Michael David Wilson 0:28
Welcome to this is horror, a podcast for readers, writers and creators. I'm Michael David Wilson, and every episode, alongside my co host, Bob pastorella, we chat with the world's best writers about writing, life lessons, creativity and much more. Today, we are welcoming back Jason Pargin to talk about his brand new novel. I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom, and here is the copy from the back of the novel, to give you a sense of what you're in store for with this amazing standalone novel from pardon outside la a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a large black box. She offers him $200,000 cash to transport her and that box across the country to Washington, DC. But there are rules. He cannot look inside the box. He cannot ask any questions. He cannot tell anyone they must leave immediately, and he must leave all trackable devices behind. And then what follows is one of my favorite Jason barg novels, so I highly recommend it at the time that you're listening to this. It is out right now. It has just came out today, so you can head to your local bookstore. You can get it on Amazon. You can get it via audio, but you are not here to listen to me. Praise Jason. Pardon you want to hear from the man himself, so we will get to that conversation imminently, but before then, a quick advert break

Andrew Love 2:31
in 1867 the young Samantha gray marries the infamous Captain Jakes, unleashing a series of brutal horrors in this epic splatter Western from Death's Head. Press Nahan Sam, by JD grace is a rip roaring tall tale of revenge, drags a coffin full of gold across the hellscape of reconstruction Texas and explodes at the top of a mountain. You better read this one with lights on. It

RJ Bayley 3:01
was as if the video had unzipped my skin, slunk inside my tapered flesh, and become one with me.

Bob Pastorella 3:10
From the creator of this is horror comes a new nightmare for the digital age. The girl in the video by Michael David Wilson, after a teacher receives a weirdly arousing video, his life descends into paranoia and obsession. More videos follow, each containing information no stranger could possibly know, but who's sending them and what do they want? The answers may destroy everything and everyone he loves. The girl in the video is the ring meets fatal attraction for the iPhone generation, available now in paperback, ebook and audio.

Michael David Wilson 3:38
Okay? With that said, Here it is. It is Jason. Pardon on this is horror. Jason, welcome back to this is horror.

Jason Pargin 3:52
It's strange because in some ways, it feels like I was just on the show and feels like I'm on it all the time. But I know that, in reality, it's been a year, but basically everything that's happened during the pandemic era, which is still, I say still the pandemic era, just because it's still that period of time where everything blurs together, and things that I movies, that I thought came out six months ago actually came out four years ago, and vice versa. So it is good to be back. It's to, I guess, to the listeners, it's been a long time, but it feels feels familiar to me.

Michael David Wilson 4:28
Yeah, yeah. Well, as you say, it's been about a year. So I mean, given what you said about time, this might be difficult to answer, but I do always like to start to find out what have been some of the biggest changes for you, both personally and professionally, in that time.

Jason Pargin 4:49
So the last nine months has been promoting this book that I'm here to talk about, which is a standalone novel that is a big departure for me, because it's not part of any of the. Series as I write that, including the one that, like made me famous. And it's not even in the genres I write. It's this ticking clock thriller, so trying to kind of convince people that it's worth reading or whatever. And these days, with my primary world being Tiktok, it has been teaching myself how to translate 140,000 word novel to person who only likes to watch videos on Tiktok, and convincing them that if you enjoy watching me, you may enjoy reading this book, but it's gone very well, but I have had to continue my transition into a becoming an almost entirely video being, or that's i, where i exist when I'm not on camera. I might as well just dissolve, because that's that's now where my audience is. It's very strange, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 5:56
and I recall the last time we were speaking, you were talking about how a significant proportion of your income is now from Tiktok, and so I guess that also can probably create some fear for you when you see people in America talking about the possibility of banning Tiktok. And I mean, do you have things in place if that happens, and what do you think the likelihood is?

Jason Pargin 6:26
Well, see, that's the thing I've been in this game, the what they my least favorite words, the content creation game that I hate using that term. I've been in this game since the late 90s, for more than 25 years. So I have watched one platform after another, one seemingly invincible platform after another turned out to be a sandcastle under the tide. So I was here for you know, I got my start in the blogging era, and it's like, oh, this is great. It's long form articles, and it's just text. You don't have to worry about what you look like or anything like that. You don't have to be handsome or charismatic. It's just the words. And then I watched that go away and be replaced with the social media era, where and then to the photo era, the Instagram era, and then now to the video era and the podcast era. And had to, like, learn how to talk into a microphone, because podcasts are where, suddenly all of my publicity is being done, and now 40% of my book sales are audiobook, because it's just like another podcast. So I've watched one era come and go. So having a platform disappear always sucks very much, including when the job I the full time job I had for 13 years kind of collapsed and went away@crack.com where, again, as the website era kind of went away. So it would just be more of the same. At this point in my life, I've kind of accepted that when you work in media, you're just being tossed around by the tides, and I've got accounts already set up on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook is growing faster than Tiktok for me, even though you think of that as just being an old folks home for the paranoid. But nope, lots of people still on there. So Tiktok, or Instagram has turned itself into a video app, just like Tiktok, trying to get that Tiktok traffic. If I think, if Tiktok is in in fact, banned, I expect a lot of that audience will just wash straight over to Instagram. But if not, they'll invent some new thing, and it'll have a stupid name, and I will create an account the first day I learned about it, and I will try to make that work too. And then 10 years from now, if I'm still coming on and doing this show in the year 2035 I'll be complaining in the exact same way. It's like this VR platform where I'm on this 3d VR neurolink thing that I'm on, they're shutting it down, and I got to go to this fourth dimensional, whatever thing they've invented, this AI thing, and have to create an AI avatar for myself, or whatever God forsaken thing they'll have in the future.

Michael David Wilson 9:13
Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting too, that your Facebook is now growing more than your Tiktok, because I think, for what almost a decade, people have felt like, oh, Facebook is on its way out, but it is seemingly the one social network that can't be killed just as you think, it's down, it's back again.

