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- [00:00]
Ryan Seacrest
Hi friend, it's your inner child calling and they want churros.
- [00:10]
Craig Ferguson
A new toy.
- [00:14]
Damian Kulash
And a new adventure.
- [00:18]
Ryan Seacrest
Or maybe five with the bestest besties on earth. Find your moment at Walt Disney World Resort.
- [00:30]
Unknown
Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card based on the February 2024 Nielsen report hey, it's Ryan.
- [00:59]
Ryan Seacrest
Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through March 25th. Spring in for storewide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible snacks from Doritos, Cheez Its and Pringles or sweet treats from Haagen, Dazs, Kinder, Bueno and Reese's, plus many more. Then clip the offer in our app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even even more restrictions apply. Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.
- [01:27]
Creativity doesn't wait. It moves. Shifts, evolves. Just like you. And with the Yoga PC from Lenovo, your tools finally keep up. Stunning, smart and sustainably sourced yoga PCs from Lenovo are designed to amplify your creativity with AI powered performance. Whether you're sketching, editing, animating or composing, yoga moves with you adapting to your creativity, to your rhythm. With beautiful displays and the flexibility to shift from laptop to tablet, yoga unlocks new ways to inspire and create. Because at Lenovo we believe your tools should fuel your flow, not hold you back. Yoga PCs from Lenovo support you at every step of your creative journey. So check out lenovo.com yoga and supercharge your creativity with yoga. Empowering creators everywhere.
- [02:26]
Craig Ferguson
This is me, Craig Ferguson. I'm inviting you to come and see my brand new comedy hour. Well, it's actually, it's about an hour and a half and I don't have an opener because these guys cost money. But what I'm saying is I'll be on stage for a while anyway, come and see me live on the Pants on Fire tour in your region. Tickets are on sale now and we'll be adding more as the Tour continues throughout 2025 and beyond. For a full list of dates, go to thecraigfergusonshow.com See you on the Road, my dears. My name is Craig Ferguson. The name of this podcast is Joy. I talk to interesting people about what brings them happiness. My guest on the podcast today, I've been aware of for a long time. His band were on my old late night show when it was. So you'll hear the story. Anyway, please welcome Damian Kulash from OK go Damien. First of all, let me apologize. Don't get too close to your microphone because I. I'm feeling a bit poorly. I've got. I think I've got a cold. But it could be leprosy. It could be anything. I don't know. We've got many symptoms start with a cold. How are you? Are you okay?
- [03:50]
Damian Kulash
I'm well, I'm better than. I'm better than that. I don't think I have leprosy.
- [03:56]
Craig Ferguson
Okay, well, that's good. Are you hypochondriac in any way?
- [04:00]
Damian Kulash
No, not particularly.
- [04:01]
Craig Ferguson
Many artists are, you know, I think it's something to do with a creative mind getting bored and you go, oh, could be.
- [04:11]
Damian Kulash
Or just the delicacy of our sensitive little souls.
- [04:15]
Craig Ferguson
Ah, no, I see. We're gonna embark on an existential crisis. Hey, I know that you did the old late night show like years ago, right when I was doing Late Night and it was right at the. It was before. This Too Shall Pass. I mean, it was really. It was quite early, right?
- [04:36]
Damian Kulash
Long time ago. Yes.
- [04:37]
Craig Ferguson
Yeah. It was when the show was so small the band had to play and then you guys had to go away and then we put the late night thing in and then we shot it out of order so that the band played first. That was right. Right, you were doing that.
- [04:52]
Damian Kulash
That sounds right to me. I've had kids since then, so I don't remember anything.
- [04:57]
Craig Ferguson
Yeah, that's interesting. So have I. And I remember Patchy Bits, who were a great band. Patchy Bits, they were really lovely. But listen, I think that was interesting. Cause I mean, obviously I've known of the band and even right at the very beginning of Late Night, I always kind of like. I would either say yes or no to the bands. And so I was very familiar with. Ok, go very early. Or I thought early on. I imagine it wasn't that early on for you. But since then, the kind of performance nature of what you do. Cause you're not like a normal rock star. First of all. I can see you're in your kitchen. That's. And you have a throw blanket on your sofa.
- [05:43]
Damian Kulash
This is true. This is true. This is not my own home.
- [05:47]
Craig Ferguson
It's not.
- [05:49]
Damian Kulash
No.
- [05:50]
Craig Ferguson
Wow.
- [05:51]
Damian Kulash
There's been fires in Los Angeles, as you know.
- [05:54]
Craig Ferguson
Oh my God. Did you get evacuated? Did you get into trouble?
- [05:56]
Damian Kulash
I did. You know, I don't. My home is still there and is safe, but my kids school is very close to where the fires were. And while I am not a hypochondriac, I'm very cautious with their exposure to heavy metals and flying asbestos and so forth.
- [06:18]
Craig Ferguson
That's exactly what I felt about it because I lived in LA for years and years and years and years and I still have a lot of friends there who have moved out. I would be terrified now to just be there breathing that stuff in.
- [06:30]
Damian Kulash
It is nasty stuff. And there's a big push towards normalcy, which I completely understand. Like everybody wants life to keep going and so the fastest you can open, you know, the faster you can open the schools, the faster you can get everybody back into their sort of like routine, the better. But we are opting out of that for a little while. We're, we're, we're in Santa Barbara because it is, it feels too toxic.
- [06:56]
Craig Ferguson
Yeah, I, I would be totally doing that as well. I'm in London and I've just been on the tube. London underground. That's pretty toxic too actually. I think that's where I might have got my cold.
