Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - QQ ep 64 - On Podcasting (about writing tho)

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

Episode 64! In this episode the guys take a deep dive in to the best and worst writing advice they've received, and also Soren explains how to recognize a tree in the wild. Big thanks to our sponsors this week. Thanks to GigaPoints. To see how much you could be earning on your credit card each year, go to GigaPoints.com/QQ.  And as always big thanks to Skillshare, Explore your creativity at Skillshare.com/qq2 and the first 1,000 people to use our link will get a free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership.  

Hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, the podcast where two best friends and former internet darlings ask each other questions and give each other answers. I am one half of this podcast, creator and star of the show Obsessive Pop Culture Disorder, and guy who for the second time in his life is earnestly trying to see if he can pull off wearing bandanas, Daniel O'Brien. And I am joined as always, I know him as my co-host, but you might know him better as the creator and star of the show Lois Kahn Dominator. Mr. Soren Bui, say something funny. Hello, everybody. I'm Soren Bui.

Lover of Greek epics, knower of which trees are which, friend to your parents in a way that's a little off-putting, and there's a good chance I was your eighth grade boyfriend. Or at least I was cast from the same mold as him. I guarantee it. It's so... I hope you're being serious about nowhere of trees is that a real thing that you can do yeah man that's something that uh i mentioned in a previous podcast that my brother and i uh just went backpacking and that's something that uh i never think about but he said that he wished he knew what trees were like he could just point to one and be like

that one's this thing, that one's that. Just like have that knowledge. And it wasn't something that I'd ever thought about in my life. But as soon as he said that, I'm like, I do too. I would also like to be in the woods with someone and be like, that's a birch, that one's pine. And I can't even like continue this bit because I'm out. Those are all of them. And those are pretty easy ones to spot.

Yeah, pine is kind of like, you got it. We all know what pine trees are. Yeah. No, I know trees really well. I think it's all from my, I just picked some of it from being a kid. But then also I took a biodiversity class in college where they forced us to learn them and it was one of those things where the information just stuck with me and i

have it yeah it's mine now and i just know what you can like point to a tree and i will know what kind it is there's something that i i just really need to to get over. Like I think about myself and I need to just move past. And it's that I will frequently undervalue the things that I do know and what it took to learn them and remember them and overvalue the gaps in my knowledge. Like I can't tell you what trees are. And that's all I think about

is how I don't know what trees are. I also don't know French. And I also don't, I'm not really as good at magic as I'd like to be at this point in my life. And I never, the thing you need to remember when you're doing that is because, well, I was learning Italian and teaching myself how to be a writer and teaching myself how to cook and all the other skills that I have. But like, as soon as I try to pep myself up with that, I'm like, yeah, but I already know that stuff now. Yeah. I don't remember learning it. I'm sure it took a lot of time and work and diligence. And I know I sacrifice things to get good at the things I'm good at, but I'm already good at them in the present.

So who cares? Have you ever met somebody though, that they're just full of blindnesses? Like you can't see where they're, where they were focused instead, like where that strength is like everything. Yes. Should we name names?

Just go across people. You're like, what the fuck was it that you were working on this whole time from like the last 25 years it's got to be something there was someone i knew in college like that who just seemed um kind of stupid kind of genuinely happy he was like a big party guy and uh didn't seem to know almost anything and then i uh i knew him for like two years and then i watched him play soccer and i was like oh okay you're very good at this i got it i got it there was a guy at my call exact same thing this guy who like these girls loved him and i couldn't get it

i was like what the fuck has he got like and then he's the captain of the soccer team and then i heard him in the uh uh student like lounge or the cafeteria and he was speaking swedish to somebody and i was like what and he was like oh yeah i know i know uh he knew all of the um the languages of scandinavia and i was like how just just like the air, like, I like learning about it. Okay. And if I met him, I'd be like, I'd be very jealous about that. The same way that like, as I'm playing bass guitar and watching someone play piano, I'm like, fuck, I wish I would have learned piano. Such a bummer. And no voice will enter my brain and be like, hey, you were probably busy learning the instrument in your hand that you

can play that other people can't it's like nah shut up get out of here i wasted my time doing whatever it is that i did yeah i i feel that way frequently it's hard to remind yourself but it's like i don't know i never feel like i'm doing enough yeah ever ever ever it's like there's all i know that there's more that I could be doing And so like it makes it really tough makes really tough for you to ever just sit down and relax and not do anything Yeah, cuz you just know a French is waiting man I know I'm like you can do you can do it on an app now and I also think like I got I took out duolingo when think like I got I took out Duolingo when quarantine started and I was like this is gonna I'm gonna come out of this and I'm gonna I'm gonna emerge having

learned French and then my brain was like well you're not great at Italian so just just like why don't you be great at one of the things you're okay at now and then we'll see if we can add French to that. It's like, but okay. I am very much a dilettante of just about everything. We're like, I realized early on that if I could get to a point where I could be good enough at something that when I first revealed it to somebody, it looked like I was an expert. That was enough. I would never pursue it any more than that. It's like, if I like in baseball, I knew how to throw a, if I could throw a curveball, it was like, that's,

that's going to be it. I don't need to know anything else about baseball. If I can do this one thing, people will be like, oh no, he knows baseball or like a dance move. You learn like one,

you learn the caterpillar or something like that. And you're like, okay, that's the one thing. Yeah. Thanks to Skillshare for supporting Quick Questions. Skillshare is an online

learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people. Explore new skills, deepen existing passions, and get lost in creativity. Be one of the first thousand people to use our link and you'll get a free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership at Skillshare.com slash QQ2, the number two.

