TRANSCRIPT Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Ep. 411: Ross and Carrie are Quantum Computers: Tracey Dolan Edition

[00:00:00]

Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

Ross Blocher: Hello, and welcome to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, the show where we don’t just report on fringe science, spirituality, claims of the paranormal. No, no, no, we take part ourselves.

Carrie Poppy: Yep, when they make the claims, we show up, so you don’t have to. I’m Carrie Poppy.

Ross Blocher: I’m Ross Blocher.

Carrie Poppy: And am I the computer you’re looking for?

Ross Blocher: You might be.

Carrie Poppy: I’m coming to you from your microphone, your speaker.

Ross Blocher: I’m really looking for a quantum computer. I was hoping you’d be a quantum computer.

Carrie Poppy: Absolutely. I assume that you don’t know what that means, but yes, absolutely. I am one.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) We’re back at the Contact in the Desert conference. And last time you heard us telling you about a remote viewing panel, and one of the participants was Tracey Garbutt Dolan.

Carrie Poppy: Wife of Richard Dolan and a remote viewer in her own right who does her own experiments and research on remote viewing.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, I want to know more about her.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, so I had already gone to one of her talks when we went to this panel.

Ross Blocher: This was the very first, like day of talks that we attended, right at the beginning. So, I was off listening to that lawyer guy. And you were listening to Tracey Garbutt Dolan.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, so I didn’t remember what had drawn me in, and I couldn’t find her bio. But you were able to find it archived on the internet. So, tell me, what drew me in?

Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) Well, the title was, “Are We the Quantum Computers We Are Searching For?” And that rhetorical question was followed up with, “Remote Viewing Dreams and the Mysteries of Our Minds”. That’s a long title.

Carrie Poppy: Great, great. Yeah, definitely. I see why that would draw me in. Okay.

Ross Blocher: Oh, absolutely. I’m realizing now why I like Garbutt so much.

Carrie Poppy: The name?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, in the original Diablo game, there was a Goatman character named Gharbad.

Clip:

Music: Ominous ambient music.

Gharbad (Diablo): (Bleating through the long vowels.) Something for you I am making. Again, not kill Gharbad.

 

Ross Blocher: But yeah, now we’ve got Garbutt. Now I realize why his name is just attracting me.

Carrie Poppy: Good. And now, if you play that game, you can put her into that goat character.

Ross Blocher: (Bleating.) Don’t hurt Garbutt!

Carrie Poppy: And when you’re really old, you’ll confuse those things.

Ross Blocher: This is a deep cut. But for all you Diablo fans out there, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) Well, I like her name too. You know what, no. I’m neutral on it, but I liked her talk!

Ross Blocher: It’s got butt. I mean, that’s—with two Ts.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, exactly. How mad can you be?

Ross Blocher: So, the description of this talk, “As a part of her lecture series, ‘The Final Frontier Is In Here’, Tracey explores what such disciplines as remote viewing, dreams, and esoterica teach us about our minds and the very nature of who we are. The vast reaches of the human mind remains one of the most fascinating and grossly unresolved mysteries of our time. We spend billions sending people into space, but could one of the primary keys to traversing the unknown vistas of reality reside inside us and within easy reach?! Could we be the quantum computers we are searching for? And finally! Where does the current state of artificial intelligence sit with all of this? With her unique lectures, Tracey Garbutt Dolan combines her many years of personal experiential study of different philosophies and disciplines of mind to explore the possibilities of unlocking these inner dimensions and our greatest untapped resource. It is her belief that ‘we’”—in quotes—“are the greatest experiment unrealized, the true final frontier.”

Carrie Poppy: Wow! Okay. Have you heard Richard Dolan speak? Could he have written that? She did not write that.

Ross Blocher: He bored me. (Laughs.) I went to one of his sessions. He’s like the historian guy.

Carrie Poppy: That could have been written by a boring person who’s just (inaudible) well. She is all over the place. That was coherent.

Ross Blocher: Okay, I’ve heard enough of her to know that she loves to go for the soaring rhetoric.

Carrie Poppy: That’s true. That is true.

Ross Blocher: She would love that piece of it. So, there we go. Her, plus a little bit of copy editing, equals what you just heard.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, yeah, perhaps. Sometimes people are very different writers than speakers. (Chuckle.) I wouldn’t know. Yeah. When you hear her speak, she has so scatterbrained. She has so much trouble staying on topic. And I relate. But like, wow.

Ross Blocher: Okay. So, she’s easily led off the path.

Carrie Poppy: Yes.

Ross Blocher: Which I understand, because I feel like my brain is constantly thinking like, “Ooh, ooh! This reminds me of this, but also this!” It’s like (dramatically) which waaay do I go? Where was I?!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I relate to that too. I relate to that too. Yeah, but she said that—(snickers) at one point she said, “I know I ramble and offroad like crazy. Is everybody following?”

(Ross chuckles.)

But yeah, attention and focus would come up a few times in this talk, and in particular hers. She did say though that we all are having trouble with focus with attention these days, and that’s part of why she needed to give this talk. You know, we’re all distracted by our phone.

[00:05:00]

You know, these phones. Right, man? The phones.

Ross Blocher: You know how the phone gives you like—they give you that weekly digest of how long you’ve been looking at your phone on average. I often hit over nine hours a day. That’s crazy! How does that happen?

Carrie Poppy: That’s a lot. That’s a lot. But what if there were a little dropdown that said like, “How often do you look at air?” Would you feel bad about it?

(Ross laughs.)

If you were like, oh, I look at air like 20—like, 12 hours a day, shit. I shouldn’t look at air so much.

Ross Blocher: Well, it’s hard not to.

Carrie Poppy: Exactly, it’s hard not to.

Ross Blocher: I’m looking at my phone through a thin blanket of air.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I don’t know what point I’m making anymore, but I feel strong about it.

Ross Blocher: We’ve gone off topic, like Tracey.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) But I’m going to give you just a little sample of her speaking. This is an example of just sort of her speaking pattern.

(Ross agrees.)

Clip:

Tracey Garbutt Dolan: I’m not thinking like, “Oh, I must be a this.” I’m just thinking about the possibility. You know, maybe I’ll think of the movie Interstellar, you know, where they have that sort of incredible scene. If you’ve seen it, you all know what the incredible scene is on the way back. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. But you know, just the possibilities, and just that we don’t know fully what we are, you know. Dimensional versions of myself—again, it’s something that we just don’t know, so I’m pondering the things that we don’t know, without answers. Just pondering them. Personification of my subconscious mind. Wow, I would really love to speak to my subconscious mind. Could I get it to—like in the holodeck, I want to talk to my subconscious mind and ask it questions about how it needs to understand things. That was something I was thinking about.

 

Ross Blocher: Okay.

Carrie Poppy: That was something she was thinking about.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, I can see like almost every sentence that escapes her lips is drawing her somewhere else. Okay, yeah, that would be really hard to follow. One of those talks where you are left with a bunch of impressions. And later on you’re like, wait, what was actually said?

Carrie Poppy: What actually said—? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. What point did she make?

Ross Blocher: And you’re trying—oh, that’s so tough when you’re taking notes, and you start writing sort of verbatim what they say at the beginning of the sentence, and then you wait for them to do the digression. You’re like, okay, well, do I write that? I’m going to write that on a separate line, assuming she’s going to come back to that first thought.

Carrie Poppy: Well, okay, maybe I could write meta commentary about how she delivered that instead of writing the actual content of what she tried to say. Yeah, there’s definitely some of that.

But she does get through it, and she does have things to say. So, a lot of her talk is going to center around her personal experience with thinking in pictures, which is something we’ve talked about before.

Ross Blocher: Like the ability in your mind to picture things in general, versus aphantasia where you can’t easily conjure images in your head.

Carrie Poppy: Yes, and there is another category of folks with hyperphantasia, I believe it would be. Hyperphantasia ,where you picture things super, super vividly. And some people who have hyperphantasia won’t think in words. They’ll think in objects, pictures that then they translate into words while they’re having a conversation. And when she was talking about it, I was like I know someone like that!

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Visual thinking. Oh, Temple Grandin, that’s right!

Carrie Poppy: Temple Grandin thinks in pictures. I’m showing Ross her book. Yeah, she thinks entirely in imagery and has to sit there and translate it for the person sitting across from her. And I relate a little. I don’t think in pictures, but I do have that sense of like thinking before it is words.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Okay. I had a coworker giving a talk the other day about a personality index, and he was saying how it was a revelation to him that other people think in words, like they picture the words as they say things. And I realized, oh, I guess that must be me, because my brain is constantly kind of taking the words that are being said and sort of playing around with them and coming up with wordplay and flipping letters and stuff like that. Like, I was just talking to someone the other day, and she was telling me about this Arctic film festival. So, in the background, my brain is just crunching. And I said, “Oh, they could call it Iceman Cinema. ‘Cause those are anagrams.” I was like why—? (Chuckling.) Why did my brain do that? I don’t know why.

(Carrie giggles.)

So, it’s this other coworker. For him, that just seems so weird that people pictured words as they were talking, because he felt like there was some sort of like assembly code running on his brain that was a totally different thing other than words, and then it came out. So.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, but see there you’re listening instead of speaking. So, that’s a little bit different.

Ross Blocher: Oh, fair. Yeah. Good point.

Carrie Poppy: But that’s interesting. I also do those (chuckles) little tricks alongside what I’m reading or listening to. Do you also do this with the clock? You see like three, one, two, and you go, “Well, three minus one is two, baby.”

(Ross confirms.)

Like, why? Why?!

Ross Blocher: And I won’t realize I’ve been looking at other people’s license plates until I make some comment about them.

Carrie Poppy: I know, right? Yep. Totally.

Ross Blocher: So, okay. Oh, brains are funny things.

Carrie Poppy: They are.

Ross Blocher: It’s amazing how people can have different experiences. Okay. So, her take on this is—?

Carrie Poppy: That she’s special.

Ross Blocher: Okay.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Because she exclusively thinks in pictures, she has to proactively translate it into words.

[00:10:00]

And she’s going to develop this theory that that is a right brain superpower that not everybody’s got, and it connects you to the greater ether in some meaningful way she has tapped into.

Ross Blocher: Okay. I’m willing to bite.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. So, she discovered her thinking in pictures when she was a kid, because her parents foolishly thought she had a learning disability. But they were wrong, obviously.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Oh, okay. Yeah. And we talked about this a little bit when you asked her a question in the remote viewing panel, following up on this talk you’re about to tell us about, that she seems to eschew any language of learning disability.

Carrie Poppy: Mental health. Yeah, that kind of stuff.

Ross Blocher: Mental health. Alright.

Carrie Poppy: We’ll talk about it a little bit later in the talk. She will say those words. It’s not like she’s avoiding them, but she tends toward other explanations of those phenomena. Yeah.

Ross Blocher: Got it. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: You were already noticing something about her, and she comments on it herself. She says that she basically feels overwhelmed with the amount of information that comes at her all the time when she’s trying to talk. And then she’s got this secondary process running where she needs to turn her visual imagery into words in order to talk to us. And so she said, “You can imagine people like me are not usually the ones up on the stage, because we’re being so bombarded all the time.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah, understandable. You’ve got all these little subroutines running in the background, analyzing what you’re saying while you’re saying it. Yeah, that’s prohibitive.

Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. Yeah. But some things we’d relate to, she’s a lifelong learner. She said that she has been learning her whole life about all these different esoteric topics, and she’ll list some for us in a minute. But she said, “Usually when I go into these things, I’m going in for like two years minimum until I learn everything I can, and then I move on to the next thing.”

Ross Blocher: Oh, okay. She’s sort of a serial monogamist with research topics.

(Carrie confirms.)

Oh, I wonder how long until remote viewing gives up its lucre, its riches.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, luster. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Interesting. I wonder if remote viewing has stayed the course or not. But yeah, she’s clearly very devoted. She spends a lot of time researching each thing, but we’ll see that her methods are maybe not the same methods we’d use. But—

Ross Blocher: We did hear the title of the talk.

Carrie Poppy: Sure. (Laughs.) Yeah, but I respect it. She also loves to give a shout out. So, she mentions Russell Targ. She tells us to definitely hear him speak at the conference. She does a very respectful shout out to the elders in the crowd in general. She says there’s a lot of remote viewers here who have many years on her and anything they say, you know, you should listen to them. And then she also mentions Terrence McKenna.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Why does that sound familiar?

