Unreality on Film introduces Patrick Vance as co-host, dissecting how films like The Matrix—with tropes such as CIA tunnels or underground preschools—mirror conspiracy narratives by offering pseudo-explanations (MacGuffins) to justify distrust in institutions. These devices, from Trump assassination claims to Soros/Gates scapegoating, let audiences bypass skepticism while reinforcing cynical worldviews, framing evidence within compelling but often false frameworks. The series aims to expose how fiction shapes societal belief, urging critical scrutiny of narratives that dismiss mainstream reality as mere "inconspiracies." [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
Have a new thing that we're going to start today with a new, I hope, I hope this stays for a while, a new co-host, essentially, for at least these, maybe other things.
Who are you, co-host?
Hi, everyone.
My name is Patrick Vance.
I have known Spencer for decades.
You know, I need to tell him how long, you know, really.
Decades.
Yeah.
It's just.
If people wonder, do they know each other?
Let's just get that out of the way right now.
Yes, we know each other a bit.
I have lived in my hometown my whole life.
I have a lot of interest in things like, you know, psychology, culture.
Where's the dating app, man?
Come on.
Community.
Oh, you wanted me to introduce myself?
Roll it out, roll it out.
Come on.
I just have a broad array of interests.
Yes, yes, yes.
He is single, ladies.
I think he's single.
Last time I talked to him.
No, actually, I'm not.
I'm not.
I'm not.
Yeah.
Oh, that hot news.
News.
Okay.
I don't want to say whether I'm single or not.
I'm just not available.
Let's say it's a little bit more.
It's complicated.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Oh, well, door's closing.
Oh.
You know.
Opportunity is going away.
Oh, my word.
Yeah, I guess we have known each other a few decades at least.
So we are not here to talk about all that fun stuff, although I think we will have fun when we do this.
This is why I'm having you here to have fun while we do this.
Yeah, I want to talk about, I mean, I want to focus with this podcast in general over all the episodes.
I want to focus on aspects of subjective reality and how we understand it, how we understand it like inside our own minds.
And that seems really esoteric and offbeat and what only like really nerdy people listen to or pay attention to.
However, I personally think that everyone is going to have to start paying more attention to this on a regular basis because we have far more influences on our realities than we ever did before.
And it's not changing.
It's not going away.
So how we come to understand how it is that we form our beliefs is of utmost concern more and more.
It's informing our politics now.
It's everywhere.
And I don't want it to be just a bunch of dry textbook stuff.
I want it to be fun.
So this is what we're doing with this sort of side series.
It's part of the main podcast feed, but all of these will be noted as what I'm going to call unreality on film.
And of course, I have the right to change that name if later on I don't like it.
I don't care if anyone's confused.
I'm just going to change it.
But it'll be unreality on film with the name of the film.
And of course, the first film has to be The Matrix, right?
Agreed.
Yes.
The themes that we'll go for, we're not going to like go through the whole film beat by beat like some podcasts do.
We're going to pick on certain themes and certain scenes in these movies that reflect the topic of reality and how we use it.
I mean, some of these movies, particularly The Matrix, have things in them that are thematic and we use metaphorically in our everyday life for meaning things that, you know, to translate our own world.
Someone's red-pilled, someone's blue-pilled, that sort of thing.
We use this terminology.
So we're going to go through that stuff.
We're going to discuss those themes and metaphors.
So stop in here for you, Patrick.
How are you feeling so far about this?
Are you well, pretty good?
And you know, part of the interest for me in discussing something like this is because I've always been interested in how fiction is useful, right?
We can't dismiss fiction simply because it is fiction, because it's just a story, because it's for me, what's most important is how I reflect to something and what the takeaway is.
And so when you mentioned, you know, being red-pilled, like that was a major societal takeaway.
You know, you couldn't, you couldn't find many people who didn't understand just the notion of it and start to use it, right?
So I think that that's a fertile ground to explore how people take these ideas, find them useful, incorporate them, and then maybe how they use them successfully and how maybe sometimes they don't use them successfully.
What are the pitfalls of having something that's so easy to reference, but then if you use it wrong, you start to contaminate the understanding, right?
