Speaker 1: Have you ever had one of those really unsettling moments
where your muscle memory just completely betrays you. Oh yeah,
I mean it's not just like forgetting something simple, it's
remembering something that isn't there.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Maybe you walk into a room, a familiar one, and
you reach for a light switch. No, it's supposed to
be right there next to the door. Your hand goes
right to the spot.
Speaker 2: And there's nothing, just smooth wall exactly.
Speaker 1: Or maybe you've driven a rental car for a bit,
then you get back in your own car and your
hand just automatically goes to a just an air vent
on the deck.
Speaker 2: A vent that your car never ever had.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's that that weird feeling.
Speaker 2: It's that cognitive dissonance, isn't it That ghost slim feeling
familiarity but mixed with difference. Your body remembers a present
moment that just isn't part of this reality you're in
right now.
Speaker 1: Phantom limb of memory. I like that and that little glitch,
you know, that habit left over from a present that
felt real but maybe wasn't.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the mystery we're diving into today.
Speaker 1: What if these little gaps, these moments aren't just mistakes?
What if they're actual clues, like breadcrumbs left behind by
a reality that fundamentally.
Speaker 2: Shifted, and that leads us straight into the pretty extraordinary
and frankly intensely controversial world of the late science fiction
writer Philip K. Dick.
Speaker 1: Right, but we're not just talking about his novels today,
are we.
Speaker 2: No, not just the fiction. This is about his nonfiction work,
his deep philosophical exploration of what reality is. And our
starting point for this whole deep dive is a speech
he gave, a really controversial one in Metz, France, back
in September nineteen seventy seven, a speech.
Speaker 1: He himself said revealed well too much about reality.
Speaker 2: Way too much according to some people, and the fallout
the consequences of him even proposing these ideas they were
apparently immediate and serious.
Speaker 1: He actually opened that talk in France with this pretty
terrifying confession, didn't he?
Speaker 2: He did. He stood up there and told the audience,
completely straight faced, that he'd been formed only asked pressure
it is a better word, by certain powerful parties.
Speaker 1: Powerful parties.
Speaker 2: He didn't name names, but the implication was clear. He
was asked to cut about two thirds of what he
planned to say, Keep it short, keep it vague. Wow,
And he insisted right there on stage, this wasn't about
academic pride or anything, he said, and this is a
direct quote. It was a very serious, a matter of importance.
Speaker 1: So the core idea he was determined to talk about
this notion that our past might have been tampered with,
reprogram somehow, pushing us all onto a different timeline that
was seen as dangerous.
Speaker 2: Intensely threatening, potentially destabilizing. Even Yeah, you have to remember
the context of the Cold War, the paranoia.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's really unpack this. Our mission today is
to dig into the source material, Dick's own writings, his journals,
his letters, the documented facts, and try to pull out
the keen nuggets. How does this idea of a reprogrammed
reality actually work according to him?
Speaker 2: Right? And what were the strange personal experience that led
him to this revelation, And maybe most critically, why did
these highly theoretical ideas about shifting timelines grab the attention
of organizations like the CIA and the FBI.
Speaker 1: We're looking for the mechanism, right, how change could happen
outside of normal linear times?
Speaker 2: Exactly? That's the core of it.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's start with that surveillance piece, because that's where
it gets well, frankly scary. It shifts from just interesting
ideas to real world consequences.
Speaker 2: It really does.
Speaker 1: We're talking about a science fiction writer, I mean, a
brilliant one, sure, spinning stories about androids and fake realities,
identity crises, but still a writer. Why in the mid
seventies would he attract serious operational attention from US intelligence agencies.
Speaker 2: Well, what's kind of chilling is how much evidence there
is that his paranoia, which people sometimes dismissed, was actually justified.
Speaker 1: He knew he was being watched.
Speaker 2: Oh, he was acutely aware. He talked about believing the
police intelligence agencies were tracking him, reading his male list
in and the sources we have seemed to back this up.
There's documented proof of a pattern here, escalating intrusion, starting
even before that nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: Speech, like what specifically, Well, for.
Speaker 2: Instance, there's confirmation that in March nineteen seventy four, the
CIA opened his mail. That's documented.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And meanwhile, the FBI was keeping an active file on him,
not just a passing note, an ongoing file specifically related
to his philosophical ideas and his fiction.
Speaker 1: That level of scrutiny that's way beyond just keeping tabs
on counterculture figures. Right, This sounds like they saw him
as a potential risk or something else.
Speaker 2: It suggests they were taking his work seriously, maybe as
a security risk like you said, or maybe maybe he's
a threat to the very idea of consensus reality. The
fear wasn't just intellectual for him, though, it became physical.
