Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - QQ ep 83 - Do we really even NEED a wagon?

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

In this episode the guys talk about things they've bought that were really worth it, and then slowly reveal their hatred of classic Christmas treats.  And as always big thanks to our sponsors.  Thanks to BetterHelp.  Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/qq .  And thanks to Skillshare. Go to Skillshare.com/qq and get a free trial of Premium Membership.

Hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, the podcast where two best friends and commentators address every question except, hey, didn't we start this off in the first place to make money? I am one half of this show, staff writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, author of How to Fight Presidents, and fisherman Daniel O'Brien, joined as always by my co-host, the god of mischief, Soren Bui. Soren, say hello. Hello, everybody.

I'm Soren Bui. I'm a writer for American Dad, father himself a husband a car owner match that Daniel a man who when he was 14 used to shut his eyes tight and pretend that the older adult version of me was waking up in my body again with a new chance to do it all over again and be 14 which was the year I assumed at the time would be the best year of my entire life. You, that sucked. You picked the one thing that I couldn't top but could match. I own a car. You do?

Yeah. God, why did I think that everyone in New York, it was like illegal to have them there. No, Cuomo's trying to, because that'll prove for another healthy distraction from his side business his other affairs um but no yeah you can you can drive and I have a car and I and I drive all about and it's great I didn't know you had a car all right well then you've matched it Daniel yeah Yeah. I mean, you could have rubbed in that I'm childless or that you said that you were a husband.

And I'm, of course, very famously single publicly for branding purposes. So you could have twisted that knife a bit. Yeah, that just felt too mean. I feel like a car is a really nice way to go because it's an unfair ask of you, except you actually do have one. way to go because it's an unfair it's an unfair ask of you except you actually do have one i wonder so i you are a person who bought um a brand new car yeah correct yeah yeah i've never had a brand new car uh and the car that i have now is like a uh the engine's nice but it's a 2008 car okay so it's not here forever and i feel like um i've i i keep my car pretty clean but it's not here forever. And I feel like, um, I've, I, I keep my car pretty clean, but it's always been kind of an extension of a garbage bag and a storage unit for me.

Of course. Is that, does that, that doesn't go away with a new car? It does for the first two months that you own it. You're like, I'm going to take care of this shit. And you're like, um, what? It's been two weeks already and i haven't washed it that's crazy i'm gonna go wash it and uh you i would take such good care of my car everything had its place everything was good and then um it's that stuck around for i guess probably a little longer than a couple months because it really started to fall off when i had kids when you have kids it just becomes an auxiliary storage unit and like a place where they barely squeeze in among all their toys and stuff and you just have all these other things

that you might need yeah it's really handy as a storage unit especially living in uh an apartment because i uh storage is limited here and the other day i I was getting in my car to go somewhere and someone spotted three fishing poles in my trunk because you could see into the trunk. And he was like, that's some pretty serious rigs. Where are you going? And I was like, ah, Whole Foods. That's where they live. They just live in here. I remember realizing that when I was in high school and I started driving a, at that point it was my dad's old truck, but I was allowed to use it. And it also meant I was allowed to store stuff in it. And it

was like, there was no room other than the cab, but you could fold the whole bench seat forward. And there's a little bit of room behind that for, I assume like tire jacks and stuff. I took all that shit out and then put in like, that was just for my things, my costume for the play and things like that. Thanks to BetterHelp for supporting Quick Question. For 10% off your first month, go to betterhelp.com slash QQ. Start living a better life today. Thank you to Skillshare for supporting Quick Question. Skillshare is an online learning community with so much to explore,

real projects to create, and the support of fellow creatives. Skillshare empowers you to accomplish real growth. Explore your creativity at Skillshare.com slash QQ and get a free trial of premium membership. Thanks to HelloTushy for supporting Quick Question. HelloTushy is a sleek bidet attachment that clips onto your toilet and sprays your butt clean with fresh water.

This is a special offer for our listeners. Go to HelloTushy.com slash QQ for 10% off, plus free shipping. Do you want to talk about whatever that, what's that time travel dream thing that you mentioned in your intro? I got hung up on the other stuff. Yeah, the thing you call bullshit? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's when I was a kid, I used to lie on my trampoline. I had a trampoline as a kid. And I closed my eyes and I would just imagine, I would open them and imagine that I was the older version of me waking up again at 14 years old. And I was like, got a chance to do it all over again. Because also in the indulgence, old me sucks and was like, I wish I could do it all again. It sucks to be old. I wish I could be 14 again. Because at that time I was like, life's pretty good for me.

I think anyone would want to come back and live this life again and so I would imagine that I was waking up again young and vibrant a young buck yeah ready to do it all again and I look back on that now and I'm like oh there's no way I'd go back yeah I that's so interesting I I did the, the opposite of that where, uh, because even in my, my private life, I, I believe in magic and ridiculous things that sometimes in my twenties, I would think, okay, well, just in case 14 year old me met a wizard and he can now see through my eyes and wants to know what life is like. Let me maneuver throughout my day as if that's true and show him that I'm doing well and things are fun. This was especially exciting for me when I was living in Santa Monica, when I had just moved to California.

