Archives for 2016

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/dont-think-twice).

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**Mike Birbiglia:** And my name is Mike Birbiglia.

**Craig:** And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Mike:** To screenwriters.

**Craig:** [laughs] Today on the podcast, John has been replaced, upgraded, possibly downgraded, we’ll find out in a few moments with comedian, filmmaker, friend of the podcast, and plain old just friend me, Mike Birbiglia. And we will be discussing his new movie, Don’t Think Twice, which is in theaters now. And we’ll also be answering some listener questions. All told, I believe based on the circumstances, this will be the best single episode of the podcast we’ve ever done. No pressure.

**Mike:** I believe so, yes.

**Craig:** Mike Birbiglia, welcome.

**Mike:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** So, you are here in Los Angeles on a bit of tour, bit of a press tour.

**Mike:** I am.

**Craig:** To promote your new film, Don’t Think Twice, which you have written, you directed, you star in as one of the ensemble.

**Mike:** With Keegan-Michael Key and Gillian Jacobs and others. Yeah.

**Craig:** And others. I like that they all just get shoved into others.

**Mike:** Kate Micucci. Tami Sagher. And Chris Gethard are others.

**Craig:** Very good. I have seen this film. Aside from being a terrific movie, I think it also has a lot of relevance. The film and its topic has a lot of relevance for what we do as filmmakers and for what our people at home who listen to the show care about. So, first, why don’t–

**Mike:** It may crush them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Mike:** It may rip their hearts in two.

**Craig:** That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

**Mike:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Right? I mean, you know me.

**Mike:** Yes. You’re doom and gloom. Or you want–

**Craig:** Winnowing. Winnowing.

**Mike:** Winnowing.

**Craig:** A constant winnowing. I just don’t – I hate the idea that somehow this podcast or anything that is encouraging might keep somebody from pursuing a career in which they would discover some life-saving medicine.

**Mike:** I agree.

**Craig:** And instead they’re working on as a fourth level staff writer on a–

**Mike:** My wife and I talk about that all the time. I did a benefit for – because my wife and I always talk about how it doesn’t seem like science is something people are – the kids are aspiring towards, because we need someone to cure different types of cancer and what not. And I did a leukemia/lymphoma society benefit recently, and there was one of the sort of the top researchers in the field was speaking and did a bit with Ellie Kemper. It was like Nick Kroll, Ellie Kemper, a bunch of people. And I just did stand up. John Oliver was in it.

And I asked this guy, because, you know, you never get to talk to these people, the top researchers in the field. And I said, “My wife and I always feel like, tell me if this is wrong, like there’s not enough young people who are interested in science in America. Like everyone is interested in sort of getting famous or whatever.” And he said, “Yeah, it’s a huge problem.” And the other huge problem is the US government gives very few grants for research.

**Craig:** Right. Well, it is – we live I think in a culture that celebrates dreams, chasing your dreams, don’t give up on your dreams. Dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams. And science isn’t so much about a romantic dream. It’s about rigor, and commitment, and hard work.

**Mike:** Discipline. Helping the planet. There’s this great op-ed, Angela Duckworth I believe wrote it, in the New York Times around the time of commencement speeches where she said, “If I were to give one, I would say don’t think about what you want to be when you grow up. Think about what’s the world I want to live in and how can I help be a part of that?”

**Craig:** Well, that’s a wonderful message that apparently did not sink in to any of the characters in your movie. Because your characters are absolutely right in the pocket of dreamers.

**Mike:** They are.

**Craig:** They are all dreaming of becoming big comic stars. So tell us about, just give us a general sketch of what this movie is, what it’s about.

**Mike:** So, this movie, Don’t Think Twice, is about a group of best friends in an improv group, and it’s sort of a Big Chill-esque sort of dramedy where someone gets a chance to audition for like a Saturday Night Live type of show and the rest of them don’t. And they’re losing their lease on their theater we learn very early in the film. And it’s this staring in the mirror of these characters in their 30s, late 30s, and early 40s, going, “What am I going to do? What do I do now?” Which is something that I think me and a lot of my friends have faced in our 30s.

**Craig:** It’s a true story, even though it’s fictional, because that is the nature of these more well-known improv troupes, Second City, and the Groundlings.

**Mike:** Yeah. And UCB. And all these places.

**Craig:** I’m sure there are many people who participate in those for the joy of it. And there are many people who participate in those because that’s where they want to be. But it does seem like the advertisement is this is how you get onto Saturday Night Live, and then that’s how you become a movie star.

**Mike:** Except it’s unspoken advertisement, I think. I don’t think that UCB, for example, is saying this is how you get on SNL. But it’s hard when you read an article about Kate McKinnon and saw that she was in a sketch comedy group there. And then you see that Aidy Bryant was in Second City. It’s hard not to draw the connection.

**Craig:** You’re movie, I think, suggests that a lot of the people that do enroll to take classes, as well as the people who are there teaching and part of the troupes, they’re certainly aware. I mean–

**Mike:** I think so. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, you are proposing, I mean, it’s an interesting thing. The way you are proposing a very unromantic view.

**Mike:** It is.

**Craig:** You’re movie is assiduously unromantic in its portrayal of the creative life and creative ambition and the petty, often envious, nature of creative people. Which I loved, because I thought it was so true and so brave. But I’m kind of curious why every movie – like you could write about anything, right? And this is your first truly fictional–

**Mike:** Fictional piece. Yeah, it is.

**Craig:** And you wanted to write this. Right? Like the anti-love letter to yourself.

**Mike:** Oh my god. [laughs]

**Craig:** And your friends, right? Why?

**Mike:** Oh god.

**Craig:** Why?

**Mike:** When you phrase it that way, Craig. Well, when I think about it, my first film, Sleepwalk With Me, is about success, is this is a film about failure. You know, I think someone kicking around in my head was, after the first movie, I had a lot of people come up to me and say I started doing standup because I saw Sleepwalk With Me. And I thought, well that’s not what the movie is about.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Mike:** The movie is actually about finding your voice in whatever field that you might be in. And so I felt like why shouldn’t there be a movie about failure and how life is unfair.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Mike:** You deal with studios all the time. I don’t deal with them. But I imagine they’re not loving a pitch like that. Like the movie is about failure. How does that go over at Universal?

**Craig:** I think it’s cute that you thought it would even get that far.

**Mike:** [laughs] Like I’d get a meeting.

**Craig:** Right. Like they don’t ask you what the movie is about. They’re like, “First of all, we’ll tell you what we want movies about. Is it one of these four things? No? No.”

**Mike:** Wow.

**Craig:** Is it about a superhero? Is it about an explosion? Is it franchise-able?

**Mike:** Wow.

**Craig:** No? How will this play overseas?

**Mike:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** No? Right. So all of those questions, you would be able to happily check no to. But this – listen, independent film more than ever is distinct and discrete, clearly separate from studio fare. There was a while where every studio was like, “We want a Miramax, we want a Sony Pictures Classic. We’ll all start doing that.”

**Mike:** Right.

**Craig:** Not anymore. So now it’s back to independent. And this is about as independent as it gets.

**Mike:** They’ve all kind of disbanded that part of their company, right?

**Craig:** Well, they were like, “So, after we made 20 of these semi-independent films, we made like $12.”

**Mike:** There was like Paramount Vantage or something, right?

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Mike:** And there were all these Universal blah, blah, blah. I don’t know, like you know this better than I do.

**Craig:** Universal had Focus.

**Mike:** Yes! That’s right.

**Craig:** Which was their specialty arm. Paramount had Vantage. Warner Bros had Warner Bros Pictures Independent I think it was called. They did March of the Penguins, I want to say.

**Mike:** Sony still has Sony Pictures Classics, but they do less movies I think than they used to.

**Craig:** Disney had Miramax.

**Mike:** Yes.

**Craig:** They finally got rid of it completely. And then Fox had Searchlight.

**Mike:** The jury is out: Hollywood doesn’t like making independent films, or small films.

**Craig:** They do not. It turns out they like making Hollywood movies. But the good news is you are the beneficiary of that. You have made a true independent film in all regards. I love it when independent films are movies that the studious wouldn’t have also made. And this is clearly one of them. I’m kind of curious, when you go down the path of being the writer and director, and I assume you’re also a producer of the movie.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you’re in the cast. So the downside of working for a studio is you have multiple layers of people meddling, each with an agenda, some of whom are well-intentioned, and some of whom are not. You have nobody technically meddling. So then the question is–

**Mike:** It’s all on you.

**Craig:** And I’m always fascinated with this, and I guess this will lead into our how we kind of interacted on this early on, but how do you deal with the struggle when you are entirely in charge of something? Okay, if somebody tells me they don’t like a thing, and I make a change, am I somehow selling myself out? And on the other hand, if someone tells me they don’t like something and I say, “No, you’re wrong,” am I somehow being self-indulgent? How do you play that balance?

**Mike:** That’s a great question actually. I would have these readings, as you know, because you were at one of them at my house. I encourage all screenwriters, aspiring screenwriters, to do this. My friends are actors and writers. They don’t have to be. They can just be friends, random people, just reading the script out loud. And I would offer pizza afterwards.

**Craig:** You did.

**Mike:** And it was always great pizza.

**Craig:** It was really good. Well, because you live in Brooklyn. Even bad Brooklyn pizza is good.

**Mike:** With [Colley], you know, [Tecca], Luzzo, like I made sure the pizza was good. And at the beginning of each reading I would say, “This script might be bad, but the pizza is phenomenal, and so it’s all going to be fine. Like don’t worry about it.”

**Craig:** Actually it was curiously comforting to hear that.

**Mike:** Yeah. Well, because, you know, and this harkens to your question, or this dovetails to your question which is like I would encourage people to give me their harshest criticism. Like I would invite you and Brian Koppelman and Phil Lord and Nicole Holofcener, and I would–

**Craig:** Michael Weber.

**Mike:** Yeah. Michael Weber. Greta Gerwig. Like I did ten of these. A zillion people came. But I invite people who are better than me at it. [laughs] I want people who are smarter, better. Ira Glass. You know, like people to come at me hard with notes and say the toughest thing.

I mean, you said some stuff to me that was so tough in the early process and it was so helpful. That’s the thing that I think writers, particularly aspiring writers, don’t get. The idea of early on, and I didn’t get in my 20s either, to be clear, is that you actually want the toughest notes.

**Craig:** You do.

**Mike:** Not because they’re right, but because you want to know how your vision is being conveyed. Is it being conveyed well or not well?

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** Is what’s in your brain working with people, or is it not working? Because it doesn’t mean – just because you read my script and something’s not clicking for you doesn’t mean that the idea in my brain is wrong. It means that the idea in my brain isn’t on the page.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** I heard Ron Howard say in an interview once that he shows rough cuts of his movies to strangers, not to find out what the vision of the movie is, but to find out if the vision of the movie is connecting with people. And if it’s not, then he makes a ton of changes.

**Craig:** Well, that’s something that you inherently understand because you’re a stage performer. And there’s this – I don’t know if you ever read this book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

**Mike:** I don’t know that one.

**Craig:** It’s a fantastic book. A very difficult book. It sounds like it would be fun. It’s actually maybe the most dense and difficult to understand book I’ve ever read in my life.

**Mike:** Sounds great.

**Craig:** Written by this guy named Robert Pirsig, who’s a moral philosopher, among other things. And in it he investigates this question of quality. What is quality? What’s good? And where he eventually ends up is that there’s no such thing as an inherent quality, but it’s not also true that just because lots of people like something that it is quality.

He said ultimately quality comes down to the relationship between a thing and the people observing it and listening to it. It’s about a relationship. Comics, standup comics, I think know this better than anybody. Right.

You go up there – I’d have to assume, I’ve never done it, but I have to assume that you have been in two different rooms on two different nights, feeling the same, telling the same stories and jokes, and getting two completely different responses.

**Mike:** Constantly. Oftentimes I’ll take jokes to like three different places. I’ll take them to somewhere like Cincinnati, I’ll take them to Brooklyn, and I’ll take them to Manhattan. Three completely different responses. And what I want, ultimately, and Cincinnati could be Iowa City, it could be St. Louis, whatever. What I want is the jokes to work in all three places, because what I’m ultimately trying to grasp at is something that’s human.

And when I would show people drafts of the script and drafts of the movie, or cuts of the movie, it’s the same thing. I want old people, I want young people, I want everybody to have an experience that ultimately is just a human experience.

**Craig:** It seems to me that you, through your experience as a standup, would have a kind of a comfort that I’m not sure a typical screenwriter gets. Because you have experienced so many times–

**Mike:** Being hammered. The audience just crushing you.

**Craig:** But knowing that the material itself, maybe it’s just, okay, this group here. But this works generally. So, let me not go home and tear it all up.

