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

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Why Files: Operation Podcast

Episode 639: Basement #009: Eric Wargo – The Block Universe, UFO Time Machines, and Precognitive Dreams
Date: March 30, 2026
Host: The Why Files
Guest: Eric Wargo (Anthropologist, Science Writer, Author)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the mysteries of time, consciousness, and the paranormal with Eric Wargo, a science writer and anthropologist known for his research into precognition, the block universe theory, and the intersections between UFO phenomena and consciousness. The host and Eric discuss taboo subjects in science—such as whether the future can influence the present—and explore ideas from quantum physics, retrocausation, precognitive dreams, and the artistic process as it relates to time loops. The tone is knowledgeable, open-minded, and playfully skeptical, with Eric providing detailed examples from science, art, and his own experiences.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

1. Eric Wargo’s Unusual Pet and Personal Background

• [01:46–06:26]
  • Eric shares a charming story about his daughter’s pet monitor lizard, Sunflower, describing the unique bond and care required (“…it’s fascinating enough to bond with a cat… but… a reptile is really… another level if you’re an animal person.” [04:03]).
  • The conversation then shifts to Eric’s academic background: PhD in cultural anthropology, with parents who were psychologists. He discusses moving from academia into science writing and editing, notably for psychology organizations in Washington, D.C.

2. Taboo Science: The Hostility Toward Parapsychology

• [06:39–12:45]
  • Eric discusses the deep-rooted skepticism and even hostility in mainstream psychology toward parapsychology and ESP (“…studies have even been done on the degree of hostility towards parapsychology… psychologists are number one” [08:59]).
  • His own paradigm shift came after a personal UFO sighting and exposure to the works of Jacques Vallee and Daryl Bem’s “Feeling the Future” precognition studies.

3. The UFO Sighting and Catalysts for Inquiry

• [13:11–20:49]
  • Eric retells his July 4, 2009 Philadelphia UFO sighting—two orbs “dancing” in the sky—eventually reported to MUFON, which sparked his deeper research into UFOs and consciousness.
  • Eric processed his father’s death and his relationship breakup through oil painting, notably of UFOs, noting the frequent connection between anomalous experiences and a sudden burst in artistic creativity (“UFOs and paranormal experiences… often inspires people to do art” [18:46]).
  • Discussion on art as a method of integrating and processing anomalous experiences, referencing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and its parallels to personal crisis and creativity.

4. Jacques Vallee & Hermetic Influence

• [22:13–27:21]
  • The multidisciplinary and philosophical depth of Jacques Vallee’s work drew Eric in—not just the science but the hermetic, alchemical angle.
  • Vallee’s “control system” theory for UFOs and the lasting impact of The Invisible College.

5. The UFO Phenomenon: Orbs, Time, and Other Hypotheses

• [27:04–34:59]
  • Host and Eric discuss the prevalence of orbs in UFO reports—ancient and modern—and debate extraterrestrial vs. local, time-travel, and consciousness-based explanations.
  • The time travel hypothesis: Mike Masters’ argument that future humans/“Grays” could be time-travelers (“…if it’s going to be possible, it already exists…” [29:39]). Eric discusses convergent evolution and the likelihood of humanoids elsewhere.

6. Government Secrecy and Technological Suppression

• [34:59–43:17]
  • Discussion about anti-gravity, zero point energy, and time travel technology—claims that these are suppressed by the “military-industrial complex.”
  • Eric describes his detour into Cold War “deep politics” and why understanding that context is essential for making sense of UFO secrecy.

7. The Block Universe Theory

• [45:04–49:10]
  • Eric explains the “block universe” (Minkowski/Einstein): all moments—past, present, future—coexist; time is another dimension, and the present is a “cross-section” of a four-dimensional reality.
  • Retrocausation, wormholes, and time travel as mathematically and physically plausible.

“From that four-dimensional perspective, we’re worms… snaking through that four-dimensional block. And the present moment is a cross-section… of that four-dimensional reality.” – Eric Wargo [46:47]

8. Causal Loops, Precognition, and the Scarab Story

• [49:10–54:05]
  • Eric reframes Jung’s famous “scarab story” not as “synchronicity,” but as a time loop: the dream is precognitive and forms a closed causal circle (“…her dream caused her to tell her doctor… which caused… him to turn around and see a scarab and give her the beetle, which is what caused her dream in the first place” [52:12]).
  • Many “synchronicities” may actually be time loops—tautologies, not paradoxes.

“It’s the opposite of a paradox. A tautology is something that must happen and therefore is not interesting… but it’s the way the world works, I think.” – Eric Wargo [53:35]

9. Teleology, Retrocausation, and Science’s Bias

• [54:10–56:16]
  • Historical context: Aristotle’s four causes, Francis Bacon’s rejection of “teleology” (future causing present), and how modern science is finally reconsidering retrocausation under new language (“retrocausation is the new word for teleology” [56:16]).

10. Dreams as Precognitive Memory: Journaling, Lucid Dreams, OOBEs

• [59:01–67:41]
  • Dream journaling as essential for precognitive work (“Anyone who does precognitive dream work…notices this…” [65:13]).
  • “Calendrical resonance”—dreams that presage events exactly a year (or more) in the future.
  • Out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) and lucid dreams as forms of precognition, often mapping onto future waking events.
  • Eric shares examples: a one-year OOBE/precognition involving his wife’s shoes and a 26-year gap precognitive dream involving obscure biographical details ([66:32]).

11. The Minutia of Precognitive Dreaming

• [77:28–83:15]
  • Most precognitive dreams are mundane, filled with minor future details (“Our dreams just be littered with all these just minutiae of the future?” – Host [80:13]; “Absolutely. Yeah. It’s minutia of the future…” – Eric [80:17]).
  • Not just about spectacular events—mundane, personal minutiae also shows up (“You dreamed about spilling coffee on your shirt two days ago…”).

12. Major Case Studies in Precognition and the Arts

• Michael Richards – [83:36–86:51]
  • Sculptor who created images of himself being pierced by airplanes years before dying in the Twin Towers on 9/11.
• David Mandel – [86:51–88:08]
  • Artist who dreamt and painted the collapse of the Twin Towers exactly five years before 9/11, complete with photo documentation.
• Morgan Robertson/Titanic – [90:47–92:16]
  • 1898 novel “Futility” about the “unsinkable Titan” that parallels Titanic disaster.
• Philip K. Dick/Jacques Vallee ([94:42–98:57])
  • PKD’s stories and dreams often precognized later events or other works (e.g., “Radio Free Albemuth” and Vallee’s control system theory).
  • The use of his dreams, personal letters, and fiction to trace these time loops.

“Artists are more sensitive. They’re more in tune with emotional…intuition. But some people, they prioritize it.” – Eric Wargo [111:33]

13. Science of Precognition – Daryl Bem and Quantum Physics

• [113:34–122:48]
  • Daryl Bem’s famous 2011 “Feeling the Future” study: statistically significant precognition in lab settings (erotic picture “curtain test,” retroactive memory tasks).
  • Replication attempts have both failed and succeeded; at least 80+ replications, many positive ([119:06]).
  • Quantum experiments (Wheeler’s Delayed Choice, quantum computing, photon “retrocausality”) show retrocausation at a physical level.
  • The block universe idea is, Eric argues, not radical—mainstream physics increasingly accepts retrocausal concepts, renamed and reframed.

14. The Bootstrap Paradox and Flow State

• [136:19–140:59]
  • Bootstrap paradox: the origin of an idea or invention is a loop, with no “first cause”—“plagiarism of the future” ([138:50]).
  • Creativity and flow state: being “in the zone” is when your future self is “giving” you what you need (“Flow state is when you are cooking in terms of that bootstrapping…” [140:30]).

15. Free Will, Determinism, and the Zen Take

• [132:27–134:47]
  • “If everything is determined, why try?” Eric argues the paradox vanishes as you “sit with” the idea of block universe and precognition; agency remains meaningful because you never know the future in advance.

16. Remote Viewing and Consciousness

• [143:06–148:03]
  • Remote viewing may simply be a form of pre-membering feedback you’re going to receive.
  • Experiments need to carefully separate true ESP from retrocausal anticipation of future information.

17. Microtubules, Quantum Biology, and Memory

• [148:42–151:11]
  • Eric is intrigued by Penrose/Hameroff’s quantum microtubule theory, but sees memory (not consciousness itself) as the crucial area—microtubules may be the quantum mechanism enabling precognition during dream-based memory consolidation.

18. Teleology, Death, and Survival

• [151:21–154:41]
  • Eric posits that precognition tends to draw us toward futures we survive; anxiety may be a “signal” from a future self having survived some challenge.
  • Death: Eric expresses agnosticism—"intellectually, death is probably the end,” but admits that on a deeper level, we all believe in something beyond.

19. The Time Faring Hypothesis and UFO Orbs

• [161:00–166:03]
  • UFOs and orbs that split, merge, or vanish may be time travelers switching temporal direction, creating the appearance of two or more objects (the “S-curve” effect).
  • Multiple orbs could be a single ship “scrubbing” back and forth in time—hence the appearance of synchronized swarms at, for example, the Trinity test.

20. Final Thoughts, Where to Find Eric Wargo’s Work

• [167:21–170:07]
  • Eric recommends his blog (“The Night Shirt”) and his books Time Loops and Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self.
  • Substack (also “The Night Shirt”) for updated posts and commentary.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Block Universe:
  “From that four-dimensional perspective, we’re worms…snaking through that four-dimensional block.” – Eric Wargo [46:47]
• On the Scarab Story:
  “Her dream caused her to tell her doctor…which caused…the beetle, which caused her dream.” – [52:12]
• On Retrocausation: “No, no, retrocausation—that’s the new word for teleology.” – [56:16]
• On Dream Memory:
  “I think it’s a kind of memory…I think it’s memory going in the opposite direction.” – [59:01]
• On Finding Precognitive Dreams:
  “Anyone who does precognitive dream work…notices this…you have dreams on the pre-anniversary of events.” – [65:13]
• On Creators as God:
  "We're gods…creators are gods because they're creating from literally nothing. It's literally nowhere in the history of an idea…" – [138:50]
• On Anxiety:
  “Anxiety could be a signal…of our future withstanding of challenges and threats.” – [151:39]
• On Free Will and Determinism:
  “When you sit with the block universe as a koan…you reach a point where—holy shit—it’s beautiful. It’s liberating to get rid of the baggage of free will.” – [134:20]
• On Orbs and Time Travel:
  “An outside observer would see…two objects splitting or merging—that's what it would look like…” – [163:35]
• On Creative Time Loops:
  “Plagiarism of the future. So this is the time loop at the heart of creativity, I think…” – [138:50]

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Key Timestamps

• Introduction, Taboo Science – [00:27–01:46]
• Pet Monitor Lizard/Personal Anecdotes – [01:46–06:26]
• Parapsychology and Prejudice in Science – [06:26–11:20]
• Eric’s UFO Sighting – [13:11–15:48]
• Art After Anomalous Events – [18:03–19:59]
• Jacques Vallee’s Influence – [22:13–27:21]
• Block Universe Explanation – [45:04–49:10]
• Jung’s Scarab Time Loop – [49:36–54:05]
• The Science of Precognition (Bem, Quantum Physics) – [113:34–122:48]
• Bootstrap Paradox Context – [136:19–140:59]
• UFO Orbs as Time Travelers – [161:00–166:03]
• Outro, Where to Find Eric’s Work – [167:21–170:07]

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Additional Resources

• Eric’s Blog: The Night Shirt
• Books:
  • Time Loops
  • Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self
  • Becoming Time-Faring
• Substack: [The Night Shirt on Substack]
• Noted References:
  • Beyond the Dynamical Universe (Madelung, Sutherland, Evans, Wharton)
  • Daryl Bem’s studies
  • Jacques Vallee’s The Invisible College
  • J.W. Dunn’s An Experiment with Time

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Summary for New Listeners

If you’ve never listened to The Why Files before, this episode exemplifies the podcast’s ability to combine well-researched fringe science with accessible, lively conversation. Eric Wargo pulls the discussion into the realm where quantum physics, time travel, creativity, and psychic phenomena all overlap, offering both personal anecdotes and rigorous thought experiments—and inviting listeners to reconsider the nature of time, fate, and how the future might already be shaping our lives.

Transcript

[Eric Wargo]

Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. And now we're customizing this rush hour ad to keep you calm, which could help your driving. And science says therapy is great for a healthy mindset. So enjoy this 14 second session on us. I think you've done everything right and absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, anything that hasn't gone your way could probably be blamed on your father not being emotionally available because his father wasn't emotionally available, and so on. And now that you're calm and healing, you're probably driving better, too.

