Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Jason Pargin and His Magical Mysteries

Episode Date: October 22, 2022

Our old Cracked friend Jason is back to talk through life's mysteries and such.  Also he's got a new book! Make sure to check it out.  And as always big thanks to our sponsors.  Thanks RocketMoney.com/qq.  it could save you hundreds a year. Thanks  Avast.com! Thanks  Magic Mind! Go to magicmind.co/14daysofmagic and use code QQ14 at checkout for 20% off.

I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? I wanna hear your thoughts, wanna know what's on your mind I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? The answer's not important, I'm just glad that we could talk tonight So what's your favourite? Who did you get? What do I be? What's it up with? Oh, forget it I saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien When will I be remembered? Was it out there? Where did all that go? Did we die? Oh, forget it.

Saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien. Two best friends and comedy writers. If there's an answer, they're gonna find it. I think you'll have a great time here. I think you'll have a great time here and recent recipient of a brand new 5k personal best daniel 2237 o'brien joined as always by my co-host mr soren buoy soren say something fast okay i'm really trying to crunch the numbers here in my head and as you know i'm a mathematician at heart so let's see 22 and a half did you say 22 37 okay so a little over 22 and a half okay and that breaks down to less than eight minutes a mile.

Oh, for sure. But all not, but a little over seven, right? I think my average was seven, uh, 20 something. My first mile was sub seven. And then I was slower every mile after that. I was very proud. It was to the second, exactly one minute faster than I was at this same race last year, which was literally my exact goal, was to shave a minute off my time from one race to the next. I am still, in the art of being humble, full five minutes slower than your wife and your college friend, Meredith, at the same race. This is going to eat you forever. Yeah. I'm never going to be that fast in my life.

My wife ran cross country for D3 and those D3 runners are faster than you will ever be. Yeah. They're faster than I'll ever be too. It was really humbling when I would go for runs with my wife when we first started dating because I was like, I'm athletic. I play ultimate Frisbee. Surely I could keep up. And they just would just, I mean, torch me, incinerate me. Thanks to Rocket Money for supporting our podcast. What's Rocket Money? You've heard us talk about Truebill, lowering bills, canceling subscriptions, and more. Truebill has changed its name to Rocket Money. Start canceling your unused subscriptions and save money at rocketmoney.com slash QQ. Thanks to Avast for supporting Quick Question.

With Avast One, you can confidently take control of your online world by helping you stay safe from viruses, phishing attacks, ransomware, hacking attempts, and other cyber crimes. Learn more about Avast One at avast.com. Thanks to Magic Mind for supporting our podcast. Magic Mind is the world's first productivity drink that helps you fight off stress and keeps you dialed in, not wired. Go to magicmind.co slash 14 days of magic and use code QQ14 at checkout for 20% off. But we are not here to talk about my running. The people who've clicked on this podcast already know that this is a special episode.

So let's get right into it. Soren is your taste back can you taste i've got like 80 taste okay that's good yeah that's good there's still things that i can't like that i'm i will eat and i'll be like i know this has got some more depth to it and i'm just not i'm not getting it yeah i'm glad we're talking about this though now yeah yeah this is clearly what people clicked on for well no but you're in a you're in a very brief window when you could enter like a hot pepper eating contest and clean up that i think those are that's the thing right people you like ghost pepper stuff like that i've seen people online eating some crazy things eating raw onions eating hot things i I realized eating

something hot recently that I didn't, when I couldn't taste it all, that I couldn't taste the heat, but that my nose started to run profusely from eating something hot. So it was like having some sort of effect on my innards, but I just couldn't taste it. Who the fuck just asked that question? So ladies and gentlemen, we have a guest on our show today. It's very exciting for us. He comes around every once in a while when he's got something to hawk, but we love having him here, and his name is Jason Pargin. Yes, and this is the only podcast I'm on to promote the book,

so this shows what a special place you guys have in my heart. Yeah. Man, I love the searching for the word heart. It's not brain. It's not. Not Rolodex. But we are thrilled to have you. David Wong from Cracked.

For a long time, he wrote under the pseudonym David Wong. But now you'll also know him as Jason Pargeant because anytime you read one of his books, it now has that name on it. Do they retroactively go back to John Dyes at the end and put Jason Pargeant on those when they republish it? We released new editions of every single one of them. They not only have my name on them, but they have a brand new afterword. It's like 10 years later, me looking and and doing stuff in character or whatever they're a lot of fun the so the new paperbacks that have my name on them they also have all new material and i realize some people listening don't know i don't know i say this every time i go on one of these the shows

of the former crack people because we're coming up on you know what's been five years for some of us since we were jettisoned uh from the company um i don't know what percentage of your like you've obviously built your own brands uh you're both media powerhouses of your own that are separate from any of the old crack stuff so i don't know what percentage of your people still think of you as part of a family with Cody and the others. Steve, Big Al, Frankie, Chunk, all the guys from the gang. I've got their names down here somewhere. Rest in power, Chunk. Yeah, so many of them have sadly passed away. But we were former co-workers at Cracked for like a decade plus in the glory days.

But I also write a book series. I wrote a book called John Dies at the End that got turned into a movie. And I, since fleeing Cracked, since being yeeted from the industry, as the kids would say, I now write novels full time. And so I've got another book in the John Dyes Dien series coming out within days before or after the show goes up. I don't know the schedule, but it's on October 18th is the day. And the book is called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. Yes, and it has a neon green cover. of the day. And the book is called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe.

Yes. And it has a neon green cover. You can get it anywhere. It's available in audiobook, ebook, all of the normal book buying places. You know how to buy books. I'm sure you do. And you've said you are a full-time novelist now, but you have a side career that's been one of the most surprising things as a recent viral TikTok star. Can you, that's, that's a very foreign platform to me. I only, the only time I ever experienced TikTok is when I see someone tweet a TikTok that they like. It shows up in my Twitter feed. I don't have a four-year consideration page on TikTok. I don't have an account there. I'm never just like browsing TikTok, even though I know it brings a lot of people a lot of enjoyment. And then recently, I was talking to another author friend of mine, and her publisher is very insistent on her

creating TikToks because TikToks moves books. Is that why you set up a TikTok or is it just the love of the game? Well, I, of course, don't want it to seem as cynical as trying to move books because I, of course, don't care about money. I only care about telling stories to people. Yeah. And promotion, things like that. I honestly just put the book out there. People either, like a lot of people who don't even know I've written a book who are friends of mine. I don't really bring it up. But I had never even considered joining TikTok. One, because I thought it was still mostly like teenage girls doing viral dances or teenage boys doing viral dances and talking about their, their jewel pods or

whatever the kids talk about these days. Um, but no similar to you. I heard that from, not from my publisher, but just from the world in general, like everyone has is on Tik TOK. Like it's the audience has moved to tech doc. If you want to reach people for your new book or anything else, you need to have an account there. Like it's just, and I did not realize until around August, I went on there and kind of tried to look at it, use it for a couple of weeks, get a sense of what it was. Cause it has expanded beyond just kids doing dances. It's now everybody and started posting and found out, oh yes, the whole world is, has moved to TikTok. So I have now, for example, I've had my Facebook page for 15 years since 2007, something like that. I have more followers on TikTok than my Facebook

by a lot. And I've only had it for two months. Incredible. I have individual TikToks. Now, I don't know what you call an individual post. Is it a post? Is it a TikTok? Is it a... Soren has the answer, I believe. Yeah. They're called little hit fixes. Hit fix. That's what they call it. Yeah. A little video snack that one of them was been seen by like 4 million people, another by 2 million. Like my account, my profile totals has like 15 million total views on the videos I posted, which means I have a bigger audience on TikTok right now than at any point of my life.

