Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - QQ ep 60 - Take a Walk on the Sunny Side feat. Jason Pargin

Episode Date: October 10, 2020

In this episode the guys welcome their old friend from Cracked, Jason Pargin, to talk writing strategy, music taste, and staying sane during a pandemic.  And as always, a big thanks to Skillshare.  For a limited time, get a free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership at Skillshare.com/qq2 

Hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, a podcast where two best friends ask each other questions and give each other answers. I'm one half of this podcast, comedy writer, author of books, man of the sea, and guy who in college was forced by a writing professor to write a piece without jokes, Daniel O'Brien, and I am joined, as always, by my co-host, Mr. Soren Bui. Soren, say good evening. Good evening, everybody. I'm Soren Bui. Soren, say good evening. Good evening, everybody. I'm Soren Bui.

I'm an innovator, a thought leader, exporter of ideas. Man, you don't even sound like you believe in that. Inspirer. Okay. And when I was 13, I heard that Jake had sex with Melanie so hard that she legally died for six minutes and decided from that day forward I would only ever have sex gently so as not to kill anyone. That's very kind of you and Jake is a liar. I don't think it was even Jake who spread the rumor.

I think it was somebody else who was at the party. Oh. Well then that sounds more true. Here's the deal, Dan. It happened in a teepee. Come on, man. We have a guest. We have a whole show to do. I also like when she died,

somebody immediately got out of stopwatch to see how long... Someone call the doctor. No, hold on. Let's see how long this happens. What's the record? For anyone who doesn't know, which you're a fool if you don't, that voice we are joined by right now is our guest that we're very excited to have.

New York Times bestselling author and new YouTuber, Jason David Wong Parjan. Hello. And I'm here to play Quick Question, where if you answer one question quickly you win fifty thousand dollars is how it's how my manager explained this show to me so i am very excited i've been studying this that you guys tend to cover and i've got my finger on the buzzer uh i don't remember on what the record is for the fastest someone has answered the question but i'm i'm a very quick answer i really need the money because I've got this operation that costs exactly $50,000 that I have to pay for. I think a more impressive record for the show

is how long someone has gone without giving an answer, which is typically how the show goes. Yeah, there's a lot of dead air. The show could just as easily be called dead air, I think. Yeah. It's sort of our signature thanks to skillshare for supporting quick question with daniel and soren skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people explore new skills deepen existing passions and get lost in creativity for a limited time get a free trial of skillshare premium membership at skillshare.com slash qq2 that's skillshare.com slash qq2 i actually do have a question i i'm not i'm not going to try to throw you throw you off your syllabus or whatever but uh so i here's

my quick question which i'm sure this violates a rule that I brought my own. But it's like when you show up to the carnival at the little shooting game and you bring your own gun. It's like that. To you guys, to everyone, does the time when we all worked for the same company seem like a really long time ago or does it feel like yesterday? I can answer for myself. It feels like a very long time ago.

I don't know if that's because in the time since I left that job to now, I've also crossed into my 30s and moved across the country. So like everything about, I guess I was in my 30s when I had that job, but everything about my life is visually immediately different

than the time that it was when I worked at Cracked. So it's like a very clear, stupid person's way of transitioning to the next chapter of my life. Where it's like, well, I used to do this one thing where it was sunny in California. And now I'm in the city where there are skyscrapers and it's less sunny for portions of the year. So it feels very distinct to me. I know that someone asked me today, one of my coworkers asked me how long I'd been at my current job at Last Week Tonight.

at Last Week Tonight, and I was shocked that the answer was 2018, because it feels like, oh, in my 20s, I did this other job across the world, and now I've been doing this for a very long time. But it was jarring how short that amount of time was. For me, it's been has it does seem like eons ago i have not moved anywhere else i live in the same city and everything but um it feels like a very very long time ago uh but at the same time when i just heard jason's voice on this call it was just like being on another call with him like we're getting on to work on the pitch doc like the people i feel like i it feels like i just saw them yesterday yeah i know what you mean it's it feels the world is so different because we're

talking about december of 2017 like and even earlier than that for soren like the world feels so different and it's just been so many things have happened since then like the way my mind perceives the time uh because that's it's that's one thing that's weird for me with memory is that like there are things in my childhood like i couldn't tell you how close to each other they occurred but they are like they're both vivid memories but i couldn't tell you if they were five years apart or three months apart and there's something with memory like just the different emotional state you were in if that makes sense like i'm thinking about the early era when we all showed up at cracked and like all of our jokes were about like jersey shore

and and batman and and sparkly vampires and everybody's making those same those same three jokes that feels like when i was a toddler that feels yeah there are things i remember from when i was in kindergarten that are more vivid than that it feels like a different planet yeah i feel like i remember you specifically having to institute a rule for our writers workshop that was like all right guys from here on out no more paris hilton jokes and like thinking about that as like a necessary rule at some point is it it sounds like it's from another century it's like oh we were making too many paris hilton jokes so we had to put a stop to it yeah i mean like i think one of my first articles for cracked was about hipsters and i'm like hipsters feel like they've been a part of our consciousness for since I was born like a decade yeah I can't

remember a time when there wasn't that yeah because it was those early Obama years and the culture was just in such a different place that I don't know I don't even know what to say about it because it's not to get political, but I know that Trump has had this distortion effect on time that it feels like Trump has always been president. But man, those, like the Obama era being fresh and new and the optimism and just, like we were obsessed over such trivial things. I don't know.

I can't even put myself back in that mindset. Yeah. I'm curious about what the time was like towards the end of your run at Cracked because since I made the very brave decision to get fired by them back in 2017. I didn't keep up quite as much. And I know I can speak from the experience of my own show that like we've, there's been a turn towards self-righteousness and anger. Like it's less fun on this show to be like,

look at this stupid thing we found. It feels bigger and more important to say, look at this policy that is hurting millions of people that we need to address. We're not allowed the frivolous things anymore, which is fine and necessary because we need to be angrier. And I'm curious if there was any kind of like either explicit conversation at cracked where you were like we're not allowed to we don't want to just sit and talk about plot holes in back to the future or whatever and we need to get more political or or or what it is that clear

you sort of it's just that it's without getting into like the the technical business side of things when you're doing for all the people out there who've never had to run a website before the the 40 percent of you or so who've never been in the business so much of what you're doing is dictated to you by like facebook and social media algorithms because they have this thing where if they decide nobody's going to see your article then nobody's going to see it like they could just slam the door on it so basically what had happened was they kind of it was such a weird situation where facebook and the platforms didn't want anything anything that was political it had to come from the new york times or washington post or anything like they didn't want crack.com eating up bandwidth.

