Who's Afraid of the Experts? | Philosophy Tube ft. Adam Conover

so for those in my audience who aren't familiar with you already would you mind introducing yourself sure thing uh hello my name is adam conover i'm the host and creator of adam ruins everything the television show and i'm also the host of a podcast called factually where speaking of experts i bring on a different expert every week to tell you all about the fascinating topic that they know about and you might not and what is adam maroon's everything uh adam ruins everything is i call it i guess an educational sketch comedy tv show informational comedy show it's a whole new season joy i know i can make work that is original and true and objectively great actually a lot of fine art is none of those things the fda legally allows calorie labels to be off by 20 percent shakespeare wrote romeo and juliet after he read an epic poem called a romy yes and juliet your boy the bard is about to do it again columbus was an incompetent buffoon who never even set foot in america uh we uh debunk common misconceptions uh share incredible truths about the world that most people don't know um tell you the awful side of everything that you take for granted that's sort of like i'm going back to like our original log lines now um and i sort of do it in this very vibrant fast-moving visual sketch comedy world as opposed to a lot of other comedians who are doing things in the hybrid informational comedy space where they're sitting behind a desk or standing on a soundstage i'm out in the world and specifically it's uh all our episodes are done as a sort of socratic dialogue where i'm talking to another person and having a conversation with them about the issue and they're sort of standing in as an audience surrogate asking the questions that uh most audience members might ask since my episode today is about experts and expertise i guess the first first question to get us going is a simple one which is are you adam an expert i don't think so no i mean i'm an expert on comedy i'm an expert on making television i'm an expert on making educational television and you know uh i would say communication like say uh science communication or media literacy sometimes asked to speak on and then i can feel i can speak with actual expertise uh the rest of the time on the show i am in my view signal boosting other experts right almost every segment that you see on our show we are taking an argument that another very smart person has made or a discovery that they have made and we're sort of you know ingesting it chewing it up spitting it back out in our own way right with our own spin on it our own sort of spin on the argument our own jokes um and then we usually at least two times an episode bring in an expert uh to literally appear on the show and to put the sort of final button on it and really give us the direct you know the direct communication with the actual expertise that's out there the chief exec of the nhs and most of the leaders of the trade unions in britain all say that you boris and nigel are wrong why should the public trust you i'm not asking the public to trust me i'm asking the public to trust themselves i'm asking the british public to take back control of our destiny from those organizations which are distant unaccountable elitist and don't have their um is experts terrify me it's so hard to know who to trust does anyone really know what we're doing or are we all just flying blind i think the people in this country have had enough of experts let me tell you a story about a deadly pandemic a president who ignored it and the people who didn't believe that the virus even existed it started in los angeles the year was 1981 and a doctor named michael gottlieb noticed that five young men had gotten sick or died recently from a rare kind of pneumonia that you wouldn't normally expect young men to get it looked like their immune systems had somehow shut down and in all five cases the men happened to be gay other doctors started noticing similar cases and it quickly became clear that an epidemic was underway but almost all the experts initially focused on gay men there had been reports for years of intravenous drug users dying of something people called junkie flu but the us still charges people for healthcare those drug users tended to be poor and therefore weren't as likely to go to the doctor and report their symptoms by the time anyone noticed that they were dying of the same thing experts were already calling the disease gay related immune deficiency or grid and what you name a disease is a critical thing because it affects how people respond to it how much they judge themselves to be at risk and what kind of research gets done all of which affects how deadly it turns out to be i would like to begin by announcing some important developments in our war against the chinese virus even though the disease was later renamed aids the idea that it was gay related took hold in a lot of people nobody knew what caused it but a lot of media coverage focused on gay victims who took party drugs or had many sexual partners and so the hypothesis emerged that it was caused by the gay lifestyle you know that thing that definitely exists that one gay lifestyle that all gay people have with the with the drugs and the sex and the the voguing it must weaken your immune system somehow but the evidence was clear people who didn't do those things were still getting it so some experts started to suspect that aids might be caused by a retro virus a special kind of virus that first evolved 450 million years ago it's tough to get more retro than that among the experts investigating the virus angle was robert gallo a scientist at the usa's national institute for health he previously discovered two kinds of retrovirus that affect humans