Imagine mapping out your family tree. Right,
something we've all probably tried to do at some
point. Exactly. And normally you expect this
sprawling network. You start with yourself, you
trace the branches back to your parents, your
four grandparents, eight great grandparents,
just kind of multiplying outward and backward
into history. Yeah, it anchors you. It gives
you a sense of place. It does. But what if you
started tracing those branches and instead of
expanding, the lines twisted, turned, and just
crashed directly back into you? Oh, wow. What
if you realized that you are your own mother,
you're your own father, and you're your own child?
Well, biologically and chronologically, that
is the absolute definition of a short circuit.
I mean, you are describing a scenario where a
human being exists without a true origin point,
just completely untethered from the rest of the
human race. That is exactly the premise of our
deep dive today. We are exploring the ultimate
brain breaking time travel paradox by dissecting
the Wikipedia article on Robert A. Heinlein's
legendary 1959 science fiction short story, All
You Zombies. Such a fascinating piece of literature.
It really is. And just to clear the air right
off the bat, since we're diving deep into the
source material for you, this is not a story
about... literal undead zombies shuffling around
looking for brains. No, not at all. Actually,
this is a narrative so meticulously constructed
that philosophers and astrophysicists, like Carl
Sagan, for instance, have utilized it to teach
the fundamental nature of causality. Which is
wild for a pulp sci -fi story. Right. And the
real -world history of the text is fascinating
in itself. Heinlein supposedly wrote this entire
mind -bender in a single day, July 11, 1958.
A single day? That's just... Yeah, and it was
actually rejected by Playboy before finding its
home in the magazine of fantasy and science fiction.
It eventually earned a Balrog Award nomination
and even inspired the 2014 Ethan Hawke film Predestination.
Okay, but to understand why academics study a
1950s pulp sci -fi story, we have to look at
the incredibly specific mechanics Heinlein built.
We do, and those mechanics start in a surprisingly
gritty setting. You know, we open in this dimly
lit bar in the year 1970. The narrator is the
bartender. And the source material explicitly
notes that he is wearing an Auroboros ring. Right,
the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own
tail. Exactly. And that is a massive thematic
anchor for literally everything that follows.
So he's working and he strikes up a conversation
with a patron, this cynical young man who goes
by the pen name the unmarried mother. Which is
such an intriguing detail. The patron earns that
nickname by writing sensational confession stories
for magazines from the perspective of unmarried
women, and he's just churning them out at four
cents a word. So the bartender is observing this
guy and essentially challenges him. He wants
to know how a man can write so convincingly from
a female perspective. And that question is the
catalyst. It prompts the patron to reveal a life
story that reads honestly like a tragic mid -century
noir. Yeah, the patron explains that he wasn't
born a man. He was actually born a girl named
Jane in 1945. And Jane was entirely abandoned,
raised in this cold institutional orphanage.
Just profound isolation right from the start.
Exactly. And Jane's one escape plan was to join
what they call a comfort organization. Which
in this universe is a government program providing
rest and recreation for spacemen. Right. But
in 1963, as a teenager, Jane is seduced by an
older, mysterious man. She gets pregnant and
is promptly abandoned again. And the tragedy
just compounds from there. Especially during
the delivery. The doctors are forced to perform
an emergency, highly complicated cesarean section.
And during the surgery, they make a profound
medical discovery. Jane has an extremely rare
intersex condition. She possesses fully developed
female reproductive organs, but also internalized,
undeveloped male sex organs. Right. And because
the pregnancy and the surgical trauma severely
damaged her female organs beyond repair, the
doctors make this unilateral, non -consensual
decision to perform a sex reassignment surgery.
So Jane wakes up from saving her baby to find
out that she is now, biologically and legally,
a man. And while recovering from that unbelievable
physical and psychological trauma, another mysterious
older man sneaks into the hospital and kidnaps
her newborn baby. Left with absolutely nothing.
Nothing at all. So the former Jane, who is now
living as a man, has to adapt. He learns secretarial
skills, leverages his experiences into writing,
and eventually becomes the bitter young man sitting
in the bar in 1970. It is a staggering sequence
of traumatic events, just complete social and
biological isolation. OK, let's unpack this.