Because you know how Facebook worries about sources. If you're not a trusted source like Breitbart or The Blaze or Ben Shapiro, then they don't want you putting fake news out there. So if you're trying to do our brand of, well, it's real, but we're kind of looking at the funny side of it. So it was a thing where the audience only wants politics like that's the only thing that has any heat around it but also the gatekeepers didn't want us discussing politics so you're just trying to thread the needle by

constantly finding something in that sweet spot but it it was it didn't matter everything nothing we did really worked it was just it was that same march of cut cut cut like even after they had you know because they they got rid of 85 of the staff and you know half of the freelancers and closed the office and all of that it didn't matter it's revenues add revenues everything felt so hard that it was still just we have to shave this many hours off the free electives we have to cut these contractors we have to get do we try to lower the payout for for by five dollars for this thing like it's just shaving nickels and like when we were there like in the glory years in 2013 2014 whatever and you had all of these plans of like we'll do in another book or we'll have a tv show someday or maybe we should make a movie or like

all of that is gone it was just where can we shave another dollar where can we shave where can we save another one percent off the budget and so like all of the for me all of the the joy of it was gone. The parts that made me happy was, you know, I was the first person to see every new Sean Baby column. I was, you know, I would still laugh reading people's jokes. We still had a ton of truly great writers working for us. You know, I enjoyed the work. I enjoyed writing stuff.

But everything else, like there were five people left. There were five editors left. Yeah. So everything with like the big calls and everybody's tossing around ideas and laughing and there's like this atmosphere well now there's like there's no calls there's no meetings it's just it's just these few people scattered working in their their bedrooms uh trying to keep this thing alive uh because there were dozens if not hundreds of contractors and freelancers who were depending on it to pay the rent so it's like you're trying to keep this thing alive for them but there was no like dynamic new ideas or bold new experiments or try this new cool thing like all the stuff that kind of gives you life as a creative person that's kind of all squeezed out of it it's just how do we get more

and more lean and more and more efficient and it's just uh very very taxing right i i do i appreciate that you stayed for as long as you did because when we had our big meeting where where we all decided to get fired together um they just sort of alluded to the fact that there are a few people who are staying around and that was my first question upon being fired was who is staying because i was uh perversely very uh protective of the brand even after it had let me go i was like well let's make sure it's in good hands even if it's not mine and they're like jason's gonna stay there i was like okay okay good then uh he's gonna he's gonna make sure it's in good hands even if it's not mine and they're like jason's gonna stay there i was like okay okay good then uh he's gonna he's gonna make sure that this isn't that it doesn't

turn into something horrible um so i do appreciate you staying there and like guiding the ship as you had done when i was there for as as long as you possibly could but there must have almost been like a strange perverse release when they got rid of everyone because then it was like good news we're not going to be a giant comedy empire that anyone dreamed of relax no more movies everybody which is like again sad to to learn but also like okay we can well then just let's make this operation the best that it can be for as long as we can. Well, there's an element that you're not necessarily getting, which is that you guys, you and Soren and the other people who did the video stuff and Cody.

I think it was just the two of us. Had kind of become the face of the brand because that's the faces. The rest of us, our faces were not on the site. So the video, you know, like we would do the live shows. They wouldn't wheel me and Brockway out there. It was, you know, it was you guys. So the fact that when they did their cuts, they cut the forward-facing lovable faces and then left the behind-the-scenes stuff.

The example I had used in, I think, a video was that it'd be like after season five, like the office fired the entire cast and replaced Steve Carell and all of the rest of the cast members. For some reason, I can't remember any of their names other than his. But just reassured everyone, like, oh, oh don't worry we got the same writing crew and the camera people producers everything's the same same same budget network don't worry it won't change it's like yeah but all of the feel is different all the people are gone it's the amount of, like, if I were doing the cuts,

I would have cut all of the behind-the-scenes stuff and then kept you guys as the face of it to put, like, a smiling face on our brutal, horrible operation we were running and then wheeled you out to make happy videos about, see, it's all the same, and then fired people like me but so the point being that the there was such backlash from the fans because you know all of all of their favorite personalities like imagine like the next season of the office starts and like steve corral and john krasinski

and all them are like on twitter talking about how they can't like pay their medical bills because the show fired them like you know you would have fans who are like just coming in every day telling everyone like don't support this like this is you know they fire everybody this is this is the site that fired all of your favorite people at christmas uh so it there's a thing where it's like i'm i'm now attached to what they perceive as this this ruthless you know because there was a theory that I had backstabbed everyone and done a coup from inside the operation to seize power, which is only, that's a half-truth.

So the energy was dark. Because it's not, like you say, most fans don't even know who you are, but it's the most loyal and most vocal who absolutely did know. It's the most loyal and most vocal who are on social media and who do follow that stuff and the ones who would know about the Leos and would follow all of you guys on social and everyone else,

they're the ones who would be most passionate about it and they're the ones that would be the loudest about saying you know i i'm i will never come to this site i will block the ads i will make sure no one ever comes here because they're the ones that that stabbed everyone in the back right and i understand what place that comes from on a human level but it was very frustrating uh Certainly at the time of the layoffs, watching people build what they thought the narrative was and who the enemies were and not being able to say, hey, this random person on Twitter who was like, so here's what happened.

In 2013, Jason stole this job from Jack O'Brien. And I was like, hold on, somebody check this person's sources. I've never heard of this human being before in my life. And they're in control of what this public narrative is of this website that we all loved. So that was very frustrating. As much as it was tempting to just wallow in my own sadness at the time, I absolutely felt for everybody who was still at the site and had to log in every day and read comment after comment that was we hate you you're bad you did this to the people we like like that was was not like lost and not not felt on me uh and it's happening again now that the youtube channel is restarting with jordan who's been doing a great job making almost everything

from scratch and you still see people years later in the comments who are mad at him and I just want to get in there and yell like hey we raised you better than this yeah because Jordan Jordan breathing who you're referring to like he just started making videos in his basement and just started showing them finished videos saying hey do you want like i made these with my own money do you want these on the site do you want like it's not like they went out and hired you know some scabbed across the layoff line or whatever principle they think is being broken like he's someone who's wrote over 100 articles for the site and taught himself to do video and set up his own green screen operation in his own home and just did it like man that's that's how it's done like that's the correct spirit right there like he just

yeah he's like i'm not gonna i'm just gonna make something it's just show it to him like oh yeah this is pretty good just throw it up on the channel and like with every single new person that comes along there's like this immediate backlash like every time we would introduce a new columnist it would just be it would be rage and and it's but i i would like to think that a year from now uh you know he will he will be the one they they love or they'll be they'll have brought some other people on and yeah i can't wait until they meet the next person well it's not just after that after the mass layoffs or anything. There was always that weird ownership people felt over the site, that the fans felt over the site,

where it felt sort of underground, like they had discovered it themselves and that it belonged to them. So you'd introduce somebody like Cody. When Cody first came on the site, I've never seen such vitriol. People fucking hated cody and only because they didn't recognize him yet and then once they did then they were like

oh okay okay he's good he's good and it just takes them a while to warm up to other human beings because like oh this person is genuinely talented and funny no wonder they have this job they hated alex the least person on earth yes yeah um i don't have more cracked stuff to say unless soren you do i want to get into some of the questions that i'm sorry i i immediately ate up the first 20 minutes of your show no i think one of the reasons that i wanted to have you on as a guest is because you're so good at talking clearly for chunks of time. It gives me lots of time to sit and not have to talk or think.

