Pod Insights Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso Is Josh Johnson (‘The Daily Show’) the 21st Century Comedian? About this episode Emmy-nominated writer and stand-up Josh Johnson is making comedy that’s timely and timeless.
On the heels of his new HBO special Symphony https://www.hbomax.com/movies/josh-johnson-symphony/47fa368e-d91d-4da7-856b-32ff6c870733, we begin with his creative process of shaping new material week after week, balancing life on the road with writing and hosting duties at The Daily Show (0:46). Then, we talk to Josh about the issues of today: Trump’s 1.8 Billion Slush Fund (4:26), pandemic fears (8:18), AI in commencement speeches (9:34), and “nonviolence as a psyop” (16:27).
On the back-half, Josh describes how he transitions between writing topical and evergreen jokes (23:12), the comedic inspiration that came from his Catholic school years (29:00), and finding his way into performing while working at Trader Joe’s (39:30). To close, we unpack the final week of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (42:27), the role of therapy in Johnson’s 2023 special Up Here Killing Myself (46:00), and what he hopes to create in the next five years (56:20).
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Transcript 11,351 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 As soon as I took a sip of the water, I knew something was up.
0:04 Speaker 00 This, no, no, no, this is CIA program. I could feel it. No, but I think that-
0:10 Sam Fragoso? I'm just like you. I just do my homework.
0:12 Speaker 00 Yes, no, no, this is, I'm, I'm mad. It sucks to be well-read.
0:26 Sam Fragoso? This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.
0:43 Sam Fragoso? Josh Johnson, welcome to the show.
0:45 Speaker 00 Thanks.
0:46 Sam Fragoso? I want to talk about a week for Josh Johnson, because this is my understanding. Friday through Sunday, you perform topical material, usually on the road. Then come every Tuesday, you upload that material to YouTube. And then you do it all again the next weekend, but not before you do your day job Monday through Thursday as a correspondent slash rotating host on The Daily Show. I don't know how the hell you're doing this, and I'm not the only one
1:18 Sam Fragoso? who has questions. So I want to play
1:21 Sam Fragoso? a clip from fellow comedian Jeff Garland, who had this to say to you.
1:25 Speaker 02 I'm just mystified. I'm mystified how he does it. I've been doing this for, in a few weeks, 44 years. And I have no idea how he does it. I've never seen anything before or since. To be that prolific, but not just prolific, but prolific with meaning, with depth, with thoughtfulness, with great, great humor. My gosh, yep. I'm in awe. I have no idea how he does it. So you might want to ask him.
1:56 Speaker 00 That's so nice.
1:58 Sam Fragoso? So Jeff Garland, and I think the rest of the internet wants to know, how are you pulling this off?
2:03 Speaker 00 I think if you just don't do anything else, that'll help, you know? I think that there is a,
2:11 Speaker 00 an idea that if I'm doing all these things, I must be doing a bunch of other things. And I think the, the real truth of it is that the set is consistently on my mind throughout the week. I'm writing towards it all week. Sometimes something happens that derails the thing that I've been writing and I have to start again. But I think that just having a real acceptance and understanding that the, the thing that you plan may not be the thing that happens helps with that because then, you know, you get a real opportunity. Like I was working on a different set before the White House Correspondents Dinner.
2:52 Speaker 00 But then that happened and so I had to accept the fact that there could be details that come out in between that Sunday and Tuesday upload that maybe changed some things. But I felt like at least if I'm speaking to the overall feeling and, and what I saw, then that stuff, there's, there's no way to debunk what you thought in the moment, you know? And to me, in the moment, like if you're talking about a, an event like that, it is genuinely funny that Trump also saw this guy and was like, oh, yeah, no, I see how he got past y'all. He was fast. Like that to me is like, that will always be a funny thing.
3:35 Speaker 00 And so you, you attach and string together all of the definitely funny things that don't necessarily depend on what happens next. And then I think you're in a better position to structure something. The footage is not good. It's very gritty, but the way he was running,
3:55 Speaker 00 it just looked, it just looked so much like anime to me.
4:03 Speaker 00 The way this dude was over here.
4:11 Speaker 00 But like fast, but like forward. Like, how you mix Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and Dragon Ball Z all in one run?
4:21 Sam Fragoso? So let's talk about a few stories in the present and then talk about your new special symphony. This week, Donald Trump reached a settlement with his Justice Department in a $10 billion lawsuit brought against the IRS. And under it, the DOJ will create a $1.8 billion fund controlled by Trump that will essentially dole out payments to allies who have supposedly, quote, "been victimized by the government weaponization." So that includes January 6 rioters. Some people have called us slush fund. How have you interpreted it so far?
4:53 Speaker 00 I think when you are assessing a scammer, it's important to assess the regular scammers from the artist.
5:02 Sam Fragoso? Okay.
5:02 Speaker 00 I think that as far as scams go, this is, this is art. I've never seen somebody sue themselves before. I've, I've known some people who've been very unstable, and I've never seen somebody file litigation against the mirror, you know? And then remember, because he was suing himself for like 10 million. I mean, not 10 billion, sorry.
5:22 Sam Fragoso? Yeah, 10 billion, yeah.
5:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, he was suing for 10 billion. So, I mean, he's lucky he got off with just 1.6. Meanwhile, this is all our money. So imagine now you are such an artist that you're like, you know what? I'm gonna, I'm gonna do the right thing. I'm gonna cut myself some slack because me suing me, you know, I, I was wilding out and I, I need, I need to take a step back and I'll, I'll settle for 1.6 of your money. Never in the history of scams has someone dreamed this big.
5:53 Sam Fragoso? So it's an artistry.
5:54 Speaker 00 He's the Babe Ruth of, of scams.
5:57 Sam Fragoso? So when you see Trump, you see an artist in this, in the vein of Basquiat or something like that?
6:01 Speaker 00 I think if there was a Basquiat of evil, this is it. This is it, because the thing about, the thing about Basquiat is that sometimes you see the overall work and it immediately hits you. And, and then you look deeper and you see little details you didn't see before. And I think that that's what this is of scams, because it is, it is so clearly a, a scam. Like, I, like, in, if, if every Republican actually meant what they said about like fiscal responsibility, or, or limited government, or the government not overreaching in, in a way, and, and how your tax dollars are supposed to matter, we're already overtaxed is their assessment. And so every tax dollar should be used in a way that is, um, that is beneficial to the people.