[Host]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Today I'm sitting down with Eric Wargo. He's an anthropologist and science writer. But that's not why he's here. Eric has spent the last decade researching one of the most taboo ideas in science. The possibility that the future can influence the present. Taboo?

[Eric Wargo]

I've been saying this for years.

[Host]

Every time I get married, I get

[Eric Wargo]

the feeling it's a bad idea. Taboo?

[Host]

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.

[Eric Wargo]

Black universe? Sounds like we're the lizard people.

[Host]

Keep the good timeline locked up. The evidence comes from quantum physics experiments, lab studies that seem to prove retrocausation. Dreams that come true years later. Artists who paint disasters before they happen. Every year I dream I'm gonna get

[Eric Wargo]

audited by the irs.

[Host]

Dim.

[Eric Wargo]

Boom.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

I'm excited, too.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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. On YouTube and just really wanted this certain kind of monitor lizard. And initially it was like, yeah, yeah, we'll get you one when you're 13. You know, we'll get you one when you're 13. And then. But it never, you know, it never went away. And then, you know what? I kind of started wanting one, too.

[Host]

Really?

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. I've. All monitor lizards are the coolest. When I was a kid, I was. Monitor lizards were just the coolest animals on earth. You know, Komodo dragons are the monitor lizards, you know. And so, you know, my father in law said he'd help out, you know, financing, financing the vivarium and. Yeah. So last April we got a baby spiny tailed monitor lizard and he's grown into a lovely, you know, two foot long little creature that we love dearly. It's been a wild, very interesting experience learning about, you know, reptile husbandry and, 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.

[Host]

What's his name?

[Eric Wargo]

His name is Sunflower.

[Host]

Okay. Are you, are you feeding like live

[Eric Wargo]

mice or live insects?

[Host]

Live insects, yeah.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

Okay.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Does he walk around the house?

[Eric Wargo]

No, he needs, unfortunately, the difficulty with lizards, and especially monitor lizards is they require very high temperatures. So he has, you know, he has like a basking rock that's like 110 degrees and you know, very bright lights in his enclosure. But no, he's awesome. And I, you know, and they're fascinating. It's just fascinating to, to bond with another kind of animal. You know, it's like, it's fascinating enough to bond with a cat or, 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.

[Host]

Same. So it recognizes. Oh, yeah, okay.

[Eric Wargo]

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 greeting

[Host]

you at the door.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

So how long, how long does Sunflower live?

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Wow.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

Okay.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, so. And we're hoping that he will because he's, he's awesome.

[Host]

I've had birds, so I guess it's kind of the same thing. Yeah, yeah, because you wouldn't expect them to recognize you. But my little maxi, he definitely, he definitely did.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

He was a cockatiel. He's a while ago. Because I have cats now and they wouldn't do well with a cocktail.

[Eric Wargo]

Right.

[Host]

I've thought about like an African gray, but they live so long that it would outlive me.

[Eric Wargo]

Right.

[Host]

So I, you know, you have to will your pet to somebody. You don't want to be on the receiving end of that.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Well, I kind of suspect

[Host]

that dad

[Eric Wargo]

will be, you know, but that's, you know, we'll cross that bridge if you come to it. That's. We've still got eight years or so until that happened. Right.

[Host]

Speaking of college, so you, your PhD is in cultural anthropology.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Your parents? Okay, well, so I grew up. My parents were psychologists growing up. And then when I studied anthropology, I really sort of studied psychological anthropology. So I got like a real basis in psychological theory and psychoanalysis and, and so on. And after I got my degree, finally, after a long time that I don't even want to talk about or remember, I was not suited to academia. So I did what everyone who has a degree and can't be an academic does, which is become an editor and writer. And Washington, D.C. is where those people congregate because it's full of nonprofits and scientific organizations and the government and people who are hiring editors and writers who are smart and have, you know, a lot of 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.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, I don't recommend it.

[Host]

Okay. I mean, there's got to be advantages. Like, you've got a problem. You can talk to mom and dad and really get to the root of it.

[Eric Wargo]

Oh, no, I'm wrong or not. Yeah. No. My, my, my. 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. He didn't, he wasn't seeing patients and stuff like that. And then, but then that sort of was a natural basis for me to work for a psychology organization in Washington D.C. so for many years I was an editor and then editorial director of one of the two big psychology scientific societies in the United States, both of which are based in Washington D.C. yeah. And indirectly that job is part of actually my backstory that led me to doing the work I do, even though the work I do would be completely rejected by my former colleagues.

[Host]

They don't like this.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, yeah, so, and it's real, I mean that we can talk about this. But the extreme prejudice toward parapsychology really came to disturb me when I saw it firsthand. And this was around the time that I was learning about, you know, I, I grew up with that kind of knee jerk assumption that ESP is, is a myth. But after I had my UFO sighting, which we can talk about. Sure. I, I was reading, you know, Jacques Vallee and he's, he's talking about psychic phenomena 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. You know, I didn't have any problem with, with UFOs, but I, I had a huge problem with the existence of anything like esp. But I realized I was reading. It was around the time, around this time that Daryl Bem's prominent research, we can talk about that too, came out his feeling the future studies, which I was like, what? I don't know if I can swear on your show. Sure, what the fuck is going on here?

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Okay, excellent. And, and then I realized, you know, I've had those dreams. I've had precognitive dreams. You know, I'd had a dream about 911 on the morning before 9 11. Well, they have, you know, and I had just swept it under the rug. You know, that's what you do when you don't have a.

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

When you don't have a mental box or a cultural box to put an experience in. You just. It just. It really just leaves your head. You just like, well, there's no place for this to live, this experience to live. And it just. 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 was true for me, too. I'd been having precognitive dreams and I. Just. Because of my beliefs, my belief system, my unexamined belief system, I just didn't let it trouble me. But I found that I had to do that. But my colleagues. When Darrell Bem's paper came out, which was in 2011, my colleagues were. It was. It was about to be published. And on 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.

[Host]

To the journals.

[Eric Wargo]

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 seems so unscientific to me.

[Host]

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.

[Eric Wargo]

Right, right.

[Host]

Well, we'll get into the details of Ben'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.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Did she see these?

[Eric Wargo]

I have no idea. I have no idea.

[Host]

Because these were seen. Yes. By others.

[Eric Wargo]

They were seen by others, yeah. Because. So anyway, I see this thing, I, you know, I show my girlfriend and I try to. I had one of those flip cams that they were selling for a couple years back around then, and I. I tried to film it. 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. And I've, like, seen tons of satellites in my life. I know what satellites and everything else, what that stuff looks like. It was not anything like that, but it was like, wow, that was weird. And then the next day I got on to mufon, I guess. I guess it must have been mufon and found that there had been other reports of the same thing.

[Host]

Were you a UFO guy at that point?

[Eric Wargo]

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 Valet 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 start reading. And so as one does, one reads. You know, I was reading Richard Dolan's books and Jacques Vallee's books.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Did you run this by mom and dad? No. No. Okay.

[Eric Wargo]

No.

[Host]

Ever?

[Eric Wargo]

No.

[Host]

No.

[Eric Wargo]

Actually, my father passed away that year. Actually, that was, that's. That's kind of an interesting aspect of this experience because this happened in July 2009. My father had cancer at that point, and he wound up. He passed away that September or October. And in fact, like a lot of life upheavals happened. My girlfriend broke up with me, and that September, my father passed away. A lot of, 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 oil paints and equipment, easels, and he's the kind of hobbyist who like, buys every possible piece of equipment for their hobby and in most cases doesn't even wind up doing it. But he did.

[Host]

I know that guy.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

that that emotion probably makes sense for your story.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

And they work through it that way. It's just like in Close Encounters, you know, he has a UFO encounter, of course, like builds a sculpture in his living room. And you could, you know, Jacques Vallee

[Host]

is one of the characters in that movie.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Yes, you could.

[Eric Wargo]

A male midlife crisis. Like suddenly, like, you know, ambivalent about his family and, and, and needing to work through these visions that are coming and create art about it and, and bond with other people who are on that same journey. But. Yeah, and so it's. Yeah, it's interesting that my UFO sighting was directly over the Philly Art Museum, which, in fact, some of the important works of art that I talk about in my writing are in that museum. You know, it's my fa. It's my favorite art museum, bar none.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Not at that time, no. I mean, it wasn't the kind of thing where I needed support, you know, I wasn't, you know, again, it was not an up close and personal kind of thing. I was not abducted. I was not. It was not an ontological shock for me to see a ufo. You know, it was just really cool. Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. And now we're customizing this rush hour ad to keep you calm, which could help your driving. And science says therapy is great for a healthy mindset. So enjoy this 14 second session on us. I think you've done everything right and absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, anything that hasn't gone your way could probably be blamed on your father not being emotionally available because his father wasn't emotionally available, and so on. And now that you're calm and healing, you're probably driving better too.

[Host]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.

[Eric Wargo]

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[Host]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.

[Eric Wargo]

Leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. The Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute presents

[Host]

Leaders a podcast with Alan Murray.

[Eric Wargo]

Hear top executives share how they navigate disruption and drive growth while shaping the next generation of leadership. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. It got me then to do the reading, but no. So I didn't talk to other experiencers at that point.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

His background is bananas with.

[Eric Wargo]

His bananas with. Yeah, but his science. But the thing is, what's more interesting to me than even his scientific background is his interest in hermeticism and alchemy. Because that actually I had gotten really interested in alchemy in the 1990s. I lived for a couple years in Prague in the middle of the 1990s. There was a lot of American expats living in Prague. And Prague was sort of the capital of Renaissance alchemy. And they were kind of in the city. They were kind of. There was a conference of alchemists and sort of an academic conference on alchemists. And there was a big museum exhibition of Rudolph ii, who was the emperor who sort of supported. He was the patron of alchemy and all that. So this was sort of fermenting at the time when I was living there. And I didn't know anything about alchemy before I lived in Prague. But that experience living there and talking to some of the scholars who came for that conference got me really turned on to alchemy. So I, for many years, you know, around the end of the 90s and beginning of the 2000s, I was really interested in Renaissance alchemy and hermetic thought. And Jacques Vallee 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.

[Host]

I think I have the Emerald Tablet by me.

[Eric Wargo]

Do you?

[Host]

Yeah, there it is back there on the wall.

[Eric Wargo]

Awesome. He. The fact that he brought so many multidisciplinary influences to his work was really appealing to me. And he wasn't just a smart guy. I mean, he wasn't just a smart, Like Richard Dolan, like, fantastic researcher, you know, just like, this is fantastic. He's an actual bonafide historian doing real research. But Jacques Vallee was bringing all these different influences to his thinking, and I just. I really.

[Host]

He's a venture capitalist for 15 years.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. So just so many angles to his thinking and. And he became. Yeah, he. I really. You know, I still have a shelf of all of his. All of his books, you know, and. And which I've read and reread.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Well, it's. It wasn't. You know, I don't agree with everything Jacques Vallee says. In fact, I've kind of come to sort of disagree with a lot of his basic ideas, which doesn't matter. You know, I just. I just respect him as a. As a thinker and as someone who is thinking way outside the box. So, you know, the first of all, just saying, look, extraterrestrial, put that thought aside for a while and think about the other dimensions of this phenomenon that don't fit that box. I mean, that was very important for me, is 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 his, you know, showing that this phenomenon goes back to the dawn of history was very important. And, you know, and his, his attempts to think about this in terms of human consciousness and human society and culture and the idea of. Of UFOs as a control system, I think was a very interesting. You know, my favorite book of Jacques is the Invisible College. I've got, like, a first edition that I found treasured.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Same. Do you think we're seeing more of the. I mean, we see a lot of orbs Are we seeing 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.

[Eric Wargo]

It's hard to tell what's an effect of the Internet and what's an effect of, you know, the culture around UFOs that sort of makes people notice them? I don't have an answer to that. I don't know my sen. That these orbs have been around from the start, you know, and, you know, I, you know, what are they? You know, I don't dis. 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 sur.

[Host]

Sure.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

It doesn't feel like it. And something. I want to talk to you a little bit later in the show is for my brain. It's easier for me to reconcile that this is more of a local phenomena, that crossing these vast distances. I just can't get my mind to wrap around that these societies have. 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 multidimensional or something like that.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Sure. So Mike Masters anthropologist.

[Eric Wargo]

Anthropologist.

[Host]

The Grays are.

