Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - QQ ep 73 - A Fellowship of the Fanboy

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

In this episode Soren tells a truly, excruciatingly awkward story about fan mail he once sent, and Daniel gives a recap of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy 20 years late! And as always big thanks to our sponsors. Thanks to Keeps. To receive your first month of treatment for free, go to keeps.com/QQ . And big thanks to Tushy, Go to hellotushy.com/qq get  10% off and FREE SHIPPING.

Hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, the podcast where two best friends and TV writers ask each other questions and give each other answers. I am one half of this podcast author, writer, historian, and guy who missed his cue in a high school play by about 15 minutes due to complications related to di-di-di-diarrhea, Daniel O'Brien. And I am joined, as always, by my co-host, Mr. Soren Bui. Soren, top that.

Hello, everybody. I'm Soren Bui. I'm a father, a woodworker, and I've got to say'm soren buoy i'm a father a woodworker and uh i've got to say it like i'm a hell of a gift giver after this christmas but i'm also a man who once told his son if they ask you at school how often you bathe you say every day or you say i don't know those are the only answers what is the truth uh maybe like oh once a week maybe two times a week okay i don't know what's normal um he gets stinky sometimes not like a not like a homeless sort of way but in a way where you're like wow you smell a lot like yourself right now uh so you you fancy yourself a good gift giver i see that

yeah yeah i think i am and it's it's very easy in my family. Cause, uh, it's not a priority for any of them. Like they, if my dad wants something, he'll go get it. Or my mom, every Christmas we'll say,

no, don't get us anything. Don't get me anything. And they don't, I mean, they'll give you money. Money is like the, look,

just go get what you want. Like, let's stop the pretense of it all. But I insist on the pretense. And every single time I win them over with the pretense where they're like god damn you are such a good gift giver um that's exciting this i'll give you uh an example this last christmas my dad was uh he i don't know if i told you but he had broken his hip and then when he was in the hospital he got covid i knew about the covid thing i didn't know about the hip thing jesus yeah it was it was rough for him it was a bad year for him and he was like don't i don't want material possessions that's what he says all the

time for on around christmas because you know he'd get his own shit and then he also i can't give him experiences either because he can't go he's not mobile right now uh and so i was like okay so i thought long and hard about it i got him him a cameo from Carl Mecklenburg, who was his favorite Denver Bronco from his favorite era, who was like, did this great, awesome cameo that was like, Scott, I heard about your year. Like I heard that it's tough when you're like, you broke your hip, you got COVID while you're in the hospital. Like, it just seems like it's unrelenting.

I've been in a lot of situations like that, where it just felt like we were down and out and he starts talking about like these bronco games specifically where he was like i didn't we didn't think there was any hope left but we kept going and you know what we won that game and like that kind of shit where i was like yeah carl this is so good and uh my dad was really overwhelmed by it he really liked it that's exciting uh a thing that i'm taking away from that is cameo which which i i feel like i need to do a deep dive into at some point because it seems very interesting like there's obviously like funny and sad things about it um but i you're talking about a bronco i've never heard of before for normal reasons um giving giving a very thoughtful present. And I just wonder

how many people like him who are not going to be a guest on The Tonight Show right now. And they're probably not going to... I don't know if there are conventions that they can go to where they really meet fans

and interact in some big way like that. And I wonder if it's possible that cameo has like opened a completely new world to a very specific kind of uh celebrity that is either like deep down on the list or just like not what you would typically think of as an in-demand celebrity yeah i mean if i was famous enough i would love to do cameo because it's such a great way you get the interaction that like you kind of want from a fan but you don't have to it's not like face to face it's exactly what you want it to be you say something and then it's over also you get paid you get paid but um it's it's like it just seems ideal to me i i think a lot

of people were treating as kind of a jokes joke. They get Johnny Bananas from The Challenge and stuff like that. Right. And it's just sort of like this fun hokey thing you can do. It's a little like this celebrity is the butt of the joke, which is a little sad. But then you get ones like this where I just was like, I wonder if any of them are on Cameo. And I found him and I found Steve Atwater and all these guys from the team. And I was like, holy shit. And now I think i want to give cameos for every gift i ever give yeah that's what it's way more interesting to me to like find someone who might give a thoughtful

response if you're like this is my dad here's some money here's what he's been through this year talk from the heart that seems way more interesting to me than like hey we got we got gary bucey to read from this silly script that humiliates him. Yeah. We have a new sponsor. Thanks to Keeps for supporting Quick Question. Keeps makes easy and affordable hair loss treatment for men. To receive your first month of treatment for free, go to Keeps.com slash QQ.

That's Keeps.com slash QQ. Thanks to Hello Tushy for supporting Quick Question. Hello Tushy is a sleek bidet attachment that clips onto your toilet and sprays your butt clean with fresh water. This is a special offer for our listeners. Go to HelloTushy.com slash QQ for 10% off. Hey, do you know who made the most on Cameo last year? Let's see if I can guess. God, this is a fun game because you bet you can't

oh really yeah um it has to be somebody in like the exact sweet spot okay it is um let me let me think it's not gonna be an athlete it's gonna be a celebrity it's it's um one of the the paul brothers no it's it uh it's you're happy that this person makes a lot of money oh no then never mind i was gonna guess that woman from tiger king she would be my next guess oh that's a smart guess no it's uh actor It's actor Brian Baumgartner, who you might know better as Kevin from The Office. Of course. Oh, he's the sweet spot. Isn't that great? Don't you love that for him? That's really wonderful.

Good. Good. I want to see him now. I want to see those. I want to see what he does. Oh, but I do want to back up for a second okay have we talked before on this podcast about how you were in the middle of a play and you went and had diarrhea and then just pretended like everything was fine when you came on stage 20 minutes late

you know if i said yes we have talked about it we could just move past this i know i have that power but uh no it was a junior year of high school it was um the play that we did that year was get smart the based on the tv show get smart and i played the the titular role of maxwell smart smart brag alert um and then opposite of brag alert i got uh some some real nasty diarrhea while i was backstage and like i'm on stage for most of that show because it's the lead role. And I was backstage and I knew I had a scene coming up. And just it was not the my stomach was not listening to reason. So I just I and like I've had stomach problems for most of my life.

