What are you doing here? Look, I know it was hard for you, but you can’t be here with me. Look, I don’t know why it didn’t work out. I don’t know why people weren’t psyched about your exclamation point. Maybe it’s because a middle-aged guy who wears dockers isn’t that exclamation pointy. I don’t know. You gotta leave the tent. You’re not gonna leave the tent? Then I’ll leave the tent. Or not. You guys, I’m stuck in this fucking tent with Jeb Bush. It’s really awful. Please clap. Please clap. Oh my god. That’s a bad camping trip. Hi everybody, I’m Liz Winstead. And I am here to take you through your Frank journey. I communicate maybe unlike any other person you’ll see in your three-day course of action here. I am my third time at Frank. I was here from the beginning. For those of you who don’t know who I am, I am a comedian and a writer and a producer and an activist. I started out my career co-creating The Daily Show and I was the head writer there for three years. I went to Air America Radio and had a show with Rachel Maddow. Then I wrote a book. Then I did some other shit and basically I spent my career calling out bullshit by people who use their power for evil. I don’t do it traditionally. I feel like there are spaces for people to do traditional communication and I think they’re awesome. Sometimes I feel like we need that person who says, what the fuck? There’s a space for that. The what the fuck moment. And Andy wants you to have your Frank moment. I want you to have your what the fuck moment. And you don’t need to hashtag that with Frank. But if you want to just simply hashtag what the fuck moment, leave out the Frank. I’ll retweet you. So just know that can happen. I’ll tell you a little bit about me in a sec. But first I want to tell you a little bit about Frank and why it’s this really powerful magical place. And you’re going to meet a whole bunch of different people from all different kinds of disciplines, documentary filmmakers, racial justice activists, reproductive rights activists, environmental activists, climate activists. You name it, education, people who communicate in ways that are really astounding. And you’re really going to learn from their skills and tools of how they communicate. But that’s only really part of it. Part of what makes this so interesting for me is not only learning their tools, but really learning their story. And we talk so much about communication. And sometimes we don’t talk enough about listening, the listening part. And we live in a world right now. I am on Twitter. I combat trolls on Twitter constantly because I’m a reproductive rights activist. And turns out some people don’t love abortion as much as me. I sound unbelievable. So learning to listen is something we’ve lost, I think tremendously, through these avenues we have to communicate. Oftentimes it’s a big game of, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. And then often it’s a game of privileged folks learning for the first time they need to shut the fuck up. Because now that everybody can say where they’re coming from and who they are and what their needs are, I’m sure you’ve all felt it, where you’re somebody who’s finally through these mediums, that’s this amazing voice in the world. And people think they don’t have to hear it. So this is a place to really listen so you can become a better ally. So you can actually learn about other things people are doing in interest that you love, but maybe you’re focused on your own thing and never get this opportunity to do it. Take the opportunity. Because what Frank offers at so many conferences don’t offer is opportunity to connect with the people who are speaking. It’s like Andy said, it’s so great to come here, see friends, see people you admire. People that you have heroes are like in this room right now. To be able to have access to them, take advantage of it. Ask questions but listen as much as you can because you’re going to get so much out of it. Have fun. Have fun. This is a place where you get to let your guard down also. You get to really meet people you really get to connect. And the people I’ve met here are incredible and I’ve brought into the work that I do. I mean last year I’ll never forget trying to list the people. I was trying to think of some people I could touch tone out for you, but at a conference that has like a zillion speakers, that’s pretty tough, but I’ll just talk about two. Ai Jin Poo who was here last year. Really connecting with the erasure of the elderly and workers and Asian women to combine all of that in a 20 minutes talk made me really rethink the way I see people. And Shankar Vedantam, I don’t know if you know him, he is amazing. And he has an incredible podcast. I don’t know it, download, it’s called The Hidden Brain. And just this week on his podcast, he did a story about how literally gynecology in this country was developed by unwilling slaves. I listened to the podcast and what I was able to do because I knew about the podcast was take it to the women of color who work with me at Lady Parts Justice. They’re talking about it on our podcast Friday. Women under 30 looking at this and talking about it through a lens that will go out into a pop culture space that maybe Shankar didn’t reach. So those are the kind of really cool things that you can do and learn and be here, but take it all in. So what I’m doing now is I kind of combine my love of shitting on people with power and my love of reproductive rights and justice. And I formed an organization called Lady Parts Justice and we do a couple of things. It started for me back in 2011 when I’ve always been an activist and I’ve always cared about these issues, but Congress voted to defund Planned Parenthood for the first time. It’s been about 57 times, but you know who’s coming. Oh yeah, me. Anyway. And the first thing they did on this bill when they all took over the nuts was they tried to defund National Public Radio, the National Parks and Planned Parenthood. And I was like, are they performing abortions on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me in Yosemite? Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me About Your Abortions. Is that the reason they’re calling it now? Because I have no idea. Turns out no. Just if you needed that. I want to be helpful always. Turns out no, but when it didn’t pass on a federal level, what happened very quickly was that there was an assault in all 49 states except Oregon. Go Ducks. Where they started eroding on a state level and it was an orchestrated plot done by an organization called Americans United for Life. Very much like Alec or the Koch brothers of the anti-abortion movement. So I was in Minnesota trying to finish my book. I was there for six months with my dogs. I drove there in a van while that’s another story. But I had to get back to Brooklyn so I called up Planned Parenthood and I said, hey, what if I take my dogs in this van and drive home and do some benefits for you along the way? And I was like, who are you? And I was like, doesn’t matter. I’m awesome. So it started out as six, turned into 82. Covering independent clinics, covering Planned Parenthoods, covering anybody who needed help. And the thing that struck me the most was everybody said, oh my god, I didn’t know this was all happening through my show when I told the stories. And I was like, I don’t know. I’m a comedian. I’m just telling you. And then they kept saying, what can I do? What can I do? And I thought, I don’t know. Can no longer be an answer because I have too much information. So I thought, maybe I can do something. And the second part of what happened was every clinic I went to, either the doctor or the clinic owner said, thank you for coming. No one ever comes. No one ever comes. So I was in a position where I thought, I’ve used these clinics. My friends have used these clinics. Everyone I know needs affordable birth control. We need to be their advocates. So I called a bunch of comedians and stuff and I said, do you want to start exposing bullshit and then also go visit these clinics? And they said, yeah. And so here’s a little video about what we do. Shout out and we’ll go to break. But okay, here’s the video. Where like on this stool by the fake fire. Jab, how you doing? We love TV, talk about you. We love television, speak up. One in three women will have an abortion in her lifetime. I’m one of them. And quite frankly, I just got sick of all these creepy, defundamentalists driving the narrative. We have the gates of hell right here. I mean, we have an actual line between death and life. And you know what? I’m not afraid to say I had an abortion. And I also feel like I owe it to every single person who needs one to fight to make sure they can get one. Lady Parts Justice League was put together by Liz Wins that she is a co-creator of The Daily Show and she’s a political comedian and a genius and she just cares. I basically made a career out of using humor to shine a light on bullshit. And what this movement needs is a jolt of provocative messaging to expose these creepy, self-appointed vaginal crossing guards. So I got some of my funny friends together, writers, comedians, activists, to make hilarious videos and do live events so we can drop info about the erosion of all this reproductive access into pop culture spaces. We’re doing something completely different that people aren’t used to. The content that we’re producing is making more people familiar with what’s going on. What better way to do that than to also make you laugh? It’s not that millennials don’t care about these issues. It’s just that the message being given to them was not effective. But we don’t want to be just some kind of anger fluffers. So we started an event where people would take action called V to Shining V. V to Shining V. Plan your V to V party. V to Shining V. People gather right before an election to talk about what is at stake in every single state in the Indian, combine that with some music, some comedy, some facts, and a call to action so that we are in control of the narrative. One of the most important and fun and meaningful things that we get to do is just pile into a van together and travel across the country to show support to the clinic providers. We’ll do a stand-up show. We’ll do workshops. We’ll do the grunt work. We’ll escort patients. We’ll take them grocery shopping. We’ll cook for them. We’ll do anything to let them know that we value them and their work. To have our peers and to have other people in this movement recognize what we’re doing. You guys appreciate us and appreciate what we go through. It just means a lot. We just feel like, you know, we’ve all used these clinics. Don’t you think we should be defending them? It made a huge difference because for me personally as a provider, having come through a throne of folk who called me a murderer accused me of harming, quote, my own race or black people. The love that I felt and the support that I felt has been amplified by related parts of justice that are being on the ground. To have come that far and to have spent your time and your money and your energy and walked into hell. You walked into hell and I am so grateful. When you all showed up, I was reminded of something that Dr. King said. If America collapses, it won’t be from the appalling actions of the evil people. It’ll be the appalling silence of the good people. So if you’re sitting there not with the first person you had sex with, it’s probably because you used birth control. Maybe because you had an abortion. So if that’s the case, maybe you should join us. It’s not a…we drink and we have shirts. Join the Lady Parts Justice League. Explosing sex as shitheads has never been more rewarding. So…thanks!