TIH 619: Jason Pargin on Writing Pop Culture References in Film and Fiction

Michael David Wilson 0:20
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 talking to Jason parjen about writing about pop culture references in film and fiction, amongst other things. Now Jason Park in is the New York Times best selling author of John Dies at the End and the ZOE ash series. He's the former editor of crack.com and his most recent book is I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom, which is currently for the month of June only at a very special price on Kindle. So head over to Amazon and get that for a bargain price right now. Before we talk to Jason, a quick advert break.

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Michael David Wilson 2:52
All right. Well, it is now time for Jason. Pardon on. This Is Horror. You Hey Jason, welcome back to This Is Horror.

Jason Pargin 3:07
So I normally don't keep up with celebrity news, but right now, as we're starting the show, there's a headline coming across Twitter where Britney Spears has the police were called on her because on a private jet she tried to light a cigarette. And I think all of us were shocked for the same reason, which is, can you not smoke on a private jet? You paid millions of dollars for a private jet. You seriously cannot light up a cigarette on your own private jet. If I paid that much for a private jet, I bet I better be able to shoot a gun on there, and for them to be fine with it, yeah,

Bob Pastorella 3:45
I better be able to shoot heroin on it.

Jason Pargin 3:50
I'm stunned that that is a crime. Like, she refused to put it out. It's like, yeah, I would too. It's a private like, haven't you seen video of like, a basketball team who won the NBA championship, and they're on their private flight, and they're all like, shoot, they've got cigars and stuff. Am I did I imagine that? Man, can you not stop saying things

Michael David Wilson 4:09
you did not imagine it. I mean, normally when someone's on a private jet, I feel more often than not, there is a cigar. Isn't that part of the experience? You know, you board and then you are past a cigar and a bottle of champagne. So this is perplexing. Not

Jason Pargin 4:29
trying to start us off on a tangent, but this is, this has been upsetting me, because it's like so you're saying, even if I become like a super famous author, if I write a book that sells like 20 million copies, and I can take a private jet to appearances. I don't smoke, but if I decide to, or if my guests want to, ridiculous Anyway, yes, thanks for having me on the show.

Michael David Wilson 4:54
Oh, my goodness, I wasn't even aware of that as this came in. We. In the last few hours, while in Japan.

Jason Pargin 5:02
It's, yeah, it's on Twitter. It's on Twitter right now, right? It's, it's like a big scandal, because it's like, she's out of control. The conservatorship ended, and she's lost her mind. She tried to smoke a cigarette on her private jet. It's like, yeah, I didn't know you couldn't do that either. So I'm sorry. I'm with her on this one. Yeah,

Bob Pastorella 5:20
yeah, I quit smoking, and now I want to go on a private jet and smoke, I mean, and I've been doing really, really good, but I'm like, you know, I could do one on a private jet, smoke one, I'd cough really, really bad, but it'd be worth it. Just to go. What are you gonna do, like, make the plane land

Jason Pargin 5:42
the back of a limo, and the limo got pulled over by the cops, and the cops were like, Oh, do you have an open container of alcohol back there, sir? And like, yeah, it's a limousine. We're all drinking champagne back here. That's why these exist. I don't know anyway, it's that's not what we're here to talk about. I realize that. But, I

Michael David Wilson 6:01
mean, it's a little bit apropos, because we are going to be talking about pop culture references and, well, there's one to begin with. But before we get into that main topic, it's been eight months since we last spoke to you. You know by now, I always ask you, what has been going on? What have been the biggest things that have happened to you, both personally and professionally, in that time?

Jason Pargin 6:28
Well, the schedule with the books coming out is I'm not on a yearly release. People may have that impression, because I had a couple of books come out a year apart. I found that in that time I cannot write a book in one year. So I am finishing the first draft of the next book in the John Dies at the End series. It would be the fifth one of those that is due at the end of this year, which means it's not going to be published until next year, around Halloween or October, whenever these are always fall releases. So fall 2026 is when that comes out, because of the glacier. Glacial pace at which publishing works, I am finishing a draft now in May of 2025 I will spend the next six months editing and revising it. I will turn it in. It's due by the end of the year. I'll turn in right before the holiday is God willing. There's not some crisis in my life. We will spend the first few months of 2026 doing edits and copy edits and formatting and choosing a cover and all of that stuff. And then preview copies will go after reviewers and influencers in the spring and the summer to try to get reviews and blurbs. And that's the long, multi year long process of getting a book out into into the world, and then once it's out, I will have to do an enormous, long press tour of somewhere between 50 and 100 podcast hits and other type interviews, and will struggle to remember what's in the book, because it will have been so long since I actually wrote

Michael David Wilson 8:02
it, and that's actually pretty relevant to writing pop culture references. I mean, if we think about the lead time from writing the book to it actually coming out, as you say, One Two years have passed. So how do you ensure, as somebody who includes quite a lot of pop culture, that it kind of feels fresh and relevant rather than being dated, even though, by the nature of how it works, it will be dated by the time it's come out,

Jason Pargin 8:38
I try very, hard to make sure that when I'm including a pop culture reference that it's already dated when I write it in, because I've had people ask me, well, like the first John Dies at the End book, there's references to Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit in there. Aren't you worried that the kids today are not going to know who that is. And it's like, okay, but Google exists, and I think if they don't know who that is, and then they stop reading the book, and they go Google Fred Durst and watch several of his videos that now makes my book 10 times funnier than what it was, because I have sent them down a rabbit hole of something they may not have known about, or they may only know Fred Durst as this elderly like Uncle type figure, and not realize the controversy around Woodstock 99 and all of that. So I don't really worry about that at all, and in fact, include some fairly obscure things, because I feel like, especially if you have something, that it's clear the way it's written, that it is of a specific time and place. When I read old, I don't know old detective novels from the 1970s or books from the CS Lewis books or whatever, and I see a reference to music. Or something that's clearly of the time. And it's like, I don't know what they're referencing there, but I can tell from context that they're comparing this guy to some famous radio host of the era, or something that's now long forgotten. I love to go look that stuff up, because it's, you know, it's a glimpse into that, into that era, and I feel like they weren't afraid of throwing that stuff in, even though Google didn't exist back then, it was just like, well, the future will figure it out. So I I try never to have a situation where, like, a plot point hinges on you knowing who some obscure comedian was, or some whatever, some pop culture phrase or catch phrase that was going around at the time. But I don't worry about throwing that stuff in, because I think, especially if you're of the same age as me, it's fun to see that stuff referenced in if you're not, I don't know it's, it's cool to go to go hunt that stuff down.

Michael David Wilson 10:58
See, it wasn't really the takeaway that was intended, but I'm now thinking, I wonder what the young generations think of Fred Durst like. What is their perception of him? Because, I mean, if you say Fred Durst, then I picture him in kind of the 90s, or maybe the early noughties. But you know, if you look at him these days, he's got this mop of gray hair. I'm I'm don't even know, is that his actual hair, or is it a wig? And he's got this insane handlebar mustache. It's like he's become a parody of a rapping grandfather. But I don't even know what, did the kids think of Fred asked,

Jason Pargin 11:43
I don't know if the kids understand any of the stuff that was controversial at the time, but has been around for so long like I'm confident that no one in Gen Z understands that when the Simpsons came out, there was a moral panic around that show the President came out against the Simpsons because it was so, like, edgy, and it's, it's animation, but it's so clearly adult, and the this family is so dysfunctional, and the father strangles his son, and that this was a huge deal. You were, you are rebellious and cutting edge for watching that show. And now it's, you know, the kids that go back and and look it up, because, of course, that show was canceled, you know, 25 years ago. It's long forgotten. I mean, can you imagine if it was still on? But now it's like, because it's been around so long, it's like South Park. It's so old and toothless. It's an institution, the idea that, and I think same thing with Eminem, who now is, was he 52 years old? I think he's my age. The idea of him like being the apocalypse and that people are terrified and want to ban the music is ridiculous, because he's this uncle. He's this his his children are old enough to wrap themselves. They're in. You know, he has adult children. So I think who these people were in the past is totally lost because, and like Snoop Dogg is Snoop does all these appearances with Martha Stewart. He has, like, a cooking show. He's at the Olympics. He's just this grandfatherly, you know, this cool uncle weed smoking uncle guys. Go listen to that music. Go listen to his first album. You have no idea.

