The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/inspiration-vs-motivation).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 569 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you sit down to write? We’ll discuss inspiration versus motivation both for your characters and for you as a writer. We’ll also talk about the phenomenon of showrunners as promotional vehicles for their shows. Does this elevate the writer/creator or amount to unpaid labor? In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, insects. Why do we have insects?
**Craig:** Yeah!
**John:** Yeah. First, right before we started recording, I apparently changed your life. In case we have other people out there listening, talk through the problem and solution, and people’s lives will be better.
**Craig:** I am shooketh. For the last all of my life, while I’ve been drinking coffee out of cups like Starbucks, Coffee Bean, whatever, every now and again, I would say half the time… Because I drink an Americano. I’m a straight up black coffee kind of dude. Two shots. Two shots, John, small size. About half the time, the fricking lid is like a dribble cup. There’s just these drips that come out, and they hit me on my shirt or my pants. It’s really annoying and hot. I was just complaining about it, and you said… What did you say to me, John?
**John:** I said, “Craig, is the lid of the cup lined up to the seam?” You were confused by what I meant. Then as you examined your cup, you saw that the plastic lid is on top of the paper cup. The paper cup has a seam on it. If the hole in the lid is lined up to the seam, it will dribble on you.
**Craig:** Yes, it will. I just put the lid back on so that the hole was not over the seam, and it didn’t dribble on me, and I love you.
**John:** Aw, thank you.
**Craig:** I love you, and I’m also very angry, because why… In their training at Starbucks University, I don’t know what… By the way, what is Starbucks’s training university called? What do you think it’s called, Espresso College or something?
**John:** I bet it’s Starbucks University, something like that.
**Craig:** You think it’s just straight up Starbucks University?
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** At Starbucks U, this should be the first and last lesson. Just don’t put the hole over the thing where the cup seams together. Here’s the thing. I’m drinking coffee without fear. I’m not afraid that it’s going to burn me.
**John:** Megana, you were aware of this life hack, correct?
**Megana Rao:** I was not, and I had to look it up on the internet-
**Craig:** Of course.
**Megana:** … to verify that this is true.
**Craig:** So Millennial.
**Megana:** A lot of forums agree with this knowledge. There’s a conspiracy out there that baristas do this on purpose.
**Craig:** Here we go.
**John:** Oh yeah, so people they hate. It’s like, “Oh, that Craig.”
**Craig:** Why would it be half the time the seam is… I don’t know how many… What do you call those, degrees?
**John:** Yeah, degrees, radians. I’m not sure what the math is.
**Craig:** The quantity of radians of that seam is maybe like 3 out of 360. This should be happening 1 in every 120 times I get a coffee.
**John:** The hole doesn’t have to line up exactly, because if you think about when you tilt the cup up-
**Craig:** True.
**John:** … you’re putting the coffee against that whole side of the thing. Really, you just need the hole-
**Craig:** I know.
**John:** … directly opposite the seam.
**Craig:** Really? Okay.
**John:** Yeah. That’s your safe spot.
**Craig:** I’ll tell you what. I’m never going to have this problem again. Never.
**John:** Never.
**Craig:** Never. I’ll tell you another thing, John. You just earned yourself grace. Do you know what I mean by this? One day you’re going to do something. I’m going to get angry. Then you’re going to say, “Craig, I would like to use my grace.” I will say-
**John:** It’s like real life DnD inspiration, like I get to roll an extra D20.
**Craig:** No, you just say, “Grace.” Now, the grace will get used. It’s not a permanent grace, of course, but you possess grace.
**John:** Love it. While we’re talking about Millennials manifesting things, I would actually like to try to manifest something here on this podcast. I would like to make a Van Halen biopic. I think there’s a great biopic to be made of Van Halen. I’ve done some work to try to figure out who would control the rights to this, what are the complications here, does any producer control some part of the story. What I’ve run into is basically it seems like it’s impossible to do at this point because there’s such disagreement between the Van Halen people and David Lee Roth’s people and that it’s going to be a mess.
There are complicated things to put together to make this movie happen. Obviously, you need all the rights to all the music, not the permission, but the blessing of Eddie Van Halen’s family, whatever representational things you want to get for David Lee Roth. There’s a fricking great movie to make from Van Halen. If you are a listener who has some access to some part of this complicated mess, reach out to me, because I really think there’s a great musical biopic to make of Van Halen.
**Craig:** Pasadena’s own Van Halen. A lot of people don’t know that Eddie and Alex Van Halen are biracial.
**John:** They’re also international. They’re born in Europe.
**Craig:** That’s right.
**John:** They’re genuine prodigies. They were in several bands before Van Halen. The whole backstory before that is great. The actual story of being in Van Halen and the conflicts within Van Halen and overcoming those conflicts to some degree, they replaced him with Sammy Hagar, all of that is great and fascinating and could make a really amazing biopic.
**Craig:** I don’t know their story well enough, but I feel like Michael Anthony, the bassist for Van Halen, had a very privileged position of just sitting quietly, watching everyone fight around him. He’s just like, “Guys, when you’re done, I’m here, ready to play.”
**John:** I saw Van Halen play at Iowa State University. It was an amazing show. There was a very long drum solo in it. That was appropriate, because that’s what you wanted in that era. You wanted a long drum solo.
**Craig:** Also, Alex Van Halen, incredibly good drummer.
**John:** Yeah, therefore he should have a solo.
**Craig:** Stupidly good drummer. Originally, I think when the parents got them instruments, Eddie was given the drum set, and Alex was given the guitar.
**John:** They both were started on piano, because that’s [crosstalk 00:06:10].
**Craig:** Of course. They are. They’re prodigies. I believe they played a concert at La Cañada High School back in… That’s a scene.
**John:** I’m not sure that’s going to make it into the picture, Craig.
**Craig:** Aw.
**John:** It could. You never know. It could happen.
**Craig:** (sings)
**John:** If you are a person with the power to manifest a Van Halen movie, know that I want to write this movie. I figured I might as well put that out there and stake my claim in it to some degree.
**Craig:** Maybe Alex Van Halen is a podcast fan.
**John:** Yeah. We have some follow-up. Megana, help us out. What did Andrew have to say?
**Megana:** Andrew wrote in and said, “I appreciated the discussion of casting stars, as it’s a question I have thought about a lot. However, you focused a lot on casting for film, and I’d like to know about the difference for television. Are there different factors involved? I’m thinking of the recently premiered Monarch, in which Susan Sarandon plays a dying woman at the head of a celebrity country music family, or Cobra Kai, where they’ve gotten many actors from the original movie series to come back, but the focus is clearly on the younger characters. I’ve thought about writing a show where the main character’s played by an unknown actor, but have more established actors in a parent or advisor character role. How should writers think about something like that?”
**John:** In television in general, you’re not as star-focused, but also who is a star changes a lot of television. Scott Bakula is a television star. If he agrees to be on your CSI spin-off, then he’s going to be the centerpiece star of that. He’ll be paid really well for that. Television is not generally as star-driven. It makes stars rather than casting stars. Is that your experience, Craig?
**Craig:** I think that that’s been the way it’s been. It has changed to an extent over the last 10 years with the rise of the limited series. The limited series are different. The reason that television stars were traditionally different, separate from movie stars, is because television stars had to make these long-term commitments to one thing. If you are let’s say Tom Hanks, you don’t have to do that, because you don’t want to be stuck on one thing, because Steven Spielberg wants to come and do this movie and someone brilliant over here wants to do this movie, and so you get to pick and choose. You don’t want to tie yourself down, whereas Mariska Hargitay has made this brilliant career but on one show.
Lately, with the rise of the shorter seasons, a lot of television series running between 6 and 12 episodes, and sometimes just once, actors, what we would call traditional movie stars are less concerned and are okay with tying themselves down for a stretch, because they know it’s not permanent. They aren’t going to be stuck on this thing for 10 seasons, 22 episodes a year. That does make quite a difference. You see a lot of people… Matthew McConaughey doing True Detective was a sign.
