Transcript
[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 do not 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 Ross Blocher.
Ross Blocher: No, you’re not.
Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) Fact check. Fact check.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, that’ll be my first fact check of the day. There will be more.
Carrie Poppy: Okay. That was a test, and you passed. I’m Carrie Poppy.
Ross Blocher: I’m Ross Blocher. And we are going to tell you about a wild character, a real standout for me this year.
Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) At the Conscious Life Expo? Or just in your life?
Ross Blocher: Yeah—in my life, yeah. It’s not like I meet people at the Conscious Life Expo and then I meet equally outlier people just day to day.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that’s fair. (Laughs.)
Ross Blocher: Dr. Steven Schwartz.
Carrie Poppy: Dr. Steven Schwartz. Not the guy who wrote Wicked, Pippin, and—
Ross Blocher: Don’t picture Wicked.
Carrie Poppy: Okay, this really is off the top of my head. Let me think about this.
Ross Blocher: Wait, wait, wait. Hunchback of Notre Dame?
Carrie Poppy: He did the Hunchback of Notre Dame, yep. And oh, there is a third one and we’re going to hear about it! Is it Godspell? It might be Godspell.
Ross Blocher: Oh, that sounds right. Now I got to look it up.
Carrie Poppy: Okay. Yeah, test me.
Ross Blocher: Stephen Schwartz, the musician, is with a P-H.
Carrie Poppy: Yes. Yeah, we are now looking up the wrong person, just to be clear.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, we are derailed. Oh, The Prince of Egypt! That’s fun. More animation. Oh, and Pocahontas. I didn’t know he was—you know, I did know he was tied to…
Carrie Poppy: Oh! Mm! I didn’t know that. Lyricist or lyricist and composer?
Ross Blocher: He’s as old as my parents. He could be my dad.
Carrie Poppy: Again, just for the listeners, this is the wrong person we are currently looking up and need to know more about.
Ross Blocher: We’re just biding time until—okay, he contributed lyrics to a number of successful films, including Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Prince of Egypt, and Enchanted! Oh, look at you. Okay. Well, we’ve covered animation. That’s what I care about.
Carrie Poppy: If that Stephen Schwartz would like to come on the show, he is also invited, as is this Steven Schwartz!
Ross & Carrie: Doctor Vibe.
Carrie Poppy: Whose name is spelled S-T-E-V-E-N. Okay, so! Dr. Vibe.
Ross Blocher: Oh my goodness.
Carrie Poppy: Never wrote a musical, never wrote a movie, has written a book.
Ross Blocher: And some music.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, that’s right. You’re right. You know, as I was saying, never made a movie. I was like, Carrie, last night, you watched a movie that he was in. What are you saying?!
Ross Blocher: Now, wait—did you pay 10 bucks to rent that?
Carrie Poppy: No, I paid $13 to buy that.
Ross Blocher: Oh, you own it?
Carrie Poppy: Yes, I own it.
Ross Blocher: Well, then I want to watch it now.
Carrie Poppy: Totally.
Ross Blocher: Because—oh, well, we’ll get to his film. He is president and founder of Bioharmonic Technologies. But he is also a chiropractor, a visionary tech designer.
Carrie Poppy: Mm! I wonder if he designs visionary tech or if he’s a tech designer who’s visionary.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, I would imagine the latter. And a sound alchemist.
Carrie Poppy: Ooh, that’s a good term.
Ross Blocher: And a regenerative medicine expert. These are all appellations he gives himself, including Dr. Vibe, which he put in quotes on his own Dr. Steven Schwartz screen. I love that when he introduced that term to us, he said, “People call me Dr. Vibe. And do you know why they call me that?”
And I’m thinking, “You call you that!” Nobody just spontaneously is like, “You’re Dr. Vibe, that’s who you are.” No, you sell a vibe system.
Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Yeah, yeah, yeah. You introduced yourself that way. That’s why they call you that. That’s what I’ll be calling you. Also, your website’s called that. Anyway, yes, he also sells vibrating beds. That’s what he’s getting at. Sound beds that vibrate for a lot of money and then says, “Don’t worry, you’re going to feel better after you get out of the bed.”
Ross Blocher: That’s a very good summation of what he’s all about, because there’s going to be a lot of sound and fury and science—
Carrie Poppy: Signifying nothing at all.
Ross Blocher: Exactly. Science-y sounding terms. All of it is to get you to buy this bed. And maybe his app and download some downloads there, and get his book, and watch the movie that he’s in. But yeah, you’re right. It’s really about selling these beds that vibrate.
Carrie Poppy: And cleverly, you will still need every other medicine and treatment you already take.
Ross Blocher: Right, but this is just a force multiplier.
Carrie Poppy: It is just—helps pave the way for your body to be perfectly primed for that chemo or whatever. Thank god. (Sardonically.) Thank god you’re here, Dr. Vibe!
Ross Blocher: “He’s the founder and president of Bioharmonic Technologies, which is a human optimization technology and therapeutic music company created to raise the vibration of the planet and harmonize humanity using sound light, frequency, and vibration.”
Carrie Poppy: Ah, that’s a lot of clauses.
Ross Blocher: “He has been the clinic director and chief overseeing practitioner of numerous multidisciplinary alternative integrative medicine facilities throughout Colorado.” (Chuckles.)
[00:05:00]
You’re already getting a sense for how he’ll just add every extra word that he can. Yeah, Colorado is kind of where he had his breakthrough moment that led him into this new world. Until then, he was a chiropractor. Oh, it says, “Dr. Steve studied sports medicine and biology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and holds a doctorate of chiropractic degree from New York Chiropractic College.”
Carrie Poppy: Nice.
Ross Blocher: Okay, but how did we find him? In fact, I did not find him. You found him. How did you find him?
Carrie Poppy: If I recall correctly, I was trying to go to something else.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. I was on my way to hear something about light language, which I was looking forward to. And I think I was trying to convince you to join me. You had something else on your dance card, but then somehow you encountered this guy who was not in the printed brochure. There was supposed to be another talk at his time and location called Soulmate Search. But I guess something happened with the Soulmate Search. It was canceled.
Carrie Poppy: (Chuckling.) So, I met my soulmate, Dr. Steven Schwartz.
Ross Blocher: And you were like, “No, actually I’m going to go see this guy.” And I think that particular day we just hadn’t seen each other yet or very little.
I was like, “Alright, well, I’ll go join you. ‘Cause I want to be in the same room as you.”
(Carrie “aw”s.)
Whoever this Dr. Vibe guy is, whatever.
Carrie Poppy: I’ll soak in his vibe to be around yours.
If I recall correctly, I was walking down the hall, maybe even to go to the bathroom, and he like intercepted me. He was corralling the way like a street magician is like, “Hey, everyone! Come over here, it’s time to do my show!”
Ross Blocher: I 100% believe that, because he is the carnival barker epitomized. I’m sure if you got within his halo, he body-routed you into his talk, to use a Scientology term.
Carrie Poppy: And also, there was a camera crew following him. There was someone with a pretty nice follow-cam on his shoulder following him around, and someone else holding the cord. So, at first I thought is this guy like really important? But then he said to me something like, “They called me last minute, so I get to be the star.”
Ross Blocher: When I arrived, that was the first thing I heard him say was, “I’m the featured speaker of the day, everyone!”
(Carrie laughs.)
And I think if you’re not on the brochure, what does it mean that you’re the featured speaker of the day?
Carrie Poppy: (Cackling.) Oh, I love that. To be featured and not be in the program is really mind blowing.
Ross Blocher: I mean, this guy is just, self-promotion epitomized and embodied as well.
Carrie Poppy: Spin.
(Ross agrees.)
Maybe that’s what he means by vibe. When you vibe so hard, it spins around.
Ross Blocher: Man, this guy’s chutzpah and bravado as a self-promoter is, to me, stunning. Head spinning.
Carrie Poppy: Which is fun, because he doesn’t totally look the part. He’s kind of a wiry little man. In my mind’s eye, which is not very strong. What did he look like, Ross?
Ross Blocher: Okay, well, he’s—clearly, he has Jewish features. He looks like he could be in my mother’s side of the family. If you introduced me to him and said, “Hey, this is your cousin, Steven,” I’d be like, hey, Steven! It really does look like he fits in. Curly hair, kind of thinning on the top. Prominent nose.
Carrie Poppy: What I really remember is being in his orbit, feeling like, well, this is what I’m doing now. So, I went in, you went in. And I would say it was pretty low attended, right?
Ross Blocher: Yeah. He was sort of biding his time, hoping more people would show up and that his hangers-on were corralling more people into the room. I think we got up to maybe 30 people. It was a small room, and by the end it was decently full, especially for not being on the program.
Carrie Poppy: As the featured speaker.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, I think he was doing okay in that respect. You know, if you told me he was Gene Wilder’s son, I would believe it.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, he does look like Gene Wilder in that photo you’re showing me. Whoa!
Ross Blocher: That’s a good approximation to hold in your head.
Carrie Poppy: Totally! Yeah. Gene Wilder, less big bushy hair.
Ross Blocher: Also, every time I see him—including this time—he will have a button up shirt that is halfway buttoned down, show off the chest hair.
Carrie Poppy: And the necklaces?
Ross Blocher: Man, just this guy, the vibe he has, Mr. Vibe—no, Dr. Vibe! Dr. Vibe, excuse me.
Carrie Poppy: How dare you?
Ross Blocher: And yeah, he’s wearing some kind of a medallion. He never explained that to us, but I’m sure it is some sort of energy focusing something rather that you could buy from him if you wanted to.
Carrie Poppy: Next time I meet him, I want to just like keep one upping him and being like, “Oh my god, what a coincidence! I’m Judge Vibe! That’s so funny. Oh, I’m President Vibe.”
Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Chairman Vibe. This guy has so many interesting attributes. None of them which I personally like, but it makes him stand out. He’s also just like a slick salesman and kind of a schmoozer. And we’ll find more of that as well, as we interact with Dr. Steven Schwartz.
Carrie Poppy: And boy, is he going to want to interact with me just from the get-go—
[00:10:00]
—just really singled in on me. I really don’t know what happened.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. I can’t wait to hear more of this story, but what you told me already was—I was going to say entertaining. I don’t know.
(Carrie agrees.)
It’s a bit cringey. It’s a bit entertaining. And before we get too far, I’ll also mention just the title of the talk, which was “Discover the Missing Link”. And he said, “They asked me for four key words for the title,” which is great insight into Conscious Life Expo. I guess they just reach out to everyone. “Give us some words to use.”
Carrie Poppy: The four-word title. Okay.
Ross Blocher: And he said, “None of them were ‘missing link’. I don’t know where that came from.”
Carrie Poppy: (Squawks.) No way!
Ross Blocher: Yeah, they just kind of determined that for him. But somehow, even though he said he did this last minute, he had printed flyers about his talk, called “Clearing Cellular Memory with Dr. Steven Schwartz” that listed the date, the time. So, he had time to do printing. So—
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Could have been that day though.
Ross Blocher: I feel like with almost everything Steven Schwartz says—
Carrie Poppy: You get the vibe.
Ross Blocher: You get a certain idea, but then you realize, oh, he nudged that. He spun that a bit. But this was like professional printing. This wasn’t just like off your inkjet printer.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that’s true. It’s pretty too.
Ross Blocher: So, he knew at least a week in advance and made the website at least, but he wasn’t on the printed brochure. Which happens. You know, I get it. Organizing events is hard. It’s a lot of work, so I’m not faulting them for that. But I’ll just read the description of the talk, which I think is representative. “Discover the missing link for long term healing and human optimization. Cellular memory is the most fundamental and the most misunderstood aspect of our—” Actually it says, “aspect or our nervous system.”
“It can optimize human potential and can imprison you to a life of illness, addiction, and despair.” Seems like you want “or” as the conjunction there. It can optimize human potential. That’s good. Or can imprison you to a life of illness. But you know, who am I to nitpick? “Join Dr. Steven—”
Carrie Poppy: You’re not a doctor.