Bob Pastorella 13:31
It's funny, because, like Trent Reznor just turned 60 years old. And, you know, so we have and I remember kids back when, when Nine Inch Nails was first coming out, and they wanted to be what they thought was like Trent Reznor. They wanted to hang out and do nothing. And it's like, you do realize that Trent Reznor, the creator of Nine Inch Nails, is out fucking working right now, he is actually doing something. He is not some slacker that you think that he just comes up with this stuff and just puts it out in 30 minutes. And so he's built this entire career around the work ethic. Yeah,

Jason Pargin 14:17
because he's not just doing albums, he's doing soundtracks. He's doing stuff that you don't even his name's not even attached to. He's doing anything. He's doing commercials and video game music. He's doing whatever project you know can will, will pay

Bob Pastorella 14:31
him, yeah, and that's, you know, I wanted to to ask, though, because this, this has come up a lot, and it hasn't come up recently, but it used to come up a lot more in the writing circles. Is like using POP references. Using pop references can the theory that it dates your work, and to me, the most common in. Answer. Rebuttal to that would be, is that every work of fiction is dated, every every story, every flash fiction, every anecdote, every novel, every epic, it's dated, whether you have pop references or not you have set this thing into a it's etched in stone. Once it's published, it is dated. The story is dated. Has that ever stopped you, or have you ever thought about that? It's like, Man, I'm maybe I'm including way too many pop references, and I should, I should kind of go more generic with with the references and stuff. Or do you lean into it,

Jason Pargin 15:41
I think what makes it feel dated is when you have an author trying to reference pop culture that they are not a part of or the familiar with, where it's like an older author inserting references to whatever YouTube Trends or something like that, in a way that's derisive and clear that they don't understand it, or don't know what it is, and they're kind of trying to either sound cool or they're trying to sound dismissive. But it's not them referencing a thing that they know and love. I think that comes across, especially if it's you know, if you'll see a sitcom, especially you look back and you'll see, you know, a sitcom, or it's like a middle aged white comedian complaining about this rap music. Well, now it, there's like no value in that, because it's just now rap music is for old white people. It's now it is like the rappers are 70 years old, so that that's something that's totally lost, where it's just a guy being cranky about it, because that stuff is going to become mainstream at some point, you know, at some point, like, Logan Paul is going to be the president. I think it's inevitable. So I think the one way you can go wrong is if you're talking about something you don't understand. But if I read like an old detective novel, and I see them talking about, like jazz music, like I know nothing about jazz or blues or any of that stuff, but it's clear they know it, and it's clear the character knows it. I love it, even though I don't know what they're talking about. I can't hear that music in my head. But their love of it, their knowledge of it, comes across. And even if it's somebody who's obscure, somebody who I'm never going to listen to. For me, it just adds flavor to it. I think what people find cringe, as the kids would say, is when somebody is trying to either latch on to phrasing or a pop culture thing that's not their own, or they're revealing that they don't know anything about

Bob Pastorella 17:38
it. I think, I think it's like it's even in horror fiction, we find it like Peter Straub uses a lot of jazz references, and he writes so authentically about these jazz references that I have spent hours looking up character, looking up musicians who did not exist because he made them up, but he wrote saw authentically and put them into people who were real. They played, you know, they mixed with this band and this band and so on, that those references, even though I didn't know who they were, obviously, to me, it did, it did. It dated that story. It dated that character, but it also gave it a sense of authenticity that you don't really see in fiction, that avoids any type of references at all. And I just, I just remember someone getting really, really upset, like on a forum or something, saying, Hey, don't, don't use POP references. That is good. It's going to date your story. I want my stories to be fluid. And I'm like do what? What do you mean? I don't think I could write without any type of pop culture reference or something. I just don't think I could do it.

Jason Pargin 18:50
Let me throw out a really good, good example for other people out there who are are our ages? How old are you guys? Remind me

Michael David Wilson 18:57
so I am 38

Bob Pastorella 19:00
I will be 58 next month.

Jason Pargin 19:03
Okay, people my age grew up watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, so these were not new, but every Saturday morning before school or whatever, this is what they would be, these bug bunny these, always these old Warner Brothers cartoons, and they were full of references to vaudeville and like big band music and opera stuff that I had no context for what they were referencing, but I could sense what the joke was. I they were, you know, because, again, it like Bugs Bunny chewing on that carrot. That's a Humphrey Bogart reference, I think, totally went over my head as a as a child, because, by the way, if you have rabbits, don't feed them carrots. They're not supposed to have them. That was something that he's imitating a movie character when he's he's doing that. It didn't matter, like everything, the fact and same thing, early symptoms, like the. Writers are referencing all sorts of you know, like Krusty the Clown, a local show where a clown is hosting a variety show. Kids today don't have that that is referencing a thing from the 1960s and 1970s that is referencing Bozo the Clown, that when you watch it, because the writers are referencing something they love and grew up with. It doesn't matter, because that made that character funny. It made that world come alive, because they were writing something that they knew, and it becomes timeless, even though the reference is long gone.

Bob Pastorella 20:34
Yeah, I remember the one with the with the little rodents, and it's like there was the honeymooners, and they had, I don't even think that Mel Bly, I think he may have done one of the voices, but they date, so they had a guy who sound just like Jackie Gleason, and other guys sound just like art Carney. And they were kind of doing like a honeymooner skit, and I didn't even know who the honeymooners were,

Jason Pargin 20:59
so I've never seen an episode of that show.

Bob Pastorella 21:03
I hadn't either until probably when I was a teenager. They started showing them in the afternoons, and I'm like, What is this? This? And that's a scene that's like, man, it's Jackie Gleason. That's the cop from a smoking a bandit, you know, the sheriff. And then I start going through these, these routines, and I'm like, going, Man, I remember watching that when I was a kid, but they it was, it was mice, it was little mice, you know, hey, Robby boy, hey, you know, it's just all this really crazy references. And it's like, yeah, this stuff's dated. I didn't get it at the time, but I still found it entertaining.

Jason Pargin 21:42
There's James Cagney references. There's stuff that's all over the all these like mafia movies, crime movies. There's some cartoon version of it that I know for a fact I never in my life, ever went back and watched the original. But as a little kid, I'm sitting there, seven years old, laughing my head off, and it's like, no, it's hilarious, because that guy talks funny. It's like, yeah, actually, he's talking like James Cagney or whatever. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 22:07
As part of my preparation for this conversation, I went back and read your 2012 release. This book is full of spiders, because I don't Well, since we're talking about pop culture, let's look at how a book is that you wrote over a decade ago, and actually a lot of the references, and I guess with it being in the John Dies at the End universe, they were very kind of timeless and well known in the sense that if you think about the media that you're referencing, it's things like Toy Story and GI Joe and Alice in Wonderland, Star Trek, Batman. I've got a whole list. The only thing on my list that I hadn't heard of was anal therapist six, which I did think, well, let's Google it. I think he made it up. Regretfully, I couldn't track it down. Yeah, but

Jason Pargin 23:00
that also it helps that pop culture has totally stagnated. So that when I think about, well, the Forgotten pop culture of my youth, like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, you know, those long forgotten franchises that surely the kids today have not heard of, it's like, oh no, studios are still milking all of that stuff for money. So a reference to Star Trek, any of those things, all those franchises are still around, Blade Runner, anything like that. It could be 50 years old. It's like, nah. It's probably still going. It's been rebooted a couple of times. They've changed out the cast, but or not. It could still be Harrison Ford at 86 years old, playing Indiana Jones as of a couple of years ago. So that does help too, that there was a time when I think we actually changed out the stuff people watched every couple of decades, and now now we just keep bringing it back. So guess what? Guys, all references are now timeless. They'll they'll still be doing skippity toilet 50 years from now.

