This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know what you think I don't know what you say

and that's all right

yeah that's okay

I don't know anything.

Hello, welcome to factually, I'm Adam Conover, and look, if you've listened to the show before you probably know that my personal

mission in life is to understand the world as deeply and richly as I possibly can.

That is what gets me out of bed every single morning.

And since you're listening to this show, I'm guessing that you feel similarly that that's a

mission for you too.

One of the cool things about our era is that we have more data than we have ever had before about the world.

If you're inclined, you can take an endless array of charts and stats and read them and understand them in order to make sense of our world.

But the problem is that numbers are by themselves insufficient to truly understand society

and our universe because one thing a statistic can never give you is direct

insight into another person's life what it feels like to be them. You know there's a

reason that when Frederick Douglas

sought to change American minds about slavery he didn't just put a bunch of slavery

statistics into a spreadsheet even if spreadsheets had been invented by then no

he wrote a narrative of the life of an American slave.

A book which, if you read it today, conveys a truth about slavery, about that institution that no set in numbers can ever give you.

That's because as great and powerful as facts and figures are,

if you can enter the head space of another person, really understand what their life is like, it changes what you think about that issue forever.

It gives you a deeper understanding of a different part of the world. It sounds so cliche, but I swear it is true.

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