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Feb. 5, 2011 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:11:36
Edition 52 - The Merlin Project

A welcome return to co-founder of The Merlin Project, hear how they created a way ofhighlighting future trends based on the past.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for returning to the website and the show.
Please tell your friends about it.
And thank you very much for the donations that have been coming in over this last month or so.
Please keep them coming for reasons that I'll get into in just a moment.
Also, thank you for the email.
If I haven't got back to you individually, I will eventually get around to it.
So many emails coming in and life has been a little tough lately.
I had a lot of work to do, got to pay the bills.
So I've been on the radio in London doing some shifts, broadcasting news here covering the situation in Egypt, which we'll be talking about with our guest this time round.
And lots of other things happening.
Wacky weather seems to be afflicting the world.
If you're listening in the United States now, you'll know all about that with the big ice storm that stretched 2,000 miles all the way down from north of Boston, right the way down to Dallas, a place that has pretty mild temperatures in the winter quite often, but they had ice there.
Chicago, well, let's talk about Chicago.
They had temperatures well into the negatives, negative 10 and beyond.
I spoke to a reporter a couple of days ago at WGN Radio, big powerhouse radio station there, and she was telling me how people were parking up their cars near the lake in Chicago and then coming back to them and not being able to find them because they were covered in snow.
An amazing concept, something it's very hard for us to get a grip of here in the UK.
But even so, their public transportation system pretty much kept going through most of it.
Now, if we compare that to what happens here in Europe and especially what happened here in London during the big freeze, we had major disruption of our transport system because before Christmas we had some snow and some sub-zero temperatures.
And in Britain, things are not designed to cope with that kind of stuff.
So you in America, you know how to deal with it.
And certainly up in Canada, you know how to sort that out and snow tires and chains and all the rest of it.
But here in the UK, we were completely caught out by it.
And thank goodness it didn't continue.
But now as I speak these words, we've got gales in the UK, really powerful winds and very, very mild temperatures.
So something's going on with our weather wherever we are.
Plus, of course, a few days ago, Australia, if you're listening in Australia, my thoughts are with you.
You had Cyclone Yassie, this thing as big as Katrina, great big spinning doughnut, if you looked at the weather charts, that barreled its way down to places like, oh, a little place called Tully, not very far from Townsville and Cairns up there in the north, which are tropical kind of places, so they expect this kind of stuff.
But if this cyclone had hit the big cities, it could have done much worse damage.
As it was, the place dodged a bullet.
Nobody died.
Nobody was seriously hurt.
But still, in those small places, a lot of damage was done.
So like I say, you're much in our thoughts.
And I spoke to a very nice lady on a radio station there called Inky Biffel, who is in Cairns on a radio station called, I think, Zinc FM.
And she was telling us how she was preparing for the cyclone to hit and people had gone to shelters and those who could get away had got away.
So all the right preparations were done.
And even though this thing could have been a lot worse, I think the emergency authorities there are pretty pleased that people did the things that they had to do and obeyed the advice.
But there's some weird weather going round, which, you know, if you're in Australia, if you're in the United States right now, you'll understand what I'm saying.
I think we get off pretty lightly.
I'm touching wood as I say that, as we say in the UK.
Here in the UK, we get off fairly lightly with it all.
Now, thank you for your emails.
Had lots from the United States.
More and more listeners in places like California, in Tampa, Florida.
Nice lady who emailed only today from New York State.
Thank you very much for your response.
Please keep listening to the show.
And most importantly, register a hit on the website.
And when you've heard the show, if you like it, tell your friends about it.
Because the only way we can spread the word about this show is literally word of mouth.
I don't have publicity budgets.
I'm not part of a corporation.
There is only me and my webmaster, Adam Cornwell, involved in this show.
And you and the guy who made the theme tune that you've just heard, Martin.
That's the entire family, like I always say.
And something important before I tell you about the guest this time round.
Because we are so small, I think that's exciting.
We can be part of the vanguard of a new kind of broadcasting.
This is a way to reach people and give you the information that you're not getting from the mainstream media.
Now, all right, I am part of the mainstream media.
I've spent years and years and years being a broadcast journalist, guy who does talk shows, news all of my life.
I've won awards for it.
That has been my existence.
But I've always realized that the picture we get from the mainstream media is not entirely the full picture.
It takes a major event for some of the stuff we talk to here to get noticed by the mainstream media.
And even then, it's often scoffed at.
And if it isn't scoffed at, it's mentioned for a fleeting second.
And there I am, snapping my fingers.
It's gone.
But there is, we know that, I know that, you know that, stuff going on that does not get reflected by the mainstream media because they don't understand it or they don't want to understand it, which could be more to the point.
We don't have the backing of great big corporate resources.
That's why we depend on donations.
So please, please keep those coming.
Look, I've got the connections.
I know a lot of people in this industry over the years that I've been in it.
I've amassed a lot of contacts.
I think I have the expertise amassed over these years.
So I am in pole position, as they say in Motor Racing, to do something big with this show.
We can evolve this into more regular shows.
We can revolve this, or rather evolve this, into, actually that's pretty good.
We can revolve this into a full-fledged broadcasting outlet if we want to.
The horizons for the unexplained are limitless.
In 2011, I'm so excited about it, more excited than I've ever been because I think we can do it.
All you have to have these days is a certain amount of ability, the will to do it, and a certain amount of support, and you're there.
So with your support, we can do this thing.
Do you want to be part of this?
Are you sick and tired of the stuff that the mainstream is giving you?
Are you tired of turning on the radio and hearing the same stuff out of different radio stations all the time?
If that is the case, join us here.
Now, all right, I'm making it sound like a campaign, and in a way, it is.
We Can start that ball rolling.
I'm very sincere about it.
I mean what I'm saying.
And with your support and your help, I can do it.
We can do it together.
All right, that's enough sermonizing for right now.
Special guest this time, a man I've been trying to get back on this show for a long, long time.
George Hart and Paul Gurcio were mainstays of my old unexplained show on radio in the UK, right across the nation coast coast, and into Europe as well.
They used to come on very often talking about the Merlin Project.
Now, if you were with the old radio show, you'll know exactly what these guys in America do.