And I was like, if 13-year-old Daniel is looking through 23-year-old Daniel's eyes, I want him to be fucking stoked. And I'm waving at coworkers and they're smiling at me to show that like, I want young Daniel to be like, wow, I've got friends and I'm waving to girls and talking to girls. This is so exciting. Oh my God, I'm playing volleyball after work. I have a car.

Oh man, I get to go home and watch, oh, empty home. Okay, all right. Well, I'm sure that'll get sorted out sooner rather than later. But I made like a genuine conscious effort to be like if to really think if 13 year old me is looking through my eyes i like what what can i show him that he will really like right which uh it's like um depending on you can spin it however you want. It can be a very sad thing because, like, you're an adult man. What are you doing?

But I think it's also, like, a fun thought experiment of, like, a cool way to look at the world and live your life is to do so in a way that would impress your past self. That's fun because then you sort of, adult Daniel learned some lessons, too. Like, I do have friends. And they do let me play volleyball with them. And I do have a car. That is like the classic story of the alien in this world. It doesn't have to be an alien. It can be Encino Man and stuff like that.

But somebody who's reintroduced to the world and sees everything through brand new eyes and you get to see it as well because you become so desensitized to it all and then watching somebody else re-experience it, you start to realize all the valuable things you have around you i see the value in it i think that's a very fun thing to do daniel and a thing that i certainly did when i was a boy sure that makes sense it's uh i i think what i've learned is it's only a fun thing to do if i if i tell other people about it

yes like this is my philosophy on life. It's not fun if I've been doing it privately for years. Then it's a weird thing. Yeah. We should get into the show. Cool. I'm not, the podcast itself isn't late to you, our listeners, but it's late to Soren and our engineer and producer, Gabe, and I apologize for that.

And that's my fault. I was taking an adult cooking class on Zoom, and I refused to let this podcast interfere with my life. So is dance over? What happened to your Afro-Caribbean dance? Dance is Mondays, and it's not Afro-Brazilian every single week. It's once a month. It's that. And then sometimes it's uh musical

theater themed broadway themed uh next week it's ballet this week it was uh like an like an indian style dancing like okay yeah yeah like like bollywood or like an indian wedding a lot of hands and and head movements yeah yeah yeah oh wow yeah. Oh, wow. Okay, are you going to do the Broadway one? I did one of the Broadway ones. That fills right up your alley. And it wasn't my favorite thing in the world. I'm glad I did it. But I don't want to get too into the Broadway here.

But if you're taking a Broadway dance class, I think the expectation is that you're going to learn some fosse not that that's the only style of broadway dancing there is it is the most iconic one and the most specific one instead it was a modern musical and there's nothing wrong with that there's a it was a jukebox musical which i don't love and it was rock of ages and that's an entire show that's based around like 80s hair metal stuff um like here i go again on my own probably that song and that kind of stuff uh so we did uh a brief bit of any way you want it by what who is that journey uh yeah yeah so we did like 16 bars of that and it's fine it's still like a fun the the class is designed to be more of like a workout than

anything else um but i'm you're just doing fucking reverse grapevines to journey at that point and it's like i could do that on my own time you know teach me some some some pops and some jazz and whatnot yes uh i see this is probably unfair to musicals but i as soon as you said that it was a musical dance class my first instinct was to just see a bunch of people hunched over snapping because west side story is so iconic in my mind of like a when you're a jet you're a jet all the way and and all kind of like creeping around and then doing some big jumps and stuff like that's how i assume every musical is i've never seen les miserables so i would assume that the uh i mean i don't it's very similar the june

rebellion who i assume is a character and that is doing exactly that yeah uh eponine comes around a corner and she's like when you're lame is your lame is in the biz. It's very, there's only like two different songs in musicals. And it's the when you're a blank song and journeys any way you want it. Okay, so how was your cooking class? The cooking class, I was very frustrated because this class, we're making two things. And the reason I'm late is I really thought we would do the dessert second. And I can cut out where we started the dessert because I was not going to make the dessert because I'm not a dessert person.

But he started with the dessert. And so I just had to sit there and watch other people prep ginger cookies. I didn't even buy those ingredients. And then when that was done, we got into the main course, which was duck, which I'd never made before. And it was we made duck with asparagus, onions, wild mushrooms and potatoes. It's very straightforward, easy recipe. I still crushed it. And in fact, at the end of the class, I don't actually know if I'm supposed to be saying this, so we can cut this if it ends up being too horny.

The chef said that I was the winner, that I won. He looked at mine and he said, Daniel is the winner. And then the host, the person who was putting the event together, was like, no, there are still other people who want to show theirs. And you know how Zoom works, so they cut to other people who who are showing their things and you can hear the chef be like okay very good you guys are all great nobody else was a winner according to the chef and the other thing that was very specific about this particular cooking class is that this was um because it's the last day of international women's history month yeah the meal was tied to this chef's um uh upbringing as as a chef and like the he he mentioned his mom a lot and he brought along

