Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Jason Pargin, Celebrity Worship, & Talking About Writing

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

The guys are joined by author, Cracked alum, and professional podcast guest Jason Pargin to talk about celebrities they get weird about, robots that sign books, the value of memorabilia, and how Jason's time at Cracked prepared him to be an excellent book salesman. Follow Jason: https://johndiesattheend.com/ https://www.tiktok.com/@jasonkpargin https://jasonpargin.substack.com/ Follow the show on socials: https://www.linktr.ee/QQPodcast Soren Bowie: https://twitter.com/Soren_Ltd Daniel O'Brien: https://twitter.com/DOB_INC

So hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, the podcast where two best friends and comedy writers give each other questions and ask each other answers. I didn't look at my form for the first time doing this and I immediately blew it. I am one half of that podcast, senior writer for Last Week Tonight, author of How to Fight Presidents, and celebration boy Daniel O'Brien, joined as always by my co-host Mr. Soren Bui. Soren, say hello. Hello everybody, I'm Soren Bui. Soren, say hello. Hello, everybody. I'm Soren Bui. I'm a writer for American Dad and the other half of this podcast. Daniel, what are you celebrating? I am celebrating the fact that I did not change out the intro from the last time we recorded this.

So I'm Celebration Boy because that's what I was when the strike ended. Oh. And I didn't update it with another fact about myself because soren i'm flustered today it's a different day than we normally do it's true it's the one time of year that we have a guest and i don't want to waste any time in getting to him ladies and gentlemen jason pargin whoo formally not formally but uh occasionally known as david wong uh yeah formally as we changed it on all the books like three years ago but do do your are your fans enraged by a third person showing up i

know this is like an intimate conversation they there's a thing where it's like hey i'm going to join my two friends soren and daniel this week to listen to them and it's like it's like i'm being in the room with them but then you know it's that thing where you go to meet with a friend, but you haven't seen him forever. And they bring their idiot brother or whatever with them. We haven't had a lot of complaints from other people. But when you're on the show, somehow you are like the you do something to the glue to the chemistry of the show that tears it down. And so we do get a lot of complaints specifically about you. We have you.

You've been around the Internet long enough to know that this probably won't surprise you but people did immediately react negatively when we started having guests on there was a a couple years ago when we had like a solid month or two run where we were just booking guests and soren and i privately were so happy that we were like this takes off some of the burden of having to fill space and and air with our stupid words and also like to a person we always brought in someone more interesting than us and the fans hated they were unhappy they didn't want our interesting people they didn't want anyone making this easier for us they like that it's just us they like that it's bad but i do do think you're the exception because you are a Hall of Fame podcast guest,

which I mean as a sincere compliment. You might as well. It's either that or TikToker because again, the number of people I reach from my books versus on TikTok or on guest, you know, on the on hundreds of podcasts, it's no comparison. There's no way on my tombstone it's going to say author. It's going to say podcast guest. I'm curious about – I know we talked about your rise to TikTok fame the last time you were on here because it's still very fascinating to me as my – the total experience that I have with TikTok is when people share TikToks on Twitter, because I am an old man and I'm going to die on Twitter, uh, pretty soon, fingers crossed. And I'm not going to learn any other social media things, even though I see fun TikTok

things coming in there. That is the sum total of my experience with TikTok. Is it, so when we were first starting out in Twitter, there was like, you immediately found other funny, like-minded people on Twitter and you became internet friends with those people. Are you friendly and communicative with other like TikTok, like book talk folks or influencers on TikTok?

That's what I thought it was going to be. See, I only joined TikTok because because, one, Twitter was dying. Remember, this time last year, Musk had just bought Twitter. It was clear it was going to die. And Twitter was the last place I had to sell books to people. Because, again, I'm not famous enough to where the whole world is waiting for my books to come out. I have to sell books on social media. That's been like that for a long time.

And Facebook is a ghost town. So I got on TikTok because I heard there's this phenomenon called book talkers, where people who review books on TikTok, they're like, go on there, make a connection with these people, make a connection with other authors, join this community. And then at least they will have heard of you, and maybe they'll hear you talk about your books, maybe they will review your books. And that was my thinking, was I will go on there to become friends with a circle of other authors and TikTok creators, because again, I am incredibly old. I'm one of the oldest people in the world.

So I get on there, and fast forward a year and two months. I joined in August of last year. I have 330,000 followers. Jesus. And my videos have been viewed by something like 350 million times total over the last year. I've reached a total in the last 60 days, reached 35 million unique viewers. You might be the most famous old person in the entire world. Yes. So I – people who don't necessarily know me have to understand. I operated with total anonymity for the first six or seven years writing on the internet until I got a real job. I get cracked when I – in 2007 when my book actually came out on shelves, I started operating as my own name because I, you know, that's the world now.

There's social media. But I did not show my face. I didn't do video stuff. I didn't have any kind of experience doing video things. I did not show up in crack videos. Even when I went out to L.A., we didn't put me in videos. That wasn't my thing. So I had to teach myself how to be on camera.

And this has taken over my life. So I know I have not successfully built a circle of friends, really, because TikTok doesn't really foment that kind of interaction, like tight communities. It really is about reaching a vast audience of people, or at least that's what it turned out to be for me. I mean, we wrote books while we were at Cracked and famously they were always like, we're going to advertise the hell out of these books. And their idea of advertising something is like they put it in the right rail of a website. You are great at advertising your own books. Does your publishing company love you? I mean, I don't imagine anyone is putting the effort in that you are.

I don't want to talk badly of other authors. I think there are a lot of other authors whose personalities don't lend themselves to self-promotion. But the experience I got at Cracked where we had to understand things like SEO and social media engagement and things like that and thumbnails and like carefully watching traffic and metrics. These are things most creative people detest and pray that they never have to have in their lives. Having that as my day job at Cracked for 13 years from 2007 to 2020. It just kind of forced me to know that stuff. So I think if my publisher is listening, don't get mad at me. I think I know more about how to promote books on TikTok than they do. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that.

This is my full-time job. They have their end of it. Like they're primarily dealing with the booksellers. They're interacting with Barnes & Noble and – End of list. All of the many, many bookstore chains. Et cetera. Borders.

There's probably a Borders still out there, isn't there? I think there is. A Walton – a B. Dalton bookseller. there isn't there a walton a b dalton bookseller uh and so like like promoting directly to to the readers is a thing where the authors are kind of left on their own again that's not an indictment of that of my publisher that is the business that's just how it works so for example like tiktok you can't hire somebody to run your tiktok for you like there's lots of famous people who have you know i hate to break the news to you but like tom cruise is not running his own twitter he has someone he's sprinting it

but even the like these wrestlers and people have these very amusing twitter accounts like no they've got some young gen z person doing it and it's just being done in their name well tiktok it's got to be their algorithm wants your face. And I know this because I tried not doing that when I started. I tried doing like videos of my books and stuff where it wasn't showing me. It's like, no, the algorithm detects a face and a voice. That's what it wants. And as soon as I started putting my own face in the videos, they took off. And it's not because i'm extremely hot it's because they didn't want it to be youtube they it wasn't just a place to upload clips of things they wanted to be people making videos to each other yeah that's uh soren wanted to talk about uh your most recent

post on substack about uh uh, fame and infamy. So I, I was curious before Soren gets into his question about that, since you brought up putting your, your face out there, do you, is, is getting recognized a part of your life now out in the world?

Or is, do you, do you still keep mostly to yourself? I've only been recognized once in the last, maybe twice in the last calendar year, but I don't leave the house very often, especially with this schedule and this dead sprint to promote this book and get the other book finished at the same time.

I've not gone very many places, but like you guys get recognized, don't you? Yeah. It's just certainly dwindled in the last few years. Yeah. I was recently in Fort Myers with my girlfriend and her parents and got recognized for the first time in a long time by a random person who was walking by a fellow named Keegan. Shout out Keegan.

Nice guy. He is familiar with all of the extended Cracked Universe of podcasts. But it was also one of those things where I'm walking down the street with this group. And sometimes you can just see someone based on the way they dress and the way they are in the world. And I'm just like, everybody, hold on. This one's going to recognize me. This is about to get weird for a second. You can just like see it in the eyes. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Glasses and like scruffy and long hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He read my shit in high school. This is, I got to say hi to this person. And he was very polite and didn't take up too much time. Was very kind. But that was the last time I'd been recognized in I don't know how long. It certainly has dwindled.

