Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Summer of Soren... Cancelled?!

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

In lieu of a Summer of Soren, Daniel shares a story of self-righteous glory, Soren shares his encounter with the calmest dad in Ojai, CA, and both of 'em have had good reasons for picking up other people's trash.Thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. Sign up for a $1/month trial period at www.shopify.com/qqThanks AURA. Go to AURA.com/PROTECTION for a 14 day trial plus a check of your data to see if your personal information has been leaked online, all for FREE

I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? I wanna hear your thoughts, I wanna know what's on your mind I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? The answer's not important, I'm just glad that we could talk tonight So what's your favorite? Who did you get? When do I be remembered? What's it up with? Where did all the boys go? Oh, forget it.

Saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien. Two best friends and comedy writers. If there's an answer, they're gonna find it. I think you'll have a great time here. I think you'll have a great time here. So, hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, the podcast where two best friends and comedy writers ask each other questions and give each other answers. I am one half of that podcast, senior writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, author

of How to Fight Presidents and Better Samaritan. Daniel O'Brien joined us always by my co-host, the boy of summer, Soren Bui. Soren, say, surf's up. Hey, surf's up, everybody. This is Soren Bui coming at you right from American Dad, or I did when we weren't on hiatus indefinitely. I'm going to say, as much as I've really tried to make it the summer of soren already i'm gonna call it it's this isn't summer of soren i think maybe next year will be summer

of soren whose summer is it i don't know that's the problem i mean i have not i haven't done the research yet or crunch the numbers but like i did it for myself and uh yeah sadly it's not going to be a summer of soren i will i will feel so humiliated if it turns out it's the summer of daniel and you're not ready for that a lot of it no no i wasn't i i put a lot of money on summer of soren as well well i mean it looked at all signs pointed towards summer of soren uh back in like december we were all gearing up for summer of soren everybody knew that was what was happening and i don't somehow it was fumbled and i mean i i canceled the plans because i knew it was summer of soren i was gonna go uh to malta and i was like no i no, I can't. That would be insane. It's summer of Soarin'. I need to be

home, and I need to be ready if I'm called upon. Thanks to Aura for supporting our show. Go to aura.com slash protection for a 14-day trial plus a check of your data to see if your personal information has been leaked online

all for free! Thanks to Shopify for supporting Quick Question. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash QQ, all lowercase. You, Daniel, you know my birthday is right near the 4th of July. And I've been telling my children, my son no longer believes it. He knows I'm lying. But for my daughter, she's very curious about why we're doing all of this stuff with like,

people are putting chairs out for a parade already. Why there are flags all over the place. Why fireworks are going off. And I've been telling her it's for my birthday. Yeah. why there are flags all over the place why fireworks are going off and I've been telling her it's for my birthday Yeah, and when we talk about like our favorite colors and stuff red is obviously my favorite color But I will also say blue because that's her favorite color So I'm like they've got all the reason they're putting those flags out is because they know those are my favorite colors the fireworks yeah, because they know that i enjoy fireworks and she is on it

she's like that we were driving through ohai which is like a little mountain town up above los angeles and there are all these chairs out ready for a parade because i guess there's nothing else to do in ohai but they put these like out a week in advance people just putting their camping chairs out and she was like they've already got the chairs out for your birthday dad i was like yes yes that's true i mean i felt like that when we were we celebrated your birthday in idle wild california uh a couple years ago and uh because birthdays are the same every year it was again around the time for fourth july and that town also days in advance just had like chairs lining the sidewalk in anticipation of this parade because people are like

like like the whole town turns into a little kid where it's like i know it's not until it's not for like six days but i'm like i'm just gonna i got energy i'm antsy i'm gonna put the chairs out now i'm gonna just like put the chairs on the side of the road now and i'm gonna put a chain on them so no one can sit on them and then and then we'll just and then we'll be ready we'll be ready if the fourth of july is earlier this year we'll be prepared yeah in case something else comes up between now and then in a town where the cat is the mayor where nothing could possibly come up um yeah i don't it was it was crazy to see how many chairs were out and then i started like my son was even like, what are they, what happens in this parade?