his high school home ec teacher who was also in the zoom to like guide him and help him and he like wove in stories about her teaching him it was very sweet it was very wonderful uh tribute to the women who who helped uh i mean i can think of no better tribute to women's history than a man hold on all right was the host was the host a man no the host was a woman okay but a man won uh on women's history month and also so i'm assuming that this design like master chef where they're supposed to be a winner no it's not absolutely not we're all learning and having a good time uh but there's one winner and the the home ec teacher the one who inspired this chef uh and and was really our icon of women's history she was like i'm gonna use a fake name for him they're all winners bill name for him they're all

winners billy billy they're all winners tonight and he was just like uh-huh god he really didn't say yes there was only one winner and it was daniel suck it old home ec teacher hard on for your duck uh so but do you ever feel a little bit maybe like you jumped out of a truck at the end of a marathon and ran across the line because you didn't slave over your ginger cookies first, like they did. Um, great question. Nope. I have a friend who, uh, I, so, you know, anybody who's does CrossFit tells you a lot about CrossFit. I've, I had three friends who were all in CrossFit together and the other two would talk shit about our third friend who would, he would do the circuits and like, he would just half ass everything except the row.

The row is where he was like, I'm going to destroy everybody because the row was the only thing where they were actually like counting how far you went. And so like he did, he wouldn't do all the lifting the medicine ball or tossing ropes or whatever he would just sort of like slowly go through the rigmarole and then he would get to the rowing and he would just torch everybody and then brag about how great he was at rowing that feels a little bit like what's going on here you think uh i mean i i i think you're you're you're just being a wiener for pod stuff you you think if i'd made cookies then i i would have been too exhausted to crush this duck no but i think you would have been

overwhelmed yes by i think that you wouldn't be in the right headspace i know how well you bake Yes. I think that you wouldn't be in the right headspace. I know how well you bake. And I think that it would have really rattled you when you then had to approach another, this other animal you've never cooked in your life. And you wouldn't have been in the right headspace for it. But instead, by bowing out, you really had time to prepare mentally for that duck.

God, did anyone show their cookies uh no yeah okay i thought not by the way ginger are they gingerbread ginger snap cookies uh ginger snap cookies god what a fucking waste of a dessert i and you don't need a class to teach you how to cook those either. They're just garbage. It's like the thinnest, brittlest cookie that doesn't have any real flavor. Well, I guess it has a lot of flavor to it. It has the wrong flavor for a dessert. It's very silly. Around the seasons, the holidays, when people are like, oh, would you like a gingerbread man? I'm like, fuck.

No, let's just make chocolate chip cookies. We do it the rest of the year and it's great. Do you have something in your life that interferes with your happiness or prevents you from achieving your goals? BetterHelp is here for you. They will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist. You connect in a safe and private online environment, so it's convenient for you. You can start communicating in under 48 hours, all without ever having to sit in an uncomfortable waiting room. BetterHelp is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and it's free to

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Christmas is a really bizarre time where people just decide to pretend to like food that we all universally hate. God, it's crazy. Like all those things that just, and not even just the taste of things, but like candy cane is, like just an unpleasant thing to consume

at any age. It's not even one of those things where it's like when you're a kid and it's cotton candy. I don't even care that I'm sticky. It's like it was never enjoyable to have a candy cane. And there are so many better vessels for peppermint flavor, but it's Christmas time. So it's like, all right, I guess I got to like as delicately as I can

unwrap this fucking nightmare hook of a treat that i i now have to have a mint for longer than anyone has ever wanted or needed a mint and then like if i'm if i'm lucky it'll like pierce my cheek yeah you can't do it cleanly it's not like something you can just throw in your mouth and be like and no one else will this. You are open to the world when you're masticating a candy cane. Yeah. It's like you slobber on a little bit of it at a time until it dissolves. And then you just move down it like a slug. I also don't like, like around the seasons, Pfeffernuss cookies become very popular.

And that's something I've just never understood. And you know what I'm talking about? I don't like, like around the seasons, Pfeffernuss cookies become very popular. And that's something I've just never understood. And you know what I'm talking about? I don't. Pfeffernuss are like a powdered sugar, dry lump. It looks like some flour that just got left out and got stale. It's very crumbly. And then it has a powder sugar on the outside and they're just trash. And everybody has them during the holidays

i guess maybe not for you but no anyone i maybe of scandinavian descent has them and they're they're just garbage man it's i i think i want to amend what i said earlier about all the the food around christmas time being terrible because they there's actually two speeds there's the terrible foods that that nobody ever wants and it seems like for some reason we as a society have just decided well you have to eat pepper noodle sometime right god forbid we don't eat it right so let's just make it now for christmas while we all have time away from work and school to recover we have we have that speed and the other speed is like really amazing rich decadent holiday cookies with like an inch of frosting on top of them that now I feel like, what are we doing that we make this a singular event? Why don't we just make the things that we like all the time?

