Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Brick By South By | Ep. 326

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

Daniel finds out that Cracked is “going to South by Southwest for the first time,” which would be exciting if they hadn’t already gone… a lot. The guys revisit some sxsw memories and try to piece together how Cracked actually fell apart—touching on corporate acquisitions, Facebook’s video pivot, and a few behind-the-scenes stories that make the whole thing seem absurd and inevitable. Plus childhood sports humiliation, coaching Little League, and an extended debate about the perfect baseball walk-up song.Thanks to ASPCA for sponsoring. To explore coverage, visit ASPCApetinsurance.com/QUESTION.  The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance.Thanks to ButcherBox.Go to butcherbox.com/qq for $20 off, free shipping always, and your choice of chicken breast or top sirloin for a year OR ground beef for life, new subscribers only. 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 think you back to the podcast. Quick question for you all right. Welcome back to the podcast with Soren and Daniel, two American dads talking And to you, by the time you listen to this, we will have recorded this last week. And it might be tonight. Folks. That's the kind of joke you could expect from this podcast.

Some really good thinkers. Two American dads growing up in the heartland of America. I got- Actually, go ahead, sorry. I got huge news for you. What happened? this is big i was tooling around uh our old stomping grounds crack dot com and i saw this massive announcement um that cracked will be making its first ever appearance at south by southwest oh my gosh that's so exciting for them oh because we would we tried to go a couple of times it just never yeah it's just

it's too big of a venue it's too big it's too uh important and we'd they weren't going to have the likes of us. What are they doing? I mean, South by has come and gone at this point. And for those not picking up on the sarcasm or those unfamiliar with the lore, we, as Crack.com, have been to Southby so many times. We created it.

An insane amount of times. We were the ones who were like, what if we did a big festival in Austin, Texas? They were like, let's straighten Austin out. and we were like, no, let's keep it weird, keep Austin weird. And they're like, okay. And Sorin brought them some of that famous Colorado barbecue that they're now known for. Yeah.

But yeah, it just struck me funny because we, it was a huge deal when we went to South by for the, for the first time in 2011, maybe. We did his whole sketch show there. And then every subsequent year for like five or six years, like we looked forward to it. It was a big. We were performing, we were hosting events there. You and I did some very strange thing where

we played like we sort of played a video game live with an entire theater full of very disinterested people. We were like the way Soren and I are your hosts and the way this game works is you all

have to download a game. now and half of you are going to press this button and half you're going to press this other button and one of you is on soren's team and one of you is on mine we are not playing somehow we just sort of like shout at you and entertain you while you maybe do this um with some pretty spotty wifi the point is we've been doing a lot of south by stuff I want to go ahead sure talk about that that when we went that time because we went to a tech award show I think it was. The interactive awards. We hosted and, um, interactive awards. That's right. Yeah. James Adomian was there. Uh, and we would are, I can't remember exactly why, but we made a video for it.

And it was like a video to get everyone pumped up for it. And I wrote it and I look back on it and I'm like, that's one of my favorite things I wrote. Because I, I talked about like the technological evolution of humanity and how far we've come and how impossible it was for us to how exciting it was that we faked a moon landing and a lot of the video was dedicated to the technological achievement

of faking a moon landing and how what a big event that was great stuff it still makes me laugh a lot that we showed that to a room full of scientists they never knew exactly what to do with us at the Interactive Festival

that was great for some reason the people who ran that festival that award show really loved what we were doing and I think they were the two people who ran it I think were the only ones who were cracked fans everyone else was like okay it's it's

it's these weird fucking 20 somethings again doing some something unexpected last time it was a sketch video now it looks like there's beatboxing and live rap music happening okay Right. All right. We're here for, we're the people who run social for the Mars rover. This is the biggest day of my life.

And I have to sit through these weird nerdcore rappers first. Yeah, that's right. That was, you and Michael and Cody performed there, didn't you? Oh, my God. Incredible. All of which is to say, going to crack.com today and learning that for the very first time, It just feels like nothing matters. I know nothing matters, but like nothing matters.

Yeah. Well, here's the thing about it is that a lot of what you remember is your achievements at crack.com outside of video because that lives on YouTube and it's its own thing. A lot of that's gone. It's all gone. I started to watch the new Superman, the newest. That's just the newest Superman. 2025 Superman? Yeah.

Great. there's a lot of what they're doing in there is points that I had made in a cracked article long ago about like why it's so hard to make a good Superman movie. And I was like, and here's how you would do. Here's how I would do it. And like they're doing a lot of that. I think independent of me. I don't believe that they read this article, but I was like, I wanted to revisit it and be like,

I want to see how right I was. It's an impossible article. I found the article. I'm pretty sure. It's impossible to read it. It's impossible to do anything to interact with it in any capacity. So I was just like, well, never mind. There was also another onion article.

When I say another, I mean, they have a long history of landing on the same things that we did. But they did a, there was this thing tying sex in the city with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And I was like, I think I wrote an article about that. Like mapping sets of four to the Teenage Mutual Ninja Turtles. And I was like, I know we definitely did it. and after hours, but I think I also wrote an article at one point. So I was trying to find it.

I was like, I have to give up. This isn't going to work. That's a shame. A decade of our resume is just unfindable and unreadable. It's insane. We worked so hard. You think about how hard you worked on every single one of those columns, how you didn't finish any of them until two in the morning

because you had the rest of your job to do. Or sometimes even later than that. Sometimes it would publish. You'd publish it an hour late and stuff published at five four in the morning. Yeah. So you were up all night working on it, and then you'd be like, okay, I did it. Yeah.

