The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/basic-instincts).
**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a little bit of swearing. I use the F-word, and I use it in a non-PG13-safe way. If you have a kid listening to this show, and you don’t want them to hear the F-word, just a heads up.
**Craig Mazin:** But they should hear it.
**John:** Yeah. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 611 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, why are characters doing what they’re doing? We often talk about motivation in terms of high-level wants like love and pride and jealousy, but what about those base animalistic desires? We’ll look at how those inform characters both on the scene and story level. Then that movie you loved, that TV show you devoured, that book that changed your life, will you be able to find it next year?
**Craig:** No.
**John:** We’ll discuss the impermanence of media in the age of digitization and how to think about it as consumers and creators, Craig. Also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, Craig, do you want to talk about swimming?
**Craig:** Okay.
**John:** I have this weird relationship with swimming, because it’s one of those few things where humans are born able to swim, but then they forget to swim. Then if you aren’t taught how to swim-
**Craig:** Really?
**John:** … you just have this whole weird relationship with swimming. I want to talk about swimming.
**Craig:** I have a different swimming experience than you, I think.
**John:** Great. I’m excited.
**Craig:** We’ll find out.
**John:** Cool. We always push listener questions to the end of the episode, and I feel like they’re rushed, so I thought we would start with some listener questions this week, Craig.
**Craig:** Thank god.
**John:** Thank god. I know you’ve been clamoring for this for years.
**Craig:** I honestly love listener questions, because it matches my lack of preparation perfectly. It’s the perfect thing for an improv artist.
**John:** You are an improv artist. That’s what we learned.
**Craig:** I’m an artist.
**John:** You are an artist. Drew, start us off. What questions do you have for us?
**Drew Marquardt:** The first one comes from Wren. They write, “How close is writing for movies and TV to writing for comics? The way I do it and have seen it done resembles scripts for animated series quite a bit, but I also don’t know how close those are to live action. Have either of you ever been curious or even dabbled in comics?”
**John:** Craig, have you written any stuff for comics or for graphic novels?
**Craig:** No, sir.
**John:** I’m doing one right now. I was familiar with the form beforehand, but this is my first time actually writing in it. There’s not one standardized format the same way there is for screenplays. All screenplays look kind of the same. Different writers and different studios will do things a little bit different for how they format stuff. A lot of it’s done in Word, but sometimes people are using screenwriting software. I’m using Highland for it.
What I’m doing looks like a screenplay except that panels I’m putting in brackets. You can see the screen description for that panel is in a bracket, and then there’s dialogue that goes with it as part of that. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s been a bit more of an adjustment than I expected it to be. You have to be thinking more visually than what I would do in a screenplay, because I’m really thinking about how is this flowing across the page, what is the bottom of the page, now I’m turning to the next page. Not every writer is doing that, but that’s worked really well for me and the artists I’m working with.
**Craig:** I think maybe the only script I’ve ever seen for a comic or graphic novel is, I’ve read some of Neil Gaiman’s original writing material that was then used for Sandman, which is a glorious piece of art. I mean, god, if people have not read the Sandman series, all of it, they really need to. It’s just remarkable.
**John:** Last year or the year before, I read Sandman. I got the giant hardback book. It’s terrific.
**Craig:** It’s incredible and kind of mind-bending. Neil has promised to come on the show. We keep missing him as he’s out here or he’s over there. We have to figure it out, because he’s just a giant. It was fascinating to read.
It reminded me more than anything of the writing I did way, way back in the very beginning of my career, when I was working in advertising, because in ad copy, at least back then, it was a two-column thing. On one side, there was the things that the person would say, and on the other side was what you would see. You were learning how to write audio and visual side by side, in a column, which is fascinating. In a way, it makes more sense. I think we’ve talked about this on another episode before. It allows you to match the words with the visuals in parallel, as opposed to in sequence, which is what we do.
I don’t know if you’ve run into this, John. When you’re writing a screenplay, there’s a bit of action that really needs to come after the dialogue to have the punch you want. However, once you read it, you understand it’s supposed to have happened during what the person said. You have a choice. You can either put it before or you can put it after. Neither is correct. That’s an interesting aspect of that format that I really like. I’ve never done it. Wren, dive in and tell us how it goes.
**John:** Yeah. I would say most of the graphic novel stuff I’ve read has been more towards a screenplay format recently. I looked at some DC books. It looks more like a screenplay, although sometimes dialogue isn’t centered the way we do it in screenplays. But it feels kind of like that. There’s a wide range of way to do it.
I think it makes sense that it is kind of like what we are used to with scripts, because it is just about, here’s the visuals, here’s the dialogue that’s happening. You can emphasize sound effects the same way you want to do it. But you have many of the same limitations that you’re not able to… You’re generally not describing what things feel like or smell like or anything else. You’re not doing other book kind of stuff in a graphic novel. Cool. What else do we have for a question?
**Drew:** Ian writes, “What’s your take on the use of photo-real de-aging and how it will or will not influence what is written? Do you think audiences will learn to accept de-aged actors such that there will be studio push for scripts that feature performances from actors who are beyond their prime or even deceased? If so, as writers, would you approach a script differently if you knew that the film or series was going to feature a 30-year-old Steve McQueen or Sidney Poitier? Or you can fill in the blank. At what point do writers have to consider the technical capabilities of the medium or the audience’s ability to believe what they are seeing? Or are all of these issues an answer to why it will never become widely used in cinema?”
**Craig:** Currently, de-aging is weird. We’re definitely in the uncanny valley zone. It’s not necessarily because the visual effects work itself isn’t perfect. I think it is a little bit more just going, “That’s not how that person looks.”
We actually did an experiment on de-aging Pedro Pascal, because in the first 20 minutes of the first episode of The Last of Us, he’s supposed to be in his 30s, and then we jump ahead and he’s in his 50s. Pedro’s in his 40s. As it turned out, with a little bit of makeup on either end, we were able to make it look like he was 20 years apart. I can’t even imagine how much money we saved on that in terms of aging. It’s much easier, obviously, to age somebody with practical makeup.
The de-aging itself was impressive, but the fact that I said impressive kind of gives away the problem. It needs to be unnoticeable, in a sense. We may get there.
What strikes me is that people still psychologically value authenticity, and so anybody can have a really close reproduction of the Mona Lisa hanging in their home. Brushstroke for brushstroke, there are people out there who are making these beautiful replicas of the Mona Lisa. Sometimes forgers make such close copies that experts really struggle to tell the difference, and yet everyone is obsessed with knowing if it’s real or not, because we value it. We just do.
So we could keep certain people alive. I think everybody will just value it accordingly, which is to say it’s copy. There’s just something in our minds. We are aware that copies are less then. When it comes to performances and human beings, especially when we’re being asked to care and feel, authenticity does seem to matter. But who knows? Once the robots take over, who gives a shit?
**John:** Craig, you talked about authenticity. And I think that’s a nuance I want to dig into here, because it’s one thing if you have a 30-year-old Sidney Poitier suddenly showing up in your movie. That’s inauthentic. We know that Sidney Poitier was not there at all. But if you were de-aging Joel for 20 minutes in your show, that’s not really inauthentic, because you could’ve done it with makeup or someone else.