Well, when we, this is how meanings of words sort of morph and shift, right?
They get you, you know, words only have the meanings they have because of the way we use them.
So as soon as we're using words in a different way enough, they're going to have those meanings, which is why I named the podcast What I Did, because I wanted the word truth in the podcast because the way that we have started to use the word truth has started to mean the opposite of the word truth.
We use the word truthy when we refer to people who are conspiratorial.
They're 9-11 truthers and all these things.
So the word truth itself and true and like true the vote was the people who made this 2000 Mules movie, which was full of all kinds of problems and complete falsehoods about the 2020 election.
Project Veritas, the Latin word for truth, was this organization that was deliberately lying to people and pretending like it was the truth.
So we have this way that we use words and the way that we have meanings behind them that are walking and changing with time.
And I think if we want to keep these meanings, we should stake our claim on them is what I'm really saying.
We don't get to go beat up the people who are using them wrong, but we can use them in the correct way more forcefully ourselves and retain those meanings.
And that's where I am.
That's where I think we need to be.
Well, we need to hold clear agreements on what those definitions are.
In order to have a shared reality.
Yes.
Consensus reality.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're probably never going to get like full consensus reality ever again.
But if it's shared enough that we all understand the same things when we refer to stuff, that's probably as close as we're ever really going to get ever again.
So movies.
I mean, I'm particularly going to pick on movies.
We might also do other media.
There will be already some episodes of some TV shows, like pinpoint certain episodes of ones and review those as well for their themes.
And maybe if I talk you into doing it, we might do a book or two, maybe?
I don't know.
We'll see.
I think, you know, anywhere where we've seen something in that type of, I guess you call it a creative space, you know, making movies, making books.
This is the creation of sharing.
Anywhere where we have found stuff that has now found those ideas have found a home in our society.
I think that's fair game, right?
Well, yeah.
Well, everything is fair game now.
But there's paper clippings.
The other thing I'm going to choose.
Here's the ingredients for my macaroni now.
This is fake news.
Yeah.
The other thing I'm going to try to do is not choose any of these that are less.
I want to choose ones that are at least five years old.
That's the mark is a five-year time horizon.
We're generally going to be full spoilers on these episodes when we do these.
And the name's already that the title of each episode is going to be long enough.
So I'm not going to put spoilers in every one.
We're going to do a little spoiler warning at the beginning of each one in case people wander in and they're like, what's this about?
And, you know, and then we spoil some movie like The Matrix.
They were just, you know, meaning to watch.
It was going to get 25 years old.
Like it's.
Maybe don't put the warning in, right?
Like maybe if they get it spoiled, they deserve it.
I don't know.
Well, with The Matrix, I think they deserve it, right?
There's been other books that I've spoiled in the past, but these were books that were like 60, 70 years old.
Like I spoiled the ending of 1984, right?
I just, I was just so excited in a podcast.
I was like, oh, and at the end of 1984, blah, blah, blah, this happens.
And I'm like, spoilers for 1984.
But I'm like, it's a 70-year-old book.
Like it's, you had time.
Everyone had time to read it.
It's famous.
And the ending hardly matters.
Yeah.
It's not really the point.
Most people forget the ending after they've gone past it because it's not memorable.
My daughter just read 1984.
And then I was just like, I have to reread the last four pages of that book because I remember everything that took me there, but I didn't remember that weird kind of ending to it.
But that's funny you mentioned that.
Yeah.
So when we look at our popular media, this is our media in general, our art.
We have much more of this across our culture than we ever did before.
Obviously, we have the ability to mass produce it and bring it to every home at great scale, much more so than we ever did before.
So this is why this is.
And our art is a thing that helps to communicate our culture, right?
We are informing things.
So this eternal question of does life imitate art or does art imitate life?
I think this is one of the more stupid philosophical questions.
It's both.
It's obviously both.
Just stop asking this question like you're saying something deep.
Just please, just stop.
It's both.
It's a gang of the two things circling each other.
Yeah, they're chasing each other.
Neither one is winning or losing this race.