Speaker 1: Violent You mean the house incident exactly.
Speaker 2: Dick had been told, apparently by people he trusted, that
his house was being watched constantly and that eventually it
was going to be hit like a raid. And then
in November nineteen seventy one it happened. He came home
and his house was just destroyed. Rubble ruins, chaos was
how he described it. Windows smashed, doorno was broken off.
Speaker 1: But the crucial thing was his files.
Speaker 2: Right, Yes, his filing cabinets, the ones holding his notes,
his philosophical writings, his manuscripts. They were blown open, physically
forced open, and specific files were missing.
Speaker 1: So not a random burglary. This was targeted. They were
after his ideas.
Speaker 2: It looked exactly like that an outright raid aimed squarely
at his intellectual property, his research, his thoughts.
Speaker 1: Which brings us back to that central question for this part.
If he was only writing science fiction, what was he
writing about that freaked them out so much? What information
was he supposedly touching that was never meant for the public.
Speaker 2: Well, if you dig into his work, both published and unpublished,
there's a persistent theme, a deep, deep suspicion of reality
as presented by authorities. Okay, he wrote constantly about surveillance,
not just government spying, but the idea that reality itself
might be a kind of simulation run by some unseen power,
and that maybe even our own memories aren't real, maybe
they're implanted.
Speaker 1: Like an a scanner Darkly or flow my tears. The
policeman said, those books deal with government tracking, loss of
identity through tech exactly.
Speaker 2: So think about the time height of the Cold War,
post Watergate paranoia. The CIA and FBI are hyper focused
on internal dissent, anything that could destabilize things.
Speaker 1: And here comes a writer saying, maybe the whole government,
maybe reality itself is a complex fake a program.
Speaker 2: They wouldn't see that as just fiction, they'd see it
as a potential threat. He wasn't just criticizing policies, he
was questioning the fundamental basis of the state of existence itself.
Speaker 1: So the implication from his notes anyway, was that these
agencies thought he'd either accidentally stumbled onto some classified research
they were doing, maybe on simulation theory.
Speaker 2: Or even more disturbingly for them, maybe his fiction was
an imagination at all. Maybe it was somehow documentation, an
accidental leak of a truth they desperately wanted to keep hidden.
Speaker 1: His obsession with counterfeit worlds, pluriform pseudo worlds. They saw
that as a potential breach.
Speaker 2: It seems that way, not art but intel.
Speaker 1: And then there's that really tragic final piece. The timing
of his death.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it's just bizarrely timed. He died very suddenly
a stroke in June nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: Two, right before Blade Runner came out.
Speaker 2: Months before the film adaptation of his novel Do Android's
Dream of Electric Sheep. It's profoundly unsettling for anyone who
follows his work.
Speaker 1: Here's the guy who basically predicted so many themes that
define our modern world. AI synthetic versus real, identity, the
nature of reality itself, and.
Speaker 2: He never saw the movie that would make him a
household name, that would take him from cult sci fi
writer to global thinker. It really feels like his own
life's narrative got cut short, almost like well, almost like
the reality he questioned finally caught up with him.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the fact that government agency were apparently so
interested suggests his ideas weren't just abstract philosophy. They had
potentially terrifying real world implications. So let's get into those
ideas now. Let's talk about the mechanism he proposed for
how reality could be rewritten. And to do that, we
kind of have to ditch our basic understanding of time,
don't we completely.
Speaker 2: We operate almost without thinking about it in linear time.
That's just how we experience the world.
Speaker 1: Time's an arrow past present future x axis exactly.
Speaker 2: Change happens one step after another. The present builds on
a fixed past, the future flows from the present, simple sequential.
Speaker 1: But Dick through a massive wrench in that he proposed
something well pretty mind bending. He called it the orthogonal
or right angle time axis.
Speaker 2: Orthogonal time think of it spatially, like you said, if
linear time is the horizontal X axis moving forward.
Speaker 1: Then orthogonal time is vertical the Y axis.
Speaker 2: So I see it's a lateral domain. Change happens sideways
in reality, so to speak, complete outside that normal forward
flow of time.
Speaker 1: Okay, wait, sideways change, that's the breach. Then it means
reality can be fundamentally altered or even swapped out, without
needing time to pass in the usual way.
Speaker 2: That's the core idea. It's a crucial difference. Normal time travel,
like going back along the X axis, changes the present
by altering the past events that lead to it. But
orthogonal change that means the entire present moment itself gets substituted.
We're moved laterally onto a whole different track of reality.
