671 - The Best/Worst it Will Ever Be
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August. All right. Okay. My name is Craig Mason. And you're listening to episode 671 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it's one of our favorite regular segments, How Would This Be a Movie?, where we take a look at stories in the news and find their adaptable angles.

We also have follow-up on AI, listener questions on partner credits, and our bonus segment for premium members. Let's discuss home automation, Craig. So over this past year, we've added a few things to our house, and you just moved into a new house. And so I'm curious what your take is on home automation and what you're doing and what you're thinking about doing. This is going to be very educational for me. I already can tell I'm going to learn a lot, and this probably will end up costing me a bit of money. Yeah. What are you going to do?

But first, I have a small rant. And so, ooh, crazy. Rubbing my hands together. So this is a thing that happened twice. And so because it happened twice, I know it's actually a real thing. It's not just like one person being weird. Okay. Okay, so I'm at the dentist and I have a hygienist who's really good. She's a fast scraper. Like, it's not painful. Great. She chats a ton, but whatever. She's not expecting me to answer back. So it's just a monologue on her side. Yeah. Great. Great.

And so she says, your wife must be so proud of how good you are at cleaning your teeth. And it's like, okay. You said hurrah. Hurrah. And so I'm like, okay, well, sometimes people don't read me as gay, which is fine. Right. And so I would otherwise correct her. But then I realized like, no, no, she also cleans Mike's teeth. So she knows that he's a man. And so in following this through, her belief is that the partner of a man is a wife, that you call that person a wife.

Oh, no. Oh, no. No. And it's happened other places too. It happened with other medical professionals. Really? It's so strange. So here I just want to state clearly so that everyone knows this.

A male spouse is a husband. Yeah. So, is this one of these cases where someone feels so comfortable with the gay community that they're like, I'm going to use your word? No, no, no, no. It's actually just a genuine, like, had never occurred to them before. It's just like a misunderstanding of how English works. In Los Angeles? Yes. Isn't that wild? That is wild. Yeah, don't do that. Yeah. So, there was no malice intended. It's just strange though, right? So, wait. So, you said...

By the by, spit, Rince. Yeah. Actually, I have a husband. Yeah. And she said, oh, I know. No, she's like, wait, you call him a husband? And it's like, well, yes. What did she think? So you're both wives in her mind? I have no idea. I couldn't get that far deep into her thought process. But essentially, any person married to a man would be a wife. Oh, honey. Yeah.

That's just wrong. It's wrong. No, it's just wrong. Wait, you said it's happened twice. It's happened twice. So that happened once and then it was another, this is a few years back, a different medical person. Wait, so it's only the medical people that are doing this? I'm noticing among the medical staff. All right, so let's talk to our health professionals out there. Yeah.

What are you doing? Yeah. Cut that out. That's ridiculous. And I can understand like people who are nervous about like understanding pronouns or they's them's. We're in a place where it's complicated. You can't always...

be sure how a person wants to be addressed by themselves. But I think this is just a subtle matter of like how English works is that a guy who's married to a guy has a husband. Yes. A married man is a husband. Yeah. Now you could say partner, spouse, other things like that. Sure. You know, I think I've done a little rant. Have I done a rant about partner? Sure. Go for it. I'll do a little rant about partner. Very common in Europe. So I've noticed in the UK,

everybody refers to their spouse as partner. And I've also been seeing it more common here. And I think in part, it's because people are trying to be really inclusive and remove gendered partnering language. The problem is partner means two different things. Writing partners. What? Your partner? Yeah. When I meet somebody and they're like, yeah, I've been working on this show and actually I showed the script to my partner who was really thrilled. And I'm like,

What am I going to do here? And so, and part of the reason we get to partner is also because it's the unmarried person you live with who we, for all functional, is your spouse for everything else but law. That's the other thing. I get that. And yet it's a frustrating situation. It's ambiguous in ways that it's not useful. It's ambiguous in ways that is not useful. And,

I'm all for coming up with language that makes people comfortable. Totally. I think that's great. And I can see why there's a need for a term that is different than husband or wife or spouse that covers somebody you're not technically married to. Although my feeling is if you're objected to technical marriage, go ahead and claim just virtual marriage and call them your spouse. Yeah. That's a perfectly great word. Yeah.

Oy. Oy. Not solvable, but just I wanted to put this out there in the world for like the husband situation, the husband-wife situation, I think is at least standardized enough in American English. You shouldn't need to worry about this. That one, that lady invented a new problem. Now we're about to get a bunch of emails about partner. I'll take it. I'll take it on the chin. All right. Some more follow-up questions.

Drew, start us off. Yeah, so we had been talking about Flight Plan and how it came from The Lady Vanishes, which is a Hitchcock movie. Andrea Bartz wrote in and said, as a thriller novelist in the throes of adapting my own novel, I had to point out that Hitchcock's masterful The Lady Vanishes was an adaptation of Ethel Lena White's criminally underrated 1936 novel, The Wheel Spins. Levels of genius all the way down.

Ooh, well, I love that. Isn't that interesting? So someone writes a book in 1936, you said. Yeah. And then whoosh, you go 75 years into the future and there's a movie about people on a plane. I mean, they had planes in 1936. I'm stretching a little bit. But that speaks more to the...

kind of immortality that you can achieve through art than just about anything I can think of. I mean, that's really cool. Because you know someone's going to take flight plan 15 years from now and do it again. It's never going to end. I mean, the central sort of gaslighting, like no one you never actually had, that person was never there, you're imagining this whole thing. It's good. It's just good. It's good stuff. What is also apparently good was your Belfast accent. David Belfast wrote in, let's listen to what he said.

Hey, John and Craig. Long time podcast listener and big fan. My name is Dave Marks or Dave Marks, as anyone outside of Belfast would pronounce it. And speaking to Craig's Belfast impression from Say Nothin' or Say Nothin', as we'd say, with no T in it. Do it now. Do was a bit more oo and a bit less oo. So with do, we just say do, not do.

Little bit Americanized. The Nye, however, was bang on point, and that's the bit most people get wrong. You just need to work on the old how now brown cow becomes hi-nye brown kye, and that gets you all the way to Belfast. Hi-nye brown kye. Great. A thumbs up from Dave in Belfast. I am elated. Yeah. Elated. And...

It really is a fascinating accent. There are so many things that are so specific to the Northern Irish accent. Somebody, I'm sure, has a linguistic term for how this functions where accents are created in part by a political boundary because it really is a political boundary accent. I mean, the Dublin accent feels like an entirely different English from the Northern Irish Belfast accent.

And there's so many wonderful, wonderful things in that accent that just, I don't know, make my heart sing. So I'm glad that I got one and a half words right. Excellent. All right, we have some more follow-up on AI. So in episode 669, we're talking about they ate our words. Benjamin writes, Craig says he didn't know if people were freaking out about Google linking when Google first started. They absolutely were. In fact, there were lawsuits over scraping and linking.

