This Paranormal Life - Synchronicity - The World’s Most Unbelievable Coincidences

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Have you ever thought about someone right before they called you out of the blue? There are cases where identical twins will both experience a specific pain hundreds of miles apart at the same time. Why do coincidences happen? Famed psychologist Carl Jung theorised that when a truly wild coincidence took place, something deeper was going on — something paranormal. On this episode Kit and Rory explore some of the world’s wildest and most entertaining coincidences to see whether synchronicities are really paranormal or just coincidences on steroids… Support us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/ThisParanormalLife⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get access to weekly bonus episodes! Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join our Secret Society Facebook Community⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Buy Official TPL Merch!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Edited by Philip Shacklady ⁠Research by Ewen Friers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's 1952 and the world's second most famous psychiatrist Carl Jung was listening to a troubled young woman in a psychiatry session. She was an extremely rational and rigid person and they were kind of getting nowhere because she wouldn't open up to her inner thoughts. Tell me, I don't know where he was from. Have you had any dreams lately? He asked her. She explained that normally she didn't dream, but last night was different. She said she had the most strange and vivid dream where she was holding a gold piece of jewelry, a necklace and at the center of the necklace was a golden scarab beetle.

In the dream she studied it. Just then, they heard a tap at the window. What is it? The woman asked. Young leaned over to the window and opened it, and a rose-shafer beetle flew in. Young grabbed it carefully and showed it to the woman. She was so rattled by this strange coincidence and symbolism, Young couldn't believe how much the woman changed and was able to progress due to seeing a

friggin' bug. He knew there was a connection that he needed to understand. Why do coincidences happen? Are some coincidences messages from the spirit world? And if my house isn't haunted, who keeps wetting my bed at night? Answers to these questions and more on this episode of This Pharamormal Life! Hello! I will be. I'm glad to see Roy's in a good mood. He's laughing already. Welcome back to this paranormal life. How are you doing today, Roy?

What the fuck are you talking about? That woman dreamed of an Egyptian amulet, a beetle flew in through a window, and a psychiatrist said, looks like you're cured. Yeah. Are we ready for conclusions today? I feel like that's kind of the whole story.

It's a psychiatrist, Roe, I don't know if you've ever plumbed the depths of the human mind, but shit gets pretty real. Wow. Okay. All right. The fun thing is usually we give a little teaser at the start of an episode so that we know what we're getting into today. I don't have a goddamn clue what we are getting into today based off of that one. Beatles? Dreams? Rory, let me ask you a question. What's the craziest coincidence that's ever happened to you? You know, I have to say for me, it's probably being born into a family where neither parents believe in you. Right. It's like statistically, how possible is that?

One of them is gonna cheer you on, you know? It's like one and a friggin' million. At least out of pity because the other one's being so hard on you, but both of them just double down. That's the clock. Oh shit. That's a coincidence, bro. What the hell?

Whoa. What is this mean? That's our prop clock that is new to the set that I didn't even know have batteries in it. That's weird. That is actually weird. Let's just move on. Let's keep an eye on that.

Next thing, this phone's going. going to start ringing in. It's not even plugged in. Geez. Well, Rory, you wanted to know what we're talking about today. It's that. It's about coincidences. The craziest coincidences that have ever happened in human history. Because I think most people, even if they're put on the spot and can't quite think of it in the moment, everyone has kind of had one or two coincidences in their life, which kind of

transcend probability into just like, why the fuck did that happen? Yeah. Okay. And listen, we've done it before. The world of dreams, the world of Deja Reve, future predictions. All of these tie in to the world also of the paranormal. You're going to understand as time goes on, Rory, because on today's episode, I have researched some of the craziest, most unbelievable and insane coincidences of all time that might be able to convince us and the audience at home that maybe coincidence doesn't exist at all. Instead, it's something else. something more paranormal. Because you'll see, Rory, I'm not the first quirked up white boy in history to ask this question. After the Scarabedal incident, Carl Jung was convinced. He had seen too many wild coincidences happen over his career,

and he proposed these were actually something else, something called synchronicity. Hmm, okay. Have you heard that phrase before? I mean, I've heard of the word, but maybe not used in this context. Yeah. It's pretty exciting to hear it kind of come out of the mouth of Carl Jung because I think the only time I've ever heard it is from like

a kind of LSD casualty surfer bro in America or something being like dude the synchronicities dude I like wanted to eat a mango and then I went to the store and you're not going to believe it dude they had a special offer on mangoes right it's like all right man yeah I think you need to I think you've been out in the sun too long that's all that is yeah but uh what's What's important about this is that Carl Jung was, I don't know if you know about him, but he was the kind of contemporary and protege, I believe, of Sigmund Freud. Ah. Which is why I mentioned Carl Jung is the second most famous psychiatrist of all time. I guess that Freud was the first most famous.

Very cool. So this guy knows brains and knows theory and shit. Okay. Okay. The legendary psychologist dropped a groundbreaking essay. just eight years later in 1960, laying out his theory of synchronicities, events that are connected by meaning or some other way that bridges the inner world to the outer world, a little like you said, Roy, like Deja Reve or premonitions. Okay, what I'm feeling is that Kit smoked a little bit of

weed on the weekend, all right, because we're dealing with that extra special corner of the paranormal world. People think that it is crypted, it is ghosts, or it is UFO, but there's a secret corner, which is mind stuff. Yeah. And today it sounds like we're dealing with mind stuff. Look, it might be connected to ESB. It might be connected to telekinesis. But this is the reason why someone calls right

as you are thinking about them. Or why twins who were separated at birth, one gets a pain in their leg right as the other one gets blown off with a firework. Right, right. The other twins legs are another other leg. As author William S. Burroughs said, in the magical universe, there are no coincidences.

There are no accidents. In the magical universe. That's a little bit of a loaded sentence. We live in a magical, let's move on. In the magical universe, you can fly on a boom stick. Like, you can do anything in the magical universe. As boom as Baru said, in Narnia, bad start, bad start. I better just explain by getting into some coincidences, Rory.