Aside from like the absolute peak of Cracked, like the glory years in 2012 2013 like like that tick tock with the four million views that makes it like i don't know the third or fourth most popular piece of content i've created in my lifetime but the level of engagement the sheer numbers there are mind-boggling i I had no idea. You don't know how dead Twitter is or how dead Instagram is until you've posted on TikTok and seen just been sworn by a massive audience. It's crazy. Yeah, that is bonkers. And just to offer some clarity of what I said earlier, it's not entirely cynical. If you go to the page it's not going to be just like tick after tick of of buy my book it's like genuinely engaging

content so if you're someone who is a fan of jason's and has been for a very long time and a lot of our audience is and at this point you you just know that he is publishing books and uh going on podcasts almost full time uh you you should know that there's a completely separate avenue of content distribution that he is very active on right now, and you should check it out. The username is Jason K. Pargin, P-A-R-G-I-N. That's how you spell the last name. And if you want to be cynical about it,

you can scroll backward through the timeline and just watch me trying to learn their algorithm by trying like trying like, OK, I'm going to try just a graphic. I'm going to try a graphic with a viral song. I'm going to try a graphic with my voice, but not my face. And then finally figured out, oh, their algorithm demands face and voice. It cannot be funny clips. It cannot be like, sometimes they'll post something where you're showing something compelling and your voice is off screen talking about it. Yeah. For the most part, it is scanning for a face and a voice, but a lot of my TikToks to be frank, are me saying out loud, just failed tweets from two years ago that have 30 37 likes on them and i'll post

them on there and they'll have 400 000 views and 5 000 comments or whatever and and it would be this whole you know because the way tiktok works it's this whole thing where you can very easily do a reaction to a video like you can do a split screen or a commentary on it and there will be hundreds of people doing reactions to my video. And it's like these things that Twitter, everyone on Twitter, like found boring or immediately dismissed TikTok. It's like, there's suddenly this huge crowd, like, wow, you're the smartest man in the world. Like, yeah, I've got, Hey, don't worry. I've got years of stuff like this built up. I got, so I've seen a couple of TikToks in the same way that Dan has, where it crosses my

periphery only because I'm on the wrong platforms, I guess. But every once in a while, it bleeds over. I'll see videos of people who, they're down in the right corner, just their wobbly face, and then they've clearly got something behind them that they're pointing out. It's another video or it's

text or something. And sometimes they're not even talking about it. Sometimes it's just a video that plays in the background and you just watch somebody in the foreground who's kind of like make a little like eyebrow raises and smiling and stuff. But other than that, they have nothing to do with the video. It's the equivalent of on Twitter where they Twitter's algorithm, like it encourages you to quote tweet somebody and you just post a little emoji of a finger pointing down at their tweet. And then you collect the likes

on your, you collect the likes on followers. It's exact same thing. They encourage that they're fine with it. Those are reaction. Those are reaction videos. And it's just you wiggling your eyebrows in response to something that somebody else worked very hard on. Because again, some of the stuff on TikTok is things that cost a lot of money to produce. It's crazy stunts and editing and stuff that's like, oh, they worked for weeks on this. And then mine is just me in my bedroom, like reading, just stating out loud a tweet that I posted in 2018. See, Biscuit being one horsepower, that kind of stuff. Yeah, a joke that I think I've been telling since I was 11 years old.

And that has like 300,000 views on TikTok. And for whatever reason, now I would love to think it is because my beautiful face and voice delivering it is so much more compelling, but it's just the nature of that platform. It's like seeing people and their faces. It's just, it's very addictive to people. And so these very banal jokes that nobody cared about, for some reason, this middle-aged man reading them into a wobbly camera uh it's just it's just audience magic apparently yeah i'm certainly kicking myself now as a former uh creative director of video for a comedy website that we put so much fucking money into sketches and videos when we

were sitting on a gold mine of jason who could just like talk straight to camera and and then we would be we would have been printing money anyway you both need to be on there because your your audience is dying off if you're depending on any other platforms to spread the word about your show uh though it's they're just desiccating apparently and I didn't know this I found a pretty big following on true social I found um I can get a lot of people on board with my thoughts there another place where seemingly dumb thoughts are regarded as intelligent by the audience hey that's right yeah wouldn't work anymore are you wasting money on subscriptions i definitely am 80 of people have subscriptions

they forgot about i'm one of them maybe for you it's an unused amazon prime account or a hulu account that never gets streamed for me it was amc plus i have been paying for it for two years and i did not mean to here's this great app I use that helps me track all of my expenses. And because of it, I no longer waste money on AMC Plus or other subscriptions I don't even use. You might've heard of it. It's called Rocket Money, formerly known as Truebill. Do you know how much money your subscriptions really cost? I don't.

Most Americans think they spend around $80 a month on subscriptions. The actual total, get this, it's closer to 200 bucks. That's right. You could be wasting hundreds of dollars each month on subscriptions you don't even know about there's an app that i love using that takes care of that for me it's called rocket money formerly true bill rocket money shows you all of your subscriptions in one place and cancels what you don't want for you rocket money can even find

subscriptions you didn't know you were paying for. You may even find out you've been double charged for a subscription. Get rid of useless subscriptions with Rocket Money now. Get rid of them. Go to rocketmoney.com slash QQ. Seriously, it could save you hundreds per year. That's rocketmoney.com slash QQ. surfing around the worldwide web, what kind of precautions are you taking? How do you know that you're safe out there? Well, Avast is the global leader in cyber protection for more than 30 years and trusted by over 435 million users and prevents over 1.5 billion attacks every month. 1.5 billion attacks. That's like an attack per person in the entire world. Actually, I don't know if that's true or not. I can't remember how many people in the world, but over a billion. Avast's new all-in-one solution, Avast One, helps you take control of your safety and

privacy online through a range of features. Because Avast believes essential protection should be available to everyone, a free version of Avast One will include award-winning free AV, free VPN, free firewall, and much, much more. Now, what are these things you may be asking? I don't totally understand. But the VPN allows you to connect safely and securely to public Wi-Fi and conduct your business wherever you want without the fear of a cybercrime.

The firewall protection keeps your personal information secure and prevents attacks that seek to access your computer and steal your data. The ransomware protection is different, it turns out. It secures your personal photos, documents, and other files from being modified, deleted, or encrypted by ransomware attacks. Avast privacy features keep your identity and your actions hidden. With Avast security solution, you can stop malware, phishing attacks, and virus attacks. And Avast performance products help clean up your computer and speed up whatever device that

you're using. That's my favorite part about Avast. Sure, it's going to be helping me when I'm online. It's going to be a shield against all the dirty stuff out there. But in addition to that, it's also speeding up my computer, which over time, I always do this. I always end up not taking care of my computer because I don't totally understand everything about it. And eventually it just gets bogged down and it slows. Well, Avast helps to speed it right up. the background activity of your apps in order to speed up your PC. It's also got a smart scan that finds and removes viruses and resolves the most common privacy and performance issues through an optimization scan. So thanks to Avast for supporting Quick Question. Confidently take control of your online world with Avast One. It helps you stay safe from viruses, phishing attacks, ransomware, hacking attempts, and other cyber crimes. Learn more about Avast One at avast.com. Jason, I could talk to you about TikTok all day, but that's not true. I'm out of

questions about TikTok. We want to talk about writing and we want to talk about creepy stuff since those are the things that I know you from. One, I'm very interested in not so much like the creative mental emotional process of writing for you because you're one of the most prolific writers i've ever met in my life just your sheer output of novels that you were keeping up while you were working full-time at cracked um i want to know like uh physically where are you when you're writing? The physical act of writing is very fascinating to me as a subject, even if the answers are not like interesting, like you're not, you don't need to be hanging upside down or reinventing the wheel or anything like that.

