Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - QQ ep 20 - Millard Fillmore, Famous Firestarter

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

So, hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel. We've been told that we need to say something up top informing listeners that this is a new episode, so this is me telling you. This one is. Quick Question is where two best friends who happen to be TV writers separated by 3,000 miles created a podcast to catch up and ask each other non-pressing questions because it seemed easier than making new friends. I am one half of this podcast. My name is Daniel O'Brien. Hello. And I am joined as always by the

second half of this podcast, Soren Bui. Hello, I'm Soren Bui. Dan, I'm loving the new couch bit. Yeah? Yeah. Is it going to be the exact same wording every single time? There was a subtle difference between the wording last time and this time okay i do like this sort of punishment for bacon though that yep most of your bits are built around hurting him speaking of bacon who's bacon hey dan um i i also like that instead of just not uh saying what the podcast is about you've now extended the amount of time that sounds exactly the same. So it actually is like the opposite of what we need that little space to do. Yeah.

So what do you feel like you've learned from this experience of you telling me what I need to do? When did you turn into like uh like pacino on set anyway the point is this is quick question with soren and daniel uh as always we are quick question and our fans prefer to be called oh i'm excited about this one uh the chronicles of narnia's oh brian the snitch and the Soradrobe so here's the thing about this you didn't even give him room

you already have a disclaimer because Soradrobe could be Sorin like Soradrobe or Michael Soror, Soradrobe so you guys have the opportunity to decide between the two of you which one is the Snitch and which one is the sword rope.

Which one of us deserves stitches? Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll hash that out, I'm sure, over time. You don't want to do it right now? You didn't even, like Narnia, you didn't even make an effort at. Nah. You just, that was your context.

So then you could get into the good stuff can i ask a question i think i have truthfully been missing the the the bit in these i thought we were making c sounds into q sounds i mean that's where the origination but there's an evolution to the jokes bacon now it's moved on to like you you can have uh quest in there anywhere that you can put it, or maybe even like a query or answer. So you think you can answer. Yeah. Listen, we've been doing this for 20 episodes and it feels like a fucking lifetime. I do.

It has felt like it's made my life longer, which I'm thankful for. At any rate, we like to call out one review every week to read on air, and Bacon told me to read this one. It was titled Wish... All right. Elaborate. Oh, cool. Okay. It's titled Wish I Found This Earlier.

I loved all the work they did at Cracked and forgot until I heard Dan on Small Beans and he wouldn't say what podcast he was doing. After some looking on Spotify and iTunes, I finally found it and binged the whole series. Amazing stuff from creative guys. Hope to see it continue for a while. You went on Daily Zeitgeist and wouldn't tell them what your podcast was called no i went on small beans and wouldn't tell them what the podcast was called to what end wait why i don't know i don't i don't like being uh like advertised to and i feel like anytime someone promotes their podcast they're they're advertising

to someone so i feel like like if you like my voice which seems insane and you want to hear more of it which is unhealthy uh you can do that but i'm not going to give you the tools you just you you go and you google it yourself this is a good lesson. When we finally do get ads on here, I want to read all of them. Before we get into the show proper, I had a real quick question. Soren, quick question. Go ahead. What are you looking at right now? What is your surroundings while you're doing this podcast?

I want to paint a picture for the audience. okay this isn't for you yeah okay uh bacon's got an extra room in his house that very feel if i was to describe it i would call it auxiliary it's nothing on the walls there is a big tv in here but it looks like maybe it's outdated by a decade. And then there's just stacks of other stuff. There's a stack of other TVs and then like books that maybe hasn't read in a while. Cause they're all dusty. I'm sorry.

Stack of other TVs. Well, there's just like a palette of other TVs over in the corner. I think I can't, maybe there might be an ant behind one of them. Well, I think you, maybe he's somebody who he used to have TVs in every room,

and then Mona... This is what I'm just assuming. I'm speculating. Mona was like, you don't need a TV in the bedroom. You don't need a TV. You need one TV room. And Bacon was like,

yeah, that makes sense. There's a lot of books. There's golf clubs in here, a skateboard, some Lego men, Oculus Rift, I think. has he figured out what to do with all of his records oh shit i don't even they're not even here living they're displayed in the living room okay oh there's also a lot of art just stacked on the floor this room is uh i was

told explicitly that anything that wasn't up to snuff for the apartment, I had to go in this room. So this is basically all of my possessions that I have like emotional connection to. Yeah. So I'll tell you, there's a, there's a coffee table in here and a couch that are completely unusable.

