Zoey Ashe’s Life in the (Future) Panopticon

Welcome back to the Bulwark Coast of Hollywood. My name is Sunny Bunch from editor at the Bulwark. And I’m very pleased to be joined today by Jason Pige and rejoined. I’ve had him on the show before one of my favorite guests. One of my favorite modern novelists but to be fair, I don’t I don’t read a ton of modern fiction because I, I get most of my fiction through The screen, I get most of my my my fiction through screens, which is, I’m sure, something you you love to hear, novelists out there, but Jason.

Thank you for being back on the show.

How’s it going?

It’s great. It’s great. So we have you back on the show today to talk about third book in the Zoe Ash series Zooey is too drunk for this dystopia. And I I have lots of questions about this book including, the title. Because one of the things you have mentioned in your afterwards and forwards, and interviews about this series is that you don’t really consider The place that Zoe lives to be a dystopia, and then here we have in the the title of this book dystopia.

So I I’m wondering if you think things changed over the last couple years or what?

The character Zoe regards it as a dystopia. But that’s that’s part of it because she’s in a position where she’s actually very wealthy and you could argue things have are better for her than they have ever been, but she definitely does not see it that way. So that is ironic because the idea that, like, I cannot I’m in no condition to deal with this civilization you have created, that is something she would say.

But I feel like there’s a but here. No. But I alright. So I alright. So we’re we’re gonna talk about the book in a minute because I I really, I’m, I I’m super interested in, the world that you have built in here and and the the kind of fun house mirror aspect of it, to to our own times.

But before we before we talk about that, the thing I really wanna do discuss with you is, I have I very rarely have actual, like, genuine celebrities. On this, on this podcast. But today, I have one of the leading lights of Bulwark. Mister Jason pargent, which my understanding is the only way to sell books now to, to anyone, the, the kids, the adults, whatever, is to become a big viral star, on TikTok, and not even necessarily talking about your books because you very rarely I very rarely see, clips of you talking about your books. It’s it’s about everything else tell the folks about your adventures with TikTok and how that has kind of changed how you look at, the the world of novel writing, and novel marketing, more importantly.

Well, I feel like we’re in an era when that’s how everything is being sold as being able to tie it to some kind of an influencer. Like, I can’t imagine anything more dystopian than me coming on here and saying, hey, you all need to become influencers. It’s your only hope for succeeding in this world. But there is no question that in a world that is flooded with products, and media, and everything else, we gravitate toward personalities as a way to cut through the noise. So You know, is it’s if it seems like a lot of the people trying to sell you things on social media and elsewhere are like self help gurus saying Now don’t buy this product because it’s good by this product because this is the candy bar that mister beast.

Endorses. And I am not happy about that. I never wanted to try to become famous. I wrote anonymously for the first several years of my life because I just wanted I’m a private person and wanted the work I wanted the work to get famous, but not me. I don’t I I didn’t dream of, like, you know, going to the grocery store and somebody comes and asks me for an autograph.

That is not what I want to happen when I’m shopping for groceries. But as in the time that I’ve been around, just because of the way the market has changed, yeah, you yourself have to be to promote books, and you have to have some kind of a personality attached to it unless you’re already either a, a super famous writer who hasn’t established you know, audience of millions and millions of people and just your name on the cover does to marketing. Or if you’re a very fancy author, and have won lots of awards and the publisher is heavily pushing you and all of the literary publications are running articles about your book and really pushing it as this is the the important book that everyone should be reading this year. But if you’re not that, if you’re just a guy trying to sell a book or frankly anything, The way you have to do it is by having some kind of a platform where you can reliably reach people and the platform you have cannot simply be a series of ads for your thing. So you wind up selling yourself as a fascinating personality who you want you know, people want to be connected to.

And then, oh, by the way, I also write books, but it’s, like, in a world of infinite where even AI can now crank out a novel in ten seconds. What cuts through is like okay. I’m gonna let you get to know the human being. Connected to this book. It’s the exact same thing as why when you try to look up a recipe for cornbread online, the first three paragraphs are the writer talking about their childhood.

That’s because they are infinite recipes that only this one came from this particular, they’re trying to connect it to our personality because it’s, like, it’s not, you know, the information, the entertainment is a commodity, but there’s only one of me. And that is a very weird place for somebody like me to be in with my personality where, again, I don’t I didn’t like to show my fa I didn’t show my face on camera until, like, Jesus. Twenty thirteen or something. Like, I did not want my face out there, but here we are.

Well, let’s let’s talk about this, kind of evolution of marketing, for lack of a better word because I I we talked about this a little bit the last time you were on the show, you know, you you you you had an audience that cracked, that that helped. You you, I believe I I seem to remember you saying that, you know, you would put out something got cracked and that would drive, you know, a hundred thousand people, whatever, to to the site, two hundred thousand three hundred, whatever. Whatever. Very large number. But the, but it was it was all kind of tied to that.

