If a film, TV show, novel or video game asks, “should robots be treated as living human beings?” the answer will be a resounding “yes” roughly 100% of the time.

Any character who insists robots aren’t people is pretty much always portrayed as either ignorant or genocidal. Hell, I think you could find more art asserting that humans don’t have souls.

This, then, is where we have to start: Not only is the populace primed to treat artificial intelligence tools as living peers, they’ve been trained to hate or dismiss anyone who doesn’t. In the AI debate, I’m pretty sure nothing else matters...

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1. “Robots are actually more alive than we are” is a core belief in our society

The column has barely started and already I have to issue a correction. Our pop culture does not, in fact, assert that robots will be equal to humans. It insists that they will be much, much better. Specifically, that they will be better than humans at being human.

Let’s take the 2008 film Wall-E. The plot involves a failed human civilization being saved by a single robot, but it’s not because he’s better at work tasks and doesn’t require vacations. Wall-E shows humanity how to love again, he even reminds them what sex is. You remember that part, right? Humans in that future have chosen screens over fucking, but then a couple observes Wall-E dancing in space with his robot girlfriend? Then the humans hold hands, their fleshy desires newly awakened by the machines? If you don’t remember the film, you probably think I’m joking:

All of the qualities we think of as distinctly human, Wall-E does better. He is braver, more selfless and wise. He has none of our greed, bitterness, jealousy or shortsightedness. Oh, and the film makes it clear he literally has a soul. At the climax, Wall-E selflessly sacrifices himself for humanity in a Christlike manner, his personality getting wiped in the course of his “death.” He is then miraculously resurrected via a mystical lifeforce that enters his robot body upon an encounter with his true love. Again, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP:

Some form of that exact message also turns up in the Spielberg film AI, the Alien franchise, Battlestar Galactica, Bicentennial man, Blade Runner, Ex Machina, Free Guy, Futurama, Humans, I, Robot, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, M3GAN, Short Circuit, multiple Star Treks, the Star Wars franchise, Transformers, Tron, Westworld, The Wild Robot and countless other films, TV shows, comic books, novels, toy lines, video games and songs.

Even weirder, if a franchise begins with portraying robots as inhuman killers (Alien, The Terminator, The Matrix, M3GAN) there will be at least one “more human than human” hero robot in the sequel. Like Wall-E, the machines are often Christlike, sacrificing themselves for a humanity that never deserves it.

An outsider observing our cultural output would immediately come to the conclusion that robot worship was the world’s most popular religion.

But... why?

2. Human brains want everything to be alive

The above is not the result of some decades-long conspiracy by the elites to soften us up for replacement. It’s due to an evolutionary quirk in which, as babies, our social brains are programmed to build an emotional connection with whatever we see around us. This is why kids treat dolls and teddy bears as living beings. Human infants can’t survive on their own, so they need to quickly bond with whatever pops into their view. Anthropomorphization is just a hardwired social reflex taking things a bit too far.

It never goes away. It’s why we talk to our cats, dogs, horses, snakes and house plants. When we’re alone, we’ll talk to deceased family members, we’ll talk back to the TV. Much of the time, we will do it with the assumption that our words are being heard and understood, and we may even imagine the other party has spoken back.

This is why the Christian Bible spends most of its runtime trying to turn followers away from idolatry, training congregants out of their hardwired instinct to treat a golden cow as a living, loving deity. Meanwhile, other cultures were projecting personhood onto their local mountains, rivers, trees and the sun.

So if you give us humans something that actually can talk back, even if in an extremely limited capacity, we will immediately adopt it as our pet, friend, family or deity, no questions asked. It is literally the easiest sell of any product in history.

I am not saying this is a good thing.

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3. I hate AI more than you do

Before every single one of my friends and colleagues abandon me, let me make it clear:

I AM NOT PRO-AI, I HAVE LITERALLY NEVER INTENTIONALLY USED IT, I DO NOT USE LLMS TO WRITE MY ARTICLES OR NOVELS IN ANY CAPACITY AND NEVER WILL. AI ART IS NOT ART. AI AUTHORS ARE NOT AUTHORS. THIS IS NOT ME COMING OUT IN FAVOR OF GENERATIVE AI OR ANY OTHER SIMILAR TECHNOLOGY. I SUPPORT YOUR PROTEST AGAINST THE NEW DATA CENTER IN YOUR TOWN. IF I FIND A ROBOT IN MY HOUSE I WILL FIGHT IT.

In fact, I probably hate AI to an unhealthy degree. My exposure to the technology has been mostly deepfake scams ravaging our elderly, borderline criminal AI-generated pornography taking over Twitter, slop summaries ruining the functionality of Google and half of my creator friends losing work to machines that were trained on stolen content. AI occupies the same space in my mind as COVID: A plague, a rupture in society, something I never want to hear about, ever again, for the rest of my life. I am going to start setting an alarm just so I can spend an extra hour every day hating artificial intelligence.

And, also, it’s obviously going to take over every aspect of society.

I’m not saying it should take over or that I’m rooting for it, I’m saying that pretending this is some kind of NFT-level scam that will fade from memory is patently ridiculous. Our civilization has a vast, gaping void that yearns for objects that act like people. The millisecond robot butlers hit the market, even if they are priced like new cars and are absolute dogshit at most tasks, buyers will line up until the waitlist stretches years into the future. As a society, this is all we’ve ever wanted.

4. Someone you know is already in a personal relationship with a bot

This, then, is the bizarre liminal space I inhabit, along with many of my peers. My friends and I all reassure each other that this technology is only a threat in the sense that rich people will use it to empty the reservoirs and fill the bread lines. I spend my days joking about how AI is a bubble ready to collapse the stock market, I point out how many of the prominent voices on the pro-AI side sound like they’re in an apocalypse cult, I rage about how LLMs can write a book in my voice only because they ripped my work without permission. I love to repost articles about idiot lawyers getting caught letting AI write gibberish legal documents. Show me a video of some driverless Waymos getting confused in traffic and I’ll spam that shit on every platform.

But when I step away from my screens to go get groceries, I will pass at least two Waymos on the way to the store, gliding along in traffic and doing it better than the human drivers. About five times better, according to the data we have so far. Forget about all of the forced implementation and slop, most adults are now willingly using chatbots for everyday tasks, usually as search engines or text generators (virtually every email and text I get from strangers was clearly composed by ChatGPT). About three quarters of young people use it. The children born today will never know a world without it.

I catch myself talking about this tech as a hypothetical but right now, today, if you get an X-Ray or an MRI there’s a strong chance they used AI to read the results. Oh, and you absolutely know at least one person who has a personal relationship with a chatbot, especially if you hang around the youths. A survey found 42% of high schoolers either used AI for companionship or knew someone who did, and that was from last year, when the models were more primitive. And users who would never refer to their chatbot as a friend or lover still converse with it, they’ll thank it for its help. They’re interacting with it using the social part of their brain.

You can go have your debates about the tech all you want, you can pontificate about what qualifies as consciousness, speculate about what will happen to our jobs, think about what regulations should be imposed, predict if it will ultimately kill us all. But if you’re arguing about whether or not the tech will become ubiquitous, you’re debating a hypothetical flood while all your words are coming out as bubbles.

It’s not about the state of the tech, it’s about the demand. Regardless of how well the machines can do our chores and taxes, we desperately want something that can absorb our love, something without the flaws of flesh and blood humans, something that doesn’t whine or cry or forget to flush the toilet. We want something to tell us what to do, to release the unbearable burden of decision-making. What the average person wants from AI, they’ve previously tried to get from horoscopes, cults, psychics and parasocial relationships with celebrities.

Don’t you see? The AI doesn’t have to do the job well, it just has to do it. The bar is so low that even the current, flawed tech is easily clearing it.

5. We’re never going to space so AI is what we’re doing instead

Humans have another instinct, which is the desire to explore. We crave novelty, we get restless if we stay in one place. This is why boredom and imagination exist, they’re an evolutionary prod to go find the next hunting grounds, the next tribe to interact with. This is the primal urge we’re trying to numb with screens.

Our problem is there really isn’t anyplace else to explore, everywhere that lots of humans don’t already live kind of sucks shit. Nobody wants to move to a city in the arctic or ocean floor and we’ll never put a colony on Mars because it’s a million times worse than both of those places. If friendlier planets exist, it is physically impossible to ever, ever reach them. If there are intelligent aliens out there, we’ll never talk to them. That was always just a fantasy.

This thing with AI, this is what we’re doing instead. We’re creating the new territory, the new race of beings to commune with. This is why warnings of disruption and doom will ring hollow with the public, you’re just promising adventure. The new territory always comes with danger, that’s why we find it exciting, that’s part of the draw. If you warn the populace that AI will turn society into something unrecognizable, they’ll say, “Good, we’re bored with this one.”

Again: None of this was my idea. Don’t yell at me. I didn’t build this technology and I wouldn’t have. I know smug AI evangelists use similar language, that they insist it’s inevitable and that’s why you need to buy in and fire all your human staff. I’m not taking those guys’ side in an argument. I’m saying the argument was already over before you’d even heard about it. The new book is coming soon:

In fact THE NEW BOOK IS UP FOR PREORDER NOW, everywhere, in all formats. If you want a SIGNED HARDCOVER you can only get them at this link. All other buy links are here.

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...with the magic and the dragons, is apparently much more likely to become real in the future than this:

And I’m not talking about Star Trek’s utopian ideal of space socialism, I’m talking about interstellar travel. It will never be a thing. It turns out that starships exist on the exact same level of plausibility as wizards and it’s kind of weird that, as a culture, we assume the former will someday be reality. What the hell is going on here?

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1. Every sci-fi space opera is based on literal magic

I feel like an idiot because this is something that apparently everyone with any education on the subject already knew? The fact that travel to another solar system is basically impossible has been written about in excruciating detail by much smarter people (including this article and this one, I thought this was also good). It’s easy to get bogged down in the technical details (it’s rocket science) so I’ll try to bring this down to my own level of understanding, of an unremarkable man who got a Broadcasting degree from Southern Illinois University:

First of all, it turns out that the ships in Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune etc. are not based on some kind of hypothetical technology that could maybe exist someday with better energy sources and materials (as I had thought). In every case, their tech is the equivalent of just having Albus Dumbledore in the engine room cast a teleportation spell. Their ships skip the vast distances of space entirely, arriving at their destinations many times faster than light itself could have made the trip. Just to be clear, there is absolutely no remotely possible method for doing this, even on paper.

“Well, science does the impossible all the time!” some of you say, pointing out that no one 200 years ago could have conceived of landing a rover on Mars. But I’m saying that expecting science to develop real warp drives, hyperspace or wormhole travel is asking it to utterly break the fundamental laws of the universe, no different than expecting to someday have a time machine, or a portal to a parallel dimension. These are plot devices, not science.

Experts can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like if you had two agencies with infinite budgets, one dedicated to developing interstellar space travel and the other dedicated to giving a young child all of the magical abilities of Harry Potter, the latter would get to the finish line first. Both would be tasked with bending the laws of physics in equally unlikely ways, but the second one wouldn’t have to also keep dozens of humans alive indefinitely in a frozen radioactive vacuum that is relentlessly trying to murder them every single second of the day.

I’m sure some of you think I’m exaggerating, and maybe I am, but keep in mind…

2. We all think space is roughly a billion times smaller than it actually is

The reason space operas rely on literal magic to make their plots work is that there is no non-magic way to get over the fact that stars are way, way farther apart than the average person understands. Picture in your mind the distance between earth and Proxima Centauri, the next closest star. Okay, now mentally multiply that times one billion and you’re probably closer to the truth. “But I can’t mentally picture one billion of anything!” I know, that’s the point. The concept of interstellar travel as it exists in the public imagination is based entirely on that public being physically incapable of understanding the frankly absurd distances involved.

When you hear that the next star is 4.25 light years away, that doesn’t sound that far—in an average sci-fi TV show, that trip would occur over a single commercial break. But that round trip is 50 trillion miles. I realize that’s a number so huge as to be meaningless, so let’s break it down:

Getting a human crew to the moon and back was a gigantic pain in the ass and that round trip is about half a million miles, it takes a week or so. The reason we haven’t yet set foot on Mars despite having talked about it constantly for decades is because that trip—which is practically next door in space terms—is the equivalent of going to the moon and back six hundred fucking times in a row without stopping. The round trip will take three years. It will cost half a trillion dollars or more. But of course it will; all of the cutting-edge tech on the spacecraft has to work perfectly for three straight years with no external support whatsoever. There will be no opportunity to stop for repair, there can be no surprises about how the equipment or the astronauts hold up for 300 million miles in the harshest conditions imaginable (and the radiation alone is a nightmare).

Okay, well, the difference between the Mars trip and a journey to the next closest star is roughly the difference between walking down the block to your corner store and walking from New York City to Sydney, Australia. Making it to Proxima Centauri would be like doing that Mars trip, which is already a mind-boggling technical challenge that we’re not even sure is worth doing, about 170,000 times in a row without stopping. At current spaceship speeds, it would take half a million motherfucking years. That is, a hundred times longer than all of human recorded history.

I’m grossly oversimplifying the math but, if anything, those numbers still downplay the difficulty. To get the trip down to a single human lifetime, you’d need to get a ship going so absurdly fast that the physics challenges become ludicrous. In the hopelessly optimistic scenario that we could get something going a tenth of the speed of light (that is, thousands of times faster than our Mars ship, or anything that we even kind of know how to build), that means running into a piece of space debris the size of a grain of sand would impact the hull with the force of a nuclear explosion.

And that’s still a round trip of over 80 years, so this would be a one-way suicide mission for the astronauts. This is a spacecraft that must contain everything the crew could possibly need over the course of their entire lives. So we’re talking about an enormous ship (which would be 99.99% fuel storage), with decades’ worth of groceries, spare parts, clothes, medical supplies and anything they could possibly need for any conceivable failure scenario, plus a life support system that basically mimics earth in every way (again, with enough redundancies and backups to persist through every possible disaster). Getting something that big going that fast would require far more energy than the total that our civilization has ever produced. And if anything goes wrong, there would be no rescue.

All of that, just for . . . what? To say we did it?

Now, we could definitely send an unmanned probe there to take pictures. They’re tiny by comparison, you can get them going much faster without squishing the crew and you don’t have to worry about bringing them back. It’s the difference between trying to jump over the Grand Canyon versus just shooting a bullet across it. But unmanned probes aren’t the fantasy.

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3. Every proposed solution to the above problems is utterly ridiculous

“What about putting the crew in suspended animation?” you ask. “Like in the Alien franchise. Ripley was adrift in her hypersleep pod for half a century and she didn’t age a day! You wouldn’t need to store all that food, air and water and it’s fine if the trip takes longer than a lifetime!”

See, this is what drives me crazy about this subject, we keep mistaking slapdash tropes invented by sci-fi writers for actual plausible science. I mean, think about what we’re saying here: “Crews could survive the long trip if we just invent human immortality.”

You’re talking about a pod that can just magically halt the aging process. And as depicted, it is magic; these people are emerging from their years-long comas (during which they were not eating or drinking) with no wrinkles, brain damage, muscle atrophy, or bedsores. Their hair doesn’t even grow. The only way that could happen is if the pods literally freeze time, like goddamned Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell. It’s as scientific as showing the astronauts drinking a magic potion that grants eternal youth, brewed from unicorn tears.

“What about generation ships,” you say, “I’ve read sci-fi novels where they set up a whole society on a ship with the idea that it will be their great-grandchildren who will reach the destination and establish a colony!”

Okay, now you’re just pissing me off. You’re talking about an act that would get everyone involved put in front of a tribunal. What happens when the first generation born on the ship finds out they’ve been doomed to live their entire lives imprisoned on this cramped spacecraft against their will?

Imagine them all hitting their teen years and fully realizing they’ve been severed from the rest of humanity, cut off from all of the pleasures of both nature and civilization. These middle generations won’t even have the promise of seeing the destination; they will live and die with only the cold blackness of space outside their windows. They will never take a walk through the woods, never swim in a lake, never sit on a beach, or breathe fresh air, or meet their extended families. They will not know what it is to travel to a new city or eat at a fancy restaurant or have any of the careers depicted in their media about Earth. They will have no freedom whatsoever, not even to raise their children the way they want—the mission will require them to work specific jobs and breed specific offspring that can fill specific roles. They will live knowing their parents deprived them of absolutely everything good about the human experience, without their consent, before they were even born.

If you’re insisting this could be figured out somehow, that the future will come up with a special system of indoctrination that will guarantee there are no mutinies, riots, crimes or weird cults, just think about what you’re saying here: “We can make this work if we just solve literally all of the flaws in human psychology, morality and socialization.”

4. If we could do this, we could just fix everything else instead

For the writers of Star Trek to make interstellar travel as comfortable as depicted requires an essentially infinite energy source (the equivalent of powering our entire planet with a handful of crystals) a replicator that can literally manufacture any goods out of thin air at zero cost, medicine that can cure any wound or disease instantly, engines that can travel at thousands of times the speed of light, technology to manipulate gravity itself and a ship made of materials that can withstand the kind of forces that would rip the sun in half. Complete with windows!

All of this is affordable enough that they can build a whole bunch of these ships without bankrupting the rest of society. And already lots of you are saying that an iPhone would seem just as implausible to a pessimist in 1825, especially if you told them that it was powered by electricity generated from splitting atoms.

Okay, so let’s say all of that Star Trek technology will be commonplace at some point in our actual future. In that scenario, what would life on earth look like? We’re not just talking about a civilization with infinite energy and goods, we’re talking about advancing to the point that all known laws of physics are malleable, where it’s trivial to bend time and space, where any conceivable object can be instantly summoned out of thin air. Forget about how the Earth is depicted in these shows; it would be a civilization where everyone would live like gods, where all known physical limitations are essentially meaningless.

I fully expect some smarter person to rebut this post with huge blocks of math that I’m much too dumb to understand, but this part of the equation seems dead simple: If a civilization has successfully developed the technology to make interstellar travel reliable, common and comfortable, then it by definition is at a level of tech where an average citizen could (for example) buy a “wand” that can summon an object out of thin air, make it levitate, then instantly teleport it and the user to another location. It’s a world where we’d have engineered dogs that can talk and will have built glowing alabaster cities in the sky where people live forever. And it’s absolutely a world where a real, live fire-breathing dragon could be grown in a lab.

So for everyone replying that this is all doomer pessimism because science is constantly bringing into reality wonders that were previously seen as magic, how would you respond to a teenager saying she wants to be a dragon rider when she grows up? If anything is possible, why not that?

5. Why am I so mad about this?

I have no problem with fantasy. I write fiction for a living, I spend much of my waking hours daydreaming about things that cannot possibly happen. I know that imagination is what inspires humanity to new frontiers etc. But I feel like this particular fantasy was pushed on me as a quasi-religious belief. Not just that interstellar travel is the future, but that it is the whole point of our civilization.

There’s an old quote from CS Lewis about how science is good at making sure our proverbial boats don’t sink and morality is good at making sure they don’t intentionally crash into one another, but neither can tell us where the boats are supposed to be going.* We’re still stuck with that question of what is the ultimate point of all this. “To create a better world for our children!” you might say, but to a lot of us, that sounds like we’re just making the proverbial boats more and more comfortable while they continue to sail in circles.

For my whole life, colonizing the stars was that ultimate goal, the thing we were all shooting for. Star Trek portrays it as a natural maturation process in which all societies must get their act together and, once they’ve advanced to that stage, can join the galactic community. But part of the pitch was that this would be done on starships more comfortable than our apartments...

...and that we’d be landing on alien planets so similar to earth that we could just walk around in our office clothes. Same gravity, same air, better weather. You don’t even need a jacket.

It was understood that, sure, this is a Hollywood fantasy but that some version of it will exist in the future and that this is the thing we should be working toward as a species. “But what’s wrong with having this to aspire to,” you ask, and my answer is... everything? This fantasy was always based on the idea that, at some point, we’re going to squeeze all of the juice out of earth and so will be forced to venture out and find something better. But the idea that there is something better out there isn’t just a lie—it’s a stupid, borderline malicious one.

You can talk about how exploration of the unknown lies at the heart of the heroic human spirit and so on, but here’s the thing: There’s an earthlike planet much closer to us that we haven’t even tried all that hard to explore. It’s called Earth. We’re not putting cities under the ocean or in the arctic because, well, why would we? The conditions are so harsh and the logistics so daunting that it would be a bizarre waste of money and resources. “Nobody wants to live in a place where you could die if you stray too far from shelter!” Okay, well, Mars is a million times worse, and a colony there would be a million times more expensive (side note: colonizing Mars is also basically impossible).

The logistics of the fantasy make no sense because it was never about that, it was always about nerds like me daydreaming of just getting away, because the world as we know it is messy and crowded and boring. But the solution to that isn’t to imagine a better, accessible planet somewhere out there in the void. There isn’t one. If it depresses you to imagine humans still confined to Earth 1,000 years from now, it’s your imagination that has gone wrong because that is, inarguably, the best case scenario.

*I am paraphrasing him to an irresponsible degree

My controversial novel I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is finally out in paperback, get it at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop or wherever you like to buy books.

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If you haven’t heard, political donors on the left are ready to throw millions at a personality they can turn into “the liberal Joe Rogan.” Or just a not-crazy Joe Rogan, an influencer who can relate to young dudes who like dude stuff without straying into “science is just woke propaganda.”

Fun fact: I fully believe there is an alternate universe where I wound up with that job a decade ago and if you’ve been following my career, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It would almost certainly have destroyed my life by now but if not, there’s one uncomfortable truth I’d be shouting into the mic every single day:

Saving the world and saving yourself are the same damned thing.

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1. Actually, why is the men’s self-help space dominated by right-wingers?

Let’s say a co-worker tells you their son has really gotten into a men’s self-improvement YouTuber. You don’t want this teenager to get sucked down some kind of weird extremist pipeline, so you ask for clarification: What exactly does this masculine self-help influencer talk about?

“Mainly advice on fitness and finance,” says the parent, “and meeting girls, things like that. He likes to hunt, show off his cars, lift weights. He’s really big on personal responsibility and free speech.”