The compromise that was eventually reached was that linking to something is acceptable because you are pointing to the source. Quoting or showing content on another site, however, had to undergo fair use scrutiny the same as if you were quoting in a book or magazine article.

Okay, well, I mean, first of all, always comforting to know that we've always been freaking out. And that's a good reminder that every time some new technology comes along, we do tend to get a bit reactionary. It didn't occur to me that the real issue wasn't so much the pointing to things, which I, and I agree with that, pointing to something doesn't feel like you're stealing it.

But the little tiny bits of summary that go along with the link, that's a republishing and that's an interesting fair use case, which, you know, obviously Google prevailed. And I think that's reasonable, actually. Yeah. That does feel like what fair use is about. A little snippet that is...

you know, meant to lead you to the intellectual property as opposed to replace it. I think it's also important to remember that we're talking about this under the legal framework. So like what is legal, what is not legal versus what is ethical and what is not ethical. And I think we're always looking for what are the laws, but what are these sort of moral rules behind what you should be doing or publishing or claiming as your own. I see this on Instagram a lot where people will republish someone else's thing without giving them credit or they will give them credit. It's like they're doing it for their own clout versus actually creating

creating an original thought. But to our degree, is that just spreading culture? It does feel like sharing culture has led to a lack of interest in attribution. Whereas in academia and journalism, attribution is still considered an extraordinarily important thing. And the levels of fact-checking that The New Yorker did on a piece, you know, an interview with me,

I mean, really, why? But it was down to like, you said you were at a cafe with this person and we had to call and check and make sure that you were. And then everything is attributable and notable and checkable. And then in sharing culture, nothing is. Nothing is. And it's not even a question of people going, oh, I'm going to put this out there and pretend it's mine. They don't even think about it. No one seems to care. That's horrible, actually. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's always been that way. It's like, you know, I think the fact that we are now looking at digital things where you could try to do the forensics and track them back, you know, we've had sharing culture for jokes for forever. We've had sharing culture for story ideas have sort of always propagated throughout. The fact that, you know, all Shakespeare's plays are directly inspired by things that came from before them, that's always been a part of... Yes, inspiration for sure. And jokes are a really interesting case because they are designed to be shared without attribution. Yeah.

it would be an interesting project to figure out who was the first person to come up with this joke that we've all heard 400,000 times. But...

On the internet where things begin with a clear attribution that's a time-stamped attribution. Yeah. And then what happens is, of course, people complain and say, you stole my thing. And then that becomes a thing. And then people share that. And da, da, da, da, da. It's worth acknowledging that joke theft is a real thing. And so among comedians, that's a huge issue. And the issue comes up of to what degree have you made something your own or are you riffing off –

this type of joke versus, you know, the actual wording of a joke. Joke stealing in comedy is a fascinating topic. There have been a few notable cases where accusations were made. I won't go so far as to say that proof was given in some sort of legal way, but there was a huge brouhaha over Carlos Mencia.

There have been similar arguments made about Amy Schumer. And then people will show side-by-sides and things. And sometimes you look at these and you're like, well, I can see how two people might come up with the same joke here. Sometimes you look at it and go, oh, no, that's kind of word for word there. And...

The world of stand-up comedians and that culture, that whole joke theft thing is fascinating. It is a major concern for them. And they will talk amongst themselves. So comedians know, for instance, hey, if you see so-and-so at the club and you're going up there before them, after them, it doesn't matter if they're there, don't do new material. Don't do new material because they'll be doing it next week and they're more famous than you. Yeah. It's scary. Yeah.

More AI feedback here from Anna. We got a lot of great AI feedback. So this one comes from Anna. Is the feedback from AI? Oh my God. I mean, no. I don't think this one is, but other ones, you never know. You don't think. You don't think.

Anna writes, I just found out that a series of novels I co-wrote with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were part of 38,000 or so fiction books. Hold on. Yeah, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has written quite a few books. But also, this sounds like something AI would say. That's true. It really, really... So I've written 4,000 books with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

It just feels like a learning language model, just put some things together. Maybe he was like, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is tall, and he got confused with height and amount of writing. Anyway, please. It's only a few novels out of 38,000, but yes. Please restart the question, but keep in mind my concern. So, just found out that a series of novels she co-wrote with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were part of 38,000 or so fiction books, both classic and contemporary, used to feed A.I.,

Apart from feeling thoroughly ripped off, I'm also bewildered. Our novels are historical fiction. They have fictional as well as historical characters, so Queen Victoria comes to mind. But there are half a dozen minor characters who do things they never did and say things they never said.

I do a gargantuan amount of research to portray an era, in this case the 1870s, accurately. But not to put too fine a point on it, I'm still making shit up. How would AI know this? In that great repository of info dumping, how will AI weed out the fake from the facts?

It won't. It won't. And Anna, so I want to back up in here and say like you're feeling thoroughly ripped off and bewildered. Those are natural emotions. I totally get why you're feeling that. Something that may be helpful for you to understand is that the LLMs, the models, they don't

kind of care about the actual subject matter you're giving them. What you're giving them is a bunch of words in English that all fit together that are complete whole thoughts. They're not looking for facts. They're looking for long strings of words that all fit together and actually make sense together. And that's what your book provided. And so I don't think you need to worry that some other person

piece of writing that's generated by one of these things is going to involve these fake stuff that you made up in historical fiction, it's unlikely to actually happen that way. Mostly what this is going to do is create a tool that is going to generate an email for somebody

That's a little bit better than it would have been otherwise. Yeah, that's exactly right. I do think this is a common misconception that what AI is doing is taking chunks of stuff and regurgitating it as its own. If it were doing that, it wouldn't be intelligent artificially or otherwise. It's just learning how our senses are put together, how grammar functions, and what words are related to other words and how closely. Yeah.

So on the one hand, don't worry that people will think that Queen Victoria, I don't know, used an iPhone, whatever it was that happened in this book that was maybe anachronistic or just incorrect. But do worry that your work was sort of used for this. And this is where it gets interesting because AI isn't taking intellectual property and using it as intellectual property. It's almost like it's taking a painting, right?

And just looking at how paintings are made. So what do you do with that? It feels to me like copyright law needs to be amended. Just side note here, because if we try and apply existing copyright law to this, I don't think we're going to get anywhere. It feels like copyright law needs to be amended to say that one of the rights that is inferred by copyright is the right for the material to be used as the basis for learning. Mm-hmm.

And that's tricky because... Yeah, human learning versus training on a model. It's incredibly complicated. It's complicated. Yeah, there's not a great easy way through this. And so, again, I understand what you're feeling. Months ago, when we were looking at these examples of like songs that were clearly like, this is a Beach Boys song. Those examples were like, okay, well, you fed in all this stuff and it spit out something that looked exactly like the original. Like you can obviously tell what its references are.

this is not going to happen based on your book being fed into this. No, no. More feedback here from Caleb. Caleb writes, we're at a new birth of artificial intelligence. It makes pretty things, but is it art? Why not? And he shares from Rudyard Kipling's poem, The Conundrum of the Workshops.

