- You know, we did an episode
about climate change, and--
- Oh, shit.
Really quick, I'm sorry,
this isn't a scientific fact, but it is true,
that I have a recurring dream
where I'm talking to Jim Henson in the 1980s
and I know that he's dying
but I'm not allowed to tell him.
(abrasive laughter)
- You were talking to a climate --
- That's a bummer for you, but--
- Yeah man.
- Yeah.
- Well, you know now too.
(classy jazzy music)
- On your television program, Adam Ruins Everything,
you've ruined things, but in a good way.
- [Adam] Yeah.
- And this game is sort of gonna be ruining
our reflexes and our minds.
But a thing that I wanted to try out
was making this a little more existentially difficult.
- Sure.
- So whenever you die,
I've just got this list of bummer facts.
(laughing)
And I'm gonna read one to you,
and then we'll just sort of gauge
how it does, how it affects our performance.
All right, so far, so good.
- [Adam] So far, so good.
- [Patrick] I didn't know you could duck that.
- [Adam] Well, neither did I, but it worked.
Oh, shit, sorry, that was,
I was trying to switch weapons.
- [Patrick] That's okay.
Scientists accidentally killed
the oldest known animal, Ming the Clam,
while trying to date it.
- [Adam] No, Ming the Clam!
- [Patrick] We can try --
Yeah, there we go.
- [Adam] Yeah, I know, I'm all over the place right now.
- [Patrick] I'm sorry.
- [Adam] It's okay.
Yeah, shit, dude.
- Look, I just wanna be clear to everyone.
I have beaten this boss in the past.
- [Patrick] It's okay, no, I think it's just
the existential load.
By the way, pigs can experiences depression.
So let's go along and give this one more shot.
(laughing)
- That sucks.
- It does, it makes me feel real bad.
- What this show does
is it combines psychology, zoology, biology,
with stand up comedy.
- This is the first tour that you've done,
not as the Adam Ruins Everything Adam character, right?
Or in recent years.
- Yeah, we did an election special a couple years ago,
that I did as a tour.
I had other characters on stage with me,
and this was much more me trying to do --
You know, I'm stand up comic,
and the essence of stand up comedy
is I am being myself on stage, right?
There's as little artifice as possible.
- Do you think for you, is that easier
or harder than having a character to be?
- That's a really interesting question.
The reason you develop a character like that,
is because you sort of learn the rules of the character,
the kinds of attributes the character has
that you can write jokes of,
which is very helpful for writer's room.
The Adam Ruins Everything character
is an extrapolation of myself.
- I wanna be done with this cold,
and those miracle drugs are worth whatever they cost.
- Even if it means the end of modern medicine?
- You are the wort person I have ever met,
and I work in finance.
- You know, the essence of the
Adam Ruins Everything character
is he's always technically right,
but socially incorrect.
You know, he's made a social mistake.
- And you've been being some sort of version of yourself
and out there doing comedy online
since before there was a centralized way
to do it. - Oh, yeah.
- Like, what were those wild west days
of online web content?
- Oh, man, thank you for asking me about that.
I was in a sketch group called Olde English,
that was my college sketch group.
I mean, we had early viral video success
in the pre-YouTube days of the internet,
like it was hard to find a place to host them.
We'd just put them on our --
everybody out at college has a little FTP account,
so we'd just put them on our FTP account,
and then they would go viral on like, literally MetaFilter,
or something like that.
Or Slashdot.
- How could you even tell when something had gone viral?
- Well, the way we could tell at our college
was because the guy who ran the college's IT department
called us in to the server room
and showed us all the requests
and said, you're video is like,
shutting down the college's network.
And so you can't host videos
on the college's server anymore.
- You're a big fan of indie games,
so much that you've made a podcast about it.
- Yeah, I do a podcast called Humans Who Make Games,
which we just had our first season come out,
we're planning a second season now.
And the idea was,
I really wanted to do long form interviews
and just sit down with--
Well, actually the main motivation was
I just wanted to meet game developers.
I was just like, I love Spelunkey,
I love The Binding of Isaac,
I wanna talk to Derek Yu,
I wanna talk to Edmund,
You know, I love Christine Love's work, I wanna talk to her.
If I make a podcast,
and then I have my own TV show,
so maybe they'll think I'm important enough
to come on my podcast.
