UFOs, Synchronicities & Prophetic Dreams

I'm here with Eric Wargo. This has been a long time coming, cuz I think I refer to your books like in every episode that I do, and so this is an honor. I really appreciate it. I found myself in your neck of the woods, uh, in DC, and uh, you know, had had to do this, and I'm really excited. You've written three books; uh, the two that I've read are *Time Loops* and *From Nowhere*, and they're just incredible.

In the world of kind of AI doomsdayers, where that's, you know, all the rage these days, where I think people struggle to separate the human mind from kind of the the the robotic mind that is AI, you have a new theory of mind that I think comports with a lot of people's intuitions as to how the human mind works. I want to start with a really interesting concept that you actually present at the beginning of *Time Loops*, which is this idea that often prophecies are—you get some sort of message; that message actually causes you to react in a certain way to the message that then manifests or causes the actual prophecy to come to fruition. The traditional example of this might be Oedipus. How do you explain that? What what sort of model do you apply to that?

If it works the way I think it works, and I think that various trends in science are converging I think on a a an actual physical explanation for how it works, if it works that way, prophecies have have to be self-fulfilling. Now what does that mean? Events in the future are, in a sense, fixed in the same way events in the past are fixed. Now, if that's the case, any kind of time travel and precognition is really a form of time travel; it's a form of informational time travel. It cannot change history. Okay, there's this is a a misconception; people people somehow they think about precognition, or they think about time travel. I think, "But wait, you could go in the past, go into the past and change history and and kill your grandfather," and so you would, you know, you couldn't be born and all that—the grandfather paradox. That's uh, it's kind of faulty reasoning. Uh, and in fact, physicists in the in the 80s kind of did the math; I mean, they got interested in wormholes and things like that, and they did the math, uh, and found that no, in fact, if you send a particle through a wormhole, or a billiard ball through a wormhole, and try to deflect it away from the wormhole, it fails. You're always gonna deflect yourself into the wormhole, and you're always going to be in what's called a closed timelike curve, or a time loop. It means that the universe is self-consistent; it means you—paradox doesn't occur. And that's the definition of paradox: something that can't occur.

Um, so any intervention in time, any backward influence via information alone or via physical objects traveling uh through a wormhole or a time machine or something like that—that adventure in the past, whatever it is—is already part of the backstory of getting in the time machine in the future. Um, and there's really no problem; there's really no problem with time travel or with information traveling in time. It doesn't lead to paradox. You just have to wrap your head around the idea that that you now are the product of time-traveling information already, and maybe time travelers, you know, you know your history, your past history includes, you know, all that time traveling—either physical time traveling of advanced beings or and very at the very least information in your head that's traveled back in time from your future. You are—you now are the product of information reflexing from your future and influencing your past and influencing your present. M. That's why uh we can say that prophecy is always self-fulfilling.

Now that doesn't mean it in a simplistic way that that that you know you have a dream and things are going to turn out exactly the way you dreamed it. There are all kinds of reasons why we don't interpret prophecies accurately; there's all kinds of reasons why the brain distorts information coming from our future. I think what one of the basic things that we're precognized uh and so we're in a sort of time loop relationship to our future surviving self. Imagine that's the case for even, you know, bacteria in the primordial soup, you know, that it goes back to the beginnings of the evolution of life; it's a it's a it's just a new way of thinking about causation. Yeah, it's interesting because on the one hand, I think belief in the block universe is traditionally associated with nihilism or something; it's like your future is sort of cemented in stone. And then on the other hand, what you're saying is there is sort of evolution upwards towards probably greater consciousness, and especially if artists artists are reaching forward into their future for kind of inspiration, you know, presumably that future is very rich and, you know, involves maybe more consciousness than is present.

I do want to get into just a few examples because I think that's really powerful for kind of the average person uh getting into this sort of stuff because it's so trippy and not, you know, uh in accord with their normal worldview. And so the example that I love is Carl Jung has this patient; she's this kind of very inaccessible kind of hyper-rationalist patient who he can't kind of get through to. Obviously, Carl Jung is this contemporary of Freud's, but who's even trippier in in many ways than Freud. And um, he sees her, and she comes in and she says, "Look, I had I had this dream last night that I was gifted this golden scarab beetle, and it was this really meaningful thing to me." She doesn't quite know what to make of it. And as she's telling, recounting the story, she sees a a scarab beetle coming down off the window seal. And uh, he then takes the scarab beetle and gifts it to her, and it's this like mind-blowing, super meaningful thing for her that like changes her paradigm. And so it's the uh attentional patterns of actually knowing the sort of prophecy or the dream, the pre precognitive dream, changing her reaction—her being aware of that dream actually caused the whole thing to happen, which I just find so fascinating. That's my favorite example of a time loop; that's the one I always use when people ask me what a time loop is; that's the example because it's so uh it's so perfect. It, you know, it shows exactly how a dream changes behavior, and the behavior leads to the outcome in in an unforeseen way. I mean, they she couldn't have known uh, you know, we I mentioned how dreams, you know, they they show us the future, but not in a very clear way, and often in a not directly, intentionally actionable way, but they had changed our behavior, like being deflected by uh you like billiards being deflected, you know, it's like it's a that was a billiard ball from her future which deflected her to this experience in her therapist's office the next day, and lo and behold, that that experience that had deflected her toward was what she dreamed about, but she couldn't have known that uh when she had the dream. Um, so yeah, that's that's a beautiful, beautiful example.

Do you have any other examples that you love? Oh, so many. I mean, I mean, another one would be just Oedipus, which is obviously sort of mythological, but do you want to tell that story? Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot to say about Oedipus because I mean, if anyone, you know, if anyone knows anything about Oedipus these days, it's they're going to be thinking about, oh, Sigmund Freud, you know, because of the Oedipus complex and all that, and he, you know, he focused—well, the Oedipus story is that uh this there's this prophecy that this young prince of Thebes is going to grow up and murder his father and marry his mother. Um, and so to evade this prophecy, uh, he flees when he learns about this prophecy; he flees his his city. He doesn't know that he's actually been brought up in a foster or adopted family. So he flees his city, winds up killing this man at a crossroads who turns out to be his father, and then winds up marrying his mother unknowingly and become, you know, so he fulfills the prophecy; it fulfills the prophecy exactly in his efforts to evade the prophecy. Um, and this is, you know, this logic uh is I think crucial to to how we relate to to time and to our precognition, which we we deny our precognition; we deny that prophecy, you know, partly because of cultural taboos and and all kinds of things.

The interesting thing is that Freud, I mean, he he he was only interested in that that uh that incestuous idea, like that part of the story, so he talked about the Oedipus complex and, you know, how uh children are sexually attracted to their uh their opposite-sex parent and want to kill because they're they're jealous of the same-sex parent and so on. Um, but you know, he he sort of denied—he didn't believe in precognition, and he denied the the rest of the story about the pro, you know, the prophecy and all that because, well, that's just premodern, you know, superstition. The thing is, in Freud's own life, he the dream that sort of uh started it all for Freud uh it was a dream he had in 1895, um, famous dream, and he spent like 14 pages of his his landmark book, *Interpretation of Dreams*, you know, interpreting this dream through free association and stuff like that. Well, like 28 years later—I think I may be getting the number wrong—uh, he had an he developed an oral cancer, which like all these elements, these key elements in that dream he'd had almost three decades earlier came true in his life, and he never acknowledged that that dream was a premonition. But it's it's like in Freud's own life, he lived out that Oedipus story. I mean, he denied precognition; he denied prophecy; he denied, you know, the very existence and and like patients would bring him precognitive dreams all the time because people have these dreams all the time, and they would bring him their dreams, and he would just explain them away in in in some facile way. And in his own life, he winds up denying prophecy and then developing this oral cancer, which, by the way, was caused by his smoking, uh, and there are hints in the dream of that fact, you know. So it has been argued that well, had he paid attention to this dream as a warning from his future, you know, he might have quit smoking and all that. That gets into these problems we talked about earlier of of time loops and foreclosing a a foreseen future; it doesn't work as simply as that, but uh that yes, that's so that's another way in which uh we fulfill a prophecy by denying it or ignoring it or shutting it aside. Um, so I think that's a hugely important archetype for modern people because we live in a culture that denies uh that that the future can influence us, especially in dreams and, you know, what what effect is that, what impact does that have on our our mental health, on our uh fortunes?

