Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - The Future We Got vs. The Future We Wanted

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

The guys discuss what modern technology would impress their 17-year-old selves, the downsides of smartphones, and the music that never made it to streaming services. Plus, Daniel reveals himself as the keeper of records for a forgotten band that now only exists on his homemade mix CD.Follow the guys on Bluesky:https://bsky.app/profile/sorenbowie.bsky.social/https://bsky.app/profile/danielobrien.bsky.socialThanks Factor! Go to FACTORMEALS.com/FACTORPODCAST and use code FACTORPODCAST to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping on your first box.Thanks to Lumen for sponsoring. Head to http://lumen.me/QQ for 20% off your purchase.

Chapel Rowan is another one where I'm like, she's the Victorian looking one. And if she's not doing that that particular day, then I'm like, oh, yeah, she's going to change on you a few times, man. I'm really sorry. Question for you, alright? The answer's not important, I'm just glad that we could talk tonight So what's your favourite? Who did you get? What would I be if you remembered? Words without words, word and all that Who do we know? Oh forget it I saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien

Two best friends and comedy writers If there's an answer, they're gonna find it So hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, the podcast with long answers. I am one half of that podcast, CD Wr writer for last week tonight with John Oliver, author of How to Fight Presidents with No One. And that's it. Daniel O'Brien joined us as always by my co-host, Mr. Soren Buie. Soren, say hello. Hey everybody. I'm Soren Buie. I'm a writer for American Dad. If you're visually watching this podcast and you see me doing this every once in a while where I'm like turning to the side. It looks like I'm sulking.

I've got a heater in here. I got a little space heater in here and I'm just like warming my tootsies by the fire. Do you need a space heater right now? I know you're in a shack or garage. We are currently, the temperature outside is about 47 degrees and in my garage, colder, I would say, because throughout the night it, my garage is the desert. I don't understand. It just, it holds no heat. He

can gain no purchase here. So I have like a little space heater right next to me that I just sort of turned to every once in a while and it's like, Ooh, there we go. Oh, yeah. I've also got a little visual game for our YouTube viewers. I'm not sure if this is actually gonna play, but I'm gonna keep my hands up and I'm gonna raise my feet up. Yep. Rolling down the slope, the natural slope

of the floor of my house. Oh no. You're on a grade. Sure am. We do some really. You know that? Yeah. Do some pretty fun matchbox car racing here. That sucks. Folks, if you're just joining us, I'm 90 years old.

Daniel Bottonhouse. Matchbox car racing. That's so, that sucks bad that, cause I, go ahead. Well, it's something where like, as you're touring the house and seeing the house, you can definitely feel there's like a slant to the floors and the, you know, it's an old house. So the person who's giving you the tour

and the people who worked on the house is like, yeah, it's an old house. They have like some kind of slant to them, it's fine. And when you're walking, you definitely perceive it, but you don't really need to adjust or do anything about it. When you decided to make the slanted room your office and your chair has wheels on it,

then you have to, you're constantly aware of it. I'm always bracing myself. I can't just like take a second, step back from the computer and like, let me it. I'm always bracing myself. I can't just like take a second step back from the computer and like, let me think how I'm going to solve this problem. Oh, oh, oh, there I go. Um, I know that it's like being in a car where you're you've got like pull in one direction or another. You just sort of get used to it after a while, but you can never take your hand off the wheel or your car just veers off the road. Right. My old car was like, let me, if I could just, if I just have two hands for one second,

then I could, I could get changed while driving and I, and I, I could save time. We're just like one second. Nope. The car flips over. Yeah. We, so when we were looking at houses long ago, we were up in Topanga Canyon and for people who don't obviously live in Los Angeles, that's just like an area of LA that it feels more wooded and it's hilly. So all the houses are built into the side of the hill, which means you don't have no yard space

or anything like that. Your back, let's say you're like two story, your back story, the second story is like up against a hill. Like you, and these houses for whatever reason, all of them should not have been built there and are tilting. So as you walk through these houses, it's like being in a dream where rooms just start

to get smaller or the floor feels very much like just on a kilter. And we're thinking about it. We're like, I don't think we can do this. It's kind of fun for a day to be in it. But to live my whole life here where I never feel like I've got solid purchase, I don't think I could do it.

