From the Vault: Bandersnatch

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. So we're
going into the vault for an older episode of the show.
This time we're going back several years to an episode
we did on the Black Mirror episode Bander Snatch. This
was before Weird House Cinema. Not a Weird House Cinema episode.
We featured it in a We featured it in a

(00:30):
core episode and talked about all kinds of things connected
to the plot. This sorry, this was not a Weird
House Cinema episode. This pre dates Weird House. It was
a core episode where we talked about all kinds of
things related to the plot. It originally aired January ninth,
twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
Now why are we talking about it right now? Well,
it's my understanding that Netflix is set to remove Bander
Snatch from its platform on May twelfth, And unlike most films,
you know, when it leaves one platform, or it can
just pop up on another, right, some other streaming service
can offer it, or it'll come out on physical media maybe,
or you know, or if you can find a stream somewhere.

(01:09):
But of course the thing about Bandersnatch is that it's interactive.
It is a choose your own path experience, and therefore,
if it's not, it's one of the it's one of
the few of the interactive experiences that they actually did,
and once it is off of the Netflix platform, you're
not going to be able to experience it in the
same way, which I thought was brilliant. I thought it

(01:30):
was an amazing interface of not only the technical aspects
of it, but just the way that Black Mirror made
use of that technology to tell a compelling story about
choices and the illusion of choice.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Going to be a shame to lose it, but it
seems like a fitting end for an episode of Black
Mirror to actually just be destroyed by the kind of
whims of a technological behemoth.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
It does, it really does. So Yeah, so you've got
you've literally gotten like what a couple of days, maybe
even down to hours at this point by the time
you're listening to this episode. So jump in there experienced Bandersnatch,
or re experience it while you have time and enjoy
our thoughts from the year twenty twenty about it.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
And the Banker Inspired with a courage so new it
was a matter for general remark, rushed madly ahead and
was lost to their view in his zeal to discover
the snark. But while he was seeking with thimbles and care,
a bender snatch swiftly drew nigh and grabbed at the banker,
who shrieked in despair, for he knew it was useless

(02:39):
to fly. He offered large discount. He offered a check
drawn two bearer for seven pounds ten.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
But the bandersnatch merely extended its neck and grabbed at
the banker again without rest or pause, while those frumiest
jaws went savagely snapping around. He skipped, and he hopped,
and he floundered, flopped till fainting he fell to the ground.
The Bandersnatch fled as the others appeared, led on by
that fear stricken yell, and the bellman remarked, it is

(03:10):
just as I feared, and solemnly told on his bell.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, A production of
Iheartradios How Stuff Works.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Hey, Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert are you feeling more
frabjess or more frumious today.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
I guess more frumious frumious would be my answer. That was,
of course the poem The Hunting of the Snark by
Lewis Carroll, But I guess a number of people are
probably more familiar with the Bandersnatch from another poem by
Lewis Carroll, that being the jabberwock Jabwacke, Yes, where the
Bandersnatch is just alluded to as another monstrous creature that

(03:59):
my i'd be running around the woods.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
I love it when a poet first named something in
a kind of in a listical kind of way, you know,
poem as listical, and then later it comes through in
another poem with more force. I think that sort of
happened with the demogorgan, right.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, yeah, I think so. And in this case, yeah,
the Bandersnatch. There's not a lot really said about it
in the writings of Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll, by the way,
was the pen name of Charles Lutwich Dodgson, who lived
eighteen thirty two through eighteen ninety eight, and he first
introduced the bander Snatch again just in a list of
creatures that might pop up in his eighteen seventy two

(04:40):
novel Through the Looking Glass in that poem the Jabberwackie,
and then pops up again in this eighteen seventy four
poem that we just read, the Hunting of the Snark,
which we didn't.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Read the whole of the poem. That was just an
exerpt from it. I think where the like who's the banker?
The banker is one of these people who goes on
a voyage hunting the snark. I've read that that poem
has been interpreted by some as metaphorical of you know,
that it's supposed to be an allegory about the search
for human happiness and contentment. But then also I think

(05:11):
i've heard it alleged that the poem actually has no
allegorical meaning, that it's just kind of silly.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Yeah, I mean, in that sense, it's kind of enigmatic.
And the creature itself is enigmatic, scarcely described, but certainly
best avoided at all costs. There's no way to outrun it,
no way to escape its intensity. And by the way,
frumius is a combination of fuming and furious. Carroll just
ran these two words together to make a nice new
adjective for a strange monster is.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
A perfectly cromulent word, very frabjous. And I was wondering,
do you need a vorpal sword if you go up
against a vander Snatch or is that only for the
jabberwock Well.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
It certainly worked on the Jabberwockie. I don't know about
the vander Snatch. There are no tales of slaying it,
are there, at least not in Lewis Carroll's original work.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Does the vorpal sword show up as an artifact in
D and D It does?

Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, it certainly does. Yeah, pretty good sword. Oh yeah, yeah,
very good sword. Now, the name Vandersnatch has been evoked
many times over the years and works of fantasy and
science fiction. I've seen it pop up as a space
slug and other such creatures. Sometimes it's just kind of
an enigmatic name for like a government project or something,

(06:22):
because it's a great it's a great name. In depictions
of Lewis Carroll's work, it is often take on a
mammalian character. Nineteenth century children's illustrator Peter Newell depicted it
is kind of a furry, horned beast that might resemble
a cat or maybe a wolf like creature, and this one,
this is a very popular image, and then film adaptations

(06:42):
have depicted it as both borlike and cat like. The
twenty ten Tim Burton adaptation has a very memorable creature
design for the Bandersnatch.

Speaker 4 (06:51):
Oh, the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland? Is that what
you're talking about?

Speaker 1 (06:55):
Yeah, yeah, I have, I've seen the first one.

Speaker 4 (06:57):
I never ventured that far into late Burton.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
Well, it had some things going for it. It had
had a really good cast, it had some interesting character designs,
I'll say that, and a very monstrous looking Bandersnatch. Okay, Now,
just a couple of other interesting tidbits about Lewis Carroll.
He was a mathematician. He worked in geometry and new

(07:23):
ideas in algebra, logic, machines, ciphers. So between this and
other details of his life, there's a lot of black
mirror to the originator of the Bandersnatch. Also, in Hallucinations,
the book by Oliver Sachs, the Late Oliver Sacks, Sax
points out that Carroll was known to suffer from classical migraines,

(07:43):
and that Caro W. Lippman and others have suggested that
his migraine experiences may have contributed to the way he
envisioned through the looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland, like
the skewing of time and space. Also, you have auditory
hallucinations that are not uncommon in migraines, as well as

(08:04):
old factory hallucinations. I've also seen descriptions of this lifting feeling,
this feeling of being moved through space.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah, I guess the extension of the lightheadedness that comes
on with the aura and all that.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
You know, there's actually an asteroid named bander Snatch.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Oh I didn't know this.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah, I look this up. Nine to seven to eighty
Bander Snatch. It's a Main Belt asteroid, so it's out
beyond the orbit of Mars. Discovered in nineteen ninety four
by Japanese astronomers Takashi Urrata and Yasuhiro Shimizu at the
Nachi Katsura Observatory, and it was named, of course after
the Frumias Bandersnatch.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
Awesome. Now, one of the this is just sort of
the introductory material on the Bandersnatch, because for the vast
majority of this episode we're going to be talking about
what as I guess the most recent cinematic invocation of
the bandersnatch, and that is the Black Mirror episode. Well,
it's not even an episode. It's a Black Mirror film

(09:03):
that came out on Netflix December of what was it,
twenty eighteen, so a little over a year ago, and
there's a lot to unpack here.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
I actually didn't watch it until this week, so I
knew you wanted to do an episode about it, and
I was like, Okay, I'll finally see what all the
fuss is about.

Speaker 4 (09:19):
I was very impressed.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
Yeah, I'll get I'll certainly get more into my very
thoughts on it later. I was impressed with it when
it came out, and then since we were going to
do the episode, I rewatched it for the first time
since its original release earlier this week, and I have
to say it, I thought it held up. I even
got a different ending and a different dead end at
one point than I had encountered previously. So it was like,

(09:45):
why every time you watch a film that you like
again you find new things, but in this case you
can actually get a different ending.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yeah, now we're going to be exploring today some of
the science and the ideas and philosophy that are alluded
to in Vanderson. But in doing so, of course, this
will involve some spoilers for this strange film. So I
would say, there are a couple of places we're not
going to like go through and explore every possible ending
or anything like that. But if you are in the

(10:14):
case where you haven't seen it yet and you don't
want anything at all spoiled, you should probably stop here
and go watch it first before you listen to the
rest of the episode. But if you've already seen it,
or you haven't seen it, and you don't care about
minor spoilers that don't go all the way to all
the endings, then you know, forge ahead with us.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
Please. However, some of you may be asking the question,
what are you talking about? What is Black Mirror? So
we should probably take a few minutes to just refresh
you on what this is. It is a is the
word refresh? Would that be the word? We should shock
you to the bone? All right? So Black Mirror is
in essence a sci fi anthology television series in the

(10:54):
same vein as The Twilight Zone, the Outer Limits, these
various shows we've discussed in the past.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
I might call it pretty often techno horror. Not every
episode is the same, but there's essentially no horror movie
as scary as the scariest episodes of Black Mirror, especially
the ones that manage to take fairly plausible technological scenarios
and follow them to their logical conclusions. I mean, it's

(11:24):
it's a show that's very good at conjuring up the
worst possible nightmares of like the intersection of capitalism and technology.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
Yeah, definitely, episodes tend to have a technological swing to
the story, and they tend to deal on some level
with contemporary anxiety about current technology and emerging technology. What
are these technologies doing to our lives? What may they
do to our lives in the future, And you know,

(11:54):
sometimes they take varying specuative leaps there, of course, since
it is science fiction. But you, I would say, you
typically leave an episode of Black Mirror feeling a little
worse about the world. I know that Netflix, their current masters,
are very into the whole binge model, but I personally
find it very difficult to binge Black Mirror, in part

