The Why Files: Operation Podcast - 639: Basement #009: Eric Wargo | The Block Universe, UFO Time Machines, and Precognitive Dreams

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

Eric Wargo is an anthropologist, science writer, and the author of five books on one of the most controversial ideas in modern science — that the future is already fixed, and that your brain knows more about it than you think.His work sits at the crossroads of physics, psychology, and the paranormal, drawing on everything from Einstein's relativity to Jung's scarab beetle to make a case that precognition is not only real but explainable through mainstream science.He spent years as an editorial director at one of the country's leading psychology organizations before a UFO sighting in 2009 sent him in a very different direction — and he never really looked back.You can find his writing at The Night Shirt and on Substack, and his books wherever books are sold.

Today I'm sitting down with Eric Wargo. He's an anthropologist and science writer, but that's not why he's here. Eric has spent the last decade researching one of the most taboo ideas in science, the possibility that the future can influence the present. Taboo, I've been sane this for years. Every time I get married, I get the feeling it's a bad idea. This isn't time travel in the sci-fi sense, something more profound. He calls it precognition, and he argues it's grounded in Einstein's Black Universe.

The universe sounds like we're the lizard people. Keep the good timeline locked up. The evidence comes from quantum physics experiments, lab studies that seem to prove retrocausation, dreams that come true years later, artists who paint disasters before they happen. Every year I dream I'm going to get audited by the IRS. Then boom.

Eric has five books on the subject. His work bridges hard science and consciousness research. And this conversation gets out there. We talk about time loops, pre-cognitive dreams, the science of synchronicity, and now the future might be pulling us towards specific outcomes. I think you're going to like this one. Let's go down to the basement.

Dr. Wargo, welcome to the basement. I'm excited for this. I'm excited too. Before we get started, tell me why on God's green and glorious earth would anyone own a monitor lizard? Why? Yeah, well, my, okay, so my oldest daughter, Emily, is really into reptiles and lizards.

And she has been wanting, you know, she watched all the reptile influencer videos on YouTube and just really wanted a certain kind of monitor lizard. And initially it was like, yeah, yeah, we'll get you one when you're 13. You know, we'll get you one when you're 13. And then, but it never, you know, it never went away. And then, you know what?

I kind of started one and one, too. Really? Yeah. Monitor lizards are the coolest. When I was a kid, I monitored lizards were just the coolest animals on Earth. Commodo dragons are their monitor lizards, you know. And so, you know, my father-in-law said he'd help out, you know,

financing the Vivarium. And, yeah, so last April, we got a baby, spiny-tailed monitor lizard. and he's grown into a lovely, you know, two-foot-long little creature that we love dearly. It's been a wild, very interesting experience learning about, you know, reptile husbandry and having a pet in my life, our lives that is not a typical pet, you know. I mean, we have cats, and of course I love my cats, but. I grew up with dogs, but, you know, reptiles are very different. What's his name?

His name is Sunflower. Okay. She named him. Are you feeding like live mice or? Live insects. Live insects. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. But he's delightful. He's delightful. They're very, you know, they're very intelligent in their own way. They're not, you know, it's not the same as like a mammal. But they, you know, he's very chill. You know, we handle him and pet him and, and, and, uh, he's, he's very chill.

So you walk around the house? No. He needs, unfortunately, the difficulty with lizards and especially monitor lizards is they require very high temperatures. So he has, you know,

he has like a basking rock that's like 110 degrees and, you know, very bright lights in his enclosure. But, no, he's awesome. And I,

you know, and they're fascinating. It's just fascinating to, to bond with another kind of animal. You know, it's like, it's, fascinating enough to bond with a cat or any other kind of mammal, but to develop a bond with

a reptile is really, it's another level if you're, if you're an animal person, which everyone in my family were all animal people. Same. So it recognizes. Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah. No, he totally trusts. It takes a lot longer to develop that bond. It took a few months, you know, to get him comfortable with, with us and comfortable with us being around him, first of all, and then eventually handling him and so on. It's not like a kitten or something like that. But, no, he's great, and he, you know, looks forward to seeing me every morning when I... Instead of you greeting you at the door.

Yeah, no, he, he's really cool. So I'm glad you asked about that, yeah. How long does sunflower live? He's going... Well, knock on wood. He is, he is, he could live as long as 20 years. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and we're hoping that he will because he's, he's awesome. I've had birds, so I guess it's kind of the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Because you wouldn't expect them to recognize you, but my little maxi, he definitely, he definitely did. Well, birds are incredibly intelligent.

I mean, they're, they're mammal level intelligence. And, yeah, that doesn't surprise me. What kind of bird is it? He was a cockatiel. Cockatiel. He's a while ago. because I have cats now, and they wouldn't do well with a cockatiel. Right, right.

I've thought about like an African gray, but they live so long that it would outlive me. Right. So, you know, you have to will your pet to somebody. You don't want to be on the receiving end of that. Right, right. Totally. Now, well, I highly recommend monitor lizards. They're very, very, very cool.

You know, I feel bad for her roommate in college, wherever she goes. Well, I kind of suspect. dad'll be you know but that's you know across that bridge they come to it that's we still got eight years or so till that happened right uh speaking to college so you your PhD is in in cultural anthropology yes and then you moved into more psychology so can you tell us about your background your parents okay well so I grew up my parents were psychologists uh growing up and then when I studied anthropology I really sort of studied psychological anthropology. So I got a real basis in psychological theory and psychoanalysis and so on.

And after I got my degree finally after a long time that I don't even want to talk about or remember, I was not suited to academia. So I did what everyone who has a degree and can't be an academic does, which has become a editor and writer. Sure. And Washington, D.C. is where those people congregate. Yeah. Because it's full of nonprofits and scientific organizations and the government and people who are hiring editors and writers who are smart

and have, you know, a lot of education, too much education and no real world experience. And so they work directly or indirectly for the government or for the nonprofit world. What does it like to grow up with two? psychologist as parents, that sounds difficult. Yeah, I don't recommend it. Okay.

I mean, there's got to be advantages. Like, you've got a problem. You can talk to mom and dad and really get to the root of it. Oh, no. Yeah, or not. Or not. Yeah, no, my, my, my, my, my, I should say my dad was a psychologist. My mom had a master's in psychology, but she didn't work in the field.

But my father was, he was more of a scientific psychologist. He didn't, he wasn't seeing patients and stuff like that. And then, but then that sort of was a natural basis for me to work for a psychology organization in Washington, D.C. So for many years, I was an editor and then editorial director of one of the two big psychology scientific societies in the United States, both of which are based in Washington, D.C. Yeah, and indirectly, that job is part of actually my backstory that led me to doing the work I do, even though the work I do would be completely rejected by my former colleagues. They don't like this. They do not like this stuff.

They are the most, I mean, studies have even been done on sort of the degree of hostility towards parapsychology of different academic fields. and psychologists are number one. They, you know, for them, anything smacking of ESP or, or, uh, parapsychology is, you know, they have a chapter on pseudoscience at the end of their psych 101 textbooks. And they'll put parapsychology in that. I remember it.

I remember that from my own studies. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, and it's real. I mean, that we can talk about this, but the, the, the extreme, prejudice toward parapsychology really came to disturb me when I saw it firsthand. And this was around the time that I was learning about, you know, I grew up with that kind of knee-jerk assumption that ESP is a myth.

But after I had my UFO sighting, which we can talk about. I was reading, you know, Jacques Valet and he's talking about psychic phenomenon, like, they're real. And he's, here's a smart guy, you know, taking this subject seriously. And I felt, well, I need to do my due diligence here and read up on it. And that was the huge paradigm shift for me. That was the huge ontological shock. I didn't have any problem with UFOs, but I had a huge problem with the existence of anything like ESP. but I realized I was reading it.

It was around the time, around this time that Daryl Bem's prominent research, we can talk about that too, came out his feeling the future studies, which I was like, what? I don't know if I can swear on your show. Sure. What the fuck is going on here? We're going to say that a lot today, I think. Okay, excellent. And then I realized. you know, I've had those dreams, I've had pre-cognitive dreams.

You know, I'd had a dream about 9-11 on the morning before 9-11. Well, they have, you know, and I had just swept it under the rug. You know, that's what you do. When you don't have a, when you don't have a mental box or a cultural box to put an experience in, you just, it just, it really just leaves your head. You just like, well, there's no place for this to live, this experience to live, and it just goes away. So people often find that like, God, I've been having these experiences, but I just didn't even think about them. And that was true for me, too.

I'd been having precognitive dreams. And I just, because of my beliefs, the belief system, you know, my unexamined belief system, I just didn't let it trouble me. But, you know, I found that I had to do that. But my colleagues, you know, when Daryl Bems' paper came out, which was in 2011, my colleagues were, it was about to be published. A manuscript draft of it came across my desk because it was about to be published by our rival psychological society. I won't use the names of the societies, but, and my colleagues were considering writing an angry letter to the journals. To the journals saying this is preposterous and should never be published. You know, it makes the field look bad, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that, like, that just seems so unscientific to me. It's a theme that comes up over and over on this show when I speak to scientists is scientific hostility from the scientific community. Right, right. Well, we'll get into the details of Ben's work, which is amazing. Take us to the UFO siding. And, you know, in full disclosure, I ask. you a few questions before we came in here, what you'd be comfortable talking about. I wasn't sure you'd be okay with the UFO story. So I was excited that you would be. Because some people are embarrassed

by it. Okay. Sure. Well, in my case, it wasn't anything up close and personal and it wasn't a, it wasn't a close encounter. I mean, it was a, it would be a close encounter of the first kind, you know, was a sighting of two orbs, sort of dancing with each other and where was this? This was in Philly on July 4th, 2009, and my then girlfriend and I were camped out. There's a, I don't know if you know Philly at all, but there's a, in front of the art museum, my favorite art museum. There's a long sort of green belt kind of area. And I was camped out with a bunch of, you know, there was just like lots of people there gathering, waiting for the fireworks to start. The fireworks don't start in Philly until sort of later in the evening, unlike a lot of cities.

So we were camped out there and there was a, Cheryl Crow was playing on the steps of the art museum. We couldn't see her, but, you know, we could hear the Cheryl Coe concert. Cheryl Crow, who turned out, turns out, is really into UFOs. I didn't even know that at the time. Did she see these? I have no idea. I have no idea. Because these were seen, yes?

They were seen by others? They were seen by others, yeah, because, so anyway, I see this thing. I, you know, I show my girlfriend and I tried it. I had one of those flip cams that they were selling for a couple of years back. around then and I tried to film it. Nothing came out on the film but it was it was far away and the light was bad. But anyway, you know, it definitely wasn't a firework, definitely wasn't Chinese lanterns, it wasn't anything like that. And I've like seen tons of satellites in my life. I know what satellites and everything else, what that stuff looks like. It was not anything like

that. But it was like, wow, that was weird. And then the next day I got on to Mufon, I guess, I guess it must have been Mufon and found that there had been other reports of the same thing. Were you a UFO guy at that point? I wasn't. I mean, I've always sort of in the back of my mind been interested in the subject, but I never, until then, I had no idea that there were serious people actually studying it, scientifically, and so on. I didn't know who Jacques Valle was and all that. But anyway, when I saw that there had been other reports of the same thing in eastern Pennsylvania

on the same night, I thought, okay, well, I'll make my report to Mufon. And so a Mufan guy called me and, you know, I made my report. So the encounter itself was not spectacular, but it was enough to get me to start reading. And so as one does, one reads, you know, I was reading Richard Dolan's books and Jacques Malay's books. And you're like, these guys are actually really smart. These guys are actually really smart. And this is really compelling.

And I had a, you know, I had a blog at that point that I was writing about science fiction films and stuff like that. But I started writing, you know, writing blog posts. You know, at the time I assumed it was extraterrestrials. And so I was, you know, all having fun with the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But the fact that this topic dovetails with parapsychology in so many ways. And the fact that you had really smart people like, Jacques Belay, talking about psychic phenomena that occur often in conjunction with UFO encounters.

That part, that was really, that was the, I guess, when people use the word ontological shock, I mean, it wasn't all at once shock, but it was a kind of a gradual paradigm shift for me to first countenance the idea that maybe psychic phenomena are real, maybe these things really happen. happen. And then, you know, gradually realizing, well, you know, I have these experiences. I have precognitive experiences and so on. Did you run this by mom and dad? No. No. Okay. No. Ever? No. Actually, my father passed away that dear. Actually, that was, that's, that's kind of an interesting aspect of this experience because this happened in July 2009. My father had cancer at that point and he passed away that September or October.

And in fact, like a lot of life of people's happened. My girlfriend broke up with me and that September. My father passed away. A lot of, a lot of real heavy stuff. And to deal with my father's passing, he had gotten into oil painting after he had retired. And he had all these. oil paints and equipment, easels, and he's the kind of hobbyist who like buys every possible

piece of equipment for their hobby. And in most cases, doesn't even wind up doing it. But he did. I know that guy. Yeah, you know that guy? I'm kind of that guy too. Yeah. But anyway, so he had all this great oil painting stuff and I had never been a painter, but I thought, well, you know, I'm going to take all this stuff back to Washington, D.C. And so I wound up spending about six months getting really into oil painting and painting these gigantic paintings of UFOs, which are still now in my house. And so that was kind of my way of working through a lot of issues, was just like diving into art. But yeah, it was a very painful year in a lot of ways. That emotion probably makes sense for your story, yes?

It does make sense. And working through it via all. art is something, you know, it's something I write about in my book from nowhere that, you know, there's the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, that's funny the way UFOs and paranormal experiences, uh, it often inspires people to do art. Yes. And they work through it that way. It's just like in close encounters, you know, he has a, he has a UFO encounter. Of course. Like, builds a sculpture in his living room and you could, you know, uh, Jacques Filet is one of the characters in that Yeah, yeah.