[Eric Wargo]

Who says that? Yeah, he's looking at it. He's a physical anthropologist and he's looking at it more from the standpoint of morphology of Grays, that, you know, for all kinds of reasons, they look like what we might evolve into. I'm less persuaded by that argument. He's, he's of the school of thought that, you know, extraterrestrials are going to look like everything. They're not going to be humanoid. I kind of disagree with that. I think that that convergent evolution is going to result in humanoids everywhere.

[Host]

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.

[Eric Wargo]

Same course, yeah. Not life, but civilization. You know, cultural beings, they're going to have taken a certain path to get where they are and that path is going to take them through bipedalism and having something like hands and a head on the top of a vertical body. I think that's my money would be that the universe will be full of humanoids. So that. 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. Right. I think there are all kinds of reasons that that hypothesis should be front and center.

[Host]

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?

[Eric Wargo]

Something like that. Some proto primate. That's species.

[Host]

Yeah. 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.

[Eric Wargo]

You know, there's the idea that had mammals not taken over the earth after the Chicxulub meteor that reptiles would have potentially evolved. You know, an upright. Sure. Humanoid, like intelligent.

[Host]

It's one of my favorite sci fi tropes Is like historian.

[Eric Wargo]

Of course. Of course. And there was a. I'm trying to think if he was an anthropologist. Dougal Dixon wrote some books in the 80s, sort of projecting what would these alternative evolutionary.

[Host]

I'm gonna have to write him down.

[Eric Wargo]

Dixon. I think I'm getting that right as far as. But I know that there's somewhere there's a sculpture of sort of a reptilian humanoid that's, you know, sort of a hypothetical, you know, reptile.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, I know. 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,

[Host]

you know, some interesting theories.

[Eric Wargo]

Some interesting theories. He's been proven right. You're now seeing that. Oh my God. He was right about a lot of stuff.

[Host]

He was. And it's just the presentation that's off putting.

[Eric Wargo]

It's the presentation and then there's the reptilians ideas like, you know, have trouble with that. But whatever. I'm 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 well, what you read on

[Host]

the, on the disclosure narrative, is this something, is this a psyop? Are we being prepared? I know we're speculating. I just kind of want your thoughts.

[Eric Wargo]

I just, I don't know, I go, you know, you could ask me the same question every day and I'd tell you something different because I flip flop. I don't know. I mean I think there's definitely psyops going on. I mean I don't think anyone would disagree with that. A lot of disinformation. I, I tend to agree that, you know, it seems like, you know, there's, there's obviously, there's, there's obviously really a there, there but that it's being obfuscated by, you know, interests in the military industrial complex who don't want, don't want it disclosed for various reasons. And so they're running all these, this interference and then there's people who want, want it disclosed but nobody, no, very few people, you know, maybe those 10 people that James Fox talks about know, know the full picture and everyone else is their, their, they're playing on some team but they don't have the full story. So it's just a very confusing, it's just a very confusing landscape. And in fact it's that, that, that kind of got me off of the UFO topic I think in about, you know, I spent a couple years like really going down the UFO rabbit hole after my sighting. And then it's like, oh my God, this field is just so full of, of people who are too credulous or people who are 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 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.

[Host]

It's hard.

[Eric Wargo]

And who's, who's trustworthy and who's not and who's, who's got an agenda.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, Jesse Michaels stuff red pilled me on that. I mean, that was another topic that I had sort of been really skeptical about, which is good.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

No, not how put off. Said that recently in the, in the documentary.

[Eric Wargo]

Right.

[Host]

That that's how they would hide these.

[Eric Wargo]

Right.

[Host]

This technology.

[Eric Wargo]

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.

[Host]

Sure. They're just temporary employees.

[Eric Wargo]

They're just temporary employees. And. Yeah. So, 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.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

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 how our intelligence community works and how the defense industry works and how defense contracting works. And I think what we're seeing is that politics Those deep politics are really at play.

[Host]

And from Roswell to Stargate all the way through everything. Yeah, well, I consider you a thinker, so let's, let's just play for a second.

[Eric Wargo]

Well, I'm glad you do.

[Host]

Everybody does. There's not a lot of you don't, you don't come under a lot of fire from skeptics, even people who are skeptical of your work. They say that it's thoughtful. So I think, I think you have a lot of respect from the scientific community. No. Do you feel there's hostility?

[Eric Wargo]

I don't think the scientific community. The scientific community is really aware of me. I think if you're talking about mainstream science, I think people who are interested in these topics are often hostile to mainstream science. And that's where I get the pushback is because people see me as a materialist.

[Host]

And you don't consider yourself one.

[Eric Wargo]

I consider myself sort of a 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 need science needs like, 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, that the last four centuries of materialism has been, has been a dead end. I mean, people who say that materialism is dead, like really, I mean, you know, how many medications are you taking? I mean, how, you know, how, you know you're how old and you're still alive? Guess, guess, guess, guess who you have to thank for, for that fact.

[Host]

So look, I hate big Pharma too, but I'm kind of glad that they're.

[Eric Wargo]

Exactly.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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 in the realm of

[Host]

computing medium like quantum computers.

[Eric Wargo]

Quantum computers, yeah. Which I think are devices that are going to facilitate communication across the fourth dimension, you know.

[Host]

Sure. We're even seeing that proven in labs now.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes, absolutely. But yes, I mean, potentially, you know, 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 disrupt things that could be turned into weapons. So there are probably very good reasons why we don't know about them. But it also makes one incredibly angry that if there are better fuel sources out there that the oil companies have been suppressing, which I firmly believe. Which I firmly believe as well, 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 for the planet.

[Host]

I see this, this fight between Jung and Freud in all of your work. This where you, you lean into sort of this positive view.

[Eric Wargo]

And then Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. And now we're customizing this rush hour ad to keep you calm, which could help your driving. And science says therapy is great for a healthy mindset. So enjoy this 14 second session on us. I think you've done everything right and absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, anything that hasn't gone your way could probably be blamed on your father not being emotionally available because his father wasn't emotionally available and so on. And now that you're calm and healing, you're probably driving better too.

[Host]

Liberty, Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.

[Eric Wargo]

Leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. The Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute presents

[Host]

Leaders a podcast with Alan Murray.

[Eric Wargo]

Hear top executives share how they navigate

[Host]

disruption and drive growth while shaping the

[Eric Wargo]

next generation of leadership. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts, then

[Host]

you just, you pull it right back like, ah, okay, we're not going to get there. We're not going to get there.

[Eric Wargo]

No, I'm not saying we're not going to get there. No, I think eventually. But there are a lot of opposing forces, you know.

[Host]

Yep. Well, at least looking 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.

[Eric Wargo]

I've heard things.

[Host]

What have you heard?

[Eric Wargo]

I've heard that there are, 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.

[Host]

But did that source tell you what the actual practical mechanism?

[Eric Wargo]

They didn't know. And they didn't know either that they're telling me something that they had heard from somebody who'd heard it. So like, you know, that's, that's the problem with this whole, whole field is you're dealing with people who've heard rumors, from people who've heard rumors.

[Host]

But I believe it.

[Eric Wargo]

Everything that we know about Stargate, it makes sense. It makes sense to me. You know, if the, the Nazi de glocker, the belt stuff is real, then certainly we have done something with that.

[Host]

And well, if you're working on anti gravity, you're working on, you're working on time, Right?

[Eric Wargo]

Right, right. These are all connected. So yeah, if you have anti gravity technology, you have kind of time manipulation technology. So they all go together.

[Host]

Okay. I'm trying not to let you scare me, but I do believe it. I don't know if we should take a quick break before. No, we can get into the black universe because I think that's sort of the structural pillars of a lot of this is black universe, what that is. And we can kind of just create the foundation for people who are maybe new to that.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Connecting.

[Eric Wargo]

If relativity, special relativity is true, if there's no objective reference frame, then there is a point of view on any moment that feels open ended, 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 are moving through a timeline and it's open ended and you have no idea what's going to happen next. And you could say fuck. And then, you know, 10 seconds, I wouldn't predict it, whatever. But there's a point of view on which all of this has already happened. So it's so, so just as we think of the past as solid and fixed. The future is also solid and fixed. And what he called this was the space time continuum. And he put a hyphen in their space time continuum. And it's come to be called the block universe because you can sort of visualize it as a big block in which there's. One of the dimensions is time. And so we're all flowing, we're all, we may think we're just, you know, bodies moving through the universe, but from that four dimensional perspective, we're worms, we're snakes, we're snaking through that four dimensional block. And the present moment is a cross section, it's a three dimensional cross section of that four dimensional reality. And that again, that future already exists and theoretically can interact with the past in different ways. You can have things like what we call wormholes now, which were theorized actually pretty early and by Einstein.

[Host]

By Einstein Rosen.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

So 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. So the block universe. Yeah. Is sort of the, the basic premise that makes all of this possible. And it's still not really questioned among most physicists.

[Host]

So this kind of throws away the many worlds interpretation.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes, yeah. As far as I'm concerned, it does.

[Host]

So can you explain? Because this was mind blowing to me. As I told you earlier, I did an episode on synchronicities based on Jung'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.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

We can do that. Yeah.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. Honestly, this is my favorite example of a time loop. It really is the best illustration of what I mean by a time loop. Okay, so for people who don't know, this patient came into Jung's office one morning, let's say, and she 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 rose chafer beetle, which was sort of the European equivalent of the dung beetle or the scarab. And he opens the. You know, he was a. Whatever else you want to say about Jung, he was a brilliant shaman, 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.

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

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. And lo and behold, the next morning it happens. And while anyone who keeps a dream journal and is aware of precognition, like, yep, that's what happens. But in this case, what makes that so hard for people to grasp is that. But wait, it was her telling him her dream that got him to open the window and give him the scarab, like, without that element, you know, this would not have happened. So they think, though, isn't that a paradox? But it's 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 turn around and see a scarab beetle and give her the beetle, which is what caused her dream in the first place. So it is a loop. It is a causal loop.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

She was remembering the future. Yeah, she wasn't seeing the future, she was remembering it in a way, or pre. Membering.

[Host]

So sending information back to her.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes. To her younger self.

[Host]

So she didn't really have to do anything. It was going to happen. She remembered it happened.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes.

[Host]

That's what's kind of. Once you get your mind around it, which isn't that hard if you just let everything else go. Many worlds, all that. She's just, it just unfolded. I think you call it the backstory. Yeah.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes, yeah, yeah. So that her, her dream was part of the backstory of that event happening in the office. And. But you can't, you know, when you tell a story like this, that's the problem I always have with my books is like, how do you tell these, these anecdotes? Because really. Cause if causation is circular like that, 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. It's all sort of equally causal. And that throws us off because we're used to linear stories. We're used to stories being linear. And so it's very, it's hard to wrap our heads around that. But that's. It's the opposite of a paradox. A paradox is something that can't happen.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

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, you know, it's not fair to, to defend an argument by its antecedents, is it? Yeah, yeah, right. But. But it's the way the world works, I think. So in a time travel universe, in any universe where time travel or time traveling information is allowed, then everything on some level is tautological.

[Host]

You said it must happen. That sounds like teleology to me. That sounds like Plato and Aristotle.

[Eric Wargo]

This is, it's teleology. This is the whole reason why people reject this is because in the time of Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon is the one who rejected teleology from the story of science.

[Host]

Let's explain teleology. That's.

[Eric Wargo]

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, 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, you know, is 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 wrote this book in which he basically laid out what causation was and, and banned teleological causation. Say we can't, you know, we can't accept, you know, causation from the future. And. But the reason was that teleology, at that time, the only teleology people could, could imagine was God's divine plan. Right, okay. And the idea was getting rid of taking God out of the equation, taking God out of the scientific equation. So what they did was throw the baby out with the bathwater. Really? They threw out teleology. And ever since then, it has been rule numero uno in science that causes travel in a single direction. And you can't have anything that defies that unilinear causal story.

[Host]

But your future is pulling you toward this result.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes, 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.

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

Sort of a non divine teleology.

[Host]

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 love to come back with a couple more time loop stories because people love those. And then talk about creativity.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, sounds great.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

I don't think anybody does. I hope. And you had something.

[Eric Wargo]

But you can, I mean, you can speculate about why it's important for an organism to perceive time in a, in a certain way and not another way. I can certainly say that you can imagine why you would want to perceive only the present moment or perceive only a very narrow slice of time that was synchronized with what's happening in Your environment and your body and so on. Like, I don't want to be responding right now to what's going to happen in 10 seconds, but that's right, worry about the bear.

[Host]

Don't worry about the future.

