Bandersnatch

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
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

(00:26):
to fly. He offered large discount. He offered a check
drawn to bearer for seven pounds ten, But the banderstatch
merely extended its neck and grabbed at the banker again,
without rest or pause, while those frumious jaws went savagely
snapping around. He skipped, and he hopped, and he floundered

(00:46):
and 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 just
as I feared, and solemnly told on his bell Welcome

(01:07):
to stuff to blow your mind? A production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, are you welcome to
stuff to blow your mind? My name is Robert Lamb,
and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert Are you feeling more
frabjous or more frumious today? I guess more frumious. Frumious
would be my answer. That was, of course the poem

(01:30):
The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, But I
guess a number of people were probably more familiar with
the Bandersnatch from another poem by Lewis Carroll, that being
the jabberwat chapwakee Yes, where the Bandersnatch is just alluded
to is another monstrous creature that might be running around
the woods. I love it when a poet first name

(01:51):
something in a kind of in a in a listical
kind of way, you know, poem, poem as listical, uh,
and then later it comes through in another poem with
more force. I think that's sort of happened with um
with the dim Organ, right, Yeah, yeah, I think so.
And and in this case, yeah, the bander Snatch. There's
not a lot really said about it in the writings
of Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll, by the way, was the

(02:14):
pen name of Charles Lutwich Dodgson who lived eighteen thirty
two through eighteen nine, and he first introduced the band
or snatch again just in a list of creatures that
might pop up in his eighteen seventy two novel Through
the Looking Glass in that poem the Jabberwocke, and then
pops up again in this eighteen seventy four poem that
we just read, the Hunting of the Snark, which we

(02:36):
didn't 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 think I've
read that that poem was has been interpreted by some
as 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 i've heard it alleged that

(02:58):
the poem actually has no allegorical meaning, that it's just
it's just kind of silly. 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. Uh,
And by the way frumious is a combination of fuming

(03:19):
and furious. Carroll just gram these two words together to
make a nice new adjective for strange. Monster is a
perfectly cromulent word. Very frabjous um. 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, it certainly worked on the Jabberwockie. I don't
know about the bander Snatch. There's there are no tales

(03:39):
of slaying it, are there, at least not in Lewis
Carroll's original work. Does the vorpal sword show up as
an artifact in D and D? It does? It certainly does. Yeah, um,
pretty good sword. Oh yeah, very good sword. Now. The
name Bandersnatch has been invoked many times over the years
and works of fantasy and science fiction. I've seen it

(04:00):
pop up as a space slug, another such creature. Sometimes
it's just kind of an enigmatic name for like a
government project or something, 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. Nineteen century children's illustrator
Peter Newell depicted it as kind of a furry horned

(04:21):
beast that might resemble a cat or maybe a wolf
like creature. Uh and this one this is a very
popular image. And then film adaptations have depicted it as
both bor like and cat like. The two thousand ten
Tim Burton adaptation has a very memorable creature design for
the Bandersnatch. Tim the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland. Is
that what you're talking about? Yeah, yeah, I have. I've

(04:42):
seen the first one. Um, I never ventured that far
into late Burton. Well, it it had some things going
for it. It had it had a really good cast,
and it had some some interesting character designs I'll say that,
and and a very monstrous looking bander snatch. Okay, now,
just a couple of other interesting uh tidbits about Lewis Carroll. Um.

(05:06):
He was a mathematician. He worked in geometry and new
ideas in algebra, logic, machines, ciphers. So between this and
other details of of his life, there's a lot of
black mirror to the originator of the bander Snatch. Also
in Hallucinations, the book by Oliver Sacks, The late Oliver Sax.
Sax points out that Carroll was known to suffer from

(05:27):
classical migraines, and that Carol W. Lippman and others have
suggested that his migraine experiences UH may have contributed to
the way he envisioned through the Looking Glass and Alice
in Wonderland, like the skewing of time and space. Um.
Also you have auditory hallucinations that are not uncommon in migraines,

(05:50):
as well as old factory hallucinations. I've also seen descriptions
of of uh, this lifting feeling, that, this feeling of
being moved through space. Yeah, I guess the the extension
of the lightheadedness that comes on with the aura and
all that. Yeah. Um. You know there's actually an asteroid
named Bandersnatch. Oh. I didn't know this and I looked
this up. Bander Snatch. It's a Main Belt asteroid, so

(06:13):
it's out beyond the orbit of Mars. Discovered in nineteen
by Japanese astronomers Takashi Urata and Yasuhiro Shimizu at the
Nachi Katsura Observatory, and it was named, of course after
the Fermius Bandersnatch. 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

(06:36):
be talking about what, as I guess, the most recent
uh cinematic in vocation of the Bandersnatch, and that is
the Black Mirror episode. Oh, it's not even an episode.
It's a Black Mirror film that came out on Netflix
December of what was theeen, so a little over a
year ago. Um and uh, and there's a lot to

(06:58):
unpack here. Actually I 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. I was very impressed. Yeah, I'll
get I'll certainly get more into my 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 uh, and I

(07:22):
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 it was like, 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. Yeah.
Now we're going to be exploring today some of the
some of the science and the ideas and philosophy that

(07:45):
are alluded to in bandersnatch Um. 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 We're not gonna go through and explore every
possible ending or anything like that. But if you are
in the case where you haven't seen it yet and
you don't want anything at all spoiled, you should probably

(08:05):
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. Please. However,
some of you may be asking the question, what are
you talking about? What is black Mirror? Uh? So we
should probably take a few minutes to just refresh you
on what this is. It is a is the word refresh?

