Scriptnotes, Episode 671: The Best/Worst it Will Ever Be, Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: All right. Okay. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 671 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it’s one of our favorite regular segments, How would this be a movie? Where we take a look at stories in the news and find their adaptable angles. We also have follow-up on AI, listener questions on partner credits, and in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss Home Automation, Craig.

Craig: Oh.

John: Over this past year, we’ve added a few things to our house, and you just moved into a new house. I’m curious what your take is on home automation and what you’re doing and what you’re thinking about doing.

Craig: This is going to be very educational for me. I already can tell. I’m going to learn a lot, and this probably will end up costing me a bit of money.

John: Yes. A little bit.

Craig: What are you going to do?

John: First, I have a small rant.

Craig: Ooh.

John: Ooh. Craig is excited I have a rant.

Craig: Rubbing my hands together.

John: All right. This is a thing that happened twice. Because it happened twice, I know it’s actually a real thing. It’s not just like one person being weird.

Craig: Okay.

John: Okay. So I’m at the dentist, and I have a hygienist who’s really good. She’s a fast scraper. It’s not painful. Great. She chats a ton, but whatever. She’s not expecting me to answer back. It’s just a monologue-

Craig: You can’t.

John: -on her side. Good. Great. She says, “Your wife must be so proud of how good you are at cleaning your teeth.” It’s like–

Craig: It’s like [mumbles]

John: [mumbles] I’m like, okay, well, sometimes people don’t read me as gay, which is fine. I would otherwise correct her. Then I realized like, no, she also cleans Mike’s teeth, so she knows that he’s a man. Following this through, her belief is that the partner of a man is a wife, that you call that person a wife.

Craig: Oh, no.

John: Oh, no.

Craig: No.

John: It’s happened to other places too. It happened with other medical professionals.

Craig: Really?

John: It’s so strange. Here, I just want to state clearly so that everyone knows this, a male spouse is a husband.

Craig: Yeah. Is this one of these cases where someone feels so comfortable with the gay community that they’re like, “I’m going to use your words?”

John: No, no. No, no, no. It’s actually just a genuine, had never occurred to them before. It’s just like a misunderstanding of how English works.

Craig: In Los Angeles?

John: Yes. Isn’t that wild?

Craig: That is wild. Yes. Don’t do that.

John: There was no malice intended. It’s just strange though, right?

Craig: Wait. You said, by the by, spit, rinse. “Actually, I have a husband.”

John: Yes.

Craig: She said, “Oh, I know.”

John: No. She’s like, “Wait, you call him a husband?” I was like, “Well, yes.”

Craig: What did she think– You’re both wives in her mind?

John: I have no idea. I couldn’t get that far deep into her thought process, but essentially any person married to a man would be a wife.

Craig: Oh, honey. [laughs] That’s just wrong.

John: It’s wrong.

Craig: No, it’s just wrong. Wait, you said it’s happened twice.

John: It’s happened twice. It’s happened once and then it was another, this is a few years back, a different medical person.

Craig: Wait, so it’s only the medical people that are doing this.

John: I’m noticing among the medical staff.

Craig: All right. Let’s talk to our health professionals out there. What are you doing? Cut that out. That’s ridiculous.

John: I can understand people who are nervous about understanding pronouns or they’s, them’s. We’re in a place where it’s complicated. You can’t always be sure how a person wants to be addressed by themselves. But I think this is just a subtle matter of how English works is that a guy who’s married to a guy has a husband.

Craig: Yes. A married man is a husband.

John: Yes. Now you could say partner, spouse, other things like that.

Craig: Sure. I think I’ve done a little rant– Have I done a rant about partner?

John: Sure. Go for it.

Craig: I’ll do a little rant about partner. Very common in Europe. I’ve noticed in the UK, everybody refers to their spouse as partner and I’ve also been seeing it more common here and I think in part it’s because people are trying to be really inclusive and remove gendered partnering language. The problem is, partner-

John: Business partners.

Craig: -means two different things.

John: Writing partners.

Craig: When I meet somebody and they’re like, “Yes, I’ve been working on this show and I actually, I showed the script to my partner who was really thrilled,” and I’m like, ”Aah, is that–“

John: Part of the reason why we get to partner is also because it’s the unmarried person you live with who we, for all functional, is your spouse for everything else but law.

Craig: That’s the other thing.

John: I get that. Yet it’s a frustrating situation. It’s ambiguous in ways that it’s not useful.

Craig: It’s ambiguous in ways that are, that is not useful. I’m all for coming up with language that makes people comfortable.

John: Totally.

Craig: I think that’s great. I can see why there’s a need for a term that is different than husband or wife or spouse that covers somebody you’re not technically married to. Although my feeling is if you’re objected to technical marriage, go ahead and claim just virtual marriage and call them your spouse. That’s a perfectly great word.

John: Yes. Oy.

Craig: Oy.

John: Not solvable, but just, I wanted to put this out in the world for like the husband situation, the husband-wife situation, I think is at least standardized enough in American English. You shouldn’t need to worry about this.

Craig: That one, that lady invented a new problem. Now we’re about to get a bunch of emails about partner. I’ll take it. I’ll take it on the chin.

John: All right. Some more follow-up. Drew, start us off.

Drew Marquardt: Yes. We had been talking about Flightplan and how it came from The Lady Vanishes, which is a Hitchcock movie. Andrea Bartz wrote in and said, “As a thriller novelist in the throes of adapting my own novel, I had to point out that Hitchcock’s masterful The Lady Vanishes was an adaptation of Ethel Lina White’s criminally underrated 1936 novel, The Wheel Spins. Levels of genius all the way down.”

Craig: Ooh. I love that. Yes. Isn’t that interesting? Someone writes a book in 1936, you said. Then whoosh, you go 75 years into the future and there’s a movie about people on a plane. They had planes in 1936. I’m stretching a little bit. That speaks more to the immortality that you can achieve through art than just about anything I can think of. That’s really cool. Because someone’s going to take Flightplan 15 years from now and do it again. It’s never going to end.

John: The central sort of gaslighting, no, no, it never actually– that person was never there. You’re imagining this whole thing.

Craig: That’s good. It’s just good.

John: It’s good stuff. What is also apparently good was your Belfast accent, Dave in Belfast wrote in. Let’s listen to what he said.

Dave Marks: Hey John and Craig. Long time podcast listener and big fan. My name is Dave Marks or Dave Marks, as anyone outside of Belfast would pronounce it. Speaking to Craig’s Belfast impression from Say Nothing or say no’hin’ as we’d say with no T in it.

Do it nye, do was a bit more ooh and a bit less ooh. With do we just say do, not do. Little bit Americanised. The nye however was bang on point and that’s the bit most people get wrong. You just need to work on the old. How now brown cow becomes hye nye brown cow and that gets you all the way to Belfast.

Craig: Hye nye brown cow.

John: Great. A thumbs up from Dave in Belfast.

Craig: I am elated. Elated. It really is a fascinating accent. There are so many things that are so specific to the Northern Irish accent. Somebody, I’m sure, has a linguistic term for how this functions where accents are created in part by a political boundary because it really is a political boundary accent. The Dublin accent feels like an entirely different English from the Northern Irish Belfast accent. There are so many wonderful, wonderful things in that accent that just, I don’t know, make my heart sing. I’m glad that I got one and a half words right. [laughs]

John: Excellent. All right. We have some more follow-up on AI. In episode 669, we’re talking about they ate our words.

Drew: Benjamin writes, “Craig says he didn’t know if people were freaking out about Google linking when Google first started. They absolutely were. In fact, there were lawsuits over scraping and linking. The compromise that was eventually reached was that linking to something is acceptable because you are pointing to the source. Quoting or showing content on another site, however, had to undergo fair use scrutiny the same as if you were quoting in a book or magazine article.”

Craig: Okay. First of all, always comforting to know that we’ve always been freaking out. That’s a good reminder that every time some new technology comes along, we do tend to get a bit reactionary. It didn’t occur to me that the real issue wasn’t so much the pointing to things, and I agree with that, pointing to something doesn’t feel like you’re stealing it.