So I went to the bathroom and was just like, I'm just, I just have to, I have to ride this out. I have to just let this, let this happen because the alternative is unacceptable. I can't, I'm not going to shit myself on stage or anything like that. And it's not, it was the past. So I couldn't like text any of my cast mates and be like stall for some amount of time. I just like disappeared to a a to a bathroom that was like not the backstage bathroom because i didn't want anyone to smell or hear my sins so i i fled to a different bathroom down the hall and and just like there's a window in the beginning of this

endeavor where i just think i i i might make this I might pull this off. If I can just wrap things up real quick. Nope. No. I'm not. I know enough time has passed that the show is moving on without me. And there are a bunch of 15-year-old stage managers talking into their headsets. Where is he? Anybody got eyes on Daniel?

It must go on, I've heard. Yeah. eyes on daniel and it must go on i've heard yeah and i eventually just like walk into the scene and uh continue the scene as if it's business as usual i just pick up my lines and we go but like you can it's it's difficult to explain how i could tell but i could tell that the two other actors on stage waiting for me had not been saying anything for a while and like the audience knew something was up to everyone in the room was like this isn't how the play is supposed to go i think they did some like because like i was it was a a plot heavy scene and a scene where like i my character needed to be the one giving the information that would move the show forward so uh john had all the load-bearing stuff yes talk to the to the to the actors my co-stars later

uh i believe there was some like where is he he's supposed to be here by now there was like some some very light improv vamping in the beginning and then just just standing still in character waiting for me the betrayal they must have felt yeah and you didn't show up was like it must have just been like i would have been seething if i had been out there like you fucking left me i hung me out here to dry yeah you better be dead no man i wish i was in a play i I think it was by Harold Pinter, called Other Places, that is a period piece. So I had to wear these wool slacks. And before the show, as I think most people do, I was a little nervous.

I was peeing a lot. And I was peeing in the urinal before, I don't know, like halfway through peeing before realizing that I was really just nailing the side of these, the zipper, like where the fly opens and there's the extra bit of fabric. Sure. I was just nailing that piece of fabric right there.

And I was like, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. I've got to wear a tucked in shirt. So like, I'm just frantically like trying to dry these pants in the bathroom. Just get them as like dry as possible. You can't tell from the outside that they're wet at all. And finally, I decide it's good enough. I run out there, just make it on time, doing the show as i'm there's a i've seated for a lot of it and as i'm sitting there i start to like smell the baked in urine of like these wool pants because we'll just kind of sort

of like holds on to those stenches yeah and i'm and i'm just horrified and thinking in my head like okay how close do i have to get to anybody throughout the rest of this play let's see let's see and just scanning these scenes in my head to be like all right i could stand a good distance away from aubrey during that part that's fine and like trying to figure it out in my brain that how i'm gonna get out of this situation while i'm supposed to be performing yeah but i made it i mean yeah that was not nearly as terrifying as yours did you tell people then at the end oh sorry i got the runs uh i don't think i i said i got the runs or even like explicitly diarrhea i think i was ashamed enough that i was like i'm really sorry i got i got very sick so like you could interpret that as yeah perhaps he was vomiting or or nauseous or something like that. And like, I don't know why vomiting is nobler than diarrhea, but it is. Yeah, it is.

It's just more cosmopolitan, you know? It's nice to give yourself a visceral out like that. Yeah. That like, then they don't have to picture anything coming out of your butt. Right. Oh, that's wonderful. Because also like, ah, nevermind. I don't want to get into that

okay i feel like let's get into it i feel like if if if you think someone just threw up and it's like oh they then you can like swish some water and maybe have a mint and like yeah go about your day if someone's like i had like crazy bad diarrhea then it's like then you will have you will have always had diarrhea until you go home and shower like like you need to wait even if you're completely clean afterwards it's still like you like i can't talk to you until tomorrow i'm sorry you're just different now i think sometimes it just it clings to you longer than that not in a real sense but like uh the idea of it if somebody there was a girl in my hut in my college who uh she got very drunk once before we were at school there and had

pooped herself at a party i think it was a humiliating experience and we all found out about it when we got there because like there people are so excited to tell any new people what had happened then while we were there it happened again so sorry her freshman year and then maybe like her sophomore junior year it happened again and uh if i ever saw her again that's how i know her like that's not ever gonna go away she is uh and when someone uh seems so cruel now but i had a friend who started dating her and we were like do you know what happened right like we were like trying to like warn him somehow that maybe that was still part of her it was like on her somehow and it was really just the stigma it was

us no certainly and and uh like i knew a kid in high school who uh pooped his pants and that kid could be the next Elon Musk. He could be giving a press conference about how he... You know, good news, everyone. We're all doing solar energy forever. I figured a way to make it cheaper and better and it created jobs. And I'll be like, yeah, Daniel O'Brien, last week

tonight, just a small question for our viewers. Do you remember when you shit your pants on in march the sun was out and you had those shoes with like wheels on them and then you shit your pants in the hallway and the teachers laughed do you remember that no follow-up questions yeah that's a pretty good moment okay thank you thank you for your time um i can't believe the show has come to this i think it's good i think it's i think what you're doing is there are these people that have their own private little tragedies or like deep humiliations and when they hear of other

people suffering the same thing especially someone of your stature daniel two-time emmy award winner that's uh they think ah ah we're all suffering of the human condition this is all of us i guess we should at some point though um like really try and make a good episode. Because I... Wait, I tried once. Just once. Just one time. Just because, like, if I wanted to get more people to listen to this show, I wouldn't tell them this one. Yeah, maybe not.

The one that starts out with me, like, really hitting diarrhea, like I'm announcing it at a truck rally. Well, to be fair, the thing that I just like hearing from some of our audience, the things that they enjoy about the show are things that I did not anticipate. When we had guests on, I was like, yeah, now this is like a polished humming thing. And I got a lot of responses from people who were like, listen to the show for you two. I don't know what the guest thing is all about. Yeah, well, that's fine. All of our core fans, the ones who are here for the Q drops and whatnot, and following the breadcrumbs to the truth about what we have to say.

