Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - QQ ep 80 - Jason Podcasts at the End (and the beginning) feat. Jason Pargin

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

In this episode we welcome back Jason Pargin to talk about inventions we can't believe haven't been invented yet.  As always big thanks to our sponsors.  Thanks to Raycon!.  Go To buyraycon.com/qq for 15% off your entire Raycon order.  Thanks to FEALS.  Become a member today by going to Feals.com/qq and get 50% off your first order with free shipping. 

Hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, the podcast where two best friends and comedy writers kill time by asking each other questions while waiting for the show to either take off or fall apart. I am one half of this program. Morning riser, evening runner, late night writer Daniel O'Brien, joined as always by my co-host who insists on being called the Ty Cobb of podcasting, Soren Bui. Soren, say hello. Hello, everybody.

I'm the Ty Cobb of podcasting. I'm an award-winning writer, a better-than-average neighbor, and just a truly outstanding wedding guest. If I've been to one of your weddings and you're listening, go ahead, write in. Tell me I'm wrong. I dare you. Soren, that's so funny that you bring that up, because every single bit of this is going to just invite more questions than anything else. But on Monday night, I was taking an adult

Afro-Brazilian dance class over Zoom because I'm trying to learn how to be a better dancer because I've been thinking about this John Mulaney quote where he said, the worst dancer at a wedding is the person who's not dancing. And I thought, sometimes that's me. And I don't want to be that person. I want to be someone who is a fun guy at a wedding. And so I want to dance more. And I'm only going to dance more if I feel more comfortable dancing, which is why I'm taking adult Zoom Afro-Brazilian dance classes.

And the connection to you specifically is years ago, we were in Beloit, Wisconsin, a small town in Wisconsin named Beloit because there's a college there. And it was a bunch of cracked people who were going to perform live comedy and then screen Michael Swayman, Abe Everson's movie, Kill Me Now.

This was also, we also flew out Caitlin Large, who was in the movie. She's the lead in the movie. And there was a party one of the nights that we were in beloit wisconsin a strange town that none of us had been to before and it had been years since caitlin and i had seen each other and we grew up together so we were doing a lot of catching up just sitting at this bar restaurant talking at this loud party and because we were in a strange town you saw and obviously didn't know anyone but there was music playing you weren't going to interrupt caitlin and i because you're you're you recognize

that we're old friends catching up and uh you didn't want to like be a strange presence there so you just went on the dance floor with all these strangers and just danced and it wasn't like a college party kind of thing i know it's a college town, but this is just like a spontaneous dance party at a hotel bar. And you're dancing by yourself, just like smiling and having a good time. There's nothing ridiculous or sad about it. I remember thinking at the time, this must have been like nine years ago. And I was thinking like, he's just so comfortable out there. What's it going to take for me to get that comfortable? And we've now learned what it's going to take.

A year being alone by myself and then finally being like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to take a Zoom dance class so I could be like Soren in the past and John Mulaney in that one late night interview I saw. I think this is a great step forward for you. Thanks, man. That's a lot of information that I was not prepared to unload. Thanks to Feels for supporting our show. Feels has me feeling my best every day

and it can help you too. Become a member today by going to feels.com slash QQ and you'll get 50% automatically taken off your first order with free shipping. Thanks to Raycon for supporting Quick Question. Raycon earbuds start at about half the price of any other premium wireless earbuds on the market. Raycon's offering you 50% off your entire order, and here's what you got to do to get it. Go to buyraycon.com slash QQ. Here's what you got to do to get it.

Go to buyraycon.com slash QQ. It's like a leap. This is a dancing leap forward. Can other people see you in the class or do you have your camera off? I've turned my camera off except for the end. But some of my friends in real life were texting me because they knew that I was doing this. So I turned my camera, my phone camera, I filmed myself to send to them so I could show them my progress. And brother, I took three videos and I sent the best one and it was the most humiliating thing I've ever done. There is nothing worse than going through these three videos after the fact and being like, oh, this one.

these three videos after the fact and being like, this one. Well, when you start something brand new, you suck at it no matter what. No matter how many times you learn that lesson that it's okay to suck at something, it doesn't register. You're always like, well, I'm

bad at it. I don't want people seeing this. When I learned to drive, I went up to the mountains alone. I was like, I'll just do it here. This is where I will learn to park. This is where I'll learn to do it all because no one's here. Yeah. And I think I also, you didn't learn to drive on the fanciest car in the world.

You didn't learn to fly a jet first. No. I think I made a mistake. And you've seen me before, so you could see this coming even if you haven't seen me you could tell by my voice that afro brazilian dance is not it's not that's not where you start that is a uh a hip forward dance yeah that's the instructor saying it doesn't matter what happens with your knees or your arms i'm like well fuck me then yeah you're that's very hip centric you're right yeah um but let's get into our show because we have a guest and i'm very excited uh so i want to waste no more time talking about dancing this guest has been here before if cracked was like a kingdom with

jack o'brien as its sultan i as his whispering grand vizier, Soren, the boy prince who would be king, our next guest would be, without question, the executive editor, ladies and gentlemen, New York Times bestselling author, Jason Pargin. Sorry, I've been a little bit distracted because I'm Googling Afro-Brazilian dancing because what I'm picturing in my mind is extremely problematic for you to be doing. I'm sure it's not. Just because it's called that, I'm not accusing you of anything. It's just I wanted to get what I'm picturing out of my head because I'm sure that I'm the one who's ignorant here. Yeah, it's crucial that you and all of our listeners know I didn't name it that. That is the name of the class that I signed up for.

