Flynn killed hundreds and Quorra is his daughter

Hello and welcome to the popcorn isn't real. I'm Leif Eric. I'm here with my co-host Torvald and today Joseph Kaczynski the director of 2010's Tron Legacy. Wow. Also the director of Tom Cruise Oblivion from 2013 and the forthcoming Top Gun Maverick. it's really really crazy that we've got the joseph kaczynski here i'm really excited to hear what he has to say about this hello it's great to be here thanks guys hey torvald what are we talking about today dude we're talking about tron legacy wow the sequel to 1982 was tron one of my all-time favorite movies growing up yeah probably the reason i got into you know programming and then cybersecurity. Tron, one of the greatest children's movies ever made. So I just wanted to start off with a question of how did you get started in your career and how did you end up directing Tron Legacy? I took a path I think that is different than most. It wasn't the plan to become a film director until I think I was maybe in my early 30s.

I went to school originally for engineering and design. I was also really interested in music. I was playing jazz saxophone. As a kid, I either wanted to be an astronaut or a jazz saxophonist. Those were kind of my two dreams. The kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum. Yeah, exactly. But I think somehow film directing is oddly a combination of both. Really? Yeah, and I can explain that. I grew up in the Midwest, ended up going to school for engineering and product design. And while I was in my senior year, one of my design professors said, you have a really great eye. Rather than thinking about engineering, you should consider something that has a more kind of creative aspect to it. One of the things he mentioned was maybe architecture. On a whim, I applied to architecture school, not really being qualified at all to apply to architecture school. And luckily, one of the schools I applied to accepted me, and that was Columbia in New York City.

So I moved from the West Coast all the way to the East Coast, right at the point where they had a really innovative program that was taking a nontraditional approach to architecture and infusing the program with digital design tools and filmmaking tools, just kind of a nontraditional approach to architecture using influence from all other art forms. there was a course that allowed you to make short films as part of your project and even though they were kind of architecture focused they were short films and i was kind of inspired out of that experience right after i graduated i made a short film called desert house that i submitted to a digital film festival in new york called res fest somehow my short film got accepted and played on the big screen. And I remember sitting in the theater with a big audience watching my first short play and hearing the reaction of the crowd. I think that's where I kind of got hooked.

Someone at Wieden & Kennedy, which is an advertising agency that works with Nike, saw that short. And a really close friend of mine, and I had a little design company in New York called KD Lab. And they basically gave us a commission to do a Nike commercial. It was called Les Jumelles, The Twins. I'm sure it's out there on YouTube somewhere. We'll have to look it up. One thing led to another, and I eventually decided to move to Los Angeles to direct commercials. For the first year I was here, I got no work. I think I pitched on 25 different commercials and got none, which is very typical. But then I got an opportunity to direct a commercial for Gears of War, which was a new video game. That was in 2006. And I did that. And I've kind of been working pretty consistently ever since then. But that commercial and a commercial I did for Halo were kind of two things on my reel that I think gave Disney the confidence to let me do a teaser trailer for Tron Legacy, which was kind of my pitch to them was, let me do a trailer for this movie that doesn't exist yet and show you what it would look like, what it would feel like.

the narrative that I think would be interesting to explore. That teaser trailer was sneaked into Comic-Con in 2008 and then leaked on the internet. Everything kind of went from there. So that's the abbreviated version of how I went from engineering to Tron Legacy. That's incredible. So you basically pitched Tron Legacy to Disney. Like they didn't come to you, you came to them. You're like, let's make a Tron movie. Yeah, well, sort of. I mean, I had a meeting with a producer at the time He was an independent producer named Sean Bailey. He's now the president of production at Disney. And he said, you know, Disney's kicking around the idea of rebooting Tron. How would you approach that? And I knew that there's kind of no way to pitch Tron legacy verbally. the best way to make a case for me as a first-time filmmaker was to make something. You know, they were throwing around ideas of, if you took Tron and crossed it with the internet,

what would that feel like? Google and Yahoo and all that stuff to me wasn't as interesting as imagining the world of the first film in a sealed server evolving on its own for 25, 30 years. The pitch was, imagine the Tron of 1982 evolving as its own isolated ecosystem, like the Galapagos, for 30 years on its own. And what does that look like? You can see the connections to the original Tron, but at the same time, it feels like we went into the computer and shot it with motion picture cameras. So that teaser was the result of six to nine months of my life with a small team at Digital Domain. Oh my gosh. And obviously the big breakthrough was convincing Jeff Bridges to be in that teaser, because that's what legitimized it. And I think if you watch that old Comic-Con video, the moment Jeff Bridges came on the screen, the place kind of went to another level. I definitely owe Jeff Bridges a lot for having the faith to kind of appear in this random test video for a movie he had done 30 years earlier.

Yeah, Jeff Bridges is so cool. He's the man. Okay, so Tron Legacy. Basically, this movie centers around a man named Kevin Flynn, who has found a way to go into a computer and interact with the programs. So this movie is about his son, Sam Flynn. The problem is that one day, Kevin Flynn disappeared, never came back. So Sam grew up an orphan. He gets a page from his father, or so he thinks, and chases him into the system that his father has become trapped in turns out an evil program that looks just like his father looks just like flynn has taken over and is wreaking havoc in the grid and flynn has been trapped there for decades sam also learns that there is a race called isos that have been all but extinguished in a rampant genocide known as the purge where this evil program Clue killed them all. Flynn is raising the last ISO. She's named Cora. So Flynn, Sam, and Cora decide to get out of there. They make it to the portal to leave, and Flynn sacrifices himself to

beat Clue, and Sam and Cora escape to the real world. Whatever you may think about Tron Legacy, because I know it's a very polarizing movie, it is one visually striking movie. Every inch of the movie is just like eye capturing and captivating and really, really cool looking. I do like how the grid looks. I also liked how the grid looked in the original Tron. I think there's space for both of those styles. And I think, you know, it's kind of a cool modernization of what the original Tron was going for. Just one look and you know that you're looking at Tron Legacy. So that's pretty cool. Because it was my first movie, I don't think I quite realized what I was getting into, which is a good thing. It's like $160 million film. You're not quite able to grasp that. I was just kind of focused on delivering this very specific vision of the film and working with Jeff. I couldn't have had a better cast and crew and in studio to work with. It was a really

special project, except for Jeff Bridges, who was a veteran. Everyone else on that film was doing their first movie. The composers had never done a film before. Claudio Miranda, my DP, I think had did one film. My production designer had only done one movie. It was a very, very youthful, naive crew. And I think that's actually one of the strengths of the film. There was nothing we weren't going to tackle. And we tackled a lot between the 3D and the suits and the way we shot it and the music and everything. I want to get into the theories that we want to talk about today. so I have a theory that there were no ISOs, at least not how Flynn described them. Kevin Flynn clearly became obsessed with this idea of living in a digital world after the events of the original Tron movie. He became fixated on the idea of humans living and evolving and progressing within a digital system. That is why he built the grid, clearly, as per his own dialogue in the movie.