Yeah. Well, I'm going to live my whole life here. Yeah, it's going to be fun for you. Can't wait. Can't wait to think of all the fun things you'll do on that floor. Yeah, I'm going to get one of those office chairs that I can bolt to the ground and then I'll be fine.

Is your foundation sinking? What's going on? Is it just the house is settled that way? I think the house is just old and settled that way and things tilt and morph over time and certainly down in the basement,'m looking at Joyce's, Joyce's article right? Yeah. Yeah I'm looking at Joyce's and some of them these 1908 Joyce's just have like a very pronounced curve in the middle of them and I'm just like well that's held for this long. I'm not gonna sit here and look at this house

and pretend that all of my bones are in their original shape. I fucked with mine too. It's all right, we're all collapsing. I know my L7 isn't there anymore. I'm a little shorter. That's gotta be something. Yeah, I'm sorry that you're dealing with that.

It is genuinely cold here. I'm in a garage that, and I keep telling myself, like my treat is always going to be, hey, you're going to do this garage at some point. Like, you're going to turn this into a more livable space. It won't be like an ADU where we have plumbing or anything out here, but it will be something that I enjoy coming to as opposed to currently what it is, the pantry from the shining. So I would like to be in a situation where I come in here and it's not like, oh no, it's going to be so cold in there. It's going to be like a little cave, but I just never get around

to it. Partially because I like looking forward to something. And if I do it, then I don't have anything to look forward to anymore. Sure. We are weather wise at the point. I think this comes up every year actually where it's the middle of last five years where our stories intersect and you're talking about it being 47 degrees and you put on a space heater and I'm talking about it being 47 degrees and I'm opening windows. I'm just fucking stoked to It's starting to warm up out here. It's so thrilling. Two shifts in the night, passing each other in opposite directions.

I see that you're in a t-shirt. That pisses me off a little. It's got collars and buttons. No, what I mean is that you look warm and easy breezy right now. Like things are nice for you. I wore the sweater knowing full well the sweater would not be warm enough but I was like my jacket makes too much noise

so I'm not wearing it. You've got for listeners and viewers who haven't seen this before, Sorin has one of those jackets that alerts him when there's danger around and it's very it's impossible to calibrate it because like, we're all kind of in danger all the time. And so it's giving out some kind of warning a lot, just like, warn it, warn it. The problem is it's also on a national scale. So I get Amber alerts on this jacket constantly.

Silver alerts now too. Yeah. Well, Daniel, if you want to, we can jump into the show because I have a quick question for you. Let's jump into the show. Hit me. Okay. I want you to presume that you could meet

your 17 year old self. Ah, peak Daniel. And obviously you're gonna have a lot of advice and stuff for him, but he's guaranteed the first question he's going to have for you is what is the future like? He wants to know what's interesting about the future. I want to know what's a piece of current technology that you could tell Daniel at that age that would actually sound impressive to him. I'll go first. I mean, you know your previous self.

For instance, like a modern day laptop will not register with a 17 year old me. Like they're like, it holds so much, there's so much RAM. He would be like, I don't know what the fuck that is. That's what I was thinking. It's such a hard question, because I'm trying to be as thoughtful with it as possible,

but like objectively, the piece of technology that has changed my life in the most profound ways is a smartphone and 17 year old Daniel, this is 2003, what is known as the, the, certainly the first iPhone and what is accepted as the first smartphone was 2007. So it would be completely unfamiliar technology to 17 year old Daniel, but I don't think it would get him pumped because 17 year old Daniel didn't have a cell phone in his pocket and didn't want one.

I didn't get a cell phone until I went to college and my parents were like, you should have this in case you get lost and we need to, or someone dies and then we need to find you. And I reluctantly accepted a cell phone. So the idea of, and I wasn't like, I was an online person at 17 years old. I had websites that I liked and we were early adopters.

So like I had middle school experiences with chat rooms, but the idea of being connected to the internet at all times and being connected to email at all times. Well, you wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't even know what that was. It wouldn't have felt like a game changer to 17 year old me. If 39 year old me had come back and was like,

you can get a camera and your email and access to weather.com and espn.com all on a little box in your pocket that gets hot all the time. I mean, like, what are you, this is, is there anything else? I wanted flying cars, I wanted hover boards, and you're selling me on like,

I can take pictures whenever I want. A thing I don't do now, and I can get email whenever I want. A thing I don't think I wanna have access to. Yes. Quick question for you. Do you find that you're getting takeout more than you'd like?