Michael David Wilson 24:04
And I mean, I think as well, there seems to be a real revival for nostalgia, and particularly for things from the 80s. When you look at television shows like most famously, I suppose, Stranger Things. So it seems that people want this, I wonder if some of it is to do with this discontent about the current times that we're living in, that they want to kind of be transported back and forget, you know, the moment that we're in in history right now.

Jason Pargin 24:37
It's funny, because I one of my most popular Tech Talk videos is asking a question of, why? For example, if you watch a TV show that is from the 70s and that show is about the 50s, it is like it's about a totally bygone era, like. An alien land, you know, if you imagine how somebody dressed in the 1960s you're picturing like a hippie. And then if you imagine how somebody's dressed like the 1950s you're picturing like Mad Men. They're in a gray suit or whatever. If somebody from, you know, the night dressed like the 1960s showed up in a show set in the 1980s that would be a Halloween costume, like if a hippie from the 1960s from Woodstock showed up in Stranger Things, you wouldn't think that's just how that person dresses. You would think, Oh, they're wearing a costume making fun of that era. But if you watch an episode of a sitcom from 2005 20 years ago, they're wearing the same thing they're wearing today, and in fact, the only way to tell that it's set in a different era is the technology their phones are. They have the flip phones. And their computer monitors are fat instead of instead of flat screen, but the styles and the hairstyles, it's exactly the same. So the question I is asking was, why do people look the same when you used to be, you know, from one decade to the next, it used to be radically different. And I actually don't necessarily know the answer to that, because, you know, Stranger Things set in the 1980s that's 40 years ago that that, you know that is a long enough time ago. But if you had a show that was a period piece set in 2006 that almost wouldn't be worth it.

Michael David Wilson 26:27
Yeah, it's an interesting point. And I think, yeah, there's a few things that have kind of come and go, like maybe flannel shirts, lumberjack shirts used to be more popular, kind of 1015, years ago. But most

Jason Pargin 26:43
somebody wearing one in public, you wouldn't think they were wearing a costume, right? Think, oh, that person came out of a Halloween party where they did 90s like, I can find a guy in the fall dressed in a flannel shirt, you know, out there that could be from the stage of a concert that Nirvana was playing. I don't know it's so that I think the like the nostalgia for the 1980s it's almost like that's the last era that they think of as being radically different, because the esthetic of Stranger Things with the, you know, the brightly colored the neon clothes, or the pastels and the shopping mall, the stuff that that they think is stereotypical 80s. As somebody who was there in the 80s, that's not what it looked like, but it's like, That's how far back you have to go to find something truly different, where, if Stranger Things took place again in 2005 it would just be like, like, okay, so they don't have smartphones. Like, that's the only difference. Otherwise, it just looks like they wouldn't even have to have a costume budget. They could just show up wearing whatever they're wearing, the only thing that might look out of places, the the leggings that women wear instead of jeans. But

Bob Pastorella 27:52
most of the time that fashion or music or technology hits general populations, it's it used to be. It's probably not so much now, but in the past, it was. It took a long time. I mean, we were, I remember back in 1988 1989 we used to go to what I guess we'd call a rave, or things like that. And they had these, these clubs that played a lot of post modern industrial music and, you know, skinny puppy and bands like that. And we, if you're hearing this stuff for the first time, you think that it's brand new, and then you come to to realize that it's that it's not new at all, that some of it is actually 10 years old. But because you're experiencing it for the first time, you feel like that, everything that you experience is a brand new thing. It just takes a long time, I think, for pop stuff in the past, the nostalgia to take on people in the early 80s dressed like they were in 1977 so that's, you know, that's something that that if you go back and look, you'll see that the closing trends really took about five to six, seven years before they shifted and everyone started wearing different clothes. But you look in the early 80s, and it's really you're seeing clothes from the late 70s, especially in my area, my neck of the woods, where everything was slow back then, it took us forever to get stuff, you know, because they just, you know, Bible Belt conservative Texas. Y'all ain't wearing shorts. That short young lady. You're just not gonna go out in the house like that, you know. And it just took a while for things to to morph and change. Now, like what you're talking about, I never thought about that. Got people. We haven't changed fashion in in 20 years.

Jason Pargin 29:54
I mean, I have shirts in my closet that are literally 20 years old. I they're just, I don't mean they're i. Bought them from the air. I mean, I still have them, because I not as like a piece of vintage clothing. It's just, it's like, well, it's didn't have very many holes in it. I can still wear that. But no, and I would say that if you went back and took up and photographed my childhood home in the 80s, it never looked like the 80s. It was brown paneling. It was brown like furniture and that brown Paisley, tan Paisley, whatever it was, not neon, that stuff we saw in movies, movies that were set in LA, but the actual 80s presented in Stranger Things. That's a movie set in terms of what an actual small town in Indiana, I think, is where that set. It never looked like the 80s. The kids were never wearing the neon. My classmates could not afford that. There was, like, two girls that could, their parents could afford to buy them those clothes. Everybody else was wearing, the stuff that, yeah, like you said, would have been the same thing. When I say from the 1970s I don't even mean like, bell bottoms and fashionable stuff from I'm not talking about Saturday Night Fever, because we also couldn't afford that stuff. It's the same jeans and T shirts and the same jeans and white t shirt that a guy could have been wearing in 1950 high school student or 1990 or in 2010 or probably today. And you wouldn't, you wouldn't snap your head around to see them, because the whole idea of having, like the cutting edge fashion again, the what we were watching in movies and on TV changed that in terms of what we actually owned. No, it was we looked like the same as we looked 10 years, 10 years earlier, because in many cases it was the same clothes.

Michael David Wilson 31:36
Yeah, it's kind of crazy how quick time goes and then, like, you know, I've noticed before, like, whoa, this suit jacket I've got is now 15 years old, but it, yeah, it doesn't, you know, if I put that on when I go to work, people aren't like, whoa. Is it retro day? There's no kind of bat batting of eyelids. I think, really, it might just be a little bit boxier than all my other very similar suit jackets, but that's it.

Jason Pargin 32:07
I also realize there are women. If you have women in your audience listening to them, we're driving them crazy because they're like our fashions change non stop. And in fact, there's entire industries of fast fashion where the thing you were wearing last fall is now ridiculous, and you have to throw it out. I'm telling you that if I my the winter jacket that I bought 10 years ago got a hole in it, and so I went to shop for a new one. It's the exact same ones on the shelf. They have not changed them. They literally it's the exact same one, only it's now made in China instead of, like, somewhere. It's, like, slightly cheaper the way it's made, but the style is identical with men's fashion. It's, yeah, they've decided we're just going to wear the same thing forever,

Michael David Wilson 32:53
I think, as well, like as men as a comfort in getting the same item, like when I've replaced my lung black coat with another similar lung black coat. I get a bit irritated if I can't find one that's almost identical to the one that I'm replacing. So yeah, there's a comfort in it, and just not wanting to make these choices really and think about like, Oh, should, should it be this cut or that cut? Just, just give me the exact one, like, like Luther in the BBC crime series, where there are shots of his wardrobe and it's literally the same outfit again and again, yeah? And that's the dream. Yeah, yeah. We you mentioned. So you know, this video going viral on tick tock. And of course, since we last spoke, tick tock was banned for about 24 to 48 hours. You know when that happened? I was thinking about you because this is one of your big areas of of business. This is your livelihood. Now, this bizarre journey that you've taken where tick tock is responsible for a significant portion of your income. So I mean that happening. How did that affect you? How is that affecting you? Now, have you had to adjust the way that you're doing business, so the way that you're operating on Tiktok, for fear that something like that might happen again,