Thanks to GigaPoints for supporting Quick Question with Soren and Daniel. GigaPoints is a site that uses data to help you find the best credit card. GigaPoints uses data to pinpoint the cards that will give you the most points based on your actual spending. See how much you, yes you, could earn at gigapoints.com slash QQ. That's a pretty good strategy, I think. Did you ever have, because I talk about a lack of confidence that I had growing up in this show, growing up into the present on this show a lot.

But bizarrely, I did think I could do a lot of things until I did them, actually. could do a lot of things um until i did them actually but it was always like from like for like way too many years of my life um we'll just get it in my head if i saw like there was a bunch of there was like a really gnarly knot or something that was all tangled i would look at it and be like maybe i'm someone who's good at knots and then i would try to untangle it and be like huh i'm not all right that's good to. Just like would see things in the world with having no reason to think I'm good at it. Just be like, perhaps I'm a basketball player? Let's find out.

Wow, nope. I do like the idea of you just moving from one thing to another, going through knots and being like, maybe I'm good at this. No, I'm not. Not, maybe I'm really good at puns not that's it pull this threat no no it's not puns no it's not yeah it's not that maybe i'm a really good baker oh this was this was a dangerous one to pursue this is a bad one um no i still feel that way in my life regularly where and i hope that other people think that of me when they're like i don't know how to get into

my locked house well soren will know i get so excited by the prospect of that because i'm i will answer yes i know how to get in your locked house and i a sight unseen like i'm just sort of guessing that i could figure something out i still think that about myself too, even though I know I shouldn't. And I know that like almost every skill in the world requires practice and knowledge and experience, but there's still something in me. If someone asked if I can get them into their locked house, part of my brain would go, you know, you've never tried to pick a lock before. There's a chance we're great at it. And I'd just be like, yeah, do you have any tweezers and paper clips? Great. Good. And here we go. Oh, I've broken it. I'm sorry. And I've broken your tweezers.

That might be a curse of being a writer, honestly, that you feel that way. Because writing certainly takes a lot of practice to get good at, but there is like an innate element to it as well. Like just like you, the same way that some people can just hear notes and music and they're like, oh no, I know how to play this song now. I just listened to it once. Like, you know, the cadence, you know, like the rhythm of how a sentence should go and like how to make it sound good. And then once you have that, like it's just sort of like something that you have. And then with that talent, then you can build off of it. And so when you become a writer

or when you think you want to be a writer when you're young and the first person tells you, you're actually pretty good at this. You're like, yeah, this was just in me. I wonder how many more things are just in me. I bet a lot. That's true. I think one of the other bummers about writing is the practice doesn't look cool and the end result doesn't look as impressive as like someone busting out sign language or French or a magic trick or a backflip.

You know, we don't, our end product isn't something that will impress someone at a party or come in handy in the world, apart from, you know, being both of our jobs. No, that's true. It's true. You have to, you really have to convince somebody to read it yeah for them to be like oh that is cool okay great and if like i i whine like i'm not good at basketball and someone could say well you're you're you're good at writing i'm like yeah but i look stupid when i write and i'm sad at the end of it it's never the way i want it to be yeah no that's true okay um writing is a good thing to talk about

because that's going to be the bulk of this episode but before that i wanted to ask you if you had any updates about life in quarantine okay so i i planted something new in my garden oh shit yeah garden corner garden corner i'm so excited i got some seeds that said edible flowers and i was like yes i am in for this i'm gonna grow some flowers that i could just pick off and eat or like put on a cake or you know whatever other ambitious thing i was planning um i mean, they're both eat. Both of your plans sort of end the same way. One of them involved me making a cake, which has never happened.

But maybe you're great at it. I might be so good. And so I planted these edible flowers. The first thing that grew were these plants that I was like, whoa, these are growing fast. They're just thistles. One of the things in there is just like these big thistles and it's like fucking up my garden and i can't touch them and i think maybe i don't know if the flowers are edible on them or the leaves are edible i've been to a farmer's market before where

they sold thistles and i thought no that's you can't do that that's not for me the other thing is that it just seems to be a grab bag of weird herbs. There's like some arugula, some basil, some kind of like this purple looking lettuce. It's just, it's not edible flowers. It's just a bunch of edible flora. Okay. And I'm furious. I see.

I mean, obviously they're growing great. obviously they're growing great but I had this real high hope that what they put in there was some plant that I didn't know about it blooms, the flower comes up and I just take the flower and I'm allowed to eat it right, it looks like a flower and then you eat it

and it tastes better than flowers taste yeah and instead I I got thistles and basil yeah Yeah. And instead I, I don't know, I got thistles and, and, uh, basil. Yeah. That sucks, man. I'm sorry. Thank you. Thanks again to our sponsor Skillshare this week. Uh, Skillshare is amazing. They help us with

creativity as self-care and learning new skills as a way to productively fend off boredom. And you can also meet a community of people with similar interests to provide support and encouragement. Daniel and I have talked on the show about how you never really feel like you're at the end of whatever you're good at. Like you can always get a little bit better. And Skillshare knows that as well. Skillshare has classes for every type

of creative endeavor you can think of. And there's no harm in going to something like that where you already think that you might be an expert just to learn more because you're not with other people sitting around a class like this is the easiest possible way to do it. Skillshare offers creative classes designed for real life and all the circumstances that come with it. These lessons can help you stay inspired and express yourself, but they can also introduce you to a community of millions, people that are like minded. They're not necessarily going to be sitting there reading it with you, but you're gonna find these people who are interested in the same passions as you,