Okay, and these are happening in our universe or the magical world? In our universe. Just cloud- just want to clarify. Motherf-f-fri. All right. And why don't we start, Rory? in East London. All right.

With a man named Michael Dick. Sorry, a man named My Cool Dick. No, Michael Dick. In 2007, wasn't he roommates with Mike? Don't get us demonetized. We're already demonetized. Did you guys know that?

We're demonetized. Mike, hush. Mike Rod. No, this is a real person. This wasn't in the magical universe. It's Michael. Michael Dick. Michael Dick, that's a normal. Mike Dick. That's a cool name. Come on. It's 2007, and Michael's miraculous coincidence appeared in national papers and paranormal experts touted this as

proof of young's synchronicity theory. Middle-aged father of three, Michael had lost contact with his then adult daughter, Lisa, and after 10 years of total estrangement, Michael decided to search for him. He left London for the town of Sudbury, two hours away in Suffolk. He knew this is where Lisa's mother, his first wife, was living. And I thought this might be the best place to start his search. Now, after days of searching and inquiring around Sudbury, Michael's search was fruitless. And in a last ditch effort, he resorted to taking out an appeal in the local newspaper. The paper wanted a photo of Michael and his two younger daughters to run alongside the appeal

and organized a photo shoot outside of St. Peter's Church in Sudbury. The piece was printed the next day. And amazingly, Lisa actually happened upon the article. But it doesn't end there. When she studied the picture of her long-lost family, she got a bigger surprise. In the top left of the image, she was in the photo. By complete coincidence, she had been walking past the family, totally unaware that a photo was being staged to try and find her. Whoa, that's cool.

And you might think, okay, whatever she lived there. She didn't even live there. She didn't even live in Sudbury. She happened to be in town over the exact same days as Michael. Cue the photo, Philby, I think we have a photo of this. As you can see, hey, family man, Roy, don't be saying, look, Michael Dick looks like a stand-up guy, and he's not estranged from his whole family. And as you can see, his long-lost daughter happened to be in the back of the photo.

That's pretty cool. That is very cool. I mean, okay, I understand what we're doing here today. What is the paranormal angle in this? That coincidences are more than just coincidences? They're the universe working in a mysterious way. That shit is meant to be, Rory. universe itself is contorting space and time and influencing us. This is real. This means there's

no free will. That means that things are happening on a train track that we don't even know about that these people are being brought together. Ah, okay. Okay. Well, that's a bit of a sad conclusion to come to that there's no free will, but I'm here for it. Sorry, I took it to a weird place. But, yeah, look, hey, we're just dipping the toes, Rory. I think, you know, this is the point. I I show you one crazy coincidence. You're like, huh, that's pretty crazy. Yeah. By the end, you'll be on your hands and knees pleading for the coincidences to stop.

You'll be waking up in the morning and going, what does it mean to walk out the door anymore, knowing that I cannot, I'm coming back to the free will thing. Yeah. That everything is meant to be. Well, hey, this is great for me because the next time that I get arrested after masturbating in the car park of a taco bell, I can tell the police officer, there's no free will. You put on your best great impression and you go, God's plan. It was meant to be.

I had no choice in this. Yeah. It's not my fault. Tacos make me horny. Is that true? Yeah. You should order the cassidias. For the love of God, brother, order anything else.

It's not like, because there's so many form factors of Mexican food. Like, if one made me commit a crime, I would opt for the barrens. Yeah. You know? Burritos do it for me too, to me honest. Yeah. All right, let's move on. That story is slightly obscure.

Let's pivot to one of the most famous and insane synchronicities of all time. It's June 1914 in Sarajevo, modern day Bosnia, and a complex assassination plot on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, has just failed spectacularly. Holy, I'm getting whiplash from how quick we're jumping around today. And I think Rory knows so much. Rory knows so little history that the end of this might come as an actual shock to him. Yeah, it might. The group of over 20 would-be assassins have either been arrested or are now disappearing into the bustling city. One of them, Gavrillo Prince, cuts into a quiet side street and lays low outside a crowded delicatessen.

He's completely defeated after weeks of planning that have been completely wasted when just then. An open-top car takes a wrong turn and pulls up right. right in front of Prince. The driver then stalls the car and tries to shift into reverse gear. Princep looks up and who is it? The Archduke Ferdinand himself. Princep drops his sandwich, grabs his gun and shoots Franz Ferdinand at point-blank range. This of course, if you know your history, you'll know that this assassination started World

War I. It tore Europe apart for four years, claiming tens of millions of lives. And it all came down to one insane, f***ed up little coincidence. That's crazy. That is crazy. Yeah, what could have been? The world would be so different.

What could have been? The only confusing thing about that on criticism, though, is like kind of makes the whole God's plan thing a little confusing. You know, because I understand, you know, I kind of throwing around the term God's plan here, because some people say, you know, everything happens for a reason. But this happened for a really bad reason. For sure, yeah.

this one murder started a world war. Yeah, that's not good. If that's a plan, that's a really bad one. So if this was some kind of paranormal, unseen force or spirit guiding events and making things happen, making them take the wrong turn, making them stall the car,

it was a demon. It wasn't a nice ghost. It wasn't a guardian angel. It was the ghost of Hitler. You feel so bad if you were the chauffeur driving that car who's just like, I just can't find the biting point. I don't know.

I've never driven this. I think, let me shift it down into one. Oh, there, I got it. Hey, Franz, I turn around that is just like, no head on shoulders. Yeah. He's like, we're going to be late for the dinner. I'm going to have to break this to the Ferdinand.

Oh! Okay, we've been to obscure. We've been to famous. this next one is just clean mental rory. It's 1975 and a taxi driver, Willard Manders, was weaving around the bustling streets of Sandy's Parish in Bermuda. He picked up a customer, John Ebbin, who he'd driven before. And as he pulled onto the island's busy middle road,

he cast his mind back. When had this man been in his taxi? Just then, Willard crashed the car, colliding with a moped. He dove out of the car to help the rider, but it was too late. The young man on the moped had been killed. Oh my God.

