John Mulaney invites fans to visit him on the picket line, if they’re cool about it

Hot Ones’ Sean Evans is known for his probing questions (and hot wings, obviously), but the popular YouTube series would never be accused of being political. Still, If you have a notable comedy writer like John Mulaney on—for the 300th episode, no less—you might as well get into the realities of being a comedy writer today. Thus, we have new insight into the Writers Guild of America strike from Baby J himself.

“It’s interesting, on the picket line I’ve heard more and more about A.I., which I thought was, not a fringe issue, but kinda off to the side,” Mulaney says when asked what the most important “wedge issue” of the strike is. The Saturday Night Live alum, personally, is “very confident” that “there is a profound difference between knowing you’re hearing a joke from a person and knowing you’re hearing it from A.I.” However, he admits to having “famously terrible instincts” and isn’t sure how artificial intelligence will be applied to the industry in the future.

“I have heard A.I. jokes that are solid,” he says. “I wouldn’t call them crossing over into good, but they’re solid. So maybe A.I. could replace that, you know, that 15th joke in an award show monologue that’s fine, and it acknowledges—you know when they have to acknowledge a movie that’s nominated or something, but like the joke isn’t that good? Maybe A.I. could provide that.” (For the record, seeing someone perform a joke he wrote in an awards show monologue is “the most satisfying thing” to him.)

Asked about how audiences at home will be impacted by the strike if it stretches on many more months, Mulaney ponders, “If I were to be a touch cynical, there’s a lot of content already out there. And you know, I feel like we’ve all been saying that for years, like, ‘God, there’s so many shows, there’s so many shows, there’s so many shows.’ And now we’ll see how many there are. Because you only have the ones you have. If everyone’s just gonna continue watching streaming TV, I wonder when it will hit a point where you go, ‘Oh, there’s [nothing]’—as a viewer, it’s frustrating that there’s not new stuff.”

Elsewhere, Mulaney talks about Josh Brolin shooting down a joke at SNL and the risk comedians take when “cannibalizing” their personal lives for jokes. After admirably completing the entire circuit of wings (shedding only a few dispassionate tears after consuming “Da Bomb”), he throws in a quick plug for Baby J: “I hope you check it out, and I hope you enjoy it, but more importantly I hope you check it out. Because that means it gets streaming ratings that I will never get any information on,” he quips of Netflix’s infamously opaque viewing numbers. “I also have nothing else coming up. There’s a writers strike. I’ll be picketing, maybe Warner Bros. at some point? Come out and bring us water, or something nice like that.”