And the argument against that will be, well, then it's not as special. And my counter argument will be, shut up. I don't care. Let's try it. Let's see if it's not as special and my counter argument will be shut up i don't care let's try it let's see if it's not as special if i eat this delicious thing year round let's see if it's not as fun at christmas time let's just try it for a couple of years i agree with you all right good so we solved that on our on our uh cooking podcast can i ask you a question on this sure do you think that would be a like could we do absolutely okay daniel quick question go what's a thing in your life that you purchased that served its purpose like so so thoroughly and uniquely that you would have paid

any amount of money for it is there something absolutely 100 there is my um shark ion vacuum cleaner okay hold on i gotta pick up a shark uh multi-flex it is lithium ion power powered uh it's got like it's got a battery it's got a battery instead of being uh plugged into the wall and i i famously hate cords i think they're they're awful and ugly and disgusting and i know that in my lifetime we will have figured out a power grid system where we there are no cords at all it's gonna be fantastic i can't wait um but for now i just have to love and enjoy this vacuum and the the the history of this vacuum is that a co-worker of mine a couple years ago got one of these because there was a good deal on amazon and he was talking about his vacuum in the writer's room. And it was, there's like, I want to say 30, there's, there's, there's a, there's an amount of time that you will allow someone to talk about a vacuum and it's about 30 seconds. And so we all like let him do that as,

as polite people do. And then he kept going on about it. And then eventually everyone just had to like start talking about other things and drown him out. Because get over your fucking vacuum, buddy. And throughout the day, we would, it seemed like a bit, but it was general, genuine enthusiasm. We would just hear him down the hall talking to someone else about this vacuum. You just hear bits and pieces of like to someone else about this vacuum you just hear bits and pieces of like like muffled noise through walls and then eventually every once in a while i'll be like yeah cordless two different settings for hardwood and carpet like yo shut up about the vacuum so then i went home and i bought the vacuum and it fucking rules i I love it. Three other guys in our office bought the same vacuum.

It's an incredible piece of technology. Not having a cord is just one part of its greatness. It's so light. It takes up so little space in your home. It maneuvers so well. I feel like it gets around everywhere and gets everything. And there's, again, like I mentioned, one button for like hardwood or tile floor and one button for carpets and rugs, which is when my coworker was boasting about this feature was not something that I thought I would care about. We grew up with like one kind of vacuum and it worked everywhere.

It just did vacuum stuff. vacuum and it worked everywhere it just did vacuum stuff uh but now that i have the shark and i try out the different feature i can really notice the difference there's a shift in the amount of power that this thing is giving me when i i put it on carpet mode and i'll tell one more quick story about this vacuum is that uh i recently had some vaccinated friends over for a visit and these were people that we hadn't seen in years a lot of drinking happened and i woke up my friends the next morning and they were all very hungover but i was like i want to tell you guys about my vacuum and i i told them about it and my buddy chris was like all right fine bring out the vacuum let me let me see it and i was like it's got, all right, fine. Bring out the vacuum. Let me see it.

And I was like, it's got two features. And he was vacuuming with the hardwood feature. And he was like, oh, this is really smooth. This is really light. And this is really smooth. And I hit the button that switches it to carpet. And he felt the change in his hand. And like, I shit you not, this 35-year-old hungover man at 8 in the morning who didn't even want to be alive anymore, his eyes lit up.

And his whole body changed because he could feel the power in this vacuum. He felt this shift. And I sat there watching a new shark owner get born this day. You would have been a great vacuum salesman, Daniel. Thank you. All right. I'm looking at a couple of these and I have some questions. Is yours the Shark Ion P50?

Do you know? Let me hear this. You'll know. I'm confused because none of them, not only do they not have cords, they're all pretty bagless as well. Yeah. And I don't quite understand where all the filth is going. It goes into the handle.

It all goes up into the handle. It all goes up into the handle, which the handle detaches and becomes a little vacuum gun, which is also very fun for corners and stuff. Oh, okay. Now, there's also the Shark Ion P50 has like a little chamber that sits up the handle a little bit, up the rod a little ways. That's not yours, right? No. That one I don't understand because you can't get under couches with something like that. No.

This is perfect. I love it so much. One of the more unhinged things that I did, I think. So, DLBs, devotees, long-time listeners of the podcast may know that I recently spent a few months in a quiet, nameless ocean town in New Jersey. And I, it was a fully furnished home. I spent my first week there looking over everything that was in the place and deciding what was acceptable and what was unacceptable. I drove back to Manhattan to get my vacuum because I didn't like the vacuum that was already in this house. It was a fine vacuum. It did what a lot of people would argue

vacuums are supposed to do, but I didn't like it. This was purely like, no, I deserve a better class of vacuum. And so I went and I got my vacuum and had a two vacuum house for a while. And so you, and did you ever even pick up the other one again or was it just sat there collecting dust

while the shark did all the work? It sat there collecting dust and I looked at the little stupid button on the side that was like, if you step on this button, then like the cord gets sucked up for storage. And I'm like, you fucking dinosaur idiot dipshit. Just why don't you do yourself a favor? Why don't you just go to hell right now?