But the little tiny bits of summary that go along with the link, that’s a republishing and that’s an interesting fair use case, which, obviously Google prevailed. I think that’s reasonable, actually. That does feel like what fair use is about, a little snippet that is, meant to lead you to the intellectual property as opposed to replace it.

John: I think it’s also important to remember that we talked about this under the legal framework. What is legal, what is not legal versus what is ethical and versus what is not ethical.

Craig: Oh, right. Two different things.

John: I think we’re always looking for what are the laws, but what are the moral rules behind what you should be doing or publishing or claiming as your own. I see this on Instagram a lot where people will republish someone else’s thing without giving them credit or they will give them credit. It’s like they’re doing it for their own clout versus actually creating an original thought. To what degree is that just spreading culture?

Craig: It does feel like sharing culture has led to a lack of interest in attribution, whereas in academia and journalism, attribution is still considered an extraordinarily important thing. The levels of fact-checking that The New Yorker did on a piece, an interview with me, I mean really, why? It was down to like, you said you were at a cafe with this person, and we had to call and check and make sure that you were. Then everything is attributable and notable and checkable. Then in sharing culture, nothing is. It’s not even a question of people going, “Oh, I’m going to put this out there and pretend it’s mine.” They don’t even think about it.

John: No.

Craig: No one seems to care. That’s horrible, actually.

John: Yes. That’s always been that way. It’s like, I think the fact that we are now looking at digital things where you can try to do the forensics and track them back. We’ve had sharing culture for jokes for forever. We’ve had sharing culture for story ideas have always propagated throughout. The fact that, all of Shakespeare’s plays are directly inspired by things that came from before them. That’s always been a part of–

Craig: Yes, inspiration for sure. Jokes are a really interesting case because they are designed to be shared without attribution. It would be an interesting project to figure out who was the first person to come up with this joke that we’ve all heard 400,000 times. On the internet where things begin with a clear attribution, that’s a time-stamped attribution. Then what happens is, of course, people complain and say, “You stole my thing.” Then that becomes a thing. Then people share that and da, da, da, da, da.

John: It’s worth acknowledging that joke theft is a real thing. Among comedians, that’s a huge issue. The issue comes up of to what degree have you made something your own or are you ripping off this type of joke versus the actual wording of a joke?

Craig: Joke stealing in comedy is a fascinating topic. There have been a few notable cases where accusations were made. I won’t go so far as to say that proof was given in some sort of legal way, but there was a huge brouhaha over Carlos Mencia. There have been similar arguments made about Amy Schumer. Then people will show side-by-sides and things. Sometimes you look at these and you’re like, “Well, I can see how two people might come up with the same joke here.” Sometimes you look at it and go, “Oh, no, that’s like kinda word for word there.”

The world of stand-up comedians and that culture, that whole joke theft thing is fascinating. It is a major concern for them. They will talk amongst themselves. Comedians know, for instance, “Hey, if you see so-and-so at the club and you’re going up there before them, after them, it doesn’t matter, if they’re there, don’t do new material. Don’t do new material because they’ll be doing it next week and they’re more famous than you.”

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s scary.

John: More AI feedback here from Anna.

Drew: We got a lot of great AI feedback, so this one comes from Anna.

Craig: Is the feedback from AI?

Drew: Oh my God. no, I don’t think this one is, but other ones, you never know.

Craig: You don’t think?

Drew: You don’t think. Anna writes, “I just found out that a series of novels I co-wrote with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were part of 38,000 or so fiction books.”

Craig: Hold on.

John: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has written quite a few books.

Craig: Also this sounds like something AI would say.

[laughter]

Drew: True.

Craig: It really– “I’ve written 4,000 books with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.” That just feels like a learning language model. Just put some things together. Maybe it was like, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is tall and he got confused with height and amount of writing. Anyway, please–

Drew: It’s only a few novels out of 38,000, I guess.

Craig: Please, restart the question, but keep in mind my concern.

Drew: Just found out that a series of novels she co-wrote with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were part of 38,000 or so fiction books, both classic and contemporary, used to feed AI. “Apart from feeling thoroughly ripped off, I’m also bewildered. Our novels are historical fiction. They have fictional as well as historical characters. Queen Victoria comes to mind. There are half a dozen minor characters who do things they never did and say things they never said.

I do a gargantuan amount of research to portray an era, in this case, the 1870s accurately, but not to put too fine a point on it, I’m still making shit up. How would AI know this? In that great repository of info dumping, how will AI weed out the fake from the facts?”

Craig: It won’t.

John: It won’t. Anna, so I want to back up in here and say like, you’re feeling thoroughly ripped off and bewildered. Those are natural emotions. I totally get why you’re feeling that. Something that may be helpful for you to understand is that the LLMs, the models, they don’t care about the actual subject matter you’re giving them. What you’re giving them is a bunch of words in English that all fit together, that are complete whole thoughts.

They’re not looking for facts. They’re looking for long strings of words that all fit together and actually make sense together. That’s what your book provided. I don’t think you need to worry that some other piece of writing that’s generated by one of these things is going to involve these fake stuff that you made up in historical fiction. It’s unlikely to actually happen that way. Mostly what this is going to do is create a tool that is going to generate an email for somebody that’s a little bit better than it would have been otherwise.

Craig: Yes, that’s exactly right. I do think this is a common misconception that what AI is doing is taking chunks of stuff and regurgitating it as its own. If it were doing that, it wouldn’t be intelligent, artificially or otherwise. It’s just learning how our sentences are put together, how grammar functions and what words are related to other words and how closely.

So on the one hand, don’t worry that people will think that Queen Victoria, I don’t know, used an iPhone, whatever it was that happened in this book that was maybe anachronistic or just incorrect. Do worry that your work was sort of used for this.

This is where it gets interesting because AI isn’t taking intellectual property and using it as intellectual property. It’s almost like it’s taking a painting and just looking at how paintings are made. What do you do with that?

It feels to me like copyright law needs to be amended. Just side note here, because if we try and apply existing copyright law to this, I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere. It feels like copyright law needs to be amended to say that one of the rights that is inferred by copyright is the right for the material to be used as the basis for learning. That’s tricky because–

John: Human learning versus training on a model, it’s incredibly complicated.

Craig: It’s complicated.

John: Yes, there’s not a great easy way through this. Again, I understand what you’re feeling. Months ago, when we were looking at these examples of songs that were clearly, this is a Beach Boys song. Those examples were like, okay, well, you fed in all this stuff and it spit out something that looked exactly like the original. You can obviously tell what its references are. This is not going to happen based on your book being fed into this.

Craig: No. No, no.

Drew: More feedback here from Caleb. Caleb writes, “We’re at a new birth of artificial intelligence. It makes pretty things, but is it art? Why not?” He shares from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The Conundrum of the Workshops. “When the flush of a newborn son fell first on Eden’s green and gold, our father Adam sat under the tree and scratched with a stick in the mold. The first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart till the devil whispered behind the leaves, “it’s pretty, but is it art?”

John: I read that whole poem. Put a link to it and we’ll put a link in the show notes to it. It’s a really great Kipling poem. It’s so clever to bring in as like, at every point in the artistic process, I’m going to question whether it’s actually artistically worthy. The poem goes on to sort of great things are made, the towers of Babel is created and the devil is always whispering, “But is it really art?”

Craig: Yes, and I don’t know. The word art is a trap. I hear it all the time. I sometimes use it to describe what you and I do. Rarely, because it feels a bit goofy to me. I think the is it art, what is implied in the question is it art is is it valid?

Validity is seemingly something conferred upon art by not artists, by critics. I don’t care. I don’t care. That’s all they do all day. The devil is a critic. [laughs] The critic is whispering in the creator’s ear. Is it good? Is it art? Is it worthy? Is it valid? Basically, not today, satan.

One of the things that does give me pause to describe what I do as art is it sometimes feels almost that the lady is protesting a bit much. “My art, you assholes, who say it’s not art.” I would rather just call it a TV show or a movie and let it be what it is. If it were a painting, I’d call it a painting. If it were a statue, I’d call it a statue.

