Stephen Colbert on connection, discovery and human nature

0:03I'm really struck by what do we most want to be and that's not alone. and loneliness is a disease and it's a modern disease. I hope the show has been, that the show has been a sort of a third space for people is that sometimes they can come at the end of the day and say, oh, Stephen is going to share basically the whole show's reaction to the same day I experienced. It's really important that I don't break news to the audience. What I'm really having with them is an emotional experience. I mean, it takes intellectual sweat to do it, but I'm sharing the emotional reaction to everything during the day.

0:35And that gives a sense that we're really communicating with each other.

1:05of the future, and we learn what it'll take to get there. This is possible.

1:15In Jaira Tolkien's Legendarium, the elves were the first to awaken under the stars, masters of language, song, and memory. They believed that storytelling was a form of stewardship, that to tell the world's tales was to help preserve its soul. In our world, we don't have elves, but we do have comedians, satirists, and storytellers. And some of them, like our guest today, wield their craft like a mirror, reflecting the contradictions, the absurdities, and sometimes the quiet beauty of being human. Stephen Colbert is one of the most influential comedic voices of our time. Best known for hosting The Colbert Report and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

2:02He combines razor-sharp satire with a sincere curiosity about the world. He's spent decades exploring what it means to live truthfully in an age of performance. In this episode, we talk with Stephen about how our storytelling might evolve in an era of AI, what speculative fiction teaches us about hope and fear, and why creativity is more than just a spark. It's a discipline, a responsibility, and sometimes a kind of prayer. Here's our conversation with Stephen Colbert.

2:44All right. Well, Stephen, we've been looking forward to this for months. Welcome to Possible. It is a pleasure. It is a pleasure. I thought the funnest way to start was that you and I are both deep Dungeons & Dragons fans, and we both started playing at a young age. So if you were to assign a character class to humanity in the 21st century, you know, bard, rogue, wizard, barbarian, what are we right now? Wait, humanity? So the entirety of humanity has to be a single character class? Or it could be a blend. well uh oh i mean because they're they're god okay so fighter then you have ranger paladin okay i i i mean there are some paladins out there there are people who are picking up what they believe to be the sword of justice and enforcing the law and the goodness as they see it i mean paladins are very narrow-minded.

3:49Well, they're lawful good. Paladins have a tunnel vision. Lawful good is a tunnel vision. Lawful good can cause a lot of chaos and evil by being completely unbending. So that's, I've always been very suspicious of lawful good characters. I mean, I think of like, what is the alignment of humanity? That's an interesting thing. So there's fighters, okay? Then there's thief. There's thief, which also has the subcategory of assassin. At least back in my day, I'm talking original ADD. Yep. AD &D. I mean, some of us are thieves. I think there are very few assassins. I think some of us are clearly thieves.

4:27Yes. And some people sincerely believe in crypto. Yes. And that is an excellent opening for a Techno Optimist podcast. And then just a quick follow-up before I hand it over to Aria. And then if you were to assign yourself a character class for your role in terms of what you do, What would your character class be? Oh, I mean, I guess, I mean, I don't think I have the skills for it, but I guess bard. Do you know what I mean? Because bard has to be, bard, you have to be like a thief and a monk or something. You have to be a cleric, a cleric monk. And then you also have to be like a thief. And then you also have to have like a high, you know, intelligence.

5:11and then you can spellbind people or something like that. I'm just talking about what's the job of a clown on camera? I guess that's barred. Although it's also the most elegant form of clown, which is speaking some, through humor, speaking some truth. All right. I'm going to stop on that one right there. All right. I'm not even going to try to compete on the sci-fi level that is here or the D &D level. But to give some street cred, I read all three Lord of the Rings. I saw all three movies. Last year, I read The Hobbit to my kids. So I have some Tolkien. And so before we get into philosophy and the future of entertainment, if you had to be desert island, Stephen, just with one Tolkien character to keep you company, who would it be and why?

