 Yep. The answer is, yeah, of course I did. I mean, like, absolutely. I read an article or five articles.
Starting point is 00:21:35 Yeah. What are you doing? What are you doing? If you're not reading articles, articles are the best form of media ever invented. They're so great. They're shorter than a book, you know,
Starting point is 00:21:43 but I totally agree. Articles are where it's at. Get to the point. Get to the, I want to know about what it is. I don't have to necessarily want to know. I can't read 400 pages about this. Just hand me a New Yorker and give me the gist. Maybe I'm not ready to commit to 400 pages. This article will help me find out if I am. In fact, I was absolutely that very annoying, probably socially awkward child. I sometimes refer to her as fifth grade Sharon, who always had, I feel like I've been a teacher for a long time. I look back on myself as a young whippersnapper and I'm like, that actually is a good question. Okay. Why did you get in trouble for asking that? And one that I can remember is we were talking about geology in my fifth grade class and how some rocks are radioactive and have like magnetism in them. And I found that really interesting.
Starting point is 00:22:37 And I raised my hand and asked a question, which was, if radiation can cause cancer, why do we use radiation to treat cancer? This is a great question. And he could have just said the dose makes the poison. That's the answer. The dose makes the poison. That's true of anything in life. The dose makes the poison when it comes to water. He could have just said that but instead
Starting point is 00:23:05 i got in trouble you got in trouble i got in trouble yes yes why are you asking that you ask so many inter you're just trying to interrupt you're just trying to like everybody was like shut up sharon i have a story like that too i was in uh i was in a math class in 10th grade and we were learning about factorial. Do you know factorial? Do you remember this? Five factorial is five times four times three times two times one. That's like the little algorithm. That's what it means.
Starting point is 00:23:34 And then they taught us, well, zero factorial is one. And I was like, why? Why? It's this simple algorithm for everything else and then for zero it's one. It's not algorithm for everything else. And then for zero, it's one, it's not even zero times one, because that would be zero. It's just one. And I asked the teacher, why is it one? And she was like, Adam, it just is. Okay. This was in, I was in Florida for a year
Starting point is 00:23:58 in high school. I grew up on Long Island, but we spent one year in Florida. And I just remember this woman's accent very, very, very clearly. Something about something about a Southern accent from a Southern, you know, mom sort of accent is like it had that extra bit of Southern condescension. Like, Adam, why are you asking this? Huh? Like, come on. She was like piped down. I was like, I think this is a valid question.
Starting point is 00:24:16 Now, I feel for teachers. You only got 40 minutes with these kids or whatever. You got to like make it snappy. I get it. But I think we've all had that experience of being chastised for asking questions and for being curious. Yes. I once asked my math teacher about greater than, less than when I was in second grade.
Starting point is 00:24:33 I said, why do we need separate symbols for greater than, less than? Why wouldn't we just move the numbers? Oh, that's a good question. Here's the symbol. The bigger number goes on the left and she could have said because in algebra when you get to algebra you're going to need to be able to interchange the symbols moving the number will change the equation at some point you can't just move the number because of order of operations she could have literally just said that and i
Starting point is 00:25:01 would be like order of operations interesting and then I would have thought about that and maybe like talked about order of operations a different day. But instead, she called my mom. You know what I mean? And I got in trouble. Like she's being disruptive again. I'm so sorry this happened to you. And also you would have loved Adam Ruins Everything as a kid. You would have been one of the kids who was like.
Starting point is 00:25:22 And one of the things I love is that kids, you know, people come to my shows and they say, I used to watch you when I as a kid. You would have been one of the kids who's like, and one of the things I love is that, is that kids come, you know, people come to my shows and they say, I used to watch you when I was a kid, or they come and they say, my kid loves you now and is too young to currently come to the show. And I'm like, that's great. That's career longevity.
Starting point is 00:25:36 But I think the truth is sometimes what's going on is the teachers don't know the answer and they're embarrassed and they, they just, no, this is just what it says in the book. Okay. Like, but unfortunately that is antithetical to learning because if someone has a question like that they are engaging with the material that's right you're thinking about it yeah when i asked a question about factorial when you ask the question about radiation you are really engaging
Starting point is 00:26:02 and learning but you're saying there's a gap in my knowledge. I sometimes think of knowledge as like a tree, right? Where this metaphor makes no sense, but you've got everything that you know and you're bolting on new pieces of the tree. That's why it doesn't make sense. But every time you learn something, you're bolting on a new piece. And so you need to build like a scaffold
Starting point is 00:26:18 up to the new knowledge and needs to connect to everything else that you know. And so you're saying sometimes, hold on a second, there's a gap here. There's a gap underneath. I don't feel secure in this yet because I have a question about what's underlying it. And that is real learning when someone is doing that. And we should be, when a kid asks a question like that, I understand all the reasons why
Starting point is 00:26:36 it's not always possible. And I have grace and patience for teachers who are overworked. But in an ideal world, when a kid is having a question like that, we would take a beat and answer it because that is them trying to learn. And if you can actually answer that question, then they will really learn it and understand it for the rest of their lives. Instead of talking about it on a podcast. As you were mentioning that you were impacted by your teacher had a southern accent. When I used to teach government in Washington, D.C., and government is very, it's a required class. You have to take it to graduate. It can be very dense material.
