722 - Orality, or Writing to be Spoken

14:47John August:Yes.

14:48Craig Mazin:So editors, and I have my editors at the mix. Editors are the most important part of this thing. Once you say, that is a wrap, everyone. Great job. Pile up the trucks and drive home. Everything now, as far as I'm concerned, is about editors and editing, and they need to be protected.

15:12John August:Next up, we have a follow-up from Leslie, and she is writing about your comment about Steve Jobs.

15:19Craig Mazin:Leslie says, I'm a historian and the executive director of the Steve Jobs archive. In episode 719, you talked about knowing whether your work is good enough, and Craig recommended watching Steve Jobs' keynote introducing the iPhone in 2007. I thought you might be interested to see the attached email Steve sent to himself about a year before he died. I think it speaks to the question of why he cared so much about his work.

15:42John August:Craig, do you want to maybe read this? Because this would be good for you.

15:46Craig Mazin:Sure. Steve Jobs wrote, I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow, I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music. I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object-oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and I'm totally dependent on them for my life and well-being.

16:31Craig Mazin:Sent from my iPad, which may be the best sign-off there possible. Well, this is an interesting meditation on gratitude. Yeah. I wonder why. It's interesting. She says, I think it speaks to the question of why he cared so much about his work. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the historian and executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive knows him and his work better than I do. But I'll tell you what I get out of this is humility. Yes. Especially for somebody who changed the world in a profound way and in a way that continues to ripple ahead. I sense great humility here, which is a remarkable thing.

17:15John August:Yeah, it's also the recognition that you are a part of a process that started before you and will continue after you. And so the fact that he was in the last year of his life, it also makes sense that he had this realization. Is it an email that he would have written to himself five years earlier? I don't know, but it makes sense for where he's at in his life. The thing that really kind of grabs at me

17:37Craig Mazin:is when I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. But he didn't realize that at first. Yes, he didn't. And that was a fatal error. Yeah. He felt like maybe he could help himself survive. and he chose, I guess what we call alternative therapies for a very serious cancer. And it's hard to say if he would have lived or not had he engaged in science-based, evidence-based medicine faster. But regardless, this is a pretty, thank you. Thank you, Leslie. That was lovely to receive. And I'm very glad that you were listening.

18:16John August:So this email reminded me of a piece I read this week by Kevin Kelly, who was a former editor of Wired, who's now, I think it's in his 80s and still blogs and writes a lot. And this was him talking about, as a young man, he backpacked through Asia and hitchhiked everywhere and sort of just relied on other people helping him out. And so he's really talking about receiving kindness. So he writes, I believe the generous gifts of strangers are actually summoned by a deliberate willingness to be helped. You start by surrendering to your human need for help. That we cannot be helped until we embrace our need for help is another law of the universe.

18:53John August:My new age friends call that state being paranoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up, and get you on your path. The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up. But to be helped, you have to join the conspiracy yourself. You have to accept the gifts. Although we don't deserve it and have done nothing to merit it, we've been offered a glorious ride on this planet if only we accept it. To receive the gift requires the same humble position a hitchhiker gets into when he stands shivering at the side of the empty highway, cardboard sign flapping at the cold wind, and says, how will the miracle happen today?

19:40Craig Mazin:That's beautiful. I love the idea of all of us as sort of less narcissistic Blanche DuBois, depending on the kindness of strangers. There is an idea about pro-social behavior that suggests that because there is a evolutionary benefit for us to be part of a group, we have an instinct, therefore, to be helpful to a group so that they will let us into the group. I mean, you could draw all this back to a kind of selfish gene theory, which is fine. It doesn't matter. What matters is that we have it and it does feel good. It feels good to help people. It just does. I mean, there are people I think who don't experience that feeling, but I know you and I do.

20:22Craig Mazin:What is this episode? Seven what? Well, why are we doing this? We're doing this not because we have been sentenced by a court. Yeah. We like it. It feels good to help people. It really, really does. And I love this idea of pro-noia, the presumption that people are actually out to help you. That's great.