It was then that... This is a grisly episode. Dude's getting their heads blown off. Moped drivers getting run down like his GTA. Final destination is real. That's wild. It seems like. It's never...

Why does it seem like these coincidences are never like... And then, you know, on the day that a butterfly landed on the grave of my grandfather, then a butterfly kind of landed on my arm. 10 years later. Can you believe that? Isn't that so sweet? This is like a bazooka fucking hit a bus. It fell off a cliff.

That butterfly was carrying a tropical disease. And it killed the grandson immediately also. It caused the black plague. Yeah, this guy was killed. And then, Roy, you think this is grudely. Wait to you. Then the driver, Willard's memory was jogged. The guy who got in his taxi,

the last time he had been in the time, taxi was almost a year ago exactly when he'd collided with another moped, killing that moped's driver too. What are you talking about? The same driver? He's killed two men. Take his license! For the love of God, take his license!

Why isn't he in jail? Bro. It's 1975. Oh man, this is just like when I killed the last guy. That's not what you want anyone to say. One star on Uber. One star, absolutely. Really? I'm gonna walk.

Any preferences? Yeah, no conversation, no murder. That's my preferences on Uber, please. Dude, we're not done. Wait for this. Do you want Uber Comfort or Uber Undertaker? Which one? Just order a fucking hurt.

Drive a f***t hearse at this point because you are collecting bodies on the way like it's crazy taxi. This is insane. This is worse than Mad Max. This is where I'm like, dude, you're not going to believe it. Then he turned around,

shot the passenger in the back of the head. No. Not only this, the driver Willard soon found out that the moped riders were brothers. Oh, for God's sake. And they were both 17, both riding the same moped killed on the same road! This is just so sad. It's so sad. It is making me depressed today.

I'm in sync with this episode. It is genuinely, like, it is genuinely interesting, because there will be nice. synchronicities happening out there in the world, but why is it that these craziest ones? I don't know. It's like, it is like Final Destination, the movies, if you haven't seen the movies,

in which the specter of death metaphorically follows these people around the world. So even if you evade death in one moment and you avoid the piano following on your head, then your friends the next day will be like, let's go to an amusement park. Right. And then you get on the roller coaster.

Suddenly, some screws are falling out. the ghosts and demons are pulling the screws out of the roller coaster to make sure that you die. It's like you have an appointment with death and you know, you can't miss it. Yeah. I also think humans are just wired to recognize bad things more than good things. So obviously like people getting killed, people like, you know, people getting hurt, people getting injured. All of that is more impactful to a human's life than like remembering the day they wanted an ice cream and then they walked outside and there was an ice cream truck. Yeah.

You know, that just doesn't register as a thing. That's just like a little moment. Whereas, I mean, obviously these are a lot bigger. I mean, there are, yeah, there. Yeah, that's true. To some extent, these are newsworthy. I mean, like, there are people who have, um, there are some stories of people who've like won the lottery twice. Which is, which is statistics, kind of maybe statistically even more insane than all of these. Yeah. So far at least. But, you know, that could also be fraud. True. That could be. If that could be. If that could be. If, if they happened in Italy, that was the mafia that did that probably. Now, this story about the taxi driver Willard was so insane. Whenever I read that, I was like, that isn't true. That just didn't happen. That's like a Ripley's believe it or not fact from a book. That can't have happened. But actually, digging a bit deeper, I think, Phil, you can throw up an image here.

Yeah, I did dig a little deeper. And there's even like people on like skeptic Reddit threads and stuff being like, this can't be. If this is real, then synchronous, then he must be real. And people are trying to figure it out. But even the skeptics were like, yeah, I did a bit of digging. And there is like, I think like three or four newspaper excerpts from the time reporting. And they're like, yeah, man, they give names, they give dates, they give times, locations.

These all seem to be real people. So pretty nuts stuff. Why wasn't he arrested and stripped of his license immediately? Like, that's crazy. That's what I want to know. It's a genuine question. I mean, I feel like, well, I'm not going to victim blame here. I'm also not going to double triple victim blame.

But like in a, it's also down to like how crazy was the moped driver writing. Like if they were weaving like Morpheus in the matrix or something through like a motorway, then I think the law would say, well, they were reckless driving. So if they hit into someone that's kind of on them. Yeah. Fool me once, you know, shame on me. But yeah, if you hit someone and kill someone twice. Stop driving.

I would agree. I would agree with that. But look, if we're trying to understand why these synchronities take place, I guess we should evaluate just like how people generally think about them in life. While it might seem out of pocket or a little bit out there or sure, Rory accused me rude of smoking weed within the first 30 seconds of the podcast starting just because I'm talking about synchronicities. I stand by that comment.

Which is so rude given that you know I can't handle wheat. Yeah, that's true. But it's not just that. You also had 19 muffins for breakfast this morning. So I assumed, I don't know what's going on with you, but he seemed real hungry. Because they say, don't eat, you know, when they say eat the weed brownie, they're like the number one rule is don't eat more. Yeah. Don't go like, oh, it hasn't kicked in yet.

I'm going to eat more. But then the munchies kick in. And all I want is brownies. All I have is brownies. And whenever you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So, yeah. Where were we again? I can't handle wheat.

So you know I'm completely sober. I would spiral into anxiety if I had it. But actually, Rory, I think that we can make the case that if anything, like this is one of those weird things where it's like whenever they poll the public about paranormal beliefs, even though the paranormal is regularly seen as out there, unscientific, disproven. Yeah. Fake. A waste of your time. Thanks for that one, mum. Bad idea for a podcast. Bad idea for a podcast. Sure. Deeply unpopular. We could go on. Even though people say that about the paranormal, most people believe in the paranormal. Most people believe in the paranormal. True. But in general, most people either believe in the UFOs, because in case I'm wrong. But I think when you look at polls of the general public, most people believe in the paranormal now. They might not all believe in the same thing. True. But in general, most people either believe in UFOs, go. telekinesis, but also getting into more kind of, as you say, mind ones, like precognition. Right, right.

