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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
I'm pretty confident talking into a mic. Hey, I'm doing it right now. But home projects? I second guess everything. Is that noise normal? Is that water damage? Who do I even call? That's where thumbtack comes in. Just upload a photo or voice note and it uses AI powered search to match you with the right top rated local pro. So instead of guessing you get clarity and can hire with confidence for your next tone project, try Thumbtack. Hire the right Pro Today hi, it's Saturday. It's the Saturday show. One from the vault and one from the week is our standard format. I think if you went back and did a content analysis of all Saturday shows, you'd find that to be true, but just barely. But today we adhere to the classic formula from the week I did a spiel on AI as different sorts of miracles and I was lighting on the fact that AI scares people because it's a certain kind of miracle, what I call an additive, not a restorative miracle. And then I noted that unlike other miracles or inventions that are scary, I always does seem to come with a disclaimer of hahaha. It's going to kill us. Why the ha ha ha if it's going to kill us anyway? You could ponder that as you listen to my spiel. But also this week I had Mike Shore with his coauthor Joe Posnansky on to talk about fandom. And you know Mike Shore and if you don't, you heard in my intro and his id, creator of all these TV shows or guy who was a executive producer on TV shows and he did Brooklyn nine nine and he was not only writing on the Office, but in the Office as Dwight Schrute's cousin. Of course. The Good Place. The Good Place was his signature creation, one of the greatest TV shows of the last 20 years. And back in 2018 we just talked all about the Good Place. And now in 2026 I give you that talk about the Good Place. Knowing what you know about the Good Place, it will probably, what do they say? Hit a little different now. Mike Shore, AI Enjoy.
- [02:10]
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- [03:33]
Mike Pesca
the Good Place began as a story of Eleanor Shellstruck, a bad person who went to heaven by accident. Heaven is the Good Place. That's the name of the show only. And listen, it's been two years. If you don't know the amazing twists and you don't want to know, join me again in 15 minutes for the spiel. But here we go. It wasn't heaven. It wasn't even Iowa. It was hell. Michael Shore is the writer and creator of the Good Place. He wrote the Office, co creator of Parks and REC and Brooklyn 9 9. He was this might come up. This is why I'm giving all the credits. He was behind the baseball oriented website Fire Joe Morgan. And if you're listening to the Gist, we know demographically you listen to podcasts. I'd recommend he has a podcast with Joe Posnanski. That's excellent. And the Good Place has its own podcast that is the best of its form. You know these kind of television podcasts that have essentially replaced the DVD commentary track. No one is doing it better than the Good Place. Long intro. Great show. Mike Shore, thanks for joining me.
- [04:29]
Michael Schur
Thanks for that was an amazing intro. I would like you to follow me around now and just do that intro wherever I go.
- [04:36]
Mike Pesca
I know the show started with you or the idea from what I've heard started with you puzzling about the ideas of a scorecard, a scoreboard keeping score of your morality. And then I also heard you tell the story of we've all been there being in a coffee shop. You want to give the barista a tip, her back is turned, you wait and then you tip so she could see it. Were did one of those experiences come before the other idea or were they both going on at the same time in your mind?
- [05:04]
Michael Schur
They're sort of going on at the same time. The little game I played where I would drive around L. A or walk around and assign negative and positive points to actions that I saw just in my head that that had been going on for years. And the sort of self critical awareness that I had about my own little foibles, I mean, that's something that has been going on since I was old enough to know what a foible is. It wasn't like it didn't suddenly. These things didn't suddenly happen probably until
- [05:32]
Mike Pesca
you were old enough to give a name to that thing that you've been knowing was a foible.
- [05:36]
Michael Schur
Yeah, yeah. The first moment that you're old enough to go, why do I do this? What is wrong with me? So it wasn't like those things suddenly popped into my brain, they just coalesced into an idea at a time after Parks and Recreation had just ended. And I sort of took a few months off just to clear my head. And during that time it's when it all started to sort of coalesce. But it wasn't just those two things either. It was a passing sort of very, very casual interest in philosophy and ethics specifically. And it was a sort of like, you know, general worldview about, you know, what I think makes for a good or bad person. And then it was a desire to do something, a show that took place in a different arena than the shows I'd been working on. Like you said, I had come from the sort of what you would call a fairly traditional workplace comedy world. It was, you know, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn, 9 9, the office before that. Like those were all shows that were more or less a big ensemble cast who all worked together. And I just, I could have kept doing that and because at that point I could do pretty well. Like I had been doing it for 12 years on three different shows. But. But it just sort of felt like, well, NBC was very kindly giving me this space to do whatever I wanted. And that's a rare thing. And I felt a sort of obligation to try something a little riskier. And so that's where all of those things sort of went into a big pot and got stirred around. And this is what came out.