he called them htlv1 and htlv2 and he won prizes for this work so he was a very prominent expert but in 1983 it wasn't gallo it was a french team at the pasteur institute in paris who did some tests on aids patients and found a mystery retrovirus they called it l-a-v which stood for lymphedema which stood for the aids virus and they sent their results to robert gallo after all he's missed a retrovirus and he said hey this is great stuff you should publish it in science big prestigious journal tell you what i'll even write the abstract for you you know the bit at the top of the article that most people don't read beyond and he did write it and he said that the french virus was similar to his own htlv a claim that the paper did not support and the french team said hey uh this isn't one of yours this is a new thing that we just found they even sent him a sample like here take a look and a few months later this happened first the probable cause of aids has been found a variant of a known human cancer virus i would like to turn now to the eminent scientist who has made the breakthrough which promised the conference today and call upon dr robert gallo with applause and appreciate as secretary of health and human services and with the appreciation of the american people and i'd like to ask dr gallo robert gallo with the backing of the american government announced that his team had found the cause of aids a retrovirus which he called htlv 3 under a microscope gallows virus was photographed wearing tiny berries and carrying baguettes just nanometers across and as if that wasn't enough genetic testing later revealed it to be 99 identical to the french sample now one of two things probably happened here either gallo stole the french sample and tried to pass it off with his own discovery or there was some cross-contamination in the lab and some of the french virus got on his equipment it does happen we don't know for sure one thing gallo did have going in his favor though was that he wasn't just an expert he was an american expert the reagan regime had been heavily criticized for not really doing anything about the aids crisis so when gallo said he thought he'd found the cause they were quick to wheel him out so quick in fact that at the time of that press conference his work hadn't even been published or peer reviewed yet but just a few hours afterwards the us government filed a lucrative patent for an antibody test eventually gallo was forced to admit that the virus he found was not a species of htlv there was an out-of-court settlement with the french government and in 1986 the virus had a new name h i v and that sort of thing terrifies me the idea that someone can become an influential expert even influence government not necessarily because they know the answers because they are a pawn in someone else's political game according to philosophy professor miranda fricker a good expert needs three things they need to be competent and trustworthy that means they need to know the truth and tell the truth but the third thing an expert needs is what she calls working indicator properties which is really just a fancy philosophical way of saying they need to look the part so sometimes you will get experts on the show how do you choose the experts that you bring on well we want the person who actually knows right that's what i want to bring to the audience is hey there is a person out there who has studied this for their entire lives right or for decades or for years uh or or they have experienced the thing firsthand is another type of expert that we have on um and uh we're gonna introduce them to you bring them into your living room so that you really get to meet them i think that's really really valuable so um for instance we did a segment uh on immigration and one of the points we made was that you know immigration doesn't work the way that in the united states we normally think of where you have you know people sneaking across the border to uh you know steal jobs and that sort of thing there's a lot of like statistical demographic facts that the average person doesn't understand um for instance that the rate of immigration is actually at an all-time low is one thing that you would not be able to tell from watching the contemporary political discourse in america um and other things like that right so we brought on a professor who has literally been doing field research on immigration since the 70s he goes down to you know the border uh the america southern border and does field research he interviews people he takes notes how long have you been here do you know anyone who's across the border et cetera just like straight up demographic research uh using you know peer-reviewed techniques and he publishes that data and you know the us government uses his data set right to uh draw their own conclusions and so when this dude comes on and says immigration is actually at a all-time low this is the dude who knows you know what i mean it's a perspective we don't often get because you know he's not particularly uh you know media trained or or uh you know telegenic or any of those other sorts of things that your average pundit is he just happens to be the actual dude who's done the research so you like to bring that sort of person on um we also like to bring on the sort of person who's experienced the subject directly we are often looking for someone who has a particular critique right a particular uh a lot of times we call it framing right a way of looking at the issue and describing the issue that is vivid and compelling and fresh and is an argument that other people are not making so that's so that's so fascinating to me because that means that there's an element of who gets to be an expert that isn't knowledge based that's not as philosophers would say epistemic because