Like the most intractable things. It takes up the majority of the room and we can't like, we're stuffed into a corner because they're not usable. In one of the episodes you can hear Sarn sit on the couch and the legs break off the couch. Yeah. Is it a couch

that the legs are gone. It sits on the floor but still is at a weird angle. And then there's a coffee table that doesn't you can't like put your legs under it or anything. It's just a big it's like a coffin for a 12 year old is what it looks like. A mausoleum coffin. It's so much better than I anticipated.

Well, I'm not looking at anything. I asked that question because I thought I was going to have the better answer, but I, I think I don't. Cause the thing that I'm looking at, I, I set up my microphone and computer at my window in my living room. And, uh, it faces a building across an alleyway from me. And I'm for,

I've been so distracted because the last like 15 or 20 minutes or so there's been the person directly across from me has been i'll say it a very handsome man he's he's been a very handsome man and he's very ripped just like a ripped shirtless man who has been trying on a series of scarves. I don't know what to do about this information because he's like bouncing side to side. I don't know if he's doing this for me or if he's just like looking at his reflection in his own window to see how he looks in these different scarves.

But it's like it's definitely a show for someone. He's doing a shirtless scarf pageant? Like runway thing. Yeah, pageant. That's amazing. I mean, I just, even like when I try to comb my wildest dreams of what that could be, I still don't know. No, you don't. I didn't expect to see this.

No one ever expected to see this. I really hope it this i really hope it seems like he's doing well but it's still it's it's a lot what's his apartment like uh you know it's i i can only see uh like a a little bit of. His kitchen seems kind of messy. There's something hung up in his living room area. He hasn't done... Well, not a mirror. I can say that he hasn't done any of his own lighting. It's all

whatever was in the apartment when he got it. It was like ceiling lights. Oh, boy. Come on, buddy buddy it's 2019 well he spent all his money on gym membership spent all his money on gym membership and fucking scarves even though it's 90 degrees in new york right now he's a step ahead he's ready for the autumnal season oh that's amazing anyway let's get right into the show which is About nothing. I have a quick question. Go ahead. So aren't there's a an article I sent you there's great article on transom

That I sent you from Tim Howard. Did you read it? Yeah, I did Yeah, Tim Howard is reply all's executive producer reply all as a podcast that i know that we both love um it's way better than this one and the article is about working on a story coming to a dead end and instead of bailing on it completely having the presence of mind to pivot and shift and change what the story ends up being about it featured a quote that i love about what happens when a story falls apart. And this is the quote, that's when you kill a story. And really you usually should, but let me make an argument for the time when it makes sense to hang on a little longer in the wreckage of your plans. I love that quote. And it really resonated with me as a writer who's chased a lot of dead ends and has pivoted from those dead ends and i was just curious if you had ever experienced that where you you've got an idea for a thing and you're

working on it you're digging into it and then it falls apart but for whatever reason you live in the wreckage of it and spin it into a new story has that ever happened to you yeah i feel like that happens all the time. Have you ever created anything where from the start you ended up with a product that you were like, yeah, this is what I meant to make? Absolutely not. I'd say the majority of the things that I do, you have to on the fly kind of be like, okay, this is something different, but it's still kind of cool.

I'll just follow this. But I know what you mean. There are some that take it a complete 90-degree turn, and it's a different place than you ever anticipated it could have gone. And I don't think I have that experience nearly as much as probably you because I'm not a journalist. The only sort of pseudo-journalism I did was at Cracked, hunting a story.