The fine arts, let’s say, for instance, painting, everybody agrees, “Oh, that’s art,” and we call it art. Just as how people seem to all agree that the best picture is a drama because that’s what’s best. It’s not, and other things are art. The word is loaded. Is what AI does art? The critics can all, “Let the devils discuss amongst themselves,” they say.

John: Meanwhile, just keep making things.

Craig: Meanwhile, just keep– thank you. Just make stuff. The word stuff, by the way, perfectly good.

John: Absolutely. Some of the stuff that’s being made increasingly are videos, and so months ago, we talked about Sora, which has now been released, so people can play around and make clips off of Sora. Google released this new product called VO2, which also looks really good. It can generate video clips that have– the physics in them looks much better. If you have a dog running down a beach, the VO1 looks really impressive. You realize that, you believe that dog is running down the beach.

People wrote in and said like, “Oh, what does this mean for us and for filmmaking?” At this point, not a lot. I think stitching these things together to create bigger projects hasn’t worked out so well. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this film festival that was debuting a bunch of short films made by filmmakers using these tools, and they’re terrible. They’re atrocious.

Craig: Much like most short film festivals. Everything in them was atrocious.

John: It was. But you can see the edges. You can see how hard they were trying to make some of this stuff work, trying to get people’s faces to look consistent, trying to get dialogue to sync and match. These are all tough things. It does a really good job at like, here’s three seconds of a person moving quietly through a space. Much harder for it to do real things.

Yet, I want us to always remember, this is the worst it’ll ever be. These tools will get better, year after year after year. Things will improve along the way, but just we all recognize there’s a big gap between where we are and where this becomes a profound danger.

I think my bigger concern is that well before these things are able to make an hour of television or a two-hour movie, they can create something that is interesting and compelling and different enough that it takes the attention of people who would otherwise see movies and television. If that were to happen at a big enough scale, that could have huge impacts on our industry. Basically a new form of entertainment comes out of this generation that just obviates the need for what we’re doing.

Craig: It doesn’t have to be better than us. It just has to be as good. If it is as good, we lose instantly because of volume. Because they can just create things at speed and volume and we can’t. Even if it’s almost as good, we lose. There is an article I will cite as my one cool thing that provides a glimmer of potential hope. It is a little bit of a pipe dream theory, but it is promising for those of us who are just hoping that AI can only go so far and that the singularity is perhaps unreachable.

Drew: Let’s wrap up here, I’ve got a question here from Michael. Michael writes, “You discussed what it means for AI to use our work, but not what it means for us to use AI. I wondered if you could share how you’re feeling about using it in your own work.”

John: Yes, so this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about for the last couple of weeks. We’re trying to draft up sort of like an official policy company-wide, but also thinking about sort of what I feel like personally. There’s a couple of different areas I sort of want to focus on. First off, would the use of AI be in some sort of public-facing role? Is this something that the world outside is going to see material that’s being generated by AI? Would it be text? Would it be images? That’s a no for me. Anything that’s representing our work or my work should not be generated by AI.

I ask, is this work that would normally be paid work, that we would pay somebody to do? That’s a huge red flag for me. Is this technology being used by the person whose job it is to make the thing? If it’s a coder doing coding, that feels different than having Drew be doing coding using one of these tools.

That’s what I’m thinking about company-wide, but then I think you have individual choices that might be different. As a writer, for me, I’m asking, am I using this the same way I would use Google? If I’m asking ChatGPT a question that I would normally ask Google for a question, that doesn’t feel that different to me. I don’t actually have big concerns with that.

An example I’ve cited is, I’m working on this graphic novel, and one of the characters in it is a philosopher. I was wondering, okay, well, what would this classical philosopher think about the situation they’re in, which they’re all hungry? It’s like, what do classical philosophers say about hunger? Not the state of famine, but the experience of being hungry.

That’s a really difficult thing to Google or to search for, but it’s actually like a really good question to ask a ChatGPT, because they can spit out answers that like, “Based on these things, this is what Socrates said about this, this is what Plato said about this,” and that was useful for me. I don’t feel bad about that, because it’s doing a thing that would be almost impossible for me to do otherwise.

Similarly, I’m reading Seneca’s tragedies, and I had ChatGPT open, I was just asking questions about like, “Wait, who is this character? What is this based on?” That was incredibly helpful. I don’t feel bad about using those ways. What I do feel bad about is any situation where the stuff that I’m doing, even internally, has an aspect of these tools being used. I think we talked about on the show is pitch decks. If there’s an image I need for a pitch deck, is it fair to generate that through one of these models versus pulling it out of some other movie still frame?

Craig: All of those objections, concerns, and allowances feel very on point to me. I don’t use ChatGPT at all. I don’t use AI at all. However, I don’t use it as I guess I would say, overtly. My suspicion is that a lot of the things I do, the underpinnings are already using AI. There’s that invisible AI I’m not aware of. The one area that I do think it’s interesting, and I would feel okay with is in temp work, not temp work like working as an assistant somewhere for a week. I mean to say in production, doing things that are placeholders until you can do the right thing. That’s interesting.

For instance, when we’re editing, I’m constantly throwing in little lines that I know I’m going to have the actors come and do later down the line with ADR. I’ll say, “Okay, I want this line where let’s say, Isabela Merced off camera says, “Wait, where are you going?” It’ll either be, if it’s a guy, any guy, it’s my voice. If it’s any woman, it’s usually our editor, Emily’s voice. But what ends up happening is you send this cut into the network and you know that they’re going to hear your voice 12 different times in 12 different places. Emily is not Isabela Merced and all of the women shouldn’t sound like Emily. Things like, okay, make this sound more like Isabella Merced for the purposes of this, knowing that then I’m going to have her come in and do this properly.

Just like have Emily do it and then just make the vocal quality sound a little bit more like somebody. I could see something like that being incredibly useful as long as, like you said, it never takes the place of the actual performer doing it. It’s just a placeholder to help you feel out if you’re doing it right.

In that regard, it’s not anything that I think is taking anyone’s job or taking away money. There are things that we do in post-production that I think probably are already using AI. Obviously, I don’t know what’s going on in some of the VFX places where they’re doing rotoscoping. My guess is AI is involved. Okay, someone is in front of a green screen, their hair is blowing around. Each one of those hairs has to be rotoscoped, against the background or comped somehow. I don’t know how they do it.

My guess is they’re using tools that are powered by AI and will be doing so more and more. I know that there are things like beauty fixes, so very common to– if there are some blemishes or things, back in the day, there used to be quite expensive retouching of things, because if an actor just has a honking pimple one day, it’s going to sort of grind your movie to a halt, especially since we don’t shoot things– So like oh, in the beginning of the movie, they had this huge pimple, then it went away, and then a year later-

John: It comes back.

Craig: -the pimple’s back in the same spot. AI can do those things very simply now. I think the people that are using these tools are using that. I, myself, I don’t use it to compose any writing. I recognize, however, that I’m close to 54 years old. I don’t think my experience and the way I conduct my career is probably going to be particularly relevant to somebody who’s 25 right now. I think they’re like, “That’s nice, grandpa. Here’s how we do it. Here’s how the kids do it.”

I don’t want to come off as a Luddite, I don’t want to come off as somebody who’s scolding. I guess all I can say is, it’s certainly not necessary to do good work. I can say that. Yes, ethically, I think we do have a responsibility to try and look out for each other as human beings and not replace each other as quickly as we can.

John: Yes, so examples of the visual effects you’re talking about or the beauty correction stuff, you’re describing the person whose job it is to do that thing, using these technologies as one of the tools in their toolkit to do that thing. That feels like much more defensible. It actually tracks with the recent negotiations and the recent IATSE deal is like, if those technologies are going to be used, they have to be used by the person who’s supposed to be doing them, which makes sense. You’re not trying to replace a person with those things.