When the flush of a newborn son fell first on Eden's green and gold, our father Adam sat under the tree and scratched with a stick in the mold. And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart till the devil whispered behind the leaves, it's pretty, but is it art?

So I read that whole poem. So you can put a link to it. We'll put a link in the show notes to it. It's a really great Kipling poem. And it's so clever to sort of bring in. It was like at every point in the artistic process, I'm going to question whether it's actually artistically worthy. And the poem goes on to sort of great things are made. The Tower of Babel is created and the devil is always whispering there. But is it really art?

Yeah, and I don't know. I mean, the word art is a trap. I hear it all the time. I sometimes use it to describe what you and I do. Yeah.

But rarely. Because it feels a bit goofy to me. I think the is it art, what is implied in the question is it art, is is it valid? Yeah. And validity is seemingly something conferred upon art by not artists, by critics. And I don't care. I don't care. That's all they do all day. So the devil is a critic. Right.

And the critic is whispering in the creator's ear, is it good? Is it art? Is it worthy? Is it valid? Yeah. Basically, not today, Satan. And so one of the things that does give me pause to describe what I do as art is it sometimes feels almost unbearable.

that the lady is protesting a bit much. My art, you assholes, you know, who say it's not art, I would rather just call it a TV show or a movie and let it be what it is. If it were a painting, I'd call it a painting. If it were a statue, I'd call it a statue. Yeah.

The fine arts, let's say, for instance, painting. Everybody agrees, oh, that's art, and we call it art. Just as how people seem to all agree that the best picture is a drama, because that's what's best. It's not, and other things are art. The word is loaded.

is what AI does, art, the critics can all let the devils discuss amongst themselves, I say. Meanwhile, just keep making things. Meanwhile, just keep... Thank you. Just make stuff. The word stuff, by the way, perfectly good. Absolutely.

So some of the stuff that's being made increasingly are videos. And so months ago, we talked about Sora, which has now been released so people can play around and make clips off of Sora. Google released this new product called VO2, which also looks really good. It can generate video clips that have the physics in them looks much better. So like if you have a dog running down a beach, the VO1 looks really impressive. Like you realize that you believe that that dog is running down the beach. And so people wrote in and said like, oh, what does this mean for us and for filmmaking?

At this point, not a lot. I think stitching these things together to create bigger projects hasn't worked out so well. So we'll put a link in the show notes to this film festival that was debuting a bunch of short films made by filmmakers using these tools. And they're

They're terrible. They're atrocious. Much like most short film festivals, everything in them was atrocious. It was. But you can see the edges. You can see how hard they were trying to make some of the stuff work, trying to get people's faces to look consistent, trying to get dialogue to sync and match. These are all tough things. So it does a really good job at like, here's three seconds of a person moving quietly through a space. Much harder for her to do real things.

And yet, I want us to always remember, this is the worst it'll ever be. And these tools will get better year after year after year, so things will improve along the way. But just we all recognize there's a big gap between where we are and where this becomes a profound danger. I think my bigger concern is that

Well before these things are able to make an hour of television or a two-hour movie, they can create something that is interesting and compelling and different enough that it takes the attention of people who would otherwise see movies and television. And if that were to happen at a big enough scale, that could have huge impacts on our industry. Basically, a new form of entertainment comes out of this kind of generation that just unites

obvious the need for sort of what we're doing. Yeah, it doesn't have to be better than us. It just has to be as good. If it is as good, we lose instantly because of volume, because they can just create things at speed and volume and we can't. Even if it's almost as good.

We lose. There is an article I will cite as my one cool thing that provides a glimmer of potential hope. It is a little bit of a kind of a pipe dream theory, but it is promising for those of us who are just hoping that AI can only go so far and that the singularity is perhaps impossible.

Let's wrap up here. We've got a question here from Michael. Michael writes, you discussed what it means for AI to use our work, but not what it means for us to use AI. I wondered if you could share how you're feeling about using it in your own work.

Yeah. So this is something I've been thinking a lot about the last couple of weeks. And we're trying to draft up sort of like an official policy company-wide, but also thinking about sort of what I feel like personally. And there's a couple of different areas I sort of want to focus on. First off, would the use of AI be in some sort of public-facing role? Is this something that the world outside is going to see material that's being generated by AI? So would it be that text? Would it be that images? That's a no for me. Anything that's representing our work or my work should not be generated by AI. Right.

I ask, is this work that would normally be paid work, that we would pay somebody to do? That's a huge red flag for me. And is this technology being used by the person whose job it is to make the thing? So if it's a coder doing coding, that feels different than having Drew be doing coding using one of these tools. So that's what I'm thinking about sort of company-wide, but then I think you have individual choices that might be different. And as a writer for me,

I'm asking, am I using this the same way I would use Google? If I'm asking ChatGPT a question I would normally ask Google for a question, that doesn't feel that different to me. I don't actually have big concerns with that. So,

An example I've cited is I'm working on this graphic novel and one of the characters in it is a philosopher. And so I was wondering, okay, well, what would this classical philosopher think about the situation they're in, which they're all hungry? It's like, what do classical philosophers say about hunger? Not the state of famine, but the experience of being hungry.

That's a really difficult thing to Google or to search for, but it's actually a really good question to ask a chat GPT because they can spit out answers like, based on these things, this is what Socrates said about this, this is what Plato said about this, and that was useful for me. And so I don't feel bad about that because it's doing the kind of thing that would be almost impossible for me to do otherwise. Similarly, I'm reading Seneca's tragedies and I'm

I had ChatGPT open and I was just asking questions about like, wait, who is this character? What is this based on? That was incredibly helpful. So I don't feel bad about using those ways. But what I do feel bad about is any situation where the stuff that I'm doing

is even internally has an aspect of these tools being used. And so I think we talked about on the show is pitch decks. And so if there's an image I need for a pitch deck, is it fair to generate that through one of these models versus pulling it out of some other movie still frame? All of those objections, concerns, and allowances feel very on point to me.

I don't use chat GPT at all. I don't use AI at all. However...

I don't use it as I would, I guess I would say overtly. My suspicion is that a lot of the things I do, the underpinnings are already using AI. So there's that kind of invisible AI I'm not aware of. The one area that I do think it's interesting and I would feel okay with is in temp work, not temp work like working as an assistant somewhere for a week. I mean to say in production, doing things that are placeholders until you can do the right thing

That's interesting. So for instance, when we're editing, I'm constantly throwing in little lines that I know I'm going to have the actors come and do later down the line with ADR. So I'll say, okay, I want this line where let's say Isabella Merced off camera says, wait, where are you going? So it'll either be if it's a guy, any guy, it's my voice. And if it's any woman, it's usually our editor, Emily's voice.

