Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff · Douglas Rushkoff

We Are Time Travelers: Retrocausality & The Long Self with Eric Wargo

January 21, 2026·1 hr 5 min·4 clips

Wargo argues precognition tracks future emotional reactions, not events — which is why participants in Daryl Bem's Cornell experiments predicted erotic images at above-chance rates but performed at exactly 50% for neutral beach or wedding photos.

The conversation treats weirdness as evidence, or at least as something worth taking seriously before it gets filed away as odd. The guest reads Philip K. Dick's experience as a time knot: future self, past self, and present awareness all tangled up inside an awakening. The interesting part is not simply that Dick had a strange experience. It is that he noticed the temporal shape of it. The host keeps raising the pressure. He frames Dick as a patron saint of the weird for people who feel stuck inside a deterministic and decaying reality. The guest meets him there. He argues that people need to come to terms with weird experiences now, across UFOs, ESP, synchronicity storms, and mystical experience. That could sound like an escape hatch, but the conversation keeps pulling it back toward agency. The point is that the future may not be a dead corridor of entropy. Maybe loops, signals, and pressure from a longer self are part of how people experience time. Dick becomes the test case because he refused to flatten the experience into mere oddness or private symbolism. The host pushes toward sovereignty: can leaning into the weird become a way to claim some room inside a timeline that otherwise feels shut? The guest's answer is yes, and he says the world needs to face the weird in all its manifestations. Jeffrey Kripal appears as a religion scholar trying to take anomalous experience seriously without draining it of meaning. The mood is warm, but not casual. Under the ESP and UFO talk is a practical question: what do people do when reality feels too small for what they have actually experienced?

As heard by us

A patient, strange conversation about time, certainty, and the edges of consciousness.

This episode moves through a patient conversation about mystical experience, precognition, synchronicity, UFOs, ESP, and the idea that some uncanny moments may also be temporal, as if the future can press back on the present. It lingers on Philip K.

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Why you'd press play

Want a conversation that treats time as something you might actually live inside?

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