you are looking for people who have this fresh take and who do say things in in moving and provocative and and i suppose like telegenic ways and that's like that's so fascinating there's this extra dimension of expertise yeah that's a really interesting point and it is one that we grapple with because you know douglas massey the professor uh who studied immigration extremely i'll just say he's not intelligent i don't think he would he would argue with me i hope he doesn't feel offended if i say that he's not a guy who has made his career or has tried to make his career on being a communicator right on being on television he's the guy who does the original research and that is why we wanted him on there for that segment he was perfect for that segment right but about a year and a half ago we had on scott galloway who's an nyu business school professor to talk on talk about why big tech should be broken up right and he is an expert because he's a business school professor who studies tech firms and he's written books about them right he also happens to be amazing on camera you know there's a degree to which even in the world of academia right that that that idea of being being a good performer or being witty and being quick on your feet like really does bring attention to you right and look i'm on television i'm a communicator i can't ignore that part of it right i can't just never have those people on but it's true that television has a bias towards people who are good communicators and those people don't aren't necessarily experts they don't necessarily know more because i know from experience communication being good on tv is a skill that you have to practice at right i i would know more about immigration or about tech firms if i'd gone to school for those things instead of doing open mic stand-up comedy for 10 years right but that's what i did and because i did that i am now good at communicating and i can be on tv where other people can't right so it is it is an interesting question that you raise it seems pretty unavoidable that whilst expertise can be a matter of knowledge and accuracy it's also about theater fairly the spectrometer hath revealed that the oxidizing agent was bromium monochloride [Music] and if expertise is a kind of performance then some people are more likely to be cast in the role than others when it comes to medicine patients sometimes get dealt with like they don't know their own symptoms and this restriction of expert status can fall along racial lines black patients in the us report that doctors frequently ignore their pain and black people in the uk are more likely to get arrested and less likely to be treated for mental health problems than white people dr ruth pierce of the university of leeds studied the history of the aids epidemic and realized that many of the same clashes over who gets to play the expert are still being had today and they don't just affect who gets listened to but also who gets punished doctors who deviate from expert guidelines can face severe penalties even when those expert guidelines are later revealed to be wrong and when new discoveries are made it's usually established experts who take credit even if they're just aggregating the work of ordinary people [Music] punk music was invented by the intellectuals of the situationist international some musicians were also involved so if being an expert does have a performative element to it that goes beyond the evidence someone might check perhaps it's little wonder that sometimes people reject the consensus of experts have you received any backlash to the show i'm guessing that you have oh of course what the show does is we uproot entrenched narratives and replace them with truer narratives right and so of course there are people who are so wedded to the old narrative that they fight back right and they uh i mean you can just go you'll find you know any dozens of you know response videos made by you know people on youtube who just you know hit play then they hit pause and go this guy doesn't know what he's talking about uh uh okay adam uh clearly we all know and then they you know they spout off sometimes they all are called x ruins adam is everything they're all called oh yeah yeah of course of course um and and by the way i did a funny voice a lot of them are good faith and are are good right in our good videos and and you know there we have done two segments on the show where we have corrected past mistakes and we've added nuance to past segments right um we've uh you know we have a really open process with regard to that with regard to that type of thing um and you know i'll say that most people love it when an entrenched narrative up is uprooted they love the the whole thing of this thing you always believed is not true they're like oh my god really tell me more because they want to know yeah they're learning something and it's fun to learn and most people are open-minded and positive and like to learn things um but yeah there are people who are just like you know their identity is we talked about this on the show it's called identity protective cognition right um and when a piece of information threatens what you perceive as being your identity uh you fight back really hard against it uh almost instinctively so yeah that uh you know the the key thing to do is to give those folks a new narrative right um we when we had a expert on talk about the backfire effect um he came on and talked about how the backfire effect is when you're presented with new information you lash out against it right and and come come back against it even harder uh well uh what you one of the things you said is that narratives are powerful you need to replace an old narrative with a new narrative that's even better right and when he said that on the air on our show i