It's both.
Yeah.
But if someone's asking that question, they're kind of also telling you where they're at with the process, right?
The gradual evolution is that they'll get to the both, but maybe they just need to be guided a little bit.
I think eventually I will do an episode on really, really stupid and pretentious philosophical questions, and that might be fun.
And that'll definitely be in there.
Yeah.
You know, Chicken Crossing the Road and what are the other ones off the top of my head?
Oh, yeah.
The definitely would be, you know, the unstoppable force and the immovable wall.
That'll be in there.
I mean, really inanes.
You know, if a car is moving at speed of light, what happens with the headlight?
You know, does the, you know, stupid shit like that, right?
entire collected works of Zen Buddhism.
Right, yeah.
Just koking.
That'll be a fun episode eventually.
But life does imitate art.
And art obviously has to imitate life.
That's the only thing it can imitate, really.
It would be stupid for it to do anything else.
But life is, you know, how we engage with the world is in some way informed by our relationships with all the people around us.
But more and more so, because we're forming so many like parasocial relationships with celebrities and this sort of thing, this is informing us.
This is, you know, the ideas that we communicate in movies are helping to inform and shape our lives.
It's part of the reason why, more and more so, our culture is becoming something closer to a monoculture.
Immediately, some people are angry and like, no, all the cultures are unique.
And yes, they are, except that, you know, business people in China and Japan and all over Africa and Europe and North and South America, all continents, the business people of the world all kind of tend to wear the same suits now, don't they?
Well, I mean, they've seen parties.
Well, this is the part of the culture that gets spread around the world, right?
And, you know, they might not realize it, but in small ways like that, this culture that's emanating from just south of our border is dominating all of these things.
And so we are foolish first to ignore it.
But I think it's worth looking at this and taking a close look at this.
So when I'm examining, when I'm thinking about this concept of looking at our visual art, these visual mediums, and thinking about the concepts that have how we're using them to understand our world, to create our subjective realities, I come across first, the first thing I think about is a thing that's called a MacGuffin.
So this is a term that actually, I think there's a little bit of discrepancy over who started this term, but for most people, it started with Alfred Hitchcock, famous director, directed many, many films, many, many big films, kind of considered to be the first real big celebrity director.
He famously talked about this thing called a MacGuffin and gave its definition in interviews when asked.
And so this is kind of why people consider it to be his idea, even though some people say, oh, someone else mentioned it somewhere.
And I don't know.
But I don't really care who came up with it, but Alfred Hitchcock is usually the one.
But a MacGuffin generally is like an object or an idea inside a narrative that allows the audience to accept the plot.
And for people who are like really sticklers for this, very often it's a thing that doesn't really matter to the audience.
So people point out things like the Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark is a MacGuffin.
It is the reason for all of the plot to occur, but it itself doesn't really matter.
But there are many, many of these, right?
Science fiction is rife with these, mostly because in science fiction, you need to have some way to tell the audience why a thing is happening that isn't happening in their everyday lives.
Oh, Star Trek, these ships are going from planet to planet.
In order for the audience to accept that these ships can go from planet to planet, we have to have a reason why they might do that.
The warp drive exists.
It's a thing that we call a warp drive.
It allows a ship to go very, very fast, much faster than light.
And this explains why it's just like a car driving from city to city or a ship sailing on an ocean from continent to continent.
So it's kind of the assumed existence of a thing that we don't go around ever thinking exists in our real world.
Usually it's not a thing that exists in our real world.
Very, very often it's a unique thing to the narrative.
Yes.
So in things like Star Wars, for example, obviously anytime you have space travel, you always have to have a way to tell the audience why they're moving at speed of light.
But in Star Wars, R2D2 is a MacGuffin across all the movies in which he exists.
Anytime you have a conflict point and you need the conflict points so that the audience is engaged for the danger aspect, but you need to get the characters out of it, very, very often it's R2-D2 that's like, oh, mysterious android that has, you know, high amount of competence.
Suddenly he's just putting his little probe into the wall and talking to a computer and hacking it and getting them out of a garbage compactor, right?
