Comedian Josh Johnson On: Handling News Cycle Anxiety, His Insane Work Ethic, and Why AI is BS

27:59Like, I've been really blessed that the right people have been in my life at the right times and that whether it was life or my own personal choices, it got the people who were not good for me away from me. Was faith a part of your upbringing and is it a part of your life now? Yes, I was raised in church and I don't go to church as often now, but I feel like all of the lessons that I took away from church as a kid or a part of my life now, and I'd like to think that I am the beneficiary of a lot of good lessons. And I've also been able to question the things that I don't think are congruent with the rest of the message, if that makes sense.

28:52In Kendrick Lamar's album, like Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, there's a song where he is basically asking the pastor in this lyric form, should we not love our neighbor, the rules of the land or the heart, what's greater? because it was his pastor coming down on his cousin, I believe, for being gay or being trans. You sometimes have, once again, a real incongruence. There are these people of faith that teach a message of love. And then when you see them online or when you see them even in person at a lot of different points, they don't seem to have that love that they preach. And so I think that there's a real gap there, especially with modern Christianity and what it's sort of turning into through politics.

29:48And so I think that knowing when to sideline that stuff that I feel like is specifically not what the religion is about, something so specifically cultural in the moment, just like temporal over things that are eternal is like that to me is the best way to digest everything that i've been taught you know like like there will be christianity after trump but there's a specific type of christianity with trump that doesn't seem like it's anywhere in the bible fair i uh i covered for a long time i spent a lot of time when i was a reporter covering evangelical Christians, even though I was raised in an atheist context, although I did have a bar mitzvah, but I often joke that I did that only for the money.

30:37And the evangelicals I met were very sincere. And I spent a lot of time with folks. And it was really, it was like I was a fish out of water, spending a lot of time with these evangelicals in the heartland. And I was actually, I really walked away in a lot of these cases impressed. And it jarred me out of the stereotypes that I held as somebody who was raised in Massachusetts. But now I look at the American evangelical scene and I can't do the math on how they're down with a guy like this. But anyway, having said that, it seems to me that you're saying, okay, yeah, I set aside what I view as the hypocrisy of the modern manifestations of the faith, but like the eternal parts around like, let's be a kind person, I'm down with that.

31:23And actually, that kind of brings me to your recent special on HBO Symphony. You should watch it. HBO Max streaming right now. How did I do? No, that was that was great. If anything, I'm I was almost going to look into your camera after you did. But I'll just look into this camera and be like, yeah, thanks. He's right. In Symphony, there's a whole part toward the beginning. I can't remember exactly what the context was. We were really just talking about how you put a lot of emphasis on being a kind and decent person. And I was, I was curious, like, was that just part of the bit or is that really a thing for you?

32:01And is that based in, in the faith in which you were raised? So it is, it is a thing for me. One, one thing I'll, I'll say about like kindness, especially in any form of the public eye is you do have pretty far to fall as well. Like that's, that's the other that's the other risk with being um the whatever like nice or kind person is that in any moment that your your impatience or in any moment that your anger bubbles up to the forefront all of a sudden now it was all an act as opposed to you having 498 good days and two bad days whereas if you are a little bit more and i think it's why we have like the current political system we have, if you're a bit more like brutish and if you're loud and obnoxious, then anytime you're not that thing, it's like, you know, I think beneath the surface, he's actually like a really good guy.

33:02And so there's once again, a sort of like hypocrisy of our understanding of who people are and who they present themselves to be. And so to me, when I'm talking about being like nice in symphony, or even when I'm talking about religion to a degree. There's some aspect of it for me that is so much about what you know you are. And it's actually why some people need so badly to lie to themselves. Because if you were alone with yourself as you truly are, some people wouldn't know how to handle it. And so you come up with all of these like reasonings and ideas of why you did each thing and what each thing meant.

33:41And I only did it because of that or whatever. But like when you're really deep down by yourself, especially meditating, you kind of know. And that's something that I wanted to get to the heart of on top of getting to the heart of other like big ideas that are timeless, you know, like like ideas around family, ideas around love, ideas around like religion as well. And so my attempt is to speak very like broadly and plainly about my experiences, how they fit through these lenses or vice versa, like like all of these things through my lens as well. And so that's what I hope people get out of it when they watch it.