And, uh, it... If it's problematic, then perhaps I'll be cancelled. The instructor, when I did turn on my camera, I was applauded for my bravery. Is there a recital at the end of this that you guys all do, and you have to...

Each one of you performs and everyone else watches? Uh, no. Not that I know of. I need to orchestrate something like that. Let's get into our show. Jason, do you have anything you want to say before we get into it? Or have we completely paralyzed you with adult Zoom dance classes?

I don't have any cool hobbies like that. This is what sucks about routinely being on a podcast with you or being on a podcast with Sean Baby, who always has some sort of a fight story he can tell. I don't have anything like that. I've been trapped in my house, and I guess in theory, I could have used Zoom to meet people and do interesting things.

I didn't. Well, that's fine i mean you're you are uh you've done you're doing a number of things because you're writing books uh all the time every minute that i've known you you've been writing books which uh i have like fully written one book and i don't know that i will ever do it again because it's it's uh it's such a daunting and unbearable process. And you're into, what is this going to be, the fourth John Dyes at the End book? Yeah, the fourth John Dyes at the End book, the sixth book total that I've written. Stephen King described writing a book as like rowing a bathtub across an ocean.

And it's just like how lonely it is. And you're maybe the only person I can think of, Jason, who would be like, this is nice. I like it out here. Okay. See? All right. I think we have brought this up on microphone before.

Because there was a time when my whole reason for working a day job was because I was afraid of what would happen to my mental health. If I wrote books exclusively, because Stephen King's friend during that period was named cocaine. That's how he got over his loneliness. The bathtub was cocaine and the proverbial ocean was also cocaine. So I knew that if I did not have the day-to-day, the conference calls, you know, the emails, like I would just have no reason to ever talk to people. So when I left, and I probably told this exact freaking anecdote the last time I was on here, but when I left Cracked, you know, a year ago, it was literally in March of 2020, I had this whole thing, like, I'm going to spend this many hours writing on book. I'm going to spend this much, you know, like talking to people, doing stuff. I'm going to have a regular schedule. I'm not going to do that, that writer thing where you just drink yourself to death by the time you're,

you're 50. And the pandemic hit like that week, like, like I was watching the basketball game that announced that kicked off the pandemic for most of us that was on like March 7th or something like that. So it was like, I left Cracked at the end of February and then I was kind of on call for the next month in case something broke. But I was sitting down enjoying like one of my first nights off and watching a basketball game. And then like doctors run onto the court and announce,

everyone has to stay home for the next year. There's a pandemic. Also, Tom Hanks has it. We just found that out too, for some reason, everyone in this building is going to die. And it's like, what? They canceled the basketball game. It's like 20 minutes later. It's like, no, we've canceled all basketball games going forward. We've shut down society tonight. So I've not had a normal day. I have not had one single normal day in my life, I guess.

Because people constantly ask me, well, how's it going? How's it going? Just trying to be a writer full time, but that's like the only thing in your life. It's lonely work. It's not a team project. I have no idea. I hope it's not like this because this has been awful. It has been real truly terrible.

Yeah. I love that. You just trying to relax with a single basketball game and they're like uh news is coming in hot we don't know everything rudy gobert just licked like five microphones everybody was sent home everybody in the world was sent home it happened stunningly fast i mean i people have to remember this right like it happened within a few days because it was just so shocking. Those were the two things that kicked off the pandemic.

And as far as I know, that's what made the Trump administration notice it. It's like, oh, Tom Hanks has it? Yeah. So anyway, I have it very good. I'm not going to sit here and whine about my pandemic experience. Because any one of your listeners, we could invite them onto this show, and they could probably tell a harder story than me. But on something where I was already afraid of what a lonely, weird, insular life this would be,

and then it's like, oh, also, you can't leave the house. Yeah. Well, the good news is that we will never invite listeners on this show. Hey, everybody. Do you have stress? Do you have anxiety? Do you have chronic pain? Are you just a normal human walking around in this big bag of bones that we have to carry everywhere we go that just seems to depreciate and get worse and worse over time

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us feeling our best every single day. And it can help you to become a member today by going to feels.com slash QQ, and you'll get 50% off your first order with free shipping. That's F E A L S.com slash QQ to become a member and get 50% automatically taken off your first order with free shipping feels That's F-E-A-L-S dot com slash QQ to become a member and get 50% automatically taken off your first order with free shipping. Feels.com slash QQ. So I want to jump right into our episode. Quick question for both of you. I would like to know a simple piece of technology that you wish or you thought would be further along right now. And i would like to give

it some context that i don't i'm not talking about like a world-changing thing like free or clean water for for everybody or or something to do with uh clean energy for the planet or anything like that something ideally every day for mine this is it's gonna start out sounding like i'm a a gross lazy nasty boy but uh i hate brushing my teeth and i think it should be better by now i don't hate the the after effects of brushing my teeth it's not a thing that i dread i don't think i'm i'm not a child where i feel like i'm i I'm pulling one over on anyone. If I go to bed without brushing my teeth, if I go to bed without brushing my teeth, then something went wrong. And I'm unhappy about that. I, I understand the importance of brushing my teeth. I do it every time you're supposed to do it. I just, I'm,

