Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Dan Folds Five (items)

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

The guys play a fun game about intellectual theft (but barely actually steal anything except for the show premise)! And as always big thanks to our sponsors.  Thanks Maev! meetmaev.com/QQ to get $40 off your first order

I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? I wanna hear your thoughts, wanna know what's on your mind I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? The answer's not important, I'm just glad that we could talk tonight So what's your favourite? Who did you get? What do I be? What's it up with? Oh, forget it I saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien When will I be remembered? Was it out there? Where did all that go? Did we not? Oh, forget it.

Saw a movie, 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 here. I think you'll have a great time here. Last week tonight with John Oliver, author of How to Fight Presidents, and the famously not lactose intolerant Daniel O'Brien. Joined as always by my co-host, Mr. Soren Bui. Soren, say your catchphrase. Hey, what's up, county people?

It was so much worse than I thought it was going to be. It was so aggressive right out of the gate. Well, yeah, here's the problem. You know how to tell a joke. So you know that the best word to put last is catchphrase there. That's the worst thing you can do to a human because then I don't know what I'm supposed to do until you get to the end of the sentence. Yeah.

I can't start prepping. Yeah. And like very often when put on the spot like that my my bones will take over before my brain can think so if I was asked to do a catchphrase it would like my bones would be like don't worry I got this 9-11 was an inside job and there's no time for my brain to be like well let's let's let's put that in the maybe pile and let's think about this it's really horrific to figure out what your first impulse is. To find out who you really are in those moments.

Every time I'm asked to create a password, I create my own passwords. Thank you. And I put them in a password safe. But every time that I create a password, I'm just top of mind. What's the first thing that comes to mind? And I'm like, dick, suck, fuck.

It's orange. And I'll sit myself down and be like you can't like those can't be the first things that come out of you or that can't be the first thing you think of you can't tell password safe that yeah i was like dick suck fuck boy wait i can't they can't first of all they can't all be that let's just like be honest with ourselves it can't be numbered versions of that. So something else, like maybe something a little more PG. I would like to think that my brain has some creativity, but no, it's awful. Thanks to our new sponsor, Maeve, for supporting our podcast.

Dogs need unprocessed, high-protein, low-carb diets that kibble and fresh foods don't deliver make the switch to raw today right now mave is offering 40 off your first order at meet mave.com slash qq do you ever if you have you ever thought about uh and a bit, that if I'm ever hacked, my intention is to... I want... Like, if someone could hack my computer and get a printout of all my passwords, I'm working because I... Not make that person laugh.

I want this hacker to look at it and be like, these are some strong fucking passwords. This, like... I never would have guessed. this guy is on top of his shit you think that you have a plus passwords oh mine are all jokes every single one of mine is like a joke based on whatever the thing is that i'm using that whatever the service is like whether i'm mad at the service my my Spectrum passwords were not very kind to Spectrum, with the anticipation that at some point they'd have to like

dig through some passwords for whatever reason and see mine. My passwords are always evolving. I change them regularly. And the starting place is complete gibberish, like truly slamming my hands on the keyboard. And then if one of the letters is like an L, changing the L to E-L-L, so it's like a phonetic thing in there. And then changing things into numbers, doing stuff with capitalization and special characters,

and then just committing it to memory. And then evolving, like doing the whole process again every few months or so. How's that working out for you? It's great. No, that's impossible. It's impossible that you're changing your password that often, that you're coming up with these random collections of numbers and letters and being like, and now it's logged in my brain.

Yeah. Well, here's what's not so clever about me, is that I don't think anyone could take my computer and get into any of my accounts, because also the password is different for everything in my life that requires a password. I don't think anyone could get into any of those accounts unless they looked at the piece of paper taped underneath my computer. All the passwords are written down. So I use an online password safe, which I mean, honestly, it's just a, we like to think it's safer it's just

the online version of what you're talking about yeah but i've never been more of a dad than when my wife can't think of a password or my somebody in my family can't think like my parents like whenever somebody's struggling with a password i'm like i'm like i set up password safe for you yeah got like where is we just go use. Go grab it from there. And when they go, I didn't put it in. The feeling that I get is such a dad feeling. This disappointment and kind of frustration, but like a tempered frustration, but a true like, I want to love you, but you're making it tough on me. Yeah. I'm trying to make your life better.

You need to meet me halfway. My mom, my mom, I gave her a specific password safe site. It's like a great one. I love using it. It's free. It's so easy to use.

