740 - On Competence

16:27John August:No, it was great. I didn't mind it at all. Widows Bay has sort of piqued my interest in the half hour... I'm sure Widows Bay is currently submitted for Best Comedy. Yeah, which is appropriate. Which is fair. Unlike The Bear, which was not correct. So it's not category fraud, as they say. But it's also a drama. Yeah. It's a dramedy. And I can see a world for a 30-minute drama. The reason that we have hour-long dramas is because network television would give a drama an hour. But 20, what, eight minutes of that or maybe 20 minutes of that were advertisements. Yeah, so they were really 40 minutes.

17:05They were really 40 minutes long. Then you suddenly got this much denser hour-long thing. So now I'm thinking, is there a new category here of half-hour drama? Which the bear, by the way, was.

17:17John August:Yeah. Is? Is. Is. Still. Yeah. We have one last bit of follow-up here. I'd love you to do this for us, Drew, if you could, because it's also your last chance to talk about D &D on the show. And your last chance to go blah, blah, blah. We'll see if I get in there. Adam writes, I think you two would be interested in a trick I've been using in my D &D campaigns. One of the hardest things about starting a campaign is finding out why this group of misfits starts working together to begin with. So start with the Stuart special. Session one starts right in the middle of the inciting incident as the event that changes the characters.

17:51There it is. Session one starts right in the middle of the inciting incident, the event that changes the characters from a group to a party. As things lead to a climax, record scratch. Yep, that's you guys. Bet you're wondering how you got here. Well, it all started at the tavern. And this can really change the tone for that first session or two. Instead of milling about, it's now the player's job to figure out why they were at the inciting incident. And if they say, I don't think my character would do that, you can say, well, we know it happens, so what would make your character do that? And if it doesn't line up in the end or they get themselves killed in the opening scene, well, the flash forward was a prophecy and you just defied destiny.

18:27So the hangover model of D &D. Yeah. I'm a little worried about a DM who says, if you die, if you get yourselves killed in the first session, I don't know, maybe ease up on the combat a little bit. It's session one. Fudge a roll.

18:43John August:Let them live. Yeah, I mean, but level one characters are so squishy anyway. It's just like one swipe by a bear. That's why you got to really tune those encounters. Yeah. Right? Right, Meredith? She's nodding. She's like, I regret everything. She's like, how do I get out of this job? Googling fast exit. So, yes, but also it's nice if a level one character dies, you've established stakes in the world of death. Is it real? That's true. I mean, you want to, I believe in death in D &D, as you know. Yeah. I think it's important. My characters have died. And I think the coolest thing a character can do roleplay wise is die.

19:19Yeah. It's awesome. We have players who disagree strongly, which is fine. I don't try to ever do it. And it's best if it happens rarely. I do believe that. Starting a campaign. This was not the point of why this guy wrote in, or a woman. The point is that it is a fun way to sort of force everybody to figure out, how did we get here? How are we friends? It is the clunkiest part of things. There's no question. It's one of the reasons I applaud Baldur's Gate for their way to get everybody together was you were just randomly plucked up by mind flayers, all of you, infected. Yep, and now... Now you're in it together.

19:55Yeah.

19:56John August:I think I did on the campaign that you played in recently, Craig, is I required all the players in sort of session zero. It's like you have to be related to two other characters in the group. And it can be they're your brother, they're your friend, you have a crush on them, that's something else, just so there would be interpersonal connections before it started and you all were in the same small town. And what we inevitably discover along the way is we find our own connections anyway because we start to get to know each other's characters and things happen. And bits develop, yeah. Bits develop, yeah.

20:23John August:All right, let's get to our marquee topic. This was put in my head by this blog post I read by Iris Meredith, and she offers this really useful framework for describing what it means to be competent. We'll put a link in the show notes to it. But the three main bullet points is that competence is knowing enough about a field to know what good things and bad things are. Two, generally wanting the good things rather than the bad things. And three, being able to execute at least one method for getting the good things rather than the bad things. So what I like about her post is that she's distinguishing two kinds of incompetence.

20:57John August:The first is when someone has no idea what they're doing. And the second is when someone knows what they're doing, but they simply just don't do it, either because of external causes, like there's bad systems around them or internal forces like burnout or just disinterest. They just don't want to do a thing. Recently, Craig, we were talking about competence porn. I think you brought up competence porn. Yes. It's exciting to watch characters who know what they're doing. Yes, we enjoy it. It's incredibly satisfying to see somebody that can't miss. It's a weird thing. You would think that the rules of drama are such that we like watching people struggle and suffer, which generally we do.

21:34But every now and again, we want to, as I say, park our brains under our seat.

