Get Smart with Adam Conover of the TV show “Adam Ruins Everything”

What I'm interested in is less how do I get that dollar from someone than how do I change someone's mind? How do I make an impact in their lives? How do I make them go, oh, my gosh, I had no idea. And that is because that's the comedian's currency, right? That's how you create a fan. That's how you create someone who remembers what you say for the rest of your life.

Can comedy change the world by changing minds? Well, plenty of science studies have proven laughter helps us learn faster and remember more. But what about the annoying guy at the party who ruins everything with a point of view that might not seem intuitively accurate until you find out he's actually right. Now, today's guest began his career as a viral YouTube star who makes a living by ruining everything. Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for curious, interested and interesting business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and banks accounts. Today's guest is none other than Adam Conover, the star of the TV show Adam Ruins Everything and investigative comedian who explores the weirdest and wildest reaches of human knowledge. You can watch him on TRUTV and Netflix and now listen to his podcast. Factually, Adam is definitely a contrarian, and we're going to talk about how he thinks the business of tv, entertainment, comedy, and where the world of streaming media is going. I'm always looking for new and better ways to entertain, educate, build an audience, and bridge the worlds of business, entertainment, and education. So if you're here for a brain upgrade, you've definitely come to the right place. So let's meet the right guy, Adam Conover.

All right, Adam, it is an absolute pleasure to be here today on Capability Amplifier. And the way I thought I'd start out the program is by asking you, what were you like as a kid?

Well, you know what I say about our show, Adam Rubens? Everything is that it's very much based on me, a younger version of me. So I wasn't sure why, but I had the perception that I annoyed a lot of people. I was very outgoing, but in ways that sort of often disrupted the flow of a class or people hanging out or whatever. So I often felt very sort of unable to interact with people socially. And so the thing on the show where I've got, you know, a piece of information that I, you know, I'm surprising someone with and bothering them, they're like, oh, my God, why do you have to tell me this? That was sort of the reaction I got from people my whole life. And it was a little bit of me trying to turn that relationship into a more positive one and trying to turn that into comedy.

That leads me to the next question, which is what are the key things that really prepared you to be great at producing a show like this in terms of take us through a little bit of a journey here. And I'm really interested in the skill sets that you developed along the way that really matched your character.

Sure. Well, it's an interesting question. The creative skill sets I developed in my years of doing comedy in New York for very little or no pay for 10 or 15 years. So out of college, in college, I was lucky enough to be in a sketch comedy group with a bunch of my college friends in the very early days of the Internet. We're talking pre YouTube time. We were putting videos up and they went viral and stuff like that. And we really did every job to make these videos. We wrote, we acted, we directed, we, you know, I did a lot of the post production, I did the video editing, I designed our website, I did the visual effects, I learned how to compress video, stuff like that. And you know, we didn't always do those things. Well, like our directing was like, you know, in retrospect, that's very unprofessional, for instance. And our writers process was very creative, but very unprofessional in a lot of ways. You know, we would speak to each other in ways that I would never speak to anyone in a writer's room now. So just, you know, 19 year olds being cruel to each other. But, you know, it was also very fertile creatively. So we did that. And that really gave me a grounding in all of those creative skills, both the technical ones, but then also just the repetition of writing work, putting it up on its feet and showing it to an audience. Then when that group eventually broke up, you know, we did it for like six or seven years. It's about as long as you can do a group like that. We. I started doing stand up and teaching sketch comedy writing at UCB in New York. And that is when I started doing standup, is when I feel like I really sort of came into my own as a performer. And the great thing about standup is all you gotta do to do it is to do it. So I always tell people, if you want to get started doing standup, just start going to open mics. You know, hope almost every city has an open mic or two. But if you're in New York, Chicago, Louisiana, probably Atlanta, I think is pretty good. Denver, I Heard has a good comedy scene. Places like that, you know, in New York you can go, you can go to three open mics a night. And it's one of those situations where people say, oh, well, what do I do? How do I write material? What do I do on stage? And it's one of those things where no matter how much you prepare, as soon as you start going up, everything that you thought you knew about it falls away. Because the experience of doing it leads everything so much. You know, you start grappling with what it's like to be on stage and just what it's like to get an audience's attention and what it's like to try to make them give a shit about what you're saying and etc. So that's just like the gym, you know, that was, that was me in the gym every single night, doing it for free. You know, I started doing that. I just actually have an alert coming up on my calendar because it's, it's. I'm about to hit the 10 year anniversary of when I started doing that properly.

And Are you still doing comedy right now?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't do straight stand up as much as I would like to. I do, I tour a live show around the country. I just wrote a new hour called Mind Parasites Live that's sort of a synthesis of what I do on Adam Ruins Everything and stand up comedy. So it's information, it's cultural commentary, I have slides, I've got research. But it's also stand up comedy. And so that's like a whole show I wrote all at once. And so that's what I'm doing in live comedy. And I still do try to go up just in bars or clubs and just do sets because that is really the.