Like he describes it as a system for users. Right. The ISOs were not a spontaneous race that just appeared. They were humans. They were users. He clearly brought a bunch of people into the system to live there, which was his plan all along. Right. And then Clue decided he hated users and exterminated them all. I mean, at the end of the very first Tron, when he meets his two friends, he says, greetings, programs. Like, it's clearly his dream to turn all humans into programs. Now, of course, he doesn't want to tell his son that he was responsible for the deaths of, like, thousands of people. Yeah. So he calls them ISOs. Yeah, they were just these spontaneous programs. ISOs. Oh, it was real sad when those ISOs got killed. He was like, hey, I don't like that. Let's get rid of those. He's like, these users are messing with my perfect system. We'll send our antivirus after them, Tron. That's pretty much what happened, yes, is that Flynn brought humans into a system and

the antivirus was like, these unknown programs shouldn't be here. Let's just, you know, quarantine them all and delete them all, right? Which is what the antivirus should do. Flynn just idiotically forgot to turn it off before bringing his friends in. And now he feels bad, so he's like, oops, can't tell anyone about that. So he calls them ISIS. One of these users in this system happened to be Flynn's daughter. Korra. He wanted to see how a human would learn, grow, and progress and what heights they would reach if they were raised entirely in the digital realm. So he brought his own daughter in there to live with him. After the genocide, he raised Korra in the grid, leaving whenever he wanted, but always returning to the grid and never contacting his son Sam or Encom or anyone else ever again because he didn't want to be prosecuted for the deaths of thousands of people. Right. And if this sounds crazy to you, it doesn't sound crazy to me because I can prove it.

I got the proof. And I'm going to convince you by the end of this movie that Cora is Flynn's daughter. Isos are humans. I haven't heard those theories. I think a lot of it, you know, I'm interested to hear the evidence of where that comes from. The notion that Cora is Flynn's daughter, I think there's some truth in that only in the fact that at the end of the film, She is essentially made of his carbon. Right, because she gets his identity disc. When you go into the Shiva laser, all of your physical matter is kind of, if you look closely, there's these canisters all at the base of it that hold all the kind of elements that our bodies are made of, which are mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, a little bit of nitrogen. But I think carbon is probably the biggest element in each of us. I mean, we're all made of stardust that goes back to the beginning of time. And Sam obviously comes out and is recomposed of the carbon that he's made of.

But Flynn's carbon from 82 is reconstructed into Cora. In that sense, the fact she is his daughter, I think even biologically, you could say, yes, she is made of his matter. That's cool. As Sam is being his biological son. So if that makes them siblings, I think that could be a problem for any future story for the two of them. perhaps. There is a little bit of truth in that aspect of it. There may not necessarily be any specific evidence, like actual real evidence that Cora is his daughter, but I would point out that there is no proof that Sam is his son. We never see Sam's mother. She just died mysteriously. Just like we never see Cora's mother. I mean, you know... Dude, you're making us sound worse. i mean we see him interacting with sam as a kid saying he's his dad no living with we see clue interacting with sam as a kid no i think sam was clue's son and i think that cora was flynn's

daughter wow i think that clue was coming out into the real world as flynn this was part of flynn's plan because i think that flynn was a deadbeat dad or whatever he just didn't like the real world and he didn't want to deal with income and he wanted someone to go out there and I think that Clue did go out there but Clue was acting super weird and crazy and then Flynn was giving Clue the disc so Clue could come out and just do the stuff he didn't want to do and then I think they had a falling out and Flynn stopped giving the disc to Clue and then Clue couldn't come out anymore but he wanted to because he got a taste of it I explored that theory as well but my sticking point was always if Clue could come out before why did he stop coming out because he clearly stopped coming out. He desperately wants to get out. But yeah, it's true. You need the disc of someone who is digitized. So I actually think he could have gotten the disc of Sam or Quora.

Well, you need the disc of someone who has proper access privileges, which is Flynn and Sam, at least at this point. It might be anyone digitized. We don't know how he set up the system. These discs, they do hold some information, but their main purpose is identity confirmation. What they do is they confirm the identity of the disk's holder for authentication purposes. Like, for example, if I'm going to authenticate with this matter reorganizer and get out of the computer. Flynn's disk was authenticated, so she just used it and then didn't matter after that. She was like, put me in my own body. Why was her body old? Like, when did she go into the system? She went in as a baby. So, I mean, she aged and it just aged her body for her. If she went in as a baby and then she comes out and it knows what she looked like. It would know what she looked like in the system. So it could rebuild her to look like what she looked like in the system with modern day clothes.

The mass of thousands of dead. Right. And that's what I was going to say. It's got extra mass. It can just rebuild that to make her body. I always wondered where the matter actually went because matter can't be, you know, obliterated. It has to be around. I'm going to have to look for those canisters next time I watch it. I never spotted that. These little cylinders all arranged around the base that, you know, we had, you know, I'm sure if you went to the original prop, it actually, I'm assuming has those labels on it, too. We had thought about that and done a lot of kind of meetings with very smart people and scientists from JPL and Caltech about how this would actually work before we did it. I love the attention to detail. I do have one more thing because we're on the subject of the laser. Why were Flynn and Alan Bradley the ones in charge of this company and their friend Laura is never mentioned again?

Like, this is classic sexism from the 80s. Laura was working with Dr. Gibbs. They were the ones who invented the laser. I thought her name was Lori. Her name is Laura, and her name as the program was Yori. Which is confusing. Yeah, no, I understand where I got confused. I get it. Laura was working with Dr. Gibbs, disintegrating things, as Alan says. But, like, this is what should have made NCOM huge. They have the teleporter from Star Trek. This is huge. And from Willy Wonka. Yeah, exactly. We already talked about this with Willy Wonka last week. This is crazy that they can essentially just teleport things now and honestly just clone them. I mean, I guess, well, you can't, well, because you need the matter, so you can't, but just clone them. But you can teleport things now. Kevin did, I believe, to Dr. Gibbs and Laura the same thing that Dillinger did to him. He stole their work. Well, no, but then he didn't actually do anything with it.