21:38John August:You want the person to be someone challenged, but to be able to overcome the challenge without... Without question. They're so good at it. There are entire genres of action movies. The point of which is, yeah, you messed with the wrong guy. The equalizer is the ultimate in competence porn. Denzel Washington plays a guy who does not lose any encounter. He, in fact, is so competent. The only challenge he has is giving himself a challenge of how quickly he can kill everyone in the room, but they are definitely going to die. And it is so satisfying to see someone that confident in what they do. Yeah.

22:17John August:Heist films in general are all about confidence. They have a plan. They're executing a plan. You don't even know how the plan works, but it's great to see them working their plan. In terms of systems, a lot of Sorkin's movies, especially like Sorkin Walk and Talks, are people who are incredibly competent. Yes. And they're just doing the thing. So even though it's a huge thing that's happening, they are on top of it. It's comforting. Yeah. I mean, the West Wing was comforting. Oh, look, everybody up there is really smart and cares and is working so, so hard. We had Tony Gilroy on the show talking about Andor and like the rebels in Andor are incredibly competent at what they're doing, which makes you feel good.

22:54John August:Because even like they're facing astronomical odds, they can do it. Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton. Yes. Competence porn. Yeah. Michael Clayton can clean up any mess. As a corporate fixer, the question only is, should he clean up this mess or not? Yeah. Not, can he clean up this mess or not? And that's exciting to watch. In science fiction, you have The Martian. And so Matt Damon's character is so incredibly competent. Like, no one else could do what he's doing. He's doing it great. The Pit is a great example, or ER, of like doctors who are really good at doing what they're doing. So, yes, they're facing challenging cases, but you know they know what they're doing.

23:30MacGyver, from our childhood, every week would take a paperclip and a piece of bubble gum and some windshield wiper fluid and make a bomb. And he could do that every single week. He needed to do that every single week. And you never sat down and expected that one day MacGyver would go, actually none of this stuff adds up. Now, is it as good as MacGruber? No.

23:54John August:No. But let's flip it around and talk about incompetence porn because I do think that's actually one of the real hallmarks of comedy. So The Office is incompetence porn. It's like people who are above their station, they don't know what they're doing. Veep is just incompetence. It's just people failing constantly. Succession, I would argue, is sort of both because you have people who work, like we have Jerry who's incredibly competent, but then you have some of the heirs who are competent only in small domains and are flailing around. I would put that right into incompetence porn because you have the most competent man in the world, Logan Roy, looking down at his fail sons and fail daughter.

24:34And the people below him that work directly for him, the non-family people like Jerry, for instance, are conniving and backbiting and would sell him out in a heartbeat if they thought they knew who was going to be taking over. And the guy who wins is not particularly competent. He's more of a coward.

24:52John August:Yeah, he learns along the way though. And that's actually one of the nice things about a multiple season show is that you see Tom Lomskans actually develop some skills along the way. Even Greg develops some skills along the way. He has no moral compass whatsoever. No, Greg is pretty incompetent. Tom describes his one skill beautifully to the character that Alexander Skarsgård played. I'm a pain sponge. I absorb misery so you, the guy who owns the company, won't ever have to be touched by it. I am your scapegoat. I am your sacrificial lamb. That's a horrible, depressing way to view yourself. But he understood that indeed was the thing that made him strong.

25:35Watching the failures there. I mean, every time Jeremy Strong's character was this close. And then he would just mess it up. He'd just shut his mouth. You ever see Father Ted? Oh, I remember Father Ted. Father Ted, great incompetence porn. Faulty Towers, great incompetence. The Brits do incompetence porn.

25:53John August:Widow's Bay is incompetence porn. Yeah. Yes. I mean, the staff is ridiculous. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Rosemary. Rosemary. So good. But what I want to point out about competence is it is not a general trait. A character is not competent across all areas. They're competent within a very specific domain. And that's what's so interesting. And so, like, I personally am a very competent rapper of gifts. I'm really good at wrapping gifts. I'm so glad you added of gifts. Yeah. I was like, no, you're not. No. Oh, of gifts. Of gifts. Yes. But don't ask me to do any sport other than running. I'm just incompetent at all other sports.

26:29You know, John, I cannot wrap a gift.

26:30John August:Yeah, I pointed out. I cannot wrap a gift. I've tried. Yeah. It is so triggering for me. So in school, I was competent across every class, including PE. Yeah. Except for arts and crafts. Arts and crafts. Arts and crafts. I was the kid who would end up with a popsicle stick in his hair. Glue. on the back of his neck, and some horrible mess in front of me, glitter everywhere, zero abilities. And I don't know what it is. And when I've tried, I've sat there with a YouTube instruction video to try and wrap a gift. It looks like an animal did it. Yeah. Whereas Melissa... Boop, boop, boop. ...could work at Bloomingdale's wrapping gifts.