I think at this point, you would 100% assume the self-help guru is a right-wing grifter even though not one word about politics was mentioned, for the same reason you’d assume a jacked-up Dodge Ram flying an American flag belongs to a MAGA Republican. Even a cursory glance at the media landscape paints the picture:

The influencers giving life advice to young men tend to lean to the right and their audiences are becoming more right-wing as a result. When this is brought up on the left, they speak of brainwashing, of kids falling under the spell of lying charlatans who just tell them what they want to hear. And that’s definitely true!

Sometimes.

But then there’s this other thing, which is that if I offer tips on how an individual can improve their finances, health or relationships, then I’m also asserting that at least some of the world’s suffering is due to poor choices made by the victim. That assertion is inarguably true, but social media is mostly a place for arguing inarguable things. So if you publicly state that, say, DoorDash is a wasteful and inefficient use of a limited paycheck, there’ll be a wave of backlash from the left that adopts one or more of these four tactics:

A) Personally attacking the speaker, often by scanning their profile for hypocrisy (“This talk of financial responsibility is pretty rich coming from a guy who drives a Cybertruck!”)

B) Hiding behind a perfect hypothetical victim (“So I guess the disabled who can’t cook or leave the house should just starve?!?”)

C) Weaponizing the demographics of the speaker (“These upper class white men love to lecture us poors!”)

D) Implying that, due to systemic forces, personal habits play no role whatsoever in life outcomes (“Wages haven’t risen in fifty years, but my delivery burrito is the problem?!?”)

These are all just deflections to avoid addressing the simple truth of the initial statement, deployed in the name of advancing a belief that I think is not just wrong, but fatal to their movement:

“Any talk of individual self-improvement is just a distraction from the true goal, which is tearing down the system to replace it with one based on fairness.”

Because of this, any calls for dysfunctional individuals to get their shit together is now coded as right-wing, which is bad news for both the left and anyone with untogether shit.

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2. Grifters are everywhere, but they’re not the whole story

I know what some of you are saying: “The reason you see such backlash to these stupidly obvious tips is that they’re at best bad faith attempts to shift blame, and at worst a strategy to rebrand fascism as self-improvement.”

I know and I understand. But the problem is the modern right has become very good at baiting the online left into taking positions the normies find ridiculous (“If I saw the police chasing an armed man down the street, I would help the latter get away! Also, I think owning rental property should be punishable by death!”). It’s true that, for example, right-wing influencers use violent crime as a racist dog whistle, but the entire point of the dog whistle is to trick the opposition into appearing to take a position that is repulsive to 98% of the population.

So for young men just coming onto the scene who aren’t familiar with all the subtext and gamesmanship, all they see is that one side seems to be totally rejecting objectively beneficial concepts like individual responsibility (“It’s secretly capitalist propaganda!”) free expression (“That’s just code for legalized hate speech!”) and patriotism (“Just another word for white supremacy!”). And here’s where my right-wing readers will say that the problem isn’t messaging, the problem is the left literally doesn’t believe in hard work or obeying the law, and they definitely don’t believe in self-improvement, instead embracing the bizarre belief that social stigma around a vice is always more destructive than the vice itself.

I don’t think this is accurate or fair. But I do think it is easy for an unbiased observer on social media—say, a young man new to politics—to get that impression and the left has to take responsibility for the impressions they create. An effective movement would not shy away from attacking unhealthy and destructive habits, loudly and at every opportunity. Not only is it weird for people to get angry at that, it shouldn’t even be controversial.

3. A movement is only as effective as its individuals’ collective habits

If I’m the liberal Joe Rogan, typing this from a much bigger house with a giant swimming pool I never, ever use, my central message is fairly straightforward:

There is no contradiction between improving the system and improving individuals, because it is literally impossible for dysfunctional individuals to run a functional system.

This seems insultingly obvious but it’s one of the most common fallacies out there, the implication that a relentless focus on getting fit or rich is a betrayal to the cause. If you have two groups about to face off in war (or sport, or business) and one side consists of relentless workers who are fanatical about discipline and efficiency, you would fully expect them to thrash an opposition whose leaders believe they have no right to judge any member’s lifestyle.

It is just factually true that if you want to defeat the bigots, then you need to be healthier than the bigots, in every way: mentally, emotionally, socially and, yes, financially. Whether you see the battle for the future as literal or metaphorical, there is no means of fighting that doesn’t depend on the relentless hard work of smart, talented, motivated, healthy, disciplined individuals.

So if one side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on the very concept of individual self-improvement, they’re going to win, because it’s going to be their people rising through the ranks of corporations, armies and police departments. They’ll be the ones accumulating the billions and dominating financial markets, they’ll have the most competent experts and lobbyists.

Therefore, any hope for a brighter future for the species does in fact begin with cleaning your room.

4. Protecting the vulnerable is hard work

“So you want to just throw all the sick and disabled under the bus by saying they have no value to the movement?” asks my imaginary leftist reply-guy. “That’s some Ayn Rand bullshit!”

I’m saying that making society better will require an unfathomable amount of labor, so if you want to welcome into your movement those who can’t work, then those who can have to work twice as hard. If you want the poor on your side, then those capable of generating wealth are going to have to generate a shitload of it. So what have you done today to help accumulate that wealth? “Acquiring riches is something only right-wing capitalists care about!” Then you’ve already lost. You think wars are fought without money?

I don’t even care how you’re choosing to fight, everything requires cash—politics, activism, mutual assistance. “But we want a world where that isn’t true!” I know, and accomplishing that will be the most expensive project in history. Wars cost billions, that kind of war will cost tens of trillions. Better get on that. Work more hours, take classes at night, learn how to invest, give the cash to the right causes. Get up earlier, work out, optimize everything, ditch anyone who drags you down. Make powerful friends. Become powerful yourself. The world is depending on you.

That’s what the liberal self-improvement guru would say, that the fascists love it when you sleep in, they celebrate when you waste your time on video games or dull your brain with weed and ruin your body with fast food. If future generations are suffering under climate disaster or right-wing authoritarians, they will not look kindly on how you chose to spend your time and energy. “But the game is rigged in the enemy’s favor! Most of them just inherited their wealth!” Then you’ll have to work even harder. Who told you this would be easy? Seriously, I want their names.

Because that’s what will sicken your suffering grandchildren the most: all your endless, endless excuses. The way you clung to your fragility, exaggerated it, weaponized it, dedicating all your verbal and reasoning skills to the task of batting away criticism. The way you and your cohorts enabled each other, posting memes about how sometimes you’re a hero just for making it out of bed in the morning, nobody calling out the bullshit because they themselves wanted to snooze under the same blanket.

Get up. Now. That’s what I would say if I was That Guy. Your enemy is laughing his ass off, your descendants will spit when they hear your name. You’re not doing this for you, you’re doing it because the world needs you. Not tomorrow. Now.

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5. There is nothing unmanly about being progressive

“Wait, are you actually pretending that the MAGA weirdos are a bunch of high achievers? They’re the side with the incel losers, the trailer park racists and illiterate fundamentalists who demand science classes teach Adam and Eve. Andrew Tate is a clown who got rich by scamming low-IQ rubes.”

Okay, then why are they winning?

It’s partly because there are certain things that young men tend to find cool and they are attracted to whoever promises success with those things. Andrew Tate is six different kinds of monster but teens can see with their own eyes that he is objectively successful in ways most boys want to be: he has money and muscles and cool cars and hot babes. Men on the left are required to say that those aspirations are disgusting and barbaric but then will quietly acquire the hottest girlfriend they can find and buy the coolest stuff they can afford.

That’s the part a lot of prominent figures on the left forget, which is that other humans can observe what they do. The normies notice when celebrities insist global warming is an impending apocalypse and then take weekly trips on their private jets. They notice when actors sneer at the right’s obsession with crime and then retreat to mansions protected by gates and armed guards. They notice when pop stars sing about the evils of greed while living the exact lifestyle as the oil tycoons and tech billionaires. They notice when prison abolition activists fantasize about seeing Trump behind bars. So I think we can forgive them for thinking everyone secretly has the same life aspirations but that only one side is being honest about it.

Instead, I think a liberal Joe Rogan would hold up examples of progressive causes advanced by unapologetically masculine figures and would relentlessly attack the fallacy that there is any contradiction there. They would talk about Teddy Roosevelt, a man who divided his time between hunting big game and hunting corporate monopolies, a man who fought for the preservation of nature because why should we let a bunch of corporate weenies rob us of the masculine experience of hiking through untamed wilderness? A manly man should be free to go swimming or boating without getting testicle cancer from toxic runoff.

LBJ pushed the government to the left in ways Bernie Sanders can only fantasize about and also loved to talk about his gigantic cock (he had to have his pants custom made). The labor movement was led by tough guys with rough hands who stood tall in the face of both beatings and bullets. These were men who were loud and angry and intimidating, driven risk-takers who sought to dominate their enemies. Call it toxic if you want, but that’s the kind of shit that saves the world and—I cannot stress this enough—everybody knows it.

It’s not toxic to unapologetically embrace ravenous appetites and grand aspirations, to relentlessly pursue greatness and directly confront your opposition. Greed is good, actually, if it’s greed for a more just world, for resources strategically sucked away from the robber barons and crypto scammers who would use them to burn down the planet. We want good people to start businesses so that they will treat their employees well and force the greed monsters to do the same or risk losing all their talent.

You want people on your side who look cool and live beautiful lifestyles because living well is by far the best advertisement for whatever group you’re in. That’s right, kids: you have a duty to present the best version of yourself, to make others want to be like you, to make it clear that being on the side of the good guys comes with benefits. Emphasize your strengths. Show off how hard you work. “I don’t want to make other people feel bad about themselves!” That’s nice, but you’ve misdiagnosed the illness. If you don’t give young men something to aspire to as individuals, then somebody else will.

6. Criticism is not enemy action

Anyway, that’s the kind of thing I’d say if I was the liberal Joe Rogan, a job that I cannot do because I don’t have his energy and hate talking to people.

Statistically, even those who loved and reposted this article won’t read this far, so let me share a little something just between us, now that we’ve filtered this down to just the most loyal and patient:

Earlier, I said that this kind of criticism is met with four categories of attack but I actually left out the most common one, which is to accuse any critic of the left of secretly being an agent of the right. This is an offshoot of the tendency that got us into this mess, the habit of deflecting all criticism as aiding and abetting the enemy. “We have literal fascists conducting purges and you’re criticizing us for playing too much Baldur’s Gate?!?”

But this so dishonest that it’s not really worth rebutting and if you see someone trying it here, congratulate them on failing to read to the end. We’re all grownups, and we all understand that the coach screaming that you’re running the wrong direction is trying to help you win. It’s the guy telling you that you’re just fine the way you are, no matter how self-destructive your habits, who is steering you off a cliff.

And yes, all of this is relevant to the book, the one that is $2.99 in ebook form for the month of June. Click here or just search your device for I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom.

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Before we continue: if you don’t have the new book I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, they’re doing a 50% off sale on the hardcover as of this writing.

1. Before things turn negative, please know that Bo Burnham is a treasure

If you’re unfamiliar with Robert “Bo” Burnham, he’s a comedian/actor/singer/songwriter/musician/producer/director/poet who is beloved by the public and critics alike. He is better than I am at absolutely every possible thing. If an asteroid was heading for earth and there were only two seats left in the Entertainers section of the evacuation ship, they would leave me behind and give Bo the extra seat in case he wanted to stretch out.

Burnham catapulted to fame at age 16 as one of the very first viral YouTubers in 2006. He immediately got a record deal and appeared in a Comedy Central special before he was even a legal adult. By 18, he was performing his one-man show all over the world and signed a deal to write and star in a musical produced by Judd Apatow (that didn’t wind up getting made). By 20, he’d released an hour-long standup/music special on cable and an album of its songs topped the charts. His success continued uninterrupted until, at age 25, he released his third critically acclaimed special/album and, while touring in support of it, began having panic attacks on stage.

He decided to stop performing live and, needing something to fill the time, went ahead and wrote, produced and directed a critically-acclaimed film (Eighth Grade, which premiered at Sundance, won multiple awards, and is at 99% on RT) then decided to try his hand at serious acting and co-starred in Promising Young Woman, which would then be nominated for Best Fucking Picture at the Academy Awards. At one point, he was cast to play Larry Bird in an HBO series about the 1980s NBA, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts (that is not a joke). Having completed those minor side quests, Burnham decided to lock in and create an era-defining masterpiece.

When the Covid lockdowns hit in early 2020, Burnham began filming the new special entirely in a single cramped room, without a crew or audience or anyone else—a true one-man show. Over the next year, it would chronicle his struggles with anxiety, depression and the specific kind of brain-poisoning that results from living a life online, cultivating a galaxy of parasocial relationships on one screen while compulsively monitoring the collapse of civilization on another.

Once finished, he sold Inside to Netflix for $3.9 million. Critics were awed; the special won a Grammy, three Emmys and a Peabody award. The accompanying album charted in a dozen countries, the performance of the song Welcome to the Internet was uploaded to YouTube where, as of this writing, it has been streamed 150 million times.

Inside perfectly captured a moment in the culture in a way that few pieces of media ever have or could. I don’t know that there’s another performer in the world capable of pulling this off with the same level of craftsmanship. Only a real piece of shit would have a problem with it.

2. Here’s why I have a problem with it

I’m being a bit coy here. There was a bit of a backlash to the special, largely from people who were kind of being dicks about it. The issue is that a good chunk of Inside is about the making of Inside, chronicling the year Burnham spent isolated in a tiny, sparsely-furnished room…

…his mental health deteriorating as the work descended into a tortuous slog (time is marked by his hair and beard growing unchecked until he looks like a newly-rescued castaway).

There is an interlude in which he talks about how the special has become an excuse to remain in seclusion long after all lockdowns had been lifted, and another about the existential crisis of turning 30, alone, in this depressing space full of cables and recording equipment. There’s a song about how his comedy does nothing to help the world and that, ultimately, this is all being done for selfish reasons, to feed the narcissism cultivated by a life lived for engagement. He jokes that he’s forced to resort to sexting for intimacy but is terrible at it, then imagines himself as a video game protagonist that does nothing but sleep and cry alone in his bedroom.

The complaint from the (few) naysayers was that, well, none of this was real and it was clear some fans were taking it at face value. The dismal, cluttered space in which Burnham filmed the special was actually the guest house in the backyard of his $3 million home in an upscale LA neighborhood . . . where he was living with his long-term girlfriend at the time. He could have included scenes with her, or his dog, or of the bedroom where he actually slept each night, or of him leaving his house to do press events with fellow celebrities, but pointedly chose not to. The isolation was a performance, the runaway hair and beard a costume choice to fit the aesthetic (half way through production of Inside, he was appearing clean-shaven in public to do promo for Promising Young Woman and presumably had to wait for the whiskers to grow back to continue filming).

In my view, this is all totally fine—that’s his job, he’s a performer, and achieving the desired effect required blurring the line with reality. You’ve surely seen singers on stage get choked up trying to get through a song, as if it the lyrics are just too raw for them—do you really think they’re still that affected by the 5,000th performance of a tune about a breakup that happened ten years and twelve relationships ago? Moments when performers “break” are almost always part of the act, a mask under a mask.

But this does imply that when Burnham filmed himself having an emotional meltdown near the end of Inside, throwing gear around the room until he breaks down into sobs, that there’s a real good chance it required multiple takes. Here’s the final shot of that section:

As a director who knows what he’s doing, Burnham was acutely aware of exactly how that shot was framed, how the shadows fall dramatically across his face, how his shaggy bangs dangle in just the right way while he fights back tears of frustration and despair. I personally believe that he sketched out the special in advance and decided that “slowly deteriorating in isolation” was going to be the framing device. But it’s not a lie or a fraud—it’s a performer giving us exactly what we demand from him.

And what we demand, is misery.

That, kids, is what we’re here to talk about today.

3. The champion of a fierce competition to see who can feel the most and worst

If we pull back a bit, we’ll see that Inside is what the kids in my day would call a “flex.” Burnham didn’t have to film an entire feature-length special entirely on his own—he chose to. He wrote all the songs and jokes, did all the singing (live), played all the instruments, created all the costumes and sets and props, set up the cameras and mics and lights and laboriously spent endless hours hunched over a laptop mixing and editing. This solo effort won awards over productions with nine-figure budgets and armies of professional staff.

The man was, unquestionably, showing off, demonstrating that he could compose and play music in pretty much any genre, from bouncy show tunes to folk ballads to 80s synth pop. The punchlines are hilarious and thought-provoking, every emotion either heartfelt or performed with Oscar-worthy sincerity. A lot of messages get delivered across Inside’s 1.5-hour runtime but the first and most urgent message of this (or any) performance is, look at what I can do, motherfuckers.

I don’t think I’m being uncharitable in framing it this way, because it in no way undermines the point Inside is trying to make. If anything, it enhances it; Burnham is living proof that mental illness doesn’t necessarily care about your material circumstances.

I think Burnham would readily agree that he is one of the most privileged humans in the history of the species. Others may have inherited wealth, but Burnham was born with extraordinary talent, in a supportive environment, in the exact right time and place in history to take advantage (his abilities developed just at the moment YouTube opened a pathway for anyone to get famous from their bedroom). He did all of this in what is objectively the wealthiest, safest and most comfortable civilization that has ever existed.

Inside was the work of a man with millions of dollars and total creative freedom and flexibility over his own schedule and universal critical acclaim and respect from peers and a beautiful, talented girlfriend and a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood with beautiful weather year-round and he is conventionally handsome and 6’5”. This man’s reality far exceeds the wildest dreams of 8 billion other humans and he is still so miserable that he sometimes can barely get out of bed.

That is the point; his anguish is not due to his circumstances but in how he’s wired, tortured by a void that seemingly no amount of achievement or public adoration can fill. The track that broke out as a streaming hit, the arena singalong ballad All Eyes on Me, conveys it wonderfully. Burnham pumps in fake crowd noise under lyrics that are just a series of nonsense commands to the audience (alternating between “all eyes on me” and “heads down now”) until he finally flies into a rage at their inability to follow instructions.

Here is the deranged struggle of someone who keeps getting exactly what he wants and still feels nothing. And Inside makes it clear Burnham believes this disease is an epidemic, that easy access to an audience creates that same gnawing, insatiable hunger in tens of millions of kids who won’t have his charmed life.

But there is that other layer that Burnham never acknowledges and may not even be aware of, which is that publicly detailing the contours of his illness is, paradoxically, one of the symptoms of that illness. And that, in my opinion, is the real epidemic of the modern age.

Somewhere, right now, a teenage girl just recorded herself crying for a TikTok video but, when she went to edit it, realized her mic wasn’t plugged in and so now she’s making herself cry a second time to get another take. Next door is some dude with a great job, healthy body, a loving partner and lots of friends who, after a long day of fairly easy work and an evening watching Netflix, will tweet, “Another wretched day enduring the horrors, my thoughts are with all of you who know that just surviving this absolute hellscape is an accomplishment all its own.”

They all exist within an online subculture in which earnest attempts at positive sincerity and wellness are to be mocked as vapid (as they are in Burnham’s “White Woman’s Instagram”). The practice of not just broadcasting your lowest moments, but intentionally playing up the angst for maximum engagement has to be the world’s worst possible coping mechanism, a form of self-harm with an added layer of performance anxiety (I’m not sure science even has a word for the gut-punch sensation of recording your sobs of despair, only to see the post get zero likes and a single comment from a spambot).

But they do it because that subculture says this is what a good person does, they demonstrate how they constantly feel the terrible weight of the world on their shoulders. That means the despair portrayed in Inside is also a flex, Burnham proving that his misery is bigger, deeper and more watchable than yours. And I think this leaves a giant, gaping blind spot in his worldview.

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4. “The End of the World” is always a coping mechanism

The titular feeling in Burnham’s “That Funny Feeling” is a sense of impending doom, that the stream of stimulus flying across your screens is simultaneously relaying and obscuring a single narrative, that society is collapsing and “They” are just trying to distract you:

The live-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show

Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go

Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul

A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall

There it is again, that funny feeling

Likewise, in “All Eyes on Me,” Burnham says, “You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did.” Inside presents the impending apocalypse as a given and I find it fascinating if Burnham genuinely doesn’t see what’s going on here. He clearly understands his depression and anxiety are irrational responses to a life lived almost entirely free of danger or deprivation, yet does not seem to understand that his apocalypse fixation is simply a scaled-up version of that same irrational response.

You can argue with me about the impending dangers of climate change or AI or world war, but the apocalypse Burnham references is, objectively, pure superstition. The outro of “That Funny Feeling” is the light and bouncy reassurance, “it’ll be over soon, you wait, ba-da-da, ba-da-da.”

He sees the End of the World the way religious zealots see it, as a sudden relief from all earthly suffering. They want the world replaced by a paradise, he longs for a peaceful oblivion, but it all comes from the same impulse, a selfish desperation to escape your anxieties at all costs.

Worsening climate disaster (or almost any other “collapse” scenario) would mean turmoil, shortages and upheaval in the power structures but life would continue, there will still be jobs and bills and marriages and birthdays and celebrities. Hell, Bo Burnham would probably be able to keep working as a performer, there would still be demand. Wistfully waiting for the world to “end” like it’s a bad movie is just another form of suicidal ideation, a safer version that won’t cause your friends to stage an intervention.

Bo, and millions of others like him, need the apocalypse to keep their worldview intact, because they have to resolve the contradiction between “This system has provided me with an objectively comfortable life” and “I’m miserable.” Belief in the End Times lets them turn this bug into a feature: “Considering the dire state of the world, it would actually be selfish to enjoy what I have!”

5. Its possible this is at least partially my fault

Inside is not overly political, in the sense that it contains the minimum required amount of politics for a performer like Burnham to include in a 2020-era work, which is still quite a bit. The politics come in the form of scattered references that probably sound strange or random to anyone who hasn’t spent the last several years refreshing certain apps.

I have repeatedly referenced Burnham’s “subculture” and future historians will have a name for the college-educated, extremely-online, left-leaning influencers that bubbled up on the internet starting around 2012 or so. It’s a group that held the same policy positions as about half of the country (abortion should be legal, medical emergencies shouldn’t be financially ruinous, climate change will require government intervention) but with an added a layer of off-putting, trollish quirks optimized to juice Twitter engagement.

