[Applause] >> Hello, everybody. Hello, hello, hello! So, yeah, I had an overnight shoot on Friday
night. We were shooting my show, Adam Ruins Everything. I missed the beginning of the festival, we
were shooting from 7pm until 7am Saturday morning, at which point I went directly to
the airport and got in a flight here. And since we had a very busy week, that 7pm
to 7am period is also the amount of time I had to work on the deck for this presentation. There's an image of me working on it. There it is. That's me between shots at 3am furiously working
on this deck while totally sleep-deprived, so I apologize if the deck's a little loopy. This conference is very special, I've been
a fan of it for so long, and it was an honor to be asked to speak. It was really important to me, so I made it
work. You guys ready to do this talk? [Cheers]
All right, here we go! My name is Adam Conover. I host a show called Adam Ruins Everything,
in which I tell people awful truths they don't want to hear and dispel common misconceptions. Let's just show a little clip. >> This is Adam Ruins Everything. Every week, I reveal the awful truth about
a beloved part of your world. >> Is he riding with us tonight? >> No, no! >> I'd be delighted to. >> Where are you? >> I'm on some kind of terrifying adventure... >> A terrifying adventure of learning! >> There's very little evidence that the TSA
has ever stopped a terrorist. >> You have the right to remain... >> Silent? Oh, gosh, I wish I could. >> But 100 years ago, Listerine was used and
marketed as a generic household cleaning fluid. >> Ah, don't you feel safe and warm? >> Stranger danger! >> Don't worry, kids, you're far more likely
to be hurt by a family member than a stranger. >> Who hurt that guy? >> That's a little clip package TruTV put
together. But I wanted to bring a little local flavor,
I wanted to do something a little special for XOXO. So I put together a special ruin just for
today. This is Adam Ruins Portland and Oregon, more
generally. [Cheers] I should say it like on the show. This is Adam Ruins Portland. Okay. So in the popular imagination, Portland and
Oregon, more generally, we think of them as being this progressive, liberal haven where
everyone is enlightened and tolerant. That's the vision of Portland put forward
by Portlandia, for instance. That's the story we tell about this place. However, it is a fact Portland is the whitest
big city in the country. Now why would that be? Is it just an accident of demographics? Do people of color just not like donuts with
bacon on them? [Laughter] Sorry. What else could it be? The city is so forward-thinking and tolerant,
what could be going on? Well, part of the answer is that Oregon was
founded as a white supremacist utopia. This is true. Here are some uncomfortable facts about the
state. When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859,
it was the only state in the union whose Constitution explicitly forbade black people from living,
working, or earning property here. It was actually illegal for black people to
move to the state until 1926, less than 100 years ago. Not that the people of Oregon at the time
were racist. No, no, they actually considered themselves
progressive, at the time, because they were opposed to slavery. They just didn't want to live around any black
people. In other words, Oregon's whiteness isn't a
bug, it's a feature that was purposefully intended by the people who founded this state. It's not just a matter of history. A 2011 audit found that Oregon landlords discriminated
against black and Latino renters 64% of the time. In area schools, African-American students
were suspended and expelled at a rate 4-5 times higher than their white peers. And today, less than 2% of Oregon is black
compared to 12% nationally. This is one of the main things that we do
on our show. We reveal how the stories we tell ourselves
about our society aren't true and how it's the hidden histories we so rarely confront
that shape the world we live in today. But I also have to admit this is a huge bummer,
right? It's not fun to learn that. How the hell have I built a career on telling
people shit like this on television? I'll be honest, I'm surprised too because
it hasn't always gone well for me. I've been absorbing information like this
my entire life. Most of the time, when I try to tell people
about it, they don't like it. There was the time I told my friends who just
bought a home that they would be better off renting. Or the time, this is true, that I tried to
explain to an airline pilot that it's a myth that you have to power your devices off when
the plane took off. He didn't enjoy me correcting him on that. He thought he knew his business, he was wrong. In my real, regular life, this compulsion
to tell people these things has always gotten me in trouble. This is a time when people seem so entrenched
in their own world views, so unwilling to hear new ideas. Oh, fuck. Very pressed for time. So, how did I make a comedy career telling
people things they don't want to hear? Well, let's step through it. In 2013, I was a standup comedian in New York
City which was exactly as unglamorous as it looks in this YouTube still. That was not in the comedy club proper, that
was in the basement. They put up a little sign. I've been doing comedy for a decade. I had gotten pretty good at making people
laugh, but after you do comedy that long you realize making people laugh kind of becomes
