The Basement: Eric Wargo | The Block Universe, UFO Time Machines, and Precognitive Dreams

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 saying this for years. Every time I get married, I get the feeling it's a bad idea. Then boom. 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. Black 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, precognitive dreams, the science of synchronicity, and how 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. 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 wanting one too. Really? Yeah. Monitor lizards are the coolest. When I was a kid, monitor lizards were just the coolest animals on earth. You know, Komodo dragons are the 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. What's. In 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, in 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. 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. He's very chill, you know. We handle him and pet him and. So you walk around the house? No. Okay. 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 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 an animal person, which everyone in my family, we're 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 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 go in there. Instead of recreating you at the door? Yeah, no, he's really cool. Yeah, so I'm glad you asked about that, yeah. How long does Sunflower live? He's going. Well, knock on wood, he is. He could live as long as 20 years. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, and we're hoping that he will, because 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 Maxie, he definitely did. Well, birds are incredibly intelligent. I mean, 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, right. So, you know, you have to will your pet to somebody. Right. You don't want to be on the receiving end of that. Right, right. Totally. Now, while I highly recommend monitor lizards, they're very, very, very, very cool. You know, I feel bad for her roommate in college, wherever she goes. Well, I kind of suspect. Yeah, dad will. Dad will be, you know. But that's, you know, we'll cross that bridge if they come to it. We've still got eight years or so until that happens. Right. Speaking of college, so your PhD is in cultural anthropology. Yes. And then you moved into more psychology. So can you tell us about your background, your parents? Yeah, okay, so I grew up. My parents were psychologists growing up, and then when I studied anthropology, I really sort of studied psychological anthropology, so I got, like, a real basis in psychology, and 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, you know, I was not suited to academia, so I did what everyone who has a degree and can't be an academic does, which is become an editor and writer. And Washington, D.C. is where those people congregate. Yeah. Because it's full of non-profits 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 non-profit world. What is it like to grow up with two psychologists as parents? That sounds difficult. Yeah, I don't recommend it. Okay. I mean. There has 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, I'm wrong. Yeah, or not, or not. Yeah, no, my. Well, 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. 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. Psychologists, 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. parapsychology is, you know, they have a chapter on pseudoscience at the end of their Psych 101 textbooks, and they'll put parapsychology, and they'll put parapsychology in that. I remember it. I remember that from my own studies, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, and it's real. I mean, that, we can talk about this, but 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 Vallée, and he's talking about psychic phenomena, and like, they're real, and here's this 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 paradox. paradigm shift for me that was the huge ontological shock i didn't have any problem with yet with ufos but i i had a huge problem with the existence of anything like esp but i realized i you know i was reading it was around the time around this time that uh daryl bem's prominent research we can talk about that too uh came out his feeling the future studies which uh i was like what i don't know if i can swear on your show sure uh what the fuck is going on we're gonna say that a lot today okay excellent um and uh and then i realized you know i've had those dreams i've had precognitive dreams you know i'd had a dream about 9-11 on the morning before 9-11 well i 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 yes when you don't have a 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 it just goes away so people you know often find that like god i've been having these experiences but i just didn't even think about them um and that and that was true for me too i'd been having precognitive dreams and i just because of my beliefs my belief system you know my unexamined belief system i just didn't let it trouble me but you know i i i found that i had to do that but my colleagues you know when when daryl bem's paper came out which was in 2011 my colleagues were it was it was about to be published an un 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 um uh and my colleagues were considering writing an angry letter to to the journals to the journals saying this 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 seemed 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 um take us to the the ufo sighting and you know in full disclosure i i asked 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 it was a sighting of two orbs uh sort of dancing with each other and where was it across the sky this was in philly okay 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 uh the fireworks don't start in philly until sort of later in the evening like a lot of cities uh so we were camped out there and there was a cheryl crow was playing on the steps of the of the art museum we couldn't see her but you know we could hear the cheryl crow 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 by others they were seen by others yeah because uh so anyway i i see this thing i you know my i show my girlfriend and i tried it i had one of those flip cams that they were selling for a couple years back around then and i i tried to film it uh nothing came out on the film but it was it was far away and the light was bad but anyway you know definitely wasn't a firework definitely wasn't chinese lanterns it wasn't anything like that 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 uh of the same thing were you a ufo guy at that point i wasn't i mean i've always i've always sort of in the back of my mind been interested in the subject but i never uh until then i had no idea that there were serious people actually studying it scientifically and so on i didn't know who jacques valet was and all that but anyway when i saw that there had been other reports of the same thing in eastern pennsylvania uh on the same night i thought oh my god i'm gonna okay well i'll make my report to mufon and so a mufon guy called me and you know i made my made my report so that the 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 uh jacques valet's books and you're like these guys are actually really smart these guys are actually really smart and this is really compelling and uh and i had a you know i had a blog at that point that i you know i was writing about science fiction films and stuff like that but i started writing you know writing blog posts and uh you know at the time i assumed it was extraterrestrials and so i was you know all all having fun with the extraterrestrial hypothesis uh but the the fact that this topic dovetails with parapsychology in so in so many ways and the fact that you had really smart people like jacques valet talking about psychic phenomena that occur often in conjunction with ufo encounters uh that part that was really that was the i guess when people use the word ontological shock i mean it wasn't a all at once shock but it was a kind of a gradual paradigm shift for me to first countenance the idea that well maybe psychic phenomena are real maybe these things really happen and uh and then you know gradually realizing well you know i have these experiences i have precognitive experiences and so on and did you run this by mom and dad no no okay no ever no no actually my father passed away that year actually that was that's that's kind of an interesting aspect of this experience because this happened um in july 2009 my father had cancer at that point and he wanted he passed away that september or october um and in fact like a lot of life upheavals happened my girlfriend broke up with me and that september my father passed away a lot a lot of real heavy stuff um and to deal with my father's passing he had he had gotten into oil painting uh after he'd 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 uh 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 um 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 dc and uh so i wound up spending about six months getting really into oil painting and painting these gigantic paintings of ufos um which are still now in my house uh and so that was kind of my way of working through a lot of issues was just like diving into art um uh but yeah it was a very painful year in a lot of ways uh but that that emotion probably makes sense for your story yes it does make sense and and working through it via art is something you know it's something i write about in in my book from that you know there's the the the it'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 fillet 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 and and needing to work through these visions that are coming and create art about it and uh and bond with other people who are on that same journey uh but yeah and so it's yeah it's interesting that my ufo sighting was directly over the philly art museum which in fact some of the important works of art that i talk about in my writing are in that museum uh you know it's my 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 uh it was not an ontological shock for me to see a ufo you know it was just really cool yeah uh but it got me then to do the reading but uh 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 Follet 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 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, in 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 Rudolf 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 I, for many. 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 Vallée 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. And. 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 he wasn't just a smart guy. I mean, he wasn't just a smart. You know, like Richard Dolan, like a fantastic researcher, you know, just like, this is fantastic. He's an actual bona fide historian doing real research. But Jacques Vallée 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. It's like, he's so strange. 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 books, you know, and. Which I've read and reread many times. So what specific. 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 Vallée 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 respect him 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. 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, and his attempts to think about this in terms of human consciousness and 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. Ooh. Treasured. That's right. You're a vinyl collector, aren't you? I'm a vinyl and a book collector. I'm a book collector. Yeah. 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 orbs. Have we seen more nowadays than we did? Like, because you see them showing up in Renaissance paintings even before. 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, honestly, I assume that the universe is teeming, 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. You know, I think we're living in a surveillance universe. Sure. You know, 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 phenomenon, 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 multidimensional or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And time travel. I am fully on board with Mike Master's thesis that time travel could be a part of it. Sure. So, Mike Master's anthropologist, Anthropologist. The Grays are. He says that, yeah, he's looking at it. He's a physical anthropologist and he's looking at it more from the, you know, 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. I mean, 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 convergent evolution is going to result in humanoids everywhere. So, that's the Copernican 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, you know. 