It means that when you set up a password, it takes another, I would say seven to 17 seconds to set up. And then you never sit there just on a blank screen being like, okay, let's see uh is it is it monkey guns 3 or monkey guns 42 and um and so like i set it up for i got it all i put all of her passwords in i was like from this point forward anytime you create a password stop

go to this create it here first and then put it in and she did she promised that she was going to do that we then had to do some work on her computer another time when i was at home and i was like all right well let's go find it in your password safe and she was like okay here's here's something i've been regretting telling you i forgot my password to password safe i was like it's just one password. And I was like, would you have it written down somewhere? She's like, yes, I do. And she went and got it.

And it's this, whatever had been written there. It's like when you were a child and you would do a math test and you would scribble out the answer so many times that there's nothing legible anymore. Yeah. Like she had, whatever she had written had been rewritten like 40 times. And so you can't read what's there because of the indents in the paper.

Excellent. And I'm like, what was this? What's the story here? How come this got rewritten so many times? She's like, well, I was having a hard time remembering it. So I did a different one. And I was like, let's just try and go through as many as you can remember. Yeah. I like the plan of uh like she was she didn't want to tell you she she didn't want you to know about this which kind of implies that the plan is maybe eventually we'll just get over computers and this this problem will take care of itself and i'll never have to use this again how relieved she would have been in some sort of apocalyptic

scenario where skynet shuts down everything and And she was like, oh, thank God. Oh man, what a shame. Cause I, I for sure knew my password. Oh, drag. Um, I, but it's to the point now where I am bewildered. If I go to, to a site and I don't have the password somehow, I'm like, I'm looking at past self, my own past self. And I'm like, well, when the fuck did this happen?

How could this have slipped through your fingers? You know better. Do you remember, you're a little bit older than me so it might not have been as impactful for you, but the first time I needed and got to create my own password that no one in my family knew was so thrilling. We were early adopters for the internet in my family.

So I must have been 9, 10, or 11, one of those ages, when we got the internet and we were making our own screen names for AOL Instant Messenger. And my older brother Tommy was like, now what do you want your screen name to be? And I picked something stupid. And he's like, all right, now it's going to ask you for a password. So just come up with a password. And I won't look at it. And he didn't look at it. And like no one in my family knew what this was. And just the idea that I was like, I'm the only one in the world that is going to have access to this. I was like, I froze just thinking like,

what could it be? What are passwords supposed to be? What am I supposed to put in here? Just you walking around for days after that being like, I have a secret and it's just mine. Yeah. And like, as much as I felt like my precious AOLs and messenger account was completely secure. I'm sure if my parents wanted to hack into it,

they could just sit at the computer and be like, honey, what's the name of the girl Daniel has a crush on? Desiree. Yeah. It's Desiree. Yeah. We're in. Do you remember what it was? Was it Desiree? It was actually the name of a kid in my class that I hated. Oh, that's smart. Yeah. Because then no one would expect that. People would think, no, he'd choose the ones he likes. Yeah. No. I remember my first one, and it was a very similar situation where I had to create a password for a floppy disk.

You couldn't access the floppy disk unless you put in this password. Hold on. I can hear our listeners switching over to Doughboys. It's happening right now. I don't know why I'm getting pings about this, but it's happening. Well, wait till I say the password because that's really the home run. My password, I was like, I want something cool. And it's like something that's cool just for me so that when I get in there and I do it again and again, I'm like, yeah, that's cool. And I chose. You wanted the process of putting your password in to be like an additional layer of fun.

Yeah. My password was snakeblood7. Oh, that is cool. You know what the seven was for? John Elway. So snakeblood and the Denver Broncos combined into one password. It was, oh, I was such a genius. That's pretty impregnable too.

And I think if your parents did like use a parent lock and override it and saw snake blood, be like, Jesus. This is another child, so we'll have to have a talk with them. Something weird is going on. Yeah. Anyway, I guess we don't have to talk about passwords the whole podcast

even though i could no we don't i actually i i thought i was gonna get you with famously not lactose intolerant because that's huge i forgot god damn it i should write these things down i should bookmark them tell me about what's going on did you take a pill no so i've been uh i believed lactose intolerant since like fourth or fifth grade and i've mentioned it on this so i've been uh i believed lactose intolerant since like fourth or fifth grade and i've mentioned it on this show i've mentioned it to anyone who will listen it's just like it's become a part of my life we've talked about it so much on this show in fact because there's a lot of interesting things about it and uh like i noticed for like 11 or 12 whenever whatever age that is that dairy products were making me sick. So I would just avoid them.

And as I've gotten older and dairy-free alternatives were expanding, I've been able to cook and eat things that used to be off-limits to me. And there's so many on the market. There's silk, there's lactate, there's almond milk, there's all these different things. There's a lot of plant-based options. And I'd been sort of blindly sticking to the plant-based options, thinking that, you know, I'm just, I'm getting, I'm lactose intolerant and I'm removing the thing. And a few days ago, I was cooking with specifically lactate sour cream. And again, I'm thinking all of these things are the same. They're all supposed to be solving the same problem.