And you could remove the UFOs from the story completely, and you could make it a story about a male midlife crisis. Yes, you could. A male midlife crisis, like suddenly, like, you know, ambivalent about his family and needing to work through these visions that are coming and create art about it and bond with other people who are on that same journey. But, yeah, and so it's interesting that my UFO sighting was directly over the art museum, which, in fact, some of the important works of art that I talk about in my writing

are in that museum. You know, it's my favorite art museum bar none. Did you seek out other experiencers or mutual support or anything like that? Not at that time, no. I mean, it wasn't the kind of thing where I needed support, you know, I wasn't, you know, again, it was not an up close and personal kind of thing. I was not abducted. I was not, it was not an ontological shock for me to see a UFO. You know, it was just really cool. But it got me then to do the reading. But no, so I didn't talk to other experiencers at that point.

Well, we talked earlier about how history will probably be very kind to Jacques Foulet, about his prescience on the subject. What was it about his writing that made you go, okay, this is something different? Well, he is a brilliant thinker and a very very, very nuanced, subtle thinker. His background is bananas with... His bananas with... Yeah, but the thing is what's more interesting

to me than even his scientific background is his interest in hermeticism and alchemy. Because that actually, I had gotten really interested in alchemy in the 1990s. I lived for a couple of years in Prague. In the middle of the 1990s, there was a lot of American expats living in Prague. and Prague was sort of the capital of Renaissance alchemy.

And they were kind of in the city. They were kind of, there was a conference of alchemists and sort of an academic conference on alchemists. And there was a big museum exhibition of Rudolph II who was the emperor who sort of supported. He was the patron of alchemy and all that. So this was sort of fermenting at the time. when I was living there, and I didn't know anything about alchemy before I lived in Prague, but that experience living there and talking to some of the scholars who came for that conference got me really turned on to alchemy. So for many years, you know, around the end of the 90s

and beginning of the 2000s, I was really interested in Renaissance alchemy and hermetic thought. And Jacques Valet is very much grounded in that hermetic philosophical tradition. And that's what makes him so fascinating. I mean, he's like on the one hand he's a scientist, but he's so much more than that. I think I have the emerald tablet behind me. Do you? Yeah, there it is back there on the wall. Oh, awesome.

He, the fact that he brought so many multidisciplinary influences to his work was really appealing to me, you know. And not, he wasn't just a smart guy. I mean, he wasn't just a smart, you know, like Richard Dolan, like fantastic researcher, you know, just like this is fantastic. He's an actual bona fide historian doing, doing real research. Jacques Valet was bringing all these different influences to his thinking. And I just, I really... He's a venture capitalist for 15 years. There's that.

You know, it's like, yeah. So, just so many angles to his thinking. And he became, yeah, he, I really, you know, I still have a shelf of all of his, all of his books, you know, and which I've read and reread. So what specific thoughts? What specific ideas does Jacques have about connecting psychic phenomena to UFOs that attracted you? Well, it's, it wasn't, you know, I don't agree with everything Jacques Belay says.

In fact, I've kind of come to sort of disagree with a lot of his basic ideas, which doesn't matter. You know, I just, I just respect him as a, as a thinker and as someone who is thinking way outside the box. So, you know, the, first of all, just saying, look, extraterrestrial. put that thought aside for a while. And think about the other dimensions of this phenomenon that don't fit that box. I mean, that was very important for me. It's like, oh, duh, yeah, this doesn't seem like aliens visiting us from outer space. This is something very different.

And his, you know, showing that this phenomenon goes back to the dawn of history was very important. And, you know, his attempts to think about this in terms of human consciousness and it's human society and culture and the idea of UFOs as a control system, I think was a very interesting. You know, my favorite book of Jacques is The Invisible College. I've got like a first edition that I found treasured. That's right. You're a vinyl collector, aren't you? I'm a vinyl and a book collector. I've got a very sizable library. Vinyl's too expensive, honestly.

It is. That was a few years, and then I thought, okay, I can't do this anymore. But books, you know, I continue to buy many, many books. I think I keep eBay in business. Same. Do you think we're seeing more of the, I mean, we see a lot of warbs. Have we seen more nowadays than we did? Because you see him showing up in Renaissance paintings even before.

Yeah. Are we seeing more now, or has it always been? It's hard to tell what's an effect of the Internet and what's an effect of, you know, the culture around UFOs that sort of makes people notice them. I don't have an answer to that. I don't know. My sense is that these orbs have been around from the start.

You know, and, you know, I, you know, what are they? You know, I don't discount the extraterrestrial hypothesis. I think that, that honestly, I assume that, the universe is teeming with civilizations, many way, way, way more advanced than ours, who would naturally send out automated probes and technology to monitor everything going on in the universe. I think we're living in a surveillance universe.

Sure. I think we are being surveyed and always have been. There have been orbs floating around our planet since before there were humans, probably. Just keeping tabs on things and who knows, nudging things or whatever. So my assumption, you know, is that there's that. But is that, does that account for the whole of the UFO phenomenon?

I tend to doubt that. It doesn't feel like it. And something I want to talk to you a little bit later in the show is, for my brain, it's easier for me to reconcile that this is more of a local phenomena, that crossing these vast distances, I just can't get my mind to wrap around that these societies have broken the light speed barrier and they're here. It's just, it's easy for me to comprehend that this is a local phenomenon that it's based on consciousness or it's multi-dimensional or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And time travel.

I'm, I am fully on board with Mike Masters thesis that that time travel could be a part of it. Sure. So Mike Masters, uh, anthropologist, uh, anthropologist, the grays are, who says that, that, uh, yeah, he's, he's looking at it. He's a physical anthropologist and he's looking at it more from the standpoint of morphology of grays that, you know, for all kinds of reasons, they look like what we might evolve into. I'm less persuaded by that argument. He's, he's of the school of thought that, you know, extraterrestrials are going to look like everything. They're not going to be humanoid. I kind of disagree with that. I think that that convergent evolution is going to result in humanoids everywhere. So that's the Caparitan principle. That's interesting.

that life no matter where it evolves is going to take sort of the same course. Same course, yeah. Not life, but civilization. Sure. Technology using cultural beings, they're going to have taken a certain path to get where they are

and that path is going to take them through bipedalism and having something like hands and a head on the top of a vertical body. I think that's, my money would be that, that, the universe will be full of humanoids. So that part I don't necessarily agree with Mike on,

but the reality of time travel, the fact that it is technologically going to be possible, and if it's going to be possible, then it already exists. I think there are all kinds of reasons that that hypothesis should be front and center. Well, let me pick your anthropology brain for a second because you just made me think of something

I hadn't considered. So if humanoids are going to evolve everywhere, does that mean primates would evolve everywhere? Something like that, some proto-primate species. That's interesting. So then you have to just keep going back through evolution then. So then mammals or some type of mammal would evolve everywhere. Or are we talking, I hate to even say the word reptilian, but a reptilian humanoid? You know, there's the idea that had mammals not taken over the earth after the a chickesalub meteor, that reptiles would have potentially evolved, you know, an upright, sure. Humanoid-like, intelligent.

It's one of my favorite sci-fi tropes. Yes, of course, of course. And there was a, I'm trying to think if he was an anthropologist. Dougald Dixon wrote some books in the, in the 80s, you know, sort of projecting, you know, what would, you know, what would these alternative evolutionary? I'm going to have to write him down, Dixon. I think I'm getting that right as far as, but I know that there's, somewhere there's

like a sculpture of a sort of a reptilian humanoid that's, you know, sort of a hypothetical, you know, reptile. I smile too and I talk about it, but there's 10% of my audience. that's screaming at us right now, that the reptilians, this is totally real. It's definitely real. Yeah, I know. I'm, I don't know what to make of that. I don't know what to make of that. I mean, I know, I'm starting to take, you know, David Ike, you know. Some interesting theories. Some interesting theories. And he's, he's been proven right. We're now seeing that, oh my God, he was right about a lot of stuff. He was. And it's just the

presentation that's off-putting. It's the presentation. And there's the reptilian's ideas. Like, you know, have trouble with that. But whatever, at this point in my life, I'm not, I'm not rejecting anything. You know, this is definitely a time of ontological shock in a lot of ways, you know, political ontological shock and, and a lot of things. Well, what you read on the, on the disclosure narrative, is this something, is this a sci-op? Are we being prepared? I know we're speculating.

I just, I don't know. I go, you know, you could ask me the same question every day and I'd tell you something different because I flip-flop. I don't know. I mean, I think there's definitely sci-ops going on. I mean, I don't think anyone would disagree with that. A lot of disinformation. I tend to agree that, you know, it seems like, you know, there's obviously, there's obviously really a there there, but that it's being obfuscated by, you know, interests in the military industrial complex who don't want, don't want it, disclosed for various reasons. And so they're running all these, this interference.

And then there's people who want, who want it disclosed, but nobody, no, very few people, maybe those 10 people that James Fox talks about know, know the full picture. And everyone else is they're, they're playing on some team, but they don't have the full story.

So it's just a very confusing, it's just a very confusing landscape. And in fact, it's that, that kind of, of got me off of the UFO topic. I think about, you know, I spent a couple years like really going down the UFO rabbit hole after my sighting and then it's like, oh my God, this field is just so full of people who are too credulous or people who are, you know, obviously covering things up and people who are spreading disinformation and so on. And that was long before the current

wave since 2017. So I just sort of put the UFO topic aside. And it's only in the last couple of years that I've sort of gotten back into it. But I'm not, you know, I can't keep, I can no longer keep track of who all the players are. It's hard. And who's trustworthy and who's not?

And who's got, you know, an agenda. It's, it's. Well, I recently was attacked by the New York Times, which means I'm probably over the target, for saying that the government, our government probably has anti-gravity, probably has some type of zero-point energy, probably has,

or is at least working on some type of time travel technology. I know you're familiar with T. Townsend Brown's work. Maybe you're familiar with AC gravity, Dr. Neal-Lay's work and anti-gravity. You tend to agree that there's technology there. Yeah, yeah. Jesse Michael's stuff red-pilled me on that. I mean, that was another topic that I had sort of been,

really skeptical about. Which is good. That's good. That's your reaction initially. Yeah, I think it's important to have skepticism toward all this. But seeing the story of Thomas Townsend Brown and, yeah, I'm convinced that that's what you're saying

is probably correct. And that this is probably all in the hands of defense contractors who are not beholden to FOIA requests. No. How put off said that recently in the, in the documentary. Right. That's how they would hide these technology.

Exactly. Exactly. No, it's all making a lot of sense. It's all making a lot of sense of why we don't know more than we do. I think that's been the big benefit of the whole disclosure movement the last several years is that I think we're all kind of learning. We're learning a lot more about how. the government works and how the military industrial complex works and how these secrets can be kept

and how people can be kept in the dark how everyone can be kept in the dark in the presidents you know let alone you or me sure they're just temporary employees they're just temporary employees and um yeah so i you know when i got out of the i i sort of departed from the ufo topic in about 2011 and i started reading about the cold war because you know i realized that the the backstory here, a big part of the backstory is, you know, the CIA and the Cold War, the military industrial complex and defense contracting and all that. So I got, you know, I acquired a big library of, you know, books on what now is called deep politics, you know. Right. And I, I recommend that for anyone who wants to think about UFOs. You cannot think about this topic

until you have learned a bit about how what the United States did after World War II and how our intelligence community works and how the defense industry works and defense contracting works. And I think what we're seeing is that those politics, those deep politics are really at play. from Roswell to Stargate all the way through everything yeah well I consider you a thinker so let's let's just play for a second well I'm glad you do everybody does there's not a lot of you don't you don't come under a lot of fire from skeptics even people who are skeptical of your work they say that it's thoughtful so I think I think you have a lot of respect from the scientific community

no do you feel there's hostility I don't think the scientific community the scientific community is really aware of me. I think if you're talking about mainstream science, I think people who are interested in these topics are often hostile to mainstream science. And that's where I get the pushback is because people see me as a materialist. And you don't consider yourself one? I consider myself sort of materialist, but I want to see, the answer is not to throw out materialism or to pretend that the last four centuries of science are bullshit or that they you know

we've been looking at the wrong direction but we do science needs like like every other human institution has a lot of problems a lot of biases uh it's ripe for some major paradigm shifts and that's what i'm pointing that's what i'm saying is what there needs to what needs to happen is a paradigm shift within science and within other fields as well. But I'm not, you know, I'm not someone who would say that, that, that the last four centuries of materialism has been, has been a dead end. I mean, people who say that materialism is dead, like, really?

I mean, you know, how many medications are you taking? I mean, how, you know, how old and you're still alive? Right. Guess, guess, guess, guess, guess, guess, guess who you have to thank for, for that fact. So, um, look, I hate big pharma too, but I'm kind of glad that they're. Exactly. So that, that takes me back to to just, uh, the thought experiment for second is what would what does the world look like if those technologies become public? What, I mean, we, we can get, we're in sci-fi world now, but what does that look like?

Yeah, that's, if they became public all at once, I could see where that would be a really disruptive thing. I can definitely see. You know, I wrote, you know, becoming time-faring, sort of trying to take a kind of techno-utopian view of these technologies, you know, transforming our lives. The reality is they're going to be secret and they probably need to be. And it's going to be a long time before they trickle down into our everyday lives. It'll probably happen first. It'll probably happen first. in the realm of computing. But... In the realm of computing, meaning like quantum computers?

Like quantum computers, yeah. Which I think are devices that are going to facilitate communication across the fourth dimension, you know. Sure. We're even seeing that proven in labs now. Yes, absolutely. But yes, I mean, potentially, you know, anytime you're talking about vastly superior energy sources like quantum, like zero point out.

energy or whatever, or time travel. You know, it's like these are disruptive things that could be turned into weapons. So there are probably very good reasons why we don't know about them. But it's also makes one incredibly angry that if there are better fuel sources out there that the oil companies have been suppressing. Which I firmly believe. Which I firmly believe as well. So that's, that's, that needs to end, you know, and we need to do what we can to, to end that

and bring these, at least some of these technologies to humanity and solve our problems rather than create more problems. I see this fight between Young and Freud and all your work, where you lean into sort of this positive view and then, then you just, you pull it right back. Like, ah, okay, we're not going to get there. We're not going to get there. No, I'm not saying we're not going to get there. You're not.

