Inception, released July 2010, blurs reality’s edges as Spencer and Patrick debate subjective perception—where dreams feel tangible yet lack logical grounding, like Elon Musk’s "woke mind virus" or pandemic-era mask paranoia. Patrick counters that framing ideas as "viruses" ignores nuance, while Spencer ties "decision paranoia" to slippery-slope conspiracy logic, comparing it to The Matrix’s unreality. Modern theories don’t just replace facts; they weaponize ambiguity, turning trust into chaos, leaving even shared truths like time zones or global travel contested. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back again today with Patrick.
How are you doing, Patrick?
Good, Spencer.
How are you doing?
Good.
Really, really good.
We just spent 20 minutes talking, wasting a lot of really good podcast material just in talking to each other.
Sorry, everyone's going to miss that.
Used it up in the preamble.
Yeah.
So this is going to be hopefully a little better than mediocre, but I'm only, you know, shoot low and maybe it's a little better than that.
Because again, all the good stuff happened before we hit roll.
So sorry.
Sorry.
What are you going to do?
You can't plan for this stuff.
But we are going to talk today about a movie called Inception.
So first we have to do spoiler warnings.
This movie is 15 years old, almost exactly 15 years old now.
It came out in 2010.
Ordinarily, I think the general rule is kind of a five-year span.
You don't need spoiler warnings, but I'm still going to give them because some people haven't seen it.
And maybe they still want to or something.
They weren't aware we're going to do this and they stumbled across this.
You're a nice guy to do that for them.
I am a nice guy.
That's kind of my thing.
Especially considering, you know, if they needed the warning, you were so charitable to give it to them after they stumbled past the title of this particular podcast to end up in here.
Could you imagine the outrage if they got spoilers at this point?
Yeah.
Well, we are definitely going to spoil this movie.
We're going to talk.
We're not going to like this.
This isn't a scene by scene recap of the thing, of course.
This is not what we do.
We focus on certain aspects, but it definitely will spoil much of the plot and most of the point of the movie, like the themes and everything.
So don't, don't, you know, think that you're going to get away from this and not have it, not have the end ruined for you, which I'm going to actually do right now.
Get it out of the way.
Rip the band-aid right off.
Because we're not actually going to like explore, like try to tell you what this movie means as far as a movie goes.
You know, like there's many, I watched a bunch of them.
There's many, many, many people who want to tell you all about what this movie means.
And there's no consensus.
Let me tell you, there's no consensus, no agreement among all of those people as to what it exactly means.
And I think it's mostly because Christopher Nolan just put as many Easter eggs into this thing as possible.
Like a decade's worth of Easter eggs.
Like as many as he possibly could throw in there.
Like they're all over the damn place.
It's nuts.
There's going to be a couple of links in the show notes to this episode that have links to other YouTube videos that have breakdowns with other spoiler things.
And the what was interesting to me was as I was going through those was that in several of them, people said that Christopher Nolan has is on record as saying, as pertains to the end of this movie, because everyone asks, is he still dreaming at the end of this movie?
Like this is all about dreams and is he still dreaming at the end of this movie?
And they several people said, Christopher Nolan is on record saying that he is not dreaming at the end of this movie.
And then several other people said, no, he is on record saying he is still dreaming at the end of this movie.
That's what the ending means.
And I found a clip that basically is Christopher Nolan saying, the point of the end of the movie is that it doesn't matter.
And that's, to me, that's the one that's, that's real.
Christopher Nolan is attempting to not tell you what the ending means.
He's meaning for you to understand it for yourselves.
And I'm not here to tell you what it means.
Understand it for yourselves.
I don't care if he's still dreaming or not at the end of this movie.
Okay.
And that seems to be the sticking point for everyone is: is he still dreaming?
Was he dreaming the whole time?
Was none of this real?
Well, according to neuroscience, Patrick, everything that you experience inside your brain, inside your mind, the pseudo-virtual space inside your noggin that we call your mind, everything that's in there is only real to you.
It is your subjective reality.
And therefore, it doesn't matter.
Christopher Nolan's right.
It doesn't matter.
If it's real to you, it's real.
And that's it.
And that's the point.
That's the point of the movie.
That's what I'm going with.
It's just whatever your subjective reality tells you.
And that's fine.
And there's no need to say that it's some hammer of objective reality coming in and saying, no, it's definitely this other thing.
We don't need that.
That's it.
So you just watch the movie.
What did you think?
What was your thought on that?
The ending of the movie.
We'll start with the end.
It's fine.
Sure.
Sure.
I mean.
To me, the end of the movie matters.
I'm not resolved either way whether he was in fact dreaming at the end.
Like, I mean, it's ambiguous for a reason.
By the way, I brought my inception top to play with for this.
You're not supposed to tell anyone else what your totem is.
Otherwise, they can use it against you.
Oh, shit.
I'm sleeping.
To me, it mattered because so much of what happened is his motivation stemming from what he perceived was the end of his wife, right?
His wife's death.
And if she is, in fact, not dead, if she was right, you know, that matters.
So I don't know.
I would love, I would love to know which was which, because if you knew, right?
Like if you opened Schrödinger's box and found out what that cat state was, you know, you look back and you think, oh, the whole time I was either right or wrong.
And as humans, we have attachments to being right and wrong.
Oh, yeah.
You know, so I think that's kind of why, that's why it matters to me is because was he right or was he wrong?
Did he?
Yeah, I don't know.
It's okay.
So this movie is just a story.
Yeah.
It's one of those movies that it's like a science fiction, but it's actually more like a fantasy.
