TIH 584: Jason Pargin on Time Writing vs. Time Promoting, The Black Box of Doom Metaphors, and Guns and Road Trips

Video timestamps. Please add 3 minutes and 25 seconds for the audio.

00:00:02.10
michaeldavidwilson
So one of the things that you were saying before was you've got this big audience on TikTok and then kind of with this book you're trying to work out how do you translate that audience to a kind of 144,000 or however many words it is for this novel and I mean I i kind of think though that this novel is almost like a culmination or it fits really neatly with what you've been doing on tiktok for the past year you know even to the point where there were thematic similarities with some of the conversations between characters.

00:00:46.97
Jason Pargin
Yeah, and that's not an accident. I'm trying to bring people into... It's weird because, ah again, I'm somebody who wrote anonymously for the first you know decade of my career. I did not want personally to be associated with the writing. I wanted it to be its own thing, but that's not the era we're in. You kind of have to introduce yourself as an individual and say,

00:01:13.05
Jason Pargin
Without saying it, look, I am an interesting person with interesting thoughts and observations. Surely if you enjoy my little videos, then you will enjoy this book I wrote because it's like one of my little videos, except on paper and long. and But I do think in theory that anybody that enjoys listening to me on a podcast or watching me on TikTok would yeah find that this is much of the same it it is trying to Notice things about the world that are interesting while also ah you're on this roller coaster careening toward what looks like some kind of certain disaster. ah But this is all I don't want to make it sound like I've got a corporate strategy like this is I have built a brand that will make people believe in the quality of my of my prose. ah But I am trying to reach people. And that's to me, it's about

00:02:13.50
Jason Pargin
just trying to go out into the world in the ways that we're allowed to do it now with the technology and trying to find people, find people that would legitimately. find the book interesting or fulfilling it that may change the way they they think somehow. I'm not trying to sell merch. I'm not trying to be where it's like, yeah, buy this branded t-shirt or hoodie or my book. All of the, you know, which I think of the like the YouTubers doing where they've just got a range of stuff in the book is just one more thing that's got their name on it.

00:02:47.50
Jason Pargin
that the super fans can buy. So I never wanted to be like that. I don't love the idea of somebody saying. I want to I follow this TikTok influencer. and I want to buy this influencer's book. Hopefully they will understand. I've been writing fiction before since before the Internet existed in high school, before anybody had a an Internet connection in their homes and that this is me trying to reach another generation of of readers. and I don't think I have a lot of children that are fans on there, but I do have people who maybe were not reading stuff in 1999 and that are are at an age where i've I've hopefully introduced it to a new group of people. but

00:03:35.43
Jason Pargin
I can speak intelligently on what it's like to have an internet poisoned brain because I've been on here every day for the last, for now, you know, more than half my life and the the knowing what, what internet brain looks like. It's one of the few subjects I can speak with authority on.

00:03:57.00
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah. Do you ever do things to kind of try and mitigate for want of better phrasing your own internet poisoned brain or are there things that you're mindful of or systems that you put into place? I suppose to, to stop it getting even more riddled with internet poison.

00:04:19.31
Jason Pargin
It's funny because I think when I say the things that I do, they're going to sound ridiculous. Like I make it a point to do my own yard work because it that forces me to go out in the sun and do something for an entire afternoon that is interacting tangibly with the world. i But i bring I hate to bring that up as an an example because the the phrase people youtube will shout at each other is touch grass.

00:04:47.47
Jason Pargin
They're telling somebody they're too online or their brains been too warped. That's like, go out and touch some grass. Well, I'm literally doing that. I'm literally going out and mowing my lawn. There are a little things like that where I try to force myself, ah you know, during the pandemic years, there was a brief period where like the convenience of having your groceries sent to your house, like, well, they just show up right at your door. That's so easy. And you're only paying like 100 extra dollars for the service.

00:05:16.04
Jason Pargin
it and very intentionally tried not to get addicted to that convenience to get out and go do that stuff myself to force myself things that could be if I could have food delivered but saying no let's go to the restaurant let's do it yeah get out and interact with humans these are all meager and sad steps and I cannot act like I'm a hero for doing that instead of keeping myself planted behind a screen all the time because my screen time ah is horrifying. It's pretty much every minute that I'm awake. And when I'm doing something, you know, I'm driving, I've got a podcast going. I'm doing the thing that I know is bad for the brain where it's constant input

00:05:58.79
Jason Pargin
that never time to never no quiet time to process it, which is what the brain needs. This is why you know we love having hobbies where we will sit and quietly do something like gardening because your brain it craves that some silence.

00:06:14.30
Jason Pargin
And there are so many people who get no silence throughout their day. It's where it's just constant, ah constant scrolling, constant reading, constant listening. That's bad for the brain. I know for a fact that is I'm very unhealthy in that way because I'm always looking at something or listening to something ah to to prevent the danger of a thought occurring. in my and

00:06:38.41
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah, so when you're doing yard work, you are also listening to a podcast or or something of that nature.

00:06:44.26
Jason Pargin
ah but See, I can't because the lawnmower is too loud. That's why I specifically chose that task.

00:06:49.80
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah.

00:06:50.46
Jason Pargin
It's like, no, this has to be done with white noise. See, because the people, for example, people talk about great ideas occur to them in the shower. It's like, well, why do you think that is? Like that's the only time of day you're giving yourself silence and white noise and you're allowing your your brain to actually do its thing. And yeah, it does have a great, you did have a great insightful idea in the shower because that's the first time you allowed yourself.

00:07:17.69
Jason Pargin
to stop ingesting information and let the brain do the work of processing the information and then actually thinking, thinking your own thoughts. But boy, a lot of us, because I now see they sell devices where it's like it's a thing you put in your shower list to a podcast while you're in the shower. It's like never, never allow yourself one moment of silence ever.

00:07:38.45
Jason Pargin
Don't ever let yourself contemplate your life or anything. Always just have new stuff coming in all at all times. So if there's not anybody out there who has successfully rearranged your lives to to not have that, tell me how you did it. Drop me an email. Let me know. I will try it.

00:07:57.89
Bob Pastorella
I have worked out too many kinks and stories that were really bugging me by cutting grass.

00:08:04.81
Jason Pargin
Yes.

00:08:05.14
Bob Pastorella
It works. And it's in, I, and I wrote a blog about it. It just, I don't know if anybody read it, but I mean, it's basically about how, if you do a monotonous task that requires very little thought, something that, that you can do.

00:08:26.29
Bob Pastorella
that is is rote. In other words, it's the same thing over and over and over again, your brain will begin to fill in gaps and in things that you were thinking of. And I, that's, that's, that's my go to if I feel like man, I'm stuck on something, I need to go cut some grass, mom, I'm cutting your grass. And so I go and I do the whole, you know, the whole shebang and I usually work out something and it's, it's, it's therapeutic, I think.

00:08:55.62
Bob Pastorella
That's why I like to do it because it gives me that, that like you said, it's that it's that white noise.

00:09:01.04
Jason Pargin
The very first fiction I wrote in my entire life was when I was in high school and I had a part-time job in in high school and in the couple years after working at a print shop. So at a print shop you've got a company that has ordered whatever 50,000 sheets of letterhead.

00:09:16.91
Jason Pargin
And you know somebody has to print that stuff. So you would have these big machines. And the way somebody like me work in there, you set up the machine. You get the the colors right. You get the ink set up right. And you get it all adjusted. You turn it on. And then from that point on, your job is to watch the machine the machine and make sure it doesn't jam. And then you let it do its thing. Just white noise.

00:09:37.45
Jason Pargin
And standing there over that machine, that was some of those most creatively productive. I had a little notebook where I would jot down ideas of stuff because I, you know, I was, had something to do. You're constantly watching it, making little adjustments, paying attention. You can't fall asleep.