I mean, it's just, he just saves the day just with a, you know, seemingly, you know, not doing anything at all.
And this is a thing in Dune with their spice.
Yeah.
You know, that's right.
That's right.
This magical process, but it's not about that.
It's not really about that.
That's just a thing that allows us to understand that it's a universe in which many, many planets exist and they just wink between them in an instant.
And so these MacGuffins, they help us to understand something.
So this MacGuffin idea leads us straight into a thing that a lot of people talk about in relation to films, which is a thing called just a moment.
Ah, yes.
Suspension of disbelief.
My brain needed to skip a gear there.
Yeah, it's fine.
When we talk about narratives like this, suspension of disbelief is sort of a concept that we're generally in everyday conversation coming to, you know, a familiarity with.
The idea that when you watch a movie, if you don't believe what is happening, then you're not going to be into it, right?
That's the idea, is that you're suspending your disbelief.
And this has to happen.
You have to work harder at this for science fiction because you're telling a much less believable story.
You don't want to alienate the viewer.
Yeah, when you're doing a romantic comedy that takes place in present day with nothing fantastical about it, you don't need to have hardly anything at all that suspends the disbelief of what's happening.
It's just characters doing their thing.
The Breakfast Club didn't need anything that suspended the disbelief.
Although, technically, the day-long suspension is a MacGuffin.
But getting back to what we're doing.
Pretty novel.
Well, I never had one of those on a Saturday.
No.
But suspension and disbelief is sort of manufactured or created or assisted by macuffins that occur in a story, right?
So they're placed there to help the audience to suspend their disbelief.
Right.
But it occurred to me when I was thinking about this that when we talk about reality and about conspiracies and about people who have different beliefs, beliefs that conflict with each other.
One person says that the presidential election went one way and another person says that same election was stolen and it was a plot to deprive candidate X of their rightful presidency and therefore all of their supporters of their rightful president.
We come across usually a concept that we call cognitive dissonance, which is the idea that in your mind, you have something that you feel is real.
And that when you're when you're given evidence that supports the thing that conflicts with that idea, you tend to want to reject the new thing that conflicts and contradicts your reality.
So it doesn't matter what's, you know, in this concept, what's objectively real isn't at play.
What's subjectively real to you is your reality.
And to you, that is objective reality because it's your reality.
I mean, this is where we start to lose people sometimes because it's difficult to explain subjective versus objective reality, right?
You don't have full direct access to objective reality.
You see things and you hear things, but your eyes are bringing the information to a part of your brain that's perceiving and your ears are bringing the information in and your brain is doing things to interpret and then that is brought to you.
And then that's like a very simple layer, like a like a, you know, looking at a screen right in front of me.
But that's a whole new layer when you have to accept what other people tell you or what the news tells you or when you read things on social media and you have to interpret what is happening in the greater world based on what those things that are coming to you are telling you.
So there's extra layers of other people in a game of telephone essentially to tell you things and you have to parse through which ones do you trust, which ones do you not trust, and which things do you think are real based on that.
And with those things, you come up with your reality, which is just your subjective reality.
Yeah, a worldview kind of.
Right.
And if you thought that your worldview was necessarily different than objective reality, you would change it.
That's how we know that everyone thinks their subjective reality is objective reality.
I guess, although I don't know that I wouldn't say that it's the standard for people to try to apply that sense of having a criteria.
They don't usually think of it that way.
They just think of it as reality.
Yeah.
Right.
But I don't know that anybody, or I should say everybody, or that even many people place a responsibility on themselves to do their very best to align their subjective viewpoint with an objective kind of continually accessible objective reality.
Scientists do this.
Yes.
Yes.
But most people don't.
They just trust things that come to them, distrust other things that come to them, pick and choose through them based whatever their each individual has their own system for doing that.
And then it gets filtered, it gets interpreted, and then they come up with their conclusion.
And that conclusion becomes their reality.
And they don't call it their reality.
They don't call it subjective reality.
It's just reality.
But they call it logic.
Well, the logic is the process.
Undoubtedly, the logic is the process they're using, whether it's good logic or bad logic.