I just want to know, like, are you at your desk at one location for every book you've ever written in your life? Or do you bounce around a lot? Are you writing it while walking? What's the scoop? Every time I read about the habits of other authors or more famous authors or authors of the past, I realize none of their experiences line up with mine because I can really be anywhere when writing. I can take a laptop to the sofa. I

can write in my kitchen. I have a desk here, an office setup because I've been working from home since 2007. So I've got the home office set up in my office chair. I do most of my writing here. But if I got kicked out of this room and had to go write on my bed with a laptop, I would not skip a beat. Most authors, like there's some who have to like rent a cabin in the woods to write away from their families. There's some people have to like get a hotel room or like Stephen King had like this particular old 1940s typewriter or whatever that he used. Yeah. used. And it's like a superstitious thing. And he had like his office and this specific corner at one time where he also did his drugs and stuff. That's obviously not anymore. But no, I don't, for whatever reason, that's never bothered me, which is weird because I

clearly have attention span problems. I am very easily distracted, but if I'm, if writing on the book is the most interesting thing in my brain, nothing can stop me from doing it. I get locked into it. And now I could not write like longhand. I wouldn't be able to, like, it does have to be on a computer, on a word processor. I, you couldn't give me Stephen King's ancient typewriter and expect me to do the same thing. Yeah. I found that I'm very similar to you. I will write on my porch. I write on my couch.

I'll write in coffee shops. I'll just sort of post up whenever. I actually do write a lot of stuff pen in hand in paper because I'm a little bit faster doing that than I am typing. Really? Yeah. Fascinating. You can't type as fast as you can write? Well, I when I'm writing like freehand

it's a lot of it is shorthanded for me. Like I abbreviate things in a way that makes sense to me but might not make sense to a lot of other people and I put a lot of weird symbols in there for where I want to like you know, I'm going to put an asterisk here and then I'm going to finish that sentence somewhere else on the page. My but might not make sense to a lot of other people. And I put a lot of weird symbols in there for where I want to like, you know, I'm going to put an asterisk here and then I'm going to finish that

sentence somewhere else on the page. My, my writing when I'm writing freehand looks completely insane, but it, it just comes out very quickly when I do it. One exception that I found that I wasn't even, that I didn't even realize what I was doing is when it's close to the deadline for,

uh, when a script is due for the television show that I work for, I am sitting at my dining room table. I'm only ever at the dining room table to record this podcast, to do work video calls. And I've found when I'm finishing a script, I don't know what it is that like my brain really connects. No matter how much work I've done elsewhere in the world, my brain really connects. I'm sitting at this dining room table now. That means it's time to like get really serious and do the final polish on this piece. The table's brass tacks. Yeah. That means that you're in it. Okay. And I never start at the table. Like I don't know if I could hotwire my brain and just be like,

what if I just like day one of this assignment, just start in the serious place. And then maybe I'll be done with time to spare. No, I don't do that. Yeah. Or maybe you dilute the seriousness of the table. Yeah. You don't want to do that either. It's such a weird, there's no like, there's no metric for writing in a way that makes it so, It's such a dangerous thing to be doing.

And I don't mean that like... I'm not trying to be hyperbolic or anything. I mean, when you write and you write a lot, that doesn't mean you're getting better at it in a lot of other things. Like Kobe's taking 100 shots after every single practice and that's making him tangibly better. But when you're writing constantly,

a lot of times what you're doing is like you start falling into these little like ruts, basically, of your writing that then you can't get out of. You've got these crutch words that you start to develop and things like that. And so it's hard to say for sure what writing is good for you and what writing is bad for you. Yeah. I will say this in regards to dancing. When I was working at Cracked and putting in the crazy, crazy hours there, I did get, and I still have it, but I have a standing workstation where you just push a button and it either goes to sitting position or standing, right? Because my doctor was like, if you continue sitting for like 18 hours a day, you're going to die.

Wow. like if you continue sitting for like 18 hours a day, you're going to, you know, you're going to die. And one thing that I found was in the standing position, I could do all of the administrative stuff. I could do all of the emails, the feedback and the workshop, all of the many, many things. But when I had to write comedy, I had to be sitting. I could not write jokes and like sitting down to write a column or to do a serious edit on a column that needed work, sitting down was like, okay, now we're getting serious position. In terms of writing the book, I've never even attempted to write on book stuff standing up. It's absurd to think that I could do it because for whatever reason, I have be bent bent over at the waist to be uh to be doing the serious writing stuff standing is like casual casual writing you know it's doing doing all the spreadsheet stuff all that yeah what about hearing voices uh Jason and other people in the in the same room as you like if you're at a coffee shop and you could hear somebody having a conversation or if you had music on that had lyrics, does that derail you at all? Or is it no problem? I have no, if I have a quiet environment, if I'm working, like when I came out to LA to work in the cracked offices, I couldn't

get anything done. Yeah. The people talking behind me, the people talking around me, I couldn't concentrate when I had a real job prior to that, working in like a cubicle farm, I wore headphones and either was listening to like audio books or something like that, lyrics, anything like that didn't bother me. But it had to be enclosed in my own head and I had to have control over it. The sound of a conversation that I can just barely hear where somebody behind me and they're like whispering something something that breaks my concentration completely for whatever reason. But I had no problem, for example, you know, following like listening to one of the A Song of Ice and Fire books and keeping track of what was going on while doing my data entry

stuff. That inability to work in the office was very common amongst crack staffers. And like in retrospect, a very strange amongst crack staffers and like in retrospect a very strange form of torture that i would insist upon when i would have cody and tom come into the office for a couple of meetings and make them stay there until 5 p.m where they just like sat quietly incapable of writing and then they would go home and write through their dinner or whatever at their houses that was yeah there was a big change at our offices where we, for a while, we did all have little rooms. We were in individual rooms and they, I don't know whose decision it was, but

it wasn't just like writers and writers were in the same room either. It was like, I was in a room with somebody who worked on the front end of the site. So we had nothing in common. He was also like a full 30 years older than me. And so our desks face each other, but our monitors obscured our own faces from one another. And I've never gotten more work done in my entire life than in that little tiny room with him. Where you could just shut a door. It was completely quiet. And I could just write there. And then as soon as they moved us into a more collaborative space, it was like, I'm never writing here again.

Yeah. I can't get anything done. Where are you physically writing now, Soren? I write in the garage. I write in that little space in the back of my garage where I record all these podcasts. I can't write in the house because it's just in the same way where I can't have conversations in the background. I can't have other people talking or it, it not only like distracts me for a second, it throws me off course so severely that I have to go through like the whole program of like getting back into writing each time it's over. Um, which was just a

thing. I don't think some people understand my wife, for instance, is not a writer. Um, and so when she like comes in to ask me questions i'm very short with her and she's like are you mad at me i'm like no it's just you don't understand i have to start again and i got to go watch robocop again before i can start writing well that's that's another part of why i bring it up like i'm i'm just like baseline fascinated with it and also uh a thing that that comes up a lot for me anyways is a lot of people who don't write uh have often said whether they mean to be insulting or not um that writing is the kind of thing they think they could be really good at if they just sat down and did it and like again like hop past whether or not that's

insulting um because maybe hey maybe they they could but i do um what i don't think they realize is that the sitting down and doing it part is and can be in my personal experience like the most important and difficult part like the the coming up with fun ideas is a thing that can happen in the shower or on a walk or on a run but like deciding i'm going to do this instead of something else and then like working yourself up into a mental state where you can do that is that like it's it's not just about uh if i found time it's about creating the time to do that uh and that's kind of why i'm so obsessed with uh everyone's answer to this question which so far you guys have both been correct these are right answers by the well it's just that if you do anything creative, whether you're, you're, you make videos or your standup comic or your, you write books, you've had the experience, or if you make video games, you've had the experience of somebody who doesn't do that work coming to you saying, Hey, I've got a great idea for a blank, a video. So I'm going to tell you my idea and then we'll like, you make it and that'll be our partnership.

Like it was my idea and then you made the video and then we'll like, we'll like split the money from her or whatever. It's like, no, having the idea is nothing. Like having, you know, having the idea is not anything. It's, it's the ability to sit down and actually execute it that you see the problems with the idea and then having to work through all of that stuff is that's actually the hard part. So having, you may have an idea for a book that would sell a million copies if it was executed properly, being able to sit down and actually write that book, that's the hard part. Yeah. There's, it was a thing that people would do regularly at crack that would drive me crazy,

which, you know, we had comments on all the articles and you would write a column and you would try and do something very insightful or with with After Hours, we would try and create essentially four pop culture essays for each person at the table, all about the same topic. And at the end, someone would watch that video or read the article that you spent a ton of time on articulating and making it right and everything. And in the comments, somebody would be like, yes, I've been saying this for years. And you have to be like, no, you know, you weren't because that's the whole point was saying it was the hard part. Figuring out how to articulate it so that other people understood it and like it.