Sort of basic practice of comedy, as I learned to do it. But at the same time, the sort of show I tour is very different from whatever anybody else is doing. So I very much created my own lane in terms of standup. I'm not. I often compare it to everyone else in stand up is trying to run the hundred meter dash, you know, in the Olympics. And guess what? You know, if Usain Bolt is running that race, you know, you could be very fast, but you might never beat him, you know, and Usain Bolt is like Brian Regan or someone else who's like insanely funny, you know, a pure standup who I'm never going to beat. But once I started combining comedy information, I created my own lane where no one's competing with me, you know, I mean, you know, on television, John Oliver does stuff that's similar, and there's other hosts like that, but in live standup, no one's doing it. And so. Yeah, that was. I forgot. Sort of got off on a different train of thought there.

No, I asked you about comedy, and I think that's really. When you look at who's getting the most attention right now in the media, in social media, and the direction you look at the volume of comedy that Netflix is producing, for example, it's phenomenal. And tv late night, the power of tv, I would argue, is basically replacing news. And fake news gets more respect and attention than real news, especially when you start looking at the numbers, you look at what Seth Meyers is pulling off, for example, it's. And you mentioned John Oliver as well, and what John Stewart did, Bill Maher. I mean, the list goes on.

So I'm curious as well. Yeah.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

And we need more women out there. So I'm curious, as you've developed, as you were developing your style and as you are moving forward right now, who do you model or most respect and why?

Well, Jon Stewart was my. I describe him as my Johnny Carson figure. You know, Johnny Carson was what he was into, Letterman and people like that. And Jon Stewart is who I grew up watching. And when I saw him do what he did, he really redefined for me what it was possible for comedy to do in the public square. That comedy could have a true impact on the cultural conversation and on the political life of the country. And also, that show was so funny. If you go back and watch what he was doing at his peak and also what Colbert was doing at his peak, it is still the height for that format. And it's because of the incredible work that he put into it. And people ask, by the way, why did Jon Stewart leave? I don't know him. I've never met him. But based on my understanding of how he worked on that show, there's really great oral history of it, if you're curious. He put so much sweat into that show, he burned out. And so he left because he'd been doing it for 15 years, and he rewrote every show himself and spent so much time in that office that.

He reached the maximum of what he could do. So in any case, that sort of impact for me was the top of the mountaintop for what a comic could do for who I respect the most. I mean, I have a lot of respect for what John Oliver does. He clearly takes his job very Very serious. And he will say, he said before, oh, I'm not doing journalism. I'm a comedian. And that's a true thing to say. Except that there have been times that they have really approached journalism, what they're doing, and they base their work on what actual journalists do. Right. He, like me, would be out of a job if not for journalists. Because we use what journalisms produce as the raw material for us to do comedy about. We need the journalists to go exhume the facts and bring them up for us. But there have been a couple cases where Oliver went out and did some research, where his team did some research themselves, where I would say, ah, they were kissing. They were kissing the edge of journalism there. So I very much respect and admire what he's been doing.

How did you originally pitch Adam ruins everything. How did you get the show and talk a little bit about that journey? And it's going to lead into the team. So I'm going to, I can ask those two separately, but I really want to talk a little bit about how you've evolved from stand up college. Basically practicing in a way what you're doing and maybe to bridge this, I really heard you say is you've kind of always been this way. So this has been a natural extension of your personality and your character.

Yes, very natural. It was a matter of, you know, coming up with a character and the angle was a matter of figuring out what was funny about me and what people found funny about me. And I realized, oh, that sort of annoying aspect of, I'm going to tell you this, even though you don't want to know, is something that, you know, my, my co workers would make fun of me around the office for doing that.

All right, and let's, let's, let's dive a little bit into that. Which was what was your aha moment? Can you remember a story or circumstance? The exact situation where it was like you had the aha? Or was it a purely evolutionary thing?