And I got so fucking sick off this thing. And it was the exact kind of sickness that I would get if I just like chugged a bottle of milk. And the next day, I just like examined the product ingredients to make sure that I got the right thing. And it says in the ingredients, warning contains milk. And I'm like, well, first of all, lactate, what the fuck is this?

And then I went online and was like, why does lactate still make me sick? And there are a lot of answers for it. It's because I'm not lactose intolerant. I'm allergic to one of the other proteins in milk. And I had no idea this entire time. Is it lactase that you'm allergic to one of the other proteins in milk and i had no idea this entire time is it lactase that you're allergic to what lactase is it the simple sugar are you saying lactase or lactose lactase is the sim is the name of the simple sugar that's in uh milk is that different from lactose yes an enzyme they're different i don't know i get that they sound very similar

but yes they're different things the point is i don't know what i'm i'm allergic to but it's definitely not whatever the product lactate removes from milk it's not that and i i believe what they remove is lactose and i looked and they're like two other chief proteins that it could be the thing that i'm intolerant to uh and it blew my mind and i've made an appointment with uh an allergist to find out what exactly i'm allergic to because for years i just i thought it was as simple as lactose intolerant but because i didn't know there were like different things in dairy products that could that people could be allergic to. Okay. So you, so you haven't narrowed it down yet though?

No, I have the appointments now for a couple of weeks. I know generally that like, if I stick with the plant-based dairy substitutes that I'm, I'm fine. Like if you just get rid of anything that resembles dairy at all, uh all chemically, then I'm okay. And the only thing I've narrowed down is it's not lactose. Okay. Well, I looked it up and just for anyone who hasn't tuned over the Doughboys, because obviously they would know the shit out of this lactose, lactase debacle. Lactase is something that your body produces to digest lactose. I was wrong.

Lactose is the sugar. That's fun. Yeah. Sorry about that. No, that's cool. That's when you're lactose intolerant. It means that your body is like lactase deficient. Like it doesn't create this enzyme.

Yeah. Well, fuck, Dan, that's exciting. So can we narrow it down or is this going to be like a test of fortitude? I think they're going to scratch the shit out of my back or take blood or whatever it is that they do and it's uh as a person like me who never goes to doctors i'm very excited that i will because everything every everything i've ever done as far as like, I think I'm lactose intolerant. I think I'm allergic to eggs has just been based on self-collected anecdotal data. So I'm very excited to find out what I'm actually allergic to, to see what doors that opens. Yeah.

Yeah. Will you ask them to just throw in some other things like eggs? What do you mean? Throw eggs in my bag? You don't know that you're allergic to eggs still. You think you're allergic to eggs still you think you're allergic to eggs but I don't know yeah I'm gonna go like the wind I well that's what I think that's the the the scratch test is designed to find out okay everything there's not just like a milk

scratch touch scratch test yeah I didn't when I made the appointment I didn't say anything about milk I didn't say shit I was just like hey I want to find out what I'm allergic to and I like yeah come in oh I can't wait what if you yeah i mean you might you might also find out that like there's a specific type of pollen that's fucking you up and you didn't realize it you're like why do i get itchy this time of year i'm so excited to find out like what things i should i could avoid to make my life better and also they might be like yeah no according to our charts mcdonald's milkshakes are fine You've always been able to have those. I want to do one of these now.

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at meetmaeve.com slash QQ. Go to meetmaeve.com slash QQ. That's M-E-E-T-M-A-E-V to receive $40 off your first order. So I told you that I got over an allergy, right? No. Suddenly one day I just didn't have it. No.

I went to a doctor and asked about it even because we got a cat, famously got a cat, as the connoisseurs of the show will know. And I thought, well, my family immediately, my brother, my mom, my dad, they're like, well, you're allergic to cats. And I was like, yeah, I know. But I just decided that I'm going to take Claritin

every single day of my life from now on. So I started doing that, went burn through a bottle so fast and then lazily didn't get another one for a little while. And I thought, all right, I'll have to deal with this. Some like sneeze attacks for a couple of days till I get this other bottle. And during that time, I wasn't getting any more allergies. And I was like, well, that's weird.

I wonder if there's just a buildup of the antihistamine in my system. And so I stopped taking it and had no reaction to my cat at all. I grew up, I mean, it would make me break out. Like I would get very itchy on my neck. My throat would start to close. I would have these huge sneezing attacks and produce a bunch of expectorant. And it was bad. Like I was so uncomfortable to be around cats when I was young. uncomfortable to be around cats when I was young. And it's just one of these things that I eventually just outgrew. And so I talked to my doctor and I was like, what's the deal? What's the deal with histamine? And he said, no, your immune system is constantly changing, even into adulthood. It's not like you just have it and that's it for life. Your immune system changes all the time. And so you can grow out of certain allergies, but you can also grow into other ones. Right. This is so frustrating because every other adult in my life, including myself, has developed late in life allergies. You're the only one I know whose body is getting better.