[Eric Wargo]

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 ten minutes ago. Okay. You want to be responding in the moment to something happening in the moment. And if you're going to survive now, there's going to be a certain advantage to having a certain amount of memory for things that have already happened, which might happen again. Likewise, there's going to be a certain advantage for knowing what's. Having an inkling of what's coming down the pike.

[Host]

Inklings and intuition.

[Eric Wargo]

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 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.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

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 it's connected to this phenomenon.

[Eric Wargo]

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 precognition is a form of memory and 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?

[Host]

And you're a long time dream journaler. Yeah.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes. Yeah, I got really interested in, I've been interested in dreams my whole life. But I had 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.

[Host]

That way. You still keep it up?

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

I understand that it makes a lot of things hard, but. Yeah, as much as I can, I still keep a dream journal. I used to keep an electronic dream journal. I used to keep a word file open. Well back in the 90s it was word perfect. I still have old word perfect files that I can't open because they were pass protected and they're now on a little floppy. This, whatever. Who knows what's in those.

[Host]

You must be a badass lucid dreamer.

[Eric Wargo]

You know, I'm not that great at lucid dreaming, really. Yeah, no, we were talking about lucid dreaming before the, the show and I'm, I went through a period when I was really, really into it and I was having some, some luck and, and I'll every now and then I'll have a 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.

[Host]

You don't. It's really hard to do.

[Eric Wargo]

It takes a lot of practice. Yes, it does, it does. And I even achieved an out of body experience.

[Host]

That was just on the tip of my tongue. Is lucid dreaming connected to out of body experience? Astral travel?

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, I think out of body experiences are. Well, here again, this is controversial, but I think they're part of the same spectrum and that they're, they're just particularly vivid lucid dreams, but I think they're precognitive.

[Host]

Have you had any of these?

[Eric Wargo]

Yes, I've had, I've had. I would say I've had four definite out of body experiences. One when I was young and I had no way of, you know, no way of processing it. I, it was very cool. But like, what the. You know, and, and then I had. Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. And now we're customizing this rush hour ad to keep you calm, which could help your driving. And science says therapy is great for a healthy mindset. So enjoy this 14 second session on us. I think you've done everything right and absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, anything that hasn't gone your way could probably be blamed on your father not being emotionally available because his father was. Wasn't emotionally available and so on. And now that you're calm and healing, you're probably driving better too.

[Host]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.

[Eric Wargo]

Leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. The Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute presents

[Host]

Leaders a podcast with Alan Murray.

[Eric Wargo]

Here, top executives share how they navigate disruption and drive growth while shaping the next generation of leadership. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts, a couple of spontaneous ones in the late 90s, I guess, with something going on in your life. I don't really remember, honestly. I did write them down though, and one of them turned out to be, you could argue, it was precognitive of what I did right after I got up out of bed to 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 kind of a wild, weird, random experience, but it turned out to be precognitive, very vividly precognitive of events exactly a year in the future.

[Host]

Really?

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. This is one of the really interesting phenomena of, 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.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Okay, well this is why. See, you know, consciously we're not aware of the date necessarily. I certainly am not. I like I couldn't tell you what date it is right now, but unconsciously we're aware of that and that same kind of process that'll you know, oh God, I'm feeling sad today. And then you look at the calendar, it's like, oh, it's the day my dad passed away. Yes, it's that same process that's pre minding you.

[Host]

Pre minding.

[Eric Wargo]

Pre minding you of something that's going to happen on the same date in a year or in 10 years or multiple years. I mean I've had precognitive dreams. My longest distance precognitive dream that I've clocked so far is 26 years. What?

[Host]

Yes, you have to tell us what these are.

[Eric Wargo]

Well, the problem is most dreams, precognitive dreams are just, they're really, they're boring. Like 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. But nevertheless it's very common. Anyone who does precognitive dream work over any length of time will like tell you. Yeah, like you have dreams that are on the 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 here before you know exact very specific details. 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 of kind constructing your internal timeline.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Well, we'll talk about that out of body experience first. So this way was wild. It was sort of a two part experience. I, I was doing these exercises, these kind of meditative exercises to induce an out of body experience. And I had had semi success previously. You know, you'll Go into a lucid dream, or you'll have sort of a sleep paralysis type experience, or you'll have Kundalini kind of sensations. But this time, boom. I am, it feels like I am. Like, just in reality, you skipped all that hypnagogic craziness. Just go straight.

[Host]

Wow.

[Eric Wargo]

And. But where I was was, I was down near the floor of a closet in my hallway, like in front of my wife's shoes. My wife's shoes. She kept her shoes on the floor of this closet. And I'm like, staring at these, at these shoes. I can't, like, really control anything. I'm just, I'm just staring at my wife's shoes. And it was, it was really weird. And then it. Oh. And. Oh. And I had a sensation of being weighed down. I had sort of a, a scary sensation that was being weighed down by my cat, Cindy. I couldn't see her. She was on my back. She was on my back somehow weighing me down.

[Host]

On your physical body or on your astral body?

[Eric Wargo]

On my astral body, whatever. And it's just strange. And it was kind of associated with a feeling of terror, almost like that sleep paralysis kind of feeling of terror that you have. But in this case, I'm staring 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 10ft farther down the hall. And I was up by the ceiling of my office, looking down through the window onto the street below. And it was like my, you know, it was like my office. I was in my office, and I was looking down through the wind, but I was up by the ceiling looking down through the window. And there was these two green lights that looked like eyes, kind of like green eyes looking at me, but there was no face or anything like that. But it was kind of spooky, like these two green eyes, glowing eyes, looking at me. And then, so it was at this point, this is probably, this is all unfolding over the span of maybe 10 seconds. Okay. I remembered the main instruction of the manual that I was following, which was keep your flights short. Go back to your body immediately because you were not going to remember it otherwise.

[Host]

It'll pull you out.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes. So, 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. I was like, whoa. Wrote it down, everything. I was, you know, I was, I really didn't know what to make of this experience. But Then So exactly a year later, I think this is exactly a year minus one day. I think there was like it was off by one day. I found I was. I had that. That closet I told you about. That's where we keep our. We used to keep our, our 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.

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

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. Hospital. To the pet hospital.

[Host]

Did you remember the experience when you're kind of rooting around the shoes like.

[Eric Wargo]

Oh, I don't remember exactly at what point I realized. Put this together. I think it was the second experience that jogged my memory of the out of body experience. So that same day, that same evening, I got up on a ladder in my study to change the light bulb in my study and I stood up there and I looked down. Sorry, I banged the.

[Host]

That's okay. I'm excited.

[Eric Wargo]

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.

[Host]

The eyes.

[Eric Wargo]

And it wasn't eyes, it was. It was my. It was my power cord from my laptop. It was an Apple laptop that has a little green diode. This guy right here, right there. It was the green diode, but it was being reflected in two panes of glass. There was two green dots, something I wouldn't have been able to see if I was 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 the scene from my out of body experience. So I like. Then I think together the rest of it that this was not an out of body experience. It was a precursor cognitive precognitive of an in body experience in a different location. You were life.

[Host]

You were on the show.

[Eric Wargo]

I was on. Now I know a lot of people have out of body experience which they experience. They see their body. 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 who are interested in this topic and who are able to achieve these things, which is it's very. It's very difficult and I've never been able to do it again.

[Host]

Can anybody learn this, though?

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, theoretically. The book I was following. Now I have a lot of books on out of body experiences, including some of the old classics. Like, I forget. There's a really great book from like the 1930s that's fantastic and I wish I could remember the name of it, but there's a more modern teacher in Australia named Robert Bruce who does sort of bodywork kind of stuff, and he wrote a very, very good guide. Now, I don't agree with his cosmology and, you know, I don't. I'm about what's happening, whatever. But he, his techniques are very sound, I think, and, and he, he really gets, you know, he really understands how you induce these things. So I was, I was following his. His guide. I think Astral Dynamics is his book.

[Host]

He's like awake to sleep method, that type of thing.

[Eric Wargo]

No, it's more. It involves meditating. It involves learning to meditate on different parts of your body and feel sensations throughout your body. Sort of a body scan kind of thing. That's very crucial, honestly. And I've found it to be really important just for meditating in general to, like, it's counterintuitive, but you're going to access that precognitive thing by focusing on physical sensations.

[Host]

Really?

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

Okay.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. And anyway, so learning to sort of scan your body 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.

[Host]

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 the. 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, right?

[Eric Wargo]

Absolutely.

[Host]

Do you go back to your journal and when things.

[Eric Wargo]

When something feels weird sometimes, you know what the. So the pioneer of precognitive dream work was a guy named J.W. dunn, who I talk about in all my books. He was an aeronautical engineer in the early 20th century, and he recommend he lived in a time when, you know, records took up physical space. And so he recommended just keeping three days worth of dream records and then throwing them out.

[Host]

Oh, no.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, yeah, because I mean, like, it would quickly, you know, my dream journals, I printed them out for a while and that turned into binders that were really thick and that's just from a few years.

[Host]

Did you tell us your 26 year precognition? Did you tell us.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

We have to remember that one.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Well, these are all very personal.

[Eric Wargo]

They're very, very personal. Yeah, but the point is no one would have the time to let alone storage space to record every dream over the course of your life and compare every dream over the course of your life to every experience over the course of your life. So he can find it to just like go through the last three days dream records, you know, and catch those short term, you know, precognitive dreams. But yeah, it becomes too big a task. I, you know, I know someone who's, you know, who's, who lives this reality totally. And she's, you know, she keeps, you know, voluminous dream records and goes through and tracks every, every, you know, every connection between her dreams and reality. And it's mind boggling. You know, it's mind boggling. But like I, it would drive me crazy.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Well, tell us your 26 year dream. And then you had a 911 dream, didn't you?

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

Okay.

[Eric Wargo]

The 26 year dream was this. It was a dream about being in this certain environment. I'm blanking on the name of the artist. Oh, gosh, the, he was sort of a precursor of the Surrealists. But it'll come to you. Yeah, it'll come to me. Anyway, I was in this very specific environment, in this very. Moving around this square and there was a character with a gun firing a guy. It was just, it was, it was very stage play like, and very much like the work of this certain painter. And, and the scenario was very specific. And it, I wrote it down at the time, but I've always remembered that dream because it was just, it was just so particular and specific. And, and then this past year I was reading a book about another artist and they talked about, about this artist that I'm trying to think the name of. And this, it was just a sentence about this person's art. That was exactly what happened in my dream. And I, 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.

[Host]

What was that?

[Eric Wargo]

I, I, it's too personal. Okay. It's too personal to say, but I thought, oh my God, this is my dream that I had. That one dream I had. And so I went back to my dream journals and guess what? It was the same date.

[Host]

Holy shit.

[Eric Wargo]

26 years earlier.

[Host]

Calendrical.

[Eric Wargo]

I just, I think this is happening all the time and we're just not aware of it because, you know, 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, I don't, yeah, that's the thing. Like I kept, you know, I kept dream records for decades without, even before I was aware of the topic of precognitive dreams. And it's only like. Well, thanks to the fact that I had been keeping those dream records, I've been able to identify a lot of precognitive dreams from that time period. But, you know, most precognitive dreams go undetected, you know, so I think this is the, this is the, the mental shift people have to make people think that, oh, if you had a precognitive dream, it must be something super significant and there's a reason you were, you had this premonition or whatever. No, I think it's an automatic process that we're brain is constantly doing this and we're just not aware of it.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Absolutely. Yeah. It's minutia of the future. That's a great way of putting it. Because they're so minute and specific that they're hard to tell these stories to other people often. I mean, it's the dreams about plane crashes and 9, 11 and stuff like that that, you know, that makes a good enough story to tell someone else. But, you know, just having a dream about some very random specific personal experience in your day, you know, that's, it's, it makes, it's meaningful to you.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Exactly.

[Host]

But you dreamed about that two days ago, Right. In some way. But you can't really recognize it because it hasn't happened.

[Eric Wargo]

Right, right, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

[Host]

It's difficult to get your mind around it, but yeah, but I love it. So what is it about 9, 11? Because there's a lot of preconditive dreams about 9 11. Is it the.

[Eric Wargo]

I would bet that Everybody dreamed about 911 before it happened.

[Host]

I mean, were you in New York?

