Hello Internet - H.I. #74: Black Mirror Season 3

Episode Date: November 30, 2016

Grey and Brady discuss: a twitter style guide, cryogenics, chess world championship, black tape on webcams, cybersecurity revisited, and Black Mirror Season 3. Brought to You By Audible: get a free 30-day trial by signing up at audible.com/hellointernet Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Harry's: Quality Men's Shaving Products. FREE SHIPPING + Promocode HI for $5 off your first purchase Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes Discuss this episode on the reddit Brady Coat of Arms Fischer Random Chess RoboCup Investigatory Powers Act 2016 Hello Internet Black Mirror Episode

I'm reluctantly telling you about a little trial I'm doing at the moment because I don't want to like hurt your feelings or stir you up. But I just thought you'd find it interesting. And I also want to find out how you deal with these things as well. Hurt my feelings. Again, immediately concerns raised to maximum. What could Brady be talking about? We are seven seconds into the podcast. I know. I'm sorry. Because now please bear in mind, I say this with love in my heart, all right?

Okay. But like sometimes you are not the easiest person to be friends with. Oh, okay. All right. And again, I say this with love in my heart. I think you're like a really nice guy and you're very generous and considerate. But you know that certain types of interactions and certain things about your personality

confuse other humans and cause problems and tensions and things like that right like you know that don't you i know some of my interactions confuse a brady that's true yes yeah all right so anyway so, and because of a lot of our interaction is like online, like through email or particularly through messaging and that, I mean, we joke this sometimes can compound the problem because there can be miscommunications because of lack of body language and nuance and just having the text there sometimes gets us both very confused. That's okay. I live with it, you know, and I'm sure you live with it too. But I'm trying an experiment because I think I've

been compounding the problem unnecessarily. And what I am experimenting with is trying a new icon to represent you on my operating system. Because it would be no surprise to anyone that i use the cg pre-gray icon that you you know you use everywhere it just seems obvious that that's what i would use so every time a message from you comes up up pops the little black circle with a cog on it and the little flask and to me like that's you but the problem with that is, and this has always been the way with your representation online, not only is it anonymous, it's kind of a little bit unfriendly. Because, you know, it's mechanical and scientific and it's very dark and very non-human. Is this unfriendly?

I'm not sure I agree with you on that. Okay, I won't call it unfriendly, but I definitely wouldn't call it friendly. I think it's very cool and it works really well for your YouTube channel and your Twitter and all those things. You know, I think it's a masterstroke on your behalf. But having that come up and look me in the face when I'm being frustrated by you in some communication, I think compounds the problem. Okay.

So what I have done in the last week is i've actually got i've chosen a photo of you where you've got a big smile on your face and you look kind of goofy and we're messing around from some photo we took ages ago with a bright colorful background and i've made that my icon on my phone for you so every time i get a message from you i've got a big goofy cgp gray smiling at me out of my phone and i think it just diffuses the tone of whatever's going on all the time. I think it's been a masterstroke on my behalf. You think this has been effective? Yeah, I do. And I think we should think carefully about the photos and icons we use to represent people on our phones as we go more and more down this path of interacting with people

in this way. I think it can make a big difference. It obviously has in this case. What do you have for me when that message for me comes up? I have the picture of you, the one that looks like it's professionally done from ages ago, where you're holding a tiny puppy, Audrey. That's the one that I have of you. You know that one.

That's just taken by my wife with an iPhone in a kitchen. Well, it's very professional looking then. It's very well done. That is the photo that I have of you. wife with an iPhone in a kitchen. Well, it's very professional looking then. It's very well done. That is the photo that I have of you. That is also the photo of you that for some reason keeps replicating itself over and over in my iPhoto library. It's like, I can't even tweet how many times that happens, but it's like, I've complained about this on Twitter. It's like a virus. I know. I'm going to complain about it again. But for some reason, when I open my iPhoto library, I'm going to say at least once a month, there are hundreds of copies of two images.

One of which is this photograph of you, Brady, holding Audrey. And the other is a Hitler meme from my Reddit video from like three years ago, which is a stupid picture of Hitler wearing high socks and looking like an idiot in shorts. It's like I have this Brady Hitler meme thing that just replicates over and over. And I am convinced that it's getting worse over time, that when I open up my iPhoto library, it's like five more every time. Because now it's like screens and screens that I have to scroll through to get rid of these hundreds and hundreds of photos so I'm just realizing as I'm saying this out loud while I do think it's a fantastic photograph of you and I have been using it as

my contact photo of you for a long time I'm realizing maybe I too also have some negative associations with that particular image and the quite literally thousands of times I have deleted it and it still will not go away. So maybe I should select a different photograph of you as well. That's got to be some metaphor for our professional relationship. I don't know what it is, but there's got to be something there. It's in there somewhere. Anyway, do you have like icons for everyone in your phone? Like everyone who messages you or are most people iconless or photo-less? Or do you attach a person to pretty much everyone who contacts you?

Yeah, I'll attach a picture. I mean, the main reason that you need the picture is that you don't accidentally send a message to the wrong person, right? Like when I'm messaging with your wife and we're talking about you behind your back, and slagging you off, I don't want to accidentally send a message to you. So I have to make sure like there's a clear visual representation of who you're talking to. So that's why like it's, everybody has to have a photograph. It would be incredibly stressful if they were just the default person outline icons. That would be no good at all. No good.

Oh, it's like initials sometimes. It's the initials of the person, isn't it? So I'd be like BH. That's right. Yeah. That's no good. all no good oh it's like initials sometimes it's the initials of the person isn't it so i'd be like bh yeah that's right yeah that's no good you have to have a photograph do you cycle them very often like will you change the photo of your wife like you know once a month or something if you had the same one forever okay so my wife has been getting on my case about this yeah but i use a photograph of her that is at this point eight years old she keeps wanting me to update to a more modern one and even just recently like hopefully sent me a few well-posed photographs she's like you know these could be my contact photos but i feel like oh no but that's not you that's the contact photo that i've been using of you for forever yeah it's just like no this is the digital representation of my wife and yeah even though she doesn't necessarily think it i

still think she looks exactly the same i can't tell the difference so i see no reason to change it changing those pictures is a big deal i have some sympathy with you there i don't change those things easily yeah it's like once it's locked in it becomes like this is not supposed to be a current photo of the person. Like this is just the shorthand representation of the person. But that's why I've had to change yours though. I've had to change yours because I'm doing psychological testing on myself. I'm saying whether using something a bit more personal and friendly will help diffuse the frustration you sometimes incite in me. I think it's a good idea. And also maybe you too should send me some recommendations

you might have of what I should use for your contact photo. Because I think maybe I do have to change my contact photo for you in the system as well because of the deletion associations. I'll go on a shoot. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by Harry's. The holidays are fast approaching and Harry's knows that finding the perfect gift for some guys is near impossible. But with Harry's you can give a gift that is both thoughtful and practical. If you haven't heard of them before, Harry's was started by two best friends, Jeff and Andy, who were fed up with being overcharged for razors. So they started their own razor company to give people what they deserve.

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So go to harrys.com right now to get a great gift. They're offering free shipping until December 9th, so act now, go to harrys.com right now to get a great gift. They're offering free shipping until December 9th. So act now, go to their website, enter code HI at checkout and get $5 off. Thanks so much to Harry's for supporting the show. So there are many things in life that cause me irritation that are my own fault. For example, the day that I stupidly on Hello Internet jokingly told people if they were not on a plane to send me a tweet. You deserve every one of those tweets.

I will regret that forever. I hope so. I really do. And it was my fault. And as people go through and listen to the back catalogue and send me those tweets, not realising I was sort of joking around a bit. I cop that on the chin. And most things I think are my fault because generally I make a lot of mistakes. But one thing that was not my fault was the belief that continues to blossom. And I continue to complain about that people think we invented the term humblebrag on hello internet okay can i just tell you something yeah i just had this happen with my own parents yesterday

this will never go away and it was not our fault we never jokingly claimed to make it up we've talked about it a bit but we've never said it was our thing ever. No. But people believe that. And now the worst possible thing that could happen seems to have happened. And that is some new game. I think it's some new Pokemon game or something that everyone's playing. Has a scene in it, like a cut scene in it that uses the term humblebrag.

And everyone who's playing this game is seeing this thinking it's some coup for hello internet that our word has been now used in this game and is sending me screenshots of the game i cannot tell you how many screenshots i have got from this game where this term humblebrag comes up on the screen and people saying this is amazing brady you're amazing and it was your fault too because you're the person who first mentioned the word on the podcast. Was it me? Did I bring it up? I can't remember. Yeah. I was grappling with the concept and you said, oh, it's a humblebrag because you'd seen the word before when it was coined. Right. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's what it is. And we talked about it from there.

Gosh, that thing haunts me and it's not my fault. The other stuff I can cop because it is my fault. Right, right. Yeah, I feel like we were more serious back then. Like modern current us might make some joke about owning a word. But no, we even did like a whole thing where we talked about the person who had invented the term. Like I think it couldn't have been more clear that like we're just discussing a word. We didn't create this word. But yeah, that meme is totally out there and seems impossible to kill

even with my own family i've corrected the idea several times like it just keeps coming on back yeah it's happened my wife's done it too thank god people don't think we invented the word flag oh brady i was just watching the olympics and they were flying a whole bunch of flags. You must be so proud. It'll never die, Brady. I know. I may as well claim I invented it, at least get a bit of credit out of it. There you go. You heard it here, folks.

Brady Haran, inventor of the Humblebrag. No, you can't do that because the guy who invented it, I think, passed away and it was a really tragic story. Well, then he's not here to contradict your claim. It's just going to be even more rock solid, buddy. No, it was not us. Gray invented it. Nope, totally Brady.

Brady, he's the guy. He's so good with all those words. Remember people, Brady's really good with all the words. Me, I'm rubbish. I couldn't coin anything, even if I tried viewjacking. Okay, Brady, I've come across a thing, which I don't really understand what it is, but I'm going to show you.

And this is something somebody put on the Reddit, which is on the Wikipedia page for Brady. As in the word Brady, not me. Just Brady in general, right? The word Brady. What can the word Brady refer to? Lady Brady's, actual Brady's, places called Brady's, all of this stuff. On there is an image for the Brady coat of arms.

Yes. Could you describe to me what the Brady coat of arms is on the Wikipedia page? Since seeing this on Reddit, I've investigated further and found all sorts of variations of this and they are all quite similar. And it is kind of a black shield. And in the top left corner is the sun. And then in the bottom right corner is just a hand pointing at the sun. Just a finger just pointing at the sun. There's the sun. Now, when I first saw this, I assumed that someone was having a little fun at the Wikipedia's expense, because I do know that our audience, on occasion, only when it's appropriate, sometimes screws around with Wikipedia and changes things to make them funny. And so I thought like, oh, surely somebody has gone in and added in this Brady coat of arms, which is a hand pointing at a thing, which couldn't be more you.