- [07:03]
Mike Pesca
Now I want to ask you about the creation of your four main characters and the fact that you've assigned them to hell, essentially. But first, can I just ask you about the tipping and being noticed? For the tip, on the one hand, it does seem kind of petty minded, but I think it's sort of the lubricant of society. And if it's true that there's no such thing as altruism because altruism gives us a good feeling. And so it's therefore not a selfless act. Is that a bad thing where maybe points would be taken away if we're going on the point system? Or is it a good thing? Is it a feature or bug of human nature that we're generous because we get the good feeling or the credit from our generosity?
- [07:45]
Michael Schur
Right. There's a lot of questions about it. And that's part of what made me think that there was a show here. Because I noticed, okay, when I get a cup of coffee, I am going to throw a couple coins into the jar, maybe a dollar into the jar, and I wait for the barista to turn around. I had sort of noticed that about myself. And my first instinct was embarrassment and shame and a feeling of like, what the hell is wrong with me that I care that I want the points, like I want the credit, right? But then you start chew on it. And what you say is like, well, okay, hang on, let's maybe let myself off the hook here. Like, there's, there is something good about a sort of face to face interaction with someone in which you smile and acknowledge that person's work and show them that you believe that their work had value. And you're going to tip them because of their work. And it makes me feel good. And it makes them feel good because they have a moment of like, oh, good, I did my job well and I got a tip. Theoretically, this is all theory, obviously, who knows what the hell's going on in anyone's brain? And then you think, well, also maybe there's something where you could say about calling attention to a pleasant interaction, not just for the person that you're having the interaction with, but for the people in line behind you and for the other people who are working at that coffee shop.
- [09:01]
Mike Pesca
Modeling a norm.
- [09:02]
Michael Schur
Yeah, modeling their. Yes, exactly. Maybe there's some value in that. And you can sort of go on and on. You can get into deep psychology, like you just said, of like, maybe this is the result of, you know, millions of years of human evolution in which that's an advancement in which we're saying, I have the instinct to do something, a small kindness for someone, and my instinct is also to let that person know that I am doing this kindness for them so that they then do a kindness for someone else or whatever. You can sort of endlessly chew on it and slice it up and break it up into pieces and put it back together and analyze it from a thousand different Views. And really, that aspect of that situation was really what made me feel like there was a TV show here, because it wasn't just. I think the version of it where all I recognized was a sort of like, slight embarrassment at how selfish I am that I want credit for tipping someone. That's more like a curb your enthusiasm type situation. Right.
- [10:06]
Mike Pesca
It's exactly what I was gonna say. And there's a lot to be plumbed, but it's the development of one character as opposed to, like, this broad idea.
- [10:13]
Michael Schur
Right. And it's less about something that. It's less about saying something about humanity potentially, than it is saying something about, in that case, Larry David. So, you know, I.
- [10:24]
Mike Pesca
Some Nendrick character. Yeah, exactly.
- [10:26]
Michael Schur
Exactly. So I. That really. The fact that you can say, well, no, hang on a second. What about this angle? That is actually what made me feel like there was an idea there.
- [10:35]
Mike Pesca
So if what we can glean about what the real good Place is, what heaven is, is. Is the photo negative of what we've seen of the Bad Place, I wonder, and maybe that's not fair, but I wonder how ethical, in at least my version of ethics, your Good place is. Because it seems that a few of these people have horrible traits or have manifested in ways that hurt others, and yet there are real explanations. You know, Eleanor's backstory shows what a scrapper she was and how. And how independent she had to be and how she was very much formed by her circumstances and a victim of them to some extent. And in your heaven, the first time she's given a chance to come out of those circumstances, she really does well. And then I think of Chidi and his. And his indecision as paralyzing, but also, you know, something that probably could be medicated. And I think of Jason's. Jason's circumstances. So it seems like your heaven is a little unsentimental.