- [07:08]
Damian Kulash
But much more romantic type of toxic it is.
- [07:12]
Craig Ferguson
It's a little bit like it's toxic but it's also a Richard Curtis movie. You can see lots of little Richard Curtis movies going on all over the subway. I think, by the way, that would be a good place for an OK Go video. Would be the subway jumping, leaping across trains instead of treadmills.
- [07:31]
Damian Kulash
Yeah. I don't know. I don't know why we haven't thought of it.
- [07:34]
Craig Ferguson
Are you still doing the super kind of complicated and like performance art videos or.
- [07:41]
Damian Kulash
Yes. We just released a new video two weeks ago. Last week. The week before. Yeah, two weeks ago. Which is. It features 64 clips on 64 phones all laid out on the floor as a mosaic.
- [07:56]
Craig Ferguson
I have to say I haven't seen it yet. What's the name of the song that goes with it?
- [08:00]
Damian Kulash
It's called A Stone Only Rolls Downhill.
- [08:02]
Craig Ferguson
Okay.
- [08:03]
Damian Kulash
And it is. The opening lines are. I wish I could say it would all be all right.
- [08:08]
Craig Ferguson
Are you concerned about the state of the. I mean, I think everybody's concerned about the state of the world.
- [08:12]
Damian Kulash
I was gonna say. Are you not concerned?
- [08:13]
Craig Ferguson
Well, you know, I am and I'm not. I'll tell you, I've been Bored in the arse of everyone who listens to this podcast. But I've been reading a lot of historical novels, particularly the work of Gore Vidal, and it's been bad for a long time. I feel like this is not. It's always crazy. I feel like I'm getting a little bit of a sense of perspective. Of course I'm worried, but if you look at it, it's always been pretty scary for humans on this planet.
- [08:43]
Damian Kulash
Yeah.
- [08:43]
Craig Ferguson
You think it's worse?
- [08:45]
Damian Kulash
I do. Really? Why? I think it is more. I think that the things we are. I think we are at some tipping points into some places we may not be able to return from as easily. I think you are right. That has always been bad and has always been crazy. But I think that I am very worried about the governmental changes happening in the US right now, that having a president that acts more like a fearer is not great. And I do think that climate stuff is passing tipping points that really change the way humans live. I don't necessarily think, like, I'm not running from a specific fire as much as I am the toxicity that comes after that and the social changes that come after that. You know, I think that a lot of what's happening, you know, I think the. Let's see, what's the right way to say. I think the war in Syria is really a climate war. I think that the migration problems at the southern border are really climate problems. That when you have. The reason you have Ms. 13 in taking over cities in South America is because there's an influx of people from agricultural areas that are no longer used for agriculture because they've been in drought for so long. So it seems like a social problem at the border of the US, but it's actually a climate problem globally. So that's what I'm worried about.
- [10:14]
Craig Ferguson
Well, what would you do? You have any ideas about how you think a solution may be achieved?
- [10:20]
Damian Kulash
You just write pop songs.
- [10:23]
Craig Ferguson
That's the way to do it. But I think it's kind of interesting because I think everybody's worried about. I mean, any sentient being, I think, has to be worried about climate change because it's the planet on which we live. But the idea that I've had this discussion with my kids, who are a bit. Probably a bit older than yours, I think. But I feel at this point, you know, all of our frothy entreaties to, you know, get your grandma to separate her, you know, plastic bag from the, you know, the eggs is not going to. It's not going to work. And I think at this point we've now reached. It's an engineering problem. We have to actually intervene in some way. And I think that's kind of. That's kind of fascinating to me because I feel that nothing's gonna change until it becomes profitable. I feel like climate change has to become profitable for someone to say, well, we'll pay you $500 billion to do some cloud seeding and bring down the temperature of the north Atlantic by 3 degrees. And then someone will do it because it can be done.
- [11:27]
Damian Kulash
I hope you're right.
- [11:29]
Craig Ferguson
What do you think then?
- [11:31]
Damian Kulash
I think that solar is already cheaper than fossil fuels, and yet we keep opening new wells and trying to dig more. I think that the. I agree is systemic. I do not think that recycling. I don't think this choice should be on the consumer. I don't think it is a consumer choice. You can't expect everybody in the world to make the best decision for the planet. What you need to do is actually make good structural decision for the planet. I am not super bullish on geoengineering stuff, but I'm also not a scientist. I just sort of feel like that those geoengineering solutions are often used as a sort of salve for, like, I know it's really bad, but we can fix this. And sort of like, no, the thing we should do is stop drilling, like stop burning oil. That is the obvious thing to do.
- [12:33]
Craig Ferguson
And yeah, I know that we could easily find, you know, someone else who could say, here's why we mustn't stop drilling oil and we must have to. Yeah, I mean, it's an argument which is. It seems like one of those arguments where you can't persuade anyone. Do you know what I mean? It's like people dig in. Exactly. And then it's like. And I feel like the nature of argument has become a little difficult as well. It's not just about climate change. It's about societal change in the sense that the difficulty in argument now is that you don't really discuss to move forward. It's not Socratic. It's more about, well, what's your position? Well, here's my position and here's why your position is wrong. And here's why my position is right. And it doesn't seem to move. I think it's a real gridlock. I think that's a systemic problem with humans as well, I think, isn't it?
- [13:30]
Damian Kulash
I believe that it is, yes.