6:08On a desert island? So not in Middle Earth. Okay. So I've, um, golly. I think probably Gandalf because he would call the eagles and we would get off the desert island. He would save you. Something like that. Yeah. Or Golem, he's a good swimmer. Maybe he could get us fish because he's good at catching fish. But Golan might eat you. I might go around again. That's true. I'm gamey. Golan would be too annoying. I think Gandalf's a great answer. Gandalf would be the key. Yeah. So not surprising with that kind of start, you know, our episodes about creativity, empathy, agency, human beings. So let's start there.

6:48What do you think is essential about kind of who we are as human beings and how creativity and empathy kind of relate into them? And how does that inform, you know, what you do? When I was offered this gig 10 years, 10 plus years ago, I had to think about it. Like I wasn't sure if I wanted it. And then I had to do the, I had to kind of do the math on it. I had to kind of dutch uncle myself about this and go, okay, what is it? What would we go? What would we good about it? And on high on the list was live audience because there are a lot of other things, a lot of opportunities to do other things.

7:26I had a whole television show all set, pilot, ready to go that I wanted to do. But when I got this, I went, oh, well, gosh, I do love being in front of a live audience because you know what's working. You can't make somebody find something funny anymore you can make them love you. It just happens or it doesn't happen. And the sense as you're working on a joke or where you're thinking about telling a joke or even the moment, if it just occurs to you in that moment where you're about to tell it, you've already got all your empathetic like mirror neurons firing in you to go, oh, how would I receive this joke?

8:06What would this, how might this play out in the mind of another person? It's kind of like fishing. Creativity and imagination is an integral part of fishing because you throw that line down into the water and you know what the hook is and you know what the bait is. And hopefully you get some sense of what the movement of the water is. And in your mind, you have to imagine what's happening. What is that hook doing down there? And then if you get a strike, you have to think, was that a little nibble from a big fish? Or was that a big nibble from a little fish? And is that fish on? And should I set the hook?

8:47And through that little line, just that little, you know, there's this, I have a friend, And I don't know if this is his term, but he and I have this thing we always say to each other, which is the tug is the drug. That's what fishing is about. That tug, the tug is the drug. And it's intermittent reinforcement, much like joke telling. You get addicted to that feeling of, will this time I read the water, the fish, the location, what the bottom is like, what kind of hook I should use, how I should weight it, how should I troll, should I bob, am I working on the surface here? What am I doing in this area with these fish?

9:21Okay, so that takes a lot of imagination, which is associated with empathy. I have to imagine, and empathy is even beyond imagination because like imagination, which is imagination, like really that term, you're actually picturing this thing. And then, and that's, I think imagination is a big part of leadership too. You have to express to the other people literally what your vision is. And that's not a metaphor. How do you actually see this happening? And then you have to take the time to accurately describe to the people who are eager to do the thing necessary to achieve it. But if you're not clear to them, you can't be mad if they don't achieve it because you didn't say what the goal was.

9:59You didn't say how you imagined this thing happening. And if you've got the answers, I mean, sometimes you don't. But creating something for me is always about what is the effect that this is going to have on the audience. And a lot of that is imagining how this is going to play out in the mind of another person. and empathy goes beyond imagination because there's also what is the feeling that this elicits? And then what is the physical response that this elicits? There's a lot that goes into empathy. Empathy and imagination are completely, completely inseparable. And I think that's what empathy has to do with creativity is that you have to have imagination on what is the effect of this on an audience.

10:39And that's why I like a live audience. And it's one of the big reasons I took this show is because 450 people in an actual theatrical experience where not only do I like get to perform to them and hear their laughter, but in the theatrical atmosphere, I also get this very specific bounce back of energy from the audience because the building is built to give me that. It's curved. I'm at the focal point of this ellipse when I perform and I get that feeling back from them. And hopefully if it's really working, they also feel how that felt for me. and then we amplify each other's feelings. That's when it's really working.