(12:15):
because each episode, of course, is a self contained story
with characters and a plot, et cetera. But then also
It's like they're often like a punch in the gut,
and I just can't just sit there and take one
punch after the other.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
Apart from one very sweet, very nice episode, there's essentially
nothing that makes me feel as bad as Black Mirror.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
Well, you know, I was thinking. I was thinking about
this because there are definitely some very bleak episode. There
are episodes of Black Mirror that I admire that I
will never watch again. But then I look back at
my some of my favorite episodes. My favorite episodes are
probably san Ju Napero, The Uss Callister, and metal Head.
Two of those, one of those is still pretty bleak,

(12:58):
but two of those are actually pretty upbeat, probably the
most upbeat episodes of the show. And maybe that's the
reason I would come back to them, because if I'm
going to double dip, I want to double dip for
optimism's sake. Now, in terms that we can't talk about
Black Meir without talking about the creator behind it, the
main creative individual behind it, and that is Charlie Brooker,

(13:21):
a British writer and humorist who the earliest thing that
he worked on that I was familiar with was that
he worked on Chris Morris's excellent news satire Brass Eye,
and then he also created a pretty great zombie movie
titled Dead Set in two thousand and eight, in which
the zombie apocalypse breaks out in and around a Big

(13:43):
Brother style reality TV production.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
I feel like two thousand and eight was sort of
like maybe two thousand and seven. Two thousand and eight
was like peak zombie satire movie.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah. And the thing about this one, though, the premise
sounds like a comedy, and so I acquired a copy
of it, thinking, oh, this is a comedy, and this
is a guy that worked on Brass Eye. This is
going to be hilarious. And it is not a straight
up comedy. It is a pretty terrifying film. But you
see shades of that in Black Mirror. Sometimes there is
a premise that could sound like a joke, but then

(14:17):
it is taken and considered with such intensity that it works. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
What if like a major tech company used eye tracking
software to make sure you were always watching their ads
and if you didn't watch them, they would ring sirens
in your brain and deduct money from your bank account
until you started watching the ads. Again, sounds like a joke,
but like if you just said take that seriously for
a bit and explore that becomes like a nightmare of

(14:44):
technoci fi.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
Absolutely. Now. Black Mirror began in twenty ten two seasons
in a holiday special came out and ran on Channel
four in the UK. Then Netflix started carrying it, and
Netflix became the owner of the main pub We'll share
the program however you want to look at it, starting
with season three in October of twenty sixteen. All in all,
it has thus far gone five seasons twenty one episodes,

(15:09):
and that's not counting the film Bandersnatch, which again came
out in December of twenty eighteen.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
These bits of publisher information will actually become relevant later
on as we discussed the story.

Speaker 4 (15:19):
Because the the ideas there.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
Yeah, because at the end we definitely get into some
citiz scenarios where we have to consider the fact that
Netflix is the business daddy behind Black Mirror.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
So Vandersnatch the film. The Black Mirror film was actually
directed by David Slade, who I was like, where do
I know that name from? He's done several things, but
one of them was he did one of the Twilight movies.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yes, and I've seen that that particular one. It was
the second one, I think, and it's that's a I'm
not a huge Twilight fan, but that is a very
watchable Twilight movie and it has a great soundtrack. It's
got Tom York on it. Oh yeah, yeah. He also
directed the Black Mirror episode metal Head that I alluded
to earlier, and there are some callbacks to metal Head
in the Bandersnatch episode.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Now, I guess one thing we haven't gotten fully into
so far is the fact that the Black Mirror movie
Bandersnatch is it's an interactive movie, which makes it very unique.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Right. This was the big selling point on it, and
indeed is one of the mean it's a key part
of the way you consume it, but it is also
very important thematically, like you know, true to form, The
creators here really thought long and hard about how to
utilize an interactive system within the work and make the

(16:35):
work comment on that system as well.

Speaker 2 (16:37):
Right, the interactive system being Netflix, like the fact that
the user can make inputs on the movie.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, basically, that's what it amounts to is you start
off watching it, it seems like a normal Netflix presentation, but
then your in my case, my Xbox one controller would
suddenly vibrate and then this little the screen at the
bottom of the screen. You're suddenly with two choices and
a timer, and you have to choose, you know, what

(17:05):
is going to happen, what the character is going to do, etc.
Now this is you know, when you're just checking out
the film, you might not realize how much work goes
into this, but it took apparently a huge amount of
work to shoot all these various branching paths, because it
becomes this tree, this branching system of possibilities when you

(17:28):
start presenting the user with these interactive choices. For instance,
the previously the longest episode of Black Mirror was an
episode called Hated in the Nation, which was eighty nine
minutes long. That's future length, right, what ninety minutes is
usually the length you shoot for with a shot film. Well,
when you're watching Bandersnatch, depending on your choices, the film

(17:52):
can run anywhere between ninety minutes and two and a
half hours. And in order to make this work, as
pointed out by a Jackie Strauss in The Hollywood Reporter,
this means they had to shoot like five hours of
footage so that they could actually cover all of these
various choices. Wow, and you may watch it like, for instance,

(18:12):
the first time I watched it, there were plenty of
scenes I did not see, and then when I watched
it again, there were films, there were scenes that I
saw the first time that I did not see, and
I got an entirely different ending that I'd never I
didn't even know about. And then there are of course
various Easter eggs and even I've read quote golden Easter
eggs that are spread throughout, things that most viewers will
not find unless they spend a great deal of time

(18:35):
going through and going back through and backing up, etc.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
With this interactive piece encouraging unhealthy obsessive behavior.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah, exactly, I mean it is black mirror. Now, as
far as the choices you make in Bandersnatch, you start
off making very small choices, it seemed very consequential. For instance,
choosing the main character's breakfast series he's presently his father
shows two boxes and you decide which one he's going

(19:04):
to have for breakfast. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
I think it was what like frosted flakes or sugar
puffs or something. I remember what I realized after I
made that choice was I was like, oh no, I
think I chose the brand that I was more familiar with.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
Ah, we'll come back to that later. That is an
important point that we'll come back to later on in
the episode. But yeah, at first, it's it's what kind
of cereal does he want? All right? It doesn't doesn't
seem to matter much, and it also gives you a
chance to try out the technology low stakes. But and
then also later on, you choose what music is going
to listen to in when he's on the bus, which

(19:38):
is kind of fun. I think you get to choose
between a eurhythmic song and something else. I can't remember
the other one.

Speaker 4 (19:44):
I think it's Thompson Twins.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
That's it. Yeah. And then later on he's in a
record store and you get to choose which record he's
going to buy. And this is also pretty great because
one of the choices is Tangerine Dreams excellent nineteen seventy
four album Phaedra, which is incredible.

Speaker 4 (20:00):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
In fact, I was listening to that again this morning
while I was doing some prep for this episode.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah, it's excellent stuff. However, this time around I forced
myself to choose the other album instead, the other album
being a Seo Tamita's the Bermuda Triangle, which very strange. Yeah,
very strange work, but very good. I was really not
that familiar with this artist or this work, which is
apparently kind of hard to come by on streaming unless

(20:26):
you just find like a YouTube full album rip. But yeah,
this is just a taste of the soundtrack. The Bandersnatch
is a wonderful soundtrack, including not only these artists but
also deep esch Mode, Laurie Anderson. Great stuff. But let's
come back to the choices you make in this interactive system.
So again, they start off seeming largely inconsequential. They start

(20:48):
off seeming a little bit fun. You know, it's just
surface level stuff like what's his breakfast cereal, what's his
musical choice? But then they become increasingly high stakes and
even nerve racking to decide on. Suddenly, when you're controller
vibrates and you're presented with this choice and sometimes dread, Yeah,
you fill this dread because sometimes the choices neither one
is all that great. Sometimes the choices are kind of horrible,

(21:11):
and there's at least one point where you have no choice.
There's something to select, but there's no alternative selection, and
that feels maddening as well. And and you have a
time or you have like what I think it's ten
seconds to choose something, and if you don't choose, Netflix
chooses for you. But Netflix reports ninety four percent of
viewers actively made choices when they watched Bandersnatch.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Now, in my experience, it wasn't that they chose for
you at random. It was that whichever one of the
two options was highlighted, and it was like a you know,
on off toggle, like you couldn't select neither one. You
were just selecting one or the other, and then you
could and you could go with it or you could
not go with it in whichever one you had highlighted
would just proceed. So there's this kind of there's this

(21:57):
horrible sense of like helplessness that that poses on you
as the viewer.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
I have not seen it. Sometimes I'll go into a
restaurant or a bar and they'll have Netflix on playing
some show. I've never seen them showing Bandersnatch. Probably for this.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
Reason, letting all the bar paytrens vote to decide.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
Well, yeah, or just going crazy like why is nobody
clicking a button? Why is nobody interacting with this? Don't
let don't let that choice go through. So eventually, as
you as you interact with Bandersnatch, a warping of time occurs.
You find yourself coming back around to pass choices like
a wanderer or lost in a maze. And of course,
befitting of a maze, there is a sort of minotaur

(22:36):
in all of this. There is the bander Snatch.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Wait is it the Bandersnatch or is it the Demon Packs?

Speaker 1 (22:42):
It is the Demon Packs, yeah, but I also it
is also the Bandersnatch. Like it's design. Okay, it's design
is roughly based on that illustration of the Bandersnatch we
talked about. Okay, cool, All right, We're going to take
a quick break, but when we come back we will
get into the themes of bander Snatch and into the
nature of choice and free will. All right, we're back.

(23:05):
So there are a lot of interesting ideas, cool themes,
historical tidbits that are thrown together, well not thrown together,
stitch together, reassembled in Bandersnatch that give it its unique feel.
Here's just a list of some of the things. First
of all, video game design circa nineteen eighty four, because

(23:26):
that is the setting nineteen eighty four.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, it takes place in the eighties with eighties music,
eighties fashion, all that stuff. But they're also programming you know,
old school adventure games for like the Commodore sixty four
and stuff.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah. Another huge part of it are Choose your Own
Adventure books which are directly referenced. And then there is
a book within Bandersnatch titled bander Snatch that is this
enormous tone that we're told is essentially a choose your
own adventure type scenario. Do you have any fond memories
of choose your own adventure books?