27:15John August:Yeah, I love wrapping gifts. I don't care about gifts. I love wrapping gifts. You just love wrapping... Love it. Does Mike know how to wrap a gift? He knows he can wrap a gift. But he comes to you, doesn't he? He's like, can you wrap this? Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned the word confidence earlier. And I think that it's important because they're related things because we often see them correlated, but I think it's when they're not correlated is when you get some really good comedy. That's the juicy stuff or tragedy. Yeah. So we see confidence before we see competence. And so we see the character is approaching a thing as if they know what they're doing.

27:44John August:But the situation itself is all the way we see whether they're actually competent there. It's the action the characters are taking that reveals whether they're actually competent. And so with confidence, you have both internal confidence, does the character believe they know what they're doing? And external confidence, does the people around them believe they know what they're doing? And those are the dynamics of seeing. That's what creates drama and suspense. It tends to work best when we in the audience can't obviously see that this person is competent if only she would take her glasses off and whoosh the hair.

28:20You know, that was a very common trope in the 80s and 90s. And you're like, no, they're pretty hot with the glasses on. The glasses do nothing. There's an off-replayed clip on YouTube of the 1978 Superman, Christopher Reeves, taking his glasses off as Clark Kent and then sort of straightening his body up and getting taller. And he's pretty awesome looking with the glasses on. No one still to this day quite understands how he got away with that. But it's better when we ourselves start to realize with somebody, wait, I can do something. Now the question is, do I have the confidence to actually try and risk failure?

29:01John August:Let's look at situations where a character is competent and confident versus competent and incompetent. So I want to compare two anti-weir heroes. So Mark Watney is the man-taming character in The Martian is confident and competent. He knows what to do and he's ready to do it. But if you look at Ryan Gosling's character in Hail Mary, he is the least confident person around, and yet he's incredibly confident. He's able to do all the stuff to save himself. But our approach to these two characters is so different because we want Ryan Gosling to believe in himself, and he doesn't. Well, you've kind of given two good starting points, not necessary starting points, but good ones for drama versus comedy.

29:38So in a drama, a character is confident and competent and must push through some emotional stressors, some very human things. because they're in an extreme situation, only they would survive at all. So the question is now really, do they have the heart to withstand it all? Whereas somebody who does not believe in themselves, but has the tools, it's going to be funny. They're going to bumble around and they're going to feel like an idiot and we're going to laugh.

30:06John August:And I would say that the confident and competent duo isn't just for protagonists. Like Miranda Priestly in Devil Wears Prada is confident and competent. And like, we see that in her and it's like that's a huge part of who she is is she's both of these things. She knows what she's doing and she believes what she knows what she's doing. Well, a good villain is typically confident and competent. Yeah. I can only think of like one counterexample, like Salieri in Amadeus. He's not very good and he knows he's not very good. Yes. He knows he's mediocre. Yeah. He is, however, a court musician. I mean, he's one of the best.

30:45I mean, Salieri was legitimately one of the best composers of all time. Just not in the top. He's not in an A rank. He's not S tier and he's not A tier. But I'm saying the character in the movie. The character in the movie, what was so fascinating about it, it's why we keep coming back to the notion of Salieri, or at least the dramatized notion of Salieri and Mozart is, to say, what happens when you are confident and competent and then you meet somebody who is resplendent? What happens when the mortal man meets the angel? What does that do to us? Which is a very specific sort of thing because he definitely wasn't incompetent.

31:23And the most beautiful moment in Amadeus to me is when Mozart is dictating his Requiem to Salieri and Salieri is scribbling this down, hating him for it. In real time, recognizing. And weeping in real time because he can hear the music in his head and being so in love with the product of it.

31:42John August:Just to complete the little grid here, we also have characters who are confident but incompetent. And Michael Scott in The Office. Yes. Always fun. Most of the heirs in succession. Yes. The Emperor in Mozart. Yeah. Too many notes. Absolutely. So that's often a comedy character. Almost always. Yeah. Because it is so funny to watch somebody blithely announce to other people, usually people who are competent. Blackadder is a good example of this. You have your Hugh Laurie, and then you've got your Ron Atkinson. It's always funny. Now, in real life, it's the worst. You served in the WGA. One of the things that happens when you serve any sort of system is that you come to learn why things are the way they are.

32:32It doesn't mean they can't change or be improved, but there are things where you always thought, why do they do it this way? And then you find out, oh, because of law and stuff.

32:40John August:Yeah. And inevitably, somebody would then come along and announce with total confidence and complete incompetence that you're all stupid because you haven't done X, Y, and Z, the most obvious things in the world to do. And everybody patiently waits and then says, we're not allowed to do that by law. You are very confident and you are very incompetent. Yeah. It's not fun in real life. No. But on TV and in movies, it's hysterical. That's delightful. Yeah. So you bring up sort of like the systems that may be an obstacle there. I was thinking about you also have to want to do the thing. And so Ron Swanson's character on Parks and Recreation, the great Nick Offerman, he could do all the things.