- [11:33]
Michael Schur
Well, the whole system is. Right? I mean, the system is.
- [11:35]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, the whole system ain't the way the system is.
- [11:37]
Michael Schur
Yes, it's very. In the early days of thinking about it, to bring this to a sports analogy, I described it in my head as a Moneyball system where it's sort of cold and indifferent to the sort of practical or real life realities of the people or where they came from. It's a very simple up or down, thumbs up, thumbs down system of, like, you do this. If anyone does this action in these circumstances, this is the number of points that this person gets. And obviously, there's a lot of fun to be had with that. We've had endless amounts of fun in the writer's room, writing examples of different activities and actions that would lead to plus or minus points. But as soon as I started working on this Moneyball system, I started thinking about why it would be a bad system. If this were the system. It has certain advantages. If it's truly, whatever you want to call it, omniscient and correct, and there's no arguing, well, that's good. But then there's a bad part of it, too, which is like, well, then there's no arguing it. And you can't say, well, look at the circumstances of this person. Look at Eleanor's parents. Look at Jason's mom or whatever. Look at, you know, look at. Look at the fact that Tahani's sister is basically Beyonce times, Rihanna times, you know, whoever times, Madonna times everybody, and that she lived in her shadow her whole life and that her parents were monsters and. And that her parents always favored her sister over her. Like, that should theoretically be a mitigating circumstance. And the system doesn't appear in any way to allow for mitigation. So, you know, that's a. That's a theme that we sort of started developing at the end of the second season and we're going to do a lot more of in the third, is like, what's good and what's bad about the extant system of evaluating people and how might it be improved?
- [13:27]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, because I think we've seen. I don't know if it's the logical culmination of Moneyball, but if listeners don't know the trends in baseball, the ideas of Moneyball have been so incorporated into the game by everyone that what we're seeing is evaluation of things like walk, strikeouts, and home runs. And that's all baseball has become. And a lot of people, I think, are plausibly arguing that the amount of Moneyball systematic, smart looking at the game has made the game a lot less quirky, rounded off the edges, and given it a sameness. Which leads me to this. Michael at one point says that the afterlife, the score, is mathematical and omniscient, but it might be wrong. And I'm just wondering, you, as a guy who is an early advocate of saber metrics and Moneyball, if you have some ambivalence about, you know, advocating for saber metrics and advocating for an omniscient mathematics to be applied to this quirky sport you love or life you love.
- [14:29]
Michael Schur
I do not. Because the people who are arguing for saber metric evaluation in baseball sort of advanced mathematical evaluation of it weren't necessarily saying it will make the game better. They were saying, and we were saying it is a better way to evaluate a player's worth or value. That doesn't mean, like, the game will be improved. It simply meant you are foolish if you don't understand that these statistics over here are straight up better ways to evaluate a player's value than the old statistics you're using. And that's just, that's just a fact. Like, there's no arguing that. You can't argue that looking at a player's batting average is a better way to evaluate him as a hitter than looking at his, you know, whatever you want to say, OPS or slugging percentage or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like there are that. So no one was saying, like, this will make the game more fun to watch for a viewer or whatever. We were just saying that it's a better way to evaluate the value of a player. So I have to say, as a huge baseball fan right now, it's because these statistics have taken over and because of the way the game now works, you basically have what's called three true outcome players, which are players who either strike out, walk, or hit a home run. Those players used to be kind of rare. There used to be, like, Adam Dunn was a guy who you would say was a three true outcome player. There now seem to be mostly three true outcome players on teams. Crazily, it's like most teams are mostly made up of those guys. And as a result, in the average baseball game, you see a tremendous number of strikeouts, a tremendous number of walks, and a tremendous number of home runs and little else. And I don't think as a viewer, as a fan, that that's made the game better. But it, but that doesn't mean that we were wrong to say that it was. That this was a better system of evaluation than the old system. Because that's just a. That's just math. Like, you can't argue with the math of it. Whether or not it's the right way for the sport to go, I don't know. And I don't know whether, you know, there may come a reckoning in baseball where they have to start tinkering with rules to try to stop that three true outcome like reality and try to like, like you said, let those edges go unsanded for a while. Because the experience of the game, it's the game right now. There's 162 of them in the regular season. It moves very slowly. No matter what they do, it will always move slowly. And as a result, it's going to lose, continue to lose ground nationally to basketball and, I don't know, maybe football, depending on whether football can get its act together. But I don't, like, I don't see a bright future for baseball, frankly, unless some of this stuff changes because it just, it's just, it's not the most exciting it's ever been right now, I would say.