They found a way, by, I don't know, intuition, science, of predicting the future on the basis of what happened in the past.
You know, people say, well, what happened before will happen again.
Actually, in life, that could well be true.
Hence the Merlin Project, which has been running for more than 20 years, I understand.
They predict a lot of events.
At the moment, of course, we have the events going on in Egypt.
I was talking to one of the Sky News reporters.
If you're in Europe, you'll know what Sky News is.
It's a little bit like Fox News, owned by the same people.
In Cairo yesterday, Andrew Wilson, and he was telling me the situation there is very, very fluid.
The army could determine a lot of what happens there.
There is a possibility that Egypt and other nations around there could tip into Islamist states and then America, the UK, Europe have another situation diplomatically to deal with that perhaps they didn't anticipate because America and the UK propped up Mubarak for 30 years, didn't they?
So this is a great crucible.
Not only that, there are changes happening closer to home, both in the US and the UK, aren't there?
I mean, here in the UK, there is rising, I'm not going to call it anger, but people are peeved about the fact that bankers did what they did, brought down, almost brought down the economy.
The banks had to be bailed out.
And the people who are paying the price for that, it seems, are the little guys who are now paying in extra taxes.
That goes for the US, that goes for the UK, pretty much around the world, depending on where you are in varying degrees.
And a lot of people here are getting sick and tired of it.
Now, I can't take a view on it.
I can only stand in the middle and watch and reflect.
But it seems to be a trend here of people getting more and more annoyed.
Where will this go?
Well, maybe our guest today on The Unexplained can tell us a little bit more about this.
This is Paul Gurcio, one of the two people who started the Merlin project.
And he's online now from East Coast USA.
Paul Gurcio, thank you for coming back on The Unexplained, my friend.
Yes, Howard, it's wonderful to talk to you again.
It's been a while.
Ah, what?
Five years at least, probably six years.
And I'm starting to worry for you guys.
I thought, what's happened to them?
Have they decided to do something else with their lives?
We've been busy all along.
Merlin, as you know, is a work in progress.
Dr. Hart, who basically is a SDI Star Wars physicist, works for the Pentagon, a man with high security clearances, who invented the laser used in LASIC eye surgery called the eczema.
And George, as a kind of side job these days, has taken to doing some kind of what I guess is called day trading.
He's not handling my portfolio at the moment because my portfolio is not big enough to handle.
But the ones he is handling, he was telling me that he doubled and tripled the value of the portfolios over the last 18 months.
And considering the nature of the market in the last 18 months, that's pretty phenomenal.
Well, you've only got to look at most of our pensions, we've got private pensions over here and the way that they have not exactly expanded with their investments.
His achievement's amazing.
Remarkable.
You know, the other thing is that one of the reasons why this Merlin technology that we developed has worked so well really from the beginning is that George has a unique ability to recognize number patterns that most scientists would not have noticed.
For instance, to give you an idea of what he does, essentially, if you had a room full of ping pong balls sitting on mousetraps, let's say you had a room 10 by 10 and you had somewhere in the vicinity of 4,000
mousetraps, loaded mousetraps sitting on the floor with ping pong balls on them, George could develop software to tell you at what point, if you dropped a ping pong ball into that room, at what point the maximum number of ping pong balls would be in flight.
And he can actually generate a graphic that would show you in milliseconds what that effect looks like as a graphic.
So literally, Paul, this is what you would call a predictive technology.
Literally.
It is.
It is exactly that.
And it's built on the fact that time is not all the same.
It's built on the idea that moments of time are unique like a DNA fingerprint or snowflakes or tree rings or popped corn kernels and that moments of time come one to a customer.
And that if you could come up with a way to freeze that moment and turn it into a mathematical formula or graphical picture, if you then compared that moment of time with any other moment, you could determine things like levels of compatibility between those two equations.
Or to give you an even better picture of it, I'm sure most of your listeners have at one time or other seen the movie or read the book, The Time Machine, H.G. Wells novel around the turn of the last century.
And there's a scene in that movie which is wonderful.
Rod Taylor, who's the star of the 1960 version of The Time Machine, is Sitting in the machine in his laboratory in London across the road from this dress shop.
And as he moves the throttle sort of forward and moves forward in time, he's watching the changing fashions on the mannequin in the dress maker's window.
I've seen the movie.
If you haven't seen the movie, definitely recommend that you see it, but it is just the most staggering thing to watch the unfolding of history before this guy's very eyes.
Exactly.
And here he's noticing this, the hem length of the dresses and skirts are getting shorter and shorter and so on.
And you could actually use that information to develop a kind of theory, at least, on what society was changing into simply by watching the changing fashions on this mannequin.
So hold on.
Are you saying that the way that history and the way that our lives and companies and countries and everything unfolds is a little bit like one of those flip over books?
You know, you have a different picture on each page, then you flip it over and the whole thing moves.
Actually, it is.
But the problem is this.
What happens if the dress shop goes out of business and the images stop?
In other words, you could do that kind of little game as long as the dress shop stayed in business.
But the moment the dress shop goes out of business, your information feed stops.
What Merlin does is Merlin is working with time equations that not only can go far into the past to see what things looked like at some earlier stage, but we're not bounded by the dress designs or the dress shop being open still.
We can go forward because time is a mathematical function.
The cycles that produce the time elements that we watch and lots that we don't watch, but the ones that we do watch, the 24 hours of the day and the seven days in a week and the full moons and new moons and high tide and low tide and so on, are organized.
They happen at a cadence.
So we can figure out what that set of cycles is going to look like years and years from now without the need of having the dress shop.
We can predetermine what the mathematical equation is going to look like for someday in the future as much as we can do it for someday in the past or say this moment.
Now look, does that work universally for everything?
I'm thinking of one area where this would be very useful.
Say I just invented a great new aircraft and put that into service and I'd spent 10 years developing this aircraft.
It was a passenger aircraft carrying 200 people, going to fly all around the world, make me enormously rich.
Are you saying that you would be able to chart its safety record even into the future?
As a matter of fact, you can do something very much like that.
And when I charted the first maiden flights, there was a few of them and they were all televised.
You may remember four or five years ago, I think, of the new Airbus 380.
I do.
Well.
