I’m just a girl. Like, patriarchy is a real thing. I just wanna say that my feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit. Add to the delete, girl. Did you hear about the slow walk? Claim our bodies. I don’t know. Claim our rights. Let’s have boundaries, bro. Oh, you ain’t know that’s baby girl. Still run away, that’s baby girl. Erring a good one, girl. I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl. Erring a good one, low baby girl. But most of y’all can’t handle baby girl. Ooh, that did, that’s baby girl. Make a own money, that’s baby girl. Still getting beat, that’s girl. Let’s do this! Oh, my God. Hi, everyone. Hi. Welcome to Frank 2018. How are you? Good. I’m Liz Winstead. How many of you are here for the first time? Oh, my God, amazing. So you have no idea what’s about to befall you. I will take you on this journey for the next three days. I swear a lot. I’m really mad. I’m really excited to be here. And I also have dedicated my career to using play to make change. So I feel like of all the themes that we get to talk about this year, using play. Here, I’m going to toss you that towel because sexy like that. It’s a really good year. This conference is special for a lot of reasons. You get to hear from incredible people who are making incredible change, doing incredible research, and who are accessible. So all the listening you do is going to benefit you because people are going to want to talk. So do both, and a lot of it. I am thrilled and delighted. This is the fifth year of Frank, I believe, Frank 5. I have been the emcee of all five. I have grown and learned so much in my own life. I’ll tell you my origin story. It’s kind of fun to open because I’m a stand-up comic. I’m a writer and a producer. I co-created The Daily Show. I was the head writer there. And now I run a nonprofit called Lady Parts Justice League. Well, maybe we have two. But it’s interesting when we talk about comedy as change because people talk about it at Nauseam. People do research papers on it. And for me, working in a corporate structure of comedy, you could reveal a lot of stuff. You could expose a lot of hypocrisy. But when advertisers say, you have to stop at that. You can’t have a call to action. That is not your job. Your job is to be funny. Sometimes we will tell you how you can be funny and who you can be funny about, limiting what you can expose. It became kind of problematic because I basically became a professional anger fluffer. You know, you just get people all riled up and then it’s like, sorry, you got to finish it yourself. In some instances, people are super good at finishing it themselves. You don’t need a lot of work. But in most instances, especially when we’re talking about life, when you tell people what’s scary and what’s wrong and you can’t direct them where to fix it, who are you servicing? You’re servicing the machine that sort of got this person elected, keeping people angry without solutions. So I was like, I’m a comic. What can I do to bring solutions? But first I had to address the problem I wanted to fix, the problem that I wanted to focus on. And for me, I looked at the landscape of all the information I was putting out there to people, and then we were talking about fracking, we were talking about the environment, we were talking about racism, we were talking about a lot of stuff that was really important and that people could get on board with because they looked at all those issues as something that affected the total humanity of everyone. And the one issue that wasn’t talked about at all was reproductive rights and justice and especially abortion. And it wasn’t talked about because it wasn’t recognized as that economic path and the economic justice people needed. It wasn’t recognized as without this component of health care for people with uteruses, they could not walk that path of their full humanity. And I was like, why are we not talking about this? Why are we not doing that in a way? I can gather people, I write jokes, I make people laugh, I have fun. I’m going to start an organization that A, Centers for Reproductive Rights as a cornerstone, asks people to reevaluate how they feel about it and see that without full access to this care, we are not giving people full access to their own destiny. So I formed this crazy organization, Lady Parts Justice, and we do a couple of things. We make videos that expose the laws because they’re mostly happening in local communities, local state legislatures are 80% of where all of this stuff is happening. And we use technology, put the videos out there, Twitter, Facebook, but that’s just the jumping off point. We use those things to literally go to grassroots activism. So every year we go in the summer on tour. Last year we did 18 cities in two summers. We went all through the American South and the Midwest and through just doing comedy and music shows, we would gather 300, 400 people in a room, and then we did talk-backs with providers and local activists. And right then and there our audience heard the needs of what these people wanted, how they needed help and how they could expand their base, and they signed up right in the room. We had about a 30% return rate and it’s fascinating to learn how people who never thought that activism was part of their lives could become activists by not asking them to do something outside of what they already do, but by simply applying what they already do to help out clinics. For example, if you’re a clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, you can’t get lawn care because they won’t come because you provide abortions. There’s people in the audience that said, wait, I have a lawn service, you’re telling me that activism can mean I get paid and take on a client? I’m like, yeah, that’s activism. And people were blown away. And so by using all we have is far in the scope of technology, videos, humor. The humor can give a message, but the humor can simply be a gathering space with which to bring people together, look around, see a belief system that is meshing right there and intersecting, and then giving people something to do. If you can give them something they can do in a day, a week, a month, an hour, you’ve got them hooked. And so through playing, we actually engage. And so that’s the nature of what we do and it’s incredible. We’re going out this summer, come talk to me afterwards, maybe we’re coming to a town near you. We also make videos that are provocative. After the Me Too movement exploded and we watched a couple of different things. We watched extremism rear its ugly head in using Christianity as a tool for hatred. We watched sexism rear its ugly head in the way of patriarchy and we watched an overwhelming amount of white supremacy takeover. We decided to use a common commercial to expose sort of those three areas of where our society is. And this is the kind of work we do in video front. Growing up, we were Klansmen. Proud of our Anglo-Saxon heritage and Christian values, we burned crosses on lawns, created a culture of white supremacy and practiced ethnic purity. I went on Mancestry.com to find out who else was in my tree of values. So I typed in my core beliefs and I was able to trace my ancestral heritage all the way back to a president, Jefferson Davis. Turns out all these years I was identifying as a white supremacist when actually I’m a Republican. So I traded in my hood for this t-shirt and this polo shirt and this button down and this blue blazer and another jacket. Mancestry.com. Find out the story only white male privilege can tell. Down the floor of my living room, but I kept this torch. This message brought to you by LadyPartsJustice.com, kicking politicians out of vaginas since 2012. I was born a gentleman. I always hold a door open for a lady. I tell women at work when they look nice and as a 32 year old man, if I want to date a 14 year old, I make sure to ask their mother for permission first. But growing up I didn’t know much about my ancestry. So I went to Mancestry.com, put my name in and tons more gentlemen started popping up in my tree. It turns out I am 10,000 times removed from Thomas Jefferson. This is my ancestor, TJ. Mancestry.com. Find out the story only white male privilege can tell. This message brought to you by LadyPartsJustice.com, kicking politicians out of vaginas since 2012. I always thought I was a Christian. I married a good Christian lady and we’re homeschooling five good Christian kids. In fact, we spent our Saturdays together as a good Christian family screaming at women entering abortion clinics. When I found out about Mancestry, I was excited to log in and find out just how Christian I really am. Imagine my surprise to find out I’m not Christian at all. I’m a domestic terrorist. I just use good Christian values to condone violence. So I traded this sign for this one. S***y women, burnin’ s***, murdering c***s, deserve to be s***. Mancestry.com. Find out the story only white male privilege can tell. This message brought to you by LadyPartsJustice.com, kicking politicians out of vaginas since 2012. That last one, what the man was yelling was actually what was yelled to patients in Jackson, Mississippi. And it’s a very powerful thing. So play is important. We’ll be talking about how we weave it in and out of making change throughout the whole conference. I’m so excited to be here. I’m so excited to kick it off. Give yourselves a round of applause for being here. We’re going to do this!