The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/who-can-you-trust).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** M-Y N-A-M-E I-S C-R-A-I-G M-A-Z-I-N.
**John:** Impressive.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**John:** This is Episode 582 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Who Can You Trust, an expert? What is expertise? Is their success an indicator that they know what they’re talking about or were they just lucky? We’ll dig into that as it applies to writing advice and general life stuff. We’ll also answer a bunch of listener questions, Craig, because we’ve got a lot of those. So many questions. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, it’s a disaster. We’ll talk about the various natural disasters that could befall Los Angeles and how to think about them.
**Craig:** What? Easier to talk about the ones that won’t befall Los Angeles.
**John:** I could say we shouldn’t have cyclones, but sometimes we could have cyclones.
**Craig:** At this point.
**John:** Anything could happen.
**Craig:** Anything.
**John:** Anything could happen. One thing that will happen this week is your show will come out, Craig, finally.
**Craig:** It’s coming out, yeah, because this show… Yep, that’s right, technically the first day of the following week. It’s Sunday night, January 15th. Finally. By the time this episode comes out, I think I will know my fate as far as reviewers and all that goes. Then shortly after that we’ll see if people show up and watch it. I hope they do. I think it’s a really good show.
**John:** I’m excited to watch it. I’ve seen not a frame of it, other than the little teaser things.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** I haven’t seen anything more. I’m coming in as just a viewer. I’m excited to watch it and to see it. I deliberately did not play the games, because I downloaded them, and I realized, you know what, I’m going to watch Craig’s show really soon. I’d just rather watch Craig’s show.
**Craig:** You know what? It’ll be a very interesting thing for you, if you do watch the show, to then go back and play the game, because Naughty Dog, the company that makes the games, released a remastered version of the first game, The Last of Us, for the PlayStation 5, and so I played it. I played it after we had produced the show. It was really weird, because it was like, “Oh yeah,” but sometimes, “Oh,” and sometimes, “Oh.”
**John:** I forgot about that.
**Craig:** Sometimes just, “Oh, we went a very different way there.” Then sometimes you’re like, “Wow, that is eerie. It’s like I’m back in the show, but I’m not in the show.” It’ll be interesting to see what you think about the process of adaptation, because there was quite a bit of adapting going on.
**John:** I’m sure there was. I’ve talked before on the podcast about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I wrote the whole script, and we started shooting the movie. It wasn’t until we started shooting the movie that I saw for the very first time Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the original version of it.
**Craig:** Wow.
**John:** Just to see, wow, the same source material, and we made some very different choices along the way.
**Craig:** I can’t believe you hadn’t seen that one. (singing)
**John:** At some point, I’m going to discover that I was locked in a room for a period of my childhood, because there’s a whole bunch of stuff that I should’ve seen, that everybody saw. It’s fine. H.R. Pufnstuf? I have no idea what H.R. Pufnstuf was.
**Craig:** What?
**John:** People talk about it. No idea.
**Craig:** Oh my god. We’ll get into that. There are a couple of things I did want to mention.
**John:** Please.
**Craig:** In regard to the show, I just saw a few things circling around on the internet, and I figured, hey, I’ve got a podcast.
**John:** You can just talk about it.
**Craig:** I can just talk about them. The first thing was, Neil Druckmann and I were featured in an article in the New Yorker. There was a quote I had that some people have aggressively taken out of context.
**John:** Bad faith?
**Craig:** Yeah, it was a little strange. I was talking about how in a video game when you’re facing certain enemies, NPCs essentially, you’re facing NPCs and you die, and you get sent back to the beginning of the encounter. Those NPCs are back, and you now know a little bit more about them. You know that they’re basically moving in a certain pattern. If you struggle with a section, at some point the NPCs really just become obstacles that you’ve got to figure out your way around, which is part of the fun of gaming.
I said watching those NPCs – I meant to say NPCs, I just didn’t say NPCs – but watching those people die shouldn’t have the same impact as watching people die, say in a television show, except pixels is how I referred to the NPCs. It’s very clear that that’s what I’m talking about, but then they left out the NPC part and just said, “Oh, pixels.” In case anybody’s wondering, watching characters, actual characters in The Last of Us, the real characters that we’re invested in, die is incredibly moving. That’s why I wanted to make a show of it. That’s one thing.
The second thing is there is a quote that I saw circulating around being attributed to me where allegedly I say something like, I don’t know, “Video games, you put a quarter in and then you smash people on the head.” Anyway, I never said-
**John:** Oh, wow. Wow.
**Craig:** They just invented a quote and then said I said it. Internet!
**John:** Craig, how dare you? How dare you say that?
**Craig:** Talk about literally manufactured outrage.
**John:** Now in the transcript for Scriptnotes, people can selectively pull that quote out of the Scriptnotes transcript.
**Craig:** Exactly. They can just pull individual words.
**John:** Anything’s possible.
**Craig:** Anything is possible.
**John:** Hey Craig, is there a companion podcast for The Last of Us?
**Craig:** There is. The companion podcast, it’s with me and Neil, and it is hosted by Troy Baker, who has a podcast of his own, but he is most notably the voice of Joel in the video game, the character that Pedro Pascal plays.
**John:** Fantastic.
**Craig:** John, you play video games. Troy Baker is the voice of almost every male lead in every video game. It’s astonishing.
**John:** It’s either him or it’s Nolan North.
**Craig:** Both of them, they work together in The Last of Us, and they work together on Uncharted.
**John:** Nice. We have a video game question later on in the podcast.
**Craig:** Whoa.
**John:** That’s a teaser for that. Only other bit of news is we’ve had the promo code for ONION for people who wanted to sign up for the yearlong subscription to Scriptnotes Premium. Thank you to everyone who did that. A ton of people did that, which was fantastic and great.
**Craig:** That’s great.
**John:** One thing we didn’t anticipate is that some people had problems switching their monthly over to an annual subscription, so they’d email Megana at ask@johnaugust.com, which you could do, but she would just then send you on to help@supportingcast.fm. If you’re trying to swap over from monthly to annual, good job. You’re saving yourself some money. If you have problems with that, go to help@supportingcast.fm, and they can get that all switched over for you.
**Craig:** I wish you would say the promo code one more time.
**John:** The promo code is ONION.
**Craig:** ONION.
**John:** ONION.
**Craig:** ONION. Such a weird word.
**John:** Such a strange, strange word.
**Craig:** Onion.
**John:** Onion.
**Craig:** Onion.
**John:** Craig, you had some time off. You had a vacation. Did you enjoy your vacation?
**Craig:** I did. I did enjoy my vacation. Went with the family to London, and then the wife and kids peeled off to go visit a friend of hers in Edinburgh. I took that opportunity to zip over to Ireland to visit our script supervisor and his husband. I think you’ll enjoy this, John. No matter where I go, in this case it was Ireland, escape room, and this time, escape room on a boat. It was quite good.
**John:** Oh, I like that.
**Craig:** It was quite good.
**John:** Very nice. I took a vacation too. I was up in Wyoming with my family. I was texting with Aline, and she said, “Every writer I know is not taking vacation. We don’t talk about how writers don’t get vacations.” I felt guilty, because I was just totally on vacation. I wasn’t doing any work. It sounds like you weren’t working.
