The Culture War - Tim Pool - October 25, 2026


NEW EVIDENCE Of Reincarnation Drops, THIS IS GETTING CRAZY

＂This Could END THE WORLD＂ The Coming Solar Storm Apocalypse

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Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

150.02

Word count

2,789

Sentence count

253

Harmful content

Hate speech

4

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.500 Airplane crash. Plane on fire. Little man can't get out.
00:00:06.140 That's what a two-year-old boy named James Leninger was screaming in his sleep up to five nights a week.
00:00:13.520 He didn't stop at nightmares. He said he'd been a pilot. He said he flew off a ship called the Natoma.
00:00:19.920 He said he was shot down by the Japanese, and he gave the name of a friend who flew with him.
00:00:26.780 His parents didn't believe in any of this, so they looked into it.
00:00:31.000 Now, you've probably heard a story like this before.
00:00:33.160 A kid says something weird, the internet goes nuts, and everybody moves on.
00:00:39.440 But there's a small research unit inside the University of Virginia's medical school
00:00:43.680 that has been quietly collecting stories like this for nearly 60 years.
00:00:49.680 Thousands of them.
00:00:51.080 Coded, cataloged, checked against death records and autopsy reports.
00:00:56.060 And this past August, they published something new.
00:01:00.440 They ran the numbers on 1,678 of these cases and found a pattern nobody had predicted.
00:01:08.720 When the person a child claims to have been died suddenly, the child seems to come back faster.
00:01:16.640 About 40% faster.
00:01:18.720 I'm not here to tell you reincarnation is real.
00:01:22.120 I'm also not here to tell you it isn't.
00:01:24.100 I'm here to show you what's in the files, because some of what we are learning is very hard to explain.
00:01:32.740 But maybe there are ancient secrets, things we've known for a long time, that we just don't want to admit.
00:01:44.100 This all starts with a psychiatrist named Ian Stevenson.
00:01:48.600 Stevenson was not some guy selling crystals.
00:01:50.740 He was born in Montreal in 1918, trained in medicine, and by the late 1950s, he was the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia.
00:02:01.860 Mainstream, credentialed.
00:02:03.980 But he had a problem with his own field.
00:02:06.500 He felt that psychiatry couldn't fully explain why people turn out the way they do.
00:02:11.680 Why one kid has a phobia nobody taught him.
00:02:14.980 Why one has a talent that came out of nowhere.
00:02:18.460 Genes and upbringing covered a lot, but everything.
00:02:22.780 So in 1960, he published a long paper reviewing 44 published cases
00:02:27.040 of people who claimed to remember a previous life.
00:02:31.100 Most were young children.
00:02:33.480 And someone read it.
00:02:34.980 Chester Carlson, the man who invented the Xerox process.
00:02:39.880 Carlson was very rich and very interested in the question of whether consciousness survives death.
00:02:45.140 He started funding Stevenson's research.
00:02:48.700 And in 1967, Stevenson founded what was then called the Division of Parapsychology right inside UVA's medical school.
00:02:58.140 When Carlson died the next year, he left the university a million dollars to keep it going.
00:03:04.740 And Stevenson went to work.
00:03:06.680 The next several decades, he traveled up to 55,000 miles per year.
00:03:12.140 India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Thailand, Burma, Alaska.
00:03:16.940 Anywhere a child was saying they used to be someone else.
00:03:21.320 He interviewed the kids, the parents, the neighbors,
00:03:24.600 and then the family of the person the child claimed to be.
00:03:28.400 He wrote down every statement and checked it.
00:03:31.540 In 1966, he published 20 cases suggestive of reincarnation.
00:03:38.940 Notice the title. Not proof. Suggestive.
00:03:42.360 That was his whole style.
00:03:44.400 Careful. Almost painfully careful.
00:03:47.500 One psychiatrist reviewing his work in 1977 put it like this.
00:03:52.120 Either Stevenson is making a colossal mistake,
00:03:55.000 or he will be known as the Galileo of the 20th century.
00:03:59.660 The unit is still there today,
00:04:01.860 and now it's called the Division of Perceptual Studies,
00:04:05.060 And the collection Stevenson started has grown to more than 2,500 cases.