I think audiences aren’t going to necessarily feel different about like, that person was never even there versus, okay, we used some fakery on this, because makeup and other things could be used for that fakery. Yes, we will get to the point where we’re not going to see it, just the same way that most visual effects you see in movies you don’t realize are visual effects, because it’s just gotten so good. We’re going to stop noticing it, and we’ll only know that like, oh, Ryan Reynolds was 20 years old there and is now 40 years old. Something must’ve been done. You’re not going to see the seams, the way the uncanny valley problem that we’ve had up to this point.
The Indiana Jones movie, the last one, the visual effects on de-aging him were really good. I didn’t necessarily love that sequence, but I wasn’t taken out of it really by his face. That was the best version of that I’ve ever seen.
**Craig:** Yeah. What you’re getting at is that there is an inability for us to make the relative distinction. If you show me the real person and then you show me that person very old or very young or whatever, then I know, okay, it’s movie magic, but it’s fine. They’re really there. I think it’s the really there part.
One thing that’s interesting about makeup is the person is still there. When we de-age with VFX, we’re not sure the person is still there. That could be a different person, actually.
**John:** Yeah. It could be a face replacement, really.
**Craig:** That’s the thing. You start to lose the connection to the person. That gets tricky. That’s where I start to wonder how this will all go. But again, who knows? By the way, people may be listening to this podcast for the next million years, because Craig bot and John bot just keep going.
**John:** We do.
**Craig:** Oh, wait, did you just give it away?
**John:** Oh, sorry, yes. It’s already out there.
**Craig:** You mean they do. You gave it away. People have just been listening to ChatGPT for the last 12 years. That could happen. Everybody passes the Turing test all the time, all day long. Nobody knows who’s real. Nobody knows who’s not real. And so at that point, authenticity and reality and the concepts of those things completely dissipate and become irrelevant. But until such a time, I do think that when we start to wonder if the person that we care about is there, then we start to distance ourselves from the work.
**John:** Absolutely. We’re recording this in 2023, so we should say this is a live issue in the SAG-AFTRA Strike right now is the concern over use of an actor’s likeness, and so use beyond the grave and also how you’re using them in the course of a film or TV show. De-aging is part of that. So we’ll see. What else do we have for questions?
**Craig:** Christian writes, “If many viewers are watching with captions on, as a recent New York Times article claims, then what does that mean for screenwriting? Reading is a somewhat different experience than listening. It makes sense to me that a writer would approach something meant to be read differently than something meant to be only heard out loud. Should we lean into the fact that viewers are reading lines and not just listening?”
**John:** My instinct is no. I think it’s good to be aware that people are recently turning on the subtitles for stuff. There may be some reasons in specifically what you’re writing that you might want to call that out, like, “In the subtitles, people will see that they’re actually saying this,” or like, “Don’t subtitle this.” There may be specific reasons why you want to do that. No, I don’t see myself changing my writing at all based on the fact that some people are going to be watching this with subtitles on. Craig?
**Craig:** No. No. Subtitles are after the fact. It’s not our problem. I really don’t care. What I’m doing is making this for people to watch and listen. However, if they are deaf and need to read the subtitles, if they don’t speak English and need to read subtitles, fine.
**John:** Great. Love it.
**Craig:** Because look, when I watch a movie with subtitles, the reading happens without my conscious awareness. It just happens. It all goes away. The reason that people are doing this is because they’re able to do some other things while they’re watching it. My sense is, if they really, really care about something, they’ll probably focus on it. We should not anticipate that. That is a path to weirdness. Real weirdness. Just ignore it. Let it happen.
**John:** In our household, we are not default subtitles on, but for certain things, like my daughter loves to watch Love Island UK, and we have to turn it on, because it otherwise doesn’t make sense. There have been moments in theaters in the last year or two where it has felt like, oh, I wish I could turn the subtitles on, because the way this is mixed, the way the accents are hitting me, I’m having a hard time following every word of this, which is the nice thing about subtitles.
**Craig:** It’s really interesting, this whole thing about mixing and dialogue, because it’s been a topic of great conversation over the last few years.
A little inside story about weirdo Craig. The guys who did the sound mixing for Chernobyl deservedly won Emmys. Excellent team. The first time they played back the first episode, I left. I said, “Thank you. I need some air.” Then I walked out, and I walked for 40 minutes in London, lost myself somewhere. But really what I wanted to do was walk in front of a bus, because it sounded completely wrong.
I went back, and I said, “Okay, I’ve taken my walk. I feel better. Let’s talk about what’s going on here, because everything sounds very, very weird to me.” What they explained was that they had made a choice, which they were happy to unmake, that was based in part on feedback from the BBC. Not that we made Chernobyl for the BBC, but everything in the UK, a lot of it is driven by the BBC, because the BBC is this huge broadcaster, and they kind of set a lot of standards.
What happened was, elderly people, who comprise a great percentage of BBC watchers, had been complaining constantly that the dialogue just wasn’t loud enough. What the BBC started asking for was louder dialogue that was more centered in the speakers. Now, what that meant for me was everybody sounded too loud and also in the middle of the room, even though they were on two different sides of the room, which sent me into a full spin-out. Now, the guys worked all night. I came back the next day. Mwah, perfect. And so it went from there.
I was interested in that conversation, because on the other side, in the US, there’s been a proliferation of sound effects that are so loud and so obscuring that dialogue gets muddled into nothing. And it is hard to hear dialogue, because people just aren’t taking the time that’s required to really mix things beautifully. Dialogue is in and of itself the most important sound, I think, that’s coming out of your speakers.
Also, a lot of mixers don’t take the time, like the wonderful folks that mixed The Last of Us, to play things back through a regular TV. So most people don’t have a 5.1 or 7.1 system. They’ve got left, center, right, or sometimes just left and right. And what will it sound like there?
So mixing things to sound good across all those things is really difficult, and I hear shows that fail at it all the time. We’ve seen movies that failed at it, where I’m like, what happened here? Did no one care? I think maybe nobody cared.
**John:** I think they had other priorities. A thing I’ve noticed in sound mixes is that the people who are in the room know what’s being said, and so therefore they stop listening for whether it’s actually understandable. If you’re the director, you know exactly what’s happening, so you know what they’re saying, and so you don’t need to listen for it. A stranger would not know that. Just like it’s great to have fresh eyes, it’s great to have fresh ears on something. And you were fresh ears in that sound mix.
Now, here’s a question for you. It’s something that may already exist in the world. I’m just not aware of it. I’m thinking back to when I ride on the Peloton, one of the choices I can make is I can adjust the sound for more music or more trainer. I can adjust the mix between the trainer and the music, which makes sense, because they’re micced separately. To what degree can we do that now with 5.1 mixing? Is dialogue on its own track in a way that a TV setting could be adjusted to say, like, emphasize dialogue?
**Craig:** No, nor should it be, because down that road is a nightmare. It’s a little bit like giving people control over, I don’t know, the focus. It’s an artistic choice of how we mix things. Hopefully, people are paying attention, as they should.
I am particularly obsessed with mixing. What we can do is emphasize certain frequencies. Things are mixed together. You have all these channels. Obviously, when you’re doing a mix, you have your dialogue channels, your sound effects, your music, and then the music is broken out into stems. But then things get mixed down into sub-mixes and then eventually into one big mix, which then goes out, and here’s what it is.
