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Welcome to watching Westworld, the official unofficial podcast for Westworld on HBO. I'm Jim.

I'm Aaron and today we're talking season four, episode four, generation loss.

Aaron, we didn't really dive into this in the instant take. Let's talk about the title for a second.

Generation loss. What's the deal with that?

I'm glad you mentioned it because it was in my notes because we did forget to talk about it.

It's so it refers to the phenomenon and digital copying.

I didn't really count a copy. Before we had the internet, you might be familiar with your

grade school teacher, if you're a Gen X or younger, handing out photocopies of assignments.

There was something, it was like that weird purple thing, the duplicator.

You can tell how many years in a row they've duplicated a thing based on how fuzzy the lines are

and how crappy the art looked. If you've seen an image meme that's been copied and copied and

it starts getting artifact-y and jaggy and this starts losing resolution, it's what happens,

the destructive part of a copying process. You can make a perfect digital copy, but

this MP3 you're listening to might be, I don't know, 150 megabytes. Just my side of the audio

when we handed to our producer is going to be something like a gig. What happened to the rest

of that data? Well, it got smashed down so you can play it on your phone. You do that another 50

times and you start, so that's the generation loss digitally. How do you think it affects

what's going on in the episode? I don't know, I was thinking about it. In my mind, there is no

digital generation loss because you do make digital perfect. Unless you're re-encoding stuff,

I can hit copy paste a billion times on the file that we record here and it will never change.

If you make a loss, what they call a lossless copy? Yeah, just a one-to-one copy. I can make it a

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