34:22Do you find that you're like you have a kind of internalized Old Testament God judging you on your level of kindness moment to moment? I am sure this is like not how some theologian would would say I'm supposed to think about it, but I don't actually separate the Testaments in my mind. I think that separating them can get you into a bit of trouble on an understanding of what like the human experience is over time and an understanding of a misunderstanding of God in general. I find that a lot of the Old Testament thinkers are also the people who happen to love and serve a God who hates all the people they do.

35:08Because that was their takeaway from Old Testament. And they forget all New Testament. They forget the Beatitudes. They forget the little lessons of both humility and charity that Jesus taught. And all that stuff is way more difficult. It's actually really easy to throw a rock. Like if you want to stone someone, I bet you could get that done in an afternoon. But if you want to love someone through addiction, that's going to be incredibly difficult. That's going to be remarkably hard because you're going to have to contend with a lot of things at one time. There's the person that you love, the person that you at least believe that you know, and then there's someone who is struggling with addiction.

35:52And so there's a way that someone's going to behave through their struggle with their addiction. And then beyond all of that, there is like a soul to be seen. and then in trying to connect with and see that soul, it's like it can be marred by all of these actions and all of this thinking that might not even be the sort of like right mind of the person. If the person had their addiction to put to the side and had the decisions to make over again, would they make all the same decisions? Maybe, maybe not. But I think that when you are trying to behave and love in the way that Jesus taught, at least in the way that the new King James version of the Bible with the red parts highlighted for what Jesus says.

36:42If you're trying to do all of that, that's going to be way harder than God hates all the people I hate. And so I don't separate them because I feel like that would sidestep some questions. I think if you're just thinking New Testament, then you lose sight of how stark of a difference people's experiences were century to century with with god and with like god's law and everything and i think that there's a lot of anxiety inducing things that um that you can pull away from just reading the old testament and i think there's a lot of delusion that you can read from just reading the new testament we had a little pool party yesterday with some family friends.

37:26They were about, I would say, about 10 kids in the pool at the same time. And they were all playing with these great toys, many of which we got from our sponsor today, Wayfair, including an awesome floating basketball net that my son has been dunking on on the regular. There's also, I don't know how to describe it. It's this floating thing with holes in it and you can throw a football into it. And my son has been working on a spiral in the pool with his friends. Wayfair helps you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value, and trusted reviews. Wayfair verified products are hand-vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection.

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38:41Might be tempting in a meditative or Buddhist context to dismiss caring about the way your hair and skin look, but I am of the view that a certain amount of this makes complete sense. You want to feel good so that you can be at your best and you can have more bandwidth to pay attention to other people, which brings me to one of my sponsors today, iRestore. iRestore has been leading the way in red light therapy for over two decades, helping shape the category with clinically backed devices trusted by over 500 ,000 customers worldwide. The iRestore elite is their most advanced laser hair growth system using 300 lasers and 200 LEDs to help regrow thicker, healthier hair in as little as three months.

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40:03I don't have a teenager yet, but I just did a family vacation with several other families, and there were a lot of teenagers in the large house in which we were all staying. and I saw that one of the pain points for my friends with teenage children is money. How are you monitoring what your teenagers are spending? How do you deal with it when they're constantly asking you for money? Which brings me to one of our sponsors today, Cash App. For all the parents out there with teenagers, we know you're already trying to keep a million different things under control. Cash App is here to help you make sure your teen's money and their spending isn't adding to all of the craziness.

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41:11Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partners. Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Cash App Visa debit flex cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC and the Bancorp N.A. pursuant to a license from Visa USA Incorporated. See terms and conditions for the Sutton Prepaid Card, Sutton Debit Flex Card, and BankCorp Debit Flex Card. Savings provided by Cash App, a Block Incorporated brand. Visit cash.app slash legal slash podcast for full disclosures. Let me get back to Symphony for a second. In these anxious times, I'm curious what you think about the role of comedy.

41:51And there's a – I was struck at the beginning of your special, again, Symphony. There's a DJ on the street and he's got a sign in front of him. Do you remember the exact words? So it starts with sort of a Basquiat quote with my addition on top of it. So the quote, I believe, if I'm calling it exactly right, was if art is how we decorate space and music is how we decorate time, comedy is how we decorate reality. That Basquiat quote and your embellishment on top of it was important enough to you to put right at the top of the special. Yes, because it's what the special and I aim to do. You look at art and you see a blank canvas and that blank canvas has this limitless potential in that space to be whatever.