They picked terrible days for those maiden flight dates.
And they've had nothing but trouble with that plane.
They have.
I mean, it's been forgotten, but just a few months ago, of course, Qantas had massive problems.
That's right.
It's largely been grounded because of engine problems.
I don't know whether they were GE or Rolls-Royce.
No, they were Rolls-Royce Trent engines.
Well, then Rolls-Royce is in trouble as a result because the investment in those engines has got to have been extraordinary.
I mean, the LyftQ, you were talking about a plane that you can actually get something like 800 people into, 500 comfortably, but you can actually get, I think, 800 on board that plane.
Imagine when one of those goes down.
Well, I don't even want to think about that.
That's an awful thought.
But have you seen the plane?
Have you actually seen one of these things?
I have actually seen the plane.
Well, I've seen them at Heathrow Airport in London, which is not very far from where I live, and they are just a staggering thing to look at.
You know, I thought jumbo jets were great, but these are works of art.
I'm not sure that they're going to turn out to be cost-effective, however, because you've got to fill a lot of those seats in order to make back what you spent on those planes.
I'm not sure at all that it's not going to turn out that a smaller manifest is going to actually turn out to be far more cost-effective than those planes.
And on top of that, as I said, they pick dates to fly this thing in its test flights that George and I would never have given them if they had asked us.
We would have said, no, no, nay, nay, not those dates.
And what you might say is, well, how could that have any effect on the plane's viability?
Well, it does sound bizarre.
It sounds like astrology, really.
You know, it's not a good day to do this.
It surely can't be like that.
Well, actually, it is kind of like that.
How come?
What we're doing with Merlin, we like to say that Merlin is what astrology would like to be and isn't.
Okay.
Okay.
And if time matters and time is unique from moment to moment, then what you do in that moment ends up having long-term characteristics that are tied to the characteristics of the starting moment.
Okay.
And as in the dressmaker's window, whatever it started with when he started doing his looking out the window from the time machine is the basis upon which all other comparisons are going to be made.
So you're saying the equivalent of if that shop, say, opened in 1912, the end date of the thing when it closed perhaps would be the mini skirt would be in the window.
If they opened in 1913, it might be hot pants.
Absolutely.
Exactly.
And from that information, you could then make judgments.
You could then make calls about what was going on in society in order for that to happen.
Now, in terms of what Merlin does, what George has actually done with this is turn each moment of time into like the beginning bars of a symphony.
And when we run this time track, what we're doing is we're running as many as 90 years forward from this initial instant of frozen time in the past.
Why 90 years?
Well, because that's, we put 18 years on a page and that's five times 18.
In fact, that's logical.
Well, I'll tell you, when we were first doing this, George only wanted to do 72 years.
And I said, oh, yeah, great.
So I have a 68-year-old come in for an appointment, and all I've got is four more years I can tell them about.
And then they're going to say, well, what do you mean?
What's going to happen after that?
And I'm going to say, beats me.
All right.
So it's a useful lifespan of a person or a thing, plus a little more.
Plus, from George's standpoint, being the practical person he is, he said to me, well, if we ran it out to 90 years, which would be another 18, he said, that's 20% more paper, 20% more ink coverage, 20% more postage to mail it.
And I was like, okay, I understand.
So he was doing this entirely from a practical standpoint.
But let's say, for argument's sake, that we handed you five sheets of paper on which there was 18 years each of a time track from, let's say, January 1st, 1930.
We were running this out to 2020 from 1930, and we handed you five pages, 18 years on a page, six years on a strip, because we put them in six-year strips on the page.
And now you were looking at what kind of, sort of, looks like sheet music.
It looks like five pages out of some symphony.
And you can actually see where it would get busy and where it's going to quiet down.
And if it were a symphony, you'd be able to tell where the movements were.
You'd be able to tell which ones were raucous and which ones were quiet.
And you'd be able to see where one movement sort of morphed into the next.
And what we found is, with these snapshots of time, we can tell you where in time things are going to get different.
So in other words, we can look at this and say, well, at about five or about 23 or 35 or whatever it happens to be, this time track suggests that the circumstances in your living situation are going to radically shift gears.
So like astrology, you can predict the trends and the art of it, that's the science.
The art of it is putting your own spin on it to say, well, this is what is likely to happen.
Well, yes, and then there's one other thing.
And if we have time today or sometime when we do this, I will run this down for your listeners because there's a way to do this on a kind of generic basis that you can sit down and figure out for yourself without the need for any of the fancy stuff that George and I do.
But it just so happens that if you have a person in front of you who's, let's say, 45 and they've experienced most of these major cycles at least once, the nine-month cycle and the 21 and the 7.5 and so on, and you know what happened at those earlier times.
You know what happened when the seven-year cycle hit.
And you know what happened when the 21-year cycle hit.
It didn't hit at 21 because where it starts depends on when you start it.
So the cycle, the 21-year cycle, might not hit you the first time until you're 39 because you arrived here just before the last one happened and it took 39 years for the first one to happen for you.
But whatever that was, if you know what happened the first time it came around and you know what the details of that experience consisted of, who was involved, what kinds of things occurred, did you make money or lose money or have a serious accident?
Did you get married or divorced or lose a parent or have a child or whatever it is?
If we know what happened when these earlier cycles hit, we can pretty much determine the kind of things that are going to happen when they come around the next time.
All right, here's the philosophy now.
If you did know those things, say you'd had a divorce seven years ago and there are the cycles showing a similar collection of circumstances occurring again.
What use is it to you to know that?
Well, if you're dating somebody and serious about it, you might want to hire a private eye and find out what you're really dealing with.
Or let's say you got married in the meanwhile.
You got divorced at this point in the past and you got married at the five-year mark after that divorce.
And now you're coming up to the seven-year interval from the original divorce.
So what we're coming to here is on a personal level, you can plan your life out if you use this.
You can actually, you know what clients use this for?
They mostly use it to know when to duck.
Okay?
To know when they might be entering into a series of circumstances that are going to repeat something that happened in the past that was unpleasant.
And in an effort to avoid that unpleasance, they would make changes leading into that repetition point where you're getting a reprise of the cycle again to make sure they don't go and do the same thing again.