But, I mean, we were getting recognized more regularly during the After Hours era. We were not pulling the kind of numbers that you are on social media. We were nowhere close to that. Yeah, it's kind of weird because I don't know to what degree. If you're doing short-form stuff, if somebody saw you do a video that's literally 20 seconds long, I don't know if your face, if you had the same kind of personal relationship that you would have if you watched a series of hour long videos or if you're a fan of your podcast or

whatever, where I think like, would they recognize my voice? Would they? And I'm also, you know, I'm not a distinct looking person. Like, Sean Baby, people recognize, even if they haven't read his articles in 20 years. Yeah, they can. And he looks the same now. Like, they spot him. They know Sean Baby. I think I'm very easy to confuse with a lot of people.

And like with Daniel, like, a lot of people are surprised to find out that Daniel is 6'8". Right. And like, oh, gosh, he's way taller than – but again, they had him sitting on a stool in after hours. He was always having to basically sit on the floor just so he would be level with everyone. Yeah, yeah. And I had to also – just movie magic, just again, just how the sausage is made. It looks like Michael and Katie are sitting across the table from us. They could never be at the table because the second half of the table, what Soren and I are looking at is just all my legs.

They're completely crammed in there, taking up all that space and two people just could not fit in that same area. They fold not only like a normal human leg at the knee, but then he also has like this horse joint as well that folds in the opposite direction. So they're really just accordion legs under there. And we put like googly eyes on my knees that stick up on the other side of the table. So we have an eye line, we have something to look at, but you know, that's how movies are made. Well, and also the fact that literally 80% of the budget for that series was having to CGI a shirt onto Soren, who would not

wear one to the shoot. In the episode, he has to have one or else the comments are nothing but that. Right. But I was, I was like, that's what I was hungry for was I just wanted those and they would always be like, okay, well, we'll just fix it in post. We'll put something on that ultimately ruined the site financially. We could have been a very different site. Should we get into the show? What do you soren yeah let's do it wait jason uh jason hey jason shut the fuck up for a second

soren how you doing man i hadn't talked to you at all today you know i know we haven't talked in a long time actually uh i'm good yeah um nothing nothing really to report i feel like we should be focusing on our guests. I don't think the listeners want that. I think they want you two to do your thing. Well, we'll do it. Whatever catchphrases you have with each other, get into the flow of all that stuff. Hachi machi. Hachi machi.

Here's something that will be surprising for the listeners. This is the first time that we are doing, when Soren and I record, we don't have our cameras going. So we don't see each other. You guys know how cameras work. But we're doing it this time to capitalize on TikTok sensation, Jason. And now I'm seeing Soren's recording setup. And he's always said it's a garage full of paint cans. It's truly a garage full of paint cans. I'm really blown away by how much paint you own. So some of this is stain. Does that help? Yeah, it does. My coworkers, when we were on Zoom, are brutal.

They're brutal about this environment. They have askedated this to, they've asked if I'm recording from The Pantry and The Shining, where Jack Nicholson gets stuck. But also, yeah, same thing. They're like, why do you have so many paints? And the answer is unfortunately very boring.

It's that I have every room in my house is an accent wall and I got to repaint have every room in my house is an accent wall, and I gotta repaint it every once in a while. And paint is a thing that you never throw out for the rest of your life? I ask because when I moved into this my current place back in May, there were a bunch of

paint cans left over by the previous tenant, and I haven't dared throw them out just in case of I don't know what. I don't know what I'm planning for but they were here already. There must be a reason for it and I'm not going to touch them or mess with them.

That's actually really smart. You can't see it but there's all kinds of stuff from whenever this house was built. It's like leftover stuff like backsplash tiles and floor tiles and things that at some point maybe i would need but like i have not in the amount of time that i've been living here it's never come up

there's really a whole category of things that you just don't know either should you throw it away or how to throw it away i'm sure this is an old uh jerry seinfeld stand-up bit uh because i think he did run about like when do you throw away a christmas card or a birthday card like what's the appropriate amount of time to just throw that right in the trash and then dump, dump food on top of it. But same thing. I have old Bibles.

Is it, when do you throw away a Bible without incurring like a curse upon you and your entire household? Old shotgun shells. I don't own a shotgun anymore, but it's like, you don't want to throw those in the trash. I could easily see like the,

the, the trash truck compressing them and then they go off and kill a child nearby but what do you is there a place you can turn them in it's america there's got to be like a a facility where you can bring your old bullets and they'll they'll give them back out to the homeless or whatever the needy people that need that need those need i i feel like with bibles that don't you just take it to a hotel and put it in the drawer? Isn't that how that works? Is that what those are? It's like a take a penny, leave a penny thing.

That's what that drawer is. If you've got an extra Bible, just leave it. All those people at the Santa Monica Promenade who are offering you free Bibles, they're not religious. They're just trying to get rid of their Bible with a clean conscience. They don't want it any more than you do. They keep getting one every Easter. Yeah, it's a big problem. Well, let's do get into the show.

I want to ask Jason a quick question, and it is celebrity related. Jason, you had a sub stack recently that was about the cult of celebrity and like how we treat celebrities and why we treat celebrities the way that we do and how strange it is that we choose like an individual person. We're like that person exists above us. Um, and you have some celebrity in your life. I think we're just talking about it. And I was wondering if even having been on that side of it, do you still find yourself feeling that way about certain people when you meet them? Is there a celebrity that you about certain people when you meet them? Is there a celebrity that you get weird about when you're around them? It's a funny thing because the thing that caused me to write that subsect is I read there was a scientific study where they had people and they had like a sweater and they asked, what would you pay for this sweater? And then they came back and said, OK, well, this sweater actually was owned by celebrity Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe sweater. What would you pay for this sweater? And then they came back and said, okay, well, this sweater actually was owned by celebrity, Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe sweater. What would you pay for it now?

And of course they all offered to pay much, much more as you would. But then they said, now one thing to keep in mind, we've completely steam cleaned and sterilized the sweater. It's completely been like every molecule has been washed off of it. It's been totally disinfected. Do you still want it and they were only pay standard sweater prices at that point because subconsciously but it makes sense right they want pieces because it's like you want something they've touched but subconsciously we think celebrity transfers via dead skin cells or bacteria or something. Because it's like if you bought, you know, had whatever your favorite baseball or football players, you had an old glove that belonged to Russell Wilson, quarterback Russell Wilson, your favorite player.

Like if it's a game worn glove, you'd be you'd be like, oh, this is amazing. Yeah, I will pay any amount of money for that. But it's like when I keep in mind it's been completely sterilized and washed and boiled, you would feel like the connection had been severed to some degree. So what that column from me was about was there is an element of magical thinking that has to have some sort of evolutionary origin that goes beyond simply I admire how good this person is at things. Beyond simply, I admire how good this person is at things. Because I linked in there a Twitter post where a fan of Taylor Swift saw her eating. Taylor Swift got an extra five minutes in her life where she could eat and was eating a single chicken finger. And she had ranch and some ketchup on her plate.

And the tweet was like, photo of Taylor Swift. She was eating. It looked like she had ketchup. And the other sauce appeared to be ranch. And treating it like seeing this person eat human food was like seeing an alligator ride a jet ski. Like, oh, my God, it thinks it's people. Weird. Clearly, this person thinks Taylor Swift is something other than a very talented person. I can't think of that many

people in my life. Like I got to do that podcast with Taskmaster guy, Alex Horne. I would love to spend an evening just asking Alex Horne questions, but I don't regard him as an ethereal being. I would feel like that's insulting to think of him that way. But if I was at somewhere in the shopping mall, and I'm in a city where famous people live, and somebody really famous walked by, like Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise or something like that, I don't think I would feel like I was in the presence of a god, but it would feel like a wax museum had come to life or something. You know what I mean? You're not supposed to be... Yeah, and he's shorter than me? That's weird.

That doesn't seem right. There's something weird that we don't... Because everybody talks about how weird celebrity worship is. Well, celebrity worship is the new religion. But I don't think we actually stop and think about there's a level of fame where you're not a person anymore. And it has to be some ancient tribal thing or something.

Yeah. It definitely, we'll always think it's important to say that it's not a new thing as much as we like to pretend that it is because it makes us feel smart to say, like, things are getting worse. We're obsessed with celebrities. Isn't that crazy how bad things have gotten in America that we're obsessed with these rich celebrities? We're doing the same thing. A guy made a tremendous amount of money selling shit that he claimed George Washington owned. And not like, these are his teeth, or this is his favorite gun.