42:40And then an artist comes along and the artist has a vision in their mind of what that space could look like. And so they create it. And then we look at this painting and we don't even see canvas. When you see the Mona Lisa, you don't think about the canvas that's underneath it. And when you see great work, you don't think about, oh, that used to just be raw, right? But it's very easy to look at a canvas and say it is what it is. It's the artist that comes along and makes it something else. Music works the same way. Music is how we decorate our time. You can look at time as whatever, these seconds passing on a clock to track it, and it is what it is.

43:17It used to be three o 'clock and now it's four o 'clock, right? But the artist comes along and they're like, I want to fill that time that passes with music and the music perfectly fills out that time. There are songs I can listen to over and over and over again because the artist came along and decorated this space. And it doesn't have to be for my time, but they decorated it however they saw fit. And I choose to fill my time with it. And you can look at reality. A lot of acceptance is looking at reality as it is what it is. That is what happened. That just is how people are. This is what we do.

43:55I don't know. This is how it's always been done. This is what I think things should be like. And comedians come along and they sort of decorate that reality. They decorate like, why do we do this? Like a lot of good comedy comes from asking questions of yourself and then of the audience. And so sometimes good jokes come in the form of a question, but it's like, why, why do we have socks? Who figured out socks? Now you could just look at getting dressed in the morning. It's like, I put on my socks, I put on my shoes. But then the comedian comes along and they're like, why aren't the bottom of shoes flat?

44:32Like, they got all these ridges. Are the ridges helping me? Like, what is the ridge for? Because I've worn champions, I've worn Nikes, I've worn Adidas, and they have different ridges. And some of them got a circle ridge. What is that? And then some of them have like a split in the middle. Like, am I walking around on buck teeth? And so then you ask all these questions. And in the answering of those questions is a sort of decoration. It's no different than the decoration of space that happens on a canvas. And I think it's no different than the decoration of time that is filled with music. But it strikes me.

45:07I love all of that. It strikes me that in a context of a lot of political and geopolitical tumult, that comedians can help us decorate reality in a couple of meaningful ways. One, give voice to our anger and anxiety and helplessness in a way that's kind of constructive in that it helps us move through the emotions in a way that gets us to a laugh and makes us feel like we're all in it together. I started that as if it's a list, but actually that's just the one thing that I was thinking of. Sure. But I also think that there's sometimes a distilling of a lot of thoughts or feelings that come through in a joke for a person like the comedian that told the joke.

45:54But they also end up being exactly how the audience distills those things as well. One of the things that I aim to do, whether it's the weekly sets that I put out on YouTube, which are more topical or the something that's meant to be timeless, like symphony that I hope for people to watch like 50 years from now, even if they don't know who I am, they just could turn it on and watch it and enjoy it. is that you are like in a universe that is so expansive, in a world that is so big, and in the short amount of time that you have, not only do you matter, but you aren't alone. There are millions of people feeling the things that you feel.

46:33Like the idea that we even have a loneliness epidemic means that there are plenty of friends to be made and plenty of people who could benefit from being a friend or having a friend. And I think that with comedy, what you can do is you can take all these things that might just seem like platitudes if they're just said if they're just tweeted out if they're just like sitting in front of you and then when colored with stories both from your personal life or just like making an assessment of the thing that is happening then uh i think that you can show you can show it more efficiently this idea that you're not alone or this idea that you even matter you know like i i i think that a lot of people end up making art for a version of themselves that they needed.

47:18And that's why it like comes out of them. And I think that those were things that at any given point in my life, I needed to hear. So you see something like the HBO special. And that to me is like me trying to tackle things that will be around as subjects and maybe issues much longer than I'll be around. Whereas the weekly that I put on YouTube, it's like I will take something that's happening right now that you may not care about in two weeks. And I will try to still that thing from a place of making it make sense through jokes. Like you look at someone like RFK Jr. and how he's like the head of health.