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 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. Right. 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, yeah. 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 Chicxulub meteor, is 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, Dougal Dixon wrote some books 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 when 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. real yeah i know i'm 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 you know david eich 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 reptilians ideas like you know i have trouble with that but whatever i'm at this point in my life i'm not i'm not rejecting anything uh you know this is this is definitely a time of ontological shock in a lot of ways you know political ontological shock and and uh what you read on the um on the disclosure narrative is this something is this a psyop are we being prepared i know we're speculating i just kind of want your thoughts i 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 i flip-flop i don't know i mean i think there's definitely psyops going on i mean i don't think anyone would disagree with that a lot of disinformation i i tend to agree that you know it seems like you know there's there's obviously there's there's obviously really a there there um 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 this interference uh and then there's people who want want it disclosed but nobody no very few people you know maybe those 10 people that james fox talks about know know the full picture and everyone else is they're they're they're playing on some team but they don't have the full right story so it's just uh a very confusing it's just a very confusing landscape and in fact it's that that that kind of got me off of the ufo topic i think in 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 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 the current wave since 2017 so i just sort of put the ufo topic aside and it's only in the last couple 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 who's trustworthy and who's not and who's who's got you know an agenda that's it's uh well i recently was attacked um 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 um i know you're familiar with t towns and brown's work um maybe you're familiar with ac gravity dr nene lee's work and anti-gravity um you tend to agree yeah there's technology there yeah jesse michael's stuff red pilled me on that i mean i i i that was another topic that i had i had sort of been really skeptical about uh which is good that's good that's your reaction initially yeah i think it's important to have skepticism toward all this but but uh seeing the story of of thomas townsend brown and uh i'm yeah i'm i'm convinced that that's what you're saying is probably probably correct and that this is probably all uh in the hands of defense contractors who you know are not beholden to foia requests no not how put off said that recently in the in the documentary right that that's how they would hide these right this technology exactly exactly no it's all making a lot of sense it's all making a lot of sense uh why we don't know more than we do uh i think i think that's been the 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 you know 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 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 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 on what now is called deep politics you know right uh and uh i i recommend that for anyone who wants to think about ufos you you cannot think about this topic until you have learned a bit about how what the united states did after world war ii and and how our intelligence community works and how the defense industry works and defense contracting works and uh and i think what we're seeing is that that those politics those deep politics are really at play and 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 i think i think you have a lot of respect from the scientific community no do you feel there's hostility uh i don't think the scientific community the scientific community is really aware of me um i think if you're talking about mainstream science i think yes people who are interested in in these topics are often hostile to mainstream science uh and that's where i get the pushback is because people see me as a materialist um and you don't consider yourself one i consider myself sort of materialist but i but i want to see the 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 in 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 uh 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 you know you're how old and you're still alive guess guess guess guess who you have to thank for for that fact uh 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 a 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 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 of these technologies you know transforming our lives the reality is they're going to be secret and uh and they probably need to be and they're it's going to be a long time before they trickle down into our everyday lives uh it'll probably happen first in the realm of computing um but in the realm of computing meaning like quantum computers yeah uh 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 uh but yes i mean potentially you know any anytime you're talking about vastly superior energy sources like quantum like zero point energy or or whatever time travel you know it's like these are disruptive things that could be turned into weapons uh so either there are probably very good reasons why we don't know about about them but it's also uh makes one incredibly angry that if there are better fuel sources uh out there that the oil companies have been suppressing uh which i firmly believe which i firmly believe as well uh that's that's uh that needs to end you know and we need to do what we can to to end that uh and bring these at least some of these technologies to humanity and solve our problems rather than create more problems i see this this fight between young and freud and all all your work, where you lean into sort of this positive positive view. And then, then you just, you pull it right back. Like, ah, okay. We're not going to get there. No, I'm not saying we're not going to get there, but no, I think eventually, uh, but there are a lot of opposing forces, you know? Yep. Well, I, at least looking at, 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, 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, they didn't know. And they didn't know either that they're telling me something that they had heard from somebody who'd heard it. So like, you know, that's, that's, that's the problem with this whole, whole field is 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. Um, you know, if the, uh, the Nazi de Glocka sure. The bell stuff is real. Uh, then certainly we have done something with that. Uh, and well, if you're working on anti-gravity, you're working on, you're working on time, right? Right. Right. These are all connected. Uh, so yeah, if you have anti-gravity technology, you have kind of time manipulation technology. So they all go together. Yeah. Okay. I'm trying not to let you scare me, but I do believe it. Um, I don't know if we should take a quick break before. No, we can, we can get into block universe at that. Cause I think that's, that's sort of the, the, the structural pillars of a lot of this is, is black universe. What that is. And we can kind of just create the foundation for, for people who are maybe new to that. Sure. So what is the block universe? Uh, so when Einstein published his first paper on special relativity in 1905, I think, um, he wasn't thinking cosmologically, whatever he was just, he was, he was dealing with questions of light and, 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 is connecting if 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 uh 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 and then you know 10 seconds you know you're going to be like oh my god i'm going to be like oh my god i'm going to be like you know you're going to be like oh my god i'm going to be like oh my god i'm going to be i wouldn't predict whatever but there's a point of view on which all of this has already happened so it's so 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 there 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 and so we're all blowing we're all uh we may think we're just you know bodies moving through the universe but in 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 uh and that again that future already exists um and theoretically can interact with the past in different ways you can have uh things like what we call wormholes now uh which were theorized actually pretty early um and uh by einstein by einstein rosen yeah oh yeah but before that i think um it was girdle who who solved einstein's field equations in a way to show that you could have a path through space-time 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 that can't happen and that would lead to paradox and blah blah blah he thought that too but then he came around because his colleagues showing him no no this this the math shows that this is possible uh and then we have yeah things like wormholes where you could have you know create a create a passage through space but if you you have one of those whole 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 right um so uh yeah so there's and then there's other possibilities you know warp drives or warp drives and so on which are time machines as well as space machines um so the block universe is sort of the the basic premise uh that makes all of this possible and it's still not really questioned among most physicists so this kind of throws away the many worlds interpretation yes yeah and as far as i'm concerned it does so can you explain because this was mind-blowing to me um 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 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 the the scarab story we can do that yeah yeah well 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 um okay so for people who don't know uh this patient came into young's office one morning let's say and she had she told him a dream that she had 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 a rose chafer beetle which was sort of the european equivalent of the of the dung beetle or something like that and she's telling him that she had had the scarab and he opens the you know he was a whatever else you want to say about young he was a brilliant shaman yes and he opened his window took the beetle handed it to her and said here's your scarab and it was like this like mind-blowing moment for both of them yes uh and you know he said that it was the moment that opened her his patient up to mysteries and so on it was really a wonderful moment for both of them now he sort of described this and he used the term synchronicity to sort of collapse this sort of time dimension 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 pre-cognitive dream this was not synchronicity this was this was something unfolding in time in the wrong direction you know this woman had a pre-cognitive 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 pre-cognition like yep that's what happens but in 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 though isn't that a paradox but it's it's not a paradox it's actually a loop it's a tautology because her dream caused her to tell her doctor the dream which caused the doctor to know to turn around and and see a scarab beetle and give her the the the the beetle and 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 it she was remembering the future yeah she wasn't seeing the future she was remembering it uh in a memory so so sending information back yes to her yes to her younger self so she didn't really have to do anything it was 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 um and but you can't you know when you tell a story like this that's the problem i always have with my books is like how do you tell these these anecdotes because really cause cause if causation is circular like that uh you could start the story anywhere you know you could start the story with the beetle showing up at the window or you could start the story anywhere in that in that in that narrative uh it's all sort of equally causal um and that throws us off because we're used to linear stories we're used to stories being linear uh and uh so it's very it's hard to wrap our heads around that but that's it's the opposite of a paradox a paradox is something that can't happen right the