Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - The 2023 Pop Culture Pop Quiz Part 2
Episode Date: January 16, 2024Soren and Dan return with part 2 of the quotes that defined 2023. What better way to ring in the new year than by looking back at the one we just finished? Dan quizzes Soren on the sentences that expl...ain 2023 (h/t The Ringer).See all 84 sentences at https://www.theringer.com/year-in-review/2023/12/18/24002319/2023-recap-pop-culture-sportsFollow the show on socials: https://www.linktr.ee/QQPodcastSoren Bowie: https://twitter.com/Soren_LtdDaniel O'Brien: https://twitter.com/DOB_INC
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I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright
I wanna hear your thoughts, wanna know what's on your mind
I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright
The answer's not important, I'm just glad that we could talk tonight
So what's your favorite? Who did you get?
When do I be remembered? What's it all about?
Where did all the bad ways go? Oh, forget it.
I saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien.
Two best friends and comedy writers.
If there's an answer, they're gonna find it.
I think you'll have a great time here.
I think you'll have a great time here. So hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel,
the podcast where two best friends and comedy writers ask each other questions and give each
other answers. I am one half of that podcast, senior writer for Last Week Tonight, author of
How to Fight Presidents, and big reader Daniel O'Brien. Joined as always by my co-host Mr. Soren
Bowie. Soren, say hello.-host, Mr. Soren Bui.
Soren, say hello.
Hello, everybody.
I'm Soren Bui, and I have really fallen off with reading.
I don't think, I mean, I've been reading the same book for about a year and a half.
This Dave Eggers book.
It's good, too, which is like a huge, usually when I stop reading a book, it's because I just can't keep with it.
But I just suck at reading now.
It's just like not the thing I want to do before I go to bed when are you reading i in the morning oh your time yeah first thing in the
morning usually it's uh and it's it's it's very deliberate i think i'm the same way as you where
i like reading but if i if i fall off then it's then it takes me so long to get back into it and so i'm
just like making it a very uh deliberate part of my life and trying to hold myself accountable and
just like constantly read make sure that i put when i finish a book pick up another book and
keep reading and i'm happier i think uh without being an asshole i think reading is good it's still like the best
way to to share ideas and to and to to think there's no i haven't found anything that makes me
think of my own ideas and my own thoughts about the world quite like reading a book uh
are you reading fiction or are you reading nonfiction? Both. I just finished a book called The Good Enough Job,
which is a guide to having a healthier work-life balance
that my dad got me for Christmas.
It was very inspiring and helpful and articulated a lot of things
that I've been thinking about jobs and work lately. And when I finished that, I picked up, it's called The Bank Shot. It's part of
the Dortmunder series of novels. You know, Dortmunder, Soren?
I'm waiting for the joke. Is that a real name?
That's the real name. So here's everything that i have to say about about this i started getting into these novels because one of the uh challenge that i set for myself when i
was looking for books to get started reading again was to find out what authors my favorite authors
like and to read stuff from them and this wasn't an author but uh the head writer and showrunner for better call saul mentioned
the dortmunder novels by this guy donald westlake donald westlake was writing crime novels about
like a very good detective and then one day he started writing a crime story and was like this
is too like he was so he was very precious about his detective it's like this is too stupid for my
detective he would never be this dumb so now i'm gonna make it about a dumb criminal instead and i he was very precious about his detective. It's like, this is too stupid for my detective. He
would never be this dumb. So now I'm going to make it about a dumb criminal instead.
And I need a dumb name for the dumb criminal. Dortmunder. Dortmunder. His name is John
Dortmunder. And it's a series of novels about a criminal and his pals trying to pull off heists.
And they're very well planned and then something in completely unpredictable and
wacky happens to throw the plan yeah askew and they're formulaic and they're so funny and they're
so fucking good and i'm so happy that the dortmunder books are in my life there's a ton of
them i'm gonna read these this is great i mean i i love hardboiled detective stories like the philip marlow stories were an institution for me and this feels like the
opposite of that but in a really good way it's it's i'm just reading about it right now and it's
very funny to think of somebody who things so predictably go wrong that he's sort of relieved
when they start going wrong in a plan yeah and i i'm i'm tickled by the idea of the author who decided that a story he was writing was not dignified enough for a previously established character that he invented. Like I'm always charmed by someone who has like that level of respect for their own made up bullshit. Cause I often do.
Yeah.
It's very precious.
I love it.
But we're not here to talk about,
Oh,
go ahead.
No,
I was just going to suggest the book.
If you,
if you're looking to read the same book as,
as me over the course of,
I want to say 24 months,
you could read,
you shall know our velocity by Dave Eggers.
It's very fun.
It's,
it's a good read.
I would be really a fun thing to do if we ever, when both of our shows are no longer
on the air and this podcast becomes our sole income and then we create a podcast empire
and a discord to have like two book clubs running at once where we have like we'll read a a few books a month month on mine and yours
will just be like the realistic book club for all the the people with families where it's like
we're gonna try to knock this one out this year no judgment yeah it's fine listen if anyone has
anything to say about this book at any time please say something in the discord if not don't worry
about it.
We're all in this together.
It's 200 pages.
We're looking to bang it out in 18 months.
If you are ahead, if you're behind, it doesn't matter.