In most AV receivers, which are the things that are processing your audio for a nicer television system at home, there are some audio settings that emphasize certain frequencies. So the human voice exists in a particular range. Male voices are here. Female voices are here. And then music, you have, everyone’s familiar with bass and treble, but the EQ, roughly. There are certain instruments that are very human voice-like. It’s the saxophone or the oboe or something. Then on the high end you’ve got your crash cymbals, and on the low end you’ve got your bass. And you can emphasize certain things slightly.
But the thing that I am hoping for, that we eventually get… And this is one of the areas where Chris… When Chris McQuarrie and I agree violently on something-
**John:** Dangerous.
**Craig:** … then it’s a thing. One of the things we agree violently on, and I know our friend Rian Johnson is a similar acolyte of this religion, is turning off the goddamn motion smoothing on your TV.
**John:** Oh, of course, yes.
**Craig:** What we’re hoping for is that eventually we can code into our content certain settings that are required, that if you want to watch this movie, it’s going to tell your TV to turn off the goddamn motion smoothing. Or I guess we did a language warning. Turn off the fucking motion smoothing, for the love of god. Similarly, it would be nice if it could also send an EQ and say, “This is how we think your EQ should be for listening to this based on what array of speakers you have.”
And if we could do that, and there could be a system that essentially responds to that, which is, by the way, not hard to do. I don’t think it’s a hard thing to do in an engineering sense. It really just comes down to somebody making something where they say, “Hey, when you turn this auto setting on, you’re giving the content control over your thing.” Oh, man. Yes, please, please. And by the way, motion smoothing is so fucking stupid to begin with.
**John:** How about you’re watching soccer? That’s I think the best case I’ve seen for motion smoothing. It actually does look like you’re looking through a window at it. It’s better for some sports.
**Craig:** Great. Then make that-
**John:** Listen to me.
**Craig:** Yeah, I know.
**John:** Backing sports here. It should be a sports setting.
**Craig:** It should be an option, like, “Oh, I want to turn this on for sports,” not like, everything looks like Days of Our Lives now. Congrats.
**John:** Yeah, it’s crazy.
**Craig:** I mean, what? And by the way, here’s what blows my fucking mind, now that we’ve got the language warning. No one gives a shit. That’s the thing. I don’t understand. People literally don’t even notice.
**John:** Younger people especially don’t notice it at all. It’s something about our eyes and our brains that we notice it more than other people do. It’s true.
**Craig:** But they go to movies. They see movies. They also watch things on their iPad, which doesn’t have motion smoothing. So they know what it’s supposed to look like. Then they put it on TV, it looks like Days of Our Lives. By the way, Days of Our Lives is fine. It’s just Days of Our Lives is supposed to look like Days of Our Lives. Everything gets turned into, oh, congrats, everything is now in focus. Congrats. Everything is sharp and weird-looking. And they just don’t give a shit.
**John:** Yeah. It’s crazy. So getting back to closed captioning, I want to think about this from an accessibility standpoint. You could say closed captioning is the accessibility standard, because the dialogue is there for you, but that doesn’t help all people who might need to have help with the dialogue.
The podcast app we use to listen to stuff is Overcast. One of the things that Marco Arment built into that is voice boost, which basically scans the podcast ahead and basically emphasizes the voices, makes the voices sound a little bit nicer. And it does genuinely work. I do wonder whether that is going to be the solution down the road is some sort of algorithm or honestly an AI that looks for and listens for the voices and moves them more front and center for people who genuinely need that to happen. That feels like a technology that if it’s not out there today, will be out there in months, because that’s a very doable thing.
**Craig:** Look who’s supporting AI now, you scab. Scab!
**John:** Scab.
**Craig:** Scab! I agree with you.
**John:** It’s an AI over any kind of algorithmic things.
**Craig:** Of course.
**John:** Really, what you were talking about was those frequencies, but basically, the same way that we can take a song and strip out the music and just hear the clean vocals using these systems, they can do that for dialogue.
**Craig:** That makes total sense. I think maybe the medium that is leading the way on accessibility is video games. So video games have started to build in an enormous amount of accessibility features. The Last of Us Part II was the first game where I saw a full array of these things for both sound and visuals, including people who are colorblind, people who have focus issues. They gave you so many different options. That is different to me.
Look, if you have a disability and you cannot experience this content the way a author had hoped, you’re not able to do it, then providing some alternative that, again, the creator has authorized, makes sense to me, whereas giving everybody the ability to just turn up dials left and right because they feel like it doesn’t.
**John:** That’s how you wind up with motion smoothing on all the TVs.
**Craig:** Yep. You know that when Rian is in a Best Buy or something, he’ll just start turning them off on the TVs that are on? I think that’s amazing.
**John:** That’s the first thing I do whenever I go to visit a relative’s house for a holiday is I’ll turn it off without telling them.
**Craig:** They’ll never know.
**John:** They’ll never know.
**Craig:** They’ll never know. You know what? You did what we Jews like to call a mitzvah, John. That’s a mitzvah.
**John:** I knew the mitzvah word. It’s good stuff.
**Craig:** You know that word.
**John:** Let’s leave this high technology behind and go back to some primal instincts here. We often talk about character motivation, what characters want, what characters need. We talk about how want versus need is sort of a trap sometimes. I really want to focus now on not the higher-level things about love and community and support of your trusting spouse, but instead the four Fs, so feeding, fighting, fleeing, and fucking, which are the base level things that all creatures do. It’s how creatures survive. It goes back to Richard Dawkins and the Selfish Gene, that idea that genes want to propagate, and they propagate by staying alive and creating a new generation.
That is also true for our characters. It may not be the top-level thing we think about them, but sometimes it’s good to remind ourselves that these characters we’re making are human beings, and humans are animals, and animals do things for reasons that are kind of hardwired into their brains. I thought we might take a few minutes to talk about that and how it could apply to the stories we’re telling.
**Craig:** When I was studying this in college, the text referred to the four Fs: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating, which we all thought was so funny. This is all very hypothalamic. Your hypothalamus, this is what it does.
I love this topic, because I think we probably begin our careers as writers and our paths as artists aiming ourselves towards complication, because what we’ve been told or what we think we’ve been told is that better art, let’s say, is about the more complicated, subtle aspects of human behavior, not the obvious, dumb things. In fact, there are no complicated aspects. There are simply complicated expressions of these things.
But what we do absolutely comes down to these four Fs. That is it. There actually is not much else, except I would add in that fucking would cover pleasure in general, because it’s inextricably linked to a larger reward system. So I would call it feeding, fighting, fleeing, fucking, and feeling good. I’ll make it the five Fs.
**John:** Five Fs, coined by Craig Mazin on-
**Craig:** Thank you.
**John:** … this episode of Scriptnotes, 611.
**Craig:** Thank you very much.
**John:** I’ve been on a safari. One of the best things about a safari is you’re in the jeep for hours, and you’re just basically looking at the four Fs. All the creatures that you’re seeing, they’re just doing that. They’re trying to get some food. They are battling each other. They are getting away from each other. It’s a bunch of gazelles who are trying to flee. Or they’re having sex. There’s these two lions just mating and mating and mating. It’s Game of Thrones is what you’re experiencing.