They're going to stick with us forever for i'm going to assume stockholm syndrome uh but if we want to get some new blood in here we have to be completely different people with a different podcast yeah sounds like a lot of work let's not do that happy new rear that's right everyone i said new said new rear. New rear, new you. In 2021, don't just make a commitment to wash your hands every time you poop. Go the extra mile and wash your butt. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the future of pooping has arrived. Okay, it's technically been around for centuries, but it's hideously expensive to poop. Have you guys noticed that? Maybe not because your toilet paper

doesn't actually bear out the cost, but imagine all the water you're using to get that toilet paper. Imagine all of the trees you're cutting down. Imagine the actual damage that you're doing to the entire world with all that waste is being flushed down the toilet and all the work that went into the manufacturing.

What if you could poop and then just wash your butt clean with pure glistening water? Well, that's what Hello Tushy offers. Now the brand Hello Tushy 3.0 modern bidet attachment is here to level the playing field. It's stylish, eco-friendly, easy to install, and affordable. Because of the Hello Tushy, you don't have to wipe at all you just do your business you spray you dry for a little while and then you go most people i assume like me you're gonna air dry hey there's no problem with that you just bake it into the cost of like how long you need to spend on the

toilet you maybe get a few more doom scrolls in there who knows plus every hello tushy bidet attachment comes with a 60-day risk-free guarantee and a 12-month warranty you already got a tush on your pot well upgrade to the new 3.0 model if you're new to the revolution join millions of happy hello tushy customers right now and have a clean butt with every flush now soren i had just a question um do i have to poop to use the bidet or can i just no do it you are allowed to sit on your toilet at any time for a little spritz and in fact if you want to get the entire area they have both an option for your number two but then they also have an option for females after they

pee which i've tried out obviously and it just hits you in a little bit different of an area gives you a good sense of what it's like to be a woman how the other half lives yeah that's pretty cool did you know that the average person uses 57 sheets of toilet paper a day and that every roll of toilet paper requires 37 gallons of water to be made a bidet only uses an average of a pint of water stop wiping and start washing. It's the smart thing to do. Go to hellotushy.com slash qq to get 10% off plus free shipping. This is a special offer for our listeners. Go to hellotushy.com slash qq for 10% off hellotushy.com slash qq. Well, Dan, to start our podcast, I have a question for you. Yeah, start the podcast.

dan to start our podcast i have a question for you yeah start the podcast the real part of the podcast um have you ever written a letter a handwritten letter to an idol or somebody that like you revered sort of okay i do you want me to tell you what i'm talking about yeah so i'll make this story as long as possible i was in second grade and power rangers the show mighty morphin power rangers had just come out and uh it started out on saturday mornings and i immediately loved that show and was like this is going to be my identity is is mighty morphin power rangers fan i'm super into this this is my world right now and i was not alone the show became popular and very quickly became a Monday to Friday concern. It was no longer Saturday mornings. You know what that means. It's Monday to Friday. And it aired, I want to say at two or

two 30 on Monday through Friday. And I was in school and you could have just taped the show like, like, uh, show way back in the past. You could put a single VHS tape into your VCR and program it to record one show a day at a certain time. So that would be an elegant solution for someone who was at school when the show aired, if you really loved it like I did. But in my house, my mom was taping all my children from 1 o'clock to 2 o'clock. I say my mom. I watched it with her. Iing all my children from 1 o'clock to 2 o'clock. I say my mom. I watched it with her. I loved all my children back in the day.

So we couldn't tape both of those shows. And mom obviously gets precedence. And this constituted the greatest problem I'd faced in my small, young life at the time. was that I had no way of seeing this show that I really loved. I had absolutely no options to see it. So I wrote to Fox, which was the network that was airing it, Fox Kids. I wrote to them and I explained. I didn't dress it up with anything fancy. I was like, look, you understand where I'm coming from, Fox.

My mom tapes all my children, so I can't possibly tape this show, and I really love it. I'm probably its biggest fan, and it would just mean the world to me if you solved my problem somehow in all of your Fox glory. I don't even know what that means, but to prove how important this is to me, I've collected 100 signatures from kids in my school just to like co-sign this letter even though like none of them this was still uniquely my problem i was just like i need you to sign this petition to fox because i need to because my parents i guess had explained to me the petitions were like that wasn't a an idea i wasn't an original thought of mine whereas like what's really going to convince them ah jesse bartley's signature that's going to send me over the map so i got 100 signatures and

convinced my brother david to write a similar letter and get signatures from his grade even though he didn't give a shit about power rangers and we sent these letters in to fox it was like please please solve this problem for me. And they wrote back to me, Mr. Fox, and they're like, we heard your concerns. That makes sense. We are going to move the show to 4.30. Now, I don't think...

What? In retrospect, I don't think I did that. I think they probably already had that planned to move it to 4.30. I think programming a show that was meant for elementary kids at 230 was a bad programming decision and they probably realized that that they were gonna be missing most of their target demographic either to school or all my children but at the time they really

made it seem like I pushed them to doing this and And they also, in addition, made me a lifetime member of the Fox Kids Club, which just entitled you to like a Fox Kids magazine once a month that I got until Fox Kids Club magazine shut down. Like all the other great magazines. That's wild. It's wild. But you may have, you may have changed Fox. I may have. And it's certainly like you may have you may have changed fox i may have and it's certainly like like whether i did or not i certainly thought i did at the time which which

ended up being a very uh powerful lesson for me and i'm really glad that my that like the incredible instincts of my mom when i'm complaining about this problem and she just says you should write a letter to fox and and and get your classmates to sign it that like that that was her her solution to this and then it fucking worked what a win for the family there's a there's like not an insignificant chance that uh that's why i'm a writer today? That's a... God damn. That's so crazy. I'm going to poke around Fox because they still own my show

and I'm going to see... I'm going to get to the bottom of this. That's wild, Dan. That's a great story. It's very... It manages to keep me humble as well because even though I got an official Fox Kids Club card that I kept in my in my child wallet and I got the magazine, they spelled my name wrong.

And I know what you're thinking. O'Brien, they probably spelled it with an A instead of an E. But no, they jammed a V in there. Oh, the old world spelling. O-B-v-r-i-e-n yeah i'm pretty sure that's uh that's celtic if i'm not mistaken yeah oh wow very cool thanks man oh they made you feel good and then they just cut you down a little bit wow that's kind of victory yeah someone should have put a v in icarus's name and then that guy would have been flying just like six feet above the earth for a while and like ruling the fucking day.

