Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Fives Across the Board

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

We had some technical issues with Daniel's camera this week. Apologies in advance. -Today the guys talk managing and being managed. An Eiffel Tower of complaintsl Sometimes it doesn't pay to be the boss.If you've *managed* to run out of new QQ episodes, just wait until you hear about Patreon, where we release an extra special episode every other Friday. You can sign up at https://www.patreon.com/quickquestionThanks to Rocket Money for sponsoring this episode. Go to www.RocketMoney.com/qq. it could save you hundreds a year.

I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? I wanna hear your thoughts, I 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 favorite? Who did you get? When do I be remembered? What's it up with? Where did all the movies go? 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. So hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, the podcast where two best friends and comedy writers ask each other questions and give each other answers. I am one half of that podcast, senior writer for last week tonight with John Oliver, author of How to Fight Presidents, and cautious internet page refresher, Daniel O'Brien.

Joined, as always, by my co-host, Mr. Soren Bui. Soren, say hello. Hey, everybody. I'm Soren Bui. I'm a writer for American Dad. People still ask me to this day, like, oh, what's Seth like? And I'm like, I don't know. We never talk.

Thanks to Rocket Money for supporting our podcast podcast rocket money will quickly and easily identify your subscriptions for you so you can stop paying for the ones you don't want stop throwing your money away cancel unwanted subscriptions and manage your expenses the easy way by going to rocket money.com slash qq daniel you and I have had our same jobs for about the same amount of time and before we get into your internet habits I've seen you with John at one point we went to a party we went to a last week's night party

and you talked to him briefly and you guys get along great like it's like this is gonna sound silly but like he knows you he knows things about you. Like, he kind of knows where you live and stuff. And you guys talked effortlessly like you were friends. Do you feel that that's true?

Are you and John, like, just buddies? I don't think that I would say we are friends. It's a very good question i think he's a a nice man and i think he's very good at uh the personal aspect of being a boss where he's not like super far removed and cold but it's we're never going to he really threads the needle we're never going to get he really threads the needle. We're never going to get so close that it could make other coworkers uncomfortable. I don't think. You know, there's no risk of like,

we are like pals who chat and hang out and in a way that would like make other coworkers not like jealous, jealous, but like professionally jealous, like feeling like they need to be part of any kind of boys club or anything like that. He knows enough about every employee that he can talk to you and have a conversation with you. But I don't think there's any ever real risk that that uh there would be signs of favoritism he doesn't have any darlings no not that not that okay so that's i feel like that's unlike any other television job i've ever heard of yeah every it's here's what i hear from other shows is like you have your showrunner uh and i assume he's a showrunner

right he and tim are the showrunners we don't technically have a showrunner or head writer okay okay so like whoever the heads of the or like the top of your show is like that person is going to pick out people from the group because they're always developing stuff on their own and they're going to pick out people from that group and they're gonna be like hey i really like the way you've been writing or i like your work or i just think you're easy to get along with do you have any ideas and the person will be like yeah i want to do this like interdimensional snowman thing or whatever they've got and the the head writer or showrunner will be like okay uh let's try and get that like let's try and get that made and then work with somebody from the show to develop on

the side and so essentially you're just putting your name on it you're kind of giving notes and stuff but really it's this writer who you like giving them a shot to make something bigger and these are the stories i've heard anyway like yeah and so but that in automatically assumes that there's going to be somebody who's not getting that who's not getting that treatment uh correct um i think uh you can because i don't want to throw any of his previous employers under the bus but i think you can really when you have a boss a manager you can kind of see whether they're doing it consciously or not what they are taking from their previous bosses and their previous companies and what what like what maybe they're going out of their way to avoid and uh and not do i think about that all the time i don't think i'm i i ever want to be a boss

again but i do in the back of my mind i'm like constantly evolving uh what management style i would apply if i ever did have uh a team beneath me a company to run again that's smart of you i stopped doing that um but i was never good i was never good as a manager we both got uh for people who don't know when we worked at cracked which was a comedy website, we eventually were promoted to managerial positions. And that was not our wheelhouse at all. We were writers and we weren't allowed to write anymore, basically. Like all of our time was consumed by making sure that the people that we were managing were doing the right thing but also happy and like content and man did i suck at that job i was not i was not good at that um so uh and we didn't like it