Jason Pargin 34:29
I spent six straight months and several 1000 hours of labor porting the operation over to Facebook, which, believe it or not, is the fastest growing social network now. So I now have 300,000 followers on Facebook. I have another 150,000 on Instagram. I have another 30,000 on threads. Another is 60,000 on Twitter. I basically had to, because I people don't know I had, like, 600,000 followers on Tiktok. Still do, but they're like, a lot of the monetization dried up there because the advertisers thought it was banned, so they left. So like, a lot of the ad rates and the payment stuff went down. So I spent half a year and a stupid amount of effort. I do not have a staff. It's just me porting over all of my videos, changing some of the videos to fit their format and their time, length and what their algorithm prefers, and moving a lot of my big hit videos and uploading them there. And I applied for monetization and got it so I now am in a position that I can lose Tiktok if I have to. And but this has been my whole life, since the internet was invented. Frankly. I mean, I started blogging in the late 90s, and I think the first time the platform I was using, they just, it just went out of business, was in like 2000 and I was one day is like, Oh, they can just do that. They can just delete their entire system. And it turns out, oh yeah, they can, and they don't have to warn you. So my life has been a series of hopping from this platform to, you know, I blogged on blogger for a while, and then on WordPress, and then I had my own server for a while, and then they invented social media, and I had a MySpace space for a while, but played the music, and I did the formatting, and then that died, and then I had Facebook, and then Twitter, and then you just hop from thing to thing. It's like I compared to those levels on Mario where you're running along a bridge and it's disappearing behind you, then you can't stop running because it's crumbling, and so you just keep going. So the platforms I'm on now, at some point, those will also go away. I started a YouTube account. I have like 12,000 followers there. I've applied for monetization. If those other things die, I like to think YouTube will still exist, and at some point a year from now, they'll invent some new goddamn thing, and I'll have to go on there, and they will want a different format of videos of a different length, maybe with a different camera. And then I'll have to do that, and that probably will be what I have to do until I finally just get exhausted and fall over and die.

Michael David Wilson 37:15
Yeah, wow. I unbelievable that so many people are kind of going back to Facebook, but it seems that everything else has got so just fragmented and chaotic that, you know, Facebook is, is the thing that people are going back to. It's honestly making me wonder, you know, I got rid of my Facebook account three years ago now, but the more people say Facebook is the one working for them is like, am I gonna be roped in? I think I might have to rejoin.

Jason Pargin 37:54
They. What they did was they pivoted the video and they launched reels, which is their vertical video thing, and they just because they're still the biggest, and have always been the biggest, they can just the advertisers stay there, and the big celebrities stay there, and there's a lot of like, it's mostly, I think, extreme right wing cranks or whatever. But that's where the audience is, and the audience to Tiktok has been steadily going down. It getting banned has not helped, but Facebook has not. Facebook has maintained their position, which I think that's where it helps to have a trillion dollars, or however much that company is worth. But no, I gave I gave Facebook up for dead years ago, I thought it was there was a point where it's just like an old folks home for the the elderly to share memes about how vaccines are bad or whatever. I used to never check it, but when Tiktok got banned briefly, and by the way, it is still absolutely banned, they just it's just this zombie platform because Donald Trump wrote an executive order telling the Justice Department not to arrest anybody, even though it is absolutely against the law to run Tiktok. It is on the books. It is in violation of federal law. He just wrote an executive order saying, yeah, just don't, don't prosecute. That is not how the law works whatsoever. That has never been how it works, but it's just out there, so at any moment they could turn it off. So I just went around and looked up like, Well, where do you go? And Instagram does not pay creators, but it's also very big, but that's just Facebook. So it basically Facebook rewards you. If you post on Instagram and you link your accounts, they'll feed both of them, so I just kept focusing on posting to those and watching those analytics instead of tech talks. And I know that this is all very boring, hearing me talk about the business of running a social media promotion operation just to get people to buy my books, but this is the business of. Writing books. Your job is not to write the books. Your job is to sell the books. Writing the books is the easy thing you do on the side, getting people to pay money for your book. That's the other 99% of the effort. To be clear, it's also very, very hard to write a book. Writing the book, you're just 1% of the way to being someone who can write books full time, because the other 99% is now trying to convince a bunch of strangers, one to read something that's 100 and some 1000 words long, but also to pay money for it. That is a difficult task.

Michael David Wilson 40:35
Oh yeah, and I mean, when you went back to Facebook, maybe there are some listeners that are like, for fuck sake, you still talking about No, I want to know, did you reactivate an old account, or did you literally start from scratch?

Jason Pargin 40:53
No, I had an account from the I signed up for forever ago. It's under my name, and I just occasionally would go in there and post updates just to keep it alive. It's the same reason why I had a YouTube channel that had no videos on it, but I had started that account forever ago. I have accounts that I've started on basically all of these obscure platforms that I never post to just I'll go there to reserve my username so that nobody else can steal it, because I'm basically Jason pardon, or Jason K pardon anywhere, and just I keep those contacts warm for in case I have to flee there at some point in the future and see that's the thing is, I didn't do that with Tiktok when Tiktok came along years and years ago, and it was Like, it's this platform where it's teenage girls lip syncing to songs. I was like, No, that's it. This is where I'm stopping. I I agree to do stupid Twitter, I agreed to do Facebook, I agreed to do all these other I'm not doing this tick tock dance stuff. And I was very slow to get on to that. And I was, I had to be basically dragged by friends and colleagues on to that platform just in 2022 I joined it late when it was already on the decline, and that became the biggest platform I'd ever had. Because, again, for people who don't know like the audience I built on Tiktok, that's a bigger audience that I've had for anything else I've done, combined, all of my books, all of my articles are cracked, all the podcasts I showed up on, nothing has been like what happened with Tiktok? So now that I'm like, when I go to Facebook, I'm just, it's the same video operation that I was doing with Tiktok. I'm just uploading them there on their reels platform. And in general, Facebook has made their system last few years very video friendly, because they were trying to compete with Tiktok, and now they're going to win. Because, again, the origin of this Tiktok ban is Mark Zuckerberg lobbied Congress saying, Hey, you should ban my competitor. And they said, Sure, in exchange for some very large donations to our campaigns, we will, we will ban this, this evil corporation that is doing the exact same thing you're doing. What else can you do? So now I have joined Mark Zuckerberg evil campaign to dominate the space, because that's where my readers are. I I'm trying to, I am trying to reach people in between me and my readers. Are these platforms. It's one. It's either one or the other. I can go through Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or the Communist Chinese government. Pick, pick your evil platform owner. They're all standing in between me and my and my readers.

Michael David Wilson 43:39
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned them, and it seems like surely, there's an opportunity for Jeff Bezos to also launch his social media. The worst

Jason Pargin 43:49
one yet, I know, yes, the most addictive, most, most ruthless platform yet. You know, he's out there. He's got to have it in mind. It's going to be the most soulless. It's going to use AI and it'll, it'll read your thoughts. It's going to be a nightmare, and I will be as soon as he launches it, I will reserve the Jason K part and username, because this is it. It's, this is you have to go through somebody. I don't have the, I don't have the billions of dollars that cost to build my own social media platform. I had somebody send me an angry piece of email months ago saying, you because they're complaining that I spend so much of my time like making videos on Tech Talk like good literature will sell itself like you should just focus on writing books. It's like, No, it won't. I'm telling you, it won't. Herman Melville had to have a day job his whole life because Moby Dick sold 3000 copies while he was alive. It didn't become a mega seller classic until he was dead. It's he had. He worked as a clerk in an office after the book, the book came and went, and critics were like, yeah, if you like whale stuff, it's fine. But. No, it did not sell itself. It became fashionable decades later because academics and people started to talk about it and it, it became fashionable to read Moby Dick, but he did not reap the benefits of that.

Bob Pastorella 45:13
Now, there's a lot of people that are that get on social media now that, like, no matter what platform you have, there's going to be, like, bad people, you know, you get somebody who posts on that, they make a post on sub stack, and then there's always gonna be some randos like, hey, sub stack, you know, caters to Nazis. Every social media platform caters to Nazis, Yeah, unfortunately, it fucking sucks. You're gonna have to learn how to navigate around it. You know, that doesn't mean that that I'm a Nazi, or Michael's a Nazi, or even Jason's a Nazi. Matter of fact, I'm pretty confident that none of it here are actually Nazis.

