How Would This Be a Crime?

• Prologue
• The Art of Daydreaming
• A $500 Million Mystery Will
• Luggage Tag Switching
• Uncrewed Narco-Subs
• A Cop Stalking a Woman
• One Cool Thing
• Bonus Segment

Prologue

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

Craig Mazin: The name on myself is Craig Mazin.

John: Today on the show, what are the fundamental skills for a screenwriter? Obviously, being able to string words together feels essential, but I would argue that just as important is the talent for daydreaming. We will discuss whether most successful screenwriters have their heads in the clouds. Then we’ll apply the skill of intentional daydreaming to four stories ripped from the headlines and ask, “How would this be a movie?” or, in this case, “How would this be a crime?”
Craig, in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to discuss an arena which we currently have no how-would-this-be-a-crime stories, but I think we will in the future. This is prediction markets.

Craig: Wow, prediction markets. There was probably a prediction market about when this would be a bonus segment.

John: Yes. I wonder if there have been any prediction markets about script notes, whether a certain Craig character will make an appearance.

Craig: We’re not allowed to–

John: Yes, to wager on that.

Craig: Yes. Oh, insider wager

John: Insider trading. That will be for our premium members. It’s a big deal. We should talk about it.

The Art of Daydreaming

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John: Yes. I want to get right into daydreaming because this last week, I was thinking about this theory that was cooking in my head that I’m suspicious of screenwriters who didn’t daydream a lot as kids. If somebody was a kid who grew up, who was just studios, who just worked, and did all these things. Now they’re a screenwriter? I don’t buy it. I don’t believe it.
I was trying to parse out why I thought there was something special and weird about screenwriters as opposed to other writers, like essayists or journalists or other things like that. I think there’s a fundamental thing of all the successful screenwriters I know that they were kind of kids who just daydreamed a lot.

Craig: Well, I agree with you, but I first want to talk about what daydreaming actually is.

John: That’s fair.

Craig: It’s a bad phrase for what I mean. Dreaming is out of our control, and it’s just generally nonsense, and we’re along for the ride. When we tell people, “Oh, my God. I had this dream last night,” everybody wants to just die because the story is bad. [chuckles] What we call daydreaming is, in fact, imagination of scenario. We are running mind movies, and we’re controlling them, and we’re revising them, and people are– they are intentional. We want to think about this. We want it to be like this.

You could call it “day invention” or just whatever, but let’s go daydreaming for now. My earliest memories to now, I find myself yesterday walking down from the third floor of our production building to the first floor, where I get out and then go and get the train. I was daydreaming about a scene, and I found myself on parking level two. [laughs] I walk back upstairs because I just zoned out into my own world.

John: Yes, I think you’re making an important distinction here because you’re floating off. You’re just not paying attention, which is like you’re being reprimanded in class for daydreaming. That’s not what I’m talking about here because everyone’s attention is going to wander. That’s natural.
There’s a guy named Jerome Singer at Yale who describes three kinds of daydreaming styles. There’s what he says are positive, constructive daydreaming, which is playful, wishful, planful imagery. There’s guilty, dysphoric daydreaming, and then there’s poor attentional control.

He says of the three of those, only the first one actually correlates with creative output when they’ve done studies. There’s that fantastical daydreaming where you’re imagining a different world that’s out there. There’s a word term for that called “paracosm,” which I didn’t know, but apparently you have, and I have as well.

Craig: We have it. Paracosm is the– and this tends to come beginning in childhood, although I would argue it can extend forever, is a– This is a good old Wikipedia definition. “A detailed imaginary world thought to generally originate in childhood. Their conception is spontaneous, and the creator of a paracosm has a complex and deeply felt relationship with this subjective universe.”

I had places that I made in my head and elaborate things going on, and some of them were dramatic, and some of them were very, almost like engineering, like imagining how things in this place could work. I had a friend that I built a little private mysterious world with, with our own language. It’s definitely the only kind of daydream I think I’ve ever done is the kind where I’m intentionally creating something. My attention doesn’t just vaguely wander. It’s always very much getting lost in a paracosm.

John: Yes, I had paracosms as well. I had little nascent ones as a kid, and some of them ended being a little bit more internal fan fiction where I was just imagining sort of James Bond-y kind of scenarios where you’re taking things from popular culture and building your own scenarios in that, like pretend Logan’s Run and that kind of stuff.

At a certain point, and this is probably when I started playing D&D, there were ongoing sagas and stories and characters who fit together. Yes, sometimes we were actually playing them in sessions, but mostly it was just me building out these elaborate family histories, figuring out what the geography was, understanding what all the interconnected relationships were of these families and these characters. It was sort of George R.R. Martin-y kinds of things done at a teenage boy’s levels.

Craig: Yes, and a lot of the paracosms that we create when we are young are derivative, and they can also– they do tend toward– I call it crunchy. There are relationships, but they are not– no one’s crying. Nothing meaningful generally is happening. If somebody dies, it’s because you just got bored with that character. [chuckles] It’s not like–

I do think the instinct to do this, and it’s an instinct. It’s not taught. Every night before I go to bed, I would spend 20 minutes just imagining and fantasizing about these worlds and these places, and then finally go to sleep. That is part of what I think it takes to do what we do. I think if somebody, if their expertise is the English language, clarity of thought, reason, and expression, and they love movies, they become critics.

John: I think that’s probably true. We should also think about who are the people who have all of these world-building abilities but don’t have a facility for writing, and what do they go into? They could become visual artists. They could become game designers, or in some ways, scenario building also applies it to military strategy or futurists. I think actors are probably in this bucket, too, where they’re imagining themselves in these scenarios, imagining themselves as those characters in these things, and that internal play acting ultimately becomes a source for how they’re doing their external acting.

Craig: All of these people are receiving something first, except for the screenwriter. You need to love the empty universe that you walk into, and then like Genesis God, you’re like, “Okay, first we’re going to do this.” Then your mind starts to do the things that we do all the time. What do the trees look like? How tall? Shrubby? Low? Grass? Yellowish-green? Green-green? Dark-green? All of these things begin to populate, and as you do it over and over and over, it gets faster and faster, and your brain gets really good at filling things in. I remember you would watch Bob Ross.

John: Oh, God. Yes. For international listeners who may not know, Bob Ross was a painter who had a show on public television. He would start in this black studio. He would start with a white canvas on his easel, and he would start painting these nature photographs. He was talking about “Let’s put some happy little clouds and build some trees.” The paintings all looked similar. He had a very specific technique with these fan brushes to create his pine trees, but it was very meditative to watch him do his thing. Again, it goes back to competence. He was really good at painting these paintings.

Craig: He was very, very competent. I always loved how I had no idea for a bit what it was that I was going to see, and then suddenly, there’s one thing. I’m like, “Oh, my God. It’s a mountain.” That’s because his brain got very good at just processing those details where he didn’t have to– Sometimes with screenplays, people will say like, “Oh, if you’ve done the first half of it, can I read it?”

The answer is no, because it’s actually not in the language you understand yet. It will be because I got to go back and do this and this and this and this. Our minds don’t necessarily layer things in linearly from the bottom up. It’s a very crazy process, I think. Yes, I agree with you. If this isn’t something that you just naturally do, I don’t know how you do this job.