But what ends up happening is you send this cut in to the network and you know that they're going to hear like your voice 12 different times in 12 different places. Emily is not Isabella Merced and all of the women shouldn't sound like Emily. So things like, okay, make this sound more like Isabella Merced for the purposes of this, knowing that then I'm going to have her come in and do this properly. But just like have Emily do it and then just

make their vocal quality sound a little bit more like somebody. I could see something like that being incredibly useful as long as, like you said, it never takes the place of the actual performer doing it. It's just a placeholder to help you feel out if you're doing it right. In that regard, it's not anything that I think is taking anyone's job or taking away money. There are things that we do in post-production that I think probably are already using AI. Yeah.

I don't know what's going on in some of the VFX places where they're doing rotoscoping. My guess is AI is involved, right? Like, okay, someone is in front of a green screen, their hair is blowing around. Each one of those hairs has to be rotoscoped, you know, against the background or comped somehow. I don't know how they do it, but my guess is they're using tools that are powered by AI and will be doing so more and more. I know that

There are things like beauty fixes. So very common to if there are some blemishes or things, you know, back in the day, there used to be quite expensive retouching of things, you know, because if an actor just has a honking pimple one day, it's going to sort of grind your movie to a halt, especially since we don't shoot things regularly.

So like, oh, in the beginning of the movie, they had this huge pimple and it went away. And then like a year later, the pimple's back in the same spot. Well, AI can kind of do those things very simply now. I think the people that are using these tools are using that. But I myself, I don't use it to compose any writing. I recognize, however, that I'm close to 54 years old. I don't think my experience and the way I conduct my work

career is probably going to be particularly relevant to somebody who's 25 right now. I think they're like, that's nice, grandpa. Here's how we do it. And here's how the kids do it. And so like, I just don't,

I don't want to come off as a Luddite. I don't want to come off as somebody who's scolding. I guess all I can say is it's certainly not necessary to do good work. I can say that. And yeah, ethically, I think we do have a responsibility to try and look out for each other as human beings and not replace each other as quickly as we can. Yeah.

So examples of, you know, the visual effects you're talking about or the beauty correction stuff, you're describing the person whose job it is to do that thing using these technologies as one of the tools in their toolkit to do that thing. And so that feels like much more defensible and it actually tracks with sort of the recent negotiations and the recent like IOTC deal is like, you know, if those technologies are going to be used, they have to be used by the person who's supposed to be doing them, which makes sense. So you're not trying to replace a person with those things. It becomes a trickier thing

line though I was thinking back to your example of like okay well using AI to create a sound light for placeholder lines in a movie in the first Charlie's Angels there was a time where we didn't have John Forsythe to do Charlie's voice and so we had a different actor who was doing that and so we kept hiring him and bringing him in to like record all these temp lines because he really did sound a lot like John Forsythe and ultimately John Forsythe came in and did it but

realistically, now we could just do a digital John Forsythe for his voice for those placeholders, and that's one actor whose job we wouldn't have hired during that time in the meantime. So even if you're just trying to do a placeholder, sometimes there is an economic cost to somebody. Yeah, I mean, one would hope that SAG continues to refine that language because I think they are probably in the front ranks of soldiers now.

that are going to be fired at by this technology. Yeah. That's the scariest. I think writers and directors will be behind them still, still in danger, but the actors will go first. I think they know that. I think they're terrified. I think reasonably so. I would be. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, let's get to our main topic, which is how would this be a movie? And so from the moment this first story started, it's like, oh, this is going to be a discussion on this podcast. How would this be a movie? So because we know that our listeners sometimes tune into these episodes five years, ten years after the fact, I need to actually explain this story, which is happening so presently that everyone's like, how can you describe this? But...

So on December 4th, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, is shot on the sidewalk outside of a New York City hotel by a masked assailant. The attacker flees and a manhunt begins. Now, the initial speculation was that it was some sort of professional attack by a hitman, which turns out there are no such things as hitmen. But details emerge quickly that the attacker was staying at a hostel in New York City and that bullets found on the scene had the words deny, defend, and depose written upon them.

Several photographs of the suspect show his time in New York City leading up to the shooting, including one of these photos in which his face is visible. So then on December 9th of this year, Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Hold on, say that sentence again because I think future people need to hear it carefully. On December 9th, Luigi Mangione...

is arrested at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania. That sounds like a chat GPT sentence. It does. It does. Yeah. The whole thing has a sort of made up fictional quality, which I think is what's so compelling about it. Yes. So a customer noticed him and believed he looked like the man in the photographs. So as we record this, Mangione has pled not guilty to state and federal charges.

So this is the world of a movie about this event. This, you know, we can come at it from any angle, but I think what's so notable about this to me is like from the start, from the moment you first heard about this, like, oh, whoever did this perceives themselves as being the central character in a movie story. It was one of those rare situations where it's like, oh, we're not forcing a narrative on this. This person is actually perceives themselves as having a role in a narrative. Yeah.

Yes. So Luigi Mangione is a evidently very smart young man from a privileged background who, as far as I gathered, has experienced both physical issues because he had back surgeries that didn't seem to work very well and he was in pain.

but also clearly was experiencing a mental health episode because he just sort of dropped off the grid, disappeared, stopped talking to friends, stopped talking to his family, moved away to Australia, I think, for a while. Didn't really tell anybody. And then started writing manifestos. Never a good sign. Essays are nice. Manifesto's not so great. Well, let me just push back a little bit. Like,

Any blog post is a manifesto if after the fact it looks like it came from a certain person. I suppose a manifesto is an essay followed by a shooting for sure. That's fair. So, you know, okay, the shooting part is definitely the issue. But Luigi Mangione does something that is both on the one hand the worst crime you can commit, which is cold-blooded murder.

On the other hand, becomes a folk hero because everyone hates the American healthcare system. And he shot and murdered the CEO of the largest American healthcare corporation. And there was this sudden sense of,

We got one of the fat cats. So that's this deep class anger and resentment that had been built up over a large amount of time, which is completely unfair, by the way, to this one man and his family. I wouldn't talk about that. Brian Thompson. And then, and this is where our brains are weak and we can't help ourselves.

The most important factor to creating this as a big story the way it is, is that Luigi Mangione is very handsome. Yes. And therein is the goof of it all. If this guy were ugly, no one, and I mean no one, would be on his side. No one. This is pretty privilege at its highest level.