Starting point is 00:27:22 It can be very dense material. And I discovered that the best way to deliver government information in a class is to do it in my full scale Minnesota accent. And there is nothing that the students found more interesting than that. I'd be like, OK, so today legislative branch. Okay. All right. Are you sitting down? Are you watching me? Okay. Legislative. All right. Here we go. That was instantly interesting. Whereas if you're like, okay, legislative branch, they make laws for the country. Say it in a nice teacher voice. No. If you're like, what are you doing? No, no, don't do it. Stop talking. We're talking about Congress, okay? It's more interesting than any of those conversations you are having.
Starting point is 00:28:11 Eventually, students would raise their hand and be like, can you talk about this topic in your accent? Like it became a request of like, I can listen better if you talk about it in, if you say it in like your weird voice voice your weird i love it and that speaks a little bit to what we were talking about earlier about the sort of intersection in your mind with humor and education that if you can have both uh you remember it better there's no tougher audience than 16 year old boys let me tell you if they laugh at you you have you could probably make anyone laugh if you can get 16 year olds to laugh Let me tell you, if they laugh at you, you have, you could probably make anyone laugh. If you can get 16 year olds to laugh at you, then you can probably.
Starting point is 00:28:49 Yeah. And that to me is a lot of what I'm trying to replicate in my work is I remember what it was like to be that age and to be bored in school, but to then have certain things that really catch your interest and that you do learn that you're excited to learn. And, and I try to reproduce that for people. Tell me more about what you like to talk about on your podcast. What are your favorite topics to discuss? Oh my gosh. So I do a podcast called Factually. It's an interview podcast. I talk to different experts from around the world of human knowledge who come on and share their thoughts and ideas with me. And it's so much fun. Like it's what I like to do is I like to find the researchers who are doing really incredible work, who don't do a lot of
Starting point is 00:29:30 press because they're, they need someone to bring them out of their shells a little bit. They need someone to get them laughing, get them talking and to help make their work, their work intelligible to an audience. And as a result, like we, we have some really incredible conversations on the show. We just did an interview with a woman named Susan Rogers, who's a neuroscientist who studies music and music's effects in the brain. But she was also, get this, a sound engineer who worked on Prince's albums. Like she worked with Prince. Speaking of Minnesota, she worked with Prince and she studies the effect of music in the brain. She's like an incredible guest who talked about how music creates our sense of self,
Starting point is 00:30:05 really cool stuff like that. But I also talked to journalists and writers. I just talked to a guy named John Cohen who wrote The Definitive History of the Lottery in America. And when you think about it, it's kind of weird that we have lotteries to begin with, that the government runs the most popular form of gambling in America. Speaking of government, that's kind of weird, right? Why is that? What is the history behind it? And what are the ill effects of it? And I'm actually also getting now government employees and officials on the show because
Starting point is 00:30:35 people have started to realize that we communicate this stuff really well on the show. So we just had the general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, who is our sort of highest enforcement officer for labor issues, talking about, you know, stuff like the railroad strike that almost happened and things like that. For me, it's a chance to really sit down and ask a person who's either in a position of power or has a great deal of knowledge every question I have for them over the course of an hour and get really in depth and say, okay, well, hold on a second. If that's true, that's mind blowing. But then if that, then what about this?
Starting point is 00:31:08 You know, and we really go down the rabbit hole and it is an absolute blast. I love that. I feel like so many people listening to this will love your show factually. Definitely check out Adam's podcast. Thank you so much for being here today. Oh, my God. Pleasure. I had a blast, Sharon.
Starting point is 00:31:23 Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for being America's government teacher. Now that I, look, my show is a mini series, so I'm off the clock now teaching people about government. I will continue your important work, Adam. Thank you so much, Sharon. Thank you so much for joining me and Adam. You can check out his podcast, Factually,
Starting point is 00:31:42 wherever you download podcasts. I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider sharing it on social media or leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? All those things help podcasters out so much. The show is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, and Sharon McMahon. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, and Sharon McMahon.
Starting point is 00:32:05 Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.

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