Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Art Was A Mistake | Ep. 322

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

The guys talk through the implications of the Paramount/Warner Brothers deal, lamenting the instability of a career in the arts (and the downfall of Quiznos) before pulling back the curtain on how TV actually gets made — from last-second joke rewrites before taping, to animatic locks, to editors performing literal magic in front of their eyes.Thanks to Factor for sponsoring. FACTORMEALS.com/qq50off and use code qq50off for 50% off your 1st Factor box and free breakfast for a year. New subscribers only, varies by plan. 1 free breakfast item per box for 1 year while subscription is active.Thanks to ASPCA Pet Health Insurance. To explore coverage, visit ASPCApetinsurance.com/QUESTION.  The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance.Follow the guys on Bluesky!https://bsky.app/profile/danielobrien.bsky.socialhttps://bsky.app/profile/sorenbowie.bsky.socialBonus episodes 2x/month at patreon.com/quickquestion OR Apple Podcasts

Welcome to quick, quick question for you all right. I want to hear your thoughts. I don't know what's on your mind. I've got a quick, quick question for you all right. The answer's not important. I'm just glad that we can talk tonight. So what's your favorite? How did you get?

I think you'll have a great time. Welcome back to Quick Question with Dean Eobines and the Sore Dog Supreme. sore dog what's up? Oh my dog is so sore. Oh, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, just the right one. Man, that's not where I thought you were going to go. I thought you would connect the nickname sore dog to most of your name being soren. Yeah. Yeah. And then you're like, and you're my dog.

Yeah, but no, it's a sore like my dogs. My dogs are, are. Only one though. Yeah. Only one of them. Okay. Well, it's the gout and a combination of the gout and my insulin deficiency. It's just there's a lot going on. What do you think of art?

Mistake? No. Yeah, probably a mistake. Probably a mistake. That's what I'm thinking, too. I think the mistake was making it business, was making art. product and business. If art was just hobby,

like any of my stupid, like make art gardening. And then I think we don't have any problems. I see, I disagree with you there. I think that the main problem with art is that at one point we convinced them that the customer is always right

that like once your art is done, it belongs to the world. Like it doesn't, it's not yours anymore. I'm like, no, well, we, no, they didn't do shit. Yeah. Like, I'll let you come over and look at it. but you don't get to talk about like,

well, there's little issues here, there. Yeah. I don't want that. See, I'm looking at my room, and I just reorganize some of it, so I have my both bass guitars that I own are out, and I have a bass ukulele that's out too, and it seems like, oh, this guy must be pretty serious about bass.

I'm not. It's really fun. It's just like a fun, stupid thing that I do, and there are much better bass players out there. And I don't have any, shame about being a pretty mediocre bass player and like wouldn't it be cool if I had a stable job and and my writing was also a thing like bass playing that I just did for fun and it didn't matter and like all art that all of us like we all did a little bit of art all the time and it was all

mostly shitty and we didn't need to worry about it well that does sound nice but then again you would be then be working another job. I know. And a job that you would be going to each day and be like, fuck this. But it would be a job that like theoretically, Paramount couldn't swallow and then just decide is not making enough money. Well, that's true. And and and and and then delete.

Like if art was not a job path and it was just like as fun and ancillary as running is in my life currently. And I was like, well, I'll write all the time. Like, I'll run all the time. And then I'll be a coder or a surgeon or something. I would do like one of the jobs that is presented as a job that a person can have to support their running and writing and base playing. Well, hold on.

Is expectation the problem for you? Like, is it, are you considering? that because you are a professional at this, that then if you were to do it for fun, there would be the same expectation as there would be of a professional doing it. You're talking a lot about making some bad art. Like how much fun that would be.

Do you feel like you don't have the license to make bad art currently? No, I make bad art constantly. Right about writing. Like my daughter the other day was like, will you write me? She was curious about story writing. And she wanted to know about K-pop Deven Hunters.

She's like, could I write a daybop dand a story? And I was like, yeah, you just got to decide what's going to be about. And I'm like, there's a cat in it. There's this big blue tiger thing that can transport through floors. And I was like, what if Rumi got that power? And then Rumi got stuck. And she was like, can you write that? And I was like, and I immediately felt the sweat of like, oh, it's got to be.

I haven't fully fleshed it out yet. I don't have a lot of a, I mean, I don't know that really the story goes yet. Oh, God. I mean, I don't even know where the second act break would be. Um, yeah, I like roomy, a cat, a cat that can travel through rooms and its name is roomy. I mean, like, do we love a name that works that like does work or should we go? I can't, I'm not going to write it without a, without the right name. Right.

And so when she's like, well, you write that story. My first instinct is like, oh, that's going to be a lot of work because I'm not willing to make a shitty story. I'm like, it's going to be. I have to sit down and flesh this out and I got to think about it and how long do you want it to be? because that's going to dictate where, like, the real crisis happens. I need a lot of information from you first. Why don't you write some shit down? And then I will take that back and I will write you something beautiful.

Yeah. I think to get at the heart of your question is I would like a more stable job in a more stable industry and art to just be a fun thing that we do on the side. Or maybe there's just no art at all. an art was a mistake. Is that I think. We just live the equilibrium lifestyle.

Yeah, yeah. We just get rid all the art. Get rid of all the art. And we're all farmers. Well, the problem is then you're seeing art even when it doesn't exist. That's the issue.

Are you talking about ghosts? What do you mean? I mean, there's some beautiful ghosts out there. No, I think, you think about a rainstorm and it's hitting the roof of your car. And it sounds like the sky is sad. But it's you.