00:09:53.86
Jason Pargin
But it let that other part of my brain work because just the sound of the machine is repetitive. I'm not being asked to do anything with my brain. I'm not being asked to solve a problem consciously so that the that back end of your brain, the subconscious that is always working on stuff, you know, sometime, sometimes a an idea or, as you said, like the solution to a problem in a plot will just appear as if by magic. And this is why old, tiny poets thought that they have like a magical muse that was giving them the stuff. It's like, well, you have that, but it's just the non-conscious part of your brain, which never stops working. So anytime you have a creative problem,

00:10:35.13
Jason Pargin
Think about it very intently, really try to take it apart and then push it out of your brain and then go. A lot of authors said they would go take a walk. Agatha Christie said she would just go for a walk in the woods. um You know, I think Stephen King says he would get on the treadmill, I think, but they've all got something like that where it forces you to not be writing.

00:10:55.19
Jason Pargin
You put down the pen, you're away from the the typewriter and go somewhere where you've either got silence or white noise. I think white noise is better for somebody like me with the attention deficit problems like having, you know, and then it will seem to your employers or to anyone else like you're wasting time.

00:11:03.94
Bob Pastorella
Mm hmm.

00:11:12.74
Jason Pargin
That's one issue with trying to manage creative workers is because like, well, he hasn't he hasn't written anything. It's like most of writing happens away from the keyboard. because the stuff has to occur to you. the stuff has to yeah You have to work it out. And a lot of times, I can't productively work out those things in front of the keyboard. But if you let me go get in my car and drive somewhere for two hours, I guarantee you that during that drive at some point, if I don't have if i didn't put a podcast on and let myself just listen to the road, they will but the solution will appear fully formed in my head.

00:11:49.79
michaeldavidwilson
I feel that this conversation is maybe giving me a revelation or a breakthrough that now seems like it should have been obvious but you know it's very rare that I'm in silence and I think like for years now for over a decade I've been obsessed with being productive and optimizing my time and obviously with all the technology you know that can mean like listening to a podcast, listening to an audio book, because I'm studying Japanese, it can be getting Japanese input as well. And it's like, when am I actually in silence? And the only time, unless you know i'm I'm with someone else and we're going for a walk, is when I purposely decide there's a story problem, I don't know how to get out of it, so I'm going to go for a walk without headphones on.

00:12:45.31
michaeldavidwilson
And invariably, the solution comes to me. And so really, I mean, that there's an irony that it seems possibly to be more productive or to be more efficient. You've got to do less, not more. You've got to have, you know, these moments of silence, but then I can already see how my brain is like, well, how would I schedule that? Which is a dangerous way to do it because like I'm still trying to even optimize these moments that aren't meant to be optimized.

00:13:17.27
Jason Pargin
This is why I think when when because I'm approached by young writers all the time asking me well, how do you do it? How do you how do you become like I want to become a full-time novelist? How do you do it? It's like one don't try to do that.

00:13:30.59
Jason Pargin
it's It's almost impossible. um But two, like one of my huge advantages has always been the type of day jobs I've had gave me brain space too, because the job that I had before I actually got work full time doing you know doing writing, and that was in 2007, but prior to that, I was doing data entry at an insurance company. So data entry just means somebody filled out a paper form and you have to put it in the computer. It's all just numbers.

00:13:58.10
Jason Pargin
So it is extremely mindless because you have to do it like a thousand miles an hour. You're just just, you know, just ripping sheets of pages ah ah in the typing, typing, pulling the page, typing. And you get into such a rhythm where you are working. Your brain's doing something. But the creative part of my brain, the problem solving problem part of my brain is not being engaged.

00:14:20.47
Jason Pargin
it's It's just this the whatever part of your brain. If you're doing some repetitive task, make sure you do it right every time. But that is prime work to but let the creative part of your brain wonder and and do its thing. If I hadn't gotten that type of a job, if I had gotten a job where I had been forced to really think really hard every day and solve problems and that kind of thing, I think I would have come home every night without ah my little notepad. I wouldn't have had anything written down. I think it would have kept me too occupied. It's is's one of those things where when I talk about the advantages I had, I did not have wealthy or famous parents. I didn't have any friends in the publishing industry. I didn't have anything like that, but I was fortunate in the type of jobs that I got that let me, you know, that I could sit there and do somewhat repetitive, mindless work

00:15:11.42
Jason Pargin
I had multiple jobs like that in a row that by kind of by luck, I got those. And let me do a lot of the thinking work that other people just don't get time to have. Plus, like I don't have kids. you know If I had been having to try to help my wife, if I had been staying up all night with a newborn for several of those of those years, you'd think I would have been productive. I don't think so. So a lot of what has allowed me to do this is good fortune, but it's not good fortune in the sense that I won the lottery. It's just that I've been put into circumstances where I did have a chance to do this work because finding the time is always the hard part or finding the time when you still have the energy to actually do something because doing something creative takes a lot of energy. It doesn't seem like it would, but it does. It leaves me exhausted like writing for six straight hours, leaves me physically exhausted because you are forcing your brain to do a lot of work.

00:16:07.04
Jason Pargin
Not everybody gets off work and can still feel like doing that because the type of work they're doing is different. I'm sure if I had been a nurse or something, you know, working 16 hour shifts of a stressful work and having to deal with insurance companies and doctors and patients and all that stuff, I don't think I would have gotten any of this done.

00:16:25.98
Jason Pargin
Cause I would come home drained all the time. So yeah, that's the other thing when people ask me like, well, how do you arrange your life in a way that you're able to write novels? Like, man, the first thing is going to be finding a day job that God willing, if you're in the United States has health insurance.

00:16:42.90
Jason Pargin
two kind of pays the bills, but three leaves your brain free to devote some of it to, to, you know, doing this creative, this creative stuff. And a lot of people just don't, just don't have that. And it's not necessarily anti anybody's fault. It's just the way things shake out, but they, they find it so much harder to get going. And I think they feel lazy or unproductive because it's like, well, I've been working on this novel for three years and Stephen King can write a whole novel in three months. It's like,

00:17:12.09
Jason Pargin
Not everybody's lives is are are arranged in the same way that allows that kind of that kind of work, uh, where, where he could write for, you know, 80 straight hours without sleeping because he was jacked up on cocaine or whatever. So not everybody, not everybody can do that.

00:17:28.83
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah, and talking about how you arrange your day and the writing, I mean, you said at the start that a lot of what has been going on for the past 10 or so months has been promoting or getting ready for the lead up to this book launch.

00:17:45.56
michaeldavidwilson
So, I mean, have you pretty much been exclusively working on that? Do you divide your day in terms of promotion time and writing time?

00:17:56.28
michaeldavidwilson
How many days a week are you working?

00:17:56.77
Jason Pargin
And my, my job as an author and most authors jobs in my observation, your day job is selling books. Your night job is writing books. So for me, it's about 80, 20. My life is, and nobody likes it. When I say this, my life is about 80% promotion, 20% writing.

00:18:16.50
Jason Pargin
And it's going to nonstop like there's not a ah period of my life where it it's like, okay, I have to kick into promotion mode. I have to promote the books year round. Like we we announced the pre-orders were out in January. The book was arriving in September. We announced it nine months in advance. And that's how we do it because.

00:18:34.35
Jason Pargin
You know, a podcast appearance may generate like twenty five copies being sold, which sounds like nothing. But if you do that steadily every day for nine straight months, it actually adds up to quite a bit. um But it is a stupid amount of effort and it is, you know, I built up that tick tock account that now has five hundred and fifty thousand followers. um The videos on there have been viewed more than half a billion times.

00:19:02.21
Jason Pargin
ah that's I built up that following so that I could sell books to those people that that is all part of my like promotion budget in terms of how I'm ah you know divvying up my time and energy but you know and if you add up throughout a week maybe one day gets devoted to writing the next book so like I'm writing the next book in the John Dyson series right now um But the rest of the time I'm filming a TikTok video, I'm doing a podcast for somebody, I'm planning social media posts because I still maintain all of that stuff myself.

00:19:36.20
Jason Pargin
the Twitter, the Threads, the Blue Sky, the Goodreads account, the YouTube page, the Instagram, um the the the TikTok, the Subscract newsletter, ah the Mailchimp newsletter, all of it I'm managing by myself. I do not have a staff. And that is my that is actually my job. If somebody asked me my job, I technically am an author. In reality, my job is book sales. And then i write on the side, I have to write the book that's being sold.