We're willing to talk about any part of the book at any given moment.
Even if you tell me what it's about and I haven't started yet, that's great.
I love that too.
That sounds great.
Okay, well, what are we doing today, Dan?
What are we doing?
We're doing part two of Daniel reads sentences to Soren. This is from an article in The Ringer.
TheRinger.com is one of my...
Oh, hold please.
I closed it.
All right.
This is from an article in The Ringer. TheRinger.com is one of the last websites, certainly one of my, oh, hold please. I closed it. All right. This is from an article in TheRinger. TheRinger.com
is one of the last websites, certainly one of my favorite websites. They do sports, pop culture,
news, politics, entertainment. It's great. I have some of my favorite writers working there today.
And the article that we're pulling from is the 84 sentences that explain 2023. We did the first half
in the first episode of this series. and now we're going to close things
out with some more sentences yeah it's a very simple game i'm going to read a sentence to
soren needs a new name i catch your name i think but let's just get started yeah daniel read
sentences to soren let's get into it i can't tell which one of these i want to because they're these are both very online things
one of them uh i'll start with the first one i'm telling you right now that motherfucker that
motherfucker back there is not yeah that was that woman on the plane who freaks out in the plane and
then and then so if you haven't seen this this woman is freaking out the front of a plane
which we got a lot of those this year and then she points to
like she's she's upset and you're like you're already ahead of the game you're like this woman
is freaking out about something that she shouldn't be freaking out about it's probably like somebody
was like loading their luggage wrong or what sat in her seat or they were next to her and they
weren't wearing a mask whatever it was but then she says that motherfucker back there is not real
and you can see everyone on the plane having the same reaction as you which is i'm ahead of this i'm ahead of this i'm ahead of this and then this curveball comes and so
everyone's like wait what so everyone looks like i want to see a not real person
or like because even if i'm on that plane i'm i'm thinking there's no way i'm gonna turn around and
see someone who's not real. But I bet
I'm going to see something kind of interesting.
Do we ever
get any more context for that?
I never looked it up. I was not interested
in finding more context on it
because I thought it
would probably only make me sad. Like we would
find out that the woman was unwell
in a very serious way. Or maybe
it would be she would
be racist and horrible in some way that like we don't need to to elevate more racists or anything
um this clip made the rounds on the internet and came back to my life again at the andy cohen
anderson cooper uh shit show new year's eve countdown celebration where they were just
going through like viral clips of things that
happened and Anderson Cooper is is uh pretty toasted by the time this clip rolls around
and we play it and Cooper is just like yeah I get it we all hate flying planes are the worst it's
like no no that's not don't you're not on her side and then his other because his first point was
like play like we're all stressed about planes.
I get it.
We're all weird on planes.
And his second takeaway was,
stop filming people on planes.
No way.
No, that's wrong too, Anderson.
Anderson Cooper,
you could not be more wrong.
It's my favorite show now.
July 11th, 2023.
This quote comes from Pinky Doll. Ice cream so good gang gang yes yes yes yeah i do
know this actually this is a woman who i think she just does these like as soon as she gets
donations from people or some or like hearts or emojis there's like a different one for each thing
you want her to say and she just does those over and over but there's one in particular where she's doing this and then her daughter comes in the room and she's off camera
and so this woman in her breaks character is just like what are you doing up what do you go to bed
i didn't i didn't see that one yeah it's really funny it's really great i've i've i've only seen
the one that the the ice cream so good i good. I'm ice cream. So good.
Yes,
yes, yes,
yes,
yes.
Ooh,
yes,
yes,
yes,
yes,
yes.
Because there's like,
there's people give her,
you,
you like tip her with these emojis,
right?
Yes.
Yeah.
She's making,
she's,
she's making money off this and she is like,
so dialed in every time you tip with this emoji,
she'll,
she'll do a pose and say ice cream.
So good.
It's not explicitly sexual,
but like all things on the internet, I don't know. It's maybe sexual. It's probably sexual
for someone, but it wouldn't fit my fairly broad definition of pornography. But she is doing
repeated motions and voices and she is like got it dialed in she she you would think she was like a cartoon
character because the the tone and the physicality is identical and perfect every time and there is
something if not hypnotic about just like a full long run of this person who is just
perfectly hitting her marks for ice cream so good my scream so good yes yes yes gang
gang the first i mean my first introduction to her was her breaking character and i think it's
because of that because it's so dialed in it almost looks like it's ai and then all of a sudden
she this woman just like and it's a very different voice it's like a different there's there's just a
different cadence to it or she's just a mom all of a sudden. She's like, what are you doing up?
What are you doing?
It's very funny.
Glad I know that one.
Let's see if you know this one.
The end game is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.
I don't have no idea what this could possibly be.
Me neither.
Skip it.
How much time do we have do we no this is fun i don't want to stop more of these i mean we could okay let's
just keep going all right um let me see if i could find some more good ones life it never die women
are my favorite guy i don't know what that is,
but it made me laugh so hard that I coughed.
I don't know what that is.