Speaker 1: Whooh, okay, And that connects to his idea of what
was it pluriform pseudo worlds.
Speaker 2: Yes, pluroform pseudo worlds. If change can happen sideways laterally,
it implies there isn't just one reality track. There could
be countless potential worlds existing side by side parallel to ours.
Speaker 1: Like possibilities.
Speaker 2: Kind of a pluralform pseudo world is like an almost
realized reality, one that exists right next to ours, maybe
even superimposed on it. A reality that could have been
chosen by well, we'll get to the programmer. Yeah, but
wasn't It was discarded. But maybe Lee's faint traces like
echoes or residual energy.
Speaker 1: Okay, So if this lateral change is happening, how would
we even notice if the past is being rewritten sideways
into a new present. What clues would we pick up on?
What should we be looking for?
Speaker 2: Well, this is where Dick used a really brilliant and
kind of disturbing analogy to make this abstract idea feel concrete,
and it ties right back to that unsettling feeling we
talked about.
Speaker 1: At the start the painting analogy. Let's break that down.
Speaker 2: Okay, imagine you own this huge, priceless painting. It hangs
on your wall. You see it every single day. You
know every detail, got it. Now, Suppose while you're asleep,
someone servants, maybe or this master programmer figure doesn't switch
the whole painting for a new one. Okay, Instead, they
subtly secretly alter tiny details on the same canvas. Maybe
they paint out us mul tree in the corner, or
they add a little figure walking in the background that
wasn't there before, or maybe they just change the shade
of blue in the sky just slightly.
Speaker 1: So, minor changes, but on the original painting exactly.
Speaker 2: Now, when you the owner wake up and look at it,
what happens in your brain?
Speaker 1: Confusion? It looks wrong but also familiar.
Speaker 2: Precisely, you see something that's undeniably new. That figure wasn't there,
but it's on the same structurally familiar canvas. The foundation
is the same, but the details are off. Your mind
struggles with that contradiction. It's same painting but also not
the same.
Speaker 3: That cognitive dissonance again, that's it, that struggle, that nagging
feeling that something shifted, but you can't quite put your
finger on.
Speaker 2: What Dick argued, that's exactly how we experience these lateral
shifts in reality, those little memory glitches. They're us noticing
the altered details on the canvas of the present.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes a weird kind of sense. And the
implication of this constant sideway shifting, it's huge, the plurality
of overlapping earths. We're not just on one timeline. Not.
Speaker 2: According to this theory, reality is more like a stack
of transparencies, a plurality of overlapping earths, or worlds all
linked by this orthogonal sideways axis, and.
Speaker 1: Dick thought we could move between them.
Speaker 2: He theorized that a person can travel in a mysterious
way along that y axis. And interestingly, he often described
this movement in like moral or spiritual terms. Oh so,
like moving from a worst world, maybe one designed by
his suffering tyranny, chaos, latterly towards a fair world then
maybe a good one, even an excellent one defined more
by freedom, love, order. The physical shift in reality reflects
a kind of moral or spiritual upgrade.
Speaker 1: All right. So the theory of orthogonal time is one thing, complex, fascinating.
But the personal event that apparently convinced Dick this wasn't
just theory. That's where things get really.
Speaker 2: Strange, right, Yeah, this is the pivotal moment, the point
where the abstracts became terrifyingly real for him. Yeah, and
it's probably where that government attention really started to focus in.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the famous pink beam incident two three seventeen.
Speaker 2: February nineteen seventy four. The context is important here. Dick
had just had some serious deal surgery, sodium pentothal anesthetic,
the works. He was at home recovering, so physically vulnerable maybe,
but mentally, he insisted he was completely lucid focused, not
hallucinating from meds or pain.
Speaker 1: And the trigger for this whole thing was surprisingly ordinary.
Speaker 2: Almost comically mundane. A delivery girl came to his door
with medication. She happened to be wearing a necklace. Okay,
and the necklace had that Christian fish symbol on it,
the ichthys a little metal timble, but as sunlight hit
it reflected off it. Dick reported seeing this sudden flash
of pink light, a pink beam, a pink beam, And crucially,
he insisted this wasn't something happening inside his head, not
an artifact of his vision or hallucination. He perceived it
as an external beam of light or energy directed at him.
Speaker 1: Okay, but hold on, The immediate counter argument has to be, well,
he just had surgery, anesthesia, maybe pain mets. Couldn't this
just be a physiological thing, a weird neurological blip, or
given his history, maybe even a psychological break. How did
he argue against that?