11:22I love that answer so much because it didn't occur to me because most people experience you through a screen, whether they're watching the show on TV or they're seeing your social media clips. And so just to hear that the live portion is the reason you did it. You know, it's funny you should say that, like, that it's like, it's news to you that the room is so important to me as a performer because I had to adjust the way I did my show when I came from Colbert Report here. And one of the significant ways that I changed it was because of the model of that show, that was in a television studio, not a theater.

11:59And it was based upon a news punditry model where there is no audience. On that show, I performed for the camera and the live audience got to witness me doing the show for the camera. I didn't play to the room. And here I'm doing a show for the room and the camera captures me doing that for a theater. That's a, it's a totally different way. It might seem subtle from the outside, but for me, as in terms of my intention performing every night, it's a very, very, and it took me a while to make that adjustment to play to the room, even though I started my career playing to the room in doing improv.

12:36I think it speaks to the importance of live and in person, which we will certainly get to. Yeah, I'm very interested, especially how it relates to AI, man. I've got theories about that. Well, so what do you, so you bring humor. You, we try to give people a sense that they have agency over their lives, but you bring creativity, empathy. Like, what do you think is the thing that's missing? What do you try to bring most to humanity right now? Because we're, you know, we're missing it. I just try to bring it to the show. Like, I don't know about humanity. Sure, sure, sure. My responsibility is I've got 41 minutes, 40, 41 and a half minutes.

13:11I forgot how many minutes we have to deliver every night to the network. We've got like 41 minutes to deliver every night. And like the sense of obligation or the sense of responsibility is not something that actually sparks the creative flame. But because it's actually just good for the show and it's good for the jokes and it helps you do build on a joke is to be accurate. Like we have good fact checkers here. We stole Anderson Cooper's fact checker for our show. And a great guy, his name is Brandon Marianacci. We've got great researchers, but he's our head researcher and he's a really lovely guy.

13:50And we just think that if you get, if you're making a joke of the actual news story with the actual data point and then really have a jaundiced eye for garbage news sites, even if they give you the setup that you want, we just don't use them on air because we know probably that's going to get fact-checked into the grave by this time tomorrow. And then we won't be able to build on the story that we're telling day to day. In terms of like, what do I want from the show? Like, what's the thing that I'm always shooting for? I'm really struck by what do we most want to be? And that's not alone. And, you know, even people who are, like, I'm essentially an introvert when I'm not in front of an audience.

14:35and you know some of my dearest friends are deep introverts but I know they don't want to be alone it's not the same thing and loneliness is a disease and it's a modern disease and so I hope the show has been it's a turn it's not my term I don't know who came up with the term it's probably an old term that just is salient now but that the show has been a sort of a third space for people is that something they can come at the end of the day and say oh I'm going to share Stephen is going to share basically the whole show's reaction to the same day I experienced. And it's really important that I don't break news to the audience because I'm not here to inform them.

15:13I'm here to curate. I'm curating my experience of the day, which is really their experience of the day. I also don't want to reframe the news. I have a lot of great comedians out there. A lot of guys who do late night, very good, who reframe the argument or they reframe what the discussion was today. And I do not do that. I want to approach it in the exact same frame that my audience experienced it because what I'm really having with them is an emotional experience. I mean, it takes intellectual sweat to do it, but I'm sharing the emotional reaction to everything during the day. And that gives a sense that we're really communicating with each other.

15:53And if you can do that right, you can get out over the camera. And so to have some sense of community like that, I think that's it. That's mostly what I'm there for. Ultimately, we're hanging out. I'm just the friend who won't shut up. Now, you were earlier gestured at in the interactive environment that you've been thinking about AI in that context. And I'm very curious what your thoughts are, because that is an unusual bridge to AI. All about what it means to community? Yes. And community and what it means to like the parasocial, the theatrical experience, the interactivity. So what are some of the ways that you've been musing about AI in this context?