47:58He's the head of health. He's the top of health. He's the healthiest we have. That's terrifying. And not only is it terrifying, it reminds me of the time where my school nurse was sick. So now you're sick and now she coughing. It's like, what are we supposed to do here? Because she sounds terrible. And it's like, and that thing that like my, my school nurse being sick is exactly what RFK Jr. feels like as the head of health and human services, because it doesn't sound, I mean, from every report I've read, it sounds like man's checked out. It sounds like he shows up for press conferences, but like He hasn't been briefed on a bunch of things and it doesn't seem like he's trying to busy himself with like fixing problems.

48:44And I'm talking about the problems we have now. Never mind like we were supposed to make America healthy again by getting all the additives out. And I don't remember what happened to that. Skittles taste the same. Did you get anything out? Maybe look, maybe I don't know. Maybe the Skittles are completely different. But things things that they don't ingest in Europe are adjusted here. Meanwhile, we're like, why are we the sickest people in the world? It's like, seems like you could put two and two together. There's just a lot of money to be made by keeping things the way they are with people who are already making money.

49:16And so maybe you could make your entire administration and your entire tenure as the head of health and human services as challenging all that. But I don't know if that's happening if you're, you know, taking pictures with like fast food in front of you and stuff like that. It's like I'm not saying that's a whole endorsement, but as a as a guy who's skeptical of vaccines, you don't seem too skeptical of hamburgers. And I think that all of that stuff is is something you could poke fun at and you don't have to be making the final statement on all of politics. I'm not trying to convince anyone to believe exactly what I believe, but I do think by questioning things, I might make them question why they think what they think.

50:01Yes. And it feels to me like you're actually kind of just helping us. You're helping reality go down smoother. You're actually getting us to acceptance, really. This is bringing the conversation full circle. That's one of the services you're providing, that you're helping us laugh about what's happening, process it together so that we can do the next thing, which is engage effectively. It's definitely an aim. And I've really wrestled for years. As long as I've been putting things out on YouTube, I've wrestled with the idea of like, okay, how should I go about doing that? Because is it always the right thing to do?

50:41I don't want to make the news go down easy enough that it feels normal because these things are not normal. And some things are like that's actually why sometimes I don't cover a topic because I don't want to make the mistake of something can be done about like RFK Jr. being head of health and human services. He could be fired. Do you know what I mean? And something can be done about a lot of things. But then there are things that I think to get people feeling comfortable or to get people feeling okay with would be a disservice to whatever the topic is and to the people that I'm talking to. And so because my job is to do comedy and because my job is to make people laugh and we're supposed to come together and have a good time, I can talk about things that are serious as well.

51:30But I also don't take lightly the subjects that I choose because I try to only choose things I really have something to say about. And I try to also give some insight on what I think can be done about it because outside of that, you're just complaining. Although I would say that sometimes the right type of complaining can be healthy catharsis. Sure, sure, absolutely. I'm not saying I know what to do in every scenario that I've brought up, but I try to really be mindful of what it is I'm going to say to people about whatever it is I'm going to talk about. And I think that for something like Symphony, it was a bit – the difficulty came from how do I hold up these subjects as pillars of the overall work and everything?

52:16And then the difficulty sometimes with the weekly is like how do I break this thing down in a way that feels digestible for the understanding? and then what would I do about it and what am I doing about it? And maybe I just share that. And so it's two very different types of contemplation that go into creating both things. Most of us can remember being about 15 and feeling completely invisible or worse, extremely visible, but for the wrong reasons. I remember one year when I was a teenager, I had a pimple in the crevice of my nose for the entire year. I didn't like that. Either way, even if we have painful memories of that age, most of us tend to soften it in memory, and it was actually harder than we remember it now.

53:11That is the territory of Carrie, streaming October 7th on Prime Video, the first ever television adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie. Eight episodes from Mike Flanagan with Stephen King as an executive producer. Flanagan had described this show as a tragedy. It's about a girl who doesn't feel seen by anyone and about how small everyday acts of unkindness compound into something nobody meant to cause, which happens now at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable not long ago. What I really appreciate about the show is that the show takes Carrie seriously as a person rather than as some sort of symbol.

53:47And the season keeps circling around one major question. Are you watching the making of a hero, a villain, or something more complicated than either of those options? Carrie is streaming October 7th, only on Prime Video.