Jason Pargin 9:33
Do either of you use Facebook still? I came

Michael David Wilson 9:37
off Facebook a few years ago, but you know, I'm I'm starting to wonder if I should return to it, because, as I say, it seems indestructible. I don't want to personally, but you know, if it's a good business move, then I'll consider it. Yeah,

Bob Pastorella 9:55
my Facebook is set to self destruct on September 29 Month, it is no longer deactivated. It is in deletion mode. Now that said, that also gives me an opportunity to come back to Facebook and build from the ground up. If I need to, I will not like that, because I think the last time we talked, I was leaving Twitter, I have returned to Twitter, and I have felt that even though the Twitter actually works for me now compared to previously, when I went out, I couldn't I basically was unusable on any on any media form. Could not use it anywhere. They had done something to my account. I have kept my mouth shut about, oh, the muskrat, and so I haven't really said anything. And I have it works better. I just, I lost, you know, 1000s, and so I'm just trying to rebuild.

Jason Pargin 10:58
It's very strange because I when all of the Twitter alternatives popped up, because we all thought it was going to die within a few months of Elon Musk owning it, I started immediately. Grabbed an account on threads, grabbed an account on blue sky, grabbed an account on Mastodon that I never figured out how to log into, and it's still, everybody's still just on Twitter. I've watched those alternatives. They've got some people on him. There's not a lot of activity threads, which is the Instagram spin off from meta. It's just, it's the same crap you expect based on Instagram and Facebook. And it's a lot of just engagement for I mean, it is extremely difficult to find the good stuff on that family of platforms, the short form, Twitter clones, and Twitter itself, which is now basically a cone of what it was, but still, that's where all the journalists still are. When Joe Biden dropped out of the race, he announced it on Twitter like that was the first place the story broke. And that still happens like that is very weird. You can't predict what's going to stick around or not. I guess the whole deal with Facebook and Matt is they've just got so much money that they can just keep acquiring companies and keep expanding and keep pouring because they tried to create that virtual reality world. I think they've probably already shut down by now. I would, I don't know. I've heard anything about that in years, and you know, if it's still there, but, yeah, it's, it's accessible, kind of mainly because you're on there, because there's specific things you want to see and people you want to keep in contact with, and the platform just fights you every step of the way. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 12:36
and everything that we're talking about here. I mean, I think it is incredibly relevant to the new novel. I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom. But something to you said before was, of course, this is a standalone, and up until this point, you have been known for your series, particularly jaundice at the end. And so Yash, what was the impetus, or why did you decide, after building this massive platform for both series, to release a standalone

Jason Pargin 13:11
I just get bored very easily, because I will make it very clear, this is bad business for an author. For one thing, generally, the best thing you can do is have a very specific genre that you stick to, and that, for example, if you're a romance author, there's an entire business infrastructure of romance author romance book reviewers and book talk accounts and bookscreen, but they only review romance. So when you make your name in that genre, you have a group of people who will talk about your book The next one that comes out, and same thing with the reader. So if there are, there are people who only read romance, or people that only read horror, only read whatever. So doing a horror series and then telling the publisher, okay, I actually want to do this science fiction series it has no horror elements in it. And then for this next book deal, got them to agree to. The book deal was basically three books, the next John Dyson book, The next Zoe book, and I wanted to do this standalone, just a ticking clock thriller and a dark satire. And they said yes, and I kind of bundled it with the stuff they knew was going to sell. And we'll probably do the same thing with this next book deal. I promise to keep this series going, but have some standalone thing, because I just don't want to get kind of roped into writing the same thing all the time. I think George RR Martin has come to hate his job because he he wants to do anything but right, Game of Thrones books he has he clearly, I don't know if you've followed his whole situation, but is has become very miserable the fact that all fans want is the next song of ice and fire. Now. People, and he has all these other things he wants to do, all these TV projects, all these other books he wants to write. It's like, Yeah, you're a creative person. If you've gotten bored with your own thing, and that's all the fans want from you. It can take you to a better place. So I've just tried to never train the reader that I can, that I can only produce one thing, otherwise they get to think of you as like a faucet where it's like, I want more of this specific thing. I'm going to turn the knob and it's going to come out of you. It's like, no, it's our art. Shouldn't be like that. A creator should you should be free to pursue some weird or maybe even stupid idea. But people have been extremely kind and very receptive to it. So far, the pre sales of this book have been very, very good for something that people don't know what to expect, because there's no built in fan base. So they are, they are trusting me to to an extent,

Michael David Wilson 15:53
yeah, and thematically, I mean, it's concerned with commentating on technology and social media and kind of the isolation in which we can find ourselves experiencing as a result of it. But I suppose, as we've only said so far, that this is a ticking clock thriller. Could you give our listeners, kind of the elevator pitch, just so they know what they're getting in for sure.

Jason Pargin 16:23
So the setup is, there's a young guy who's driving for a rideshare service, and he meets a strange woman who offers him $200,000 to drive her across the country from outside LA to Washington, DC. But it's off the books she has with her, this large black box, like big enough that a person could crawl inside of it. She's like, I've got to have this box to Washington, DC in a few days. But if we do this, you cannot look inside the box. You can't even ask me, What's in the box. You have to leave behind any devices that can be tracked. So no phone, no GPS, no laptop, nothing like that. You cannot tell anyone you're doing this. You have to just disappear with me, and we have to leave now. You don't have any time to think about it. This is urgent. So he agrees. But then some people on the internet and some other parties get wind of this trip, that there's this mysterious woman with mysterious box traveling, and they have decided, based on some other clues they've pieced together, that this is a precursor to something terrible. They speculate it may be part of a terrorist attack, because they are heading toward the capital. So it creates this very tense and sometimes extremely stupid situation where a bunch of strangers communicating on social media are trying to coordinate a way to stop this from happening, but in order to do that, they have to filter through this social media ecosystem where truth really cannot survive in that environment. So it's like, can they arrive at what's actually going on? Can they arrive at the truth in time? And that goes about as badly as as you would expect. It's spoiler alert. I don't think it's a spoiler to let people know. It goes very badly.

Michael David Wilson 18:19
Yeah, and I think I must have said before, but, you know, I naively thought when we got the internet and we got access to more information, I thought, right, there'll just be more objective truth out there. But the more information we have, the more it seems impossible to actually discern what is true and what isn't. And now, with the rise of AI, it's like, well, you can do the deep fake. You can even provide video evidence that is not of this reality.

Jason Pargin 18:53
So how old are you guys? Because I'm 49 How old are you?