It feels like a convenience thing. It's just, you get to that time of night where you're like, oh, darn it. I spent all my time thinking about other things today and what I should have been thinking about is what I was gonna have for dinner and now I have no other options. My hands are tied. I gotta get takeout. Let's talk about what I ate from Factor instead,

because I didn't have to think about those things. I had a beautiful poblano pepper and chicken with a cauliflowered rice. Rice, cauliflower? Yeah, I think that's the way you say it. And then I just sort of lumped them all together and cut up the chicken and mixed it all up. Oh, gorgeous. It was so good. And I didn't have to think about it. And that was the best part. Factor has chef made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. They're ready to heat and eat in two minutes. So no excuses. That's why Factor is America's number one ready to eat meal delivery service. Check out today's sponsor, Factor. Head over to factormeals.com slash factor podcast and use code factor podcast to get 50% off your first box

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I, I thought about my phone as well. And I was like, and the reason why I was like that. to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. I thought about my phone as well. And I was like, and the reason why I was like that, I don't think he'd be interested in that for the same reasons. Like, well, a 17 year old me has no use for those things. At my time, 17, at my time, when I was 17, phones, there were cell phones, but we weren't, I didn't, I surely didn't have one.

And cell phones were on a trajectory to getting smaller and smaller. Like that was the goal. Yes. And so like, if I was to tell myself, oh no, you have a phone. It's much bigger than the ones you see today. I'd be like, oh, you guys fucked up.

Like, and they're like, and I'd be like, well, but you can do a lot of things on it. You can, there's maps, like anywhere you go, you can get a map to where you want to go. And I'd be like, buddy, I know my town. I know where I'm going. That is not one of 17 year old Daniel's problems. Yeah, I think I'm good on maps.

The only way I can think I could even pitch a phone to myself is as a music streaming service. Like if I could explain, it's like an iPod. I shit iPods didn't even really exist. But if I could be like, it's like a mixtape. It's like our mix CD, but it's every song. Yeah, it's a mixt CD, but it's every song in the world, even songs you hate. And I think he might be able to kind of get on board with that, but he would also be like, I'd also have to explain, you have to get a new one every two years. They fall apart

after two years. And he'd be like, what? My CDs last longer than that. You can't breathe on the bottom of them. Right. And he'd be pissed about that. When you were going over the rules of this hypothetical in advance of this episode, you said it's not a piece of technology that you would bring back and give to yourself. You would just tell yourself about it. But I think even if we weren't playing by those rules, if 2025 Daniel showed up with a smartphone and was like, you're 17 years old,

this is gonna give you so much information. You never have to study for anything again. I think 17 year old Daniel was still be like, no, thank you. I don't want another like thing in my pockets. And that thing is fucking huge. I'm so, I can't, it doesn't go with the chain to my wallet. I, this is the past, you understand.

I can, I vividly remember as a kid having to carry keys in my pocket briefly. Like once I started to drive at 16 and I had keys and I was like, oh, fuck, this fucks up everything. And leaving my keys everywhere because we'd go jump on trampolines and stuff at people's houses. You take it all out of your pockets and you jump and then you're like, and the world stops existing behind me. And it's like you go do other things and you're like, oh no, where are my keys? Because also where I grew up, we didn't have house keys. So our house

was never locked. We'd go on vacation and our house wouldn't be locked. And so this was the first time I had actually had keys in my pocket. I was like, how do people live like this? Just, I would come home sometimes with down a shoe. And then this future stranger is like, here, you want this phone. This phone is your whole life.

It's got your wallet on it. Like, oh man, no way. Absolutely not. I'm gonna drop that phone in a swamp where I'm trying to climb a tree. I know it looks big, but it's gonna be a little bigger when you have to put a little rubber protector

all over it because it's very delicate. And also, I mean, as much as you try to protect it, it's gonna break. It's gonna break within probably about a year and a half. And look, I know you don't take pictures constantly, but with this phone, you have a camera that's very often you have to charge. So like, that's the other, oh yeah,

I should have told you that at the beginning. The most important thing in your life once you get a smartphone is orienting everything you do around proximity to an outlet at all times. Because if you can't charge your phone, your life shuts down completely. So you have to change everything now. The idea of you like walking home from school

instead of taking the bus and then just being out for an afternoon in the world, out of the question. Cause you need to be able to charge your phone. Yeah, the charging, trying to explain like, you're gonna, at 17 also, I couldn't keep a handle on anything. The fact that I have two devices that go together.