Like, it's your grief that's driving that. Like a rainbow. Rainbows aren't inherently beautiful. We just decided because, like, there's some real symmetry to them and, like, there's a lot of good color and stuff. And so you're finding art in places that it wasn't intended. It's not supposed to be there.

And then your natural next instinct is, what if I did make it intentional? And everyone's just going to keep doing that. It's an instinctual. Nah, our natural next instinct is, ah, God must love me. And then you move on to your farming job. Oh, is that right? Is that how people, when people watch your show or they? going, oh, another one in the books.

That's what people say when they look at rainbows and they hear rain and it may, and it sounds like crying. They're like, ah, what an elegant God. The only person who's allowed to make art. Okay. Only God can make art. Okay. All right.

Well, okay. So, all right. I see what you're saying. I'm sorry that you're feeling. A little unstable at the moment. I don't think I could do another job anymore. I think that when the apocalypse comes, people always compare it with that. like that there's no like real good skill set.

I'm not, I don't know what my job would be after this. We are saying the same thing. If art was not presented as a job when we were young, then we would have had another job. It wasn't. It wasn't presented as a job. Everyone was like, don't do this.

Everyone was like this. You're never going to get a job doing this. Please stop right now. People who were already in the job were saying that to us. People were like, if I could tell you one thing right now, it's don't try to do internet sketch comedy as a real job or like don't try and be a writer

there's like there are fewer writers for television than there are writers I mean then there are players in the MLB like it's right everyone's telling you these things all the time and there are even fewer writers in the MLB which we don't talk about enough far fewer yeah not enough I would say

okay well is there something going on with Paramount right now that's driving this Yeah, I mean, this podcast is not supposed to be an industry podcast, and it's not. It's just the timing of when we're recording this being that there was a bidding war for Warner Brothers Discovery, which is the company that owns HBO Max, the one to watch, which is where I make my stupid fucking jokes about fucking horses. There was a bidding war who was going to get them. Netflix emerged as the winner for the longest time, and Paramount was very upset by it. and there were so many headlines about how Netflix won this thing.

And, like, Paramount, you just got to, like, take the L and walk away. Paramount didn't take the L and walk away. They made a different bid, and Netflix backed out. So now it's all but assured Paramount is going to take over the parent company of the parent company that makes my show about fucking horses. And I don't know what any of it means. None of us know what anything means. We have no insider information.

Soren and I about anything in this industry. It just, it's, it's so much stuff, so much noise around the thing that we want to do, which is make jokes, and the thing that people want to receive, which is jokes and information. And then there's meanwhile, like, just like a bunch of these weird money ghouls that are having the best time in their lives, seeing who can say the largest, number and then taking a victory lap on it. The.

And Paramount said the largest number. They said, Paramount, why did Paramount say the lot? Did Paramount get some backing from another, uh, money source recently? I mean, Paramounts the,

the, the, the owner of. That's a trick question. Paramount Skynet. Yeah, you know, it's the son of the

of Larry Ellison, who is like, their own gravitational pull and slowly pulling everything into them. Also, they think that they did actually recently get some money from a Saudi prince as well. well. So there'll be some Saudi Arabian influence in whatever Paramount does from here to four.

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year. Eat like a pro this month with factor. New subscribers only varies by plan. One free breakfast item per box and one year while subscription is active. So, Dan and I have lived through buyouts before. Buyouts in a couple different ways. And I'll say that never once has a buyout gone well for the people who are working under it. I'll say never has media merger been good, period. They've never been good for anyone. It eradicates jobs and it limits competition and it makes the product worse for consumers. Yeah. It is good for the people at the very top who love making deals,

which is my least favorite kind of person there is. I am learning. It ends up ruining a lot of things. Yeah, even outside of our industry. Quiznos. R-IP. I can go on all day about how much I loved Quiznos. Kisnos was a Colorado company, by the way.

Is that for real? Yeah. Man, I loved when Quiznos came to town and got Subway sweating for a while. Subway. We were like, Quiznos has chili and Corbred Subway. You better fucking do something. And Subway was like, we are, I promise you, we're not going to do anything. It did, but get worse.

Well, we're all going to get worse. That's the secret. And you can see the trajectory of like a Jersey Mikes right now where they're in the same tailspin as Quisnos was. They are. They're done. They're cooked. Absolutely not.

Cooked. What are you basing that off of? Talk about Quiznos and then we'll talk about Jersey mics. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to doughboys. What happened with Quiznos was they started in Colorado. small little sub shop in Denver and then they started they were such good subs that they started to branch out the idea of toasting a sub completely foreign to the entire world it turned out until Quiznos like Subway that was not even on their radar that they could do that and they're

turning out these hot subs they were really good and as they started to franchise things were still pretty good and then they got bought and that person decided look Subway is the most famous or Subway has the most real estate in the entire world in terms of fast food restaurants like There are more subways than anything else, more than McDonald's. If we're going to compete with them, we got a spread out. And so they got too big for their bridges. They got over their skis. And they ended up sacrificing on quality to the point where all of a sudden, a Quiznos sub became inedible.

It was, I don't know when that tipping point was. But if you were to put one in your mouth, you'd be like, oh, fuck, this isn't supposed to be in there. And you'd be upset with yourself. And so people just stopped eating it. Quiznos went bankrupt. Quiznos for sure when bankrupt, I don't believe Jersey Mikes is suffering a similar fate. I think out of almost any growing fast food chain I've seen, they have managed to maintain quality at scale to a degree that is pretty remarkable. And they're still innovating in creative and exciting ways.