This was another one that I should have done more research on,
but it was,
um,
Kyle Gordon featuring DJ crazy times and Bill Yana electronica and a song
called planet of the base,
which is,
I think,
uh, electronica and a song called planet of the base which is I think started to spread because people believed this was like a European dance pop song sung in
English I recognize the picture and that's why I like that the the phrases
were we're always a little bit off but I believe we have learned it's a parody of a fake
Europop song
oh well that's less
fun
yeah sorry
sometimes you think you found something funny but it's actually
they did it funny on purpose
we hate it
we hate it when there's writers and intention behind
things we wish it was all magic
it's true We hate it when there's writers and intention behind things. We wish it was all magic.
It's true.
There were pictures from this music video that went around,
like one in particular where you see all of his pockets and straps and it's like, this is every band from 1992 or whatever.
Yeah.
Okay, go on.
August 14th, 2023.
Also, Mark takes this sport seriously
and isn't going to fight someone
who randomly shows up at his house.
Whoa.
Wow.
Mark takes this sport seriously.
He's going to get in trouble for fighting.
And this is in August.
This is going to be another baseball one
uh who it is not a baseball what is this and no one actually fought oh what is this
this is a spokesperson for mark zuckerberg oh respective fight with elon musk oh god damn it
i i got to my head was in sports and it shouldn't have been.
It should have been in billionaires.
Yeah.
That's right.
There was going to be a potential fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla.
Fucking snoring.
Yeah.
Come on.
Musk.
Yeah, Elon Musk.
They were going to maybe fight and Mark Zuckerberg was clearly training.
And I think Musk got very scared and backed out.
Yeah.
It's,
it's wild that like,
I'm not rooting for anyone in this fight,
but it,
it,
I did end up leaning Zuckerberg.
I think just because he is doing the version of rich detached billionaire that
I would do if I was a billionaire, he is doing the version of rich detached billionaire that I would do if I was a billionaire.
He is doing the, I bought an island and I taught myself to surf and I have a little compound and
I'm using all of my money to do every hobby. I'm training and fighting. I'm learning this.
I'm learning that. I'm in great shape. I'm doing whatever I want. And Musk is using his money to
buy Twitter and shit post all the time.
And when he,
when Musk goes out,
it was like,
I want to have a cage match.
I challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match.
And Mark is like,
yes.
Okay.
I guess.
Okay.
I will do that.
I will,
I will meet you on the,
the,
the battlefield of,
of,
of sweat and,
and brawn.
I lean a little towards that robot just because he makes more sense to me as an alien
than uh elon musk's version of alien speaking of billionaires is there and maybe you didn't
pull this one out but is there any brian johnson quotes on there brian johnson is you know who that
is that's that billionaire who uh for a while was uh stealing his son's blood that was like
oh remember him he did the blueprint and his his motto is never die yeah he's that guy like i i
don't know anything about him i don't know where any of his money comes from i kind of like never
doing a deep dive on him because he reliably pops up on my social feed as like,
this just in, Brian Johnson says, I have the penis of an 18 year old. I'm like, great,
good for you. That's right. Not clicking on that link.
He keeps, yeah, he will pop up in your feed for doing something else crazy related to trying to
stay young forever. And we've've watched i've watched like some of
this blueprint documentary on the things that he's doing and he is just he's a complete lunatic
like each night he's getting zapped by these electrocurrents as he's sleeping and he sleeps
with this visor on that's full of light it's like it just, it's just pure torture. It's wonderful.
September 15th, this personally was my story of the year that I never got over.
I genuinely did not recall vaping that evening
when I discussed the night's events with my campaign team
while confirming my enthusiasm for the musical.
Oh, yes.
Oh, thank you.
The musical was my foothold.
That's uh representative
from my old stomping grounds in rifle colorado that's lauren bobert does that how you pronounce
her last name i don't care that's how i pronounce it this was uh i was so grateful that the strike
ended for a lot of reasons but one of the reasons was the week our show came
back on television last week tonight our our current events political comedy show came back
was the week that this story broke where lauren bobert a professional politician was escorted out
of a touring production of Beetlejuice the musical
for vaping in front of a pregnant woman who was sitting in front of her
and groping the penis of the man next to her,
who was also groping her breasts during the performance.
I dined out on that for so long.
It's such a fun and stupid and perfect story
that she got kicked out for vaping and groping
in the middle of a touring company performance of Beetlejuice,
not a sexy musical.
Like, you don't need to have seen the musical
to know that it can't, by design, be horny.
You're not watching Spring Awakening or anything like that.
It's gross Beetlejuice, the musical.
And she is like, over the pants, hand-jobbing some guy
while he's grabbing her tits and vaping
and gets kicked out of the show.
And when she first gets kicked out
and people are asking her like,
hey, is it true you got kicked out for vaping?
She was like, no, I got kicked out. I guess we were having a little too much fun.
We were laughing too loud because we were enjoying the show so much.
And they kicked us out, I guess.
I don't know.
And then someone was like, no, weirdly, because this is our weird dystopian present slash future.
Someone was filming you in the audience.
So we have footage of you vaping
and getting groped and fondling your partner.
And then for her to be like,
yeah, I guess I did that.
I forgot, but yeah, that's probably right.
That sounds like me.