Because I do this in photos all the time. Yeah, yeah. You did this in the very last episode. But sure enough, when I went to click on the link, like it's from 2007, like it predates the podcast by a lot. And so I just like, I was totally confused by this. You do some searching, you find all sorts of like ancient coats of arms for Brady and it's all variations of this finger pointing at the sun so so you've done much more deep research into this you found this going back well if a quick google image search counts as deep research then yes i think that totally counts yes it does i think if you just google image brady coat of arms

you'll find a whole bunch of other ones i find this this just an amazing, miraculous coincidence that makes me smile. It is a nice coincidence. And I like that the thing that's being pointed at is like an astronomical object too, and reflects my kind of space geekiness too. So yeah, it could only have been better if it was the moon. It could only have been better if it was the moon, but it still strikes me as just a remarkable coincidence. I just can't believe that this was actually a thing that pre-existed the podcast

and it was not internet shenanigans. Absolutely amazing. What's the grey coat of arms? I'm sure just in coincidence's sake, it'll turn out to be like a bunch of gears, right? That's what it'll be. Quick Project Revolution update. It's been a bit of a palaver, but it looks like as we record, we're recording on a Sunday night, it looks like the albums will actually hit the post tomorrow.

Oh, wow. But don't like hold me to that. There've been more problems than I would have expected. Put it this way, you could make an entire podcast of Corporate Compensation Corner based on some of the problems I've been having getting these things sorted out. You better be careful making an offhanded comment like that. People will start asking for Corporate Compensation Corner as it relates to Project Revolution. You can't mix your corners though. Oh, is that not how that works? That would be confusing. Do they get all round and squishy if you mix too many of them together? Is that what happens? Yeah, they do.

You have too many corners, things start rounding off a bit. So I don't think we'll do that. But speaking of corners, you up for a paper cut or two? Let's just give you one paper cut. I know you don't like multiple paper cuts. I've always got a lot on my list, but... Sure, Brady. Why don't you give me a paper cut? My paper cut, as many of my paper cuts these days tend to do

relate to bbc twitter streams i don't like kicking the bbc you know i used to work for them i think it's a good organization maybe it's just a reflection of the fact that i follow a lot of bbc on twitter so they have more opportunities to irritate me okay they're a bigger target i noticed three word tweeter was back on shift this week, by the way. Oh, no. Yeah, but let's not go there. But the thing that they do, and I'll use the example that most irritated me, is they were tweeting something about Barack Obama, something he'd done. I can't remember what it was. Let me just make something up. Barack Obama has met with the

French president. And what they said was meeting in paris between french president and at potus they didn't call him by his name or say what he was and they just used his twitter handle a i find the informality a little bit grating from the news organisation. But worse, I find it a little bit ingratiating when they do that. Like they're almost hoping for like a retweet or... And because it's not like it's someone who like you're not going to know or like you're not going to go, oh, I didn't know I could follow the President of the United States on Twitter. Thank you for providing that useful service, BBC.

It's just a little bit like chummy and a bit, it makes me feel squeamish seeing the BBC referring to at POTUS. Look at this photo of at POTUS walking on the street. Because it's almost like a call out to him. Like, because when you're at someone, the main reason you were at someone is so that they will see what you just tweeted. So it's almost like we want the President to see that we just tweeted about him. Like this is the BBC and the President of the United States. It's not me and Justin

Bieber. Oh man. I like the idea of someone at the BBC is going onto their tweets and reply tab and then flipping over to the verified tab and hitting refresh, refresh, refresh. Like, did he see? Did he give us a like? Yeah. I think it's silliness. Don't do that, BBC. They should very rarely be using the ads of people. I don't even like it when the BBC sports site does it. It'll go, you know, oh, fabulous goal today by at Wayne Rooney. Like, don't do that. See, I'm going to totally disagree with you, Brady. I think that they should do that. I think that that's exactly what they should be doing. And what I'm wondering is, did the French president not have a Twitter account? Like, is that why they said the French president and POTUS? I was just making that up. It wasn't

a French president. I didn't even know what it was about. So it was like at French Prezi and at POTUS. I don't know. But also sometimes the Twitter handle doesn't always reflect who the person is. Like, I guess most people know that POTUS means President of the United States, but not everyone would know that. And so sometimes with sport, it'll be, you know, fabulous goal today by at Johnny 371, because that's what some sports person has as their Twitter handle. And then you don't even know who the person is who scored the goal. And also you say they should do it i mean why should they do it to help sort of the interconnectivity of twitter and build the platform that's not what the bbc should be doing i think that this is like the grammar of twitter right the bbc being on twitter in the first place means well you should be using the

system like the way it is to me it's like for the longest time, and even still, it always bothers me how newspapers seem incredibly reluctant to actually link to a thing, right? Whenever they talk about it in their news articles. It's like, if I ever find a news article about a thing and it says like, oh, they're talking about like, here's this amazing thing that someone is making and they mentioned the website, right? But they don't link to it. And so it's like, God damn it. Like, you know, you're on the internet, right guys? Like you link to a thing. And I always find that super frustrating. I agree with that, Gray. And I agree on Twitter also, there's like an etiquette. And if I'm mentioning you, I will use your app rather than just say Gray. Like I agree there's an etiquette, but I feel like there is a line somewhere of kind of a formality and people who

should be a little bit above. And I think once you've got the British Broadcasting Corporation and the President of the United States, I hold them to a slightly different standard. And there are times they should use ats and things like that. And I can even handle, you know, emojis and things like that. But this just feels wrong. It just felt juvenile calling him at POTUS. Yeah.

It just felt a bit wrong to me but i'll defer to your judgment thank you but i'm just thinking like somewhere almost certainly there has to be like a style guy that exists for the bbc twitter account oh man i'd love to get my hands on that yeah i'd rip that bad boy up and rewrite it whoa okay no three word tweets no three word tweets. No three word tweets. No use of the flames for someone is on fire. But I'm just thinking like a style guide must exist somewhere, right? Like this has to be a thing. And I think the problem you would run into with the style guide is trying to define an arbitrary line of seriousness over which you're not going to use the Twitter handles. And I think it's especially weird in a place like Twitter because you can easily end up with, you know, if the BBC had some rule like, oh, heads of state will always use their names

and we won't use their Twitter handles. But that also just runs into the weird popularity thing on Twitter that there are like tons of heads of state who have pitiful numbers of Twitter followers, right? Versus like actual celebrities who have like millions and bazillions of Twitter followers. And so it's like, I don't think there's any consistent way to come down on a ruling of when you should use a name versus a Twitter handle. I think if you're on Twitter, you should just use the Twitter handle. Like, I think that's the medium. That's the way that this works. Well, I'll say two things to that. One is, I actually feel like there probably is not a very well adhered to style guide for the

bbc and twitter because i find them very inconsistent on this and i know bbc you know i used to live by a bbc style guide so i know about bbc style guides and twitter gives me the impression it's the wild west and they haven't got their act together and secondly i don't know where that line is and you make a fair point you know where, where would you draw that line? But that line does exist because if, for example, the Pope died tomorrow, heaven forbid, I can't see the BBC saying, oh my goodness, at Pontifex has died. Like they wouldn't do that because that would feel really, really inappropriate. And that shows that there is a line and therefore there can be a discussion about where that line is that to me feels like there's something in there which is like the office versus the person i don't

know i feel like i'd have to think about that but you're right like it would be weird if they're like at pope awesome dead now that would not seem like an appropriate way to do that yeah so i feel like you've introduced a little crack here but i still feel like i'm okay with it with the twitter handles i think i'm not okay with that i'm just looking i can't believe this so i have the current president's twitter profile open up on my page because i was like i just went to the potus thing yeah and the president is using the thing that i can't stand which is like the three noun description of yourself, which almost always starts with the thing that other people will care the least about and then ends with the

thing that everybody cares the most about. So what is it? So the president's Twitter description right now, it says, dad, husband, 44th president of the United States. Okay. I hate that. Greg, you know what that is? That's a total humblebrag.

It drives me nuts when like some famous important person is like, father, right? They put it as their first thing. Like, oh, come on, dude. Like, nobody's going to your Twitter profile because you're a father, right? Like they're going to you for the thing that you're known for. And it's extra funny to me that it's fallen into this pattern of so many people's Twitter bios have like three nouns as known for. And it's extra funny to me that it's fallen into this pattern of so many people's Twitter bios have like three nouns as the description. And it's like, and so does at POTUS. What would yours be, Grey? What would your three be?

Like in that humblebrag genre, it would it be like, you know, human, male, YouTube superstar? Yeah, that's what I would do. This is why I don't have a Twitter description. It's fundamentally impossible to write a good one. So I just didn't. Oh no. So I'm going to have to redo mine before this podcast goes out. So yeah, no, let's look.

Let's see what it is. What does Brady have? Doggy owner, filmmaker, something, something. Yeah, that's yeah. Dog owner, husband. Hello internet co-host. Yeah, that's right. i don't know what mine says you actually have a decent one you have a decent one because it actually gets to the heart of what

you are and why someone would be looking at your twitter profile yeah so as of right now it says video journalist and youtube person and then you have at number file at periodic videos at hello internet nice to see and other stuff location the mighty black stump i think that's good like i think that's a perfectly good profile because it clarifies who you are and there's like a little bit of a joke for people who would like that yeah but i swear to god i would throw up in my office right now if it actually started with like doggy owner husband youtube person that would be the worst don't do that i won't do that so great there's been probably two news stories this week that have caught my eye

and i wanted to discuss with you because both of them made me think of you for various reasons i don't particularly want to talk about the news story, but there was a big news story in the UK over the last week or two, and it dealt with a 14-year-old girl who was dying. I think she was dying of something like cancer. It was a terrible story. But she wanted to be cryogenically frozen after she died and hoping that one day the cure would be found and she would be brought back to life.

And there was a whole bit of controversy about it to do with her parents. We don't need to go into that. But what I did want to go into was just the whole issue of, because it got people talking about cryonics again. And I read lots of articles and things around the place about what they do and how it works and how people can be frozen. And it did get me thinking that if someone said to me, Brady, there is one person who you are friends with who actually has paid for and is going to be cryogenically frozen after that person dies, which one of your friends do you think it is?

Without doubt, my answer would be CGP Grey. Really? There's nobody else you'd even think of on top of that list there? No, because I don't know where you stand on this. And I deliberately haven't asked you about where you stand on this. But I can imagine you are either vehemently opposed to it and think it's ridiculous. Or, and I slightly lean this way, I think it tickles you. And I think it's possible it's something you have not ruled out doing.