John: It’s weird that we’re in 746 episodes into this and we haven’t discussed this thoroughly, but we can talk a lot about how to string those words together and how to get better at them. How to recognize those patterns that spark people’s brains in the right ways. You’re taught at school, and just with a lot of practice, you get better. If I’m meeting an aspiring screenwriter, I first want to ask them, “Did you do this?” My assumption is, “You had to do this.”

I could be wrong. There could be friends of ours who we know who are tremendously successful who do this as a living, who didn’t do this growing up, who don’t have this internal thing. We’ve talked about there are talented writers who don’t seem to have an internal visual mind. I suspect they were still telling stories. I think they were still a story sent.

Craig: Something has to be going on inside the brain that is separate from words going on a page. The words don’t come out of nothing. There must be some story. In the simplest way, even if they’re not as visual as, say, you or I, or when we’re imagining, because you or I are very like, “All right, how moldy is the carpet?”

Let’s say they’re more of like, “I’m in an office.” It doesn’t matter. Office, general, fine. They still need to know, did somebody walk into the office? Was somebody already in the office? Vaguely, are they wearing suits? Are they wearing dresses? Are they cash? What’s going on? There’s got to be something going on, and then why then their problems and their issues with each other needs to be–

I think one of the things that’s great about our training, the way you and I were trained, is that we came up through features where everything was understood to be our responsibility in terms of what goes on the page. I think for a lot of people who come up through the television system, writing in rooms, a lot of times, they don’t get full responsibility. They may not have as much practice doing all the other bits. They may get more practice in, say, basic plot, which is hardware and can be theoretical. You know what I mean?

John: I do. I also think we didn’t come up through the improv world or through the collaborative comedy world. That is a whole different set of skills, but it is collective world-building. It’s a different way into it. It may not have the same rooting in just wild imagination of the daydreaming to piece things together. Looking at stuff about this, I found, going back to, of course, Freud, because everything goes back to Freud.

Craig: Everything.

John: He had a 1908 essay called Creative Writers and Daydreaming, which argued that fiction basically is socialized daydreaming. One of his quotes was, “The writer understands how to work over his daydreams in such a way as to make them lose what is too personal in them and repel strangers and to make it possible for others to share in the enjoyment of them. He understands, too, how to tone them down so that they do not easily betray their origin from prescribed sources. This is, of course, Freud being avoidant on a lot of things.

Craig: Sure. Yes. Let’s put aside the whole, “All right. This is really about my fetish for toes. I’m going to write it die hard.” He is right that part of learning how to do what we do is to formalize something that maybe is a bit ethereal and neurologically rapid and unformed into something that is structured and is followable and is enjoyable. That’s what we do.

John: That’s what we do. Is there any action to take off of this conversation? My hunch is that if you’ve been listening and you’re thinking like, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to be a screenwriter, but I didn’t actually do these things as a kid. I didn’t have these things. I was playing Little League and writing essays and doing that stuff. I always loved movies, but I never was inside movies. Should I pursue screenwriting?” I think it’s worth thinking about whether this is going to be the right fit for you.

Craig: There are so many other ways to express yourself, and 98% of the jobs in our business are not screenwriting jobs. There are a billion other kinds of jobs. If you love movies and television, there’s so many ways in that are creative or that are managerial in an important way. Helping writers in and of itself is a gift, and it’s a rare one. There’s also stage. Animation is its own world. There’s just so many different ways to think about it. If you’re not a big daydreamer, if you don’t do a lot of imagination in your mind of scenes, places, things, moments, if you don’t hear the words, it might not be for you.

John: Yes. There was a study I found– thank to– we’ll put it in the show notes, for Michele Root-Bernstein. She did a study at Michigan State that MacArthur fellows were about twice as likely to have engaged in childhood world play. World play is a fun term for that.

Craig: World play.

John: As undergraduates, and significantly more likely to see connections between that play and their adult professional work.

Craig: I’m not in love with the blank play thing that has happened.

John: Tell me more.

Craig: Every single thing has become a blank play. We used to just be, I don’t know, whips. It’s like lash play. [chuckles] Everything has become something play. Everything’s become something max. Oh, just those old trophy things are dripping candle wax. Now it’s like tallow play. It’s just always something play. I’m like, “Stop saying ‘play.'” I don’t know. I just think of play as this wholesome, innocent sort of thing, and people are like, “[crosstalk] remember to play.”

John: As opposed to games, which can’t have a malevolent thing like mind games.

Craig: Right. Games are fine. Word games.

[laughter]

Craig: Word games are much better. Everyone loves a word game. Yes. Games, I don’t know. Play. It’s always like– Everything– I don’t know. It’s like cutesifying stuff that is supposed to be on the margin. Edgy.

John: Here’s an action that may be helpful here is that if you are listening to this and you’re saying, “John and Craig are wrong because I am a successful screenwriter who has these movies done and I didn’t do that,” let us know because I’m genuinely curious because I do wonder if there’s some aspect of self-mythologizing when someone is successful, they sort of go back and retroactively say that this is what made them successful or this is what their youth was like, which may not be accurate.

Craig: Yes. I mean, if this weren’t something that I still did, then I would say, “Okay, this may just be a non-causal relationship, but I still do it. I mean, it is essentially part of what I do.”

John: I still do it. A lot of my time is spent imagining stories that I’m not being paid to write, which is just like ongoing sagas of things that maybe someday I will write, but yes.

Craig: Or doing it for stories I am paid to write. Either way, it’s happening.

John: Yes, it’s true. All right. Let’s get to our marketing topic. How Would This Be a Movie is a regular feature where we take a look at stories in the news or stories from history, sometimes stories that our listeners have sent in, and consider how they could be turned into filmed entertainment. We say “movie,” but it could be a series if a series makes more sense.

Meredith, I would love to actually talk to you about this because your job before this, you were working on Radio Rental, which was all about people’s true-life stories, spooky things that had happened to them. So many of them must have felt like, “Well, how would this be a movie?”

Meredith: Oh, yes. We got a lot of reach-out about optioning individual stories, which was interesting in a business sense because it’s not necessarily like we owned that person’s life rights. Yes, and some of them were crimes. A lot of them were crimes or almost crimes. Crimes that didn’t quite make it to the last stage. The last stage would have been terrible, but the whole thing they experienced was scary.

John: Yes. What’s so interesting about your program is that people were self-reporting what had happened to them as you were interviewing them. It wasn’t journalism in the classic sense where there’s outside fact-gathering. It’s just someone is telling about the thing that happened to them, and you’re intuiting whether this is plausibly– whether they’re being honest or authentic. What was the litmus test there?

Meredith: Is this plausible? Are they telling the truth? Then sometimes you could give it a pass where you might see a way that this could be a completely different scenario that they totally misconstrued, but they believe the version that they experienced. That is just as interesting of a story, in my opinion.

Craig: Yes. There should be a German word for that. The feeling you get when someone’s telling a story about how they were wronged or somebody did something and you side with the other person, even in their version of the storytelling.

Meredith: You’re right. Right. [chuckles]

John: 100%. I hope that word– if that word doesn’t exist, would some German listener-

Craig: Please. Please.