- [13:32]
Craig Ferguson
So maybe. But what I'm trying to get to is maybe writing Pop songs is the right way to go. Because if you can, in some way, through art, maybe not only pop songs, but pop songs and literature and art and entertainment and all of the things that artists do, perhaps that can help people kind of break the log jam of. This is my position, and I will never change from it. Because, you know, one of the great things I think. One of the great movies I think to watch for this is Dirty Dancing. You ever seen a movie dirty. Of course. You've seen the movie Dirty Dancing. You watch that movie. If you watch that movie when you're 15 or you watch that movie when you're 50 and you have children, it's a completely different. It's a completely different movie. You're like, wait a minute. That dad is right, you know, and she should be put in a corner. And what age is Patrick Swayze with that? This is. It's all about what's going on here. And I think perspective is an artist's job, right?
- [14:36]
Damian Kulash
Yeah, it is.
- [14:37]
Craig Ferguson
That's why I kind of. I loved about the first Mad Giant performance piece that I saw of yours was. I saw the very famous treadmill video, which is very fun.
- [14:51]
Damian Kulash
Thank you.
- [14:52]
Craig Ferguson
But the Rube Goldberg machine, for this, too, shall pass. I feel like that must have taken about four or five years to get. I mean, it was an enormously complex. Did you actually get it in one take? Eventually we did.
- [15:08]
Damian Kulash
What you actually see is it goes from take A to take B back to take A, because there's a section of that where we're going down an elevator shaft following a bunch of fluids that sort of rise and fall different, you know, as the. As the machine shapes itself. And the incredible, incredible cameraman Mick Waugh, who was. Who was doing this amazing job filming that did, in the one perfect take, otherwise did miss the level of the liquid in there for a second. So we had to sort of stitch in take B.
- [15:43]
Craig Ferguson
But it's not cheating because you did get the machine to do what it set out to do. Who designed the Rube Goldberg machine? Are you part of that?
- [15:51]
Damian Kulash
Yes. Well, there was. We put. I mean, this is now, you know, 10, 15 years ago, but we put a job posting on a sort of, like, nerdy artists board saying, we're looking for an engineer who can help us build a Goldberg machine. And 12 engineers together wrote us a proposal. And we're like, guys, you're not very good engineers, if you like. You know, we asked for one.
- [16:15]
Craig Ferguson
This is too many.
- [16:17]
Damian Kulash
We cannot afford you. And they said, no, no, we'll just Pay us like we're one person and we'll just split it up. And it. So it wound up being this sort of group art project where by the end, I think people logged hours and you only got paid if you did more than 10 hours a week or something like that, like, and. But people would just come into this giant warehouse and everybody would sort of work on it together and play and have fun. And my dad built some of that machine, I built a bunch of that machine. We broke it up into a whole lot of different 6 second chunks of the song. And so that there was sort of like there were discrete problems to try to solve and we could then review things while we were on tour and come back and you know, like the last three weeks of that build, I was there every day, but there was another like three months before that.
- [17:05]
Craig Ferguson
So would you, in the case of like these big videos, will you amend the music to fit the video? Will you change like, you know, if you're in a, you know, that one shot looking thing in the airplane, do you change the music to generally?
- [17:19]
Damian Kulash
No, the, the, the, the one shot one in the airplane is. That's the, that's the album version of that song. That one is, you know, we're in zero gravity and you can get 28 seconds of. Sorry, you can get. Yeah, 28 and a half seconds of zero gravity for each. Each time the plane dives. So what we did for that was we broke the song up into 21 second chunks that were. That fit the tempo of the music nicely so that every four bars there.
- [17:53]
Craig Ferguson
Would be a pause, basically. So how do you rehearse something like that? Do you have to rehearse it? Like, are you watching a clock while the plane is in the sine wave? Is that what was happening or were you.
- [18:05]
Damian Kulash
We spent six flights just bouncing off the walls doing every like, you know, six flights of 50, 15 periods each. So what is that, 300? Do I have that? Six times 15 is six. No, I'm way off. 60, 90. So we had 90 little like test segments. And then. And then with the footage from that, we had GoPros everywhere just filming everything. With the footage from that. We put together what we thought a routine would be. You know, just in a dance studio going kind of like we could do this thing and then that thing. And then we went back to the plane, spent another week, another six flights trying out that routine. And then finally a week of shooting those. And during the week of shooting them, each flight you have 15 periods of weightlessness. The video requires eight of them. So you do seven as a rehearsal, then reset everything and do the full video as the final eight. And in between each, like it's 30 seconds of weightlessness, more or less, then five seconds, five minutes as the plane climbs back up to where it can basically drop you again. And during that, we just have to sit still as we could so that we would later be able to morph over that period.
- [19:19]
Craig Ferguson
It sounds fantastically expensive. Was it? Yeah. Who paid for the record company pay for this?
- [19:26]
Damian Kulash
No, we are our own label. So a Russian airline. This was back before Russia and the west fell apart. There, you'll see on the back of the, the back of that plane. I mean like in the, in the back you can see it says S7. That's a Russian airline. And they were. This was their ad campaign.
- [19:45]
Craig Ferguson
Wow. So they, they donated that for an ad campaign. That's great.
- [19:53]
Ashley Kineti
This is Ashley Kineti from the Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous podcast. It feels like everyone is talking about GLP1s these days. Those are Ozempic and Semaglutide. And with Future Health, you can find out if they're right too. Maybe you feel like you've been struggling with your weight for years and no matter how much you diet and exercise, you just don't feel healthy. Just gonna try FH.com to find out if weight loss meds are right for you. Try fh.com future health is not healthcare services. Provider meds are prescribed at provider's discretion. Results may very sponsored by Future Health.