**John:** Agreed.
**Craig:** There’s been fuzzying of the lines. In terms of how you think about this, Andrew, just don’t worry about it. You write for who you want. For whom you want. How dare I?
**John:** How dare you?
**Craig:** How dare I?
**John:** His second question there is what if you cast an unknown actor in that main role but a more established, better known actor in those supporting roles? That can be tricky. Definitely it’s possible, but think about that as an audience member. If you have no idea who that central person is, and yet you recognize those other people, you are going to expect those other people are going to have really big, significant things coming up. There’s just a weird expectation game that happens. It can totally work. Just be aware that there could be some bump for your audience there if they don’t recognize your central person but they do recognize the people around them.
**Craig:** That too I think has gotten a little bit worse because of the amount of television. Let’s go back once more into the way back machine and think about Game of Thrones. They had Sean Bean. Sean Bean was somebody that people knew, but I don’t think, at least in America, he was what we would call a star. Nobody was building movies around Sean Bean. He was the bad guy in Golden Eye. Spoiler, by the way. You think he dies, and he doesn’t. He’s the bad guy. He’s Trevelyan. Other than that, a lot of people we didn’t know, and Dinklage. Even Dinklage, I have to say, was-
**John:** He was in an indie film that people liked that was-
**Craig:** Exactly. He was in The Station Agent, which is a wonderful movie. He’d been around, but again, not somebody that people were building movies around. Everybody was okay with it because we learned new people. It’s a little trickier now also looking at the new Game of Thrones show, House of the Dragon.
**John:** You kind of recognize Rhys Ifans, but there’s not a lot of-
**Craig:** There’s Paddy Considine.
**John:** Paddy Considine, yeah.
**Craig:** Doctor Who.
**Megana:** Matt Smith.
**John:** Matt Smith, of course.
**Craig:** Matt Smith, right. There are some, but again, for Americans, not these people that anyone’s building a movie around. You can still do it. I think, Andrew, cast who you want in your head, and then we’ll deal with it later when life starts happening.
**John:** I think we’ve talked about this on the show before. I’m a big caster in my head before I start writing. I like to see that there’s at least one actor out there who could play the role. Is that the person who’s going to play the role ultimately? Almost never, but it does help me to be thinking about that in my head. If you feel like you need a person with giant movie star charisma in that central role, cast that that way, but know that other factors are going to determine whether it is a movie star, TV star, or an unknown in that slot. Last bit of follow-up here. We got a lot of emails about burials and cremations and such.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** I want to say that we are not going to talk anything more about it.
**Craig:** Nope.
**John:** There’s clearly a market for a burial podcast. If you’re thinking, “I really want to start a podcast, but what should my podcast topic be?” the topic of burials and cremations and what do you do with dead bodies seems to be fascinating to a huge subset of our listenership.
**Craig:** You got to find that small Venn diagram intersection between knows a lot about burying people and interesting. If you can find that person, I’m down.
**John:** Something like internment and interesting, I feel like there’s a thing that can go together there. There’s something about that. People are obsessed with death, because they’re obsessed with murder podcasts. There’s going to be something about dead bodies.
**Craig:** We’re all going to be dead.
**John:** Universal experience.
**Craig:** We’re all going to be dead, even you, Megana.
**Megana:** Never. No.
**Craig:** It’s happening. What, do you think you’re eternal?
**Megana:** I’m knocking on wood so it doesn’t happen.
**Craig:** You’re knocking on wood. Knocking on wood doesn’t even work for things that are forestallable. You’re knocking on wood against death?
**John:** I want to defend knocking on wood, just as a tradition of saying, “Listen, I recognize that what I just said could potentially come back to haunt me.” It’s a public way of doing it. I would never knock on wood privately, but I might do it publicly.
**Craig:** Interesting.
**Megana:** Interesting.
**Craig:** Do you think Megana’s really starting to think about her own mortality for the first time right now?
**John:** Based on our previous insect discussion, I think she was already a little bit worried for our own lives.
**Craig:** She was halfway there. We’ll get to that in the Bonus Segment, but first, we have a marquee topic.
**John:** Indeed. Let’s talk about inspiration versus motivation. The idea behind this came from a recent issue of Inneresting, the newsletter we do. Chris Sont, our editor, linked to this blog post by John Scalzi, who is a very good writer of science fiction and other things. He has this blog post called Find the Time or Don’t. Basically, people ask him questions like, “How do I find the time to write?” His point is either you find the time or you don’t do it.
I’ll just read one little quote here. He says, “The answer to the first of these is simple and unsatisfying: I keep inspired to write because if I don’t then the mortgage company will be inspired to foreclose on my house. And I’d prefer not to have that happen. This answer is simple because it’s true — hey, this is my job, I don’t have another — and it’s unsatisfying because writers, and I suppose particularly authors of fiction, are assumed to have some other, more esoteric inspiration.”
I like the post, but I would like to separate out the idea of inspiration and motivation, because I think they get conflated and confused. For our discussion, Craig, if we can talk about inspiration being that desire to write the specific thing and that flash of genius, like, “Oh, this is the thing I’m called to write,” versus motivation, which is what gets you in the chair every day to write, which is getting you to get the work finished.
**Craig:** I think it’s a great distinction to make.
**John:** Both are really important, but they don’t always happen at the same time.
**Craig:** No. One needs to happen all the time, and one sometimes happens when it feels like it. Inspiration does not adhere to a timetable. You can’t plan it and you can’t force it. That’s why it’s inspiration. If it weren’t, if you could just say, “Oh, I’m going to be inspired in 10 minutes,” then it wouldn’t be very inspiring. Also, people talk about the spark of creativity. Sparks last a millisecond, and then they’re gone. They’re just meant to ignite. Then the rest of it, honestly, all the rest of it is motivation.
**John:** Let’s go back to your spark thing, because what I really like about that idea is, as a person who builds fires with flint and steel, yes, you had that one little moment, but then it’s all the work and careful work, diligence of just like, “Okay, now I’m going to get it in the tinder. I’m going to slowly add the kindling and slowly build it up into a thing.” That’s the whole work. It’s not the striking at the flint and steel. It’s the actual building of the fire. That’s what a lot of people don’t do. You see people who wander around saying, “I have this great idea for a movie. I have this great idea for a book.” They have inspiration, but a lot of times they don’t actually have the motivation to actually get a thing done.
On the contrary, sometimes in movies we’ll see this cliché scene of the guy sitting at the typewriter, and he’s like, “I can’t get any words out.” He’s just waiting around for inspiration. That’s not necessarily the case for most people. Really, it’s that they kind of have the idea, they kind of know what they want to do, but they cannot physically get themselves to sit at that typewriter and try to work on a thing. They’d rather do anything else. That’s procrastination. That’s perfectionism. It’s all the other reasons why they’re not willing to sit down to write.
**Craig:** You do hear the dog, right?
**Megana:** Yeah, so cute.
**John:** The dog barking in the background?
**Craig:** It’s not just me.
**John:** That dog is my dog Lambert, who’s sleeping and dreaming in the background.
**Craig:** Aw.
**John:** I’ll take a picture and I’ll post it on-
**Craig:** Lambert.
**John:** … my Instagram so everyone can see how cute he is as I’m recording this.
**Craig:** Everything you said is spot-on. The marketplace of creative romance overvalues inspiration. By the way, inspiration sometimes is wrong. Sometimes you get so excited. You’re like, “That’s it. I figured it out, this brilliant, wonderful idea. All I have to do now is the easy part of just unraveling it.” Then you realize that you were inspired stupidly, that the inspiration did not stand up to the test of what motivation has to deliver, which is execution and work. You’re allowed to be falsely inspired. Don’t overvalue your aha moments. They’re aha moments if they pan out. If they don’t, they’re not. Simple as that.