It's infuriating. If it makes you feel any better, I still definitely get hay fever. I mean, all the pollen stuff has stuck around. And this i didn't develop until about puberty like early on in my life i was just wandering through hay fields man the back countries of colorado just like whatever like like broad spring allergies there are to like pollen that make you like that make your eyes shitty and you and and sneeze a lot i felt invincible going through life as a kid and everyone was complaining about allergies. And I was like, I have, I am so awesome and so lucky.

And then at like 26 or something like that, I just started suffering when it became a springtime. And I was like, no, I thought, I thought I was the chosen one. I had this beat, man. This was not supposed to be my thing. I'm dealing with so many other things. Yeah, it was really demoralizing because my brother had it really bad when we were young. He also had asthma. So he would get allergy attacks that would trigger asthma attacks.

So it was super dangerous. And I remember in summers as a kid, he couldn't be in Colorado. My parents would ship him off to his grandparents in in new jersey and he would stay there for the summer uh they were so bad but uh i didn't ever have to deal with that as a child and i was a dickhead about it like i would like if he was making me angry i just whip off a flower i don't even know if he was allergic to it or not but like trying to like stuff it in his face i want that really like depressing nerdy coming of age tale too of him like spending summers on the jersey shore and meeting girls who were like what brings you to jersey he's like well at home if i i might sneeze so bad i fucking die so now i have to live in the

water it is great that in your interpretation of him he's been in Jersey so long that he's developed the accent. Yeah. How's the water for you? Is it warm? Yeah. So he, and then, and then I grew into it and maybe even in some ways, I think maybe my allergies, certainly to hay fever have surpassed his, or maybe he just got his under control and I never bothered. But he's developed some other like weird ones for like, he gets a haircut he gets bumps all over his neck and shoulders where they're allergic to his own hair i guess i would say switch barbers maybe

that feels like a pretty reckless barber might just be scabies i don't know like whatever's on the brush uh should we get into the show? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Hey, Soren, quick question. Go ahead. It's multi-parts. Have you seen the movie Yesterday?

No. No, but I am familiar with it. Yeah. Man, that was very exciting. No! Well, I got very excited once I realized what it was. For our listeners who don't know, the movie Yesterday is by Danny Boyle. It came out a few years ago.

It's in the movie. There's a struggling musician who is like a singer-songwriter who goes around town playing music to very small audiences. Then he gets a terrible accident, and he wakes up from his accident, coma thing, whatever, and he wakes up to a world where no one has heard of the Beatles. He mentions the Beatles to his friends. They don't know what he's talking about. They think it's a side effect of the coma. He goes to his computer. He searches for any kind of, any reference to the Beatles, any proof that the Beatles as a band ever existed. And he finds none.

And the movie treats this as real. He wakes up, there's no more Beatles, and he decides to just start playing Beatles songs from memory and passing them off as his own. And he gets great success. He's going through their entire catalog and quote-unquote writing these songs. And he's taking the whole world by storm. And there's a very interesting side conversation about this, which is whether or not that would actually work

if there were no such thing as the Beatles. And then in 2019 or whatever, some guy was like, this song is called I Want to Hold Your Hand. And everyone was like, fuck yeah! Yeah, in the reality of the movie, people go as nuts as they did for the Beatles. I don't know if one artist could come out and do like please please me through Eleanor Rigby through Abbey Road and and like be as commercially and critically successful

as the Beatles were I think like the thing about the Beatles is what they were doing when they were doing it and as they evolved as a band in real time but that doesn't matter because like the in the rules of the movie universe it works he becomes modern beatles level fame and uh success and all that so my question my quick question is who could you, yesterday, if you woke up one day and an artist was gone, and we're not really, neither of us are very good musicians, but an artist, we could say it's a writer or a comedian. Who could you, you wake up from your coma and this person is gone or this band is gone. Who do you think you could conceivably steal the entire career of from memory because yeah you've got to know their entire you got to be so familiar with the catalog that you could just pull up yeah it's a it's a really fun thing

to think about because like my my knee jerk the band whose music i definitely know the best is ben folds five a band that is not like, they're known worldwide and certainly they existed for years solely on their music. So it's not like they're nobodies, but I don't, they're not big enough. They're not Beatles, certainly. Like even if I was like, what's this? I Googled Ben Folds 5 and they never existed. And then I wrote the Ben Folds 5 song, Jackson Cannery. Well, to be fair, you did write Brick. I did write Brick. That's right.