So where do you stand on the issue of cryonics in general? Tell me your story, Gray. Well, you're wrong in that I haven't signed up for cryonics yet. If you're looking for a friend who's signed up and written a check, I am not on that list. However, if you're assembling a list of people who have seriously looked into it and found inadequate cryogenic solutions in the UK and thus were unable to pay for it, then I would also be on that list. Wow. So you're that serious about it? Yeah. I looked into this a little while ago.

Oh, I feel good. I guess it's not the most amazing prediction in the world, was it? Considering your interests, but yeah. I think it's a fantastically accurate prediction, right? Score one in the Brady score. You definitely win this one. So what you've like, like you know you've got a few brochures and looked at a few websites and priced it up have you and didn't find the deal you were looking for yet well no it wasn't that i didn't find the deal that i was looking for it's just that i'm gonna say this was like probably at least three years ago now so i haven't re-researched it in a little while but at least at the time what i came across was that it seemed like America was

way harder core into the cryogenics industry. Yeah. Probably because it has a larger number of slightly nutty, super wealthy people who are happy to fund it, is my guess. Yeah. I'm gonna bet cryogenic sales are fantastic in a place like Silicon Valley I'm basing that on nothing except just a guess yeah and so maybe that's why that industry exists more there but it seemed like there were a serious number of services that you could really sign up for and at least at the time when I looked into it in the UK there was nothing that seemed adequate or trustworthy for what I was really looking for in a cryogenic service. Well, before we go into that, I mean, you are right. America and Russia are the only place

that have facilities that are doing it at the moment. Interesting. About 1600 people are signed on to do it in the future. I think only a couple of hundred or a few hundred people have actually frozen at the moment. You say you couldn't find what you were looking for. What are you looking for? Well, again, I'm trying to dig up vague memories of what it was at the time part of it was these things were shockingly costly some of them were just like i cannot possibly afford this really because the one thing that struck me was that it was cheaper than i expected okay still expensive like you know not something everyone can do but i was surprised that it was a bit cheaper than i

thought maybe prices have come down in the past couple of years, right? It's like genetic testing. Maybe the price keeps halving every 18 months as time goes along and eventually everybody will get it done. Yeah. But whatever it was, it was too expensive at the time. But more than that, it was a question of time to freeze. Like, how fast can they theoretically get you frozen?

Because I feel like, surely surely if this has any chance of working that is the key factor right how mushy do you get before they stick you in the freezer that has to be the thing and so in america there were a bunch of services that basically like their whole selling point was we can get you frozen really fast after you're declared dead yeah and it seemed like that was not the case in the uk, right? In the UK, it was like, oh, yeah, once you die, we'll stick you in a box on a freight ship across the ocean to get you to America. And then we'll freeze you like once the rats have finished eating you. That's what it seemed like. So yeah, didn't seem like a high probability of success with that. Yeah, I'm a little dismissive of it and skeptical about it. So this afternoon,

I was reading a bit about it. And the more I read about it, it didn't start appealing to me. But the more I read about it, the more I thought, no, this is totally going to appeal to grey. And because you can kind of make a justification for it quite easily. You could say, well, okay, maybe if the technology for cryogenically storing people now is flawed, because it is flawed, that doesn't matter.

It just means it'll be a longer wait until the technology exists that can undo that flaw and get around the problem. Any problem can be fixed if we wait enough years. And, you know, then I started going off into all sorts of Pascal's wages and all sorts of things about it and it all becomes quite philosophical. And I started thinking, oh God, I've stumbled into a CGP great video here. Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. It would be a good video for you actually. I'll do one on cryogenics and I'll speculate. That'll be your favorite. You'll love that. So why doesn't it appeal to you though? Like what is it that you find resistant about the idea?

Well, I don't think it will work. I think the technology is too crude. And if it did work and they were able to revive something in a thousand years time i don't think that thing would be me and i think there would be no connection of consciousness and it would be kind of a pointless thing i mean you may as well have frozen my shoe and brought that back to life it's just a vessel that won't have me in it so i'm pretty skeptical about the whole thing and maybe all that money could be used for something better for family and you know almost any cause would be a better use of the money but i then do think you know what do i know about what we're going to know in a thousand years and maybe having my frozen brain will make something

possible that i just have don't understand this is when the whole all the pascal's wager stuff starts coming in doesn't it so you know it's for me, but I'm finding it harder and harder to dismiss people as complete nutcases for wanting to do it. Because who knows where we're going to be in a thousand years. And maybe just having someone's toenail in a thousand years will be enough to completely bring them back and their consciousness and everything for all we know. There's so much stuff we don't understand about people and consciousness and the brain. I'm sort of fascinated by a thing you just tossed out there. And I want to go back to this. When you said, let's imagine that they freeze you, you die and they freeze you. In a thousand years, they wake you up. When you said that you think it might not be you, what do you mean by that? You're not going to pull the sleep card on me now, are you? No, but I'm curious by what you mean. Do you mean that the thing that wakes up

won't be conscious or won't be alive? I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. I don't know. You're asking me to speculate as I think now, but I think if it has a consciousness, it probably wouldn't be my consciousness. I don't think the two would be connected. I think there would be a catastrophic breakdown of whatever makes me me caused by A, death, B, the freezing process. And that is something far more catastrophic than falling asleep. I'm not bringing it to sleep. So you think it would be like a brand new person waking up. Is that what you mean? I don't know.

I find it hard to believe it would be me. That's very interesting. Whether it's something with consciousness or not, I probably would. All I would be doing was be putting down, you know, a hundred thousand bucks or something so that something else could exist in a thousand years that's not me. And there'll be plenty of stuff to exist in a thousand years without something having to be made from the mush of my brain. I just don't buy it. I'm just fascinated by that because I have had over the years conversations on cryogenics with people sometimes. I've never heard anybody have that worry that the thing that would wake up wouldn't be them. I think that's really interesting. That's a really interesting,

different take on it that I find surprising. I just think the preservation of the brain is such a messy process at the moment and so much stuff goes wrong with it. And I just don't think it could still be me. That's interesting. I guess my take on it, the whole reason why I would be open to the idea and seriously looked into it at one point is because I feel like, well, this is a total game of probabilities. I think anybody who's frozen now might have quite literally less than a one in a billion chance of ever being revived. Everything we seem to know about the way that the freezing process works, even putting aside how likely is it that an institution that is preserving these bodies is going to last for as long as necessary,

there's so many questions around the possibility of it working but the thing is when you die and they burn your corpse or bury you in the ground you have an absolutely zero percent chance of coming back so i feel like well you're not going to need that money after you're dead. And so why not spend some money on essentially like the grandest lottery ticket that is possible? Yeah. Why not roll those dice? Why just walk away from the table and say, I've had enough. Thanks.

It was fun. Why not take one last roll of the dice with your dying hand? I feel like I can see that being worth doing. I hear your argument. I guess the question is, at what point do those odds become so small that you think a better use of your money would be instead of buying that lottery ticket to let someone you love now use the money for something?

Yeah, they can use it for cryogenic services. That's what they can use it for. Yeah, yeah. I think the payoff of potentially having life in the future is shockingly high it does become very very pascal's wagery in a sense because you're talking about like infinite rewards and infinitesimal possibilities like i can totally see where this becomes a thing where you can just kind of come down on one side or the other but i feel like the possibility of living again after death is worth rolling the dice, even if it is incredibly unlikely.

Well, let me ask you another more meaningful question, if I dare. Why do you want more life? Because it's better than being dead. Yeah. I don't think that's like a hard question, right? Yeah. Being dead, you know, doesn't seem very appealing. You know, we've all done it before. We know what it's like. And I don't feel like having another eternity of that. So. Well,

we don't know what it's like. Do you know what it was like before you were born? I don't know what it was like before I was born. Of course you do. It was nothingness forever, right? That's what it was. You have no experience of anything. And so I feel like, well, of course, more life is better than more of that. That's why the cryogenic thing seems like it's worth rolling the dice and taking the risk okay i also learned today that walk disney wasn't cryogenically stored oh really is that just an urban legend that's an urban legend he was cremated oh wow see cremation the opposite of cryogenics we want to make sure there's a zero percent chance we're going to take your body and we're going to put entropy to the max.

Yeah. That's going to need some real tech to bring him back. Yeah. That is beyond the pale. All information lost. It's just totally gone. No more Walt Disney. Sorry, everybody.

Sorry, kids. Thank you to Audible.com for supporting this episode of the podcast. As I record now, they've currently got an epic library of 180,000 or so audiobooks and spoken word audio products. And remember, you can get a 30-day trial at audible.com slash hello internet. Now, the most recent audiobook for me was one lots of people have been talking about, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. For those of you who don't know what it's about, I'm not going to spoil it. In fact, I was so spoiler free, I went into this not even knowing if it was fiction or non-fiction. I listened to it on a holiday and I was so engrossed I was even finding excuses to listen a bit longer. Extending a walk, going to

the gym, maybe having just one more drink by the pool. Actually, probably the drinks by the pool excuse was used a lot more than the gym, but you get the idea. This book's really addictive and worked really well in audio. I listened to the version narrated by Will Wheaton, and many of you will know there's a Steven Spielberg film on the way based on the book, so why not make sure you're across the original material before that comes out. Audible's a top service. They've got a really great app. There are no problems exchanging books if you end up with one you don't enjoy so much. And although I've not used it yet, I hear great things about the whisper sync for voice feature

which lets you switch back and forth between reading the book on say Kindle or a Kindle app and listening to the audiobook. All of that without losing your place. Where was I up to? Where was I up to in the audiobook? Where was I up to on my Kindle? Oh, I can't remember. Not a problem anymore. And of course, remember that 30-day free trial

the first time you sign up with Audible. Go to audible.com slash hellointernet to check it out. And thanks to them for supporting the podcast. So the other thing I've been following this week, with great interest, actually, more interest than I would have expected, is the Chess World Championship. Oh, really?

Does this come onto your radar at all? No, I didn't know there was a Chess World Championship. Why would I know there's a Chess World Championship? Well, I know you don't mind chess and used to play a bit. So it made me think, you know, you know more about chess than me, I thought. Certainly playing, I'm a terrible player. But I'm very interested in like the personalities and the stories of chess. Of course you are. You love yourself some personalities. I do. I don't care

at all about the people playing chess, but I did play chess a long time ago and I was very bad when I did play it a long time ago. Well, this is the first time I've ever followed one as it happened. I've read a lot about historic ones. And I've really gotten into it. Like I've been watching like these sort of 45-minute, hour-long summaries of the games afterwards where they explain all the moves and what was going on. I've been really into it.