Meaning, like, what is special about this one? And I was like, you know what? Probably nothing. It's probably fire truck, fire truck, fire truck, some guys on horses, an ambulance maybe, and then a float with some kids on it. And that's it. Like, that's what a parade is. They don't do anything different here it's not like disneyland where they're also doing little dances next to each float

like it's a parade's a parade in a small town and i have no idea why that's so exciting to people still in my old town which was a one square mile town on the jersey shore they got really excited about their fourth of july parade and they had like like all the the the groups that i think only work for parades they only do the parade circuit where it's like the bagpipers and here's like a band that is exclusively very old veterans playing some kind of old-timey music and they also had the fire trucks going by and the the one of the other things that made this parade special was that um if you were gonna drive your car in the parade then you were also it was expected of you to have candy to throw at children so you're just throwing candy at kids

all day long that's they turned it into another halloween yeah that was and when as a kid that was all i cared about in a parade was am i close enough to get the candy because they're going to be throwing candy at us and the fact that there were floats going by it meant nothing to me like even then i was over the idea of a fire truck i was like yeah they we see them we've seen these yeah but for an adult is an adult really like setting up the chairs being like all right right, this is going to be a pretty much spot because 50% yeah, like 70% of the firemen I know are left handed. And so they're going to be throwing off this side. So we're going to be getting a lot of Tootsie Rolls that we could otherwise go to the store and get for 75 cents.

I yeah, anyway, I didn't understand it. Anyway, I went camping. Let me walk that back. I did not go camping. I went and stayed in a cabin in a KOA with a bunch of families from Ronan's school. And this is,

it's like, the cabin doesn't have a stove, so you're cooking outside still on your little two burner Coleman or whatever you've got. But for all intents and purposes, you're staying in a cabin. You're not, it's not real camping.

This was so much fun, Daniel. Oh, good. I was really like coming up on this trip being like, Oh, this is going to be tough, man.

It's going to be all these kids and not everyone raises their kids the same, you know, you know how that is. And so you're going to end up being responsible for other kids sometimes that you don't really know what their rules are. And it was so great that eight years old, I feel like is this turning point where I didn't see my son for three days. He was just in this biker gang with his friends and they cruised around this camp going from the pool to this thing called a jumping pillow,

which is... I can put it together with context clues, what it probably is. This thing they can jump on. And then like surviving off of s'mores, I just let them loose. And these kids, they made good choices they weren't being bad the worst thing they did was throw a chair in the pool and that was like they felt pretty bad about

that yeah and they otherwise they were so good and so nice to each other and they played really well and they just lived on their own in this little campus, basically. And so I had one child. The chair thing is, it's a very understandable impulse to want to see what happens. Of course. You're eight years old, and you have a chair in a pool. You're very curious. Like, I certainly remember being around pools as a kid, and some adult at some pool was like, Now, I want you all to see that there is a cinder block over there.

Do not throw the cinder block into the pool. And we were all like, oh man, what's going to happen if we throw that fucking cinder block in the pool? I got to see it happen. And just the innate, it's in a human's DNA to want to throw big stuff in water yeah and so we're we're constantly thinking like oh man i'm near the all these rocks like these rocks have got to go in that water so bad and so seeing a chair too and being like i maybe i could stand on it then maybe i could do

different things with the chair like who knows the possibilities once that chair is in the water so right theoretically you could sit in the chair in the bottom of the pool and pretend you're at a computer or pretend you're having tea i understand the impulse completely the bits it's a great idea there's so many fun things it turns out you can do in a chair underwater yeah and so they were they wanted they wanted that chair in the water bad and ultimately i didn't know that that was a bad thing until one of the parents was like got really upset with her kid not not really upset but was like mad at her son for doing that and not getting it out because i think he also said she was like get that out of the water he's like no and then she was like wow here we go and so understandably i i saw the chair go in and i was like yeah i wonder what

that chair is gonna do well when When I was in eighth grade even, so when you transition from eighth grade to high school, we had our, not prom, but like our farewell dance slash party, which was on a boat for the eighth graders in my middle school. We all took up like a sunset cruise and ate Subway sandwiches and like danced if we wanted to, but mostly we're on a boat. You can dance if you want to. Go on.

That's right. We took our instructions from that and other songs. And one kid, Evan, there was white folding chairs around the boat, and he took one and he threw it off the back of the boat into the water, which I don't condone. I don't condone polluting the actual ocean.

Certainly that's bad and that's wrong. It was bad then. But it was just like, we're kids. We're in eighth grade. We're on a boat. No one's allowed to drink and no one wanted to drink. But like, what are we supposed to do on this thing after you've eaten? And he saw a chair and he picked up the chair and he threw it off the side of the boat.

And we all watched it to see what would happen. And it was nothing surprising, but it was still interesting. You understand? Of course. We were still excited for a thing thing for like gravity to function the way it always does still somehow fascinated us and the teachers were immediately like evan you shouldn't have done that and we're on a boat so they get like they're not going to throw them in the brig they're just like we are using a boat phone to call your parents. And as soon as the boat docks, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. And Evan was just like, I understand.