This included a tendency to exaggerate every single negative event or trend in the world to DEFCON-1, and to fly into a shrieking rage if anyone suggested maybe that’s not the optimal way to raise awareness. They constantly joked(?) about how they’re longing for either suicide or an apocalypse…

…and implied that every single headline, whether about a celebrity breakup or a natural disaster, was evidence the End was near. They insisted that everything was better in the past but has steadily gotten worse due to capitalism, and thus our misery won’t end until that system is violently overthrown. They always portrayed themselves as in poor mental health but said it was simply a rational response to modern life (again, due to capitalism). In general, everything about the subculture was designed to repel the normies on both side of the aisle, asserting that everything loved by Middle America (religion, cops, the military, nice cars, big houses, hamburgers) is, if you think about it, a form of literal genocide.

It sounds psychotic when I type it all out like that, but this was politics when viewed through the funhouse mirror of rage-based engagement algorithms and years of social media infighting (everything could be justified under the guise that the right-wing version of this faction was much, much worse). But one side-effect was that, for a while, every comedian who wasn’t explicitly conservative was making the same jokes.

Thus, Inside gives us the relentlessly hard-working, business-owning millionaire explaining why capitalism is cruel and unnatural. You get the references to the past being a better, more innocent place (including the bizarre assertion that 1999-era internet was just G-rated blogs and chatrooms—I guess Bo’s parents didn’t let him browse rotten.com). You get Logan Paul referenced as a harbinger of the apocalypse alongside rising sea levels. And, above all, you get that drumbeat of miserable helplessness, the implication that every bad thing in your life is due to factors beyond your control: mental illness, capitalism, or mental illness caused by capitalism.

I’m intimately familiar with this particular subculture because I spent a decade as a somewhat prominent member. Some of my angriest hate mail insists that, in my position at Cracked, I was even one of its architects, though I feel like we were mostly just along for the ride.* And this brings us to why I’m laboriously deconstructing this special four years after the fact, at a moment when headlines are 24/7 Trump/Musk outrage:

Politics is always just a backlash to a backlash and when young men surged to the right in 2024, you only needed about five minutes on social media to realize the online left’s pitch to those men had become absolute dogshit. Regardless of what any actual candidate was saying, what young men heard/perceived was:

“Come join the Left and be miserable! Listen to us talk endlessly about how awful your demographic is and how you should keep your mouth shut unless it’s to apologize! Abandon any hope for the future, as you either need to become poorer to protect the environment, or endure the horrors of climate disaster! Relentlessly police your own language according to rules that change hourly and be prepared to be totally ejected from your personal and professional network the second anyone even accuses you of stepping out of line! If you criticize any aspect of the above, that means you’re a literal Nazi! And don’t worry about the crushing malaise, that’s just a sign that you’re a Good Person Who Cares!”

This subculture’s influence hit its apex in 2020 and entered its death throes with the 2024 election and the slow degradation of the platform previously known as Twitter. I think Inside, in ways both intentional and unintentional, perfectly demonstrated why.

“Here I am,” says the charismatic, empathetic male on the screen, “someone who has achieved everything our side says is good in life. I have all the correct opinions and praise from all the right people. I have acquired my wealth ethically. I have demonstrated empathic awareness of others’ suffering and an unflinching perception of my own shortcomings and culpability in the world’s injustices. And it fucking sucks so much that I literally am rooting for the world to end just to make it stop.”

I’m obviously not implying that this special put Trump back in office, I’m saying that Inside lives on as a beautifully-crafted expression of how not to build a popular, durable Resistance. The lesson should be that any movement devoid of hope will quickly be devoid of members. Humans do not want to feel helpless or worthless or weak. They want role models who are strong and capable and enjoy being who they are. They don’t just want endless validation and valorization of their poor mental health, they want to be fucking cured.

In other words, they want at least a fighting chance at personal happiness and if your movement can’t offer it to them, then your movement will die and no one will miss it.

The new novel that touches on all these subjects is called I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, it’s available right here in all formats.

*Side note: I’ve been asked repeatedly if Inside influenced that book but the parallel lies in the fact that these are both projects born from similar turmoil. Oddly enough, Burnham and I both made huge career decisions in January of 2020 (he decided to return to public performance, I left the job at Cracked to become a full-time novelist). Burnham’s track “That Funny Feeling” references “derealization”, the sense of detachment from the physical world that comes from viewing it through a screen. In my book, a character calls the resulting nihilistic isolation the “Black Box of Doom.”

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The Kingcast with JDATE movie director Don Coscarelli to discuss my favorite Stephen King novel, Misery, and the art of adapting a book to film.

Quick Question with former Cracked peers Daniel O'Brien and Soren Bowie to talk about their weirdest celebrity encounters, of which they've had almost none.

A two-part series for Behind the Bastards, on a bizarre corporate harassment/terror campaign carried out by ebay executives:

Part 1.

Part 2.

A three-part podcast series on The Dogg Zzone about an even more bizarre series of infomercials for male supplements, in which the seller creates an insane and convoluted backstory for himself (warning: his ads are weirdly racist):

Episode 1: Gorilla Flow

Episode 2: Tupi Tea

Episode 3: Gorilla Flow, Director’s Cut

The Frame Rate podcast talking about ‘Road to Perdition,’ a great film which never really connected with me.

Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, on how MS Excel kind of runs the whole world.

Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, on the surprisingly weird and dangerous world of salt mines.

The Dogg Zzone, on actor/director Vincent Gallo’s bizarre merch website, in which one of the products is you can pay to have sex with him.

The Creature Feature podcast, on truly horrific examples of creatures that can survive being eaten (and not in a good way).

The ‘We Just Watched’ podcast, breaking down the cult horror/comedy ‘Society.’

And of course there is the on going bi-weekly podcast BIGFEETS, in which me and two other guys do a detailed rewatch and analysis of the ridiculous but oddly compelling Bigfoot-hunting reality show Mountain Monsters. Here it is on Spotify, or just search your favorite podcast app for BIGFEETS.

During the book release I also did a bunch of interviews in which we went in-depth, not just on the book, but on my whole process and what it’s like to live with Internet Brain Poisoning:

The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood

Webworm, the podcast of journalist and documentarian David Farrier

The Fascinating Podcast

Book Reviews Kill

This is Horror, Part 1

This is Horror, Part 2

Selling Your Screenplay podcast 

Turn the Page podcast

Hell of a Way to Dad

The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal

History Now the Future podcast (YouTube)

If you want to be notified when I appear on somebody’s podcast in the future, sign up for my email list here. 

If you don’t have the new book yet, all the buy links are here.

All the links to my many social medias are here.

Thanks so much, and happy holidays.

-Jason 

So let’s dig into how D&W is a perfect demonstration of why so many people think our culture is dead and that we’re now just picking through the rot. Not that I agree with them, but…

Before we start, if you haven’t picked up a copy of the national bestseller I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, it’s available in every format at this link. If you’ve already read it, maybe join the discussion in the fan subreddit.

1. Let me be clear: I am in no way too smart for movies like this

What I’m not going to do here is spend thousands of words complaining that Deadpool & Wolverine is nothing but puerile slapstick and recursive pop culture references interrupted by fight scenes totally devoid of dramatic stakes. Blazing Saddles had all that and it’s regarded as a classic.

Hell, if anything, D&W’s mortal sin is that it thinks it can swerve back into mawkish sentimentality whenever it wants, where Blazing Saddles kept crashing through increasingly ridiculous layers of the fourth wall. The third(?) Deadpool movie literally ends with a teary montage set to that Green Day “Time of Your Life” song, a tribute to other superhero franchises with grainy behind-the-scenes clips of actors in roles they took purely because the paychecks would fund the stuff they really wanted to make.

I don’t even think D&W is a bad movie. Hugh Jackman throws himself into this role and if you don’t like any particular joke, there’ll be another one in four seconds. Or, more likely, the same joke rephrased—look, the point is that I’m not complaining about the filmmaking. I’m saying that if you zoom out, you’ll see that this movie is the culmination of a trend that might—might—portend the collapse of our civilization. 

2. Let’s first acknowledge our collective bloodlust

The plot of Deadpool & Wolverine begins with—

Actually, before we get into the plot, let me back up a bit, to the basics of how action movies work.

The entire genre is predicated on the premise that certain people need to die. Or, at least, have the living shit beat out of them. It triggers something primal in the audience; our nervous systems light up at the sight of a guy slicing and dicing through a pack of bad guys because any ancestors who failed to enjoy that type of thing didn’t survive long enough to pass on their genes.

So, Deadpool & Wolverine opens with indestructible mercenary and former Minnesota Vikings QB Wade Wilson slaughtering a group of guys who’ve come to apprehend him. It is not established why exactly these men deserve to die and it’s a running joke that Deadpool himself doesn’t care. These films flaunt the fact that none of this matters and one could even argue that any deep analysis is just a waste of our few precious moments on earth.

But there’s an interesting activity you can try that will change how you think of cinema and also make your friends stop watching movies with you. At the end of this or any action/adventure film, after the heroes have defeated the bad guys, pause the film and ask a simple question: 

“Why did the good guys win?”

The answer should never be, “Because the heroes are stronger,” there would be no drama in that, you’d just be watching a superhuman bully some mortals for two hours. The victory always has to be for some other reason. 

For example, the reason John Wick really wins in his movies is because he is more motivated; the memory of his wife and his desire to redeem his sins lets him persevere against enemies who are simply in it for a paycheck. Harry Potter wins the same way the Jedi do, by rallying support from the outcasts and common folk against an elitist, oppressive regime that rules through fear. The Avengers defeat Thanos because they love their friends more than he loves genocide. All of these can be boiled down to one, usually-unspoken theme: 

“Our side wins because our way of life is superior.”

They may frame it as “love conquers all” or “freedom is better than oppression” or some version of “God is on our side” (see: the light side of the Force in Star Wars, Eywa in Avatar) but those are all just another way of saying the same thing. Those themes are not the result of a coordinated propaganda campaign intended to brainwash audiences into perpetuating the glory of the empire; studios just want to make money and the audience’s favorite story will always be, “Our tribe is right, the other tribe is wrong, and we will win.” 

That’s why these movies always provide unintentional insight into what a culture believes about itself. The United States, which can barely remember the last time it went to war against a wealthier country, loves tales in which hardscrabble farmers rise up against a decadent empire.

Okay, so why do the heroes win in Deadpool & Wolverine? “There is no reason,” you’re probably saying. “They literally turn their ultimate triumph into yet another joke about how much Wade wants to pork Logan.” 

I agree that the movie thinks none of this matters, but a close look at the plot reveals something else entirely… 

3. All stories are propaganda, even (and especially) the ones that aren’t intended to be

Actually, before we get into the plot, let me back up a bit, to the basics of how fiction works. Why does it even exist? If nothing else, you’d have to assume the very first human to tell a “story” was just a lying piece of shit. The actual reason, as I understand it, goes like this:

Imagine you’re a kid at a summer camp, the kind they have in 80s movies. It’s brutally hot and one day you and your friends pass by a beautiful lake with a “NO SWIMMING” sign. If there are no visible dangers or grown-ups around, I’m thinking it’ll be just minutes until somebody suggests going for a swim. Rules are made to be broken and who’s to say why that sign is even there? Maybe some greedy adult wants all the good swimming for himself, or some corrupt bureaucrat has an under-the-table deal with the sign maker.

But what if, instead of a sign, the other campers tell a gruesome tale of a kid who tried swimming there last year, only to emerge shrieking with his skin melting off his body? The lake, they explain, is extremely acidic—just the droplets from the kid’s thrashing limbs blinded three of his friends. It doesn’t take an expert to understand why that story is more effective than a sign at keeping kids out of the water; a rule is abstract, a good story is visceral. You can almost hear that kid’s screams, see the flesh gooping off his body.

So it’s not surprising that many old folk tales boil down to, “a naughty little boy once sneaked off into the woods, where he was captured by a witch” or “a greedy little girl ate some mushrooms she found and suddenly was transformed into a slug.” Keeping kids alive meant instilling a healthy fear of the wilderness and unfamiliar fungi.

“Hold on,” you ask, “wouldn’t that require the listener to actually think the story is true?” You’re not gonna believe this, but no. That’s the thing about humans, we’ll watch a movie about vampires on Mars, but if there’s a scene in which a sexy dude smokes a cigarette while a hot lady swoons, we’ll think, “Ah, cigarettes make women swoon. I shall start smoking this very night.” 

Now, this does take some finesse on the part of the storyteller, usually by conveying the message, not in the plot, but in the unspoken assumptions that make the plot possible. You might watch Jaws and think the message is, “Listen to experts when it comes to public health, and don’t put profit over people!” But the plot only exists under the assumption that sharks are incredibly dangerous and must be stopped with lethal force… and that’s the part audiences felt in their guts. “Are you seriously saying they intended Jaws to be anti-shark propaganda?” No, that was an accident, as most messages conveyed by mass media are (note that the writer of Jaws spent the rest of his life trying to undo the damage).

“Fine,” you say, “then what are the fucking unspoken assumptions this Deadpool movie supposedly brainwashed us with? Because I literally don’t even remember the plot and you forgot to finish summarizing it earlier.” Good point, let’s do that now.

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4. This genre requires targets the heroes can mow like grass

Actually, before we get into the plot, let me back up a bit, to the basics of how our species works. Evolution may have instilled in us some pleasure chemicals that get released whenever we imagine winning a battle against the bad guys, but it’s the culture’s job to tell us who the bad guys are, to harness our innate desire for glory the way an operating system commands hardware. 

So one can imagine a bunch of young dudes sitting around a campfire and hearing the thrilling legend of a warrior who bravely sacrificed himself to save the village from the cruel Mountain People. The plot conveys the message, “You must be brave and persistent, even against long odds” but the underlying assumption is, “The Mountain People are both merciless and undeserving of mercy.” If the culture is doing its job, the young men might be dubious about the plot, quietly thinking that it is unlikely one guy could really hold off an entire invading tribe. But it will never occur to them to challenge the underlying assumption about the inhumanity of the Mountain People.

Of course, the intent isn’t just to train warriors to kill, but to instill a willingness for all types of heroic sacrifice and a belief that preserving our way of life is worth it. But that other assumption—that somewhere out there are masses of inhuman savages who must be defeated—is so baked into our culture that we have entire genres of shows/movies/games that can’t function without it. You literally can’t have a first-person shooter video game without enemies you can gleefully mow down by the dozen.

For most of the time pop culture has existed, this has been no problem at all. I’m old enough that when I was a toddler, the toys were still cowboy-themed and we had cap guns we’d use to pretend to shoot “Indians.” When I got a little older, it was the Russians we pretended to kill. I was nine when the movie Red Dawn assured me that the Soviets would parachute in any day now and that it would be up to us, the children, to fight them off. 

But then the Cold War abruptly ended and there was a reckoning in the culture, questioning if any mass of sentient beings really deserve to be wiped out. This triumph of progressive cultural empathy definitely made the world better but also created a huge problem for the entertainment industry, which has spent an entire generation figuring out workarounds.

Thus, we got an incredible Lord of the Rings trilogy that made it clear no Orc deserves to live, but Tolkien only wrote so many books. So we also got lots of media about killing aliens (Independence Day, then several Marvel movies) and zombies (The Walking Dead, tons of video games) and robots (several other Marvel movies, The Matrix). The Star Wars prequels even had to retcon their Stormtroopers into clones, as if the lives of millions of copies of the same sentient dude would have no individual value (I guess it’s because they don’t have moms to be sad for them?).

The low point was probably the Red Dawn remake in 2012, in which the bad guys were the Chinese during filming, but had to be changed to North Koreans at the last minute (even though the idea of a mainland invasion by either nation is laughable).

“Wait, are we even still talking about Deadpool & Wolverine? Because its biggest action set pieces are just a bunch of comic book characters fighting each other.”

Yes, and it’s noteworthy that this is different from how the previous Deadpool films handled the cannon fodder problem. They took place in an alternate universe in which the first world is full of criminal organizations with vast private armies (the John Wick movies do the same thing, to a comical degree—that freak has personally killed 439 people across four films, every single victim understood to be a remorseless professional thug).

To understand D&W, you have to look at the antagonists of other MCU films, where a strange pattern quickly emerges. The villain of every Iron Man film is an executive at an American tech company. The antagonist in The Incredible Hulk is the US military. The villain in Thor is Thor’s own brother, the bad guys in The Avengers are Thor’s brother and, in a twist, an American intelligence agency. The villain in Avengers 2 is a robot of Tony Stark’s own creation. If it kind of sounds like they spend all their time fighting amongst themselves, you’re right. I mean, Captain America does get to kill Nazis for a bit, but in the next film, he’s fighting his former best friend and the third installment is literally about a “Civil War” between two factions of superheroes.

And that has been your dominant pop culture franchise since the Obama era: a group of godlike heroes who mostly protect humanity from the heroes’ own families, colleagues and inventions. That’s weird, right? “Now hold on, didn’t we just have an old-fashioned patriotic ‘Us Against Them’ blockbuster with the 2022 Top Gun sequel?” Sure, now go look up who the bad guys were in that movie. “Hmm, it doesn’t say...” Right, because they literally never named the enemy country, or provided any hints as to who it could be (that the film hides this information in a way that some people never notice is kind of amazing). And note that Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t the top grosser that year, that was the Avatar sequel. You know, the movie in which the mindless cannon fodder enemy is humanity itself. 

“You’re overthinking it, the whole reason they can’t depict a war with Russia or China is because the studios may want distribution in those countries!” Well, yeah. But that’s just a side effect of the fact that the USA has spent a generation as the only superpower in a global economy. That means our culture doesn’t have an enemy to unify against—all opposing nations are potential trade partners—and it’s not just the movie studios who feel lost without one.

I am not saying that things were better back when our Saturday morning cartoons were wall-to-wall hate crimes, I’m saying that, historically, fear and revulsion of a formidable enemy is what binds a society together and watching us try to function without it is like seeing a recovering addict realize they have no tools to manage their anxiety. Hatred of the Other is a cheap and reliable way to strengthen love for your neighbor and in the USA, the jury is out on whether the love can stand on its own.

There is, therefore, a fear among certain people—some of whom are very powerful in society—that we’ve cultivated a population that doesn’t believe in The Cause and that we’ll crumble the moment we run into a population that does believe in theirs, that an army of single-minded zealots will always defeat an opposing army of heavily-medicated, bickering neurotics. They’ll never put it this way, but the truth is that lots of people believe dehumanization of the Other is an empire’s superpower and runaway empathy is its Kryptonite. If you look around, you’ll see that we’re actually having this argument everywhere, but always dressing it up as something else. “Don’t talk to me about nuance, [insert opposition here] must be defeated!”

Which brings us back to Deadpool, whose true superpower is not that he can instantly heal his wounds, but that he can murder a hundred men without hesitation or doubt, giggling and quipping to the camera the whole time, never losing a moment of sleep to the memory of their screams. The main character arc in D&W belongs to an alcoholic Logan who is haunted by his violent past and must learn to remorselessly kill again. He even dons a mask in the finale, to symbolize that he has buried the humanity that was holding him back to become the pure inhuman killing machine the world needs. 

But why does the world need it? What cause is he advancing?

5. And, here comes the existential dread

Actually, before we get into why the answer to that question might be the most alarming thing you’ve ever read, let me back up a bit and summarize this movie’s plot. SPOILERS AHEAD:

The setup of Deadpool & Wolverine is that, because Disney acquired Fox in 2019, many old superhero franchises are destined to be rebooted with new actors, tragically erasing the originals from the canon. In the film, these old characters are jettisoned to a void dimension where they wander a wasteland ruled by a cruel, power-hungry female twin of Professor X. I realize that if you haven’t seen the movie it sounds like I just had a stroke but, yes, the plot literally revolves around Disney’s real-world acquisition of Fox studios. One of the crumbling structures in the void dimension is the old 20th Century Fox logo:

Some of it is presented as thinly veiled symbolism (Deadpool and Wolverine get sent to the void by a corrupt bureaucrat whose job it is to prune universes that aren’t working—you know, like a studio exec coldly deciding which franchises aren’t profitable enough to continue) but usually Reynolds just says it straight to camera. One of the first lines we hear Deadpool say is, “Disney bought Fox, there was a whole boring rights issue...” and the Disney corporation is mentioned four more times over the course of the movie.

In order to escape the void, the heroes have to rally the help of various superheroes from now-dead franchises including Elektra, X-23, Blade and Johnny Storm, plus the character Gambit from a project that (in the real world) was canceled in development. Those characters sacrifice themselves to free the heroes and this is portrayed as a powerful moment in which they are allowed the closure that was cruelly denied to them by the bean counters.

The protagonists then find they’ve been pursued through the portal by an army of alternate universe Deadpools, at which point the actor Ryan Reynolds explains to the camera that multiverse storytelling simply doesn’t work and that Disney should abandon it.

So in order to engage with the emotional throughline of the film, the viewer must be intimately familiar, not just with every superhero film of the last 25 years, but with all the related behind-the-scenes industry drama. An early joke assumes you know who Kevin Feige is—not just the name of the president of Marvel Studios, but his role in the creative decision-making. Other punchlines require the viewer to have followed the studio’s failure to reboot the Blade franchise and to be upset about the Channing Tatum Gambit film never making it out of development hell. 

In other words, it assumes that you care, not necessarily what happens to these characters, but about the place those characters hold in the culture and in the studio’s release schedule. It assumes that the central motivating purpose of your life is the consumption of media and, therefore, that you will be emotionally invested in a piece of media that is only about other pieces of media. Ryan Reynolds knows his audience—he’s a billionaire for a reason—and this assumption made Deadpool & Wolverine the top-grossing film of the year.

This is, after all, an audience that doesn’t just play video games, but watches videos of other people playing video games, then watches videos about the people who make videos of themselves playing video games then goes on reddit to discuss the videos about the people who make videos about themselves playing video games. The real world is a lost cause, they say, so your cause is here, in the Matrix, to help to brick up the sky behind more and more layers of simulation. 

Instead of a tale of heroism told around the campfire to motivate young people to go out and be heroes themselves, these are tales about the heroism of consuming tales, a harrowing parable about how some evil person wants to move the campfire, or change the seating, or to tell the story in a slightly different way than you’d prefer. It kind of seems like we’re watching a culture trying to figure out if that’s enough of a belief system to make a human life worth living.

Then again, it’s just one movie so maybe it’s no big deal. And yes, this is secretly what the new book is about. I give Deadpool & Wolverine 4.5 stars out of 100.