6:46 Speaker 00 And to then see this thing happen and not have some sort of aneurysm, at least a nosebleed, means that you don't stand on anything. Like, that, that's a, that's a crazy thing, that these people who you have pardoned, that some are of their own, of their own doing, are like back in jail already.
7:06 Sam Fragoso? It's kind of like a straight white guy from a wealthy family not succeeding. I mean, the deck was stacked for you to do well. How do you go back to jail?
7:15 Speaker 00 It's, it's an actual get out of jail free card, because you didn't need to do anything. You just stayed in jail. And I remember they sang, remember what they sang to him? And that must have touched him. Oh, say, can you see by the non-early light what so proudly we have? I don't really get how anyone can be anything but enraged over this, but I also think that there's, um, there's another art of distraction to throwing so much at someone that you, you kind of end up in, just because you can only hold space for so many things, let something slide eventually.
7:59 Speaker 00 Like, like, in, in your mind, you're like, okay, there's a war that no one can tell you why we're fighting. Some things aren't even Trump's fault, they're just happening while Trump's in office. So you also, as a citizen, have to contend with that stuff. So like, he didn't do Haunty virus. Like that one wasn't him.
8:18 Sam Fragoso? Yeah, but I I'm curious about that one. Ebola and hondavirus. Are you more concerned about the outbreaks or the fact that our response to them is being led in part by a conspiratorial penile implant specialist?
8:31 Speaker 00 I look at what could happen in any general outbreak and and how the public might respond or people's like personal hygiene leading to a spread. And then I look at RFK Junior as someone who feels like he's been training his whole life for this moment. In so much as like, you know, you know, they talk about patient zero being like the first person. I think he'll be patient zero as in he will outlive all of us. Like he gonna catch everything. And then he he's gonna make the Ebola in him, fight the hondavirus in him, fight the COVID in him, fight the sewage water in him.
9:09 Sam Fragoso? It's a lot of sewage water.
9:10 Speaker 00 He is electing all by himself to have some of the same experiences as people that are experiencing environmental racism. Like, like, there are people who would love to just go swim their local lake and it's been poisoned by like a factory downstream. No, upstream. But like, he is like, that's good water.
9:30 Sam Fragoso? And thinking about the future and who's gonna outlive us. I don't know if you've noticed, but kids are graduating from college around this time of year.
9:39 Speaker 00 Yes.
9:40 Sam Fragoso? And with that comes commencement speeches.
9:42 Speaker 00 Yes.
9:42 Sam Fragoso? There's an article in the Times with the headline, "The villain of this year's commencement speeches: Artificial Intelligence." Here's what the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, said in a speech to graduates at the University of Arizona.
9:54 Speaker 03 Today, we stand on this edge of another technological transformation, one that will be larger, faster, and more consequential than what came before. It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have. I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear.
10:27 Sam Fragoso? I want to know, as a kid who went to college to study lighting design for theater, are you seeing AI as like this mass vessel for displacement?
10:40 Speaker 00 I look at AI as-
10:41 Sam Fragoso? That smile scared me.
10:42 Speaker 00 No, no, here's my thing. I look at AI as a mass vehicle for displacement because of who is like at the forefront of using the AI. Like, I think that-
10:53 Sam Fragoso? Who's driving the car?
10:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, who's driving the car. AI, as it stands, AI as the idea of what AI is, like for regular people, everyday people, does not exist. It doesn't exist, like, there is no machine that is just doing the stuff from the Jetsons. It's like, they scraped all of our stuff. AI, right now, it's not this boogeyman because it's a bit of a lie of what it can do and what it is doing.
11:26 Sam Fragoso? What do you mean?
11:27 Speaker 00 I look at how the people with these programs are rushing to replace people to sell their product. That's all that's really happening. It's not creating, and it's not intended to create, a better world, a safer world, a more- It's better for surveillance, it's better for kind of just cheating people out of their labor. I think if you are a young person who is getting this, getting this technology at a formative time, you kind of understand it better than the people who maybe even run some of these companies and aren't the engineers themselves. And you see it for what it is, which is like, why would I be creative if you're just gonna steal it
12:08 Speaker 00 and then repackage it and then give it to somebody and not give me anything for it? You know what I mean? It's kind of like when Google asked you after your commute, you'll like Google Maps, how to get somewhere? And then afterwards, as soon as you get off the train, Google's like, hey, how crowded was the train?
12:23 Sam Fragoso? I hate this.
12:24 Speaker 00 And it's like, that's, I don't work here. You pay me, pay me, or don't ask me.
12:29 Sam Fragoso? This bothers me so much. It happened this morning on the train.
12:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:33 Sam Fragoso? And they're like, was it delayed? And I was like- What the hell do I know? You, that's what you're here for.
12:39 Speaker 00 And that's what-
12:39 Sam Fragoso? You have tons of money to go pay someone to be a train tardiness monitor. Why am I doing this?
12:45 Speaker 00 That's exactly my thing, and I think that that's what a lot of AI is. Obviously, not all of it, but that's a good portion of it is like, Google will then tell the next person, hey, just so you know, the train's actually a little bit delayed, so you might want to leave early. Like, like to the next person, Google will show up-
13:01 Sam Fragoso? Right.
13:02 Speaker 00 As, as like, an all-knowing being.
13:04 Sam Fragoso? A supportive friend.
13:06 Speaker 00 And for you, it was a thief. That's what a lot of AI is, and so I think that if you are creative, I think it's still important to create and, and share, like, boldly with the understanding that your art and you as a person cannot be replaced. One of the things that we do is, is slowly over time, and especially with a, with an understanding towards business, because there are certain things and certain behaviors that I find like disgusting, that we give a pass because it's just business.
13:38 Sam Fragoso? Can you power rank those for us? Give me, give me like the Mount Rushmore of bad behavior.
13:42 Speaker 00 I think that some of the most heinous acts against workers get disguised as like shareholder responsibility. Every company goes through this sort of like bulking and, and, and lean phase.
13:54 Sam Fragoso? I've been trying that for years.
13:55 Speaker 00 It, I am not good on the bulking side of it.
13:57 Sam Fragoso? You're somehow bad at both.