No, I think eventually, but there are a lot of opposing forces, you know. Yep. Well, at least looking at time loops and how you basically solve the grandfather paradox for me, which we'll get into specifically, I don't think we've turned time travel into a weapon because we haven't. I've heard things. What have you heard? I've heard that there are weapons based on manipulation of time. Then that's literally all I've heard, but I have heard that.

And I don't, what do I do with that? I don't know. But did that source tell you what the actual practical mechanism is? No, and they didn't know either. They're telling me something that they had heard from somebody who'd heard it. So like, you know, that's the problem with this whole field as you're dealing with people who've heard rumors from people who've heard rumors. But I believe it.

Everything that we know about Stargate. It makes sense. It makes sense to me. You know, if the Nazi de Glaca stuff is real, then certainly we have done something with that. Well, if you're working on anti-gravity, you're working on time. You're working on time. Right.

Right. Right. These are all connected. So, yeah, if you have anti-gravity technology, you have kind of time manipulation technology. So they all go together. Okay, I'm trying not to let you scare me. But I do believe it.

I don't know if we should take a quick break before. No, we can get into Black Universe. Because I think that's sort of the structural pillars of a lot of this is Black Universe, what that is, and we can kind of just create the foundation for people who are maybe new to that. Sure. So what is the block universe?

So when Einstein published his first paper on special revelativity in 1905, I think, he wasn't thinking cosmologically, whatever. He was just, he was, he was dealing with questions of light and how light works and how reference frames work. But his math teacher, Herman Minkowski, saw the implications of what he was saying that if this is true, which it seems to be, then...

What's true? Connecting... If relativity, special relativity is true. If there's no objective reference frame, then there is a point of view on any moment that feels open-ended that from which it's actually in the past and it's already happened. So you and I sitting here talking right now,

we feel like we're, we are, you know, moving through a timeline and it's open-ended and you have no idea what's going to happen next, and you could say fuck in 10 seconds, and I wouldn't predict it, whatever. But there's a point of view on which all of this has already happened.

So just as we think of the past as solid and fixed, the future is also solid. and fixed. And what he called this was the space time continuum. And he put a hyphen in their space time continuum. And it's come to be called the block universe because you can sort of visualize it as a big block in which there's one of the dimensions is time.

And so we're all blowing, we may think we're just, you know, bodies moving through the universe, but from that four-dimensional perspective, we're worms, we're snakes, we're snaking through that four-dimensional block. And the present moment is a cross-section. It's a three-dimensional cross-section of that four-dimensional reality. And that, again, that future already exists. And theoretically can interact with the past

in different ways. You can have things like what we call wormholes now, which were theorized actually pretty early. And... By Einstein. By Einstein and Rosen. Oh, yeah, but before that, I think it was Gertl who solved Einstein's field equations in a way to show that you could have a path through spacetime that actually wound up in your own past. Yes.

And, you know, and this was, you know, Einstein was not thinking in these terms. He was not, and in fact, he was initially kind of, he was initially just as alarmed by the idea of time travel as pretty much anyone is because the first thing you think is like, wait, wait, no, no, no, that can't have. and then I would lead to paradox and blah, blah, blah, blah. He thought that too. But then he came around because his colleagues showing him, no, no, no, this, the math shows that this is possible. And then we have, yeah, things like wormholes where you could have, you know, create a passage through space.

But if you take one of those holes, one of the mouths of the wormhole and you move it in near the surface of black hole and then move it back out, then they're out of sync with each other and you can have time travel between those. So, yeah, so there's, and then there's other possibilities, you know, warp drives, Akubia, warp drives, and so on, which are time machines as well as space machines. So the block universe, yeah, is sort of the basic premise that makes all of this possible. And it's still not really questioned among most physicists. So this kind of throws away the many world's interpretation, yes? Yeah, as far as I'm concerned, it does.

So can you explain, because this was mind-blowing to me, as I told you earlier, I did an episode on synchronicities based on Young's famous Scarab story. And part of my research was Time Storms, and I was halfway through the episode, and I went, well, shit, I'm wrong about all of this. And it doesn't happen a lot where someone just changes my whole point of view on a specific topic, but you did because I think you solved the grandfather paradox. Well, do you want to talk about the Scareb story? We can do that, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, this is, honestly, this is my favorite example of a time loop. It really is the best illustration of what I mean by a time loop. Okay, so for people who don't know, this patient came into Jung's office one morning, let's say, and she told him a dream that she had the night before that someone gave to her this piece of, jewelry in the shape of an Egyptian scarab beetle. And right as she's telling him this dream, he hears a tap on the window behind him,

and he turns around, and there's a rose chafer beetle, which was sort of the European equivalent of the dung beetle or the scarab. And he opens the day, he was a, whatever else you want to say about young, he was a brilliant shaman. And he opened his window,

took the beetle, handed it to her, said, here's your scarab. And it was like this, like, mind-blowing moment for both of them. Yes. And, you know, he said that it was the moment that opened his patient up to mysteries and so on. It was really a decisive turning point in her treatment. Now, he sort of described this, and he used the term synchronicity to sort of collapse this sort of time dimension.

to say time doesn't matter here. You know, this was, you know, she's telling the story about a scarab and then a scarab shows up. But really what was happening, you know, she had a precognitive dream. This was not synchronicity. This was something unfolding in time in the wrong direction. You know, this woman had a precognitive dream about being handed a scarab beetle. And lo and behold, the next morning it happens. And well, anyone who keeps a dream journal and is aware of precognition, like, yep, that's what happens.

this case, what makes it, what makes that so hard for people to grasp is that, but wait, it was her telling him her dream that got him to open the window and give him the scarab. Like without that element, you know, this would not have happened. So they think, isn't that a paradox? But it's, it's not a paradox. It's actually a loop. It's a tautology. It's because her dream caused her to tell her doctor the dream, which caused the doctor to turn around and see a scarab beetle and give her the beetle, which was what caused her dream in the first place. So it is a loop. It is a causal loop. It's what blew my mind was. She wasn't seeing the future. She was remembering the future. Yeah. She wasn't seeing the future. She was remembering it in a way or pre-membring.

So sending information back to a... her. Yes, to her younger self. So she didn't really have to do anything. It was going to happen. She remembered it happened. Yes. That's what's kind of, once you get your mind around it, which isn't that hard. If you just, if you just let everything else go, many worlds, all that, she's just, it just unfolded. I think you call it the backstory. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that her, her dream was part of the backstory of that event happening in the office. And, but you can't, you know, when you tell a story like this, and that's the problem I always have with my books,

is like, how do you tell these anecdotes? Because really, if causation is circular like that, you could start the story anywhere. You know, you can start the story with the Beatles showing up at the window, or you could start the story anywhere in that narrative. It's all sort of equally causal. And that throws us off because we're used to linear stories.

We're used to stories being linear. And so it's hard to wrap our heads around that. But it's the opposite of a paradox. A paradox is something that can't happen. The tautology is something that must happen and therefore is not interesting in a way or not interesting to a logician because it's not fair to defend an argument

by its antecedents, is it? Yeah, right. But it's the way the world works, I think. think in a time travel universe, in any universe where time travel or time traveling information is allowed, then everything on some level is tautological. You said it must happen. That sounds like teleology to me. That sounds like Plato and Aristotle.

This is, it's teleology. This is the whole reason why people reject this is because in the time of Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon is the one who rejected teleology. from the story of science. Let's explain teleology. That's purpose. So, Teleology was one.

So Aristotle codified these, I think, four different kinds of causation. And one of them was efficient causation. That's what we understand is causation. You know, one thing leading to another, like billiard balls.

But one of them was teleological causation. That is to say the end, telos, meaning the end, you know, is in some sense causing what happened before it. Now, a part of the Aristotelian framework for centuries.

But then in the 1500s, Francis Bacon, sort of one of the first real thinkers about trying to create what we now think of as the sciences. He wrote, and I'm blanking on the name of his book, but he wrote this book in which he basically laid out what causation was and banned, teleological causation. We can't, you know, we can't accept, you know, causation from the future.

And, but the reason was that teleology at that time, the only teleology people could, could imagine was God's divine plan. Right. Okay. And the idea was getting rid of taking God out of the equation, taking God out of the scientific equation. So what they did was throw the baby out with the bathwater. really. They threw out teleology, and ever since then it has been rule numero uno in science

that causes travel in a single direction, and you know, you can't have anything that defies that unilinear causal story. But your future is pulling you toward this result. Yes, that's what I'm, that's what I'm arguing a lot. What more and more physicists are arguing is that no, no retrocausation. That's the new. word for teleology. Yes. Sort of a non-divine teleology. And we'll get to that later, not just in theory, but in practice, how some of the cool

experiments that are proving that. Before we go to the break, and I would love to come back with a couple more time loop stories because people love those and then talk about creativity. Yeah, sounds great. But the last question is, why are we wired, programmed evolved to perceive time in this linear way? That is a great question, and I don't have an answer to it. I don't think anybody does.

I was hoping you had something, but it's a tough way. I mean, you can speculate about why it's important for an organism to perceive time in a certain way and not another way. I can certainly say that you can imagine why you would want to perceive only the present moment. or perceive only a very narrow slice of time that was synchronized with what's happening in your environment and your body and so on. Like I don't want to,

I don't want to be responding right now to what's going to happen in 10 seconds. That's... Right. Worry about the bear. Don't worry about the future. Right. Yeah, you worry about what's happening right now.

So that's going to create sort of a collapsing of, of, you know, it's not going to be helpful. It's not really going to be adaptive to be precognitive all the time. Just the same way, it's not going to be adaptive if I'm only responding now to something that happened 10 minutes ago. You want to be responding in the moment to something happening in the moment. And if you're going to survive. Now, there's going to be a certain advantage to having a certain amount of memory for

things that have already happened, which might happen again. Likewise, there's going to be a certain. advantage for knowing what's having an inkling of what's coming down the pike. Inklings and intuition. And intuition. So, yeah, what we're talking about when we talk about precognition is we're really talking about intuition, what has always been called intuition. And what I'm arguing is that intuition is really based on real, you know, real signals from a real future. And it's not just calculating the odds of something happening based on what's happened in the past. It's actually getting signals, indirect and fuzzy signals from an actually existing future.

That's a great cliffhanger. We're right back. We're back. Can we define what precognition is, or at least how you define it? Yeah. Precognition is being influenced by a future experience in some way. Now, that could be, some people will say seeing the future. I don't think it works that way.

I don't think it's a kind of perception. I think it's a kind of memory. I think it's memory going in the opposite direction, basically. But being influenced by a future emotional experience, for instance, or just an interesting experience, something salient in the landscape of your future that exerts an influence on you in the present. Now, via a dream, via intuition we were talking about, via a lot of people when they're meditating will have flash kind of visions

when they're meditating, these often turn out to be precognitive. People who are prone to sort of having a vivid imagination or very suggestive, you know, they'll have visions that are, or they'll hear voices. It's different for everybody. But they'll, in one way or another, it's that the future, future experience kind of leaking into the present and influencing you. So if dreams are, I know we don't really know, but if it's consolidation of memories, organization of memories, that would make a lot of sense that's connected to this phenomenon. Yeah, it makes every bit of sense based on what we, you know, what mainstream psychologists will tell you about dreams, which is that they're involved in the making of memories.

Well, that if recognition is a form of memory, then if at night your long-term memory is a form of memory, then if at night your long-term memory is, is being sort of formed based on recent experience or past experience, well then why not future experience as well. And you're a long-time dream journaler, yeah? Yes. Yeah, I got really interested in, I've been interested in dreams my whole life, but I had a, one of my professors in graduate school in the early 90s was a psychoanalyst, actually.

And so I had some seminars on psychoanalysis and Freud and got very interested in dreams through that. And I started keeping a dream journal, I would say in the mid-90s, 94, 95. You still keep it up? Yeah, when I can. I have little kids now. Right, I understand. It makes a lot of things hard.

But yeah, as much as I can, I still keep a dream journal. I used to keep an electronic dream journal. to keep a word file. Well, back in the 90s, it was word perfect. I still have old word perfect files that I can't open because I, you know, they were past protected and they're now on a little floppiness, whatever. Who knows what's in those? You must be a badass lucid dreamer.

You know, I'm not that great at lucid dreaming. Yeah, no, we were talking about lucid dreaming before the show. And I went through a period when I was really, really into it. And I was having some luck. And every now and then I'll have a lucid dream. but it's not like a regular thing for me. And I'm, I used to be better at sort of getting into a lucid state

from meditating on the edge of sleep. I sort of had a technique and I kind of lost it. I lost the knack. But then again, you know, when you have kids, you kind of like, you don't have time for that stuff.

You don't. It's really hard to do. Yeah. It takes a lot of practice. Yeah, it does. It does. And I, I even achieved an out-of-body experience.

I wanted to, that was just on the tip of my tongue, is lucid dreaming connection. to out-of-body experience, astral travel? Yeah, I think, I think out-of-body experiences are, well, here again, this is controversial, but I think they're part of the same spectrum and that they're just particularly vivid, lucid dreams,

but I think they're precognitive. Have you had any of these? Yes, I've had, I would say I've had four definite out-of-body experiences. one when I was young and I had no way of, you know, no way of processing it. It was very cool, but like what the fuck, you know. Right. And then I had a couple of spontaneous ones in the late 90s, I guess. Was something going on in your life?

I don't really remember, honestly. I did write them down though. And one of them turned out to be you could argue. it was precognitive of what I did right after I got up out of bed to like investigate my dream. And then the one that I was able to successfully induce, this is after months of working with like one of the manuals on how to, you know, have lucid dreams, one of the modern books. It turned out to be, it was, you know, kind of a wild, weird random experience, but it turned out to be precognitive, very vividly precognitive. of events exactly a year in the future. Really?