Ross Blocher: That’s right. I don’t have a doctor in front of my name. I’m just a mister. “Join Dr. Steven Schwartz as he explains basic physiology of—”
Carrie Poppy: Okay, that part’s almost right.
Ross Blocher: “—cellular memory, as well as technology that can”—comma—“release, reprogram, and optimize cellular memory—” (Chuckling.)
Carrie Poppy: He just took a breath there.
Ross Blocher: “—through bioresonances.” Yeah, he was writing, he’s like (gasps).
Carrie Poppy: He’s like, “Jesus, I gotta let myself—” (Laughs.)
Ross Blocher: I mean, I’m half at these conferences and the various things that we go to just for the bad copy editing.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, and what’s really unfortunate is I followed all of that, and I was like, “Oh yeah, the missing link. I get it. I get where—” (Laughs.) I get exactly what they meant.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, it’s fair.
Carrie Poppy: But only because of the tortured logic I’ve been sitting in rooms with for so long. But I bet that I saw “memory” on that board. And I was like, “You’re catching my attention, and you have a thing about cellular memory and something that sounds like psychological trauma living in the body. Please. I’m in.”
Ross Blocher: Okay, so thematically also. Not only was this carnival barker pulling you in, but you thought, “Oh, this is kind of relevant to my particular domain of interest.”
Carrie Poppy: That’s what I’m guessing.
Ross Blocher: And I can’t recall right now if he said that during our talk, but definitely I’ve seen him talk about trauma.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, yeah! I’ll play you a clip from the movie I watched last night that he’s in where they talk about it, alright.
Ross Blocher: Okay. So, yeah, while he was—
Carrie Poppy: Vamping.
Ross Blocher: —stalling for time—yeah, yeah. He asked, “Hey, what has everybody been doing? Seen anything interesting around here?” And so, Carrie chimed right in.
Carrie Poppy: And then—oh, nope. He made eye contact with me and kind of singled me out and was like, “What about you? What is—?”
Ross Blocher: Oh, he was just asking you, not the room. Okay.
Carrie Poppy: Uh-huh. “What do you think? What’s the last thing you saw?” And the last thing I had seen was something called “EXACTLY how to improve your self-esteem”. And I liked the specificity of the claim. So, I was like, “Okay, I saw EXACTLY how you improve your self-esteem.”
He’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, what’d you learn?”
And then I, as I was relistening to the recording, I was like, oh, poor thing. I was like trying so hard to like be polite, but I have learned clearly nothing. So, I’m saying stuff like, “Be nice to yourself, but don’t—you don’t—”
Ross Blocher: Yeah, (stumbling) do things that you do like, but don’t things that you don’t like. That’s very much how I felt outside the Raëlian baptism before we started the show, when the guy was asking me like, “Oh, what’s this alien thing all about?”
Like, I’m in earshot. I’ve got to do it charitably, but accurately. This is going to be tough. I’ll find myself in that situation later when I interact with Dr. Vibe the next day, and he asked me to recount what I thought of his lecture.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, great. (Laughs.) Well, also while still making eye contact with me and then with some other people too—
[00:15:00]
He started asking the room if we wanted to join him for a sex positive board game.
Ross Blocher: Yeah! (Laughs.) He introed this by saying, “Has anyone been hangry? Man, I was hangry earlier. And I just—I needed some food. And I went downstairs, and everyone was telling me there’s this great grilled cheese sandwich, but it’s $16.” And I would end up ordering the same grilled cheese sandwich on people’s recommendation. So, I feel his pain here.
Carrie Poppy: Was it good?
Ross Blocher: It was good, and it had like sauerkraut in it and interesting bread. It was some kind of like grain rye bread. I don’t know. Yeah. It was out of the ordinary, and it wasn’t like fully melted cheese. There was still like a little bit of—yeah.
Carrie Poppy: (Flatly.) Oh. Oh, that’s too bad.
Ross Blocher: It’s both not optimal, but also not the usual. So, it’s like I’m getting a fancy grilled cheese. But it’s a grilled cheese sandwich. $16. Give me a break.
Carrie Poppy: Sure. Sort of a Reuben inspired grilled cheese.
Ross Blocher: Yes. A cousin to the Reuben. Well done. And then he said, “After I paid for it, I realized it was a 20-minute wait for this sandwich.” And he’s like, “That was not cool.”
(Carrie reacts with shock.)
So, that’s when then he interacted with this woman who had a booth nearby, and she had this sex positive board game which cost $111.
(Carrie “wow”s.)
Eleventy-one dollars.
Carrie Poppy: And he’s thinking, “If I buy this board game, the woman selling it to me has gotta come back to my room to play this board game!”
Ross Blocher: Well, he openly invited us in the room, probably Carrie specifically.
Carrie Poppy: Uh-huh. Yep! That’s how that felt. (Laughs.)
Ross Blocher: “You need seven players. So, later on this evening, how about we all meet up by the grilled cheese stand, and let’s play this sex positive game.”
Carrie Poppy: I’m just looking around the room. Like, “Anybody in for that? Certainly not me! Anybody in for that?”
Ross Blocher: So, he’s waiting for more people to come in the room while he’s trying to kind of coopt everyone in his earshot into an orgy later. That’s kind of what was going on.
Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) That’s really how it felt! But like—but very politely, very like opt in. You know.
Ross Blocher: That’s true. That’s true.
Carrie Poppy: In that way, it’s hard to accuse him of lechery, when he stands up in front of a crowd and is like, (loudly) “Who wants to come make out in my hotel room?”
It’s like, well! Well, hey, listen, at least you’re being straightforward, aren’t you?
Ross Blocher: He’s just the kind of guy that would do that though. And like him locking eyes with you is a good indicator too of how he will try to make those little connections from time to time and will just sort of pop out of his presentation to have a little one-on-one moment. And, ah, he just—he strikes me as the—I’m just going to keep using the word epitome and epitomize, because he’s like—he is a confidence man. He really is!
Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. He has confidence! And it catches.
Ross Blocher: He has confidence in himself, and he tries to build up your confidence in him. What a character! This guy.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yes. So, he—I’m always interested in who these people’s teachers are. Like, where did your origin story begin? So.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, he shares a bit of that.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, so Bruce Lipton is one of the people who influenced him.
Ross Blocher: It’s a name I know but not really well.
Carrie Poppy: Me neither. But boy, he came up a lot. And then James Oschman was his like first teacher, and James Oschman wrote one of the popular energy healing books. Yeah, he said he read that book 20 years ago. And as a doctor reading that book, he knew right away that it was real.
And I thought, well, If you know anything right away, it’s that you didn’t approach it scientifically! (Laughs.) It sounds like you didn’t even finish the book!
Ross Blocher: Fair.
Carrie Poppy: What kind of analysis was involved here?
Ross Blocher: Mm-hm, mm-hm. He also mentioned Gregg Braden and Todd Ovokaitys. Okay. But he’ll talk—
Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, I remember that Ovokaitys name.
Ross Blocher: He’ll talk about this in just a moment. I guess—
Carrie Poppy: Sorry, I got ejected, Ross. What were we saying?
Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Okay! Oh, nice transition!
Carrie Poppy: Thank you!
Ross Blocher: Okay. So, he introduced us to—he said, “Have any of you ever heard of ejection?” And I’m thinking—
Carrie Poppy: Is this a trap?
Ross Blocher: Yeah, there’s an ejection seat in the Batmobile. What? Yeah. What is—?
Carrie Poppy: Am I really going to raise my hand to this?
Ross Blocher: But of course, he has his own definition of ejection, which is the things that take you out of a presentation, out of a conversation, a discourse that are too—I don’t know—esoteric or too above your pay grade or whatever.
I think that’s a useful framing device and something to be aware of. “I’m going to use a lot of medical terms here, and you might be tempted just to get ejected from the conversation.”
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, “Do not let me bore you. If I do, that’s on you.”
Ross Blocher: Right, because you should have told me.
Carrie Poppy: “You must control all of your attention and focus it on me, and if you start thinking, there’s a problem!”
Ross Blocher: So, he has all of us do this breathing exercise together, a series of deep inhales and exhales—just so we can (breathes) feel destressed and less stimulated. And then he promises us “the next 45 minutes will change your lives.”
Carrie Poppy: Oh, and did it?
Ross Blocher: “We’re going to create an interdimensional portal.” Did we?
Carrie Poppy: Did we?! I don’t even remember a portal being involved.
Ross Blocher: I feel like if there were an interdimensional portal, and I could see it, I would have taken a photo.
[00:20:00]
And I did not. Yeah, I don’t recall that.
Carrie Poppy: In going back through your records, you couldn’t find the portal?
Ross Blocher: In a way, my life was changed. I’ve been getting texts from this guy regularly.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, I don’t. That’s interesting.
Ross Blocher: You know what, they did quiet down after a while. Something in the texting system realized that I was not going to buy. But I got quite a few texts.
Carrie Poppy: Interesting. Maybe I didn’t sign up for the—maybe I avoided giving Dr. Vibe my phone number. That seems like what probably happened.
Ross Blocher: That seems like a smart move, given the circumstances. So, my life was changed in that now I have Dr. Steven Schwartz in my list of comparisons.
Carrie Poppy: Yes. Okay.
Ross Blocher: And he tops a lot of lists for me.
Carrie Poppy: So, one of his big things is the living connection tissue matrix.
Ross Blocher: Sure. Yeah. Mm-hm. Eject, eject!
Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Yeah. Yeah. That’s on you. So, the living connection tissue matrix appears to be the human body? I’m pretty sure he’s saying the human body.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. Kind of the way he defines it is it’s every part of the body that is not water. And—
Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Why would that even be useful? Okay. Okay. Okay, here we go.
Ross Blocher: Well, first of all, he says this number that made me go, “Wait a second! That’s not what I remember hearing.”
He said we are—he said a few numbers and then he topped out at 78% water. And I was like that’s too high!
(Carrie agrees.)
We’re not that much water. So, I go look it up, and there’s a variety of estimates. And like when you’re an infant, yes, you are a higher percentage of water, but—
Carrie Poppy: Sure, you’re not eating salt.
Ross Blocher: The good average seems to be about 60% of our weight is made up by water and slightly less for women on average—maybe like 55. And within an individual, it could fluctuate from like 50 to 75. There we go. There’s some parameters, but 78 seems like overdoing it. And you know, he’s making his points about water and what water does and its properties.
Carrie Poppy: Then there’s that whole thing.
Ross Blocher: But yeah, the rest is this matrix that he can address with his products. But he gives us a little bit of a bio first, or at least a little bit of background on how he got into all this. So, he wants to take us back 20 years ago to 2004. Now he will keep changing his story in print and as he’s telling it to be 2000 and 2004.
Carrie Poppy: Okay. ‘Cause he also said he got a download in 2009.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, that was for like one of his products. But like his origin story either kicked off in 2000 or 2004, depending on what you read or when he’s talking to you.
Carrie Poppy: And to be clear, this man’s like 60 ish, right? Or maybe 50? Maybe 50.
Ross Blocher: Okay. Yeah, I would have said late 40s.
Carrie Poppy: Okay. I’m also bad at that! Okay. But 20 years ago—I’m just saying this man didn’t pop out of thin air 20 years ago. He’s not like—he didn’t just leave college.
Ross Blocher: He was a young man at the time. I think he was in his early to mid-20s when he had this big breakthrough, but apparently he’d already been through enough training to be a practicing chiropractor.
Carrie Poppy: So, when I’m looking at the Colorado licensing website, I see a Steven Schwartz who was an electrical apprentice. Steven R. Schwartz.
Ross Blocher: Okay. I mean, it’s such a generic name.
Carrie Poppy: But I can’t—there’s no one coming up in Colorado with a license.
Ross Blocher: Okay, he was in Denver.
Carrie Poppy: Denver, that’s him.
Ross Blocher: He was running a last resort clinic.
Carrie Poppy: Huh.