That's the hard part. It's like people saying, well, I had the idea for Netflix years before it existed. Like the thing where you just, the stuff just comes up on your TV whenever you want it to. I had that idea. It's like, well, that's not the difficult part of Netflix. There were some technical challenges that had to be overcome that you probably don't fully understand. Yeah. We all had Napster in college and quietly thought, they should do this, but for all movies.

Jason, you should know that I invented the electric toothbrush. Oh, really? Oh, good. Yeah. And then the idea was stolen from me. I realized I could use a motor and I could make a little brush on the end. And I thought, surely at some point I'll get to this. And then electric toothbrushes came out.

You've heard Soren and i talk about our stance on the environment we're pro we love it we love all of it including the amazon rainforest also known as the lungs of the earth because it's responsible for producing more than 20 percent of the world's oxygen that's me being a rainforest magic mind is helping the amazon rainforest through their new program hashtag 14 days of magic they take the program, hashtag 14 days of magic. They take the views of hashtag 14 days of magic and they convert it into cash and they send that to reforestation for one of the Brazilian sectors of the rainforest. And we are teaming up with Magic Mind and they are offering you 20% off your order when you go to magicmind.co slash 14 days of magic and use code

QQ14 at checkout. Devotees of the podcast know that I am always on the lookout for energy solutions. Sometimes I need help getting started in the morning, but more likely I need something to help me maintain energy throughout the day so I can work and stop procrastinating and focus and get things done. I'm trying to get my energy steady throughout the day, especially in long story meetings when coffee was just not cutting it. It made me too jittery and then had that mid-afternoon crash. We all know what I'm talking about. Magic Mind offers solutions to my problems to give you that steady energy throughout the day without the coffee jitters, without those coffee crashes. It's just a little shot and it is designed to improve your mornings. And you can take it with you to work. You can

chug it and get instant energy. Instead of reaching for a second or third, or in my case, a fourth cup of coffee, you can trade that for just this little shot every morning with your first cup of coffee. And then you'll be good to go for the rest of the day. You'll have less stress, less anxiety. And a big part of that is because Magic Mind

helps you get things done. But also because it contains a compound called L-theanine that naturally reduces your body's stress levels. For 20% off and to learn more about Magic Mind's 14 Days of Magic hashtag and their donations to the Amazon rainforest, go to magicmind.co slash 14 days of magic and use code QQ14 at checkout for 20% off. Jason, did you have a quick question for us? I sure, I of course know the format of this show. I listen to it every week.

I mean, it's very rigid. It's a very rigid format. We've never deviated from it. Yes. What is the creepiest or weirdest real thing that has happened to you? love you aunt patty you're the best aunt patty i was visiting her with my family and she was living in some kind of uh townhouse or condo situation where like every house in this uh development was like connected and looked exactly the same it was it was just this this property that she was staying at where it was like you know house after house after house that was identical

and i took the garbage out of the house and dropped it off in the dumpster. And when I turned around, I couldn't tell which house I'd come from. I didn't memorize the number or anything like that. I was so excited that I was chosen to take out the garbage and like be on my own doing a thing in a different state. That was very appealing to me. Like, man, I'm such a big boy. Look at me taking out this garbage all on my own and then I turned around and I immediately didn't know where I was and was like timidly going up to houses I think I walked into one that was definitely not it and then closed that door back in and then I was just like like just where I was at in terms of survival instincts as a 10 or 11 year old was i'm going to just stand in the

street and cry until this is resolved and so i did that for a while just like looking because it really it felt like forever that i couldn't find this house and it felt like uh very twilight zone already with all these identical houses and then ann patty comes up to me and the thing that really set me over the edge was she comes up to me and she sees me crying she sees there's there's clearly something wrong and what she says to me was were you lost which is a reasonable question for her to ask what i heard was are you lost and i had now thought my aunt is has been replaced like like this was i was just at the age where aunt is has been replaced like like this was i was just at the age where i uh could still believe in like terrifying magic that oh thank god my aunt is here but my aunt doesn't recognize me because are you lost is something that you would say to like a stranger that you found crying i fully completely

believed i had stepped out of this condo and into an alternate universe where no one knew who i was so as soon as my aunt said what to my ears sounded like are you lost i fucking lost all composure i i was inconsolable for a while after that until i was returned to the house and everything was straight and down everyone proved that they knew things about you no one else could know i made everyone cut open their arms so I could see the blood, prove that we were all human. That's terrifying. I remember watching Flight of the Navigator as a little kid

and how much fun the kid had on the little spaceship. And then he comes back and his family's like 20 years older. And it was like, that was deeply upsetting to me when I was little, that you would walk out of the space and everything changes and nothing can go back. Okay. I'm going to very briefly derail the entire podcast. Dan, what you said triggered something in my mind. This is a question I've asked on Twitter before, and absolutely no one cared, but I'm sure your audience will find it interesting. You know how,

you know how in like any kind of a body switching movie, like a freaky Friday type movie, big, there's always a scene in every single one of them where the body swapped person has to go speak to one of their friends and convince them, Hey, it's me. I'm in Tom Hanks' body, but I'm actually your young friend, whatever.

I've swapped bodies with Tom Hanks. And they say something, it's like, well, this is something that only whoever would know. So it must be you. It must be true. Now, in real life, if tomorrow a little girl came up to you and said, hey, I'm actually whoever, somebody you know. I'm actually Katie Stoll. I have been body swapped into the body of this seven-year-old child. swapped into the body of this seven-year-old child, is there anything, anything that person could say to you that would actually convince you in real life that they had body swapped, that body swapping was a real thing that could occur?

That's such a great question. I think no, there are so few people. the only thing that comes to my mind is is like one of my brothers because we're very close but even then if if i had said all right prove it say something that only my brother would know i don't think there's anything that fits that category the most embarrassing secrets that both of my brothers had uh i revealed in toasts at their weddings so like that information is out. And I like, and for anyone else who's not as close to me as, as one of my siblings or someone who's like immediately in my family,

there were so many people in my life who was like, like a Katie Stoll showed up as a seven year old girl was like, Hey, I'm actually Katie Stoll. I'll prove it. I'll tell you things only I would know. My birthday isyear-old girl was like, Hey, I'm actually Katie Stoll. I'll prove it. I'll tell you things only I would know my birthday is. And I was just like, Hey,

Katie, I'm going to stop you right there. I'm so sorry. I don't know when your birthday is. So you could, you could say anything. I'm a bad friend. I don't keep track of birthdays.

I think that you have enough. Well, this might actually be very telling, but like, I think you have enough intimate experiences, even with people that are just for like work acquaintances, that you could Rolodex those real quick and try and turn one of those into a question. The problem is just that things that you thought were really memorable, they would be like, oh, I don't remember that. I don't know.

Ask me another one. And you'd be like, oh, ouch. this is a big thing in my world in my industry because every single horror movie every single horror novel ever written you've got to have that scene where the characters go from they're being attacked by vampires obviously early on they don't believe in vampires and there has to be a scene where they finally come to terms with that because otherwise it is very obnoxious to the reader or your audience who it says vampire on the poster like they know they're watching a vampire movie it is only delaying things when you have a character who's like well i for one don't bring vampires you know it's like there's they're literally exploding in the sunlight out there um so you've got to try to

write a scene where they're they're expressing a believable amount of skepticism because that has to be there, but you can't drag it out because it's just pure wasted time. It's the time that it takes to convince this person that zombies are real. It's like I'm literally watching a movie called Day of the Dead. I'm already on board. So in the same thing with the body swapping movie they've always got to have that cutesy scene where it's like only we know where

our secret hideout in the woods is oh it's like oh my gosh you've swapped bodies i've got to help you get your body back but in reality i've always asked myself like what could they possibly show like i would assume i had just gone insane and that none of this was actually happening i would never come around i would uh i would now like to watch or make uh just like a tight cheap indie drama where the scene one is a guy sees zombies and then he holds up in an apartment and tries to convince the person that he's with that there are zombies out there. And it takes the entire length of the movie. Just two people breaking down their walls and finally getting to what is actually at the heart of this, which is like, you know, the question you're not solving is, are zombies real or not?