it was sort of a strange um not that anyone not that any one person tricked us but i think just like uh corporate capitalist american society tricked us where we got hired to to write because we were good writers and then uh just like like the idea of promotions being a good thing is so woven into the work ethic of every American on planet earth that it just seemed like, well, yeah, if I'm, I'm, I'm writing long enough and I'm doing a good enough job,

then, uh, I should get, uh, a bump from that. So you go from writer to head writer, which I was at some point. And then,

uh, the, you never want to like plateau at just one thing so the step above writer is some kind of managerial position where now i have a team of people who are under me and i'd never there's there was one employee uh in cracks history that did the right thing and that was alex schmidt when we wanted to give him a promotion like everybody else was like hey you did such a good enough job that that now you are manager you're still gonna write and you're still gonna podcast but your manager in charge of our social media division and he turned it down he

was like no i don't i don't want to do that so like thank you very much i don't want to do that and we had no idea what to do with that information we were like but this is what we do with the people that we like we give them we want to give you more money and we're not allowed to just do that because this is a corporate machine so we have to put manager in your title and we can't just give you manager in your title we have to give you people if you're going to be a manager duties uh and that means you have to be a boss and he's like i understand no thank you i i appreciate the vote of confidence but no i don't want to be on that on that route at all i didn't have that instinct in me i just sort of like blindly went along with head writer to manager to creative director to uh right fired the normal path that people take yeah it was um i so i think that corporate america in general is like not designed for

creative pursuits so it it presumes that you hate your job it's presumed that you're doing something shitty up front and then you graduate into these positions where you're doing less shitty shit and now you're like you have more free time of your own where you're just like and if you're at any sort of job where you start as a creative it's the opposite it's like you're doing the stuff that you want to do up front and like even when you get more i guess you graduate a little bit into getting more freedom within that like you get to do more like going from just a general writer at crack to a columnist like suddenly you get here you have a lot more freedom in terms of what you can write but like the trajectory is clear you get to this point where

you're no longer writing it's like yeah just like i think if you were working at a desk for your well we were working at desk well if you're working at like crunching numbers you don't want to be fucking crunching numbers your whole life it's like you're the presumption is that you're moving up in these positions to get away from that and like all we're doing is getting away from the and this is a silly word but like getting away from the art and you're like i don't like this by the way alex schmidt was one of my uh managers he was one of the people that i was managing and he was the easiest person to have like that was my if i had to do one-on-ones with somebody i was so excited when it was going to be alex because he didn't ever make anything my problem and i loved it and he is so good at his

job and like eager to like try new things and he'll just like do it on his own pull the trigger by himself and i was like this is great i'll i if i could just have a bunch of these i would be fine yeah you were uh briefly one of my employees and in a way that like yes i was very unhappy about at the time uh because it's because we were like clearly friends and peers and uh equals in terms of what we were doing and what our responsibilities were and then suddenly it was like hey daniel you are soren's boss now and was like i don't think that's gonna fly i don't think i don't think he's gonna want me telling him to do stuff and i don't want to tell him to do stuff i'll run it past him but uh yeah it also puts for anyone who is not in

the corporate america world which we uh ended up being by accident that we have to do like these performance reviews at the end of the year which which for for our company involved 360 reviews where you would have to like review a bunch of your co-workers and then read the reviews of other people that they've made for other people and then you have to give your direct reports some kind of ranking some like like a one to five point ranking for all these different like attentiveness punctuality communicative whatever all that stuff and i was soren's boss and i looked forward to the review period because i was like great i'm going to give him fucking fives across the board because we're pals and a thing that people might not realize is you can't do that like even our boss at the time jack who is not like a corporate stooge or anything he was aware of how

the machine worked so he would see the report that i gave for soren and i was like you can't give him all fives and i was like but he's he's really great he is fives in all of these all of the ways that you would evaluate an employee he did things right and jack's like no i understand that but like the system can't accept someone who was like, get a perfect score because then they have to like give them more money. The system is like, we need to give this guy more money. And I'm like, no, yeah, great. Do that.

Do that. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. So no one gets fives across the board. Not even you, Daniel, get fives across the board. I'm like, fuck you. Give me fives across the board. I mean fuck you give me fives across the board i mean so it's good but i'm incredible right for someone to get fives across the board would mean that like the rating system is broken so to that end you have to give soren fours somewhere and i'm like okay um it seems like we're taking all the wrong lessons from this, but fine.