John: -please tell us what the ideal German word is? It’s a common phenomenon.

Craig: It happens to me all the time where I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to be a positive listener here, but you are damning yourself on the stand, sir.” [chuckles]

John: Related is the thing when you’re telling a story and as you’re telling it, you realize that you come across terribly in the story.

Craig: Oh, no.

John: That happens to me at least once a month where I’m just like–

Craig: [laughs] What’s happening?

John: Where I’m just like I am telling the story, and now I seem like a monster in my telling of the story. It’s a self-reflection that happens mid-narrative.

Craig: That’s awesome, like, “Oh, wait, I just realized describing how I killed this child in the woods probably is not,” I shouldn’t have told this story.

John: Of course, it’s mostly that it’s a social faux pas. No actual crime has been committed.

Craig: Oh, you’re not killing children in the forest.

John: No. No.

Craig: Okay.

John: Unlike the stories we’re about to recount here-

Craig: [unintelligible 00:19:06]

A $500 Million Mystery Will

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John: -let’s start with a $500 million mystery in a will signed by a ghost.

Craig: This is a weird one.

John: This comes from David Siegel in The New York Times. This was fascinating. We’ll put a link in the show notes, but for listeners who aren’t listening to it, Meredith, can you give us the summary of what happens in this story?

Meredith: Yes. Okay. A $500 million estate is the subject of an inheritance dispute due to the unusual circumstances surrounding the newly discovered “will.”

John: Air quotes, right?

Meredith: Yes, air quotes.

Craig: Air quotes.

Meredith: Air quotes. Tony Hsieh, former CEO of Zappos, died in 2020. You may remember the headlines. It was sudden and shocking. He was unmarried. He had no children. There was no will until one day there was. Out of nowhere, a will showed up, sent to a law firm in Reno, Nevada. Supposedly, a 91-year-old man with Alzheimer’s had the will in his possession overseas in Pakistan.

After that man’s passing, the will was purportedly forwarded by his grandson. The document held inexplicable claims as to where Tony Hsieh’s money should go. Even more puzzling, now neither the sender nor any of the four other witnesses/signatories can be found. Did they vanish? Were they ever real to begin with?
To make matters more complicated, Nevada-based lawyers were named as co-executors by the will. Neither of them knew Tony Hsieh. They didn’t have to take any action, but instead they decided to file a petition to validate the will and remove Tony’s father as the estate’s administrator. Court battles to ensue.

John: This is a live ball. This is still ongoing here as we’re talking about this. Craig, I have small connections to Tony Hsieh. I never met him in person, but friends of ours worked for him. At some point, they’ve been reaching out to have us do a live show in Las Vegas where Zappos was based. That never came to be.

Craig: You mean our show?

John: Our show.

Craig: Oh. Well– [chuckles]

John: Tony Hsieh was redeveloping downtown Las Vegas.

Craig: That would have been cool. [chuckles]

John: It would have been fun to do a Vegas show.

Craig: I love Vegas. Yes.

John: There could still be a Vegas show sometime in the future, but it won’t be with Tony Hsieh because Tony Hsieh is dead. Tony Hsieh also died. It was a light of this, but he died in tragic circumstances. It was smoke inhalation and a house fire. During this period, he was clearly manic. He was using a lot of drugs. This is something pulled up from the article. He dreamed up “Country Zero,” a theme park combination built on his ranch in Park City, Utah. It would be a place with its own time zone filled with hot air balloons and run on a seashell-based barter economy. He believe–

Craig: That’s where he lost me.

John: He believed the project which never broke ground, would draw billions of people in a matter of months and usher in world peace.

Craig: Paracosm.

John: Yes. This man was an incredibly successful businessman, a visionary. He built Zappos, which had a well-deserved reputation for quality and things. If it was just a story about Tony Hsieh, it would be just the tragedy of this person who’s– I don’t want to say he was bipolar, but there was something going on that made him– his drive ultimately–

Craig: He was mentally ill and had a serious substance abuse issue.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes.

John: Craig, what handholds do you find in here that make this interesting to you as a movie or a series?

Craig: Well, it’s an interesting basic concept for a good courtroom drama. I’ve never seen this. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen this, which is why David Siegel likely wrote the article. Did some random will shows up from some guy? Weirdly, the courts need to take it seriously. They’re not saying we accept the will as correct, but we can’t just go beat it.
We have to actually go through this probate process to decide if this will is real or not, which is going to cost a lot of money and both sides have to spend money. I think, my guess is that these two lawyers took this because they’re like, at some point, these guys are just going to pay us to go away. Regardless, if you had a situation like this that basically combines a mystery with a court battle, who was this nine-year-old man? Why did he have the thing? If it, in fact, is possibly real–

John: Did the nine-year-old man exist?

Craig: Did he exist or was he somehow always there in a connection to this person and nobody knew? It becomes a very interesting kind of whodunit-ish sort of thing. The only issue is that the stakes are a bunch of money and that’s tough.

John: Yes, well, it’s $500 million, which is a bunch, a bunch of money. I think it wouldn’t be hard to imagine there’s ways to create stakes that are actually meaningful for the characters involved. Obviously, a fundamental decision is, are you basing it on the actual real events or are you taking this as a premise to just do a whole separate thing?

Craig: I go premise.

John: I go premise, too. If you’re going premise, then you can create stakes that are meaningful in terms of what is going to happen to this land. What if you actually were married to this person who died this way? It’s a whole mysterious thing. It’s the wife of a man who dies and–

Craig: You know what you’re struggling? You’re always struggling with– I’m just thinking about the audience. They’re like, “Well, a bunch of people who did not invent Zappos and revitalize downtown and so on and so forth are fighting over the money that was left behind that they kind of didn’t earn. There’s something about inheriting money that’s slightly– it’s hard to root for it, per se. I certainly want– what I root for is that it would go be distributed in some fair way. It’s hard to break down over somebody that didn’t get money that they didn’t earn. In court cases–

John: Well, except that there are charities which he would have-

Craig: That’s different

John: -given to. Yes.

Craig: That’s different. If it’s not a person, I mean, that’s–

John: There are orphans who are basically going to die because of this weird will. That’s plausible. I also say that succession. You’re not rooting for anybody in succession and yet you’re, at every moment, fascinated by what’s happening.

Craig: If it’s a series where you get to learn all these snakes and it’s Game of Thrones, which is succession with Game of Thrones, [chuckles] who gets to sit on the Iron Throne, then it becomes a fun soap opera. It’s not about the concept anymore. Then what this is the thing that happens in the pilot that sends everything willy-nilly. Ultimately, it is just a spark that starts a much larger problem.

John: Yes. Let’s think about the movie versus series thing. I think you can imagine so many twists and turns that the series is really appealing. I think one of the challenges with thinking about this as a series is that, fundamentally, there is an answer. I think because there’s an answer, that’s really a movie idea.

Craig: It’s a movie.

John: It’s a one-time closed thing. It’s conclave. We’re going to elect a new pope at the end. There’s going to be a decision that is finally reached. That’s why I think it probably is more a John Grisham courtroom investigation thriller or some fieldwork to get you there. You’re puzzling together the mystery. It’s a Rian Johnson movie versus a Rian Johnson series.