They recently launched a pregnancy series. safe sub, which is so handy because you're not allowed to have deli meats when you're pregnant. And Jersey Mike's like, yeah, we're going to, we're going to cook it for you. And it's, and it's like specifically for you pregnant, Shea. Isn't that nice? I love that for you. Thank you. The buyout happened in 2025.

Oh, fuck. Really? Yeah. Blackstone bought Jersey Mike's. Yeah. And they are at all. Immediately people started, if you can go on threads on Reddit, immediately people started noticing that the subs were shorter,

that they started baking the bread smaller. So just like seeing what they could get away with. They're going to just keep like moving the line to see what people will tolerate. And then they'll stop there for a little while. They don't go back. They stop there for a little while until people get used to it. And then they keep pushing the line. And so the quality will just continue to fall off.

You can tell the people there are fucking pissed off. I don't know the last time you were in a Jersey Mikes, but they don't want to be there. I think it's it's due. I mean, right now I agree. I'll still go there. My son loves it and I certainly there's things there that I like. But it is not what it once was.

Originated Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Not in Colorado? No, weirdly. Not in Mike Colorado. It is, I love what they do. And it does taste exactly like a Jersey sub. It's so good. I remember that for my childhood being in Ocean City,

going to like Vultacos or wherever and being like oh there's a real specific taste to a Jersey sub here and they figured that out they they nailed that yeah had we were all better for it for a while and this is why I've been saying like sandwiches where we went wrong with sandwiches is they never should have been business

sandwich should have just been a thing that we did like gardening why is it? Just do it on the side it's gonna these guys are gonna find shit to play with no matter what And it's just going to start that I was realizing the other day. I was like, I'm going to have a whole day. I'm going to try not to interact with AI in any capacity of the day and just see what that's like.

It's like fucking avoiding plastics at this point. Like I can't do it. I can't get away from it. I call a call center or something like that. I'm going to talk to an AI. If I try and use Spotify, I've got AI, like it's, it's fucking, they are ramming it down our throats. And I don't want it. I've never once been happy with the results I got from AI.

This isn't an original complaint, but it's still a fair. barely new development where, so Google, which was a great company that has been steadily getting worse over our lifetime after being like the best fucking search engine and the best fucking email host in the history of time. They've just decided to get to be in the getting worse business, which is cool for them. Something that they've done with Gmail, over the last couple of years, a good thing that they did is they started sorting your mail into different categories. So you had your, and they did it automatically. Yeah. It filtered out, here's your primary emails, which they, their algorithms, their AI, their whatever, their software could isolate. These are the things like, this is a conversation from a person.

This is the, based on our information, this is the kind of email that you probably want. That's your one tab, your primary. And they had a promotions tab, which is like they filtered out all the shit that you probably don't want, like, all the mailing list that you're on because you bought something off Amazon or, subscribe to Peacock or whatever the thing, you get all the stuff that you don't really need to interact with. But it's there in a separate tab. And social. That's where you'll see posts from, in my case, Nextdoor or Substack or LinkedIn, all the good reads, all the different social things that, again, I don't need to interact with. It's, it's handy.

It was like a Google innovation that I'm like, this is good. I think 99.9% of the stuff that I need is in the primary tab. well-filtered, good job Google. Then very recently, they started doing this thing at the top of all of my email threads where it says AI interview and it has bullet points where it tries to sum up the conversation

that happened in the threat. It's powered by Gemini. There may be mistakes. I have the option to learn more. And I don't like it because I like reading my emails. It's for all the people who are using AI to,

to write emails or to summarize other emails, I cannot find kinship with you. I don't really have a problem reading or writing emails. It's a part of my day and a part of my life that I'm okay with. So when I see this thing, I don't need it. I don't like it. And it says AI overview right at the top. And I have my strong principles about AI.

There's like, if there's a way I could turn this off, then I would like to turn it off. And I go in settings and I finally find the way to turn off AI. and if you want to turn off AI that summarizes the conversations that I have with my friend Michael Swain, you can turn it off, but you also lose the filtering that Gmail already got me to fall in love with, this very handy thing that I've been using for the last two years or so that I love and is helpful. If I want the good thing, I also have to keep the AI Conversations Summarizer on. And it's fucking awful.

It's just weird. How much it's so weird. It's so weird. They're like really insistent on like, look, fucking use it. You have to use it. I'm like, I don't want to. It's not actually very good. They're like, it doesn't matter.

You have to use it in every walk of life now. It's crazy. It's such a funny tech thing because none of the other good things were rammed down our throats quite as much. I don't recall getting an advertisement for Google as a, search engine. I discovered it, like a lot of us discover it, from my older brother. We all, it was a wonderful street campaign of seeding Google to older brothers and cousins to, to filter out to the rest of us. And it was just the kind of thing like, this is, this is so good

that we don't even need to tell you why it's good. You're going to use it and you're going to understand. Similar to the iPhone. I know that Steve Jobs did his big, like, presentation and people still talk about what a great presentation that was. I don't think. anyone was like banging down my door telling me you're going to want an iPhone you're going to need an iPhone for the rest of your life I could go a little while not having one and then when I got one I was like holy shit this is so much better I understand now this is a good thing and the product knew that the designers knew that they knew like the people once they touch this thing they're going to fucking fall in love with it AI is different than all those things AI everyone all these These sweaty tech ghouls are like, you're going to love this thing. You just have to use it all the time. You just have to prove that you're reliant on it. And then it'll just get me through this quarter.