[Eric Wargo]

No, I wasn't. I was in. I had just moved to Washington D.C. actually a week beforehand. I'd moved on September 1, 2001. I was live. I was living in a suburb of D.C. and working in Tenleytown neighborhood which is far away from the Pentagon. In fact, as it was happening and people were saying planes hit the Pentagon and stuff like that is like. It took me a long time to realize, oh wait, that's. That's where I live now.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Eric Wargo]

But no, the. That that morning and I still have the dream record. It was, you know, it was just a dream about two identical buildings that had this, these corrugated gray facades and they were mosques somehow. And, and there are other details in the dream which I sort of decoded afterwards that also made sense in terms of the events. But you know, okay, that's weird. I wrote it down and I don't even think that as the events were happening I was thinking of that dream. I think it was the next day that I looked at my dream record and go, oh shit. I sort of had a dream about this or related to this. But it's like, you know, I had no, never before or since have I dreamed about two identical square buildings that have like gray corrugated facades. The. The topic of Islam and was not on my radar at all until that morning of 911 when suddenly it came on everyone's radar.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

And I'd never, you know, I was able to do an electronic search of my records. You know, did the term mosque ever show up? No. You know, that's the one. You know, the one dream, one time in my life I've ever dreamed about mosques and, or anything related to Islam. You know, so, you know, but you know, and there were symbolic aspects of the dream that I, I don't want to go into too sort of again too personal, but that related to the topic of suicide and which makes sense again in terms of the events of that day.

[Host]

So if lots of people are remembering 911 pre remembering, they're not having an out of body experience. They're not experiencing it. They're more reminding themselves of just watching

[Eric Wargo]

the news experience of watching cnn.

[Host]

Wow. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of stories like this. In one of your books you talk about the Michael Richards case.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

Would you mind regaling us? I know you told it a million times. It's a great story.

[Eric Wargo]

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 in the arts.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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 Michael Roland Richards, who was a sculptor in New York in the 1990s. He was sort of an up and coming young Jamaican American sculptor. And over the last couple years of the 90s, he made a series of sculptural self portraits of himself dressed in a flight suit where he 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 high in the towers, and then there would be an exhibition at the end. They'd show their work. Anyway, so he was one of the summer 2001 cohort. And he was working, apparently based on people who had visited his studio before the attacks. He was working on, let's see, a self portrait of himself riding a burning meteor and another self portrait of himself as a fallen angel of his torso, like having fallen to the ground. Wow. And so he was the only one of that artist cohort who was in his studio. He had stayed the night in the studio on the night of, of 911 and was killed in the attacks the night 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 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 911 is just, you know, stunning. It is stunning.

[Host]

The other artist was. Was it Stephen Mandel?

[Eric Wargo]

Oh, yeah. David Mandel. David Mandel, yes. So this is a, A. I don't know if he's still alive, actually. He was already. He was a retired Art teacher living in London. And he had a history, a life history of precognitive dreams. And what he did was he painted 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 11, 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 he thought might be precognitive, he would go, he would take the drawing to his local Barclays bank building, okay. And have himself photographed under the clock of the Barclays bank to have the date. So for a date stamp, okay, again,

[Host]

we can see this photo.

[Eric Wargo]

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.

[Host]

Hi, it's Sarah Gibson Tuttle, founder of Olive in June. Are you ready to save so much time and so much money and love your nails more than ever? That's exactly why I created Olive in June. And I have something just for you. It's called the DIY Mani Challenge. And it starts with one simple idea. Today is the day that you learn to do your own nails. So whether you're brand new to doing your nails or already obsessed with your at home mani routine, this is your invitation to level up your nail game with expert guidance every single step of the way. So no matter where you are in your nail journey, we've got you covered at Olive and June ready to take the DIY mani challenge. We've taught millions to mani. And now it's your turn. So go to oliveandjune.com DIYlove20 for 20% off your first system using code DIY L O V E20. That's oliveandjune.com DIYLove20 Liberty Mutual customizes your

[Eric Wargo]

car and home insurance. And now we're customizing this rush hour ad to keep you calm, which could help your driving. And science says therapy is great for a healthy mindset. So enjoy this 14 second session on us. I think you've done everything right and absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, anything that hasn't gone your way could probably be blamed on your father not being emotionally available because his father wasn't emotionally available and so on. And now that you're calm and healing, you're probably driving better too.

[Host]

Is this what got you interested in creativity?

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

But artists seem to be sensitive to this.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes, yes. Anyone who's creative, using their imagination, they're tapped in to their intuitive precognitive abilities. And 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 a lot of people don't really want to hear, you know, but everyone can connect to creativity in some way, if not in the arts and sciences, whatever. You know, just flow, state, flow, state. Yeah, And I was really intrigued. You know, honestly, it was Philip K. Dick that, because he had regular precognitive dreams and he was very aware of how his stories played out in his life afterwards. And so it was Philip K. Dick was really the first case. And also Morgan Robertson, who wrote the story about the Titanic, tell that story.

[Host]

And then let's get into Philip K. Dick, because he's everybody's favorite.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

This is the unsinkable Titan in the novel?

[Eric Wargo]

I don't know. Yeah, it's called Unsinkable. Yeah. And it's on its third voyage between Liverpool and. And New York, I think, going from New York to Liverpool in this case. And it strikes an iceberg and almost all the passengers die because there's not enough lifeboats. And that's even like a plot point in the story. And so 14 years later, he's as stunned as everyone else to read the New York Times headline that Titanic sinks and. And most of the passengers are lost because there's not enough lightboats. So, you know, really incredible story. And that's been looked at a lot. You know, it's. That's, that's one of the most famous.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Let's see. Yeah, 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.

[Host]

Right, like that. Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

And he, He. He's another one of these Artists who is. His life was full of synchronicity. Okay. You know, I argue synchronicity is what it feels like when we're precognitive. We don't know it, you know.

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

Feels like. Like, you know, wait a minute, you know, like, how can these coincidences be happening? And it's your own precognitive brain guiding you through life and you're sure. Yeah. And because you don't have a concept of precognition, you're, like, surprised by it. But. But yeah, I think that's, you know, I think it's. It's precognition, really. But yeah, so. So Philip K. Dick, before you jump

[Host]

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.

[Eric Wargo]

Everybody. Everybody. Yes.

[Host]

So Phil K. Dick, who invented Precog, right? Minority Report.

[Eric Wargo]

No, it's actually another one of his stories, I think, in which he used the term precog first. But yes, he sort of. He's the inventor of the term precog, and precognition factors into a lot of his fiction. And he was himself very aware of precognition occurring in his life, and he was very thoughtful about it. And his. So he was aware of how his. He would write a story and there'd be a character or some sort of plot element in story, and then. And then it. This. He would meet this character in real life or he would read an. An article. Like, he was a. He was an avid reader of, like, popular science magazines and stuff like that, and he would, you know, like, like, he wrote, you know, he basically wrote about split brain research in

[Host]

Scanner Darkly.

[Eric Wargo]

Scanner Darkly. And then like six months later, before the novel came out. But, you know, he read an article in Scientific American or something like that about split brain research and all kinds of examples like that. And 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 worth it. Totally worth it. Yeah. If there's any. Yeah. If there's two things I recommend people shelling out the money for, it's. It's Philip K. Dick's letters and Jacques Vallee's journals. You know, those are the.

[Host]

Can you get those?

[Eric Wargo]

Journal? Yes, Chuck Valle's journals. Are you kidding?

[Host]

I gotta write that down.

[Eric Wargo]

Forbidden Science, volumes one through six. Yeah. But anyway, so you can go through his letters and see him, like telling his. Like he had this pen pal in the late 70s. I'm blanking on her name. But he, you know, he'd write these long letters to this person and tell about these dreams he was having and, and a lot of the kind of the rudiments of what became his exegesis or you 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 to himself. Like, I think this is in time loops. I talk about a dream he had that he was clearly precognizing Close Encounters, like three years before the movie came out. But it's like, it's uncanny, the connections between this dream and Close 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 Vallee.

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

And there are interesting precognitive connections, I think, between him and Jacques Vallee going on.

[Host]

You have to tell us, wasn't there one? It was mind blowing where Jacques Vallee pre. Remembered something about a PKD story. Maybe it was valis.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

It's a fun show.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. But I, you know, I think that Velis, I think, is Vali because. So what's the story here? Jacques Vallee, 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. 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 we, which was published after his death as Radio Free Album. Ooth. Okay, Right. And it's about this teaching satellite that broadcasts things to awaken sensitive people on Earth. You know, it's basically, it's a. Basically the premise of Jacques Valet's book. But Jacques Ballet's book had not come out yet. They did not know each other.

[Host]

Can you imagine running into them at a Berkeley bar?

[Eric Wargo]

Oh, man.

[Host]

Oh, wow.

[Eric Wargo]

There are Two people. I would love to, you know, get together in a room.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Eric Wargo]

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 an ESP experiment, which I don't rule out.

[Host]

You know, he'd be the guy.

[Eric Wargo]

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 valis. And it actually looks like a French word.

[Host]

It does.

[Eric Wargo]

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 Vallee's books. She couldn't remember the titles of Jacque Valley's books, but the most recent one was Invisible College. So I basically, I'm certain that he read Invisible College three years later.

[Host]

He must have.

[Eric Wargo]

And I think he was precognizing it when he was crafting, initially crafting this story that became Velas. But, you know, long before he could read, before he did or even could read Jacques Belle's work. So I think there's a connection going on there.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Any other.

[Host]

Any other. Just examples of PKD predicting the future. Oh, I don't mean to put you on spot. I was just curious.

[Eric Wargo]

No, just dreams where he would predict something in his life, basically. But, I mean, the world becomes more and more Phil Dickian. It does by the day.

[Host]

When the androids are built, we're going to remember.

[Eric Wargo]

Boy. Yeah, it's.

[Host]

Did you ever see his talk in Mets. Metsfresh77.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

Where he talks about. He was a Many Worlds guy, and he talks about that man in the High Castle being an alternate reality. What do you think he was seeing? If you. If Many Worlds is not a thing, you know it.

[Eric Wargo]

A person can be precognitive without having a correct theory of reaction.

[Host]

He could be wrong.

[Eric Wargo]

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.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Eric Wargo]

For it to work.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. Nabokov.

[Host]

Nabokov.

[Eric Wargo]

Okay. So, yes. When he was. Long before he became a famous Author. When he was 17, he was this aristocratic kid in St. Petersburg, Russia, you know, collecting butterflies and writing poetry and stuff. And his uncle Vasily dies and leaves him an estate, basically. So suddenly, he is a rich man and set up for life. And about 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 own uncle Vasily appears to him in a dream and says, I will come back to you as Harry and Kuvirkin. Okay. All right, so What? Fast forward 40 some years, I believe. I can't remember the exact number. He's living in Cornell or living in Ithaca, New York, working at Cornell, teaching English at Cornell, and, you know, subsisting. He's not rich anymore. And he reads. A friend calls him up and says, have you read the New York Times today? And there's an article in the New York Times about how 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, but still. It's still a lot, but there was a huge amount at the time. And so he learns, basically, from the New York Times that he is now a rich man. Yep. And here's the thing. So it's Harris Kubrick Pictures. Kuvirkin. If you Anglicized it would be Kubrick.

[Host]

Unbelievable.

[Eric Wargo]

Unbelievable.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Eric Wargo]

And then. So he got interested, maybe because of that, I don't know, but he got interested in precognitive Dreams, and he got interested in the writing of J.W. dunn and.

[Host]

Who influenced a lot of writers.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes, who influenced. Yes, he influenced a lot of writers. But Nabokov found Dunn's book called An Experiment with Time and read it and replicated his experiment. He did the experiment, which is basically keep dream records and go back to your dream records for the last few nights at least, and see what matches you get. And lo and behold, he got several hits. Really nice hits of, like, exactly the kind of thing you would expect, which is like, some 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, in fact, the two best examples are things he was watching on TV in the following couple days. Little. Little scenes in. In shows that he was watching. You know, like, the bulk of my precognitive dreams are, like, things on Twitter. Sure. Yeah. But, yeah, so, yeah, he's. He replicated it. And. And, yeah, J.W. delmon was hugely influential on mid century writers, J.R.R. tolkien being. Being one of them that people don't realize.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, yeah. They, they sort of live in this timeless reality that, you know, their sort of cosmology. And it was based on J.W. dunn's work. And Christopher Tolkien found notes in his father's writings. He'd found drafts of Lord of the Rings and notes about elvish time and the elves that were all sort of stuff, including diagrams taken from J.W. dunn's books. So J.W. dunn was influential on Tolkien. We don't know, unfortunately, if JRR Tolkien ever kept a dream diary. Which would be awesome.

[Host]

Oh, yeah.

[Eric Wargo]

Which would be awesome.