For those who don't know, it's currently, well, as we're recording, it's currently going on. It probably will be over by the time people hear this. It's between the reigning world champion magnus carlson from sweden and the challenger sergey karayakin from russia and by the way magnus carlson is not from sweden he's from norway i just said that because i knew how much it would stir up all the norwegian listeners okay well there you go looking for some trouble i even went so far as to find out just to double check that sweden was the country that would upset them most for me to say good good this this feels to me like a very brady

moment right here's the real core of your personality shining through because what i want to find out is how many people like pause the podcast right tweeted me and messaged me in those 10 seconds that is totally a thing People pause the podcast to immediately write out the tweet and then unpause it to hear the clarifying sentence a little later. It definitely happens. So you're going to enjoy some of those tweets. I'm very aware Magnus Carlsen is from Norway. I actually know quite a lot about him. I'm mildly fascinated by him. So anyway, I've gotten so into it. The other night when it was happening, they're playing in New York. I actually woke up and like started watching on Twitch, like live commentary of like this six and a half hour game.

At one point, my wife woke up and like said, what on earth are you doing? Because I had it on my iPad. I said, I'm watching the chess tournament. And it was like during one of these 20 minute gaps between moves when they were just all talking and speculating about what might happen next. Oh my God. I wasn't even watching the game.

I was watching like someone else's like computerized board of it because I wasn't watching the live feed of the actual game. Oh my God. I don't understand you at all, Brady. That's amazing. I don't understand you at all. I've just gotten consumed by it. How do they fill 20 minute gaps between moves?

Like what do they comment on? Well, they have two boards on the screen. The one I watch, they have two boards on the screen. Okay. The smaller board on one side is the current state of play. And on the left, they use it as like a bit of a sandbox. And they're like, whoa, he could move this one here, but then he'd move this one here. And you just watch all the potential things that play out. And actually that brought up one of the points I wanted to make from watching one of my observations is because I've always been a little bit fascinated by these grandmasters of chess and a little bit in awe of them. But watching this has kind of taken that away a bit.

And this will actually probably make you love them more, but it makes me love them less. It's made me realize how much they are just like pure computers. Like the people who are best at chess are just the people who can hold a lot of information in their brain and compute lots of moves under time pressure and like it's taken away some of the magic i always felt of like creative moments or just following like an instinct or something like and it's made me realize more and more that the people who are best at chess are people who had just got serious hardware up top. Sometimes, Brady, I feel like I don't understand you at all. Like, what on earth did you think chess grandmasters could possibly be except humans with brains bizarrely specialized for this one activity? Like, how could they be

anything else? I don't know. I think because I read lots of nice literature about chess players, I'd kind of just conjured up something a little bit more magical in my head and a little bit more like creative and dashing and unpredictable. And like, I'm not belittling the skill of being a good chess player and the amazingness of it. It's certainly beyond me. My brain melts just watching it. But I've kind of lost, I've lost something. What have I lost, Gray? Help me find the word. I don't know what you've lost except your own incorrect fantasy about what chess players are like. That's the word I was looking for. Incorrect fantasy. Like, I don't know what you're imagining, but you're thinking chess players are like poets or something. I don't understand what you're imagining, but you're thinking chess players are like poets or something. I don't understand what you were thinking.

Yeah, maybe that's it. Maybe there was a little bit of that. I knew they were super smart and could see ahead and had incredible memories and had computational power. But I think I saw a little bit more poetry in there somehow. And now I'm realizing that was an incorrect fantasy. Yeah, this to me falls into the thing I've said in many different places in many different areas that the people who are best in the world at anything are total freaks because they have to be if you have anything that's remotely competitive. You know, it's like the people who are best in the business world, like broken people, but they're broken in this useful way where they create businesses for the rest of us

just constantly, right? Or if you look at athletes, like the people who are the best in the world are people who are total freaks because they have a combination of like the perfect genetics and a kind of mental attitude that is very conducive to training that nobody could possibly endure. And so in chess, where you have an activity that is just incredibly perfectly cerebral and computational, of course, you should find the people in the world who are functionally human computers. That's what you should expect to find playing chess. Yeah. I guess that's what's taken away some of the magic though, because like if I'm watching a game of cricket or game of football or something, there's not a little bar down the bottom that will say, well, the computer says that if he bowls the next ball here, he will definitely win the game. Whereas chess, it's a bit like, well, the computer says Carlson's next move should be this. And then 99 times out of 100, that's the move he'll do.

Right, right. So it's almost like, well, why am I even watching humans do this now? And it's not helped by the fact they're playing draw after draw after draw right but they have been quite exciting draws and don't get all upset chess fans i haven't been appreciating the games and sometimes they do a move that's not predicted by the computer and that's quite exciting and i have really enjoyed it well i'm glad you've enjoyed it but it to me it's also like well these people aren't the best chess players in the world anyway anymore computers are the best chess players in the world

so it's like you're watching a bunch of inadequate computers playing a game it's like oh there could be much better games being played by computers but we just don't do that because people want to see a human do it but it's like oh you're not even watching the best in the world because the best in the world are not humans that's what the chess tournament should actually be even watching the best in the world because the best in the world are not humans. That's what the chess tournament should actually be, right? Is the best computers playing each other. Go away. Go away. Well, like silliness and you know, I don't think that that's silliness.

I think that the chess thing exists because people want to see other people do it. But then it becomes not about like what's the best chess game that exists. It's more about like, I want to see monkeys playing chess. Oh, look at these monkeys that are freakishly like computers playing chess. This is what I'm actually watching. If you want to see the best chess game, watch two computers play each other. But nobody wants to do that because they want to watch monkeys play chess. Monkeys that are like computers. Is that really what you believe? You'd rather watch two computers than the two best humans? Well, I have no interest in watching either. I couldn't possibly imagine watching a chess game. If I said you have to watch one, you'd choose the computers.

But you're, this is a different thing now, right? What about empathy? What about empathizing with the players and the stress they're under and the pressure and like the egos involved that knowing that one of them is going to be humiliated. And that's been the most interesting part of this, the body language, the storming out of press conferences, the big egos being crushed. Yeah. but that's a different thing. Like that's, oh, we want to watch the monkeys play chess. That's what it is. Like monkeys want to watch a bunch of monkeys playing games. And I understand that. Like that's what sports is. That's what any of this stuff is. I think the chess one is extra funny because it's an area where, unlike sports, at least for now,

until the RoboCup catches up, humans are the best in the world at sports, right? So it's like you're watching both the humans and the best example of this thing possible, right? Whereas the chess one, it just strikes me as funny because it's like, well, it lays bare more clearly what's really happening is that the humans want to watch humans doing a thing, right? That's what's occurring. Yeah. Maybe that's partly what struck me. Maybe that's partly the emotion I was having. It's a funny thing that when you say about like the mechanicalness of it, because this is one of the reasons why I lost interest in chess at a certain point was because I recognized like, oh, once you get beyond the basics,

like it very quickly becomes about just the sheer number of positions that you have seen that you are familiar with. And I feel like, oh, this game became less fun because of this, because now I see like, oh, to get better, it's really like a game of incredible memorization. And it becomes like, I'm learning routines to go through these various things. And I've seen some stats on how long the openings are for chess games until you get to like a unique position that has never been seen like it's incredibly long yeah it's one of the reasons why i know bobby fisher was pushing his version of random chess which i did play a few games of and i thought

like oh i wish this had caught on because this actually gets the game i think much more towards what you would want which is by randomizing with some rules, the starting locations of all of the pieces. I think it knocks people out of the, you are an incredible computer that is just recalling a database of moves. And it gets the game much more into a, you have to be creative because the number of permutations here creates boards that no one has ever seen like in every single game. And I think that that would actually be much more interesting to play and much more interesting to watch play is a quasi random setup of the board every time. So another thing I've realized, and this is like a naive realization, but it's just I found it quite cute in myself. That is the importance of pawns in chess like when you're

like dumb and young like me when i was playing as a kid the pawns were almost these things you wanted to get off the board as soon as possible because they got in the way of all the powerful pieces you know blazing their way and doing all the cool things they could do and like losing a pawn meant nothing to me but these guys will fight to the death to protect a pawn. Pawns are so important to them. It's so funny to me how cavalier I always was. But oh, yeah, go on, take a few of my pawns. I don't care.

It just means I can move my queen better. In all these end games, the pawns are just so important to the whole game. Yeah. Well, there's the quote, which is that the pawns are the soul of chess, which is definitely true, especially because of their funny attacking sideways thing that the structures that you end up creating with the pawns really determine the flow of what's happening on the board. But I also think it's because at that high of a level, a pawn is the largest size mistake that you're possibly going to make. Right. Like the best players in the world are not going to do the kind of thing that like me as a normal player would do of like, oops, I wasn't paying attention and I lost my rook, right? Like that doesn't happen. Yeah. Oh, I didn't even know you could take my rook. Well

done. Didn't see that bishop over there. Yeah, that's exactly it. Like, I remember, you know, I was a terrible player, but I remember playing against friends and like intentionally hiding a bishop like on the corner of the board. So you just hope like someone doesn't notice. notice it's like i don't think those sort of errors are happening at the grandmaster level but so i think the only thing that ends up happening is a pawn level error yeah i don't think magnus carlson's gonna say oh i forgot that one could move diagonally yeah exactly like those knights they're so tricky with their l-shaped moves i always forget yeah so like the biggest mistake that's ever going to happen is is someone gets They're so tricky with their L-shaped moves. I always forget. So like the biggest mistake that's ever going to happen is someone gets maneuvered into a position where they end up losing a pawn.

And then that is actually quite dramatic at the grandmaster level. Yeah. And my last observation, maybe suggestion, and I know this is going to upset some people, but I don't know how I feel about it. I don't think people should resign in games of chess. I understand when they agree to a draw, but what happens in so many games is one of them resigns and I can't even really see why they've lost. And then the experts will say, well, this would have happened and this would have happened and, of course, this would have, and then there would be no choice, but this would have

happened. And ultimately he would have been left in this position, in which case he would have lost. I think they should play it out just for the spectators. And also there's something so dramatic about checkmate, but you never see checkmate in games of chess between grandmasters because they both see it coming a mile off and resign before it happens. And I think we should get to see the death of the king. And also I think you should be made to go through it. If you lose, you should be made to play it out and lose your king. I find it a little bit disappointing and I can see reasons for it,

you know, saving time and energy and that. But I think you shouldn't resign. I think they should play it out and we should get to see the checkmate. We should get to see the coup de grace. I mean, can you imagine in a baseball game, a better example might be a football game or something, in a football game and some team is down by 30 points and there's 20, 30 seconds left, they still play to the buzzer.

