Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - QQ ep 98 -Daniel Explains the Cat Lady Thing

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

In this episode Daniel walks Soren through the viral Cat Lady drama that swept twitter, and halfway through the story Soren remembers that he's familiar with it! We promise it's really engaging!!  And as always big thanks to our sponsors, thanks to Honey, shop with confidence — get Honey for FREE at JoinHoney.com/qq. And thanks to Hello Tushy.  10% off + free shipping HelloTushy.com/qq

So hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel. The podcast where two best friends and comedy writers ask each other questions and give each other answers. I am one half of this podcast, author of How to Pite... Oh, fuck me. Author of How to Pite Fresidents, staff writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and guy who is alarmingly susceptible to advertisements, Daniel O'Brien, joined as always by my co-host, America's favorite balladeer, Soren Bui. Soren, say hello.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Quick Question. I'm Boren Sui. I am a writer for American Dad. I'm a father to two children and a husband to a wife and a homeowner and uh god there's just really every single time i do this i think i haven't done anything i used to hate it when i'd read like playbills and stuff like that where someone would be like he's hailing from fresno california and where he lives with his two beautiful dogs and I'd be like well fucking nobody cares about your dogs and uh now I do that on every single podcast I'm like I have children I made these sex trophies what do you think it's so wild the things that like there's no standard

for writing bios or anything like that but there are certain tropes that if you've ever had to write a bio you fall into because because you didn't learn how to do it in school, probably. And like when I was writing my first author bios, whether it's for a byline for a comedy website or for a book, I would write like I would start with a few of my accomplishments and then always end them with Daniel lives in Santa Monica with his dog, Jackson. And I don't know why I did that other other than seeing it before. Just seeing it like the guy in Fresno with his two dogs. I'm like, well, it'll be weird if I don't mention the dog, right? Okay.

We have a mutual friend, Rosie, who she has just told us a story that I think it was her sister-in-law told her, which was they had their first kid, and she said, I felt like he took half of me. And then we had our second kid and all of me was gone. And it's like, you do become parent.

Like that becomes like your moniker. And you would try and do other things in your life. Like there's other stuff that you've got going on and that you'd probably much rather talk about. But really so much of your life is dedicated to this one role that like you just become parent after a while. Like'm father is just yeah i get it i'm father from now on i make food and i keep this thing alive these two things alive i just try and make them good people so that when they're faced with really tough decisions later on they make the right ones

i'm not gonna be there for it. And I'm scared about it. And I'm just trying to get it right now. Didn't you discover Lost City? Yeah, that was in the prequel. That's not canon. That doesn't count. Yeah, it's from the similar Akram or whatever the fuck.

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for promo codes and automatically applies the best one available at checkout. Go to joinhoney.com slash QQ. Daniel, I want to bring up something. This is unprecedented, but I want to bring up something that you did in a previous episode. You said that you're hunting for the right mattress your whole life. Not specifically mattress. It doesn't need to be mattress it could also be like if the difference maker is the mattress topper the kind of pillows the amount of pillows or the kinds of blankets whatever it is that's going to give me like a great night's sleep like there's one bed that i've had in my entire life that i was that i still think about it was at your bachelor party we stayed we rented a house in henderson nevada and i uh i think the first night slept on the floor slept on the couch and then

the second night i slept on this fucking bed and i was like oh see i thought beds could be uncomfortable or acceptable i didn't know that there there was a third tier that was just like a fully comfortable bed. And I wish I had my wits about me at the time to write down every element of this bed, but I just didn't. And now I don't, I don't, I don't know what will be the difference maker. And I know that it's one of those problems that's very expensive to try to even to solve. Because like I can ask, I can go online and like ask what the best thing is but still it's gonna be some guess and check and everybody's different it's a lot of object subjectivity i'm also a person who is very bad at returning products even ones that i don't like or use i i for some reason the path of least

resistance to me is owning a thing that I hate instead of like sending it back and going back to the drawing board like I'm I I'm such a chump with every ad that gets advertised on a podcast where it's like try this for for 12 weeks and if you don't like it money back like I'm gonna I'm gonna like it I'm not gonna send it back that's not a selling point for me there's no world where I get my butt blasted by a toilet product and then months later change my mind about it. Certainly not in a way that would require me to involve the postal service. Right. Get a third party in on this.