Jason Pargin 45:53
No but every every alternative they suggest, it's like, Okay, give me five minutes. I'll find you a Nazi on here. I'm telling you right now, there's nobody that police. Is it that tightly? Because, again, I used to run it. You guys use WordPress like you tell me there's not some neo Nazi runner to wordpress blog out there. I guarantee you. It's just that's not the way it works. It's, I'm sorry,

Bob Pastorella 46:17
yeah, it's like some social media purity test that we have to jump hurdles through, and it's like, you know, I and I kind of, I would, kind of, I would love to go back to Facebook. I don't think I can, though. I don't think because my I got banned from there. I had an account, I deactivated, I reactivated it, and I never posted anything on it for months, I never did anything. And so now I think there's like, maybe 20 days left for me to appeal that I'm an actual human being, when Facebook actually will give me an AI friend. But I have to prove that I'm fucking real. So you know to me that that's, I don't know that that's probably the reason for why don't. Why is it pastoral on Facebook? Well,

Jason Pargin 47:09
I'm telling you right now, if you try to get through to their customer service for help, you're not gonna, you're not gonna reach anybody. You would think a trillion dollar company would have somebody you could get on the phone and walk through getting your account back. No, I can promise you, they you will never talk to a person because I've had a large account with money at stake. I can't get anybody even on email. If something goes wrong, they've got, they got, like, some, some self help thing, the and that if you click on it, it's just going to be a 404, error all of these companies. It's, there's nobody running them. It's just a series of algorithms, of software. There's nobody, there's nobody at the helm.

Michael David Wilson 47:51
Yeah, well, I presume if I went back to Facebook, it would be kind of the public. This Is Horror page. I might be dating myself, and you're like, what? There's no public and private page anymore. Like, I don't know, because it's been three years since, since it happened, but I'm assuming I could just log back into that my my previous private page. That's presumably no good. But, yeah, the fan page, as it

Jason Pargin 48:20
were, yeah, it's if you can remember your passwords. I'm telling you, anybody out there, if you're worried about your the platform you're on going away, Facebook still exists. Any of those keep them active if you're in this line of work, if you've got a podcast, if you've got a band, anything like that. And you and you think that Facebook is from 10 years ago. That's true, but they've come back, and they apparently will be the survivor after these other ones die, or at least for a while. But this is the nature of it. If you're having to promote yourself, if you're not a superstar that has a team of people to promote for you, this is the life you have to stay on top of where the people are and which platforms are active. It's an absurd amount of your time and energy that goes into this part of it. I hate to say I'm not happy about it. Nobody's happy about it again, nobody. Nobody wants this for their life. It is if you do not have, you know, money to buy an ad during the Super Bowl. The only other way to reach this number of people, this is how you have to donate an absurd amount of your time to one of these platforms, or in my case, all of them,

Michael David Wilson 49:33
yeah, yeah. It's interesting, because I know I was being efficient getting off Facebook. But you know, what's the reality now? The reality is that I put something on X, I put it on blue sky, I put it on Fred's. I'm just copy and pasting everything, changing if I've tagged somebody to their unique username for that. So I might as well at least add Facebook back. Into the mix. So stand by everyone. Three years later. Oh, This Is Horror back. But I, I mean, I don't think, you know, I don't have such a platform that I need to make a fanfare about. Hey, fireworks going off. I'll just start posting as if i i put something up yesterday, and we'll see if anybody engages with it.

Jason Pargin 50:26
Yeah, and I again, this is even if you're not in the business. I think this is relevant to everybody listening this, because in general, there's so much stuff out there in terms of things people can be playing or watching or listening to trying to find the stuff that's your stuff, the things that will connect to you, is kind of a nightmare. And for example, all of my friends have podcasts. I am in friend, you know, friends with many people who make their living with podcasts, even if they're not rich off of it, they can pay the bills with it. But the process of trying to find new listeners with a podcast kind of a nightmare. The platforms don't make it easy. They like to promote the same few gigantic names at the top. And occasionally you'll be like, there, we're going to push Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro and, you know, Theo Vaughn and these guys like that. And then occasionally, a superstar celebrity will enter the space, and now they're all pushing Conan O'Brien's show, and you're competing with that. So I I sympathize with you and everybody in your space, because none of the platforms make it easy for somebody who's kind of not. I'm not saying you're a nobody, but you're not an existing celebrity, and you're trying to, you know, you're trying to put your show out there the platforms and like Spotify, they don't do a good job of pushing your show out to people who may like it. It's just not, you know, it's not kind of the way it works. So you wind up having to go out and try to find people on social media or whatever. And I think some fans wonder like, Well, why do you why do you bother? Why do you spend so much time doing that? Part of it just may focus on making the show good. I'm telling you, that's not enough. The platforms where you're putting the show up on, like episodes don't go viral on those platforms. You have to, like, find some other place where people can talk about it.

Michael David Wilson 52:26
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's trying to get that balance as well, to try and get new listeners, but at the same time, not isolate old listeners by incessantly, you know, promoting and asking people to review, because, of course, if you review, then supposedly Apple podcast will put you up the rankings. But yeah, for podcasting, for writing, is it's just this wild game. And as you say that they're pushing people like Joe Rogan who who we know he really needs to expand his audience. So thank God that they're they're doing that.

Jason Pargin 53:09
Yeah, I know that everybody can say, because there's musicians out there listening to this and saying, Well, it's the same thing in in the world of music, they're going to push the artists who they already know are huge. And so you are trying to find a way to go big on, on what on YouTube, like, you know, someplace where you've, you know, where, separately, people can talk about your music. But it's not, you know, it's not like the old days, where it's just in your region, you're going to be able to, like, play small venues, or whatever you're hoping that your song will become a hit on Tiktok, like that was the thing with Tiktok, you'll have some snatch of 15 seconds of a song that may be obscure and maybe from somebody who and then tries to cash in on that. But the process by which you find your fans and the people that were love your music. It's changes from year to year, and everything about how entertainment works, everything that you watch, everything that you consume, it's all based on these companies trying to decide what to feed you. So if you know again, there's people who are confused why somebody like me spends 85% of my time and energy promoting on social media and then 15% writing and editing the books. It's like there's no natural mechanism for people to just find your book. It doesn't work like that, that you have to separately go out and then find people on a social media platform who are not there to find books necessarily, and reach them that way, and you're almost doing an end around but everything you consume is has gone through some kind of a filter like that. It's the same thing you know on YouTube, and you know you have a piece of software that's trying to predict what you're going to want to watch. Age, and they may be pushing again, some right wing anti Vax documentary on you, because they've decided you're the right demographic. But behind the scenes, there's an ocean of creators jockeying to figure out, how can I get YouTube to show my video to people that don't already follow me, like, how do you wait? How do I get them to show it to to new people? And it's just kind of a nightmare.

Michael David Wilson 55:26
Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, of course, talking about promoting things, one of the reasons that we're having this conversation mentioning it now almost an hour in, is because of my new book, daddy's boy, I've got these kind of series of tangent conversations, so first of all, should have done this at the start, but thank you for providing such a wonderful blurb for

Jason Pargin 55:53
it. Yeah, and I try to never turn down. People ask me to give like the birds. People are not in the biz. It's where there's a little quote on the bank of the book. The only time I don't give it is if I read the book and it turns out it's just terrible, and then I have to, like, pretend that I didn't get a chance to read it, or whatever. But you obviously wrote, you know, you knew it's the exact kind of book that I like, and the type of thing I'm into, where you start with a premise and then it just becomes absolute, nightmarish chaos. And if you've ever had a family member like is described in this book, without spoiling things too much, you will recognize this where you are. You are by years, not the adult in the relationship, but you are actually the adult in the relationship, and you're speaking to a much, much older person who is the child in your relationship. This people who have had that experience with anyone, be it a father, anyone else, will see their own lives and this very silly, Amplified version of it. But I'm I'm not any any older family members of mine out there. I'm not talking about you specifically. I'm talking about a hypothetical other older person who acts like a child that I've had to maybe deal with maybe may or may not have I don't want anybody complaining to me that I'm airing out my grievances. I'm just saying it is a somewhat universal experience, at least for some of us out there.