Because in most science fiction, the premise is sort of pretending that the science that's that's presenting as the reason why the plot is happening the way it is is something that's possible.
It's almost always the reason why science is, why science fiction takes place far in the future.
It's a way to justify the fact that those things are happening and we would need some time to develop all that technology that they're using to develop the plot and have it occur the way it occurs.
But of course, in this movie, the technology that's available to everyone is exactly the same as the technology that we have today, with the exception of whatever is going on with these dreams, right?
Like the helicopter is no better than a helicopter of today, of present day, right?
The cars that are in the movie aren't any futuristic cars.
They're not like flying cars.
Right.
There's no other futurisms in there.
And many of the things that he's using as devices for the dreams are also not how dreams really work.
And so it's fine.
It's fine.
It's just a fantasy.
It's just a, it's just a way for him to explore the theme of how we understand reality.
And that's all it is.
It's just a, it's just a metaphor for reality.
And that's it.
And that's exactly what I want to want to explore here today, right now, is because we are all dealing with our own attempts to understand reality every day and increasingly more difficult every day, generally speaking.
And this is not unlikely to stop anytime soon.
AI is not going to come along and be a great device for determining what is and isn't real.
It's much more likely that it's going to make it more difficult, actually, because the people whose interest it is to make that line more difficult to see are going to be in charge of the AI.
So, you know, it's much more likely that it's going to, we're going to have fake media that you can't tell from real media, et cetera, right?
I mean, that's much, it's a much more likely outcome from all of this AI technology.
Some people say we're already there.
Well, that's that's that technology is one reason why we have people who say that things are just fake.
They can just dismiss it as fake, even if it's real.
They just, oh, well, that's, they can make that with machines now.
It's, I don't need to believe that.
It's a, it's a way to sweep it under the rug and say, I don't, I don't need to, I don't need to take that on board my interpretation of the world because they could have done that in a lab, essentially.
Right.
But yeah, this, this movie is about, you know, two things and trying to tell the difference between them.
One is reality and one is an experience that isn't real, but is indistinguishable from reality.
Right.
And why is it indistinguishable?
It's because you're taking it in through your senses the same way you would objective reality.
And this is what he's saying in the dreams.
Like his dream world is much more vivid and realistic than our dream world because it's it's appearing to us through our objective senses to get into our minds, right?
He can't make it like our dreams are.
He can only do it, you know, he has things and you know the worlds that are bending and everything else, but everything else just seems hyper real, which isn't really how dreams really work.
They're not hyper real.
They're just places in which we don't question whether things are real.
You don't have like lucid dreaming exists and that's sort of a different state.
It's where you're kind of, you know that you're dreaming and you know that there's a version of you that's different than what's happening in the dream.
And so we're, you know, that, and that's not really what he's exploring.
Even still, like any level of dreaming compared to conscious life would seem like an impairment of some sort.
You know, the ability to sort and processes is your brain really doing like he says, like one of the characters say that, you know, you're, you're only using 10% of your brain while you're awake and you're using all of it while you're asleep and it's doing all these other things.
We actually use more than 10% of our brains.
that's not actually a real thing.
That's sort of a myth.
It sort of looked that way once upon a time back in the, I don't know, 70s or 80s when that sort of first came about, because we started having machines that could view parts of what was, you know, part of the electrical signals that were going on in our brains.
And it looked like only parts of our brain were being used, but it was because we didn't understand enough about neuroscience to understand yet fully.
or maybe the few people who did weren't good at communicating this completely, but that our brain was dividing up tasks for specific portions of the brain that were more efficient at doing those tasks.
So like when you're speaking, there is a portion of your brain that comes up with the words that you're going to use to speak with.
And that's that part is a, you know, relatively, it's not your entire brain that's doing that.
It's some portion of the one side of your brain kind of that's doing that work, right?
So if you're just speaking and just coming up with that, it might look like only some part of your brain is being used because that's the part that's interpreting words.
But the rest of your brain does things and it's it's possible.
So like it's not really true that we're not using our whole brains, but it is sort of true that we're using more of them when we're asleep because we used to think that when you're sleeping, your brain is resting.
It was a thing that sort of made sense for, you know, a few thousand years, right?
You go to sleep because your brain works really hard during the day, right?
And it needs some time to rest.
Actually, we found out that the brain works way harder when you're sleeping than it does when you're awake.
We don't know everything it's doing.
We know a couple things that it's doing, right?
Which we're not going to get into heavy today.
There's plenty of other podcasts that go through those sorts of things, other people who do them.
But it is working harder technically when you're asleep than it does when you're awake.
A couple of the reasons why all of this things that he says wouldn't really work the way it does, because it kind of bothers me, is that, you know, if you use a sedative to sleep, it usually impairs your ability to dream rather than just put you in a dream state, right?
You only really dream when you're in REM sleep, which you're not doing the entire night long, by the way, also.
So it's interrupted.
So this whole process would be like you dream for a bit, you know, and then you'd, that would be interrupted.
Your brain would be doing something else and it would, you know, you don't know what that is because you're not conscious during it.
But, you know, we can measure this now with machines.
And we know the times when you're dreaming and the times when you're not dreaming, that's a, you know, objectively real thing.
So, yeah.
And if you have really heavy sedative, you might not dream at all.
Some people don't dream at all when they have a lot of sedatives in them.
Interesting.
Yeah, it's a weird thing.
Like some people who drink a lot have trouble achieving all the REM sleep that they would need because of the way the alcohol affects them.
And that's one reason, one of many reasons why alcohol can be very bad for you.