You were proud of it. Not anymore. And it was like, you know, hit and publish on your legacy. It's like, this is my contribution to the anthion of comedy writing. I hope you all enjoy this article that I have to have sex with Keshe as a form of punishment. both of us. Hey, everybody. As you probably will know, I have a cat named Bethany.

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The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance. As I was reading the cracked article about their first ever appearance at South by Southwest, it did make me, well, I had two thoughts. I think Simon Gia is still the only cracked employee who has survived from. I believe so. If you go to like the About Us and the team, he's still there. So I guess Simon putting you on notice, man, you were there, not at Southby, but like, do you remember how once a year all of your coworkers left to go somewhere? That was Southby. You can flag that the next time your new coworkers say it's the first time there's.

doing it thing. I've talked to you about this before, but I would love to get Mandy on one of these these podcasts to just talk about the real reasons that the crack failed. They cracked fell apart because it happened with a sale and it happened based on like numbers that people were confused by in the sale and the sale of scripts, EW scripts and how that was like the beginning of the. end and how that destroyed everything. There were some other things that helped, certainly.

Facebook's weird bait and switch with the algorithm for video. Yeah, Facebook. There's, there's, like, a broader content bubble bursting that affected all of us. There are a lot of strange elements. There's, there's, I think, I hope this doesn't feel like too much of a scoop or putting someone on blast, but like a legend in the podcast game, Adam Sacks, I think bears a not insignificant amount of responsibility. He was the guy who was Earwolf, podcast network Earwolf. That was like his baby and that got partnered with mid-roll. That was sold to scripts before Cracked was

sold the scripts and scripts acquiring earwolf uh was one of the things that gave our bosses tremendous confidence and faith in scripts as a company we're like uh not we they were like oh they purchased earwolf they purchased this like undeniably hip cool everyone wants to be their comedy podcasting brand this scripts team they must know what they're doing this is a this is a good move and like adam sacks was in communication with our people. When we were sold, I talked to Adam Sacks. And I was like, so this is good, right? This is your Earwolf, we're partners in this thing now.

You like scripts and he was like totally. I definitely like scripts. And a few months later, he left Earwolf and did his own thing. And there's a podcast that I tracked down that I think Alex Bloomberg did with Adam Sacks where he's very frank about like Earwolf was destroying my life and I was working so hard on it

and I just needed to like get rid of it and get out of there and I found a company that was going to take it and it took me a long time to leave because I had to sign this big non-compete thing that had him like not work for anyone else for a year or so but it's just a thing

that was always simmering in the background that like the the template that we used as proof that the water was fine to jump in with scripts was a guy who like by design um did not care about the future of his company and just wanted to sort of like save his mental health and cash out which is good for him it's fine it's just for years after cracked explosion implosion I was collecting everything I was like all these little pieces for for why this thing uh fell apart and that was one of the data points I was like this is kind of interesting

When we say fell apart, we mean, like, there was a mass firing, but there was also, I mean, there were people that stuck around and then dealt with whole other nightmares there. Alex Schmidt being one of them who stayed with the company. The company was sold again to, like, I-Haz cheeseburger. And he dealt with all kinds of terrible things there. He dealt with, like, them trying to slowly, because he was doing the cracked podcast at that point and was doing something, what is essentially a secret, but secretly incredibly fascinating now. He was doing some really interesting stuff. He was finding these little details from the world and being like, this is a thing you should know, which was like the crack ethos.

Like that's what we were fucking doing. And so he got it. And he had a really good podcast on his hands. And they were like slowly trying to strip that away from him and come up with cause against Alex Schmidt. And so he was like, America's sweetheart, Alex Schmidt. Which is diabolical. Like the nicest person in the world who works hard as hell at any job he has. And they were like looking for cause to fire Alex.

And I was like, this is what happened? Yeah. This place fell apart. I'll say that we have a mutual friend who's working on some sort of content about this age of like sketch comedy on the internet, which is very exciting, very cool. I can't wait to see what they do because there's so many people, different people from that age that are like, They were doing incredible things. They were making like, we all thought we were pioneers, man. It was the internet was the Wow West.

We were all making sketch comedy there. It was all like fly by the seat of your pants. We're making it for nothing for no money. And everybody's doing that. And we're finding other people out there who are doing it. We're like, please come on cracked. Please. And I met like a lot of great people that way.

They'd make the guys that were making periods. Like now those, the man who created that was he's on, he was on Big mouth. He was on human resources. He's been on a bunch of other shows. shows. And you look at what happened with Good Neighbor. Like, they've got illustrious careers. Britannic debuted two movies at South by Southwest last week. They're written and directed by pizza movie, which is out on Hulu now. Check it out everywhere. Hulu's are Hulu. It's so funny. And shoot, I forgot the name of the movie that they adapted that Yorma from

Lonely Island directed, but that is their other movie. I've given you enough information that you can find it by Googling. You can find it on your own. Yeah. Rachel Bloom, like all these people that, Sam Richardson, all these people that early on felt like we were all in the secret club. It was like, this is incredible.