13:58 Speaker 00 And when, when you pull back, when you're like, okay, here's our actual market share, here's how many people we employ, here are our margins, and we do have to let some people go. So in that process of, of layoffs, right? Which feel like they happen annually with some of the same companies. And then the company has like a great December. And so then they hire people, but then they let some people go in July of the next year, whatever that is, right? That, that is like a normal thing that has always happened in business. Like, we're already seeing the dialing back of certain programs because they thought, like, out of greed, they thought they could fire everybody and just do the thing themselves. And then they're finding that the program is, um, is good at task.
14:43 Speaker 00 It's good per task, but it's not a good worker.
14:46 Sam Fragoso? Mm-hmm. On Trevor Noah's podcast, you said you don't get paid to do your job. You get paid not to riot.
14:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
14:54 Sam Fragoso? They pay you just before rioting.
14:56 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
14:57 Sam Fragoso? And if they paid you any less, you'd riot. And they know that. What's the update to that bit two years later? Because I think it was a joke that you hadn't quite cracked at the time. I don't know if you have since, but thinking and thinking about it from the AI perspective and what we're talking about. Do you still think that's what it is?
15:18 Speaker 00 Oh, I hundred percent think that's what it is. I even think that now they've been emboldened because of, because of the lack of, of like immediate backlash. I think there's different types of backlash. There's like a political backlash that politicians now are pretty aware of that they're going to catch. And as long as it's nowhere near election cycle, they're kind of good with it.
15:43 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
15:44 Speaker 00 You'll see some of these people go back to their own town hall, say the talking points they've been giving in Washington, and then get booed and then be like, aight, that's how y'all feel. You know, you even see it in, what was it, Utah, where they had the, the huge data center, that Kevin O'Leary data center? And you see every, you see everyone in the room. You've never had a clear indication of what your voters want. They're here and they're booing. So that seems pretty clear. And then city council, they left the room to go have the vote in peace and do the thing that nobody wanted. And so it's becoming more blatant and in our faces. And I think that.
16:21 Sam Fragoso? Rioting is the only option.
16:23 Speaker 00 Not the only option, but it can't be taken off the table. I think that there has been a, a co-opting of nonviolence into the point of almost being a psy-op. Eventually you can see down the road what might happen. And if you take away all of people's political power, or even the idea that they have political power, and you also take away their ability to feed their family. And you also, you can only take away so much from a person before they have no options left other than to, you know, like scream in the street, i.e. like sort of riot or something like that. Or before they, they. Pinpoint certain individuals that they see as the perpetrators of all these crimes against making a way of life. You shouldn't have to earn the right to live.
17:08 Speaker 00 Like, I think that we have been so business brained and so capital coded that now, when people of no fault of their own get sick and they can't afford whatever this astronomical bill is, and then they get, you know, put on the hook for this bill for their care, and then they have insurance because they have a job and they're literally doing everything right, but then the insurance company is over here sidestepping them left and right, you know, putting them on hold for three days, or putting them in a circle of reasoning around paperwork until they die anyway. It's like, that's not considered violence by us. That's actually not considered violence. That's just considered business.
17:52 Speaker 00 And so I think that when people rise up against that thing, we've labeled that thing violence. And so whenever people are so outwardly and loudly nonviolent, I think there are some people that take advantage of that, knowing that you're basically saying, nothing's ever gonna happen. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and see if I can wait out your 12-year plan to change things. Meanwhile, like 60,000 Americans die a year unnecessarily over these sort of circular, these sort of like circular tactics, not being able to get their insulin, not being able to get, things that are actually cheap or could be affordable, you know?
18:34 Speaker 00 And so I think that, yeah, there's a dark road ahead for people who take for granted the general public's nonviolence. Because people don't want to be violent. Like, you may get mad at somebody, but you're not like, I'm actually gonna kill you. I'll give you an example right now. You know, you look at something like the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and if you're someone like Trump and you genuinely believe, now you've had like, a few attempts on your life. If I were Trump, I'd be like, you know what? Free school lunch. Y'all not gonna shoot free school lunch, are you? Like, I think- That that's the tactic, but they're so greedy and they're so sadistic, they can't even do that. They don't even have the self preservation to be like, oh, y'all, y'all go shoot free healthcare? Okay, okay, by all means, come at free healthcare.
19:19 Sam Fragoso? Like he's forced at gunpoint to do the right thing.
19:22 Speaker 00 That that's kind of what I mean about with some of nonviolence feeling like some sort of psyop is because a government should be in fear of their people. It should be scary for any politician to pull off the things that we're seeing. The scams are happening in broad daylight and there's and there's a thing, you know, especially from just grade school with bullies where it's like a bully might walk up and slide your whole lunch off the table and then ask you what you're gonna do about it. And obviously, we're not supposed to have any violence in schools, but when a bully walks up and slides your whole lunch off the table, who you weren't messing with, you didn't like, like antagonize them or anything. I think when something like that happens and eventually a kid getting picked on can only handle so much.
20:06 Speaker 00 And so he gets up and he pops his bully in the mouth. Maybe they both get detention, maybe the kid gets expelled, whatever the rules are gonna be for that school. But that was such a human reaction. It's not about condoning or not condoning, it's about eventually that thing could happen.
20:23 Sam Fragoso? Can I say that sounds a lot like the eight year old Josh Johnson who grew up in Alexandria? And got into his first fight, I think with a kid named Petey.
20:37 Sam Fragoso? I think you just described your first fight.
20:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, but in this scenario, okay, so this is the thing, I don't want anybody draw conclusions that I'm gonna do the political violence. That was the example. That was completely separate from my personal life.
20:55 Sam Fragoso? And yet, and yet it's exactly describing what happened, is that right?
20:59 Speaker 00 Look, look.
21:06 Speaker 00 Oh, it feel like a setup now, they gonna play this in court, oh no.
21:12 Speaker 00 Actually, right now, I can't recall. But that's my thing. It's like, it's like, there's, there is unimaginable wealth in, in, in, in the country. I'm just trying to pivot.
21:26 Sam Fragoso? Oh, I'm aware.
21:26 Speaker 00 There's, there's unimaginable wealth.
21:28 Sam Fragoso? I'm gonna pivot right back.
21:29 Speaker 00 Okay. And, and I think that-
21:31 Sam Fragoso? I told you, what kind of show do you think this is?
21:32 Speaker 00 No, I'm, I hear you. I hear you.
21:36 Speaker 00 As soon as I took a sip of the water, I knew something was up.
21:41 Speaker 00 This, no, no, no, this is CIA program. I could feel it.