If he were ugly, people would have been like, okay, yeah, he was this crazy, ugly guy who shot somebody and you shouldn't do that. Look, yeah, our young colleague is suspicious. Well, no, I am. I think the act itself, because before we knew who he was, before we even had the face of him, I think there was quite a lot of support for the act, at least online. Let me take both sides here. I think...

when the act happened, there was a mystery of who this person was. But they also, there was immediately a sense of like, we are not in any danger. Like, the normal American person is not in any danger, which is such a unique situation. Because usually, there's a manhunt because like, that person is a danger to society. This guy wasn't. We wanted this guy off the street because he had done this thing in a very public, big way. And the,

The police were embarrassed. There were lots of other factors there, but we never saw him as being a danger. So he was just this mysterious man. But the slow trickle out of like, okay, here we can see a little bit more of his face because the mask is down a little lower. Oh, here he was flirting with the woman at the hostel. That one picture changed everything. Absolutely. Like, oh my God, he's a smoke show. And therefore the Timothee Chalamet and all the other stuff. Absolutely. But I think of the 24 hours before, I think,

The competency, in a way, was the most attractive thing. Well, so the idea, there are two possible ways of thinking about this. One way is there is a masked Avenger out there who is fulfilling our need for street justice against evil corporate overlords. It feels like a Robin Hood. It feels like a Robin Hood, except instead of stealing money from the rich and giving to the poor, he's just murdering people on a sidewalk, which isn't great.

But then the picture came out and everything changed. Then it was like, oh my God, he's hot. A hot guy is doing this. Then...

When they caught him and they said his name was Luigi Mangione, everybody, it like got even better because it was like, it felt like a meme name. You know, I saw a headline when they caught him and the headline, when they finally figured out, okay, who's this person? They figured it out. The headline was, it's a me, Luigi, which made me laugh. And then I thought, why am I laughing? A man was murdered on the sidewalk.

So, Saturday Night Live did Weekend Update, and of course they mentioned Luigi Mangione. And many, many—and they were women, you could tell by the pitch of their voice—went, woo! And Colin Jost went, oh, yeah, okay, we're wooing for justice, right? Because—

He's a murderer. So how do we make this a movie? How do we make this a movie? Because so really it's where do you choose to center the story? And obviously, is this a movie versus is this a series? I think there's obviously a good case to make it for a series. I'm sure Ryan Murphy is going to make... Those conversations are already happening to make the series. I'm sure they're on day 40 of shooting already. Yes. So, but the question is...

You can easily imagine the narrative that's all centered on him leading up to and after the shooting because it's compelling. The planning, the escape, the being on the run, the camera surveillance state, all that stuff is really exciting. And in that version, it's really hard to center or anchor around this man who was killed and the actual, the crime itself in a way because the crime itself kind of becomes secondary to the cultural phenomenon. I tend to think about these things differently

As much as I can from the least privileged point of view and make that the interesting point of view, the least privileged point of view in this case would probably be Brian Thompson's family. Because, listen, we can discuss whether or not it is fundamentally unethical to be the CEO of a health insurance corporation.

However, that is our system. The health insurance corporations exist. You could argue that it is unethical to not be the CEO of a health insurer if you think you would be better at providing health to people than the alternative. If it's like me or that asshole, I mean, I guess I'd do better than that guy. So that's the system we have. He was murdered because somebody with mental health problems

felt aggrieved by decisions that that guy probably had nothing to do with. And now my husband, my father, my brother is dead and everyone's cheering. Yeah. And they've turned this kid, who by the way looks terrified, into a hero. He is not. And now it really becomes an exploration of how we distort reality.

truth to create narrative. The Luigi Mangione backlash will be coming soon. It's going to come. Yeah. It's inevitable because that's how this pendulum swings. But I would make probably a movie about the way people lost their minds. I probably would also fold into it the other least privileged point of view, which is somebody caught up

in the united healthcare system because there are poor people who are suffering because that insurance company is gross and they're not murdering anyone so who's gonna look after those people while we concentrate on the most powerful two people involved in the story the man who ran a corporation and the person who was pulling the trigger of a gun yeah

So we are recording this and Manitoni has been arrested. He's now being transferred back to New York City, but we don't have information from his point of view. All we know is like his note, this manifesto, we don't have any greater insight. And that's going to completely transform the,

kind of everything once we have his current explanation of why he did what he did, how it all fits together, and that's going to really influence things. So I do wonder about sort of trying to map out the story now when you don't, he's still just a cipher. We still don't have a way to handle him. And you say like, well, he's going through a mental health crisis.

Sure, that tracks with what I've seen. But until we actually see an interview with him, we can't know what this is because he could also be incredibly savvy in ways that we're not anticipating. He was pretty savvy. He wasn't savvy enough to not sit in a McDonald's, which, by the way, is a corporation, with his manifesto in his bag and the murder weapon in his bag. Duh. So he was exhibiting what I would consider to be

high intelligence and also disordered thinking. And anyone that thinks that murdering somebody is a solution to their problems is exhibiting disordered thinking, I would argue. He's also a fan of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who in a very similar way was brilliant and

targeted people that he felt were putting technology ahead of humanity. So it wasn't, again, quote unquote, random. Those of us who weren't involved in research labs to, I don't know, whatever, invent new plastics. We were not getting a bomb. No, we weren't getting mailed a bomb. So then there is that weird sense of, yeah, someone's doing something about it.

Americans love the story of a violent loner. Hollywood has been celebrating violent loners since film was invented. Probably not a good idea. Yeah. Getting back to sort of where he fits in this overall cinematic universe, we have other examples like Bonnie and Clyde. The villains who were sticking it to the rich man do become cultural heroes. So that's not a unique experience for us to be having with Hollywood.

Mangione in this situation. I'm also struck by like, not that atypical. I think you could find a lot of people who meet the general characteristics of a Mangione, like the kinds of podcasts you listen to, that self-improvement, that kind of stuff. I think part of what's so compelling to me about this story is that, well, what's different about him versus like the other thousand guys out there who are sort of fitting the same template? Yeah.

Well, a circuit breaks. And we don't know which circuit and we don't know why. But I would say the great majority of people, if put in front of their enemy or the person that makes them the angriest and handed a gun, would not pull the trigger. Yeah, but that's not what he did. It wasn't that he was in a situation where he had the opportunity. He had to make a plan and systematically pull out and put the plan into place. And I feel like we actually have...

We reward society for those individuals who can build companies, create new things. So he sort of has that founder's mentality, but for... He still had to pull the trigger. Yes. So my argument is that's where he steps away from the rest of us. Yeah. Because the reason most people build businesses as opposed to murder, aside from the illegality, is because murder is not an option. Right.

And I say this as an atheist. I feel like atheists get special points for saying this. I don't not murder because I'm afraid of hell. I don't not murder because I'm afraid of God's punishment or disappointment. I don't murder because my brain is organized in such a way as to find that horrifying. I could not do it.

I'm fascinated by portrayals of people who struggle to murder people. And I do oftentimes think about how interesting it is when we watch movies where the tone is, I can happily murder. You know, like, it's kind of like the 80s really went all in on that. The kind of happy, quipping murderer hero. That's where this is...