Craig: I feel like my gut is telling me mystery, that you’re treated sort of like a whodunit, and that the person who’s fighting for this money is not fighting to keep the money, but rather is fighting to– also, they’re like, “Hey, this company–” obviously, I’m not talking about Tony Hsieh now. I’m talking about our fictional guy. This company did bad things. Now this guy’s left all this money behind. One of his kids wants to fix the bad things that happened. There’s this other group that suddenly shows up saying, “It’s our money.” Now it’s Erin Brockovich fighting for people and not “I just really want money that I didn’t earn.” [chuckles] I think it’s a whodunit in a way.

John: I think it’s kind of a whodunit, too. Going back to the actual real story, if you were to imagine an adaptation of that story, the characters, so Tony Hsieh, would largely be a character in flashbacks, I imagine. We might reconstruct what had happened before, sort of how Citizen Kane reconstructs who he was after his death, or Evita reconstructs who she was after her death.

Obviously, characters would be those lawyers who are named in the will. I think there’s all sorts of choices you can make for who those lawyers are and why they would be doing what they’re doing. They could have very noble purposes for why they’re doing it. It’s like, “This is the thing we’re going to do.” There could also be shady things. You can make a lot of choices about that. If you’re using the real people, of course, you’re being very, very careful because these are real people and they’re attorneys.

Craig: I don’t think you need to.

John: I don’t think you need to either.

Craig: This feels like if it were, let’s say, a Knives Out movie. Someone knocks on Benoit Blanc’s door, and they’re like, “Guess what? You were named in this weird new ghost will.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: “You’re in line to receive $400 million.” [chuckles] Now he has to solve a mystery so that he doesn’t get the money because he doesn’t. That could be, “Hey, Rian, write that.”

John: “Write that, Rian.”

Craig: “Write that, Rian.” Rian may be writing that, by the way. [chuckles] What if he is?

John: Yes. We’re basically ruining another [crosstalk] for Rian.

Craig: We’ve just ruined more Rian– Ruin Johnson.

John: Ruin Johnson. I’d also say that in the reporting of the story here, we bring up Eli Siegel, who’s a Las Vegas journalist. She’s done most of the reporting on the– boots-on-the-ground reporting about this. Someone like that who follows a very small lead, it becomes a bigger lead. We have a whole tradition of journalistic mystery thrillers.

I think there’s something to do here. I don’t know that it’s going to be a direct adaptation, but I think it’s a very ripe space for a story. I say this is framing. It’s like, “How would this be a crime?” It’s not even clear that it’s a crime being committed, but there’s some weird motive. That’s the thing. It’s like, “Who’s trying to do this thing because it’s not clear that anyone’s trying to directly benefit?”

Craig: That’s why it’s a great basis for an Agatha Christie-style mystery.

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s a good thing for a mystery. Anything involving a will or sheep or both.

John: Two things go well together.

Craig: There’s always a will. There’s always a will.

John: Where there’s a wool, there’s a way.

Craig: My last woolen testament.

John: Yes.

Craig: Okay.

John: You need to write this song.

Craig: [chuckles] I wish did that.

Luggage Tag Switching

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John: Wouldn’t it be so nice? [chuckles] Let’s go to our next mystery, our next crime story. This is about luggage tag switching, which seems like, “Ah, kind of innocuous.” Unless it lands you in jail and– this looks not good. This was reported by Avery Haines and Joseph Loiero from CTV News in Canada.

Craig: Yay.

John: Yay. I love Canadian media. Meredith, talk us through what happens in this story.

Meredith: At least 17 passengers from various Canadian flights were detained on drug-smuggling allegations over the past year, but turns out the passengers themselves were innocent. Somewhere along the line, their bag tags were switched onto suitcases filled with drugs. How the scheme works, a corrupt airport worker unsticks the luggage tag from an unsuspecting passenger’s bag and reattaches it to a suitcase packed with drugs.

A bag tag switch can happen in seconds in security camera blind spots. If the drug bag makes it through undetected, someone at the destination country receives it. You get to your destination, and you pick up your real bag, missing the tag, none the wiser. If it’s intercepted, the innocent passenger is left facing the consequences.

Craig: Holding the bag.

Meredith: Yes.

John: Yes, literally holding the bag.

Craig: Literally holding the bag.

John: In real life, all of these innocent passengers were eventually released, but some had been stuck there for months. They were all handcuffed, arrested, jailed overseas. In some cases, they were pulled off the flight before it left Canada. They’ve arrested some baggage workers and ramp workers at Toronto Airport, but it’s not clear whether this has all been resolved. Craig here, I don’t think any one of these stories individually is compelling. It’s not going to be an adaptation of this specific thing, but this as a scenario for starting a shitty thing that happens that gets characters trapped in a bad situation. What are you thinking?

Craig: It feels like the plot of an episode of a procedural where you finally uncover that it was the baggage guys all along. It doesn’t seem meaty enough or even exciting or interesting enough to be the concept of a film. Certainly, there’s no series called “The Luggage Tag Switchers.”

John: Let me flip it, though. Let’s say instead of it from the police’s perspective or from these passengers’ perspective, this is a scheme hatched by a group of baggage workers or other drug kingpins or Canadian pot kingpins who are going to try to do this thing.

Craig: It’s not pot, Josh.

John: Oh, sorry.

[laughter]

John: No, it is. It is.

Craig: It is.

John: It’s all cannabis. It’s all cannabis.

Meredith: Oh.

Craig: The weed, literally, everywhere in Canada, what is the problem? I don’t understand.

John: That’s the thing. No, it’s Canadian weed to foreign countries.

Craig: Oh, really?

John: Yes. I think that’s the fun twist of it is that it’s–

Craig: That’s what it is?

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh my God. There’s no real money. The real money’s in fentanyl. I don’t know what these people are doing. [chuckles]

John: Yes. They are–

Craig: That’s what they’re doing?

John: It’s vacuum-sealed bags of pot.

Craig: Hold on. I’m looking through the– because I don’t remember that.

John: It’s from various Canadian flights to overseas.

Craig: No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

John: Tell me more.

Craig: This is what Nicole says. They brought out the bolt cutters, opened her luggage. It’s just massive vacuum-sealed packages of pills.

John: Okay, so some of this is pills, but some of this is not, because you’ll also look through that same article, you’ll see all the weed.

Craig: Okay, hold on. I saw meth. I saw pills, meth. Where’s the weed?

John: Oh, sorry. It’s in the video.

Craig: Oh, I didn’t watch the video.

John: Dominican Customs posted a video of three Canadians being led to face charges of importing 79 packages of Canadian marijuana into the country.

Craig: Well, those people should have probably been doing the pills and [chuckles] the meth.

John: Smaller. Yes.

Craig: It’s easier.

John: All right. The scheme, which maybe you’re flying things back and forth. Maybe there’s a whole network you’re setting up.

Craig: Yes, it could be in The Sopranos. In this particular season, there might be a four-episode stretch where they’re trying to do a new scheme. They were doing Webex. I remember it was a stock scam that they were doing. This could have been, “We know a guy at Newark. He’s going to switch the tags. We get him in. We get a taste.” Whatever. It just feels like an element that gets used and burned, and then you move on.