Michael David Wilson 18:57
So I'm 38

Bob Pastorella 18:59
I'm 57 See,

Jason Pargin 19:01
this is fascinating to me, because every show I go on, I ask about this because we all had the internet come along at different parts of our lives. Because you're young enough that you can't have remembered very much of your life without the internet, right? You would have gotten it when you were, like, 1010, years old. Something like, yeah, about 10, yeah. So I happen to be in position where I got it in college. So I was, to some degree, a fully formed adult already. When I first was exposed to in my experience, it was these old IRC chat rooms. And as a lot of I was mostly going to chat rooms for like, Chicago sports and things like that, and we were just making horrible jokes at each other. But it is fascinating to talk to younger like podcasters, whatever, people in their late 20s who have never known a life without the internet because they were a toddler before it came around. And then I know there's some people probably listening to this, and definitely people who watch my tiktoks, who. Can't fathom a world without the internet, like they can't conceive of it. They can't even picture what it would be, what it would look like. I just find that extremely interesting. It because it wasn't in my formative years, but I definitely became because, again, for people that don't know me, my career was made on the internet, the first book that made me famous, whatever was written as a series of blog posts back in the late 90s and early 2000s and then that got turned into a film, and I got a book deal out of it at a time when bloggers were not getting book deals. This was a new phenomenon. It was one of the first, like internet sensations that made its way into, you know, mainstream Hollywood film, you know, hardcover released by Millen. Now that happens all the time. Now everyone, if you have a blog and you don't have a book deal, then you must be lazy or something, just just joking, of course. But so, like, do you remember when you first got on my like, either, either one of you do. You remember the first time you got on and thought, were you? You both like, wow, this is fantastic. It's gonna, it's gonna change my life.

Bob Pastorella 21:13
I had had a little bit of experience with it at work, because I was, I was in, I was selling cars, and they wanted to use the internet to sell cars, to be able to to be, you know, to be able to give people quotes. And so I got a crash course from someone much younger than me, and how to, you know, set up an email. And this is back when, you know, now we have, like, we have websites. This is back when we had a web page. So web page was basically your splash page and everything about you with an email link to where you could click on the email link and it would send if you, if you had your email set up, it would send an email. So you could send an email to this company. And so that was, like, my first experience, but with the internet was, you know, and all I wanted was, I want that email to go to my email, you know, so I can get all the sales. And they're like, Well, no, it goes to me and I divvy them out, you know. And then I got the internet at home, which we had to wire into, you know, this before Wi Fi. And, of course, I had some friends over. And what, of course, we're, you know, I'm still young. I'm still, you know, I'm under 30 years old, and bunch of guys over drinking beer. Finally got the internet hooked up on my laptop. And so the first thing, you know, we pull up a browser, Alta Vista, you know. And I'm like, so what do I do now? And my buddy, he typed, he goes, Well, I know what to do. He types in, www.porn.com, and all I know is that 50,000 little windows popped up all over my computer. And I said that that's a lot of porn that I'm not going to pay for, and we spent the next 30 minutes closing out every browser tab, because that's how stupid we were. So that is my first experience with the internet, but

Jason Pargin 23:15
that's the way that people used to browse, by guessing a domain, because back then, you could type in www dot I know disney.com and it was just some guy's webpage, because the companies weren't on there yet. They didn't know what arrived. Corporations were really late to get to this. People don't remember. So you could easily go to, I don't know, Coca cola.com and it would also be a porn site that run by some 19 year old kid in Ukraine, like whatever running out of his bedroom. No, it was the wild it was the Wild West. But my, my experience in terms of the first content I saw online, extremely similar to your first in terms of, wait a second, I wonder if there's, if there's nobody policing what it gets posted on here, I wonder if, and yeah, found out yes, the answer is yes.

Bob Pastorella 24:09
I remember, at a writer's conference prior to that, that I was talking to an editor who worked for, I can't remember it was one of the big five. The guy next to him handled Tom Clancy's books, and we were talking about how you know the future. And this guy, he's probably not in publishing anymore, because he says there will never, ever, ever be a time when a writer will email his book to a publisher it will never happen, because we need the hard copy to be able to edit it. He says, My, he goes, the guy next to me, in my, in my, in my building, edits Tom Clancy books. He has to wheel this, these manuscripts, around in a wheelbarrow. You. I'm like, I go. But if you email that, you could just read it from the computer, right? You know, and you wouldn't have to worry about all that paper. He's like, it'll never happen. It's never you can use you can mark my words. It'll never happen as so I've been, I've been snow mailing my manuscripts ever since, because you said it never happened.

Jason Pargin 25:23
As as recently as 2013 my publisher was still editing on a hard copy. They would FedEx me with somebody taking the little red pencil. Oh, wow, done all their markings. And then it was my job to manually Mark either keep the change or No, keep it the way it is. And I kept thinking, because it's like, what if FedEx loses that package? Do you just have to start over again? Because I don't think they photocopied this. And that's the same thing. Like my change is sending it back. It's like, man, if this gets ground up at a mail sorting machine or gets routed to the wrong building. We've got to start all over, because it took months for them to do those edits. But that was extremely recent. That was only a decade ago, and I remember them asking me with the next book, like, Hey, we're we're migrating over to digital. We know a lot of authors are not a fan of this. Would it be okay if we sent this to you as a Word doc where you can click the changes, it's like, Yes, I am okay with that. Yes, thank you. I literally have not worked in hard, hard copies of any kind. Yes, thank you. So yeah, the publishing industry was very, was very late to come around.