20:47John August:And so as I look at the protests in Minnesota this week, and I look at the marches in sub-zero weather and people trying to get in the way of ICE doing terrible things, that resonates for me because it's people who don't know who they're actually helping, but they know they're helping. And that's a crucial aspect of being human.

21:07Craig Mazin:Yes. The concept that you are going to be one of a thousand people and of that thousand people, some of you may die. Yeah. But that may create some small movement on the needle. I mean, the civil rights movement in the United States was very much, whereas the civil war was just, you were sent and you had to do it. And what they find in war is that people really are just trying to defend their friends. They're not trying to defend their side. But to march across a bridge with the expectation that some of you are going to get bitten by a dog, some of you are going to hit by a fire hose, some of you are going to be beaten with batons, that incredible scene in Gandhi where the march on the saltworks happens, that is the highest form of pro-noia is I'm going to help you by putting myself in a position where I will actively be hurt.

21:55Craig Mazin:It's not just that I'm out to help you. I'm also out to get hurt myself to help you. we do these things because of this unity we feel. We went on strike. Yes, there are rules and the rules say you have to strike. Although there's a way out of it. There is a way out of it. You can say I'm financial core. So I still can work on gold cover projects, but I'm not subject to the rules and I can work and I don't have to strike. And when we strike, what, I don't know, like three people do that maybe? Basically no one does it, yeah. Basically no one. regardless of what you feel about the merits of any particular strike.

22:33Craig Mazin:You have a sense that if you can suffer a little bit for the betterment of your group, it's worth it. Or suffer a lot. It's what keeps us together. I love this concept.

22:44John August:And so what I see in both Steve Jobs' email and in this blog post by Kevin Kelly is recognizing that you are benefiting from others doing that on your behalf. And it's so easy to overlook that. And so we think of ourselves as protagonists who have to go out and do the thing, but it's recognizing that we're also the beneficiaries of other people helping us out. And so again, it's gratitude. And it's also just remembering that you're part of this bigger experience and that no one is an individual. We often talk on this podcast how relationships are everything. And we think about the people in our lives who we know directly, but it's also relationships with invisible forces and invisible groups that we can't perceive.

23:27Craig Mazin:Yes, the shoulders of the giants upon which we stand.

23:30John August:A little bit more follow-up. Brian wrote in about Ava Victor.

23:34Craig Mazin:Thank you so much for inviting Ava Victor on. A key reason their interview was excellent for me was the fact that Ava made this film like an auteur. Script Notes is largely focused on the craft of screenwriting, which is great, but rarely does Script Notes do a deep dive with a true indie auteur who did it all to create a worthy film from scratch. It's fascinating and inspiring, and this is the core reason why I pay the premium subscription for Script Notes. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah, well, we got your$5. That's all we care about.

24:02John August:Yeah. I think Brian makes a good point. It's that we'll have Rian Johnson's on and stuff like that. We don't have a lot of... Greta Gerwig. Greta Gerwig. We don't have a lot of auteurs who are just doing their own thing and that's why it's so nice to have those. Well, now that I think about it, we do have a fair number of auteurs. So we're like Christopher Nolan. We have like mega auteurs.

24:18Craig Mazin:Yeah, and Chris McQuarrie. The thing is, what I would encourage Brian to consider here is actually not to diminish what a writer-director does, because it is exciting, but to remind them that if you sit down and talk to most people that we call an auteur, they're going to very quickly start pointing at the people that help them. So just to stay on theme here, I write and direct episodes of this show. Am I an auteur? Well, I'm going to start talking to you about my editors. I'm definitely going to talk to you about the actors. I'm going to absolutely talk about the cinematographer first and foremost, the production designer, and then you start going down the line, of all the people that worked to do something, the visual effects people, the artistry, you're not really an author.