They are using some.
But some of the items and processes and things that are in their mind are based on things they've seen before, based on interactions they've seen before, people they've seen in scenarios, people they've seen on screen in scenarios.
And so in this way, our art does, in some way, inform some of the little bits of models we have in our minds to interpret our reality.
So it's not as direct as like people just saw a film and then they just believed all the things that were in the film, even though that film was fictional.
It's more like it's more subtle than that.
They might watch a film and then they might think, oh yeah, well, I know that Harry Potter isn't real and that magic isn't real.
But you know, like there is something to some parts of the way that the characters were interacting that I think is very interesting.
And they might go through and they might pick up on some of that.
And then when they interact with people in their world, how you know, Harry was interacting with some of the characters, that might inform how they interact and how they interpret other interactions.
And in this way, it does help to inform us.
So what I'm getting at here is that MacGuffins becoming like stepping stones to our to assist our suspension of disbelief is directly relatable to our narratives in real life and how they affect our cognitive dissonance.
So you can get past your cognitive dissonant barrier with the help of narratives that people might tell you about a thing.
I mean, this is essentially how anyone comes to believe in a conspiracy theory.
Because someone showed them pieces of the evidence in a selective form and then provided a narrative that went along with that.
And then that made some kind of sense.
And this became sort of like stepping stones on a path that led a person to form a new belief about whether or not a thing was the way that the media portrayed it or the way that this new video portrayed it, right?
This is essentially how this works.
Let's stop in there.
How am I doing?
Am I making sense?
Am I connecting these two ideas well enough?
Well, just that last idea, I think, could use some anchoring or with an example, maybe, if we can flesh that out or elaborate.
Right.
Okay.
So I mean, I did a podcast just my most recent episode was an episode about a check-in on the Trump attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Yeah.
July 13th, 2024.
And pieces of this can be shown.
So the two gentlemen I was talking to have skepticism about whether or not this was exactly the way it was portrayed or told, or maybe whether or not there's something fishy happening.
I mean, they weren't like full-on conspiracy and fully, as we might say, fully pilled, but they were cynical about whether or not this was all on the up and up.
And part of how they got there was that they had looked at images.
They had seen an image of Donald Trump with two red streaks on his cheek.
And they had said to themselves that, I don't think that if the bullet put a hole in his ear, then first I don't think that it would have that small amount of blood.
And I don't think I think his ear would be much more messed up.
And that was essentially where they were.
They were like, I don't know all the details, but I think that seems fishy to me.
And so this became like a stepping stone toward having a disbelief in how that event occurred.
Or just the face value fact that it was a bungled assassination attempt.
Right.
In the, like in the sort of what might be called the official narrative.
I don't even like to use that because that's the terminology that's used to almost vilify it, right?
Yeah.
Oh, you follow the official narrative.
You must be one of the sheeple.
Mainstream media.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You just bought the line, you know.
But as we went through in the last episode, it was difficult to, more difficult increasingly, I think, anyway, more difficult to form the opinion that it was some kind of inside job or staged event once you looked at more and more details of how the thing occurred.
But the way it's often presented is that it's just this politician.
And usually in this case, anyway, it was a politician that these two gentlemen did not want to see gain any respect or power or prominence.
And he gained prominence in this way.
And, you know, so it's presented often as this one image of Trump with his fist in the air and he's mouthing the word fight.
And, you know, in the video, the crowd is chanting it.
Some people tell the tale that he's saying the word fight.
Not really true.
Yeah.
I see how you kind of get there if you're thinking about it.
Whether he did or not.
Well, the stuff that comes out of his mouth doesn't exactly matter.
No, except that, you know, if you're trying to be accurate to say that, you know, because I got the accurate data, and then you owe it to yourself at least to be accurate.
That was a very, I'll say that was a very interesting cast.
I listened to that one.
Yeah.
Well, this becomes like a stepping stone.
It becomes essentially like a MacGuffin that helps lead people to the belief that this was a staged event.
And so in this way, our conspiracy stories are narratives.
And those narratives have MacGuffins in them that lead people to other things.