Because you don't do the, you know, the REM sleep that you need is more difficult to achieve when you are heavily, I mean, alcohol is sedating you, right?
It's one of those sedatives that inter that can interrupt this work that your brain is doing.
So yeah, but I mean, I think this, in the same way that we should forgive Star Trek for having sounds in space when they explode, we should forgive this movie for not like following hard science because it's not a documentary about how dreams work.
It's a story about reality, right?
Well, also those say those sedatives are like highly specialized cocktails.
Well, they would have some additional fictional device to say, well, you know, we've allowed for REM with this sedative.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
We get that you can make it designer synthetics.
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay.
And it will keep you in your REM state the entire time.
Yeah.
No problem.
Yeah.
We went over this.
it's a mcguffin right it's the thing that allows the yeah yeah okay so So on to what we're doing here.
Where are my mind notes?
I have notes about this, but they're so scrambled, much like how this movie works.
I have no notes.
That's okay.
I'm not going to fire you or anything.
So when we're trying to interpret reality, we have an interpretive layer on, you know, we have senses.
We have five senses, right?
And two of them are kind of heavily linked, right?
You know, taste and smell are almost one sense almost.
But, you know, we have senses that are bringing objective information from the world into our minds.
And we have an interpretive layer that is doing things.
And that's what creates our subjective reality.
It's taking the objective information in and then it's interpreting it.
And then we get subjective reality from that.
And this is why, of course, we had a little bit of this conversation in one of the previous episodes where I mentioned to you that it's possible that when you hear a tree falling in the forest, you experience something that's not the exact same as what I experience when I hear a tree falling in the forest, right?
And that's our interpretive layers that are doing this.
And this movie is saying that this is happening while you dream and this is why the dream works this way.
And it kind of yada yada's past that part.
But the important part is, is that in real life in this, this is why conspiracism and unreal, unreality, unreal things exist because everyone is interpreting a very complex world in different ways.
And they're taking different clues with which to do that.
They're often for conspiracies themselves.
They're starting from the conclusion.
They're starting from the conclusion that there's someone out to get them.
It's a start through the seed of paranoia.
And then it works to, they don't need to affirm the way in which it happening or they don't need to affirm that it's happening that way.
They just need to see how it is it's happening.
And once you're doing that, you're on a track for confirmation bias to just form, you know, look for the thing that's out to get you.
I mean, there's a reason why we have paranoia as an experience.
It's because it helped keep us alive for many millions of years, right?
Like, you know, animals that were paranoid had a survival advantage over animals who, you know, didn't ever become paranoid.
And therefore, the ones that never became paranoid probably didn't make it.
Probably long gone before we ever came around.
Well, it's a special type of forecasting, right?
It's a forecasting based on threat.
It's an anticipation of threat.
Yeah.
And so it's there.
It's always going to be there.
We're never going to get rid of paranoia.
We need to find a way to properly interpret our world despite those layers of paranoia that are always just going to surface, right?
Yeah.
So I think we'll start with that.
We'll get your thoughts.
So I'm not the only one talking here.
And how have I done so far at explaining how it is that we are coming up with different versions of reality and therefore need to compare notes, if you will?
We need to, we always need to talk to each other about what we're seeing, what we're hearing, what we're experiencing to go over this because we need to have some idea that other people.
Yeah.
Well, like you said with the with the tree example, we could be coding that, you know, translating that sensory experience in completely different ways.
Whereas if I suddenly unplugged my jack and stuck your jack in, it would come through like absolute noise and wouldn't resemble a tree at all.
But we both have the commonality of experience so that when trees fall, they always code to our experience the same way because of that assembler or that interpretive layer as you as you mentioned.
Yeah.
If you were an alien from another planet who didn't have trees and didn't have things like that that fell and you came to the planet and you met me, let's say I'm Arthur Denton, you're Ford Prefect, and you came to Earth and then we went into the forest and a tree fell and you went, what the hell was that sound?
And then I told you that is the sound of a tree falling, then you would have that interpretive conclusion available to you that you would match up with the sound you just heard available for recall.
Next time when you're wandering into the forest alone and you hear that sound, you go, oh, I recognize that.
That's the sound of a tree falling.
And then, and so in this way, we are helping each other interpret these things as we provide communication about our experiences with everyone else.
And this is, this is a fundamental part of how we understand reality, partly through the way other people before us have understood it and communicated their experiences to us.
So how do we tie this to the plot line of the movie as well as misinformation or disinformation?
Yeah, yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, I think we're just going to yada yada past it just the way they did in the plot of the movie.
Okay.
We're dealing with the fact that all of us are coming up with a view, a version, a worldview that's not quite the same as any other one of us.
And we all have come to an understanding that some, every other one of us might have some slightly different version, but that it's close enough that we can still function with each other.
That your view and my view aren't different enough that we can't work together on things in this world.
Like you understand that we're on a podcast right now, right?
And that we're going to record this and other people will listen and give us feedback.
By the way, you can send that feedback to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Tell us all about what we got right, what we got wrong, where we're screwing up, whether I'm talking too much, whether, you know, you'd rather hear it the other way around.
You'd rather hear Patrick talking too much, whatever you want.
Tell me.
I don't care.
I'm not going to get personal.
Let Spencer know if this was a good time to mention the email for you guys to write.
Like, were you motivated to write in because that this is where you encountered it?
Yeah, no.
Or especially tell me if it was a terrible time.
No, that was terrible.
Yeah, that's it.
What are you doing?
Yeah.
Put it at the end.
What are you kidding?
Put it at the very beginning.
So I don't have to listen to the rest of it.