**Craig:** I wish that were the case. I did have to do a number of music approvals and visual effects approvals. The business does shut down. We had built in this time where we knew we actually had to get stuff done aggressively, quickly, because once we hit the holidays, it was going to be rough.
**John:** Starting December 6th, the town does shut down. It’s hard to get answers on anything.
**Craig:** In terms of the effects vendors, they’ll work with you all the way up to Christmas Eve, and then it’s like, “Hey, we need a little bit of time off here. We’re people too.”
**John:** Let’s jump ahead to this question from Alex, which is about video games.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** Megana, could you help us out?
**Megana Rao:** Alex asks, “I had some time off recently and decided to play the new God of War and absolutely loved it. While it was a blast to play, I was really impressed by the writing, and not just the cut scenes and big story moments, but the little bits of dialog between characters as you ride your sled or sit in your canoe. This got me thinking, how does someone become a writer for a video game? Do they hire film and TV writers? Are there writers that specialize in writing for games, or do they just get one of their level designers who took a creative writing class in college? I know you guys aren’t designated video game writers, but I thought your shared interest in games and Craig’s work in adapting video games to TV and film might give the Scriptnotes team a unique perspective on the matter.”
**John:** Alex, there are definitely video game writers. It’s a real job.
**Craig:** Oh yes, of course.
**John:** Neil would be one of them.
**Craig:** Neil Druckmann for sure. There are writers for video games. Of course there are writers for video games. We’ve been talking about it actually for a long time, going all the way to the Writers Guild trying to maybe organize some companies. The primary creative director of God of War is a guy named Cory Barlog. I presume there are quite a few writers on the game. There are a number of writers on all games. For The Last of Us 2, the writers were Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross. Now, how do you become a writer for a video game? I gotta be honest. I don’t know.
**John:** That’s a question I think we can try to answer. I think it should be our goal for 2023 for Alex is we’re going to try to get some video game writers on to talk about the job that they’re doing and how they’re getting started writing in video games.
**Craig:** Listen, we can crush that goal.
**John:** Done.
**Craig:** If that’s our goal for 2023, we can just go ahead and go dark for February through the end of the year, because we’re going to crush that.
**John:** What I’m mostly curious about on Alex’s behalf is what the form is for writing in video games, because I have a friend who’s just moved. He’s an established screenwriter who just now started working full-time for a video game company. He’s learning the differences between writing standard, normal scripts and writing for this, in which you have decision trees and there’s bits of dialog that could come or could not come, and there’s whole story things.
You’re trying to tell a story that both feels like you as a player are in charge of it, and yet there’s a story also happening. Jordan Mechner, who’s a friend and also a video game designer and writer, often talks about that challenge. It’s like, how do you make it feel like the player’s really driving the story rather than spectating as the story’s happening around them.
**Craig:** There’s certainly a creative concept there that has to be figured out. Interestingly, I know from Neil at least that the script for The Last of Us and the script for The Last of Us 2 I think was primarily in Final Draft. It wasn’t like there was a specialized form. I talked to him about not using that anymore and switching. Depending on the kind of game you’re writing… Very different kinds of games require very different sorts of writers.
**John:** If you’re playing a Skyrim, that open-world game isn’t going to have one script for the whole thing, because there’s not just one linear flow through everything. Each of those characters has to have stuff written for them to be able to do and some development. That’s very different than the things we’re doing, and yet they’re similar skills. Let’s get some people on who can talk to us about that.
**Craig:** Again, if that’s our goal, I’m telling you…
**John:** I think that we’re setting low goals for this year and just knocking them out.
**Craig:** I love it.
**John:** That’s the goal.
**Craig:** Just finish off by Jan. 20. I like it.
**John:** I see another follow-up bit here, a writer who is new to the plot twist game. Megana, can you help us out?
**Megana:** This writer wrote in and said, “In Episode 574, a listener asked about pitching a script that contains a big twist, do you give away the twist in the pitch or keep the mystery? You suggested not giving away the twist. My question is, if you’re not going to give away the twist, what exactly do you say in the pitch?”
**John:** If you’re pitching The Sixth Sense, Craig, do you give away the twist? Would you say it in a log line? What would you say in the room?
**Craig:** I would absolutely give away the twist in a pitch. Did I say we shouldn’t do that?
**John:** According to Megana, we said you should give away the twist.
**Craig:** I think you should give away the twist. I don’t know how to pitch something and be like, “Then you get to the end and that’s it. Please validate my parking.” You gotta give it away.
**John:** What form of the pitch do you give it away in? In the three-sentence version, you might not give it away.
**Craig:** Definitely not.
**John:** If you’re really giving the person the whole experience of watching the movie, then yes, you do need to give away the twist. A sit-down pitch would have that in there, but the very short log line-y pitch would probably not have that twist in there.
**Craig:** That’s right. I’m talking about a standard Hollywood style pitch, which is very different than the sort of pitching that people do in contests and conferences, where you sit in a room, you have an appointment, the meeting is set for an hour, there’s 5 or 10 minutes of chitchat, and then you dive in. In about 20 minutes or so, you’ve spelled out the whole movie. Then there’s some questions and some discussion, and you go home.
**John:** In the old days, you would drive across town, you’d park in a lot, you’d find your way to the building and do this. Now you log into the Zoom. The executive’s about two minutes late, so you’re talking to the junior executive for a little bit. Then you can re-pitch. Sometimes you have a deck. It’s nice. I love it. Craig, you proposed the topic for this week, which doesn’t always happen, so I was really excited.
**Craig:** That’s so nice of you to phrase it that way. How about we phrase it accurately, which almost never happens?
**John:** Talk to us about this topic of who should you trust in expertise. What gets you thinking about this?
**Craig:** There was a tweet that had been circulating around. Somebody screenshotted it and sent it to me. Without going into who it was, it was somebody that charges money as a screenwriting consultant, and you know how I feel about that. This is what that person said. Quote, “We suffer too much from success bias in this industry, especially with writers. Those who have great success must know what they’re talking about and be heeded, and therefore those without major successes must be wrong, but I cannot effing tell you how often this isn’t the case.”
This got me thinking. On the one hand, how dare you? On the other hand, fair point that just because you have had success, it doesn’t guarantee that you know what you’re talking about, because you and I both know very successful writers that we wouldn’t trust talking about anything. Success is not a guarantee. However, I think it’s also fair to say that the implied converse is not true either, which is failure doesn’t make you any more likely to be right either. Probably quite a bit less likely.
I thought it’d be an interesting conversation to have, since you and I have put ourselves out there as experts who ought to be trusted. What do we think makes somebody trustworthy? Who should we be looking to for authority, and who should we be suspicious of as we make our way in the world?
**John:** I think these are all great topics. Going back to the tweet, I’m struck by “success bias,” which is probably another way of saying survivorship bias. Basically, the people who have made it through to the end made it through to the end, so therefore they can feel like, oh, what I did must be the reason why I was successful, when it could’ve just been pure dumb luck that got them there. There’s not necessarily just a reason. Maybe it wasn’t their actual skills that got them there. It could’ve been some other factor. Fair point. You could see that in all sorts of different industries.