Here's a few, here's a small list of conspiracy MacGuffins that are used over and over again in conspiracy narratives.
So off the top of my head, tunnels or underground spaces.
So Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory about a pizza parlor that had supposedly a basement that had things going on in the basement.
And a man went there with a heavily armed and he held people hostage, demanded to see the basement, and of course there was no basement.
And people asked how could this possibly be?
Well, it turns out that the people who told him this were just telling them a story, had never even been to the Pizza Parlor themselves.
Of course, they are just making it up.
And they made up a part that you can't see.
They said, oh, yes, it looks normal, but there's a part you can't see that is where all the evil happens.
And this helps people get to the place where there's evil happening in that unseen place where they're hiding it from us.
There was a thing called the McMartin Preschool.
This was a thing that happened in the Satanic Panic back in the 80s.
There was a series of people who claimed that there was abuse, sexual abuse happening in the McMartin preschool.
And they claimed that it was happening in tunnels underneath, that there was a complex tunnel system underneath the preschool.
And this was to create the story.
At first, when people looked at the, you know, there were stories that there was things happening in the McMartin preschool.
And then people looked and they couldn't find evidence of anything.
And that's when it started to say, oh, well, you can't find the evidence because the evidence is in a hidden place.
It's a series of tunnels underneath the preschool that you can't see.
And this was widely spread across people who spoke about it, that there was a series of tunnels underneath that you can't see.
And there aren't convenient.
Yes, it's convenient.
Yeah.
There are no tunnels underneath the McMartin Preschool.
There was a trial.
I think some people even went to prison.
I can't remember all the details of the McMartin Preschool, but it turned out that there was no abuse at all happening.
This was part of what's false memories essentially planted in people who later was like, yeah, I don't understand any of that.
It never happened.
It was just a thing that people asked me about.
And they asked in such a way that led me to it.
Little kids, right?
They don't know.
They want to please their parents.
Other conspiracy MacGuffins are the rich billionaire is making a thing happen in a way, right?
So George Soros is paying people to do things.
He's paying protesters to show up at rallies.
He's funding leftist groups to do things or whatever.
Also, Bill Gates is rich billionaire.
He's paying people to do nefarious things.
He's doing something to make a thing happen that makes him even more rich than he is.
If they're rich enough to be that powerful, they can do whatever they want.
And you just won't be able to figure it out because they're that rich.
Yeah.
What are some other famous sort of conspiracy MacGuffins?
I had a list once upon a time.
I'm curious.
Where does the domain of a MacGuffin kind of begin and end compared to just the phenomena of delusion?
Well, a MacGuffin would be a thing that's assisting you in forming the idea that an unreal thing is happening.
So really, this loops into another concept that I have an episode about called pseudotangibility.
So in pseudotangibility, you have a tangible item that's being directly related as in like juxtaposition style with an unreal idea.
So this is a crystal ball.
A crystal ball is an example of pseudotangibility.
It's a mystical device that it's a real ball, but you don't know how it works.
Only the grifter knows how it works.
And they are seeing things in the crystal ball that you can't see and they're telling you about them.
So this is also, you know, tarot cards, tea leaves.
These things are pseudotangible.
They are things that you, that can lead a person to think that they're real because they are actual objects.
The tarot cards themselves are real cards.
But the idea that they're telling the future is an unreal idea.
But it can lead people.
It can be a stepping stone to lead people to the idea that there's a real thing happening here that's kind of spooky or whatever it is.
And that's MacGuffins are, as they're used in conspiracies, serving this sort of pseudo-tangible nature.
The McMartin preschool itself was real.
The tunnels were not.
So people looked at the preschool and went, oh, that preschool, I mean, it's right there.
Like, that's where all the things are happening, right?
Yeah.
In the tunnels underneath where no one can see and someone can't, you know, there doesn't ever seem to be a hatch.
I don't know why the whole thing doesn't collapse.
There's so many tunnels under there.
But, you know, magical tunnels where these things happen in the unknown space, right?
You don't have to understand the tunnels.
You just have to know they're there.
Yes, yes, right.
And of course you can't see them.