Yeah. I mean, for the longest time, I didn't care where I slept. Sleeping was the easiest thing in the world to me. When we would shoot sketches, we'd be've, for the longest time, I, I didn't care where I slept. Sleeping was the easiest thing in the world to me. I would, we would shoot sketches. I would, you know, we'd be on set for a long time or after hours. And sometimes I would just curl away somewhere on a furniture pad and I'd be like, ah, best night's sleep I've ever had. That was great. That was a great bed and be like, that was a furniture pad. Yeah. Whatever, whatever you call it. Um, I didn't care where I slept. And I've just sort

of noticed recently in my life, I camp out in the yard sometimes with my son and we're on little air mattresses. Or on the last trip to Colorado, I slept on a fold-out couch and it sucked. I can't sleep on these things anymore. I'm not who I used to be. Like I wake up and it hurts a little bit or like in the middle of the night, I'll just be like, ow. And like trying to find the best position and just not getting there. And so a mattress is becoming

more and more important in my life. I mean, I have had really nice sleeps in hotels or at Airbnbs and stuff. And then at the end been like, well, that was great. Too bad that room stops existing after I leave it. And I'll never know what that bed was. And now I think I am at a point where I need to start checking.

Like I need to, when I go somewhere, I spend a good night's, I get like a really nice sleep, night's sleep on a mattress that I like. I'm going to have to fucking lift that thing up and look at what it is. Yeah. I also know that just because I, I'm familiar with how the world works, that when I track this down and figure out what makes a very comfortable bed for me, it's going to be expensive. It's going to be more expensive than I want and more expensive than I'm predicting. There's no way I'm going to walk into like a mom and pop shop and they're just going to be like,

oh yeah, just put this blanket on top and then it's going to completely transform things. No, it's going to be some fucking Raym raymond flanagan or some mattress scientist that was like yeah we had our best team in the world make this mattress and that's why it's seven thousand dollars fine there's a lot of people at my work that swear by uh weighted blankets i have a weighted blanket you do okay yeah they're like thunder blankets for people um and it just sounds terrible to me. I think it sounds very claustrophobic and awful. It feels like, especially in the dog days of summer, that it would be awful in there. It just gets very sweaty and you cramped and you

can't move very well. I think that I would hate that. I don't use it very much in summer because I run so hot. but if i keep my place very cold as i do from time to time then i'll put the weighted blanket on top of my normal blanket wow and i'll pin myself under them both yes it's great do you just wake up in the exact same position you went to sleep in no it's not that it's it's only 12 pounds of weight on you distributed across the blanket that's like uh that's a that's a good-sized dog sleeping on you yeah uh i mean that's that's like jackson's exact weight that's fine okay it's not a good-sized dog he's a he's a cat yo come on he's bigger than a cat he's not in the room is he he's in the room yeah that's why i'm saying it i'm saying it just because i know he's listening and i can tease him oh but he only

speaks a combination of spanish and italian so that's right it's fine yeah all right well anyway i had to check in because i'm getting to that point in my life where i'm going to start to become a mattress connoisseur i'm mattress people now oh yeah i guess i'm gonna have to be i i'm realizing that beds don't cut it there's not every bed cuts it for me anymore yeah so what are you gonna i mean because i can't imagine a world where i spend a year getting multiple mattresses brought to my house and then i set them up on my bed and then i sleep in them on a trial basis and make a decision after that. No,

I'm going to, I'm not going to do it that way. I will be somebody who, when I travel every single time I sleep on a bed, whether I like it or I don't like it, I'm going to be the guy who has to know what the mattress was so that I either know what to avoid or what I like. Yeah.

And eventually I'll start to, once I learned like the glossary of terms around the mattresses, I will know, Oh, this, the air springs. That's what i like yeah and eventually i'll start to once i learn like the glossary of terms around the mattresses i will know oh this the air springs that's what i like yeah that's another thing that's difficult anytime i'm i'm required to investigate and then uh put words into the way i feel about things physically there's that's a non-starter if i ask online how to find a good mattress and someone's like well what are you looking for in a match i'm like ah get the fuck out of here yeah i'm i do you move around a lot when you sleep i don't know what i do but nothing more humiliating than somebody trying to fit you for running shoes yeah you're like you're like no i run a lot like i'm a good

runner and then they start asking you these questions and you're like i don't know what any of this means i don't do you ever find you you run on the outsides of your feet or the insides like i use the whole animal man yeah man i'm like the native american give it all to me uh yeah i i it's humiliating and then like they put you some i've had been a place where they put you on a treadmill and they kind of like watch your gait that's not how i run i now i'm running with somebody watching so this is something performative i don't know what i'm doing i did that in a running stew shore with running shoe store with a guy not on a treadmill but just like now walk across the room and like yeah like i'm fucking on rupaul right now this isn't how it looks it's it's a desperate and violent exercise

in real life yeah but i didn't i needed to mentally prepare for this before i came in i needed to practice at home to make it look natural, figure out what's natural about it. Listen, I used to act. But yeah, I'm going to just be that kind of person who now everywhere that I go, I'm like Kevin's uncle in Home Alone. That feels like something he would have done. Constantly checking out the silverware everywhere he goes.