It was just like he owned this book and he read it. Do you want it? You can buy it for a lot of whatever our it's the past, whatever a lot of money is to us here in the past. You can buy this book just selling memorabilia that people just like to have and hold because to them, George Washington was God and king and hero and savior and all these things. And that's – I'm sure it went on before George Washington. That's just where my brain has decided time begins.

No, I think you're right. But do you have any memorabilia, either of you, in your homes? Do you have any celebrity autographed items items anything like that i do not and i was i was never a person interested in uh collecting celebrity autographs i even though i like i i collect a bunch of dumb shit now in my in my life as an adult and i like value having hobbies and collections i even as a a kid and seeing a famous person i still thought what what what will i do with the signature where do i put it where does it go it didn't hold any interest to me as something that i could like look at with fondness or show off to someone and and have them be impressed by it yeah i don't really have a ton i mean i have

some like i have some hitler memorabilia but that's pretty much it uh i have some autographs i have a a foul ball that i caught at a game and then it got signed and like that has the same sort of feel to me because i will scour that ball and you look at it and you're like here is where like it's here are the scuffs in it from where it was hit. Like, here's like, these are the moments that like, there's like a roadmap of the history of the ball's use on the ball. And like, I like thinking about that and I like looking at it. But are you just remembering a moment, though? Or is it because this is the ball that was hit by Mookie Betts or whoever?

I mean, well, it wasn't even hit by anybody. It was Russell Wilson. It wasn't hit by anybody in particular that was like, that I'm super excited about. The ball is signed by some players from back in the day that were very good, like Tim Salmon and Chili Davis. But the ball itself is just like, this is a foul ball. It is no different than any other ball they play each game. They're like, they got like a hundred balls to just use.

And so, and like the ball hits the dirt. Once a pitcher throws into the dirt, the catcher is like, all right, well, this one's fucked. And like,

they just get rid of it. Uh, and they give it to the ump and the ump gives them a fresh ball. So the balls mean nothing, but a ball hit into the stands, even a foul, not just a home run, like even a foul ball.

And then catching that ball and having that ball is like, and now I'm part of it. I'm part of the whole thing. I'm part of the game in some way. And so like the ball, you get like a case for it. And you, it just,

the, the history of the ball is what means something to me. And I see, this is what's interesting to me, because when I was a very small kid, I went to a AAA baseball game here in New Jersey to see Trent and Thunder. They were like a fun team to go watch. I had no control over my life.

I was a child. I went where my family took me. And we would go to a couple times a year to see Trenton Thunder play. And one year, a foul ball came right to us, and I got up to go and get it. And, like, a full adult man knocked me out of the way and, like, landed on top of me, got the ball, celebrated, and left. And I was, like, in pain because I got smashed on concrete steps by a giant man and was like crying and having a bad time. By the end of the game, all the players are leaving and my dad managed to go to like call out to a player down there.

My son got trampled by an adult earlier. Can we have one of those balls because they're doing signatures and throwing baseballs out. And either the first or third baseman made eye contact and threw the ball. And then my dad said sign it and he threw it back to the guy and the guy said best wishes daniel he signed it he signed his name and it felt cool i was connected to this moment this story it didn't matter to me that triple a is not the matrix because i'm a kid and like you all look like professional athletes to me you're doing this this this thing and getting paid for it, and it all looks real. So I did have that special connection.

But then years later, you're playing baseball with your friends, and you hit enough baseballs into the woods. It is more valuable to me to be the kid with the new baseball that we can use than it is for me to hold on to that signature. It just reached a point where I was like, well, I can stare at Best Wishes Daniel over and over again. Or I could be the hero of this game by being like, I have a ball. We can use mine because that is so valuable as a kid. Because like even – like Kirby Puckett is somebody I was obsessed with as a kid. And if I had gotten a Kirby Puckett signature – like I had been in stores before where there was like a Kirby Puckett rookie card and he had been signed by him. And just like holding that card, I knew that he had also been in the presence of that card.

And there was something really magical about that to me. And I think that is the same thing. Like that's the cult of celebrities. Like, oh no, they occupied the same space as this. And now I'm occupying that space. Like we are connected in that way. Yeah. Well, let me give you an example.

So I sign books. We do a thing for pre-orders where we will – there's a local bookstore here in Nashville where I will sign a book. If you order it through them, I will sign the copy. So I went in two days ago and signed 1,400 copies of the book of orders that had come in for signed copies. of the book of orders that had come in for signed copies. Now, there was a scandal a couple years ago with Bob Dylan where it turned out that he had some limited edition book that he released that were signed by him, and they were expensive. It was like $500 because, for me, the books that I signed sell for the exact same price as an unsigned one.

My signature adds literally, like the economy has said that my signature adds zero value. Well, you signed too many. It is an honor. Yeah. It is an honor that people want them, but, and it's great. But the point being these were expensive and then it turned out that he had used a machine.

Like they have like an auto writer. There's some sort of a robot that can sign things for you because he's 147 years old and is not going to sign, you know, 2000 copies of his book or whatever. And people, they gave them refunds because like, it sounded like he was at least in the room. Like he like pushed the button on the robot to sign the books. It's like, no no it has to be your hand it's like okay so let's let's define it down what if he had held the book in his hands

while the robot signed it would that be enough what if he used a stamp but he he did the stamp like it was in his hand and he did the stamp but he just couldn't you know his old arthritic hands couldn't actually sign the signature. Like at what point has it lost the magic? Because there clearly is a line in everyone's mind where it's like, no, this doesn't count. He wasn't physically close enough to the book or something. Right. And using robots, it's so funny that after all this time that Dylan still did not get the memo. Do not go electric.

We don't like that from you. We want you to do the real thing. That's a Dylan deep cut for the music fans out there. So I don't know. Do you, Daniel, do you have somebody that you were surprised at yourself at your own reaction? Yeah, I have three answers to this question because uh in in our lives as people in entertainment industry and and living in holly weird for as long as we did you are around a lot of people who are on tv and in movies and are and are famous people and i thought i i was pretty good about being normal around most of them.

I could have a conversation with, with famous type people and in like comedy and acting. And then the one year, one of the first years we went to just for laughs comedy festival in Montreal, it happened to be the year, um, Blake Griffin,

who is a, a basketball player. And this is like peak basketball powers, Blake Griffin, who is a basketball player, and this is like peak basketball powers Blake Griffin, and he was also, anyone who knows anything about Blake off the court knows that he really likes comedy. He really wants to be a comedy actor person. Like a lot of athletes, just like, no, I'm doing the athlete thing, but I want to be an entertainer.

And he did stand up at uh just for laughs and we're at this this festival and i'm seeing like there's nick kroll there's john mulaney these are like actual heroes of mine that's really cool i'm just gonna like nod there's judd apatow i'm gonna be normal about this holy fucking shit it's blake griffin like seeing him i for some reason really made me uh maybe it's because he's so tall. I don't know. I'm 6'8", but it's still, it was still very jarring to see him. And there's, I couldn't tell if it was like a height thing or if it's because he is so good at a thing that I am so bad at and don't really understand what it takes to be that good at his specific thing

that it's not like i'm walking into a room and it's like oh there's will arnett and i feel like we could just talk and it will eventually get into like shared common ground of comedy that we both love or or writing or improv techniques that we're both familiar with but blake griffin just like that might as well be an actual superhero to me. For all the things that he can do that I cannot do, I was like absolutely, truly, and literally speechless when I saw him and he nodded at me and made eye contact. And I was just like, no, sir, not me. Not today.

Not you and I talking. That's not going to happen. That helps me understand it a little bit better. Not today. Not you and I talking. That's not going to happen. That helps me understand it a little bit better. Because I think it is.

It's like if you look at somebody who is so good at one particular thing that you have no aptitude for, it's like what they're doing is basically magic. So you're like essentially in the presence of a wizard. You're in the presence of somebody who has unlocked this other element of like being that you will never touch. And you're like, ah, I am in the presence of a wizard. I'm in the presence of someone who truly can do magic. And you may – because you both – you may both think, well, John Mulaney is obviously a more accomplished comedian than I am. But you both can make people laugh like he can. You both can make a crowd laugh. Like that is a skill.