It's so, it's, I can't even,
I'll never be able to articulate why i like it so much but it's just
so strange and so perfect and so weird and fun a low-stakes scandal that because everything she
does is mostly horrible and this is too but it's horrible in a way that like it's only bad for her
she didn't get to see the second half of beetlejuice and that's
it's almost a victimless crime except for the woman the pregnant woman who
was caught in the vape cloud yeah but no i know exactly what you mean it is really fun and it's
god you know what the only other way we get this is that occasionally like something will happen
and there's one set of there's like one person giving their testimonies to what happened and eventually we will get the footage and those
are usually really dark cases because that will almost always be police cam footage where it's
like you don't get the footage for a while so you have a story first then you find out what actually
happened and there is something it's like it scratches a very nice itch for you narratively
because you're like oh here's the truth and so it feels very fun it never feels fun and also like man if they would
have put that footage out in the beginning then this wouldn't have been fun this wouldn't have
been a story at all and so that that we got a story like that yeah that did that was more
light-hearted than what we'd ordinarily have with police camp footage was so great and like such like a sigh
of relief for everybody like oh i needed that oh yeah it was still this was this was up there for
one of the moments that almost had me walk away from twitter for good because
twitter a few years ago would have would have had only fun with this but twitter today has a little
bit of fun and then there are people who are like listen no matter what you feel about lauren bobert or vaping or whatever
it's weird that we're filming strangers with our phones in in public in theaters can we agree on
this and there's a part of my brain that is like yes probably but there's a louder part of my brain
that's like shut up was that anderson
cooper saying that fucking shit to tiktok get it out of here get it out of my stupid twitter where
we're all terrible to each other that must have been go away person saying that must have been
anderson cooper right yeah it was yeah can we stop filming celebrities this is my yeah my takeaway
from uh anderson cooper's anderson cooper's new yearin' Eve, or whatever it's called, is that guy does some awful shit on planes that he doesn't want anyone to know about.
That's the only takeaway that I have.
All right.
One of these, it's not a sentence, The Ringer broke his own rules.
And it's a picture of Kevin James from the set of King of Queens with his hands in his pocket.
Yeah, I know it.
And a weird smirk on his face.
And that's all I'm getting?
I know it too.
That's all you're getting.
And it is dated as September 21st, 2023, which I guess was the inciting incident for this picture with no explanation showing up on my Twitter feed all day, every day.
Oh, so this is in relationship to something that I, okay.
I know the meme.
I don't know him.
I know the shrug that he's doing.
Like the, aw shucks.
Like little old me kind of shrug.
I don't know why we, why we started using it.
And I actually don't even know how I would employ it as a, as a reaction meme to a bit of information.
Is that, oh, they're not giving you the information?
No.
Okay.
Here's what I think it might be.
And maybe this is just my individual little world,
is that it showed up a lot with Denver Bronco memes
right around that time
because the Broncos were historically bad last year.
Everyone thought, oh, it's Nathaniel Hackett's fault.
He's the coach.
He's bad. They got Sean Payton instead. hackett's fault he's the coach he's bad they got
sean payton instead sean payton used to be the coach for the saints and there was a movie made
about sean payton in which kevin james plays him and in the beginning like uh preseason everything
there was still like a lot of problems with the devere broncos it was so clear that like
it's not just nathaniel hackett that's the problem. And so like, I think that there were a lot of memes of Sean Payton
getting a big contract from the Broncos and them still being bad, but I could be wrong.
Also from September, my comedy Arnold Palmer is 70% emotional truth. This happened. And then 30%
hyperbole,
exaggeration, fiction.
Oh, that's got to be my boy,
Sebastian Maniscalco,
the best comedian out there doing it today.
I don't know who this is.
I don't know who this is.
That's Hasan Minhaj.
Oh, yeah.
Daily show boy
who got in trouble for lying.
Yeah, he was a comedian,
very popular comedian
who was on The Daily Show
and then had The Patriot Act.
And this is a big gray area
for a lot of comics and comedy writers
and comedy adjacent people
because there was this article
that came out as sort of an expose
that was like,
hey, Hasan Minhaj doesn't,
not everything he says in his standup is true,
which is itself not a revelation for standups.
Every standup in the history of standup comedy
has exaggerated anytime they are in their set
and they're like, oh, the craziest thing happened
to me the other day.
It didn't happen to them the other day.
It might not have happened ever.
These are exaggerations that like we all sort of expect and uh let's slide like we don't need our comedians to be complete truth tellers all the time
uh in hassan's case there was specific things that he made up were um uh someone mailing anthrax to his home in response to one of his comedy pieces
like he he talked about that in his special and how scary that was and made jokes about uh anthrax
coming to his house that never happened there was no record of that anywhere. And another lower stakes thing he talked about was, uh, is, uh, girl he had a
crush on in high school that he was going to go to prom with. She eventually dumped him or didn't
go to prom with him because of, of his race and religion. And that was like a catalyst for like
the, uh, like part of the climax for his standup special,
which was called prom King or homecoming King.
Um,
I'm getting some of the details wrong,
but I'm a comedian.
Uh,
but I,
you know,
I'm going to say this,
we,
it turned out that like the,
the,
the,
the breakup or the dumping or whatever it is that didn't happen.
Like the,
the interviewer,
the interviewer,
uh,
track this person down and was like, yeah, no, I, I never, I never, the interviewer, the interviewer, uh, tracked this person down and
was like, yeah, no, I, I never, I never, the story that he's telling never happened. I never
dumped him because of, of his race or religion or anything like that. We were never going to
homecoming or prom together, whatever. These are, uh, very specific embellishments to make,
right? It's not someone who was saying this thing happened to me
when it really happened to a friend, or it's an exaggeration of something that happened to him.