But it's going to be made with mattresses. This could be just like a long ad for casper at this point where we just finally land on casper at the end that's that's my dream is that a company that makes mattresses sponsors this podcast and then gives it to me for free and then i have no skin in the game yeah oh that's the dream yeah yeah yeah is that a unique thought that my dream is uh not paying for nice things am i the first guy there are a lot of good things about heading into the warmer weather but a butt crack dripping with hot summer sweat isn't one of them just say goodbye to swamp ass and hello to what i'm going to coin as wet ass with hello tushy. Yeah, swamp ass is a nightmare.

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i got a quick question for you yes shoot um how because you don't spend nearly as much time online as i do because you have all these other priorities you have a father and mattresses and whatnot uh how tapped into the cat person discourse are you cat person discourse is the thing that has been as of this recording sweeping the internet god i saw a bunch of people posting about it saying like, I want to come clean. I am the cat from Cat Person and stuff like that. And I only vaguely remember that Cat Person was a short story from like years ago. And so I was so far behind on this one that I didn't even bother trying to track down and understand what it was.

It's good. I'm happy to try explaining it to you. Although I think I'll have to do more work than anticipated because right off the bat, no has come out as the cat from somebody it was like a joke i mean i don't follow joke accounts so like somebody was like making a little joke about it so that's how far behind i was that like the earnestness had already happened and the jokes were rolling in about it yeah required you to understand everything to even understand the joke i found myself obsessed with this entire saga for a morning and then i went through various stages of twitter of getting very angry laughing and then just sort of coming to accept the like i came around to liking twitter again because just what a bonkers

place that is how it just exists to be an outrage and take machine. And I think seeing Twitter reach its peak absurd Twitter-ness is healthy for me to do as a reminder that, like, none of these are real people. That's an important disassociation I need to make. But we'll get there. To start this, we have to go back to 2017 when an author named kristin repenian published a uh a piece of short fiction and i want to say the new york post it was called cat person and it detailed a story about a young woman named margo who met an older man named robert while she was in college and working at a movie theater they had

uh some strange flirtation and eventual eventually a romantic relationship that included one sexual encounter and then she followed that by uh attempting to ghost him because this wasn't the relationship that she thought it was going to be and he was not the person that she thought he was going to be uh and it culminated with him softly stalking her and sending her a bunch of aggressive texts and the final line is her texting her that uh she's a whore there are plenty of other details in this details about uh margo working to impress this person who she viewed as like an older more sophisticated more powerful person i think the age range was she was 20 he was 34 and she he just seemed more worldly to her and uh she always felt like she was working to impress him and and gain his affection and then in their during and after their one sex encounter she was going over a lot of

their past time together the text message that they shared and this one date that they shared and seeing him in eventual new light who was not this like powerful worldly person but like kind of a nervous and weird and uh not the the not the best uh talker not a very empathetic person not very well functioning socially kind of like kind of kind of a shitty person like anonymously shitty person and the this piece was the first piece of short fiction to go viral, which isn't a thing that really happens now. It's just like very undeniable that this piece had a connection with a lot of people. And this is 2017 internet.

There was a lot of, it was in the Me Too zeitgeist because in their sexual encounter, there's like some murky bits about consent where she is giving consent in the beginning but then because we're living in her head she no longer wants to have sex with this person but feels like it would be too difficult not to and that's where the story digs into and okay uh it it it paints him as quite the villain and paints her as uh naive but then growing to understand her power and her position in this uh so the internet reacted in the ways the internet reacts which is all over the place and absurdly there's a lot of people who are like

i have been direction yeah a lot of people who like i have been have been Margo. I have met Roberts. I know this story. And this is a well-told version of the story as a guy looking at a guy who doesn't immediately seem like a villain, but by the end is like an entitled kind of slime ball. men on the internet who are furious that like this this Robert character you did him dirty he did nothing wrong and like first of all you can't tell the author of fiction that he's not especially

at this time in 2017 when for all we know this is a made up person possibly pulled from the author's life but you know people were mad she of course received death threats from men on the internet uh the story due to its popularity was optioned for a movie and i i have no reason to not be excited about that it seemed like a short story that uh captured the internet at the time and now we're in the present where a new writer alexis nowicki

has written her article where she's saying i am the cat person or i am the the she is essentially margo in cat person and how does how does cat cat person fit into this the um cat person robert mentioned several times in the book that he has two cats and there's like a whole back and forth between the two characters about like a flirtatious bit that they did was they would text each other in the voices of their cats and

like build a sub relationship with the cats and then when Margot goes home with Robert he warns her at the door like just by the way reminder I have two cats. And she's like, yeah, I know. You told me. We did a whole thing about it.