Now, some of my listeners are going to email me and say, well, I'm very interested in what Paul Gercio had to say there, and I quite like the idea of this Merlin project, but Couldn't I just plan my life out using common sense and I'd be okay anyway?
No, because common sense is like the rhythm method for Catholics.
It's like, what do you call people who are on the rhythm method?
You call them parents.
Okay, it's not common sense.
First of all, we are terrible, absolutely terrible at standing at a distance and looking at our own actions and drawing conclusions from them.
We are creatures of habit, first of all.
We are highly emotional.
And we never believed we could possibly find ourselves in the same circumstances again.
But if my life has anything to go by, we repeat our mistakes.
Absolutely.
Actually, I think we perfect them.
We get better.
We get better.
And you know what else is funny about this?
Even when you know that you're entering into a period of time like that, the tendency sometimes is irresistible to repeat the same circumstances.
And I've come to the conclusion that the reason that is, is that what we did the last time, even though it didn't work, is familiar.
And so we'd rather do the familiar than break the pattern.
I've just thought of something, though, Paul.
And this is a potential flaw in it, but you can tell me why it isn't.
Now, say I get a prediction that something bad is going to happen a year from now.
No, no, no.
don't tell you something bad's gonna happen.
All right, I put that back.
No, no, no, no, that's not even a downtrend.
A change.
No, because for some people, look, look at it this way.
If you back this all up to its ultimate starting point, okay, it suggests that people born on the same day of the same year at nearly the same time are going to have these things come along at exactly the same points in their lives.
Are they all going to die at the same times or get into car accidents at the same times?
No.
But from a selected series of things, often things that are an extension of each other.
So one gets married and the other gets divorced.
Or one has a child and the other loses a parent.
Or one loses their car in a terrible accident and the other wins a car in a sweepstand.
All right, so it's a kind of binary thing.
It's plus or minus.
It's quiet times and busy times.
But if you make a change, what I'm saying is, if on the basis of that you make changes in your life, have you not then altered your predetermined time track?
In other words, thrown out your calculations completely?
No, you haven't altered the time because the time is immutable.
Like the ocean tides, we could all stand on the shore and wish the high tide not to come in.
It's going to laugh at us.
Okay?
It's going to come in.
And what we're suggesting is, for instance, that if you had a personal tide table and you knew what high tide was for you in low tide, like the ocean tides, if you're a clam digger, you want to know when low tide is because you want to go out and clam when there's no water there.
Now, you could go clamming at high tide, but that'd be a little silly because the clams are going to laugh at you as they float away.
Okay, on the other hand, if you were a shipbuilder, you might want to know when high tide is to launch your ship.
You could drag it across three quarters of a mile of mud flats to get to where the water is, but you're liable to rip up the bottom of the damn thing getting there.
And wouldn't it be smarter to wait for the water to come to you?
If you knew when that was in advance, you would make changes in your life differently than if it comes along willy-nilly at what seems to be a random point, but it's only random because you didn't know what the timetable was.
And the problem is that none of us came here with any foreknowledge of this.
I'm willing to concede that what makes lucky people lucky is that they know when to make changes on some instinctive level and the rest of us don't.
Most of us make changes when we're very unhappy with what's going on.
How many of us make changes when things are going well?
How many people change jobs when they just got a promotion?
Well, some people do because they get bored.
I mean, that's the human condition.
No, it's what we call lucky people.
Lucky people are the ones who make changes when there's no reason to.
That means I'm lucky then, because I have to say that in the past, certainly work-wise, sometimes I've just got bored with what I'm doing, and for the sheer hell of it, I've gone and done something else.
And sometimes that hasn't been a great idea, but there we are.
I was going to say, one of the things that generally happens to people who do do that, especially the ones who do it on purpose, is that if you keep track of what goes on for them, they generally end up better off than the rest of us do.
Okay.
I hear what you say.
What we're doing is we're saying that if you pick the moments of making changes on purpose instead of by accident, which is what generally happens, you get more control over the situation and you end up with less grief and more goodies when the dust all settles.
I like the sound of that.
There's something else about these.
We found out more in recent years than initially because although we developed this, neither one of us knew exactly how good it was going to get or how much information it was going to be able to tell us or even what it was going to completely look like when it was all collated.
Okay, we had an idea, but it turned out to be far more remarkable in those respects than we ever imagined.
If, for instance, you take one of these time tracks and you compare it to the same 18 years for somebody else or for some other situation, because you can run it on situations instead of people, you know, like D-Day, or you can run it on when the corporation was formed or, you know, when you got the big break and you happen to know what that date was.
If you run these things and compare it to, say, your time track, if the time track for the date involved happens to fill in all of the empty spaces on yours and vice versa,
so that if you take these two sheets of paper and you put one over the other and you hold them up to the light and you now see no empty spaces, no lines with nothing going on, and one filling in the empty spaces of the other, you have a high degree of compatibility with that moment or person.
I love that thought.
That's almost like gears meshing together, isn't it?
It's exactly that.
And if gears mesh together, the thing that you're dealing with works.
Well, aren't we finding out even in medicine with receptors and all of this that we live in a plug-and-socket universe?
We've just come up with a way to find compatible moments that fit together with earlier moments.
Or for instance, let's say you wanted to sell a house.
And in this market, I'm sure even in your situation over there, because I hear about all this austerity stuff going on, it's gotten a lot harder to move properties than, say, it was five years ago.
If you put out that property on a particular day at a particular time and get it in what would be the equivalent of your multiple listing book, the MLS book and whatnot, you are more likely to attract a buyer because you don't need to reach everybody.
All you need to do is reach the person who wants to buy your house.
And if you put that out at a particular moment on purpose, because the starting moment for the sale is when people can become aware that it's for sale.
So when you put it out into the marketplace, you're actually starting the clock.
If you picked a moment to put it out into the marketplace that was purposeful, that did one of these filling in the empty spaces kind of thing, the chances of you finding a buyer within, say, 60 to 90 days is way up in the 70 or 80 percentile, even in a marketplace where only 10% of the houses are moving.
Understood, but haven't you got to know who your potential buyer is for that to work?
No, you don't.
Because the moment you pick to put it out on the market, set up what we would ordinarily call a coincidence quotient.