**John:** I often say on this podcast that we are our own main characters in our own stories. Let’s think about how characters relate to motivation and inspiration. Inspiration in a movie, that classic call to adventure, there’s a thing that happens early on that’s like, oh, this is the thing that you are destined to do. You can choose to follow that path or not follow that path. Something is going to change in your life, or you have characters who fall in love at first sight. That inspiration in movies tends to be the enduring quest. That’s a thing that they are called to do. That’s not them actually leaving home and doing the work. It’s a siren song, but it’s not the actual plot and story and work of the movie. That’s generally motivation, because the motivation is what’s getting them from this scene to that scene, what’s getting them to say the next line, what’s getting them to move and take some actions.
**Craig:** Sometimes the causal flows in the direction opposite from what we would imagine. Sometimes you are uninspired, and you just have to do stuff. In our own lives, this is true. We don’t want to do a thing. We’re forced to do a thing. We start to do a thing, and lo and behold, something happens while we’re doing it that then feeds into a kind of inspiration. The idea of waiting to be inspired is a trap.
Dennis Palumbo of Episode 99, his big prescription for writer’s block is start writing something, even if it’s nonsense. If you are a writer typer, start typing stuff. Start typing about how you can’t write. Start typing anything. It doesn’t matter. If you’re a pen and paper guy, start pen and papering. Move your hands or fingers in a writing motion. Then, lo and behold, you may find suddenly you are in the groove and inspiration occurs.
**John:** Let’s talk about motivation for writers, motivation actually for characters as well. We’ve talked about this on the show before. You can have intrinsic motivation, which is something that is about who you are. It’s generated from inside. It could be about your self-perception, your self-worth, this vision of who you are as a person. Calling yourself, “I am a writer,” that’s an intrinsic motivation to do the writing because you’ve perceived yourself as being a writer. It can also be negative intrinsic motivation, like shame or guilt, that’s pushing you to do that.
**Craig:** That’s what I have.
**John:** We’ve got those. Those could be the things that are motivating you to do this creative writing or to literally show up and do the work on that day. There’s also extrinsic motivations, as Scalzi’s saying, like, “I have to pay the bills. I have a deadline that I’m required to meet.” Sometimes it’s good to have a balance of the things that you were doing because it’s a part of who you are, the intrinsic things. Also, setting deadlines is a way of external accountability. That’s also motivating you to write.
**Craig:** I wish that our motivations were all positive. I wish that we were all motivated by a sense of self-worth and value. I wish that I could wake up in the morning and think, “I should write today, because I’m good, and people are interested.” That’s not what happens. What happens with me is that I wake up in the morning and I think, “I need to write today.” I’m already in trouble. I just start off the day, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble. I’m behind. I’m bad. The best I could do is try and write my way to just get my nose above the waterline so that I don’t drown in my own shame and misery.
Now, that’s an anti-romanticism. I don’t recommend it. I don’t think it’s good. It is so common that I suppose the reason I’m talking about it is because I don’t want people to feel like that is bad with a capital B. It’s bad with a lowercase B. So many of us have it that if it gets us writing and it makes the work happen, as long as we can somehow find ways to hug ourselves afterwards, and I really do try, then I think it’s okay. It’s okay. I just don’t want people to beat themselves up for beating themselves up, if that makes sense.
**John:** Definitely. I’ve had moments in my career where I could not wait to write. That combination of inspiration and motivation were happening at just the right dose at just the right times, where it was like, “I’m going to leave this party and go home and write this scene, because I just know exactly what this scene is.” There’s been projects where for two weeks at a time, all I wanted to do is write the project, but that’s rare. I think the career of writing is recognizing that will happen sometimes, but that’s not going to be your normal experience.
Your normal experience is going to be probably some mix of the lowercase B bad motivations to get you there to do the work and recognizing that while you’re doing it, you’re going to have some discoveries, sometimes moments that you might happier about the work at the end of the day than at the start of the day.
**Craig:** I’ll tell you that one remarkable motivation… I’ve never had this before in my life. Working on The Last of Us, I had I think half of the script done by the time we started shooting, with the understanding that I had to write the other half. Neil wrote an episode, but I had to write all the remaining ones, including one with Neil, while we were in production. That’s terrifying, because I don’t have to imagine people waiting. They’re there. I can see them. They come and find me. They’re like, “When are we going to… Can you give me a peak? I would just love to know,” because they have jobs to do.
I made a point of saying, “Look, schedule-wise, I need to deliver a draft of a script to everyone, meaning I’ve already given it to HBO, great, now I can give it to everybody, with two months’ time between them getting it and us shooting it,” which in television, sadly, that’s quite a luxurious amount of time, because there are people that deliver these things the day of.
**John:** Classically on network procedural shows, sometimes they’ll get so backed up, you’re prepping off of an outline, if that. Scripts are being written as they’re shot.
**Craig:** There are showrunners that we’ve spoken to on the show, who I have great admiration for, and they’re notorious for-
**John:** Last minute.
**Craig:** When you show up on the day, you find out what you’re… They’re that behind. It all works for them. I did find that the reality of a machine of human beings needing the pages was remarkably motivating. I guess I didn’t have to draw so much from my bottomless well of self-loathing, so that was nice. Instead, I borrowed from my bottomless well of fear, you see, which is actually preferable, I think, to self-loathing, just terror as opposed to disgust. These are my wells that I get to draw from in the morning. Megana, do you… I know John’s not like me. I know that.
**Megana:** Yeah, we’re shamecore.
**Craig:** Good. Thank you. I just needed to know that there was another shamecore on board here.
**Megana:** Yeah, I feel you.
**Craig:** I love it.
**Megana:** I primarily operate out of fear. Writing is just so fun. What you guys are talking about, I feel like it is really fun, and it is all of the fear that gets in the way of me actually sitting down to write.
**Craig:** Fear.
**John:** Megana, when you’re saying writing is fun, is it fun when you’re in flow or is it fun even when it’s a struggle?
**Megana:** I think it’s fun when you’re in flow. To me, the desire to get back to that state has to outweigh the fear. That is when I sit down to write.
**Craig:** That’s quite perfect. That is a great summation of what’s going on with me. I just need the desire to get into the flow of it to outweigh the fear. That’s just perfect. Chef’s kiss. You know what? You’ve earned grace.
**John:** I changed your life, and she says one nice thing?
**Craig:** I know. It’s hard. It’s hard knowing me.
**John:** This is grace inflation.
**Craig:** I never promised you a rose garden, and I’m not fair. Megana, you have earned grace. Here’s the thing. She’s never going to need it. When is she ever going to do anything where I’m like, “Meh!”
**Megana:** Just you wait.
**Craig:** Not that you do, John. Honestly, John just never does anything either. I’m really handing out grace to people that don’t need it. That’s the God’s honest truth.
**John:** I’ve talked about this before with Arlo Finch. Writing those three books was one of the rare experiences where for two or three months at a time, I was just writing those books. My entire life was just writing Arlo Finch books. I did build up some good routines and habits where I just need to write 1,000, 1,500 words a day, and that the books will get done. Sitting down to do that work and finishing that work was actually a lot easier, because I could sit down knowing this is going to take a couple hours to do, and they’re going to be done, and I’m going to feel really good about it. It was a rare case in my life where the motivation was positive, because I knew I’m going to feel good about having finished that work. I’m not going to finish the whole book today. I’m just going to finish this chapter, and that’s going to be enough.
**Craig:** That’d be so nice, just to feel good.
**John:** Recognizing when enough is enough is good. Actually, this last script I did was a similar situation where… Granted I had really good inspiration going into it. I really wanted to write it. With every scene, I was like, “Oh yeah, this is exactly what I want to be doing right now is writing this scene.” Sometimes it does happen.