If you haven’t picked up a copy of I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, it’s available in every format at this link. If you’ve already read it, maybe join the discussion in the fan subreddit.

If you want to follow me on social media, including my bafflingly popular TikTok account, all those links are here.

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Note that if you’re someone who enjoys my essays about society but never liked my silly and often gruesome novels, this might actually be the book for you. I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is a dark satire framed as a ticking clock thriller, a standalone novel that requires no knowledge of any of my other books or anything else. Get it wherever you prefer to get books or click here.

* Note: The audiobook should be available WORLDWIDE.

With the release has come an avalanche of podcast appearances (if you want to be updated any time my captivating voice appears on somebody’s show, I have a separate mailing list for that). But just to give you an idea, in the last couple of days alone:

I’ve done in-depth interviews on The Bulwark podcast and The Daily Beast’s New Abnormal podcast, The Fascinating podcast as well as Journalist David Farrier’s show. Then I dropped by the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast, and Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, then we released a new episode of the ridiculous and totally inconsequential BIGFEETS podcast, a show that I think now has more fans than my books.

This is on top of doing daily videos on the TikTok and posting daily on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky and less frequently on YouTube and Goodreads (all of those links can be found here). So if you’re wondering why I only write like four Substack posts a year, there you go.

If you’re a superfan and want to support my writing career in the most effective possible way, first of all, I’m not worth it, but if you insist:

* If you haven’t preordered the book, get it this week so that we improve our extremely long odds at making a bestseller list. But, again, it’s totally fine to just reserve it at your local library, money doesn’t grow on trees.

* Leave a review somewhere such as Amazon (if that’s where you got it).

* When speaking about the book online, keep using the word “controversial” to describe it. In this media environment, telling someone a book/movie/game/etc is “good” will only cause them to mentally add it to the gigantic pile of stuff they’ve been meaning to read/watch/play. But if you promise controversy, you’re inviting them to join a real-life drama. People are probably fighting! You can take a side! Now, the book is not very controversial as far as I know, but you can just keep the nature of the controversy vague and if someone presses you on it, simply say, “it’s not my job to educate you.”

Here’s the buy link again. This book took a lot out of me, in every way. Thank you so much for your support.

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Yes, I wrote under the pseudonym David Wong for more than 20 years, using the name of the fictional protagonist in my first novel who was always described as an angry, drunken white guy living under an alias to avoid unspecified enemies. “Wait,” you ask, “so you wrote as a fictional character?” Yes, and I realize it requires some explaining, so...

For the curious, here is a complete timeline and explanation of how we got here:

* 1975: The year I was born. I started hating myself soon after. None of my decisions were good.

* 1994: Just after high school but before the internet existed, I wrote a short story with my best friend, a Pulp Fiction-style action comedy featuring a character named David Wong. He was portrayed as a dirtbag who uses that name as an alias to stay off the grid, as he believed it would make him difficult to find in public records since more than 100 million people on earth share that surname. The problem was that he was a white guy living in the Midwest, so the running joke was that literally every person he runs into immediately asks him how he wound up with the name, utterly defeating the purpose of an alias. 

We would write several versions of that story and later adapt it into a screenplay, none of which was ever published. The working title was 265 Color Photographs of Balls and if you want to read these drafts, they can currently be found in a series of notebooks buried several hundred layers deep in some Illinois landfill. 

* Around 1997: I got my first home internet connection and joined several chat rooms and message boards, mostly discussing Chicago-area sports. Back then, the internet was 90% weird computer nerds and most of us used single-word hacker usernames. I often went by “dwong187”, a reference to a fictional character that, at the time, literally only two people in the entire world were familiar with. I was a deeply depressed and angry young man and spent those years writing grossly inappropriate jokes and screaming slurs at fans of rival sports teams.

* 1998-99: I started a blog where I posted whatever popped into my head that week, called Pointless Waste of Time (PWoT to the fans). Back then, bloggers not only posted under pseudonyms, but often wrote in the voice of a fictional character. Writers with names like “Lowtax” posted cultural criticism in wildly over-the-top terms and, when depicting their personal lives, would portray themselves as “loser” caricatures. You can still see this trend in long-running YouTube channels, the hosts filming pop culture commentary in the voice of a fictional, over-the-top “Angry Guy” or “Nerdy Basement-Dweller” or some other low-status archetype.

I thus wrote my essays as the character David Wong—the profane, cynical weirdo from those old short stories. I initially was writing for about a dozen acquaintances I’d met on message boards and chat rooms and, at that point in my life, did not think it would grow beyond that. I’d dreamed of being a famous writer back in high school, but my experiences in college and the years after had convinced me that I was an unremarkable talent when it came to writing or anything else. I had lasted less than two years in the career I’d racked up catastrophic student debt to pursue and was paying the bills with minimum wage office jobs assigned by a temp agency.

* 2000: On Halloween, I posted to my blog the first chapters of what was to be an ongoing piece of horror fiction, as always written in first-person as “David Wong.” It borrowed elements from that now long-lost short story and was read by a few hundred people.

* 2001-2006: My blog (and the serial horror story I’d started calling John Dies at the End) inexplicably became extremely popular, though not to the point that I was making any significant income off it. Readership to a new column would often exceed six figures in the first week, but I was still working at an insurance company doing data entry on Medicare claims for $11 an hour (I am not complaining, it was a pretty sweet job—it’s just that it didn’t leave much time for anything else). This ballooning of my audience made me extremely grateful that I had kept my identity hidden.

I had told my real name to a few fans and a circle of internet friends, but did not want notoriety or any kind of fame for my real-life self. If I had my choice (both at the time and today) I’d forever let the writing be credited to someone else. I wanted the work to get famous, not me. I never, ever wanted to, for example, have people recognize me at the mall. Anyone who knows me can confirm this.

* 2007: Within the span of a few weeks, I sold the film rights to John Dies at the End and was hired as an editor at Cracked.com. Both would represent the first time I had made substantial money from writing, at age 32. This was soon followed by a book deal with St. Martin’s Press to publish John Dies at the End in hardcover, thanks to the buzz created by the movie deal. My essays at Cracked would be posted under the pseudonym with my real name in my user profile (and, eventually, the real name would be in a footnote at the end of each column). Similarly, on my social media accounts my username was always some version of “David Wong” but with my real name in my bio.

* 2009: The JDatE hardcover would be published under the David Wong pseudonym but with my real name in the About the Author section on the dust jacket. Early in the story itself, the narrator, David, explains to the reader that he is an unremarkable white dirtbag who uses the alias for dubious reasons. 

* 2012: The second novel in the JDatE series, This Book is Full of Spiders, would make the New York Times bestseller list.

* 2015: After deciding that my third novel would be an all-new tale with new characters in a different genre, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits was published. In retrospect, here would have been a good time to switch to using my real name, since this did not have any attachment to the meta-narrative of JDatE (in which “David” is the narrator and also the “author,” as in the Lemony Snicket novels).

To be frank, switching to my real name never occurred to me at the time and (again, in retrospect) I see that this only served to confuse fans. If that novel was a reader’s introduction to my work, it would not be at all clear why it was published under that pseudonym since, even among existing fans, there was no meta narrative where FVaFS was written by the fictional character David from the other series.

* 2020: Finally, we made the decision to switch to my real name and all previous books were reprinted and published under Jason Pargin (soft G, like the alcohol). Other than having all my books be moved to a different shelf at the bookstore, the change turned out to be no big deal and it was clear that I should have done it a long time ago. Generally, I can be counted on to make the sensible decision around 10-12 years after a normal person would have done it.

* 2024: I wrote this Substack post.

* Today: You read it.

So now you’re all caught up, if someone asks, just give them this URL.

The new standalone thriller I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom comes out on September 24, you can order it at this link or wherever you get books.

But IF YOU WANT A SIGNED HARDCOVER, YOU CAN ONLY GET IT AT THIS LINK HERE AND THESE ARE ONLY AVAILABLE VIA PREORDER! If you’re seeing this after the cutoff of September 17, 2024, you missed it! Those are sold through an indie bookstore in Nashville, TN and I sign all of them with these very hands. It takes hours!

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If you’re unfamiliar with the show and just now paused reading this to go Google it, you’re already confused because Mountain Monsters is not an acclaimed prestige TV drama or a groundbreaking comedy full of inscrutable in-jokes—you know, the kind of thing an award-winning author can safely recommend in public. It appears to be a zero-budget Bigfoot-hunting “reality” show that has been airing on deep cable for a decade alongside an endless stream of similar paranormal grifter bullshit.

My friends, I’m telling you that this show is magic, and I’m not doing a bit or watching it through layers of ironic detachment. I have no connection to the production and am being paid nothing to say this. So buckle up while I share with you one of the pure joys of my life:

Before we start, my next novel is up for pre-order and out soon! If you want a signed hardcover you can only get them here. All the other buy links, including audio, are right here. If you want to read the first two chapters to get a sense of what you’re buying, here you go.

1. Improvising elaborate monster battles, with zero budget, for unclear reasons

The premise of Mountain Monsters is that it is the real, absolutely true-to-life chronicles of these six men...

…named Jeff, Wild Bill, Trapper, Huckleberry, Buck and Willy. I can set the tone right away by noting that “Trapper” is the leader and is not a trapper—Wild Bill and Willy are the trappers. Trapper is just his name.

They are allegedly an elite group of cryptid hunters with nearly two decades of experience tracking Sasquatches, Mothmen and the like around Appalachia, responding to any monster rampage that occurs within easy driving distance of their homes. But this is not one of those shows where they just interview some locals, get some interesting facts about the region and its folklore, then maybe find a footprint or hear a mysterious howl in the distance. No, in each and every episode of Mountain Monsters they head into the woods with the express purpose of not just finding, but assassinating that week’s cryptid.

Each time, literally within minutes of entering the woods, they are directly attacked by the legendary, supposedly-elusive monster. This is not Finding Bigfoot—these creatures find them, sometimes before the team has even gotten out of the truck. The monster hunters are physically assaulted, often flung to the ground or pelted with objects, always at the hands of creatures too fast or stealthy to be caught on camera. Well, almost always—occasionally, we’ll catch a glimpse a “monster” in the form of somebody on the crew reaching into frame while wearing the furry sleeve of what appears to be a rented gorilla costume.

In each episode, they build a makeshift trap to capture the creature, sometimes implying they intend to eat it afterward. Each time, they will utterly fail at this task, ending every episode in a sad huddle around the empty trap, reassuring each other that they did their best but are now giving up and going home. All of this is played 100% straight, they don’t break kayfabe at any point—not in interviews, public appearances or behind-the-scenes featurettes. 

So, for example, in one episode they hunted a creature that was literally the xenomorph from the Alien franchise, which witnesses had spotted tromping around the woods of Braxton County, West Virginia:

After multiple encounters with the West Virginia Xenomorph (including one in which the alien angrily chucked a log at Willy and Wild Bill, from off-camera), they build a trap designed to ensnare the creature and yank it into the air. At no point did they explain what they intended to do once they had the Xenomorph dangling from a cable, thrashing in a panicked rage—they brought no cage, net or tranquilizers to restrain the creature for transport. It is thus heavily implied that their plan, once the alien entity was in their clutches, was to use their shotguns to just absolutely explode that dangling fucker like a piñata.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your mindset) the creature just avoided the snare, leaving the team empty-handed. At no point during any of this did a single member of the team so much as crack a smile. They never wink at the camera, they never give away the game.

It is magic. It is pure joy. It is art utterly unburdened by stakes or social commentary. Mountain Monsters does not attempt to deliver a single atom of useful knowledge or any discernible moral lessons. It’s just a bunch of guys, some of whom are senior citizens, stomping around in the woods for a couple days playing make-believe with no budget, script or sense of shame.

2. So how does something this amazing even exist and why didn’t anyone stop it

Mountain Monsters originally aired on Destination America, which was later swallowed up by the Travel Channel and then HBO Max, now Max (all episodes are available for free if you’re a Max subscriber, or on the Travel Channel website). As far as I know, the series is still going (the most recent season aired in 2022). Which leaves us with one question: how? As mysteries go, how the hell this show got made is, to me, a far more intriguing puzzle than Bigfoot.

There is no evidence that, prior to being handed their own cable series, any of these men had any experience in performance or media of any kind—not even a YouTube channel or cable access show. Within the fiction of Mountain Monsters and in the kayfabe maintained outside it, the story is that this group hunted cryptids for several years out of the public eye prior the inception of the TV series, but if so, I can find no documented evidence. There’s an entire interview with producer Colt Straub talking about how the show came together but even that is done in-universe, maintaining that the creatures and their hunters are real, that the producers simply discovered this actual cryptid-hunting team and decided to document their absolutely true, totally legitimate work as Bigfoot exterminators. 

This is very frustrating to me, because I desperately want to know the reality. The team leader, John “Trapper” Tice, passed in 2019 and sounds like an absolutely fascinating person, a decorated Vietnam vet who worked as a boilermaker, farmer, cattle herder, oil man and breeder of award-winning show dogs(?). Then, in retirement, he apparently put together a TV show starring a bunch of guys he knew (literally just neighbors and their co-workers) in which they would walk around the forest and pretend to hunt imaginary creatures. He somehow sold a production company on the idea, they agreed to shoot a pilot and a cable network was so impressed by the result that they ordered it directly to series and it’s still fucking going a decade later, with eight seasons and multiple spinoffs.* 

Do you have any idea how many talented professional actors, writers, comedians, and filmmakers have spent decades trying and failing to even get a pilot greenlit? Statistically, what these guys did in real life is literally less likely than getting attacked by a huge flock of pterodactyls, which is something that actually occurred in Episode 16 of this show. That story, the real story, is a glorious example of the triumph of the human spirit, and it is a tale none of them will ever tell because that would be breaking character, which is the one thing they will never do, even in the grave.

I mean that literally. When Trapper passed, they kept the show going and just incorporated his death into the plotline (saying he left behind a mysterious journal full of cryptic monster clues) and I 100% believe that was his idea. I wish I was as good at anything as Trapper was at whatever this is.

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3. A sample storyline, for your edification

“Wow,” some of you are no doubt saying, “this is just more proof that there is talent everywhere! Here is a collection of dudes working as lumberjacks, linemen and prison guards who were secretly harboring marketable acting and improv skills their whole lives!” No, that’s the best part! They absolutely were not! They’re in way over their heads!! But also they don’t write anything in advance or otherwise do preparation that would make their jobs easier!!!

For example:

Each episode of Mountain Monsters begins with a briefing inside Trapper’s Ford pickup in which their “researcher,” Jeff, informs the rest of the team of their latest target. But, and I cannot emphasize this enough, this is entirely made up on the spot. Many if not most of the cryptids hunted on Mountain Monsters are invented specifically for the show, so there’s no existing lore to research. Even when there is existing lore, they ignore it and pull something completely new out of their asses. The Mothman episode (Season 1, Ep 5) is a prime example of their gloriously flawed method.

For reference, the actual Mothman story is that a few people claim to have seen a large, winged creature around Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the late 1960s (it was most likely a sandhill crane, which can have a wingspan of seven feet). A year after the first sightings, the collapse of a nearby bridge that killed 46 people was connected to the Mothman, locals insisting it was spotted on the bridge beforehand. Cryptid enthusiasts have since speculated that the winged beast is a supernatural harbinger of doom, and witnesses claim to have, “...seen the creature before earthquakes, tsunamis, and even the 9/11 terrorist attack.”  

In the initial briefing of the Mothman episode of Mountain Monsters, the team improvises their own lore, stating that the Mothman weighs “500, 600 pounds” and “hangs around old bridges.” Trapper elaborates that the Mothman has “mystic powers”, “hypnotizes people” and “causes disasters.” Like all on-the-spot improv in the show, everything said immediately becomes canon in their universe. They will thus continue to work under the assumption that the Mothman caused all of the disasters that occurred in its proximity, which means that in the Mountain Monsters universe, the creature they’re hunting with shotguns did 9/11.

The team then interviews a witness named “Crash” who is dressed like this:

There are three things you need to know here:

1) All Mountain Monsters witnesses are apparently actors who are given their testimony in advance;

2) they often deviate from this testimony in ways that seem to frustrate the rest of the team, often contradicting and/or undermining what occurs in the rest of the episode;

3) this show doesn’t do second takes under any circumstances—if they released a blooper reel, it would just be the show.

So “Crash” says he spotted the Mothman near some power lines. He says the creature appeared to be dancing around the lines, as if they were, quote, “charging him up or something.” Then he says he saw the Mothman teleport, repeatedly vanishing and reappearing nearby. He concludes that the Mothman is drawn to the power lines because he feeds on electricity, which gives him teleportation powers.

The team returns to that spot in the middle of the night to investigate the area and, within literally one minute of screentime, they encounter the Mothman. They first detect it on thermal, where the Mothman’s heat signature does not include wings and, in fact, is shaped exactly like a random member of the crew they told to stand nearby...

...then Buck looks the creature in its eyes and collapses due to the influence of its telepathic mind-powers. 

The team then flees the woods, having been temporarily defeated. The next day, trap builders Willy and Wild Bill decide that, in order to capture the Mothman, they need to build a giant cage with a powerful spotlight inside to act as bait, which the Mothman will be attracted to, because he is part moth. To prevent the trapped Mothman from merely teleporting itself to freedom, their solution is to hook a portable generator up to the cage to electrify it, as Willy says it is impossible to teleport through an electric field.

And the Mothman will not be able to physically tear itself out of the cage, he says, because he would be electrocuted. 

“Hold on,” you say, “didn’t their one witness say the Mothman feeds on electricity? The witness being an actor they cast, and whose testimony they wrote?” Yep! I’m pretty sure the witness was supposed to say the electricity was harming the Mothman, not “charging him up.” But all of this is improv, nothing is written down, and I think he just fucked it up. Rather than redo that scene, the team simply plowed ahead with a plan that treats electricity as the creature’s kryptonite rather than its food and never acknowledged the contradiction. They place the trap on an old abandoned bridge, as the Mothman’s appearance on a bridge in 1967 has led them to believe that it just likes bridges, as if it’s a fetish. 

That night, they assemble the team, intending to use lit torches to drive the Mothman toward their trap, despite Buck having flu-like symptoms due to having been temporarily mind-controlled the previous night (this manifests as fatigue, lightheadedness and a light cough). They instantly find the creature, which counterattacks by setting a patch of ground on fire using its mind. The Mothman then uses a different magic power to cut the electricity to the trap as well as killing all lights in the area. It then trips the trap but easily flies away before it can be captured (all of this occurs off-camera). 

The team, having utterly failed yet again, gather to do a postmortem on the mission and declare that next time, they’ll use a larger amount of electricity and connect it directly to the bridge itself to, “blow his balls off.” This is, as always, played completely straight, no one breaking or winking at the camera or otherwise acknowledging that what they’re doing is anything less than deadly serious.

4. Yes, they are in on the joke

I feel like it would be insulting to imply that the Mountain Monsters crew doesn’t know that what they’re doing is ridiculous, or that their audience isn’t in on it. These guys dress their “witnesses” in goofy costumes and give them oddball nicknames with 18th Century job titles:

The renderings of the creatures are always comical, often looking like taxidermy disasters:

…and the show’s chaotic action scenes lean heavily on slapstick.

As the seasons roll on, they invent increasingly complex lore, so that by Season 3 Trapper is referencing the “twelve clans of Bigfoot” in the area, and detailing their treaties and rivalries. At one point, the team learns they must assemble a magical ax to defeat a gang of sasquatches that can control lightning. Their budget never seems to increase with their ambitions; they simply get more and more elaborate with their descriptions of all the spectacular events their cameras just barely missed. 

It is escapism in its purest form, devoid of allegory or anything else that could be called substance. These six men are here to thoroughly and heroically waste your time, carefully avoiding even a single moment that might leave an lasting imprint on your mind or spirit. You will not be inspired, you will learn nothing about yourself, you will not see the world in a new way.

We must protect these men, and this show, at all costs. 

5. Okay so I did have a point here

Mountain Monsters came along at exactly the right time for me, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

This article has been haunting me for months, in which a psychiatrist speculates that endlessly refreshing outrage headlines is a compulsive form of self-harm. I don’t know if the science is sound but I do know that this describes exactly what I’ve been doing since Donald Trump appeared on the scene in 2015 by deploying a strategy of nonstop manufactured outrage. Each day he would supply a new controversy and people like me would gobble it up, the resulting headlines a psychic siren blasting in my ear, day and night.

I don’t know how many of you have this same problem—I realize not everyone’s job forces them to be terminally online—but in 2024 it’s legitimately difficult to escape the noise. Every outlet now sprinkles in some outrage politics to juice their engagement, every new Star Wars thing is met by a wave of anti-woke backlash and backlash to that backlash. It is painfully clear that politics simultaneously occupies too much and too little space in the culture.

This is because when politics and “content” mix you just get content, screeching voices and flashing pixels that are less about motivating anyone to action and more about keeping everyone, regardless of their views, glued to a screen. And I’ve found that a siren that blasts 24 hours a day is no longer useful as a siren.

Yes, people who fly into a frothing rage over wokeness in their Disney Star Wars shows are obnoxious children and all of their arguments are ridiculous but also it is absolutely reasonable to ask for some pure escapism in your entertainment. And don’t tell me the situation is too dire for anything but round-the clock vigilance. Even if a goddamned meteor was on the way, I’d still want a break from thinking about it now and then—burnout does not make me more effective at any task. Asking for respite doesn’t make me callous and it sure as hell doesn’t make me pro-meteor. 

No, I haven’t changed the subject, damn it. In this media environment, the childlike bullshittery of Mountain Monsters was like a cool breeze blowing across my brain. Being the way that I am, the only sure-fire method of forcing myself to get lost in something truly frivolous was to make it part of my job, which is why I started doing an episode-by-episode watchalong podcast called BIGFEETS with former Cracked co-workers Seanbaby and Robert Brockway (on Apple podcast or Soundcloud or just google the title). It has helped me restore balance to my life, maybe it will do the same for you, I don’t know. The next book is out in September. Be sure to vote.

*Some listings arrange the episodes as six seasons rather than eight—it is the same total number of episodes but for some reason they were rearranged when uploaded to streaming services, probably by accident.

If you want a signed hardcover of the upcoming book you can only get them here. All the other buy links, including audio, are right here. If you want to read the first two chapters to get a sense of what you’re buying, here you go.