Deja Reve. There's a lot out there. Or in the case of synchronicity, these meaningful coincidences that some things that happen happen for a reason. Yeah. Yeah. So in culture, we kind of accept this. You know, even if you miss out on an opportunity, people will just casual as anything,

just say, Roy, hey man, what's for you, won't go by you. that wasn't meant for you. And I'll say, what the fuck do you mean by that? It wasn't meant for me. Because I don't understand that you're trying to say something nice. It sounds like you're saying that I don't deserve it. Right. Because you got a chip on your shoulder.

Yeah, of course. I'm upset. We would take that poorly. But yeah, and it does hurt to hear when, you know, it's like you miss out on your dream job. Sure. Or you're, you know, the most beautiful person you've ever dated dumps you. Yeah.

Or something like that, you know, you know, then it's, like you're not going to take that well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. But you're saying it was all part of a plan. I had no part of it. Right. So like me being a bad partner, being like unreliable,

unloving, unemotional, cold, unwelcoming, evil. When I set those booby traps in the house, that was all part of like a plan that I had nothing to do with. So it's like, fine. Yeah, yeah. I know like, yeah,

Rory will not get the job interview and his mom will be like, Rory, don't blame yourself. That job just wasn't for you. Rory's like, you weren't in the room, mother. You weren't in the interview because I had some tacos. And now if you knew what happened to me when I ate tacos, I get horny. And when I get horny, so it kind of starts you on a path.

So not just in like day-to-day chat, do people kind of talk about these meaningful coincidences, but that's not even getting into kind of the religious world where exactly that. there's multiple kind of almost in every major world religion there's a sense of there being a plan or some kind of destiny that we is greater than us we can't understand and can't escape so while scientists don't necessarily recognize that people believe it and talk about it all the time yeah i don't like it i hate that i don't i don't agree with any of this right you want to be you want to

feel like you're in control yeah exactly look what i can do right now don't jack off don't what i can just leave i don't even have to do this podcast if i want that's me executing free will but here's the thing i'm gonna go to macdonalds i know you're gonna come back and guess what this grown man is gonna get a happy meal for kids oh well come down not i can do whatever i want because you're you're taking it too far you're taking it too far can i borrow some money i actually don't have any money i can't do anything i don't have my wallet on man obviously yeah and i've gonna come back he's gonna come back Because I want to.

Because I want to. I did call it though before you came back. Just saying I could have left if I want to. But don't you sometimes think like, I don't want to, I don't want to set you down a path that's going to make you spiral and like, you know, lose it. But like, don't you sometimes think as a guy who's like you've, you've like made your life being in like, entertainment and like you have you you're like a YouTuber in some ways I don't like that like either playing video games you know how you're like a child for a living like you never grew up and you like a joke job but you do your other if anyone doesn't know outside of this

paranormal life and researching the part normal Rory plays video games on YouTube don't like that I'm a but it's a real thing it's not like I'm not making it sound like he does as a hobby it's like personality. I'm a content creator. I do work in the video games industry as what kids trying to say. Yeah, well, you play the games. Just to be clear, you were the one holding the

kill you with his telephone. I'll do it. Is that predestined? Murder right now on the show? I'm just saying, it's like, but isn't it just like, didn't like 1980s and 1990s Japan just like one shot, like me and you? They just, like we saw, we saw

of Super Mario in the 90s and we were like, that's my life now. Right, we just been on that track since the very beginning. Yeah, there was no choice. There was no, you know. Yeah, I don't really know what the argument here is, but. I'm trying to say, you don't have free will. Oh, because you were saying you hate the idea of not being in control. Yeah.

Yes. So while in the kind of folk, tradition, religion world, people have kind of long believed in things like synchronities, because I guess they didn't have to really prove them or think too hard about them. You guess you could just say like, you know, it's just a faith thing. Like that just something feels right. And so you believe it.

Carl Jung, we mentioned at the start of it, who is our psychotherapist friend and psychiatrist, he was almost like the first cat to take it serious. You know, much in the same way as, you know, in one of my favorite cases that I won't shut the fuck up about, the aerial school UFO. One of the reasons that was so interesting was because you had Professor John Mack, who was the Harvard Professor of Psychology, who went to Africa, interviewed the kids and was like, I think something might be going on here. And then he started putting

an Iron Man, started putting different stories together. And then not basing the rest of his career on paranormal experiences, but specifically abduction experiences. And even more specifically, abduction experiences with kids. But he, as a psychologist, was putting this together, that there might be some connection between the physical experience someone seems to be having and what's going on in their mind and there being some connection. So he kind of saw paranormal as either being a psychological phenomenon or connected to it.

Yeah. Young was very similar. He was, although he's one of the most celebrated, brilliant psychiatrists and thinkers of all time, he was surprisingly big into the paranormal. And it wasn't just stuff like synchronicities. It was kind of everything, to be honest. He both experienced and documented extensively his own precognitive dreams, which I guess is Deja Revei, right? Yeah.

Clarevoyance and even poltergeist activity. He viewed them as significant meaningful occurrences rather than just hallucinations. In fact, his interest in the paranormal probably set him off on a course to become the kind of professional he ended up being because it all even started in childhood. He actually wrote his doctoral thesis in academia on his cousin's mediumistic trances where he was communicating with the dead. Okay, so this is, this guy's way further down the rabbit hole than I thought at the start. Yeah, I know. It wasn't like a doctor that thought about like he discovered this thing. He's in the magic universe.

Like 100% both feed in Magic Universe. Yeah. But like John Mack, like he's not losing his cred. You know? It would be like, it would be, well, I mean, he hasn't. I mean, okay, there are, there's probably some people. There's kind of like, there's people who disagree with this school of, you know, young Ian thought. Yeah.