I just get it, you know, like, especially tell me when I'm screwing up.
I need that.
I need that.
We all do.
Well, yeah, but I'm not going to volunteer for other people to sign up for that.
Let Spencer know when I'm screwing up too, then.
Yeah.
And I'll choose which of those things to tell him.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
So, yeah, we're just going to get straight into a few of these clips that I put together.
Just sound clips, audio clips from the movie.
Yeah, here we go.
So here's the first one and we'll go through it.
There we go.
What is the most resilient parasite?
Bacteria?
A virus?
An intestinal worm?
What Mr. Cobb is trying to say?
An idea.
Resilient, highly contagious.
Once an idea has taken hold in the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate.
An idea that is fully formed, fully understood, that sticks right in there somewhere.
Okay.
So the first clip I pulled up, the first idea I had when I watched this movie, the first little piece that fit with conspiracy ideas was this one.
An idea as a virus.
So he does mention it being contagious, but what he's mostly, what the theme of the movie is mostly talking about here, isn't that it's contagious so much as it's virulent.
It's very difficult to remove from a mind and this comes up again and again.
Uh um, mostly in the again full spoilers for this the fact that he incepts the idea of dying into his own wife and then, even as they leave the dream or maybe he's still dreaming and he only thinks they left but, assuming they're not dreaming and he really left the dream she still has the idea of dying in her mind even when she wakes up and she can't escape that and she commits suicide.
Right, and this is the thing that haunts him.
Um, and this, this idea as a virus, is something that sits with conspiracy notions a lot.
I mean we Elon Musk very famously constantly talks about the Woke Mind virus right, how this has poisoned our atmosphere, our information zone right, that that being allowing people to think certain things is a dangerous thing for the world.
Uh, very strange thing, by the way, for a free speech absolutist to uh sort of put side by side with his free speech absolutism.
But you know, I can't, you know i'm not here to on this episode anyway.
Maybe a future episode I will examine all the man's uh inconsistencies.
But um, here we have in this movie bringing up the idea of a, an idea as a virus that you can't get rid of you once it's in there.
Once it's in there good and deep you you, you can never really dig it out.
You there's, you know it has too many roots.
What do you think of this idea Patrick, The idea of an idea as a virus?
Right.
So meta.
So meta.
I think it is, it is so hinged to a person's own subjective assessment of whether or not that idea is good, whether or not that idea has spread.
Like if a person looks at their own kind of social landscape, whether that's their circle of friends and family and co-workers, or whether that's the internet at large and they see it everywhere.
I think that, you know, the tendency to call something a virus is just, it's a reveal that a person has a negative connotation for a particular idea.
I don't think that you can use the word virus positively, because if we were to say, oh, a positive idea, you know, is not a virus.
It's revolutionary.
It should spread, we say, when we like that idea, when we approve of that idea, we say, oh, that's catching like wildfire, right?
But we don't talk about that stuff when we talk, like when we say a virus, you know, it's, it's like saying that inoculating against it is a greater challenge because it's, it has virus-like properties or that it's, you know, I don't, I don't see viruses as being, or I mean, sorry, virulent ideas, you know, something going viral.
It, it only can spread where there's fertile ground, right?
And when it comes to minds, there's a lot of different minds that are fertile grounds for what I would consider amazingly bad ideas, but, you know, to the people holding those ideas, I am on the other side of that.
So I seem like I have amazingly bad, you know, sheeple ideas or whatever it is that they're using to combat the fact that we have a difference of opinion, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is an interesting time to bring up one of the most unknown conspiracy ideas, Patrick.
So ideas like the idea that there are a global elite, you know, group of steeple-fingered, mustache-twirling rich people who regularly meet in rooms to plot the demise of humankind.
Those sorts of conspiracy ideas tend to catch hold and spread sort of like a virus, right?
But have you ever heard of a thing called morgolons?
No.
No, no.
Yeah, it's very, very niche.
Morgolons is the idea that aliens are here, but they're microscopic and essentially like the size of, you know, larger, larger than bacteria, but like tardigrade?
Yeah, yeah.
They're they're people claim to find them essentially in their snot, that they're living in their nose.
And they examine their snot for morgolons.
There's an account I follow on Facebook that the account is a person who has many, many alternate accounts on Facebook that he relentlessly joins these sort of niche groups and then puts screenshots from their chats onto Twitter.
And so you can read them without ever having to go there.
And the Morgolons were the most bizarre idea.
I mean, you'll get, you'll have QAnon groups that maybe have several thousand people in or whatever, but the Morgolon group will have like 20 people.
And this is like grand total, right?
Like it's so believing in this planetary total.
The idea is just not catching on.
It's not spreading like a virus because it's so, it doesn't, it doesn't satisfy any of the paranoia that would, you know, find fertile ground in more and more minds, right?
It's even in the Morgolon idea, the aliens are there, but you might even be happy that they're there, right?
Like this, it's not even clear what they might be doing.
They don't appear to be doing anything at all.
Even to the people who believe that they're there, they're not doing anything bad at all.
They're just happy that they're there.
I just, I just try to treat my Morgolons really good, you know, and that's the kind of idea that, you know, I might want to have a good look at one, but if they don't want me to see them, then that's the only reason why I can't see them because they don't want me to, right?
Right.
So it's a self-fulfilling.
These are sophisticated aliens, after all.
Oh, yes.
They went all the way across the galaxy to come here, right?
But this is why you've never heard of it because it's not catching on.
It's not, it's, it's not, it's an idea that's not spreading like a virus.
It's, it's not catching on.