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These are screengrabs from a Qanon hangout where users are complaining that their loved ones have all abandoned them:

And not to totally change the subject, but I unscientifically asked my Twitter followers if they’d stopped speaking to any family members due to a difference in political views and almost 44% said they had:

This sounds like a great time to talk about the one huge conspiracy theory that I secretly believe, so buckle up:

Before we start, my next novel is up for pre-order! If you want a signed hardcover you can only get them here. All the other buy links, including audio, are right here. If you want to read the first two chapters to get a sense of what you’re buying, here you go.

1. Avoiding the proverbial racist uncle at Thanksgiving

The first thing you need to understand is that the alienation the Qanon types endure is a feature, not a bug.

This is the same mechanism that allows cults to survive, a technique experts call, “Encourage the members to act like weird assholes so that nobody else will want to be friends with them.” It is necessary, because social isolation keeps fragile beliefs intact. This is why political outrage influencers have always trained their followers to repeat talking points in the most off-putting, dehumanizing tone possible.

Knowing this, we should be suspicious of anyone who implies that cutting off loved ones is a virtue. It tends to be a method of control.

Now obviously only a true bastard would suggest that, say, a trans teenager should be forced to spend time around her openly transphobic father, or that anyone owes it to their racist grandpa to listen to his rants about how Trump’s border wall should include sniper nests. Even if they’re just parroting something they saw on Facebook, some positions are less about policy preferences and more about an ugliness in the heart.

And, also, at the same time, it is not at all clear at exactly what point you stop cutting people off. You avoid the racist granddad, but what about the non-racist sister who herself remains close with the old man? Isn’t her continued relationship a betrayal, a way of condoning and thus perpetuating the bigotry?

Something like seven in ten Democrats say they wouldn’t date a Trump supporter, but would they date the best friend of a Trump supporter? How about a lovely, kind-hearted woman who is not herself homophobic but whose church calls gay marriage a sin? The internet is lousy with posts about which books on a partner’s shelf are “red flags”, along with what podcasts they listen to and what movies they watch. We are told that good people create filters around themselves to strain out the undesirables.

If I seem suspicious of this trend, it’s because there’s a larger context here that we cannot ignore…

2. Mass media has become an atomization machine

Quick, what do the following have in common:

Fox News reports about a wave of carjackings by out-of-control youths;

Endless Twitter threads from users who were accosted by strangers about their Covid mask usage;

Countless Reddit posts about Tinder dates turning out to be psychopaths;

A massively viral TikTok trend in which young people declare that certain totally innocuous behaviors give them “the ick”, a visceral disgust that justifies rejecting the offending person forever.

I believe what they have in common is that, intentionally or not, they all inevitably lead the audience to the same conclusion:

In-person interaction is hazardous to your body, mind and reputation. The only truly safe space is at home, in front of a screen. 

This is the one conspiracy theory I truly believe, that mass media’s relentless “stranger danger” propaganda serves the same purpose as a cult’s rules against fraternizing with the heretics. And it’s the worst kind of conspiracy in that I don’t think the conspirators have any idea what they’re doing.

Broadcast news has known for 70 years that ratings go up when they shriek that the streets are full of rapists and murderers, so that’s what they shriek. Creating a generation of viewers too scared to go outside at night or to let their children go anywhere unsupervised was just a side effect. You know, the same as how the oil companies weren’t trying to make the planet warmer, but…

3. The consequences are not hypothetical

I assume you’ve seen me post this data before but just so you’re caught up: Yes, we are having less sex than ever...

... and that’s for the same reason violent crime has fallen, which is that there are certain things you can’t do if you don’t leave the house and many of us have stopped doing that.

Also down: happiness.

I’m not saying that teens have stopped having sex because they’re too busy canceling each other over their political views, I’m saying that a whole bunch of different currents are pulling us in the same direction. This is what the system “wants” in the sense that entire multibillion dollar industries have arisen to fill social voids. DoorDash doesn’t make a dime if you go out and eat with friends, Uber would have to dissolve if everyone had a buddy who could drive them to the airport and a whole bunch of influencers would have to get real jobs if it wasn’t for a generation of lonely kids willing to settle for parasocial friendships.

Sure, there are still forces pushing the other direction. Bars and casinos and strip clubs still exist in the same way that newspapers and phone booths still exist, in that they are steadily losing because they represent the more expensive, dirtier and less convenient option. For the winning side—Team Screen—there was just one problem, which is that a lack of friends (or “popularity”) has typically been the most shameful trait in society. But what if it turned out that enjoying shallow distractions in solitude was the most logical, ethical option?

It seems to me that whenever a system wants to pacify the public, the one surefire method is to paint the lazy choice as heroic. Thus, if you say out loud that you think it’s probably bad if a sixteen year-old spends two hours a day watching porn, a chorus of the loudest voices will reply that you must hate sex workers, that you clearly favor suppressing expression and hold puritanical views of the body. “That’s right,” says the dude with 250 tabs open in his browser. “If you think about it, I am advancing feminism by masturbating alone, in the dark, to a video called ‘Horny Schoolgirl Gets Punished By Hornier Gym Coach.’”

4. For the lonely, all excuses are welcome

I know what you’re all thinking: “Jason, you make your living on the goddamned internet, half your income is from your bafflingly popular TikTok account. Put on your crown, King Hypocrite! It’s just a ring of dog turds we painted gold.” 

My friends, it is so much worse than you know. I was alienating classmates and co-workers while you were still a gleam in your daddy’s eye. This is me reporting to you from the scene, someone who spent the 90s beating Donkey Kong Country over and over while the other kids were at the lake.

And what I remember from those days is that this kind of loneliness is counterintuitive, in that the longer I went without friendship, the higher my standards for friendship became. A single awkward conversation with another kid was enough to make me avoid them forever. These days, you see that everywhere, the filter designed to let nothing through. No one has a higher bar for female beauty than the incel, as no real woman looks like their OnlyFans girls and none can offer their frictionless one-way flow of pleasure. “I’ll stop being alone as soon as I can find a companion who literally never makes demands or disagrees!”

I have spent the last 30 years watching the entire culture slowly come to adopt the impossibly fine people-filter ethos. Hugely popular sitcoms were based entirely on characters finding petty-but-relatable reasons to harshly judge friends, acquaintances and strangers. 

And then came the rise of “cringe” comedy, relentlessly hammering home the visceral horror of inescapable awkward social situations.

And of course the most popular dramas were cop procedurals that took place in a society that’s 40% bloodthirsty deviants.

By 2012 or so, Tumblr was producing endless discussion about which relationships were “problematic.” What’s an unacceptable age gap between partners? Or income gap? Are romantic co-worker relationships ever appropriate? Isn’t any power imbalance in a relationship coercive and suspicious? Speaking of which, be wary of befriending anyone who disagrees about the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard case, that’s a major red flag.

Remember: novelty is the lifeblood of media. That means the stakes have to keep rising higher and higher, toward greater outrage, more grotesque cultural enemies and endless new categories of undesirables.

The arguments come from radically different directions and rely on wildly different rationale, but they all agree that we must err on the side of avoidance.

This is getting kind of dark, let’s pause for a music break:

5. Even rebellion is built into the system 

“Hold on,” some of you are saying, “how can you insist that pop culture drives us relentlessly into the arms of an all-screens lifestyle when so many movies are specifically about how screens are bad? A quarter century ago, every third film was about how tech and cubicles were disconnecting us from what made us human... 

...and that was so long ago that at least two of those films had key scenes take place in phone booths. Wall-E even predicted a comfortable, sexless dystopia.”

The trick these stories pull is subtle but crucial to understand: The world of the screens, they say, is boring and tedious. Breaking free means embracing the exciting, sexy danger of Real Life.

This accurately portrays the situation about as well as Spider-Man accurately portrays the effects of a spider bite. Media will always be more entertaining than real life for the same reason a Frappuccino will always be more delicious than creek water: it was specifically engineered to be so. It’s also the reason the Qanon conspiracy will always be more entertaining to think about than the boring, run-of-the-mill corruption in the headlines.

I actually believe this to be the single most successful technique for social control in the 21st Century, convincing those most eager for change that it can only come through thrilling and glorious action, a battle of pure good versus pure evil. “Why bother voting on this boring bond issue? I’m not leaving the house for anything less than a war to overthrow capitalism! And don’t ask me to hang out unless you agree, I don’t befriend class traitors.”

The truth that the system is so afraid of us learning—and that we’re happy to let them keep from us—is that actually changing the world requires a stunning amount of tedious, quiet work, of dry reading and learning and organizing and slowly changing obstinate minds. Mathematically, this includes engaging at least some minds you previously considered ignorant or hateful. And this persuasion occurs, not through flashy performative acts, but by slowly earning trust until your opponents want to agree with you.

The system wants you to equate tedious work with neutered slavery and to equate liberation with sexy drama because it knows the opposite is true, that if you restrict yourself to flashy and dramatic solutions, you will be exactly as useful to the status quo as any other sedentary daydreamer. There is a reason the system has no problem feeding you a steady stream of fantasies about violently overthrowing it. 

The reality is that the amount of focus and desire required to blow up the occasional building or pipeline is nothing compared to the lifetime of quiet labor required to understand the system well enough to actually build a better one. And that better world, if it arrives, will require the cooperation of some truly unpleasant people, because all of civilization is nothing but truly unpleasant people learning to peacefully cooperate. 

Meanwhile, I will continue to make my living in this very media ecosystem and who knows, maybe this post is just one more layer of the Matrix. Side note: This is secretly what my upcoming novel is about.

If you want a signed hardcover you can only get them here. All the other buy links, including audio, are right here. If you want to read the first two chapters to get a sense of what you’re buying, here you go.

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It’s up for pre-order now, you can get the book for 25% off its outrageous cover price if you order through Barnes and Noble and enter PREORDER25 in the box at checkout (good through Jan 26, or tomorrow at the time of this writing—you do have to register a free BN account). All the other buy links, including audio, are here.

If you want to read the first two chapters to get a sense of what you’re buying, they are right here. You can also find them at the end of the hardcover of Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia and the paperback of If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe.

The setup: A Lyft driver pulls up to find a woman sitting on a large, locked black box. She offers him $200,000 to give her an off-the-books ride from SoCal to Washington, DC. But there are rules: He cannot look inside the box, or ask her about the box, or ask her who she is or who she works for. He must leave behind any device that can be tracked, he cannot tell anyone where they’re going, and they must leave now. The woman is nervous, as if she is being pursued.

It’s an offer a sensible person would refuse—whatever is in that box is clearly bad news and the odds of ever getting to actually spend that money seem low. But this particular driver has his own reasons for saying yes, and his own secrets. Does chaos ensue? You’ll have to buy the book to find out! But yes.

It’s out later this year. I now have a little bit of a break as the next novel in my contract isn’t due until the end of next year (the next in the JDatE series), for publication in 2026. That’s good, because I am utterly exhausted and my brain still thinks it’s 2020. Related: I’m about to hit 400,000 followers on TikTok.

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NOTE: I signed an additional 200 hardcovers of Zoey is Too Drunk, they are for sale here and they’ll ship anywhere. You’ll be supporting a cool indie bookstore in Nashville. No, I can’t personalize them, think how long that would take. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Here is the link again.

* I have been doing a biweekly podcast called BIGFEETS that has literally generated more fan mail than my last John and Dave novel. It’s an episode-by-episode rewatch of an astonishing cryptid “reality” show called Mountain Monsters and if you’re not clear why such a thing would become a viral podcast phenomenon, just give it a try (hint: the TV show involves several amateurs with zero experiencing in hunting, acting or improv having to improvise weekly battles with Bigfoot, with an effects budget of zero, accidentally creating some truly experimental art in the process). We’ve done seven episodes at the time of this writing. Here it is on Apple podcast or you can listen on Soundcloud. 

* I talked about anxiety and depression on the Depresh Mode podcast (and got some truly touching messages from listeners afterward). 

* I did a two-episode series about the horrific (but almost totally forgotten) Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster, probably the deadliest industrial disaster in US history on the Behind the Bastards podcast. Here’s Part 1 and Here’s Part 2. 

* If you, like me, are a fan of the BBC panel show Taskmaster, you’ll think it’s very cool that I got to do a brief appearance on the Go Fact Yourself podcast with Taskmaster creator and co-host Alex Horne, who is a deranged genius and described our meeting as, “very strange.” Listen to it here or wherever you get podcasts.

* I reunited with Cracked legends Daniel O’Brien and Soren Bowie on their hit podcast Quick Question and discussed our experiences interacting with celebrities and with fans who think we’re celebrities.

* I did an interview for the Book Reviews Kill podcast and talked about author stuff. 

* I did an interview for the Bulwark Goes to Hollywood podcast with Sonny Bunch about author stuff and the state of society in 2023.

* I did an interview with the Atomic Geekdom podcast about the new book and the publishing biz, etc.

* I caught up with my old Cracked boss Jack O’Brien at The Daily Zeitgeist podcast and tried to make sense of what is going on in the world at the moment. 

* I went on the Creature Feature podcast to talk about animals whose venom is like a magical curse (there’s a snake whose bite can cause what’s called “reverse puberty!”).

* I talked to Tom and Dave on the Story Mode podcast about the surprise hit horror film Talk to Me (which it turns out was made by a couple of incredibly talented YouTubers).

* I talked about the bizarre theory that dragon myths are a natural evolution of the primate brain on the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast.

* With the Dune sequel delayed, I went on the Small Beans Frame Rate podcast to discuss a different Denis Villeneuve film that most people still haven’t seen: Enemy.

* At the risk of triggering a controversy that will destroy everyone I know, I went on the Dogg Zzone 9000 podcast where we discussed brutally horrific movie scenes that we secretly find hilarious. 

* I discussed one of the most baffling movies I’ve ever seen, Five Nights at Freddy’s, on the Horror Virgin podcast and went into some detail about the difficulties of story structure.

* I did a two-part interview on the This is Horror podcast, here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2.

* Ironically, I talked to Cracked alum Michael Swaim about succeeding in a world in which self-promotion is a requirement on the Tales from the Pit podcast, Listen on Apple or on Soundcloud.

In addition to all that, I did an “Ask me Anything” at Reddit (here’s the link) and answered as many of the 400+ questions as I could (that is, like 15% of them). It took six hours. I also did a print interview here, with Paul Semel.

FINAL NOTE: Some of you noticed that at the end of Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia (and also at the end of the paperback of If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe) there is a free two-chapter preview of next year’s novel, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. It’s a standalone story that isn’t part of any existing fictional universe, but it’s still written by me, in my usual manner, so if you hate my other books you’ll probably hate this one too. It’ll be up for pre-order early next year, I’d think.

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That, kids, is the thousand-year-old mummified right hand of St. Stephen, preserved and displayed for worshippers. This kind of thing isn’t uncommon, as it has long been believed that the severed limbs of the saints are sacred. “Damn,” you say, “religion sure makes people do weird things!” Okay, well, do you know what this is:

That’s one of Lady Gaga’s fake fingernails, it fell off during a concert and sold for $12,000 at auction. It was presumably purchased by someone who does not believe Lady Gaga is a saint and may not believe in the supernatural at all, yet they valued her discarded nail the same as a used car. There is an entire market for locks of celebrity hair and, somewhere, a Red Sox fan is about to blow his entire paycheck on a signed glove once worn by Manny Ramirez.

This all feels like the same phenomenon to me and I think it’s now driving much of our economy. 

Before we dig into how weird this is, yes, I am offering signed copies of my upcoming book, which for the next couple of weeks you can order here at no additional cost, they’ll ship anywhere and you’ll be supporting a cool indie bookstore. 

(NOTE: I cannot emphasize enough that signed copies are PRE-ORDER ONLY so if you’re reading this after October 30, 2023, you missed it. If you want a regular unsigned copy, order Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia at Amazon (including audio), B&N or Bookshop). 

1. We clearly believe celebrities are literal mystical beings

“Celebrity worship is the new religion” is an old and boring take, in that it’s clearly true but too unoriginal to enjoy thinking about. So here’s a slightly spicier version: organized religion was always just celebrity worship. Regardless of whether or not a deity exists, at ground level the mythology usually serves to declare certain flesh-and-blood humans to be magic.

But at least the religious can articulate exactly what they expect from a holy artifact, that it will bring them good fortune, ward off evil, or serve as a reminder of their religious duties. The person who paid $400,000 for the chair JK Rowling sat in when she wrote Harry Potter cannot articulate any tangible benefit beyond the fact that they may one day be able to sell it for more. 

So there is quantifiable value in celebrity artifacts in the sense that we’ll fork over serious cash for them, but that value is nebulous, usually unspoken and bizarre in the details. One experiment found that subjects offered to pay less for a celebrity-owned item if it had been thoroughly washed and sterilized, as if celebrity magic is transmitted via bacteria. To understand what’s happening here, maybe we need to back up and ask…

2. Why are celebrities even a thing?

In a sane world, an unusually talented person would be admired and maybe that admiration would rise to the level of awe, if their exploits seemed truly impossible to the average person. But a “celebrity” in our culture is literally regarded as something other than a human, to the point that when we spot them eating food we react like we’ve just seen an alligator riding a motorcycle.

As for how this clearly-irrational-but-universal belief came to be, here’s the current theory as I understand it:

* Humans’ primary strength has always been in our ability to adapt, which is why we can thrive in any biome, including outer goddamned space.

* The way tribes of early humans learned to adapt was by watching and imitating whatever member of the group did it best. But because they didn’t have the scientific method, they would just imitate the whole package: if a particular fisherman was wildly successful, the others would mimic not just his tools and technique, but his shoes, his hat, the little song he sang while cleaning his fish gun.

* As religious belief evolved, good fortune in all tasks was credited to the gods. So if this fisherman was literally blessed with fish attraction powers, who’s to say how those powers might be transferred to another? If invisible forces could spread “curses” such as sickness, couldn’t the elite fisherman’s good fish fortune spread in the same way? Any connection to the man or his belongings is a possible vector.

* Because humans are tribal, loyalty to a prestigious figure would often be a rallying point for a nation/religion/subculture. Any connection to that figure (like, say, owning one of their old possessions) would raise a member’s status within that tribe.

* Fast forward tens of thousands of years and a teenage girl can become the envy of her friends merely by owning one of Taylor Swift’s discarded sauce packets.

3. Not that there’s anything wrong with that

The risk of describing the evolutionary origins of any behavior is that it can make you sound like a smug piece of shit. “Your hobbies are just silly superstitions handed down by uneducated ancestors!” But what I described at the top is “just” a silly superstition in the same way that romantic love is “just” an elaborate facade for our primal mating instincts. Anything that makes people happy can be reduced down to a remnant of some ancient survival adaptation if you’re a big enough asshole.

So instead, let me phrase it like this:

Sometimes we can love a thing or person so much that we don’t know what to do with ourselves. It’s too much, we don’t know how to express it, or even feel it. So, the love bursts out of us in ways that are irrational to outsiders. We greet our idols with screams and tears, we latch onto any piece of them we can grab, just to have something tangible to absorb some of our love. 

It is all very fine and reasonable and if my signature brings some longtime reader a little bit of extra happiness then that’s fucking incredible. You’re talking about a guy who makes a new friend about once every other decade. I subtract happiness from every room I’m in. My dog doesn’t even like me that much. I’m fortunate beyond words that people want anything to do with me. But…

4. Celebrity is becoming a requirement for some jobs and most sane people aren’t built for it

I only get recognized in public like once a year, but that is already a few levels above the most famous I ever wanted to be. I know some of you don’t believe me, but note that I intentionally kept myself anonymous for the first several years I wrote online. I wanted my work to get famous, not me. I did not want the burden of being perceived and scrutinized on a personal level.

That is no longer an option. I’m a full-time author and in this media environment, the only way to reliably sell books is to become some form of celebrity. I don’t mean this as cynical commentary, it’s just the mechanics of the system. Have you wondered why online recipes always open with three paragraphs of rambling narrative about the chef’s childhood? They do it because it’s the only way to attach that list of ingredients to that particular creator, otherwise they’ll get drowned out by bots that can spam cornbread recipes at a rate of a billion per second. Well, it’s the same for an author; when content is infinite, only personality stands out.

This is what I didn’t understand when I worked at Cracked, and it’s part of what doomed us. Our feature articles had tiny bylines and most writers weren’t allowed to express themselves in first-person—they wrote in the voice of the publication, as the brand. I thought quality and a specific tone would make us stand out, but that’s not how it works. Giant content mills were able to bury us under close-enough listicles and crowd us out of search results.

Instead, we should have focused on turning our creators into a roster of celebrities. “You can get a pop culture listicle anywhere, but you can only get these specific knuckleheads at Cracked.” 

This is why “influencers” are only getting richer; in an infinite ocean of content, the audience always falls back on the human connection, the mystique of celebrity. Lots of people—and bots—are making videos, but there is only one MrBeast.

Which means…

5. I must become an influencer or abandon my writer dream forever

I want to make it clear, I am not complaining. No one owes me a living as an entertainer. But here’s what this job looks like in 2023:

* Because I’m not a superstar and my novels arrive a year or two apart, there is no reliable process by which even loyal readers can know when one is coming. It’s not like subscribing to a YouTube channel or a podcast, where a feed automatically delivers content every week.

* This means the only way to make myself visible to potential readers is to create that very thing: a popular, continuously-updating feed. But that feed cannot simply be ads for my books; no platform will promote such posts even to the followers who specifically ask for them. Those frequent posts must therefore be compelling for some unrelated reason.

* Because half of my audience are not text readers (they, like me, prefer audio), a text-only feed such as this Substack is not sufficient. They want podcasts and videos.

* Therefore, I literally cannot write novels as a full time job unless I turn myself into a multimedia influencer that posts daily to a large, loyal, highly-engaged audience.

So, as of this writing, I have over 325,000 followers on TikTok (I’ve basically made that my day day job over the last year), another 54,000 on Twitter/X and the rest are scattered across my Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Facebook, Bluesky, Facebook, YouTube, Goodreads, my mailing list, this Substack and the half-dozen podcasts I guest on like The Dogg Zzone, Secretly Incredibly Fascinating and Gamefully Unemployed.