and who knows what'll happen. I've taken a bunch of classes from Skillshare in the past. There's ones I've taken about magic. There's ones I've taken about music theory. There's a class I took about sign language. They've all been really helpful. They're things that I pointedly wanted to get better at uh for years and skill shares really helped me but i also decided to just do kind of a sillier wackier one and it's fun with

faces create a stylized digital portrait and i can't tell you what a blast i am having with this class it's a neat and interesting way to learn how to do a unique doodle of your own face. And I really like it. I'm going to try to make my face, and then I'm going to try to make Soren's face. And then maybe I'll put him on a t-shirt or something. I've been telling you about this birthday present that's coming for you, Dan. Please don't do that because you're already getting that. Is that...

$2,000 cost for this. Explore your creativity at Skillshare.com slash QQ2. And the first thousand people to use our link will get a free trial of Skillshare premium membership. Receive access to thousands of classes for a limited time. Be one of the first thousand to sign up at skillshare.com slash QQ, and that's for a free subscription to premium membership. How's your quarantine? It's okay.

I'm back to cleaning a whole lot. I was pretty diligent with that in the beginning, and then that started to fall off the edge of the world a little bit for me because there's so little to do where it's like well if i do the dishes now what am i gonna do tomorrow you know and uh i think just like that was laziness and sadness for a while but now i'm back to like deep cleaning different parts of my apartment that i never really dug into before uh like really organizing my closet and just like getting behind the fridge and just doing things that are are non-showy but like productive cleaning things

um i'm i really came at this hoping it sounded cheerful it's not is it is it i'm thinking sad i want everyone to know i'm doing fine okay i'm thinking because i've i've known you long enough to know that when you start getting into like deep cleaning multiple times a day that that's a red flag okay it's not multiple times a day it's very much like my to-do list every morning one of the things on there will be clean something and i'm slowly running out of things that, uh, I haven't cleaned yet. Um, in like a, in like a deep way, but just stuff like I'm not, I'm almost never a person that like cleans inside of cabinets. And now I was just like, well, that's what I'm going to do today. That's going to be my Monday morning is just take everything out of the cabinets, wipe them down, clean them, and then put everything back.

And you won't, I don't see the inside of my cabinets that much. But when I do, it's nicer now. Yeah, that is nice. I have been doing similar stuff. It hasn't been cleaning, though. It's been like my cabinets are on these hinges that if you, you know, you screw the hinges a certain way, the cabinet hangs a little bit more or lifts a little bit more or they don't, they close at like a weird symmetry. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yes. Going through my kitchen and just like getting every single one of those dialed in so that it's perfect. Nice. And that feels really nice to walk into that kitchen and seeing, instead of seeing, you know, cabinets that are just off by the tiniest bit at the top, thinner at the top, and the gap is thinner at the top than it is at the bottom. That kind of thing is very, very nice and pleasing, even though it means nothing to

anybody else. So I get that. I've also, I've been sitting in different places in the apartment and standing in places that I don't normally stand in. And that's been very helpful for cleaning and I'll explain why. And this is a tip I picked up years and years and years ago of owning my own apartment that any young men listening, take heed to this if you hadn't thought of it already. I found that my place is so familiar to me that my eyes sort of glaze over. This is, again, years ago.

Eyes would glaze over and miss certain things. And in particular, the bathroom, I'm just like doing my business in there. And that's it. And then one time I sat on the toilet, very focused, like looking at it as if I'd never seen it before and noticed all of the blind spots that I had when cleaning, like right, like in the crack of the door and other parts. And it just clicked with me, like do this often, like really, especially if you're going to have someone come over, especially if it's going to be a woman, imagine them sitting on your toilet for the first time. What do they see? Because they're not going to like take out

a book and start reading it and they might not take out their phone. And what are you like presenting? It's this kind of thing that like you probably miss because it's also familiar to you that you're not even really thinking about it. But this is someone in your place for the very first time. And this is something that they're going to see and uh that really informed my cleaning of my bathroom and now i'm trying to do that with just sticking myself in other places in the apartment to be like what if i had company and they were sitting in this chair that i never sit in or they went up to the window and looked out for a while what does it look like to them? That's such great advice. I'm going to do that from now on. I walk into a room and look at it brand new is like a great way to think

about how to not only just clean your house, but also organize it. Yeah. I'm going to start trying that. I do really like the idea of you walking around your apartment and like trying to get the angle right of like where her eyeline would be. I mean like crouching a little and then like getting on your tiptoes and being like no get real daniel yeah tall girl would never go for me exactly yeah uh but yeah god i'm gonna i'm gonna do that the way

that i learned how important it was to keep like a tidier house was i stayed with a buddy in new york and went into his bathroom and was so appalled by like how much just sort of errant fuzz there was in the corners and on the baseboards and around the rings that made their way around. I don't even know what you call it. It's probably like just, I don't know, like oxidizing iron or something.