They built them there so that you couldn't see them, right?
Yeah.
Mysterious government organization X is also a MacGuffin, right?
So the CIA.
No, the CIA, right?
If you need a reason why, you know, the Secret Service is also another one, right?
They say, you know, Hillary killed a whole bunch of people.
Well, how'd she get away with it?
Well, you know, the Secret Service, they were there the whole time because she was a, you know, her husband was a president and she was a senator and blah, blah, blah.
And so, you know, they're basically just goons who will kill people for you and bury the bodies.
And that's not really what the Secret Service is there to do.
And if you actually found any instance of that, that would be very interesting.
And the Secret Service are perfect for this because they're also never going to tell you anything that they're actually doing.
Because if they told you anything about what they're really doing, people could start to make plans and, you know, assassination attempts might start to become more successful.
So of course, they're never going to tell you anything about their procedures.
Yeah, they operate shadows.
It's called the Secret Service.
Yeah.
But the CIA often serves this exact purpose.
You need to, in your conspiracy narrative, you need some way in which this thing happened, this gap to be filled.
The CIA did it, dude.
And the fact that the CIA did do a bunch of stuff really helps to seal the bridge on this.
And, oh, they probably did a bunch of other stuff, too, that I don't know about, right?
It serves the same purpose as, you know, the tunnel is, you know, the preschool is really there.
The tunnels probably are too.
The CIA really did a bunch of stuff in COINTELPRO and all that stuff.
They probably did all this other stuff too that I don't know about.
Yeah, I think that's enough examples, right, of inconspiracies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's a device that allows us to move past something that isn't realistic and is treated like it doesn't matter so that we can get to the thing that we're trying to put our focus on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a stepping stone.
It's sort of like grease for the machine to allow the machine to get to where it needs to go.
And this is what these MacGuffins serve as a way.
They help you understand the plot that's occurring in front of you.
So they serve the same purpose in a conspiracy narrative as they do in a film, in a movie.
And that's sort of the comparison I'm getting to.
So as I choose these movies to do, and of course, first will be The Matrix, I will be aiming for pieces of them, moments in them that highlight these, these,
how they help to explain a piece of our subjective reality that we're trying to understand or a piece of our a way in which we have like a conspiracy trope where people can cynically say, oh, all of Hollywood is like that, or all of the CIA are like that, or whatever it happens to be.
It might be something like that that'll explain a part of that to help see how people might be looking at movies and using that to inform how they interpret the world.
Because they might look at a movie and say, of course, the movie wasn't real, but you know, there was that CIA agent in there.
And I bet those CIA agents are up to bad stuff like that, just like that guy was up to in that movie kind of thing, right?
I mean, that's a part of a movie that you might take with you and say, yeah, well, you know, I mean, the movie itself was fake, but that one part, I bet you they still up to that stuff, right?
And that's that'll be a thing that we highlight as we as we do this.
Yeah.
So I think I think I beat that idea, not quite to death, but just enough to exhaustion to use the horse again tomorrow.
What do you think, Patrick?
Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's an important piece because it's a device for examination.
And if we're going to look at things, we have to, you know, I think anywhere we're even ourselves, we have to look at ourselves and say, are we excusing ourselves from a necessary aspect of examination?
Or have we, in fact, looked at it as much as it deserves for us to say, okay, we feel like we have an understanding that we can move on from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sounds good.
Yeah.
I'm done talking.
We're going to end the episode.
Okay.
So this is good.
This is a good primer introduction.
I don't know if I can't remember if I mentioned at the start, but if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they hear on this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And as a side note, every once in a while, I get an email from someone who unsolicited wants to, you know, be on the podcast or like sell me something related to the podcast or something like that.
I'm generally just ignoring those, just as a, you know, in case any of those people listen to this episode and they wonder why I haven't responded.
I'm not responding to those.
I think they're either disingenuous or I really don't like sales pitches and salespeople and people trying to sell me things, so I avoid them.
Yeah, sorry about that.
If you have a complaint about that, make a more detailed email and send me that one.
Send me a picture of your pet, too, so I know it's not just an automated thing.