Ross Blocher: And he was already into bioenergetic work, so he was obviously—
Carrie Poppy: Sure, he was an electrical apprentice.
Ross Blocher: An electrical apprentice. When I hear that, I think of an electrician.
Carrie Poppy: Well, I mean, it makes sense if you sell vibrating beds.
Ross Blocher: But he wasn’t doing that yet.
Carrie Poppy: Oh man. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Ross Blocher: So, the inciting incident for him was an invitation to some sort of conference or talk in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And that’s where he got to hear Bruce Lipton, Gregg Braden, Todd Ovokaitys. And Bruce had written Biology of Belief, and that lecture and then reading the book totally changed his life.
Carrie Poppy: Okay! And now he’s about to do that for us!
Ross Blocher: He said Todd Ovokaitys —nobody in the room seemed to recognize that name—was also singing whale songs. And Steven followed him to Mount Shasta. So, that was a little pilgrimage. Then he—I guess he learned about the didgeridoo.
Carrie Poppy: Oh yes. We’ll, yep. We’ll learn more about that.
Ross Blocher: Maybe with that guy. Yep.
Carrie Poppy: You will hear it, listener. Don’t worry.
Ross Blocher: And decided that this was really important. And I guess at some point a Peruvian shaman came to Denver, and he asked this guy to teach him how to play the didgeridoo.
Carrie Poppy: It must be so great to be this rich. You’re just going all over, just hanging out. Oh, I’ll follow you there. Sure. Yeah, no problem. Oh, I’m doing important work now.
Ross Blocher: This guy invites him to Peru, and he goes with him.
Carrie Poppy: Great vacay.
Ross Blocher: He’s also learning about Lemurians from this guy. So, he’s getting in with the wrong crowd and taking them very seriously.
(Carrie laughs.)
And in Peru, he has plant medicine for the first time.
[00:25:00]
So, we all know what that means. Ayahuasca. He shows us a picture of himself next to a pot of ayahuasca. He shows us a picture of a young him with a didgeridoo across his lap.
Carrie Poppy: I’m picturing his father now, because he tells us later that his dad at some point was like, “Why don’t you go back into chiropractic?”
Ross Blocher: Yeah, why aren’t doing chiropractic?
Carrie Poppy: “You know, that felt so normal at the time—it now feels so normal, didn’t at the time.” (Laughs.)
Ross Blocher: Yeah! It’s funny, the way he tells it, you’re missing that context. But yeah, it was probably like, “I was okay with that. I was willing to flex. And now you’re kind of going off the deep end. Whale songs.”
Carrie Poppy: “Whale songs, the didgeridoo. You’re not good at the didgeridoo, Steven.”
Ross Blocher: Didgeridon’t.
So, when he got back, he was so transformed that he realized the drinking problem that he had before was now completely gone! So, all of a sudden—I’ll include the clip here, because he just changes tone. And all of a sudden he goes into this rapid-fire delivery. He says—
Clip:
Steven Schwartz: And so, what came in was about cellular memory. How did I feel like this thing that I would experience before was completely gone? And as a doctor, I’m working with reversing chronic degenerative conditions and allergies and autoimmune diseases at a very high level using exclusively vibrational techniques and technologies.
Carrie Poppy: Oh my god!
Ross Blocher: What?! What just happened? What was that?!
That was much faster than he was already speaking, which was quite fast. But I just thought, Whoa, what?!
Carrie Poppy: He will try to cram so much into this talk. He doesn’t have a great plan. And there’s like a point where he’s like, (frantically) “Okay, I’m going to try to rapid fire tell you about the entire human body! Here we go! Do you know what a cell is?!” It’s like, Whoa, if you have to do this, you have gotten too granular. Like, zoom out a little!
Ross Blocher: And we went from just this kind of like, “Here’s my backstory,” to all of a sudden, (rushed) “and this is why I’m a doctor, and I’m doing this, and I’m selling this technology based on this—” And I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
Carrie Poppy: “Water flows between the connective tissue matrix!”
Ross Blocher: Speaking of connective tissue, I need a little more unpacking of everything that just happened in that last run on sentence.
Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Yeah. This talk could use some connective tissue matrix.
Ross Blocher: Man, oh man. So, he says, “So, I’ve been trying to clear cellular memory for nearly a quarter of a century. Does that sound interesting to you guys?” We’re all like (unenthusiastically) yeah…
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, specify your thesis statement better, but probably!
Ross Blocher: We were—as a room, we were excited. Yeah! Tell us more.
Carrie Poppy: Totally. Yeah. So, just to be clear about what I think the purpose of this talk is, I think it’s basically “how do you get rid of the experiences in your past that have impacted your psyche and created the person that you are and the bad habits you have while retaining the good habits and purifying the water in your body that holds all the relevant memories?”
Ross Blocher: Yeah! Now, he would say every now and then those things about emotions and the mind, but it seems like most of his examples and specific breakdowns were more about physical phenomena.
Carrie Poppy: Yes, because he has this misunderstanding that a lot of people have that water holds memories, and he just seems to have accepted that from the jump and then created this whole complicated thing around how that works. And the water’s flowing through the body, and it’s holding all your memories. And if we can just purify the body, then we can purify the water.
Ross Blocher: Water does three things. It conducts, it stores memory, and it detoxifies and dilutes. Okay.
Carrie Poppy: Then you’re clear, as L. Ron Hubbard would say.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, this felt evocative of Scientology in that way, especially because of this memory retrieval and a lot of focus on how these memories can be—and usually are—from your early childhood, your infancy, and your neonatal—you know, like in utero history as well. And so, he doesn’t talk about clearing engrams or anything like that, but it seems to be kind of based on that same sort of flawed understanding of how we come to be.
Carrie Poppy: Which is not to say that experiences in utero can’t affect you. But not emotional ones, physical ones.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. So, what he has found in all of this is this important network that makes up who we are for good or for ill can be reprogrammed through vibrational energy.
Ta-da! Now we’ve created a hook that he can develop something to manipulate.
Carrie Poppy: Yes. He can detoxify your living tissue matrix by laying you in one of his beds and playing one of his songs and vibrating the bed.
Ross Blocher: I’m impressed you were able to internalize that. The living connective tissue matrix. That’s a phrase that does not want to stick in my head. The ol’ LCTM! The living connective tissue matrix. Seems like we didn’t need all those words, but okay.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, he means the body. Minus water, apparently. The body minus water.
Ross Blocher: Oh, he said even up to 79% water in our bodies. Give me a break. That’s too much. So, yeah, he also described the living connective tissue matrix as the exoskeleton. Not helpful.
[00:30:00]
So, here’s a good example of him—I don’t know—being folksy with the crowd. He says, “Who loves saying funny words?” And we’re like, yeah, of course we do. “Well, let me give you the three best terms in the body. Microfilaments, microtubules, and intermediate tubules!” And he says, “See? Look, you’re all laughing.”
And I said, “It’s up there with Golgi bodies.”
And he immediately says, “Mm, Golgi apparatus!” Like, I recognize your term.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, game recognizes game. I recognize this game. What’s the Golgi apparatus?
Ross Blocher: Oh, it’s one of those little organelles in the cell. I can’t remember its exact function right now. Then he also mentions the clivus. That’s another fun word.
(Carrie agrees.)
I hadn’t heard that one. That’s part of the occipital bone at the base of the skull. But why is he telling us about these microfilaments, microtubules, and intermediate tubules?
Carrie Poppy: Oh, to prove to us that he is a doctor, and we should listen to the rest of what he says.
Ross Blocher: That’s pretty much it, but yeah, I guess they’re part of the cellular matrix, the tissue matrix, the whatever. I’ve already forgotten the term again.
Carrie Poppy: The living connective tissue matrix.
Ross Blocher: Whew. Alright. I’m going to call on you every time I need that.
So, everybody in the audience is like, “Aaah!” These little sounds of recognition and being impressed. You’re right. That was accomplished. And then he invited us to repeat this phrase that I am known for saying. He’s quoting himself. “We are physical manifestations of our own energetic expressions.”
Carrie Poppy: We had to repeat that? I can’t believe I did it. Okay.
Ross Blocher: So, we are energy first, and we are physical second.
Carrie Poppy: We are—okay, so what is it? We got to repeat it.
Ross & Carrie: We are physical manifestations of our own energetic expressions.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. So, this is like the law of attraction kind of theory.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. Or, you know, if you need to address the physical, if you’ve got physical ailments, let’s look at the energetic causes.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. So, it feels to me like he basically has created a little market for rich people with illnesses.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. People with bodily complaints and too much money.
Carrie Poppy: And who are already getting typical treatments, because he’s not anti any of those medications. But while you’re at home, antsy, waiting for your next real, actual medical treatment, why not also have my bed there?
Ross Blocher: Yeah. There were no diatribes against Western medicine. Good point. And he even mentioned a few things that he got into. Like, when he learned about this stuff—he was already into energy medicine, but now that he was learning all these new things—he tried channeling, astrology, numerology.
Carrie Poppy: Yes. And these all converged.
Ross Blocher: Esoteric studies. And yes. That’s right. He found more similarities than differences. And he—
Carrie Poppy: (Sarcastically.) So wise!
Ross Blocher: He put it all together. And then this is the kind of like turn on a dime thing he’ll do. “Has anyone heard of the piezoelectric effect?” And me and one other guy like raise our hands. Like, yeah?
Carrie Poppy: It’s a term I’ve heard.
Ross Blocher: I’m not going to do it justice, but the basic idea is that there are certain substances that you can apply pressure to and just sort of the rearranging of their structure will generate some electricity. So, it’s like true for quartz and ceramics and, conveniently enough for him, bones.
Carrie Poppy: I see.
Ross Blocher: And DNA. So, the way he phrases it is that “in a living system, if two objects move around each other, they generate a magnetic field. And we’re in a living system, okay? So, this piezoelectric effect generates your—and here’s gonna be a hippie word folks—
Ross & Carrie: Aura.
Carrie Poppy: Okay, I remember the aura coming into play.
Ross Blocher: AKA your electric biofield.
Carrie Poppy: So, is that an argument from analogy, or is he saying that the piezoelectric effect applies to all of humanity?
Ross Blocher: It’s taking an output from a known physical effect and plugging it into the wrong input of something we all know of but hasn’t been demonstrated or proven in any way the aura or electric biofield. And just the fact that he keeps introducing like multiple terms for a thing feels a little bit like this—
Carrie Poppy: Blinding with science?
Ross Blocher: Yeah, blinding with science and drowning in new language.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Totally.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, this guy is the epitome of blinding with science.
Carrie Poppy: And it makes me want to pause and be like, wait, okay, you just said something. Let me fact check that in my head. But then, no, he’s pre punished you for that. You’re ejecting!
Ross Blocher: Oh, right! Yes!
Carrie Poppy: Not allowed to do that, no fact checking. No pausing and thinking. Ejection!
Ross Blocher: You’re right! That’s a good point. The whole ejection mechanism is a—
Ross & Carrie: Thought-stopping cliché.
Carrie Poppy: Totally, totally.
Ross Blocher: We’re onto you, Steven Schwartz!
He is smooth about it. He’s unctuous, but he’s smooth. “Photonic emission. Who’s heard of that?” Again, a few people. And again, he does the same thing. He gives us this like namby-pamby—I mean, it’s correct. He’s talking about like electrons and how when they move from one shell to another—
[00:35:00]
—they can emit photons. Sure. That’s how we get light from things. But then he plugs that into the wrong input and says, “That’s what generates life force energy.” In what way is that meaningful or true?
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It’s like he pulls it into the soup of metaphor and then pulls it back out and then reapplies it somewhere else.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. Yeah. And there’s this whole wire connecting all of it that doesn’t deserve to be there, but we’ve accepted it. So, he asks if anybody in the room has low energy or chronic fatigue.
Carrie Poppy: No, none of us! All 30 of us are completely fine!
Ross Blocher: And by doing so, he’s just established, “You need my product, right? And my product addresses this on a scientific level.”