I'm so frustrated that we, we did stick with bristles on it. And that was a great invention. And I'm stoked that we did that. And then we did electric. And that's a huge leap forward for everybody. And now we've done the electric that will even time it out for you. They give you pulses every 30 seconds to know that it's time to switch to a different quadrant of your mouth because there are four quad quadrants and two minutes is the dentist recommended

amount of time. We got all this shit down and we've stopped innovating. You still have to do my least favorite part, which is that I have to hold a toothbrush with my hand the whole time and it drives me nuts and I have to stand over a sink. I can't go anywhere because i don't want to drip the goo out in my in my my home or on my clothes so i'm standing in front of the sink and it's one of the only tasks that i have that is part of my day that uh i can't

i can't multitask with i can't maybe some people can. I can't text and brush my teeth at the same time. I can't, uh, clip my nails. I can't shave while I'm brushing my teeth. I can't send an email or, or, or, or fold my clothes. I would love to fold my clothes and brush my teeth at the same time. And I feel like we've had a bunch of examples throughout pop culture from like tv and movies where there was some crackpot scientist who invented like a helmet that brushes your teeth a hands-free situation like i've seen it in in i want to say honey i shrunk the kids and certainly futurama and i think lego movies some kind of like you're on a conveyor belt and your teeth get brushed for you and these are held up as examples that prove the scientist is like kooky and a bad inventor. We laugh at them for doing this.

And I'm not saying that I think a helmet that is like half loaded with toothpaste and the other half is like an erector set arm that brushes your teeth so your hands are free. I'm not saying that that would be like affordable or practical or chic if everyone in the world had that. But I also think like, let's fucking start there and then innovate from there. Because no one is even trying to do a hands-free toothbrushing solution. And it drives me absolutely bananas. So your issue. I can already tell that you're not as mad about this as I am.

Your issue with brushing your teeth is not, like the solution is not that there's slop coming out of your mouth constantly. You need a bib that you can have a bib for, or that you've got a giant stick that has to go in your mouth. No. None of that is, the fact that after you do it anything that's citrus based tastes like shit like none of that bothers you it's that you have to

manually hold the toothbrush that's correct okay and uh and that i can't do anything else like if if i know what i'm going to describe is is not going to to look sexy but this is where i'm at right now if you could put a fishbowl on my head or one of those like old-timey scuba things where it's just this giant sphere on my head and you had told me that like it's gonna power wash my whole face and i just open my mouth and it'll it'll do the work that brushing my teeth is supposed to do if i just walk around with this orb on my head and my mouth open, if you told me I could do that and fold my clothes at the same time, I would do it and I would love it.

Well, you happen to be in luck, Dan, because you're talking to somebody who, as I mentioned on a previous podcast, invented the electric toothbrush. That's right. And then the idea was stolen from me when i was i think eight uh and i have other ideas like maybe that's the problem is that there was one person who had like caught lightning in a bottle and then the idea was just grifted and and now i felt so

defeated that i haven't evolved but i have another idea if you want it um is it going to solve my problem yeah because because because i want that because i feel like let me just give me give me one more second because i still feel like you're not completely on board yet they invented a a metal flexible neck brace so billy joel can play the harmonica and piano at the same time and i feel like more people would get use out of my thing than his thing he's the only one on the planet who was like you know it'd be great if i could play harmonica and piano simultaneously and they're like all right fine we'll put two of our scientists on that and then you'll buy all these harmonica holders whereas my thing

is at least me and billy joel at least the two of us would enjoy this thing. So that way he can brush his teeth and play piano at the same time. And I could fold my laundry. All right, now what's your invention? Fuck me. I'm looking it up right now and somebody has already taken it. Somebody's already stolen it. What is it?

I was going to suggest like a mouth guard that has basically a car wash apparatus within it. Like it brushes on the inside of the mouth guard. So you just put the whole mouth guard in. It's custom to your mouth. And it does like a cycling bristle thing inside your mouth. So it's on both the outside and the inside of your teeth. And it's just sort of like massaging your gums. And now I'm looking at it.

And there are like six different brands that are doing this thing. Mouthpiece toothbrushes. I mean, surely this is, here are my two main questions. Are there, does it seem dentist recommended? Or is it one of those things where dentists are like, look, if chewing your gum was a substitute for brushing your teeth, then dentists would give you gum instead of toothbrushes. Like do dentists hate this? There's some for kids too. There's so many of them that I have dentists hate this and there's some for kids too i yeah there's so many of them that i have to assume that this works okay and now how much not good solid logic

in this world the sonic brush pro is what i'm looking at oh but it does have it's very funny looking it has basically like a big vape pod coming off the front of it because it needs a battery that sticks out of your mouth. But yeah, it is just a mouth guard with car wash bristles on the inside. Oh, man. It just shakes. Man, there are, if you just Google image search Sonic Brush Pro, there are pictures of people using it. And it's, you wouldn't think that something could be described as

less sexy than brushing your teeth but but but they're doing it it's like a big it's a giant pacifier i can't believe my my idea got stolen again i'm sorry this is why i got out of the toothbrush game so now i feel bad because because when Daniel imagines like advanced technology, he's imagining like some gadget from a 1980s Rick Moranis movie, like a Rube Goldberg thing that some wacky mad scientist put together where I was thinking like, oh, so you want like a mouthwash you can swish around for 10 seconds that just dissolves plaque off your teeth. Or even better, like once a year you go to your dentist and he puts like a wax or something on your teeth that just makes stuff bounce off of them.