John: Yes, I agree with you. We’re going to have another drug smuggling thing, which I think has more cinematic potential than this does. Maybe we’re combining the two, and it’s just like, “We got to get the drugs moving.” Like drug logistics movies.

Craig: That’s the thing. In general, I have this issue about the drug smuggling movies because it’s like, obviously, the tension is we’re trying to do something illegal, and then there is law enforcement that tries to stop you. The problem is we all know that generally speaking, it’s like traffic or rain. It just keeps coming. I never think to myself like, “Oh, the drug war finally has been resolved.” [chuckles] Even if the good guys win, it’s like right behind them, you should see trucks going by full of fentanyl, because that’s how it goes.

Uncrewed Narco-Subs

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John: Let’s jump ahead to our next drug-related thing. This is about uncrewed narco-subs and how they could transform the Colombian drug trade. This comes from Peter Guest, who’s running for MIT Technology Review.

Craig: Yes, not uncrewed as in C-R-U-D-E, but uncrewed as in there’s no crew inside.

John: Yes, robots.

Craig: Robots.

John: Meredith, talk us through it.

Meredith: Colombian drug traffickers have been using narco-subs to move product for decades. In April, government officials intercepted the first autonomously operated one. Usually, when officials intercept a narco-sub, they board the vessel to find a few exhausted men amidst diesel fumes and a cargo compartment full of cocaine. This time, they found no crew and no product, but a fuel tank, an autopilot system, and control electronics, and a remotely monitored security camera.

Bolted to the hull was another camera, as well as two antennas for connecting to Starlink satellite internet. This was Colombia’s first confirmed uncrewed narco-sub. It could be operated by remote control, but it was also capable of some degree of autonomous travel. It’s likely a prototype built by the Clan del Golfo, a powerful criminal group that operates along the Caribbean coast. Uncrewed subs could move cocaine over longer distances, and they wouldn’t put human smugglers at risk of capture. It can wait out patrols or bad weather, loiter near a meeting point, or take longer and less well-monitored routes.

John: I think what’s fascinating here is that, in many ways, the remote-controlled robotic narco-sub has taken away so much of the potential coolness and drama from the story.

Craig: It’s basically like, what if Das Boot didn’t require sailors?

John: Absolutely, yes.

Craig: Then I don’t care. [laughs]

John: Absolutely. It’s like all things with drones. It’s like you have to find a different frame for how you’re doing because the thing itself is not– there’s no drama to the thing. You’re not worried about an empty submarine, whereas I’m worried if I know there’s a guy who’s crouched in that little submarine, I’m scared for him. For a robot, no, I’m not.

Craig: Yes, I agree. This article figured out how this would not be a movie, right in the headline, almost.

John: I think it’s interesting to think about warfare overall in the era of drones because you look at what’s happening in the Ukraine war with Russia, it’s at the front, there’s not fighting in the same way. Everything is way back in video.

Craig: Sort of?

John: That’s right. They had to be close enough so that they can– That’s the thing.

Craig: There really is this very exciting thing going on where there are guys who are hidden in some half-bombed-out church because they have an antenna. They are sending these drones super-duper far. While they send them super-duper far, the Russians are like, “We’re picking up some drones, and we know somebody’s driving the drones. We have to triangulate and use our capacity to figure out exactly where they were and drop a bomb on that church.” It’s like, “Okay, they’ve figured out where we are. They’re going to be here in six seconds. We blew it up, let’s run through a tunnel,” and then they blow up the church. It actually is crazy.

John: I rescind my concern that we’d move too far from the front lines because with the requirements of the drones that they’re using, they need to be close in order for these things to work, which is important. If we want to apply that back to these narco-subs, I think you would have to create a scenario in which you have to actually be close enough to the sub to control it during certain things, and you put yourself at risk.
Obviously, with the strikes that this administration has been taking on fishermen in the area, it’s very perilous just to be on those waters overall. That is some of the stakes. I’m not going to have tremendous sympathy for the pretend fisherman who’s remote controlling a narco-sub.

Craig: No, I don’t really care.

John: All right. Again, I think in both these cases, with the logistics being switched to get drugs in or the narco-subs, we’re lacking characters. We’re lacking stakes. We’re lacking reasons to feel like this is more than just a runner in some other story.

Craig: It’s really just about a new tactic for doing a thing that we’ve seen people do a long, long time in shows and things.

A Cop Stalking a Woman

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John: All right. Let’s do our last story here, which is titled “Footage Shows Cop Stalking Woman He Met on a TV Set After Surveilling Her with a License Plate Reader.” This is a grim one. Jason Koebler writing for 404 Media. Meredith, help us out.

Meredith: Another Florida Man story, and this one unfortunately starts on a film set. A Florida police officer allegedly used multiple law enforcement databases and automated license plate reader technology to track a woman he met while working security on the set of Apple TV’s show Bad Monkey. After allegedly harassing the woman on set, catcalling her, and asking her for her Instagram, he put her license plate details on a surveillance hot list so that he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera. Dashcam footage shows the officer pursuing her at high speed and conducting a traffic stop, despite having no legitimate investigative reason, and nearly causing a head-on collision in the process. The article asserts that this case illustrates how powerful surveillance tools intended for policing can be when abused for personal stalking. It raises broader questions about oversight and accountability.

John: Florida, man. I think this is a movie, not this specific case, but I think this scenario is a movie. I think it has a visceral fear to it. I think you’re seeing probably both perspectives, both POVs on it, and yikes. Craig?

Craig: Yes. No, I think you would obviously have to have a smarter villain. This particular Florida man was an idiot. He did all this stuff knowing full well that it would be completely logged. I didn’t know this when I read the story. I didn’t realize that, and I don’t know if this is everywhere, but in this particular municipality, if you drive your police car over 70 miles an hour, the dashcam automatically turns on.
All of this would be so obviously trackable and reportable. He knew it. Even when law enforcement was investigating him, he was like, “Yes. I knew that was stupid, but I did it.” You’d need a smarter cop. The amount of power a policeman has today with access to these things does turn them into a pretty dangerous cat-and-mouse type of thriller killer. It’s a woman in peril. We’ve seen this a lot.

John: Yes, but I think that woman who recognizes this situation– It’s a familiar situation of a guy who’s hitting on you who can’t take a clue and is pursuing you, but generally you feel like if you leave a space, they’re not going to be able to find you, but of course now they can find you. It’s not just because of the internet. It’s because he literally has this superpower of having access to all of this technology to track a person. Then the people you’re supposed to be reporting him to, you don’t know if you can trust them either. It gets out. You can imagine scenarios that go much further and beyond the complications before it gets to judgment and conclusion. You can imagine there’s a lot of scenarios there.

Craig: Yes, for sure. I’m not a big fan of just sort of like a person hunts another person down, and eventually the person that is being hunted gets them and kills them. It’s an incredibly predictable format, but there is another way of thinking about this, which is, yes, you could absolutely do that movie. There’s also, again, this could be a fascinating episode of something.
The concept that you can get a ping when a driver’s license goes by is pretty, that’s– I have the little metro pass thing that allows you to drive in the HOV or the metro lane, metro express, that’s what it is. Jessica thought that was just like, “Oh, it’s just like our family pass.” She drove down the 110 in the express lane and they send us a bill. They take a picture of her and the car and the license plate. These cars are flying by, 75 miles an hour or whatever, and it’s perfect. That, plus some report back. This guy’s crazy, though. This is nuts. Does he honestly think this is going to work?

