What’s Wrong with Capitalism? with John Cassidy

Factually! with Adam Conover

Headgum

Comedy

4.4 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2025

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 collectively started to believe that there’s nothing to be done about it. Find John's book at factuallypod.com/books

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a headgum podcast.
0:05.0	I don't know the truth.
0:08.3	I don't know the way.
0:10.9	I don't know what to think.
0:13.6	I don't know what to say.
0:16.6	Yeah, but that's all right.
0:19.4	That's okay.
0:22.0	I don't know anything.
0:27.1	Hey there, welcome to Factually.
0:28.6	I'm Adam Conover.
0:29.6	Thank you so much for joining me on the show again.
0:31.6	You know, it's pretty apparent if you look around the world today that capitalism, or at least the kind of capitalism we have,
0:38.7	is not going great.
0:41.1	You know, climate change could have been addressed early on decades ago if it weren't for the
0:45.9	efforts of the global oil industry and the rest of the corporations that run the planet
0:50.1	to stop us from doing anything about it.
0:52.8	And the neoliberal era of globalization, which hollowed out the middle class in this country,
0:58.0	created massive inequality around the world.
1:00.5	Well, that paved the way for the fascist backlash we are living under today.
1:05.4	We as a society, as a species, let capitalism run rampant across our planet in a way that has mangled our future,
1:14.2	our democracy, and ultimately all of our lives. It was fundamentally self-destructive to do so.
1:21.4	So what the fuck happened? Why did we do it and why were we unable to stop it? We have lived under capitalism
	...

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