Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Perfectly on-brand ft. Katy Stoll (Some More News, Sequoia Subscription)

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Friend of the pod Katy Stoll sits in the Soren seat to catch up with Daniel on revenge newspapers, secret dairy, and the things they did as kids that turned out to be perfectly on-brand for their adult selves. Find Katy on Instagram: www.instagram.com/katystoll Watch Some More News: https://www.youtube.com/@SMN If you missed Soren this week, he'll be back for Patreon on Friday, where you get a bonus episode every other week. www.patreon.com/quickquestionThanks to Aura VPN for sponsoring this episode. 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 will I be remembered? What's it up with? Where did all the good weeks 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 Record Scratch with Katie and Daniel, joined as never by my co-host for the first time, Ms. Katie Stoll. Katie, empress of a growing podcast and YouTube content network empire. How are you?

Say hello. Hi. Hello. Well, out of the gate, I'm doing great. I've never been described as an empress of anything. And I like it. I think it suits me. I feel like I need to dress for the occasion a bit more, but for the future,

lean into my new title. I'm glad to break that seal. And I don't think you need to change because like you're, our listeners at home don't know this, but there's like an aesthetic thing going on with what you're wearing and the painting behind you. It's very, very pleasant.

Thank you so much for acknowledging it, noticing it. I love this thing that's behind me but it's kind of locked me into a color palette yeah that i have to wear whatever there's a camera on but luckily this is my color palette um that i think i look best in let me let me tell you this fucking schmuck that i record with every week sometimes his background is a single plant in a window. Sometimes it's a bunch of paint cans in a filthy garage. And he wears the same fucking 2003 J.Crew shirts like I do every week.

And just the fact that I've got someone who's going to really put in some of the extra effort, it's very nice. It's much appreciated. Thanks to Aura for supporting our show. Go to aura.com slash protection for a 14-day trial plus a check on your data to see if your personal information has been leaked online. All for free! So we're talking smack on Soren today?

Yeah, we are. No, we'll get right into the show. He's not here, I noticed. He's not here, yeah. The elephant in the room is that we normally record this podcast with Soren, because that's what it's called. And he is not here at the moment, so Katie is very kindly filling in on short notice, and we appreciate that very much.

She's a longtime friend of ours, and you've heard her on the show before. But in the room why isn't soren here it's because uh i had to push our normal record date why did i have to push it yeah uh because my fiancee was out of town and uh my life falls apart what you did there oh fiancé. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. It's going to be harder when she's with Shay. I think that's going to be a tougher sell. Yeah. Yeah.

With Shay. Or Shafe. Shafe? Shafe is better. Shafe is closer. It sounds like, I don't know, what came to my mind was like something you would do to get the dead skin off your feet. Oh. Shafe something. That's close. I don't know what came to my mind was like something you would do to get the dead skin off your feet shave something that's close yeah I felt like it was

prison weapon adjacent or that one of the two romantic either way yeah regardless she was out of town in her hometown and I was like it's so humiliating i was like not sleeping well

and i was not uh doing great at my because she was like my job because she was gone and i'm just like used to her presence here for like sleeping and and like keeping me on a normal person schedule um i will say the most surprising she's back now so everything's better say the most surprising humiliating thing that i did is is one of the rules that we both have when the other is out of town is that we're allowed to eat whatever we want with no judgments and often for me that has meant like too much chinese food that i will regret uh always. But this time, it was Taco Bell. And I am very famously lactose intolerant. Yes, yes.

But I got Taco Bell anyway because I thought, maybe it doesn't count if I do it in private and no one sees me. This is what I mean about my life falling apart, is that i forget like how the body works and the rules of yeah of science i am very much alert to cheese willfully forget yeah yeah is it but even when no one's around i'm allergic to cheese so i ate some got very sick lost sleep and my life just fell into like a weird little disaster chunk of time. I wonder when we outgrow that instinct because I do it too.

It's like, well, there's no one around to see this happen. So it maybe didn't actually happen. It happened. And I felt like shit. And then enough time passes that you forget. Even if I'm just... Maybe, maybe this time. Even if I'm just... And like, maybe, maybe this time. Even if I'm just eating a bag of candy in my car,

I'm still like, it doesn't count because I'm moving. I'm traveling at great speed. We're joking, but I did, there was this, when I was a kid, you know, I have talked about issues with food and body image that I've struggled with my whole life. And I'm in a good place now. But as a kid, I remember having a very excited conversation with one of my best friends who was in a similar boat.

And very sincerely being like, if no one's around when we eat it, it doesn't count. It doesn't count. I was like, yeah, makes sense to me. It doesn't count. I was like, yeah, makes sense to me. I think when enough people independently have the same thought, it can just be a different kind of truth. I think we can say that. I think we're allowed to say like, hey.

