Hi,
In this Webworm podcast episode, I bring you a conversation with someone I found 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 have this pet belief that the world is full of people who would be cult leaders if they had that ambition.
They have a superb ability to manipulate, they have a machiavellian-like personality, they have a desire to control people — but they do not have the messianic world view. They’re not L. Ron Hubbard. They’re not somebody looking to take over the world.
So what they have is a little weird cult around them of just like a few people — that they are either controlling those people, or victimizing them, or they are fiercely loyal to them.
And you can see that there’s something otherworldly about them, and kind of dangerous and fascinating.
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.
Oh, and if you like books, get his book. It’s great.
David.
A World Full of Potential Cult Leaders