Speaker 4 (24:00):
I was obsessed with them.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
I loved them when I was in elementary school, and
I would love them despite the fact that you know,
you die in most of the endings, like it imposes
a kind of horrible paranoid fatalism on a child. I think,
where you know, oh, this is a book about exploring
the Arctic, but almost no matter what you do, you
get eaten by a polar bear, or you fall beneath

(24:21):
the ice and you can't get out. I guess my
young brain was drawn to that kind of thing, though,
you know, I had that like morbid obsession with peril
and danger and death and all that. But also I'm
curious what is so appealing about the choose your own
adventure books, because one thing we should say is that
this is not the first interactive film Bandersnatch, and previous

(24:43):
attempts at interactive films have generally been very unpopular. I
think a lot of times people don't actually enjoy the
experience of choosing the outcome of a film, and I
think there are reasons for that. I mean, for one thing,
it's just like hard to make a story where like multiple,
like so many different options of how the story could

(25:03):
go would all be equally satisfying. I mean, there's a
reason that an author writes a story a certain.

Speaker 1 (25:08):
Way, right. For instance, one film that we've talked about
on the show before, William Castle's Mister Sardonicus from nineteen
sixty one, was presented was marketed as having an interactive
element in that at the end of this you got
to choose the fate for the villain would it be,
you know, justice or mercy? And the thing is, audiences

(25:30):
never chose mercy for this horrible villain. Of course, they
always chose justice, and so there were even accusations that
they never even shot the alternate version, like there was
the idea that it was interactive was just you know,
the pitch was just the marketing, but there was no
actual interactive element. William Castle, I think, claimed otherwise, saying

(25:51):
yes they did shoot the sequence. I do not know
personally if that's true or not, if this footage has
ever materialized, but what I did did read was that
generally people point to nineteen sixty seven's Keino automat as
the first truly interactive film, but even that, I think
there are only like four choices that could be made,

(26:13):
and this film was also I think, largely comedic.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
Okay, well, I mean I would say there are many
reasons why this format doesn't always work. For some reason,
it worked for me as a kid with to choose
your own adventure books. I loved those. But I mean,
one problem I think is that it's hard to make
all the narrative branches as good as each other, but
another one is just the like.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Yeah, like, for instance, when you finish it, I don't
think there was ever a sense where I'm like, Okay,
that's the ending I got. No, I want the good ending,
or I want the robust ending you go.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Back and do it again. It's more like a video
game or.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
So I don't want the ending where I randomly die,
Like the story of Super Mario is not that he's
killed by a mutant turtle three minutes into the game,
you know, I mean, that's not an epic tale.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
So in some ways, I think the choose your own
adventure books are sometimes better thought of as like a
puzzle to solve than as like a narrative to be experienced.
And another big difference I will say is that one
of the great pleasures of watching a movie or reading
a book, or you know, engaging in any kind of
narrative with an author's storyteller and you as the passive audience,

(27:20):
is a surrendering of responsibility for what is about to
happen in your own mind. You give up that responsibility
and suddenly you know when when bad things continue to
happen in the story, when characters make disastrous decisions that
unfold and increase the peril and heighten the drama, you're
not responsible for what's happening. You're just witnessing it, and

(27:42):
that witnessing is very fun. It's peaking through a hole
in the wall and what's happening to somebody else. When
they make you make decisions, it introduces this horrible tension
between what you want to see versus what you think
you should do. You know, like that, I think there's
this ten whenever. A great example would be in Bandersnatch,

(28:03):
I often felt, in a bizarre way, morally compelled to
make the tamer, safer options, where at the same time
I felt more interested in seeing the more kind of
like dangerous disastrous options play out.

Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah, this was definitely my experience with my first viewing
a Banterer Snatch is that when the decisions start start
hitting you, like later on they become like this horrible
choice or this horrible choice and becomes harder to play
this game. But earlier on there are moments where you're like,
are you going to do the sensible thing or the
more rebellious thing, or even the more dangerous thing? And

(28:39):
I found myself choosing the safer thing. Like minor spoiler here,
but he is he's offered the choice between producing his
dream game with this company at their offices, with their support,
or saying no to them, and so like the responsible
part of me is like, yes, say yes to this
is employment this is going to be good for you. Like,

(29:01):
clearly you're you're stuck in a weird situation at home.
You need to get out of the house, protagonists, and
and so that's the way I went. But it's ultimately
not the best choice, and it kind of dead ends
if you take that choice.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
Well yeah, it almost kind of gives you a little
slap on the wrist for making that choice, you know.
So so I don't want to spoil anything, but yeah,
there's like a slight shaming of the viewer for choosing
the safe option.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
Yeah, and this is very early on, so we're not
really you know, spoiling anything, I think nature, But yeah,
I would do that a lot. I would take I
would make safe choices. And in fact, it ultimately ended
up reminding me a little bit of the Spacing Guild
and Doune, who of course used the spices to see
into the future to figure out how to navigate the
dangers of space, which is helpful if your navigating the
dangers of space. But in life and in politics and

(29:50):
all these other choices, it's this road to stagnation for
the Spacing Guild because they always make the safe choice.
And when we look at the narratives that we love generally,
they're not about people making the safe choice after safe
choice after safe choice. They're about people flying off the
handles or making huge mistakes and having to deal with those,

(30:10):
And so there is I think there's a learning curve
there with Bandersnatch, And so my second viewing of it,
I tried to do more of that. I tried to
make choices that I felt were interesting or more dramatic,
and that seemed to work really well, and I feel
like the product rewards you for doing that.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
Yeah, So I think that tension is definitely there with
the movies, and I wonder if it's more the case
in a movie than in a book, just because a
movie is more sensorily visceral. The fact that you know
that it's actually visually presented to you in video and
audio makes it harder to just pursue, you know, your

(30:52):
sort of lust for drama and weirdness and whatever it
is you want to see as opposed to making the
safer choices. I don't recall feeling compelled to make the
safer choice the same way with Choose your Own Adventure books.
That could just be because of like the lower sensory
salience of books compared to movies.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
I don't know, Yeah, maybe, So I finally finally remember
the Choose you Own Your Adventure books as well, in
part because they had them at the library and I
could check them out. Yeah. But also another series that
I finally remember, the Lone Wolf series. Were you familiar
with these? So these there's a series of these. The
first one was by Joe Deaver and Gary Chalk, and

(31:35):
this is they're like a Choose your Own Adventure series,
very much fantasy Dungeons and Dragon style high fantasy, but
there's more of a role playing element to it. So
for instance, when you open the book, it has not
only a map of the adventuring world you're taking a
part of, but there's also an action chart and a
combat record because you're going to end up having to

(31:55):
pencil in your stats as you go through the story,
picking spell and so forth.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
It's more like a one player D and D module.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yeah, exactly. It's like imagine it's like a Choose your
Own Adventure book and a one player a D and
D module come together into this one little tone. So
I finally remember those, and I might be misremembering here,
but I think I did get turned off later on
when I reached an artificial dead end in one of them,
like there was something broken and I couldn't go back.

(32:25):
Oh no, yeah, but again my memory may not be
perfect on that. If you're at all interested in this format,
I do highly recommend picking up one of these old,
fabulous used copies of the Lone Wolf series. And I
think they've republished them again with new artwork, but I
don't know. The classic artwork is exactly the kind of
thing I love.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
The Choose your Own Adventure book that I brought in
today for you to look at Robert is called You
Are a Shark by Edward Packard. It has a kid
turning into a shark. He's like mid animorph sequence, oh man,
but he also looks like he's slipping sliding as he
turns into a shark.

Speaker 4 (33:00):
Is pretty good.

Speaker 1 (33:01):
That's pretty brilliant too, like channeling something that children, especially
of that time, would have been familiar would have likely done,
and giving this fantastic spin on it.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
But the story is essentially the fingle doppling scene from
Overdrawn at the Memory Bang, where he just gets transformed
into various different animals. Do you know you get turned
into an elephant or a seagull, or of course a shark.
I think I recall one death where you get turned
into a squid and you're being chased by something, maybe
it is a shark, and you run out of ink

(33:32):
to disguise yourself with and you're doomed.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
All right. Well, coming back to Bandersnatch, we mentioned the
video game aspect nineteen eighty four Choose your Own Adventure books.
There are a number of other elements and homages in
there as well. It deals with mental illness, it deals
with LSD. There are allusions to Philip K. Dick. There's
mention of alternate timelines, and of course it spends a

(33:57):
lot of time contemplating this idea of a free will
and the potential illusion of choice.

Speaker 4 (34:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:03):
I think that's the main theme of it, is interrogating
the idea of what it means to be in control
of one's own actions.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah. And the basic plot is as follows. A young
programmer named Stephan Butler is obsessed with a choose your
own adventure style book titled Bandersnatch that was written by
the late troubled writer Jerome F. Davies, and he really
wants to turn this into a computer adventure game, and
he's begun work on it on his own. So he
ends up falling in with this video game company called

(34:34):
Tuckersoft and meets its lead creative, this programmer named Colin Rittman.
And from there it departs through these varying winding paths,
reality warping, through madness and sometimes horror, and through all
of it, there's also this feeling that there is a
minotaur like monster pursuing you, pursuing our protagonist as well.

(34:56):
And this is the Bandersnatch, but more specifically, it is
titled Packs. Its name is Packs, and it is we
are told it is the Thief of Destiny.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Yeah, there's a great moment where the game appears to
give you an option to either deny worshiping packs or
submit to worshiping packs.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
Oh yes, this is the game within a game.

Speaker 4 (35:14):
It made me want to play the game.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Yeah, yeah, it looked really cool.