And then she realizes later when she's home that she never saw the cats and didn't know where the cats were. It was a detail that just added an extra layer of compelling, the compelling nature of this thing. Where it's like, yeah, and did this guy lie about cats or were the cats in another room? I don't know. This guy could be a guy who lies about cats. We'll see. But she found out that she was cat person because when the story came out, she got a lot of texts from people. I was like, is this you?

Your name isn't Margo, but like the town where it's set and the specifics of the job of working at an artsy movie theater and the specifics of the distance and age between this relationship that's all really familiar do you know the woman who wrote this and she was like no i don't know this woman and she forwarded to forwarded to the the the real robert essentially and the real robert was like uh this is this is really strange this guy in this piece seems like a real slime ball am i a slime ball and alex was like no you're not a slime ball and then she mostly just like kept this story at a distance to herself which is a reasonable thing to do if you feel like a stranger is writing about your life it's kind of uh i i understand not wanting to engage with that publicly or or deal with it at all i can also understand how that just makes you feel crazy for a while like it's

like truly feels like gaslighting where you want to say a couple of details are changed but i know this is me even though i've never met this woman. And she says, it's all a work of fiction. I know this is me. And I feel insane by not saying anything. And so finally, it's three years later, and she is admitting that she is this person. The biggest question I had going into it was, why? Because there's not really a sense of too much closure. We do find out that the author did loosely base this on her because the author knew this guy robert and through social media had picked up some other details and used this information to build what felt like a very realistic encounter uh because it's based on real people and uh our author alexis reached out to the fiction author kristin to get confirmation and uh i guess just sort of like

author, Kristen, to get confirmation and I guess just sort of like get personal closure that like, okay, good. I haven't been, I'm not crazy. I have been gaslit into thinking that this wasn't about me for three years. So now it's good to know that I'm not crazy. And the other element of this that I think is why we talk about it today is the guy, Robert, the real life version of Robert, passed away recently or a few years ago and so this was also an opportunity for alexis to be like she was very um i think diligent at skillfully including some red flags about the real life person she is not leaving out the fact that their age different was considerable and she is not leaving out the fact that their age different was considerable. And she's not leaving out the fact that like all of my friends didn't like this relationship,

but at the same time, she is insisting throughout the piece. He's not as shitty as the guy in the piece. And, uh, I just want to make that clear. It's, uh,

when you get all those details, it's like, okay, this is, she's clearing the air for her own self and also this person that she knew that she no longer has a relationship with and hadn't had a relationship with for years is dead

and I want to take control of both my own story and like his representation in the world of internet fiction whew and in the world of internet fiction. Whew.

And is it well-written? It's well-written, yeah. I think both are well-written. The second one, the one by Alexis, is harder for me to engage with, really, because I think it must have sucked to be gaslit for three years and to have your story told by someone else. I don't understand writing about it publicly,

but everyone processes things differently, and that's the decision that she made. Because by the end of it, I am hoping... I wanted her to win in a more tangible way. I wanted someone to be like, okay, yeah, and you know what? Here's money. Or I wanted her...

A lesson that she learned from it to be something that felt more triumphant than what it ultimately was. But again, that's one person's opinion on the motivation behind writing a piece. Yeah. And then the internet just went nuts about it. And there were so many people who, I think what made me come around to the other side to love Twitter again is because for a while, people were saying it was wrong of this woman to borrow details from

people that she's seen in her life and put it into her fiction that's stealing and other people who are like no it's not stealing that's look listen to joan didion listen to anyone yeah writers quietly pay attention to things and like steal stuff from their real life all the time and it's not stealing it's like you're absorbing life and you're writing about something realistic and like and there's some we have to understand the nuance of that between autobiography fiction and stealing someone's life we just have to uh and i was mad that it even became a discourse at first because i just thought this woman needed to write this thing let her write this thing fine everybody shut up get out of here but then by like two in the afternoon the takes on twitter had emerged to like completely

run the gamut and i think my favorite was someone who was like why is this a surprise fiction writers are sketchy they're all sketchy people it was my favorite thing i've seen on the internet in a very long time that like a person very passionately is just like yeah they all do it i thought we all knew that about them awesome what a take that fully sent me over the edge into like this is an important reminder when you're getting worked up over twitter that you've got millions of people all of whom feel an unearned pressure to have something new to say about everything and immediately yeah and you're not going to get and it's it's a platform that doesn't reward nuance or doesn't reward my first opinion on this piece which was yeah okay i don't know why you write

that wrote that but good good for you i don't know uh so that's all i had to say today oh man okay we all shop online you do it i do it i was recently taking a beach vacation and i bought three new bathing suits online baby because I was gonna spend every single morning on that beach and I wanted to look great and I didn't want to leave the house to get them you've all seen that promo code field taunt us a checkout thanks to honey manually searching for coupon codes is a thing of the past honey is the free shopping tool that scours the internet for your promo codes and applies the best one to your cart imagine it you're shopping on one of your favorite sites and at checkout, the Honey button drops down like

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We never recommend something we don't use. Get Honey for free at joinhoney.com slash QQ. That's joinhoney.com slash QQ. I mean, I can understand why she would want to clear the air, particularly after that person died. Because if you have somebody in your life who you feel like has been unfairly villainized, even if in the fictional version of them, you'd be like, well, their story is over at this point. They can do no more damage than they are. They're not going to get worse at this point.