Michael David Wilson 26:41
Yeah, when we talk about technology and being late to come around, when I first came to Japan in 2014 I was amazed that they were predominantly still using fax machines to communicate that

Jason Pargin 26:56
I've heard somebody tell me that they're they came there and found that their ATMs had hours that their ATM machines were closed. It's like, oh, it's 5pm the ATMs close. Like, yeah. What? Like, yeah. They said Japan is very, it's very in some ways, it's decades ahead. In some ways it's incredibly old fashioned. They said there's tons of businesses that still are, like, all cash or whatever,

Michael David Wilson 27:18
exactly, yeah. It's so paradoxical. I mean, because even now, most businesses have a fax machine. And, you know, recently, some cutting edge young politicians have said, hey, maybe we could phase out the fax machine. And, you know, I tell people at my workplace, it's like, look, the fax machine was last popular in the UK in the 80s, before I was born. And they think I'm joking. I'm like, no or exaggerating. It's like, that's literally the reality. So I mean, it's only been this year that my day job workplace, because we send a time sheet every month, they've now said, Oh, instead of faxing, if you want, you could email it. It's like, yes, of course, I want that. But there's certain expenses where they're like, No, you can't email or that you've got to send that through the post. That's the way we do that. Like and ones that don't even have a receipt says like, so why? Why you're getting the same information? But yeah, slowly but surely, Japan is catching up. And then, on the other hand, you know, we have the bullet train, one of the fastest trains in the world. You know, we've got Sony. We've got so many technological advancements. And sometimes I feel like, you know, it's a two tier system. There's some parts that are so technology, technologically advanced, and then others where they're kind of caught in, I suppose, decades previous. And I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that there's such an aging population as well, because I know in the UK, if you want a doctor's appointment, it's pretty difficult to get it if you don't have the internet. And I know that because my grandfather, who is 93 and still going he like finds it really difficult because he's refused to get the internet, and now in 2024 that is causing quite a lot of problems for his life. So my parents will have to do things kind of for him, and they don't live close to each other. You know, he contacts them on his landline. That's the only way that you can reach him. And

Jason Pargin 29:57
this is relevant to the book, by the way, people. Think we've gotten so far off time. This story is very much informed by the fact that the two main characters, the two people taking this trip, are in their mid to late 20s, so they are people who are in their era where they can't imagine a world without these devices. So the idea, for example, she tells him, you know, you have to leave your smartphone behind, implying we are being tracked, that I'm not going to let that device give a Get away, give away our location. He almost sees that as a deal breaker, because he's like, how would you travel across the country without a smartphone to without the ability? How would you do it with that GPS? Like, well, you will use a map. It's like, well, yeah, but how do you how do you find out where restaurants are? How do you do any of this? It's like, well, no, that's you do it the way people did it in the past. You you see the signs on the highway and you and will pay with cash. And it's like, well, will hotels even let you stay there these days without a card? Like, can you just pull out a wad of cash at a Holiday Inn and stay there? Because it seems like they always want a credit card and they want and they want to be able to bill room expenses to the card, instead of having to hit you up for you to pull cash out of your wallet. It's like, could you actually get across the country without a without a credit card, without any transaction, any electronic transaction, or anything like that? I couldn't do it, and I'm in theory, I can't I was an adult before the first time I logged on. But, you know, I live in a city for the first time in my life. I grew up in a very, very small town. Now live in a large city. I could not navigate this city without GPS. It's too many streets. It's too the way it's set up is too confusing. I But of course, that obviously, was the way people function for all of civilization, until, you know, whatever, 15 years ago, when, when everybody started getting iPhones. But it's so strange because there's such a dividing line between the world before and after that device came about, because that was as big of a change as going from no internet to to the internet. Going from internet is on a computer like Bob or the in your house, where you had a computer that you went to that had the pornography or whatever on it to now it's in your pocket and on your person at all times, and where every question you could possibly have can be answered with your phone. And when you go to a restaurant, a lot of times, they do not have a menu. They've got a little code on the table, and you scan that, and it just assumes, one, the EVA smartphone, two, that you know how to use it, and three, that you're fine with this being your entire life, that everything happens through this, through this screen.

Bob Pastorella 32:42
It's I'm working in in in the tech industry, and it's I and I sell cell phones and I sell cell phone service. But I also am old enough to know that we don't need none of this stuff. Okay, we have survived for 1000s of years without it, and so why are we so dependent on it? It's because we've been tricked into thinking that we need it when we really don't need it. Now, I'm shooting myself in the foot. If somebody's thinking about coming get service with me, they're probably not going to do it now, and I don't care, because it's the truth, and you probably need to hear it. We don't need this stuff, and they pay me stupid money to sell you something you don't need.

Jason Pargin 33:29
But we the one of the most common questions you'll see anywhere on social media, on Reddit, anywhere from young men, it's like, well, I've tried online dating, and it doesn't work. So how are you supposed to meet people? It's like, well, how, how did people, how did people meet each other before? Because they can't it. They can't conceive of Well, isn't this how you do it? You you set up a Tinder profile, and then you get rejected 5000 times, and you eventually stumble across the one real, actual woman on the platform. It's not just a bot or like an only, only fans account. And it's like, why do you meet people asking this basic question? And you have seen people reply like, well, it's good to have some sort of a hobby where you leave the house and go interact with people, or if you you know, if you go out in public to places you know, and where you can encounter other humans. That's how people do it. People in the past used to meet each other at church or in bars or whatever at the workplace, although I assume most workplaces would prefer you not try to do that now, but I find that fascinating, like the basic function of pair bonding, where people couples meet each Other, has been turned into like a corporate smartphone technology that doesn't work. It doesn't because, by the way, if Tinder gets you matched to someone and you marry them, you're obviously not going to use Tinder anymore, hopefully. So they've lost a customer. So the thing that makes them the maximum money and the engagement is. If you never meet someone permanently, if you just cycle through a bunch of hookups, and guess what? That's what it does. Because they will, they would lose money if they actually solved your problem and solved your your loneliness. So that, to me, is like the most fundamental example of, well, how do you do this without using the smartphone? It's like these things did not exist as recently as 2008 and people, you actually met each other more frequently back then without the technology.

Bob Pastorella 35:33
It's crazy because, I mean, it's like when a kid, if I don't have children, but if my if my child, or if my teenage or 20 year old son or daughter came out, how do I meet somebody outside of online and being like, you know, I'm old enough to be like, well, I met your mom because she was trying on a pair of shoes at a store, and I was getting some shoes, and I told her I didn't like the way those shoes looked on her feet, and she got kind of pissed off at me, and we started talking. And next thing you know, we had some things in common. And then later on that evening, I seen her at another store, and I was like, You're following me. So and so she gave me her number, and that's how we actually met. And then be like, you met in person? Of course, yes, we met in person. I've tried internet dating, and you're right. It doesn't work. It's like you spend all this time chatting with someone and you don't know what they're telling you is true or not. You're you've built up this avatar of yourself. You know, it's never gone

Jason Pargin 36:44
humanizing. I was lucky enough again that I met my wife before either of us had email addresses, and so I previewed all of this. But no, I and again, I don't know if, Michael, if you've had great experiences with it. I hope we're not dedicating

