TRANSCRIPT Oh No, Ross and Carrie!: Ross and Carrie Transmit Bashar (Part 2): Follow Your Excitement Edition

[00:00:00] Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

[00:00:08] Carrie Poppy: Hello. Welcome to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, the show where we don’t just report on fringe science, spirituality, claims the paranormal—we take part ourselves!

[00:00:16] Ross Blocher: Yep. When they make the claims, we show up, so you don’t have to I’m Ross Blocher.

[00:00:20] Carrie Poppy: And I’m Ross Blocher. And we are back to see Bashaaar!

[00:00:26] Ross Blocher: (Singsong.) Bashaaar. Yeah, so the last time we left off, we were partway through Bashar’s Q&A, but there’s still more Qs and there’s still more As.

[00:00:33] Carrie Poppy: That’s right. And in the meantime, we watched some Bashar content.

[00:00:38] Ross Blocher: My goodness. Bashar is the font that flows and gives. And Darryl Anka! Very similar to Bashar.

[00:00:44] Carrie Poppy: Right, who of course is a different person.

[00:00:47] Ross Blocher: Yes. Yeah. (Chuckling.) But they seem to have a lot in common.

[00:00:50] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They live in the same house.

[00:00:52] Ross Blocher: So, I don’t know, if for some reason you’re just now tuning in like, “Hey, I’ve always been interested in, Oh No, Ross and Carrie!. Let’s jump partway in through one of their series-es.” Bashar is the name of a maybe physical, maybe nonphysical E.T.—an entity that is channeled through Darryl Anka, nephew of Paul Anka, former visual effects artist and model maker who then realized he could channel aliens.

[00:01:20] Carrie Poppy: In the ’80s.

[00:01:21] Ross Blocher: In the ’80s, yeah!

[00:01:23] Carrie Poppy: He’s been doing this forever.

[00:01:24] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Going on 40 years very soon.

[00:01:27] Carrie Poppy: Yes. He started in 1982.

[00:01:29] Ross Blocher: Well, he started as Bashar in ’84.

[00:01:33] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Had his UFO experience in 1982.

[00:01:36] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Another thing of his that I watched is a documentary called First Contact.

[00:01:41] Carrie Poppy: I saw that on Amazon Prime or something.

[00:01:44] Ross Blocher: Not to be confused with Star Trek: First Contact.

[00:01:47] Carrie Poppy: Right. I think I might’ve actually watched this whole thing last year, but I don’t remember it.

[00:01:51] Ross Blocher: Oh, really?!

[00:01:52] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. But it’s in my notes from last year.

[00:01:54] Ross Blocher: Oh, interesting. Okay. So, he made a documentary about himself.

[00:01:58] Carrie Poppy: Sure, of course.

[00:02:00] Ross Blocher: Uh, because he is a filmmaker. Yeah.

[00:02:01] Carrie Poppy: Did he direct it?

(Ross confirms.)

Oh, you can’t—you can’t do that.

(They laugh.)

Oh, you can’t do that.

[00:02:05] Ross Blocher: Your own biopic/documentary about Bashar. But he did it! That’s exact—but he did it.

[00:02:10] Carrie Poppy: No, you can’t do that. Go to jail.

(They laugh.)

[00:02:14] Ross Blocher: Don’t even collect $200.

[00:02:16] Carrie Poppy: I saw a clip from it though, yesterday while I was flicking around. And that explains things—that he directed it.

(Ross agrees.)

Because—yeah, because he’s talking as if he’s trying to make it seem off the cuff, but it’s definitely not off the cuff.

[00:02:33] Ross Blocher: This isn’t a fair question, but guess who narrated it?

[00:02:36] Carrie Poppy: Darryl Anka?

[00:02:37] Ross Blocher: That would be brilliant. Actually—

[00:02:38] Carrie Poppy: James Woods.

[00:02:39] Ross Blocher: What?! Yes, that’s right. (Chuckles.) Did you see that name somewhere? Okay.

[00:02:42] Carrie Poppy: I remembered from looking around on there.

[00:02:45] Ross Blocher: That’s craaazy. Why was James Woods so hard up for money that he did this narration? It’s like sometimes you hear somebody narrating a thing and you’re like, “Oh, they snuck this by you. They didn’t, uh—you know, they just gave you the script you’re supposed to read, and it sounds fairly innocuous.” But this one, it’s just unambiguously treating Bashar as a—you know, a real entity. A real alien.

[00:03:07] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. That seems, uh, fairly—

[00:03:09] Ross Blocher: I thought, “James Woods. What you doing?”

[00:03:11] Carrie Poppy: —credulous. Drew mentioned that he’s like very rightwing, James Woods?

[00:03:15] Ross Blocher: Mm-hmm. You never know; maybe they’re buddies or something.

[00:03:19] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. That could have no relation but—

[00:03:20] Ross Blocher: A friend in common. Anyways, yeah, so he tells this whole story. It’s quite interesting. I don’t know; do you want me to go into it at all now, or save it for later?

(Carrie confirms.)

Okay. Okay. So, things I learned about from First Contact. Made in 2016. Like you mentioned, he had a UFO sighting with his siblings, and it was kind of fun. All the footage was, you know, in LA. They were living in the valley, so I was recognizing all the places they were driving. So, they showed him and the siblings—who showed up later, like on camera.

[00:03:49] Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting!

[00:03:50] Ross Blocher: And they seem to be corroborating his story.

[00:03:53] Carrie Poppy: Huh! How many siblings?

[00:03:55] Ross Blocher: Three. I think a sister and two brothers. And one of the brothers was like an art director on not only this but some of his other movies. They seem to be collaborators. But in the recreation, where they have some young guy playing him with a very thick goatee—he did have a goatee when he started the whole Bashar thing.

I don’t know why that was so important for me to note. Like you need to picture him—young Darryl Anka with a goatee.

[00:04:18] Carrie Poppy: What was he wearing?

[00:04:20] Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Oh, like a button up kind of polo shirt. Alright. So, they were driving around in the car, and they started chasing this UFO they saw, and the UFO was kind of like a triangle with rounded edges. And one of the brothers described it as like a rack for billiard balls, like the one you put on the table to get them all lined up, and then you take it off very carefully.

[00:04:40] Carrie Poppy: That little triangle. Yeah.

[00:04:41] Ross Blocher: Right. But you know, solid and with like these two blue lights and one other larger light. Anyway, so they were chasing it around.

[00:04:47] Carrie Poppy: I have down in my notes that he had two witnesses.

[00:04:50] Ross Blocher: I thought there were three in the car. Maybe it was just two.

[00:04:52] Carrie Poppy: And then, apparently—I also have in my notes that I found a later newspaper report where he said there were six witnesses. So, there were two, three, or six. One of those.

[00:05:00] Ross Blocher: Oh, all right. Well, if you multiply two and three, you get six.

[00:05:03] Carrie Poppy: That’s true.

[00:05:04] Ross Blocher: So, he first found channeling through a guy named Tom Massari.

[00:05:09] Carrie Poppy: Oh, see you can’t do that either.

[00:05:11] Ross Blocher: He found—

[00:05:11] Carrie Poppy: Thomas, I’m sorry, but you can’t be Thomas Sorry.

[00:05:16] Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) Tom Masari. Okay. He is the sleep medium and channeler of Abram.

[00:05:23] Carrie Poppy: The sleep medium! That sounds relaxing! Okay.

[00:05:27] Ross Blocher: Maybe like the sleeping prophet, Edgar Casey. I—yeah, I’m not sure, actually, how he got that name.

[00:05:31] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I wonder if he gets all of his downloads or whatever while asleep.

[00:05:34] Ross Blocher: But Bashar saw this, and the way he describes it, he is like, “Oh, I didn’t know that was a form of spirituality.” And he took classes with this guy. So, essentially he just studied how to be a channeler.