That is the world we live in now. That's right. That people just say it is true. that is a world that for i'm assuming all of our listeners know because the the the venn diagram of people who know this show and people who know your work and your shows uh is a complete circle at this point we're all expats from crack.com days yeah and i don't think there's anyone for for your your show has a uh wide audience of people who who like uh the news and and and comedy and perspective um our show is just like exclusively some people who liked us from cracked and uh some of my but not all family members um so there's you get your family

members yeah a few of them but there's no one who comes to our show who was like i'm gonna check out this show from these two uh straight whites that i know nothing about uh and if someone did stumble upon our show as like an algorithm recommendation i i can't imagine they get anything out of anything of value out of it because like the oh the show is premised on like our friendship and our and our our uh the laurels that we've been resting on from cracked and i think there's some people who might come in and be like oh it's a show hosted by two current working comedy writers surely they must get into some writing advice no almost never absolutely not uh yeah i had several thoughts i think that you are very humble uh i'm curious how i'm sure somebody has stumbled upon this show but you're right it is probably family members and cracked people yeah not looking for advice on writing

hopefully just want to hear your guys's They miss you guys. They want to see you on their YouTube page. We miss them, too. But again, just in case there are some people who don't know you. You. Oh, right. Very popular. Some more news and even more news. Yeah. I please forgive me.

I thought there was a new bonus pod recently launched. You're correct. Well, we're working on that. See, I always have to hold my horses. I've been wanting to do a new show that's more like this. Cody and I have a different friendship from you and Soren,

but also we're friends. We're very different people. We're very similar and very different people. And oftentimes, like, he wants to talk to me about video games. And I'm like, mm-hmm. Or, and I talk about whatever bullshit that I've been reading. And we wanted a format for us to be able to discuss things other than the news.

Because whenever we do that on our show, some people dig it. Primarily the people that listen to our shows watch our shows from cracked other people are like get to the news and i'm like oh it's fine i like talking about the news i just like talking about other things so way less news is going to be a new thing and yes we have started off by releasing it on our patreon but my goal is to be releasing it wide. Here's the thing. At a certain point, it's very difficult to scale things. You add one more process to the mix and it throws everything out of whack

because when we're releasing two shows every week, essentially, that's a tight turnaround all the time. It is, yeah. And you're doing like full productions with your things. And it was when we were trying to schedule this podcast, you said on Mondays we have meetings from something like 11 to 2.30. And I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Meetings.

We used to have meetings at Cracked and we had to like regularly make things and keep to a schedule. I don't know how we did that so much. Like, I don't have the tolerance to sit in hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of meetings like I did before. It's hard enough being in my house doing it. I was at Cracked was I would, because everyone has shared calendars, so we know when everyone is available, I would just book myself in non-specific meetings that people could see, oh, he's busy from one o'clock to four o'clock on Wednesdays, so we can't schedule a meeting. And all I was doing was just reserving a conference room for myself and just shutting out the noise of everyone else. And it was just like, i need i need to occasionally write

things for this website and i need some like uninterrupted time to do that and that was the only way i found out how it was impossible let alone okay outside of meetings it's all open concept and very fun to wander around and do bits with your buds but at a certain point you have to do work you have to write the stuff that we're going to shoot yeah i think a lot of us would come into the office and like bullshit for several hours and get dragged into bullshit meetings and then they're like all right it's five o'clock time to go home and work time to actually put some pen to paper well once you get through thirsty thursday anyway oh yeah yeah that's when the real creative juice flows. But Katie, should we just get into the show?

Should we get into the show? Have we not yet? Yeah, for sure. Nah, we never. We've got quick questions. We do. We have quick questions. I have a quick question for you. Uh-huh. What is something you remember having done as a child that, in retrospect, you think is an incredibly on-brand thing for current you and

i can go first if you would like some time to think oh i've got an answer oh she's got an answer folks i do this is the perfect perfect question because i was actually telling this story recently it's a little bit of a story there's a couple things to this that are very perfectly on brand. First off, when I was about, let's say 10. I lived on a street called Sequoia Avenue. And I decided to start a newspaper for the neighborhood called the Sequoia subscription. And it was filled with things like, well, it was mostly about my family's news. Every so often it would be another neighbor like, you know, the Thompson family got a new puppy. Let's all say hello to our new neighbor.

And then I'd draw a picture of the neighbor. I'd write short stories. I would write short stories for class and then put them in there. I did everything like hand printed it. The title, remember that big S, that Stussy S? Yeah. Or was it like I would, it was a big S, Sequoia subscription. Yeah. Okay. So I did that and then I would deliver it to everybody's houses. But then we had this oak tree in our backyard, this big oak tree and our neighbor behind us was threatening to sue us because the roots were disrupting her driveway and my parents this has been going on my parents finally gave in

they're like okay okay we'll remove the tree and i was furious so emergency issue of the sequoia subscription and i'm like she who will not be named but lives at blah blah blah blah Sequoia Avenue is tearing down the Stoll family's precious oak tree home to squirrels and birds alike there is a protest being staged on whatever day please join us no one joined us nobody showed up it's the it's very funny i thought i thought the angle was going to be like you're expressing yourself creatively and and being very community-minded uh which is the on-brand thing but no it's you're controlling the media so you can accomplish your agenda just like you're doing now with your new show i'm like I'm doing now. All of that is true.