That's absolutely fascinating because you think of Freud as believing that most people are sort of repressed, and they have sort of an ego and an id, and the id is sort of this compartmentalized savage self or something, you know, all these repressed desires. And so maybe the id for him was in some ways realizing that like his his own work was actually sort of somewhat autobiographical because I, you know, he did have that interesting relationship with his own mother. Yeah, and uh, so you know, it's like, yeah, who watches the watchman or whatever—he's this like preeminent psychologist, but in fact, you know, maybe a lot of his own work and theories are actually projections of his own subconscious. Well, it it's his—this is why I think Freud is so interesting and important in all this because even though he didn't believe in precognition per se, uh, his theory, his what what's sometimes called his metapsychology, which is that that's that kind of layered model of the of consciousness where you have the the tip of the iceberg that's the conscious self, and then this buried, submerged unconscious—that theory of the unconscious is super important, and it it's a ready-made theory of precognition because really precognition manifests in all the ways that interested Freud in his career. So being with dreams—that's the number one way that people become aware that they are precognitive uh is through having precognitive dreams, but also they manifest in waking life in these kinds of uh what he called the psychopathology of everyday life, which is uh that was the title of his second book, uh, which is things like slips of the tongue and what we now call synchronicities—you didn't have that word yet; that was a term introduced by Carl Jung—um, you know, more generally just h, you know, having a random thought about an old friend and then seeing him on the street, you know, like that; it's a very typical experience uh uh and other like foibles like neurotic symptoms or whatever—that that w these all these uh all these kind of quirks of human behavior—that's how precognition, that's how it gets our attention; that's how we experience it; and creativity, which is the subject of my my most recent book and my next book that's coming. So it's a ready-made; it's a ready-made theory to understand precognition; we just have to—the way I always put it, you know, you okay, you picture the iceberg with the the tip on top and the the submerged base, but you know, you usually we think of time as a as an axis, an x-axis, you know, running from left to right, so tip the iceberg on its side, yeah, uh, and just think of that fut that big submerged part—that's just that's the future; it's we we don't know the future yet; we so we can't interpret; we can't correctly interpret all this this information coming at us and and manifesting and all these oblique uh indirect symbolic ways, uh, but that's where it's coming from; it's not coming from some submerged layer of thought that we're not aware of because that's kind of a paradoxical idea anyway. Um, it makes much more sense to to think of that the unconscious as our future consciousness—that's that's impacting us now.

Yeah, it's interesting; it's like you get shards of it, you know. I often think when I have these sort of conversations with the AI dogmatic people, you know, they think the AI is going to take over everything. I always say, well, I think the human mind works in a fundamentally distinct way, and I often cite your book, which has a really interesting model of the mind as kind of a hybrid quantum-classical computer, and the very creative and interesting idea that you bring up—and Robert Lanza and biocentrism also sort of touches on that—there's temporal non-locality in quantum systems, so uh, you know, you can do a double-slit experiment in the future; it seems like one interpretation that's affecting, you know, the one done with an entangled photon in the past, and uh, you can even reverse qubit positions in in uh quantum computations. And so a lot of people, even who are working on quantum computers—obviously, the bottleneck is the hardware and getting the chips to work—have hypothesized that you can send information back in time on the semantic application layer in a hypothetical working quantum computer. And so if our brain is a quantum system, which people as prominent as Roger Penrose have have, you know, hypothesized, maybe we can glitch into the future and access some of some of this information, send it back in time. I think this is going to be—I think what you're describing, the the kind of use of quantum computers uh as uh comm or tesseract is the kind of the term I use from science fiction as like these four-dimensional information processors and communication devices. I mean, I think that is really—it's kind of the link; it's going to be—it's the link that's going to lead to true time travel, okay? I think um uh because it's that informational time travel uh that, you know, uh that's already happening. You can look at biological systems as models for how it works, uh, and yeah, in a quantum computer you can theoretically scale up the the that causal indeterminacy that's happening on the the quantum level; you can scale that up into like a usable, you know, object that you can measure at two time points and get, you know, get a sort of output prior to an input, in a sense. Yes. Um, and you scale that up uh in a quantum computer server that you leave plugged in for many years, uh, it really opens the doorway to actually communicating across time. This is the uh this is the really cool premise of William Gibson's *The Peripheral*. I don't know if you've read the book or seen the series; the series is actually really quite good. Um, uh, it's the the premise is that this uh video gamer in the American South, you know, around now, uh is in this like in this advanced sim and flying this drone in this like futuristic city, and she thinks it's a sim, whatever, and she sees this character getting murdered—like she thinks it's an NPC getting murdered—uh, but then she gets a call uh via quantum computer server from uh from this publicist who lives in London in like the 22nd century, and he tells her that in fact what she witnessed—she was actually piloting a real drone in in future London via a quantum computer server and had witnessed a real murder—and so he like enlists her aid in solving the murder—this murder across, you know, uh, you know, a century, you know—it's a really cool premise, but I think William Gibson is is really—obviously, I mean, he foretold uh cyberspace essentially, and I think I think this is the next—I think this is the next thing, and I think people who are thinking about quantum computing simply from the standpoint of just speeding up number crunching or whatever are like really missing, missing the boat. I I I think it's absolutely the next thing. And the idea that the body is warm, wet, and noisy and not, you know, actually um a good conducive to quantum coherence is slowly being destroyed; it's going out the window. You have quantum biology; you have um, you know, enzyme creation using quantum tunneling; you have birds navigating home using the cryptochrome protein spin, which is, you know, basically a a kind of a magnetometer; it's it's detecting the magnetic field of the earth and allowing them to do that, and um, you have you have other examples as well, and it's these things are getting proven out over over and over and over again, and I think actually have you—are you familiar with Rupert Sheldrake by any chance?