tautology is something that must happen and therefore is not interesting in a way or not interesting to a logician because you know like uh you know it's not fair to to defend an argument by its antecedents is it yeah right but but it's the way the world works works i think so in a time travel universe in any universe where time travel or time traveling information is allowed then everything on some level is tautological um 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 is the one who who rejected teleology is the one who rejected teleology from the story of science let's explain teleology that's yeah so teleology was one so aristotle codified these i think four different kinds of causation uh and one of them one of them was efficient causation that's what we understand is causation you know one thing leading to another like billiard balls uh but one of them was teleological causation that is to say the end you know telos meaning the end uh you know is in some sense causing what happened before it now this was a part of the aristotelian framework for centuries uh but then in the 1500s francis bacon uh 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 he he wrote this book in which he you know basically laid out what causation was and and banned teleological causation say we can't you know we can't accept you know causation from the future uh 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 bath water really they 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 what more and more physicists are arguing is that no no retro causation that's the new word for teleology yes uh sort of a non-divine teleology and we'll get to that later um not just in theory but in practice how some cool experiments that proving that before we go to the break and we'll i would like 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 um i don't think anybody does i was hoping you had something but you can i mean you can speculate about why it's important for an organism to perceive time in a in a certain way and not another way um i can certainly say that you can imagine why you would want to perceive time in a certain way and not another way um i can certainly say that you can imagine why you would want to perceive only the present moment or perceive only um 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 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 you don't worry about the future right yeah you worry about what's happening right now so that's going to create uh 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 gonna be adaptive if i'm only responding now to something that happened 10 minutes ago okay 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 yep for things that have already happened but which might happen again likewise there's going to be a certain amount of memory for things that have already happened but 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 you know what we're talking about when we talk about precognition is we're really talking about intuition what has always been called intuition um and uh the 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 uh it's it's actually getting signals indirect and fuzzy signals from an actually existing future that's a great cliffhanger we'll be right back we're back can we define um 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 way 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 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 uh these often turn out to be precognitive um people who are prone to sort of having a vivid imagination or very suggestive uh you know they'll have visions that are or they'll hear voices for it's every it's different for everybody um but they'll in one way or another it's that the future future experience kind of leaking into the present uh 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 uh 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 uh well uh that if if precognition is a form of memory then if at night your long-term memory is being sort of formed 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 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 uh i would say in the mid 90s 94 95 that way you still keep it up yeah when i can i'm i have little kids now and right i understand that it's it makes a lot of things hard uh but uh yeah as much as much as i can i still i still keep a dream journal i used to keep an electronic dream journal i used to keep a word file open well back in the 90s it was a dream journal i used to keep a word file open well back in the 90s it was a dream journal i used to keep a word file open well back in the 90s it was a perfect i had i still have old word perfect files that i can't open because i you know i i they were past protected and they're now on a little floppiness whatever i 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 i i we were talking about lucid dreaming before the the show and i'm i went through a period when i was really really into it and i was having some some luck and and i'll every now and then i'll have a 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 i 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 it does it does um and i i even achieved um an out-of-body experience i wanted to that was just on the tip of my tongue is lucid dreaming connected to out-of-body experience astral travel yeah i think i think i think out-of-body experiences are well here here again this is controversial but i i think they're part of the same spectrum uh and that they're they're just particularly vivid lucid dreams uh but i think they're precognitive have you had any of these yes i've had 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 i it was very cool but like what the fuck you know and um and then i had a couple of spontaneous ones in the late 90s i guess um was something going on in your life i don't really remember honestly i did write them down though and and 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 uh and then the one that i was able to successfully induce after 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 um it turned out to be it was you know kind of a wild weird random experience uh but it turned out to be precognitive very vividly precognitive of events exactly a year in the future yeah this is one of the 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 uh thing last a couple about a week or two ago i had a very vivid dream about a dad i 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 uh i certainly am not i it's like i couldn't tell you what date it is right now but uh unconsciously we're 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 process that's pre-minding you pre-mining pre-mining 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 i've had precognitive dreams i my 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 some the the problem is most precognitive dreams are just they're really they're boring like they're not things that would make really make sense to other people i can 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 um nevertheless it's very common uh anyone who does precognitive dream work over any length of time will like tell you yeah it's like you have dreams that are on the the the pre-anniversary of events i had precognitive dreams about the births about very specific 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 exactly very specific details um and uh so there is 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 in your 26 year one we'll talk about that out of body experience first um uh so this way was wild it's sort of a two-part experience um i i was doing these exercises these kind of meditative exercises to um induce an out-of-body experience and i had had semi-success previously you know you'll go into a lucid dream um 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 in reality you skipped all that hypnagogic craziness 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 on 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 it was really weird and then it oh and and oh and i had a sensation of being weighed down i had sort of a a scary sensation i was being weighed down by my cat cindy uh 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 just on my astral okay whatever um and you know just strange and it and it there was it was kind of associated with a feeling of of terror almost like that sleep paralysis kind of feeling of terror that you have um but in this case i'm staring my wife's shoes and my cat is sitting on my back and then it changed and 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 you know it was like my office i was in my office and i was looking down through but i was up by the ceiling looking down through the window and there was these two green lights that 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 like these two green eyes glowing eyes looking at me and then so i it was at this point this is probably this is all unfolding over the span of maybe 10 seconds okay uh 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 that'll pull you out yes so uh so i i i don't i don't think i had a sensation of flying back to my body but i basically just woke up at that point it's like whoa wrote it down everything um i was you know i was i really didn't know what to make of this experience um but then so exactly a year later i think this is exactly a year minus one day i think there was like it was off by one day i found i was i had um that that closet i told you about that's where we keep our we used to keep our um our uh medicines and stuff like that and i dropped an advil on the floor and i was down on the floor rummaging among my wife's shoes looking for that advil that i've dropped because i was worried my cat cindy the one that had been yes weighing me down i was worried that she was going to or had eaten this this advil and their advil is very toxic to cats yes so i couldn't find the advil 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 street she's like oh i don't remember exactly at what point i realized i put this together i think it was the second experience that that that jogged my memory of the of the out-of-body experience so that same day that same evening i 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 i looked i was i was up by the ceiling of my study looking down through the window and i saw two little green lights the eyes and it wasn't eyes it was it was my 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 it was being reflected in two panes of glass so 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 pieced together the rest of it um that this was not an out-of-body experience it was an a pre-cognitive pre-cognitive of an in-body experience in a different location you were in my life you were on the i was i was on a ladder now i know a lot of people have out-of-body experiences which they experience they see their bodies so like 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 uh who are interested in this topic and who are able to achieve these things which is it's very it's very difficult and i've never been able to do it again can anybody learn this though yeah theoretically the the book i was following now i have a lot of books on out-of-body experiences including some of the old classics like um i forget there's a really great uh fantastic and i wish i could remember the name of it but uh there's a more modern teacher uh in australia named robert bruce who uh does sort of body work kind of stuff uh 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 he his techniques are very sound i think and and he he really gets you know he really understands how you induce these things so i was 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 uh no it's it's more it involves meditating is almost learning to meditate on different parts of your body and feel sensations in your throughout your body sort of a body scan kind of thing that's very crucial uh 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 that precognitive thing by focusing on physical sensations really yeah okay yeah and anyway so learning to sort of scan your body uh and feel kind of energetic sensations in all parts of your body is what 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 at remembering yes absolutely do you go back to your journal and when things with something feels weird um sometimes you know what the so the pioneer of precognitive dream work uh was a guy named um uh jw dunn um who i talk about in all my books but he was a aeronautical engineer in the early 20th century um and he recommended he lived in a time when you know records took up physical space and uh 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 on my dream journals i printed them out for a while and that turned into 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 