And then that went away. That that essentially goes away which then creates a a marketing problem. And I am I I I find the whole thing fascinating, because We live in such I we live in, dystopia adjacent times, in the sense that Everything is not quite what we want, but we have everything we need. And I, and this is a perfect example of it. You have a great platform, here, you you have created this this little mini empire of short videos and, kind of weird semi viral things that people find interesting and like to share, but it’s it’s not really what you wanted, or at least it’s not what you thought you wanted.

Right. But this is, I think this is true for anybody making any kind of art. Because you ask a filmmaker. Like, what percentage of your time is spent actually shooting a movie and making creative decisions and making the film? Versus what percentage of your time is spent in meetings or spent dealing with budget issues or doing logistical stuff, like working at permits for some location, like stuff that’s The very the boring tedium, and then all of the politics of trying to, you know, jockeying with the studio for budget, how much budget?

And And then if if you do get a star in your film dealing with their agent and their people and how much changes they wanna make, like, the the pure art part of the job of making the art is a tiny sliver of it. And then all the rest of it is all of this business stuff. On the side. And I think it’s most jobs are like that. The central task is only one section of it.

And then there’s a lot of side stuff that is so for me, that’s just the reality of the job. If I didn’t want to be an author full time, I would, you know, I could go get another job, but this is the job. And the job is, like, fifteen to twenty percent of the time is spent writing books or thinking up ideas for books and being creative and the other eighty, eighty five percent is promotion. Yeah. And that’s just because we live in an era of abundance of media.

Again, when I grew up, again, I I was born in nineteen seventy five. So I in our house, for most of my childhood, we had three channels on the TV, three broadcast channels. We did not have cable until I was a teenager. We did not have a VCR, you know, until that that technology didn’t exist for us until, you know, the the late eighties. So I could go to the grocery store and they had a rack of paper back did not have a bookstore.

So, you know, we were in a small town. So you had a rack of paperback. You had a rack of comic books. I wasn’t that interested in those. You had the magazines.

And you had the TV with nothing on. You’d had you had nothing on demand. You know, yeah, if you had music, you would buy very expensive cassette tapes. But, you know, and we couldn’t afford tons and tons of that stuff. So your my choices in the era when Steven King was getting big, like, when he came out with a novel, that was my only option for entertainment for that week.

Like, I bought it, and I was gonna read it, and it nothing else was clamoring for my attention. Well, now We live in an era when infinite books are available. Essentially infinite books are available for free if you know where to get them. But also infinite video games, live streams, Twitch streams, YouTube, TikTok, social media, If you’re trying to slice through an era of abundance, you’ve gotta try to make yourself stand out. And the challenge is just very different than it would have been you know, thirty years ago, but that’s because we have advanced and there’s such an abundance of media available to people that They have they have so many other options.

So and so I can’t complain about that. It’s just the reality is to cut through the noise, You have to be able to connect with people somehow other than saying, hey, buy my book because they have no reason to buy your book. So it’s cutting through the noise to say, hey, look at me, the human being, and how interesting I am. And then you reach millions of people that way, and then you say, hey, of you, those of you who are readers, I write books, those of you who are readers of this particular genre. I write books in this genre, And then some smaller segment of those people will actually fork over the money to buy the books, and that’s that’s how it works.

It’s just a funnel. You’re funneling people into your books.

Yes.

And it is very exhausting.

Well, let’s let’s run through what your average day looks like. Right? So do you do you wake up? Do you have ideas for here’s the here’s the short film I’m going to make today? Because essentially that’s what you’re doing.

Almost every I I’m actually so this but I have to apologize. I’m actually not on TikTok. I don’t I’m I it’s not it’s I but I but I see your clips on Twitter. Which is which is where I I spend way too much of my time. And, it feels like there’s a new one every day.

Feels like there’s a new a new little thirty second thing every day.

Yeah. I I post three to four videos a day. Okay. And TikTok, because of its algorithm, Will Saletan but one of them, or maybe all of them. And that’s that’s dealing with any social media algorithm.

If if you’re not on TikTok, it It doesn’t matter who you follow. It it has a feed. It’s like the way Twitter works now, the terrible way that Twitter works now, where it feeds you a bunch of strangers, posts, So it doesn’t matter. Like, I have about three hundred and thirty thousand followers now. I joined a year ago when I was promoting promoting last year’s book.

But I can post a video that may only get seen by six hundred people. TikTok may just decide to to spike it. You can spend two hours filming one, and then TikTok to decide, no. Don’t like that one. So it’s it’s a kind of a shotgun effect thing.

We have to I have like this big giant list of ideas, and I’m just looking for stuff day to day. And then you post, and and you post until one hits, and you’ve done your work for the day. But TikTok effectively became my day job last year. Once I once I realized because for context, I had sold books on Facebook prior to this. I had sold books on Twitter.