Carrie Poppy: Thank god. Yeah, he will hearken to him being such a scientist so many times. He does that thing where he’s like, (snootily) “With my science background, and as scientist, and I was a doctor, and—oh, you know, you guys might not be as skeptical as I am. I’m a doctor.”
Ross Blocher: I’m thinking you’re a low-level doctor. I’m not fully signing on to your use of the term doctor for yourself. Technically true.
Carrie Poppy: Also, I can follow you. I can follow you fine. Just say true things, and we’ll be fine.
Ross Blocher: You drew this point to my attention later when you were watching the documentary. But on the slide—he didn’t vocalize this, but on the slide he was showing at the time—by the way, there’s this very fast slideshow going on. And it’s all I can do just to like take pictures of each slide, because he’s just racing through them. They’re information dense, and he’s got little diagrams of Golgi bodies and, you know, cells and little receptors on the edges of the cells and wavelengths and heat maps and—whoa, whoa, whoa! And it all looks very science-y.
So, reading on one of those slides, it says, “We are light that is slowed down into a grounded three-dimensional matrix.”
Nope.
Carrie Poppy: Oh-kay? That doesn’t sound right.
Ross Blocher: Disagree.
Carrie Poppy: Okay, so this reminds me of something that I sent you last night. Because he was in a movie called Beyond Physical Matter with other…
Ross Blocher: Luminaries. Thought leaders.
Carrie Poppy: (Strained.) Thought leaders like him. (Laughs.)
Ross Blocher: On their website, he’s just listed as “cast member”, and he’s the penultimate guest listed.
Carrie Poppy: Oh my god. I am confident this was four people who traded off standing behind the camera and being like, “Now you talk. Oh, that was wise. That was a good one. Now I’ll sit down. Oh, Steve, you get lunch.” Okay. Anyway.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, let’s hear one of these zingers.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, this light versus sound thing I ran into in the movie, and I was like physics isn’t my thing, but this sounds really wrong.
Ross Blocher: This feels wrong.
Clip:
Speaker 1 (Beyond Physical Matter): The whole entire world is energy, vibration, and frequency. So, if you look at that from the perspective of light and sound, it’s something that’s a universal thing that anybody can tap into. That’s the most exciting part is that anybody has the ability to tap into the quantum field.
Speaker 2: You have light on one level, you have sound on another level. All of those are spaces of energy that are constantly moving towards definition.
Steven Schwartz: The difference between light and sound is speed. As we begin to slow down, the light, it grounds into sound.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I heard this, and I was like I am pretty sure this would be one of those pop science facts that I would have heard a million times if you could slow light down into sound. So, I text Ross, and I’m like, “Hey, real quick, you can’t slow—(laughing) you can’t slow light down into sound, right?”
And Ross is like, “Nope.”
Ross Blocher: No. These are different phenomena. Yeah, that’s totally wrong. Sound is vibration of molecules in the air that we translate into—well, sound. Light is photons.
Carrie Poppy: Photons. Okay, yeah.
Ross Blocher: You can have different wavelengths and get everything from radio waves to gamma rays. We broke that down quite a bit in our 5G episodes. But no, these are not related. No, (stammering) slowing down light has nothing to do with sound. No!
Carrie Poppy: Still can’t find this guy’s license. You should be Dr. Vibe before this guy should be Dr. Vibe.
Ross Blocher: Okay, and I don’t want to be called Dr. Vibe.
Carrie Poppy: And you don’t even want to be called Dr. Vibe! Because you are aware! (Laughs.)
Ross Blocher: Yeah, but this is not my specialty.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, you’re like, “Oh, let me look this up. I’m on a podcast. I don’t want to misspeak.”
He’s like, (yelling) “I’m Dr. Vibe! La-la-la! I know more science than everyone in the room. Anyway, you can slow down light into sound. Bye!”
Ross Blocher: This guy is the epitome of chutzpah. Wow. Isn’t there any part of you that just wants to stop and be like, “You know what? Maybe I shouldn’t talk about this. I don’t understand this fully.”
Carrie Poppy: You know what? I’m going to Google this before I give a talk about it.
Ross Blocher: Okay, so this might be my favorite moment in this presentation.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, good! Okay, favorite moment!
[00:40:00]
Ross Blocher: Yeah, bringing that back. So, he says, “My favorite quote is from one of everyone’s favorite scientists. I mean, of course, there’s so many great scientists. I love Pythagoras as well.”
Carrie Poppy: It’s gotta be Carl Sagan. It’s goootta Carl Sagan, right? Oh, Einstein. Einstein. Einstein, my man!
Ross Blocher: Einstein. It’s Einstein. Okay, so there comes up a slide with a big picture of Einstein.
Carrie Poppy: Okay, and it says, “How do you clear cellular memory?” Here comes the quote. “Everything is energy, and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want, and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”
Ross Blocher: Okay. And I’m thinking Einstein would never talk this way.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that first part, no. Yeah. It’s definitely worded awkwardly for him.
Ross Blocher: And quotes. I get it. They’re tricky. Sometimes someone says something that has the right idea, but then someone else is a little pithier with it. And that’s the one we all quote. So, who do you give attribution to? It’s tricky. But as a rule, when you see a shared quote from Albert Einstein, Mark Twain—
Carrie Poppy: Abraham Lincoln.
Ross Blocher: Abraham Lincoln! Maybe stop and look it up. Just make sure it’s an actual quote first, because those figures in particular get misquoted so often. So, I was immediately ejected from the meeting.
Carrie Poppy: Good for you!
Ross Blocher: And on my phone, I’m trying to look for these keywords. So, I find the quote.
Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Ross is smiling so happily.
Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) Surprise, everybody. It is not Albert Einstein.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. Oh, let me try to guess! Is it another public figure?
Ross Blocher: Yes!
Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) He’s so happy. Sylvia Brown.
Ross Blocher: I mean, you’re in the right sphere.
Carrie Poppy: Oh no! Is it a man?
Ross Blocher: Yes. We’ve covered him on the podcast extensively. Let me—
Carrie Poppy: Okay. Oh, oh! Bashar?
Ross Blocher: Yes.
Carrie Poppy: No! NO!
Ross Blocher: Let me read it as Bashar voice. (Drawn out and percussive.) “Everything is energy, and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want, and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”
Carrie Poppy: Does Bashar himself ever channel Albert Einstein? ‘Cause I know Bashar sometimes talks to these other figures. So, I wonder if he—
Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Oh, that would be good.
Carrie Poppy: I wonder if it was Darryl Anka channeling Bashar, channeling Albert Einstein. I wouldn’t be surprised. Oh my god. Wonderful.
Ross Blocher: Oh man. So, now I’m just in this mode of “I’ve got to tell this guy. I’ve got to tell him. It’s not an Albert Einstein quote. He needs to know, he must know.”
Carrie Poppy: Relatable.
Ross Blocher: And Steven even follows that up with, “Thank you, Albert Einstein.” And then he tells us, “This could be out of a second grade science book, guys.” I’m thinking, well, you could not write a second grade science book, because all of that was wrong.
Carrie Poppy: Quick, what’s photosynthesis?
Ross Blocher: And he asks, “Does anyone want to eject?” And at that point, I am ejected, because I’m looking up the quote. But nobody else says anything. So, good. Let’s keep moving. Then he has this slide that he says, “This picture says it all.” And it’s a little diagram of a receptor at the edge of a cell and then a hormone sending a signal inside the cell. And all of this is to establish signal transduction. He mentions mitosis. He’s just throwing out terms that we heard at some point at school. And wow, this guy is like—has mastery of all of these terms! He can say mitosis in a sentence!
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. There are certainly words in his head.
Ross Blocher: And then like he has this other slide about embryology and how that’s so important.
Carrie Poppy: Yes, this is his most important slide.
Ross Blocher: And he’s just pulled this straight out of a science book, but you can see the germ layers, the ectoderm, the mesoderm, the endoderm, and he speaks to those. Again, not for any purpose other than just to establish “look at how comfortable I am saying these things!”
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah, this is the moment where, as an audience member, you kind of zoom out and go, “Why are we talking about the cells right now? I walked in because it said find the missing link. Why am I hearing about mitochondria? How did this happen?”
Ross Blocher: (Giggles.) There are transitions. But boy, they’re fast, and he’s going through so much here.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
[00:45:00]
Promo:
Music: Playful, exciting synth.
Ellen Weatherford: People say not to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
Christian Weatherford: Which is why here on Just the Zoo of Us, we judge them by so much more.
Ellen: We rate animals out of 10 in the categories of effectiveness, ingenuity, and aesthetics, taking into consideration each animal’s true strengths—like a pigeon’s ability to tell a Monet from a Picasso or a polar bear’s ability to play basketball.
Christian: Guest experts like biologists, ecologists, and more join us to share their unique insight into the animal’s world.
Ellen: Listen with friends and family of all ages on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get podcasts.
(Music ends.)
Ross Blocher: So, now we get to how we directly influence bioresonance. He’s created a device for this.
Carrie Poppy: And much like Albert Einstein, he loves a patent, right?
Ross Blocher: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah! Good transition there.
(Carrie thanks him.)
That’s right. Albert Einstein, so far we haven’t heard anything that he said in this lecture. But he was a patent officer.
Carrie Poppy: He did work at the patent office. And I have a feeling that Steven Schwartz also thinks patenting is very important, because he has a vibrating bed. And he got the message for how to make his vibrating bed while running a music company and getting a psychic download in 2009.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. So, he’s given us pieces of this journey. And in 2007, he created Bioharmonics, his music company. And so, he was using sound at that point to increase mental clarity, tissue regeneration, detoxification, stem cell support. So, he was already doing this with audio, but then—
Carrie Poppy: Emotional balancing, that’s important.
Ross Blocher: Yes. But then what happened, Carrie?
Carrie Poppy: Okay, so in 2009 he has this psychic download where he realizes that he needs to create this full body technology that works with your neurological system to train the body to fix a whole bunch of things that might be wrong in there that make your body an inhospitable environment for getting well.
Ross Blocher: And I just remember him saying he was floating when he had this download. But had the idea for a new product, just like Dr. Emmett Brown when he slipped and hit his head on the toilet, envisioned the flux capacitor.
Carrie Poppy: Or me looking out in my backyard and thinking (sighs heavily).
Ross Blocher: There’s gonna be a train out there.
Carrie Poppy: Drew’s gonna get into trains, isn’t he?
Ross Blocher: Hasn’t happened yet.
Carrie Poppy: It hasn’t happened yet, but also, I want him to get into trains.
Ross Blocher: I want to be the first to know when Drew does go into his choo-choo Drew phase.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, well, he’s really into the trains at Descanso Gardens. He likes trains.
Ross Blocher: We’re making progress. Have you been to the Carolwood Barn?
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Is that the one at Griffith Park?
Ross Blocher: The Walt’s.
Carrie Poppy: Yes. It’s cool.
Ross Blocher: Anyways, we were talking about a vision, a picture in your head. And in this case, he pictured this bed that would combine with the sound and really give all of the benefits.
Carrie Poppy: Get that connective tissue matrix finally clear, so the water with the memories can flow between your tissues, and you can finally cleanse yourself of all these bad experiences!
Ross Blocher: Yeah, yeah. Because he reminds us the issues are in the tissues.
[00:50:00]
Carrie Poppy: Oh, nice. Nice.
Ross Blocher: Though in his humblest moment of this presentation, he says, “I didn’t come up with that. That was somebody else.” Oh, you were so impressed with him for a moment!
Carrie Poppy: Yeah! I was like this is the best thing he did!
Ross Blocher: At least he acknowledged it wasn’t him.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I wonder who gave him the tea.
Ross Blocher: So, this is where he tells us like, “This is why they call me Dr. Vibe, because I created this thing.” I’m thinking you called you Dr. Vibe. But up on screen, he’s showing us this bed. And it’s got all these little waves flowing through it, and the person is wearing headphones listening to his music. He’s been producing since 2007. And we learned that the “vibes” is an acronym for Vibrational Individualized Body Enhancement System.