16:39A million years ago when I was in New York, and I guess I'd come here to work for the Dana Carvey show and we had been canceled that summer. I just, through Hooker by Crook, I ended up being involved with News Corp's digital side. Because I had a friend who worked for News Corp, worked for Uncle Rupi. They were trying to create something. Oh, God. Mindspring. Remember? They owned Mind, remember Mindspring.com? And I just had dinner with this guy one night. And he said, we're trying to figure out a way to turn this into a kind of like, I don't know, like some sort of like performance space where people could get together and there could be like some sort of like literally like little town you go to, there'd be venues.

17:21And I started talking about how improvisation would, cause I was an improviser and I've been in Second City for years and how those things would interact nicely with interactive technology. Because we used to do this thing on stage at Second City. We did it a few times called Global Village, where we would get online and we would get suggestions from people all around the world about what their day had been like. And then we would perform, we would be those people in common scenes together on stage. Like somebody from sub-Saharan Africa, like, you know, someone from South America, some from Asia, someone from Europe, whatever.

17:54And we would be those people on stage. And then we would get other suggestions from them as we told them how the scene was going. It never really worked. But I really loved the idea of using improvisation to create common performance spaces online. The technology wasn't there at the time. This was like in 1998. or yeah 98 so that's seven was a 27 years ago i was thinking about doing that how to do that now when i look at the ability of ai to create a sense of an experience for you online like um that you're looking at a real human that you're hearing actual laughter that you're interacting with an AI human, all of that.

18:39It's a logical extension of the capability of in a digital environment. My question, I don't have an answer. The question is, is that ever not gonna have some sense of an uncanny valley in it? Are we, is it, is because art is by humans for humans about being human. It's not about ideas because ideas are constructs and humans are not a construct. They experience ideas and they have emotional responses to them. And I think art is that combination of an idea that it's that elicits an emotional response i just don't know if that's ever going to feel um not going to feel alien to us if it's not presented to us by a human i mean the interesting question there is there is one question about like you know sometimes people feel that they are they are more able to express themselves for example talking with chatbot because they don't feel as potentially threatened by it as they would be another human being um there's some kind of like you know i literally had a um friend of mine a couple months ago say you know um claude is my best friend and i'm like nope that's you know claude is not your friend friend is a two-directional relationship it's it's uh you know it's kind of a, it's a way of doing it.

20:20But the notion where AI can be in a way that helps you like navigate your own space and also navigate even a parasocial space. Like for example, one of the things I think is, you know, you know, kind of a very easy extension is that when you're doing meetings or discussions or other kinds of things, having AI listen and suggest things or interpret it. I mean, like one of the funny things that I didn't anticipate with the AI assistant Pi that, you know, my co-founded Inflection does is people actually use it for facilitating even marital conversations. Like they'll have Pi sitting there saying, oh, oh, when Reed said X, maybe he was thinking about Y or maybe this is the question, that kind of thing.

21:14And so that kind of facilitation strikes me as very possible within AI and it complicates this kind of space of emotional connection. It's not disagreeing with what you just said as much as it's a multi-threaded tapestry. And by the way, I just want to be clear. I did say it, but I say it as a question. Will it ever, will it ever be able to get beyond, and I mean beyond uncanny valley. I really mean in the same way that modern food, nutritionism, as Michael Pollan calls it, modern food has ostensibly everything you need. manufactured processed food has everything you need to be healthy. And yet there is a growing suspicion that there are micronutrients of which we are not aware that we are robbed of, which is why even nutritionism like this, this is vitamin fortified, whatever doesn't matter because that is actually not the natural.

22:19That's that. That's not, that's not the natural state of your consumption that you evolved for. So it might get to a level that there is an unidentifiable, I cannot tell the difference between you and the AIU. For instance, your AIU could be you because I've seen your AIU and it looks very much like this. But there's a micronutrient of another human being and it might be the disappointment of the inability of the other human to help you, if you know what I mean. There might be a nutrient in the failure of the human to help you. There might be the flawed nature of human interactions, the fact that emotion will become a part of it because that is inextricable from our experience of the world, that that might be the micronutrient that is actually excised because it's the part that makes you uncomfortable when you go to talk to someone because you fear judgment.