This is like we've, we're the voice of a generation. And like the downer of it. And I know people don't love when we talk about the crack.com days. I think they are curious. And we're doing fine and everything's fine and I'm doing fine. But the downer is when you're, we think about that time. We think about this time as like, it's us and it's Britannic and it's good neighbor

and it's Sam and it's Rachel and it's Michael and Abe and Cody and all these people and Katie and Katie are doing all of these things. And like what a cool time that was. What a fun time capsule it will be for someone. to look back on and say, wow, look at all the people who are here doing stuff. And it turns out they can't. No one's going to remember it because this is the first time Crack is going to South by Southwest and nothing matters. Because the site has been erased and no one will remember any of this. I do. I wonder how so cracked was a mad rip-off magazine in 1958 that did have a lot of

great illustrators and comic writers at that time and had gone through a bunch of different iterations before it was revived as a website in 2006 and we all came on board and made it the crack that we fell in love with. I'm sure they were, I'm sure they were people that I didn't pay enough attention or respect to. When I was steering the ship at cracked, I was not thinking about the legacy of like the 1958 magazine or anything. I'm sure they were like old comics writers who were like,

we went to South by Southwest in 1962. And now I'm that. I'm the old curmudgeon. I'm not a hard Spiegelman. Who works for Cracked? No, he did not. No way, Art Spiegelman.

No. I don't know actually who, which is probably the problem. I'm sure that they look back and they're like, these guys. That's actually not true because every time that cracked regularly when I'm on

Facebook, I see them posting new videos on there and it's us. It's us doing things. And I'm always like, it's always a surprise to me because we did so much content at once. It's like you forget a lot of what you were doing while you were there and a video will show up and I'm like, oh, this sounds

interesting and I'll start watching it. I'll be like, oh, I'm in this. Oh, I fucking wrote this. Cracked will do 24-hour YouTube streams of after-hours Yeah Which Yeah Doesn't completely make sense

Like what do you mean Just Just go to YouTube and type the episode that you want to see I don't understand The purpose of a 24-hour Just like I'll get like a tweet or a blue sky about it It was like hey look there's a live stream again I'm like but

Of what? of the videos that that just live there, just watch them. What's happening? But you have to there, you have to create the playlist or whatever.

It's like on television, my show gets, my show has whole days of American Dad marathons. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds right. That's good.

That's nice. It's nice to just have it on in the background and not have to choose that you're going to go somewhere else. I can't think of anything worse than if my show

last week tonight had once a year just done 24 hours. stream a whole season, stream 30 straight hours of John telling you how bad things are. Yeah, John talking about the mayor of a town in Canada. You're like, what? He's been mayor for 12 years. Rob Ford, was that his name?

Doug Ford or Rob Ford. There are two fords and they're both pretty bad. The crackhead forts. Yeah. One of them died and the other one was like, don't worry. about it. I feel the exact same way as him about everything. We're brothers. Like the Cuomo's. So, Dan, we should do this actual podcast that we do.

Okay. At some point, I think we should have Mandy on at some point. I think it would actually be very boring, but very informative to people because not that Mandy's boring. Mandy's great. But it's like it has to do with CPMs and stuff like that and international expectations that are, it's all, it's all these numbers that, people didn't understand except for her. People buying the company didn't understand and then we're confused by

and then we're mad about. And that's basically it. What should have tipped us off is that the sale went through and then within a few months our editor-in-chief and our head of business left.

That should have been that should have given someone like me a heads up that all was not well in Denmark. Well, folks, it's spring. That's exciting. It's always exciting when spring rolls around again. Everything starts melting.

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slash QQQ, all lowercase. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. For anyone who doesn't know canonically what happened, the company was constantly in trouble after that. And like we kept, when I say in trouble, like we had to go visit mom and dad and get yelled at, which means that we were going to

EW scripts in Cincinnati, I think. Yeah, fucking Ohio. It doesn't matter. And we would go to get yelled at. And at one of these trips, I already knew that. Very quickly. We did not know we were getting yelled at. We were just summoned there.

It was like, come to Ohio and was like, okay, I don't, I mean, I like trips and hotels, so sure. But they didn't tell us to prepare anything or what the expectations were. And we just had like a couple of days in conference rooms where the heads of their other brands were talking about how cheap they made video. for, like doing a presentation for us that I thought was like, I thought was designed to impress me. And I was like, hey, man, you should be really proud of that. That's cool. You made 200 videos for $19. That's nuts. That sucks. I'm not going to watch it. But like, you seem pretty, this is, man, Cincinnati is the Hollywood of who gives a fuck. This is cool. You should be, you should be real proud. Well, we go there. Yeah, we get this dressing down. I guess we didn't realize at the time was

that but during the one of the last ones that we had where we had to go there and they were really upset with us for not making enough videos at once I already had a new job like I had something else lined up and like on that trip I was planning on telling Mandy and the she was so sad I told her that I was going to American Dad because she was like she just felt so kind of like in the dark she already she knew they weren't great to specifically to her they were pretty rough on her. Yes. Actually.

And she had friends. She had friends at the site and the friends were leaving. Jack had left. Michael had left and I was leaving. And I think that there was, in her mind, it was like, am I going to be the only one here? Am I the only one who goes to Cincinnati from now to get yelled at? Is my friend Jason now? All right.

Let's do the show. We've talked enough about the things people have been dying to hear about. Now let's just talk about some bullshit. As you know, my kids are in baseball right now, Daniel. Your kids are in baseball right now. They're in baseball. I'm coaching one of the teams and I'm soft coaching the other one. That just means that I'm available all the time.

