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Obviously, The Matrix has had such a huge effect on the culture, huge effect on Rebel Wisdom as well. The first film, one of the first films that I put out was called A Glitch in The Matrix. And it sort of felt like a really significant starting point for this. And it’s obviously got such huge Christian undertones. And then the reason we didn’t do it about The Matrix was because when it came out, the reviews were so poor. And I actually watched it. And it’s probably one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life. And it just felt somehow tokenistic to then speak about a film that was so universally panned. But maybe that’s a good place to start with something sort of more concrete. And maybe kind of riff from there into the broader kind of topic of sci-fi. What did you make of it, Damian? Yeah, I think the first Matrix movie is still this very potent religious symbol in our culture. And we draw these other symbols for it, like the glitch in The Matrix, like you say, and the red pill, which are both about this idea of seeing through reality as we have been introduced to it. This can’t be what be real. You know, when we were first thinking of talking about The Matrix, it really, I thought back to like 1999 and watching that. The Odeon Multiplex Cinema in Guildford at the time. And you know, that was my experience of watching The Matrix movie. But then trying to put it into context, it had a really powerful effect on me when I saw that film. And I remember trying to talk about it with my brother at the time. And like, we just didn’t have any language to talk about it. Because retrospectively, I can see like life experiences that have happened since. We were living at maybe like the most secular point in history there. You know, it’s like Britain, a very secular country, like the commuter belt coming into London. We just had no language of religion. I had probably been to church like three times as a completely passive experience in my life. And then here was this film that either accidentally or deliberately was like a religious experience, you know, going to the cinema for that. And I think I’d experienced the bits of that through science fiction. And then The Matrix really hit me with that. And I think a lot of people with that. And I’ve had so many experiences in my life of talking to people who are fascinated by that movie like a kind of religious text. It opened up some kind of mystery for them that they’ve then been pursuing ever since. It’s funny your experience about remembering when you saw it. I have the same experience. I didn’t know anything about it. And I was getting married in 1999. And so I was busy and I decided to kind of disconnect from media and I wasn’t doing anything. And my friend said, you have to see this movie. You have to see this movie. And I was like, I’m too busy. And he said, no, go see the movie. So I went for a matinee like in the afternoon. I was the only person in the theater. And I just remember when the movie ended, I just sat there for at least 10 minutes. And I was like, what did I just experience? It really did have a big effect on me as well. And I think that there’s something about, like you said, it did reawaken in people the idea, at least of the notion of different levels of reality. The idea that reality stacks up to a certain extent. And that narrative is constructed and it affects the way that we perceive the world and it affects the way that we interact with reality and it frames reality, you could say. And so I think that that was a big, it was the beginning of a shift, which is continuing on today. The thing about The Matrix, which is funny, it’s almost like an upside down spirituality. It’s like a reverse Platonism where the real reality is this kind of gritty, non-narrative world where everybody is dirty and everybody is, it’s like the body, right? There’s the one guy, I forget what his name is, who says, I was born free, like I was not in The Matrix and he doesn’t have this experience. And the fake world is, let’s say, the world of imagination and the world of ideas. But I think that secretly, even the Wachowskis love The Matrix. I don’t see how they can escape it because it’s like, it’s a strange contradiction in the story because in The Matrix, you can do whatever you want. You can be whatever you want. It’s much closer to their own reality and the way, and I heard an interview with one of them saying recently how there was a relationship between The Matrix and trans reality because The Matrix has to do with imagination, the capacity to be what you want to be. I was like, I knew it. I remember watching the movie, not the first time, but the second or third time thinking, which is better? What do people right now prefer? Would they prefer to be in this kind of gritty world or they would prefer being in this video game reality? So I think Ready Player One is closer to people’s actual perception of what The Matrix is. And the metaverse is closer to, people will want to be in The Matrix way more than than what is presented in that first Matrix movie. Yeah, that’s a really fascinating observation actually, Jonathan, because I think the kind of storytelling tradition that The Matrix is coming out of, it was like, it was cyberpunk coming into the mainstream in a way. And like William Gibson’s novel, New Romancer, which kind of defined that genre, it’s really obsessed with the idea of escaping the body. So the characters are like the first characters in fiction to jack into, it’s not The Matrix in the book, I forget the word that he uses, and cyberspace. That’s it. And like Gibson’s starting point for the book was watching kids playing arcade games, early arcade games like Space Invaders. Amazing intuition. They were just like in the game. They were completely outside their bodies. And that’s what he wanted to explore. And I think that’s why when he gets through to the Wachowskis, this idea of you can escape your body into the virtual world. I think you’re right, it is very, very appealing to people. And that’s why their depiction of reality is so dark. It’s a place you want to escape from in there. Should we talk a little bit about this Matrix film? I can summarize just in a few sentences that I think Lana Wachowski, and actually, I’m going to credit this because I’m stealing this from a member of my science fiction community. But Lana Wachowski like stole, wrote a fan fiction about The Matrix, basically. And then was given like a huge budget to put it on screen as well. But it really has that aspect of like someone who likes The Matrix, kind of riffing on it. And I’m not sure how much more there is to say about it, except that there’s to an extent, and maybe it’s because of what we were saying about the embodiment. Like the Wachowskis have always seemed a bit confused by the thing that they made and the symbols that were in it. And in some ways, they don’t like it and have been trying to take it apart ever since. You’re so right, because the second and the third movie were so bad. And pretty much everything they’ve made since then has been mediocre. And so you think, what happened? What were they possessed by to be able to make that first movie? What is it that happened to them? And then after that, it was gone, I guess. Because the second and the third are also, like you said, trying to play around it, trying to break it apart, trying to deconstruct their own story, I guess, is what they were trying to do. But it wasn’t very successful. I don’t think we need to talk any more about this. About the Matrix. But the thing that’s interesting, maybe let me say something about the Matrix, which I think was helpful for people, is that one of the things the Matrix forced people to do was to consider meaning and language as part of the manner in which we interact with reality. And it’s something which was being kind of evacuated. And there was something postmodern about it, but I’ve always said that postmodernism is the right way of seeing postmodernism is a way back into kind of re-enchantment, because it understands the causality of language and the causality of meaning. And you see that in the scenes with, I forget what her name is, the prophet lady, the oracle, where you realize how, because we’re in a world of meaning and of consciousness, that the mechanical causality at some point breaks down. Where it’s like, if I tell you this is going to happen, but does it happen because I tell you it’s going to happen? Or would it have happened anyways? And you can’t break the consciousness aspect out of the equation, because it’s part of it. The meaning and the consciousness is part of the equation. And so you’re stuck with the conundrum of realizing that meaning participates in phenomena themselves. So I think that that jolt was part of what is leading into kind of this re-enchantment that we’re seeing around us, where people realize, for good and bad reasons, realize that story is inevitable and that narrative participates in causality, meaning participates in causality, all of these things. So the Matrix was really, in that sense, it was done really well, because it really forced you to think about that.