(08:28):
Would that be the word? We should shock you to
the bone Alright, So Black Mirror is in essence a
sci fi anthology television series, uh, in the same vein
as the Twilight Zone, the Outer Limits, Uh, these various
shows we've discussed in the past. I might call it
pretty often techno horror. Not every episode is the same,

(08:51):
but there's essentially no horror movie as scary as the
scariest episodes of Black Mirror, especially really the ones that
manage to take fairly plausible technological scenarios and and follow
them to their logical conclusions. I mean, it's, uh, it's
a show that's very good at conjuring up the worst

(09:13):
possible nightmares of like the intersection of uh, capitalism and technology. Yeah, definitely,
episodes tend to have a technological swing to the story,
and they tend to deal on some level with with
contemporary anxiety about current technology and emerging technology. What what

(09:34):
what are these technologies doing to our lives? What may
they do to our lives in the future? And you know,
sometimes they take varying speculative leaps there, of course, since
it is science fiction. But you I would say, you
typically leave an episode of Black Mirror, uh, feeling a
little worse about the world. I know that Netflix, their
current masters, are very into the whole binge model, but

(09:57):
I personally find it very difficult to binge Black Mirror
in part because each episode, of course, is a self
contained story with it with its with with characters and
a plot, etcetera. 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.
Apart from one very sweet, very nice episode, there's essentially

(10:19):
nothing that makes me feel as bad as Black Mirror. Well,
you know, I was thinking. I was thinking about this
because there are definitely some very bleak episode. They are
episodes of Black Mirror that I I admire that I
will never watch again. But but then I look back
at my some of my favorite episodes. My favorite episodes
are probably San Junipero, The U S. S. Calister, and

(10:41):
metal Head. Two of those one of those is still
pretty bleak, but two of two of those are actually
pretty upbeat, probably the most upbeat episodes of the show.
Um and uh. And maybe that's the reason I would
come back to them, because if I'm gonna double dip,
I want to double dip for optimism sake. Now, in
terms that we can't talk about Black Mirror without talking
about the creator behind it, the main creative individual behind it,

(11:06):
and that is Charlie Brooker, a British writer and humorist
whom the earliest thing that he worked on that I
was familiar with was that he worked on Chris Morris's
excellent news satire brass Ie Um. And then he also
created a pretty great zombie movie titled dead Set in
two thousand eight, in which the zombie apocalypse breaks out

(11:28):
uh in and around a Big Brother style reality TV production.
Feel like two thousand eight was sort of like maybe
two thousand seven. Two thousand eight was like peak zombie
satire movie. 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 Ie.

(11:49):
This is gonna 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 it is taken and considered with such intensity that
it works. Yeah, what if like a major tech company

(12:11):
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, uh and explore it,
that becomes like a nightmare of of of techno sci fi.

(12:32):
Absolutely now. Black Mirror began in two seasons and 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 publisher of the program. However
you want to look at it starting with season three
in October. Of all, in all, it is thus far

(12:53):
gone five seasons, twenty one episodes, and that's not counting
the film band or Snatch, which again came out in
d Member. Of these bits of publisher information will actually
become relevant later on as we discussed the story, because
the ideas there, because at the end we definitely get
into some citiz scenarios where we have to consider the
fact that Netflix is the the business daddy behind the

(13:16):
Black Mirror, so Bandersnatch, 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. 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

(13:36):
a very watchable Twilight movie and has a great soundtrack.
It's got Tommy York on it. Oh 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 band or Snatch episode. 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

(13:57):
interactive movie, which makes it very unique. Right. This was
the big selling point on it and uh and and
indeed is one of the I mean, it's 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 um an interactive system uh within the work

(14:21):
and make the work comment on that system as well.
The interactive system being Netflix like the fact that the
user can make inputs on the movie. Yeah, basically, that's
what it will amounts to. Is you you start off
watching it, it it seems like a normal Netflix presentation, but
then you're in my case, my Xbox one controller would

(14:41):
suddenly vibrate and then this little the screen at the
bottom of the screen. You're suddenly presented with two choices
and a timer and you have to choose, Uh, you
know what is going to happen with the character is
going to do, et cetera. Now, this is you know,
when you're just watch checking out the film, you you
might not realize how much work goes into this, but uh,

(15:02):
it took apparently a huge amount of work to shoot
all these various branching paths, because it becomes a you
know this this this tree, this branching system of possibilities
when you 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

(15:25):
eighty nine minutes long. That's that's future length, right, what
ninety minutes is usually the length you shoot for with
the film. Well, when you're watching Bandersnatch. Depending on your choices,
the film can run anywhere between ninety minutes and two
and a half hours. And in order to make this work,

(15:46):
as pointed out by a Jackie Strauss in the Hollywood Reporter, uh,
this means they had to shoot like five hours of
footage so that they could actually cover all of these
various choices. And you may watch it like, for instance,
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

(16:07):
I got an entirely different ending that I never didn't
even know about. And then there 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 going through
and going back through and backing up, etcetera. With this
interactive piece encouraging unhealthy obsessive behavior exactly, I mean it is.

(16:31):
It is black mirror. Now, as far as the choices
as you make in the in band or snatch, um,
you start off making very small choices. It seemed very consequential.
For instance, choosing the main characters breakfast cereal. He's presented
his father shows two boxes and you decide which one
he's going to have for breakfast. Yeah. I think it

(16:52):
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. Ah, well,
we'll come back to that later. That that is an
important point that will come back to later on in
the episode. But but at first, it's it's what kind
of serial does he want? All right? It doesn't doesn't

(17:12):
seem to matter much, and and it also gives you
a chance to try out the technology low stakes. But uh,
and and then also later on you choose what music
is going to listen to in uh when he's on
the bus, which is kind of fun. I think you
get to choose between a rhythmic song and something else.
I can't remember the other one. I think it's Thompson Twins,
that's it. Yeah, and and uh, and then later on

(17:35):
he's in a record store and you get to choose
which record he's gonna buy. And this is also pretty
great because one of the choices is Tangerine Dreams excellent
nine four album Phaedra, which is incredible, absolutely. In fact,
I was listening to that again this morning while I
was doing some prep for this episode. Yeah, it's it's
excellent stuff. How However, this time around, I forced myself

(17:56):
to choose the other album instead, the other album being
a Sao Tamita's The Bermuda Triangle, which very strange. Yeah,
very strange work, but very very good. I was really
not that familiar with with with this artist or this work,
which is apparently kind of hard to come by and
streaming unless you just find like a YouTube full album rip.
But but yeah, this is just a taste of the soundtrack.

(18:18):
The Bandersnatch has a wonderful soundtrack, including not only these
artists but also Depeche 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 off seeming a little bit fun, you know,
it's just surface level stuff like what what's his breakfast cereal?