- [20:24]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through March 25th. Spring in for storewide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags. Turn on eligible beverage items like Powerade Monster and Poppy, or breakfast items like Quaker Instant Oatmeal or General Mills cereals, plus many more. Then clip the offer in our app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more restrictions apply. Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.
- [20:53]
Creativity doesn't wait. It moves, shifts, evolves, just like you. And with the Yoga PC from Lenovo, your tools finally keep up. Stunning, smart and sustainably sourced yoga PCs from Lenovo are designed to amplify your creativity with AI powered performance. Whether you're sketching, editing, animating or composing, yoga moves with you adapting to your creativity, to your rhythm. With beautiful displays and the flexibility to shift from laptop to tablet, yoga unlocks new ways to inspire and create. Because at Lenovo, we believe your Tools should fuel your flow, not hold you back. Yoga PCs from Lenovo support you at every step of your creative journey. So check out lenovo.com yoga and supercharge your creativity with yoga. Empowering creators everywhere.
- [21:53]
Unknown
Sail to breathtaking destinations in Alaska or Europe with Disney Cruise Line. Discover where onboard magic meets onshore adventures, where beloved characters.
- [22:04]
Ryan Seacrest
Hi.
- [22:04]
Damian Kulash
How.
- [22:05]
Unknown
Meet alluring landscapes, where Broadway quality shows meet historic cities, where imaginative dining meets amazing wildlife. And where exciting experiences await the whole family. Book an adventure filled summer Disney cruise to Alaska or Europe.
- [22:23]
Craig Ferguson
Hello, this is Craig Ferguson and I want to let you know I have a brand new stand up comedy special out now on YouTube. It's called I'm so Happy and I would be so happy if you checked it out. To watch the special, just go to my YouTube channel at the Craig Ferguson show and it's just right there. Just click it and play it and it's free. I can't. Look, I'm not going to come around your house and show you how to do it. If you can't do it, then you can have it. But if you can figure it out, it's yours. You must have some very clever producing skills or some very clever producers to, I mean, how the hell do you get in touch with a Russian airline? So do you want to do a music video? And it'll get, you know, because I don't think, I don't think I'd even watch that video and go, you know what airline I should be taking is the one that.
- [23:15]
Damian Kulash
I do remember thinking, like, how ambitious are you? Like, and how risk averse are you? Because, like, that's not the type of airplane you want to be in. But, you know, our Rube Goldberg machine was underwritten by, by State Farm Insurance, which it's like, I feel like everything that happens in that video looks like something you should be insuring, you know.
- [23:35]
Craig Ferguson
Like, but that's, that's kind of interesting because they, I mean, presumably they were the good guys when they were underwriting the video. But I don't know if everyone's very happy with State Farm Insurance right now, particularly in Los Angeles.
- [23:49]
Damian Kulash
No, no, certainly not. I mean, again, this is many years ago, but we had to make this choice 15, 20 years ago about whether or not we were going to do the standard music industry dance or try to do it ourselves. And that State Farm video was the first one where we had any brand money helping to pay for stuff. And it was a difficult balance because back then the idea of selling out was a very real thing. And it Was like, people are going to hate this if it feels like we are just sort of dancing monkeys now as best I understand it, like younger millennials. Definitely Gen Z and beyond see those brand collaborations as a badge of honor.
- [24:44]
Craig Ferguson
I think that the opposite. I think that's right. I think they look at it a different way as well because they also use it as their, as their power. I think the young people, when they say we will withdraw our business from Target or Starbucks or whoever it is they're angry at at the time. Until you fall in line with, you know, whatever we're arguing about, which is a different. It is a kind of change, which I think is, it has, it's valid. I mean there is a kind of like, well, I'm not buying your crap until I feel like you're a decent human being or you're position aligns with mine, which I think is fair. That seems democratic to me.
- [25:20]
Damian Kulash
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that, I mean voting with your dollar is a. Is more effective than voting.
- [25:27]
Craig Ferguson
Yeah, I think everybody's voting with dollars. It just depends how much dollars you have and what votes you're using to do. What is the situation then with your record company now then you. Is it only your band or do you bring in other bands and do you, do you function like a.
- [25:41]
Damian Kulash
We have occasionally released other bands. For the most part it's more the record company stuff isn't very fun. So it's like we don't particularly want to do it unless we're doing it for ourselves. But it's mostly just that it's not like the functions of an old fashioned record label. It used to be a lot about physical distribution and now that's not part of it anymore. There's still a lot of business. I mean it's still a lot of stuff that has to happen and most of it is sort of just, you know, promotional and, and, and logistical. But it is, you know, I don't, it's not stuff I relish doing, but if you're kind of a detail freak, you're going to wind up wanting to oversee it all anyways, you might as.
- [26:26]
Craig Ferguson
Well just do it. Are you a detail freak, you think? Unfortunately, yeah, I think that's, I think that, you know, it's not unusual for musicians or artists to be that way. I mean, you want your, you're, you want your shit to be the way you want it to be. That's, that's the whole gig, right? You want it to be what I always say when, when I'm doing anything is I don't want it to be produced unless it's produced by me. I don't, I don't, you know, if you say, well, this is what happens here you go, I don't know what happens here. I'm doing it. So I feel like it's. That's why through all of it and through doing the late night show and through all the television that I've done, I eventually went back to doing only stand and doing podcasts because I can talk to who I want to on a podcast because there's no one here to tell me. I can't. You can't talk to. Like I remember one of the early podcasts I did was with one of the senior undertakers in New York City, a lovely man. And I wanted to know about undertaking and what it. I had no idea. It's fascinating world and it's like you have to go to have a college degree to do it. And it's like a real, a real interesting thing. And I wouldn't have been able to get that guy a three minute interview, second guest on a Wednesday night, on late night. There's no way I would have been able to do that. And I could talk to him for an hour. And that's what I think is the great gift of this world now, the kind of. I know that you have talked. Didn't you go in front of Congress or something about net neutrality?