00:20:03.33
Jason Pargin
and And it sounds very cynical when I tell people that people who aren't aware of how this works, they kind of hate that because it seems so sad. But in this ecosystem where people have infinite things that can be doing with their time, infinite video games that could be playing because your competition is not other authors. Your competition is.

00:20:24.13
Jason Pargin
Netflix or Twitch or whatever people could be doing instead of reading your stupid book. So it's like, you've got to tear people away from these other things that, you know, there's some company that spent half a billion dollars making a blockbuster movie or a video game to trying to entice them away from your book. And you have to wrestle those people back. You have to sell them on the idea, not just at this book.

00:20:47.51
Jason Pargin
might mildly amuse them for a couple days but that it's it's important that you you you don't want to miss this and and it's kind of the hard sell and i know there are ah authors out there who don't have to do this because i they're not on tiktok or whatever but uh most of us that you Therein is people in my boat where you are. You have to go out and push it yourself and you've got to find you build up your own platform. Get your fans all together in one place and get them to have some faith in you. And then ask them to do something that is objectively ridiculous, which is I want you to spend 30 bucks reading this this 140,000 word document.

00:21:26.12
Jason Pargin
that most people would not read, even if I gave it to them for free, which I know because in trying to get like warps from people, you send out hundreds of copies and most people do not read it, even though that they they did not pay a penny for it. So it's a big ask. It is. I respect what a difficult thing I'm asking people to do to spend that much money on something that they're going to be able to blow through in a few days. I mean, it didn't take that long to get through a novel.

00:21:51.03
Jason Pargin
um So it does not seem that weird to me that it is kind of a monumental task, but most people who are aspiring writers, the moment I tell them how much promotion I have to do, they get extremely discouraged. And I hate that. I hate that for them. I hate that it is the way it is. But if you know an easier way to get people to buy the books, again, send me an email and let me know, because I would get a lot more sleep at night if I didn't have to do this.

00:22:23.02
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah, it seems that even in the 11 years that we've been doing this as horror podcasts, that there's more and more marketing and promotion that the author has to do.

00:22:35.59
michaeldavidwilson
That's certainly the the feedback that I seem to be getting from other authors and from my experience.

00:22:41.39
michaeldavidwilson
And it doesn't seem so uncommon that, you know, even if you're with a big publishing house, the publicity is going to be very, very limited.

00:22:53.07
michaeldavidwilson
You know, unless you're a very big-name author, and then the irony is, if you're a big-name author such as Stephen King, well, just being Stephen King will sell it anyway.

00:23:05.15
Jason Pargin
Yeah, where his name is this big on the book and then the title is somewhere underneath because people are just buying it for his name.

00:23:07.49
michaeldavidwilson
Right, right.

00:23:10.82
Jason Pargin
But to be clear, and when I say this, I'm not saying that my publisher has abandoned me. They do a ton of work like going. they They're the ones who hit up the bookstores and the chains and and try to get them to buy a bunch of copies, get them to put it out somewhere prominent.

00:23:23.91
Jason Pargin
they will hit up some reviewers and and and stuff like that. They'll set up some appearances. They do some stuff, but 95% of it is done by me. And the system's set up so that it kind of has to be. Like, the publisher can't run my TikTok account. It's got to be my stupid face and my stupid voice on there, or else people don't watch it. So it's the same thing. And like my Twitter and all that, the reason people will engage with it is because it's me, because it's it's authentic. You're hearing directly from the author.

00:23:51.75
Jason Pargin
If i was a big enough big shot yeah i would be able to hire an intern. to Just run my account and then they just announced when the next book is up or when there's news on a new movie or something.

00:24:03.01
Jason Pargin
but the way I do it and the way I have to do it is people want to hear from me. So no, the publisher can't do this podcast appearance for me. They can't they can't do my Instagram post for me. It's gotta be me and I could maybe hire somebody to take care of some of the technical things like if I you do a video and they're the ones who upload it to all of the other platforms to make sure it's also up on Reels and on YouTube Shorts and all that, whatever. But that wouldn't save me that much time. Ultimately, what this system wants is me as an individual, my face and my voice and my thoughts and my whatever. They want access to me and my personality, which again, you're talking to somebody who used to write anonymously. I did not want the audience to know even who I was.

00:24:50.40
Jason Pargin
this is now an era starting with the social media era when if you want to sell a book you're selling yourself as an author and then oh because you like me and my personality so much you also surely like this book i would not have created the world to be that way if i had if i was in charge of it i uh

00:25:13.70
Jason Pargin
Again, I realize not everybody has to do this, but my Instagram or whatever is full of, you know, it's a young author. They have rolled out there and they're on, they're on Instagram posting their vacation photos because that's part of their job as an author to say, look at this beautiful vacation I went on.

00:25:35.95
Jason Pargin
aren't you interested in this life I'm living or won't you also therefore be interested in these books I've written and it feels weird. To do that, it feels weird to have to sell yourself as a personality to get people to buy the books. But that is the way it works in the influencer era that we're in. This is why you have YouTubers selling their brand of freaking chocolate bars. There's like a Mr. Beast candy line and ah Logan Paul has an energy drink line that the kids all all love. And it's like in a world where very soon, AI will be able to generate a book. It's going to be even more important.

00:26:14.94
Jason Pargin
that you can say hey flesh and blood human here that's associate when you see my name on the book cover associated with this flesh and blood person because right next to it on the shelf very soon it's going to be a book with a human sounding name that was written by a robot But that the publisher did not have to pay an author a penny for because they had a piece of software that they just hit a button and it cranked out a mystery who done it. And then that will be what you're competing against because they will be able to crank out infinite of those books. And so it's not going to get any better in the future. Being able to say, hey, I am a human who bleeds red blood. And I wrote this book for you. That will be the big selling point, but it is going to require turning on a camera.

00:27:01.83
Jason Pargin
and getting in front of a microphone and introducing yourself to people. And some people simply can't do it. And I understand some people's personalities like they're mortified at the thought of having to do what what I do. I get it. ah But I basically had to teach myself to do it just in the last few years.

00:27:22.32
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah, it's interesting what you're saying about, you know, potentially competing against AI offers because in Japan, I mean, that there's a lot of shyness in terms of being on social media. So a lot of people have avatars and they have like literal kind of virtual aliases, but then we're seeing a weird thing where if I ask junior high school students, you know, who their favorite celebrity is, it's a YouTube kind of robot, a VR YouTuber. So it is AI, so they're more interested in this this robot than actually hearing from a human, and it's a bizarre trend, but I guess that's what a lot of teenagers are into right now in Japan.

00:28:16.42
Jason Pargin
Okay, but Bob you work in cell phones, right?

00:28:21.54
Bob Pastorella
Yes.

00:28:22.35
Jason Pargin
So is the latest iteration of these phones, isn't they all have new like AI integration? Isn't that the whole, the like the entire selling point of this next generation of phones?

00:28:34.27
Bob Pastorella
Yeah, it's, um, and I want to say it's very kind of, I mean, some of the phones have access to chat GTP, um, To me, it's very elementary because like you can um you can circle things with your camera and it'll it'll look things up. So it's like an advanced form of of Siri or or advanced form of Ask Google.

00:28:58.50
Bob Pastorella
you know there's with With the new iPhone, in you with they we're going to roll out and probably in the next month, it's going to be Apple Intelligence, which is going to allow your iPhone to do the same thing that the Googles can do, your Androids can do.

00:29:15.33
Bob Pastorella
And so that's, I see a lot of people that are interested in that, but I also see an almost equal sized population who are like, when you, if you even try to tell them about that and there's a way that you can turn that off, right?

00:29:32.81
Jason Pargin
See, this is where I...