was like oh that's like what our show actually does because we are providing folks with like you know a more intere like you've been told that the engagement ring is you know this age-old tradition but you know what's even more interesting than that it was invented in the 30s by the de beers corporation to sell more diamonds that story is better than the old story also has the advantage of being true right so it's more interesting like it it's it's more interesting that okay oh yeah some old prince did it you know a thousand years ago and now we're all following the same pattern okay sure not much of a story a shadowy cabal of uh diamond miners like hired an advertising firm to inject a a new tradition into society via advertising and we all believed it and then forgot it was an ad campaign and now we just believe that it's a tradition that like we independently came up with a thousand years ago that's an incredible story right i could talk that's the first adam ruins everything ever yeah i'm still boggling my own mind just telling you about it today it's a [ __ ] nut story that's why it's better so in the same way you know folks who really have that as part of their identity they need to craft a new identity right and that's hard like i i did i don't know how to provide that to someone in seven minutes and and so that's where that's where i'm trying to you know improve what i do when you do get backlash is it more directed against the factual content of the show is it people saying you are factually wrong or is it more directed at you [Laughter] uh i'd say like 30-70 which way you know uh 30 70 facts versus me personally so it's 70 just like abuse yeah all this guy's got a punchable face of the character it's a it's a funny character where i'm i'm behaving in a fake smug and nerdy way in order to do comedy about how i'm annoying people you're like oh this guy's annoying yeah that's the character urkel was annoying too that was the point you know um but yeah that sort of thing uh you know i get called a cuck that's fine that's you know but uh yeah you know with the with the factual information you know people love to for instance uh find you know we publish all of our sources right um so people can go through and and like read where we got the information from uh and there have been times where you know we published at this point thousands of sources and you know a couple dozen of them are like less good than others right and so people will go pick out that one and say oh look at this like one thing that people say would be like oh they cited a vox article so therefore what they're saying is wrong and in our first year we did cite a couple box articles because their process is i think pretty good right um in future years we you know sort of bolstered our citations process and we would say well let's go find the original study that the vox article is citing because vox is ultimately an aggregator the same as we are right we're repeating information so let's go to the original source of wherever that journalist got their information right weird as it might seem now when hiv was discovered there was a whole movement of people who didn't believe that it existed or if it did they didn't think it was the real cause of aids they said things like oh aids is just pneumonia and they've slapped a new name on it so they can sell you drugs that don't work so pharmaceutical companies can make money some said that aids is really another disease called swine fever spread by pigs but the government doesn't want you to know about it because they're all in the pockets of big pork but in 1987 a biologist named peter duisberg published a paper in which he said hiv was benign he just didn't think it could do the kind of damage that we see in aids patients and he was wrong but the skeptics jumped on him and made him a celebrity expert this rock star scientist going against the mainstream being silenced having his free speech taken away what's happened to open debate we must hear both sides you've probably heard similar things said about public intellectuals today whether it's jordan peterson or julie bindle or david irving i'm not saying that they're all equivalent to duesberg or each other just that i personally find it terrifying when the same tactics have been used to sell ideas for 40 years and we haven't learned a thing duesberg was a media hit especially although not exclusively with conservatives homophobes loved him especially when he suggested that the real cause of aids might be a lifestyle that was criminal 20 years ago play in the hits but of course they didn't explicitly say these dirty gay people are getting sick because they're gay instead they tried to cast doubt on the expert consensus they said things like oh the data isn't all in yet and we are far from understanding this disease and has anyone really proved that it isn't caused by voguing scientific controversies are rarely just about science which is why they don't always end when the data comes in one of the other big factors is who's paying for the air time a lot of people in the usa believed in eugenics for years after it was discredited some still do and that was at least in part because eugenicists had a lot of funding organizations and publications like the american eugenics society and eugenical news were paid for by huge donations from the rockefellers as in rockefeller center the carnegies as in carnegie hall and kellogg's as in cornflakes these fantastically wealthy families paid for the research and the publications and they made sure that eugenics was talked about even though scientifically it was bollocks and this also still happens the heritage foundation are a very influential right-wing american think tank they published aids denialism in the 80s and they're publishing climate denialism