21:46 Speaker 00 No, but I think that-
21:47 Sam Fragoso? I'm just like you. I just do my homework.
21:49 Speaker 00 Yes, no, no, this is, I'm, I'm mad. It sucks to be well-read. I just look at the unimaginable wealth we clearly have because I think people forget what a billion really is. I think that people think that they can fathom a billion dollars or that they could even spend it in a lifetime or something. And it's like, only until you travel and you see that it's not this way everywhere else, do you get a real appreciation for how it, it could be for, for us. Like, the fact that China has a better understanding and, uh, better application so far of, of AI in the workplace and AI in, in, in relation to the worker, then we do prove it's possible.
22:33 Speaker 00 And it proves that AI as whatever sort of industrial revolution it's being pitched as, it's not, it's not worth what we're paying for it. And we're the ones paying for it. We're subsidizing it. We're the ones who have given it everything. And, and I think that the, the thing that we've been taught for a long time, which is that the value of the worker is only in so much as they are useful to the employer. And the value of, of labor is only worth something in so much as much money as it makes. I think these two understandings have driven us to a really, uh, dark place that devalues all of our, all of our worth to ourselves, you know?
23:12 Sam Fragoso? So much of the work that you make, I think in the past year, it's 50 to 60 hours of stand-up material uploaded to YouTube. It's kind of wading in the waters that we've been in.
23:24 Speaker 00 Oh, like not fun?
23:25 Sam Fragoso? Your words, not mine. I think there's tons of fun stuff, but this new special.
23:31 Speaker 00 Yes.
23:31 Sam Fragoso? It seems to be existing in like real contrast to that more timely topical kind of humor. And I guess I want to know with Symphony coming out on HBO. Why is this special different or distinct from the sets that you drop every week? Like, how are you thinking about its distinction?
23:52 Speaker 00 Those things feel more immediate and they are my sort of meditations on slash things that I think are funny about the world we live in now. And I think that things like a special are meant to be as
24:10 Speaker 00 as timeless as possible. And so I try not to do any topical stuff in a special like this because I do want people to look back on it, you know, years and years from now and still get the same, the same feelings from it and walk away with the same level of entertainment and the same closing thoughts. And I think you can only do that by speaking to the broader ideas. Because at the end of the day, even when you're talking about politics and even when you're talking about something that happened that is so exactly something that could only happen now, you're still speaking to the broader thing of power.
24:53 Speaker 00 You're still speaking to the broader relationship between people and government.
24:58 Sam Fragoso? It sounds like it's kind of in the mold of George Carlin's work.
25:00 Speaker 00 I suppose so. I mean, I look at.
25:03 Sam Fragoso? Because you can watch those now.
25:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, and they still apply.
25:05 Sam Fragoso? And he was very good about not name checking.
25:09 Speaker 00 Yes.
25:09 Sam Fragoso? In a way that would make it very 80s or early 90s.
25:12 Speaker 00 Yes, because I think that even though you can trace back something to Reagan, I think if you actually write a Reagan joke in a Reagan era, and it might be perfectly apt and it might sum him up exactly, I think that you still have created a barrier where someone at least feels like they need to go learn about Reagan to get your joke, which is like not how anybody's going to digest comedy.
25:34 Sam Fragoso? This is from the new special Symphony, now on HBO Max.
25:38 Speaker 00 Do y'all ever wonder if the first chiropractor?
25:49 Speaker 00 Was just bad at murder.
26:03 Speaker 00 I hurt my back, right? I hurt my back and I went to chiropractor. I didn't even really know what chiropractors do. I just knew that they were supposed to fix like backs and stuff. And so I laid there, I didn't know what to expect. But then this man put one hand here and one hand here. And I was like, I'mma go.
26:25 Speaker 00 No, no, I don't know what I did to offend you. But I have watched a lot of Jason Bourne. I know exactly what happens next.
26:36 Speaker 00 You're not gonna get me.
26:39 Sam Fragoso? Did you know when you were going to the chiropractor that it was gonna feel like a Jason Bourne movie?
26:44 Speaker 00 No, here's the thing. I feel like there are certain professions where you provide some amount of pain for some amount of relief. And I think that if someone doesn't know that going in, that they will think they've only been attacked. Do you know what I mean? It would be like if, and I know they're not the same, but it would be like if you went to a dentist, but you had no concept of what a dentist was. And now you're like, who is this man playing in my mouth? And then he's like, oh, you have a cavity. And you're like, I don't even know what that is. And it's like, don't worry, we're about to drill. And you're like, drill what? Into your head? Oh, what? It's like, and you have a hard time accepting that like,
27:27 Speaker 00 oh, if I don't do this, you'll slowly go insane and die. Do you know what I mean? Like if you, like, your mouth is actually so important. And if you're running around with like a bunch of cavities in your head, that is a huge issue.
27:41 Sam Fragoso? You opened the new special with this line. You say, if you're not careful, especially as a man, you end up spending the last 50 years of your life still trying to figure out the first 15. At the risk of doing that, I would like to know a little bit more about like where you came from and how you grew up. Like I said earlier, Alexandria. I think both of your parents, at least for a time, were special ed teachers, is that right? As an only child was the first monologue that you wrote, the one in your head? And if so, what was, what would be like a tight five for Josh as a young kid?
28:19 Speaker 00 It probably would have been something about how different life is for people who had black and white TVs and people who had colored TVs. I think, if you had a colored TV, you had options. If you had a black and white TV, you were living in the past. And there's probably, there's probably a lot of symbolism there. Because woof, when you had, when you had the dial on the TV, when you had the knob for the channels too, that was limited options. That was, your TV didn't believe that there were more numbers. Do you know what I mean? But then you see somebody with like the first smart TV. Cause I went, I went to school with a couple of kids who were, who were pretty rich.
29:04 Sam Fragoso? Yeah, you went to a Catholic school.
29:05 Speaker 00 I did, I went to this Catholic school and went to school with a couple of kids who were pretty rich. And not only, I remember going to like a rich kid's house and they had a flat TV. I really was like, where the rest of it? Cause I saw the TV on the wall and thought to myself, so they dug out that whole wall to put the back of the TV in? And then they moved it, cause it was one of those ones that had the anchor on the wall, whatever. They moved it and I saw that the TV had no back. It had like no ass. And I was like, this is all the TV in there?
29:45 Speaker 00 I look back at those little differences in how people were living and how connected they were to other differences in how they were living.