And it's just, you forget about it. Man. No, you're, you're imagining a helmet. You keep using the word helmet over and over again. Yeah.

I, uh, specifically like an old timey scuba helmet. Like, even though that technology has gotten better and involves like a more modern looking chic mouth guard i wasn't even going there i was going further back because that's how bad i want this it was a whole uh aquatic suit that slowly filled with fluoride all the way up to just your mouth level the only other drained again the only other idea i had and and also i i am not

shooting for the moon on this idea was like what if there was a a pill that you put in your mouth and it exploded violently but did the work of a toothbrush in my head this invention is still something you do three times a day and it still lasts for two minutes each time i hadn't even conceived of like the possibility that someone would invent a once a year thing i was like no i'll put this tiny toothbrush grenade in my mouth every morning and and like sit with it exploding in my mouth and then meanwhile look at me turning pages with with both hands free or typing on my computer or flipping a flapjack turning pages yeah how would you ever wanted to like read men's health while you're while you're while there's an uh pop rocks explosion in your mouth yeah but not on a device in 2077 when this

is all happening you still have the paper magazine that you got you stole from the actual dentist's office when you went once a year. Yeah, I'm still trying to get to the end of the maze in highlights. Do either of you have simple technology you wish was further along by now? I have seven of them. We can just pick one, but I'm getting to the age where all technology, I feel like, is just burdening me. And all things that they claim are improvements just make things worse. Like in cars, when they get rid of buttons and they give you a screen instead that's much worse than buttons.

So, for example, the first one that pops into my brain is printers. the first one that pops into my brain is printers. I have never had a printer for my computer at home in the office anywhere that has ever worked close to the way it's supposed to. Whether it loses its connection, whether it just refuses to print, whether the ink cartridges or whatever dry up in between uses, because most people do not print something every day. They need it every once in a while. But that is a technology that i swear to god is not any better than it was 20 years ago that's so true and it's it's bizarre that we've all collectively decided it can't be any better like there i don't own a printer but there's there's one in my building in like the office center of my apartment building. And the few times where I've needed a printer,

I would go near it with my computer. And like, you still have to go on your computer and try to find a printer in the network and then connect to that. And it doesn't work. And then I go to the people who work there and like, yeah, I tried to connect my computer to the printer because I need to print out a boarding pass. And they're like, oh yeah, we can't, you can't do that do that we all like and you're not allowed to be mad at us either we all agree

printers are not supposed to work so this is just one of those things maybe maybe uh i don't know see if your friend has a printer it has it's true i mean i've always i've always struggled to first of all connect but then also just like the printer has always, there's some sort of error on the printer, no matter what. And it's an error that just has a number associated, but you don't, you're not privy to the information of what that number means. And so you're just like, you're shit out of luck. Anytime your printer's not working, you're like, well, maybe it's a paper thing. No, it's not that. Maybe it's an ink toner thing. It turns out it's not that maybe it's an ink toner thing it turns out it's not that well what do you think 202 might be yeah it's print print head alignment it's not it's not the ink

cartridge it's the print head it's like well isn't that part of the ink cartridge no it turns out it's not well how does it get out of alignment that's a good question. You need a new printer. But no, the one I finally, this last time, because I had the ink machine, I got so frustrated by the fact that it doesn't detect when it's out of ink. It just, when it's like halfway out, the software makes it stop printing to force you to buy because that's how they make their monies on the ink cartridges. So somebody's like, well, you do, if you're willing to spend a premium, you get a laser printer. Got the expensive cartridges, lasts forever. It's the toner cartridges.

It has not worked. I have a whopping two computers in this house. So it's got to be networked over Wi-Fi. It will show up on my computer on my list of stuff. I will send a print job to it. It will say printing it'll bring up the little box and then nothing will happen nothing i can reboot the computer i can reboot the printer one time it printed i think six days later and it when you look up it's an hp i'm happy

to say the name of the company because if you look up the like they have a piece of software that lives on your computer and like your taskbar it's called like print doctor that you run to try to diagnose why your printer didn't print this time which i have to run every time i want to print a document because again i am not a i'm not running an office in 1996 i only have print things like three times a year when a company gives you a PDF and you click on it. It's like, oh, it doesn't seem to be letting me fill out the PDF in my browser. They want me to freaking print it out and fill it out with an ink pen and then scan it back into my computer. So it's when that comes up that you have to own a printer or else you have to go begging your neighbors like Daniel's going to have to.

It feels like we should be in a renaissance of printing right now because everybody has to be at home. And this is happening to every single person where they're getting mailed shit. I mean, they're getting emailed stuff that they have to sign and then send back. A shocking amount of stuff is still done on paper, which is a separate thing we could talk about because that should not still be a thing. But like with my taxes, half of my tax forms, the W&I stuff, that freaking stuff came through the U.S. Postal Service in an envelope where it could have gotten wet or gotten lost or whatever. But anyway, the troubleshooting steps are all about like the server connecting to the server and the hub. And it's like, I have two computers. I have two.

There's no hub. There's no matrix here that I'm having to connect to. It's just this computer, that computer, the printer. It should not be. It's like, no, your document has gotten lost somewhere in the vast web of the system. And it's been like this since the day it came out of the box. If you Google the problem, you will find many, many, many other customers having the same problem. And you just live with it because it doesn't matter what you spend.