Let’s talk about whether you and I are experts and how you can determine whether you and I are experts. I guess we have credits. We’ve done this for a time. We have a body of work. We’ve not just had one success. We’ve had a string of successes and a string of failures. We’ve actually seen both sides of these, of the coins.
**Craig:** True, true.
**John:** We know how it all works. That feels like an important marker. I’m also questioning an expert on screenwriting or an expert on the craft of screenwriting, an expert on the business of screenwriting. I feel I’m much more qualified to talk about what it’s like to be a screenwriter and not necessarily, these are exactly the ways you should be putting your words together on the page. I feel like there’s a range of opinions on that. In terms of how to actually do the work of screenwriting, my experience is partly what makes me an expert there.
**Craig:** I think it’s fair to say that if somebody has had little to no success in our business, that it is not likely that they are going to be a very valuable expert when it comes to advice seeking, because advice is practical. It’s, I don’t know, hard to trust somebody giving you practical advice if they themselves do not appear to be succeeding, because isn’t that what the advice is for?
When we’re asking for practical advice, we’re saying, “Hey, what do you think about this situation? I’d like to succeed in the following: how to make a better contract for myself, how to improve my chance of selling this, how to improve my chance of getting casting, how to navigate successfully between a studio and a director and an actor.”
We’re talking about success. If someone hasn’t had any, I’m not really sure why they would feel entitled to or even encouraged to act like an expert when it came to advice giving, although that certainly doesn’t stop people. I do think that your success and my success is not necessarily directly connected to our theoretical success as advice givers.
**John:** Agreed. I think you and I could’ve had the same kinds of careers and actually give some really terrible advice.
**Craig:** That’s right.
**John:** You and I both know writers who have good track records. You could look. You can point to what they’ve done. It’s like, “Oh, that should be great.” You’ve actually talked to them. Sometimes we’re on panels with them at various conferences and like, oh god, don’t do what he says, because they’re only relying on what their experience has taught them, and they may have a perspective that is solely shaped by their experiences.
I think one of the things that’s good about us and that’s really good about this podcast is we’re continuously bringing in other people to talk about what their experiences have been and trying to learn things, rather than pining just strictly based on what we’ve done before. In 2023, we’re going to have some video game writers on to talk about their job rather than just speculate on what their jobs are.
**Craig:** There’s a little bit of humility required, and that I suppose also implies a certain amount of good faith, that the reason you and I are giving people advice is because we legitimately want to help them. We are not giving them advice to feel really powerful or important about ourselves.
There are people who give advice as a performative act of self-reassurance. “I am giving you this advice. Therefore I’m awesome.” You gotta keep your antennae up for those people. You don’t take advice from people who are puffing themselves up. This is a bad idea.
I still think that there was a bit of a slippery false dichotomy here from the original tweeter, because while it is true that those who have had great success don’t necessarily know how to give advice, I think that has nothing to do with the odds of getting good advice from people who simply have had no success at all.
**John:** I wonder if we can distinguish at all between advice, which is what we give on this podcast, versus teaching or leading. There are people who are good English teachers who are not good writers. I’ve definitely learned from that. Definitely there are incredibly successful football coaches who are not good football players and never were good football players. There can be a difference between the person who is leading a discussion on something or organizing a group to do something. That means it’s different from being the expert on actually doing the thing.
**Craig:** That is true. I think that when it comes to critical analysis, you don’t need to be a writer to understand how to analyze writing. It’s a different discipline. One is creating and the other is taking apart, examining, and critiquing. English teachers, and I’m talking about once we get past grammar and so forth, pretty much exclusively are teaching you how to analyze and think about writing.
Now, there are creative writing classes. I know for instance at Princeton, they have a pretty amazing creative writing program. When I was there, James McPhee was teaching a class, and Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. You got a pretty good shot there, because they’re good. They know how to write. They have had tremendous success as writers, and so at least there’s a decent chance.
It’s a little bit tougher when… For writing, you can’t define success as just brilliant writing, because there’s a lot of brilliant writing that isn’t commercially successful. If you’re trying to do what you and I do, which is write movies and television for a mainstream audience-
**John:** Things that get made.
**Craig:** Things that get made. It’s really hard for me to see how people who have had no experience with that whatsoever are going to be able to help you get that. I think they might help you with scene work. They might help you with this or that. I think that there is something special about people who do it and have proven that they can do it. They must know something in certain cases. Now, whether they’re able to give that advice out reliably, that’s a matter of character.
**John:** Let’s think about why people might listen to somebody who doesn’t have credits, who doesn’t have any track record of real success. I think a lot of times it’s that they project a confidence. It may be an unwarranted confidence. Particularly newer writers, aspiring screenwriters, they want answers. They want a clear guide to, “This is how it works. You should definitely not use we sees. You should definitely do this, not do that.”
I think you and I both have strong opinions on certain things and clear lines, but we also recognize that there’s many ways to do things and that sometimes you can’t know what the right answer is. The right answer is what’s right for you in that scene, in that script, in that project you’re working on.
**Craig:** Which I think is a kind of humility. Do you watch Barry?
**John:** I did. I’ve watched all of it, Barry. It’s great.
**Craig:** It’s a wonderful show on HBO. Henry Winkler plays an acting teacher. The whole joke is that he’s not a good actor at all. In fact, he can’t get any acting jobs, and he behaves poorly. He’s neither good nor a reliable and professional actor, but he behaves with his students as if he is the fount of all wisdom, and he is not. That’s part of the joke.
There are a lot of people who, in lieu of getting where they think they ought to be or getting where they want to be, simulate the kind of respect and admiration and success they were looking for in this area by cultivating it as an expert, a self-anointed expert. A lot of people fall for it.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who can’t really help. Just for everybody, I’ve been giving this bit of expert advice for years. Take everything with a grain of salt, and really just be a critical thinker. If anybody puts themself forth as the fount of wisdom or behaves as if they know things, when there doesn’t appear to be much justification for that, maybe you should think twice or thrice about taking that advice. Oh, that was a beautiful rhyme.
**John:** I really liked the “twice or thrice.”
**Craig:** “Taking that advice.”
**John:** I’m trying to apply this advice to my own life and trying to think about where am I looking for experts, where I don’t necessarily know if I’m seeking the most qualified person. I can’t immediately link to mine, but I’m sure there have been cases where I’ll reach the person who is accessible, the person who I can easily find on Twitter, and assume they’re an expert on a topic because I just don’t know it, like economics or macroeconomics. I just don’t know, and so I will tend to believe a person who can passionately defend their point of view, even if I don’t have the broad experience of even being able to judge whether they are an expert or not.
**Craig:** There’s a little danger there, because passion is not necessarily an indication of correctness. It’s just conviction. So many other careers and industries have credentials. Credentials themselves can be extraordinarily misleading. There are plenty of people with a PhD after their names who don’t deserve it or aren’t any good at anything.
If you are looking for an opinion on health, exercise, economics, politics, clothing, anything, in a lot of industries you will find some sort of credential that might help. If somebody is a professor of economics at Wharton, they probably know a bunch. At least you wouldn’t be an idiot for thinking they did. If somebody random on Twitter is going on about, “Here’s an incredible thread you need to hear and need to read, because this will make everything make sense. 1/323,” then you’re like, “Oh god, maybe not.”