And if one is missing, you can't use the other one. It was like, I would lose that cord. I lose those cables now. And I know the how important they are. As a 17 year old, a 17 year old me could not be trusted with a charging cable. Also, you couldn't be like, it's fine, man. Sometimes if you forget to charge it overnight,

you can just do it in your car. Oh no, wait, you can't. Yeah. You're not gonna be able to do it. And again, like all of the other things that are so natural as part of our lives with phones, like emails and web browsing and all of the apps that we have is something that you'd really have to sell

2003 Daniel on. Like even my- You have to explain. You have to have social media. Father worked for Amtrak for 38 and a half years and they got beepers at one point, which was like, ah, fuck beepers, great, now they can reach me. And I remember being a kid and his company,

not a lot of people had cell phones, but his company was like, we are going to give you a free cell phone, TJ. How do you feel about that? You don't have to pay for it. You can even make non-work calls on it. This is for free that we're giving to you so we can reach you whenever we need you."

And he said, no, thanks. And just like fully never took the phone. I don't think you could get away with that today. I think like if a company is giving you a company phone, they're savvier. But this was right at a turning point where he correctly spotted this as like, oh, this is a machine so my boss can call me when I'm at home not working. No, I'm not going to. That's a terrible way to live. No, thank you. I work when I work and then I go home. And I, 2003, Daniel didn't have like a job job stuff, but having email constantly available to me wouldn't have been a selling point. I wasn't emailing fucking anyone. Right.

I don't know that I had an email address. Again, it's not solving a problem for me. I didn't. You know, I didn't get an email address till I was in college. I mean, email certainly existed. Cause my dad, everyone's like, go into forums and meet people.

And then I would email with them, but I'd have to email through my dad's account. So he was just, it was like going through a prison service where the prison was just like, well, we're going to read all of these before they get to them. Dad, why is this all blacked out? When you printed it out for me, that's redacted. I didn't like what that person was saying. So yeah, that's obviously a hard sell. I also think my next instinct was streaming services, like the idea that you could just watch a movie or show anytime you wanted. And even then, I think that would enrage 17-year-old Soren because I tried to explain to him, oh no, you've got to... He'd be like, well, how do you buy it? And I'd be like, oh, well, you pay like

a monthly subscription, but there's a good chance the movies you won't be on the subscription you have. So you're going to need like six or seven others. You'd be like, what? So it's not like a library. You just described it to me as a library, that's not true. I'm like, no. No, in fact, you're going to have to have a lot of different services. Those movies, they're going to bounce around

and occasionally they won't be available anywhere. Then I'll be like, all right, well, I'll just go get it on VHS. I'm like, oh no, we don't have those DVDs either. Blu-rays, you don't know what that is yet. Those aren't going to be available anywhere. And then I'll be like, all right, well, I'll just go get it on VHS. And I'm like, oh, no, we don't have those DVDs either. Blue-ray, you don't know what that is yet. Those aren't going to be available either. And I'd be like, how much am I paying for this? Oh, man, easily over $200. Oh, and also, you know how like that huge, like the tremendous bonding experience you have of like once a year going to your friend's house to sleep over and watch Monty Python, Holy Grail over and over again, this replaces that. You don't watch things with anyone anymore. Also, you will never watch something more than once.

You might want to, but then you'll see something else immediately available that's brand new and you will chase that shiny thing. So anyway, as I was thinking about it, I was like, there's not going to be an answer that we're going to be happy with each other. Either I'm going to try and convince him something's very interesting that's not, or he's going to be impressed by something that I'm like, fucking that? What? I don so, I don't wanna say it, but like. I have one too that I'm embarrassed about. It's AI, like AI is not even good. But like explaining to 17 year old me what AI is, is like that would actually get his dick up.

That's like, I could just like say what I want and then it makes what I want. Like, I, cause I wasn't learning Photoshop back then. So the idea of like, oh yeah, I can help with Photoshop. You can just like describe the kind of image that you want and it will make that. And then you could tweak it from there. That would be a legitimate time saver for me at that age.