Yeah. Because I promised the listener a mind
-bending exploration of theoretical physics and
time travel. Right. And right now, we are deep
into a gritty medical trauma drama. You've got
this classic noir set up, a tragic victim in
a bar with a dark past. How does a story about
an orphanage, a C -section, and a kidnapped baby
translate into a high -level physics paradox.
I mean, it feels like two completely different
genres. I completely agree, but that dissonance
is exactly why the story is brilliant. Every
single detail you just mentioned, it isn't merely
project backstory. Yeah. No, it is the strict
biological mechanism required for the physics
loop to function. Heinlein is setting up the
parameters of an impossible equation. Yeah. Think
about it. Without the orphanage, there is no
isolation. Without the specific intersex physiology,
the upcoming chronological loop violates biological
reality. The medical trauma is quite literally
the engine of the time machine. The engine of
the time machine. Okay, let's look at that engine
then because we are back in the bar in 1970 and
the bartender makes an impossible offer. Right.
He listens to this horrific life story and then
the bartender tells the unmarried mother that
he can offer him ultimate revenge. He says he
can deliver the patron directly to the man who
seduced and ruined Jane's life. So the bartender
leads the young writer into the back room, reveals
a portable time machine and jumps them both back
seven years. They land precisely on April 3rd,
1963. And he turns the unmarried mother loose
to find the seducer. But the bartender does not
wait around. No, he doesn't. He uses the time
machine to execute this highly calculated heist
across decades. First, he jumps forward 11 months
to March 1964. He infiltrates the hospital, kidnaps
the newborn baby, and then time travels way back
to September 1945. And he drops that infant off
at the very orphanage where Jane grew up. Exactly.
After planting the baby, he jumps forward again
to 1963. waits a month, picks up the unmarried
mother, and pulls him out of that timeline. But
we have to look really closely at what the unmarried
mother was doing during that month he spent stranded
in 1963. He was searching for the man who ruined
his life. But instead, wandering around, he bumps
into a lonely 17 -year -old girl named Jane.
Oh my god. He begins dating her, eventually seduces
her, and leaves her pregnant. Here's where it
gets really interesting. I remember reading this
for the first time, and the realization just
hits you like a freight train. He was instinctively
attracted to his younger female self. Exactly.
The older man who seduced Jane, Jane herself,
the baby stolen from the hospital, and the time
traveling bartender pulling the strings. I mean,
for everyone listening, try to draw that family
tree in your head. You can't. You can't. They
aren't a family. They're the exact same person
at four different stages of a single life cycle.
It's just a single thought. What's fascinating
here is how Heinlein constructed what the author
Staniso Lim calls the minimal possible bootstrap
paradox. The minimal possible bootstrap paradox.
What does that mean exactly? Well, the term comes
from the old physically impossible adage of pulling
yourself up by your own bootstraps. In this framework,
an object, an event, or in this case, a human
being, exist without any true origin. They're
entirely self -created. Let's just connect the
dots here for this one. Jane gives birth to herself,
fathers herself, and orchestrates her own kidnapping
to ensure she exists. Yes, they're entirely self
-created. But biologically, how do physicists
or philosophers even grapple with that? I mean,
where did the original genetic material come
from? That is the big question. If the bartender
drops himself off at the orphanage to grow up
to father himself, how can DNA just exist without
an origin point? It violates everything we know
about how matter and information work. And that
is exactly what broke the brains of academics
analyzing the text. You are shitting on something
called an ontological paradox. Ontological? Yeah.
Ontology is the philosophical study of being
and existence. In our normal reality, information
and matter have to come from somewhere. But in
a bootstrap loop, the information is completely
uncreated. Completely uncreated? Right, think
of it like a word in a dictionary that defines
itself using its own word. There is no root origin.