You'd set up a circumstance whereby the person who wants to buy your house happens to see your ad.
Now, how come they happen to see it?
How can you know that's going to happen?
Well, because you're plugging into...
You know, it's just coincidence.
But what if it isn't just coincidence?
What if coincidence is a name for a law we haven't figured out yet?
And that it's actually going on underneath the surface.
We just don't know how to attack it.
If you knew how to attack it, you'd do things at particular times instead of any old time.
Because then you could start to control some of that.
I'm going to quote the Bible to you.
I don't often do this, but isn't there a passage in the Bible that says, physician, heal thyself?
On that premise, how's this worked for you?
Well, it says to everything there is a season.
All right, but how has this worked for you personally then?
You must have used it for yourself.
I have, and George and I both have, and as I said, that's what we do for clients.
I can tell you that I have managed, first of all, George and I have managed to probably be the only two people in the history of the planet who have taken a concept that started out as a soft science, like astrology,
for instance, and turned it into a hard science that actually produces consistent results a minimum of 70% of the time, which means that whenever we run this stuff, it's 20 percentage points above a coin toss.
All right.
Well, look, you know that I'm one of the converted here.
I was captivated by this when I first discussed it with you more than five years ago on the radio here in the UK, and I love this concept.
You know, we started doing this in 1989.
I know you did, but we started talking about it, what, five, six years ago on radio here in the UK.
But the only thing is, if it's so good and if it works so consistently 70% of the time, that's pretty high numbers, how come I haven't been reading about you in my newspapers here in the UK?
How come the pair of you are not megastars now?
Because it's very, very difficult to get people used to the idea that time isn't all the same.
When you sit them down and you start pointing out some of these things, like for instance, certain years in which a tremendously high degree of activity happens versus years when virtually nothing goes on, and that those years in which the high activity occurs are organized into intervals every so many years.
When you start to actually label all of that and you dissect their lifetime into some of these intervals, then they kind of say, oh my God, I had no idea that was going on.
Well, right.
My dad worked for General Electric, the electronics manufacturer, for 45 years.
And for 45 years, he was involved in the sale of point-of-purchase consumer electronics, clock radios, electric blankets, fans, that kind of thing.
He looked at this thing, and after years of not understanding what George and I were doing, and he's a real smart guy, he finally said to me at 93 a year or so ago, he said, so in other words, if I understand this correctly, if what you and George are doing is just nonsense, there's nothing to it, using your advice can't be bad because there's nothing to it.
On the other hand, if you're even partly right, you're going to give your clients an enormous advantage over everybody else who never knew this was true.
I said, that's it exactly.
He's a very wise man by the sounds of it.
But he said, but on the other hand, he said, trying to talk them into the fact to pay attention to moments of time as being different from each other, one being more valuable to them, say, than the next, is going to be quite a job because whoever considered that as a possibility?
Well, whoever did, that's a fact.
And there's something else.
Not only did that have it, you know, people in general ever considered this, but when you throw it out to them, they throw up their hands and say, oh, great.
Another thing I'm going to have to take into account before I make a decision.
They don't want to.
It is.
Too complicated.
No, it's not too complicated.
Well, it's too complex for people's minds to take on board.
That's what we're saying.
So many...
We already now have...
That's more than our grandparents were exposed to in a whole year.
Okay?
There's so many factors tugging at us today in terms of taking this into account or taking that into account that people just don't want to have to consider whether it's the right moment to do it or not.
Whether it's a good idea, yes, whether they have the money, whether their friends think it's something they ought to do, their wife, their kids, et cetera.
But to consider, to have to wait for several more weeks or months or God knows a year or something to do this thing to sort of semi-guarantee that it's going to work better than seven times out of ten, they're not willing to do it.
One of the things I have the hardest time with, even with regular clients, is getting them to make a notation of when they had that conversation over lunch and jotted something down on a napkin, okay, of when it actually happened, because they don't pay attention to that.
They pay attention to inventing the thing or getting the patent on it.
All of those are important, but what's really important is when did it start?
Right.
And part of this might be, again, to do with the human condition, that what you're asking people to do is to accept something that a lot of people can't accept, and that is their own fallibility.
Well, as I said in the biblical quoting, there's all kinds of quotes about time.
And one of the things that sort of circles around us that we kind of jokingly refer to now and then are things like, oh, the seven-year-itch and seven days of creation and how a statute of limitations is seven years.
And if you break a mirror, you get seven years of bad luck.
And the biblical seven lean years and fat years.
Where did that come from?
Okay, and the other problem is that we are base 10 crazy.
We pay attention to five years and 10 years and 25th anniversaries and Groundhog's Day and all of this stuff, none of which are the actual increments into which time is actually broken down.
It's not broken down into seven day weeks and 365 day years and leap year and months that are uneven.
Okay, we live in a universe of lunar cycles.
There are 13 of them in a year, not 12.
13 lunar cycles in a year.
And if we simply paid attention to that, never mind all this other fancy stuff George and I are talking about, just that, you'd get further along because you'd notice that there are patterns going on.
And those patterns are repeatable.
And if you know when they are and simply sidestep some of them, you are going to be better off at the end of the year.
You're going to have more money in your pocket and you're going to have engendered less grief.
Now that I'm doing a lot of national shows, I've been dispensing some of this information, some of this basic stuff for 40 years.
I'm now reaching people who I guess they're glad to find out I'm still alive, but they hear me on shows or they find out I'm in Facebook or whatever it is.
And the one thing I keep hearing from them above all others is, boy, this red date and green date stuff that you passed out, stuff that anybody, any of your listeners can figure out in 10 minutes if they wanted to go the trouble.
I've had clients tell me it's the most interesting and useful piece of information they have ever found out.
Hey, Paul, I work at a place that is, you know, fairly high-pressure environment, news environment, and I have observed, and I've observed this in other places too, that there are days when everybody seems to be a bit down and things are not very functional.
You know, they are slightly dysfunctional.
Using what you do, could I predict those days?
Yes, you could.
You could predict them in advance.
It's getting useful.
Yes, it would be.
And this cycle that I'm talking about, this red date and green date cycle, is so simple to figure out.