The question you're solving is like, do you trust me over your own instincts? Can I, what can I say to make you override everything that you think to be true? And then at the 90 minute mark, the other guy's like, okay, you're right. There are zombies. And then we just ended the movie. I feel like you could go the other way. I think you could have somebody come up to their best friend and be like, okay, this is going to sound crazy, but I was just attacked by a vampire. And they're stop say no more i'm on board that sounds crazy as shit and i believe you what are we gonna do i already have stakes point them out which one is it um soren could anyone ever convince you that they had body swamped is there anything they could say that you would actually help them yes i mean katie stole was

a good example because Katie Stoll is somebody I haven't talked to in years. And so like, it would be very difficult. But immediately I was like, what is something only Katie knows? Oh, I would talk to her about this moment where we were on, we were filming out in this ranch out near Palm Springs

and it was like crazy hot. And where we were shooting had all these flies inside of it. And she was going crazy from these flies. It was like, it was literally making her like her, her eye was twitching in like a cartoon way. And, uh,

I said to her, I will, if you want, I will kill all of these flies, but that's on you. I mean, that's their deaths are on you. And she was like,

yes, please. And, uh, and then I systematically went through in between takes and just killed every single fly in this place which ended up being like 40 flies and i feel like i could turn that into a question well no longer because now everyone knows it but there's a because that jumped to my mind immediately i was like oh i could i could

do this i think i could come up with a question that would be suitable for anybody in my life um if katie is out there listening that's the reason we dragged you into this is because i just recorded your show like half an hour ago so i did i did even more news that's why that name popped into my head if there's people out there trying to google katie stalls who is this why do you drag this woman into this scenario it was just a random example of someone we've all known that yeah uh because i literally don't know the names of any of soren or dan's other friends i would also be so sorry go ahead earlier when you were talking about the good old days at cracked you said when we worked with cody and his friends like i don't like cody

the other host of that podcast was the other name you can come up with. I'm excited that you will hold Soren in my name just for the next podcast you do. Just for an hour and no more. I don't know that I would ever, that I'd make Katie do a test. If she came to me, of all people, and was like, I'm seven years old now, I would, I would, I would be so flattered that she was like, you're the one who could solve this. That I'd immediately be like, yeah, yeah. Okay. That's I believe you. I, you came to the right person. Okay. Uh, Soren, do you have a creepiest thing that's, that's ever happened to you in real life?

uh soren do you have a creepiest thing that's that's ever happened to you in real life oh boy um yeah i i've talked before on here about the glowing grave which is a there's a in my hometown which is was a mining town and then a farming town with potatoes there's this place called white hill uh which has an old cemetery that's exactly the type of creepy cemetery you'd expect from like a stephen king movie like the hinges are literally coming off of one side of the gate and inside there's all these old 1863 and around that time gravestones. When you're down on the road down below it, you can look up at this,

where the approximation of where this little cemetery is and you will see a glowing light up there. And when you get up there, it's impossible to find. But every single night, we used to do this as a kid. We were like, oh, you haven't seen the glowing grave? Let's go see the glowing grave. And you'd go up there, you'd sit down there on the road, and you just look up this hillside. It's like, no, there's somebody clearly up there. There's a light up there. And as you got up there, there's nothing. You can't find it to the point where like we brought walkie-talkies and like one person was just up there and we're like all right shine a

flashlight all right you're about this close to it move to the left do you see it and i'm like no i don't see it uh and i have to this day i haven't figured out what it is wow can i has any like is this a famous is something only you and your friends know about or is it something that locally everybody, like you call it going brave? If I Google that, will I find? No. It is something that's local. It's urban legend in the entire town. Everybody knows it.

But it has not, in a lot of ways, where small town stuff hasn't made the leap onto the web yet. I've started to look for it because Dan and I researched our hometowns and I couldn't find any information about it. But if you went to Carbondale, you'd be like, do you know where the glowing grave is? They'd be like, yeah, I'll show you.

Yeah. Confirmed just tried Googling that and there's a lot of similar things, but like it has that Google notification where it's like this contains most of the words that you're searching for except carbondale right right yeah it just crosses the line through it um but there's another one that i thought of last night when i was thinking about this uh i had uh this is okay you have to bear with me for the very first part of

this i had a dream once okay that Okay. I had a dream once that there was a, we all knew there was an earthquake coming and we were all preparing for this earthquake. And we had still gone to work the day of the earthquake and it was in the old offices and everything. And back when I'd worked on the second floor there and then an earthquake happened and I could feel the building going over. And when I woke up, LA was having an earthquake. And it was like one of those premonition dreams where your dream leads to some sort of culmination of when you wake up. Sometimes it's like you have those dreams where you're like counting down until an alarm goes off. And when it's supposed to go off, your alarm in your house goes off. And it made me not question whether I was like clairvoyant or anything, but made me question the nature of my dreams. Like whether I'm actually,

there is a story there or there's like, I'm creating a narrative in my head or I'm just, it's just a random flip book of pictures that are unrelated to one another. And then right as I'm waking up, my brain like links them all into like what could have been a story. Like, I don't know that I'm actually experiencing the story in the dream or if it's just when I'm, as soon as I'm waking up and like that logical part of my brain clicks back on, it just makes all these connections and throws out everything else.

It's like, this was the story. That scenario. It is in the first book and the first John dies at the end book as an example of something that he couldn't explain. It's cause that was written in there because I had the experience of, it was a dream where something, either a gun was about to go off or something was about to explode.

And when it went off, there was, I was woken up by thunder. So the dream had led up to the thunder as if the dream timed it for the thunder to end. It's the same thing where some people said they've woken up to alarms where in the dream, they were waiting for a phone call and then their phone rang, but it was actually their alarm going off. But the dream started before that as if while asleep, they knew exactly what time it was. Or in my my case somehow knew when the thunder was coming. This is something that I have researched because it creeped me out. And the explanation, the explanation for, and this will come into play with my story, but the explanation for something you experienced always sounds good

to other people, but not to you. So the explanation is like, well, you're retroactively remembering the dream. Like that's not actually the dream you had. You woke up and then when you heard that, like, it feels like you, it's like, no, that's not how it happened. But if you're someone else, that's, that's very easy enough to dismiss the same thing. Me sitting here, like you're glowing gray thing. It's like well you know they're probably it's probably just it was foggy and there's probably like a street light that reflects off of it and they you know probably from that angle but it and like you would say well no we would have noticed that like we you know but you weren't there that if you weren't there it's very easy to write off the you know the experience but no the the dream that that

that thing that you just described, that's something that's weirded me out for many, many years. Yeah. And it feels like everybody's got one. Everybody's got one of those moments where it's like, how could I have known in my sleep that this was going to happen? And I think that it's, I have to assume that it works backwards, that that's just how it is. It's like, yeah, you're exactly like you were saying, as vivid as the details are of the dream and as intimate as it feels, it really is just a dream.

I mean, it's like, you don't actually know what it is while you're in it. And it might be- So you're buying the explanation that it's your brain retroactively making sense of it? I think so, yeah. I'm not buying that at all. Because when I wake up, I'm in charge and I know what's going on

and I've got my wits about me you know that there's like weird elements of a dream where it's like a snowflake where as soon as you start to think about it for a little while it starts to kind of dissolve anyway like as soon as you start really like hammering down into the details of it you're like wait a second what was that part and then

it just sort of like melts away in a way where you're like oh I never had a hold of this in the first place. Yeah. Nope, still doesn't break. Jason, do you have one? Yeah, because as soon as we talked about the premise of this episode, the first thing I said was, well, what is scarier about today's world than cancel culture? scarier about today's world than cancel culture. So let me tell you about an actor named Kevin Sorbo who had a thriving career until he came out as a conservative family values Christian. No.