the easy part. You know how to lean into a sentence. You know how to find the punchline. You're surrounded by comedians who can all
do that just as well as you. The hard part becomes finding something to
stay that people give a shit about. I was trying to figure that out. A couple years prior, I read this article
in The Atlantic about the diamond industry. [Single cheer] An Atlantic reader. Wow. [Laughter] Okay! The article wasn't very funny or anything,
but the information stuck with me. One day I just started talking about it on
stage. I'd like to do that standup bit for you guys,
are you cool with that? [Applause] It is a little gear shift to straight
up do standup, but let's do it. Okay. So, all my friends are getting married now. Classic standup intro. All my friends are getting married now and
you know, the weird thing about wedding traditions is a lot of them, we don't even know why we
do them anymore. Like I was talking to my mom and she was telling
me when you're buying an engagement ring, the rule is the ring has to cost three months'
salary? That's what her mom told her, that's what
she told me, apparently that's the rule. I thought that was a little suspicious, so
I went home and looked it up and it turns out that's not a rule. That's just an ad campaign that the De Beers
diamond corporation ran in the '30s and people internalized it, forgot it was an ad and now
they repeat it to each other as a rule. That's wild, right? That has to be the most successful ad campaign
of all time. That's like if in 100 years people are going,
I'm kind of hungry? What's that old rule? Pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening,
pizza at suppertime, when pizza's on a bagel, you must eat pizza all the time? Okay. I guess we are having pizza bagels. [Laughter] That's the rule! Thank you guys for remembering that ad campaign. I have to say, I understated it a little bit
because I continued to read the article and it turns out the entire concept of a diamond
engagement ring was made up by De Beers to sell more diamonds and that's 100% true. Nobody was doing it before they put it in
movies, magazines, massive ad campaign to convince us it was something you had to do
and now it is part of our culture. I find that to be a mind blowing fact, but
unfortunately, we're still fucked because knowing that does not get you out of buying
an engagement ring. [Laughter] I can't propose to my girlfriend
like, Honey, will you marry me? Well, this isn't a ring because the concept
of an engagement ring is a scam on the part of the De Beers Corporation. This is a joint checking account. [Laughter] It's far more meaningful. [Applause]
That's the bit. It's the original genesis of all of Adam Ruins
Everything was me doing that bit. And when I did that bit on stage, I started
to notice the audience would react a little bit differently. They would laugh like they did for all my
other bits, but they would also lean forward in their seats a little bit and listen a little
bit harder to what I was saying. After the show, people would come up to me
and say, is that really true? That's incredible. And they'd come to my next show and say, I
looked that up and that was true! I can't believe it. Oh my gosh. And I realized something really important,
which is that people just fucking like to learn. [Applause] They like it! People like it! I'm serious, we forget that. Sometimes people say with Adam Ruins Everything,
you're hiding the medicine in the dog treat, right? You're giving them something they don't want
and making it tasty with comedy. No, we're not. Everyone actually just does have a desire
to learn and share knowledge, just not everybody has the time or the access to the information. By combining comedy and information, I wasn't
just elevating the comedy, I was also giving people the information, the learning, the
new knowledge, the new perspective they craved, just in a way that made it go down easier. I realized hey, if this works on stage, it
should work on the internet too. At the time I was working at CollegeHumor,
I was a video writer there, and they're going to be very mad I put that jester up. They're very embarrassed by that art. It was in many ways a writer's paradise. I had near total creative freedom. I was forced to write every week, which is
one of the most important things... if you want to get better at a skill, put yourself
in a position where if you don't practice, you'll be fired and you'll get better. I got immediate feedback on everything I created
from our audience. But I also realized that for a clip to really
catch on, it couldn't just be funny. It also needed to give the audience something
else they wanted, and it needed to give them a reason to share. The classic version of this is the relatable
video. You know, That Feeling When... The guy in the office who X, Y, Z... You Know When Your Parents Do This... And then people will share that video because
oh, I relate to that and I'm going to post that because that says something about me. Well, I had the inkling that the same deep
down drive to learn and share information that made me want to tell people about the
diamond article, that made me want to tell that pilot that he was wrong, might also cause
people to share a funny video that taught them something fascinating. So I said I'm going to convert that bit into
a sketch. The problem was I had tried to write material