Facebook is mostly a ghost town. Instagram. I’m on there. They’ve tried very hard to push video. So if you’re still on there, you need to be doing video of photos, which was not what Instagram was before, and then Twitter engagements just falling through the floor because of the way Musk has has changed it.

So I joined TikTok because I had to and was not happy about it. I’m not a video person. I had to train myself on in how to be on video. And what to do with my face and and what people seem to want out of video, all of that. I had learned it.

I was not a YouTuber. I was not never a video person. So it but that became my day job because it’s like I saw how many people was reaching, and it’s a stupid number of people. I I think I total my videos have streamed something like three hundred and fifty million times over the last year. In the past sixty days, past two months, it says I’ve reached thirty four u thirty four million unique users.

There’s no other platform that even can come close to touching that. So that basically at that point, I was basically full time TikTok person author on the side, even though in theory, writing books is how I pay the, you know, I how I pay the mortgage and how that’s what I do for a living, but if you can’t If you can’t reach people to let them know the book exists, then it doesn’t matter how good the book is. It just it just doesn’t. Yeah. You know, the the publisher can do their job.

They’ll they’ll get the chance to stock it. It’ll be on the shelves at Barnes and Noble. They’ll probably have it upfront in the new release section. It doesn’t matter. With that promotion, that will sell a couple hundred copies.

People just stumbling across it. It’s like, oh, this this looks interesting. But if you’re trying to sell tens of thousands of copies enough to, like, do it as a full time job, this is this is what it takes. And what I’m doing is, like, the bear, the bare minimum. The it’s, I ideally, I would be spending twice as much time promoting But the problem is that I can’t hire it out.

Cause if somebody asked, well, isn’t it if the the publisher’s job to promote the book? It’s like, well, the publisher can’t run my TikTok account. The publisher can’t do this interview. Like, it has to be me, it has to be my voice and my face. So what do you want the publisher to do to hire and It’ll look alike to go an actor to pretend to be me.

It’s like, no, it’s gotta be me. It’s just that’s the mechanics. I’m not complaining. That’s how it works. It has to be me talking about it.

So it’s this is what I think a lot of young authors don’t understand. A lot of them are not not prepared to do, which is very reasonable because I don’t think that, like, Herman Nellville had to do this. He sold three thousand copies of Mobynec while he was alive.

Right. Right.

It it it didn’t get discovered till after he was dead. So this is what I tell myself that my books will sell tens of millions of copies in the year, like, the twenty twenty eighty three after they will they will all be discovered after I’m gone.

I I’m fascinated by the TikTok thing, and I’m fascinated by the video thing for reasons we were talking about just before the show started, which is that I am very explicitly not a video person. In fact, I am recording video on this podcast for the first time, in part because we were just talking about it and how you have to have video to promote things now. How has how has the game of book promotion changed? Just in the last two or three years in terms of what audiences are looking for and what publishers are looking for and what social media platforms are looking for.

Well, this is what is so hard for, I think, for a lot of people to is that a lot of it is just a change in the technology. Like, like, when I came about started writing, it was in the late nineties, and the internet was based really invented. I got an AOL account. Back then, Dion, it was basically text only. Like, even a photo on your page would drag down the load times back then.

Yep. So back then, it’s like, it’s all because it’s all text only, you know, and I started giving away my book for free. The book that kind of made my career. John dies at the end. That was written just on a website, on a blog before they had the the word for blog.

Back when the internet was tech only, and that’s all people wanted. It was a bunch of nerds out to read interesting stuff. So then as time went on, Stuff becomes more photo based, but then they they didn’t invent social media until the late two thousands, and then smartphones didn’t become ubiquitous until, like, twenty ten. That totally changed the game because now the nature of what people want to read and ingest on a phone when they were new was photos. That’s why Instagram suddenly blew up.

So it’s like it went from, are you interesting in text? To are you interesting in a photograph? Like, is your life aesthetic? Do you have a beautiful book collection? Do you have a beautiful library that you can take photos of your sitting like a leather chair with your old fashioned typewriter.

And then what happened over just over the last several years is that smartphones, data plans, everything that allows for streaming videos so that a site like TikTok can exist, because keep in mind, The fact that you can record a video, instantly upload it, instantly have it live, and then turn around it in your car on your data plan scroll a hundred short clips. That technology is very, very recent. But once it was invented, That was how people wanted their content. So from the creator’s point of view, it goes from being good at photo good at writing, to being presentable in a photograph to having a voice and a face and a a presence on video, That’s that is compelling. Because, again, you need to be able to reach people.

You can’t reach people unless they follow you and you have a following on a platform. They won’t follow you on a platform unless they enjoy watching you now. In the video era, watching you talk and say and do things on camera? So I have nothing to complain about because for example, for women authors. Needing to be young and attractive becomes a premium.