This is why phones, search engines should be hobbies. Oh, my God, shouldn't be business. Let us just make calls on the side of our farming jobs. We have a quick message from today's sponsor, the ASPCA Pet Health Insurance Program. Ladies and gentlemen, I have a cat. A cat that I adore. It's like a family member, more than it is a pet.

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insurance company and produced by ptz insurance agency limited the aspca is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance. I do want to talk about people's jobs. I think this is probably, this is art adjacent, if not art itself. I don't even know that I would call what I do art. I think that that's a pretty big rich. So I'm going to say art adjacent for all of this. We talked a lot on the show about like writers rooms and stuff, but I realized I had my

meeting yesterday for my animatic screener and I'll tell people what that's, what that is in a second. but the number of people who also work on a television show who are magicians at their jobs is pretty phenomenal and we don't ever really talk about that. So I wanted to ask you some questions about yours because you're live action. That'll be a first for John.

And so I wanted to get like a sense of like what your post looks like. I'll go through kind of what, what I have first. So there's a lot of rewrites of our show. You turn in a table drafts, a writer. You do a rewrite. After the table read, then there's another rewrite. Then you have what's called an animatic, which is like a very rudimentary animation of everything. That's after you've cast all the characters, you've gotten an audio, like a radio play of it, which is just everybody's dialogue and you've chosen your takes and everything like that. Then you're getting

this one version of it that's black and white and everything kind of moves really stiltedly. There's no real fluid animation to it yet. And then you're doing a rewrite after that, and then you're getting a color screening. And that's the one where there's actual, everything's been animated, everything looks pretty much like it's going to be, except there's a lot of sweetening that has to be done,

and there's no music for it yet. And then you do a rewrite after that. And that's a really tough one, because if you'd make big changes in the color, everyone hates you. But in this process, you know, when I'm doing what's called an animatic lock, which means you're getting it to time.

Like you have this animation comes in and it's like it's always going to be over time. And you're always like you're beholden, especially on broadcast TV, you're beholden to a very down to the second, like how much time your episode, how long your episode can be. And we get to this point where we are working in the room with them.

You've got, you're with the editors. And the editors are, you're looking at something, you're like, oh, you know, this isn't, I think we can just lose that line. Like, let's kill it so that we have more time. But it's in the middle of, it's in the middle of a line. Like, you're losing like six words.

And they're like, all right, hold please. And like they just sit there and they work for 10 seconds. It's not even 10 seconds. And then all of a sudden you have like a very fluid new version of it. And it's like, it's the most incredible thing I've ever seen. It's on the audio side as well where you've got a line of dialogue. And it's like, you only got one take from Seth. And you're like, I don't think this one really works.

It's, it's, I want to lose this part of it. but it's going to be clipped. And then we're going to losing like the beginning of his, the line his. And they're like, oh, hold on. And then there's like 15 seconds. They come back and it's perfect. And you're like, well, where did you even get that? And they're like, well, I remember that in this other episode, he uses a hard H when he's saying like this other word.

And we put it in our library. And so I've just spliced it in from there. And they, but they, the amount of things that they just have at their fingertips and the way their ability to like utilize those tools is like magic to me. It's unbelievable. Man, you've taken a big sip. That would have been a great time for me to talk. I was giving your room. I know.

I'm trying to think if I have anything like that because our whole process is obviously very different. We'll have like a Zoom read of a script at an early stage and we'll get a bunch of notes and punch up. And then slightly later, like two days before or the night before we tape, we'll do another read in a different room. That's sort of our black and white version, I guess. And then we'll have a rehearsal.

in studio with like all of the elements John's in a suit we have all the elements behind him playing and if there's a stunt we'll rehearse the stunt and then the rewrite room is the bosses three writers and a couple of people a couple of producers talking to the post team

which is somewhere else and we'll never have to do anything as wild as like cutting together like sewing up dialogue based on other audio clips but there are so many tweaks to like a graphic and sometimes like a photoshopped graphic

where it's like a design like an animal wearing a suit at a business meeting or sometimes it's just we will have a bunch of tweets in B-roll scrolling in the background while John is describing something and we might say hey this this badger dressed in a suit at a meeting I kind of imagined it was actually going to be a rooster in a suit in a meeting and like it seems dumb and it is dumb but it's

actually really important to me so can we make it a rooster and also in this thing where it's a bunch of tweets that are scrolling that doesn't really play can we get can we see what it looks like where instead of a scroll it's 150 tweets on screen static at once yeah and uh someone in the room types into a computer. And then a bunch of really hardworking graphics and post people are, I think, wisely kept very far away from us so they can scream. And then like turn the badger into a rooster and turn the scroll into 150 tweets. And there's like a graphics element that goes into that.

There's like legal clearances of what images we can use that needs to go into that. and that feels like complete magic to me as well because it's a couple of dope sitting in a room and we're like, yeah, let's just, I want to see what it looks like with a rooster instead of a badger. Yeah. And then...

I don't even know if that's right. I just need to see it. Then we move on. And then we start talking about other things. And then in the middle of rewrite, someone will pipe in and it's like, they have the rooster now if you want to look at it. And then we'll see the rooster on the screen

and we'll be like, yeah, good, or... Go back. I guess the Badger was fine. We do a lot of that too. We're just like in the room, we're like, oh, you know what? This isn't. I feel like she's saying a different word or like something like that. And you're like, I want to like change it.