I really appreciate it. I have been coasting this whole episode. You're so good. Yeah. So, you know, contract fulfilled. You did the thing that we brought you on here to do, which is nice. And now I have some questions, unless Soren has any other longstanding cracked issues

that he wants to bring up. Now, Jason, I tried to get an article published at one point that you... Here we go. I don't have anything. You can move on. Thanks again for Skillshare. I've been using Skillshare to learn a bunch of

things in the pandemic. I've used it as self-care. I've been using it to learn different languages and learn a little bit of close-up magic and also to fend off boredom, which doesn't seem important, but it really is. And not only that, there's a community around it with similar interests that provide support and encouragement to me and my various occasionally silly interests. Skillshare is an online learning community with literally thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people. Explore new skills, deepen existing passions, and occasionally get lost in creativity. It's a time right now where many important conversations are happening in our world. Your voice, right this second, is more essential than ever. Explore classes to unlock

your creativity for social good. Find out how to speak your voice. Skillshare offers creative classes designed for real life and all the circumstances that come with it. These lessons can help you stay inspired, express your self, and introduce you to a community of millions. A thing I like about Skillshare is that it has classes to fit my schedule and my skill level. I never need to feel bad if I miss a day or two of my Italian classes. Skillshare is always there for me to pick up right where we left off. I also love it because members get unlimited access to thousands of inspiring classes with hands-on projects and feedback from a community of millions.

And most classes are under 60 minutes with short lessons to fit any schedule for a limited time get a free trial of Skillshare premium membership at Skillshare.com slash QQ2 that's QQ both of them the letters and then to the number receive free access to thousands of classes for a limited time. Explore your creativity at Skillshare.com slash QQ2, the number, and get a free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership. That's one more.

Time, Skillshare.com slash the letter Q, the letter Q, the number two. That's Skillshare.com slash QQ2. A thing I wanted to talk about, I mentioned sort of chicly at the top of the show that you're a new YouTuber now, which is kind of true. You've been consistently putting out long, very thoughtful YouTube advice videos, and I watch every single one of them. They're really great. And one of them that I've been thinking about, you mentioned, and I'm going to paraphrase you, when you're starting a project, any project, whether it's you're going to finish a screenplay this year, or I'm going to learn French, I'm going to get in great shape. What you really need to be saying when you're making a commitment like that is, here's what I'm planning on losing in pursuit of that.

Because anytime you add a new thing, that's going to require time. Something needs to give. is to write that novel when they should be alongside of that saying, I'm going to write that novel. And as a result, that's why you're not going to see me on weekends anymore. Or that's why you say to your partner, sorry, we don't have date nights anymore. That's the thing that gets lost.

Or you say, I'm not going to, if you're a person who exercises regularly, then you say, well, I lose that part of me. I then you say, well, I lose that part of me. I thought that was very interesting.

I thought that was very true. It's something that's easier for me to intellectualize when I think about what it means to run a marathon because I ran a marathon in 2012. And anytime I get like any sense of itch that I want to maybe run another one, I know how to ask myself, well, do I really want to lose my Saturdays? Because that's what it took for me. It's running several times a week. And then Saturday becomes the big running day. We're adding mileage. And that means prepping in the morning before the run and then recovering after the run. And I can very clearly answer my own question. Do I want to lose my Saturdays

for a couple months to run a marathon again? No, I can answer that question easily. The thing that is less clear for me is when it comes to writing projects, when it comes to writing books, because I don't remember what I gave up when I wrote my first book. And I was wondering how formalized your process is when you are committing to another book. Is it like an actual conversation you have with your wife or with your friends where you just say, like, okay, it's book time. That means you can't talk to me on Fridays. Or is it less formal than that? I don't have to do that at all now because I'm writing book number six.

Like, I've been in, I now have it down. Everyone in my life knows these are the boundaries. The same as, you know, no one would show up at your office and say, like, hey, let's knock off and go to, like a Soren showed up at your office at last week tonight like hey let's let's bro out and go have a bro weekend at tijuana let's go i do say i'm always nailing him yeah he's like he pulls up in his giant pickup truck and he's got like the two jet skis behind him one says daniel one says soaring on it he's like hey let's go have

a jet ski jet ski bro bro, bro ski holiday. Like, I love that he drives to my office in Hell's Kitchen and is like, let's go to Tijuana. Yeah. In my truck. In my giant truck towing jet skis the whole way. Like, it's, you know, that would be an insane thing to do because everybody knows work is work. That's what you're doing to stay alive. So, like, they know that's your work. Like, work like that's just well you have to draw that same boundary like if you're

going to train every Saturday to go to a marathon it's like you have to put work boundaries around it now now because I you know everyone who's in my family friends everyone around me knows I write books for a living so no one if I say if if my wife says Jason can't come he's writing that's it like everyone now knows now today in 2020 knows that's the end of discussion he's at work like it doesn't look like he's at work you know he may be laying on the sofa staring at the ceiling trying to think of like a funnier word for the word but but it but yeah that's so what you're talking about is something that i went through in the years after college because i you know i got a degree in journalism and then immediately failed at that and like in less than two years of that

job i immediately got a job as a producer at an abc affiliate um where i was from in southern illinois but within two years knew that I hated it and then left and just started working a series of office jobs. Well, that's when I started writing the book, but trying to explain, like if it's not earning any money and if it's not published, like that was hard because there you're trying to explain why you're not showing up to things and why you're not. But let's be clear. Like, I had no friends. Like, I was not doing any of the things that you do to make friends, going to any of the activities.

You know, like, I was saying no to everything because I was working one job during the day, working a part-time job in the evening, updating the website, what they would now call blog, part-time job in the evening updating the website the what they would now call blog during weekends and then writing the book on holidays and overnight and whenever I could I could squeeze it in but I had made that decision because and it wasn't something that's like I've you know I'm going to venture out and do this it was like I have nothing like I have no I'm just bouncing around a series of like office jobs it's. This is the only thing close to a career or aspirations that I have, is trying to write this book and pray that it becomes something, pray that the site I can parlay into something,

because it wasn't making really any substantial money at all. Is there something that you think you've added now? Because you left Cr left cracked i want to say march is that correct uh yeah yeah and that's um in the the entire time that i've known you you have been full-time at cracked and writing books on the side that uh often become movies or option for television shows and i assume that also takes some time. And then suddenly March happens and you don't have this thing anymore.