Because you can go on book talk and I follow every woman author I can’t. I try to support them all, but I do not get elderly women authors. They’re on there. Their algorithm doesn’t feed them to me. Mhmm.

Because they want a pretty face. And that is Not how it should work for an author. If you’re a movie star, yeah, I get it. You gotta be you gotta be hot. But I have the least to complain about because I’m able to get a following.

It there’s such a bias toward being young, thin, and attractive for women authors’ dad I feel like this is a huge loss. If you’re a woman starting out, if you don’t happen to fit the exact conventional conventionally attractive profile they want, your climb up the hill has to be a hundred times harder because TikTok for women is so geared towards the aesthetic and are you pretty. Whereas, you know, the male authors I follow, they just look like us. They’re just dudes, and and they’re old guys. And, like, I filed with eight, you know, seven year old guys, and they you can look like George R.

Martin, if you’re a guy and it’s like, no, that’s what a male author should look like. So I’m not I don’t have room to complain because I’ve been very successful, but it it is very weird. It’s a fun house mirror version of how things should be because it’s, like, it’s not about your words. It’s not about your ability to craft a story or to to, you know, to pick to choose your phrasing or bring out ideas, it’s that plus are you pleasant to look at and listen to?

Has this has has what you have noticed here influenced the Zoe Ash books and story because I I I feel like, I feel like some of this comes through, particularly in the most recent novel. Let’s actually, let’s shift let’s shift to talking about the books. Why don’t you, give people the elevator pitch on the Zoe ash series just so they can, so they they understand what we are talking about here in the in the broadest sense.

It takes place in a near future where it’s not so far in the future that cars are flying or that there are sentient robots, but it is a future where For example, they have social media where everyone just wears a live streaming camera pinned to their bodies because cameras are tiny and they can run all day. So everyone is streaming their life all the time. So they have a social network that’s they just called Bulwark, but it’s basically a god’s eye view of the world because you can hop to any camera feed, any car, dash camera, any security camera, any body camera, any drone camera, Any spot in the world that you wanna look at, you can go look at it. So if there’s a live event that breaks out. If there’s a mass shooting, In Central Park, you can hop to the feed of any victim, of any bystander of the shooter, and you basically have a god’s eye view of the world.

So part of what these books are about is How does this change how society behaves when everybody knows they’re on camera? All the time. Basically, the moment they walk out their front door, they they the assumption is you are being streamed whether you have your own camera or not, you’re in view of somebody else’s. So the protagonist is a young woman who was living with her mother in a trailer park, and she finds out that she basically has inherited her estranged father’s estate and her estranged father was a crime lord. So she has to go off and basically winds up through a series of strange and frankly implausible events has to take over his crime family, and she’s this twenty three year old woman from a trailer park has no idea how to do any of this.

And then it takes place in a city that is what libertarians call a charter city, where they find some vacant spot of land and they just build a brand new city. And it and it’s the fictional world of these novels. In southwestern Utah, somebody has built a sprawling Dubai type city. That’s this lawless playground of very, very wealthy people, and everyone is kind of crazy. So she has to go live there in this place that is this sprawling metropolis where there’s all of these new technologies, but also She is now living in a world where it’s so dense with cameras that she has become a public figure, and she also is very wealthy.

So The idea of having to live life in public, it’s all it’s that ante up times a thousand, which is why I think I for me, that’s what good science fiction should do. It’s not you’re not trying to predict the future. It’s like, imagine if these current trends are amped up to to eleven, to absurd levels.

And and so this brings me to, again, back to my question about video and, you know, the treatment of, of women authors on TikTok, etcetera. I I feel like there’s a I just discussing it with you right now, it feels like that has, entered its way into into your books, or into this this most recent book, at least in in terms of how Zoe feels about herself and how the rest of the city feels about Zoe or am I am I am I mis misreading here?

Well, they’ve always been about that. It’s just the technology advances quicker than I can write it. The first Zoe book came out of twenty fifteen. So exam so for example, that came out before the ring doorbells got popular. So the concept of having a social Bulwark, where it’s just kind of ubiquitous neighborhood view of of things, whereas now those doorbells are networked.

And if you know, if there’s a crime committed on somebody’s front lawn, you can hop from doorbell to doorbell and see exactly where they ran, who they were, and what car they parked And then somebody will have their Tesla park nearby, and it captured it on its camera. Like, even in the time these books have been around, The ubiquity of cameras has has kind of become even more than what it was when I started writing them. So You’re you’re kind of seeing how that affects things already, but what the books are about is We kind of think of celebrities as all being crazy. And part of that is because they basically have to play a character twenty four hours a day. Like, you, like, you know, if if you’re Taylor Swift, you’re you’re playing one version of yourself on stage, but also if you’re just out at a restaurant, you’re still playing Taylor Swift, Pop Star.