Like let's listen to takes. Let's see what we can do. And like we'll build a whole new line of dialogue out of like the other takes that the actor did. And then at the end you're like, no, you know what? Let's just go with the original. It's better. It's like, this person is just their, that's their job is to be like the whims of this show. and the writer who wrote the episode

just sitting there being like, you know, I think what might be funny? And not even knowing themselves. Right. And I don't even know if the people in the other room are getting the feedback that like, yes, this worked or no, this didn't work and has nothing to do with you.

As far as I know, they're just like sitting in a dark room being fed instructions from like a pneumatic tube that they open up and it's like, rooster. I'm like, oh, okay. Oh, God damn. All right. I used to have that with, Randall on our site,

friend of the show, Randall Maynard, he used to do all of the photo jokes for our columns. Well, not all of them, but once we started getting in trouble for using unlicensed photos, so it was like,

we needed somebody who was in charge of us. So like, you'd be working on a column and you would, a lot of times Dan did his own photoshops. I did a few of my own, but I was not good at it.

So occasionally I'd be like, Randall, I need an elk topus walking around an apocalyptic scenario. And he's like, an elk to pus. And I'm like, yeah, fucking elk to push. What's hard about that?

What's hard to understand about that? And then, like, he would be like, okay. And then from nothing, he would summon a half elk, half octopus, climbing through the rubble of an apocalyptic scenario. And it was incredible. It's magic. I tried not to make him do too much magic because before Randall, I was that job.

I was doing every job at cracked, including all, like, the Photoshop's for, and all the layout and all the coding for every article that ran on the site. So, and then I was doing it for my own column. And then when we had a Randall, I was still, like, kind of split that job up because I can't, it's really hard in good conscience to, good conscience. Yeah, conscience. Yeah. To ask someone, hey, can you make, like a sandwich monster of hair, your arms and legs?

Grabbing Mike Piazza in a locker room. It's hard to ask someone to do that. when you know how to do it. And it's the burden of having too much information on a thing where it's like, if I didn't know, that I could assume it was easy for him. But I know too much. I know I know Photoshop.

I was like, I can't ask him to do that. I just, I have to do that. And meanwhile, because I know less about music, turning to my older brother and being like, hey,

I want to score for this sitcom we wrote that's kind of like, you know like warm like 30 rock okay see ya and then like expect him to do that because that's a thing where I'm not burdened with knowledge that's another one that on our show happens where you're like you've written a song I'm not I haven't written the whole song I've written the lyrics to a song and I'm like and now I just give it to our composers and they're like and now we're just going to turn it into a real we'll do all the hard work you wrote some things that rhyme that's very cute but now we will do all the hard work of figuring out syncopation everything to it. And like you get it back and you're like, yeah, yeah, that's what that's what I like. I like it like that. There's a show that just came out called Striplaw. I've been blues guy about it. It's by Cullen Crawford, who I think we both know from Internet, but not in person.

He's one of the funniest joke perverts around, just like a dyed in the wool. I care about jokes and nothing else kind of guy. They gave him a show. He hired a bunch of incredibly talented people to work. on it. It's called strip law. It's on Netflix. It's hilarious. And in his run of like promoting the show, he's blue-skying about it a lot and talking about all the unsung heroes and all like the fun little jokes and Easter eggs that are hidden in there. And one thing that came up is, he had an idea for a song to be playing to underscore a montage. And his idea was just like, I thought it

would be funny if there was like a hard rock song that you know starts with like one two three four and then it's just they just keep counting for the entire song and then someone made a catchy like six minute song that is just counting and i say just counting but it's not just like it's like a it's a really good song it's a really believable hard rock song where all the lyrics are just numbers

in sequential order and that again is just like a weird comedy freak who's like I think it would be funny if there was a song that was counting and it was hard rock and someone's just like okay yeah I could do that

and then they turn around and they do it and now it exists yeah it's amazing It's like, it's, it is basically magic to me. The directors too, the directors of our animated episodes are like they are, it's, I think, probably harder than like a direction, trying to direct an entire live action show because you are, you're responsible for every piece of choreography and everything and making sure the timing of everything works.

And like things that, if you did like a zero gravity episode, that's the fucking, it's like the hardest thing to do in animation. Or that in just my recent episode, there's a, there's a scene where somebody is bleeding and they're spraying blood from their chest and it's growing in how much it's spraying. It's in a pulse because it's going with their heart but then it's getting to be more and more and more.

And so when you have a situation like that, you have to draw the physics of that and like what's getting covered with each spray and like how that's going to look to make it grow and in each surge of it. And like that's it's so so complicated. And I just walk in and I'm like, yeah, it looks good. there's no there's no there's nobody's like you write a joke and be like that's a fucking good joke

that's a funny ass joke nobody i'm not doing that for him i'm not feeling like oh this looks like it took a lot of work i could you this must have been really really hard it's just like yes you captured the thing that i created that i insisted upon here it is my vision even when i'm just talking about it now i'm like my episode yeah my episode it's a i'm just i think it's cruelly unfair. The people who are doing this for television are like the best of the best, obviously, because this is like where you want to end up, I assume.

And they're so fucking good at it and they're so fast. Like they do it right in front of my face. They make these seamless edits in front of my face where I'm like, how do you, how does you do that? Do you feel like

what you do looks like magic to anyone else? Um, yes. Which I will, in this same rewrite room where we're barking at graphics producers to fix things, we will occasionally come up against a joke that doesn't work. And we try to fix it in the room. And if we can't fix it in the room, then we skip it and we get to the end of rewrite. And then John and Tim, our bosses will tell the writers, okay, just, we still need that joke fixed.