Speaker 4 (35:16):
So something that.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
Made Bandersnatch different from most of the choose your own
adventure books that I remember reading. I'm sure there are
probably exceptions, but in the classic books I remember reading,
the story is written in the second person. The protagonist
is an unnamed you. You know, you go down the
left hall, you get eaten by a swarm of feral pigs.
You go down the right hall, you get turned into

(35:40):
a bowl of ice cream by magic pirate. You know,
you explore all the different dooms on offer to you,
but it's you.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah. Likewise, in the Lone Wolf books, as I recall you,
you kind of make choices regarding how this characters put together.
You have a fair amount of control. It is your character.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
But band ver Snatch challenges this formula a little bit
by making the protagonist a third person character with a
name and pre existing individualized circumstances. You've got Stefan right.
But then this is where it starts getting even weirder.
So not only is it this definite third person character
with their own characteristics and not just a second person protagonist,

(36:22):
there are moments where the options are you choose, not
what Stefan does. That's how it mostly is. You know
what does Stefan pick? You know what, what does he
listen to? What does he answer to somebody who poses
a question to him? It then changes and gives you
the option to dictate what happens to him from the
outside The specific example I recall is what messages he

(36:45):
believes he is receiving on his computer screen. Oh yeah, Now,
of course, if you go with the most straightforward interpretation
of the story, which is that Stefan is experiencing symptoms
of psychosis, in a way, you're still dictating the activity
of his brain. Activities of his brain that he as
a character does not perceive as coming from himself. They're

(37:06):
hallucinations that he believes to be coming from the outside.
And you know, this makes me wonder about the framing
of how we should think about hallucinations that are generated
internally by the brain but perceived to come from an
external source. Are those hallucinations best understood as you or not?
Are there processes within your own brain that are, in

(37:29):
some legitimate sense not you, even though they are your brain,
they're not anybody else.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
Yeah, it's not really the voice of God. It is
is it is something coming from inside your brain that
you are perhaps imagining or interpreting as the voice of God.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
But is you more synonymous with your whole brain and
everything it does, or is you more synonymous with the
part of your brain that you identify as yourself.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
That's going to be very key to some interpretations of
the base theme explored in Bandersnatch right, and they do
explore this theme amazingly. Well, I felt the second time
I watched it, I found all these additional layers. You know, again,
I'm I'm tempted to make the best choices for a protagonist,
or at least there's still that inclination that I want

(38:17):
to do that. And at one point there's this song
playing with the lyrics doing what's best for Nigel, and
it's all in the stc or I think so. Yes, Okay,
I was not familiar with that group or that this
song before, but yeah, it's playing, and the whole scene
is about like how his father is making choices for him,
or other times it's you know, it's his therapist that
is giving him advice about how to how to make

(38:39):
choices in his life. And so you have all these
forces that help him make his choices or make choices
for him. And then that's also what we are doing
as we interact with the product.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Well, yes, and in a weird way, it kind of
brings you back around to this question of wait a minute,
is he is he a third person narrator or are
you supposed to identify as him. So when these choices
are in some cases things coming to him apparently from
the outside, you know, they might be messages he's receiving
from some kind of otherworldly source or hallucinations, are you

(39:14):
still making choices for him or not? And it leads
back into this theme of whether or not you are
really in control of your own actions and what does
it mean to be in control of your own actions?

Speaker 1 (39:27):
And in this we come to the subject of free will,
which is a huge topic that we return to time
and time again on stuff to blow your mind. And
we're not going to try to encapsulate everything about that here.
You know, we've talked about in the past, we're talking
about it today, We're going to talk about it in
the future. But it suffice to say philosophies vary, scientific

(39:48):
interpretations vary, and then it drags in additional drags in
just about everything about the human condition, right, I mean,
moral responsibility, theological quandaries, etc.

Speaker 2 (39:59):
Yeah, it's a problem that it is such a huge
topic and that almost all discussions about free will that
I encounter in the wild are an absolute mess.

Speaker 4 (40:10):
This is my personal take.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
I noticed, do you ever notice how conversations about free
will almost never seem to clarify anything. They almost never
seem to provide any more focus or clarity than you
had to begin with.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
Yeah, Like sometimes it's at times it feels like having
a conversation with somebody in a swimming pool about whether
water is wet. Yeah, because it does get down to like,
like it seems wet to me, I am in it.
It seems like free will to me because I am
immersed in it, and it's difficult for me to remove
myself from the experience that I'm having and all of

(40:48):
and everything in my life that supports everything in the
culture at large, that supports the idea that I am
making choices and form choices about my life.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
I mean, I feel like some dilemmas having to do
with free will or like they force you to choose
between two options that.

Speaker 4 (41:04):
Are both tautologies or both absurdities.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
And any time you encounter a problem like that, I
think there's a pretty good chance that the underlying disease
causing that is poorly defined terms.

Speaker 1 (41:16):
Right, Yeah, and yeah, to your point, the extreme versions
of this are to tend to come off as kind
of loony, Like if someone is just like I am
a completely free moving soul, Like no, you're not dummy.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
You know.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
It's like when we discussed in the Thankfulness episode that
we put out, you know, like everybody's life is shaped
by these other factors. These are other individuals in their
life to some extent, and I feel like to argue
against that is just lunacy. On the other hand, if
someone is saying I am a just a pure automaton,
I mean, there you can back that argument up with
some very intriguing arguments, and we'll get into some of those.

(41:50):
But at the end of the day, does that match
up with your experience of reality?

Speaker 2 (41:55):
I totally agree, But I think even talking about it
at that level, that's already like a level up, like
having accepted some terms as unproblematic more than I think
they should be. So like anyway, I mean, I think
the main problem with free will is people aren't being
clear what they're talking about before they start talking. And
I'm totally guilty of this as well. This is usually

(42:16):
the case when it comes to free will, and this
happens even when we're not aware that we're being unclear,
So we can't do it full justice. In the short segment.
I think we will try to do better than an
absolute mess. So to try to understand what our terms
actually mean.

Speaker 4 (42:31):
What is free?

Speaker 2 (42:32):
Will A common understanding is I am in control of
my own actions. And I think most of the time
for most people this feels true, though curiously, of course,
not all of the time and not for all people.
We can come back to that, but I would argue
that it only feels true in a general way, and
it gets stickier and thornier the more you try to

(42:55):
think about it, and the more precisely you try to
define those terms. So, if I'm in control of my
own actions, who is I.

Speaker 4 (43:03):
We brought this up a minute ago. Is I my
whole brain?

Speaker 2 (43:07):
I mean? Also, I think there's a good case to
be made that other parts of your body gets some
kind of vote in your decision making. So is it
my whole body? Is it everything with my genome? Even then,
I would say your microbiota sort of gets a vote.
I think there are questions about what the eye is.
But then also what counts as control? If I am
in control of my own actions, does it mean that

(43:29):
that I make my decisions with no outside influences? I mean,
that's obviously not true, as you were alluding to a
minute ago. But once you accept that outside factors have
some influence over whatever it is you're talking about controlling,
what's to stop you from assuming that they have total influence?
I mean, what part of your decision making is not

(43:49):
influenced by pre existing factors like your memory and your
physical circumstances and so forth, Like what part of you
can you identify that stands outside of the world. And
then from the other end, paradoxically, if you were to
suddenly act in a way that made no sense given
your own history and memory and all of the inputs

(44:10):
coming in that you think of as influences on you,
wouldn't that action actually feel less like something that comes
genuinely from you, whatever you are. Wouldn't by this metric,
the most objectively free action seem like something coming from
the outside.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
You mean, like if you go to a restaurant where there's,
say there's a drink menu, and you always tend to
order something that is made with a base of say
rum or bourbon or whiskey, and instead you throw caution
to the wind one day and you get a mescal
or a vodka drink.

Speaker 2 (44:41):
Uh, does that actually make you feel more free or
does it seem like something you know, something.

Speaker 4 (44:48):
Got into you. Where does that phrase come from?

Speaker 1 (44:51):
I don't know. When I do things like that, I
think it does make me feel more free, because I'm like, no,
I'm not gonna be the same person I've been every
time I'm gonna try I had a different direction. You know,
I'm going to I'm going to get a different type
of drink, I'm going to try a different type of food,
I'm going to walk a different way to the train station,
et cetera.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Well, I mean, I would say that this just highlights
that neither branch either acting in character where your character
has been shaped by everything that ever happened to you,
nor a by acting out of character where you know
something got into you. Neither way really cites the origin
of decisions or the origin of actions in something that's

(45:29):
out without outside influence. So a lot of the arguments
about whether we have free will actually seem to me
to reduce to the question of whether we feel we
have free will. But what would it actually mean to
settle the question of whether we are like physically objectively free?
So maybe we should look at like a more thought
out dictionary definition. So one that I found is quote

(45:52):
the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
Oh or fate. Now that that brings me back to
this demon Packs, the thief of destiny, I find myself.
I found myself with the second viewing of Bandersnatch, returning
to that title and trying to figure out exactly what
it means. Because destiny, on one hand, means like, you're predestined, right,
There is a destiny in place for you, and you

(46:17):
perhaps don't have any real control. It is the thing
that the gods have laid out for you. That's like
one way of looking at But another way of looking
at destiny is that destiny is the thing you aspire to. Like,
you choose your own destiny, You choose your own adventure. Right, So,
which of the two is the demon Packs stealing from you?
Is he stealing from you the power to make your

(46:40):
own decisions? Or is he stealing from you a pre
destined path? Is he liberating you from this from the
same tired walk to the train station and the same
tired choices on the menu.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
Well, the funny thing about it choose your own adventure
is that even though you are making the choices on
each page about which page to turn to next. Somebody
else wrote the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (47:01):
That's true, and I mean, to a certain extent, like
you can. You can apply that to life, like as
rebellious as you might seem, ordering something else on the
menu that you normally don't get, it's still on the menu.
And other things in life are like that too. Like
you were large, you are constrained by the possibilities of
your culture, of your station in life, of you know,

(47:23):
political realities, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
But even then, is the unpredictability of a behavior at
all evidence of your control or your personal volition.