25:07Craig Mazin:Like, it's not, it's not. I wish I could just kick that word back over to France. Yeah. I used to say this, and I think many people thought, well, because he's not a director. Well, I direct. And the whole film by thing still makes me want to vomit. It's ridiculous. It's an insult to literally everyone who worked on the movie. It's such a joke. So I kind of feel that way about auteur, but I get Brian's point. If I just replace the word auteur with writer-director, then this works great. Yeah, filmmaker.

25:38John August:Yes. Lastly, a bit of praise that is not specifically towards Craig, but a relative of Craig's.

25:45Craig Mazin:This is from Hannah in Lethbridge. Hannah writes, this is not a question, and it's not for John and Craig. It's for all the listeners who heard Craig plug his daughter Jessica's music and thought, yeah, but dads are going to dad. I'm here to tell you that dads are going to dad, but nevertheless, Jessica's music is amazing. I came across her in the wild, and I only just put the connection together. Way to go, Craig, and Craig's plus one for producing at least one amazing artistic thing.

26:13John August:So Craig doesn't have to talk anymore about his daughter, but Jessica really is a unique, singular talent. And so it's very nice to see her and to know her from before this was discovered in the world. Listen, like, independent of her relationship with Craig, like, she's going to do some kinds of amazing things. And it's just neat to see it from the ground floor. So she's recording new music now. We'll see, like, there'll be albums, there'll be things. But, yeah, she's a real talent. Yeah, I mean, I really got in on the ground floor.

26:40Craig Mazin:Yeah. I was there from that first breath. Well, I'll tell you, Hannah, that's lovely to hear. I'm so glad that you appreciated that. And I will share this with Jessica because no surprise, I don't believe she subscribes to the podcast. But what I really like, Hannah, is that you're from Lethbridge, a place where I've spent quite some time. I've even spent time in that Lethbridge casino. Lethbridge is a...

27:07John August:I have no idea what Lethbridge is.

27:08Craig Mazin:Tell me. I'm going to tell you. Lethbridge is a town in Alberta. It is a city. And it's pretty close, I think, to Montana. It's down towards the border there. and it's kind of like a factory town a little bit. Like there's a big vegetable cannery. Trains go through there to pick stuff up from the U.S. and well, probably not now anymore. And it's a blue collar city, but it's like you could feel a spirit, you know? It's funny. I'm like a guy that spent time in a lot of weird Canadian cities and I kind of, I dig it. I liked it. I like Lethbridge and I like that Hannah is there in Lethbridge and I salute you, Hannah.

27:40Craig Mazin:And I salute Lethbridge. Had a great time. Casino is small. I'm not going to lie. It's a small casino. But it was trying.

27:49John August:All right, let's move on to a marquee topic here. So my thesis that I'm trying to defend here is that screenwriting has notably higher orality than other prose writing. And I stumbled across this because there was this thing called Havelock's Orality Tester, which I'll put a link into the show notes too. So you can paste it in some text and it tells you how oral it is versus how literary it is. And so the idea is that some text basically kind of is written to be spoken aloud, and some stuff is just written to be read with your eyes. The definition that they have on the little side here is, orality refers to the characteristics of speech that distinguish it from writing, the patterns, rhythms, and structures that evolve for memory and performance before the advent of literacy.

28:36John August:Drawing on the work of scholars like Walter Ong and Eric Havelock, this tool analyzes text for markers of oral tradition, formulaic expressions, repetition, sound patterns, direct engagement, and the agonistic tone of a spoken debate. So it put in some text in the score. A higher score suggests that the text carries the DNA of the spoken word. So some of the markers, so if you paste some stuff in, you see what it tags things. And so things like a literary marker might be qualifications that signal uncertainty, nuance that would be impossible in live speech. Nested clauses. This is a thing you run into all the time.

29:12John August:In a novel, you can have many nested clauses and your eyes can track back and figure out, like, where am I having the sentence? Like, what am I actually referring to? If you try to say that aloud, you would get lost. A lot of, like, Trump's speech issues are because there's just, the clause within the clause never comes back to the original thing. And it's like, wait, you get lost.

29:34Craig Mazin:I think there's a problem underneath that problem. There's other things happening there, too. I think we know there's a decline that's happening there.