like this before at CollegeHumor and the reaction from the writer's room was not great. Writer's rooms are very cruel and I always
got the vibe that other writers thought my pedantic rants were annoying. So to ward off the blowback when I brought
this script to the writer's room, I just wrote in two of the writers being annoyed with me
into the script so they couldn't be annoyed with me in the room. And we wrote it that way. Emily and Murph, my co-writers and eventual
co-stars. And by doing that, I unwittingly created the
comedy engine for the entire series. Here's the entire secret to Adam Ruins Everything. If I were to boil down what success we've
had, the whole formula, it's this. First, I say a fact, and then second, I get
yelled at. That's it. That's all I do. [Laughter] That's the pattern of the entire
show. Watch our show. You'll see that pattern in action. What I figured out that I had discovered without
realizing it was this comedy principle called status switching. It's the only reason my character on the show
is even tolerable. Status switching, the easy way to think about
it is like the movie Trading Places. Rich man becomes poor, poor man is rich -- there's
a switch, there's a reversal. It's funny. Elemental thing that's funny. When I'm teaching another character on the
show, I'm high status, and when the other character's make fun of me for ruining everything,
it reverses and I become low status. Or my character often learns things on the
show. We bring on experts, we bring on other characters. Sometimes we need to voice a fact that a white
man by default wouldn't know about, and so we have another character on the show educate
me. When we do that, I become low status and I'm
on the bottom. And as my friend, the very talented writer
Eliza Skinner pointed out to me, that helps the audience see me as a friend. Because a friend isn't someone who you're
always superior or inferior to. A friend is someone you switch with. Sometimes you make fun of them, sometimes
they make fun of you. Sometimes you're late, sometimes they're late. Sometimes you're the better friend. Sometimes they're the better friend. So we made this video. It was called "Why Engagement Rings Are a
Scam." It got over 12 million views. We made a few more videos, they did well too. And I suddenly realized that our videos were
actually changing minds. People were coming up to me and saying things
like, my girlfriend and I saved the money we would have wasted on a ring because of
your video. Or because of you, we didn't get our son circumcised. If you want to circumcise, go ahead. There's no medical reason to do it, you can. But I was like, that's a profound effect to
have other on people's... [Laughter] There's some kids out there who,
like, owe their foreskins to me. [Laughter] Wow, that is a direct impact, you
know? And then, I used to think guys with your haircut
were douchebags is the third... Ah, the circumcision thing was funnier. [Laughter] The format I stumbled across turned
out to be the secret sauce for changing people's attitudes, which meant that when we sold the
show to TruTV and gained a big new audience, I felt we also took on a lot of responsibility. Because now that we were on television, we
had the opportunity to dispel misconceptions and spread challenging ideas to the people
on the largest broadcast medium ever devised. And it was very, very important to me that
we broadcast, that we not narrowcast. That we make a show that anyone in the country
could learn something from. In other words, I did not want to preach to
the choir, right? I wanted to change minds. That was very, very important to me. That put our show in a desperate battle with
something called the backfire effect. We've discussed the backfire effect on our
show. It's a phenomenon, a psychological phenomenon,
in which when you give people strong evidence against their beliefs, many people will reject
the evidence and believe their old misconception even more strongly. It happens all the time. It happens on the internet every day. I'm sure you've seen it happen. When you correct people, they just arm their
defenses even harder. It's a really powerful problem. We fight back against it in a few ways. We cite all of our sources on screen and encourage
the audience to go look at them and judge for themselves, to do the reading themselves. We provide a counter-narrative that's stronger
than the original myth. The story of how the diamond engagement ring
was created is much more memorable and powerful than the idea that we've been doing it forever. We voice good faith counter-arguments and
respond to them. That's so important. We don't just leave them sitting on the table
if the audience is going to think, hey, well, here's my answer to that. We respond to it right on the show. And we're transparent in response to criticism
of the show. We actually did a segment, an entire segment
correcting mistakes we had made on the show and exposing our research process to the audience
so they understood even when we're making errors, we're doing so in good faith. Everyone makes mistakes. The goal is not perfection, the goal is honesty,
transparency, and growth. We work really, really hard to put out a show
that changes minds and convinces people of the facts, and then encourages people to think