(18:39):
What's his musical choice? But then they become increasingly high
stakes and even nerve racking to decide on. Like suddenly
you're when you're controller vibrates and you're presented with this choice,
and sometimes, yeah, you feel this dread because sometimes the
choice is neither one is all that great. Sometimes the
choices are kind of horrible. And there's at least one
point where you have no choice. There's there's something to select,

(19:02):
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 of viewers actively made choices, uh when they watched
band or Snatch. Now, in my experience, it wasn't that
they chose for you at random. It was that whichever

(19:25):
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, and whichever
one you had highlighted would just proceed. Uh. So there's
this kind of um uh, there's this horrible sense of
like helplessness that that imposes on you as the viewer.

(19:49):
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 band or Snatch,
probably for this reason, letting all the bar patrons vote
to the side, oh 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.

(20:09):
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 lost in a maze.
And of course, befitting of a maze, there is a
sort of minotaur in all of this. There is the
BANDERSNATCHA is it the Bandersnatch or is it the Demon Packs?
It is the Demon Packs, yeah, but I also it

(20:30):
is also the Bandersnatch. Like it's design. Its design is
roughly based on that illustration of the Bandersnatch we talked about. Okay, cool, alright,
We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come
back we will get into the themes of Bandersnatch and
into the nature of of choice and free will. Alright,

(20:51):
we're back. So there are a lot of interesting ideas,
cool themes, historical tidbits that are thrown together, we'll not
throw in together, stitched together, reassembled in band or Snatch. Uh,
that that give it its unique feel. Here's just a
list of some of the things. First of all, video
game design circa four because that is the setting. Yeah,

(21:14):
it takes place in the eighties with eighties music, eighties
fashion and all that stuff. But they're also programming you know,
old school adventure games for like the Commodore sixty four
and stuff. Yeah. Another huge part of it aren't choose
your own adventure books? Um, which are you know, directly referenced.
And then there is a book within band or Snatch
titled bander Snatch that is this enormous tone that we're

(21:37):
told is essentially a choose your own adventure type scenario. Uh.
Do you have any fond memories of choosehown adventure books? Absolutely?
I was obsessed with them. 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

(21:58):
fatalism on a shot. 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 fall beneath the ice and you can't
get out. Um. 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

(22:21):
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 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

(22:41):
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 go would
all be equally satisfying. I mean, there's a reason that
an author writes a story a certain way, like, for
for instance, one film that we've talked about on the
show before William Assole's Mr. Sardonicus from nineteen sixty one

(23:04):
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 never chose
mercy for this horrible villain. Of course, they always chose justice,
and so there were even accusations that they never even

(23:25):
shot the alternate version, like there was the the 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 yes
they did shoot the sequence. I do not know personally
if if that's true or not, if if this footage
has ever materialized, But what I did did read was

(23:47):
that generally people point to nineteen sixty seven's uh Keno
Automat as the first truly interactive film, but even that,
I think there are only like four choices that could
be made, and this ELM was also I think largely comedic. Okay, well,
I mean I would say that there are many reasons
why this format doesn't always work for some reason, it

(24:08):
worked for me as a kid with the 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 that like, for instance, when you finish it,
there's not 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 all. I want the robust

(24:29):
ending you go back and do it again. It's more
like a video game, 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, uh
three minutes into the game, you know, I mean, that's
that's not an epic tale. 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

(24:53):
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, storyteller,
and you as the passive audience is a surrendering of
responsibility for what is about to happen in your own mind.
You you give up that responsibility and suddenly you know

(25:16):
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 that you know that witnessing
is very fun. Is peeking 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

(25:39):
you want to see versus what you think you should do.
You know, like, uh that, I think there's this tension whenever.
A great example would be in Bandersnatch, I often felt,
in a bizarre way morally compelled to make the tame
or safer options, where at the same time I felt
more interested in seeing the more kind of like dangerous

(26:02):
disastrous options play out. Yeah, this was This was definitely
my experience with my first viewing a band or Snatches
that you know, when the 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

(26:23):
more rebellious thing, or even the more dangerous thing. And
I found myself choosing the safer thing. Like 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 or saying no to them. And
so like the responsible part of me is like, yes,

(26:44):
say yes to the this is employment, this is gonna
be good for you. Like, clearly you're you're stuck in
a weird situation at home. You need to get out
of the house, protagonists and uh, 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. Yeah,
it almost kind of gives you a little slap on
the wrist for making that choice, you know. So he

(27:06):
So I don't want to spoil anything, but yeah, there's
a there's like a slight shaming of the viewer for
choosing the safe option. And this is very early on,
so we're not really spoiling anything. Think nature. But but yeah,
I would do that a lot. I would say I
would make safe choices, And in fact it ultimately ended
up reminding me a little bit of the Space and
Guild and Dune, who of course used the spice to

(27:28):
see into the future to figure out how to navigate
the dangers of space, which is helpful if you're navigating
the dangers of space. But in in life and in
politics and all these other choices, it's this road to
stagnation for the Space and 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

(27:49):
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. And so there is I
think there's a learning curve there with Under Snatch, and
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 um or more dramatic, and

(28:12):
that seemed to work really well, and I feel like
the product rewards you for doing that. 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
sensorly visceral. The fact that you know that it's actually
visually presented to you in video and audio makes it

(28:35):
harder to just pursue, you know, your sort of lust
for drama and and and weirdness and whatever it is
you want to see. Um 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,
and that that could just be because of like the
lower sensory salience of of books compared to movies. I

(28:59):
don't know, Yeah maybe so um. I finally finally remember
the Choose Your Adventure books as well, in part because
they have them at the library and I could check
them out. Um. But also another series that I finally remember,
the Lone Wolf series. Were you familiar with these? So
these there, there's a series of these. The first one
was by Joe Deaver and Gary Chalk, And this is,

(29:22):
uh there like a Choose your Own Adventure series very
much fantasy Dungeon 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 gonna end up having to pencil in your

(29:43):
stats as you go through the story, picking spells and
so forth. It's more like a one player dn D module. Yeah, exactly,
It's like imagine, it's like a a Choose your Own
Adventure book and a one player dn D module come
together into this one little tone. So I finally remember
are those And I might be misremembering here, but I
think I did get turned off later on when I

(30:06):
reached an artificial dead end in one of them, like
there was something broken and I couldn't go back. Yeah,
but uh again, I'm 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 use copies of the Loving Wolf series, and I
think they've republished them again with new artwork, but I

(30:27):
don't know. The classic artwork is exactly the kind of
thing I love. The Choose your Adventure book that I
brought in today for 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. It's very good.