Bob Pastorella 57:25
And I am talking to the people who are like that in my family. You know who you are,

Michael David Wilson 57:33
and I mean, before you were saying about, look, unless you've got, like, a massive budget for advertising. You know you need to be on those social media platforms. Speaking of which, I mean, for the first time, really, I've started talking about Jeff Bezos. In fact, I've started experimenting with Amazon ads specifically for daddy's boy, because I don't have all the books that I've written. This is the one that's kind of hardest to put in a neat genre, and also, if you were, it's a little bit outside, you know, the horror genre, and what I've done before. So I started doing Amazon ads, and a lot of people recommended to go for the automated ad campaigns. But Amazon algorithms, they don't know where to put daddy's boy is an absolute mystery to them. So I mean that the closest to the audience I've got is when it pushes it to people who are searching for horror comedy. Okay, there could be some crossover there, but I've seen it push to anything with daddy in the title, from, you know, erotica to children's books. And it just seems to be baffling for the Amazon algorithms to even know what to do with it. So I would say that I've had limited success with that so far. Probably more emphasis on limited rather than success. But is that something that you've experimented with yourself the Amazon advertising or to

Jason Pargin 59:21
you in the past, in the past, there's no platform. There's no ad platform. I've not tried at some point to see if I, if I sold enough books to make it worth it, whether you're talking about Google ads, since at one time I you know in you could use be able to buy space on Goodreads. I've done all of them. None of them have really worked that well for me, I don't think to the point where it seemed like the amount I was spending versus the number of books I was I was selling, but for example, the book that I was promoting last time I was on here, I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom that got flagged as. Science Fiction everywhere for mysterious reasons. That was not how the publisher sent it out. That was not in like the metadata of the stuff we pushed out. Some reason, it got tagged with that on Goodreads and Amazon and in some bookstores chains, they have it in science fiction section. There's no spaceships. It doesn't take place in the future. There's no robots. There's no science, Fi. Sci Fi, in this bit, maybe the title something about it sounded sci fi. Maybe some random intern just flagged that as that at some early stage, and then it got pushed down to all these other platforms, because nobody really cares. And I'm not, you know, I'm not a nobody. This is a Macmillan release, like I'm a best selling New York Times, Best Selling Author. I've had books get turned into movies. You would think that, wow, this guy's a big shot. He could just pick up the phone and tell Mr. Amazon, hey, fix it. No, you can't. That's none of us can. It doesn't if you get to where you're big enough to do that at some level above me, apparently. So this is writers will always feel like peasants, I think, to some degree, in any process. And when you're trying to promote you're trying to get people to buy it, you're trying to get stores to stock it, or whatever, because, for example, you don't find my books at Target or WalMart, for the most part, you're not going to find them at the grocery store. I'm not one of those authors, you know, I'm not James Patterson. You're not going to go to Kroger. And then next to the meat section there's, you know, a bunch of his books. It's that's not me. So all of these things you try to do to promote, they always treat it like, Okay, you're just some weirdo trying to publish their manifesto, no matter how big you get. I think, unless you're a superstar, you know, then you're, I don't know, it's almost like they're, I'm not saying they're not trying to sell your book, but they're not trying super hard to sell your book. It's kind of like either your book is already popular or you're just bothering us. And so I don't know, I there's some like on my Kindle screen. When it goes into sleep mode, it shows an ad, and it's always for some book and and a lot of times it is some like, self published, like a 299, ebook. And I just always think, man, what did the author pay for that? Like, are the is it working for them? Are they me? Are they selling a bunch of books this way? Because they, like, paid for the Kindle sleep screen, a full, full screen thing of the cover of their book, and it's like, it's, I don't know. And every time I look at I think, should I be doing that? I wonder if I could do that. What if I can get the publisher to do it? Or could I do it out of pocket? I have no idea, because, again, the way I promote is incredibly inefficient. I've said on videos before that when I do a Tiktok video about my book, like, specifically with an excerpt or talking about the book, for about every 2000 views, I'll sell a copy of the book. Like, that's pretty reliable. So if I have a video does 40,000 views, I'll sell 20 copies of the book by 20, not 20,020 copies. And then if I have a video that's totally unrelated, just like some video I'm talking about movies or something, I'll sell a copy for about one copy for every million views of the video. So if a video goes super viral, gets 5 million views, I'll sell five copies of the book off that. Because what you're talking about someone at Tech Talk is them watching your video, going to your profile, clicking on your links, seeing the list of books, clicking on the Amazon link, reading the description and thinking, Oh, that sounds interesting. I'll go ahead and buy that. That's a one, literally, a one in a million. Action on tick tock. Not as bad on Facebook. Facebook, you can actually have the URL where people can click on directly face, you know, take back, you don't So, but the I just those of the numbers, and I just work in volume. I just do a video, one or more videos every day. And just through sheer numbers, eventually it all adds up selling books 510, and 15 and 20 at a time.

Michael David Wilson 1:04:24
Yeah, yeah. It's incredible the amount of hours that have to be put in just Yeah, to make a living. Because as as you say, you know, if you don't, then Herman Melville, Moby Dick, that's kind of not what anybody kind of wants to have happen. And I mean in terms of the MIS classification of books you spoke about, the latest one being put into the Sci Fi genre, that kind of thing has happened to me numerous times. So I think I've said before. Order with their watching that Bob and I wrote together, which is an occult horror book, because there is a dancing scene. It's put into erotica so often, and I don't know what to tell you, but if you read that book hoping to get off, then you are going to be very, very disappointed, and

Jason Pargin 1:05:24
leaders blame you for that, because they come in feeling like they were promised something, like we can laugh, but they come in expecting something, and they don't get it. They're going to reflect that in their reviews. They're going to hold that against you as to whether or not to buy any of the other books, because it comes off like you misrepresented something as like, No, trust me, I I begged them to change it, and they just they wouldn't return the message. I don't even think anybody checks those messages

Michael David Wilson 1:05:52
well with that one now, so I tried to enroll. They're Watching in the Amazon advertising because I don't look this is easier to classify, so maybe I'll have more success. And I basically get an automated message saying, Sorry, we can't accept erotica for our adverts, like it's not fucking erotica. Please help me and Bob send a horror book. So as you say, you know, I could try and contact Amazon, but, oh, actually, I'll probably get a kind of this page doesn't work, so, so it's just done until Amazon decide to not classify it as erotica, which is probably never and then with daddy's boy. Luckily, it's not happening often, but occasionally it turns up in the lawyers and political humor section, because there is one reference in, I think, like page three, where just a character says he's looking to get a loan, and then there's a reply, lawyers and landlords, thieving bastards, the lot of them, and they decided that that was enough to put this in legal and political humor.

Jason Pargin 1:07:13
Do you think it's using AI to scan the text? Because you're uploading the thing to candle, so it's got access to the text. You think it's using AI, just scan, quickly, scan through and it's looking for keywords. Because what they're trying to avoid, I think they're trying to avoid the author putting their book in, like, a more popular genre than it actually is. So like, no, no. We will decide what genre it is. But I wonder if they're just using a bot and just using an AI, just quickly skim it in a microsecond. It's like, okay, we've detected law, lawyer, whatever. All right, that this is we're putting next to John Grisham. It's a John Grisham legal thriller.

Michael David Wilson 1:07:51
Yeah, I think that must be part of it. And I suppose, like in Amazon's defense, like in the keywords, I have made clear. Look, this is a dark comedy, and it is. I mean, if I look mostly now, it's in the dark comedy, it's in the dark humor section. It's in horror comedy, it's in horror parodies and satire. So it's in the right ballpark, but just as a kind of third obscure category. It keeps going into lawyers and humor, and it's occasionally in the charts there, I suppose, depending on how the other books that they've possibly falsely put in that category are getting gone. But I do think it must be some sort of AI and scanning it, because particularly if you were to take the first 10% of the book, there are references to to the legal case, and that there's a legal case for a cat custody battle as well. So you know, it's got lawyer, it's got solicitor, it's got custody battle. Amazon are like, this is, says legal humor right here.