And it's like humiliating that I would be sharing this technology with young me. And I still be like, yeah, but we, but sucks and we hate it. And we don't think it should exist. And it's bad because they're training the AI on our data and also copyrighted material. And 17 year old me will be like, wait, we grew up, we give a shit about that stuff. It's like, yeah, it's mostly all we give a shit about. It's kind of all we care about. It's our big thing, man. Yeah, the idea that you could just

fabricate any image you want and it looks like a real pic, well, more or less like a real picture. You could make it look like a Polaroid and then it looks like a real photo. That would be hard. It would be very enticing for a 17-year-old me. I thought the thing that I would be most excited about at 17 and that I can very easily explain to a 17-year-old me, Waymo cars. Hey, did you know that when your metabolism is working properly, you feel the benefits in

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and they think the rest of the world knows what LA is like, but we don't. So Soren, tell people what this dystopian bullshit is. They are cars you regularly see on the road with nobody driving. They're self-driving cars that are not Teslas. And in Teslas, obviously somebody has to be in the driver's seat.

Frequently these Waymos have no one in the car at all. It's just a car with nobody. And I would have lost my 17 year old mind over the future if I knew that there were cars out there that were driving themselves. Yeah. Waymo's and Samos, another LA thing. It's a Samos little robot that delivers goods to your home if you order it and you don't want to pay a human for whatever reason. It's a door dash. It's a robot. Yeah.

That all looks and feels very futuristic and you would explain it to 17 yearold you and they'd be so pumped and you'd still be like, yeah, but you don't really use it. We don't. Yeah, it's so good. I don't even know how I would get in a Waymo. I don't know entirely what they do. For a long time, I thought they were a mapping service. That's wrong. That's not right. I think it's a taxi service, but I wouldn't even know. You'd need that big clunky phone I told you about earlier to even use it. Right. That 17-year-old Daniel is excited about Samo. He's like, no, I only brought up Samo as a way to get you excited about the phone and all the apps on the phone. Apps. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much anything that you do in the future, you're going to need an app for. It's going to be great. It's cool. Your vacuum, it's going to need to be on through your phone.

Yeah. Oh, I hate everything. Yeah. You're not allowed to have a job without a smartphone. Seems like a mistake. Yeah, probably. It's not going to work a lot of the time too. Those apps are going to crash a lot.

You're kind of the beta tester. Technically, you work for the app company for free. As those apps come out, you're sort of the one who has to figure out whether or not it works and then tell them. Yeah, the future is way better. Although one of the apps called Slack broke down for 10 hours one day last week. And my job just stopped.

And no one knew if it would start again. And no one could talk to each other. Because the talk to each other machine was gone. And now, yeah, and now that's, yeah, I try to explain like even like the speakers in my house because I get my head around that. I'd be like, you have all these speakers that are tied to that phone and they can play any music you want and they will keep playing while you use that phone. And they'd be like, cool. And I'd be like, but also the speakers are no longer, the company went out of business, so they're no longer supported. And so if any of you have any problems with them,

which you will regularly, it'll just stop. There's nothing to do. They will just stop working. The smart speakers is a good answer for 17 year old me. I think like broadly the same things that appeal about AI appeal with the smart speakers, because I could say you just speak out loud the thing that you want, whether it's a news story or a specific song, any song in the history of

music or if you want to know the weather. I don't know. 17 year old me is going to be so upset at how often- How much you love the fucking weather. ... currently talks about the weather. But that idea of like, I say a thing and then a robot gives me an answer, that would appeal. That's a good answer for this. I was trying to...

It's another... Well, you have to continually understand it. I watched Star Trek when I was young, so I knew that the idea that you could just say computer, and the computer could tell you anything. Like that, that's what I would assume that future computers were. So the idea of an Alexa, I'd be like, ah, so this is all you use now. And they'd be like, no, in fact, most people don't even have these. They don't like them.