(30:47):
That's pretty brilliant to like channeling something that children, especially
at that time, would have been familiar, would have likely done,
and giving this fantastic spin on it. But it's The
story is essentially the fingle doppling scene from Overdrawn at
the Memory Bank where he just gets transformed into various
different animals. Do you you know you get turned into

(31:08):
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
to to disguise yourself with and you're doomed. All right. Well, Uh,
coming back to bandersnatch, we mentioned the video game aspect
Choose your Own Adventure books. There are another number of

(31:30):
other elements and homages in there as well. Uh. It
deals with mental illness, It deals with l s. D uh.
Their allusions to Philip K. Dick. Uh. There there's mention
of alternate timelines, and of course it spends a lot
of time contemplating this idea of a free will and
the potential illusion of choice. Yeah. I think that's the

(31:50):
main theme of it, is is interrogating the idea of
what it means to be in control of one's own actions. Yeah.
And the basic plot is as follows. A young programmer
named Stephen Butler is obsessed with a choose your own
adventure style book titled Bander Snatch that was written by
a the late troubled writer Jerome F. Davies, and he

(32:12):
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 Tucker Soft and meets its lead creative, uh, this
programmer named Colin Rittman. And from there it departs through
these varying winding paths, reality warping, through madness and sometimes horror. Uh.

(32:35):
And through all of it there's also this side of
this feeling that there is a minotaur like monster pursuing you,
pursuing our our protagonist as well. And this is the Bandersnatch,
but more specifically, it is titled Packs. Its name is Packs,
and it is We're told it's the Thief of Destiny. Yeah,
there's a great moment where the game appears to give
you an option to either deny worshiping packs or submit

(32:57):
to worshiping packs. Oh yes, this is the game within
a game. It made me want to play the game. Yeah,
it looked really cool. So something that made Bandersnatch different
from most of the choose your own adventure books that
I remember reading. I'm 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

(33:17):
unnamed you. You know. You go down the left hall,
you get eaten by a swarm of Ferrell pigs. You
go down the right hall, you get turned into a
bowl of ice cream by magic pirate. You know that you.
You explore all the different dooms on offer to you,
but it's you. Yeah. Likewise, in the Lone Wolf books,
as I recall you, you kind of make choices regarding

(33:39):
how this characters put together. You have a fair amount
of control. It is your character, but Bandersnatch 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's

(34:00):
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. There are moments where the
options are you choose, not what Stephen does. That's how
it mostly is. You know what does Stefon pick? You
know what? What? What does he listened to? What does
he answer to somebody who poses a question to him?

(34:22):
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 believes he is receiving
on his computer screen. Now, of course, if you go
with the most straightforward interpretation of the story, which is
that Stephan is experiencing symptoms of psychosis in a way,

(34:43):
you're still dictating the activity of his brain, but activities
of his brain that he as a character does not
perceive as coming from himself, their 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

(35:04):
but perceived to come from an external source. Are those
hallucinations best understood as you or not? Um? Are Are
there processes within your own brain that are, in some
legitimate sense not you, even though they are your brain,
they're not anybody else. Yeah, it's it's not really the
voice of God. It is the it is. It is

(35:25):
something coming from inside your brain that you are perhaps
imagining or or interpreting as the voice of God. 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. That's going
to be very key to some interpretations of the basic

(35:46):
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. Um. You know again,
I'm I'm I'm tempted to make the best choices for
a protagonist, or at least there's still that inclination that
I want to do that. And at one point there's
this song playing with the lyrics doing what's best for

(36:08):
Nigel and it's all and uh stc or I don't know,
I think so. Yes, 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 the therapies therapist that is giving him advice about
how to how to make choices in his life. And
so you have all these forces that that help him

(36:30):
make his choices or make choices for him. And then
that's also what we are doing as we interact with
the product. Well, yes, and in a weird way, it
kind of brings you back around to 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 are in some cases things

(36:51):
coming to him apparently from the outside, you know, they
might be messages he's receiving from some kind of otherworldly
source or hallucinations. Um, are you still making choices for
him or not? Uh? 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

(37:11):
be in control of your own actions. Uh, and 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. Uh.
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, very scientific

(37:35):
interpretations vary, and then it drags in additional drags in
just about everything about the human condition, right, I mean,
moral responsibility, theological quandaries, etcetera. Yeah, I mean 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. And this isn't my

(37:57):
personal take. I notice, do you ever notice conversations about
free will almost never seemed to clarify anything. They almost
never seemed to provide any more focus or clarity than
you had to begin with. Yeah, Like sometimes it's it's
at times it feels like having a conversation with somebody

(38:17):
in a in a swimming pool about whether water is wet,
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 and all of and everything
in my life that supports everything in the culture at large,

(38:38):
that supports the idea that I am making choices and
form choices about my life. I mean, I feel like
some dilemmas having to do with free will or or
like they force you to choose between two options that
are both tautologies or both absurdities. And and any time
you encounter a problem like that, I think there's a
pretty good chance that the underlying disease caused that is

(39:00):
poorly defined terms, right, yeah, and yeah, to your point,
the extreme versions of this are are to tend to
come off as kind of luney, like if someone is
just like I am a completely free moving soul, like no,
you're not dummy. Uh. You know, It's like when we
discussed in the in the Thankfulness episode that we put out,
you know, like everybody's life is shaped by these other factors,

(39:20):
these 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. But at the end
of the day, does that match up with your experience

(39:41):
of reality? 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. Uh. This

(40:02):
is usually 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. Uh. So, so to try
to understand what our terms actually mean. What is free will?
A common understanding is I am in control of my

(40:23):
own actions, and I think most of the time for
most people this feels true. Uh, 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 THORNI or the more you try
to think about it, and the more precisely you try

(40:43):
to deform define those terms. So, if I'm in control
of my own actions, who is I? Uh? We brought
this up a minute ago. Is I my whole brain? Uh?
And 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? May king? So is it
my whole body? Is it everything with my genome? Even then,

(41:04):
I would say your microbiota sort of gets a vote.
I think that 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
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

(41:26):
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
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

(41:48):
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
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