I'd like everyone to know that they were never that bad. And also, it just seems like if it was your life, you want the world to know. I don't know why. I don't know where that impulse comes from, but it, I, maybe that's where you and I differ. If,

if somebody had written about me and they didn't cover their tracks well enough, and it was clear that it was me, I would be like, well, fucking somebody, everybody needs, I can't do anything about it at this point. I'm not like,

I'm not going to sit with the same person who's's going to sue or come at them over IP or anything, but I want everyone to know this person did do a good job of covering their tracks, and that's me. Do you remember that this is a thing that happened to me? What? Yeah. No.

I could have sworn I told you this. Someone, it wasn't for like a, I don't want to embarrass her or anything like that, but it wasn't for a major website or anything. It was like a personal blog that she had been using to detail like partly just her life and specifically romantic life. And she was kind of a mutual friend of ours, but more of a mutual friend of like our extended friend group and uh i i had gone to a few parties that she had also gone to and would talk to her politely as a person does and uh we made we attempted to make nothing explicitly romantic was ever said we attempted to make plans at one point and i got the feeling that it was a date and i didn't want it to be a date so i stopped the plans before they actually happened and then we just still see her every once in a while from time to time and then

saw fully this story from a different perspective i want to say a wrong perspective but that's because i'm i'm i'm the the fictional character in it and uh it was never a big enough thing that i i needed to reach out to her and be like so this is fucking me right especially because it like it meant something to her to to write this you know and and present this version of what on her side of things was me being uh indecisively flirting when my side of things is no anything that you thought was flirting was just being polite and i canceled our thing because that's not the most straightforward way to to communicate that you don't want to date but it's like a it's in a way that that it's a gentle adults do it in their 20s yeah which is where this took place the 20s i could have sworn us i sent it to you yeah it's it's um it's coming back to me now i know who we're talking about yeah um man i had forgotten that that had taken

place and how deeply uncomfortable that is uh but you weren't like a you weren't the villain of it right it was just like this is a confusing thing yeah i don't understand why this guy's flirting with me and he won't date me i wasn't the villain villain in it. There was a lot of um, it's a thing that I've seen before as someone who's like not the best master of language and not the most straightforward person. Uh,

the amount of times where I thought I was subtly uh, turning down a message on her end of things, I was subtly turning down a message. On her end of things, I was a goofball who wasn't getting the message. And that's like a thing that's happened with me in relationships and flirtations a lot that is such a thin ice to to walk on because you you it's when you're speaking in codes there's there's no

way to like suddenly drop the code and still be a a kind and certainly not cool person i can't be like hey uh this this night i wasn't i wasn't missing the signals you were sending i was getting them i'm not responding to them because i'm not interested and like i'm just not being harsh about it but that doesn't mean like i'm just too dumb to pick up on it and i'm sure i've been on the other side of that thing too where i've i probably a million times more, in fact, where I flirted with someone and I thought, I don't think she knows that I've been wearing my heart on my sleeve for a year. No, she knew. Well, I mean, I've seen your interactions with women before, Daniel,

women who I know are interested in you, because we've been at Comic-Cons and things that where there are there are people who come up man that sentence could have gone so many in much better ways because i've seen women come up to you at just leave it there leave the audience wondering could be parties could be museums at panels you've done. And there's no question about their interest. And you are engaged and you look them in the eye and like you ask them questions about themselves. And I can see how to an ordinary person, somebody who's very charming comes off as flirting

because just your natural state is like, I'm going to be respectful and kind to you and treat you like a human being. And I think that there are a lot of people who just don't do that in the world. Like, especially when they're approached by somebody who clearly has an interest in them, they don't want to have an interest in the other person.

And so they do what this woman did in Cat Person, I think, which is, I'm not interested in this anymore. I'm just going to ghost this person. Like, you can check out even if you have a conversation and it's clear like you're at a party you're talking to somebody and it's clear like no i i don't i don't want this to happen between us whatever you're getting from this i'm not i'm not sending it out and so they just like shut down the signal and you don't do that because you're a kind person you you you still talk to them you ask them questions.