John: There’s a sense of characters should take agency and do whatever it takes to get the girl. I think he, like all great villains of stories, he sees himself as the hero in the story.

Craig: Yes, but I want him to be smarter. That’s really what it comes down to. I would love for him to not high-speed chase her around, but rather have him blocking off a street that he knows she’s going to get to, so she has to stop and he has to get out, “Sorry, man, the street’s blocked. Oh, hi. Sorry, there’s a thing down there, but how are you?” I want him to be smarter.

John: Yes, you do. That’s for me the fun, is that I think he should be smarter up until the point.

Craig: This guy, geez Louise, what an idiot.

John: There’s the aspect of, obviously, we’re always stalking the people we are interested in on the internet. Looking at their Instagram, that’s just a thing that happens.

Craig: It’s why I’m not on Instagram.

John: It’s part of the courtship ritual is looking a person up.

Craig: It’s crazy to me.

John: Well, it’s Olivia Rodrigo’s song.

Craig: I know, but it’s so sad.

John: We didn’t have Instagram, but we always had ways of finding out about a person or asking about a person or figuring out what they liked.

Craig: It’s just a bummer that– I get it. I would do it, too, of course. It’s sad to think that there could be very good relationships between two people that could last a lifetime and they don’t happen because somebody reads some weird thing on Google and they’re like, “I don’t know. That’s weird. They’re into blank play. Next.”

John: Here’s what I would stress. I don’t think you need this specific story. I think this is a jumping-off point. 15 scripts will be written about this general topic. The good scripts about these topics, the woman at the center of this will be interesting and would be a fascinating character even if this never happened to her, that she’s not just a generic victim waiting to happen. Whatever her goals are and the things she’s trying to do, it should be the benign version of his extreme version of this. I think if she’s pining after somebody and does the mild version of this, but then he’s the insane version of it, that is interesting.

Craig: All right, let me pitch an idea. All right, here’s my pitch. Smarter cop using technology and his wiles to stalk this woman and she has no interest in him. Also, she is doing a crime.

John: Oh, fun.

Craig: The more he stalks her, the worse it gets. I don’t know how this goes, but I like that. Somebody do that. I’d watch that movie.

John: I like it. I think we’ve taken so many bad lessons from Obsession, but I think a good lesson to take from it is sometimes you can do something that is simple and focused on people and stakes, and we will love those things. It’s not a horror movie, but it’s a thriller in a way where you’re not making big screen thrillers often, and so I’d love to see this. All right, just to recap here, we think that is probably a movie, and we’re going to see some version of a movie like that, I suspect, at some point.
I don’t know if we’ll be able to trace it directly back to this, but this type of movie will happen. The $500 million mystery, we think is a really good premise and a setup, so I don’t know that you’ll get a specific adaptation of the Tony Shay story, but a mysterious will showing up, I think that’s going to happen.

Craig: Whodunnity kind of thing, yes.

John: We are both low interest on drug trafficking-centered movies, and we think it’s probably more of an episodic runner into something else.

Craig: Agreed.

One Cool Thing

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John: All right, it’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is something that I’ve been using for 10 years, and I’ve just never talked about it on the air. Craig, you and I play D&D with a bunch of folks, and we’re playing on our laptops, and so I get to see people’s laptops, and I see their desktops, which have 19,000 documents on them just scattered all over.

Craig: Ask me how many documents are on my desktop.

John: How many documents are on your desktop?

Craig: Zero.

John: Zero for me too.

Craig: Zero. The desktop must be clean.

John: Yes, and it’s not just an OCD thing. It’s important to understand on a Macintosh, all of those icons are potentially animated and doing things. You are actually burning cycles, and you’re slowing down your computer by having a bunch of shit on your screen that doesn’t need to be there.

Craig: Also, it’s messy.

John: Messy for your mind.

Craig: I mean, people who are like, “Look, my actual desk is a bit messy,” but that’s because that’s not my real desk. This is my real desk, the computer, and I keep it clean.

John: In previous episodes, we’ve talked about folder organization, which is basically stick stuff in project folders so you can find it later on, use sensible numbering schemes. There’s always those documents which you don’t need for very long, but you need to hold onto it for a little while. My one cool thing is the pending folder. You make a folder called pending, and you stick all the things in there that are just temporary that you need for maybe a day or two or a week, but they’re not part of a project. They’re just there.

Instead of putting them on your desktop, just make a folder called pending. I put it in Dropbox so it shows up on all of my devices, and it’s just where I stick all of those things, so blog posts, lists, test documents. If I need to send somebody something through Dropbox, I stick it there, and I copy the Dropbox link out of there and send it on. I urge you to think about a pending folder and drag it over to the sidebar on the Mac so you can always see it right there. I will save you so much agony, and I will clean your desktop if you just use a pending folder.

Craig: What if I told you that I do, it’s just I have exactly what you have.

John: That’s amazing.

Craig: It’s just a slightly different name.

John: What’s it called?

Craig: Holding pen.

John: Perfect.

Craig: Holding pen.

John: Exactly.

Craig: It’s my holding pen.

John: How long have you had this, and do you know when you got the [inaudible 00:49:26] to do it?

Craig: Forever. I can’t remember how long I’ve had it. This one, the holding pen currently has 646 items in it. If I scroll down, I’m going to find images that I needed to grab and then throw onto something. I’m going to find, when I take a picture of my driver’s license for the 4 millionth time, if I’m going to find I needed to send somebody a photo of a COVID test or a receipt. I’m looking through this mortgage form, a bunch of sides that I had to send somebody for the show. It’s all there.

John: It’s exactly how mine works as well. The crucial thing is, if this got deleted tomorrow, I wouldn’t care. I would just make a new pending folder because nothing in there is crucial that I have to hold onto.

Craig: That’s right. I do only because storage is cheap and easy. My holding pen happens to be nested inside of documents inside of the iCloud drive.

John: Another great place for it.

Craig: Like you, I make sure it’s on the sidebar so it’s right there. That is different than downloads, which is specifically for things that get downloaded. I’m with you completely. I think it’s essential to have– it’s like the packet drawer in the kitchen, the one with all the catch-ups and paper clips and crap. That’s what that is. Yes, people should have that. Nothing should be in your desktop. Clean it.

John: I would also urge you to empty your downloads folder often because the stuff gathers up in there. It means that every time you are downloading something new, you have to look through it to find the stuff. No, don’t do that. Just get rid of those things.

Craig: Download and holding pen are both set to sort by date added. It’s last in first out. Lifo.

John: Lifo. Craig, you said as we were starting to record, you didn’t have a one cool thing, but I actually have a one cool thing on your behalf, if that’s all right.

Craig: Thank you. Yes.

John: All right. This is the 40th anniversary of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a movie I deeply enjoy.

Craig: 40.

John: Megan Garber wrote up a piece about it for The Atlantic, and there was a friend of the show who was mentioned in it. Not surprisingly, she had a significant role in baking the movie the way we loved the movie. This would be Lindsey Durran.