(42:11):
the outside. You mean, like if you go to 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 mess coal or a vodka drink.
Does that actually make you feel more free or does

(42:33):
it seem like something you know, something got into you.
Where does that phrase come from? 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
going to be the same person I've been every time.
I'm gonna try a different direction, you know I'm going
to I'm going to get a different type of drink,
I'm gonna try a different type of food, I'm gonna
walk a different way to the train station, etcetera. Well,

(42:56):
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
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 out without

(43:17):
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? Uh So,
maybe we should look at like a more thought out
dictionary definition. So one that I found is quote the

(43:38):
power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate
or fate. Now that that brings me back to the
demon packs the thief of Destiny, I find myself. I
found myself with the second viewing of band or Snatch,
returning to that title and trying to figure out exactly
what it means. Because destiny, on one hand means like

(43:59):
the you're predestined, right, There is a destiny in place
for you, and you 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. Uh So, which which

(44:20):
of the two is the demon pack stealing from you?
Is he stealing from you the power to make your
own decisions? Or is he stealing from you a predestined path?
Is he liberating you from this from the same tired
walk to the train station and the same tired choices
on the menu? Well, the funny thing about to choose

(44:40):
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. 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,

(45:02):
largely you are constrained by the possibilities of your culture,
of your station in life, of you know, political realities, etcetera.
But even then, is the unpredictability of a behavior at
all evidence of your control or your personal volition of
that behavior. I don't know. I mean that those things

(45:25):
seem perhaps unrelated to me. Actually, yeah, I mean you
can also be predictably unpredictable. Yeah, um. But anyway, coming
back to this definition, the one that's you know, acting
without constraint of necessity or fate. So I think it
can be 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,

(45:46):
anything I do or think or say, given the exact
same inputs, I could have produced different output than I
actually did. Um. And this this would be I think,
some way 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

(46:08):
done something different than what you did. Unfortunately, I think
this is just a completely untestable assumption. You know, given
the complexity of brains, you can never have all of
exactly the same inputs that somebody had at a given moment,
So you can't experiment on this to find out what's true.
That we certainly love ruminating on this in our fiction.

(46:29):
Like any kind of time travel film, any kind of
Groundhog Day scenario is exploring this subject. Yeah. 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 them. So it would be funny

(46:49):
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 any new knowledge or whatever. Um.
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

(47:12):
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,
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

(47:33):
of input is the same. Is that actually freedom? That
just sounds like a different kind of impetus or control.
That's interesting. You bring up randomization via some sort of
technology like dice or casting of bones, because we've we've
discussed that in the past on the show. How that
is sometimes brought up as being like that that like,
that's the purpose of these early divination um uh technologies,

(47:57):
techniques a way to randomize chill and to sometimes force
us towards a decision that we otherwise 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,

(48:17):
it's funny, I mean either way you go there, So yeah,
say you're doing the each ing 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,
But does that actually change what people mean when they
say when they say free will? I don't know. I mean,

(48:39):
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 and the randomization is still an
input on you. Um So I don't know. So uh,
anyway to 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

(49:02):
of free will is this claim. And the claim is
our consciousness dictates our choices of how we act, or
in other words, we're conscious of the process by which
our choices are made or by which our actions are generated.
Right that that when we act, we are able to

(49:22):
consciously be a part of the impetus to act, or
consciously cause the impetus to act. And I think this
one is actually testable, and we can come back to
that in a minute. 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 uh,
you know, essentially banging their head against the wall about this. Uh,

(49:45):
for the thousands of years. The philosophers Democratus and Lucippus
saw the universe as wholly governed by natural laws and
composed of you know, essentially indivisible atoms. They took the
determinus view of life of one propelled down a flowing
stream of events. Aristotle, on the other hand, is a

(50:07):
great example of someone who stressed the individual's responsibility for
their actions. The indeterminates view of life is a boat
propelling itself through a body of water. So, yeah, to
what extent are you just sailing down the river? Uh?
You know, at you know, with with no power on
where you're going, Or are you in a boat that
have in which you have the power to move about

(50:27):
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
band or snatch. Alright, we're back, So let's start with
some arguments against free will, because ultimately I think these
are these are often easier to discuss Sure, I would

(50:50):
say the most basic one, right, is just the science
of physics. Right. Physics is very predictable. 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? Right? And it

(51:11):
basically comes back to a democritus and lucippus, right, the
the idea that their natural laws and they they are
in place, and we're not above those laws. Sure. Yeah,
so we're acting on the inputs that come in and
you know that that uh, being 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

(51:33):
as physically reactive objects. Uh. Now, this is an argument,
of course, is the most common argument I think against
free will. But one question, is our free will and
causal determinism really incompatible? Uh? 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

(51:53):
called compatible lists. They 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 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

(52:16):
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 will, right right. Another take on
this that I came across, and this goes back to
something we're talking about earlier, contemporary British analytic philosopher Galen Strawson. Uh.

(52:38):
Their argument is that it's that basically free will is
impossible because we act the way we are right. And
this argument, this argument always makes me think of of
Yates in the poem No Second Troy. There's that line
what what could she have done? Being what she is? Uh?
And I think about that with myself, like what when
I look back on past choices, what else could I

(52:59):
have done? And 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 these
these things in my life, and my mind is this,
and then what other choice would that mind have made? Right?
I mean, this is Uh, that's a very good way

(53:22):
of putting it, and 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 free, right, Like it was in
my nature too responsibly come to work this morning, and

(53:42):
so therefore I did. Uh. Could I have decided not
to come into work? Could I have gone to the
local I don't know, arcade or something or whatever whatever
whatever one does when one skip squirk, I guess I
could have. In theory, there's nothing stopping you. Yeah, nothing
at all, except that is not my nature, and that
is not what I did. Because of my nature. Given

(54:03):
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. Yeah. Now
that being said, yes, events could have been different. We
could have had an email from our boss saying that
there is going to be like a rock concert in

(54:23):
the that's in the office today. This 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,
you can tease your brain all day thinking about what
elf and how this would have this little detail where
this other detail would affected your choices, but ultimately we

(54:46):
only have the version of the path behind us to
look back on when we 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 it
to break downs between what feels like the moment of
choice and what physically signals a choice being made. Yeah,
I think this very much complicates the idea that Again,

(55:07):
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. 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 hard to deny. All right,