**Craig:** That sounds so nice.
**John:** Recognize that it’s rare when it does happen. It’s lovely when it happens.
**Craig:** Again, I don’t know if I ever feel good. I just make some of the bad go away. It’s just who I am. I have to accept it. This is the therapy thing. Part of therapy is saying you’re okay as you are, also oh my god, you’re screwed up and you have so many problems.
**John:** It’s a dialectical struggle is that you’re both imperfect and you’re doing your best.
**Craig:** I’m trying to change, and also I’m fine the way I am. I don’t see this going away. I think I’m just making my peace with it. At least I can put it in perspective. There is a difference between thinking I am bad and I feel bad about myself. That’s a very important distinction. By the way, this has turned into a therapy session for me and probably Megana. You’re fine, John, again. I think that’s part of it. I don’t recall a time where I ever wrote something and then sat back and said, “I feel great.” I just feel like I made the bad go away. I guess if that’s how it works for you at home, I’m just saying that’s okay. I’m sticking up for the shamecore people.
**John:** For sure. Let’s wrap this up with a… Let’s a quote from Scalzi which I think puts a good bow on this. He says, “Being a writer isn’t some grand, mystical state of being. It just means you put words to amuse people, most of all yourself. There’s no more shame in not being a writer than there is in not being a painter, a botanist, or a real estate agent, all of which are things I think personally I do not regret not being. It’s a weird thing we put this pressure I think on what a writer identity has to be and what it has to mean. If you take some of that pressure off, that can also be helpful for people.
**Craig:** I love this quote, and I love him for saying it. I think it’s so important to hear good writers, and he is a very good writer, deromanticizing what we do. There’s so much BS out there, so much glowy nonsense from people about writing. Makes me want to barf, always has.
Ted Elliott of Pirates of the Caribbean fame and Shrek and Aladdin, the original, and so many other things, he talks about writers describing receiving inspiration from the heavens and how they suck at the crack in the cosmic egg. It just makes me laugh, because he’s right. It’s just so ridiculous. It’s not romantic.
Most importantly, it’s okay to not be a writer, the way we have always said to people, “Hey, it’s okay to stop.” If it’s not working, if it’s not making you happy, or even not unhappy, as is the case for the shamecore people, you can stop. It is not magical. I can tell you from my own personal experience that you can do really well as a writer, you can be successful, you can have credits and go to premiers and know famous people, and it still is not romantic at all.
Don’t think that there’s some magical thing on the other side of the velvet rope. There isn’t. In fact, that’s how you know you’re a writer, because you get to the other side of the velvet rope, you look around, you go, “Oh my god, it’s the same thing as the other side of the velvet rope, and I still have to write.” That’s it.
Anyone that talks about the cosmic inspiration and being kissed by Jesus and connecting with the grand river of energy that runs through all of us or crystals or any of that, just run, because they’re not real. I just don’t think they’re real. This guy’s real. That Polish lady that said that when you’re successful it feels like failing, she’s real. Those are real writers to me. I love this. Love this. This plus the coffee thing has made my day.
**John:** Let’s see if we can keep your-
**Craig:** Yay.
**John:** … streak going. Let’s talk about creators, showrunners, the responsibility for them being promotional vehicles for their shows, for the things that they create. We’ve talked a little bit about this before. Yesterday as we were recording this was The Last of Us day, so you were tweeting out about the new teaser trailer. You were having little conversations online. That got a great response, which was terrific.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**John:** A thing that has happened over the time we’ve been recording this show is that showrunners and creators are more and more responsible for interacting directly with fans about the things that they are making. Back in the day, you might see Steven Bochco interviewed in the New York Times, but he wasn’t responsible for the day-to-day promotion of his show. Now, because of social media, that is becoming much more of an expectation.
I just want to talk through the pros and cons of that, because I think it is great that the people who are able to make these things can get the popular culture credit for the things that they’ve made, which is terrific. It also just feels like so much work and unpaid work to be doing that I wonder I some people who would otherwise make shows are reticent to do it, because they are just not social people and they don’t want to have that responsibility.
**Craig:** It’s not a requirement. It’s not like it is for actors. Actors have to promote the show or the movie. They’re not paid to promote the show or the movie. They’re paid to act, and then it’s expected that part of the payment for acting is go promote the show and the movie. By and large, that’s who people want to hear from. We can flatter ourselves and say, “People can’t wait to hear what I, the showrunner, has to say.” There’s some people, and I love that, but it’s not like… Pedro Pascal can say anything on any given day, and it will be viewed by vastly more people than anything I say. It will be viewed with more interest, because that’s the way it ought to be. Famous people are famous.
It is not a requirement. Just to be clear, if you are contemplating being a showrunner, and it’s a real thing, you don’t have to be on Twitter at all. You don’t have to. You don’t have to be on anything. They can’t force you to be on it. If you’re not on it already, they don’t even need you to be on it, meaning if you have a social media presence, they want to leverage it. If you don’t, there’s nothing to leverage anyway. It doesn’t matter.
All you can really do at that point is probably screw up, because what’s going to happen is someone’s going to say something stupid, because believe it or not, people say stupid things on social media, and then people who aren’t accustomed to it or people who are new to it are going to react. Then suddenly, there’s a problem. It is not a requirement.
I will say if you are a showrunner on social media, you have to make sure that you can preserve your own legitimacy and authenticity as a voice, because if you start to sound like a brand or a corporate sloganeer, you just aren’t as interesting. People will see through it instantly. I will say the social media system is… Once you start to see how it all functions on the other side of it, not the way I do it, but just the way that very famous people and brand names and the influencers and all this stuff… It’s reality television, meaning it ain’t reality. It’s all so rigged. It’s incredible how calculated so much social media stuff is.
**John:** I’m thinking about showrunners who left social media. David Lindelof famously left social media after Lost and his frustrations there. Other friends of ours are infrequent tweeters, but then when they have a show, they’ve told me that they feel pressure from the studio or the network to be live tweeting episodes and to be hyping stuff up, in some cases out of fear, because if it doesn’t hit out of the gate, then what’s going to happen? I get the pressure to want to support this thing that I love. I always respect that, because it’s one thing for a novelist to be promoting their stuff. You get that. With a TV show, it is yours, but it’s also everybody else’s. You have to grapple with the internet. All the ugliness of the internet, while trying to make something beautiful, is frustrating.
**Craig:** A network will always ask people to do stuff. That’s what they do. Anybody that can possibly go out there and promote and support the show, they will say, “Hey, can you go and promote and support the show?” That’s their job to do. There is no showrunner on the planet that is essential to a show’s success in terms of social media promotion. None. Shonda Rhimes doesn’t go on Twitter and talk about her shows. She doesn’t need to, because people love her shows.
**John:** She’s also beyond that though.
**Craig:** My point is, if you’re not beyond it, then you’re not in it. You can’t help. There’s no special Goldilocks zone where a showrunner is not beyond it but also can make it a success by tweeting. Either people will like it or they won’t, and they will watch it or they won’t. I can’t imagine a world where a network is like, “Look, that show would’ve worked, but the writer didn’t talk enough on Twitter.” No.
**John:** That’s true.
**Craig:** That’s just not a thing. They’re going to ask, and you’re allowed to say no. If you feel pressure, that’s because you’re being pressured, but only because that’s what they do. They just pressure everybody into doing it. If the actor, the star, if Pedro Pascal is like, “I’m not promoting The Last of Us,” oh my god, there would be lawsuits. That’s a huge deal. He is, by the way. My point is, nobody would be like, “Oh my god, Craig isn’t tweeting about The Last of Us. We have to sue him.” They don’t care. They don’t care. That’s one of the best parts about being a writer.
**John:** I want to circle back then, maybe close on a pro of promoting stuff on social media is that the degree to which you are identified with a show that you create can be helpful with your power vis a vis the studio, the network, and future seasons and future negotiations. If people see that the fan base responds to the show but also responds to you as the showrunner, as the person behind it, it’s a little harder for them to fire you or to do crazy things down the road. We’ve definitely seen situations where people who have been a guest on the show have big fan bases who know them, and so it’s going to be inconceivable for them to be booted off one of their own shows.