Yeah. But I also, the reason why I don't want to drop this is that I feel like we feel like we're in a time of increasingly violence as political violence being a thing we see in the world, even in the U.S. after the... Yeah. Attempted assassination on Donald Trump. Absolutely. But also, I would say January 6th before that was the kind of political violence we just aren't used to. And we used to have more of it, used to have bombings and those kinds of things. Yeah.

I just feel like I can envision a character like Mangione who sort of sees this as a killing baby Hitler kind of situation where they feel themselves as like, this is a chance for me to alter the future. And therefore, it is not just this is not just a murder. This is actually a an act which will change society. Yeah, that would be a thought of deep, deep delusion and also not particularly smart for a guy who is smart.

Somebody else has to be the CEO now. It's like that company isn't going away. A little bit like Tim McVeigh drove a truck bomb up to the Murrah Federal Building and blew it up. And hundreds of people died, including children. And that accomplished nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

There is that sense of we're going to start something. We're going to kick off this big war that everyone's ready to go fight. No, most people are not ready to go fight. I think social media has amplified some of the worst voices and made them feel more plentiful, I suspect, than they are. How many people... I'm thinking about the Trump-Biden election today.

I think Trump got 68 million votes or something like that, or maybe tens of millions of people voted for him. 5,000 showed up that day. Very small number, happily. My argument being most people are good, or if not good, terrified to commit violence. Luigi Mangione was not. That makes him terrifying to me. So people that are celebrating him, I think, should not. That's what's terrifying to me, is the idea that somebody can...

calmly walk up to somebody on a sidewalk and after all their planning, do it. That's the scary thing. Yeah.

All right, let's move on to our next story. This is by an article by Paul DeBowl written for Commonwealth Beacon in Massachusetts. It is how do you license a fortune teller? So in the state of Massachusetts, fortune tellers have to be licensed, which is great. So he basically investigates sort of like what the licensing requirements are and what different cities in Massachusetts do for this. How do you even define fortune telling? Well, this is how it's laid out in the law.

Okay.

crystal gazing, or other such reading through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mind reading, telepathy, or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article, or substance, or by any similar such thing or act.

I just respect them so much for like pulling out the thesaurus and figuring out what are the things, because they have to be careful like not to define like probability or statistics or other things that are fortunate. That's an amazing list of things, although necromancy really shouldn't be. I mean, necromancy, the raising and manipulation of the dead. Anywho, they could have just said bullshit. This is an interesting, I actually understand why they do this because...

Because let's say you decide reasonably, business licenses are for businesses, not for a bunch of bullshit. Mm-hmm.

So we're not going to license bullshit. That's ridiculous. Well, now you've got like 20 bullshit shops in the rundown part of town because, weirdly, the people that peddle this crap, they can never seem to afford nice places. You'd think that they would, but it's always crap. Anywho, they can't leave that unregulated. I suspect that the licensing of these places, even though there's this wonderful moment in the article where they ask like,

Why do you license these places? And the woman says to make sure that they're good at it or something. But it's really just to limit how many of them there could be, I suspect. Yeah. So in certain cities, like there's Amesbury City lifted the cap on one license for the talent and fortunes for money per 50,000 residents. So basically, you're trying to control a thing that's out there and also to make sure that because they're...

actual legitimate businesses, they're collecting taxes and there's not sort of shady money laundering stuff. There's reasons why you have to do it. Yet, I just found it this delightful. And I think there's some

It's not probably the central focus of the movie, but I think there's some delightful thing about either a family business, a family fortune-telling business that loses their license or some legal drama, some sort of my cousin Vinny is like, you know, you have to defend this company. You could also see a supernatural, you know, comedy adventure like Men in Black where...

you meet a guy and his job is to check and grant slash renew licenses for these people and they're all real. And he finds that one of the one thing is no necromancy. You know, can't do necromancy. And then he's like, someone's clearly doing necromancy here and follows it into some Ghostbusters-y sort of thing. It's a great...

Like beginning where you take a job and you're like, none of this is real. And then it turns out some of it's real. It is mind-blowing to me that people go to these things and believe any of it. It is mind-blowing. There's so many of them. There's so many. Yeah, I know really smart people who...

I have gone to them and I found them useful and helpful and then also became sort of weirdly obsessed with the people who are giving them their fortunes, which makes sense. Of course. And get built for money. Yeah, they became weirdly obsessed with the charlatans that are con artists that... Are very skilled at doing this thing. Yeah, digging their claws into you and extracting your dough. I mean, I've said this before. If I could do any of those things, I would be performing those things for free

As a saint, because that's what I would be, a saint, I would be the most famous, most beloved person in the world if all I did was legitimately help people talk to the dead. Yeah. No. The people that claim to be able to talk to the dead, they would prefer to be in a small shop in a strip mall next to a nail place.

charging $25 a read. Interesting. Lastly, we have

An article by Susan Dominus for the New York Times Magazine. This is about an IVF mix-up, a shocking discovery, and an unbearable choice. Oh, yeah. So here's the brief version of this. So we have a couple, Alexander and Daphna, who give birth to their second daughter, whom they name May. She's a great, easy baby. But the husband, other people start to say, like, this does not really look like it came from either one of us. And this was a baby that was implanted in the mother via IVF. Absolutely. So they had the baby...

my IVF. And so they did a home genetics test and they found out like neither of them is related to this baby. So like they have this moment of quandary decision. And it was sort of like around three or four months ago. Yeah, so quite young. Yeah. And so the question like, what do we do? Do we tell anyone? Like, do we go to the clinic? Like, what do we say? So they end up hiring and a surrogacy lawyer went to the clinic and it found, it turned out that

One of their initial suspicions was like, okay, this is not the right embryo that I gave birth to. But what happened to our embryos? What happened there? And it turns out there was another baby born about the same time who was their embryo. Living 10 minutes away. Yes, which is crazy. So they meet this other couple who are in fact, one's Asian, one's Latino. That's why these babies don't look anything alike. And they make the decision, well, we are going to swap the kids back, but what will that even look like? What is the process going to be?

oh, do we do this? And in the background of all this, there's the lawsuit against the facility company. But the story really focuses on like, what do these families do? And there's older kids. How does it all fit together? Craig, what did you take from this? Like, where do you think the interesting points are to hold on to if you're trying to adapt this? I thought maybe you approached best straightforward. The part that was heart-wrenching and fascinating was what do you do

When you've had a baby for four months and you find out that all of this love and attachment that has occurred shouldn't have. Yeah. And you now are supposed to have that same love and attachment to a baby you don't know. Yeah. Now, I will tell you, if you have an asshole baby, this is a dream come true. Because some babies are assholes. I'm not going to lie. Yeah. If you have a good one. Yeah. Oh, no. I got to babysit over this weekend the best baby in the world. Like an angel baby is amazing, right? Yeah.

Our first baby was not an angel. I would have been like, definitely, no, it's definitely, that's my kid. So the question at the heart of it is what defines parenthood? Yeah. Let's be even more specific. What defines motherhood? Because these women didn't just receive a child from a surrogate mother. They carried these babies to term. These babies grew inside of them. They gave birth to these babies. Right.