But then, okay, so the tree got it. The tree got it. Okay, yeah. Took it down. And the other thing that's very on brand is that I can't stay in a space of negativity for too long. I tend to find the positive. So my whole family is in the backyard after it's gone. And there's just this big trunk, perfectly flat. And I'm sitting there and I'm looking at it and I go, well, cheer up, folks.

At least we have a stage now. And I think that's the most on rent story I could possibly tell on all angles. Incredible. That's perfect and delightful. Oh story I could possibly tell on all angles. Incredible. That's perfect and delightful. Oh, I love that so much. Thank you for a perfect and delightful question. I wasn't going to, so I'm going to talk about two things, because I wasn't going to bring up this one thing,

because I don't think I was young enough. I was in college by the time I was doing it, which is too old for for like predictive behavior or anything like that but just because you mentioned making your own newspaper called the sequoia subscription when i was in college i was uh unhappy with the comedy magazine newspaper that existed at rutgers at the time yeah it had gone it was called the medium it had like great uh speaking of roots and a lot of people left from the medium to work for the onion and have great careers by the time

i was in school it was not uh it wasn't great it was divided up into about half of it was uh like borderline racist rants that people would like, you know, like how a lot of young white men think like, I'm going to be provocative. And the, the most provocative thing any young white man can think of is like, it's like,

I'm going to play a racist character. I'm going to, I'm going to pretend I'm racist or I'm'm gonna pretend I'm ableist or whatever that's like the beginning and comedy yeah yeah that's when everybody was was really firing on all cylinders um but the the medium was half that and half um just nothing wrong with it pornography it was just like this was the comedy newspaper comedy it was a comedy porn no it was just like my like with permission my girlfriend has allowed me to send you a picture of her breasts and like who knows if permission was actually granted but this was like for for a

soft sensitive weasel like me seeing that this was the comedy newspaper i originally tried to go like the formal route and launch a new newspaper and got like signatures got a faculty advisor on it and everything like that and rutgers looked at my proposal and then they said we already have a new we already have a comedy newspaper this doesn't different enough on paper from the thing that we have so we can't like give you any funding for this and i wanted to say like it's very different because i'm gonna i'm gonna do a different thing it's gonna be better than that like you like there are lots of magazines that occupy the same space that are allowed to exist but i understand it's a it's a an academic bureaucracy and i can't we can't have two newspapers that are comedy based.

It's simply not allowed. Yes. And so what I did was I just started writing my own newsletter that I called similar to the creativity behind the Sequoia subscription. It was called the Monthly Daniel. And I would just print it out. I would write like very long comedy stories, print them out at, uh,

at great personal cost of printer paper and ink. And then just leave them around campus. Just have them just like drop stacks of them. There was no way to contact me or to find out the last name of the, the, the titular Daniel. And i wasn't really in it for that i was just like this is a thing that i think is funny and it's not allowed to exist here so i made it exist here here it is i'm gonna drop it uh next to our proper newspaper and and and

then not receive any credit or did you purposely leave like your last name off because you didn't want to get in trouble? There was probably an element of that. Or was that just an oversight? It was definitely not an oversight. I'm trying to not rewrite my own history because the truth is probably I don't want to get in trouble. When I am rewriting my own history, I choose to believe that there's no last name or contact information because I wanted people to believe that there was just like a weird altruistic comedy person whose sole goal was spreading jokes and fun. A Robin Hood of comedy.

Yeah, that kind of thing. Of sorts. Yeah. But you were basically just doing a sub stack to an unwilling audience that hasn't signed up. Absolutely, yeah. And it lasted a few issues, and then I was like, I'm a college student, and this is really... I don't have enough budget for... You're, like, failing your actual classes. I doubt that. Daniel, I'm sure you were a great student.