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah. Terrence McKenna was a psychedelics researcher. I should know more about that era. I don’t know a ton about it, but that’s what I associate him with is the sort of like psychonaut movement. Yeah. She said, “There’s people like Terrence McKenna, who talks about a dream that he had. And in his book, he took LSD, and he had a full-blown LSD trip, and it changed his life forever. And so, he never actually took LSD. So, you know, we got some stuff. I guess it’s just a label.”

Ross Blocher: (Laughing.) Okay!

Carrie Poppy: I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what that was.

Ross Blocher: That fizzled out.

Carrie Poppy: But yeah. But Terrence McKenna got a shout out. Okay. I also had the opportunity to fact check one newspaper clipping, which was very exciting. So, she put up a clipping from the Chicago Tribune, and I want to show it to you. If you wanna read that out.

Ross Blocher: “’The CIA’s Crystal Ball’, by James Coates. We once found a guy that could see anywhere in the world through his psychic powers. We could show him a picture of any place, and he could describe any activity going on there. But he died, and we haven’t heard from him since.” (Laughs.) Oh, that’s so funny. That quote from CIA director Stansfield Turner also showed up in that documentary, Third Eye Spy.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting.

Ross Blocher: Talking about that white dove fellow, Pat—

Carrie Poppy: Price?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Who—I didn’t mention this when we were talking about the remote viewing panel, but he died under mysterious circumstances, you know. It looked like he had a heart issue. And then they had all this conspiracy theorist speculation about maybe the government killed him off. And amazingly enough, Uri Geller was actually taking the contraposition there saying, “No, the CIA doesn’t kill people.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay!

Ross Blocher: Uri, really?

Carrie Poppy: Well, that’s—yeah, that’s not even probably right.

Ross Blocher: But the idea was, well, he’s too useful for them to have killed, so he must have just died on his own.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, well, would you like to see that passage in full?

Ross Blocher: Yes.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, here we go. Here is the original newspaper clipping. I found it.

Ross Blocher: Oh wow, okay, nicely done!

Carrie Poppy: Thank you.

Ross Blocher: “‘The CIA financed a project in 1975 to develop a new kind of agent who could truly be called a spook,’ CIA Director Stanfield Turner has disclosed. The CIA chief said that the agency found a man who could, quote/unquote, ‘see’ what was going on anywhere in the world through his psychic powers.”

[00:15:00]

“Turner said CIA scientists and officials would show the man a picture of a place, and he would then describe any activity going on there at that time. The tight-lipped CIA chief wouldn’t reveal how accurate the spook was, but said the agency dropped the project in 1975. ‘He died,’ Turner said, ‘and we haven’t heard from him since.’ In a slightly, but not much, more serious vein—” (Laughs.) Okay, yeah, that’s an important line there. “Turner confirmed that the US intelligence operatives have discovered that the Soviet Union is spending money and time researching whether occult and psychic methods could be used to spy on other nations. At a recent breakfast meeting with reporters, Turner declined to be specific, but confirmed reports that the Russians are studying persons who claim to be able to read minds, teleport themselves into secret meetings, and foretell the future.” Yeah, that did change the reading of it. So, he might have been a little tongue in cheek when he was saying that.

Carrie Poppy: Totally. And even if he wasn’t, the only actual information conveyed is like, “Yes, some people have claimed to do that.” And that’s it. that’s everything this guy said.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And the selective quoting there made it look like much more of a ringing endorsement of these powers.

Carrie Poppy: Totally, yep. Oh, she also said that there are a lot of children who remember their past lifetimes and that that’s verifiable. And then I was like, okay, cool. She’s gonna name a source. And she said, “So, many of us have heard these stories. There have been books written about this.” End of sentiment.

Ross Blocher: Okay! You can’t write a book about something unless it’s verified.

Carrie Poppy: Which book? Which book?

Ross Blocher: The shorthand appeal to knowledge. You kind of have to at some point just assume that everybody else is doing their due diligence when they make books and write articles and stuff, but not always the case.

Carrie Poppy: True. No. Okay. So, then she talked about science. So, the scientific method is going to play into her talk quite a bit, because she’s going to be talking about experiments. So, here’s how she sets up the science portion of her talk.

Clip:

Tracey Garbutt Dolan: One of the keys that I have found from all the different modalities that I have studied, are—is—the art of the question. So, it spans every modality. So, scientific with building a hypothesis, reducing it down to hypothesis. We are targeting in on a very particular statement or question to either prove or disprove. If it’s consciousness-based with remote viewing, this is the target. So, sometimes if you’ve heard about this, there will be a target number that you are aiming for. But behind the target number is a very specific statement of not only, you know, the coordinate—let’s say—that they’re looking for, but they also have to direct your mind, your consciousness, to the place in time. So, that target is super, super important. It’s even with things like tarot—or any of the intuitive divination modalities—the more crystal-focused-clear you can get of what you want, the better the answer is.

Gateway Experience, the Monroe Institute—this became famous, the great CIA doc of Gateway Experience. So, this is somewhere else I’ve spent a lot of time.

 

Ross Blocher: Boy, she’s tough to follow. (Laughs.) Oh, man.

Carrie Poppy: Was that clear? (Chuckles.) Yeah. So—okay, so she’s talking about remote viewing. I think the point that she’s making is that during remote viewing, you have to get really clear on your questions and what it is you’re trying to figure out. And then you need a scientific—

Ross Blocher: Okay, that sounds good!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, and then you need a scientific attitude about accepting and adjusting your hypotheses.

Ross Blocher: We’re in agreement! Except—

Carrie Poppy: I think, if that’s what she said.

Ross Blocher: The term “adjusting” makes me a little nervous there. Because I feel like in this crowd—

Carrie Poppy: Oh, fair. Though I threw that in, so.

Ross Blocher: Sure. But I think that is kind of in their mode, where they’ll play around, and if they’re not getting what they want—well, let’s adjust it a bit. And oh, now it’s giving us the results we like.

Carrie Poppy: That’s true. That’s true. And there’s the special pleading phenomenon. But on the other hand, good scientists get bad results and then say, “Okay, let me try this the second way, and see if I get a different result.” So, let’s see which of those narratives plays out here, shall we?

Ross Blocher: Yes!

Carrie Poppy: So, she is all about experimenting on yourself. Can you believe this?!

Ross Blocher: Yes.

Carrie Poppy: Huh, interesting.

Ross Blocher: (Chuckling.) Experimenting on your—yeah, yeah. I think you and I are okay with that.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) I am okay with experimenting on myself broadly. I’m not one of these people who’s like, “You must try everything.” I don’t agree with that. But yeah, I’m down to experiment on myself, often.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, within reason.

Carrie Poppy: Often, yeah.

[00:20:00]

Ross Blocher: And of course, keeping in mind that you are not necessarily representative of the public at large, and that you are a sample size of one.

Carrie Poppy: That’s true. So, she says experimenting on yourself is the most important thing!

Ross Blocher: I don’t know if I agree with that.

Carrie Poppy: No, you should! It’s the most important thing!

Ross Blocher: Okay. Do I have to agree before we continue this conversation?

Carrie Poppy: No, nah. She said that she had a psychology professor in her 20s who had her and the other students do psychological experiments on themselves. And that really got her interested in the power of the mind and how she could set new goals for herself and watch herself achieve them. And I had a psych professor like this in undergrad, the one who’s just like really into behavior change, and is like, “Let’s help you figure out how to start running a mile or whatever! I’m going to help you do that!” You know, it helps people plot their behavior change path and stuff.

Ross Blocher: We need those kinds of people.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. So, I think she had one of these guys. But then—

Ross Blocher: As long as there’s not too many of them around.

Carrie Poppy: Uh, why?

Ross Blocher: Then it just gets invasive. Get out of my life!

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. (Laughs.) Everyone’s just following you around with charts.

Ross Blocher: I can run my own program. I’ll figure it out. Leave me alone.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, yeah. Not too many. But then apparently he also taught the students to heat up one part of their body and not another with their minds?

Ross Blocher: Okay, yeah, this sounds more like Wim Hof type stuff.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, but with your mind?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, like control over my body to the point where I can create internal heat to keep me warm.

Carrie Poppy: Mm. Okay, maybe.

Ross Blocher: I feel like those are claims that we heard around Wim Hof. There’s yogis out there who can do that and raise their internal temperature.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. That’s probably right. Well, here’s how she put it.

Clip:

Tracey Garbutt Dolan: And it was fascinating. So, our whole time in psychology was doing experiments that we could see and get feedback ourselves that we were actually affecting—you know, we were able to affect ourselves, do something that we could see. So, this has kind of informed me my entire life. I’m an experientialist. I can tell people about remote viewing, and there will aaalways be people who are like—they don’t believe it. They think it’s BS. And that’s fine, because really you have to know for yourself. You have to try these things and find out. It’s really all that matters.

I’m very influenced by being with my father on his deathbed. And I think about the things I would regret all the time. And I feel like these things—I personally want to experience these things myself. And I absolutely encourage other people to do this as well, so that you know. And that’s what my workshop is—how to create these experiments.

 

Carrie Poppy: I so wish we had been at a workshop now. I want to create these experiments.

Ross Blocher: Oh, did she follow up with a workshop at the Contact in the Desert, or this was elsewhere, another time?

Carrie Poppy: Oh, good question. When I was listening back to this, I just assumed it was at Contact in the Desert. But I don’t know.

Ross Blocher: This is an attitude I think we encounter every now and then, where they’ll say, “Oh, totally fine that you don’t accept this. I wouldn’t have either. I didn’t in your position. But if you try it for yourself, then you’ll get it.” And on one hand, it’s kind of charitable in that it’s allowing, yeah, I sympathize with your position. On the other hand, it’s a little condescending. Like, (patronizingly) oh, you don’t understand, ‘cause you haven’t tried it the way I have.

Carrie Poppy: Mm. Mm-hm. It could also be cost prohibitive. If you’re just saying like, “Well, I used to feel like you, but then I put up money. And if you also put up money, you’d feel different.”

Ross Blocher: Oh sure, especially if this is something being monetized. “And that’ll be $6,000 for this remote viewing course.”

Carrie Poppy: Right! Right, exactly. She also apparently did deprivation work, where you have to hold in your poop and pee and not eat or drink or sleep. And then like you watch yourself become unwell.

(Ross reacts with confusion.)

And then you’re like, “Well, now I’m having visions for sure.” And then you write down those visions. I was like, yeah, I bet that works.

Ross Blocher: Oh, geez! Just give me some DMT.

(Carrie laughs.)

That sounds far preferable to whatever that is. Oh my goodness.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It sounds awful. And then she’s like, “You really will. You’ll see stuff.”

And I was like, yeah, I fucking bet.

Ross Blocher: I believe it! That’s so funny. Other shortcuts to altered states of consciousness. ‘Cause like, you know, we’ve tried the holotropic breathing. Like, who knew just by breathing really fast in a certain shallow but rapid way that you can get into an altered state of consciousness. I believe what she’s saying that you could abuse yourself thusly and experience altered states.

(Carrie agrees with a laugh.)

But that sounds like the worst way to do it!

Carrie Poppy: Oh my God. Sleep deprivation is the fucking worst. Oh my lord. No thanks. Okay. Other things she’s gotten into: mediumship, intuitives, divination, psychic commentary.

Ross Blocher: She’s definitely a searcher. She’s tried so many things.

Carrie Poppy: Totally. Telekinesis! But girl, if you can do telekinesis, I no longer care about you being able to do little drawings! (Laughs.)

[00:25:00]

Ross Blocher: Yeah, please. Let’s stop everything. Show me you moving something with your mind. You’ll rock my world.

Carrie Poppy: Right?! So much more interesting than you being able to see my house or whatever, like it’s Lost Highway.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Okay. Telekinesis. Wow.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Daoist mysticism. Oh, yeah! And then she said that she didn’t know when she got into Daoist mysticism, that the area she was getting into explores mystical experiences via bodily pain. She was like, “So, I learned a lot from that. I probably won’t do that again.” Oof!

Ross Blocher: Wow. And I know dream interpretation seems to be one of her big topics.

Carrie Poppy: We’re getting there, yup!

Ross Blocher: Okay. So—boy, if she spent two years on each of these, that’s a longer life than I think she’s lived, but I guess they overlap.