- [27:58]
Damian Kulash
I did, yeah.
- [27:59]
Craig Ferguson
Can you describe to me what net neutrality actually means?
- [28:05]
Damian Kulash
Net neutrality, boy. And I, I, it, it has been a long time since that was the specific argument. So I hope I'm not too out of date, but that, that the traffic on the Internet is going across lines that are.
- [28:21]
Craig Ferguson
Right.
- [28:22]
Damian Kulash
Right. Like there are people there. There are there. The, the actual infrastructure of the Internet is owned by the same people who are generally by same companies who are selling us that access and so they can preference what information travels and at what speeds. And so that there was actual preferencing of corporate information over private information back then and that there was basically, it was essentially Internet payola and that was a nasty, nasty, nasty thing. Now we have a much worse issue which is sort of. We have wound up asking the content networks to be the police of the content on them. We expect Facebook to be, to decide what should be on Facebook and the misinformation that flourishes is their problem.
- [29:17]
Craig Ferguson
Yeah, but it's an interesting thing because then people got mad at Mark Zuckerberg recently because he said, all right, we're not going to police it. We're just going to. People can flag it. Is that neutrality? Is that, is that I don't.
- [29:31]
Damian Kulash
This is why I was scared of being on a date because I honestly don't know where like we've got now gotten past the point where we're worried about Comcast and AT&T throttling things so that they can. So that they can serve the interests of their business partners and into the world of misinformation. And honestly I'm so overwhelmed by it myself that I have not developed a.
- [29:55]
Craig Ferguson
Position that I really tried. First of all, that's a very refreshing thing to hear any human being to say in this day and age. But what I think is fascinating though that in the age of. As we wander into every discussion I've had with everybody at some point we end up talking about AI And I think because it's an enormous change in how we live and it's coming fast. But what I'm fascinated by with it is that it really is as far as the Internet goes, as far as the digital information goes, we're in a post truth environment where you can't actually trust anything, even the video which you're watching. I mean I'm sure there's an AI program that could make an okay go video that would convince most people that you had done it.
- [30:43]
Damian Kulash
Yes, for sure. And it's mind boggling. And it also luckily for my little band, it does put a premium on stuff that where people try just for the sake of trying. Right. I mean there is some trust is involved that people do on the other end of the screen. Like the thing we make winds up on the other end of the pipeline going into your eyes or going into your ears. And you need to trust us in some way that this is the real thing. Luckily we've been doing this for 20, 25 years, so we're trustworthy. Source of you.
- [31:17]
Craig Ferguson
I mean you are trustworthy, but the machine is no longer trustworthy. That's what I think is the frightening thing, that I trust you to make the product the way that you make it and the way you said you made it. But I don't know if I trust my phone to be giving me something that wasn't put together in a bot farm somewhere and I don't know, anywhere. Wherever the bot farms are. Do you ever use. Are you ever. Because on one side everybody likes to. I certainly like to talk about how scary AI is and how bad it is, but it's also, you know, it could be great. You know, I've talked to a surgeon on this podcast who's like, no, this is fantastic. This is going to save so many lives in surgery because this thing can do stuff that I just can't. You know, it can do it faster. It can do it, it can do it. It can make decisions, it can analyze data that would normally take me a week, a day, two operations, three operations, I don't have to do it. I can get it instantly as soon as the patient is. Sometimes I don't even have to open them up. And I think that that is the other side of is the technological balance, isn't it?
- [32:31]
Damian Kulash
Yeah, no, it's incredibly, incredibly powerful. And I think people mostly sort of jump to end points. Is this going to be a big monster that's going to come after us and try to kill us, or is it going to make a believable version of Craig Ferguson that's not actually Craig Ferguson? I think the more realistic, in my estimation, sort of slide into the future has more to do with how many intermediary steps it cuts out and whose jobs it's replacing and what that does to the eventual product. That like when you think about it with respect to music, it's not that you, it's not just that you can have an AI replication of Taylor Swift's voice, it's that I would be astonished if our recording programs within the next year or two didn't have a button that you could push to get a better guitar track than the one that you just recorded. Right.
- [33:23]
Craig Ferguson
Oh, right. So it's like auto tune almost, but extrapolating that so that it realizes what you're trying to do and makes it better.
- [33:33]
Damian Kulash
Yeah. So like for instance, my wife and I directed a film for Apple the year before last and in the mixing process, I remember you were, you know, we're there in a giant mixing studio to do this very high end professional cinema mix and the tool that was used to clean up the audio was all AI based. And it's unbelievable what you can do. You can take a track from, you know, a musical track from the 1960s and pull out each individual instrument and remix it on the fly if you want to. And that's unbelievably powerful tool.
- [34:06]
Craig Ferguson
That's crazy.
- [34:07]
Damian Kulash
It's it. And it is, you know, from a workflow perspective, why would you not do that? But when you think about what that is, what that is capable of, then why, like if that tool, anybody in the path is dumb not to use that tool, Right? But now, now, like pivot that to logistics, let's say if you're running a port right now, you would be dumb not to run your logistics through an AI that can make better routing decisions than you can. Right. And if you are a small local government, you would be dumb not to interface with that AI, with your own AI. And at some point it's not a question of this big evil robot coming after people, it's just that they're all black box decisions. We don't know why it's a better decision. We know that it came up with an answer that works and that's all we know. Right. You usually can't go back into an AI and actually figure out what the reasoning was because there is no reasoning. It's pattern recognition and it's recursive and it feeds on itself and it can't explain to you why it has done it. So what happens when you have misalignment with the actual human goals that have gone into it?