I'm going to tell, this is a story that I'm telling in public for the first time. My wife probably has been waiting for me to tell the story somewhere. Okay, Soren, hit the scoop alert, the theme song. Hot school. Thank you. That was a soundboard, guys. He actually did record all of these into a soundboard.

It was all just, it was the first take. He didn't spend a lot of time on it. Didn't need anymore. Didn't need anymore. Well, once I did it, I heard it and felt it. It was the right one. So this is the story of a middle-aged man who went viral on TikTok. No, I'm not, seriously.

And he did it, And that man was me. One of my first videos that went huge on there was me asking a very simple question. Have you ever lost an item, a physical item in a way that physically shouldn't have been possible? And this on TikTok, this video has like 260,000 views. It has 6,500 replies from people with their own story where they were in an enclosed space, like a room or a car or something like that. They were alone. They dropped an item that should have been easily visible. They could not find it and they never found it. It glitched out of the universe. And then in the replies to that TikTok, you will find people talking, telling, there's like a subset of those people for whom the item reappeared in an equally implausible way. And one person moved and they did not pack up the item like it was lost.

And then when they unpacked at their new place, there was the item that had been packed, even though they packed, they did the packing themselves. They don't have a roommate. It was only them. And there's almost everybody I ask has this, this, uh, situation. So I'm going to tell mine. The problem is if you know, you are a listener, it'd be very easy to just assume I made this up, but I did not because if I was going to make up a horror story, it would be way cooler than this. It would be about being stalked by a serial killer or something. So you may remember back in early 2020, there was a pandemic and everything was shut down for a while. So during this period,

which actually continued from then until I would say now, there was a situation during the lockdown where me and my wife had to go stay in a hotel for a couple of nights. So it was still a period when, um, it was kind of an eerie experience because it was like, you know, it was that thing where they, there was first time I had been anywhere. Like I wasn't going out to eat at restaurants. I wasn't doing anything. And so we had to go stay at this place and like the staff were all like masked and behind plexiglass. It was, it seriously weirded me out. Um, and like the other thing where like the room service was not cleaning the rooms,

this was foreshadowing, um, and, and all of that. So in like, we, it wasn't, you know, like a vacation thing. We were going to be in the hotel. We would get food like delivered, or we would go pick up curbside. Cause again, most in, you know, dining rooms have been closed still. It was still during that part, that part of the, the pandemic. So the item, my wife has a necklace that is the most valuable thing she owns, but not in monetary value. It's sentimental value. It's not diamonds or anything like that. But I would say of all the things she has, it's one of a handful of things she would be most upset about losing. We would rather lose an entire laptop or even an entire car than this necklace. Now, for the purposes of the story the thing you need

to know this necklace is not like a dainty thin chain that could easily disappear it's like a like a heavy silver kind of like a chunky type necklace has multiple strands if you wanted it up in your fist it would be about the size of a golf ball like that's all the more you can compress it. So the way we operate in hotels, and this may be an inappropriate thing to say, but I was always told not to leave valuables out when you leave as to be tempting to the cleaning staff. Not impugning anybody that works in a hotel, but some of them probably have meth addictions and probably would steal your earrings or whatever to sell for meth money. And then, because it'd be very easy for them to say, well, you probably lost them, right? Like that's the thing. And so we were always told, you just don't leave stuff out. And that's always been our habit.

So the way she, my wife handles her jewelry is she has her suitcase. And if you picture a suitcase, it's one of the kind of suitcases that has like the wheels on the bottom and the handle that extends. And then on the front, there's a cut. There's like a,

just a pouch that you unzip where you can put little items. And it's specifically for, you can put little stuff in there, your, your jewelry or whatever. So she would set that next to the little vanity in the hotel room where she would get, get ready. And then when she would take the jewelry off, she would just put it in that little patch in the suitcase and zip it up. So the only time we went out during this period, because again, as I said, we got food, we would get it delivered or whatever, is we took a walk. There was like a college campus across the street, closed because again, pandemic. And she had it on while we were, just took this walk. And if it sounds strange that she would wear this piece of jewelry,

that was so precious to her just while we were walking around, keep in mind, we had not left the house. This was like a special thing to get out and walk in a new place. It was like something we had not been doing. We were, we actually like wore nice clothes and just. Yeah. On that score, you were wearing your top hat. You were wearing your necklace, which has a giant clock on it. Yes.

And baseball glove, roller skates, no bottoms. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. So, yeah. And then the hat has lights on it so you can see the way. So anyways, no big deal. We go for the walk.

She comes back, takes off the jewelry, and puts the necklace in the pouch and the suitcase, zips it up. The next day, we stay overnight. Next day, we go home. I am downstairs. She is taking the suitcase upstairs to go through the process of getting the crap out of it and putting it away. And she calls down to me and says, I can't find the necklace. There is nothing I can say that will accurately convey the level of panic that hits in that moment. Now, I know what some of you are saying, Jason, are you not a professional novelist? How can you say you don't have the words? Listen to me. I save that for the novels. For the purposes of this podcast and the amount of preparation I put in this podcast,

there is nothing I can say at the level of effort I'm putting out that will convey the level of panic that's caused. Because it'd be one thing, like if I had found out I'd left my phone behind or something like that, it's a hassle, but this is something that cannot be replaced. It is one of the few items that cannot be replaced. So by the time she called to me, she had already done what any person would do, which is get all of the, like she looks in the pouch that's not in there, get all of the clothing out and then shake it out thinking, well, maybe somehow I didn't put it in the pouch. I put it in the main suitcase, at which point it could be

inside a folded up piece of sweater or something. So she taking each item of clothing out and then shaking it out, didn't find it. And then did the one thing that every, again, any smart person on this podcast, but do, which is to see if somehow it fell inside the suitcase. Like if there was a hole in the pouch or if it fell inside the lining, but if you know,

if you see the design of the suitcase, there's not a place for that to happen. It's the, the pouch is literally just like a flap of canvas or whatever they make suitcases out of with a zipper that goes up and around and closes it on three sides. And there's not like layers of material there. So it's not just that that didn't happen. It's that it's obvious that it didn't happen but even that would be implausible because again this is something that's like the size of your your car keys like it's um and if you've ever lost something incredibly valuable you know what happened next which is you start looking in stupid places 100 check check the freezer. Absolutely. Yeah. Maybe I fell into a fugue state and put them in the freezer.

My car key's in the oven. I don't know. Because it doesn't make sense. Because again, you could say, well, maybe did you think it was stolen? We didn't encounter anybody. We didn't come in contact, but that's the reason why the pandemic is relevant to this. It's not like, you know, well, we had an all night, you know, orgy in the hotel room and the next morning the necklace was gone, like not

even cleaning staff were coming in. And when we weren't in the room, she had the necklace on. So we weren't thinking theft, even though normally that's what, you know, that's what I would say, We weren't thinking theft, even though normally that's what I would say. Like, oh, well, probably some foreigner stole it. But no, seriously, that would be the normal thing. With something valuable, you say, well, it's gotten stolen. There was no opportunity for that to happen. So I tear the car apart.

I pull the lining out of the trunk because we had the suitcase back there thinking, well, somehow we hit a bump and it pulled the zipper open and it fell out of the zipper and fell into the container where the spare tire is. I pulled the spare tire out of there. I pulled the floor mats out. I get under the edges of the carpet with a flashlight. We call the hotel multiple times to talk to multiple people. We asked them to search the room. We asked them to search the parking lot, the lobby. Did it get turned into the lost and found? This goes on for hours. And me being a man, I keep going back to the suitcase and thinking, well, maybe my wife didn't check the pouch where she put it in. And I keep obsessively opening this pouch and running my hand along there thinking, well, surely with my superior male searching powers, because I can rotate objects in my brain in ways that a woman would never be able to.