It's mind-boggling that they don't pass it out in third grade, you know.
But I've gotten old enough now to know that there's lots of things they didn't teach in third grade that they should have.
Okay, well, this is one of them.
And if you sit down and figure it out for yourself, your mate, your kids, your boss, anybody else you have to deal with, there are certain times of the year that you're going to give those people a wide berth because that's when they're going to be irritable and out of sorts.
That's when you don't want to ask them about a raise or some other kind of thing that's going to make you part of the problem.
If you become part of the problem, you're going to end up paying for it.
I have a system and what George and I like to call it is your personal luck cycle.
It's not really that.
But what it really is, is a system for avoiding periods of time when your ability to cope deteriorates.
And if that's organized and you know when it is and you avoid it, look at all the bad decisions you didn't make in any given year.
All right.
Well, you know, I like the sound of that, but it is practically difficult, isn't it?
See, Well, using that principle, there would be whole swathes of time during the year when I shouldn't be going to work.
Isn't that true?
Well, George Norrie said to me once from coast to coast, he said, you know, Paul, he said, if everybody paid attention to this, there'd be days on which people wouldn't fly and days on which doctors wouldn't operate.
Exactly.
He said, doesn't that bother you?
And I said, no.
He said, why?
And I said, George, we're never going to run out of dumb people.
That is true.
All right, but look, at the moment, there is a whole crazed trend, call it whatever you want, around the law of attraction.
You've heard of this stuff.
You know, if you think of a thing, it's going to come to you.
This that you're doing flies right in the face of that, doesn't it?
Well, no.
One of the things I'm amused about reading some of that stuff is that if it were that simple, we'd all have, you know, jaguars and a large bank account.
It isn't simple.
My teacher used to say, it's not wishing and hoping for things that get it to you.
It's putting things in place so that they're drawn to you by the series of things that you do.
And he said, for instance, if you want a really expensive fast car, you not only have to wish and hope for it, but you've got to be able to smell the leather.
You've got to be that specific about it.
Okay, listen, talking specifics, we're going to have to narrow this down now.
We've got about 20 minutes or so to go, and I want to talk about some very specific things.
Now, as we record these words together, Egypt is in the middle of a crisis.
President Mubarak has been there supported by the U.S., the UK, and others for 30 years.
It looks like he's on his way out.
I know that you've observed this situation.
I've looked at some of your time tracks on it.
You explain to me what you're saying about the situation in Egypt.
Okay, well, first of all, let me just mention to your listeners that by the time they get a chance to listen to this, these will undoubtedly be up on our website and they can actually look at these.
We have a website that you're welcome to investigate.
There's two of them, actually, the primary and the secondary.
The primary website is called ProjectMerlinwithnospaces.com, ProjectMerlin.com.
The other is called TimeTracks, No C, TimeTracks, T-R-A-K-S dot O-R-G.
That's where these time tracks are going to be placed.
And you can actually go to those sites, click on these things, and actually look at them.
Well, since I sent you these ahead of time, you have the advantage, Howard.
And if you were to pull out Hosni Mubarak's own time track, the one for his birthday, and he was born in May of 1928, and you pull out the one for when he took over, which was essentially the day that Anwar Sadat was assassinated, and you take a look at the two of these, they tell a very interesting story.
The Hosni-Mubarak run starts to run out of gas at the beginning of 2011, and there's a gap in the trend line at that point in 2011, around February, March, right around where we are now.
And then you'll notice on the bottom line of that time track, there's nothing but fits and starts.
There's little peak here and a little peak there, all separated by big empty spaces.
On the rest of the page, the only empty space is around 2000, 2001.
And I believe he had an assassination attempt at that point.
But what I do know is that the first two lines of this time track, which start in 2000 and end in 2012, there are virtually no breaks in the trend line at all.
It's a continuous line of activity from late 2001, around the time of 9-11, right through to early 2011, where the time track starts to disintegrate.
And then on the bottom line, there is no continuous activity.
It's just a series of fits and starts with nothing continuous going on.
If you look at the time track for him for when he took over on the day that Anwar Sadat was assassinated, you notice almost exactly the reverse.
This is one of those, for instance, whereby if you put one over the other, they essentially fill in the empty spaces.
But you'll notice that on the takeover run, the one for October of 1981, it's nothing but fits and starts from the first line all the way down to where we are now.
End of 2010, beginning of 2011.
And what happens at that point?
The trend line not only becomes continuous, but it goes crazy.
It practically jumps off the page.
There's a mountain range from about 2010, middle, late part of 2010, all the way out to 2018, which is the remainder of this page, which is nothing but mountain ranges.
And some of the highest peaks you'll find on any of the pages I sent you, this Mubarak taking over an Egypt run has that.
So what does that mean?
Well, when George and I first started doing these, which was in the end of the 80s, 89 basically, we turned the program loose for the very first time on the Soviet satellite countries.
You know, Romania and Lithuania and Czechoslovakia and so on.
We used the founding dates of all of those communist satellite countries, and we did a run for each of them.
And they all looked like this Mubarak taking over run.
They all had this enormous mountain range going on for the next several years.
And if you take a look at some of these others that I sent you, like Tunisia, for instance, Tunisia, little twos next to it, it kind of looks like the Mobark taking overrun.
In other words, the time tracks that refer to this period of time in those situations Have this enormous run of activity going on over the next, say, five to seven years, or maybe even a little longer than that, but at least that period of time.
And when George and I started running this stuff back in the late 80s, that was where we were able to determine whether this was actually going to work or not.
Because when we ran these on all the founding dates for the Soviet satellites, I think we were the only two people on the planet that knew either that we were looking at World War III or we were looking at the collapse of communism or the whole idea of this system didn't work.
Because what amazed people at that time, and I was on radio, you know, it was early in my career, but what amazed people was how that this thing happened seemingly out of a clear blue sky.
Nobody was really expecting it.
Ditto with what's happening in Egypt and Tunisia and those places, that this seems to have come from seemingly nowhere.
The same thing.
But you know what?
If you count the number of years between the Soviet hiccup, where everything sort of fell apart, and the period of time we're in right now, it's in the 21 to 22 year range.
And that's exactly one of these key cycles that I mentioned earlier in the show.