**Craig:** I will challenge you on this.
**John:** Please.
**Craig:** I think that networks prize showrunners who are delivering. If the showrunner is not delivering, then it’s not happening anymore. It’s rare that there’s a circumstance where the show is fine and doing great, but they have to get rid of the showrunner. When things like that are happening, it’s typically because there is an HR problem.
**John:** Yeah, or drama behind the scenes, a conflict with another producer, another-
**Craig:** A massive conflict with-
**John:** … star.
**Craig:** Most importantly, that showrunner is not indispensable.
**John:** That’s true.
**Craig:** Now, if you are not indispensable, it does not matter what your fan base is. You will be dispensed with, because what they know is everybody loves the show. The drama that would happen over the dismissal of that person would last all of the day. Then tomorrow, somebody farted on TV, oh my god, everyone, new story, and that’ll be the end of that, because they like the show. That’s how it works. If somebody else can come and write that show and make it great and run it, people will keep watching it. Look at, what was it, The West Wing.
**John:** West Wing, that’s true, [crosstalk 00:39:21].
**Craig:** Aaron Sorkin was like, “I’m leaving.” They were like, “Okay.” Then John Wells came, and people kept watching. That’s how it is. If they think are you are indispensable… Jesse Armstrong, there’s a good example. Jesse Armstrong is the showrunner of Succession. Jesse Armstrong’s not on Twitter. Nobody hears from Jesse Armstrong. He doesn’t have a podcast. He’s the quietest guy. He is indispensable to that show. If Jesse Armstrong was like, “I don’t want to do it anymore,” it’s over, because he’s indispensable to that show, and everybody knows it.
I guess my point is, just like social media itself… Social media overemphasizes the value of social media. Underneath all of it, there is a reality of who has value and who does not. Yes, there is value, promotional value. There always has been to famous people. That’s why we have always had stars in Hollywood. Beyond the actors, Spielberg doesn’t need to tweet.
**John:** Let’s do some listener questions.
**Craig:** Yay.
**John:** We’ll start with Kiefer. Megana, can you help us out with Kiefer’s question?
**Megana:** Kiefer asks, “An acquaintance who’s working on a series for a large streamer just told me they’ve been told to put explicit act breaks in their scripts just in case a streamer decides to launch an ad-supported subscription. Are commercial breaks bad? How do you write both for viewers who will just see a two-second fade to black and those who will be diverted from your perfect, shiny streaming show and besieged with two minutes of Fancy Feast cat food commercials?”
**Craig:** Oh, no, Netflix.
**John:** Kiefer, you’re right. You will notice that some streaming shows really do have act breaks in them. I’m thinking of Only Murders in the Building has things. I guess Hulu actually has ad-supported too already, so I guess it makes sense for that. You’re going to see more of this. I would say be aware of it, because if it feels like it’s a thing that could happen, it’s not the worst idea to plan your show in a way that it could work.
Remember that Mad Men never really did act breaks properly. It just suddenly would stop, and there would be a commercial, and they would just keep going. You can get by without doing the explicit buildup to rising actions and things like that. Classically, in the broadcast model, your acts are really clear, because they have to have some kind of cliffhanger, something that gets you back after the commercial break. We don’t do that in streaming, for good reason, because it’s really artificial. It may be worth thinking about if you were to put a commercial in here, where would it do the least harm, and be thinking about it that way.
**Craig:** I assume that the acquaintance is working for Netflix, because Netflix is talking about putting ads in. What’s going to happen is Netflix is going to offer two tiers of subscription, I believe. One is ad-supported, and one is ad-free. The whole idea is, hey, spend more, and then you don’t have this chopped up thing that’s annoying because Fancy Feast just showed up. By the way, it may not be Netflix. It may be another one. I don’t know. Better not be HBO. All I can say is don’t worry about it yet. One of the things that we were just working on here on our show is we were putting the main credit sequence in and the main titles, the credits in the beginning.
**John:** Craig, I want to stop you and say I thought it was a really bold choice to have it all be like this model of the whole world, and the camera flies over it, and there’s a sun, and there’s little gears and things. I thought it was so innovative, what you’ve chosen to do there.
**Craig:** Shut up. We don’t do that. It’s an interesting choice you make. Episode to episode, it’s a little bit different. Sometimes there’s something that happens, and then we stop, and then we do the thing, and then we return to the episode. Sometimes we just do it, and then we do the episode. It’s basically how we feel it works best.
We do have to suddenly go, “Okay, this thing that we’ve put together, we actually have to now find a spot, stop, talk about a fade, talk about a cut, talk about how it works,” meaning if you have an episode that is designed to run uninterrupted, and someone says, “You have to find three interruption spots,” you can do it. You can do it. It’s annoying, and you don’t like it. I would hate it. I would throw a tantrum. I won’t do it. You can do it, is my point. It’s not going to be a disaster, meaning you don’t have to worry about how to write something that is and is not at the same time this Schrodinger’s episode that can both be ad-supported and not ad-supported. Just deal with it when it happens.
**John:** Another thing to stress is that, Kiefer, this is already happening overseas. Many things that are made for cable-
**Craig:** Oh, god.
**John:** … and for streaming-
**Craig:** Don’t tell me that.
**John:** … here actually debut internationally on ad-supported.
**Craig:** No. You’re telling me that people are watching Chernobyl out there, and it’s being chopped up with ads?
**John:** Ah, that’s a great question and a thing our listeners will know. If any listeners have seen an ad-supported version of Chernobyl, do let us know.
**Craig:** Please.
**John:** I suspect it could be out there.
**Craig:** Write in and break my heart. Do it. Please. We’ve all gotten very sensitive about this, because, John, you and I have been doing this long enough, so we remember that when we would write a movie, the movie would be in theaters, then it would go to home video, and then eventually it would-
**John:** Go to broadcast TV.
**Craig:** It would go on broadcast TV.
**John:** Charlie’s Angels.
**Craig:** Yes, they would put it on television.
**John:** Charlie’s Angels was a $25 billion deal for ABC.
**Craig:** It was so much money. You would get a lot of residuals for that. Of course, they would chop the movie up. They would chop it up. They would replace language. There was a whole network TV ADR session you had to do. It was a thing.
**John:** We had to do that for The Nines, which to my knowledge has never actually been broadcast, but [inaudible 00:45:03].
**Craig:** We had a bunch of stuff running on TBS, I think, or something. Anyway, point being, they used to do this all the time. We weren’t such babies about it. Now I’m a big baby.
**John:** Now everything has to be exactly frame by frame. Craig is going to go to everyone’s house and turn off motion smoothing.
**Craig:** That’s right. I’m the Stanley Kubrick of motion smoothing.
**John:** We don’t have to rant. Everyone knows motion smoothing is terrible. The best thing you can do-
**Craig:** No, not everyone knows.
**John:** While you’re home for the holidays, grab your parents’ remotes and turn off motion smoothing.
**Craig:** Turn off motion smoothing or anything that sounds like motion smoothing. Just go to the Menu. Go to Picture. Look for that stupid setting and turn it off. Next question.
**John:** Let’s go with Peter’s question. Megana, can you tell us what Peter had to say?
**Megana:** Peter asks, “I’ve been curious about this question for years. I’m a screenwriting nut like everyone else here, but in my chill time I love to research the projects of my favorite writers. IMDb never has them all. This I’ve known since the ’90s. I scrounge through trade articles as best I can to find them. For example, I’ve confirmed that Sheldon Turner has set up or been attached to at least 104 projects in film and television as a producer and/or writer. Something like 84 of those were scripts he’s worked on and been paid for since he broke into the biz in 2000. My question is, does the WGA have a database that has a list of every project every writer has been paid for in their careers, specs, rewrites, adaptations, script doctor jobs, and quick onset polishes?”
