I’m not sure if you’ve noticed recently, but discovering stuff on Netflix can be kind of hard. Sure — you’re presented with a bunch of categories like “Top 10” when you login, but outside of those initial lists, finding things that are compelling and worth your time seems close to impossible. The compelling stuff is there — it’s just buried. With that in mind, I feel very excited to be able to share two things from Giorgio Angelini, one of my favourite documentary makers. The first is something I’ve been wanting him to write forever — about what it was like to release his latest documentary on Netflix. Secondly — Giorgio’s let me publish his latest short here on Webworm. It strikes at the heart of what’s going on in America right now.

My friend loaded about a year’s worth of our text history into Google’s AI (privacy, what privacy?) — and instructed the AI to create a podcast about me based on those texts. That’s what today’s podcast is — just a couple of AI people talking to each other about me, based on nothing but a text thread between me and my friend. It’s truly awful and I told Aaron as much. On top of this Joshua Drummond shares his latest big of art around New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.

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/