29:39John August:Yeah. Literary stuff will often acknowledge opposing views before it counters them, which is not a thing you tend to do in speech. Right. Embodied action. And so description of physical actions and bodily experience, that's a thing that tends to happen much more often in oral tradition than literary tradition. And we saw a bit of that in, I think, Kevin Kelly's thing, which was, I would say, actually felt kind of spoken, where she's talking about like standing on the side of the highway, holding a sign. you're putting yourself in the body of that person in that space. Other orality markers, using first and second pronouns, asking questions, imperatives, so musts, the commands, contractions, discourse markers, well, so anyway, interjections, short clauses, fewer nominalizations where you're taking a verb and making it into a noun.

30:35John August:And it's all just tracked for me. It's one of those things where it's like, oh yeah, that describes a thing I've sort of noticed but never had a word for.

30:42Craig Mazin:I think this would be incredibly useful for screenwriting teachers, whom I'm often railing against, to use at the beginning of a class on screenwriting because no one who begins, very few people who begin, have spent time reading screenplays. I certainly have. What I had spent so much time doing was reading literature because I was a student. So I was reading Shakespeare and Faulkner and short stories and essays, all of which really were not oral. They had low orality. They were highly literate. And maybe the closest thing that I was reading at the time that felt like maybe it would fall into orality was Stephen King.

31:33Craig Mazin:His books tend to feel like that. He has these long paragraphs in italics that are really designed to be spoken. Yeah. And they're beautiful. I always loved those. And I think this would be an amazing way to sort of start with people and say, you're going to have to actually weirdly forget all that. Because even though you were taught that was the stuff that's going to help you be a writer, it's not going to help you be this kind of writer.

31:57John August:Another thing which is striking me about screenwriting, which I don't know is tracks for morality, but it feels like it would, is that screenwriting is a present tense. So we're not referring back to characters who refer back to the past, but the actual action of a screenplay is in the present tense. You're right there. So you're describing a moment that you're in, and generally you're in with the person who is hearing you, who's there. And that's why it feels so live and so active. So when I say that a screenplay just feels like a long pitch that's written down, yes, there's specific grammar we use in screenplays.

32:32John August:the ints, the x, the transitions. But if you notice what we do on the page, what a lot of screen readers that you and I both do is we'll often like end sentences that go into the transition that continues the next thing. Always. We're always bridging those things. Always. So that it reads well, but it's really so that it sounds good. Yes. So it sounds good to say aloud.

32:53Craig Mazin:Yes. We know when we listen to people telling stories that flow is important. Yeah. A sense of continuity. What it implies is that the person who's telling you the story knows where it's going. We've all had the experience of listening to somebody tell a joke and watching them realize they screwed up or can't remember. And it comes to a hitchy stop. And you think this is not going to be that funny anymore because they don't have confidence in it, which means I don't have confidence in it. Yeah. So with your screenplay, you want to, this is something Scott Frank said to me a long time ago. He said, you want to feel like the person who wrote this is in complete control of it.

33:29John August:Yeah.

33:30Craig Mazin:And that is different than good and bad. It's just, but it is sort of an essential start that they needed you to read that so that you would read this. And then the next page is this on purpose and never just like, oh wait, a scene is happening or they're correcting something. The plates are getting wobbly as you spin them and you lose confidence. Yeah.

33:52John August:And so none of this should be taken as a slam against literary style. Oh God, no. Because I think all of the sophistication that you see in that is so important that there's things you can do in a book or in a scientific article that is very clearly good for that medium. And that it's just, thank God we have it. And thank God we have the innovation and the centuries of literacy to be able to do that kind of stuff. It's just different than the oral tradition, which I'm arguing is screenwriting probably really stems from. And if you think back about the origin of screenwriting, it's like it started as just like a list And then it became kind of just like some descriptions of sort of how it's going to come together and feel.

34:33John August:Even playwriting, obviously it's off the dialogue as an oral tradition. And Shakespeare was an oral tradition before it was written down. That's why there's multiple folios and controversies over where stuff came from. But the scene description was so minimal. It doesn't have the same, some of the DNA that screenwriting does, which is basically creating visuals all the time.