So yeah, is it the Golga Frinchians or something from Hitchhiker's Guide where they got swallowed up by in the nose of a dog or something like that?
It's just there's a tie in there.
This could tie trace all the way back to someone's asset trip reading Hitchhiker's Guide.
Yeah, it could.
Yeah.
There was a species that had meant to make war on Arthur.
I seem to be having terrible difficulty with my lifestyle went through some sort of wormhole and started a war.
And when they finally figured it out, they came to kill us and this kind of war caused the war.
And then they, but they, through a massive misunderstanding of the size difference, once they got there, they were fast outmatched because their entire army just fit in the size of a, you know, we need to let those 20 people know.
Yeah, we figured it out where you got this idea.
Yeah, yeah.
Don't worry.
We got the origin story of the Morgan.
Yeah, but that's an it's it's just an idea that's not catching on.
It's it's not viral.
It's it's nothing.
It's it's also incredibly silly, but there's other things that are incredibly silly that do catch on.
Yeah, but it's persistent.
I don't know.
I'm not sure how old it is.
I don't think it's that old.
You know what I mean?
It's not like some ideas like a lot of conspiracy theories now are pulling from ideas that are 100 or 150 years old.
Oh, okay.
So they have a history, right?
And they sometimes pretend like they don't have a history.
And sometimes they draw on that history and say it's been around for a long time.
Like this is the thing that makes it real.
I don't know.
They're pseudo facts, right?
That are meant to support these things.
But they like to find those things that are so-called hiding in plain sight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then the fact that you can't see them is meant to be more proof that they're really there because they worked so hard to hide them.
Anyway, let's get on to the next clip that I pulled up.
What do you want from us?
Deception.
Is it possible?
Of course not.
If you can steal an idea from someone's mind, why can't you plan one there instead?
Okay, here's me planning an idea in your head.
I say to you, don't think about elephants.
What are you thinking about?
Elephants.
Right, but it's not your idea because you know I gave it to you.
The subject's mind can always trace the genesis of the idea.
True inspiration is impossible to fake.
It's not true.
Robert Frischer.
What's your problem with this, Mr. Fisher?
That's an altier.
Mr. Sido, this isn't your typical corporate espionage.
You asked me for inception.
I do hope you understand the gravity of that request.
The seed that we plant in this man's mind will grow into an idea.
This idea will define him.
It may come to change.
It may come to change everything about him.
Okay.
So the people listening really close will realize, of course, that there was two clips there.
I put two clips in there because they're both about inception explaining the idea and how it's going to change him.
And this against his will.
Well, yeah, I mean, they're going to pretend in the movie like he has to come up with the idea himself.
So it's this whole idea thing of, you know, if he just had the right things in place, the right things in place, would he have come into these conclusions anyway?
Difficult to say.
But from a conspiracy mindset, this is at a very important point.
So it's a thing that I'm now calling decision paranoia.
So I mentioned earlier that there's a sort of a seed of paranoia that's there generally, but this is a very particular kind of paranoia.
So when almost all people who fall into conspiracy beliefs have this idea that they don't want their decisions to be influenced by the wrong people or really by anyone outside themselves,
that they, there's a, there's an undercurrent of like this sort of notion of freedom and then no one will take it from them.
But it's almost all related to the decisions that they're making, that some force that they don't want and is bad is going to affect their decisions and has already affected a bunch of decisions.
I mean, this is the idea behind the woke mind virus that Elon Musk comes up with, that there's a negative force in the world that's indoctrinating people into bad ideas and these are affecting their decisions in bad ways.
And so in this movie, they are literally looking to change, and they're saying a single decision.
But as they say, this could change the course of their entire life.
They could change everything about them, this one decision.
And this is what most conspiracy believers believe, is that the ability to change any one decision can become the ability to change everything about a person.
That it is a slippery slope argument that they're making in their minds, but this idea of not knowing, believing that they can change some decisions and not knowing the process by which those decisions can be changed and which decisions are being changed leads with paranoia to believe that all the decisions could be affected.
That it's it can be almost like mind control.
That's the end result of that thinking.
That once it's totalizing in that way, once all of your decisions are affected, someone does have control of your mind, right?
Well, control of a very, well, particular but crucial piece of it, like at a decision point.
Right.
Well, in this movie, they're talking about one decision point.
Yeah.
But in the minds of people who follow conspiracies, you can't let them ever affect any one decision because letting them affect any one will allow them to affect all of them.
I mean, this was a central theme of people that didn't want to wear masks during the pandemic.
Because having the, you know, the they, the omnipotence they make you wear masks was going to somehow allow them to make you do all kinds of other things that are bad.
And so that process was also unknown.
And, you know, like, how is it that wearing a mask would, you know, it was very unclear.
Maybe some people said that it was a signal of your subservience to some other thing, but that's also really strange, right?
I also drive on the right side of the road as I go down the highway.
Is that subservience to a societal thing?
Should I start driving on the other side or wildly crossing the lines on both sides just to prove that I'm my own person?
Freedom.
Yeah.
We drive, we follow rules of society because we understand that following these set of rules this way will lead to the maximum number of us living safely and comfortably in our lives and also having the maximum amount of trust when we're living our lives doing those things.
It's not a system that allows a mysterious they to control us.
If I ever needed to drive on the left side of the road, I am capable of it.
If there's an accident, I need to go around people, I'm capable of going around them on the left.
I'm not confined to the right.
If I'm wearing a mask for a pandemic and I need to take it off because of something in my world, I'm able to take it off.
I'm still in charge of me.