33:17John August:He just doesn't want to do all the things. And so he just chooses not to. Yes. Well, he's a reluctant hero. Yeah. But you do know that when the chips are down, Yes. that Ron Swanson could probably do anything. Have you ever seen, you're not a big South Park fan, are you? I've watched a lot of South Park, yeah. Have you ever seen the episode Scott Tenerman Must Die? Incredible. And so you look at how and Cartman is like, wow, Cartman could do all these things. Cartman can murder a child. Cartman, as it turns out, is when he puts his mind to it, is the most competent person in the world. Yeah. That episode still has one of the best endings of any work of art I have ever experienced.

33:55It's incredible. It's incredible.

33:57John August:I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't seen it. If you have not seen Scott Tenorman Must Die, look it up. Watch it. We also need to talk about knowledge. So the character has to have the ability to know what is right and what is wrong, what the actual goal is and whether they've achieved the goal. And so you think about, there's people who are knowledgeable, but incompetent. And so you think of like the critic who can't actually do the thing that they're criticizing. The chef who knows every technique, but can't get dinner on the table. So like they kind of know the field, but they can't actually execute the thing.

34:26John August:That's an aspect of competence. Yes. And there's a good growth story to be had there. The experience of book smarts released into the world and learning how things actually go. That's a fun story to watch. Yeah, so that's both in comedy and drama. Yes. So let's just talk about sort of just overall areas though. So we've been talking a lot about careers, but it also applies to parenting. The trope of the dad who doesn't know how to do anything or who has had sort of weaponized his incompetence so that he doesn't have to do anything. Oh, a diaper. I can't do that. With any technology. So like the grandparent just can't.

34:59Can I just ask you, the very first time you changed a diaper, I was sweating. I was drenched in sweat. Drenched.

35:06John August:Yeah. I wanted to do a really good job. This baby would not stop moving. Yeah. It was my baby, by the way. It wasn't some random baby. Like, stop moving. I would say that I'm good at wrapping gifts. And so it actually really applies. It actually makes sense. Yeah. It was getting the onesie on and off that really put my adrenaline. There's some argument that happens there. But all new parents begin as incompetent. Yeah. Whether they know it or not. They can be confident. They can be not competent, but they are incompetent. Yeah. And then you learn pretty fast. You learn fast. You learn fast. You learn fast.

35:41John August:Every workplace is a steady in competence and incompetence. And so we mentioned Ron Swanson, but you also have, let's say, Nope, who is so competent that she wants to do everybody else's jobs and that's the source of the friction. Yes. She's an A-plus student and that is fun. Cooking shows we love to watch because they're just so good at doing these things. Like, how are you able to pull that off? Same with like the fashion design reality shows. Like, how did they make that thing happen? Well, and we also love watching those things for when people suddenly have an exposed incompetence. So like Project Runway, you have someone that's doing great every week and then suddenly the challenge is going to Home Depot and make dresses out of stuff you can find at Home Depot.

36:18And somebody who's amazing with regular stuff is like, I made something out of saw blades and sandpaper and it's bad.

36:25John August:It's bad. And finally, we have the characters who are clearly really good in like one specific domain and they try to apply those skills to things that have no business touching. So Elon Musk is a classic example of this. Greg, there's a crossword puzzle word which I had to look up. Ultracrepidarian? I don't know. Ultracrepidarian, is that a new coinage? No, it's an existing word. It's in the dictionary, but it's a person who frequently professes opinions and judgments outside their area of expertise. And wow, we know some of those folks. We sure do. We call them know-it-alls normally. Ultracrepidarian is not a great crossword word because it's too long.

37:02Yeah, you need quite a large grid for that.

37:04John August:Yeah, but it feels like a puzzle word. It feels like some thing that you build together out of little pieces. Ultra-crepidarian. So a crepidarian is somebody that - Crep, not crap. Somewhat, crep. Crep. Oh, not crap. Yeah, so I think - Because crep feels like knowledge. There's something - Okay, I see. Ultra-crepidarian. So a crepidarian is somebody that occasionally will profess knowledge outside their area of expertise, whereas an ultra-crepidarian - We're being ultra-crepidarians right now where they're assuming that we can get to the definition of this word. I feel pretty good about what I just - As we wrap up this topic, I want to talk about how the rise of the internet overall, but especially AI, changes how we perceive someone being competent.