34:53Craig Mazin:I think this is such a nice distinction to make because it also helps people who may, in a snobby way, think that screenwriting isn't real writing, understand that it's just a different kind of writing. It is trying to achieve a different feeling, but it is writing nonetheless. So you have the Richard Brodies of the world who insist that screenwriting is not art, whereas I guess apparently writing refuses. But I think you may fall into that trap if you are overeducated to the point where you have become blind to the existence of another kind of writing entirely. And I don't quite imagine how that can even happen, but apparently it does.

35:37Craig Mazin:And there's a cultural value to this because I think some cultures have simply relied more on orality than others. Western culture has tended to be very much about the literary tradition with wonderful exceptions in drama. They're still doing Death of a Salesman. That clearly, clearly is art high on the orality scale. And of course, we're still performing Shakespeare and ruminating and iterating on Shakespeare in so many different ways. But Western civilization tends to get very fussy about the literary stuff. And orality, I think as you go around the world, you may find that it's higher or more prized in those cultures than it might be in some ivory towers here in the West.

36:21John August:Yeah, we'll see. So listen, I've not read Havelock or Ong or any of the original material here. But if you want to experiment with this yourself, we'll put a link in the show notes to this orality tester. And it's fun to just like grab some text from your stuff, but also just like grab a few paragraphs off of a scientific paper or off a literary paper or a newspaper and sort of see like what it is, because it'll give you a score. But more interestingly, it'll break down like why it's giving that score and it'll highlight the sentences and sort of what it's noticing in there. that has aspects of these certain discourse markers or epistemic hedges and like sort of what it's seeing in there that's giving you this instinct.

37:02Craig Mazin:One final question as I look at it, is this gonna like scrape stuff as we put it through because it is.ai or?

37:08John August:Yeah, so I don't know. I mean, if you're pulling stuff that's already on the internet, I just don't know that it's actually a thing to worry about.

37:15Craig Mazin:Yeah, it's already out there.

37:16John August:That's all the stuff I put in there, stuff that was already on the internet. So it's fine. And again, I don't think that any writer should change how they write to get a higher score than this. I don't want anyone's work to be like, well, you have to hit this number on this. That would be a giant mistake. I think what you and I are both arguing for is that I think an important part of learning about screenwriting should be to understand how it tends to feel on the page and why it tends to feel so spoken on the page.

37:43Craig Mazin:Yes, I mean, just conceptually, this is a great place to start so you understand where you're heading as opposed to where you think you might be heading. Exactly.

37:51John August:Great. Cool. Let's answer some listener questions. Okay.

37:54Craig Mazin:I see one here from Lori. An increasingly common piece of screenwriting advice is to just write a script that's undeniable. But what does that even mean? Does just write an undeniable script mean the way to sell a script is to write a script that sells? Is telling someone to write something undeniable actually useful advice? And if so, what does it really mean other than write something good and marketable.

38:20John August:So to me, this reminds me of, and I cannot think of the source of this, but when someone says like, oh yeah, next time we got to try harder. And it's like, yeah, it's not like you didn't try as hard as you could last time. It's like, it was no shortage of effort. It's just like, it just didn't happen. It just didn't work. And so undeniable feels like one of those, ah, it's like something you say about something that after it succeeded, well, it was undeniable. Well, plenty of people denied it. Yeah, of course.

38:48Craig Mazin:Nothing is undeniable. There are people who have written a script, the movie gets made, they win an Oscar for that script, and other people are like, I hate that, I hate that script, I hate all of it, and I would deny it. So the problem, Laurie, is everybody is desperate to try and say something. There is nothing to say. And we're saying that as guys who've been doing this for a while. But when you really get down to this question, and I think what's underneath this question is, but how do I write something that people are going to love and make and buy and give me a job and all that? The answer is that you're going to write something that they will want to buy and make, and they will be impressed by.