**Craig:** Look, kids.
**John:** It’s a terrific… Highly recommend it for anybody who wants to go see it. It’s also good to remember that’s also us. That’s also what we’re doing. We just have more layers over it. I was going to say this is the lizard brain. And as I looked up lizard brain, apparently that’s gone out of fashion. It’s a myth that we have a lizard brain that has layers built on top of it. That’s not really true. It goes back to the core things that drive all creatures, certainly all vertebrates. We’re trying to do things to propagate our genes to get us to the next generation.
**Craig:** Yeah. When we’re writing, I think it’s a really good idea to start there. A lot of times, what we’ll say is, okay, what does this character want? If you don’t understand what people in general want, you’re going to end up with a character that wants something that is so intellectual that no one gives a shit.
I see this all the time where people will say, “What this character wants is,” and then they will explain something. I’m like, that’s an interesting concept, but it’s not how human beings actually work. Again, we’ll complicate our behavior. We also lie to ourselves. We delude ourselves. And that’s interesting.
But you peel the layers away, all these Fs lead to another F, which is fear. Fear is really something that is used in response to these. We’re afraid to starve. We’re afraid to be killed. We’re afraid we will get stuck somewhere, fail. There’s another F. I’m up to six Fs now, seven Fs. All of that stuff is what underpins everything else.
It’s a really good exercise to ask yourself, if you’re struggling with a character that people just aren’t relating to, does this character actually want something that people generally want when you really get down to it, or have I created some foofidy, artistic, overcomplicated, intellectual simulacrum of a human being?
**John:** Let’s talk about the expressions of these different Fs. Start with the expressions of feeding and what feeding might actually look like in terms of a human character in your story. Feeding, like literally they could eat, but also, any time they’re trying to hoard or they’re trying to store up or save things, that’s all about feeding. It’s the fear of hunger down the road. Greed is essentially a feeding expression. It’s the desire to accumulate, to have those things. With control of the food, with control of the money, you have power, you have status. These are all tied up together.
**Craig:** Yeah. The economy, as complicated as it is, comes down to food in the end. Everything comes down to can we eat or not, or else we’re dead. Vampire stories, which most people think are about fucking, and to some extent are, I think are also about feeding.
**John:** Of course they are.
**Craig:** It’s a great way to analogize hunger.
**John:** They have a very specific hunger that has incredibly strict requirements on it. It’s difficult life to be a vampire, because they’re always driven by the need to feed.
**Craig:** The Hunger is a great movie. It is a really interesting way to tell a story of something we all experience. If we just make a movie about somebody who’s really hungry, their stomach is growling, and they need a sandwich, who gives a shit? They’re hungry and they need blood. Okay, now you’ve complicated the expression of a basic thing. Every movie or story that’s about addiction is about feeding. That is all addiction is. It is the same loop in the brain. I need to put substance in to keep going.
Always interesting to take a simple thing and then analogize it outwards in a different way, so that you can show something that’s fun, that is also relatable, because none of us are vampires, and yet we love watching vampires do shit, because in fact, they’re incredibly relatable. They’re just hungry and horny. Let’s get into the Hs.
**John:** We’ll get the whole alphabet in there.
**Craig:** The Xs are going to be tough.
**John:** Likewise, fleeing. Obviously, we think about fleeing as it relates to a slasher movie, where you’re running from the killer. But realistically, our characters are often running from something, running from a danger that they may not even be able to say is the danger they’re running from. Characters are always running from something, some version of something that scares them, something about themselves, something about their situation. Characters are running.
Think about on a primal level what happens when you are fleeing. What is that elevated heart rate? What does that adrenaline feel like? What is it like to maintain that state? If you look at an antelope fleeing a predator, they go into panic mode. But they also get out of the panic mode when it stops, because they have to just do all the other Fs. For our human characters, sometimes they’re always running. They’re always running from something. That’s an interesting dynamic to start a character or to find a character at in the middle of the story.
**Craig:** When you think about heist movies or any movie where you’re supposed to root for the criminal, feeding is a part of it, because they want something. They need money so that they can feed themselves, metaphorically. But fleeing becomes a fun part of it. How do I get away with this? Getting away with murder is exciting.
When we watch movies where James Bond has a mission, half of the mission is get inside somewhere and get a thing. The other half is, and get out. That’s fun to watch. That’s where a lot of tension comes from. Fleeing is suspenseful. We all know that terror of being caught, and so it is relatable.
**John:** We think about fighting in terms of action movies, but even a movie like Erin Brockovich, she’s fighting against these corporations. What is the nature of that fighting? How is that fighting like the primal version of fighting? I think it actually does tie in, because fighting is often about status, maintaining your control over your situation, driving off enemies so that you can maintain your terrain. There’s lots of reasons why animals fight. I think the same reasons apply to humans, why they’re fighting. We’re not fighting with our claws and our jaws. But we’re still using the tools we have at our disposal to drive off others. That’s still fighting.
**Craig:** If you want to watch feeding, fighting, and fleeing all at the highest level, no fucking as far as I can tell, in a movie where no one does anything other than talk, watch Glengarry Glen Ross. It is incredible. There is a scene at the end between Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey where Jack Lemmon goes from fighting to realizing he’s been caught and then begins fleeing. It is the most squirmy, uncomfortable, sad thing possible. Jack Lemmon does such a beautiful job of expressing what Dave Mamet did such a beautiful job writing, which is a man desperate to avoid the jaws that are squeezing down on his head, and there’s nothing he can… He keeps trying. For actors, that’s a wonderful thing to give them.
**John:** Oh, god.
**Craig:** Tactics, strategies. Everything comes out of what you want. I need to not die here. I need to get away. What do I say? What do I do? How does it work? He tries to bribe his way out. He tries to smooth talk his way out. He tries to lie his way out. And eventually, he tries to beg his way out. And none of it works. And it’s remarkable to watch.
**John:** I’m glad you brought up actors, because of course they are the other ones who are always thinking about motivation. The classic director advice is, don’t direct with adjectives, direct with verbs. Directing with these four F verbs is actually really useful. Think about, “Fight back against that. Run away from him metaphorically.” Those are things an actor can play. An actor can’t play, “Be joyful.” That’s not a thing. The fucking, like, “Take pleasure in this. Really have fun. Enjoy this moment.” That’s a thing an actor can do. Looking at the primal, playable emotions underneath that is good advice for actors and writers and directors.
**Craig:** Actors are a lot like us as writers. Obviously, I am an actor, John. You know that.
**John:** I know that’s been well established.
**Craig:** Pretty impressive actor. A lot of times, they need to figure out how to get what you want in their own way or reorient their mind so that it makes sense to them, so that they can do it. Even if you do give them certain verbs, it may not necessarily connect to one of their instincts that are all connected to the Fs until they can make it connect to their instincts. You can see them searching or hunting. Sometimes the back and forth is about that. It’s about them finally going, “Okay. Wait. I know how to do this as me.”
Similarly, we’ve been in situations where someone said, “I understand why you did this, but what I think it should be is this.” You think to yourself, “Okay, I understand that, but how do I do that as a writer? How do I do that in a way that isn’t just giving you what you just asked for in the dumbest, most surface sense, but actually getting inside of it and making it good and making it something that I believe in and actually want to be there?”