So like, go off. They're going to do their thing. And then the writers go off to a different room and we write somewhere between seven and infinity options for this joke, knowing that it needs to be short because our episode is probably running long because it's always running long and needs to be not any of the joke pitches that they've seen before because obviously none of those works. It needs to be new jokes. And also we're taping the show in 25 minutes. and that's that's it's very common to me to just like okay we're going to go into this room

and like the three of which are going to quietly sit and write 18 different new jokes for this setup and then like continue about our day none of it was strange until my brother and sister-in-law came to a taping years ago and I met them after the taping and they were asking me like what the process was like

and I told them was like oh yeah yeah rewrite was fine We had a couple of joke TKs that didn't have punchlines. So me and Charlie and Joanna sat in a room and came up with like 30 alts. And then I don't even know which ones ended up on the show. We just like did him another car. And that to him was magic. He was like, he was like, so you just with the show taping in 25 minutes,

the idea of us sitting there and just like writing on command was foreign to him. I mean, even that sounds magic to me. You're ready on a deadline? Because knowing that the show is taping no matter what, like the panic that that would instill in me in that room would be like, oh, fuck, we got to come up with something quick. Because we do, go ahead. It's very frustrating to me because when the show was taping in 25 minutes

and my bosses are like, we need a joke right here. Yeah. Do it. I do it. My body does it. The part of me that I didn't invent that works hard and knows how to do this, just does it beyond my comprehension or conversation. control. And then when I'm writing a draft, and I have so much more time than 25 minutes,

I want to just say, like, you could just do it now. Just write 15 jokes. I'll put 25 minutes on the clock. Just do it now. There's, there are so many 25 minutes between now and the end of the week. We can write a million jokes. And I just don't. I can't turn it on the way that I can and rewrite. Are you guys seeing each other's jokes as they're being written? Yes. Okay. That's part of it. You know, like, so to peep behind our curtain is like, I talk about all these different rewrites you have. At every single one of these rewrites, occasionally there's a joke that like the showrunner doesn't like, but the writer is insistent on where the writer's like, I'd like to give it a shot at the table. Maybe it doesn't do great at the table. The writer's like, I feel like the read wasn't great for it. Like, I would still like to give this a shot and the showruner will just be gunning for this one joke. And so eventually what will happen is like that has to get rewritten. And when that joke gets rewritten, it goes to our. joke room. And so whoever happens to be in that joke room at the time is like, they're going to write out 10 different versions, 10 alts for it.

And you do that for every episode, for every rewrite, you're going to get, maybe you get like three of those, maybe four. Sometimes it depends. But then what will happen is that whatever we all decide on as like, oh, that's the joke that should go in there, sometimes the showrunner will be like, I don't like that one either. And then you're like, okay, so on the next rewrite or even like right away,

like you're already doing a new joke or you're waiting until the next rewrite and then you're putting in a new one there. And so by the end, you might have one section or one area of the script that you've, the team has written 50 or 60 jokes for. Yeah. Like you can look through the script. There's these little script notes things and you just pop on the bubble and you can see everything that was there. And you've got to do that every single time because you got to be like, well, we're not, he didn't like any of the old ones. So like we're going to, you can't repeat any of those. They're doing brand new jokes every single time.

When I've been the main writer on a story and I will submit a draft with six options for a joke and then none get taken and then I do a punch up so I do four to six more options and then get taken and then we take it in gangs and I write however many I wrote in gangs and they don't get taken and then it comes back to us again and this is a like this is now several days trying to solve the same joke puzzle. you get to a point where sometimes it unlocks really creative outside the box jokes that I love. And sometimes I'm like, maybe I'll just blow my fucking brains out on the page. Let's see if they like that. They didn't like anything else. So maybe this is what they want. Yeah. Yes.

There are definitely those moments where it comes back for the fourth time and you're like, well, maybe it's the whole fucking area that doesn't work. Jokes should, it should just fit. Things should just fit here. We should have like 12 options that are good for them. this. And if you don't like any of them, then maybe the whole area is fucked. We can just change it. And sometimes we do. Sometimes we're like, we'll just cut this. Let's just cut this. We'll cut it. It's going to be cut. I know it's going to get cut in the color anyway, because it's like,

it's already like a long walk for a joke. Let's just cut it now. Let's just get the job done. That does feel good when you write 40 options for a joke and then by taping the setup gets cut. And it's like, hey, guys, sincerely. thank you for the opportunity. You probably knew it couldn't be done, but you wanted to give me a shot. You wanted to be surprised. Yeah.

And we all agree now, it can't be done. And I really, it was a fun exercise. We had to explore every option before we knew it could not be done. Yeah. Yeah,

so I would hope that, for that same reason, I would hope that that seems like magic to somebody because it's so much work. And like, and it's not fun work. People are always like, you must be joking around all the time in the room.

Like, yeah, I guess. Like when we're breaking a story. but you get to a certain point even when you're breaking a story where you're like, it's just silence and everyone's sitting there and everyone thinks it can't work

and we're like privately they're like, I don't, we're stuck. Like I don't know the way forward or we just get a joke, you get a joke area and like it comes to you and you're like,

everyone just sits there in silence and then someone eventually would be like, okay, break this one out. Stan says and like and like, and so we're like we're like saying it in the room

and slowly it like it comes together. But if you were to just go watch a writer's room, you would be like, this is tense. Like this is, I don't, I don't like this. Because it's everybody quietly working on their own and then trying to like come up with a joke and then shouting it out loud.