00:29:33.18
Bob Pastorella
And they're like, uh, yeah, yeah, there's, there's a way you can turn it off. You're like, you know, especially with the androids, it's like, to you know, and and if you even say, and it has AI technology, I mean, half my customers will go and I can turn that off. I'm like, yes, yes. You can actually turn the whole, the whole thing off to where it doesn't do it. And I show them how to do it. And they're like, Oh, okay. Well, I like to go ahead and get that phone, which and when it can hear in the way, the way the American.

00:30:01.80
Bob Pastorella
A phone carrier system works. They don't pay us for the phones. We could care less if you buy a phone. They pay us for the service. So they want us to take an account and add more lines to it. We want a new customer coming in that's switching carriers. That's that's where they make their money.

00:30:23.10
Bob Pastorella
the The big companies, your Verizon, your AT&T, they they don't they don't make money from the devices. They could care less. They're going to write them off. That's why they give them away. It's an advertising expense. so But that's what draws the people into the stores. So the AI stuff is is is coming. They're shoving it down our throats. But I have a feeling that in a couple of years, it's going to be a nothing burger.

00:30:52.29
Bob Pastorella
when it comes to the tech. um

00:30:55.64
Jason Pargin
See, I can't I keep saying the same thing, too, but I don't know if I'm just old and out of touch because it does nothing for me. The the a none of that's the ai stuff does anything for me.

00:31:05.47
Bob Pastorella
No.

00:31:05.65
Jason Pargin
It's I've not found a use for it.

00:31:08.54
Bob Pastorella
No, it's it's not anything different than what I've seen. It's just a repackaging the same thing, you know. It's like now, now Siri's more intuitive. so c Siri was intuitive to begin with. you know I haven't seen any changes in that. And again, with Apple intelligence,

00:31:28.08
Bob Pastorella
and give Give me about two months and I might have a different story on that, but I really just don't see it. What I've seen on the Androids is, you know, with the with the Android experience, it's very similar to what we've had previously. Yeah, you can open up your camera and you can draw a squiggly line and it'll put a snake on the picture.

00:31:49.05
Bob Pastorella
And then you can modify how the snake looks. you know So if you're taking a picture of a table and you you put a squiggly line on it, the the the the AI will go, oh, you're wanting ah a snake. okay And if you don't want a snake, you can you can do something else and it it'll it'll and or change it.

00:32:06.50
Bob Pastorella
I've seen that with the Google Pixel that that that that actually happens. ah Someone showed me that. They're like, hey, look, you can take a picture and you can draw a squiggly line on it. And it puts an image of like a photograph of a snake on that picture. And I'm like, oh, that's actually pretty cool. I said, but couldn't you just find a snake and take a picture of it? You know?

00:32:28.70
Jason Pargin
because

00:32:28.94
Bob Pastorella
And it's what you're talking about, even like we're going to be competing with AI books.

00:32:29.44
Jason Pargin
at least there there's a

00:32:32.46
Bob Pastorella
This is a time that style and weirdness is going to be king. That's going to how you're going to tell a human writer, you have to, you're going to have to have your own style and be very, very, very weird with it.

00:32:44.39
Jason Pargin
Because with like Michael, your story about the like the the sort of AI avatar that became an influencer or whatever, at least they're usually there's still a human behind it making creative decisions. And like the thing you just described, Bob, that's that's still a thing in theory that is to help you unlock your creativity if you want to add animals to your photo or whatever at least that is a person making a creative choice and then the tech is helping you execute it the dream on the end on the part of

00:33:14.63
Bob Pastorella
Mm hmm.

00:33:18.35
Jason Pargin
the the the studios and the publishers and all that is to not have to pay a person at all to get that they can have a thing that can just crank out. So the ideas of having where they've got a robotic influencer that they don't have to pay, that's not taking a cut of everything, but they can still put that face and voice on things. They can sell, sell merch. It can sell products only. They get to keep all the money because there's not a celebrity. There's not a Mr. Beast or whatever ah who who is demanding you know to to get rich off of it too they've got just a piece of software i don't know

00:33:54.83
Jason Pargin
It's so easy for me to say, well, that would never replace interaction with interaction with a real person. um But there are entire like you can find subreddits where people have A.I. friends and that they've got the software and they've kind of fallen in love with this imaginary A.I. replica of a person. And among the kids who are very ah ah kind of moldable in terms of how their brains and personalities work. I don't know.

00:34:29.39
Jason Pargin
if they're going to necessarily be able to tell the difference if you create because kids already have, you know, they love imaginary friends. They love ah believing that like their teddy bear is alive and real and they can have a conversation with it. And then in the right now they could make, in theory, and but probably exist a teddy bear that does talk to them and has has conversations with them and would give the illusion of being alive and of loving them back which is the thing every person wants but it's ultimately just a piece of software who's like going through a tree of responses and if you make it complicated enough it sounds just like you're talking to a person. I have absolutely done tech support chats where it lasted for a few minutes before I realized I was not talking to a person that I was talking to

00:35:19.83
Jason Pargin
and AI bot that had been programmed to sound with phrases that sound personable and and that sounds like a person talking.

00:35:26.97
Bob Pastorella
Uh-uh.

00:35:27.79
Jason Pargin
um I don't know. I don't know. I feel like everybody reaches a certain age where the tech the next big technological leap is scary to them.

00:35:40.78
Jason Pargin
And I hope I'm not just doing that. I hope I'm not just being old and cranky. I. do not see any positive outcome of an AI that pretends to be your friend or that pretends to be an influencer or pretends to be a celebrity and that gets you to love them and then buy their stuff. Because if there's no person to connect with, I don't know. I don't like that at all.

00:36:10.24
Bob Pastorella
Yeah, I think that if we're talking about the arts, we're talking about publishing, we're talking about creative movies and things like that and using AI. To me, I feel that a lot of this is coming about because the people who run the publishing companies, the people who run the studios and things like that are not creatives or they haven't been in the creative mindset for a long time. And I think that if somebody who had any type of cloud or any type of pull on a company who had a creative mindset would see, hey, this is not a good idea because people ultimately, like you said, they want to interact with other people. You know, I don't fear that AI will ever take away my job. What I do fear is that AI is going to reduce how much money I make. I will still be doing the same job, but I just won't make the same amount of money. And I fear that that's what's going to happen in publishing.

00:37:09.89
Bob Pastorella
Um, because their, their AI is not going to get rid of me. They're going to try to pay me less, you know, and that's the people who make those decisions are not creatives.

00:37:17.33
Jason Pargin
Mm hmm.

00:37:23.78
Bob Pastorella
They're, they're probably very good at what they do, which is making money.

00:37:30.20
Jason Pargin
Yeah, and they can look at a balance sheet and say, well, gosh, if we didn't actually have to pay the creative, we would make X amount of more money. It's just a bit often if they're not Yeah, because like the film studios, once upon a time they were run by Hollywood people. They were run by former agents and people and producers, people that had climbed their way up you know the ladder, but they were film people. And now they're run by you know finance bros and people that came from the world of money. And they're the ones who it's like, well, why why but don't we just only make superhero movies? like That's what makes the money. Why were we making all this weird stuff and not realizing that

00:38:08.06
Jason Pargin
It takes a creative person to understand that the audience doesn't know what they want until they see it. ah You know, nobody was asking for Star Wars before Star Wars came around. It's they thought when they saw the dailies on that film in this late 70s, they're like, this is the biggest turd that we just might as well just flush the money down the toilet. And it was only when it came out, theaters audiences went wild for it. They're like, oh, OK, this thing we allowed this weirdo to make ah and go way over budget on. It turns out we've we've tapped, you know, we tapped into something.

00:38:40.92
Jason Pargin
But if you tried to just break it down into an algorithm of here's what worked the last year, therefore do more of what worked last year, you're just going to see the returns just shrink and shrink and shrink because that's how creativity works. Audiences want to be surprised by something weird. They that's what fun to look at is something you've never seen before. But if you're endlessly just trying to remix Star Wars or Marvel or whatever,

00:39:07.56
Jason Pargin
It just starts to all seem it starts to all feel the same, which again, if you're somebody who runs it based on spreadsheets, you'd think you're making a no risk decision because we're only going to stick with the stuff we know works. But guess what? Over time, it's going to stop working because that's not what people what people want out of their entertainment. They want to.