Craig: Once again.

John: Once again. Lindsey said, “If Ferris was destined to be an enduring influence, Durran did not want him to be a bad one. She convinced Hughes that Ferris would be more compelling as a character and more responsible as a cultural power broker. Were his rebellion framed as a day-long lark rather than a way of life? Thus, Hughes edited the joy ride that Ferris takes with Cameron and Sloane into a journey that is, in the end, notably wholesome. There’s no strip clubs in sight, which there were in the original. He turned Ferris into a rebel with a decidedly vanilla cause. He is a teenager who skipped school to expand his horizons, who frees himself from the stultifying confines of Shermer High and receives a more meaningful education from the wide world beyond the school’s walls.”

Craig: Absolutely true. When you look at what Ferris Bueller does throughout the day, even though he lies to his parents and skips out of school and hacks the school computer and so on and so forth, he’s been absent nine times. Nine times. Where does he go? The museum.

John: The museum.

Craig: He goes to the museum. He goes to see a Cubs game. There’s a parade that he joins. They have lunch at a fancy restaurant. It’s all like– and as many people have noted, the real key to unlocking all this is that he’s not even the protagonist of the film. It’s Cameron. All of this is like your sneaky angel coming to get you to stop being such a depressed loser. It works.

John: He’s Manic Pixie Dream friend.

Craig: He is Manic Pixie Dream friend. He really is. You know?

John: It’s good stuff.

Craig: Yes, it really is. It’s a fascinating movie because it is. John Hughes, in general, didn’t seem to care a lot about what I would call like the really hard fundamental rules of basic commercial narrative. He would go all over the place. What a great thing that Lindsay did here because, yes, we don’t want Ferris to be a devil that shows up and gets you to do bad things, but we want him to be fun, good angel. That is nine times, nine times. You want a gummy bear? They’ve been in my pocket all day. They’re soft and warm. Meredith, have you seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?

Meredith: Oh, tons of times. It’s so good.

Craig: Okay. I just wanted to make sure because now I get to say to somebody– oh my God, I won’t tell you who it was. It was a 31-year-old person who was a lesbian who did not know who Martina Apostolova was. It was like one of the first athletes to come out, iconic, an incredible tennis player, one of the greatest of all time, still active out there commenting on tennis and all the rest of it. Then I’m like, “Oh, yes, that’s right because we’re old.” Now I’m like, I check on everything. I’m like, “Do you–” Okay.

John: A movie I watched this last week was Citizen Kane, which I’d seen in college or maybe start of film school. I hadn’t seen since. It holds up. It’s a really good movie. It’s also modern in ways you don’t expect that the narrative structure is racing ahead and it’s taking its time in other places. It’s really good. It’s so odd to watch a movie about here’s a narcissistic, rich person who wants to be a media titan and a politician, and yet the movie’s not, weirdly, not judgmental about it, or less judgmental than you would expect it to be.

Craig: It gets to the core of the problem. It holds up in part because so much of what we do comes from that movie.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s seeing the oral text of things. The other thing I appreciated about watching it now after having made a lot of things is that so many of the sets have ceilings on them, which is nice. Then later the movie is, as does it get grander where you can’t see the ceilings anymore, you notice the change.

Craig: A lot of low angles. A lot, yes. A lot of times we don’t build ceilings because that’s where the lights go and at the point we don’t look up there. It is fascinating to watch that film.

John: That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Meredith Stedman with help-

Craig: I accept that.

John: From Lauren Loesberg.

Craig: Okay, interesting.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Supposedly.

John: Outro this week is by Gloom Canyon.

Craig: Wow.

John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we often answer on this program. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We recently had an issue that was all about, is dystopia getting worse? Which was delightful. The answer is, kind of, but also dystopia is always a reflection of the time that we’re in. It’s fun for that level. The Scriptnotes book is out and available wherever you buy books. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware you can break out to celebrate Scriptnotes on any other day. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Where possible, we try to give the non-paywall links to things so you can actually read the articles. Some of these are behind paywalls, I’m sorry. Thank you to all our premium members. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We really adore you. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on betting markets. Craig, I bet we’ll have a good conversation, but this was a delightful talk about daydreaming and other things.

Craig: You got me on that one. Thank you.

John: Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Meredith.

Bonus Segment

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[music]

John: All right, Craig. I remember when you were talking about Sheep Detective was about to come out, and you were saying like, “Oh, if I were a betting man, I could go on Polymarket because I think people are underestimating this movie,” and you didn’t. Did you end up betting on your movie?

Craig: I sure did not.

John: You did not. You could have made some extra money because it was undervalued.

Craig: It was undervalued, I presume. I don’t actually know– It would be, per the terms of those gambling markets or those prediction markets, I would not be allowed to bet on the thing that I was an insider on. That said, I’m sure it happens constantly.

John: Constantly, I’m sure. We’re talking about Polymarket, Kalshi, political markets, betting markets overall. I’m against it. I’m not for it. I’m against it. Yet, I can probably argue both sides of it because I’ve listened to some podcasts that are talking about the origins of them, and they do serve an interesting function in terms of predicting political things and for who’s going to be elected to things, they are accurate, but it’s one of those systems where I just feel like we are putting financial cosplay on what is just gambling. If we acknowledge that gambling is not a good thing for society, we have to acknowledge that gambling under another name is probably also not a good thing for society.

Craig: Yes, I think it’s pretty terrible. Remember Hollywood Stock Exchange? That probably was something.

John: Yes, HSX, yes.

Craig: That was a thing.

John: Remind us what that was.

Craig: It was basically a box office prediction site where every movie that had yet to come out had an IPO. Once it was on the schedule, and the site would attach some dollar value, and people would buy the stock or sell the stock. They could short it, they could long it, all based on how much money they thought would make in the first, I think, four weeks of release. You weren’t winning real money. You were winning fake money. The site basically was supported by ads, I think. It was a game. That’s all it was.

John: It was a game. How do you feel about that as a game?

Craig: Fine. People, over time, have become obsessed with the mechanics of our business, not just the movies or the shows. They love reading about what’s going on backstage. They love getting into the box office and who got what and how much and what was the budget. Then there are debates. Did it make money? Did it not make money? The answer is it made money all the time. People like it. That’s fine. Play the game. This is not that. This is different. What you get that’s positive is an enormous amount of data. The markets and market data tends to be better than a lot of other sampling because sampling is small. That’s how it works. These markets are huge.

John: You get the wisdom of crowds because people are contributing their insights into things. They’re doing additional research and they’re converting opinions into probabilities. It gets people who are below hearts to actually put money on real things, and because there are some stakes, it motivates honesty. I’m making the pro arguments here, is that there’s a reason why it tends to be predictive in a useful way is because people are actually-

Craig: They want to make money. Exactly. It doesn’t matter who you think the president is. All that matters is who you think the president will be and then you gamble. The part about this that’s ruinous, of course, is the gambling. Now, Polymarket and Kalshi in a way are probably not as insidious as a lot of the sports betting sites. We talk about, I think people are still stuck on porn has ruined everybody. It’s the gambling that’s going to ruin everybody. It is so brutal, especially young men who, as we know, are already a mess in our society and need help and attention and care and direction and structure. What they’re getting is gambling and losing their money.