[00:05:47] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Yeah. And this was during that big channeling boom, right?

[00:05:50] Ross Blocher: Yeah, in 1984. And so, there’s videos of him throughout the years—as he gets kind of older and older, and the goatee disappears, and the hair gets lighter—of him channeling Bashar.

[00:06:02] Carrie Poppy: Okay. I also wanna note I have here that the LA Times reported in 1986 that a local academic studying channelers found a spike from two channelers to 1000 in LA in those two years.

[00:06:14] Ross Blocher: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are the years again?

[00:06:16] Carrie Poppy: In 1986, they wrote that in the last two years there was a spike from two channelers to 1000 in LA.

[00:06:24] Ross Blocher: Oh my goodness. I wonder if it was all Tom Masari, just—

[00:06:28] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Maybe some of it anyway. Wasn’t that also around the time that Monica Dietrich was learning to do pet psychic-ing?

[00:06:35] Ross Blocher: At least roughly, yeah. Interesting.

[00:06:37] Carrie Poppy: Maybe a lot going on then.

[00:06:38] Ross Blocher: That’s a big boom. In the documentary, he drops a lot of little nods—kinda like we played before in our previous episode—where he kind of nods to the possibility that maybe this is just all made up.

[00:06:50] Clip:

Darryl Anka: Is it possible that Earth is being contacted telepathically by extraterrestrial beings through channeling? Based on my experience, it’s possible that I’ve been channeling such a being for the past 30 years. Of course, no one has to believe anything in this film. Sometimes I can hardly believe this happened to me.

[00:07:12] Ross Blocher: There was a screen that flashed up with a quote from him saying, “We have no need for you to believe in us. We are here to assist you in believing in yourselves.”

[00:07:21] Carrie Poppy: Okay. I guess that’s fair.

[00:07:24] Ross Blocher: It’s this weird flirtation. We talked about this before, but like this flirtation with the idea that like, oh, maybe it’s not all real!

[00:07:31] Carrie Poppy: Right, right. Oh, okay. Well, actually—

[00:07:32] Ross Blocher: I’m floating it out there!

[00:07:33] Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Yeah. Actually, if it isn’t, that’s catastrophic for your case.

[00:07:37] Ross Blocher: Right! Oh my goodness. And at the end, he really does—you know, I think it’s worth playing this clip for you.

[00:07:44] Clip:

Darryl Anka: Some think I’m imagining all this—or worse, making it up. They say truth goes through three stages. First, it’s ridiculed. Second, it’s violently opposed. And third, it’s finally accepted as self-evident. The fact is, I’m just an ordinary person who experienced something extraordinary. I think these people don’t understand my experience, because they’ve never had such things happen to them. So, they believe they can’t happen to anyone.

When people come back to me and say, you know, “I applied this information the way Bashar told it to me. It solved this problem. It cleared this thing up. It gave me a whole new perspective. It allowed me to feel like I was in control. It allowed me to experience the outcome that I really preferred to experience.” I mean, that’s very gratifying. And it tells me that this is real on that level. I think that’s the important thing to understand is it’s not about whether people believe that Bashar is real. It’s not about whether this is another aspect of my own consciousness. It’s is the information real? Can you prove that it works? And yes, you can.

I’ve applied it in my life and gotten amazing results. Other people keep telling me that they’ve applied it, and it works for them. It changes things in very positive ways. They see more synchronicity in their life. They feel more positive in general. They do better at what they do. They’re following their passion more often and living happier lives.

[00:09:08] Ross Blocher: So, I think, again, very telling. I think he’s kind of explaining his rationalization to us of, “Well, it doesn’t really matter if it’s real, ‘cause people come to me and they say they’ve had all of these great, you know, increased synchronicities and awareness of life and positive outcomes.”

[00:09:25] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I know this works on people, but it’s so—it’s so obvious to me.

[00:09:31] Ross Blocher: And again, in his own documentary that he’s making about himself, I think he’s revealing so much here. He then goes a little further a few minutes later and talks about the advantages of this life that he’s chosen for himself.

[00:09:44] Carrie Poppy: Okay.

[00:09:45] Clip:

Darryl Anka: I have learned things I never believed I would’ve learned, never imagined were possible to experience.

Music: Mystical, chiming music.

Darryl Anka: I’ve certainly traveled to many different places on the Earth I probably never would’ve gone to if it wasn’t for the channeling. It’s really enriched my life in a lot of different ways. So, I think that anyone who has an opportunity to follow a path that’s unusual, even if people think you’re crazy, I think the rewards outweigh anyone else’s opinion. And you know, you don’t always know where you’re gonna wind up, and that’s okay. That’s part of the adventure. So, I’d say go for it, because the alternative is to wonder what would’ve happened. And I’d rather go forward and be called crazy than to look back and say, “I have a regret that I never followed that path.”

[00:10:41] Carrie Poppy: Mm. Dope vacations.

[00:10:44] Ross Blocher: Yeah. “It worked out for me! I got to jet set around the world. Wouldn’t have done that if I’d just been a humble model maker and effects guy.”

[00:10:51] Carrie Poppy: I mentioned this, I’m sure, when we were talking about Tony Robbins, but I always get in this little circle in my head when I listen to people like this speak where I’m thinking, “So, you’re inspiring people to be like you. Okay. But if you need 100 followers to sit in a room and nod at you for that to seem legitimate, then each of them needs 100 followers to sit in a room and nod at them—”

[00:11:17] Ross Blocher: A Ponzi scheme that falls apart very quickly.

[00:11:17] Carrie Poppy: Yeah! (Chuckling.) Yeah, exactly. You actually can’t communicate the thing that you wish to communicate. This can only be a few people who can do this.

[00:11:27] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And I do think it requires a rare overlap of skill sets. And one is—one really important one is just that ability to be willing to say this stuff in front of an audience. I just don’t think I could constitutionally do it.

[00:11:42] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could pull off the performance if you weren’t morally wracked about it, but yeah. I don’t think I—I would be so in my head about whether I was doing the wrong thing.

[00:11:53] Ross Blocher: Right, and well, I’d need to immediately explain the ruse. “Okay, so you see what I did there?! It was—”

[00:11:57] Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Oh, yeah, that’s right.

[00:11:59] Ross Blocher: I don’t think I could not do that. Another note from the documentary is that he says the name Bashar was revealed to him, but he didn’t know if it had any particular meaning. But then—

[00:12:10] Carrie Poppy: Oh! But then I bet he found some!

[00:12:12] Ross Blocher: Years later, someone told him that it meant in Arabic “messenger or bringer of good things”.

[00:12:17] Carrie Poppy: (Faking awe.) Oh my God! Can you believe it?

[00:12:19] Ross Blocher: I tried doing some like translation stuff online to see if I could find anything. You know, I can neither confirm nor deny.

[00:12:26] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Glomar.

[00:12:28] Ross Blocher: Glomar.

(They chuckle.)

Thank you for repeating that. I’m gonna internalize this.

[00:12:31] Carrie Poppy: It’s just like Ella, coming from Ella Poppy High School. There are no coincidences.

[00:12:38] Ross Blocher: Ella Barkley. Amazing. Another interesting thing in First Contact was he told this origin story of the gray aliens that I’ve never heard before.

[00:12:45] Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. Like where they came from? Okay.

[00:12:48] Ross Blocher: Yeah, like they had this other planet where they were like us, and they advanced very quickly. But then—and this is illustrated by like an alien dude, kind of human-like, but he’s wearing like sunglasses. And then, like his sunglasses get bigger, and then they turn into like VR glasses, and then they turn into like more elaborate VR glasses.

And they were getting disconnected from the world, and eventually they just moved underground and started cloning themselves.

(Carrie “woah”s.)