That’s something where, I don’t know how many Ps we’ll need to use for directing, but patience certainly is one of them. I think it’s important for directors to be patient with actors, especially when actors are struggling with what to say. Sometimes you’ll say, “Hey, look, I would like you to do this,” and they’re struggling. You can think to yourself, “Oh, no, I’ve given a bad direction,” or you can just feel bad. Don’t. Just wait. Just be patient. Give them time. They just heard it. Give them time to process. Be patient. Then lo and behold, they generally will get there. You just don’t have to push. I’m going to keep doing Ps. I’m on the P theme now.
**John:** It’s tough. As I was pasting this together, I was also looking up the prey drive, which is another P there. The prey drive is really fascinating. The stages of the prey drive, and we think about it with dogs, but other animals do it too: searching, stalking, chasing, biting to grab, and biting to kill.
Most of the dog behaviors we see, like dogs love to play fetch or dogs are good guard dogs or they love to do a certain kind of thing, it’s because we’ve emphasized and trained them on one part of the prey drive and discouraged other parts of the prey drive. Our herding animals, we emphasize their stalking, but we take away their desire to bite and kill things. I think it’s fascinating to think back to how does that apply to humans.
When I look at the prey drive, it also feels like dating. It feels like how we can think about relationships and how we get to… Men especially tend to think about how to go out and date. A man at a bar with his buddies is very much like that dog and his prey drive.
**Craig:** The cops and robbers genre is a wonderful combination of feeding and fleeing and then this notion of prey, which is a different kind of feeding. Hunting people down. Very excited when we watch our heroes. You ever seen the movie Commando?
**John:** I have seen Commando, yeah. I loved it.
**Craig:** Schwarzenegger movie. It’s a pretty standard concept from the ‘80s. Arnold Schwarzenegger is an impossibly jacked human being who lives in a weird mountain shack with his daughter. There is no mother, because who needs them? It’s the ‘80s. Bad guys come and steal his daughter. He goes into his shed, where he has all of his hidden armaments, as one does, and he begins to hunt them all down and kill them one by one. Oh my god, so much fun, because we like watching predators do what they do when we’re rooting for them. It’s exciting. It’s exciting because it’s empowering. \
Superhero movies where they’re hunting down the bad guys, those scenes where they finally master their powers and kick ass, those are prey scenes, where we are enjoying rooting for a killer to kill. It satisfies us, because it satisfies the part of us that wants to be a predator. It makes us feel powerful and safe to be the predator.
**John:** Craig, do you think any of your puzzling comes… Or solving. I’m sorry if I’m using the wrong term.
**Craig:** Solving.
**John:** Does it apply to prey drive? Is the desire to solve a problem and to look for an answer and come to the answer, do you think that ties into the desire to hunt?
**Craig:** I don’t think so. There is a survival aspect to it, I think. It’s definitely triggering some weird pleasure circuit to make sense of things. The interesting thing about solving puzzles is I think it’s so separate from the base purpose of what drives it that it almost doesn’t matter. It’s a little bit like what we do. We are compelled to write stories. That compulsion is certainly related to one of these Fs or multiples of these Fs, because it is so disconnected from its base purpose that it’s hard to distinguish where it came from at all.
**John:** It’s abstractions on top of abstractions.
**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. It’s something that you can only do when you feel safe because you aren’t worried about that first or second level of the four Fs. You’re now on the 10th level above it. As you said, abstractions of abstractions.
**John:** Yeah. Let’s move on to our next and final topic, impermanence. On this show before, we’ve talked about how once upon a time it felt like there were video tapes and you go to the video store and find a thing and now it’s hard to find certain movies.
On Episode 364, we had Kate Hagen on. We were talking about how Netflix killed the video store and this assumption that you’d be able to find things forever, because of first Netflix on DVD, then Netflix as a streaming service. Oh, we’ll always be able to get those things, and now it turns out that’s not true. Things are actually harder to find than ever in some cases. I was talking about this with Drew yesterday. Drew, do you even remember or did you ever experience Netflix as a DVD delivery service?
**Drew:** Only vaguely. In high school, I remember some people were getting Netflix DVDs in the mail.
**John:** Already, that generation doesn’t have that assumption of like, oh, that movie’s always going to be there, sitting on a shelf somewhere for me to watch it. It’s also important to remember we’ve always lost things. We’ve always lost media. We’ve always lost culture. Euripides, ancient Greek playwright, probably wrote 80 to 90 plays, but we only have 18 of them. We only know the four most famous Greek playwrights. The rest of them are lost to history.
I thought we’d check in in 2023 on what we’re holding onto, what we’re losing, how we’re doing in terms of the sense of the stuff that we make and our ability to find it 5 years from now or 10 years from now.
**Craig:** The phenomenon of disappearing stuff actively is relatively new. We used to lose things passively. There are great concerns in the film community that old movies are disappearing simply because the prints have become lost to time or damaged beyond repair. The negatives can’t be found.
There was a fire, I think at Paramount, in a film vault, and a whole bunch of movies that were just never copied were gone permanently. The film preservation concept has gathered a lot of interest. That’s a way to actively prevent a passive disappearance.
We also lost things passively through disinterest. There were shows that were on TV. Nobody cared about them. They were canceled after four episodes. Nobody bothered to make a videotape release or anything like that, and no one’s complaining about it anyway.
**John:** My TV show, DC, I think four episodes may have aired. I can’t find them anywhere. I don’t know if they exist anywhere for anybody to watch. We’ve accepted that.
**Craig:** People I guess aren’t clamoring for it. This concept of actively removing things now and throwing them down the black hole is fairly new. Started with the takeover of Warner Bros by Discovery, it seems. And now everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s getting into it.
What I think is going to happen in reaction is, as things now are streamed or released, people on their own are going to go about the business of preserving them. We will see far more bootlegged things made available. If corporations are going to disappear stuff off of their channel, people are going to reappear it now, because the costs of doing so are essentially $0 in terms of technological costs. There’s maybe some legal exposure you’d have to worry about, although honestly, kind of a hard time arguing in court that you have damaged me by showing a thing that I removed from my service, thereby claiming as a loss.
**John:** Yeah, I see that. David Streitfeld has this piece in the New York Times about Internet Archive, which is doing a similar kind of thing with books. Books you could not find anywhere, they were putting online. Then all the publishers sued them and won and got that whole service taken down. That’s the challenge is that we as a culture both want to protect creators and we want to ensure access to things. And those are contradictory goals at times.
**Craig:** Yes. If a publisher just stopped publishing a book, but the book’s existed out there, and then someone said, “I’m going to put this on Internet Archive, because there are not that many copies of this thing,” okay, I get it. You could say, “Look, people could buy that book. They could buy it for lots of money. They’re not. Screw you.”
If a company says, “I’m the only place you can get this thing. I am actively making it disappear,” the analogy would be, I’m a book publisher, I’ve pressed a button, every one of those books had a self-destruct in it. It is now blank paper. Harder to argue that people are harming you by reintroducing something that you have tried to make go away. But it’s sort of an academic discussion, because it’s going to happen regardless.
