Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld run a podcast where Jake often joked that his name was Josh. On this show his character's name is Josh.
Jake Hurwitz' character 'Josh R.' is a callback to an episode of "Jake and Amir" titled 'Amnesia' in which Jake says " I'm Josh. Josh R."
In Episode 2, "Orion", the opening scene shows Ruby Jade (Amir Blumenfield) closing down pornographic tabs on his computer. Along the right side of a couple of these pages, an ad can be seen showing the creators and their previous acclaimed project, "Jake and Amir".
The show's creators had a long-running Internet webseries called "Jake and Amir". In a 2012 episode titled "Olympics", Amir created a Twitter with the handle of "@USARice" and when it came to creating this show, the writers made a call back to this by naming one of the leads "Josh Rice".
Amir's date in Episode 1 appears in "Jake and Amir"'s 'Movie Date' as Julie, Jake's date who ends up marrying Doobs.