That's why I'm just going to take something from a five to a four. And then when I have my one-on-one with Soren, I'm going to explain to him why I had to do it this way. And we're both going to laugh about how bullshit it is. And then we're going to return to our job of staring at spreadsheets and crunching numbers. I don't miss any of that i don't miss the like being part of a corporate world in that respect like being a writer now is i am ushered everywhere that i need to be it's like if we're starting up writing and we're like you need to be in the room or you need to be like this meeting or something somebody just like comes

and fucking gets me like i'm four years old and they're like hey you got to go to this and i'm like this is great this is exactly what i want this is like being on set like i love i love being told what to do at all times we had our um intern seminar with we do this twice a year with our interns where they come and they ask all the writers who are available whatever questions they want about the industry and about this job specifically and all of our various paths. And one of the final questions was asking the writers where they, and keep in mind, the interns are college age interns and they all are like, my name is this and I'm studying film and technology at NYU

and I would like to one day be a showrunner and storyteller. All these people who are just like made of ambition. They're already interning at an HBO show. They're 19 years old. They're going to be fine. They're just like relentless engines of ambition. And they're asking us writers season 11 into the show. They're asking us, what do you want to do after this?

What are your goals after this and i'm and to a person we're all like i'm gonna keep doing this until the show shuts down and if the show shuts down then i'd like to do it somewhere else i want to like keep being a writer i want to keep getting assignments from someone and just like doing it no one no one has any ambitions of of running a show anymore really we're all just like especially knowing uh that we're in an industry that is you know falling apart at the seams we're all just like keep our head down like i'm gonna write until you know 2026 or so when we just decide uh fiction and content shouldn't exist anymore then i'll be a farmer i don't know whatever i'm allowed to do for as long as i'm

allowed to do it that's my career ambitions right now driving until the wheels fall off and i'll just assume i'm gonna write john's show if john's show gets shut down then i'll be like john do you need someone to write a podcast for you because i will do that too i do you need an assistant what can i do yeah i'm in the same boat where yeah well people will john buddy you don't be writing your own tweets i'll do that i understand the space let me do it for you yeah people ask me okay, well you're at the show. Like, what are you like? What are your ambitions? Like,

what do you want to do next? Like, what do you mean next? This is this. I know showrunners. I know how miserable they are. I know what a huge leap and destruction of your quality of life. It is to go from being a writer to running a show like it's

it's brutal man and it's like all that managerial stuff comes right back you have to be so good at dealing with and negotiating people and like making them feel heard making them feel good making them feel like their writing is good making them all like each other and then like also you're you're appeasing everybody on the opposite side as well which we're generally shielded from as writers which is producers on the various networks like all that stuff you there's so much to do as a as a showrunner that i'm like why would i want that for me i love writing i want to just keep doing that yeah Yeah. Towards the end of the time it cracked when I was managing just exclusively creative people and they're all fighting for the same site real estate and they're all fighting for the same rapidly dwindling production budget.

These are people and they're creative people. So they're all like soulful and emotional. And these are the people that I'm trying to appease every single day, and I would have meetings and meetings and meetings trying to keep everyone happy, knowing that we would leave the meeting and the people that I am managing, I would make them 70% as happy as a person could be. Like, that's the negotiation that i would have to do is i would leave this meeting with a bunch of creative people no one no one is 100 happy uh and i am miserable in the pursuit of this goal we would just like end every week and i and like a win for me would be like well i don't i think i think i'm the only one who

is miserable so i guess that's good i made cody pretty happy this week cody got a win that's huge hey that's great he is still gonna like go home and complain about me but could be worse uh and yeah i guess there was i mean we've been talking about as a manager having people under you who are like just normal people you also occasionally manage somebody who's really bad at their job and that gets that's like that's so deeply hard like you can't think about anything else now you've got like this occupies all of your the real estate in your brain because you're like now i have to start tracking their work i have to find out what they're doing hourly now i have to make sure that there's like a proper log of hey did you are you getting this work done

you have deadlines did you meet your deadlines and like it all has to be those people a paper trail because now you also have to consider the possibility that this person needs to be fired and it's like it's so awful i never want to do that and it would also be it's a uh job that by design has me getting uh not yelled at but like just like my bosses would be upset with me when numbers didn't work or when when when morale was bad and other departments would be like hey one of your employees was supposed to hand in a thing and they didn't they didn't hand in their script until two hours late that upsets everyone else's time that impacts production now you're impacting my department so i'm like okay so i would go and get yelled at by other departments and then i would go to my employees and be like hey man you were late on this thing and then they would complain to me about me so you're