39:29Craig Mazin:And there is no way to advise you how to do that. None. We try to give you general advice about how to write things in ways that we wish we would have had to maybe get there a little quicker, but write something good for whom? You only need to write something that one person says is undeniable, right? You can send it to 80 people, 79 of them deny it. This is not an undeniable script, but if one person buys it, job done, you did it. So the truth is, no, it doesn't really mean much. It's a mouth filler to answer when people are asking you for some sort of, give me a step one through seven method of writing a script that people will buy.

40:11Craig Mazin:It just doesn't exist.

40:12John August:So Laurie, in the longer email, notes that Lawrence Kasdan wrote The Bodyguard in 1975 and his script was rejected 67 times. Well, there you go. And it became a giant, giant hit. Yeah. He's undeniably a great writer, but like, did he write the undeniable script? No, he is not an undeniably great writer

40:29Craig Mazin:because they denied him.

40:31John August:So here's what I'll say is like, I think that's the after-the-fact argument, like, oh, well, that script was undeniable and it wasn't the case. What is generally helpful about a script is a script that feels like only you could have written it. And so when someone reads the script, it's like, wow, that's a really effing great script. And I don't think anyone else would have written that script. That feels like specifically your script. And that is an achievable goal, I think. That's something that writes something that's really, really good, that is unique to your interests and skill set and experience, it's going to help you out more than trying to hit, quote unquote, undeniable.

41:08Craig Mazin:Yeah. I mean, there is a certain solace, I suppose, to be taken in the fact that the greatest living screenwriter, Lawrence Kasdan, you know, got rejected 67 times with a script that went on to be a massive hit. It's hard. We do sort of give the phrase break in a little too much stick because as we point out, you never stop breaking in. But there is a moment where credibility is achieved. It is fragile. It can be smashed within seconds into pieces. But for a moment, because of something that occurs, you get a little bit of credibility and your job is to leverage that credibility and build upon it to get more credibility until there is a point where you are so credible that people would rather believe you than themselves.

41:57Craig Mazin:Like, so at some point, if you sit Larry Kasdan down and you're like, hey, we were thinking about doing the Star Wars movie. What do you think about this? And he's like, I didn't really think that it's a way to go. Then you're going to go, Larry Kasdan, because he has so much credibility. Yeah. But when you begin, you have zero. You get a little shred. Get a little shred. And you build on it. But it's not easy to get that first shred. And John, you're absolutely right. Really the only way, other than be a very talented writer and write something that's very interesting to people, is to write something that is somehow specific to you.

42:33Craig Mazin:You don't even have to know how it's specific to you. Yeah. If you just write honestly, it'll be there. It'll be there.

42:39John August:Nick has a question about deliverables.

42:42Craig Mazin:Assume you're in development, unpaid, on a feature script, and doing notes for your producer or agent manager. Assume you're generally okay with their notes and assume you've made a good faith effort to address them. what do you actually deliver? Obviously, you send the revised draft of the script, incorporating their notes. Do you also send a version with the edits starred, redlined, something else? How much transparency do we as writers really want in this situation? On one hand, highlighting the edits demonstrates that you made them. On the other hand, do we want to show how the sausage is made?

43:13Craig Mazin:Is it acceptable to simply deliver the final revised draft that incorporates their notes and an explainer doc or transmittal email

43:20John August:pointing the reader generally to the notes that you've incorporated? This is a good sort of general question. It's like, do you send the start changes or do you just send the new draft? And I tend to email first saying like, hey, do you want start changes or do you want the full draft? And if they say they want start changes, give them the start changes. If they want just the clean draft, that's great. I'll tend to make both. I might send different ones to different producers if there's multiple producers. It's not a giant hassle to do start changes in most cases. If I'm doing a big rewrite, I won't even turn on star changes because I know that so much is going to change.

43:53John August:It's not helpful for someone. If every page is mostly stars, it's useless. Yeah. I mean, assuming that you have... I don't like the fact that you're unpaid, by the way. Maybe this is like, you know, he sent his manager a script like, let's go out with this thing. And the manager's like, eh, this is not ready yet. So if it's a spec that the manager's been signed out.