Carrie Poppy: Ohhh, fair, fair. Yeah, probably overlap. She did a shamanic journey. I assume that means some kind of psychedelic. Tarot, psilocybin macro dosing. Love that term. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Hey! Sounds like she’s ready to join the podcast.

Carrie Poppy: And then—oh yeah, and then she kept saying this phrase: “Just apply some pressure. Apply some pressure to your mind. Do some prompts, try some ideas.” And she kept saying, “Apply some pressure.” And I was like, are you talking about stressing out your mind? Because all your examples are like you’re making yourself sick.

Ross Blocher: Or just—when I hear that, I just think force yourself out of your comfort zone. Engage. Think hard. So, maybe it’s something along those lines?

Carrie Poppy: Okay, maybe? Okay, maybe. And then she said, “I don’t think we’re going to get what we want from science if we wait for it. So, how about the self-experiment? Because you will get results that are going to be fulfilling, because you’re going to be—they’re going to be about you! It’s all for you, about you. Your therapist fixed my stomach, you know, whatever! But it’s thrilling and fascinating. And it’s just like one of the most amazing mysteries. And it’s sitting here in a cave in the dark with two doorways, two side doors, and we just kind of take it for granted! And I just want to frame our focus back to how freaking amazing we are. You know, we’re just absolutely amazing.”

Ross Blocher: Okay. I listened to a conversation that she had with actually another speaker at contact in the desert, Alexis Brooks. It was a podcast called Higher Journeys. And I think she kind of arrived at what really motivates her in a similar way to what you were just saying, where for Tracey, it seemed the bottom line was that we realize just how capable we are. And that seems to be her bottom line. Like, jumping from all of these esoteric topics from one to the other is just about establishing “we are so much more than we think we are!” Which came up in the remote viewing panel. Like, we want to know that these things are proven. We want to be able to use that terminology and say that there’s studies, and there’s books, and there’s all this support. But really, the takeaway at the end of the day is just we can do so much more than we think we can! Than these mere material bodies!

Carrie Poppy: Okay. What more are we?!

Ross Blocher: And can you demonstrate any of these things to an impressive level? Can you tell the gummy bear in my hand? Oh no, you can’t! I don’t know. I feel like that’s where this all ends, but do you think that’s kind of what she’s going for?

Carrie Poppy: Oh, yeah. She does eventually start talking about AI as a metaphor for the human brain and how the human brain is—it’s so vast.

Ross Blocher: Does she need another metaphor for the human brain?

Carrie Poppy: It’s just so big, Ross. It might as well be Canada. It’s just so big.

Ross Blocher: Canada’s pretty big.

Carrie Poppy: It’s so big. They got so much land up there. I think about this quite a bit.

Ross Blocher: Do you?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It’s just so much land! Yeah. So, yes, you mentioned AI, or maybe I just did, and so did she. So! She kept using—(sighs) okay, I’m going to try to tie these things together. She was talking about AI, the left brain, and the right brain in kind of one breath.

Ross Blocher: Oof. Okay. I know she’s really, really, really into the left brain/right brain thing. That seems to be a major explanatory filter for her.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. Yeah. Okay. So, we’re going to have to just accept some things that you and I don’t accept. (Laughs.) Let’s do it! So, left brain means thinking in logic. Right brain, pictures and art. Right, good. Left, bad. Okay? Okay.

Ross Blocher: Okay. I always remember that by thinking of how the left brain kind of maps to the right-hand side of the body, and the right hemisphere of the brain to the left. And I think about how our society is mostly right-handed, so that’s how I remember that the left brain is bad, and the right brain is good. I’m not sure how tied that is to their whole synthesis, but that’s how I remember which is the good one, which is the bad one.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, now I’m thinking of the left-hand path. Was it Aleister Crowley?

[00:30:00]

It’s one of the satanists who was like, I’m bad. I do the left-hand path. I think that’s right.

Ross Blocher: The left-hand path, so sinister.

Carrie Poppy: Anyway. Oh my god. Okay, I’m gonna try not to be Tracey Dolan and stay on topic. So, she talked about ChatGPT for a second. And of course, then she had to explain to everyone what that was. And she said, “If you don’t know, ChatGPT is a software that people are using to control artificial intelligence.” I actually thought that’s kind of a decent—like, I like that it separates out the user, the intelligence itself, and the product.

So, she said, “Remote viewing is kind of like that.” So, she believes that there is an untapped supercomputer. There is a holodeck. And she had to test this hypothesis and try it out for herself. But the right brain pulls in information from somewhere else. And then you need the analytical mind, the left brain, to direct that information that came in from the holodeck to the right brain.

Ross Blocher: So, she derived all of this by analogy from AI and invoking a Star Trek concept.

Carrie Poppy: Well, and from her personal experience doing these experiments.

Ross Blocher: Oh yes, lots of personal experience. Okay. We’ve talked about this before, that the constant temptation is to compare the brain to whatever the current technology is. 100 years ago, you would get analogies of how the brain works like a telephone system, ‘cause that was new and exciting. And then when tape recorders came around, oh, the brain works like a tape recorder! But then later on, the brain worked like a computer, and then it worked like the internet, and now it works like AI. It’s just—you know, we kind of grab what’s new and current, and we draw those connections.

Carrie Poppy: You can definitely see that in L. Ron Hubbard’s writings with the filing cabinet metaphors for the hippocampus.

(Ross agrees enthusiastically.)

Yeah, mm-hm. Yep. She also thinks that part of what’s going on is that we’re taking information from our future selves? So, when we’re remote viewing or in an altered state—

Ross Blocher: Oh, ‘cause we’ve already introduced time travel.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I guess. But we hadn’t really, she just said this. Well, what she actually said was “They do hypothesize that you are actually being informed by your future. It’s not something that is for sure.”

(Ross laughs sadly.)

She’s right about that. It is not something that is for sure.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. What is the point of even saying that? Because obviously she wants you to be taking this at face value, but I guess by throwing out that we don’t know this for sure, she’s just giving herself a little bit of credibility. Like, “I’m not completely sold on this, but the rest of the sentence will take for granted that you accept it.”

Carrie Poppy: She has a presentation that doesn’t seem to allow for cynicism for me. So, I think this sentence entered her head, and out it came! And there I was to hear it.

Ross Blocher: Oh my goodness.

Carrie Poppy: But if I hadn’t been recording it and reviewing it, would she know what she had said and what it meant? I don’t know. Okay. So, could the right brain functioning that we were using—could that be the universal language? Could that be the access to the supercomputer that is connected to everything in us?

Okay. So, when we are able to access the right brain—that purely visual brain without any words and interpretations and rationality layered on—

Ross Blocher: Rigid structure, yeah.

Carrie Poppy: That’s when we are connecting to the great beyond. And—

Ross Blocher: Oh, this is such a soup of analogies and the leaps that we just agreed to take together but aren’t really grounded in anything.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) And then the delivery flattens everything to the same volume. (Speeding up.) Because she’s just got so many thoughts, and she’s saying this, but then this, but then this, but then this—!

So, you’re not hearing what’s important coming at you. ‘Cause everything’s the same. Oof.

Ross Blocher: It’s like this verbal cubism, where everything’s just getting flattened, and you see it from all angles at once, and you don’t know what’s foreground or background and—

Carrie Poppy: Yup. People are clapping, but don’t seem to know why. Oh, her inflection indicated I should clap now.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. I wish I could jump from brain to brain in these audiences. Because I think—you know, I’m totally projecting here, but I’m thinking that the majority of the audience members just hear little phrases and kind of clip together quantum consciousness, potential. They just kind of hear all these things. Ooh, that sounds so nice! I love all these words being next to each other. I love it when you say them in that order. Yay! Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. I feel like it’s an emotional response.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It’s like, you come to these conferences, and you say, “Can you give me wonder?”

And the speaker says, “I can try.”

Ross Blocher: I think it’s natural to sit in an audience and just sort of assume that everybody understands things better than you do. But you and I like, I think when we’re engaging, try to actually parse the sentence construction and figure out, wait, what are you actually saying. A) In the moment, if you’re trying to do that, you’re leaning forward, you’re squinting.

[00:35:00]

You’re furiously writing notes. You know, you’re thinking. Everybody else just seems to be kind of smiling and taking it in, much like I’m used to seeing in the pews in church. You know, when things are just kind of washing over people. And I just—I think that’s all one’s processing power allows for. And then, B) we have this process of kind of later on taking it apart more slowly and trying to like piece it all back together. Wait, what? Where—she started it here. Did she ever finish that thought? And like, trying to regiment it and figure out, okay, where did that come from? Did she set that up? It takes a lot of work that you just—you can’t do in the moment.

And so, I don’t feel too uncharitable just assuming that most people are kind of responding on an emotional level.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, I think that’s right.

Ross Blocher: To how the words feel.

Carrie Poppy: And for them, I think this is a fan convention. You know, they’re going to this thing, and they’re like, “Yay, she can see aliens! Yay! She can see other objects. And even if I don’t learn to do that, that’s okay. These are my personal celebrities.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah. But when I hear that, you know, people are clapping for something that’s just been said, my mind just kind of assumes like, “Oh, they all understood, and they approve.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting. Okay.

Ross Blocher: But when I think about it in this context that we’re talking about, I think it’s just sort of a gestalt in the room. Like, “Yeah! That generally sounded really good to all of us!”

Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting. I think I hear applause and think option two almost by default.

Ross Blocher: Oh, interesting. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: Uh-huh. I think like, oh, we’re all clapping, are we? Aaaalright. Unless I’m personally compelled to clap by the quality of the product. (Laughs.) You know. Standing ovations, I feel like—oh, I think I sweat when there’s a standing ovation.

Ross Blocher: Really?

Carrie Poppy: I’m like, so I have to decide now?! I have to decide in front of all of you whether this person gets a standing ovation?

Ross Blocher: You feel like it reflects on you.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, I’ll do it!

And then I always end up standing, because I don’t want everybody thinking like, “Mm, there’s only one person who’s not standing.” But if I were the performer, I’d be thinking I don’t want everybody to just stand up just willy nilly. Do they all mean it? There’s no way they all mean it.

Ross Blocher: I didn’t truly earn it. Wow. Yeah. Okay. We’re different in this regard. I’m a clap first, think later kind of guy. I’d be like, “Hey, we’re clapping! Okay, okay. Interesting. Why are we clapping?” (Claps.)

(Carrie laughs.)

But I don’t think I feel like this tacit endorsement that I’ve given just by joining in on it, that I feel like I had to fully understand it before I engaged in the group function.

Carrie Poppy: Well, I was also the person who was like looking at the lyrics of the worship songs and being like, “Can’t sing that, don’t agree with that.”

(They laugh.)

I gotta wait out this verse. I do not agree.

Ross Blocher: I certainly had those songs where like, “I’m going to skip this part.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. This is not biblical. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: I remember—

Carrie Poppy: This was at my own church! I’m a child!

Ross Blocher: We loved Keith Green. I’ve talked about him on the show before. He was this like late ’70s, early ’80s Jesus movement leader. And we would listen to his tapes all the time in the car. But there was a song, “So You Want to Go Back to Egypt”. And at one point he sings, (singing) “Can God even take a joke?”

And then God replies, “NO!”

And my mom would always respond, “Yes, yes, he can!” ‘Cause she just hated the thought that Keith Green was insinuating that God didn’t have a sense of humor.

(Carrie laughs.)

So, she had to like argue with it every time it played.

Carrie Poppy: Did she see the irony in her own behavior?

Ross Blocher: No, my mom has never seen the irony. In anything.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) That’s incredible.

Ross Blocher: But I mean—but I also—I would listen to the Smashing Pumpkins, and I would love how edgy this was and the thoughts they were getting me to think that did not come from the pulpit. But like, I would listen to the song “Zero”, and there was the line, (singing) “Emptiness is loneliness, and loneliness is cleanliness, and cleanliness is godliness, and God is empty, just like me.” And I would turn down the volume, because I just—

(Carrie laughs then “aw”s.)

I couldn’t process that God is empty. Like, no, I’m not—that’s a bridge too far.

Carrie Poppy: Yep. No, I totally get it.

Ross Blocher: But I’ll listen to the rest of the song.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. ‘Cause once it goes through your head, now there’s dirt in there. There’s dirt.

Ross Blocher: (Singing.) Be careful, little eyes, what you see.

Carrie Poppy: There’s—all the gunk is there now. You can’t. You have to not.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Well, I did not want to assent to that statement. And yeah, okay. So, there we go.