I 100% famously wrote Brick. You canonically wrote Brick. But if I wrote like Uncle Walter by Ben Folds 5, it would, that song didn't chart or make it to the radio when the actual already famous band made it. So I would be like, I would wake up and there's no, you know, I'm Marty McFly, but there's no Chuck before Chuck Berry. And I'm like, listen to this. And I just play this song underground that no one's heard of in like either universe. It's so interesting. I guess I want to have that conversation

first before I tell you mine, because in that world, everything else is the same, which means that all these bands that were influenced by the Beatles, I'm assuming, are still around and have still existed. The history of music continues as though they were there, but there's a gap.

Right. The reality of the Yesterday universe, Ed Sheeran plays himself as Ed Sheeran, though they were there but they're just there's a gap right the reality of the yesterday universe ed sheeran plays himself as ed sheeran who writes ed sheeran songs which assumes that i don't know what it assumes it assumes that music history has gone the same trajectory right like the beatles there's no beatles but somehow ed sheeran who if not directly influenced by the beatles is surely influenced by people who are influenced by people who are influenced by the Beatles. And this

movie universe suggests that it... No, he's just... There would always be Ed Sheeran doing exactly what Ed Sheeran does. It's a logical plot hole that we would probably explore in an After Hours or a Cracked article. But the movie really doesn't want us to think about it.

Well, yeah, but it helps. I think it helps sell the fact that everyone would be so excited because basically if you had the same, everything else existed exactly the same and you had the progression of pop music happen in exactly the same way, even though the Beatles weren't like a huge chunk of that timeline. Yeah. same way even though the beatles weren't like a huge chunk of that timeline yeah as soon as you heard a beatles song it would feel like some that you were accessing something that had been missing like it would be because they were like this platonic ideal of pop at that time and if we

you never that never happened then even though we were past it i think you'd still as soon as you heard one you'd be like yes that sounds, I think you'd still, as soon as you heard one, you'd be like, yes, that sounds influential. I think you would like, you would come up with it and you'd be like, I don't think that we're so far beyond it that you would be like, ah,

it sounds like everything else. I think you would be like, oh my God, that's what everybody else has been trying to do. Yeah. Because that's what they were trying to do. Right.

They were trying to manage or to mimic that. I would be so pissed in that universe if I met Sheeran and some guy comes out making Beatlesles songs and people are like whoa did you influence ed sheeran and that's like no i've been fucking doing this how did this happen i've been playing for four weeks that is funny that it would probably get it would be reversed engineered where people would say oh my god that sounds that sounds a lot like Ed Sheeran. Are you like a huge fan of his? You'd have to be like, no, that motherfucker was a hack. He stole my shit. Or well, not my shit. Yeah. God, I do feel like it would be even Ben Folds 5, which is their day has passed. I'm sorry, Dan, but their day has passed.

Ben Folds has a new album coming out next month. day has passed i'm sorry dan but their day has passed uh ben foals has a new album coming out next month is it all exactly the same or is he sort of evolved as a musician because here's what i'm hearing okay you better look out because i'm gonna say fuck yeah yeah you got it okay and it's a lot of it's heavy piano very very high vocals like vocals that are crystal clear um there's like you know what it is to my in my mind it is the precursor and this is not an insult it is the precursor to ska and folds five yeah i think i mean i don't take that as an insult i don't i don't know if that timeline works out oh really, really? Yeah. Well, in my mind it is.

Okay, that's enough for me. It felt like it was like getting everybody ready for that. It was like, we are sick of muddy music. We're sick of music where like you can't, there's distortion on everything. You can't hear. There's no separation between instruments. I mean, the Ben Folds Five fans fans are gonna rig you over the fucking coals

one of the things about that band is like a three piece piano bass drums bass stands out for being 90% of the time slamming on distortion really? yeah

Brick is the least like them song. It's the only song in the band's entire discography, I think, where bass player Robert Sledge plays an upright instead of an electric. And it's one of the only songs where they don't do the signature harmonies that define the band. Are there horns a lot in that? No.

Oh, then I'm that was that was the other ska pro issue yeah i don't know why i'm thinking maybe i'm thinking of somebody else oh real big fish i'm thinking of real big fish okay yeah the cherry pop and daddies i get them confused with ben fools five a lot that's so upsetting it's ben if i when i say ben folds five and i'm using they there is that correct pronouns for ben folds five or is it he ben folds five is a three-piece band okay great uh and ben folds was a solo act after that and continues to be a solo act to this day okay ben fold folds is his last name yes he Yes. He's not folding five things. No, no.