The other team doesn't just walk off and say, oh, you've won and leave the field. Oh, we've got no hope now. We're never going to come back in that time. You play it out. I would like to see these chess games played out. I'm just thinking of how at our Alabama football game, like what would be the feeling in the stadium if the opposing team just halfway through just walked off?

We're like, okay, we resign. It would be like, are you kidding me? We're here for a thing like to watch a thing i'm totally with you if resigning is a super common thing at the grandmaster level i would feel really disappointed by that if i was a fan of oh well don't watch grandmaster chess you'd never see a checkmate it's always a resignation now i have many reasons not to watch like what you want to see is i want to see someone's king dramatically knocked over right that has to be the end of every chess game. Checkmate's so exciting, but they just never do it. And I understand they see

it coming and it's inevitable, but I still think A, play it out for us to see it happen. And B, you never know. Mistakes get made. I'm with you. I'm with you on this one. Play it to the end, people. Don't resign. Don't resign like a chicken, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. People should make bugak noises in the audience when someone resigns. there an audience can people like jeer i don't understand are the people yeah yeah there's an audience yeah you get audiences it was famous all the problems with the audience in the bobby fisher spasky chess game of the century bobby fisher always said they were making too much noise i wanted them further away and he was a real funny bean about the audience so then they went and played in a back room for two or three games because he didn't want an audience and they put a camera in there so the audience could watch out in the hole.

And then eventually he agreed to come back out into the hole. But there you go again. I'm sure Bobby Fischer was a super normal dude, right? Because he's the best person at chess in the world. I'm the picture of normalcy. But yeah, I like the idea of people begocking at the person who resigns. You should play it until the end. And I agree with you. It is almost impossible to imagine that in the history of chess no grandmaster has ever resigned a game that they would have won if they played through to the end yeah right like that has to be the case that someone was wrong at some point so i think they should play through to the end even if they play faster they should still play through to the end without a doubt maybe you and i should play

chess braving oh god that would, that would not be good. No, we should do a game of random chess on the YouTube channel. And we let people comment on it. People could do running commentaries. Unless the random configuration starts with me already having you in check, mate. I don't fancy my chances, but... So, Gray, I have started putting a small piece of black tape over my webcam. Oh, really?

Why have you done that, Brady? Why have you done that, Brady? Why have you done that? Well, obviously, this is following up on our discussion about whether or not people can hack into webcams. And I don't particularly think they can. And if they could, I don't think they'd particularly want to do it to me. And if they did do it to me, I'm not particularly worried about them watching me edit videos

and look at my periodic table on the wall behind me and also i know that mark zuckerberg does it and then i saw the boss of the fbi apparently also puts tape over his webcam on his computer as well it's reaching a point now where i'm thinking well hang on all these people who know stuff are doing it maybe i'm supposed to be doing it what about you yeah well the quick answer to what you said there is for the moment i haven't actually put anything over the cameras yet but going back to that conversation we had where we were wildly speculating without really a lot of information about a thing we're just talking about computer security it was one of those interesting conversations because often when you're talking on a podcast, I'm so aware of back in the editing, you realize in all of our conversations, like how often you have assumptions in your head that you're kind of not saying out loud.

And that security conversation was definitely filled listing a ton of cases where like, yes, someone was able to hack into a person's camera or microphone, right? It's just like, I'll link to that discussion in the show notes, but it's like terrifying, terrifying number of stories and examples of people being able to hack into devices. Now, one of the things that wasn't universally true, but was very, very often the case in those stories was there was some level of user error, right? That the user had been tricked into installing a piece of software that they shouldn't,

right, or the user had done an action that had like opened the door for malware to get on the system, right? Clicking a link in an email, you know, loading up a website that they shouldn't, all of this kind of stuff. And so there's this problem of computer security that you can see unroll in that discussion, which is, it is this balance of how much does the attacker care and how secure is your system and I think at the end of that conversation in the reddit I came down to the conclusion in some sense of like well

things are less secure than I thought but still largely it's like demonstrations of cases where you can hack into someone's device but if you can't trick the user and if they're using a secure platform it still ends up being like near heroic amounts of effort that have to be done in order to be able to do this and so so like, I saw examples of people saying like, oh, you can break into somebody's iPhone by installing a device that pretends to be the local cell phone network, right when the person connects to it. And then you wait for them to install an app and you have ready and waiting like a fake version of the app that they're going to install through this fake connection. But I still think like under most normal circumstances, it seems like if the user

is relatively savvy using a relatively secure system, the likelihood of this is not super high, but it's definitely, it seems higher than I had first mentally examined it. But I still have a ton of links and things to go through and read in more detail that resulted from that conversation. So this is just us kind of talking out loud about that now. One of the things that I think is a bit of a strange thing to think about, though, is like, so you said you put tape over your computer, the computer you're sitting in front of right now. Is that the one that you've done it with? Yeah. But like, have you done it with your iPads and with your phone i haven't done it with those yet no this is the faff of taking the tape on and off all the time this is part of the thing which is also a bit like well i have some

devices that are relatively easy to secure in terms of like my office computer would be trivially simple to do this i could actually totally break the microphone on my office computer and it would never even matter to me. Right. I could just have the external microphone that I plug in and I could cover up the camera on that computer. But then, well, that's the device that I'm in front of by far and away the least. Right. The thing that's the hardest to secure is my phone, which is the thing that's with me all the time. It's like, am I going to have something over the microphone and over the cameras on my phone? That then becomes a super hassle. And the more I think about this, it almost feels like there's no real way to win this game, right? Like the devices that are easy to secure are the ones you're probably

using the least. And the ones that are the hardest to secure are the ones that you're using the most. That says something about you too, though. That's not true with me. But I guess maybe you're a more common case. But I'm certainly in front of this computer a lot more than I'm on my phone or my iPad. If you broke into my camera on my iPad, unless you caught me watching Netflix last thing before I went to sleep, you wouldn't see much. And on my phone, what you just probably see inside my pocket. But presumably if someone's turning on the microphone in your phone, this is with you essentially all the time. I'd be shocked if you're saying that you're using your office computer more than your phone is with you. Like, I don't think that's probably very likely. Yeah, you're probably right. Do you know what I mean? Like your phone is with

you all the time and that becomes very hard to secure. If like someone's in there and they're able to turn on the camera, it's like, well, they can turn on the microphone and they can turn on the location services and they can find out a bunch of other stuff. Like if you've been tricked into installing software that you shouldn't have installed. So, yeah, I think I in the end am going to just cover up the camera on the devices that are the easiest to do. But I'm not sure like I'm going to end up trying to do it on my iPads and my phone because I'm just not sure that like the risk reward profile there pays off in terms of the sheer hassle of it. But I will say like, man, that discussion thread on the Reddit, that is not something to read right before you go to bed. That is not a thing that's going to make you feel super secure. That's for sure. And speaking of things that make you feel

insecure, there's a story that just caught my attention today, which in theory, I should be really angry about this. And I should be really worked up and upset about this. Perhaps the equivalent level that I get upset about garbage. But I feel like this is a thing that is so big, it's almost like too big for me to react to. And it is the fact that in the UK, they're trying to pass this investigatory powers bill, which will require all of the internet service providers in the UK, all of the mobile phone carriers in the UK, to record all of the websites their individual users use for a year and to turn them over to an enormous list of government agencies without even a warrant. This to me is, it is just incredible. At the time that we're recording, this looks like it's going to pass.

It looks like it's actually going to get through. And I feel like this is unbelievable. This to me is like so incredibly 1984-like like I find it hard to even react to. It's like it's just so big it's mind-blowing. So just someone working for the food standards agency can say oh I want to see CGP Grey's browsing history for the last year and they can have it. Yeah I mean like that sounds like an exaggeration but that is literally what it is. There's this comical list of government agencies that can just request a specific person's browsing history over the past year. It's absolutely crazy. It's like the job seekers government department, which deals with tons and

tons of people can just request it. Like, oh, somebody comes in and they're looking for help for a job. And a dude can just be like, oh, show me what this person has browsed on the internet for the last year. It's so incredibly invasive. I keep using this word. It's just like, it's just unbelievable. It's just totally shocking to me that this is even really a thing. I just can't believe it.

I totally can't believe it. I don't know what to say, Grey. I can't believe it either. It's crazy. It's called the Investigatory Powers Bill. Yeah. And like, I'm looking at this list of things. It's like the food standard agency, places that you would expect, right? The Ministry of Justice, but also like just the tax department is allowed to look at everything that you've browsed on the internet for the past year. My personal favorite on this list, which is like, how did this even end up here?

The Welsh Ambulance Services is allowed to look up what you've been browsing on the internet for the past year. It's like, to me, this is like the surface of attack on this is just crazy. It's like, does anybody think that all of these various government agencies will be able to keep all of this data secure? It's totally bizarre. And I mean, talking about computer security, I feel like, well, I've been using a VPN for browsing Wi-Fi on foreign networks, but it looks like, well, I guess I'm just going to be routing everything I ever do on the internet through a VPN for the rest of my life in the United Kingdom to try to get around this. Like, it's absolutely crazy. And I can't believe that it looks like

it's going to pass. They've picked a good time to sort of sneak this through, haven't they? With so much other big political news happening all around the world that people are kind of sleepwalking through this one. Yeah, I think they really are. But go buy your VPNs, people. I need to learn about those, Gray. Can you give me a tutorial soon? Yeah, I'll set you up. It's just so invasive. What else is there to say? There's like a government looking over your shoulder and recording every website you go to.

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It helps let Fracture know that you came from this show. Once again, go to fractureme.com slash podcast. Mention that you came from Hello Internet in their survey and take care of a bunch of holiday shopping all in one place. Thank you very much to Fracture for supporting the show. Black Mirror. Black Mirror. I feel a bit bad, Gray, because obviously the homework we set, which I, did we say it? I kind of thought it was implicit, is that we were talking about the new series, Series 3, which

has been recently put on Netflix. But I saw some people sort of saying messages, oh, how much do I watch? I've just watched Series 1. Do I have to watch Series 2 and 3 as well? I'm like, no, we've already talked about episodes in Series 1. This is just Series 3 we were saying to watch. I'll try to pull it up for the show notes. But I know we have discussed in the past earlier episodes of Black Mirror. We were just setting Season 3, which does have six episodes in it. And if you're feeling bad that you watched those earlier episodes of Black Mirror. We were just setting season three, which does have six episodes

in it. And if you're feeling bad that you watch those earlier episodes, don't because they're fantastic. And secondly, you can go listen to the old shows, which I will put in the show notes where we talk about some of those episodes. So we were just talking about season three, which we are going to do very shortly. So obviously, as usual, expect spoilers. Expect spoilers for all of the seasons because we might reference stuff. It's all going to happen. So pause the podcast now, people.