Are you like crazy into yoga now? Is there something that has replaced the time that Cracked used to take up? Or is it just, has the pandemic replaced it? It's that last thing. Because I made the decision to leave. This had nothing to do with pandemic. The pandemic was just a rumor in the background because i started i made the decision

to leave at the end of last year and it just took that long to set the table for to make sure that when i left everything was okay there was not a vacuum like i basically put in my notice like two months before i left like i you know i made sure every task was trained up trained up for someone else so i had in my mind like okay i'm going to be you know, I made sure every task was trained up, trained up for someone else. So I had in my mind, like, okay, I'm going to be, you know, full-time novelist. But the situation was I was not on a pace to get the next book done because when I signed this book deal, there were 43 people working at Cracked. It was a two book deal that I signed, you know, four years ago or whenever it was. Um, and when I signed the deal and they offered me the deal, I went to Jack, my boss at the time and said, look, you know, they're offering me this book deal,

but I'm working like 90 hours a week at Crank. I was like, I can't, you know, these, they've got where they want a new book every two years that can't be done on the schedule. I want to start handing off tasks to work a more human schedule more like a normal full-time schedule so that i can write a little bit in the evenings i signed that deal and then like eight months later they fired everyone and and immediately i was i was doing jack's job robert evans's job uh like four other four other people's jobs because they were all gone. I was doing the personal experience articles. I was doing... I remember you were three of the four After Hours characters for a while

there. We had to shoot it like that Eddie Murphy movie where he had to play every member of his family. No. Norbit! And yeah, wearing different heavy latex makeup. But anyway, so that was kind of a, you know, again, everyone else losing their jobs. I sometimes tell the story like what a sad thing that was to happen to me, even though I still had my health insurance. Like I can, I'm sure

people that would be infuriating to hear me act like I was the victim there. But it also became clear I can't fulfill this book deal now. Like that's not going to happen. So as time went on, you know, the juggling act of trying to keep the site alive and then once they, you know, they sold the site to a different company, not the company that fired everybody, and then it was like, okay, the goal is to make sure that it's running smoothly, and then I've got to check out so that I can get this next book turned in. Otherwise, it's not going to get done on time. So the plan was I leave, I can write full-time, and then I can decide, can I do more promotional things?

Because I don't travel and do book signings. I don't go to conventions. I don't do any of the hobnobbing with other authors, which is, I'm told, an important part of... Like George R.R. Martin, I think this is what he does instead of writing books now, is just go to shows and sign stuff. I never do any of that.

So I thought, well, it'll be like the more full author experience where you go on the road and maybe you you like have an affair you fall in love with like a fan or something and you like drink yourself to death and tell me about that but the moment I left so I leave and it's like all right it's like I expected it to be like this weight off my shoulders because it's like gosh I don't have to check my email 30 times a minute on Sunday I can you know I'm, I don't have this inbox full of pitches coming in. I don't, you know, I'm not like 20% of the operation anymore. And then as soon as I left, like, like sit down to like watch a basketball game. And it's like, ladies and

gentlemen, the basketball game has been canceled. There is a pandemic. Everyone now has to stay home for the next year. You're that man at the end of the Twilight Zone who's got like all those books to read and all the time to read them now, but now his glasses are broken. So now like I'm sitting there and it's still at the time, like seven months away from the last book coming out and, you know, like two years away from the next book having to be turned in. And, you know, like two years away from the next book having to be turned in. And I now have nothing on my plate but to sit on the sofa and refresh pandemic news and Trump outrage news because you can't leave. I couldn't go anywhere.

So I didn't even have the job to distract me. Like it was such weird timing because literally it feels like it happened hours after I, after I left and closed those accounts. Like, all right, I don't, I can turn off this email. I'm just not even going to check this anymore. Then immediately it's like every single person, you know, is in crisis. I had friends who lost their jobs, had been laid off. And, and, uh, you know, I, my, my parents are, and, and in-laws are like medically like at risk. You know, like my father has chronic lung issues, like he's not caught it, but he's someone who is at the, you know, obviously elderly. And it, so, uh, it was just nonstop anxiety. So it was, it was really, what you said

is interesting because I'm used to feeling like I've, putting out like an enormous amount of work a week and then went to where I was producing nothing like not one word on the on the new book just sitting there watching news it was it was not great for me now yeah I mean structure I know has always been super important to you because I remember being at a cracked off site which is the thing we would occasionally do where everyone would get together. The greatest minds of cracked would get together and decide on the future of the site. And you'd already written, you're having huge success with your first book and your second book. And I didn't understand quite why you were there anymore. And I was like, why do you still work here? Cause we were doing, you know,

pitch docs that take you 24 hours to put together. And that's over the course of like three days. Uh, and you said that it was the structure of it that kept you there. That like, if you didn't have this thing to get up for every morning, then you don't know what you would be doing. And it's the same way where like, I think you, when you start. Was he that dramatic? Good Lord.

No, I, that's, we, we had this, we've had this conversation on our rooftop bar and like. You remember. Good. How and when. Yeah. Because it's, cause it wasn't, I'm not bragging, but it's not a money issue. Like, like that's why the book deals are such, that's why I can't just tell them, ah, the book's going to be two years.

Like, like they've paid me enough that they're they're expecting it um but but yeah not having a day job like authors tend to go crazy name a non-crazy author like you can't jk rowling kept up with jk row oh daniel oh I snuck it in underneath you. So, no, I was legitimately afraid of it. But, Soren, this is something, like, this was a decision that took me months because of exactly that. Because it's like if I didn't have something, because, you know, when I worked at Cracked, I set an alarm. You know, you've got the pitch meetings. You wake up.