really getting it from every single possible direction of just like getting towered by complaints yeah but i'm curious so i in like a very clear literal way i never want to be a boss again are you ever curious in the abstract sense of like uh rising to the challenge of creating what you think is an ideal work environment because whether i definitely don't want to be a boss but that idea is interesting to me like like almost as a creative endeavor i i want to to see like what what would my workspace be What would my hierarchy system be? What is the workflow? What is the communication? Could I design as close to a perfect managerial system as a person could get? That is an interesting challenge to me.

You don't think that way at all. No, it's not a pursuit that i'm interested in it's like could i make the very best broccoli pie it's like i don't want to make broccoli pie i don't want to do that i mean maybe i could make one that people be like hey you know for broccoli pie this isn't bad for like for for your managerial skills soren this isn't bad i don't i don't care to rise to that challenge um and i know that it's there's just too many variables for it to ever go right for me like i know that it's gonna be fucked up at some point and i'm gonna have to devote a lot of thought to something that i genuinely don't care

about here's what i want and what i knew early on with like building a, uh, uh, uh, being an employee anywhere, this is like the secret to being an employee anywhere and being an employee that people really like, first of all, do what they ask you to do, which is like, they get, they go nuts when you do that, when they give you an assignment or something to do and you do it, they're like, they can't believe it. They can't believe that you actually did the thing they asked you to do second of all if you don't understand something fig try to figure it out before asking the question so as opposed to just going to your your direct uh your lead or whatever and saying hey how do i do this or like what is it what is this part i don't totally understand this if you solve the problem yourself they will fucking love you they will go nuts for you if

you are solving problems on your own and figuring things out on your own they go nuts for that those are like the two things if you want to be ambitious and like do other things on your own and be like i've also like i'm gonna start spearheading this thing because i noticed that we don't have any of this that stuff's fine it's not as doesn't mean as much to a manager because they also get a little apprehensive about that because they're like oh fuck i don't even know are you just going to compromise your real job what are you actually losing to do this uh i don't even know if there might already be somebody working on this like none of that shit matters nearly as much as you think it does it's do your own job and then don't ask questions and but like figure out the answer a different way and man like take two days to figure out the answer

on your own and they will love you yeah i do think probably uh of my many failures one of my biggest failures as a manager at cracked when i was managing uh managing robert evans he is someone who uh is the kind of employee you described that was like that was ambitious and wanted to to launch new initiatives and uh grow and expand and do more things and it was just my shittiness of a manager as a manager to just be like i even reading your proposal for a new thing the site could do takes a lot of my time that i just didn't want to invest in it and as a result i would just be like i don't think we can do this robert evans meanwhile i i think his the the massive success of his podcast behind the bastards which has grown into a podcast network on its own that he is like completely overseen i think just that is proof positive to just let him cook which i did not do and i just wasted his talents for years well i here's i'm gonna extend this even further than work it's truly depressing there's like i

wasn't even thinking about it until right now but there's like there's no greater proof to my failure as a manager than like i managed this guy alongside jack o'brien for 10 years and then cracked disappeared and robert evans moved to the how stuff works podcast network with jack o'brien and is thriving like there's just no no other argument could be made be fair be fair the things he was asking to do was like it was it were a comedy website and he was like uh i'd like to go to ukraine and embed with soldiers there and you're like that's correct no no it's like there's a tribe of people who don't wear clothes and they fight whales with spears and i would like to live

with them for 10 months i don't know if we'll get any content out of it and they'd be like i don't know man yeah maybe maybe just could you like create an instagram account for the site please could you do that instead yeah i i don't blame you for that i don't blame you were doing what was within your wheelhouse and like what was the expectations of the site with him and he was doing great at that stuff so like yeah you just but yeah he clearly had a higher ceiling than anyone could have anticipated that doesn't doesn't make you a bad manager two things about me that our audience knows or needs to know one i am saving money for a wedding and two i have moved in with a person and we had to consolidate all of our various subscriptions to streamline things.