So I guess he didn't. No, he was gone, though. He just ignored their work. No, he was going to until he became responsible for thousands of deaths and had to lay low for decades. So Flynn was planning on stealing the work of Dr. Gibbs and Laura, just like Dillinger had done to him and profiting off of it or maybe giving away for free. I don't know. But then, yeah, he ended up committing, you know, genocide on all the people who came into his system. and he decided maybe it'd be better it just happened to be an identical program who looked and acted just like him who did the genocide he decided maybe i should just bury this laser in my basement yeah i mean like no how did laura feel about that he stole her laser and buried it in his basement but i think it's sad because i always thought it was cool in tron how of the three kind of main characters who are all kind of you know nerdy programmer people one of them's a

woman in the 80s but I mean she's just this normal person right like she's not super ditzy or weird or like very magical girl so I gotta ask you at the beginning of this movie I guess this isn't Flynn this is Clue talking to young Sam that's a question yeah that was what you told me no I just assumed it was true okay so Flynn or Clue when talking to Sam he describes what he's been doing He says, the grid. We built the grid for programs and users. This is built for users, right? People are going to live here. And then he says, and then one day something happened, something extraordinary, a miracle. And that is the term he always uses to describe the birth of Korah, because how do you always talk about it when you have a baby and you want to be a little flowery and you want to talk about it in a nice way? You call it a miracle. You call it something extraordinary a little miracle a little bundle of joy right right so he always refers to telling

sam that i've got another family i've got you've got a sister basically yes emotionally flynn feels very much it has a paternal kind of feeling towards all the isos because they did emerge from that kind of digital soup of the sea of simulation that he created it's almost like a biblical father i would say it's kind of the relationship and that's another cool aspect of the movie, the idea of like, what is God? And is Flynn God in this world? Did he create life here? There's that great reaction from Jeff, which is, you know, one of those things that only Jeff Bridges can do. But when Sam asks him if he created them, Flynn kind of laughs at the question because the creation of the ISOs is something that he could have never dreamed in a million years. He created the world, but their manifestation was, it was miraculous. And that's what makes them so unique and so special. And obviously, Cora was the last one of them.

Unless they were all users. Unless they were all users, which, you know, I'm open to hearing any theories like that. The digital de-aging, like the tech to digitally de-age Jeff Bridges as a main character in the movie. Like, that's insane. If you look at what we have today, it's like one shot of Princess Leia, a couple shots of Tarkin right in Star Wars it's just a little bit here and there Clue is in this whole movie the main bad guy he's he's a main character there's so many shots of that face it must have been so much work for them to do kudos to them for really going all out I think it was a touch of genius to make digitally de-age Flynn into a digital being right yeah I think they were right on the money there I like it it was very ambitious that's why I a soft spot for that film because there was no barrier that we were afraid to kind of tackle. And we just tackled everything. And that's something I'm really proud of. So the next thing is that we get a montage,

basically headlines that are all saying Flynn is erratic and crazy and weird. Flynn out of control. What is Flynn doing? And then Flynn's book, Digital Frontier, Mapping the Other Universe. He always refers to it as a frontier, which is a place to be explored and colonized they've even got a shot of him talking to a crowd saying in there is a new world in there is our future in there is our destiny using his tony stark beltless okay that's something we didn't even talk about i love jeff bridges i think he's so cool i think he's a great actor he's so fun i wish he was in more movies he can be like a hippie or like a really really imposing bald businessman like he's really good as just like the burned out cowboy from a true grit oh yeah he's so good in true grit he's so good dude true grid that's what they should have called this tron three true grid but yeah basically he's saying we're all going to live in this computer that's our destiny right like he has a clear plan but

like if Flynn was coming out and it was sometimes Flynn like pimp in his book but it was sometimes Clue just like talking to his kid or doing business stuff I would describe that as erratic like the way he describes it to his son he's like man I have so many things to do I had to I had to spend time with you I had to work at income I couldn't be in the grid all the time like he talks about it like his son and his job were obstacles to what he really wanted which was to all the time so it makes sense that he would create a program to do the outside stuff for him like that's that's what i would do as a programmer who does automation like anytime something is taking my time i try and think of a way to automate it so flynn's like hey i'll just automate my child time so there was a really cool arg run in conjunction with the release of this film and arg stands for alternate reality game it was called flynn lives and it involved people

in real life finding clues in real websites and in the real world leading them to believe that Flynn is still alive and is out there somewhere it was really cool oh it was awesome I wish I could have been a part of it when it was happening they set up this whole n-com website like an actual website for n-com and it was hosting like all of Flynn's games which you could play on there and in playing these games you could find like secrets in the game you could play space paranoids matrix blaster and a whole slew of them yeah you can play them all no but there was like a wall you could clip through in the tank game which led to like one of the first clues that led them to a place in the real world where they met an actual operative like an undercover agent who gave them a cell phone and then they had to call a number on that cell phone they got a code like it's really really cool and it all led up to a bunch of users solving everything which enabled an event called

the pulse where a pulse enabled a signal to be sent from the grid where flynn was trapped which triggered a page on alan's phone and we saw that page in the movie wow it's wait but then that means that we were working for clue right exactly so that's the funny thing is that the bad guys trying to get alan to go into the grid so wait in that arg it was literally clue leaving the clues that makes sense wow you're right that's cool dude the whole arg was so cool it culminated in like a big party at flynn's arcade wow it was so freaking cool you can like see pictures of it so this was like suicide club in real life this was like them solving desserts clues with the numbers with the finger numbers and texting the thing and then going to the place and getting a piece of skin stripped off their back i don't know what you're talking about suicide club oh suicide yeah wow suicide circle yes dude it was our second episode

Yeah. Like, I honestly think Tron Legacy was the pinnacle of this kind of ARG. It was a very interesting viral marketing campaign. That was one of the most interesting parts of rolling out that movie was being a part of that NCOM stunt in San Francisco, which was insane, you know, that we had a guy jumping out of a glowing helicopter at a fake press conference to the scavenger hunt. Yeah, Bruce Boxleitner. Yeah. And, you know, within the scavenger hunt, you know, running through the streets of San Diego at night and the reveal of the arcade and then the following year, the arcade and building the end of line club in a warehouse. it was kind of at the peak of this kind of viral marketing craze tron legacy came out before instagram and twitter and tiktok and those kind of things had taken off a viral campaign still had a physical real world component to it which was great you know now i feel like it would just

be purely digital we were there at a kind of a sweet spot from a marketing point of view to do some really fun stuff yeah yeah and not only that but i don't think any other huge viral marketing campaign in history did it better yeah it was like just as good as the movie itself in my opinion you guys were you guys there did you guys make it no i wish i wish i was we were too young at the time we were just like little teenagers okay yeah it was fun it was fun to be a part of that and on the ground in san diego when that was all going down it was fun it was wild okay sam he's speeding down just you know catching the attention of all the police on his way to commit a crime at income he has to easy money that door yeah so that is a big door by the way when i watched that movie in theaters with brita and it was opening i leaned over and i said now that is a big door and then sam said it and she's like how did you know everyone knows he's gonna

I was like, come on. Everyone knows that's a big door. Also, this door is like half as big as the one from the original. Yeah, no, the one in the first one was a way bigger door. Come on. So from a hacking perspective, I thought it was kind of cool. His little code cracker that he uses to get in. It's a Nokia phone, and he has some sort of code cracking program on it. It's a touchscreen, but it has a bunch of different buttons, which seem to correspond to different types of encryption that it can crack. It can crack AES encryption, which is Advanced Encryption Standard, which is like the most widely used and secure, I mean, debatably the most secure encryption out there. XTR, which is another kind of encryption, BF, short for Blowfish Encryption, and ECDSA, which is Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. That's not encryption. I mean, it's using encryption technology, but it's actually for generating digital signatures.