And they're like, you know, I don't believe his work on archetypes is this that or the third. But he, it wasn't like, he didn't go Tom DeLong mode where he quit what he was doing. doing to become a nut job. He was a nut job from the beginning. Which I admire. I really do. This is like LeBron getting really into Magic the Gathering, spending arguably way too much time playing Magic the Gathering. But you can never quite call him a nerd because he never stops dunking. Right. He's still really good at basketball. He's still operating at the absolute highest level of his profession. I hate to say it, but that is a fantastic analogy. It really is good. Right. That's why you're the pro.

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from $30 for two people, up to $60 for five. So no matter what day of the week, week, Go's got you covered. Find out more at gotransit.com slash tickets. So Young thought that this was all connected somehow, whether it was ESP, telekinesis, clairvoyance, precognitive dreams, that there's some kind of whatever you want to call it, but paranormal layer other world in which things are connecting, like an internet of the paranormal out there in the ether of things being connected and happening, which we can't see. And at least can't exactly. be scientifically measured. And that is I suppose where the skeptics come in. And they would say we are,

I think you mentioned earlier, kind of biologically predisposed to notice patterns and start connecting things. I think there is a scientific term for that, isn't there? Much in the same way that we would, like, could look at a set of inanimate objects and make a face out of it with our minds that we might see to events and link them as being connected. So that's what the skeptics think. But maybe even for the listeners at home and for Rory, you can see where you come down on the skeptic to nut job continuum. You can see where you personally come down as I tell you some more insane synchronicities. Okay, okay. Now, Roy, me and you are sitting here making a podcast essentially in the entertainment biz.

And as we know from making this podcast, the world of entertainment and movie making specifically can be extremely superstitious. And huge significance has been placed on synchronicities over the years. For example, in 1939, when Frank Morgan was cast in the Wizard of Oz, a rack of overcoats were thrifted by the costume department in downtown Hollywood. Now Morgan and the team inspected the selection of secondhand clothes, looking for the exact right coat they would need for Morgan's character. Now once he had chosen his preferred coat, he just happened to turn out the pockets and was astonished at what he found.

Sown into the lining was a label with the name L. Frank Baum. the author who wrote The Wizard of Oz 40 years ago in Chicago. What? The publicist for the film tracked down both the Chicago Taylor and Baum's widow, who confirmed it was his old coat. Wow, that's crazy. Isn't that absolutely twisted? That's really, really cool. In a very similar and equally mind-blowing case, when Anthony Hopkins was cast in The Girl from Petrovka in 1972, he wanted to track down a copy of copy of the original novel to do a deep dive on the source material. He scarred the bookshops of London, but long out of print, the book was impossible to

get his hands on. Defeated, he headed for the underground and made his way home. As he sat in the tube, disappointed by his day's search, he spotted a book lying face down on an adjacent seat. You can see where this was going. It was miraculously, of course, a copy of The Girl from Petrovka. But the story doesn't end there. Two years later when the film was in production, Hopkins was chatting to George Fyfer, the original novelist.

The two connected over how difficult it was to track down a copy. Hopkins said, surely you have a copy of your own book. But he said, no. The last copy he had was loaned to his friend and they lost it in London somewhere. Wow. Hopkins pulled out the book said, was it this one? Fyfer opened up the book and instantly recognized his own annotations in the border of the book. That's very cool. Very cool.

What the hell? Damn. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. I mean, yeah, we have two options today. The only problem is, okay, it's either a coincidence, and coincidences happen, or it's not a coincidence, but then we still need an explanation or a reason for it happening. Otherwise, it still is just a coincidence. Because the supernatural explanation still needs some kind of force or reason for those events to take place. Well, sure, but you're looking for the, you're looking for the scientific, how does it happen? What's the mechanism of how it happened? I'm looking for the why. If it's supernatural why. The why is the, the why is always on some beautiful shit of like to bring these people together. No, I don't need, I don't want the beautiful shit today. I don't want it. Beautiful shit has no place on this podcast. Well, yeah, but in Anthony Hopkins case, it was, he needed a copy of the book and there it was.

us. Okay. There we go. That's kind of crazy. That's like almost like manifesting. Manifesting is arguably the modern like Gen Z TikTok equivalent of everything we're talking about. Pretty much. Yeah. Like, you know, but it's not something we talk about a lot, but a lot of these kind of old school spiritual paranormal beliefs are having real resurgence on places like TikTok where people, I mean like you've seen it before. They'll even be like, you know, like spiritual numbers and like manifesting numbers. and stuff. And it'll be like people making like TikToks where it's just like lines and lines of numbers. It's almost like lottery numbers being like these are these are these are the the lucky numbers for like manifesting wealth. You know? Yeah. Yeah, which listen, I'm just disappointed in

because if I knew that manifesting was a real thing you could do, I wouldn't have spent so much money on Jeannie lamps over the years. Yeah. So much money on Jeannie lamps. Just buying anything that looks weird on eBay and just rubbing the shit out of it. And they don't pause. They don't love you going into an antique shop and just start rubbing stuff. No. No, they don't. They call me the rubber. They call me the rubber now because I just go in and I'm rubbing everything. Because I don't, you know, it could be a lump, but honestly, these days it could be anything. It could be like a iPhone 6 or something. Yeah. I don't know. So I just start rubbing it, rubbing it. If it's worth money, sometimes I'll just take it to also. We should, we need, I'm just really, I know you just said you're over, genie lamps.

We need one for the studio, I feel like. I think they're going to be pretty hard to find. Yeah, I think they've been, it's like Bitcoin, they've been bought up a long time ago. We're bullish on genie lamps. There's a genie housing crisis happening in 2026. Genies probably don't know where to go anymore. They're going into Stanley Cups. They're going into matcha lattes.

Right, there's no oil lamps. There's no, no lamps anymore. That's a good point. Yeah. I'm like, that's good for the housing crisis, though, is good for the consumer, you know, who wants to find a genie, though, because now the genies are in, like, flat shares. There's like six genies to one lump. So that's like, what's that, 18 wishes? There's three, there's three genies in the case for my AirPods.