29:53 Sam Fragoso? So tell me, what do you think that symbolizes? Or at least it symbolized for you?
29:59 Speaker 00 I think it kind of put two things into perspective for me that are like, almost like mantras now. One is that everything is connected. And I don't even mean that in sort of a walk barefoot every day for an hour sort of way. I mean, like legitimately, I think a lot of things, a lot more things are connected than people make connections. And one thing that is like, good for comedy, or at least the way that I write, is like making those connections. I think that everything that I have lived through up to this point, and all the experiences that I hopefully will be blessed to have, will work as sort of like constellations where you can connect the dots in any which way across other things that are happening in the world.
30:43 Speaker 00 The other thing is that people are pretty much the same. And I don't mean that in a way that is dismissive of, of people's actual differences. I just have a pretty firm belief that if I had grown up in any other time, or with any other family, or in any other situation, that I would be a different person. And so I think that as a kid, if, if, if I had to like, whatever like type five thing, it would be something along the lines of like, whether you have like thirty five channels and a black and white TV that's very fat, or you have a flat screen TV with one thousand channels, nobody can find anything to watch. And that is like a thing in which somehow with my thirty five choices versus a thousand choices,
31:28 Speaker 00 we still end up like.
31:30 Sam Fragoso? Searching.
31:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, searching.
31:32 Sam Fragoso? At fourteen, I think that was around the time that you were left alone for the first time in the house. And you've told this story that you kind of feel like you got here, not this podcast, but where you are in your life, by the grace of God, and that throughout your, your teenage years, you had a lot of friends who would go, this isn't for you, like.
31:57 Sam Fragoso? This is not the path for you.
31:58 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
31:59 Sam Fragoso? And I wonder, like, is there an instance or a memory that comes to mind? Do you see a story or that a pivot point?
32:06 Speaker 00 Well, I just, I remember this time, I'm, I'm trying to even remember what they were gonna go do. Because it was not good. And, and I was around some kids and I don't know if they wanted to,
32:20 Speaker 00 like, go beat up this kid. I don't, I don't remember what the actual thing was, because I walked up so late. Like, I walked up as they were all agreeing that, like, something had to be done.
32:30 Sam Fragoso? Mm hmm.
32:30 Speaker 00 And I, and I walked up and immediately, one of the kids who I was friendly with, that just, like, literally just took a shine to me, like, just took a liking to me. I didn't even, I think, do anything special. He was like, go away, you're too young for this.
32:47 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
32:47 Speaker 00 But we're both kids. But like, whatever it was that they were gonna go do, was bad enough that he didn't even want me to know.
32:55 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
32:56 Speaker 00 And, and I think that the one thing that was chosen for me, which is try, it, it's why I try to have a lot of grace for people who had the opposite things chosen for them, is that a lot of people, in a way, situation wise, decided for me that I was like a good kid. Or they decided for me that I, I shouldn't be involved in something. And then I look at stories of people that, even people that I've, you know, artistically looked up to, like a DMX or something like that, and how there were people older than him that set him on a bad path, or they, whether, whether it's, it's someone taking advantage of someone that they have power over or feel,
33:36 Speaker 00 um, that they can influence, or just people decide that you're bad and they tell you you're bad or something like that. I, I try to have a lot of grace for those people because I was the, so the opposite. I was, I wasn't just told to be good, I was told that I was good. And so then, some of those things just have some reinforcing beliefs. I, I have and have had a wonderful life, so I'm not being like boo hoo me or anything like that, but I've also had a life where I cannot make, um, I, I can't make certain mistakes that are afforded to other people, you know? Like even when I was in high school, it's like I was around kids that had money.
34:18 Speaker 00 I was around kids whose parents knew new cops and new judges. And I didn't have any of that. So if I got in the same trouble as them, or even in trouble with them, I would be the person who actually like faced consequence.
34:33 Sam Fragoso? Your parents split up at 12, something like that?
34:35 Speaker 00 Something like that. I, I think it was like final by the time I was 13 or something. Yeah.
34:40 Sam Fragoso? Between your mother, your father and your grandmother, like who was the most influential on your sense of humor?
34:48 Speaker 00 It, it changed by year, you know? Cause it was like, there was a time where I would be with my grandma a lot during the summer. My mom would get up and go to work and drop me off at my grandma's house. And then we would talk, but it got to the point where I really enjoyed making her laugh. But then it shifted a little bit to my mom again. And then it was, then for a little while it was my, my aunt. And then it became my granddad, cause my granddad was like probably the hardest person to make laugh. And so then it became this like personal challenge where I was like, what could be? And it's like, it's like, when I look back to how much he lived through.
35:33 Speaker 00 And I know he loved, my, my granddad loved me so much, like really, really, really. And he, and he's one of the people who taught me how to love people. But he was very hard to make laughs sometimes. I would be like doing what I didn't know at the time were bits, but I'd be like doing bits. And he'd be like, alright.
35:50 Sam Fragoso? Well, give me an example.
35:51 Speaker 00 There was one time where I took the covers. I, I had taken a nap and I took the covers and I had wrapped the quilt around me. And I had started walking around the house like a little king. And it was making my grandma laugh so hard, cause I was like a little king that couldn't find my kingdom. And so my grandma was laughing, my, my aunt was laughing, I think my mom was laughing. And my granddad was like. I'm dragging it on the floor. We just washed it. They like it was it wasn't like he was trying to be a bad sport or anything. It's just like, what, what could I do that was like funny to him? You know? And looking back at like everything he lived through, I could see how
36:36 Speaker 00 he loved me, but everything I was doing just being annoyed. Like, like, imagine you are from an era of sharecropping and you've lived through the civil rights movement. And now this kid is like, it's like, yeah, it's not hitting. It's not, it's not, I mean, you love him, but it's not, it's not crushing.
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40:56 Sam Fragoso? I want to do a segment called the fact check.
40:58 Speaker 00 Okay.
40:59 Sam Fragoso? So to begin, the first open mic you did in Chicago.
41:03 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
41:04 Sam Fragoso? It was at a place called Pressure Billiards.
41:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
41:07 Sam Fragoso? Is that right?
41:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
41:08 Sam Fragoso? Okay. Is there any remaining bit from that set that you still like?
41:15 Speaker 00 I think something had happened with, uh, with OJ. And, and I was like, you would think that after murder, you'd lay low.