37:41John August:Because you can fake your way through things much more easily now than we could when we were in school. Yes. Even prior to the emergence of AI, the technology that underscored this for me the most was music production. drumming for instance used to require an amount of competence and now it requires you to have a finger and a button to press yeah things like adding reverb editing music blending tracks down mixing all of that stuff has been automated to a remarkable extent which has democratized music production to the extent that so much of it is ignorable because it all sounds like the same. So the floor rises, everyone feels competent for a while, and then they realize, oh, no, no.

38:35If everyone around me is at the same level of competence, this is no longer competence. This is just the floor. AI may be doing that for some things. I know, for instance, vibe coding has turned the floor of coding. The floor of coding is raised. Yeah. So now people that couldn't code anything can now code some things. Yeah. But that doesn't mean it's good. No. It just means it's the floor.

38:56John August:Well, I think the challenge is we're so used to looking at the output and assuming like, well, if this output is good, then the person knows what they're doing. But you have broken those things apart. So the output could look good. And so we can assume like, oh, this person must be confident, but they really don't have no idea what they're doing. They just punched the buttons and got the right result. You can now generate a college essay this way. What begins to happen is that people who are exceptional become all the more notable and interesting and valuable. We are all pretty good now at dressing ourselves because there's so much you can read about what colors vaguely to throw together.

39:36So everybody can vaguely dress okay. So no one gets credit for it. I mean, these guys do, but we three don't. And I feel that's the way it's going to be with a well-written essay. No one's going to get credit for that anymore.

39:52John August:Well, let's talk about then how do we assess competence in a world where there is AI and where we can't judge the outputs. We become more particular and we become more refined in our taste because restaurants. You know, people didn't go to restaurants that often and now they go to restaurants all the time. foodies. We didn't have that many different kinds of opportunities when we were growing up in the 70s. And now we can eat foods from everywhere. So now we can go, this Thai is fine. I mean, it's fine. It's not great. Thai food would have blown my, it did blow my mind. The first time I had what today I would call a C tier pod CU blew my mind when I was 17 because I'd never eaten it before.

40:34This is what occurs now with everything. The democratization of what we would call vaguely competent just becomes normal. And then we start to look for the exceptional.

40:44John August:I think some of what you're saying in higher ed may be what we need to start doing in the workplace as well, which is basically it's interviews. It's talking like looking at the output and then actually speaking with the person about the output and making it clear that they actually understand the output and how they got there. That wasn't just generated by some outside system. You know, it's the interviewing references and just talking with people. You want to make sure you have a person who can't just like do the thing once, but actually understands it and can do the thing in a crunch. And so as we're hiring people, I think I feel like I'm going to be especially vigilant.

41:15John August:I don't want to hire somebody off just one writing example. I want to make sure that I talk to them about how they got there and sort of what their process is. You also are looking for something that feels better than the average. Yes. The average is going up. And we will then have to redefine what competence is as the average improves. And it is. I do remember reading in college, you know, sometimes we'd all have to, you know, here, we've all written papers, read each other's papers. And I would read a paper and think, well, this is a perfectly well-written thing. It is boring. Yeah. I am unmoved and uneducated.

41:52It is formatted correctly. It's competent. Yeah. That used to be kind of an insult. Well, it's a competent paper, meaning you checked all the boxes. It's just not special. Well, now if I read that, I wouldn't even get two paragraphs in and chuck it because it doesn't matter whether a human did it or a computer did it. It's merely competent, but it's not special.

42:12John August:All right, let's go to listener questions. And for this one, I think I'd love to have Meredith read it because Drew, I think you will have a good answer for this. Okay. Okay, this is from Claudia in London. Claudia writes, so my agent whom I've been represented by for two years at quite an established agency has completely ghosted me. And before you think it, I don't believe I've done anything to warrant it. I know the very clear answer to the conundrum is that I must part ways with immediate effect, but my question is, why would an agent do this? I signed with them when I had a contract come in to write a feature film, and since then I've delivered two spec scripts that are ready for industry circulation, but since checking in mid to end of last year, I now cannot muster any response whatsoever.

42:55Could you tell me why agents do this and how we as writers can cope with the mental rejection? Very British question. Excellent use of whom and full effect.

43:07John August:Full effect. I love it. Drew, you had a British agent. I had a British agent for two years. Talk to me about your instincts here. I was dropped because they just took me off their website, is how I found out. I'm so sorry. It's okay. We simply don't represent you anymore. It was that. It was like, well, you know, you're in America now and it just didn't feel right for you to be there. And I said, well, I feel like I'm an artist worth having on your books. and worth putting out there. And they said, ah, there's the crux of our difference. They said, well, if that's the way you're going to be, then maybe we should part ways.

43:39Sweet. They weren't trying to get rid of you as a client. They were just taking your picture off? No, they were, but in that very slow break. British sort of way. British sort of way. And the British, I do feel like the British industry is much different than the U.S. industry in that way. It is, yes. Particularly with agents and casting and all that stuff. But like, I mean, I guess that's really my experience. but I feel like, especially in the States, I've had agents be more directly mean to me, but they've been also in a nice - It goes faster. It goes faster. Or they say, like, I had one agent be like, your career doesn't have a pulse.