You know what he's doing where blake griffin like daniel looks at him and says okay i can dunk like him like yeah chris like if chris paul gives me a lob i can put it down but i can't defend like blake griffin no i can't i can't you know i can't run the floor i can't you know it's it's the mid-range that he doesn't have yeah it's the fostering the team energy that Dan lacks that Greg Blake Griffin is so famous for. I don't know. And you're always talking about it in this podcast when I just, when I,

it just becomes hero pod for me when I just start takeover and I just run it by myself and I don't incorporate my teammates, my helpers, uh, by which I mean, Soren, I guess you're a pod hog um yeah my other two the things that this question has me thinking about is like one i i everything surrounding taylor swift is

mind-boggling to me i know i i know that she's very talented she's and she's like undeniably popular i'm not trying to be a crank or a stick in the mud here and Soren I know you love her so much I have liked a bunch of her songs I have never like sat down and listened to a full album I don't think and I don't begrudge anyone who does but I just never got

particularly caught up but seeing people's reaction to her is unlike anything I feel like I've ever seen. I know I was the guy saying, like, we used to do this for Washington, and I'm sure Beatlemania was a similar or identical thing, but, like, she is dating a football player right now, we think, and she keeps going to his games going to his games and as a result

of that her fandom is so passionate and strong that they are selling out of jerseys for her kind of boyfriend the two of them have not like made a public statement together or anything like that they've been seen they're probably dating they might just be having sex. We don't know. This could also be a publicity stunt of some kind. We don't know. But a fandom that is so devoted that they will engage with you on a level that I don't even understand how that translates to enjoyment for them. It's not going to a concert. It's not buying her merch. is not buying her merch.

It's giving your money to the NFL so that you can own a Travis Kelsey jersey for, I don't know, forever? What do you do with it? The ratings for the games where she's in the stands, they're watching these entire three-hour and 30-minute-long broadcasts for the occasional shots in the booth of Taylor Swift and for the occasion when Travis the booth of Taylor Swift and for

the occasion when Travis Kelsey will catch a pass. And you have to understand, listeners, for people who are not fans of the NFL or football, it is a garbage sport to watch. It's just a bad sport. I've been a football fan my entire life. It's a terrible sport. There's a lot of standing around. The rules don't really make sense people are getting hurt constantly like that they will seriously watch

an entire broadcast it's hard to convey how much that is to ask of someone yeah i don't i i'm i'm trying to think of the i i think what i'm learning is that i i don't love any artist the way taylor swift fans love her and i think that's that's so fun for them and good for them unless one of them mark david chapman's her and then it's a bad thing and i don't like it but i i like there are my favorite artists like ben folds who i talk about a lot and even when he does stuff that is still in the music world there are some things i'm just not interested in. Like he will occasionally tour with a full orchestra and do like his – the classical music pieces that he's composed with an orchestra. And I'm like, that's good for you.

I'm happy that you're fulfilling a dream. This is not why I like you, so I'm going to skip this particular tour. so I'm going to skip this particular tour. And then meanwhile, there are people who at some point fell in love with Taylor Swift's music and now as a result are massive Kansas City Chiefs fans with their Travis Kelsey neck tattoos. And it's just anything that gets caught in the orbit gets eaten by this fandom that exists

like the solar flares of this of taylor swift it's do you know who diana agron is she was in the cast of the no she's been in some she's been some other things anyway she's like her and taylor swift i think hung out a couple times in like 2014 and to this day like if you just go search Taylor Swift and Diana Agron, like there, there are so many people like obsessed Twitter, I'm not Twitter fans, Taylor Swift fans that are convinced that these two are in a lesbian relationship and have been all of this time. Like if you, there'll be millions of results if you went and looked because they, people are just like putting it all together. And so the minute somebody like enters the field, like enters the force field of the

celebrity, like they're part of it. Like they are just, they, they help burn it. For that reason, she is someone that I, that I, I would, would freak out to be around. Not because I'm such a fan of, of the, the work and it connects with me on a deep level, but because like, you are a level of celebrity that I don't understand. and it connects with me on a deep level, but because you are a level of celebrity that I don't understand and I don't know that I know

how to talk to you about that because your world is so different from mine. And also there would be a tiny thing in the back of my head that is like, hey, this book I wrote 11 years ago, How to Fight Presidents, you know if you held it up in a in one picture it would change my life do you understand that do you could could you just do that real quick please well in that way

she is like a god i mean the power that she wields like just by having you nearby if a picture got taken where you happen to be like next to her, the, the, the world would go crazy. Like every, suddenly you would be somebody who was known or like, yeah, same thing with like your book. If she happens to be reading it on a beach somewhere, that's the fucking end.

Like you're forget your, your, your, your job right now. Now you're an author. So now to get into, if you want to get into a little bit of the science I talked about in that column,

the best, cause there's been many books and studies on celebrity worship and understanding it because it it you see kind of examples of it among primates where there's like the one leader of the troop of monkeys where they're all imitating that monkey like if they start washing their food in a certain way everybody else will start to do it so there's a crude theory that going back in evolution, if you believe in that stuff, that that, you know, humans are we are where we are because we are infinitely adaptable. Like, this is why you find us living in the Arctic, in the desert, in outer space. Like, we can adapt to live anywhere. That's why we dominate the planet.

And that's why, yeah, we have dunked so hard on nature, we have shattered the backboard. But the theory was that part of our adaptability is that when we go to a new environment, whichever member of the tribe adapted first, we would just instantly imitate it. Because that's what we learned. Oh, they figured out where the fish are and we would instantly. And so you move here, you know, there's different kind of food here, different kind of berries. The hunting is different. The first one that figures out how to catch this new type of food, we watch it and then we instantly like grab onto that.

So in order to motivate you to do that, there has to be all of these emotional things bound up in like, yes, I want to imitate this guy who's really good at hunting. And then the theory goes is that because they didn't have the scientific method, when you're imitating that hunter, you imitate the whole package because you don't know what all helped him. So you're not just imitating, you know, if he's really good at catching fish, you're not just imitating, you know, if he's really good at catching fish, you're not just imitating the net he used.

You're imitating the little song he sang while he fished because you don't know what all helped him. So you're now imitating like his whole personality based on like, this is the guy we all want to be like right now. And then as time went on, that kind of becomes a religious belief, because that's how, you know, there's a for most of our history, we could not separate the supernatural from the natural and still can't. So if you see someone who's especially good at whatever the farm, yeah, the the farmer who's really, really good at growing crops, because you don't know

anything about like the soil acidity around his home or whatever, you just think he's been blessed, that he is the blessed farmer, that the gods have decided that they will bless him with a good crop. So because you don't know how that stuff transfers, the same as before they knew what germs were. If one person got sick, you know, this person catches it, but this person doesn't. You think, oh, the gods are mad at these specific people, because otherwise, why would his misfortune spread? And so you start to think, well, clearly misfortune can spread because if just borrowing a blanket from the sick guy made me sick, so clearly like misfortune can spread. So why wouldn't blessings spread the same way? So then you had in the middle ages, like the limbs of dead saints, like they would have their severed hand that is still on display in a church somewhere because it's like, no, that's his body

part. He was blessed by God. And so who can say how that transfers? Surely his clothing and his chair and all of that, all that stuff was all blessed. And that in an era where we've left a lot of those beliefs behind, a lot of your behaviors are built in by evolution. These were adaptations. So your tendency to want to see a person

and declare them to be holy is kind of built in. You get pleasure from doing it. But it is just a theory we it's kind of impossible to know uh soren did you have a famous person i feel like anything that we say is now like a step down of of from of intelligence from yeah there is one there's one that's like a genuine problem i've got one that's uh that so patrick Stewart, when you run into, you run into Roger the alien at work. Kind of.

Yeah. Patrick Stewart, who is a Bullock. He's Avery Bullock on our show. Patrick Stewart was somebody who surprised me in the way that I responded to him where we, cause we'll, we do the records. Like if you, if you write him into an episode and it's your episode, then you're going to be there for the recording of it. And, uh, and Patrick Stewart was somebody who like, I was, I couldn't do it. It couldn't be like, I can't, I'm not, who the fuck am I to direct Patrick Stewart?