**Mike:** Agreed.

**Craig:** You know, so that helps you keep your – because I, you know–

**Mike:** It even makes me lose my breath hearing you describe it, but it’s so true. Yeah, I have shows all the time where I bring something to the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan and it doesn’t work, but I know the seed of what’s there is right.

**Craig:** And so you experience this rejection, but you do not turn in on yourself. That is an amazing ability. It’s something I struggle with all the time.

**Mike:** I think we all do, yeah.

**Craig:** You know, someone says, “I don’t like it,” and I immediately think, oh, okay, what do I need to do to make you like it? That’s not actually a great instinct.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At all. But it’s the normal instinct, I think. It’s how we’re brought up. You know, well, if somebody is upset with you, stop doing that. You know what I mean?

**Mike:** Yes. Yes.

**Craig:** But this is different and so I went to your house. By the way, you live next door to Mari Heller.

**Mike:** Marielle Heller and Jorma Taccone. Power directing couple.

**Craig:** Amazing. She was on our show as well. That building, it’s a duplex, right?

**Mike:** Well, we share a wall.

**Craig:** You share a wall. If there’s like a gas leak in that building, American culture will suffer. Primarily because we lost the writer of MacGruber.

**Mike:** That’s correct.

**Craig:** Because you know how I feel about MacGruber?

**Mike:** Oh, I feel identically about MacGruber. It’s one of the great comedies in American history.

**Craig:** The greatest. The greatest.

**Mike:** Along with Popstar, Jorma’s recent movie.

**Craig:** I haven’t yet seen it. But I’m going to, because I believe in him.

**Mike:** You will love it.

**Craig:** I will. If I loved MacGruber. So that’s an amazing home.

So I go to your home and you have this very impressive group. You have Frank Oz, by the way, reading one of the parts.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I didn’t know that was Frank Oz.

**Mike:** That’s what Ira said.

**Craig:** I didn’t know. I walked in, I sat down–

**Mike:** He’s like, “You’re getting notes from Yoda?”

**Craig:** I know! So I showed up, I sat down next to this guy, I didn’t really know anybody except for you and Mike Weber, who hadn’t shown up yet. And he’s just this nice man.

**Mike:** He is.

**Craig:** And I just started chatting with him and we were just like, you know, laughing and stuff. And then someone told me that was Frank Oz and my heart just – you know, like when your heart sinks and rises at the same time. You’re like, I’m scared and thrilled. I mean, it’s funny, like Yoda, but really for me, Grover.

**Mike:** I know.

**Craig:** It’s Grover. Like this man was there when I was four.

**Mike:** And he’s Cookie Monster.

**Craig:** I know. Miss Piggy.

**Mike:** He’s Miss Piggy. He’s Fozzie. He’s Animal.

**Craig:** Plus, he’s Frank Oz. I mean, the guy’s made some terrific movies.

**Mike:** Oh my god, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, What About Bob? You could list them all day.

**Craig:** Did he make In & Out?

**Mike:** Bowfinger. In & Out.

**Craig:** Amazing movie.

**Mike:** Yeah. I know.

**Craig:** Paul Rudnick script, I believe. Very funny guy.

**Mike:** Those films are a great example of films it doesn’t seem like Hollywood is making right now.

**Craig:** Because they aren’t.

**Mike:** What?

**Craig:** They’re not. They just don’t make them. They don’t.

**Mike:** And those are great comedies. Those are great studio comedies.

**Craig:** It’s a tale for another time. But that room was very impressive because you had intentionally assembled a lot of high powered people.

**Mike:** Wrecking crew.

**Craig:** A wrecking crew. And then exposed yourself to them. And then everybody has opinions. So many opinions.

**Mike:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And there were so many opinions that I made a choice to just write all my opinions down.

**Mike:** That was very generous of you.

**Craig:** Because ultimately, you can’t – I don’t know about you. I get into opinion overload where suddenly everything, my brain stops. I get numb.

**Mike:** Oh yeah. I had that. Every single reading.

**Craig:** It’s a weird feeling, isn’t it?

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you just want people to leave and take their pizza. Just get out of my house.

**Mike:** I would drink a lot.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s healthy. I think that’s a great idea. Because from my understanding, drinking solves all emotional problems.

**Mike:** Yes. But, Craig, be cautious. Use it in moderation. No, there’s extreme stories.

**Craig:** Really?

**Mike:** Yeah. I’ll tell you. When the podcast ends, I’ll tell you all about it.

**Craig:** Sounds alarmist. Anyway, I want to talk to you about the paradox involved in writing a movie about a troupe of improvisational comedians. You’re doing the least improvisational thing there is, writing a screenplay.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And yet you somehow–

**Mike:** You’re trying to immortalize an ephemeral art from.

**Craig:** Correct. You are attempting to catch lightning in a bottle and freeze it, which of course then ruins it, right? There’s no way to have great improv that’s not improv’d. Everybody can smell it, right?

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So how did you approach this from a screenwriting craft way?

**Mike:** I was doing a regular show at the Upright Citizens Brigade called Mike Birbiglia’s dream, where Tami Sagher from the movie and Chris Gethard from the movie and a rotating cast of people each week, Connor Ratliff, sometimes Aidy Bryant would play. Sometimes Gary Richardson would play. And we’d improvise every week and I would always ask as a prompt, “Has anyone had a hard day?”

And there’s a few, like in the movie where someone said like I saw my dad for the first time in ten years and he was driving a taxi. And that’s from a real show. And so I wouldn’t rip from the shows’ improv, actual improv, but I would rip sometimes the suggestion.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**Mike:** And then I would free associate as though I were all the characters. And then I brought the cast to town early. Actually, Frank Oz gave me this piece of advice. When he came to the reading, he says, “The script is pretty much there. Just get the cast to town and take them bowling.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**Mike:** It’s something he does when he directs films. And it worked. We all went bowling.

**Craig:** Take them bowling?

**Mike:** Yeah, he said because if they’re believably friends, the movie works. If they’re not, it doesn’t.

**Craig:** He really is Yoda.

**Mike:** I know.

**Craig:** Why? [Yoda impression]. I mean, it works. It legitimately works that way. I want him to do that for me all the time. That’s great, great advice. Because the thing about the movie that buoys everything, I think, is the absolute believability of all of those characters. There isn’t one of them that feels like they’ve been dropped in by a screenwriter. And it’s the best compliment I can give you as a writer.

**Mike:** Thank you. And I will compliment you on something that you’ve said on the podcast before, and then you said to me – your notes on my specific script is, you were like, “Cut a character.” You and John have said this before, many times, I believe. Think about cutting a character. It’s easier for your cinematographer to make frames. It’s easier for the audience to follow these characters.

One of the things that we found in the edit is that we had to cut a whole plot line and a character back to like a minimal amount because the audience can’t always follow all these characters. When you have six principals, it’s like how many more characters can people juggle in their head?

**Craig:** One thing that has always surprised me – it never stops surprising me – are the confusions that audiences do experience. I think, you know, on studio sides, they’re always obsessed with confusing the audience. So, they think audiences are confused by details and plot, and that’s why in movies a lot of times people are telling you things in a way that feels insulting to your intelligence, because many people’s intelligence was not insulted by that information.

But mostly what people are confused by are the strangest things like, “I didn’t know that those two people were two different people until halfway through the movie when they were in a scene together.”

**Mike:** That’s why casting is crucial.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**Mike:** I had to keep that in mind when casting the six principals. Do they look different enough from each other so people don’t think that person is that person?

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Mike:** It sounds like we’re exaggerating by the way, and it’s actually 100% true.

**Craig:** Even smart people. Very smart people will say, “I didn’t understand that that person was her boyfriend.”

**Mike:** For example, I will never be cast in a movie with Ike Barinholtz.

**Craig:** Well, hold on.

**Mike:** It’s not going to happen.

**Craig:** There’s a good reason for that. Ike Barinholtz, way funnier than you.

**Mike:** Wait, I will walk out of this podcast right now.

**Craig:** So much funnier. Better looking.

**Mike:** Better looking, sure.

**Craig:** Better looking you. Funnier. He’s basically the best version of you. He’s like, if I’m making a movie of your life, I’m casting him.

**Mike:** Well, Seth Rogan is moderating a Q&A of the movie this weekend, and I’m going to make a pitch to him privately. “Can I play all the Ike Barinholtz parts in your movie? Because I’m cheap. I’m cheaper. I’ll do it for less. It’ll be more fun.”

**Craig:** By the way, it’s that classic thing.

**Mike:** I look like him. You can sub him out.

**Craig:** Who’s Ike Barinholtz? Get me Ike Barinholtz. Get me Mike Birbiglia. The young Ike Barinholtz. Who is Mike Birbiglia? [laughs] Get me Ike Barinholtz. This is Hollywood. This is it.

Tell us about the rollout of your movie. Right now in theaters.

**Mike:** Yeah. So we’re in that stage where we’re being sort of tested in the major markets. So it’ll be like in Chicago, Detroit, Boston, DC, Seattle, Austin, Portland, Los Angeles, all that kind of stuff. And then if it does well, it could end up in 500 or 1,000 theaters. There’s no way to know.

**Craig:** And who is releasing – tell us about the business of this.

**Mike:** A company called the Film Arcade is releasing it. It’s a company owned by Miranda Bailey, who is a great producer, and run by Jason Beck and Andy Bohn, who are – I had a meeting with Miranda, and Andy, and Jason like right after Sleepwalk With Me came out. And they said, you know, we have this company. It’s a small distribution company. They did Afternoon Delight. They did James White, which was a good indie film from last year.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** I think it’s a company – I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying this – but I think it’s a company that gets outbid a lot by companies like A24 and some larger mid-range sort of indie distribution companies.

**Craig:** Tough business to be in.

**Mike:** Tough business, yeah, out of the festivals. And so they were game for this idea of like I said, “Here’s what I learned from releasing the film with IFC Films last time. I learned that when I show up around the country that it works. That you end up with people who, I answer questions, I went to 10 or 15 cities with Sleepwalk With Me. And when you talk to people about your movie, they can kind of see how much you care about it.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** Because I really do care about these things I make. And I try not to put out garbage. And I try desperately not to. And so I said to them, I was like I want to do that bigger. I want to do 30 cities. And I want to really strategize with you guys. And they were game for that.

And we’re like in the middle of it right now. I mean, it is a doozy.

**Craig:** This one is bigger than Sleep was, right?

**Mike:** It is. And it has the potential to be bigger. I think like what’s weird about it is in some ways it’s filling a need for a type of film that studios aren’t quite making, like we were saying, which is movies like The Big Chill, and like Hannah and Her Sisters, and Beautiful Girls, even, Almost Famous. These like mid-range budget films that actually are–

**Craig:** But you’re movie isn’t even in that what they would call mid-range budget, in other words like studios will say we’re trying to not make the $35 million adult drama.

**Mike:** No, I know.

**Craig:** This doesn’t cost $35 million.

**Mike:** No, no, no. It’s a fraction of that.

**Craig:** But the point is that–

**Mike:** But that’s the niche, I think, we could fill.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it does. I think there is this desire to see adults navigating life. This group of characters that you put together is kind of remarkable. I think they work together beautifully. I believed them all as improvisational comics. I mean, they all are.

**Mike:** Yeah. Yeah. They’re all comedians and comedic actors. But I had them come to town two or three weeks early, which was, you know, this is an indie film, so you have to sort of beg people like on the phone. “Hey, it’s all about us being friends, so can you come to town and we’ll rehearse things. And I can’t pay you. It’ll be fun.”

**Craig:** Right. Don’t tell SAG.

**Mike:** Yeah. And so they came and we did these improv workshops with Liz Allen, who is sort of an improv guru and friend. And we did improv shows. UCB and the Magnet. We actually did shows–

**Craig:** I didn’t know that. That’s amazing. As a troupe?

**Mike:** Yeah, to the point where like–

**Craig:** How did it go? Just out of curiosity.

**Mike:** Pretty good.

**Craig:** Really?

**Mike:** Yeah, the shows were–

**Craig:** That’s a risky move, Mike. Because you’ve put your cast together. You do a show. And you guys bomb and you’re like, oh boy.

**Mike:** Well, yeah, it’s ridiculous. I mean, Gillian always makes the joke that we’re doing a photoshoot in New Jersey for photos that are in the movie. And then they were like, okay, next thing in your itinerary is you guys are performing at UCB at 8 o’clock. And she’s like, “We are?” So, yeah, I mean, and I would say to them, like you don’t have to participate a lot if you don’t want. You can. You can stay on the backlines.