we have to remember that one okay it's not that interesting but it it was interesting to me but it was not well these are all very personal yeah they're very personal you know and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point yeah but uh 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 um but yeah it becomes too big a task i you know i know someone who's um you know who's who lives this reality totally and she's uh 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 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 experience it's a great task for ai because it's great a pattern recognition true see like it has 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 being in this um uh this certain environment um i'm blanking on the name of the artist um oh gosh the he was sort of a precursor of the surrealists but um 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 uh and there was a character with a gun firing a guy it was just it was it was very stage play like and very much like the work of this certain painter uh and and the scenario was very specific and it uh 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 um and then this past year i was reading a book about another artist and they talked about um uh 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 i uh 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 i i it's too personal okay it's too personal to say but i 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 calendrical i just i think this is happening all the time and we're just not aware of it because you know who who records their dreams if they do record their dreams do they go back to their dream records probably not if they you know i don't think yeah that's the thing i like i kept you know i kept dream records and i kept them in my dream records for decades without even before i was aware of the topic of precognitive dreams uh and it's only like well thanks to the fact that i had been keeping those dream records uh i've been able to identify a lot of precognitive dreams from that time period um but you know most precognitive dreams go undetected you know so i think this is the this is the 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 were you had this premonition or whatever no i think it's a i think it's an automatic process that we're brain is constantly doing this uh and we're just not aware of it could our dreams just be littered with all these just minutiae of the future it's absolutely yeah it's minutiae of the future that's a great way of putting it because the they're so minute and specific that uh they're hard to tell these stories to other people often i mean it's the it's the dreams about plane crashes and 9-11 and stuff like that that you know uh that makes a good enough story to tell someone else but you know just having a a dream about some very random specific personal experience in your day um you know that's it's it makes it's meaningful to you right i spilled coffee on my shirt it's bothering me exactly you dreamed about that two days ago right in some way right but you can't really recognize it because it hasn't happened right right exactly exactly exactly it's difficult to get your mind around it but yeah but i love it so what is it about 9-11 because there's a lot of precognitive precognitive dreams about 9-11 is it 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 dc actually a week beforehand i'd moved on september 1st uh 2001 um i was living i was living in a suburb uh of dc and working in tenleytown neighborhood which is far away from the pentagon um in fact as it was happening and people were saying planes hit the pentagon and stuff like that it's like it took me a long time to realize oh wait that's that's where i live now uh yeah but um no the that that morning uh and i still have the dream record it was you know uh it was just a dream about two identical buildings that had this these corrugated gray facades and they were mosques somehow and uh and there are other details in the dream which i sort of decoded afterwards that all of also made sense in terms of the events but um you know okay that's weird i wrote it down um 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 identical square buildings that have like gray corrugated facades the the topic of islam and it was not on my radar at all until that morning of 9 11 when suddenly it became on everyone's radar right um 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 um uh 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 a personal but that related to the topic of suicide uh 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 it's they're more reminding themselves of just watching their experience of watching cnn yeah wow yeah yeah there's a lot of people who are remembering cnn yeah wow yeah yeah there's a lot of people who are remembering cnn yeah wow yeah yeah there's a lot of people who are remembering cnn yeah wow yeah yeah there's a 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, yeah, just look up Michael Richards. And we're not talking about Michael Richards, the comedian who was on Seinfeld. Right, this is incredible. 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 in a flight suit. Where he had fallen to the ground, had parachuted to the ground, or where he was crashing to the ground. And in the most famous case, he's standing. Standing vertically erect in a flight suit, and he's being pierced by multiple little airplanes. Okay. Well, sort of on the strength of his growing body of work, he 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. Okay. 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, that was the, 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 a lot. Lots of sculptures also of planes, planes crashing. There's watercolor that he did of a, 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, on 9-11. Is, is just, you know, stunning. It is. Stunning. The other artist was, was it Steven Mandel? Oh yeah. David Mandel. David Mandel. Yes. So this is a, 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 water. Watercolors of his dreams. And anyway, on the morning of September 11th, this is, here's another calendrical resonance 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, he'd 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, they're, they're not necessarily as vivid as that, but, uh, I. But artists seem to be sensitive to this. Yes. Yes. Anyone who's creative, um, using their imagination, they're tapped in to their, you know, intuitive precognitive abilities. And this, when I wrote my first book on precognition, um, called time loops, it was the connections to creativity that really interested me the most, even more than dreams. Uh, 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, you know, uh, 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, uh, I was really intrigued, you know, honestly, it was Philip K. Dick that, that, because he, he had regular precognition. And he was very aware of his, how his stories played out in his life afterwards. And so he was like, it was Philip K. Dick was really the first case. And also Morgan Robertson, the, 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, uh, which I covered was the Titanic story. Yeah. The Titanic story. So, so in 1898, Morgan Robertson, he's this sort of science fiction writer. Uh, writes this novel called futility about the biggest ocean liner ever called the Titan, which hits an iceberg on an, on its third voyage. This is the unsinkable Titan in the novel. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It's called unsinkable. Yeah. And it's, uh, it's on its third voyage between Liverpool and New York, I think going from New York to Liverpool in this case. Uh, and it strikes an iceberg and almost all the passengers die because there's not enough lifeboats. Yeah. That's even like a plot point in the story. Yeah. Uh, and, uh, so 14 years later, you know, he's as stunned as everyone else, uh, to read the New York times headline that, that, you know, that the Titanic, you know, sinks and, and most of the passengers are lost because there's not enough lifeboats. So, you know, really incredible, uh, story. And that's been looked at a lot. You know, it's, that's, that's one of the most famous. Well, he also wrote about world war one later on as well. Let's see. Yeah. He wrote about. About, he had a number of stories that people have argued were prescient of things. Uh, it's been argued that he sort of precognized like technical developments, like sonar, things like that. Um, and he, he, he's another one of these artists who was, his life was full of synchronicity. Okay. Uh, you know, I argue synchronicity 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, how can these coincidences be happening? And it's, it's your own precognitive, uh, brain that's guiding you through life and you're, you know, and because you don't have a concept of precognition, you're like surprised by it. Uh, but, uh, but yeah, I think that's, you know, I think it's, it's precognition really. But yeah. So, so Philip K. Dick. Before you jump to that, just so 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. Uh, no, it's actually another one of his stories. Uh, I think in which he used the term precog first, but yes, he sort of, he's the inventor of the term precog. Um, and it 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. Um, and his, uh, so he was aware of how his, he would write a story and there'd be a character or some sort of plot element in story. And then, and then it, this, he would meet this character in real life or he would read an, 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, um, scanner darkly scanner darkly. And then like six months later before the novel came out, but you know, he read an article in scientific American or something like that about split brain research and all kinds of examples like that. And, uh, 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, and we have his letters. And if you want to shell out a couple hundred dollars, you can buy his letters, which I did. And it's totally worth it. Yeah. If there's any, yeah. If there's two things I recommend people shelling out the money for it's, it's Philip K. Dick's letters and Jacques Vallée's journals. You know, those are the, can you get those? Journal? Yes. Jacques Vallée's journals. Are you kidding? I got to write that down. Forbidden science volumes one through six. Yeah. Um, but anyway, so you can go through his letters and see him like telling his, like he had this pen pal in the late seventies. Um, um, I'm blanking on her name, but, uh, he, you know, He'd write these long letters to this person and tell about these dreams he was having and a lot 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. 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 encounters. 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 Vallée. Yes. And there are interesting precognitive connections, I think, between him and Jacques Vallée going on. You have to tell us, wasn't there one, it was mind-blowing, where Jacques Vallée pre-remembered something about a PKD story? Maybe it was Vallis. 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 Vallis, I think is Vallee. Mm-hmm. Because. So what's the story here? Jacques Vallée, 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? Okay. Okay. So exactly at the same time, but a year before his book is published, Philip K. Dick has his famous 2374 experience and starts writing a novel based on it. And the first. We have the first version of this novel, which was published after his death as Radio Free Albemuth, okay? Right. And it's about this teaching satellite that broadcasts things to awaken. And that's what we're talking about. sensitive people on Earth. You know, it's basically. It's basically the premise of Jacques Vallée's book. But Jacques Vallée's 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 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 VALUS. And it actually looks like a French word. It does. It does. It does. It does. It does. It does. And he, 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 Vallée's books. She couldn't remember the titles of Jacques Vallée's books, but the most recent one was Invisible College. So I basically, I'm certain that he read Invisible College three years later. He must have. And I think he was precognizing it when he was reading it. He was crafting, initially crafting this story that became VALUS. But, you know, long before he could read, before he did or even could read Jacques Vallée'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 that, of PKD predicting the future? Oh. I don't mean. I didn't mean to put you on the spot. I was just curious. No, just dreams where he would predict something in his life, basically. But, I mean. The world becomes more and more Phil Dickian. It does. By the day. When the androids are built, we're going to remember. Boy, yeah. It's. Did you ever see his talk in Mets, Mets for S77? Yeah. Where he talks about, he was a many worlds guy. And he talks about that man in the high castle being an awful. 