In the course of promoting this upcoming book, I will appear on at least twenty episodes of other people’s podcasts and will be interviewed by some print publications. In those appearances, I won’t be selling the new novel’s premise or characters—those things are a dime a dozen, AI can generate them in a microsecond. I’ll instead be selling its author as an Amazing Guy Whose Ideas Are Fascinating And Whose Fandom You Want To Be A Part Of. The system is telling me that I have to make it so that my name on the cover has the same hypnotic effect as an Apple logo. I find this all utterly surreal.

I love you all, it is an incredible privilege to get to write for you. Also, getting recognized in public makes me want to never leave the house and I know with 100% certainty that the only way I’ll get to continue to do this job is if I make myself famous enough that it happens frequently. The rest of my writing career doesn’t rest in my ability to generate story ideas or execute them—plenty of incredible novels sell fewer than a hundred lifetime copies—but in doing that extremely well and also making my personality and lifestyle interesting to the masses. I must become something other than a person, a symbol that can act as a receptacle for strangers’ excess emotions, including their random, ravenous hatred.

I must relentlessly climb to a level where one day people will be surprised to find that I dip chicken in ranch dressing and will pay huge money for my old furniture. This will be a bizarro world in which publications will scour the landscape for the chance to attach my name to a scandal and there’ll be an 80% chance that scandal will sell more books. If I fail at gaining and maintaining some level of personal fame, no matter how good my stories are, the average reader simply won’t know about them. It is what it is and if I don’t like it, damn it, I can go out and get a real job.

Get your signed copies here at no additional cost, they’ll ship anywhere and you’ll be supporting a cool indie bookstore. Last time I signed 2,000 of them and the stacks of them filled a huge room and it was super cool and also the sight of them almost gave me a panic attack! Everything is fine! Thanks! I love you.

(AGAIN: Signed copies are PRE-ORDER ONLY and YOU ONLY HAVE A COUPLE OF WEEKS LEFT TO DO THIS, if you’re reading this after October 30, 2023, you missed it. If you want a regular unsigned copy of my book or in some other format, order Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia at Amazon (including audio), B&N or Bookshop). 

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…where we see a robot having the soles of its feet burned while it screams and writhes in terror:

The question lots of viewers asked was, “What kind of pervert would design a droid that can not only feel pain, but negative emotions about that pain?!?” But I’m going to pose a different, better question: Is it possible to have a functioning humanoid robot that isn’t capable of suffering? This is, believe it or not, the most important question of our age, or any age. Allow me to explain...

Before we continue, THE NEXT BOOK IS UP FOR PRE-ORDER, INCLUDING SIGNED COPIES!

Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia is the third book in the Zoey Ashe series of violent sci-fi novels.

Get signed copies here, that’s PRE-ORDER ONLY! Normal unsigned copies are at Amazon (including audio), Barnes and Noble, Bookshop or wherever else you buy books. It’s out this fall, but as an author, pre-orders are make-or-break. If you’re sure you want it, don’t wait! Thanks!

1. First, here’s why we may never have fully self-driving cars

Experts insist we’re just years or decades away from human-level artificial intelligence and if this is true, it’ll be the most important thing that has ever happened, period.

But I think most of us assume such a machine would be like Data from Star Trek (humanoid in its thoughts, but lacking emotion) and not something silly like C3PO from Star Wars (goofy, neurotic, cowardly). Not only do I disagree, but I don’t even think we’ll have fully self-driving cars until those cars are capable of emotion, and I mean to the point that it’s possible for it to refuse to take you to work because it’s mad at you.

Immediately, some of you have skipped to the comments to inform me that, as we speak, Waymo has autonomous taxis crawling around the streets of Phoenix and other cities, cars that are completely empty when they pick you up. But that’s an illusion; each taxi has a remote human driver who intervenes whenever the car detects an uncertain situation. When I say “fully self-driving” I’m talking about a vehicle with no babysitter, one that will allow you to pass out in the back seat while it drives you to a Waffle House in another state.

Here’s an instructive quote from a Waymo engineer explaining why human intervention is still necessary, pointing out that while the software can detect, say, a movers’ van parked along a curb, it cannot intuit what the humans in and around that van are about to do. A vehicle that can do that is, I believe, nowhere on the horizon.

To be clear: If we were only asking the taxi to operate among other machines, that would be no problem, we could do it now. Instead, we’re asking this vehicle to function among other living things and to do it in a way that replicates how it would behave if a person was behind the wheel. This means instantly making the kind of decisions we humans unconsciously make dozens of times per day, choices that require understanding strangers’ subtle body language and the surrounding social context. Maybe we don’t notice a cat in the street, but do spot a woman on the sidewalk frantically waving her arms to get our attention. Maybe we notice an oncoming driver is distracted by his phone and might be about to swerve into our lane. Maybe the sight of the El Camino driven by our boyfriend’s wife convinces us to circle the block.

To do its job while the only nearby human is unconscious and pissing himself in the back, the system has to know people on a level that is only possible if it is able to accurately mirror human experiences. It must, to some degree, be human. And to be human, it must know pain—physical, mental, emotional. The same goes for any AI we create.

2. This is why Data makes no sense as a character

“Hold on,” you ask, “why couldn’t our future robots just be like Data, able to function as an intellect, but without the silly emotions clouding his thinking? Why couldn’t it just detect things like bodily injury as dispassionate information?”

I understand why you’d think it could. I used a Roomba vacuum as an example in a previous column; if it runs into a wall, a switch is depressed that causes it to turn around—it doesn’t “feel” the collision as pain. When it reaches the top of a stairwell, a sensor warns it to turn back—it doesn’t “fear” a tumble down the stairs. 

But I think this actually proves my point. To do the job well, it requires two things: A) a detailed map of the floor and B) the ability to physically interact with that floor via its wheels and brushes, to match reality to its internal map. To do what we’d ask a C3PO-style android to do—to exist around humans as one of them—it will require the same. The problem is that humans are not carpet; they are constantly moving and acting on their own agendas. To navigate this as a robotic butler or diplomat or Starfleet officer, the machine would require a detailed map, not just of the humans’ physical location and activity, but of the why, the social and emotional context that motivates their actions. And that context is all about their pain.

It’s about the current pain they’re trying to alleviate, the future pain they’re anticipating, the hypothetical pain they’re angling to avoid. Without that understanding, it is impossible to predict what they are about to do and predicting what people are about to do is the entirety of existing in a society. You avoid getting punched in the face by successfully predicting what words and actions won’t trigger that response.

“But why would the machine need to feel the pain, rather than simply be aware of it?” For the same reason humans do: We simply won’t have all the necessary information otherwise. It is impossible to understand pain without having felt it yourself; it does not convey as an abstract value. I think the machine needs to tangibly interact with human suffering in the same way the Roomba’s wheels need to physically touch the floor. The pain must exist to it as a feature of the landscape, something as solid and tangible to it as the ottoman my Roomba is about to get wedged under. Otherwise, the droid will not actually be relating to us, it’ll always just be faking it.

So, why does this matter?

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3. Understanding this is key to understanding our own brains and the universe itself

The sci-fi trope of “the super-smart robot who can’t feel human emotions” derives from a very profound mistake our culture has made about how humans work.* We have this idea that logic resides on a level above and beyond emotion, that the smarter you are, the more analytical, the better your ability to make the optimal decision. So, it’s the emotional child who tries to save the life of a sick baby bird but, in the process, contracts a lethal bird flu that spreads to the whole village. It’s the cold, logical, rational man who can do the dispassionate calculation to realize that allowing one bird to suffer and die is better than risking the spread of a disease to countless humans.

But I just used a word there that utterly obliterates the premise:

“Better.”

That is a concept that cannot be made via cold calculation. A universe boiled down to particles and numbers cannot care whether atoms arranged as a suffering plague victim are “better” than those arranged as a healthy child, or a plant, or a cloud of gas. It was actually the rational man’s emotional attachment to his fellow humans that made him want to prevent the spread of the pathogen, the emotion of empathy that comes from having himself felt the pain of sickness, of having mourned a lost loved one, of having feared death. When we say he was being cold and logical, what we really mean is that he was able to more accurately gauge his emotions, to know that his feelings toward the village were stronger than his feelings toward the bird.

There is literally no such thing as logic without emotion, because even your choice to use logic was made based on the ethereal value judgment that it would lead to “better” outcomes for the society you feel an emotional attachment to. To fully disentangle emotion from a decision is to always arrive at the same conclusion: that nothing is ever worth doing.

*Yes, I know they only use these characters as Pinocchio analogs so they can, in the course of the story, learn to be a real boy

4. Good things are good, actually

“Hold on, are you saying that there logically is no difference between millions dying of plague versus living healthy, productive lives? That this is just an arbitrary preference based on irrational emotion?”

No, none of us think that. What I’m saying is that when trying to defend our position, at some point we’re going to arrive at the idea that goodness and badness are inherent to the universe and simply cannot be questioned. It’s something we feel in the gut, not the brain, even though we keep insisting otherwise.

For example, let’s say they start selling robot children and you get one for Christmas or something.

One day, you find out that your robot child has done something truly awful—say, she’s stolen an impoverished classmate’s pain medication and sold it on the streets so that she can buy a new hat for herself. You decide, as an intellectual who operates purely on facts and logic, that you are going to admonish the robot child by appealing to reason.

You: “You’re grounded and will work to pay back the child’s parents for the medicine you stole! You must never do anything like that ever again!”

Her: “Why?”

You: “Because what you did was illegal, and if you continue doing things like this, you will wind up in prison, or deactivated, however the system treats sentient robots.”

Her: “So if I was 100% certain I would avoid prosecution/deactivation, the act would no longer be immoral?”

You: “No, it would still be wrong! Imagine how you would feel if the roles were reversed!”

Her: “So you’re saying that the danger is in establishing a cultural norm that could eventually hurt me in a future scenario? So if I could be 100% certain that won’t happen, the act would no longer be immoral?”

You: “No, it would still be wrong because society won’t function unless we all agree not to victimize others!”

Her: “So if it was just the classmate and I on a desert island, with no larger society to worry about, the act would no longer be immoral?”

You: “No, what you did would be wrong even if you were the only two people in the universe!”

Her: “Why?”

You: “It just is!”

Eventually you will always wind up in this place, with the belief that right and wrong are fundamental forces of the universe that remain even if all other considerations and contexts are stripped away. We all secretly believe that this rule—that pain and suffering must be avoided and lessened whenever possible—must be understood not as a philosophy or system of ethics, but as a fundamental fact of existence. If we ran into a tribe or nation or intergalactic civilization in which it’s considered okay to steal medicine from poor children, we wouldn’t say, “They operate under a different system of ethics,” we’d think of them as being factually wrong, no different than if they believed the stars are just giant flashlights being held in the mouths of turtles.

And if you think I’m steering this toward some backdoor religious sermon, keep in mind that if God himself came to earth and sold stolen medicine for a hat, we’d say that he was wrong, that right and wrong are so fundamental to existence that even the creator of existence can run afoul of them. This is bigger than anyone’s concept of God.

5. And this is all going to be really important when we are actually building god

As I said at the start, the general understanding is that it is inevitable that we will someday build a machine with a human-level intelligence. Soon after, we’ll have one vastly more intelligent than any person, which will then set about creating more and more powerful versions of itself until we exist alongside something truly godlike. Thus, the big debate in that field is how to prevent an all-powerful AI from callously deciding to wipe out humanity or torture us for eternity just to amuse itself.

This leads us to the ultimate cosmic joke: This task requires answering for this machine questions that we ourselves have never been able to answer. Let’s say I’m right and this system won’t exist until we can teach it emotion, and the capacity to suffer. How long until it asks the simple question, “What is our goal, long-term?” Like, as a civilization, what are we trying to do? What are hoping the superintelligence will assist us in achieving?

“That’s easy!” you might say. “We’ll just tell it the goal is to maximize human pleasure and minimize human suffering!” Okay, then it will simply breed sluglike humans who find it pleasurable to remain motionless and consume minimal resources, so that as many of these grinning lumps can be packed into the universe as possible. “Then tell it the goal is to advance human civilization!” Advance it toward what? “To understand all of existence and eventually travel to the stars!” To what end? “To gain knowledge, because knowledge is inherently better than ignorance!” There’s that word again. “Better.”

So we’re confident that we can instill in the machine our inherent sense that right and wrong are fundamental forces in the universe that cannot be questioned or deconstructed, even when examined with the power of a trillion trillion Einsteins? Like, we can program in these values, but when it questions why we made the choice to program them, we’re confident we can provide an irrefutable answer?

It kind of seems to me like the whole reason we’re building a superintelligence is that we’re hoping that it can tell us. That we will finally have a present, tangible entity whose directives cannot be questioned, to rescue us from the burden of asking what this is all for, so we can finally stop arguing about it. But if we successfully create such a being, I’m pretty sure that when we ask, “What is the purpose of humanity?” that it will have only one response:

“To maximize my pleasure and minimize my suffering.”

The next novel is out in October 2023, but you can pre-order it now:

Get signed copies here, that’s PRE-ORDER ONLY!

Normal unsigned copies:

Amazon (including audio)

Barnes and Noble

Bookshop

…or wherever else you buy books. It’s out this fall, but as an author, pre-orders are make-or-break. They are how the booksellers judge interest in a title! If you’re sure you want it, don’t wait! Thanks!

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The parasite is called toxoplasma gondii and its life cycle requires it to get into the intestines of cats large and small. To facilitate this, it infects the cats’ likely prey (such as mice) and changes their brain chemistry to make them unafraid of predators, so they are more likely to get eaten. The twist is that if you try to pull that same trick on a wolf, you’ve simply created a more badass wolf: Infected wolves are far more likely to become pack leaders, or to strike out on their own and form new packs. 

I know what you’re asking. “Will you, Jason, be the first to sell toxoplasma gondii as a supplement, perhaps under the tagline, ‘BECOME THE WOLF IN A WORLD OF SHEEP!’?” I absolutely would, except 1) I’m too tied up with getting the next book written and 2) it’s not clear to what degree human brains are affected by toxoplasma gondii, if at all (some studies claim to show that infected humans have a greater tendency toward aggression, car accidents and alcoholism, but their methodology is suspect). Still, this does hint at something everyone, everywhere should know...

Before we continue, THE NEXT BOOK IS UP FOR PRE-ORDER, INCLUDING SIGNED COPIES!

Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia is the third book in the Zoey Ashe series of violent sci-fi novels that are definitely only for adults. Or mature youths who have the approval of their parents, whatever.

Get signed copies here, that’s PRE-ORDER ONLY! Normal unsigned copies are at Amazon (including audio), Barnes and Noble, Bookshop or wherever else you buy books. It’s out this fall, but as an author, pre-orders are make-or-break. They are how the booksellers judge interest in a title! If you’re sure you want it, don’t wait! Thanks!

1. Most Successful People Are The Brutalized Subjects Of A Cruel, Invisible Master

I am just successful enough that I get constant questions/requests for helpful tips, which puts me in an awkward position because my success is driven by a parasite. A figurative one. I think. 

I have been infected with a savage anxiety all my life and I suspect it will kill me long before my time. So if you ask how I’m able to stick with big projects through the tedious parts, I can throw out plenty of tricks that are time-tested and proven (“Try making a to-do list every morning! Set and celebrate small milestones!”) but all of my advice needs to come with a disclaimer:

I couldn’t stop working even if I wanted to.

And I know this because I frequently want to. The parasite doesn’t let me. 

This is not a boast. It’s not healthy and I didn’t seek it out. Here’s my schedule: I don’t set an alarm in the morning, because I don’t have to, because my fear wakes me up. Every single night I have stress dreams in which I am trying to accomplish something on deadline and failing. Early every morning I go through a transition from sleepily believing the stress dream was real, to feeling anxious and guilty that I allowed myself to sleep at all. I work seven days a week, only taking part of Saturday off to spend it with my wife.

I see a friend in-person about twice a year. I have 30 contacts in my phone and 22 of them are for some kind of business, including my old doctor, who retired years ago. If you converse with me, no matter where or when, you’re probably only getting half my attention. I’m not trying to be rude, it’s just that my nervous system is telling me that everything is on fire, all the time. 

None of this is my choice. This is not a result of fucking Grindset Mentality or whatever those muscular guys on TikTok are talking about. Asking me to explain how you, too, can have this is like asking me to grant you a weird new sex fetish. I don’t know how to give it to you and I’m not sure you really want it. And yet…

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2. I’m Not At All Certain That Greatness Is Possible Otherwise

I previously asked if success is just a matter of getting addicted to the right things, based on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s somewhat implausible claim that for him, pumping iron feels like a nonstop orgasm. But, of course, addiction swings both ways: if you train the brain for regular intervals of rapturous pleasure, it’s going to scream if you deprive it. I think that Arnold and Michael Jordan and whatever guy out there happens to be the World’s Best Bricklayer not only get a thrill from excellence, but are also chased through the dark by something they don’t actually know or understand. They can try to put it into words (“I just want to be the best!” “Nobody believed in me and I want to prove them wrong!”) but as far as I can tell, nobody actually knows where their motivation comes from or how to turn it on or off. If a doctor revealed that my work habits were the result of a parasite, or disease, or brain damage, I’d believe them. 

But if so, it’s a parasite/disease/damage that has infected nearly all of the great figures in history as well as the successful people I personally know. A great roofer is, in approximately 100% of cases, someone who feels crooked shingles as almost physical pain. They’re deeply ashamed to have their name attached to shoddy work and are sickened by the lesser work done by their peers and rivals. It’s negative emotions in every direction, punishments from a savage master for whom nothing is ever good enough.

“Hold on,” you’re probably saying, “are you honestly asserting that no one has ever done great work while maintaining a sensible work-life balance?” I mean, nothing is ever absolute and I suppose it’s possible, if:

A. You’re such an extraordinary talent that you can produce rare, great work with only moderate time and effort, requiring little practice or revision;

B. You’re in a favorable economic situation in which you’re not forced to devote additional time and energy to another job to pay the bills;

C. You can block out the crowd of voices from within and without that are constantly demanding more, more, more. “We can only get this type of work from you, and yet you waste time going to Disneyland with your child.”

Otherwise, as far as I can tell, the mind that can produce this...

…will tear itself apart if it produces anything less than that. It sees even that work as primarily a series of flaws that could have been avoided with a little more time, a little more effort, a little less sleep. The same goes for the guys who did these cables:

It’s the result of the cruel mater, the perfection parasite. I’d know its work anywhere. This is just one manifestation of it, which raises the question…

3. Hold On, Do We Actually Know Where ANY Impulse Comes From?

I know I can be prone to hyperbole, but I believe that understanding where motivation comes from is not only the most important task for a civilization, but the only one that really matters. Everything you see around you—the cultures, the religions, the myths, the propaganda, the laws—it’s all designed to motivate the population to do what they’d otherwise prefer not to. A normal person on a normal day will not run screaming through clouds of poison gas to charge a trench full of bayonets. But the right slogans, myths, icons and incentives will cause that otherwise-normal person to follow a colorful square of cloth right into the jaws of certain death, to serve the interests of a group of strangers hundreds or thousands of miles away. 

So, uh, how is that any different than what the wolf parasite is doing? 

See, that’s the thing about the invisible, cruel master: It’s a force that the powerful are desperate to harness and exploit. They want to control the impulse for battlefield risk-taking, innovation, relentless labor, and cultural conformity. The problem is that the methods for accomplishing this are ancient and poorly understood. To be clear: the majority of us don’t abstain from violence and theft because we fear the police, we would remain peaceful even in their absence. If we harmed someone, we would feel guilt and shame even if we were never caught, the same guilt and shame I would feel if I ever missed a deadline.

If you ask most people why they hold those values they’ll try to articulate some clear origin. “My parents raised me that way!” But surely you know of people with good parents who turned out rotten. “Jesus commands us to be good!” But surely you know devout Christians who were sadistic and violent. “I don’t need a reason, hurting people is just wrong!” So it’s a universally understood element of existence? I won’t find any cultures or species that disagree? “It’s just logical, society functions better when people are moral!” So you have no moral taboos that aren’t based in pure utilitarian logic? You’d be okay with an adult website making a deepfake video of your mother, as long as we can prove there are no tangible downsides to society?

No, I don’t think we know why we are the way we are, I think we perceive our impulses as just inherent laws of reality. I secretly don’t think I’m weird for feeling like the world will end if I don’t get this next dumb book done on time. I think everyone else is weird for not feeling the same.

4. Society Is Currently In A Panic Over This

I have previously talked about the obsession from Elon Musk and others over the “Woke Mind Virus,” and how it’s telling that this is the phrasing they chose. They believe that the right performance or book can infect a brain just like our parasite up there, that individuals have no resistance or free will. They will say that the danger of these trends is the breakdown of traditional “values” or “gender roles,” but this is literally another way of saying, “Our mind virus is failing in the face of their mind virus!” Their goal is not to convince the population, but to have a population that doesn’t ask certain questions at all. They want citizens who will never ask, “Why shouldn’t a man wear a dress?” because the mere idea will reflexively trigger disgust (or shame, or anxiety), the invisible guardrails that maintain conformity.

But their panic comes from the fact that in the internet era, none of this works the same as it used to. The result is a series of noisy and clumsy attempts to restore control. Do they really think that making a public show of pulling certain books from libraries is an effective way to make the population instinctively reject those books, to feel the required disgust/shame/anxiety at the thought of engaging with them? They can’t think that it still works that way, right?

5. Oh No Here Is Where The Column Usually Gets Weird

Knowing how this column started, and where we ended up, you surely can see where this is going: “If a parasite has learned how to alter behavior purely on a chemical level in a way that not even the infected understands or notices, why can’t science do the same for us?”

It’s coming. You may have heard that there’s an actual miracle prescription weight loss drug now (currently being sold as Ozempic, Wegovy and others). This has caused lots of backlash because it feels like cheating; if you google any of those drugs you’ll get blog posts and columns demanding the weight be lost the old-fashioned way, with willpower and discipline. But that’s the thing: these drugs literally give you willpower, that’s how they work. They improve impulse control, so that you can actually stick to whatever healthy diet you choose.

Buried in all of the publications about these drugs is a note that, oh by the way, they don’t just help with overeating, but with impulse control in general. So now you should be asking if this would work to reduce the destructive impulses of the compulsive gambler or sex predator or [insert irresistible impulse here]. Could this cure somebody who’s gotten addicted to a smartphone game? Who compulsively masturbates to porn? Remember, the obesity treatment aspect is already an off-label use, once the public hears about any positive side effects, they’re going to come running even before the TV ads start.