Go watch some episodes. If you haven't watched them already, it's a very good TV series. I think it's totally worth it. And now we're going to talk about some stuff. So there are six episodes in series three. I have watched five of them. I have not watched episode five, but I've watched one, two, three, four, and six. How have you done? I broke it up

into two sessions. I watched the first three episodes in one session and the second three episodes in another. So I have seen all of them. It's an interesting thing. Like this was a longer season of Black Mirror than the other ones i think the first season was like three episodes the second season was four and now this is six episodes well it was kind of three three and then a christmas special and then six so season one was three and season two was three but then they had this special christmas one which was a longer episode okay and then we've got six now in series three netflix is listing that as season two which is why i think i was thinking about it but maybe you are more technically correct yeah just sort of talking about it overall i think it was kind of an interesting viewing

experience because i think this this season cemented most clearly to me this feeling that Black Mirror is the Twilight Zone with technology, that that's what this TV show is. And I think that that comes with good things and bad things. So like, I have watched all of the Twilight Zone episodes at various points in my life and gone through like Twilight Zone kicks where I'll crank through a whole bunch of them. And whenever I do that, one of the things that I think is interesting is how when I think about the Twilight Zone, I am in my head remembering actually a relatively small subset of episodes that really stick with me. And when I rework my way through the Twilight Zone, I'm aware of all of the episodes that I just sort of forget about that don't stick with me for some reason. And this season of Black Mirror, I really felt that. I watched a bunch of episodes, but I feel like there was really only one in this season that I

feel like I'm going to come back to and think about a bunch. And the others, they were very good. Just like when I'm watching Twilight Zone, I think like, oh, these episodes are good. They're entertaining. And like the Black Mirror episodes are vastly better than most things on TV. But it did feel like a bunch of these episodes were just sort of episodes in this Black Mirror world to me. And I didn't feel like, oh, wow, I was super grabbed by every single thing that I saw. Those are sort of my general impressions of series three.

What do you think, Brady? Yeah, I think of the five of the six I've watched, and I've stopped watching five at the start because it just wasn't grabbing me, but I will go back and watch it. Like anything, there were some sort of hits and misses i thought there were probably more than one that stuck with me there were a few of them had me thinking the next day which is about as good a test as you can apply to these things i liked them you know unsurprisingly perhaps i'm not as excited as i was by like series one when it was new and interesting and something really different you kind of know what to expect now kind of a quite a cynical look at the way technology is infiltrating society so there is a sort of sameness coming to it both in the mood and the content of the shows but i still think it's good i think it's a good

use of your time and i'd certainly recommend watching them oh yeah which was the one obviously everyone's going to want to know which the episode was that did something to you. Well, we'll get to that in a moment, but I think you actually hit upon an excellent point there, which is there is a little bit of a saminess in that I found myself when watching these episodes this time, you're sort of aware and waiting for the thing, like the moment where like,

oh, we're going to learn about what this world really is yeah it's like a one trick pony yeah well i have mixed feelings about this because i feel like um this is gonna be like super overblown but if you think about the matrix which is i think it was 1999 maybe a long time ago now but i feel like the matrix set up like the modern story of the world of like this is a story about how the world is not what you really think it is. And particularly is related to technology. And I'm totally fine with this as a story archetype that is repeated over and over again. And I feel like that's particularly like a modern story archetype that like technology makes the world not as it truly seems.

Yeah. I felt like season three leaned on that a bit too much with a number of the episodes. And so it's like episode two, play test, the San Junipero episode as well. Like that leans on this idea of the world that you see is not really what it is. And episode five, the one that you were watching is a similar kind of thing of like, oh, what the people are seeing is not really what's occurring in the world. And so like, while I don't mind that as a story type, I feel like in a six episode season for three of the episodes to turn on that exact same point was like a little bit too many. I felt a little bit like, I know this, I'm fine with this story,

but not like three times in a row am I fine with this story. I just had episode five spoiled for me, by the way, people. So just so you know, that's okay. I knew I was walking into the spoiler zone. So sorry, Brady, you're here with us. I know. You're here with us. So you're in the spoiler zone. Sorry, Brady. You're here with us. I know. You're here with us. So you're in the spoiler zone as well.

I couldn't exactly pause the podcast and go and watch it though, could I? No, you couldn't. This is a hazard. But being fair, I think probably five is by far and away the least interesting one in the six episode season. Yeah, that's exactly right. And also there is kind of the cynicism that goes through. I mean, I know it sort of defines the series.

It's called Black Mirror. So, of course, there is this strong streak of cynicism through it. And Charlie Brooker, who I really like all his work, is such a cynical guy and that runs through it. And if you watch them in a marathon, it does start to weigh heavily on you. You start thinking, come on, man, like, you know, how bad can the world be? But you don't watch this series if you're not up for some of that. Yeah, exactly. No one's thinking, you know what I'd love? I'd love a fun, carefree evening. Let me put on some of the old Black Mirror.

Yeah. I need a real pick me up something light, something to make me smile. You know, it's like, that's not what Black Mirror is for. No. But that being said, i do want to say like on the flip side so like this is my little bit of a criticism of series three but on the flip side like there's so many things about the series that i absolutely love and top on that list is i just love the way technology is simply used and accepted in a lot of the episodes.

Like there's episode number three, which is Shut Up and Dance, which has the characters being blackmailed by people on the internet into doing things. Yeah. I think like that was a great episode where I was just so aware of they have characters who are just using technology like you would expect normal people in the world to use, right? They're using GPS on their phone. They're using map tracking. There's a drone at one point and the drone is just used.

Nobody feels any need to comment on it or explain what it is. I'm often aware when I'm watching modern TV or movies that technology ends up falling into one of two things. It's either used as just magic that can solve any problem in a ridiculous way. Or I often feel that the writers are trying to like write around the existence of cell phones, because cell phones solve so many plot problems in movies, right? Like that the writers are trying to like get around this. And so characters never just use phones in the way that a normal person would it's one of the things that i absolutely loved about watching black mirror is like this is a show that understands and portrays technology just as people in the real world would use it the characters in the show

don't feel the need to comment on or explain to the audience what is going on like they just assume that you're going to get it yeah and so I absolutely love that in the show. Like something about that makes it feel super grounded and super real that the characters don't need to explain or comment on this stuff. And people use technology in a realistic way that isn't magic or isn't avoidance for plot reasons. The one episode that I think fell down a little bit in that respect perhaps was the final episode six with the robotic bees because i felt like the four episodes i'd watched before that felt like they weren't condescending and they were quite believable and they felt like they were made for like a young audience. And the sixth one felt like it was made like a Hollywood movie,

like it was how Hollywood would treat technology with robotic bees burrowing into brains and lots of hand wavy, oh, he's hacked the system, oh, we're locked out, we're locked in. And it was kind of like black hat hackers who can do these amazing things no one understands. I felt like that one dropped the ball in that respect. I still thought there were interesting things raised in the episode, interesting conundrums, and it was thought provoking. But it was the one that felt like they sold out a bit.

And even the way they ended that one, I feel like they sold out a little bit too. So that felt a bit like The Black Sheep. That one stuck out, not least because it was 90 minutes long. It was essentially like movie length. And I'm not really sure that that needed to be the case. But when I was watching that one as the last one that I was watching, I was really thinking, this is very Twilight Zone-y, but not in the good way, in the way that some of the bad episodes are just like, we're doing a silly thing. And here we have robotic bees digging into people's brains and their pain centers. And yeah, I'm kind of with you on that one, that that one just didn't quite land

for me. And also what I kept thinking of was, this show obviously has super high production values, but those bees, man, that is some of the worst CGI I have seen in a long time. Oh, that's harsh. That's harsh. It was middle of the road. I've seen worse. I mean, I have seen worse, but not in something with as high production values as this. And it's just like, it kept breaking me out of it

every time that these bees were walking around. It's like, this CGI looks awful. Like, it doesn't look like the bees are on the surface. It doesn't look like the bees are in the scene. It fell into that uncanny valley for me where it's like, it's just too CGI. It doesn't work. Yeah. And they were just imbu like the bees are in this scene it fell into that uncanny valley for me where it's like it's just too cgi it doesn't work yeah and they were just imbuing the bees with powers that they couldn't have like surgical precision to find parts of human brains and

i had a few issues with that episode but it was okay too it was okay it wasn't a waste of my time this is the thing to say is like none of these episodes that i feel like i've wasted my time whereas i have seen plenty of movies where i feel like boy was that a waste of my life right like those are two hours just gone but i was just aware like felt like the wheels were coming off a little bit at a couple points here but even in that last episode it had a good example of what i mean where the characters at a couple points use self-driving cars and i like that they felt no need to even point out that they're self-driving cars. Like it's just the characters use it really naturally.

It's like everybody understands what's going on. And even if you miss it, that the cars are self-driving, it doesn't matter because they're just getting the characters from one place to another. It's that kind of stuff that I like. They don't feel the need to linger on or explain stuff. It's just like, we all know what self-driving cars are. We all understand how this works. And this is why the interior seating arrangement of this car is a little bit strange.

But if you don't notice, it doesn't matter. And you can just keep moving right along. I don't 100% agree with you there. I think episode six was a little bit self-conscious about the self-driving cars. They referenced it a couple of times. You know, the girl who doesn't drive and she says, I'm going to wait for self-driving cars to become a bit more mainstream. And then when they get in the self-driving car with like the equivalent of the FBI guy, they do comment on it and how this is an even better one

than they've seen before. So I think that episode was a bit self-driving car, self-conscious. But I agree with your overall point about the series. It does integrate technology in a very believable way which is unusual so everyone's dying to know grey which is the episode that you haven't said you liked it there's just one that you particularly want to talk about so what i said is that there's one that stuck with me i feel like in each of the seasons there's an episode that stuck with me in season one as i've mentioned many times it's the 15 million merits which i think is probably still their best one to date.

Which is the thing that I think about all the time. Season two, which I was sort of mentally including the Christmas episode. Like that Christmas episode still haunts me. Like I mean that word. Like that Christmas episode haunts me. It is now Christmas time in the UK. And I swear to God, when I hear that Christmas song, it sends literal shivers down my spine still, right? Like, it's just like, I can't hear that

song and not think about that episode. It's horrible. Thanks, Charlie Brooker. I can't remember which song it was. It's the I Wish It Would Be Christmas Every Day. I think maybe it stands out particularly for me because this is not an American Christmas song. It's just a totally foreign and bizarre Christmas song. it's like I was introduced to it in this nightmare scenario and so that's why it's like when I hear it I just absolutely shudder okay and so then for me in season three I think the standout episode by far is get ready for disappointment people it's not the one you want it's nosedive that's the one that really stuck out to me and I thought was surprisingly,

was very, very affecting. For people who sort of can't remember the names or the numbers, which episode was this one? So Nosedive is the episode about people rating each other on their phones with five-star or four-star ratings. It's the episode with the woman who is going to the wedding to give the bridesmaid speech. That one to me just really felt like quintessential Black Mirror. Everything about it just really landed for me. I loved the visual design, like the way it looked, that all of the characters are in this like happy pastel land and they're all smiley and giving each other five star ratings. But it was able to just very, very effectively like tap into my anxiety as I was watching that.