(55:28):
So here are some 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. 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. Yeah, And men and the idea that

(55:49):
the way that there are 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 choice is 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. And and of course that

(56:13):
has an important evolutionary role. It has put an 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. Um,
this is this is important, but it can also lean
into these interpretations that you know that certainly, uh, you know,

(56:36):
I have more choice than I actually have, or even
ultimately an idea that, of course it's explored in Bandersnatch,
the idea that these other alternate choices are kind of
alternate timelines, 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 way that exists
because I just saw it. Unfortunately, I would say about

(56:59):
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. Like if
you ever had a like a close call where say

(57:22):
you're almost in a wreck or you almost do something
that could have conceivably gotten you killed. Um, and then
you have that moment of reflection granted on one level,
like it it may get your just 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
of realizing your close proximity to this other possibility, like

(57:44):
I was just some minor choice, some minor bit of
input data away from something more catastrophic. Yes, it makes
you suddenly you come face to face with how dependent
you are on moment to moment circumstances and awareness. Uh.
Though I would say a lot of times when I
get that like that, like you know, catch your breath
about what could have happened. It wasn't because I narrowly

(58:05):
avoided something really bad happening. It's because I suddenly, out
of nowhere, imagined something really bad happening. Like ever, you're
going down a flight of stairs and it's going fine,
but you just imagine, oh I could fall and hit
my teeth on that thing, and oh yeah, oh yeah,
I do that. This is of course, this is one
of my pitfalls, is to almost constantly, um essentially fantasize

(58:29):
about bad things that could happen. Uh. And I think
a lot of us do that, you know, and part
of that is your your mind is exploring possibilities of
what is happening or could happen or has happened, And
but in doing that we can lean into the negative
possibilities too much, and then our lives become this, you know, abysmal.
Choose your own adventure book of most of mostly terrible ends,

(58:52):
even though the path that you were actually on may
not be leading to any of them. Um It's it
seems like the curse of all this confused sh 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 counter factuals is what makes is what

(59:14):
gives rise to this whole argument. Uh So, another thing
I have on 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

(59:35):
opinion generation, deliberation, will, power to stick to a choice,
and the large human brain has all of this in spades.
Cave argues that the level of free will UH 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 f Q in

(59:56):
the same way that we well roughly measure ones intelligent creativity,
and other psychological factors. I do think that's possible, but
I also think that that would be subject to a
lot of debate about exactly what it is you're measuring.
There as a lot of these actual uh, you know,
human or animal quotients are I mean, when when you
measure human intelligence, there's debate about what exactly are you

(01:00:17):
measuring uh, 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. What what
what do you mean when you say freedom? Yeah. Another
take on this that I had read in the past
was something that neuroscientists David Eaglemanu called the principle of
sufficient automatism. And the idea here is that the more

(01:00:37):
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 factor hitching a ride
on top of enormous automated machinery. Um So again it
comes there's there's plenty of ground in between automaton and
self moving soul where you can you can so of

(01:01:00):
move the slider towards one direction or the other and
still have something that we can at least refer to
as free will. But it might only be a very
very little bit of something. Yeah, it might, And it's
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? Uh? Yeah? And I think for me,

(01:01:23):
at least, some of the definition problems would still remain,
Like I'm not sure that even then that that's clarifying
what the concept of freedom means there. Um 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 that if

(01:01:43):
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, we 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 pyirical research is pretty clear that
this is not true, at least not in many cases.

(01:02:06):
Um 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 are all our decisions are reached?
Um So, first of all, I want to look at
one by a soon brass Hines and Haines, published in
Nature Neuroscience in two thousand eight, called unconscious determinants of

(01:02:26):
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've got a left button pressed with your

(01:02:47):
left hand. You've got a right button pressed with your
right hand. Uh. 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 what 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

(01:03:09):
your decision about which button to push, and in some cases,
the researchers could detect brain activity of the prefrontal and
prietal 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

(01:03:31):
believe that you have consciously made a choice to do something,
machines can look at your brain and showed 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. This is 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

(01:03:54):
the lightning, but perhaps I am the thunder, or at
least my experience is that of the thunder. But then
the the other question is, well, does that mean I'm
not the lightning? Am I not? Both? And maybe just
I'm like I have a thunder level awareness of what
I am, but there is this lightning that precedes this
experience of me. Well, I mean, I don't know. I
mean the the decision is generated by the brain. So

(01:04:17):
again you're back to this question of what free will means.
But if it, if it does have something to do
with consciously being a participant at the moment that a
decision is made, that 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. But okay, that
was two thousand eight. Is there anything since then? Sure.

(01:04:40):
Here's one study with findings along these lines, but applied
to voluntary mental imagery, who was published just last year
in twenty nineteen, and the open access journal Scientific Reports.
It's by Kenny Robert and Pearson in I said, Scientific
Reports called Decoding the Contents and Strength of Imagery before
Volitional Engagement. Uh, And again this was published in twenty nineteen.

(01:05:02):
The short version here is that the researchers exposed people
to two different images. You've 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 what it's what it looks like in your brain
when you're thinking about these two images separately. Uh, They

(01:05:24):
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 and average
of eleven seconds before the person's actual choice about which

(01:05:45):
one they were going to imagine. So one of the authors,
Joel Pearson UH was quoted in a statement I believed
to 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 that comes

(01:06:06):
back some we talked about recently. Um 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, for example, why

(01:06:28):
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 are things going on within

(01:06:50):
the brain that we can detect with machinery from the
outside that suggests 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 in a measurable way

(01:07:13):
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. So again,
kind of a thunder and lightening scenario right now. Of course,
this stuff we've been talking about is is true of
typical human brains. Once you start looking at a typical

(01:07:35):
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 site, the fact that people
can physically react to visual stimuli while believing consciously that
they are blind, or that they're blind in some part
of their visual field, like you can react to, you know,

(01:07:57):
raise your hand to catch a ball without leaving that
you have seen the ball, or you've 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
when you meant to pick up the fork. Um. Of course,

(01:08:18):
the experiences of split brain patients, which we 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 callistotomy, 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
and making choices without the conscious awareness or control of

(01:08:41):
the left hemisphere, which seems to be the part of
the brain that can usually talk, and the last example
lead to hypotheses like Michael Gazaniga and Joseph Ladue'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 narrative explanations that reconcile past and present

(01:09:03):
and give us the sense of that 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 and has rational justifications. Uh, and

(01:09:23):
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. Uh, And then you've got to
like terrible options that are designed in order to be
ignored and discarded by the boss and flatter the boss

(01:09:45):
and give them a sense of control, which can be
a dangerous exercise. Absolutely, I'm not advising that is a
good strategy. I'm just saying people do it. To look
quickly at one more study I found. This was published
in in p N A. S By by Darby, jouts Burke,
and Fox called lesion network localization of free will. Very briefly,

(01:10:07):
the authors here defined the 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 know, you've
got volitional control, and then a sense of responsibility for
that action, which is the feeling of agencies. You have
volition and agency. And then they looked at two neurological conditions.