- [35:24]
Craig Ferguson
Right. So when the human goals and the synthetic intelligence goals don't mash up, so the artificial intelligence makes a decision in favor of who or in favor of.
- [35:36]
Damian Kulash
What it believes the goals to be, which you may have set, but like, you know, like the Aladdin's lamp or whatever, it's sort of like there's always a way to achieve those goals which actually may reveal to you that you should have had better goals.
- [35:48]
Craig Ferguson
You know, but it's, but it's an interesting, it actually goes back to, I think the point you were making early on about climate change effects is what's affecting the society change because it's a technological, it's like when the printing press is invented, then very quickly you lead on to the Protestant Reformation because people are starting to look at Bibles that they weren't allowed to look at before. And then you start thinking about, we'd like to look at this in our own language. And suddenly there's a rev and suddenly everything changes because of a piece of technology. And I think that the AI, to me it seems to be on a par, I think with the printing press in the sense of the changes it will bring. Some of them are outstandingly good, but it's probably not all going to be good.
- [36:39]
Damian Kulash
No. It's hard for me to imagine an industry that won't be completely top down, I mean top to bottom, revolutionized by it. Because mostly what AI is currently good at is pattern recognition. Mostly what humans do is pattern revolution and like, and that's, and we're in the early days, we're like, we're, we're at you know, we're in the Internet of 1978, not even 1990. You know what I mean? We're like, this is very, very, very early days. And so I have a hard, like. In fact, the first song on our new album is. Is written to this idea. Because I just realized writing a rock and roll album right now feels almost silly. Like a bunch of guys standing there with guitars and drums making music. Like, it feels like releasing a brand new flip book the day before cinema is invented. You know what I mean?
- [37:33]
Craig Ferguson
Yeah, I get it. But I think that that's why. I mean, I feel like my reaction to it has been like, all of the work now has to be live. Everything has to be live. I have to do shows which are live. I have. When I started out in my life When I was 15, 16 years old, my job until I was about 21 was. I was a drummer. I was a drummer in rock bands, in punk rock bands. And I remember saying, nothing's gonna replace drummers. That was the first fucking thing to go. It's like. I mean. And I was. I should have known better. I was listening to Kraftwerk when I was 12, but I didn't see the signs. You know what I mean? It's like I didn't put the. I didn't make any pattern recognition. But I think you're right. There's also. You go into any town in the United States and you will see a bunch of groovy people looking for vinyl in some store, probably near the railway station. Oh, yeah, I listen to vinyl, you know, I still do it. I imagine you probably have a vinyl collection as well. And I think that there is. I don't think it's just nostalgia. I think it's also. It's a different experience.
- [38:42]
Damian Kulash
Well, I think it all points to the same slippery slope, which is that when anything is possible, nothing is special, right? So everybody wants to have more and more access to the stuff they love. But the more access you have to it, the less special any individual part of it becomes. And so you and I grew up thumbing through punk rock Record Store 7 inch boxes to find that one 7 inch from that one band that nobody else had a copy of. Because it would. I mean, the music that was on there could change your life, but just having it was a thing. It took some work, it took some effort. And that relationship to songs changed 20 years ago at least. Right? But it continues to change all the time. I mean, there's no now to a 15 year old. It's just as easy to discover Etta James as it is to discover Taylor Swift. Right. Like, they're not, other than the promotional money behind one, there is no, they're, they're both right there on your phone. Right. There's no, I, like when I wanted to know who John Zorn was, I had to find a weird enough record store to carry John Zorn records. Now you just have to know, you have heard the names, you know the algorithm.
- [39:54]
Craig Ferguson
But I think, but I think. Right. Is that, does that make you optimistic or pessimistic? Because, because some of it is, some of that is great.
- [40:01]
Damian Kulash
Right? It's both. I, it's just, it's just, you know what I mean? It's just that like it doesn't, it, you can't, that, that you can't really put that genie back in the bottle. And, and like we buy, people buy vinyl now, but I don't even know if they buy it to listen to so much as to like have a tactile experience again and be able to like engage with something.
- [40:22]
Craig Ferguson
Right.
- [40:23]
Damian Kulash
You know, that's not sort of coming from the cloud. And I would say that that's why I think that the cloud, the AI universe is likely to be that expansion to every piece of human labor there is that everything is possible and nothing is special. And so hopefully there's just things that are then arbitrarily special because we're going to put work into it. Ok. Videos. There is an easier way to make this, but we're going to do it this way because it will mean more.
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- [43:37]
Craig Ferguson
I did a, a movie about, I don't know, 10, more than 10 years ago, probably like closer to 15 years ago for the, I don't know if you've heard them, the Disney Corporation and, and, and, and yeah, yeah, that's right, these guys and they decided that they wanted to make a movie of Winnie the Pooh, but they were going to do it all hands. So I did, I did the voice of Owl, but the entire movie was hand drawn. It was done in the old style and it was, I think the last one they've done. And I remember asking them why are they doing it? And they said, because we can. Because we can. Because we're Disney and we can, we can do it. And it can be great. And it is great. It's beautiful and it has. Maybe it's because I know that the movie was hand drawn. It feels different to me, but because I'm sure that the AI program can now, can now make animation look like that. It can make it look exactly the same way. My oldest kid is an animator. He's 24 and he's looking at, having studied all through that time now looking at an industry which is changing. As you say, it's like the Internet in 1978. It's like what now? What now? What now? What now? What now? But you have children. What do you have? You have parameters in your parenting. Is there something you think this is what I must teach them in order to navigate this? No, I don't think they're six and.