But like it's around toilet bowls and around bathtubs and the sink rings and things like that. i was just like how do you live like this and i think that you just it's very easy to live like that you live in it for a week and it just becomes part of who you are and you stay subjective about it all and so after that point i was like i can't live like that like i have to i have to every single week i'm going to just clean my place because it's not for me it's for anyone who happens to come over yes because when you when you saw your buddy's place in new york you still remember it now that's the thing that you're always going to that's that's not going anywhere i i remember shitty apartments that i've been in crappy houses and i thought like oh i uh i don't think I'm going to come back here unless I absolutely have to because their their their bathroom is deeply

unpleasant yeah when we worked at cracked I I was a little older than everybody else at cracked with the exception of Jack uh and Jason but I was I was probably like four years older than most people there and we would go to people's apartments and I would be like I'm not comfortable in this place I'm gonna go that's just it's not like i don't i see that couch and everyone's gonna be sitting on it and i don't think i want to sit on that because i can see the dorito crumbs from here and and i don't i don't have to do that i see like rabbit hair you don't even have a rabbit but i can see that that's rabbit hair uh that's another thing you're good at is you can spot hair and identify it yes

like down to the age of the animal right without a microscope you just count the rings uh that was a relatively pleasant covet update apart from you getting fucking hosed on your edible flower ambitions it's really a bummer fucking thistles like what what a terrible thing to throw into somebody's garden trick them into growing well let's get into the show where we ask each other questions um this can be a little bit different because i didn't prepare uh i wanted to talk just broadly about writing because if there's something that people i mean because we're both writers and if someone is interested in our careers it's probably about writing and they must be uh sick and tired of us talking about gardening and fishing

because that's nothing to do with why they like us and why they support us in the first place. And that's also like the questions online I get the most are about writing. And I've been reading Chuck Palahniuk's book about writing called Consider This lately, and it's very good. He's not even my favorite writer in the world but he is like undeniably successful and and prolific and beloved and i was and and this book is incredible and i'm i was struck by how humble he is and how he's clearly he clearly considers himself still um a student in a way that has changed the way I'm going to think about myself as a writer. Not that I thought I was an expert or a genius or anything like that, but I did feel like

I have acquired the skills that I've acquired and now I'm going to apply them over and over again for the rest of my life. And he, I didn't realize, is still like going to workshops with other writers and learning from them. And every advice that he gives in the book is always couched in this language of like, I'm not a teacher. I'm still learning. If you were my student, I would suggest maybe doing this. And it could just be like mock humbleness or faux humbleness, rather. But it seems really genuine and it's shaping how I want to think about

my own writing as more of a pursuit than a thing that I figured out. And it's also got me thinking about, like, just to boil it down into a more quick question friendly format, best writing advice you've ever friendly format best writing advice you've ever gotten worst writing advice you've ever gotten i the worst writing advice i ever got was people saying you have to write every day i feel like that's that's bad advice uh because writing has no like it has no great metric for what's good.

In the way that you could be Kobe Bryant, you could spend every day after practice, you're going to take 100 free throws. Or you're going to be like, you have to make 100 shots. You're getting the form and the muscle memory exactly right. But with writing, it's a little bit different because it's very easy to suddenly develop crutches when you're, it's very easy to suddenly develop crutches when you're writing. Like if you, if you did the same thing every single day, the same motion every single day, and you're like, we're going to write the same thing. That's just going to be our

pattern. It's you fall into it very easily. And then you can't get out of it. Like there's, and so much of writing is like trying to explore new ways to put things on paper, writing is like trying to explore new ways to put things on paper, like new ways to explain something or, uh, make a joke. And the patterns can sometimes be really dangerous. Sometimes you, I'm trying to think of what to equate it to. Um, but you, you get yourself in a rut and like, you can't, you, you rely on the same word over and over again, and then you get sick of your own writing and then you can't write at all. And so it's like, it's like this really weird thing where you're trying to like build up your own, your own sense of self. Like you're trying to build up your ego a little bit while you're doing it because immediately you're going to hate

anything that you write. Like the first draft years, they called a vomit draft for a reason. And then after that, you kind of like fix it and you learn how to be like, oh, yeah, OK, I see where I was. And then it all looks very much intentional. But it's just it's so much so easy to get to a point where you hate your work, you hate your own writing, and then you don't write at all. I think similar to that bad advice that I've gotten and in fact gave a bunch because I believed in it and I don't think I do anymore. fact, gave a bunch because I believed in it and I don't think I do anymore. The first thousand things you write are going to be bad, so just get them out of the way. Like we heard about it for sketches that you're not going to write a great sketch your first time. You got to write a bunch of bad ones first and then they'll be good. And I think there's, in the same way that there's

probably value in writing every day, I think there's probably value in writing every day i think there's probably value in that advice but um the value only comes from nuance and what you get instead is people who are just like thoughtlessly writing garbage thinking i just got to get through a thousand of these and then i'll have a good sketch and i i i i think it removes um the thoughtfulness. And if you're just going through the motions to get to a thousand and one, then you're not really putting too much effort into examining why you're getting better and what you're learning every day. In the same way that like writing every day could be practical if you have a bar for what you're learning every day in the same way that like writing every day could be practical if you have a bar for what you're trying to do and not just, well, I'm going to put a thousand

words down or, uh, I, I wrote a letter to my friend that counts as my writing for the day. Um, it's just, that's exercising without weights, I guess, or something like that. Yeah. That's, I guess, or something like that. Yeah, that's, I've heard that before. Um, no, I agree with you. I think that it's, it ends up kind of hurting you in the long run. Who was it? Oh, Stephen King.

Stephen King and on writing was saying like, this is how many words you should be writing a day. And it's such a weird, it's such a weird thing to put on it because so much of your writing is not writing. Just putting stuff down is not, that's like one very small part of the process. So much of writing is just staring at what you just put down and be like, all right, I got to fix this. I got to fix this. How am I going to do that?