Sure. So like, I think he doesn't have, you know, really clear mathematical models around how any of this stuff works, but he has really good experiments showing that humans in their bodies often just instinctively know when certain things are about to happen, and it's almost like we become, you know, it's like we know that—or animals know that—earthquakes are about to happen; kids know when their parents are near, and it's almost like you get overeducated, you get your, you know, elite Western liberal education or whatever, and you like unlearn that, but that's of course like incredibly instinctive; it makes total sense. And even prosaically, if you think about how the mind learns, it is in low sample size; you come out of the womb with like, you know, a fear of snakes and with a Chomsky and pregrammar for certain things, and that's not how a classical computer works; you need to, you know, look at like the large language models that OpenAI is using—you're running the internet through that thing—like those are two very different things. So I think we have to be open to this quantum, you know, uh precognition of the future model. Absolutely. I mean, I think that uh, you know, Stuart Hameroff—I'm sure you know his work on microtubules—I think that's, you know, that's going to be the—I think microtubules are probably going to be the the mechanism here. I think there there many—there are many quantum—like I said, like I say in *Time Loops*, I think the brain—a lot of people simplistically say, "Oh, the brain is a quantum computer"—it's not that simple; it's a it's a hybrid; it's a hybrid of classical and quantum systems, you know, meshed. And we understand at this point, you know, through decades of neuroimaging and and and neuroscience that we have at this point—we understand really well that classical—the classical circuit level, you know, way in which the brain takes input from the senses and controls the body and all that, you know, in this in a way that you can liken to a, you know, a computer chip in a in a robot, you know, it's it's just way more complicated than that, but we, you know, that that is true—that that classical level of computation and control over our system is is true, but but what's happening inside neurons is what we're only beginning to understand, and uh and lo and behold, these things that used to be just thought of as the bones of neurons uh turn out to be these really interesting, highly dynamic structures that oh, they're quantum, you know, they're they're—it's already been shown that they uh are superconductive, which really suggests that yeah, these quantum relationships are going on. What was that study that came out a few months ago that they're super radiant? Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, yeah, there's been a bunch of stuff coming out from this team that Hameroff works with, and I don't—I'm forgetting their names, but uh yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff coming out here's—but the thing is, I think that, you know, I almost think that that Hameroff could almost win the Nobel Prize for this work if he wasn't focused on consciousness. I think consciousness is really kind of a red herring in all this—wanting to to show how this generates consciousness, but I think—and just for people for people that don't know—the way he tries—the way he got on to this is Penrose created this theoretical model for, you know, the brain being a quantum system, which is kind of answering this age-old question of why we see discrete macroscopic reality in kind of general relativity form when actually it's sort of probabilistic, you know, and it's, you know, underlying at least subatomic nature—like where does that cut off occur? And so he he writes that—*Emperor's Mind* or something—and then *The Emperor's New Mind*, I think is the one with Hameroff. Hameroff is this anesthesiologist who realizes that when you shut down the microtubules, the rest of the body is running as if it's totally alive, but consciousness shuts down. And so he thinks it's a center of consciousness. Well, that in and of itself is an interesting point, but uh but I think focusing on the question of consciousness—I, you know, it's such a fraught area, you know, it's, you know, someone on Twitter a c last month posted a graph of like like 200 different theories of consciousness, you know, and they all, you know, I'm I'm sympathetic to a lot of these, you know, both the hard materialist versus the, you know, the even the eliminative materialist explanations and the panpsych—they're all interesting; I think you can learn from all of them, but but I don't think any any physical explanation is going to satisfyingly explain consciousness. Yeah, and so it's kind of a hopeless, hopeless task to like try and try and say, "Here's the answer to consciousness with this one physical process." It's a very interesting physical process, but I don't think he's going to convince people, you know, with with that. But these microtubules he's studying are I think the basis for precognition because if they're quantum computers, if uh they can then theoretically do what we were talking about, which is uh scale up this ability to sort of have a system where you're measuring at one point and then measuring at a second point and then getting information reflexing from that second measurement and reading it out in the past, you know, you string a lot of those together in some system, well, then you have a precognitive circuit. And what's fascinating about microtubules is that these control the shape of the cell; they control um uh they control like the uh dendrites and axons, you know, forming new connections, and they control the the the the size of a synaptic connection—like, you know, when you have a memory forming, they will expand that that synaptic connection to facilitate that memory—so they're in charge of memory formation, and if precognition is a form of memory, as I argue and as a lot of people have argued, then right there you have a potential mechanism; you have a

Potential physical mechanism to explain this this thing that has been rejected for for centuries because, oh, it's impossible; it's, you know, has no physical basis. Well, I think we are now converging on a possible physical mechanism. I mean, that's a testable hypothesis at the very least. Have you heard of a Russian scientist with the last name Liberman, L I B R? Okay. Uh, two friends of mine, Denil and David Liberman, they previously worked at Snapchat. They're absolute geniuses. They sort of, um, resemble like Bond villains or something; they like have this mind meld going on; they use one phone; they're very eccentric. Their father knew uh Hamov, and or I think knew Penrose rather, and was uh really interested in cytoskeletal learning. But okay, I I have a I have a different possible candidate, um, outside of microtubules for a quantum system inside the brain. And this is not, I would say, mutually exclusive with um microtubules, but are you familiar with the kodate nucleus and the paman? So Gary Nolan studies this stuff, and you know that's this part of the basal ganglia and the dorsal striatum of the brain. And if you hook somebody up to an fMRI while they're playing the game Go, you know, this more complex East Asian version of chess, um, when they make a brilliant move—and what defines a brilliant move is a move that doesn't make any sense in the context of like the incremental Go forward rational decision; it only makes sense in the context of an endpoint in which the person wins—so it's often based on the other person slipping up or what their their adversary slipping up—that part of the brain lights up in an fMRI. And so, and then that part of the brain, according to Gary Nolan, is also much more neuronally dense when you you see a greater preponderance of UFOs and you have more premonition; you're a little more psychic. And so I wonder if that is not part of the quantum processing, at the very least. Well, the quantum processing would be again would be going on within the cells in that brain area, but that's that makes perfect sense; the the that system is part of the reward system, um, and so it's it's involved in our uh registration of rewards, our learning based on rewards, our predictions based on past rewards, um, uh, and that system I think is central, you know, it's central; it's kind of the central classically in that classical computer uh model uh in terms of the organism, you know, changing its behavior based on rewards and getting excited about possible future rewards and anticipated rewards and all that. So that's what that system is doing. But but the cell but but all the neurons in all parts of the brain have those microtubules and have those quantum uh components in them. So yeah, I mean that's that's G to I'm sure that's going to somehow prove to be important in, you know, in future decades when we understand this better, and in in time loops and in from nowhere you have so many just fascinating examples in kind of the Zeitgeist and culture of precognition. And so I don't know if you want to, you know, just cite some of those, like Michael Richards, this resident artist in the Twin Towers. Do you remember that one?