more critically about the world around them that causes them to expand their perspective. That's our mission and we take it very seriously. We also try to make jokes on occasion. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work. People say to me, you must get a ton of pushback
on your show. We do. But the weird thing is we don't get it when
we'd expect. We didn't get a ton of angry responses to
our segment about how climate change is happening right now before our eyes. We didn't get a ton of angry responses about
how trophy hunting can be good for endangered animals in some situations, or about how formula
feeding shouldn't be stigmatized in favor of breastfeeding. These are all very divisive issues, you'd
think we'd get a lot of angry replies. The video that got the angriest responses,
by far, was a total surprise to me. It was this one, Why Alpha Males Don't Exist. [Laughter] Now the idea of the alpha male
is simply, I don't know how else to put it. It's simply an unscientific concept. It's a very popular idea in pop psychology,
but there is no sociologist or anthropologist on Earth who would tell you there is such
a thing as an alpha male in the human species. That's just not how people work as a species. It's not even how wolves work as a species,
it turns out that's a myth and we debunk it on the show. Because this idea is so pervasive, but there
is no science behind it, we thought it was a perfect topic for us to ruin. We were a little surprised when we received
video response after video response claiming that we hate men and that I'm a beta... [Laughter] Which is weird because you would
think the most beta move would be to be so insecure in your own masculinity that you
cling to a false dichotomy and make 23-minute long YouTube videos insulting other men to
make yourself feel better. [Applause] Not a lot of confidence being expressed. I like to think I've transcended the dichotomy
and I'm thus an alpha and omega male. [Laughter] Dumb joke. So what's going on here? Why are so many people defending this completely
pseudo-scientific concept? It's not what you'd expect, right? Well, what has happened is that communities
on the internet like the pickup artist community, the "men's rights" activist community, people
like that, have latched on to this concept of the alpha male and they've embedded this
bit of pseudoscience into a complex ideology they've built their entire personal identity
on. In other job, my job is dispelling bullshit,
but these guys live on top of bullshit mountain. [Applause] And they're worried that if someone
removes too much of the bullshit, the whole structure will collapse taking their identity
down with it, so they make these YouTube videos to shore it up and plug the holes. [Laughter]
There's a scientific name for this, it's called identity protective cognition. When someone's identity is threatened by a
new idea, they fight back to defend it. It's why a hardcore climate change denier
who's made their career, their whole life, on denying climate change will never change
their minds. It's why your friend who bought the Tesla
on the first day and wears the Tesla shirt and everything will defend Elon Musk in the
face of -- I mean, god, what the fuck has he done today? [Laughter] This is a really powerful thing. When you built your sense of identity around
an idea, it is really hard to hear a contradiction to it. It's the strongest force that we've come up
with, and I'm sure there are times that I do it too. This is something that we are all... Don't just think of this as something other
people do. You guys do this too. You folks do this too, excuse me. It's a very powerful force, and I haven't
figured out how to beat it yet. I don't know how. I want to tell you about another video that
caused some strong reactions. Last year, we did a video called Adam Ruins
The Suburbs. [Clap] The Atlantic reader also saw this video. [Laughter] Thank you. Not surprising, really. The short version is that after World War
II, America experienced the greatest ever surge in middle class homeownership. It was the birth of a new American dream. Millions and millions of Americans were suddenly
buying homes and that created the world that we live in today. But black Americans were largely shut out
of that dream because of a process called redlining. Redlining was a system by which the Federal
Government explicitly segregated homeownership by denying loans to black Americans, which
created a massive wealth disparity we still persist with today, because if your grandparents
didn't get a government-backed loan to buy a house, then your family doesn't have that
house now. And it segregated suburban neighborhoods. So if you've ever wondered why the town where
you grew up in, like the one that I grew up in, was divided into a white neighborhood
and a black neighborhood, redlining is arguably the most significant reason. It's another story about how our history affects
and creates the present we have today. It also features an interview with Nikole
Hannah-Jones, who is one of the foremost writers on this subject in this country. Her work is incredible. Check it out. [Applause] Some of you have seen it. We were incredibly lucky and honored to have
her on the show, and this video was a hit for us. It's honestly one of the segments that me
and my team are proudest of the most. And, unfortunately, not everybody loved it. You know, don't read the comments, right? No, fuck it, let's read some. [Laughter]