I mean, it was a lot of things coming together all at once. Part of it was that I was doing standup. I was also working at college humor at the time when I was doing standup. You know, I learned how to make people laugh, but I was trying to figure out how to make them give a shit about me. Right, and that's your second challenge. Okay, I can tell jokes, but who cares about the jokes? Right? And once I started combining comedy and information in stand up, just telling, oh, there's this old story I read about in the Atlantic years ago about how diamond engagement rings were escaped on the part of the De Beers corporation. I started telling that story on stage. I realized, oh, people started leaning forward a little bit more, you know, and paying a little bit more attention. And they would come at me afterwards, oh, is that true? Or I'd see them at another show and they said, oh, I looked that up. That is true. That's wild. And so I realized that had a bit of juice, that that was like something that people were gravitating towards and really caring about. That was making the perk up and take notice. And then so I started writing those at. I started writing similar sketches at college Humor. And at college Humor, I had to write two sketches a week, and then usually one of them would be shot and filmed. And I was like, I think this material will do well on the Internet. But I had flirted with writing that kind of information before. And the feedback I got in the writers room and, you know, writers rooms are very cruel. The feedback I had gotten was, oh, this is so pedantic. This is so annoying. Adam. You're going on about this like, this is not funny. It's just a lecture. What is this? And so what I did for the second draft was I wrote in the other writers who played characters in the episode, in the segment, having that reaction in the script right on screen saying, oh, my God, why are you telling me this? I don't want to know this. What a bummer. Oh, God, we hate you, right? That relationship between me. So I'm an informational host that the people who are being informed hate. Right? That's the basic comedy engine. And I did that purely in self protection to get them to not make fun of me in the writers room. But it turned out to be the comedy engine that made the whole thing fly. And so we did that. We did three or four of those. And then CollegeHumor had moved us all out to Los Angeles because they wanted to sell television shows. And they said, okay, this seems like this is a television show. I was like, I agree. And we just worked on what is the pitch process for this going to be. So we made. I wrote a document. We make a deck, a little PDF that we bring around. We went to every network that we thought would be open to it. Took our little. You do a little dog and pony show on the road. It's a little song and dance you do in a room. Anyone who's tried to sell in a room is probably familiar with what that's like. And the piece of advice I always give other People who are trying to pitch TV shows now is the main thing I took away from it was we got very lucky because someone needs to be buying what you're selling. So we would go pitch in a lot of rooms that were like, you know, they'd say, oh, everyone loved it, right? Everyone in the room loved it. They'd say, oh, this show is great. This is funny. It does well on YouTube. I really love it. But then they would say something like, but on our network, all of our shows are really guys dying on fishings or documentaries about Hitler. So if this isn't that, I love it. But not for us. We got that reaction a ton. And it wasn't until we went to TruTV where they said, oh, you know what? We have a mandate this quarter to get informational comedy or comedy that makes you smarter. That's our marketing strategy this quarter. Oh, we have another show that this would fit with. And we were thinking of calling it the Brain Candy Block. Now, in reality, they never had a Brain Candy Block. And whatever that other show was like, was canceled before ours even came out. So it wasn't even. You know what I mean? Like, it didn't actually end up fitting that, but they had had some specific mandate, you know, from their higher ups at that time. That meant what we pitched was just what they were buying. Hey, we were selling widgets, and they were buying widgets when everyone else was buying gadgets. And if we had gone in there trying to sell a gadget, they wouldn't have bought it, right? So that's the approach I take now whenever I'm pitching anything is like, I'm gonna make it as good as I can. I'm gonna make it so everyone in the room loves it. But I'm not gonna, like, put my ego in whether or not they buy it, because maybe that's not what they're looking for. It's also what I do in auditions. I don't do auditions that often, but when I do, I'm like, hey, I'm gonna go do my thing. And if they're looking for a guy like me, then I'll. Then they'll hire me, you know? But if they're not, well, then that's fine. I'll wait until someone is. And so that allows me to go in and pitch with a lot more confidence when I do it that way, because I'm not, oh, I hope they like it. It's gonna change my.

Instead of just like, hey, here's what I'm selling. You want to buy or not so. Yeah, so then it was. And that led to us selling the pilot and then we made the series.

And if you think back a little bit, just for the listener, how many total series or how many seasons have you had so far?

It's complicated. They spread our seasons along multiple years, which was a bit of a cost cutting measure because they don't have to do season bumps as often. So we've been doing the show for four years, technically three seasons. We've produced 64 episodes.

Okay. And out of the 64, if you're going to look back and think about an episode that you love, it was great to make and it got a lot of accolades and it's gotten you a lot of attention. What's one of them that really stands out? And can you tell us the story about that? And I'm going to ask that question for a very specific reason in a moment, but I want to establish this first.

Okay. Well, we did a segment, one that I really love was we did an episode on the suburbs, the history of the suburbs. And we did an episode on a segment on redlining and on the. The history of the suburbs and segregation in the suburbs that explains why, you know, when, when you live, you know, like I did growing up in the suburbs, hey, why, you know, it's only white people in my neighborhood. Why is that? You know, not really sure why. Just don't have to be a lot of black people around here. Well, the reason for that is that Post World War II, there was a specific policy by the federal government that led to home loans being denied for African Americans in the growing suburbs. Right. And that specifically, it's called redlining because they specifically sectioned off the areas in places like Levittown. It was completely explicit. Levittown simply did not sell to black folks.

And that policy is not, it's not as explicit today. But there's still housing discrimination that affects our state today. But even if there weren't, the racism of the past affects the structure of our lives today in ways that we don't often appreciate. We just say, oh, yeah, I guess that's white folks like to live over here and black folks like to live over there. Nope, it was a specific policy. And on that segment, we had Nicole Hannah Jones, who is a incredible journalist and writer with the New York Times, who is the really foremost person writing about segregation in the US Today. And she was kind enough to appear on it and walk through it with us. The segment was not only a hit for us, we've been told that it's you know, professors and teachers show it in their classrooms. It's really gone very, very wide. And, you know, it's one of the ones that we're certainly most proud of. You know, one thing that stuck in my mind is, you know, the writer Ta Nehisi Coates, who's a wonderful writer on the subject of. Of race in America, tweeted the video and said, I can't believe something like this was shown on TV a couple years ago. I wouldn't have thought this was possible, that we'd see a segment on redlining on cable television. So that made me very proud. In the segment.