I get out there and I coach first base and stuff for however you can do that for a coach pitch game. Can I tell you a little league sports thing? that blew my mind that I don't know if is familiar to you. The Flagrant Ones podcast I talk about a lot. One of the hosts is a basketball coach for his son's team. And his son's teams is great. And they look like little little kids. They, instead of having finals, like bracketed finals or even like,

here are the top two teams. They're going to see who's first place. the end of the season is determined by shootout. It's just like you have a certain amount of time on the clock and you get different teams will do like a shootout against each other like knockout style I guess. We're just like you're on the foul line and then you shoot and then I shoot. That was the first part that I thought was weird to me.

The second part, like most of the teams don't show up. Like this, the host, his son was the number one team this year. and not everyone RASVPed and of the people who did RSPed only two players showed up so it was just like two on three like all the parents by the end of the season were like all right that's enough basketball

we don't need to know who wins the season that is generally that's great actually I don't like that they think that basketball is just the shots it was not my experience playing basketball when I was a kid we we played the whole time. And we had like, we had finals, we had championships. There was one year that my team was undefeated in the regular season, which is the kind of thing that happens for players like me,

because they will, they evaluate the players in like camp before the season starts, and they stick really bad players like me with really good players. And so I've had, I had maybe the best player in sixth grade at that time on my team. I had Kevin Durant, Slim Reaper and me. So we went undefeated in the regular season and then we get into the championship and we lost our first game in that and then we were out of contention. And it was tough but like it mirrored basketball at least. I wouldn't I wouldn't have understood it if I just showed up one day for a game. They're like no, no, no, now it's just shooting. I was like, oh, we're just doing. Oh no. We're playing horse. We're playing horse to the ceremony who gets the trophy.

We were, so I, so I think you can agree that I'm not responsible for our undefeated season, but I could better hide my weaknesses because I wasn't shooting. Now if it's just shooting, there goes all my coverage. I see all the other kids did not come. That should have been, I should have done that. I, you know, I was in a very similar situation to you because I played basketball in fifth through eighth grade. and when I was in eighth grade

we no I couldn't it couldn't have been fifth it was only available to seventh and eighth we played like JV essentially in fifth and six but the actual like competitions against other schools was happening in seventh and eighth eighth was such a good team the Carbondale middle school team was so fucking stacked

that they went all the way and I was not included in the stacked part I was part of the team because I went to the school but I was allowed to play the last 30 seconds of a game unless it was tight, in which case maybe the last 11. And that was like, you couldn't do enough damage in that time to be a problem. So they'd let me play that time. Then, because the seventh grade team didn't have enough players, I'd play on the seventh grade team.

And that's tough when you, everyone in the stands knows that you're an eighth grade and you're playing with the seventh graders. Were you shining as the older male? Well, so that's the silver lining. No, not at all. I was not even as good as the seventh graders at the time. Making a lot of mistakes out there. So the first day that I made a basket, I was playing with the seventh graders. Like in the first game, I actually had a basket.

I was playing with the seventh graders. And I was so fucking jacked. The rest of the night, the rest of the week, I was like, I scored. I scored in a game. It's two points, Dan. It's like, you're supposed to, everyone's supposed to have scored. basketball. That's sort of the point of basketball. It's not like soccer where

you get one goal every month. Like you're supposed to have scored more than a couple baskets a game, regardless of where you play. The famed undefeated season, I did not score a single basket for an entire season, which like, genuinely

because I liked playing basketball. I hated playing Little League baseball, but basketball I enjoyed playing and I was fine like if my contribution was running around and getting in the way. occasionally stealing a ball. I felt good about that kind of thing. But my lack of scoring was so loud that when I did take a shot and it looked close,

other people's dads got excited. Like everyone knew by mid-season, everyone was like, wouldn't it be great if he scored one? Wouldn't that be a huge moment? We've all noticed. How do you even notice that? You're supposed to be watching your own fucking kid. And it's I'm I look back on that experience.

I was like, why did I do that? Why did I just fucking quit? It was humiliating. But I did it anyway. And I was, vacillating between trying to decide if I was really proud of myself and that that was very brave or just like I didn't know any better. And I was like, well,

I'm on a team. I'm not Joel Gomez. I'm not like, I'm not crushing it every single game. But I'm still, I'm part of the team. I'm helpful. Yeah.

Just deletional. I have to assume I bear a fraction of responsibility for our undefeated season. I have to. Surely I'm not. You must have done something. I'm not nothing. I'm not a liability. So my kids are playing baseball.

Baseball. Now there is a thing where they do walk-up songs. All the kids get walk-up songs. It's very popular because the pros do it. And it's like one of the most fun part of being at a game where show it atani, you know, is coming up because you're hearing, I'm feeling good all of a sudden by Michael Boubley, that famous song by Michael Boubley. And everyone goes nuts. Man, he doesn't get enough credit for all the crazy good songs that he, Michael Bubley, has written. And so my kids were very into the idea of the walk-up songs.

they spent a lot of time thinking about what their walk-up songs were going to be. I love what they landed on. It's fascinating exploration into your child's psyche when they choose their own walk-up songs, which I'll tell you what they are in a second. But for the time being, I want you to think about this, Daniel. If you were suddenly a baseball star, what would your walk-up song be? You're only getting 15, 20 seconds of the song. Okay.