You've got prep for that meeting that's coming up. You've got to get done. it's extremely structured i have a big whiteboard in my bedroom and it's got here's the edits that need to be done each night you know i've got the calendar very structured you know and so i that exactly it with my personality knowing the way i am if i didn't have somewhere to be every day one i would just never interact with people because it's like you know it's like i'm working at home my wife's always at her job you know like these are the only people i talk to every day these are the only friends i have really it's and so the idea of just never interacting interact with anyone it's like whatever i've come up with to fill that

void is going to be terrible i'm just telling you right now it's not going to fill that void is going to be terrible. I'm just telling you right now, it's not going to be, it's not going to be good. Um, but the decision I made to leave, like, that was the big thing I had to deal with. Cause it's like, well, what if I came up with a structure of, well, you write from here to here every day. And then from here to here, you answer emails from, from fans or whatever, from here to here, you, you do your, your social media stuff, or you meet with your social media, like come up with a structure that keeps you productive keeps you not being crazy

and also find something outdoors something that gets me out into the sun something that lets me live some sort of a more human life or interact with people and so i had all these grand plans like i am going to be the world's first mentally healthy author i'm gonna that's what they're going to remember me for and then the pandemic happened it's like oh no you can't even leave the house to go walk the dog right now it's like no if you want groceries you have to you have to pay someone uh to to die in your place to bring them to you and to risk it's like you can't you have to have to sit there and stare at the wall so it was other people have it much much worse than me again i that's why i don't talk about it a lot because it's like i've not gotten sick i didn't lose my job it's it's you

know other people have it much worse but it was an adjustment yeah i think we can, uh, you're very kind. I think we can dispense with other people have it much worse. I think that, I think that's, that's kind of understood. Um, certainly on this podcast where Soren and I complain about our lives constantly, uh, I do, I, i i it's it's not difficult to um have empathy or sympathy for you even though you're not sick at the moment jason my garden isn't doing well and i can't shut the fuck up about it um it's such a weird king's go ahead no it's such a weird time now because i'm in kind of a red state so they're like trying to force stuff to open and they are almost like pushing you so it's like no go go go back to cheesecake factory and it's like but i don't want to now it's like uh it's because it's this weird gray area because they're like trying to reopen things.

But I don't want to go shopping. I don't want to go. It's like now it's not, there's not any rules keeping me from doing it. It's just you go like here. I don't know what it's like where you guys are, but it's here. You know, you go to the grocery store. They've still got somebody there disinfecting the carts. Everyone's wearing a mask, got a big sign out front.

And, you know, they've got somebody watching people coming in and out because they they have max capacity right you know to make sure it's not too crowded and then you're just shopping and you're trying to maintain distance from people and they've got like direction markers on the aisles and somebody's always going down the wrong way and somebody's always too close to you and then there's always someone who as soon as they come in the store they take their mask off because they i don't know that it's it's oppression or whatever like it's such a stressful thing is my point like it's it's not you know it's not the end of the world it's it's not lethal stress but it's like every little thing is a struggle every little thing is just a little bit harder and the

idea of like no please go we need you to return to normal go out go just hang around the mall like you used to and just walk around and look at stuff and it's like okay like so it's like you know you stop and you get like a pretzel at the pretzel place at the mall and then you try to like eat it around your mask like i'm just it's just so sad everything about it is just the mentally imagining you know just i don't know we have this little neighborhood here with all these boutiques and shops and stuff. And they clearly are struggling, but also they can only allow in like three people at a time. And it's just, I'm not, you know, I'm obviously I'm wearing a mask. I'm not complaining about the mask thing. It's a small price to pay, but also I hate the masks.

It has a psychological effect on me not being able to see pieces people's faces freaks me out uh and having my breathing slightly restricted freaks me out and especially if i like jog a little bit or walking uphill and i want to breathe a little bit harder and i can feel it being restricted and there's some psychological thing where i feel like i'm being strangled all these little things they're trivial in the grand scheme of things i know it but it's just everything is so stressful everything had a really dark moment groceries is hard yeah i had a dark moment the other day where i realized my son had outgrown his mask like it was too small on his face and i was like i have to i have to size up this in his masks

now i have to maybe i should go buy him one that's a little bit bigger so he has one to grow into and then i thought about god it's this is just this is really hard and i wrote an article on cranks like saying none of you are prepared for if this stuff is still around at christmas like saying none of you are prepared for if this stuff is still around at christmas yeah like none of you are ready because you're not getting republicans already do war on christmas every year they already say that the evil government is trying to to outlaw christianity so if this gets to be a thing where come december 24th there's certain states or certain cities that still have outbreaks and they're still limiting like gatherings and that sort of thing. And telling people you cannot go see your, go to grandma's house.

So your, your 84 year old grandmother with 13 members of the family and all sit for, for 12 straight hours around a table and around a Christmas tree, because that's literally indoors where it's cold. So there's no ventilation. Like it's literally the most spreadable you know event you can do and then having these like democrat governors in these cities telling people you can't celebrate christmas when they've already been doing this thing on glenn beck and all you know and all of the whatever the various online platforms where right-wing people go saying

you know that the democrats are trying to outlaw christmas and if like if joe biden wins and like the very first thing that happens is look see the first thing they did when they came into power as they outlawed christmas i can't yeah i mean is it going to be cleared up by then is there any chance pretty slim i mean soren and i uh quite famously don't know anything so we can't answer that question that is i i read that article of yours and that's certainly it's it it sucks to call you smart you're very smart i i feel boring i feel like a boring fan saying that, but you're so smart and good at seeing how narratives will be framed. Because that's absolutely how it's going to be. It's going to be reported.

You can't... Governor Cuomo is saying you're not allowed to see your grandma for Christmas. That's how it's going to be presented to the world. And there's... It's presented to the world. And there's, it's deeply sad. There's knowing, knowing there's no real way out of that. There's a quote from Frederick Paul. Do you know who that is? It's yeah, there's Logan Paul and Jake Paul.

Yes. Yes. He's one of them. He said, he's, there's, I think about it every time I think about Jason, which is he says a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile, but the traffic jam. And I feel like that's how Jason sort of lives his life. Like Jason is so lucid at seeing the forest or the trees

that he can understand connections between things long before culture kind of catches up to it. And because of it, he sees those those connections he can predict what will happen then going forward and you can like see these things before we all kind of are aware of them and Dean that was in he said that in the same video where he filled Logan's jacuzzi with slime oh that's right no war yeah yeah that's the one um that's actually it's i'm here promoting a science fiction novel i wrote for people who don't gosh the people who don't know who i am i just came on i'm dominating the conversation i made your episode depressing it's like this

this mournful atmosphere now but the the book is called Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick. But part of the problem writing it, because it tries to project what social media would be a generation from now. And it's basically distilled down to, well, everyone's basically just live streaming their lives. You've got a compact camera that people just wear like an accessory on their clothes somewhere. And it's just live streaming. And then they have an internet that's basically an internet of cameras. So it's basically you can go to any feed anywhere and the AI just, if there's like a shooting or some event, the AI just takes you to the cameras that can see that event.

And so you've got this you can just watch basically any spot on earth where there's people or security cameras or dashboard cameras like you just have like this god's god's eye view of everything which seems like that's my best guess for what the future would be because like even now like when I wrote the first book in the series like the ring doorbells were not a thing. That was invented about a year later. And where now you can, sure enough, go on. They've got a network together.

And you can just watch a network of people's ring doorbells and watch a burglary happen across four houses. But coming up with that technology is very easy soren trying to think of how that would change the culture and the psychology and the group psychology boggles the mind like you know you can watch sci-fi now like a lot of sci-fi shows just ignore social media entirely because it's too mind-boggling because so many plots depend on you know like deception or depend on it's like, well, what if it's a future where everyone has an app that will read faces and tell them if you're lying? What if it's a future where lying is not a thing? It's like, well, that's how do you even write a story in that case? How do you write a crime story?