Yeah, it had to happen, though. That's it. I weighed the pros and cons before. This isn't my first day. I thought, there's no way to do this discreetly. I'm going to get caught. It's going to be bad when I get caught. I will have some time between doing the action and getting punished that i could just like live in that moment for as long as i can

and then my life will be worse okay i've made my decision i'm throwing this chair overboard me and me alone i'm doing this bring the consequences that's yeah that's good i mean he he knew he knew what he was getting into yeah and that's like he thought it through and now that's all you can ask of a kid like you can't be in big trouble of course i am i know that we're all adults here uh but anyway yeah this trip was really really fun it ended up being like even when i knew that i can't quasi camping glamping was like gonna be it's already gonna be be a fun experience. It's going to be seminal for the kids.

But I was not anticipating how much fun I would have on it. And it was so great. And then we went to a park on the last day on our way out of town. There's high monkey bars because monkey bars, for whatever reason, are 11 feet off the ground at every single playground. And there was a kid doing them and i saw this kid fall and put all his weight on his wrist and then fall on his like his whole body fell on his wrist and i watched this kid break his arm and like screaming on the

ground screaming on the ground and the way like a football player when you see them break a bone like it's like it's clear there's a different type of scream and his dad like a football player when you see them break a bone. Like it's like, it's clear. There's a different type of scream. And his dad like is very calm and goes over to him. His son rolls over and he sees it and I can see it and it's wrong. Like it's like the arm is just wrong at the wrist. And he's like, and he calls his wife over

and he's like, hey, we need to get him to a hospital. But he's being so calm. And then he starts walking around. Well, he gets, he's like, when you take, his wife is me. His wife is like going like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. And he's like, please take your shirt off. And she was wearing like a button up over another shirt. She took it off and he wrapped it around the arm so that the boy wouldn't be looking at it.

And he kept saying like, Hey, don't look at it. Look at me, look at me. Everything's going to be fine. I promise that everything's going to be fine. I know it hurts really badly right now.

And then he walked around the park to everybody and he was like, Hey, do you know, and now take your shirt off as well. Now, please take your shirt off. Ma'am, of course,

please. We're going to, uh, and he was like, do you know if, um, if there's a children's hospital here in Ohio? And I was like, no, I saw that happen.

You should go to the hospital anyway. You should just go to an ER here. And he's like, yes, but we've been in situations before where my son has been injured. We ended up waiting at an ER only to be told that we had to drive to like Los Angeles. And I was like, okay, yeah, I would. I don't know. i don't know obviously ask somebody else some other people were like yeah we have kids we've taken with this er this is where you should go they eventually all collected themselves and walked away he didn't carry his kid or anything his son walked and um i watched this whole circumstance unfold and i was like i am not that guy as much as i want to be that guy in a circumstance like this, he was doing everything right.

And he was being very calm and he knew that even though he was taking more time in that scenario, in the long run, this time was paying off better than what I would have done. And so I was reminded of like, what would you have done? Well, great question, Daniel. I would have lost my shit. I would have been I would have been running around. I would have been carrying him. I would have been like, we have to get an ambulance here now. Bring the doctors to us. Like he's like time would feel of the essence for no reason to me other than I don't like looking at this thing. It's wrong. feel of the essence for no reason to me other than i don't like looking at this thing it's wrong and like this is in my child and this has happened once before when my daughter fell she fell she slipped on a bath mat and fell face first into a cabinet knob and it was like a metal alloy and it shattered she fell so hard on it and like pulled her head upward and caught her kind of like right underneath the the yeah the eyebrow and split open blood everywhere and my wife heard her crying and came upstairs and was like what happened and i couldn't tell her like i was in such this uh or this the state that i didn't have

the words for what had just happened and i was, I couldn't get it out what had happened. And I'm like trying to like help my daughter, but also like trying to explain what happened. And it's just not good. One of those things is not going to work. And so like I just stopped and I didn't explain it to her. It took like an hour before I was like calmed down enough that I could tell my wife even what had happened. And so I'm not good in those situations. My daughter bit through her tongue.

And I was like driving her to the hot to the uh er and i'm like writhing in my seat and like calming trying to calm myself down she's fine but i'm being like it's okay it's okay honey so it's fine it's fine and i know that there's a tongue dangling back there and and she's fine at this point and like gotten over it and i'm just like i can't i can't deal i can't deal i can't deal like losing my shit i'm not as much as i want to be heroic i'm those circumstances i am useless it feels like every time you turn around there is another major leak of personal information you get those emails from banks or from ticket companies or from whatever saying warning there's been a another leak of information