Oh, thank you. I was fine. College is easy. I don't know if everyone would say that. Not at Rutgers. It feels like there's a major leak of personal information every single week. I'm constantly

getting emails that are like, hey, insert company name did that, and your information might be leaked out there. Have you read about the recent ones at major phone and healthcare companies? Your information, your full legal name email home address phone numbers credit card info and more can be easily found online data brokers also get your data legally from public tax records from credit card companies cable internet providers

and sell it to anyone who will buy even scammers we did a whole episode about data brokers on the tv show i worked for and it is insidious. It made me never want to sign up for anything or tell anyone my name, even doctors. Aura is a great way to try out a great VPN. We're thrilled to partner with Aura, the all-in-one online safety solution that helps protect your information. Aura is offering you a 14-day trial plus a check of your data to see if your personal information has been leaked online all for free when you visit aura.com slash protection and that's not all or also monitors identity theft financial fraud and other online threats before

they happen with aura you can rest easy knowing that someone is looking out for you and my favorite thing or also helps reduce annoying roboalls, telemarketers, and junk mail by sending takedown requests on your behalf regularly. I get, this is real, probably four to six robocalls every single day. I answered too many of them, and now they're just the only phone calls I receive. And Aura is going to help me reduce those annoying robocalls, and I'm excited. Hey, if you're looking for a gift for someone in your family, this will be unique and give them the protection they need online. I'm thinking about giving it to my parents because all of my other previous

attempts to teach them about online security have failed, but Aura makes it easy. I love that Aura alerts me when I click on a link that's not safe. And who hasn't done that? For a limited time, Aura is offering our audience, that's you, a 14-day trial plus a check of your data to see if your personal information has been linked online all for free when you visit Aura.com slash protection. That's A-U-R-A dot com slash protection. Certain terms apply, so be sure to check the site for details. Aura dot com slash protection. The story that I actually wanted to tell that I don't know if I've told on this podcast, but I've told before, and I don't know if I've told you,

is that when I was... This is like... I think creepy behavior. When I was very young, like middle school young, I was molding little figures out of clay that were like, at one point I started and I was like, I'm going to make this video game character that I like out of clay. So I could just like have this model. That's a fairly normal thing for a kid to do and then i was like no you know what i actually want to do is i want to mold almost my entire middle school out of clay and just have like teachers and students just like a shelf of my childhood bedroom was taken up by these clay figures that uh if my parents thought there was

something weird about that they never brought it up but i'm sure they walked into my room at some point when i wasn't there and was like okay that's definitely joe that's definitely chris that's his art teacher this is bad this is something we don't know what this is but it's bad when you led off you're like oh it may be slightly creepy i was like there's no way daniel always has that opinion about no but that is a little bit weird it is it's certainly it's weird enough that i knew not to tell like even at 11 or 12 years old i was like this isn't my friends aren't ready for this information which also makes it weirder in a way i know because why am i doing it secret and there's like shame attached to it like i know i shouldn't be but i'm going to i'm obsessed with this idea your least self-aware age in all of

time to still be like no this is this is different from the other weird stuff i do this one should should stay with me have you always been pretty self-aware i feel like maybe you have what age did that kick in that's a great question is it self-awareness if you don't know why you should be... No, I think no, because even though I knew to keep this secret, my shame forever, there was a lot of stuff like my love of performing in local theater when I was a kid and love of singing in choirs and stuff as a kid, that was never, that didn't become embarrassing to me for a long time, which is like a precious thing that I'm really,

I'm really glad about. But like, if you're not to date myself, but if you're a kid who's bad at sports, but really into singing musical theater 1990s New Jersey is not kind to you it's not it wasn't cool then the way it is now when I would like come into school and brag like guess who's a fucking munchkin no one was like oh damn i wish i had your courage to perform on stage

no one no one was ever thinking that i don't know how to make myself vulnerable like you i'm bullying you but only because i wish i had your bravery yeah yeah sure yeah that'll affect things yeah i didn't i didn't know to be ashamed of certain things um but here's the pivot with the clay figures that i i think moves it away from being creepy becomes more of a brand thing and more of like a long walk to what i was actually trying to accomplish is that i started um i would take my parents video camera and i would stay up late and film stop motion clay movies with my friends as like the cast of saturday night live where i'm essentially like ripping off sketches completely and i made the

insane decision of like instead of making will ferrell out of clay or indeed instead of making harry carry will ferrell's long-standing impression of harry carry out of clay and doing a sketch show i was like no no no no this is going to be my buddy matt made of clay doing will ferrell's harry carry that's the most efficient way I can think of achieving my dreams of making a sketch show starring my friends. That's quite beautiful. It's too many steps. It's way too many steps. But it's sweet.

And it is truly very reflective of you today or what your trajectory has been like as an adult. I mean, that's literally how we know each other. Yes. Is you writing sketches for me to perform. Right, for all of my buddies to do things. Like, we spent a significant chunk of our adult lives just doing that. Just being clowns.

Having you write us things. Being clowns and funny things. Yeah. Yeah. That is sweet. It's the kind of thing that i was like an energy that i didn't really know what to do with at the time and i was just the same with uh the disposability of the monthly daniel newsletter i would tape these things and like doing stop

motion claymation is a very time-consuming thing i would stay up late doing it then i would watch the tape of what i just made and be like all right good and then i would tape over it tape over it the next day absolutely tape over it every time so it was like oh i wasn't showing this to my parents i it was just like for me just to do a thing and like that is odd sort of sweet no i i think now i'm definitely rewriting my history but like this is gonna sound rude to art broadly but like the disposability of of ideas and and and jokes i think like from a very early age was like fine with me and that has like informed uh my life as someone who like fired content into the cracked void for years before cracked was successful and like the the nature of last week tonight where i work now so much of it is a volume game of just like writing a million jokes

for every setup knowing that uh best case scenario, they're going to pick one and sometimes they pick none and you have to throw more jokes at it. That's never been a style of writing and creation that was like particularly frustrating to me because I just, I've always felt like make the thing, put the thing out there. Hopefully people see it. Okay, make the next thing.