That guy's a knight. Yeah. Like what? I can't, I shouldn't be doing this. And so like, I was very mealy mouth and like, desperate and a little sweaty around him in a way where I was like, I don't think I should write him into stuff anymore because it's really a problem. I can't, I'm not a, I can't be a normal human being around him. If he's listening, this would be a really funny bit for him. He must be aware of the, his stature at this point.

aware of the his stature at this point he should anytime there's a new writer working on one of his episodes he should really do a shitty job just to see if this new writer will correct him on anything just like just like completely fucking eat it just to see if anyone would dare try to direct him i would i would like turn to our showrunner after every line he did i turned our show and i'd be like that that was perfect. That was it. That was perfect. He'd be like, no, I don't think so. You hear stories like this, though, where young actors talk about how they'll get cast in a movie with Robert De Niro or somebody who they grew up watching. And it's like I'm in a scene with this guy and have to work with him and be like – and I remember probably my favorite example of this is Kobe Bryant talking about his rookie year

playing against Michael Jordan. Again, you know, they were separated by enough that that's like, this is God. This is not somebody who's really good at basketball. This is Air Jordan. Like, he's on my shoes. Like, his silhouette is on the shoes I'm wearing. And that he's in a game with Michael and, like, trying to guard him on my shoes. Like his silhouette is on the shoes I'm wearing. And that he's in a game with Michael and like trying to guard him on the baseline.

And Michael just blows past him and dunks in a blink and turns him and says, happens a lot faster in real life, doesn't it? Like that dunk looks like you could stop it watching it on TV. I bet you thought that. It's like, yeah,

welcome, welcome to what it's actually like to play against Michael Jordan. It had to have been such a crazy moment. And then to face him and get better and better at basketball until you're able to actually beat him has to be so weird. I'm surprised there aren't more athletes fanning out. Because if you, for the acting example, that makes sense to me. If you get a movie with Robert De Niro, you might be able to talk. You're both doing the same thing.

You're working for the same outcome to make this movie good together. You might sit down and talk to each other as peers or as a mentor-mentee relationship and shoot the shit and learn from each other. relationship and and shoot the shit and learn from each other but basketball is so strange to me because you are the antagonist to probably a bunch of your childhood heroes in that kobe michael situation that's like that's michael jordan he is uh a large part of why i'm playing basketball today and i really gotta fucking beat him i have to look like i'm mad at him i have to try to be faster and better at this thing than he is and like i just never see you know these these 20 and 21 year old basketball players who are never just like oh my god it's kevin durant he just fucking knocked the ball out of my hands these guys these kids are like coming basketball's great because

they're like they're like 17 or 18 when they're coming to the leagues if they're a phenom and like so they are coming straight out of high school. They've been watching LeBron play. And then all of a sudden, like a week later, they're catching passes from LeBron. And they're like, what the fuck? That's, this is, it can't even feel like real life. Or stealing from him. And then being like, like if it were me, I'd be like, I'm so sorry.

You were much better. I just got really lucky, Le'd be like, I'm so sorry. You were much better. I just got really lucky, LeBron. You can have it back. You deserve it. And also playing against Michael Jordan, he's saying the most awful things to you the entire time. Because to be clear, there's a reason they can't do the thing where they mic up players in the NFL. They'll put a little microphone on them. You can't do that on a basketball court.

The things they're saying to each other is, I'm not going to give examples, they are extremely inappropriate for any workplace. They're saying the worst things. I wanted to jump to, I can't even pull any one specific insult they would lob at someone because none of them are words that i say in 2023 yeah they're they're brutal they're and they're you can tell that they're brutal because like joel and beetle get on twitter and he's like we'll just eviscerate somebody and you're like oh you've been thinking about that person for a very long time the only other people that i think do are like cornerbacks cornerbacks get it in the same way in the NFL,

where cornerbacks, their whole job is to get inside the head of a wide receiver. Leading up to the game is just as important as the game itself, where Jalen Ramsey would start DMing the wives of the player they were going to play, he was going to play against, and just get in her DMs with the off chance that

this person is looking through his wife's phone and seeing that, or that she'll mention it. just anything to like get this edge and i i feel like right because if she's not if she's not completely like tapped into the league she could be like is this one of your friends from work who's dm who is this yeah who's dming me so have either of you like you've both you both work with extremely famous people i know you've both been to parties and company events and you probably have corporate retreats or whatever where the cast of Succession is there and all that. Have you got to sit down and have heart-to-heart conversations one-on-one with extremely famous people, or have you talked about that endlessly on this show already? I don't know that heart-to-hearts have happened.

We've talked about when I got to meet Jesse Armstrong at the Emmys party last year. He's the creator of Succession. And I just ended up being in a room with just the two of us and like one or two of his kids at this party is reading sushi. And I talked to him about writing and about Succession for a while until other more famous people came in. And then I froze up when Sarah famous people came in and then i i i froze up when sarah snook came in the room um well there's very good reason for that sure it's in the episode i'm gonna i'm gonna tell you jason because i don't think you know she came into the room she she glided into the room and said it's so fucking hot and then lifted up her dress

in front of a fan like a motor fan not like oh sorry yes not like a we're talking about uh fascinating they're all weirdos celebrities they're all just the weirdest the weirdest people they live in a whole separate a whole separate world i'm sure uh there's many people on in the cast of succession i would love to to talk to like uh you know jesse strong or i'm sorry jeremy strong uh and i know that would be the most awkward conversation in the world because he cannot string together like two human sentences that that make sense because he's just so like spaced out and whatever so i have a million questions i would love to ask him about like like acting choices and creative choices and stuff like that i would not come away with any information and he would not find that conversation pleasant at all like i think he's an amazing actor i think it's an incredible like the way he embodied that

character i don't know what we would have to say to each other that would be that would be interesting for either of us yeah i would need to see him like wearing a boston celtics hat or i would or like a tat a beatles tattoo or something something that is not about acting or his process that i should be like oh my man are you eating a hot dog oh i fucks with hot dogs let's talk about hot dogs and then i could feel like we were on the same level talking about hot dogs we had one experience dan where we were at the webbies in new york and we were just like at this after party that then we went away with these two other guys and like hung out with them for a little while and then their buddy showed up and their buddy was Jeffrey Fletcher,

who is the writer of precious, the movie precious. So like this, uh, um, uh, Academy award winner just came and hung out with us and we all had dinner with him. And that was the first time where I was like really in the presence of somebody where I was like, well, I feel like I could just ask you some questions here. And he was like game for it.

And that was the first time that I've ever had like a real experience. I was like, so what's that like adapting a book into an Academy award-winning movie? And that was, I don't know. I think he got nothing out of that conversation, but it was certainly great for me. Speaking about writing.

I want to ask some questions about writing because I noticed that we, we spent so much time talking up top about promoting and how good at promoting Jason is. Have we mentioned the name of the new book yet? I don't think we have. No, not in the least. Yeah. The book is called Zoe is Too Drunk for This Dystopia. It's the third Zoe Ash novel, but you can read them in any order but it

is that it is the third one these are science fiction novels take place in the fairly near future uh but if you're familiar with any of the stuff i've written it's like that well don't i mean you can read it read the other ones in any order but not this one because she dies in this one right well that's yeah we're gonna it toward the end i mean she's in most of it but uh i love these books and i can't wait to read this one i read the first two uh it's a it's a fantastic series i i i will disagree with jason i think it's fun to read them in order the way that i experienced them because i i i feel like the zo Zoe experiences some real growth across it, and I liked being with her every step of her journey.

Anyway, this question is about writing. Jason and Soren, do you ever talk about what you're writing while you're writing it? And I'm going to answer first because for the longest time, my answer to that question was yes, based on nothing but an internal logic that made sense to me where i thought if i am telling a friend or another writer a thing that i'm working on then two things will happen talking about it will have me like defend it in some way and like i'm i'm talking out loud i'm i'm gaming out some stuff and maybe i'm i'm figuring out what i'm trying to say and and solving some puzzles

uh as i'm articulating it for the first time in the world and not just being trapped with myself on the page so it'll be good for me as a writer to be talking it out and b it'll be good because if someone else knows about it i think i I will have accountability. Now there is someone who will ask about it in the future and see how far along I'm in it. And I thought, these two things, this is going to get me to really finish this thing. And it made so much sense to me, but it never ended up being true in my experience, those two things,

even though the logic sounded really correct to me. And then recently, I listened to a podcast called Subtitles On that I've mentioned before that I love. And they talked about a study, and I couldn't find the study, but this also makes sense to me. And the host said that he never tells anyone what he's working on because according to this study describing what you're working on to someone scratches the same itch as finishing it and putting it out in the world like that's what it does to your brain you feel like i can write this pilot or i can tell you what i think the pilot is going to be and what i want you to feel and and you know the different places i think it can be and what I want you to feel and, and, you

know, the different places I think it can go and all the potential it has. And once you do that, especially if you do it to a person who was like, yeah, I can really see that your brain has gotten what you want it to get out of the creative process already. And then you no longer, uh, have any desire or like whatever was pushing you to write it in the first place is god you got your treat already you got someone saying that sounds good interesting and as writers and if people in your social circle who are aspiring writers we have all known somebody who talked endlessly about the book they were writing and never produced a book. But they loved to talk about the great book idea they had.