Becomes a trickier line, though. I was thinking back at your example of like, okay, well, using AI to create a sound of life for placeholder lines in a movie. In the first Charlie’s Angels, there was a time where we didn’t have John Forsythe to do Charlie’s voice. We had a different actor who was doing that. We kept hiring him and bringing him in to record all these temp lines because he really did sound a lot like John Forsythe.

Ultimately, John Forsythe came in and did it. Realistically, now we could just do a digital John Forsythe for his voice for those placeholders. That’s one actor whose job, we wouldn’t have hired during that time in the meantime. Even though you’re just trying to do a placeholder, sometimes there is the economic cost to somebody.

Craig: Yes, one would hope that SAG continues to refine that language because I think they are probably in the front ranks of soldiers that are going to be fired at by this technology. That’s the scariest. I think writers and directors will be behind them still in danger, but the actors will go first. I think they know that. I think they’re terrified. I think reasonably so. I would be.

John: All right. Let’s get to our main topic, which is how would this be a movie? From the moment this first story started, it’s like, oh, this is going to be a discussion on this podcast.

Craig: How won’t this be a movie?

John: Because we know that our listeners sometimes tune into these episodes 5 years, 10 years after the fact, I need to actually explain this story which is happening so presently that everyone’s like, how can you need to describe this? On December 4th, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare is shot on the sidewalk outside of a New York City hotel by a masked assailant. The attacker flees and a manhunt begins.

Now the initial speculation was that it was some sort of professional attack by a hitman, which turns out there are no such things as hitmen. Details emerged quickly that the attacker was staying at a hostel in New York City and that bullets found on the scene had the words deny, defend, and depose written upon them. Several photographs of the suspect show his time in New York City leading up to the shooting, including one of which one of these photos in which his face is visible.

Then on December 9th of this year, Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Craig: Hold on. Say that sentence again because I think future people need to hear it carefully.

John: On December 9th, Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Craig: Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. That sounds like a ChatGPT sentence.

John: It does. It does. The whole thing has a sort of made-up fictional quality, which I think is what’s so compelling about it.

Craig: Yes. Yes.

John: A customer noticed him and believed he looked like the man in the photographs. As we record this, Mangione has pled not guilty to state and federal charges. This is the world of a movie about this event. You can come at it from any angle, but I think what’s so notable out of this to me is like from the start, from the moment you first heard about this, oh, whoever did this perceives themselves as being the central character in a movie story. It was one of those rare situations where it’s like, oh, we’re not forcing a narrative on this. This person is actually perceives themselves as having a role in a narrative.

Craig: Yes. Luigi Mangione is a evidently very smart young man from a privileged background who, as far as I gathered, has experienced both physical issues because he had back surgeries that didn’t seem to work very well and he was in pain, but also clearly was experiencing a mental health episode because he just dropped off the grid, disappeared, stopped talking to friends, stopped talking to his family, moved away to Australia, I think, for a while. Didn’t really tell anybody. And then started writing manifestos. Never a good sign. Essays are nice. Manifesto is not so great.

John: Let me push back a little bit. Any blog post is a manifesto. If after the fact, it looks like it came from a certain person.

Craig: Yes, I suppose a manifesto is an essay followed by a shooting. For sure. It’s fair. Okay, the shooting part is definitely the issue. Luigi Mangione does something that is both on the one hand, the worst crime you can commit, which is cold-blooded murder. On the other hand, becomes a folk hero because everyone hates the American healthcare system and he shot and murdered the CEO of the largest American healthcare corporation and there was this sudden sense of we got one of the fat cats.

That’s this deep class anger and resentment that had been built up over a large amount of time, which is completely unfair, by the way, to this one man and his family-

John: We’re going to talk about that.

Craig: -Brian Thompson. This is where our brains are weak and we can’t help ourselves. The most important factor to creating this as a big story the way it is that Luigi Mangione is very handsome.

John: He is.

Craig: Therein is the goof of it all. If this guy were ugly, no one, and I mean no one, would be on his side. No one. This is pretty privilege at its highest. If he were ugly, people would have been like, “Okay, yes, he was this crazy ugly guy who shot somebody and you shouldn’t do that.” Look, yes, our young colleague is suspicious.

Drew: No, I am. I think the act itself, because before we knew who he was before we even had the face of him, I think there was quite a lot of support for the act, at least online.

John: Let me take both sides here. I think when the act happened, there was a mystery of who this person was, but also there was immediately a sense of like, we are not in any danger. The normal American person is not in any danger, which is such a unique situation because usually there’s a manhunt because that person is a danger to society. This guy wasn’t.

We wanted this guy off the street because he had done this thing in a very public, big way and the police were embarrassed. There were lots of other factors there, but we never saw him as being a danger. He was just this mysterious man, but the slow trickle out of like, okay, here we can see a little bit more of his face because the mask is down a little lower. Oh, here he was flirting with the woman at the hostel.

Craig: That one picture changed everything.

John: Absolutely. Oh my God, he’s a smoke show and therefore the Timothee Chalamet and all the other stuff comes out. Absolutely.

Drew: But I think of the 24 hours before, I think the competency in a way was the most attractive thing.

Craig: Well, the idea, there are two possible ways of thinking about this. One way is there is a masked avenger out there who is fulfilling our need for street justice against evil corporate overlords.

John: It feels like a Robin Hood.

Craig: It feels like a Robin Hood, except instead of stealing money from the rich and giving it to the poor, he’s just murdering people on a sidewalk, which isn’t great. Then the picture came out and everything changed. Then it was like, “Oh my God, he’s hot. A hot guy is doing this.” Then when they caught him and they said his name was Luigi Mangione, everybody– it got even better because it was like, it felt like a meme name.

I saw a headline when they caught him and the headline, when they finally figured out, okay, who’s this person? They figured it out. The headline was, “It’s a me, Luigi,” which made me laugh. Then I thought, why am I laughing? A man was murdered on the sidewalk. Saturday Night Live did Weekend Update. Of course, they mentioned Luigi Mangione and many, many, and they were women, you could tell by the pitch of their voice, went, “Woo.” Colin Jost went, “Oh. Yes, okay. We’re wooing for justice, right?” Because he’s a murderer. How do we make this a movie?

John: How do we make this a movie? Because so really it’s, where do you choose to center the story? Obviously, it is a movie versus a series. I think there’s a good case for making it a series. I’m sure Ryan Murphy is going to be, those conversations are already happening to make the series.

Craig: I’m sure they’re on day 40 of shooting already.

John: Yes. The question is, you can easily imagine the narrative that’s all centered on him leading up to and after the shooting because it’s compelling. The planning, the escape, the being on the run, the camera, the surveillance state, all that stuff is really exciting. In that version, it’s really hard to center or anchor around this man who was killed and the actual, the crime itself in a way, because the crime itself becomes secondary to the cultural phenomenon.

Craig: I tend to think about these things as much as I can from the least privileged point of view and make that the interesting point of view. The least privileged point of view in this case would probably be Brian Thompson’s family, because listen, we can discuss whether or not it is fundamentally unethical to be the CEO of a health insurance corporation. However, that is our system.

The health insurance corporations exist. You could argue that it is unethical to not be the CEO of a health insurer. If you think you would be better at providing health to people than the alternative. If it’s me or that asshole, I guess I’d do better than that guy. That’s the system we have. He was murdered because somebody with mental health problems felt aggrieved by decisions that that guy probably had nothing to do with.

Now mine husband, my father, my brother is dead and everyone’s cheering. They’ve turned this kid who, by the way, looks terrified into a hero. He is not. Now it really becomes an exploration of how we distort truth to create narrative. The Luigi Mangione backlash will be coming soon. It’s going to come. It’s inevitable, because that’s how this pendulum swings.

I would make, probably, a movie about the way people lost their minds. I probably would also fold into it the other least privileged point of view, which is somebody caught up in the UnitedHealthcare System because there are poor people who are suffering because that insurance company is gross and they’re not murdering anyone. Who’s going to look after those people while we concentrate on the most powerful two people involved in the story, the man who ran a corporation and the person who was pulling the trigger of a gun?