Oh yeah, I yes, his story is uh it's tragic, but you know, fascinating. Um, he was so Michael Richards, this is Michael Rolando Richards, not Michael Richards the comedian, uh, but Michael Rolando Richards was a um a sculptor, a black sculptor in uh the 90s. I mean, he was sort of an up-and-coming uh sculptor in the New York art world uh in the 90s, and he did a series of like all of his works were like obsessed with flight, and uh he would he would do these uh sculptural self-portraits of himself as a Tuskegee Airman. And the Tuskegee Airmen were uh black aviators in World War II who sort of distinguished themselves, you know, in their in their piloting, but then were subject to all the racism that uh that you might expect. And anyway, he would portray himself as a Tuskegee Airman uh in some sculptures; he had crashed to the ground uh or he had tried to parachute or was trying to parachute into a target that was too small or um uh and and in and in the sculpture that made him most famous uh which he did in 1999 while he was in Miami uh he portrayed himself as a Tuskegee Airman standing vertically erect and levitating off the ground and being impaled by airplanes by a bunch of airplanes. And the sculpture is called Tarab versus St. Sebastian. And St. Sebastian was the was the Medieval Saint who, you know, is always depicted like pierced by arrows uh but anyway, so he, himself, pierced by planes as a martyr, pierced by planes. Okay, so he, you know, on the basis of the strength of his work, including I assume that sculpture, he, and this would be another time loop, uh he got a um he was awarded studio space for six months in the Twin Towers. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council uh had been uh issuing studios to like a co, you know, cohorts of 15 artists like like for six months, you know, so two cohorts a year. And uh so he was part of the summer 2001 cohort of artists, and um he alone among those artists uh had stayed in his studio the night of September 10th and was killed on the morning of September 11th. So when you you know know that story and then you see this sculpture that he did um where he's martyred, impaled by planes, but the thing is he was people who visited his studio said that he was working on other sculptures that were similarly like unbelievable, like like one of them was of him riding a burning meteor uh and another one was was of his torso um with wings uh like it was called Fallen Angel. Uhuh. So uh and his other works, you know, he did some pen and pencil stuff too, including one that had a plane crash, like a lot of sculptures of planes crashing. So crazy. Um, so you know what do you make of that? And uh it's you know but the thing is this is so common uh in artists and you when you delve into the lives of artists, I mean there are a lot of famous cases. So there's there's a famous case that I talk about in in time loops uh and you you'll read about it in most any book on ESP was Morgan Robertson who was this science fiction author uh at around the turn of the 20th Century who wrote this famous novel, well was not famous at the time he wrote this novel called Futility about the collision of the biggest ever ocean liner called the Titan with an with a with an iceberg on on an April night in the North Atlantic on its third voyage between Liverpool and New York. Okay, so you know 14 years later you have blue-blooded elite families, oh, and they all die because there not enough lifeboats; it's the Titanic essentially. Um, you know, stories like that, um but the thing is when you delve into like and and it's easy for skeptics to go, oh well, you know, in a world of, you know, chance, yeah, that's going to happen, you know, sometimes, and then we single out those those examples and we make something of them, but it's all just random. Well, no, I mean you when you study the lives of artists uh you find this stuff happens all the time, not necessarily with big events in the news; I mean mostly as with precognitive dreams, it happens mostly with personal upheavals, upheavals in our own lives, things that wouldn't necessarily even be significant to anybody else, but but they are meaningful to us. And when we're dreaming or when we're creating art or whatever, we those things come out um and it's just incredibly incredibly common. I mean, I have so many; I filled this book with examples, and I've got a million more, you know, I've got I'm writing a second book on the same, you know, a similar subject with even more cases from from writers um so it's just it's a very very common uh very common phenomenon. Yeah, it's fascinating. You I mean the idea that profits aren't real is a that's a modern idea; that's a symptom of modernity; it's not um you know that's kind of an aberration if you look at actually like the long-time scale of human civilization, and you even I don't know this is a weird example, but like Alex Jones, say, wa will about the guy as far as some of his other beliefs, but are you familiar with he he had an on-air call on CNN where he goes Osama b l if you take down the the Twin Towers, I'm gonna come after you or something; it's just this absurd like, you know, literally what happened in six months before, and he's like on he's on cable; you can't fake that; he's on, you know, CNN. I didn't know about that. There's a million I mean there's a million there uh prophecies, whatever you want to call them, of 9/11. I mean there's uh simply by virtue of the fact that, you know, the there was the internet already at that point, and you know, people can now collect all that stuff and put it online, so it's like it's an overwhelming mass of of material uh prophecy in that event. But yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, there's so many. My dad actually is a he's kind of a self-help author, and he uh he wrote a book called The Tools, and in it he talks about how he would always dream of an earthquake on January 17th, and that was both the day that's my birthday, that's the day I was born, and then two years later that was the Northridge Quake. Oh wow, in and we live in LA. And so um yeah, I don't know, very very interesting. And I bet you the more people you pull like it's it's much higher percentage of people that can sort of pull these examples out uh than than would meet the eye. One interesting instantiation of this that we've talked about um in our phone calls is you have this remote viewing program that the CIA ran, I think it was CIA and then DIA from 1972 to 1995, and it was a psychic spy program. And whenever I tell people this, they're like, no way, like that can't be real. But you have guys like Joseph McMoneagle who have won the Legion of Merit for over 200 instances in which he's helped, you know, uh add intelligence and very vital cases, finding hostages, uh you know, drawing up, you know, Russian nuclear sites, like pretty pretty intense interesting stuff. And you even have Jessica Utts who's a statistician out of Stanford I believe, and Ray Hyman who's a skeptic I think out of University of Oregon coming in saying, you know, we expect this maybe to be debunked, and you know, coming in with a, you know, pretty scientific method going through the you know, recently declassified documents for Stargate—that's the name of the program—and coming out saying, you know, we think there's some inexplicable thing here, and we actually think that there is sort of a psychic function when it comes to human beings. So Utts uh did an analysis of a lot of uh evidence for psychic functioning, not just the Stargate program I don't believe, uh and she found overwhelming evidence, and she's been very very vocal about this. I mean, she was the, you know, the president of the American Statistical Society and stuff one year, and she's, you know, in her address that year, her presidential address, um you know, she said, you know, this is this is evidence that would be nobody would question; it's so strong; the statistical, you know, the the the quality of the evidence is so strong that if it were in any other field nobody would question this. Yes, but people people reject it, and they don't even want to see the evidence; they just they reject; they they don't even want to confront the ev it's fasc and every elite university from the Rhine Center at Duke for I think that was 1931 to 1960, and then you have SRI, you know, know in the late 60s, early 70s, you have the Princeton Engineering Anomalous Research lab, you have Washington Wash St Louis with McDonald Douglas; they had a parapsychology program; you have a lot of these elite universities pretty open-minded when it comes to kind of mind over matter effects and remote viewing. And you talk to anybody from those programs, and they all come out saying, yeah, we're pretty sure they're like weak effects; they're hard to instrumentalize, you know, that's hard to turn in; we we can't turn them into math; we're on the we're in the Stone Age in this stuff, but it's real; it's like definitely real. I've got, you know, I've got some kind of contrarian opinions about why they say that the effects are small or why they get they think they get small. I want to hear your contrarian opinion.

Well, I think they're very often using the wrong conceptual frameworks understanding this stuff. I mean, I think you, as you probably know from hints in my work, you know, I I suspect my hypothesis is that that a lot of what's gets called remote viewing is really precognition, y um and I think more and more I think a lot of people in the remote viewing community push back on that strongly, but I I think, you know, a lot some of the key players in that community are open to that idea more and more. I me I think Russell Targ even has sort of come around to that idea that that that it's that feedback may be important beyond just training remote viewers that, you know, maybe maybe maybe that's what remote viewers are really seeing; they're seeing that feedback in the future. That's a really interesting point. And and the thing is if you went at it if you studied this stuff with that in mind, what kind of different results would you get? You know, I think people, you know, from the start of psychical research, you know, the the the this was presumed to be telepathy; that was the model that was introduced by Frederick Myers in 1882 uh and the Society for Psychical Research, you know, collected all these amazing stories, amazing mountain of data basically, and it was all interpreted in this mode of telepathy at that point; precognition was not even thinkable. Um, uh, and there was this new new technology, the telegraph, which provided this nice metaphor for understanding these effects, you know, uh and so you know they uh psychical research and then early ESP research kind of carried that forward, and telepathy was dominant model until the television age. Okay, so the television age in the second half of the of the 20th century, oh, you know, it got reconceptualized, and this kind of older vague idea of clairvoyance got turned into the dominant kind of framing for psychic phenomena, you know, remote viewing; that's television; you know, that's it's it's just T it's taking another um technology from the culture and applying it and using it to help understand some kind of psychic effect. But the thing is if that's not really what's going on, then your results are only going to get you, you know, you're only going to get uh you're not going to get the best results if that's if that paradigm is dominating your thinking; you're going to miss a lot of evidence that didn't fit within that paradigm, and uh and you're not going to be studying it in the most effective way. Um, so you know that's my again that's my contrary in opinion. A lot of people will throw tomatoes at the TV set at the computer when they when they see me say that. I mean, people in remote, you know, who do remote viewing, you know, very much favor the idea that, you know, their consciousness is non-local and that they are traveling across space or seeing, you know, things across space, but uh I think there's compelling reason to to think that this is a this is a temporal relationship. Well, I spoke to Hal Putoff, who ran the Stargate, the psychic spy program for the CIA for a very long time, about your hypothesis that actually it's precognition; you're accessing a future knowledge state, and that your feedback that the target was right—so say you drop a Russian nuclear base, getting confirmation that that was actually correct might be essential to actually the accuracy of the remote viewing in the per first place because you're not just yet remote perceiving anything—and he seemed open to it. So I I I don't know, you know, the fact that he's open to I mean he's as deep as anybody on this stuff scientifically, so that's that's a good sign for you. But I guess in the case of like a random event generator or like, you know, affecting a random quantum mechanical process with your mind, how would that fit in with sort of, you know, it wouldn't be like you'd have a pre-knowledge of the result or something.