- [17:12]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I agree. I mean, just say the words baseball or hit and run. Those are fun words to say. But three true outcome. It's goddamn tongue twist.
- [17:22]
Michael Schur
Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't make the game sound super exciting, does it?
- [17:27]
Mike Pesca
Michael Schor is the creator of the Good Place Thursdays on the National Broadcasting Company. Thank you, Mike.
- [17:34]
Michael Schur
Thanks for having me.
- [17:58]
Mike Pesca
And now the spiel. I've been thinking about miracles more than usual. I have, in fact, created a taxonomy that's not complete, but it's instructive. I think there are two kinds of miracles, broadly speaking, both the miracles from the Bible and the things we call miracles, like medical events or things in the news that we didn't think would happen. And those two kinds are additive and restorative. Those are our kinds of miracles. Restorative, that would be Jesus healing Lazarus, possibly bringing him back from the dead, or in modern times, a miraculous rescue at sea, or a miraculous surviving after a natural disaster, even a miraculous rebirth of an urban center taking a thing back to its original healthy state. Then there are the additive miracles, a transformation or the creation of something we hadn't seen before. So this would not be the rebirth of inner city providence or the creation of the modern city of Dubai. Another additive miracle might be an invention that the world has never seen before. And the reason that this taxonomy should give us a little bit of insight is I think this in general, the restorative miracles, both the literal miracles from the Bible, the figurative miracles, just the things we call miracles, if they're restorative, we welcome them. They're not scary to us. And the reason they're not scary is that they are returned to the status quo. And that is comforting and represents stasis whenever a miracle worker comes by and returns things to the way they were or the way they were supposed to be. We give them credit, but we don't spend any mental or emotional energy wondering, well, what does this mean? What are the consequences of this thing? Because it's not a new thing. We know that the consequences are what was always ever thus. But with additive miracles, there are questions. There is dislocation. Can you imagine if you were alive during the time of Jesus and saw this man who you thought to be a man, change the loaves to the fishes, your eyes might drop out of your head, you might not believe what you just saw. I don't think you would. As I described the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, in fact you, depending on your level of belief in the Bible as the literal word of God, you said, well I wouldn't have seen that because it didn't happen. And this means that you can't believe it even happened. Which is certainly what someone who saw it, if it did happen, would be saying. This was a transmogrification. This was my category of additive miracles. Something new was created. It's hard to get your mind around that. And these sorts of miracles a rational person thinks probably didn't even happen. This of course brings me to a I I like the printing press and the steam engine and the Internet and antibiotics created something new, transformed something into what had never been before. But with AI, there's the double black box, which is black box one most laymen don't understand it. I you could explain the printing press were Gutenberg so inclined to show everyone how movable type worked, but not really understanding it being beyond the can of the layman. That is pretty much true of all computing or anything dealing with electronic communication beyond the telegraph. It's a double black box because not only do we laymen, non experts not understand it, but the experts don't really truly 100% understand exactly how it works. It's pretty cool that it does. They think especially if they have shares in the company. The scariness of AI inherent in any additive miracle is not necessarily ill founded. But I have noticed a social phenomenon when it comes to AI. So whenever a graduation speaker mentions AI and the clearly transforming nature of this miraculous technology, they're met with a response like this.
- [21:48]
Michael Schur
Time magazine selected its person of the year for 2025 and it would this time it was the architects of artificial intelligence.