44:13And I was like, wow, but that guy's been really nice to me for most of, like, for the rest of my time in LA. And when I need an actor for a thing, I'll reach out to him. And he's at a big established agency and he's super helpful. He was honest. He was honest, which is different. Yes, there is a certain passive aggressive nature to, I don't want to tarnish the entire British culture here, but they are infamously dangerously polite. I have quite a few British people that work on our show and I, from time to time, have to stop them and go, I feel like what you're trying to say is we should not do this.

44:48It would be bad. And they tend to put it all in the form of a question.

44:54John August:Pose a hypothetical. Pose a hypothetical. Speak in subjunctive. Yes, and it is cultural. However, culture does not justify out-and-out rudeness. To not return phone calls, messages, texts, emails at all is insufferable and cowardly. Why do they do it? Because it's uncomfortable for them. It's the simplest answer. They don't want to deal with the minimum discomfort of delivering bad news to someone. And as the weeks go on, it becomes harder and harder for them because it will become more and more uncomfortable for them. because now they have to both express why they don't want to be your agent anymore and apologize for not having told you this for like two months now.

45:44And it just gets worse and worse. And eventually they're just closing their eyes and hoping that the ghost that keeps knocking at their door leaves. They think of you as the ghost. They want you out of their house. It's not acceptable.

45:59John August:It's not acceptable. So I think what Claudia is feeling is that Shredder's cat, do I have an agent? I just don't know if I'm represented or not. And that's the weird kind of limbo. And the answer is you're not represented but I think you're also worried that if one of these SpecScript sells or has interest suddenly this person is going to reappear they probably won't. Well, the quickest way to assure that they won't is get a new agent. Yes. And get a new agent before you're officially dropped. Yeah. Don't wait for them to Yes, that makes sense as well. Because you can honestly say that I'm represented at this agency they've not serviced me well.

46:35John August:I'm looking for this. I have two spec scripts ready to go out, which is a great thing. Certainly inaction here is not an option. She has to do something to get a new agent. But to the direct question, why? Cowardice. Cowardice. Simple as that. Incompetence too, maybe. It's a form of, it's dishonorable. That's what I would say. It's not incompetent, it's dishonorable. I agree. All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. Drew, this is your last show. I would love for you to start with your One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is rhubarb. All right. I am completely opposed to this. So am I. Yeah.

47:15John August:You're going to have a... So am I. Oh, please tell me why we should put celery in our pie. Because it's delicious and it's super easy to make. Okay. So there was a New York Times cooking article that had like a little, hey, it's rhubarb season. I was like, I haven't had rhubarb in a while. It's super easy to make. You just, it's a little bit of sugar and you cut it up and you put a little bit of lemon. It's a whole lot of sugar. It's a quarter cup. Okay. Quarter cup of sugar. A little zest of lemon. Massage that together. I put a little bit of ginger and a little bit of, Trader Joe's has a vanilla bourbon paste.

47:46This is supposed to make a rhubarb pie? It's making a compote. And so you just have a little rhubarb compote that I put on. I have oatmeal every morning. I put it on my oatmeal. You can put it on dessert at night. You just, it's like a little summer treat. And it's just been like this lovely little thing that's brightened the start of my summer and I highly recommend it.

48:03John August:It's entirely possible I've been wrong my entire life. So in believing you, I will make this rhubarb compote and I will try it to see whether I can... Do you not like the flavor of rhubarb to begin with or do you not? So the texture of it freaks me out. The fact that it is essentially celery, like Craig said. It's horrible. It's a stalk. It's a stalk. Friends of mine got married and instead of a wedding cake, they wanted to have rhubarb pie. And so like all their friends each made a rhubarb pie and brought a rhubarb pie. I didn't care for it. If you're not a fan of the taste, then I don't think it's going to change your mind.

48:34Maybe I just didn't really give it enough of a shot. You don't want like a crunch on it though too. Hopefully you have to cook it down enough. It cooks it down. And the recipe that I found, we'll put in the show notes. It's like 20 minutes in the oven, just super easy. But it becomes mush basically.

48:47John August:Okay. So I was just saying, this is no celery slander. I love celery for savory purposes. But to take a celery product and put it into a sweet context, I just find abhorrent. Melissa loves this. And she goes, oh, it's tart. I'm like, it's a gross vegetable sitting in the middle of what would otherwise be a delicious— You took a strawberry pie and you ruined it by shoving this piece of crap in there that nobody eats. There's no other dish with rhubarb ever. Isn't that amazing? No, no. Yeah, there's an indication there's a problem. It's like, oh my God, what do we do with this awful weed? It is technically edible.