And you sit in there, you can sit there for four hours looking at it and not change a thing, but work has been done technically. I mean, yeah. And I also think if there's something that I've written that I've liked, it didn't happen because I sat down and did it in the hour of writing that Stephen King told me to do every day. And it didn't happen because like, well, I need to get 1500 words or whatever. I don't know how it happens. It happens because I stared at a blank

page i went for a walk i went for a run and then eventually a joke came out i was like oh good right the the the machine still works somehow yeah that's it's so nebulous it's really terrifying like that so and so i think that's why so many writers are so unhappy because every single turn you're like i think i lost it yeah i don't think I'm good at this anymore. Um, but that part of the process is the, those runs and things that you're talking about where you, so much of writing is not sitting in front of a computer, sitting in front of a blank page. It's just like, you're out in the world thinking about this in the back of your brain. And then suddenly it starts to kind of coalesce and then you're allowed to put something down and you're like okay it's starting to make sense a little bit more yeah um the good advice

that i got though was uh i can't even remember who said this it might have also been steven king and on writing i can't but that is even if we can we can disagree with the right everyday mandate um that's one of my three favorite writing advice books and like i've i've read a bunch of them and i disagree with so many of them but on writing is like yeah read this one everyone should read this one it's it's very very good and he i think he might have said this in there he said write for one person like pick your audience when you write don't write to try and please everybody or don't think about the people who are going to criticize it or the people that uh that are going to read it looking to for holes like write for the person

that you want to you you want them to feel the stuff you want them to feel the story so like my my brother for instance is like he's got a great sense of humor he's funnier than i am uh he's a great writer and i will always write to impress him you know like i will write something that i'm like yes i think he would really like this and just write to that because as soon as you as soon as you try to please other people with it it starts to the work starts to deteriorate yeah and has it uh has it worked has he ever been impressed i don't think so yeah oh man then it has worked you got it that's that's that's the fuel you need baby i certainly do that same thing in a it's it sounds like you you can do it in like

a metaphorical hypothetical sense where you're just thinking about your brother and thinking about him reading this. I do it in, I've done it in a much more literal sense of like, well, my coworkers are going to see this pitch that I'm writing, or they're going to see this script that I'm writing. So I really want to make them laugh. And this goes back to, to crack days too, when I was writing after hour scripts, I, a thing that I still do that I would probably hate if I was an editor is burying as many jokes as possible in as many places as possible. And that includes descriptions of the across the page, which is like the interior diner night, which is all you needed to say for after hours. But I would use that real estate to like write a full strange, bizarre paragraph that no audience would ever see except the three of you guys and Jack O'Brien. And it's just like, this is again, this is a waste of my time and your time. But it's like, hey, I'm going to make a thing and I want to put as many jokes as possible in the thing, even though it's not going to maximize the amount of people who see it just by

the design of it. And I'm still doing that to this day at my like fancy professional job. And I don't know if my boss has hated or not, but I, I feel like if you can take away anything from the writing that I'm, I'm doing for this show now is that like there was joy when I was doing it which is uh uh like a new discovery I've I've found in my own writing that like I want I want you to like my jokes obviously I want you to feel like the the

pace is good and the argument flows the way it's supposed to but I also want you to to put down the page and think he had a really good time doing this right yeah when it you it's like when you read a work and you can tell that you're in good hands from like the first couple sentences even even though it's it's like in a script somebody else reading that script is going to be looking for dialogue and stuff like that but they're not expecting a joke in that across the page and when it comes it's like oh okay i've yeah and then they're more at ease i think you're more at ease writing it when you like get that you know that it's a first laugh you're like okay i feel more comfortable in what i'm doing yeah i feel i i i like it to like seeing a stand-up

comedian for the first time that you've never seen and like if they come out and there's something immediately funny about them or immediately confident about them or immediately warm about them then it's like it you strip away the the anxiety in the audience of is this going to be good or not you strip that away as soon as possible and then they're just more willing to have fun with you right uh and honestly that's what we what i wanted it cracked because i i didn't want anyone to change my shit i wanted them to read it and be like from the start be like oh this is gonna be good because then they're in the right mindset to not change any of it um but yeah i those are those are my two i think good and bad i think i a problem that i have that i i really want to fix is um finishing stuff see robert cargill who wrote

um dr strange the screenplay and he wrote, and he's got a bunch of books. I feel like a jerk for not remembering what they are off the top of my head right now. But he's a former movie critic for Ain't It Cool News, turned screenwriter and novelist, and he's just fantastic. And his pinned tweet, because he's very open about giving writing advice on Twitter, and his pinned tweet is, The most important thing in writing is to finish. A finished thing can be fixed. A finished thing can be published.

A finished thing can be made into a movie. An unfinished thing is just a dream, and dreams fade if you don't hold on tight enough. So finish the thing. And that's something that I definitely struggle with. Because I finish all my assignments at every job I've ever had because I mean, because I finish all my assignments at every job I've ever had because of deadlines, because I have to,

because I've already spent the money that they've paid me to be a writer. But as far as like the dream and side projects, I have so many things that are started and not finished. And he sounds smart. His advice sounds good. I guess I just need to try it. I don't know.

How do you feel about the just finish the thing? Yeah, totally. But I have the same problem. Did you ever see the movie Adaptation? Yeah. Where he's just struggling. He's a great writer. Charlie Kaufman, he plays his own twin in it.