Bob Pastorella 1:09:04
You should lean into that. I mean, like, if it becomes like, if, let's say like, a book becomes like a big time bestseller in legal and it pushes all the other books up, right? And you end up being like, number three or number five or something like that. You mean, like, currently number three in legal thrillers. What the fuck you could lean into it? I will

Michael David Wilson 1:09:29
lean into it, being in the top three in any category.

Jason Pargin 1:09:34
Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah. But if you get a big five publishing deal or whatever, I'm telling you gotta be the same thing. It's it does not matter. The platforms are too big and they're too understaffed, and they don't care. They really don't. It's your job to sell it. And even though they supposedly provide tools and all that stuff that, in theory, would make any author be able to like promote their. And work on the platform. It's the system is not there for you, it's there for other people.

Michael David Wilson 1:10:06
Well, we've got a question from Patreon regarding pop culture. So this is from Eric, and they say, why does it seem so difficult to write a convincing pop culture reference for a fictional reality future or otherwise like, what would the hawk to a joke of the hunger games universe be,

Jason Pargin 1:10:36
right? And in fact, that's the weirdest thing you'll notice about almost any fictional universe is that they don't have pop culture, like if you watch the Disney Star Wars Show and or they have very brief glimpses of like, what TV is like in the Star Wars universe, which, prior to now, was not a thing. The idea that they have media that they watch, it's like, well, what movies does Luke Skywalker watching? Yeah, you actually show him in his room, and he's like, 20 year old Luke Skywalker, like playing like a toy jet because he has no TV to watch, and there's no there's no Internet, and for the most parts, because when they try to imitate it, it just looks weird and it doesn't sound convincing, then you try to write like, well, what music would they have in that universe? Or what would opera look like? What would theater look like? And for the most part, they kind of try not to show it. There's that one of the Star Wars prequels where they go to like this opera, and there's just, like, a bunch of bubbles floating around, and it's like, yeah, I can see that. That's that what entertainment is in the alien worlds, they've just got, like, giant bubbles that float around and make sounds or whatever. But yeah, because what you're trying to do is create something that sounds like the kind of thing other people would be into in this other world. And it's like, well, if I was capable of writing that, I would just write that for our world. If I find a great idea for, like, a TV show that it's would convincingly make you say, Oh yeah, this would be a huge hit in metropolis where Batman lives. It's like, Well, I wouldn't write that in my Batman story. I would just write that and try to sell that on its own, instead of embedding it in this other thing. But that's why, and so usually, like in my books, when they are referencing their music and pop culture or whatever, it's always satirical. Like in the ZOE books, it's very big that it's in the future. So when she talks about, like, the anime that's, that's, you know, famous in the future, it's something bizarre. And the joke is that it's is that it's bizarre, and everybody understands, like everything in that world is exaggerated. Everything is very silly. So it's played for laughs. But if I was trying to come up with, like, what's a fantastic legal drama that people in the future would watch. It's like, Well, I wouldn't put that in the book. I would just write. I would write that legal drama on its own thing. But every time, every time a fictional universe tries to, like, come up with, well, here's what they watch there. They either don't do it, or else, what they come up with is not convincing. It's like, well, this wouldn't be, I can't imagine this actually being the music people would listen to. And it's very funny, because when you have a movie that's set in the future, their music is always like some kind of electronic or whatever. It's like, well, yeah, but why would that be? Why? Why wouldn't like folk music come back in the year 2100 like, they'll still have guitars, they'll still have like, Why? Why would there? It's like, well, no, it's a future. It's got to be like computer noises. It's like, well, yeah, but that, do you understand that in 2100 that could sound ancient and old fashioned, and the jazz may come back. You know, music can be timeless. But if you had a, you know, a show that took place 100 years from now, and everybody's listening like country music, they would think it's a joke. But why? Why wouldn't that? Why wouldn't the steel guitar come back? Why wouldn't the blues come back? You know, it's, there's no reason they couldn't.

Bob Pastorella 1:14:16
Yeah, it's like, it's like, you know, they would have the same kind of music that we would have, because music is based on tones, from frequency and so, and those are kind of like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's actually physics, you know, if you think about it, you know, it's like, it's like, your your your stoner buddies, like, I'm going to invent a new guitar scale. No, you're not, you're, stoned, you're not going to do that, you know? And there's some,

Jason Pargin 1:14:47
there's some science to it with the music, like it's imitating the tones of, like a human voice, like the sound of a violin has that effect on your moods, because it's like imitating certain vocal ranges or something like that. But, but it's, it's not. Music is not universal across cultures, but it's something that develops simultaneously on opposite sides of the world. Because it is, you know, it's brain science and things like that. But no, that is an excellent question, because the thing that I love to point out is that our fictional heroes don't consume media, and if you ever see them like consuming media, it's portrayed as something very sad, like in andor, there's one point when one of the spies she gets extremely depressed. And the way they show her being depressed is she's like, laying on a sofa watching a TV show, and you're like, oh my god, she must be near suicide. She's like, just laying there staring at a screen like a zombie. It's like, okay, well, I've been watching this show for five straight hours in this exact same position she's in, but in, like, in Fight Club, and they showed Edwin Norton, you know, he's, like, totally disconnected from the world and the way they portray that, he's just like, laying on a sofa like a zombie with his remote, like just watching, like, Man, what a sad, pathetic life this sad bastard lives. He's just staring at the screen for hours at a time in like a zombified state. Wow. Can you imagine getting that low and like, No, this is what I'm doing right now. But when a movie character doesn't, you know, and you watch any heroes like well, what are the TV shows you know, Bruce Wayne watches like none. He's always he's working on the Batmobile. What are the TV shows that Tony Stark watches when he's not Iron Man? It's like none. He's not he's not scrolling on his phone. He's working on his dragster. He's improving his his space suit. He's fighting somebody, he's at a meeting, he's out at a nightclub. He's out, you know, when they're having fun, they're out doing stuff, they're out with friends, they're gambling, they're drinking, they're not they're never just scrolling on their phone. And if you had a character who was just scrolling on their phone, you that would be that would signal like, Oh, they're in a dark place. They've, you know, look, this is Bruce Wayne. Is just there staring at his phone for an hour. And road you'd be like, my god, the Joker has finally gotten to him. They just staring at his phone for hours at a time, like I'm doing right now, the decompression

Bob Pastorella 1:17:16
shower, yeah, you know. And I was thinking, Is there any pop culture reference that came from a movie that be, that was a pop culture reference in a film that became something in our film? And only thing, and I'm sure there's probably a million of them, but the thing that comes to mind is, like, Robocop, I'll buy that for $1 that was not anywhere except for Robocop, which was, I mean, so it's like, if you do like any type of pop culture thing, it has to almost mirror our own pop culture. That's the only way it's going to work within that world.

Jason Pargin 1:18:00
Yeah, that's a good question, because most of the movies about, like, a band hitting it big, like, I know the song from that thing you do, the Tom Hanks movie, I know that became a hit on its own. That's rare, though. It usually like the song in the movie that the hero comes up with. This going to be the huge hit, I guess, the Eminem song from eight mile. But if it's a case where for it's just, it's not a musician being in the movie, but they're coming up with a song, and in the universe of that movie, the song is a huge hit, hugely usually in real life, the song is just awful. It's the same thing when you're watching a movie about a novelist and he's like, an award winning novelist, and they read an excerpt of the of the novel, it's like, oh, that's the worst thing I've ever like, Well, yeah, it's because the screenwriter just trying to sound like an, you know, an award winning novelist. They're not actually, you know, it's, but that's, you know, that's, that's a good point, because there's, you're, like, trying to create the second layer of, I, I'm writing something that in this universe is really, really amazing and is a huge hit and has won a ton of awards, but I'm not capable of actually writing something that becomes hugely popular and wins a bunch of awards, so we have to pretend that people's tastes in the fictional universe are much worse than they are in real life.

Bob Pastorella 1:19:22
Yeah, Eddie and the cruisers comes to mind. Oh, yeah, yeah, because that that, I don't think that song was famous until they actually did it in the film. And it's not even Eddie and the cruisers. But yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:19:39
what is a piece of pop culture, or something that's happening in the world today, or that's happened relatively recently that you think future generations or history books will completely get wrong or misunderstand?