**John:** It’s tough. I do find myself gravitating towards folks who have not only had a consistent opinion for a long period of time but clearly are curious, and they’re actually still trying to explore and not even defend their opinions but challenge their own opinions. I hope that we’ve done some of that on this podcast, because I think if you go back 10 years, we’ve been consistent, but we’ve also grown and changed on some opinions.
**Craig:** Yeah, of course.
**John:** You had written no television when we started this podcast.
**Craig:** That’s right. How many times did I say that the Academy would never let me in?
**John:** Hey, you were wrong. Craig was wrong.
**Craig:** I was just flat out wrong. We have changed our minds plenty of times. I’ve changed yours, and you’ve changed mine. We also, I think, do a pretty good job of trying to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and interrogate our own internal biases and the natural slants that we may have in our own mind that would perhaps lead us a bit astray. We’re not perfect in that regard, but we’re trying. I’ll just come back to that word again. It’s humility. You have to be somewhat humble when you give advice.
**John:** Absolutely. The other thing I will say I’ve noticed is expertise fades after a time. We both can think of screenwriters who really were genuinely top of the game. You talked to them, and it’s like, “Oh, you don’t know how things are going right now,” and they’ve lost the thread. One of the things that I think has been good about us doing this podcast and continually talking to the new folks who are doing this job is we’re staying a little more current on where things really are at.
**Craig:** We do try, and we are helped by all the people who come on the show, but it’s also just as important for us to say, “I don’t know.” People ask me a lot about writing rooms, and I’m always very quick to say, “I actually don’t know.”
**John:** No experience.
**Craig:** I just don’t know. It’s not the way I do it, so I’m not going to give you an opinion. People ask me about mini rooms and span and all the rest of it. I’m like, “I’ve gotta put my hand up. Not an expert about that.”
**John:** In the episodes you missed this last year, I asked a lot of stuff about rooms, just because I was so fascinated the different ways people were running their rooms. There’s not one right answer. There’s a bunch of different ways that work. The consistent thread I got from showrunners was you need to pick the way that it’s going to help you create the show you need to create.
**Craig:** Simple as that. It’s good advice.
**John:** I see on the Workflowy here that Megana Has a Question, which is my favorite segment.
**John and Craig:** Megana Has a Question.
**John:** What’s your question, Megana?
**Megana:** My question is, how do you guys unwind or go to sleep after a good writing session or when you have that sort of rare moment of creative inspiration?
**Craig:** I love the amount of mistaken premises in this question. There’s like a hundred mistaken… For instance, the idea that I ever go, “That was a good writing session.” That never happens.
**Megana:** To give you some context, this past week, I feel like I finally figured out something, and the experience and how exhilarating it was so exciting to me, I could not get to sleep for hours.
**Craig:** Wow.
**Megana:** I imagine that you deal with that a lot.
**Craig:** No. Here’s what I deal with. I deal with misery, and then when I have that moment of inspiration and clarity, it just gets me back to where everyone else’s normal is.
**John:** Aw.
**Craig:** There is no high.
**Megana:** Do we have a wah-wah sound effect?
**Craig:** We can. Ready? Wah-wah.
**John:** That was very well done.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**John:** You’re your own sad trombone.
**Craig:** I’m a human sad trombone.
**John:** Megana, I totally recognize what you’re going through, so ignore Craig.
**Craig:** You’re healthy.
**John:** Even this last week, while I was in Wyoming, I had that moment of creative inspiration on this project that’s been maybe 15 years percolating in the back of the brain. I was like, “Oh, that’s how I do it.” It’s 3 in the morning. I wake up, and I know how to do this thing. It’s tough. I was up for a long time.
What’s helpful for me is, I think I just open the notes app on my phone, vomit it out as much as I could get out there, just so it was out of my brain. Once it was out of my brain, I didn’t feel responsible for keeping it circling, then I could go back to sleep. Respect that something’s trying to get out of you. Get it out of you. Then you know it’s there, and you can be joyful about it in the morning, but you can go back to sleep.
**Craig:** I find these days the only thing that apparently helps me unwind and go to sleep after whatever my day is half of an edible, five milligrams total.
**John:** This is a thing you learned over the course of 10 years.
**Craig:** Exactly.
**Megana:** Craig, maybe you don’t feel that after a writing session, but your show’s about to come out, and I can already tell there’s going to be a great reception. There’s going to be so much excitement around it.
**Craig:** Oh god, [inaudible 00:30:57].
**Megana:** I’m knocking on wood, which will solve all of that superstition.
**Craig:** Fair.
**Megana:** How are you going to go to sleep after that? Because I already know I’m not going to be able to go to sleep after watching the first episode.
**Craig:** First of all, that’s very flattering. You might fall asleep in the middle of the first episode. You don’t know. Boy, I’m bad at self-promotion. I’m certainly looking forward to it coming out. I think if I’m at a lot of jangly adrenaline, that may be a night where my good old friend Ambien comes to tuck me in, because boy, that’ll just cut through any tension. It’s all anxiety for me. It’s just anxiety, because I have anxiety. It’s the way it goes. I’m very jangly. I’m a bit scared right now, even though I love the show and HBO loves the show and everybody so far that’s watched it has been really happy.
**John:** Megana, one thing that’s really helpful that Craig’s doing right now is he’s labeling the emotion. He’s labeling his anxiety. He’s labeling exactly what he’s feeling. As you’re up and you’re not able to get to sleep, try putting some words for how you’re feeling, so not just excited. What is it that is causing you to be up and ah? Is it anxiety about the thing? Is it excitement? Is it joy? What is it?
**Megana:** That’s a good question. I guess it’s a fear that I will never have that feeling again.
**Craig:** Oh, good.
**John:** That’s insightful.
**Craig:** Now this I understand, finally. I was waiting for this, because normally, I feel like Megana and I are both-
**Megana:** We do relate emotionally totally.
**Craig:** We just wade around in the misery pool and then bump into each other every now and then, and you’re like, “Oh, you’re still here.” That I totally get. Believe me. Listen.
**Megana:** I just don’t want this to stop, because I’ll probably never have a moment of clarity again.
**Craig:** That’s a great fear. I get that fear completely. Completely. Right now, I’m afraid about writing another season, because I’m like, “I love this season. How am I going to do that again?” I don’t know. I don’t know.
**Megana:** Exactly. Not that I can relate to that.
**John:** I totally hear what both of you are saying. I totally get that as valid. It’s just not been my experience at all.
**Craig:** No, you’re much happier with yourself. You are.
**John:** I am.
**Craig:** You are.
**John:** While we were doing the Big Fish musical, we had these talk backs on Wednesday after the matinee. It’s all the old people who come to the matinee. Then there’d be a talk back. Some of the actors and some of the people involved in the production would talk to these old people afterwards. We were talking about the show. I’m there. I can picture two actors who are behind me. This woman raises her hand. She goes, “Why are you so confident?” I was like, “Because I am.”