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Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of 500 million in canceled subscriptions. Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash qq. That's rocketmoney.com slash qq. That's rocketmoney.com slash qq. Rocketmoney.com slash qq. Here's what I was going to say, though, is that I think you, the things that I said about making you a good employee, I think also makes you a really good spouse.

Like, makes you good in a relationship too what was that hey just excited about it because if you are somebody who is basically how much like a relationship comes down to how much of your partner's brain you're occupying with your own bullshit like how well the relationship is doing and so like if you're occupying with your own bullshit like well how well the relationship is doing and so like if you're even like the like these silly little questions that don't mean anything like if i'm gonna go to my wife and be like hey do you think that gilly's done with her dinner now like that's occupying like this new now she's got whatever she's working on she's gotta stop doing that she's gotta think about whether this is true and it's a question that

i could easily answer on my own because i am also a parent or like i'm i'm also in this relationship so i'll give you as much as you are a team together it's like you answer questions on your own you figure it out on your own you communicate obviously whatever you decide or like what you've got going on but you answer questions on your own you figure it out on your own and you don't make you like all this like the blind work that goes into running a house or like being with somebody else you make that as easy on the other person as possible and you do you know jobs fall into different camps like yeah there are certain things that i'm going to always do that she's not going to do there's certain things that she always does as long as i'm not like burdening her with those things i'm getting my jobs done and i'm answering questions on my own fucking that's a great

relationship you're making me very self-conscious of the things that i don't the problems that i don't solve on my own of which there are many there's a thing that i think about deciding what those are yeah something i think about a lot is like there's stereotypes in pop culture sitcom world of like the clueless husband while the woman runs the the whole house and it's and it's it's ray verone who doesn't know how anything works and i would watch those things as someone who lived alone for so long i would watch all those things and think like, how do you become useless? This is not a stereotype that makes any sense to me. How do you,

were you just like waiting around for a den mother to come in and run things? It doesn't make any sense. It does make sense to me now. Once you, because I've, when you live with someone and you you're you move all your stuff in together uh that person can redesign the the space in accordance with what makes sense to her and i'm very deferential to what she wants to do with the space and uh and she is better at

uh utilizing space than i am she is better at at design she's better at at planning all the stuff she excels and i don't i don't do well at them and i am very happy to follow her lead on things the result is that i don't know where anything is in my home there are so many things that i that and i've just turned into raverone where i'm just like where where is the where's the i'm gonna here honey i'm gonna clean the whole house while you're gone where is the mop where is the vinegar where are our cleaning supplies which rags am i allowed to use for for which thing just because i used to know where everything was in the house and now i don't know where anything is yeah yeah but i mean you guys are you are still at the beginning

stages where you like it is being in a new job where like you don't know shit about each other you don't know where these camps are like what's going to fall into which camp like which jobs are going to fall into which camp and some of the jobs obviously you share but like you're still kind of like figuring out well who's in charge of this is which one of us is going to be the one who's like in charge of this and that's a hard that's like there's gonna be some fights there's a lot of fights right around then like figuring all that stuff out that's why when people are like worried about moving in together those are the intangibles of moving in together is that okay now we need to be able to cover one another's blindnesses like here's something i want you to tackle and i'm using like company speak for this but like you're going to

spearhead this uh but you wouldn't obviously sit in a relationship but like you start doing that job and if you suck at it, the other person's going to take it over. And then like, and then you've got to find the things that you're good at and that the other person's good at. Like right now there are certain blindnesses that I kind of had and they've gotten way, way worse because of my relationship,

because now I'm not in charge of those directions. Don't fucking ask me, man. We go to a gas stop and our gas station. And afterwards I need to ask her which direction to pull out so that we can get back on the road because i can't remember which way we were going but she can't turn on the tv she has no idea how like the process works of like getting the tv on and getting to the channel that you want or like the streaming option that you want there's just like things where we went our separate ways and you are you

can become completely helpless in one respect and you just account on this other person to cover your blindnesses yeah it also took me and it continues to take me time to remember that i can also like learn things i can learn where things are in the house, so I'm not completely relying on her. There was, she had a very, she has a very specific way of folding towels. They're very, like, neat and compact, and they're all uniform. And in the beginning, when I was doing laundry, I would think, like, oh, I'll leave towels for her, because she knows how she likes them. So I will just, I'll make that one of her jobs and I will do all these other jobs. And that is how compromise works.