Okay. Oh, you learn something new every day. Some of us do. Well, let's get back to where we were. Ben Folds Five. I think that even though that ship has clearly sailed because my finger's on the pulse of music these days, I think that if you start playing benfold folds five songs now i think that that would have the same effect people would be like

yes yes yes yes that's it that's what we were trying to do yeah i mean i singled them out because i was just trying to think like what band do i have the best shot of yeah writing their entire discography if i needed to and that they satisfy that criteria more than any other band because I've listened to them the most and I know their songs backwards and forwards. And when I was in a band with my brothers, hashtag shout out Lunch Money Criminals, find us on Pure Volume,

we would just play a random Ben Folds 5 tune every once in a while so it's I I have experience just like fucking around on them and their songs a couple of times where we I wouldn't need to look at music or like a tabs or anything because I've heard them so many times that it's just like you know where it goes so it satisfies the criteria of I know this very well it doesn't to me satisfy the criteria of like if I start playing Ben Folds Five music in 2023, it's going to take the world by storm and change my life. Because Ben Folds is

still playing Ben Folds Five music today, and you think he's real big fish. Just kidding. I didn't really think he was really big fish. But yes, you're absolutely right. But I think it's also, I mean, there's got to be the presentation to it as well. Because it's like, there's like that extra quality the intangibles you know like the intangible quality of the performer it's like you could play brick but it's not just gonna be like d g b minor seven like you you're gonna have to you're gonna have to emulate it perfectly for it to really sell yeah i think on that score the other band that I feel like I had the best shot of doing this for, and I wouldn't do their entire discography,

but I've listened to and played enough cake that I think I could, if I woke up and cake didn't exist, I could play a bunch of their bass lines and then explain to better musicians what I want them to do on their instruments because they're their arrangements are they're like very bass forward and very poppy the arrangements are are really simple and

very clean that like even if I couldn't play guitar I could talk to a guitar player and be like this is what I want you doing over this line and then drummer you're doing this and then then, trumpet, I'll find someone who knows how to talk to trumpet players. And I know enough of their lyrics, and I don't have the voice of him. But a guy with a weird and very specific voice is in my wheelhouse as far as singing goes.

That I thought, I could get in a studio and quote unquote write 10 cake songs. That movie I like a lot better. I like the movie where there's a guy that knows just the bass lines to every Paul McCartney song. But like he's also not much of a singer. So like he's

like trying to teach you the songs through just the bass line. And then there's like a lot of like, right here I'm just just not playing because just right here it's all guitar yeah i mean focusing on bass is fun there's also like there's yesterday becomes a very fun movie depending on the band you pick if it like if yesterday happens to someone who is super into you know it's a it's a cliche, tired example, but like Nickelback, a band that, some band that never went far actually is a better example.

Some band that just- Limp Bizkit. Yeah, yeah. Like someone wakes up like, Limp Bizkit didn't exist? This is my moment. And everyone's like, oh, stop it. Don't do that anymore. No.

Yeah, I mean, I'm curious if you could make hits out of those types of songs now though now that they didn't exist like you'd find out pretty quick how influential they were in the the annals of pop of pop and rock music yeah like maybe they were helpful maybe they were a touchstone and you know you know who would know is uh sex drugs and cocoa pops chuck klosterman yeah yeah chuck klosterman would would know for sure because he's done that all that exploration with 80s hair bands where he was like this seems like a dead end it seems like we are just like fucked up as a culture during this time and we can throw it all away but i i postulate that no yeah all this music was necessary and that it helped to form today's music.

Yeah. I love that. I love that about him. I think, uh, cause I think we've all had fantasies of, of like, I wish that song didn't exist. So then I could write it because I really feel like I could have written that song. Yeah. If this other band didn't do it. And I feel like if I prayed like my Faustian bargain, I was like, just wipe out a band from everyone's collective memory and I'll wake up

tomorrow and I can write the songs. The band that would get wiped out from memory would be my unsuccessful high school college band, Lunch Money Criminals. I would wake up and be like, all right, I'll just, I'll,

I'll, I'll write these songs now and let's see if I'll get my brothers to play. It'll feel natural to them. I'm sure. Let's see if, let's see if I'll get my brothers to play. It'll feel natural to them. I'm sure. Let's see if, let's see if it works this time. Oh, it would change the dynamic of your family a lot.