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55:39you've mentioned the weeklies on youtube a couple of times and i didn't mean to ask you about them how many weeks have you been dropping these hour-long um pieces of content on youtube for we just made uh three years this week congratulations thanks yeah and it's kind of insane i mean that's it's an extraordinary achievement but like to do a an hour of new new material every week on top of in that same period of time doing a full special on hbo and then being one of the the uh a correspondent and co-host of the daily show that's just an enormous amount of work so i'm just curious like how you find the time and energy to do it why did you want to do it in the first place i mean some of it is uh some of it is like obsession i i want to I want to be my version of whatever the best is and I look at comedians that um I feel like are just so incredible and I'm like how do you how do you get that good well you get that good by practice and what's the best type of practice to do something every day and then if you're doing something every day makes sense to put out that work putting out work makes it easier for you to accept what the responses are to your work like all all these things every every day is like practice for the next day you know and so I set out to become a better writer a better comedian and it's on my mind all the time I'm like writing all the time and everything and then through becoming more known and getting more popular I've been able to be on the road and do shows most weekends and by doing shows more often i'm able to practice the actual stand-up more often and then it just is a yeah it's a it's a a cycle that i'm on of like what is the thing that i'm passionate about to talk about go out talk about it give it give it away to the people who couldn't make it to the show and repeat that thing you basically had an audacious goal which is i want to be one of the best, if not the best at my craft.

57:51And so how am I going to do that? I'm going to work my ass off and I'm just going to create. And I think you in an accompanying social media post around the fact that you just reached this three-year milestone, one of your messages to other aspiring creators of any type is you have to just start. And that appears to be what you did um are you going to keep going forever i'm not sure i mean i think the thing that's nice about um a pursuit of being the best is that in every art form everything is so subjective and relative that like the best is like it's nice because it's it has a carrot in front of you that you're never going to get to but it keeps you like running a bit harder on the treadmill, which keeps you fit, if that makes sense.

58:39I look at getting better as something that only I will know. So it has to come with a little bit of acceptance that I'm getting better, but to call myself the best would feel like delusion. So I'll never do that. So then where does that leave you? And if you think about it too hard, it kind of leaves you in a weird limbo. But if you're like, oh, maybe I can be a little bit better tomorrow and maybe I could be a little bit better tomorrow and you keep getting tomorrows and you keep making things, then I think that you're on track to be somebody's best. I can be somebody's favorite. Can't be everybody's favorite.

59:17And I may never feel as good as the people I look up to, but that's okay. And as long as you inspire somebody, somebody enjoys you, someone had a phenomenal time, it's the best show that they've ever seen, then who's to say you're not on that path? And I think that one of the most like biting things I ever got as advice was not luckily not even to me or I think about it every day. It was to somebody else in my class where there was someone who came to speak to us and they were talking to us about our projects and they had asked one of us about their story. They were writing a short story and the person who was talking could tell them everything about the short story.

1:00:04They could even they were even projecting how the reader would feel at certain parts of the story and like in the twist and just getting it all out there. And then they were like, oh, can I read it? And they were like, oh, it's not quite done yet. And simply they just simply said the most important thing about artists is that artists finish. And it's like, that's that's it. We're all so worried about people who aren't even looking at us. You know what I mean? You could worry all day about how somebody is going to digest something that you put out. Or you could put it out and see because you could be wrong.

1:00:38Do you read the comments? Yeah, yeah. I'm sure at times that's unpleasant. It can be. But I mean, I've been blessed with an incredible community around me that I think are really earnest both in their criticism and in their praise. And I try not to read too much because I think it could sway you one way or the other. It could have you feeling like the best that ever did it off of opinions online, or it could have you feeling like you should quit off opinions online. Meanwhile, the thing you share is a thing that the people in the video liked. That's one of the things in journalism that I sometimes was perplexed by.

1:01:15You would see online someone make a joke, especially if it was stand-up and especially if it was produced stand-up. Right. There would be an anchor that would be talking with a panel about if a joke was funny, but then just play the clip. Are the people laughing? Then the people laughing found it funny, even if I don't find it funny. like there there's plenty of things that i'm like hi it's okay and then if you play the clip the people there are dying though so it's funny to them so it's it's it's a hard thing to say what is and isn't funny and it's and it's a hard thing to say what uh should and shouldn't be done i can only control what i will and won't do and what i find funny you know i i think that But like bombing is a good indication of whether or not you were funny.