Like, that's like, that's probably the tipping point, I think, for a lot of people is that when I'm no longer interested in talking to somebody, I do this a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well. And like that kind of thing where it's like just this feeling of wrapping it up where like i've got nothing more to contribute to this and uh it's it's not super kind but it's kinder than being like i don't want to talk to you anymore yeah it's just feel the flow of the conversation be emotionally intelligent enough to realize okay well this person would like to move on and uh i think that your your

instinct is to be like this this person has taken the time, the courage to come up and talk to somebody who they're clearly interested in that they've only seen on the internet before, a complete stranger, and like, look how sweaty they are. Look how much they want this to work. You can see the desperation in their eyes,

and you're very helpful. You're accommodating to that, and I think that that could get read wrong. Um, let me back up for a second with the story. Um, I remember when cat person came out now, I'm remembering that I came into the discourse by the time everyone had sort

of turned on her as like on the character Margo or the author on the character like- On the character Margo or the author? On the character, no, the character Margo, where they were saying she is selfish. She's only thinking of herself. I think that there's, correct me if I'm wrong, there's a sex scene in it. There's a very long, very bad sex scene in it. Yeah.

And in it, she's like getting, she's into the idea that he's into her. Like he takes off his pants, I think at one point. And like, she doesn't like the way he's taking off like he takes off his pants i think at one point and like she doesn't like the way he's taking off his pants he forgot to take his shoes off and that's what she's like oh boy could i leave now or is that rude and then during the sex the only thing that she's getting turned on by is that he's turned on by her yes which is like a really dark place to start sex from um and uh and so everyone was like jumping on that they were like this is a very selfish young person she's not she's not saying

what she what she actually wants or her communicating her needs or her what and like her needs are also very selfish and like deeply problematic and uh that's when i like that's when i came into the discourse that and i was like i don't i'm so far behind on this i don't think i can i can catch up but yeah if i was to read that about myself i would probably find those same elements and be like i'm the bad guy in this story yeah well i i would read it from that perspective of like anything that was critical of me i would be like that no this is awful this is not who i am and so i completely understand like the need to clear the air in that respect as well of like this is me in the story uh but it's not really me i i don't know why this author chose to make me the vessel for this terrible person but i'd want you to know that this isn't who i am

yeah it's it's this isn't necessarily what alexis did but it's fun to to take control of your own narrative i'd be like yeah it's kind of based on me in that i was uh young and hot and nice but the rest of that stuff is bullshit i worked in a video store that was it i mean in a movie theater i can't remember what she did movie theater um but uh i i so i've had experiences where somebody would like will tell me on twitter they'll be like hey i created a dnd character around you and i'll be like i don't i don't like that well who which version of me the version of the and find out like that because everyone assumes whoever you were and the thing that they saw that's who you are especially something like

after hours and that's understandable because we did a show where we played essentially ourselves we are called by our own names and we leaned into our our the archetypes that were easiest for us to play but man it's scary to think that there are people out there that like they think they know you well enough that they're like, I could, yeah, I could play that. I could cosplay as him. Yeah, I think a few of the takeaways are like, I know this must be shitty for Alexis. That sucks. I hate that it happened to her.

And as for the original author, cover your tracks better, I think. Like, I don't think there's anything wrong. If you meet like a schlubby, beardy guy with a very specific vibe and very specific interests who is 34 going after 20 year olds or going after high school girls. I think the real life version of this was. And it's like, yeah, I want to tell a compelling story about this that a lot of people will find relatable. Pick a different town.

Yeah, that's like a thing about being a writer that no one really talks about at panels and things like that where people are like, well, what is your process? A huge part of the process is if you borrow from your own life or like some moments that you've had in your life

or you've seen other people have, learn how to fucking cover your tracks so that you don't humiliate somebody right the first title page of my pilot is gonna say scrubs but they're camp counselors but then by draft five it's called like welcome to camp motherfuckers or something like that i you remove all the parts about it being scrubs and then no one will know the wiser right yeah the experience shouldn't be so identical to theirs well unless it's a really good experience i'm thinking back now to an episode of our show that we did where a guy uh tried to buy something off of craigslist and it went sideways so fast

and in such a funny way that i'm like well no i guess if you change that story it's not any good so it's just gonna be that i guess oh, I guess if you change that story, it's not any good. So it's just going to be that, I guess. But yeah, in general, especially with something like this, where you're making up so much of it anyway. Yeah. Yeah, choose a different town. Yeah.