But anyway the point is we improvised and, I mean, Gillian got to be so good as an improviser. She denies this, but like she’s incredible. She was recommended by Lena Dunham, who read the script and said you have to get Gillian Jacobs for this part. And I said I’ve watched everything she’s done, and I’ve never seen her play a part like this. She said, “Gillian Jacobs can do anything.” And it proved to be entirely true.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**Mike:** Yeah. I feel very lucky. I quote you a lot in interviews and they say, “Wait, Craig who?” And then they say, “How do you spell that?”

**Craig:** And why?

**Mike:** And then I spell it. I say it over and over again. And then finally they just say, “Can we just say an anonymous screenwriter?” And I say, sure, doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** Jew. Can we just say Jew? Some Jew?

**Mike:** I’m not in this part of the conversation.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Mike:** [laughs] No, but I quote this thing that you’ve said before, which is that TV is a chemistry experiment and film is a biology experiment, which is to say that TV you can work on the next episode, change this, add this ingredient, add this chemical. Next season we’ll try this. Next, you know, whatever.

Movies, you put in this cinematographer, this director, this cast, this gaffer, this makeup artist together, here’s what happens. It works or it doesn’t work. And so when I think about this movie, I just think, oh, I just got lucky.

**Craig:** Well, yes. But no. I mean, that’s the thing. Chance favors the prepared mind. You did all the right things. There’s no denying that luck happens, right?

**Mike:** Of course.

**Craig:** But even then the luck that occurs, I think, is a product of the fact that you are a talented guy that people love. Right? So Lena Dunham isn’t just chatting with other people.

**Mike:** A niche group of people. Sure.

**Craig:** But they’re a great niche of people. And I actually think it’s in your nature to be able to lead people to do things they may not otherwise have been comfortable doing. Because you’re so nice, and you’re so humble. I don’t know if it’s fake. It’s the best fake humility in history if it’s fake.

**Mike:** Thank you. No, I mean, I feel terrible about myself all the time.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Because it really shines through. And I think that, you know, I’ve always said some people motivate through fear and other people people just want to hug and make feel better. And I want to make you feel – I think everybody is rooting for you. And you somehow managed to be that guy, but also then be a legitimate leader, because you can’t survive directing a movie. Especially, I mean, look, directing low budget movies is hard.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, how many pages were you guys doing a day?

**Mike:** At least five a day.

**Craig:** Yeesh. It’s tough.

**Mike:** It’s hard.

**Craig:** It’s tough. And it’s exhausting. And you’re acting in it. So how do you do that when you are tired and you are worried about the 14 other things that are happening?

**Mike:** Well, when I was casting the movie, Jorma Taccone, who we were talking about earlier, said you’ve got to play Jack, because it’s the best written part. And I was not being falsely modest. I said I’m not talented enough to play Jack. Like Keegan has a thing. Keegan-Michael Key has a thing that is – you look at him. You’re like, “What’s he going to do?”

**Craig:** I wouldn’t say that you’re not talented enough. I would say that that part requires the sort of person that Lorne Michaels would go, “You.”

**Mike:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Right. He has that glow.

**Mike:** He’s one of the great sketch comedians of the last 30 years.

**Craig:** That’s the other thing. In your mind you’re like, well, he does kind of deserve it, right? In real life he actually does have his own show, so yeah, he probably deserves it.

**Mike:** Yeah. And so then it was like, well, what part do I play? And in the readings I would do all different male parts. And with Miles, the part I play, it’s like, well, I can do bitter. I can handle bitter.

**Craig:** Well, you know what’s interesting. As I – when I saw the movie and I thought back to my initial impressions when I read the script, there were two interesting things that happened. One was that the character of Jack became so much more identifiable to me and sympathetic to me, even though he was succeeding and leaving people behind. I cared for him and I felt all of his dilemmas. Your character actually went the other way, because I felt so bad for your character. And it’s your portrayal, your directing and portrayal – on your own of your writing, he comes off as more broken.

**Mike:** He’s broken.

**Craig:** He’s broken.

**Mike:** Miles has had a hard time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, and that’s your choice. You went for the broken guy. Who also is a little scummy.

**Mike:** Yeah. He’s a lecherous person.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that’s what you went for.

**Mike:** I know.

**Craig:** You could have picked anyone. Mike Birbiglia.

**Mike:** Yeah. But I’m lucky that the cast works in the way it works.

**Craig:** It’s brilliant.

**Mike:** It’s weird with movies. It’s like the biology/chemistry thing you say. You watch a movie and you just go, like sometimes when I watch Gillian Jacobs’s performance I go, “If she didn’t do that, wouldn’t be a movie.”

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. You know, and that’s where part of it is luck, but you also understood that that was the thing. Because in the end, the great fear of every actor, you know this, is that somebody in a room somewhere is going to make a decision about whether the camera should be on them or not, and which take to use.

So, it’s a credit to you. I mean, ultimately you can’t get more authorial than writing, producing, and directing your own movie, and starring in it.

**Mike:** I think there’s something to be said for when you do that you run the risk of spreading yourself too thing. And certain elements being not strong. But, the flip side of that, the positive is it pares down the amount of people on the set. So, it’s more likely that everyone is on the same page about what the vision of the film is. Because I think it’s Sidney Lumet who says in his book on directing, “The most important thing is everyone is making the same movie.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Mike:** And I can’t – if anyone is an aspiring director – I can’t emphasize that enough.

**Craig:** No one really is there to undermine you. Whereas I think, you know, a lot of directors making movies for studios, someone at some point is going to make them question everything. Which isn’t necessarily great.

Sometimes it’s important, but maybe not at that time.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, you did a fantastic job. I loved the movie. I think you did a great job.

**Mike:** Thanks.

**Craig:** I know that–

**Mike:** One of the things I want to, just in terms of the directing thing, too, is I’ve been traveling around the country, going to 30 cities with Liz Allen who coached our improv team in the movie. And she does these free improv workshops at these theaters and then I kind of speak about how improv related to my process as a director, and writer, and actor. And the thing that I always say, and I say this to everyone who listens to this, and I’m an avid listener to this show.

**Craig:** Of course you are.

**Mike:** So, we’re of the same people, all of us listeners. I would highly recommend people make something. If they’re aspiring, you know, they’re living in Austin, or Iowa City, or Chicago, or anything, and you feel like you have something to say, or a story to tell, we’re in an era where you can shoot something for nothing.

**Craig:** For nothing. With an HD camera in your hand.

**Mike:** Yeah. And if you don’t believe me, go on Netflix. You can use my password. And watch Tangerine. And you will just go, “Oh, that can be a movie. Holy cow.”

**Craig:** We say this all the time. There’s no real way to understand what the job of screenwriting is if you only do half the job. Because half the job is putting some document together. And then the rest of it is seeing it through.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, you know the first time you saw what you wrote, then edited and put on screen, you thought, okay, now I have to go back and relearn everything and rethink everything.

**Mike:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** Now I understand what this means. So, you’re 100% right. I don’t know – I mean, look, I think a lot of people do make little shorts. They’ll shoot a scene. But I wouldn’t suggest necessarily to people to go out and start making things so you can become famous and sell those things. Make them as part of your education.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You don’t have to show them to anybody. If you make something of your own thing, and you hate it, you’ve learned so much.

**Mike:** I did that in college. I shot a short film called Waiting to be Great.

**Craig:** It’s still waiting.

**Mike:** It’s still waiting. I mean, it was really not done. I mean, in the edit we kind of gave up on it at a certain point. And like we showed it to friends. And it was terrible. And they said, “Nice try.”

**Craig:** [laughs] These friends sound awful. Well, you are our good friend. We’re very, very proud of you. The movie is getting terrific reviews, although, frankly, you know, I don’t care about that.

**Mike:** You’re not a reviews guy.

**Craig:** I just care about my own review. Well, come on, Ira Glass is producing it. It’s like rubbing bacon on something and holding it in front of a dog. Of course they like it. Please. But I like it. And I matter. So, everyone should go see this movie. If it is playing in a city near you, think about going and bringing a friend, because it’s also good to support this kind of cinema, I believe.

**Mike:** I think it’s like your favorite coffee shop on the corner, your favorite sandwich shop. If you want it to still exist, get your coffee there.

**Craig:** Right. And best news of all, this movie is entertaining and funny. It is not homework. We’re not asking you to eat a bunch of sprouts on a plate. It’s good. It’s like comfort food.

**Mike:** The cool thing is people keep tweeting me things like I’ve seen it four times now. Yeah, that’s all I want to hear.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. So, fantastic. Why don’t we move on to some listener questions, because I want to hear your wisdom about things. I got to start with this question, because the name is so fantastic. [Ayish Taccuh]. I believe I’m pronouncing [Taccuh] correctly. [Ayish Taccuh] writes, “First of all, I’m a big fan of Scriptnotes and I appreciate what you guys are dong. Keep up the great work.”

**Mike:** Agreed.

**Craig:** I presume they’re talking to you and me, and not John.

**Mike:** Yeah, not John. No.

**Craig:** “So, I am writing a screenplay in which my plot demands to assassinate the President of the United States and the objective is completed. Can you please tell me if it is legal to do that? Or if it is a felony of some sort.”

**Mike:** Oh my gosh. It depends on how well it’s written.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Mike:** It depends on what font it’s in. Don’t put it in ZDingbats.

**Craig:** Like clipped together newsprint. Yeah, exactly. You don’t want to scroll it on the back of a wrinkled picture of yourself in blood. You know, we get questions a lot–

**Mike:** Markers and blood.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s probably a bad idea. With bits of your hair taped to it. That’s probably not the way to go. We get legal questions all the time. You know, so neither John nor I are lawyers. Obviously, Mike Birbiglia, admitted to the New York State bar and is a practicing attorney in the area of – what do you work in? Mostly family/divorce stuff?

**Mike:** Yeah. I do divorce law.

**Craig:** Divorce law. You are allowed to assassinate a fictional president in a movie.

**Mike:** In a movie script, yeah.

**Craig:** Of course. And you know this, Ayish, because it’s happened so many times in movies. But, no, you definitely don’t want to write something that makes people go, “Uh, is this a cry for help?” Just don’t be weird about it.

It’s actually a good question. You want to be careful to not make people think that you’re nuts, or that you’re – anytime that you write something that seems a little scary, it’s a reasonable question for people to say, “Are you also scary? Or is it just your movie?” You know, like was it Andrew Davis who wrote Se7en? Andrew Walker Davis, I believe.

**Mike:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** It would have been fair to say, “Is this guy okay?” Or he’s just a really good writer, right?

**Mike:** But that’s why you’d say don’t hold back. Like I always say I try to write in the morning at 7AM. I go to a coffee shop, before I’m afraid of the world.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**Mike:** You know what I mean? I never want to hold myself back from what’s in my subconscious. I like to blurt it out and then edit it later. It’s like the Hemingway quote which is like write drunk, edit sober. And I don’t write drunk, but I write sleepy.

**Craig:** By the way, I tend to write sleepy on the other side. You know, I let the day go through–

**Mike:** Late at night. Yeah, I’ve heard that about you. I heard people get emails from you at three, four in the morning.

**Craig:** Well, you know, it’s business hours somewhere.

**Mike:** Exactly.

**Craig:** The hell with them if they don’t like it.

**Mike:** No, they love it.

**Craig:** Look how quickly I get angry about everything. All right, next question, this is from John Lambert. John says, this is appropriate to what we were talking, being in your 30s and facing this crossroads. “I’m 34. I’ve made the conscious decision to move to LA and chase my screenwriting dreams. My long term goals, I think, are irrelevant at this point. My short term goal is sufficiently daunting and difficult. My short term goal being getting staffed on a TV show. I guess I’m just looking for some advice from two very trusted sources, whom I respect.” Or in this case, just one.

**Mike:** One, yeah.

**Craig:** “By the way, I’ve been speaking to a manager, but I know I shouldn’t expect meetings to be set until I’m an official LA resident.” So, he’s looking for general advice, I guess, being 34. It seems like, okay, maybe I’m starting a little later than the kid out of college. What do you think about that as a general?

**Mike:** Well, they say, I don’t write for TV, but I have friends who have come out here and written – they say write a spec. I’ve heard that, kind of let your imagination run wild, because no one is going to ever make the spec. But you can kind of show them the extremes that you’re kind of–

**Craig:** When you spec, you mean like a spec episode of an existing show?

**Mike:** I’m sorry. Write your own original.

**Craig:** Yeah, your own original. Exactly.

**Mike:** Yes. And then kind of like with no respect for budget or talent or whatever. Just sort of like let your imagination run wild, the way that Charlie Kaufman did with Being John Malkovich, I think, was intended as something that he knew would never be made.