49:23Shove it in a pie.

49:24John August:And the leaves are poisonous. Yeah, they're poisonous. You have to grow it in the dark to get the red color too, which is labor-intensive. There's no value here. It's delicious. There's no value. It's fall in the early summer. It's kind of that feeling for me that I really like. While we're in the conversation about like slightly wrong tastes, can I say about Meyer lemons? No. Meyer lemons are no fruit. No. Because like they're not really a lemon. They're sort of halfway between a lemon and orange in a way I don't want at all. Incorrect. They're just not lemons. Yeah. So you try to use them as lemons in recipes for lemons.

49:54They're as wrong. Screws everything up. This is, it's stone fruit season right now. And at the farmer's market, there are 4 million permutations of different plums and stuff like that. And some of them are amazing and some of them it's like, oh, God, no. We should not have made that.

50:05John August:No. Rhubarb. Yeah. Rhubarb. It's got the rhubarb in it. I will make this recipe and I will try it. Okay. You're making this rhubarb recipe? I'll make this rhubarb, but I'll bring it to D &D so we can... No. You can just do two stalks. It's a little bit. Oh, just here, pointlessly, throw this in. It's like, oh, here's pizza, and then let's just put this weird thing on top that nobody asked for or wanted. There's no place for rhubarb in this world. Yeah. And I like mayonnaise too, so I'm going to... Oh, God. No. Put a little rhubarb compote on top of that mayonnaise sandwich. Yeah, try it out. Oh, my God.

50:41John August:So good. My one cool thing is a website by Bartosz Chodhowski. It's an explainer on how curves and surfaces work for like, you know, bezier curves, which is like those things in drawing programs where like you put the little points and you drag the handles in order to make the curves. Spirograph. I've never understood like the math behind it. I've never been able to make those things work properly. This is an explainer that goes through with like constant little like interactive explainers where you can move the sliders around to see like this is what's actually happening. I see. And I feel like I kind of understand it for the first time.

51:13John August:It's just like so smartly done. And so it does a good job of sort of compressing the math down so you don't have to really think about the math. But like, oh, if I'm dragging these points out, I'm creating a tangent. Like, I get what's sort of happening here. So I love to start an experience like not really understanding it and get to the end. It's like, oh, I get it. Will it change my life? Yeah, but it's just good to see this. And I just really applaud someone putting the time and effort into explaining something for the betterment of the world. Do you think that that site, that explainer would have been improved by adding a bitter, crunchy, disgusting vegetable?

51:47Yes, 100%. Just in the middle of it for nothing? Yeah. For no reason? Yeah, because you needed it. For a treat. For a treat. A treat. Just a treat. Here you go, kids. Kids. You know what you would like? Do you like celery? Well, this is grosser.

51:59John August:Yeah. It's grosser celery. Let's throw it in dessert. My God. I'm so glad we could bond over that. I'm just happy that you got some Craig Umbridge on your last episode. I say finally did. Finally. Wow. I've had rhubarb. Craig, what you got? I have a recipe. I'll be fine for it. Yeah. And this is a good one. Oh, yeah? Yeah. There's no vegetables in it. Impress me. Yeah. It's called cheesecake, my friend. It's delicious. All right. So there are a lot of cheesecake recipes out there. I've actually used a few. I'm not even sure if this is the exact one I've used, but it's very, very close. So it achieves the things that you're going to look for.

52:33I do like to make a cheesecake. It's a little tricky, but it's not too tricky. And if you get it right, nothing's better. This particular one is from Sally's Baking Addiction. And what I like about it is that it follows what I think are just the simple, basic things you need to do to make a good cheesecake. You need a graham cracker crust. Oh, yeah. Graham crackers are one of those things. I like to make everything from scratch. I do not make graham crackers from scratch. It is pointless. Don't do it. I've made shortbread from scratch. I'll do that. I will not make graham crackers from scratch.

53:04Why? I don't think they even exist in any other form other than here. Honeymade. Boom. Done. You want to add some sour cream to a cheesecake. Yeah. It'll help it from being dry, but it doesn't add any flavor. Just a little bit of vanilla, a little bit of lemon. always. Eggs, butter, cream cheese. But the key to all this is the water bath.

53:26John August:Yeah, the bain marie. The bain marie. So when you put a cheesecake in an oven, it starts to cook. If there is nothing to moderate the temperature around the pan, you need a spring form pan, obviously. It will crack because it doesn't cook. The outside will cook and get hotter than the inside. So the water bath helps the inside keep up with the outside. One little trick that I like to use, the danger when you're making a cheesecake is you've got a spring form pan, which you need to pop the sides off. But you put that in a water bath, water leaks in, you're done. Disaster, yeah. It's over. You might as well have a rhubarb pie at that point.