Like, they're just, they're finding anywhere they can hang out. You have summoned me! No, just want to listen to some tunes. Listen to a podcast. Oh, can I have an ear? That. It's annoying. Only having one ear.

Oh. What do you wish for, master? I wish you'd shut the fuck up for a second. Seems like a waste of a wish, no? No, that's what I want. Okay. Right with wish inflation, Matt. You could just use wishes for anything.

Yeah. It's like, oh, you know what I'd love. Just that ice cold look is it? I'm hanging. I'm hanging, bro. Just that ice cold look is it. Really? Alexander the Great wish to be the greatest to rule.

out of old time. Luke is it, mate. Luke is it. Get on it. You know, you could actually wish for a home for your genie. I'm using him like Siri. Hey, Jeannie, what's the weather going to be like today? It's looking a little cloudy and maybe some rain in the evening. No wishes today? Nothing. If you do three, I get to disappear. I don't want three. I don't want to wish today. Hey, Jeannie, can you tell me the weather? Do you wish? Wish to know the weather? Nope. No, no.

Just ask Siri then. Don't ask Jeannie. Don't say, hey, Jeannie. Look, I do have some more insane synchronicities to get through. But to your question, Roy, that is the million dollar question about what is the mechanism of this happening? I mean, you said the why, but it's like, why does Bigfoot exist? That's like, God didn't sign off on that shit, you know? Well, he's a cryptid.

Yeah, but what we want to know there is the high. How, like, how is it? Like, what? Like, why is... How is he there? How does he exist? How has he evaded capture? How has he done this, done that?

We don't need to know why, because that's getting into, like, into his role in the universe. But here, it is... I mean, this is probably why it is tough to investigate things like ESP, things like telekinesis, things like precognition,

is because we kind of end up with all of these hand-waving and going, the other realm. It's all possible in the other realm. And I think it's become very popular in recent years. We saw a lot of this at Contact in the Desert. It's become very popular to get into pseudoscientific explanations for these things. And I see why this is attractive.

Because it would be a nice way for me to start rounding out the episode to go, look, bro, let's get up the diagrams. It's crystals. Because if you look at the crystals inside the magnetic core of the earth, they create an And electromagnetic, I'm making this up, but this is literally what people think. It's crystals. They'll be like, oh, there's like electromagnetic fields and that's interact. And they try to explain it with like science that's not really science. Right.

Yeah. You know you're at a bad point in the podcast when one of the possible explanations is one word crystals. Yeah. That's dangerous. Yeah, it's a dangerous point to be in. Like there was, I think we've talked about it before. There was a famous documentary that blew my mind when I was like 13 and didn't know any better. It's called What the Bleep Do We Know? I think that's it. It was, that was big,

bro, pre-internet. It was like a documentary. They sold it on DVD. And it was, uh, it's pretty famous because they interviewed loads of like legit quantum physicists and like scientists and stuff. And we're like, can you like describe like quantum physics? And then they just edited all their words really tightly to make it sound like they're describing like ghosts and shit. And then they're like, bro, this explains ghosts. It explains, yeah, like ESP. And then afterwards, all the scientists were like furious. They're like, we didn't agree to any of this.

That's not what I said. They're going to be like, I really don't think this is real. It's nonsense. Play the documentary. It's real. It's not nonsense. I really do believe in all of this. It's real.

Then they get a guy to stand in looks nothing like the scientist to be like, ghosts are real. That's not even me. But yeah, I think there would be, I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm not trying to BS anyone with like a pseudo scientific explanation for why this would be. I think some people would want to get into like, yeah, like honestly, like the quantum realm. You know, Einstein described what he called spooky action at a distance. If you remember. There's too much happening.

There's too much happening today. But that was when, that was when, you know, there are, there are. interesting things that happen at the quantum level that can explain things interacting with each other that are not seemingly connected in any way. Okay. That really does happen at the quantum level. But I don't really want to sit here and suggest that's why a taxi driver killed two guys one year apart. We need it's so fun to throw around the quantum world and crystals and all this shit. What the fuck are we actually talking about today? A guy who took a picture of his missing daughter in a photo trying to find his missing daughter. Yeah.

Anthony Hopkins found a book on the tube. I just, we need to, we need to hone in on reality again. Spending too much time in the magical universe. I'm sorry, Mr. So, so you've never, you've never had anything happen to you that's, that's, that's, you've been like, that's too crazy. That just doesn't make sense. I know, that something, something took place that touched you in some way, Mr. fucking robot? I don't think so. Are a Mr.

A video game? Mr. Bleep bloop? The things that touched me in peculiar ways is between me and my therapist, all right? This is a podcast speaking about the paranormal. The only person who likes to touch me in mysterious ways is my chick, right?

I'm not going to let the power in a fellas. Is it weird to let the paranormal touch you in mysterious ways? Okay, so I've got the challenge. I've got the challenge of picking the last synchronicities and coincidences to show to Rory, because he's playing real hardball, and he's seeing no apparent interest in any of these at all. So I need to really pick carefully here.

What will make him go, that is too crazy to be true? And then after that, I want you to tell me what we're concluding on today. Bro, our synchronicity is real. Is there a, is there a, is there a, is there a, there's not a time lord. No.

Is there something beyond our scientific understanding? That's what the paranormal is, by the way. Is anything occurring outside of our scientific understanding of the world as we see it today? Rory's, he wants to conclude. He wants to conclude already. Okay, if you don't believe it, can you at least just try and enjoy yourself and try? I'm ready. I'm ready for this.

I'm rapidly, expeditiously losing Rory on believing in synchronity. So we're going to have to do some rapid fire. Okay, this one isn't fun. But he killed another guy. The taxi man, he ran over a woman. Okay, this is the short story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi. He was on a business trip to Hiroshima on the fateful date of 6th of August 1945. Yamaguchi actually witnessed with his own eyes the B-29 bomber Inola Gay dropped the little boy bomb.