Gosh, I wonder if Amazon would have appealed to me. No, probably not. No, I mean- I think I could sell- You're already 17 year old me. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Well, I didn't have any money, so it didn't. So the idea that I could get anything I wanted ordered to my house, like theoretically I had that technology in 2003 as well. I just didn't have the means to make it happen. I think I could sell myself on smartphones sell myself on smartphones specifically for what they can do to cars because that was an identifiable problem for me at 17 years old is I have mixtapes and I have my giant CD wallet and I didn't even have a nice enough car that it had like a big deal at the time,

a five CD changer. So for our listeners who are not old, you could put five CDs in your car and cycle through them. And that seemed like the most amount of music a person could ever want. Do you also tell them that? Most cars, it was in the trunk. So like if you wanted to change any CDs in that, you had to park, get out, open your trunk,

and then pop this big, it looked like a big magazine out, and then you could change out one of the CDs from it and put it back in, and then you were allowed to drive again. If you were lucky enough to get a five CD changer, I had a cassette player and CD player, and I would like take a CD out while driving very unsafely, open my massive CD wallet of all the physical media of songs, take one out, put it in, hope it wasn't scratched

and listen to, you know, your pot committed to a full album at that point because you're not going to change it multiple times on a drive. This was the reality of driving in 2003. If I could explain to the young me, with your phone, you plug your phone in and you get all music, anything that you want, all the music that you have, all the music that has ever existed until Spotify cancels a deal and then some of that music will go away and you'll need a new thing. But for our intents and purposes,

all the music in the world, it's on your phone and you could summon it onto your car and the sound quality is great. That would be appealing to 17-year-old me. All of the other stuff on the phone is superfluous bullshit. And 17-year-old me would be like, would it be possible to get a phone that's just for music and I get rid of the other stuff and I would say, no, you have to have your email on it. I don't know why. There was a time when you could have, but that time has passed, that ship has sailed.

It was also around the age of Limewire and Napster. That was lawless and weird where you'd try to get a song and there was a good chance you were getting up with something that was wrong. Like you knew it said Weezer, Dope Nose. And you'd be like, yep, that's the song I'm looking for. And then it would come on. It would be Bonnie Raitt's I Can't Make You Love Me. And you'd be like, ah, fuck, I already have this six times. Right. And so you download, you download Yeah by Usher. And unfortunately, the one you downloaded is the one that starts with a radio DJ from somewhere going like, oh shit, about to play this song that everyone's calling about. It's like, yeah, I just, I just want the song, sir, please.

This is how I, this is the only way I know how that song goes now is with you screaming before it starts. Yeah. This is the only way I know how that song goes now, is with you screaming before it starts. If I was to tell myself, oh, you can just type in a song and you're guaranteed to get the right song. You know that that one's going to be the auto-populate to the top. I'd be like, word, let's do that. How long does it take to download? 45 hours? They'd be like, no, man, you just listen to it right away. He would be like, that's incredible. That's so great. I can't wait. And I'd be like, but here's the monkey pot curse. It's on this device that's gonna control your life.

And you have to have it with you at all times. Also, and knowing where I was at in 2003, 17 year old me would be like, you mean I can just using my phone, listen to my favorite song, Prince Charming by International Orange. And I would say, no, that never makes the jump to streaming. It's only on the mixed CD you made.

Don't throw that CD out because I'm gonna miss that version. I'm gonna want to listen to that in the future. In fact, if we can just take a minute now, I know you have a lot of questions for me, but if we could just listen to that, it would mean a lot to me. It's the whole reason I came back here.

We don't have it in the future. There's probably other stuff we don't have in the future, but it's mostly this song, Prince Charming by International Orange. We all have those songs. I was at a snowboard competition when I was young, and at the end, for all the competitors, they do these raffles. And they'd also during that be tossing shit out to the crowd. And they talks tossed out this snowboard mix CD that was all local bands. And there was one song on it that I absolutely loved. And didn't ever even occur to me that like this band didn't make it big,

that this band that was not going to go anywhere. And so now I think back on that a lot. I know exactly how the song goes, but I will never find that song again. Yeah. There is a band that my band, Lunch Money Criminals, do we have a clip? Here it is. Sounds great.

There was a band that we used to play with called Hello Nurse, named for the Animaniacs recurring bit. And there weren't a lot of bands in the early 2000s New Jersey that we found that were like a good fit for us on a show, because there was a lot of like, screamy metal, angry, a bunch of guys dressed in black with long hair being mad at women. There's a lot of that.

And there wasn't a lot of like alt pop stuff, which is what we were doing. And Hello Nurse was also doing. So when we found bands like that, we just stuck together and like played shows together because there was a lot of overlap with the crowds. I fucking love this band. They wrote great tunes. They put on such a show.