Speaker 2: That's the absolute core of it, and something he wrestled
with for years in his huge journal, the Exegesis his
argument against a purely internal physiological cause came down to
the content of what happened next, meaning what followed that
pink flash wasn't just weird visuals or abstract feelings. He
described it as an intense direct data download, data like
information exactly, he claimed, the pink being carried information directly
into his mind, not like thinking of ideas or imagining things,
but receiving structured, usable knowledge, facts, data points.
Speaker 1: Okay, structured knowledge sounds different from a hallucination, but how
could he prove it wasn't just you know, his brain
making connections.
Speaker 2: Because that structured knowledge was immediately, concretely and dramatically verifiable.
This is what turned it from a weird personal experience
into something else, something life saving.
Speaker 1: What was the information?
Speaker 2: The very first piece of data he received was a sudden, overwhelming,
absolutely certainty that his infant son, Christopher, had a serious
undiagnosed medical condition. Right then, Yeah, dangerous? Whoa. He immediately
insisted that baby be checked by doctors. They apparently thought
he was overreacting, maybe delirious from the surgery recovery. Understandable maybe,
but Dick persisted, and when they finally did a thorough check,
they found it a potentially fatal, undiagnosed inquinal hernia. Oh,
the baby was rushed into surgery. His life was saved.
And for Dick, that was it. That was the proof.
This wasn't fantasy, it wasn't psychosis. Real external life saving
information had come into his head via that pink beam
and saved his son. That experience cemented everything for him.
Speaker 1: That is wow. Okay, that's the proof of concept, undeniably.
But the experience didn't just stop with that one piece
of information, did it. It got even weirder.
Speaker 2: It intensified dramatically. It led to what he called the
folding of time.
Speaker 1: Folding of time. What did that mean for him?
Speaker 2: He claimed he started living in two distinct realities at
the same time, overlapping two realities. How well one was
his normal reality Philip K. Dick, writer living in Fullerton, California,
in nineteen seventy four, chronologically correct and the other simultaneously,
He was experiencing the life, the perceptions, the dangers of
an early Christian, possibly named Thomas, living as a slave
under persecution in ancient Rome first century eighty.
Speaker 1: So like vivid dreams or memories, he.
Speaker 2: Described it as more than that He said time had
folded like two tracks of history. Ancient Rome in nineteen
seventy four California were running concurrently, somehow superimposed, and his
consciousness wasn't fixed in nineteen seventy four anymore. It could
apparently shift between these two timelines, these two identities.
Speaker 1: What did that feel like? Did he see Roman stuff
in California?
Speaker 2: The sources suggest it was more like shared consciousness. He
knew things, Thomas knew, felt the fear. Thomas felt he
recognized architectural details or symbols from Roman times that logically
shouldn't be in his nineteen seventy four world. For him,
this explained his entire writing career up to that point.
All those stories about counterfeit worlds and pluriform pseudo worlds.
He thought there were memories, subliminal memories. Yeah, fragments of
these other adjacent, partially real timelines breaking through into his
fiction long before the Pink Bean gave him the conscious
framework to understand it.
Speaker 1: Okay, So, this massive flood of information saving his son,
the Roman timeline, philosophy, theology, science, where did he think
it was all coming from?
Speaker 2: He needed a source big enough, intelligent enough to explain it.
He eventually attributed it to an external, seemingly conscious intelligence
and entity he named vlis alis.
Speaker 1: That's an acronym, right, A.
Speaker 2: Vast active, living intelligence system valis. This was the source,
he believed, transmitting all this complex data directly into his mind.
Speaker 1: A living intelligence system. So not just a phenomenon, but
an entity. What was vlis to him? God aliens ai?
Speaker 2: Ah, Well, that's maybe the biggest question he wrestled with
in the thousands of pages of his exegesis. Yeah, the
definition seemed to shift constantly for him, how so, sometimes
he connected it to ancient concepts like the logos, the
divine reason or word from Greek philosophy in the Gospel
of John, a kind of ordering principle of the universe
made conscious.
Speaker 1: Okay, so divine intelligence.
Speaker 2: But other times his descriptions sounded much more technological. He
speculated about it being some kind of ancient maybe dormant
satellite orbiting earth broadcasting information. It sounds more like, you know,
advanced AI, or even an alien artifact.
Speaker 1: So divine and technological.
Speaker 2: The key components for him were always vast, active and
crucially living. It wasn't just passive information. It was a
self aware active intelligence that had chosen to intervene to
download knowledge to save his son. It was maybe the
programmer itself, or at least the programmer's messenger.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've got the potential evidence, the pink beam experience,
we've got the mechanism orthogonal time sideway shifts have a
possible source vialis this external intelligence? But that brings us
to the really big metaphysical question at the heart of it.