41:25 Sam Fragoso? Mm hmm.
41:26 Speaker 00 It's kind of wild for a courtroom to ever see you again. After you, after you get away with what looks like, you know what I mean? Like, cause I basically had a thing of like, in, on a cosmic level, it started to feel like OJ was like sucking up all of black men's chances in America.
41:48 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
41:48 Speaker 00 You already don't get many. And OJ is just getting so many extra.
41:53 Sam Fragoso? Right.
41:53 Speaker 00 It's like, there's a kid who like, you know, made some sort of mistake and went right to jail for 20 years, no questions asked. And meanwhile, OJ is like breaking into like, I don't know if it was his friend's house or like, he's getting some of his memorabilia back. Cause he's like, no, the way you got it was, and it was one of those things where I was like, okay, even if that's true, after a double murder.
42:17 Sam Fragoso? Mm hmm.
42:17 Speaker 00 You gotta chill.
42:19 Sam Fragoso? Yeah.
42:19 Speaker 00 You gotta lay low.
42:21 Sam Fragoso? Yeah. When you're performing in, in Chicago and then you go to New York, I think, uh, you're working here in the city, uh, Trader Joe's. Performing standup at night. Um, and then you get hired on the Fallon, uh, show. I, I've heard you say that you need only between four to five hours of sleep.
42:39 Speaker 00 Sure.
42:40 Sam Fragoso? What, are you, are you taking like HGH, Adderall, antidepressants? Like, how are you managing on four to five hours of sleep?
42:48 Speaker 00 Managing is a strong word.
42:52 Speaker 00 Like I, like I, I'm saying that's the bare minimum that I needed to like live. So I didn't have a heart attack.
42:58 Sam Fragoso? Right.
42:59 Speaker 00 But I was also younger, so I could like get away with it a little bit. There's not some magic trick. I feel terrible when it happens. I like, like when, when I've had four hours of sleep, you can tell.
43:11 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
43:12 Speaker 00 You, you see it on me. I wear it. I don't, I'm not grumpy, but I am, uh, nihilistic.
43:19 Speaker 00 Do you know what I mean? I'm not, I'm not gonna snap at you and get rude.
43:22 Sam Fragoso? Yeah.
43:22 Speaker 00 But I will be like, oh, nothing matters.
43:27 Speaker 00 You know? So that's, that's a lot of it.
43:30 Sam Fragoso? Uh, there's a bit on your special, uh, Up Here Killing Myself.
43:34 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm.
43:35 Sam Fragoso? Where you talk about political correctness and you said, "I feel like political correctness works in proximity to the problem." Can you unpack that for us?
43:44 Speaker 00 I think that it is very easy to, um, to engage in all the right language and all of the right, um, rhetoric when you are not immediately impacted.
43:58 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
43:59 Speaker 00 And I think that that is a thing that we see in, in, in a lot of different, just a lot of different spaces. I think that if you are bird's eye view, looking at statistics or looking at a person in, as a case study in a book, it's very easy to act like you can fully diagnose everything that's going wrong and what you would do in that situation. But if there was someone in front of you taking all their clothes off and swinging their fist, I think you'd have a little bit more of a, of an immediate like, someone arrest this person. Do you know what I mean?
44:34 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
44:34 Speaker 00 And, and I, I don't know. I, I still feel that way to a degree because I find that people who have all of the, um, like, right opinions.
44:44 Sam Fragoso? Mm-hmm.
44:44 Speaker 00 Are usually pretty comfortable people.
44:46 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
44:47 Speaker 00 Like, I, I just think that a lot of the people that we end up looking up to as people who, um, set such a great example, at least rhetoric wise, of how to speak on everything,
44:59 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
45:00 Speaker 00 are usually coming from a place where they've had the leisure to like, read about this stuff thoroughly.
45:04 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
45:05 Speaker 00 And I'm not saying that if you are crammed for time or if you don't come from money that you can't. I'm just saying you probably won't be able to do about everything.
45:14 Sam Fragoso? Hmm.
45:14 Speaker 00 You're probably gonna have your blind spots because you only have so much time. You're spending the rest of your time surviving.
45:18 Sam Fragoso? So for the record, we're taping this, uh, during Colbert's last week, uh, on the air. And I know you just went on the show, I think, just a month or two ago. What does the cancellation of The Late Show portend to you? What does it say about late night? What does it say about free speech? How are you thinking about it?
45:37 Speaker 00 I mean, I don't, I don't see it as the end of late night. I do find that the clear and blatant attempts to like silence and undercut people that you've seen Colbert have, that you've seen happen to Kimmel and stuff like that are, those, those are.
46:00 Speaker 00 I would, I would say that those are speaking to a much scarier and darker thing. I'm not worried about late night comedy, so much so as I am worried about a comedian's ability to make a joke and all the things that, all the things that the anti-woke, anti-cancellation people have always talked about are literally happening right now out in the open blatantly. Because then you'll see, you'll see, what's his name? Is it Brett Carr or something like that? Like, you'll see.
46:29 Sam Fragoso? Brendan Carr.
46:30 Speaker 00 Brendan Carr. You'll see him come out and give whatever explanation that is layered and layered and layered in government jargon and is veiled in a way that is supposed to seem bipartisan or for the good of the public. And then Trump will just come out and be like, they promised me that Jimmy Kimmel was supposed to be off the air. And it's like that, so, so it is that. Because one thing that Trump will do is he'll accidentally tell the truth for someone else's lie. That's, that's gonna happen every time. Like, you will make yourself look so stupid defending him because he will come out and say his real intention. And so I think that when you talk about free speech and you talk about comedy and it not
47:14 Speaker 00 being safe right now and everything, it's always come from the perspective that the people without power that just had an opinion on how some people's jokes made them feel because they were the subject of the joke, that that was the end of comedy. Meanwhile, you got this going on and all of a sudden, you don't have as many brave souls standing up for comedians and standing up for free speech or anything. And so, you know, I, I think that. Um, people are gonna have their uh takes and opinions on on why Colbert's off air. But Trump definitely didn't help any uh any discussion that doesn't look like he tried to make it hap- you know what I mean?
47:56 Speaker 00 Like, there's just, there's no world where you don't put those two things together based on how he's behaved. And so even if that's, even if that's somehow incorrect, you still made it look like the reason and you celebrated it like it was the reason. Which is, which is something that is um a bit unprecedented in the, in the way of someone in the office being so shameless. And then you see the same thing with him um mentioning Seth and Fallon. It's like, what did Fallon do?