John: We recorded this and Mangione has been arrested. He’s now being transferred back to New York City, but we don’t have information from his point of view. That’s all we know is like his note is his manifesto. We don’t have any greater insight and that’s going to completely transform everything once we have his current explanation of why he did what he did, how it all fits together and that’s going to really influence things.

So I do wonder about trying to map out the story now when you don’t, he’s still just a cipher. We still don’t have a way to handle him and you say like, “Well, he’s going through a mental health crisis.” Sure, that tracks with what I’ve seen, but until we actually see an interview with him, we can’t know what this is because he could also be incredibly savvy in ways that we’re not anticipating.

Craig: He was pretty savvy. He wasn’t savvy enough to not sit in a McDonald’s, which by the way, is a corporation with his manifesto in his bag and the murder weapon in his bag, duh. He was exhibiting what I would consider to be a high intelligence and also disordered thinking. Anyone that thinks that murdering somebody is the solution to their problems is exhibiting disordered thinking, I would argue.

He’s also a fan of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who in a very similar way was brilliant and targeted people that he felt were putting technology ahead of humanity. It wasn’t, again, “random”. Those of us who weren’t involved in research labs to, I don’t know, whatever, invent new plastics or Ted–

John: We were not going to get a bomb.

Craig: No, we weren’t getting mailed a bomb. Then there is that weird sense of, “Yes, someone’s doing something about it.” Americans love the story of a violent loner. Hollywood has been celebrating violent loners since film was invented. Probably not a good idea.

John: Getting back to where he fits in this overall cinematic universe, we have other examples like Bonnie and Clyde, the villains who were sticking it to the rich man, do become cultural heroes. That’s not a unique experience for us to be having with Mangione in this situation. I’m also struck by not that atypical. I think you could find a lot of people who meet the general characteristics of a Mangione, the kinds of podcasts he listened to, that self-improvement, that kind of stuff.

I think part of what’s so compelling to me about this story is that, well, what’s different about him versus the other thousand guys out there who fit in the same template?

Craig: Well, a circuit breaks and we don’t know which circuit and we don’t know why. I would say the great majority of people, if put in front of their enemy or the person that makes them the angriest and handed a gun, would not pull the trigger.

John: Yes, but that’s not what he did. It wasn’t that he was in a situation where he had the opportunity. He had to make a plan and systematically put the plan into place. I feel like we reward society for those individuals who can build companies, create great new things. He sort of has that founder’s mentality, but for–

Craig: He still had to pull the trigger.

John: Yes.

Craig: My argument is that’s where he steps away from the rest of us. Because the reason most people build businesses as opposed to murder, aside from the illegality, is because murder is not an option. I say this as an atheist. I feel like atheists get special points for saying this. I don’t not murder because I’m afraid of hell. I don’t not murder because I’m afraid of God’s punishment or disappointment. I don’t murder because my brain is organized in such a way as to find that horrifying. I could not do it.

I’m fascinated by portrayals of people who struggle to murder people. I do oftentimes think about how interesting it is when we watch movies where the tone is I can happily murder. The ’80s really went all in on that. The happy quipping murderer hero. That’s where this is scary.

John: The reason why I don’t want to drop this is that I feel like we feel like we’re in a time of increasingly violence as– political violence being a thing we see in the world and even in the US after the–

Craig: Attempted assassination on Donald Trump.

John: Absolutely. Also, I would say January 6th before that was the political violence we just aren’t used to. We used to have more of it. We used to have bombings and those kinds of things. I just feel like I can envision a character like Mangione who sees this as a killing baby Hitler situation where they feel themselves as like, “This is a chance for me to alter the future. Therefore, this is not just a murder, this is actually an act which will change society.”

Craig: Yes. That would be a thought of deep, deep delusion and also not particularly smart for a guy who is smart. Somebody else has to be the CEO now. It’s like that company isn’t going away. A little like Tim McVeigh drove a truck bomb up to the Murrah Federal Building and blew it up. Hundreds of people died, including children. That accomplished nothing. Nothing.

There is that sense of, “We’re going to start something. We’re going to kick off this big war that everyone’s ready to go fight.” No. Most people are not ready to go fight. I think social media has amplified some of the worst voices and made them feel more plentiful, I suspect, than they are. I’m just thinking about the Trump-Biden election. I think Trump got 68 million votes or something like that, or maybe tens of millions of people voted for him. 5,000 showed up that day. Very small number, happily.

My argument being most people are good, or if not good, terrified to commit violence. Luigi Mangione was not. That makes him terrifying to me. People that are celebrating him, I think, should not. That’s what’s terrifying to me is the idea that somebody can calmly walk up to somebody on a sidewalk and after all they’re planning, do it. That’s the scary thing.

John: Yes. All right. Let’s move on to our next story. This is an article by Paul DeBole written for Commonwealth Beacon in Massachusetts. It is, how do you license a fortune teller? In the state of Massachusetts, fortune tellers have to be licensed, which is great. You basically investigate what the licensing requirements are and what different cities in Massachusetts do for this.

How do you even define fortune-telling? Well, this is how it’s laid out in the law. “Fortune telling is the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing, or there’s such reading through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mind reading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any similar such thing or act.”

I just respect them so much for like pulling out the thesaurus and figuring out what are the things– because they have to be careful like not to define probability or statistics or other things that are fortunes.

Craig: That’s an amazing list of things, although necromancy really shouldn’t be in. Necromancy? The raising and manipulation of the dead? Anyhoo, they could have just said bullshit. This is an interesting– I actually understand why they do this, because let’s say you decide reasonably, business licenses are for businesses, not for a bunch of bullshit. We’re not going to license bullshit, that’s ridiculous.

Now you got 20 bullshit shops in the rundown part of town, because weirdly, the people that peddle this crap, they can never seem to afford nice places. You’d think that they would, but it’s always crap. Anyhoo, they can’t leave that unregulated. I suspect that the licensing of these places, even though there’s this wonderful moment in the article where they ask like, “Why do you license these places?” The woman says, “To make sure that they’re good at it or something.” [chuckles] It’s really just to limit how many of them there could be, I suspect.

John: In certain cities, like there’s Amesbury City, lifted the cap on one license for the telling of fortunes for money per 50,000 residents. Basically, you’re trying to control a thing that’s out there and also to make sure that because they’re actual legitimate businesses, they’re collecting taxes and there’s not shady money laundering stuff. There’s reasons why you have to do it. Yet I just found it this delightful, and I think there’s some– it’s not probably the central focus of the movie, but I think there’s some delightful thing about either a family business, a family fortune telling business that loses their license or some legal drama, some sort of, My Cousin Vinny is like, you have to like defend this company.

Craig: You could also see a supernatural, comedy adventure like Men in Black where you meet a guy and his job is to check and grant/renew licenses for these people and they’re all real. He finds that one of the one thing is no necromancy. Everyone is, can’t do necromancy. Then he’s like, “Someone’s clearly doing necromancy here,” and follows it into some Ghostbusters-y sort of thing. It’s a great like beginning where you take a job and you’re like, “None of this is real.” Then it turns out some of it’s real. It is mind-blowing to me that people go to these things and believe any of it. It is mind-blowing. There’s so many of them. There’s so many.

John: Yes, I know really smart people who have gone to them and I found them useful and helpful and then also became sort of weirdly obsessed with the people who were giving them their fortunes, which makes sense, and get bilked for money.

Craig: Yes, they became weirdly obsessed with the charlatans that are con artists that–

John: Are very skilled at doing this thing.

Craig: Yes, digging their claws into you and extracting your dough. I’ve said this before. If I could do any of those things, I would be performing those things for free as a saint because that’s what I would be, a saint. I would be the most famous, most beloved person in the world if all I did was legitimately help people talk to the dead. The people that claim to be able to talk to the dead, they would prefer to be in a small shop in a strip mall next to a nail place, charging $25 a read. Interesting.