- [45:04]
Damian Kulash
A half year old twins. And so I'm basically just hanging on for dear life, to be honest. Young kids, like, being proactive is difficult.
- [45:16]
Craig Ferguson
You just try to keep it from going. Totally understand. And I've been there. But it's interesting because my oldest is coming up on 24 and there were just coming in when he was a little kid, iPads and stuff like that. So there were things to do. I don't know how. When I see people at the airport where their kids have got headphones on and they're looking at phones and stuff, I think you don't know how lucky you are. You know, I mean, I, and I.
- [45:43]
Damian Kulash
Am that generation because we are total fascists about screen time. We do not let our kids have any screen time unless they're traveling like that. And then it is. And then it is this incredible drug because they've never.
- [45:55]
Craig Ferguson
They don't exactly the same. But what's interesting, I noticed that both kids really, but my youngest will put it down. It's almost like they're Tom Bombadil with the younger generation. They're like, yeah, it's a thing, but it's not the only thing. Oh, wow. And I think that will happen. It's true, it's a thing, but it's not the only thing. And you can't have a visceral experience without viscerality, if that's even a word. You have to. I mean, the idea of you can have a, you know, you can have an AI interactive sex robot and you go, well, you can, but it's. That's not going to be, it's not going to be the same.
- [46:36]
Damian Kulash
It might be all right, but no, no stakes. There's just no stakes. There's no stakes, you know, because when everything is possible, nothing is special. You know, it's a sort of like there's that finding the, the human equivalent to that person takes real risk.
- [46:54]
Craig Ferguson
And also it's a very interesting thing. I'm very glad that my romantic life reached a conclusion in terms of monogamy before the invention of the dating apps, because I don't know how because now it's involved and I know, I won't say who it is because it's a little embarrassing, I think, but I know a relative of mine who found out he was in a flirty relationship with a robot, was not a real person. You know, it's crazy. Or is it maybe it's okay to be in a flirty relationship with a robot. Nobody's Gonna get it.
- [47:35]
Damian Kulash
Well, so you started with, it's this, is that it's always been crazy.
- [47:39]
Craig Ferguson
It's always been crazy. It's just crazy changes, you know.
- [47:44]
Damian Kulash
Yeah, I believe that. But I also think that the level of, let's say if you were to measure social changes with a Richter scale, we are experiencing several, like seven to nine, you know, like really, really big earthquakes simultaneously right now. We've got climate change and we've got AI and social media, I think has really, really dramatically changed a generation of people for the works. And all of that is either feeding or fueling or bouncing off of the rise of totalitarianism all over the world.
- [48:32]
Craig Ferguson
Well, totalitarianism is not new. I mean, that's a pretty tried and tested kind of. That's been around for a while.
- [48:40]
Damian Kulash
It sure has. But there have been a whole bunch of big tent pole democracies that stabbed it off for a couple hundred years that are not doing a good job.
- [48:48]
Craig Ferguson
Of stabbing off that. I mean, I kind of know, I struggle with this a little bit because the conclusion I've kind of come around to this is only a personal thing, but the thing I've come around to is that I kind of messed around with all sorts of looking at religions and philosophies and theologies and basically what I seem to, to be zeroing in on in the past couple of years is basically the works of Epictetus, Socrates, Seneca, people who have been dead for a couple of thousand years, but basically said the same thing. It was like you can do very limited stuff you can actually fucking do and everything else is really not your concern. You know, I mean, and, and I think you can drive yourself. I mean, like Seneca was, he was Nero's schoolteacher. I mean, that's a dangerous fucking job, you know. But I think that the idea that we all cause, you know, I have this conversation with my wife and she's like, have you seen this in the news? And have you seen that in the news? I'm like, I've seen it, but I have a clutch mechanism, which is what the fuck am I going to do? What the fuck am I going to do?
- [50:04]
Damian Kulash
Oh, totally agreed. I'm not saying that I know what to do or that there's anything we can do, but I do think that the last hours of the Weimar Republic were probably a scarier time than the early hours of the Weimar Republic. Right?
- [50:19]
Craig Ferguson
Like, that's actually depends on who you talk. You may not be able to do this. I mean, yes, I would agree, I think, but that's historical perspective. That's like, if you stand at a period of time and look at that time, you know, like, if you stood right here, right now, and you were talking to the geniuses that were putting together the fucking Treaty of Versailles in 1918, you'd say, you know what, France, maybe you should calm the fuck down and not make everybody angry to make this shit all rise up again, you know? Whereas you take real geniuses like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu who say, you know what? We have to dismantle this. It's the only way we're going to move forward. Truth and reconciliation. And that, to me, is fascinating because I think historical. I don't think history begins until everybody's dead, you know, so, you know, the way that we are looking at. You know, the way that we look at the Second World War is about to change, you know, like this kind of like all of the. That's why I think you get these scary rise of. Of weird kind of crypto fascist organizations, because so many people have now forgotten what was going on. They're like, well, they had nice hats. I mean, it's tricky. I don't think history repeats itself. I think there's been attributes to Mark Twain, who says, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. I think that that's. And speaking to someone who does, part of what you do is you make things rhyme.
- [51:54]
Damian Kulash
I do often rhyme things.