Michael David Wilson 36:59
it too much I have actually,

Bob Pastorella 37:05
there's a celebration there. I

Michael David Wilson 37:07
didn't want to derail. But I sometimes think that my success with internet dating, if we're gonna tell me that kind of universally, is because so many other people are not good at using it. So I feel if you can just have a basic conversation with someone that's a little bit more involved in high how you what you up to, then you're instantly in the kind of top percentage. So I think it might be a user error sometimes that. And you know, as you correctly said, that there are a number of bots that you have to watch out for, so you have to be discerning about that. But yeah, I think generally, my personality and the way that I am is very like either gonna probably like me quickly or not like me because it's quite it's quite intense. I don't play internet dating in a kind of regular way. I will cut to some philosophical questions, maybe a little bit like how I am in the podcast. I mean, I don't, I don't open with, what are your early life lessons, but, you know, I, I tried to be efficient with it, and so, yeah, it worked out okay for me, not using it at the moment as I am married, but you know when, when I wasn't? Yeah, it worked out well.

Bob Pastorella 38:35
I think that that because of internet dating and in society has changed, but we've I think that that humans have lost, younger generations have lost this thing called flirting. I think flirting is, is it's kind of about a wayside and I don't know, I grew up in an era where you had to flirt if you wanted, if you wanted to to meet, you know, for me to meet women, I had to flirt, and I would be, if the internet suddenly died, we'd have just a bunch of people who, like, they'd be going to older people. How do you, how do you, what's this thing called Fly train? No, it's flirting. I looked it up in a book, because that's all just left. How do you do it? I was like, well, because

Jason Pargin 39:25
it is not easy, by the way. It's a it is a subtle art as the thing, because I've known so many guys that were very bad at it, I'm sure there are women that are bad at it too. And I do think that's one of many kind of in person techniques or art forms that has degraded because people don't do it. Like, there are guys online that give classes like pickup artists, and it's these terrible techniques on how to approach women. It's like, what you gotta do is you gotta kind of insult them a little bit, and they. Know that will, that will lower their self esteem enough that they'll want to date you. Because it's like, well, this guy's probably the best I can get. But it's people watch that, because it's like, well, no, I don't have that experience of you know, like you go online, you can just pretend to be somebody else. It's not the same thing in person, you've got to pay attention to what you're wearing, and how you're standing and the tone of voice you're using, and, yeah, it is that in a lot of things have been have been lost. Like, one generational difference for me, I feel like my parents generation liked to haggle, for example, when buying, like, buying a car, and this whole game of back and forth. Like, wow, I can't go 18,000 on this thing. No, I'm sorry i Boy, that's, could you go 16? I think 16 is the highest I can go. And the salesman's like, Well, no, we've got more than say, and you're both lying to each other, and it's just a game. I hate that. I would. I wish I could order a car the way I order stuff on Amazon, like it's there it is. You click this is that. Here's the financing. You click on it and it shows up at your house. At some point, there was a time when those type of conversations used to happen at furniture stores in all sorts of settings, and that was a whole category of human interaction. And there are part other countries, especially, I'm told that in the Middle East, this is still a huge deal, that if you go up to allegedly a food vendor on the street, that there's this thing where they will be like, no, just take it. Just take it. And then you have to say, no, it's worth at least $1 like, it's a little haggable exchange because it's just built into the culture. That's a thing where, in the era of just buying stuff online, I can't fathom that That, to me, is the most awkward possible conversation to have. But I think people of my parents generation liked it. They saw it's like a like a sport. They could tell other friends like, Nah, I got this thing, got him to knock off 2000 from the from the sticker price and but you know, it's a type of conversation that I can't imagine, like Gen Z enjoying that exchange, or going to a dealership and having to talk the guy down, or having to insult the car until he agrees to give it to you for less money. But no, I think you could sit here and list all sorts of types of in person exchange that kind of doesn't happen anymore, or at least not in the same way. That

Bob Pastorella 42:33
was why the dealerships wanted to go to the internet, because they knew that there was a demographic that was growing and building that wasn't gonna buy a car on haggling, you know. And so they're like, Hey, we can, we can just shoot him a price. And you get the old guys, they're like, Well, what do you mean? We're going to give them a price? Is that going? Well, I ain't gonna make no money off of that, you know. But the you know, those of us that were young enough to see the potential there. That's why I was like, I want all the emails to come to me, you know, because I'll, I'll weed through the trash and get to the good customers, you know. And they're like, no, don't work that way. You're gonna have to divvy them out. So I dealt with mine, you know, my 10 that I got a week and hopefully gotten into two or three sales out of it, you know, but that's they saw a demographic that was emerging, and it is now. It is pretty much how it's done. It's completely shifted.

Jason Pargin 43:34
But I love how your first experience with the technology was trying to control the flow of information, because that is the battleground. I mean, my my previous industry was destroyed, because once upon a time, you could make money by making con content and putting it on a website, and then you would have ads on the website. Well, social media came along, and Facebook came along and said, Hey, we will just scrape the best parts of your article, host them on our thing called Facebook, and we'll sell ads against that. And so all of our advertisers, these big advertisers, used to pay, like, pay six figures for these and ad deals. Facebook came and said, Hey, we've got all the eyeballs and all of those ad deals started flow right to Facebook, two companies, Facebook and Google, because all they did was that subtle thing of, instead of the traffic coming to the page of the guy who wrote the article, we wanted to come here. We just slight, just a subtle redirection, and trillions of dollars pivoted with that, with them winning that war, because people don't use websites anymore. They use apps, they use social media, they use Reddit, these, these aggregators. But you know, the idea of running a website, making money off it is, is Gone With The Dinosaurs, and that's why, because of that exact same thing, it's like. I want the link to lead here instead of there, and and that's a few gigantic corporations have kind of molded the whole thing around, around that. And

Michael David Wilson 45:13
seeing as we're talking about people who have become quite dependent on the internet and technology, there is a prominent character who we find out is an in sale. And I don't think, I hope it's not a spoiler to to say it in terms such as that. I haven't said who the character is, but if it is, then we can rewind, edit that like it didn't actually happen.