And nothing that looks like progress. Like if you just walked into that room and it was just like, what are we trying to solve for? It's like, we want a joke after this video clip. If I'm a stranger in that room and like six minutes go, passed, I would like, well, maybe there's a solution that's not jokes. Maybe we just got to do something else because I don't, I don't know. This, whatever this is is taking too long. And it does. It takes a long, long time. My son had to come with me once to work when he was really young. He

was probably like four. And I had taken him to preschool and preschool just was closed that day. And I was like, oh, fuck. So I just took him to work with me. And for a little while he came and sat in the room with us. And we're all sitting there doing our job. And he was like, it's really quiet. And Jeff Kaufman, who is a great writer for us, goes, it's because we're stuck, Ronan. That was great. That's so funny. That's, this is just tangentially related, but I've been thinking about that just because we're going to have a kid soon. It's been snowing. like crazy recently. We just had a historic blizzard

a few days ago and we're close with our neighbors who have like a 16 month old and just talking to them as our nice wonderful neighbors that we love and we're texting back and forth about like how's your house okay you lose power blah blah blah because they were staying

with someone else and for them to come back and be like yeah everything's good we're staying with the in-laws but daycare is is just canceled for the next two days. So, like, when you're talking about, like, Ronan is with you because preschool isn't there, that's something that I, I hadn't thought about until very recently that, like,

when school is canceled or when preschool is canceled, there is a working parent whose life just has to be different than. Oh, my God. And they're both working parents. And they have, like, stuff they do. And it's like, oh, we just, we, so we just need to, like, we just have the kid now. We didn't used to have the kids Monday and Tuesday,

and now we have the kid. And the kid doesn't understand that we're at work. And how challenging that must be. A snow day, a sick day. Like, you have your kid and they're shitty because they're sick. Like, it really can throw off an entire week or whatever. Like, it's so detrimental when your child has to break their usual rhythm. of going somewhere during the day.

It's wild. And then like three-day weekends. Three-day weekends are happening all the time. It's not just holidays. It's in-service days and stuff like that where you're like the school is just like, nah, the teachers are going to get together this day. We're going to talk about teaching instead.

And you're like, but first of all, I bet you're not. I bet that's not what you're doing. And so you're just like, you have your kid for that day. And so I would get back to work at Cracked when I had a child, Jack and I had kids, and I think nobody else did at that time. And I would get back and people were like,

ah, how is your three-day weekend? And I would be like, why the fuck would you ask me that? Awful. What, you think, this is the break. I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, on Saturday, you don't ask somebody, did you have a really fun week at work? You don't do that.

This is my vacation. I'm here right now. I'm talking to you instead of playing pretend playing pretend is really hard you're going to find that Dan you're going to learn that playing pretend when you're a new dad is like it's great it's really fun because you're like I will

I can think up the best stories you're so fucking lucky to have me we are going to go on some great adventures together and then pretty soon you realize they don't want that they want to replay the same the same interaction at a grocery store 500 times in a row and you're doing it wrong every time

You're just like, and then it eventually the fatigue of them treating you like a toy as opposed to like somebody that you're playing with, you're just like, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not playing pretend. It's never the way you want it. I try to introduce some crisis because there has to be something for this story to go on. I'm trying to incite something and you're just not playing along. You got to learn improv is what I'm saying. I don't think you've considered how this game feels from the big monster's perspective. has to keep falling down. You have to really bite your tongue about to tell your child over and over again. I don't want to hear no. I want to hear yes. And then you can make the story bigger if you want. Yeah. But anyway, I said all this to, I hope that people would think that what I'm doing is magicists because I work so hard at it.

But I think that the people that I'm surrounded by are like, they're. amazing. They're so fucking good at their jobs. And even the people who are even, I should say, that's like diminutive. But like the people who are doing the logistics around the show too, the timing for the show or like the person who's responsible for making sure that the script is in the exact same order as like, as what's appearing on the screen. So that if there's dialogue that needs to be covered again, you're not even in a meeting with the people who are doing audio, but there's one person sitting there who's going to be like, oh, they want that line. differently or they want takes for that differently and they're also marking all of those and they're making sure that that's all happening. It's not on me. I'm just like along for the ride. I went in for taping

last Saturday and I wrote like a throwaway joke about John having a sink a physical sink that he holds up and puts on the desk and I'm writing because we needed like a very quick visual out

for a thing and It made sense in the context of the show. And I also, even though I've been doing this for however long I've been doing this, there's still a part of me that believes in movie magic that, like, they will get, like, a thing that is sync-like and easy to manipulate and store and put away. Because when you're sitting at home watching TV and it's like, man, how did they get that sink-looking thing in John's hand under the desk for him to put on top of the desk? Now on that taping.

and I'm watching our PA, Jordan, carry a sink across the street and upstairs and into an elevator and hunt a set. I'm just like, I did that. I made him do that. Yeah, man, I'm sorry. I'm real sorry about this. I, if I'm being generous with myself, I thought they were going to get a prop sink that was like styrofoam and easy. but if I'm being true to myself I didn't think about the consequences at all

And also that probably doesn't exist Probably doesn't exist Because why would people make What business is that? Who's doing that is their business? And even like If I'm really digging into it If it was going to be a Prop Sync

One of you would still have to make it It would still be someone's problem I think about that with In our taping When we do the records for our show we have our cast who is outstanding and we occasionally will get guest stars that are also really wonderful

but Scott Grimes in particular like Scott who is Steve on the film Who is not wonderful Scott Grimes will I'll come in and I'll be like Same with like a song like if it hasn't gone through anybody on our side to the composer or anything like that

I'll come in with lyrics to a song At one point I had a lyrical map to an old water water hole that like these kids would go to in the summer and they didn't have a real map, but they had a lyrical map on how to get there. So it's like basically looks like a poem. And he sees it and he's like, do you know what this is going to sound like? And I'm like, oh, no, I thought you would do it?