A little bit of like a Wall-E story or something. Like, the bones disintegrated. Well, that was Wall-E; it wasn’t in this story. But yeah, they just became pinched and bitter. And eventually, like it changed their physiognomy so that you had them looking like these gray aliens.

[00:13:30] Carrie Poppy: It sounds a little bit like Scientology.

[00:13:31] Ross Blocher: Yeah, totally! I feel like there—just in terms of the storytelling, I feel like there’s a lot of overlap with kind of how L. Ron Hubbard crafted his tales.

[00:13:40] Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. Yeah. The like spirits leaving and going into the earth. Very Scientology.

[00:13:46] Ross Blocher: We learned the name of Bashar’s home planet.

[00:13:48] Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah. Okay. Cyrano De Bergerac.

[00:13:54] Ross Blocher: (Laughing.) Yeah, that’s it.

[00:13:54] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah, yeah? Okay, cool. That’s cool.

[00:13:59] Ross Blocher: Essassani, which I think I—well, I read elsewhere in a book we’ll talk about—that’s like named for the place of light or people of light, something like that. That’s what he says. It sounds like a good brand of water, Essassani.

[00:14:11] Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) And then what—? He’s from like a community within the Essassani, right?

[00:14:15] Ross Blocher: I don’t know the details of that, but they’re kind of a collective consciousness.

[00:14:19] Carrie Poppy: Got it. He’s a member of the E.T. society called the Sassani.

[00:14:23] Ross Blocher: Sassani! Oh, okay. Okay. Interesting.

They’ve been observing us apparently for thousands of years. And so, this came up last time. We cut it out of the episode, ‘cause I wasn’t sure yet. You’d mentioned that he’s from the future, and sure enough, there are many different references to him being from the future. And I was all excited, because I thought I’d figured out exactly how far in the future he was.

Turns out it was another being that he was channeling that I found that description for. And that one was from 175,000 years in the future. Willa Hillicrissing is from 700 years in the future. So, I haven’t yet narrowed down how far in the future Bashar is supposed to be.

[00:15:01] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I’m not sure either. He lives on a spaceship 7,000 Earth miles above Sedona though.

[00:15:06] Ross Blocher: Okay. And his home planet is like 500 light years away? Except if he tried to point out where it was, it would be—well, it doesn’t matter, because it’s on a different vibrational plane. So, even if he pointed out exactly where it was, we wouldn’t be able to see it.

[00:15:21] Carrie Poppy: Isn’t that coincidental? Bashar is 5’0”.

[00:15:25] Ross Blocher: 5’0”?

[00:15:26] Carrie Poppy: 5’0”. Five feet. Five feet tall. 60 inches.

[00:15:28] Ross Blocher: Oh, gotcha! Okay. Oh, that makes him sound pretty physical.

[00:15:33] Carrie Poppy: Yeah! Good point. And yet.

[00:15:35] Ross Blocher: On Bashar’s website, it says he’s a physical E.T., and then on another intro on a YouTube video, it says he’s a nonphysical extraterrestrial.

[00:15:42] Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah. My whole description here, I have Bashar’s five feet, white/gray skin, no hair on males, hair on most females, usually white. Eyes are larger than human.

[00:15:52] Ross Blocher: So, that’s his race.

[00:15:54] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, but this all makes very little sense if he’s nonphysical.

[00:15:57] Ross Blocher: Yeah, so he must be physical. This all sounds very physical. Someone had a typo.

[00:16:02] Carrie Poppy: You know, there’s more oxygen and more water on his planet.

[00:16:05] Ross Blocher: Okay. Aaalright. I’m trying to think if that—

[00:16:09] Carrie Poppy: (Giggles.) That’s better.

[00:16:09] Ross Blocher: —raises any flags for me, like does that sound wrong? I don’t know. There’s lots of testimonials, of course, in the documentary.

[00:16:17] Carrie Poppy: Of course. Does Darryl give a testimonial for Bashar?

[00:16:20] Ross Blocher: He should! At this rate.

[00:16:21] Carrie Poppy: He should. And then Bashar should give one for Darryl as a channeler.

[00:16:24] Ross Blocher: It’s just so strange and solipsistic that he’s making his own documentary about his channeled alien.

[00:16:29] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, it really—yeah, this is so interesting, ‘cause I wanna know what his personal relationships are like. You know? Like, he seems to be married. I think he’s married to Erica Jordan.

[00:16:39] Ross Blocher: Yeah, Erica Jordan.

[00:16:40] Carrie Poppy: And he and his wife run an escape room themed Like Egypt, in Calabasas.

(Ross confirms with a laugh.)

[00:16:50] Ross Blocher: That’s close by. We gotta go. Should we pick a date?

[00:16:52] Carrie Poppy: A couple towns north of here. Yeah, we should pick a date. I gotta admit this is—I love escape rooms. I love them. And this does not look like the escape room for me, but obviously we need to go.

[00:17:03] Ross Blocher: Yeah, it looks pretty sterile from the photos they post, but I’m always up for an escape room, so I don’t care. I’m in.

[00:17:10] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, same deal.

[00:17:12] Ross Blocher: The key of destiny! He’s so enterprising. Bashar just—

[00:17:16] Carrie Poppy: I know!

[00:17:17] Ross Blocher: I mean, you can’t fault him for lack of energy.

[00:17:21] Carrie Poppy: No. Yeah, he’s tried a lot of things.

[00:17:22] Ross Blocher: I also started watching this film that he made, called Dearly Departed, and that one he did narrate. Because it was—

[00:17:29] Carrie Poppy: He’s done a lot of movies!

[00:17:31] Ross Blocher: Yeah. He interviewed people who had died. And I don’t know—

[00:17:36] Carrie Poppy: (Shocked.) I’m sorry?!

[00:17:36] Ross Blocher: The whole idea is like there’s all these interviews with these sometimes talking heads, sometimes you see their full body. But there are people who have these little rays shining out of them, because they died, and he’s asking them about their deaths or what they meant to achieve in life or what they’re gonna do now. And I only got a quarter of the way into it, so I have no idea where this is all going.

[00:17:57] Carrie Poppy: Hmm. Strange. Okay.

[00:17:59] Ross Blocher: Yeah, but it’s his muted voice that’s asking all the questions of these dead people. One of them was Cochise, the—(chuckles).

[00:18:06] Carrie Poppy: I don’t know who that is.

[00:18:07] Ross Blocher: A famous Native American warrior. And it was—it was so bad, but a very Darryl Anka moment.

[00:18:14] Clip:

Music: Light wind instruments.

Darryl Anka: You chose your time of death.

Cochise: We all do. Not always by the clock. It’s less about time, more about timing. If you move through your life in a good way, in a way that is true for you, you will always end up where you need to be exactly when you need to be there.

Darryl Anka: You’re talking about synchronicity.

Cochise: I prefer to call it Indian time.

[00:18:40] Carrie Poppy: (Flatly.) Oh, cool. Cool, cool, cool.

(Ross “wow”s several times.)

Yeah. Cool. So, okay, so they’re real people, and they’re Darryl/Bashar’s understanding of how they would really respond to these questions? Maybe?

[00:18:52] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And I don’t know how much it ties into his other ideas of spirituality or what. But yeah, you know, if I was filming you, I would ask you questions. You’d pretend to be dead and answer the questions. And then, later on in post I would add shimmering lights floating out of you as you were talking, which is actually pretty well done.

[00:19:11] Carrie Poppy: I just—there’s no way I could pay attention until I at least knew if the filmmaker was claiming this was fiction or nonfiction.

[00:19:17] Ross Blocher: Oh, it’s clearly fiction. Yeah, yeah.

[00:19:19] Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. Alright. Well, speaking of fiction, he also made a movie called Alienated.

(Ross confirms with a laugh.)

And you recommended this. Drew and I pulled it up on the TV.

[00:19:30] Ross Blocher: Five stars, would recommend. (Laughs.)