Jason Pargin 45:42
No, you can't. We can't talk about the book without getting into stuff like that. So every interview I'm doing, I'm just trying to advise people before they sell into it. If you some people want to be totally blind going into a book like for them, finding out anything about it as a spoiler, if we're going to talk about the themes of the book, or whatever, and specific stuff that happens, we have to get into stuff that, in theory, you don't find this out until, like, I don't know, 20% of the way into the book, but it's kind of like a trailer for a Hollywood movie. They show you scenes from more than halfway through the movie, because they've got to show you stuff. That's the same thing. If we're going to discuss the themes of the book, we kind of have to get into things that happen. So I think it's fine if there are any listeners out there who are listening, if you are afraid of finding out anything about the book, pause, go read the book for a few days and then resume, because the discussion will probably be more fruitful if you've if you have read it first anyway. But for those of you who have no idea who I am and you want to know what the book is about, stay tuned, because we're gonna, yeah, we're gonna get into it. But, but yeah, the thing about the about, like, saying this person is an INCEL, like that personality type that, like the young man who hates women, has always been a thing. What the internet gave us, and what this book touches on is the ability for those people to form a subculture, to where they can all find each other, to the point that they are like a force in politics, in politics now, because there's like, a specific kind of of like conservative politics, that takes root among these, like young, sexually frustrated young men who got their Tinder account maybe, and then swiped right at 6000 times and didn't get a single match. And it's like, Well, okay, I guess society has no use for me anymore, and that that frustration has to go somewhere, and usually it's not, somewhere productive in my experience,

Michael David Wilson 47:43
yeah, And was there any, I suppose, not reluctance, but just awareness that there might be certain people within the readership who would push back or be like, oh, oh, no, You've written an unlikable character there. And, you know, just just being mindful of that.

Jason Pargin 48:06
I think there's a fringe of readers, or in many cases, like very young readers, who kind of react in a weird way. You'll occasionally see them, whether they've, like, read Lolita for the first time, like, how was this book allowed? And it's like, well, books, books expect you to come in with a certain level of like, maturity and to understand, I'm reading this through the eyes of a monster or a person with monstrous impulses and and so you have to recognize that this is not necessarily endorsing that person. So here, yeah, you have somebody who has adopted hateful views, but also, as with any of these people, you can see how they got there and they you can see the system that helped kind of program them. Because if you want to go on Tiktok or YouTube or any of these platforms that act like they are very heavily moderated, if you click on a video, that's about, it's some dude talking to a camera about how women are all gold diggers and how blah, blah, blah, whatever, they will start feeding you more and more and more of that same thing. They will take you right down that pipeline, because it's like, oh, this is what you like. And the system is not trying to create incels or mass shooters. It just knows people who liked this also tend to watch this and like that. So here you go. Now you're being fed a buffet of look at all the ways you've been wronged by women, and then look at all the ways you've been wronged by feminism. And then look at all the ways you've been wronged by immigration, like they just take you right down this path of you're frustrated because you can't get a girlfriend. You've been told now that the system is thanked again. Against you and against you ever finding love and then, well, who do I blame for that? And once you have an angry young man trying to find out who to blame for the state of his life, there will always be somebody out there saying, Hey, if you subscribe to my YouTube channel, I will tell you who to blame. If you buy my book, if you whatever, I will tell you exactly who's because it's not your fault. It's nothing you're doing. It's not your grooming or your attitude. No, no, it's whatever. It's the enemy out there. So without trying to turn this person into like a cartoon villain, it's just trying to show that this person, and lots of people in that same boat, are hugely starting from a place of an unmet need and something that they wish they had in their lives, and they may not even necessarily know what's missing in their lives. And I think it's the same for almost every hateful person you run into, they weren't, they didn't come out of the womb being like that. Well, then I know a couple people that probably came out a little womb being like that, but for the most part, they were things occurred that put them in that place and in that headspace and and so on social media, there's just an entire ecosystem that's happy to cater to you as a customer, that's happy to cater to your rage. So it's not letting anybody off the hook. It's just we're all people who exist in a system, and all of us are susceptible to this stuff to different degrees. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 51:39
that seems to be a real lack of accountability and a lack of kind of looking inward when things go wrong. And I think when you couple that with the fact that, well, yeah, sometimes unfair things do happen, or you're born into shitty circumstances, so you have those two things together, and it's very easy to see how people become in sales or things of that nature. And, you know, I've met people like that, and I've tried, you know, talking to them and and some things that they've said, I've just been like, but, but you're making a generalization, you know, you're saying all women are blah, blah, blah, and it's like it, it's objectively rung, because it's not all women, because what you're saying has not been, you know, my experience, we can, we can maybe say that you have had a lot of these negative experiences, but, you know, it's misplaced rage. It's directing anger in the wrong direction.

Jason Pargin 52:46
And it doesn't take long before you hear them use phrasing that you can tell they borrowed from some streamer they listened to, or something like they've got this very specific scenario or slogan or there's terminology that you can tell is not theirs. That's just something they heard in that group. It's like, this is the way we talk. And it's like, oh, you realize you've, you've kind of joined a cult and and this person is doing this for for a profit. And, yeah, so it's in trying to be realistic about what type of this this book is a collection of characters whose personalities have all been warped to different degrees by what like this, by this ecosystem. And that happens to be his way. But the book features a lot of people who, in some cases, are just misanthropes, like they've just decided that humanity is garbage. And in the case it's kind of same thing, it's like they wound up on a feed that's just showing them, you know, depravity. And it's like, well, yeah, but that's not, that's not what you see when you go outside and walk around your neighborhood. You just see your neighbors and your friends and little kids playing and walking their dog. But it's like, yeah, but I get online and I see but I've trained my algorithm to feed me videos of people committing street crimes and immigrants committing burning down cars or stuff like that or rioting. And now I'm I'm afraid, it's like, yeah, but that's not, that's not what you're seeing with your own two eyes out in the world. Why do you trust what you're seeing on the screen versus what you're experiencing. It's and if the screen tells you that the world is full of villains, and yeah, it's very compelling, and because people kind of want to hear that for some for some strange reason, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 54:36
and you're absolutely right about, you know, people having almost this new language in these buzzwords. I mean, at the moment, people who seem to think traditional media is all a conspiracy, I've noticed, you know, this last year, the matrix and legacy media seem to be the two kind of buzz. Buzzwords that these type of people are using, but I mean, what? What I kind of hate about all of this is whatever viewpoint you have, there seems to be so much point scoring, and people will take a clip of a speech and then be like, right. That is what has been said. It could be on the left, it could be on the right, it could be any political persuasion. It might not even be political, but they'll doctor it to serve their own agenda. And usually, if you look at it in context, it's not actually what's been said, or it's missing key parts of the overall context. Yeah, and