It turns out it doesn't matter what brand you go with, which of the two printer brands you go with, you will, they will, there's about a 40% chance that we'll print and a 60% chance. It will not only give you an error message. It just won't give you an error message. It will just sit there.

For all I know, one of my neighbors who also has a wifi HP printer, like they've just had like copies of my books printing out once a year. There's like a 400 page manuscript here. Somebody sent me. It's very funny that like it's a product unlike anything else I can think of off the top of my head. Because my apartment building also has like a digital marketplace where anyone who lives there goes and you can either say like, hey, does anyone have pizza recommendations or does anyone know any good dog walkers?

Someone recently posted, I'm in the market for a printer. Does anyone have a printer that they recommend? No, not a single person has any kind of brand loyalty or any good experiences with a printer anywhere. And I feel like if I had gone into that digital marketplace and was like hey i'm thinking of getting into wooden hangers does anyone have any suggestions i would get people who were like yeah don't go to this one these are the ones that you're supposed to get these ones are like strong opinions about wooden hangers that they stand by and will like go to bat form when it comes to printers no one in manhattan uh has ever had a

good experience they also somehow bring down the quality of any other thing that they try to do as well like scanners work but if you have add a scanner to a printer there's a good chance it won't work anymore like a scanner on my phone it never failed i can always take pictures it immediately turns into a pdf and i can send immediately. But I remember trying to scan on a printer that I had where it had like a little top that opened up and you could do photocopies and I would scan it. It would send it to my computer maybe like, yeah, 40% of the time. And the rest of the time, it just, the document would just disappear into the ether. I wouldn't have it. Okay. I don't know about you,

but I always feel like I'm looking at a screen. It's just part of my life that takes up, I would say, a very unhealthy portion of my day. When I get those little notifications at the end of the week where it's like, here's what your screen time was this week on your phone. It's never a good number. And I know that that's about 50%

of the amount of screens that I'm looking at because there's my computer screen, my television screen. I look at a lot of screens is the point. And I want to take a break from that every once in a while. And I get to do that with my Raycon earbuds. I use those to listen to podcasts, still get a lot of the content that I want, but I feel a little bit better about it because I'm not looking at a screen. I can listen to podcasts. I can check in with Terry Gross, see what's happening in the world. Shout out to Terry Gross. And I just feel like I can keep up, but I don't have to be staring at a screen any longer. And that just feels better. That's why we've teamed up with Raycon and recommend their wireless earbuds. You'll get 15% off your entire Raycon order at buyraycon.com

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For a while. I don't know how long your workouts are I don't need six hours, but six hours is nice to know that it's there, right? The best part, Raycon makes great sound accessible to everyone with wireless earbuds starting at half of the price of other premium audio brands. Raycon's offering 15% off all their products for my listeners. And here's what you do. Specifically my listeners, Dan, go pound sand, buddy, because this is for the connoisseurins out there. Go to buyraycon.com slash QQ.

That's it. You'll get 15% off your entire Raycon order. So feel free to grab a pair and a spare. That's 15% off at buyraycon.com slash QQ. Buyraycon.com slash QQ. Soren, do you have a piece of technology for us buddy leaf blowers all right fucking leaf blowing how is that not that not evolved at this point it's a when you think about like how rudimentary that technology is it really will piss you off because it it we have the technology to do like some sort of outdoor vacuum,

which gets rid of everything all at once. And you could just suck it all up into something and deposit it. But instead we decided like, let's just blow it all up into the atmosphere. Let's blow it into every other yard we can think of. And it just will stop existing once it's outside of our yard. I have a neighbor who has a dog the dog shits in his yard and then uh the lawn people come and what they do at the

end after they're done mowing and everything is they just blow everything uh off into the corners so there's always just piles of dog shit at the at the like the far reaches of his yard because they blow the dog shit too and you if you watch them out in the street like people will just take leaf blowers and blow it right out into the street and it's like and it no longer is my problem it lives out there now they're also so so loud like blocks away you can tell when somebody is using a leaf blower because we decided gas is the best way to do it this is i feel like uh this is an important lesson in perspective because we we never had a a leaf blower growing up we we raked our leaves all the time and so i feel like as soon as i saw someone with a leaf blower down the street that's that's the that's both like the peak of uh innovation and

the peak of of wealth like that that's that's the fucking ticket if i saw a leaf blower i would run to whatever lab they invented the leaf blower and be like guys stop you cracked it you're not gonna top this it's perfect the rake sucks this is the The rake does suck. I will agree with you there. But I feel like, so snow blowing, I get. Snow blowing, you do have to, it is about moving all the snow from one area to another area. But then it feels like we just tried to translate that to the leaf blower and it does not, it doesn't work the same way. Snow is fine to move from one area to another, but when it's dust and debris, snow is fine to move from one area to another, but when it's dust and debris,

that's just like swafting up into clouds around everybody who, who walking by, it's like, it becomes a real, a real nightmare. See, so one of my things on my list of many things that I had for the subject, just general lawn care was one of them because the same thing with grass,

like where I live, I'm in a neighborhood where people for whatever reason they maintain their lawns it's a cultural thing or whatever and if i like let mine go just let it become a lot full of weeds i think the police would come like there's probably an ordinance against it that to me is crazy it's crazy that the way you solve that you either have to get out there with a machine and cut it yourself through the summer at least once a week, or you have to pay a shocking amount of money to have somebody else do it and either haul away the clippings or blow away the clippings or do something. All of that, the only reason that's further down my list is because I guess I just assume that's like a status thing, like it's hard on purpose,