1:02:07In the three years, are there moments in any of the videos where you bomb and you've posted it anyway? Not really. No, there's definitely been some moments where I was like, let's let's leave this in when I'm doing that. You know, like like sort of assessment of which show went the best and my editors like editing it. I'll be like, maybe we leave this in because it didn't get the biggest laugh, but it is part of my overall like idea that I'm sharing. So sometimes those things are important. And sometimes you'll you'll find like this happens sometimes with late night. It also happens with produced sets by like some third party company where a comedian will perform.

1:02:51and then the comments will say like the audience didn't give them enough and maybe that's even they the audience wasn't mic'd as efficiently as possible or things can happen but people online are going to have their specific opinion of whatever you did it might be influenced by how it went but they're going to have their own opinion and so yeah i i find that the practice is what has helped me not have to wonder, oh, the set didn't even go well, but should I post it just to say I'm keeping up? It's like, I haven't really had to make that sort of decision. You've been very patient with all my questions today.

1:03:32Oh, it's not even patience. I like talking to you, but I also talk a lot. So if at any point you want to chime in here, feel free. That's not my job. My job is to get you talking. Okay. If you say so. Is there anything you were hoping we would get to that we haven't gotten to anything else coming up that you want to oh yeah i can talk about the tour please do yeah so i'm very excited comedy band camp which is my new tour and the tour is and then the intention behind it is to give everyone the sort of like camp experience that i always wanted um there's a lot of uh different aspects to the world that you that you're going to be visiting so there's a show you can buy a ticket to a show and come enjoy the show and the show is gonna have music's and dance and and and comedy but there's also a personality quiz that we have that you can take and you take the personality quiz and it'll tell you what troop you're in and the the troop is based off of like different people's personalities like if you're super independent you might be red rogues if you're a little mischievous you might be feisty foxes if you're like really into music and like um have a yeah have like a sense of awareness around your emotions you might be sapphire blues and everything you're more introverted you might be fuchsia flames and so all these troops come together and there's going to be um an aspect of the show where you can hopefully get to maybe meet your people.

1:05:10If you got Ivy Leaves and someone else got Ivy Leaves and y 'all are both wearing your Ivy Leaves shirt, then yeah, you might be able to strike up a conversation just on that. But the intention around it is to introduce as many people as possible to people who are like them already, not just in the fact that they wanted to go to a comedy show that night but also um in their personality and and like and create these icebreakers so people already have something to talk about outright and then there's gonna we're gonna have as far as the scope of the tour as long as the tour lasts there's gonna be games that come out and and different like meetups that we're planning and everything and scavenger hunt and stuff so i'm i'm working on making this uh something that people really can remember and on top of coming to the show.

1:05:59I love that. It's comedy, it's entertainment, but it's also like the antidote to the loneliness crisis. That's what I hope. Yeah, I hope there's a source and a means of community through people coming to the show. Thank you for making time for me today. Really appreciate it. It was a pleasure to meet you. Yeah, it's great to meet you. And what a voice, by the way. Oh, thank you. What an incredible voice. I have a little brother. Same voice. Really? Yes. Our parents and wives cannot tell us apart. On the phone. Yeah. Wow. Yes. This is incredible because here's the thing. Sometimes when you're watching the news, you're thinking that's that person's news voice.

1:06:38Do you know what I mean? Like this is the voice I have to have to tell you about the horrible thing I'm about to tell you about. Because honestly, I think you could deliver some real good bad news. Yeah. Well, that was my job for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. But here's the thing. I watched you on TV and always thought like, all right, He's got to like center himself. He's got to get himself ready. He's got to like do the vocal, the vocal warm up just so he can hit us with like 12 people today. Right. But you you're over here. This is how you order breakfast. Yes. My first anchor job, I was 23 years old and I looked like I was 12, but I had this crazy deep voice that is really is what saved me in those early years.

