This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In January of 1981, Ronald Reagan took office as the 40th President of the United States. His first day, like most

presidential first days, began with a tour of the White House. It's said that

while Reagan was being escorted around the grounds. He had one particular request. He wanted to see

the war room. You can probably conjure up an image of the war room in your head. An underground

bunker with ominous overhead lighting, a large

circular table, and a big map of the world hung up on the wall. But here's the

thing, that war room simply does not exist. It's not in the White House, it's not in the Capitol building. Not one room in the Pentagon remotely resembles the war room Reagan had in mind. But Reagan believed it must have existed because he had

seen it somewhere. And that somewhere was the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove.

Am I to understand the Russian ambassador is to be admitted entrance to the war room?

Are you aware of what a serious breach of security that would be? I mean, you'll see everything. You'll see the big board the design was so

iconic that it's become our mental image of where we think important decisions

should be made Airbnb and the soccer organization FIFA have since built their own replica war rooms modeled after

the film, which is ironic given that Dr. Strangelove is a farce about the destructive

insanity of the nuclear arms race.

But that is the power of a good movie.

What we see on the screen has this way of influencing our perception of the world, which makes sense because the

average American spends two hours and 51 minutes watching movies and TV each day.

That's a whopping 19% of our waking hours.

We conceive media as sometimes just a thing that's just kind of rolling or the ambient noise

of our lives, things that we do to distract ourselves or turn our brains off.

And what I contend and what the evidence kind of largely backs up is that this stuff is actually really meaningful.

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