because it's to demonstrate that you can afford to do this, where it's like a status thing like it's hard on purpose because you it's to demonstrate that you can afford to do this um where the where it's like a well thing whereas whereas if they invent grass that like grows three inches tall and then just stops it's like absolute turf on this grass because surely in this era of modern miracles somebody could make such a plant um that doesn't have to be watered again i'm in'm in the South. Everybody's got lawn irrigation, which is the most wasteful freaking thing I could possibly imagine where you're just pouring out perfectly good potable water to keep your lawn green. But it's a, I keep thinking as well, it's just it's people like proving that they can do it because it's,

it's cost and time and effort intensive. So it's like, see, I'm the, I'm the king of this little patch of land. Look how nice it is. There's a knowledge to it as well. Like they like the wisdom of it. You know that you have to aerate every once a year. You have to fertilize. Like you have to reseed.

Like to get it all the same color and uniform, there's like a pride to it. I know exactly what you're talking about. That's LA like in a nutshell. That's America. Yeah. And having a giant machine that just blows your problems into somebody else's lawn that's the most american thing i can imagine or blowing it into the street blowing it into the commons into the public areas just blowing

it off your private property and blowing your trash into the the public street that is america right there that should be our flag it also, it entails wearing like basically a giant proton pack to get it done. You have to wear an engine on your back to do this job. At the very least, it feels like we could consolidate all that just into the leaf blower itself. I've got, I'm now way in my head about this because I'm trying to figure out when I was brainwashed because when I go to visit one of my brothers sometimes the first thing out of my mouth when i get to their house house is the lawn looks great it's a thing that i notice and and like i can see that it that it's it's it's good it's well maintained and i don't remember when i was

when i decided i give a shit about that i feel like it was just it was born in me but no I think I was I must have been conditioned to think that I'm supposed to care about that or I'm supposed to want that or that's the American dream yeah I wonder if there's something to it like the you've instead your subconscious you have harnessed nature in some capacity you've carved out this little section but you're like this I've domesticated this this portion it does exactly what i wanted to do this piece of the wilderness i don't know i but leaf blowers are they really piss me off and also it's just like this weird thing that we've decided it's fine to do it anytime you want you can do it if you're a leaf blower at 8 a.m or 7 a.m you're gonna be like oh that sucks but it's not it's not like an offense where you

you can hate that person forever like uh you get to a rich enough neighborhood you'll find they've got ordinances against it it's if you get you get to a fancy enough neighborhood i guarantee you will not see them running leaf blowers at 7am but it's for i certainly do but it's i think if you've got enough influence with your city council or whatever, you can keep that out of your, out of where you live. I wasn't, I don't know that I've lived in a neighborhood fancy enough to have things like ordinances. I also wasn't aware, Soren, that they, they're still mostly gas powered? Yeah. Huh.

The battery powered ones are not nearly as strong they don't they don't blow nearly as hard they exist but they're not you can't like the one he's describing the backpack one the one that will literally deafen you if you don't wear your plugs while operating it that thing will will blow a goddamn car over yeah you're creating your own meteorological event with that yeah you're harnessing yeah the elements now i can yeah i get the feeling of using you know a leaf blower if there was like a little switch you could flip that would make it shoot the flames out of it like vaporize some of the gasoline turn to flamethrower that's even better again probably probably against the law but yeah i mean and the idea that we wouldn't i know we i just sort of

glossed over it before but the idea that we wouldn't, I know I just sort of glossed over it before, but the idea that we wouldn't create some sort of sucking mechanism is baffling to me. I mean, we didn't decide with vacuums like we were just going to blow it all out our front door. Right. We were like, no, let's take care of this stuff. Otherwise, it all just goes up in the air and then settles right back where it was. Yeah. It seems like even an inventor who is past his prime and mostly out of ideas could just say vacuum but for outside yeah uh we could do more inventions or soren do you have any questions for our our wonderful guest

yeah jason i got a quick question for you in all of your books uh it seems like there's a really efficient evil within the stories uh or like some malicious force but it's always a really stupid one it's always kind of bro-y and kind of a kind of a doofus like the whatever that manifests as a person it's always kind of a dickhead who's not that smart and i'm very curious about why i mean in most horror and stuff evil is so smart the evil is intelligent like paranormal activity it has to be so smart to be so scary and you've chosen to go the exact opposite direction i'm wondering what you think is so much more terrifying about dumb evil as opposed to like intelligent evil i wonder if people who aren't to me, like seeing this from outside,

aren't going to say this is like a class thing, but for me, and I'll explain what I mean in a moment. Like for me, the idea of the devil is like a suave, smooth talker, like Al Pacino and, Devil's advocate?