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 could be wrong. He could be wrong. That's fine. You know, who cares? In fact, there's a part of me that thinks maybe you have to be wrong. Yeah. For it to work. You had a great story about, I forget the author's name, of Lolita? Yeah, Nabokov. Nabokov. Okay. So, yes. When he was. 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 and, 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 the New York Times about how Paris Kubrick Pictures has just purchased the rights to Lolita for a huge sum, for like something like $150,000, which at the time was a lot. It's still a lot, but it was a huge amount at the time. 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. Yep. 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 J.W. Dunn. And. Who influenced a lot of writers. Hmm? Dunn, yes. Yes, who influenced, 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 like 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 precognitive dreams are like things on Twitter. Sure. Yeah. Uh, yeah. So, yeah, he's, he replicated it and, uh, and yeah, J.W. Goodellman was hugely influential on mid-century writers. J.R.R. Tolkien being, being one of them that people don't realize. No, um, I didn't either until, uh, until I read your work. Tolkien, I was like, eh, what was the, what was the theory that Tolkien used, um, the elves? Mm-hmm. Because they're sort of immortal and omniscient. Yeah. Yeah. They, they sort of live in this timeless, um, uh, that, you know, their sort of cosmology and it was based on J.W. Dunn's work and Christopher Tolkien found notes in, in his father's, uh, writings. You know, he'd found drafts of Lord of the Rings, uh, and notes about elvish time and, 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, we don't know unfortunately if J.R.R. Tolkien ever kept a dream diary which would be awesome. Oh yeah. Which would be awesome. I'd shell out for that one too. Yes. But, um, anyway, Dunn's ideas at very least were influential on him and, and, uh, he and C.S. Lewis talked a lot about Just to wrap Tolkien, he has two unfinished time travel stories based on Dunn's work. Yes. Which, that's fun. Yes. Yeah. The, uh, The Lost Road is one of them. I forget the other one but, uh, yes, he started, he started writing a time travel novel. He, he, 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 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, and then we have the Beatles documentary, which everybody needs to watch. Everyone needs to watch it. Everybody, yes. So there's some precognition there, which I wasn't aware of until you told the story, and it blew my mind. Well, I'm glad it blew your mind, because 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 to have 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. 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 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 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? 1969. 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 you once belonged. And then Jojo comes in. I think I have the chronology written down. I can't. I can't replicate it for you exactly, but he, you know, a couple of 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, walks out, see around the clubs, he says, and walks out because he's kind of basically sick of Paul McCartney. Sure. 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 once belonged. And to add to this, that line, get back to where you once belonged is something that Paul stole from George Harrison. Right. From another song? From another song George had written. Sour Milk Sea. Right. Is this song that George had written and given to another, 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 belonged. So basically he's noodling on this idea. All he's got, you know, to start with is get back, get back to where he once belonged. Jojo, Jojo from Arizona, which sounds like Harrison. Jo-jar-ison. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, and, and, and, 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 liked 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 it, work it out, you know, just kind of like Roy Neary in 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? What is it? You know, and, and, um, you know, you can reread that Close Encounters as precognition if you want. Like you can reread it as he's, he's, he's creating this thing and then looks over at the television and then sees what he's been working on. And that's the way it happens in the lives of artists that they, they work out these ideas and then they, 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 were just sort of. Drawn to a conclusion or meant to be. Yeah. 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, I think it's just that artists are more, you know, sensitive. They're more, they're more in tune with. Emotional? With, yeah. And more imaginative, more, um, I think everybody has an imagination that 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, they're noting it. They're noting it at least mentally, if not on paper. Right. And that's what, 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 stuff. So like when you're paying attention, that's why I met it. Again, there's 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'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 McDick, 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. Yeah. I think we can. But those can be magical. I don't, you know, I don't want to be the kind of materialist who says you can't think of it as magic. You know, it, it's perfectly fine to think of it as magic. Quantum mechanics is magic. Sure. I don't think anyone would, Feynman would say so. Sure. Yeah. All right. So we, can we talk quantum mechanics when we get back? Yeah, sure. All right. See you in 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, Darrell, could be a good place to start. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So the, Darrell Bem's a really interesting guy. He, 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 Onerton, who was a parapsychologist and doing parapsychology research, wanted, he wanted someone who had training as a mentalist to sort of be part of his experiments because that's a good control, you know, to make sure that there's no cheating and that, and that, and so on. And Darrell Bem is a trained mentalist. And he didn't necessarily have an interest in ESP or whatever, but he didn't, he wasn't, he wasn't a knee-jerk, you know, he didn't, he just didn't know anything about it. And he, but he was game to sort of be part of these experiments to sort of ensure that everything was, was kosher. And Onerton got, you know, very, you know, positive results in these. I think, I think they were telepathy experiments, if I'm not mistaken, or maybe they were remote pairing, I'm not sure. But anyway, Darrell Bem realized, you know, there's something to this. Um, you know, he's getting results and, uh, and so anyway, in the, in the first decade of this century, uh, he, you know, he already had a very successful career as a, uh, on personality and various, various topics. And, you know, he was a very, um, very respected psychologist. Uh, but anyway, he did this large series of experiments in which he reversed cause and effect in. basic psychology paradigms. um one of them being like priming like you're 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 some something subliminal afterwards okay uh 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 um these were very large experiments with large groups of undergraduates um 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 jenner 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 fifty percent correct as you would expect fifty percent was when 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 robotic yep emotional adults engaged in consensual sexual acts porno yeah um they they did better than chance i think seventy percent something like that no it wasn't that high i mean the the the you know the effect size is still small in these experiments um but but statistically because he had so many participants and so many trials it reached a significance okay uh and then there's another series of experiments that sort of reversed the typical order of a memory experiment so uh so at a typical memory task you might like 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 you'll be expected to perform better on the words that were you were reminded of okay sure well in his version he showed had 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 facilitation of recall is what he called this um 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 uh this this came out in 2011 right immediately skeptics were enraged i mean my colleagues at one of the psychology organizations were enraged um uh anyway and then skeptics said no this can't be replicated and here we try to replicate it and we couldn't uh but a lot of teams around the world did replicate it successfully uh and yeah it does don't get on wikipedia because you'll you will see a completely biased of course uh version of this but uh i think something like 80. independent 83 independent replications yes something like that um so yeah fascinating fascinating evidence for something like precognition he would call it pre-sentiment feeling the future and that's what he called the art of the um what he called it in his original article on this so for the skeptics of bem's work i think we have um in the late 80s physicist aronoff's split laser to be able to replicate it that's what he called the art of the um what he called it in his original article on this so for the skeptics of bem's work i think we have um in the late 80s physicist aronoff's split laser to be able to replicate it in the late 80s physicist aronoff's split laser to be able to replicate it in the late 80s physicist aronoff's split laser to be able to replicate it in the late 80s physicist aronoff's split laser test is a hold my beer test is a hold my beer test is a hold my beer right that story well yeah this wasn't right that story well yeah this wasn't right that story well yeah this wasn't aronov this was um aronov this was um aronov this was um oh i'm oh i'm oh i'm howell and dixon i believe um this is also howell and dixon i believe um this is also howell and dixon i believe um this is also at cornell i think at cornell i think at cornell i think um um um where where where they uh they uh they uh they took a laser beam they took a laser beam they took a laser beam they put it through a beam splitter to they took a laser beam to create two identical beams essentially create two identical beams essentially create two identical beams essentially they don't that's not the terms they use they don't that's not the terms they use they don't that's not the terms they use in physics are different but they're in physics are different but they're in physics are different but they're essentially creating an experiment group essentially creating an experiment group essentially creating an experiment group in a control group like you'd have in a in a control group like you'd have in a in a control group like you'd have in a psychology experiment psychology experiment psychology experiment um and um and um and they did what was called a weak they did what was called a weak they did what was called a weak measurement on both of these beams measurement on both of these beams measurement on both of these beams uh which is measuring the amplitude of uh which is measuring the amplitude of the beam without interfering too much the beam without interfering too much the beam without interfering too much with the beam and this is a challenge with the beam and this is a challenge with the beam and this is a challenge that we can talk about with these kinds that we can talk about with these kinds that we can talk about with these kinds of experiments this audience every time of experiments this audience every time of experiments this audience every time you you you measure something you're you you you measure something you're you you you measure something you're interfering with it in some way right interfering with it in some way right interfering with it in some way right that's the collapse the challenge yeah that's the collapse the challenge yeah that's the collapse the challenge yeah and the challenge is to try and find and the challenge is to try and find and the challenge is to try and find ways of measuring