This is like the, the heart of the special. If your, if your special hinges on the, the,
the way the world has treated you, and this is your most illustrative example then
i don't know if it belongs in your autobiographical stand-up piece and with the
anthrax thing that certainly makes your special your story more powerful um but Um, but you know, it's not true.
And I, and I, there's, that's what makes it such a gray area because like no one can really
draw the line of what, what truths are okay and what truths are like, what lies are okay
and what lies aren't and what exactly emotional truth, uh, means.
Yeah.
truth uh means yeah in in a comedy act and and uh it's it resulted in a whole lot of very smart and very dumb conversations all over the internet when it came out
yeah it's tough it's tough when like yeah the moment of poignance in what you're doing
it's like it's a lie. Yeah.
Because, yeah, I totally agree that stand-up comedians should be able to lie as much as they want on stage.
So the other day I was doing this, and you're like, no, no you weren't.
But that doesn't matter.
There's a suspension of disbelief because all I'm looking for here is the joke.
I want the laughter that I'm going to get.
But when you're like, this is the pulse of america don't close your eyes to
it look at it it's like oh but that's a lie you don't have to do that there's a lot of terrible
things that probably have happened to you doesn't have to be these lies right uh october oh if everybody could do it everybody would that's probably not helpful
let me think for a second
october 22nd 2023 i i don't know what this is you
you you mentioned it uh in the previous episode when we first started doing this list
with football stuff um is and then i'm going to need you to explain to me what it is okay great
is it's not aaron rogers again is it okay no um who everybody could do everybody probably would Um, who, I don't know who this is.
It's Nick Sirianni, Philadelphia Eagles head coach on the brotherly shove.
Yeah.
What is that?
You mentioned it before.
Yeah.
There's a play that they do called the brotherly shove, which is like a one yard play.
Like it's a game, but it's like a play that cannot go wrong. But I think that there's, I don't actually know all of the hype that's surrounding it.
I know that the Eagles are famous for it.
And I think that there might be some question as to the legality of the play.
Let me look it up real quick.
Okay.
It involves, you know why this also got a lot of attention was that it involves the other Kelsey.
It involves Travis Kelsey's brother.
And that's a big deal because at the same time, his brother was dating Taylor Swift and everyone
was like, we know the Kelsey's, we know them well. Okay. I think that the Barbaralee show,
and I may be wrong here. I just watched the play. I think that it ends up looking like they're going to spike the ball.
Like they're running out of time and they're close and they're going to spike the ball to try and stop the clock.
And instead of spiking the ball, they hike it.
And then the entire team, like both the fullback and the running back behind the quarterback, start pushing the quarterback over the line.
Okay.
So it looks like they're either going to try and get them to jump off the defense to jump off sides,
or they're going to try and spike the ball.
It's like on a spike ball,
there's like a,
there's this etiquette to football,
which is nobody's.
Nobody really tries on that play.
Like you're not hitting each other because you're like,
why are we doing that?
It's like,
it's world war one Christmas truce in one play.
It's like,
let's just take a break here.
We all know what's going to happen. Why hurt ourselves ourselves and instead they make a play out of it and they push the
quarterback over the line if he's got like a yard to go or something like that so i think it's
breaking the etiquette of the game okay so we don't like this play i don't know i mean i don't
think anybody i think a lot of people come down and like,
no,
it's football.
I mean,
there's a lot of great plays in,
in NFL history where they go to fake a spike and then somebody's wide open
out on the side and they,
they're actually trying on the play and nobody else is.
And so like they end up in the end zone and like we've,
we celebrate those plays,
but for some reason,
everyone on this one is like,
no,
we don't.
You know what i've been
thinking about recently because uh with with the holidays just behind us i've watched more football
than i normally do all year because it's just on at various houses for holiday stuff um so it got
me thinking about football do you remember my uh i think my 29th birthday when we rented a football field and played football.
Yes, I do remember that.
It's because I never liked to celebrate my birthday, but for a time,
I had two friends on either side of my birthday whose birthdays were before and after mine.
Two friends that I just stole from Soren, Dan and Justin that I've
incorporated into my life. Our birthdays were three days in a row. So we just did like a joint
thing, which took the pressure off birthdays every year and made me very happy. And we would
for a time do like a big physical fun activity during the day and then drink and eat at night
like you do. And one year we did, we got like a college football field and we got a referee and we got enough guys to do like a full game of football of, of like buddies and friends, all of us in or close to our thirties and not like, like, like varying levels of athletic, but certainly not people who have regularly played football.
of athletic, but certainly not people who have regularly played football.
And my team, which I believe you were probably on, we lost handily.
And the thing that sticks out in my mind is the not our team went first and they scored on their first drive.
And then they were kicking off to us and they did a fucking onside kick
and i'm thinking about it now i like at the time which is like oh that's pretty crazy but i'm also
tired of running and and this is all a lot more exhausting than i thought it was going to be
but looking back it's a friendly game with buddies and i can't believe those motherfuckers
did a trick play on our first on what would have been our first possession.
They do an onside kick.
Yeah, that was pretty shitty.
Just very competitive birthday buddies.