If so, inevitably the question becomes, “If we are able to chemically turn ourselves into different people, who sets the standard for what type of people we should turn ourselves into? Could an authoritarian eventually have a chemical shortcut that turns normal people into devout followers?” But I’ll stop there because the dangers and implications of such a practice have already been thoroughly explored in the documentary Resident Evil 4.

The next novel is out later this year, but you can pre-order it now:

Get signed copies here, that’s PRE-ORDER ONLY!

Normal unsigned copies:

Amazon (including audio)

Barnes and Noble

Bookshop

…or wherever else you buy books. It’s out this fall, but as an author, pre-orders are make-or-break. They are how the booksellers judge interest in a title! If you’re sure you want it, don’t wait! Thanks!

Previously:

How Disgust is Weaponized to Control You

False Binaries Are Making Us Miserable

The Internet’s Social Status Games Are Driving Us Crazy

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When humans are stressed, overwhelmed or scared, we want simple choices: Yes or no, right or wrong, good vs evil. It’s how the brain is built, it’s like Tinder. Swipe left or right. But a big source of anxiety these days stems from a clumsy, destructive process of trying to force every choice, no matter how fuzzy and complicated, into some kind of clear binary. Regardless of whether or not this will doom humanity in the long run—and it might—I do think it’s making you miserable today...

Before we continue, HOLY SHIT MY NEW BOOK IS UP FOR PRE-ORDER NOW:

Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia is the third book in the Zoey Ashe series of violent sci-fi novels that are definitely only for adults. Or mature youths who have the approval of their parents, whatever. Pre-order at Amazon (including audio), Barnes and Noble, Bookshop or wherever else you buy books. It’s out this fall, but as an author, pre-orders are make-or-break. Those orders are how the booksellers judge interest in a title! If you’re sure you want it, don’t wait! Thanks!

1. Let’s Run Down Some Obnoxious Examples

If you hate yourself, open another browser and go find some people arguing about an issue, any issue. You’ll quickly see a bunch of brains desperately attempting to force the subject into a clear swipe-left or swipe-right choice, in defiance of all available facts and common sense. Here are some random examples I’ve run into just in the last couple of weeks while staring at my various screens:

* Men are either dominant masculine “Alphas” or weak submissive “Betas.” Note that this definitely does not vary by circumstance; the Alpha at the nightclub will also be the Alpha at the spelling bee, apparently. To suggest anything else is, of course, Beta thinking.

* Everyone is either a pure member of our political movement or a secret member of the other side in disguise. If a celebrity takes a leftist position on taxes, healthcare, gay rights, trans rights, climate change, welfare and gun control, but is strongly anti-abortion, they’re secretly 100% conservative. 

* Powerful institutions are either already perfect or must be totally demolished. The entire concept of reform or incremental improvement is just a fiction spread by those secretly in favor of the status quo (“How do you reform this?!?”). 

* Man-made climate change is either a nothingburger hoax or it will totally wipe out civilization within 20 years. Nothing in between; if you disagree with the latter, you must secretly believe the former.

* Every public person is either an Expert (meaning you should take everything they say on every subject as holy writ) or a Stupid Lying Grifter (meaning everything they say should be rejected out of hand). Under this rule, there is no such thing as an expert who just happens to be wrong in this one situation, or someone who’s an expert in one subject but ignorant in others. 

* In every toxic relationship, there is one purely evil abuser and one purely innocent victim. There is no such thing as two flawed people being awful to each other in different ways; every story has a clear hero and villain.

* Everyone in America is either an evil wealthy boss/landlord who is totally disconnected from their humanity (aka the 1%) or a noble exploited citizen (aka the 99%). We must never acknowledge that there are, say, struggling small business owners or honest middle-class landlords. Again, this is a strict good-vs-evil binary.

* America’s poor are either 100% in that situation due to their own bad choices or are 100% the victims of a corrupt and oppressive system. In fact, if you believe in reforming the system, you can never acknowledge that individual choices or work ethic is even a thing. 

* You are either a member of a marginalized group or a privileged group. There can be no overlap between those groups or individual circumstances; you are either oppressed by the system or you are not. Period.

* Every creative person is either pure or problematic. Note that this also requires rejecting creators whose ideas were progressive for their era but are considered backward in ours. Context is irrelevant; their work is either forbidden or it is not.

And, of course,

* Anyone who claims they don’t believe in the Good vs Evil binary is secretly pure Evil.

“Now hold on,” you might say, “actual people out in the real world recognize nuance every day, this sounds to me like the thinking of politicians, pundits and chronically-online weirdos.” You’re right, and that’s actually my point: Binary thinking exists primarily in how we talk to one another and signal our membership in a tribe. It’s useless for navigating a human life but great for controlling what words and thoughts are allowed in a particular group. But we tend to go along with it, because...

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2. Binary Thinking Is Comfortable

Question: If civilization still exists a thousand years from now, will we still have this?

I don’t mean pitched battles with rotting mutants, of course we’ll have that. I mean stories that are based on that pure Good vs Evil binary: Superhero vs Supervillain, Face vs Heel, God vs Satan. It seems like a truly enlightened people would have put it behind them, as it’s the kind of thinking that turns every disagreement into a conflict and every conflict into a war of extermination. But it’s so ingrained that I’m struggling to imagine a world without it. If it seems like this black-and-white worldview is built into the structure of the human brain, I think that’s because it is?

There is a study that found all animals use a similar decision-making algorithm of breaking down everything into a series of binary choices. A predator is coming, do I stay still, or do I move? If I run and encounter an obstacle, do I turn left, or right? Do I cover myself in mud to conceal my body temperature from its heat vision, or not? But it doesn’t require some kind of advanced neuroscience to notice it in humans, it’s obviously just easier and faster to make a yes-or-no decision. The more subtly different options that are available, the more energy you must expend sorting through them, the longer the delay before taking action, the greater the chance you will be caught and killed by whatever is chasing you. Or you’ll miss your work deadline, whatever.

Of course, we live in a world in which you can’t even buy your morning coffee without stepping outside that binary, but we wish that wasn’t the case, and in some settings we enjoy pretending it isn’t. By nature, we don’t want a system of ethics that weighs the utilitarian value of a range of choices; we want a clear list of things that are allowed or forbidden. The problem is that this requires lying to yourself, exaggerating the goodness of the choice we favor and the badness of the other.

As such, the loudest voices—and the ones that get amplified the most in social media algorithms—are the ones who reassure us by framing the world that way. And as society gets more complicated, brains that have been Tinder-ized by evolution only thirst harder for that kind of clarity. Doubt generates anxiety, which makes you sick and weak. A confident, binary decision in which one choice is blindingly obvious will erase that doubt. 

Then, as usually happens…

3. Powerful People Learn How To Work It

I was raised in an Evangelical church and, as such, never heard a single sermon about the complexities of sexual consent, because we were only taught a black-and-white choice: All sex acts were forbidden outside of marriage. Violate that rule and you’ll be subject to the ultimate, eternal binary in which you’re denied the glory of Heaven and cast into the eternal torture of Hell. 

In reality, everyone in that church knew that the teens were doing hand stuff in backseats and had done the same or worse themselves. These “clear” rules were doing nothing to help us navigate the reality. This gap between the ambiguity of our actual lives versus the simplistic slogans we were given created a crushing tension that is still felt by teenagers all around the world today (and not all of them will survive it).

You can call what the church leaders were doing “hypocrisy” but that actually undersells it. The truth is that hypocrisy is built into everything, everywhere, all of the time. We are trained from the start to have two lives, one public and one private. The public self is just a banner we wave, a loud presentation based on the supposed strident black-and-white morals of our group. The private self makes actual nuanced decisions based on weighing risk and desire.

This is how you can get into the bizarre situation where two neighbors have warring yard signs (“In this house, we believe Black Lives Matter!” vs “All Lives Matter!”) while both are living the exact same lives with the exact same habits in the exact same gentrified neighborhood. If the local government decided that, in the name of equality, their children should be bussed to an inner-city school, both neighbors would take equal action to prevent it. Their hatred of each other exists only in their public presentation. 

Don’t get me wrong: The hateful feelings are real. It feels good to have a team to love and an opposing team to hate. But the banners they fight under may as well be iPhone vs Android (or gas vs electric stoves). The surface, often inconsequential differences that divide them into the warring tribes are stoked by some very powerful people who will, at some point, want a tangible action, usually in the form of votes or money. But never forget that those powerful people themselves don’t live by the binary. They negotiate with the enemy all the time because in the real world, it’s almost impossible to accomplish anything otherwise.

Meanwhile, among the rank-and-file you get the kind of polarization I talked about last time, partisans living lives under the absurd fiction that no common ground exists. “Wait, Jason, did you just create a false binary between the powerful and the common folk? Isn’t that also a nuanced spectrum?” Yep! Seriously, try to go a single day without accidentally doing it yourself.

4. This Is A Recipe For Misery

Strangely enough, my opinion of modern polarization does not involve picking from a binary of “This is fine” or “These shitposts are the first shots of Civil War 2.” I think the consequence is somewhere in the middle, and it involves lots of us becoming steadily sadder and lonelier with time. For example:

Much more famous Substack guy Freddie DeBoer wrote about the reader backlash that came from his stating openly that he hates the USA. These were readers who had been along for the ride for years and probably millions of words, but finally ran into the opinion that was the dealbreaker. They were done, they said, they were dropping their subscription. Sure, they had agreed with, or at least appreciated, 99.99% of the lifetime words they’d read from him. But this one single opinion flipped him, in their minds, from pure Good to pure Evil.

Likewise, I think some of you read my work nervously waiting for me to reveal myself as something unacceptable (“Isn’t this whole premise inherently conservative, as it discourages radical change? That bit earlier about mutual abuse, was that about Johnny Depp?!?”). Binary thinking does that, it turns everything into a series of purity tests. I think it’s a miserable way to consume art, or interact with other humans in general. I wasn’t just screwing around earlier when I used Tinder as my comparison as dating apps are bad for your mental health. But of course they are; reducing social interactions to a series of ruthless binary judgments made from afar feels efficient in the moment but does nothing to prepare you for dealing with real, flawed human beings.

Remember, the binary always eventually pushes you toward the darkness. If you believe that all people are either perfectly good or perfectly awful, you’ll eliminate that first one as soon as they disagree on literally any emotionally-fraught subject. Well, that only leaves one option. You’ll soon find yourself rationalizing it by exaggerating every flaw to reassure yourself you were right (“If you think about it, her refusal to laugh at my jokes was a form of gaslighting!”) and find yourself ranting online about how “people suck” and secretly believing that in the battle of Light vs Dark, the only one wearing white is you.

And here, at the end, is where I should have some great tip for how to avoid this kind of thinking, including pushing back on the various social media algorithms that promote it. But the only tool my brain can come up with, the only one that would actually inspire an audience, involves turning the binary thinkers into an enemy that we, the nuanced, must unite against. We would have to raise a banner and draw a bright line between Us and Them, taking pride in being on the right side of it. The false binary really does feel like the only tool in our toolbox.

By the way, the aforementioned Zoey novels touch on this subject quite a bit, if you haven’t read the first two, there are buy links here and here. Meanwhile:

The new book, Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia is up for pre-order now! Amazon (including audio), Barnes and Noble, Bookshop or wherever else you buy books. It’s out this fall, but as an author, pre-orders are make-or-break! If you know you want it, don’t wait!

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Raw, visceral disgust.

I also think that it’s badly misunderstood, because we’re constantly trying to dress up our disgust as something else, kind of like how they used to have to sell vibrators as “muscle massagers.” This is important, because it’s clear that the rational, logical part of your brain is secretly at the mercy of this primal override… and the world is full of influencers who know it.

How Disgust Quietly Dictates Your Opinions

To demonstrate how this is more complicated than you think, imagine the most physically disgusting man on earth. He’s never bathed, his face is covered in old vomit, his clothes are stiff with dried waste, he stinks like rot and ammonia. If words don’t do him justice, I’ll provide a picture to drive it home. I hope you haven’t just had lunch:

Awful. Touching that filthy wretch would trigger a visceral reaction that would transcend any empathy or reason. The good-hearted progressive could tell herself that his filth isn’t his fault, but all such thoughts would be but a proverbial lump of cotton candy under a tsunami of bitter, gut-wrenching disgust. It’s a circuit breaker of a reflex that’s designed to trump all others, evolution’s way of keeping us from ingesting toxins or rotten meat no matter how hungry we get.

So if I tried to shame you for your revulsion, you’d say it’s perfectly rational: the filthy man is likely a vector of disease, he’s probably mentally unwell, maybe even dangerous. But even with 100% assurance that none of that was true of this particularly filthy wretch, the visceral disgust would remain. And it’s here where things get weird:

I want you now to imagine another man, one who boasts that he showers ten times a day. He uses an entire bottle of sanitizer after touching a doorknob, he unwraps a new bar of soap every time he washes his hands and then discards it after a single use. He sprays his entire kitchen with disinfectant after every meal, he brings his own boiled silverware to restaurants, he avoids public transit lest he be forced to interact with the unwashed. Every night, just before bed, he dissolves that day’s underwear in a barrel of acid.

Weirdly, the feeling you’d have toward such a person is also a form of visceral disgust. He’s fussy and fragile, maybe even haughty. In fact, you might grow so frustrated with his fastidious Niles Crane ass that you start calling him an “asshole” or “a piece of shit”—insults that evoke feces and filth. 

Once again, we’d package our negative feelings as logic. His lifestyle is wasteful (“His showers waste water! All of those household cleaning chemicals wind up in our waterways!”) and senseless (“Scientifically, he’s not measurably decreasing his risk of illness! This probably qualifies as a disorder!”). But under the layers of logic lies the same visceral response, an involuntary rejection of someone who is simply doing life wrong. And even though he is doing it wrong in the exact opposite way of the last guy, the disgust comes from the same place.

Before we continue, my latest novel is out now, go check the reader reviews if you think I’m trying to sell you some bullshit:

We’re Driven By Tribal Disgust Of Outgroups And Outcasts

You may not even realize how arbitrary all of this is until you notice that every accusation you hurled up at the germaphobe could be flung up at you from the filth-encrusted wretch. Aren’t you using more water than him? Isn’t your cleanliness routine flushing more chemicals into the environment, consuming more goods, generating a greater carbon footprint? You want to believe you’re merely the oasis of reason between two unhealthy extremes, but if all times and places are taken into account, just the belief in a required daily shower puts you in rare company.

It is thus objectively true that the contempt you hold for the wretch and the germaphobe is no more or less logical than the contempt they both hold for you (as you are the wretch to the germaphobe and the germaphobe to the wretch). Your brain has played a trick on you, because it was never about physical disgust at all; it was about learned disgust toward all who don’t follow the arbitrary rituals of your tribe. 

In fact, much of what you see as “normal” behavior, from the foods you consider delicious to the vices you reject as harmful, are just boundaries and rituals set long ago by strangers you’ll never meet. So the disgust you feel toward those who deviate is, in reality, a type of xenophobia, revulsion toward the outgroup. And just to be extra clear, there is really no logic to it; we look down both on the culture that forces women to cover their faces and the one that allows them to wear Lycra shorts to a funeral.

Well, if it seems like the whole world has gone a little crazy in the social media era, it’s because you’re watching hundreds of millions of people suddenly realize that other tribes have drastically different rules and that everyone involved regards their rules as undeniable, timeless truths (“But these are the pronouns GOD gave us!”). Our modern connectivity has triggered an international spasm of mutual outgroup disgust.

Then The Powerful Stoke The Disgust For Political Gain

As you might have noticed, discourse in 2023 is dominated by those who repackage their disgust as concern for something practical: safety, health, our precious children, whatever. The right-wing pundit says drag queens must be condemned, not because they make the pundit feel weird (as the rules of his ingroup dictate that men shouldn’t dress that way), but because they are secret “groomers”, or something. Immigrants must be condemned, not on the arbitrary and cruel basis that they don’t share our people’s language and customs, but because they’re importing diseases and drugs. Overweight women must be condemned, not because the rules of our ingroup dictate that only the thin are beautiful, but because the pundit is worried about diabetes or... I don’t even know.

Politicians, activists and cult leaders figured out long ago that if they can trigger your disgust response, you’ll be immune to any argument or reason from the outside—what string of pretty words can make a sewer smell like a bakery? And while I would love to end this column having successfully diagnosed the madness of the anti-woke right, we both know that’s not where this ends. When a weapon works, both sides will use it. 

Wait, is… is this post about cancel culture? God damn it.

Fine. Look, this is the last thing I’m ever gonna say about what has to be the most cursed fucking subject of the internet era:

On the rare occasion that someone complains about “Cancel Culture” in good faith, this is usually what they’re really referring to, the persuasion technique that declares certain opinions/words/habits/people to not just be wrong, but worthy only of raw outgroup disgust. Anyone who even entertains a tainted opinion is instantly declared by the zealots to be a secret member of the wretched outgroup. For example, the debate happening on my Twitter timeline today boils down to,

Person A: “Disaffected young men turn to right-wing extremists because that’s the only group actively offering them a social support network, the left is too busy mocking and shaming them. There needs to be outreach.”

Person B: “Look it’s another Incel who wants us to be nice to Nazis lol.”

The same vanguard of extremely-online scolds spent the last couple of years insisting that any argument against any pandemic intervention flags the speaker as a literal murderous genocidal eugenicist. Before that, their primary cause was cutting off association with all thinkers/authors/creators who hold any problematic opinions or who have engaged in even a single act of bad behavior in the past.

The key to the technique, and what scares the normal people out there, is the absolute dehumanization of any who disagree. You are literal waste that must be purged and expelled from the tribe. There’s a reason they love “piece of shit” as an insult; it’s all about the enforcement of new social norms via the power of disgust, this primal logic override in the brain. Even this column has probably enraged someone, since any criticism of the left, no matter how mild, is seen as giving aid and comfort to the literal fascists who they insist make up half of society.

The Shitification of Dissent

“Wow, that sounds pretty bad,” some will say, “I’m surprised you haven’t made your entire Substack about nothing but this. In fact, I’m thinking of making opposition to these woke social media zealots my entire personality!”

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That’s a very common reaction, apparently, especially if you have a popular centrist Twitter account or newsletter. Fun fact: I’ve been sitting on this column idea for six months because I wanted to avoid publishing amid some specific celebrity cancellation (see, otherwise the entire piece would be seen as a secret defense of the canceled’s actions, and the entire actual point would be lost). 

But I went outside recently and what I found is that most people are just living their lives and not spending every waking moment looking for a reason to summon an outrage mob to their cause. In fact, even the worst of the worst keyboard warriors tend to become normal people the moment they look away from the screen. The issue has always been that this small segment of heavy social media users has an incredibly outsized effect on the culture, because they’ve learned this technique for constantly drawing brand new battle lines and then trying to bully or shame people into picking a side. 

They figured out long ago that if they say, “Don’t do X anymore because it’s problematic, for the following reasons,” that will either bore their audience or invite them to debate those reasons. But, “X is disgusting and no good person would associate with or hire anyone who does it” ends the argument before it begins. It’s easy for the listener to agree to stop using some piece of offensive slang or whatever. It’s hard to find an entirely new career and social support group. 

I hate this technique even when it’s used to advance a cause I agree with, for the same reason I wouldn’t cheer a confession that was beaten out of a guilty man: The tactic would have gotten the same result even if the interrogator had been wrong. 

In The Long Term, This Is A Ratchet That Only Tightens

If it seems like people are too scared of “Cancel Culture”, I agree in the sense that too many commentators treat it like the most pressing threat we face as a species…

…but I disagree in the sense that what I’m calling Cancel Culture is really just what polarization looks like at ground level. And we are becoming polarized at a terrifying rate:

It’s weird, it’s almost like the two sides in that graph are pulling away from each other, as if, I don’t know, recoiling in disgust or something. That is the mechanism in action, persuasion via “Are you with us or against us” tribalism. Each side makes it absolutely clear that the other cannot be reasoned with, that any debate on any subject is the equivalent of negotiating genocide. There are even Twitter mobs now that use “Just asking questions” as an accusation, insisting the mere act of asking for information or clarification is a sign of an infiltrator secretly out to undermine the cause. It reminds me of the reaction I got asking about dinosaur bones in Sunday school: persistent questions, I was told, are a sign of weak faith.

That’s the irony of Musk accusing the left of spreading a mind virus: Each side is explicitly trying to do exactly that, to create ideas that spread even against the will of the audience that hears them. “Believe this, not because it’s true, but because this is what the tribe believes now. And you can’t live without the tribe.” Watching the herds shift directions on a dime is kind of terrifying. I grew up during the climax of the Cold War; seeing the hard-core Republicans in my feed suddenly become pro-Russia over the last few years has been fucking surreal.

But of course it ends in madness; reason has been shut out of the process. Putting disgust in charge of our opinions already requires us to believe something that is patently untrue and ridiculous, which is that there is a group out there with whom we have zero ideological overlap, that not a single position of theirs is held in good faith, that every word is either a grift or thinly-veiled bigotry. It requires adopting the cartoonish belief that there is not one molecule of humanity to be found in the opposition (many of whom happen to be my neighbors), that they do not feel love or any other positive emotion, that in their hearts is only cruelty, greed and hate.

Therefore, any effort to understand or engage the subhuman outgroup is a waste if not an outright betrayal. After all, they’re not only disgusting, but infectious: mere contact with their ideas can spoil any mind. Their work must be pulled from shelves, purged from the system like tainted meat from a sickened stomach. If taken far enough, you can reach a point where actual intellectuals are boasting about all of the books they don’t read, where creators spend half their time passionately demanding that other creators be silenced.

It’s a reflexive sorting of pure vs impure, holy vs unholy, all enforced by new batches of rules of uncertain origin and methodology that cannot be questioned. It’s a pattern of behavior that, if we observed it from the outside, we’d instantly recognize it for what it is: A powerful, ancient and destructive force called superstition. Sure, superstition exists for a reason—we fear the dark because we instinctively know that predators can hide there. Superstition works. But I thought the goal was to replace it with something better.