They were nursing these babies. So what is parenthood? Now, the fascinating question to me is how this is approached differently by the father and the mother. You can see even in the story, the fathers are like, oh, this is an easy one, switch them. Well, you didn't grow it in you. You didn't grow it inside of you. You're not keeping it alive with your body, not only prenatally, but postnatally.

What is the nature even of love? And what's beautiful about this story is that the two families decide to just sort of combine and let these kids grow up almost as sisters, even though there's really no reason that they should. And the parents struggling. I think in a drama, you would want one of the parents to want to switch and one to not. Yeah.

You'd want to create some conflict and you'd want to create a sense of that tearing apart. There's some interesting ways to conclude it. But the issues at the heart of it, if we're looking for, oh, what's our central dramatic argument? The central dramatic argument is you do not have to be related to a baby to love it like it is your baby. And in fact, fiercely so. Yeah.

To me, the most interesting moment was weirdly before the two couples met and where the first couple was like, what do we do? Because we do nothing. Are we under any legal obligation to say anything? Maybe not. I mean, I think there's a moral obligation probably. Right. But there's not like a legal obligation. So they could have just said nothing. But then there would always be this...

this time bomb out there like at some point this is going to come out and at what point do we do we figure out I think that's a really interesting I would love to see that moment staged and that this actually could be a play in a weird way yeah for that reason I feel like that discussion that debate is really great

And this is a theme that goes all the way back to old stories and fairy tales. The idea that you have stolen a child from another mother. Because the other thing is they don't know what the deal is with the other family. Yeah. At that point, they don't know that they have their own kid that's out there someplace too. Exactly. So, A, they don't know if their own kid exists. Their biologically owned kid exists. B, they don't know if...

The parents who are supposed to have had this embryo, they don't know if those people have a different baby, another baby. So now you're just quietly raising someone else's baby. You know it's not quote unquote yours, but it kind of is. That's the fascinating part. Maybe the more interesting statement isn't you can love a child as if it is your own, even if it is not biologically your own. Maybe the more interesting statement is,

You are capable of not loving a child that is your own biological child if you don't know it. Yeah. Because one of the fascinating things is they each meet their other child and they're like, yeah, nice baby, but who the F are you? I don't know you. And that's fascinating to me. Yeah.

So I think lots of good ways into this. This feels like it's not a series. I think it has to be a short thing. Unless you were to actually do the blended family, but then it becomes... Then it's a comedy, probably. It's just... We're sisters, but we're not. Our parents can't swim to the park. And so having had our daughter through surrogacy and knowing that there are going to be other siblings out there because genetically there are going to be other siblings out there. Yes, it's what's...

Interesting and not so uncommon about this era that we live in. But what's interesting about this story to me is that, you know, it's not classically like the two babies were switched up at the hospital and you're just going to switch the babies back. There's more complicated unknowns in there too. Just the fact that you are carrying a child within you all the way to term. It's just an entirely different thing. Craig, should we just be doing genetic tests like at birth? Well, it did strike me that if...

I were running a fertility clinic and part of my job was implanting embryos that, yeah, at birth, immediately, immediately that day, make sure that we didn't mess up. Like, I don't understand how that's not just an immediate thing to do. Yeah. Well...

All right, let's review our three movies here. So there's going to be multiple Luigi Mangione murder movies. Multi-Mangione. Multi-Mangione. I think there'll be at least one feature film. There's definitely going to be some sort of series, some sort of Ryan Murphy-ish series, probably several of them. There's going to be so much. We're going to hit peak Mangione in about two years. Was there ever a Unabomber movie? I'm not sure I ever saw one. I...

I think there might have been some, yeah, I bet you, Drew, if you Google up Unabomber movie, there's going to be some miniseries. There has to have been some, right? Yeah. There's one documentary, it seems like. Oh, okay. Interesting. Well, you know why? Wasn't that handsome?

Was not handsome. Was not handsome. Lived alone in a cabin. Lived alone in a cabin. Looked kind of like a crazy old man. Yeah. No one wants that. His sketch was handsome. In reality, not handsome. That's why. Oh, I lied. We had a Ted Kaczynski movie in 2021 with Sharlto Kopi. Oh. I can see Sharlto Kopi. Okay. Sure. And what was it called? Unabomber? Ted K. All right. Oh, boy.

Second story, licensing a fortune teller. There's nothing in the bowl story that you need to buy. There's nothing there to buy. But the idea of licensed fortune tellers, I think there's a comedy there to be found. Seems about right. I would agree. The IVF story. Um...

Yes. Yeah. I think there's a made-for-a-lifetime movie that's pretty obvious. Whether there's a bigger movie to be made out of this, possibly, maybe. What was the Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore movie, which was about the... Oh, May, December. May, December, yeah. So May, December was inspired by actual events. So there's definitely a big feature version you can make at some point, too. I can envision somebody doing this on the road. Cool. Yeah.

Let's answer listener questions. Let's start with Jane Doe here. Jane Doe writes, I'm writing a pilot with a buddy based on his memoir. Credits wise, I'm sure an ampersand makes sense as we're absolutely writing this thing together. My question is about order of names. What exactly does it mean to order the writer's names chronologically?

Does that mean alphabetically? He'll obviously have the based on the book by credit for himself. So that's not in dispute at all. Just curious if I'm right that it should be written by Jane Doe and John Everett, D first, E second, or if chronologically means something other than alphabetically.

Also, does the fact that it's Everett's book affect the byline order for the script in any way? So, the chronologically comes if there's multiple writers over multiple drafts and it's separated in time, you list them chronologically. That makes sense for that. If it's an ampersand, you're really considered one writer. We don't actually list

Them chronologically. Yeah. So writers that are separated, not as teams, are actually listed in order of prominence of authorship. Well, but before it goes to arbitration. No, before it goes to arbitration. So basically on that top sheet, you should list... Is that what she's asking or is she asking about like the final credits?

I think final credits. Okay. Yeah. So final credits still doesn't apply to her case because she's a writing team. Yeah. You can order your names in a writing team however you want. Yeah. You can argue about it, fight about it, but eventually you're going to have to put out a title page that has your names in one order and that'll be the order you'd go for. So sometimes people will put their names in based on how the town refers to them.

So if the town calls you Smith and Jones, then you'll probably say written by Smith ampersand Jones. Yeah, I think Lord and Miller are kind of always Lord and Miller. And I don't know that that was chronologically. Because it sounds better than Miller and Lord. Yeah. Lord and Miller. But that's the actual ordering within the ampersand. It doesn't matter. Nobody cares. It doesn't imply anything.

It's just sort of almost branding more than anything else. Yeah. Because the ampersand means writer. Yeah. We're one. We are one entity with multiple brains. Yeah. And no, the source material credit has nothing to do with that either. Yeah. So. Yeah. She should stop worrying about that. Agreed. Yeah.