There’s a moment in Bros. There’s a really good speech in Bros where Billy Eichner is basically [inaudible 00:33:58] why are you confident. It’s like, because I’ve had to fake being confident for so much of my life that I just get good at it, and I somehow convinced myself to be confident, like, “Oh, it’s going to work out. I’m going to be able to solve this thing. I’ll be able to write that scene tomorrow. It’s fine.”
**Megana:** Wow.
**Craig:** Oh my god. They would have never asked. They would have been like, “What’s wrong with you? Are you okay? Do you need a hug?”
**Megana:** Aw.
**John:** Aw. Be born a gay, closeted child, and then all your problems will be solved.
**Craig:** I wonder what happens when you’re born a gay, closeted Jewish child, because then it’s like the war begins.
**Megana:** I do think this gets back to who should you trust, because the distinction that you make sometimes, Craig, between core pride and core shame, which I really like, the people who are so tempting to trust are people who have core pride and can just say these things really confidently, whereas you and I are up all night being like, “We’ll never write again.”
**Craig:** It’s true. I also think, Megana, sometimes that the people who have, I don’t know if it’s core pride, but sometimes there are people who know how to trigger your core shame as they’re doling out advice. In fact, that’s their con artistry. Then anyone that can trigger your core shame, you’re trying to make them happy now.
**John:** Cult leader.
**Craig:** I am as susceptible as anyone to somebody who says something bad about me to me. They already become way more valid in my mind than anyone else. That’s not right. That’s incorrect. I know enough to know to not go down that path and let that happen to me. My instinct, inerringly, is to over-reward people who are critical and under-reward people who are praising. I’m not John.
**John:** That’s true. Wow, what a therapy session this has been.
**Craig:** “Why are you so confident?” I love that lady. Was that my mom? That was probably my mom.
**John:** “Why are you so confident?” I think it was your mom, actually.
**Craig:** “What’s wrong with you?”
**John:** “Don’t you know this is all going to fail and burn?”
**Craig:** “You’ll end up dead.”
**John:** “You’ll still die.”
**Craig:** “You’ll still die.” That was a great question, Megana.
**John:** Yeah, nice question.
**Craig:** Good job.
**Megana:** Thanks, guys.
**John:** Let’s return to some listener questions. How about James? He has a question about raising kids in LA.
**Megana:** James is an aspiring screenwriter currently working as an editor to pay the bills. He says, “My wife Alex and I have been living on the west side of LA for about five years now, but we’re thinking of starting a family. It’s time to move to what will hopefully be our forever home. Alex is pitching that we move to New York to be closer to her family, but I’d prefer to stay in LA. It goes without saying that there are myriad fundamental differences between living in New York versus LA, but I’d like your advice about parenting in particular.
“One point of disagreement between me and Alex is the idea that our children will be significantly impacted by what city they grow up in. Alex believes that East Coast culture inherently shapes children into more grounded, worldly humans. She fears that children brought up in LA are more likely to be vacuous, superficial, and materialistic. She also feels it’s harder to forge truly deep and meaningful friendships here.
“While I think Alex is being reductive, I can’t say I fully disagree with her. I believe there’s a certain type of person who lives in LA, namely those who work in the entertainment industry, who reek of superficiality and who don’t understand the difference between making friends and networking. If those people are sending their kids to the same school as our kids, then our kids will be exposed to their values, right? John and Craig, what has been your experience raising children in Los Angeles?”
**Craig:** Lot’s to go through here.
**John:** Lots to go through here. I don’t know that we can fully resolve the LA versus New York battle, because that has never come up before. First competition to ever happen between LA and New York and which is a better place to raise a family.
You can raise great kids in either place. Are you talking New York City, the city itself, or somewhere out in the suburbs? They’re very different experiences. Are you talking about staying in the west side or going to the Valley? Because those are different experiences too. I think you’re right to be thinking about where do you want to move to have kids. My advice would be, wherever you go, if you could move someplace where your kid can go to the public school, you’re going to get rid of a lot of your worries about the superficiality and grossness of the place.
**Craig:** James, I’m going to go backwards through your points one by one quickly to get to the one that matters the most I think to me as I read through it. First, I raise my kids in La Cañada. It’s in LA, basically. It’s between Glendale and Pasadena. My kids went to the public schools here. It is not like West LA. Very few people in the entertainment business in La Cañada. It’s mostly just lawyers and some financial industry people and just various people.
There is an emphasis on raising kids in a healthy, nurturing, kind environment, where there are just decent pro-social values. I don’t mean to say family values. I mean legitimately, it’s progressive. They’re trying to do the right thing. I like that. It is doable. There are other places doing it. It’s not just La Cañada.
I grew up in New York. My kids grew up in LA. I have a little bit of the benefit of that perspective. I can tell you that, you think there’s a certain type of person who lives in LA, reeking of superficiality and don’t understand the difference between making friends and networking, and I will point right to the entire industry of finance in New York, which is horrifying. It’s horrifying. Apologies to everybody in it, but the culture of that industry is pretty brutal.
You want to talk about reeking of superficiality. At least in the entertainment business, we’re making stuff for people to watch. In the financial industry, they’re just making money. That’s it. Their job is to just make money. To me, you make money to do the thing, but they’re like, “No, the thing is to make money.” There’s an enormous amount of superficiality in all that.
If you’re around the superficial people, it’s going to happen. New York, full of them. LA, full of them. I disagree with Alex when she thinks that children in LA are more likely to be vacuous, superficial, materialistic. I went to school in Manhattan for a couple years, and oh boy, I met some winners.
Here’s the thing that you said that I went, “Oh.” Alex says she wants to be in New York to be closer to her family. I gotta tell you, if you are starting a family and having a child or maybe prospectively having more than one child, being near an extended family that you can get along with, and I’m assuming that you do, is a huge bonus.
**John:** I agree.
**Craig:** It’s a massive bonus. It will help you and your wife tremendously. It’s definitely worth considering, just for that alone. While you may engage in the progressive male feminist fantasy that you are going to be as much of a nurturer as your wife is, I doubt it. I just doubt it. I think that what will happen is, without you even trying, you’re going to naturally just imagine that some of this stuff is going to be more on her shoulders. I’m not accusing you of anything, James. I’m just saying it’s going to happen, and then she’s going to need the extra help, not you.
My suggestion is to think less about what’s going to happen to your kids, because if you’re good people, and you can put your kids near good people, they’ll be good people. I would think more about who’s going to help you as you raise these kids.
**John:** I think the accessibility of your wife’s family could be a huge boon and probably a reason for considering New York over Los Angeles. I agree with you there. In terms of you’re an aspiring screenwriter just working as an editor right now. You can do that in New York. You’ll get a job. It’ll be fine.
**Craig:** Yeah, completely.
**John:** We should say though, Craig, you’re proselytizing La Cañada, and you loved it, but you are moving out of La Cañada.
**Craig:** That’s right. My youngest is in her senior year of high school. She’s going to be going to Berklee College of Music in the fall.
**John:** Fantastic.
**Craig:** In Boston.
**Megana:** Congratulations.
**Craig:** I didn’t do it. She did it. I salute her.
**John:** You made a James and Alex choice to move to a neighborhood you wanted to raise kids in, and now you’re done.
**Craig:** We raised kids. We’re done, and now we’re leaving, because somebody once joked about La Cañada, you don’t move there for the nightlife. We have friends obviously in La Cañada. Most of my friends are more near where you are, including you. That made sense to do a little switcheroo and head down there.