You mentioned the writer, but, like, how big is your typical team that you're working together with? And are they the same every time, or do you bring in specialists and, like, how are you organizing and finding the people to do this and describe, like, what's a team made up of?

Sure. So we've got a. Well, first of all, you know, an entire television show, the entire television show probably has, you know, over 100, maybe 120 people working on it in different capacities. And, you know, almost everybody's doing one job. You know, the guy holding the boom mic is the only boom mic holder on the set. You know, so it's accountants and PAs and the line producer. And, you know, it's an incredible group effort. The team that I directly supervise is the creative team. And so that's made up of this. Last year we had me, my other eps, who I work with, then a head writer, a head researcher, and five additional writers and five additional researchers. And each episode is written by one of those writers takes the lead on it, and one of the researchers takes the lead on it. They work together as a team, but, you know, it also, we bring it to our writers room, you know, to give feedback. The head writer always takes a pass on it. I often take a pass on the script. And yeah, so it's, you know, you get the sort of best results by giving the script to a team and say, okay, this is your baby. You two have to make it really great. And that usually gets it most of the way to the finish line.

Okay, and for you right now, where do you think you're going to go next? Like, what do you want or need in your career and what's your long game at this point?

That's a very good question. I. I don't believe in getting too specific about my individual goals because it's very much a matter of what opportunities are in front of you in my experience. So you know, I would never say I want to show on hbo, I mean, or something like that, Right? I mean, like, if I was on hbo, I'd probably be paid more and more people might see the show. Right? That's, that's a, you know, higher tier network. But I'm not going to go and, you know, say that's my goal and I must do that because I think your efforts end up being too narrow when you do that. So my goal really more broadly is to grow what I'm doing in any way that I can. And, you know, I want to keep standing for the values that I stand for. I want to keep having the voice that I have, I want to expand that voice. I want more people to see it. Right. And you know, simultaneously, you know, the sort of like lower level drives are. I would like more praise from people. You know what I mean? There's like, there's like, as a comedian, you're like, I want laughs. I want audiences to like what I'm doing. That's a big part of sort of the gut level drive. I'm not particularly money motivated, but I would like to continue to make a living. So mostly it's about expanding, you know, what I'm doing creatively, and I try to do that using whatever options are in front of me. So I want to continue doing Anna Rima's Everything as long as they'll have me do it. But I also am constantly thinking about, well, what are other things, formats that I might flourish in. We recently, you know, me and the guys I produced the show with our production company, was recently talking to another production company that raised the idea of doing a documentary film. I was like, well, I haven't considered it, but now that you mention it, what would that look like? Okay, let me try to put that together. You know, so that's an, that's an interesting thing to think about. And that's not something that I set as a goal for myself. That's something where it's like looking for that opportunity. Right. And I just launched a new podcast called Factually, which is a investigative comedy interview podcast where I sort of reveal some incredible facts. And then I talked to some incredible experts. In our first month, we had two Pulitzer Prize winners on the show. And so I'm really excited about that podcast and I'm, you know, excited to grow that as big as I can. Yeah, I mean, I know it's not too specific of an answer for you, but yeah, I'm always looking for new creative challenges and new ways. I Can expand what I'm doing. Great.

Well, I think you answered the question, but I'm going to ask it a little bit more specifically, which are. So the documentary popped up. You've created the podcast, which is awesome. But what other opportunities have shown up for you as a result of doing the TV show? And you think about either groups that you get brought into connections you've made, or the notion of books or movies or other talent opportunities that pop up. What's been a hell yes versus a hell no for you?