Carrie Poppy: No, I’m with you.

Ross Blocher: So, when we criticize Tracey Garbutt Dolan for getting off topic, just know that we understand where this comes from.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) No, I don’t I don’t get it.

(Ross giggles.)

So, she said that recently in 2023, she got extra levels of her extrasensory perception.

Ross Blocher: Ooh, extra levels of extrasensory perception!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, EESP.

Ross Blocher: In that interview with Alexis Brooks, at one point I think it was—Alexis was just bagging on our five senses. Like, “Oh, there’s just—there’s so little information that we get from our five senses.” I was like stop iiit. We should be grateful for the five senses we have.

[00:40:00]

They give us a lot of information. Yes, we do not perceive gamma rays. I think that was the point she was making at the time. But that’s okay. We perceive a lot.

Carrie Poppy: Be nice to the senses.

Ross Blocher: And how cool that we can build machines that let us know about these other areas of the visual and other spectra, but that doesn’t mean we’re entitled to them, and it doesn’t mean that our five senses are crap.

Carrie Poppy: Imagine if you said the same thing about emotions instead of senses. They’d be up in ARMS, if you were like, (dopily) “Well, emotions aren’t real, you know. They don’t matter. They’re not anything. We get so little information from emotions, intuitions, feelings.” They’d be like, ah! (Shrieks affrontedly.)

Ross Blocher: I’m not sure what the counter argument would be, but yeah.

Carrie Poppy: So, remote viewing, that’s why we’re all here. She’ll get to it, and so will I. Remote viewing, she says, is when you’re just using your mind to try to perceive a target that’s hidden from you, or you’re just attempting to get psychic impressions about the target. I was like, Tracey, beautiful, perfect, mwah! Mwah! Mwah! Perfect!

Ross Blocher: Yeah, wait, say it one more time.

Carrie Poppy: When she needs to give a glossary definition, she’s right. Boom, got it.

“Remote viewing is when you’re just using your mind to try to perceive a target that’s hidden from you. Or you’re attempting to get psychic impressions about the target.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah, that’s a great definition.

Carrie Poppy: Better than that whole panel.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Good job, Tracey.

Carrie Poppy: So, she said that during the process of remote viewing, the left brain interviews the right brain about the visual pictures it’s getting. I kind of like this metaphor.

Ross Blocher: Interesting! Okay. Yeah. And at least from what you’ve said so far, kind of like the thinking fast and slow, the quick brain, the slow brain—that you have this slower deliberative brain that can crunch on what the gut reaction is giving you. She’s putting it in terms of left and right, but okay.

Carrie Poppy: And she said, “Sometimes it’s going to look like you got it wrong. If you just wrote down, you know, nouns and descriptions. But that’s because your words are too specific. You want to describe shapes, colors, things like that.” So, this is calling back to our panel, of course. And then she described being an outbounder. Did we talk about outbounding?

Ross Blocher: No.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. So, an outbounder is an experiment where you, yourself, plan with a group of people that you are going to go visit them at noon, even though they’re in Florida, and you’re in California. You’re gonna visit them wherever they are, at noon on this particular day. And they should think of you, and you’ll think of them, and you’re gonna draw what you see.

Ross Blocher: I feel like the only other place I’ve encountered that was at the International Academy of Consciousness, where they would have these predefined meeting places.

Carrie Poppy: Exactly. Exactly the same.

Ross Blocher: In the ethereal realm.

Carrie Poppy: And I believe this was through the Monroe Institute. She said, “You have to go somewhere mentally and perceive whether someone on the other end is male or female.” And she got to do it one time. And so, she focused on this target, and she started drawing, and she quieted her mind and focused in. And she started to get a park—just a park with grass. And she started to smell grass, but it was surrounded by buildings and the city.

Clip:

Tracey Garbutt Dolan: I can tell. I can tell it’s a body of water. I could then pick up these smells that were so—it was like when you’re in a park, an enclosed body of water in cement, and you can smell the moss. And you can smell all the creatures. You can smell, if you’re sitting on a bench, and the duck poop, and the squirrels, and the swans. Like, for real, like that dank smell. I could smell that, and I could feel that it was large, like a big hole. And then there were these structures all around, but far back. And I mean, you really start to feel into the information, which is kind of interesting, right? You wouldn’t sort of think it goes that way. You could tell it was an aquarium. Now, when your brain guesses a word like this, it’s quite often wrong. But in this case, I felt very connected to the target.

 

Carrie Poppy: Okay!

Ross Blocher: Okay.

Carrie Poppy: So, shall we see her drawing?

(Ross agrees.)

Okay, here is what she drew, and here is what she should have received, on the right.

Ross Blocher: Okay, so I see multiple drawings. There’s kind of a top one and a bottom one. They’re both like from that same session?

Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. Everything on the left is what she drew during her outbounder session. And on the right is what she was supposed to have seen in the target image.

Ross Blocher: Not bad. Like, that fountain—so, she’s drawn like two concentric circles. It could just be like a tube of some sort. And then there’s this—yeah, like a little spout of water that’s shooting up into the air. And sure enough, the target image is this giant fountain in the middle of a city park.

Carrie Poppy: Would you describe that as an aquarium?

Ross Blocher: No, not an aquarium there, no.

[00:45:00]

Carrie Poppy: She called it an aquarium.

Ross Blocher: There are no turtles or fish or squid.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that’s a fountain, right?

(Ross confirms.)

She called it an aquarium.

Ross Blocher: I mean, but the drawing feels right on.

Carrie Poppy: It does, but there is an aquarium in this park. And she went on to explain why there’s that drawing of the eye on the left side. Do you see that? A drawing of like an eye on a reflective surface?

Ross Blocher: I mean, if I didn’t know anything else about it, it’s like either a pendant that’s unfurling, or like a slice of pizza. But it’s kind of like a little cylinder with a bit of a triangle coming off of it, and a little bit of scribble on each one.

Carrie Poppy: Well that was an eye, and that’s the part of the story that changes. Her. Life. So—

Ross Blocher: Oh, no. Tracey. Raise your standards.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) So, she somehow decides that she was right that she thought it was an aquarium. Which confuses me. Because, again, I agree with you that it’s a visual match, but of a fountain. But she keeps saying aquarium. Okay.

Ross Blocher: Alright. Well, and is she a native English speaker? Yeah, it feels like it.

Carrie Poppy: Yes, I think so, yeah. Well, the reason I’m pointing this out is because there is an aquarium at this park. And apparently there was a woman from the group who went to the aquarium. But wasn’t the target. And so, later, Tracey meets this woman. And she’s like, “I think I saw your eye!”

And the woman says, “Oh, I did go to the aquarium, and I had my compact and my purse, so I may have looked at my own eye!”

Ross Blocher: (Interrupting.) Nope! Nope! Not allowed. We can’t just change our answers later and jump around between all these different things that aren’t things. You had a target; you matched the target quite well. You should be impressed with yourself.

Carrie Poppy: For some reason! Yeah, I know!

Ross Blocher: And now you’re changing the whole narrative, because you met somebody who—

Carrie Poppy: Just say it was a fountain, and I drew a fountain!

Ross Blocher: Yeah, good job!

Carrie Poppy: Then we’d just be like, “Oh, yep, you drew a fountain. We at least know that much.”

Ross Blocher: Now you’ve shown us 1% of your remote viewings. Can we see all the others, please? Because they only show us the ones that are superficially impressive.

Carrie Poppy: And it sounds like the group you were working with was in Florida, near a very large municipal park.

(Ross agrees with a sigh.)

So, if they said to you, “We’re going to go to the park,” and you Googled it, and then you were like, look at that! There’s a fountain and an aquarium!

Ross Blocher: Yeah. We’re totally even taking out of the equation all of the context clues that you could go on to figure out what you might be looking at.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. And it is a very large park. Aaalright. So, anyway, that woman’s name was Patricia Sires, and she was in the audience today, and they are friends still. And of course, we all had to clap for Patricia. And I was like, (flatly.) “Everyone’s clapping. I guess now I have to fucking clap.”

Ross Blocher: Nope. I would call it cheating, but it’s just, you know, not understanding basic psychology. It just—it flummoxes me that they can’t see what they’re doing, jumping from one test design to just, “Oh, let’s just completely bash down the walls that we put around this test and take in anything we can as verification.” There was a target, you hit the target, but now you’re somehow talking this woman about where she was—totally different situation—and applying it to this reading as well?!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, and why?

Ross Blocher: You’re double dipping.

Carrie Poppy: You had a decent hit. Why?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, it’s a good hit!

Carrie Poppy: What wasn’t satisfying to you? Why did you say aquarium? (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: It’s sloppy.

Carrie Poppy: How does this connect to an eyeball?

Ross Blocher: This is sloppy. But of course, the important thing here is that we are so much more than we think we are!

Carrie Poppy: Yes, exactly. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.

Ross Blocher: Because I never hear them—and I’m guessing she doesn’t do this—like, try to push this remote viewing ability towards any practical application.

Carrie Poppy: Right! Not that I know of.

Ross Blocher: She’s not saying, “We can solve child disappearances. We can—”

Carrie Poppy: Oh, right. There’s famous hostage situations right now.

Ross Blocher: Let’s solve all of the shipwrecks with Spanish galleons buried at the bottom of the ocean. I mean, to what end? Why are we doing this? We’ve been doing it for, you know, 50+ years. To what end? What is the end goal here? It’s just to prove that (airily) we’re so much more than this. Okay. Say that if it makes you feel good, but don’t pretend that the universe is other than it is.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I mean, I get the impression from her that it’s to give meaning to why she’s special instead of abnormal.

Ross Blocher: And take the win when you draw a water fountain, and then people show you that the target was a water fountain. That’s fine. But we’re also going to point out the context clues that you had and the fact that it’s only one match out of probably many mismatches.

Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. But I think, you know, she’s probably having really anomalous experiences that are—you know, her friends aren’t reporting the same thing. So, she’s going, “What is weird about me?”

[00:50:00]

“Is it that I’m special? Or is it that there’s something wrong? Or—? How do I interpret being anomalous?” Oh, she also warned us not to remote view our friends without permission. she had a woman show up at her house! (Beat.) Spiritually.

(Ross laughs.)

It really startled her.

Ross Blocher: These sentences start one way, and then they zag.

(Carrie laughs.)

So, you know, I’m picturing this woman outside her window or something. Like, oh no! A woman showed up at her house! Spiritually. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: Just as startling. You know?

(They laugh.)

She was really surprised by it. She’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. We have to set that up.” And she had to set a new boundary.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) It’s like being all up in someone’s DMs, but all up in their AT, their astral travel.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) Okay. So, then she did get to dreams, but you know what my dream is Ross? To microwave a good meal.

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[00:55:00]

Carrie Poppy: Okay, well, anyway, so about dreams, Tracey wanted to talk to us about dreams, because that’s where it all began for her. She’s been a night owl for most of her life, but she’s always had these really vivid dreams, and they’ve always been important to her. So, she said, “First of all, dreams are accessible to all of us.”

Ross Blocher: Sure. I assume there must be some people who claim never to dream at all.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, yeah. Well, I know I’ve definitely talked to people who say they don’t remember their dreams.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. But generally, since people acknowledge, “Yeah, I have them. They just don’t stick with me, and I don’t make an effort to try to quickly recall them or write them down.” Yeah.

Carrie Poppy: Capture them, yeah. She said, “You don’t have to be anybody special. You don’t have to take a course. You don’t need to be psychic. You don’t have to do anything! It’s there for all of us, for the taking, for experimenting.” But her dream world has never been normal. Her dreams have always been weird. And they aren’t just a mishmash of the day, because she sees things that she has never seen before in her dreams, she says.

I feel like I’ve been hearing this since I was a kid, that anything that you’re picturing has to be made up of constituent things you’ve seen. But I feel like that’s—that just seems too loosey goosey a claim.

(Ross agrees.)

I’m like I’ve seen sooo many things with my eyeballs in the real world and the fake world and illustrations and movies. Like, there’s way too much data at this point for me to pick apart like which pieces built it up.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. I mean, I think we may have individually different percentages when it comes to dreams that are just like rehashing the day versus more flights of fantasy and pulling together new and fantastical elements. But I think we’ve all experienced all of the above at one time or another. And yeah, I think the brain can take symbolic relationships and say, “Okay, I’ve seen a horse, but I know what it’s like for something to be gigantic. So, I can also imagine a horse that’s as tall as the clouds.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, exactly. And that’s purple!