John: Lastly, we have an article by Susan Dominus for The New York Times Magazine. This is about an IVF mix-up, a shocking discovery and an unbearable choice. Here’s the brief version of this. We have a couple, Alexander and Daphna, who give birth to their second daughter, whom they name May. She’s a great, easy baby. The husband, other people start to say like, “This does not really look like it came from either one of us.”

Craig: This was a baby that was implanted in the mother via IVF.

John: Absolutely. They had the baby with IVF. They did a home genetics test and they found out neither of them is related to this baby. They have this moment of faulty decision.

Craig: It was sort of around three or four months.

John: Yes, so quite young. The question’s like, what do we do? Do we tell anyone? Do we go to the clinic? They end up hiring a surrogacy lawyer, went to the clinic, and it turned out that one of their initial suspicions was like, “Okay, this is not the right embryo that I gave birth to. What happened to our embryos? What happened there?” It turns out there was another baby born about the same time who was their embryo.

Craig: Living 10 minutes away.

John: Yes, which is crazy. They meet this other couple who are in fact– well, one’s Asian, one’s Latino. That’s why these babies don’t look anything alike. They make the decision like, “Well, we are going to swap the kids back, but what will that even look like? What is the process going to be? How do we do this?” In the background of all of this, there’s the lawsuit against the fertility company.

But the story really focuses on like, what do these families do? If there’s older kids, how does it all fit together? Craig, what did you take from this? Where do you think the interesting points are to hold on to if you’re trying to adapt this?

Craig: I thought maybe approach best straight forward. The part that was heart-wrenching and fascinating was what do you do when you’ve had a baby for four months and you find out that all of this love and attachment that has occurred shouldn’t have? You now are supposed to have that same love and attachment to a baby you don’t know. Now, I will tell you, if you have an asshole baby, this is a dream come true because some babies are assholes. I’m not going to lie. If you have a good one, I don’t know.

John: I got to babysit over this weekend, the best baby in the world.

Craig: Right, like an angel baby is amazing, right? Our first baby was not an angel. I would have been like, definitely? No, not definitely. That’s my kid. The question at the heart of it is, what defines parenthood? Let’s be even more specific. What defines motherhood? These women didn’t just receive a child from a surrogate mother. They carried these babies to term. These babies grew inside of them. They gave birth to these babies. They were nursing these babies. What is parenthood?

Now, the fascinating question to me is how this is approached differently by the father and the mother. You can see, even in the story, the fathers are like, “Oh, this is an easy one, switch them.” You didn’t grow it in you. You didn’t grow it inside of you. You’re not keeping it alive with your body, not only prenatally but postnatally. What is the nature even of love?

What’s beautiful about this story is that the two families decide to just sort of combine and let these kids grow up almost as sisters, even though there’s really no reason that they should, and the parents struggling. I think in a drama, you would want one of the parents to want to switch and one to not. You’d want to create some conflict, and you’d want to create a sense of that tearing apart. There’s some interesting ways to conclude it, but the issues at the heart of it, if we’re looking for, oh, what’s our central dramatic argument? The central dramatic argument is you do not have to be related to a baby to love it like it is your baby, and in fact, fiercely so.

John: Yes. To me, the most interesting moment was weirdly before the two couples match and where the first couple was like, “What do we do? We do nothing. Are we under any legal obligation to say anything?” Maybe not. I think there’s a moral obligation, probably, but there’s not a legal obligation, so they could have just said nothing, but then there would always be this time bomb out there, like at some point, this is going to come out, and at what point do we figure out that? I think that’s a really interesting. I would love to see that moment staged, and that this actually could be a play in a weird way for that reason. That discussion, that debate is really great.

Craig: This is a theme that goes all the way back to old stories and fairy tales, the idea that you have stolen a child from another mother because the other thing is they don’t know what the deal is with the other family.

John: Yes, at that point, they don’t know that they have their own kid that’s out there someplace, too.

Craig: Exactly. So A, they don’t know if their own kid exists, their biologically owned kid exists. B, they don’t know if the parents who are supposed to have had this embryo, they don’t know if those people have a different baby, another baby. Now you’re just quietly raising someone else’s baby. You know it’s not “yours”, but it kinda is. That’s the fascinating part.

Maybe the more interesting statement isn’t you can love a child as if it is your own, even if it is not biologically your own. Maybe the more interesting statement is you are capable of not loving a child that is your own biological child if you don’t know it, because one of the fascinating things is they each meet their other child and they’re like, “Yeah, nice baby, but who the F are you? I don’t know you.” That’s fascinating to me.

John: Yes. I have lots of good ways into this. This feels like it’s not a series. I think it has to be a short thing. Unless you were to actually do the blended family, but then it becomes– then it’s a comedy probably.

Craig: It’s just blah. We’re sisters, but we’re not. Our parents went to birth.

John: Yes. Having had our daughter through surrogacy and knowing that there are going to be other siblings out there because genetically there are going to be other siblings out there, yes, it’s what’s interesting and not so uncommon about this era that we live in. What’s interesting about this story to me is that it’s not classically like the two babies were switched out at the hospital and you’re just going to switch the babies back. There’s more complicated unknowns in there, too.

Craig: Just the fact that you are carrying a child within you all the way to term, it’s just an entirely different thing.

John: Craig, should we just be doing genetic tests at birth?

Craig: It did strike me that if I were running a fertility clinic and part of my job was implanting embryos, that, yes, at birth, immediately that day, make sure that we didn’t mess up. I don’t understand how that’s not just an immediate thing to do.

John: All right, let’s review our three movies here. There’s going to be multiple Luigi Mangione murder.

Craig: Multi-Mangione.

John: Multi-Mangione. I think there’ll be at least one feature film. There’s definitely going to be some sort of series, some sort of Ryan Murphy-ish series, probably several of them.

Craig: We’re going to hit peak Mangione in about two years.

John: Was there ever a Unabomber movie? I’m not sure I ever saw one.

Craig: I think there might have been some, yes, I bet you, Drew, if you Google up Unabomber movie, there’s going to be some miniseries or there has to have been some, right?

Drew: Yes. There’s one documentary, it seems like.

Craig: Oh, okay. Interesting. You know why? Wasn’t that handsome.

John: Was not handsome.

Craig: Was not handsome.

John: Lived alone in a cabin.

Craig: Lived alone in a cabin. Looked like a crazy old man. John: Yes. No one liked that.

Craig: His sketch was handsome. In reality, not handsome. That’s why.

Drew: Oh, I lied. We had a Ted Kaczynski movie in 2021 with Sharlto Copley. Oh. I could see Sharlto Copley.

Craig: Okay. Sure. What was it called? Unabomber?

Drew: Ted K.

Craig: Ted K. Oh, boy.

John: Second story, licensing a fortune teller. There’s nothing in Debole’s story that you need to buy. There’s nothing there to buy. The idea of licensed fortune tellers, I think there’s a comedy there to be found.

Craig: Seems about right. I would agree.

John: The IVF story. I think there’s a made for lifetime movie. That’s pretty obvious. Whether there’s a bigger movie to be made out of this, possibly, maybe. What was the Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore movie, which was about the–

Drew: May December.

John: May December. Yes. May December was inspired by actual events. There’s definitely a big feature version you can make at some point, too. I can envision somebody doing this

Craig: Cool.

John: Let’s answer listener questions. Let’s start with Jane Doe here.

Drew: Jane Doe writes, “I’m writing a pilot with a buddy based on his memoir. Credits wise, I’m sure an ampersand makes sense as we’re absolutely writing this thing together. My question is about order of names. What exactly does it mean to order the writer’s names chronologically? Does that mean alphabetically? He’ll obviously have the based on the book by credit for himself. That’s not in dispute at all. Just curious if I’m right that it should be written by Jane Doe and John Everett, D first, E second, or if chronologically means something other than alphabetically. Also, does the fact that it’s Everett’s book affect the byline order for the script in any way?”

John: The chronologically comes if there’s multiple writers over multiple drafts and it’s separated in time, you list them chronologically. That makes sense for that. If it’s an ampersand, you’re considered one writer.

Craig: We don’t actually list them chronologically. Writers that are separated, not as teams, are actually listed in order of prominence of authorship.

John: Before it goes through arbitration.

Craig: Oh, before it goes through arbitration.

John: Basically on that top sheet, you should list.

Craig: Is that what she’s asking or is she asking about like the final credits?

Drew: I think final credits.

Craig: Yes. Final credits still doesn’t apply to her case because she’s a writing team. You can order your names in a writing team however you want.

John: Yes. You can argue about it, fight about it, but eventually, you’re going to have to put out a title page that has your names in one order, and that will be the order you have to go for.

Craig: Sometimes people will put their names in based on how the town refers to them. If the town calls you Smith and Jones, then you’ll probably say written by Smith & Jones.

John: Yes. I think Lord and Miller are always Lord and Miller, and I don’t know that that was chronologically, I don’t think.

Craig: Yes, because it sounds better than Miller and Lord. Yes. Lord and Miller. That’s the actual ordering within the ampersand doesn’t matter. Nobody cares. Doesn’t imply anything. It’s just sort of almost branding more than anything else, because the ampersand means writer.

John: We’re one.

Craig: We are one entity with multiple brains. No, the source material credit has nothing to do with that either. She should stop worrying about that.

John: Agreed. All right. It is time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a book called Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath. I brought this to D&D last week. It is this remarkable book about the history of role-playing games, starting with Dungeons and Dragons, which was the first in the ’70s, and continuing up through the 2020s. It’s really a remarkable excavation of a lot of games I’d never heard of so much, which I did know, and sort of how this whole system of role-playing games developed and grew.

Stu Horvath is publishing this through the MIT Press, but it’s all based on games that he collected over the years. They’re all from his own personal collection. His interviews with a lot of the folks who were behind them, sort of piecing together sort of what grew and what changed, how one game influenced the next game. If you love D&D and other role-playing games, you will love this book. If you don’t care about them, this won’t probably make you care about them. I found it to be just incredibly useful and just a delight to read.

My one observation about this kind of book is it’s the size of a monster manual or a player’s handbook. Its dimensions, but it’s also thicker and heavier. It’s a difficult book to read sitting on a couch. It’s actually not a comfortable book to hold. There’s a class of books that are like, this is a great book, but I need almost like a lectern to sit it on to read because it’s just too big to enjoy that way, but a small cost. Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground.

Craig: Fantastic. My one cool thing is this theory of quantum consciousness.

John: Tell me what this is.

Craig: Quantum consciousness, like almost every theory of consciousness, is completely unsupported by anything we would call evidence. Consciousness is the most– it’s like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. It’s so hard.

John: Consciousness is a feeling. Basically, we have the sense of what being conscious is like, but it’s actually hard to put that into concrete terms.

Craig: It is not only a phenomenon that is difficult for us to describe, we are also asking the phenomenon to describe the phenomenon, which already introduces a huge problem into the mix. We also know that it is pervasive across humans. It is, in fact, probably what defines us more than anything else, more than standing on 2 feet or having opposable thumbs. It is the fact that we are conscious, that we can metaphorize our existence, that we experience things moment to moment and can put them into words, what is going on.

There is this rise of a concept of quantum consciousness, which suggests that the old model of consciousness, which was whatever it is, it’s clearly the function of wiring neurons leading from one to the other. It’s like a huge circuit board, which then would imply AI, right? If it’s just a big circuit board, we can just build a big circuit board over here and it’ll do it.

This other theory is, no, that there are inside of cells in the brain, these microtubules, these very tiny protein things that are behaving in ways that show some sort of quantum mechanics at work, which I will be clear to say, I do not understand at all. All I know is this, quantum functioning has nothing to do with circuit board stuff. If they’re right, that human consciousness is the product of some sort of quantum state occurring rapidly and in this massively distributed manner, AI will never get there until we build quantum computing.

John: Which we got much closer to this last week, I’ll put it there.

Craig: Here’s the other fascinating thing is, at deeply frozen states and all the rest. One of the knocks on quantum consciousness and most scientists are like, “Screw you,” is that the brain is too warm and too wet, as they say. I have no idea. The mystery of consciousness is profound. I find that in and of itself fascinating, that we have no idea how it works. We can barely define it.

John: Yes, like art. It’s one of those tough things. You sort of know when you see it.

Craig: You know it when you feel it.

John: I understand why people are reaching for these things. They want to have a sense that what we do in our brains is different than everything else and that there must be some magic. There’s some homunculus in there who is the real us that is the thing. I think what we’re going to find is that consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon that happens when you have a certain amount of processing capability. It just erupts because also if you look at animals around us, primates, octopuses, and other creatures, it’s clear they can do some very sophisticated things that would, by any of our normal standards, involve consciousness. The things that ravens can do feel like they’re conscious.

Craig: That’s the interesting thing is we’re not sure because we don’t know because we can’t be in their heads. If there is a difference between intelligence and consciousness, it seems like there is. There have been arguments that consciousness is a function of language itself. That if you do not have language, you can’t be conscious because that’s what consciousness is.

Animals don’t have language. Everyone’s going to write in, “Dolphins can talk,” and blah, blah, blah. No. They don’t. They have communication. They don’t have language. I don’t care. I’d send whatever emails you want until a dolphin talks and says stuff. “Actually, there’s one dolphin.” I don’t care. They’re not talking. The end.

John: Yes. The situations where that boundary between what is animal communication versus animal language is interesting. The grey parrots who learn to speak and actually can do some sophisticated things in talking, it becomes a question of like, well, how much is that the training given them to a place? They can say novel things, but does that really mean that they’re conscious in ways that–

Craig: They’re combining sounds. Again, birds communicate through song, and whales communicate through song, and apes communicate through grunts and hand gestures, but none of them are currently writing a limerick. We are different. Now, you’re right, it may be that this is all just this desperate narcissism, neuro-narcissism, that no computer could do what we do. You’re probably right, because after all, we’re not real either. It’s just a question is, how sophisticated is the matrix that we’re inside of? Probably pretty sophisticated. Seems pretty sophisticated.

Drew: Why is language the benchmark for consciousness? I still don’t–

Craig: It may not be. It’s just a theory that consciousness is a function of the brain having an understanding of what the word I means, what the word you means, what tenses mean, am, were, going to be. Those concepts alone create a sense of consciousness, memory, planning ahead, experience right now, and then metaphor, which is a very complicated thing. It’s a very complicated way of thinking.

John: It’s a form of pattern matching, but is generalizable to ways that are so different.

Craig: Yes, and now I can explain something to you using metaphor, which even the word metaphor is a fascinating word. The vocabulary that we have, the thousands of words that we know, all of that stuff is perhaps what is leading to this mush in our heads. Moment to moment, if you try and define your own consciousness, you will fail.

John: The experiment we could never do, which would be telling, is if you could actually raise children in an environment with no language whatsoever and see what are they like, and do they have–

Craig: We’ve seen some of those cases. What happens is they start to create their own language. It seems like language is neurologically innate. Chomsky’s big theory, which seems true, is that grammar, the basic concepts of grammar, are true across all languages, that all languages ultimately do have subject, verb, object.

John: They could put them in different orders. They could have different rules for forming them, but that they all have that concept.

Craig: Yes, that all languages erupt out of the same neurological instruments. Yes, because why? Why would we need me, you, doing things? Somehow that’s how we organized it.

John: A sense of the future, a sense of the past, and we build, communicate those.

Craig: Then conditionals. Conditionals alone. Just the word “If.” That word is so powerful, and I’m not sure a lot of animals have if. If this, then this. If this, then this. If not this, you’ve lost my dogs. If, sit, then treat. I don’t even think they get that far. I think their brains are like, “Sit, treat.” Regardless, it’s not language.

John: All right. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli, outro is also by Matthew. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find them all at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links for things we talked about on today’s show in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for Craig and I to do this show every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on home automation. Craig, thanks for a fun and freewheeling episode.

Craig: Yeah, no, we won’t get any emails for this one.

John: Not a bit. Not a one.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Craig, let’s talk home automation and sort of what stuff in your house right now can you ask an assistant, digital assistant to do? What things happen automatically? What do you have working in your house right now?

Craig: Very, very little. I have my thermostats or Nest thermostats.

John: Do you use the app for it or just do you just turn it on and off?

Craig: I generally use the app, although from time to time, I’ll walk by, wave my hand in front of one of them and adjust it. I have reduced the amount of automation they have. The auto scheduling, I found to be brutal. I don’t think it’s very good at figuring out what I want. I found myself constantly being like, “No, Nest, I don’t want it to be 67 degrees. I would like it to be minimum 69, please.” It’s cold as shit in here. It’s like, “Oh, okay.” Then the next day, “You like 66?” I’m like, “No.”

I actually turned auto scheduling off. I do like the auto away, auto home. It knows, okay, if we’re out of the house, but then I worry about the dogs. I don’t want them to get too hot. I’ll probably turn that off too once it gets to the summer. Other than that, my lights are not all wired into a system. I don’t have Alexa. I don’t. You’d think I would. Tell me what to do.

John: In our house, Mike has rewired all our light switches to be programmable and sort of beyond the system. It’s actually really good. It’s actually really nice because I can ask to turn down the lights to 10%. I can turn the lights up. In my office, when it gets a little dark, I can tell it to turn on the lights. It’s really nice for it to do that. I can do the same with our Nest thermostat. I say like, I can ask like, “What is the temperature in the room?” Turn it up to 70 degrees if it’s too cold. That stuff has been really useful.

The other app that we tend to use a lot is as we leave the house, we can turn on the lights to sort of– it sort of randomly turns on different lights as we’re away. It makes it feel much more lived in, which is really, really good. Our locks are on the system, so we can have it lock the doors, unlock the doors. We get a notification if the gate has been opened or a door has been opened. We get a sense of like, “Oh, the housekeeper’s here.”

Craig: I do have that. I have the Lockly is my front door. My question for you is, do you put an Alexa? I assume that’s what you’re using.

John: Oh, in the house, yes.

Craig: Yes. Do you put one in every room so it can hear you everywhere you go?

John: Yes. There’s one in most rooms and you can sort of call out for it. We were always an Apple family. We were using the HomePods, because we rented an Airbnb that had Alexas and it was like so much better that we ended up switching everything off to that. It has been good. On my watch, I can open and close the gate. I can do that kind of stuff. When I’m calling out for someone to do something, it’s generally Alexa.

Craig: Nest is a Google product. Alexa is Amazon. They work together, I guess? They’re happy with each other?

John: The systems for communicating between each other have gotten better. They’re not nearly as good as you sort of would hope they would be, but they’ve gotten better.

Craig: They’re using some sort of protocol, like a standardized protocol. For your lights, what system did Mike put in?

John: I don’t really know.

Craig: Your wife.

John: What does my wife do, by the way?

Craig: What does your wife do?

John: I don’t know which light switches we ended up going with, but they’re all standardized now. My daughter hates them.

Craig: Oh, tell me why.

John: She’s been away at college when it changed. Now, a classical light switch is like the top turns it on, the bottom turns it off, unless it’s a three-way switch with somebody else and then it works the other way. Now the top always turns it on, the bottom always turns it off, but it doesn’t lock in the bottom place or the top place.

Craig: It’s a two-pole or a three-pole. This is another side, a good bonus episode is dealing with your children when they come home from college. Poor Jesse. Poor Jesse, please. I love her to death. We got a different house and she was upset. She was like, “I didn’t want to come home to some weird house, I wanted to come home to my house,” which I completely understood.

Then also I understand, let’s say we had stayed in that house, but only changed the light switches. It would still be somewhat traumatic because that’s where they grew up and they remember something. It’s also a little bit of a sign. I really do sympathize with our kids. They leave to go to college and they come back and they’re like, “Oh, the second I was gone, you started undoing things,” like as if to say, we could have done all this light switch work, but the kid was here. All right, you’ve got your lights automated, which is interesting to me.

John: Generally very useful. We’ll start to watch a movie. It’s like, “Oh, turn the lights down to 10%.”

Craig: That does sound great. Do the switches themselves have to be replaced, or is it some central thing somewhere that–

John: Replacing the switches. Basically, each individual switch knows where it is and what’s going on.

Craig: So many switches.

John: It’s a thing, electricians will come out and it’ll take a day to switch out all the switches.

Craig: They’ll do all the switches. Then you’ve got your switches. You’ve got your lights. I have Spotify, but I suppose if I had Alexa, it could tell Spotify to do that.

John: Yes, it plays then for sure.

Craig: Which would probably be better. I do worry about the Alexa. We had an Alexa briefly and it started to creep me out. Does it ever creep you out?

John: Not so much. We get frustrated with it. We will ask it for like, the daily news, like as we’re making breakfast and sometimes she won’t hear it right or the wrong one will answer or it’ll want to keep playing after we told her to stop. There’s those frustrations. No, on the whole, it’s been fine.

Craig: Do you yell at it?

John: Sometimes I lose my patience a little bit. The, “Damn it, Alexa,” is probably a thing it hears a lot.

Craig: Wow. Do you think Alexa eventually is going to sort of come out and do an article in Variety about you?

John: Absolutely. What an abusive employer.

Craig: Just toxic home environment.

John: Never asked about me.

Craig: Never, but also just yelled. Just a lot of yelling.

John: Wants to know like the air quality a lot for who knows why.

Craig: Also, here’s a transcript of everything they’ve said for the past five years. They do hear everything.

John: Apparently, how these systems were supposed to work is that only when they hear the trigger word, then they start paying attention to what comes after it. That’s how they’re supposed to work.

Craig: Supposed to.

John: Supposed to. It’s a thing I just had to learn to live with like that.

Craig: You sort of go for it. Last question about home automation. I’d love to hear from some of our listeners who are super gear heads who have like really wired their homes up because I feel like there’s some great total solution. This will do it all, because instead of this patchwork of products, maybe I’m wrong. Your Nest thermostats. Do you have the latest Nest thermostats?

John: We don’t. We have ones we’ve had for years and they’re fine.

Craig: I was looking at the latest ones. I can’t tell really what’s different about them other than that they look somewhat cooler. They also look slightly like HAL from 2001, which is unnerving.

John: It’s not the best. I’m curious to hear from our listeners because I also think there’s a sweet spot where it’s like the amount of home automation we have is like it’s useful but not a pain in the ass. I’m never against it. There’ve been other times along the way where we’ve tried to do things that were a little bit fancier and it’s like, “Oh, God.” In the old house, we had a home theater system where the projector would drop down from the ceiling and there was a screen that came down. It was always a nightmare. It was maybe a 20% chance it would work properly the first time, and you’re not helping yourself that way.

Craig: I’m open to it. I would love something that would be– the dream is something integrated where there’s one thing that is running the door, the lights, the thermostats. I’m not sure what else there, the gate.

John: Things like your sprinklers, things like that, yes.

Craig: Sprinklers.

John: The pool pump.

Craig: The sprinklers– and yes, sure. There is an app for the pool pump that I have and I just never look at it because to me, the pool pump belongs to the pool people that come and maintain it. The sprinklers belong to the gardeners who come and maintain that. Now, if I were working on that stuff myself, if I weren’t such a dandy lad, yes, I would want to have all of it integrated would be– that would be the dream.

John: Cool. Thanks, guys.

Links:

• The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White
• The Conundrum of the Workshops by Rudyard Kipling
• OpenAI’s controversial Sora is finally launching today. Will it truly disrupt Hollywood? by Wendy Lee for LA Times
• I Went to the Premiere of the First Commercially Streaming AI-Generated Movies by Jason Koehler
• A timeline of the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and search for his killer by Michael R. Sisal and Cedar Attanasio for Associated Press
• How do you license a fortune teller? by Paul Debole
• An I.V.F. Mix-Up, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice by Susan Dominus for NYT Magazine
• Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath
• Your Consciousness Can Connect With the Whole Universe by Manasee Wagh for Popular Mechanics
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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