00:04:14.260 Let's start with one of the oldest cases.
00:04:16.880 Before Stevenson ever got involved, Delhi, India.
00:04:21.140 A girl named Shanti Devi, born in 1926.
00:04:25.740 Around the age of four, she starts talking about her husband, her house in a town called
00:04:30.600 Mutra, which is Mathura, about a hundred miles away. A woman named Lugdi had in fact died in
00:04:39.520 Mathura in October 1925, about nine days after giving birth, a little over a year before Shanti
00:04:46.780 was born. The story gets out. Lugdi's widower, Kedarnath, comes to Delhi to see this girl,
00:04:53.800 And here's the test. He pretends to be his own brother. She isn't fooled. She recognizes him.
00:05:01.700 It became such a big deal in India that Mahatma Gandhi appointed a committee of 15 people to look
00:05:07.440 into it. November of 1935, they took nine-year-old Shanti to Mathura. According to their report,
00:05:14.600 she recognized family members, guided the group through the streets to her old home,
00:05:19.740 and pointed to a spot where she said she had hidden money.
00:05:24.160 They dug.
00:05:25.120 They found a container of valuables, but it was empty.
00:05:28.900 Her husband later said he had taken the money after Lugdi died.
00:05:33.020 Shanti Devi never married.
00:05:34.940 For the rest of her life, she considered herself a widow. 0.99
00:05:38.320 Now, that's India. 0.73
00:05:39.540 And a lot of people will say, of course,
00:05:41.620 that's a culture that believes in reincarnation.
00:05:44.260 Fair enough.
00:05:45.340 So let's take it to America.
00:05:48.440 James Leininger, the boy from the cold open.
00:05:51.840 Nightmares start right after his second birthday.
00:05:55.080 Over the next months, he tells his parents his name was also James.
00:05:59.420 He flew a Corsair.
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00:06:54.200 He flew off a ship called Natoma.
00:06:56.960 He was shot down near Iwo Jima.
00:06:59.700 He had a friend named Jack Larson.
00:07:02.460 He signs his drawings, James III.
00:07:05.960 His father, Bruce, a Christian, he sets out to prove his son wrong.
00:07:10.800 Instead, he finds the USS Natoma Bay, a small escort carrier that fought at Iwo Jima.
00:07:17.620 He finds a pilot named Jack Larson who flew from it, still alive.
00:07:23.360 And according to ABC News, he finds that only one pilot from that squadron was killed at Iwo Jima.
00:07:30.880 James M. Houston Jr.
00:07:33.840 Shot down on March 3rd, 1945, age 21.
00:07:39.240 Eyewitnesses said his plane was hit in the engine and went down in flames.
00:07:44.800 James Houston.
00:07:46.420 James Leininger.
00:07:48.020 James III.
00:07:49.600 And there's one more detail that really gets me.
00:07:52.280 According to the case write-ups,
00:07:54.540 Little James had three G.I. Joe dolls named Billy, Walter, and Leon.
00:07:59.440 Three of Houston's squadron mates, who died before he did, were named Billy Peeler, Walter Devlin, and Leon Conner.
00:08:07.900 UVA's Jim Tucker, Stevenson's successor in this work, investigated the case and published it.
00:08:14.180 Then there's Ryan Hammonds, Muscogee, Oklahoma.
00:08:18.560 His dad is a police officer.
00:08:20.520 Around the age of four, Ryan starts saying he used to live in Hollywood.
00:08:24.340 A big house with a pool on a street with rock in the name.
00:08:27.980 Trips to Paris, an agency where people change their names.
00:08:31.840 He wants to go home.
00:08:33.740 So his mom checks out library books on Hollywood,
00:08:36.820 hoping something will settle him down.
00:08:39.340 Flipping through one,
00:08:40.920 Ryan stops at a still from a 1932 movie called Night After Night.
00:08:46.220 Points at a man in the background and says,
00:08:48.480 that's me.
00:08:50.360 The man wasn't even credited.
00:08:52.680 It took a film archivist to identify him.
00:08:55.500 Marty Martin.
00:08:57.400 an extra who became a Hollywood talent agent. He lived on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills,
00:09:03.260 and he died in 1964. Ryan's mom had kept a journal. In 2016, of the 230 things Ryan had said,
00:09:11.780 55 had been confirmed. Only 15 were clearly wrong. The rest could not be checked either way.
00:09:18.520 One of those confirmed details, Ryan said he died at 61. Marty Martin's death certificate
00:09:24.740 said he was 59. That got counted as a miss. Until later records showed Martin was born in 1903. He