And the one time that comes to mind the most for me is that I was trying to get two scammers to talk to each other through email. I was getting a lot of those Nigerian Prince emails and I was trying to convince them. It was like such a long walk to get there. I was trying to convince them that I was a woman who had broken up with her boyfriend and that he had access to her bank accounts. And so they had to write him on her behalf as a lawyer to be like, you need to forfeit this bank account or you need to give up the number to this bank account. And then when I finally got one of them to do that, a spammer to email this guy and be like, hey, your wife, your ex-wife or your ex-girlfriend needs this bank account number. I got another spammer to be his agent or his lawyer.

So then the two would be only battling against each other. And I had like this grand design of how it would go. And you have to play that out really over a long time because you have to keep them on the hook if you do that immediately they know it's a they know it's a joke but if you can yeah if you can put a frog in the pot before it boils then like they'll just stay in it and so i was trying to orchestrate this whole thing and it just was not working at all and so finally i did what a storyteller does i just made it up and i i made up some of the emails at the end and fabricated a bunch of it like a journalist you know yeah yeah yeah if there's no story make a story that's right i i wanted it was gonna be this just opera of of like i had so many grand designs for how this thing would go where they were both fighting with each other as pretend lawyers over pretend people looking for a pretend bank account.

And it just didn't happen. I love that you still turned it into an article as a way of saying, like, look, this was a good idea. I want you to appreciate the idea that I had. Look where it could have gone. Do you have these i did i i had it with uh um the millard film war chapter of my book how to fight presidents which uh anyone can buy right now how to fight presidents defending yourself against the badasses in this country um the millard film war chapter because every chapter of that book was based on a lot of research and then finding a narrative within the research and then building, taking a person's life's work and boiling it down into a very unfair 2000 word summary of that work. And I got to Millard Fillmore and I read so much about him and it was so unforgivably boring there was nothing to say about him and

i kept looking like just there are plenty of boring presents that i can i can squeeze two thousand words out of and millard film or i just couldn't i was like give me fucking anything buddy give me something oh you were left-handed. That might be interesting. You, you joined the no nothing party and tried to run again as the anti-Irish immigrant candidate. Maybe there's something there, but even that there's not enough. I just like, I dug so much into this guy that I couldn't find anything. And I remember even found one book that was talking about how he was an underrated president and he was very interesting. And then I found out that book was satire because there's nothing good about Millard Fillmore. So at the end of the day, I just

decided to make that chapter. It's like, it's a break from the rest of the book. And it's just about me, the author being pissed off that there's nothing good about millard film yeah that's a good direction i'm sorry that's a great direction it was it's i i don't love it but it was like the only thing i could do was i was like i'm i'm trying to find something interesting i can't okay then maybe the most interesting thing about millard film or is that a person whose job it is to find something interesting about him can't find it that's what the chapter's about and it ended up working for the book luckily yeah and i think that's why you still haven't found it even since then like nothing has i still haven't found it and i think that

chapter ends with just me saying fuck miller filmwork like me the author being like fuck this guy well this this podcast is brought to you by how to fight presidents defending yourself against fuck Miller Film War. It's like me, the author, being like, fuck this guy. Well, this podcast is brought to you by How to Fight Presidents, Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country by Daniel O'Brien. You can find it at your local Barnes & Noble. Some art in there by Winston Roundtree.

A really great book. You should check it out. Very good. Dan, I have a quick question for you. Go ahead. Are there people that you encounter in your everyday life who you just they're innocuous innocuous people they're not like i'm not talking about nazis or like misogynists or just rude people in general i mean people that are

doing very innocuous things and you just hate them for it are these uh singular people that i see every day no it ends up being like a it's like a contagious thing where like they're all doing something similar i'll give you some examples of the ones that i hate the most please i i can't stand people who take pictures or uh cell phone video of fireworks there's something about it that really irks me that speak on that that they would that people are trying to capture first of all this very ephemeral thing that you're just supposed to enjoy in the moment but i don't want to sound too stodgy and old man ish i think it's also silly because it's the middle of the night those photos have never once turned out good if you're on a cell phone you i

guess there's people who take real professional photos of fireworks and maybe those look great, but I've never seen. No, no one has ever taken a good picture of a, of a firework in the history of humankind. And so what, what are they?

