A conversation with someone I find endlessly fascinating to talk to — one of my favourite authors, Jason Pargin. He’s perhaps most well known for writing John Dies At The End, or a host of other books that all have amazing titles including This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It, What the Hell Did I Just Read, and If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe. His latest comes out this week, and is called — in true Jason style — I Am Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. I was reading his stuff way before I knew I was reading his stuff, later finding out he was the guy who started Pointless Waste of Time which ended up being Cracked.com. If you don’t know his writing, you might know him as “the geriatric TikTok personality” (his words, not mine) who stumbled upon Tickled recently, before moving onto Mister Organ. After watching that reaction video, I got in touch with him and fawned a little, before discovering that we have a lot of interests in common — from the chaos of social media and AI, to cults and religion, to all the stuff Tickled and Mister Organ touched on. I loved talking to Jason — and so here’s our conversation. It goes all over the place, and I hope you enjoy what he has to say. BOOK LINK: https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/starting-to-worry-about-9781250285959/

I’ve been trying to have this conversation for about seven years now, but it was impossible due to ongoing litigation in various United States' courts, including the New York State Supreme Court.

David D’Amato (the “big bad” in Tickled) died from a heart attack back on March 13, 2017. He left behind a legacy of tickling videos and online harassment, along with a couple of cats and tens of millions of dollars.

I noticed that one of the key people named in D’Amato’s will (as you’ll know from the film, we had a trove of documents from D’Amato’s computer) was Robert Maher. So back then, out of sheer curiosity, I dropped him an email.

To my surprise, he replied.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Corey Harris, the 44-year old man who went viral after Zooming into his court appearance while driving. The headlines generated were basically all the same: “Man With Suspended Driver's License Dials Into Court Hearing While Driving”. The video of Corey’s confused expressions went viral on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok — no-one really stopping to think why he looked so confused. He looked confused because a judge ordered his driving suspension be lifted over two years ago. 7News Detroit reported this fact, pointing out it was the court’s fault because they’d never passed those orders on.