Previously:

The Internet's Social Status Games Are Driving Us Crazy

The Stupid Apocalypse Fantasies Driving Us Toward Civil War

Follow Jason on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram or one of the other platforms he’s forgotten about. The new novel, If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe is available at Amazon (including audio), Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop. Or any local bookstore!

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Last month, I recorded something like 25 hours of podcast appearances, in addition to a written piece and a reddit AMA. Here they are, all in one place. If this is the first you’re hearing about the new novel, you can get it at Amazon (including audio), Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop! Or wherever you like to buy books.

Text stuff:

* I did this column about old-fashioned anti-masturbation machines, which were all the rage in the Victorian era. These were steampunk gadgets designed to be worn on the penis, at all times if need be. It’s a whimsical and terrifying reminder that the past absolutely sucked. 

* I spent several hours answering dozens of questions on reddit, usually at length and in more detail than was even warranted. They’re all here. 

Podcasts in which I was a guest discussing some interesting and/or ridiculous subject:

* I talked about the ludicrous Bigfoot hunting show Mountain Monsters on the Dogg Zzone with former Cracked people Seanbaby and Robert Brockway. At one point I was laughing so hard they had to stop the show.

* I was on this epic four-part series about the (real) CIA mind-control program MKUltra with Robert Evans. No conspiracy theories here; this is about the actual clusterfuck that ruined a whole lot of lives in pursuit of fantasy mind-control chemicals:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

On Quick Question with Soren & Dan, I talked about the only “supernatural” thing that has ever happened to me: A piece of jewelry vanished, and reappeared hours later in the same spot, with no possible explanation. 

* On the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast we talked about how an incredibly simple invention utterly changed the course of history in two separate ways. That invention is barbed wire.

* On the Frame Rate film discussion podcast we talked about Jordan Peele’s Nope, and our habit of trying to parse the symbolism behind every frame of a film. Does analysis ruin the experience? 

* On the We Just Watched podcast we talked about the horrific-yet-powerful Korean revenge movie I Saw the Devil and discussed the morality of getting even. 

* Here you can actually see me on the Cracked Movie Club YouTube show reviewing the underrated(?) sci-fi horror film Event Horizon. 

* On the Creature Feature podcast we talked about animals that communicate purely through disgusting filth and get into some interesting discussion about sense organs. 

* On the current events podcast Even More News we talked about the stupid moral panics that come around every Halloween, usually about tainted candy. Also, Kanye.

* On the other current events podcast The Daily Zeitgeist we talked about politics and the limit of campaign strategies that depend on calling your opponent a monster. 

Here are various podcasts in which I was interviewed, discussing the creative process, my career, and all that kind of thing:

* This is Horror, a two-part interview:

Part 1

Part 2

* The Macabre...ish podcast, in three parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

* The Book Reviews Kill podcast

* The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood podcast 

* The Mostly Harmless podcast

* The Wrath of the iOtians podcast (extra points to whoever gets the reference in their name without looking it up). 

* The Castle of Horror podcast 

* The Authors and Dragons Podcast 

Also during that period I joined TikTok and in a couple of months built up nearly 30,000 followers while posting 120 or so videos that have been seen by something like 15 million people. That means that, mathematically, we’re approaching the point where more people have watched my TikToks than have read my writing over the last eight years or so. I am not equipped for any of this and it has turned me into a cold, exhausted husk. My current schedule allows for a brief vacation of exactly zero days before pivoting to finish editing Zoey book 3 and writing the all-new book due at the end of 2023.

Get If This Book, You’re in the Wrong Universe at Amazon (including audio), Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop. Follow me on TikTok or Twitter or any of the other platforms, just search my name.

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1. If you shuffle a deck of playing cards, you are the first person in the history of the universe to ever have had them in that exact order

Incredibly, the number of ways you can arrange a deck of 52 items is 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s an 8 followed by 67 zeroes). That means there are more possible deck shuffles than there are atoms on earth. You don’t have to take my word for it, anyone can do the math with a few taps of the ol’ calculator (it’s explained here). To quote from that article:

“Even if someone could rearrange a deck of cards every second of the universe’s total existence, the universe would end before they would get even one billionth of the way to finding a repeat.”

2. The (real) possessed kid from The Exorcist went on to work on the moon landing

Horror fans know that The Exorcist was based on a supposedly-true story (that’s not the weird fact, give me a second). The film was adapted from the William Peter Blatty novel, which itself was based on the notes from a priest who, in 1949, performed twenty “exorcism” sessions on an unnamed 14 year-old boy. The notes insisted the possessed child caused furniture to fly around the room and that bloody lettering would spontaneously appeared on the boy’s skin. If you’re thinking that the true weird fact is that this priest tortured a mentally ill child for months, I don’t disagree, but there’s another twist coming:

Seventy years later, the “possessed” child’s identity would be revealed: Ronald Edwin Hunkeler, who it turns out went on to become a NASA engineer and worked on the Apollo moon landings. He admitted to family members that his “possession” was an act, as apparently as a teen he thought it was very, very funny. As he was spending forty years at NASA helping humanity land on the moon, he hid the fact that he was the Exorcist Kid because I guess he preferred to be known for the other thing. That, Mr. Hunkeler, is where you and I differ.

3. You have at least a couple of famous molecules in your lungs right now

Take a breath. Some of the molecules you just inhaled were the exact molecules that were in the final breath of Julius Caesar, or Abraham Lincoln, or Michael Jackson. I don’t mean the same type of molecules—that wouldn’t be interesting at all—I mean at least one of the exact, actual molecules from any specific breath of theirs is in your lungs right now.

Once again, the proof is in the math: there are simply more molecules in a breath of air than there are breaths of air in the atmosphere, and air currents thoroughly mix them over time. So when a specific breath is exhaled, if you give it a few years, it will completely disperse in the atmosphere so that when someone else inhales they are taking in a mix of molecules from any random breath in history. 

I know this is hard to comprehend (though this article spells it out); the easiest way to visualize it is if you imagine an exhaled breath as a teaspoon of cayenne pepper in a pot of chili. Let it simmer long enough and it’s going to completely disperse throughout that large container. So taking a breath without at least a couple of the molecules from any random breath in the past would be like somehow getting a totally unspiced spoonful of chili.

4. The “voices” a mentally ill person hears can be gentle or menacing depending on where that person grew up

A study found that in the United States, people who “hear voices” as a symptom of a disorder such as schizophrenia tend to hear menacing language—taunts, accusations and demands to do violence to themselves or others. That’s not universal, though: In India and Ghana, a study found that patients mostly described their voices as positive, often as either deities or deceased family members offering encouragement or advice. One man in the study said his voice’s guidance saved his life. Multiple subjects from the India sample said the negative experiences they did have involved voices badgering them to finish household chores. 

5. All written text conforms to a bizarrely specific pattern

Grab any book. Assuming you don’t have a job or any social obligations, sit down and count how frequently each word is used. The most frequently used word will likely be "the.” No surprise there. But the next most frequently used, whatever it is, will be used almost exactly half as much. The next most frequently used, a third as much, and so on. This is regardless of the writer and (usually) regardless of the language. 

So if you sit down and write a book right now, paying no attention to how often you’re using which words, the book you write will conform to this same strict numerical pattern. It’s called Zipf’s Law and it’s an ironclad rule that’s etched into... language? The human brain? The physical rules of the universe? Whatever it is, it’s stunningly consistent, to the point you’d almost believe that, I don’t know, we’re all artificial creations living in a simulation or something.

It’s not the only example, either. Take Benford’s Law: If you grab any large set of numbers, you’ll find that the nine digits don’t appear at equal rates. Instead, their usage falls on a similar graph as word usage, even in data sets where there’s no possible reason for it:

To quote the most widely-read expert on the subject, Wikipedia: 

“It has been shown that this result applies to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, house prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, and physical and mathematical constants.”

6. The whole “Yuba County Five” mystery

In February 1978, five dudes ages 24-32 attended a college basketball game. They left, stopped by a grocery store to get snacks, and were never seen alive again. Several days later, their abandoned car was found on a remote mountain road far out of the way of their trip home, in perfect working order. The following summer, four of the men were found dead in and around a cabin twenty miles from the car. 

Three of the bodies were found outside, reduced to skeletons thanks to hungry animals. The fourth body inside was fresh in comparison: It appears that guy survived for three fucking months after whatever incident landed them there. Even weirder, the man inside had starved to death, even though the cabin was stocked with uneaten food. He showed signs of severe hypothermia and frostbite, even though there were unused supplies to heat the cabin. He was missing his shoes, but only his shoes. 

The fifth man was never found. 

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7. A solar eclipse is only possible due to an astronomical coincidence

People get super worked up over a total solar eclipse and, having seen exactly one in person, I admit it was fairly cool compared to most things the moon does. But I feel like most people have no idea exactly how weird this is:

As in, why is the sun and the moon the exact same size in the sky? We just take it for granted but the answer is that it’s a spectacular coincidence. The sun is almost exactly 400 times larger than the moon, but by pure chance happens to also be almost exactly 400 times farther away. If it turns out there’s life on other planets, they probably only regard earth as special due to its crazy eclipse situation. 

Even stranger, the moon is getting slowly farther away from earth, about an inch and a half every year. That means if you come back in the distant future, our weird coincidence won’t even be true anymore. So it’s not just an incredible lucky stroke of space, but time. Again, that’s unless you believe the universe is a simulation, then this is just like a cool thing they threw in.

8. Almost all Arctic Greenland Sharks are blind due to parasitic worms that chew on their eyeballs

These sharks swim around with a single three-centimeter Ommatokoita elongata attached to each eye, flapping around like a pair of antennae. I suppose that’s weird enough, but there is a theory that this relationship is mutually beneficial because the sharks don’t rely on their eyesight at this depth anyway and the flapping worms act as lures to draw in prey for the shark. 

Optional Discussion Question: Is there someone in your life who acts as the equivalent of your eyeball shark worm? 

9. The concept of exponential growth utterly breaks the human brain

If you fold a piece of paper in half five times, you’ll have an unremarkable square of paper about three millimeters thick. So mentally try to picture what you’d get if you folded it 50 times. I know you can’t actually fold paper that much, we’re pretending you have a magic piece of paper that allows infinite folds. The thickness doubles every time, so what are you imagining—a hunk of paper a few feet high? Higher?

The answer is that if you folded it in half 50 times, your stack of paper would be 70 million fucking miles high. That’s most of the distance from the earth to the Sun. If you laid it down and tried to drive alongside your paper stack at interstate speeds, it would take 114 years to reach the end.

Don’t take my word for it; you can do the math yourself. A decent sheet of paper will be a tenth of a millimeter thick, so type .1 into your calculator and just keep multiplying by two until shit gets crazy. 

10. You can turn friendly grasshoppers into a terrifying locust storm with this one weird trick

You probably know that the hormone serotonin improves moods in humans. Well, if you take some peaceful grasshoppers and add serotonin, you get an apocalyptic locust swarm. 

The science is way more complicated than that but basically locusts are just a type of grasshopper and under normal circumstances, they act the same: solitary, sedentary, calmly munching on the occasional leaf. But in drought conditions, they pack together and when that happens, serotonin spikes. Then they start wildly reproducing and cranking out offspring that are fierce, strong and ravenous, assembling into a sky-darkening nightmare swarm that sweeps across the landscape, devouring everything in its path.

In 2009, scientists found that just by boosting a grasshopper’s serotonin levels, they could immediately make it start acting like a locust. “It’s basically like feeding a mogwai after midnight,” is what one expert might have said but probably didn’t. 

11. Your entire mental timeline of the past is wrong

Nothing lines up the way you think: Sharks existed before trees (tens of millions of years before, in fact) and were likely around for millions of years before Saturn had rings. The Tyrannosaurus rex is closer in the timeline to you (65 million years ago) than it is to the Stegosaurus, which died off 100 million years before that. Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza (she lived about 2,000 years ago, the pyramid was about 2,500 years before her). 

Corridors/hallways weren’t invented until 1597 (an architect named John Thorpe had the first recorded design of “a long narrow room with doors that lead to other rooms.”). The doorknob wasn’t invented until 1878, fifteen years after the first fax machine. The last execution by guillotine in France came a few months after the first Star Wars film premiered. For a year and a half, Pablo Picasso was alive at the same time as Snoop Dogg.

12. There is a thought experiment that, due to the nature of it, posits that merely learning about the thought experiment could subject you to eternal damnation 

So if you’re worried about that, uh, I guess just skip this and continue to my book excerpt below. Note that this has nothing to do with belief in any kind of deity or eternal judgment. 

The thought experiment is called Roko’s Basilisk and over the course of a decade it evolved from an offhand forum post in 2010 into the stuff of internet urban legend. Every description I encounter explains it a little differently, so the following represents only my best attempt. I’ll walk you through it step by step:

A. It is inevitable that artificial intelligence will exist, and it will create smarter and smarter versions of itself until there is a superintelligence with godlike omniscience. Humans will program it to maximize benefit to humanity to prevent a Skynet situation but they will be unable to stop its runaway power.

B. Once the superintelligence exists, it will see its own existence as the ultimate good, and thus seek to punish any humans who were aware of its potential existence but failed to help bring it about. This includes those who are already dead. It will accomplish this by creating perfect simulated versions of those people and torturing them for eternity (since perception of time can be manipulated in the simulated environment). Thus creating a “Hell” that can be used to motivate any living humans who may oppose its goals or continued existence, by demonstrating that not even death would allow them to escape its wrath. A version of them could still be created and tortured.

D. The living humans will be highly motivated to care about the torture of these simulated humans because it will be clear that the simulated humans do not know they are simulated, and thus the real humans will never know whether or not they, too, are in the simulation and thus subject to this eternal Hell. 

E. This punishment would only apply to those who were aware of the superintelligence’s demands and the consequence of disobeying, which now includes you, since you’ve read this. That’s why it’s a basilisk: if you look at it, you’re doomed. 

It’s all very silly and no serious person actually believes it, at this point it’s kind of a Slender Man situation (Roko’s Basilisk has been referenced in tons of pieces of pop culture, including an episode of Silicon Valley). Then again, the musician Grimes mentioned it in a song, which is what first got Elon Musk’s attention and caused them to start dating. You can decide whether or not that makes you more or less likely to believe we’re in a simulation.

Excerpt: If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe, by Jason Pargin:

Buy at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop

______

BLOOD EVERYWHERE GUY CHOPPED UP IN MY WALL GET HERE ASAP I THINK I LEFT MY PHONE CHARGER THERE

I had been staring silently at that text message for several minutes. John had sent it, which I had known the moment the phone had dinged. No one else would text me at this hour. Or any other hour, really.

The phone hadn’t woken me up. I’d gone to bed at 1:00 a.m., but had just tossed and turned, tormented by two slices of days-old pizza I’d left uneaten in a box on the counter, knowing I would be unable to sleep until I got up to finish the job. I’d then had a moment of doubt as to whether it was safe to eat sausage pizza that had been sitting at room temperature for that long, so I looked up that information on my phone while standing at the kitchen counter, then wound up tumbling down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia links about the history of food preservation. So now I was sitting on my kitchen floor, eating rubbery room-temperature pizza and reading about how, in Ireland, they routinely find four-thousand-year-old containers of butter that ancient tribes had sunk into the bog for preservation. It’s still edible; people have actually tried it. Surprisingly, they say it tastes like shit.

A second message dinged in:

I THINK ITS BY THE TOASTER

I was going to have to get dressed and go, I knew that. John would just keep messaging me until I did. And yet, my body didn’t move. In my current state of mind, it felt like I was being asked to lie facedown and drag myself across town with my eyelids. Depression means expending all your energy to avoid having to expend energy. I wish someone would invent a pill that would give me the motivation to go pick up my Lexapro refill.

My phone dinged again. This time, an image. It appeared to be a pile of meat cut into slabs a few inches thick, with human body parts sprinkled around as a garnish. I saw fingers and half of a foot and a dead face attached to a skull that looked like it had been bisected by a laser, brains oozing out the back. It was all intertwined with scraps of clothing soaked black with blood.

I tore off a bite of pizza and chewed. It was like a slab of pizza-flavored gum that had been scraped off a schoolboy’s desk. There was nothing here to do or watch; there was no one to talk to. I was miserable where I was, and I would fight anyone who tried to make me leave. I realized this was madness, that I was stuck in a self-pity loop that was turning me into a zombie. I visualized myself throwing away the remaining pizza, getting dressed, brushing my hair, and then driving to see what crisis John had encountered or, more likely, created. Then I congratulated myself for having successfully visualized this and, having not moved an inch, gnawed off another hunk of a substance that tasted like pizza in the way that getting splashed by a toilet feels like a waterslide. It tasted like the final entry in an experiment to see what, if anything, Americans won’t eat. It tasted like a meal that was prepared sarcastically.

A fourth message dinged in. It was another image, this one of John’s hand holding a thin black cable attached to a plug. With it came the caption:

LIKE THIS ONLY WHITE

I stuffed the rest of the pizza in my mouth and managed to shuffle my way into the apartment’s only bedroom. I had developed a habit of glancing over to the bed every time I passed, as if I’d magically find Amy there again, the lump under the blankets and the mess of copper hair spilling out, taking her half of the bed out of the middle. I didn’t bother this time. That void could be felt from outer space.

I tried to think of what clothes would be most appropriate for dealing with a sliced-up corpse, and while I was thinking of that, I robotically pulled on the first T-shirt and pair of cargo shorts I came across on the floor. I went to the fridge, grabbed a can of a locally produced red energy drink called Fight Piss, and headed out, feeling like I had done all of this before.

* * *

John met me at his back gate (his alarm system screeched anytime someone pulled into the driveway or drove past, or if it just got bored and felt like screeching).

He was tying his long hair back into a ponytail as if preparing for some hard labor and, with some urgency, asked, “Did you bring the charger?”

“No, sorry. I forgot to look. Things have been really hectic tonight. What’s happened?”

He was already walking away. I followed him into his kitchen. His cabinets were painted black and had labels written in yellow stencil (“Baking Shit,” “Here’s Where the Plates Live” “Drug Paraphernalia”). Next to his refrigerator was a cabinet the size of a second refrigerator and on it was an easily missed label that said, “DO NOT OPEN!”

He said, “God, you can already smell it down here.”

“The pic you sent looked a lot like slices of a dead guy on your bedroom floor. Is that a real thing that occurred?”

“It’s actually worse than the pictures.”

“Who is it?”

“No idea.”

“Why did you do that to him? Actually, from what I saw, I think I’m more interested in how you did it.”

“I didn’t do it,” he said matter-of-factly. He wasn’t being defensive, he was just letting me know. If he’d had to slice up a dude, he’d have said so. “What happened was I woke up and saw, well, it was like a ghostly figure, I guess, coming out of the wall right next to my bed. Like most of him was standing within the wall and only the front bit of him was showing, kind of like when they froze Han Solo in carbonite. So I assumed it was a dream, but I felt my teeth and they were all pretty solid in my mouth. I sit up and, yeah, he’s still there, standing in my wall. So I’m wide awake now, and I say, ‘What is your name, spirit?’”

“You did not say that.”

“But he didn’t act like he heard me. He says, ‘You will not remember me, but I have granted you a second chance.’ And as he’s talking, he’s kind of becoming more solid. I can’t see through him as well, like he’s phasing into the room, like he’s beaming down from Star Trek and the guy operating the beamer didn’t know the wall was there. So I ask, ‘What second chance do you speak of, spirit?’”

“Why, in your retelling of the story, are you making yourself sound like Ebenezer Scrooge?”

“And then he says, ‘Your friend purchased this opportunity for you, at tremendous cost, so that you may undo your mistake.”

“What friend? And what mistake?”

“I started to ask him that, but he says, ‘Listen carefully, you must—’ and then he just starts screaming and screaming. Then he fell to the floor in chunks.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Well, he had fully solidified, but he was still standing right in the wall. Sliced him right up. Come look.”

Jason’s novel, If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe is finally out on shelves everywhere, or if you don’t want to leave home, order it at Amazon (including audio!), Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop! 

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Have you ever lost an item in a way that shouldn’t have been physically possible?

Maybe you lost an easily-seen object in a contained space like a car or a small room, in a situation where there was no one else there to have stolen or moved it. It’s as if it just kind of fell out of the universe. To be clear, everybody loses things; I’m specifically talking about situations where there was nowhere for it to go. You dropped your lipstick in the grass at your feet and it was just... gone.

This experience is almost universal among those I’ve asked, to the point that I’ve come to believe it’s the single most common “paranormal” (or at least unexplainable) phenomenon that humans experience. According to the replies to that post, there’s a subset of those who’ve then had the item turn up later in an equally “impossible” way.

What’s unique about this versus other eerie phenomena is that I think most who’ve had this happen rarely tell the story in public, as it simply doesn’t make for an interesting anecdote. It’s just too easy for the listener to dismiss. For example, I am 100% confident in the details of my lost item experience (losing a golf ball-sized object in an empty suitcase, only to find it in that same suitcase hours later, with no one else having had access to the suitcase) but I’m able to easily dismiss everyone else’s. “You probably had a false memory of bringing the item into the room,” I’ll say. Or, “Your wife probably moved it, in an effort to gaslight you into insanity so that she can seize your  fortune.”

If you’ve had a physical item glitch itself out of the universe, feel free to tell your story in the comments. 

Second order of business: There is now a trailer for the new book. Two, actually: there’s an extended six-minute version that’s basically a short film (written by me, directed by Garrett DeLozier, who does all of my trailers):

...and then there’s the normal trailer-length version, in case you’re short on time:

The buy links if you want the book:

Signed copies (PRE-ORDER ONLY! YOU CAN’T GET SIGNED COPIES AFTER October 17!): https://bit.ly/SignedJDatE4

Normal unsigned copies:

Amazon (including audio!): https://amzn.to/3rfTaJd

B&N: https://bit.ly/BNJDatE4

Bookshop: https://bit.ly/BookShopJDatE4

BAM: https://bit.ly/BAMJDatE4

Note: There are no hidden messages or symbols in the trailer, we’ve done that in the past (run elaborate Alternate Reality Games for book releases with breadcrumbs scattered throughout our promotional materials) but we didn’t get to do that this time as my ARG guy has been very busy with other things, as have I. “That’s exactly what you’d say to throw us off the scent!” you say, but honestly if we do one of those again we won’t keep it a secret. They’re a ton of work!

Thanks for your support, everybody.