I don't know why you'd want to crack a digital signature, but I can try to crack that, I guess. It also includes RC2, RC4, RC6 buttons, and those are ciphers. Either way, when he wants to crack this door lock, Sam chooses the XTR button and then the F of I button and the K of J button and go. Interestingly, so XTR encryption is public key encryption, which would never be used in a door lock. public key encryption is for confidentiality like that's for trading information securely as in like https traffic or for creating digital signatures um you'd never use that maybe they want like the delivery person to be able to get in i thought this was cool though i mean one little slip up there with the type of encryption is fine like they actually did use actual encryption standards in the button so i thought that was really good as it's cracking the encryption. It looks like it's visualizing the XOR and the other sequences, the byte swapping

and stuff that it's doing to try different combinations. And that was fun. That looks similar to how you might visualize the steps of an encryption algorithm or a decryption algorithm. You wouldn't need to visualize it. No, that's the thing. You wouldn't need to visualize that unless you built this for like your school project and you wanted to show your teacher. You just want it to look cool. It must be running a dictionary attack. And usually you do a dictionary attack of common passwords, right? Like you would just run all the common passwords on this door and see if one of them matches. The passwords it's trying are pure gibberish. Like they're nothing. He's not using a dictionary of common passwords. He's using a dictionary of like gibberish. Where did he get that? Exactly. That's what I came up with. He must, as an income insider, have a dictionary of income gibberish passwords. Why would you reuse gibberish passwords? You just generate them.

Exactly, yes. So, I don't know. Maybe they have really weird security where it's very secure in that the passwords they've generated are actually kind of secure. They might not be long enough, but they're pretty secure. But then they don't generate new ones. They just reuse them all, so it's not secure. I don't know. Anyway, my next point here is I love, I really love, like this is like my favorite part of the movie. I love the inclusion of Edward Dillinger. Yeah, he's the main bad guy from the first time. movie oh my gosh you just want more about dillinger he's he's a fantastic actor i was thrilled we were all thrilled that he agreed to do it it was essentially one night in los angeles that we shot that scene yeah well and i was wondering about his casting too was there ever any plans to like have him be a bigger character if like a sequel was ever made was that ever talked about yeah yeah absolutely he felt like a worthy successor to the dillinger empire um

and uh and as if i remember it was a big tron fan and i think his only requirement he said to me was i'll do it but you've got to promise me that if this character comes back and for the movies that i get to go into the grid and i was like absolutely i love that idea yeah oh man he was so great we got one scene he just want to see him in the grid so sam i guess wants to basically what's going on here is ncom is going to release os12 which is the most secure operating system they've ever released sam's purpose here is that he wants to release this operating system for free so he breaks into the server room he connects the server to his nokia and he uploads a file that he got from the server to some website somewhere i thought it's interesting he runs the command tron open file like the command is tron and the arguments it takes are open and file so he's got a little tron program on his phone

that was kind of cool and then he uploads the file ncom underscore os12.exe so there it is that's the os it's an executable file it's a windows executable I guess it doesn't make any sense if it's its own os but whatever we see then in the very next scene, NCOM developers and board members are releasing their latest and greatest NCOM OS. And that OS is Linux. It's running on Linux. It literally says so. If you look at the console that young Dillinger starts typing on, it says NCOM Linux console. Right. But Linux is freeware, right? So they can do that. It's completely realistic because anyone who's going to go and develop a new operating system is gonna develop it on top of linux just because it's completely open source and it's a good operating system it's a great starting point sam has i guess replaced the os file with a video of his dog and when they try to show the os is it's just a video of his dog and they're all freaking

out all these board members are like what's going on oh no but luckily dillinger jr is there to save the day yeah dillinger jr he springs into action he's like don't worry i took care of it he runs the ps uh command to list all the processes running and then he greps uh os12 which is to find any process with the words os12 and then you can see in another console he's running tetris and a towers of hanoi simulation with 30 discs now if you don't know what towers of hanoi is It's basically a game where you have three towers and you have an amount of discs that are arranged on this tower from largest to smallest. And your purpose is to move all these discs in order from largest to smallest to the third tower. And you do this by moving the smallest disc first and the second smallest disc and then the smallest on top of that. So basically you have to move them around over and over and over and over and over again.

And it takes a long, long, long, long time. It's to show you exponential time. There's this myth that there is a man who is running a game of Towers of Hanoi by himself, like just picking up these discs and moving them. And he can move one disc every like 20 minutes. And he's doing it in a game of like 10 discs. And the world will end when he finishes the game. But that's actually a very optimistic view of the end of the world, because it turns out that it will take him longer than the heat death of the universe to finish that game just because of how long exponential time takes so if dillinger is running towers of hanoi with 30 discs it would take two to the 30 minus one moves which comes out to 1 billion 73 million 741 823 moves he's just eating up resources for no reason i don't know why he's doing it Why would you ever run a Towers of Hanoi simulation? It's literally just to eat resources.

That's the only thing it does. That actually kind of leads into a tiny little sub-theory that I had, was that Edward Dillinger, he acts like he saved the day. He's like, don't worry, I took care of it by getting rid of the dog video. And then the CEO or whatever is like, well, wait a minute, you haven't solved anything. Our system was just released for free. And he's like, well, we'll just say it's a gift, shrug. Right. I believe that maybe Ed Dillinger Jr. doesn't like his father. And he was a friend of Sam and maybe Flynn. Maybe he was working with him and he was eating up system resources somehow to make it easier for Sam to get in. And then that's why he gets rid of the dog to make it act like he's on their side. But in the end, he's the one who's like, we released it for free. It's a free gift, which was Sam's plan. Like, I think they're friends and he's working with them on the inside.