**Craig:** Correct. Right.

**Mike:** And so he wrote this wild script, and then sure enough it got made.

**Craig:** Because I think Charlie Kaufman was working on, I want to say Alf. I mean, he was a sitcom writer.

**Mike:** Yeah. He was staffed on a lot of shows.

**Craig:** I think that sometimes people get a little too hung up on how their circumstances narrow their possibilities. You know, so John is 34, and I understand he’s a little concerned that maybe he’s not 20. And how do you get to this place. And I always think, well, I guess if everything lines up perfectly for you, the odds are a million to one. So, now maybe the odds are three million to one, or five million to one. What’s the difference? At that point, the odds are bad. Just presume that. Doesn’t matter who you are. Does not matter who you are, the odds are bad.

Absorb that. Now do you still want to go for it? Go for it. But I always say to anyone – I don’t know if John has a family. It doesn’t sound like he does. But if anyone is relying on you, please make sure you have a job, a job of any kind, with health insurance. Because it goes back to our dream discussion.

Dreams are nice and everything, but “follow your dreams” is actually terrible advice. Attempt your dreams while doing other things just in case your dreams don’t work out. I’m a big believer in that. I’m a bets hedger.

**Mike:** And I would say, this is just hitting me about the TV question, because I feel like I don’t write for TV, but I always think like I’m making independent film, not because it’s going to make me rich, because it won’t, but because it’s what I love. I would always say like if you love TV, go after that.

**Craig:** Don’t go after it just because you think the jobs are there. I completely agree.

**Mike:** Because they’re not.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. You could say like, oh, there’s five extra jobs for the 14 million people that want them. You’re absolutely right. You’re best odds are you doing the thing that you’re best at.

**Mike:** Yeah. Do what you love and not what you like.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** Doing what you like only leads to a lot – you’re in competition with people who love it. And that will lose.

**Craig:** I will give Brian Koppelman credit. This happens once every four years. Maybe the best two words of advice that I’ve ever heard for people that want to break into show business. “Calculate less.”

**Mike:** Oh interesting. I like that.

**Craig:** Because, man, they’re always, and I understand the instinct to try and reason your way to success, and if I do the following and I arrange these things. It just doesn’t work that way.

**Mike:** Eugene Mirman says this thing, because he gets approached by young comics all the time, and they say what do I do. And he says, “Start doing comedy, keep doing comedy, call me in ten years.”

**Craig:** I mean, isn’t that it? Right.

**Mike:** And I think that applies to anything in the artistic realm. It’s like it takes a hard ten years.

**Craig:** There is no – I know, it’s rough when people are like do you have any words of advice. He’s asking a reasonable question.

**Mike:** How can I get staffed on a show?

**Craig:** I’m just looking for some advice. There is kind of none.

**Mike:** Well, it’s the thing, and I think you guys have said this before. There is no path to becoming a professional screenwriter. And the reason there’s no path is that once someone has paved their own path, that path is done.

**Craig:** It’s done.

**Mike:** And so then not only do you have to be a great screenwriter, but you have to invent what your path is that hasn’t been done before.

**Craig:** That’s right. Which echoes, of course, what your value is to the business anyway, which is some kind of unique voice or expression. We see this when there’s a big explosion of somebody. And it doesn’t happen often, but when it happens, everyone notices. Quentin Tarantino or Diablo Cody.

**Mike:** Yes. Diablo Cody was a big one.

**Craig:** Or Lena Dunham for instance.

**Mike:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** In their wake are a thousand pretenders who are like, “Oh, that’s how you do it.” No, no, that’s how they did it. The way is shut. When the way is shut, the way is shut.

All right, let’s get to Freddie. Freddie Hernandez has two questions. One, he’s always been curious as to how long it takes either John or I, or you, Mike Birbiglia, to write a feature. “Is there a timeframe I should try to build towards as a writer? I realize that timeline is probably driven by other factors, but I’m curious as to your thoughts in how long a professional screenwriter should take to crank out a draft, and what is acceptable in the industry.”

So, let’s start with that question. You have an answer for that?

**Mike:** My script of Don’t Think Twice took about a year and a half, which is a long time.

**Craig:** That’s one draft or multiple drafts?

**Mike:** Multiple. Probably about 13 to 15 drafts.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** The Coen brothers, god love them, three months. I mean, it’s baffling to me.

**Craig:** They’re kind of amazing that way.

**Mike:** The degree to which they’re prolific, and Woody Allen the same way. Three months or whatever. I don’t understand it. I imagine you write scripts fast, because when you would give me notes on my script it was like your brain was like a fountain of ideas and solutions. And that was so sort of like flowing that I was astonished by it. And I thought that’s because you’ve been doing this for 20 years. Your brain is somehow like – how long does it take you?

**Craig:** Well, you know, we have to draw a distinction between a draft and coming up with a story and the final script. You know, Scott Frank says, “Anything good should take a year, minimum.”

**Mike:** I generally feel about the same way.

**Craig:** I agree. And the truth is it may take the Coen brothers three months, but I don’t believe that they just lock it down and then they’re not changing a word after three months. Plus, there’s two of them. And they’re brothers. Granted, they’re also geniuses. So, maybe their genius thing.

But for me, I think—

**Mike:** I wish that they had a podcast.

**Craig:** That would be amazing.

**Mike:** Then I could understand the secrets of them. But not to disrespect what you and John are doing.

**Craig:** No, no, of course.

**Mike:** But if the Coen brothers had Coen-Notes, I would subscribe to that so fast. And I would unsubscribe to this.

**Craig:** So would I.

**Mike:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** I would mostly come on this to just talk about what they said. God, would John get upset. Oh my god, would he get upset.

**Mike:** We’d start a podcast called Talking Coen-Notes.

**Craig:** That’s right. Post Coen.

**Mike:** It would be us and Chris Hardwick.

**Craig:** Oh, is he a big Coen–?

**Mike:** No, he does Talking Dead after Walking Dead.

**Craig:** This is how little I know about podcasts. We just had our own one, like John did as a joke, a quasi-joke, Matt Selman–

**Mike:** Talking Scriptnotes?

**Craig:** Matt Selman, who is the head writer at Simpsons, did a Talking Scriptnotes episode.

**Mike:** Oh, that’s awesome!

**Craig:** With Aline McKenna and Rawson Thurber.

**Mike:** Is that on the premium?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Mike:** Oh my gosh. I got to get that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I haven’t listened to it.

**Mike:** Wow.

**Craig:** Because I don’t listen to podcasts. But we’ll have to get to that.

**Mike:** By the way, Scriptnotes, I don’t know if this is a first, you’re thanked in the credits of the movie, Don’t Think Twice.

**Craig:** What? The podcast?

**Mike:** Yep.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**Mike:** Scriptnotes podcast.

**Craig:** Wow. Oh, that’s fantastic. John’s going to flip.

**Mike:** And you and John, separately.

**Craig:** Nice, but did I get a slightly larger–?

**Mike:** Yeah. It’s a huge font.

**Craig:** Like I get my own card. Like the first time in history someone got their own special card at the end–

**Mike:** Single card.

**Craig:** In a picture. [laughs]

**Mike:** And your Facebook status. Married.

**Craig:** It’s so great. Thank you for that. Freddie, I think, I could tell you how long it takes me. It takes me usually about four weeks to really break out a story, and about eight weeks to get to the end of first draft. So now you’re talking about three months. But then another six months of revisions and thinking and revise, and revise, and revise. If it’s going to be done properly. I don’t often get that luxury.

A lot of times I’m told, “We need this to be fixed. We need it within—“

**Mike:** Fast.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like there’s an actor who will say yes or no to this, so your job is to get an actor to say yes. At that point, my job actually isn’t screenwriting, it’s this other thing that I can’t really quite describe. But for things that I’m doing that are original to me, I’m looking at about a year.

So, don’t beat yourself up, buddy. Don’t worry. There are writers who will tell you that they work super, super fast. There are writers who will tell you they work super, super slow. If there’s any trend I can identify with the writers that I think are really good at what they do, they’re a bit slower. They actually seem to be taking their time.

**Mike:** And I think, again, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite I think is the key. I always try to think of get a pass done. I think John says this on the podcast that he’ll go away and break the back on the script, I think is what he says. And then revise from there.

I mean, when I was in screenwriting class in college, my professor brought the American Beauty screenplay in for us to read. And he said, “Note that it says Draft 13 on the front.”

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**Mike:** And we all were like, “Right, for this movie.” And you don’t realize until you’re in this field that, no, it’s 13 drafts, 14, maybe 20.

**Craig:** Right. And some of those are smaller revisions. Some of them are larger. But it will never stop, really. You stop writing the movie when you lock picture, basically. That’s the end of it.

All right. We have time for one more question. Let’s go for, I’ll skip his second question, because he only gets one. Here’s an interesting one. It sort of ties into Ayish’s question about assassinating the president. Chris Christ, that can’t – I mean…

**Mike:** Stage name.

**Craig:** Yeah. Chris Christ writes, “Huge fan of the show. Been listening for nearly four years now.” I wish that were the question, but there’s more. “My question is, is there such a thing as too violet a script? I have a scene where a main character is brutally murdered by the villain, and while the brutality aligns with the villain’s character, I worry that it may be off-putting to future readers. However, I then think about people’s heads exploding on Game of Thrones, or people being eaten alive on The Walking Dead. Where is the borderline between shocking yet effective violence and gratuitous violence?”

**Mike:** This is so subjective. I don’t enjoy gratuitous violence in film. But, yet, I love Quentin Tarantino films.

**Craig:** Well, there you go. So, gratuitous is the word we give to violence we don’t like.

**Mike:** Yes.

**Craig:** And effective and impactful is the words we give to violence we do like. And it is – violence to me is like nudity. In and of itself, there’s an inherent power to it. And so you have to employ it with skill, otherwise you’re just being pornographic, or you’re just being gross. And it’s amazing how the slightest differences in tone can turn something from beautiful or evocative into porny or disgusting.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, the answer is write it well. All right, I think it’s time for our One Cool Thing. So, my One Cool Thing this week is an app called FING. F-I-N-G. It’s free. It’s a wireless network scanning app. It shows every device currently accessing your wireless network. So, you got a Wi-Fi thing at home and you’ve got like 4,000 little bitsy-bobs in your house that are all on your Wi-Fi network, but something is not working or something is slowing down, this thing shows you every single device that’s currently connected.

**Mike:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** And it also shows you who manufactures the device and whether or not they’re connected through the Internet. And you can do a ping or trace route. If you are the IT expert in your home – are you? I’m going to say not a chance.

**Mike:** Not really.

**Craig:** The baby, right? It’s the baby?

**Mike:** The baby, Una.

**Craig:** Una is like–

**Mike:** Una Birbiglia. 14 months old. Tech expert now.

**Craig:** By the way, greatest name. Because her name is One Birbiglia in Italian.

**Mike:** Oh, my wife is going to love that.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. Una Birbiglia. Always wondering if she’s getting good ping on a particular device. So, FING. And it’s free. So an easy one to download if you are the IT expert in the house.

**Mike:** I used your One Cool Thing from many, many episodes ago, the password protector thing. One Password.

**Craig:** How great is that?

**Mike:** Phenomenal.

**Craig:** Isn’t that amazing?

**Mike:** Yeah. That’s phenomenal. And also, by the way, I always tell people about this podcast, and any aspiring screenwriter, and if people are listening for the first time because they wanted to hear me, and then unfortunately they have to listen to Craig, just know that all of the episodes – this podcast, there’s hundreds of episodes and they’re all brilliant.

And I think people always ask me what episodes should they crack into, and I always say the one with the psychiatrist.

**Craig:** Episode 99.

**Mike:** That one is phenomenal.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Mike:** And then there’s one about TV versus film, what’s the difference.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I don’t know the number of that one off hand.

**Mike:** That one was really interesting. Isn’t there an episode about what is the best episode? I think there is.

**Craig:** We’re not that self-serving.

**Mike:** Oh, yeah, okay. It’s not that?

**Craig:** You can do that on After-Notes, or whatever they call it.

**Mike:** Yeah, yeah, Talking Notes.

**Craig:** [laughs] Talking Notes. We have a name for it. I can’t remember. He came up with a name for it.

**Mike:** But listen to that doctor one. The psychiatrist one. 99.

**Craig:** That’s a great one. He’s a psychologist, actually. Dennis Palumbo was, I’m not in therapy currently, but for many years he was my weekly therapist. And he’s just awesome.

**Mike:** He’s a writer-therapist.

**Craig:** I mean, how amazing is that? He has an Oscar nomination. And he’s a therapist.

**Mike:** It’s unbelievable.

**Craig:** He’s terrific. And I think about what he says all the time.

**Mike:** So my One Cool Thing would be indie film. Support your local indie film cinema, wherever you are, so that more movies like ours, and Captain Fantastic, and Tickled, to name a few, get made.