Ross Blocher: So, ta-da! Look. I’m a brain. I’m cool. I just made that happen. Yeah, exactly. I know the color purple. I’ve never seen a purple horse. But I understand the concept of being gigantic and being purple. Ta-da!

Carrie Poppy: So, I don’t think I buy that part is that unusual.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. What’s so unusual, Tracey, about your dreams? What’s so unusual?!

Carrie Poppy: But I do buy that they seem really vivid to her and that she like seems to remember them more often than other people.

Ross Blocher: I think dreams are fascinating in telling that our brains are such potent simulation machines.

Carrie Poppy: True! And that sleep is this, you know, cognitive pruning process—

[01:00:00]

—where our memories are being stored and consolidated, which she kind of agrees with. She—this is interesting. She seems to be up on the alternative explanation, but kind of like Whitley Strieber, she’s like—

Ross Blocher: Acknowledged and dismissed!

Carrie Poppy: “I have kind of a tenuous understanding of the competition, and I say no thank you.”

Ross Blocher: Or maybe it explains a small portion of dreams, but not the part I’m interested in.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, so what she actually said was “A lot of people believe dreams are a mishmash of the day, but do we know that for sure? You know, we don’t know that for sure. Scientists think that it’s a pruning process where it’s added to it. It seems like it is, to some extent. There is a pruning of your memories. There has to be, like a computer. We have to optimize. We can’t store every single memory that we have every single day. We have to optimize it and prioritize what’s important, right? So, our mind is doing this type of pruning.”

Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) It seems like just because she’s heard that’s a function of dreams, she’s taking the argument to be either that’s all dreams do, or dreams are something completely different. No, it’s just one of the things dreams do.

Carrie Poppy: And now I need to defensively stand against the scientific understanding of dreams.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, essentially a straw man.

Carrie Poppy: She said, “Some people have prophetic dreams. Some people can live their lives by their dreams. It can help you when you’ve got ailments.” Don’t like that, don’t like that!

Ross Blocher: Oh yeah, you already lost me at prophetic dreams. I always think back to the biblical examples of this, because there’s dream interpretation in the bible as well. Where I kind of grew up thinking that was one of those things like the fact that you had Magi who somehow followed a star and got to Jesus. Like, so does that mean astrology is true? I remember hearing these stories and thinking like, “So, does that mean like dream interpretation is true? ‘Cause we don’t do that at the church. That seems a little occultic.”

It was just one of those weird things like, oh, I guess you snuck in the door there into reality.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Well, prophetic dreams are real Ross. And I’ll tell you why. She predicted the covid pandemic in a dream.

Ross Blocher: And she didn’t warn us?

Carrie Poppy: No. Well, I can see why she didn’t. And when you hear the dream, I think you’ll also see why she didn’t know this was a dream about the covid pandemic at the time.

Ross Blocher: Okay, did she picture seven skinny cows and seven fat cows?

Carrie Poppy: What’s that?

Ross Blocher: The biblical…

Carrie Poppy: Right, might as well. Here’s what she said. “I’ve been traveling for decades, and I had never seen a cruise ship dream. I might have had one before, but it was around the time I dreamt I was on a cruise ship with a ton of people in great detail, and the cruise ship very slowly capsized. I was fine. I walked away. There were lots of people that I think were lost in the water.” End of dream! That’s her covid dream.

Ross Blocher: Uuuh, okay. And this is connected because early cases of covid were on cruise ships?

Carrie Poppy: No.

(Ross laughs.)

I think it’s just a metaphor for lots of people dying, but she’s fine.

Ross Blocher: Ohhh. Okay. A) Not impressive. B) Only makes sense in retrospect, and you just—you can’t get credit for that!

(Carrie agrees.)

If your prophetic dream doesn’t actually prophesy to the point where you’re like, “Oh, I think there’s a pandemic coming.” If after the fact, after the pandemic happens, you’re like, “Now I get what that dream meant!” Sorry, it doesn’t qualify. That’s postdiction; that’s not prediction.

Carrie Poppy: I’ll tell you how I’d give her credit. Totally. I’d give her credit if a freaking cruise ship had capsized! But it did not!

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And again, we were talking last time like there needs to be a set deadline. Like, it’s got to happen within a couple of weeks. Otherwise, I’m not impressed. If there’s a cruise ship that goes down nine months to a year from now, not impressed.

Carrie Poppy: And define your symbols now, people!

Ross Blocher: These things happen.

Carrie Poppy: So, she has a ranking scale for types of dreams. With ordinary on one end, and on the far end, you’ve got alien experiences and those kinds of things.

Ross Blocher: Oooh, a ranking scale!

Carrie Poppy: Those kinds of things. Yeah, it’s not fully formed. Don’t get too excited. But she just talks about it a little bit.

Ross Blocher: She doesn’t—aw, alright. She doesn’t give you a hierarchy of these elements mean you’re in a Class C dream!

Carrie Poppy: There’s a little bit of that. I don’t know if it’ll satisfy your itch, but there’s a little bit of that in there. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Now I’m staring intently at Carrie. Yes.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) “I need this. I need this so much.”

Ross Blocher: Give me the—I’m either gonna validate it or I’m gonna tear it apart!

Carrie Poppy: But she did say that aliens do contact humans during dreams. And that sometimes—

Ross Blocher: Why? Why do they do that? Just trying to think—again, me as a traveler to another planet, I’m not going to reveal myself to where everybody can see and agree that I’m here. But! I can’t interrupt the nighttime thinking process of these creatures on this planet. (Whispering.) I’m gonna do that. That’s how I’m gonna talk to them.

Carrie Poppy: I mean, it’s good work if you can get it. You don’t have to leave your planet. Did you ever see Out of This World?

[01:05:00]

Ross Blocher: That doesn’t ring a bell.

Carrie Poppy: (Singing.) “Well, would you like to—”

Ross & Carrie: (Singing together.) “—swing on a star? Carry moonbeams home in a jar.”

Carrie Poppy: It was a sitcom about a little girl who’s half alien. She’s a hybrid! Yeah. Oh, I loved it as a kid.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Wait, that wasn’t the one with the little girl who was a robot?

Carrie Poppy: No, that’s Small Wonder. Also good.

Ross Blocher: Oh, I’m getting those conflated in my head. Wow! I used to get that song stuck in my head all the time and I totally forgot about the show it went with.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay! I really loved it.

Ross Blocher: But I watched it!

Carrie Poppy: You did watch it? When I broke my arm and I was in the hospital, I just watched a bunch of Out of This World.

Ross Blocher: Every time Carrie mentions her broken arm, she flexes her elbow the way it should not go.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) That’s right! So, also sometimes Tracey predicts power outages by seeing a black sky in her dreams.

Ross Blocher: Tracey, please email us right after you have the dream.

Carrie Poppy: Tell us where the power out will be. Can’t just be any circuit that breaks.

Ross Blocher: Yeeeah. You gotta predict. You can’t just postdict.

Carrie Poppy: She also has nap dreams that help her. And I’ve had this experience where, you know, you’re thinking something through, you can’t figure it out. But you go and you take a nap or sleep, and then you figure it out.

Ross Blocher: Oh! I actually rely on this a lot. When I’m working on a big project, I’ll be overwhelmed by it, but I’ll just try to at least get all the pieces in my head and then go to sleep. And then as I’m going to sleep, I’ll try to work towards something approximating a solution, and then I feel like I can pretty regularly wake up with motivation to get into it and oftentimes a solution.

Carrie Poppy: I know that’s in Why We Sleep, that book. So, she said—here’s their example of a nap dream helping her plan. So, she wanted to go on vacation with her mom to Florida. Florida came up a lot in this talk! And she had a nap where she saw the words Treasure Island. And she got up, and she Googled it with Florida, and there was a great hotel called Treasure Island in Florida. And she went, and they loved it. And now they are repeat customers, Ross.

Ross Blocher: I mean, cool. That’s a story worth telling. I’ll give it that.

Carrie Poppy: I feel like—(sighs) give me any coastal state, and I’m going to look up the words Treasure Island.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. North Carolina.

Carrie Poppy: (Typing sounds.) “North Carolina’s involvement in the true story of Treasure Island began when the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe arrived heavily damaged at Ocracoke Inlet in need of help.” See, my point is made!

Ross Blocher: What?! I just had a dream, and we were going to North Carolina. That’s amazing! That’s what the aliens were trying to tell me.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, like you can Google anything and make it work.

Ross Blocher: Okay, Tracey I think just has a case of being too easily impressed.

(Carrie agrees and chuckles.)

You need to ratchet up your expectations, Tracey. You need to get a little better at documenting these things if you’re going to make claims later about predicting power outages. I want to see a journal. And you need to tell me—

Carrie Poppy: Oh, a journal. That’s a good idea. A log.

Ross Blocher: You need to have every time you have that dream of the black sky, and you need to have every time there is a power outage. And then we’ll see! We’ll see if they really line up.

Carrie Poppy: But we’ll help you, and we’ll be nice. Just come with your Sheets. Come with your Sheets, Tracey.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. But you can’t ignore the misses.

Carrie Poppy: That’s what I always say to Drew, right?

Ross Blocher: Haha-ha.

(They laugh.)

Carrie Poppy: Okay. So, here’s a thing that she said and never explained. “I’m gonna leave this one out, the dog shark.” Moves on to the next slide.

Ross Blocher: That’s what she said? “I’m gonna leave this one out, the dog shark.”

Carrie Poppy: Yep.

Ross Blocher: So, she has a dream story about a dog shark.

Carrie Poppy: About a dog shark, and she’s like, “I gotta tell that Treasure Island story, but you know what? I’m gonna leave out the dog shark story.”

Ross Blocher: Tracey, this is bad. We need to hear about the dog shark.

Carrie Poppy: You can hear me react to this on the audio. She says, “I’m leaving out the dog shark,” and I’m like what?!

Ross Blocher: We’ve mentioned this before, but she’s Tracey with an E-Y. Dolan, dog shark…

Carrie Poppy: Okay, then she talked about something that interests me.

Ross Blocher: I’m not getting anything on the internet. Tracey, tell us about the dog shark!

Carrie Poppy: Oh. Well, see, I think of—isn’t dog shark an SNL thing?

Ross Blocher: Is it?

Carrie Poppy: You know, “Dog shark.” They knock on the door. “Dog shark.”

Ross Blocher: There’s a land shark.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, that’s it! Land shark. (Laughs.) Okay, same thing.

Okay. As she was about to tell us about the dog shark, she got distracted and had to tell us about cabbage. So, she has stomach issues, and she’s never been able to get around them. Maybe someone suggested the cabbage juice diet?

Ross Blocher: Oh no!

Carrie Poppy: The detail she left out of this that would make this make a little more sense.

Ross Blocher: The one that we thought about doing for the podcast?

Carrie Poppy: Jilly Juice.

Ross Blocher: Yes! Oh, that sounds so gross!

Carrie Poppy: Maybe? Well, don’t worry. She didn’t do it. So, she knew that cabbage is bad—doesn’t sit well in her stomach. So, instead she—

Ross Blocher: But it’s like—what?—fermented?

Carrie Poppy: She didn’t actually mention Jilly Juice. So, try not to get too distracted by Jilly Juice.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Yeah, sorry.

[01:10:00]

I’m still haunted by the fact that we were considering drinking Jilly Juice.

Carrie Poppy: So, instead she dreamt about cabbage.

Ross Blocher: Okay.

Clip:

Tracey Garbutt Dolan: We can apply that learning to dreams, something that we all have access to, and test it out. I’m going to leave this one out, of the dog shark.

(Carrie puffs in disbelief.)

Just another thing, random thing. But having a stomach issue forever. One thing I did not have in my diet—I don’t like cabbage really that much. Anyhow, I had this dream about cabbage, and it like solved the problem. Anyhow.

(The audience laughs.)

I’m just saying there’s some practical information you can get out of there. It’s like it’s working for you all the time. It knows you. It knows everything about you! It’s just we don’t know how to talk to it.

 

Ross Blocher: So, she’s had chronic stomach problems, but she had one dream about cabbage, and now she no longer does?

(Carrie confirms.)

I’m skeptical of that story.