**John:** Borrow a cup of sugar from Aline. She’s right down the street.
**Craig:** It’s more likely that she will have to borrow the sugar from me-
**John:** That’s true.
**Craig:** … because everybody knows that my pantry is well stocked with the staples.
**John:** Gotta have them all.
**Craig:** Megana, if you need a staple, you come talk to me.
**Megana:** Like flour and sugar?
**Craig:** Oh, it goes well beyond simple flour and sugar. What kind of sugar? Confectioner’s sugar, dark brown, golden brown, light brown, demerara? Yes, I’ve had them all.
**Megana:** I’m excited that you’re moving closer to us.
**Craig:** You need rice? Basmati, short grain, long grain? What would you like? I have it all. Just come on over. Knock knock.
**John:** Fantastic. I think this was good advice. I don’t want to jinx us, so let’s go right ahead to our One Cool Things.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** My One Cool Thing, I actually have two of them, the first is a video by Erik Grankvist, who’s a Swedish kid who moved to the wilds of Sweden and spent three years building a log cabin. It’s great. It’s 90 minutes long. It’s so good. I watched the whole thing. There’s no dialog in it the whole time. Craig, you probably read My Side of the Mountain growing up, didn’t you?
**Craig:** I love that book.
**John:** I have tried to get the rights to it several times. I’m honestly not sure it needs to be a movie now that this movie exists.
**Craig:** Tough movie. It’s a tough one.
**John:** Honestly, this video is probably better than the movie would be, because this guy, he just starts building a cabin on his grandparents’ property, which is really basically the plot of My Side of the Mountain. Instead of getting a falcon, he gets a little puppy. He sees puppy grow up into a full dog while he’s doing all this stuff. It’s really impressive. I’d recommend this. Honestly, Megana, if you have trouble sleeping sometime, you’re going to watch this. This is going to make you feel happy about things. It’s anxiety-relieving.
**Megana:** Oh, nice. Thank you.
**Craig:** Megana, have you read My Side of the Mountain?
**Megana:** I thought I did, but I think I’m confusing it with a different book, so no. I feel like I’ve absorbed it.
**John:** There’s a book called Hatchet which is actually similar.
**Megana:** Did you say Hatchet? I was thinking of Hatchet.
**Craig:** I think you should read it.
**John:** A kid runs away.
**Craig:** It’s survivalism. It’s teenage survivalism. I love that stuff.
**John:** It’s good stuff. It’s good.
**Craig:** What else you got?
**John:** My other thing is, I have to do a lot of screenshots for stuff, for work stuff, but screenwriting stuff, but also a lot for the app development stuff. I have this utility called Skitch that I love, which is really good for taking a screenshot and being able to send it to somebody or do the little annotations on it. It basically became unsupported, and I really missed it. I found something that was much, much better, and it’s absolutely free. It’s called Shottr. Shottr.cc is where you get it. It’s a Mac utility. You just want to take a little screenshot of a piece of your screen and send it to somebody or-
**Craig:** Wow.
**John:** … drag it into something, so, so good. It’ll tell you what colors are in the selection. It’s really, really smart. I salute the makers of Shottr. Everyone should use it, because it’s just so much better than the built-in screenshots on Mac OS.
**Craig:** Damn. I love this. I’m going to check this out for sure.
**John:** Do you screenshot things often, Craig?
**Craig:** Constantly, yeah.
**John:** Do you find yourself [crosstalk 00:45:57]?
**Craig:** I’m basically a Command Shift 4 guy. That’s fine.
**John:** Replace your Command Shift 4 with this. Basically just map the same thing to that and it’s better.
**Craig:** It’s just better. It’s more functionality.
**John:** More functionality, and also it won’t litter your desktop with a bunch of screenshots that you don’t want anymore.
**Craig:** Oh god, tell me about it, although I did remap my screenshots to a different folder, which you can do.
**John:** You can do that in this too.
**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a simple article this week in Wired, one of my favorite publications, with a headline that grabbed me. Oh boy, it was like it was designed for me. The headline is “Humans Walk Weird.” It should be weirdly, but fine. “Scientists May Finally Know Why. Humanity’s peculiar gait has long confounded engineers and biomechanists, but it might be one of nature’s clever tricks.”
It’s stuff that I never thought about, because I didn’t really understand. There is this weird thing that we do when we plant our leg, before we swing it to the next step, our leg bounces twice. It bends and extends when our foot touches down and then again just before take-up. Why do we bounce twice? Never been clear until now. Scientists at the University of Munich may have found an answer. It all basically comes down to our foot, which is really weird. Really weird. In the Animal Kingdom, it’s on its own. Of course, all this connects to evolutionary biology, as you would imagine it would. It’s a short article, but it’s a really interesting one. I haven’t thought about it as I’ve been walking, but I want to, because it’s just a very strange thing to think that our walk is weird. Even our walk is unique among the animals.
**John:** I’m sure the folks that listen to this podcast who work in animation are familiar with how strange people walk and how you’ve built a believable walk cycle for a character you’re trying to animate. I love evolutionary biology, because you recognize humans are strange for so many reasons independently of our big brains and our ability to speak and think and organize societies. Our hands are just so remarkable. The fact that we can swim so well, as primates we can swim so well, and if you’ve ever read the book Born to Run, we can just run so fast and so long, so much more than any other primate, but really most mammals. We just have these physical abilities that are so special and strange. It’s not just our brains that got us here.
**Craig:** No, but it’s our brains that keep us here. That’s our show.
**John:** That’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
**Craig:** Yeah, it is.
**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** As always.
**John:** Our outro this week is by Nica Brooke. It features an ode to Sexy Craig.
**Craig:** What? Who? Who did you say?
**John:** Nica Brooke?
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Sexy Craig?
**Craig:** Oh, yeah.
**John:** If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com.
**Craig:** I’ve got an outro.
**John:** That’s also the place where you can send questions.
**Craig:** You like outros?
**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting.
**Craig:** Inneresting.
**John:** It has lots of links to things about writing.
**Craig:** Oh, yeah.
**John:** We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can 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.
**Craig:** You like back-episodes?
**John:** Remember to use the promo code ONION to save a ton on your annual subscription.
**Craig:** I’ll give you a promo code.
**John:** Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun episode.
**Megana:** Thank you.
**John:** A useful, therapeutic episode.
**Craig:** Thanks.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Craig and Megana, I had to break this to you, but Los Angeles will at some point suffer a huge disaster, a natural disaster, and I don’t know what to do about it. I kind of know what to do about it, just not a lot. Obviously, one of the things that could befall Los Angeles is the big one, a giant earthquake. Looking at the stats, within the next 30 years, probability of a big, big earthquake, 60%. That would be an earthquake measuring 6.7, which is Northridge, 46% earthquake measuring 7, which is big, really big. I heard that gasp. A 31% chance, basically a one third chance that an earthquake measuring 7.5, which is really big, can happen in Los Angeles.
**Craig:** That’s scary, but let’s also point out that when they say an earthquake measuring magnitude 7.5 in the Los Angeles region, the Los Angeles region is enormous.