Choose a different job. Right. There's so many different ways to make that person think, oh, it's not me. No, this one works at a bookstore. This one works at a bookstore in like Victorian England. at a bookstore in like victorian england can't be me done done i mean the littlest changes don't name him robert yeah i don't know what his real name was easiest thing to do is like margo she's 20 she loves school she loves coffee she has three

arms great not me i was worried for a second there but the third arm thing that's very clearly not me i would have really loved that discourse of of when they finally arrived at that point where they're like, and they don't really talk about it much. It doesn't come up much of the story, but she does have that third arm. What do you think that means? Okay. Well, Daniel, I have a quick question for you. Oh, great. If you feel like we're capable of

moving on at this point oh absolutely yeah and i just looked at the time we are in the home stretch oh excellent for the last episode ever uh don't say that because then i'm just gonna get questions people are gonna ask about it um so uh have you ever have you ever ridden a segway or like any sort of mechanical thing that has a gyroscope in it i wrote a segway once i i waited in line at a college event to ride a segway for like 30 seconds that's what they after you do it they should put that on a t-shirt a free t-shirt yes i waited in line an hour it was one of those segway college events before the school year started where it's like you can you can hit a a target with a hammer or you can like wait online and bash an old car with a bat. Or you can get just dumb, basically carnival stuff.

And then part of it was like, hey, you probably haven't ridden a Segway before. This is 2005. You almost definitely haven't. You want to just do it? You want to wait in line in the heat and then do it? And I did. And it seems like a wealthy and time-intensive pursuit

because you do not start good at it. It feels, it felt very uncomfortable to me. Like there is some element of sustained falling that was essential to the forward motion of this craft, which I didn't like because my body was like, I don't know that we're on a stupid thing that doesn't exist. It just feels like we're falling constantly it feels like we're always in mid-fall and then my body sends panic signals to my brain and then i get off the thing good that's

good to know that it was not intuitive yeah um over this my last trip to colorado i have a friend who had a one wheel skateboard if you've seen those they've got that one big fat wheel in the middle of them and then there's the planks on either side that you stand on and the wheel kind of comes up through the planks and it's just moves by gyroscope like you lean forward and you move it propels you forward you lean back and you kind of slow down i was so bad at this thing i fell like five times we did we rode from this guy's house to the store to pick something up and i it was not far it was like a couple blocks and it was humiliating how much i fell because i tried to pride myself on being good at sports particularly sports like skateboarding and snowboarding that i've done for so long. It was completely non-intuitive to me.

So to give you a sense of like, you start with one foot down on the ground, your back foot down on the ground, and then you put your front foot on, you kind of lean up like a balance board. Like you get up into that position and that's fine. Then as you lean forward, you know, you go faster. The faster you go, the harder you lean forward. And then as you lean back, you kind of slow down and stop. Are your feet completely parallel to each other or is one leading the other a little bit?

No, one's leading the other completely. It's like being on a skateboard. Okay. You know, so you've got one foot, you've got whatever your dominant is when you're forward and then the other one in the back. Yeah. My feet trade places on being dominant. They haven't really, there's not like, there's not a clear alpha of the two. So it's really a day-to-day thing.

There's, this is a tangent, but when you're a little kid, they're trying to figure out which to make you goofy or regular for snowboarding. Whoever is setting up your snowboard will tell you to turn around and then they push you at whichever foot you reach out and stop yourself with that's your dominant oh uh but my feet in that situation my feet curl up because they've recognized i'm a more powerful person and uh they don't mind sacrificing the rest of me if it pleases the pusher you just slowly rolling into a somersault and then onto your belly. It's a very, very funny image. And you're still wearing goggles and mittens and everything. Okay. So I don't know if you've ever skateboarded, but on a skateboard, you've got your, you're, you keep that front foot on

the board and then you're pushing with the other foot. So there's a lot of weight that's getting distributed onto that front foot every time that you take your back foot off the board. So anytime that you want to slow down, like you drag your other foot, you put a lot of weight on that front foot to get the back one off the board. And so my instinct is to, when I want to slow down, put some weight on that front foot. And that was the complete wrong thing to do. because if my turning radius wasn't good, I went into a construction site, basically. It was like a terrible movie where I couldn't get the turn quite right, realized I would either hit the curb or have to go to this site,

and just traveled into a construction site and then fell there and didn't get it. The other thing is that when you're on a snowboard, uh, or a skateboard, you're turning, you're using that front foot to either you go onto your toes and that takes you into like a toe turn or you under your heel, which takes you in a heel turn. And the back foot's just kind of like there for support. It's, it's just like, it's, it's morally there. And, uh, so that's my instinct too. So like we, we make turns and have to go down a different block or whatever. I'm leaning on that front foot and immediately just like speeding up. Yeah.

And I fell so much on this thing. And I was like, the friend who I was with is a, he used to be like a professional telemarker. He's sponsored by a lot of different companies. He's very athletic. And so it was like deeply humiliating that i just couldn't fucking get this thing right it's professional did you use a word for a device that i haven't heard before or did you say telemarketer oh telemarker telemarker yeah teleskiing uh okay so okay because because that was your first like now this guy used to be

a professional telemarketer. Okay, sounds like you should have been better at this. Telemarketing is skiing, but your heel isn't connected. It's like, you think of it being on cross-country skis, the way that your skis are, where you're like skinning up something. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where you, okay.