The 21 years later, there's a level of reprise of what happened 21 years ago.
Well, there's some interesting stuff going on with respect to that, even in Russia, because we're now dealing with a Russia that's a lot more like what was going on, not as badly, but with elements, because as somebody once said in the case of Putin, you can take the KBG out of the person, but you can't take, or actually you can take them out of the KGB, but you can never take the KGB out of them.
Okay, we have a situation going on in Russia these days with respect to things like natural gas and whatnot that are causing a lot more angst in the U.S. State Department over some kind of at least minimal return to the kind of problems we were dealing with in the Soviet Union back 21 years ago.
And now we have what looks very much like an equivalent problem going on in the Middle East.
And both of these came out of seemingly nowhere.
There was nobody who wasn't caught flat-footed by the end of communism.
Nobody.
And the same with what's happening in Egypt and what's happening in those places in North Africa.
But what everybody's asking now, and I'm sure they're asking in Washington particularly, is whether Mubarak will go, which it looks like he will, to be replaced by an Islamist as opposed to Islamic state.
Well, I'll tell you something.
One of the problems with May birthdays, and I don't know that I'm talking to a May birthday, so I'll, you know, unless it's late May, okay.
I'm a June guy.
June.
Okay.
May birthdays don't give up the ghost easily.
I mean, Ariel Sharon is a May birthday.
He's still around.
He may be a vegetable, but he's still around.
Okay.
May birthdays have a habit of holding on.
They kind of sort of don't get the message.
And I will be very surprised if he just up and leaves without some more than minor prodding going on.
Well, as we record these words, he has said that he wants to go, but he won't go yet.
Why won't he go yet?
Because he says there will be chaos if he does go immediately.
Problem is that his country's already got chaos.
And chaos, exactly.
And the chaos is being caused by him being there.
So in other words, there's a sort of Mexican standoff.
And my hunch is from looking at these two time tracks that this is going to be a problem a lot longer than we would like it to be.
And it is liable to spread to Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan.
Okay, we are liable to see over the next five to seven years something that kind of sort of looks like what happened to the Soviet Union 21 years ago.
Now, this is a bit of a worry, isn't it?
Because a lot of these states have been very, very useful over the years to the U.S. and the UK.
Well, there's that.
I mean, that's a major factor, but leave that aside.
We're talking political stability here, aren't we?
Well, yes, but there's something else.
With the major industrialized countries going through, like you are, all kinds of financial difficulties, largely due to the market collapse of a couple of years ago, we sure don't need an oil problem going on because that could really put the kibosh to things in the rest of the world.
Forget even what's going on in the Middle East itself.
And I don't think that we're going to see nearly as peaceful a transition going on there, even if I'm right about the fact that it's on the drawing board and about to happen and about to take several years to happen.
You know, at least the Soviet satellites were living in the 20th century.
A lot of these people are living in the 13th.
All right, but look, there are going to be people who will email me about this stuff.
There are two ways to look at this particular situation we're talking about now.
And the other way of looking at it, and you asked those people in Tahrir Square about this, is that this is about liberation, of people getting their freedom.
Ditto with the Soviet Union, the Eastern European states back in the back end of the 1980s.
You know, if you were to time track the people who are protesting, these would be good time tracks.
This would be good time change, wouldn't it?
Well, yes and no.
As I said, the problem with a lot of this is that at least in the Soviet Union, we weren't dealing with people who were living in the 13th century.
These people, in large measure, are.
Okay, so that's a problem all by itself.
Well, Paul, I mean, a lot of those people would probably disagree with you.
They would say that they're very advanced.
we can't say that about everybody out there.
I think that's.
No, but we can certainly say that there's a lot of that going on in those countries where, you know, we're talking about countries that in a lot of cases don't have electricity that's running all the time.
In many cases, don't have running water.
And this is a whole different, this kind of a transition is going to come with a lot more stresses and strains than what was going on.
Czechoslovakia had a political problem.
They didn't have a problem of flush toilets to complicate that.
Okay, so let's boil this right down now.
And we're saying that Bubarek's not going to go easily and there will be a period of great instability that could last for some time.
I mean, some of the political analysts are kind of hinting at this at the moment, but truly, none of these people who talk on the television and on the radio really know what's going to happen.
But you're saying that we're going to have this big, unstable period, and that instability that we here in the West will observe.
We're not going to like it.
It's not going to be good for us.
Well, it's certainly not going to come with the ease that the Soviet Union collapse came because it really was as though the Soviets just went belly up.
I mean, there were some riots in the streets, and there were some people killed.
But pretty much it was a soft collapse.
Now, this is not a soft collapse we're looking at.
This I don't see as a soft collapse, no.
And these are the kind of conditions that historically, and I wonder if you've looked at this one, take the world to war.
Well, I think that I can't see that anybody gains an advantage here by this kind of thing going on.
You know, the Soviets, the Russians, got to be careful because that's all changed.
The Russians have pretty much decided that going up against us militarily was a bad idea.
They should have done what China's doing, beating us to hell economically.
I mean, look, we can't even complain to the Chinese, at least we can.
I don't know about you guys, but we can't, because they own so much of our debt.
Okay, what do we, what do we, if we talk to them, we have to talk to them very nicely because if they decided next week to trade in dollars for Euros, in six weeks we'd be in a depression.
You guys are sunk, absolutely.
But it's not in their interest to do that, and it's not in your interest to do that.
Right.
But on the other hand, if you go back and you take a look at the Soviet collapse, we were largely bystanders to that.
It didn't directly affect us economically or otherwise because we weren't counting on them for something we need.
Well, they were a closed society.
Now, we do depend on that region for our oil.
Right.
Europe depends on them to a large extent for natural gas.
So the Soviet Union collapse was going to have much more of an effect in Europe than it was going to have in America.
This thing going on in the Middle East is going to affect everybody.
Because, and as I said, the simple fact that you've got extraordinary differences between the haves and the have-nots, you didn't have that going on so much in Russia or any of the satellites, but you got it going on in every single one of those countries.
It's very, the only thing that may be similar to the Soviet collapse is the timetable.
And that's what this thing that George and I really do.