It was like three months into living together that I was like, or I could learn how to fold the towels that way too, I suppose. Yeah. Then we both know how to do things correctly instead of just one of us okay i could see how that's a better system yeah i i can i can also hear in what i'm saying it sounds like we're already a finely oiled machine that's not the case either we still have like a lot of these arguments and stuff and i still put a lot of like mental weight on her of like the same where it's like i'm it's gonna be mother's day i'm gonna do so many good things

first i need you to tell me where everything is so that i can get it all ready and also while i'm like preparing the day before while i'm preparing honey don't you worry about dinner tonight also though what are your allergies while i'm like getting everything ready while i'm like i'm gonna make you breakfast in bed i'm gonna make you waffles while but but just the kids are gonna be in your room for a little while so i can get these waffles done because they're driving me crazy like there's the mental load is is so clear that we you like put on each other and and it's really tough because you get these positions where you're like you're putting something on, you're putting a mental, or if someone's putting a mental load on you,

you can feel it happening. And so you get a little crabby, you get a little cranky and then like you snap it, like you're short with them or something. And they're like, whoa, all I did was ask you where the Windex was. And you're like, no,

it's bigger than that. I can't explain why, but it's bigger than that. Yeah. I can't explain why, but it's bigger than that. Breaking news. I mentioned earlier that I was refreshing the internet. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah. We just, a few minutes ago, last week tonight, has won a Peabody Award.

Whoa. Awards are silly and meaningless, but this is one that is not a guarantee. We don't win it every year. I don't even know if we get nominated every year. I don't entirely know what goes into Peabody awards but i know that we were nominated and that they were going to announce results today and they're they're such a like smugness about the peabody awards that made me immediately want one because yeah all of all of their all their branding around it is like we don't have a voting committee and this isn't about

who gets the most what thing makes the most money or gets the most views we just want to give awards to things that that we the peabody group believe to be good and as soon as i hear them television they they give awards to the television that they believe to be the most enlightening which is like i know oh so silly give me that oh give me that all day that they believe to be the most enlightening, which is like, oh, fuck. I know. So silly. Give me that. Oh, give me that all day. That's so exciting, Daniel.

Congratulations. Thank you. I don't know if this means, like, we get a thing. Yeah. There is a Peabody Award. It's like a guy on a coin. There is, yeah. It's Professor Peabody.

It's got to be Professor Peabody, right? What's that dude's name? It's like, it's it's it's professor peabody it's gotta be what's that dude's name uh it's like it's something so oh george foster peabody yeah it's him yeah man that sounds fancy wait does this say does the award say the university of georgia across the top what does that have to do with anything oh it's i guess i should have done like any kind of research into this thing that i just now said was really important to me the first question if you search is how hard is it to win a peabody award because everybody's doing the same thing we are which is like oh that would that'd be a nice notch in the belt for me that would look look nice. I think, yeah, it's the same. We all probably have the same thought process every year,

or at least I certainly have, where it was like, what does it take to get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize? You just need a college professor to nominate you. Oh, fuck. I can't wait until my former college roommate owes me a favor because he's a he's a professor at a university now and just as soon as i help him move a couch like hey buddy throw a nomination my way well daniel i we've we strayed away from it but i do want to say huge congratulations to that that's

incredible that's wonderful there's that is like a very distinguished award i would say more distinguished even than the emmys even though there's a lot of pageantry and like fun to the emmys this is that's huge that's so great you it it is like a turn in terms of not just like what's good content or like fun like what's making the world better and you're on that side of it well i'll say it like that i don't i don't believe we're making the world better i mean that's very kind of you to say, but that's a... You know as well as I do how paralyzing a thought that is for a writer to have.

I won't speak for all of our writers, but I couldn't imagine writing this show thinking that any episode has the potential to make a difference in the world whether i could think that in the abstract is is neither here nor there but just for like the sheer act of writing the show you can't i don't know how you would write it thinking it was important i just don't think that's like a uh a fun or healthy way to to view the task at hand which is make funny episode of television you know you know every script i write i'm thinking as i'm writing

it is this the next great piece of american literature is this the one that's gonna do it did i did i heal did i is this this is maybe if we just like without any introduction no words just like hand it over to to vladimir putin is he gonna just go like wow and then cool it and just like yeah apologize and step down right his thing that's tiger to the sunset yeah i i think i think i did it i think this is the one that everything i write i'm like oh um hold on before i tell this story i want to get her name exactly right it's najimy kathy najimy is that he's kathy najimy yeah yeah yeah king of the hill and okay yeah hocus pocus okay so uh my first episode for american dad um there was a part that i really wanted kathleen and jimmy for and i was like asking my showrunner about he's like oh that's interesting uh well we'll reach out to her i was