**Craig:** And when you saw local independent cinema, are you talking about the movies – the places. Like the actual physical buildings that run these movies need people to show up.

**Mike:** They do. So your Landmark Cinema. The Main Art in Detroit. Or the Music Box in Chicago. The Landmark New Art in Los Angeles. Just look at what they’re playing, because chances are they care about what they’re playing. And they’re not just looking to play the movie that’s going to make them the most money.

**Craig:** No question.

**Mike:** If they wanted to make money, they’d play Batman v. Superman on every screen.

**Craig:** Well, they can’t. Because they don’t get Batman v. Superman. But that’s the point is that they will disappear if people–

**Mike:** If you don’t go.

**Craig:** If people say, “Well, oh, yeah, I loved Mike Birbiglia’s last movie. I’d love to see this one. I’ll Netflix it. I’ll iTunes it.” Well, okay, then these places will go and you won’t get to actually see them on – and especially a comedy like yours. I mean, it’s dramatic, and it’s sad, and it’s sweet, but it’s also really funny. There’s nothing like seeing it in a big room.

**Mike:** With strangers. To laugh and cry with strangers and to feel like, oh, I’m not the only person who feels like that.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**Mike:** And BAM, in Brooklyn, we’re playing at. That’s a great cinema.

**Craig:** I’m going to say before we hit our little conclusion here that you did have your stand up show running in New York called Thank God for Jokes. Is that going to be touring?

**Mike:** I’m going to do probably 15 cities that we haven’t announced in the fall. And then we’ll film it and release it as a comedy special. But you can find out all that if you follow me. I’m @birbigs on Twitter. Or like me, Birbig Fans, on Facebook, which I try to go minimal political tweets.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, me too. [laughs]

**Mike:** But I sometimes am so enraged. But, trust me, I hold back.

**Craig:** These days, I think, I don’t know, the gloves are off.

**Mike:** Follow Craig for all Ted Cruz – all tweets about a candidate who didn’t get the Republican nomination.

**Craig:** It’s so great. Feels so good, man. Are you going to be, I assume, Thank God for Jokes will be touring here in Los Angeles?

**Mike:** I hope so. Yeah.

**Craig:** Because I’d like to…

**Mike:** Like to check that out?

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe come back stage.

**Mike:** Oh. I don’t think we’re available that night.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**Mike:** I’m not sure what the night is. But–

**Craig:** Who’s the “we,” anyway?

**Mike:** Well, it’s an organization of people. There’s a lot of–

**Craig:** I understand your team.

**Mike:** It’s my team.

**Craig:** Your team is not available.

**Mike:** There’s just not enough room backstage.

**Craig:** I understand. At the Pantages.

**Mike:** [laughs] But I appreciate your interest. But, no, of course I’ll invite you to that when it comes to Los Angeles. And I bow to you and John, whose seat I’m filling. It’s an honor to be sitting in your seat this week, John. I appreciate, and I think a lot of us appreciate what you guys do, making this podcast, for free.

**Craig:** For free. Always for free. That’s the most important thing. Except that I feel like John is making a lot of money. As always, meaning for a few days now, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from someone that Godwin is going to select, so it is a surprise to me, but we’ll be sure to credit him or her next week.

If you have an outro for us that you would like us to try, send it in to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions, of the type you heard today. For shorter questions, on Twitter I am @clmazin. John is @johnaugust.

You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment, because John always says to do that. And he loves comments. He loves them. You know, a lot of times he says, “You know what we should do? We should read some of the nice comments.” And I always think, oh, I want to read the terrible ones. I’m only interested in the terrible ones.

**Mike:** You want people to go after you.

**Craig:** And, you know, luckily my life has brought me a lot of that, so there’s never been a lack of abundance of criticism for me.

**Mike:** Yeah, you got to hit the Internet more.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, in this case, the comments are all incredibly lovely.

**Mike:** Oh, that’s nice.

**Craig:** And it’s weird for me. Mike, thank you so much for being here. And for everybody listening at home, please, if it is in your city, check out Don’t Think Twice in theaters. I think it’s got a 100% on the critical slurry site where they take all of the irrelevant opinions and blend them into a thin paste of nonsense.

**Mike:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And fear not, John will be back next week. And we will see you then. Bye-bye.

Links:

* [Don’t Think Twice](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dont_think_twice/) on Rotten Tomatoes
* [Angela Duckworth](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/jobs/graduating-and-looking-for-your-passion-just-be-patient.html) New York Times Op-Ed
* [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/629.Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance) on Good Reads
* [Frank Oz](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000568/) on IMDB
* [Episode 99: Psychotherapy for Screenwriters](http://johnaugust.com/2013/psychotherapy-for-screenwriters)
* [FING](https://www.fingbox.com/download)
* [Landmark Theatres](https://www.landmarktheatres.com/los-angeles/the-landmark)
* [Music Box Theatre](http://www.musicboxtheatre.com/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Mike Birbiglia](https://twitter.com/birbigs) on Twitter
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matt Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/Episode_261.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/anthrax-amnesia-and-atomic-veterans).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 260 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, Craig and I are going to implore all screenwriters to think twice before using the phrase “begs the question.” We will also be doing one of our favorite features, How Would This Be a Movie? This week we’ll be looking at Anthrax, Amnesia, and Atomic Veterans.

**Craig:** Now, that in and of itself would be a fantastic single movie.

**John:** One hundred percent. I think you need some, like there’s a superhero aspect. There’s a courtroom trial aspect. Atomic Veteran just feels like a lesser grade Marvel hero.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, we can’t get Captain America, but we did find Atomic Veteran.

**John:** Completely. He doesn’t remember that he is Atomic Veteran because of the anthrax attack. But it will all be sensible by the third act.

**Craig:** Yeah. Atomic Veteran’s principal super power: reminiscence.

**John:** Oh, very – fond reminiscence but also a little heartbreak.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** The things he had to do. The flash of light that took away his true love.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. This is actually getting to be a really good movie.

**John:** It’s going to be a good movie. So, let’s save that for the key points, though. Because last week was a huge bombshell episode.

**Craig:** I mean, everything happened. We are the show where nothing happens for 258 episodes, and then at 259 the whole thing goes up in flames.

**John:** So, to recap, I am moving to Paris. Stuart is leaving us. We have a brand new producer, Godwin Jabangwe. Also, I sold a book.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And so on the episode last week I talked about it in a vague sense because the announcement hadn’t gone out, but now it is out. So, the books title is Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire. Arlo Finch is the lead character of it. It is middle grade fiction. It is sort of the kids’ fantasy fiction. The same kind of book as a Harry Potter or Percy Jackson. There will be three of them at least. And it’s Macmillan that bought it, so it’s a division of Macmillan. And I’m so excited. I am writing them now.

So, my year in Paris will be spent writing kids’ books that are not set in Paris.

**Craig:** Arlo Finch is so instantly recognizable as a YA hero name. And it’s great.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I kind of secretly want there to be a YA series where the hero is Jim Cummings, or Tasha O’Brien. Just something that’s so – it’s not even mundane. It’s in the weird uncanny valley between Jim Smith and Arlo Finch. You know, just like–

**John:** I see what you’re saying.

**Craig:** It’s so average, it’s nothing.

**John:** Like Tasha O’Brien is an interesting case, because Tasha could go somewhere and O’Brien could go somewhere, but Tasha O’Brien feels just like weird. And it doesn’t have–

**Craig:** Like a mistake.

**John:** Like a mistake. You’ve got that weird sort of Shwa at the end of Tasha O’Brien.

**Craig:** It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing. And I just thought of it. I have to give myself a pat on the back, because, you know, the things we ask our brains to do. I said, Brain, fetch me a name that is weirdly off.

**John:** Yep. So, I’m very excited to be writing it. At some point I’ll go into sort of more of the details on how I wrote it and how I sold it, but this was my NaNoWriMo project. I wrote a bunch of it back in November. I didn’t write all of it back in November. What you actually sell when you sell a book is often, in this case, the first bunch of chapters and then a proposal for the rest of it. And so that is what the editors read and that is what they bought. And it’s been exciting to go back and write the whole book.

**Craig:** Now, I see that it’s coming out through Roaring Brook Press. And Roaring Brook is part of Macmillan. So, give us a sense of the other kinds of books that we’ve seen from Roaring Brook so we know what your family is of books.

**John:** From that specific in-print, I cannot point to any titles that you would have recognized. The other books that my editor, Connie Hsu has worked on, they’re really good sellers and really well done books in that genre, but they’re not like big blockbuster names.

**Craig:** You will make Roaring Book Press – I mean, you will be the – Roaring Brook will be the house John August built.

**John:** It could be. So, it is good to understand, we always think in terms of studios, and so we have Paramount and we have Warner Bros, but within each of those big places you have the individual labels. Like Sony has TriStar, they have Columbia, they have Studio 8, and Sony Pictures Animation. There’s different houses within that. And that’s sort of is what it’s like with Roaring Brook Press. They are one of the labels within the bigger company, Macmillan.

So, while I’m so happy to be writing for Connie and for this division, bigger people at Macmillan had to make the call whether to say yes or no to the book, and so I’m happy that they did.

**Craig:** Did it go all the way to Macmillan?

**John:** It goes to Mr. Macmillan himself. He has a monocle. And so you have to speak very quietly and slowly, but then he says yes or no and it’s all good.

**Craig:** I will never, never release my child-like view of the world. I just presume, oh, the company is Macmillan, well, so when can I speak to Macmillan?

**John:** Exactly. But Macmillan is actually headquartered in the Flatiron Building. So, I’ve not actually visited their offices yet, but I’m excited to visit their offices because it’s that weird narrow building in New York City as you head downtown. And you always see that in movies and that’s actually where they will be dissecting every comma in my book.

**Craig:** I believe, just off the top of my head, I think the Flatiron building is right near a place called Eataly.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Eataly.

**John:** I’ve heard many legends of Eataly. I’ve never been there, but that is the famed sort of Italian market with a zillion restaurants and a place where everyone enjoys their Italian food.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really cool. I like it.

**John:** Cool. There’s other follow up. So, last week not only did we have the season finale episode, we also had Matt Selman , Aline Brosh McKenna, and Rawson Marshall Thurber discussing the season finale episode in a bonus episode we called Duly Noted. That was just the three of them. I wasn’t there while they were recording it. I hit record and I left the room. And so I want to thank them for doing that. It was just a weird lark experiment.

Craig, what did you think of it?

**Craig:** [laughs] I think you know the answer to that. I don’t listen to podcasts, John. I have no idea what they said whatsoever. I mean, I love all three of them. At some point I will listen to it. Was it good?

**John:** It was good. It was – they’re three very smart people. So, it was weird and fascinating to hear them talk about me and us without us being there. And so that was great. They’re all three big fans of the show. Matt Selman has never been on the show, but has listened to almost every episode, so it was great to have him as an outside voice dissecting sort of what we do. So, it was fun.

It was just sort of a lark. And I don’t know that there will be more Duly Noted, but let us know what you thought of that and if you’d like to hear more of those in the future. It’s not going to be a weekly thing. This isn’t going to be our weekly recap episode.

**Craig:** No. We can’t support that sort of thing. We’re just not that interesting.

**John:** No. I will say that if listeners find a given episode so noteworthy that they actually want to record their episode, I wouldn’t stand in their way. So, if you do want to record a response episode and you can do a good job of it, send us a link and I would consider putting it in the feed as a Duly Noted episode. You could be any random people who have the ability to have a good conversation about the show. I’d consider that. No guarantees, but maybe.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s very generous of you.

**John:** Well, I’m not really promising anything other than I might listen to it.

**Craig:** So, I take it back. That was just empty generosity.

**John:** [laughs] Last week, you had a One Cool Thing, and we had a listener who wrote in with a response to your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I was talking about the idea that we live in a simulation, which I pretty much agree with. And then I had read that the existence of Pi and irrational numbers like Pi that never stop, the digits just keep coming and coming, that they prove possibly that we’re not in a simulation because there’s no end, and a simulation theoretically should be finite.

And about 14,000 dorks on Twitter patiently explained to me that that was not true. Alit decided to write in. So, we’ll give Alit the floor. Alit says, “PI being theoretically infinite,” well, hold on. Well, I guess that’s fair, because we never got to the end. “Pi being theoretically infinite doesn’t preclude a finite simulation including Pi as part of its construct. This is because Pi is defined as a ratio between a circle circumference and it diameter. Any representation of Pi in real rational form, that is 3.14, is necessarily an approximation, both in a simulated and non-simulated universe.