Like, this is good. This is good for me. I gotta go higher. Um, well, I want to tell you a story about, uh,

a thing that I did and I was probably too old for this. Yours sounds very cute and endearing. Um, there's an, an author that I really enjoyed, uh, at the end of high school and all throughout college i really loved his work and tucker max and i graduate it was yeah tucker max um i will say his name because i don't think it hurts him at all uh

is neil pollack oh yeah he wrote a book called the anthology of american literature which is just a bunch of his his short stories and articles And then he's got a book called Nevermind the Pollocks, I think. He's got a few other books, but I was a huge, huge fan when I was younger. And so it turns out when I was, looks like by the time I was about 25, and you'll know exactly why I know the exact age here in a second. I messaged him and I found his email and I messaged him. It's, first of all, the instinct that humans have to, when they're so moved by somebody's art or like what they've done, that you feel this like overwhelming urge to be like,

I have to let them know I exist. I have to write them. I have to tell them that they mean something to me. I can't, I don't know what else to do with this. So I wrote him and I wrote him asking if he wanted me to be his assistant. Wow. And yeah, I'm looking at the email right now. I think I just assumed that anyone who was a published author had a bunch of money and probably needed uh an assistant and i was like well you gotta shoot your shot you miss 100% of the shots you don't take that's right and so i wrote him and it says first off i have an avid fan of your work and i've read almost at least two i've read almost all and at least two of your

books that was a little joke i was doing to show them that i had chops with that said i want to offer you the opportunity to pay me money i have chops with that said i want to offer you the opportunity to pay me money i have no idea if you're in need of an assistant or if you're the type of writer who would rather not have one see how the there's only two options it's that either you need an assistant or you're the type of writer who's like no i don't need that in my life uh my robot butler does it for me um but i'm currently leaving my job and I'm giving you first dibs. I'm an LA-based writer and have included a short publication

from The Sun magazine to prove that I'm impossibly good at it. Furthermore, I have previously worked as an assistant to a talent manager, so I fully understand what is expected of the position. I have included a resume

in case you'd like to see my work history uh or all the affirmative adjectives i use when describing myself thank you for taking the time to read this i hope we can talk at some point sincerely sorambui p.s should you choose not to accept me as an assistant please now take time to consider me as a house painter. Okay. That's good. Then another little joke to, to end it off with. And, you know, agonized over this for days,

probably thinking of like just the right words. I was James Joyce writing at one sentence at a time, like one sentence. That's it for the day. Finally had constructed, obviously this beautiful, beautiful letter and sent it off to him um he declined he did he wrote me back though oh wait give me that really bummed me out

i think as it should i think it's pretty deeply humiliating. It's really rough to go back and revisit it now and see what I, not only like what I thought he'd want, but also like just who I thought I was. I mean, that's, and it's rough. It's, I hope you take it as a compliment.

The reason that it bums me out is because it's so surprising and uncharacteristic of you. It's pretty desperate. I would expect me to have sent a letter like that to Slimer at some point in my childhood. But the fact that it's you doing it at 25 is world-shaking. Yeah, it's going to get worse, Dan. Because this is how I knew I was 25 at the time.

He responded and said that he's flattered that I think he was important enough that he'd require an assistant. But he says, obviously, I'm not in a position where I can afford that. And then I can see that the email following that, not on the same thread, says, my birthday.

And it says, dear Neil, quick exposition. I'm the guy who offered to be your assistant. Now, for the terrific news, you're invited to my birthday party. Holy fucking shit, Soren. I'm turning 25 on July 2nd, and we are celebrating on Saturday, June 30th. We will likely go to the red lion on glendale boulevard and silver lake and i can first yeah it's a well great place on tap jagermeister it's really cute and i can foresee no reason why this would interest you

other than curiosity however if you are free that night and can find a babysitter that's i'm going to come back to that put a pin in find a babysitter and would like to join us then i would love to meet you also my friends with the exception of a few are a lot of fun to hang out with now i completely understand if you don't want to spend your evening with a bunch of strangers and if that's the case then just ignore this email that's it stay well soren p.s oh fuck i didn't see oh rough what could it be it says regina is welcome to come as well so regina is his wife now here's this this takes me back to that babysitter part i was it was also a part of my life where i thought the more i knew about him would be more helpful and like the more that I I was like it wouldn't look crazy or creepy at all if I was like no I know you've got a kid I know what your

wife's name is that I was just like such a big fan like look how easily I could slide into being your assistant because I already know everybody it's looking at it now it's like my ears get very hot and like my neck gets itchy it's really rough so it gets worse oh boy i don't he says go ahead go ahead if you want no i just want like before you say whatever you're gonna say i want you to know that that i i can't be the stable and balanced one on this podcast. We can't, we can't switch for too long. I was, God,

apparently I was 25, but this feels like I was 14. Like this feels so long ago that I'm humiliated by it. Okay. I don't, don't even know who this person was. Okay. He wrote Soren colon colon thanks so much for your

invite but i have domestic duties that night i can't begin to uh i can't even begin to write about them have fun and happy birthday he's being so kind is a fucking saint god almighty he's being so fucking nice to me and then and then i wrote him back and then i wrote him back and i said i understand completely due to some sort of vermin infestation at the red lion we are moving the celebration to tuesday night july 3rd at the edendale grill good lord he elected not to write back after that and our communication sort of stopped that was the end of our epistolary relationship but um i'm looking just like sat down with his wife and showed her the emails and was like so i've i've put in enough for this kid right i've

i've i've done enough i'm not an asshole if I don't respond anymore, right? Okay, good. Let's go to sleep. I see now, though, that if I just do a search for his name through Google, I see a couple other times where I tried to contact him. But what I did was he was on an email list of people where I sent published writing or a sketch that I had done. So I continued to send this poor guy things that I thought he might like and tried to impress him.