One of I guess the side effects of this current disappearing is that there’s going to be a lot more individual acts of preservation. These days, you can go and find some random, weird thing from your childhood on YouTube. I think there’s going to be a whole lot more of that. Note, YouTube is Google. Sorry, Alphabet. And Google does not have a streaming service like Amazon or Apple. Google’s not interested in that.
**John:** YouTube’s streaming service is YouTube.
**Craig:** It’s just YouTube.
**John:** You could pay for it, but yeah.
**Craig:** You’re just paying to get rid of ads. They don’t make the content. They used to try.
**John:** They tried. It didn’t work.
**Craig:** They tried. It just didn’t work. What Google is interested in is the opposite. What Google is interested in is content being everywhere, and basically they just suck it up and then spew it out across everything and eliminate themselves from any sort of exposure for that. You’re going to start seeing these things popping up all over the place. Even if there is a copyright take down, then it’ll just show up on a gabillion other torrent sites or whatever. Nothing, I think, soon enough will be disappearable. The only things that can be truly disappeared are things that never came out in the first place, like for instance the-
**John:** Batwoman movie.
**Craig:** … Batwoman movie. Even then, I gotta be honest, somebody’s going to leak that out someday.
**John:** Someone’s going to see it.
**Craig:** It’s inevitable.
**John:** Deadpool was a similar situation. They had a VFX thing, and they nixed the project. Somehow, that snuck out there.
**Craig:** I can’t imagine how.
**John:** How that happened.
**Craig:** Who could’ve done that?
**John:** Now it’s a franchise.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** I want to go back to the film vault and the fire in the film vault problem, because I want to talk about two different needs for this preservation. There’s the preservation of at least one copy so that scholars can look at the thing and so that there’s an ability to go back to that source to actually see where the thing was. That’s very, very hard to argue against, that we need to have one master copy of a thing so we can look at what was and just for culture and for everything else that we have one copy saved there.
Anybody at any point can watch things at any time was never a guarantee. It’s something we took for granted as streaming came up, but that was never always really the case. I want to make sure we’re distinguishing between the two of those.
Even on Broadway, any show that opens on Broadway, they do go in and they film one version of it, so they can keep it in the master vault. The public can’t see that, but that way, other directors can go in and see what was this performance like. Scholars can go in and see that. I want to make sure we’re doing something like that for all of the film and TV that we’re making, just so that there’s at least a record, we just don’t fully lose something forever.
**Craig:** The companies will probably not be reliable for this. It is incredible to me how they still haven’t learned the lessons of all this. It also betrays a certain lack of respect for the material they make, but people are filling it in.
Also, AI, again, is going to help, because restoration of things, particularly stuff that was not made digitally but on film, is going to be improved dramatically over time, using AI, because it can go frame by frame to remove noise, scratches, artifacts, and try and get things back to what they used to be.
My feeling is that what has happened over the last really year or two is I think hopefully a strange kind of inoculation, and that everybody’s gone, “Oh, I didn’t know they could do that. Let us now react accordingly.”
**John:** Some of these shows disappearing was a business decision made by tax incentives and other things too. What I do take some solace in is these companies are not in the business of losing money, and so if they can make money off that show, they’ll find another place to put that show and have it make money. That’s what they used to do with things before.
If something disappears off a streaming service, but then it moves to a fast service, I don’t know that that’s a loss. I think that actually is maybe the right place for that show to exist, and those creators can get paid in that new venue.
I hope that is the transition that we see is that some of these things which are no longer on Netflix are now available someplace else. Grace and Frankie is apparently still on Netflix, but it’s also available on E right now. Great. You can watch it in two different places. That’s how things used to be, and it’s how things I think should be.
**Craig:** There’s two kinds of things that have happened. There are things where they’ve said to themselves, “Okay, just running this on our service isn’t making us any money at all. It’s not driving subscriptions, nor is it retaining subscriptions, and there are costs associated with keeping it on. So we’re going to go ahead and put it on a different channel and make some money off of it.”
Then there are things that just weren’t being watched at all, by anyone. That stuff, unless someone’s grabbed a copy of it, either it’s gone or it one day will be bundled into some sort of thing they could try and make 10 cents off of, but unlikely.
**John:** That’s also always happened. For most of broadcast history, the shows that never made it, you couldn’t see anywhere. There’s shows with tremendous actors in them who ran 13 episodes that you can’t find anywhere, or you’ll find them maybe on YouTube, and maybe that’s the right place for it.
**Craig:** Exactly. Jim Carrey’s first thing was, was it called the Duck Factory, I think? It was a sitcom about a guy working in a animation studio. You can’t watch that on Netflix as far as I know. But I think it might be on YouTube. There may be a episode. I don’t know.
**John:** Again, I want to make sure that the person who’s writing the Jim Carrey biography can find that episode, just because that’s a part of the whole story. That’s a part of culture.
**Craig:** No question.
**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things.
**Craig:** Wahoo.
**John:** Craig, do yours first, because I’m excited about your One Cool Thing as well.
**Craig:** Obviously, my One Cool Thing is Baldur’s Gate 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 is-
**John:** The two things Craig loves.
**Craig:** D and D and video games smashed together. Baldur’s Gate is a role-playing video game that functions not like D and D, functions exactly like D and D. You are playing D and D. All of the classes, sub-classes, spells, but also, more importantly, all of the rules. There are few things that they had to change slightly because of the nature of video games, and I think they did it brilliantly.
For instance, when you’re playing regular D and D, your characters can take a long rest. That basically resets them. They get all their health back. They get all their spells back. They get everything. It’s like starting fresh. When you’re playing D and D, the rules basically are you can long rest once every 24 hours, basically, which keeps your characters from long resting every 2 minutes. In video games, you can’t really track time like that. So what they do instead is they use a resource system, where long resting uses up resources, and you have to keep finding resources to pay for a long rest.
**John:** Great.
**Craig:** That was very smart. It’s beautiful.
**John:** Craig, what are you playing this on?
**Craig:** I’m playing it on, of all things, people are going to start screaming at me. I’m playing it on a Steam Deck. There’s something about just… Is it the most brilliant visual way to play it? No. But I don’t have a PC. It’s much easier. It’s portable. I can play it anywhere. I can play it on a plane. I can play it in a hotel. I can play it wherever I want. It actually plays quite well. It will burn through the Steam Deck’s battery in about an hour and a half. That’s the most. The heat that’s pouring out of the top of it could melt an icicle. But it plays really smoothly. Once you get a hold of the simple radial menus and stuff like that, combat function’s great. More importantly, the story is really good.
The concept of the story is you’ve been captured. This is where a lot of people are just turning off the episode. I’ll be real brief. You’ve been captured by the Illithid, mind flayers. Mind flayers will put this little thing in your brain to turn you into their slave and eventually turn you into an Illithid. You’ve gotten one implanted in your brain, but it somehow got interrupted. So you have certain Illithid powers and properties. You have been marked as a member of some weird cult that involves the absolute and true souls, so they kind of think you’re one of them, but you’re not one of them. You gotta get this thing out of your head before you turn into an Illithid. You have some fellow travelers in your party who also have these things in their head.