(01:10:28):
One that is believed to disrupt each of these functions. Uh.
They looked at focal brain lesions that disrupt a volition
causing a kinetic mutism. And a kinetic mutism is a
condition where 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

(01:10:48):
and this would of course cause alien Limb syndrome. Again
Alien Lynn syndrome. That's where you've got part of your
body acting or moving in a way that does not
feel voluntary. It moves, but you don't feel like you
did did. And then they basically found that brain lesions
that disrupt volition occur all over the brain, but there
within a brain network that is connected in some way

(01:11:09):
to the anterior singulate 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 pre qunus. Now, again
I would note that this this acknowledges physical evidence that
there are distinct brain processes involved in generating action, you know,

(01:11:30):
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. Now,
obviously we could keep going here, We could keep discussing uh,
free will and what feels like free will and how
it matches up with with neuroscientific data, etcetera. But at

(01:11:53):
this point the podcast, we probably do need to bring
it back around to band or snatch and the question like, okay,
given all this stuff we've talked about. What does Bandersnatch
seem to be saying about all of this, Well, 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 that we can resist,

(01:12:14):
but it takes considerable effort to run counter to the
current that we're stuck in. I would say a thing
that is a theme that has 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. Yeah,
Like I was thinking, I was trying to list, like
all the various factors and agents that are influencing Stephen

(01:12:39):
in the story. I mean, we have his mental health,
his past trauma, his father, his therapist, uh, the the
the work and tragic life, the influence of Jerome F. Davies,
his boss at Tucker Soft, his mentor slash hero, slash
friend Colin Rittman, conspiracy theories, music, need, etcetera. And that's

(01:13:01):
not even getting into the Specco development 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 a player in another world. Yeah, the story
really brings home this paradox, which is that I think

(01:13:22):
it is the case that the closer we look at
free will and the more we uh, you know, bring
bring our our sharpest scientific tools and and philosophical instruments
to uh to understand it, the less it seems to
make sense and the less it seems to be there.
And yet at the same time that we acknowledge that
to feel like your actions are not under your own

(01:13:44):
control is not a heightened state of consciousness, that is
still a problem and it uh and I don't know
exactly what that signals. That maybe yet another unresolved tension
in the the issue of free will, that like, the
more closely we examine it, the less we feel like
we have it, and yet genuinely feeling like you don't
have it, the more you feel that way, the more

(01:14:05):
this is a serious impediment to you living a healthy life. 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 and certainly again Black

(01:14:25):
Mirror frequently comments on our uneasy regarding new technology. 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. Yes, uh,
you know, I would say one of the things that

(01:14:45):
is a legitimate concern about free will, however you define
it as 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,
I can sort of make sense of that it was
because I read this book, or I read this article,

(01:15:07):
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. Does that make sense? Yeah? Yeah,
And we've we've discussed some of these in the past.

(01:15:29):
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 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 might just
be some highly targeted advertisements for example. Right. So, uh,

(01:15:52):
Two individuals that I ran across the road about this
topic or or 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 Veal, a technology
policy researcher at University College London, who utilized Europe's General

(01:16:14):
Data Protection Regulation or g d p r UM law
to request a copy of the data Netflix collected about
him and his choices through the use of the band
or Snatch program. Now they complied, perhaps in part because
of vail status as a public person, but basically Netflix
acquires this information in order to carry out the Bandersnatch experience,

(01:16:38):
which makes sense rights it has to chart your path
through this this complex system but then also Netflix keeps
this information, 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,
on on one level, that sounds well and good as well,

(01:16:58):
except that the veal 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 shoes article, she points to the early choice
we make between uh Kellogg's Frosties and then Quaker Sugar Puffs.

(01:17:19):
Now both of these are real serials, though I have
to admit I thought Quaker Sugar Puffs was made up
because it has this ridiculous honey monster mascot. It's like
super fun, kind of a cheddar Goblin sort of thing.
But it turns out this was an actual UK product.
It was just a UK only products, so Americans such
as ourselves were perhaps not privy to it. But again,

(01:17:42):
both were real products, and neither one was a paid inclusion,
so it was not official product placement or product integration.
And Netflix, of course is like an ad free UH
system anyway. But Shoe points to some of the words
of Reed Hastings, co founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix,
who pointed out during a webcast tied to an earnings

(01:18:03):
report that seventy of Bandersnatch viewers selected Kellogg Frosty's over
the the the Quaker Sugar Puffs. No, I did too.
I feel so vulnerable right now. 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,

(01:18:24):
which I guess I should have mentioned that earlier, because
that has a whole another 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. But again, I'm 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

(01:18:44):
Sugar Puffs is awesome and weird. Again, but more to
the point, as Shoe points out, Spencer Wig, 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 of the quarter. Now, she said,
while Netflix doesn't run commercials and has stated that it
would not use bandersnatch information for anything like this, others

(01:19:07):
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 here yet.
But I suppose we have to to consider two key
factors in that statement. So first of all, we're in

(01:19:29):
the early days of truly you know, interactive features like
this on major streaming platforms. Uh, you know assume and
that is this assuming that it really catches on at all.
As we've discussed, interactive cinema is not new. It's been
around for decades and it has largely failed to catch on. Um,
it is not like a driving force in our entertainment.