We can't necessarily characterize how much conflict there's going to be, how many, you know, what the body count's liable to be, that kind of thing, because that's really not what this does.
What this does is find similar sets of circumstances where the timetable is going to govern the length of it.
Listen, when we ran Bush's war in Iraq, what we call Bush II, the aftermath, I think I may have sent you that time, yeah.
That's right, 2003.
Look at what we saw when we saw that.
That was run for the night of the first incursion in March 19th of 2003, which they launched right at the time of the national news programs in America, which is 6.30.
And they didn't even let the 48-hour clock run out, which they had given Saddam to get out of town.
They'd given him 48 hours to get out of town, and then they thought they had a shot at him earlier than that, so they said, oh, well, never mind the 48 hours.
But anyway, you look at that and you see this burst of activity in 03 and 04, and then it goes on from late 04 on, all the way out to 2011, where the trend line stops.
So what George and I said when we got on shows, and they laughed at us, we said, if they don't get it right at the beginning, this is going to go on until 2011.
And everybody thought we were nuts.
So what happens this year then?
Well, if you take a look at 2011, you'll see that the trend line drops out.
And we have effectively ended that conflict.
We no longer have any combat troops in Iraq.
We have some advisors.
Doesn't mean the problem's finished, though, does it?
It just means that the U.S. connection to it is finished.
Right.
Exactly.
It's our connection to it that was going to change at the 2011 mark.
Not necessarily the stability of the country.
And look, it took them, what, eight or nine months or something to get a government in place after the last election?
Okay, that doesn't bode well for things.
My hunch is that if we maybe pick the last election date that occurred there, or I'd have to go hunting around.
And here's where it gets tricky.
Finding the right starting moment is what you need to tell the story.
If you don't have the right starting moment, this thing doesn't work.
So you're saying that if Gulf War II, whatever it was, Bush's War, 2003, if that was started by Blair and Bush at a different time, it might have had a different outcome.
Exactly.
Well, that's fascinating.
Now, listen, time is running out on us, and I know that we could probably talk for three hours continuously.
Well, I know we could, three hours continuously, and some.
So I'm going to pick one thing that I know you will be familiar with and concerns everybody.
Periodically, I have to run news stories that say, based on what some politician has said or some police chief has said, we are under a continuing terrorist threat in the UK and it goes for the US as well.
And a terrorist strike, a big one, is not just a possibility, it is an inevitability.
So the point of this question is, did you run time tracks on 9-11?
Yes, I'm sure you did.
And when is the next one?
Yes, we did.
When's the next one?
Well, the interesting thing about the 9-11 time tracks is that they're beginning to wind down.
So I think the likelihood of another 9-11 type attack is beginning to become less likely than it was, say, a couple of years ago.
And we've also gotten much, much better at snooping and finding these things before they ever get a chance to become a real problem.
And my thoughts all along were that if we'd spent a fraction of the money that we spent in Iraq with black ops to really have people on the ground to listen in on what's going on, we could stop these things before they happen.
I don't think that we've just been lucky.
I think in the last several years, a lot of the near misses were basically spotted and disassembled before they got a chance to become a real problem.
What I've always been concerned about is loose nukes.
And as the U.S. and the Soviet Union or Russia become more concerned with that themselves and the stockpiles get smaller and smaller, we really then have to worry more about the North Koreans and the Iranians than we have to worry about al-Qaeda.
And I think that North Korea, while they saber rattle and they make a lot of noise, I think they're easy to buy off.
I mean, Kim Jong-il, you know, when he let those women go because Bill Clinton went over, I swear it's because Clinton brought a whole supply of American porn.
And that that's how that crisis got resolved.
I'm serious.
I'm absolutely serious.
But you know what?
Nothing is impossible and nothing would surprise me.
That's what I'll say about that.
All right.
Two minutes.
That's about all we've got now.
So Iran, a lot of people have said Iran is the wildcard here.
We don't know what they're planning, what they're doing, and what they're going to do.
So what do you think?
Well, I think that if we're right about this disintegration of the various regimes on the north of Africa and into the Middle East, as they said, Morocco and Algeria and so on,
Tunisia, Jordan, perhaps, Lebanon, that the Iranians might very well start to go back to something that's a little bit more democratized as they really were during the time of the Shah.
Yes, he had a secret police, and yes, there was some nastiness going on.
But more Iranians were westernized in that period.
The women aren't running around with Burkazan and so on.
There's a lot of women doctors in Iran, a lot of American educated people there.
I can see that situation stabilizing, especially if the Iranian mullahs watch what's going on in Egypt and some of these other places and kind of get...
I think so, yes.
Right.
Okay.
Now, listen, Paul, we've got to leave it there.
And as I say, we could talk for three hours, probably talk right into the night.
But we'll do this again, and we'll get George Hart in, your co-founder of the Merlin Project.
He loves doing this, so I'm sure we can arrange.
Well, you know, you were my favorite guests on the radio show, so it's great, great, great to have you back.
Well, you were our favorite host, so there for the Mutual Admiration Society.
Okay, well, you're coming on here again just for that.
So if people want to read about you, two websites, give me them again.
Websites are Project Merlin, No Spaces, Project Merlin, MerlinlikeTheWizard, dot com.
To look at these time tracks, it's time tracks with a K and no C. So it's T-R-A-K-S dot O-R-G.
Those are the two websites.
I'm on Facebook.
They can just friend me.
It's Paul Gercio with no spaces.
That's P-A-U-L-G-U-E-R-C-I-O.
I'll do it one more time.
P-A-U-L-G-U-E-R-C-I-O on Facebook.
And if they want to write us, we have a U.S. mail address.
It's Box 1241, Box 1241 in Seabrook.
All one word, S-C-A-B-R-O-O-K, Seabrook, New Hampshire, N-H.
And the zip is 03874.
One more time.
Box 1241 in Seabrook, New Hampshire.
The zip is 03874.
Done like a proper radio announcer, which is what you were for years, Paul.
You just told on me.
No one.
And I tell you what, I always ask everybody who comes on this show to give me contact details, but nobody's done it as well as you do it.
So, Paul Kersey, a real pleasure to have you on here.
My name is Howard Hughes.
We're right out of time.
This has been The Unexplained.
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