[Host]

I'd show up for that one too.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes. But anyway, Dunn's ideas, at very least, were influential on him. And, and he and CS Lewis talked a lot about.

[Host]

Just to wrap Tolkien, he has two unfinished time travel stories based on Dunn's work.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes. Which.

[Host]

That's fun.

[Eric Wargo]

Yes. Yeah, the. The Lost Road is one of them. And I forget the other one, but yes, he started, he started writing a time travel. Now he, he and C.S. lewis 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 going to write a space travel novel and Tolkien was going to write a time travel novel. And so he got four, four chapters into it and never finished it. But yeah, that. And there's, there's a precognitive dimension to that unfinished novel too. That's pretty interesting that I talk about in one of my books. But yeah, no, JW Dunn was a really, really interesting, really interesting person. Very interesting figure.

[Host]

Well, we stumbled on a segue and I'm. 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, whichever. Everybody needs to watch. Everyone needs to watch.

[Eric Wargo]

Everybody. Yes.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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 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.

[Host]

It's the unfalsifiable.

[Eric Wargo]

It's the unfalsifiable. So, yes, yes. So all this, this is speculation, but

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Right. But, yeah, so. So, yes, everyone should watch Get Back multiple times. It is like, one of the most phenomenal things if you grew up, especially with the Beatles, it's one of the most phenomenal things ever put on film. I mean, it's like, unbelievable to be in this room with those four people and just watching their creative process is just. Just beyond interesting. And so the. The way the series starts is I'm forgetting the exact dates, but it's like the first few days of. Of what year? 1960.

[Host]

69.

[Eric Wargo]

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 you once belonged. And then JoJo comes in. I think I have the chronology written down. I can't replicate it for you exactly. But a couple days later, he thinks of JoJo. JoJo left his home and Tucson, Arizona, whatever. But so what? A few days later? Leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. The Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute presents

[Host]

Leaders a podcast with Alan Murray.

[Eric Wargo]

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[Host]

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[Eric Wargo]

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[Host]

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[Eric Wargo]

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[Host]

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[Eric Wargo]

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[Host]

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[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

Walks out. See around the clubs, he says, and walks out because he's kind of basically sick of Paul McCartney. Sure, point. And so then they have to spend, like, they have to, like, make three visits to. I think they all convened at Ringo Starr's house. Or whatever, to convince George Harrison to get back. To get back to where he once belonged. And to add to this, that line, get back to where you once belong is something that Paul stole from George Harrison.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

From another song. From another song George had written. Sour Milk Sea, right. Is this song that George had written and given to another. Another artist. I forgot who recorded, recorded it. But basically Paul took this line, kind of tweaked it a little bit, made it get back to where he once belonged. So basically, he's noodling on this idea. All he's got, you know, to start with is get back. Get back to where you once belonged. Jojo. Jojo from Arizona, which sounds like Harrison.

[Host]

Joe Jarrison.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, and, and, and, and right, that morning, the morning before George leaves at lunchtime, okay. He walks out of the band, he says, see you around the pubs. Leaves at lunchtime that morning. John adds the line. But he knew it wouldn't last.

[Host]

Well, that's right. Yeah. That's worth a rewatch. You'll watch it completely differently now.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

I think John would've. Yeah, yeah, that's the way it works. I mean, artists get inklings of things and they just get these ideas, like, where does this idea come from? But it's like they have to work through, work it out. You know, just kind of like Roy Neary and Close Encounters, like having a vision of this, like, tower thing and, like, trying to work it out. What does it mean? What is it? What is it? You know, and, and, you know, you can reread that Close Encounters as Precognition, if you want. You can reread it as. He's. He's. He's creating this thing and then looks over at the television and then sees what he's been working on. 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.

[Host]

Well, any of these stories that are kind of teleological, we are just sort of drawn to a conclusion or meant to be. You can go back and see that you could be in a loop.

[Eric Wargo]

In a loop. Exactly. Exactly.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. I think it's Just that artists are more sensitive. They're more in tune with emotional. Yeah. And more imaginative. More. I think everybody has an imagination. Everybody has an intuition, but some people are. They prioritize it.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yes. And they're aware of it and they're noting it. They're noting it at least mentally, if not on paper. And that's what it takes to notice this stuff is you have to be noting. You have to be paying attention in your life, in your waking life, to make those connections to the dream world and to the. To the. The world of creativity and. And. And stuff. So, like, when you're paying attention, that's why, again, another reason why meditation is so valuable, because it gets you to pay attention. Mindfulness, you know, just being mindful. So I think the more mindful you are, the more you are going to notice this working in your life. I'm. I'm. I don't like when people talk about precognition as some kind of power or special power that some. Some certain individuals have. I think it's. I think it's basic to our functioning and we're just not aware of it. And I think it's becoming aware of it. That is what makes you a Precog. You know, I think we're all Precogs, but a Precog is someone like Philip 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.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

Yeah, I think we can.

[Eric Wargo]

But those could be magical. I don't, you know, I don't want to be the kind of materialist who says you can't think of it as magic. You know, it. It's perfectly fine to think of it as magic.

[Host]

Quantum mechanics is magic.

[Eric Wargo]

Sure.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Sure. Yeah.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, sure.

[Host]

All right. See, in a minute, 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 Bomb could be a good place to start.

[Eric Wargo]

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So the Darrell Bem is A really interesting guy.

[Host]

He.

[Eric Wargo]

He's a psychologist at Cornell. He's emeritus now, but he. So his story is interesting. He got interested in. He was never interested in. In parapsychology really, until the 90s, I think the early 90s, when a colleague of his. I guess a colleague or another psychologist anyway, named Charles Honerton, who was a parapsychologist and doing parapsychology research, wanted. He wanted someone who had training as a mentalist to sort of be part of his experiments, because that's a good control, you know, to make sure that there's no cheating and.

[Host]

Sure.

[Eric Wargo]

And that and so on. And Darrell Bam is a trained mentalist, and he didn't necessarily have an interest in ESP or whatever, but he didn't. He wasn't a knee jerk, you know, he didn't. He just didn't know anything about it. And he. But he was game to sort of be part of these experiments to sort of ensure that everything was. Was kosher. And Otterson 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 the remote bearing. I'm not sure. But anyway, Darrell 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 topics. You know, he was a very, very respected psychologist. But anyway, he did this large series of experiments in which he reversed cause and effect in basic psychology paradigms, one of them being like, priming. Like you're, you know, a typical priming experiment. You'd be subliminally shown some picture or whatever and then see how it affects your behavior afterwards.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

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.

[Host]

Can we explain the curtain test?

[Eric Wargo]

Yes. Yeah. Like, this is the most famous one. So he had. These were very large experiments with large groups of undergraduates, but he had undergraduates sit at a computer and choose which of two curtains on a screen had a picture behind it. Okay, now, I'll add there wasn't actually already a picture behind these curtains. It was generated randomly after the mouse click. So. Okay. Anyway, so they make a mouse click and then it shows if they're right or wrong. And they did. They performed at chance 50%. Correct. As you would expect, 50% was when. When the picture to be revealed was boring. Okay, right. Like a beach scene or something like that. But when the picture to be revealed was erotic. Yeah, Emotional adults engaged in consensual sexual acts.

[Host]

Porno.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, they. They did better than chance, I think.

[Host]

70%, something like that.

[Eric Wargo]

No, it wasn't that high. I mean, the, the, the, you know, the effect size is still small in experiments, but statistically, because he had so many participants and so many trials, it reached statistical significance. Okay, and then there's another series of experiments that sort of reversed the typical order of a memory experiment. So at a typical memory task, you might be shown a word list, and then you engage in some seemingly unrelated task that reminds you of certain words on that list. And then you take a test on the word list, and you'll be expected to perform better on the words that you were reminded of. Okay, sure. Well, in his version, he showed, had kids look at a word list, then he tested them on the list, and then after the test, he had them engage in a task which subliminally reminded them of certain words on the list. And guess what? What? They did better on the words that they were subsequently reminded of.

[Host]

Just let that land for a second.

[Eric Wargo]

Just let that land.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yes. Retroactive facilitation of recall is what he called this.

[Host]

Just to be fair to the skeptics, 2023, there was a replication issue, right, with BEMS research.

[Eric Wargo]

Okay. There's a lot of controversy about this. Immediately the skeptics jumped on this in this. This came out in 2011.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

Immediately skeptics were enraged. I mean, my colleagues at one of the psychology organizations were enraged anyway. And then skeptics said, no, this can't be replicated. And here we tried to replicate it, and we couldn't, but a lot of teams around the world did replicate it successfully. And yeah, don't get on Wikipedia because you will see a completely biased version of this, But I think something like 80 independent. 83 independent replications, I think something like that. So, yeah, fascinating evidence for something like precognition. He would call it presentiment, feeling the future. And that's what he called the art. The. What he called it in his original article on this.

[Host]

So for the skeptics of Bem's work, I think we have, in the late 80s, physicist Aronoff's split laser test as a Hold my beer. Right. That Story.

[Eric Wargo]

Well, yeah, this wasn't Aronov. This was. Oh, I'm Howell and Dixon. I believe this is also at Cornell, I think, where they, they took a laser beam, they put it through a beam splitter to create two identical beams. And essentially they don't. That's not. The terms they use in physics are different, but they're essentially creating an experiment group and a control group, like you'd have in a psychology experiment. And they did what was called a weak measurement on both of these beams, which is measuring the amplitude of the beam without interfering too much with the beam. And this is a challenge that we can talk about with these kinds of experiments. Every time you, you, you, you measure something, you're interfering with it in some way.

[Host]

Right? That's the collapse challenge.

[Eric Wargo]

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, 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 lo and behold, the beam that got the strong later measurement was amplified like 10 times compared to the previously compared to the other beam, which suggests retro causation. Now you'll get controversies and physicists will debate the significant, you know, what this means and so on, but that seems to be evidence for retrocausation.

[Host]

But John Wheeler's delayed choice, certainly that

[Eric Wargo]

would be another example. Yeah, there's, there's so, so this is an active area of research, and multiple experiments have been conducted like that that I just described, which seem to show retrocausation. Then you also have the field of quantum computing, which is showing that you can have indeterminate temporal ordering of, 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, so many articles have come out in the last several years showing that you can invert causal order in a quantum computing circuit.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. So, okay, so there's. Let me take the example of this.

[Host]

Or if you have a different favorite.

[Eric Wargo]

Well, like one of the experiments that I think excited John Wheeler So his idea was that you could take light from a distant quasar, say, and choose to measure it a certain way. And it would, it would show that how your choice of how to measure it had influenced the light from that distant quasar. Well, a blanking on his name, Ali, I think an astrophysicist, I forget which university. But he, he heard Wheeler speak and had an idea for actually testing this using mirrors placed on the moon by the Apollo astronauts. 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. Well, they used, you know, they shot a laser at the moon and it takes like what, I think a second for light to get to the moon and back. So that's enough time to change the parameter of experiment.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. And, and it showed indeed that you can, like, you can change how you're going to measure light. And the light somehow seems to know.

[Host]

It seems to know, seems to know

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Right. It fulfilled its destiny.

[Eric Wargo]

It fulfilled its destiny. Yeah. So, yeah, there's all kinds of reasons to think that, yes, retro causation 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, you know, behaving in seemingly impossible ways. But there are certain circumstances where you can scale up. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters.

[Host]

But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more.

[Eric Wargo]

Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no

[Host]

room for shipping delays.

[Eric Wargo]

That's why Grainger offers millions of products

[Host]

in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly.

[Eric Wargo]

Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop

[Host]

by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Eric Wargo]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place. From H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by grainger for the ones who get it done. 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 enters the realm of objects that we're used to interacting with. And you can demonstrate that quantum magic at a large scale.

[Host]

That could be the strong force measurement. Right. Just this entanglement of the equipment or a quantum computer.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Sure.

[Eric Wargo]

You can have a material thing that is responding to its future. Yes. Okay. And okay, then set aside those, those ideas and enter the realm of biology where more and more people are thinking that 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 four dimensional information processor that is pre spawning to its future as well as responding to its past.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

the photosynthesis is a quantum process.

[Host]

They're checking all the paths simultaneously. It's superpositioned in real time on leaves. So clearly the quantum state can be held in a wet hot place.

[Eric Wargo]

Right, Right. And that's always been the, the point of skepticism. 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 is scaling up these quantum effects.

[Host]

I want to ask you about microtubules in a second. But before we move to that, what did Niels Bohr, how did he address retrocausality? I know he didn't like any of this.