Is what does that even look like? crime story is what does that even look like but you're exactly right because yeah there were you could go back and read you know sci-fi novels from the 1970s and they predict something like the internet you know it's it's like we've all got a computer that's as small as a car and i just need to jack it into the the hyper web a network, and then I will be able to talk to the other computers, but it's always about like accessing data databases, or I'm going to get the crime stats off of this. They didn't conceive of social media and they certainly didn't conceive of the way, like, how would you even explain something like the the what was it what was the pewdiepie meme that that mass shooter had written on his gun it was like subscribe to pewdiepie or something

like that because they had done some and he'd because pewdiepie was being was close to being the uh not the top most subscribed person on youtube at the time right yeah so this mass shooter at this mosque had written it on his assault rifle and then live streamed the shooting like how would you go back to 1970 and explain all of the layers of that it's like well here's what a meme is and here's how they play out and then here's what pewdiepie is and he's a video game streamer well here's what a video game is and then it's like well yeah but why would you want to watch someone else play it's like well uh like the mindset of it's like well people kind of they don't they kind of glom onto

celebrities uh but they kind of gravitate more toward regular people who just do everyday things and then stream it. And then, but it also, for some reason, a lot of them are Nazis. They're like white nationalists. It's like, well, why would that be? It's like, well, see, that's hard to explain even. And I'm living there. So trying to project like, again, trying to project that technology, no problem. Trying to project what kind of subcultures would pop up is beyond me because it's it's so yeah I can't look that far ahead

so I had another quick question this is a departure from everything else that we've talked about so far um but jason how long have we known each other since 2007 yeah okay um so i've known you for quite a while hold on i'm doing the math let me crunch the numbers soren just take your time okay 19 that's 10 18 13 years yeah we got there okay for a while we were on the phone every single morning you and I and and Jack

and sometimes a few other people we talked every day you were a huge fixture in my life professionally and personally I have never once asked you are a huge fixture in my life, professionally and personally. I have never once asked you what kind of music you like, because so much of our relationship has been business stuff. We've talked about the site,

and also our brains are shaped kind of similarly where we're info junkies who just want to scream facts at each other with jokes. We've never had like a sit down, like we've never, the way Soren and I bro out, you and I have never done. I've never just sat down and been like, let me pick your brain for a while. So it occurred to me recently that I don't know what kind of music you like and I was trying to think what that answer could be and absolutely

everything would be either surprising or not surprising like there's you could tell me right now you don't listen to music because you find it unpleasant and distracting and I'd be like that's right

or you could say like don't put me in a box I love jazz I love opera I love rock I love hip hop I love it all baby you could say that and I'd be like yep that makes sense for him but I don't know I couldn't with a million guesses i couldn't

say what your favorite band is before you answer jason you the audience at home should also know he's he's just sort of an enigma i mean at cracked there was before you know we had brockway move out here where there were people who moved out to work at the cracked offices and jason was just a satellite who was doing 60 of the work but like by himself off uh as far as i knew in the clouds and on a tower and uh you would talk to him occasionally on calls but you i didn't know anything about him i didn't know he had a wife until i went to nashville and met her, we met her and she said, he has never mentioned me to you, has he? And I was like, no. And then Jason said, in my defense, I don't know if Dan's married.

All right. The answer to this is either extremely boring or extremely telling, depending on how you want to approach it. Because as a creative person this will be the type of answer that infuriates you like if you were a musician or something music for me is something for whatever reason it's primarily done in the car like when i was a teenager i was in high school and college like i had good sound systems in my cars that was like

really big on having music playing and having it sound good. And I knew how to like have the equalizer and all that installed and all that because I work from home and don't drive anymore. Music just kind of left my life. I don't, it's the same thing when I talk to somebody who, you know, have the, has like never read one of my books, even though it sounds like something they might love. And like, oh yeah, I read a book like eight years ago that was very similar. It sounds like that would change my life. And I'll talk to him like two years later. He's like, yeah, no, I never got around to reading it.

And there's these things where you enjoy them very much, but you also just kind of never, it never intersects. There's like some restaurant you love, you also just kind of never, it never intersects. Like, you know, there's like some restaurant you love, but it's like two blocks too inconvenient for you to get to, so you just never go there. Music is like that for me. So my tastes are now frozen in my college years in the late 90s.

So, you know, back then I loved what was popular at the time, which was the grunge and the Seattle bands. I loved Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins. I've seen them live. All those bands back then. So if you ask me what I like now, you would say, oh, that actually sounds a lot like, like it's the rare song that sounds like that.

I listen to, if I listen to rap now, it's rap song that sounds like that i listen to if i listen to rap now it's rap music that sounds like 90s rap not like trap music anything like that it's stuff that sounds like like i like run the jewels because it sounds like public enemy it sounds like the bomb squad it's uh and i'm like twitter mutuals with the the white guy and run the jewels and um but it's i will like hear some song in like a movie trailer and say oh that sounds nice and i'll go and download it and listen to it a couple of times in in the 40 seconds it takes my car to get to the grocery store and then and then back home because otherwise like i can't listen to music while i'm writing because my brain

that interferes i i can't i either like hold the whole thing with the list of music in the car it's like i'm if i'm playing music i am listening to the music you know i'm saying like it's not a thing like my wife likes to put music on while she's cooking and she's kind of got in the background and she's drinking a glass of wine and she's cooking i can't do that it's like if i'm listening to music that's the activity i'm listening to the music. And I guess I've decided I would rather just not have it in my life than try to, but seriously, like the fact that I can't listen to it while writing is the big thing. And like when

I'm on the treadmill or doing something like that, I tend to listen to podcasts, not because I prefer them to music, but because I've got all these shows I subscribe to, like half of them hosted by my friends who I'm trying to support. And at any given moment, I have 470 hours of podcasts saved up, right? Where it's, you know, because it's shameful that I've not listened to all the episodes of your show, but I've also not listened to all the episodes of Alex's show or Tom's show or David Bell's show or Adam's show or tom's show or david bell's show or adam's show or jack's show jack show is daily which is inexcusable like i'm not and they do like weekly recaps too yeah have you seen that shit where like the weeklies i guess why they where they're like

recap what they did that week that's they should be in jail but the thing i said about being frustrating for a creative person to listen to, because those of you out there who aspire to write books or to make a game or something like that, I'm telling you, if your audience didn't respond to something you made, 95% of the time, it's literally something just this stupid. It's like, yeah, no, I stopped reading books because I started, I got really into playing Fortnite. And that ate up my,