1:07:20Wow. Yes. I want to hear a snippet of you kind of doing everything. That would be great. Have you ever thought about like lending your voice to like the audio version of an instruction manual? Nobody's asked me to do that. I would ask you if I owned an appliance, I would ask you to do that immediately. You don't own an appliance? Well, I don't own a company. Oh, I see. I mean, you could read it to me. you could come over and then we could sit with my ikea furniture as i put it together and not only would it be a soothing experience i feel like i would do it right because i'm just hearing me in my head when i read yeah you don't like your version no i'm i'm good on it i'm all right but you've got yeah like such a perfect delivering voice for information the there you know there are all these sleep stories the the people read really boring stuff yeah like the calm yes the calm app does that i should probably do that i could read no 100 are you are you not doing that no i should do that do you have to do this yes even if you just do it for 10 minutes as a joke you have you have to do this i'm telling you and find something you got you got to find something like old school like like i would say read um i would say read little shakespeare hit them with some shakespeare and like don't don't emote though whether you're like the courtesan or you're the porter or whatever hit them with your life yes monotone absolutely yeah i think you you would you would put them out and the thing is now i don't even need to do it because ai can take a few snippets of my voice and just you just put the ikea manual in it and it spits out me reading it.

1:09:06Can I tell you that that thing is something that I actually hate so much. I like I don't I don't necessarily hate all of AI, but the fact that like we were promised cures. Yeah. And then they're like, well, we could just steal your whole likeness. That's the same, right? Like that's kind of like living forever. That's curing you of having a job. Yeah, we'll cure you of having a job and no one will even know that you're gone. Yeah, exactly. It's like, meanwhile, it's like, no, you said that cancer screenings would become like 99.9 % more efficient. Like you would, what happened to that? It's like, oh, we're working on that.

1:09:49But we could, using just your retina, steal all of your personal information. What about that? That's good too, right? I have such a bone to pick with like what we're being sold versus what we're getting. Because if they had a couple of breakthroughs, I'd be like, y 'all, I think we got to let them take all the water. Do you know what I mean? But they don't. They're like their thing. The biggest thing I've been trying to get people to understand is that there is an attitude towards AI as if it is an inevitability. Right. But who told us it was an inevitability? The people from the company. so we we forget how tim cook came out and said that the apple vision pro would be the future of work and play like this dude was you will you will you won't want to take it off apple vision pro and then it came out and then people were like nah do you know i mean like these people actually know so little about people about the future and about what we want or what has to be and for whatever reason with AI, maybe because we're impressed by like getting a whole portrait in two seconds or something like that, we're letting them in a way that doesn't make sense.

1:11:07You look at the metaverse. Zuckerberg was like, that's the few, you won't want to leave. He's selling you something. And they're all selling us AI right now. And the AI they're selling us isn't even the AI they're giving us. Right. And that's what's so frustrating. It's like, if there was truly a thing that was straight up curing people's cancer, I'd be like, yeah, I think you got to let the AI be the doctor. He cures, this AI cures, but that's not what's happening. What's happening is that they stole art and they stole art from artists and then they fed it back to us. Because now if you type in a prompt and you get a picture, it's based off of a mixture of other people's work.

1:11:50So AI almost doesn't exist. like it's almost a lot like when i'm like hey did you hear what he said yeah that's like the best version of the best description i have for ai like this generative idea that's coming up with with tons of things on its own that doesn't exist right now you think the promise is all bullshit like that where none of this none of the good stuff is going to come the pike that mostly it's just going to be theft and job erasure? Yes, because I think that the rate at which I think that art was the perfect red herring and the perfect placement to look like it was doing things it couldn't do.

1:12:32If I go in for a scan and I'm worried I may have something wrong with my body, you can't then steal someone else's scan and steal someone else's results and then wrap it all up and then hand it to me and be like, here's your scan. You need to be able to do what it is you say you're going to do. With art, I could be like, can you show me Donald Duck fighting an angel? And you can mix Michelangelo and Walt Disney and a little bit of Lex Fletcher or something like that. You can mix all these cartoonists up and then give me that, but you can't steal real results. And they have what they have by scraping all of our work and selling it back to us.

1:13:14And so I don't I'm not saying that those things can't happen, but you would think they'd be working on them a little harder. OpenAI spent billions on Sora. They didn't spend billions on this medical equipment to make cancer screenings perfect. They could have just like Zuckerberg could have spent eighty eight billion dollars on something besides the metaverse, you know. And so it's like I think that those promises are what they hold above our heads. I think these salesmen are becoming a lot like politicians where we have to give them something. They used to just have to make stuff and then sell it to us.