Yeah. This is one of the really interesting phenomena of precognitive dreaming is this, this aspect that I call calendrical resonance, where you will have a dream about an event on the exact same day, a year later, or multiple years later on the same date. This is something that anyone who does precognitive dream work notices. This is, it's a, it's a very, very common thing. Last, a couple, about a week or two ago, I had a very vivid dream about dad and woke up and said, that was weird and it was his death day, which I'd forgotten about.

Okay, well, this is why. See, you know, consciously we're not aware of the date necessarily. I certainly am not. It's like I couldn't tell you what date it is right now. But unconsciously, we're aware of that. And the same, that same kind of process that'll, you know, oh, God, I'm feeling sad today. And then you look at the calendar, it's like, oh, it's the day my dad passed away. Yes. It's that same process that's pre-minding you. Pre-minding. Pre-minding you of something that's going to happen on the same date in a year or in 10 years or multiple years.

I mean, I've had precognitive dreams. My longest distance precognitive dream that I've clocked so far is 26 years. What? Yes. You have to tell us what these are. Well, the problem is most precognitive dreams are just, they're really, they're boring, like, they're not things that would really make sense to other people. I guess certainly describe it, but it's not anything that's going to be wow you.

It's not like, you know, a dream about a terrorist attack or something like that. Right. But nevertheless, it's very common. Anyone who does precognitive dream work over any length of time will, like, tell you, yeah, like you have dreams that are on the, the pre-anniversary of events. I had precognitive dreams about the births, about very specific details of the births of both of my daughters

exactly a year beforehand. Now, that's a year. So it's like, you know, you can't, it's not like nine months. It's like it's a year before, you know, very specific details. And so there is a way in which we are unconsciously aware of the date. And it may be, in fact, that dreams are part of a system that kind of, that's not only consolidating memories,

but it's constructing your internal timeline. Well, what was your one year one and your 26 year one? Well, we'll talk about that. Out of body experience first. So this way was wild. It was sort of a two-part experience. I was doing these exercises, these kind of meditative exercises,

to induce an out-of-body experience. And I had had semi-success. previously, you know, you'll go into a lucid dream, or you'll have sort of a sleep paralysis type experience, or you'll have Kundalini kind of sensations. But this time, boom, I am, it feels like I am like just in reality. You skipped all that hypnogogogadic craziness? Yeah, just go straight. Wow. And, but where I was, was I was down near the floor, of a closet in my hallway, like in front of my wife's shoes. My wife's shoes, she kept her shoes in the floor of this closet.

And I'm like staring at these at these shoes. I can't like really control anything. I'm just, I'm just staring it at my wife's shoes. And it was really weird. And then it, oh, and oh, and I had a sensation of being weighed down. I had sort of a scary sensation. I was being weighed down by my cat, Cindy. I couldn't see her.

She was on my back. She was on my back somehow weighing me down. On your physical body or in your astral? Just on my astrali. Whatever. And just strange. And it was kind of associated with a feeling of terror, almost like that sleep paralysis kind of feeling of terror that you have.

But in this case, I'm staring my wife's shoes and my cat is sitting on my back. And then it changed. And then I was immediately in my office, which was just like maybe 10 feet farther down the hall. And I was up by the ceiling of my office, looking down through the window onto the street below. And it was like my office. I was in my office.

And I was looking down through the window, but I was up by the ceiling looking down through the window. And there was these two green lights that looked like eyes, kind of like green eyes looking at me. But there was no face or anything like that. But it was kind of spooky. like these two green eyes, glowing eyes looking at me. And then, so it was at this point,

this is all unfolding over the span of maybe 10 seconds. Okay. I remembered the main instruction of the manual that I was following, which was keep your flights short. Go back to your body immediately because you were not going to remember it otherwise. It'll pull you out. Yes.

So I don't think I had a sensation of flying, back to my body, but I basically just woke up at that point. It was like, whoa, wrote it down, everything. I was, you know, I was, I really didn't know what to make of this experience. But then, so exactly a year later, I think this is a year minus one day. I think there was like it was off by one day. I found I was, I had that that closet I told you about, that's where we keep our, we used to keep our, our, uh, medicines and stuff like that. And I dropped an adville on the floor. And I was down on the floor rummaging among my wife's shoes, looking for that ad val that I've dropped because I was worried my cat, Cindy, the one that had been

weighing me down. I was worried that she was going to, or had eaten this, this adville. And their adville is very toxic to cats. Yes. So I couldn't find the adville. And I wound up, taking her to the, it was a whole ordeal, taking her to the hospital, to the pet hospital. Did you remember the experience when you're kind of rooting around the shoes? Like, oh, I don't remember exactly at what point I realized, put this together. I think it was the second experience that jogged my memory of the out-of-body experience. So that same day, that same evening, I got up on a ladder in my study to change the light bulb in my study. And I stood up there and I looked down, sorry, I banged the...

That's okay, I'm excited to. I looked, I was up by the ceiling of my study and looking down through the window, and I saw two little green lights. The eyes. And it wasn't eyes. It was my power cord from my laptop. It was an Apple laptop that has a little green diode. This guy right here.

Right there. It was the green diode, but he was being reflected in two panes of glass. There was two green dots. It's something I wouldn't have been able to see if I was right down on the floor, but I saw it up up from where I was. And that's what I think, I go, oh my God, this is this is the scene from my out-of-body experience. So I like, then I think I piece together the rest of it that this was not an out-of-body experience. It was a pre-cognitive, pre-cognitive of an in-body experience in a different location.

later in my life. You were on the... I was on a lawyer. Now, I know a lot of people have out-of-body experiences in which the experience, they see their bodies. So I'm not saying

that that's what all out-of-body experiences are, but I think it's a hypothesis that people should consider who are interested in this topic and who are able to achieve these things, which is, it's very difficult, and I've never been able to do it again. Can anybody learn this, though?

Yeah, theoretically. The book I was following, now I have a lot of books on out-of-body experience, including some of the old classics like, I forget. There's a really great book from like the 1930s. That's fantastic and I wish I could remember the name of it. But there's a more modern teacher in Australia named Robert Bruce,

who does sort of bodywork kind of stuff. And he wrote a very, very good guide. Now, I don't agree with his cosmology and, you know, I don't, I'm, about what's happening, whatever, but his techniques are very sound, I think, and he really gets, you know, he really understands how you induce these things. So I was following his, his guy, I think Astral Dynamics is his book. He's like a wake to sleep method, that type of thing? No, it's more, it involves meditating, it involves learning to meditate on different parts of your body and feel sensations throughout your body, sort of a body scan kind of thing.

that's very crucial, honestly. And I've found it to be really important just for meditating in general to like, it's counterintuitive, but you're going to access that precognitive thing by focusing on physical sensations. Really? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. And anyway, so learning to sort of scan your body and feel kind of energetic sensations in all parts of your body is kind of the doorway to having these experiences, according to him.

and it worked in one case for me. So for people listening that want to start, you know, I'm asked about lucid dreaming all the time because I'm obsessed with it. I say dream journal is that that is the gateway. You must start. You can't do it without it. And the more you journal, at least in my experience,

the better you get it remembering. Right. Absolutely. Do you go back to your journal and when things, something feels weird? Sometimes. You know what? So the pioneer of precognitive.

of dream work was a guy named J.W. Dunn, who I talk about in all my books. He was an aeronautical engineer in the early 20th century. And he recommended, he lived in a time when records took up physical space. And so he recommended

just keeping three days' worth of dream records and then throwing them out. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah, because I mean like it would quickly, you know, my dream journals, I printed them out for a while and that turned into,

of binders that were really thinking that's just from a few years. Did you tell us your 26 year precognition? Did you tell us? No, I didn't, I didn't tell you that way. We have to remember that one. Okay. It's not that interesting, but it was interesting to me, but it was not. Well, these are all very personal. Yeah, they're very personal, yeah. But the point is no one would have the time to, let alone storage space, to record every dream over the course of your life and compare every dream over the course of your life to every experience over the course of your life. Of course.

So he can find it to just like go through the last three days dream records, you know, and catch those short-term, you know, precognitive dreams. But yeah, it becomes too big a task. I, you know, I know someone who's, you know, who lives this reality totally. And she's, you know, she keeps, you know, voluminous dream records and goes through and tracks every, every, you know, every connection. between her dreams and reality and and and it's it's mind-boggling you know it's mind-boggling but like I it would drive me crazy it's a great task for AI because it's great a pattern recognition that's yes if AI is

aware of your actual waking life experiences true see like you test you have to be recording not only your dreams but you have to like be recording everything and you know that quickly becomes an unmanageable sort of task well tell us your 26 year dream and then you had a 9-11 dream, didn't you? Yeah. Okay. The 26-year dream was this, it was a dream about it being in this, this certain environment. I'm blanking on the name of the artist.

Oh, gosh, he was sort of a precursor of the surrealists. It'll come to you. Yeah, it'll come to me. Anyway, I was in this very specific. environment in this very moving around this square. And there was a character with a gun firing a guy. It was it was it was very stage play like and very much like the work of this a certain painter.

And and the scenario was very specific and it I wrote it down at the time but I've always remembered that dream because it was just it was just so particular and specific. And and then this past year. I was reading a book about another artist and they talked about this artist that I'm trying to think the name of and this, it was just a sentence about this person's art that was exactly what happened in my dream.

And it was just like, whoa, and it really struck me and then there was something else on that page that was like really like, amazing, like mind-blowing to me. It was like really an important reading experience. What was that? It's too personal. It's too personal to say.

But I thought, oh, my God, this is my dream that I had. That one dream I had. And so I went back to my dream journals and guess what? It was the same date. Holy shit. 26 years earlier. Calendrical. I just, I think this is happening all the time and we're just not aware of it.

Because, you know, who, A, who records their dreams? If they do record their dreams, do they go back to their dreams? dream records, probably not. If they, you know, if they're being, yeah, that's the thing. Like, I kept, you know, I kept dream records for decades without, even before I was aware of the topic of precognitive dreams. And it's only like, well, thanks to the fact that I had been keeping those dream records, I've been able to identify a lot of precognitive dreams from that time period.

But, you know, most precognitive dreams go undetected, you know. So I think this is the, this is the mental shift people have to make. People think that, oh, if you had a precognitive dream, it must be something super significant, and there's a reason you had this premonition or whatever. No, I think it's an automatic process that our brain is constantly doing this, and we're just not aware of it.

Could our dreams just be littered with all these, just minutia of the future? Absolutely, yeah, it's minutia of the future. That's a great way of putting it, because they're so minute and specific that they're hard to tell these stories to other people often. I mean, it's the dreams about playing, plane crashes and 9-11 and stuff like that that, you know, that makes a good enough story to tell

someone else. But, you know, just having a dream about some very random, specific personal experience in your day, you know, that's, it's, it's, it makes, it's meaningful to you. Right. I spilled coffee of my shirt. It's bothering me. Exactly. But you dreamed about that two days ago. Right. In some way. Right. But you can't really recognize it because it has happened. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's difficult to get your mind around it. Yeah. But I love it. So what is it about 9-11? Because there's a lot of pre-cognit dreams about 9-11. I would bet that everybody dreamed about 9-11 before it happened. I mean, were you in New York? No, I wasn't. I was in I had just moved to Washington, D.C.

actually, a week beforehand. I'd moved on September 1st, 2001. I was living I was living in a suburb of DC and working in Tenley Town neighborhood, which is far away from the Pentagon. In fact, as it was happening and people were saying planes hit the Pentagon and stuff like that, it took me a long time to realize, oh, wait, that's where I live now. Yeah. But no, that morning, and I still have the dream record, it was, you know, it was just a dream about two identical buildings that had these corrugated gray facades, and they were mosques. somehow.

Oh, boy. And there are other details in the dream, which I sort of decoded afterwards that also made sense in terms of the events. But, you know, okay, that's weird. I wrote it down. And I don't even think that as the events were happening, I was thinking of that dream. I think it was the next day that I looked at my dream record and go, oh, shit, I sort of had a dream about this or related to this.

But it's like, you know, I had no, never before or since have I dreamed about two. two identical square buildings that have like gray corrugated facades. The topic of Islam and was not on my radar at all until that morning of 9-11 when suddenly it came on everyone's radar. Right. And I'd never, you know, I was able to do an electronic search of my records. You know, did the term mosque ever show up? No.

You know, that's the one, you know, the one dream, one time in my life I've ever dreamed about mosques and or anything related to Islam. You know, so, you know, but, you know, and there were symbolic aspects of the dream that I, I don't want to go into to sort of, again, too personal, but that related to the topic of suicide. Okay. And which makes sense, again, in terms of the events of that day. So if lots of people are remembering 9-11, pre-remembering, they're not having an out-of-body experience. They're not experiencing it. They're more reminding themselves of just watching the news?

experience of watching CNN. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of stories like this. And one of your books you talk about the Michael Richards case. Yeah. Would you mind regaling us? I know you told it a million times.

This is a great story. It's wild. Yeah, it's one of the best stories, honestly. I mean, well, tragic. But, I mean, one of the most clear stories, I think, of precognition in the arts. We can invite everybody to look this up as you're telling this story. Yeah. I just look up Michael Richards and they were not talking about Michael Richards, the comedian who was on Seinfeld.

We're talking about Michael Rolando Richards, who was a sculptor in New York in the 1990s. He was sort of an up-and-coming young Jamaican-American sculptor. And over the last couple years of the 90s, he made a series of sculptural self-portraits of himself dressed as a, in a flight suit where he was, he had fallen to the ground, had parachuted to the ground, or where he was crashing to the ground, or, and in the most famous case,

he's standing vertically erect in a flight suit and he's being pierced by multiple little airplanes. Well, sort of on the strength of his growing body of work, he got this, got studio space in Tower One. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council gave out studio space to a cohort of like 15 artists twice a year. So they would spend six months in their studios, high in the towers, and then there

would be an exhibition at the end. They'd show their work. Anyway, so he was one of the summer 2001 cohort. And he was working apparently based on people who had visited his studio before the attacks. He was working on, let's see, a self-portrait of himself riding a burning meteor and another self-portrait of himself as a fallen angel of his torso, like having fallen to the ground. Wow. And so he was the only one of that artist cohort who was in his studio. He had stayed the night in the studio on the night of 9-11 and was killed in the attacks.