The world's first atomic bomb to be used in war. Despite sustaining major injuries, Yamaguchi crawled from the rubble and after a day in hospital returned to his home city in Nagasaki. All right. Yamaguchi was describing the blast at Hiroshima to a colleague with a second atomic bomb detonated over his home city. Miraculously, I can laugh because he did crawl from the rubble a second time and he lived until 2010. Wow. I'm only laughing because that is just such a like Simpsons scene. It's unbelievable.

Yeah. It's like, you're not going to believe what happened to me at the weekend. And then, that's crazy. Unbelievable. On the theme of war, or did you know that the first and last British soldiers to die in World War I are buried opposite each other by pure chance? There are over 2,500 World War I cemeteries. And British deaths number 8,000, almost a million, 886,000 people.

And the first and last guys, there's a photo of it. I don't think I have it right now, but there's a photo of it. The two graves sitting completely opposite each other. Wow, that's cool. And actually sticking with wartime on a slightly more humorous note, just weeks before the Allied landings on D-Day, the British newspaper of the Daily Telegraph printed a crossword puzzle that completely rattled the forces preparing for the enormous military campaign.

The crossword contained no less than eight code words that were being used by the Allies on D-Day. The iconic code words of Utah, Omaha, gold, Juneau and Sword were all featured, which were all secret names for the specific beaches being targeted. And the words Overlord, Neptune, and Mulberry were also present, which were code names for the overarching campaign and portable pontoons laid down during D-Day. Wow. that's pretty crazy. The coincidence was so absurd.

Britain actually fully assumed it was a German espionage and MI5 launched an investigation into it. I'm like probably like waterboarded the guys who write the crosswords at the Daily Telegraph and there was nothing more to it. Look guys, I can feel Rory's eyes

into the side of my head. I can feel I'm losing him. So I'm going to leave him with one more in sane synchronicity, okay? I'm going to leave him with one that the God's plan crew, the guys who think that God has this all planned out and that there is some kind of secret code to why things happen in the way that they do, the coincidences that we see in life, I feel like this is the final boss. Rory, the next time you're lucky enough

to see a total solar eclipse, think about what the phenomenon actually is. The sun, the moon and the earth all combined to create the perfect conditions for an eclipse thanks to some startling astronomy. The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun. So how can it completely obscure it during an eclipse? Well, because the moon is also 400 times closer to the earth than the sun. So they perfectly obscure each other when they overlap during the solar eclipse. Even astronomers through history have been confused by this, chalking it up to cosmic chance. Orrory is a everything magic. So those are our two options today to come down on?

No, it's our synchronicity's real. Do you believe the question is, do some events in the world that take place defy sheer chance and coincidence? And they step out further into, you know, these have to be physically connected in some way that is beyond science, beyond the understanding we have. I think today the problem is we're dealing with a bit of a chicken and egg thing, is the, are we recognizing the anomaly because it's magic or are we thinking that it is magic just because of the chance of it happening in the first place? It's like they say, if you put an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters, they will eventually write the works of Shakespeare. Does that mean that there are, there's a magic monkey out there that's actually smart? No, it means that in a world of, billions of people living hundreds of years that eventually you will find coincidences in the normal world. And when one of those happens, then we acknowledge it and recognize it.

There were a lot of people who, you know, they'll always say like, oh, did you hear about this person who was supposed to be working on the morning of 9-11? But they got a phone call, so they were late, and then they missed the planes hitting the towers. A lot of people didn't. A lot of people just did go to work. And it's like, okay, so there is like a coincidence here and that could be part of a magical plan. Or it could be that, you know, in this infinite world of just numbers of possibilities and events, occasionally we will have moments that are unusual or defy logic.

Phil cut that from the podcast. Because remember whenever I did the thing, the shit about LeBron and Rory was like, that was weirdly a good analogy. Unfortunately, the monkey analogy was pretty awesome because, yeah, because, yeah. Listen, the other one that fits this is The Simpsons. You know, it's a big thing in the world that people say, oh, did you know that the Simpsons have predicted the future so many times? The other way of looking at that is it's a TV show that has hundreds of episodes that cover pop culture and they have just coincidentally gotten it right a lot of times

out of sheer chance and the sheer amount of numbers of episodes. We're just looking at that on an infinite scale. Well, see, you're wrong about that one because Matt Grinning's in the Epstein files. So he, I think he is in the Illuminati. So I think they probably did. Is the question, are coincidences magic? I break it down into two different words. Coincidence is not a helpful word to use, which is why Carl Jung invented a new word, synchronicity.

He was a guy who spent his life studying psychology, studying the paranormal. And he didn't use the word coincidence because the word coincidence already has a place. It's a coincidence if, you know, you and Phil turn up to work one day and you've packed the same lunch. You went to different shops and picked the same sandwich. Oh, that's funny. We both got BLTs. That is a coincidence. But when something, I mean, in Jung's case, he was actually very interested in the psychology of it,

of not just when something was, it wasn't just it being so improbable, but when it was being. It was like extra meaning. Significant somehow. that it was, because then it's getting from the kind of inner world or a spirit world through to the real world. Okay. That was the thread. Genuinely does help me understand it a little bit more. It's not like two people trying to name a number between one and a thousand and saying it at the same time.

Right. That's just a very unlikely coincidence. But yeah, if it's more of like an emotional, psychological or personal coincidence, that feels like it could be something else. Yeah. And I appreciate I've muddied the waters by some of the, some of the sync critiquities I'm reading are just entertaining and not really meaningful. It's like, because it's like, do I think, do I think that it's meaningful? That's, periama Gucci was nuked twice in one day?

No, no, I don't think that's particularly meaningful. Crazy. But for some of them, you know, you do, you do wonder. There are the interpersonal ones that are interesting. The one that started off the show in some cases, the kind of precognitive. of dream of the beetle, that it sets off some kind of psychological thing. You dream something that happens. Or indeed, you know, if you want to get kind of grim, yeah, that someone like Archduke Franz Ferdinand, that maybe he did have a fate that he just couldn't escape. Right, right, right.