things that don't ways of measuring things that don't ways of measuring things that don't interfere too much so that you can tell interfere too much so that you can tell interfere too much so that you can tell if a subsequent interaction is having a if a subsequent interaction is having a if a subsequent interaction is having a retro effect well in any event they they retro effect well in any event they they retro effect well in any event they they split the beams split the beams split the beams weakly measured both of the beams weakly measured both of the beams weakly measured both of the beams and then did a strong measurement on and then did a strong measurement on and then did a strong measurement on one of the two beams one of the two beams one of the two beams and lo and behold the beam that got the and lo and behold the beam that got the and lo and behold the beam that got the strong strong strong later measurement was amplified like 10 later measurement was amplified like 10 later measurement was amplified like 10 times compared to the previously times compared to the previously times compared to the previously compared to the other compared to the other compared to the other beam uh which suggests retrocausation beam uh which suggests retrocausation beam uh which suggests retrocausation now you'll get contra controversies and now you'll get contra controversies and now you'll get contra controversies and physicists will debate the significant physicists will debate the significant physicists will debate the significant you know what this means and so on you know what this means and so on you know what this means and so on but uh that seems to be evidence for but uh that seems to be evidence for but uh that seems to be evidence for retrocausation john wheeler's delayed retrocausation john wheeler's delayed retrocausation john wheeler's delayed choice certainly that's would be another choice certainly that's would be another choice certainly that's would be another example um yeah there's there's uh example um yeah there's there's uh example um yeah there's there's uh so so this is an active area of of so so this is an active area of of so so this is an active area of of research and multiple experiments have research and multiple experiments have research and multiple experiments have been conducted like like that uh that i been conducted like like that uh that i been conducted like like that uh that i just described um which seem to show just described um which seem to show just described um which seem to show retrocausation then you also have the retrocausation then you also have the retrocausation then you also have the field of quantum computing field of quantum computing field of quantum computing which is showing that you can have uh which is showing that you can have uh which is showing that you can have uh indeterminate indeterminate indeterminate temporal ordering temporal ordering temporal ordering of of computations in a quantum of of computations in a quantum of of computations in a quantum computer circuit and i'm you know i admit computer circuit and i'm you know i admit computer circuit and i'm you know i admit i am not a physicist i'm not a i am not a physicist i'm not a i am not a physicist i'm not a computing researcher so you know this is computing researcher so you know this is computing researcher so you know this is all above my pay grade but there's so all above my pay grade but there's so all above my pay grade but there's so many so many articles have come out in many so many articles have come out in many so many articles have come out in the last several years uh the last several years uh the last several years uh showing that you can showing that you can showing that you can invert causal order in a quantum invert causal order in a quantum invert causal order in a quantum computing circuit yeah in cambridge computing circuit yeah in cambridge computing circuit yeah in cambridge they're they're solving problems from they're they're solving problems from they're they're solving problems from with information from the future yeah with information from the future yeah with information from the future yeah yeah um can we explain just a little bit yeah um can we explain just a little bit yeah um can we explain just a little bit about uh delayed choice what's about uh delayed choice what's about uh delayed choice what's happening there how it connects to time happening there how it connects to time happening there how it connects to time the photons going back to the source the photons going back to the source the photons going back to the source changing their state that sort of thing changing their state that sort of thing changing their state that sort of thing just to remind folks just to remind folks just to remind folks yeah so uh yeah so uh yeah so uh okay so there's um okay so there's um okay so there's um let me take the example of or if you let me take the example of or if you let me take the example of or if you have a different favorite well the like have a different favorite well the like have a different favorite well the like one of the experiments that one of the experiments that one of the experiments that that i think that i think that i think excited john wheeler so his idea was that excited john wheeler so his idea was that excited john wheeler so his idea was that you could um take late light from a you could um take late light from a you could um take late light from a distant quasar say distant quasar say distant quasar say and choose to measure it a certain way and choose to measure it a certain way and choose to measure it a certain way uh and it would uh and it would uh and it would uh it would uh it would uh it would show that how your choice of how to show that how your choice of how to show that how your choice of how to measure it had influenced the light from measure it had influenced the light from measure it had influenced the light from that distant quasar well uh that distant quasar well uh that distant quasar well uh a a a blanking on his name ali i think uh an blanking on his name ali i think uh an blanking on his name ali i think uh an astrophysicist um i forget which astrophysicist um i forget which astrophysicist um i forget which university but he he heard wheeler university but he he heard wheeler university but he he heard wheeler speak speak speak and had an idea for actually testing and had an idea for actually testing and had an idea for actually testing this using this using this using mirrors placed on the moon by the apollo mirrors placed on the moon by the apollo mirrors placed on the moon by the apollo astronauts because they placed mirrors astronauts because they placed mirrors astronauts because they placed mirrors on the moon to bounce laser light back on the moon to bounce laser light back on the moon to bounce laser light back to sort of measure the very minute like to sort of measure the very minute like to sort of measure the very minute like changes in distance between earth and changes in distance between earth and changes in distance between earth and moon moon moon in different phases of its orbit um well in different phases of its orbit um well in different phases of its orbit um well they used they used they used you know they shot a laser at the moon you know they shot a laser at the moon you know they shot a laser at the moon and that takes like what i think a and that takes like what i think a and that takes like what i think a second for light to get to the moon and second for light to get to the moon and second for light to get to the moon and back so that's enough time to change the back so that's enough time to change the back so that's enough time to change the parameters of experiment unless you're parameters of experiment unless you're parameters of experiment unless you're nixon on the phone then it's instant nixon on the phone then it's instant nixon on the phone then it's instant right yeah um right yeah um right yeah um and and and uh and it uh and it uh and it showed indeed that you can like you can showed indeed that you can like you can showed indeed that you can like you can change how you're going to measure light change how you're going to measure light change how you're going to measure light and the light somehow seems to know it and the light somehow seems to know it and the light somehow seems to know it seems to know seems to know how it's seems to know seems to know how it's seems to know seems to know how it's being measured yeah being measured yeah being measured yeah um um um well you know seeming to know something well you know seeming to know something that you shouldn't be able to know that that you shouldn't be able to know that that you shouldn't be able to know that you know that seems like you know that seems like you know that seems like telepathy you know but another way of telepathy you know but another way of telepathy you know but another way of looking at telepathy is that it's looking at telepathy is that it's looking at telepathy is that it's really precognition that the that that really precognition that the that that really precognition that the that that the light the light the light was influenced by that subsequent was influenced by that subsequent was influenced by that subsequent measurement measurement measurement and uh and that information essentially and uh and that information essentially and uh and that information essentially from the future traveled back in time along the world line of that along the world line of that along the world line of that photon right it fulfilled its destiny it photon right it fulfilled its destiny it photon right it fulfilled its destiny it fulfilled its destiny yeah fulfilled its destiny yeah fulfilled its destiny yeah so so uh yeah there's all kinds of so so uh yeah there's all kinds of so so uh yeah there's all kinds of reasons to think that yes reasons to think that yes reasons to think that yes retrocausation retrocausation retrocausation is a real thing at the at the smallest is a real thing at the at the smallest is a real thing at the at the smallest scales scales scales in nature now you know that that quantum in nature now you know that that quantum in nature now you know that that quantum realm where you're talking about realm where you're talking about realm where you're talking about individual particles individual particles individual particles uh you know behaving in seemingly uh you know behaving in seemingly uh you know behaving in seemingly impossible ways impossible ways impossible ways but there are certain circumstances where but there are certain circumstances where but there are certain circumstances where you can scale up you can scale up you can scale up though that quantum magic and that's when though that quantum magic and that's when though that quantum magic and that's when this topic of entanglement comes in when this topic of entanglement comes in when this topic of entanglement comes in when you entangle particles together you can you entangle particles together you can you entangle particles together you can create a larger and larger larger object that uh enters the realm of 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 an essentially an object that performs computations and uh it and in those settings you can again we talked about quantum computers reversing cause and effect sure you can have a uh a material thing that is responding to its future yes okay and okay then set aside those those ideas and enter the realm of biology where more and more people are thinking that you the brain could be a quantum computer or have quantum computing properties um and if that's the case you know add add all these add all these up and you get the idea that the brain could be a a four-dimensional information processor that is pre-spawning to its future as well as responding to its past so on the show i've i've covered quantum biology with the with the cryptochromes in the bird's eye which has been proven that they're entangling with the magnetic field um quantum processing processes and plants where they're finding the photosynthesis is a quantum process yeah they're checking all the paths simultaneously it's superposition in real time on leaves so clearly a quant the quantum state can be held in a wet hot place right right and that's always been the the point of skepticism uh oh you can't have entanglement uh occurring in a warm wet environment like the brain but it's increasingly being shown that that actually you can and that living that life is a quantum uh is is scaling up these quantum uh effects I want to ask you about um microtubules in a second but before we move to that um 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 uh figure in in the sort of I'd say century-long denial