Why don't you pack up your cord and your stupid caveman bag and get the fuck out of here? Because you don't belong in this world anymore. I have a vacuum like that. Oh, good for you. Yeah. Maybe I'm a new shark owner today. I don't know. Oh, I i hope so my concern with it is that

battery powered anything never is as powerful as something getting its juice directly from a wall man if if covid wasn't a factor no joke the first thing i did would be flying to los angeles and and letting you try out my vacuum for a while. You know what's funny is that everyone who's listening to this podcast is just going to be skipping, being like, this is the longest ad I've ever heard. These guys are really putting it all into it. When are they going to get to the promo code? Time is what we make of it. So no matter what 2021 brings, you can spend that time creating something meaningful

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Especially when compared to pricey in-person classes and workshops. You guys know me. I've taken several classes with Skillshare at this point. They've made me a better Instagram photographer. They have taught me a little bit of close-up hand magic. They taught me a little bit of American sign language. They taught me a lot of bit about creativity. And that's the one that I want to talk about this week is the class that I took is Productivity for Creatives. You know, Soren and I talk about on this show all the time, the struggle of being creative on a deadline. This class has been great for me. It's Productivity for Creatives. It's treating inspiration not as a muse, it's a a muscle and you have the power to make it stronger. And this is the class that is going to help you. It's taught by a guy named Thomas Frank, who's a YouTuber, author and entrepreneur. And I've been

able to set up a physical and digital space that works for me. I've completely transformed my home office space based on this class. And it's much better for what I need, and the ideas are just flowing like mad. You can explore your creativity at Skillshare.com slash QQ and get a free trial of premium membership. That's Skillshare.com slash QQ. I have something in my life as well, Dan, that's equally as trivial, and I just bought it recently. This is what made me think of the question. I bought a wagon, a little wagon for, that I can carry my kids in or that I can just carry stuff in to the beach and stuff like that. Okay. Describe it.

Okay. It's, it's a foldable, it's collapsible. So it collapses as small as a stroller would collapse. It's got four pretty big sized wheels that are like a solid rubber. So any, there's no terrain that's like really too much for it. And it's got two seatbelts on either end of it so you could strap your kids into it. And then it's got, you know,

a little handle that you can pull it with. What do the kids sit in? Is it just like a bed, like a bed of a truck? Yeah, it's just a, yeah, exactly. It's got, it looks like a big box basically on wheels. And so, yeah, they sit inside of it. There's seatbelts in there. And then it's got a handle on the front. It's got smart casters on the front. I don't know if you know what those are like. So the wheels can spin in any direction. So it's real easy to steer. And it's got a handle on it on the front so I could pull or I can go around to the back and I fold up this other bar that's like a shopping cart type bar and I can push it instead. And it's been awesome. It was fairly expensive. At the time I was like, I don't know, do we really even need a wagon? Like we've got other things I can carry my daughter in, my son, if he needs to ride something, get right on my shoulders. No, this has been

so valuable to us. I realized every day that I use it, I realized something new about it. It has lots of storage on the outside too. It's like we went to the beach and you pile everything into it with the kids on top of it all. And it just handles sand like a dream. And then I put my daughter in it when she was sleeping so I could fit the entire car seat into the middle of it, and it's kind of like it doesn't lock in, but it's just like this perfect snug fit so it doesn't go anywhere, and it has a canopy, Dan. I can fold up these things on the sides,

and there's a canopy over the top to keep it shaded, and I could take her for a walk, and while she was sleeping, the biggest problem you have with walking with an infant in a st stroller is that you know as you're making turns and things like that new sun the sun's coming from a new angle all of a sudden and it's just no matter how much you can close up a a stroller the kids are getting hit with it and i say i was gonna guess that the biggest problem was birds i don't know it's not birds at the beach diving in there yeah but kids are so sticky and tasty they are they're also they're just big enough that a bird is like I'm gonna wait and see how

this plays out I want to see if this thing's dangerous or not okay and maybe I'll have a kid then and the nice thing about that how I can switch it around I can go from either side or like spin the whole thing around is that as I'm walking with her, if I get to an area where I'm like, oh, it's too sunny right here, ordinarily, I would either turn around or I try and block it with my body. I just turn the whole wagon around and continue going that with pushing the back. And it's been awesome. I love it. And so the first day that we used it, I broke it.

Very first day we used it. And it's my fault. The back thing, the push bar, I was going towards a curb. Both kids were in it. And I tried to like push down on that to pop up the front wheels and get it up on the curb, which was a huge mistake. You would with a grocery cart. But it hinges on this rotator so that you can actually fold it down and immediately i snapped it on one side and so i wrote the company and i was like i

broke it and they were like that's fine we'll send you a new one and i was like really no like yeah yeah just send it back and so i just got a brand like i did it wasn't completely unfunctional or anything but i was allowed to just send it back to them and get a brand new one and i it's just been such a treat to have now did someone a couple of follow-up questions did someone recommend this to you no that's maybe also why it means so much to me i just was like i'm gonna go look at wagons um because i'd seen other people pulling children in wagons before and i started looking them up. There were some that were like decent and they looked like, oh yeah, that'll serve the purpose. And then this Cadillac of wagons appeared on my screen and I was like, wow, that's a pricey one.

But listen, I've been saving for a while. Maybe I deserve this. And that's the one I got. And it's worth it. I would have paid so much more for it. Have people stopped you and asked you about it yet? Yes. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, because that's the most fun thing in the world. It's the canopy is really what sells it for people. As soon as people see it, it looks like this palaquin. I think that's the word where you're just like your child is an emperor of some sort and people stop you like, wow. You're just like, your child is an emperor of some sort. And people will stop you and be like, wow. Did you have to build that section yourself?