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Certain terms may apply, so be sure to check the site for details. Well, Soren. Yeah. I have a recent story where I was the kind of person I wanted to be. Oh my god, Daniel. Did you give directions properly to an ambulance? Not in like a heroic situation. Not in like a crisis or anything. But I was, this was a few days ago early in the

morning we the building manager at my building doesn't live on site and she emailed all the residents with a picture that another resident had taken of our garbage area our garbage area is in the parking lot we have one large dumpster and eight or nine cans that all collect mixed recyclables. So everything just goes in there. And the picture was of the garbage area, and there were a ton of empty cardboard boxes. Some of them were open with other boxes stuffed in them. Some of them were broken down and just like left in that area it looked it certainly looked trashy and bad and the building manager emailed this picture to all of us it was like one of the residents just sent this to me this is unacceptable this is horrible if anyone did this take care of it or if you didn't do it but you see an address of who was responsible you can call me and tell

me the address and every number everyone who calls me this is confidential and i will deal with the person who did this and that was the email so i took uh jackson for a little walk to the beach we hung out on the beach for a while and then i came back to the building and i chained jackson up near the garbage and i started breaking down the boxes and folding them up and putting them away and uh was just like i'm gonna just do this like truly i had time it was like and it was like a nice morning and i'm also you can tell by looking at the boxes that i wasn't looking for addresses because I didn't even want to be like accidentally a narc on this. But you could see by looking at the boxes that it has things on it like labeled kitchen or labeled bedroom or labeled like John's dresser.

Clearly someone had recently moved and moving always takes so much longer than you want it to take. There are always so many boxes to break down. And when you feel like you're done, you don't want to break down any more boxes. I understand how exhausting moving is. half where the heat wave is briefly interrupted by 40 mile per hour winds and uh tremendous lightning storms and and flooding so there's been no good weather patterns to to deal with a move and i also uh you know you can be lazy at the end of moving and you don't feel like doing it i have time so i'm breaking down these boxes and like methodically folding them, listening to my podcast, putting them in the recycling. And I wanted to do this because I wanted to make things look nicer and make a problem go away because it was within my power to make a problem go away. And there was something sitting in me that, you know, at the risk of self-aggrandizement, when I get this email that comes in with this picture that another resident took and then complained,

I thought, like, this is one of those two kinds of people scenarios, where you can take a picture and complain and get really upset about it, or you can fix something if it's within your power to fix it. So I'm fixing it because it's within my power to fix it. fix it so i'm fixing it because it's within my power to fix it and as as as much as i'd like to say i'm exclusively listening to my better angels that's not 100 what i was hoping would happen because then a woman comes out from my building to approach me and soren this is what i hoped would happen because this woman is clearly the one who took... She has her phone in her hand.

And I don't know if she's going to film me or if she's just going to show me the email that she sent. But she comes up to me with her phone out. She goes, all these boxes yours? And I go, big smile on my face. She goes, no. She goes, what? I'm like, yeah.

Someone emailed the building manager this morning about all these boxes and I had some time before work so I figured I'd break them down and she is just stunned she doesn't know what to do she stares me for a little while it's like did you are you new do I know you how do I have we? How long have you lived here? I was like, I've lived here for, uh, pretty well over a year at this point. And I told her my unit number. She introduced herself to me and I was like, I'm Daniel. I would shake your hand, but it's, it's covered in someone else's garbage. And she was just like looking at all the garbage. And she was like, yeah, there's just, it's, there was just so much of it. And I was like, yeah, I know.

You know what I think happened? I think, because if you look at the recycling bins, like eight out of nine of them are full. Like, like we are due for someone to pick up our recycling. So I think the person whose boxes these were, they're like, there's, there's just no room for them unless you're going to really spend a lot of time like moving stuff out of cans. There's just like, like, I don't even know how I'm going to fit all this recycling in these cans but i got time and you know we all share this space together it's our space so i'm going to take care of it and she is so deflated and i'm so happy and then she pivots to something else to be wrong when When I'm talking about how it's like our shared space, we all have to make it look nice.

And she goes, yeah. And did you see? Because there's like a, like imagine my building is in the shape of an H. There's like an alley, a connected alley in between that like cuts the building in half where you can walk through from one side to the other. She's like, and did you see in the thruway,

someone had written in chalk all over the thruway i was like what did they write in chalk what did they write she goes i'm just like just like a line of yellow chalk just lines on the wall must have been one of the kids and i was like yeah it was probably one of the. It's probably one of the kids here for summer having a good time. And she was like, there was nothing else for her to do. She's so, she was like, well, thank you. Thank you for doing this. I was like, yeah, it's really, it's no problem. Like I said, I had time and, you know, again, it's our space.

It really, I don't mind to do it. I like being outside. She's like, it's our space. It really, I don't mind to do it. I like being outside. She's like, okay. All right, well, I'll see you around. She started to walk away. And I said, it was nice to meet you. And I, let's say her name was Sandy. I was like, it was nice to meet you.