I love it. Yeah. Dillinger was a good guy. There's a short called The Next Day that's supposed to wrap up some loose ends and kind of give closure to the Flynn Lives ARG. And it's really cool. But this short chronologically takes place after the movie, right? It's done in a mockumentary style, like someone was making a documentary about the Flynn Lives movement. There's footage from all different decades, and then there's some footage from like the next day, from, you know, a little bit after Tron Legacy ends. All this footage is kind of tied together by a character named Zach Attack, the lead hacker behind the Flynn Lives movement. He is destroying all this evidence and stuff that he has and trying to, you know, get away or something. That was one aspect of that that I was not involved in. But I remember them shooting that and trying to fill the story out in a way that kind of made sense and connected all the pieces together.

short, I think, is amazing. No, it's really good. For just a 10-minute little mockumentary short, like constant Easter eggs, really fun callbacks. Whoa, and one mind-blowing twist at the end. It actually really supports our theory that Dillinger Jr. was working with Sam and Alan the whole time to release OS 12 for free. And only that theory. None of the other theories, really just that one in the next day we see lots of different clips and little news clippings in this mockumentary two of these newspaper clippings says that dillinger senior split off from n-com to start dillinger systems which was in direct competition to n-com and started beating them after flynn disappeared yeah i thought that was interesting that then his son would end up on the board of income it sounds like dillinger senior was actually taking income in the right direction focusing on like software and like weird lasers and then flynn came back he's like we make video

games he started just merchandising the crap and also let's live in computers and calling everyone by the names they had in the computer and no one knows why ram and tron i love how alan's like yeah it's really weird Flynn took to calling me Tron which is the name of a random program I made never knew why he started calling me that but oh well yeah it's such a good movie I love Bruce Boxleitner like he does he does first of all yes his acting is amazing uh he's he's a great actor but second of all whoever wrote this movie knew exactly what every Tron fan wanted to hear like I've been dying, just waiting for years to hear Alan's reaction to Flynn saying crap like, greetings program to him.

What is interesting is that Dillinger Jr. does not work for Dillinger Systems. He works for NCOM. I think that based on the other evidence we've seen from Dillinger Jr., I believe that he believes in the same philosophy as Flynn, Bradley, and Sam, which is why he decided to stick with NCOM. Okay, so he believes that Flynn lives. Yeah, I think he's part of the Flynn Lives movement. Like, no one knows who Zach Attack is, but we see that he's got some popcorn. Is it real? I think this popcorn is real, but we'll see. You need to retract that statement. No, no, sorry, sorry. The popcorn isn't real. Okay. No, when this happened and it had already shown Ram, whose name is Roy Kleinberg. And I was like, dude, Ram, it's popcorn co-worker. He's back. And then in Zach Attack's house, it showed a bowl of popcorn. I was like, spoiler alert. Oh my gosh, Ram is Zach Attack. And then at the very end, they actually reveal that because Alan Bradley just walks in.

The greatest reveal ever. And is like, hey, Ram. And then Ram's like, how come you got the cool nickname Tron and my name's Ram? Oh my gosh. They also revealed that Alan was one of the hackers who was part of the Flynn Lives movement as well. Ram, Roy Kleinberg, is played by Dan Shore, who is the person who played Ram in the original. And the best part is that Alan Bradley comes into his secret hideout and takes some of Ram's popcorn. Yeah, he takes his popcorn. Finally getting his popcorn back. I just love that the people who made this were just like, oh yeah, okay. Hey, Alan, can I get some of your popcorn? Can I have some of that popcorn? The most important line in the movie. So for anyone who doesn't know, we're referencing a really, really small line in the original Tron movie. What we based our whole podcast on. It's true. As Alan leaves his workstation to go talk to Dillinger, his friend, I don't remember his name,

but he wrote the RAM program. Popcorn Coworker was his name. Popcorn Coworker. And they gave him a name for the next day, which is Roy Kleinberg. Roy Kleinberg, who wrote the Ram program. He pops his head out of his cubicle and says, hey, Alan, can I have some of your popcorn? And Alan says, fine. So when Sam puts Alan Bradley back in as CEO, Ram asks him, well, what's going to happen to the current CEO? And he's like, he's gone. And he's like, what about Dillinger Jr.? And Alan responds, Jr. earned his place. He stays. Oh, what does that mean? Yeah, it sounds like he did something important for the movement. We don't know exactly what he did, but it could have to do with him just eating up, you know, system memory while Sam hacked in and released the OS for free. And then he was like, hey, guys, we'll just say it's a gift. And I mean, this might sound a little crazy. It might sound like you're taking everything out of context.

And it's like, no, he was just saying this guy could keep his job. But no, you have to take this in context. This is literally the two shadowy heads of the Flynn Lives hacker movement discussing the next steps for their hacker movement now that they have control of the company. And he's like, this kid has earned his keep. He's basically saying he's done his part for our movement. He helped us release the operating system for free. He stays, right? I mean, I buy it. I don't recall that being his motivation. It's interesting you bring that up and the part about that extra detail being in the next day, I don't remember that detail. But our thought at the time was the Dillinger's are such a interesting kind of opposite to the Flynn empire that keeping the Dillinger name alive would be worth it and would pay off in further stories and further movies if we decided to do one. and just the idea that you know a good antagonist to alan bradley on the income board

you know that was that was kind of the idea at the time of of casting and that scene actually was shot a year after the movie was shot we did that was that was something that we added to the movie a year later that that boardroom scene it wasn't in the original script and i think it really filled out and really set the movie up better and just kind of gave it a bigger feel and kind of a more operatic, epic platform for it to happen. That was a good choice. All right. So Sam makes his way to Flynn's Arcade. I'm about to get to some of the best evidence that I have for my entire theory. Sam goes into the basement. He finds Flynn's computer, his terminal. When he turns on the console, you can see this computer has an uptime of eight days. The grid has only been running for eight days when Sam finds it. Uh-oh. So someone has been turning this grid off and on. Go watch the movie, pause it when Sam first turns on the console

where he can input commands and get himself into the grid. That's uptime, eight days. And in a movie that had an ARG tie-in that was so focused on tiny details, it must mean all the tiny details are important in this movie. That, to me, is proof that Flynn is not always in the grid. He leaves sometimes and he turns it off. He's been in there for eight days, I think, right now. I think anytime he leaves, he turns it off, though. What I remember is when Sam gets to the console, it's kind of covered in dust. There's a digital counter underneath the dust when he wipes his hand that reveals a timer that shows how many seconds have passed since Flynn went into the system. And I think the amount of seconds should correspond to Flynn going in in 1989. That was the intention, whether or not there's a, flaw in the unix code that we put in that's always that is possible but i thought i thought we were pretty specific but i'm gonna have to do a special edition now and fix all these uh errors