Carrie Poppy: That’s what happened. So, there you go! What don’t you understand? She had IBS. She knew that cabbage would help. She had a dream about cabbage. The IBS is gone. What don’t you get? (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Just the casual way she told that story, I don’t think it’s right.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, no, the whole thing is not—it is not—

Ross Blocher: If that really happened to me, I would be very ecstatic about it!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, definitely! I don’t think I’d connect the events though. Like, if I dreamt about cabbage? I have IBS. (Laughing.) If I dreamt about cabbage, I wouldn’t think that must have done it!

Ross Blocher: If it was truly predictive where you’re like, “I am going to dream about cabbage to clear my IBS,” and then I had a vivid cabbage dream—what is a cabbage dream anyway?

Carrie Poppy: I don’t know. And so, now does she never diarrhea? Like, now I want to follow around and be like, “Did you diarrhea today? ‘Cause if not, the cabbage dream ran out.” This is why studies are so important.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, we need the journal. Yeah, I’m picturing like—are the Cabbage Patch kids like dancing around? Are you outdoors in a field of cabbage? Are there giant cabbages just rolling around? Wow, what’s your cabbage dream?

Carrie Poppy: I love cabbage, but it’s frankly not worth dreaming about. I’m sorry! If you’re a cabbage listening, I’m sorry.

Ross Blocher: And I need to know more about the dream. Was there just a cabbage sitting on a table somewhere in your dream?

Carrie Poppy: Right! What are you gonna do with a cabbage in your dream?

Ross Blocher: Or was it all cabbages all the time?

Carrie Poppy: You can’t. You can’t!

Ross Blocher: Ah, just what do you do with these stories? There’s so much—I need more information, Tracey.

Carrie Poppy: But then she talked about something that I—a recurring dream I have. I’m curious whether you do. Disgusting bathroom dreams?

Ross Blocher: No, not a thing I have.

Carrie Poppy: Ohhhh, okay!

Ross Blocher: Thank goodness I don’t.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, apologies to the listeners, ‘cause now 30 of you are gonna have the recurring disgusting bathroom dream.

Ross Blocher: Oh, by suggestion.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Sorry. But—

Ross Blocher: Okay. Yeah. Our apologies.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) But I get these. Yeah, it’s so weird.

Ross Blocher: If I do get one, I will be upset with you.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Okay, that’s fair. I mean, I think it usually is that like I actually do need to pee, and then my brain is registering that, and it’s like, (slurring) “You need to find a bathroom,” and then it conjures up these like really disgusting scenes. And like, “But you gotta go! You gotta go in here, where there’s just like endless urinals filled with poop, and you need to hover above it and pee into that!” It’ll be things like that.

Ross Blocher: Oh no! Yeah. I have within recent memory had dreams where I had to pee really bad and then woken up and been like frightened, like, “Uh oh! Uh oh!” And then realized, no, I don’t need to pee. So, when I was young, that definitely was a marker that you need to get thee to a bathroom now. Maybe not so much anymore.

Carrie Poppy: Well, (sighs) she gets the recurring bathroom dreams. She said they’re the weirdest dreams for her, and they’re worth looking at.

Ross Blocher: Are they though?

Carrie Poppy: Yeeees, because her bathroom dreams have evolved. She’s had hundreds of these dreams. She said, “I’m not exaggerating. I’ve had them my whole life. And I’m not running to get to a bathroom or anything like that. I’m showing up in the bathroom.”

Ross Blocher: This whole thread seems more relevant to her IBS than the whole cabbage thing.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, touché! (Laughs.) Yep.

Ross Blocher: I don’t think she’s really healed of it. That’s my theory, my pet theory.

Carrie Poppy: That’s why we have to follow around and ask her about her diarrhea.

“It has never one time—”

Ross Blocher: Tracey, let us in. We’ll be your worst friends ever!

Carrie Poppy: “It has never one time been a bathroom I have ever laid eyes on in real life.” She’s so obsessed with this, whether she’s seen this stuff before.

Ross Blocher: Oh, that her brain came up with a brand-new bathroom. Brains can’t do that. Yes, they can, Tracey. Yes, they can.

Carrie Poppy: She said, “I’ve seen maybe five or less that actually look like a bathroom that we would—you know, like one of the bathrooms in the here and now. They’re so unusual. They used to be decrepit and weird and old and scary, but now it’s almost a joy to look at them and go, ‘What amazing thing am I going to find in this bathroom?’”

[01:15:00]

Ross Blocher: (Snorts.) Okay. Alright. Wow. I do sometimes look forward with anticipation to just having a dream. Like, that is really cool that your brain’s going on this whole epic of creation.

(Carrie agrees.)

That reminded me, one thing that I’ve had before is having like a recurring location that shows up in dreams. Like, I remember I used to dream about visiting my grandma’s house, but it wasn’t my grandma’s house. It was a completely different architecture. And it was like this sprawling multi-story thing with like hidden passages. And I would have that dream. And it didn’t strike me as weird that my grandma was living in this totally different place that wasn’t her house. But then years later, I would visit that place again that I’d only seen in the dream. And that was just such a cool feeling. And I have a few places like that.

Carrie Poppy: That’s cool.

Ross Blocher: But (gasps) I never saw it in real life! Well, okay, Tracey, our brains do that. Our brains are cool.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. All the things in movies I’ve never seen in real life, but I’ve seen them.

Ross Blocher: That doesn’t make me a quantum computer.

Carrie Poppy: She said, “If you want to amp up your dreams, try adding a little meditation. It’s like a steroid.”

Ross Blocher: Before you go to sleep? It’s like a steroid.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I guess before you go to sleep. I assume that’s when she meant.

Ross Blocher: I don’t do it often, because I don’t know if it’s quite worth the payoff, but do you ever try to like fixate on something or influence your dreams and be like, “I really want to dream about this person or this thing.”

Carrie Poppy: I still haven’t fucking had one dream about Sri Harold Klemp. And every once in a while I’ll go and like look at his picture and be like, “You fucker.”

Ross Blocher: Show up in my dream already!

Carrie Poppy: “Show up in my fucking dream.” And it’s just not—he’s just not doing it.

Ross Blocher: Rude. I feel like I’ve had success with that a few times, but not so much that it’s worth trying to repeat a name or a place or a theme or flying or whatever it is into a dream. ‘Cause it usually doesn’t work.

Carrie Poppy: I always have that excitement response if I gain any control, like any lucid dreaming control. I get too excited. And then it’s like immediate.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, then you snap right out of it. Yep.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Then she talks about emotional match dreams. So, it’s like a beginning phase of precognitive dreams, where you might think that you don’t have a match, but you actually do. You may think that you didn’t actually predict anything, but when you look back at it, Ross—(chuckles).

Ross Blocher: Uuugh. And lower your standards of matching and evidence.

Carrie Poppy: Yes! That’s called an emotional match dream, and here’s how she describes it.

Ross Blocher: Oh no.

Clip

Tracey Garbutt Dolan: I had these things happen that I call emotional matches. What that is, it’s kind of like a—for me, it felt like a beginner to precognition. So, I would dream something like driving in a car with a person, and I would have to—you know, I was telling her to slow down; she’s driving out of control. You know, I’m like, “Slow down.” She doesn’t respond. “Slow down!” And then I had to actually escalate to a level that was really uncomfortable for me to get her to actually slow down. And you know, I woke up wondering what the heck was that.

In the day, my wonderful dog at the time had started chewing my computer cord. And I had—you know, I was trying to get her to stop, and she wouldn’t stop. Again, I’m on her, I’m on her. I had to escalate to a level that was so uncomfortable. I hate doing that, like you would hate doing that to your kid, your animal, right? But there was this emotional match that I started noticing that was happening that was the peak of emotion in the dream. The context was completely crazy, but the peak emotion was matching the peak emotion of something that was happening in the day. So, again, I’m telling you these things for you to use…

(Sound fades out.)

 

Carrie Poppy: Did you follow that?

Ross Blocher: It seemed like all of the effort was in setting up the emotion she had during the dream. How did it pay off in real life?

Carrie Poppy: So, she—in the dream, she got mad at a human. And then later in real life, she got mad at her dog.

Ross Blocher: Nope. Not—no, Tracey, no. No.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckling.) It’s an emotional match! But it’s an emotional match, Ross.

Ross Blocher: There are X number of emotions that we experience. If you experience it in your dream, yes, at some point you will experience it in your real life. Didn’t even match that one was with a human, and one was with a dog. No. Does not qualify.

Carrie Poppy: It’s an emotional match!

Ross Blocher: Jury, I would like you to disregard the story that Tracey just told you.

(Carrie laughs.)

Strike it from the court transcript.

Carrie Poppy: Then she started having deja vu inside her dreams.

Ross Blocher: Okay, that happens.

Carrie Poppy: And she said, “Now there’s a potential scientific explanation for that. A familiarity part of the brain.” But then she said, “Fine, we’ll write that one off. But deja vu in dreams!? I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that before.”

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Okay. Wow. Yeah, that’s quite the Whitley Strieber move there to acknowledge that there’s an explanation. And she even assented to it.

[01:20:00]

“But in dreeeams? Impossible!”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I mean, what’s kind of interesting about the claim is like, okay, perhaps the actual mechanism we describe as causing deja vu in most waking cases might not be what would make you think that you experienced it in a dream. You know, you might actually be having a dream about the experience of having deja vu. That’s about the most interesting thing I can say about that. And I would say it’s not very.

Ross Blocher: I don’t know, can we describe those theories about how deja vu is formed? Like, they have something to do with either the brain sort of thinking of something twice in a row, and that sort of echo gives the feeling of familiarity. And then we register that as, “Oh, I’ve sensed this before!”

Carrie Poppy: Interesting.

Ross Blocher: I feel like there’s another popular explanation.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, I don’t feel learned on this, but the explanation I’ve absorbed is that the memory building process is happening early. And so, the action being performed is sort of being logged as if it happened in the past.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Then that seems very much related to—I think another explanation I’ve heard is just that you get the sensation of recall. And that sensation is just sort of devoid of content. But just like you can have the feeling of surety about something, you can have the feeling of repetition. And that that’s just kind of hijacking the moment. Like, “(Gasps.) I’m feeling that sense of recollection!”

Carrie Poppy: Are you tempted to ask people when it stops when they say they have deja vu?

Ross Blocher: I feel like they’ll often tell me on their own.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay.

Ross Blocher: Like, “Oh, oh wow! I feel like you said this to me before.”

Carrie Poppy: “It’s still happening! It’s still happening!”

Ross Blocher: “Okay. Now this is new. Okay.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. My brother used to love to track that in people. If someone said they were having deja vu, he’d be like, “Tell me when it ends.” And they’d just like watch. “Oh, how long is it going to last? Oh, that was a long one!”

(They laugh.)

He loves that stuff.

Ross Blocher: I love it! Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. I mean, point taken that the brain is cool and does really, really interesting things that fall outside the normal range of a normal day. I’m with you on that, Tracey. These are cool experiences, but we disagree on the interpretations.

Carrie Poppy: Well, she’s met inventors in the dream world, and they’re showing her inventions, things she has never laid eyes on before, Ross!

Ross Blocher: Okay, has she gotten patents on any of these?

Carrie Poppy: Well, no, because they’re the other inventors’ inventions, so she wouldn’t do that. You know. So—

Ross Blocher: I’m waiting. Did she invent the toaster strudel?

Carrie Poppy: No, she didn’t try to take anyone’s invention, but she did say global awareness is rising.

Ross Blocher: I feel like this is when you have the dream, and you just wrote like the next hit song, or you have this like brilliant idea that’s going to change the world. And you like write it down right when you wake up. And then you read it later, and you’re like, “Oh, this is ridiculous.”

Carrie Poppy: “This wasn’t that good.” (Laughs.)

She said she now has an awareness in every dream she has, where she’s aware that she’s an imposter, and she’s looking at her environment and looking for things. Okay. I don’t know what that means. She also has a dream sometimes where she’s gotten a tattoo. And I get this dream sometimes where I’ve gotten like a tattoo, and I don’t know why I’ve got it or like I don’t like it, or—the distressing tattoo dream.

Ross Blocher: And I assume you started getting those after you got a tattoo in real life.

Carrie Poppy: No. The most distressing one I’ve had was probably like 10 years ago, so I did have a tattoo. But it was that I had gotten a tattoo of the basketball team, the Lakers—the Lakers’ logo over my entire stomach.

(Ross “oh no”s through laughter.)

Like, bottom of the boobs to like beginning of the pants line, like a foot. And I like looked in the mirror and saw it and started crying. I was like, “Why did I do this?!” And then I also realized that I had done it upside down and backwards, so I could look at it.