44:12Craig Mazin:Yeah. The sausage is not being made on the page with the asterisk. The sausage is being made in the sausage inside your skull, my friend. That's where the sausage is made. No one's getting in there. So don't worry about that. The mystery is still the mystery. It's not like handing them a script with asterisks is going to have them go, oh, this is how they do it. Let's just get rid of this guy. We can do it ourselves. They can't. Typically in a situation like this, I will send both. I'll just send, here's a clean copy. And if you're interested, here's a copy with asterisks. Up to you. It doesn't matter to me.

44:44Yeah.

44:44Craig Mazin:I don't care.

44:45John August:That's fair.

44:45Craig Mazin:Yeah, the sausage is safe in my head. The sausage is safe. The sausage is safe. Do we still title these episodes? Because we do.

44:54John August:The sausage is safe. The sausage is safe. We do title these episodes. Excellent. So that may be the one. Yeah. Let us go to our one cool thing. I had an article, but I also have a game to recommend. So I'm going to do both because I can do both. The first is an article that I think our friend Ken White may have first linked to. It's called Quantum Computing for Lawyers. Substack post by JP Omason. And we hear about quantum computing, especially post-quantum cryptography a lot. And this sort of demystifies that, explains what's going on and why our timelines may be a little too fast for it. Like we may be overthinking this a bit at the moment.

45:32John August:So essentially quantum computers work differently than conventional computers. They're doing a bunch of things at once in ways that are hard to understand for our little brains. but because they can in theory break our normal cryptography much more quickly by just trying, they can essentially just the mathematics works out that they can just do things that would break normal cryptography which hurts for encryption and Bitcoin-y kind of stuff. We have to sort of think about new ways to do that. Mathematically there are ways to do that. It makes it much harder for it. This article just does a really good job demystifying some of it and also saying you know what, we may not actually get quantum computers in any reasonable timeline, so don't assume that it's going to happen.

46:14John August:So a good demystifying article. The second thing I want to recommend is a game we played once in the office and once last night called Swoop. Craig, have you heard of Swoop? Swoop? Swoop. Swoop, Swoop. Swoop may be the next heated rivalry, Craig, because it is a sensation crossing the country. It is a card game, and it looks like Uno or sort of a typical card game. You can play it with normal decks of cards, but it's helpful to get the real deck. It's a Midwestern game that shares aspects with scum and asshole and other summer camp games. Essentially, you are trying to empty your hand and your board and be the first so you don't get stuck with points.

46:55John August:But it has a really nice mechanic. It is super simple to pick up. I will also put a link in the show notes too. This video made by the people who make the decks, which is so Midwestern and kind of cheesy but actually explains the game really well.

47:09Craig Mazin:I mean, their website. I'm looking at their website. It's like, it is. The Midwest is pouring off of this. Yeah. It's serving Midwest. I like it.

47:18John August:You know, we played it with seven people last night. It's probably good with three, but you can just play with as many people as you have. It's a really fun game. And what I like about a card game is that when it's your turn, you'll be paying attention, but you don't have to pay that much attention when it's not your turn and it moves pretty quickly. So you can keep other conversations up in the air, which is, I think, a game night where you have to focus too much on the card game. It's not fun. No. Well, that's all right. Swoop. Swoop. Swoop. And you're going to say swoop a lot, which is just a fun word.

47:48Craig Mazin:Swoop.

47:49John August:Nice. Craig, you've got an article. You've got science for us.

47:51Craig Mazin:I've got science. So it looks like we're going to double dip on science here. So this is a report of a study in Stanford Medicine, their medical magazine, where they report on things. And there is a team at Stanford, which is probably reporting on this, that has figured out how to perhaps reverse the degenerative disease that I guess we'll cover under arthritis or osteoarthritis. So as people get older, they begin to lose cartilage between the joints. It becomes very painful. There becomes swelling. And this just causes a real loss of quality of life. And, of course, it's incredibly expensive for societies to help people like this.