[Eric Wargo]

No, he did not. Niels Bohr is a really important figure in the sort of, I'd say century long denial or refusal to look at retrocausation because ever since the 1920s there has been this idea that that retro causation 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, he sort of got the whole field of physics to just basically agree to not interpret what was going on at a quantum level and just say it's random and just accept that the world is random on a fundamental level. And that's the answer. And you just have to wrap your head around that. Well, a lot of people have not wanted to wrap their head around it. They have not been satisfied with that answer. Einstein famously said, God does not play dice.

[Host]

That's right.

[Eric Wargo]

And. But Niels Bohr basically dominated the field until really the last couple of decades when what's called the Copenhagen interpretation, and he was from Denmark, so it's called the Copenhagen Interpretation when it's kind of broken down. And now you have this kind of flurry of rival theories going on in the field. So you've got, besides the Copenhagen interpretation, you have, you know, many worlds theory that we talked about, you've got Bohm's pilot wave theory, you've got multiple rival theories, but retro causation or some version of retrocausation. And not all physicists call it retro causation. The problem is they use different terms sometimes to mean the same thing.

[Host]

Like what? What are we looking at?

[Eric Wargo]

Well, now they'll tell you that, to be really precise, you can't talk in terms of causation anymore, and you need to talk in terms of constraints. And they'll use different language because they don't want to give this impression that somehow energy is traveling from the future to the past and stuff like that. There's a team that wrote a book relatively recently called beyond the Dynamical Universe, which is basically making this, 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 other physicists who use the term retrocausation. But they're basically talking about the same thing, which is that something happening in the future is constraining what's happening now. And thus that's a kind of information traveling backward in time for us ordinary humans who need to be able to grasp this somehow. We need, need, we need these clumsy expressions like influence or information traveling backward in time. We need to be able to put it that way so that we can wrap our heads around it. But that's, you know, a physicist will have a more precise way of talking about it. But the basic idea is that what happens in the future influences what's happening now. And what's happening now influenced what happened in the past.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

It does. That's something kind of stressful about your theories is determinism and free will. So if everything that's going to happen is going to happen regardless because we're on this timeline, then why does anything matter?

[Eric Wargo]

Well, right. That's where people's heads go. But the more you sit with it, you get to another place. I think that's a devil's advocate, because I'm on board. Yeah, that's what hangs people up. That's people's hang up. It is a literal hang up. People get hung up on this question of free will and they think, oh, well, then if it's going to happen anyway, what's the point? But just think about that for a second. You can't know the future. That's the thing. This is what I call the precognition paradox. You cannot know the future.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

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, that's an action just as much as getting up and putting on your pants and going to work. That's true. So it's like, it doesn't make any. You got to do something. And when. So I'm a Zen guy. All right. And really? Yes. And. And when you sit with this, when you sit with the block universe, as a koan, as a kind of, you know, koan, you reach a point where you go, holy 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. Determinate, like, who fucking cares?

[Host]

It's just easy for you to say.

[Eric Wargo]

Well, but honestly, this is a point you can get to when you treat this as a koan, as a riddle to be solved and don't just turn away from it. But that's unfortunately what generations of physicists have done. They've turned away from it because this trespasses on some philosophical idea that's really important for us as Western Westerners.

[Host]

True.

[Eric Wargo]

And it's distorted their interpretation of the science, which is. That's not scientific either. You know, we've talked about ways people, ways in which scientists don't behave scientifically. Well, generations of physicists have avoided a very obvious and elegant conclusion or a very obvious and elegant hypothesis about nature simply because it is philosophically and culturally kind of uncomfortable. And that's not behaving scientifically either.

[Host]

No, it's not. Fortunately, they all haven't. So eventually the evidence is just going to stack up.

[Eric Wargo]

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, when you measure something, you're interfering with it. So how is your measurement? Is it simply changing the future or is it changing. 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 911 wasn't a coincidence. I mean, it's, of course you can't prove that. That will always be the counter, the uncertainty principle. So that uncertainty principle is right there at the heart of the topic of recognition.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

And yeah, so the, the bootstrap paradise is my favorite. I mean, it's, it's another way of putting a time loop. Basically. It's the idea. So say you have a. Here's an example that David Deutsch, the physicist and quantum computing pioneer uses in a paper that he wrote in the 1990s, he says, okay, you have a Nobel Prize winning physicist, I'm sorry, Nobel prize winning mathematician, and he has access to a time machine and he goes back in time and finds himself, his younger self, you know, studying in the library and gives him the proof that he later won the Nobel Prize for solving. And so the, the, he basically just gave it to himself in the future. And there's nowhere in that causal loop where anybody actually did the work.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

Of solving that math problem. Okay, well, that's what makes steam shoots out, shoot out people's ears. You know, it's like bothered me since

[Host]

Star Trek for the Voyage Home.

[Eric Wargo]

Exactly, right, exactly.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Exactly. It's there 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. In fact, I think that everything is bootstrapping.

[Host]

Wow. I hadn't.

[Eric Wargo]

It goes all the way down that in a time travel universe, in a universe that allows time travel at all, ultimately everything is bootstrapped. Everything's a bootstrap.

[Host]

I guess it has to be.

[Eric Wargo]

And this is why I love the topic. This is why I wrote my last book, where was it before the Dream? Because 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.

[Host]

And that's plagiarism of the future.

[Eric Wargo]

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 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.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's an inspiring way of thinking about art and creativity, but about just creative solutions in general. I think that's what's happening. It's easier to show with art because you have an artwork that then is something like a dream journal that you could then compare to a later event or whatever in a person's life. It's a little harder with things like inventions and scientific theories and stuff like that. They just are not as amenable to that kind of confirmation process and that kind of comparing with a person's biography. But I think that that's what innovation really is, is bootstrapping.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

That's your future self just kind of giving.

[Eric Wargo]

Flowing into the. Yes. Flowing unimpeded. Yeah. I mean, anyone who. And it's yeah. And it goes beyond creativity. Like any, anyone who's, who's 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.

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

They are not thinking about their free will. This is another reason I tell people, stop worrying about free will. You know, your best self always comes out when you're not thinking deliberately about your will. Every time exerting your will, your best self is that in the zone. When you are a machine, you're part of a machine and you're part of what I think of as a sort of four dimensional machine that's like cycling through time as well as space. It's, you know, that's what, you know, the Zen, you know, it's a Zen thing. You know, we, the Zen, Zen masters are all about finding that state where you are not freely willed. You know, you are, you are doing what must be done.

[Host]

And this, I'm going to go off script a little bit because something just occurred to me as you're saying this is as a martial artist, as a performer and sitting here in this room when things are moving. Well, it's very automatic. But I will find myself with a second dialogue, almost observing. It's happened here a couple of times today where I'm just sort of observing. Oh, that was a great question. Oh, this is really interesting. It's going well, that sort of thing. Or if you're performing, you're doing stand up, you're like, oh, the audience is kind of rough up tonight. Let's try this material. What do you think is going on in the mind when we've got these split monologues?

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, it's a great question. I come back to. It's an idea that I talk about in time loops, a bit called Libet's Golem. Benjamin Liebet was a neuroscience researcher.

[Host]

Terrifying, terrifying research.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

We may have to describe experiments, but.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, well, that would be fine. But the thing is, the other shot I think of his research is that 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, but it is

[Host]

one way of interpreting it exists, whether we want to prove it or not. It happens to people in flow state. Even when you're sinking a bunch of baskets. Yeah, you're on. Something's going on.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

And this is a big debate. There'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.

[Host]

Well, I saw you criticize Pat Price. 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.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

So they're just remembering they were right.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

Before we assume that remote viewing is actually 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 membering the feedback you're going to get afterwards. True. And this is very small. Experiments have been done to try and test this, but not on any scale. And I, I, I always tell remote viewers, you've got, I'm, unfortunately, I'm not a, an experimental, you know, parapsychologist. I'm not, I don't have the setup 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 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 they're happening.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

I don't know.

[Host]

Did you remote view your wife's shoes?

[Eric Wargo]

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.

[Host]

So remote viewing.

[Eric Wargo]

But I'm saying it's an open question and I put it out there because no one else is voicing it. And I think it's really something that the field needs to address.

[Host]

Well, that's why I asked you, 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, ask your questions. Maybe it's not even your field, but you're here, so might as well pick the brain.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, but it's, you know, remote viewers will get understandably touchy about it because it's, it's important, you know, it feels, it's validating of a certain belief system that, about consciousness and so on, that it leaves the body and so on. And 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 going to really believe that, you need to test it. That's the point of being a materialist scientist, which is really testing rigorously and taking the most reductive version of a story and seeing if that reductive version can explain the results. And maybe it can't. I'm open that maybe there is more remote viewing than precognition. I certainly talked to people who are very convinced that that's the case. But it needs to be done in the context of. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters.

[Host]

But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more.

[Eric Wargo]

Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no

[Host]

room for shipping delays.

[Eric Wargo]

That's why Grainger offers millions of products.

[Host]

Products and fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly.

[Eric Wargo]

Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop

[Host]

by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Eric Wargo]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. Studies that are published where you can

[Host]

look at the evidence and hard to get that published.

[Eric Wargo]

It's hard to. Yeah, it is.

[Host]

Probably not an accident that Jacques Fillet was hanging around Sri in the 70s. No, probably not an accident.

[Eric Wargo]

Probably not an accident. 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. 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.

[Host]

Has valet addressed the microtubules and Penrose Hameroff work yet?

[Eric Wargo]

Not that I'm aware of.

[Host]

Where do you stand on that quantum process?

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

The anesthesiologist.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. Like microtubules. I think microtubules could be the answer. I am not personally that interested in the question of consciousness.

[Host]

You're not?

[Eric Wargo]

No, I think it's a red herring. I think if something's going to come out of this search for consciousness, it's going to be a sort of serendipitous discovery of the mechanisms underlying precognition. And I think that's where the significance of microtubules is. So we were talking about memories being consolidated. So guess what? It is in neurons that reshape the synapses every night when you're dreaming and creating new memories.

[Host]

Microtubules.

[Eric Wargo]

Microtubules, yes. So if these microtubules are the little quantum computers that are pre sponding 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's what I think is the significance of microtubules. 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.

[Host]

Are you not interested in it?

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

You'll never get a satisfactory answer.

[Eric Wargo]

No, you're never going to get. Yeah, and that's the other thing. No physical explanation of consciousness is ever going to satisfy anybody. And I've read a lot of them. I find a lot of different physicalist interpretations of consciousness interesting. This is illuminating. But this is not. And this is not the ultimate answer. Likewise, I find, you know, non physicalist interpretation of consciousness interesting. But none of them are satisfying. None of the, none of the stories about consciousness are satisfying. And I think that that suggests that consciousness is not a problem that can be solved right now. Or we're using the wrong terms.

[Host]

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.

[Eric Wargo]

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.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

I think anxiety could be a signal, signal of our future withstanding of challenges and threats

[Host]

that

[Eric Wargo]

if precognition is drawing us towards an existing future, then it can't be drawing us towards a fan of possible futures. So it's drawing us towards a single future in which we are experiencing our survival of something. You're not going to experience your survival if there hasn't been a challenge to your survival if there hasn't been a threat there. So we're not, we're not going to precognize a future that's all roses and all good things and nothing bad ever happening. Nor are we generally going to precognize hitting the brick wall of death. We're going to precognize close calls. And guess what? That's what people often have precognitive dreams about. Certainly close calls, things, you know, situations in which we say, wow, that sucked, but it could have been worse. That's that, that is the basic thought I think at the heart of most precognitive dreams is, but I survived. And we could be talking about something as, as trivial as the sink backing up or something like. Yeah, it's just, you know, real really, really minor threats and upheavals. But, 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. But that, but I'm still standing.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

That's why. That's exactly, that's exactly it. Why were we so glued to CNN on the morning of 9 11?

[Host]

Because it wasn't us.

[Eric Wargo]

Because it wasn't us. Yeah. Yeah, there's that great. 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.

[Host]

Right, Right.

[Eric Wargo]

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. Not that. That would be kind of Freud's kind of dark.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

View of human nature. The point is it's pure semiotics. You can't have a signal X signal without that contrastive signal. So you can't have the I survived. You can't have I survived without something representing the possibility of not surviving. And that's, I think, accounts for people's fascination with disasters and death. It's not that we're bad people or we're. 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. We like. We like that message, but I survived.

[Host]

You look at sunflowers sometimes and you're like, I get you.

[Eric Wargo]

I get you.

[Host]

Well, what happens after we die? What is. What is that consciousness that's out of my.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

I don't. Okay.

[Host]

So if you're not sure, give them.