Sandy, right? She goes, uh-huh. And then she looks at me, clearly doesn't remember my name, and walks away and just goes off to her world. And I felt so good. I did like the good guy thing of putting the cardboard away. But then I did like the bad guy thing of like being seen doing it and feeling superior to someone. Just being in a situation where...

Which scratches an itch that I wish I didn't have. But it's definitely in me. And I'm sure... I'm not sure. I have a strong suspicion that she probably... Because she seemed like the type, I don't think she went back to her place and thought, this is a teachable moment for me. I can be the kind of person who makes the world better too.

I think she went back to her apartment and was like, he's fucking lying. That was his garbage. I know it. I know that was his garbage. And he is lying. And he's lazy. This is the world that I want to live in. That's what I assume.

I bet he did that chalk too. Yeah. Yeah. I bet if I was to search him right now he'd have chalk on him. Yeah. I mean guaranteed. It's so funny how quickly

like the antagonist in any situation flip-flops so fast in my brain uh where like you're telling me the story i said we left a bunch of shit out i'm like that sucks if somebody does that the minute you find i find out that there's a tenant who told i'm like no new bad guy that's the new one yeah there's a tenant who told that that's yeah i didn't like it either but we don't tell on each other we're not fucking getting stitches around here and you don't take a picture and send it to the off-site manager to say like i don't like that i have to look at this cardboard yeah that's wild and also and then

the way the manager reacted to it too which was yes you were right to send me this picture anyone else who wants to send me information about this person will be handsomely rewarded. I know. I was really shocked at, because I wish I still had the email, but I deleted it and Gmail sucks now, so I can't find anything ever.

But it really seemed like her saying, the building manager saying, if you call me, all calls are confidential. I think in my memory, she said something that was like, as you all call me all calls are confidential i think in my memory she said something that was like as you all know all calls are confidential as if this was like a standing policy yeah her yeah this isn't the first time somebody's put trash next to trash yeah uh so daniel i'm so oh god it's just like i want to replay that in my mind because it's so nice when you're in a moment

where someone thinks you're doing something wrong and you're not like it's like this moment I just want to sit in for the rest of my life like getting pulled over at a cop being like confident that you've got drugs in your car and you're like you know you don't have anything in the car and you're like I don't want you to search

it yeah well what do you have to hide like why don't you want me to search it? I don't know. It's going to take a long time. I don't like the idea of you tearing up my car. Those moments where you are completely in control is like just having two aces in your hand. You feel so good. There's no better feeling in the world

than that kind of self-righteousness. And it truly couldn't have gone better. And I definitely have shades of being an asshole in this because I secretly wanted this outcome. But there was no guarantee that was ever going to happen. It was still like, by design, I'm cleaning up this garbage and putting it away and spending my time putting this garbage away and like telling myself as I'm doing it, this is still a good thing. This is still, like, if all that comes of this is you've fixed a problem, then you've succeeded in, like,

a goal that's in my heart all the time of making every room and every planet, not every planet, but making this planet, leaving it better than how we found no it's sort of how i i like to go through life it's just like leaving things slightly better than how we found them and protecting things that we have so if all that happens is i make things slightly better that's a great win that i can accomplish before eight o'clock in the morning uh but then the woman coming up with the phone out and like it's it it

i i paint with such a broad brush that is very unfair to a lot of people but she's exactly who i wanted her to be too like demographically 100 who i wanted this person to be and her name was It's Karen. Yeah. Oh, that's such a dream. Hey, when I started this podcast with my best friend, Daniel, we didn't have in our minds that this could actually be a business. We just thought, hey, it would be really fun to keep talking and it would be fun to have that be something that everyone else could listen to. Really philanthropic if you think about it. But in the end, we ended up making piles and piles of money that we didn't know what to do with

because we weren't used to the idea of having a business. Well, thanks to Shopify, the global commerce platform, they gave us help at every stage of that business from the launch your own online shop stage. We're actually not there yet. To the first real life store stage. Also, I'm now starting to realize how far back we actually are. All the way to the,

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Go to shopify.com slash qq now and grow your business no matter what stage you're in. shopify.com slash QQ now and grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash QQ. So frequently my wife does this thing where she will pick up trash when she goes to pick up my son at school. Around the school, we walk through the whole playground essentially to get there. And then a couple of blocks to walk there. There's always stuff out.

And so it's this sisyphean task where she's just like she will bring rubber gloves she'll bring a bag and she does this really kind thing where she's like picking up trash and every single day it's full up again you know like there's like the kids are disgusting they throw stuff everywhere and she's just quietly doing this and uh uh your first might be, are you doing it too? No. Generally not. No.