Well, there's two answers to that: one is, you know, PK doesn't need to be any doesn't need to be related to precognition. I mean, there's there's a lot that we don't know about about uh the mind and its abilities and effects of of biological systems on things in the vicinity, you know, there are a lot of possibilities there, but I I'm not a believer in this construct of psi, you know, this this it was it was that was originally a word that was just to denote a black box. I mean, this is what we don't know about; let's call it psi, but like was originally for the the Greek letter for the for the wave function for, well, equation. Yeah, but um but in parapsychology it just sort of became this black box term, but it like all black box terms it got reified, and people like took it, oh, there's this thing called psi, and it's this force or or whatever, and people treat it as a thing rather than just as open question, and calling these dis these different things psi is itself biasing people towards towards thinking that they're going to find one force or something that that that explains all these things, and I don't think that's the case at all. I mean, I think precognition uh has I'm, you know, anticipating that there's going to be a a pretty uh not that amazing uh physical, you know, process mechanism that can explain it, but but PK effects may be explained very differently, may have a very different uh something very different going on there. But the second answer though is that there is the possibility that um research on PK effects is uh is influenced by the experimenters' precognition, and this is an argument that's been made by Ed May. Um, I don't know if you've talked to him before, but he he sort of took over the he from Hal Putoff; he sort of uh led that program or the research arm of that program, the sort of its final decade until it was, you know, uh declassified and supposedly ended in 1995. Don't think it ever ended. Yeah, but uh the argument he he has made is that, you know, he's he's not a believer in the PK stuff; he thinks that the micro PK results—that is the supposed effects of consciousness on random number generators—uh can be explained by um uh I forget the term he uses, but he has a good term for oh, decision augmentation—that pre pre the the researchers' precognition is drawing them to start an experiment or start a trial at a time when the random numbers are just GNA are going to generate the results that he wants or he here or she wants. Um, I think uh that is I haven't looked at the the PK data, so I can't speak to that, but I I think that decision augmentation theory is potentially hugely important across science um because this if this is an effect, then what kind of effect is this happening uh in any kind of biophysical experiment or in the health sciences or in psychology um uh it could be a huge hugely important factor; who knows in the in the replication crisis that we're seeing; I it's uh I I think it's a a really important question that uh I hope some people will start sort of I hope some people will take that ball and run with it and and really uh investigate that potential. But you have to you have to accept pre first; that's that's the barrier that we're up against right now. Yeah, yeah, it's a big barrier. Um, when it comes to kind of remote viewing anything in the future or these prophecies or predictions, sometimes it feels like you're looking uh at like a bunch of alternative possible timelines, and you know, you're not you're not looking at, you know, the definite thing, you know, and so like how would you explain that?

I'm not a believer in alternative timelines. Okay, you are you're a block, un-block universe guy? And I think that that giving ourselves timelines I do and I don't this is a, you know, this is its own conversation, and and you know, we can we can go down the rabbit hole on that, but um that's the hang-up. Yes, the hang-up is free will; that's why people don't want to think about this stuff. Yeah, but I think we need to be brave and confront, you know, confront this idea, and that means temporarily taking your belief in free will, setting aside and just see what see what the data shows us. And uh I I think that it's it's kind of a cop-out to resort to sort of the many worlds and the multiple timelines and and all that um because in actual reality if the Everettian many-worlds um interpretation were correct, uh it means that there's practically infinite M par universes; there's not just one where, you know, I got in the car accident and one where I didn't; I mean there's a million, not there's infinite variations there. So it immediately makes kind of absurd this idea that oh, I'm seeing an alternative timeline; I mean, how how do you how do you even constrain that? How do you make that into any kind of right scientifically testable idea? And I I I find it I find it implausible and uh and not interesting, honestly. I think it's much more interesting to think about how an actual future is is inflecting or influencing us and sending us messages, but in a way that we inevitably misinterpret so that we so that those time loops happen uh and this gets back to the Freud stuff because, you know, Freud was a theorist of symbolic transformation; how uh how events in our lives, and he thought that they were advented our past lives, got not past lives, but I mean our prior history get transformed symbolically, and our thoughts get transformed symbolically into dreams. Well, what I argue in Time Loops and and my second book, Precognitive Dream Work and the Long Self, that uh it's actually be precisely because of those time loops that have to be fulfilled that we as freely willed beings only get information from the future indirectly, obliquely, symbolically, um and that's why there's this kind of ironic logic to fate; that's why fate has this kind of edle logic where we fulfill prophecies precisely by trying to evade them, where, you know, outcomes in our future uh we don't see clearly; we see them um uh symbolically transformed; we misunderstand them, and those misunderstandings get us to take the actions that lead to them. But that doesn't mean that we're fated to like, you know, if we have a dream about a a car accident, we're we're going to have that car accident. Very often we I dream about a car accident, and there are tons of examples of this that I've collected from from readers in my books, but also in the literature, you know, people will have a dream about a car accident, and they'll come to the intersection where they like, oh my God, I dreamed about a car accident here, and they'll suddenly be put on alert, and they'll just narrowly avoid a car accident. So so yes, the obvious interpretation is that oh oh my we I took a different timeline, you know, the dream was showing me one timeline; I took a different one. The simpler explanation is that collision in your dream was kind of a what if; it was kind of like a close call, and you and you you know when we have a close call, we always imagine in our heads what would have happened; we you know those that catastrophizing thinking uh and especially after we have a close call, we like, oh my God, that could have you know I we could have collided. I think it's those thoughts, those thoughts about near misses uh any thought that gives that that reminds you of your survival; that's the kind of stuff that reflexes back in time in your Tess brain uh and so yeah, we have dreams about catastrophes that we in reality nearly miss or avoid um but there's a way in which our brain focuses on those kinds of near misses and situations that in one way or another remind us of our survival because makes perfect sense, right, that precognition would presentiment would arise uh as part of our sort of as you know, Darwinian.

The reality of survival and our persistence in the BL universe—that I think is the message we're getting in precognition. So, on the one hand, it's not an alternative timeline you're seeing; it's a "what if." It's a thought about a near miss, or a thought about a worst-case scenario that, fortunately, you avoided. That's how I interpret those kinds of examples.

Are you familiar with Donald Hoffman by any chance? He believes that your perception itself has to be fitness-selected; it has to be perceptually adaptive. It's not adaptive for you to actually see the substrate of underlying reality. Then you have this other guy, I believe his name is Dean Buono. Your brain is a time machine, and he talks about how our brains have to work on a lifetime scale; we can't work on these cosmic time scales. You touch on this with the concept of the long body, or the Tesseract mind. So, what does this mean? Is there a more primordial version of us that we're interacting with? We interact with it in these life-and-death situations. Yeah, it makes sense that you would get the prophecy about the car crash or whatever, because that part of you doesn't want to get in a car crash; that's the most adaptive, naturally selected thing for you to know. How does this work?

Well, yeah, that's a great question. I think it gets to this dichotomy we talked about between the classical computer of the brain—that's really the classical computer of the brain—it has to be controlling our actions right in this moment and no other moment. You don't want to be completely dysfunctional. Your body, your senses, actions, and everything happening in your body has to be coordinated to be most effective at this instant in time. So, that classical computer system of the brain is doing that. But there are probably quantum processes that are helping, for instance, syncing it up. You have nerves that travel up the length of your body; you step on a tack. That has to be synchronized with the immediate visual signal of the tack, which is immediate because your eye is right here. This is the Benjamin Libet work back in the 70s and 80s—his landmark studies showing that there's this neural syncing of all these different sensory—all this different sensory information that has different flight times through the brain, so it all syncs up. But it puts us about a half-second in our past, according to that prediction; but we're not half a second in our past. So, something quantum is probably going on there to readjust these sensations and coordinate them.

But what you're asking about is those longer time frame, precognitive or presentiment signals. Those have to sort of inflect us and orient us and maybe impact our decision-making, for instance, or what we think of as our free will. So, it's on that kind of level that precognition is operating. And there again, it's why it's always outside of conscious awareness. Our consciousness—it's always in—it's not something we're aware of because it's not right now; it's not part of the "now" that the classical brain is constructing out of our experience. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's another reason why I'm impatient with people who keep throwing the word "consciousness" around in these contexts of psychic phenomena, also UFOs and stuff. Everyone wants to say consciousness—it's all about consciousness. I think that's a distraction and it doesn't help us see how these things actually work.

But as you mentioned Donald Hoffman, yeah, his work is really interesting. I don't know what to make of it. I feel like it's overstated a little bit. I think a lot of scientists do this when they want their ideas to have legs. I know I myself, in my writing, I kind of overstate things a little bit, because you want an interesting idea, and you want to see if it sticks to the wall—like throwing spaghetti at the wall or whatever. I don't know if I would go as far as he does in saying that we don't perceive reality at all. He sort of likens our perception to icons on the computer screen; what we're seeing is the fitness—what I forget how he phrases it—we're seeing the fitness value of things. I don't know about that. I think he's partly right, certainly, but whether he's completely right, I don't know.

So, do you believe we're in some sort of Platonic cave, and we're seeing something that is not at all like reality, and occasionally we sort of glimpse the light? Or do you think we're seeing something that's just perceptually adaptive? I don't know. I feel like it's somewhere in between. I think there's something slightly cave-like about our experience, but I wouldn't go so far as to that sort of extreme Gnostic view—that we're in this complete bubble, Truman Show kind of—well, the Gnostics—are you familiar with RZ Ver? Do you know? So, he talks about this simulation hypothesis, the multiverse simulation. I'm sympathetic to this idea that maybe your consciousness is being ported into this sensory-reductive, 3D, time-bound world, and that there is this more primordial self that the Greeks would say you experience in forms of noesis. You forget yourself when you're born, and it's this anamnesis process. Then, through these mystery rituals that all these guys used to perform at Eleusis, they experienced their primordial selves. So, you think that's a possible model where you occasionally get these downloads from on high, from your higher self, but mostly you just have access to the sensory stuff? But the senses are actually reductive on a default state of possibly greater omniscience; they're not productive, which Aldous Huxley and William James would be fans of this model, right—the reducing valve model.

Well, yeah, what you're describing is what mystics throughout time have said, because they have these experiences of higher consciousness or whatever. There's this implicit model that what we're living on a day-to-day basis is this reduced, constricted, constrained thing. I think, but again, we have to survive in the world. If we were going through life in this mystical state, we'd immediately get eaten by a predator. You've got to deal with the real world, and then sometimes have these expanded experiences. Those are equally important, but I think it sells that pragmatic reality short to say, "Oh, it's like living in a cave." We need to have that reduced, pragmatic focus a lot of the time. We can't be living our higher self all the time. So this notion that we're evolving towards always living a higher-self kind of state—I don't quite buy that kind of evolutionary view in that sense.

How do UFOs play into all of this? I know UFOs, in some sense, led you into this work yourself. Do you think UFOs have anything to do with the overall model of time that you have?

Yes and no. There's a common offered claim nowadays in the UFO world—and it goes along with this idea that oh, it's really about consciousness and stuff—an offered idea that somehow our precognitive experiences, synchronicities, and all those things are somehow part of the phenomenon, or part of this UFO phenomenon, which I think is totally not true. I mean, precognition is intrinsic to who we are as creatures, and I think it's intrinsic to all life probably. People sort of think they're all part of one thing, maybe because they get interested in them together, as I did. You have one remarkable experience; it's going to lead you to reading about other remarkable experiences, and certainly openness to certain kinds of experiences. If you're open to seeing UFOs, you're probably open to your dreams and having precognitive dreams and so on. But I don't think there's any intrinsic connection there. But the UFO question is hugely interesting to me, and I think this time loop model is possibly very important. I'm in total agreement with Mike Masters—who I know you've interviewed—that the strongest hypothesis I think about what is underlying the real core of the UFO phenomenon—I mean, I think there's a lot of deception and scop stuff going on too—but the real core there probably involves very likely involves time-traveling humans, or involves time-traveling technology at the very least.

Yeah. And if so, then all the things that we can start to understand about time travel just from our own experience, and from our own precognitive experiences and all these things that we were talking about—like time loops and the ways in which stuff from the future influences stuff in the past in a way that history is self-consistent—those same factors are going to be really important in time travel and in our development of time-traveling technology. We already talked about the quantum computer sort of step towards that. I think that that technology of communicating across time is going to cause an acceleration—technological acceleration—towards more advanced technology and towards probably solving these problems of physical time travel. But yeah, I think time travel is hugely important. So, yeah, I mean, if there's a way—if there's a place to look for time travel besides quantum time-traveling information—it's probably the UFO phenomenon.

Maybe there's something about biology that is a porting of something that's a little more probabilistic or quantum, and maybe biology becomes vestigial in the future. Actually, what we're interacting with is some sort of quantum code or something that's unbound by biological constraints. Because I think about your model of time loops, and it's you're kind of glitching into some information layer of the future or whatever. But the Mike Masters thing is like you're literally seeing these beings that are like from the future, and those are two very distinct things. You could find some sort of biological matter transporter, but maybe more likely we just become the sort of quantum information systems or something that can time edit at will and kind of show up at will, and almost be more information-theoretic, like in a John Wheeler model of the universe or something than us.

Yeah, there's all kinds of possibilities. I'm just—one of the premises—like we talked about the peripheral—it's like at one point in the story, this guy in the future—the user in the future—sends—so it's the character in the 20th century; she happens to work at the local 3D print shop. Okay, and so he sends her instructions to 3D print this future technology headset that enables her to visit the future in an avatar and stuff like that. But that idea of trans—you know, 3D—you know, printing out information in the present based on information from the future is going to be part of this halfway house, basically, to time travel. In the sense that you could have, say, a drone operator in the future control a drone in the past, and that's been built from future technology. But with the present capabilities of a 3D printer, you could essentially have a future time drone flying around that's under the control of someone in the future via an existing 3D or the existing quantum server. So, we're going to start seeing really interesting phenomena the moment the first quantum computers come online. And of course, the idea that maybe they're already online in deep black programs somewhere—you know, it's an interesting variant of the idea of a flying saucer coming through a wormhole into the past. You could have a flying saucer that's been built in the present based on information from the future, and that's maybe even controlled by someone in the future via a quantum server. There's just all kinds of possibilities that I think we need to start thinking realistically about—not just these high-strangeness UFO encounters—but think about what are the possibilities? What are the things that we're going to do when we have these technologies, maybe in a few years? Yeah. What are the effects that's going to have on society? What are the phenomena that we're going to start encountering in daily life because of this new relationship to our future when we have quantum computer servers that we leave plugged in for years, decades, centuries? That's going to be transformative. If anything, I think of the idea of the singularity—the sort of brink after which human history becomes unpredictable—well, I think that it's not spiritual machines that are going to do it; it's this time-traveling technology that comes from—or this informational time-traveling technology that comes from quantum computer servers that are going to allow this new relationship to our future, and it could be incredibly destabilizing. The first people to use these devices are going to get very rich by predicting stock fluctuations and all that.

So, I don't know. But when we talked earlier about somebody having a premonition of a car crash and that being sort of adaptive because that's based on this really important survival mode for them, that they have to be cognizant of that when the event possibly is about to occur, so they swerve out or whatever—I had the thought that on a more macro scale, when it comes to humanity, these UFOs seem to show up consistently around nuclear sites. Yeah, and so if you were trying to find the Archimedes lever—the point of most leverage for affecting timelines when it came to humanity—you would probably go straight to nuclear sites. Yeah. And so maybe that points to these things pushing us towards some teleology, right?

Yeah, I mean, the point of time travel—or one of the points of time travel—is not going to be—you people think of this in terms of again changing timelines and stuff. I think that's not the way to think about it. I think you can go into the past, and you can do stuff in the past and have effects, and you can plant the seeds for things that you will then harvest in the future. So, you can go into the past and affect things, shape things in a way that will then pay off for you. You can plant—the way I put it in my second book is you can plant seeds in the past for a better tomorrow. So, a simplistic example that I use—there's all kinds of problems with this thought experiment, but just go with me—so say you have a quantum computer server that's—that you leave plugged in from now until for centuries—and it's connected to 3D printers, big 3D printers, industrial 3D printers. And say you're working for—you're an astronomer in the 22nd century, and you discover an asteroid that's on a collision course for Earth, and it's—you've detected it too late to intervene, to send a rocket to deflect the asteroid. Oh, but you have a quantum server that's connected to 3D printers on the moon's far side, say, and you send an instruction to print out a rocket 30 years in your past and launch the rocket. And so it—when you detect the asteroid—but there's a rocket right there that destroys it because you launched it in the past. That kind of scenario—there's all kinds of ways in which that kind of logic can be incredibly useful for obvious reasons—not just in amassing huge wealth but in solving problems that ordinarily take too long to solve. If you can recruit the past to help you solve that problem, or say pandemics—say a new virus is discovered that's super deadly, but you can—and it's going to be a huge pandemic unless you do something quickly—well, you can use—again, use the same setup to do all the needed trials and drug development 10 years in the past, so that the vaccine is ready by the time the virus presents itself. That kind of using the past to solve problems in the present that wouldn't be soluble otherwise because they just take too long—not just because it's a computer, not just because it's a mathematical problem that requires too many years of number crunching, but because you actually need people and machines and infrastructure to deal with the problem—that takes time. So that kind of thing—again, this is why I see this intermediate technology towards physical time travel being super important in coming years with quantum computation.

There are other models of physical time travel that involve possibly manipulation of gravity, which is very related to spacetime in general relativity. Well, that's the next thing—that's what will come next. And there you're not limited to going—sending information back in time just to when you turned on your quantum computer. And there you're free to travel as far back as you want in time, potentially, whether you're using a wormhole or what I call a time-shi—which would be—are you familiar with Die Glocke? Do you know what that is?

No.

This German—the Nazi Bell—where you create super high voltage over a short distance, and it's this bell with a ceramic internal chamber where—there are two ways to change gravity—to affect gravity: enough mass and enough energy. We think of not being able to have the capacity to have enough energy to actually affect gravity in a real way, but if you have enough mass, you can obviously do it. If you have tons and tons of energy, you might be able to do it with really high voltages—electric plasma thrusters. So there's this rumor of this Nazi bell program under SS officer Hans Kammler, and he had this bell-shaped object, and the guys that were working on this reportedly were Ernest Groz, who was head of the SS medical division—so that probably means would imply that there are people involved—right?—and Walter Gerlach, who was a gravity physicist—he was a physicist very focused on gravity. You would put somebody inside the chamber, and you would pour the whole thing with so much voltage that you'd create a different inertial reference frame inside the chamber. So, like every second on the outside would be a thousandth of a second on the inside; you'd slow time down, just like in a black hole in general relativity. The closer you get to a black hole, the more time slows down—that gravitational source—and you walk out, and all of a sudden you're a thousand years in the future. So, it's a wacky model, but I got really interested in this mid-century inventor, this kind of gravity inventor named Thomas Townsend Brown, right? And kind of the subtext of his whole story is actually that he's extremely interested in time travel, and that he thinks that gravity manipulation leads to time travel. So, I find that a very fascinating little—yeah, maybe part of the—maybe it's the next intermediate step before pure information transfer, à la the movie *The Fly* or something.

That's cool. Yeah. Do you think—you know, like—I think about—have you read like the lectures by Schrödinger, *What is Life*?

No, I have not. I have—I have not read it.

Yes, because he talks about these aperiodic crystals in the DNA that are somehow really important information receptacles, and it's sort of speculative. I don't think he really has a good model for this at the time. I don't even think we had the double helical structure of DNA at the time; it was 1944, right? So, he's talking about this, and I think what he's implying is that that's the port between the quantum world and the more biological world or something.

Well, that's really interesting you say that because I've—you know, thinking back to this idea of 3D printing something based on information from the future—I've—I'm totally speculative—but what if DNA is—is like a quantum server, and that DNA controls proteins and all that? So, what if what if that is essentially what we are—is 3D printed drones essentially based on information from our evolutionary future? It just sort of opens up—that's interesting possibilities.

Maxwell's equations work forwards just as they work backwards. The more I get deep into the UFO thing, the only time the door shuts on me is around this model of what's called extended electrodynamics. It's not around like UFOs are real—that's being pushed clearly—but there's this secret science component of all of this. I think it's this extended electrodynamics—this idea that actually a more faithful adherence to the original 21 Maxwell's equations and not the compression of Oliver Heaviside into these four vector calculus equations might actually represent true reality more and actually allow for all these exotic wave types outside of the transverse Hertzian wave. And so it might explain some of this spooky action at a distance that's kind of weird because you don't get the typical electrons pairing off sort of thing, or attenuation over spacetime or through material or whatever. But there's one of these wave types—I realize this is a crazy rabbit hole—but one of these wave types is called helicoidal, and it's shaped like DNA. And so there's this guy named Constantine Meyl, and he's in the Black Forest of Germany, and he's studying this extended version of electrodynamics on plants, and he thinks that…

Can affect DNA in these sort of super-structures? You had this guy, Luke Monier, who's this French Nobel Prize winner. At the end of his life, he was saying, "You know, electromagnetism is really important for communication, information transfer within DNA." Within these aqueous nano-structures in DNA. I have no idea whether any of this is true, but DNA, it's so clearly this information receptacle, like, and that's clearly what it's there for. I mean, you can, you can cold-store semantic information on it, like, from a, use it like a computer server; it just takes a while to retrieve. So that's, it's just fascinating.

Yeah, I want to know, you know, I'm not in the, you know, I'm not a physicist, and I'm certainly not a quantum physicist, and I'm not a quantum biologist. So, you know, I'm at a certain limit with my understanding, but I, you know, it's speculatively, it's fascinating, and I would love to know more about the quantum, uh, quantum computing processes or, uh, aspects or capabilities of DNA. Yeah, because it seems like that's, that could be key. Totally. Do you, do you, what do you think of John Wheeler? Because I'm, I'm a big fan of his, and I've heard you talk about him in other interviews. To me, he comes closest to my model of the world with the sort of information-theoretic approach.

Yeah, totally. I, I, yeah, I love Wheeler, and I'm particularly fond of that, his U-diagram. Are you familiar with his, uh, that, that diagram he wrote, you know, with the U? It's kind of more of a glyph, you know, of the U, with an, where one tip of U is the Big Bang, and the other tip is an eyeball staring back at the Big Bang. And, you know, that I think is right. I mean, I think he's, he's, and he was working with, uh, not quite retrocausation; he was working with, uh, that kind of model that, well, you can affect a system by deciding whether to measure it as a particle or wave, you know, that kind of delayed, that delayed choice is sort of a, that again, it's kind of, I think a conceptual halfway house to true retrocausation. Um, but if you add, if you add real retrocausation in there, which I think there, there are some very compelling models, uh, of, of real retrocausation. I mean, Yakir Aharonov, uh, his two-state vector formalism and, um, uh, ideas, Cramer. Yeah, I mean, Cramer is a bit different; it's a handshake, it's a handshake, but it doesn't, I don't think Cramer's model really allows like affecting the path in a way that that I think Aharonov's model might.

Anyway, if you, if you add to Wheeler's U a real retrocausal, um, interpretation of quantum mechanics, uh, plus all the time, time-traveling technology and all the those possibilities that that become more and more potentially prevalent in the universe as the universe ages, you know, like you have the potential of, of truly retro-causing, you know, retro-causing the Big Bang, you know, in a, in a big loop. And I, I love that model. Um, and if time travel becomes possible at any point in the future, it's inherently always been possible, right? Right, which is fast, right? Well, it's, if it becomes possible at any point in the future, then, then time travelers have always been here and could be present at the beginning of the universe, and it would explain the alien thing, and it would explain all this sort of like forbidden archaeology stuff. You know, you have like, um, the Antikythera mechanism and all sorts of like precociously advanced architecture from the past, and you know, all the alien mythology and lore, you know, it would just be these sort of time-editing, you know, uh, future versions of ourselves that have figured out time travel and are maybe trying to sway things towards a specific teleology.

What, you know, also interests me is, is the possibility that the search for dark matter and dark energy could be, um, that this may have something to do with that, that, that you know, what if, you know, what if these trans-temporal effects, what if the effects of massive, uh, massive time-traveling technology or wormholes or, or something are affecting the mass of, of galaxies in their future, and that that somehow affects things in the present that we can't detect? Oh, that's, I just, um, you know, again, I'm, I, I, I'm beyond my level of, of, of, of cosmological understanding, but it just seems like, you know, there's retrocausation and time travel are the missing, are the things is missing from our understanding of so many phenomena right now. I feel like there's going to be a, there's gonna be a paradigm shift, there's got to be a paradigm shift, um, that, that where people wake up and go, "Oh, well," I think you know, Steven Spielberg, who I think is very clued into all the UFO stuff, has, you know, since he was, I think a kid, he was super into UFOs, obviously made E.T., he made, you know, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He's told this guy, Robert Liefeld, who I think created Deadpool, that, you know, "UFOs are like, what do you think is more likely, that these are like, you know, from Zeta Reticuli, Proxima Centauri, or that they are future selves sort of guarding our, our, you know, our present and making sure that certain timelines get sustained?" And I just think that is the clearest, you know, kind of Occam's Razor explanation, and it is, it is paradigm-shifting, and it's, it's bizarre to kind of conceive of, um, and yet it's, it's very interesting, and it would involve factions; it would involve maybe different versions, depending on which type of universe you believe in, it might involve different versions of the future trying to sustain themselves or something. Well, or just different, you know, F, yeah, different future factions, you know, there doesn't need to be a unified, sure, you know, civilization in our future. I mean, we're very divided now, and we, and we, you know, we fight amongst ourselves, and and countries are at war with each other, you know, that could happen across time, time too. You know, you could have, uh, you know, I don't know, just to take some example, you know, Russian time travelers in, in, in, in 50 years going back in time to the United States and meddling in ways that will benefit them in the future, and just as we, you might have American time travelers, you know, doing, say, you, we'd have like multiple, uh, factions, you know, intervening in each other's histories.

What do you think of Philip K. Dick? You write about him, from where you kind of talk about him, and you talk about who's a massive fan of his, and I'm a big fan of both, but I also think their worldview is just so fascinating. And, and specifically Philip K. Dick, you know, I think people don't fully realize how real he thought a lot of this stuff was and how autobiographical a lot of his stories are. Uh, you bring up VALIS, but I think he even gave a speech in Metz, in France, in like 1976 or so, where he goes, "No, like, *The Man in the High Castle* was actually a real timeline where, you know, there are these simulators, and they simulated this version of World War II where the Japanese and the Germans won, and they, you know, cut America in half, and then they decided to rewind the clock because that, you know, didn't quite work out." Yeah, the simulators were rewinding the JFK assassination multiple times trying to make it work out. Yeah, it's, it's fascinating. Yeah, no, he was, he was a fascinating character and, and definitely troubled. I mean, you know, he had a million different versions of reality going on and, and was, you know, pretty [ __ ] up guy in a lot of ways, but brilliant and, and uh, and probably, of, you know, he was the only artist that I've like studied in my, you know, work on artists and writers who really understood and basically accepted what I'm arguing, which is that artists are influenced by their future. I mean, that, that he, he knew he was a precog; he knew, um, he was precognitive, and it wasn't just these weren't just empty claims. I mean, he, you know, it's very clear in his writing, he sometimes writing about his own future experiences, and you can see, actually, you can go back to his letters; I mean, he was very open at writing about his dreams and stuff in letters, and you can see even examples of precognition that he didn't detect.

That's wild. Like, what's an example of that? So that shows it's not all this crazy signaling where he's just trying to act like there's an example that I write about in my new book, um, that he, in, so say by my argument in, in one of the chapters of my new book is that, you know, he and Jacques Vallée were kind of precognizing each other's work, and that in fact, VALIS is Valis, um, because they both read each other's work; they were both writing, uh, in 1974, 1975; that's when, uh, Vallée was writing *The Invisible College*, and that's when Dick was writing the first draft of what became VALIS. It was at that point, uh, I mean, they published, fortunately they published that first draft posthumously, it's *Radio Free Albemuth*, um, but he was, he already had this, this, this word had come to him, VALIS, and, and it, and this story that he wrote around this idea is all to be found in Jacques Vallée's book, um, this, the idea of a teaching-like satellite and the idea of, of, of people receiving, you know, awakened people receiving signals from some, uh, distant star that are designed to, to, you know, uh, uh, save us from some peril or whatever. There's so many parallels between these two books, but neither of them could have read each other at that point, um, so the argument is a little complex, but, but yeah, there's a convergence there, a precognitive convergence, I think, um, but, uh, the one of the examples of, of Phil Dick's many precognitive dreams was that around, I think this was in 1974, he had a dream where, uh, there are a lot of details of this dream, but it was like there were these, these, these small alien creatures, um, I think came out of a spaceship, gave him some piece of technology, uh, but there was another part of the dream where he was, he was shown a, a, a brownie, I think, or, or that, that had been scored by a fork around, around its edges, and it was somehow a relief map, okay, but it was to do with this, oh, and, and someone told him, "Oh, don't take that; it belongs to, um, Betty Fields." He, he misremembered the name Betty Hill as Betty Field, and he thought, "Oh, this is a reference to the UFO abduct," so 3 years later, he's like super excited when he sees *Close Encounters*, uh, and he doesn't make a connection to that dream, but a dream of like diminutive, childlike creatures coming out of a spaceship, a, a piece of food that's scored by a fork around the edges, I mean, that's like, that's the scene in *Close Encounters* where he fork-scores, you know, mashed potatoes around the edge, you know, and it's a relief map, turns out to be a relief map essentially of, of, of Devil's Tower, um, and, and idea, and that all being linked to a UFO, someone who's had a UFO encounter, I think it's it works, that's the way precognitive dreams work; they, they work on associations, you know, they don't present something literally, but they present, you know, a set of associations around this core thing. I think he was precognizing Spielberg's movie.

That's fascinating, that people precognize movies that way all the time, um, uh, yeah, so yeah, he was, but there's so many examples like that, and a lot of them he was aware of, you know, he'd have this dream and then, "Oh my God, the next day, you know, this, this thing happens; it was just like in his dream," and you know, he's not making this stuff up. I have a really weird, actually personal example that's just came out; I'll figure out whether I'm gonna cut this or not, but I, I was hanging out with a friend, and he was like, "Man, like, you should go to France." He just said it out of nowhere, and I was like, "Why, why should I go to France, man?" He was like, "I don't know; I kind of see you dating a French girl or something." And I was like, "Interesting, okay," and he, he was like, "My last girlfriend," he knew her, and he was like, "Yeah, she was, you know, British, but she kind of had like this American mentality; like, I think you need like a true European mentality," whatever, and he's like, "I'm, I'm convinced of this because I just saw this movie, *Before Sunset*, made by Richard Linklater, and the main character's name is Jesse," and, um, and I'm like, "Man, I love that movie; I love Richard Linklater; he's amazing," I'm like, "I, that movie is incredible," and he's like, "Yeah, I kind of see you with this, like, you know, the character like Julie Delpy," whatever. I'm like, "She's awesome; she's be, I wouldn't be down for that." And so the next day, on a whim, I book a trip to France, and I end up being there for the whole summer, and in Paris, I end up dating a girl, and then I, I come back, and her, her name was Selene. Her name, I come back, and I watch the movie *Before Sunset*, and her name was Julie Delpy's character's name. Isn't that weird?

That's incredible. Yeah, that's nuts. Well, there's a time loop there because he told you this and then, yeah, literally it affected your actions. And, and I was thinking about it in the back of my head where I'm like, "That's kind of why I made the decision," which is crazy to make a decision based on that, but it felt like, you know, yep, the right synchronicity or something to act on. But people, that synchronicity, sort of the, the go-to term that people use when this kind of stuff happens, you know, because they don't have a concept of precognition for the most part. Yeah, uh, so you know, synchronicity will work, you know, um, yeah, maybe precognition. Yeah, yeah, that's, um, but, and then, and then Jacques Vallée is how I learned of VALIS because I was at his apartment; he was like, "This is my favorite book," so maybe you're on to something. But Eric, I appreciate your time, man; this was awesome. Uh, we could probably go much longer, but, uh, this was fantastic, and uh, everybody go out and buy *From Nowhere*; it's a really fantastic book, and time loops. Thank you very much; it's been fun, finally, finally getting to sit down and talk; we made it happen.