[00:19:31] Carrie Poppy: Oh, we were— Out of 12?

(Ross agrees.)

We watched the first, hm, 50 or so minutes.

[00:19:40] Ross Blocher: Okay. You got over halfway through.

[00:19:42] Carrie Poppy: And then, we just started pushing the 15-minute fast forward button until the end. Just like—or I mean, 15-second. So, it would just be a few seconds of the next part of the—“Okay. That’s what happens. That’s what happens. That’s what happens.” And we did that through the rest of the movie.

[00:19:58] Ross Blocher: Okay. (Laughs.) That’s what it deserves.

(Carrie agrees.)

The Dearly Departed one was 2013. The Alienated one is quite recent. It was 2021.

[00:20:06] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that sounds right.

[00:20:07] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Oh, this movie. So, okay. It’s called Alienated. Somehow Darryl Anka got the money and ability to direct another film. And this one is very much related to his whole alien storytelling. And there are points in the film that I was like, “Ooh, that’s his Bashar talking point.” But nowhere in the film is channeling mentioned. Certainly not Bashar. Bashar is not named-dropped. Darryl Anka himself does not show up on film, but he—

[00:20:35] Carrie Poppy: But his wife does. She’s a cameo at the bookstore at the end. Mm-hm.

[00:20:39] Ross Blocher: Oh! Okay. I’ll have to go re-watch that again.

[00:20:42] Carrie Poppy: Okay. (Laughs.) Watch the whole movie again.

[00:20:44] Ross Blocher: Yeah, just to get to that part. I don’t know how to fast forward movies.

[00:20:47] Carrie Poppy: 15. 15. 15.

[00:20:49] Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) So, Alienated. Great title. But yeah, it’s about this young man who’s a scientist, but we get a lot of his backstory. Carrie is scrunching her face in dismay.

[00:20:59] Carrie Poppy: It’s already—I find it so hard to explain a movie to begin with. And this movie? Ay-yai-yai.

(Ross laughs.)

Um, yeah, it’s like a kid—an American kid with Irish parents. This is never explained.

[00:21:11] Ross Blocher: Well, especially the dad. Yeah. The dad has a really bad Irish accent. Never explained. Why does the son not inherit any of the accent from his father?

[00:21:21] Carrie Poppy: Or the mother! The mom has an Irish accent.

[00:21:22] Ross Blocher: Does she too?

(Carrie confirms.)

Okay, but a lighter one, I guess.

[00:21:25] Carrie Poppy: Oh, I found it pretty pronounced.

[00:21:27] Clips:

Kid (Alienated): Let me guess. We need more iron in our diet.

Father: Ah, isn’t it a beaut?

Mother: More trash.

Father: One man’s trash—

Mother: Is still trash by any other name.

Father: You’re thinking of a rose, my darling. Like you. A wild Irish rose.

(Mother giggles.)

Kid: You guys are embarrassing me.

[00:21:45] Ross Blocher: Why doesn’t the son—

[00:21:46] Carrie Poppy: The son doesn’t have it, so I just assume he’s first generation American, but like that’s never addressed and seems important.

[00:21:52] Ross Blocher: There’s no point for the actor to be using a fake Irish accent. Just like tell him, “Speak normal.” It adds nothing to the story.

[00:22:01] Carrie Poppy: I wonder if maybe the wife—maybe hers was real, and they were like, “Well, then you need one too, sir. You can’t just have an Irish wife.” I don’t know.

(They laugh.)

[00:22:11] Ross Blocher: This is confused filmmaking at its finest.

[00:22:14] Carrie Poppy: Yes. Yeah. So, the little boy grows up.

[00:22:20] Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. To become a scientist.

[00:22:21] Carrie Poppy: Yes. He becomes a scientist, who’s—

[00:22:23] Ross Blocher: But bad movie scientist.

[00:22:24] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, he was always like working in a lab, in a lab coat, like writing formulas on a whiteboard, and being like, “Oh, we’re one step away!”

[00:22:30] Ross Blocher: Yeah, lots of—lots of formulas. Yeah. Yeah. Talking about science without really understanding science.

[00:22:37] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. And then meanwhile, he is still in relationship with his father, who is old now and a bit senile.

[00:22:45] Ross Blocher: And a hoarder. Though, now he looks—he hasn’t aged at all, so he looks—(laughs).

[00:22:48] Carrie Poppy: Here’s what’s wild you guys.

[00:22:51] Ross Blocher: So, he looks just a couple years older than his son.

[00:22:53] Carrie Poppy: They cast this movie, and they hired an actor who was like exactly the same age as the son to play the father. And then, instead of putting prosthetics or anything that you would do to age a person up, they give him a longer beard, so he just looks more Jesus-y as he ages.

[00:23:14] Ross Blocher: It’s so strange.

[00:23:15] Carrie Poppy: It’s so—and he is like this like jacked guy who obviously goes to the gym and stuff. So, he is like in his 60s. He’s like super cut. It’s so strange.

[00:23:23] Ross Blocher: Totally the wrong look. And he’s a hoarder. He’s been holding onto all these like experiments that he has been trying to build, like create free energy machines.

[00:23:33] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Very Bell’s dad in Beauty and the Beast.

[00:23:36] Ross Blocher: And he can’t even make a wood chopping stove thing, like Maurice did.

[00:23:42] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Always good for a laugh.

[00:23:45] Ross Blocher: (Chuckling.) Crazy, old Maurice.

I was waiting for something that he made to like become functional or useful or part of the plot later on, like finally his free energy device comes online and saves the day.

[00:23:56] Carrie Poppy: You were right all along.

[00:23:58] Ross Blocher: Kind of they do that with this weird gear that he made. And they’re like, “(Gasps.) That helped me solve the psymatic relationship of the vibrations that underlie time space continuum or whatever.”

[00:24:08] Carrie Poppy: It’s like a gear they keep in like a mini pizza box.

(They laugh.)

Is it not?

[00:24:13] Ross Blocher: Oh, this sounds like we’re telling a bad dream, ‘cause it’s a bad film.

[00:24:16] Carrie Poppy: And then—we haven’t even dropped this feature. There’s an alien in it. There’s a girl who’s an alien.

[00:24:22] Ross Blocher: A love interest played by—this is a great name—Gracie Lacey.

[00:24:27] Carrie Poppy: Oh, that’s who that was. I saw that in the credits, but I didn’t know who she was.

[00:24:30] Ross Blocher: That’s a great name!

[00:24:31] Carrie Poppy: Gracie, please come on the show. Tell us about your whole situation.

[00:24:36] Ross Blocher: Absolutely. How did this happen?

[00:24:37] Carrie Poppy: Is this your—is this your real name?

[00:24:39] Ross Blocher: So, he meets her in the park shortly after seeing a UFO, and the UFO looks almost identical to the UFO that Bashar used in his First Contact documentary to show the one that he saw, down to like the shot with the clouds and the UFO descending. I wouldn’t be surprised if he just reused the shot in the film.

[00:24:59] Carrie Poppy: Oh wow. Okay, yeah.

[00:25:00] Ross Blocher: I’d have to go back and compare them, but I was like, “Wh—oh! Same.”

[00:25:04] Carrie Poppy: And we mentioned this in the last episode, but Darryl Anka—he builds models. Oh, you said this, didn’t you? But yeah, he builds models. So, a lot of the stuff, you know, the special effects going on here are sort of—

[00:25:16] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And he was a compositor, so I imagine he could do a lot of that. Though, I imagine he—since other people were credited, maybe he just had good connections for people who could do cheap work.

(Carrie agrees.)

But at least, you know, I would trust him to have an eye for it. And the effects work is, you know, fine for what it is.

[00:25:32] Carrie Poppy: It’s fine. It’s completely fine.