Yeah, I do remember that.
I also remember losing that game and being really upset, like mad that we lost.
That was the same day that you showed up to the game and the wheel was falling
off of your car.
That's correct. They just not put the lug
nuts back on your wheel after they
did it. And everything was falling off. My car was
going to break and then I spent a bunch of money to get it fixed.
I want to go back really quickly
on the brotherly shove and say that
it is not just an issue of etiquette.
It is an issue of danger
that like brotherly shove there's
high incidence of injury on it because your entire team is pushing behind you so like guys get they
fall and they get trampled um it's it's a really easy way to get injured and so like they're
thinking of outlawing the play yeah well they should that'll make football safe but that's
the thing that everyone's been mostly mad about, right? Yeah, guys getting rolled up on. That's always been the issue.
You'll probably know what this means, but I don't know if it'll mean like the full meaning will land with you. This isn't your mother's Mean Girls.
Okay, there's a new Mean Girls that came out. That was a musical version of mean girls.
Correct.
I didn't realize it happened this late. I thought it was much earlier in the year. And then the ad for it said, this isn't your mother's mean girls.
movie with Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams and other people. And then there was a musical adaptation of the same story, also by Tina Fey and Jeff Richmond, I believe, did the music.
And now this is the movie of the musical. And they put out a trailer in November. And the tagline for
the trailer was, this isn't your mother's Mean Girls. Now, here's what's notable about this.
Because this is 2023,
for some reason,
studios don't want people to know
if their movie is a musical.
Like, you can watch a trailer for Wonka,
and you would be forgiven
if you didn't realize that that is a full-blown musical.
With, like, 15 original songs in it.
Yes.
And trailers for the new Color Purple movie, also a musical.
They don't show you any of the songs from either of those movies in either of those trailers.
And the same is true for Mean Girls.
That is a musical with original songs and you don't hear any of them.
You don't see anyone singing.
original songs and you don't hear any of them, you don't see anyone singing. There's like maybe two seconds of what could be choreography, but not enough to convince you that it is like
a dance in a musical and not a dance in like a dance scene in a movie. You would be forgiven
if you didn't know the trailer for Mean Girls, if you didn't know it was a musical uh the weird thing about this particular tagline is to anyone who was unfamiliar with the broadway
musical and didn't realize that they were making an adaptation of that musical this trailer looks
exactly like their mother's mean girls except for the fact that all of the actors are different and at this point less beloved nobody knows who any of these like that's not lindsey america
sweetheart lindsey lohan or rachel mcadams or amanda syfried or uh lizzie caplan these are just
other people who are saying the same lines as as rachel mcadams and l Lindsay Lohan in the trailer and no clear indication to like a complete normal person
who's not incredibly online or on Broadway.
There's no indication why this movie exists
or why it's different.
Okay, that makes sense.
I did not have the context for that,
but I'm shocked to find out that Wonka is a musical.
Oh yeah.
shocked to find out that Wonka is a musical.
Oh, yeah.
Timothee Chalamet sings like nine songs just by himself,
and I didn't know he was a singer.
Good for him.
He's good.
It's a delightful movie.
I don't know.
I saw it.
That's what makes a movie good to me at this point.
Like, well, I saw it.
So it can't be bad because if it's bad, then I wasted i wasted my time yeah that wouldn't have invested in something that was bad um okay all right uh that one means very little to me i don't i i don't have any like
real i think that's also why it blew past me because mean girls came out i knew that there
was a mean girls musical coming out and didn't have the
context for the fact that they're fucking trying to convince people that
they're not that like surprise them with a musical,
an ambush musical.
Yeah.
I don't know why studios are doing that.
I,
I,
I understand if,
uh,
musicals aren't popular.
They wanting to hide that fact but it's you're with
with social media that can only fire yeah last for so long absolutely also some people like musicals
and just try like don't rely on everyone being as online and as broadway connected as i am
market musicals to people who like
musicals maybe their assumption is that the people who like musicals will already know
like why because i do because people who like musicals are not shy because i obviously do
not shy about doing their own research what new musicals are coming out
uh we got two in a row that are in your wheelhouse.
Karma is the
guy on the Chiefs coming straight home to me.
Is this Travis Kelsey
Taylor Swift thing?
Yeah, I don't know when she said that.
Did she say, did she call him Parm?
Karma is the guy on the Chiefs
coming straight home to me. So like Karma is
a song. Okay. I did
not have that context no really
man um okay one of us was uh i don't want to say forced one of us uh
wasn't delicate easy one of us is grateful that he had the opportunity to watch the taylor swift eras
tour concert twice in a weekend and one of us was not and it shows
i got a text from dan i think in the throes of this where he was like i don't know why you
what like this fucking girl so much talking about taylor swift because i've defended her
several times on the podcast and like said just in passing oh she's good
i think he needed somewhere to put all of his ire and it was like well i know soren
fucking loves her to death he wants to marry her what do you like this girl so much you were so into blank space is when it uh blank
space uh yes what fucking ever that's right i guess my fandom of taylor swift pretty goes in
and out pretty quick but yeah blank space came out and there was like a very specific reason i
liked that song i thought the music video was great and in particular there's one moment when
she looks at camera and says uh they think that i'm insane and the acting is so wonderful in it
like she's there's prep it's clear that like she's done some daniel day lewis type shit where you're
like oh you tapped into something in it like you had it on the surface ready to go and it's really really authentic and good and so i was really impressed
by her acting in it and i was like i love this song
um i think i'm i'm on record enough times on this podcast that I, I nothing but respect. And I, and it's,
she's clearly a phenomenon and,
and it seems like she's doing great things with money. Yeah.