And he's struggling to like figure this thing out and get it exactly right and his meanwhile his brother is just like cranking shit out he's writing a screenplay about a guy who's got multiple personalities and at one point his personalities are in a car chase with each other and charlie kaufman's trying to figure it out he's like no not charlie kauf Kaufman. Is that his name? Yeah. Nicholas Cage? Yeah. Wait, the Nicholas Cage played Charlie Kaufman. Yeah, for a second I was worried

I was saying Andy Kaufman. But Charlie Kaufman's like trying to figure out how that would even work. He's like, camera tricks or whatever his answer was. And like the people who just write and just do it and like create a thing and are not afraid to write poorly are like they're the most successful people you'll meet yeah and it's such like i'm so jealous all the time and i think everybody is of people like that who aren't afraid to just finish a thing because the it's a very different process to write the end of something than it is

to write any other piece of it yeah it's almost like a different skill set i think that's there's one of the things that's been very helpful about writing it last week tonight is because scripts are assembled from a bunch of different drafts from a bunch of different writers and things change like language changes so much from start to finish everything gets pretty meticulously rewritten right up until the last minute and uh that means that no one is too precious throughout the process and we're always kind of moving and sometimes that means you just write down while you're assembling a draft, you write down or one of the bosses will write down parentheses joke TK, which means joke to come. And then you move on to the next thing,

knowing that, yeah, eventually somewhere down the line, we're going to figure out what that joke is. But in the meantime, let's finish the thing and then go back out. Like, sorry. In the meantime, let's finish the thing and then go back to it. Like finesse the language later because you'll have that luxury later. And if you don't have a killer joke right here, that's fine. You know you need one. So just like put a placeholder and then move on. That's a thing that has certainly informed like the private side writing that I do now.

like the private side writing that I do now where I used to just like, I really thought I needed to move chronologically and solve every problem as it came up. And now I'm absolutely throwing joke DKs into my own, you know, whatever it is that I'm working on. You're right. Did you know that with the right credit card, you could be earning hundreds

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To see how much you could be earning on your credit card each year, go to gigapoints.com slash QQ. That's G-I-G-A points.com slash QQ. giga points.com slash qq um i have scary advice that i got too it's not it it haunts me and i don't know if it's true it wasn't even advice i think it was just uh jason pargin friend of the show author of so he punches the future in the dick one of the funnier writers that either of us will ever meet um he mentioned either in a a podcast or a column or a tweet at some point that there aren't like, there aren't a ton of great 70-year-old writers, 80-year-old writers. Like he's, one of the reasons he's as prolific as he is and has he's, as he's been is he's got this idea in his head that you know you're gonna you're

gonna run out of steam at some point and and uh so you gotta do it now and that's the thing that i think about all the time that scares me not that i i i want to be writing till the minute i'm dead but i internalize that as well you've only got six million funny words you're ever going to write in your entire life. And then that's it. And then they're done. I don't know if I logically believe that, but I certainly internally feel it. Thoughts? They're just like the eggs in your ovaries when you're born.

These are how many you have for the rest of your life. And each month you're allowed to produce one thing. Right. I don't look back at like, man, why did I try to make my high school essays funny? What the fuck? Now I'm out of a job at 39? That writing is not a renewable resource. I don't think I believe that.

But I do believe that you get less sharp the older you get and the more comfortable you get. You don't think about things as critically anymore because you're not forced to. Like your brain, you just start shutting certain neural pathways down because you don't need them anymore. And a lot in some ways like that really can devastate your writing, I think. For instance, like now I know that I'm slower than I used to be. I know that I can't come up with things as quickly names of things escape me all the time and that's really scary and I know that that has an effect on the writing because you think about people the writers who are your favorite these people who have just this arsenal of language they have when they want to say

something they have 47,000 different ways they could say it and when you start to realize that you don't it's it's like oh fuck like i i don't even know how to make this good yeah yeah i worry about that too i think that's that i my main worry is i worry that i'm going to stop learning new tricks or maybe i've already stopped learning new tricks that's i think what I'm getting out of the Chuck Palahniuk book that I want to absorb and channel in myself to make myself a continued student because I definitely worry that, like, not that I'll run out of words, but that I'll run out of new words or new ways of looking at things,

and I need to figure out how to avoid that because that's a very scary trap. It is scary. Speaking of writers, Dan, I have a question for you. Oh, cool. About a writer that I like who's a Broadway writer.

Okay, let me... Do you want to guess who it is? It's not Jeremy O. Harris. It's older. Okay. I wonder if listeners will realize how funny it is that i said it's not jeremy o harris i don't know i don't know if soren's it's a you wouldn't like it it's it's uh it's another joke in the recurring bit of wouldn't it be funny if if soren was a racist so you wouldn't like it but it's a it's a pretty sharp joke um i'm talking about andrew lloyd weber okay

how surprised is there there's there's a musical i don't know if you're familiar with it it's called jesus christ superstar uh-huh and when my daughter is going to sleep at night, I sing to her because she seems to enjoy it. And it puts her to, she stops like writhing around in my arms and just calms down to listen. And one song that I sing to her is Everything's Alright, which feels like a very fun, good lullaby if you just listen to like the first stanza of it. Yeah. And for people who aren't familiar with it, it's when Mary is not, not Virgin Mary. Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene is like trying to get Jesus to just calm down for the night and like go to bed. Like the world will keep turning without you.