Jason Pargin 1:19:56
Oh, that's a real good question, because. For example, the Bible is full of pop culture references that we have no freaking idea what they're talking about, because it is so it is so long gone. I think the best example is there's in the book of revelation about the the end of the world, the end times when one of the horses of the apocalypse is like starvation or whatever famine. And they say something like, you know, a loaf of bread cost a bag of gold, but don't touch the olives or the grapes. And people were like, What? What are they talking about? Apparently, that's a joke, because there was this period where there was a local famine in that region. But because the farmers were growing grapes for all for wine and olives for olive oil, but it was all getting shipped off to Rome, so they were not able to grow the staple crops for themselves to eat. They were growing stuff to be shipped away, for rich people to consume. So in the book of Revelation, when this angel of starvation comes, he's like this Roman official saying, you're all starving, but don't you dare eat the grapes. Those are getting shipped off to make wine to Rome. And it's like a joke. It's, it's, it's satire, but it's that context has is so lost because of 2000 freaking years ago that now it's just mysterious, or it's just ominous, but it's like, well, no, that was supposed to be funny. It's he's parodying what's going on right now. People at the time would have gotten it, but now it's been lost. That is, that's interesting, because especially now, so much of what we're doing, there's a layer of, like, irony or sarcasm, and there's so little just genuine, like sincerity, just straight ahead, especially in, like the Marvel movies era, and the way we do our sitcoms and all that, if you try to watch an episode of Rick and Morty, you know that will not hold up. I don't think the way that, like the Bugs Bunny cartoons did, where 50 years later, you can watch it, because so much of that is riffing on tropes from existing it's like, Hey, we're all sick of this thing that happens in movies and TV shows now, and I can joke about it and make fun of it, and I don't even have To explain what I'm mocking, because we all know that this is what I'm riffing on. I'm taking this existing trope, but I'm I'm pulling it apart and making fun of it, and I'm in and subverting your expectations, because you're used to this happening in this story, but this is going to happen instead Well, 50 or 100 or 200 years from now, all of that's going to be lost, so all that's left is like the recognizable format of the story. You have a person in a problem, and they go out and try to solve the problem, and then this happens. So I would be fascinated to know which episodes, not just of that show, but of any show, hold up, because so much of the pop culture is about pop culture. It's not about life. It's about this is a riff on other movies you've seen. This is a riff on other TV shows, other cartoons you've seen, rather than this a riff on a familiar situation we've all had to endure at work or in life or in family. Those things are timeless, that if the thing you're making is actually just a twist on look, we're all sick of these Marvel movies. So here's a thing that is a riff on those Marvel movie tropes. It's like, Yeah, but that's going to be forgotten. I don't know, because for a long time, I grew up with some media that was riffing on it like when I saw Blazing Saddles, I did not have decades of watching Westerns to know that each and everything that happens in Blazing Saddles is a riff on people who were sick of westerns. They had been watching Westerns their whole lives. Hollywood used to release 20 Westerns a week, like it was just inundated and so every single thing that happens with the sheriff, and then the twist with the sheriff being black, and every single scene in that movie is riffing like, you know, some trope that we're now, now sick of. As a kid, I just saw it as a bunch of wacky people in the desert, you know, screwing around, and when somebody fell down, I would laugh, and somebody farted, I would laugh, but I didn't have any of the context for what he was making fun of, and then all of the other pop culture stuff that was layered on top of that. So I don't know you could say that Blazing Saddles holds up really well. I think it's really interesting to think about if you go even further into the future. Because, for example, I don't know if you took a Gen Gen Z kit and showed them Blazing Saddles, would they get anything from it? There are certain moments that I'm sure are kind of universal. But you know, even like some of the racial humor, the context is totally different. Now you don't realize, hey. How kind of the taboo a lot of the stuff they were referencing was at the time.

Bob Pastorella 1:25:07
Yeah, I think also that if you, if you showed it to kids now in my I think my dad could relate, because I know growing up, it seemed like literally, right before the Creature Feature every Saturday, there was a Western on there. There are there were more Westerns made worldwide, most of them in Hollywood, but all over the world than any other genre of film ever made. There are Westerns that that you could watch one a day, you can watch 10 a day, and you probably wouldn't watch them all in 10 years.

Jason Pargin 1:25:44
You cannot go to IMDb and just look up the list of how many movies John Wayne was in. He would five movies a year like they would just knock these suckers out. It is hard to overstate to kids how ubiquitous Westerns were in a time when you did not have infinite options for stuff to watch. Like this was, you know, this is a time when for a while, theater was the only place to see visual media. And then TV, you had three channels, three broadcast channels, and yeah, it would be Westerns on all three. Or maybe there would be a football game. And then Western Western it is people complain about, like, the saturation of superhero stuff for the last, you know, 20 years, or whatever, nothing, nothing compared to how Westerns dominated for decades. This went on for a long time.

Bob Pastorella 1:26:34
It's refreshing now to actually see a Western, you know, because we, we grew up with them, and then, and then it was all superhero, you know, in Star Wars and Star Trek and jaws, and in a in slews of slasher and giallo movies and everything like that. And then you learn about universal and Hammer films. And then somebody makes a really cool Western called the proposition. And you're like, Oh, fuck. This is a Western with Guy Pearce, and they all in in Australia, I'm fucking down. This is the shit right here. You know, it's, it's refreshing to see things like that. Now.

Jason Pargin 1:27:12
Side note that that movie that Alec Baldwin was making, the Westerner, the the woman was tragically shot and killed because of the grossly irresponsible handling of the farm. Apparently, the movie is pretty good.

Jason Pargin 1:27:27
which is, I don't know what say that. Apparently, it's like this. The tragedy is actually the pretty confident, competent movie, and would be have been recognized as a decent Western, gritty Western, that people could have just enjoyed, if not for this incredibly irresponsible thing that they had done. Anyway, just a side note, Rust is the name of the movie. Apparently, pretty good. I've not paid to see it feels wrong. Apparently, all the money is being sent to, like, the victims. That's why they released a movie, because they wanted to, like, pay for the departed cinematographer that was killed. But anyway, apparently it's pretty

Michael David Wilson 1:28:01
good. Yeah, I don't know how to respond to that.

Jason Pargin 1:28:05
I don't know the morality of giving money to because you are, you are enriching the people who did the terrible thing, but whatever.

Michael David Wilson 1:28:13
But you said that a lot of the money is going to that's

Jason Pargin 1:28:17
why it was released, because otherwise they would have just ditched the it would have been incredibly tasteless. Yeah, he's like, Hey, still, you know otherwise. But no, they it's because, I guess that was part of the wishes of the family, and I think that that's the profits are being channeled to please google that before you go see the movie. But, and again, I realize you're still also helping, like Alec Baldwin become more famous, if you if you think that he should be in jail for that. But anyway, just point out, the idea is that there, there was a time when that would have been, like, huge release gets, like, Western, pretty good. Got some famous people in it. And whereas now it's like, that's, that's a rare that's a rare thing because, yeah, people got people got sick of them about, I don't know. Guess it would have been the early 80s, early 70s, when that right after the spaghetti westerns kind of came and went, that people were like, All right, that's enough. That's enough of the Westerns.

Michael David Wilson 1:29:09
Yeah, yeah. I mean it, it's such a kind of almost gray area with the release of that in terms of morally, what the right thing is to do, because if, if you go and and support it, I suppose that the victims families get money, but at the same time, there's something that it feels dirty to go and see it. So,

Jason Pargin 1:29:36
yeah, occasionally Mel Gibson will release the movie, and people like, that's actually really good, like I don't, I don't know, am I? Am I supposed to be giving him money? I don't know. I don't, but I suspect there's a lot of people like him in Hollywood. It's just they didn't get caught being as loud as he was. But in terms of people who are secretly like it, anti Jew or whatever, I actually think that's probably more kind. Them, and then we think it's just that they did not get drunk and get pulled over by the cops.