"White folks, you don't have to apologize for wanting to live with your own kind." "People will self-segregate. This is not a problem." "Denying loans isn't a matter of race, it's
economics." "What's wrong with being white? Are you raceest?" [Laughter] And also, "Hey, that's the guy
from Dog with a Blog." That's on point, my co-star Regan did indeed
star on the Disney Channel sitcom, Dog With A Blog. [Laughter] They were very perceptive. Man, you can't slip one by them. By the way, remember the good old days of
the web when dogs still had blogs? [Laughter] Now all the dogs are on FaceBark. [Laughter and groans] I'm sorry, that was
the best joke in the talk, so it's not going to get better than that. You should enjoy that one while you can. I hope it distracted you from the completely
unashamed racism of the previous comments. You know, we often have the desire to write
that off, right? That the comments are just written by some
monkeys on typewriters that we don't need to pay attention to. But I look at them as, no, those are real
people who watched the video and had that actual reaction. My goal, again, is to change minds. I want to speak to everyone. That's the goal I have set for myself. I don't know how to change the minds of people
who have that prejudiced of a perspective. It wasn't just the comments. This video has one of the highest dislike
ratios of any video we've ever made. 98,000 upvotes to 28,000 downvotes. For a while, I got really bummed out about
that. We told a true story. The story of redlining is settled history. This is not fringe history, this is not surprising
facts to historians. This is some of the most solid history we
have. This is 20th century shit. We told this story in the most honest, open
and humorous way we could and there were still that many people whose minds were closed to
it. And that really sucks because those are the
people, in my opinion, who need to hear it the most. Right, I don't want to preach to the choir. I want to change the minds of the people who
need to hear it. I felt like I failed and I beat myself up
about it for a while. At some point, I realized I was focusing on
the wrong number. Instead of focusing on these people, I needed
to focus on these people. We made a difficult video about the most divisive
topic in America and 4 out of 5 people who cared enough to click a button on YouTube
liked it. This is not bad. 4 out of 5 wins every election every time,
right? So why was I focusing so much on trying to
win over the most close-minded people? The most set in their ways? The most prejudiced? When there were so many minds willing and
eager to be opened. Was it because I didn't want to preach to
the choir? As I was thinking about this, I read an essay
by the writer Rebecca Solnit. [Cheers] She is wonderful. It was called Preaching to the Choir, I recommend
you DuckDuckGo it. [Laughter] Oh, yeah, this is my crowd. It's a wonderful piece, look it up. There's no paywall, you can read it. But this excerpt really stuck with me. "The phrase 'preaching to the choir' implies
that talking to those with whom we agree achieves nothing. But only the most patient and skillful among
us can alter the views of those who disagree most profoundly. Is there no purpose in getting preached to,
in gathering with your compatriots?" And she speaks to a preacher who gives this
next quotation. And she says that her task as a preacher "is
to find the places of agreement and move somewhere from there. Not to change anybody's mind, but to deepen
an understanding." That made me think about how, despite the
fact that I did not reach -- let me take it back. That made me think about how despite the fact
I could not reach those hardcore downvoters, friends of mine around Los Angeles, smart
people who they already care about issues like race and segregation, right. They're already in my choir, they would come
up to me and say man, I saw that redlining video. I can't believe I didn't know that. It changed the way I see my neighborhood. Or when I went on tour, you know, a couple
years ago we went on a big tour and toured all around the country and an old dude in
Dallas came up to me and said I don't agree with everything you say, but I like the fact
that you make me think. Or I think about how a 12-year-old wrote me
a letter saying she liked how we corrected our mistakes and she was going to try to do
the same thing. The fact that our message is most strongly
heard by those who are receptive to it... That's not a weakness. It's a strength, because those are the people
who will deepen their understanding and take action as a result of hearing it. So, who is my choir? My choir is made up of anyone who is open-minded
and loves to learn, anyone who prefers hard truths to comforting fictions, and anyone
who's empathetic and doesn't want to see others suffer and thinks that's something we should
stop when we can. That's a lot of people. That's easily four out of five people. And that means by focusing on them and directing
our energy towards that audience, we can change minds and we can have impact. In other words, as much as it is still my
goal to reach everyone, to reach every single person that I can, to change as many minds
as I can, I don't write anybody off, I try to speak to anyone who will hear me, I've
gotten more comfortable with preaching to the choir because the truth is the choir is
big as fuck. [Applause and cheers] That's all I got. Thank you guys so much. Thank you, folks, so much. Thank you. [Applause]