Now, my son was, like I was playing some songs for him and I know songs that he likes and he was just like not feeling any of them and I'm like well what are you looking for and he was like I want a song that starts out real quiet and then explodes and I was like oh yeah of course that sounds great and so I'm thinking and my racking my brain for stuff from the era in which I actually listened to new music and I was like dude I got your song and I played bombs over Baghdad for him from out of and he was like I love this. the song. And so that became his walk-up song. And it's

excellent. It's a great, great walk-up song. Because it starts out, if you're familiar, goes, one, two, one, two, three, four. Yeah. And then the whole song is just huge and big and fast. And every time that like it gets played out there, you see people like in the stands like bob in their heads and stuff. Because I think everyone loves outcast. But they haven't heard it in a while probably. Yeah. I've thought about it in a bit. It's from stankonia, I think. And Yeah. Everyone goes crazy for it. The other songs that show up there are like Bad Bunny.

Almost every kid has a Bad Bunny song. And I just don't know Bad Bunny well enough to be like, Ronan, I can't help you in this regard. I could make you very cool in 1998, and that's about it. My daughter has chosen a song by Too Many Zoos. Have you heard of them? No, I've not heard of Too Many Zoos. Too Many Zoos is a band.

It's a trio. It's a guy who plays bass sax, a guy who plays percussion, and then a guy who plays trumpet. And I have to assume that they started in a subway because this is like the perfect subway band. But they are, they're undeniable. They're so fun to listen to. They're very funky and good.

She chose a song called Subway Gods by them. Well, yeah, that's starting to make sense. Every time that song comes on, I'm like, also like, this is a really good song. Hey, this song is really good. but yeah most everybody has a bad bunny song and i just have let my children down in that regard that i can't i can't compete with new music i just don't know what's i gave up you know what's interesting and incredibly specific pull is that when you said when you describe the makeup of the

band i almost said out loud i bet the sax player is leo from lucky chops is it it is him chops absolutely yeah is he a bass sax player yeah lucky cheques yeah lucky cheques Topps was like a it was, I don't even know if they're still around. They were like a legendary New York subway band. And he especially was like elevating the form. And he always had like a crazy look.

He had like a mohawk or big spiky blue hair and really tight clothing. And he was like dancing and doing like crazy footwork while he was playing. So the fact that my brain can't grasp the possibility that there are too successful Barry's bass sax fronted bands. So when I heard that there was another one,

I was like, oh, Lucky Chow's supposed to must have broke up or something. Yeah, well, I mean, honestly, it's either him or that guy from Bayla Fleck who played two saxophones at one. Yeah. There's really, those are your options. Nobody else is sticking with sax that long. Seeing my kids have these walk-up songs and seeing other kids who had like, other kids had like Eminem and stuff like that where I was like, oh, actually, like one shot or whatever. what that song is called? One Shot or The Moment? No, it's, uh, lose yourself. It's called Lose Yourself. Yeah. It's called Mom Spaghetti. That other kids chose chose those songs. I'm always like,

oh yeah, yeah, oh, this is a good walk-up song. Like, they really put some thought on to it. I enjoy hearing what these kids have decided is like, this song represents me and it gets me hyped up and I really love it. Because like, you know, my daughter also really wanted a K-pop Demon Hunter song too. She was very into Hunt tricks. Sure. And I was like, yeah. I mean, that very first song and that, uh,

how it's done is like a great, has like a great intro to it. But it made me think about like what I would want as my walk-up song. If I was an MLB player, I put a lot of thought into it. And this is what I landed on Daniel. Okay. Hell yeah. Tumbling out of beard and he stumbled to the kitchen for my search.

A cup of ambition And yawning And stretch And try to come to life Jump in the shower And the blood starts pumping Out on the streets The traffic starts jumping

With folks like me On the job Nine to Five Yeah so anyway You know how the rest of that goes I should fucking do That is a pump up song That is like

I love the like The way that piano's gearing up And obviously the dulcet tones Of Dullet Parton Of course everything about that song is it's a wonderful song it's very catchy and I'm constantly blown away that that song was just like hey we need a song for this movie yeah was like okay and she wrote a fucking hit she might have written that and jolene and i will always love you in one afternoon

there's some like crazy fucking story about dolly part and writing two or three masterpieces in like a shit session it's crazy it's amazing so what a treasure um anyway i don't know that anybody's doing. Is anybody in the MLB doing 9 to 5? I know they're doing careless whisper. That's a fun one. Careless Whisper is the only one that I do know that someone was doing, which is where my brain went. Did we do this episode of the podcast before? It doesn't matter. We're pretty deep in it now. But careless whisper is my entry to this because I, that as someone who doesn't watch a ton of baseball, that news penetrated my algorithm that like, hey,

there's a baseball player who walks out to Careless Whisper. Isn't that pretty funny? Because it's such a non-pump up song, which does inform my decision. This is going to sound like too many layers of self-parity. But I am famously a massive Benfolds 5 fan. And like every Benfolds and Benfolds 5 fan I've ever met, I don't really care for his one radio hit, Brit. It's the song that doesn't super represent the band.