And that one just really, really landed for me quite strongly. You don't agree? Do you know what? I don't agree. Ah, tell me. What are you thinking? Well, that thing you point out, that kind of pastel look of it, and kind of the over-the-top friendliness that everyone has to each other,

was so exaggerated. I wasn't able to suspend my disbelief enough. And I know, like, Edward Scissorhands, which is one of my favourite films, is very much like this as well. It has this kind of very unrealistic suburbia where everyone's dressed in pastels and is really overly friendly to each other in a way that is parodying. But it didn't quite work as well as it does in Edward Scissorhands. And for that reason, I didn't get immersed in the episode as much. I never kind of sympathised or empathized with the main character because I never really saw her as a real person. When things start going wrong for her and

her rating nosedives, I didn't really care about her very much because I didn't think of her as a real person anyway, to start with. So the whole episode didn't grab me at that kind of visceral level where I was watching it and getting sort of scared by it or thinking oh gosh this could happen to me or this is terrible for me it was more just an interesting commentary on social media and ratings and things like that and in that respect I thought it was really good I had really good observations and it probably like you it probably affected me maybe more than all the other episodes too but not in the right way not in that way more just in a that's interesting way i did like it i did think it

was really good i did think it was really good and it was so good that i actually told my wife afterwards that she must not watch it why i don't know because i think she's a bit cynical about social media and doesn't like the way we place so much importance on all the ratings and that. And that's what this was about. And I think she would watch this and it would just infuriate her even more. I said to her, oh, you'd find it really interesting. It's about this sort of future world where your social media ratings and likes and things are really important and everyone's really heavily judged on them. And she said, what you mean like now? So. I had a funny experience

with watching this episode because one of the key plot points in the episode is how people's star ratings affects their real world ability to be able to get a discount on a nice home or like, which cars can they rent or what towns can they go into and if you don't have a star rating above a certain level you're not able to access those resources and also this idea that the companies are wanting to provide rewards to highly starred highly influential users within this social system yeah and it ended up just being weird because in the week immediately preceding watching this episode, I had two conversations with two totally unrelated people who work with companies whose whole job is to find influencers on social media and get them to use products, like to explicitly like pay people to just wear certain brands of shoes on their Instagram accounts. And the thing

that was amazing to me is like, okay, I knew that this existed, right? Obviously, this is a thing that exists. If you have millions of followers on Instagram, you have value in promoting products to companies. But the thing that was baffling to me was these companies were going after what I would consider people very, very low down on Instagram and Twitter totem poles, like people with more followers than average, but not like hundreds of thousands of followers. Their explicit strategy was, we just want people to see popular people using our products. And so it just, it ended up being like a weird thing that I had two separate conversations about like more or less the same phenomenon

of sort of normal but well-regarded people in a social network ending up getting like rewards and bonuses for their popularity and their high ratings. It just ended up feeling like, boy, this is like a little too weird and real to a conversation that I've just had with two different people at two different companies doing like exactly this. It was very strange. That's what's so scary about this episode. I mean, it's basically, it shows us a society where what's happening now has just been made a little bit more formalized and overt. But this is already happening.

I mean, you see it in lots of things. I mean, around the same time I watched Nosedive, I had a similar experience where I was doing something with YouTube, like filling out some form for some program or something, you know, to do with the bureaucracy behind the scenes. And things you're asked to fill out is, you know, how many subscribers does your channel have? How many views have you had? What is your most viewed video?

This is part of the process now. I applied to do something one time. I think it was like a social media event with NASA or something to go to an event, which I couldn't end up going to. But filling out the application form was, what's your Twitter handle? How many Twitter followers do you have? What's your YouTube channel?

How many YouTube subscribers do you have? And's your YouTube channel? How many YouTube subscribers do you have? And it all felt very quantitative and not very qualitative. It wasn't like, you know, what do you make videos about? What are your ideas? You know, what do you want to say? Right. It was just give us the data, give us the numbers. That was clearly a big part in the decision process.

And so it's happening all the time already. Yeah. And the other thing about that was just too real was a few months ago, I can't remember the company's name, but there was a social media startup that was doing this exact thing, that they wanted to be a place that could collect rankings just about individuals and where people could rate individuals. And it ended up crashing and burning because there was a really big backlash of people pushing against it saying like they don't they don't want a website that's just

ratings for people in general and the site was was trying to pull together like what are all of your various accounts like let's try to form some kind of unique identifier of you that can then be rated by everybody but i feel like yeah that one crashed and it didn't work. But I feel like this is essentially inevitable. Like I will be pretty surprised if this doesn't eventually come about, that there's some kind of centralized aggregate one to five star rating database for individual people. I think that's one of the reasons why like this episode struck me because it's one of these cases where I was trying to figure out like a little bit of an

inconsistency in my own mind about the star ratings. Because as I've mentioned before on this very podcast, one of the things that I think Uber should do is make the star ratings of the customers more immediately apparent to the users of the system. That I think this would actually encourage good behavior on behalf of not just the drivers, but also the customers, right? And like have a little bit of a feedback loop to people who are total dicks, right? That maybe other people think you're a total dick too. But I was trying to think about like, why am I okay with that in the Uber scenario? But I really don't like the idea of this website where you can rate people on a one to five

star rating. And I think the conclusion I've come to is I'm okay with ratings in like specific transactional circumstances. But I think the reason why I found this episode very anxiety inducing to watch is i don't think it makes sense and i don't think it's fair to have like an aggregate rating just for a person that's like them across all spectrums yeah how do they interact with people in public how do they interact with people in private how do they interact with people in private? How do they interact with people at their office? Like, I don't think it's good to collapse all of those to a single dimension where I feel like I'm much more okay with how are you in an Uber car in a transactional

environment? Then I feel very comfortable with star ratings and think they're good. I think that's the conclusion that I've come to about how do I think through when are these things okay and when are they not okay? That's fair enough. Yeah, that makes sense. The other reason why I think this episode hit me particularly hard, not related to technology, but my general feeling of how do big problems happen is that in my experience in life, big problems are the result of a sum of small problems,

none of which individually would be an issue, but all of which together form a real tragedy. That was the other reason, like, this episode just had the right hooks for my brain, because this is my experience, and this is how I think, that, like, a series of small problems leads to a huge problem which is essentially how the entire episode unfolds and that's why like my anxiety just kept getting like ramped up and ramped up and ramped up as I guess she keeps dropping her numbers a little bit and the more her numbers drop like the more that causes more problems it's like I found that very hard to watch hard to the point at which after the episode was over it occurred to me to check my Apple Watch

heart rate data. And sure enough, like you can see the data of my heart rate increasing as a function of time as the episode goes on, as I was just sitting there watching it. So it's like, this one struck me right in the heart. Did you recommend it to people? Like, did you say to your wife, oh, you should watch this one or friends or that or that? I actually ended up just watching this one twice because i felt like i was a little bit too involved in it the first time and so i watched it a second time actually with my wife just before recording this and i'll just say that black mirror is not a show for my wife when it was over her conclusion

was just well that was horrible and like a conversation over like she wants to watch something else yeah fair enough there was no version in which i was ever going to make my wife sit through all of the episodes but i just happened to want to re-watch this one before we recorded and she happened to be in the room so i was like i'm gonna put this on you can watch it if you want but i'm not sure this is for you. And it was not for her. Not for her at all. So the one that lots of people seem to want to hear you talk about was the one called San Junipero. I'm just basing this on my own social media feeds, but it seems to be the one that people are talking about the most.

What did you think of that one? This is the one, by the way, where people who are either sick or dead are being uploaded to this beautiful, perfect life by the beach and can live there happily ever after, their brain in a big hard drive somewhere. Yeah, the San Junipero episode, I'm surprised to hear that, that this is the one people wanted me to talk about. I just presume that, of course, the one that struck me the most would also be the one that people are requesting the most, but I guess that's not the case. That was an episode where I did feel a little bit bored in the first half. It was a slow burn. They took too long to get where they needed to be. Yeah. And I feel like this episode should have been more aware of the fact that, you know, you're a Black Mirror episode, right? Like there's no mystery here.

Everyone's waiting for a thing. You know, when they first opened the scene and it's taking place in the 1980s, I thought for maybe a minute and 90 seconds, like, oh, it'll be interesting to see if they'd actually do a Black Mirror episode that is set in the past. Like I was kind of wondering what could you do?

Maybe there's an interesting story to do there. But it became like as soon as they started running through the music, it's like, oh, no, this is a cartoon version of the 1980s, right? This is not supposed to be the actual 1980s. And so you're just immediately like, well, I'm watching a Black Mirror episode. Obviously, this is some kind of simulation or something. Yeah. And I did feel like it took way too long to get to the behind the scenes. Like there isn't really any mystery here, people. When you keep jumping in time and it's always nighttime and everybody's referencing midnight,

I just, I felt like the first half of that episode didn't really work. I mean, the only bait and switch was, oh, is this about time travel? But that seems unlikely for a Black Mirror episode. And sure enough, it wasn't about time travel. Yeah, it's funny. That didn't even cross my mind as a possibility. I was just like waiting for the thing. And then I felt the simulation reveal on that one was not particularly surprising by the time they get there because they took their sweet, sweet time to get there.