“So any simulation dealing with Pi would only need to compute Pi out as far as practically necessary for the simulation. Therefore, Pi exists, therefore we’re not in simulation argument doesn’t hold.” And a bunch of people said similar things. Including, oh, you know, if they’re smart enough to create a virtual reality as complicated as the one we appear to be in right now, they could probably toss on a few hundred trillion digits of Pi. I think we’ve managed to get up to a trillion or something like that.

**John:** Certainly. So, Craig, the important question is are you convinced by this line of reasoning?

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems convincing. I think I’m going to have to stand down on the whole Pi thing and revert back to my initial perspective which was that none of this is real. And especially not you.

**John:** And especially not the 10,000 Twitter people who tweeted you the answer that Pi was not proof, because they weren’t real either.

**Craig:** No. No. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, I got to say, I’m really enjoying the show so far. I mean, the show of reality is just terrific.

**John:** It’s really well done.

Last week we also talked about Overboard and one of our listeners had done a recut sort of as a request that took the Goldie Hawn comedy and made it a thriller. We have a different trailer that Latif Ullah also wrote in with, which also does similarly a good job of using moments from that movie to set it up as a thriller. So, we’ll put a link to his version, or her version. I don’t know if Latif is a male or female name, in the show notes.

**Craig:** Also in follow up, a little something about Phil Lord, who recently moved off to England with his writing and directing partner, Chris Miller. I went to Chris’s house for a little goodbye soiree and ran into Phil. And he told me that he listens to us in the shower. So, when Phil, and this is now the person that’s going to be imbuing life to the new Han Solo, when Phil is nude he listens to us. But more importantly, John, I wanted you to know that he told me that he uses Highland.

So, Highland theoretically now will be used to write the new Han Solo standalone movie.

**John:** That is pretty much amazing. So, Phil Lord, who I should also say has one of those names that is kind of broken and wrong in a Craig’s bad YA novel character way. Like Phil Lord, it’s like it’s two words, but it sort of comes out as one word. Phil and Chris are fantastic. And Phil had actually emailed me a couple weeks ago because there’s something they were trying to do in Highland and he couldn’t figure out how to do it. It was a Courier Prime problem, and I talked him through how to do it.

But I was so excited that he was using Highland to write this new version of Han Solo that he was working on. So, hooray.

**Craig:** Hooray.

**John:** Let’s get to questions. We have a question from Zack in the UK. And rather than us reading it aloud, I asked if Zack would actually record himself asking the question so we could hear his question in his own words. So let’s listen to Zack.

Zack: Hi John and Craig. Zack from London here. I wondered if you might be able to help solve a script problem that’s been driving us all nuts. We have a script in which a characters’ consciousness are transferred between bodies. When describing the character, it’s important to know which consciousness we are looking at, as well as which body. Both consciousness and bodies recur during the script, so we can’t just discard them after each switch.

So my question is, how would you suggest notating the script to make this clear to the reader. The danger is that bad notation turns a script into one big hot unreadable mess. Is there an elegant solution?

**John:** Craig, what’s your thought? Is there an elegant solution for dealing with a situation where the person speaking is not the person we see onscreen?

**Craig:** I think there is. I dealt with something like this when I writing a script called Cowboy Ninja Viking, which I guess still might get made. Chris Pratt has signed on to do it, so that’s exciting. And the idea of that property is that there’s a guy who in his mind has I guess what you’d call split personality, and so imagines himself as a cowboy, a ninja, and a Viking. And in these scenes, sometimes we would see those characters when we were in his perspective, but then from other people’s perspective, we would just see him.

And at times, he alone would be acting as a cowboy, or a ninja, or a Viking. So, what I did in those situations was the character’s name is Duncan, so I would have Duncan, and then I would have Ninja, and then I would have Duncan as Ninja.

So, in this case, I would probably do something similar. Like if it were you and me and were switching minds, I would say John, Craig, Craig inside John, John inside Craig. Something like that.

**John:** We have one listener in particular who is so hot and bothered hearing John inside Craig and Craig inside John.

**Craig:** It’s Sexy Craig, right?

**John:** That is.

**Craig:** Inside.

**John:** Just awful. So, what you’re describing, Craig, is that in the character cue, so like the little bit that goes above dialogue, you are saying Duncan as Cowboy. That’s the name of the character who is giving that dialogue, correct?

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. So I changed the character names, and this way – because as you’re reading through a script, as much as possible you want to keep the flow. The one thing we know that always breaks up dialogue is a character name. There’s no option to not have it there. So, that seems like good real estate to repurpose to kind of help get this across. It should do the trick.

**John:** It should absolutely do the trick. And so my advice is the same advice. There are times where I’ve had to do character name/somebody else. Usually that means you’re sort of hearing both people talking at the same time. Or, character name and then in parenthesis after it, like the form of the character that we’re actually experiencing. But anything like that to indicate what’s going on is helpful.

I will say that in general any kind of body switching movie, it can be very tough both on the page and in the movie to remind the audience of who they’re actually seeing. The Change-Up was a movie starring Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds, both friends of ours, and I had a hard time over the course of that movie really remembering who it was that I was watching and following. And sort of what I was supposed to be paying attention to and sort of who was doing the action.

I think it’s actually harder when the two people are kind of similar.

**Craig:** Little bit of a problem with that movie, wasn’t it?

**John:** It was sort of a problem with that movie. It’s much more obvious when you’re in a Freaky Friday situation. It’s like, oh, she’s being teenager and she’s being a mom. When it’s a huge difference between those two things, then it’s much more clear. Or, in Ghost when you have Whoopi Goldberg possessed, then you can sort of see what’s happening there. It’s tough when you have people who are very similar to the other form of themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. In something like this, also, I think Zack you would be well advised to put a little paragraph in when this starts. And when it starts put a little paragraph, put it in italics, you can put it in parenthesis so everybody gets that it’s a comment. And just say when you see XXX or XXX, this is what it means, so people know.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Everybody gets the drill here. Clarity is hugely important. And it’s going to ruin everything if people are confused. So, that little note and then changing the character names so we understand, it’s Craig inside John, yeah.

**John:** That’ll do it.

All right, let’s get to our bit of umbrage for the episode. And this is a topic that I think most recently came up on Twitter. We had a little spat back and forth on Twitter. Not between us. Like we were in agreement, but someone else was disagreeing with us.

So, I want to dig into this issue of Begging the Question. And we’ve actually used this on the show. I searched the transcripts and back in Episode 188, we were doing follow up on the Tess Gerritsen Gravity lawsuit and you said–

**Craig:** Begging the question means building an argument around something that needs to be figured out by the argument. It’s essentially saying people are definitely hungry because they’re hungry. This guy – and this is the person we’re referring to – is basically saying I’m baffled by your continued defense of Warner Bros and Cuarón because they’re wrong.

**John:** Exactly. And, Craig, is that begging the question?

**Craig:** It’s essentially begging the question. Yes.

**John:** So talk us through what that term originally meant.

**Craig:** Originally, begging the question was a – it came up all the time in discussion of logic and philosophy. And the idea of begging the question was to take something that you were trying to prove and incorporate it into the basis of the argument to prove that thing.

And so you would end up saying, well, I believe B because the following is true – A, B, and C. It doesn’t work that way. And when you boil it down, really what begging the question refers to is a tautology. In its simplest form, the way it comes up is you can’t teach those people because those people don’t learn.

**John:** Exactly. So, some examples of begging the question would be opium induces sleep because it has a soporific quality. Well, induces sleep and soporific mean the same thing, so you’re basically arguing A equals A.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Let’s plow through some more examples just so it really lands. Strawberries are delicious because they taste good.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] And you know it’s funny, when you say a proper tautological argument, one that begs the question like this, it sounds so ridiculous, but you have an example here that I think we actually hear all the time in slightly tweaked versions. If marijuana weren’t illegal, it wouldn’t be prohibited by law. Now, I hear a version of this argument these days a lot surrounding police shootings.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** If they weren’t doing something wrong, they wouldn’t have been shot. Meaning you deserve to be shot because you were shot. Doesn’t work that. That’s begging the question.

**John:** You hear that with immigration as well. Like, well they’re breaking the law because they’re here illegally. There’s implicit like, well, that’s breaking the law because it’s illegal. Like, you’re not actually getting to what’s really the cause here.

**Craig:** Right. And so you end up drawing conclusions that are faulty because your entire argument is based on the thing that you’re attempting to prove.

Now, we are among the very few people that use it this way, which is the proper way. The vast majority of people say “that begs the question” to mean that invites the question.

**John:** Exactly. And so to the degree to which even in dictionaries now, sometimes they won’t even distinguish that it’s not the original usage of the phrase. The original usage of the phrase comes back form Aristotle days. And so it meant this kind of circular reasoning. And lawyers would use it. And rhetoricians would use it to describe this exact phenomenon. And my hunch, and I have no evidence for this being the actual case, is I think screenwriters and television writers are partially to blame for sort of how this phrase has drifted into modern usage.

My suspicion is that people would see courtroom dramas and they would see the defense lawyer stand up and say, “He’s the begging the question.” And really no one kind of means what that means, but they would hear that phrase begging the question. Like that’s an important thing to say.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And because they hear that important to say, they try to use it in their own speech. And they would use it in a way that really means to suggest the question, invite the question, elicits the question. Which is a very useful thing to say. So, I don’t want to be negative on the construct as like that’s a useful thing to have. I think it’s very, very useful. But, by using begs the question to mean invites the question, we’re sort of stepping over the original usage of the word.

**Craig:** It’s so funny that you bring up that courtroom thing. It’s absolutely true. And if you stop and think about it, that really should have been the place where people stopped and said clearly this doesn’t mean invites the question, because somebody would say, “Objection your honor. Begging the question.” And the judge would say, “Sustained.”

Well, if it meant invite the question wouldn’t everybody go, “True, go ahead and ask the question.” It’s just a totally different thing. This is one of those things where the war is not only unwinnable, it has been lost for years. You and I are like those Japanese soldiers they would keep finding on islands in the ‘50s who hadn’t heard the news we’ve lost. But I will still fight. I will fight on for the truth of begging the question.

Although I see that you’ve indicated a very good substitute for it which would definitely avoid you pedantically explaining to somebody what begging the question is, and that is to say, “Oh, you’re using circular reasoning.”

**John:** Yeah. And so maybe we could put this all to bed by saying when you’re trying to use the logical argument for it, maybe say circular reasoning so people know that that’s what you mean. Because I think people kind of figure circular reasoning, it makes a little bit more sense in terms of what logically the fallacy that’s happening here.

But if you’re using the phrase “which begs the question,” I would just ask you to please stop and think could I say which invites the question, or which raises the question. Some examples here. I have 40,000 Twitter followers, which invite the question, why am I not verified? Or which raises the question, why am I not verified. But to say which begs the question, well, that’s kind of ambiguous. And who are you begging? It’s a strange thing. You’re trying to use this smart-sounding phrase that isn’t actually the correct phrase.

**Craig:** I mean, you can see how this happened. I mean, someone goes, well, the idea is that it’s so obvious that it’s begging to be asked, right? But, yeah. Which raises prompts, invites, all that would be great. We’re losing this fight. Even right now, John, I feel the blood draining from me and the world grows dim.

**John:** The only reason why I think it’s worthwhile raising this thing, because I’m not even fighting this fight anymore, I’m just raising this because our listener base are the people who are writing movies and television.

**Craig:** Good point.

**John:** And I think as the people writing movies and television, let’s just be mindful of what words we’re picking and what words we’re putting in character’s mouths. And if there’s an opportunity to not use the sort of twisted version of begs the question, let’s do that. If there’s an opportunity to say circular reasoning rather than begs the question for this other thing, maybe we should do that.

And let’s also just be mindful of are we trying to use phrases we don’t really understand and putting them in the mouths of big Hollywood actors who are going to say them in blockbuster movies and therefore perhaps shift the usage of language or sort of break a phrase in language when we didn’t need to?

**Craig:** You know what? You’re right. You’re right. Fight on.

**John:** We will fight on. It’s our last dying battle for begs the question. So we just ask you to look at your drafts and look at any usage of begs the question. Look at the usage. Just do a find/replace for “which begs the question.” Because that’s almost the only construct you’re going to see this in. And anytime you see that, just consider using a different word rather than begs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s get on to the subject of the day, How Would This Be a Movie? And so on Twitter this morning I asked people to send in suggestions for this segment and we have the best listeners in the world, so a bunch of people sent in a bunch of great suggestions. I picked two of them and then one of them was a thing I just – was a deep Wiki hole I fell into myself.

But the first thing that someone suggested was The Day that Went Missing. It’s a New York Times Story by Trip Gabriel. And this was suggested by Elise McKimmie, who is a friend, and she’s also the person who runs the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. So she’s so smart and she wrote in with a suggestion.