So that's it is wildly out of character for me. I never did that with anybody else. I had obsessions as a child, like Kirby Puckett. I really liked he was a baseball player for the Minnesota Twins. It never even crossed my mind that I would ever write a letter to him that seemed crazy this was the first

person that i'd ever written to and i think i don't know what led to it maybe there was somebody else who i'd heard had gotten a job by like just like being bold going out there and saying hey i like what you do do you need any help and they were like yeah and it worked and i was like i could do that yeah i just like i all i gotta do is pierce the veil like i could if i can cross this little stream like that's i can reach him on the other side and so i did it and it was such a mistake it was such a big massive horrible well i don't think cold emailing him looking for a job as an assistant was a bad idea i'm not coming down on that i i i i think it's it's oh you think there's something wrong with the approach i took

yes it's just the content that i have notes on uh you have to remember it was a different time daniel i bet these were these jokes were hits back it makes me think about because you you are uh a known personality i imagine you've gotten as you're like reading off that letter to me i'm thinking of every similar letter that i'm certain you've gotten over twitter dm or private message somewhere else facebook email whatever and how you would have responded to them not like not what you have said to the sender but like what you would have thought and what you would have wished you could have said to the sender yeah how would i candidly react to it it's not pleasant um he which it just makes me like him more because he was so nice i should actually write him yeah you should have to see how nice he is what is he up to now

by the way because i remember reading his stuff you you turned me on to him years ago yeah he's he stopped doing satire after a while he was he was a great satirist um had like built this really beautiful cool character and then um stopped doing that and started writing about weed and then yoga i think he started blogging about his kid for a while and then he wrote a lot about uh um yoga and so his whole sort of lifestyle changed and i sort of stopped i fell off around that point but man i i was i was clearly infatuated yeah with this guy and i was like i i just gotta try it this would be my dream it is so oh so many questions i hope i can keep track of them um were you talking to anyone else about this while you were doing it were you running the

letter by anyone or just or like talking to like your your your buddy dan friend of the show dan campana were you telling him like you know this author that we both like i'm gonna reach out to him do you think this is a good idea did anyone know that you were doing this no i definitely didn't run the maybe the birthday, but I didn't run the letter by anyone. And that was, I think it's, I have to guess that it's because I was like, listen, I'm a great writer. I could do this and tried to make it my own.

And really just what a whiff. The, this next question, uh, is possibly two questions. Did you think there was a chance that he would show up to your birthday party? Or did you think the idea of inviting him was funny and that he would find it funny? No,

you, I think that it was a, it was, I intended for him to show up at my birthday. Then this question has become two. What would you have said to your friends who were getting you Jägermeister straight from the tap, which I guess is something you wanted? What would you say to them if this older man showed up with his wife and was like, good news, Soren, I got a sitter like you asked.

Let's chat. What would you have told your 25-year-old friends, all of them at the, just like fucking living their lives, having great time being young and healthy and fit in silver like eating sausages and listening to the piano player downstairs and then neil pollack shows up and you're like excuse me i have to talk to this man now i would have abandoned my own birthday party and god be like fred 62 is with him i've been like let me buy you a dime bag let's just talk it's so wonderful i'm so happy you did this um because i do like the boldness of it when you said when you sent the follow-up email about your birthday the first time yeah that's why i wanted to know if you had anyone over your shoulder or anyone that you were communicating with about this because if it was me that you

were communicating with I'd be like hey what what exactly is your goal here because the writers assistant job sure that makes sense but then pivoting to like social peers I'm not sure what you want out of this relationship now validation the same thing anybody who's ever messaged a celebrity wants they just want validation i mean maybe the icing on the cake is what they're actually asking for which is like let's be in a relationship or let's get coffee sometime or anything but the truth is like what at the heart of it all is that this famous person has to know who I am. They mean so much to me.

I have to mean anything. It doesn't matter what it is. I have to mean anything to them. And I think that looking at it now, I'm pretty sure that that was the case, even if I wasn't aware of it at the time. But I wanted so badly for him to know who that I was there. Right. That I was a human being too i was trying to suss out if like you wanted to pick his brain and learn from him or if you wanted to you wanted

him to meet you so he would understand that you were both peers like like well just a couple of just a couple of us comedy writers hanging out like oh we should be friends because you're funny and talented and i'm funny and talented you just don't know who i am yet but once you do know then like we can we can sit in like tea houses and talk about how how difficult the craft of writing is and how misunderstood comedy geniuses are i so that would have obviously been a great end goal uh that would have been a yeah had that outcome happened i would have been over the moon i think at the time i really was coming from a from a position of i could learn a lot from him and that's what i was telling myself okay is i

was like there's so much i could learn from him what i really just wanted was i should i think if we talked i could make him laugh like that kind of thing i get there's like i could um and i wanted that and uh boy did i did i reach for it and over and over is there anyone that you would like to reach out to now i i i can't imagine that you would because of time and experience. But is there someone that would fill a similar place in your heart as Neil did at the time where it's like, I want this person to know who I am. I want to be on their radar and get that kind of out. Yeah, sure. Yeah, Seth MacFarlane.

I'd love it if that guy knew who i was thanks to keeps for supporting quick question keeps makes easy and affordable hair loss treatment for men losing hair is the worst two out of three guys will experience hair loss by the time they're 35 this um i turned 35 last week and there's three people working on this podcast right now. And I do not like my odds here. Luckily, thanks to today's advancements in science, Keeps offers proven treatments that can help treat the symptoms of hair loss and help you keep the hair you have. The sooner you start using Keeps, the more hair you'll save.

So act fast. Many men even experience hair regrowth with Keeps treatments. Keeps offers their products at half the cost of your local pharmacy. You don't have to go broke to avoid going bald. These treatments start at just $10 a month. To take action and prevent hair loss, get your first month of treatment for free by going to Keeps.com. free by going to keeps.com slash qq that's k-e-e-p-s.com slash qq for your first month of treatment for free oh very good uh i have a question for you unless there's there's uh more meat on this bone for you like go on if you found absolutely any other correspondence between you and Neil, this question is COVID or quarantine related, rather pandemic related.

Jesus. Is there anything, any piece of pop culture that you've made time for it, not made time for it, but that you've like invested yourself in during the pandemic that you would not have otherwise made time for because of life stuff of going to a job and going to restaurants and taking your family places yes oh do you want to go first i do yeah um okay i i recently watched all of uh lord of the rings

it's very good whoa dan no I I'm so proud of you that was such a big blinds a huge blind spot like it didn't like I'm I I didn't start out trying to be contrarian it genuinely didn't look appealing to me when it first came out and I missed it in the theaters and my brother who's obsessed with them tried to get me to watch fellowship once and i fell asleep and just sort of determined from that i guess this this stuff isn't for me and then once something like that snowballs then it sort of becomes it it became fun to me that i hadn't seen it and i wasn't trying to be a prick about it i was just like the more time passed the fun and the uh more time i had spent re-watching things that i'd already

seen or watching things that were terrible it all became the idea of it became very funny to me the idea that i'd seen tiptoes three times but none of the lord of the rings or or just like re-watching clips on youtube of things that fucking hot wings show where that idiot makes people eat hot wings. I've watched all of those, some of them multiple times, but I hadn't seen that bridge is burned now, by the way,

but I hadn't seen Lord of the Rings. And, uh, you know, just like at the end of my life, thinking about doing an audit of things that I'd seen, it was really funny to me. They're like, so it looks like you watched

this cut for time John Mulaney SNL sketch. The amount of times that it takes to watch Fellowship, but you didn't watch Fellowship. How do you feel about that? And I'd be like, no regrets. God send me wherever. That's how I felt for a long time. Just that it was funny that I hadn't seen it for an audience of no one.

And then I watched it last weekend. And it's very good. I know I'm not surprising anyone about this. And I'm also aware that this Oscar winning film was good. I found that I'm not coming to it with any uh any nuance or like anything like i don't have a perspective on it that is that has been enhanced or aided by time by the fact that i'm watching it so much for so many years after it came out like i like I'm bringing nothing fresh to it. I'm watching it and, like, texting people

that scene in Fellowship where the Fellowship, like, forms, and they all, like, decide we're the team that's gonna do it in the music place. That's real effective. Those guys knew what they were doing when they made that scene. And just, like, watching things and, like,

Carl Urban's character shows up in the second one to help fight at the place and the music swells. And I'm like, oh, cool. It's that guy. He's cool. It's like Riders of Rohan. Just these very basic ass things where I'm sitting there like resisting the urge to text

my brother. Yeah, Aragorn's pretty cool, huh? Do you ever think of it? Like, I know you like this movies, but like, do you ever think that Aragorn's pretty cool huh do you ever think of it like I know you like this movies but like do you ever think that Aragorn's pretty cool cause that's what I think oh man this person died that sucks he was just changing his mind about being a bad guy and now he's dead

what a bummer your brother is giving a child a bath getting soap in his eye just like looks at a text is like no no it just goes back to what he's doing um well that's about how i appreciate movies now daniel so that was right in my wheelhouse you could have texted me okay i mean i still can i got nothing are you done with it yeah i'm done with it um and i might uh take a little bit of time and then watch the extended editions. Because that's something that my brother and sister-in-law have done a bunch of times. And I really want to do just because I finished them and then went on.

I thought I missed something. So I googled what happened to Saruman. Because he's just not in the third movie. And then Wikipedia is like, he's in the extended version. movie and then yeah wikipedia is like he's in in the extended version you see him doing da da da da and as soon as i knew that like extended version doesn't just mean scenes are longer or like no no yeah stuff that should have been cut was rightly cut it sounds like there's some like pretty impactful things that happen in these extended editions huge plot points

and like yeah stuff that like i guess you could forgive but it's i don't know why they the movie is already that return of the king is like four hours long and and at that point make your movie as long as you want who's who's crunching your your numbers at that point saying no you got a cap at four so it is crazy that they left out a bunch of stuff who's breathing down peter jackson's neck this has got to be a tight 350 buddy yeah yeah new line is not telling peter jackson what to do anymore um but they that movie also has credits at the end of it, the extended cut. And I know this from when I tested DVDs back in the day. The credits are 40 minutes long.

Yikes. Yeah. So don't sit through those. Because what they did is by that point, the fandom had begun. And I don't know what their affiliation was with all these people. They joined some sort of fellowship of the ring that meant that they had special privileges with the movie or something but then they got their names in the credits so there's a bunch of people that are um i don't know dressed like hobbits right now in their lives and they are in that movie that's cool oh did you see um well flight of the concords what's his name uh brett

or jermaine brett brett's in it brett's an elf i did not and like kind of an important elf i think he's got lines in in the original trilogy not the not the whatever happened in the hobbit no in the original trilogy yeah um when uh see i'm forgetting everybody's names what's the elf woman's name um live tyler's character something like that eowyn yeah eowyn when eowyn wants to go back she's supposed to be going to the ships and she's trying she starts she's like i can't do it i gotta go back uh he's the one who's like trying to convince her not to oh yep and vigo morgeson broke his foot kicking an orc helmet did you know that i didn't i again i need to watch it a second time my takeaway at first bluff is is uh boy that that Legolas sure can shoot, huh?

Yeah, he sure can. I texted my brother and sister-in-law, I liked when the river became horses. Because that's a scene that happens, and it's tight as hell. It's just a Chris Farley movie. I don't totally know what everyone's name is. And sometimes the stakes were kind of murky to me but yeah they all look kind of similar there's the king that has two sons and i can't tell them apart yeah yeah uh that's a good one

but uh uh listeners if you haven't seen uh lord of the rings really really give him a give him a shot i was skeptical too dear dear listeners but uh stick with it that's really nice of you that's nice of you to like try and extend the fan base of such a small little mom and pop operation like that fellowship might start off a little slow but it really picks up immediately after the opening title sequence wait there is a a whole lead-in to that movie that's like 40 minutes long of just a woman talking about a ring snooze that is it but then it gets a little slower i think because that's gandalf come you get all the exposition of gandalf coming to a fucking hobbit town the shire and and that weird relationship that he has with Bilbo.

All right. Well, all right. Anyway. I want to watch it again. Did you know that Gandalf fights in that movie? I didn't. He fights the whole time. He's in all the battles.

It's cool. Yeah. He rides a horse. Show them the meaning of haste. Shadow facts. Yeah. Sick. All right. Well, you want to hear mine?

No, I want to talk about Lord of the Rings. I genuinely have no one to talk to about it. I did see it pop up again, and I considered watching it. And then I was like, that's a big investment. I will rewatch it, Daniel, if you want to text about it. Has there been a Lord of the Rings podcast ever? No. It's just like this huge glaring hole in the podcast network.

As far as I can imagine, that seems like a less vocal fan group, right? Lord of the Rings are quiet about their appreciation? Yeah, I mean, that's why it's so hard to find them. All right, go on with whatever you're going to say. Nine of the best Lord of the Rings podcasts. Shit. All right. That's nine of the best.

