Keyser Soze, Inception and Revertigo: Pop Culture References I Use Every Day

The Usual Suspects - One of the best suspense file of all time

Quoting movies is as old as time.

The most famous example is probably from The Godfather — "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse." Everyone knows it. Everyone's used it.

But I do something slightly different. Instead of just quoting movies, I use them as reference points when making a point in conversation. A well-placed pop culture reference can punch an idea home in a way that a direct explanation sometimes can't.

The only problem? It doesn't always land with younger people who have no idea what you're talking about. And that, my friends, is how you know you're getting old 😂

The Usual Suspects — Keyser Soze

The Usual Suspects is one of the best suspense films ever made — and it has one of the greatest reveals in cinema history. If you haven't seen it yet, stop reading this right now and go watch it. I'll wait.

Without spoiling anything, there's a mythical figure in the film named Keyser Soze. Nobody has ever actually met him. But everyone has heard of him — through stories, through reputation, through the protocols and decisions that seem to trace back to him somehow.

Sound familiar?

In every large company I've ever worked in, there's a Keyser Soze. Someone whose name comes up constantly. Someone whose decisions shaped how things are done today. Someone who is supposedly still in the building — and yet nobody you know has ever actually met them.

When The Usual Suspects was still in the cultural zeitgeist, saying "this person is a total Keyser Soze" would get an immediate knowing laugh. Now I say it and get blank stares.

Sigh. I am old 😂

Christopher Nolan's Inception

Christopher Nolan is one of the greatest directors working today, and Inception remains one of the most original screenplays ever committed to film.

The premise — without spoiling it — is that a team of specialists can infiltrate someone's subconscious and plant an idea so deeply that the person believes it was their own. The deeper the level of the dream they plant it in, the more powerfully it takes root.

Here's the thing — incepting people is something that happens in real life every single day. We just call it influence.

In business, you rarely sell a recommendation once and have it accepted immediately. You present it multiple times, to the same people, from different angles, until it sticks. That's inception. I tell my team this constantly — and I tell my kids the same thing when they're preparing presentations at school. Make it land so well, and reinforce it enough times, that the idea feels like it was always theirs.

The most recent example: I was in a conversation with someone in IT about how AI models sometimes give confidently wrong answers. They explained that AI "hallucinates" — it builds layer upon layer of assumption until it convinces itself it has the right answer, even when it doesn't.

My immediate reaction: "That's literally just Inception."

And honestly? It is.

How I Met Your Mother — Revertigo and Legendary

How I Met Your Mother is one of my favourite TV shows of all time. So much so that I still can't refer to the cast by their real names — the actor who plays Marshall is now in Shrinking and I still call him Marshall every single time 😂

Recently I was catching up with one of my oldest friends — someone I've known since high school. He mentioned that whenever he hangs out with our group from back then, he finds himself reverting to his old self. Old habits, old jokes, old energy. For better or worse.

My immediate response: "That's Revertigo."

HIMYM dedicated an entire episode to this exact phenomenon — the way certain people from your past activate an older version of you, almost involuntarily. They gave it a name. It stuck.

And then there's Barney. His entire relationship with the word "legendary" permanently rewired how I use it. The bit where he stretches it out — "Legen... wait for it... and I hope you're not lactose intolerant, because the second half of that word is... dairy!" — is so deeply embedded in my brain that I cannot say the word "legendary" in a normal, flat way ever again. It always comes out with some kind of dramatic pause attached.

I've accepted this.

A Final Thought — The References That Don't Always Travel

Some of my most-used references come from a world that not everyone has access to.

Stephen Chow is a legend of Hong Kong cinema — his films like Shaolin Soccer have crossed over into Western awareness, but his earlier classic comedies are another level entirely. The humour, the absurdity, the specific cultural timing — when something ridiculous happens in my life, I'll often reference one of his films when talking to my brother, just to capture how completely unhinged a situation has become. It lands perfectly every time.

But outside of that conversation? Blank stares again 😂

That gap — between the references that travel universally and the ones that only land with people who share your specific cultural background — is actually kind of interesting. The ones that don't travel are often the most personal. And the most accurate.

So which movies or TV shows have permanently changed how you talk? Drop them in the comments — I want to know which references you're still getting blank stares for 😂