Keep going, keep going, keep going. that's actually very very very good training and something that i don't have i've worked to develop it can be hard you you've put work into something and it's vulnerable and you're putting it out there and it doesn't land and it took me a long time to to understand that it just doesn't all work and it might might be extremely, it might be a very funny joke. It might be a very funny bit, script, whatever. But it's not working for this specific thing. I also know, like, there's stuff that we've made that I've been like, but it hits, you know, and people love it. And so there's like a lack of preciousness.

But that's always been hard for me to overcome because I grew up being like, please cast me in things. And, but you develop that superpower from a young age. It is interesting to tape over every single one and not show it to anybody, but that wasn't what it was about for you. It wasn't about. It was just,

I wanted to make funny sketches and didn't have the vocabulary to know how to ask for that. And, and, you know like i i don't know when ucb as like a school that would teach you specifically about improv and sketch writing that kind of thing i don't know when they started if they were around in early 90s word was not getting back to new jersey like the idea of theaters that were training you for specifically sketch didn't exist right sketch was for saturday night live or mad tv and i just didn't there was no like it was a thing i wanted to to play with

but i didn't know how to get there local theater and like eventually high school improv was was i thought the only way to do it even like the local theater itch was probably just trying to find some route around to like sketches and sketch writing um but we just didn't if you're a kid who likes snl so much and you have no connection to ucb or second city or groundhog groundhog's day groundlings um then you just don't know what to do with that energy and and and there's a part of it that's like well i guess this dream just dies then because there's nothing to to do with it yeah but it didn't die it didn't die you made it you made it not only you made it your dream of reality literally i cracked yeah which is similar yeah to mad we i have similar i have follow-up questions to your

quick answer oh yeah um did your i don't want you to take this the wrong way but sure no i won't pivoting from here's your newspaper where you draw and you report on the news and you try to take down uh your corrupt neighbors and uh old lady old lady i'm immediately pivoting to a stage um is that representative of young katie were you jumping from thing to thing or did your parents when your parents saw you making a newspaper did they think we should get her some journalism classes or did they think this is just the next thing this is next just the next thing I mean I think that they were I'm very different from my older brothers and in every way imaginable and I think that it was like

let's see what she does next. But theater was a thing that I was involved with since, I don't know, six or seven. I did my first play. And then I got at a little elementary school, stupid thing. I mean, amazing, great performances all around. But then, you know, theater camp and doing that. And throughout high school, I was actually doing independent study and doing plays at our local theater during the school year. And so that part, this is, but I loved, I was very precocious and I was always writing. I think that that was all a big part of the soup of me. I will, I will take it a little sadder and say that I think there was, we all have

chaotic, there's things that have happened in our childhood or family dynamics. And my family is amazing, but we all have them. And I think a coping mechanism for me or a thing I developed is wanting to be cheerful, wanting not being, not feeling good when people are maybe a bit down. And this is definitely still true for me to this day. I work on it. It is not my responsibility to manage other people's emotions. But that's what I was doing. I think also, I think I had an awareness, not to rewrite history, but I was pretty clued

into other people's emotions. to rewrite history, but I was pretty clued into other people's emotions. I think I had an awareness that I made the situation worse for my family by being so upset about it. And I don't know how true that is. I don't know how true that is, but I know that my parents don't ever want to let me down. And I was being very stuck. I was stuck in my position of we can't let this tree go.

And the squirrels, where would the squirrels live? So I felt like I wanted to turn the mood around. But also I got a huge laugh. And that will carry me. Absolutely. Huge laugh. Although then, I mean, the story kind of continues. Penny, I don't think she's alive anymore.

I think it's okay for me to say her first name. Sure. Went on a big bender after that. She got really depressed that I had printed, written about her in my newspaper. Really? And she showed up at my house drunk, like a week later, crying and apologizing to my parents. And I remember being in the hallway like, this is not the outcome I wanted. Holy shit.

I know. She was just drunk for a week after that. But like. So I felt bad about that, but also a little bit like, well, that's what you get. Oh, but then then wait a minute. I'm going to lose my remorse because now I'm just remembering she, about a year later, she did it to another neighbor too. Oh,

okay. On the other side. You know what? Take it back. Fuck you, Penny. Hater of trees. I was,

I was falling for Penny a little bit because I, because I thought like, this is no one is listening to this little girl who's trying to save the tree except for this one woman like you were the only she was the only audience member for which your subscription package had like found purchase and she was like she was but she did turn around and do it to another neighbor. So, yeah. Anyway.