And of course, it's not there. But I'm doing that stupid, irrational thing where I'm just searching the suitcase over and over again. I'm like running my hands all around the fabric, all around the material in the bottom of it. I'm like feeling all the seams, even though if this thing got, got somehow trapped between layers and fabric,

it would be again, like a big golf ball. It'd be comical. Like it would be, it would be obvious from across the room. Um, and at this point, it's like, I don't know, it's late at night and we have resolved the next day. We're going to drive back to the hotel, which is hours away. It's like four hours away. But the goal is we're going to search the grounds ourselves, search the parking lot ourselves. We know exactly the path we walked. We remember exactly where we parked because we told the staff to check that spot and think, well, maybe the park, a car has this tire parked over it. And then we think what we're going to do is go to that college campus

and we're going to search the grounds. We'll retrace the path we walked with a flashlight, or during the day we'll check and see if it fell off into the grass, even though this is a type of necklace. If it fell off, you would feel it. They'd make a noise, like it's not a dainty little chain. It would make a sound like falling off your neck. And then there was a gas station we stopped at on the way home. We would stop there.

We would check their parking lot, talk to their staff, check around. And again, none of this makes sense. She was not wearing it during the drive home. There's no way it could have gotten out. You were talking about somebody having to have broken into the trunk of the car, knowing exactly how to get it out of the suitcase or whatever. Right. But at that point, you're trying to solve an impossible thing with a different impossible thing. It makes sense to behave irrationally at that point, because you looked in all the rational places and it wasn't there. Yes. And we are, and at this point I am by no means rational. Like I'm so extremely upset because she's upset. Nothing upsets me more than when she's upset. So, and she's, at this point, I'm upstairs, she's downstairs and has been for some time because there was nothing else to do upstairs. The search had moved on to her working

the phone from the sofa downstairs in the living room. She's one who's been calling the hotel, talking to the, you know, the night manager, talking to the cleaning people, you know, and then she tried to call that college campus. It turned out there was nobody there. We're seeing if maybe there's a lost and found or somebody on staff, a janitor, like a search, whatever. She's been down there. It is bedtime.

We've decided we're going to just the next day, I'm going to drive back either both of us or just me. It is time for bed. The suitcase is on the bed. I go to move the suitcase off the bed and the necklace is in there in that pouch. What? It was not caught on a seam. It was not tucked out of sight. It was not poking out of something. It was sitting neatly in the middle of the pouch, exactly where it would be if you had taken it off on the counter and put it in

the middle of the pouch. It's kind of neatly coiled up in there. Do you have very clear memories of checking the pouch? Seems like a pretty obvious question. Over and over, right? You said like you checked it over and over like obsessively. I checked it not just because again, it's not I'm checking the pouch. I was checking the edges of the pouch, which again, the pouch was like deep enough to fit your hand into it. We're not talking about a patch that's six feet long by eight feet. It's deep

enough to fit your hand into and then sweep your hand across maybe a foot wide and maybe six inches deep. And I'm not, I'm running my hand along there to feel, is there like a tear in something where it could have fallen out? And thinking, well, if there's like a hole in the bottom of the pouch, it could have fallen out into the hallway while we're rolling it down the steps of the hotel. Maybe it bounced in the step and it jostled. So I'm looking. I'm not just searching the pouch. But again, this pouch is not a large space.

It's like the combined space of your four pants pockets. Like, that's it. So now I know immediately what you, both of you and every listener saying, obviously my wife snuck up and put it there because she's trying to gaslight me into convincing me that I'm insane so that she can have me institutionalized and seize the family fortune. Yeah, 100%. That is word for word what I was going to say.

And that's what I thought too. The issue is she literally never had the opportunity to do it. I had been obsessively checking that pouch over and over again, and she had been downstairs that whole time. She'd never had a chance to come up and sneak it into there into the pouch to to convince me um that that i had gone mad uh when i found it in there i immediately instead of running down and talking to her i left the room and searched the upstairs to see who else was there with me yeah because i thought someone at the hotel stole the necklace, followed us home, felt bad about it,

broke, broke into the house and then quietly put it in the suitcase because I could not imagine any other physical possibility other than that, a stranger who had stolen it and then realized oh crap i'm in deep trouble if this like this is more expensive an item than i thought i'm going to just give it back to these people and then they got into the awkward situation thinking they were going to follow us just like 20 minutes to our house it's like where do these people live and they've been following us for four straight hours and then when they parked they had to do

a comical thing where they climbed in through a window not a thing you can do in a modern house without like breaking it um and got up to the second floor and somehow reinserted it into the pouch and suitcase and then exited the house again without me finding them without making a noise and without damaging anything and closing all of the exits and the doors and windows behind them. Um, and we, I went down, told, told Shannon, it's like, I said, look, I, I, and I didn't, I didn't grab it and bring it down to her. I brought her up and I said, look, it's, it's like, it's here in the suitcase. And we both, both just stood there and kind of have never told the story because if you tell the story to someone else, it's so easy to say one, either you're making it up, like you're exaggerating, like clearly,

surely a suitcase has hundreds of pouches and you just skip one of them. It's like, no, it's, it's one. I can take a picture of the suitcase and show it to you or whatever, but it doesn't matter. Please do. It's very easy to dismiss it if it's happened to somebody else. That's why I was saying earlier. If it's somebody else's story, it's so easy to say, wow. So what I would kill for, like if I ran to a genie who gave me one wish, it would be able to see that situation from a third person point of view and observe what actually occurred.

Yeah. rational explanation is that this necklace was sitting in this pouch the whole time. And that me and my wife both went up there and both ran our hands around that pouch over and over again, our hands missing this easily visible necklace by millimeters. But for some reason, both of us had a glitch in our brains that made the necklace invisible to us. And that we were sitting there staring right at it and running our hands around the pouch with this big chunky necklace right in the middle of it and somehow not registering somehow not registering that it was there yeah it's interesting that you that you say that we as listeners would just quickly assume no you, you missed it. It was in the pouch the whole time, obviously. But the reality is,

I uncritically believed your theory that someone else was in the house. Like, once you got to that part, I was like, oh yeah, that's obviously fucking it, no question. Some little impish youth stole the necklace, was hanging out in the attic, and was like, oh man, these guys are really stressed about this. This is... it back i gotta put it back this is a bad time i'm not ready for for this level of emotional devastation let me just put this back and then live in the

in the attic for a while i guess uh i have a question for you actually david david you call me david yeah, I did. God, man. It's like being back in the forums, honestly. It's like being back in a meeting. I have a question for you, Jason. Why did you have to leave your house? What do you mean? Why did we have to leave our house?

You had to go to a hotel. It wasn't a vacation, right? You guys had to leave for a reason? No, it was a family emergency we had okay or we had a family member that they didn't have covid but they had they had a medical thing that was complicated by the fact that the world was in covid mode and it was it was a nightmare but not you didn't have a carbon monoxide leak that needed fixing. No. Shoot, I thought I had it.

Well, no, but the funny thing is, here's the thing. It says something about our marriage because the obvious, because I was the one who found it. If you're my wife, there's no mystery at all. Right. Your crazy freaking husband had it in his pocket the whole time. He was embarrassed. And was trying to pull a prank or something. And for the first time in your entire lives together, your 20 some years together, he's become a prankster.

And then finally realized it had gone too far and put it in the suitcase, you know, in order to drive you insane so that he can have you institutionalized and then go, I don't know. Family fortune, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah, just seize her family fortune and all that. And not at one point did she ever doubt that I – like she didn't question me like, did you put it there it is like she like i told her and i think because she saw my state of mind either either i put it there again in a fugue state again not something that's known to happen to me not not a problem but the the mechanics of when i would have moved it and when i would

have put it back even then become complicated yeah um so like even even then like from her point of view like like let's say because let's say i i took it for what to teach her a lesson about the jewelry i don't know um like if i became this very sadistic person and took it knowing that it would upset her tremendously and then at some point realize oh this, this prank has gone too far. Yeah. This is not going to make a good Tik TOK. I'm going to just delete that the whole video. And then I'm going to put it back.