53:59That's how bad it is. So you wrap the bottom in foil, correct? Here's the problem. It doesn't matter. I use heavy-duty foil. I do two layers. Somehow, water finds some sneaky, and there's always some little leaking in. But a roasting bag works great. Okay. So the kind of thing you might put a turkey in. Sure. So you place... In a roasting bag, lift that up. I like to tighten that around with some tinfoil and some elastic. Put that in the water. Nothing's getting in.

54:28John August:That's great. What a complicated way when you could just cut up a little bit of rhubarb in one pan. Yep. 20 minutes, you're done. Why even cut it up? Why put it in a pan? Why not just stick it up your butt at that point and just say, look, it's done? I just think the barrier for entry on mine is much lower. It is for good reason. It's garbage food. It is a gross piece of garbage food. It's fibrous. You're leaking in the water? Yes, mine requires care so that something good happens in the end. You're just taking a gross thing, making it hotter, and then handing it to us. Horrible. I want to point out the episode of South Park, Scott Chamber Must Die, actually refers to a pie baking competition, I believe.

55:09John August:It's chili. Chili, but it is food. It's very recipe-based. Yeah, it's recipe-based. So it's appropriate that this is the final fight. It is. The final fight. Our first and final fight. Can't believe he brought up rhubarb at the end. You know what? He knows he's leaving. That's why he did it. Absolutely. Even this whole time, this would have made me crazy. Now people are going to write in about their grandma's rhubarb. You know, it's refreshing. Oh, I'll beat it. Meredith already. Meredith's taking notes. I'm like, well, my final thing to piss off, correct me. Mayonnaise. Yeah. Ten years from now and she finally leaves us.

55:38I had dinner with a British friend the other night and she didn't even understand my mayonnaise thing. She was like, what do you mean? that's, you can't not like mayonnaise. You can't even like subsets of mayonnaise. And I was like, I hate all of it. And the worst of it all is salad cream. Have you seen this disgusting thing the British have? It's like, what if we took mayonnaise and made it sickly green?

56:05John August:And thin. But you're okay with cream cheese. So your cream cheese on a bagel, fine. Oh, yes. Of course. I'm Jewish. I want to make sure that it wasn't just all white, spreadable foods. It's a lot. And so for instance, sour cream is not something that I would ever use in any way other than a constituent ingredient. So sour cream like on a potato never? Do not do. I do not do it. I don't begrudge people who do it, but I don't. It's not a rhubarb level of... Rhubarb is just stupid. Yeah. I can eat rhubarb. I just don't know why I'm doing it. It's not like I'm disgusted by it. I just think it's dumb.

56:35You can put rhubarb on yogurt. You could. You could also put gravel on yogurt. You don't. Or like lawn clippings. It's edible. Like, I guess grass is edible. We don't sprinkle it on...

56:48John August:Yeah, it's not actually edible. It's edible. It's as edible as rhubarb. Rhubarb is not a processable food. It's just fiber. It's cellulose that just goes through you. There's no calories in rhubarb. It has no nutritional value. It's a delivery system. Of what? For all the sugar and good stuff around it. So is a spoon. You can't beat me on this one. That is our show for this week. This group knows it's produced by Drew Marquardt. with help this week from Meredith Stedman. It is edited by Matthew Cilelli. Thank you, Matthew. Our intern is Lauren Loesberg. Also, woo! She's here in person. She's watching the cameras.

57:25She's watching this madness. Yeah. Quietly thinking about how to break it to us that her parents own a rhubarb farm.

57:35All of her money comes from big rhubarb.

57:37John August:Absolutely. She grew up a rhubarb farmer, which is so good. Our author this week is by Matthew Cilelli. It's a special one produced just for Drew. Is it a blah, blah, blah? No, I gave him two song options. So I'll see which one he picked. Okay. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Drew will not be on the other side of that mailbox anymore. Never again. So I'll miss you all. All right. You'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with the signup for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

58:05John August:This past week's was especially great. So please keep reading Interesting. The Scrimmonauts book is available wherever you buy books. Drew, thank you for all your help making the Scrimmonauts book. Thank you, guys. 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. Lauren has been doing a great job cutting video for our Instagram and our TikTok also. We have a TikTok? We have a TikTok. So cool. Yeah. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

58:36John August:Thank you again to our premium subscribers. Make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You'll miss the premium subscribers. Very much so. Yeah, they're the best. They're the good people. You can sign and become a premium subscriber like Drew at scriptnotes.net where you get all the backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record on whether you should quit your job loudly. Oh, loud quitting. Loud quitting. Drew just kind of did that. He just kind of did that. He did. He went out with a big rhubarb bang. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

59:14Thank you.