now it's the same people doing the same [ __ ] and we haven't learned interestingly though science wasn't just distorted by political ideology some patients were aids denialists too nowadays people with hiv can live very happy lives it can be managed although there is still stigma but back then a lot of people felt it was a death sentence and for many it really was so if you knew you were infected of course you would want to listen to anyone who told you don't worry big pork are just trying to scare you into buying drugs that really will make you sick what you really need is my miracle herbal supplement only 39.99 guaranteed miracle supplement is not guaranteed side effects include constipation diarrhea pneumonia black death shortness of breath and lightness of wallet something else to keep in mind is that being gay was officially considered a mental illness until the 70s so only 10 years later a lot of gay people understandably were like you can't trust doctors and they loved it when duesberg seemed to be pissing them off it will be interesting to see how gallow and the other aids virus ideologues will respond to duesberg's paper and in the interest of scientific dialogue they must respond to it fully and in detail in my opinion the best thing they could do would be to apologize and say they were wrong but i doubt that they will if the public health service and the media remain silent about duesberg's article and persist in expounding the discredited hiv mythology then gay men will have cause to be gravely concerned this would mean that the government and their confederates in the medical establishment are not acting in good faith that nothing they say can be trusted that their interests are hostile to ours their silence would raise the possibility of a horrible hidden agenda the economist deidre mccluskey says that whenever we consider the facts we also consider the person who is presenting them to us even if they're just an anonymous name at the top of an article it's an unavoidable feature of speech that we judge the speaker people doubt the deadly diseases exist people doubt that the earth is round because they are suspicious of the people telling them and whilst that's very understandable and human it can also lead to horrible tragedy the imbeci government of south africa was heavily influenced and later directly advised by peter dewsburg they denied that hiv causes aids they banned the use of antiretrovirals and they actually said that the disease would go away if people stopped testing for it and as a result hundreds of thousands died and south africa still has one of the worst hiv infection rates in the world and again look at the current pandemic it's not just mum genes and vaporwave that's making an 80s come back virus denialism is too although what happened to all of those pig farmers who worked for big pork they all sold their farmland in the 90s right and what did they build on that farmland five g masts do your own research wake up sheeple this little piggy's going to market the marketplace of ideas of course the tricky thing is that people don't always agree on what counts as a fact you probably know that 17th century astronomer galileo got a lot of pushback from the catholic church because his findings seemed to contradict the bible but the catholics weren't backwards irrational rubes who just loved authority they believed that the words of the church were true and counted as knowledge just a different kind of knowledge that's not really a disagreement about the facts that's a disagreement about what counts as the facts which is a lot harder to resolve so have you ever had feedback from people saying that you've changed their minds about stuff oh yeah absolutely i mean our our show is a little bit of a mind-changing machine that's sort of the goal and and you know as we've done harder and harder topics i i have to say i you know i'm not positive you know i think we probably changed more people's minds about engagement rings than about guns right yeah because i think uh people are still more hardened about guns um but yeah i mean i've had people come up to me and say yeah we didn't get an engagement ring because of you instead we took a vacation i'm like wonderful that's great nice we did a segment on circumcision and uh had plenty of people come up to me and say hey adam we didn't circumcise our baby because of your video and i'm like that's a very i don't need to know that but they've got they've got a part they've got a part of their body that they might not have had otherwise you know yeah we we have changed people's minds in that way and and i hope more broadly that we you know what we want the show to do is encourage people to think more critically about the world around them right and to have those questions themselves um and to sort of absorb our process and apply it in their own lives right this process of careful rational empathetic inquiry i suppose i i'm i'm wondering like what is the limit of that and because there are some like this came to me today i was thinking like would there ever be like an adam ruins q anon because i've read an amazing article about that in the atlantic today and what what strikes me about that and about conspiracy theories and all sorts of like really big misconceptions people have is it's not so much based on factual claims but it's more like it's more like a vibe and like how do you how do you expertise how do you present somebody out of something that is like that isn't really decided on the facts that is just like this is like entirely vibes based which which so many really big topics seem to be well yeah i mean we could not like yeah put us in front of like a a q anon supporter right um and i could not fact them out of that right um it's not possible they've built up too much of an