**John:** Nice.
**Craig:** It’s just been a joy. What it captures more than anything is just D and D-ness, entering some weird, decrepit chapel and finding a secret door that leads into a room where some weird cultish stuff was happening and digging into a mystery, all those little side quests and main quests and encounters and things like surprise. Just in general, the characters do what they’re supposed to do. Duergar, they larch. They got it right. What can I say? They got it right. It’s like playing D and D in your hands, and you can play D and D whenever you want, because it’s right there. Baldur’s Gate 3. They nailed it. What can I say? Absolutely nailed it.
**John:** I pre-bought it for PlayStation 5, so next week I’ll start it.
**Craig:** I’m really curious to see how it plays on the PS5.
**John:** Yeah, I am too.
**Craig:** You’re going to love it.
**John:** I’m going to love it. I have two One Cool Things. First is the word jamoke. This last week, I heard somebody say it, and I thought, wait, is that racist? Then our friend Chris Miller had a tweet this last week that said, “Calling people jamokes, like look at those two jamokes over there, is the most fun thing to call people that sounds like its origins are racist, but surprisingly and thankfully it’s not.” I looked it up, and it’s not. It’s just a word that kind of came into being. Jaboni, jamboni, jabroni, there’s lots of things that are like that. But it just spontaneously happened.
**Craig:** Jabronis. Jabroni.
**John:** Jabroni.
**Craig:** Jabroni feels like a very Philadelphia… My Philly friends have always said jabroni. I like the fact that we’re totally cool with calling somebody an asshole as long as we’re not being racist.
**John:** Totally. 100%.
**Craig:** It’s fine, guys. It’s totally cool. We’re just saying they are the human epitome of an anus.
**John:** I don’t know that I’m going to be using jamokes a lot, but I like that it’s out there as an option. If I needed to use it in a script and it felt right, I would do it, because it’s a word that exists in the world.
My other Cool Thing is something I just didn’t know existed until now. Hydrostatic life vests. These are life vests you wear over your clothing. They’re flat. If you fall into the water, they automatically inflate. They have a CO2 cartridge that automatically inflates if you fall into the water. They’re set up in a way that just getting sprayed with water, it isn’t going to happen, but you could be knocked off and knocked out, knocked off a boat, and you’d land in the water, and this will inflate, bring you up, and turn you to the right side. It’s just a really smart invention that I didn’t know existed until now.
**Craig:** They should put those on planes, because I’m so tired of using the inflatable tube.
**John:** How many plane crashes do I have to go through until they actually improve these? I wonder how many people have used the life vests in planes in the history of aviation.
**Craig:** Oh, it can’t be that many.
**John:** There’s the miracle on the Potomac.
**Craig:** The Hudson. The Hudson River crash, I assume some people put the life jackets on.
**John:** I said Potomac. It’s Hudson. You’re right.
**Craig:** The miracle on the Potomac was a miracle. There was a plane crash. Very few people survived. I don’t think they had life jackets on, because it was so sudden. The miracle part was that some people… People have studied this in psychology. There was a man who was driving over the bridge, sees this plane crash into the Potomac. It was cold as hell. People were going to freeze to death. He got out and just jumped in the water and saved somebody.
**John:** That’s great.
**Craig:** For years, psychologists have been asking the question, but why? Literally, what is going on with us where some of us will just put our own lives in danger to save another person we do not know and have no connection to whatsoever?
**John:** That doesn’t tie into our four Fs, honestly.
**Craig:** It is a whole other topic of altruism and how it might function in a way that does tie in.
**John:** I guess you’re propagating your species. There’s a kin selection kind of thing.
**Craig:** I think it’s more about we’re programmed to be pro-social because it’s self-protective, but sometimes that leads us to do things in an abstracted way that make no sense. Very few people have had a chance to put the life vests on and pull the cord. Please, outside of the plane is the most important.
**John:** Outside the plane. Come on. We all know.
**Craig:** Everybody knows.
**John:** It’s going to be a mess if you do it inside the plane.
**Craig:** Listen, the one thing you gotta do when the plane’s going down, keep your head about you. Read that card as the plane is going down. Read the card to remind yourself where are the emergency exits.
**John:** This is a small rant, but I feel like we’ve gone too far on the clever videos to explain how to use all the stuff in a plane, like the clever onboard things. It’s just gone too far.
**Craig:** It’s annoying.
**John:** I’m ready for the boring, basic ones, because we are spending clearly millions of dollars to make these things, and I don’t care.
**Craig:** What if we just made one that said, “When mask falls, put on kid, then yourself. Here is life jacket. Do this. Don’t do that. Here are exits. Goodbye. Here’s where the seatbelt is.”
**John:** We’ve gotta have choreography. We’ve gotta have koala bears. We’ve gotta have everything.
**Craig:** Exactly. We have to have celebrities coming on. The first time I saw the British Airways one, I was like, “This is delightful.” The 4 millionth time, I’m like, “I hate all of you.”
**John:** My god.
**Craig:** All of you. I will destroy your careers.
**John:** And you have, quietly.
**Craig:** Yes. The last one that remains is Sir Ian McKellen, but I’ll get him too.
**John:** They’ll all go down.
**Craig:** They’ll all go down.
**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
**Craig:** Yay.
**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** Whoop whoop.
**John:** Outro this week is by Bob Tibbing. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re a little thin on the outros, so please send those in. That’s also the place where you can send questions.
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting. There’s lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and sweatshirts that are great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.
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 swimming. The other thing you need to know if your plane crashes is how to swim. Craig and Drew, thank you for a fun show.
**Craig:** Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Craig, when did you learn how to swim?
**Craig:** I was very young. I was five.
**John:** I was younger. I was three.
**Craig:** Oh my god. I don’t even remember things from when I was three. It’s possible that I learned to swim when I was three, and I’ve just forgotten.
**John:** Where did you learn to swim?
**Craig:** My dad got a job over the summer working at a sleep-away camp in upstate New York, Camp Algonquin.
**John:** Love it.
**Craig:** If anyone has gone to Camp Algonquin in upstate New York, it’s near Argyle or Saratoga Springs, go ahead and write in and tell me your memories. I was there, I believe it was 1976. Camp Algonquin closed I think in the ‘80s. Then because it had closed, it was used as the setting for the horror movie Sleepaway Camp, which is considered a cult classic, in no small part because of the shocking ending. There was a lake there. I think it was called Mirror Lake. They had a little dock that pinned in some of the lake, so it wasn’t like you were going out in the open lake. That’s where I learned to swim. My dad took me out there.
**John:** In a lake?
**Craig:** In a lake. Again, I just want to be clear, they didn’t throw me in the open lake. This was a little, boarded-off area of the lake. It was a lake. I was in a cold fricking lake in upstate New York.
**John:** I learned in a heated pool-
**Craig:** Of course you did.
**John:** … in Boulder, Colorado with my mom. It was called Gym and Swim. There was little, not really gymnastics, but just this little balance stuff for half an hour, and then there’s a half an hour in the pool. I was with my mom. I learned how to swim and basically learned how to not drown. You don’t learn how to swim very, very well. I went through YMCA swimming lessons and made my way up to baby shark or whatever. I pretty much stayed at that level. I can swim competently, but I’m very much a swimming pool swimmer. I’m not a very good ocean swimmer. I’m not going to drown, but I’m not going to win any races swimming.