I know it would be very upsetting. Your brother's like, fuck, these songs are really good. I feel like I could have written that. Maybe that's what's happening. Maybe in those universes where you, in our current universe,

where you hear a song and you're thinking, how did I not write that yeah you did you did motherfucker you did it in another universe and then this guy stole it i mean that's that well what i think the the movie is about artistically in the non-literal way uh because the movie very much is like no the beatles didn't exist this happened but i think what it's trying to say is like uh to hear songwriters talk about how they write songs it does it often does feel like they think they're stealing from from someone just this idea that like if the muse is speaking through you or if you're just like very

gifted musically sometimes when you're writing stuff it feels like I must be stealing this because because like it's just flowing out right so perfectly so like that's what i feel like the movie is trying to to get at for creative people where it it you you can't believe that you are capable of making something so great so your brain decides you must be stealing it. Your brain creates a world in your subconscious where the Beatles existed because you can't handle the idea that you are the Beatles. Yeah. I mean, it does certainly, it should feel like hard work. And when it doesn't, you're like, wait a second, what shortcut did I miss? Like, what am I, what did I do here? Yeah. I get, that's true of writing. I mean, that's true of all writing. Right. The days where it's like really clicking for you, you did I do here? Yeah. I get, that's true of writing. I mean, that's true. All right. Right.

The days where it's like really clicking for you, you do not trust it at all. No, no, a hundred percent. No. Tom Waits talks about that a lot in interviews about the muse visiting him. And like, he treats it very much like that. Like where you don't get to choose when the muse comes to you. And when it just like comes to you and just like fills your song, your head with a song before this podcast,

we were talking about how Paul McCartney, uh, when they were writing yesterday, right. Yeah. That he was just, he had the tune in his head, but he was just singing scrambled eggs to it over and over again.

Yeah. So he didn't know the lyrics yet. And, but like scrambled eggs, he just knew that was the, that was the syllables. But the song was there that it ended with an A sound. Yeah.

And so Tom Weiss talks about like being stuck in traffic, not being able to write for a long period of time. The movie's just not visiting him. And then being stuck in traffic and just getting the song in his head. And he's like, this is a really good song. I already know it's a good song. I can't do anything with it yet. Yeah.

And so like yelling at the muse in his convertible, like screaming, just the man next to you in the middle of traffic screaming, I can't do anything with you yet. Please go away. It would be very funny if he was, if this is a documentary and he's like, yeah, I couldn't, the muse wasn't coming to me. And then it came to me when I was stuck in traffic and I wrote a song and it was a good song. And then we cut to the song and it's like, I hate being in traffic,

stuck behind a yellow car. Just gotta be open to the muse when she whispers her strange poetry in your ear. I can't decide if I like that better or worse than him think with us cutting to the song, and it's just the sound of like chains on floor. Like it's one of his weird, the weird industrial pirate phase of his.

Okay. Well, I've made a decision. Okay. Let's hear what I'm going to take. And it's based on the trappings that I'm seeing so far, which are that I think that the performance matters so much that I'm going to pick somebody who doesn't have to perform at all.

All it is is words on the page. So I'm picking a writer and it's a writer that I don't, I mean, I don't obviously have their entire catalog memorized word for word, but I know the stories well enough. And I know the characters well enough and the descriptions of the characters that I could, I could fucking ape it. I could do it. And that's Raymond Chandler. Oh, wow. What an ambitious choice. No, I've read every Raymond Chandler book and his novellas and I've read them several times.

And for a long time, that's what I was doing anyway. Yeah. So I was just stealing Raymond Chandler when I was learning how to write. I'm just like, because I had never even read noir before. So anyone who had come after him, I hadn't read their stuff yet. So noir, other than when it would show up in Tiny Toons or something, was brand new to me. And here was an adult version of it,

and I was in love. I was like, this is it. This is the best writing i've ever read and the way that he describes everyone like a cartoon character was so great that i was like i was just consuming all of it and like really focusing on like deconstructing it like how is he saying each thing like how does he do this and emulating it and so a lot of that is still stuck in my craw. Like I still have it in there. Yeah. And I think that I could, God, I'd really have to like sit down and go through it. But I think every single one of his novels, I could be like, okay, I know the progression.

I remember what the turn is at the end, what the reveal is. And the mysteries are so good objectively. Yeah. But even if I didn't get the writing exactly right, I feel like the mysteries themselves sell the story. Right. You wouldn't need to do it word for word at all. But you know the language and the vocabulary and you know the mysteries and the vibe of

it for sure. Yeah. The detective element and even him talking about Philip Marlowe and how you create that character because he's done that before. He's written about how he built Philip Marlowe. Who's if anybody doesn't know, this is, he's like the original hardboiled detective crime novelist.

Yeah. He's the one who invented the genre and he always has the same detective throughout all of his stories. And the character's name is Philip Marlowe. And he's written about Philip Marlowe and like who that character needs to be in this world. And, and everyone has borrowed from that from like a Matlock to Batman,

like everyone who writes even the simplest detective or the most complex has borrowed from Raymond Chandler. And I feel like I could just like slip in there, put that the, the building blocks back into history and everyone would be like, Holy shit, this is it yeah this is what everyone's been working toward man wouldn't that be such a relief if you woke up and

like you you went to your bookshelf to get an old raymond chandler and it wasn't there and then you googled and no one had heard of them and it never existed you could you could just like quit your job and write 30 books or however many books you did after that first one yeah after i after i write the big sleep yeah and it works i'd be like oh you motherfuckers don't know what's common oh this is so exciting and everyone would be like oh it's weird that you chose the 1920s your story soren what where did that come from and i'd have to like make some bullshit up about living in Los Angeles and how Los Angeles never changes. Right. It'd be funny.