or refusal to look at retrocausation because ever since the 1920s there has been this idea that that retrocausation could explain a lot of this spooky quantum stuff uh but the idea just keeps getting shoved aside uh partly because of Niels Bohr's personality I mean he was just a very forceful personality and he um he sort of got the whole field of physics to just basically agree to not interpret what was going on uh at a quantum level and just say it's random and just accept that the world is random on a fundamental level uh and 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 uh that's right and 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 uh and and now you have these this kind of flurry of rival theories going on so that's kind of the way it's going to be going on in the field uh so you've got besides the Copenhagen interpretation you have you know many worlds theory that we talked about you've got um uh bones pilot wave theory you've got uh multiple rival theories but retrocausation or some version of retrocausation 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 well so 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 like 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 um to be uh there's a there's a team that wrote a book relatively recently called beyond the dynamical universe uh which is uh basically making this same argument that i'm talking um to be uh there's a there's a team that wrote a book relatively recently called beyond the dynamical universe uh which is uh basically making this same argument that i'm talking um to be uh there's a there's a there's a team that wrote a book relatively recently called beyond the dynamical universe uh which is uh basically making this same argument that i'm talking about but they don't use the term retrocausation and they and they take pains to distinguish themselves right from other physicists who use the term retrocausation but they're basically talking about the same thing which is that 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 need to be able to grasp this somehow we need we need these clumsy uh 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 it does that's 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 that's where people's heads go right but the more you sit with it you get to another place that's that i think that's a devil's advocate because i'm on board yeah that's that's what hangs people that's people's hang up it is a literal hang-up people get hung up on this on this question of free will and free will and free will and free will 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 um you can't know the future that that's the thing this is the par this is the boy called 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 that's an action just as much as as getting up and putting on your pants and going to work uh that's true so it's like it doesn't make any you know you got to do something and uh uh and when so i'm a zen guy all right and really yes and and when you sit with this when you sit with the block universe as a koan as a kind of you know koan you reach a point where you go holy that's it's beautiful and it's like it's liberating it's liberating to get rid of the baggage of free will determining 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 koan as a as a you know as a riddle to be solved and don't just like turn away 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 um and 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 which scientists don't behave scientifically well uh generations of physicists have avoided a very an elegant conclusion or a very obvious 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 because of this problem of distinguishing between you know when you're trying to find the evidence and you when you measure something you're interfering with it so how is your measurement you know is it is it simply changing the future or is it changing it's 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 of course you can't prove that that will always be right 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 hemeroff 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 and yeah so the the bootstrap paradox is my favorite i mean it's it's another way of putting a time loop basically um uh it's uh the idea so say you have a uh uh here's an example that david deutsch uh the physicist and quantum computing pioneer uses in in a paper that he wrote in the 1990s he says okay you have a uh uh a nobel prize winning physicist i'm sorry nobel prize winning mathematician uh 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 um 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 like bothered me since star trek for the voyage home exactly right exactly how do we know you didn't invent the thing exactly it's it's it's there at the 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 uh in fact i think that that everything is bootstrapping wow i hadn't it goes all the way down that that it in a time travel universe in a universe that at allows time travel at all ultimately everything is bootstrapped everything's a bootstrap i guess it has to be and this is and this is why i love the topic this is why i wrote my last book um where was it before the dream because it it is an answer to that question of of you know 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 right older self and that's plagiarism of the future plagiarism of the future so this is this is this is the time loop at the heart of creativity i think and it's create and it's literally creation ex nihilo 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 some little imp is putting it hammering it together or putting it together nowhere that your that your brain is piecing together things and creating a new thing it's it's receiving it as a gift from its future self you are the muse yeah of yourself yeah i when i when i'm having good ideas now i find myself thanking my future self like i appreciate that that's great that's good idea yeah yeah is that driving some of your work yeah totally yeah yeah yeah it's it's um i i think it's an inspiring way of thinking about about about art and creativity but about you know just creative solutions in general i you know i think that's i think that's what's happening it's easy to show it's easier to show with art because um 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 it's a little harder with things like inventions and scientific theories and stuff like that uh they just are not as amenable to that kind of confirmation uh process and that kind of comparing with a person's biography but uh 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 flow state is when you are cooking uh in terms of that 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 any anyone who's who's uh uh doing some skilled activity a martial artist or um you know a jet fighter pilot or a brain surgeon you know they're in a zone yes they are not thinking about their free will this is another reason i tell people stop worrying 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 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 that's like you know cycling through time as well as space uh it's uh you know that's what you know the zen you know it's a zen thing you know we the zen zen masters are all about finding that state where you are not freely willed you know you are you are doing what must be done and it this i'm going to go off script a little bit because something just occurred to me as you're saying this is um as a martial artist as a performer and sitting here in this room when things are moving well it's 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 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 yeah you're doing stand-up you're like oh the audience is kind of rough of tonight let's let's try this material what what do you think is going on in the mind but we've got these split monologues yeah that's a great question you know i i come back to um it's an idea that i talk about in in time loops a bit called liebit's golem if benjamin liebit was uh a neuroscience terrifying terrifying research terrifying research about how you know we're out of sync with with reality we may have to describe experiments but yeah well that would be fine but the thing is the 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 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 even when you're sinking a bunch of baskets yeah you're on something's going on yeah yeah totally and you talk to psychics remote viewers go into that state too when they're you know when they're cooking what do you think remote viewers are they are they remembering the future as well this is a big debate there's a big debate in the field i mean i i think that's a hypothesis that needs to be tested and no one's testing it um well i saw you criticize pat price well i'm a huge pat price fan and when you kind of described 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 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 uh it needs to be falsified that you're not previewing or pre-remembering the feedback you're going to get afterwards true and and this is you know some very small experiments have been done to try and test this but not not on any scale and i i i always tell remote viewers you've got i'm unfortunately i'm not a an experimental you know parapsychologist i don't know i don't have the setup to to 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 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 nothing 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 the 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 and i i put it out there because no one else is voicing it and i think it's really something that that that the field needs to address well that's why i asked you because when i read your work i put it down and i just like oh i hadn't considered that's why i ask you these masculine 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 because it's 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 and and i get it i you know people don't want a cold water thrown on that and i'm i'm just i'm saying look this is you if you're gonna 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 version of of a story and seeing if that reductive version can explain the results and maybe it can't you know i'm i'm open that maybe there is more remote viewing than precognition. certainly talk to people who are who are very convinced that that's the case um but it's it needs to be done in the context of 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 um and he 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 this was 1978 i think with the sri guys 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 and pemrose hammer of work yet not that i'm aware of where do you stand on on that quantum process i'm very much in favor of hammer off's work the anesthesia 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 that's where the significance of microtubules is um so micro so we were talking about memories being consolidated and then we were talking about the importance of yes okay um 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 uh that are pre-spawning to their own future states it makes perfect sense you know it really creates a perfect little hypothesis for how precognition works um so i think you know i think there and microtubules aren't the only structures and 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 uh theory that it's um are you not interested in it i'm not really i don't i don't think i i think consciousness is people are being premature in thinking that we can get to the part of what consciousness is because there are there are really good arguments to be made that consciousness is an illusion that 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 i find a lot of different physicalist interpretations of consciousness in the literature and i've read a lot of them and i find a lot of them 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 they're 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 uh right now or we're 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 i think we're being pulled towards survival i think that's what how precognition that's how time loops work in the life of an organism we're being drawn generally towards our survival i thought i watched you describe anxiety this way now that you mention it yeah i think anxiety could be a signal that signal of our of our future withstanding of challenges and threats um the that if we're not able to survive we're not able to survive 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 we're not going to precognize a future that's all roses and and and all good things in and nothing bad ever happening uh nor are we generally going to