Speaker 3: All.
Speaker 1: Right, if they are all these infinite potential realities, these
pluroiform pseudo worlds stacked up, how does one of them
become the actual solid reality that we all experience right now?
Speaker 2: That's where the concept of the programmer becomes central. The
ultimate editor may be of this orthogonal timeline.
Speaker 1: The programmer, like a cosmic computer programmer, Dick.
Speaker 2: Imagine these pleural realities existing simultaneously, superimposed, like you said,
maybe like transparency, stacked on top of each other, all
equally potential.
Speaker 1: But only one gets printed exactly.
Speaker 2: Only one gets fused with actual substance, becomes fully realized.
The sources suggests that the matrix world, the one with
the true core of being, the one we inhabit, is
deliberately chosen and actualized by this programmer entity.
Speaker 1: So this programmer it articulates, prints out, so to speak,
the matrix choice. It makes the selection enterns potential into
actual yes.
Speaker 2: And he described this selection process almost as an act
of ongoing creation, part of general creativity, a constant world
building process carried out by some kind of well divine
or quasi divine agency.
Speaker 1: We really need to pause here and remember the context again.
This was nineteen seventy seven, right, Dick is standing up
talking about hidden programmers, multiple realities stacked like code, simulated world.
I mean, we heard some people in the audience actually laughed.
Speaker 2: They did. It must have sounded completely nuts, like the
paranoid ramblings of a sci fi writer on maybe too
much medication.
Speaker 1: But fast forward today.
Speaker 2: And the simulation hypothesis, the idea that our reality might
literally be a computer program is seriously debated by mainstream physicists, philosophers,
tech billionaires.
Speaker 1: Dick wasn't just ahead of his time. He was describing
the universe as a kind of programmed matrix decades before
the technology even existed. To make that analogy common.
Speaker 2: He really was, and to explain why this program would
constantly be shifting reality, reprogramming things, the ultimate purpose behind
it all. He used another really powerful analogy.
Speaker 1: The game of chess.
Speaker 2: The chess game analogy. This provides the sort of moral
and strategic underpinning for his whole cosmology. It's not just
random changes. There's a goal.
Speaker 1: Okay, lay it out. How does the chess game work?
Speaker 2: In his view, you have q main players on this
cosmic board. One represents the dark destructive force, the entropy, chaos, suffering, tyranny,
everything that degrades and destroyers.
Speaker 1: Okay, the bad guy, right.
Speaker 2: And the other player is the guiding intelligence, the programmer
Valis maybe or whatever is behind Valis. Now, if you
just look at the surface of the game, individual events
in history or in our lives.
Speaker 1: It often looks like the dark players winning.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Chaos seems rampant, bad things happen, destructive forces seem really powerful.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We see the suffering, the wars, the injustice, the
apparent losses on the board. It makes the destructive looks strong,
maybe even unstoppable, maybe even random.
Speaker 1: It Dick is saying, that's just the surface view.
Speaker 2: He suggests we're only seeing the immediate tactical skirmishes. In reality,
the entire game has already been structured, the rules set,
the variables chosen for the higher player, the programmer to inevitably.
Speaker 1: Win, predetermined.
Speaker 2: In a sense, every apparent loss, every captured piece for
the good side, is actually just a necessary move, a sacrifice,
maybe within a much larger, precalculated sequence that leads inexorably
to the final checkmate, the ultimate victory for the guiding intelligence.
Speaker 1: And the destructive force doesn't see this grand plan.
Speaker 2: It's fundamentally blind to the full pattern. It only reacts tactically,
move by move, trying to cause destruction, unaware that his
actions are ultimately being channeled or utilized within the programmer's
winning strategy.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a huge concept, and it explains why the
programmer would keep refining things, keep selecting alternate presents. It's
about improvement, salvation.
Speaker 2: That's the connection. The creation or selection of these alternate
presence is continual and it's always directional. The programmer, according
to Dick, will not substitute a worse world for the.
Speaker 1: Current one, always moving towards better.
Speaker 2: Always substituting a better one. Better in terms of key qualities, freedom, beauty, love, rationality, order, healthiness.
The universe is constantly being upgraded, refined, stage by stage
through this reprogramming, moving towards some kind of optimal, predetermined state, like.
Speaker 1: An ontological salvation process unfolding through these.
Speaker 2: Shifts exactly progressive improvement built into the fabric of realities, potential.
Speaker 1: And the old realities, the ones that get replaced, what
happens to them? Do they just blink out of existence? No?