00:09:32.860 was 61. And then there are the bodies. Stevenson noticed that in about a third of these cases,
00:09:39.940 the child was born with a birthmark or a birth defect, and that sometimes the mark lined up
00:09:46.040 with a wound on the person the child claimed to be. He spent years pulling autopsy reports
00:09:52.340 and hospital records. In 1997, he published more than 2,000 pages on it, covering over 200 cases.
00:10:01.000 Among them, 18 kids with two birthmarks that matched the entry and exit wounds of a gunshot.
00:10:10.660 One case you can wave away. A kid overheard something. A parent embellished a lucky guess.
00:10:18.340 But Stevenson didn't just collect stories, he coded them.
00:10:22.040 Every case, more than 200 variables, all of it entered into a database.
00:10:27.120 And when you step back and look at thousands of them together, the stories start to rhyme.
00:10:32.260 The kids start talking about the past life at around three years old.
00:10:35.820 On average, 35 months.
00:10:37.880 And they stop around age six.
00:10:39.920 The memories just fade.
00:10:42.060 Right about when ordinary childhood memory takes over.
00:10:46.260 About 75% of them describe how they died.
00:10:49.480 And here's the strange part.
00:10:51.520 In about 70% of the cases, the person the child remembers did not die of old age.
00:10:57.280 They were murdered, killed in an accident, killed in combat, suicide, violent, sudden unfinished deaths.
00:11:05.560 In those cases, more than a third of the kids have a phobia tied to the way they died.
00:11:10.460 If the past life ended in water, the child might be afraid of water.
00:11:14.740 If it ended with a gun, the child might be terrified of guns.
00:11:18.920 And the gap between the death and the child's birth, the median is about 16 months.
00:11:24.480 Which brings us to this year.
00:11:26.440 In August of 2026, three researchers at UVA published a study in an American Psychological Association journal.
00:11:34.620 They took 1,678 cases from the collection and asked a simple question.
00:11:41.300 Does the way a person died change how long it takes for the child to show up?
00:11:45.860 It does.
00:11:47.300 According to Psychology Today's write-up of the story,
00:11:50.300 when the death was expected, like a long illness, the gap averaged around 21 months.
00:11:55.760 When the death was completely unexpected, an accident, a murder, it averaged around 12.
00:12:01.680 The more sudden the death, the shorter the wait.
00:12:05.040 Now, the obvious objection is, these families believe in reincarnation.
00:12:09.280 They're telling the story they expect. So the researchers checked. They limited it to the best
00:12:15.260 verified cases. They limited it to families who had no contact with each other before the case
00:12:20.860 began. The pattern held. And this is the part that I can't stop thinking about. The effect was
00:12:26.960 stronger in families who did not believe in reincarnation. Think about that. If this were
00:12:33.140 all wishful thinking, you'd expect the believers to produce the cleanest pattern. It went the other 0.99
00:12:38.240 way. Now, it'd be a disservice to you if I didn't tell you what the critics were pointing out,
00:12:45.960 because they have very real points. And it's always important to be skeptical, especially
00:12:50.880 when dealing with things we can't physically touch, smell, see or hear. It doesn't mean it's
00:12:56.180 not real. It means it's harder to verify. But of course, it can be. So let's check some of the
00:13:02.680 critiques. The biggest one, of course, most of these cases are investigated after the fact.
00:13:08.820 By the time a researcher arrives, the two families have often already met. Stories get retold,
00:13:13.780 details get filled in. Memory is not a recording. In the 1970s, a research assistant who worked
00:13:19.120 with Stevenson, Shamp Ransom, wrote an internal critique flagging leading questions, short
00:13:25.220 interviews, and long delays. He said only a handful of the cases he reviewed had no prior
00:13:30.280 contact between the families. The philosopher Paul Edwards was harsher. He said Stevenson was
00:13:36.020 living in cloud cuckoo land. And the famous cases aren't perfect. James Leininger said he flew a
00:13:43.140 Corsair, but on the day Houston died, he was flying a different plane, an FM2 Wildcat. A