Carrie Poppy: No, that’s a backronym.
Ross Blocher: That is a backronym!
Carrie Poppy: No, you did not start out needing to express those five words and then discover that it was vibes. (Laughs.)
Ross Blocher: “Let’s see. Well, it has to be vibration. It has to be—it certainly has to be individualized. That’s an important word that we can’t do without. Well, it does involve the body.” Yeah, you’re right. This is a very blatant backronym.
But yeah, the benefits include mental clarity, tissue regeneration, detoxification, stem cell support. Sure. Why not? Let’s throw that in there. Emotional balancing. (Flatly.) Wow. It does everything! Improved sleep.
Carrie Poppy: Stem cell support?
Ross Blocher: Well, you know, they’re doing their thing. You got to support them through the matrix.
Carrie Poppy: What does that mean? Oh lord.
Ross Blocher: Oh, there’s just this sea of terms swimming through our heads now.
Carrie Poppy: So, a term that stuck out for me around here was heart rate variability. So, he said that he would be working in his studies on heart rate variability. And all these, you know, terms about physics and stuff are just swimming by me. I have no depth to catch them. But heart rate variability, I say to myself, whoop! I hear about that in class a lot! What are we saying? What are we saying about heart rate variability? Because it is a proposed biomarker of autism spectrum disorder.
Ross Blocher: Oh, interesting!
Carrie Poppy: So, people on the spectrum tend to not be able to vary their heart rate between activities as well as neurotypical people. You just get into one rhythm, and you keep going, and it’s very hard to shift.
Ross Blocher: Interesting. So, if you’re trying to transition into or out of exercise, say, that could be difficult?
Carrie Poppy: Uh-huh. It would take longer than other people to slow down and calm down. Yep. And yeah, so various people have tried to do stuff to impact heart rate variability. And he’s already talking about people sort of being like spacey or emotional, have emotional problems. And I’m like, oh god, don’t fuck with the autistic people. What’s happening now? But then he put up a slide saying that he did a study on one person. And their heart rate did shift after laying in a bed for 20 minutes! And I was like, oh my god, what groundbreaking science. A person laid in a bed for 20 minutes, and then their heart rate slowed down.
Ross Blocher: And their heartrate changed. Oh my goodness.
Carrie Poppy: Well, you certainly cured autism, didn’t you?
Ross Blocher: Well, and that one slide—which was titled “Case Study HRV”—also had a huge collection of other one-off studies. Like a measured biological age. You know, sometimes you have various—I don’t know—like scales or whatever that will tell you your biological age. So, essentially—
Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah! He made someone younger after laying in the bed. (Squeaks into a laugh.)
Ross Blocher: Yes. That’s the claim. So, he had a person go from like having their bodily age rated higher than their actual age to lower than their actual age. And then he had—
Carrie Poppy: Based on what?! I mean, I guess it had to be their heart rate. It had to be, right? It had to just be like, “Well, you walked in with a heart rate that was 100, and now it’s 70 because you laid down.” Oh my god.
Ross Blocher: Skin conductivity and—yeah, I mean, I’m sure it’s taking like three factors and making this little numeric measurement, but that’s all he needs is to just show, like you said, single individuals as his test subjects. On the same page, he also has like a little brain map of like a heat region. Like, this one looks bad. It has red on the green! And, oh, this one looks better. It has blue on the green, and it’s more centered. And someone had like their spine get straighter as a result of using this thing for 20 minutes.
Carrie Poppy: (Snorts.) Laying down?!
Ross Blocher: And I swear to god, these are the exact same spine diagrams, but—
Carrie Poppy: My spine also gets straighter when I lay down.
Ross Blocher: They’re just colored differently. So what am I to do with this? Nothing has changed about that spine.
Carrie Poppy: That is… yeah, I mean, maybe there’s some slight difference between those two. But if so, I don’t know.
Ross Blocher: The spine went—oh, you know what? The spacing did change between the vertebrae. Okay, fine. Okay. But one went from being orange and yellow—oh no!—to being light blue and green. Yay!
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. Fair enough.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, so much blinding with science. It’s not even like poor study control. It’s just—it’s not a study.
Carrie Poppy: It’s not controlled. Yeah. I mean, I was just thinking like—
[00:55:00]
I laid down in my bed in the other room. I bet if you measure my back before and after, yeah, all the compression from me standing and walking and sitting down all day is going to loosen up a bit, and I’m going to appear a little taller. Yes. Yes.
Ross Blocher: And as he’s talking about this, he gives us another Einstein quote.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, good. A real one?
Ross Blocher: No. Well, I wasn’t able to figure out who said it, at least not then and there. So, I’m highly suspicious of this, but I can’t point to like, “This was actually so and so.”
Carrie Poppy: The Einstein letter, yeah.
Ross Blocher: “The medicine of the future is frequency medicine.” Pretty sure that’s not Albert Einstein.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, no way. Absolutely no way that’s Albert Einstein.
Ross Blocher: If someone can show me Albert Einstein saying that I will happily eat my hat.
Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) What was it?
Ross Blocher: “The medicine of the future is frequency medicine.”
Carrie Poppy: Okay. Yeah, this could be a fun search for our listeners. If someone can figure out like what’s the original provenance of this quote. Yeah, I would love to know.
Ross Blocher: We’ve mentioned he had the audio business, and he’s just sort of subsumed this into the vibes business. And he still has an app that you can download called Vibrophile, which I have downloaded.
Carrie Poppy: I knew you would. I almost downloaded it. And then I was like why am I doing this? I know my buddy will do this.
Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) It’s a free app. But surprise, surprise, there are in app purchases.
(Carrie fakes surprise.)
So, you can buy these various tracks here, the Bioharmonic Technologies. And he also has the term for them Sonicceuticals. Like Pharmaceuticals. And that’s trademarked. Great. But yeah, there’s various ones that you can choose from the Sonicceuticals menu. Energy Clearing, Cellular Attunement, Sonicceuticals Vol. 1. I’m still waiting on Volume 2. It’s going to be great. There’s only Volume 1.
(They chuckle.)
Cell Cleanser, Spectrum, Transformation and Abundance, and The Journey.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. And does each describe what it’s for? Or is it just the word?
Ross Blocher: Yeah. And you know what? I’ll save those descriptions for when I get to his booth, where you can actually choose from these. But I’ll play you a little bit of—I don’t know. You want to hear a sample track from Abundance, Cell Cleanser, Energy Clearing, or Spectrum?
Carrie Poppy: Well, I definitely want to hear the description of Spectrum, but maybe Abundance, we’ll hear the sound?
Music: A track from Abundance by Steven Schwartz, a cacophonous mix of chimes, percussion, and synth.
Ross Blocher: And there’s an abundance of it. It goes on for almost six minutes.
Carrie Poppy: Music to do shrooms to. Fine.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, and it’s a cool, chill tune. Now, the implication is that it’s finely crafted to match certain harmonic frequencies. And that’s the claim that really gets me. Like, come on, just some musician—probably not even you—created this tune. It felt groovy to them. And now you’re just saying that it’s been finely crafted to achieve a particular effect in the body.
Carrie Poppy: Or like, maybe you had one friend who was like, “I have anxiety, and I listened to it, and it made me feel better.” And then you’re like cool! We’re going to call this the anxiety track.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, exactly. That’s probably how we get the titles. Or I mean, you just listen to it and think, “Well, this is soothing. Oh, this is energizing! Yeah!”
Carrie Poppy: Right. It’s what you’d play in a spa.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. You can almost smell the Palo Santo as you’re listening to it.
Carrie Poppy: I am finding four results for “the medicine of the future is frequency medicine”. And one is a woman named Lynn who was quoted in the Sydney Herald.
Ross Blocher: AKA Albert Einstein.
Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Another is a woman named Marie-Hélène Rousseau. The third is Sound Healing Calgary, and the last is someone named Tara Star. That’s it.
Ross Blocher: Aaah! A lot of ladies there.
Carrie Poppy: A lot of ladies. Yup. Okay.
Ross Blocher: Okay. He also tells us about his book that he has, so you can download the app. You can buy his book.
Carrie Poppy: And I diiiid!
Ross Blocher: Which you did!
(Carrie sighs heavily.)
Yeah, he said, if you spend 25 bucks, you can get it signed. Okay, what is this intake of air?
Carrie Poppy: Oh, I just felt really trapped by him, and I bought his dumb book.
Ross Blocher: Oh, you bought it out of pressure. Salesman pressure.
Carrie Poppy: Guilt or whatever. Like, get me out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, he came over to talk to me, and then I was like, “O-oh…”
Ross Blocher: There’s no way to eject.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. “Oh, no one’s buying this, are they? Oh yeah. You really like me. Uh, okay. Yes. Here’s $20. Ah, fuck!” And then I had him sign it, and I pawned it off on Claire for her birthday.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, you give it to Claire, and I was like, “Okay, you’re not keeping that for—? Okay.”
Carrie Poppy: No, I got trapped here!
Ross Blocher: Now Claire has it. I’m sure it’s good. I almost bought it for $5 on Kindle, but just didn’t have time to go through it.
[01:00:00]
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, maybe Claire can come on in a future episode and give us a book report and give us a break. And we can go, “Oh! Huh!”
Ross Blocher: I realized we had enough to cover here that I thought, okay, I’m not going to try to pound through this book. But also there was the movie that you mentioned, Beyond Physical Matter. And he said, “It’s going to be on streaming platforms in a couple of weeks.” And nope! It’s not on streaming platforms. My Roku TV’s never heard of it. Letterboxd.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, the Beyond Physical Matter movie? Oh, that’s—
Ross Blocher: Yeah. You can buy it off of a website. It is not on streaming platforms.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, gotcha, gotcha. Oh, okay. I guess I just think of streaming as something else, but okay. I see what you’re saying.
Ross Blocher: Well, and plural. He made it sound like, you know, you’ll be able to find it on the Roku channel or Tubi!
Carrie Poppy: Oh, right, right, right. You’ll barely have to search for it.
Ross Blocher: I’m not asking for it to be on Max. I know those things are complicated. You don’t always have control over that, but still. Not easy to find, and then you’ve got to pay 10 bucks to rent, 13 bucks to buy.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I believe that’s right.
Ross Blocher: So, then he says, “Okay, okay. I’ve got two minutes left. Do you all want to do a little bit of Q&A, or do you want to see what’s in my mystery bag?” (Shouting.) Q&A! Q&A!
Carrie Poppy: And Ross and I, the only two people—truly, two people, (shouting) “Q&A!”
Ross Blocher: I need to tell you about this quote!
Carrie Poppy: I absolutely do not want to zone out for no reason! I want to talk to you!
Ross Blocher: You have a wrong quote and a highly suspect quote!
(Carrie laughs.)
But no, Carrie, what does he pull out of the mystery bag at the demand of the rest of the audience?
Carrie Poppy: A didgeridoo. (Sighs.) Why is Ross opening the door? Do you have one?
(Cackles.) No! (Inaudible), let me get my pets!
Okay, okay. Ross has revealed that for the last 13 years, he has been mastering the didgeridoo. He will now play for us. He is enlightened. He is a spiritual leader. He doesn’t have his headphones on, so he can’t speak yet and defend his honor.
(They laugh.)
Ross Blocher: All of that was correct, except I haven’t had it that long, and I have not mastered it whatsoever. But I have tried playing it.
Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Okay. It’s beautiful.
Ross Blocher: But yes, I have a very lovely didgeridoo. His was huge. It was in sections, and he had to like thread it together. Oh, Drew has been intrigued.
Carrie Poppy: Here comes Drew. Drew, we’re about to didgeridrew.
(Muffled off-mic speaking.)
He said, “I gotta see this.” Okay. Ross is resting it on his foot. Okay, interesting.