You’re not you don’t just get to kick back. You are there’s a public persona. And it’s I think we’ve always regarded this as unhealthy thing they have to do. Because it you can’t be your genuine self. People have expectations of you, and and they project things onto you.

So imagine a world where everyone has to be like that, it’s taking a phenomenon we already see where, you know, you can go Find, you know, there are teenage girls that have two thousand followers on Instagram, not because they’re influencers, but because that’s how it’s has to to be. So the idea that you can be sixteen years old, and you’re taking a picture of your lunch, and your lunch has to be inter interesting to two thousand strangers, That’s already making them do the thing that celebrities have to do that kind of makes them emotionally unhealthy people where You have to craft a version of your life for public consumption, and you’re now not acting on your own needs that are desires. You’re now trying to fit yourself into a character archetype for the public. So the whole concept of the Zoe books is like what happens when the whole world is doing that? What happens when the criminals are doing that?

What happens when, you know, the politicians already do it, but what happens when everybody you run into Every conversation you have out on the street, it’s assumed that it’s being recorded and will be analyzed and scrutinized later. When do you get to be your genuine self? And to what degree is, like, fame I think John updyke updyke has a quote that fame is a mask that eats the face. Like, eventually, it’s it’s just an ask. Right?

Yep. So that’s why it it’s diving into that. In in the latest book, for example, they’re having an election, but it’s an election in this extremely stupid era of when are having to be even more performative than they are than they are now?

Will Saletan let’s talk about the the political aspect here because I do think it’s it’s pretty interesting and does feel, look, it feels it feels ripped from the headlines. Shall we say? But, but I I feel like this is a constant. Question with your books. I I I again, I remember reading in the the afterwards of the previous two, you know, was this was this character based on Donald Trump?

Was this was a Sky based on. It does feel like there is a more explicit connection to the villain in this, this book too, shall we I mean, I I feel I feel fine saying that that is a Donald Trump like figure.

I tried very hard to not make it a Donald Trump like figure because I started these books because the it’s always father who passes away and leaves her everything. He is a casino and real estate magnet that he was not the model for him wasn’t Donald Trump. It was bugsy. Siegel, the guy who founded Las Vegas, and was famously very paranoid and then ultimately wound up getting getting killed by by rivals. And it was like, well, what if there was a futuristic version of that guy who had all of his crazy over the top where he’s basically using the power of his personality to build a new city, like, to to draw investors and to just because part of being a real estate guy is being larger than life.

And they’re all kind of gangster and their and their tone, and they’re all very brash. And, like, that’s just It’s a certain personality type that does that work. So I came up with the ideas for these books before Trump came onto the scene back when he was just the host of the the apprentice. Mhmm. Like, before he became president before he started running, I had and so now that people going back and reading these books is like, oh, this is a Trump arc type, I would I personally kind of hate when books do that when it or a movies do it, and it’s clear it’s like the exact guy from real life.

And it’s like, oh, this is, David Crump. The evil evil racist So here in these books, it is political there in the middle of election, but their two parties are not Republicans and Democrats. They have two very distinct and the idea was that in the future, just as you would not recognize the two parties from, say, nineteen sixty, In the future that you, the two parties trying to win election in this crazy lawless city, don’t perfectly align with any with any party to the point where you’ve you’ve got one candidate who’s kind of a hands off lazy fair, libertarian, who also has an extensive criminal record, and the other candidate is, like, a Eugenicist and we need to purge society of the impure of the impure pure races. There’s no strict Republican or democrat there. It’s just She’s having to choose between one, a corrupt candidate and a and a candidate that that she thinks will lead to just a mass perching of society and mass grave.

So it’s like, well, I’m going with the corrupt candidate every day because we can work with that. But I think I, you know, I think this guy wants mass graves. So it is there’s no It’s not hero versus villain or there’s one pure party and one evil party. It’s it’s the series of bad choices she has to make, and that’s kind of the theme of books. This is a woman who becomes very wealthy and very powerful that still doesn’t feel like She is at the wheel of society.

This is someone who grew up being totally cut out of capitalism. She had no role in it. She had no property. She had no promising career or wealth to her name. And then suddenly she inherits all of this property.

All of this money and thinks, okay. Now that I’m near up here at the top, I can fix the world. It instantly finds out It doesn’t work that way. The the entrenched parts of the system are far more entrenched than you think, and it’s only when she got to a position of power that she that she realized that?

One of the things that I I really enjoy about this book, is Zoe’s team You know, she has a team of guys who worked with her dad. One of them, is a psi ops guy, named Will Blackwater, which is the his last name is is a kind of a running joke in the first, first book. And then, and and other people on the team, but will will is the most interesting to me because he is the guy who both works within the system that Zoe’s father helped build and everybody around Zoe’s father helped build. But is also working with her to change the system and kind of temper her expectations on how much the system can be changed or the speed with which it can be changed. Maybe I should say it that way.