John: I don’t think either of us are coming from a morality standpoint or ethics or a whole other situation there. Just data on folks who are using these services, it seems to be ruinous, both financially, but also it’s just taking all of their attention and time and pulling them away from other things in life.

Craig: Yes. There was a way to do this. Let’s think about– I’ll take it away from the sports stuff and put it in the general markets. There was a way for people to do this. The penny stocks. It was a notorious group of companies that were companies raising money by selling millions of shares of stock for pennies. The people who did it were all chasing these dreams of, I bought a stock for three cents. It went up to $1.50. If I put $1,000 into that, oh my God. Except 99.9% of the time, nothing happened. It just didn’t work. It was taking advantage of people who didn’t have a lot of money. That’s it. It was pretty limited, I think, to get-rich-quick type people, but now it’s everywhere.

John: Of course, the GameStop bros or people who were spending all their time and attention on this stock, who we think was undervalued, and let’s boost it up.

Craig: Stonks.

John: Stonks and crypto, largely, people who were like-

Craig: Crypto is also– it’s just betting.

John: Coin offerings and that kind of stuff. Similar kinds of dynamics at play there. I’m going to try to draw a distinction, but I don’t know the distinction is particularly clean between that and the stock market, the commodities futures market. I think in those cases of these institutional markets, they are serving a crucial function of finding a price for what is the right price for the stock based on all the different people’s desire for it.

The institutional investors trying to figure out how to do things and farmers trying to figure out how much sorghum should I plant? It serves a societal useful function, even though there is an aspect of gambling to anything that’s involving stock-served commodities.

Craig: Basically, there’s a very big poker game going on with professional poker players. Then right outside that are a bunch of people going, “Hey, you could play with these guys. You could be just like them. You buy a smaller amount of chips and we’ll get you in there.” Day trading, penny stocks, all of which are very subject to pump and dump scams. That’s not going on with Ford stock. It’s just not because it can’t, because it’s managed by investment banks and institutional investors and so on and so forth. The SEC is staring at it and the DOJ is staring at it. Even then, of course, things go wrong.

Basically, if you’re not involved in that mainstream sort of thing or you are not on the inside of stuff, you’re probably just a sucker. Polymarket and Kalshi generate fascinating data that reflects probably a very true state of things. Also, people are losing their money and they’re suckers. People are losing money to sports betting, gambling. The entire concept of gambling is designed for you to lose your money. Statistically, that’s it. You lose. You lose before you start. I don’t mind gambling money. I don’t mind losing. It’s fun. I go to Vegas sometimes. I gamble. It’s fun. In my mind, I’m like, “If I walk out of here even, that’s a huge win.”

John: If you’re approaching it with this is the money I’m going to spend tonight and lose to entertain myself, I can respect that. The sports betting analogy earlier on, one of the real issues with sports betting, one of the big concerns classically has been that the players themselves will participate in sports betting and they do. They can rig the outcomes to get the results that they want.

Craig: They probably don’t do that much. I think generally what’s happening with athletes is they’re betting on other sports. There’s a few that are betting on some things. Shohei Otani was implicated in betting. In the end, it was determined that I think it was his translator or somebody that was assigned the blame, I’ll say, carefully. Yes, athletes are betting.

John: Let’s wrap up this segment by talking about one of our favorite, fabulous George Santos. George Santos is a former member of Congress. Kalshi reported him for betting on himself. He was betting in a market about whether he would attend the State of the Union. He bet that he would not attend and didn’t attend. There’s just nothing more perfect than that. I think anybody putting money on anything George Santos does is foolish, granted. It’s also just like this– you’re looking into a hall of mirrors like, well, what are we even doing here?

Craig: Even Kalshi was like, “Let’s refer this to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission,” which is a federal regulatory body that basically were like, “I think we saw what happened here.” George Santos, going back to jail. I don’t know what to say. He loves it. He loves being a criminal. I don’t know what else to say. He seems to really love just being a criminal. It’s amazing.

John: It’s amazing. It’s not hard to imagine how we got to George Santos. We were sliding towards George Santos for a while. We’ve always loved these larger-than-life cartoonish characters. Here is what I’ll say about pressure markets overall, though. I don’t know how we’re going to solve this or fix this.

Craig: We can’t.

John: I think it’s fundamentally broken. I don’t know how the US or any other country is going to actually resolve this because some of this stuff is going to happen in one way or another.

Craig: It’s just we found an amplifier for human behavior. I think about these drug subs that we talked about. I know it seems dumbly simple, but isn’t it obvious that we should just stop the laws that criminalize this? It’s not working. Just stop it. Stop that. All the cartels go away. All the violence goes away. All of that goes away because you know what’s not going away? The drugs. Ever. Never. Ever. If you want to get cocaine, can you get cocaine, John?

John: Oh, could I?

Craig: Yes.

John: I’m trying to think of who I would reach out to, but in a day, probably.

Craig: Yes, exactly. In one day, you could get a substance that they’re trying to stop coming here through submarines. This is my point. The same thing is with the betting markets. It can’t be stopped. Gambling can’t be stopped, but we have amplified it now, and that’s the scary part. Kids are gambling, which is terrible.

John: Here’s what I think we probably could do. We have some control over apps and mobile betting. We could take those away, and that’s a possibility.

Craig: They’ll just use a laptop.

John: No, laptop, but then it’s not in your pocket buzzing. I think it’s less of a-

Craig: Yes, but here’s why that won’t happen. Because Apple would be the one to do it, and then everybody who’s a gambling addict just goes and switches over to Android, which will never do it because you can easily jailbreak an Android phone and get out of the garden wall. Then Apple’s like, “We’re not going to do that. It’s impossible. If people want to bet, they want to bet. We’ll just say this is an 18-plus app.”
You know where I would get cocaine? If I had to get cocaine in one day?

John: I want to know.

Craig: Meredith.

Meredith: You’re going to be waiting a while. You’re going to be waiting a long time.

Craig: Meredith.

John: I don’t think that was in our initial conversations. It wasn’t sort of the hiring process. We didn’t go through it. It’s like, “How can– give me that.” That’s what everyone thinks. The Hollywood producers, that’s what they’re actually really after. It’s like, “Oh,–“

Craig: Cocaine, you’re going to get us cocaine. Meanwhile, still have never seen cocaine.

John: I’ve never seen it.

Craig: I know. The two of us. It’s incredible. I will tell people that, and they look at me like, they’re so confused. Then I’m like, I’m confused. Where is all this cocaine?

John: I find myself shocked when I will talk to somebody, and it’s like, “Oh, yes, did some coke.” I’m like, “What?” It shocks me that I know a person who has ever encountered the substance.

Craig: I feel like most of the people we know. I think you and I are the only– I’m not asking Meredith a question. I’m not going to ask her. I just feel like she’s like, “Oh, this is a moment for me to be quiet.” I don’t know where it is. We’ve talked about this many times. I need to get one of those subs.

John: Absolutely. Craig’s going to get one of those subs and just sail far away from Vancouver. Load me in. All right. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Meredith.

Meredith: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, guys.