But she's a better person than I am. Because you pick up garbage every time I see you. That's not like a setup to a joke or anything like that. You just are known for picking up trash, walking down the street in in a city picking up trash and throwing it out in whatever garbage you come across my the reason that i don't do it is an ill-preparedness where like i would if i see trash in the way i'm like oh shit there's trash i don't have anything for that i don't have and that looks pretty wet too i don't think i want to pick that up.

But she goes with gloves and everything. She does a really great job. And one time she was doing it. I was with the kids at the park and she was picking up trash around the park. And this janitor was just like sitting and watching her. And she was like, aware that he was watching. And then she walked past him she said hi and he goes what are you doing and he's she's like i'm picking up trash and he's like is that your job she was like

no and he was so confused and and they did just like these people bewildered that anyone would do something that was not for immediately for themselves is like baffling to some people. Um, and I think Daniel, when Mr. Rogers said, look for the heroes, like look for the people who are running towards the tower as opposed to

away. Yeah. You're one of those guys, man, you are one of the heroes. I mean, I don't want to take away the, tint of asshole that's part of that. No, I think that's true of everybody.

I mean, we also, we, Fiancé and I will clean up the beach. We go through our beach every couple of days or so with a bag and just clean up garbage from there. And in my old place, I lived on a street where there was like a big grass divider separating eastbound and westbound traffic. It was still a small town. A medium. Thank you. Jesus. And because it's a beach town, you get all kinds of ruffians and degenerates who will throw things out their window right onto this grass medium so once a median once a week uh i would take jackson on a walk and i would have my gloves and i would have my bag and i would pick up whatever little tiny bottles of smirnoff or scratchies or whatever people were leaving out

there i would collect that in garbage and uh i never got stopped by anyone who was asking me what i was doing but the one time i was stopped the guy who was asking me what I was doing. But the one time I was stopped, the guy who was like, hey, man, it's great work. Usually I do that. It's great to see you doing it. That's awesome. I want to be like, no, you fucking don't. I'm here every Monday.

This trash never disappears when I'm not there. I believe that you want to be the kind of person who does this and i i i i believe that you've thought of it yeah and maybe you even told people you did it but but no sir you don't no you don't that's great i so the assholeness element of it where you're like hoping for something like that so the assholeness element of it where you're like hoping for something like that, I think that that's part of everybody helping ever. Like the point is the work is getting done,

you know, but like where the reasons behind it are always going to have like a little bit of a strange shade to them. Like anyone who becomes, let's say like the, the highest, the highest form of like a hero, like if you're like a firefighter or something like that,

right. You become a firefighter because there is a performativeness to it like there's something about it it's not just an altruistic thing it's also like the cachet that comes with being a firefighter you wear the uniform you know that it's like you're you're a conspicuous hero and like that's that's what you value and that's fine like nobody should be nobody should look down on themselves for for doing the right thing for reasons that aren't entirely pure because there's no such thing as entirely pure i mean the bible is pretty clear about it that you're that god sees what is done in secret and he will reward you in the kingdom of heaven and so you don't need to go

around broadcasting what you're doing, which I didn't. I mean, I wasn't broadcasting what I'm doing until this literal moment where I'm speaking into a microphone to talk about my good deeds, just in case God missed them. I remember as a kid, uh,

getting the idea during recess, it must've been like third grade. I was like i'm gonna pick up trash this uh on the playground i'm gonna spend my whole recess doing it and i'm gonna do it in a place where the teachers can see me and then they're gonna give me an extra recess and it just like that that was what was occurring in my brain the most valuable thing to a child i already had in my mind what the reward was going to be and so i picked up trash around it around them all over the place and they were like very supportive of that they were like you're doing a great thing thank you for doing

this threw it all away bell rings i'm like hey since i spent the whole recess picking up that trash would it be possible for me to get a couple extra minutes of recess and they were like no and i was like what that but i but all that i fucking wasted all that time doing bullshit no one wanted to do that i didn't want to do that i don't care i can go through all that trash back on the ground i don't care i just wanted a recess that was just mine and doing it for entirely the wrong reasons but the work still got very it's interesting to me that uh i thought that was occurring to me now um that we would pick up trash in high school um as uh in affiliation with one of the like student narc groups that i was a part of one of those things that looks good on a high school resume when you're applying to college one

of those like not a single friend of yours yeah natural helpers yeah one of these these thankless groups that you join hoping it looks good on a resume um and we would just have like a couple of times a year well Well, the natural helpers are going to go to the train station and pick up garbage and clean up the garbage. Or we're going to go to the beach and pick up garbage on the beach and just like clean up these areas. And I'm thinking about this now that I'm older is the stray garbage pickup, uh, endeavor. pickup uh endeavor is that solely within the purview of uh forced child servitude like that's not there's no my business uh at hbo and then before that my business at cracked and before that my business at ruby Tuesday. They don't have a similar thing. They don't make the adults like every once