I there’s the the the I I really I what I guess what I’m trying to say is here. I I like the kind of realistic expectations that the book brings to how do we improve society without first destroying it entirely and starting over from rubble.

Yeah. And this is very mild spoilers for the first book, but basically what you find out is that her gangster father had left everything to Zoe because he was trying to go straight and that it instantly got him killed. And he kind of had this very Unrealistic idea that if I put it everything in the hands of somebody from the outside of the system, That could maybe be finally be the change of because he had only met Zoe a couple of times. He w it was a an exotic dancer he had knocked up, and she he did not pay child support anything totally disconnected. But in the couple of times, he had ran into her, she was, like, so, stubborn toward him and, and then refusing his money, refusing everything to do with him.

That he was impressed. He’s like, I he had this idea in his head. Like, she’s got the toughness I have in me. Only she’s not been corrupted by the system. So you got the sense that him leaving everything to her was like his last chance to kind of absolve himself because he helped start this new city and had this naive libertarian idea of if enough wealth accumulates here, then everything will be fine.

Like, we don’t need the government We don’t need all the regulations. If you just leave people be, give them enough opportunity, give them enough jobs, and property, and money Everything will work itself out. And then, of course, it quickly organized crime crime swept in as tends to happen. Same things with the early days of Vegas. Like, you had all of these people In the absence of strict regulation, yet all these people swoop in and impose their own regulation in the form of, you know, But pay pay me protection money, you’re also gonna burn down your casino.

So that’s kind of the the whole thing is that He had an idea of her that if if I just it’s the same thing. It’s like she’s a blank slate, which is the name of the city, Estebula Rasa, and that’s the the running reference. It’s like, I think if we just start over and give her everything, then everything will be fine. And, again, and again, the people around her have to explain to her. You can want to change the system if you want.

You you can want your employees to be treated better than they were under your father. You can want all of these things But let me explain to you exactly what’s going to happen because you’re not the first person to try to change the system, and you won’t be the last. So that’s it. The thing is that it’s so much of fiction. It’s about like a wish fulfillment or a power fantasy.

And it’s like if I finally had the power, this is what I to do, and here is her learning lesson after lesson and having to make these difficult decisions, which I think is, again, it’s what The science fiction, I like that’s what it’s about. I like that’s why I liked about the old star trek. It is always about these moral quandaries when it’s like we have an the we have an Earth you know, system that’s basically utopia. We have a spaceship that can do anything that time and time again were faced with these difficult decisions. Like, oh, it’s not so simple.

You can’t just interfere with this culture to do this. You’ve got the prime directive for a reason. And that’s the thing, is it that it is her running up against the reality of of having power over and over.

Yeah. I I wanna I wanna talk about reality for a minute because the one of the I we we’ve talked a little bit about the kind of Panopticon nature of this society that she lives in. There are cameras everywhere. And in theory, If cameras are everywhere, you would know instantly what is happening, what what the truth is, what is real, and that is not necessarily the case. I wanna I I just wanna read, a passage from the book.

This is a, a character who is talking to Zoe right now. Quote, have you ever wondered what would happen to a society if it became totally impossible to discern fact from fiction? End quote, after only brief consideration Zoe said, Quote, actually, I think we’re living in it right now. En quote, is the other character again. I mean, truly unable to the point where evidence could be falsified so thoroughly that no human sense could detect a forgery where lies could be created that are identical to the truth down to the molecule, to the point that all of our forensics and experts would be helpless to determine what is real and what is false.

What would people cling to when searching for truths. And I I can’t I look, again, I we are not quite to that point yet. We’re not, we’re not there. Precisely. But it it does feel like we are heading towards that moment in a, on a on a, you know, train that is speeding and full of zombies and we’re out of control and we can’t stop it.

And, we’re we are headed there. I I What is what is the answer there? Cause I I feel like there’s I let me phrase it this way. I feel like you’re a little more platform agnostic than I am. In terms of how to reach people.

And I I what I fear with TikTok and, you know, some of the other social media platforms combined with the rise of generative AI, etcetera, etcetera, is that we are getting to a very a place very quickly where truth and fiction are essentially interchangeable and we have arrived at the choose your own adventure future that should be terrifying to all of us who worry about that sort of thing.

Well, and these books are not trying to tell you Okay. Here’s what we need to do to fix all of this. It is Right. And also, it’s not trying to predict the future. There could be a backlash to this, among young people, they could decide they don’t wanna live their lives this way.

They could they could reject the cameras. This is about what if What if the incentives keep pushing us the same direction? But, you know, a lot of times they don’t. There may get to be a point where the most the way to be a unique And attractive person is to not have a presence where a pet makes people think you’re mysterious and cool. Where where this is the the version of being the aloof cool guys by not being on every on every video platform and not being available, and so they wanna seek you out in real life.