precognize uh hitting the brick wall of of death we're going to precognize close calls and guess what that's what people often have precognitive dreams certainly close calls uh 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 that and we could be talking about something as as trivial as the sink backing up or something like yeah it's just deal real really really minor threats and upheavals but uh but you know little things challenges that happen or things that challenge our security in one way or another our peace of mind things that challenge our peace of mind um but that but i'm still standing well that when people say why do we want to watch a train wreck that's why that's why that's exactly that's exactly it because why were we so glued to cnn on the morning of 9 11 because it wasn't us is it wasn't us right yeah yeah the 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 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 right view of human nature the 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 we're we're excited by that it's that it's that they're 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 i get you i get you well 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 correct in whether we say it or whether we say it or not we all believe in god and we all believe in the afterlife agreed and we cannot help it but believe that so i can sit here and intellectually say why i don't you know i haven't seen evidence that convinces me otherwise but deep down of course i believe sure you know but it doesn't i haven't i i genuinely have not seen uh convincing evidence that we precognize things that we don't that we don't survive to learn about but but that it is that is an interesting question there are there are a tiny handful of of precognition cases that seem to be about things that happened after a person's death a tiny handful um edgar allen poe his story uh something about gordon pym i forget the story but like he has a has a story about these these uh four people in a lifeboat who cannibal who three people who cannibalize the fourth person in the lifeboat and has the names and then after his death decades after his death there was a real case with exact those exact names and they cannibalize some of the people in the lifeboat i was in my synchronicity 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 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 uh they're wrong to do that but nevertheless it is real that coincidences happen and and it's in those names were common at the time and cannibalism at sea was actually it was surprisingly common uh you know so you can make the argument that it was that was pure coincidences but you know that's that that just validates my my favorite theory 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 i you've got a this is a problem nobody's objective completely and and this is why science is so important because science is a collective enterprise of people who are 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 um uh i i will say i've been led to a theory of precognition based on evidence you know from a from a place of not at all believing you know in anything like precognition uh 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 physics that explains it you know putting a lot of pieces together but will i be objective and tossing out a certain piece of of evidence that that doesn't fit my theory i mean the thing is i don't know if i'm going to be able to do it i don't know if i'm going to be able to do it i don't know if i'm going to be able to do it of any other cases like that gordon pym one right there aren't a lot you tell yourself you would be objective yeah but it'd make a great story maybe we'll keep it in what 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 combination it was of yeah yeah reading 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 for physics he debunked the grandfather paradox idea that that uh 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 you're thinking about this wrong any time you go back in time and have an effect in time that's part of the backstory of the present and including your travel your journey through time so he basically was articulating something like a time loop or bootstrap paradox in fact his term for bootstrap paradox is the term for bootstrap paradox which is the term for bootstrap paradox bootstrap bootstrapping uh is gin the gin you know they 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 uh an effect arising from traveling through a wormhole that where something arises literally from nothing uh so this was you know igor novikov was writing about this in the in the 90s um uh 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 just because now i'm now i'm off script i'm just asking my questions um orbs appearing from nowhere orbs splitting apart yes this what i talk about in becoming time faring so what are we seeing there i don't know but the the 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 uh that is consistent with a single object traveling reversing its course in time how does that work well an object say you have say you have a time ship let's say you have an orb time ship 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 gonna you're gonna pull that lever and suddenly the external world this is presuming you could see outside your yeah there are a lot of problems with this but you know you'll you're gonna look like when you pull that lever suddenly everything outside your ship is gonna look like it's a film in reverse okay it's ever everything's gonna look like an hg wells story it's gonna it's gonna look well hg wells and his story mainly went to the future really talk about but he talked about how he watched things happening yeah but but but in this case if you pull the lever say you're going you're 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 in reverse and you're going to see history happening backwards okay like a film in on rewind okay from an outside perspective the outside observer what they're going to see is two time ships identical time ships emerging and disappearing yes that's what it's going to look like to an outside observer and likewise say you um you know you you're enjoying the sort of the history rewinding for a while i'm gonna 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 and and so that that whole that s-shaped movement would look like um 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 i worked this out for myself uh using flip books flip books yeah okay i uh i wish i'd brought them actually they're uh uh 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 little stop motion animations um on my website you can find out on my website for some of the stuff i talked about in that book um but uh i worked this out in flip books using little orbs and flip books and like what it would look like and it's like really trippy to to you know what this visual effect is and it is consistent with with some descriptions of of of um of ufo behavior and so you know what that's that's where my why i support mike masters you know or at least the the plausibility of his hypothesis that that it's it's again i'm less interested in the anthropological part of it but in the uh the behavior of 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 you could 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 i use in the book is um apparently uh verner von brown now he wasn't there to see it he wasn't at the trinity test but 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 uh well like what if it was a single object single single guy in a time ship you know wanting to get multiple vantage points on this single this is this event and scrub it back and forth like you were looking at scrubbing scrubbing a timeline scrubbing a timeline back and forth wow what if it was a single object scrubbing a timeline scrubbing 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 um so yeah i uh i wish i'd brought those um flipbooks because it's it if you have them online we'll we'll throw them online i uh there's a website i did i did little my daughter helped me uh make little like stop motion animations of flying saucers merging and stuff like that so what are we missing out of um time faring that we should cover i mean i think i could throw all my stuff i'll talk to you for hours you know the the don't get hung up on grandfather paradoxes these like these hang-ups that people have about about time and time travel um they're they're totally false they're they're they're myths and the thing is they're they're falsehoods that have been uh promoted by some of the greatest minds of our time like stephen hawking yes thought that 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 burger uh the the there's time travel does not lead to 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 eric i don't know we covered a lot where should they go where do you want them to go um the night shirt um if you're into sci-fi the night shirt yeah i don't really contribute i mean i i i don't have time to blog anymore i'm on lately i've been putting some things on my sub stack it's also the night shirt um and um uh they can find my books on my website and you know they're all on amazon and nobody should follow you on twitter right let's not oh 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 then when twitter changed i lost i lost you know you did yeah i had i was i was and i was in 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 uh hell site but uh 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 sub stack i didn't know you were doing that the night shirt was mostly the way i prepared for this oh 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 sub stack 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 i reposted those on on the sub stack 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 re i sort of rewrote 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 is great this has been really fun really fun you'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 that comes directly from einstein's special relativity herman minkowski formalized it 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 daryl 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 were future studying improved past performance the results were statistically significant and here's what most people think about erotic images and that's that they're not actually erotic but that's what people don't know bem's work has been replicated a 2015 met analysis found 90 independent experiments many showed the same effects 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 calendrical 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 the same 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 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 episodes 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 night shirt 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 the truth and know that you are appreciated i played polybius in area 51 a secret code inside the bible said i was i love my ufos and paranormal i love my ufos and paranormal fun as well as music so i'm singing like i should but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth my friends and it never ends no it never ends I fear the crabcat and got stuck inside Mel's home With MKUltra being only two away Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone On a film set with the shadow people there The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man And I'm told, and his name was cold And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fishes Heck, I'll fish out Thursday night, Wednesday, J-2 And the robots have been eating all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the world falls on its feet all through the night The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come to have got the secret city underground mysterious number stations planet surf 02 project stargate and where the dark watchers found in a simulation don't you worry though the black That said a lot, it told me so I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish Heckle fish on Thursday nights when they chase you And the wild boars on the beat all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the wild boars on the beat all through the night And the fish on Thursday nights when they chase you And the wild boars have been beat all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the wild boars have been beat all through the night Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, yeah Gertie loves to dance on the dance floor, because she is a camel, and camels love to dance when the feeling is right or wasting time At Harmony Bank, we believe that better happens together. 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