And, and who's that for also? Like, who are you going to show that to and be like, see this, are you going to put that a shitty picture of a firework on Instagram? Whose brand is that? Uh, Bacon's.

Well, Bacon, do you do this? No, no, no, no shot. But I do think it's like a human reaction because it's very impressive. I feel like, oh my God. But then you have that disconnect. Someone's got to see this. History will want to know what happened here. I've never seen it. Yeah yeah no one has ever taken a

good photo of firework no one's taking a good video of a firework uh i don't get it i and it pisses me off that people do it because i'm like you don't even know why you're doing it you don't know i understand that in the same way that i understand like when i've been uh backpacking through somewhere where uh i'm caught up in a moment and i i want to capture how i'm feeling at the moment so i can remember it and i can share it with people and i'll take a picture and then immediately look at the picture and be like no that's not it yeah the picture never gets it right it's the same way with fireworks where it's like i'm enjoying where i'm at right now i love the company that i'm

keeping i'm on a boat on the water watching fireworks having the time of my life i want to capture this again take a picture look at it nah it sucks ass that's not good it never looks good yeah i don't get it it's also it ruins the experience for everyone else around you too because you've got that bright screen now up in the sky yeah and they try and get close to it with their like fully arm arm fully extended out like that's gonna help i really pissed off those people i also really dislike people who when the plane lands they clap yeah you've mentioned this before why the pilot can't hear that who's that for and also he's doing that's his job like he's it would be a huge disaster if he didn't do that well i get is are people just happy they're not dead yeah well that's silly you planes take off and land all the time it's it it's like such a menial part of somebody's job i feel like that

to clap for almost feels uh like you're patronizing them i would say a thing that that's plane related that bothers me more than clapping when uh plane lands is people who stand up as soon as the seatbelt light comes on. Because, and this is just a signal for me. I don't like sitting when people around me are standing. It makes me very uncomfortable, very upset. And I've flown enough that I know that when a plane lands and when you get the okay that you could take your seat belts off

that doesn't mean you can leave the plane immediately there's still going to be a bunch of time when they attach that that fucking jetway big accordion wiener to the door and secure that and then you can go out but as soon as the seat belt light turns off people stand up and then i'm just sitting there secure in the knowledge that like, no, we can't move yet. But now all your crotches are in my face. But now all your crotches are in my face. And I'm just like looming around me. And I hate that.

And I just want to be like, look, just don't get up until the door opens and people start moving. Because otherwise we're just a bunch of weird sardines in different stages of anxiety. So just like, keep waiting. I know the sign came on that said you could take your seatbelt off, but you can't affect the change anymore by standing. So please cool it. And I hate you yeah it's the that's that feeling that like motochrome of control they get out of it of like well at least this is my own this is of my own doing i can now prepare this part i stand um i'm with you i really hate it when they stand

i similarly hate when they uh when you're boarding a plane and yes the boarding group hasn't been called but they just people who decide like well they called boarding group one but i'm boarding group four but i still want to like clump up near the line even though if i'm not technically online right now i want to like hang out near it, like there's the chance that the woman calling is going to be like, she's going to go from boarding zone one to all of a sudden be like, and four.

Yeah, and you guys, you smart guys in boarding group four who decided to show up early. You guys, you can get on now. That really bothers me. It's like we have a system. Just follow the system. Yeah.

You're right. That one really drives me crazy. And they don't recognize that their bodies are a physical presence that's in the way of everybody else. Yeah. It just feels very inconsiderate. I used to be one of the people that jumped up as soon as the plane, the sign went off. I was just like, and now I'm up. Now things are different.

I know I have to wait a little bit longer, but now we're at a new level now. This is the part where I stand. But I really hate it, especially now that I have a kid, because he gets really excited. And then he thinks we're going. And we're like, no, no, no. Just stay calm. And then he starts to get very anxious and weird. And you can't calm him down when everybody's up and just silent.

But I don't know if you noticed, Dan, I know, I know that about you. And when I put you in the compliment corner, that's something I really try to emulate is that you're lower than I am kind of at crotch level. Uh-huh.