And I'm like, no, no, no. It comes with it. Look, it all folds down. Sorry, I googled Poliquin, and it's like an incredibly jacked Canadian author. Let me see what it... Palaquin. No, I'm right. I'm right.

A palaquin. P-A-L-A-Q-U-I-N. P-A-L-A-Q-U-I-N. Okay. Well, Google recommended me a different situation altogether. Oh, it's palanquin. It's got an N in it.

Palanquin, the N. Okay, all right. I don't know. Check out this author, though. He looks fucking jacked as hell. Okay, I'm going to go look at him, too. Save that for later. Yeah.

Really do a thorough look at those traps. But anyway, I've loved it. I've loved every second of owning it and I love folding it down I love just throwing other shit in there with my kids and they love it my daughter won't eat her dinner anymore because she knows after dinner she's going to go for a ride so all she does is writhe around her chair looking behind her hoping the front door magically opens and we get to leave

it's a great that's very exciting i'm super happy for you i am thank you i'm so sorry to you and our listeners i'm i'm i'm fully into this charles palaquin guy now because like like as soon as i i googled that and google was like i think you mean paliquin so i was like sure google and then you see an image in the right rail of this like incredibly fit shirtless guy at a gym and then when you see below it canadian author like well what the hell that's not what authors are supposed to look like he He's carrying a sledgehammer. And I look at his books, and now I've got to buy them. One of them is called Manly Weight Loss. That's going to be stupid.

One of them is called Winning the Arms Race, and it's got him flexing his arms. Poliquin Principles. This is going to be great. This is going to be my summer reading. I think I see a picture of him but he's like 70 so that can't be yeah he's like an old jacked canadian author okay yeah i've got the right guy yeah i guess i'm not the magic isn't there for me no all right i've been reading too much sean baby i think i'm really in the market for books where a lunatic teaches me how to punch trees.

Hey, Soren, I have a quick question. And it might be bad and we can bail on it if it fucking sucks shit. We haven't before. It's an editor I follow on Twitter, Samantha Wiener. She posted something recently to the effect of Billy Joel's Piano Man and Sheryl Crow's All I Wanna Do take place in the same cinematic universe.

And she refused to take questions on that. And I immediately knew what she was talking about. But it also got me thinking about bands that have what feel like a shared universe. Like even if all the songs are not necessarily narrative songs or just like Maroon 5 is just Adam Levine singing about falling in love with a woman or dancing or whatever the fuck. But the idea that a band like let's pretend for a second they've created a world where all the characters in their songs live is there uh a is there a band's universe that you'd like to live in and b is this is this question any good or is it is it more like it more like a fun thing to think about privately at home alone?

Well, I don't know. You go first and then I'll tell you. I like the Hold Steady for this a whole lot. The Hold Steady is a very obvious answer for this. Some of their songs are connected from album to album. And even if they're not narratively connected like they're they're they're literally talking about characters holly hallelujah is a character that appears in multiple hold steady albums and uh but even when they're not doing that everything sort of feels like it's part of the same like week-long party somewhere in minneapolis or something like that and it's it

all of it feels even though the the guy's voice the craig finn i want to say the lead singer of the whole city has like uh an undeniably older voice he's still all of the songs feel like uh immediately young and immediately nostalgic it all feels like i'm watching dazed and confused for the first time and feeling nostalgic about a time i did not live through or the wonder years something like that where i watched that and i'm just like yeah just just that's how it used to be just just running around in the past and and dirty and liking girls. And that's what the whole Hold Steady universe feels like to me. Because none of his songs, the songs almost always feel like the weekend is just starting.

Or you're putting off the week starting up again. It's always in that excitement and hope of it's friday night we're gonna we're gonna go and the the excitement slash dread of it's like there's still a few more hours of nighttime before we have to go to work again and all the possibility contained within those two bookends it just feels like a fun low stakes place to live where everyone everyone is trying to uh party in a not scary way everyone is trying to to get laid in a consensual way and listen to music and run around and live forever knowing that they can't this question fucking rules yeah i think that's a great answer too i think that thinking of a universe in which everyone is about to have the

weekend is a really great, I don't know. It's cool. It's a good universe. Um, I have one for you. You're going to hate it. The Decembrists,

Daniel. Oh God. The Decembrists, they paint such a, uh, Oh, God. embassy you could run into like a bag man who's who's a spy and uh you could get traded away to a family of trapeze artists and uh i i'm assuming you want to say you get traded away as a child you get traded away to a family of trapeze artists where you that's where you would grow up um it's everything that happens in the song there's a lot of uh everybody's very full of emotion everybody's in love with everybody but it's also a very strange

and like brand new bizarre world and i like it i can see that as an answer even if i can't stand listening to that band there's something undeniably whimsical and old-timey about them it's it's very and i probably say this because i watched one music video where they're doing this, but it's very like we hopped aboard a train in the past, like hobos did, and we're going to just see where the train takes us. And like, and on our way we meet a matchstick girl. And as a listener, I'm like, was a matchstick girl a thing? Did you like Google that matchstick girl was a thing? Or did you just say it because you thought it sounded like a thing yeah yeah you twee fuck it does seem and like yeah it's