We became friendly with them. And I think sometime in the last year, I went to go track them down to see like whatever happened to them. And there was, they just don't exist. There's no record of them. I think they only had a MySpace page when, when having a MySpace page mattered to bands. That page is now devoted to a different band and I can't find any of the music. And it like really dawned on me the, the homemade mixed CD of Hello Nurse songs that they gave me in exchange for a CD of our band's music.

I am like the keeper of records now. I am the one. I don't know how many of these Hello Nurse CDs exist in the world. I have it. And that's why I can't throw out my giant CD wallet because they didn't make the leap to streaming and it falls to me to remember, remember bands that were never big enough to succeed. I, I, I, you, as you're saying this,

I'm remembering how, like, certainly music was not as attainable, but the songs held a much bigger, they were like outsized in your brain in terms of how much they made you feel. Maybe a product of that was also that you were 17 and full of hormones and emotions. But you also like, when a song came on, it felt like Providence, like a song that you really loved and you were like seeking out in the world but you didn't have the CD or whatever. And all of a sudden it would come on in a store

or come on in your friend's car and you'd be like, ah, you get so excited to have that song in your life again for a second. And I don't, obviously haven't felt that in a very long time. But that's also because I can just have any song I want at any given moment. I was thinking back to, I was into punk music when I was 17 and slow down, not real punk, like blink 182 punk, no effects punk. I would dabble in something

that was a little bit harder. AFI was a very big punk band back then before they became an emo scream band. They were dangerous to us. We went to an AFI show and it was so scary and I loved it. But for the most part, it was like pop punk. There was this band at a Warped tour that I saw called Slimer. And I was like, yeah. Like you just, you chanced upon a band that you didn't anticipate seeing and you liked them. And you're like, oh, this is for me. That the world has conspired to let me hear them.

Couldn't find them for a while. And then went to college. And one of the guys from Slimer was at my college. Wow. Yeah, I ended up living in the same house as him my senior year. And now that guy, Daniel, he makes all of the beats for Doja Cat.

Whoa! Dave Sprecher, shout out to Dave Sprecher. Shout out to Dave Sprecher. Shout out to Doja Cat. Goes by Yeti Beats now. But yeah, like he makes from the jump, like he was her guy. And so he makes her music. That's all right. I was just very quickly Googling which one is Doja Cat.

Eyebrows. The one who drives her eyebrows on has no hair. I wasn't, I don't know what I was hoping to see when I googled that. She has a lot of different looks. So even if you were to look up Doja Cat, you're not going to probably recognize her. The most iconic version of her think, is from a few years ago. She was on Dave, the show Dave. And that was very clearly, oh, I know this person. Now she's got a lot of different looks.

And I say, she's killing all of them. She's great. She's wonderful. If you don't listen to her music, Daniel, listen to the song, Go Down. It's so good. I get so pumped when, not that I need to know who is popular in music, it's not important to me anymore. I'm practicing selective curiosity in 2025. Okay. But I still get very, I'm very grateful when Ice Spice comes out and she has very specific little orphan Annie style hair as her look.

She has this tight curly afro of like red orange hair and like, ah, that's very helpful. Thank you. That's the one that you are and I will remember you forever because you have a look and as long as you never change it, then I can be part of the conversation. Yeah. Sorry, I messed up earlier. It's not go down, it's called go to town. Ah, okay.

But I'm sure Gabe will change all of that and it will all be magic. Yes, as long as they're wearing what they were wearing at the Grammys, then I know who you are. Chappell Rhone is another one where I'm like, as long as they're wearing what they were wearing at the Grammys, that I like, I know who you are. Chapelrone is another one where I'm like, oh, I'm going to have a tough time picking her up out of lineup. I know that she's the Victorian looking one. And if she's not doing that, that particular day that I'm like, oh, yeah, she's going to change. She's going to change on you a few times, man. I'm really sorry.

She doesn't look Victorian. I don't think I can. She's not wearing a big white wig. I don't think I know who she is. Yeah. Did we get answers for this? I think. Oh, sorry. Yeah, so I think my-

Smart speakers and A-high. Smart speakers was yours. Waymo was mine. And I would be so mad at myself. I would be so mad that that's what he was into. But I'd be like, yeah, but you're not going to ever use it. And he'd be like, yes, but you can see those cars out on the road and no one's in them and they just drive themselves and they don't crash all the time.