So in this story, Trip Gabriel, who is a reporter for the New York Times, he’s discussing June 17, 2015. He went sailing and he does not remember this day whatsoever, because in fact all he does know about this day was waking up in a CAT scan machine and reading a Post-it note saying you’ve had an incident, you have a form of amnesia called Transient Global Amnesia. You’re going to be okay. You didn’t have a stroke. It’s going to be fine eventually.

Craig, what did you make of this story?

**Craig:** Well, this story falls under the general category of Oliver Sacks. And the great Oliver Sacks, sadly the great late Oliver Sacks, was a neurologist who wrote a book called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. And it was a collection of stories based on his work and his research into others. People who were suffering from neurological conditions that changed the nature of the way they interacted with the world. And one of Oliver Sacks’ stories became the basis for the movie Awakenings, which was a wonderful movie. But it’s a genre to me. I think of this as the Oliver Sacks genre of what to do with someone whose mind is now functioning a way that changes their inherent way of dealing with the world around them.

We had the romantic comedy version of this is 50 First Dates. So we know about that.

**John:** The thriller version of this is Memento. In Memento he can’t form any memories, but this is sort of more limited version of Memento. But even in the story, Gabriel is discussing Memento with his doctors. He says like, “Oh, is this like the movie Memento?” And then a few seconds later, “Is this like the movie Memento?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finding Dory is another extreme example of a character who has no recollection and no ability to sort of form those long term memories.

**Craig:** Precisely. And in 50 First Dates they introduced an interesting twist where Drew Barrymore’s character would proceed through her day thinking that it was the day that she got into a car accident that caused the injury. And would be perfectly fine throughout that day, but then in the morning wake up and it was the same thing all over again. Sort of Groundhog Day in her own head.

These are hard to do because they are gimmicky by definition. Memento, for instance, I think smartly understood that it wasn’t enough to have somebody not remember stuff. They needed to tell the story backwards to make it really fascinating for all of us.

So, it’s a tricky thing. You can’t really do a movie that’s just like, oh my god, I have amnesia. What do I do? You can’t do a Terms of Endearment version.

**John:** I think there’s a version of this that could be like a Gillian Flynn novel like Gone Girl where it centers on this event that happened. So, in Gone Girl it’s her disappearance. In this case it’s like what happened during that day. And it’s all focused on a character wakes up and you’re trying to figure out what actually happened during the course of this day and reconstructing what must have happened. And obviously something very big must have happened during the course of that.

And that’s a classic setup for a story, and especially for a thriller, is not knowing who you were before this moment. I mean, The Bourne Identity is based around Jason Bourne waking up and not knowing who he was. Not just a day was missing, but a whole lifetime was missing before this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah, we like as audiences watching characters try and solve the puzzle of their own life. And that is what The Hangover was. And that’s what Dude, Where’s My Car was. And we enjoy that process. And we can induce that in all sorts of ways, whether it’s okay you drank too much, or you got hit on the head, or you were part of a secret government program.

**John:** Or you were roofied.

**Craig:** Or you were roofied. Exactly. Rohyphnol. The idea of sort of living with this as a condition – so I feel like, first of all, I would say I think we have a pretty good supply of movies where characters have amnesia that are then comedies, romantic comedies, thrillers, spy movies, et. So then the question is is there an Awakenings style movie here?

So, Awakenings was about a patient who sort of had like a – well, I guess we now call Locked-In Syndrome. They seem to be catatonic and yet they were awake. And so the question is are they alive in there, and if so, how do we get to them? And it’s Robin Williams plays the doctor who is interacting with Robert De Niro, the patient, and they do wake him out of this. And he wakens up.

But what we understand in the movie is really it’s about Robin Williams’s character and how he needs to wake up from his own life, which is sort of a flat line. So, you can do a drama like that with this. The problem with amnesia is it disrupts every relationship with that character. Constantly. I have to take my hat off to Tim Herlihy and everyone that worked on 50 First Dates because it really – I love that movie. And they manage to make the relationship work.

**John:** Well, if you look at that movie versus Overboard, like at no point in 50 First Dates do you feel like Adam Sandler is taking advantage of Drew Barrymore’s character. It would be very easy to set that up in a really uncomfortable kind of rapey way. And they were able to move past that, which was very, very smart.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And one of the ways they did that very cleverly was by having Adam Sandler meet her father and brother very early on. So he understood that there were people watching and taking care of her. And that they were naturally suspicious of anybody who is going to interlope.

But I’m not really sure this one says movie to me.

**John:** So, going back to your Oliver Sacks version, there’s a book I read a couple of years ago called The Answer to the Riddle is Me, by David Stuart MacLean. And this might be the longer version that sort of can build out to a full movie. So, in this version, MacLean, it’s a true story, he woke up in India and had no idea where he was. And was basically having this crazy acid trip and went through a horrible two weeks. And these people sort of took pity on him and kept him protected. But eventually they were able to figure out who he was and contact his family and had his family come pick him up and bring him back to the US.

So, it turned out that he was doing work in India and was taking this drug for malaria which sometimes causes these horrible freak outs. And it’s like a form of amnesia where it just kind of wipes your identity clean. And so it was the process of him trying to rediscover who he was and sort of the bad things about who he was. It’s like you always sort of think like, oh, if I could reinvent myself or sort of come back with a fresh slate, but you sort of never get that fresh slate. And all the bad stuff came back with him.

So, that might be the longer Oliver Sacks version, because the journey happens post-recovery from the actual syndrome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Maybe.

**Craig:** But I don’t know. It just seems like a slog.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I don’t know. My studio is not buying this.

**John:** All right. Why don’t you pitch the next one? This is Atomic Veterans. This was suggested by Maxwell Henry Rudolph, our listener, and it’s all about the post-war atomic tests.

**Craig:** Yeah, so between 1945 and 1962, approximately 500,000 American soldiers were exposed to radiation from tests of atomic bombs. It’s hard to imagine because we live in a time where there’s a comprehensive test ban treaty and nobody tests atomic bombs. And technologically we would know if somebody did. It was going on constantly.

The US was constantly blowing these things up, as was the Soviet Union. And they were also constantly using – we were constantly using our own soldiers, almost exclusively men, as guinea pigs to see how close you could get.

**John:** Yeah. So, there are two articles we’ll link to in the show notes. The first is by Tom Hallman, Jr. The second is a New York Times piece by Clyde Haberman. The Clyde Haberman one also has a video that goes with it which is really well produced. But essentially after WWII, well, we detonated these bombs. We knew they worked. We knew they could level cities. But the question was how else can we use them? So we were testing like what happens if we blow them up above a ship? And so they would put a ship out there and blow it up and they’d have a bunch of sailors like kind of cover your eyes, watch it, while the ship goes up in the distance. And then the sailors would have to board the vessel and measure it for radioactivity.

But they’re just wearing tee-shirts. There wasn’t a fundamental understanding or, I don’t know, cleverness to sort of like say, wow, we should have some protective gear here. Or maybe we shouldn’t be doing this at all.

Then, of course, there were the bomb tests in the deserts where they’d be digging trenches and they’d blow things up. And we’ve seen versions of that in movies before where they’re seeing like could we level a house. Well, what happens next? Well, what happens many years later is you have a bunch of these soldiers with cancers that seem quite unusual. And in some cases we see cancers or other problems showing up in their kids and in the generation after that. So, these soldiers who weren’t killed by the blasts, but suffered some sort of radiation poisoning, and that becomes I think the focus of any movie that you try to make out of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are actually a ton of different approaches here. We can go on the nose. Let’s set this in the 1950s and let’s have somebody investigating the government’s effort to use our own men as guinea pigs. And let’s have a sort of domestic espionage movie.

You can definitely do a movie about the men now as they exist now as veterans. It’s very tricky when you’re dealing with older people who are in physical peril. Whether we know it or not, we are all little insurance actuaries in our own minds. And we do this narrative calculation the way that courts do calculations of how much money somebody who has been wrongfully injured should get. And a huge part of that is how long do you expect to live. Well, you’re 15, that accident cost you your eye. It was that guy’s fault. We’re figuring you got 80 years or 75 years of not having that eye. You get this much.

My grandmother, my late grandmother, was diagnosed with cancer when she was 80. And it was stomach cancer. And they strongly recommended that she have her stomach mostly removed. And so she went under the knife at 80, which is an enormous risk, and did survive the operation only for us to find out she didn’t have cancer at all. That it was a contaminated slide that the pathologist had messed up. And so my parents sued for malpractice.

And as you can imagine, one easily – it never went to court. But that’s when I learned, if you’re an 80-year-old woman, they’re like, well, we’ll pay you for the next, I don’t know, expected six years of your life. So, we do a similar moral equation when we’re watching movies and old people are at risk, because in part we’re like, well, all right, but you know, he’s 80. Uh, am I worried about him making it to 85?

And it’s wrong, but we do it.

**John:** My hunch is that the place where this movie wants to live is in the ’60s or ‘70s. And so these people aren’t especially old, but maybe they’re having their first kids with like birth defects. That feels like the sweet spot. Because what’s also fascinating about this point in time is they think they’ve been good soldiers and at the time of the tests they signed pledges that they would never reveal what happened. Basically it’s treason for them to talk about these nuclear tests.

But once your own kid is having these problems, or you start to have these problems, or your friends start to have these problems, you have to ask yourself like, well, do I hold myself to this pledge, do I risk treason to perhaps save my daughter’s life, to save all of my fellow solders’ lives? At what point do you cross over that line? And that to me I think is probably one of the really inflection points.

And the true story is this is where they first started appealing to the Senate for help.

**Craig:** There’s another like totally wild way to go is let’s just go fictional. Let’s go science fiction, because any time you’re exploding nuclear devices theoretically you’re messing around with quantum physics and stuff.

You’ve got some guys that are exposed to this. They’re too close. And it disrupts time/space fabric. And they are now moving through time, but always in other places where a nuclear device is about to go off. This actually feels more like a TV show.

Remember like–?

**John:** Quantum Leap.

**Craig:** Yep. Quantum Leap.

**John:** Or Voyagers.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s Voyagers is really what it is. So, it’s like, okay, it’s happening again. At some point in time, right, there’s now bad people who have nuclear devices moving through time and we have to keep up with them because they will detonate this nuclear device and destroy Paris in 1770. And so we are now there at the same time as them trying to stop them. It’s like there’s so many, you know, a movie studio, they’re not going to make the straight up movie. Ever.

Never, ever, ever. Because there’s just not enough, I think, for them to latch onto. But, the idea of a government – if you are writing a movie and you needed to show how the United States government mistreated its own soldiers, this would be a great scene to show it.

**John:** Yes. I think the straight ahead version of it could be made for an HBO. I think it could be made as a History Channel movie. I think there’s a venue in which the kind of Erin Brockovich-y version of this could be a really compelling movie. And it would have a really good home.

But I don’t think we’re often making the big end of year blockbuster movie about this very often. Although sometimes we do. So we make Spotlight. And this could be a Spotlight. It could be the one of these a year that we get that is focusing on one particular abuse by the government in this case and we are going to really show the character’s affected by it and the fight to have the story told.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s possible. But unlikely. I think my studio will not buy this project either.

**John:** So, the actual people who are mentioned in some of these stories, Frank Farmer who is 80 years old during part of this, but I feel like the other characters you’re going to focus on would probably be lawyers, they’d be soldiers, they’d be bureaucrats. They’d be family members. No matter what, it feels like an ensemble version if you’re doing this.

If you’re doing the Marvel version, then they see the atomic blast and they get super powers. And we’ve seen versions of that quite a lot.

**Craig:** And they will never stop. Ever. Ever.

**John:** All right. Our last story for How Would This Be a Movie is about anthrax. And so I fell into this Wikipedia hole over the week because Mike Pence, who is the Republican VP candidate, I was reading an article about him and it mentioned he was a big proponent of investigations during the anthrax scare. And I had sort of forgotten about the anthrax scare.

So, this is what happened. In 2001, one week after the 9/11 attacks, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to ABC, CBS, and NBC news, the New York Post, and the National Enquirer. And then later on two more letters were mailed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. So, the first letters read, “9/11/01. This is next. Take penicillin now. Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” The second letters read, “9/11/01, you cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.”

And so the return addresses on these envelopes were a fake elementary school. Overall, 23 people were infected with anthrax and five of them anthrax. And so what followed is what’s considered one of the biggest FBI investigations in history. A lot of the initial suspicion focused on this guy, Steven Hatfill, who was eventually exonerated. He was a bioweapons expert.