Speaker 4 (47:35):
Of that behavior. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
I mean those things seem perhaps unrelated to me.

Speaker 1 (47:40):
Actually, yeah, I mean you can also be predictably unpredictable.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah, But anyway, coming back to this definition, the one
that's you know, acting without constraint of necessity or fate.

Speaker 4 (47:51):
So I think it can be.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Hard to pin this down to a concrete claim, but
I think what it comes closest to is saying that
for any given action or moment in my life history,
anything I do or think or say, given the exact
same inputs, I could have produced different output than I
actually did, And this would be I think, some way

(48:12):
of making free will a kind of like a physical proposition. Right,
If exactly the same inputs went into you, everything was
exactly the same, you could have done something different than
what you did. Unfortunately, I think this is just a
completely untestable assumption. R. You know, given the complexity of brains,
you can never have all of exactly the same inputs

(48:34):
that somebody had at a given moment, So you can't
experiment on this to find out what's true.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
Though we certainly love ruminating on this in our fiction. Yeah,
Like any kind of time travel film, any kind of
Groundhog Day scenario is exploring this subject.

Speaker 4 (48:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:50):
Though, even with most of those time travel things where
people want to go back and relive it, what they
actually are imagining is they want to go back and
relive a moment with the wisdom and knowledge that they
have now that they didn't have then. So it would
be funny to just like replay the same instance over
and over again with exactly the same physics involved, and
see if anything different happens without having.

Speaker 4 (49:11):
Any new knowledge or whatever.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
Oh yeah, but even then, I mean imagine maybe you
could do that somehow, You know, you could just watch
the same period of time play out over and over
again and see if anything different happens. Even if it
were true that you could have produced different outputs given
the exact same inputs, would this really mean you were free?
Would this be what people mean when they see free will,

(49:34):
like they're in control of their own actions? You know,
imagine there's some random dice rolling machine inside your head,
or a ghost or a spirit in your brain which
pushes you in different directions even if every single iota
of input is the same. Is that actually freedom? That
just sounds like a different kind of impetus or control.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
That's interesting. You bring up a randomization via some sort
of technology like dice or a casting of bones, because
we've discussed that in the past on the show. How
that is sometimes brought up as being like that, Like
that's the purpose of these early divination technologies techniques, a
way to randomize choice and to sometimes force us towards

(50:16):
a decision that we otherwise wouldn't make, like in a
way to free us from these predestined paths that are
before us, or at least, you know, lean us over
towards a different path that we would that is available,
but we normally wouldn't go for Well.

Speaker 4 (50:31):
It's funny.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
I mean either way you go there. So yeah, say
you're doing the etching or throwing bones. Does either or
not doing that either way is one making you more
the author of your own destiny than another? I'm not sure.
I mean, they have differences in outcomes, right, but does
that actually change what people mean when they say when
they say free will?

Speaker 1 (50:52):
I don't know. I mean, even if you randomize your choices,
you are the one that will then enact that choice,
Like you're still the actor in your narrative.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
And the randomization is still an input on you.

Speaker 4 (51:03):
So I don't know.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
So anyway to sort of sum it all up, I've
got a theory here, and it is that I think
what a lot of us are actually circling around when
we're trying to figure out how to articulate our concept
of free will is this claim. And the claim is
our consciousness dictates our choices of how we act, or

(51:24):
in other words, we're conscious of the process by which
our choices are made or by which our actions are generated.
Right that when we act, we are able to consciously
be a part of the impetus to act, or consciously
cause the impetus to act. And I think this one

(51:44):
is actually testable, and we can come back to that
in a minute.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
So this is, of course, this is one of the
big riddles of the human experience. And so people have
been thinking about this and you know, essentially banging their
head against the wall about this for thousands of years.
The philosophers Democritus and Lucippus saw the universe as wholly
governed by natural laws and composed of you know, essentially

(52:11):
indivisible atoms. They took the determinist view of life of
one propelled down a flowing stream of events. Aristotle, on
the other hand, is a great example of someone who
stressed the individual's responsibility for their actions. The indeterminists view
of life is a boat propelling itself through a body
of water. So, yeah, to what extent are you just

(52:33):
sailing down the river, you know, you know, with no
power on where you're going, or are you in a
boat that in which you have the power to move
about and even move upstream if you need to. On
that note, we're going to take one quick break, but
when we come back, we will start rolling through some
arguments for and against free will, and then we will
return to bandersnatch. All right, we're back. So let's start

(52:58):
with some arguments against free will, because ultimately I think
these are these are often easier to discuss.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
Sure, I would say the most basic one, right is
just the science of physics, Right.

Speaker 4 (53:08):
Physics is very predictable.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
You can, you know, given given the inputs of forces
and energy and all that, you can determine what's going
to happen as an output of that action. And if
we assume that applies to everything, then why doesn't it
apply to us?

Speaker 4 (53:24):
Right?

Speaker 1 (53:24):
And it basically comes back to Democritus and Lucipus, right,
the idea that their natural laws and they that are
in place, and we are not above those laws.

Speaker 4 (53:33):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
Yeah, So we're acting on the inputs that come in
and you know that be being pushed in one way
or another by our life history and our brains and
all that we're going to act a certain way as
physically reactive objects. Now this is an argument, of course,
it's the most common argument I think against free will.
But one question is our free will and causal determinism

(53:58):
really incompatible? Not that it settles the issue but I
think the majority of philosophers who look at this issue
pretty closely actually end up becoming what are called compatibilists.
They accept causal determinism, they say, yeah, you know, we're
physical objects being pushed around by physical forces, but they
define free will in some way that it is compatible
with that. That you are a physical object being pushed

(54:21):
around by physical forces, and the whole history of your
life and everything, and yet somehow free will still applies
to you. This often comes down to like an understanding
or feeling of free will, like I was talking about earlier, like,
even if your actions are causally determined, somehow you feel
like you have agency, and that's what we mean by free.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
Will, right right. Another take on this that I came across,
and this goes back to something we were talking about earlier,
contemporary British analytic philosopher Galen Straws, and their argument is
that that basically free will is impossible because we act
the way we are right in this argument, This argument
always makes me think of Yates in the poem No

(55:03):
Second Troy. There's that line what could she have done?
Being what she is? And I think about that with myself,
like what when I look back on past choices, what
else could I have done being who I am? You know,
without the you know, some sort of sci fi foresight
brought on by time travel or groundhog day shenanigans, Like
I am who I am? I am influenced by all

(55:25):
these these things in my life, and my mind is this,
and then what other choice would that mind have made?

Speaker 4 (55:32):
Right?

Speaker 2 (55:32):
I mean, this is That's a very good way of
putting it. It almost like it maybe emphasizes the fact
that free will is a difficult concept because of some
of the baggage brought by the word free. Yeah, to
act in accordance with your nature and your circumstances is
not necessarily not.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Free, right, Like it was in my nature to responsibly
come to work this morning, and so therefore I did.
Could I have decided not to come into work? Could
I have gone to the local at an arcade or something,
or whatever whatever one does when one skips quirk, I
guess I could have.

Speaker 4 (56:08):
In theory, there's nothing stopping you.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
Yeah, nothing at all, except that is not my nature,
and that is not what I did. Because of my.

Speaker 2 (56:15):
Nature, given the circumstances of who you are and who
you were, this morning and what was going on this morning.
You didn't do it, and that's all we know is
that you know you acted the way you were at
that time because that's who you were at that time.

Speaker 1 (56:28):
Yeah. Now that being said, yes, events could have been different.
We could have had an email from our boss saying
that there was going to be like a rock concert
in the in the office today. That would never happen,
and it might make me think, well, maybe I don't
want to come into work today, and maybe the easiest
thing to do would be just to skip. I don't know. Again,

(56:51):
you can tease your brain all day thinking about what
if and how this would have this little detail where
this other detail would affected your choices, but ultimately we
only have the version of the path behind us to
look back on when we think about all of this. Now,
two other basic arguments against free will. This is when
I think we'll come back to Experimentation has pointed to

(57:12):
breakdowns between what feels like the moment of choice and
what physically signals a choice being made.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
Yeah, I think this very much complicates the idea that Again,
what I think people are actually really getting at with
their idea of free will is that they have conscious
control over their actions and thoughts.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
And another one, and this is again we've been touching
on this the whole episode, but myriad causal influences at
least guide our decisions, if not make them for us.

Speaker 4 (57:39):
Yeah, hard to deny.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
All right, So here are some arguments for free will.
The big one, of course, is that subjectively, we tend
to feel like we have rational, reflective control over our
choices and actions.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
Sure, I mean, I can decide to do anything that
occurs to me to do right now. You know, I
could throw my computer across the room if I really
wanted to.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
Yeah. And and the idea, the way that that our
brains enable us to simulate these possibilities really I think
allows us to lean into that interpretation because it's like
the Choose your own adventure book. The other choices are
in there, and if we want to, we can cheat,
and we can check one out and then back up.
And in a way, you know, we can't do that
in real life except through our ability to simulate possible futures.

(58:25):
And and of course that has an important evolutionary role,
It has important role for our survival. We can think
about the different ways we might try to say, steal
a piece of meat from a hungry lion and escape
with food and our lives, and then choose the best
course of action. This is this is important, but it
can also lean into these interpretations that you know that

(58:48):
certainly you know I have more choice than I actually have,
or even ultimately an idea that of course is explored
in Bandersnatch, the idea that these other alternate choices are
kind of alternate timeline. It's that they're out there like
I saw it in my head to a certain extent,
that reality where I tried to take more meat than
was feasible and was killed by the lion in a

(59:09):
way that exists because I just saw it.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
Unfortunately, I would say about this argument, it does often
feel that way that you know, like I could have
done anything a minute ago, but you didn't. You did
what you did. So again, this comes back to the
untestability of this one, like there's just never any way
to prove that you could have done differently than you
did in the moment.