So yeah, it was one of the two episodes where I noticed that like i took out my phone and did a couple things at one point it's like oh that's not a good sign but it's like i got like distracted by myself for a little bit of it but i mean again it's good tv like i don't regret spending my time on it but i'm a little bit surprised that this is the one that people seem to want to ask about because i'm not even really sure like what is it that people are wondering about. I mean I have to say I thought the first half of it was a bit slow. I thought the second half was very compelling and was amongst the best part of the whole series for me. So why do you think that? I liked the sort of discussions that it raised and the thoughts that it made me think would I want to do that and what do you do if someone else you you love hasn't gone

into it and you know made a conscious decision not to be uploaded and then she was like well i don't want to do it because my husband didn't and my daughter died it raised a lot of like emotional issues that spoke to me but also i just thought it was quite a compelling story and there was some nice little twists and turns towards the end and i thought the final scene was very powerful with like you know the blinking lights of the servers just reminding us all that this is all happening in a server was a really nice ending. I think the reason people want to hear from you on it is because, you know, you're so interested in things like consciousness and free will and stuff like that. I think they probably just wonder what you think of the technology. I think it goes without saying, you'd love to be

uploaded to one if you could. Yeah, but also I think anyone who's listened to the show would probably expect my answer, which is that in the episode, while the elderly and the sick are using this virtual town San Junipero to vacation in, and they're able to like experience this virtual world, while I think that is the case, in the end, when they die, and when they're uploading themselves into the cloud essentially to live in this thing forever. I come down on the side that I am not convinced that it is actually possible to transfer your consciousness into a computer. I think it will and it will inevitably be possible to transfer a copy that is indistinguishable from you. So when I'm watching that episode

and the show is showing like, oh, well, these two characters have uploaded themselves into the server and they get to live here forever. All I'm thinking is like, well, they're obviously dead and there's just these copies of them that are living on forever in the server,

but it's not them. That would be like my actual take on what I think the technology would be. That's so not what I expect to hear from you. Really? I feel like that's obviously what I would be thinking. I just would have thought, you would have thought if you could get the right degree of complexity of the algorithm in the system that constitutes a Brady or a Gray, that would count as a consciousness. I thought you sort of thought consciousness was a sufficient level of complexity.

So you've just got to have big enough servers with enough complexity to hit the tipping point for consciousness. This is, again, a different thing. I can fully believe that the copies are conscious and the copies think that they are the people who have lived their lives outside of the machine before being uploaded into the cloud yeah but that's a very different question from if i am imagining i am in a bed dying and something is being uploaded to the cloud from this machine that sits on my forehead and reads my brain waves or whatever i still say that like my expectation is that my personal experience is i close my eyes and I die and it's lights out forever. And on the server, a thing wakes up and has the subjective experience that it has been

just transferred into the machine and now gets to live forever. But I don't see any reason to expect that that would be me. This really does go back to like the transporter problem, because it's the same issue of whatever you're uploading, you could probably do it without having to have the person on the other end die. So I don't see any reason to think that it's anything except a perfect copy and not an actual transfer of consciousness. I mean, this is a direct echo of what we were talking about with the cryogenic freezing too, where I said, I thought the person in a thousand years probably wouldn't be me. Well, that's why I think it's really interesting that you're sort of taking the opposite opinion here. Like you think you could be uploaded into a computer and that it would be you? No, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just surprised that you don't think it,

but I have no particular opinion on it. I mean, they don't really address that technology in the episode. It could be possible that you can only be in one place at once. And when you're holidaying in San Junipero, you know, you're not also in yourself. And when you get uploaded out of your body, they take something, you know, they have to take something away. I don't know. Yeah, the episode doesn't really touch on it. Yeah, they're just they're kind of blowing past it. But I think in any kind of reasonable thinking of like what could this machine possibly be doing like or what is a machine that we could possibly build in the future we've touched on consciousness so many times but I really do have this I mean it's a gut feeling it's not based on anything

obviously but I think that my subjective experience of being me is probably tied to my actual biological brain in a way that is not removable right in a way that is copyable but not removable which is why like i have a very hard time imagining like even if lifespans get expanded like it's you know a thousand years in the future i have a very hard time imagining that I would ever really want to upload myself into a machine, because I feel like I'm pretty convinced that that would be my subjective death. Even if everybody else around me was like, Oh, you Luddite, you finally uploaded yourself into the cloud. Isn't this awesome, right? And like, cloud me would be going, Yeah, I don't know why I never did this before what a fool i was right but like actual biological me would just be dead right dead dead dead that's

my feeling about it so gotta keep the brain going occasionally i get these little glimpses of hope for your humanity occasionally gray you make me happy i don't understand what you mean by that why is this a glimpse i don't know because that sort of half surprises me that that's your view. Like that you have that kind of attachment to your mortal coil. I know. That you place that importance on your mushy self makes me a little bit happy. Yeah, but again, you phrase these things always so wrong and in such a strange way. My attachment is to being alive, right? Like my attachment is not to like, oh, this human body, it's fantastic.

No, it's a horrible pile of rotting meat that we drive around in. And if I could upload myself into the cloud, I would. Well, I guess what I'm saying is I'm happy that your definition of life is so attached to your mushy self. Yeah, but it's not the way I would want it to be. If I could snap my fingers and change it. When you say something and I say, oh, that makes me happy that you think that, you immediately rile up and say, oh, well, if that makes Brady happy,

I must have to rephrase it because... No, no. The reason I have to rephrase it is because when you're that, you immediately rile up and say, oh, well, if that makes Brady happy, I must have to rephrase it because- No, no. The reason I have to rephrase it is because when you're happy, it's almost always based on some kind of bizarre misunderstanding of what I'm saying. No, I wind you up. Basically what I do is you say something that makes me happy. I tell you you've made me happy, but then I put it to you in another way that you didn't say it. That winds you up. Right. You say it in a way that is wrong, right? Which is why I feel the need to correct it. I want nothing more than a Brady to be happy, but you take my thoughts and re-express them in a way that I don't agree with. And so I

feel compelled to correct you. That's what's occurring there. Just quickly, the two other episodes we haven't talked about really at all, other than briefly, but I have watched. So I'll ask you what you thought of them. Playtest test episode two they're sort of the video game brain implant one i thought that was quite cool i thought it was a cool episode that's the word i would use to describe it i liked the style of it and the story i thought it was cool yeah i can give it a coolness i can go along with that i kind of like the setup of it I did like that whoever was writing the script was clearly super into video games because that script was just packed full

of little video game references. And it really did feel like whoever's writing this knows their stuff, right? Like, would you kindly open the door? It's like, oh, it's a perfect line at that moment, which like indicates that the person writing this knows what they're talking about. I did the kind of nintendo style ceo of the company i enjoyed watching it the only thing was i'm just generally not a fan of the horror

genre like this was a horror episode for the most part and most of the time when I'm watching horror, I just feel kind of bored, right? Or they're using jump scares to try to get a reaction out of you. And I did think it was funny that this episode kind of commented on the jump scares. It's like, oh, he knows that he's waiting for jump scares. But I did have a note, which is like, jump scares are annoying

even when you're playing with the idea of jump scares. Like it still doesn't change what it is because the jump scare is just like poking someone in a sensitive spot, right? It's like if you're doing it ironically, like you're still poking someone in a reflexive spot and they can't do anything about it. So I thought it was fine. I did like that it was a bit of a different take

on the like we can't necessarily trust the world around us. But it wasn't firmly for me, partly because of the genre that it happened to be set in. Fair enough. And Shut Up and Dance, the sort of the blackmail filming you on your webcam and getting the dirt on everyone and then making them do weird stuff. I felt a bit weird about this one. What did you think of it? Yeah, it was a bit of a strange episode. In a way, I felt like it was kind of believable and also ridiculous at the same time. What was kind of what I kept thinking of.

I thought it was implausible. Yeah, I can see that. I felt like I was riding on the edge of the suspension of disbelief. And I think as the further the episode went along, the more my suspension was disbelieved. Is that how that works? Like the idea of blackmailing people and having them run errands and do stuff. It's like, OK, I can see this. But when the episode starts to turn into like, oh oh we're having them run all of these errands and having them do things to self-destruct themselves it's like okay well now i'm having

a bit of a harder time going along with the plausibility of this like this is a lot of effort to ruin a few people's lives it became a bit like moral crusading like you'd almost think it's more likely the trolls would have them just rob a bank for the money rather than teach them some big life lesson. Yeah, that's where it started to get like, I can't believe the resources that are being put into this. And perhaps the note that rang most incorrect for me out of anything I've ever watched with Black Mirror was at the end when they have the blackmailers

send the characters a little troll face on their phone. That just clanged wrong for me because like I have spent too much time on the internet to take that troll face seriously. And so when they're trying to use that as like the gut punch at the end of the episode, like LOL, it was all a joke. I can't take that seriously this can't be like the oh look at us we're having a serious ending to this episode yeah so that didn't quite work super well for me yeah there were a few things in that one that just didn't quite gel for me so my favorites were definitely san junipero playtest and nosedive i haven't watched Men Against Fire yet,

but you tell me it's not that good. And I didn't like the start of it. Well, I don't want to spoil anything for you. So we're well and truly in the spoiler zone. If you had to divide them into three to watch and three that you could give a pass to, just for the fun of it, what would be your three favorites? Obviously, Nosedive would be number one. I think I would probably put san junipero is number two maybe and then i'll probably put hated in the nation is number three right as the next one to watch that leaves play test the horror one men against fire which i think was probably the worst in the bunch in my opinion, and Shut Up and Dance is the three that I would feel like you're not missing a lot if you skip them.

Nosedive, San Junipero, Hate of the Nation. That would be my top three from this season. Well done, Black Mirror. I don't know if they can milk the cow again, but they've done all right so far. It's very interesting because I feel like I was looking at the episodes from season one. And in season one, you start out with the national anthem, which is just sort of a bizarre story that stands on its own. Same with 15 million merits, which is a thing that stands on its own. But then interestingly,

it ends with the entire history of you, which is that episode about being able to record and play back everything in your life. But looking back on it, I think that the entire History of You episode is the episode that has laid out the Black Mirror universe, in a sense. Like this whole idea of a near future world. People have modern phones. We all have contact lenses in our eyes and augmented reality and this universe that feels very real and very close and i feel like season three i feel like they may have used up that universe now right like season two revisited it in a number

of locations most notably in white christmas it's like boy did they lean on that again in a fantastic way but i i think season three is like maybe we're done with this now and if there is going to be another series i would want to see probably more like standalone episodes like create a little world and go through it and talk about it and come back. Like, I'm not quite sure there's a lot more to be done in this entire History of You universe that they set out a few years ago. They're kind of penned in by their name though, isn't it? Because the whole, you know, the Black Mirror name is holding up this mirror to our current society, but with this black tinge, dark thing so to veer away

from that and start creating new worlds and not do that would kind of i guess the black mirror would just become a meaningless brand name then wouldn't it be you know well it's still be a cool brand name but yeah it's a very cool brand i've always taken it to be the phone surfaces like i've always thought that's what it's referring to like the like the ipad screens and the iphone screens are the black mirror like that's that's always how i really took it i always thought it was like reflecting our society back to us but in a in a darker tone well this is why it's a fantastic brand name right like you can you can read whatever you want into it fair enough cool black mirror season three still recommend it i feel like it sounded like we might be a little bit down on it but still recommend it definitely tv worth your time glad I finally got around to it and also

super glad and thank you to my audience that I was able to get to it essentially spoiler free which is the way I prefer to watch these things so very happy