Ultimately, the blame was pointed at this guy named Bruce Edwards Ivins who was an anthrax researcher who actually wanted people who was involved in the research effort for the FBI, he was one of the main sort of scientists trying to figure out where the anthrax came from. He committed suicide. And so in 2008 he killed himself with an overdose of prescription Tylenol. And the FBI closed its investigation.

So, I will say that there’s still a not too Tin-Hatty discussion that he really couldn’t have been the guy, or at least not the only guy. But right now it is considered a closed case and that he was the guy who sent the anthrax.

**Craig:** Yeah. I remember this whole thing. I remember that the letter was sent from very close to Princeton University. Here’s the part of this that jumps out at me and that I think, ooh, you could go anywhere with this. You don’t have to be stuck telling this particular story, because this particular story feels old and no longer immediately relevant, because we have bigger problems now, different problems with terrorism, both domestic and international.

But what fascinates me is the idea of the perpetrator being hired to find the killer.

**John:** Absolutely. I think that’s the most compelling thing. Especially if you as the audience either know or suspect that he’s involved in it from the start. That’s great. It’s compelling.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s something about the government facing this challenge. Someone has done a very bad thing and they cannot figure out who it is. And this case has landed into – it’s always good when it’s some new law enforcement person who needs to prove herself, you know?

So, this is a big break. And you use the trope of the old drunk who used to be great. So the one person who can help you that we haven’t been able to get through is blah, blah, blah, because he’s out of the game. But there’s all sorts of ways you can get to that person. The point is, that person becomes her partner. And we’re telling that very familiar story of two odd couple/unlikely partners on the trail of a criminal.

And then she starts to suspect it’s him. That’s really interesting.

**John:** I think it’s interesting. That obviously you could take that in a fictional direction and it doesn’t have to be tied to this one anthrax attack. And you could set that present day. That’s a great dynamic between two characters. Classically like do you trust that partner? And so Training Day has an aspect of that, too, although that was much more sort of present tense.

What I think is compelling though about the original anthrax attacks, and made me surprised that I hadn’t seen a good movie version of this, is I feel like people kind of remember what happened during that time. I mean, 9/11 was sort of overwhelming everything, but I remember the paranoia that people felt. I remember like people handling their mail with gloves on. And this paranoia like where are the letters going to come next.

The Unabomber had a quality of that, too, where every couple of years the Unabomber bomb would go off and you’re like, oh wow, that’s still a thing that’s out there. To me I think the home for this kind of story would be as a limited series. Like a People v. OJ Simpson, where you chart through and you follow this session of history and really drill down into it.

I found myself really compelled by this, and if I weren’t just incredibly busy, I think this is the kind of thing I would pitch a network as a limited series because I feel like there’s a really fascinating story to chart through, particularly Ivins’s role is just so good and so castable. It feels like the kind of thing you can bring a movie star in to do this limited series and make something really cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. What you would need I think to find in there is that cultural relevance that obviously OJ Simpson had. You’re always looking for the bigger picture of, okay, I’m going to get you inside the minutia of this investigation, this story, because that’s an exciting soap opera. But ultimately, this meant something and it meant blah, blah, blah. And I’m not sure what the answer is with this one.

**John:** Yeah. I think what was so interesting about that time is that obviously 9/11 we had the attacks then and it was such a visible scar on the world, whereas this was almost more like a sniper attack. It was hitting individual things, but in some ways had a bigger effect of disrupting our news media and our entire postal system than the 9/11 attacks themselves did. It was strange that it was happening at the same time, and yet it was such a different scale.

And in some ways the people who were affected were just so kind of random. There’s a quality of, you know, sort of the cliché movie moment where they’re circling things on a map to try to figure out where something came from. This actually has that, where you had to figure out like well what mailbox did these all come from. And we have to trace it all the way back. It has those qualities which is compelling.

**Craig:** There’s a short story I remember reading from way, way back when about a detective who is on the trail of a killer. And he cannot find the killer. And it made me think of this. I was looking at the Wikipedia page that you linked to and interestingly we’ve combined two of our ideas here. Ivins apparently said to the FBI when they were investigating him that he suffered from loss of memory, stating that he would wake up dressed and wonder if he had gone out during the night.

And that led me back to my memory of that short story, because the trick of the short story, and there’s a serial killer out there who is cutting people up, it’s horrible, and it’s preying on this poor detective. And he comes to understand finally at the end it was him. When he thought he was asleep, he was doing these things.

That’s a really interesting thing. The idea that you’re chasing yourself. Tricky. I like that.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think there’s a lot of material to be mined there. So, whether it’s this individual attack, or it’s just that idea of the agent within who is subverting the whole thing is fascinating. We’ve talked about No Way Out on the podcast before, and that’s another great, compelling moment.

In No Way Out, they save it for the very, very end of the story, that reveal. But if you revealed early on sort of what’s going on, then that’s compelling. We love to watch the villain and sort of watch the villain try to stay ahead of things. There’s a tension that’s naturally there when we know something that the hero doesn’t know.

**Craig:** That’s very typical horror movie type stuff.

**John:** Cool. All right. So those are our three entries. Thank you to everyone who sent in suggestions for what could be a movie and How Would This Be a Movie. If you have more of those suggestions, always write in. So you can just write to ask@johnaugust.com, or hit us on Twitter. When I see things that are interesting, I just file them away and eventually we get them sometimes.

It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** So, my One Cool Thing is macOS Sierra beta. And this is the beta version, the preview version, of what will be the new Mac operating system to follow – what are we on now, Mountain, Tiger, what is this thing?

**John:** I think we’re in El Capitan now.

**Craig:** There you go. Oh, that’s right. They switched from cats to landmarks. And they’re still in landmarks for Sierra.

So, this is new for Apple. Apple went through this one very big thing where they suddenly were like, hey guess what, the operating system is free, which is awesome because you could just hear pants filling in Redmond, Washington as Microsoft was like, “What????”

So, yeah, and lo and behold, Windows, which used to cost hundreds of dollars, now free.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So that was the first big change that Mac introduced. But this is the first time I believe they’ve introduced a beta of the entire operating system out in the wild to anyone – anyone who wants it. And we’ll put a link up in the show notes for you to download.

I did download it because I’m crazy like that. And it’s actually working quite nicely. The big change is Siri. You have Siri built into the system, so it’s not just on your phone now. If I want to ask my computer a question, I can.

**John:** Have you found it useful so far?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s about as useful as it is on my phone. Which is, you know, once every week maybe?

**John:** I find myself as a heavy Siri user. And so I haven’t installed the Mac OS beta because of some other issues, but on my phone I do use it a lot and I think it’s because I just – if you just sort of push yourself to use it more, you find it incredibly useful, especially in the car. I use it for sort of like quick math things. I won’t pull up the calculator. I’ll just ask Siri the answer. And she’s really good at that.

I find it generally pretty useful.

**Craig:** My problem, honestly, and I don’t know if I’m common this way or not, but my problem is I am so embarrassed, even when I’m alone, to say, “Hey Siri,” I’m embarrassed.

**John:** Yeah. And you don’t have to. You can just push the home button.

**Craig:** I know. But if I’m driving and my phone is over there, then I want to, then I’m like, oh my god, am I going to say it? Am I going to–?

**John:** I say it all the time. And I’ll ask for directions while I’m headed someplace and a lot of the times it works. It doesn’t always work, but it works enough that I’m actually really happy to have it.

You don’t have the Amazon Alexa, do you?

**Craig:** No. Alec Berg has it.

**John:** People love it.

**Craig:** Again, I can’t say, “Hey–,” sorry, I don’t want to say it. “Hey Thingy,” I don’t want to say that because I’m embarrassed. I feel like a dope. But I understand that there needs to be something for it to know that I’m talking to it.

**John:** It’s true. I mean, I do like that we’re kind of living in The Next Generation where they tap their little badges and ask the computer a question. That’s always been my fantasy. One of my very favorite episodes of The Next Generation was where Doctor Beverly Crusher discovers that she’s in a simulation – or not really in a simulation – she’s in a time bubble. And she’s the only character in that part of the episode, and so she’s only talking to the computer, and the computer is giving her answers back. But the computer is describing the ship as like, well, what was that sudden shock? Well, the first three floors no longer exist. It was decompression of the hull.

I love that sense of talking to the computer and talking to this disembodied voice. And Siri and Alexa, they’re getting us closer there.

**Craig:** What a surprise that you like talking to a computer.

**John:** See, if you had listened to the Duly Noted episode with Matt Selman and company, you would know so much more about that.

**Craig:** Now I got to listen to it.

**John:** Now you got to listen. My One Cool Thing is called Phased. It is a Vimeo video shot by Joe Capra. And what is it is a series of time lapses of different sections of Los Angeles. And so we’ve seen a lot of time lapses where clouds drift by and things are really lovely. This was shot in 12K resolution on this camera called a Phase One XF IQ3. It’s 100 megapixel camera.

**Craig:** Geez.

**John:** So what that lets you do is you’re in this incredibly wide panoramic shot, and then you can punch into a pretty good close-up of a section. And so you can go from like the panorama to like, oh, I can see individual people. It’s really remarkable. And so I thought it was terrific. I can imagine lots of uses for this, particularly, I mean, for visual effects certainly, so you can get these incredibly detailed backgrounds on things, but other smart directors will find great uses for this just like they found uses for slow motion and for high frame rate photography.

There’s going to be something really cool to do here. So, I do want to stress that what I’m linking to is time lapse, so everything always sort of looks magical and cool because it’s time lapse. But there will be some great uses for this in the future I can sense.

**Craig:** Grand Theft Auto 7.

**John:** It does look like a video game already. And that’s what’s so remarkable. What I love about time lapse of cities is there’s just a glow behind things just because of sort of light bouncing around in special ways. And it does just look magical.

**Craig:** I think honestly the next generation of these big sandbox games will be normal. But I can easily see, like I don’t know, Grand Theft Auto is once every five years, something like that. I could easily see that, we’re maybe two years away, so seven years from now when Grand Theft Auto 7 comes out, they will have 12K’d an entire city. Or, maybe even the entire country at that point. And figured out a way for you to access it as you’re driving around, looking at the real – it’s going to be amazing.

**John:** It’s going to be Pokémon Go, but real. And basically you’ll just shoot real people. [laughs]

**Craig:** I can go to my own house.

**John:** So here’s what’s going to happen. Essentially they’ll just decide that the world is now Grand Theft Auto and the rules are just there are no rules.

**Craig:** The rules are there are no rules. I actually feel like it would be a more peaceful world. Because when you’re feeling really pissed off, you just go into your computer and you blow up people you want to blow up and you get it out of your system.

**John:** Yeah. That’s what we need. It’s like training for how you should deal with things in life.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Oh, shoot, I thought I could just hit reset, but I can’t hit reset. Like all those Brexit voters who thought like, oh, I can just refer to a safe state.

**Craig:** Well, Brexit voters are, yeah. They are not saved.

**John:** They are not saved. That’s our episode this week. There are links in the show notes to almost everything we talked about, including a lot of the articles we discussed. Our One Cool Things. So, definitely check those out.

If you’re listening to this episode in most podcast players, they have the links below the title artwork. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our editing is by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** If you have a question for us, write us at ask@johnaugust.com. You can also find us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on iTunes. You know how to leave a review for us. And that would be so fantastic if you would. It just helps new listeners find our show.

And our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro for us, send it in to that same address and we will maybe play it on the air. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thanks.

Links:

* [Arlo Finch](http://arlofinch.tumblr.com/) on TUMBLR
* [Duly Noted: Let’s Talk about Episode 259](http://johnaugust.com/2016/duly-noted-lets-talk-about-episode-259)
* [Craig’s One Cool PI Thing](https://www.quora.com/Do-irrational-numbers-like-pi-disprove-humanity-being-a-simulation)
* [Latif Ullah’s Cut of Overboard](https://vimeo.com/174891455)
* [Begging the Question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)
* [Begging the Question Fallacy](http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-the-question.html)
* [Trip Gabriel](http://nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/the-day-that-went-missing.html?_r=0)
* [Oliver Sacks](http://www.oliversacks.com/)
* [The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia](https://www.amazon.com/Answer-Riddle-Me-Memoir-Amnesia/dp/0547519273) on Amazon
* [Tom Hallman, Jr.](http://www.oregonlive.com/living/index.ssf/2016/07/the_fight_continues_for_vetera.html)
* [Clyde Haberman](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/us/veterans-of-atomic-test-blasts-no-warning-and-late-amends.html?_r=1)
* [2001 Anthrax Attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks)
* [Bruce Edward Ivins](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Edwards_Ivins)
* [macOS Sierra](http://www.apple.com/macos/sierra-preview/)
* [Phased](https://vimeo.com/173472729) by Joe Capra
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter