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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:29AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Taboo? I've been saying this for years. Every time I get married, I get the feeling it's a bad idea. Taboo.

• 0:49AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Black universe? Sounds like where the lizard people keep the good timeline locked up.

• 1:03AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Well, every year I dream I'm gonna get audited by the IRS. Taboo.

• 1:17AJ Gentile?

  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 gonna like this one. Let's go down to the basement.

• 1:42AJ Gentile?

  Dr. Wargo, welcome to the basement. I'm excited. I'm excited for this.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  I'm excited too.

• 1:47AJ Gentile?

  Before we get started, tell me why, on God's green and glorious earth, would anyone own a monitor lizard? Why?

• 1:56Speaker 03

  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 the 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 kinda started wanting one too

• 2:30AJ Gentile?

  what really

• 2:31Speaker 03

  yeah I've all monitor lizards are the coolest I when I was a kid I was I monitor lizard were just the coolest animals on earth you know Komodo dragons are the monitor lizards you know and so uh you know my father-in-law said he'd help out you know financing financing the vivarium and yeah so last April we got a baby spiny-tailed monitor lizard and he's grown into a lovely you know two foot long um little creature that we love dearly it's

• 3:11Speaker 03

  been a wild very interesting experience learning about you know reptile husbandry and uh 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

• 3:35AJ Gentile?

  what's his name

• 3:36Speaker 03

  his name is sunflower

• 3:37AJ Gentile?

  okay she named him are you are you feeding like live mice or

• 3:42Speaker 03

  live insects

• 3:43AJ Gentile?

  live insects

• 3:44Speaker 03

  yeah yeah

• 3:45AJ Gentile?

  okay

• 3:45Speaker 03

  yeah uh but he's 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 he's very chill you know we handle him and pet him and and

• 4:01AJ Gentile?

  do you walk around the house

• 4:03Speaker 03

  no he needs unfortunately the the difficulty with lizards and especially monitor lizards is they require very high temperatures so he has uh you know he has like a basking rock that's like 110 degrees and and you know brave bright lights in his enclosure

• 4:22Speaker 03

  But no, he's awesome. And I, you know, and they're fascinating. It's just fascinating to to bond with another kind of animal, you know, it's like, it's fascinating enough to bond with a cat or any other kind of mammal, but to develop a bond with a reptile is really, it's a, it's another level if you're, if you're an animal person, which everyone in my family were all animal people.

• 4:47AJ Gentile?

  Same. So it, it recognizes?

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:50AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. No, he totally trusts. It takes a lot longer to develop that bond. It took a few months, you know, to get him comfortable with, with us and comfortable with us being around him, first of all, and then eventually handling him and so on. It's not like a kitten or something like that. But no, he's, he's, he's great. And he, you know, looks forward to seeing me every morning when I

• 5:14AJ Gentile?

  greeting you at the door?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, he, he's, he's really cool. Yeah. So I'm glad you asked about that. Yeah.

• 5:20AJ Gentile?

  So how long, how long does sunflower live?

• 5:23Speaker 03

  He's going, well, knock on wood. He is, he is, uh, he could live as long as 20 years.

• 5:29AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:30AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, and we're hoping that he will, because he's, uh, he's awesome.

• 5:37AJ Gentile?

  I've had birds, so I guess it's kind of the same thing. Yeah.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:40AJ Gentile?

  Cause you wouldn't expect them to recognize you, but my little Maxie, he definitely, he definitely did.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Well, birds are incredibly intelligent. I mean, they're, they're mammal level intelligence. And, uh, yeah, that doesn't surprise me. What kind of bird is it?

• 5:52AJ Gentile?

  He was a cockatiel.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Cockatiel.

• 5:54AJ Gentile?

  He's a while ago. Um, cause I have cats now and I, they wouldn't do well with a cockatiel.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:58AJ Gentile?

  I've thought about, um, like an African gray.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:01AJ Gentile?

  They live so long that it would outlive me.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:04AJ Gentile?

  So I'd, you know, you have to will your pet to somebody.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:08AJ Gentile?

  You don't want to be on the receipt, receiving end of that.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Right. Right. Totally. Now, well, I highly recommend monitor lizards. They're very, very, very, very cool.

• 6:17AJ Gentile?

  Uh, you know, I feel bad for her roommate in college, wherever she goes.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Well, I kind of suspect.

• 6:25AJ Gentile?

  That'll, that'll

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Dad will be, you know, but that's, you know, we'll cross that bridge if we come to it. That's, we've still got eight years or so till that happens.

• 6:33AJ Gentile?

  Right. Uh, speaking of college, so you, your PhD is in, in cultural anthropology.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:39AJ Gentile?

  And then you moved into more psychology. So can you tell us about your background, your parents?

• 6:45Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, so I grew up, my parents were psychologists, uh, growing up. And then when I studied anthropology, I really sort of studied psychological anthropology. So I got like a real, real basis in, in, uh, psychological theory and psychoanalysis and so on. And, uh, and I, after I got my degree finally, after a long time that I don't even want to talk about or remember, um, 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.

• 7:22AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  And Washington DC is where those people congregate.

• 7:26AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Uh, because it's full of nonprofits and scientific organizations and the government and people who are hiring editors and writers, uh, who are smart and have, you know, a lot of educate, too much education and no real world experience. And so, so they work directly or indirectly for the government or for, for the nonprofit world.

• 7:49AJ Gentile?

  What is it like to grow up with two psychologists as parents? That sounds difficult.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I don't recommend it.

• 7:55AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 7:57AJ Gentile?

  I mean, there's gotta 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.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, or not, or not. Yeah, no, my, my, my, uh, well, my, I should say my dad was a psychologist. My mom had a master's in psychology, but she didn't work in the field. But my father was, he was more of a scientific psychologist. Um, he didn't, he wasn't seeing patients and stuff like that. Um, and then, but then that sort of. Was a natural basis for me to work for a psychology organization in Washington DC. 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 DC.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, and indirectly that job is part of actually my backstory that led me to doing the work I do, even though the work I do would be completely rejected by my former colleagues.

• 8:57AJ Gentile?

  Psychologists, they don't like this.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  They do not like this stuff. They are the most, I mean, studies have even been done on, on sort of the degree of hostility towards parapsychology of different academic fields. And psychologists are number one. They, you know, for them, anything smacking of ESP or, or, uh, parapsychology is, you know, they have a chapter on pseudoscience at the end of their Psych 101 textbooks and they'll put parapsychology in that.

• 9:29AJ Gentile?

  I remember it. I remember that from my own studies, yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, and it's real. I mean, that, we can talk about this, but the, the extreme prejudice toward parapsychology, uh, really came to disturb me, uh, when I saw it firsthand. And this was around the time that I was, um, learning about, you know, I, I grew up with that kind of knee jerk assumption that ESP is, is, uh, myth. But, uh, after I had my UFO sighting, which we can talk about, I, I was reading, you know, Jacques Vallée

• 10:14Speaker 03

  and he's, he's talking about psychic phenomenon, like they're real. And he's, here's a smart guy, you know, taking this subject seriously. And I felt, well, I need to do my due diligence here and, and read up on it. And that was, that was the huge paradigm shift for me. That was the huge ontological shock. I didn't have any problem 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.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Around this time that Daryl Bem's prominent research, we can talk about that too.

• 10:50AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Came out, his feeling the future studies, which I was like, what? I don't know if I can swear on your show.

• 10:59AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  What the fuck is going on?

• 11:02AJ Gentile?

  We're gonna say that a lot today, I think.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Okay, excellent. And then I realized, you know, I've had those dreams, I've had precognitive dreams, you know? I'd had a dream about nine eleven on the morning before nine eleven. Well, I have, and I had just swept it under the rug, you know? That's what you do when you don't have a.

• 11:20AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  When you don't have a mental box or a cultural box to put an experience in, you just, it just, it really just leaves your head. You're 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. 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.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  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, and my colleagues were considering writing an angry letter to, to.

• 12:30AJ Gentile?

  To the journals?

• 12:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:44AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 12:52AJ Gentile?

  Well, we'll get into the details of Bem's work, which is amazing. Take us to the UFO sighting and. You know, in full disclosure, 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.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  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, a sighting of two orbs, sort of dancing with each other and moving across the sky. This was in Philly on July 4th, 2009, and my then-girlfriend and I were camped out. There's a, I don't know if you know Philly at all, but there's a, in front of the art museum, my favorite art museum, there's a long sort of green belt kind of area. And I was camped out with a bunch of, you know, there was just lots of people there gathering, waiting for the fireworks to start. The fireworks don't start in Philly until sort of later in the evening,

• 13:55Speaker 03

  unlike a lot of cities. So we were camped out there and there was a, Sheryl Crow was playing on the steps of the, of the art museum. We couldn't see her, but you know, we could hear the Sheryl Crow concert. Sheryl Crow, who turned out, turns out is really into UFOs. I didn't even know that at the time.

• 14:13AJ Gentile?

  Did she see these?

• 14:14Speaker 03

  I have no idea. I have no idea.

• 14:15AJ Gentile?

  Because these were seen, yes?

• 14:17Speaker 03

  They were seen by others, yeah, because, so anyway, I see this thing, I, you know, I show my girlfriend and I tried it. I had one of those flip cams that they were selling for a couple of years back around then. And I, I tried to film it. Nothing came out on the film, but it was, it was far away and the light was bad. But anyway, you know, 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 of the same thing.

• 15:02AJ Gentile?

  Were you a UFO guy at that point?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  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, until then, I had no idea that there were serious people actually studying it scientifically and so on. I didn't know who Jacques Vallée was and all that. But anyway, when I saw that there had been other reports of the same thing in eastern Pennsylvania on the same night, I thought, okay, well, I'll make my report to MUFON. And so a MUFON guy called me and, you know, I made my. Made my report. So 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 Jacques Vallée's books.

• 15:48AJ Gentile?

  You're like, these guys are actually really smart.

• 15:49Speaker 03

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

• 16:31Speaker 03

  with UFO encounters, that part, that was really, that was the, I guess, when people use the word ontological shock, I mean, it wasn't an all at once shock, but it was a kind of a gradual paradigm shift for me to first countenance the idea that maybe psychic phenomena are real, maybe these things really happen. And and then, you know, gradually realizing, well, you know, I have these experiences, I have precognitive experiences and so on.

• 17:03AJ Gentile?

  Did you run this by mom and dad?

• 17:05Speaker 03

  No.

• 17:06AJ Gentile?

  No. Okay.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  No.

• 17:07AJ Gentile?

  Ever?

• 17:08Speaker 03

  No, no, actually, my my father passed away that year. Actually, that was, that's, that's kind of an interesting aspect of this experience, because this happened in July 2009. My father had cancer at that point, and he went, he passed away that September or October. And in fact, like, a lot of life upheavals happened. My girlfriend broke up with me in that September, my father passed away, a lot, a lot of real heavy stuff. And to deal with my father's passing, he had, he had gotten into oil painting after he had retired. And he had all these

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Oil paints and equipment, easels, and he's the kind of hobbyist who like buys every possible piece of equipment for their hobby, and in most cases doesn't even wind up doing it.

• 18:01AJ Gentile?

  I know that guy.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know that guy. I'm kind of that guy too. Yeah, but anyway, so he had all this great oil painting stuff, and I had never been a painter, but I thought, well, you know, I'm gonna take all this stuff back to Washington DC. So I wound up spending about six months getting really into oil painting and painting these gigantic paintings of UFOs, which are still now in my house. So that was kind of my way of working through a lot of issues was just like diving into art. But yeah, it was a very painful year in a lot of ways.

• 18:41AJ Gentile?

  That emotion probably makes sense for your story, yes?

• 18:46Speaker 03

  It does make sense, and working through it via art is something, you know, it's something I write about in my book From Nowhere, that, you know, it's funny the way UFOs and paranormal experiences, it often inspires people to do art.

• 19:04AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  And they work through it that way. It's just like in Close Encounters, you know, he has a UFO encounter.

• 19:09AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Like builds a sculpture in his living room, and you could, you know.

• 19:13AJ Gentile?

  Jacques Vallée is one of the characters in that movie.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, and you could remove the UFOs from the story completely, and you could make it a story about a male midlife crisis.

• 19:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you could.

• 19:25Speaker 03

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

• 19:55Speaker 03

  You know, it's my favorite art museum bar none.

• 19:58AJ Gentile?

  Did you seek out other experiencers or mutual support or anything like that?

• 20:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:19AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Uh, but it got me then to do the reading, but, uh, no, so I didn't talk to other experiencers at that point.

• 20:27AJ Gentile?

  Well, we talked earlier about how history will probably be very kind to Jacques Falay is about his prescience on this, on the subject. What was it about his, his writing that made you go, okay, this is something different?

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Well, he is a brilliant thinker and a very nuanced, subtle thinker.

• 20:49AJ Gentile?

  His background is bananas with?

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Is bananas with, yeah, but his side, but the thing is much more interesting to me than even his scientific background is his interest in hermeticism and alchemy.

• 21:00AJ Gentile?

  Uh huh.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  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. Uh, uh, it was, 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, uh, there was a conference of alchemists and sort of an academic conference on alchemists. And there was a big museum exhibition of Rudolph the second, who was the emperor who sort of supported, he was the patron of, of alchemy and all that. So this was sort of fermenting at the time when I was living there.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  And I didn't know anything about alchemy before I lived in Prague. But, uh, that experience living there and, uh, talking to some of the scholars who came for that conference.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  Uh, got me really turned on to alchemy. So I, for many years, you know, around the end of the nineties and beginning of the two thousands, 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

• 22:26AJ Gentile?

  I think I have the Emerald Tablet behind me.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Do you?

• 22:28AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, there it is back there on the wall.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Oh, awesome.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  He, uh, the, the fact that he brought so many multidisciplinary influences to his work

• 22:45Speaker 03

  was really appealing to me, you know, and not, he wasn't just a smart guy and he wasn't just a smart, you know, like Richard Dolan, like fantastic researcher, you know, just like this is fantastic. He's an actual bona fide historian doing, doing real research. But Jacques Vallée was bringing all these different influences to his thinking and I just, I really

• 23:04AJ Gentile?

  He's a venture capitalist for 15 years.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  There's that, you know, it's like, yeah. Um, so

• 23:12Speaker 03

  just so many, um, angles to his thinking and

• 23:18Speaker 03

  and he became, yeah, he, I really, you know, I, I still have a shelf of all of his, all of his books, you know, and, and which I've read and reread.

• 23:27AJ Gentile?

  So what specific thoughts, what specific ideas does Jacques have about connecting psychic phenomena to UFOs that attracted you?

• 23:35Speaker 03

  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,

• 23:46Speaker 03

  which doesn't matter, you know, I just, I just respect him as a, as a thinker and as someone who is thinking way outside the box. Uh, so, you know, the, first of all, just saying, look, extraterrestrial, but with that thought aside for a while, uh, 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, this doesn't seem like aliens visiting us from outer space. This is something, this is something very different and, uh, his You know, showing that this phenomenon goes back to the dawn of history was very important.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:52AJ Gentile?

  Ooh.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Treasured.

• 24:56AJ Gentile?

  That's right. You're a vinyl collector, aren't you?

• 24:58Speaker 03

  I'm a vinyl and a book collector. I've, I've got a very sizable library. Vinyl's too expensive, honestly. I, I, that was a few years and then I thought, okay, I can't do this anymore. But, but books, you know, I continue to buy many, many books. I think I keep eBay in business.

• 25:18AJ Gentile?

  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?

• 25:30Speaker 03

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

• 26:14AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  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 I'm, my assumption, you know, is that

• 26:33Speaker 03

  There's that, but is that, does that account for the whole of the UFO phenomenon? I tend to doubt that.

• 26:41AJ Gentile?

  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, they've broken the light speed barrier and they're here. It's just, it's easy for me to comprehend that this is a local phenomenon, that it's based on consciousness, or it's multi-dimensional, or something like that.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. And time travel. That, I'm, I am fully on board with Mike Masters' thesis that, that time travel could be a part of it.

• 27:17AJ Gentile?

  Sure, so Mike Masters, anthropologist.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Anthropologist.

• 27:21AJ Gentile?

  The grays are.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Who says that, that, yeah, he's, he's looking at it, he's a physical anthropologist, and he's looking at it more from the standpoint of morphology of grays that, you know, for all kinds of reasons, they look like what we might evolve into.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  I'm less persuaded by that argument. He's, he's of the school of thought that, you know, extraterrestrials are going to look like everything, they're not going to be humanoid. I kind of disagree with that. I think that, that convergent evolution is going to result in humanoids everywhere.

• 27:53AJ Gentile?

  So that's the Copernican principle. That's interesting, that, that, that life, no matter where it evolves, is going to take sort of the same course.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Same course, yeah. Not life, but civilization, you know.

• 28:02AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  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, a vertical body. I think that's, my, my money would be that, that the universe will be full of humanoids. So that, that part I don't necessarily agree with, 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.

• 28:45AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  I think there are all kinds of reasons that that hypothesis should be front and center.

• 28:52AJ Gentile?

  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?

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Something like that, some proto-primate.

• 29:05AJ Gentile?

  That's.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Species, yeah.

• 29:06AJ Gentile?

  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?

• 29:18Speaker 03

  You know, there's the idea that had mammals not taken over the earth after the Chixalube meteor, that reptiles would have potentially evolved a, you know, an upright.

• 29:36AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Humanoid-like, intelligent.

• 29:43AJ Gentile?

  It's one of my favorite sci-fi tropes is like the story.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Of course, of course. And there was a, I'm trying to think if he was an anthropologist. Dougald Dixon wrote some books in the eighties, you know, sort of projecting, you know, what, what would, you know, what would these alternative evolutionary?

• 30:04AJ Gentile?

  I'm gonna have to write him down, Dixon.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  I think, I think I'm getting that right as far as, but I know that there's somewhere there's a like a sculpture of a sort of a reptilian humanoid.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  That's, you know, sort of a hypothetical, you know, reptile.

• 30:22AJ Gentile?

  I smiled too when I talk about it, but there's 10% of my audience that's screaming at at us right now that the reptilians is totally real. It's definitely real.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  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 Icke, you know.

• 30:41AJ Gentile?

  Some interesting theories.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 30:48AJ Gentile?

  He was.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  And.

• 30:50AJ Gentile?

  It's just the presentation that's off-putting.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  It's the presentation and then there's the reptilian's ideas like.

• 30:57Speaker 04

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• 31:25Speaker 03

  You know, I have trouble with that, but whatever. I'm, I, at this point in my life, I'm not, I'm not rejecting anything. You know, this is, this is definitely a time of ontological shock in a lot of ways, you know, political ontological shock and, and.

• 31:42AJ Gentile?

  Well, what you read on the, um, on the disclosure narrative, is this something, is this a psy-op? Are we being prepared? I know we're speculating, I just kind of want your thoughts.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  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 psy-ops going on. I mean, I don't think anyone would disagree with that. 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 these, this interference. Uh, and then there's people who want, want it disclosed, but nobody, no, very few people,

• 32:34Speaker 03

  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, full story. So it's just 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, I spent a couple of 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.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  People who are too credulous, or people who are, you know, obviously covering things up, and people who are spreading disinformation and so on. And that was long before the current wave since 2017. So I just sort of put the UFO topic aside, and it's only in the last couple of years that I've sort of gotten back into it. But I'm not, you know, I can't keep, I can no longer keep track of who all the players are.

• 33:33AJ Gentile?

  It's hard.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  And who's trustworthy and who's not, and who's, who's got, you know, an agenda. It's, it's.

• 33:42AJ Gentile?

  Well, I recently was attacked by the New York Times, which means I'm probably over the target, for saying that the government, our government, probably has anti-gravity, probably has some type of zero-point energy, probably has, or is at least working on some type of time travel technology. I know you're familiar with T. Townsend Brown's work. Maybe you're familiar with A.C. Gravity, Dr. Neil Lee's work in anti-gravity. You tend to agree that there's technology there?

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, Jesse Michael's stuff red-pilled me on that. I mean, I, that was another topic that I had, I had sort of been really skeptical about.

• 34:21AJ Gentile?

  Which is good. That's good. That's your reaction initially.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's important to have skepticism toward all this. But seeing the story of Thomas Townsend Brown, and, yeah, I'm convinced that that's, what you're saying is probably, probably correct, and that this is probably all in the hands of defense contractors who, you know, are not beholden to FOIA requests and not.

• 34:52AJ Gentile?

  No. Hal Putoff said that recently in the documentary, that that's how they would hide these, this technology.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. No, it's all making a lot of sense. It's all making a lot of sense, why we don't know more than we do. 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.

• 35:33AJ Gentile?

  Sure, they're just temporary employees.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  They're just temporary employees, and.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  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?

• 36:06AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  And I recommend that for anyone who wants to think about UFOs. You cannot think about this topic until you have learned a bit about how, what the United States did after World War II. And, and how our intelligence community works and how the defense industry works and how defense contracting works. And, and I think what we're seeing is that, that

• 36:39AJ Gentile?

  We are.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Those politics, those deep politics are really at play and

• 36:45AJ Gentile?

  From Roswell to Stargate, all the way through.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Everything, yeah.

• 36:49AJ Gentile?

  Well, I consider you a thinker, so let's, let's just play for a second.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Well, I'm glad you do.

• 36:53AJ Gentile?

  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?

• 37:12Speaker 03

  I don't think the scientific community, the scientific community is really aware of me. I think if you're talking about mainstream science, I think

• 37:20AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  People who are interested in, in these topics are often hostile to mainstream science. And that's where I get the pushback is because people see me as a materialist.

• 37:31AJ Gentile?

  And you don't consider yourself one?

• 37:35Speaker 03

  I consider myself sort of materialist, but I want to see. The answer is not to throw out materialism or to pretend that the last four centuries of science are bullshit, or that they, you know, we've been looking in the wrong direction. But we do, science needs, like every other human institution, has a lot of problems, a lot of biases, it's ripe for some major paradigm shifts. And that's what I'm pointing, that's what I'm saying is what there needs to, what needs to happen is a paradigm shift within science and within other fields as well. But I'm not, you know, I'm not someone who would say that, that the last four centuries

• 38:20Speaker 03

  of materialism has been, has been a dead end. I mean, people who say that materialism is dead, like, really? I mean, how many medications are you taking?

• 38:27AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  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? So.

• 38:38AJ Gentile?

  Look, I hate Big Pharma too, but I'm kind of glad they're there.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 38:42AJ Gentile?

  So that, that takes me back to, to just the thought experiment for a second is, what would, what does the world look like if those technologies become public? What?

• 38:53AJ Gentile?

  I mean, we can get, we're in sci-fi world now, but what does that look like?

• 38:57Speaker 03

  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, and they probably need to be. And there, it's going to be a long time before. They trickle down into our everyday lives. It'll probably happen first in the realm of computing. But

• 39:38AJ Gentile?

  In the realm of computing, meaning like quantum computers?

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Quantum computers, yeah. Uh, which I think are devices that are gonna facilitate communication across the fourth dimension, you know?

• 39:48AJ Gentile?

  Sure, we're even seeing that proven in labs now.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  But yes, I mean, potentially, you know, any, any, anytime you're talking about vastly superior energy sources like quantum, like zero point energy or, or whatever, or time travel, you know, it's like, these are disruptive things that could be turned into weapons.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  So there, 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 out there that the oil companies have been suppressing.

• 40:31AJ Gentile?

  Which I firmly believe.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Which I firmly believe as well. Uh, that's, that's, that needs to end, you know, and we need to do what we can to, to end that. And bring these, at least some of these technologies to humanity and solve our problems rather than create more problems.

• 40:53AJ Gentile?

  I see this, this fight between Young and Freud and all of your, your work, this where you, you lean into sort of this positive view and then, then you just, you pull it right back like, ah, okay, we're not gonna get there. We're not gonna get there.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  No, I'm not saying we're not gonna get there.

• 41:08AJ Gentile?

  You're not.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  No, I, I think eventually. But there are a lot of opposing forces, you know?

• 41:16AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 41:18AJ Gentile?

  Well, I, at least looking at, at time loops and how you basically solved 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.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  I've heard things.

• 41:34AJ Gentile?

  What have you heard?

• 41:35Speaker 03

  I've heard that there are weapons based on manipulation of time. Then that's literally all I've heard, but I have heard that and I don't. What do I do with that? I don't know, but.

• 41:50AJ Gentile?

  Did that source tell you what the actual practical mechanism is?

• 41:53Speaker 03

  They didn't know, and they didn't know either. They're telling me something that they had heard from somebody who'd heard it. So like, yeah, 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.

• 42:04AJ Gentile?

  But I believe it. Everything that we know about Stargate.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  It makes sense. It makes sense to me. You know, if the, uh, the Nazi de Glaca.

• 42:13AJ Gentile?

  Sure, the bell.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Stuff is real, uh, then certainly we have done something with that, uh, and.

• 42:24AJ Gentile?

  Well, if you're working on anti-gravity, you're working on time.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Working on time. 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.

• 42:40AJ Gentile?

  Okay, I'm trying not to let you scare me.

• 42:43AJ Gentile?

  But I do believe it.

• 42:47AJ Gentile?

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

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. 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,

• 43:35Speaker 03

  saw the implications of what he was saying, that if this is true, which it seems to be,

• 43:44AJ Gentile?

  then. What's true, connecting.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  If, if relativity, special relativity is true.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  If there's no objective reference frame.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  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 have no idea what's going to happen next. And you could say fuck and then, you know, 10 seconds, 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

• 44:38Speaker 03

  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 so we're all flowing, we're all, 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. And that, again, that future already exists.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  And theoretically can interact with the past in different ways. You can have things like what we call wormholes now, which were theorized actually pretty early. And

• 45:33AJ Gentile?

  By Einstein, by Einstein and Rosen, yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. But before that, I think it was Gödel who, who solved Einstein's field equations in a way to show that you could have a path through spacetime that actually wound up in your own past.

• 45:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  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, no, this, this, the math shows that this is possible.

• 46:14AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  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 take one of those hole, one of the mouths of the wormhole, and you move it in near the surface of a black hole, and then move it back out, then they're out of sync with each other, and you can have time travel.

• 46:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Um, so, uh, yeah, so there's, and then there's other possibilities, you know, warp drives, Alcubierre warp drives, and so on, which are time machines as well as space machines. Um, so, the block universe, yeah, is sort of the, the, the basic premise, uh, that makes all of this possible, and it's still not really questioned among most physicists.

• 47:03AJ Gentile?

  So this kind of throws away the many worlds interpretation, yes?

• 47:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and as far as I'm concerned, it does, yeah.

• 47:09AJ Gentile?

  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, shit, I'm wrong about all of this. And it doesn't happen a lot where someone just changes my whole point of view on a specific topic, but you did, because I think you solved the grandfather paradox.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  Well, do you want to talk about the, the, the scarab story?

• 47:38AJ Gentile?

  We can do that, yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, this is, honestly, this is my favorite example of a time loop. It really is the best illustration of, 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.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  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 the scarab. And he opens the, and he was a, whatever else you want to say about Jung, 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.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Uh, and you know, he said that it was the moment that opened his patient up to mysteries and so on. It was really a decisive turning point in her, in her treatment. Now, he sort of described this, and he used the term synchronicity to sort of collapse this sort of time dimension and say, time doesn't matter here. You know, this was, you know, she's telling the story about a scarab and then a scarab shows up. But really what was happening, you know, she had a precognitive dream. This was not synchronicity. This was, this was something unfolding in time in the wrong direction. You know, this woman had a precognitive dream about being handed a scarab beetle.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  And low and behold, the next morning it happens. And well, anyone who keeps a dream journal and is aware of precognition, like, yep, that's what happens. But in this case, what makes it, what makes that so hard for people to grasp is that, oh, wait, it was her telling him her dream that got him to open the window and give him the scarab. Like without that element, you know, this would not have happened. So they think, isn't that a paradox? But it's, it's not a paradox. It's actually a loop. It's a tautology 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.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  The beetle, which is what caused her dream in the first place. So it is a loop. It is a causal loop.

• 50:11AJ Gentile?

  What blew my mind was she wasn't seeing the future, she was remembering it.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  She was remembering the future, yeah. She wasn't seeing the future, she was remembering it. Uh, in a way, or pre-membr-ing.

• 50:22AJ Gentile?

  So, so sending information back.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 50:25AJ Gentile?

  To her.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Yes, to her younger self.

• 50:27AJ Gentile?

  So she didn't really have to do anything.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 50:29AJ Gentile?

  It was going to happen. She remembered it happened.

• 50:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 50:32AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:40AJ Gentile?

  She's just, it just unfolded. I think you call it the backstory, yeah.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  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 anecdotes? Because really, 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.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  But that's, it's the opposite of a paradox. A paradox is something that can't happen.

• 51:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  A 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?

• 51:48AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. But, but it's the way the world works, I think.

• 51:53AJ Gentile?

  So.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  In a time travel universe, in any universe where time travel or time traveling information is allowed, then everything on some level is tautological.

• 52:03AJ Gentile?

  Um, you said it must happen. That sounds like teleology to me. That sounds like Plato and Aristotle.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  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 from the story of science.

• 52:25AJ Gentile?

  Let's explain teleology. That's

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so teleology was one, so Aristotle codified these, I think, four different kinds of causation. And one of them, one of them was efficient causation. That's what we understand as causation. We have one thing leading to another, like billiard balls. But one of them was teleological causation. That is to say, the end, you know, telos, meaning the end,

• 52:49Speaker 03

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

• 53:30Speaker 03

  And, but the reason was that teleology, at that time, the only teleology people could, could imagine was God's divine plan.

• 53:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Okay. And the idea was getting rid of, taking God out of the equation, taking God out of the scientific equation. So what they did was throw the baby out with the bathwater, really. They, 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.

• 54:11AJ Gentile?

  But your future is pulling you toward this result.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  Yes, that's what I'm, that's what I'm arguing a lot, what more and more physicists are arguing is that no, no retrocausation. That's the new word for teleology.

• 54:25AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Sort of a non-divine teleology.

• 54:29AJ Gentile?

  And we'll get to that later, not just in theory, but in practice, how some cool experiments proving that. Before we go to the break, and I would like, love to come back with a couple more time loop stories because people love those and then talk about creativity.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, sounds great.

• 54:44AJ Gentile?

  But the last question is, why are we wired, programmed, evolved to perceive time in this linear way?

• 54:52Speaker 03

  That is a great question, and I don't have an answer to it.

• 54:56AJ Gentile?

  I don't think anybody does. I was hoping you had something, but.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  I can certainly say that you can imagine why you would want to perceive only the present moment. Or perceive only a very narrow slice of time that was synchronized with what's happening in your environment and your body and so on. Like, I don't, 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.

• 55:38AJ Gentile?

  Right. Worry about the bear. Don't worry about the future.

• 55:40Speaker 03

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

• 56:10AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 56:21AJ Gentile?

  Inklings and intuition.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  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. And what I'm arguing is that intuition is really based on real, you know, real signals from a real future, and it's not just calculating the odds of something happening based on what's happened in the past. It's actually getting signals, indirect and fuzzy signals from an actually existing future.

• 56:53AJ Gentile?

  That's a great cliffhanger. We'll be right back. We're back. Can we define what precognition is, or at least how you define it?

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Precognition is being influenced by a future experience in some way. Now, that could be, some people will say seeing the future. I don't think it works that way. I don't think it's a kind of perception. I think it's a kind of memory. I think it's memory going in the opposite direction, basically. But being influenced by a future emotional experience, for instance, or just an interesting experience, something salient in the landscape of your future that exerts an influence on you in the present. Now, via a dream, via intuition we were talking about, via, a lot of people, when

• 57:43Speaker 03

  they're meditating, will have flash kind of visions when they're meditating. These often turn out to be precognitive. People who are prone to sort of having a vivid imagination or very suggestive, you know, they'll have visions that are, or they'll hear voices. It's different for everybody. But they'll, in one way or another, it's that the future, future experience kind of leaking into the present and influencing you.

• 58:14AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 58:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it makes every bit of sense, based on what we, you know, what mainstream psychologists will tell you about dreams, which is that they're involved in the making of memories. Well, that, if recognition is a form of memory, then if at night, your long-term memory is being sort of formed based on recent experience or past experience, well, then why not future experience as well?

• 58:51AJ Gentile?

  Sure. And you're a long time dream journaler, yeah?

• 58:55Speaker 03

  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, I would say in the mid 90s, 94, 95?

• 59:27AJ Gentile?

  That, you still keep it up?

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, when I can. I'm, I have little kids now, and

• 59:33AJ Gentile?

  Right, I understand.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, it makes a lot of things hard, but 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, well, back in the 90s, it was WordPerfect.

• 59:47AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  I still have old WordPerfect files that I can't open because I, you know, I, they were password-protected and they're now a little floppy, just whatever, I, who knows what's in those.

• 59:57AJ Gentile?

  You must be a badass lucid dreamer.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  You know, I'm not that great at lucid dreaming.

• 1:00:02AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, 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 every now and then I'll have a lucid dream, but it's not like a regular thing for me, and I'm, I used to be better at sort of getting into a lucid State from meditating on the edge of sleep. I sort of had a technique and I kind of lost it. I lost the knack. But then again, I, you know, when you have kids, you kind of like, you don't have time for that stuff.

• 1:00:31AJ Gentile?

  It's really hard to do. It takes a lot of practice.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  It does. It does. And I, I even achieved an out of body experience.

• 1:00:40AJ Gentile?

  I wanted to, that was just on the tip of my tongue. Is lucid dreaming connected to out of body experience, astral travel?

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:01:02AJ Gentile?

  Have you had any of these?

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Yes, I've had, I've had.

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  I would say I've had.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Four.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  A couple of spontaneous ones.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  In the late nineties, I guess.

• 1:01:40AJ Gentile?

  With something going on in your life?

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

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• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  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. And then the one that I was able to successfully induce, this is after months of working with like one of the manuals on how to have lucid dreams, one of the modern books. It turned out to be, it was, you know, kind of a wild, weird, random experience, but it turned out to be precognitive, very vividly precognitive of events

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  exactly a year in the future.

• 1:02:56AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  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 thing.

• 1:03:24AJ Gentile?

  Last, a couple, about a week or two ago, I had a very vivid dream about dad. I woke up and I said, that was weird. And it was his death day, which I had forgotten about.

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, this is why, see, you know, consciously, we're not aware of the date necessarily. I certainly am not. I just like, I couldn't tell you what date it is right now. But 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.

• 1:03:55AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  It's that same process that's preminding you.

• 1:04:00AJ Gentile?

  Preminding?

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Preminding 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. My, my longest distance precognitive dream that I've clocked so far is 26 years.

• 1:04:15AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:16AJ Gentile?

  You have to tell us what these are.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Well, some, the, the problem is most precognitive dreams are just, they're, they're really, they're boring, like, they're, they're not things that would 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.

• 1:04:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  But nevertheless, it's very common. 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 pre-anniversary of events. I had precognitive dreams about the births, about very specific details of the births of both of my daughters, exactly a year beforehand. Now, that's a year. So it's like, you know, you can't, it's not like nine months. It's like it's a year.

• 1:05:00AJ Gentile?

  It's a year.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  Before, you know, exactly, very specific details.

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  And 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.

• 1:05:21AJ Gentile?

  Well, what was your one-year-one and your 26-year-one?

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Well, we'll talk about that out of body experience first. So this was wild. It was sort of a two-part experience.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  I, I was doing these exercises, these kind of meditative exercises to induce an out-of-body experience. And I had had semi-success previously, you know, you could go into a lucid dream.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Or you'll have sort of a sleep paralysis type of experience, or you'll have Kundalini kind of sensations. But this time, boom, I am, it feels like I am like,

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  just in, in reality.

• 1:06:06AJ Gentile?

  You skipped all that hypnagogic craziness?

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  Just go straight.

• 1:06:10AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  And, but where I was, was I was down near the floor of a closet in my hallway.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  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 at, 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.

• 1:06:51AJ Gentile?

  On your physical body or on your astral?

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  On my astral body, 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. But in this case, I'm staring at 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 in 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 the wind, but I was up by the ceiling, looking down through the window.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:08:09AJ Gentile?

  It'll pull you out.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  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 and like, whoa, wrote it down, everything.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  I was, you know, I was, I really didn't know what to make of this experience.

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:08:41Speaker 03

  I found I was I had that closet I told you about that's where we keep our we used to keep our our 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 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.

• 1:09:12AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:09:20AJ Gentile?

  Did you remember the experience when you're kind of rooting around the shoes like oh shit?

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  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 it banged the.

• 1:09:45AJ Gentile?

  That's okay. I'm excited too.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  I looked I was I was up by the ceiling of my study and looking down through the window and I saw two little green lights.

• 1:09:57AJ Gentile?

  The eyes.

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  And it wasn't eyes. It was it was my it was my power cord for my laptop. It was an Apple laptop that has a little green diode.

• 1:10:06AJ Gentile?

  This guy right here.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  Right there. It was the green diode, but he was being reflected in two panes of glass. There was two green dots. It's something I wouldn't have been able to see if I was.

• 1:10:17AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  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. That this was not an out of body experience. It was a precognitive.

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  precognitive of an in-body experience in a different location.

• 1:10:43AJ Gentile?

  You were floating.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  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, so I'm not saying that that's what all out-of-body experiences are, but I think it's a hypothesis that people should consider, uh, who are interested in this topic and who are able to achieve these things, uh, which is, it's very, it's very difficult and I've never been able to do it again.

• 1:11:07AJ Gentile?

  Can anybody learn this, though?

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  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, ah, I forget, there's a really great book from like the 1930s that's fantastic, and I wish I could remember the name of it, but, 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.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  So I was, I was following his, his guy, I think Astral Dynamics is his book.

• 1:11:56AJ Gentile?

  Is it like a wake-to-sleep method, that type of thing?

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  Uh, no, it's, it's more, it involves meditating, it involves 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.

• 1:12:25AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:12:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:12:44AJ Gentile?

  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 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.

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  Right, absolutely.

• 1:13:00AJ Gentile?

  Do you go back to your journal and when things, when something feels weird?

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  Um, sometimes, you know what the so the pioneer of precognitive dream work was a guy named

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  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 recommend he lived in a time when, you know, records took up physical space. And uh, so he recommended just keeping three days worth of of dream records and then throwing them out.

• 1:13:32AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  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 for a few years.

• 1:13:43AJ Gentile?

  Did you tell us your 26 year precognition?

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  No, I didn't. I didn't tell you that.

• 1:13:48AJ Gentile?

  We have to remember that one.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  Okay, it's not that interesting, but it it was interesting to me, but it was not.

• 1:13:53AJ Gentile?

  Well, these are all very personal.

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, very, very personal. Yeah. But uh, the point is, no one would have the time

• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  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. 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 boggling,

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  but like I, it would drive me crazy.

• 1:14:47AJ Gentile?

  It's a great task for AI because it's great at pattern recognition.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  That's, yes, if AI is aware of your actual waking life experiences.

• 1:14:55AJ Gentile?

  True.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  See, like, 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.

• 1:15:07AJ Gentile?

  Well, tell us your 26 year dream. And then you had a 9/11 dream, didn't you?

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  The 26 year dream was

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  this

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  it was a dream about it being in this, um, uh, this certain environment. Um, I'm blanking on the name of the artist.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, the, he was sort of a precursor of the surrealists, but um.

• 1:15:39AJ Gentile?

  It'll come to you.

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it'll come to me. Anyway, I was in this very specific environment, in this very moving around this square, and there was a character with a gun firing a guy. It was 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

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:16:47AJ Gentile?

  What was that?

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  I, I, it's too personal.

• 1:16:49AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:17:00AJ Gentile?

  Holy shit!

• 1:17:01Speaker 03

  Twenty-six years earlier.

• 1:17:03AJ Gentile?

  Calendrical.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Calendrical. I just, I think this is happening all the time and we're just not aware of it. Because, you know, who, who, A, who records their dreams? If they do record their dreams, do they go back to their dream records? Probably not. If they, you know.

• 1:17:15AJ Gentile?

  I don't.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the thing. I, like, I kept, you know, I kept 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.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  You know, most pre cognitive 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, you had a pre cognitive 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.

• 1:17:57AJ Gentile?

  Could our dreams just be littered with all these, just minutia of the future?

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  It's absolutely, yeah, it's minutia 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 nine 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, it's meaningful to you.

• 1:18:34AJ Gentile?

  Right. I spilled coffee on my shirt. It's bothering me.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:18:36AJ Gentile?

  But you dreamed about that two days ago.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:18:38AJ Gentile?

  In some way.

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:18:39AJ Gentile?

  You can't really recognize it because it hasn't happened.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  Right, right. Exactly, exactly, exactly.

• 1:18:46AJ Gentile?

  It's difficult to get your mind around it, but.

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48AJ Gentile?

  But I love it. So what is it about nine 11? Cause there's a lot of pre cognitive, pre cognitive dreams about nine 11. Is it?

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  I, I would bet that everybody dreamed about nine 11 before it happened.

• 1:18:58AJ Gentile?

  Were, I mean, were you in New York?

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  No, I wasn't. I was in, I had just moved to Washington DC, actually a week beforehand. I'd, I'd moved on September 1st, uh, 2001. Um, I was, I was living in a suburb, uh, of DC and working in Tenley Town 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.

• 1:19:26AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:27Speaker 03

  But, uh, no, the, that, that morning, uh, and I still have the dream record. It was, you know what? Uh, it was just a dream about two identical buildings that had this, these corrugated gray facades and they were mosques somehow.

• 1:19:42AJ Gentile?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  And, uh, and there are other details in the dream, which I sort of decoded afterwards that also made sense in terms of the events, but, um, You know, okay, that's weird. I wrote it down. And I don't even think that as the events were happening, I was thinking of that dream. I think it was the next day that I looked at my dream record and go, oh, shit, I sort of had a dream about this or related to this. But it's like, you know, I had no, never before since have I dreamed about two identical square buildings that have like gray corrugated façades. The, the topic of Islam and was not on my radar at all until that morning of nine 11, when suddenly it became on everyone's radar.

• 1:20:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  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 too sort of again, too personal, but that related to the topic of suicide.

• 1:20:53AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  And which makes sense again, in terms of the events of that day.

• 1:20:59AJ Gentile?

  So if lots of people are remembering nine 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 the news?

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  Their experience of watching CNN. Yeah.

• 1:21:12AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, there's a lot of stories like this. Um, in one of your books, you talk about the Michael Richards case.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21AJ Gentile?

  Would you mind?

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:22AJ Gentile?

  Regaling us? I know you've told it a million times. It's a great story.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  It's wild. Yeah. It's, it's one of the best stories, honestly. I mean, well, tragic, but I mean, one of the most clear stories, I think of, of precognition and the arts.

• 1:21:37AJ Gentile?

  We can invite everybody to look this up as you're telling this story.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Just look up Michael Richards. And we're not talking about Michael Richards, the comedian who was on Seinfeld. We're talking about

• 1:21:45AJ Gentile?

  This is Kramer.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  Michael Rolando Richards, who was a sculptor in New York in the 1990s. He was sort of an up and coming young, uh, Jamaican-American sculptor. And over the last couple of years of the, of the nineties, he made a series of sculptural self-portraits of himself, dressed as a, in a flight suit.

• 1:22:13Speaker 03

  Where he was, he had fallen to the ground, had parachuted to the ground, or where he was crashing to the ground, or, and in the most famous case, he's standing vertically erect in a flight suit and he's being pierced by multiple little airplanes. Okay. Well, sort of on the strength of his growing body of work, he, he got this, got studio space in Tower One. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council gave out studio space to a cohort of like 15 artists twice a year. So they would spend six months in their studios,

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:23:32AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  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, 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 lots of sculptures also of planes, planes crashing, there's watercolor that he did of a burning plane. You know, just the incredible imagery.

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  And just, but there's that one sculpture, which is called Tar Baby versus Saint Sebastian, of himself being pierced by airplanes, and that he died as a martyr on, on 9/11, is, is just, you know, stunning.

• 1:24:30AJ Gentile?

  It is.

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  Stunning.

• 1:24:32AJ Gentile?

  The other artist was, was it Steven Mandell?

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, David Mandell.

• 1:24:36AJ Gentile?

  David Mandell.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  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 watercolors of his dreams. And anyway, on the morning of September 11th, this is, here is 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 actually does a drawing of it. And he goes, what he always did when he had a dream that

• 1:25:20Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:25:34AJ Gentile?

  Again, we can see this photo.

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:25:53AJ Gentile?

  Is this what got you interested in creativity?

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  No, no, these cases, I mean, there are so many cases, like, they're not necessarily as vivid as that, but I-

• 1:26:04AJ Gentile?

  But artists seem to be sensitive to this.

• 1:26:06Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Anyone who's creative, using their imagination, they're tapped in to their, you know, intuitive, precognitive abilities. And this, when I wrote my first book on precognition, called Time Loops, it was the connections to creativity that really interested me the most, even more than dreams. Because, you know, partly, like, a lot of people don't identify with dreams, you know, like, some people who are really into dreams, really- Love hearing about dreams, but but a lot of people don't really want to hear.

• 1:26:36AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  You know, but everyone can connect to creativity in some way. If not in the arts and sciences, whatever, you know.

• 1:26:45AJ Gentile?

  Just flow state.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  Flow state, yeah. And I was really intrigued, you know, honestly, it was Philip K. Dick that the because he he had regular precognitive dreams 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.

• 1:27:10AJ Gentile?

  Tell that story and then let's get into Philip K. Dick because he's everybody's favorite.

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14AJ Gentile?

  So Morgan Robertson, which I covered was the Titanic story.

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Titanic story. So so in 1898, Morgan Robertson, he's this sort of science fiction writer, writes this novel called Futility about the biggest ocean liner ever called the Titan, which hits an iceberg on an on its third voyage.

• 1:27:37AJ Gentile?

  This is the unsinkable Titan in the novel.

• 1:27:39Speaker 03

  I don't know. Yeah, it's called unsinkable. Yeah, and it's it's on its third voyage between Liverpool and New York, I think going from New York to Liverpool in this case.

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  And it strikes an iceberg and almost all the passengers die because there's not enough lifeboats. And that's even like a plot point in the story.

• 1:27:57AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:58Speaker 03

  And so 14 years later, you know, he's as stunned as everyone else to read the New York Times headline that that, you know, that Titanic, you know, sinks and and most of the passengers are lost because there's not enough lifeboats. So, you know, really incredible story. And that's been looked at a lot, you know, it's that's that's one of the most famous.

• 1:28:21AJ Gentile?

  Well, he also wrote about World War One later on as well.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  Let's see, he wrote about he had a number of stories that people have argued were prescient of things. It's been argued that he sort of precognized like technical developments like sonar.

• 1:28:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:28:38Speaker 03

  Like that.

• 1:28:38AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  And he he and that 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. We don't know it, you know?

• 1:28:51AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  It feels like, like, you know, wait a minute, you know, like, how can these coincidences be happening? And it's your own precognitive, uh,

• 1:29:00AJ Gentile?

  Everyone.

• 1:29:00Speaker 03

  brain that's guiding you through life and you're

• 1:29:02AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:29:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:29:16AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  Everybody, everybody, yes.

• 1:29:25AJ Gentile?

  So Philip K. Dick, who invented precog, right, Minority Report?

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  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 about it. 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 the 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,

• 1:30:24AJ Gentile?

  Scanner Darkly?

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  Scanner Darkly, and then like six months later, before the novel came out, but he read an article in Scientific American or something like that about split brain research.

• 1:30:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:30:33Speaker 03

  And all kinds of examples like that. And, uh,

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  He's a wonderful case because you can not only see it happening with his fiction, but you can see it happening with his dreams because he wrote tons of letters and we have his letters. And if you want to shell out a couple hundred dollars, you can buy his letters, which I did, 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 Philip K. Dick's letters and Jacques Vallée's journals. You know, those are the-

• 1:31:06AJ Gentile?

  Can you get those?

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  Journal, yes. Jacques Vallée's journals. Are you kidding?

• 1:31:09AJ Gentile?

  I gotta write that down.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

  Forbidden Science, volumes one through-

• 1:31:12AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:12Speaker 03

  Six. Yeah. But anyway, so you can go through his letters and see him like telling his, like he had this pen pal in the late 70s. I'm blanking on her name, but he, you know, he'd write these long letters to this person and tell about these dreams he was having and a lot of the kind of rudiments of what became his exegesis or he can find in his letters. But he was having dreams that then would play out in his life. And in a lot of cases, he wouldn't identify himself. Like I, I think this is in time loops, I

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

  talk about a dream he had, that he was clearly precognizing close encounters, like, 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.

• 1:32:16AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  And there are interesting pre cognitive connections, I think, between him and Jacques Vallée going on.

• 1:32:23AJ Gentile?

  You have to tell us, but wasn't there one, it was mind blowing, where Jacques Vallée pre-remembered something about a PKD story?

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  Uh-

• 1:32:32AJ Gentile?

  Maybe it was Valis?

• 1:32:34Speaker 03

  Well, so I, I argue, and it's an argument, you know, it's hard, it'd be hard to summarize the argument.

• 1:32:41AJ Gentile?

  It's a fun show.

• 1:32:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. But I, you know, I think that Valis, I think is valley.

• 1:32:47AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  Um, because-

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  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, that extraterrestrials could be broadcasting educational material to us like Radio Free Europe.

• 1:33:22AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  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 is called, which was published after his death, as Radio Free Albemuth.

• 1:33:47AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  And it's about this teaching satellite that broadcasts things to awaken 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.

• 1:34:04AJ Gentile?

  Can you imagine running into them at a Berkeley bar?

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:34:09AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  If there are two people I would love to, you know, get together in a room.

• 1:34:14AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Speaker 03

  But, you know, at that time, we know that, 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 a, of an ESP experiment, which I don't rule out.

• 1:34:34AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, why? He'd be the guy.

• 1:34:36Speaker 03

  He'd be the guy. And I think it's, it's more than uncanny that he winds up, he calls this extraterrestrial control system, Veilis.

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

  And it actually looks like a French word.

• 1:34:54AJ Gentile?

  It does. It does.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:35:21AJ Gentile?

  He must have.

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  And I think he was precognizing it when he was crafting, initially crafting this story that became Valis. But, you know, long before he could read,

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  before he did or even could read Jacques Vallée's work. So I think there's a connection going on there.

• 1:35:41AJ Gentile?

  Did you find any others with Phil Dick, just for the fans like me, in his work that was precognition?

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  Any other?

• 1:35:48AJ Gentile?

  Any other just examples that, of PKD predicting the future?

• 1:35:53Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:35:54AJ Gentile?

  I don't mean to put you on the spot, I was just curious.

• 1:35:56Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:36:00Speaker 04

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• 1:36:29Speaker 03

  No, just dreams where he would predict something in his life, basically, but, um, I mean, the world becomes more and more Phil Dickian.

• 1:36:39AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  By the day.

• 1:36:40AJ Gentile?

  When the androids are built, we're gonna remember.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  Boy, yeah, it's, he was.

• 1:36:45AJ Gentile?

  Did you ever see his talk in Met's, uh, Met's Friends 77?

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:49AJ Gentile?

  Where he talks about, um, he was a Many Worlds guy. And he talks about that man in the high castle being an alternate reality. What do you think he was seeing if you, if Many Worlds is not a thing?

• 1:36:59Speaker 03

  You know, a person can be precognitive without having a correct theory of precognition.

• 1:37:04AJ Gentile?

  He could be wrong.

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  He could be wrong. That's fine, you know, who cares? In fact, I, there's a part of me that thinks maybe you have to be wrong.

• 1:37:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:12Speaker 03

  For it to work.

• 1:37:14AJ Gentile?

  You had a great story, but I forget the author's name of Lolita.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, Nabokov.

• 1:37:18AJ Gentile?

  Nabokov.

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  Okay, so yes, when he was, um, long before he became a famous author, when he was 17, he was this aristocratic kid, uh, in St. Petersburg, Russia, you know, collecting butterflies and writing poetry and stuff. Uh, and his uncle, the silly 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

• 1:38:03Speaker 03

  in a dream and says, I will come back to you as Harry and Kuverkin. Okay. All right. So what, fast forward 40 some years, I believe?

• 1:38:17AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:18Speaker 03

  I can't remember the exact number. He's living in Cornell, or living in, um, 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 Harris Kubrick Pictures has just purchased the rights to Lolita for a huge sum for like something 150,000, which at the time was a lot, still, still a lot, but it's, it was a huge amount at the time.

• 1:38:54AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:54Speaker 03

  And, uh, so he learns, basically from the New York Times, that he is now a rich man.

• 1:39:00AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  And, and here's the thing. So it's Harris Kubrick Pictures. Kuverkin, if you anglicized it.

• 1:39:08AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  Would be Kubrick.

• 1:39:10AJ Gentile?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:39:10Speaker 03

  Unbelievable.

• 1:39:11AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:39:12Speaker 03

  And then, so he got interested, uh, 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. Um, and.

• 1:39:22AJ Gentile?

  Who influenced a lot of writers.

• 1:39:24Speaker 03

  Hmm?

• 1:39:24AJ Gentile?

  It done.

• 1:39:25Speaker 03

  Yes, who influenced, yes, he influenced a lot of writers. Uh, but, uh, Nabokov found Dunn's book called An Experiment With Time. And.

• 1:39:37Speaker 03

  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, and see, see what matches you get. And low and behold, he got several hits, really nice hits of like exactly the kind of thing you would expect, which is like, uh, 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, uh, in the following couple of days, like little, little scenes in, in shows that he was watching. Um, you know, like the bulk of my precognitive dreams are like

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  things on Twitter. Sure. Yeah. Um, but, uh, yeah. So, yeah, he's, he replicated it and, uh, and yeah, J. W. Giddelman was hugely influential on mid-century writers. J. R. Tolkien being, uh, being one of them that people don't realize.

• 1:40:36AJ Gentile?

  No, um, I didn't either until, uh, until I read your work. Tolkien, I was like, ah, what was, what was your theory? That Tolkien used, um, the elves were, because they're sort of immortal and omniscient.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. They, they sort of live in this timeless reality. 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 know, unfortunately, if J. R. Tolkien ever kept a dream diary, which would be awesome.

• 1:41:29AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:30Speaker 03

  Which would be.

• 1:41:30AJ Gentile?

  I'd shell out for that one, too.

• 1:41:32Speaker 03

  Yes. But, um, anyway, Dunn's ideas, at very least, were influential on him and, and.

• 1:41:40Speaker 03

  He and C.S. Lewis talked a lot about-

• 1:41:43AJ Gentile?

  Just to wrap Tolkien, he has two unfinished time travel stories-

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:41:47AJ Gentile?

  Based on Dunn's work.

• 1:41:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:41:49AJ Gentile?

  Which, that's fun.

• 1:41:50Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, The Lost Road-

• 1:41:52AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:41:53Speaker 03

  Is one of them, and I forget the other one, but, uh, yes, he started, he started writing a time travel. Now, he and, he and C.S. Lewis, uh, because of Dunn's book, they, or maybe it wasn't because of Dunn's book, but they, they challenged each other. One of them, C.S. Lewis, was gonna write a space travel novel, uh, and Tolkien was gonna write a time travel novel, and so he got four, four chapters into it and never finished it. But, uh, yeah, that, and there's, there's a precognitive dimension to that unfinished novel, too, uh, that's pretty interesting that I talk about in one of my books, but, um, yeah, no, uh,

• 1:42:35Speaker 03

  J.W. Dunn was a really, really interesting, really interesting person, very interesting figure.

• 1:42:41AJ Gentile?

  Well, we stumbled on a segue, and I, so I have to pull another story out of you. We have Lord of the Rings, we have Peter Jackson, then we have the Beatles documentary, which everybody needs to watch. Everyone needs to watch.

• 1:42:50Speaker 03

  Everybody, yes.

• 1:42:53AJ Gentile?

  So there is some precognition there, which I wasn't aware of until he told the story, and it blew my mind.

• 1:42:59Speaker 03

  Well, I'm glad it blew your mind, because I was like, I was scared to tell that one, because I thought, oh, are people gonna just go, no? I don't know. I mean, some, some people I've suggested this to, like, looked at me with skeptical eyes, and it's like, you know, there's no way of proving this stuff, that's the problem.

• 1:43:14AJ Gentile?

  It's the unfalsifiable.

• 1:43:15Speaker 03

  It's the unfalsifiable, so, yes, so all this, this is speculation, but-

• 1:43:19AJ Gentile?

  I'm aware that you can make connections down the road and all of that.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:22AJ Gentile?

  It's just, it's interesting and fun, that's why we're here.

• 1:43:25Speaker 03

  Right, um, but, yeah, so, so, yes, everyone should watch Get Back multiple times. It is like one of the most phenomenal things, if you grew up, especially with the Beatles, it's one of the most phenomenal things ever put on film, and it's like unbelievable to be in this room with those four people, uh, and just watching their creative process is just, just beyond interesting. And so the, the, the way the series starts is, uh, I'm forgetting the exact dates, but it's like the first few days of, of what year, 1969?

• 1:44:01Speaker 03

  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, this musical idea. And he's kind of got the tune, but he's like, he's struggling with the words. All I can think of is get back, get back, get back to where he once belonged. Um, and then JoJo comes in, I think, I have the chronology written down. I can't replicate it for you exactly, but he, you know, a couple of days later, he thinks of JoJo. Um, uh, JoJo left his home in Tucson, Arizona, whatever. But, so, what, a few days later,

• 1:44:46Speaker 03

  George Harrison leaves the band. This is the big cliffhanger ending of the first episode. George Harrison leaves the band.

• 1:44:53AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:44:54Speaker 03

  Walks out, "See you around the clubs," he says, and walks out because he's kind of basically sick of Paul McCartney.

• 1:45:01AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:45:27AJ Gentile?

  Right, from another song?

• 1:45:28Speaker 03

  From another song George had written. Uh, uh, "Sour Milk Sea."

• 1:45:32AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:45:32Speaker 03

  Is this song that George had written and given to another, another artist. I forgot who recorded it, but, um, basically Paul took this line, kind of tweaked it a little bit, made it, "Get back to where you 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.

• 1:45:56AJ Gentile?

  Jo-Jarison.

• 1:45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. Anyway, uh, uh, and, and, and, and right that morning, the morning before George leaves at lunchtime. Okay, he, 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."

• 1:46:19AJ Gentile?

  Well, that's right.

• 1:46:23AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that's worth a re-watch. You'll watch it completely differently now.

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  But I mean, you can't prove, you can't prove that. But that's the way it works, though. I mean, these

• 1:46:31AJ Gentile?

  But Paul and John, they would have liked this theory. John would have liked this theory, I think.

• 1:46:35Speaker 03

  I think John would have, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:38Speaker 03

  That's the way it works. I mean, artists get inklings of things and they just get these ideas, like, where does this idea come from? But it's like, they have to work through, work it out, you know, just kind of like Roy Neary 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? You know, and, and,

• 1:47:01Speaker 03

  you know, you can reread that Close Encounters as precognition, if you want. Like, you can reread it

• 1:47:07AJ Gentile?

  It affects.

• 1:47:07Speaker 03

  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. 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.

• 1:47:24AJ Gentile?

  Well, any of these stories that are kind of teleological, where you're just sort of drawn to a conclusion or meant to be.

• 1:47:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30AJ Gentile?

  You can go back and see that you could be in a loop.

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  A loop, exactly, exactly.

• 1:47:35AJ Gentile?

  What is it about creativity and artists and emotion? Because all these seem to be tied to emotion, yes?

• 1:47:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I think, I think it's just that artists are more, you know, sensitive. They're more, they're more in tune with.

• 1:47:48AJ Gentile?

  Emotional?

• 1:47:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:48:01AJ Gentile?

  That third eye is always kind of a little bit open.

• 1:48:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:48:09AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:48:09Speaker 03

  And that's, 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. Mindfulness, you know, just being mindful. So that 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

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  have. I think it's, I think it's basic to our functioning and we're just not aware of it. And I think it's becoming aware of it that is what makes you a precog. You know, I think we're all precogs, but a precog is someone like Philip Big Dick, who is aware of this operating in their life and develops kind of an understanding of it, even if it's not, they're not necessarily completely correct. They don't need to be correct about it, but they can be just aware enough that they're aware that it's happening.

• 1:49:18AJ Gentile?

  Well, you set up a great cliffhanger again for the break is because this isn't magic. This is science and biology.

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:24AJ Gentile?

  I think we can.

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  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's perfectly fine to think of it as magic.

• 1:49:35AJ Gentile?

  Quantum mechanics is magic.

• 1:49:36Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:49:37AJ Gentile?

  I don't think anyone would, Feynman would say so.

• 1:49:39Speaker 03

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:49:40AJ Gentile?

  All right. So we, can we talk quantum mechanics when we get back?

• 1:49:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:49:43AJ Gentile?

  All right. See you in a minute. But 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 Bem could be a good place to start.

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  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 nineties, I think the early nineties when.

• 1:50:23Speaker 03

  A colleague of his, I guess, a colleague or another psychologist, anyway, named Charles Honerton, who was a parapsychologist and doing parapsychology research, wanted, he wanted someone who had training as a mentalist to be part of his experiments, because that's a good control, you know, to make sure that there's no cheating and that, and so on. And Daryl Bem is a trained mentalist. And he didn't necessarily have an interest in ESP or whatever, but he didn't, he wasn't a knee jerk, you know, he didn't, he just didn't know anything about it, but he was

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  game to sort of be part of these experiments, to sort of ensure that everything was kosher. And Honerton 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, Daryl Bem realized, you know, there's something to this, you know, he's getting results, and, and so anyway, in the, in the first decade of this century, he, you know, he already had a very successful career as a, on personality and various, various

• 1:51:43Speaker 03

  topics, and he was a very, very respected psychologist. But anyway, he did this large series of experiments, in which he reversed cause and effect in basic psychology paradigms, one of them being like priming, like you're, you, you know, a typical priming experiment, you'd be subliminally shown some picture or whatever, and then see how it affects your behavior afterwards.

• 1:52:12AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:52:12Speaker 03

  Well, he would do an experiment in which people perform on some test, and then are shown something subliminal afterwards, okay? So this kind of like reversal of cause and effect. Anyway, he got significant results in like eight of nine experiments that he did.

• 1:52:29AJ Gentile?

  Can we explain the curtain test?

• 1:52:31Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, like this, this is the most famous one. He, so he had, and these were very large experiments with large groups of undergraduates, but he had undergraduates sit at a computer and choose which of two curtains on a screen had a picture behind it, okay?

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  Now I'll add, there wasn't actually already a picture behind these curtains.

• 1:52:58AJ Gentile?

  They're just curtains.

• 1:52:59Speaker 03

  It was generated randomly after the mouse click.

• 1:53:01AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:53:02Speaker 03

  So, okay. Anyway, so they make a mouse click and then it shows if they're right or wrong. And they did, they performed at chance, 50% correct, as you would expect.

• 1:53:16AJ Gentile?

  50% was there.

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  When, when the picture to be revealed was boring, okay?

• 1:53:22AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  Like a beach scene or something like that. But when the picture to be revealed was erotic.

• 1:53:30AJ Gentile?

  Yep. Emotional.

• 1:53:33Speaker 03

  Adults engaged in consensual sexual acts.

• 1:53:36AJ Gentile?

  Porno.

• 1:53:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  They, they did better than chance.

• 1:53:41AJ Gentile?

  I think 70%, something like that?

• 1:53:43Speaker 03

  No, it wasn't that high. I mean, the, the, you know, the effect size is still small in these experiments. But, but statistically, because he had so many participants and so many trials, it reached statistical significance.

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  Okay. And then there's another series of experiments that sort of reversed the typical order of a memory experiment. So, so at a typical memory task, you might like be shown a word list.

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:54:28AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:54:28Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:54:46AJ Gentile?

  Just let that land for a second.

• 1:54:48Speaker 03

  Just let that land.

• 1:54:50AJ Gentile?

  They were reminded of certain words later, and those happened to be the words they did better on from the list.

• 1:54:55Speaker 03

  Yes. Retroactive facilitation of recall.

• 1:54:59AJ Gentile?

  Hmm.

• 1:55:00Speaker 03

  Is what he called this.

• 1:55:01AJ Gentile?

  Um, just to be fair to the skeptics, 2023, there was a replication issue, right? With Bem's research.

• 1:55:07Speaker 03

  Okay, there's a, there are a lot of controversy about this. Immediately, the skeptics jumped on this in, uh, this, this came out in 2011.

• 1:55:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  Immediately skeptics were enraged. I mean, my colleagues at one of the psychology organizations were enraged.

• 1:55:23AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:24Speaker 03

  Um, uh, anyway, and then skeptics said, no, this can't be replicated. And here we tried to replicate it and we couldn't. Uh, but a lot of teams around the world did replicate it successfully. Uh, and yeah, does, don't get on Wikipedia because you'll, you will see a completely biased.

• 1:55:48AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:55:49Speaker 03

  Uh, version of this, but, uh, I think something like 80 independent, 83 independent replications.

• 1:55:59AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:56:00Speaker 03

  Something like that. Um, so yeah, fascinating, fascinating evidence for something like precognition. He would call it presentiment, feeling the future. And that's what he called the art of the, um, what he called it in his original article on this.

• 1:56:18AJ Gentile?

  So for the skeptics of Bem's work, I think we have, um, in the late eighties, physicist Aronoff's split laser test as I hold my beer, right? That story?

• 1:56:29Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, this wasn't Aronoff. This was, um, oh, I'm Howell and Dixon, I believe. Um, this is also at Cornell, I think. Um, where they, uh,

• 1:56:45Speaker 03

  They took a laser beam, they put it through a beam splitter to create two identical beams. Essentially, they don't, the terms they use in physics are different, but they're essentially creating an experiment group and a control group like you'd have in a psychology experiment. And they did what was called a weak measurement on both of these beams, which is measuring the amplitude of the beam without interfering too much with the beam. And this is a challenge that we can talk about with these kinds of experiments.

• 1:57:14AJ Gentile?

  This audience.

• 1:57:14Speaker 03

  Every time you, you, you, you measure something, you're interfering with it in some way.

• 1:57:19AJ Gentile?

  Right, that's the collapse.

• 1:57:20Speaker 03

  The challenge, yeah, and the challenge is to try and find ways of measuring things that don't interfere too much, so that you can tell if a subsequent interaction is having a retro effect. Well, in any event, they, they split the beams, weakly measured both of the beams, and then did a strong measurement on one of the two beams. And low and behold, the beam that got the strong later measurement was amplified like 10 times compared to the, previously compared to the other beam.

• 1:57:50AJ Gentile?

  Previous.

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  Which suggests retrocausation. Now, you'll get controversies and physicists will debate the significant, you know, what this means and so on. But that seems to be evidence for retrocausation.

• 1:58:05AJ Gentile?

  But John Wheeler's Delay Choice certainly.

• 1:58:07Speaker 03

  That's would be another example. Yeah, there's, there's, so, so this is an active area of, of, of research, and multiple experiments have been conducted like, like that, that I just described, which seem to show retrocausation. Then you also have the field of quantum computing, which is showing that you can have indeterminate temporal ordering of, of computations in a quantum computer circuit. And I'm, you know, I admit, I am not a physicist, I'm not a computing researcher, so, you know, this is all above my pay grade, but there's so many,

• 1:58:47Speaker 03

  so many articles have come out in the last several years, showing that you can invert causal order in a quantum computing circuit.

• 1:58:56AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, and Cambridge, they're, they're solving problems from, with information from the future.

• 1:59:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:59:04AJ Gentile?

  Um, could we explain just a little bit about, uh, delayed choice? What's happening there? How it connects to time? The photons going back to the source, changing their state, that sort of thing? Just to remind folks.

• 1:59:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, uh, okay, so there's, um, let me take the example of-

• 1:59:23AJ Gentile?

  Or if you have a different favorite?

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  Well, the, like, one of the experiments that, that I think excited John Wheeler. So his idea was that you could, um, take late light from a distant quasar, say, and choose to measure it a certain way. Uh, and it would, uh, it would show that how your choice of how to measure it had influenced the light from that distant quasar. Well, uh, a, I'm blanking on his name, Ali, I think, uh, an astrophysicist. Um, I forget which university, but he, he heard Wheeler speak

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  and had an idea for actually testing this using mirrors placed on the moon by the Apollo astronauts.

• 2:00:13AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:00:13Speaker 03

  Uh, because they placed mirrors on the moon to bounce laser light back to sort of measure the very minute, like, changes in distance between Earth and Moon in different phases of its orbit. Um, well, they used, you know, they shot a laser at, at the moon and that takes like, what, I think a second for light to get to the moon and back. So that's enough time to change the parameters of the experiment.

• 2:00:35AJ Gentile?

  Unless you're Nixon on the phone, then it's instant.

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. Um, and, uh, and it showed indeed that you can, like, you can change how you're gonna measure light and the light somehow seems to know.

• 2:00:50AJ Gentile?

  It seems to know.

• 2:00:51Speaker 03

  Seems to know how it's being measured, yeah. Um, well, you know, seeming to know something that you shouldn't be able to know that, you know, that seems like telepathy, you know, but another way of looking at telepathy is that it's really precognition, that the, that the, that the light was influenced by that subsequent measurement and, uh, and that information essentially from the future traveled back in time along the world line of that photon.

• 2:01:20AJ Gentile?

  Right. It fulfilled its destiny.

• 2:01:22Speaker 03

  It fulfilled its destiny. Yeah. So, so, uh, yeah, there's all kinds of reasons to think that, yes, retrocausation is a real thing at the, at the smallest scales in nature. Now, you know, that, that quantum realm where you're talking about individual particles, uh, you know, behaving in seemingly impossible ways, but there are certain circumstances where you can scale up that quantum magic. And that's when this topic of entanglement comes in. When you entangle particles together, you can create a larger and larger object that,

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  uh, enters the realm of, of objects that we're used to interacting with. Uh, and you can demonstrate that quantum magic at a large scale.

• 2:02:11AJ Gentile?

  That could be the strong force measurement, right? Just this entanglement of the equipment?

• 2:02:15Speaker 03

  Or a quantum computer. A quantum computer is a bunch of particles that are entangled together to create essentially an object that performs computations. And, uh, it, and in those settings, you can, again, we talked about quantum computers reversing cause and effect.

• 2:02:33AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:02:34Speaker 03

  You can have a, uh, a material thing that is responding to its future.

• 2:02:40AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:02:41Speaker 03

  Okay. And, okay, then set aside those, those ideas and enter the realm of biology, where more and more people are thinking that the brain could be a quantum computer or have quantum computing properties. And if that's the case, you know, add, 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 responding to its future as well as responding to its past.

• 2:03:11AJ Gentile?

  So on the show, I've, I've covered quantum biology with the, with the cryptochromes and the bird's eye, which has been proven that they're entangling with the magnetic field. Quantum processes in plants where they're finding the

• 2:03:24Speaker 03

  Photosynthesis is a quantum process.

• 2:03:26AJ Gentile?

  They're, 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.

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  Right, right. And that's always been the, the point of skepticism. Uh, oh, you can't have entanglement 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 scaling up these quantum effects.

• 2:04:03AJ Gentile?

  I want to ask you about, um, microtubules in a second. Before we move to that, um, what did Niels Bohr, how did he address?

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• 2:04:39AJ Gentile?

  Retrocausality. I know he didn't like any of this.

• 2:04:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:04:54Speaker 03

  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. But the idea just keeps getting shoved aside, partly because of Niels Bohr's personality. I mean, he was just a very forceful personality and he

• 2:05:19Speaker 03

  he sort of got the whole field of physics to just basically agree to not interpret what was going on at a quantum level and just say it's random and just accept that the world is random on a fundamental level.

• 2:05:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:05:51AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:05:51Speaker 03

  And but Niels Bohr basically dominated the field.

• 2:05:59Speaker 03

  Until really the last couple of decades, when what's called the Copenhagen Interpretation, and he was from Denmark, so it's called the Copenhagen Interpretation, when it's kind of broken down. And and now you have these this kind of flurry of rival theories going on in the field. So you've got, besides the Copenhagen Interpretation, you have, you know, many worlds theory that we talked about. You've got

• 2:06:28Speaker 03

  Bohm's pilot wave theory, you've got 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.

• 2:06:42AJ Gentile?

  Like what? What are we looking at?

• 2:06:44Speaker 03

  Well, they'll tell you that to be really precise, you can't talk in terms of causation anymore and you need to talk in terms of constraints and like they'll 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.

• 2:07:03Speaker 03

  To be, there's a, there's a team that wrote a book relatively recently called Beyond the Dynamical Universe, which is 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 from, 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 expressions like influence or information

• 2:07:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:08:02AJ Gentile?

  It's so elegant. I don't know why there's such resistance to it. It's so elegant.

• 2:08:05Speaker 03

  Well, it takes away free will, or it seems to.

• 2:08:08AJ Gentile?

  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?

• 2:08:24Speaker 03

  Well, right. That's, that's where people's heads go.

• 2:08:28AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:08:29Speaker 03

  But the more you sit with it, you get to another place. That's, I think.

• 2:08:34AJ Gentile?

  That's a devil's advocate because I'm on board.

• 2:08:38Speaker 03

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

• 2:09:04AJ Gentile?

  Right. So.

• 2:09:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:09:21AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 2:09:22Speaker 03

  So it's like, it doesn't make any, you know, the, the, you gotta do something and, uh, uh, and when, so I'm a Zen guy, all right?

• 2:09:32AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 2:09:33Speaker 03

  And, yes, and, and when you sit with this, when you sit with the block universe as a koan,

• 2:09:41Speaker 03

  as a kind of, you know, koan, you reach a point where you go, holy shit, that's, it's beautiful. And it's like, it's liberating. It's liberating to get rid of the baggage of free will, determined, like, who fucking cares?

• 2:09:58AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 2:09:58Speaker 03

  It's not, it's just, it's just.

• 2:09:59AJ Gentile?

  Easy for you to say.

• 2:10:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:10:23AJ Gentile?

  True.

• 2:10:24Speaker 03

  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

• 2:10:43Speaker 03

  a very obvious and elegant conclusion, or a very obvious and elegant hypothesis about nature, simply because it is philosophically and culturally kind of uncomfortable.

• 2:10:59Speaker 03

  And that's not behaving scientifically either.

• 2:11:01AJ Gentile?

  No, it's not.

• 2:11:03AJ Gentile?

  Fortunately, they all haven't. So eventually, the evidence is just going to stack up.

• 2:11:07Speaker 03

  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, 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 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 nine 11 wasn't a coincidence. I mean, it's, you know, you can't prove that.

• 2:11:43AJ Gentile?

  That will always be the counter.

• 2:11:44Speaker 03

  The uncertainty principle. So that uncertainty principle is right there at the heart of the topic of cognition.

• 2:11:50AJ Gentile?

  So before we talk about Penrose and Hemmeroff, which everybody listening knows, let me pull another story out of you because I love the bootstrap paradox.

• 2:11:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:58AJ Gentile?

  Did you, you've addressed this, I think, in your work. Can you explain what that is?

• 2:12:01Speaker 03

  And yeah, so the, but the bootstrap paradox is my favorite. I mean, it's, it's another way of putting a time loop, basically.

• 2:12:10Speaker 03

  It's, the idea, so say you have a, here's an example that David Deutsch, the physicist and quantum computing pioneer uses in a paper that he wrote in the 1990s. He says, okay, you have a Nobel Prize winning physicist, I'm sorry, Nobel Prize winning mathematician. And he has access to a time machine and he goes back in time and finds himself, his younger self, you know, studying in the library and gives him the proof that he later won the Nobel Prize for solving.

• 2:12:53Speaker 03

  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 of solving that math problem. Okay, well, that's what makes, steam shoots out, shoot out people's ears, you know, it's like.

• 2:13:11AJ Gentile?

  It's bothered me since Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home.

• 2:13:13Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:13:15AJ Gentile?

  How do we know you didn't invent the thing?

• 2:13:17Speaker 03

  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 not really a paradox. Bootstrap paradox is a misnomer. It's a tautology. It's not a paradox.

• 2:13:33Speaker 03

  In fact, I think that that everything is bootstrapping.

• 2:13:37AJ Gentile?

  Wow, I hadn't considered that.

• 2:13:39Speaker 03

  It goes all the way down. That in a time travel universe, in a universe that allows time travel at all,

• 2:13:48Speaker 03

  ultimately, everything is bootstrapped. Everything's a bootstrap.

• 2:13:51AJ Gentile?

  I guess it has to be.

• 2:13:52Speaker 03

  And this is why I love the topic. This is why I wrote my last book, Where Was It Before the Dream? Because it is an answer to that question of, 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 by your older self.

• 2:14:27AJ Gentile?

  Plagiarism of the future.

• 2:14:28Speaker 03

  Plagiarism of the future. So this is the time loop at the heart of creativity, I think. 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 little imp is putting, hammering it together, putting it together. Nowhere that your brain is piecing together things and creating a new thing. It's receiving it as a gift from its future self.

• 2:15:02AJ Gentile?

  You are the muse of yourself. When I'm having good ideas now, I find myself thanking my future self. Like, I appreciate that. That's great. That's a good idea.

• 2:15:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:13AJ Gentile?

  Is that driving some of your work?

• 2:15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's it's 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 because, you know, you have an artwork that then is something like a dream journal that you could then compare to a later event or whatever in a person's life. It's a little harder with things like inventions and scientific theories and stuff like that. They are not as amenable to that kind of confirmation process and that kind of comparing with a person's biography.

• 2:15:58Speaker 03

  But I think that that's what innovation really is, is bootstrapping.

• 2:16:04AJ Gentile?

  What do you think's happening with flow state and sort of unconscious behavior?

• 2:16:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a flow state is when you are cooking in terms of that that bootstrapping.

• 2:16:15AJ Gentile?

  That's your future self, just kind of giving

• 2:16:17Speaker 03

  Flowing into the, yes, flowing unimpeded. Yeah, I mean, anyone who and it's, yeah, and it goes beyond creativity, like anyone who's who's doing some skilled activity, a martial artist, or, you know, a jet fighter pilot, or a brain surgeon, you know, they're in a zone.

• 2:16:37AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:16:38Speaker 03

  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

• 2:16:48Speaker 03

  thinking deliberately about your will.

• 2:16:50AJ Gentile?

  Every time.

• 2:16:50Speaker 03

  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. It's a, you know, that's what, you know, the Zen, you know, it's a Zen thing, you know, 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

• 2:17:20AJ Gentile?

  This, I'm gonna go off script a little bit because something just occurred to me as you're saying this is

• 2:17:27AJ Gentile?

  As a martial artist, as a performer, and sitting here in this room, when things are moving well, it's very automatic, but I will find myself with a second dialogue, almost observing. It's happened here a couple of times today, where I'm just sort of observing, "Oh, that was a great question. Oh, this is really interesting. It's going well," that sort of thing. Or if you're performing, you're doing stand-up, you're like, "Oh, the audience is kind of rough tonight. Let's try this material." What do you think is going on in the mind? We've got these split monologues.

• 2:17:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I come back to, it's an idea that I talk about in Time Loops a bit called Leibitz-Gollum. Benjamin Leibert was a neuroscience researcher.

• 2:18:12AJ Gentile?

  Terrifying research.

• 2:18:13Speaker 03

  Terrifying research about how, you know, we're out of sync with reality.

• 2:18:18AJ Gentile?

  We may have to describe the experiments.

• 2:18:20Speaker 03

  But, yeah, well, that would be fine. But the thing is, the upshot, I think, of his research is that we are actually, we are actually pulling our meat puppet strings from the future. And that those moments that you're describing, you know, like I'm a martial artist 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? That's, you know, again, how do we prove that? I don't know. But it is one way of interpreting.

• 2:18:58AJ Gentile?

  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, something's going on.

• 2:19:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, totally. And you talk to psychics, remote viewers go into at-state too, when they're, you know, when they're cooking.

• 2:19:13AJ Gentile?

  What do you think, remote viewers, are they remembering the future as remote viewers?

• 2:19:17Speaker 03

  This is a big debate. It's a big debate in the field. I mean, I think that's a hypothesis that needs to be tested, and no one's testing it.

• 2:19:26AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 2:19:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:41AJ Gentile?

  So they're just remembering they were right.

• 2:19:44Speaker 03

  That's, that's the hypothesis that needs to be falsified.

• 2:19:48AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:19:48Speaker 03

  Before we assume that remote viewing is actually, you know, sending your consciousness across space to some other location or to some target. It needs to be falsified that you're not previewing or pre-remembering, pre-membering the feedback you're gonna get afterwards.

• 2:20:08AJ Gentile?

  True.

• 2:20:08Speaker 03

  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 unfortunate, I'm not a, an experimental, you know, parapsychologist. I don't, I'm not, 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.

• 2:20:43AJ Gentile?

  Well, they're, they're happening. We're just, you know, Stargate never ended, I don't think.

• 2:20:47Speaker 03

  Right. But are they, but are these experiments that would falsify the precognition hypothesis?

• 2:20:52AJ Gentile?

  They're probably not, probably not focused on it.

• 2:20:53Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:20:54AJ Gentile?

  Did you remote view your wife's shoes?

• 2:20:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:21:07AJ Gentile?

  So remote viewing.

• 2:21:11Speaker 03

  But it's, 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.

• 2:21:21Speaker 03

  Needs to address.

• 2:21:23AJ Gentile?

  Well, that's why I asked you is because when I read your work, I put it down and I just like, oh shit, I hadn't considered. That's why I ask you these, I ask you questions. Maybe it's not even your field, but you're here. So might as well pick the brain.

• 2:21:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's, you know, remote viewers will get understandably touchy about it because I mean, 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, I get it. I, you know, people don't want cold water thrown on that. And I'm, I'm just, I'm saying, look, this is, 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, you know, version of, of a story

• 2:22:18Speaker 03

  and seeing if that reductive version can explain the results. And maybe it can't, you know, I'm, I'm open that maybe, maybe there is, you know, more remote viewing than precognition. I, I certainly talked 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.

• 2:22:42AJ Gentile?

  And hard to get that published.

• 2:22:43Speaker 03

  It's hard to, yeah, it is.

• 2:22:45AJ Gentile?

  Probably not an accident that Jacques Vallée was hanging around SRI in the seventies. No, probably not an accident.

• 2:22:51Speaker 03

  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 is 1978, I think, with the SRI guys and said, like, how do you guys know this isn't precognition? You know, you're treating this all like this is clairvoyance and this could be all precognition. And he was, he was very early on that kind of bandwagon that this may be precognition.

• 2:23:16AJ Gentile?

  Has Vallée addressed the microtubules and permos hammer of work yet?

• 2:23:20Speaker 03

  Not that I'm aware of.

• 2:23:22AJ Gentile?

  Where do you stand on that quantum process?

• 2:23:24Speaker 03

  I'm very much in favor of Hameroff's work.

• 2:23:28AJ Gentile?

  The anesthesiologist.

• 2:23:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:23:37AJ Gentile?

  You're not?

• 2:23:37Speaker 03

  No, I think it's a red herring. I think, I think if something's going to come out of this search for consciousness, 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. So, so we were talking about memories being consolidated.

• 2:23:59AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:23:59Speaker 03

  Okay. So, guess what it is in neurons that reshape the synapses every night when you're dreaming and creating new memories?

• 2:24:09AJ Gentile?

  Microtubules.

• 2:24:09Speaker 03

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

• 2:24:53AJ Gentile?

  Are you not interested in it?

• 2:24:55Speaker 03

  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, there are really good arguments to be made that consciousness is an illusion.

• 2:25:12AJ Gentile?

  You'll never get a satisfactory answer.

• 2:25:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:25:23Speaker 03

  You know, and I've read a lot of them. I find a lot of different physicalist interpretations of consciousness interesting, you know, this is illuminating, but this is not, not the, and this is not the ultimate answer. Likewise, I find, you know, non-physicalist interpretations of consciousness interesting, but none of them are satisfying. None of the, none of the stories about consciousness are satisfying. And I think that that suggests that consciousness is not a problem that can be solved right now, or we're using the wrong terms.

• 2:25:50AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 2:25:59Speaker 03

  Well, we're being pulled towards our survival. I think we're being pulled towards survival. I think that's how precognition, that's how time loops work in the life of an organism. We're being drawn generally towards our survival.

• 2:26:13AJ Gentile?

  I watched you describe anxiety this way, now that you mention it.

• 2:26:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think anxiety could be a signal, that signal of our, of our future, withstanding of challenges and threats. The, that if, if precognition is drawing us towards an existing future, then it can't be drawing us towards a fan of possible futures. So it's drawing us towards a single future in which we are experiencing our survival of something. You're not going to experience your survival if there hasn't been a challenge to your survival, if there hasn't been a threat there. So we're not, we're not going to precognize a future

• 2:26:54Speaker 03

  that's all roses and, and, and all good things and nothing bad ever happening. Nor are we generally going to precognize 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 of, is close calls. Things, you know, situations in which we say, wow, that sucked, but it could have been worse. That's that. That is the basic thought. I think at the heart of most precognitive dreams is, but I survived. And that and we could be talking about something as as trivial as the sink backing up or something like,

• 2:27:38Speaker 03

  yeah, it's just 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.

• 2:27:57AJ Gentile?

  Well, that when people say, why do we want to watch a train wreck? That's why.

• 2:28:01Speaker 03

  That's why. That's exactly. That's exactly it. Why were we so glued to CNN on the morning of nine 11?

• 2:28:06AJ Gentile?

  Cause it wasn't us.

• 2:28:07Speaker 03

  Is it wasn't us?

• 2:28:09AJ Gentile?

  Hmm.

• 2:28:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:28:28AJ Gentile?

  Right. Right.

• 2:28:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:28:38AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:28:38Speaker 03

  View of human nature. The point is it's pure semiotics. You can't have a signal, X signal, without that contrast of signals. 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 there on some basic reptilian, you know, we started about talking about reptiles on some basic reptile level. Uh, we like, we like that message, but I survived.

• 2:29:19AJ Gentile?

  You look at sunflowers sometimes and you're like, I, I get you. I get you. What happens after we die? What is, where is our consciousness?

• 2:29:26Speaker 03

  That's out of my, that's out of my lane. I don't know.

• 2:29:29AJ Gentile?

  You don't have any feelings? We're allowed to speculate.

• 2:29:34Speaker 03

  I don't, okay, so intellectually, I would, I would, I would say, well, I think it's death is probably the end, but the thing is, I don't think it's possible to really believe that. I don't think it's possible. I think we all, deep down, believe in

• 2:29:54AJ Gentile?

  Whether we say it or not.