Speaker 1 (59:33):
Like if you ever had a like a close call
where say you're almost in a wreck or you almost
do something that could have conceivably gotten you killed, and
then you have that moment of reflection granted. On one level,
like it may get you just bodily you're excited, right
because this has happened and your body's on high alert.
But on the other hand, part of it is sort

(59:53):
of realizing your close proximity to this other possibility, like
I was just some minor choice, some mine, or a
bit of input data away from something more catastrophic.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
Yes, it makes you suddenly you come face to face
with how dependent you are on moment to moment circumstances
and awareness. Though I would say a lot of times
when I get that like that, like oh, you know,
catch your breath about what could have happened. It wasn't
because I narrowly avoided something really bad happening. It's because
I suddenly, out of nowhere, imagined something really bad happening.

(01:00:26):
Like you're going down a flight of stairs and it's
going fine, but you just imagine, ooh I could fall
and hit my teeth on that thing, and.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, I do that. This is of course,
this is one of my pitfalls, is to almost constantly,
essentially fantasize about bad things that could happen. And I
think a lot of us do that you know, and
part of that is your mind is exploring possibilities, sure
of what is happening or could happen or has happened.

(01:00:55):
But in doing that we can lean into the negative
possibilities too much, and then our lives become this abysmal
choose your own adventure book of mostly terrible ends, even
though the path that you're actually on may not be
leading to any of them.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
It seems like the curse of all this confusion about
whether we have free will or not and what that
actually means, could just be rooted in the fact that
we can consider hypothetical alternative scenarios. The fact that we're
able to imagine counterfactuals is what makes is what gives
rise to this whole argument.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
So another thing I have in the list here, and
this basically is just an extrapolation of everything we're talking
about right now, is Philosophers Stephen Cave and also Bruce
Waller have both argued that animals evolved with the capabilities
we tend to associate with free will in order to survive,
such as opinion generation, deliberation, will, power to stick to

(01:01:52):
a choice, and the large human brain has all of
this in Spades. Cave argues that the level of free
will that we have may actually vary from individual to individual,
and he argues that we could potentially even put together
a method of measuring one's freedom quotient or FQ in
the same way that we will roughly measure one's intelligence, creativity,

(01:02:14):
and other psychological factors.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
I do think that's possible, but I also think that
that would be subject to a lot of debate about
exactly what.

Speaker 4 (01:02:21):
It is you're measuring.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
There as a lot of these actual you know, human
or animal quotients are I mean, when you measure human intelligence,
there's debate about what exactly are you measuring, And I
think the same thing would be true of freedom subject
to all of these you know, crazy caveats we've been
talking about so far.

Speaker 4 (01:02:38):
What do you mean when you say freedom?

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
Yeah. Another take on this that I had read in
the past was something that neuroscientists David Eagleman called the
principle of sufficient automatism. And the idea here is that
the more that we map the human genome and study
the brains many subconscious machinations, the more it becomes clear
that a free will exist. It's only a hitching a

(01:03:01):
ride on top of enormous automated machinery. So again it
comes there's plenty of ground in between automaton and self
moving soul where you can sort of move the slider
towards one direction or the other and still have something
that we can at least refer to as free will.

Speaker 4 (01:03:21):
But it might only be a very very little bit
of something.

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
Yeah, it might, And it's interesting to sort of do that,
to do a little self reflection and think about that, Like, yes,
I had choice in the Senate situation, but really, how
much choice was there?

Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
Yeah, and I think for me at least some of
the definition problems would still remain, Like, I'm not sure
that even then that's clarifying what the concept of freedom means. There,
So we can't test whether it's possible for a person
to produce different outputs given the exact same inputs. That
just seems beyond the bounds of empiricism. You could believe

(01:03:56):
that if you want, but I don't think there's any
evidence for it. But this might not be what we
really mean by free will. Maybe, as I mentioned earlier,
what we mean by free will is that we are
conscious of the process by which we make decisions or
generate actions. And I think the empirical research is pretty
clear that this is not true, at least not in

(01:04:18):
many cases. So just to look at a few studies
undercutting traditional notions that our consciousness dictates our decisions or
that we're consciously aware of how all our decisions are reached.
So first of all, I want to look at one
by us soon Brass, Hinds and Haynes, published in Nature
Neuroscience in two thousand and eight, called unconscious determinants of

(01:04:40):
free decisions in the human brain. In this study, the
authors found that they could use brain scanning to detect
a person's choice between two options before the person believed
that they had made a choice. So you've got a
very simple setup. You're supposed to freely choose between pressing
two buttons. You got a left button I pressed with

(01:05:00):
your left hand. You got to right button pressed with
your right hand. The two different hands were used because
this made it easier to see which hand was about
to be engaged through motor control and brain imaging. And
so you take your time, you decide which button you
want to press, and then you note which letter in
a timed sequence is displayed on a screen in front
of you at the moment you believe you've made your

(01:05:22):
decision about which button to push, and in some cases,
the researchers could detect brain activity of the prefrontal and
parietal cortex indicating which choice a person was going to
make up to seven to ten seconds before the person
believed they had made their choice. So this study indicates
that at least in some cases, at the moment you

(01:05:45):
believe that you have consciously made a choice to do something,
machines can look at your brain and show that the
brain has made a choice before you believe you have
made a choice and predict with better than chance accuracy
what that choice is.

Speaker 1 (01:06:01):
This is a study that really intrigued me. I remember
when it came out because it's basically this idea where
I think that I'm the lightning, but perhaps I am
the thunder, or at least my experience is that of
the thunder. But then the other question is, well, does
that mean I'm not the lightning? Am I not? Both?
And maybe just like I have a thunder level awareness

(01:06:21):
of what I am, but there is this lightning that
precedes this experience of me.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
Well, I mean, I don't know, I mean the decision
is generated by the brain. So again you're back to
this question of what free will means. But if it
does have something to do with consciously being a participant
at the moment that a decision is made, there's pretty
good evidence that that's not going on. The brain is
making decisions before the person thinks I have made a decision.

(01:06:49):
But okay, that was two thousand and eight. Is there
anything since then? Sure? Here's one study with findings along
these lines but applied to voluntary mental imagery who is
published just last year in twenty nineteen in the open
access journal Scientific Reports. It's by Kenning, Robert and Pearson
in I said Scientific Reports called Decoding the Contents and
Strength of Imagery before Volitional Engagement. And again this was

(01:07:14):
published in twenty nineteen. The short version here is that
the researchers exposed people to two different images. You got
a red circle with horizontal lines and a green circle
with vertical lines. And then the researchers were able to
correlate images of brain states with mental representation of the
different pictures, so they know it's what it looks like
in your brain when you're thinking about these two images separately.

(01:07:38):
They could use this brain imaging to predict, again above chance,
which image subjects would choose to visualize in their head
before the subjects believed they had made a choice about
which one to imagine in their head, and they could
make these predictions at a rate above chance an average
of eleven seconds before the person's actual choice about which

(01:07:59):
one they were going to imagine. So, one of the authors,
Joel Pearson, was quoted in a statement I believe to
a medical express quote. We believe that when we are
faced with the choice between two or more options of
what to think about, non conscious traces of the thoughts
are there already, a bit like unconscious hallucinations.

Speaker 4 (01:08:19):
That comes back to something we talked about recently.

Speaker 2 (01:08:20):
Yeah, As the decision of what to think about is made,
executive areas of the brain choose the thought trace which
is stronger. In other words, if any pre existing brain
activity matches one of your choices, then your brain will
be more likely to pick that option as it gets
boosted by the pre existing brain activity. This would explain,

(01:08:41):
for example, why thinking over and over about something leads
to ever more thoughts about it as it occurs in
a positive feedback loop, and then to quote from the
study abstract, the authors say, our results suggest that the
contents and strength of mental imagery are influenced by sensory
like neural representations that emerge spontaneously before volition. So there

(01:09:03):
are things going on within the brain that we can
detect with machinery from the outside that suggest what you're
going to think about before you think about it now.
I think we should be fair that it's possible. This
isn't always the case, but there's plenty of evidence that,
at least in some of the at least in some cases,
when people think they're consciously making a choice, the brain

(01:09:25):
in a measurable way has already made a choice that
can be detected from the outside. The brain has already
set one course of action in motion before the conscious
part of our brain is aware that we're going to
choose that course.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
So again, kind of a thunder and lightning scenario right now.

Speaker 2 (01:09:43):
Of course, this stuff we've been talking about is true
of typical human brains. Once you start looking at atypical
neurological situations, you can find all kinds of evidence of
action without the sensation of conscious awareness or choice. A
lot of these are things that have come up on
the show before, like blind sight, the fact that people
can physically react to visual stimuli while believing consciously that

(01:10:06):
they are blind, or that they're blind in some part
of their visual field, like you can react to raise
your hand to catch a ball without believing that you
have seen the ball, or you got alien limb syndrome,
where something like a brain lesion can cause part of
the body to act in a way that you do
not feel in control of. The hand moves on its own,
it moves against your will, It picks up the spoon

(01:10:28):
when you meant to pick up the fork. Of course,
the experiences of split brain patients, which we did a
deep dive on in January of twenty nineteen. The short
version is that some patients who undergo a surgery called
a corpus calisotomy, in which the main avenue of information
sharing between the two hemispheres of the brain is severed,
can seem to show signs of the right hemisphere acting

(01:10:51):
and making choices without the conscious awareness or control of
the left hemisphere, which seems to be the part of
the brain that can usually talk. And example led to
hypotheses like Michael Gazaniga and Joseph Ledu's left brain interpreter model,
where they argue that part of what the left hemisphere
of the brain does is generate an ongoing series of

(01:11:12):
narrative explanations that reconcile past and present and give us
the sense of that we understand why we do what
we do now. Of course, their model could be incorrect,
but I think it's also possible that they're really onto
something that the brain seems to have a major function
of trying to convince itself that its behavior is coherent

(01:11:34):
and has rational justifications, and if possible, to convince the
conscious part of the brain that it's in control. I
think this is kind of like at work when you
give the boss three options. You know, it's like, here
are the three things we came up with, and you've
got the one you actually want to go with, and
then you've got two like terrible options that are designed

(01:11:54):
in order to be ignored and discarded by the boss
and flatter the boss and give them a sense of control.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
Right, which can be a dangerous exercise.