00:13:48.880 philosopher named Michael Sudeth published a long critique in 2021, arguing the family's account
00:13:55.680 changed over time. Tucker answered back and called it full of distortions. That fight is still going
00:14:02.400 on. Ryan Hammonds got things wrong, too. He said he was cremated. Marty Martin was buried. He said
00:14:08.980 his heart exploded. It was a brain hemorrhage. So those are the questions, and I think they deserve
00:14:14.140 to be asked. But here's what's interesting. Even some of the most famous skeptics in history
00:14:19.120 didn't want to close the door. Carl Sagan, the guy who basically built modern science skepticism,
00:14:25.680 wrote a whole book called The Demon Haunted World, Debunking Pseudoscience.
00:14:31.440 And in it, he listed three claims in the paranormal field that he thought deserved serious study.
00:14:36.740 Number two, that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life,
00:14:41.640 which upon checking, turn out to be accurate,
00:14:45.380 which they could not have known about in any other way other than reincarnation.
00:14:50.740 He said he didn't think it was likely to be true, but he said it might be.
00:14:54.520 And look, critics can explain a wrong detail.
00:14:58.020 They can explain a leading question.
00:15:00.020 What's harder to explain is a toddler in Oklahoma picking an uncredited extra out of a 1932 movie still,
00:15:07.400 or three G.I. Joes named after three dead pilots,
00:15:10.960 or a pattern across 1,678 cases that gets stronger, not weaker, when you take the believers out. 0.83
00:15:22.360 So where does this go from here?
00:15:24.520 In January of 2025, the Division of Perceptual Studies launched the biggest push in its history
00:15:30.200 on these kids, a two-year, $750,000 program running into early 2027, led by Marietta and
00:15:39.740 Philip. And they're changing the questions. For 60 years, the work was mostly about proving cases.
00:15:46.660 Is this detail right? Is that one wrong? Now they want to know why. Why do some children report
00:15:52.900 these memories and others don't? Is it something about memory? Something about trauma? They're
00:15:58.500 comparing kids who have these memories to kids who don't, using behavioral tests in the division's
00:16:04.020 own brain imaging lab. And it might be more common than you think. A survey published this year of a
00:16:10.320 representative sample of Germans found that 11% said they had distinct memories that seemed to
00:16:16.460 come from a past life. One in nine people. Ian Stevenson died in Charlottesville in February of
00:16:22.980 2007. He was 88, and he left behind one last experiment. Back in the 1960s, he set a combination
00:16:31.200 lock using a word or phrase that only he knew. Something he said was extremely meaningful to him.
00:16:38.100 Put it in a filing cabinet in the psychiatry department. The idea was simple. If consciousness
00:16:43.900 survives death. Maybe he could find a way to pass the code along. After he died, people sent in
00:16:51.460 guesses. Words that came to them in dreams. His colleague, Bruce Grayson, who took over the
00:16:57.660 division, tried them. None of them worked. As far as anyone has reported, that lock has never been
00:17:04.160 opened. Maybe that tells you everything. Or maybe it just tells you that a combination lock is a
00:17:09.320 very hard way to send a message. What I can say is this. For nearly 60 years, serious researchers
00:17:16.260 at a serious university have been writing down what little kids say about lives they never lived,
00:17:22.900 and they still can't fully explain how. Neither can the critics. Maybe one day we will get these
00:17:29.840 answers. We know there are things that we cannot touch, smell, see, or hear, but do exist. I mean,
00:17:37.840 radio is a really simple example. Is it possible there exist other spectrums of energy or elements
00:17:47.080 of existence that we cannot perceive with our limited bodies and technology? I think the answer
00:17:53.100 to that is an overwhelming yes. So the secrets of the universe stand before us, my friends,
00:18:00.140 and we're going to have to figure them out. We're going to have to do the research.
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00:18:26.100 guys thank you so much
00:18:28.300 for joining us in this video
00:18:30.380 and we will see you all next time
00:18:33.440 You