00:39:29.48
Jason Pargin
have something catching catch them off guard, then you can't ask them in advance what they want because they don't know they're not creatives. They they they will know it when they see it. ah And an AI can't do that. It's an AI is not going to know how to like, you know, an artist is is creating based on their childhood trauma and their undiagnosed personality disorders and and their drug use. There's no piece of software that can replicate that.

00:39:56.84
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah. And I mean, talking about making creative decisions, I really love the afterward that you included in this book. And, you know, one of the parts of that was you said, in every circumstance in which I had to choose between the reality revealed in my research and a bit of fantasy that would make the story more entertaining, I chose the latter. And I mean, in in terms of that research, I mean, was there a lot of research that went into the book or were these things that you were kind of pulling on that you had accrued over years of experience and in creating these articles and these TikTok videos and these pieces of content to use a terrible term?

00:40:50.67
Jason Pargin
It's you I mean, on one hand, yes, this book took an unholy amount of research. It's I think people who don't write fiction don't realize how much homework it takes because even if you're not writing, for example, a story that takes place during World War Two and you're having to research a bunch of stuff at World War Two so you know how to talk about it. I don't even mean that. I mean, just everyday things about police procedure. It's like, well, what would the police do if this happened? And so you've got to look it up. And these days you have the Internet. That's great.

00:41:21.35
Jason Pargin
But in here, this is a you know a road story. This is a road trip story. So figuring out where they go, what those places are like. We visited some of them. I didn't go to every location discussed here, but I've been to most of them.

00:41:36.23
Jason Pargin
Um, and trying to make sure that it's authentic and true to life, but I am able to do this job because I've been just kind of an information and trivia junkie my whole life. ah And so when they invented the internet, you know, like I used to spend outrageous money on.

00:41:53.73
Jason Pargin
magazines i was like a high school kid and i would get i had the chicago tribune whatever big national newspaper i could get my hands on from my small little town i would get it and i would just read all of this stuff i just i just hoovered up information so that that's the thing that attracts people to my tiktok into my columns it's learning odd little facts about the world and and interesting little tidbits. That's been my whole personality. I think mainly because from a young age, I didn't know how to talk to people. So I like to have some weird fact I could bring up because I can drive a conversation, right? Like if you can, you know, if they if they mentioned something

00:42:33.20
Jason Pargin
Uh, about any random subject that you can, you can pull it up and it's like, well, actually, well, did you know that there's actually a type of lizard that if you cut off its head and it will grow a new body or whatever, and something you read in a book 10 years ago. So this, this story yeah is. Thankful of a lot of stuff that is true, but I also wanted very definitely to not let people think that.

00:43:01.75
Jason Pargin
that I'm trying to ah do an expose on how any government agency or any corporation works. This is a story about people and about how these individuals have to live in the system and how they navigate it and what kind of like unmet needs they have based on living in the system and the type of kind of social isolation that it creates.

00:43:26.69
Jason Pargin
When you start getting into things like FBI procedure or how to build a bomb, I I'm happy to completely make that up. but That's not you shouldn't be learning how to build a bomb from reading a piece of fiction. are And I don't need you to ah have read this and feel like you know ah how you know the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI deals with like domestic terror threats or anything like that. I'm happy to.

00:43:54.80
Jason Pargin
Make that make it up and then make it feel as authentic as possible and end it. Stop there. Some authors are are not of that like they want everything to be as genuine and true as possible. And I'm fine with fictionalizing.

00:44:13.02
Jason Pargin
That stuff because that's not what it's about. This is not this is not a police procedural. This is not anything like that. This is about a bunch of people stuck in a very stupid and terrifying situation and seeing how they navigate it. ah So this is one reason why in a lot of fiction they like.

00:44:32.03
Jason Pargin
Characters that kind of rogue cops are loose cannons because if you write the procedure wrong, you can always just say, well, yeah, they're rogue. They didn't. Of course, they didn't do it the way the real cops would do it because they're they're a loose cannon. Sue me.

00:44:46.49
Bob Pastorella
The thing that I found fascinating about it is like after reading and thinking about how each one of the incidences that happened, and there's hundreds, there's hundreds of things, any one of these things could have happened. Any one of them could have happened in real life. But in this book, they'll only happen this way. And I find that because it is...

00:45:08.70
Bob Pastorella
You know, we talk about that the this you know the the satire, the social commentary about, you know, influencers and and things like that. But at the same time, you've got a story that is unpredictable and extremely logical. And I love that because I can figure out where it was going. And every time every time or every time I thought I knew where it was going, you come up with something That just blindsided me and I was like, oh shit, we have to deal with this now and it's just it was so tightly knit that you almost have to like if you want to think about the social commentary of it, you have to kind of set that part of the rest of the story aside to even think about it because it's just so intermished. So.

00:45:52.05
Jason Pargin
I mean, I hope that nobody comes away from all of the press I'm doing about this thinking that this book is, it's somebody lecturing you about getting away from your screens for 300 pages.

00:46:00.39
Bob Pastorella
No, no, there's, there's one hell of a story in there.

00:46:04.26
Jason Pargin
Yeah, it's, if I've done it correctly, yeah it should feel the way the news has felt for the last. I don't know, eight or nine years where it's like every day you log in, it's like, Oh, now there's a, now there's an earthquake in whatever city on top of everything else.

00:46:22.70
Jason Pargin
Like. Now there's ah what, then now there's another war. There's another war break. What country is this? I never heard of this country where every day, because people will joke about like the script writers are they, they're throwing us a new, the the people who write real life are throwing us a new twist or whatever.

00:46:41.77
Jason Pargin
And it feels like that when you have total awareness of, and then you have politicians who their whole method of like staying visible is just,

00:46:41.91
Bob Pastorella
Yeah.

00:46:51.18
Jason Pargin
ah Clearly creating controversy or trying to say outrageous things and there's like this fire hose of scandals and outrage and. I was trying to simulate in this story. The feeling of just living in the world over the last decade or so when when they things feel like they have accelerated so fast.

00:47:13.02
Jason Pargin
but you have this bizarre story just at the time we're recording this in the the war in the middle east with israel and they did this thing where they rigged a bunch of pagers to explode and killed like a dozen people and wounded thousands of others and it's like such a cyberpunk thing to happen i don't mean to make light of it it's just It's it's the kind of thing that would happen in like a Tom Clancy novel or something that they they secretly intercepted all of these walkie talkies and pagers and and inserted, I guess, little tiny bombs into them and then distributed them out to all of these guest members of Hezbollah. And they sent out a killer signal that detonated them all simultaneously.

00:47:56.79
Jason Pargin
ah That's the kind of thing that did not used to happen. And I mean, it's kind of thing where you say, is that possible? Like, is that a thing that can be done? I guess it is. And it's the same thing with every headline that comes along with breakthroughs they claim they've done with AI.

00:48:16.66
Jason Pargin
And there's headlines that we have astronauts stranded in space and it's a total non-story. Nobody's following it. It's like, do you realize we have astronauts that are stranded in space and they're going to be there until February. They're going to be in, they will have been in space for like nine months because their, their ship, they're supposed to take them back to earth and malfunction. Like that is a plot line out of a sci-fi novel.

00:48:40.26
Jason Pargin
that can't be real life and not only has it happened but there's so much other weird crap going on that kind of nobody cares and like once a year somebody with the United States Air Force will come out and say yeah we've got more UFOs ah we don't know what they are there's some orbs flying around we don't know what they are it's like All right, throw it on the pile. ah Sure. And you feel like it's your job to keep track of all of it, to be a good citizen, but it's kind of impossible. ah So I think every day, if you're somebody who is super online, you've had the experience of trying to follow a complicated news story and then watching it.

00:49:24.26
Jason Pargin
fall Just cascade like a waterfall across whatever platform you're using if you're on Twitter you're on whatever and it's like oh my god Somebody tried to shoot the president. Oh my god, they missed him by a millimeter. Oh my god We've got video of the guy on the roof and oh we've got all of these different videos and we've got the guy's manifesto and his social medias and it's just ah you feel like this the stress of Is it my job to know?