That's fair. Okay. Do you have other ones that you hate? It's, it's also, I'm finding now as I think about it, it's also i'm finding now as i think about it it's also about spatial awareness it's about like walking down a hallway or walking down like uh apartment corridors and people who

seem to take up what feels like the entire horizon available to me just like all of the the entire width of human sight somehow can be consumed by two people with linked arms that really bothers me when i'm walking down the street or walking down a hallway and there's just these people who are walking very slowly and taking up a lot of slowly and taking up a lot of physical real estate that bothers me that's like anything that implies that you are not aware that there's a whole world around you will always upset me yes that infuriates me i i get people who are just inconsiderate because they're not focused on the world around them really piss me off because i've spent so much time being focused on that another one that i that i really genuinely hate that's just a little bit different is the people who say i've been uh like i've been writing since before i could walk or like i've been playing pianos i wanted to play piano since

before i could before i could talk like the ones who talk about how they've been doing this one hobby since they were babies like somehow that makes them good at it that drives me up the wall really do you encounter that a lot yeah well i'm done x factor or shows like that all the time that or anytime there's somebody who so i i meet occasionally with people who are they're in college or whatever and they're interested in the field that I work in and that's a lot of times that's how they start

they're like I love writing just for our listeners Soren every Monday Wednesday and Friday he will go to a different college from like 6 to 2am and just sort of skulk around

looking for people. This is what you're talking about. This is when you find these people. You're not going to recognize me because I wear a hat and glasses. What I do is I lick my lips also. It's the season.

They get really chapped this time of year. But yeah, it's, I'm just looking for talent. Yeah. Scouting. Yeah, I occasionally will meet with people and they'll, when people want to prove to you how much something means to them or how good they might be at it, they're like, oh man, it's what I've wanted to be my entire life. Even before I could walk, I was doing this.

And you're like, motherfucker, none of that old shit matters. People, that doesn't mean that you're good at it or that you deserve to do it. Right, you can't really convince another person about your qualifications. You can just display it. You know, you can't say I've been writing forever

and that's why I'm good. You can't say I've been thinking about designing buildings and that's why I'm a good architect. Just show me a piece of writing or show me a building, I guess.

Continue that metaphor. A blueprint, let's say. Yeah, sure. It's like there's something that people automatically ascribe working on something for a long time to it naturally being good. And you find that everywhere where somebody, when you give anybody some criticism on something, if it's very candid and you're not sugarcoating it, a lot of times the response you'll get from people is like, do you have any idea how long I worked on this?

And it's like, those two things are not related. Sure, I mean, working on something and thinking it through all the way is important, but how long you spend on something and how good it is, those things are not synonymous ever. Yeah. I mean, not ever. It it helps i'll say that i'll help i'll say that it does help but if if already something is bad and then they're like you know how long i've worked on it that doesn't sway me i'm not like oh oh shit oh maybe it is good if i want to criticize something that i read that is submitted to me by someone who wants criticism, it will not be changed based on how long they worked on it. Right.

In fact, I think it only hurts if you tell them. If they're like, listen, this is something that's been my passion project for the last five years. I'm like, no, you're not selling it the right way. Yeah. Bacon, what are your thoughts on this? I was actually thinking that sometimes it's the opposite. I played guitar since I was 13 years old. And for the last six years, I don't really play that much guitar.

And so the longer, the more I age, it sounds more impressive by that virtue. Because I've been like, now I've been playing guitar for like 20 years. But I've gotten worse in the last six years. There's a fall off here. Yeah. So it's like it creates a bigger expectation and a worse result now. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Yeah, I guess if there was a six-year-old who was out there writing like some James Joyce or some shit, I'd be like, yeah, that is impressive. But when people say I've been writing since I could hold a pencil in my hand, I've been telling stories. And you're like, I bet those stories sucked. Speaking of writing and James Joyce and stories, uh, so I got a quick question for you. Shoot. What are the books that you read in high school that were assigned to you

from high school? Do you remember? Yeah. Uh, a scarlet letter. The day no pigs would die. Do you know that one? Oh,