And so I've always felt like that's dangerous. You're trying to get like your social reward out of the book. But for me, it's partially that, but also like there's this big thing among George R.R. Martin's fans about how, like, when is he going to finish the series? And I would put all the money I have on him never finishing it because the show has already – How much money is that, by the way? Can you say it? Yeah, say the amount that you have. This is the part of the show.

Over $400. Because the TV series, whatever, it deviates from the books, but the ending is the same. Like that's been confirmed. What he did is he gave them a broad outline of where the story is going, and then they told a very bad version of that story. To me, this would be like if you're at a party or a dinner party and you're starting to tell a joke,

as if you guys tell like classic set-up punchline jokes. But just imagine you're the type of person that does that and you're telling the joke and then somebody else surprised like oh i've heard this one and they they blurt out the punchline but do it badly like they don't perform it but they're and then the people sitting around you are like oh yeah it's kind of funny haha they probably left and then somebody turns you this we'll finish the joke it's like well i can't no matter how i tell it it's it's it's been ruined like the surprise has been ruined like i can't what's kind of the same thing if i tell a bunch of people what i'm working on what i'm doing for me it's like i've let the air out of the balloon the

thing that's pushing me like man way they find out what happens at the end of this thing. Like the moment I verbally tell somebody, it's kind of like it takes the pressure off me. Because it's like, no, the pressure is you doing this so that people can find out about it. And there's something in the brain. Maybe it's just another side of the coin of what Dan discussed. Maybe it's just another the other side of the coin of what Dan discussed. And I do think this is a personality type thing, because obviously there are people who work in writers rooms like Soren works in a writer's room. It's a team effort.

I cannot do that. I can't do the thing where we sit around and bounce around ideas and come up with something like I have to sit down by myself and operate in my own head. And the thing you see in movies where the author like sends the book to their agent or their publisher, like one chapter at a time. That is madness to me. I can't, I don't know if anyone actually works that way. I think they do. I think George R.R. Martin works that way. I think he sends it off in chunks.

I mean, well, that's insane. First of all, because you have to, you don't even know what the book is until you finish it. And then you're like, and now I have to go back and make sure everything connects and looks like it was intentional. Like you're finding things along the way. That is, that's definitely a trope in movies that I don't think could happen to produce a good novel. Because if Cormac McCarthy sent the first few chapters of The Road

and then the editor was just like, hey, yeah, stop. I don't really see it. Maybe they're so bummed out. Maybe bring another character in there. Like you can't give notes three chapters. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, like I know what you were saying at the beginning of like that it will light a fire under you to tell somebody about it.

I also felt that and continue to feel that. But I think it maybe is determined by the type of people you tell or who you what you think that they might do with that information. Like, I when I tell somebody about like a idea that I have for a feature, after telling them my thought process is, Oh fuck, I got to write that before they do something with that idea. Like I'm worried that they're going to take it or that somehow just talking about it also puts it out into the, into the atmosphere in the same way that like people have the synchronicity where like they're writing about the same thing at the same time, the same way my phone can somehow predict what i'm thinking about like if i put that out into the energy into the atmosphere like other people are gonna be like oh yeah vampires i should do a vampire

thing and they're gonna land on the exact same thing that i'm working on and so like right i don't spill it intentionally but like occasionally someone will ask about it and if i do then i'm like that really gets me going like i start writing immediately do either of your wives ask you what you're working on and you tell them like like beyond just saying i'm writing a pilot or i'm writing a feature or i'm writing a book will you say like this is what happens to zoe in this book i want to explore this idea with the third in the series or it's just like no don't talk to me about writing no she'll read it after it's complete and i like i'll send it off to the publisher and i'll and she'll get to read it first before anyone else but there's absolutely no like

working through stuff or like well i'm gonna try to do this i'm gonna try to do that it's like no it's not nobody nobody has that not agent, not my editor, nobody. That's all contained inside my head. And that is a weird place to be because if you're spending two straight years writing something and you have no feedback as to whether or not it works on even a fundamental level, it is just you. It's pretty vulnerable. That is a weird place to put yourself. I see why a lot of writers drink themselves to death. In On Writing, Stephen King talks about it as floating in a bathtub across an ocean.

That's what writing is. It's the most deeply lonely thing you can be doing. I think he has the same sort of writing process as you, where it's like, I make this thing, and when it's done, it will be done. But until then, I'm going to just keep it. And then you, maybe not intentionally, but you start to separate and bifurcate from the rest of the world because you have to just pull into this other world that exists and make sure you know everything about it as you build it. Stephen King famously has a story where his wife found the first few pages of Carrie in the trash. For people who don't know Stephen King's career. Carrie was his first bestseller.

That's what made him Stephen King. Because he had written a few books that he hadn't sold, written a lot of short stories that some people read but didn't care about. And he was teaching, just teaching English at a high school. And she fished Carrie out of the trash. And he's like, no, I want to see where this goes. He's like, no, the main character is obnoxious and she's like she's really passive she's just getting abused the whole book i guess not really she had no finish it trust me finish it

but it was only because she saw it in the garbage it wasn't a thing where they like talked it out over dinner and they worked through the story she happened to notice it when taking the trash out off his bags of cocaine in there. Not yet. I don't think early on, I don't think he was. Yeah, no, I think that, um,

but yeah, like I, Colleen has, she will occasionally ask, but I don't, we, we've like learned how to negotiate each other in those circumstances where like,

she's not going to give me feedback on it. Cause we fought about that before where she like occasionally I, if it's something that's very dark or something that is like sexual or something like that and she gets this it's like a representation that i'm representing her out in the world and so like if i'm writing this i'm a representation of her so like she is very like please don't do that don't don't write about that and i'm like no really yeah and then i will like and then i push back on that too hard and like i dig my feet in too hard and then like i will start to believe in something that probably doesn't work occasionally and so we don't really do it that way

anymore the only thing that i've we've done is that she will ask me if i'm working on an episode she'll be like what's it about and i will tell her she'll be like oh okay and then we there's no working on an episode she'll be like what's it about and i will tell her she'll be like oh okay and then we there's no editorializing after that i mean that feels pretty safe too because the episode you know what the episode is going to be yeah at that point really and it's not there's there's no risk of you running out of steam and not handing in your episode or or or her stealing the idea for that episode i will certainly if anyone asks me what I'm working on at Last Week Tonight, then it's the simplest answer for whatever A story I'm working on, which is like freight trains at the moment or some other evergreen topic that we're going to do a deep dive into.

And the beauty of working at Last Week Tonight, no one ever has any followup questions when they find out. It's like, Oh yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm working on, uh, migrant abuse in tomato farming.

And they're like, okay, all right. They're like the nitty gritty of the writing is not fun to talk about. It's not like when the, even if somebody was like at another job, when somebody is like asking you about your job and you're like, um,

I've got this one person that I'm managing and they're a real problem. Like you want to kind of talk it out but with writing it's not fun it's not fun to talk about the thing that you're working on because the problems that you're having are like things where you're getting stuck takes so long to explain to a person that it's like not worth it and a lot of it and i don't know if if listeners are bored by the insider talk of the writing process. But a lot of the stuff that you spend the most time on is not inspirational. Like I'm trying to find the heart of this metaphor or whatever.

It's mechanical stuff. It's like, well, you got to understand, their car exploded in this scene, but the next scene requires them to have a car. So I'm not sure if I should save the car explosion for later, but if I do that, then that scene is now boring because the car doesn't explode. But now I've got to work out a thing where they

get another car, but it needs to be that car. So I'm trying to figure out where can I move the car explosion, or if I don't have the car explode, is there something else exciting I can have happen here? And because every change you make, it reshuffles the whole deck.

You gotta think, it's like, well, the only way for them to get out of this situation is if one of them had a knife. Okay. Maybe he pulls a knife out of his boot. Why does he have a knife in his boot? Well, I need to circle back and not just write him inserting a knife into his boot.

I need to write a funny scene where when you read that scene, you don't realize I'm setting up something. You just think it's a funny bit that involves. It's like silly. It's like he's such a goofball that he would have a knife in his boot. And then when it pays off, it's like, oh, that worked out. It's like, well, no, I circled back and inserted the setup later, which is why you can't send stuff one chapter at a time to the publisher.