But yeah, that does reflect me in lots of ways. Now everybody knows my psyche and some of my issues and that I try to manage people's emotions. No, that's what the show is about. The show is therapy. It's always been where we come and do therapy and we unpack trauma and we do some healing and change the world and save lives. Oh. Because that's very lofty. Yeah. I mean, we don't think so.

It's great. Just because it's what we do every week. You don't think so because you're so humble. Yeah, yeah. I think what else would you do with a platform if not unpack trauma, heal wounds, save world a little bit? Save the world. Just a little bit, save world a little bit. Save the world. Just a little bit, though.

A tiny bit. You can't put that all on your shoulders. No. Yeah. Well, I feel healed. I hope everyone listening does. That's good. I couldn't.

When I texted you about this and you said you had the perfect answer, I don't think I could have imagined how perfect i think it's it's so good i'm very very happy oh i'm happy with yours as well thank you um i was this is i don't know what comes next in this conversation but i wanted to say that i was listening to your last episode about biking oh i also don't know what comes next because one of the fun fact about this show is that we and this is only like 30 percent of a joke we enter like a fugue state when we record and neither of us has any idea what we end up saying we've been just recording our phone calls for like five years now and especially once we added cameras i could see him taking a sip of water or he's like turning his head away and like oh no i now it's my turn to say something i better open my mouth and hope it's

something good and that's like how the show gets made so when whenever someone reaches out to one of us afterwards to be like hey man i totally agree with you about the Khmer Rouge. I'm like, what did I say about the Khmer Rouge? What did I say? I have no memory of it. This is just flat by the seat of my pants. I don't even have any thoughts.

Sometimes that happens to me. Someone like, I love what you said about blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I said something about that. What?

I'm glad it landed. Or that sometimes it'll be like a really good quote and someone will have typed it up and made it a post on instagram and tagged me i'm like you sure i said that yeah i don't know people i'm not on twitter anymore but that's that's happened on twitter where someone would like twitter post yeah i, not fully. I do the soft deletion where I deactivate my account and there's some kind of internal clock

that lets me know, because the way that Twitter works, after you deactivate your account, you have 30 days to log back in. And if you don't log back in within 30 days, then you lose everything completely. Right now, it just looks like my account doesn't exist anymore. But if I reactivated it, I would have all of my followers and all of my post history.

And there's something inside me that has logged me back in roughly once every 30 days just to preserve that. But then I get back on and I spend 30 seconds on it. I'm like, this is not a place that I want to be. And I leave it. It's ugly and bad. It's ugly and bad. And I just, I miss a version of Twitter that doesn't exist anywhere anymore. I do too, so badly.

And I just have to part with it. It's like any sort of breakup or loss. There's a grieving process, I guess. I'm not grieving it anymore, but I was at first. I haven't done that. That's a a good idea I barely even remember to retweet our stuff anymore because I hate logging on it just feels like and a cost it's like it costs my senses at all like it makes me feel sick yeah it's it's like fully unpleasant to be on and also like when i some of the times i'd logged on uh with intention it would be

like oh the academy awards are airing right now i want to see if if my old twitter friends are still having fun and like i had an idea for a joke that i wanted to make about the tonys or the nba finals whatever it is and then i will log in, oh, it's not really the place for this anymore. You know, it's not that I... It's definitely not. It's not just that I... I can't find the people who are having fun on Twitter. There's just not...

That's just not the vibe anymore. There's all... Like, every once in a while, they'll get some... It would be the place if you wanted to tweet something extremely mean or cruel yeah that would enrage people right and i that was your take on the tony's i don't want to do that uh i and so i just i have nowhere to put those particular jokes which is fine i could just keep them or just not make them but do you well see you write joke I do jokes and pitch jokes but it feels different

now I feel like a little less sharp without that uh for me personally it helped at the beginning of the somewhere news journey I mean it felt like a much better place to get news and to look at people's conversations to see opinions I liked and didn't like, reasonable. I mean, it wasn't always reasonable. There's always been a cesspool element to it, but it could be. But also was a place where you could workshop jokes, where I became a bit better of a writer, not in terms of overall structure of an idea, but in terms of trimming the fat, getting to the point, idea but in terms of trimming the fat getting to the point and you know having a paced out joke i found it to be incredibly helpful and it built my confidence until it then systematically crushed

my confidence yeah now i could tweet something innocuous and get sony like you're a fucking hack you should die what yeah i agree on the first part but not the second you are not a hack and you should never die i know um i don't know if you've uh started listening to jamie loftus new mini-series 16th minute of of fame it's really i mean i love everything that jamie does and she is going through like her hand-picked versions of uh like viral main character of the day a lot of people from from twitter often obviously because that's where main characters used to go viral and her one of the more recent episodes was about a woman in 2022 who had posted like there is nothing i like more than sitting in my garden with my husband and drinking