You need to go to sleep. Everything's, everything's all right. Everything's all right. Everything's fine. We'll get by without you and then meanwhile Judas is sitting there in the corner being like what the fuck are you putting oil on him there's we could have we could have used that oil for the poor like that and then Jesus has a counter and like they have a bit of a an argument Jesus and Judas there and i think they made up in the end right those two crazy kids worked it out no oh damn no i only saw the first

act oh yeah no they don't um but i in seeing it to my daughter over and over and over again i start to realize like i think it's first of all it's a very good argument that they have and a very kind of philosophical argument on how you be philanthropic in the world. And as I'm listening to it, I'm really like thinking Jesus kind of sucks in it. I'm thinking like Judas's position is way better. And I'm wondering if you like where you stand if you know if you're familiar with the lyrics, do you want me to, like, read them to you before I start? Read them so the audience can know at least. Okay. She says, try not to worry.

And then she's, like, got some ointment for his hands and feet. So then Judas jumps in. He says, woman, your fine ointment's brand new and expensive. Should have been saved for the poor. Why has it been wasted? We could have raised maybe 300 silver pieces or more. People who are hungry, people who are starving matter more than your feet and hair, which is like, that's solid.

That's a solid argument. And then Jesus interrupts Mary Magdalene, jumps back into trying to calm him down. Jesus jumps in and says, surely you're not saying we have the resources to save the poor from their lot. There will be poor always pathetically struggling look at the good things you've got think while you still have me move while you still see me you'll be lost you'll be sorry when i'm gone and i think like the point of it that andrew lloyd weber is trying to do is be like look are the i think you're

supposed to side with jesus in this i think you're supposed to be on his team in the musical where you're like, oh, okay, you can't save everybody. Like, make sure that you appreciate the good things that you have. But I don't know, man. I'm still pretty much on Judas' side. I think you're... I do think you're supposed to mostly be on Judas' side. Are you?

I think he's the main character of of the musical certainly yeah uh i mean i don't know if if um necessarily you're supposed to agree with him that mary magdalene shouldn't have oils and lotions but i think like broadly speaking he's the one who who has an arc in this in this musical right he does but i think he also is sort of the antagonist i think jesus is i thought that jesus was like jesus is pretty much the protagonist throughout it isn't he yeah but i but it's it's the show is about judas and uh i it's the kind of thing that's like i don't want to call jesus christ superstar like first thought writing because it's i think it's brilliant but it is like

you know kind of first thought writing you have the most famous story in the world that has it's good guy and it's bad guy and then what if we told it from the bad guy's point of view what if the book was what if the big bad wolf was the hero and the pigs are bad that kind of thing that's a wicked it's a wicked situation yeah it's it's it's wicked it's it's julius caesar it's it's a it's a thousand things that that are varying levels of good and terrible um i i know it's called jesus christ superstar the show starts with judas he's so clearly tormented the entire time and and it's the show felt like an exercise in a rebellion because of the language they used the kind of music they were doing for broadway and the timing in which which it came out um and b an exercise in what what does it take how can we sympathize with the the the guy who had to kill the son of god or the guy who like arranged for the son of god

to be killed what what do we do to make the audience feel for him and kind of understand this unthinkable choice that he was forced into by circumstance? Oh, so all you're saying is that Andrew Lloyd Webber's writing has worked on me. Yes. Ah, and I was too dumb to understand that Judas was the hero of the story. It just feels like quite some, like that's a pretty crazy thought to put in Jesus's mouth in your show. Like it's pretty bold thing to do to be like, no, Jesus here would say, we're not gonna save everybody.

Come on, man. Like we gotta take breaks every once in a while. Look, just be thankful that you've got what you've got. And I was like, I don't think that that's like a, that's the ethos of christianity necessarily yeah i mean i i i wish i knew the bible better than i do because there's there's always a chance that he said some version of that at some point but it it it certainly is a pretty bold idea to put into jesus's mouth if he didn't say some version of it. Okay. So in,

in my dumb understanding of this before this point was this story was about Jesus. It's just like a really fun, like he's, he's Tommy and in Tommy where it's like, this is your main character. That's fun. This is your main character.

This is who you're following. This is the good guy. The, uh, he gets dared to walk across the swimming pool. He's not going to do it. and then they kill him and and then and judas is like you just watch this one guy kind of turn throughout it and you don't know why you're with him but it's like an othello whatever that his his right hand man is you just like watch iago yeah where you would just watch iago sort of like you don't know his his motivations he's just he's just gonna bring this guy down and so then i'm saying this to my

daughter and i was like oh shit i thought i had really well stumbled across something great it turns out i did his name is andrew lloyd weber and he wrote a good fucking play yeah i mean i think uh listen to the whole soundtrack again i'll send you uh which one my favorite is um because you you do learn judas's motivations throughout and i think the jesus character with with the exception of like one really anyone else i think again yeah andrew little ever worked um on you you you you fucking rube yeah um the other thing i thought you were going to bring up as you were singing a song from superstar to your daughter uh when... There's a lot of implications there. Later when like Jesus is resting

and the reprise of that song, Mary Magdalene sort of turns into that soliloquy of I don't know how to love him. Yeah. And those lyrics, because that gets into, she starts singing, I don't know how to love him. Should I bring him down? Should I scream and shout? And that was something that young Daniel,

listening to that soundtrack on a CD player on the way to a field trip, because I've been this way my whole life. That was like 13 year old Daniel realizing after listening to that song for like a thousand times. I was like, oh, she's talking about sex stuff, I think. I don't think I was supposed to. I didn't know you could do that in musicals because I'm an idiot. Like, why did anyone? Should I bring him down?