That stuff, I don't think people realize how much of any task, of any artistic task is boring. Like if you ask some artist who has like abstract work where it's all like blocks of colors or whatever, they could probably talk for hours about trying to get the right kind of varnish that wouldn't meet the colors, but they wanted it to be covered. It's like, well, I tried to use a clear coat, but the clear coat didn't do it. It'd be like all this technical stuff. It's like, well, I tried and I had to use acetone on it, but it dulled the effect. And so I really wanted it to, like, it would just be so mind numbing because in their world, like when they're talking to the press, they will say something like, well, I wanted this to represent the sunset over an oppressive society and how

everyone watches the same sunset. But in the end, the day-to-day of the work, it's, I ordered this pigment. It's not the right shade. It doesn't match what I have here. I can't go over it because you can't paint over this. So now it's all stuff about canvases and chemicals and stuff like that. It's the nitty gritty. And writing is the same thing. It's all of this mechanical stuff that is interesting to no one on earth. Not even the person doing it.

But you and maybe another author. I think about your favorite author. It's not the fun part. Think about who your favorite author is. And then you would be shocked and appalled by how many times that person has sat in front of a computer or a typewriter or however they write on a napkin,

scratched out the word uh and put the, and then scratched out the and put uh again, and then scratched out the and then put another a. Like, that. Just, like, going through, like, whether this is going to be the thing or it's going to be one of several things. Like, deciding that thing over and over and over again, like, what fits

better is so awful. Right. I change it back and forth over and over again, and then my timer goes off that says I was writing for an hour, and it's like, doesn't matter how I spend the hour. It's so awful. Right. I change it back and forth over and over again. And then my timer goes off that says I was writing for an hour. And it's like, doesn't matter how I spend the hour. It's all writing. I changed that of. That's today's hour.

Did it. Talking to people that work in TV and movies is the worst of all because you ask them anything about like, well, now, why did this character? Like, why when they had this conversation about their dead father, why was it just the two brothers there? Why didn't you want the rest of it? It's like, oh, well, she wasn't available to shoot that day because she had already left on maternity leave. So that's why she wasn't there. It's like, oh, OK. Or it's like, well, we couldn't rent.

We wanted. Why didn't that just take place in his home? Why is he alienated from his own home that they had to do this out in a public place? Well, we couldn't. That apartment is actually a real apartment. Somebody lives there. We couldn't shoot that day. They just weren't.

We didn't have permission to shoot that. So we had to shoot it at the bar. It was going to be like an uplifting family story, but it was raining the day we were supposed to film the park scene. So we just killed his dad instead and that's where the story went they did that now but i don't know if people realize how much of your mental powers it like doing something that's involves a cast and a production crew how much of your mental energy goes to juggling that stuff like can we afford to shoot this on the helicopter or do we have to rewrite it so it's in the

park? And that's like, for every one thing you want to shoot, you may have 20 different ideas for it and only one of them actually has the available location in the budget. All the people can be there, you know. You both have seen all of breaking bad correct yes soren yes i have great uh soren is nodding for our listeners uh the uh i was reading a recent interview with vince gilligan the creator of that show that i know that that show has had some interesting uh writing decisions

where they liked to paint themselves into, like the first season was very rigidly structured, what they wanted to do. And then by the second season, they liked the idea of writing themselves into corners and then figuring out a way to write their way out of it and just like be real loose and run and gun with it. And then Gillian was talking about the final season

and how they decided they're going to open final season at breakfast. Walt's having his birthday. He's eating his breakfast at Denny's or wherever it is. And we see him, and he looks like shit. His hair's grown out. He's got a beard. He looks like he's aged many years because this is a jump ahead in time from the story that we've been following and then he goes to his car and we find that he has bought a giant machine gun in the parking lot from some guy and that's our

our beginning of the episode and that's our flash forward and then what's going to happen and then vince gilligan goes on in the interview to be like, I was so mad at myself for doing that. Why did I do that? And for like months working on the show, he was bashing his head against the wall with the writers and being like, just as a hypothetical, what if we never pay it off? What if we never explain why he bought the machine gun? I don't know why he did that. I just thought it would be a cool thing to do. And it's like funny that it's all, it managed to

work out and you could say that's either like a bunch of people operating at the height of their abilities and their craft, solving problems with their sharp minds, or it's, you could say it's like that magical writing thing where some part of Vince must have known that this machine

gun was going to matter. Either of those explanations are fine. To me, my big takeaway from that interview was this is the most stressful writing I've ever heard in my entire life. I can't imagine putting myself in that position of being in season five of your critically acclaimed show where every single season was a pocket watch with a bunch of pieces working together and then you open with this dumb machine gun thing and then immediately afterwards you're like where the fuck would you buy a machine gun he's a chemistry teacher what's he gonna

do with a machine gun he's got cancer this is so stupid can we pretend it was a dream I think but like what he's like tapping into is that you have to balance the logistics of what you're writing with what you would enjoy watching. So you start from the point of view of what's an interesting story? What are elements of a story that are interesting that I would like to see?

And then you're like, got one, got another. Okay, how do I connect those two things? Where's the game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon between these two things? Like, how do these two things make sense together? So that's where all the logistics come in. You have, Jason knows that he wants, they have to get in another car because there's another set piece he likes. Like, there's another place they need to be that's like, this is exciting. This is fun.

But now there's like this problem because the car exploded and you're like, oh, yeah. Okay. And like so much, like that's 90% of the writing is like getting between the things that you know would be fun for people in a way that it's believable. The difference is with a novel, I can finish the whole thing before anybody sees it on breaking bad that he says they were only working about three episodes in advance.

He said they'd be shooting one pre-production, another writing the third, and that's all the further they went. So when they started the season, they did not have any kind of a plan except for the one season where they had the plane crash. He says we outlined it all in advance. And he said that was the worst season. He's like, so from then on, we worked on the fly. And that means setting up foreshadowing and setting up a Chekhov's gun without anyone in the writer's room knowing what the payoff is going to be.

You decide after the fact. So here, like with that flash forward scene, you do that because you know you've looked at your structure and you know that it starts slow. So if you're starting slow, you need to give, drop a hint very early. Like, hey, this is building to something. So having him go out, you know, it's got the question. He's there. He's eating breakfast. He's meeting the man. What are they meeting about? Oh, there's something mysterious going on. They've got something in the trunk. What's he doing? What's he buying? They opened their trunk. There's an M60 machine gun, like a heavy machine gun in there. Oh my God, what is he going to do with that? Who's he going to shoot with that thing?

It creates all these questions in your mind. Now, okay, flashback. One year earlier, here's the stuff and the audience is on board because we want to find out what he's going to do with that machine gun. But most people do not realize that the writers also did not know that Bryan Cranston did not know

what Walt was going to do. No one involved knew what he was going to do with that machine gun because they had not written it yet. Many, many twists are written this way. Where they set up a cliffhanger of an episode as the guy opens the box. It's like, oh my God. And it's like, we'll find out next week what was in the box. When they filmed that, they did not know what was in the box.

The actor's direction was just, what's in there is extremely shocking to you. Yeah. Just Vince Gillian up at 4 o'clock in the morning would be like, why the fuck did I say Walt was going to go kill Dracula? What are we going to do? Now we've got to bring Dracula in. Okay, we've got to introduce Dracula. Maybe when Walt's under his floorboards, he finds a coffin.

Now, when people who are listening to this think that that is an act of insanity, that he would like, why would the show be worse when you plan it all out? Let me explain why. Because Jesse Pinkman was supposed to die in the first season. Why? Because Jesse Pinkman was supposed to die in the first season. That character only existed for him to die partway through the first season to up the stakes for Walt, to show what kind of, he was supposed to get tortured to death by a drug dealer, and then Walt was going to get revenge. But as once they cast the part, and once they saw Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul together, only then, when they were filming, did they realize,

oh, this is what our show is about. It's a surrogate father and son relationship. It's a dual arc between one man having his downfall and this wayward kid redeeming himself in parallel as a father and son who are on divergent paths and that he is, one has to avoid being corrupted by the other, but not in the way you would expect. It's like, oh, this is our show. This side character we just brought in to be like comic relief who would then die and be heartbreaking as just part of Walt's crazy journey to be in a kingpin. It's like, oh, no, the show was about Jesse and Walt.