Well, it's. You know, I think it's the ultimate irony that more opportunities come your way, the more successful that you get. I think it's. I realized it was happening as soon as the show was sold and people started watching it, and I was like, what. What a perverse thing this is. Because when I was doing open mics, I would have killed to go on podcasts. Right. Or to get my name out there. Right. To do a podcast like this one, or to be booked on shows, you know, and now I get, you know, this is the second podcast I've done today. Right. People are. People ask me all the time to do them. It's like. It's weird. It's sort of like when you're at the bottom of the pit, no one's helping you. It's only when you get towards the top that people start throwing you down a rope. Right. Like, well, hold on a second. I could have used that down here. Right. It's bizarre. And what it is, is the rich gets, the rich get richer. Right. I really have fundamentally felt, and I don't know who couldn't. Who's in a position of privilege like I am. I've really fundamentally felt, oh, yeah, the rich get richer. Right. Simply put, it's like a law nature. Yeah. And so it makes me think a lot about what my responsibility is to, you know, folks who are further down the hole where I was or even, you know, further, further, further down, who didn't have the advantages I had and how I can, you know, offer them help as well, and how I can sort of try to help change the structure of American society. So that's not quite so necessary. That's part of what my show is about as far as the individual, you know, opportunities that have come my way that have been great. I mean, you know, one of the things is that now that we have had so many incredible experts on our show, it is very easy for us to book more of them. Right. Because we've had a couple Pulitzer Prize winners on the show. And, you know, I interviewed. It's coming out on our podcast in a couple of weeks. I interviewed Matthew Desmond, who wrote the book Evicted, which is incredible. It's a Pulitzer Prize winning book on the problem of addiction. Sorry, in Milwaukee. I mean, this book reads like a novel, but it's complete nonfiction. I can't recommend it highly enough. And I had never talked to him before. Often the people we have on our podcast are people who I've experts we've already had in television shows. So it's an easy ask. Hey, you did the TV show. You want to come on the podcast too? But this guy, I was like, we've never talked to him before. It's a cold call. You know, he's. He's a busy academic. You know, he. He probably has better shit to do than come on my show because of our reputation with, you know, other folks.

He.

It was an easier yes for him, right? And he was, oh, yeah, I'm actually aware of what you do. And, you know, he knew that we do a good job of getting people's word out there to a new audience that might not otherwise hear it. And, you know, one of the advantages of that for me is that I am, look, I play a know it all on tv, but in real life, you know, I'm just like a really curious comedian, you know, who likes learning things. And so to me, it's like these people to me are like the ultimate celebrities to meet. You know, researchers, scientists, journalists, people who are actually finding out the information, getting to, getting to speak with them. So it's really been a way to also increase my knowledge, my understanding in a really awesome way.

So I have an idea for you that is in line with this with regards to your big vision, and that is as you establish and build your platform, you know, a little bit of my background, and I came from the product creation space, I basically worked with celebrities, performers, talent who oftentimes may have had a show, for example, but then they didn't have an audience or they didn't have a list and they were served by. In other words, they'd have like a production company and maybe distribution, but they didn't own the distribution. And where they end up making their next leg of money comes from leveraging their name, their brand, and being able to productize, for example, create a book, get more advances, but more importantly, create their own income streams that they have total control over. And, you know, you were recently on Joe Rogan, like, Joe has put in his hard 25 years, right? Built his reputation and his podcast right now, technically, I mean, it has unbelievable reach, more than most TV shows do. And he's got a variety of ways he can earn and make money.

Yes.

So for you, for example, as you develop your reputation in your platform, you could effectively productize your knowledge and not only share that, but profit from it too, and be rewarded in the sense of creating courses or programs that would help people do what you've done. Because you've been in this interesting position of again, putting in your time as a comedian, crafting your ability to storytell, figuring out how to align your character with your message and get rewarded for your natural curiosity, your comedic style, and the annoying part of you that uniquely you. Yeah, I hope I have permission to say that.

Oh, of course.

I'm just curious what your reaction or response to this statement is. Have you thought down that pathway and has anything like that been thrown at you?

Well, I have made a concerted effort to build parts of my business that I control more fully because television is a wonderful industry. I'm in fact very happy to be on linear television. Streaming is great and our show's on Netflix now. But linear television knows how to pay its performers a little bit better and they know how to do PR a little bit better. And it's a reliable way to get seen. But at the end of the day, you don't control whether or not you're doing it next year. I've been making a concerted effort to own my own home more. Part of that for me is live touring. Once you've built a live business, no one can tell you that you can't do it. And doing a podcast as well is definitely a part of that. And that's been like a priority for me as I sort of figure out what the business relationships are with the places that I'm, you know, that I'm doing it with. I'm not trying to rent myself out anymore. I'm trying to build something that I own. At the end of the day, as far as, like productizing goes, it's interesting because like I said, I'm just simply not that money motivated. Right. I'm happy with the, frankly, happy with the. I'm the lowest paid TV hosted television and I'm pretty happy, you know what I mean? And so, like, I'm, I'm sure, you know, for me it's like, sure, I'd be happy to like have, you know, a couple more numbers in my Vanguard account, but, you know, I feel okay, you know, so what I'm really Focusing on is, you know, I'm motivated as a comic, you know, and what I want is more laughs, right? I want more audience response, and I want more cultural capital, if that makes sense. I want more people to listen to what I have to say and to care about what I have to say. And I want, you know, more respect, you know, and those are the things that motivate me more deeply. And so for me, rather than, you know, I think was sort of part of what you described, I relayed to part of it and. But not all of it. And part of what you described sort of sounded like almost like I'm franchising. Like, oh, I can, like, teach you to do the same thing, which is an interesting angle. But, you know, I'm productized. Isn't quite how I put it. Because what I'm interested in is less how do I get that dollar from someone? And how do I. Then how do I change someone's mind? How do I make an impact in their lives? How do I make them go, oh, my gosh, I had no idea? And that is because that's the comedian's currency, right? That's how you create a fan. That's how you create someone who remembers what you say for the rest of your life. You know, think about all the people, like someone who's done this very effectively, who. Who I don't always agree with. But think about Malcolm Gladwell, right? And think about how many people say, oh, I read this great Malcolm Gladwell piece on that, you know, and they remember his name and what he talked about in whatever that piece was for their entire life. I still was thinking yesterday about a piece about ketchup he wrote for the New Yorker that I read 15 years ago. And so that is. That's sort of the way that I'm looking to grow. It's just a little bit more of a cultural. A cultural effect that I'm looking to have rather than a business impact, if that makes sense.