1:13:48But now they have to sell us a promise. And then that promise is going to be us giving them permission through legislation or through putting the people in office who they're going to lobby to whatever to change our lives for the thing. They're still dangling over us. That is not going to happen. you know and so i think that really coming to the understanding you see you even see grads doing it like you saw all those uh students booing those people giving the commencement speeches yeah and it's like yes because we are saying no like we said no the apple vision pro we are saying no the same way we said no to the metaverse the difference here is that they've lobbied our politicians and they've got they've got things that they shouldn't have been able to get based off promises that they do not have to fulfill to get us in a position where only they benefit.

1:14:35And I think that teaching and believing that it is an inevitability gives up our agency in a way that is unnecessary. You know, I understand there's the feeling of you can't fight city hall, you can't whatever, but I'm telling you our rejection of the thing matters. And it matters more than we are being given credit for by the people who want to build these data centers and communities that say no it matters more than the politicians who literally need our vote to stay in power and right now i think in this specific moment and hopefully this year is the end of it we are seeing um a complete disregard for the general public for our effort for our labor and for our intelligence really it's like the nerve it takes to take everything that i made and then sell it back to us as in someone else my words my my work and my effort but then also say you don't need me and they're finding now that like ai is not necessarily uh at least in its current state a net benefit to the uh market it's it's sunk in what there's there's like 1.5 trillion dollars sunk into it for what?

1:15:51Not for a profit. What other ideas? Imagine if we were like, hey, what if we put 1.5 trillion into hunger? You're willing to lose the money anyway. You're bad with the money anyway. So you might as well feed some kids while you do it. You know,$88 billion. Like that's the thing, not to go on another tangent, but it was, you also may want to cut this. But one of the things that I would say to a friend about like, especially after that last shooting at the White house on the lawn was like all trump would have to do is come out because now we're talking we're losing count on attempts right and so now all trump would have to do is come out and be like hey you know what y 'all free school lunch y 'all not gonna shoot free school lunch all right free school lunch and and you know what i'm gonna walk without a hat on free school lunch for everybody I think that these people are, they're too set in their ways.

1:16:49And I think they're too greedy and they're too blinded by what they think they can get to. They will sink the whole world. They will burn it all down just to try to get to a version of AI that nobody asked for, that we don't need, that we have no plan. if if the u.s was one of those countries that might genuinely be open to some sort of ubi like if they were actually open to a universal basic income as as a like a bipartisan effort then yeah let's give it a shot let's let's give some of it a shot not all of it because you're still making all the water dirty but like let's give it some sort of shot but you can't tell me that you're going to steal from me and then make me pay you for the things that used to be free all while displacing me and think that nothing's going to happen.

1:17:36That's actually insane. What I can say with some degree of confidence is the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years are going to be tumultuous and largely because of AI. And we're going to need comedy. Fingers crossed. Yeah. We're going to need comedy. Yeah. Yeah. That's why it's important to come see me in person. that somebody could steal my likeness and be like, I love Sora. Sora's the best. I mean, somebody could clip it. Yeah. Yeah. Come to the real show. Be with real people. Indeed. Just want to remind everybody, aside from your tour, again, you got that special on HBO. It's called Symphony. And you are a regular on The Daily Show.

1:18:22Yeah. You can go to Josh Johnson Comedy on YouTube and you go to joshjohnsoncomedy.com for tickets to the tour. Great job. One last thing before I let you go. If you want to listen to the show without ads, check out 10 % Happier Plus, which is a subscription that is available right inside Apple Podcasts. If you become a subscriber, you'll get every episode ad free. That's new episodes and all the episodes from our vast 10 year plus archive. Look for 10 % Happier Plus in Apple Podcasts and just hit subscribe. And a quick heads up, if you're already a subscriber to my app, 10 % with Dan Harris, you've already got access to ad-free podcasts.

1:19:01Ad-free listening is baked right into your app subscription along with everything else, so please don't pay twice. You can check out the app at danharris.com, and you can check out 10 % Happier Plus inside Apple Podcasts. Thank you very much for listening to the show. I deeply appreciate it. See you soon. Deuces. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10 % Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Kashmir, David Hart, and Hayden Broom. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. And Nick Thorburn of the indie rock band Islands wrote our theme.

1:19:39Thanks for listening. Peace.