now i have one more piece of very very important evidence from that console there are currently two users logged in two users it says so right there two users who could they possibly be. We know one is Flynn. The other one is Cora. Sam is not logged in. Oh, that's true because he hasn't logged in yet. The other one could only possibly be Cora, meaning that she is not an ISO. She is a user. She is a human. Yeah, unless Clue. That's true. No, you're right. It could actually be Clue. He was able to get a page out, which is interesting to figure out how he did that. So as part of the big ARG, the big Flynn lives thing. Yep, exactly. Interestingly, there are currently 196 tasks that are on this console. Only two of those tasks are running. 194 of them are sleeping. My guess here is that each task corresponds to a user and 194 of those tasks are sleeping because the users died there's two tasks still running which are Flynn's task and Cora's

task okay so task doesn't correspond to programs running it corresponds to users running I don't know I mean that's the thing is clearly programs work differently in this world than in ours so I'm kind of just trying my best to interpret it but it seems like there's one task per user because there's two users and two tasks running and that means the other 194 sleeping tasks would correspond to 194 dead users right that is the biggest evidence that i have that flynn leaves the grid whenever he wants quora is a user and 194 people died in the grid okay and you can go and verify all that it's right there visible on screen uh when when uh when sam pulls up the console so well this has been the popcorn isn't real well i mean dude like this is when i watched this movie and i saw that that's when everything clicked for me i was like holy crap cora is a user and that means all the isos were users and then i was like oh my gosh it all makes sense they were users and they

died i get it so i kind of like how he actually gets into the computer it's more realistic than a lot of big budget Hollywood movies. He first tries to figure out who the currently logged in user is with a whoami command, which is a real command, and it returns the name Flynn. So Flynn's logged in. He uses uname to get the operating system name and information. So the system is Solar OS, which is not a real operating system, but it's probably based on Sun OS, which it does seem to be based on and which would fit time wise sun os was available back in 1984 or whenever this was made then he tries to log in as root because he wants more privileges that i understood so then he tries to log in as backdoor wow and it works what a hacker he's so cool so usually there won't be a username backdoor on a system but i mean maybe back in the 80s that was like a common thing to do. I don't know. Either way, he knows his dad and his dad liked to make a backdoor user. So

good job. Sam uses the history command, basically the history of Flynn's commands that he has written. He sees that his dad installed a laser test, double checked everything. He opened his last will and testament file. I don't know if you saw that. And then ran the laser control program and disappeared for 20 years. Yeah. Presumably, he was expecting to come back, right? And he hasn't been able to because of Clue. Right, yeah. So if he was expecting to come back, why check your last will and testament before going in? Right, yeah, that's true. I think the implication there is that the laser test is so dangerous, it might kill him, right? But yeah, it could also be that he's like, well, I'm out of here, see ya. Yeah, I think that's proof right there. He's like, I'm done. All right, bye, Sam. Last will and testament. That's a good point. You own the company. I understand. so sam's now in the grid in the system why could it possibly take four women with laser fingers to

remove one program's clothing i like it how these women like they they act completely robotic for this whole scene like they don't even talk to him and they walk forward and then they walk backwards into the wall and only one of them talks and she says survive and then he meets her later that woman comes back later her name's jem and she's like a totally normal person and she's like oh yeah that was just my day job this is great proof for your theory because what it means is that this is a performance and why would flynn set up a performance well he's an 80s guy he's a little sexist he knows all the users coming into his system that he brought in 194 of them want you know oh sexy ladies taking off my clothes wowed yeah yeah you know i think that he wants this kind of cool like like sci-fi 80s sort of fantasy of like all these ladies strip off your clothes and put you in the no that's totally yeah that's what every 80s and it's obviously a performance

because like you said when jem shows up later she's acting normal she's just a normal person exactly that's her day job is performing for the people who come in what we have discovered is that jem this nice you know computer program has been going to work every day and just sitting in that wall all day yeah waiting for a user to show up who never shows up yeah for a thousand years but But then true to being a program, when he shows up, they just do it. They're not like, wow, finally. Nope, they just do their job. Oh, wait, but Jem, or maybe one of the other ones, says to Jem, this one is different when they step away for a minute. She's saying he's different from the other users because he's the son of Flynn. Right, he's Flynn's son. That's what she's saying. And she is actually saying that because they all recognize him as the son of Flynn. That's kind of a recurring theme in this movie.

Everyone's calling him son of Flynn or son of the creator. Yeah. Okay. I want to point something out here, which is no character in this movie ever says the word ISO, except for Flynn, Clue, Korra, and Sam. That's true. Not even Zeus says ISO. He mentions the purge, and he, while mentioning the purge, says, I believed in users once before. He didn't say I believed in ISOs. no all the other programs that sam meets in the grid talk about users they don't talk about isos what do they mean users they've only ever met one flint that's true unless the isos were users yeah okay so jarvis is introducing clue to the people of the grid and he says your liberator your luminary your leader and maker the one who vanquished the tyranny of the user those many cycles before clue now if clue is famous for a genocide of the isos why is he the one who vanquished the tyranny of the users it's because the isos were users he vanquished their

tyranny that's what all the programs thought of the isos or users as tyrants because they came in and were being users and were like bossing the programs around yeah like there's a big difference between a user sitting at a computer running a program and a user inside a computer talking to the program, right? Yeah. I can see why they didn't like the users. Well, because you could interpret that as if he forced Flynn into hiding. No, it means like conceptual user tyranny. He absolutely 100% didn't vanquish Flynn. And everyone knows that. Like everyone knows Flynn's still around and Clue wants him, right? No, he vanquished the ISOs who were users. It's an interesting theory. And the only thing I'll say is the ISOs do have a more kind of organic and humanistic to them than a program does. So I think that's why Clue feared them and saw them as different because they were a spontaneous life form as opposed to a created.

So I guess you can make the argument that they are more human than the typical program, but they're not users from the outside world. She was definitely born inside the system. be closer to user than program there's a kind of a blur a blurred line there you know it gets a little fuzzy so she takes sam to his dad or should i say to their dad flynn right so i i like flynn's house i think design's really cool minimalistic like all blacks and whites in his house right like it's almost i don't know a little like kubrick-esque like the way his house is laid i like it a lot yeah no certainly the end of 2001 was a huge influence and that that's what i was thinking when i watched yeah flynn's room was i mean that was in the original teaser that like was literally a sketch i did a digital domain and we just built you know in a week essentially the teaser version which was fully digital and then you know a year later to be able to walk on the

fully built version in vancouver was uh you know one of my all-time that set is one of my you know it's like up there is one of my all-time favorite places to work and be in and just having jeff and olivia and garrett and shooting all those scenes in there with them is uh just you know great memories of that they eat dinner and they're eating a giant pig so you believe that flynn has been digitizing pigs and other real food so that humans can eat that real food that's the only way he would be building off the work that dr gibbs started when he digitized an orange in the very first one exactly this is the only way that food could be in the grid he's eating like a pig and green beans and stuff but we never see food anywhere else in the grid only energy water right right yeah no programs ever consume anything but water or drink anywhere else so what we know based on this is that Flynn goes out shopping and brings back food into the grid he leaves the grid