I wore the mask during the pandemic because I wanted to generate the most trust in everyone else's safety so that we could function as a society.
And I drive on the right side of the road for the exact same reason, because I want everyone who experiences me on the road to have the maximum amount of safety and comfort and trust when they're on the road.
There's a difference in those two sides of that comparison, though, that I don't think it necessarily weakens it, but it has to be noted because if people decided that they were no longer content to stay relegated to the right side of the road, would see disastrous outputs immediately right whereas the problem with the uh the the mask issue for example was that consequences weren't visible
No, no, they weren't.
And, you know, the problem with it was that you had people establish or evaluating what their decision was going to be about the mask, regarding it with two completely different things.
Like you said, you know, some of us were interested in wearing the mask because we believed that it contributed to the common good and it did not cost us anything sufficient.
Whereas some people said, like, I'm not evaluating whether or not this makes sense to wear the mask scientifically.
I'm evaluating the mask on purely unscientific principles and looking at it politically in terms of government slash state control.
Right.
So if they can make me wear a mask, they can make me, you know, that's blank.
That was their path to like enslavement, basically.
It's a decision paranoia.
It's allowing them to affect this decision will give them some kind of special in, a foot in the door, if you will, to affect all kinds of other decisions.
And we can't let them do that.
Which is, you know, it's not like the masks were, you know, like a court precedent or something.
No.
Yeah.
It's also, yeah.
So really strange set of ideas, but it were, it was ones that caught on.
And certainly among people who it was also a strange thing from a purely from a logical standpoint, if you didn't want to get a vaccine, you should want a mask.
Like if you believed that COVID was real and you also thought the vaccine was going to, I don't know, somehow kill you, then a mask was a useful alternative to a vaccine, except that we generally saw everyone who refused the vaccine also refuse a mask.
And the thing that explains that is decision paranoia, because the decision paranoia is what drives both of those decisions to avoid the vaccine and also avoid the mask.
It's the route that drives both of those in that direction.
So this is why, to me, this is a fundamental part of almost all conspiracy notions that I know about.
I mean, aside from Morgolons, they're the unique in one spot over there.
A primary fear is with having any outside force, particularly what's seen as an oppositional outside force affect any decision at all is of primary concern to people who believe in conspiracies.
Great.
So I'm going to take your silence as assent to that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, you said it all there.
Great.
Yeah.
Next clip.
No.
Okay.
I'm ready.
I promise I'm ready.
Okay.
Here.
Three, four hours each day.
In dream time with this compound.
About 40 hours each and every day.
Why do they do it?
Tell him, Mr. Carp.
After a while, it becomes the only way you can dream.
Do you still dream, Mr. Cobb?
They come here every day to sleep.
No.
They come to be woken up.
The dream has become their reality.
Who are you to say otherwise?
Let's see what you can do.
So that was taken from a relatively obscure moment in the movie where they're looking into what looks almost like an opium den.
There's a bunch of people sleeping and they're going there.
And the conversation says that the one man says they come here to dream.
And the other man who runs the place says, no, they come here to be woken up because they can't tell the dream from reality anymore.
And then that might have been Leonardo DiCaprio's character who said that, but the man who runs the place says, who are you to say otherwise?
And that's the point.
That's where this movie is.
And also where conspiracy ideas are.
That the people who really believe in these things, they can't tell that they're not real.
To them, these conspiracy ideas are real.
And that's a thing that's difficult for me to understand, sort of.
I'm getting better at it, understanding that they believe these things are really real.
But that's, I think, still difficult for me to communicate to other people who look at these situations.
I have an uncle.
He might even listen to this podcast.
I'm not really sure.
But he believes or has communicated in the past, maybe he doesn't believe it anymore, that all the people who claim that they believe in flat earth are just kidding.
They don't really do it.
They're doing it to get a rise out of people, to get attention, to troll people online who will respond and try to tell them all about how the Earth isn't flat.
But once, you know, this is only that belief that they're only kidding, I think is only possible if you've never looked into it.
You've never tried to have conversations with them about it.
You've never tried to go into a Twitter space where they're talking about these things and see how much spite and venom and fervor they put into these thoughts and these ideas and these arguments.
And then also the thing that really puts a much finer point on it is if you try to talk to any of their relatives, their relatives who deal with them, who are related to them, see them all the time, siblings or children or parents or whatever.
Their relatives are convinced that they really believe these things.
So the idea that they only pretend to believe these things just to get a rise out of people on the internet falls on its face when we look at the other people in their lives who say, oh, no, oh no, my cousin or whoever, they're lost.
They can't talk to me about anything except for that now.
And that's, you know, that puts a much finer point on this is that it does interrupt families.
It does get in the way of, you know, family gatherings when you gather for Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever people gather for these days.
I don't know.
And they try to have conversations about things and they have to avoid like a larger, what seems to be anyway, a much larger list of things each and every year because the number of topics that gets swallowed up in this black hole gets larger every year.
It used to be just flat earth, but then it was flat earth and also the political elite who cast the image of the, you know, the illusion of the spherical earth upon us, which means the UN to the flat earthers.
It's the UN.
And then it's, you know, the next year, it's, it's not just the UN, but it's individual politicians who they think are propping up the UN or working with them, or a favored politician that they think is somehow going to, you know, tear the illusion away or something.
Well, they always have to be on the hunt to drag new things into the whole connective, you know, fabric of that belief system, right?
Because they'll never find anything conclusive or cohesive enough to present it and say, aha, that's it.
We're done.
It's settled, right?
Right.
It's what's never going to be settled.
No, not using those means, right?