Ross Blocher: So, I bought these from my friends Gina and Jim. I think it belonged to Jim. And they were moving to Mexico, and they sold a lot of really cool stuff.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, wow! Cool!
Ross Blocher: Have you seen the little cabinet in my living room?
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, your curio cabinet. Yeah!
Ross Blocher: Yeah, that was from Jim. And then I’ve been adding odd stuff to it from our investigations. So, Dr. Vibe plays the didgeridoo for us. And actually, he does a good job of it. I will say.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting. I went and watched like a lady who actually plays the didgeridoo well. And I was like, well, it didn’t sound like this, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to sound like exactly.
Ross Blocher: He showed that he had practiced.
(Carrie agrees.)
I mean, it’s not an easy instrument to play. But you’re right, it’s not like this guy’s professional.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Like when someone blows it into a harmonica and has never done it, you know.
Ross Blocher: But it was the longest didgeridoo I’ve ever seen. And I’ll include some of his audio here, but I will try playing the didgeridoo. I figured since I have one, I should bring it.
Carrie Poppy: Okay, here we go. (Claps.)
Music: A low, resonant note.
Carrie Poppy: It’s cool! It’s cool!
Ross Blocher: Alright. Didgeridoo!
Carrie Poppy: It scared my dog, but it’s cool. She’s okay, she’s okay.
Ross Blocher: If anybody wants to didgeridoo, okay. It’s kind of like one of those embouchure things there.
(Carrie plays a broken note.)
Hey, there we go!
Music: Carrie struggling to produce a sustained note on the didgeridoo.
Carrie Poppy: So, you have to do the trumpet thing. Oh, that’s hard.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Carrie Poppy: Drew used to play the horn, so he’ll be able to do it.
Drew Spears: No, don’t set me up for that.
(They laugh.)
Carrie Poppy: You can probably do the thing with your mouth easier.
Music: Drew struggles to play a sustained note on the didgeridoo.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, it’s okay, baby.
(They laugh.)
Totally. Okay. Now I see that Dr. Vibe can in fact play the didgeridoo.
Ross Blocher: See! Okay, he had a long, sustained note that was not bad.
Drew Spears: Ross had a sustained note, I felt.
Ross Blocher: Thank you.
Carrie Poppy: For sure. Well, yes—no, I know. But I’m saying now I realize that it’s hard to do. That it’s not just like you blow in, and that tone comes out.
Ross Blocher: Right, right, yeah. You have to really get the vibration going with your lips and cheeks.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. How long did that take you to understand how to do?
Ross Blocher: I watched a few internet videos and kept trying until I had like a semi decent sound come out of it.
Carrie Poppy: Well, you’ve really saved Dr. Vibe’s honor with this now. Now I’m like, okay, that takes skill!
Ross Blocher: Well, that sits outside my bedroom door every single day. And I thought, well, geez, this is an opportunity to take it on the road. Yeah. It’s lovely. We’ve got like a kangaroo design. And…
Carrie Poppy: We can form a band now.
Ross Blocher: You on the banjo, me on the didgeridoo?
Carrie Poppy: The banjo and the didgeridoo. It’s like a classic duo everyone talks about.
Ross Blocher: Sure. Didgeridoo is, speaking of words that are fun to say, fun to say.
[01:05:00]
Carrie Poppy: I also think it’s funny to combine like a famously slow instrument with a famously fast instrument and see what the fuck we try to do.
(They laugh.)
Ross Blocher: Alright! Dueling didgeridoos.
Carrie Poppy: Exactly. Now I know why when you came up I was like, “But that can’t be Rost, it sounds like a huge package.” (Laughs.)
Ross Blocher: Yeah, I was like, shoot. Like, I want to make sure it’s going to balance here and not fall. So, I kept repositioning. I was like, oh, I’m making noise.
Carrie Poppy: Ooh! That’s what that was! (Laughs.) Okay, well, then I was like, oh no, it is Ross. Nothing else. Yeah, so he plays the didgeridoo.
Music: Steven Schwartz playing several varying notes on the didgeridoo with some added vibrato.
Steven Schwartz: Wait for it.
(Several more deep, resonant notes.)
(Applause and cheers.)
Steven Schwartz: Thank you!
Carrie Poppy: Again, this is—you know, an hour ago, I was going to see a different talk, and now this is what’s happening.
Ross Blocher: (Giggles.) And then he said, “I’m Dr. Steven Schwartz! Thank you for vibing with me!” And reminded us again, as he had many times, to visit him—please!—in booth number 301. Come try the Vibe bed, you know, and do all the other things that will generate money for me.
And there was a guy near me who got up and said, “Thank you. Fucking awesome.”
(Carrie laughs.)
I thought, wow, that was not my assessment. But it was something.
Carrie Poppy: Was he the guy who had already bought a bed? There was one guy there who had already bought a bed.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. I’m not sure if it was the bed stooge, but yeah. He kept saying like, “Well, who are my people—”
Carrie Poppy: Some of my friends live there in New York.
Ross Blocher: “I know I’ve got people who have bought my bed here at the conference. Why aren’t they here?” There was a lot of that going on with him trying to curate his audience of testimonials providers.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. “Where is everybody?” Well.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. “Where are all the people that are going to sing my hallelujah chorus?”
Carrie Poppy: We’re new customers. That’s better, right?
Ross Blocher: Yeah, yeah. He wanted the live testimonials. But I didn’t interact with him again until the next day. I wanted to tell him about the quote, but he shot off quickly, and I ran into my friend James.
Carrie Poppy: Mm. Lucky for you.
Ross Blocher: So, we started talking, and I was like, “Oh, he got away!” Yeah. So, yeah—what happened to you, Carrie?
Carrie Poppy: Well, I got him to sign my book. I asked him if he had read The Body Keeps the Score. And he said, “No, but boy, a lot of people mentioned that to me. It must really be in line with my teachings.” And I was like, yes, it is.
Ross Blocher: (Chuckling.) Now he’s taking that as another enthusiastic recommendation.
Carrie Poppy: Right. This girl’s into me. And last night when I watched the video, there was stuff about trauma in the body. Do you want to hear it?
(Ross confirms.)
Clip:
Music: Soft, gentle piano.
Steven Schwartz: It’s all about an energetic disturbance in different parts of the body. And it usually, as a diagnostic, shows that the region that there is disease or dysfunction is the area where there is most trauma. It trickles down into the physical body. So, if there was some kind of emotional trauma that happened from your parents or as a child, or you were bullied, or you had—whatever the situation might be, that gets lodged in the cells as a vibrational resonance or a vibrational dissonance.
Carrie Poppy: The claim is basically when we have an emotional reaction, we release these biochemical markers that then—if we run into a similar situation—we now have an association, right? We go, “Oh, that reminds me of that. Now I’m afraid. Or that’s comforting. So, it reminds me of my mother,” or whatever. That’s all true. But that has nothing to do with something rushing to a part in your body, lodging there when you were 12, coming back when you’re 30, pulling it out of your foot! (Chuckling.) It’s just like sooo convoluted to think about it that way.
Ross Blocher: It’s there physically in a little repository, just waiting to get dislodged.
Carrie Poppy: Yes. And now you can like become sick because of it? No! No, no, no, no, no. The closest thing we can say is like chronic stress affects the HPA axis. That’s like the best argument I can make.
Ross Blocher: HPA axis?
Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah. The HPA axis is this part of our threat detection system that says like, oh, there’s a threat.
[01:10:00]
And if you’ve been around a lot of threats for a long time, your HPA axis finally learns like, “I gotta be really overreactive to threats to keep this person safe.” And that can happen. That’s about it. That’s how the body keeps the score.
Ross Blocher: Well, thank you for the little preview of your book.
Carrie Poppy: Thank you. (Laughs.) Well, so anyway—I’m hearing him say he’s never even read this book. And I’m like this has deeply impacted your thinking. You don’t even know where it’s coming from.
Ross Blocher: Through cultural osmosis. Well, I bet that’s true for 90% of what he says. Man, what a character. Okay. So, he’s seen you. He’s already taken an interest in you, seems to either have not noticed your wedding ring or just not care.
Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) He wanted me to follow him to his booth. He started doing that like, “Follow me, follow me,” you know, gesture. Follow me. And then if I like sort of peel off a little bit, he’s like, “Hey, wait, we’re still going! Here we go. Here we go!” I eventually had to go to the bathroom. I go to the bathroom. I come out. He’s right there!
Ross Blocher: He’s waiting for you?
Carrie Poppy: He’s like at the bathroom!
(Ross “oh no”s.)
And then I know I tried to get away for a while, but I can’t really remember this. I think Drew does though, ‘cause I was texting you, right?
Drew Spears: I just remember that this was an issue.
(Carrie laughs.)
I don’t remember—
Ross Blocher: I remember—
Carrie Poppy: Oh, you remember!
Ross Blocher: Yeah, well you were texting me about it too. About him hitting on you.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. Please, if you recall what was happening.
Ross Blocher: Oh, we had a fun text chain going on these days.
Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) I bet.
Ross Blocher: A lot of TwinRay stuff.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, I’m picturing it now. Okay, go ahead. Go ahead. (Laughing.) That’s right. I remember. Okay.
Ross Blocher: Text from Carrie. “Oh Jesus. Well, Dr. Vibe just spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to hit on me.”
Ross replied, “Oh wow.”
Carrie. “I got away by pretending to talk to you on the phone for a few minutes ‘til he got tired of it. Gestured wildly with my newly ringed hand.”
And I wrote, “That was a good talk we had.”
And next thing we talk about, our Maitreya. That’ll come up in the future.
Carrie Poppy: No, I remember this now. So, it was that little hall between the bathroom and the registration area. Yes. So, now I’m—
Ross Blocher: Littered with pamphlets.
Carrie Poppy: What I remember doing is like visually describing it to fake you and making that seem like you were lost. So, I was going like this—I going like, “No, I’m next to like—I’m next to like a bee thing. I don’t know. There’s like bees. God, okay. Over here, there’s—what even is—”
Ross Blocher: Very elaborate.
Carrie Poppy: And that’s how you get away from Dr. Vibe, if anybody needs to.
Ross Blocher: Sometimes it’s nice being a white guy that nobody’s interested in stalking.
(Carrie laughs.)
And then I sent you a picture of what a $16 grilled cheese sandwich looks like, but it was $18 with the tip, which is a bit much.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, okay. I mean, it looks tasty.
Ross Blocher: So, was that the last you saw of him then, when he finally relented?
Carrie Poppy: I think so. Unless we saw him the next day when you were there, babe. I think that’s it.
Ross Blocher: So, the next day I went to see him at booth 301, because he still didn’t know his Albert Einstein quote was wrong.
(Carrie giggles.)
So, I got there. I was talking to one of the guys at his booth who’s very interested in my seeing stone necklace that one of our listeners gave us the previous year. And then Steven shows up. And I say, “Oh, hey, just wanted you to know you had that quote that was actually Bashar.”
And he had some glimmer of recognition like, “Oh, yeah.”
And I said, “He’s the channeling guy. And in fact, he’s here at the conference this weekend.”
So, he actually said, “Thank you for fact checking me.”
Carrie Poppy: Oh, nice.
Ross Blocher: Though, I think there was a little bit of a, (flatly) “Thanks a lot,” kind of a tinge to it. But still, that was a nice thing to say. But then he said, “Ah, I don’t know if it carries as much punch though, coming from Bashar.”
Carrie Poppy: Great point.
Ross Blocher: And I’m thinking—
Carrie Poppy: That’s so interesting, isn’t it?
Ross Blocher: Well, it doesn’t matter, because Albert Einstein did not say it. So, I’m thinking like why are you even like chewing on this? Does it matter what the punch is? It’s wrong. End of quote. I always wanted to ask like can you pull up your laptop? I want to see you delete that slide, please, and remove the Einstein picture.
Carrie Poppy: (Cackling.) It’s so close to self-awareness, too. Huh!
Ross Blocher: Yeah, he was evaluating—
Carrie Poppy: That’s interesting! So, the thing that I thought was proof is not. Huh! What should we do about it?