[00:25:36] Ross Blocher: So, okay—so, all of a sudden this young woman appears, and they become love interests. And she’s just so quirky and weird, and he’s so (dropping his voice) buttoned up and straight.

And they build this very awkward romance.

[00:25:49] Carrie Poppy: Right. Yeah. I mean, it’s so obvious that this is supposed to be a love story from the beginning in the way it’s written, but there’s no chemistry between the actors. No—people aren’t even like off book, you know. It’s just—I’m picturing Darryl Anka just like barely off screen being like, “We gotta pump this out before 11, when crafty disappears.”

[00:26:08] Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) Totally. And then there’s this whole subplot about this older guy who’s also in the park and tries to take photos of the UFO, and they don’t develop. And he starts chasing the girl, ‘cause he figures out that she’s an alien.

[00:26:21] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. And he’s sort of bad, but—

[00:26:24] Ross Blocher: Oh yeah, she’s an artist. She’s a quirky artist. And—that’s right. That’s how the young scientist meets her, is because he’s buying her artwork, ‘cause it looks like the UFO that he just saw.

[00:26:34] Carrie Poppy: So, he’s willing to pay $5,000. Oh my god.

[00:26:36] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Just ‘cause he wants to have dinner with her. Well, anyways, we’re giving way too much detail about this silly movie. It’s called Alienated. It’s free on a lot of platforms if you wanna watch it.

[00:26:46] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, if you wanna watch it. You’ll do more than I did with it.

[00:26:49] Ross Blocher: Then, later on, when they’re solving these equations that they’ve written on the whiteboards—which by the way, the quirky artist girlfriend recognizes, “(Gasps.) You got it wrong; you got the equation wrong.” And so, they have a little fight over this, like why would you even joke about that?!

[00:27:05] Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. This must have been when I was—

[00:27:08] Ross Blocher: Fast forwarding 15 seconds at a time. So, they have this little breakup fight, but then they’re both so sad, ‘cause they really miss each other. Anyway, so the friend looks at this equation they’ve been working on for forever and says, “(Gasps.) She’s right! This shouldn’t be a minus; it should be a plus.”

[00:27:21] Carrie Poppy: Oh my god!

[00:27:23] Ross Blocher: And then, the young scientist has the revelation that the figure that his father had—the gear, it explains everything. And he runs back to the lab, and he says, “Oh, I’ve got it now! Look at this post-it note. Look at this other post-it note. What’s different about them?”

(In a dopey voice.) “I don’t know. They’re the same.”

“Well, look, this one’s here and this one’s there. It’s just placement! We just need to recognize the placement energy and quantify that. And then, we can teleport if we can reverse engineer it.” And this was one of Bashar’s talking points during this talk that we’re attending. So, he worked it into the movie. And then, they go and make up. Well, he goes to look for her. She’s had to leave, ‘cause she has to go back to her planet. And he still doesn’t realize that she’s an alien. And so, then he finds her, and they’re so happy in the park together, and he gets teleported up into her ship, and they have another weird little fight. It’s such a strange movie.

[00:28:12] Carrie Poppy: Oh, they have a fight on the UFO?

[00:28:14] Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) Yeah, just after they’ve made up and talked about how they want to be with each other for forever. And then, he is like, (dropping his voice) “Well, what the hell? What is this place?” And I don’t know. It’s just bad dialogue. There’s lots of it.

[00:28:25] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It’s not a very good movie. You know what’s a good movie is Presommar. Anybody who hasn’t seen Presommar, it is my remake of Midsommar.

[00:28:33] Ross Blocher: Do yourself a treat. Yeah. Find it on YouTube.

[00:28:35] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Go and look at it on YouTube. It’s really good.

[00:28:38] Ross Blocher: Escape rooms, movies that he’s directing, movies that he’s writing. This guy’s everywhere.

[00:28:44] Carrie Poppy: I mean, I respect the hustle, and I respect a person who goes their own way. But man, he’s doing it weird.

[00:28:52] Ross Blocher: Okay, well we said we’d go back to the Q&A. Should we go back to the Q&A?

[00:28:55] Carrie Poppy: Let’s go back to the Q&A. But first, I have made a movie.

[00:28:58] Ross Blocher: Yeah?

(Carrie confirms.)

Well, this is exciting.

[00:29:01] Carrie Poppy: Uh, not just Presommar, but also—yes, also a movie about—(snickering) a movie about two podcasters who are sitting in one of their living rooms when a man walks in with a trumpet and an official scroll and says, (trumpeting) “I have a jumbotron!”

[00:29:22] Ross Blocher: You gotta write what you know. And that’s what we know. ‘Cause it happens all the time.

[00:29:25] Carrie Poppy: That’s what happened this afternoon.

[00:29:27] Ross Blocher: We cut him out of every episode, but he always shows up, and he always has the trumpet.

[00:29:30] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. And then we’re like, “We’re trying to record.” Anyway, this afternoon he came in with a jumbotron for Vero!

[00:29:38] Ross Blocher: And the jumbotron said, “Happy birthday Vero.”

[00:29:41] Carrie Poppy: “You’re an amazing person, and I’m so happy that you’re part of my life.”

[00:29:44] Ross Blocher: “Love, your Dave.” Aw, that’s so nice.

[00:29:48] Carrie Poppy: That’s so nice. I don’t know what on earth it means. But it’s been delivered to us again through this messenger. And—

[00:29:54] Ross Blocher: That seemed pretty straightforward. “You’re an amazing person and I’m so happy you’re part of my life.” I don’t know what it means.

[00:29:58] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I just mean I don’t know why we have this person who shows up and delivers us these messages. I don’t know a Vero.

[00:30:05] Ross Blocher: Yeah, be gone, person with the trumpet.

[00:30:08] Carrie Poppy: Anyway, I’m glad I’m doing this docuseries about my own life.

[00:30:11] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Good. I feel like they’re just missing a Chuck in their relationship.

[00:30:15] Carrie Poppy: Chuck and Vero and Dave. What’s that?

[00:30:17] Ross Blocher: (Singing.) Vero, Chuck, and Dave. Dododo-dodododo.

[00:30:19] Carrie Poppy: Ooooh, oh, uh, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. Is that what that is?

[00:30:24] Ross Blocher: Close. It’s uh “When I’m 64”. And it’s Vera. But you know, I’ll take it.

(Carrie affirms.)

By the way, I gotta say Dave was completely on time. It was just this trumpet man.

[00:30:34] Carrie Poppy: The trumpet guy made us release this episode a week late.

[00:30:38] Ross Blocher: (Laughing.) Yeah, let’s blame him.

[00:30:39] Carrie Poppy: We were so stunned when he walked in.

[00:30:42] Ross Blocher: So, just know, Vero, that Dave had you in mind long in advance. This is our fault.

[00:30:47] Carrie Poppy: Dave really does love you. Don’t read into this, Vero. I know how you are! Just kidding. I don’t know you at all. You seem cool.

[00:30:53] Ross Blocher: We love you too. It’s just this stupid trumpet guy,

[00:30:56] Carrie Poppy: This stupid trumpet! Anyway, speaking of him, he has something else! (Trumpeting.)

[00:30:59] Ross Blocher: How did—how did—how did he get back in here?

[00:31:04] Carrie Poppy: (Cartoonishly.) Hello! I’m Trumpy.

[00:31:08] Ross Blocher: Oh no, that’s not good.

(They laugh.)

[00:31:11] Carrie Poppy: It’s a coincidence! But I’ve been hounded for the last six years about my goddamn name! I’m so mad!

[00:31:17] Ross Blocher: Have you got another jumbotron for us?

[00:31:19] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I got a jumbotron. It’s from Sunday Assembly!

[00:31:23] Ross Blocher: Oh, hey, my friends at Sunday Assembly!

[00:31:26] Carrie Poppy: Okay, here. Let me hand you this scroll.