Does that mean like, oh, this this is very advanced i better not tell my parents i'm listening to jesus christ superstar that was a real like eye-opening moment for young daniel that that musicals can be horny yeah and then i've i've since learned that they all are yeah man greece i saw at an early age and i was I was uh scandalized uh what part of it they talk when they're they're dancing all over the car and they're talking about how it's gonna make their chicks cream oh yeah pussy wagon I was like oh

this is I'm not supposed to see this um but yeah they all are they're all pretty horny yeah I wish I was more prepared to talk about jesus christ superstar maybe i'll listen to it tomorrow and then we'll do a bonus episode yeah wait no we won't i don't want to do that um that was your question for me was about uh that song in jesus christ superstar yeah okay um you used to sing that to your son too right i did yeah it's a song i know really well and i I'm trying to think back. I can remember like listening.

I was very curious about it when I was a kid. We had the record and then there was all kinds of pictures from the movie musical where they are all on a bus and then they go put on a show out in the desert. And I was very fascinated with it. And so I think I just had that song in my head and I would just sing it to my son and then now my daughter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a song that I would, I would play, uh, when I was really stressed living in Los Angeles, uh, and, and had a car that was like a treat for myself. It was like, I'm going to calm down. I'm going to put on this song and go into a car wash because being in a car wash, not the ones where like you get out and you watch the car or people wash by hand when you're just like through the machine yeah that just takes your car it's one of the most relaxing things for me because it's very much like you're not driving but everything's under control and you're just gonna and like you're gonna come out and the car

is gonna be clean and it's gonna look and and smell better. And in the meantime, you get to watch going through a car wash, which is super fucking cool to me because I'm a child. And I would put that song on because it's a very soothing, relaxing song and always effective. That combination of car wash and that song where someone's telling me everything's all right. And I get to sit there thinking like, my struggles are the same as Jesus's. It always worked 100% of the time. I'd come out that car wash and be like, all right, everything's okay.

We can keep doing this. It's a very relaxing song until the very end. And I think that's also the point where they start to get into that chant of close your eyes, close your eyes and relax. Everything's all right. Yes, everything's all right. And like, it's becomes a cacophony like everybody's singing it at once and it starts to get kind of oppressive

a little bit yeah uh in a way we're like yeah jesus is never gonna just relax and like there's always gonna be this shit on his mind and so even somebody telling you stop just stop what you're doing just relax just relax like that's what it feels like at the end of the song but the whole first part of the song easy oh i used to listen to it all the time thinking yeah yeah everything's gonna be okay this is a good song to just chill out to we don't get to the stressful part because it's not a very long car wash so it's the timing is perfect i encourage everyone anyone who doesn't know it go look at the lyrics and then just like scroll down and just look at that block of text at the end it's horrifying it's like you can see how the

song suddenly just turns and gets very scary um that's it all right i think that's about all the time we have today we talked about i don't even listen to the show when i'm doing it we talked about writing and musicals and uh had a real good time i need to track down all the social accounts and that's going to take me a minute. And in the meantime, Sorin, I just wanted to sit you in the compliment corner for a second because you've always done that for me. Or the compliment couch, whatever it is. I really admire your patience and your thoughtfulness. Every story you tell about how you interact with your children,

it feels like you're open to growth and learning new things about how to be a better person and a better dad and like lead them by your example. And I was just curious, which one of them do you like more? My son. of them do you like more my son i mean that's open that that might change at some point he's the older one if i was put in a situation where i have to just keep one like he's the one i've really established a closer bond with yeah i guess he does more he's got more tricks and stuff i think it would be more uh devastating for him at this age to lose me than my daughter.

She doesn't know me. That reminds me of a thing I did with my three-year-old nephew when I was after the camping trip with my brother. I wanted to play a new game game with him and it was based on this scene from there's an episode of Lovecraft Country where these like demonic spirits haunt a character

and there's a song that's playing every time we see them and they're doing like weird jerky dance movements and the song involves it's two voices in the song and it sounds it's two voices in the song and and it sounds like like an old-timey 50s don't you don't you do that knocking at my door at my door and it's like very cheesy and corny but every time they say at my door another voice comes in and it goes let me in let me in and

so i started doing that to him i would i would like move really jerkily and pound my fists into my knees and dance like a broken puppet and get closer to him and closer to him and go, let me in, let me in. And he fucking loved it. Me and his parents are like, this is kind of scary. I don't like it. I was like, no, I don't like doing it. But he's really into it. Yeah. I find those games with my own son.

And I think I marvel at with little children is that they are so enamored with their, just like charmed by their own smallness and helplessness. And what a great feature that is for somebody who's small and helpless to be like excited about that. That's why they love being chased when you're a monster. Like I will pretend to be dead for my son constantly. And he just gets pumped because he knows I'm coming back as something that he is going to be like terrifying. And then I chase him around as a zombie or as a mommy, as he calls it or whatever it's

going to be. And, uh, and he's so like, they love to be like picked up, thrown around. And like when you do steamroller with him, we're like, I roll over with him and it's like a little bit painful for him because it's my whole body. But they just, they're so enamored

with how tiny they are in this world that it's like, it's very's very charming for me well that's fantastic uh you can talk to soren more at soren underscore ltd any questions you have for me uh whatsoever you can send them to at make me bacon please on twitter that's make me bacon pls all one word you can email the show at qq with Soren and Daniel at gmail.com. You can find us on Twitter, twitter.com slash QQ underscore Soren and Dan or Instagram. If you just use your imagination,

you can find and hire eventually, uh, our super talented and super kind engineer, producer, editor, Gabe at Gabe harder.com. We also have a Patreon you can contribute to if you want. And I believe that's it.

Great. Bye.