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Peter, so Sheldon Turner, a busy screenwriter for sure. He came in really about the same time as me and Craig, so he would have a bunch. I don’t know that I have 104. I have a lot.
**Craig:** I don’t know how many I have.
**John:** The second part of your question is does the WGA have a database of every project? Yeah. If you’ve been paid by somebody, a WGA signatory to do work, yeah, it’s in the database there. That is-
**Craig:** Wait.
**John:** … a record that you worked on that project, but not a public thing. That’s just behind the scenes. If you want to check for yourself, all the checks you’ve… No, there’s not a public-facing thing for that, because those aren’t movies that came out in the world. They’re just development projects.
**Craig:** Also, there’s not a database that shows the things that you’ve just been employed on, because part of the credit system is that we say, “Look, here is the credit for this movie.” Now we’ve started changing it. The point is, there isn’t like, “Oh, and here’s the 80 people that were employed on it.” No, there is not a public database with such a thing. Of course, the Writer’s Guild is aware, because you have to pay dues every time you’re employed, so they know. When it says he’s been set up or been attached to, I don’t even… Been attached to is a weird thing.
**John:** It’s a weird thing. It doesn’t mean anything.
**Craig:** Sometimes I’ll see these articles in the trades where someone’s like a writer’s been attached to something. First of all, I don’t want any article about me ever. Then second of all, I can’t imagine having an article that says I’m attached to something. That’s almost like, “So-and-so has asked this girl out on a date. Did she say yes?”
**John:** I think attached as a writer is a strange thing to me. I’d get I guess if there was a book, and this writer’s attached to do the adaptation. Attached as a director means something, although directors will attach themselves to 19,000 things they’ll never do.
**Craig:** Precisely.
**John:** Actors will attach themselves to things they’ll never actually do. Also, you’re saying 104 projects that he’s a producer and/or writer. Some of those producer projects there may not be really a record for, because if he’s just producing a movie and he’s not actually writing on the movie, there’s not going to be a WGA contract. He’s not getting paid as a writer. We won’t know to what degree those things were real.
**Craig:** Do you know how there are words that suddenly pop up in our business that are annoying, but people start to use them all the time in meetings and things?
**John:** Mm-hmm.
**Craig:** You know what I’m talking about, like little weird metaphors and things?
**John:** Yeah. “At the end of the day,” happened.
**Craig:** Exactly, the blank of it all showed up 10 years ago and never stopped. I don’t know, it must’ve been 70 years ago, someone said, “No, this person hasn’t been hired or anything, but they’re attached to it.” That became this cool, new, hip thing to say. Now we just accept it, like that it’s a thing. It’s not. It’s just dumb words that don’t mean anything. What does that even mean?
**John:** It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just like hip-pocket deal or something, like wait.
**Craig:** What does that mean? “This agent hip-pocketed me.” They don’t represent you. That’s what that means. That means they chose to not represent-
**John:** They represent you if you’re getting work but not if you’re not getting work.
**Craig:** Exactly, so you don’t have an agent. That’s what that means. You’re attached to something, so they haven’t paid you? Okay, I’m attached to everything. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything.
**John:** I’m trying to attach myself to the Van Halen movie, which does not exist but I believe should exist.
**Craig:** No, you have attached yourself to it.
**John:** I have attached myself.
**Craig:** You have officially attached yourself to the Van Halen movie.
**John:** It’s in the transcripts. People will be able to Google it, like John August attached to the Van Halen movie.
**Craig:** You’re attached to it, absolutely, completely. I’m attached to Scarlett Johansson.
**John:** Do you know Scarlett? Scarlett’s great.
**Craig:** I don’t know her.
**John:** I like her a lot.
**Craig:** I don’t know her.
**John:** I just saw a clip of her on Kelly Clarkson, and she was [crosstalk 00:50:11].
**Craig:** I’ll tell you this much. I know that she married a guy from Staten Island, so that means I got a chance.
**John:** She also married a guy from Vancouver.
**Craig:** Wow. I’ve been to Vancouver. I don’t know. I’m already married. You know what, Scarlett? How about this? No. I’m turning you down. I’m already married.
**John:** You’re already attached.
**Craig:** We are no longer attached, Scarlett.
**John:** Wow. Good stuff.
**Craig:** Brutal.
**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, I see what’s here, and I don’t know what this is. Talk to us about your One Cool Thing.
**Craig:** This is an advance. This is a One Cool Thing amuse-bouche for what is almost certainly going to be my next One Cool Thing. My next One Cool Thing, there is a game coming from Rusty Lake. You’ve played the Rusty Lake games, right?
**John:** Oh, yeah, I’ve played Rusty Lake games.
**Craig:** They’re amazing. There’s a game forthcoming to Rusty Lake called The Past Within. The Past Within is coming out on November 2nd. That will happen-
**John:** The day before the live-
**Craig:** Oh my goodness, that’s coming. The Past Within, the forthcoming Rusty Lake game, is unique in that it requires two people to play it. The idea is that you are both on the app at the same time. You’re either in the same room or you’re talking over Discord or the phone or whatever. You need to cooperate, because you’re each seeing things on your version of the game as Player 1 or Player 2 that impacts how the other person is going to solve a puzzle. As an amuse-bouche, there is a game that does this very same thing. It is called Tick Tock: A Tale For Two. It’s been out for a bit. Let’s see. It looks like it came out in 2017 actually. It’s lovely. I played it with Melissa. You can play this with Mike. You can play it with Amy. Play it with whomever you want. Not Lambert. He is a dog. He’s stupid.
**John:** He’s sleeping too.
**Craig:** He’s sleeping and he’s dumb. It was quite gorgeous. The puzzles were very good. I thought they implemented the back and forth in a very smart way. It was engaging. What I liked about it was that we never got frustrated with each other. It was more like we really had to cooperate. It’s a short game. I think there’s only three chapters in it, or there’s a prologue and three chapters. It’s quite beautiful. The story makes no sense whatsoever. None. That happens all the time.
**John:** They get a mechanic [crosstalk 00:52:35].
**Craig:** Narrative is hard. I get it. The story is really just, what? Then again, the Rusty Lake folks, their stories make sense, but purposefully also don’t make sense.
**John:** They’re surreal.
**Craig:** They’re fully surreal, so I give them a pass on everything. They’re wonderful. I think Tick Tock: A Tale For Two is a very fun game. It is on literally every possible platform. Check that one out if you have somebody you like playing games with, in a good way, not like head games.
**John:** Sounds good. My One Cool Thing is Whisper by OpenAI. OpenAI are the people who do Dall-E. They have these giant train models of searching the whole internet to figure out what things are. They’ve been able to make Dall-E. Whisper is their version of a spoken language. Basically, it listens to countless hours of people talking and can understand what they’re saying and can give you transcriptions, and nearly real-time transcriptions of what people are saying. Craig and Megana, I have a link in the Workflowy here. Click through that and take a listen to this demo. I want you to see what it is you’re hearing.
[unintelligible audio clip plays]
**John:** Craig and Megana, what was it that you heard?
**Craig:** I’ll go first. That was Scottish. It was a Scotsman speaking with a strong Scottish accent. I heard helmet. I heard three holes. I heard something about weather. The rest of it was unintelligible to me.
**Megana:** I heard something about Merlin, but it was a Scottish accent. It was a man with a Scottish accent who was outside. There was a lot of bird noises.
**Craig:** Yes, I heard the birds as well.
**John:** Great. This is the actual transcription. “One of the most famous landmarks on the borders. It’s three hills, and the myth is that Merlin the magician split one hill in three and left the two hills at the back of us, which you can see. The weather is never good though. We stayed on the borders with the mists on the Yildens or Eildons. We never get the good weather, and as you can see today, there’s no sunshine. It’s a typical Scottish borders day.”