She is,
is,
is,
is good and nice and kind.
I,
I've,
I've watched the errors concert tour twice.
Now I don't get it.
It's fine.
It's not for me to get.
I'm sure people didn't get the Beatles. It's okay. It's not for me. I don't get it. It's fine. It's not for me to get. I'm sure people didn't get the Beatles.
It's okay.
It's not for me.
I don't like it.
It's so funny that this comes up now because I listen to terrestrial radio with my children when I give them a bath.
I have like a little painter's radio basically in their bathroom.
And a song came up and I was like, this is really good.
Like, what is this?
This is really good for terrestrial radio.
It was a Taylor Swift song.
I think that it was ready for it.
Anyway.
November 15th, 2023.
He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.
Wait, wait.
He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.
If that sentence sounds like it's several sentences that have been edited together for a trailer inelegantly, it's probably because that's what happened.
Oh, what is this?
elegantly it's probably because that's what is this this is from madam webb the upcoming madam webb movie starring uh dakota johnson which is why i thought this one was up your alley too
because she goes your friends um i i have seen this trailer yes and i remember yes okay
this is this made the rounds on twitter because everyone was like, does Dakota Johnson know she's in a Marvel movie? Because they show just like a bunch of different clips of her doing something completely different. And I don't know, maybe phoning it in. I don't think so. I don't know. She's just a funny person. It always looks very easy to her.
Yeah. it in i don't think so i don't know she's just a funny person it always looks very easy to her yeah it's a a trailer that no one knows based on the trailer what that movie is about or what's going to be good or really bad and there was a lot of inexplicable choices made in it and that
line in particular really found purchase in a lot of people's brains.
Mine included.
That's a pretty funny line.
I wish I would have written it.
Did you, this is an off topic, Daniel, but did you see Blue Beetle?
I had it on in the background when I was doing either cleaning or Thanksgiving food.
That's gotta be the best way to watch it.
So it was recent.
It was, you just watched it. Oh, good. Yeah um i had not i didn't see it when it came out weird that that
happens with me but yeah i saw it was on actual television i was like i'll watch that it's it's
pretty bad damn yeah it's got some cool things that i like about it and it's it's definitely
fun it ends with a dick joke i think that's fun uh but as far as if the reason you're bringing it
up to connect dakota johnson not being aware that she's in a marvel movie this was so strange
to see susan sarandon as the main villain of this movie, delivering
like fucking comic book villain lines that she clearly, if not memorized, like held them
in her brain long enough to say them in one take on a camera.
And it's just like, man, who told you to do this?
Why are you doing this? Yeah. What agent was like, man, who told you to do this? Why are you doing this?
Yeah, what agent was like,
you know what Susan Sarandon needs in her career right now?
This is going to take her to the next level.
This is a fifth gear for Susan Sarandon.
I think it's agents, and I think it's, again, studios,
because so much about this movie,
I loved the main guy and his family surrounding him too but there's
just i you can see like studio intervention you can see like the the ceo group thing of like
well you also need like an established actor with gravitas to play your villain it's because that's
because we've done that and so
that must be the right thing so we've got who is an older established actor that hasn't done
a marvel or dc movie yet it's slim pickings right now we're running we're almost out of people
mads mickelson but he was in dr strange fuck damn it. All right. Well, who?
Rene Russo?
No, she was in Thor.
All right.
Sam Rockwell.
Susan Sarandon.
Oh, he already did fucking Iron Man.
God damn it.
We burned Sam Rockwell in an Iron Man movie.
A bad one.
Yeah, it's very tonally bizarre.
I will say, yeah, the family dynamic, that was like one of the saving graces of the movie but yeah it's it's just fucking rough to watch you actually caught more of it than i anticipated
it's like the love story is really is really tiresome and then there's also a lot of blue
beetle jokes in there that are for nobody the whole point of this is like they're scraping
the bottom of the barrel for like comics books that they can still turn into movies and so they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for like comics books that they can still turn into
movies and so they're like oh how about this one this weird blue beetle one and there's some
expectation that you have a a pre-understanding of the blue beetle and no no one does no one in
the world does yeah and like i didn't think i was supposed to yeah i i would have done the homework
if i knew there was some.
Yeah.
All right.
Do you have another one?
You said you had two.
Strip Weathers.
You forgot about him?
This is from a movie. What is this?
So Strip Weathers is from a movie.
It's one of the characters in the Cars franchise,
a series of movies I've never seen,
but I know are very popular.
This particular quote,
someone called in to Stephen A. Smith's show
and asked him a question about cars, characters in cars,
and who was the goat in cars. I think they were trying to get him with a gotcha question,
make him feel foolish. And then Stephen A. Smith does a perfect run, seemingly from memory,
of stats for various cups that various characters in the cars franchises.
Oh, that's awesome.