He was on the 92nd floor, and that was the 91st floor was the top floor from which anyone was able to escape the building. So, you know, but that just that one, and he had lots of sculptures also of planes, planes crashing. there's a watercolor that he did of a burning plane. You know, just the incredible imagery. And just, but there's that one sculpture, which is called Tar Baby versus St. Sebastian of himself being pierced by airplanes and that he died as a martyr on 9-11

is just, you know, stunning. It is. Stunning. The other artist was, was it Stephen Mende? Oh, yeah, David Mandel. David Mandel. Yes. So this is a, I don't know if he's still alive, actually.

He was already, he was a retired art teacher living in London. And he had a history, a life history of precognitive dreams. And what he did was he painted watercolors of his dreams. And anyway, on the morning of September 11th, the Here is another calendrical residence example. On the morning of September 11th, 1996, he wakes up from a dream in which the Twin Towers in New York are collapsing. And he actually does a drawing of it.

And he goes, what he always did when he had a dream that he thought might be precognitive, he would go, he would take the drawing to his local Barclays Bank building. Okay. And have himself photographed under the clock of the Barclays Bank to have the date. So for a date stamp, okay? Again, we can see this photo. We can see the photo, yes. And anyway, then a few months later, he had a dream about planes crashing into the towers.

And he did a watercolor of that too. And so five years to the day after that one dream. Is this what got you interested in creativity? No. No, these cases, I mean, there are so many cases like they're not necessarily as vivid as that. But artists seem to be sensitive to this. Yes, yes. Anyone who's creative using their imagination, they're tapped in to their, you know, intuitive, precognitive abilities. And this, when I wrote my first book on precognition called Time Loops, it was the connections to creativity that really interested me the most, even more than dreams. Because, you know, partly like a lot of people don't identify with dreams. You know, like some people who are really into dreams really love hearing about dreams, but, but a lot of people, don't really want to hear.

No. No. But everyone can connect to creativity in some way, if not in the arts and sciences, whatever. You know. Just flow state. Flow state, yeah. And I was really intrigued. You know, honestly, it was Philip K. Dick that, because he, he had regular precognitive dreams.

And he was very aware of how his stories played out in his life afterwards. And so he was like, it was Philip K. Dick was really the first K. and also Morgan Robertson, who wrote the story about the Titanic. Tell that story and then let's get into Philip K. Dick because he's everybody's favorite. Yeah. So Morgan Robertson, which I covered was the Titanic story. Yeah, the Titanic story. So in 1898, Morgan Robertson, he's this sort of science fiction writer, writes this novel called Futility

about the biggest ocean liner ever called The Titan, which hits an iceberg on its It's third voyage. This is the unsinkable Titan in the novel. I don't know. Yeah, it's called unsinkable. Yeah. And it's on its third voyage between Liverpool and New York, I think going from New York to Liverpool in this case.

And it strikes an iceberg and almost all the passengers die because there's not enough lifeboats. And that's even like a plot point in the story. And so 14 years later, you know, he's as stunned as everyone else to read the New York Times headline that, you know, that Titanic, you know, sinks and most of the passengers are lost because there's not enough lightboats. So, you know, really incredible story. And that's been looked at a lot. You know, it's, that's one of the most famous. Well, he also read about World War I later on as well. Let's see. He wrote about, he had a number of stories that people have argued

were prescient of things. It's been argued that he sort of precognized, like technical development like sonar, things like that. Right. Yes. And he's another one of these artists who is, his life was full of synchronicity, okay? You know, I argue synchronity is what it feels like when we're precognitive and we don't know it, you know, it feels like, like, you know, wait a minute, you know, like how can these coincidences be happening? And it's your own precognitive brain that's guiding you through life and you're, sure.

Yeah. And because you don't have a concept of precognition. you're like surprised by it. But yeah, I think that's, you know, I think it's precognition, really. But yeah, so Philip K. Dick. Before you jump to that, just to connect this to people listening, everyone has that experience where you're thinking of somebody random

and they call. Everyone has it. Everybody. Everybody. Yes. So Philip K. Dick, who invented precog, right? Minority report? No.

It's actually another one of his stories, I think, in which he used the term precog first. But yes, he's sort of, he's the inventor of the term precog. And precognition factors into a lot of his fiction. And he was himself very aware of precognition occurring in his life. And he was thoughtful, very thoughtful about it. And his, so he was aware of how he would write a story and there'd be a character or some sort of lot element in story and then and then it this he would meet this character in real life or he would read an article like he was a he was an avid reader of like popular science magazines and stuff like that and he would you know like like he wrote you know he basically wrote about split brain research

in um scanner darkly scanner darkly and then like six months later before the novel came out but you mean he read an article in scientific american or something like that about split brain research And all kinds of examples like that. And he's a wonderful case because you can not only see it happening with his fiction, but you can see it happening with his dreams because he wrote tons of letters. And we have his letters. And if you want to shell out a couple hundred dollars, you can buy his letters, which I did. Worth it?

Worth it. Yeah. Yeah. If there's two things I recommend people shelling out the money for. it's Philip K. Dick's letters and Jacques Valet's journals. You know, those are the... Can you get those? Journal. Yes. Shockvillet's journals. Are you kidding? I got to write that down. Forbidden science, volumes one through six. Yeah.

But anyway, so you can go through his letters and see him like telling his, like he had this pen pal in the late 70s. I'm blanking on her name, but he, you know, he'd write these long, uh, uh, letters to this person and tell about these dreams he was having and a lot of the kind of the rudiments of what became his exegesis or he can find in his letters. But he was having dreams that then would play out in his life. And in a lot of cases, he wouldn't identify himself. Like I think this is in time loops. I talk about a dream he had that he was clearly precognizing close encounters. like three years before the movie came out, but it's like it's uncanny the connections between this dream and close and calories.

And we know from his journals that he was really fascinated with that movie. Like when it came out, he got all excited about UFOs and he was reading UFOs and he was reading Jacques Valet. Yes. And there are interesting

pre-cognitive connections, I think, between him and Jacques Valet going on. You have to tell us, but wasn't there one, it was mind-blowing, where Jacques Valet pre-remembered something about a PKK story?

Maybe it was Valis? Well, so I argue, and it's an argument. You know, it'd be hard to summarize the argument. It's a fun show. Yeah. But, you know, I think that Valis, I think, is Valie. Mm-hmm. Because, so what's the story here?

Jacques Valet in 1974 wrote the book we talked about before, Invisible College. where he develops the idea of UFOs as a control system. And he talks about psychic phenomena, and talks about Uri Geller, and talks about, and he floats the idea that extraterrestrials could be broadcasting educational material to us like Radio Free Europe. Yes.

Okay? So exactly at the same time, but a year before his book is published, Philip K. Dick has his famous 2.374 experience and starts writing a novel based on it. And we have the first version of this novel, which was published after his death as Radio Free Albumuth. Right. And it's about this teaching satellite that broadcasts things to awaken sensitive people on Earth. You know, it's basically the premise of Jacques Belay's book.

But Jacques Blaze book had not come out yet. They did not know each other. Can you imagine running into them at a Berkeley bar? Oh, man. Oh, wow. If there are two people I would love to, you know, get together in a room. Yeah. But, you know, at that time, we know that Philip K. Dick was hearing voices.

He was hearing, you know, he would get these names that came to him at night. He would get, you know, these ideas that came to him. He even thought he was the subject of an ESP experience. experiment, which I don't rule out. You know? He'd be the guy. He'd be the guy. And I think it's more than uncanny that he winds up.

He calls this extraterrestrial control system, valis. And it actually looks like a French word. It does. It does. And I know, because I confirmed this with Tessa, Dick, that in 1977, like three years later, same year that Close Encounters came out, he got really into UFOs and was reading Jacques Valet's books.

She couldn't remember the titles of Jacques Valet's books, but the most recent one was Invisible College. So I basically am certain that he read Invisible College three years later. Must have. And I think he was precognizing it when he was crafting, initially crafting this story that became Valis, but long before he could read before he did or even could read

Jacques deilé's work. So I think there's a connection going on there. Did you find any others with Phil Dick just for the fans like me in his work that was precognition? Any other? Any other just examples of PKD predicting the future? Oh. I don't mean to put you on the spot. I was just curious. No.

No, just dreams where he would predict something in his life, basically. But, I mean, the world becomes more and more Phil Dickian by the day. When the endroids are built, we're going to remember. Boy, yeah, it's, he was. Did you ever see his talk in Metz, Metz for 77? Yeah. Where he talks about, he was a many worlds guy. And he talks about that man in the high castle being an alternate reality.

What do you think he was seeing if many worlds is not a thing? you know a person can be precognitive without having a correct theory of precognition he can be wrong he can be wrong that's fine you know who cares um in fact i there's a part of me that thinks maybe you have to be wrong yeah for it to work you had a great story but i forget the author's name of lelita yeah navikov navikov okay so yes when he was um long before he became a famous author when he was 17, he was this aristocratic kid in St. Petersburg, Russia, you know, collecting butterflies and writing poetry and stuff. And his uncle Vasily dies and leaves him an estate, basically. So suddenly he is a rich man and set up for life. And, but a year later,

the revolution happens and sweeps away the wealth. of all these aristocrats and he and his family have to go into exile. But at that time, his uncle Vasily appears to him in a dream and says, I will come back to you as Harry and Kuvirkin. Okay. All right. So what? Fast forward 40 some years, I believe.

I can't remember the exact number. He's living in Cornell or living in Ithaca, New York, working at Cornell, teaching English at Cornell. you know, subsisting. He's not rich anymore. And he reads, a friend calls him up and says, have you read the New York Times today? And there's an article in New York Times about how Paris Kubrick Pictures has just purchased

the rights to Lolita for a huge sum for like something, 150,000, which at the time was a lot. It was still a lot. But it was a huge amount at the time. Yeah. And so he learns. basically from the New York Times that he is now a rich man. Yep. And here's the thing. So it's Harris Kubrick pictures.

Kuvirkin, if you anglicized it, would be Kubrick. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Yeah. And then so he got interested, maybe because of that, I don't know, but he got interested in precognitive dreams and he got interested in the writing of JW Dunn. And who influenced a lot of writers. Hmm?

Yes. Yes. Yes. He influenced a lot of writers. But Nabokov found Dunn's book called An Experiment with Time and read it and replicated his experiment. He did the experiment, which is basically keep dream records and go back to your dream records for the last few nights at least and see what matches you get. And lo and behold, he got several hits, really nice hits of like exactly the kind of thing you would expect, which is like, some vivid, fantastic scene in your dream, and it turns out to be a scene in a children's

cartoon that you see the next day or something like that. So, you know, in fact, the two best examples are things he was watching on TV in the following couple days, like little scenes in shows that he was watching. You know, like the bulk of my pre-cognitive dreams are like things on Twitter. Sure. Yeah. But, yeah. So, yeah, he replicated it.

And, yeah, Jade Wigodalman was hugely influential on mid-century writers. Jarar Tolkien being one of them that people don't realize. No, I didn't either until I read your work. Tolkien, I was like, what was the theory? The Tolkien used the elves because they're sort of immortal and omniscient. They're immortal, yeah. Yeah, they sort of live in this timeless reality. that, you know, their sort of cosmology and it was based on J.W. Dunn's work.

And Christopher Tolkien found notes in his father's writings. You know, he'd found drafts of Lord of the Rings and notes about elvish time and the elves that were all sort of stuff, including diagrams taken from J.W. Dunn's books. So J.W. Dunn was influential on Tolkien. We don't know, unfortunately, if J.R. Tolkien ever kept a dream diary, which would be awesome. Oh, yeah. Which would be a shot up for that one, too. Yes.

But anyway, Dunn's ideas at very least were influential on him. And he and C.S. Lewis talked a lot of them. Just to wrap Tolkien, he has two unfinished time travel stories based on Dunn's work. Yes. Which is fun. Yes. Yeah. The Lost Road is one of us.

I forget the other one, but yes, he started writing a time travel. No, he and C.S. Lewis, because of Dunn's book, they, or maybe it wasn't because of Dunn's book, but they challenged each other. One of them, C.S. Lewis was going to write a space travel novel, and Tolkien was going to write a time travel novel. And so he got four chapters into it and never finished it. But yeah, and there's there's a precognitive dimension to that unfinished novel, too. That's pretty interesting that I talk about in one of my books. But yeah, no, J.W. Dunn was a really, really interesting, really interesting person, very interesting figure. Well, we stumbled on a segue, and so I have to pull another story out of you. We have Lord of the Rings. We have Peter Jackson,

that we have the Beatles documentary, which everybody needs to watch. Everyone needs to watch. Everybody. Yes. So there's some precognition there, which I wasn't aware of until he told the story and it blew my mind. Well, I'm glad to believe your mind because I was like, I was scared to tell that one because I thought, oh, are people going to just go, no? I don't know. Maybe. Some people I've suggested this too, like looked at me with skeptical eyes. And it's like, you know, there's no way of proving this stuff. That's the problem. It's the unfalsifiable. It's the unfalsifiable. So yes.

So all this is speculation. But I'm aware that you can make connections down the road and all of that. Yes. It's just, it's interesting and fun. That's why we're here. Right. But yeah. So,

so yes, everyone should watch Get Back multiple times. It is like one of the most phenomenal things. If you grew up, especially with the Beatles, it's the one of the most phenomenal things ever put on film. I mean, it's like unbelievable to be in this room with those four people

and just watching their creative process. is just beyond interesting. And so the way the series starts is, I'm forgetting the exact dates, but it's like the first few days of what year, 1960. 69. And they're all in a room kind of noodling on different musical ideas. And Paul McCartney is there sort of noodling on this idea, the musical idea, and he's kind of got the tune,

but he's like he's struggling with the words. All I can think of is get back, get back, get back to where he once belonged. And then Jojo comes in. I think I have the chronology written down. I can't replicate it for you exactly. But a couple days later, he thinks of Jojo. Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona, whatever. But so what, a few days later, George Harrison,

leaves the band. This is the big cliffhanger ending of the first episode. George Harrison leaves the band. Yes. Walks out. See around the clubs, he says, and walks out because he's kind of basically sick of Paul McCartney at that point. And so then they have to spend like,

they have to like make three visits to, I think they all convened at Ringo Starr's house or whatever to convince George Harrison to get back. to get back to where he wants belong. And to add to this, that line, get back to where you once belong is something that Paul stole from George Harrison. Right, from another song. From another song George had written. Sour Milk Sea is this song that George had written and given to another artist.