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
Absolutely, I'm not advising that as a good strategy. I'm
just saying people do it to look quickly at one
more study.

Speaker 4 (01:12:08):
I found.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
This was published in twenty eighteen in PNAS by Darby, Jautza, Burke,
and Fox called lesion network localization of free will. Very briefly,
the authors here define the neurologically relevant parts of free
will as having two parts. So first of all, there's
the desire to act, that's volition. You got volitional control,

(01:12:32):
and then a sense of responsibility for that action, which
is the feeling of agencies. So you got volition and agency.
And then they looked at two neurological conditions, one that
is believed to disrupt each of these functions. They looked
at focal brain lesions that disrupt a volition causing a
kinetic mutism. And a kinetic mutism is a condition where

(01:12:53):
patients are unable to voluntarily move or speak. This would
of course be a disruption of the volition part of
the brain. And then lesions that disrupt agency, and this
would of course cause alien Limb syndrome. Again, alien limb syndrome,
that's where you've got part of your body acting or
moving in a way that does not feel voluntary.

Speaker 4 (01:13:11):
It moves, but you don't feel like you did it.

Speaker 2 (01:13:14):
And then they basically found that brain lesions that disrupt
volition occur all over the brain, but they're within a
brain network that is connected in some way to the
anterior cingulate cortex. And they found that lesions that disrupt
agency also occur in different locations around the brain, but
they tend to be defined by connectivity to a part
of the brain called the precuneus. Now, again I would

(01:13:35):
note that this this acknowledges physical evidence that there are
distinct brain processes involved in generating action, you know, volition
versus recognizing personal agency in that action, and typical brains
executing typical actions have both of these acting in sync.
But brains can have either one without the other.

Speaker 1 (01:13:56):
Now, obviously we could keep going here. We could keep
discussing free will and what feels like free will and
how it matches up with neuroscientific data, etc. But at
this point the podcast, we probably do need to bring
it back around to Bandersnatch and the question like, Okay,
given all this stuff that we've talked about, what does
Bandersnatch seem to be saying about all of this? Well,

(01:14:18):
it does seem to be largely a rumination on the
idea that we do not seem to have as much
free will as we think we do that we can resist,
but it takes considerable effort to run counter to the
current that we're stuck in.

Speaker 2 (01:14:33):
I would say a thing that is a theme that
is hammered home about free will, and it is the
more we look at the concept of free will and
think about whether we have control over our actions, the
less we feel we have it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:45):
Yeah, Like I was thinking, I'm trying to list, like
all the various factors and agents that are influencing Stephan
in the story. I mean, we have his mental health,
his past trauma, his father, his therapy, the work and
tragic life, the influence of Jerome F. Davies, his boss

(01:15:06):
at Tuckersoft, his mentor slash hero slash friend Colin Rittman,
conspiracy theories, music media, et cetera. And that's not even
getting into the speculative elopment that there is either an
actual demon entity that is the literal thief of destiny,
or that a power beyond himself is influencing his decisions,
some sort of voice from beyond or the machinations of

(01:15:28):
a player in another world.

Speaker 2 (01:15:30):
Yeah, the story really brings home this paradox, which is
that I think it is the case that the closer
we look at free will, and the more we bring
our sharpest scientific tools and philosophical instruments to understand it,
the less it seems to make sense, and the less
it seems to be there. And yet at the same

(01:15:52):
time that we acknowledge that to feel like your actions
are not under your own control is not a heightened
state of consciousness, that is still a problem. Yeah, and
it and I don't know exactly what that signals. That
may be yet another unresolved tension in the issue of
free will, that like, the more closely we examine it,
the less we feel like we have it, and yet

(01:16:14):
genuinely feeling like you don't have it, the more you
feel that way, the more this is a serious impediment
to you living a healthy life.

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
Absolutely, now, this seems this may seem like a logical
place to end the conversation, but one of the things
that's really interesting here is that is that we were
talking about an episode of Black Mirror that deals with
free will and our choices in life. And certainly again
Black Mirror frequently comments on our unease regarding new technology,

(01:16:42):
but then band or Snatch itself this show on Netflix
this this movie. This movie itself factors into some user
concerns about the future of this sort of interactive viewing technology.

Speaker 2 (01:16:55):
Yes, you know, I would say one of the things
that is a legitimate concern about free will, however you
define it as murky as it is. At least one
thing that we want is to we want to think
that we understand the incoming influences on our behavior, right
Like you'd like to think that if I did X,

(01:17:16):
I can sort of make sense of that it was
because I read this book, or I read this article,
or I had a conversation with this person, and I
connect the knowledge I gained through that or the influences
of those past experiences with the decision I just made.
Life starts getting more difficult when you have trouble understanding
what the influences on yourself are.

Speaker 4 (01:17:38):
Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (01:17:39):
Yeah? Yeah, And we've we've discussed some of these in
the past. We've discussed a number of these in the past,
but technologically speaking, we have discussed advertising and we have
discussed social media, which are good things to keep in
mind as we continue here. Because there might not be
a band or snatcher, a demon awaiting you in the
maze of future interactive media technology. But there there might

(01:18:00):
just be some highly targeted advertisements for example. So two
individuals that I ran across wrote about this topic or
touched on this topic. One is Matthew Galt, who wrote
about this last year for Vice's Motherboard, and then Tiffany
Schu wrote about it for The New York Times. So
Galt wrote about Michael Veil, a technology policy researcher at

(01:18:24):
University College London, who utilized Europe's General Data Protection Regulation
or GDPR law to request a copy of the data
Netflix collected about him and his choices through the use
of the Bandersnatch program. Now they complied, perhaps in part
because of veil status as a public person, but basically

(01:18:47):
Netflix acquires this information in order to carry out the
Bandersnatch experience, which makes sense, right, it has to chart
your path through this complex system. But then also Netflix
keeps this in which the company claims is in order
to quote determine how to improve this model of storytelling
in the context of a show or movie. And I mean,

(01:19:09):
on one level that sounds well and good as well,
except that Vial thinks that Netflix quote should really be
using consent, which you should be able to refuse or
legitimate interest, meaning that you can object to it instead. Now,
in Shoe's article, she points to the early choice we
make between Kellogg's Frosty's and then Quaker Sugar Puffs. Now,

(01:19:33):
both of these are real serials, though I have to
admit I thought Quaker Sugarpuffs was made up because it
has this ridiculous honey monster mascot that's like super fun,
kind of a cheddar Goblin sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:19:45):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (01:19:45):
But it turns out this was an actual UK product.
It was just a UK only product, so Americans such
as ourselves were perhaps not privy to it. But again,
both were real products, and neither one was a paid inclusion,
so it was not a official product placement or product integration.
And Netflix, of course is like an ad free system anyway.

(01:20:07):
But Shoe points to some of the words of Read Hastings,
co founder, chairman and CEO of Netflix, who pointed out
during a webcast tied to an earnings report that seventy
three percent of Bandersnatch viewers selected kellogg Frosty's over the
Quaker Sugar Puffs.

Speaker 4 (01:20:26):
Oh no, I did too. I feel so vulnerable right now.

Speaker 1 (01:20:29):
I don't remember what I did the first time around
the first time I watched it, I also watched with
my wife, so we were voting on which choices. You know,
we're having a discussion. I guess I should have mentioned
that earlier, because that has a whole other wrinkled as
a scenario of making communal choices and voting on something.
But on my own, I chose the Quaker thing just
because I thought it looked weirder. Okay, but again I'm

(01:20:51):
in the minority for doing so. So first of all,
I think this is a shame because I think the
cover and TV advertisement for Quaker Sugar Puffs is awesome
and weird. Again, but more to the point, as Shoe
points out, Spencer Wang, a Netflix vice president, chimed in
and joked, and let's be clear he was He was
apparently joking that this was the most critical data point

(01:21:11):
of the quarter.

Speaker 4 (01:21:13):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:21:13):
She writes that while Netflix doesn't run commercials and has
stated that it would not use bandersnatch information for anything
like this, others outside the company do see the potential, namely,
in quote, the possibility of inserting brand name products into
streaming shows based on data generated by interactive programming. Now,
Shoe stresses that the technology to roll this out isn't

(01:21:34):
here yet. But I suppose we have to consider two
key factors in that statement. So, first of all, we
were in the early days of truly interactive features like
this on major streaming platforms, you know, assume, and that
is just assuming that it really catches on at all.
As we've discussed, interactive cinema is not new. It's been

(01:21:56):
around for decades and it has largely failed to catch on.
It is not like a driving force in our entertainment.
You'll find plenty of examples of it. You also find
a lot of computer games that kind of fulfill this
this niche right, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:22:14):
Those are also sort of failed.

Speaker 1 (01:22:16):
Yeah, you know, I would have there are certainly deeper
dives and say the history of things like what Telltale
Games I think was the company maybe that did a
number of these things that were again not really released
as they weren't marketed as interactive movies so much as
they were interactive gaming experiences. So that's one thing to consider.
Interest in interactive films has essentially gone up and down

(01:22:38):
over the years, and again it hasn't really like ignited
still Netflix and also Netflix itself has only released a
handful of interactive titles, mostly kids stuff. Bandersnatch is their
only true adult drama release in this of this product type,
though they claimed to be doubling down on interactive content
in the future. Given you know how Netflix tends to

(01:22:59):
be a little bit secretive about what's coming out, or
at least they don't tell you a lot, I guess
we'll just have to know about it when we see
it pop up. But also it's also worth reminding ourselves
that a great deal of work went into creating Bandersnatch
as well. I think I've seen it written that like
three times as much work went into Bandersnatch versus say

(01:23:20):
that long episode of the show that was approximately ninety minutes,
So is it cost effective content? Are all the limitations
worked out yet? For instance, I don't believe Bandersnatch works
on many mobile formats or older models, like you have
to have something more updated. Like I tried to load
it onto my phone and I have an older iPhone.