and last time he left was eight days ago that's yeah the the idea was that Flynn is grasping for any sense of normalcy and trying to create a lifestyle for himself that has some aspect of the real world so even though he doesn't have to eat a giant roast pig pig right yeah now he just reminded me of the uh the disgust uh Olivia Wilde had for a having this uh real pig on the table in front of her it wasn't even a prop it was an actual it was real no no we went and got a we bought a roast pig but the idea was Flynn is is trying to create some sense and obviously with Sam being there it's like oh my son's here I'm going to try to create this really normal homey thing and of course the dinner is the opposite of that it's like this very strange yeah uh awkward dinner and dinner conversation i love that scene it's one of the best scenes in the movie it's it's so like you said awkward and a little surreal yeah it was meant to be all those things

uh but yeah it's just the idea that when's trying to create like a dinner for you know his son and ends up just kind of failing and ends up with this kind of weird experience and sam you know basically bails that night yeah for the city yeah that's really good he also mentions that the isos just shattered everything he yeah the possibilities their digital dna disease history science philosophy uh every idea man has ever had about the universe is up for grabs the this was going to be my gift to the world how does some random digital being solve all these problems He already has a gift to the world. He can digitize matter. Exactly. And that's what he's talking about. The ability for humans to live in the digital world. That's what solves all these problems. Now we don't have diseases because if you're sick, you just digitize yourself. You think he was just giving his basic memorized pitch for his idea and he just tweaked it

slightly with the word isomorphs. Instead of users, isos. Yes. No, he's saying that I had this idea, I tested it, I brought the users into the system and it worked it shattered everything we know about the world because now we can live in the digital world is this around the time he says the only way to win is not to play yeah he says that wow awesome reference to war games with matthew broderick no it's a good easter egg good callback i liked it okay he describes how he can't activate the portal from inside the grid who would willingly trap themselves inside of a computer like there's there's no way that he forgot to build a way out because he spent the entire first movie looking for a way out he knows that problem exists there was a way out in the first movie when it wasn't programmed in yeah he would find a way out he also just before he says the only way to win is not to play he says it's amazing how productive doing nothing can be because that's been his lifestyle

for the past a thousand years like it's like i'll just lay low and do nothing it hasn't been productive what has he produced nope nothing he has produced his ability to not go to jail that's what he's produced okay okay so they're going to end of line now zeus do you think zeus is a good character i think zeus is the best gosh zeus and he's amazing he's such a good actor too he should have gotten a spin-off he's just like that classic trickster loki character i like as the fight scene starts then dash punk starts dropping sick beats and the music changes every time like a new character enters the fight scene it's so good shooting his weird cane all over the place no i mean it's so good when they're fighting and then flynn enters the room and everything goes quiet and the lights go out it's amazing it was an amazing scene to shoot i remember being the most tired i've ever been on the set i think we all were you know michael sheen to me stands out as

one of those, he kind of came into the movie halfway through shooting and kind of blew us all away with his performance. I mean, he's an example of like, you know, every once in a while you work with an actor who you feel like was born an actor and you can't imagine them doing anything else. And Michael Sheen is a lot of what he did on the day was his creation. You know, the originally Zeus was supposed to be this character who had multiple personalities and he had different masks that he would be switching with different faces and michael took that into the performance and you notice he's like he's doing like he plays like four or five different characters and different voices and he took that into his performance and then the whole dance you know once he gets the disc that little kind of charlie chaplin thing was like something he created and it's just you know it's just like one of those amazing gifts to a director to have

after who does everything you want and more and brings all these additional things for you to play with and just creates a character that literally kind of pops off the screen right in the middle of the movie when you need something you need a new element to kind of shake things up you did that that's great definitely so Cora gets injured and well Flynn's upset about this Sam tries to apologize he's like I'm sorry I know I messed up we can go back I can go back and Flynn says no we stay together sam says dad i can do this exactly like that you've done enough already right yeah no flynn he he's just the rage in flynn's voice at his son who just almost killed his daughter flynn says i gotta identify the damage code the sequencing is just enormously complex and sam says but didn't you write it and flynn says oh some of it the rest is just beyond me some of it but her mother you know helped right he's literally saying yeah i

genetically wrote it he's literally looking at a strand of dna when he says that it's interesting evidence but seems like you're reaching i would say reaching a little bit that is part of what we do on the podcast we're all about reaching no i like it no i like pushing pushing the envelope looking at it very very closely it's good as we are arguing sam and Cora are siblings and if you watched this movie when it came out you might remember some sort of like romance subplot that was in this movie but I will say re-watching it there is no romance there is no romance not a single they look at each other sometimes they occasionally look at each other and I think you kind of expect that just because of how movies work but like I think that they knew these two were siblings and that's why there's no overt you know romance between them To continue this scene, Flynn says, she's the last ISO. She's the miracle, man. Everything I

worked for, a digital frontier to reshape the human condition. He's saying like, if I could raise a child in the grid, then that would change humanity forever, is what he's saying. Reshape the human condition. In our world, she could change everything. There's no reason she'd change everything if she's just some random piece of code that sprung up out of nowhere. she would only change everything if she's proving that a human can live their entire life in the grid yeah that's all he wants to prove with her she's his little experiment his miracle well this is actually a good time to bring up there's this cool thing where flynn is a failed father figure to clue clue is like this angry rebellious jealous child yes jealous of the the isos jealous of cora jealous of sam he was mad that flynn brought his daughter into the program sorry into the grid as a user and so he's like well i'm gonna kill all the users right no and that i think is one of the

greatest thing this movie does and it even shines true in the title tron legacy right like this is flynn's legacy is his three children sam cora and clue this may be the biggest evidence against my theory cora describes to sam the purge clue was relentless the black guard were executing isos in the streets i prepared for the end and just as everything was going dark i felt a hand on my shoulder and when i opened my eyes standing above me was the creator your father he saved me i guess you could say i'm a rescue so i mean i think she's saying my creator my father no i mean my point is that she never said that she didn't know flynn before this happened and also like you said she probably doesn't know that she's flynn's daughter well she overtly states that she did know him right if she knows he's the creator as soon as he shows up. Exactly, yes. But yeah, one argument against the theory is that Sam bleeds and Cora does not.

Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know. Wait, wait, wait. But you can explain this by saying that Cora has never left the grid. She was never made of carbon or flesh and blood. Sam, for whatever reason, does bleed in the grid, but he actually was made of flesh and blood, which he left inside the laser. Cora, on the other hand, has never been made of that, and she was born in the grid, so it makes sense that she wouldn't bleed now, but maybe after she leaves at the end, if she came back, she would bleed like Sam. Yeah, we don't know how it works, dude. I think we're about at the end of the movie. I liked how you painted them as Flynn's three children, because now this movie ends with a face-off between Flynn's three children, Sam, Cora, and Clue, and I thought that was pretty cool, right? You've got the two kids who are working together versus the one spurned kid who doesn't want to work with them.

But also Sam was kind of spurned as well. But Sam has had a change of heart, you know. The last thing that happens in this movie, Flynn reintegrates with Clue. I don't know what happened there, but I'm certain that Flynn is faking his death and he's probably going to come out. Yeah, there's no reason that deleting your program or killing a task would also kill you. Flynn would never have created his grid to do that. So they get out and then he transfers something from the computer to like an SD card using his phone. And the SD card looks like a little identity disc. What is he transferring out of the computer? Is it Flynn? Like that's the only thing I could think they're doing is that like this is their setup for a sequel that he somehow saved Flynn and got his data out or something. When Cora was out, Flynn and Sam, they cooked up some sort of like, okay, I'm going to fake my death. This is your sister.

No. So another thing that supports the theory that Kevin Flynn may have faked his death at the end of Tron Legacy is... Well, not necessarily faked, but that he could have survived. At the end of the next day short, as Sam Flynn is coming in on a motorcycle to be the CEO of Encom, and reporters are like mobbing him, and he's like, I just have one thing to say, and he opens his shirt and he has a Flynn lives shirt underneath. His only thing he wanted to say to the press was Flynn lives. What does that mean? I mean, it could mean I'm Sam Flynn and I'm alive and I'm the CEO now. I don't know. I don't think that's what it means. I think it means that he knows, like we talked about, he and his dad may have come up with some sort of like on that butterfly transport, like some sort of plan to fake his death. And, you know, then he somehow took his dad out on that card. And he knows that in some way or another, his dad is still alive and could come back.

I know it's our thing, but I don't think we even need to reach that much here. I mean, at the end of the movie, they show him downloading something onto an SD card, which the only thing he would want out of that system is his dad, right? He doesn't want Clue. He's already got Korra. Exactly. So it must be his dad. And then with him the next day showing his shirt saying Flynn lives, I think it's pretty clear, right? He got his dad out of the system. He's going to go get another laser because his company makes those lasers and he's going to bring his dad back, right? Yeah. I do have one other theory about Zeus. Oh, tell me. There was a user named Eleuthera Danner on TronSector.com who wrote a fanfic about Castor and someone read that fanfic and posted a comment which explains Zeus's origins. And then Eleuthera Danner copy-pasted that comment and put it on TronSector.com. I don't know who left the original comment because that's long gone.

They believe that Zeus' user died in 1995. Zeus is older than all the other programs. He's named after his creator and his user, Conrad Zeus, which he definitely is. It's spelled Z-U-S-E, just like Zeus' name. Conrad Seuss is kind of known as the father of the digital age, along with Alan Turing. He built huge computer terminals. The first, the Z1, was completed in 1938. So like, this is an ancient computer. That's kind of known as the very first computer terminal ever. But Seuss is not the Z1. Seuss is the Z3, which was completed in 1941. The Z3 was one of the first terminals in the world to be Turing-complete. Now, Turing-complete is a way of describing a modern computer. If something is Turing-complete, it can do anything a modern computer can do. That is literally as far as we have progressed. The only difference between an old Turing-complete computer and a modern Turing-complete computer

is processing power and resources, right? Like RAM, hard disk space, stuff like that. this man believes that zeus is the z3 um that he is that computer and that for whatever reason flynn took him and put him into his grid i don't know why but i thought that was a kind of cool cool little um theory now one other thing that supports this in 1967 conrad zeus suggested that the universe itself is running on a cellular automation or some sort of similar computational structure. And the cool thing about this idea is that there is no physical evidence against his thesis. So you can't say that it's not true, but you also can't say it is true. And I just gotta say, you know, the idea of a universe as a digital simulation running on some sort of like grid in a computer system, that's kind of similar to what this movie was about, right? Well, maybe there's another theory like okay if we just go with the normal interpretation that Korra is some sort of

program and it makes no sense that she can come out maybe they came out of that simulation into another one and that's the only reason Korra can come out because the real world is also oh no they never left the grid was just a hint dude Sam was born in a grid Sam was born in a grid and then Flynn created a grid within a grid, and that's the miracle. Oh my gosh, it's Inception. So Sam has no idea he's in a grid. He is Korra of his own universe. Oh my gosh, Flynn just keeps going deeper and deeper, creating more and more worlds with his kids. That's what he did when he exploded. He was creating a grid within a grid in a grid. He was going one more level deep. He's going to go have another digital kid so let's sum this up we had some crazy theories today what do you think of a theory that Flynn basically brought a bunch of people into his grid and they all died so he calls them isos just to and and went into hiding to get away from it to never have to pay for his

crimes what do you think of that yeah I mean I couldn't find too much evidence to argue against it. The only the only solid evidence I could really find was, of course, that Sam's blood versus Cora's no blood. The computer terminal evidence was really good. I didn't spot that, but that is good. And yeah, I think it all fits. Then it creates a new logic for the film itself. Do you believe that Clue had been leaving the grid? I was a little iffy on it at first, but now I actually have to say I like this theory because it establishes a clear-cut reason for Clue to want to leave the grid. If he had never left the grid and was a program with a purpose of making this perfect grid, why would he ever want to leave the grid? Yeah, he'd have no purpose out there. Well, I just want to say thank you so much to Joseph Kaczynski for joining us. It's incredible to talk to you about this movie. I had a lot of

fun watching it, a lot of fun analyzing it and trying to come up with a, you know, different interpretation for it and it was really really cool to be able to ask you questions about it and learn so much more about it thanks guys this has been a lot of fun and i and i i really appreciate the the detail you guys went to but you know going into tron and asking those questions i love it when fans you know really dig in and come up with their own theories and i think that's what films are meant to do they're meant to be discussed and debated and uh so i i appreciate that yeah Yeah, thanks so much for taking the time. Music for this episode was provided by Christine. And if you like our podcast, don't forget to rate, review, subscribe on whatever platform you get your podcasts. Go ahead and tweet at us, at Popcorn Isn't Real on Twitter. Let us know what you think. Do you think Cora was Flynn's daughter all along?

Do you think the ISOs were actually humans? Were they really users? Did they die in some tragic genocide? We always include a link to the movie in the description, so make sure to watch the movie and do that with our theories in mind and see if you agree with us or not. But like, if you watch the movie, get the Blu-ray and watch the next day short because that is absolutely worth it. If you are a fan of Tron, it's great. And until next time... Remember, the popcorn isn't real.