- [51:55]
Craig Ferguson
Yeah. I think that that's how it appears to me. That's what it seems like. And I don't. I don't know. I mean, when I look at the way things are now politically in America, I happen to be reading at the time, just when the election was going on, about Gore Vidal's biography of Aaron Burr. It was fucking crazy. I mean, but. And because he's been dead for such a long time. Highly entertaining. And. I don't know. I mean, I wrestle with it, but mostly I seem to come down to. I don't know if this is the way you do. I come down to, I'll deal with what I can deal with. And that's all I can really do. I don't feel like I'm going to change anybody's mind. I think it's folly to think that.
- [52:40]
Damian Kulash
You will, except your kids. You're right. And that's exactly where the. Where I'm still stuck with.
- [52:48]
Craig Ferguson
I'll just deal with it, but I.
- [52:49]
Damian Kulash
Can'T, because I have no idea. How do you prepare them for all this stuff? There's no. That's what our new song that's what the song, by the way, that A Stone Only Rolls Downhill is like my kids, when I was writing it, they were four, four year old twins. You cannot tell a four year old the world is fucked. No, not a good idea.
- [53:09]
Craig Ferguson
It might not be. It might not be. I mean, if you were to say the world is the middle of the Black Death, you know, when one in three people in Europe was killing over dying, when infant mortality was off the charts, when antibiotics were just a fucking. Nobody even thought about it. Like germ theory was like a couple of guys. And you know, Pythagoras had maybe mentioned it at some point, you would have said, well, this is the end game, clearly, you know, I mean the, the, the.
- [53:36]
Damian Kulash
Well, but I would argue that like. Yeah, that time was way worse than 100 years before and 100 years after.
- [53:45]
Craig Ferguson
Yeah. Depending on where you were standing, you know, I mean, it's kind of like I wrestle with it all the time myself, you know, and I think trying to find a sense of perspective in the world when perspective. And maybe this is what it is like, as you say, social media has changed the generations. I think, I think what's called legacy media, I think is this. It's been destroyed. You know, the idea that the press will somehow keep the government in some degree of honor, that's gone. And it's been gone for a while.
- [54:20]
Damian Kulash
I think longer than we gave it credit.
- [54:23]
Craig Ferguson
I mean, fucking, you know, William Randolph Hearst was not, you know, I don't think he was impartial. Do you know what I mean? I think no. And I think that on the one hand I get as scared as everyone else, but I think on the other hand, I think ultimately it comes down to we'll know in about 100 years when it wouldn't matter to you and me.
- [54:46]
Damian Kulash
Well, you know, there's a term in biology and evolution, punctuated equilibrium.
- [54:53]
Craig Ferguson
No.
- [54:57]
Damian Kulash
The world doesn't change and evolve in some sort of steady and up ramp, like a nice even line. You have long periods of sort of things relatively imbalanced and then something happens and everything shifts really quickly.
- [55:12]
Craig Ferguson
Right, right.
- [55:13]
Damian Kulash
And that doesn't mean that when the dinosaurs were alive they weren't, you know, in constant struggle and things weren't crazy all the time. But also there was a moment when accommodated. Right, like. And when there's a, when there's a vacuum in a system like that, the entire system rearranges itself, you know, you.
- [55:37]
Craig Ferguson
Think that's the, that's where we are. You think we're in that, that place.
- [55:40]
Damian Kulash
I think we are, yes. I think that like, just because Aaron Burr had an incredibly insane life and because World War II or World War I or utterly horrific and world transformative, does it like they were. Those are all moments, those are all punctuations in the equilibrium. The 50s that followed World War II were not free of strife and craziness. They were full of strife and craziness. But they also represent an equilibrium of sorts. Right? Like you can make some guesses as to what's going to happen next. They're not all right, but you can trust certain institutions and certain kind of trajectories to be more or less as you imagine they will be. You know, like, and right now I think it's incredibly hard to imagine what, what the world will be like three years from now, much less ten years from now. And, and I think like some of that, I mean a big part of that is technological, A big part of that is social, you know, socioeconomic stuff, like governmental essentially. And I do think that we are an inflection point with, with, with climate change. It's a slow, slow change, but it's starting to have these effects that people notice as human. I would argue, like I said, that the conflicts in Syria and on the southern border in the US are clearly climate issues, but people don't recognize them as that. And they're not going to be. Publicly, people aren't going, let's fix the climate so that there won't be an immigration issue across the Mediterranean.
- [57:17]
Craig Ferguson
That's not what people are saying, you.
- [57:18]
Damian Kulash
Know, but they are saying, holy shit, LA just burned down. And now there's Canadian wildfires that last all year. You know, people are noticing that the erratic climate is causing real human issues. And I think that if that may not be a three year change, that might be a 10 year change or a 20 year change. But when you combine that with the other ones that are going on right now, I do think we are likely at one of those inflection points.
- [57:49]
Craig Ferguson
I think that's a, that's a fair hypothesis. I think that could be argued pretty reasonably. What will you do? Will you go back to la?
- [58:00]
Damian Kulash
Probably not, but I'm not sure I, that that mostly, I mean, I, I love la. I love my house in la, I love my life in la. But the long game for LA looks like a lot more of this.
- [58:17]
Craig Ferguson
I live in a much colder place with less fires, but other problems. It is what it is. It's been fascinating to talk to you. I thought we would have an interesting conversation and I've certainly been very interested in hearing what you have to say. Thank you so much for making time for us. I really appreciate it.
- [58:37]
Damian Kulash
Thank you. This has been so so so much fun.
- [58:39]
Craig Ferguson
And for me too. Thanks very much. Now off and deal with your kids.
- [58:43]
Damian Kulash
I will.
- [58:58]
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