All right, it is time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is a book called Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath. I brought this to D&D last week. It is this remarkable book about the history of role-playing games, starting with Dungeons & Dragons, which was the first in the 70s, and continuing up through the 2020s. It's really a remarkable excavation of a lot of games I'd never heard of so much, which I did know, and sort of how this whole thing

of role-playing games developed and grew. So, Stuart Horath is publishing this through the MIT Press, but it's all based on games that he collected over the years. They're all from his own personal collection. He has interviews with a lot of the folks who are behind them, sort of piecing together what grew and what changed, how one game influenced the next game.

If you love D&D and other role-playing games, you will love this book. If you don't care about them, this won't probably make you care about them. But I found it to be just incredibly useful and just a delight to read. My one observation about this kind of book is it's the size of a monster manual or a player's handbook. It's that...

dimensions but it's also thicker and heavier it's a difficult book to read sitting on a couch it's actually like it's not a comfortable book to hold and there's there's a class of books there's like this is a great book but i kind of need almost like a lectern to sit it on to read because it's just not it's just too big to enjoy that way but uh a small a small cost stew horvath's monsters aliens and holes in the ground fantastic

So my one cool thing is this theory of quantum consciousness. Tell me what this is. Quantum consciousness, like almost every theory of consciousness...

completely unsupported by anything we would call evidence. Yeah. Consciousness is the most, it's like trying to nail jello to a wall. It's so hard. Well, consciousness is a feeling. It's basically, we have the sense of like what being conscious is like, but it's actually hard to put that into concrete terms. It is not only a phenomenon that is

is difficult for us to describe, we are also asking the phenomenon to describe the phenomenon, which already introduces a huge problem into the mix. But we also know that it is pervasive across humans. It is, in fact, probably what defines us more than anything else, more than standing on two feet or having opposable thumbs. It is the fact that we are conscious, that we can metaphorize our existence,

that we experience things moment to moment and can put them into words, what is going on? And there is this rise of a concept of quantum consciousness, which suggests that the old model of consciousness, which was whatever it is, it's clearly the function of wiring neurons together.

leading from one to the other. So it's like a huge circuit board, which then would imply AI, right? If it's just a big circuit board, we can just build a big circuit board over here and it'll do it. This other theory is, no, that there are inside of cells in the brain, these microtubules, these very tiny protein things that are behaving in ways that show some sort of quantum mechanics at work.

which I will be clear to say I do not understand at all. All I know is this. Quantum functioning has nothing to do with circuit board stuff. If they're right that human consciousness is the product of some sort of quantum state occurring rapidly and in this massively distributed manner, AI will never get there.

until we build quantum computing. Which we got much closer to this last week, I'll put it there. So here's the other fascinating thing is at like deeply frozen states and all the rest. So one of the knocks on quantum consciousness and most scientists are like, screw you, is that the brain is too warm and too wet, as they say. Yeah.

I have no idea. But the mystery of consciousness is profound. And I find that in and of itself fascinating that we have no idea how it works. We can barely define it. Yeah. Like art. Yeah.

it's one of those tough things. You sort of know when you see it. You know it when you feel it. I understand why people are reaching for these things. So they want to have a sense that what we do in our brains is different than everything else and that there must be some magic. There's some homunculus in there who is the real us that is the thing. I think what we're going to find is that consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon that happens when you have a certain amount of

processing capability, it just kind of erupts because also if you look at animals around us, primates but octopuses and other creatures, it's clear they can do some very sophisticated things that would by any of our normal standards involve consciousness. The things that ravens can do kind of feel like they're conscious. The interesting thing is we're not sure because we don't know because we can't be in their heads.

If there is a difference between intelligence and consciousness, it seems like there is. There have been arguments that consciousness is a function of language itself. Yeah. That if you do not have language, you can't be conscious because that's what consciousness is. And animals don't have language. Everyone's going to write in and be like, no, no, they don't. They have communication. They don't have language.

I don't care. I'd send whatever emails you want until a dolphin talks and says stuff. Well, actually, there's one dolphin. I don't care. They're not talking.

The end. Yeah. And so, and the situations where that boundary between what is animal communication versus animal language is interesting. Like the gray parrots who learn to speak and actually can do some sophisticated things in talking, it becomes a question of like, well, how much is that the training getting them to a place? They can say novel things, but does that really mean that they're conscious in ways that- They're combining sounds. And again, birds communicate through song and whales communicate through song and-

Apes communicate through grunts and hand gestures, but none of them, none of them are currently writing a limerick. It's, we are different. Now, you're right. It may be that this is all just this desperate narcissism, neuro-narcissism, that no computer could do what we do. You're probably right, because after all,

we're not real either. I mean, so yes, it's just a question is how sophisticated is the matrix that we're inside of? Probably pretty sophisticated. Seems pretty sophisticated. Why is language the benchmark for consciousness? I still don't know. It may not be. It's just a theory that consciousness is,

is a function of the brain having an understanding of what the word I means, what the word you means, what tenses mean, am, were, going to be. Those concepts alone create a sense of consciousness, memory, planning ahead, experience right now, and then metaphor.

which is a very complicated thing. It's a very complicated way of thinking. It's a form of pattern matching, but it's generalizable to ways that are so different. Yes, and now I can explain something to you using metaphor, which even the word metaphor is a fascinating word. The vocabulary that we have, the thousands of words that we know, all of that stuff is perhaps...

what is leading to this mush in our heads. Moment to moment, if you try and define your own consciousness, you will fail. So the experiment we could never do, which would be, you know, telling us if you could actually raise children in an environment with no language whatsoever and see whether they

What are they like? And like, you know, do they have... We've seen some of those cases. What happens is they start to create their own language. So it seems like language is neurologically innate. Chomsky's big theory, which seems true, is that grammar, the basic concepts of grammar, are true across all languages, that all languages ultimately do have subject, verb, and...

Yeah. They could put them in different orders. They could have different rules for forming them, but that they all have that concept. Yes. That all languages erupt out of the same neurological instruments. And yeah, because why? Why would we need me, you doing things?

Yeah. Somehow that's how we organized it. Yeah. Yeah. A sense of the future, a sense of the past, you know, and be able to communicate those. And then conditionals. Yeah. Conditionals alone. Just the word if. Yeah. That word is so powerful. And I'm not sure a lot of animals have if. Mm-hmm.

If this, then this. If this, then this. If not this, you've lost my dogs. If sit, then treat. I don't even think they get that far. I think they go, I think their brains are like, sit, treat. Regardless, it's not language. All right. That's our show for this week. Descriptions is produced by Drew Marquardt. Edited by Matthew Citelli. Our show is also by Matthew.

Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for Craig and I to do this show every week.

You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on home automation. Craig, thanks for a fun and freewheeling episode. Yeah, no, we won't get any emails for this one. Not a bit, not a one.