So it's like that, but the skis are a lot wider. They're like actual Alpine downhill skis, but still your heel isn't connected. These are really good for like in the back country. If you have to climb up to a hut or something like that, you put skins on the bottoms of these, which is just like a furry skin to keep you, you give you some traction in the snow. And that's how you would hike up basically cross country ski up to a cabin. And then you take those off and you get to ski down it's a lot of fun but telemark skiing you can always see it because there are those guys who on every single turn they bend their knee way way down and then jump to the other side and bend their knee way way down um is that clear do have you ever seen somebody do that before no but i can google it okay um yeah so he was a professional telemark

like he was one of the people that sort of like pioneered the new version of the sport for a long time that was considered like old world where the the old crusty guys were the ones who would telemark and they were only in it for the passion of like going down the hill and climbing up to the cirque or like up to the double diamonds and skiing moguls like that but then this new breed of kids came along and they like oh telemarking is fun but i would like to do it in the park and so they're like doing rails um they're in the half pipe on telemark skis they're hitting tabletops which is just those big jumps it's like jump uh transition into the front big and flat on top and then a transition down the

other side you just avoid that middle section like you just jump from one side down to the transition of the other okay and so he was really good at at uh doing all kinds of tricks getting air and uh going inverted and then he started doing like cliff jumping after that which was you go up uh you have to get pretty high above the rest of the resort whatever your ski resort is and then sometimes you'll find some exposed cliffs up there and so he was excellent at this stuff and it just like came to him it came to him intuitively and he's always been very good at sports so when he was like do you want to ride this i was like i've never ridden one before he's like you'll be fine you'll pick it up and i didn't it's like it never had it been so clear to me again that I was like, oh yeah, I grew up here, but I don't belong here.

Did he, when he was, when you were both going to the store, did he have a second one of these or was he traveling? Yes. Okay. Yes. His wife has one as well. And she's pregnant and she rides around on a pregnant. So you think it's much very intuitive, easy thing.

It's much funnier to me if you're just like rolling around into construction sites and he's just like slowly jogging alongside of you. Trying to catch up, lift me up, pick me up off the ground, be like, is your knee okay? How about that little skin on your hand? That feels okay. Did you never get better at it?

I mean, I started to pick it up a little bit, but it was so clear right from the jump that like, oh, this is going to take me a while. I think a pretty major difference with us is like 30 seconds on the segue not only am i not good at it but my brain is like this is good news we never have to be good at this i'm not interested in being good at it i i i'm glad i know that now we both learned a lot today you and the segue but and that's the other thing is i came into this so confident too because my dad has a segue he's somebody so he's got uh multiple sclerosis and it's tough for him to get around so in order for him to continue doing hiking trails and things

like that he got this segue that has kind of these big tread on the tires so you can actually get up trails and um when he first got it of course my brother and brother and I were like, let's do it. Let's ride it. And riding around, I was like, yeah, I see why they made this. It's like when Apple first made their products, I was like, oh, it's so intuitive. I get it. And felt very confident on it. And then caught on this fucking one-wheel skateboard. And it was like, this is different.

It's completely different. I don't like it. Well, I'm glad to know that I will never have to try one of those i didn't even know until this podcast that they they moved by a gyroscope yeah that we said yeah that's how you stay upright on i see them around they're a huge they like every other motorized piece of bullshit is a huge scourge here in new york um but i guess i assumed you had a remote in your hand or it was a skateboard thing. Yeah, so they do make skateboards like that. Skateboards, they have like a little, they make motorized

skateboards that you just carry around this remote with you. But I guess I assumed the same thing. But yeah, this thing is all just powered, self-propelled in its own and it's all by your, how you lean on it. Yeah. Anyways, a nightmare. Well, I think we could pretty much wrap things up now probably that's another yeah let's do it that's another full episode had some laughs in there learn some

things you can if you can follow us at the show on twitter at twitter.com slash qq underscore soren and dan you follow me at dw underscore inc or Soren at Soren underscore L-T-D. You can find and hire our super producer, executive producer, Gabe at GabeHarder.com, G-A-B-E H-A-R-D-E-R dot com. We also have a Patreon that you can find by doing some very

light Googling with our names and the words Patreon. And if you give money, you get exclusive bonus content where we answer your questions once a month someone will correct me in post that's not the schedule well that's good then we'll know or i mean obviously someone who's actually checking that will know yeah it's tough because this is where they would put the correction but i never listened to the end of the episode or the beginning of the episode.

I check into the middle. I skip ahead 45 seconds just to make sure our levels are good, and then I'm out. I don't care how a car does when it's in first or second gear. I want to see it in overdrive. Absolutely. Is that a thing?

Yeah, the fifth gear. I think on old cars it used to be called O because it was overdrive. Okay. All right, bye.