00:49:52.92
Jason Pargin
all of this and it's just, yeah it's that chaos and it's a type of anxiety that I think is specific to our age because I think it was very different when you would turn on the evening news at dinner and watch the news and maybe that news was upsetting or whatever, but then you turned it off and maybe you'd get up in the morning and you would read the newspaper. They got delivered to your doorstep and you'd read the paper and then you're done, you drink your coffee and then you go to work, but now you are away from the news.

00:50:21.42
Jason Pargin
now that the news is in your pocket. And the thing that they want is to get to where they keep trying to invent it, where it's it's a thing you wear on your head so that in between the real world and your eyes is a screen where Apple dictates what you see of the universe. And that's a product that still has not caught on. They keep trying because that's the dream to have you truly never away from the feeds.

00:50:47.69
Jason Pargin
To where when you're eating a meal, it's in front of your face. And when you're talking to another person in between you and them is a screen in front of your eyes that displays information or distracts you. And it's like they're just. Trying more and more to intrude on you on the way they do it is just by continually.

00:51:05.86
Jason Pargin
trying to tell you these stories that are scary and that you kind of don't have any control over in that sense of helplessness is what I was trying to simulate in this book where you're watching the situation careening out of control and you wish you could reach into the story and grab people and shake them by the shoulders and say, do you not understand what you're doing right now? And that's, I don't know, that's the way I feel every day to some degree.

00:51:35.36
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah, it occurs to me that, you know, this technology and what they're trying to do, and somewhere it's almost like what John Carpenter did with They Live is starting to become reality or that feels like the overall goal now. And yeah, I don't know what the solution is here, but I do think with the story you're obviously one of the things as the reader you're trying to guess throughout what is in this black box of doom and you know you're getting all these theories the theories seem to be more and more ridiculous but then what I like is I guess about halfway through we then realize oh the black box of doom is also a metaphor for something else so you've got two black boxes now

00:52:25.83
Jason Pargin
Yeah, and and it's it's fairly straightforward that if you're experiencing the world through a series of screens, then you are in somebody else's box. like They are feeding you reality that they that they dictate. it's not It's no longer what you're going out into the world and collecting with your own eyes and ears. you are It is being mediated by the software and these algorithms and these companies who only have one goal. Their goal is not to inform you.

00:52:55.74
Jason Pargin
They have one goal, which is to keep you glued to the screen at all costs. So the the moment you feel like if you have a question on your mind, the moment you get the answer to that question and you're satisfied and you feel like you can walk away, they failed. The goal is not to give you an answer. The goal is not to let you get to a place where you're at ease because I wonder what was going on. I went and looked it up. Now I know I'm going to put the thing down and go live my life. It's like, no, no, no, no.

00:53:22.22
Jason Pargin
but you Here's another little piece of information that casts doubt on what you think you know. Here's a weird theory about what happened. Isn't this interesting? The idea is to make you so you're so so scared to walk away from it because of what you'll miss, even though it's an illusion. You you actually personally can't do anything. I have been following, for example, the war in Ukraine, which has been going on for I don't know, three years, so three years now, but I've watched, I have Twitter accounts that I follow and they show like where the battle lines and now like these days in the East Russia is winning. They're pushing their way further and further and those front lines are collapsing. I follow that every day.

00:54:06.49
Jason Pargin
I follow the reports of the ground they've lost. I follow the reports of how like when the weapon systems are going to arrive and it's going to make it in time. and Is it going to matter? They've got F 16 now. There is nothing I can do about that situation. Nothing like in theory, I can help inform who I vote for, or I could try to signal boost somebody trying to bring awareness to the situation.

00:54:30.86
Jason Pargin
It is objectively a waste of my brain power and of my anxiety and my stress in my mind. I can't do anything to affect that situation. There's no reason for me to necessarily know about it. Whether or not Russia winds up owning 25% of Ukraine and they draw new borders.

00:54:49.53
Jason Pargin
that That should not matter to me, but that is one of a buffet of things I could choose from that if I wanted to become obsessed with it and what I tell myself is, well, yeah, but this is better than, for example, being obsessed with some celebrity drama. Like where I'm obsessing over what this ah celebrity said about this celebrity or following the twist and turns in a rap beef. I tell myself that this is better because it's something that it's important and it has to do with real things in the world, but it's all the same.

00:55:20.25
Jason Pargin
these platforms that are trying to get me to care about the war in Ukraine only care that I'm glued to the screen. Whether I'm glued to the screen watching war news or watching animals, animal videos of like that baby hippo that's going viral at the the zoom in Thailand. It doesn't, it doesn't matter. They only care that I'm glued to the screen. And if I'm glued to the screen and telling myself,

00:55:44.33
Jason Pargin
Well, I'm helping because I'm actually watching videos about a police anti police protest or I'm watching stuff about the election. It's like, yeah, but you made up how you were going to vote like five years ago. Like, what are you actually what are you actually watching? And it's like you kind of are giving yourself permission to just stare at the feed, which is all they want. They always win if that's all you're doing because, hey, I could be going out and doing things in my community that would help people. There's somebody on my block. I can guarantee you there's some elderly person that would love it if I would come mow their lawn for them. That they can't get out and do it because it's too hot or whatever I could go up there with my lawnmower and fix and and make their their week and I'm not doing that I'm staring at news about Ukraine and thinking I'm doing a good deed by obsessing over these casualty figures and ah It's it's a lie. It's a dumb lie that I've allowed myself to believe

00:56:50.37
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah, well, taking a kind of turn from one part of the media to another, I want to know, do you know where the fentanyl skin contact myth came from?

00:57:07.00
Jason Pargin
I don't know because this still comes out. You will have police departments releasing a press release saying, Hey, during this encounter, our officer got made skin contact with fentanyl and they had a seizure and had to be rushed to the hospital. And it does not work that way. It, it, but you still see it. I mean, you see it fictionalized. I've seen it in multiple movies where there was one where an assassin killed people by getting fentanyl granules, like, like rubbing it on their fingers or something. And and that actually caused the person to have ah a heart attack or whatever.

00:57:37.52
Jason Pargin
But that's like such a great example because fentanyl is deadly and they're mixing it in. Every drug has a little bit of fentanyl in it. That's what killed Prince. He got he got painkillers that he thought were just painkillers. They had fentanyl mixed in with it. But that that that amount of deadliness is not enough. We have to invent some new weird thing. The same thing when I was a kid.

00:58:01.78
Jason Pargin
They used to warn us that ah people were putting like needles and razor blades in the candy. And that never has happened even one time ever in the history of the world. That is a total hoax. it is a It is a myth. But we had a police officer come to my classroom and warn us, do not accept unwrapped candy or any homemade candy. Do not accept unwrapped fruit from strangers because they're they're putting needles and razor blades and stuff in it.

00:58:27.71
Jason Pargin
which is it with even a few seconds of thought would be an insane crime that you could not possibly get away with. Every parent would remember which house sold the weird apples that turned out to have like they would trace it back to the person immediately. But the reality of the situation, which is that there are many children in your neighborhood being or in your city being abused and they're just being abused by their parents ah yeah or there's, you know, that adds a drunk. And so, you know, he he beats the kid.

00:58:57.69
Jason Pargin
that happens all the time. But we're bored with that. What we want is something weird. So we replace the real crime that definitely needs your attention with this weird science fiction crime. And it's like, no, fentanyl just as a thing that people use to get high and then they die from from it. That's scary enough. The reality is scary enough that people don't want that they want some weird warning on facebook that like well now they're hiding fentanyl in children's candy and giving it to them for halloween is like there's no addict who's going to get rid of his fentanyl he's he's hoarding that stuff he's not gonna he's not gonna hand it out to your kids uh he wants it all for himself but we all want like a weirder version of reality even if the reality is scary enough and in most cases it is but

00:59:52.01
Jason Pargin
That's kind of the central driver of this book's plot is that if if people could just hone in on what they the information they have, that would be one thing that people want.