Maybe maybe that would be the future. But it is worth Exploring because the whole point is that the technology advances much more quickly than the culture can adjust. You know, humans are adaptable. That’s why we dominate the planet. That’s the one thing that’s special about us is we can adapt to anything, but if change happens too fast, You don’t have time to create societal norms around how how do you you know, like, right now, People clearly don’t have a sense of how to filter true information from false.

I think they had it at a time, but it was always imperfect because they, for instance, believe that everything their preacher told them was true. You know, or they believed they were told as young people, believe what the old people are telling you that that age means they’re they’re reliable, but there were cultural norms around trying to learn what works, what is safe to do, what is not. And in the mass media era, it has come on so fast. Because again, just in my lifetime, the availability of media has exploded a billion times over. It’s not just that there’s Ten times as much media available.

There’s infinitely more media available to me now than there was when I was a kid. There’s nothing in the human brain and in human culture set up to filtered through all of that. And and we don’t really like, parents will try to limit their kids’ screen time, but Okay. The are you limiting, like, are are you setting strict rules for what they watch, how they think about what they watch, how to filter through what they’re watching, what they hear, to try to find truth. And that’s something that, like, are they teaching that in school how to critically think about claims.

If you watch a TikTok or somebody saying that there’s some new health fad that seed oils, are what’s killing us or or you have to cut this out of your diet. Are we teaching them how to stop and double check that? How to go find an original source? Because that’s a skill that now you have to have. Whereas before that, you know, it you could live your life without, you know, that’s trying to sift through that much noise wasn’t as much an issue.

I think we just haven’t had time to adjust and Even if you try to adjust to what we have now, let’s say we’re gonna teach this next generation of kids how to live in a world of TikTok and streamer personalities, and people trying to turn themselves into a brand to try to sell you things By the time you’ve taught those kids, the media landscape will have changed again. But but right now you’ve got some some parent looking at their credit card and trying to figure out why their kids somehow managed to send three hundred bucks to a streamer. It’s like, why did you send three hundred bucks to this famous video game streamer? It’s like, well, he he reads the chats on the screen, and if you pay him, If you donate three, you know, three hundred dollars, he’ll say your name in the stream. It’s like, but what did you but what did you get for that?

It’s like, well, he read my he said my name on the stream. And that’s that’s how these people get to be millionaires. Like, it’s people it’s kids sending them sending them their money. Like, that’s a behavior that I don’t know that a lot of parents even know to warn their kids against because they didn’t know that was a thing until they saw the money gone.

I am also too drunk for our dystopia. I just I feel like it is it is I as as have two kids myself and I I look at this world and I think to myself, this is, you know, it’s good. There’s a lot of things that are good here, but not lot of things that are not great too. I want to, I want I want to bring this back, just very, very briefly. To the the question about selling books.

So you you got on TikTok about a year ago.

Yes. Last August.

It was which was after I guess right before the the release of, your, your, John, the most recent John dies at the end book.

Yeah. It came out in October. I joined in August as, like, a last minute. Oh my god. I’ve gotta figure out this TikTok thing.

Yeah.

Let me ask you. I I and maybe you don’t know the answer to this. Maybe we don’t have any good data or sales figures yet, but have you have you noticed a a tick up in presales. What what is the, what is the actual measurable effect of this for you in the way that matters to you, which is selling books.

It saved my it saved my career. Period. It saved my author career. It’s a it’s I I would not there’s I do not think I would have been able to persist to get another book deal because I’m on a book deal. I signed a three book deal, the one coming out is the second, the third is coming out, or the one that’s current.

First, the one that is current next year would be the second. I don’t know that I would have sold enough books to get another deal without TikTok. It it changed. It changed everything. It totally turned it turned everything around.

Like, like, the presales this is book three in a series. The it’s the presales are much much higher than book two, which is not a thing that occurs. Like, usually, you lose readers in between.

Right. Right.

Because, you know, because people just don’t know about it. It’s made it’s made all the difference in the world because my other methods of reaching people, again, Facebook as a ghost town TikTok or Twitter rather X is a nightmare of of this. It’s a nightmare. This is a dystopian nightmare. And it just but just engagements is down there because people are too busy yelling yelling at each other.

So there just weren’t that many outlets left. The this is the nature of trying to sell things on social media, is that entire landscapes vaporize virtually overnight. And you have to rebuild. I mean, think about how many, like, back when there were vine superstars. Remember, vine?

Yeah. Like, well, those and, like, there’s some of those names. I don’t remember where they wound up, and I bet I could go find them on TikTok. They’re probably out there, but you don’t find just disappeared overnight. One day it was there and the hottest thing, then it was gone.

So in five years from now, TikTok will probably be gone. It’ll be something else. And I will have to be doing that, or I will have to agree to just not write books as a full time job. Again, I can write books as a hobby, selling a couple thousand of them. You know, that’s I could do that.