like oh this is surreal she ended up doing it and uh she we did the episode we did the records i'm there for the recording of it and then afterwards we're like okay well thank you kathy like this has been great you were wonderful she's like yeah see you at the emmys and i was like that's i'm gonna ride that for six months said that we would go to the emmys together because of my episode and obviously she was joking but but she still said it and so i was just like i think i did it i think this is the one this is like and then if i go back and re reread or watch my first episode i'm like oh it's all over the place this thing's a mess but you can take those compliments and dine out on them for your entire life we did a uh in the

crack days did a podcast michael jack and i with um mike reese and jeff martin from yeah the simpsons just like titan simpsons writers and it was a like very clearly we are fanning out on them and they are just tickled that simpsons fans have crazy questions it was it was after our after hours episode about the simpsons and that like got their attention and they're like yeah if you want to ask us questions about the show we'll do it on the podcast and like reminisce and shoot the shit they were very gracious with their time and very like in no uncertain terms all of our fan theories and all of your fan theories listening at home they're all wrong we have all simpsons fans have put more thought into the show than the writers have and they were really happy to shoot down every like theory after theory. We're like, is this a reference to the fact that Principal Skinner at the flea market episode puts on a helmet and reminisces about his prison days and his prison number is 24601.

That's the same as the prison number for Jean Valjean from Les Mis. Jean Valjean, who famously throws away his identity and becomes someone new uh was that a reference were you like foreshadowing the reveal that seymour skinner stole someone else's identity and they were like nope great question no and i was like cool i've been thinking about it for a decade but the the reason i bring this up is at the end of the episode we we thank them for their time and we're like we're such huge fans of your work and they said yeah we we're fans of your work too we like the show and and and cracked and i jokingly was like, just a room full of the greats. And Jeff, in a perfect punch up, says, no one here but us legends.

And it was like very clearly a sweet joke. But in the back of my mind, I'm going, no one's going to know it's a joke if I put that on my resume or a book jacket someday. or a book jacket someday. That tone won't come across when he's dead and I run around town with that quote. Yeah, that's how I felt. We did a podcast with Dave Barry, Jack and I, in the podcast days. And Dave Barry was, yeah.

And it was incredible. And he's like, he's so insightful and he's very smart. And at the end, said, called out After H hours. I was like, I love after hours. And I was just like, that's, you don't know what that means to me to hear if there was like a, can we put that on the cover? Can we put that on the jacket somehow? that on the jacket somehow it's very gratifying and also at the same time uh there's a part of it that's like i never would have made it if i thought you were gonna watch it like this is this is i thought you were done consuming content and i thought like you only read like dave barry you only read surely other dave barry books right like you like or people that are out there people that are at that level you you just read from your peers this isn't the shit that we make that's not for you that's for the fucking guppies out there this

is we're making bird seed. You don't get, get away from here. Yeah, it was, it was, it was really great. It was really wonderful to hear. He also, at the end, he was like, do you guys have any, any other questions for me? And I, I don't, I still don't know how Jack felt about this, but there was a, I was having my child at that time. My, my wife was pregnant with my first child. And I was like, you're a dad. You write about that being a dad a lot in your column. Do you have any advice for like, well, somebody who's going to be a new father. And he was like, and I like really put him on the spot and he was like,

yeah, just let your kid be whoever they are. Don't try to make your kid anything in particular. Like don't try to raise somebody. They're not blank slates. Like don't try to raise somebody they're not blank slates like don't try to turn them into something that they don't want to be and just let them be who they are and i was like okay thanks and honestly like i think about that all the time now every time that like i'm like every time i'm like forcing my son into something i'm like this is not his thing this is not his wheelhouse like what am i doing i'm like i my son into something, I'm like, this is not his thing. This is not his wheelhouse. Like, what am I doing? I'm like,

I'm trying to give, and obviously I know what I'm doing. I'm trying to give him like as many universal experiences, because if he starts to like this, the first bit of anything is very difficult. There's like a steep learning curve to everything. And kids don't understand that yet. And they have to get good at something before they understand if they like it.