48:26 Sam Fragoso? Touch his hair?
48:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, but he proved it wasn't a weave.
48:30 Sam Fragoso? True.
48:31 Speaker 00 Like, like, I don't, I don't even know what Fallon could have done.
48:34 Sam Fragoso? That was kind of investigative journalism for him.
48:37 Speaker 00 I mean, to, to a degree, if that, if that hair had come off, it could have changed the course of the election.
48:43 Sam Fragoso? It could have changed the course of this entire conversation.
48:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
48:47 Sam Fragoso? Your new special is called Symphony, but the one before was called um Up Here Killing Myself. And it's really excellent.
48:56 Speaker 00 Oh, thanks.
48:57 Sam Fragoso? Both specials are excellent, but I, I want to talk about that one a little bit before we go. Because it's sort of this setup, or the setup of it is um a stand-up interspersed with a kind of therapy session, where the line is blurred between what is the setup to a joke? And what is some admission you're making in a therapist's office? But how do you understand the interplay of those two things? Or how, how do they interplay in your life?
49:26 Speaker 00 The best way to sum it up is that in therapy, I've talked about a lot of things that I wasn't ready to talk about yet. And then by the time I talk about it on stage, I've like reached this either conclusion or uh acceptance of the thing which ends up being the joke or the story. If that makes sense.
49:44 Sam Fragoso? Yeah.
49:45 Speaker 00 Yeah. It's like, there, there are certain things I'm probably not fit to or ready to talk about. In front of people that I would talk about in therapy. And then the takeaways that I have from talking it out in therapy become the, either the back end of the premise or the overall like realization is the joke. You know?
50:10 Sam Fragoso? At the end of your special, there's this exchange you have with a therapist, but it also sort of feels like the audience. And I want to play a little bit from that.
50:19 Speaker 00 This is the most important thing in the world to me. Cause it's one of the last places they can be completely honest and get away with it.
50:31 Speaker 00 Like the deeper that I dig into this, the more I realize it actually saved my life.
50:37 Speaker 00 Like if I didn't have this, I probably would have killed myself a long time ago.
50:43 Speaker 00 It's a hard thing to admit because people look at you different after you say that. It's why you, just by being here, just by listening, saved my life.
51:00 Speaker 00 And I think I'd be remiss if I didn't at least take a second to say, thank you.
51:12 Sam Fragoso? When I watched that for the first time, I couldn't tell if you were saying comedy saved your life or if therapy saved your life or both.
51:25 Speaker 00 I see it as both, you know, there's, there's a double speak there. But then also I think that you can, you can like save a life in a lot of different ways as well. I think that sometimes you save a life to the point of someone not wanting to take their life. But then I also think that you can be saved from a life you don't want to live. To make a piece of work and to, to share that thing and for people to.
51:55 Speaker 00 Understand it, feel comforted by it, or feel like sort of seen by it, or whatever, is like that, that thing becomes the skill. And so that's the thing that I, I had hoped to do with, with releasing the special the way I did. And it's what I hope to do each week.
52:12 Sam Fragoso? I think you do that. I, I, maybe I'm not finding the right words. Let me get this right. Because as, as you can probably tell, like I've, I've read and heard every interview you've done. And there's a thing that you keep saying in so many different podcasts, pieces of press. And I'm like reluctant to say it because it's maybe because I identify in some way, which is that in every interview you talk about when I'm gone,
52:38 Sam Fragoso? when this is over, when I'm no longer here. Now, I haven't heard someone this young talk about death this much since like my childhood with my mother. Like my mother, since the age I was like 12, she'd go, well, you know, when I'm gone, you'll take that or make sure you settle that with your brothers and all like, we had a kind of fixation with death. And as someone who inherited some of that and thinks about it often, do you talk about when you're gone and death this much? Because in talking about death,
53:21 Sam Fragoso? you kind of invariably talk about life and what's worth living for.
53:27 Speaker 00 I think that it's, it's a part of everything. And so it needs to be a part of your assessment of things. I, I look at my father's death. And with, when my father passed, I sort of promised myself that as best as possible, I would not hold grudges. Because now, looking at the entire scope of time I had with my dad, there's definitely some time that I wasted being mad at my dad. And you know, you could be like, oh, you were young or you were a teenager or whatever. But I definitely carried some anger towards my dad, you know, after my parents divorced and everything like that. But if I had known, okay, you're Only gonna have your dad for this long.
54:07 Sam Fragoso? He passed away in 2016.
54:08 Speaker 00 Yes, and so I'm like, alright, 26 is still
54:13 Speaker 00 relatively young to lose your dad, but also I had, I had a a good amount of time with him that a lot of people don't get with their fathers, right? And, but even in that scenario, I was like, okay, I'm not going to hold grudges anymore because I have to treat the things that happen, things that I do and things that other people do under the weight of death. Does that mean that I'm gonna like patch things up with everybody from here on out for the rest of time? No, but I will not hold an unnecessary grudge or hold on to feelings that don't serve me or might misrepresent the other person because what would I feel like if they weren't here? And so I think that that's a really important thing to remember. And I also think if you, if you consistently
54:59 Speaker 00 live your life like you don't have time to waste, you end up making decisions and treating people in a way that makes you feel good in the moment. Like in, like actually in the moment, you, you put off fewer things and you, and you have a, yeah, you have an understanding that endings are a part of stories. And so, and, and so that's, that's where a lot of it comes from.
55:23 Sam Fragoso? And so your dad's passing did that for you.
55:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I think it shaped a lot of how I am now, like even if it is a passing acquaintance. I definitely want to always let people know how much I love them. Like it's, it's like very important to me because I feel like those were, those were such important words that I got to say to my dad when he was still like fully coherent and he was
55:52 Speaker 00 dying and when he was like had slipped into his sort of coma and was passing and, and
55:59 Sam Fragoso? You got to tell him that.
56:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, I got, I got to tell him that in a way that I knew he heard it and I got to tell him that in a way I hoped he heard it.
56:05 Sam Fragoso? How did he take it?
56:07 Speaker 00 I, I think that for him, he probably wasn't as
56:13 Speaker 00 in the mindset of like, this is the last time my son's gonna say, like, I don't know if it had as much weight for him, but it has that weight for me as a memory. So I think that that is really, really.