Yeah, no, it totally does. And I think one of the things that really came out of this, it revealed your value system, which I'm sure you've seen the company masterclass dot com.

Yeah.

And they've got, like, tons and tons of people teaching acting and directing and writing. Malcolm Gladwell is one of them. Just for the record, he's almost impossible to follow. He's so all over the place. So for a guy who's such an unbelievable, concise writer, it's really hard to get through his material. And again, as a comedian, you have a huge Advantage in terms of being able to deliver content at a rate that people can actually store it and bring it in, which is very valuable from a delivery perspective.

I think I get what you're getting at. I have thought about that. I've developed through comedy a set of skills for effective communication. And I have thought about, oh, that is something that I could share with other people. Is there a speaking opportunity where it's like, oh, here's how to communicate more effectively, et cetera. And that's not something that disinterests me. Right. It hasn't been my focus the last couple years. But I'm sorry, go on with your question.

No, it's fine. And I think maybe to clarify the original statement, which is, you know, again, an interesting value thing that you have. We've said a few times, it's not about the money for me. You know, one of the things that you said is it'd be nice if some people who are lower down the wrong. I could give them the rope that I didn't have.

Yeah.

As they fought. And then. So there's two different styles of teaching, which are people just like you, you know, on the up and come, versus, you know, right now. You've got a. A consumer audience you're speaking to, and a lot of what you're looking for is influence and impact and the rewards, the. The emotional rewards that go along with that. So it's just, again, it's really interesting to see how who you are and what you've done has created this, really who you are right now. Which leads me to the next question, which is through your lens at this point, what scares you or terrifies you? What do you see as the biggest threats to you, your business or your way of being able to make a living that motivate you to press on?

Interesting.

I think that the media industry is becoming extremely fragmented. I think fragmentation is the big change that we're seeing. And people are talking about how, look at Game of Thrones, and it just came off the air and some of the commentary is, this will be the last show like that that everyone in the country is watching. And it feels like that, Right? You're like, yeah, what other show? And that show's been on for years now. When it started, we were in one place and now we're in another place. What disconcerts me about that is, well, okay, the good part of that is that everyone can find a niche. Right. So many people are able to. I have a couple friends who are in comedy, and they are able to make a living off of their podcasts. And their podcast might have under 100k downloads, which is not that many. We're talking five figures people. But they've got a really great fan base. They're able to tour, they're able to raise, run a patreon and make a comfortable living. And they are so happy doing it because they're in complete control of their own destinies. That's a beautiful thing. And that's a positive result of fragmentation. A negative result of fragmentation is that it's harder to reach people with broad messages. And I'm interested in reaching everybody that I can. You know, I consider myself a broadcaster, not a narrow caster. And the ability that we have to broadcast is narrowing. So, you know, the, the chances for, you know, CBS style broadcasting are much less than they used to be. And you know, say Netflix is the most comparable thing we have coming out. You know, that's new, that is, that has that kind of reach. But then on Netflix, you know, you're being algorithmically divided up and you're not, you know, you're not even being presented with the shows that other people are watching. Right. So that is something that concerns me a bit. But I don't have control over that media environment. All I can do is be aware of it, try to match what I'm doing to it and try to grow what I'm doing as wide as possible.

No, that makes a lot of sense. And there again, that's when you go out and you're developing and building your platform. You gotta look at what can you control, what can't you control. And the stuff you can control is like capturing and building a list, having, you know, even on stage, being able to capture leads and actually own them and have something else to offer them a little bit later on.

I'm curious if you looked back at the, at this point. Well, how old are you?

I'm 36.

Okay, 36. So you've put in, you put in your 20,000 hours. You know, you put in, you put in not just the, the 10,000 hours.

But I guess I have, yeah, I've been doing comedy since my sophomore year of college, so it's been a while.

Right. And that's, in my experience, my observation, they always say it takes 10,000 hours to master something, but in my experience it's usually 20,000 hours to actually really get paid in an environment and have a platform and create that momentum, that professional momentum. And if you were going to look back at your 20,000 hours and think about the skills, the mindset that have led you to this point right now. And think about it through the Pareto, the 8020 filter. What advice would you give your younger self that would enable you to get further faster besides just applied wisdom?

I think.