I only have a few hours a week spare time. So it's like, that's why it's why I bought all of your books. But this one's cause this year I happened to get really into playing Fortnite or something like that. It's just something totally arbitrary. And it's not even so many of like when it comes to any kind of entertainment, no matter how much you think it matters to people at the end of the day,

you're not like curing cancer. And so they can literally just forget you exist for years at a time. So the people out there making great music that I would probably would probably change my life if I listened to it. I apologize. My reasons for not engaging with it has nothing to do with you at all. Is there anything that you're listening to at all when you're writing? with you at all. Is there anything that you're listening to at all when you're writing? Like TV on in the background, some show that you've seen before? I have the TV on with it muted and subtitles on because most shows you can pretty much tell what's happening. You can kind of like glance up and look at it. But so that kind of like keeps me company. I have searched long and hard for like instrumental music or

something i can put on that would i can have earphones or earbuds in while i'm writing and i've not found that i just don't because it's there's not like genres i like i don't really care about classical music um it just sounds like you know like music or something you'd hear in elevator to me like you know because you so much of it you've heard, because it's public domain, it just doesn't mean anything to me anymore. I don't hear a piece of Mozart and like, oh my gosh, this is the most beautiful piece of music I've ever heard.

It's like, no, that's the music you've heard in every commercial for your whole life. So no, if someone came up with something that I could put on that would block out the world and be pleasant to listen to, that would be amazing. I've tried a bunch of different, I just never came up with something that I could put on that would block out the world and be pleasant to listen to, that would be amazing. I've tried a bunch of different. I just never came up with it. Yeah.

I've talked about it on this show before. I listen to a lot of tap dancing videos. That's a thing you could check out. I don't know if that's on your list of things that you've listened to before. Are you telling the truth or are you because someone left it? No, I swear to god yeah like i listen i listen to a lot of tap dancing videos when i'm writing because i can't write in complete silence uh but i also get like music makes me think about music i think the same way that you do when you're listening to music

you're listening to music so when i'm i'm thinking about it if i'm hearing it i'm thinking about like what if this is me singing it or what if this is me playing it or what if this is or like what what is this person trying to say but tap dancing videos are just like repeated noise that fills my ear and also uh is there's like an action and a tension to it. So I can't relax. Like, I don't know. It makes my heart beat in a good way to just hear tap dancing over and over again in my head. That's fascinating. Do you think it's like an ASMR type reaction?

I don't know. I think it occupies the part of your brain that would otherwise be sabotaging you, Dan. I think that the same reason that like at the free throw line, they encourage basketball players to sing to themselves because there's like a part of your brain in high pressure. Yeah. High pressure situations that will that will actively like it thinks it needs to take over and override the system and it's always wrong like it's going to fuck up your muscle memory it's going to mess up whatever you're trying to do and so you really need to like you just need to distract this one part of you for your like for your unconscious mind to do the fucking work it needs to do well let me give you an example like the last real job I had before I came to Cracked,

like out in the world, I was just working at an insurance company just doing data entry on, like literally you would have paper insurance claims and I have to just type the information to a computer. So totally mindless, right? Because it's just, here's the numbers you type them in and you have to do it incredibly fast. But I would listen to audio books because there I could, because I didn't need to tend to what I was doing. It's just as you know, like it's totally separate part of the brain that can listen to a plot of a novel and follow it versus the part of your brain that's just typing this string of numbers into this screen. But if, but if I tried to do that, obviously while writing my novel, I would wind up just stealing

ideas from... Like, hey, that is a good idea. I should... I like that line. But it's interesting how you have these different channels in your brain, because I think a lot of people probably do listen to music while they... Or a lot of writers probably do listen to music while they write. I think Stephen King says he does um but i mean i

would love to do the issue with the silence that absolutely like it limits how long i can write because i like i'll like stop and go watch a youtube video or stop and do something every once in a while because it's just i can't just be alone with my weird thoughts for that long yeah um and i think that's why so many writers again just wind up drinking themselves to death but uh if i know i've actually i have the exact same i'm not saying i'm going to try that the tap dancing because that sounds like a path to madness but something like that where for whatever reason it engages that because what i'm trying to do is block like sort exactly what soren said i'm trying to block out the world. And that's why I would listen to audio books at the day to interesting because I was in a cubicle farm with 200 other people.

And if I'm not listening to an audio book, I'm listening to these people muttering to each other. And, you know, my ears automatically want to like try to tune in to what they're saying because you just instinctively, there's something being said over there. They sound tense. I wonder what that's about. So I had to block it out.

And of course, you can't just wear earmuffs. People actually get offended if you do that. So yeah, so I had to have something. But yeah, any suggestions that the listeners want to send us for things I can listen to that don't... Because music, the whole thing, music, it elicits emotion. Like I want to feel the action of it. It ends up becoming the soundtrack to whatever you're writing. You write in the same energy as the song you're listening to. Music, it elicits emotion. Yeah, it's tough. It ends up becoming the soundtrack to whatever you're writing.

You write in the same energy as the song you're listening to. It's almost like something you can't help. Yeah. And meanwhile, this morning, just for full context, this morning I was co-writing this Sunday's episode of the show, and I got up early to do it, and it so happened that my neighbors had recently moved out so someone was in there doing construction amazing I fucking loved it there was like a steady hammer happening in the apartment next to me and it was I was as soon as it happened I was like yes this

this is what I need this is gonna help me right that sounds awful so bad did it's that wouldn't work for me because I can't control that sound I want to be able to turn it off if I or I wanted to pick what it is but if it knowing that it could stop at any moment or that they're picking which instrument or which tools are going I see I couldn't I couldn't handle that it's crazy Dan that you need like us you have like a benchmark for how much cortisol you need in your body at any given moment we're like you need something providing a little bit of stress to you to be at a functioning level yeah yeah anytime my my bosses give me a deadline they're like thursday night at 9 p.m i'm like

cut it in half please I need to be cornered. So we should probably wrap up the show. Jason, we've mentioned your book several times, but I think we've only said the actual name of it once. Do you want to plug it and let people know where they can get it? Yeah, the book is called Zoe Punches the Future and the Dick. It is book two in the series. It stars the same

characters, but you can start on this one. It's like the Sherlock Holmes stories. You can just grab one. There's not like one continuing thing. So no, it's available October 13th. I don't know when this episode is going up, but basically anywhere books are sold

any book any book place please support your local bookstore uh if if you can otherwise i've got it at amazon and all all the book places except for like like grocery stores won't have it but yeah you just sent people off to their death jason do you see and again i don't know because like i had somebody yell at me about like getting a haircut it's like well i thought we were doing haircuts now i thought that part was over are we still not because they've definitely reopened the hair places and like the hair cutting people are saying like please we are starving please come let us cut your hair but then i guess like nancy pelosi got her hair cut and then it was a

scandal because we're not supposed to be doing that so now i worry that people like watching my youtube videos like man shouldn't his hair be longer i feel the same way i don't know anything about any of the of the rules as we're recording this it's um we just started shocktober and uh October and New York is now allowing people to dine inside restaurants to limited capacity but I'm still seeing like viral Twitter threads they're like don't do this it's awful like what I but the but the governor said I don't know I don't want to do the right thing and I don't know how to find out what it is the rules that the government is telling us and then the rules that twitter is holding us to apparently are very different it turns out but we are still charged with fully knowing both sets of rules because again the people working at these restaurants that depend on tips i kind of think they do want us there

but also as far as i know sitting if you especially if you're going to eat for a long time in an enclosed place. It's one of the most high-risk things you can do. Yes. Even outdoors, it's one of the most high-risk things you can do. The most dangerous possible thing. Because, you know, it doesn't take long to cut my hair. You've seen my hair. It's like a 12-minute process.