• 2:29:55Speaker 03

  Whether we say it or not, we all believe in God and we all believe in the afterlife.

• 2:29:59AJ Gentile?

  Agreed.

• 2:30:00Speaker 03

  And we cannot help 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 the deep down, of course I believe.

• 2:30:13AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:30:13Speaker 03

  You know, but it doesn't, I haven't, I genuinely have not seen

• 2:30:23Speaker 03

  convincing evidence that we precognize things that we don't, that we don't survive to learn about. But, but that is, that is an interesting question. There are, there are a tiny handful of precognition cases that seem to be about things that happened after a person's death. A tiny handful. Edgar Allan Poe, his story, 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, in a lifeboat who cannibal, who, three people cannibalized the fourth person in the lifeboat

• 2:31:05Speaker 03

  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 cannibalized some of the people in the lifeboat.

• 2:31:15AJ Gentile?

  That was in my synchronicity episode. I got it wrong. It's a time loop.

• 2:31:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, you know, that would, that would not fit my model.

• 2:31:21AJ Gentile?

  It wouldn't.

• 2:31:22Speaker 03

  Right. But.

• 2:31:23AJ Gentile?

  Why not?

• 2:31:24Speaker 03

  Because it was after his death.

• 2:31:25AJ Gentile?

  Oh, right. He couldn't pre-remember it.

• 2:31:27Speaker 03

  Right. On the other hand.

• 2:31:32Speaker 03

  Coincidences do happen.

• 2:31:33AJ Gentile?

  They do.

• 2:31:34Speaker 03

  They are part of the universe. And by that argument of the law of large numbers, which is what debunkers throw it at this problem all the time. They're wrong to do that, but nevertheless, it is real that coincidences happen. And it's in those names were common at the time. And cannibalism at sea was actually surprisingly common. You know, so you can make the argument that it was that was pure coincidence. But, you know, that's that that just validates my favorite theory.

• 2:32:12AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:32:12Speaker 03

  You know.

• 2:32:13AJ Gentile?

  How do you know what to throw away when you're going through the stories? Like, ah, that's probably not it.

• 2:32:16Speaker 03

  Well, you know, you've got to.

• 2:32:21Speaker 03

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

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• 2:33:09Speaker 03

  Have that attitude. That's, you know, that's skepticism. And I I will say I've been led to a theory of precognition based on evidence.

• 2:33:23Speaker 03

  You know, from a, from a place of not at all believing, you know, in anything like precognition. You know, based on the evidence of my own experience, correlated with other people's experience, correlated with, you know, scientific findings, correlated with the plausibility of a physics that explains it, you know, putting a lot of pieces together. But will I be objective in tossing out a certain piece of, of evidence that doesn't fit my theory? I mean, the thing is, I don't know of, of, of any other cases like that Gordon Pym one.

• 2:33:56AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:33:56Speaker 03

  There aren't a lot.

• 2:33:57AJ Gentile?

  You tell yourself you would be objective.

• 2:33:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:00AJ Gentile?

  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?

• 2:34:09Speaker 03

  What was that?

• 2:34:10AJ Gentile?

  Was that spark that made you go time loop? That, cause it's, it seems so far out of your field.

• 2:34:16Speaker 03

  Um.

• 2:34:19AJ Gentile?

  Was it a culmination?

• 2:34:20Speaker 03

  It was a culmination.

• 2:34:21AJ Gentile?

  It was?

• 2:34:21Speaker 03

  Of, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:34:24AJ Gentile?

  Reading Phil K. Dick.

• 2:34:25Speaker 03

  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, I'll name Igor Novikov, who's, uh, he is a Russian physicist who, he was the one that really debunked, for physics, he debunked the grandfather paradox idea that, 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. Anytime you go back in time and have an effect in time, that's part of the backstory of the

• 2:35:10Speaker 03

  present and that, 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, bootstrapping, uh, is djinn. Djinn, you know, they, they're the mythological creatures in Islamic mythology that just appear out of nothing. He called, he called them djinn. 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. So this was, you know, Igor Nobukhov was writing about this in the in

• 2:35:49Speaker 03

  the 90s. Um, uh, you know, there's so these all these ideas have been floated before.

• 2:35:57AJ Gentile?

  So arriving from nothing reminds me of something else you talked about. This is how we know we're kind of toward the end because now I'm now I'm off script. I'm just asking my questions. Um, orbs appearing from nowhere or splitting apart.

• 2:36:09Speaker 03

  Yes, that's what I talk about in becoming timefaring.

• 2:36:12AJ Gentile?

  So what are we seeing there?

• 2:36:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:36:30AJ Gentile?

  You do?

• 2:36:31Speaker 03

  Uh, that is consistent with a single object traveling reversing its course in time.

• 2:36:36AJ Gentile?

  How does that work?

• 2:36:38Speaker 03

  Well, an object, say you have, say you have a time ship. Let's say you have an orb time ship. You're you're sitting in your orb and you pull a lever to reverse your temporal direction and travel back in time. What that's going to look like to you on the inside, it's gonna, you're gonna pull that lever and suddenly the external world, this is presuming you could see outside your, you know, 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.

• 2:37:11AJ Gentile?

  Like an HGL story?

• 2:37:13Speaker 03

  It's gonna, it's gonna look well, HGL's story mainly went to the future.

• 2:37:17AJ Gentile?

  Future.

• 2:37:17Speaker 03

  Really talk about.

• 2:37:18AJ Gentile?

  But he talked about how he watched things happening.

• 2:37:20Speaker 03

  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 gonna look like it's in reverse and you're gonna see history happening backwards. Okay, like a film in on rewind. Okay. From an outside perspective, the outside observer, what they're gonna see is two time ships, identical time ships converging and disappearing.

• 2:37:52AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:37:54Speaker 03

  That's what it's gonna look like to an outside observer. And likewise, say you,

• 2:38:02Speaker 03

  You know, you're enjoying the sort of the history rewinding for a while. I go, oh, I'm gonna throw it back into forward. You pull the lever again. What that's gonna look like is two time ships emerging from nothing and traveling apart. So an outside observer would see like that. So that whole, that S-shaped movement would look like an object over here, two objects splitting over here, and these two objects merging and disappearing, and that other object flying off. That's what it would look like. I worked this out for myself using flip books.

• 2:38:42AJ Gentile?

  Flip books?

• 2:38:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:38:43AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:38:43Speaker 03

  I wish I'd brought them, actually. They're, 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 on my website. You can find out on my website for some of the stuff I talk about in that book. But I worked this out in flip books, using little orbs in flip books and like what it would look like. And it's like really trippy to, you know, what this visual effect is, and it is consistent with some descriptions of UFO behavior. And so that's where my, why I support Mike Masters, you know, or at least the plausibility

• 2:39:28Speaker 03

  of his hypothesis that it's, again, I'm less interested in the anthropological part of it, but in the behavior of these objects, there is all kinds of reasons to think that they are manipulating time. And that's one of them, that they could be actually reversing their course in time. They could be actually physically traveling backward in time.

• 2:39:52AJ Gentile?

  What about when we see multiple, more than two?

• 2:39:55Speaker 03

  You could have

• 2:39:56AJ Gentile?

  You could?

• 2:39:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:40:05AJ Gentile?

  We see that.

• 2:40:06Speaker 03

  We see that. We see swarms. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, the example I use in the book is, apparently, Werner von Braun.

• 2:40:17Speaker 03

  He wasn't there to see it. He wasn't at the Trinity Test. Apparently, he wrote in his diary that that people at the Trinity Test reported seeing swarms of objects.

• 2:40:30AJ Gentile?

  A lot of tests, we've seen this.

• 2:40:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, uh, well, like, what if it was a single object, a single, single guy in a time ship, you know, wanting to get multiple vantage points on this single, this, this, this event and scrub it back and forth like you were looking at a-

• 2:40:47AJ Gentile?

  Scrubbing, scrubbing a timeline.

• 2:40:48Speaker 03

  Scrubbing a timeline, back and forth.

• 2:40:51AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:40:51Speaker 03

  What it would look like to an outside observer is a swarm of objects.

• 2:40:55AJ Gentile?

  And why are they moving the same way? Cause it's the same ship?

• 2:40:57Speaker 03

  It's the same ship.

• 2:40:58AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Scrubbing a timeline.

• 2:41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:01AJ Gentile?

  Okay. Blew my mind again.

• 2:41:03Speaker 03

  Um, so, yeah, I, uh, I wish I'd brought those, um, flip books, cause it's, it-

• 2:41:11AJ Gentile?

  If you have them online, we'll, we'll-

• 2:41:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have 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.

• 2:41:22AJ Gentile?

  What are we missing out of, um, timefaring that we should cover?

• 2:41:27AJ Gentile?

  I mean, I think I got through all my stuff. I'll, I'll talk to you for hours.

• 2:41:29Speaker 03

  Which is, you know, the, the, don't get hung up on grandfather paradoxes. These like, these hangups that people have about, about time and time travel. 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.

• 2:41:53AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:41:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:42:07AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 2:42:20AJ Gentile?

  Everyone needs to read your, read your books for sure.

• 2:42:24AJ Gentile?

  Uh, what else did we miss, Eric?

• 2:42:27Speaker 03

  I don't know. We covered a lot.

• 2:42:30AJ Gentile?

  Where should they go? Where do you want them to go? Um, the night shirt?

• 2:42:33Speaker 03

  Um.

• 2:42:34AJ Gentile?

  If you're into sci-fi, the night shirt.

• 2:42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't really contribute. I mean, I, I don't have time to blog anymore. I'm on, uh, lately I've been putting some things on my Substack. It's also the night shirt. Um, and, um, uh, they can find my books on my website, ericorgo.com and you know, they're all on Amazon.

• 2:42:53AJ Gentile?

  And nobody should follow you on Twitter, right? Let's not.

• 2:42:56Speaker 03

  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?

• 2:43:05AJ Gentile?

  You did?

• 2:43:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:43:20AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:43:21Speaker 03

  And they can interact with me there. They can DM me or whatever.

• 2:43:24AJ Gentile?

  Well, I definitely want to check out your Substack. I didn't know you were doing that. The night shirt was mostly the way I prepared for this, 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.

• 2:43:37Speaker 03

  Well, actually I've started, uh, on my Substack, I've been reposting a few of the older articles that I really liked on the night shirt that, you know, no one sees anymore. I, I reposted those on, on the Substack.

• 2:43:49AJ Gentile?

  I'd love to see you go back to those old ones with new commentary, things that you've learned through your writing.

• 2:43:53Speaker 03

  Well, that's what I did. I re, I sort of rewrote, rewrote those pieces and added to them and so on, but yeah.

• 2:44:00AJ Gentile?

  All right. Dr. Eric Wargo, huge influence on this channel and my storytelling. Thank you so much. This has been great.

• 2:44:05Speaker 03

  This has been really fun, really fun.

• 2:44:07AJ Gentile?

  You'll come in for every book.

• 2:44:09Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 2:44:09AJ Gentile?

  All right. Thanks, Eric.

• 2:44:10Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 2:44:12AJ Gentile?

  So here's what checks out about Eric's work. His PhD is from Emory University. He worked as an editor for psychology organizations for years. The block universe theory is real. It comes directly from Einstein's special relativity. Hermann Minkowski formalized it in 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 Bohm's experiments. This is where things get interesting. In 2011, Bohm published nine experiments showing precognition effects. Students chose which curtain hid erotic images before the computer even generated them. Memory tests where future studying improved past performance. The results were statistically significant. And here's what most people don't know.

• 2:44:56AJ Gentile?

  Bohm's work has been replicated. A 2015 meta-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.

• 2:45:40AJ Gentile?

  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 documented. And I keep coming back to Jung's scarab story. The patient dreams of receiving a scarab beetle. The next day, Jung 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 Jung, 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.

• 2:46:23AJ Gentile?

  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?

• 2:46:36AJ Gentile?

  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 Pre-Cognitive Dreamwork, 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.

• 2:47:16AJ Gentile?

  I thought I had more, but I guess not. Until next time, be safe. We're having fun, right? Be safe, be kind, and another you are appreciated.

• 2:48:58Speaker 05

  ...

• 2:49:24Speaker 05

  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come To have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets circle to Project Stargate And what the Dark Watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The Black Knight satellite, it told me so. I can't believe, I'm dancing with a fish. Headless fish on Thursday nights with daydreams. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

• 2:50:08Speaker 05

  So one more zombie beat all through the night. Headless fish on Thursday nights with daydreams. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 2:50:44Speaker 05

  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 on the way within time.

• 2:51:20Speaker 06

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