They had to find that out by not just writing it, but by casting it and filming it and seeing the chemistry they had together. That's why he, they, they couldn't just, you can't just plan out the whole series. You've got to watch it and see how it actually, it actually works.

Yeah. It takes a while for a show to figure out what it is, which is like terrifying. And that shows get canceled after three episodes now because yeah, show never figured it out like the show i will the show might have figured it out even like by that third episode like okay we know now and like well that's useless that information is useless to you now yeah i mean i feel that that resonates with me in a big way because last week's night john John was supposed to die in season one. In episode three, we were going to lose him completely.

Tortured by a drug dealer, right? Yeah, and then, yeah, that's right, tortured by a drug dealer. And then it would be about finding revenge, but our EP Liz was like, well, hang on, I think this guy's really got something. I think the audiences are really responding to the little funny guy at the desk. We should keep him around for a bit.

But do we have to make him keep doing that accent? Can we just let him talk regular? No, it's too late. You're locked in. I know. Couldn't there be a plot point where he gets a bonk on the head or something? He gets amnesia.

The doctor's like, no, he loses this affectation he's doing. He gets to talk. It could be his twin or something. Is there any way we can... I'm only bringing this up because it's one of my my favorite dumb television things that's ever happened chasen did you watch the the show hemlock grove that almost no one watched no it's vampires and werewolves and uh famke jansen was in that the whole run of that show what bill skarsgård it was like one of his

first things right it's a a pretty bad show that ran for way too many seasons and i watched every episode multiple times i don't know why and fonka jansen is supposed to be this like very very old vampire from way back and she had this this british accent uh in season one and she is not pulling it off. It's not good. And by the end of the season, events conspire to get her tongue ripped out in an attack. And then in season two,

she takes the tongue from a corpse and puts that on, and because that tongue, that dead person was from Oklahoma, the tongue no longer has the British accent. So she just has an American accent for the rest of the show. And it's explained away as like, oh, she was from Tulsa.

This tongue's from Tulsa. So it would be crazy if this tongue knew British. So now I sound like this. Is everybody happy? Did we fix one of the problems on the show? Good, great. That is incredible. It's wonderful.

It kind of reminds me of recently they had to uh recast all of the voices in rick and morty because there's one guy that did basically all of them and the way they did it they did an open casting and they they had i think they said 600 people uh one of our former friends and co-workers read for both parts um and i'm trying to imagine having that job of having to listen to 600 people's rick and morty impressions oh yeah over and over to try to judge which one's best so if you think you had a bad week at work somebody over the summer or whenever they had to do this had to listen to hundreds. It was literally hundreds of people doing their Rick and Morty. I think at a certain point, you hand a sheet of paper with a list of like 25 names and

like any one of them could do either of the parts. We looked into them. They all sound the same. This is the list of people who, as far as we know, have not sexually assaulted anyone. That is our main criteria for replacing Justin Roiland on this show. Also, I feel like anybody can do those voices. I know. I was going to start doing it right now, but I guess that would be embarrassing.

I don't want to out our friend who was was asked to read for this role because i don't know if he signed anything saying he's not allowed to talk about it or she uh but he was asked to read for the role and they were like don't try to just sound like the rick and morty that you've heard really like do your own thing like put your sound a little bit like them but put your own spin on it i watched the trailer for the new season. They sound exactly like the fucking original Lincoln Morty. There's somebody just doing an impression. 100%. It sounds kind of like if I had just done it.

Yeah. All right. Soren, do you have any more questions for our wonderful guest and pal? No, I can wait until next year. We've taken up so much of his time already. Yeah. I think I'm good. I know I say this every time i'm on but

it every time i get asked to do a show the first thing same thing with with jack o'brien's show the dailies i guess occasionally he'll reach out to have me on or somebody i will always say man i was just on though like are we gonna have anything to talk about like see anything happen in the news and all again it's been nine months it's literally september last time i was on in january the way time moves when you have a deadline and it's one deadline like the book you have one year to write this book which is the situation for 2023 and the entire year is just one deadline the time moves it's it's like legitimately upsetting how fast it moves because you missed everything. Like, I can't.

It's such an old, cranky, old person thing to say. It's like, I can't believe it's almost Halloween already. It was just summer. I'm telling you, there was a thing of tartar sauce in the refrigerator. I had made some fish. I went to get the tartar sauce. I thought, well, I just bought this. Like, I just opened this.

And it expired in June, which means I had to have bought it in, like, February. I vividly remember that trip to the grocery store. I remember buying it, thinking, oh, I'd like to have fish in the next couple of weeks. I better get some tartar sauce. And then eight months later, in my mind, it's like, oh, it's time to have that meal because it's been a couple of weeks. It's time we should have that fish. Everything is like that. I can't, to the people, I know a lot of your listeners are very young. A lot of the 12 and 13 year olds who listen to your show, they can't comprehend this because a year to them is an incredibly long time. But a year being old and then a year being old with one deadline where this is due at the end of the year, like every day, every you've got 50 weekends, like that's it. And you can count those down and you can,

it's like, okay, I'm'm 20 of the way through the year and i've barely started it makes the time go fast in a way that is legitimately bad like i no one should live this way because you just miss everything because it feels like like i'm so bad at keeping in touch with people anyway but it feels like I just talk to everyone. But like my family, I saw them at Christmas. In my mind, I just saw them. And I'm sure from their point of view, it's like, well, he just falls off the edge of the earth. Like, he just doesn't care.

It's like, man, you have to understand, Christmas just happened. Like, the fact that it's about Christmas again, they've got Christmas up everywhere, is so weird because it never stopped being Christmas. Yeah. Well, our guest has been Andy Rooney. I know what you mean, though. And it's really heightened. That voice again, folks, that's TikTok sensation.

It happens with children a lot because kids, my daughter is three, so her entire life has been just three years. So the idea of her waiting 15 minutes for something to me is nothing, but to her is crazy. It's insane that I would ask her to wait 15 minutes before she eats something when she's hungry, because that's such a big portion of her life. Like the percentage of her life in that is like insanely. And so for me, like, yeah, time just like moves past so fast. Like all of a sudden it's football season again, because, and it happens faster and faster every year. Cause you're compounding, but it's funny to see it on the opposite end where your children

are like, they like a year ago is nothing to me a year ago is half of or like a third of her life ah so cruel the passage of time the show was quick question but you knew that already we are recorded edited and produced by the irreplaceable

Gabe Harder and today Jacob Weinstein our theme song is by the incredible Merex their digital album is available at merex.bandcamp.com you can find all of us on Twitter and all the Twitter places you can buy Jason's new book or buy all of his books any of the three in the

Zoe Ash series or any of the many hilarious John Dies at the End series of books what the hell did I just read this book is full of spiders if you're reading this you're in the wrong universe john dies at the end i'm missing fucking one of them aren't i it's fine okay uh buy them anywhere books are sold unless jason has a preferred place for book buying no get it wherever it's cheapest don't even care or or no i'm sorry I said the wrong thing. Support your local bookstore.

Right. If that happens to also be cheapest, that's even better. But yes, please support your local independent bookstores if you somehow have one. I literally don't know that I have one in my city other than the place where I sign my books at Parnassus Books in Nashville.

But good Lord, if there's a brick and mortar bookstore they're struggling all of them yeah uh please please spend some money there i think we just i just brought the energy up after the slow passage of time reminding us uh how how fleeting and precious life is and then you've segued into small businesses dying. I'm trying to end on something positive, Jason. You got to meet me halfway. Do a song or something.

Do one of your songs. Do your song about Gaza. God. One of those bad parody songs where the, the, the lyrics to try to fit the jokes and they don't even go with the rhythm of the song. They have to cram it in really fast. You know what I'm talking about.

Of course. The really bad parody songs. Right. He's got Jason's parody song, Gaza Shop, which is a play on Thrift Shop by Macklemore. So it's not even like a timely parody. Is that how you say his name? Macklemore so it's not even like a timely parody is that how you say his name Macklemore yeah okay alright

solved see ya I've got a quick quick question for you alright I wanna hear your thoughts, wanna know what's on your mind I've got a quick quick question for you alright The answer's not important, I'm just glad that we could talk tonight So what's your favourite? Who did you get? When will I be remembered? What's it out for? Where did all the good things go? Oh forget it, I'm movie, Daniel O'Brien Two best friends and comedy writers If there's an answer, they're gonna find it I think you'll have a great time here

I think you'll have a great time here.