everything's an adventure in that world yeah you're gonna tomorrow you might end up on a steamship and uh then you get hijacked by pirates and now you're a pirate like there's all kinds of really fun cool stuff that happens in them and i guess because all the songs are narrative uh it's like clear there's a story taking place in all of them there's also some magical realism there's like a lot of stuff where they take old fairy tales and things like that but um i just i love the idea of everything being an adventure have they ever have the decemberists ever um stepped out of that fairy and whimsy and done like modern narrative songs i imagine not they've never been like and the printer was jammed again and it was terry's turn to fix it but terry said like whatever

uh you mean have they have they branched out like led zeppelin did from jr token yes i don't think so i don't know i haven't actually followed them in a while. Occasionally, I'll hear a new song from them. I'll be like, this is good. This is good. I like what they're doing. But I haven't like, I was very into them in the early 2000s. They were the band that I was like, wouldn't shut up about.

And then I just, I don't know what happened. I got over them. I might be OD'd. There's just, you know, you fall out of love. Yeah. That reminds me of a thing I can talk about because we're just trying to fill time at this point and it's kind of adjacent.

Do you know the song Young Girl by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap? No. Young girl, get out of my mind oh yes yes yes yes yes it's one of those songs i uh and maybe you can you can relate to this uh even though i'm not writing for a website that asks me to do um deep dives on obscure topics, I still do it from time to time. And this was one that was very frustrating because it just ended up being fruitless.

There was nothing there. But the song is Young Girl. As a song, it's very fun to sing. It really kicks ass as a song. It's very enjoyable. Gary Puckett's voice is incredible. He was one of Elvis's favorite singers. Elvis said that all the time.

The song is surface level creepy. It's not even like a crack style observation where it's like, if you really think about it in this context, it's like you're much too young. context it's it's like you're much too young girl yeah he's singing to a girl that that he uh i think in the narrative of the song uh just found out she is uh too young to be legal for him to engage with sexually and he's uh hilariously heartbroken and less hilariously kind of angry at her and the the lyrics don't like dance around any of this it's it's he's lamenting i'm reading them you know beneath the makeup and the perfume you're just a baby in disguise and he needs her to get away from him because she's too young and if she sticks around he might change his mind and and and then they would then a that's in his mind her fault and b they'd both

be in trouble like you gotta get out of here because i can't control myself it's i'm right i'm bruce banner right now and i know what's coming so you better get out of here or else i can't be blamed because then it'll be the other guy's fault uh and like she is definitely way too young like at the end he's like you bet you should go home to your mom. So she's like still living at home, kind of young girl in a way that like, I know that things have always been like pop music then and now has always, uh, glorified and sexualized young women to a very unhealthy and irresponsible degree. into a very unhealthy and irresponsible degree um this wasn't done in like what felt like a the usual past way of doing things where they're sort of winking at things like she was just 17 you know

what i mean this is like no i'm aware of the law you can't be near me get out of here and i started googling around on this song because i felt like there's got to be a bigger story here we have to find out that because it's so surface level explicitly about a creep and a little girl that i thought like there's there's got to be some more clever thing that the guy is intending you know it's got's got to be like Nabokov writing Lolita, where we're not supposed to like the main character. He is the bad guy. There's got to be something that our lead singer is trying to say.

Or if there's not something clever about it, then maybe we're going to find out that Gary Puckett in real life turned out to be a sex predator. And it's like, that's the missing piece. That's why it makes sense why someone would write this explicitly terrible, creepy song um but none of that that's what made it very frustrating a not a lot of people have covered this song in depth b there's no deeper meaning there's no gary puckett is not a sex pest it wasn't written by him it was written by a guy named jerry fuller

and he's not a sex pest uh i don't know why I'm saying this. I think he might be. He might be. Just not caught yet. He's done an interview about this song where he said that- Jerry Fuller did? Yes. He based it on his own personal experience, quote, where 14-year-olds look like 20-year-olds.

Oh. Yeah. Pretty rough. Yeah. That's not fun at all. That sucks. That's real bad. oh yeah pretty rough yeah that's not fun at all that sucks that's real bad um so that's a bummer but not surprising at all i guess like some of the best songs are

you're when you find out why the best thing an artist can do is when they write a song is just shut the fuck up about it and be like that belongs to the world now you decide what it means you hold your hand through your own experience and uh and let this song guide you but uh the first thing that comes to mind is brian adams because i don't particularly like but he's got a song called summer of 69 where they were like come on what what really happened in the summer of 69 like it sounds really charming and like it has that nostalgic feel like wonder years and uh and he said 69 you know like 69 i think the interviewers are just like okay no further questions that rules i like that he chose that date because he's like 69 is cool.

Sucking down chili dogs. I just found out about it. And then I wrote the song. It's cool. Right. I didn't know that was a thing people did. And then as soon as I found out they did it, I wrote a song about it. So yeah,

it's a, it's a shame. It's a gross song song i do know the song it's a very fun song to listen to yeah um i guess if you just ignore the lyrics but man it really reminds me of how many songs there are where it's just about a guy being like you're too young for me right and that that pining which is something that i've usually in songs there's like something you can relate to it's very nice to like have bouncing souls, singing a song about how you're a good kid and you just don't know what you're doing yet.