It's got no harmonies. For a band that had harmonies out the fucking ass, these three guys who were singing harmonies together constantly, their one hit doesn't have any harmonies at all. It's just one voice. Another hallmark of that band. Bass player plays an electric bass, like an electric guitar. He slaps on distortion a lot.

he is a fucking shred machine on bass and in brick he plays an upright bass which is one of I think two Benfold's five songs where he plays an upright bass and it happened to be the one that became a hit the other thing about this band they write there are swears in their songs

and they're goofy and they're stupid and their storytelling songs and the fact that they got famous for this one that was like a sad true story about an abortion on Christmas Eve or the day after Christmas without harmonies and without electric bass is like this is the least Benfolds five song I could think of

and I would go to his concerts and like they would play Brick and be like I guess it's obligatory that they have to play this song I don't love it I'll go to the bathroom now and I loved when enough time had passed that they and he had stopped playing that it was like we've weeded out the people who are only here for Brick now we just play the other song that true Benheads love and know.

All that said, I think... Let's try it. Let's just try it on. The start of that song is so funny. It's so funny to... I don't have anything that can play music right now. I have it right here.

Okay, do it. Oh, that's a single from Moogie Betz. Mookie Betts on first base. No outs. Now up to bat. Daniel O'Brien. There's a big long intro. Stepping out of the box.

Picking off his watch. Forgot to take off his watch. Now he's ready. Ready to back. That song has... That's a real long one. The intro to that song has gone from like, oh, this again. I got to skip this to just like a funny punchline.

in it of itself to me that I'm just so crazy about. I don't think you need to know that I'm a huge Benfolds 5 fan for that to still be a funny thing to come up somewhere. It certainly makes it even funnier. My brother ran a half marathon a couple years ago and his wife put together a running playlist that was shared with me so we can add songs because she was like, I know some stuff that he liked.

I'm going to pull some stuff that is on his other playlist, but like throw in a bunch of things that you use to get pumped up while you're running. And he's not going to know the playlist in advance, and they're just going to like pop up while he's running. It was like, absolutely say no fucking more. And I put a bunch of legitimately like fun, upbeat running songs. And also brick by Ben Folds 5,

because I'm thinking if he's at mile 11 and he's just running on fumes and he's like, I just need something to get me into the home stretch. and then... Do do do do do do do do do do do da da da da da da da da da da. There's nothing dumber and funnier to me because even if you've never heard the song before

if you were just like an international baseball fan who's seen his first baseball game and that song comes on and it's the first time you've ever heard it you'd be like, I think this is about abortion in winter. This is a sad just,

no one's even spoken yet. And this sounds like a sad song. There's no way this turns around. and is like, I love being alive. This is a bummer of a song. It's got an extra layer, too, of being not just about abortion, but about the person who's getting the abortion, fucking dragging you down in the dirt, man.

Yeah. Dragging you down to the bottom of the sea. What they should really do is take that song and put it in a Lego movie. It is perfect for a Lego movie. What do you mean? It's called brick. And it's like a guy who's a guy who's a little. in love with a Lego lady.

She's a brick. I can't believe I fell for that sore. I'm so tired. Yeah, we didn't talk about the fact that you have a baby very much today. I have an 18 day old baby. And it's been going great. Like, there's, we've been knock on wood, very lucky with everything. and everyone talks about the first two weeks being a blur.

I don't think that's been the case with us. And you get prepped for sleeplessness. And I didn't super believe that because we would get, the baby just needs to eat every three or four hours. And you'll go to sleep and then you'll wake up at the three hour mark and you'll change the baby and you'll feel. the baby and then you'll wrestle the baby down to sleep and then maybe we'll go to sleep and then you'll sleep for three more hours or two and a half hours and get up and do it again and then morning comes

and the first few days of that I was like this this counts as sleep to me this is I've been backpacking before and I think I've had sleeps that were less restful than the little three hour chunks that I'm getting now but the thing is Soren is I backpack for like two nights yeah And now I've been, when it starts to dawn on us that we haven't had more than four hours of sleep in a row in over two weeks, it's just, it just starts to add up and you get, and we're just very sleepy and a tiny bit insane. It is a bit of fine. It's a bit of, it's not intentional, but it is sandbagging when people say the first three months, for instance, are a blur. Or like you don't, you, you'll, it'll all go by so fast. they're not actually remembering that.

What they are, it's because the memory is a blur. In the moment, it feels interminable. We are so long and boring. Well, sometimes there's a little bit of boredom. And that's mostly when like, when Shea's asleep in the middle of the day and the baby's asleep. And I don't have the energy to like, like exercise really or do most of my things. But I also am not a good napper.

So then I'm bored when like everyone's asleep and I can't watch one of the shows that Shay and I are watching together. And so I've just been rewatching West Wing again. And I was like, this is, I can't, I'm, I'm bored. But generally, it's not bored and doesn't feel interminable. I mean, the thing, when people say it's a blur, that feels so insane to me because I, we still just love staring at our son. Right. Yeah, you're early on. And playing with him and like talking with him and sticking my tongue out and he sticks his tongue out.

And it's a lot of fun. and we're just like touching his fingers and his toes and all that kind of stuff. All that seems fun and we're so we're so present for it. We're just both. We're never staring at a thing together the way that we're staring at our son Cooper together. Yeah. So I think you're right. I think I'm jumping the gun a little bit here when I say that it's long and boring.