edifice um and the thing about conspiracy theories is that they tap into a human bias for pattern seeking right and to make sense of the world um in a way that is deeply emotional um and that can't be debunked so easily on adam ruins everything we try to do justice to uh people's emotional truth that's what the the person i'm talking to that's what their purpose is right is they say well okay adam that might be true but here's how i feel about that right and that's really important because the audience if they feel the same way then it's going to be echoed for them right they're going to say okay this show understands how i feel and they're responding to it right but um you know something like q anon is all emotional truth right there's no debunk you can do to it and the emotional truth is so powerful and so pernicious for the person that it's very very hard to fight back against um and so for that reason it's a little bit outside of our realm i can help other people understand conspiracy theories right and how to speak to someone who's in the thrall of conspiracy theories but you know i can't show up and go uh you know there isn't actually a cabal of uh you know blood drinking uh child eaters out there uh yeah that's all right like it's not gonna not gonna work yeah once hiv was at least mostly accepted as the cause of aids the hunt for a treatment was on when you're designing an experiment to see whether a medicine works the gold standard is what's called a double blind trial half the volunteers get the medicine and the other half get a placebo so you can compare and see whether the drug really is better than nothing crucially in a double-blind trial neither the patients nor the researchers know who's got the real thing and who's got the dirt so you can be absolutely sure that nobody's expectations are affecting the results but some aids trials had big problems firstly almost all the subjects were white gay men when you're testing a new medicine you want to try it in a wide selection of patients but if doctors only ask one sort of person to volunteer or only one sort of person gets to see a doctor to be asked there's not a lot you can do and the other problem was that subjects didn't always follow the rules one group in miami realized that half of them were on placebos so they shared out their pills invalidating all the data and when they were asked why did you go against the expert's instructions they said because we're dying we're not lab rats where people with a disease if you have a drug that you think might work even if it's just a hunch you cannot just let half of us get sicker that is a totally understandable and even kind of noble way to reject the expert opinion those people must have felt so alone and desperate and like the experts didn't care about them but the story of how things changed is actually kind of inspiring philosopher alvin goldman distinguishes two kinds of expertise within any field of study he says there are primary questions the big issues in the 80s the primary questions were what causes aids and how can we treat it and almost nobody was an expert there because no one knew for sure and not many people were in a position to find out but there are also secondary questions questions about the arguments and the evidence that relate to the primary ones things like what do the studies actually say and how do they compare a lot of aids activists and patients worried that doctors and experts didn't always have their best interests at heart so they studied the medical literature and learned the biology themselves becoming secondary experts and once they mastered the technical jargon of medicine they were able to perform their concerns in ways that traditional experts took seriously as research into aids continued activists and patient groups started designing clinical trials they said we want these rules for placebos we want these rules for how fast drugs get approved and it worked more people signed up and more people stuck with it because the experts involved people rather than preaching at them none of this would have been possible without protests cooperation and ordinary people becoming so-called lay experts by doing so they were able to remind the establishment experts that they weren't just searching for abstract answers to abstract questions the whole point of becoming an expert was to make a real difference to the questions that actually shaped people's lives the arguments of aids activists have been published in scientific journals and presented at formal scientific conferences their publications have created new pathways for the dissemination of medical information their pressure has caused the prestigious journals to release findings faster to the press their voice and vote on review committees have helped determine which studies receive funding their efforts have led to changes in the very definition of aids to incorporate the hiv-related conditions that affect women their interventions have led to the establishment of new mechanisms for regulating drugs their arguments have brought about shifts in the balance of power between competing visions of how clinical trials should be conducted their close scrutiny has encouraged basic scientists to move compounds more rapidly into clinical trials and their networking has brought different communities of scientists into cooperative relationships with one another thereby changing patterns of informal communication within science what i find really interesting about adam ruins everything and specifically why i asked yuan is the character that you play is less like an expert who's just informing people like you touched on this at the start like you're not just the guy in a suit behind a desk no disrespect to my to my countryman john oliver uh but his style is you know he gives