But when you hear a song like Tom Petty singing about my little queen bee, you're just like, no, I think I'm going to skip this one. I'm just not finding an entry point here. It's, it's legitimately such a bummer that, that young girl is as earnest as it seems that it's real like this this jerry guy who like let's unpack jerry a little bit it was like yeah it's it's it's all 14 year olds look like 20 year olds to me and it's like well i don't think you know what 20 year olds uh look like jerry and like it's very clear that jerry doesn't have any

friends because if anyone i knew was like that 14 year old looks like a 20 year old hey that one too that one too and it's like no we need to talk to jerry jerry is bad we need to tell jerry that uh there's something else at play here like here's here's what 20 year olds are supposed to look like jerry also i don't know when when you're doing this jerry but stop looking at 20 year olds too i'm i'm not gonna look up how old jerry was when he made this comment because i have a feeling he was not anywhere near 20 when he said it and so it's like jerry why are you even looking at 20 year olds in the first place um let me just see here the song came out in uh 1968 doing my math, Daniel.

This could take a while. Hell yeah. I could talk about the singer who was also interviewed about this, which is all I really wanted was an in-depth deep dive into this. We've got like a quick thing in 2019 where he chats about singing Young Girl

in the age of hashtag Me Too. And his response to it was, yeah, the guy in the song is not creepy at all and i've always thought of it that way since we first recorded it i've always thought the guy in the song is upstanding when he discovers the girl is a certain age he says wait a minute this is wrong go away people can think it's creepy that's their prerogative but i've never thought of it that way okay i mean that's just cover fire yeah that's that's it ignores the fact that you would be with somebody who's clearly so young right and and like that you're first attracted to them for a very specific reason and you're ignoring the song clearly leaves the door

open for like and then when the song done's who when the song is done who knows what that what the narrator gets up to after that and also like sorry gary but that's a low bar where it's like no if you listen to the song he never actually uh assaults a minor so you know point to where's the point to the part in the song where's his parade maybe he's a good guy uh fuller was 30 when he wrote that song okay these 14 year olds look like 20 year olds jesus i know it's real rough well um wrap up yeah we can wrap up here i can track down the the social accounts in just one second um no way i mean i could do them i have them right no i uh it really it's really, I'm super fast about this.

This is like the first time I've ever been prepared, honestly. I know, but like, it's like, you know, I'm on a hot streak and you don't want to mess with me when I'm on a hot streak. I won dinner today, Soren.

Let me do it. I'm going to do it really well. But while I'm doing that, just quick as you can, don't even think twice about it. What is the right age that a woman should be I've always felt like age is always just sort of it's always been like a number to me it's just it, it's just a number you, it always changes. It's always going

in a, in a direction. And that seems silly. It's like, you're as old as you feel. Okay. However old you want to be. That's how old you are at heart. That's what we should start asking each other. We shouldn't be asking each other, Ooh, are you 18? We we should be like how old are you at heart i want the listeners to know that that was um i never mentioned like an age for sexual consent or anything like that i wasn't i just like what age a woman should be uh and that's where soren took it and you could find him and ask him about it on twitter at soren underscore ltd you can find me on twitter at dlb underscore inc you can find the show on twitter at qq underscore soren and dan or instagram if you search you can find and hire our editor producer engineer and good buddy gabe at gabe harder.com let's see if you can gabe harder.com here i go oh the website is still ready to go man when this website

launches it's really I'm gonna freak and you guys I can't wait the stuff that Gabe said off the podcast that he is cooking up for this website it's gonna fucking knock your socks off everybody I actually I need to make I need to apologize to the people because I thought that this was ready because

when I go to the Gabe Harder dot com there's a button to chat with a live person. And I just kind of assumed that that was going to mean that someone would help them get in touch with me. But I actually think that's for me to build the website. Yeah, looks like that's probably the case. There's a really nice clip art of a rocket. Yeah, because the site is ready to launch. Yeah. We also have a patreon for the show uh i think we're doing exclusive stuff for the patreon so do you want me to tell them what it is daniel yeah yeah uh we will uh do you want

me to tell them what it is soren oh we do and we do bonus episodes oh yeah okay we do a little bonus episodes where yeah people ask questions on there we choose a question and we do an entire bonus episode around the question yeah i gotta say it's only a matter of time before that show becomes the real show because i'm i'm i'm i'm out of questions yeah yeah i know you really well i think maybe for the worse. Yeah. I don't know that either of us have come out of this feeling like,

oh, our friendship has grown. Yeah, and I think if there are still questions that you have for me, you know enough to know that that the answers will be like friendship deal breakers. Yeah. And you don't like,

you respect me too much to turn that corner knowing that it will be the end deal breakers. Yeah. And you don't like, you respect me too much to turn that corner knowing that it will be the end of our friendship. I'm not saying this is what's happening here, but I'm saying Emerson once said, when I first met you, I thought you were an ocean vast and deep and now I have walked your shores and I see you're only a lake

and I am done with you. Wow. Again, not saying that's what's happening. Did, did Emerson sound like such a prick when he said it? Or is that? I think probably, yeah. Those transcendentalists were kind of like pompous. All right.

Bye. See ya.