in a while. There's no like like mandate for adults to clean up the garbage. So it seems like it's just children and prisoners that we have. It's handling the infrastructure. Yeah. It's probation

thing. It's like yeah you're doing this instead of time or paying money. That's probably a bad system. You teach kids really great values about not cheating and being a good person and working hard and cleaning up garbage. And then there's almost whispers like, hey, as soon as you leave here, you don't have to do any of this fucking shit anymore. Once you graduate, you can be a real person like me just throw your trash out the window i don't i mean i'm not even done with these chicken wings and watch man yeah i don't i guess it never really occurred to me it is really like a

a child labor that we're totally fine sanctioning. I guess because nobody's making a profit off of it. But it is weird that the only other people we make do that work is somebody who was drunk driving. We're like, ah, you fucked up. You got to do the kid stuff now. You got to do the same terrible job we get children. Right. A grim thought. But there's got to be some city planner who is like, we arrested how many people this year? Oh, thank God. These streets are getting filthy. I was really worried we might need to pay someone to clean up all these soda cans, but phew.

So there are videos that I watch online of... Me too. That about wraps it up for today. I'm not the only one. There are videos I watch online of generally they are motorcyclists, but there are also other circumstances. There's somebody in a parking lot where somebody will throw trash out their window. A motorcyclist will come along,

pick up the trash, throw it back in the car. And I love these. Like they're like my favorite thing in the world um it's it's only a thing i think you can get away with on something like a motorcycle because you no one can keep up with you no one can like keep pace with you and it's what i secretly want to do all the time because i see people throwing trash out their windows and i'm like yeah we all have to live here don't don't do that i would tell the building manager if there was one but uh yeah i don't i don't know what to do with that like other that feeling other than just like eat it until i watch these videos and then it's very cathartic and it's like oh yeah okay good

some people are getting their their reckoning yeah that's wonderful i also do think it's worth saying that i understand the appeal of throwing things out your window it it is not something i do because we all don't do it yeah even with like an apple my brother will be eating an apple and because they're biodegradable you can leave them anywhere you're allowed to do that he will throw it out his window and uh it looks so cool and there's there's such a simplicity to it and like when you watch they make a big show of it in uh anchorman because it's set in the 70s the people who were just like drinking a smoothie or a milkshake or whatever and then they just throw it over their shoulder behind them it's the past and the characters are assholes so it's

allowed but i still see it just like oh that's so nice that's so freeing to be done with a thing and not have to think like now i have to like me a sucker driving around with an apple core in my car until i get home so i could bring the garbage into my house to put it in my garbage and then add to my own garbage. How nice would it be to just like, I'm done with this thing, bonk, throw it away, take a cigarette, throw it on the ground, stomp it out. We all know why that's appealing. The appeal is clear. The appeal is like this thing stops existing behind you.

You throw it and the world just stops existing back you yeah like you throw it you're here you throw it and the world just stops existing back there and that thing is gone right and how paradoxically my dream situation is to never have to use my home garbage that i could just keep that nice get my trash can clean yeah um yeah i i understand the appeal of it obviously but we are the fact that we are all controlling that impulse is what makes me so angry when somebody is not. Because I'm like, yeah, we all want to cut in line, dude, but we're not doing it because this is the way society works. We've all agreed that this is a better version. And even to the point where I will be walking past a trash can with stuff that I've accumulated by eating food or whatever.

And I'm like, okay, this can go in there and this can go in there. But now I'm going to hang onto this bottle and we're going to wait till we get to something a little bit better somewhere that this belongs as opposed to, and my impulse is like, put it all in there. It goes away forever. I don't ever hear about it again,

but I know that I've done enough. Surely I do more than most people, but I'm still like, now I got to go to the now i gotta go find a recycling as well yeah and then occasionally you will get to a place where you've got the options for compost trash and recycling and i'm like okay um kids you should go play because i'm gonna be here for like 15 minutes trying to figure this out now i've got a receipt here i know that's paper but it's like a weird carbon paper.