**John:** LA is giant.
**Craig:** It’s giant.
**John:** It’s giant. I love the maps that show the population of LA County is bigger than almost the entire rest of the United States. It’s crazy how many people live in Los Angeles versus everywhere else.
**Craig:** It is a sprawl. It is a geographic sprawl. Having lived through the Northridge earthquake, I do know that a 6.7 thrust quake, as we experienced there, was very frightening to ride out near the Beverly Center, which is far away from Northridge and right by Megana’s house, but we survived.
**John:** We did.
**Craig:** Very few buildings fell down. One apartment building in Northridge collapsed. One. Now, there were some overpasses that fell down. The 10 overpass by La Cienega and I believe Fairfax fell down.
**John:** There was also one on the west side. It’s past the 405 freeway basically, because I was living in Palms, and suddenly my commute to Santa Monica got actually faster because no one could get on the 10 freeway except for me right by the 405.
**Craig:** Right, because you’re in between the trouble. Chunks of the Beverly Center fell off. I remember that.
**John:** [crosstalk 00:52:17].
**Megana:** Oh my god.
**Craig:** If the Northridge earthquake hadn’t happened at 4 in the morning, a lot more people would’ve died.
**John:** It would’ve been bad.
**Craig:** Even then, you think about the amount of buildings in Los Angeles, which is just insane, for so many of them to make it through and for so few people to be seriously injured, we’re fairly well prepared.
**John:** I think that part of the reason we’re well prepared. Because we’ve had these earthquakes, we actually have building standards that are actually pretty good.
**Craig:** Really good.
**John:** A giant earthquake could do some crazy, crazy, damage, absolutely 100% true, but we’re actually built for the Northridge earthquakes.
**Craig:** Yes, we are. New construction is very well designed for earthquakes. Our very tall buildings downtown, quite a few of them are on rollers, so they’re able to move back and forth, which will be very scary when you’re on top floor, because you’ll be, “Whoa. Whoa.” What isn’t happening is the bottom isn’t fixed where the top is swaying, which is what ends up toppling buildings. I will be scared during an earthquake, but I’m not scared of earthquakes.
**John:** Now that we’ve made it through the earthquake fears, my new fear from this last week, my friend Miles quote tweeted a thing about ARk floods. Craig, are you familiar with ARk floods?
**Craig:** No.
**John:** This is the new thing to be worried about. It’s a real, genuine thing. These have happened before in California. Essentially, what happens is two big storms. One comes from the north. One comes from the south. Basically, the river of moisture comes from the south, and they get jammed up over California. It just rains and rains and rains and rains.
If you look in the Workflowy, you’ll see ARkstorm flood areas, which is basically what happened in 1862. There were inland lakes. Basically, the whole central part of California got flooded. Those canyons, they became a landlocked sea for a time. There wasn’t as much of Los Angeles at the time, but it got wiped out. I think it’s worth thinking about that, because I know the same degree we’ve prepared for earthquakes, we haven’t really prepared for floods in Los Angeles as much, because it just hasn’t happened to us recently. I think it’s causing me some concern as it rains so much this season.
**Craig:** That’s scary, but what are we going to do about it? I’d love to know.
**John:** Craig, what are you doing right now for emergency preparation? You’re obviously moving to this new house. Are you thinking about how many days of water and food and stuff like that?
**Craig:** Yes. I have a decent supply of canned goods that I always make sure we have on hand, along with some basic emergency supplies, knives, strike-all matches, tarps, blankets. In La Cañada I have a generator, which runs on natural gas, but if that gets disturbed, it also has a backup propane tank. At the new place, I’m not sure where I’d put the generator, but I’m thinking about it. I do also have large 50-gallon storage bins for drinking water, and I have water purification tablets.
**John:** In both places you have a pool, which you can use for water as well for a time.
**Craig:** The name of the game is how can you survive comfortably for a week. That’s what you’re going for, a week, because if emergency services, FEMA, the government can’t help you after seven days, you’re screwed. It’s over.
**John:** As I even put this on the Workflowy, I realized that the first time we talked about COVID was in a Bonus Segment. I don’t want to somehow manifest an ARk flood by putting it-
**Craig:** Oh, you thought that’s how that worked?
**John:** That’s how it works. We are the reason COVID happened, that it became what it did. One difference I would point out though, Craig, is that with an earthquake, we’re always prepared, like, “Okay, you’re going to bunker down. You’re going to stay there until things get better.” In a flood, you may just have to leave, because your house may be underwater.
**Craig:** Yes, that’s right.
**John:** Preparing to get out is a thing too. I’ve never thought about having a boat, a canoe. I guess there might be some parts of Los Angeles. I’m up on a hill, so I don’t think about it so much. There’d be some parts of Los Angeles where it wouldn’t be the worst idea to have some sort of inflatable raft someplace.
**Craig:** You’re not on a significant hill, meaning if you have a massive flood that is turning areas into lakes, the fact that you’re maybe 20 feet above the street may not be enough to save you.
**John:** Thanks. Thanks.
**Craig:** You’re saying you’re going to keep a canoe?
**John:** Megana [crosstalk 00:57:03] come over here.
**Megana:** That is my emergency plan. Now that Craig has this pantry-
**Craig:** I was going to say, I have all the staples.
**Megana:** I’m just going to be swimming from Craig’s place to John’s place.
**Craig:** Which actually is adorable. I love that.
**John:** It’s nice.
**Craig:** There won’t be any internet, so I can write notes to John, and you would just swim them over to him.
**John:** To end this on a happier note, I will say one of the best memories of the Northridge earthquake was that power went out. Everything was out. That was pre-internet. Phones were out too. I had just started dating a guy. My car, I got it out of the garage. I drove it over to his place. He was there. I could check in. He was fine. We just hung out for that weekend and saw his friends. We were sitting on rooftops watching transformers blow. It was kind of romantic in a snow day kind of way, so I do have some good memories from it.
**Megana:** That’s horrifying.
**John:** No, it wasn’t horrifying. It was kind of romantic in a way that-
**Megana:** It is romantic, but you were just watching transformers blow?
**John:** The end of the world. Yeah, they pop.
**Craig:** I’d like to point out that you said that’s horrifying and John’s rebuttal was, “No, I repeat it was romantic.”
**John:** Romantic.
**Craig:** “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time. Clearly, I said… ” I can see how that’s fair.
**John:** I don’t mean to invalidate your feeling there. I would say in my experience it was romantic.
**Craig:** I can see that. I remember that sound actually, if you watch the first episode of The Last of Us.
**Megana:** How do you know that it’s okay to travel though if you don’t have your phone?
**Craig:** We used to just do it all the time, Megana.
**John:** We just did it.
**Craig:** Megana, literally every time anyone traveled anywhere ever, it was without a phone. Ever. Anywhere. Everyone.
**Megana:** I deserve that.
**John:** We grew up in a time where there weren’t phones.
**Craig:** Everywhere.
**John:** Everything will be okay. Everything’s going to be okay. It’s going to be fine.
**Craig:** Everything will be okay. Now John, just to be clear, because I want to understand this, you’re saying that you’re going to keep a canoe or some sort of kayak on your property so you can just get out there?