But listen, at the end of every episode of this paranormal life, we do have to decide whether or given paranormal investigation is real or not, whether we think it's paranormal or not. I'll be super specific so as not to throw Rory. We're not talking about Clinton. Today, we're talking about Jung's synchronicities. Yes. Are these supernatural, well, are these synchronicities supernatural or are they just fucking coincidences on steroids? Right.

I appreciate you clarifying the concept for me. And I'm always here for exploring different corners of the paranormal world that are beyond the mainstream. This is a tricky one today because I'm still kind of looking for the why in how beyond that kind of people can will the universe into a certain way or there's some sort of shadow hand controlling the events based off of things and i don't quite i'm not quite there yet so i think it's going to be a no from me today well i think that's it roi i think that's it's the problem there's lots of there's lots of paranormal investigations and some of it is this kind of stuff where

it's just impossible to prove. And that's something the skeptics would often say. I mean, honestly, a lot of paranormal stuff falls into that. But at least something like ESP can be proven technically. And that's why they locked Uri Geller in a room and asked them to draw things was because you could kind of, in theory, prove scientifically. Yeah. there's something would be impossible to know, and yet the guy knew it.

But when we're talking about events that harbor meaning for us, you know, it's not like it can be a statistically significant level of meaning. It's like, dude, the butterfly, fuck, the butterfly that represented the dead grandmother landed on the grave. That is insane. You can't scientifically investigate that. And that's okay. Some paranormal things are unresearched.

unprovable, and that is the nature of the beast. But if we were going to sit here and say whether they're real or not, that makes it tougher. And I guess that's it. I guess we just don't have anything to push it beyond coincidence. I think it's no coincidence, pun intended, that Young was a psychologist and that John Mack was a psychologist, because those guys are studying psychology. And psychology is not measurable by science. And famously boring, too. So it's like, it's cool to sprinkle in some magic in there. Well, yeah, I guess. They're investigating ghosts and shit.

But it is true. You can kind of just add stuff to psychology. And it's like, yeah, you don't need to prove that, actually. We can just say it's a psychological phenomenon. So those guys kind of got the excuse to research the paranormal. We've kind of got a bit of a paradox at the end of today's episode as well, because if it is real, then apparently we had no choice and we're destined to always say it wasn't real at the end of the podcast. There was never a choice in it if it is real, even though the choice was saying

that it doesn't exist unless it doesn't exist and I did have the choice to decide yes or no. And I decided no. All right. We got to get a couple more edibles in the studio here. Sorry, I'm not high. I'm not actually on edibles. But listen, guys. I don't know what we even do now. because usually we would like tell people about the Patreon and get them to join but we can't change anything if they haven't joined they'll never join

and sorry I'm just I'm having a hard time here yeah but no but but even within free will Patreon.com by the way forward slash this paranormal life to get lots of bonus episode extra content from there's no point ourselves but no but even within

within the world of free will not existing, you know, the point is, if you don't believe in free will, we have no choice but to tell people about it because we are gonna. Oh my God. But then that's what they're right. They have to find out about it,

but then once they know about it, they have no choice but to subscribe. So that's, I think, the message. Resist if you can, listen, resist if you can't. You don't even need me to tell you what's on there because you can't resist. Because just by us mentioning it,

now you're curious, aren't you? It's like the pink elephant. Don't picture the pink elephant. Uh-oh. There he is. Glistening, pink, large in your mind. Are you talking like Morpheus? Because I'm feeling cocky now.

In the lack of free will that dictates our listeners. So listeners, try if you might. But you will find yourself. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But probably this weekend when you have a free minute. You know, work's done for the week. You're going to be bored for a second.

You've watched your last reel on Instagram. You're getting bored. before bed and you're like, you know what? Let's pull up Safari. www. www. patreon.com forward slash this paranormal life. I'm going to just see what the boys have on offer and then boom, you're hit with just how much is on there.

Hundreds and hundreds of bonus episodes. We're talking full-length bonus investigations. Weekly after parties, or Rory and I go behind the scenes of this paranormal life, talk about what we're up to. Sometimes we shoot it in a different set. We kind of kick back, relax, much like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. And not just that. raffles, giveaways. There's a ton of stuff. And it is the best way to support this paranormal life.

We've been doing it for, what, nine years now? Yeah. And so this is how we've kept this paranormal life going, this whole time, how we have this beautiful, gorgeous world-class set, these pristine, crisp-press suits that Roy and I are sitting in. It's all thanks to our wonderful patrons of patreon.com. Yeah, Kit said that you're going to go and check it out this weekend. I would say now, the sooner the better, because the set was expensive. The new set was very expensive building this. And I know what you're thinking. Isn't this financially irresponsible to spend $2,300 on a set for an audio show?

And to them, I say we had no choice, apparently. Yeah. I don't control the things I do anymore. Yeah. All right? Do you understand what we've just established on this podcast today? We should take heroin. We should.

Right now. Yeah. I just like, because I know I'm taking it to a different place, but I also think nothing matters. Because I think if free will doesn't exist, then nothing matters. I'm going to bring a gun to an airport. Yeah. Just because nothing matters anymore.

You can't arrest me because I didn't do it. They have no choice but to her. Oh, fuck. God, how does this work? Yeah, we got a free will next week. We're going to investigate free will. The judge is like, I have no choice but to give you the death penalty. What?

But I had no choice to do it. Oh, this is, I'm confused, Your Honor. Thank you for tuning in. This has been This Paranormal Life. We are going to be hanging out on Friday on the after party over at patreon.com. For slash This Paranormal Life. Link is in the discreppy of this episode.

If you're on YouTube, if you're on Spotify, swipe up wherever you are. You can find those links. Or go to our socials and grab those links. And then we'll be back on Tuesday with a brand new paranormal tale. Bye-bye. Ciao.

Well done, Phil. Well done, everyone. Woo! That's lunch. That's lunch. That's lunch. lunch kids gotta fly home