I forgot who recorded it. But basically Paul took this line, kind of tweaked it a little bit, made it get back to where he once belong. So basically he's doodling on this idea. All he's got, you know, to start with his get back, get back to where he wants to belong, Jojo, Jojo from Arizona, which sounds like Harrison. Joe Jarison. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

And right that morning, the morning before George leaves at lunchtime, okay, he walks out of the band. He says, see you around the pubs, leaves at lunchtime. That morning, John adds the line, but he knew it wouldn't last. Well, that's right. Yeah, that's worth a rewatch. You'll watch it completely differently now. But I mean, you can't prove. You can't prove that.

But that's the way it works, though. I mean, these artists. They would have liked this theory. John would have this theory, I think. I think John would have. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way it works.

I mean, artists get inklings of things, and they just get these ideas. Like, where does this idea come from? But it's like they have to work through, work it out. You know, just kind of like Roy Neary and Close Encounters, like having a vision of this like tower thing and like trying to work it out. What does it mean? What is it?

What is it? You know, and, you know, you can reread that close encounters as precognition if you want. Like you can reread it. And he's creating this thing and then looks over at the television and then sees what he's been working on. That's the way it happens in the lives of artists, that they work out these ideas and then they open a magazine. It's like, oh, Jesus, I just wrote a novel about this idea.

Well, any of these stories that are kind of teleological, we're just sort of drawn to a conclusion or meant to be, you can go back and see that you could be in a loop. A loop, right? Exactly. What is it about creativity and artists and emotion? Because all these seem to be tied to emotion, yes? Yeah. I think it's just that artists are more, you know, sensitive.

They're more, they're more in tune with emotional? Yeah, and more imaginative, more, I think everybody has an imagination, everybody has an intuition, but some people are, they prioritize it. That third eye is always kind of a little bit open. Yes, and they're aware of it and they're noting it. They're noting it at least mentally, if not on paper. Right. And that's what it takes to notice this stuff is you have to be.

noting you have to be paying attention in your life in your waking life to make those connections to the dream world and to the to the the world of creativity and and and and stuff so like when you're paying attention that's why that again is another reason why meditation is so valuable because it gets you to pay attention uh mindfulness you know just being mindful uh so i think the more mindful you are the more you are going to notice this working in your life. I'm, I don't like when people talk about precognition as some kind of power or special power that some, some certain individuals have. I think it's, I think it's basic to our functioning, and we're just not aware of it. And I think it's becoming aware of it that is what makes you a precog.

You know, I think we're all precogs, but a precog is someone like Philip Big Dick who is aware of this operating in their life and develops kind of an understanding of it, even if it's not, They're not necessarily completely correct. They don't need to be correct about it, but they can be just aware enough that they're aware that it's happening. Well, you set up a great cliffhanger again for the break is because this isn't magic.

This is science and biology. Yeah. I think we can. But those can be magical. I don't want to be the kind of materialist who says you can't think of it as magic. You know, it's perfectly fine to think of it as magic. Quantum mechanics is magic.

Sure. I don't think anyone would findmen would say so. Sure. Yeah. All right. So can we talk quantum mechanics when we get back? Yeah, sure. All right.

See, a minute. So we talked about how Einstein relativity allows for time travel. We talked a little bit about creativity, precognition. Let's get into some of the science that makes this work. I guess Darryl Bum could be a good place to start. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. So Darryl Bum is a really interesting guy. He's a psychologist at Cornell. He's emeritus now. but he so his story is interesting he got interested in he was never interested in

in parapsychology really until the 90s I think the early 90s when a colleague of his I guess a colleague or another psychologist anyway named Charles Anerton who was a parapsychologist and doing

parapsychology research wanted he wanted someone who had training as a mentalist to be part of his experiments because that's a good control, you know, to make sure that there's no cheating and that and so on. And Darrell Bam is a trained mentalist. And he didn't necessarily have an interest in ESP or whatever, but he didn't, he wasn't a kneejerk. You know, he didn't, he just didn't know anything about it. But he was game to sort of be part of

these experiments to sort of ensure that everything was kosher. And Adershon got, you know, very, you know, positive results in these. I think they were tell up the experiments, if I'm not mistaken. Or maybe the remote pairing, I'm not sure. But anyway, Daryl Bim realized, you know, there's something to this. You know, he's getting results. And so anyway, in the first decade of this century, He, you know, he already had a very successful career as a, on personality and various, various topics.

And he was a very, very respected psychologist. But anyway, he did this large series of experiments in which he reversed cause and effect in basic psychology paradigms. One of them being like priming, like you're, you know, a typical. priming experiment, you'd be subliminally shown some picture or whatever and then see how it affects your behavior afterwards. Right. Well, he would do an experiment in which people perform on some test and then are shown something subliminal afterwards.

Okay. So this kind of like reversal of cause and effect. Anyway, he got significant results in like eight of nine experiments that he did. Can we explain the curtain test? Yes. Yeah. Like this, this is the most famous one. He, so he had, these were very large experiments with large groups of undergraduates.

But he had undergraduates sit at a computer and choose which of two curtains on a screen had a picture behind it. Okay. Now I'll add, there wasn't actually already a picture behind these curtains. It was generated randomly after the mouse click. So, okay. Anyway, so they make a mouse click and then it shows if they're right or wrong. And they did, they performed at chance, 50% correct, as you would expect. 50% was there.

When the picture to be revealed was boring, okay? Right. Like a beach scene or something like that. But when the picture to be revealed was erotic. Yep. emotional. Adults engaged in consensual sexual acts. Poor no.

Yeah. They did better than chance. I think 70% something like that? No, it wasn't that high. I mean, the, you know, the effect size is still small in these experiments. But statistically, because he had so many participants and so many trials, it reached statistical significance. Okay. And then there's another series of experiments that sort of reversed the typical order of a memory experiment.

So at a typical memory task, you might be shown a word list. And then you engage in some seemingly unrelated task that reminds you of certain words on that list. And then you take a test on the word list and you'll be expected to perform better on the words that you were reminded of. Sure. Sure. Well, in his version, he showed, had kids look at a word list. Then he tested them on the list. And then after the test, he had them engage in a task which subliminally reminded them of certain words on the list. And guess what? They did better on the words that they were subsequently reminded of. Just let that land for a second. Let that land. They were reminded of certain words later. And those happened to be the words they did better on from the list. Yes. Retroactive facility. of recall. Hmm.

Is what he called this. Just to be fair, the skeptics, 2023, there was a replication issue, right, with Bem's research. Okay, there's a, there's a lot of controversy about this. Immediately the skeptics jumped on this in, this came out in 2011. Right.

Immediately skeptics were enraged. I mean, my colleagues at one of the psychology organizations were enraged. Yeah. Anyway, and then, skeptics said, no, this can't be replicated and here we try to replicate it and we couldn't. But a lot of teams around the world did replicate it successfully. And yeah, don't get on Wikipedia because you'll, you will see a completely biased version of this.

But I think something like 80 independent. 83 independent replications, I think, something like that. So, yeah, fascinating evidence for something like precognition. He would call it pre-sentiment, feeling the future. And that's what he called the art, what he called it in his original article on this. So for the skeptics of Bem's work, I think we have in the late 80s, physicist Aronov's split laser test as a hold might be. year, right, that story. Well, yeah, this wasn't Aronov.

This was, oh, I'm Howell and Dixon, I believe. This is also at Cornell, I think, where they took a laser beam. They put it through a beam splitter to create two identical beams. And essentially, the terms they use in physics are different, but they're essentially creating an experiment group and a control group, like you'd have in a psychology experiment. And they did what was called a weak measurement on both of these beams,

which is measuring the amplitude of the beam without interfering too much with the beam. And this is a challenge that we can talk about with these kinds of experiments. Every time you measure something, you're interfering with it in some way. Right. That's the collapse. The challenge, yeah.

And the challenge is to try and find ways of measuring things that don't interfere too much so that you can tell if a subsequent interaction is having a retro effect. Well, in any event, they split the beams, weakly measured both of the beams, and then did a strong measurement on one of the two beams. And lo and behold, the beam that got the strong later measurement

was amplified like 10 times compared to the, previously compared to the other beam, which suggests retro causation. Now, you'll get controversial. and physicists will debate the significant, you know, what this means and so on. But that seems to be evidence for retro causation. John Wheeler's delayed choice, certainly. That would be another example.

Yeah, there's, there's, so this is an active area of research. And multiple experiments have been conducted like that that I just described, which seem to show retrocausation. Then you also have the field of quantum computing. which is showing that you can have indeterminate temporal ordering of computations in a quantum computer circuit and I admit I am not a physicist,

I'm not a computing researcher, so this is all above my pay grade, but there's so many articles have come out in the last several years showing that you can invert causal order in a quantum computing circuit. Yeah, In Cambridge, they're solving problems with information from the future.

Yeah. Yeah. Can we explain just a little bit about delayed choice, what's happening there, how it connects to time, the photons going back to the source, changing their state, that sort of thing? Just to remind folks. Yeah. Okay, so there's, let me take the example of... Or do you have a different favorite? Well, like one of the experiments that I think excited John Wheeler,

so his idea was that you could take light from a distant quasar, say, and choose to measure it a certain way, and it would show that how your choice of how to measure it had influenced the light from that distant quasar. Well, a blanking on his name, Ali, I think, an astrophysicist, I forget which university, but he heard Wheeler speak and had an idea for actually testing this using mirrors placed on the moon by the Apollo astronauts. Yes. Because they placed mirrors on the moon to bounce laser light back to sort of measure the very minute, like, changes in distance between Earth moon in different phases of its orbit.

Well, they used, you know, they shot a laser at the moon and that takes like, what, I think a second for light to get to the moon and back. So that's enough time to change the parameters of an experiment. Unless you're Nixon on the phone, then it's instant. Right. Yeah. And it showed indeed that you can like, you can change how you're going to measure light and the light somehow seems to know.

It seems to know. It seems to know. seems to know how it's being measured. Yeah. Well, you know, seeming to know something that you shouldn't be able to know, that, you know, that seems like telepathy, you know. But another way of looking at telepathy is that it's really precognition, that the light was influenced by that subsequent measurement. And that information, essentially, from the future, traveled back in time along the world line of that photon. Right. It fulfilled its destiny.

It fulfilled its destiny, yeah. So, yeah, there's all kinds of reasons to think that, yes, retrocausation is a real thing. At the smallest scales in nature, now, you know, that quantum realm where you're talking about individual particles, you know, behaving in seemingly impossible ways. But there are certain circumstances where you can scale up that quantum realm. quantum magic. And that's when this topic of entanglement comes in. When you entangle particles together, you can create a larger and larger object that enters the realm of objects that we're used to interacting with. And you can demonstrate that quantum magic at a large scale. That could be the strong force measurement, right? Just this entanglement of the equipment? Or a quantum computer. A quantum

computer is a bunch of particles that are entangled together to create essentially an object that performs computations. And in those settings, you can, again, we talked about quantum computers reversing cause and a fact. Sure. You can have a material thing that is responding to its future. Yes. Okay. And, okay, then set aside those ideas and enter the realm of biology, where more and more people are thinking that the brain could be a quantum computer or have quantum computing properties. And if that's the case, you know, add all these up, and you get the idea that the brain could be a four-dimensional information processor

that is presponding to its future as well as responding to its past. So on the show, I've covered quantum biology with the cryptocromes and the bird's eyes, which has been proven that they're entangling with the magnetic field. Quantum processes in plants where they're finding the... Photosynthesis is a quantum process. They're checking all the paths simultaneously. It's superpositioned in real time on leaves. So clearly the quantum state can be held in a wet, hot place.

Right, right. And that's always been the point of skepticism. Oh, you can't have entanglement occurs. in a warm, wet environment like the brain. But it's increasingly being shown that actually you can and that living, that life is a quantum, is scaling up these quantum effects. I want to ask you about microtubules in a second,

but before we move to that, what did Niels Bohr, how did he address retrocausality? I know he didn't like any of this. No, he did not. And he, yeah, Niels Bohr is a really important, figure in in the sort of I'd say century long denial or refusal to look at retro causation because ever since the 1920s there has been this idea that that retro causation could explain a lot of this spooky quantum stuff but the idea just keeps getting shoved aside partly because of

Neil's Bohr's personality I mean he was just a very forceful personality and he he sort of got the whole field of physics to just basically agree to not interpret what was going on at a quantum level and just say it's random. And just accept that the world is random on a fundamental level. And that's the answer. And you just have to wrap your head around that. Well, a lot of people have not wanted to wrap their head around it. They have not been satisfied with that answer. Einstein famously said, God does not play dice.

That's right. But Niels Bohr basically dominated the field until really the last couple of decades when what's called the Copenhagen interpretation. And he was from Denmark. So it's called the Copenhagen interpretation when it's kind of broken down. And now you have this kind of flurry of rival theories going on in the field. So you've got, besides the Copenhagen interpretation, you have many worlds theory that we talked about. You've got BOMS pilot wave theory. You've got multiple rival theories, but retrocausation or some version of retro causation.