Jason Pargin 55:42
that's what the central thrust of this book is. You're watching a piece of information try to travel through that ecosystem where every player has motivation to make certain things be true, and that motivation has nothing to do with what actually is true, like you've decided you have a worldview, and so there are moments in the story that, hopefully, if I've done it well, are both very funny, but also in infuriating to read, because it's like, you've seen this happen before, where somebody has They've got a piece of information, and they have just tweaked it a little bit and put it out into the world, and then it the way they tweaked it was in a way that's going to create outrage or fear or whatever. Emotion makes stuff go viral, that gets you the engagement, and you can watch. It's like, Yeah, but the truth is being mutated through each attempt to try to get it out to the world, or for each each party, trying to get the engagement, to get the eyeballs on them. And you can watch them all kind of pulling at it's like a bunch of people fighting over a dress, and they're ripping it to shreds as they're pulling it's like, Yeah, but what, what you actually wind up with is not going to be the thing you were trying to get, because in the effort of all these different parties pulling it, you have ripped it and torn it and pulled it into a shape that nobody can can recognize, and you can watch that every day, especially in an election year. And I know that not a single listener wants us to descend into election year talk. But this is politics occupy so much of our culture now, and I hate it. I hate the fact that you go on Twitter on any given day and of the top 10 trending subjects, half of it is politics. And I don't mean if you click on the politics tab, I mean just it's this is it has infused our entertainment and everything and trying to use those platforms to learn about what's going on in the world just the bare facts is all but impossible, because they have been optimized so well to favor like you said, whatever is the however we can twist this to make it the worst possible version, so that to the point that if there is word of a you read about, whatever, a Trump scandal, and then you find out that the thing that you that headline was kind of misleading, and actually, it wasn't nearly as bad as what the headline implied. In fact, was just kind of stupid. There's no mechanism of saying, Oh well, that that wasn't even he's not as bad as that or whatever. It doesn't work like that. It's like, no. It's we, we just double down. We just keep coming back. Just like, Well, this one thing may not have been true, but that just shows you how bad they are that we thought it was true for a moment. Like that sounds like a road to madness that you're describing right there, where the truth kind of doesn't matter anymore. But I, and I'm not interested in an argument about like, which like, which side lies more or worse, because ultimately, it is about trying to have a conversation about a complex subject in that ecosystem is like trying to have a complex conversation in a very noisy nightclub or a bar where they've got the music cranked up so loud you can't even hear yourself. Think it would be like if you were trying to talk to your grandfather about his will and his estate planning in a nightclub with like a stripper on his lap. It's like, that setting, the information is not going to transfer in that in that setting. And I think of it that same way. I see people trying to hash out the truth on Twitter. It's like, buddy, you're not in a place where the truth can survive very long. You're in a place where people want to want to dance and to feel weird things, and the last thing they want to do is be informed.

Bob Pastorella 59:50
Yeah, it's it's crazy, because, to me, it's like they could discover that there were unicorns, and you can see that. At on social media, and that post wouldn't get any likes, but then you twist it to dangerous animal, could actually kill kids, you know, and suddenly it's got 12,000 likes every time it's a fucking unicorn, okay, we should be celebrating it that there was a unicorn that farts a pink and rainbow colored rainbow we should and it flies, but no, we're worried about it killing kids because, because there's no other reason why it's just fucking because I got licks. You

Jason Pargin 1:00:37
will hear people, for example, talk about like, well, they've we spent all this money on whatever, but we can't cure cancer. It's like, we've actually reduced cancer deaths by like 75% over the last 30 years. We have made miraculous advancements in survival rates. There are cancers of people that I know, people have had, they had a 20 years ago and they're still alive. It's like, you know, a colon cancer, whatever, that would have killed you when I was a child, that they're so good at the detection and the surgery and all that, like, No, we've made huge strides. But those headlines don't, they don't go viral. They just, they just don't. So there's such a bias toward negativity that you can actually, I used to love to whenever they would release economic news, no matter which direction it went, it was always framed as disaster. So unemployment went up, the stock market crashed because it means interest rates are going to stay high, and unemployment went down. Well, that's also bad news, because it means recession is coming. It's like, so what do you what would be the good news? There just is the same like, where it's the same thing, it's like, I to this day, I can't figure out if a strong dollar is good or bad for the economy, because if they're like, Oh, the dollar is very strong, that's going to kill exports or imports or something. And same thing, like a weak dollar, it's like, oh, here we go. America is failing. Its currency is weak against the whatever and everything will always be. And I this actually comes up in the book. I don't think this is spoiler, but they were talking about that if in the future, they find a series of technologies that basically stops climate change in its tracks, and it starts to reverse itself. I can tell you with 100% certainty that will be reported as bad news. It will all be about like, oh, but these windmills we put up, it's they're killing birds, and you know this, oh, we've got another, this nuclear power plant that leaked some some radiation. Like, whatever we do that fixes the problem. It, we're only going to hear complaints about it in the fact, like, oh, okay, technically, temperatures dropped for the first time in the last decade. And it does appear that we fixed that problem. It that will, that headline will get, will get buried, just as we don't talk about like, the ozone layer anymore, or acid rain, things that used to be considered like apocalyptic problems that just quietly, once upon a time, we thought that HIV was going to be the pandemic that ultimately wiped out civilization, because we just keep mutating. It's like, no, we've quietly, kind of cured it. It's magic. Johnson still alive, and there was no big moment. We didn't have the party of we did it. We beat aids in the 80s. We thought this was going to kill a billion people, and we kind of quietly won that war. Julius moved on to the next to the next scare, and that's that's how we do it. And it's weird, because it feels so dismissive to tell somebody that the reason you're anxious is because you're on your phone reading bad news for six straight hours every night.