And I'm constantly like thinking about that and thinking about can i like baseball like i'm like is should i stick with baseball if he's not having any fun right now like do i get him over this hump so that it's like more enjoyable for him or is he just like not a sports guy and then like i think about what dave barry said and i'm like oh we don't need to do this you could just what is he into oh he wants to build stuff. Let's just do that. Let's just like, get back to,

let's just do that. Like you want to do, want to do baseball. Let's quit it. Like, let's do, let's build. That's very curious advice to me.

I'm sure it's, it's correct. But I also, I, I like, what if, what if you turned around and, and your son just had a fucking cannon?

Like he was just like idly playing with a baseball and then threw it across the yard and you, you could spot it like a talent scout. And he was just like throwing it to get rid of it. And there's part of you, part of you that knows like, if if i make his life miserable for a couple years yeah he's going to be so happy later right if like but but because you would know that like this is going to require coaching and discipline and maybe nurturing yeah maybe moving towns to be near better baseball schools or whatever the thing happens to be that is like his the thing that he clearly has a god-given talent for you know how much sacrifice would be required of that but you also know the great potential rewards i don't know that seems like it would be tough for a parent it's

it is it's really hard it's really hard at this age i mean i think it gets a little easier later when they they develop real passions for things but they don't have a passion for anything right now like they're there's things that they kind of like but they want it's like you're trying to nurture something that might be a future passion and it's like it's a real gamble if you like go in whole hog on all these things so it's it's scary it's there are things that he like riding a bike that's a great example when i it was the pandemic and i was like we're gonna learn how to ride a two-wheel bike in back in 2020 and uh he did not want to do it he was scared of it it was like not a fun idea to him but i was like i think i have to push this because when they're young they also think well maybe they don't know how long life actually is and i think in his mind he's like maybe i'll just be a person

who doesn't ride bikes maybe my whole life i'll just be a person who doesn't swim not realizing that doesn't that can't happen like it's going to ruin the whole aspects of your life if you can't do these things and i know that once his friends are all riding bikes like once there's real peer pressure to it and they're like hey we're going to go we're finally has the freedom we're going to ride our bikes to the park and he couldn't do that that would be very hard for him so i'm like i think i just force him force him to do it and did and now he's like great about it he's great about riding his bike loves his bike loves riding it and what a terrible lesson that was for me to learn as a dad yeah i'm curious you were saying about the dave barry podcast that you're not sure how jack feels about it what did what do you what did you mean by that

i jumped in and asked a very personal question oh okay i did a very selfish thing on a podcast that wasn't for like it's for everybody else and i'm asking about something very niche and specific i see i thought this was going to be uh i thought we would learn that jack has two children and you've never once asked him as soon as another dad enters the picture you're like oh my god i've been waiting to talk to a dad for so long thank you thank you for coming first of all day barry second of all i have to work with this guy every day and i just i can't get anything any any sort of valuable insight from him um yeah i i asked only it was like a selfish thing to ask on a podcast that was not for me and but i still

like took the opportunity because you gotta shoot your shot yeah of course i'm glad i did hey man me too and that's probably gonna wrap up this episode episode, huh? That's it. Great. The show is quick question, but you knew that already. We are recorded and edited and produced by the irreplaceable Gabe Harder, our president and CEO of Podcast Operations. Our song is by the incredible Merex. Their digital album is available

at merex.bandcamp.com and you can find the show on Twitter, Instagram, Patreon where we are releasing fun, exclusive bonus episodes. And you can also watch this show on YouTube if you've only been listening to it. And you can email us at qqwithsorinanddanielatgmail.com with all of your questions and comments. That is it, right? You can go find us on youtube at youtube.com

slash at qq podcast and we don't talk about bacon anymore but bacon is still a huge part of this podcast we stopped thinking i mean here but bacon is still if you're worried that we somehow replace bacon we did not he's he's still still kicking around define huge part of the podcast he's on the text chain but i don't think he has said a word in months he he's getting us all of our advertisers okay all right bye i assume he he's listening to this. So thank you. That's a big assumption. All right, bye.

I've got a quick, quick question for you, all right I want to hear your thoughts I want to know what's on your mind I've got a quick, quick question for you, all right The answer's not important I'm just glad that we could talk tonight So what's your favourite? Who did you get?

When will I be remembered? What's 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