But doing it as a full time novelist where this is the the way I, you know, I pay my bills. You’ve gotta be you’ve gotta be out there. And if I it was only seeing the returns I was getting from trying to push stuff on the other platforms that I realized, I’ve gotta go where the people are, and everybody said the engagement on on TikTok is not a little higher. It’s a thousand times higher than anything else. It’s everybody.

That’s where everybody has gone. And and even now, I’m sure that a lot of the kids have already moved on to to Snapchat or whatever. But right now, it’s it’s crazy. The number of people you can reach there is crazy.

Yeah. Alright. I always like to close these interviews by asking if there’s anything I should have asked, if there’s anything you think folks should know about your novels, about the world of social media, the world in general, what what do, what should folks know about that I have not informed them about.

Well, it is important to me that I I don’t write about a world that is doomed. I don’t write post apocalypses. I don’t write Like, I don’t want people to be scared of the future because I grew up in the cold war and did not believe there was gonna be a future I thought that by now, if I had somehow survived to the year, the crazy futuristic year of twenty twenty three that at best we would be living in a nuclear land, fighting rats for food and being chased around by mutants and bandits. So I I was told in the mid eighties that nuclear war was going to happen. It was purely a matter of when.

I was told that over and over again. It was not if. It was when that the Soviets would. And then suddenly, in the early nineties, the Soviet Union just evaporates. And it’s like, oh, okay.

Well, I guess not. So you yeah. You’re gonna have to have a future. It turns out you’re gonna so you you’re gonna have to figure out a career and because I did not think I would have an adult life. So for me to sit here in my Air conditioned home, doing podcasts to promote my my silly books that I sat at home and wrote in my bedroom, and got paid a bunch of money for.

And, oh, let’s say, oh, my gosh. The world is just awful. It’s all falling apart. It’s like, If this if somebody had told me the conversations and controversies we were gonna be having, if you’re going back to fifteen year old me or twelve year old me or thirteen year old me and told me that this is what I was gonna be worried about. I’d be worried about book sales.

That it’s like, yes, we’ve got a crazy president who is frankly kind of on the same level of that as Reagan, but people will regard that as apocalyptic. I would say, I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I’ll take it any. I’ll take that any day of the week that the world is still there.

That poverty around the world has dropped massively. The technology is, like, I the smartphones we have now, they didn’t even have those in Star Trek To tell me that this is where we would be, I would I would have said I will take that any day of the week. So I do not have this message of be afraid. Be afraid of the future because I grew up afraid of the future, and it affected my personality in ways that I am still trying to undo. Because when you look out into the horizon, you just see darkness.

You it’s hard to be ambitious about things. It’s hard to care about things. It’s hard to be passionate about things because, like, well, what does it matter? The reality is everybody thinks the world is going to end all the time, and it just never does. So, yeah, you probably if you are a young person out there, if you’re in your twenties, there’s a real good chance that in the year twenty seventy five, You’re still gonna have a job.

You’re still gonna have birthday parties. You’re still gonna have memos and a grocery store and bills and all the stuff. And it we’re on a trend line where the world has steadily gotten better in fits Ron DeSantis. But there’ll still be wars. The politicians will still be scumbags.

The corporations will still be greedy. But it you will still have things in your life worth living for, and I would highly encourage you to stick around for because when I was a teenager, I, over and over again, thought about not doing that. And I’m glad that I am here.

Again, the name of the new book is, Zoe is too drunk for this Distopia, the first book in the series is called, futuristic violence in fancy suits, and the second one, Zoe punches the future in the dick. Well, you know, that’s, how did your publisher like that title? I’m, I’m just curious.

They thought it was hilarious. That was I I submitted that as a working title on the manuscript because I thought it was funny. And then they started sending me cover mock ups with it on there. I was like, oh, we’re going with we’re going with that. I’m like, yeah.

Might not? It stands out. And and, you know, I think there was a time when that would have been considered Racy, but if you go to the self help book section, every title has the f in it. So it’s like, oh, okay. This is so yeah.

Why not? But, yeah, people people think it’s funny. They see it on the shelf. They get a little chuckle out of it. I figure if I can bring somebody one moment of happiness when they’re passing the the book cover.

But if you have Kindle unlimited, that which is the the Kendall’s net for books. Both of those books are free on there. Otherwise, you can probably get them for some very inexpensive price or Steel will copy whatever. If you wanna catch up on the series, it should not it should not cost you very much. Sure.

But, I I would obviously prefer you pay full price for the most expensive possible addition you can, but it it these days, everything’s so expensive. There’s there’s lots of inexpensive of ways to catch up on the series if you want, but also if you just wanna read this one, you can. They’re episodic. They will it will explain to you exactly what’s going on in the first few pages.

Yes. Very much. Alright. Jason, thank you for being on the show again. I really appreciate it.

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Alright. My name, again, a Sunny Bunch. I’m culture editor at Boolwork, and I will be back next week with another episode of the Bulwark goes to Hollywood. See you guys