The advice I would give to myself is don't stress out so much about getting further faster, right? What I had was I had an immense impatience when I was younger. I wanted to be doing more. I wanted to get booked more on shows. I wanted to be writing for television shows more early and stuff like that. And that impatience made me unhappy. And what I really needed to do was continue on the path that I was on, right? I was doing everything right.

My values were in the right place. I was honoring those values in the work every day. I was correctly prioritizing the work over the results, right? Just going in and putting in the work at the open mic every day rather than trying to focus on am I getting booked or whatever. But I still had a certain amount of impatience. And so, yeah, I mean, the main thing I would say to myself is like, hey, these things take time and you're doing okay, right?

I think we're starting to have an awareness that the productivity trend, productivity grind, lifestyle, that kind of stuff.

Is a lot of bullshit and is something that people put on themselves that makes them unhappy because they're being told that all they need to do is grind, grind, grind, and everything will happen when in reality, no, these things take time. And.

This is an ethos that if you're not careful about, can really harm your health. Let me put it another way.

I used to read, like productivity blogs in my mid-20s, and there's this whole thing, oh, I want to get more done. I want to get more done, right? Because I felt like I wasn't getting enough done. My goals weren't happening right away. So I got to do more now. And I would like, here's how to have a To do list. And I would download an app and I would, you're blah, blah, blah, right? And it's only now, like 10 years later that I actually have a use for the to do list app. You know why I wasn't really using the to do list app before? I would, like, get the app and I would, like, make all this shit happen. I would stop using it after a week, right? The reason was that I didn't have enough things I needed to do, right? And what I realized is now I have to have a to do list app because I have so much stuff I have to do. I need to sort it and organize it, right? So I realized productivity is not a thing that you do because you've got the grit or whatever. Productivity is something that happens to you, right? Having to work that hard is something that happens to you and then you need those apps to manage it. And it's not good to have that much work to do. It's stressful. It can harm your health. And now the big challenge in my life is finding enough time to relax, not getting it up done in one day. It's like being able to turn it off and stop churning through my to do list so I can watch a basketball game for two hours out thinking about work. So my advice to myself would be like, don't worry about all that stuff. Like what you're just don't worry about I'm not getting enough done or I'm not meeting my goals or da da, da, da. Just do the work, right? Just do the work that is making you. I liked going to open mics, right? And I knew that going to open mics every single day would pay off after years, right? And, and that was the work. I had all this other negative energy of like, oh, I need to be doing more, I need to get farther, further, right? But all that was just upsetting me. Didn't matter. All I needed to worry about was going and doing the work, you know, the basic work every day. So yeah, that would be my advice to myself. If it's applicable to other people listening, well, then they can take it too if they like.

No, that was great. So if you could wave a wand and had three wishes, what would they be at this point in your career?

I don't have any wishes for myself because I've achieved everything I've ever wanted to. All I wanted was to. There was a point at which I was doing comedy. I couldn't even articulate the fact that I wanted my own television show because I knew it was so unlikely. I didn't really conceive of it. I went from being a sketch writer, a college humor on the web, to show running my own show. And right before I show ran my own show, I applied to be get, you know, to be a writer on Seth Meyers and on John Oliver's show. Had I gotten those jobs, I wouldn't have my own show today. Right. But I would also have told you I've achieved every goal that I had because at the time that my, my only goal was to write for television. And so at this point, for four years I've been making A television show where I get to say exactly what I want with a wonderful crew of people working underneath me and people like the show and they come see me live because of it. Right. That's all I ever dreamed of. And so if I can do a little bit better than that, great. But I'm not shooting for anything more. So, you know, I'm afraid that all my, all my wishes would have to be about, you know, I mean, I'm very concerned with like, we've got a big homelessness problem in la. Maybe I'd use a wish on that. I don't know. I don't want to get into like all of the other shit I do with wishes. Because that's not what your podcast is about.

But no, no, it's actually, I was dead serious. It doesn't matter if it's business or personal. I'm more interested in you, the human being than the character.

Yeah.

And that's that. That to me is the differentiator here.

Yeah.

So.

Well, yeah, I mean that's, you know, I'd probably try to, try to use them to, I don't know, expand voting rights and things like that. I don't know. So one of the strange things that happens is I realized in the course of my career is my 20s, I was very, very focused on myself and on my own career. That was like the main focus of all my efforts. I was self centered in that way, as most people are. Right. And not incorrectly. Of course, you got to worry about yourself first. But now I'm like, again, I've achieved everything I want to and I still work on myself and I still am like, okay, what's next for me? But like, I'm not worried about myself anymore. And now my worries are about like everybody else and the world at large. Right. And climate change and things like that. And one of the really. And that feels worse because the thing is, no matter how bad your life is, you can say, well, I'm going to get up tomorrow and go for a jog and that'll make me feel better. That's a step I could take to improve it. It's a lot harder to do that with.