And not all physicists call it retrocausation. The problem is they use different terms sometimes to mean the same thing. Like what? What do we look at it? Well, they'll tell you that to be really precise, you can't talk in terms of causation anymore, and you need to talk in terms of constraints. And they'll use different language because they don't want to give this impression that somehow energy is traveling from the future to the past and stuff like that. To be, there's a team that wrote a book relatively recently called Beyond the Dynamical Universe, which is basically making. making this same argument that I'm talking about,

but they don't use the term retrocausation. And they take pains to distinguish themselves from other physicists who use the term retro causation, but they're basically talking about the same thing, which is that something happening in the future is constraining what's happening now, and thus that's a kind of information traveling backward in time. You know, for us, us ordinary humans who need to be able to grasp this somehow,

we need these clumsy expressions, like influence or information traveling backward in time. We need to be able to put it that way so that we can wrap our heads around it. But that's, you know, a physicist will have a more precise way of talking about it. But the basic idea is that what happens in the future influences what's happening now.

And what's happening now influenced what happened in the past. It's so elegant. I don't know why there's such resistance to it. It's so elegant. Well, it takes away free will or it seems to. It does. That's something kind of stressful about your theories

is determinism and free will. So if everything that's going to happen is going to happen regardless because we're on this timeline, then why does anything matter? Well, right. That's where people's heads go. Right. But the more you sit with it,

you get to another place. That's, I think. That's a devil's advocate because I'm on board. Yeah. That's what hangs people. That's people's hang up. It is a literal hang up. get hung up on this, on this question of free will.

And they think, oh, well, then if it's going to happen anyway, what's the point? But, you know, just think about that for a second. You can't know the future. That's the thing. This is the, this is the, I call the precognition paradox. You cannot know the future. Right. So.

You cannot know the future. And you don't know how any, you know, how the future is going to unfold based on your actions. and just laying in bed in the morning and not getting up and putting on your pants and going to work. You know, that's an action just as much as getting up and putting on your pants and going to work.

That's true. So it doesn't make any, you know, you got to do something. And when, so I'm a Zen guy. All right. Really? Yes. And when you sit with this,

when you sit with the block universe as a co-on is a kind of, you know, co-on, you reach a point where you go, holy shit, it's beautiful. And it's like, it's liberating. It's liberating to get rid of the baggage of free will determined, like, who fucking cares? It's not, it's just, it's easy for you to say. Well, you know, but it's honestly, this is a point you can get to when you treat this as a con as a, as a, you know, as a riddle to be solved. And don't just like turn it from it. But that's unfortunately what's what generations of physicists have done. They've turned

away from it because this this trespasses on some philosophical idea that's really important for us as Westerners. True. And it's distorted their interpretation of the science, which is that's not scientific either. You know, we've talked about ways people, ways in which scientists don't behave scientifically. Well, generations of physicists have avoided a very obvious and elegant conclusion or a very obvious and elegant hypothesis about nature simply because it is philosophically

and culturally kind of uncomfortable. And that's not behaving scientifically either. No, it's not. Fortunately, they all haven't. So eventually the evidence is just going to stack up. Yeah, but it's the, you know, it is acquiring that evidence is tough because of this problem of distinguishing between, you know, when you measure something, you're interfering with it.

So how is your measurement, you know, is it simply changing the future or is it changing? It's it is very hard to test this experimentally. And for exactly the same reasons why it is hard to prove that my dream about two buildings with corrugated facades that were mosques on the morning before 9-11 wasn't a coincidence. I mean, it's, you know, you can't prove that. That will always be the counter. The uncertainty principle. So that uncertainty principle is right there at the heart of the topic of recognition. So before we talk about Penrose and Hemmeroff, which everybody listening knows, let me pull

another story out of you because I love the bootstrap paradox. Yeah. Did you, you've addressed this, I think, in your work. Can you explain what that is? Yeah. So the bootstrap paradox is my favorite. I mean, it's another way of putting a time loop, basically. It's the idea, so say you have a, here's an example that David Deutsch, the physicist and quantum computing pioneer uses it in a paper that he wrote in the 1990s.

He says, okay, you have a Nobel Prize winning physicist. I'm sorry, Nobel Prize winning mathematician. and he has access to a time machine and he goes back in time and finds himself his younger self, you know, studying in the library and gives him the proof that he later won the Nobel Prize for solving. And so the, the, he basically just gave it to himself in the future. And there's nowhere in that causal loop where anybody actually did the work right of solving that math problem. okay well that's what makes steam shoots out shoot out people's ears you know it's bothered me since star trek for the voyage home exactly how do we know you didn't invent the thing exactly

it's it's it's it's there at the heart of any time loop is this bootstrap paradox but again it's we're not it's not really a paradox bootstrap paradox is a misnomer it's a tautology it's not a paradox in fact, I think that that everything is bootstrapping. Wow, I hadn't considered that. It goes all the way down that in a time travel universe, in a universe that allows time travel at all, ultimately everything is bootstrapped. Everything's a bootstrapped. I guess it has to be.

And this is why I love the topic. This is why I wrote my last book, Where Was It Before the Dream? because it is an answer to that question of, of, you know, where does a new idea come from? Well, it's literally like that proof that is given to the younger self by the older self. And it doesn't come from any. It literally comes from nowhere in the sense that there is nowhere in the history of an idea where somebody like actually did the work of solving a problem. It just literally is given to your younger self by your older self.

Plagiarism of the future. Lagerism of the future. So this is, this is, this is the time loop at the heart of creativity, I think. And it's, and it's literally creation X, Nilo. So it's literally we're gods. Okay, creators are gods because they're creating from literally nothing. There is literally nowhere in the history of an idea that some, that, that, that some little imp is putting it, hammering it together, putting it together. Nowhere that your, that your brain is piecing together things and creating a new thing. It's receiving it as a gift from its future self. You are the muse of yourself. Yeah. When I'm having good ideas now, I find myself thanking my

future self. I appreciate that. That's great. That's good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Is that driving some of your work? Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I think it's an inspiring way of thinking about, about art and creativity, but about, you know, just creative solutions. in general. I think that's, I think that's what's happening. It's easy to show, it's easier to show with art

because, because, you know, you have an artwork that then is something like a dream journal that you could then compare to a later event or whatever in a person's life. It's a little harder

with things like inventions and scientific theories and stuff like that. They just are not as amenable to that kind of confirmation process and that kind of, comparing with a person's biography. But I think that that's what innovation

really is, is bootstrapping. What do you think is happening with flow state and sort of unconscious behavior? Yeah, that's a flow state is when you are cooking in terms of that bootstrapping. That's your future self just kind of giving... Flowing into the... Yes, flowing unimpeded.

Yeah, I mean, anyone who... And it's... Yeah, and it goes beyond creativity. like anyone who's doing some skilled activity, a martial artist or a jet fighter pilot or a brain surgeon, you know, they're in a zone. They are not thinking about their free will. This is another reason I tell people,

stop working about free will. You know, your best self always comes out when you're not thinking deliberately about your will. Every time. Exerting your will. Your best self is that in the zone, when you are a machine. You're part of a machine

and you're part of what I think of as a sort of four-dimensional machine. That's like, you know, cycling through time as well as space. It's, you know, that's what, you know, it's a Zen thing. You know, the Zen masters are all about finding that state

where you are not freely willed. You know, you are doing what must be done. And this, I'm going to go off script a little bit because something just occurred to me as you're saying this, is as a martial artist, as a performer, and sitting here in this room, when things are moving well, it's very automatic,

but I will find myself with a second dialogue, almost observing. It's happened here a couple of times today, where I'm just sort of observing, oh, that was a great question. Oh, this is really interesting. It's going well, that sort of thing. Or if you're performing, you're doing stand-up,

you're like, oh, the audience is kind of rough of tonight. Let's try this material. What do you think is going on in the mind when we've got these split, monologues? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I come back to, it's an idea that I talk about in time loops a bit called Leibet's Gallum.

Benjamin Lebet was a neuroscience researcher. Terrifying, terrifying research. Terrifying research about how, you know, we're out of sync with reality. We may have to describe experiments. But yeah, well, that would be fine. But the thing is the upshot, I think of his research is that we are actually, we are actually pulling our meat puppet strings from the future. And that those moments that you're describing, you know, like I'm a martial arts too,

you know, you have those moments where you kind of mentally replay something really great that you just did. Well, what if that's your freely willed self pulling your meat puppet strings in the past? You know, what if that's where your free will is being exerted is on your past behavior? Um, that's, you know, again, how do we prove that? I don't know. But, but, but it is one way of interpreting. It exists. Whether we want to prove it or not, it happens to people in flow stuff. Even when you're sinking a bunch of baskets. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And you talk to psychics. Remote viewers go into at state to when they're, you know, when they're cooking. What do you think remote viewers are they, are they remembering the future as row of viewers?

This is a big debate. There's a big debate in the field. I mean, I think that's a, a hypothesis that needs to be tested and no one's testing it. Well, I saw you criticize Pat Price, I'm a huge Pat Price fan. And when you kind of describe what Pat was doing, it made a lot of sense to me. Because he was, because remote viewers are wrong more than they're right. But when they're right, they're definitely right. Yeah. So they're just remembering they were right.

That's the hypothesis that needs to be falsified. Right. Before we assume that remote viewing is actually, you know, sending your consciousness across space to some other location or to some target, it needs to be falsified that you're not previewing or pre-remembering the feedback you're going to get afterwards. True. And this is, you know, some very small experiments have been done to try and test this, but not on any scale. And I always tell remote areas you've got, I'm, unfortunately, I'm not an experimental.

you know, parapsychologists. I don't know, I don't have the setup to study this myself, but I think someone who has the, the, the means should set up experiments where they, you, you, and unfortunately, these are kinds of experiments are the kinds that would be done in any psychology laboratory where you have to deceive your subjects. And I think that's why it does, these experiments don't happen because, well, they're happening. We're just, you know, Stargate never ended, I don't think. Right. But are they, but are these experiments that would falsify the precognition hypothesis. They're probably not focused on it.

I don't know. Did you remote view your wife's shoes? I did not remote view my wife's shoes. I precognized being on a floor hunting for an Advil that had dropped among my wife's shoes. Yeah. So remote viewing. But I'm saying it's an open question. Sure.

I put it out there because no one else is voicing it. And I think it's really something that that the field needs to address. Well, that's why I ask you is because when I read your work, I put it down and I just like, oh, shit, I hadn't considered. That's why I ask you these, I'm asking you questions. Maybe it's not even your field, but you're here. So might as well pick the brain. Yeah. But it's, you know, remote viewers will get understandably touchy about it.

Sure. Because it's important, you know, it feels it's validating of a certain belief system that about consciousness and so on that it leaves the body and so on. And I get it. I, you know, people don't want cold water thrown on that. And I'm, I'm saying, look, this is, if you're going to really believe that, you need to test it. You know, that that's the point of being a materialist scientist, which is, you know, really testing rigorously and taking the most reductive, you know, version of, of a story and seeing if that reductive version can explain the results. And maybe it can't. You know, I'm open that maybe there is, you know, more remote viewing than precognition.

I certainly talk to people who are very convinced that that's the case. But it needs to be done in the context of studies that are published where you can look at the evidence. And hard to get that published. It's hard to, yeah, it is. Probably not an accident that Jacques Valet was hanging around SRI in the 70s, no? Probably not an accident. Probably not an accident. And he was like the first, one of the first people to raise this possibility, by the way.

I mean, it's in his journals. Like he's, you know, he had lunch since this was 1978, I think, with the SRI guys and said, like, how do you guys know this isn't precognition? You know, you're treating this all like this is clairvoyance and this could be all precognition. And he was, he was very early on that kind of bandwagon that this may be precognition. Has Valet addressed the microtubules and Pemrose Hemero's work yet? not that I'm aware of. Where do you stand on that quantum process? I'm very much in favor of Hammeroff's work.

The anesthesiologist. Yeah, like a microtubules. I think microtubules could be the answer. I don't, I am not personally that interested in the question of consciousness. You're not? No, I think it's a red herring. I think, I think, uh, if something's going to come out of this search for consciousness, uh, it's going to be, it's, it's going to be a sort of serendipitous discovery of the

mechanisms underlying precognition. And I think that's where the significance of microtubules is. So we were talking about memories being consolidated. Yep. Okay. So guess what it is in neurons that reshape the synapses every night when you're dreaming and creating new memories? Microtubules. Microtubules.

So if these microtubules are the little quantum computers that are presponding to their own future states, it makes perfect sense. You know, it really creates a perfect little hypothesis for how precognition works. So I think, you know, I think there, and microtubules aren't the only structures in cells that seem to have quantum computing properties, but that that's, that's what I think is the significance of microtubules. I'm not, I'm not convinced by any of the explanations for consciousness. And I'm not convinced by Hammeroff and Penrose's theory that it's Are you not interested in it?

I'm not really. I don't think, I think consciousness is people are being premature in thinking that we can get to the part of what consciousness is because there are really good arguments to be made that consciousness is an illusion.

You'll never get a satisfactory answer. No, you're never going to get, you know, yeah, and that's the other thing. No physical explanation of consciousness is ever going to satisfy anybody, you know? And I've read a lot of them. I find a lot of different physicalist interpretations of consciousness interesting. You know, this is illuminating, but this is not, not the, and this is not the ultimate answer. Likewise, I find, you know, non-physicalist interpretation of consciousness interesting, but none of them are satisfying. None of the,

none of the stories about consciousness are satisfying. And I think that that suggests that consciousness is not a problem that can be solved right now, or are using the wrong terms. Where are you on the soul then and life after death? And our death is just waiting for us, right? We're being pulled toward it. Well, we're being pulled towards our survival. Oh, okay. We're being pulled towards survival.

I think that's how precognition, that's how time loops work in the life of an organism. We're being drawn generally towards our survival. I watch you describe anxiety this way now that you mention it. Yeah. I think anxiety could be a signal. signal of our future withstanding of challenges and threats

that if if precognition is drawing us towards an existing future then it can't be drawing us towards a fan of possible futures so it's drawing us towards a single future in which we are experiencing our survival

of something you're not going to experience your survival if there hasn't been a challenge to your survival if there hasn't been a threat there. So we're not going to precognize a future that's all roses and all good things and nothing bad ever happening. Nor are we generally going to precognize hitting the brick wall of death. We're going to precognize close calls. And guess what?