(Ross thanks Trumpy.)

No problem. It’s extra for me to read it, so I’m leaving.

[00:31:31] Ross Blocher: Alright, thank you. It says: if you’re an evidence-based fan with good humor and empathy, like so many ONRAC listeners, you’d love Sunday Assembly.

[00:31:40] Carrie Poppy: (Returning to her normal voice.) We are a secular community in over 20—Carrie, 21—cities around the world, largely in the US and the UK.

[00:31:50] Ross Blocher: We do what churches do, like offering connection, celebration and exploration, but without deity, dogma, or doctrine.

[00:31:58] Carrie Poppy: So, sing a pop song offkey. Learn something new. Be embraced for who you are. We look forward to seeing you.

[00:32:05] Ross Blocher: Oh, that’s great. And they knew what was going on. They knew Carrie would look at that and be like, “Over 20?”

[00:32:10] Carrie Poppy: Over 20? Hooow many?! You’re wearing a Sunday assembly shirt.

[00:32:15] Ross Blocher: You know what? That is actually a coincidence. I just put that on this morning.

[00:32:17] Carrie Poppy: Whoa! A real fan.

[00:32:19] Ross Blocher: That’s right. Yeah. And I’m part of the local Los Angeles Sunday Assembly fold and just went there on Father’s Day. It was really, really nice.

[00:32:27] Carrie Poppy: If you are part of the bound—my friend, Steven, calls them the bound and the unbound—that some people just prefer to be bound, to have community, to have that kind of thing.

[00:32:35] Ross Blocher: Oh, I like that!

[00:32:36] Carrie Poppy: I am unbound.

[00:32:37] Ross Blocher: I like that. Okay.

[00:32:38] Carrie Poppy: But I think you are a bound.

[00:32:40] Ross Blocher: I am definitely a bound. The Los Angeles branch, they’re now holding their meetings at USC, at the Office for Student Religious Life that there’s a name for it that I’m butchering, but it’s pretty cool. The school has a secular chaplain there, as many schools now do, and that’s where they meet regularly. But as they said in the jumbotron, there’s Sunday Assemblies all over the place. So yeah, if you—

[00:33:01] Carrie Poppy: 21!

[00:33:02] Ross Blocher: If you like to get together and do the singing, have the food, hang out, share your milestones, things that are going well in your life or things that are going poorly and you want other people to hear that and react to it, it’s there for you. And they have something that would be like a sermon, except it’s someone who’s an expert in something just sharing, like often a scientist. Like, “Hey! Here’s something I’m working on. Here’s some slides.” It’s really cool. Half the length of a normal sermon. And it’s educational, and it’s not always the same person over and over.

[00:33:30] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen some of these talks. They’re good.

[00:33:32] Ross Blocher: So, there you go. That’s my pitch. So, visit SundayAssembly.org to learn more and check out a community near you.

[00:33:39] Carrie Poppy: And Sunday Assembly, I’m looking forward to every jumbotron you buy for the rest of your existence updating the number so that it stays accurate.

[00:33:46] Ross Blocher: Yeah, that’s true. If it changes, uuuh…

[00:33:49] Carrie Poppy: (Playfully.) I’m gonna be so mad. Just kidding.

[00:33:50] Ross Blocher: We should hear from you.

[00:33:52] Carrie Poppy: Speaking of things that we genuinely like and genuinely use—like Sunday Assembly and Vero—when we have an ad for Squarespace, finding it in my email is almost impossible. Because!

[00:34:05] Ross Blocher: Oh yeah, you can’t put in, ‘cause if you type in Squarespace, it gives us every—

[00:34:08] Carrie Poppy: Every email.

[00:34:09] Ross Blocher: Every email that someone sends through our web form.

[00:34:11] Carrie Poppy: Because we really use Squarespace! And have, as long as this show been alive.

[00:34:17] Ross Blocher: Now you’ve got me curious; I’m gonna type this in.

[00:34:19] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, do it.

[00:34:20] Ross Blocher: Squarespace. Oh, it just says 1-50 of many.

[00:34:24] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. (Laughs.) Yeah, that’s right. ‘Cause we really use Squarespace! It is the all-in-one platform for building your podcast, growing your business.

Whatever it is you do, you can stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, your listeners, sell whatever! Products, content, sell your time. Whatever it is you do, Squarespace can do it.

[00:34:45] Ross Blocher: I’m now just distractedly scrolling through here, and I’m already to 800 of many. Yeah, I give up.

[00:34:51] Carrie Poppy: See? It’d be like me looking up “Drew” in my email. It’s just like you gotta be more specific, dude. You have a full-on relationship with Squarespace.

[00:34:59] Ross Blocher: ‘Cause you two just email each other back and forth all the time?

[00:35:03] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah, we email each other a lot. Do you and Cara not email each other a lot?

[00:35:05] Ross Blocher: Very, very little.

[00:35:06] Carrie Poppy: Whoooa! Cool.

[00:35:07] Ross Blocher: Well, we’re in each other’s texts constantly. And we call each other, but you know. But yeah, no constant emailing back and forth.

Well, look here. You don’t get this in a relationship. You don’t get a website and an online store that comes with a suite of integrated features and useful guides that help maximize prominence among search results. Drew doesn’t provide that for you!

[00:35:26] Carrie Poppy: Drew doesn’t do this for me!

[00:35:27] Ross Blocher: (Whispering.) What a dick!

[00:35:28] Carrie Poppy: What a piece of shit! I hate him!

[00:35:31] Ross Blocher: If it makes you feel any better, Cara does not have powerful blogging tools to share stories, photos, videos, and updates. But Squarespace lets you categorize, share, and schedule your posts to make your content work for you.

[00:35:42] Carrie Poppy: Agh! And you know what? Neither of them—Drew or Cara—has extensions! You can’t connect your store to vetted third party tools to extend the functionality of your marriage!

[00:35:53] Ross Blocher: Cara could probably get extensions, but she has long hair as it is.

[00:35:56] Carrie Poppy: That’s true. Oh, she’s so lucky. It takes so much to grow my hair. Anyway, (laughing) Squarespace is a great—it is a great website provider!

[00:36:04] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And it’s a website whereby, and for which, and with whom for how you can produce more websites.

[00:36:12] Carrie Poppy: Oh, I loved this. I loved this role. What do you call those? What are they? They’re like, uh—what kind of clauses are those?

[00:36:19] Ross Blocher: Prepositional clauses?

[00:36:20] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Love ’em. Anyway.

[00:36:23] Ross Blocher: Yeah, I’m totally tramping in on Carrie’s domain here.

[00:36:27] Carrie Poppy: Oh! Oh, do I do that a lot? Oh, yeah, I do do that a lot. You’re right.

[00:36:29] Ross Blocher: You’re famous for that.

[00:36:30] Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. Oh! Well, well! I’m gonna make a Squarespace website about it.

[00:36:34] Ross Blocher: The trumpet guy’s in the window. He’s got—he’s got his thumb up.

[00:36:37] Carrie Poppy: (Trumpy voice.) I know exactly what he is talking about!

[00:36:39] Ross Blocher: (Trumpy voice.) Ross is right!

(They laugh.)

[00:36:42] Carrie Poppy: So, head to Squarespace.com/ohno for a free trial. And when you’re ready to launch, use the offer code “oh no” and save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

[00:36:52] Ross Blocher: 10% off with the offer code “oh no”?!

[00:36:54] Carrie Poppy: Yes, that’s right Ross! Squarespace: Leave your spouse!

(They titter.)

[00:37:04] Ross Blocher: Oh, and while you’re at it, listen to this Maximum Fun show!

[00:37:09] Promo:

Music: Plucky orchestral music.

