meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Premonitions That Came True! Aberfan, Plane Crashes & Death Foretold | New Yorker Staff Writer Sam Knight on Seemingly Impossible Stories of Dreams and Visions Before Catastrophe

Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Mayim Bialik

Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Comedy

4.85.9K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 86 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What if precognitive abilities could actually save lives? Sam Knight (New Yorker staff writer, author of the widely popular The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold) joins Mayim Bialik's Breakdown to unpack some of the strangest, most unsettling questions in human experience: Can we really be scared to death? Do premonitions give us access to other timelines? Or are they evidence of a hidden, collective consciousness? Sam takes us inside the real story behind the deadly coal mine collapse that dozens of people eerily reported before it happened: a wave of psychic warnings so compelling it led to the creation of the British Premonitions Bureau, an experimental project designed to collect premonitions and prevent future catastrophes. We explore why people in the past seemed to understand extrasensory abilities better than we do today, and how head injuries have triggered sudden psi abilities in some truly bizarre cases. Sam also breaks down the most common types of premonitions, what separates accurate warnings from noise, why there aren't premonitions about positive things, the implications of so many different families and cultures sharing these inexplicable accounts, and why it’s actually anti-scientific to dismiss reports of precognition altogether. Do people who experience premonitions have a moral responsibility to act on them? Could these uncanny glimpses be messages from alternate timelines, or something emerging from the depths of the unconscious mind? And the biggest question of all: Do we all have the ability to receive premonitions but we just don’t know how to listen? If you’ve ever felt a strange sense of déjà vu, had a dream that came true, or wondered whether the future is already whispering to you…this is the episode of MBB you can’t miss. Sam Knight’s book, The Premonitions Bureau: https://www.samknight.net/books Subscribe on Substack for Ad-Free Episodes & Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

John Barker is a psychiatrist at a mental hospital.

0:04.0

Hencher rings him up one night and is like,

0:06.0

I have a prediction. Barker's like, okay, what is it? Is it another plane? He's like, no, it's you. If someone tells you're going to die, do you die? It's the concreteness of those premonitions that then lead on to the forming of the Premonitions Bureau. Bureau.

0:19.0

Journalist Sam Knight.

0:20.0

He's a New Yorker staff writer.

0:22.0

His book, The Premonitions Bureau. Journalist Sam Knight, he's a New Yorker staff writer,

0:22.2

his book The Premonitions Bureau,

0:23.6

a true account of death foretold.

0:26.1

Shockingly true stories about precognitive abilities

0:29.5

and predictions of future tragedy and even death.

0:34.2

I don't know how you sit down in your kitchen and write out that there's going to be a train

0:39.8

crash and you put it in the post on a Wednesday and it happens on a Sunday night.

0:44.0

How many of the things that are predicted do come true?

0:47.5

October, 1966, an astonishingly nightmarish thing that happened.

0:52.7

Huge coal mining part of the UK for a hundred years,

0:55.0

huge amounts of coal, taken out the ground,

0:57.0

and they would just pile up the waste of these things.

1:00.0

One day, one of these piles of coal waste

1:04.0

that had been rained on for weeks and weeks and weeks,

1:06.0

suddenly dislodged and just rushed down the mountain

1:09.0

and buried a school and killed 116 children.

1:11.6

John Barker rushes to the village and starts talking to people, uncovering these stories,

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mayim Bialik, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Mayim Bialik and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.