coffee and talking to him for hours we do it every single day send tweet and there are people even 2022 the writing was already on the wall for twitter that there are people who are like wow this fucking entitled you have no idea not all of us have the disposable income to sit in our gardens with our husbands and people who were, this is insulting to people who are single. And just like, this is, that's like the, the, the most appropriate negative reaction you should have to someone talking about wanting to have coffee in their garden with their husband is to just roll your eyes privately and ignore it. Like that's on the spectrum of reactions that's totally fine it

shouldn't get any more negative than that but twitter is just has like turned into the the strange outrage machine and uh bridget todd who's a journalist and podcast host was saying that like we all know that everyone's brains broke a little bit in COVID, but one of the ways that she believes manifested on Twitter was people who were just like seeing people die all the time and seeing people suffer all the time. And just feeling like I, I would also like to be seen as someone who is suffering. And Twitter became a really great outlet for that.

If someone posted something that you, you could do a bad faith reading of it to be attacked by it it was like okay good now i can be i can be suffering too and i and like the suffering is like not specific to the coffee in the garden it's it's it's like a broader and very real suffering but it was just sort of like laser focus targeted on these very undeserving, I'm going to use the word target again, targets that became so insanely popular on Twitter. And then, of course, algorithm reasons made Twitter worse. Absolutely. I'm wrapping myself up on twitter discourse because

it's there's you know no it's interesting i mean people starting to get sick of us talking about it so i haven't in a minute um on our show but yeah i think that that's a really interesting point and it is true um that it became yeah that kind of a space where we're focusing on suffering and then people and people have been suffering. And also just the Internet in general. Wonderful invention in so many ways. Just truly astounding. not think that our fragile human psyches have evolved in such a way that we are meant to absorb all the news of the world and to have to care. I mean, I care about everybody I do, but like, I'm supposed to care about the people in my immediate community. I'm supposed to care about the things that I can have control about and care and have empathy.

But it's hard because now I know. Now I know about this thing that's happening and I can't stop thinking about it. And there's something in me that's like, but maybe I can fix it. Maybe something I do can make this better. But I can't. I mean, I can try. I can talk about things. That's why I feel like talking about the news, I can control that. I can control my opinion. But at the end of the day, it's like, where do we stop, draw the line in terms of personal responsibility? I don't know. Now I'm meandering too, but there's something about that that I think. being designed more and more so to foster arguments to that's that's what engagement

means now is people being angry instead of people being delighted uh i remember being able to share a sweet story on twitter and it being a good thing and people saying like you know what i had a bad day and that made me feel better not anymore that's gone those days are gone uh so i don't do it at all you know uh do i want to say a wacky thing about twitter or do i want us to get back on track that's a big decision i don't know one quick thing that i learned about twitter from this same jamie loftus show is uh and she ran an experiment to confirm this, but if you actually take the time to, because the way Twitter used to work is you would curate your own feed,

the people you follow would post, and you would see what the people you chose to follow either posted or retweeted from someone else. It was a flawless system, and it was great for everybody. It has pivoted to an algorithm generating what it thinks you want to see based on what's popular and based on whatever magic juice flows through algorithms. And what they learned in this experiment was that if you got one of these things that the algorithm forced you to look at, you can click a button that says, I don't like this kind of content.

You can say like as a way to try to recurrate your own feed again and if you do that the algorithm will send you more of that because uh enjoyment i don't want it yes because because enjoyment is not the the goal like engagement is the goal somehow so even you like taking the time to click i don't like this or click x on it is like it's the same reason youtube loves their little skip ad button because it forces you to for a while spend five seconds looking at an ad before you click skip because yeah that's kind of a commercial you can walk away and go to the bathroom during a commercial but if you have an ad and it's like all right i have to i have to listen i have to hear about Brooks Running Shoes for five, four, three. I'm, like, locked into that ad more so than I'd be if I just walked away.

Brooks Running Shoes is in your mind if I want Brooks Running Shoes. Absolutely, that is. But that is very gross. I did not know that if you specifically, because that was, like, the big advice at first. Just click not interested. Yeah. Sorry. But, yeah, I guess it's's not surprised i did not know that it's not

surprising based on my experiences of like i thought i said no more elon musk yeah i thought i muted him i thought i thought i mean i was i was right i did but it didn't help yeah all right now here's the other wild thing uh i got us off track you were were talking about bikes? Oh, I had just listened to it, and I resonated to your story about, okay, you got into a bike kerfuffle accident a while ago, and then finally got back on a bike recently. I broke my wrist and had a metal plate and 28 screws, and you downgraded that to kerfuffle.