**Craig:** I just looked it up. It’s Summit Lake.
**John:** Summit Lake.
**Craig:** Summit Lake. That’s where I learned how to swim, Summit Lake.
**John:** My point about swimming though is that if you’ve seen the videos, babies when they’re first born can totally swim, because they’ve been in water this whole time. It’s actually cool seeing newborns swim, because they actually are really good at it. At a certain point, they stop being able to instinctively swim, and they get afraid of the water and you have to get them back past that thing.
If you look at kids who are raised in boat culture and water culture, they’re really good swimmers, because they’re just always in the water. It’s so interesting that humans who don’t start swimming as children really have a hard time learning how to swim. It’s not one of those skills that immediately you get back.
**Craig:** I love swimming. I swam a lot. The one thing that I always noticed about myself, and this is true for some people, is I don’t float as easily as other people. Some people are slightly denser than water or about as dense. Most people are not, and so they float very easily. I am not an easy floater. It doesn’t take much to keep me floating. I always noticed that. I always wondered, huh, is something wrong with me? But no. Some people are just slightly denser than water.
**John:** I’m a very good floater on my back. I’ve always been a very good floater on my back. I can do the head up and Jesus sort of position. I can do all the survival kind of floating. I got my swimming merit badge. I can do all that stuff. But never got great at swimming to the point where like, oh, this is what I want to do for exercise for life. It’s more just I splash around and have fun, but I’m not great at it.
Some things that have helped me a lot though is, I always got frustrated by ears getting filled with water, and so I got really good earplugs. I’ll put a link in the show notes to those earplugs. Listen, it’s a hassle because you can’t hear people anymore, but it makes diving and everything else so much more pleasant, because you’re not dealing with getting water out of your ears half an hour later.
**Craig:** I not only didn’t mind water in my ears, I loved getting the water out later, because it was so warm. You would just hop on one foot with your head tilted, and then suddenly it would go puh, and then this wonderful warm water would come out of your ear. You’d be like, “Ah, this is a wonderful relief.”
**John:** It was always great when it happened, but it sometimes would get stuck behind stuff. Then I would have a day of water in my ear, which is never good.
**Craig:** Oh, god. That never happened to me. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, god.
**John:** That’s why I wear the earplugs.
**Craig:** When you were learning to swim, did you learn multiple strokes or just freestyle or…
**John:** Definitely learned freestyle, which at that point was called Australian crawl. They used to call that Australian crawl.
**Craig:** Interesting.
**John:** I really loved backstroke. I loved elementary backstroke, where your two arms are going at the same time. I was always a really good backstroke swimmer. Of course, then you’re always worried you’re going to bang your head into the far side of the pool. I’m good on sidestroke, but only with my left shoulder up. If you dropped me in the water right now, I’d probably default to a sidestroke.
**Craig:** In that regard, you are like many older ladies.
**John:** I am an older lady, yeah.
**Craig:** That is such a classic older lady move.
**John:** What’s yours?
**Craig:** I was a big fan of the breaststroke myself. Freestyle was sort of like the dessert, because for a while there, I was going to the Y and actually in this swimming… I don’t know what you’d call it. It was like a club. It wasn’t competitive or anything. We had to just do like a thousand laps. You’d have to go through all of them. Freestyle was the dessert swim, because it was so simple to do.
Backstroke I didn’t mind, although I definitely didn’t enjoy the whole, am I going to smash my… It was my hand I was more worried about than my head. You’re going to smash your hand before anything else. Breaststroke, I don’t know, there was just something about it that, I don’t know, just worked for me. I was very fast with that one. I was quicker with that than I think any other stroke.
**John:** While we were living in Paris, my daughter competed on the swim team there. She’s a confident swimmer but was never a great swimmer. It was so interesting watching her versus actual kids who were really good at it. It’s just a whole different skill and scale, because it’s not like running. That gets faster. Swimmers, they get lapper. If you’re a good swimmer, it’s just such a difference between an ordinary swimmer.
**Craig:** Definitely. Did you see the video of, I don’t know if you would call her the poor woman or the wonderful woman from, I can’t remember what country it was. I believe it’s an African country. There was an Olympic level sprint. They sent her out there. She was not a competitive runner at all. It was startling, because for the first time in my life, I realized just how fast Olympic runners are, because it was like watching somebody moving in slow motion while these other people just went zoom, except you realize when you’re watching her run, you’re like, “That’s how I would run.”
**John:** 100%.
**Craig:** That’s what a normal human looks like. Swimmers, it’s hard to tell, when they’re all moving at the same speed, just how fast they’re going. I think they should do this for all Olympic sports. Put one regular person in a race just so everyone can see, holy shit, how fast these people are at what they do.
**John:** Drew, before we leave, what’s your swimming experience?
**Drew:** I learned at a Y. I did swim team when I was a kid and then I stopped. Now as an adult, it’s interesting how much currents freak me out. If I’m in the ocean or a river, one of the four Fs pop up at me and I start getting anxiety in the water, which is really strange. It’s a new one.
When I was growing up too, I had trouble diving off the starting block to do these races, so the swim instructors would duct tape my legs together, and I would just plop off, and then they’d have to rescue me from the bottom of the pool basically, because I couldn’t…
**Craig:** I had to do stuff like that for studying to be a lifeguard. Oh my god, the worst is when they would throw you in a pool with all of your clothes on. Did you ever do that one?
**John:** Oh yeah, take them off, inflate your jeans.
**Craig:** Yeah. Oh my god, the worst. You’d take off your clothes, get your shoes off, get your socks off, get your shirt off, get everything off, get your pants off, then come back up, tie the legs of your jeans together, empty them of water, blow air into your jeans and then wrap them around your neck and make a… You did the same.
**John:** I did the same thing.
**Craig:** Has anyone ever saved their life using the jean trick? Somebody write in, please, and tell me that you’re alive because of that.
**John:** I want to hear that.
**Craig:** Because it just feels like, how often does that come up?
**John:** Not very often. It didn’t save anybody on the Potomac, so it’s not going to save me.
**Craig:** In the Potomac, I think the-
**John:** The crashing was part of it.
**Craig:** The hypothermia was a real big issue there. It turns out water is really cold.
**John:** Things we learn. Craig, Drew, thank you so much.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**Drew:** Thanks, guys.
Links:
* [Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/technology/personaltech/subtitles-streaming-shows-speech-enhancers.html) by Brian X. Chen for the New York Times
* [No, You Do Not Have a Lizard Brain Inside Your Human Brain](https://mindmatters.ai/2021/03/no-you-do-not-have-a-lizard-brain-inside-your-human-brain/) from Mind Matters
* [Prey Drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_drive)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 364 – Netflix Killed the Video Store](https://johnaugust.com/2018/netflix-killed-the-video-store)
* [The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/business/media/internet-archive-emergency-lending-library.html) by David Streitfeld for the New York Times
* [Baldur’s Gate 3](https://baldursgate3.game/)
* [Tweet by Chris Miller](https://twitter.com/chrizmillr/status/1696276296337342585?s=46&t=xGDWKvLrNvj-hJqhgtqqlA)
* [Hydrostatic Life Vests](https://mustangsurvival.com/products/elite-28-inflatable-pfd-auto-hydrostatic-md5183)
* [British Airways safety video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCoQwZ9BQ9Q)
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Bob Tipping ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/611standard.mp3).