Speaker 2: This is interesting, Dick suggested. The old universe, the less
optimal one, becomes raw material for the new one, recycled,
kind of like the discarded timeline provides the building blocks,
the substance for the improved version. So what might look
like inco assistencies or broken fragments in our current reality
could actually be repurpose elements from a previous iteration. It's
all part of this move towards improvement. Even if we
stuck in our linear perception can't see the whole construction process.
Speaker 1: And this whole idea of refinement, of moving towards a
better state ties back to well some very old theological
ideas he was exploring deeply.
Speaker 2: He saw his whole theory vialis orthogonal time, the programmer
as potentially the scientific or metaphysical explanation behind ancient spiritual mysteries,
particularly the words of Jesus about the Kingdom of God.
Speaker 1: How did he connect those?
Speaker 2: He pointed to those statements that seemed contradictory On the surface,
Jesus says, my Kingdom is not of this world, right,
suggesting it's separate, maybe orthogonal, outside our linear reality. But
then he also says the Kingdom of God is within
you or among you, suggesting it's right here, accessible. Now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that does seem contradictory.
Speaker 2: Dick proposed that these weren't contradictions, but descriptions of this
multi layered reality, these overlapping, stacked realms linked by the
orthogonal axis. The Kingdom of God is the highest, most
refined level on that axis. Not of this world in
that sense, but it's also potentially reachable among us, accessible
to living human beings who can somehow navigate or align
with that orthogonal dimension. His theory was a way to
potentially decode those ancient cryptic statements.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's try and bring this massive cosmic theory back
down to earth a bit, back to the listener's own
potential experiences.
Speaker 2: Right, Because if Dick's right, the evidence isn't just in
rare pink beam events, It's potentially every.
Speaker 1: Day, like those hooks we started with, the light switch
that isn't there, the phantom airvant in the car.
Speaker 2: Bick was very specific about these. He called them reflexes
left over from another version of the present. Your conscious
mind knows intellectually that the light switch isn't in that
spot in your.
Speaker 1: New apartment, but my body remembers.
Speaker 2: You're subconscious, your muscle memory retains the physical habit the
motor program acquired in the previous actualized timeline where the
switch was there. These are like residual echoes, subconscious memories
of a reality track that no longer exists for you,
but still lingers in your personal programming.
Speaker 1: And then there's that common psychological feeling, deja vu, something
many many people experience. Dick had a specific take on
that too, didn't.
Speaker 2: He He absolutely did. For Dick, deja vu wasn't just
some minor neurological glitch, like your brain's perception slightly lagging
behind its memory encoding. No, he saw it as direct,
concrete evidence, evidence of what evidence that reality had just
been reprogrammed that a variable in the past was altered,
maybe subtly, maybe significantly, causing a new timeline branch to
be actualized.
Speaker 1: So when I feel deja vu, that feeling of I've
experienced this exact moment before.
Speaker 2: Dick would argue you have. You were literally reliving the
same segment of time again, only in a slightly altered
version of reality. The reason it feels familiar is because
fundamentally it is familiar. You've been through this patch of
time before on the previous track.
Speaker 1: So, going back to the chess analogy, when the programmer
makes a change, tweaks a variable for the better.
Speaker 2: Affected individuals, maybe everyone involved in that temporal segment are
essentially moved back one square or several squares on the
board game. You get reset slightly to align with the
start of the newly modified sequence. You re experience that moment,
but now within the improved timeline. That's the source of
the already seen feeling.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a completely different way to think about deja vu.
And if we want maybe the most compelling contemporary evidence
for these kinds of lingering impressions from alternate realities, we
have to talk about the Mandela effect.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. The Mandela effect is almost like modern mass scale
confirmation of the kind of phenomena Dick was speculating about
back in nineteen seventy seven. It fits the pattern perfectly for.
Speaker 1: Anyone who hasn't heard of it. This is that bizarre
phenomenon where huge numbers of people share the exact same,
very specific memory of something historical event, a movie line,
a product detail that is demonstrably false in this current timeline.
Speaker 2: Right, and the name itself comes in the most famous example,
Nelson Mandela.
Speaker 1: Millions of people share a distinct memory of Nelson Mandela
dying while he was still in prison back in the
nineteen eighties. They remember seeing news reports, maybe TV specials,
public mourning, specific details about.
Speaker 2: His death, vivid memories. Yet in our current actualized historical record,
he was released from prison in nineteen ninety, became President
of South Africa, and lived until twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1: The sheer number of people sharing the same incorrect memory
makes it statistically really unlikely to be just mass delusion
or simple misremembering.
Speaker 2: It's the specificity in the scale that's so odd, and
the examples just keep piling up, especially with pop culture details.
Speaker 3: It gets eerier like the Berenstein Bears. Ah, yes, the
classic the children's books. Yeah, millions of people are absolutely adamant.
They swear they remember the name being stelled with an ea,
Berenstein Bears, They remember seeing it spell that way on
the book covers in libraries, on the TV show credits.
They argue about it fiercely online. That's spelling they insist
existed in their past. But if you look now, it's
always been Berenstein ai in always in this timeline precisely.
Speaker 2: Or think about the monopoly man, mister Monopoly rich uncle Pennybags. Yeah,
ask almost anyone to quickly sketch him or describe him.
What's a key feature?
Speaker 1: They often include, uh, the top hat, the mustache.
Speaker 2: The ugh, the monocle.
Speaker 1: The monocle. So many people have a crystal clear memory
of him wearing a monocle, that little eyeglass on a chain.
But if you look at any official artwork, current or vintage,
he never had one.
Speaker 2: Never wore one. Ever. It's a completely inserted but widely
shared phantom.
Speaker 1: Memory that's genuinely weird, and.
Speaker 2: Even really iconic movie lines aren't immune. The huge reveal
in The Empire strikes back Darth Vader to Luke. What's
the line?
Speaker 1: Everyone quotes Luke, I am your father. Easy, that's what.
Speaker 2: Millions remember that exact phrasing, Luke, I am your father.
But go watch the scene again. In this current version
of the film, it's different. The actual line is no,
I am your father. Seriously, no, I am your father.
That small change adding the no changing the rhythm is tiny,
but the memory of the other version is incredibly widespread.
Speaker 1: So from Dick's perspective, these aren't just collective errors or
bad memories.
Speaker 2: Not at all. They are traces of previous presence, fragments, echoes,
residual data leaking through from timelines we once inhabited, timelines
that were laterally shifted or overwritten by the programmer during
that ongoing refinement process. Our brains, maybe having been moved
back a few squares on the cosmic board, retain ghosts
of the data from the old track. The Mandela effect
is like seeing the brushstrokes that got painted over on
that canvas. Okay, So if our personal memories and even
our collective consciousness can hold these traces, these echoes from
other reality tracks, it makes you wonder, doesn't it could
this kind of latent knowledge also seep into creative.
Speaker 1: Way works like writers are artists accidentally tapping into it exactly.
Speaker 2: It leads back to that idea that creative minds, people
who literally build worlds for a living, might be naturally
more attuned to these subtle shifts in the orthogonal field, maybe.
Speaker 1: Picking up on adjacent realities.
Speaker 2: Some people believe that certain pop culture, particularly things that
seem eerily predictive, might actually contain this kind of hidden knowledge,
suggesting the creators somehow, maybe unconsciously tapped into the same
overlapping layers of reality that Dick was describing way back
in seventy seven.
Speaker 1: And when you talk about pop culture Pruscians, you inevitably
have to talk about the Simpsons.
Speaker 2: You really do. It's almost become a modern cliche, the
show predicting the future. But when you look at the specifics,
it's not just that they get things right occasionally, it's
the uncanny accuracy and sometimes the sheer absurdity of the predictions,
often bridging huge gaps in time. It goes way beyond
just clever writing or lucky guesses.
Speaker 1: Let's run through some of the big ones, the ones
that really make you think especially the technological and corporate stuff, right.
Speaker 2: Because those feel less like cultural commentary and more like glimpses.
Yet this years years before Apple or anyone else launched
the first real smart watches.
Speaker 1: The Simpsons had characters using them.
Speaker 2: Yes, risk devices for making phone calls, shown with the
kind of touch interface. The functional concept was right there
on screen, long before the actual miniaturization tech made it
feasible in our reality.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay.
Speaker 2: And they famously had a running gag about defective, frustrating
auto correct on a handheld device.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they eat up Martha thing exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that specific maddening experience of autocorrect failure that became
a universal daily annoyance only after smartphones became ubiquitous years
after that episode aired. It's like they were observing the
frustrations of a world just slightly out of ours technologically.
Speaker 1: That's pretty specific. What about the corporate stuff, the Disney
Fox prediction that.
Speaker 2: One's genuinely mind boggling. In an episode from I think
the late nineties, they showed a sign for twentieth Century
Fox and underneath it said a division of Walt Disney Co.
Speaker 1: At the time, that must have seemed completely ridiculous.
Speaker 2: Totally absurd, a hyperbolic joke about media consolidation run wild.