The world's problems, you know, because they're so diffuse. So it's an interesting dynamic where once your sphere of worry goes from being yourself to everybody else, you have a lot less concrete steps you can take. Does that make sense?

It did. And again, here's. I'm a fixer. So as I'm listening to you, I'm like, if you Waved your magic wand. The beautiful thing is you can wave your magic pen and you can actually impact and make these problems go away. So if it's Elway's homeless, there's a freaking amazing story there that could be done in a way that's entertaining and engaging at the same time. Oh, yeah, right. And the same with climate change or expanding voters rights. I mean, if those were your three wishes, they're the wishes that you can truly affect right now.

Well, and those are topics that we've done on our show. But, you know, the frustrating thing is, well, I do them on the show and then I say, well, that's going to change the problem. Right. But then the next year there's still, you know, disinformation franchised in, you know, Florida and, you know, climate change is, you know, I can't get us back into the Paris agreement, you know, so the impact I have while I know we're having one is a lot more diffuse than that. But yeah, I mean, those are the things that I spend my time on apart from my own career is, you know, I'm involved with a group in Los Angeles that is trying to make the tiniest dent in the crisis here.

One other one that I'm curious about is your network, your connections, your key relationships. So I'm curious what your primary source of key relationships, connections, business and personal, are. Where, where do you network safely where you don't have someone clamoring at you, using you, trying to get, get, get and take, take, take. Where's a safe space for Adam that you find emotionally and personally satisfying and business wise too? But I'm curious, you know, where is your safe personal zone?

Well, as far as networking goes, I always felt that I would never do anything that I would conceive of as networking. Right. Because networking, as far as people like, you know, in comedy, occasionally you'd meet some. I'd meet somebody at like a, you know, comedy club or a bar show or whatever, and I'd say, oh, nice to meet you. And they'd say something like, oh, yeah, I heard this is a good place to come to network with other comics. We would just walk away from those people because it's like, what are you, what are you doing? Like, that's not something we're doing here. This is just comedians. We're just hanging out, you know, so it seemed as very inauthentic. But like, you know, in terms of personal relationships, comedy is entirely built on personal relationships. It's. It's a very decentralized industry and so just by doing comedy for 10 years, you know, I've come to know a lot of people. I always tell people, you know, I met Michelle Wolf at our first week doing open mics and I still know her today, you know, and so we, like, came up together. I came up with so many people who, you know, I know head writers for half of late night shows on TV are people I worked with early on. And so, and that's just organic. Through doing comedy in basements, you know, you don't need to do it in a cynical way. Just paying attention to who's doing the work right and who is not and then gravitating towards the people who are doing it right. Those people tend to go somewhere and then, you know them later, you know what I mean? And as far as a personal space, you know, I try to maintain those, like, pre comedy friendships. You know, I just went to my college reunion, spent time with my, you know, friends from, you know, from college. And, you know, that was very meaningful because those folks, you know, have known you for a very long time and they know a society that others don't. So, yeah, that was very powerful.

Well, again, what you really revealed there were your values, and that's more important than anything. I apologize for using the N word. The network.

Oh, no, no, no, no, it's not. It's what it is. It's just that you don't say it out loud, you know.

So this is really my last question, and that is how can this audience best support you as you move forward? Because it's amazing if you are explicit and specific about how someone can make your dreams come true. Someone out here might just say, that will be an effortless ask and an effortless give for me. So what might that be?

Oh, it's you, wiz. Very good question. I mean, if somebody wants me to. If anyone's in a position to book me to come do my hour show in a large, ish venue, you know, and can, can pay a fee for that, you know, that's. I'm always looking to do more of that work, but hey, I mean, really, it's just about like, you know, subscribe to the podcast and watch the show when it's on tv. You know, I don't know, if anyone works for a major media company and wants to greenlight something, let me know. But I also happen to be doing a television show right now, so, you know, it's a little. Yeah, like I said, I don't have that many like, like big wishes, you know, I'm always developing new stuff. Yeah. If anyone listens, this happens to be television programming. I've got a couple TV show ideas that I'm developing with my production company that I'd. I'd love to spread. Yeah. Actually, that's what I should say is a transition that I've made in the last year is now that I've made my show and had the opportunity of being supported by a wonderful production company and a team and, and gotten my voice out there, my goal is, my next goal is do that for other people. And so I'm me and the small production company that I started with the guys who I produce, Adam ruins everything with. We're developing new shows with other creators, trying to get their voices out there as best we can. And so, you know, we're constantly putting pitches together and going around rooms and we would love to get one of those sold because, you know, then we could bring another incredible set of stories to life. So if anyone's a programming executive for a, for a network and wants to take a meeting, let me know.

Beautiful. It's a great ask. It's a very good ask. Well, what I want to do is stay in the line with me, but we'll officially end the podcast, but I want to thank you very much. This is Adam Conover. Adam ruins everything. You can find him online. I will make sure that there are links in the show notes as well as the transcript to this. And Adam, you've been an absolute pleasure.

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

You got it.

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