The scent of a woman where he played the devil. It wasn't revealed two years later that he was the devil in that movie it's it's really a lot of subtext but uh hannibal lecter lucifer like they're all that yeah well or even like the the dracula archetype of the vampire it's always an aristocrat right like he's got he's he's he's fancy and he's educated and smooth talker and and it's the seductive, smooth talking evil for me. When I wrote my, my first horror novel or when John dies,

Dan, they meet like this Lovecraftian demigod. And he speaks with the voice of like a 13 year old on Xbox live. Like it's just, it's just homophobia and slurs because it's like, that's, he's not smart. He can't come up with like good insults. And it's terrifying because he's also incredibly powerful. And to me, there's nothing

scarier than that. There's nothing scarier than a monster with no brain, but there's like no, or there's like no head. There's nothing you can like negotiate with. It's just dumb, destructive evil. Because I feel like in the real world, people who believe in like conspiracies, they want the opposite. Like they want to believe that there's some all knowing like this evil cult that's secretly arranging all of the child abduction and child trafficking in the world. trafficking in the world where the reality that it's just a bunch of people doing it for profit or whatever. Boredom is so much worse. Like they, they believe in conspiracy theories because they prefer to believe that

there's some mastermind. So I always, I keep that theme is probably in every book I write this idea of like distributed evil where it's kind of hard to find a, a mind at the center of it. Yeah, I think. Yeah. And I'm thinking just in terms of like the way people react to natural disasters and stuff when they're like, oh, well, this is this is God because we like we get gays marry each other. Like that kind of feeling of it's less terrible to believe that there's a malicious God than there is to think that there's a God that's not even watching.

Or that there is no God. Like there's nothing at the head of it. And we're all just suffering together. But at least with a God, there's an element of like, well, you know, it's out of our control. This was God's will or whatever. But I feel like with conspir conspiracies they want someone to blame they want someone to to hate because something like the most recent disaster when we recorded this of the many disasters that have happened and the most recent one was the freezing in texas right where i don't know how many people wound up dying but it was a lot um where there's this cascading failure of like their power

plants were not winterized you know it's a republican state there's certain like infrastructure is not in place to take care of people there's a lot of things that in the aftermath you look back and the blame kind of spreads so many directions that it kind of doesn't exist, where it would be amazing if there was like one guy who was like, it was his fault for not properly preparing the state. It was his fault that they didn't have the ability to clear the streets or to keep the power plants running. It was his fault that they didn't have a grid that connected to the rest of the country to offload all of the things, all of these failures that went wrong, but the life usually denies you that. And so you're left with just all this suffering.

And there's, there's individual people you could probably find who are at fault or some, you know, energy company CEO or whatever. But it's so much scarier to me when you don't have that. Because I think, I think one reason people like horror where there is like one monster or whatever is because it's it's comforting interesting yeah it's definitely um it's very effective horror when it's just a uh a dumb really powerful thing especially when you throw in like conspiracy theory nonsense it's not hard to draw like modern parallels certainly when you see people armed and and storming the capital and and trying to see the trying to like find and unseat the power i i'm sitting back cowering being like hey no very afraid of the thing that you are right yeah I I something that's there's this Twilight Zone episode where there's a little kid

who it toilet zone toy toy light how does that closer Jason did you know about this that that Soren in real life says Twilight the way that he just did? Yes. As toilet? Yeah. As a toilet zone? Fascinating. Twilight.

But yes, that episode, I'm familiar with that episode. And that's if our listeners too young to have watched the Twilight Zone. But it's a classic. They did a Simpsons a, it's a classic. It was, they did a Simpsons episode, a segment about it, or it's the little kid who has like Godlike powers, but he still has the mentality of a little kid. Right.

And so he throws tantrums and he has no rhyme or reason. Like he'll do things just cause he's bored. Cause you know, little kid and it's, it's, it's the scariest twilight zone episode that's ever, that they ever made. It is really terrifying. It's like that. And you watch this family, that's ever that they ever made it is really terrifying

it's like that and you watch this family that's just a slave to this child it's very very scary because they you don't even know how to appease it you don't it's not even that you can't negotiate with it and and try and tell it no no my life is valuable please spare it it's that you need to make it happy and you don't it's a moving target you can't always make it happy because it keeps changing yeah there's a there's a Stephen King I mean I'm sure there's a thousand Stephen King stories like this but under the dome by Stephen King it's just this town and it's got to be Maine because it's Stephen King and suddenly there's a dome there's a dome that covers the whole town and for so long they don't know who put the dome there and it's Stephen

King so we find out it's Stephen King. So we find out it's aliens. But there's a lot of speculating throughout the book, just like amongst the characters. And also you as a reader, you're trying to think who put this dome here. And your brain naturally goes to like some force in the government. Some smart person somewhere is doing some evil experiment. Or it's aliens, some like smart alien who somewhere is doing some evil experiment or it's alien some like smart alien who wants to to to study us or some evil alien who wants to crush us and i think we

find out by the end of it that it's it's it's some like child aliens like they have the power to do this but it's the same as like if you or i were burning an ant with a magnifying glass not really knowing what we're doing just like you just know that if I put this thing here, look at, look at the, the ant squirm. That's kind of interesting. That's kind of funny.