Achieved. It's really, it's such a fun one. Like I don't always love Stephen A. Smith. He's really
hit and miss for me, but this is just great. I don't know if it's staged or not, but it's just
delightful to watch Stephen A. Smith go on a rant about the King. Stripweather's stats.
Yeah. I mean him and Skip Bayless king. Strip Weathers stats. Yeah.
I mean, him and Skip Bayless, like I miss way more often than him.
I don't like either one of them.
I think that they're both idiots, but that's amazing.
Like that's really wonderful.
He could do that.
Also because Strip Weathers is not a name that's said in cars very often.
They always call him the king.
Yeah.
Oh, really?
So you've seen all these movies?
Yeah, I've seen the first one probably like 16 times.
That was my son's go-to movie from ages about four to seven.
Yeah, the Cars movies just hit at the wrong time for me
where I was too old to start them when they first came out.
And as a result, just never dove into them so i don't have the nostalgia thing going for me that like toy story i'll
always see a toy store movie because i'm i bought into that early enough right yeah yeah i i in fact
to this day if i my kids were listening to record or watching record Ralph in the car on our drive to Tucson this year to Christmas and a song comes on in record Ralph where I was like, ah, you know, they already used that song in cars.
This shut up and drive song.
I was like, I know the whole soundtrack.
I know everything about that movie.
Except apparently I didn't know a strip.
Well, this is the King's name.
Yeah.
December 7th. another sports one.
I regretted mentioning 9-11 in my message that day,
and I immediately apologized to the team.
This sounds like the Jets coach, but that's not going to be him.
Who is this?
It's the Buffalo Bills head coach.
Who was using the...
He was trying to motivate his team
and his example of a group of people
who came together to accomplish something
was the 9-11 hijackers.
Oh my God.
That's incredible.
How did I miss that?
I don't know.
Because they really did pull it off.
Jesus.
Yeah.
In an effort to highlight
the importance of team communication,
McDermott said the 9-11 hijackers
were on the same page
when they executed the terrorist attack.
You just see like
Josh Allen looking over at Stefan Diggs being like, what the fuck is going on?
Who are we in this scenario?
There are so many other examples to pull if you're talking about people being on the same page and working together to accomplish something.
being on the same page and working together to accomplish something.
There are so many better examples on 9-11 to pull from that are a better showcase of people coming together to accomplish a shared goal.
And he picked the most wrong one.
That's amazing.
That's amazing.
I wonder if that was just like in the moment or if that was like, because if you ever watch
Hard Knocks, which is where like you get to get an insider view of, of a team.
That's why I thought it might be the Jets head coach, because you see some of his inspirational
speeches that he's giving to the team while they're all like in their stadium seating.
And they are so bad.
Like it's clear.
He decided the night before or whenever this is it.
This is the one that's really going to get them going.
And he's telling the story about like, like hawks are better than crows.
You're like, what?
What is going on?
And I thought for sure it would have been him,
but I guess this is just an all head coach thing.
Yeah.
It's really, it's very baffling.
He's, he's 49.
There's no age excuse.
He's not like so old that he's losing it a little bit.
And he's not so young that 9-11 is like super distant to him or anything like that.
There's no explanation for it other than maybe this is just a thing that guy thinks all the time.
Maybe Sean McDermott is just like,
you know,
love him or hate him.
They really pulled it off.
They were really on the same page with that.
You got like,
think about how difficult it was.
It would have been,
they had to learn to fly.
You got to hand it to the hijackers on 9-11.
They had to synchronize their watches and stuff and like keep,
keep cool under pressure.
This is like very clearly something that he thinks about a lot and thought maybe incredible this is the time to trot it out and other people would
agree with him but you know 9-11 is just one of those things that that every ear in the room is
going to perk up even the guys who were like half listening to you because it's halftime they don't
want they don't they're sick of hearing speeches you say think about 9-11 they're like all right
well this one's different.
This is different than the other speeches he gives.
So let's all shut up.
Funny to then think about them going back out there after halftime.
And like, did they win that game?
Like, did they come back?
Cause then, cause maybe it worked.
Uh, I know that they didn't because the Bills lost most of their games where they
were trailing in the first half
yeah so
maybe they're still thinking about it
maybe that's what did the Bills in
that speech
none of them can get it out of their heads and they're just not
focused on the game anymore
just on the line whispering to each other
so are we the high-tenders
is that what he wants us to do?
It's so funny.
I want to get a mic'd up of the players after that speech.
Well, thank you, Daniel.
I want all the speeches after that where he's over-correcting.
Yeah.
Just like really talking about SEAL Team 6 a lot all of a sudden.
Yeah.
just like really talking about seal team six a lot all of a sudden yeah zero dark 30 like mentioning a lot of the actors even like how they they how hard they worked
yeah
uh well i think we've done uh i'm out energy. I think that's pretty evident based on the fact that I like,
I volunteered like an act out comedy sketch premise where I said I wanted to
hear his overcorrecting speeches in any other episode would have been a great
opportunity for me to like launch into some, but I'm, the tank's dry, man.
I think we're done. Okay. Well, everybody, thank you for listening.
This is quick question, but you already knew that.
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I'm pretty sure he's still there.
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Bye. question for you all right the answer's not important i'm just glad that we could talk
tonight so what's your favorite how did you get
two best friends and comedy writers if there's an answer they're gonna find it i think you'll have a great time.