(They laugh.)

Which like, at least there’s that.

Ross Blocher: Someone right now is looking down at their Lakers tattoo, and they’re like, “What?! What? It’s a good tattoo!”

Carrie Poppy: “Why didn’t get this upside down and backwards? That’s so smart!” Okay, but her tattoo was of the Air Force symbol, but she’s never been in the Air Force. So, she’s telling the story, I’m waiting for the Air Force shoe to drop, and it never does.

Ross Blocher: Okay.

Carrie Poppy: There’s no—there’s nothing—okay, tell me how you met an Air Force person after that if you want to tell this story. It’s not precognitive.

Ross Blocher: She’s just found a really clever way to get to a point in her life where she can stand up in front of an audience and tell them about her dreams. Well done, Tracey.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. Everything you’re describing, I’m like none of this is real.

Ross Blocher: (Faking disapproval.) What an attitude, Carrie! None of this is real. I mean, look at the sky right now. What is that light that’s getting bigger and coming toward us?

Carrie Poppy: Oh!

Ross Blocher: It’s—frankly, I would describe it as jumbo right now.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It’s like an enormous sun-like object coming to swallow us.

[01:25:00]

Oh, it’s a jumbotrooon!

Ross Blocher: Oh, that makes sense! And wait, did you just say none of this is real? Because it says none of this is real!

Carrie Poppy: Oh my gosh, that must have been implanted into my mind in a download!

(Ross laughs.)

Okay, let’s see. What does this say? What does this say? “Ever ask yourself, ‘Is any of this real?’ Or do you wonder if your poop can tell the future?”

Ross Blocher: “Wanna know if you should go in that dark tunnel under the ruins? Or do you just need a friend to believe all over you?” That’s a great phrase.

Carrie Poppy: “Hosts and BFFs, Sarah Sinkhole and Doomsday Damini bring you all that, plus wild theories, hot takes, and occasional rants on None of this is Real, the podcast for all things mysterious and weird.”

Ross Blocher: “So, come hang out and cry-laugh into the void every Tuesday on all platforms. Visit NoneofthisisRealPodcast.com. Follow them on Instagram, and subscribe on all of the podcast platforms. And remember, none of this is real.”

Promo:

(Pleasant school announcement chimes.)

Janet Varney: Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I’m here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience—one you have no choice but to embrace, because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls!

(Pleasant chimes.)

 

Carrie Poppy: Okay, then she talks a little about that sleep deprivation protocol. So, if you guys want to do this—which why would you?

Ross Blocher: We don’t recommend it.

Carrie Poppy: But for a couple weeks, she forced herself to do very short sleep cycles every night, waking up at 3:30 or 4:30AM, and then she’d do a remote viewing in the pre-dawn hours with her eyes closed and a paper next to her.

Ross Blocher: Oh! I feel like this came up at the IAC, where they would recommend that as a technique.

Carrie Poppy: Makes sense.

Ross Blocher: Setting an alarm for the middle of the night, and then as you go back to sleep, then try to remote view. And pop! You get outta your body, and you’re off to the races.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I’m picturing it. You know, I get up in the middle of the night, I come to my desk and put a piece of paper down and close my eyes. Yeah.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And you’re still in a partly hallucinatory state. Yeah.

Carrie Poppy: I bet you get stuff. She said, “Just follow your body’s rhythms. Let it do its thing.” Every time she did this, she woke up, and she had the most fascinating dreams every time. And they were happening so fast, she hardly got them out.

Ross Blocher: Uh, you know what? Actually, I’ll sign on to that. Yeah, sure. If you want interesting dreams, that’s a good way to go about it.

Carrie Poppy: Well, depending on what your phenotype is. You got bipolar, don’t do this.

Ross Blocher: Oh.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah. She also said to create a night version of working at your desk. This sounded kind of lovely. She was talking about the second sleep, this concept that some people used to have in times of yore where you would get up in the candlelight and write poetry or think about things, ponder life, write in your journal. And it was kind of expected that it would be off tempo with the rest of your family or house. You weren’t expected to do this at the same time as everyone else. It was truly alone contemplation time. So, she was encouraging this sort of behavior. If you wake up in the middle of the night, and you’re kind of like, “I could go back to sleep, or I could get up.” Get up! Go to your desk, have your nighttime writing thing.

But she’s describing quite a disruptive style of sleep at this point. Sounds nice.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. I mean, if your life affords it, and you don’t need to show up at work at 8AM, you know, good for you.

Carrie Poppy: But it sounds nice.

Ross Blocher: Sure!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Alright. And she said also in the morning, write two pages as soon as you get up. Two pages of anything, just write, start writing. Okay. Yeah, sure, good advice, especially if you want to be a writer. (Chuckles.) Yeah.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, absolutely. Might get some gold.

Carrie Poppy: Then you mentioned gamma waves. She did talk about gamma waves for a while. She talked about how lucid dreaming appears to be a more active state than regular dreaming. So, she wanted to know, “Is gamma a doorway?”

And she said, “The people who study this, the dream specialists, they’re really leaning into this right now—that the potential that lucid dreaming and the gamma stage is some kind of intermediary, different state of consciousness. I don’t even think people know about this! So, I wanted to know where else do you see gamma waves? Where else is this anomaly going on? Right? So, it’s happening in lucid dreaming and in the Dalai Lama’s monks. And it’s showing up in seizures, schizophrenia—” (Chuckles.) So, with Schizophrenics, she says, “It’s not all the time, but when they have what’s called a positive episode, they have trouble differentiating fantasy and reality.”

[01:30:00]

“That’s a positive episode, and that’s when gamma’s present. So, that’s interesting!” It’s another—she hears the other interpretation, then she’s like, “And that’s another way you could see it. Anyway, back to what I was saying.”

Ross Blocher: I’m just trying to think of what she wants to get out of laying this information down for all of us. If her goal is still just to establish that things are weirder than we all think and that we’re more amazing than we all think, I guess she’s done her job.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It feels to me like this compulsive disclosure honesty, which I’ll give her credit for. But it feels to me like she passes over her explanation, and then in her periphery, she’s like, “Oh, that reminds me there was this other—there was a scientific explanation for that I heard. Well, I’ll tell you that too. I mean, I don’t find this persuasive, but to you, I’m putting it out there. I’m an honest person. Anyway, moving on.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Okay. Sounds right. Yeah, I don’t know enough about sleep studies in comparisons with the Dalai Lama’s monks and stuff.

(Carrie agrees with a chuckle.)

So. Or schizophrenic brain states. So, I’m sure there’s interesting material to be mined there, but it looked like she hasn’t really tried to close the loop on it, herself.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. And she seems to be saying sort of—well, we’ll get there. I think she has some mental health denialism going on. So, here she is talking about gamma waves and mental health.

Clip:

Tracey Garbutt Dolan: A healthy mind will have bursts of gamma for a certain amount of time, and then it will go—like, will resume normal life or other brain states. When someone has a positive episode, like seizures or schizophrenia, it gets stuck in drive. And so, an unhealthy mind has trouble navigating those realms, whatever that realm is. Which is the question. What is that realm? Because we don’t—we call that fantasy, that DID—you know, Multiple Personality Disorder. We really don’t understand what the heck is going on there. Schizophrenia, we don’t really understand what is going on there. We don’t know if they’re accessing something that’s an actual reality. We do not know. We don’t. And as deep as you go, you realize that they don’t actually know.

 

Carrie Poppy: Philosophically true. We don’t know anything. You know? Is that worth saying every time we think about anything? I’m not so sure.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, well, I feel like this is kind of related to the God of the Gaps thing, where you just want to be able to point to an area of scientific ignorance and be like, “Aha! And here is where I can shove all of these ideas! Because you can’t fully explain this, or at least I can’t.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. And I mean, I don’t know, I’d argue we can explain some of this pretty well. Schizophrenia is 80% heritable. I mean, yeah, we don’t know some of the factors, but it’s not like a mystery like, you know, Agatha Christie here.

Ross Blocher: Uh-huh. We keep talking about brain waves. So, there are delta waves, theta waves, alpha waves, beta waves, and gamma waves. And these all correspond to certain ranges of Hertz that the brain is—or the signal measured from the brain is oscillating at. Yeah, brains are interesting things. Yeah. I don’t know what to do with any of that. I think she’s just found an area where she can just kind of say, “Aha! I’m sure eventually someone will find validation for all these things that I believe in somewhere in these brain states.”

But I feel like Tracey and people of her ilk aren’t actively supporting science or like, “Let’s get to the bottom of this and actually solve it!” I think they’re just happy that they have the little area of scientific ignorance that they’ve identified.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I don’t remember if it was at the Oscars, but one year I saw Viola Davis present to Meryl Streep, and I loved Viola Davis, and I don’t really like Meryl Streep. But Viola Davis clearly likes Meryl Streep. And she—

Ross Blocher: I just pictured Meryl Streep as a listener to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, and she was listening, and she’s like, “(Gasps.) Carrie doesn’t like me! What more do I need to do?!”

Carrie Poppy: (Inaudible.) I like her in Defending Your Life a lot.

Ross Blocher: Okay. There you go, Meryl. We like you, Merly.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, anyway. Oh, where am I going? Where are we going with this? Okay. Meryl Streep—

Ross Blocher: I was just—I was worried about Meryl that she was gonna be offended.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, shit. Why am I talking about her? Oh, Viola Davis! Great actress, says to Meryl Streep, (thoughtfully) “Where do you go when you get into a character?”

Ross Blocher: Is this like an Actor’s Studio kind of thing?

Carrie Poppy: Kind of, but like she’s so clearly actually feeling it that I was like, “Viola Davis, wow. Like, you need to know where does she go!” But I feel like I’m hearing the same sentiment here. It’s just a poetic, (airily) “Where do people with mental illness go? We can’t possibly know. What happens?” It’s like, yeah, that’s philosophically true. There are other ways to view the experience besides the philosophical way, though. There are additional interpretations. We don’t always have to run to poetry and walk away.

Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. I always think of it in terms of filters.

[01:35:00]

You can look at the world through that philosophical filter, or the filter of doubt, or the filter of science. And you know, you’re supposed to just jump back and forth between them all the time. ‘Cause, when something doesn’t make sense, you know, zoom out a bit, and look at it in a different way.

Carrie Poppy: Weeeeell, anyway. It was quite a talk to get through. And at the very end, she—

Ross Blocher: No kidding. This is like an hour and a half. These talks were long.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. And at the very end, she left us with this.

Clip:

Tracey Garbutt Dolan: So, I believe we are the greatest quantum computers there will ever be. We just haven’t discovered ourselves yet. Thank you.

(Applause.)

Did I finish in the nick of time? Thank you all so much for coming. I know I ramble and off road like crazy.

 

Ross Blocher: So, I would have been there clapping and then thinking, “Wait, why am I clapping? Wait, what does she even mean by quantum computer?”

Carrie Poppy: (Giggles.) And I would also be clapping, but be annoyed about it three seconds earlier.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: Why even use the term quantum computer? That didn’t apply to anything that was said that whole talk.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I think she just means complex. I think she just means complex. And I’ll agree. The mind is complex. We build technology around the human experience, so that is kind of to be expected, but yeah.

Ross Blocher: As far as I can tell, there was zero connection to quantum computing and zero understanding of what quantum computing is.

Carrie Poppy: There is no way she would pull off that Trudeau move where the reporter was like, (nasally) “Can you give me a definition of quantum computing?” And he said—

Ross Blocher: Oh yeah! Oh, and he actually did! I think he gave a cogent one.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, did you ever see this?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, yeah. I know what you’re talking about. But he was ready!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it wasn’t like, you know, a mind blowing—but he was like, “Yeah, I know what that is. I can explain it.” (Laughs.) It was impressive. Anyway, I feel like you’d ask her, “So, what is quantum?”

And she’d be like, (freezing up) “It’s… small.”

Ross Blocher: I like to think that would have been my question if I was in line. And then she would have said I was out of line.

Carrie Poppy: (Scoffs a laugh.) I’m not using quantum in my everyday life to make claims, so I guess I’m off the hook for not having a great definition of quantum. But if I were pressed for it, I think I would be—okay, okay. Here’s what I’d say. I think quantum computing is when the options are more than binary.

(Ross confirms.)

Really? Is that it?! Oh, great!