56:27 Speaker 00 Important to me to just like not just do my best to treat people with care and everything, but to just like try to give people the best that I can on on every level because I don't know what comes next.
56:42 Sam Fragoso? Do you believe you wouldn't be here without comedy?
56:48 Speaker 00 I wouldn't have been here, I at least wouldn't have been here in this way. And I'm, I don't know, it's hard to say. Like it is, it is a very difficult thing to assess. I think that if I'm being thoughtful and honest, it's like, yeah, I don't know. I really, I really don't. You know what I mean? Like, I, I think that one of the reasons that mental health is so important to me is because it, it, um, it works so nearly to a physical health where there are people who don't seem like they have anything wrong and then out of nowhere they drop dead. I think there's also people who don't seem like they're, they have anything wrong and
57:33 Speaker 00 then go off and do something drastic. If there's even an inkling, like it, it's literally like how any man who has a, like a health scare by not taking care of himself, you, you will see those men turn around, all the men around and be like, go get checked. It's like that. It's like if there's even the chance that I could have a, like a horrifically failing or rapidly declining mental health, then I should speak on that thing in the case that it, that it, um, could happen to anyone else because it does happen to other people all the time.
58:13 Sam Fragoso? In this moment, how are you feeling?
58:16 Speaker 00 I feel good. Yeah. I mean, I feel like the, there's a, for the last few years, there feels like a real purpose to everything that I'm doing and, and, um, I've always tried to live with purpose, but I think that.
58:36 Speaker 00 There are some times where you feel more so in like the flow of things you were meant to do than you've ever felt. If this conversation has led to a certain type of thinking, I want to be clear that I want to be doing everything I'm doing for as long as possible.
58:53 Sam Fragoso? It's also kind of fitting and perfect that we have to end this interview momentarily because you have to go.
59:00 Speaker 00 Yeah.
59:01 Sam Fragoso? And perform. And so before we do that, in 2017, when you had just moved to New York, you're working at Trader Joe's during the day, stand up at night, you did an interview with the Comics Comic. This was probably your first interview ever.
59:16 Speaker 00 Maybe so, yeah.
59:18 Sam Fragoso? And they ask you, where do you see yourself in five years? Which is kind of a question you only get during a job interview or a podcast interview.
59:25 Speaker 00 Sure.
59:26 Sam Fragoso? But I want you to read the answer that you gave.
59:29 Speaker 00 Okay.
59:33 Speaker 00 Okay. Oh, you got the font big. You knew I couldn't see. Okay.
59:39 Speaker 00 I want to get to a point in my career, that's what the next five year goal is, to get to a point in my career that people love me as much as they love Chipotle. Because Chipotle is steadily poisoning people. And people are still going to Chipotle, like not my Chipotle. I just want to get to the point where even if I do some horrible joke that a blogger hates me for, my fans will go, not my Josh Johnson. My Josh Johnson would never poison me. Yeah. I don't think I'm there.
1:00:11 Speaker 00 I don't think I'm there at all. As soon as I started reading it, I was like, did I say this? Then when I got to the Chipotle, I was like, no, I remember the Chipotle.
1:00:19 Sam Fragoso? It sounded like you doing a bit.
1:00:20 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:00:21 Sam Fragoso? I could hear it in your voice so clearly.
1:00:24 Speaker 00 And actually, just a little background, that exact thought comes from my friend's mom being like, I've tried to live such a good life. She's this crazy. She said, I've tried to live such good life that I could get one murder in.
1:00:42 Speaker 00 I've been a beacon of the community. I volunteered just so that way if somebody tried me and I gotta get that one kill in. Every jury would be like, not her.
1:00:53 Sam Fragoso? It's like OJ in The Good Will in the opposite way.
1:00:56 Speaker 00 Yeah. And so I asked her, I was like, can I do that? And she was like, yeah, if you want, because I also at the time, I don't think she believed I was actually going to do comedy. So I was like, hey, can I like, can I use that? She was like, yeah, I guess. I mean, don't tell me it was me.
1:01:13 Sam Fragoso? So would you update any of that? Where are you at on that? On that journey there? Do you have any updates, amendments, additions? Chipotle is not a sponsor of the show, so it's fine.
1:01:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think, yeah, I, I want to still be on my pursuit to be the, the best, which I find to be whatever my version of the best is, is the best that I can do. And so I think five years from now, I want to have enacted a lot of my touring goals. I have ideas for tours. I have ideas for specials and I have ideas for formats of, of entertainment that even if they have been done in some way before, I, I think I can really bring something different to them. And so I think that my five year goal is to be completely unencumbered creatively.
1:02:01 Speaker 00 And whether that's by, by money or by access or by, um, by who has time to collaborate with me. It's like, I, I just want to make sure that as a, uh, like a, a vessel of creativity, that I'm more and more able to like, express myself as freely as possible. And to, yeah, like, speak out against things that are, things that are happening in a way where I can be an effective enough communicator for people to, uh, walk away with the, with the takeaways of how much they matter, how important they are, how important their work is and how important their creative, um, endeavors are.
1:02:43 Speaker 00 And how much those things together all work towards making the world turn.
1:02:48 Sam Fragoso? Well, to bring us to symphony, Basquiat famously said, if art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time. My last question. What is comedy?
1:03:00 Speaker 00 Oh, so the finishing of the quote that I've added on, that I've tagged on, that I've tagged.
1:03:06 Sam Fragoso? A little Boskiot tag?
1:03:07 Speaker 00 Is comedy is how we decorate reality. I think everyone can see what's going on, but I think only through comedy can you take what is like that blank canvas of a fact of what is happening and decorate it to show how absurd it might be, or just that it's not the end of the world.
1:03:28 Sam Fragoso? Well, Josh, I don't like what is happening.
1:03:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
1:03:33 Sam Fragoso? But I do appreciate that you're there every week to make it just like 1% better and palatable.
1:03:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, if I can get to 2%, that would be double.
1:03:43 Sam Fragoso? Maybe that's when you'll come back on the show.
1:03:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Let me know when I've hit 2% for you.
1:03:48 Sam Fragoso? Okay, probably like six months from now. Josh Johnson, thank you for the time.
1:04:11 Speaker 04 I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.
1:04:19 Speaker 05 We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.
1:04:22 Speaker 04 I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?
1:04:25 Speaker 05 There were 32,000 pounds of them.
1:04:27 Speaker 04 32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.
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