I'd be like, yeah, but your car basically does that, dude. The car that you have will also be, you will occasionally just turn on this special type of cruise control, and your car will stay a certain distance behind the car in front of it and just drive. And he'd be like, but there's other cars with no one in them? I'd be like, yes. Yeah, I guess so. It's been a real fun experiment to think about because the things that I was immediately like, what makes my life easier?

And I was like, well, it was a pretty good day when I found out my credit card has the chip in it so I could just tap it instead of tipping it into something. That was sincerely pretty momentous for me and explaining to young me, signing up for clear at the airport and how you don't have to go through the usual stuff of taking your shoes off and taking out a bunch of things from your pocket. That's all this stuff is like really handy and a time saver.

And when you get older, time saving is the only thing that matters. I have one more that I think 17 year old me would be very impressed by. And we don't even think about it anymore. And that's LED lights. I think he would go nuts for the idea that you would have lights that change color within the bulb, like string lights and also just how much brighter. I mean, cars and stuff. I guess you'd need to see that. But the idea that you can have lights

that can be any color you want them to be at any given moment, and it's all within one bulb, and it's a much brighter light than anything he's ever seen before, I think he would be very impressed by that shiny thing. In fact, young Soren, the lights are so bright that it's a problem when you drive at night. It makes all of us insane. More people have eye problems at younger ages

than they ever have in the history of the world. And it's one of those problems that's pretty universal but also low on the totem pole. So I don't think it's ever gonna get addressed. I think it's just gonna be one of those things that makes us all blind and insane. It's gonna be great. We're going to enjoy it.

I think my first instinct to even would be like, oh man, cars don't use gasoline. Well, a lot of them still do, but there's cars that don't use gasoline and that just run on a battery. He would either say, oh, I didn't realize that they didn't already. I think that there's, I see a battery under the hood. I thought that was just an option. Or he'd be like, cool, why? And I'd have to be like, oh, things get pretty bad. The world starts to kind of fall apart and we get pretty worried about the global warming thing that you're just sort of hearing about right now, but only about

150 of us care. I'm on the brink of collapse right now. There's going to be fires and earthquakes in Oklahoma where there never were before because drilling and there's going to be a lot of things that are going to be a problem. Goodbye. I think I'd just worry him if I told him about electric cars. Well, that about wraps up the show and Sorin is going to take us home. Thank you everybody for listening to this episode. This has been Quick Question with Sorin and Daniel. You knew that.

An independent podcast. It's an independent podcast. We're not part of a network. We're just lone wolves out there on our own together. If you liked our theme song, that's by Mee-Rex. You can find their music anywhere you stream music. Don't tell your 17 year old self about it though. It'll get confused. Don't look for them on LimeWire either. You're going to end up with some Bonnie Raitt. If you like this podcast and you want to see a video version of it, you can do that over on YouTube. You can also find that on Apple subscriptions. Hey, speaking of Apple subscriptions, you can get an Apple subscription to this podcast, and that will sign you up immediately for our Patreon.

You can also just do it directly through Patreon, but you're going to get extra content from us, which is these every other week, we do a less buttoned up, a little bit shorter version of this show, where Daniel and I are just more loose-lipped, both about our careers and about just our general life stuff that's not necessarily ready for public consumption. Yeah, a lot of our real opinions that, if you want to clip it and destroy my career and relationships, you got to at least pay $5 once. Yeah, surely you have to go there first. We were held together entirely with editing and sound engineering and producing by Gabe

Harder. And you can find Daniel I on Blue Sky, doing some jokes there. Never getting political. Really, this is a good joke. Is the show on Blue Sky? I think it is. I don't think we've done anything,

but I just started following it. Okay, that's it, bye. Bye. I've got a quick, quick question for you, all right? I wanna hear your thoughts, wanna know what's on your mind? I've got a quick, quick for you alright I wanna hear your thoughts, 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 can talk tonight So what's your favorite?

How did you get it? What would I be if you remembered? Words without words, word and all that You got it with you, oh forget it I saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien Two best friends and comedy writers If those two were in the same room I'd be a good friend I'd be a good friend Oh, forget it