Because it has the memories of blur to me. At the time, though, what happens is that when your child is, old enough to sit up and kind of like explore things it's fun to see them discover a new thing discover that they can pass things from one hand to another and stuff like that the achievements are few and far between around there and there's i made a very pointed decision early on that i would not be on my phone around my son when he was born because i didn't want him being interested in this thing that i had all my attention like had me wrapped so i was just not going to do that and so it was a lot of me just like spending time with just him and reading pornography from a magazine.

Well, yeah. I mean, I'm not a robot. You've got to look at something. And so it was, there's a lot of time where they're just lying there or just sitting there and like looking at one brick over and over again. Or like they need your help. Yeah, it's brick. It's like you're, it's so boring. It's so boring.

then eventually they do they get old enough where they want to play pretend and that's a worst kind of boring sure that's like and so there's i i think early on you're right it's like staring at a very interesting fire there is it's so nice to look at we do trade off my wife and i um depending on our level of of energy where which one of us is more interested because like i'll be sitting there staring at him with him on my on my on my knees and just like looking at him and he and he's the he's the hung the moon he's the whole world and I'm like honey look it it's the boy look look it's his face and it's and it's his nose still here and she'll put her phone out and be like and like yes let's sing and play with the boy and then

sometimes it's reversed where I'm just trying to look at my phone for a second and and shea's like look look look look the boy look at the thing and it's like oh yeah okay still still doesn't even know how to smile yet, huh? All right. Okay. But my hazy memories are, I was constantly looking for my children to unlock new achievements so that I could actually play with them that early, where I was just like, wow, this is a real long-term investment that we've saddled up next to.

Like, this thing can't even hold its own head up. Yeah. I got a, I'm responsible for this head every single day. And if it bends in the wrong way, my child will die. We have a really help. test case right across the street are our neighbors who are we are friends with they have like an uh an 18 month old or so so we see all the different things like that's that's in our future on the horizon yeah in the good and bad like it's so fun to see her running or like we've watched her grow up

because we've been living here for over a year and it's fun to see her like now she's toddling around and she's climbing on things and I'm just like this is this is going to be sick when when my boy learns about climbing. But I'm also talking to my neighbor who's like, yeah, if you think it's hard to get a diaper on a squirmy seven-pound thing, just imagine wrestling that to get a diaper on that. And it was like, oh, I guess it hadn't occurred to me that we're doing diapers for two years or whatever it is and that it will be, like, he's already pretty strong when you're trying to get a diaper on him. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how I'm going to get a diaper on a 14 or 20-pound kid without like leaning with my full weight an arm on their chest i don't know it's

i guess we're going to find out yeah is it uh did when you look at that other baby that's now 11 months old and you see its feet are you like oh my god those are giant feet this thing is huge i guess i don't look at her feet oh you should you're always you're always looking at feet and shoes that's important so you determine the worth of a person um no i've I do remember that moment when I had a newborn and we had friends who brought over their baby who was older. And first of all, I was blown away by how stinky the poops were. Even in the diaper, I was like, oh, that solid food is really eating poison, clearly. We should all just be drinking breast milk the rest of our lives.

This comes out great. But then also just seeing this other baby's feet, I was like, those are baby feet, but they are giant gigantic. They're huge. My child's feet will never be that big. Getting clothes from people, we are like, my baby. baby will never grow into this. My baby's never going to fit in this. Yeah, remember that feeling. Anyway, it's going to get boring. It's going to get boring. We are, we're watching, uh, we're watching Mad Men. Uh, Shays never watched it and I never finished it. So we started

watching Mad Men to have just on, yeah, in our house every second that we're awake. And there's an episode in the first season where, uh, it's Sally Draper's birthday party. And, Don His whole arc in the episode is he builds her a playhouse in the backyard goes to get pick up a cake comes back with the cake

decides he doesn't want to be at his house anymore drives away with a cake, falls asleep and the street wakes up, smokes a cigarette, comes home with a dog and I'm not thinking about the bailing on his own party

and forgetting to bring home a cake and getting drunk in the street. But I am watching that episode. They make a whole point to show that he is just getting, he's getting lit the entire fucking day. He's got a beer in his hand at all times while he's building this playhouse

and the other wives are watching and build the playhouse and they're like, now that's a man. And then when he's done and the guests show up and he's not building the playhouse anymore, he's just got a scotch in his hand as the kids are running around and all the men are drinking

and all the wives are also drinking and the kids are just running around. I'm watching that holding my 18-day old kid and just thinking, hell yeah, one day. That's going to be me. See that man hitting somebody else's child? Yeah, yeah, yeah. See somebody else's kid be in bed and smacks him. That's going to be my buddy Joe. That's going to be Joe hitting someone's kid. This is going to be awesome. Yeah, it's there, it becomes, I mean, obviously there are amazing moments. It rarely does it feel amazing in the moment itself, though. It's like the memory of the moment that really you start to really treasure. But the day to day is, it gets so mundane with, because you're not watching TV and you're not on your phone. And all these things that would ordinarily are like, your stimulus. Like, and they provide like a really consistent hit of dopamine. Now you're relying on just this child to give it to you. And you're like, we got to come up with some new things for you to do. I'm going to create a maze. I'm going to do that. And like, you're building things for your kid. Like you're just trying to. And when my son was really little, I was like, I was like,

putting him in small spaces. I was just like, let's see if he fits in the microwave. He does. It is. I'm still finding tremendous joy in reading and discovering children's books. Like, not like, not the emotional ones. Like, we haven't gotten to where the wild things are or anything like that or any of these things that are going to, like, make me weep as I'm reading them.