I've never even heard of that. Okay. That's a very agrarian book i'll tell you about it it's uh i have some very sad stories about that book um we read uh a book called all over but the shouting you ever read that no makes me what makes me want to holler oh wait this might be a good time to explain that i went to school i went to school in a barn yeah it's important that everyone knows that soren went to school in a barn in the past i i genuinely went to school in a barn i a lot of we read oh like we read uh into the wild

okay so there's one yeah um uh canterbury tales we read the bible uh-huh i know it um let's see is there one in particular that you're looking for no i was gonna just like ask about high school literature broadly but it seems like we are not working from the same baseline frame of reference yeah so it was to do that uh just to give you some context i went to a small school that was very outdoor oriented a lot of the curriculum was built around uh like when we read into the wild no when we read jack london's to build a fire we didn't do it in a classroom. Are we, we didn't know what we were expecting.

We got to the class, the teacher put us on a bus and we went up to this area called spring book Gulch, which is a cross country ski area just covered in snow. And we all sat out in the woods for a little while in the snow, not prepared for that at all. And read to build a fire out there. Cause he was like,

this is what it's like. And so it was all everything had that element to it it was new we were never just like reading a story for the get it giving yourself that arsenal of like how to understand and dissect a story it was more like how do you contextualize this within the greater context of nature and then did you did you build a fire as part of your curriculum no he just wanted us to get give us the scent because that guy only walks five miles i think in that in the short story are you familiar with it no okay to build a fire is a story about a guy who i can't remember why he can't stay in his cabin but there's a blizzard he needs to get into town

or something and he knows it's only five miles and so he decides to walk and it's so brutal that he can't make it and on the way he knows that he in order to survive he has to build a fire and i think he falls in a stream at one point and so he's getting hypothermic he finally gets a fire going underneath a tree branch and then the snow from the tree branch falls it melts and falls and in extinguishes the fire and he dies it's five miles it feels like anything you could do anybody could do it but in the right circumstances or i guess what you would call the wrong circumstances it's just never going to work for you and so in order to actually feel that they took us out into the snow made us sit in a snow bank and

fucking read that story wow fascinating yeah that is not where i thought this question was going to go at all yeah so it was it was a very specialized education that i would say kind of hurt me in some regards when i went away to college that i was not prepared for actually treating it uh knowing how to dissect a book yeah right when you got to college was that the first time that you were like doing close reading and and yes like like approaching literature as like i don't know an art an art i don't know yeah but like doing yeah like a self-contained piece yeah we'd never treated it like that before huh well we had different situations what was yours no i was just i i've just been thinking about it

a lot lately because there's a an episode of another podcast that is much better than ours uh that is called keep it and by the way everyone should be listening to keep it reply all like these are great, great podcasts. Oh, they're so good. They're so much better than the others. Reply All is my absolute favorite podcast of all time. It's one of the only necessary podcasts. And their ad reads, perfect.

Oh my God, they're so fun and engaging. But anyway, on Keep It, they were interviewing Gia Tolentino, who's got an amazing book right now called Trick Mirror. Everyone should check it out, Trick Mirror. And she was talking about the books that she read in high school, and it made me think about think it's insane that in my high school experience at least the de facto assumption was we are giving you this book to read and the book is good like every single thing that we read in high school the starting place was by the way this was this

is good yeah chaucer is good catch 22 is good grapes of wrath is good that uh animal farm is good crime and punishment is good catcher in the rye is good and they didn't allow the idea that a reader could say hey uh i read this whole fucking chaucer thing and i think it it uh sucks ass in a pretty major way that's not allowed if you have that opinion you're wrong and i think that's just like an insane way that literature curriculum is taught across america but it turns out it's not that way across america because you read books about fucking dying in the woods or whatever. No, but I know what you're saying.

I think every single thing that we did read was with that assumption. Like, we wouldn't give you shit. We're not going to train you to read and write shit. Like, we'll show you the very best that literature has to offer. And that was always the precedent, yeah, going into it. And having the opinion that this just isn't very good that literature has to offer. And that was always the precedent, yeah, going into it.