Or not with those beliefs that, you know, using everything else at our disposal, you know, we can clearly see that our world is not flat, you know, for example.
So it does.
Here's the thing I'll concede.
When you're just standing in a field, you can think that it's flat.
You can, you know, the world, the way it looks to you, when you're just your eyeballs and you're just looking at landscape, you can't tell the difference between a flat earth and a spherical earth.
That's, that's true.
And if, if you were a medieval peasant who was born on a estate and then you worked on that estate and then you died on that estate, and that was what, you know, roughly 98% of humans in Europe anyway, who were kind of our descendants for you and me, you know, their lives, yeah, to them, it wouldn't make a difference.
Who should tell them one way or the other whether it's the earth is flat or spherical?
And what difference would it make to them?
It wouldn't.
It wouldn't make any difference.
Who are you to say otherwise, as the man in the movie says?
Because the things that a medieval peasant would see would be indistinguishable in either case.
It wouldn't matter to them.
They're never going to travel far enough that it's ever going to make any difference.
And they're never going to see any technology that's going to, you know, even if they go on a pilgrimage, they join a crusade, which they would feel lucky to join a crusade.
They get to see new scenery, right?
They travel from Britain to Palestine, Jerusalem, whatever.
And they get to see different time zones.
But with each passing day, they would, you know, they would never notice that their day is creeping in time because they're not moving fast enough, right?
It takes them a year or two to go from Nottingham to Jerusalem.
And they're never going to notice that the days are changing like this.
The seasons are coming and going much faster than they're noticing the, you know, difference in time zones.
So to them.
Well, even in modern society, right?
Like where do we see that?
Where do we see it having any impact, right?
Where do we see the belief in a flat earth or the belief otherwise in spherical earth?
Where do we see that actually having an impact on people's lives unless you are involved in some sort of transport industry?
I bet there's no pilots that think that people.
As a person who has podcasts, who occasionally has guests in both the UK and Australia, I will tell you that it definitely makes a difference because some of them are having a time tomorrow morning rather than this evening.
And some of them I can't talk to in the evening because they're asleep and it has to be my morning for it to be their evening or I have to wake up at 2 a.m. or something.
And those time zones are real.
Absolutely.
Like as soon as you start to have friends who are in other parts of the world, time zones are real, man.
Like, you know, and you can try to, you know, believe that they're lying to you about what time it is there.
Yeah, you can.
You can, you can form a belief that they're lying to you, but that's, why would you do that?
Why, why would you even talk to them if they were just going to lie to you about the time where they live, right?
Right.
So to come back to the, to the phrase that he says, you know, and you've noted who are you to say otherwise.
Yeah.
I, you know, I don't see that particular notion to be of any use to somebody who's trying to propagate misinformation.
It seems more like it's a it's a consolation for me, for me knowing better and saying that, no, I know that this is the waking world.
That's the dream world.
I can differentiate the difference because we started from the same original place.
They just took it somewhere else, right?
And say, well, that's not important to them anymore, right?
So that's for me, knowing that the difference between the real waking world and the and the sleep world, that's it's a way to say that like whatever the need is that you have to share your own affirmation about what the nature of reality is, you can stop it being satisfied that you know it, that you've sufficiently explained it for yourself.
You don't need to then deliver that revelation to people that have left the need for that behind.
Does that make sense?
I think so.
I'm trying to think about how does this, how does this work and integrate with misinformation?
That notion of who are you to say otherwise is used to undermine the authority of reality.
I mean, they don't use that phrase specifically, but they use phrases that essentially mean the same thing as to mean, make no difference.
And the point of most people who sort of like conspiracy influencers, like they're that, you know, they'll have a YouTube channel or something or a Rumble channel is more likely these days.
And they'll, you know, spew almost daily new conspiracy ideas.
I mean, this is what Alex Jones does every single day.
He has a very specific set of political things he'd like to accomplish as he does it.
He's not just coming up with these things randomly, of course, but that's essentially what he does every single day of his life.
Attempt to reinterpret the world according to his the political reality he would like to see is essentially exactly what he's doing.
But he's the point often is not to create a cohesive, an actual cohesive narrative that everyone that the audience can live in and have everything about their world make sense.
So what I thought at first was they were attempting to actually make a world that made sense, just made sense with a different shape.
I mean, this was sort of flat earth was sort of my first idea of an unreality, a specific, an unreality is like a specific set of untruths that stitched together to replace a piece of actual reality.
So flat earth is the perfect example because they're only replacing the one piece of reality.
can go to work as an accountant and being a flat earther never interrupts your ability to be an accountant.
Right.
It would, it would interrupt your ability to navigate across an ocean or to fly a plane across an ocean, right?
Like it would interrupt your ability to do that appropriately.
But if you're going to work in a cubicle, that's unlikely to ever affect your life.
So you can, you know, replace that part of your reality.
the fact that the earth is spherical with a flat earth idea.
And you're, it's making no difference to your life, generally speaking, for most people.
But where was I going with this?
I should take better notes.
So note to self, take better notes.
You'll note that I'm also not writing that down right now.
So I'm already failing at this.
But the purpose isn't to create a version of reality that makes sense.
So, I mean, that does seem to be what flat earthers are doing, but they're not really doing that.
And I know that they're not really doing that now when I've looked into it because they don't have a model that works.
Their model moves every single day.
And any two flat earthers will have a different model if they were forced to draw it out.
Right.
And so the point isn't to make a version of reality that works, isn't to make an unreality that works and is cohesive and fits with everything that's available.
The point is to undermine confidence in actual objective reality.
That's the point.