Ross Blocher: Yeah. You can perform calculations where there is more than just yes or no, off or on and—

Carrie Poppy: Oh, well, I see why that appeals to this poor woman who can’t filter out her inputs.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Metaphorically there’s a connection there.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. She must feel like that. Yeah.

Ross Blocher: Quantum phenomena are at a scale far, far magnitudes of order below the scale of firing of neurons in our brains. I have to throw that out there. It just doesn’t make sense to talk about our brain functioning or even consciousness in quantum terms. Quantum is so small. And when people say like “quantum leap” as like a big thing, no! It’s like the smallest thing imaginable.

Carrie Poppy: It’s like a little tiny, teeny tiny.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Well, a lot of thoughts there, but I think at least the way I can pull all of that together—that soup of dreams, and remote viewing—

Carrie Poppy: Thinking in pictures.

Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. Right brain, left brain.

Carrie Poppy: Experimenting on yourself, AI as a left brain metaphor.

Ross Blocher: I think the common thread for Tracey is that all of these things just show that we’re more than what we think we are.

Carrie Poppy: Which is like, well, what do you think we are, Tracey? Are we more than that too?

Ross Blocher: Right, because I feel like there’s some assumption that we’re kind of crummy. Just the way that we seem to each other and ourselves is just not enough.

Carrie Poppy: You’re right.

Ross Blocher: Maybe we just need to raise the level of how we see humans in general.

Carrie Poppy: Everybody does this to some degree, but like there’s some self-serving here, in that she’s like, “The best way you could be is to think the way I do in pictures.” (Laughs.) I mean, that’s making the world revolve around you a little bit.

Ross Blocher: She’s noticed something that’s unusual about herself. I doubt unprecedented. I’m sure there’s many people whose brains function the way that hers does, but yeah, yeah. She’s almost like turned that into an aspirational thing for everybody else, which is a weird flex. I think at some point you just realize like, “Oh, in this respect, I’m different than everybody else. Well, that’s cool.” But if it’s something to do with you, just constitutionally, who you are—that’s not something you can pitch to other people as an aspirational thing. Like, “Hey! I have a weird fixation on memorizing numbers. If you memorized pi, you’d be so much happier, Carrie. You should really try pi memorization!”

[01:40:00]

I realized like, no, it’s not for everybody.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is something that we point out with religious leaders a lot is that globalizing of the idiosyncratic experience so that all your followers are like, “Why isn’t this fulfilling for me? It was fulfilling for Guru Dave.”

Ross Blocher: “Boy, I hate it when people talk about my elbows. I just feel so demeaned when people talk about my elbows. You know what? In my religion, elbows shall never be mentioned!”

Carrie Poppy: Right, exactly. “And then everyone’s going to feel better, because everyone must feel how I feel.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And you know, sometimes it’s for good. You know, Ellen White was a vegetarian, and so that got written into her faith. The Seventh-day Adventists, you know, now have all kinds of weird back formations of why they don’t eat meat. Good on you.

Carrie Poppy: They’re kooky reasons.

Ross Blocher: Why did you use the word kooky, Carrie? Why’d you have to say kooky?

Carrie Poppy: ‘Cause they did.

(They chuckle.)

Ross Blocher: Touché. So, yeah, Tracey—I mean, we’re all pretty cool as it is. I don’t know. You don’t need to make up stuff to make us cool. Humans are cool. It’s great being a human.

Carrie Poppy: Well, I think her mind’s interesting. I think something interesting and anomalous is happening, and I’m curious about it. And I don’t know. I just—her idea that she can, that it means she can physically go somewhere and withdraw information, that’s just a whole other claim that you need to give me a lot more to verify. You need to test it. And the tests right now are not super impressive.

Ross Blocher: When looking her up, I saw that she had a TEDtalk.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, cool.

Ross Blocher: It wasn’t about any of this stuff, and it was 2017. So, just a mere seven years ago. At the time, she was just Tracey Garbutt. She had not married Richard Dolan yet. So, maybe she wasn’t involved in the UFO world, but it was called “Saving Our Hidden Visionaries: Alienation”—nothing to do with aliens—”and Authenticity in Schools”. And yeah, it was just about how a lot of people either leave school or get discouraged, because they don’t feel a connection to other people. Here are some programs that you can try to get people to have dinners together or hang out in an inflatable swimming pool or—you know, whatever it is. Like, little methods just to get people to feel comfortable and make connections. It was all completely unobjectionable and very nice. Nothing to do with any of this stuff.

So, you can tell that she has just this kind of, I don’t know, heart for people and meaning and engagement. And that’s all great. We haven’t described her either. She’s an attractive blonde woman.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, that’s right. That is what she looks like. Pretty blonde hair.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. She could be a presenter on Fox News if she wanted to be. And so, I just—I wonder how she met Richard Dolan and how they kind of formed their relationship and if he got her into all of this kind of psi related phenomenon. He focuses more on UFO history, and she seems to have really gotten into the whole remote viewing and dream interpretation side of things.

Carrie Poppy: I bet she was a fan of his, but I don’t have a good defense of that. But that’s my sense of it.

Ross Blocher: Well, she seems like a nice person.

Carrie Poppy: Totally. I forgot to tell you also that she put up a slide where she spelled ayahuasca in a very cute way, and psilocybin.

Ross Blocher: Oh, I’ve seen so many fun spellings of ayahuasca. Is it the I-A—oh! Okay. She starts out with the A-Y-A, aya-huu-ah-ska. Okay! Added an extra syllable there. I’m trying to think, if I was giving a presentation for a group of people, I feel like at least I have the trigger where if I’m misspelling something, I’ll realize you are spelling in ignorance. Go check this out before you finish writing this. And I’ll do that if I’m writing someone a text, let alone giving a public presentation.

Carrie Poppy: But if you thought in pictures, you might find that process a lot more laborious.

Ross Blocher: There I go, imputing my own personal tendencies onto other people for their self-worth. Okay. Well, that was, uh—that was hard to follow without the interpretation. So, thank you, Carrie, for parsing that.

Carrie Poppy: My pleasure. Thank you for coming along. Tracey, If you’re out there, come on the show anytime. Well, not anytime. We should be there. Don’t just take over the feed, Tracey.

Ross Blocher: Fair. (Laughs.) It’s rude. Yeah, maybe we can work out some mutually beneficial ways to log some of these connections that you’re making. ‘Cause I feel like if you’re going to go to the trouble to say that your dreams are predictive or make these other kind of grandiose claims, that we need a little better documentation.

Carrie Poppy: That seems right.

Ross Blocher: Yeah.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah!

Ross Blocher: And then if they turn out that way, cool!

Carrie Poppy: Great.

Ross Blocher: You’ve changed the world! But if not, well then.

Carrie Poppy: Oh well. We can go back to the other stuff.

Ross Blocher: We can go back to being humans, but that’s pretty cool, Tracey!

Carrie Poppy: There’s a bunch of stuff to do. You could watch the whole Dick Van Dyke show!

Ross Blocher: Alright. Well, that’s it for this episode.

Carrie Poppy: Our theme music is by Brian Keith Dalton.

Ross Blocher: Our administrative manager is Ian Kremer.

Carrie Poppy: You can support this and all our investigations by going to MaximumFun.org/join.

[01:45:00]

Ross Blocher: Yes, please. Thank you. Do. Also, I’m just going to say again—haven’t yet heard from any families that are going to Camp Omni. And I know that takes some planning. You’re looking at your schedules. That’s good. But just know money’s still on the table. Camperships, $500, CampOmni.org. Learn more. Think about whether you want to go to the SoCal camp, hang out with me and my son—or at least send your kids to do that. Email info@ohnopodcast.com and say, “Camp Omni Campership”.

Carrie Poppy: Did you tell the fine people that I once used a Blocher scholarship?

Ross Blocher: Oh, I did not! Oh, yeah!

Carrie Poppy: When I went to TAM, The Amazing Meeting, for the first time, I couldn’t afford it! Ross gave me a Blocher scholarship for $100.

Ross Blocher: I love that. Well, get a Blocher scholarship to Camp Omni.

Carrie Poppy: This could be you! Then Ross will start a podcast with you.

Ross Blocher: That’s the usual order of things, indeed.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, I also want to say that today was my final final at Harvard Extension School. Thank you! Thank you, thank you.

Ross Blocher: Congratulations! That’s gotta be a load off.

Carrie Poppy: Yes, I’ll have a Topics in Human Behavior certificate shortly. I’ll brag about it then.

Ross Blocher: And then, like Tracey Garbutt Dolan, you can have a Magna Cum Laude.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, we’ll see. I don’t know if they do that. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: I checked my transcript. I was a Magna Cum Laude.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, were you? Congratulations.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Me and Tracey have that in common. Do I put that on my intros to anything? No.

Carrie Poppy: I should break out my folder with all my certificates and just make like a long honorific for myself. Class Clown 2014, USC.

Ross Blocher: I was walking out of work today and someone asked me what I was reading right now. And I said, “Oh, I’m reading a book on the history of Satanism.” Because I’m reading a book about the satanic temple, which is quite good.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, is it Speak of the Devil?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, by Joseph P Laycock, but I just said it was a book on the history of Satanism, because that was easier than a more thorough response. And so, she turns to the newer employee next to her and says, “Ross is an exorcist.”

(They chuckle.)

And like, I was like on my way out and I’m like, “Yeah, it’s a long story.”

She’s like, “(Gasps.) There’s so many things about you!”

It’s like there’s context there. We should definitely talk about it sometime, but okay. Bye! See you!

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) I was wearing my “aliens built earth” baseball cap to the coffee shop I go to. And the guy working there—I could just see him reading it and taking my order and glancing at the hat and taking my order, glancing at the hat.

Ross Blocher: And then you’re like, “Uh-oh, you can’t—you’re judging me. I need to give you context. I need you to understand why I’m wearing this hat.”

Carrie Poppy: I just said, “Are you deciding whether I think aliens built Earth?”

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: That’s a good way to broach the topic.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, he’s like, “I was just thinking you always have cool hats. I was just thinking every time you come in here, you have cool hats.”

And I was like, “No, you’re wondering whether I think aliens built Earth. Well, I don’t!”

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: How dare you judge me? For the hat that I chose to wear.

Carrie Poppy: They also go, “Oh no!” when I come in the coffee shop. And the first few times, I was just like they don’t like me here. (Laughs and snorts.)

Ross Blocher: So, you feel like you need to overrule the first impression, which was not good.

Carrie Poppy: Well, no, now I get it. They’re referring to my podcast.

Ross Blocher: Oh, okay. They know, and they say, “Oh no.” Okay.

Carrie Poppy: But I was just like, “Oh, what? I’m sorry.”

Ross Blocher: Funny. And remember!

Clip:

(Camera shutters click throughout.)

Justin Trudeau: Normal computers work—either there’s power going through a wire or not. One or a zero. They’re binary systems. What quantum states allow for is much more complex information to be encoded into a single bit. A regular computer bit is either a one or a zero, on or off. A quantum state could be much more complex than that. Because as we know, things can be both particle and wave at the same time. And the uncertainty around quantum states allows us to encode more information into a much smaller computer. So, that’s what’s exciting about quantum computing, and that’s what we—

(Cheers and applause.)

Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

Clip:

Music: A bouncy beat.

Dave Shumka: (Rhythmically.) If you need a laugh, and you’re on the go, try S-T-O-P P-O-D-C-A-S-T-I—augh. (Sighs.) Hm.

(Music stops.)

Graham Clark: Were you trying to put the name of the podcast there?

Dave: Yeah, I’m trying to spell it, but it’s tricky.

Graham: Let me give it a try.

Dave: Okay!

(Music resumes.)

Graham: (Rhythmically.) If you need a laugh, and you’re on the go, call S-T-O-P P-A-D—ah, it’ll never fit!

Dave: No, it will! Let me try.

(Music resumes.)

(Rhythmically.) If you need a laugh, and you’re on the go, try S-T-O-P P-O-D-C-O-O. UGH! We are so close!

Graham: Stop Podcasting Yourself.

Dave: A podcast, from MaximumFun.org.

Graham: If you need a laugh, and you’re on the go.

(Music ends.)

 

[01:50:00]

Transition: Cheerful ukulele chord.

Speaker 1: Maximum Fun.

Speaker 2: A worker-owned network.

Speaker 3: Of artist owned shows.

Speaker 4: Supported—

Speaker 5: —directly—

Speaker 6: —by you!

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