And I don't think that's good for the planet. So I think that goes in trash. Now my bottle cap, that's different than the bottle itself. And I know they need to be separate for the recycling purposes. The bottle, easy. But now I'm dealing with this other type

of like thicker plastic cap. Okay, let's look this up. Where does this go? It was also separately very very nothing more frustrating when i was living in the city than picking up garbage while i'm walking down the street and just humming my little like i'm a good person i'm a good person i'm a good person sing it to myself and i get to the garbage can and it's like full to the point of bursting there's no room for me to put anything else in there unless i want to stack this bag of dog

shit on top. And I have to really stare at the garbage and be like, how good a person am I? Am I look for another trash can good? Am I deviate from the most efficient route that I was taking to the office

so I could find another garbage can? I guess I am. That sucks. It fucking sucks. Yeah. Me, just like try to picture this in your mind, me standing over my own trash, holding two AA batteries and just staring at the trash can and being like, I don't have a separate bag to put these in right now. I just took all my dead batteries in. It would be so easy to be rid of these right now. But I think that's bad.

I don't totally understand why. But I can't. And just like looking at the trash can, just wanting to put them in there. I go through the same thing with batteries where I lie to myself every time I need to get rid of a battery where it's like oh these batteries are kicked they're supposed to go to a specific like you gotta take them to staples and like recycle them properly and then then the the devil on my shoulder will be like didn't we hear that was a myth didn't we read somewhere that they solved that and we don't have to do it anymore and i'm like um hey you know you're making some sense devil kind of but like i need i need more from you man i need i need a source i really want to believe you on this but but you've tricked me before yeah that's how i feel about food on my

recyclables where i'm like i'm trying to clear out the pasta sauce glass and i'm like or the the container that it came in and i'm like if there's still some crust around the ring and i'm like surely that can go in the next piece of glass whatever they're building that little bit of pasta sauce won't matter that's fine right i'm so confident i'm not gonna google it yeah also well think of the water i would waste trying to clean the rim of this glass. Where is the payoff? At what point is this diminishing returns? So I think we're just going to put this whole thing in the trash.

Yeah. Yeah. I can really talk myself into being a worse person pretty easily. Yeah. But it's just so hard to be good. It is hard to be good. It is hard to be good. I think I did a pretty good job. I resisted the temptation to make a joke that said,

I also used to pick up trash in high school. We had to go to another town for that. That's good. And that was going to be a joke about, yeah, you got it. You see where it was going. And I was like, it's right there. It's a nice low- fruit to pick but yeah i don't think i think it'll be narratively too confusing yes it's off brand for us to to dip into that yeah yeah it's a good joke but an off-brand one so i didn't

make it there are moments where i have where i'm on social media, like X when I was on that or on blue sky where like the tone is clearly something different than you, what you and I do, which is very along the lines of, Hey, I might commit suicide. Here's a joke about it. Yeah. You know, you know, that brand, that brand that's on there or like people just waiting to die. And that is not me. And every once in a while I will think of a really good joke that is that brand and i'll be like i could post this it would do really well but i would really hurt my brand yeah no one would know what to do with that i think i just gotta eat this one or i could sell it to someone

yeah who's who's sad on blue sky and posts a lot everyone might have disposable income oh yeah disposable income is the problem that's right that's the thing you're never gonna uh all right everyone well thank you for listening to the show. Quick question with Soren and Daniel, which you already know. You can find us on Patreon where we do special episodes. We call them After Dark. We do? We actually do.

We answer some questions that you guys have of us, which is really fun to do. It turns out we really enjoy our audience, which didn't ever anticipate. I'm going to be honest with you. I didn't think I'd like people. But you're all wonderful. And you ask some really great questions. Anyway, that's Patreon slash Quick Question. You can find us on X at Soren and Daniel at Quick Question.

You can find us, you can find Daniel and I on Blue Sky, because we're not on X anymore. Just go search our names. We're on Instagram. It's soaring and Daniel, a podcast at instagram.com. Uh, if you liked our theme song,

that's by me Rex. And you can find their music anywhere you listen to your music or whole albums. If you want to download those at me, Rex dot bandcamp.com. We are engineered, produced and, uh, edited by

Jacob Weinstein and Gabe Harder when he's also around. Not today. And that's it. Wow, that was all from memory, Daniel. I'm no longer writing this down. Atta boy. Great job. I may have gotten the Instagram somewhat wrong,

but it's more or less right. Yeah, it didn't sound it didn't sound confident no when you were delivering it i don't think quick question was i wasn't paying i wasn't paying too much attention because i was thinking about uh our audience here versus our audience elsewhere and my brain started spinning but i'm trying to bite my tongue on it because i keep doing this thing where we end the show and then I bury more content at a part where I'm sure people have

stopped listening so I'm going to just hold it in and I'm going to talk about it in our next episode alright bye question for you all right i want to hear your thoughts on what's on your mind i've got a quick quick question for you all right the answer's not important i'm just glad that we could talk tonight so what's your favorite who did you get oh forget it Saw a movie Daniel O'Brien Two best friends of comedy writers

If there's an answer they're gonna find it I think you'll have a great time here I think you'll have a great time here