The second link is the 10 best Lord of the Rings podcasts and radio in 2019. All right. This market is flooded like that horse river. Very good. Very good drop um so i started watching a show during quarantine that i don't think i ever would have checked out because i don't really watch british television unless someone is like no you have to watch fucking sherlock or whatever it is and i'm like okay i'll check it out but uh this one was just i came across organically on youtube um because there's a comedian i like named um hold on one second something

james acaster oh um i really like james acaster and i there was a this show called taskmaster best of james acaster and i was like what is this and so i discovered this show called Taskmaster, best of James Acaster. And I was like, what is this? And so I discovered this show called Taskmaster from the BBC. Actually, I'm not in confidence on the BBC. I just assume everything that's in Britain is on the BBC. BBC and then like one of four different numbers. And that sustains that entire fucking country somehow.

The premise of the show is this. They have five comedians on every season. Each season is eight episodes long. And then there is a host. And then his assistant, his like admin, basically. And it's this guy that he just shits on the entire time. His name is Alex Horn. And is that right?

Alex Horn? Yes. Yeah, Alex Horn. And Alex Horn is actually the creator of the entire show. Like he came up with this whole concept, but it's, they take these comedians, they assign them to tasks out in the real world. They have a house where they do a lot of it, where they film a lot of it. The people show up, there's just a little note card. It tells them exactly what their task is. And it's like, throw a potato in this hole. Don't step on the green surrounding the hole. And then there's like this red golf green around the hole that surrounds it by like 10 feet. And so their instinct is to do

it as fast as possible. They throw the potato at the hole and then the potato is stuck out there so that they have to go find some sort of supplies to get it back. There's a lot of fun with aubergines are what they call eggplants, I guess there, but they've got one where they're in a room and they have to get rid of or hide three abergines, which are these giant fucking eggplants. And they had to think of ways to hide this thing in this room. And so some of them are eating it as fast as they can. Some of them are tearing it into the tiniest little pieces they can think of so that it essentially just disintegrates into the carpet. But their reactions and how they try to solve these problems is always very, very funny.

And the concept of the show is so simple and easy to follow and fun. And then the hosts are also the relationship between them is like perfect. It's like dead perfect from the go where they didn't have to figure this out at all. The host is very arrogant and really enjoys forcing people to do what he says. He's got he sits in a throne and Alex Horn sits next to him in a seat that's just a little bit lower. And Alex Horn is a character is I think this guy is maybe the funniest person I've ever seen on television

he is the way that he adopts the role of this admin is so fucking good he's the driest comedian i've ever seen but he's the one that also oversees all the tasks that are outside of the studio audience and he's so funny the whole time it is i i watched this show because you told me to and i got immediately hooked on it and like the tasks are very simple they're they're or i guess deceptively simple they're if you've ever taken like critical thinking classes in middle school or anytime like they put you in a group in middle school and did one of those things where it's like use these supplies and figure out a way to make to make this egg land safely when dropped from a height like build a parachute for the egg all those kind of like team building things except it's a group of adult comedians and they're really trying their fucking

hardest to to solve these things and just like here's some supplies build a bridge build the tallest bridge in the shortest amount of time and they they you know sometimes they think outside the box and like scheme and come up with really creative ways and most of the times they they uh they fail in very funny ways yeah they do and like it's there's there's something i don't know how if this is like unique to to british shows but there's something to the fact that winning doesn't really mean too much in that show like if you win the episode it's uh it's like bragging rights and also you get like a a token from each competitor who played that that day with you and if you win the entire series because it's one team of comedians for the for the whole season if you win the entire series you get a trophy of the the the taskmaster's head a gold

yeah a gold effigy of his head like just the fact that they're that the the the stakes are so low and there's you know no one's playing for a bunch of money or a trip or anything like that it's just like no there's just like it's a it's a game show that's fun and these comedians are funny and the tasks are uh they seem easy but we're gonna watch these people humiliate themselves anyway it's an addictive show i'm glad you showed me it yeah it's wonderful and some of the tasks are like there's different types of tasks there's tasks that they do in the actual studio audience too where at the beginning of every show they're supposed to bring in some item and so it could be like the item in their house that's the most charming

or like bring in the most amount of money. And then that becomes the prize for the entire episode. And one of them in the very early episodes, they said bring in the best present for Greg Davies. Greg Davies is the host of the show. And they had like eight weeks to work on this gift. And the gifts were incredible. And one guy got Greg's name tattooed on his foot it's so bold and that's for like five points and that's something that doesn't actually matter and it just

makes it even better that it's all completely that none of it matters because the lengths that they go to to win still is really fun yeah that's a great show everyone should check it out it's a task master yeah so i did some researching into it and found out that alex horn um this is something that he used to do it wasn't a television show originally he would just get his friends who are comedians and set them on these tasks and they would participate because it was very fun and eventually people were like i think this could be a show. And he realized he wasn't a ringer for a host because he's very kind of quiet, dry guy. So he got Greg Davies to do it.

Who's just absolutely perfect for the role. And he's like, he, he's just fallen into this admin role. That's so good. Like I'm so jealous of him because he's clearly the glue to the entire thing and like really helps keep it going. The British show that I watched on YouTube is this show called Only Connect

and it's very different. It's still very fun. I'm never going to be good at it ever. It's full of smart people. The show is in four different segments. The first one, you will see four images, and you need to find out what the connection is between all four of those images. And I'll start with one that is uncharacteristically easy for this show,

where you'll see a picture of uh terry from brooklyn 99 and then you see a picture of the actress penelope from vicky christina barcelona and vanilla sky and then you'll see the actor from the mission impossible franchise and it's like ah all people whose last name is cruz spelled differently terry cruz penelope cruz tom cruz and then whatever the fourth cruz is that's like a deceptively easy one uh normally they're it it just looks like nonsense to you or i just the things they're putting together it's like here's a streetlight okay here is sir ben kingsley all right here is uh a simple illustration of the concept of time and now i'm going to play a single chord and you have to find out what all the four of those things

have in common and like first of all most of the contestants know them like it's it's so humbling they're all so smart and even if they're wrong they will explain how they like what their thought process was like we think it's this because of x y and z even their explanations of wrongness are smarter than anything that i can come up with and that's the first round the second round is they show you three images or words in a sequence and you have to guess what the fourth one is going to be which is even harder i can't even i'm not even going to try to like give you a for instance the third one is you get a bunch of there's like a wall of words that are all jumbled together and you need to find out which yeah like

they don't know yeah let's say there there's 16 different or no there's a yes it's 16 yeah 16 you know that of these 16 words there are four different groups of four and you need to figure out what those four are and there are a lot of red herrings in there to trick you and then the final segment in the show is you'll get a category and you have to figure out the answer to the category by looking at letters, but it's all the vowels have been removed and and it'll be things like like something as simple as aphorisms and then you just look at a bunch of letters with no vowels and you have to figure out what it is before the other team does it's it's so humbling for someone like me who watches jeopardy every day and does kind of okay at jeopardy and that makes me think i'm smart i watch this show and i'm a fucking dummy i can't hang at all on this show and are the contestants just people off the street they're yeah they're random people i mean they're not like random people they're a lot of them are like

they're they're not famous if that's okay that's what you're asking yeah that's it's like more like jeopardy yeah yeah okay and there are people who are just like really good at pub quizzes and that kind of stuff there's just wow people who know so much about so many different things i'm surprised to hear this is as good as it is because my instinct tells me it's not great television to watch people think it really i promise you it is i'm gonna watch it i'll give it a ride um it's it's a it's it's quite a coup that it took me well over a decade to watch lord of the rings and i got you to watch only connect on youtube after like a six minute barely coherent description of it well i have to i i can't i got spread out taskmaster i don't want to go through

it all at once so i need something else to fill that void i what i'm struck by most of it with it though is that they're so good to their comedians in great britain like they there's so many opportunities for comedians to do work there like they think you could be on the great british baking show you can be on this show there's another show there's like all these other trivia shows that occasionally pop up in the side reel when i'm watching taskmaster task master and all the same people are in it. Noel Felding is on like six shows there. And I'm like, well, they're so good to them. And it's not selling out.

The shows are clever and good. All the game shows are really fun and they make it even funner. And I'm just jealous. I don't know. Yeah, I felt extreme jealousy as soon as I watched Taskmaster. I was like, they should bring that to America, and they should expand the criteria for what counts as a comedian,

and then let me do it. Because I think I would have a lot of fun. Oh, it seems like so much fun. Do you remember, of course you will remember, but I threw a party, a New Year's party, and in order to keep people at my house, as opposed to have them drifting around Los Angeles from party to party, I organized an entire night of games. And people were assigned to teams before they came.

That was so much fun to do. I had an obstacle course in my backyard built. And people moved from different quadrants of the house, depending on which games they were playing. And it was always competing against one other team. Yeah, there was the obstacle course. You had general trivia. You had, I think, did you have running flip cup charades? Yes. That is a Britannic special. That's Nick Kocher and Brian McElhenney created that game, I think. Yeah. But I stole that and then

had a couple of, I think there was one other thing that we had people do, but yeah, it was a bunch of competitions in the night. And at the end, I was sort of sad. I was like, that was a lot of fun. I think everybody had a lot of fun. I would have loved to have done that. I would have loved for someone to have created that for me. And I could just go do it. All right.

Well, I think we're done here, Dan. Oh, are we? Okay, cool. I think so um we've been on at this for a while now i can't imagine i will i will you're gonna go no you can't go wait we sorry we haven't done any of the uh information on like how people can find us outside of the show if they're curious about us yeah i have all that it's fine i'll do it right now uh except i gotta grab it um i'm in my garage right now i do this podcast from my garage and i keep that framed in our room so i'm gonna have to go run inside and

grab that while i do it um if you could just stall for a little bit i have a subject for you if that helps okay i know in the past that you've said it's just science but i wanted to create some space for you here to talk about why you are so insistent that Republicans are more attractive than Democrats. Thank you. What an opportunity. To begin with, they dress sharper. You will find a lot of ostentatious clothing on the left because they are more willing to take risks and to stand out republicans on the other hand uh just by their very nature lean conservative and just like i'm divorcing that from from politically conservative and talking more in terms of like traditional fashion sense conservative and while that might not be everyone's cup of tea a fine crisp tailored suit creates a natural symmetry and this is why i say it's just science

like the our bodies are trained to appreciate symmetry and that like a line cut from a perfect suit that goes from from from from top to toes that tricks your brain into thinking there's some kind of symmetry going on and someone in a suit or like a very nice dress or a power pantsuit they look more professional that makes the brain think like hey this person's got it together it's like a like something deep in our biology where you see someone that looks mature and looks like they've got it together and it's like yeah that is attractive to me that is a partner that is a partner that's not someone i'm gonna have to carry that's not someone i'm gonna have to keep up with that's someone who's gonna join me going forward in the future that's stability that's what i'm looking for hey i'm back sorry i missed all that i just want to ask did you get to the part where you talk about how their faces

are more symmetrical uh yup that's okay the thing whenever i look at at matt gets i'm like that's everything everything is lined up the way it's supposed to be that's how a human should look all right on twitter you can follow dob underscore inc you can follow me soren at soren underscore ltd you can follow quick question at qq underscore soren. In fact, it's probably the only way you could reach out to Bacon, our CFO, or that he could possibly reach out to you for help. Email QQ with Soren and Daniel at gmail.com. We've got an Instagram, QQ underscore with underscore Soren, underscore and underscore Daniel.

And you, well, you can't. You can't follow, hire our sound engineer and editor, Gabe Harder, because there's just no way to do that. I actually have a website now. Okay, let's play this game again. What is it? It's www.pleasereturngabeharder.com. Fantastic. I'm going to go see if it's under construction.

This site can't be real. Soren, while you're doing that, I just want to say just to follow up on the things that I said before about conservatives. Hope Hicks is hot as hell and we're just not allowed to talk about it. And it's absurd. I have nowhere to put that information. I just have to sit here and be like,

I'm ideologically opposed to this. And like I am. like where who am i supposed to tell about this you can tell me that's fine and our audience by the way i'm on please return gabe harder.com and it's it's great it's a it's actually a website there's a picture of Gabe on it. It tells you how to reach him. My name is Gabe Harder. I'd really like my website back. This is incredible. Send me a name.

Well, I hope that that works out for you, Gabe. Yeah, thank you. Me too. It's possible also that I just forgot the login information for GabeHarder.com but I'm not convinced. It's in the ether somewhere. Yeah. Alright, bye.

Bye.