you the facts like here is what it is here are the jokes hear the facts jokes facts jokes you're and he's actually mentioned like what your show does is more like a socratic dialogue it is much more like like a philosopher the character you play is not somebody who's like a traditional expert but more of a gadfly less somebody who informs and more somebody who just like deliberately complicates things which is like an approach that i find like really very interesting as like a basis for for launching information and expertise yeah i've tried to um you know when we started my character was was an extreme caricature right i was very much like here's the facts and i'm going to tell them and it's annoying right uh the more we did the show the more i wanted to build in my actual process right which is like hey i'm a comedian i'm very curious about the world i have a lot of questions i'm trying to figure [ __ ] out come figure it out with me right and so we started having more and more segments where my character is actually at a loss and has to learn something from somebody else right or or moments where my character is proven wrong or you know moments where my character learns something over the course of the episode has his own mind changed right because that's my own experience in life like i in real life me making the show is me trying to learn things yes right like i very quickly ran out of in the first season it was like hey here's all the [ __ ] that i've learned over the last 10 years i read this book and i read that article and i spoke to that expert and i've wanted to say this for a long time i've wanted to tell the story about the truth about circumcision here it is right then after that i was i sort of ran out of everything that i knew a lot about right it was more like okay i'm yeah i'm curious about this and that's really important to me because i don't fundamentally consider myself to be like smarter than other people i'm i'm more fortunate than than many other people i'm fortunate enough and privileged enough to have had a really excellent education um that has you know brought me to my way of thinking about some things but apart from that i'm just like a curious person trying to learn more about the world and i want the audience to to be my companion in that i want us to go on that journey together uh and that is ultimately how i want to be seen and it's funny because the original format adam ruins everything is a little bit at odds with that and i've been trying to make that adjustment right over time in order to shift it in that way if you see me live uh when it was still possible for me to do live stand up that was very much what it was about was was me and the audience going on a journey together adam is ruined by everything yeah i really am i really am um but yeah i mean that's that is who i want to be for the audience i'm not you know i'm not some [ __ ] guy in a suit right anymore like sitting behind a desk telling you this is how it is i'm someone who's engaged in a process of of inquiry and curiosity and i hope that the audience feels that same way and wants to go on that journey with me and wants to have that sort of even friendly relay relationship with me that's what i'm sort of craving is uh to build like a community of folks who want to proceed with that inquiry together i want to ask questions in this in this open empathetic curious way well i think i've got just the community for you i don't know i think they're underneath this video right now all right fantastic well welcome everybody uh i don't know watch my show or whatever maybe i gotta start uh posting [ __ ] on youtube no hang on this is my turf get out of here oh youtube let me tell you youtube's terrible business so i know i know wow a media company where they get all the content for free and shave you off a little bit of ad dollars if they feel like it that's a great business model well that's why there's patreon.com philosophy i'm kidding yeah no absolutely go sup go support the guy thank you thank you very much um adam thank you so much for coming on the show yeah it means a huge amount to me like as a fellow creator and as a fan of your work thank you so much thank you so much as a fan of your work thank you so much for having me i i really appreciate it trust me [Music] destiny [Music] destiny destiny their destiny very well thank you [Music] destiny [Music] destiny had enough all the experts [Music] [Music] um [Music] destiny destiny destiny destiny their destiny had enough of experts [Music] big pork

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Views: 493,815

Rating: 4.9425182 out of 5

Keywords: science, education, philosophy, adam ruins everything, adam conover, michael gove, experts, AIDS, conspiracy theories

Id: LRNkDZy30xU

Length: 46min 15sec (2775 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Blucrunch]

In addition to the knowledge I gained, this video also makes me sad. I wonder how many really smart experts knew all the answers to important questions but never got the exposure they deserved because of some social quirk that made them not "television worthy"?

[u/eleetpancake]

This is a topic I was really excited to see Olly cover. I think most of the problems the world faces in the modern age are being worsened by rampant ant-intellectualism or the rejection of the proper expertise. This video does a lot to explain why those sentiments exist, when / why they are wrong and how to change people's minds.

[u/gwillad]

this was a really interesting one. big fan of adam and olly

[u/whoopsdang]

"Philosophy Tube" Oh?

"Adam Conover" Oh.

[u/CleanSurf]

Any kind person willing to do a TL;DW for this one? If so, TIA for sure.

[u/Shapen360]

I like Adam Conover. He gets too much hate because he makes arguments that people don't like.