Ross Blocher: It won’t resonate with—
So, Steven—after musing on that, he says, “You think it sounds like Bashar?”
And I said, “100%.”
It still sounded like he was kind of thinking out like does it pass as Einstein? Or does it really sound like Bashar to someone who knows Bashar?
Carrie Poppy: Oh, right. Like he’s asking you like, “Do you think this could just be between you and me?” Wrong person to ask.
Ross Blocher: Kind of! That’s sort of the gist I was getting from that.
Carrie Poppy: I mean, we are going to be talking about everything you say to us at Conscious Life Expo. Every person there, sorry. You could tell me where the bathroom is.
[01:15:00]
I’m going to be talking about it.
Ross Blocher: So, I was just backing that up saying, “Oh, well, I’ve seen Bashar twice before here at the conference. And actually, I attended his escape room in Calabasas.” So, this is where I found out—I think—
Carrie Poppy: Actually, Bashar’s not involved. I asked.
Ross Blocher: Oh, that’s right. It’s Darryl Anka.
Carrie Poppy: Darryl Ankle. Yeah, (laughs at herself) Darryl Ankle. Yeah, Darryl Anka.
Ross Blocher: And he wasn’t there, unfortunately. He wanted to be there, but we met his wife when we did the escape room. And I don’t know, have we talked about it on the podcast?
Carrie Poppy: I don’t think so.
Ross Blocher: It was a well-done escape room.
Carrie Poppy: It was a great escape room. One of my favorites. We have a live audience now.
Ross Blocher: I was expecting it to be hokey, because the photos on the website—those aren’t great. It looks hokey. But it was actually really well designed. A lot of handcrafted materials, a lot of thought went into it. It was fun to solve. Well done, Darryl Anka.
Carrie Poppy: Way more substance than glitz on that escape room. And usually you get the reverse. Mad respect.
Ross Blocher: Yeah. So, hats off.
Carrie Poppy: Yep. Also it’s next to the pet cemetery where Ella Poppy is laid to rest.
Ross Blocher: You knew the way. And we had Indian food beforehand.
Carrie Poppy: Which was good!
Ross Blocher: And then we talked about his didgeridoo. He got it from Bali. We talked about where he lives. He’s in Beverly Hills. He’s a local.
Carrie Poppy: Interesting.
Ross Blocher: He asked what I do. So, I said animation and podcasting, so I actually offered both. And he said, “Seems like a lot of work. That’s why I don’t want to make a podcast.”
Carrie Poppy: He’s like, “I’d go into animation. That sounds easy. I would never make a podcast.”
Ross Blocher: Tells me something about his work ethic, but also I could agree. Yes. Podcasting is a lot of work. It’s an easy medium to get into. Really hard to sustain.
Carrie Poppy: True. I’m just also interested that he didn’t think animation sounded hard. I guess he felt like that wasn’t something he’d ever take up. I guess that’s (inaudible).
Ross Blocher: Oh, he’s getting there. He’ll talk about animation next, but I think podcasting just had more of an immediate resonance for him. He was saying, “So, I have a TV network, Traverse TV. And they want to produce a show for me.” So, in retrospect, I’m realizing now I think when he said I have a TV network, I think he means like I have this group that’s interested in doing something with me.
Because in the moment I thought, “You have a TV network?!” And I said like, “That sounds like a lot more work, trying to produce a TV network.”
Carrie Poppy: Did he respond to that?
Ross Blocher: No, ‘cause he’d moved on to asking what kind of animation stuff I do. So, I told him I work at Disney.
Carrie Poppy: We looked up this Traverse TV thing, and we couldn’t find him on it anywhere. It’s all—
Ross Blocher: It said it was like family friendly entertainment, but it was playing political propaganda, like pro Trump conspiracy theory stuff. Cool. He didn’t have any more questions about like animation or Disney, but he said, “So, besides picking apart my quote, what else did you enjoy?”
Carrie Poppy: Oh, shit! (Laughs.) Okay. Whew! Okay. Eh!
Ross Blocher: So, now I’m in this moment where I’m trying to think, uh-oh, what positive sounding thing can I say about your whole presentation?
Carrie Poppy: Oh, you’re in the position I was in at the beginning of his talk when he was like, “Tell me about the last talk.”
Ross Blocher: Yep, but he’s asking me to evaluate his talk.
Carrie Poppy: To him!
Ross Blocher: And so I start to say, “Well,” and then this woman, thankfully—saved by the bell—at least she buys me some time. She shows up and offers him some chocolate. And he’s like, “Okay, thanks.”
And she said, “It’s high frequency chocolate.”
And Dr. Vibe says, “Of course.”
(They laugh.)
Which I thought was so telling. Like, it just seemed like a little bit of skepticism from him. Like, “Oh, of course, it’s high frequency chocolate. Right.”
Carrie Poppy: “That goes without saying.”
Ross Blocher: And she very sweetly—’cause I was standing there talking to him—she offered some to me and I was like, “Oh no, thank you. That’s very kind, but I’m not going to do that to you.”
Carrie Poppy: My frequency is very high.
Ross Blocher: I’m not going to make you out of social obligation give me some of your overpriced chocolates. I know it was overpriced. But that bought me a little bit of time. So, now he wants to know what I thought of his talk. And I said, “You had a lot to say, and it was going really fast. I took pictures of the slides, and I’ll have to do some absorbing later. And there were things that I’d heard before, but not in that context. And some things that were new to me altogether.” That was enough for him to say—
Carrie Poppy: (Giggling.) Do do good things. Don’t do bad things.
Ross Blocher: (Cackles.) That came across to him as a positive review. Whew!
Carrie Poppy: Wonderful. Good. Well done.
Ross Blocher: And I mentioned that my friend bought your book. So, you know, I might take a look at that later, or maybe she’ll pawn it off on another friend as fast as she can. So, I asked the chocolate lady if she worked here at the booth. And he said, “Oh no, she’s just a vibrophile.”
Carrie Poppy: Mmm! Tell me about your vibrophiles!
Ross Blocher: So, not only is that the name of his app, that is the name for any lover of his system. We call them our vibrophiles.
Carrie Poppy: Interesting.
Ross Blocher: And then he says, “But some people complain that it sounds like pedophile.”
[01:20:00]
(Drew cackles off mic.)
“But I try to tell them that ‘phile’ just means lover.”
Carrie Poppy: Love. That’s true.
Ross Blocher: And I said, “Yeah, you know—” Like, I think we both came up with audiophile. And I said—
Carrie Poppy: Anglophile.
Ross Blocher: Anglophile, yeah. And he’s like, “What’s an anglophile?” Someone who really likes English culture and language. So, I defended him on that one. I said, “You know, they should be able to put it together that It’s not related to pedophile.”
Carrie Poppy: Sure. I don’t think of pedophile, but I do think that if someone reflected that to me, I wouldn’t then turn to the next customer and be like, “Do you think of pedophile when you hear my name?!”
Ross Blocher: He remembered from the lecture that I was one of the people who responded in the affirmative to his query about etymology—“Who here enjoys etymology?” So, he’s like, “Yeah, you like etymology.” And I was like, yeah, I do.
Carrie Poppy: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals blog used to be called the PETAphiles. They changed it.
Ross Blocher: (Laughing.) No! Now, see that’s bad, ’cause it actually sounds like it.
Carrie Poppy: That sounds like pedophiles. They changed it.
Ross Blocher: That’s not a good pun.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I don’t know if it was intentional. I really don’t know.
Ross Blocher: Really? Oh no.
Carrie Poppy: If it wasn’t, wow.
Ross Blocher: So, he asked me if I want to try the vibe. And I say, “Well, yeah!”
So, he gives me a QR code or points me to one, brings up a website, and there’s check boxes. So, I don’t select healing and rehabilitation, but I do select stress reduction and relaxation, meditation and mindfulness, and research and scientific study as things that I’m interested in. And then there are additional ones I didn’t check. Pain management, sleep improvement, and athletic performance and recovery. I don’t know, maybe that was just for them to know how to categorize me in the future. It didn’t like recommend a track to me based on that.
But then he personally was trying to do that. And he said, “This is the applied science that we were talking about. I’m so glad that you were there at the lecture.”
So, here is the Sonicceuticals menu that he wanted me to choose from. This is the audio that would be playing, and I guess paired with a different vibration pattern that would match it. There’s Energy Clearing, “a sonic sage that clears negative energy out of your nervous system, space, and dwelling.” Cellular Attunement “balances 12 different emotional relationships.” This is the abbreviated form of each description. Sonicceuticals Vol. 1 “supports physical healing with bone regeneration, stem cell activation, visceral emotional healing, and wound healing.” Cell Cleanser is “an anti-inflammatory detox plus shamanic journey.” Sure. Why not put those together?
Carrie Poppy: Mmm. Sure.
Ross Blocher: Spectrum is for “brain and nervous system balancing, designed to calm down overactive minds, ADD, ADHD, depression, anxiety, and autism.”
Carrie Poppy: Oh, there you go. Called that.
Ross Blocher: Transformation and Abundance, it’s “a sonic vision board to create your ideal reality.” The Journey is: “choose your inner spiritual journey of self-actualization—a tribal jungle adventure or a spaceship ride to Pluto.” So, I wasn’t sure. I was kind of hemming and hawing.
He said, “Well, what do you want to achieve out of this?”
And I said, “Uh, which one gets me closer to productivity?” I think he gave me Transformation and Abundance and said it would be like a sonic DMT.
I was like, “Oh, psh! You had me at sonic DMT, let’s do it.”
And so, for 20 minutes, I sat on the bed. They put a cover over your eyes to block out light, and you’re wearing headphones. And they’re pretty effective noise cancelers, ‘cause it’s loud in that place.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, yes it is.
Ross Blocher: In the booths. And I could still hear what was going on, but it was severely muted. And then the bed is vibrating, and it’s comfortable. I enjoyed it. It was a nice 20 minutes.
Carrie Poppy: Great.
Ross Blocher: I was even having like mild visions. I was seeing kind of along the lines of what we had during the holotropic breath work, very—like, light. Just, I kept seeing maps for some reason and the color purple. Not the film. Just the actual color.
Carrie Poppy: Yes, got it. You saw the entire Color Purple. That’s interesting. Yeah, a little bit of like—
Ross Blocher: I mean, yeah. I don’t know if that’s just my mind saying like, well, you don’t have any visual input right now. I’m just going to overlay some things.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Something like hypnopompic hallucination.
Ross Blocher: So, it was pleasant. I got out of it. And you know, they wanted to know how it was. And I had positive things to say. “Yeah, no, that was really pleasant. I enjoyed it. I would do it again.”
And then he says, “Oh, and that’ll be $20. Did I mention that?”
Carrie Poppy: Ohhhh, this is so cruddyyyy.
Ross Blocher: So cruddy.
Carrie Poppy: How did he get $20 out of both of us? He cornered us both!
Ross Blocher: And I went around for a day convinced that he had just done that to me because he thought he could. And he’s just that kind of guy. And the next day I stopped by the booth when he wasn’t there and I said, “Oh, how much is it for the vibe?” And they said $20. So, I take it back. But I know he was offering it to you for free.
Carrie Poppy: Yes, I believe he was offering it to me for free.
Ross Blocher: I remember you telling me that.
Carrie Poppy: But also, even if it is $20 when you ask, you got to say that before you sell someone something. I do not give him as much grace.
[01:25:00]
Ross Blocher: Telling me that after the fact. And that, “Did I mention that?”
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, no, that’s really shitty.
Ross Blocher: You know you didn’t mention that! Yeah.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. That’s like the I Love Lucy vacuum salesman who sells her the vacuum and then it’s like, “Did you want the casing that comes around all of the gears?” Mm-mm. Mm-mm! He’s that guy.
Ross Blocher: He was trying to get back at Lucy for the football thing. And that was the wrong Lucy.
Carrie Poppy: Right. Yeah. You’re following.
Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Yeah, so I was miffed about that. But it’s one of those things like, well, costs of doing podcasts.
Carrie Poppy: Yes. Yeah. That is always our salve. Our saving salve.
Ross Blocher: Still, I didn’t even get a grilled cheese sandwich out of it. But then again, I did get a pleasant vibe. Anyway. So, that was my additional interaction with Dr. Vibe. What a character.
Carrie Poppy: Wow. Yes. Uh, may we not run into him again. But he’s lovely, I’m sure.
(They laugh.)
Ross Blocher: He’s just such a salesman, such a schmoozer, such a—all the things I’ve given him the title of epitome of this and that, he is the epitome of all those things. And yeah, makes me super uncomfortable just on a human level. But what a fascinating type of person that is out there in the world.
Carrie Poppy: Yes. God bless him. May he go on many more vacations.
(They giggle.)
Before we go, Ross, I got to tell you an update about Donny Pauling. You remember this guy?
Ross Blocher: Yeah.
Carrie Poppy: Donny Pauling was a Christian public speaker who was fixated on me in my mid-20s.
Ross Blocher: Oh yeah. And just would kind of cyber bully you all the time. All these little just bullying tactics. And at some point I tangled with him online, and he tried to bully me online for a while.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that’s how he is.
Ross Blocher: Cool.
Carrie Poppy: Well, when I was 25, he bet me $500 that I would believe in God again, by the time I’m 40, probably thinking, “I can rhetorically get away with this. I’m just going to bully this little girl, and she’s going to bend over and be like, ‘Yeah, you’re 40. You probably know.’” But guess what? He picked the wrong person to do that to, Ross. So, for 15 years, I’ve been following him around saying, “Still don’t believe in God. I still don’t believe in God!” And anyway, he paid up yesterday.
Ross Blocher: Fantastic! YES! Yes! (Claps.) Oh, that is a good—well done, Donny, for paying up.
Carrie Poppy: Oh, that’s very kind. First, he wrote me an angry email saying, no, he wouldn’t pay up. Because I can’t—
Ross Blocher: Okay, this is the Donnie I know and hate.
Carrie Poppy: I can’t prove that I don’t believe in God. Maybe I’m just lying. Maybe I believe in God, but I also want $500. So, I’ve made it up, and he sent me this like angry, vitriolic email in the middle of the night about that.
Ross Blocher: Oh, that’s all his style.
Carrie Poppy: And then saying, “And when we made this bet, you idolized Richard Dawkins. And now you don’t even like him! Why?! Because he has fallen away from the liberal agenda.” And I was like oh my god. A) I’m friendly with Richard Dawkins. I don’t hate Richard Dawkins. We disagree about the thing you’re talking about, but I’m not the kind of person who doesn’t talk to people because of their disagreements. That’s the opposite of me. THIS IS SO OFF TARGET!
Ross Blocher: Oh, I feel so bad. This guy’s married now, right?
Carrie Poppy: No, no. He went to prison for raping a child.
Ross Blocher: Oh, I can’t believe I forgot. Yes. Okay. Uh, good. I’m glad he’s locked away.
Carrie Poppy: No, he’s out now. So, anyway…
Ross Blocher: He was able to give you $500. Oh, what a menace to society.
Carrie Poppy: Anyway, then he was like, “And Richard Dawkins himself believes in God now, as he has said in many interviews.” I was like—
Ross Blocher: No. He hasn’t, he doesn’t.
Carrie Poppy: Oh god, now I have to email Richard Dawkins. So, I email Richard Dawkins. I say, “Yo, you believe in God now?”
He’s like, “Nope!”
I go back to Donny Pauling and I’m like—yeah, I was like, “Hey, guess what? I actually know Richard Dawkins. Here’s a screenshot of him answering your question. Would you like to send me $500?” Anyway, this went on for some time. And then he—
Ross Blocher: This version of the story makes him seem less gracious.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He eventually paid me $500 and Claire $500.
Ross Blocher: Wow! She was included in the bet?
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, she was on most of these emails as well.
Ross Blocher: Fantastic. Okay. Well, well pursued. It’s just so funny, ‘cause I’m thinking how we were very similar in that regard. One of my mom’s favorite stories is that she made us leave Jurassic Park.
Carrie Poppy: What?
Ross Blocher: The first time that I went to see it, I was so excited. I was loving the film. She made us leave Jurassic Park—the film, yes, not the actual park.
Carrie Poppy: Got it.
(They laugh.)
I was like she claims she took you to Jurassic Park.
Ross Blocher: Because—“Ross, I’ve got to tell you, it wasn’t Jurassic Park.”
Because she was expecting that it would be more like a nature documentary about people having a picnic at a park with dinosaurs.
Carrie Poppy: Ohh! Oh, that’s like when I went to see Black Swan ‘cause I love ballet.
(They laugh.)
That was great.
Ross Blocher: So, I told her, “This is just good filmmaking. You should have at least let me finish it; you know. Wait in the lobby or something. But also, you watch films like King Kong.”
[01:30:00]
“Sure, it’s from 1933, but it’s also got situational peril. It’s kind of the same thing, but you were okay with that because it’s a classic.”
And she’s like, “Well, if it were a classic, I would watch it.”
(Carrie snorts.)
And I said, “Well, what makes a film a classic?”
And she said, “Well—”
Carrie Poppy: Age?
Ross Blocher: Yep. 10 years. She said, “If it’s 10 years old—”
Carrie Poppy: This is Donny Pauling’s argument. Age is everything, huh?
Ross Blocher: So, I sat on that for 10 years.
Carrie Poppy: There we go!
Ross Blocher: To the dot! And then I pulled out the VHS and said, “Guess what, mom? You’re watching Jurassic Park.”
Carrie Poppy: It’s a classic.
Ross Blocher: It’s a classic! It’s a newly-minted classic. And she still tells that story to everybody. “He remembered! Down to the day!” Not from the release of the film, but from our conversation. So, I—
Carrie Poppy: That’s right. That’s right. And that’s what this podcast is. That’s right, thank you!
Ross Blocher: Game recognizes game. I appreciate that you got $500 out of that jackass.
Carrie Poppy: I gave $125 to LGBT Center. I gave $125 to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and I kept $250 myself for all that fucking work. (Sighs.)
Ross Blocher: Nice, nice! I love it. Well done.
Carrie Poppy: Thank you. He did eventually follow up and tell me where he got his Richard Dawkins misinformation. Dawkins said in an interview—in a debate with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is a Christian, he said that he was a cultural Christian.
Ross Blocher: Oh yeah, a lot of people got confused about that. I’m a cultural Christian.
Carrie Poppy: Yeah, it means like I celebrate Christmas. That’s like—that’s my culture feels Christian, or I believe in the ethics of it or something, but like it’s not a metaphysical affiliation.
Ross Blocher: And touchstones in my life. Like, mental associations are all based in me being stewed Christianity for the first 20 years of my life.
Carrie Poppy: Right. Anyway, I said, “Not remotely the same thing.”
And then he replied, “I still think you should watch that video. He calls wokeism a mind virus, by the way.”
I was like, (whispering) oh my god, I have to go. I have a job.
Ross Blocher: What a waste of time he is.
Carrie Poppy: Oh my lord.
Ross Blocher: I feel so bad for anyone in his life.
Carrie Poppy: But I bought a new Gameboy with that $250. Yeah. Need some new games.
Ross Blocher: Yeah, man. Nicely done. Well, that’s it for this episode! Our theme music is by Brian Keith Dalton.
Carrie Poppy: This episode was edited by the lovely Ross Blocher, on his son’s birthday and/or Father’s Day. Thank you, Ross.
Ross Blocher: My pleasure. Our administrative manager is Ian Kremer.
Carrie Poppy: You can support this and all our investigations by going to DrVibe.com. Just kidding. Go to MaximumFun.org/join.
Ross Blocher: And you can also leave us a positive review. You can tell a friend. There’s so many ways that don’t involve money, but yes, if you can, MaximumFun.org/join.
Carrie Poppy: And remember!
Clip:
Music: Inspirational acoustic guitar.
(There is a significant amount of loud, unrelated background conversation in the audio.)
Steven Schwartz: Alright, hello. My name is Dr. Steven Schwartz, and I am the president and founder of Bioharmonic Technologies, which is a therapeutic music and vibrational sound therapy music company. And what we see in the back here, this is the Vibe 3.1 vibrational sound therapy system. And it’s a vibrating membrane that responds to music, and I create all the music that’s formulated for shifting and influencing physiology. There are harmonic music frequencies that are in a higher spectrum than—the radio frequencies are at a lower physical spectrum.
And when you put yourself in a field between the highs and lows, what we end up experiencing is what I call full spectrum therapy. And in this space, you’re creating chemistry where only awesome things can happen. People start coming in, and they come in for like conditions. So, like for instance, people talk about—like, somebody just asked me on Alzheimer’s today. So, there’s like three different tracks that I put you on with Alzheimer’s. I have a track for—its anti-inflammatory music called Cell Cleanser. Then there’s another track called Spectrum, and it’s for brain nervous system balancing. And then I have stem cell activation frequencies that are found on an album called Sonicceuticals Vol. 1. And so, when people have advanced conditions, yeah, you might be on for an hour, an hour and a half.
Carrie Poppy: Ross! This is Carrie. I am coming to you as a voice memo on my phone, because you have left my house, and I have continued obsessing about Dr. Vibe. And I have to tell you—I think I know where his download (laughs) in 2004 came from. Or whatever happened in 2004. I think I know why he left Colorado. I have found a letter of admonition from the state of Colorado to Steven Schwartz from December 3rd, 2003. And this is what it says.
“Dear Dr. Schwartz, the Colorado State Board of Chiropractic Examiners has received an anonymous complaint against you concerning your failure to use DC, chiropractor, or chiropractic somewhere in your advertisement after the title ‘doctor’. At its meeting on November 6, 2003, the board reviewed your advertisement. The board voted to issue you a letter of admonition pursuant to”—and then there’s a code. “The board finds that you failed to use DC, chiropractic, or chiropractor somewhere in your advertisement after the title ‘doctor’.”
[01:35:00]
“This is a violation of”—lists some ordinances. “On the basis of these findings, the board hereby admonishes you and reminds you that continued practice may lead to further disciplinary action against your license. Also, please note that the use of the Jaffe-Mellor technique is unproven and requires informed consent. Please review board rule nine to be in full compliance. You’re hereby advised that you have the right within 30 days to”—you know, whatever.
Uhhh, yeah. So, there you go! This is from Karen Brumley, the program director at the State Board of Chiropractic Examiners. So, if anyone was wondering if Dr. Vibe is even meeting the standards of the chiropractic body of Colorado, the answer is no. And pretty soon, he decided he needed to get to California. Okay, that’s it!
Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.
Promo:
Music: Upbeat, quirky banjo music.
Dan McCoy: I’m Dan McCoy.
Stuart Wellington: I am Stuart Wellington.
Elliott Kalan: I’m Elliott Kalan.
Stuart: And together, we are The Flop House: a long-running podcast on the Maximum Fun Network where we watch a bad movie and then talk about it.
Dan: And because we’re so long running, maybe you haven’t given us a chance. I get it, but you don’t actually have to know anything about previous episodes to enjoy us. And I promise you that if you find our voices irritating, we grow endearing over time.
Elliott: Perhaps you listened to one of our old episodes and decided that we were dumb and immature. Well, we’ve been doing this a while now. We have become smarter and more mature, and generally nicer to Dan.
Stuart: But we are only human, so nooo promises!
Dan: Find The Flop House on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get podcasts.
(Music ends.)
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!
About the show
Welcome to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, the show where we don’t just report on fringe science, spirituality, and claims of the paranormal, but take part ourselves. Follow us as we join religions, undergo alternative treatments, seek out the paranormal, and always find the humor in life’s biggest mysteries. We show up – so you don’t have to. Every week we share a new investigation, interview, or update.
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