**Craig:** Wow.
**John:** The model could actually figure out what this guy was saying, which is really impressive.
**Craig:** Wow.
**Megana:** Wow.
**Craig:** I thought he was saying holes and helmet, and he was saying hills. You got Merlin right.
**John:** You got Merlin. You got Merlin.
**Craig:** Well done, Megana.
**Megana:** Thank you.
**Craig:** Boy, that is… Wow. The program understood? It knew that that’s what that guy was saying?
**John:** It did. It was able to take that. Even with some of the tools we’re using to do Scriptnotes, we have transcription stuff built in, but it’s really trained on very specific English accents. It’s murky at times and doesn’t get a good sense of this. Here, because they trained it on all the languages, it can hear French and give you a real-time transcription in English. It’s really impressive. As great as all of the “draw me a flying cow” stuff has been, this is so useful and practical. You can imagine a year from now, five years from now, how important and impressive this is going to be.
**Craig:** We’re getting close to that day where everybody understands everybody. Then we can all be yelling at each other faster.
**John:** That’s what you want.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** Speed. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
**Craig:** What?
**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** No!
**John:** Our outro this week is by MCL Karman. If hearing this outro has inspired you to write one of your own, let us provide you with some motivation, because we really do need some more outros. Send us your outros to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Hoodies too. 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 insects. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.
**Megana:** Thank you!
**Craig:** Thank you!
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Megana, you have an insect infestation in your apartment, correct?
**Craig:** Infested.
**Megana:** Yes, absolutely. My place is overrun.
**John:** How many did you see?
**Megana:** So far, I have seen one earwig.
**Craig:** Oh my god. Oh my god. This is like that Creepshow episode where the guy was completely surrounded by cockroaches. You are surrounded by ones of bugs.
**Megana:** I went to bed at 8 p.m. last night because I saw this in my living room, and I was like, “I can’t.”
**Craig:** Wait a second. I got to roll back. You in your 20s went to bed at 8 p.m. like somebody who lives in a rest home, because you saw… Now, by the way, I hate earwigs. We can discuss my horrible run-in with an earwig many, many years ago. It sent you to bed. You were that shaken. You had to get into bed. Did you fall asleep?
**Megana:** I did not fall asleep, no, actually, because once I identified what this bug was, and I Googled earwigs, the second entry that came up on Google… You know how they have those suggested questions?
**Craig:** Yes.
**Megana:** The second entry was, “Can earwigs get in your bed?” The answer was yes.
**Craig:** Of course they can.
**John:** They are mobile.
**Craig:** Exactly. They’re mobile. Unless your bed is surrounded by some sort of force field, yes.
**John:** A moat would be a choice.
**Megana:** I don’t know, I don’t really think of spiders as being in your bed.
**Craig:** Oh, they are.
**John:** Oh my god, I’ve had spiders in my bed.
**Megana:** Oh my god.
**Craig:** Did you not know?
**John:** I’ve been bit by spiders in my bed in college.
**Craig:** Absolutely. I get bit by spiders. We have so many spiders in La Cañada. I get bit by them all the time.
**John:** That’s why he’s moving.
**Craig:** You wake up, and you have a bite. It’s not itchy. It’s just a bite. You’re like, “The hell is this?” Then you realize it’s a spider.
**Megana:** I guess I just had this willful ignorance that bugs-
**Craig:** Respect your bed?
**Megana:** Yeah.
**Craig:** They know, like, “You know what? Guys, she’s in bed. Let’s leave her. It’s her private place.” No, they don’t care. They don’t care.
**John:** While Megana’s dealing with her one earwig, at our house, because of all the heat… This happens whenever it gets super, super hot. A bunch of ants get into our house.
**Craig:** They look for water.
**John:** Ants just suck, and they’re annoying. You see the line going through. It’s like, “Why are you here?” Their entire mission is to get to one little piece of toothpaste that is left on the counter. That’s going to be their meal for the whole colony.
**Megana:** Aw.
**John:** It’s so, so much.
**Craig:** See, the bugs in your house are cute. The bugs in her house are nightmares that need to be extinguished in fire.
**Megana:** Absolutely.
**John:** Then we put out the ant traps. The ant traps do work. It takes the poison, and it kills the colony eventually. It is still just so annoying to have ants and to wake up in the morning and see now there’s a new line headed from point A to point B [crosstalk 01:00:00].
**Craig:** There is a real life horror show when you pick something up… I was actually at a hotel a couple of months ago. It was a really nice hotel, but they had an ant problem. I lifted something, and a billion ants went nyah. I was like, “Oh, god.”
**John:** As we established last week on the podcast, there’s 40 quadrillion ants on Earth. Ants outnumber us 25 million to 1.
**Craig:** There are so many.
**John:** They’re going to win.
**Craig:** No, they already have won. That’s the joke. We are here on ant planet. We have all of our debates. We fight wars where millions of us die. Ants are like, “What? I’m sorry, millions? Lol. That’s not a number. Call us when you’re into the trillions. We’re in the quadrillions, jerks.” We’re just guests on ant planet.
**John:** Craig, you promised us the earwig story, which we heard pre-show. Obviously, this earwig changed your life, and we want to hear about it.
**Craig:** I’m so angry about it. Growing up on the East Coast, I just never saw one. I assume there are earwigs on the East Coast, but there weren’t any in New York. There weren’t any in New Jersey as far as I could tell.
**John:** You had roaches.
**Craig:** Roaches, of course.
**John:** I hate roaches. I did not see roaches until I came to Los Angeles.
**Craig:** Roaches in New York, sometimes they’ll cosign a lease with you. That’s no problem, but earwigs, no. I’m in LA. I’m in West Hollywood walking down… I believe it was Fountain. I believe I was on Fountain, John.
**John:** Take Fountain.
**Craig:** I suddenly feel this stingy, pinchy, nasty, bitey pain on my neck, like on the nape of my neck. I reach my hand back, spasm, like ah, and there’s something there, which is the worst feeling in the world. You never want to feel anything. You just want to feel your own skin.
**John:** You want it to be an illusion.
**Craig:** You just want to think, “Oh, this was one of those weird exogenous, no, endogenous pains that just come out of nowhere,” but no, there’s something there. I’m like, “Ah!” I throw it down. Then it’s on the ground. It’s on the concrete. I look down at it, and it’s a fricking earwig. I didn’t even know what it was called.
**John:** Because we have international listeners who may not know what an earwig is, we’re describing an insect that is maybe an inch long. Is that the size for both of yours?
**Craig:** Yeah, I would say.
**Megana:** I would say five inches.
**Craig:** That’s not correct, Megana.
**John:** [Crosstalk 01:02:14] five inches.
**Craig:** At all.
**John:** Largely flat. It has just way too many body parts and limbs to it. It’s flat and [crosstalk 01:02:23].
**Craig:** The worst part is-
**Megana:** It has this weird pincer thing.
**Craig:** That’s the thing, its butt.
**John:** That’s the thing.
**Craig:** Its butt has two pincers sticking out of it like a lobster claw. It bites you for no reason. I didn’t ask it. First of all, how did it get on my neck? How did it get on my neck?
**John:** Did it drop? Did it climb up to it?
**Craig:** It dropped down. It paratrooped down onto me. Then it bit me. That’s the thing. Essentially, it bit me with its ass. It ass-bites you. It doesn’t die. At least bees have the dignity to die. They sting you, their stinger breaks off, and they die. You think, “You sacrificed yourself stupidly, but fine.” There’s some poetry to that. No, not this little bastard. This little thing just bites you for no reason. To that day, I have hated earwigs. We’re talking about 20 years, 30 years, still, if I feel a sudden pain, I think earwig. I’ve never been bitten by one again, or ass-bitten.