He's like, all right, do you want it to sound like Gordon Lightfooty? Do you want it like folk? And I'm like, oh, that sounds nice. And then he's just like, boom, we'll just do it. And he'll create this beautiful song out of nowhere that like just pull it from the ether. And I'm like, where did that town? come from. That's amazing. That's the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. It was pure magic. Yeah. I do think what we do is bullshit and all the other jobs are real magic.

We had Mario, the wonderful singer. Lopez? Oh, damn. No. Okay. And Chrissy and I wrote this a fish song, a song that fish for him to sing like a slow jam. And he went and did it. it sounds so fucking good. And I can't even wrap my brain around how he did it. And it's just magical. And what I did is I opened up a word doc and I went to rhymezone.com. And I was like, wish, here we go. That rhymes.

I'm like counting syllables of songs to make sure that the rhythm is right. I think I can do that for sure. Yeah. We got to close on out of here, but I do want to go back because I think it's very funny that your segue into this whole conversation was that you wanted to talk about jobs

and you thought that this was art adjacent. And then you talked about animatics and writing and creating music. Yeah. I think you're a fool. I think maybe I don't know what art is. That doesn't matter. I feel like arts at a museum, and I don't see a lot of that stuff at the museum.

No, he's painting. Actually, that's not true. People are. When I was going to give the people that I was thinking of immediately when I was going to give those kudos out, where everybody who works on records and stuff for us and everybody who does the editing for us. I was like, it's so amazing what they do. But it is, I mean, it is an art. It's like a real, they understand things in a way that I don't,

and it's what they create can then be considered something that you would analyze and critique and be like, oh, that's interesting. I wonder what they're thinking with this. So I guess it is all art. I don't know why I call it art adjacent, just to diminutize what they do. Editing is still a miracle to me when I would write a script,

and we would see rough cuts of it at cracked. And the rough was just basically like, here is an assembly of the things that were written down and then said and filmed in order. And I would watch it like the first rough cut of the first episode of After Hours that I watched. And I was like, oh, I guess that was a huge waste of time. I'm sorry.

I thought it was funny. But now that I'm seeing it, it's real bad. I'm very sad. I'm super scared that we wasted all this time. And then Michael Swame did an editing pass on it. and it just like sang and moved. And I've seen that a million times. And it still feels like a miracle when you get a rough,

rough of something. And then Nick Rood, my favorite comedy editor of all time, we're just like, do a thing that I don't understand, but that to him is second nature. And I know it's not as simple as like cutting out of a scene faster or cutting into a scene faster or cutting to a wide to let a joke land better. I don't, I know it's not simple. I know it's just him, you know,

painting the way a painter would or doing whatever a musician would do, which is like he sees time codes and they look different to him than they do to me. And he knows what to do to make them, make it sing and make it, make it funny. And that is still like, that seems impossible. It seems as, as removed as like looking at an alphabet and not understanding how it becomes poetry, is looking at like, I saw a rough cut. And it's bad. There's no way you have enough good things to sculpt this.

to something funny. And then they do. The editors do. Shout out editors. That's amazing. Yeah, it's like seeing a tree trunk. I mean, like, well, I'm sorry, I turn in this tree trunk. Do you think someone would like this? They're like, no, but I do see, I see something in here. And they can already see it. Like, they already know how to get there. That's the amazing thing. It's like, they know how to get from that to whatever their final sculpture is. And it's like, oh, okay. I couldn't see it the way you do. I hand Michael Angelou a giant cube of Marvel and I was like in my head it was a guy

Guy? Do you do guys? I didn't know how to do it but like that's where I wanted it to be and it's clearly not so I guess we scrapped the whole fucking thing and he's like give me a second leave the room and give me a second I peek back in and I say oh Mike he's got to be naked and then I shut the door quietly he's got to be naked

do you get this from David and Goli? Okay he's got to be naked and he's got to be a little worried. Okay Bye. All right. Thank you, everybody, for listening to this episode, a quick question with Sorin and Daniel. If you liked our theme song, that's by me, Rex.

If you like a video version of this podcast, you can watch that on YouTube. If you like more of this podcast than you're currently getting, you can subscribe to our Patreon. And we do a shorter version of these podcasts every other week. That's a little bit more untucked,

a little bit more loose. You can check that out. And always, as always, thank you to the magician for this show, Gabe Harder, who does everything. He does video editing. He does sound engineering.

He does composing sometimes just to trick me, to hurt me. He does it all. All right. Thanks, everybody. Bye. Bye. I've got a quick, quick question for you all right. I want to hear your thoughts on what's on your mind.

I've got a quick, quick question for you all right. The answer's not important. I'm just glad that we can talk tonight. So what's a question? your favorite who did you get when will i be remember what's it out of whoie daniel o'brien two best friends and comedy writers if there's an answer they're gonna find it i think you'll have a great time new