It's still very books that he is not comprehensive. apprehending at all that I'm just reading for the first time and giving commentary because it's these weird books where it's a bear is missing its hat and he goes around and asks other animals have you seen my hat and then it turns out a different animal stole the hat and then I think we learned by the end that a third animal kills and eats that animal that stole the hat and the bear just gets his hat back and these are fun things to just like that's that's the part of the story that's for daddy. You get the part where it's like, look, it's a bear with a hat. Have you ever seen such a crazy thing? And I get to hold this dark story in my heart. We both get something.

You also, you're going to try out so many good voices. When you read those stories, you get to just really like, you get to take that out for a, your vocal cords out for a big ride. You get to like, I wonder if I could do Scottish. It's not good, but this fucker doesn't know. there are these high contrast books that I believe we got from sister-in-law that are like, Hello Garden or Hello Ocean, where it's all black and white in patterns that are really exciting for a newborn. They love the high-contrast black and white stuff. And narratively, the book is just like, hello octopus, hello fish, hello shark, different versions of hello. And I was going and doing fun voices of each thing.

And then I turn the page and I get to a thing and it's instead of hello, it's bonjour jellyfish. And I get to that and I think, well, I didn't read ahead and I'd already independently decided that the squid was French. So now what the fuck am I supposed to do with, like, you don't, you don't need to put anything on it. I'm going to decide who's from where in the sea. There's, that's, that's, there's one called, um, um, the pout pout fish. And you really get to, yeah, you really get to like, like, explore voices with that one because you the pow-paw fish meets all these different animals that are

fucking mad at him for being such a stick in the mud and so you meet a jellyfish and you meet a octopus and stuff and deciding on what they're all going to sound like is so, so fun. I do need to read ahead more because when I was reading the Who Stole my hat book and I was like

oh a bird. A bird's going to sound like this and I saw your hat, man. And then I turned the page and there's a squirrel and I'm like fuck that would have been a good squirrel voice. Shit. Oh! Yeah, what are I going to do for the squirrel? They're going to be, okay, they're Cheryl Lane.

A Cooper, they share a lane. I hope that that's all right. There's a book called, I think it's called The Going to Bed Book. Yeah, the going to bed book. Do you remember the, you've probably seen these books before. It's like really kind of black and white, mostly crudely drawn animals. And this one, they're all on a boat together and they're getting ready for bed. Okay, no.

This one's a great one. But you're discovering new things along the way. as you're reading it. And I was pretty convinced throughout reading the going to bed book is all these animals are like putting on pajamas and brushing their teeth and everything that there is a paraplegic pig. Oh. That all the other animals can walk except for this one pig because the pig is always either sitting down or being carried somewhere.

And I was like really like flip it through the book curious about it. There's one page where I think you see him up on his feet. But everything else, like they also get up on the top of the ship and exercise. that piggy's doing a handstand. And so I was like really excited by these little developments. These, you know, that cracked part of your brain. It's like, you know what I think? I think that there's something else going on here.

And you're going to find a lot of those. You'll find a lot of them in fucking Winnie the Pooh, man. It's full of those. This donkey book where the pattern of the book is you just add another. It was like, there was a donkey, but this donkey had three legs. He's a wonky donkey. There was a donkey. He had three legs and one eye. It was a winky wonky donkey. And it builds on that. There's like funky, like all the different things that you could do. And it's a lot of fun. But meanwhile, in the page where we learn he has one eye, there's like a bird clutching his eyeball flying away with it. Oh, wow.

People are just running fucking wild in children's books. It's nuts out there. I'm also reading because I've learned that. I've learned that. that my educational books and the doctors have stressed that, like, he is not receiving anything other than the cadence of speaking voices. So you can read anything to the kid. It doesn't really matter. So I'm also reading what I'm currently reading, which is Mother Knight by Kurt Vonnegut,

which is about a lot of things. But to say a lot in a little, it's a double-crossing spy for the non-non-lawful. writing propaganda. So I'm just reading a lot of... I'm saying Hitler and Himmler a lot.

To my son more often than I think... You want to get him comfortable hearing those names. I do want to... It makes me want to reach out to my doctor because, like, look, I know you said that it doesn't matter what I'm saying, but let me just tell you what I'm saying.

And then you can re-evaluate. I don't think you should stop. I think that's great. I'm not going to. All right, everybody. I think that's going to do it for us today. We talked about a lot. We talked about the old days.

We talked about the present. And we talked about the future. Uh-huh. And we talked about baseball walk-up songs, which I'm 90% positive. We did. We already did. It doesn't matter. The first five seconds of a song before.

We're like, what songs do you love the first five seconds? seconds out or something like that. Yeah. I think that might have been it. All right. Anybody, blah, blah, blah. If you liked the songs we listened to today, go find them. If you like the theme song of this, it's by me, Rex.

If you like this podcast and you want to watch your video version of it, you can do that on YouTube. If you like this podcast so much you want more of it, then you go to our Patreon and you can become a Patreon subscriber. And we do Patreon episodes as well. If you like this podcast, just in general, the way that it's put together the way that it sounds or looks that's all Gabe Harder. Thank you Gabe Harder and you're ours forever. Goodbye. Bye.

If there's an answer, they're gonna find it. I think you'll have a great time here. I think you'll have a great time here.