That's what people often have precognitive dreams about. It's close calls. things, you know, situations in which we say, wow, that sucked, but it could have been worse. That's, that, that is the basic thought. I think at the heart of most precognitive dreams is, but I survived. And we could be talking about something as trivial as the sync backing up or something like, yeah, it's just, you know, really, really minor threats and upheavals. But, you know, little things, challenges. that happen or things that challenge our security and one way or another are peace of mind,

things that challenge our peace of mind. But I'm still standing. Well, that, when people say, why do we want to watch a train wreck? That's why. That's exactly, that's exactly it. Why were we so glued to CNN on the morning of 9-11? Because it wasn't us. It wasn't us. Right. Yeah. Yeah, there's that great, it's supposedly an Aristotle quote. I don't know if it actually appears in Aristotle, but luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with an arrow. And that's a very interesting thought because it's not luck is when nobody gets hit with an arrow. Right. Right. It's when the guy next to us. And the thing, but the thing is it's not because

we're bad people and we wish harm on other people. It's not that, that would be kind of Freud's kind of dark view of human nature. The point is it's pure semiotics. You can't have a signal, X signal without that contrastive signal. So you can't have the I survived. You can't have I survived without something representing the possibility of not surviving. And that's, I think, accounts for people's fascination with disasters and death. It's not that we're bad people or we're excited by that. It's that there on some basic reptilian, you know, we started about talking about reptiles.

on some basic reptile level, uh, we like, we like that message, but I survived. You look at sunflowers sometimes. You're like, I get you.

I get you. What happens after we die? What is, where is our consciousness? That's out of my, that's out of my lane. I don't know. You don't have any feelings?

We're allowed to speculate. I don't, okay, so. If you're not sure, give them, intellectually, I would, I would, I would say, well, I think it's death is probably the end, but

the thing is, I don't think it's possible to really believe that. I don't think it's possible. I think we all, deep down, believe in... Whether we say it or not. Whether we say it or not, we all believe in God, and we all believe in the afterlife.

Agreed. And we cannot help but believe that. So I can sit here intellectually say why I don't, you know, I haven't seen evidence that convinces me. But deep down, of course I believe. Sure. But it doesn't, I have, I genuinely have not seen convincing evidence that we precognize things

that we don't, that we don't survive to learn about. But that is an interesting question. There are a tiny handful of precognition cases that seem. to be about things that happened after a person's death, a tiny handful. Edgar Allan Poe. His story, something about Gordon Pim,

I forget the story, but he has a story about these four people in a lifeboat who cannibalize the fourth person in a lifeboat and has the names. And then after his death, decades after his death, there was a real case with those exact names and they cannibalize some of the people in the life foot. I was in my synchronity episode. I got it wrong. Right. Time loop. Yeah. Well, you know, that would,

that would not fit my model. It wouldn't. Right. But why not? Because it was after his death. Oh, right. He can re-remember it. Right. On the other hand, coincidences do happen. They do. They are part of the universe. And by the law, by that argument of the law of large numbers, which is what debunkers, you throw it at this problem all the time. They're wrong to do that, but nevertheless, it is real that coincidences happen. And it's in those names were common at the time. And cannibalism at sea was actually surprisingly common. You know, so you can make the argument that it was that was pure coincidence.

But, you know, that's, that just validates my favorite. Right. You know. How do you know what to throw away when you're going through the stories? Like, ah, that's probably not it. Well,

you know, you've got a, this is a problem. Nobody's objective completely. And this is why science is so important because science is a collective enterprise of throwing away people's pet theories and individual biases and seeing what the evidence really shows. So,

you know, you've got to have that attitude. That's, you know, that's skepticism. And I will say I've been led to a theory of precognition based on evidence, you know, from a place of not at all believing, you know, in anything like precognition. You know, based on the evidence of my own experience correlated with other people's experience, correlated with, you know, scientific findings, correlated with the plausibility of a physical. that explains it, you know, putting a lot of pieces together.

But will I be objective in tossing out a certain piece of evidence that doesn't fit my theory? I mean, the thing is, I don't know of any other cases like that Gordon Pim one. Right. There aren't a lot. You tell yourself you would be objective. Yeah. But it would make a great story. Maybe we'll keep it in.

Well, was that spark for someone who's trained as a cultural anthropologist working in science? What was that? Was that spark that made you go? time loop that because it's it seems so far out of your field um was it a culmination it was a culmination it was of yeah yeah reading and it's yeah and it's yeah and it's like um the um you know the different pieces of the argument have all been made by other people you know I'm just I'm just assembling what what you know I'll name Igor Novikov who's uh He is a Russian physicist who he was the one that really debunked for physics.

He debunked the grandfather paradox idea that, you know, that you could have paradoxes caused by time travel. I mean, he's the one who really, you know, said, no, you're thinking about this wrong. Any time you go back in time and have an effect in time, that's part of the back story of the present. and including your travel, your journey through time. So he basically was articulating something like a time loop or bootstrapped paradox. In fact, his term for bootstrapping is gin.

The gin, you know, they're the mythological creatures in Islamic mythology that just appear out of nothing. He called, he called them gin. And this was in the context of writing about wormholes and how you might have an effect arising from traveling through a wormhole. that where something arises literally from nothing. So this was, you know, Igor Novikov was writing about this in the 90s. You know, there, so these, all these ideas have been floated before. So arriving from nothing reminds me something else you talked about. This is how we know we're kind of toward the end because now I'm off script.

I'm just asking my questions. Orbs appearing from nowhere, orbs splitting apart. Yes. That's what I talk about in becoming time-faring. So what are we seeing there? I don't know, but that behavior of objects appearing from nothing and splitting into two or merging and disappearing, which you get in some reports of UFOs. You do.

That is consistent with a single object reversing its course in time. How does that work? well an object say you have say you have a time ship they say I have an orb time ship you're you're sitting in your orb and you pull a lever to reverse your temporal direction and travel back in time what that's going to look like to you on the inside it's going to you're going to pull that lever and suddenly the external world this is presuming you could see outside your you know there are there are problems with this but you know you'll you're going to look like when you pull that lever suddenly everything outside of your ship is going to look like it's a film in reverse. Okay, everything's going to look. Like an HG.U.L.'s story? It's going to, well, HG.L. his story mainly went to the future.

You don't really talk about it. But he talked about how he watched things happening. Yeah, but, but in this case, if you pull the lever, say you're going, you're in your orb time ship and you're just, you're in ordinary time, and you pull the lever to go into reverse. You throw it into reverse. Okay. Suddenly, everything outside your ship is going to look like, it's,

It's in reverse and you're going to see history happening backwards, okay, like a film on rewind, okay? Yeah. From an outside perspective, the outside observer, what they're going to see is two timeships, identical timeships, converging and disappearing. Yes. That's what it's going to look like to an outside observer. And likewise, say you, you know, you're enjoying sort of the history rewinding for a while. I go, oh, let me, I'm going to throw it back into forward. You pull the lever again.

What that's going to look like is two time ships emerging from nothing and traveling apart. So an outside observer would see like that. So that whole, that S-shaped movement would look like an object over here, two objects splitting over here, and these two objects merging and disappearing and that other object flying off. That's what it would look like. I worked this out for myself using flipbooks. Flipbooks? Yeah.

Okay. I wish I'd brought them, actually. You know, I was like, I was sort of mentally going through like, what would this look like? And so my animation skills aren't great. Although actually on my, I wound up doing a little stop motion animations on my website. You can find out on my website for some of the stuff I talked about in that book. But I worked this out in flip books. using little orbs and flipbooks and like what it would look like.

And it's like really trippy to, you know, what this visual effect is. And it is consistent with some descriptions of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, UFO behavior. And so that's, that's where my, why I support Mike Masters, you know, or at least the, the, the plausibility of his hypothesis that, that it's, again, I'm less interested in the anthropological part of it, but in the, um, the, um, um, the, um, um, um, you know, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, the behavior of these objects, there is all kinds of reasons to think

that they are manipulating time. And that's one of them, that they could be actually reversing their course in time. They could be actually physically traveling backward in time. What about when we see multiple more than two? You could have a single object that reverses its course multiple times and the time stream would look for that duration of time

like a swarm of objects. We see that. We see that. We see swarms. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, you know,

the example I use in the book is, apparently, Werner von Braun, now he wasn't there to see it. He wasn't at the Trinity test. Apparently he wrote in his diary that, that people at the Trinity test reported seeing swarms of objects. A lot of tests,

we've seen this. Yeah. And, well, like, what if it was a single object, single guy in a time ship, you know, wanting to get multiple vantage points on this single, this event and scrub it back and forth.

Like you were looking at a... Scrubbing a timeline. Scrubing a timeline back and forth. What it would look like to an outside observer is a swarm of objects. And why are they moving the same way? Because it's the same ship. It's the same ship. Yeah.

Scrubbing a timeline. Yeah. Okay. Blew my mind again. So, yeah. I wish I'd brought those clipbooks because it's it if you have them online we'll yeah I have them online I uh there's a website I did I did little my daughter helped me make little like stop motion animations of flying saucers merging and stuff like that

what are we missing out of time faring that we should cover I mean I think I could throw all my stuff I'll talk to you for hours just you know the the don't get hung up on grandfather paradoxes. These like these hangups that people have about about time and time travel, they're they're totally false. They're their myths and the thing is there are there falsehoods that have been promoted by some of the greatest minds of our time like Stephen Hawking. Yes. Thought the time travel was impossible because it would lead to paradoxes. But the whole first chapter of my book is why that's a complete nothing murder.

the the there's time travel does not lead the paradox if you get on board with that and block universe and delayed choice everything just seems to make sense now everything just seems to fall right elegantly perfectly yeah everyone needs to read your read your books for sure uh what else do we miss er i don't know we covered a lot where should they go where do you want them to go um the night shirt? If you're into sci-fi, the night shirt. Yeah, I don't really contribute. I mean, I don't have time to blog anymore. I'm on, lately I've been putting some things on my substack. It's also the night shirt. And they can find my books on my website, Ericorgo.com. And, you know, they're all on Amazon. And nobody should follow you on Twitter, right? Let's not encourage it.

I'm on Twitter. I don't really, I don't really post that much on Twitter anymore. I had a great following a few years ago. And then when Twitter changed. I lost, I lost, you know. You did? Yeah, I had, I was, I was, and I was, had a good engagement. I had a good audience on Twitter and then, and then half the people left Twitter and then half the people stopped posting and it became kind of a hell, hell site, but I'm still there. Okay. And they can interact with me there. They can DM me or whatever. Well, I definitely want to check out your substack. I didn't know you were doing that. The night shirt was mostly the way I prepared for this conversation. But talk about a rabbit hole.

So fascinating. That stuff is evergreen, by the way. Doesn't matter that you haven't posted in a while. Well, actually, I've started on my substack. I've been reposting a few of the older articles that I really liked on the night shirt that, you know, no one sees anymore. I reposted those on the substack. I'd love to see you go back to those old ones with new commentary, things that you've learned

through your writing. Well, that's what I did. I sort of rewrote those pieces and added to them and so on. but yeah. All right, Dr. Eric Wargall, huge influence on this channel and my storytelling. Thank you so much. This has been great. This has been really fun, really fun. They'll come in for every book. Cool. All right. Thanks, Eric. Thanks. So here's what checks out about Eric's work. His PhD is from Emory University. He worked as an editor for psychology organizations for years. The Block Universe theory is real. It comes directly from

Einstein's special relativity. Herman Minkowski formalized at 1907. Now, that's the idea that the past present and future, all exist simultaneously. And most physicists accept this. It's not fringe science. Now let's talk about Darrell Bem's experiments. This is where things get interesting. In 2011, Ben published nine experiments showing precognition effects. Students chose which curtain hid erotic images before the computer even generated them. Memory tests where future studying improved past performance. The results were statistically significant. And here's what most people don't know. Bem's work has been replicated. A 2015 meta-analysis found 90 independent experiments.

Many showed this A-FX. The replication crisis you hear about is focusing on failed attempts by skeptics. But successful replications do exist. I just had to bring that up. Just to keep us honest. Now, the quantum physics part, that's real too. Wheeler's delayed choice experiments, I've talked about that a million times. The quantum eraser studies.

These show measurement choices can retroactively affect past events. quantum computing researchers now working on something called indefinite causal order. Computations where cause and effect run backwards. I know. I know. And Eric's personal stories are compelling. His 26-year precognitive dream, the cylindrical resonance patterns, artists like Michael Richards sculpting himself being pierced by airplanes before dying in the Twin Towers.

David Mandel dreaming about the towers collapsing exactly five years before 9-11. these cases are documented. And I keep coming back to Young's Scarab story. The patient dreams are receiving a scarab beetle. The next day, Young hears tapping on his window, a beetle. He catches it and hands it to her. Eric calls this a time loop, not the synchronicity.

The dream caused her to tell Young, which caused him to notice the beetle, which caused the dream in the first place. It's a closed causal loop. This connects to a lot of topics I've covered on the channel. The episode about synchronicities touched exactly on these patterns. The time travel episode from Project Pegasus to John Teeter, even the CIA's gateway process research.

They're all exploring the same fundamental question. Does consciousness transcend linear time? I don't know. Eric's work is thoughtful. He's not rejecting materialism or mainstream science. He's arguing for a paradigm shift within it. The future might not be fixed, but it might be influencing the present in ways we don't understand.

His books are great. Time loops and precognitive dream work and the long self. You can find them on Amazon. and check out his blog, which is super interesting, especially if you're into sci-fi. It's called The Nightshirt. We'll link all this stuff below. Eric brings serious academic credentials to these questions, and that matters in a field full of speculation. Now, thanks to scientists like Eric, we might eventually get some answers to what are probably the most important questions ever posed. I thought I had more, but I guess I guess not.

Until next time, be safe. We're having fun, right? Be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. Scenario 51, a secret code inside the Bible said I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing like I should. And it never ends. No, it never ends. I got stuck inside males home with M.K. Out of being only two of where the shadow people.

And I'm told The name was cold The city under Serious number stations Planet surface And with a dark watcher