It's really just like adolescent aliens who put this dome on this one town in Maine. And that's so much scarier than like a super smart thing that you think you can reason with or a super evil thing where it's like great all i do now is try to fight it and if i beat the evil thing that's good news and if i lose to the evil thing well i'm a good guy who went down fighting but it's just a kid alien who doesn't know any better and it's so much scarier spoilers by the way well it's just so weird to trace trace that sequence of events back to the beginning

that it all starts with Homer bringing home that pig. This is something, well, you'll see it. There's a part that's mentioned in the upcoming book where somebody gives a speech where they mention that alien abductions and all the theories about the people have where it's this very grandiose thing. It's like, oh, they're studying humans or they're wanting to make a human-alien hybrid're maybe they're preparing for invasion and it's like knowing what we know about people and humans and societies it's far more likely that if aliens were abducting humans and studying them it's due to some politician like trying to just distract the people his people back home from some scandal or or it's just like they had money in the budget and that they have to spend it like this year or else they don't get that same amount of money next

year so they just picked up some humans and study them just so that it will appear that they're doing something like when you go outside of humans you assume you're going to find like perfect rationality right and like whatever the devil is, he's doing it for rational reasons. You know, he is, you know, he's jealous of God or he's got a plan. He's trying to the idea that there's no rational reason that it's just somebody doing something for extremely dumb. was like having an affair and the local media had caught wind of it on his planet. So to distract them from the scandal, he sent an invasion at Earth just to get that off the headlines. Because it's like, well, yeah, but if this has this kind of an impact on our lives, it has to have been done for some important reason. It's like, no, you already know that's not true about the universe. That's what you want to be true.

I feel like you just find a lot of comfort in horror when evil has a plan like when it's executing that plan flawlessly it just sort of feels like second nature to horror and i do like i love this new approach jason i feel like you just gave out um three great movie ideas in that that uh very eloquent answer to that question and i uh i just want everyone to know that everything said on this podcast is trademarked uh between the three of us we've come up with three great movie ideas and one almost their toothbrush idea we're really close and and yeah you're like 99 of the way through the toothbrush because once you start with a helmet the rest can come together it's just a matter of getting the parts on there

okay well i think we're uh we're about out of time here i'm gonna give jason i'm gonna give you a chance to talk about things that you're working on and that you're excited about that you want to tell people in a second i'm gonna tell everyone where they can find all of us on Twitter. But God damn it. It's on, it's, it's on a, it's sitting as like a printed out copy on my scanner and that's okay. Yeah.

Go get it. But so in the meantime, I want to give Jason a chance to talk about, we just were talking about John dies at the end. I want to ask you, Jason, what was your least favorite part of the John dies at the end movie? The like 40 to 50 percent of the questions I get from fans is them trying to trick me into like trashing the movie, because I guess they figure that's the only interesting thing that I could say.

It would be to like burn the bridges of everyone I work with. like burn the bridges of everyone I work with. So no, I, someday I will be elevated to a position where they can make a movie off something I wrote and I can just like Alan Moore, like just crap on it. Like Hollywood, Hollywood only ruins everything. They ruin everything while I'm like literally sitting in a house bought with their money. I am not at that place yet. I, I cannot believe someone spent that kind of money to film something I wrote.

I will be shocked by that until, but it, the, the only way that movie could have like put me in a position where I've been like publicly trashing it as if for some reason it turned out really racist or something. But I was sitting there as sundance like i they brought me to the premiere of sundance and this whole time is like i like right up until they started rolling it i thought it was going to turn out it was a prank that they had just lured all of us into that theater to do like an inglorious bastards thing like they would just just gun us oh yes that that very funny uh prank at the end of inglorious bastards yeah yeah they pulled on hitler uh like no i thought it was a trick or something because

it's like the idea that they had actually filmed all this and it took years and they had actual actors in it who i've seen on tv and i just sitting there watching the whole time like this is the greatest thing ever made i i because of course i liked it it's like i this is all my idea this is it so no but i i will get that question probably forever if you go out look at like any reddit ama it's like well what what were you most disappointed about like well what would you change what would you change about the movie it's like well what what do you mean if in some magical world where i knew how to make movies because Cause I, I don't. Wow.

Well, so there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, when asked the question, what's his least favorite part of the movie, David Wong, Jason Pargin said, Paul Giamatti. You can follow Jason on Twitter at John dies at the end.

That's not with an end D it's just John dies at the end. E N at the end. You can follow I don't have characters on Twitter it cuts you off there you can follow Dan at DOB underscore inc

you can follow me Soren at Soren underscore LTD you can email our show at QQ with Soren and Daniel at gmail.com and you can follow find and hire

our producer sound engineer editor in general good guy Gabe Harder at Gabe Harder dot com jason is this stuff you want to plug uh the last book is called zoe punches the future and the dick uh please support

your local bookstores the the clerk will probably be amused if you go up and ask them for the name of the book but you should be able to find it pretty much anywhere uh i think as we speak there's like a amazon boycott going on, but that's fine. You can get it anywhere. The next book comes out next year. If you want to follow some of his other novels as well so you get caught up, you can read John Dies at the End

and that whole series. The other series starts with a book called Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits. And they're all great. Our podcast Oh shit! You know what i forgot to talk about i guess it doesn't matter what um this is a huge this is an update for long-time listeners of the show soren got me into this show taskmaster uh we talked about a couple episodes ago soren you know who else is now a fan of Taskmaster because of our show? Fucking Jason. Who?

Oh, good. Oh, that's so nice. Jason, I'm glad that you like that show. Me and my wife listened to your show and then told me, like, okay, they recommended we have to watch Taskmaster. It's all on YouTube, everybody. It is wonderful. It's a BBC show that I'm sure if you listen to their episode,

some people are only here for me, so they're actually unfamiliar with you two. But we've watched it through season five, and there's never been a bad episode of it. It's so charming. It is a delight. There is nothing topical about it. There is nothing serious about it.

There is nothing about the real world that will intrude on it. It is just people having fun in a very well done, very smart way. Well, thanks for being on our show, Jason. Bye.