It is just a self -referential circle. Jane's
DNA wasn't created by a combination of a separate
mother and father. Her DNA is just permanently
suspended in this loop of time existing simply
because it exists. It's like putting a microphone
directly next to a speaker. You get that screeching
audio feedback loop where the sound is just endlessly
amplifying itself with no external input. That
is a perfect analogy. But you mentioned earlier
that philosophers like David Lewis actually defended
this story. How can a philosopher look at a person
fathering themselves and say, yes, this makes
perfect logical sense? Well, because David Lewis
in his highly influential 1976 paper, The Paradoxes
of Time Travel, analyzed the logic of timelines.
And he specifically praised Heinlein's construct
here. Yeah. Lewis argued that the grandfather
paradox, the idea that you could go back in time
and kill your own grandfather, thus erasing yourself,
is logically flawed. Instead, Lewis championed
the idea of a block universe. A block universe,
meaning time isn't like a flowing river, but
a solid object. Precisely. Imagine the universe
not as a story being written line by line, but
as a DVD that has already been burned. Oh, I
see. all of the past, present, and future exist
simultaneously. Lewis argued that a time traveler
doesn't change the past when they go back. Their
journey was already baked into the timeline from
the very beginning. So you aren't writing a new
draft of history. You are just fulfilling the
original draft. Exactly. So under Lewis's theory,
a bartender isn't altering his past by dropping
the baby off in 1945. Because if he chose not
to do it, the universe wouldn't unravel. Right.
Because in a block universe, it is impossible
for him to choose not to do it. Spot on. His
future self was already present at his own past
events. Lewis pointed out that Heinlein's loop
is logically watertight. Every single action
perfectly causes the next, forming a closed loop
with absolutely no loose ends. So the timeline
is consistent because there are no contradictory
events. Right. The loop is bizarre, yes, but
it does not contradict its own internal rules.
Which brings us to Carl Sagan. a legendary astronomer
analyzing a pulp fiction story about an intersex
time traveler. It's quite a crossover. It is.
And Sagan said that science fiction like this
conveys inaccessible knowledge, forcing the reader
to contemplate causality and the arrow of time.
But I want to bring this down to Earth for you
listening right now. So what does this all mean
for you? It's a heady concept to apply to real
life. It is. Because we all experience time as
a one -way street. Cause always precedes effect.
Like you accidentally push a glass off a table,
it hits the floor and it shatters. Pushing the
glass is the cause. The shattering is the effect.
And the arrow of time dictates that the shattered
glass will never spontaneously reassemble itself
and jump back onto the table. Thermodynamics
and entropy demand that time moves in one direction.
Right. But Heinlein's loop forces us to ask,
what happens to our reality? If the glass shattering
is the very thing that caused you to push it
in the first place, what if the effect is the
cause? It completely flips everything. It does.
If you apply that to a human life, it redefines
what existence means. We use the phrase a self
-made person to describe someone who, you know,
built a business from scratch. But this character
is the ultimate literal self -made entity. They
owe their existence to absolutely no one but
themselves. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, they're completely self - in the most
literal, biological sense. It's the ultimate
thought experiment in self -reliance and the
illusion of beginnings and endings. The snake
eating its own tail. The Ouroboros ring isn't
just a piece of jewelry the bartender wears.
The ring is the map of his life. There is no
head and no tail, no start and no finish. But
we have to look at the psychological reality
of living as an Ouroboros. Because having no
origin outside of yourself might sound like the
ultimate form of independence, but when you actually
sit with it, It is a nightmare of loneliness.
A total nightmare. And the source material highlights
that emotional toll brilliantly in the final
act of the story. It really does. Because after
the bartender retrieves his younger self, the
unmarried mother from 1963, he doesn't just drop
him off anywhere. He transports him to the year
1985 to an outpost of the temporal bureau. And
the temporal bureau being this secret police
force that travels through time, manipulating
historical events to protect the human race.
Correct. The bartender drops the young man there
specifically to enlist him, which means the bartender
has just recruited a younger version of himself
into the very agency he already works for. Wow.
He created his own past, orchestrated his own
birth, and now he's officially initiating his
own future. Once the mission is complete, the
older bartender returns to the bar in 1970, arriving
just moments after he initially left for the
back room. He ties off the loop, and there's
a brilliant dark detail here that we have to
mention. Earlier in the 1970 timeline, a customer
was playing a song on the jukebox, and the bartender
yelled at him for it. He hated it. Right. But
when he returns, having just completed this monumental
existential task, he actually allows the customer
to play the song. And the track is I'm My Own
Grandpa. It's just Heinlein injecting this dark
comedy into an incredibly bleak reality. Yeah.