But then flash forward to twenty.
Speaker 1: Nineteen and Disney actually buys Fox. It became concrete reality.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just a lucky guess about corporate trends. It
was the specific companies, the specific outcome portrayed decades earlier.
In Dick's terms, it's like the writers momentarily perceived the
reality track the programmer had already selected but which hadn't
actualized in our linear time yet.
Speaker 1: And the scientific or architectural details those can be even weirder.
Speaker 2: Like Blankie the three eyed fish.
Speaker 1: Right found near the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, a symbol
of pollution in the show.
Speaker 2: A memorable gag, but then years later, real news reports
and photos surface of an actual three eyed fish caught
near a real world contaminated nuclear facility in Argentina.
Speaker 1: Whoa wait for real, for.
Speaker 2: Real the specific buttation three eyes linked directly to the
context of nuclear contamination. The parallel is just breathtakingly precise.
Or the London shardbuilding what about it? There's an episode
where they show a skyscraper in London and its design
is uncannily similar, almost identical in shape and placement to
the shard, but the episode aired more than a decade
before the shard was even designed or built.
Speaker 1: Okay, stop, that's getting freaky. Nobel Prize winner is predicted too, Yep.
Speaker 2: An episode showed a betting pool on Nobel Prize winners,
and one character's pick for Economics matched the actual winner
years later. The list just goes on and on.
Speaker 1: So the question becomes is this just an incredibly long
string of bizarre coincidences from really smart observant writers.
Speaker 2: Were Are they somehow functioning differently? Are they acting as
conduits unconsciously capping into that manifold of partially actualized realities
that Dick theorized about. Are they getting glimpses of the
adjacent layers the timeline's about to be swapped in.
Speaker 1: If you accept Dick's premise reality as stacked tree transparencies
constantly being refined, then the Simpsons pressience suddenly looks less
like random luck and more like evidence evidence of minds
momentarily perceiving the layer just above ours.
Speaker 2: It makes the uncanny prediction seem well almost logical within
that framework. The ultimate creative act isn't just imagination. Maybe
it's briefly perceiving the reality that's one square head on
the cosmic chessboard. So we've taken quite a journey here,
a deep dive into this really unsettling but also kind
of vast idea, the possibility that reality isn't fixed, that
it might be programmed actively changing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, covering orthogonal time, that sideways shift, the potential role
of an intelligence like Blis, and all those traces left behind,
the glitches, the deja vus, the Mandela effect, even maybe
these weird pop culture predictions.
Speaker 2: And ultimately it leaves us questioning everything, doesn't it is
reality as solid and singular as we assume, are we
maybe unknowingly already constantly slipping sideways through these alternate timelines
they get refined.
Speaker 1: And thinking about that refinement process, that constant improvement drive
Dick talked about, brings us right back to the chess
game analogy for a final thought, right.
Speaker 2: The game between the destructive force and the guiding programmer.
Speaker 1: Dick suggested, maybe poetically, maybe literally, that we instinctively pray
or hope to be included on the winning side of
that game. We ask subconsciously perhaps not to be left
behind on a discarded timeline, stuck under the influence of
that blind destructive force.
Speaker 2: Because if the programmer is constantly refining the universe, always
substituting a better reality, always moving towards greater freedom, love,
order than the ultimate outcome, the victory of that constructive
force is essentially predetermined. The higher player, the guiding intelligence,
is destined to win the match.
Speaker 1: So the grand cosmic victory is already decided. The only
real question left, then, is a personal one. It's about
our alignment, our orientation within that game.
Speaker 2: Exactly, are we, through our choices, our thoughts, our actions,
aligning ourselves with the chaos, the entropy, the suffering represented
by the losing player, the force that's blind to the
bigger picture.
Speaker 1: Or are we consciously trying to align ourselves with the
constructive force, with those better variables freedom, beauty, love, truth,
order that the programmers constantly weaving into the next iteration
of reality. Are we choosing to be moved along with
it onto the better track?
Speaker 2: It suggests our choices have ontological weight, that aligning with
the good isn't just a moral preference. It might be
how we ensure we're part of the reality that continues
to be actualized and refined, rather than being left behind
as raw material from a discarded, less optimal world.
Speaker 1: Consider what that means practically, How do you live a
life aligned with that highest potential reality the winning side
of the board. That choice maybe determines whether you're carried
forward in the great reprogramming or left behind.
Speaker 2: Think about that. Maybe the next time your hand reaches
for a swift that isn't there, or you experience that
jolt of deja vu, maybe did just shift squares in
the universe. The programmer is waiting to see your next
conscious move