01:00:04.18
Jason Pargin
the the the true No matter how weird the truth turns out to be, they always wanted to be something something else. and that's you the yeah And it's like you can't... This is ah the very first thing you said when we got on here. that you It's so weird that this machine where we have total knowledge and total access to knowledge, you can't kill urban legends. They never go away.

01:00:28.54
Jason Pargin
there There's 9 11 conspiracy people to even now 23 years later, they're like, well, you know that they'd scientists determined that that the fires didn't burn hot enough to it's like still still you're doing that. It's it's it can the truth just not hold up. Is this is it like the equivalent of of a weed that has grown resistant to weed killer and we just don't know how to we just don't know how to kill it. So it just spreads. Is that what is that the situation we're in?

01:01:01.45
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah yeah it it all comes back to that that it doesn't matter how much access to truth and fact you have there will always be people that they they won't accept it or they'll then kind of invent their own truth their own version and yeah people kind of get caught up in it but One, one thing that I actually thought when I saw the promotion would be a bigger part of the story, but just turned out to be a side quest was the bunny, the white bunny. So when did this come into the plot? When did you decide this was a little side quest that you were going to throw in?

01:01:45.95
Jason Pargin
I will let readers decide what like what metaphor is there because there is there is something but it's just this guy getting out of his little cocoon and running into a situation that is In reality, kind of low stakes and kind of doesn't matter. ah But it is an example of where you get the sense that he probably has encountered a lot of people in his life who needed help, and he could have helped them. And when he talks about his situation and how miserable he is, but he is also an able bodied.

01:02:29.92
Jason Pargin
middle-class guy. ah And you realize that you're kind of surrounded by people that need you. And I think a lot of people would be happier if they realized that. um Because honestly, if you sit around all day kind of navel-gazing, like, well, what's the point? What was I what was i meant to do? what was i Why was I put on this earth? And it's like, one, ah objectively, scientifically, you weren't put on this earth for any reason.

01:02:58.33
Jason Pargin
But two, if you're looking for a purpose in your life, you're never more than a few houses away or a few apartments away from somebody who could easily use your help. We are. The world is full of elderly and disabled people or people who are just too sad to get out, who could you could go get groceries for them or you could run some errands or you could give them a ride to the to the doctor.

01:03:21.07
Jason Pargin
the the world is full of people you pass every day who need you and you would get tremendous satisfaction out of trying to help them and it's help you can offer and that your question of what was I put on earth for will go away very quickly it could say yeah I I was put on earth to to help these people I was put onto a planet full of people that need something anything. They need a friend. They need somebody to complain to. They need something. And the moment you realize that I think you are very far into solving your problem, of like whatever exit existential crisis you have. And here you have a main character in this book who it's clear does not see any meaning in his life and does not see a future for himself and does not kind of feels like he was born at the worst possible time. He's watching the world end. And I think

01:04:16.08
Jason Pargin
The first step toward maybe realizing what's actually going on. Started with encountering somebody who simply needed something from him, something very simple, something he could help with, which is help trying to chase down this this animal. So on the surface, it kind of seems like something to just kind of distracted them and on the way of doing this much more important thing. But I think in reality it is a moment of, oh, there's, you're in a world of proverbial lost lost bunny rabbits.

01:04:54.05
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah, and it's certainly a turning point in the transformation of you know the main character, Abbott.

01:05:04.43
michaeldavidwilson
But I mean, there's so much that you've packed into this that we haven't even began to cover because another thing that you'd jump into is swatting and then the dangers of online targeting and online bullying and then kind of reaction to that. And I wonder if swatting is a uniquely American phenomena because so obviously in in like the UK and in Japan, like the ah police don't have so many guns. So you'd you'd really have to have like an incredible situation for them to send the SWAT team round. But it seems like whenever I read about something once, I then see it turn up 10 times. And I think we've probably spoke about that phenomena

01:06:00.03
michaeldavidwilson
Before so you've got swatting in the book and then I saw the horror off of Brian Keene the other day talking about, you know, when he was a victim to swatting and it is this anything you've had any personal experience with or kind of heard of others?

01:06:18.64
Jason Pargin
No, ah other than it just seems like the most extreme manifestation of this like ah online culture and online just this ecosystem where if if somehow there's listeners who don't know what swatting is it's where you use a you can use software that will send a 911 call but will make it appear it's being sent from like you can spoof a fake phone number So, their 911 center will get a call that looks like it's coming from a particular house, and then yeah they will say, oh my God, i'm I'm in this house. My father has gone crazy. He's got a gun to his head. He says, if anybody even gets on the property, he's going to kill us all. In other words, they create a situation where the police would have to dispatch, not an officer, but a SWAT team.

01:07:07.99
Jason Pargin
guys in body armor because they've got to come in hard and fast armed to the teeth and helmets because armed armed man he's dangerous he's going to start shooting any moment and it is a prank that has gotten multiple people killed because again If you show up and you startle somebody, if they do have a weapon in the house or they show up at the door with something in their hand that looks like a weapon in the United States, there there's a real good chance they're going to shoot that guy. ah So a person has gone to prison for that or get like a swatting and prank that resulted in somebody dying. It specifically does. I'm not I wouldn't be shocked if there's other countries where it has occurred, but it is.

01:07:48.24
Jason Pargin
Something that does seem to play specifically into America's police culture, where because we're in a country where any home you show up at could have 30 seven guns inside of it. You just don't know. It's not like it's weird for an American household to have a gun in it and where the police know if they're going to show up and there's somebody armed and they already, according to the call, they're already shooting.

01:08:11.29
Jason Pargin
Yeah, they're not going to pull up and knock on the door. They're going to show up, you know, arm to the teeth and they're coming loud and suddenly and do that thing. That's what teams do. And the people who do this.

01:08:23.42
Jason Pargin
ah Either they're sociopaths or they're just so disconnected from it that they see it all as just Internet stuff like a video game, like it's happening on the screen, so it's not real.

01:08:35.58
Jason Pargin
and every once in a while it will become real because somebody will get shot because usually the whole thing that happens is they want the what they usually want to do is they'll do it to a streamer who's alive and streaming when the team or SWAT team arrives and it's like they come in and throw the guy to the ground and arrest him then they have to explain to the police no you it was a hoax I've been swatted ah but every once in a while it goes horribly horribly wrong and I Again, it's one of those things that if somebody had made this up in an old cyberpunk novel that you could use technology to imitate a fake emergency call to get a SWAT team to spin to a house, that seems like something out of a Neil Stevenson novel or something like that, or out of Blade Runner.

01:09:19.52
Jason Pargin
and just It's something that could only happen in this era. And I think in this culture, because again, if the police go to a home in Japan, they're pretty confident. The guy who answers the door is not going to have a gun like that's rare. He's not. he's Maybe he's Yakuza. Maybe he's got. But for the most part in the United States, you have to assume their arm. The same thing you pull over a car. You have to assume they've got a gun in the glove box because in the United States of America, it's not weird if they do. That's not a one in a thousand thing. It's like a one out of three thing.

01:09:53.55
michaeldavidwilson
Yeah, I recall at the start of the story, you know, talking about, you know, if you go on a road trip, you take a gun with you. That is kind of the way that it is for most Americans.

01:10:08.51
michaeldavidwilson
Which makes me wonder, does that mean that you both personally take a gun with you when you go on road trips? Is this an essential item that must be packed?

01:10:17.19
Jason Pargin
I do not. I do not. I never have a gun in the car, although if you are listening to this and are thinking of carjacking me, maybe I do. Maybe I'm just saying that you don't know that I am a gun owner.

01:10:27.95
michaeldavidwilson
There you go.

01:10:28.96
Jason Pargin
I'm from a part of the country where it's not weird to see a gun yeah because I have friends who like grew up in whatever L.A. and they think it's weird that I have guns in the house. and It's like. ah Where I'm from, everybody had a gun in the house. This is this is in, you know, rural ah America near Appalachia. And yeah, everybody had guns, a hunting gun, hunting rifles, ah pistols. It's just you got you got them for Christmas. It wasn't weird to have a gun. ah So but but no, but and when I talk to my chat with people from other countries, I think that's the weirdest thing in the world. It's like. Not weird here, not weird at all.