Mark Gagliardi: What is up people of the world? Do you have an argument that you keep having with your friends and you just can’t seem to settle it, and you’re sitting there arguing about whether it’s Star Trek or Star Wars? Or you can’t decide what is the best nut! Or can’t agree on what is the best cheese.

Hal Lublin: Stop doing that. Listen to We Got This with Mark and Hal, only on MaxFun.

Mark: Your topics asked and answered objectively, definitively, for all time.

Hal: So, don’t worry, everybody!

Mark & Hal: (In unison.) We got this.

Music: We got this!

[00:37:40] Carrie Poppy: Shall we finish up this Q&A?

[00:37:42] Ross Blocher: Let’s do it.

[00:37:43] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Okay.

[00:37:44] Ross Blocher: I love me a good Q&A, and this is where Darryl thrives. This is his element. Maybe not filmmaking, but you know, as far as Q&As go, he’s got it.

[00:37:54] Carrie Poppy: He doesn’t even have to give a talk.

[00:37:55] Ross Blocher: So, after where we left off, there was a woman who came up and she was wearing a multicolored throw and blue jeans.

(Carrie suppresses a laugh.)

And she had a two-part question. What was she asking about, Carrie?

[00:38:04] Carrie Poppy: Is she the one who asked about the source of humor?

[00:38:07] Ross Blocher: Yeah! I kind of like this. She asked, “You make a lot of jokes. And so, what’s the connection between humor and connecting to source?” And I was like I like this question!

Essentially, kinda asking him, “Hey, why do you do this thing where you’re like making all these jokes. Is this important?”

[00:38:25] Carrie Poppy: Right, right. Is it as annoying as it seems? Or you got a purpose here?

And Bashar’s answer is a sort of analysis of what is humor; how does it function? And he says, “The source of humor is being led in one direction, and then being surprised when you’re taking in a new one.”

[00:38:42] Ross Blocher: That resonated with me on my frequency, because I feel like my go-to summation of what makes things funny is upset expectations. You kind of get somebody picturing something, and then you make ’em realize like, “Ooh! I had that picture wrong. Oh-ho-ho! Very funny.”

[00:38:59] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I remember learning about this in undergrad theatre class, and it’s called Incongruity Theory.

[00:39:07] Ross Blocher: You can go to an undergrad class, or you can attend a Bashar lecture.

[00:39:12] Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) But yeah, he’s—you know, it’s one theory. And I think it makes sense. But yeah, he’s presenting it as, “This is it! This is the formula for comedy!” And it reminded me of a clip from The Dick Van Dyke Show, my second favorite show of all time.

[00:39:26] Ross Blocher: Mm-hmm. After Mary Tyler Moore.

[00:39:27] Carrie Poppy: So—that’s right. Thank you! So, may I play it for you?

(Ross confirms.)

So, in this clip, Rob—Dick Van Dyke—has been selected as father of the week for his son’s school, and he’s a comedy writer, and he’s having trouble explaining his job to the kids. As he’s sort of fumbling through his explanation, he trips. And that makes the kids laugh, and then he—off the cuff—explains to them what made it funny to them.

[00:39:53] Ross Blocher: Why they’re laughing. And it’s always funnier when you explain the joke.

[00:39:58] Clip:

Rob (The Dick Van Dyke Show): You laughed then! Did you know why you laughed? Because that was unexpected. You didn’t expect me to do that. Did you see that? Unexpected means that something happens that you didn’t think would happen, and it is kind of like a surprise, really, and that makes you laugh. For instance, if Mrs. Gibbon had said, “Children we’re going to have some addition now,” and she said, “First of all, hm. One and one are 12.”

(The children laugh.)

See, that surprised you! That was the unexpected. So, you laughed. Of course, everybody knows that one and one are 11.

(They laugh again.)

Yeah, see! That’s what the unexpected does. It makes you laugh, because you don’t expect that, and it’s a surprise.

[00:40:38] Ross Blocher: Aw, I like that! And he’s a funny man.

[00:40:40] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, it’s sweet. And so, you don’t need—yeah, but you don’t need to go to Bashar. You can go to 1960s TV for this same level of analysis.

[00:40:49] Ross Blocher: Okay. So, sad story. I went to Disneyland on Monday, and because I did, I missed an opportunity to see Dick Van Dyke.

[00:40:56] Carrie Poppy: Oh, no. What? How? Was he at Disney Animation Studios?

[00:41:00] Ross Blocher: Not at our studio but on the lot. There was a 95th birthday party for Richard Sherman, and 97-year-old Dick Van Dyke was there. I know.

[00:41:11] Carrie Poppy: (Pained.) Ooooh, gutting. I’m so sorry.

[00:41:13] Ross Blocher: But I didn’t cancel the plans I’d made months in advance for my family to have a day together at Disneyland. I know. It was rough.

[00:41:20] Carrie Poppy: Painful. Painful. Dick Van Dyke, if you’re listening, big fans. Please come on the show. We’ll make another podcast. We’ll do whatever you need.

[00:41:29] Ross Blocher: We’ll come to you. Yeah, yeah. Let’s start a new podcast, the three of us.

(They chuckle.)

He did have another point about the humor though. He was saying that when you laugh, then it lightens your vibration, and you can actually understand things better. So, that’s why it’s kind of a useful tool. As we know, Jesus spoke in pairs of jokes.

[00:41:47] Carrie Poppy: (Snickers.) Okay.

[00:41:48] Ross Blocher: It’s not a good joke.

[00:41:48] Carrie Poppy: Is that like parables?

[00:41:51] Ross Blocher: Yeah, I was trying to like make it sound like parable, and just like I misremembered. Actually, he was a notably bad teacher. Parables bad.

[00:41:59] Carrie Poppy: Why do you keep talking in parables then?

[00:42:03] Ross Blocher: (Laughing.) That’s right, Julia Sweeney. Oh, that’s so good. Yeah, just—he’s confusing his own followers. And—

[00:42:08] Carrie Poppy: Even your staff doesn’t understand them!

[00:42:12] Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) That’s such a great line. So, he said—“he” being Bashar—“Even your own Einstein said it: you cannot solve a problem from the same level at which the problem was created.” Then he mentioned that your greatest comics on your planet can make associations at lightning speed, and it shows that they’re especially clever.

[00:42:30] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Except I think he says like, “Very, very, very, very, very humorous about it.”

(Ross giggles.)

I felt like he was stalling for time to really land the—nail the landing. And then, doesn’t.

[00:42:41] Ross Blocher: So, he asks if that helps, and she says it does. But then, she gets to part two of her question!

[00:42:45] Carrie Poppy: Which is, “How can I share your message with my adult kids,” basically. “They aren’t receptive. They think I’m kooky.”

And he’s like, “Yeah, don’t force it on them. They don’t need to take it if they don’t want to.”

[00:42:57] Ross Blocher: Yeah, this was all fine.

[00:42:59] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, “Be a living example of how the formula enhances your life, and they’ll want it too.” And I remember my youth pastor saying this to me in high school.

[00:43:06] Ross Blocher: Okay, walk the walk and then others will be interested. Why is Carrie so special? What makes her different?

[00:43:11] Carrie Poppy: Yes, what makes her so happy?

And I remember like the social toll that puts on you. ‘Cause now it’s like, “Oh, okay, so I need to model this, and I need to seem really happy and really with it, so that you want Jesus too! And when I actually feel kind of dark and sad, I still need to model it! Actually, I’m happier than you are, and you could be happy like me!”

[00:43:31] Ross Blocher: “And then, later on when I find out that I’ve been doing everything right and following all the rules, yet nobody seems to want to be like me! (Dissolving into fake tears.) And this is very strange, ‘cause I was promised that I’d be the shining example, but I gotta be happy! I gotta pretend to be happy!”

[00:43:44] Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Right, yep. It’s a lot of pressure. It’s pressure.

