Jarrett Sleeper, Tony Valenzuela & Monique Coleman on “The Fourth Door”

With so many news stories about the power of social media culture in the last week, we couldn’t have asked for better guests on the What’s Trending Podcast than Jarrett Sleeper, Tony Valenzuela, and Monique Coleman from the new hit series “The Fourth Door.”

Tony and Jarrett gave us a lot of insight into the creation of this supernatural fantasy from New Form Digital, starring Monique as a woman who has to rescue the man she loves from the King of Limbo, played by Joey Graceffa. Tony explained how Graceffa’s character is based on fear and the way it controls our society.

“The first sketch concepts for him were a really scary face with a mask and these black clothes. But I was like, ‘I’ve seen this before. I’m not afraid of it, it’s a cliche. If you look at fear and the power that it holds in our world currently, he should look like the packaging of an iPhone – perfect, pristine, untouched and uber powerful.”

Discussing the latest trending stories, they raised some good points about how someone posted the entirety of The Fat Jew’s book to Twitter, as revenge for the comedian stealing other people’s content from the internet.

“I think it’s so weird how everyone’s attacking this one guy, but Facebook profits hugely off of taking other people’s content and reposting without crediting, Buzzfeed does the same thing,” Jarrett said. “I just gotta say, it was an interesting thing to see everybody go after this one human because they had one person they could point at who ran an Instagram account.”

They also talked about the Essena O’Neill controversy and had an interesting debate about the value of social media, and the ability to have an authentic experience and create things of value online.

Monique Coleman, famous for her role on “High School Musical,” said she could see where O’Neill was coming from. “There are a lot of young people who are growing up on social media that don’t know that a lot of these things are not real. They don’t know that people are getting paid to sell certain things. They have this perception and they’re judging and they’re thinking that social media is a place where they can be validated, and that they are not enough if they don’t live up to this standard that they’re seeing.”

You can listen to the entire podcast on Soundcloud or download it on iTunes. Leave us a review on iTunes for a chance to win a “Fourth Door” hoodie signed by Jarrett, Tony and Monique.