Well, obviously I wouldn't put it back in the goddamn suitcase. I would, I would go out to the car. I would go out to the car and say, oh, you know what? I found this under the brake pedal. I don't know why it was there, but I bet it fell out. I bet when you were leaning over to get something out of the car, it fell off your necklace. And then when I took a curve at 80 miles an hour, it slid. Yeah. When I was drifting, because sometimes I'll drift like in Fast and Furious, and my drifting, the momentum probably drove. I just didn't think to look under the brake pedals.

When in reality, I had looked thoroughly under the brake pedals. I had looked under there thinking, well, hey, maybe I would put it somewhere where it could plausibly have escaped our notice. I would not have tried to convince her she had gone nuts. Of course. And that's the story. And I'm worried that the listeners are waiting for me to come up with some explanation for how it worked. I have none. I don't even have a theory other than we both temporarily went insane together.

Yeah. Because the idea of someone being in your house, stealing it and replacing it sounds crazy, but it also sounds like the exact same level of crazy as the two of you looking and searching for this thing and both of you missing it. Like, I know that the second one sounds more plausible because just it's less fantastic, but it still requires a tremendous logical leap, I think. a tremendous logical leap, I think. I would be so terrifying to actually see what happened, to watch yourself and watch your wife both going back to this place where it obviously is and just swiping your, like pawing it, pawing it and not seeing it and being like, no, it's not here, it's not here, and then wandering around more in the house.

I think I would lose my, I don't know, I'd have to question everything after that. Yeah. Because again, it's not like we found it on the floor in a place where it's like, Oh, that's weird. I'm well, I probably stepped on it a couple of times and somehow didn't see it on, in the, on the rug because that'd be easy to think, well, we weren't expecting it to be on the floor or whatever. It was in the place it was supposed to be. In other words, it was never lost. The entire process she went through of unpacking the suitcase, shaking out all the clothes, all of that stuff, none of that would have happened. Do you see what I'm saying? It was

in the original spot. It was exactly where it was supposed to be the whole time. It was never lost. The initial moment of, oh, this is lost. I've got to start looking for it. Let alone her realizing it's so lost that she needs to call down to me to help look for it. Like it doesn't get to that place. And then all of the stuff that happens after that of me, like pulling the suitcase apart and running my hands over obsessively, you know, probably searching that pouch. I would say at least 20 times in that way that you do when you're just totally at a loss is for what else to do.

You just search the same places over and over and over again. Thing is going to turn up. This was the one time it did. I know. And now this happens, you're going to do it twice as up more. Like you're going to, the next time you lose something,

you're gonna be like, okay, well let me, if I can sneak up on this pocket maybe it'll be there but i get this question a lot as a professional writer as a master of horror as i've called myself and people ask me like well have you ever seen a ghost you ever seen like that comes up in press interviews a lot like have you ever seen a monster or something you couldn't explain answers no not even i've never seen a ufo i've never seen a ghost. I've never like,

other than the weird prophetic dream thing where you, your dream somehow anticipates things happening. Uh, no, never. I I've not, I've not seen anything like that. This is the one supernatural thing that has ever happened to me, if you can call it that. And so when I posted that TikTok, found out that everybody has one example of that story. Definitely. But for me, it was a piece of jewelry. It was my wife's wedding ring or her engagement ring where we were at a,

it was at her parents' house in Arizona. We were going to her sister's baby shower and Colleen was getting ready in the bathroom. And as she was getting ready, like she was like putting it on her finger, taking it off. I can't remember which, but she dropped it. And it's a small little bathroom. And she heard the sound of it hitting the toilet, but she didn't hear the sound of it hitting the floor. And she was, she thought for sure she had dropped in the toilet. And so like, I came in there and

searched for 45 minutes, like looking around every scouring, every little piece of the floor, there's nowhere for this thing to go. Cause it's a, you know, it's a bathroom. There's not a lot of like little like hideaways or anything. It's everything is, is flush and, and epoxy because you don't want water damage going in anything and so i'm like filing around finally i'm like putting my hand all the way down through the toilet and up through the other side to see if somehow because i've like it ramped somehow like it fell in and then ramped up and through the back uh through the p-trap and like i can't find it anywhere and it's just gone and we're we're both like it has both like, it has to be here.

It has to be here. And we're already half an hour late to the party. Everyone's been out in the house for so long that we finally just give up. And later, my son, he must have been like four. But he also didn't talk for a very long time. So that's going to become important in a second. He was carrying it and he had it in his hand. And we were like, in a way where you would be like on the verge of tears because you don't know what's going on. I was like,

where did you get this? Where did you find it? And so he was very taken aback and all of a sudden a little scared. And I was like, no, no, no, no. You just take me to this room and show me exactly where you found it. And so like, it's hard to get a story out of a young child anyway, but also one that doesn't have the language for it. Like it wasn't clear where he had gotten it from.

My guess is that it had fallen off, hit in the toilet, hit the toilet and then had gotten lodged somehow up higher, like between the cabinet down below and the drawer above. There's a little ledge there that somehow it just sat up perfectly there. And I wasn't on the right level because I was looking at the ground. And that somehow, because he went in there and that's exactly eye level for him, he was just like, oh, there it is. But at no point could he make it clear to me where it was or how would it have gotten hold would it have freaked you out more if he had

said i've always had this papa fell out of my butt i don't know why i gave him an accent no he's got one that's's pretty dead on, Ronan. Little Victorian child. Yeah. Dan, have you ever lost an item inexplicably in a way that shouldn't have been possible? I'm sure I have. It would only slow down the podcast and disappoint if I sat here and tried to remember exactly what item it was. And you both told your stories in such great detail that that i know it

would let it down i i the only thing that is making me think of is a a this is not supernatural it's a quirk of my dad's when we were younger um he would hide things from us to teach us lessons sometimes like i would come home and put my wallet on the counter and then later i would return to the counter to get my wallet and I couldn't find it. And I would look everywhere for it. And he had like moved it to a closet somewhere. And he's like, that'll teach you to leave your wallet on the counter. No, that's where I wanted it to be.

I was right. That's rough, man. That'd do some psychological damage. Yeah, I think it occurs to me now that on a previous podcast, I have talked about going into hotels and immediately putting everything in the exact spots where they're supposed to go. And I think that must be where that comes from.

I don't doubt it at all. Yeah. Well, that's fascinating, Jason. Yeah. I think we are just about out of time. I do want to let our listeners know that we did find out what happened to the necklace and how it happened. It's a very interesting story and it's in the afterword of, if this book exists, you're

in the wrong universe. Yeah, this is all viral marketing. Well, it's great to talk to you, Jason. Thank you. I really checked in for a second. I don't know if you heard it where I paused before Jason because I was like, yeah, am I going to do this again? Am I going to call him David?

Yeah. Do you have any last things you want to plug? We know we can find you. I think it's got just about all of your links to socials and links to all of your books and your sub stack at john dies at the end dot com yeah i should all be there but also if you just google my name it'll you'll find it all eventually it's it's an unusual name um and the and again the book is out tuesday the 18th when does this episode go live uh the 21st uh yeah so it's already out wherever you buy wherever you buy books unless you're you get them at like the

grocery store or something they don't they're not going to have it like walmart but they'll have it at bookstores or at amazon or barnes and noble or any of the you know the bookstores all the many all the many book chains that are still left, you know, you know what they are. I don't need to name them all. Yeah. Well, great. Always. I have a really bad habit of talking in the middle of stretching that I'm trying to work on.

Always great to have you. I, I know I'm going to love this book. I've loved all the other books that you've written. And I can't wait to talk to you again. When you are writing another book he's he's in the middle of it we are we did it again we did it uh thanks jason

i've got a quick quick question for you all right i want to hear your thoughts, I wanna know what's on your mind I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright The answer's not important, I'm just glad that we could talk tonight So what's your favourite? Who did you get? When do I be remembered? Was it out there? Where did all that go? Oh, forget it I saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien Two best friends and comedy writers If there's an answer, they're gonna find it

I think you'll have a great time here I think you'll have a great time here