You would be giving interviews about like, well, I just really love that time period. And I've read so much about it. I've just always been fascinated. Just like those old stories, that old time. Then you get home and your wife would be like, why didn't you ever tell me you were into the 1920s? We don't have any books about the 1920s in this house. Never talked about it. We never talked about it. We literally never talked about it.

It interests me. I also don't have a lot of crime stories outside of those. I mean, I've read some, but I don't have them on my shelves. And so it would be very confusing for everyone where this was coming from. Strange. He went, so he was an American confusing for everyone where this was coming from. Strange.

He went, so he was an American dad for like seven years, and now he writes novels about crime in the past. He wrote one kind of detective story for American Dad, and I guess that was just the bug. He caught the bug right there. I think either of us easily could if they, this is not movie, this is not music or books, but if we woke up

tomorrow and our favorite show, Taskmaster, had never existed, we could make that show. I think about that sometimes when I'm running and disassociating and I need to just send my mind somewhere. I just think, Alex Horn is great and it's so cool that he made that show.

But wouldn't it be better if I did it and I did it before him and it was as successful? I think even he would agree that it should be mine. It's so, I mean, I still watch it regularly. Me too. And I'll go back to old episodes and stuff and I catch little things that he does all the time where he's so good

in the moment at playing the part and then also during the tasks when just making the task funnier like making the jokes funnier in each moment is a it's just brilliant I wish I was him he's perfect

anyway yeah I think we could do that show right now and we could probably even steal it whole whole hog right now and it would still be successful they uh i don't think we could only because well maybe times have changed now but two things have happened they aired one episode of the original taskmaster on the CW and then canceled it immediately. Really? They tried to bring it over here, and I guess in literally one episode, and then they never did that again.

They never ported over the existing British one again. And two, I think it was Comedy Central that brought Alex Horne over and tried to do an American remake of it with Reggie Watts as the host, and it was just missing something and didn't work and nobody here wanted it as much it's so interesting it's so interesting that it didn't work here but it worked other places because they like went international like they tried to they planted those seeds and like for some reason new zealand was like yeah we dig it it's working like everywhere all over the world it's it's a global brand now and it rules

and and and we just don't have it here i it's funny you say that when you're running you think about it because when i'm trying to go to sleep and i have something terrible in my brain that i don't want to think about anymore i sit there and i think no okay go to a task the getting the spaghetti inside the grapefruit in the dark how would you solve it and i will just sit there and like think of like try to be very clever and how i solve it and that really is very soothing well soren i talked a whole bunch i don't know if we have any time for your questions i know you had some good ones oh shame shame i will have to save them for the next

episode yeah well well they going to be pretty great. Because you already had them locked in the chamber for this episode. And now you have a whole new week to really polish them. So I'm excited. I'm excited for how interesting the questions will be. And honestly, how tightly you deliver the questions. Me too. I can't wait to hear what I do. Anyway, the show is called Quick Question, but you knew that already.

We are recorded, edited, and produced by the irreplaceable Gabe Harder. Our theme song is by the incredible Merex. Merex. Their digital album is available at merex.bandcamp.com. Want to reach out? You can find us on Twitter, which just gets worse and worse. Merex, their digital album is available at merex.bandcamp.com. Want to reach out? You can find us on Twitter, which just gets worse and worse. I am dob underscore inc.

Soren is soren underscore ltd. And the show is qq underscore soren and dan. We also have an email, qq with soren and daniel at gmail.com. We also have a Patreon, patreon slash quick question. I have a sub stack, substack.danielobrien, where once a month I send book recommendations and talk about books. And this week we talked about quitting books and how that's okay. Because sometimes you don't need to be a completist. If you're not having a good time with a book, it's not you.

Just drop the fucking book. The author doesn't't care what do you mean we i you have like a team on this on your suspect i say we because it's because it's a small community right now okay so like i'm still at the at the point where when people leave comments i read them and it feels like we're it's like a small nerdy community of book readers who like talking about books. That's sweet. Maybe I'll look, maybe I'll go check it out. Thanks man. That would be great. The first time one of these has worked at the end of our podcast where somebody actually goes and does the things that we say.

All right, bye. Bye. How did you get? When will I be remembered? What did I do? Where did all the good things go? Oh, forget it I saw a movie, 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 here I think you'll have a great time here I think you'll have a great time here