To kerfuffle. I was riding my bike to church and got in a traumatic accident that you... I'm sorry. Cancel, Katie. Cancel, Katie. How dare you, privileged elite from your car, calling it a kerfuffle?

I didn't fall in a ditch. I broke my bones. Okay, a major kerfuffle on your way to church. And took you a while and you started riding a bike and then were nervous. You wanted to test it out and you did fall. But because you were acting a fool a bit or something. Correct. You were doing something fancy.

Okay. Well, recently, this isn't a great story. I just related to this. Okay. Well, recently, this isn't a great story. I just related to this. I am seeing somebody, a very outdoorsy person, and bikes and does all this stuff. And I went to visit and it was like, yeah, let's go for a bike ride. And I'm like, I haven't ridden a bike in a long time since I was a kid. And I would ride my bike to school and I hit pothole, and I went over the handlebars. And I'd kind of forgotten just how...

Just what a kerfuffle it was? What a kerfuffle it was, indeed. But I was playing it cool. I'm like, yeah, tough girl. I'm going to do this. It's fine. I was terrified, Daniel. Well, it didn't help that I started off by going downhill,

but I had a full on panic attack. I was like, hyperventilating. I had tears streaming down my face. I was like, this is going so poorly. My bike's like this. I didn't have a bad accident, but I did kind of, I can't like, he'd be like, what are you doing? I was, he wasn't mean, but he's like, you're really leaning hard to the right. You're looking to fully tip over. It was so scary. He was like, it's just like riding a bike. I'm like, yeah, just like riding a bike.

This is going great. Anyway, it's not like riding a bike. It's dangerous. And there are accidents everywhere. Last time I did it, I hurt myself badly. Yes. Anyway, that's all. It wasn't a story

i just was relating hard to being um close to our 40s and getting on a bike and aware of the danger i think that is a story and i think what are we doing here if not trying to find common ground and relate even two people as different as you and me. As different as us. On different sides of the country. Well, that is looking at the clock. I'm sorry you were scared. And I'm glad that you got back on the bike. Or if you decide to never get back on the bike again, I'm glad about that, too. Thank you.

You're very welcome. And thank you for joining us. I'm going to wrap us up now. But do you have... We're so bad at our own plugs, because we're both off Twitter at this point, and neither of us can remember what our Instagram handle is. So while I track that down, do you have anything you would like to plug?

Sure. Great. Well, yeah, I... You know, we've got our show Some More News that I do with Cody Johnston, also from Cracked. He hosts a show and I play a very abusive character on it and sometimes host. And then we have our podcast Even More News, which is a weekly news show where we try to limit the bullshit talk. But there is some bullshit talk as well.

And in the near future, we're going to be doing way way less news which will also be us it's very fun I enjoy the shooting the shit format the other thing that we're starting to experiment with and I'm not sure maybe this week will be the first one scoop is doing our own version of the video podcast it was always daunting for us because when we do our news podcast we edit it and release it the next day. So editing video to go along with it sounds like a lot. But we're doing it. And so pretty soon you'll be able to watch even more news on the YouTube channel.

That's something exciting to look forward to. It is. And you, yeah. I love your shows. Even more news is like a platonic ideal podcast format for me. I'm always jealous the few times that you've had me on because I feel like you have a great secret weapon in Jonathan. Oh, Jonathan. First of all, great voice for podcast.

Right. Second of all, just someone who's going to come in and like tell you what's going on so you can respond to it i cannot tell you how much my life has improved um it was fun when it was just cody and i but i would do that and i would feel so anxious planning the show uh doing the research making sure people are recording properly have the zoom like all the stuff and then trying to be funny and host it and then we heard jonathan and he does so much so effortlessly it feels like i'm taken care of he provides a platform so that we can all thrive and be our best and we are very

grateful for jonathan protect jonathan at all costs shout out jon we've got to get you back on. Oh, I'd love to. Anytime. Okay, now you do your plug. You can find us. This show is Quick Question. You can find the show on Twitter at QQ underscore Soren and Dan. You can email us, QQ with Soren and Daniel at gmail.com. You can find us on Instagram by searching.

You can also find us on Patreon slash Quick Question if you want to support. If you do support us on Patreon, you get a bonus episode twice a month that's shorter and looser than the structured stuff that we normally do our theme song is by the incredible me rex you can find at band camp and speaking of theme songs we have a brand new amazing theme song for just our patrons. If you go to Patreon and you subscribe, you can get our bonus content, which includes our brand new theme song. It's, I'm going to say, one of the best songs ever made. We are engineered, edited, produced by our CEO,

president of Podcast Operations, Gabe Harder, who has a website called GabeHarder.com that doesn't work. You can also watch this show on YouTube if you aren't doing that already. Our theme song is by the incredible Merex. Track them down on Bandcamp. That is all

I have left to say. Bye! Bye! Bye Bye Who did you get? Where did I be? Do you remember? What did I do? Where did all this 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. I think you'll have a great time here.