23:11Judgment might just be part of our experience. And I'm not saying that that's not a good thing for you to take as a first step, but it's like saying that the be all and end all of sex is masturbation. Yes, it's very freeing. There's no judgment. You don't feel about how you look or how the other person might feel or anything like that. But there you are missing something essential and intimate with that. A question from me would be you talked about the parasocial relationship and again, sort of the love of human interaction. And I'm with you so much about the loneliness crisis and sort of lack of community that people feel.

23:48When you think of where entertainment is going, it's actually heading towards these parasocial relationships. It's creators. It's unmediated by the television shows. It's, you know, one on one. It's your Twitter feed is for you. So you get exactly what you want. Right. I mean, some of it's literally like one on one, like OnlyFans is on one on one. Absolutely. Like, how does that is that good? Is that bad? Like when you think about the future of that. It's fine. I think that's fine. I mean, I think what entertainment starts off with, you know, uh, your parents making you laugh, you know, and, and that makes you, that, that makes you feel good and more comforted.

24:28And then you do it back to them and you make them laugh and, and, and then you're, you, you end up finding out, Oh, I like singing and I can sing and you sing for your friends and they want to hear you sing. And then you sing at school. Like It all starts off in little ways. I love the modern forms of entertainment that are destroying my business. I had to remove Instagram from my phone because I got the reports of how much of my day I was on it. And I thought, I got shit to do. I can't be doing this. But I find I could spend one hour on Instagram and I could find from random people who I'll never even see again, a little I'll never even come across their feed again.

25:07I bet in an hour I would come across. 15 things that I would save in my folder and go, wow, that's great. And it's only 90 seconds. You know, they're like sonnets or there was a Barry Urgrau. Do you know who Barry Urgrau is? He's a great author. He wrote A Man Jumps Out of a Plane is sort of the first group of the collection of short stories that kind of made him famous in the 80s. And they're one page long. All the short stories are one page long. And I love them. A Man Jumps Out of a Plane. I highly recommend it. They feel like these are like Barry Yergaard. They're almost like they're great like little blackout scenes.

25:45They're so good. I would kill for being able to be able to write some of these jokes or to say whatever the thing is that succinctly and that visually. I think it's beautiful. I think we're on now. They don't assemble into much bigger ideas. They don't assemble into larger emotional events. And so therefore they're very digestible and excretable very quickly. I can't give you an example because of that. But I love I love this, quote unquote, new form of entertainment. And I don't even I don't even know if it's new. It's just using a very specific time restriction to be incredibly pithy. Like, if you could have that level of entertainment for a feature-length movie, God, that would be fantastic.

26:30I think this might be finger exercises for a whole new form that we haven't seen yet. Couldn't agree more. I actually find great joy of going on social media. I'm like, people are hilarious. They are. This is the funniest thing I've ever seen. Sure, that too. And awful. Your blood feels slightly carbonated. if you spend too much time on.

26:57You know, like one of the things we started with is talking a little bit about, like you have fact checkers on your show. And one of the things obviously, you know, Instagram doesn't. But one of the things that obviously is the huge discourse around the difference between, you know, quote unquote, traditional media and quote unquote, new media is this notion of responsibility, you know, responsibility of fact-checking, responsibility of standing for, you know, when you make a claim to something in the world, that you've done something substantive to try to make that claim accurate. And who bears that responsibility?

27:34Well, that's part of the question for you, actually, and part of how do you think about this? Not me. No, that's really never been, like, we choose, that's why I was talking about fact-checking, We choose to do it because it actually is good for the joke. Do you know what I mean? That's because these shows, generally speaking, you know, we all do them a little bit differently, but these shows, generally speaking, are about whatever the national conversation was today. We're kind of talking about our country back to the country and to the world based on the English-speaking world because we're in a bunch of different countries too.