48:39Craig Mazin:And what they have found, because they were sort of chasing stem cells and platelet-rich injections, they found this other thing. There's a thing they call the gerozyme, which is a protein that is basically driving the loss of tissue function. And blocking the function of this protein, gerozyme, or 15-PGDH, it basically allows stuff to build back. So in theory, if this pays off and it works in human trials and so on, there may be injections that will... I don't have any cartilage in my big toe on my left foot. It's gone. It's gone because of an injury. So basically over time you injure things, there's an inflammation process, cartilage just dies.

49:24Craig Mazin:It's painful. I could get it back. And as you get older, John, you're going to start feeling it. If you don't feel it already, you're going to start. And there are people who unfortunately genetically are predisposed to getting this much earlier. And it's rheumatoid arthritis. There's a lot of ways where this can be very disabling and painful. And they can regenerate adult tissue in theory just by turning something off as opposed to putting something in. That's exciting. So quietly, they just sort of said, hey, we may have fixed a massive problem. But we'll find out.

50:01John August:Yeah, we'll see how it happens in human trials. Early days, early days. I think this is only good news, but it does remind me of a thing I liked so much in the movie I Am Legend. If you remember the movie I Am Legend, Emma Thompson is on this news program and they say like, oh, so in a word, what have you done? It's like, I think we've cured cancer. And it cuts to like the zombies that comes through the whole thing. So it'd be just, I don't think this is going to be the thing like, oh, we generated cartilage and now we have zombies running throughout the universe. Yeah, zombies probably, no. Probably not zombies.

50:32Craig Mazin:But I say probably.

50:34John August:Yeah. Instead, we all just become like shark people who are made entirely of cartilage. I would love that, honestly. I mean, honestly, if I could squeeze under doors because I had cartilage, if everything was just like my nose, that'd be great.

50:46Craig Mazin:You punch me and I'm like, ow, but also nothing's broken. Yeah, it's fine. You just bent me a little bit. No worries.

50:55John August:I bend, but I'm breaking. I'm like a bow. I'm like a little branch. Yeah. Yeah.

50:59Craig Mazin:Lovely.

50:59John August:I learned the Spanish word for branch this week. I'm doing Anki, which is the flashcards for Spanish and for other languages. And so I do that every day. And Rama is the word for a branch or a limb. I just like R-A-M-A. It's just a great word. Rama. So rendezvous with...

51:15Craig Mazin:With a branch. Rendezvous for a branch. Yeah. Rendezvous with Rama. With Rama. With a branch. With a branch. Rendezvous with branch.

51:21John August:I like that. Yeah, and when the bow breaks, the cradle will fall. It all feels... It all works. It fits together. It works. It works. That's our show for this week. Script News is produced by Drew Markwart. Thanks, Drew. Maybe. Edited by Matthew Cilelli. Could be. Our outro this week is by Jennifer Lucy Cook. A first-time outro. I love when you have a first-time contributor. It's also an especially good one. It's just different, and I just love that. So I love when somebody comes in and just kills it. So thank you to Jennifer Lucy Cook. Thank you to everyone else who's submitting outros. Please keep them coming in.

51:49John August:I just love hearing new things after 700 episodes. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You will find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books. People are still sending in their Instagrams of like, you know, their books. And I love that. We wrote a book. We wrote a book. Remember that? I forgot about that. There's a book.

52:19John August:There's a book out there in the world. How's that going? It's going good. It's still selling some copies. It's nice. It's nice.

52:25Craig Mazin:See, people want it. It's great. It's fully useful advice.

52:28John August:Yeah. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You'll find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers. You keep the lights on and make it possible for us to do this each and every week, you can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on, the 2026 movies, and just how many of them there are.

53:04John August:We're not like a box office podcast at all. No. But it's just really notable this year, so I'm excited to talk with Craig and Drew about that. Craig, Drew, thank you so much for a fun show.

53:15Craig Mazin:Thank you, John. Thanks, guys.

53:35John August:Domi Re Tito