**John:** Mike has not heard this yet. That’s why I was thinking something inflatable, just so that we can use it if need be, but store it in this giant storage closet that holds our giant bucket of food and our canned goods.
**Craig:** The food bucket. Megana, I don’t want to be a downer, but it does concern me a little bit that you’re going to be swimming back and forth between my house and John’s, because a lot of the water is going to be contaminated with raw human sewage.
**Megana:** John has a pool float.
**John:** The pool float, yeah, it’s [crosstalk 00:59:34].
**Craig:** As long as you can float down shit river, you’ll be thrilled. So much fun.
**John:** We need to figure out a plan for chemical toilets, because in a flood situation, toilets won’t flush anymore.
**Craig:** In a flood situation, the toilet is the world. That’s what the toilet is.
**John:** All the world is a toilet.
**Craig:** Just go ahead and jump in the water, wave hi to Megana, take care of it.
**Megana:** Wow. Wow. I’m not going to be able to sleep after this conversation.
**John:** I’m so sorry.
**Craig:** You will. You will. You’re going to be fine. Megana, don’t worry.
**John:** If you click through the links, you’ll find that La Cañada Flintridge is singled out as being a very dangerous place in a flood scenario.
**Craig:** That’s why we’re moving. La Cañada is generally not considered at all a flood problem because we have flood channels and we are 1,600 feet above sea level. However, mudslides could theoretically be a problem for certain areas, and they have been. Our street is not a mud flow problem area, because there’s a rather large valley between the hills and where our street is. There are other areas west of us that got absolutely hammered. Homes got wiped out by some mudslides when we had severe rainstorms a few years ago. It’s definitely a thing.
**John:** Craig, would you ever live in the Hills? Would you live in the Hollywood Hills?
**Craig:** Never. Never, ever, ever.
**John:** We have friends who live up there. I would never do it.
**Craig:** Forget earthquakes and the ARk floods. Forget all that. How about just I cut myself badly chopping vegetables, I need an ambulance. They’re going to have to squeeze through the narrow thing going up. You ever notice in the Hills it’s like, “Oh, I live on Waterton Place. It’s off of Waterton Avenue, which connects with Waterton Street.” You’re like, “What? Why?”
**John:** If you want to have a party in the Hills, just give up, because no one will be able to park anywhere.
**Craig:** No, you can’t park. It’s brutal. I understand why people live there. I truly, truly do.
**John:** Gorgeous views.
**Craig:** Melissa and I have always been in absolute lockstep on this. Never would we ever live in the Hills.
**John:** Megana, you’re going to parties in the Hills all the time.
**Craig:** All the time.
**John:** Would you live there?
**Megana:** I have also made the mistake of driving to parties in the Hills. Also, you don’t get any service there, so it’s not like you can call an Uber or anything either.
**John:** That’s the problem too. We have friends who will say, “Oh, we’re wrapping up here, so time to leave.” They’re like, “Oh, great, I’ll call an Uber.” They’re like, “Oh god, you’re going to be here another hour, because someone will refuse to come get you.”
**Craig:** Look, I’m from New York. Again, I like a nice grid system. Streets at right angles are lovely.
**John:** They are. Plus, the Hills always burns. It’s always fires.
**Craig:** They burn. They burn.
**John:** Where you are in La Cañada, that could’ve theoretically burned too. How close did the fires ever come to you guys?
**Craig:** Very. There was the station fire. Oh jeez, that was, I don’t know, maybe 13 years ago or so. We were evacuated. Our home was never threatened by fire, but the smoke was unbearable. You couldn’t even see. I did go to the very top of my street, because my street is on quite a steep incline. Like I said, my house is about 1,600 feet above sea level. There’s probably another hundred feet of elevation or more to get to the very end of the street. When I got up there, I did see… You know when there’s a utility pole and the steel wire that goes to the ground on an angle to it, to anchor it? That steel wire was partially melted. The fire got that close.
**Megana:** Oh my god.
**Craig:** We definitely had to leave. You know what? I think it was more like 15 years ago, because I remember we were like, “Okay, we’ve got an hour to just start packing crap up. In case our house burns down, what do you bring?” At the time, Melissa just started packing these large photo albums into our car. I was like, “Photo albums? Who cares?” Now there’s no photo album. There’s no nothing. Just take your laptop. You’ve got everything on your laptop. Everything. Megana, we used to have photo albums.
**Megana:** I know both of those words separately.
**Craig:** I know. Imagine a book, a big, huge, massive book, and on each page, it’s just blank cardboard and then this nasty plastic film that you would peel back and it’d go sss, like that.
**John:** That eventually gets yellowed.
**Craig:** That’s what it would sound like. Then you’d stick your printed photos on the page and then lower the plastic back down.
**Megana:** Wait, but I do know what a photo album is. I was just kidding. I’m not that young.
**Craig:** Megana, let me explain again.
**John:** Craig, I gotta say-
**Craig:** I don’t think you get it.
**John:** Your sound department must love you for the Foley, because clearly they’re just like, “Craig, we need you to come in and do the Foley for the show.” You’re just like, “I’ll make it all with my mouth sounds.”
**Craig:** I’m going to tell you. I will tell you. I will give this podcast an exclusive story about The Last of Us following the completion of its airing. I will say I’m all over that thing.
**John:** He is his own Foley.
**Craig:** When you hear it, you’ll be like, “What?” I’m not talking about my voice. I do have an appearance by voice at one point, but sound effects-wise, when it’s over, just you wait.
**Megana:** I can’t wait to see that in the credits.
**Craig:** It’s not in the credits.
**Megana:** It’s just right there.
**John:** Only Scriptnotes Premium Members know about this.
**Craig:** Exclusive to Scriptnotes.
**John:** Love it. Thanks, guys.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
**Megana:** Thank you.
**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.
**John:** Bye.
**Craig:** Bye.
**Megana:** Bye.
Links:
* [The Last of Us](https://www.hbo.com/the-last-of-us) premieres on HBO 1/15/23 at 6pm!
* [Can “The Last of Us” Break the Curse of Bad Video-Game Adaptations?](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/02/can-the-last-of-us-break-the-curse-of-bad-video-game-adaptations) by Alex Barasch for the New Yorker
* [Use PROMO code ONION for $10 off an annual Scriptnotes Membership](https://scriptnotes.net/) email help@supportingcast.fm if you run into any issues
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 574: Difficult Scenes, Transcript](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-episode-574-difficult-scenes-transcript)
* [Erik Grankvist’s Video of Building a Log Cabin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtiaSn5iCg8)
* [Shottr](https://shottr.cc/) screenshot app
* [Humans Walk Weird. Scientists May Finally Know Why](https://www.wired.com/story/humans-walk-weird-scientists-may-finally-know-why/#intcid=_wired-verso-hp-trending_31383010-6a51-4efd-ba74-12b85959c72f_popular4-1) by Katrina Miller
* [The Big One – Probability Earthquake Will Occur in Los Angeles](https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-probability-earthquake-will-occur-los-angeles-area-san-francisco-bay-area)
* [ARK Storm](https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/how-an-arkstorm-could-wreak-havoc-on-los-angeles/) and [The Great Flood of 1862](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nica Brooke ([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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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/582standard.mp3).