(01:19:53):
You'll find plenty of examples of it. You also find
a lot of computer games that that kind of fulfill
this uh this niche right, I mean, um, those are
also sort of failed. Yeah, um, you know, I would
have there're certainly deeper dives and say the history of
things like what Telltale games I think was the company
that did a number of these things that were again
not not really released, as they weren't marketed as interactive

(01:20:16):
movies so much as they were interactive gaming experiences. UM.
So that's one thing to consider. Interest in interactive films
has essentially gone up and down over the years, and
again it hasn't really like ignited. Still Netflix and and
also Netflix itself has only released a handful of interactive titles,
mostly kids stuff. Bandersnatches their only true adult drama release

(01:20:37):
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 be a little bit
secretive about like what's coming out, um 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

(01:20:59):
think I think I've I've seen it written it like
three times as much work went into Bandersnatch. Versus say, um,
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

(01:21:21):
to have uh, you know, something more updated, like I
tried to load it onto my phone uh, and I
have an older um iPhone. 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 to generate the necessary user data to then

(01:21:44):
be employed. I can really see this kind of thing
being used as a as a major data mining that
I mean, I don't know. It seems very possible to
get psychologically salient information through this. Now, of course that
they're already getting information through all kinds of things. You know,
the tech business can get your information through, uh, through
what you buy online, through what websites you visit, through

(01:22:05):
what you do on Facebook or other social media. 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 recommendation of what you might want
to watch in the future right now. This is so,

(01:22:26):
of course we're talking about this and possibly going multiple ways.
One is using interactive choices in uh, 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 ads of stuff you searched

(01:22:47):
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 show as you watch right right, Like,
you know, they know that were given the serial scenario,

(01:23:09):
like potentially the the the master of the content being
Netflix or some other company. Hypothetically, they might know that
you are saying more inclined towards you know, healthy lifestyle
choices and therefore some sort of granola uh, you know,
health wrapped content would be ideal for you in that scenario,

(01:23:29):
or they might know that that's not your your your
ideal serial, 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 you on the screen. Now, that would be,
of course, something we're more familiar with, just like inserting ads.

(01:23:52):
And you might imagine a character walking past a billboard
or something in the movie like happens all the time now,
except that billboard can be you know, dynamically inserted with
new imagery or something. 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

(01:24:13):
specially tailor do 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, you know that, like
sometimes the values of of a filmmaker creator come through
and what happens in a story, uh, and then other

(01:24:35):
times they're they're sort of like cheap attempts to display values.
What would often be called like pandering, right, you know,
like uh, you know, cheap appeals to patriotism or something
like that in a movie, or or I don't know,
I guess you could make an argument for Awards season
Academy Awards bait as well. Right, yeah, sure, you know,
just like sort of cheap attempts to exploit the specific

(01:25:00):
desires or value interests of a specific target audience. Um.
And and so you can imagine, 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

(01:25:22):
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. And so
what I was imagining beforehand was you could have different
versions of the movie Independence Day. You remember that speech
Bill Pullman gives before they all get in the planes
and go fly off and fight. Um, So it's this

(01:25:43):
rousing moment where Bill Pullman gives this kind of innocuous
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 that's that's
very elusive. He gives a speech, He's like, humans will
join arms together around the world. There will be no

(01:26:04):
more nations and borders and creeds, and we all, you know,
we all unite as one and standing 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, who are watching, right,

(01:26:28):
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 they are
They're not feeding you Independence Day UH with a tailored
uh speech in it, but they are feeding giving you
a feed that that that reflects your world views and values,

(01:26:52):
and people are are very invested in like the values
of what media they consume these days. I can imagine
it being judged ay 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.

(01:27:12):
It doesn't have to be a coherent vision or picture
of the world. 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 names and what uh
you know, how power works, etcetera. And it's not everybody's

(01:27:33):
political or philosophical cup of tea. I mean, you can,
I think you can enjoy that film without focusing on
all of that. But still it's definitely there um and
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 and what it's saying. But then you
have films like say Patton. Patton is often brought up

(01:27:56):
as example of a film that meant one thing to
one part of a divided America and another to the
other part of the divided America without having to have
like an A B version, 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,
Is that like an anti war movie or a patriotic movie?

(01:28:17):
You know, you sort of have some elements of each
you can latch onto what you want to see there. Um,
But yeah, I don't know. I'm I'm somewhat disturbed by
the idea of like of of media filling up with
these like personally tailored options that are designed to make
a sort of like generic media template, uh, individually palatable
to the user, as opposed to standing for something on

(01:28:40):
its own and allowing you to judge it. Yeah, Or
having some level of ambiguity like does the does the
the modern audience and like the 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

(01:29:01):
the creator or creators behind it, like they you know,
is there is there an increased hunger for that? And
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 Conan the Barbarian, but I
think your view is is pro totalitarianism and uh and

(01:29:24):
and you know, I don't know, I celebrates uh 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
Conan the Barbarian, uh, you know, the the uh relaunch
of the platform, then you will get what is tailored
to you. Its treatment of masculinity and power will be

(01:29:47):
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 uh,
you know, to to the role of the these narratives
in our in our culture. I remember many years ago
how much of like uh the new Internet and the

(01:30:08):
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 how scary and
messed up that would feel when it actually happened. I

(01:30:30):
like to come back to Banterer's net. 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, Uh,
make a choice here and there that were just different
from what I did the first time. I got a

(01:30:51):
bleak ending, but it it felt more authentic. Um so,
uh yeah, it's interesting to think about, like how how
choice potentially impacts our appreciation of of a work like this,
especially if we're talking about increasingly interactive work in a
hypothetical future. Had to find a good bleak note to

(01:31:13):
end on, I think that's it. Yeah, yeah, I mean,
if we're talking about black Mirror, that's that's where we
have to leave it. All right, Well, we covered a
lot of ground in there. Um. 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 banders such? How
many viewings have you given? Did you do like Joe

(01:31:33):
and go in and try and find every Golden Easter egg?
I didn't get all of them, but I got a
lot of them. 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 you all have some

(01:31:56):
experience to share about this, and we would love to
hear from you. In the mean time, 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 dot com
and that will redirect you to a place where you
can find the episodes and wherever you get the show.
We just have to ask that you support us by
rating and reviewing and subscribing. And don't forget we have

(01:32:17):
another show out there titled Invention and Invention covers Human
techno history, one invention at a time. 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. Uh. If you would like
to get in touch with us with with notes on

(01:32:37):
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.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radios.
How stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio

(01:32:57):
is at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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