Jason Pargin 1:03:51
if you had access, if you had been lift, you had lived in the 1970s and you had had access to that level of technology so that every genocide that was going on the world. You could have seen videos from ground level of people having their heads hacked off with machetes. You would have had a worst view of the world back then too. It's not that things have gotten worse, it's just that it's all being brought before your eyes and on a device that's in your pocket and it if you told me that it does not in any way skew how you think that would be such a to me, that would be such a weird thing to say. It would be the equivalent of somebody if somebody told me that they eat six pounds of gummy bears a day and that has no effect on their health. It's like, I don't believe you. I you know, a single gummy bear or one pack of them is probably fine, but if you're eating that volume of them, it has to be doing something to your insights. I just, I just don't believe it, and it's the same thing. If you sit there and you Doom, scroll on your phone for the entire evening and then go to bed, I refuse to believe that you're not ruining your own health. You run sleep cycle and everything else. Yeah,

Bob Pastorella 1:05:03
just always think what would happen, or what would have happened if the JFK assassination happened during the internet age, Hori, if 911

Jason Pargin 1:05:11
had happened during the goddamn smartphone age, and you suddenly had had 1000 streams of people from inside the building when they were trying to get out streams of the buildings collapsing that, you know, that statements

Bob Pastorella 1:05:24
of it, yeah, that with they would have been

Jason Pargin 1:05:28
on Facebook, live. They would have been live on Twitch, on all these platforms, you know, people yelling in their cameras, like, Mom, I love you. We're gonna try to get to the fire escape. And then they hear the sound of the building like the we had the internet in 2001 we did not have, you know? Yeah, so it's, I cannot overstate in the same thing, when people talk about the the gory days of the 90s, I wish to go back to the 90s, when everything was was fun and cheap, and it's like, man, we had malicious training in the woods. They blew up a federal building, including a daycare full of dozens of children in Oklahoma City. If you had had smartphones for all those victims and all that rubble and seeing what happened to those bodies when that bomb went off and what happened to those children, it would have been a whole different thing. There's so many moments that only because they're not documented as well, that we see differently. And again, I'm not saying that this is entirely a bad thing. I think it's good that people see what happens on the ground in a war. Everybody should see that. I want you to know. Let's not, don't, don't turn it into a propaganda film, like in Desert Storm, where they had a bunch of these fun videos of like a cruise missile destroying the evil Iraqis headquarters. And wow, what wonderful technology. And it's all it's all so bloodless and fun. And no, let's see it. Let's look. Look at what burned bodies look like, you know. Look at what these what modern weapons do to people, what they do to bodies that this drone footage looks very cool and very bloodless and very clean. Look at it on the ground. Look at what that wedding looked like after that Hellfire missile landed in the middle of 70 people seated for a wedding, look at what was left behind. Look at it. Understand it. Understand this about the world. I I'm in favor of that. I would not go backward. I wouldn't undo this technology. But as if I, as if I could. But I also the running theme I bring up in every in every interview, is that it is clear the culture has not caught up with this, and we've not taught we're definitely not teaching our children how to handle it, how to process it very well, mainly because I think a lot of adults could not tell you day to day which platforms their kids are on, because It's not even Tiktok anymore. Tiktok is the usage has been going down. The kids have left Tiktok. They found something else, and I don't even know what it is. I don't know where they went, but in terms of what kind of messages they're being exposed to, what kind of content they're being exposed to, I think most parents don't know, even if they're very attentive, I don't think, unless they've got a straight up ban on screens in their home, I don't think they realize what type of culture their kids are interacting with every day. Because in the past, they would have they when I was a kid, my parents knew who my friends were. They knew whose house I was going to but if all of your social interactions are online, and if you if all of your friends are people you've met on Minecraft or Roblox or whatever online game kids play these days, it's like, do the parents still know? Do they know who their Minecraft friends are? Do they know what their circle of internet acquaintances are that live give kids that probably live all around the world? It's like, are they able to sit in on that and kind of vet that and making sure that they're not being, you know, indoctrinated into something, and I'm gonna guess, in most cases, no, because they don't know how, they wouldn't Know how to eavesdrop on that.

Michael David Wilson 1:09:21
Thank you so much for listening to Jason pardon on this is horror. Join us again in just a few days to hear the second and final part of this conversation. But if you can't wait and you want to get that episode and every other episode ahead of the crowd, become our patreon@patreon.com forward slash, this is horror. Not only do you get early bird access to each and every episode, but you can submit questions to the writers that we talk to on this is horror, and we've got another. Number of fantastic conversations coming up in October. Dean Koontz will be returning. We'll be talking to danger, Slater, Brian Asman and David moody, to name but a few. So go to patreon.com forward slash. This is horror. Look at what we're offering, and if it is a good fit for you, I will see you there. Okay, before I wrap up, a quick advert break.

Bob Pastorella 1:10:40
From the creator of this is horror comes a new nightmare for the digital age. The girl in the video by Michael David Wilson, after a teacher receives a weirdly arousing video, his life descends into paranoia and obsession. More videos follow, each containing information no stranger could possibly know. But who's sending them and what do they want? The answers may destroy everything and everyone he loves the girl in the video as the ring meets fatal attraction from iPhone generation, available now in paperback, ebook and audio

Andrew Love 1:11:10
in 1867 the young Samantha gray marries the infamous Captain Jakes, unleashing a series of brutal horrors In this epic splatter Western from Death's Head press mayhem. Sam by JD grace is a rip roaring tall tale of revenge. Drags a coffin full of gold across the hellscape of reconstruction Texas and explodes at the top of a mountain. You better read this one with the lights on.

Michael David Wilson 1:11:39
You know, in this episode with Jason, he was talking about how promotion is a big part of the writing life. So with that in mind, it seems apropos that I remind you that I have a number of books the girl in the video they're watching, co written with Bob pastorella and House of bad memories. I'd love you to read them. You can get all of them in paperback, ebook or audio form, and if you do read them, or you have already read them, please, please leave me a review over on Goodreads. I want to know what you like about the stories. I want to know what you didn't get on with. I want to know what you might want to see from me in the future. So please, if you can support me, buy my books and allow me to keep doing this amazing privilege storytelling and releasing these books into the world. And I'll tell you now, if you like Michael David Wilson books, there's a new one next year, maybe two new ones next year. So something to look forward to, all right, I'll see you in the next episode for part two of Jason. Pardon but until then, take care of yourselves. Be good to one another. Read horror. Keep on writing and have a great, Great Day.