01:11:05.75
michaeldavidwilson
I mean, it's useful information for for me to have, you know, if I go to America and I go on a road trip, when I go to the car rental, and my am I meant to go to the gun rental as well?

01:11:16.31
michaeldavidwilson
And, you know, I mean, that go on Bob.

01:11:19.05
Bob Pastorella
No, I don't have a gun. um And I guess because of my legal situation that's over, I'm still several years away from being able to actually get a gun. I think I've gotten in Texas. I have a five year. Do I have to wait? Um, but I will say this and I've never needed a gun and I've had in my life, two guns pointed at me and, uh, don't let me get the gun away from you.

01:11:52.66
Bob Pastorella
Cause I do know how to do that.

01:11:55.87
Jason Pargin
Yeah, and by the way.

01:11:56.62
Bob Pastorella
Let's just say, I'll just, I'll just leave it at that. The last guy who pulled a gun on me regretted that decision.

01:12:02.98
Jason Pargin
Let me say anyone listening out there, we're being I'm being lighthearted about the gun situation. ah Don't ever introduce a gun to a situation that doesn't have a gun in it. You're not going to improve.

01:12:14.21
Jason Pargin
You're not going to improve things. If a confused drunk like bangs on your door, that's bad.

01:12:16.07
Bob Pastorella
Yeah.

01:12:19.41
Jason Pargin
You can call the cops or you can yell at the guy to go away. If you introduce a gun, And you pointed at him you like you decide you're going to be a badass, you know, come to your door with a gun. And now you've startled a drunk guy. And now he's going to, you know, maybe try to get that gun away from you and maybe he will. And now he has a gun. ah There are very few situations that are improved. There are very few conflicts that are improved by introducing a gun to it. And I I will spoil something in this story.

01:12:46.20
Jason Pargin
The guns in this story do not make anything better when they show up. ah that's they do not and if i If somebody broke into my house, it would have to be an extremely desperate situation.

01:12:50.30
Bob Pastorella
no

01:12:59.28
Jason Pargin
For me to go get a a firearm out of the closet they it would have to be truly like. This person is crazy and possibly armed himself because I think a lot of what people imagine have imagining happening in that situation is not what's going to happen.

01:13:11.86
Bob Pastorella
No. Mhm.

01:13:14.13
Jason Pargin
ah You know it is if you're pointing a gun at somebody in the dark. And how sure are you that this is that you're pointed at the right person? How sure are you that you can hit them before they can close the distance? um In most cases, you simply have gifted that person a gun ah because that person may be way better at fighting than you are. It's also possible that even if you shoot them, they may keep coming. That also happens. It is unpredictable.

01:13:42.30
Jason Pargin
And if you talk to somebody in law enforcement, they'll tell you the same thing. If you've not had lots and lots of training of what to do in those situations, you are not going to be useful. This is the same thing that it's like, well, you know, if there's, if you want to prevent school shootings, you need to arm the teachers.

01:13:59.63
Jason Pargin
Okay, for every for every one school shooting, yeah a badass teacher stops with a gun, you're gonna have you know an 86-year-old English teacher at her desk, and you're gonna have some troubled 17-year-old high school kid who's gonna figure out how to get into that desk and get the gun out of it.

01:14:01.10
Bob Pastorella
Thank you.

01:14:15.03
Jason Pargin
I think that's going to happen about 50 times for every one mass shooting you stop by having armed teachers. we We in America have this distinct idea that you can solve almost any problem by just arming people up even more than they were before. In my experience, that's not how it works. Usually if it's ah if it's not a gun situation, you making it a gun situation,

01:14:36.28
Jason Pargin
does not does not make things better. People get upset, they get angry, they get scared, and it escalates from there. As we have observed happening in many videos, you can go on your smartphone and watch right now of people being shot to death if that's why you want to spend your evening.

01:14:55.06
michaeldavidwilson
Well, it is a hell of a note to close out the episode on. But, you know, we're coming up to the time that we have together.

01:15:06.04
michaeldavidwilson
What is it that you're working on now, apart from promoting this book? And what is it that's next for you? And in fact, you did mention working on The John Dies at the end, so that that's probably

01:15:19.26
Jason Pargin
Early stages of that, because that's not due in the manuscripts, not due until the end of next year. It takes me two years to write a John Dies at the End novel, and even that's not very much. They tend to have extremely complicated plots that loop in on themselves. They are unbelievably difficult to to plan out and they have several thousand jokes in them that I have to write. They're difficult. So this will that will be due at the end of next year. That book will be out in 2026. So there will be a break of a couple of years. I had been on a schedule for like three straight years of releasing a book a year that has almost killed me.

01:15:56.14
Jason Pargin
I'm not, I'm not a young man anymore. I can't do that schedule anymore. So if I, if you see me going back to a schedule of releasing a book a year, it means that I am in some financial desperation and then I somewhere, somewhere I am very exhausted and unhappy. Uh, so the idea is that book will be out in 2026, no title for it yet. I barely even know how it ends. Uh, then that, then that will be the end of this book deal. And I presumably will.

01:16:23.68
Jason Pargin
ah God willing be offered another book deal. um Otherwise, the Zoe Ash novels those are in development as a TV series at Sony. i I don't know if it's actually going to become a show that's a multi step process that's full of nonsense but they have, they have bought the rights to that and have a bunch of ah prominent showrunners attached. There's always somebody trying to pitch a John dies at the end TV series or streaming series. Nobody has said yes yet, but somewhere out there, I guarantee you somebody's having a meeting maybe as we speak and maybe that would become a thing someday. Otherwise, I just continue to write the books and make my little videos and try to try to keep in touch with with my my readers and my fans and

01:17:13.25
Jason Pargin
the The book with this book is called, if you didn't hear, say the title, I don't even know if we said it in this episode. It's called I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. And by the time you hear this, it should be out and everywhere in all formats, including ah audio. No, I don't read the audio book they hired a professional. I have to say that because people keep asking if I read the audio. No, I mean, they hired somebody to do that. Thank God. That would be awful.

01:17:41.28
michaeldavidwilson
Okay and where can our listeners connect with you?

01:17:45.97
Jason Pargin
I am Jason Pargin K. Pargin, P-A-R-G-I-N, all one word, pretty much everywhere. That's my username on TikTok, ah Twitter, threads, Blue Sky, ah Facebook. or Otherwise you do, you search my name, you'll get those social media pages. TikTok these days is where everybody follows me. If it goes away, we'll all have to find ourselves somewhere else. And it probably will, even if they don't ban it,

01:18:11.62
Jason Pargin
It will fade away and some something new and even worse will come up a few years and then I will probably be on there unless I have a book somehow breaks out and sells millions of copies and then I can become a recluse like I've always wanted to be.

01:18:29.73
michaeldavidwilson
All right, do you have any final thoughts for our listeners and viewers?

01:18:37.06
Jason Pargin
just take care of yourselves. We've got an election coming up here in the United States. Uh, just don't let the news, your, your own mental health and your physical health is a precious resource. And every time somebody makes you upset, that takes a toll on your body. And you only have so much of that in you. And when someone has occupied your brain to make you worried or anxious or outraged or anything else,

01:19:01.38
Jason Pargin
That has taken a little bit of a toll. They have asked you something of you. You have absolutely every right to close out of the app and walk away.

01:19:13.52
Jason Pargin
They're not required to care about any of this stuff, any of it, because they don't care about you. So you have to, ah topic like most of all, look after your mental health if if following this news and obsessing over what's going to happen next, if that is destroying your ability to function,

01:19:32.63
Jason Pargin
Turn it off. Turn it off. You can't. The world will keep right on spinning with you without you staring at it. and well It won't end if you if you stop watching and you have to give yourself permission to do that. It does not make you a bad person. It doesn't mean you don't care. um It means that you have to take care of yourself first.