**John:** We cannot discuss insects without discussing the worst of all insects and the insect that must just be banished from the Earth, which is the mosquito, because when you and I moved to Los Angeles, Craig-
**Craig:** There were none.
**John:** … there were not mosquitoes.
**Craig:** There were none. It was actually one of the best things about coming from the East Coast, which is 98% mosquito, to Los Angeles where there were none. No one ever got a mosquito bite.
**John:** Then we imported some sort of-
**Craig:** What the hell happened?
**John:** Apparently, it was a slow roll-up from the South or some other place. We got these little mosquitoes that are down on the ground level.
**Craig:** They bite your ankles.
**John:** They’re ever-present. They’re always biting your ankles.
**Craig:** Ankles.
**John:** They’re the worst.
**Craig:** The worst. They’re just so terrible. Megana, I can’t explain what a paradise it was here. I have a friend named Linus Upson. I’ve known him since college. I think I’ve talked about this before. He was the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google Chrome. He’s since moved on to a much more noble effort, which is trying to get rid of mosquitoes entirely.
**John:** Love it.
**Craig:** He has one of these groups that is essentially genetically engineering a mosquito to… The women are the problem. The male mosquitoes don’t bite you and make you itchy. It’s the females, apparently.
**Megana:** Oh, really?
**Craig:** Yeah, apparently it’s entirely the females. Basically, they’re genetically engineering these male mosquitoes to only get female mosquitoes pregnant with male mosquitoes. I’m probably butchering this. The point is, through some crazy breeding thing, they’re going to get rid of mosquitoes. Basically, the population eventually just goes completely sterile. They run out of women and they die.
**John:** [Crosstalk 01:05:12].
**Craig:** Like a lot of the corners of the internet. All the girls are gone, and it’s just guys angry at each other, and then it’s over. Mosquitoes are awful. They have been killing people forever with malaria. They’re no good. They’re everywhere now.
**John:** Their role in the food chain must exist, but it’s not substantial. Some bats and other things eat them, but we’ll make it work.
**Craig:** Exactly. I feel like we’ll be okay. We’ll be okay without them. It’s not like ants. We probably need ants to decompose everything.
**John:** They do. They help chop stuff up, which is really useful.
**Craig:** Help chop stuff up. Do we need roaches? Probably not, although again, they probably also break down a lot of garbage. They do show up where the garbage is. Maybe there’s a reason, but mosquitoes?
**John:** My first year at USC in grad school, I was living in campus housing. I had never encountered roaches before. I was in this apartment I shared with a guy. At one point, I unplugged the power adapter for my phone answering machine. This is way back in phone answering machine time. I unplug it, and all these tiny baby roaches were swarming around it because of the heat of the transformer for the adapter. That’s where I first learned about boric acid, the powder acid that you put out that they walk through and it kills them horribly. It’s the worst. Finding a roach on my pillow one morning was just-
**Megana:** Oh, no, your bed?
**Craig:** That’s terrible.
**John:** … terrifying.
**Craig:** That’s terrible.
**John:** I still have nightmares from that.
**Craig:** We’re not helping. Megana, we haven’t talked about spiders much. Do you hate spiders? Are you afraid of spiders?
**Megana:** I am very afraid of spiders. I do not like them. I feel like I’m slowly making my peace. Is the spider going to eat this earwig?
**Craig:** That’s the thing. The spider is your friend. My daughter is terrified of spiders. She will fly out of her room in tears over this. I’ve tried to explain to her that these little spiders that we get in our house, they’re wolf spiders, they’re not going to be a problem. That said, we do have a lot of black widow spiders up where we are. Megana, can I tell you a little bit of a ghost story about the black widow spiders?
**Megana:** Okay.
**Craig:** I’m going to get real close to the microphone. Here we go. When my daughter was young, she was in the Girl Scouts. One day, we had a Girl Scout event at the house. The girls, as the evening came, they wanted to sleep outside, like camping. We had tents. We have this pretty large lawn on our property, down in the back of the property. We set up the tents. Me and another dad were setting up the tents. There’s this little retaining wall with these little river rocks in it that bound that little lawn area. As the sun went down, the other dad was shining a light, and he said, “What are those?”
**Megana:** No.
**Craig:** Yeah, and I shone my light on the wall, and Megana, I’m not saying there was a black widow or 5 or 10. There was thousands of them.
**Megana:** What?
**Craig:** Thousands, all emerging, because they had been living inside the wall, in the cracks of the rocks. As the temperature lowered, they came out. They were swarming, all of them, black widows. I said, “Okay, let’s calmly get these tents down, go back inside.” Here’s the thing. I didn’t think that the black widows were going to be leaving the wall. It was like, “There’s a lot of them, so let’s go back inside and tell the girls they’re sleeping inside, because… We’ll just make something up.” I can’t remember what we made up. Wolves. “There are wolves.”
**John:** Wolves.
**Craig:** Megana, you would’ve died.
**Megana:** I would’ve died. I’m very close right now. Is that real? Do they live that close to each other?
**John:** They can. They can live in groups.
**Craig:** Why are you asking John, as if I told you a lie? Megana, first of all, John’s not a bug expert.
**John:** I have been bitten by a black widow spider. I’m, out of all the people on this call, the only person-
**Megana:** He’s a Boy Scout.
**John:** … to actually survive a black widow spider.
**Craig:** He is a Boy Scout. That is true.
**John:** I used the venom extraction tool and got it all out and was fine.
**Craig:** That’s good. Did you think that black widow spiders were just loners, where they’re like, “I don’t want to talk to another black widow spider.”
**Megana:** Yeah, I thought you would just, worst-case scenario, see one.
**John:** I’ve only seen one at a time in my life.
**Craig:** There were so many of them. I’m looking up swarm of black widow spiders right now on the internet.
**Megana:** I’m so glad you’re moving.
**John:** He’s going to bring the spiders with him though.
**Megana:** I just want to put out a request to our listeners. If anyone is cool with bugs and they want to be my friend or if they have a good solution for being really scared of bugs, I would love to hear either possibility.
**John:** To be honest, cognitive behavioral therapy is probably the way to get through any of those kind of phobias. Basically, they desensitize you to it.
**Craig:** Some things we’re supposed to be afraid of.
**John:** It’s an overreaction of a natural innate fear.
**Craig:** Megana, you’re supposed to be afraid of black widow spiders.
**John:** We’re hardwired to be afraid of snakes. You can show a baby monkey a piece of hose, and they’ll freak out because, oh, it’s a snake.
**Craig:** (singing)
**John:** We need more baby monkeys, less black widows.
**Craig:** Aw, baby monkeys.
**John:** Aw.
**Craig:** Megana, you’re not afraid of baby monkeys, are you?
**Megana:** I’m not, but monkeys are vicious.
**Craig:** Oh, wow. You’re not wrong.
**Megana:** Growing up, going back to India all the time, monkeys are more of a pest than I think people realize.
**Craig:** I saw those things where in the early days of the shutdown of COVID, there was a town. It was a village. It was a city in India where everyone had just gotten off the street because of the shutdown, and the monkeys took over. Oh my god. They were fighting each other, like monkey gangs fighting. It was amazing.
**John:** Eventually, they formed a society of their own. Were there problems? Yes, but eventually they found a good leader and democracy ruled.
**Craig:** Damn dirty apes.
**John:** Thanks, guys.
**Megana:** Thank you.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**John:** Bye.
**Craig:** Bye.
Links:
* [Starbucks Seam Life Hack](https://www.reddit.com/r/lifehacks/comments/16pvai/does_your_starbucks_cup_leak_sometimes_make_sure/)
* [John Scalzi’s Blogpost: Find the Time or Don’t](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/09/16/writing-find-the-time-or-dont/)
* [Happy The Last of Us Day!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBRRDpQ0yc0) Check out this trailer.
* [Whisper by Open AI](https://openai.com/blog/whisper/)
* [Tick Tock the Game](https://www.ticktockthegame.com)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by MCL Karman ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
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