And so the phrase, who are you to say otherwise, is the thing that undermines confidence in that.
It tells everyone else that they don't need to listen to this supposed authority on reality.
Who is that guy to say that that's real?
And this is where our language about these things has become problematic.
We've referred to, I mean, we, I mean, the royal we, not me and you, the royal we, we in general, we in the field of people who are attempting to push back against unreal notions have often referred to reality as a version, as a narrative.
And this is something I'm trying to get people to not do is to refer to reality as a narrative, because then it becomes one of several narratives.
And then they have a choice.
And if they have a choice between, you know, like with flat earth, if they have a choice between a spherical earth or they have a choice between the flat earth upon which it's the north pole is the center and all revolves that way.
Or if they have a different version over here that's like an arched earth that somehow has, I don't know, something to do with density instead of gravity and something else.
I mean, I've seen that one.
And then they have another version.
As soon as you have many, many versions, you have eight different versions of the flat earth and then also a version of the spherical earth.
They all appear to have the same likelihood, which is a logical fallacy people make when they have multiple choices.
They just think that all the choices have the same likelihood when they don't know enough about them.
And once you have eight unreal ones and one objectively real one, it looks like all the other ones are collectively have a much greater chance of being one of those being real.
So insisting that this one be the one becomes almost annoying.
It becomes almost the one like, yeah, like, why are they pushing so hard against this one?
We have all these options.
Like, what's this guy's point on this, this one?
We have, you know, and so that's also a thing that's sort of weaponized against people who do this.
Like, why are you pushing so hard about this one thing?
Really weird, dude.
Really weird that you care so much about this.
Like, who's paying you to do this kind of thing?
That's the thing that they usually come to.
But one of the things that they do to undermine it is like, who are you to say otherwise?
Prove that the earth is spherical.
I don't have to prove the earth is flat.
Prove the earth is spherical, right?
And of course, very few of us can.
And as soon as you bring out any sort of what you consider a credential, then it's immediately refuted because, of course, people with credentials are going to say that.
They're the ones trying to run that so-called, you know, narrative.
So you believe in scientism then?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's, it's one of many religions.
You know, science is just one of many religions if you just, you know, dismiss it as scientism, right?
And so, yeah, that's, that's one of the things that they will do.
And the point isn't to make something that's real.
And that's, I guess that's what I'm saying is that this is one way in which this movie isn't like the conspiracy world.
Because in the movie, they are trying to make something that is truly indistinguishable and that every piece of information you get will be just like the real world.
But in the conspiracy world, they're not doing that at all.
Not even close.
They're just trying to undermine confidence in reality.
And that's it.
It just needs to be not real.
Yeah.
That's enough.
Well, I think that, you know, there's also a core nugget to like to this movie that there is an element of deception because of the interference, you know, the injection of this team in there to deceive this person into thinking that the idea that they wake with in the waking world is actually their own design.
I think that's appealing to any sort of conspiratorial mindset because that's what, you know, they have to explain why so many people believe the thing that they're fighting against.
Why so many people believe that the earth is spherical, that the masses have somehow, against their will, been infected by an idea that they have no control over because they've been, you know, indoctrinated into whatever, you know, they label the masses at that time.
They had those ideas incepted into them in childhood.
Right.
Yeah.
They don't use that language, but this is what they would say if they were comparing this movie to their set of ideas.
But then you always encounter that convenience too, where that lens is only applied outwardly and nobody ever wants to stop and ask the question and be like, well, what if that's been done to me?
Right.
Which is what.
Everyone's reality is inviolate, right?
Everyone's decisions are their own decisions.
Everyone's the hero of their own story.
Yeah.
So check my notes.
I think that's pretty much everything I have here.
Yeah.
I do have another section here, but we're already over an hour.
I can do it another time.
We can come back to this movie.
This movie has so many, many different parts.
Yeah.
We don't need to do a two-hour thing on it today.
We can do one hour on it and then we can do another hour on it.
Let it percolate for a while, see how it sits with the people.
If anyone else has any ideas, you know, and writing into you.
Also, if anyone is curious about the part that I left out, if I don't get any feedback, we're never doing this again.
You'll never know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Feedback.
Or the bit gets it.
Send that killed his dog.
Yeah right, National Lampoons second edition, yeah, unbelievable.
So yeah, send that email to truth unrestricted at gmail.com.
Um yeah, so I think with with that, that's it.
So uh, almost any part.
Oh, is there more?
Well, I want to know what the next movie is.
Yeah, the next movie.
The next movie.
So I want to do the Manchurian candidate.
Okay.
There's a problem.
There's two versions of Manchurian Candidate.
They're both good.
And I don't really like, I don't know if I want to do like two episodes about it.
And like, that seems like a lot, but they're connected.
So I don't know if I want to do them separate.
So I think I'm not going to do the Manchurian Canada right now.
I think we're going to phone in an easy one for the holidays.
I think we're going to do They Live.
Okay.
That's the bubblegum.
Yeah.
Sorry for such a.
Right.
So for those who don't know, They Live is a movie that came out in the 80s.
No spoilers for it right now.
But it was done by, let me look up, who was the guy that did that again?
Famous, famous, yeah, John Carpenter.
Of course, it was John Carpenter.
What an amazing maker of low-budget movies.
Sorry, John Carpenter, but that's what you were.
You were a maker of low-budget movies, but they were good.
They were good at a low-budget.
And it's very simple.
It wasn't a big movie at the time.
It's a cult classic, though, really.
And I think everyone who has any thoughts about any kind of conspiracy stuff should watch it at some point in their life because it's good.