Turns out that worked.
But then in terms of what the show gives people,
I realized, you know,
we almost never get that personal side
of game development.
You know, in the interview, developers, they'll tell you,
here's all the new features,
here's the gameplay, et cetera.
- It's so, so tightly controlled by PR, it's like
when you're talking
to a big game developer, - Especially with Triple A.
you're not getting anything that anybody else
hasn't already gotten.
- Yes, very much so.
And I really wanted to know, like,
what is it like to make video games?
- Approximately three years ago you said that Twitch
streaming is like this immensely popular
cultural and important form of online entertainment,
and that the New York Times wouldn't know
or care about it for three years.
(laughing)
How does it feel to be right?
- Oh, wow, I forgot about that prediction.
Yeah, I mean, that is how I felt at the time.
I was like, when I found Twitch,
I was like late to it, and I was like,
what the hell are people doing?
Like, people are streaming this
and millions of people are watching it every second?
You know, like this is a brand new form of entertainment
that has never existed before under the sun,
that Twitch stumbled into, you know?
I started doing it just because
I like doing things with other people,
I realized that about myself.
I'm the kind of person,
I won't see a movie if I can't
find someone to see it with me,
which is stupid because then I end up not seeing movies
that I wanna see.
But the reason I do it is just,
then I'm playing the game with other people.
And they're watching it with me
and they're enjoying it with me.
So like, my best experience was
I played the first Dark Souls on Twitch,
and it was wonderful,
because I had a small community who watches.
They would follow along very closely,
and everyone watching was like,
oh, I know what's gonna happen next, Adam doesn't know.
They got to witness me experiencing
all of these things for the first time,
and I got to feel like that moment wasn't lost
because another person experienced it with me, you know?
The first time, you know, I went down into Blighttown.
- Oh, God.
- Or I like panicked my way through death, you know?
I never mapped the depths,
I just fell through holes until I got through the end
and somehow didn't get cursed by Basilisks, you know?
And they were like, we can't believe that happened to you.
- Oh, damn, shit.
- Okay, I keep thinking I can shoot the projectiles.
- Yeah, I'm sorry if this isn't helping here,
but CPR usually doesn't work.
- You know, we talked about doing that on the show.
- Really?
- Yeah, it's not as effective as you'd like.
- Definitely not as effective as television
makes you think it would be. - Oh, damn it.
See, I tried.
- Oh, boy, 73 percent of fish have ingested plastic.
- Oh, yeah, that's very true.
The oceans are incredibly full of plastic.
- [Patrick] Now, I'm making myself sad.
- Yeah, no, that's seriously...
Get ready for more news like that
for the rest of your life.
(laughing)
Sorry.
- All right, phase two, phase two.
- Aw, shit, I hit the pumpkin brain.
Oh, I got pretty close.
- You got pretty close there,
but I just wanna let you know
that I don't remember my grandfather's voice
and I'll never hear it again.
So you wanna try an easier boss level?
(laughing)
I'm not gonna say easier,
I'm gonna say a more reasonable boss.
You wanna try Goopy le Grande?
- Don't accuse me of being bad.
I mean, here's the thing.
It's okay to be bad at video games.
- It really is.
- [Adam] I mean, are you really playing right
if you didn't risk anything and did not improve?
- [Patrick] That's true,
you've risked nothing. - Oh, shit.
- [Patrick] It's the discourse, man.
- Yeah, I'm not a fan of that.
- I'm gonna be writing a strongly worded letter.
- I mean, this is, this is--
There we go, a knockout!
- [Patrick] There we go.
- He's not that tough.
This is a tutorial boss.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- [Adam] Well, how did I do?
I got no parries, C-minus.
- [Patrick] That's a passing grade.
- [Adam] Yeah.
- [Patrick] You don't show it to your parents,
but it's a passing grade.
- [Adam] Yeah.
(soft jazzy music)
I also have another new podcast, called Factually!
That is launching at the end of May.
It's like comedy Terry Gross, is sorta what it is.
Is it's me, except what I do
is I don't just talk to folks
who have a new book out or whatever,
I talk to people we've had on Adam Ruins Everything,
or whose work I'm interested in.
- Cool, well thank you again so much for hanging out.
- Of course, thank you for having me.
- Yeah, I'm bad at ending things,
someone tell me how to end this thing.