(01:23:41):
I tried to load it on there to watch on
an airplane and it wouldn't work. I had to watch
it through my Xbox One. And another big concern is
there would need to be I guess enough interactive content
out there tuned for this sort of thing to generate
the necessary user data to then be employed.

Speaker 2 (01:23:58):
I can really see this kind of thing being used
as a as a major data mining I mean, I
don't know, it seems very possible to get psychologically salient
information through this.

Speaker 1 (01:24:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:24:09):
Now, of course that they're already getting information through all
kinds of things. You know, the tech business can get
your information through through what you buy online, through what
websites you visit, through what you do on Facebook or
other social media.

Speaker 1 (01:24:21):
Right Like, a website like Netflix already knows what kind
of movies you have watched, what kind you like, what
kind of movies you want to like, and then also
you know how you have rated things as well, and
then they can serve you a recommendation of what you
might want to watch in the future.

Speaker 2 (01:24:38):
Right now, This is so, of course we're talking about
this and possibly going multiple ways. One is using interactive
choices in a film to gather data about you, and
the other side would be giving like specially user tailored
media experiences, which we already get somewhat of course on websites,
you know, you get websites loading with the ad of

(01:25:00):
stuff you searched for on Amazon and all that. But yeah,
I guess we're being forced to consider what if that
starts happening within the movies and TV shows you watch,
So you start seeing product placement for specific products that
are aimed at you individually within the shows you watch.

Speaker 1 (01:25:18):
Right right, Like, you know, they know that given the
serial scenario, like potentially the master of the content, be
it Netflix or some other company, Hypothetically, they might know
that you are, say more inclined towards, you know, healthy
lifestyle choices, and therefore some sort of granola, you know,

(01:25:39):
health wrapped content would be ideal for you in that scenario.
Or they might know that that's not your ideal cereal,
or maybe they know that you have children in the
house and therefore a children's cereal would be more appropriate.
Like that's the kind of information that they could conceivably
have and then feed into the cereal that appears before

(01:25:59):
you on the screen.

Speaker 2 (01:26:00):
Now, that would be, of course, something we're more familiar with,
just like inserting ads. And you might imagine a character
walking past a billboard or something in a movie like
happens all the time now except that billboard can be
you know, dynamically inserted with new imagery or something.

Speaker 1 (01:26:16):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):
I think things start getting even creepier when you imagine
something more like Band or Snatch Itself, where there are
alternative versions of a film that are specially tailored to you,
that have different narrative content depending on who's watching. I mean, so,
one thing Robert and I were talking about briefly before
we came in here is the idea that you know,
we often know that movies can embody values, of course,

(01:26:41):
you know that, like sometimes the values of a filmmaker
creator come through and what happens in a story, and
then other times there are sort of like cheap attempts
to display values what would often be called like pandering, right,
you know, like you know, cheap appeals to patriotism or
something like that in a movie.

Speaker 1 (01:27:01):
Or I don't know, I guess you could make an
argument for awards season Academy Awards bait as well.

Speaker 2 (01:27:06):
Right, yeah, sure, you know, just like sort of cheap
attempts to exploit the specific desires or value interests of
a specific target audience.

Speaker 4 (01:27:17):
Right, And so you can imagine.

Speaker 2 (01:27:21):
Okay, well, now if a movie is made and it
wants to pander, it needs to at least make a choice. Right,
It's hard to pander to everybody at the same time.
But you can imagine, Okay, what if somebody just starts
making more like a Bandersnatch kind of thing where maybe
you don't make the choices, the choices are made for
you based on what is known about your user profile.

(01:27:43):
And so what I was imagining beforehand was you could
have different versions of the movie Independence Day.

Speaker 4 (01:27:49):
You remember that speech Bill Pullman gives before they all
get in the planes and go fly off and fight.

Speaker 1 (01:27:55):
Oh yes, So it's.

Speaker 2 (01:27:57):
This rousing moment where Bill Pullman gives this kind of
innocus speech that could appeal to basically anybody. But you
can make that speech a much more tailored, specific interest
group pandering kind of thing, where you could have one
version of the film that plays for somebody that's that's
very inclusive. He gives a speech he's like, humans will
join arms together around the world. There will be no

(01:28:18):
more nations and borders and creeds and all. You know,
we all unite as one and stand in brothers and
as brothers and sisters against this. Or you could have
a version where he gives a speech about American exceptionalism
and how we're the first and we stand up and
fight when no one else will, or you could get
you know, you can imagine a million versions of this
depending on what kind of user they think you are

(01:28:40):
who are watching.

Speaker 1 (01:28:41):
Right, I mean, and that that kind of personality profile
or worldview profile would be pretty easy to acquire. I mean,
basically websites like Facebook have that information. Like sure, they're
not feeding you independence day to a tailored speech in it,
but they are feeding giving you a feed that that

(01:29:02):
reflects your world views and values.

Speaker 2 (01:29:05):
And people are very invested in like the values of
what media they consume these days. I can imagine it
being judged a very profitable enterprise by some studios to say, well,
let's just cover all the bases. You know, we'll have
way less trouble if we make a movie, you know,
a version A of the movie for you and a
version B of the movie for you. It doesn't have

(01:29:26):
to be a coherent vision or picture of the world.

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):
Yeah, this is you know. I can't help but think
on past films, like, for instance, we talked about Conan
the Barbarian on the show in the past, like that
is a film that has a has a very particular
view of what strength means and what, uh you know,
how power works, et cetera. And it's not everybody's political
or philosophical cup of tea. Sure, I mean you can.

(01:29:51):
I think you can enjoy that film without focusing on
all of that. But still it's definitely there. And that's
not a film, I mean, especially at the time it
came out. It's not a film where you would necessarily
ask for an alternate version of it. But again, it's
very clear in what it's saying. But then you have
films like say Patent. Patent is often brought up as
example of a film that meant one thing to one

(01:30:13):
part of a divided America and another to the other
part of a divided America without having to have like
an ab version.

Speaker 2 (01:30:21):
Right Yeah, I think you could say that about a
lot of like war movies, especially. I think that might
be sort of true of Platoon, right yeah, is that
like an anti.

Speaker 4 (01:30:29):
War movie or a patriotic movie?

Speaker 2 (01:30:31):
You know, you sort of have some elements of each
you can latch onto what you want to see there,
But yeah, I don't know. I'm somewhat disturbed by the
idea of like of media filling up with these like
personally tailored options that are designed to make a sort
of like generic media template individually palatable to the user,

(01:30:52):
as opposed to standing for something on its own and
allowing you to judge it.

Speaker 1 (01:30:56):
Yeah, or having some level of ambiguity, like does the
as the modern audience and like the near future audience,
do they want ambiguity in their work or do they
want like a clear cut view that is expressed clear
cut values not only of the film, but of like
the creator or creators behind it, like they you know,

(01:31:18):
is there is there an increased hunger for that? And
if that is the case, you could easily see a
way of worming around that by taking this ABC approach
to film creation, because then nobody can say, well, I
like the character of Cone in the Barbarian, but I
think your view is pro totalitarianism and you know, I

(01:31:38):
don't know, celebrates toxic masculinity or whatever the critique might be,
And then they could say, well, that's all good, well
and good, but you're you're only talking about one version
if you watch Cone in the Barbarian.

Speaker 2 (01:31:51):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:31:51):
The twenty twenty eight relaunch of the platform then you
will get what is tailored to you. It's treatment of
masculinity and power will be exactly what you want to see.
And I mean that opens the door to just a
big question of like what art is and what does
that do to you know, to the role of these

(01:32:13):
narratives in our culture.

Speaker 2 (01:32:15):
I remember many years ago how much of like the
new Internet and the new media landscape was being sold
to us. It was so often on the selling point
of customization and individualization. You know, get what's right for you,
get an experience that's personally tailored for you. And somehow
I just feel like we were not able to anticipate

(01:32:38):
how scary and messed up that would feel when it
actually happened.

Speaker 1 (01:32:42):
Yeah, Yeah, I like to come back to Bandersnatch. The
first time I watched it, I think it probably was
over two hours that I spent questing after the happy ending,
and I got it, and I have to admit I
felt a little empty when I reached it. The second time,
I tried to just again make more dramatic choices, make
a choice here and there that were just different from

(01:33:03):
what I did. The first time. I got a bleak ending,
but it felt more authentic so yeah, it's interesting to
think about how choice potentially impacts our appreciation of a
work like this, especially if we're talking about increasingly interactive
work in a hypothetical future.

Speaker 2 (01:33:25):
Had to find a good bleak note to end on.
I think that's it.

Speaker 1 (01:33:28):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, if we're talking about black Mirror,
that's where we have to leave it. All right, Well,
we covered a lot of ground in there. I imagine
listeners will want to chime in, certainly on Bandersnatch if
they have experienced it. I'd love to hear from anyone
who's like, how much time did you spend on Banderstatch?
How many viewings have you given? Did you do like
Joe and go in and try and find every golden

(01:33:50):
Easter egg?

Speaker 4 (01:33:50):
I didn't get all of them, but I got a
lot of them.

Speaker 1 (01:33:52):
Or did you do like me? Did you sort of
go through it once and maybe go through a second time?
And maybe you haven't seen or haven't read about the
other endings. And of course free will you all have
it or maybe you all don't have it but you
think you have it, which however you want to look
at it. You all have some thoughts about free Will.
You all have some experience to share about this, and
we would love to hear from you in the meantime.

(01:34:13):
If you want to check out more Stuff to Blow
your Mind, you can find us anywhere you get your podcasts.
You can certainly go to stuff to Blow your Mind
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where you can find the episodes and wherever you get
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us by rating and reviewing and subscribing. And don't forget
we have another show out there titled Invention and Invention

(01:34:34):
covers human technohistory, one invention at a time.

Speaker 2 (01:34:37):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson, who is doing a heroic quick turnaround on
today's episode, So praise him, everyone, praise him. If you
would like to get in touch with us with notes
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, just to say hi, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:35:06):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}From the Vault: Bandersnatch