You know, and we're both wearing masks. That seems far safer than the restaurant thing. But I don't know. I mean, you know, I'm in a city with plenty of small restaurants that are not changed. I know they've got to be struggling because the government, you know, did that one round of stimulus eight months ago or whatever it was. It's like, they need my money. I know these places, half these places that are my favorite places either they they got to be closed by now i haven't checked i know they have to be it's like there's no way but do they do they want me there or are they because again twitter's is like oh so you're just going to send these people to die with your with your germs and it's like well i don't

yeah i i don't know either it out yeah um but we do have to wrap up i'm gonna go i have to track down jason i don't know if you know this about the show but uh we keep the the social accounts like the plugs uh they're in in soren's house they're in the shed in my place i have a pretty big walk-in closet and they they're right at the top shelf. All the social blogs are up there. So it takes me a minute to get them. So I need to track them down. While I'm doing that, I wanted to give you a little bit of time

to talk about something that you said to me years ago that was very interesting. And it was right when I met you and I was 21 years old. And I was like, I've got, everyone's got like their top 10 favorite writers who influenced them. Who are yours? And you're like, there's no top 10. There's no top five. It's just one.

It's Tucker Max. And I wanted to give you a little bit of time to speak about that now. Why Tucker Max is important to you. You came to him late in life, which is very surprising. But you love him. And you said, this is a direct quote, he influenced everything I've ever written in my life, period. So take it away.

Now, there is a name I've not heard in a long time. And if you told me that Tucker Max was now in Congress, I would 100%. Because when I try to go back and look up the personalities that were the face of the Internet back in the day, like Low Tax from Something Aw awful and Maddox. It's some of them have podcasts. Some of them have just fallen out of society completely. So without Googling it, gosh,

I know it's going to turn out he's in jail and that everything we're saying is that everything we're saying is going to, this is going to be the only thing anybody cares about from this episode. It's like, Oh, so they've, they've platformed Tucker Max on that show. I'm surprised after he turned out to be the Oregon strangler and eviscerated 37 women.

That's okay. I've actually got to, I, my keyboard is under my microphone. Can someone else Google to find out what has happened to Tucker? Can I tell you, it's, it you, it's weirder than that. He's like repositioned himself as like a self-help author. Man, no, that's not weird at all.

That is the only industry that's left. That is why I have put both feet into that. Because that's the only, people are like so starved for guidance right now that if you if you can just speak in like an authoritative tone of voice it really doesn't matter what you're saying so if you just got like a number of slogans or whatever people will people will worship you as a god and then what you need to do is you need to get to a place to where it doesn't matter like what crimes you commit because you're just you're just invincible at that point did you see the pictures of, I know you're trying to end the episode. Did you see the pictures of Dr. Phil's house?

No. Yeah, because Dr. Phil was selling a house and the interior of it, like his dining room had a bunch of machine guns mounted on the wall. Everyone listening to this, go Google Dr. Phil house. It'll be the first result because it was a viral thing for one day and it's like yeah it's like like leopard skin everywhere it was so it was totally like the home of like a colombian like drug lord and it's it will it will make you every single piece of advice you've ever heard him give, it will put it into a totally different light because he lives in a crazy person's home. He has an entire balcony made out of like elk antlers.

Oh, are you looking at it now? Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Jason, I miss talking to you every day so much for exactly this reason that you can casually bring up in the middle of conversation did you see dr phil's house and the answer is uh the the details are are incredible and wonderful and uh i appreciate it uh thank you so much for joining us you can uh buy book anywhere buy book good lord gabe you can buy the book anywhere books are sold. Support your local bookstores.

All that. It is Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick. You can find Jason online on Twitter at at John Dies at the E-N. Yeah, because it exceeded the character limit on Twitter. So it's one character short and in back when i didn't think twitter was going to be anything i was like ah like i was just making it like an experimental account to see what how it worked i and i was not like well one day the president will use this and try to start world war three uh but you can find him there you

could probably find him if you just start searching John Dyes at the it'll autofill and bring you to him you can find Soren at Soren underscore LTD you can email our show at QQ with Soren and Daniel at gmail.com you can find the show on Twitter at twitter.com slash QQ underscore Soren

and Dan you cannot friend me on Twitter but you can donate to the Cyic fibrosis foundation if you want that's a thing you could do with your time instead of looking at my tweets about gotham you can find and hire our producer engineer and editor gabe at gabeharter.com we have a patreon that you can check out or you can skip it. I think that's it. Soren, is there anything else I'm supposed to say?

Yeah, one last thing. The last book that Tucker Max wrote was, he was ghost wrote a memoir for Tiffany Haddish. So simmer on that for a while. Not in a thousand years would I guess that. Can we do a separate episode just about tucker max because i like in literally days of cranked like we were trying to get him to write for us but he was like too famous already and he i i don't know if you and i have talked about this before or not

but he um considers himself uh the reason that cracked was successful what what did he do for us uh i don't know he used to have a message board that i'm ashamed to say that i frequented and and just like was was was there as like a forum member who was like i want to talk about movies and and like whatever other bullshit that gets discussed on message boards in the 2000s. And when I started working for Cracked, I noticed there were a bunch of funny people on this forum, and I wanted some of them. So I messaged him, and I was like, hey, I just got this job.

I'm an intern, and I wanted to know if I could post something in the forum where I can like try to get some of the writers from here to come write for us. Because they're very funny people. And he was like, you know what? I've done enough for Cracked already. I was like, very sorry? That's great. Oh, gosh. You were such a Tucker head back in the day to have to hear that from your

hero. Like it's just, it's right. Like that's why you don't want to meet those people. Cause they, they're never what, you know, you get one image of Tucker Max from his books and his,

and you know, and then you've talked to him and it's like, Oh, he's just a, just a jerk. Biggest shock in the world. And meanwhile, I bet his house is like very tasteful. Got to Google it.

Well, yeah. All right. That's probably the end of the episode, right? Yeah. Bye.