[Eric Wargo]

Intellectually, I would. I would. I would say, well, I think it's pro. Death is probably the end. But the thing is, I don't think it's possible to really believe that. I don't think it's possible. I think we all, deep down. Correct in the. Whether we say it or whether we say it or not, we all believe in God and we all believe in afterlife.

[Host]

Agreed.

[Eric Wargo]

And we cannot help but. But believe that. So I can sit here and intellectually say why I don't. You know, I haven't seen evidence that convinces me otherwise. But deep down, of course I believe.

[Host]

Sure.

[Eric Wargo]

You know, but it doesn't. I haven't. I genuinely have not seen. Convincing evidence that we precognize things that we don't. That we don't survive to learn about. But. But that it is. That is an interesting question. There are. There are a tiny handful of precognition cases that seem to be about things that happened after a person's death. A tiny handful. Edgar Allan Poe. His story. Something about Gordon Pym. I forget the story but like he has a, has a story about these, these four people in a, in a lifeboat who cannibal. Who. Three people cannibalize the fourth person, the lifeboat, and has the names. And then after his death, decades after his death, there was a real case with exact, those exact names and they cannibalize on the people in the lifeboat.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

It wouldn't.

[Eric Wargo]

Right.

[Host]

But why not?

[Eric Wargo]

Because it was after his death.

[Host]

Oh, right. He can pre remember it.

[Eric Wargo]

Right. On the other hand, coincidences do happen.

[Host]

They do.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

Well, you know, you've got a. This is a problem. Nobody's objective completely. And this is why science is so important. Because science is a collective enterprise of throwing away people's pet theories and individual biases and seeing what the evidence really shows. So you know, you know, you've got to 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, 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 evidence that doesn't fit my theory? I mean, the thing is, I don't know of any other cases like that. Gordon Pym one.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Wargo]

There aren't a lot you tell yourself

[Host]

you would be objective. Yeah, but it'd make a great story. Maybe we'll keep it in. What was that spark? For someone who's trained as a cultural anthropologist working in science, what was that, what was that spark that made you go time loop that? Because it's, it seems so far out of your Field. Was it a culmination?

[Eric Wargo]

It was a culmination. It was of. Yeah, yeah.

[Host]

Reading film.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. And it's like the, you know, the different pieces of the argument have all been made by other people. You know, I'm just, I'm just assembling what, what, you know, I'll name Igor Novikov, who's, he is a Russian physicist who, he was the one that really debunked for physics. He debunked the grandfather paradox idea that, that, you know, that you could have paradoxes caused by time travel. I mean, he's the one who really, you know, said, no, you're, 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 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 is jinn. Jinn. You know, they're the mythological creatures in Islamic mythology that just appear out of nothing. He called, he called them jinn. And this was in the context of writing about wormholes and how you might have an effect arising from traveling through a wormhole that. Where something arises literally from nothing. So this was, you know, Igor Novikov was writing about this in the, in the 90s, you know, there. So these, all these ideas have been floated before.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

So what are we seeing there?

[Eric Wargo]

I don't know. But the, the, that behavior of objects appearing from nothing and splitting into two or merging and disappearing, which you get in some reports of UFOs you do that is consistent with a single object traveling, reversing its course in time.

[Host]

How does that work?

[Eric Wargo]

Well, now an object, say you have, say you have a time ship. Let's say you have an orb timeship. 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, you're going to pull that lever and suddenly the external world, this is presuming you could see outside your. Yeah, there are a lot of problems with this, but you're going to look like when you pull that lever Suddenly everything outside your ship is going to look like it's a film in reverse. Okay. It's ever. Everything's going to look like an H.G.

[Host]

wells story.

[Eric Wargo]

It's going to, it's going to look. Well, H.G. wells and his story mainly went to the future, really talk about.

[Host]

But he talked about how he watched things happening.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah. But in this case, if you pull the lever, say you're going in your orb time ship and you're just, you're in ordinary time and you pull the lever to go into reverse. You throw it into reverse, okay. Suddenly everything outside your ship is going to look like it's in reverse and you're going to see history happening backwards like a film on rewind. Okay. From an outside perspective, the outside observer, what they're going to see is two time ships, identical time ships, converging and disappearing.

[Host]

Yes.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Okay.

[Eric Wargo]

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 on. 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 flipbooks using little orbs in flipbooks and like what it would look like. And it's like really trippy to, you know, what this visual effect is. And it is consistent with, with some descriptions of, of, of UFO behavior. And so that's, that's where my. Why I support Mike Masters, you know, or at least the, the plausibility of his hypothesis that, that it's, it's. Again, I'm less interested in the anthropological part of it, but in the, the behavior of, of these objects. There is all kinds of reasons to think that they are manipulating time and that's one of them. That they could be actually reversing their course in time. They could be actually physically traveling backward in time.

[Host]

What about when we see multiple more than two?

[Eric Wargo]

You could have a single object that reverses its course multiple times in the time stream would look for that duration of time. Like a swarm of objects. We see that, we see that, we see swarms. Yeah, yeah. In fact, the example I use in the book is apparently Wernher von Braun. Now, he wasn't there to see it. He wasn't at the Trinity test. But apparently he wrote in his diary that people at the Trinity test reported seeing swarms of objects.

[Host]

A lot of tests we've seen this.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Scrubbing a timeline.

[Eric Wargo]

Scrubbing a timeline back and forth. What it would look like to an outside observer is a swarm of objects.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

It's the same ship.

[Host]

Yeah. Scrubbing a timeline.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah.

[Host]

Okay. Blew my mind again.

[Eric Wargo]

So, yeah, I wish I'd brought those clip books because it's.

[Host]

If you have them online, we'll throw them.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, I have them online. There's a website I did little. My daughter helped me make little stop motion animations of flying saucers merging and stuff like that.

[Host]

What are we missing out of time fairing that we should cover? I mean, I think I got through all my stuff. I'll talk to you for hours.

[Eric Wargo]

Don't get hung up on grandfather paradoxes. These, these hang ups that people have about time and time travel, they're totally false. They're myths. And the thing is, they're falsehoods that have been promoted by some of the greatest minds of our time. Like Stephen Hawking 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. The there's. Time travel does not lead to paradox.

[Host]

If you get on board with that and block universe and delayed choice, everything just seems to make sense now. Everything just seems to fall right elegantly, perfectly. Yeah, everyone needs to read your books for sure. What else did we miss, Eric?

[Eric Wargo]

I don't know. We covered a lot.

[Host]

Where should they go? Where do you want them to go? The night shirt. If you're into sci fi. The night shirt.

[Eric Wargo]

Yeah, I don't really contribute. I mean, I. I don't have time to blog anymore. I'M on. Lately I've been putting some things on my sub stack. It's also the night shirt and they can find my books on my website, ericwargo.com and you know, they're all on

[Host]

Amazon and nobody should follow you on Twitter. Right? Let's not encourage you on Twitter.

[Eric Wargo]

I don't really, I don't really post that much on Twitter anymore. I had a great following a few years ago and then, then when Twitter changed, I lost. I lost, you know. You did? Yeah, I had, I was, I was. And I was in, had a good engagement. I had a good audience on Twitter. And then, and then half the people left Twitter and then half the people stopped posting and it became kind of a hell, hell site. But I'm still there.

[Host]

Okay.

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

Well, I definitely want to check out your substack. I didn't know you were doing that. The night shirt was. This is the story of the One As a procurement manager for a hospital

[Eric Wargo]

system, she keeps every facility in her network stocked and ready. That's why she counts on Grainger to be her single source for thousands of

[Host]

products from disinfectants to lighting, air filters and more.

[Eric Wargo]

And with fast, dependable delivery, Grainger helps

[Host]

her keep every facility stocked, safe and running smoothly.

[Eric Wargo]

Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickranger.com or to just stop

[Host]

by Granger for the ones who get it done. Hi, this is Alex Kanchowitz.

[Eric Wargo]

I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on air contributor to cnbc. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives.

[Host]

So each week on Big Technology I

[Eric Wargo]

bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it as asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

[Host]

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.

[Eric Wargo]

Well, actually I've started on my substack. I've been reposting 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.

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

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

[Host]

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

[Eric Wargo]

This has been really fun. Really fun.

[Host]

You come in for every book.

[Eric Wargo]

Cool.

[Host]

All right. Thanks, Eric.

[Eric Wargo]

Thanks.

[Host]

So here's what checks out about Eric's work. His PhD is from Emory University. He worked as an editor for psychology organizations for years. The block universe theory is real. It comes directly from Einstein's special relativity. Herman Minkowski formalized 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 Darrell Bem's experiments. This is where things get interesting. In 2011, BEM published nine experiments showing precognition effects. Students chose which curtain hid erotic images before the computer even generated them. Memory tests were future. Studying improved past performance. The results were statistically significant. And here's what most people don't know. Bem's work has been replicated. A 2015 Meta Analysis Foundation 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. Events. Quantum computing researchers now working on something called indefinite causal order computations where cause and effect run backwards.

[Eric Wargo]

I know, I know.

[Host]

And Eric's personal stories are compelling. His 26 year precognitive dream. The calendrical resonance patterns. Artists like Michael Richards sculpting himself being pierced by airplanes before dying in the Twin Towers. David Mandel dreaming of the about the towers collapsing exactly five years before 9 11. These cases are documented. And I keep coming back to Young's scarab story. The patient dreams of receiving a scarab beetle. The next day, Young hears tapping on his window. A beetle. He catches it and hands it to her. Eric calls this a time loop, not synchronicity. The dream caused her to tell Young, which caused him to notice the beetle which caused the dream in the first place. It's a closed cause puzzle loop. This connects to a lot of topics I've covered on the channel. The episode about synchronicities touched exactly on these patterns. The time travel episodes, from Project Pegasus to John titor, even the CIA's Gateway Process Research, they're all exploring the same fundamental does consciousness transcend linear time? I don't know. Eric's work is thoughtful. He's not rejecting materialism or mainstream science. He's arguing for a path paradigm shift within it. The future might not be fixed, but it might be influencing the present in ways we don't understand. His books are great Time Loops and Precognitive Dream Work and the Long Self. You can find them on Amazon and check out his blog, which is super interesting, especially if you're into sci fi. It's called the Night Shirt. We'll link all this stuff below. Eric brings serious academic credentials to these questions, and that matters in a field full of speculation. Now, thanks to science's law, like Eric, we might eventually get some answers to what are probably the most important questions ever posed. I thought I had more, but I guess I guess not. Until next time, be safe be we're having fun right Be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

[Eric Wargo]

Oh oh yeah I play Polypius in Area 51 a secret code inside the

[Host]

Bible said I would

[Eric Wargo]

I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as

[Host]

music song sang in the like I should

[Eric Wargo]

but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth my friends and it never ends no it never end. I feel the crap cat I got

[Host]

stuck inside Mel's home with MK out

[Eric Wargo]

truck I've been on only 2 aware did Stanley Cubric fake the moon landing alone on a film set or were

[Host]

the shadow people there?

[Eric Wargo]

The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold But I can't believe I'm dancing with the. The Mothman sightings and the solar storm

[Host]

still come to Agatha the secret city

[Eric Wargo]

underground mysterious number stations Planet Circle 2, Project Stargate and what the Dark Watchers foundation don't you worry though the Black Knight satellite It's all I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish on Thursday nights with they chase you and. What it was to just hear the truth of wambs on my feet all through the night. Love to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel and camels love to dance when the feeling is wide that always in time.

[Host]

Hi, this is Alex Cancerwitz.

[Eric Wargo]

I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on air contributor to cnb. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives.

[Host]

So each week on Big Technology, I

[Eric Wargo]

bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues, and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Josh Spiegel, host of the podcast Lunatic in the Newsroom.

[Host]

If you enjoy journalism that drifts into

[Eric Wargo]

mild panic, wild overthinking, and a guaranteed

[Host]

nervous breakdown, Lunatic in the Newsroom is for you.

[Eric Wargo]

It's news like you've never heard before. The only newsroom with a panic button. You'll laugh, you'll cry and gasp in horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news, it's emotionally unstable. Lunatic in the Newsroom.

[Host]

Listen today. This is Mike Bolough of Lexicon Valley

[Eric Wargo]

and I'm Bob Garfield. Are you one of those people who sometimes uses words? Do you communicate or acquire information with, you know, language? Hey, us too. So join us on Lexicon Valley to true over the history, history, culture and many mysteries of English, plus some rice cracks.

[Host]

Find us on one of those apps

[Eric Wargo]

where people listen to podcasts.