So the bartender close up the shop and time travels
one final time. retiring to his home base in
the year 1993. And this is where the philosophy
of the story turns completely inward. He's all
alone. Yes. As he gets ready for bed, exhausted
from effectively orchestrating his entire life
cycle, he looks down at his own stomach. He stares
at the surgical scar, the scar left over from
the cesarean section he endured back in 1963
when he gave birth to his own daughter. who is
also his mother, his father, and his entire history.
He knows the truth of that scar better than anyone
in the universe ever could. And staring at that
physical proof of his loop, he has a final revealing
thought. He thinks to himself, I know where I
came from, but where did all you zombies come
from? It's a haunting realization. Where did
all you zombies come from? That's a chilling
arresting line. And it finally explains the strange
title of the story. Yes, the formatting. The
title is formatted with dashes on either side.
I'll use zombies. The dashes indicate that the
title is actually a fragment. It's a quote pulled
directly from the middle of this exact closing
thought. Exactly. It represents the alighted
text before and after the phrase. It's a literal
snippet of a mind completely isolated from the
rest of humanity. I just marvel at the sheer
terrifying isolation of the character in that
moment. I mean, even though he knows his own
perfect closed -loop origin, everyone else in
the world is an inexplicable mystery to him.
How were they born? Right. Normal people have
mothers and fathers and sprawling oak trees of
ancestry that extend into infinity. To him, normal
people are the bizarre anomalies. They are the
zombies because they wander around with these
messy, linear, unprovable origins. This raises
an important question about solipsism. Solipsism.
Yes, the philosophical idea that the only thing
you can be absolutely sure exists exists is your
own mind. Everything else outside of you could
be an illusion. If you think about playing a
massive open world video game, you know you are
the player holding the controller. But every
other character walking around the city is an
NPC. A non -player character. Right. They're
just code generated by the system to give you
a backdrop to interact with. They have no inner
life. And for the bartender, that isn't just
a philosophical thought experiment. It is his
empirical reality. He is the only person in the
universe whose existence he can physically prove
from beginning to end because he is the sole
author of it. Exactly. Since he cannot trace
the origins of anyone else, the way he can trace
his own absolute undeniable loop, the rest of
humanity lacks the same level of reality to him.
They are just a backdrop. It is the ultimate
tragedy of his design. He has conquered time,
but in doing so he has alienated himself from
the human race. He is a species of one. It is
incredible to look at the journey of this narrative.
I mean, we started by looking at a rejected magazine
manuscript from 1958, bouncing back from Playboy
to find a home in a sci -fi digest, eventually
earning a 1980 Balrog Award nomination and inspiring
a major film adaptation. And it deserved all
of it. It really did. Because what we actually
untapped was a master class in theoretical physics
wrapped in a noir detective story. It takes that
sprawling family oak tree we talked about at
the very beginning, strips away all the branches,
and whittles the entirety of a human life down
into a single impossible self -sustaining point.
It challenges our fundamental understanding of
cause and effect. It proves that fiction can
be just as rigorous as a mathematical proof or
a physics equation when constructing a closed
system. Absolutely. But as we wrap up our analysis
of Heinlein's loop, there's one critical implication
we haven't touched on. And it's something I want
you to think about long after this deep dive
in. Let's hear it. We established that the bartender
ultimately works for the temporal bureau, right?
A secret police force dedicated to actively manipulating
history and protecting the human race. Right.
But think about the block universe we discussed.
If this agent's entire existence, his birth,
his trauma, his recruitment, is a perfectly closed,
predetermined loop that cannot be altered, how
can he possibly possess the free will necessary
to manipulate anything else in history? Oh, wow.
If his own timeline is completely unchangeable,
wouldn't his interventions in the world's timeline
be just as predetermined? Are you actually holding
the pen and making choices, or are you just flawlessly
executing a script that was written before you
were even born.