- [21:57]
Mike Pesca
Interesting is Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. Crowd didn't like that. When I heard that booing, I didn't say, oh, undergraduates, they get it. Undergraduates wise beyond their years or undergraduates are reflection of the anxious job seekers of tomorrow. I said they're booing AI but without AI, many of them wouldn't have even made it to graduation. And this is the phenomenon of the additive miracle of AI. The most acceptable thing to do about it or say about it publicly unless you're on CNBC and are in line to get some shares of the IPO of OpenAI. The most acceptable thing is to worry about it, to grouse about it, and you come out looking wise, the wise grouse. There is a lot to be worried about, but I also think there's just a lot of social approval. This is where we've landed that the socially somewhat quasi sophisticated take to show that you are in the know and a good person when it comes to AI is to put your worries forward. And the people who phrase their worries the best or put their worries forward in the most frightening form get the most social approval. But when even those AI worriers talk about AI in their own lives, they can't help but reflect upon how time saving it is, how wondrous it is, all the things it can do. So there is a public private divide over AI. Maybe just like someone eating one of those fishes 2000 years ago. My turn to his neighbor and say, I can't believe this thing was once a loaf. You know, I guess I hope I don't get sick, but let me say this is one delicious mackerel. And the moldy pumpernickel it was set to be didn't seem so appetizing. Not at all. Oh, and the fatty oils. Didn't know about fatty oils. Then that would be the next miracle. My private conversations. Again, I'm not in an elite tech class. I'm more in the worried media class. But my private AI conversations, even among the worried media types, are characterized much more by admiration and curiosity, trading tips and tricks for how to get AI to work better for us than it is by deep, deep worry. And it may all be true that AI might be coming for our jobs, our lives. I don't know. I can't discount that it may be coming for the nuclear codes and invent some weapons that we can control. But I am just struck by how big the disconnect is between the public consideration of AI and the private use of AI. If anything, I actually operates. Miracle though it is, it operates a little like pornography, which is that there is one acceptable way to react to it among other people. If you think you're being watched and noted and someone is writing down your name. And there is another way to react to it on our screens and perhaps even privately, if our names and reputations aren't involved. Again, this isn't among tech investors. It isn't among the class of people that venerates the wizards of AI but it is among just regular people who want to be seen as sophisticated. You can't write an article in the mainstream press broadly praising a I. It has to at least hold the promise of AI being a disaster. I read an article in the New York Times real estate section. I used AI to negotiate my price. And I believe the reason that the article was titled that way was it held the promise of disaster because people are kind of curious about AI blowing things up, killing them, killing the deal. But in fact, by using AI to negotiate a real estate deal, the author wound up much better off. I don't think that actual headline would get as many clicks. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they did some AB testing via AI. It's another way in which among regular people or regular readers of the New York Times or regular writers of headlines of the New York Times, just people who think of themselves and want to be seen as sophisticated. There is a de Gore demand that any mention of our discussion of AI be publicly accompanied by a laugh. And if it doesn't destroy us first because it will take many generations to complete. I mean, you know, theoretically anyway, that is in case, you know, AI doesn't take over everything in the next hundred years, which is the more likely scenario.
- [26:06]
Michael Schur
This sounds like an amazing future. As long as the AI doesn't take over and destroy us all first.
- [26:13]
Mike Pesca
Don't worry, we've got a lot more in store before the robots take over.
- [26:17]
Michael Schur
As long as the air doesn't take it over and right now sleep or something. Right?
- [26:25]
Mike Pesca
But the laugh, it's interesting. I've been thinking about that laugh. The purpose it serves, how other existential risks don't have it accompanying them with the frequency of the. I mentioned global warming. Right. The other existential threat supposed didn't get the but who knows, maybe the weather will murder us all treatment. But in public AI does get the world is doomed or boo. How dare you credit the thing that brought us to these seats under these mortar board hat. That reaction here was Gloria Caulfield of the Tavistock Development Company speaking at the University of South Florida. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.
- [27:12]
Michael Schur
Whoa,
- [27:16]
Mike Pesca
what happened? Okay, I struck a chord. She said that in private at a dinner, even with people who weren't in the know, just people who might be on the board of the University of South Florida say the conversation would not be boo. How dare you say that? Or I'm mad at you for saying that or you're endorsing something that I'm against. The conversation would be just like the conversations I've been having. Oh my God, did you see how much faster fable is then opus that is anthropic new and old. LLM Opus and fable by the way also good words to describe how the future assessment of the technology will read either as a great triumphant work or as a tale ultimately based on falsehoods. Fable and opus are also two ways to look at the Bible, the account of miracles. One is preferred by pessimists. They'd call themselves realists who see themselves as sophisticates. One more by true believers who welcome the wonder working powers of the message there in. That's it for today's show. Corey Wara produces the gist. Jeff Craig runs our how to feature. It's a great podcast. You should listen to it. Ben Astaire is our booking producer. Kathleen Sykes she does the gist list and Michelle Pesca oversees it all in fable and opus form. More opus than fable, not the Penguin, the broad majestic work of art. And thanks for listening.