And having the opinion that this just isn't very good or has a lot of holes in it, that wasn't, you're right, that's not something that was allowed. And even in college, that wasn't allowed. Now I'm allowed to say like, hey, I think Canterbury Tales kind of sucks ass. But at the time reading it,

if I expressed even like an articulate version of that opinion, I fail the test. Yeah. I think I understand it though. It's because that's sort of a non-starter with anything. I being, having just a criticism of it,

of how it's created doesn't teach you the actual lessons they're trying to teach you about the tools of that the author is employing, you know, like they're trying to, they're showing you, look, on a very basic level, this is how a metaphor is helpful. This is how you foreshadow early on in a story.

This is how you tie a story together and you give arcs to your characters and create archetypes for each one of them. And if you start, if your starting point is, well, this book sucks, then it's, it doesn't really advance the conversation.

Same. I think like when we adjust pop culture, I know a lot of pop culture is bad, but if I continue to look at it over and over again, I can come up with a reason why Con Air might be good. Right. So I get it, I guess.

But yeah, it is, it does seem like, I think maybe it's also changing too. I think that that's a pretty, it seems like in colleges, you're allowed to now say, no, Mark Twain is problematic.

Here's why this book is not, is bad for anyone who's not a white guy reading it. Right. I'm actually curious what kids are reading in school today. Not so curious that I want anyone to tell me on Twitter what they are. Email it to us. Oh, my God. Email it.

Yes. Perfect spot for it. It'll live there forever. I promise you. Load it up. Okay. It's time to wrap up. I'm going to close things out with all of our social media accounts to give you guys places to follow us.

But while I'm doing that, I just wanted to bring something up. Todd Phillips, writer-director behind The Hangover Trilogy and also that War Dogs movie that everyone saw, and the helmer of the upcoming Joker movie, had this to say on the subject of why he moved from comedies to the very serious Joker movie, quote, go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture. There were articles written about why comedies don't work anymore. I'll tell you why. Because all the fucking funny guys are like, fuck this shit, because I don't want to offend you. It's hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter. You just can't do it, right? So you just go, I'm out.

And I believe when he said that, which is to say when he said that woke culture is ruining comedy, so that's why he's quitting it, you, Sorent, said, same. Care to expand on that? Yeah, oh, absolutely. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. I know that I happen to work on a comedy show, but every single day I walk in there and I think about how I can fuck over my audience and really stick it to them because that's the only way people grow. You hurt them,

right? You hurt them, you abuse them, and that's how they grow. And that's what comedy is supposed to be. It's not supposed to be funny. If you're laughing, it means you don't get it. It's supposed to hurt inside of you. And then you're supposed to say at the end, thank you very much for that pain. I'm a bigger, better person because of it. And if they're not doing that, then they don't get it. So people who think that comedy is about laughing, what is this? A kid's cartoon? We watch an anvil fall on a coyote? That's not what we're doing on here on stage. We're teaching lessons about the world. This is the school of hard knocks, my friend. And you're going to get knocked. Speaking of which, knocked up.

Excellent movie. Perfect example. Like you're teaching people. If you're teaching people that women, not so great unless they're hot, in which case they better be insecure. And even if you can get that window open and you finally like get them pregnant hang on to that you can find soren on twitter at soren underscore ltd you could find me at dlb underscore inc you could find our cfo bacon at make me bacon please you can email the show at qq with soren and daniel at gmail.com you can find the show on twitter at qq underscore soren

and dan or on instagram at qq underscore with underscore soren underscore and underscore daniel you can find and hire our amazing engineer editor producer vincent at silicon beach podcasts.com we also have a patreon that you could probably fucking find somewhere and that's that's it that's the that's the show it's good to talk to you dan yeah this is this was nice i'm glad i got to give you that space at the end to say how you really feel really freeing i feel good yeah yeah do you think bill burr will call me me? I think you've got, there's a podcast lineup in your future that is you and Bill Burr and Joe Rogan and Adam Carolla. I think I can see that for you and I love that for you.

Yeah. I see it now. It's just the top, the tour is called Women Aren't Funny. It's the hashtag triggered tour. All right. Bye. Bye.