[00:43:46] Ross Blocher: It’s a dark spiral. He had a fun line there. He said, “Give them the option not to take it,”—meaning your advice—“and they’ll eventually wonder why you said that.” Which got a laugh. And that’s humor, ‘cause we weren’t expecting that he would say that.

(Carrie laughs.)

I’m just gonna explain every joke from here on out.

[00:44:02] Carrie Poppy: Sometimes he also delivers something that’s like not really a joke, but he delivers it like a joke, and it just makes you kind of (forcibly) ha-ha-haha! I think that was a joke! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

And then a few seconds later you’re like that wasn’t a joke!

[00:44:14] Ross Blocher: Why are we laughing?

[00:44:15] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It just felt like a joke!

[00:44:16] Ross Blocher: I fell for it too! We all laughed.

[00:44:19] Carrie Poppy: It did have the rhythms of a joke.

[00:44:20] Ross Blocher: That’s—it’s like when, you know, you’re a dog and someone’s like, “I’m gonna throw the ball!” And they like do the whole motion with their hand. And you turn your head around and you’re like, “Where is it? Where—?

[00:44:28] Carrie Poppy: It’s exactly like that. Relatable.

[00:44:29] Ross Blocher: “Where—what—oh, you still—you still have it!”

(They laugh.)

[00:44:32] Carrie Poppy: When you’re a dog it’s exactly like that. Then, he talks about the red light/green light synchronicity thing, which we talked about a little.

[00:44:40] Ross Blocher: And I hope you enjoyed that advice about children, ‘cause he’s not gonna say anything new about children from here on out. If you ask him about children, he’ll be like, “Well, I already answered that.”

[00:44:47] Carrie Poppy: Oh, is that right?

[00:44:49] Ross Blocher: Yeah, it happens later.

[00:44:49] Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. Okay. I respect it. He’s like, “That’s not important.”

[00:44:52] Ross Blocher: Oh, you know what? I’m actually fully behind that. “I had my spiel on that subject. I’m not gonna deliver it again.” I’m actually cool with that.

[00:45:00] Carrie Poppy: Although, since he did do a raffle, there’s probably some people in the line then who are like, “Oh shit, that was my—okay. Uuuh.”

[00:45:06] Ross Blocher: Right. “Oh, I gotta come up with a new question now. I should have had a backup.”

[00:45:09] Carrie Poppy: “Yeah, my question is about how you’re funny.” (Chuckles nervously.)

[00:45:12] Ross Blocher: Well, and I also imagine a lot of people on the line with their questions just kind of focusing on, “Okay, well what’s he gonna say? How do I introduce myself? He’s gonna say something snarky back at me.” I picture them being all in their head trying to work out this conversation. So, at the point they get to him—I think this happened a few times where he said, “Well, did you not hear the thing that I, blah, blah, blah?”

And they look a little shell shocked. Like, “Oh, well, um—hm. No, I wasn’t really paying good attention.”

[00:45:36] Carrie Poppy: Right, right. “I’m—you’re the first—this is the first time I’ve seen you. I was picked out of a basket.”

(They laugh.)

Okay, then there was a point where I think he might be talking about himself a little bit? So, okay. This is something that we’ve remarked on with lots of these people, that they’ll be telling a story or a lesson that’s presented as global, but it’s so particular to them. And you can kind of track how their own life fits into this little lesson they’re telling you. You know what I’m saying?

[00:46:02] Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. That kind of aligns with what I was talking about in the last episode, about the difference between a mainstream religion and just this one-off person who has their own thing—because their personal issues will creep into it. Like, “Well, this is really important to me. And people teased me about this when I was 12, so you’re gonna hear my thoughts on it now.”

[00:46:20] Carrie Poppy: Right, right. This is a defining principle for me, and so it will be for you. So, when he’s talking about red light/green light synchronicity, he’s like, “Sometimes you’ll really be excited about something, and then you’ll keep hitting a wall, and you’ll realize that it’s a red light synchronicity. And maybe you get really far on one project, but then you can’t really cross the line on it, and it isn’t that successful. But you—you know, then you’re kind of able to pivot and do something that’s really similar.”

And I was like—in my head I’m thinking like, “Okay, this movie. Oh, now he’s talking about this movie. No. Okay, he’s—” I can just see how his life maps to that storytelling.

[00:46:54] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Well, it’s funny, ‘cause he did that in that documentary, First Contact, as well—where he was talking about, you know, how life hands you different things and opportunities and you need to jump on them. And he told his own story of seeing Star Wars and being so blown away, and then going to a movie theater ‘cause he realized, “Oh, well if I take that job that they’re offering to anybody, I’ll get to see the movie more. And because I was there, I got to meet a big-name effects guy from Star Wars, and I recognized him, and he liked my enthusiasm, and he recommended me for a job. And that’s how I got into the film industry.” Which is, yeah!

Good advice. That’s how that works. I give that kind of advice to people all the time about the animation industry. But like you’re saying, you know, it’s his story that kind of creeps into this global lesson he’s offering.

[00:47:41] Carrie Poppy: Right. “And you can do exactly what I did, and it’ll work out the way it did for me.”

[00:47:45] Ross Blocher: So, next, a woman in a white linen coat and hood comes up.

(Carrie “oooh!”s.)

Yeah. See, this is good clothing info, right?

[00:47:51] Carrie Poppy: Yeah! The bride.

[00:47:52] Ross Blocher: And so, she’s ready to parlay with him and have a little bit of fun. She says, “I’m still waiting for the invitation to zap me into your ship.”

And he says, “Keep waiting.” So, everybody has a laugh at her expense.

[00:48:05] Carrie Poppy: She says—that’s probably a call back to something. He doesn’t remember exactly what the something is, but he’s got, you know, a response at the ready?

[00:48:12] Ross Blocher: She’s saying she wants to join him on the physical ship where he’s floating, and he’s saying, well, keep waiting for the invitation. But then he realizes, you know what? There is a deeper point here. The invitations have already been sent out to all of you. You just need to get to the point and the right vibration where you can receive them.

And so, she insists, “I’m ready now!”

And he says, “No, you’re not, or you’d be on the ship.” She insists that she can see him, and he says, “Well, maybe astrally, but we’re talking about physically.” So again, I guess he must be physical. She has a question about where she needs to go, like which is better for me: Mount Shasta, Sedona, Joshua Tree, Baja, California?

Those are the options she gives him.

[00:48:54] Carrie Poppy: Okay, lady!

[00:48:55] Ross Blocher: And he says, “Well, which do you like best?” And she said Shasta. And he says, “Well, why are you asking me?”

And she said, “Because my trip’s already been canceled twice.” So, I guess she’s trying to go to Shasta, but it seems like the universe is telling her something! Fair point!

[00:49:09] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, fair! Red light synchronicity.

[00:49:11] Ross Blocher: Totally. He goes back to the red light/green light thing. And yeah, that’s I think how he got pulled into that whole aside. And so, he said, “Okay, well if you can’t get to Shasta, go where you can go, and then maybe we will bring you eventually to where you wanted to be in the first place.” But there you go. You just need to follow what’s available and your excitement. That’s it!

[00:49:29] Carrie Poppy: Follow your excitement. Follow your excitement. Unless you can’t get to Shasta.

[00:49:33] Ross Blocher: That’s a good name for this episode. “Follow your Excitement”.

[00:49:37] Carrie Poppy: “Unless you can’t get to Shasta” in parentheses.

(They laugh.)

[00:49:40] Ross Blocher: That’s right. Unless your Shasta trip gets canceled.

[00:49:43] Carrie Poppy: Okay. So, the next question is a parenting question. It’s essentially how does a parent allow the kind of freedom Bashar is describing without spoiling their child? And he’s like, just—

[00:49:56] Ross Blocher: Asked and answered!

[00:49:57] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Again, follow the formula. Give kids a safe enough place to experience consequences, but to learn they don’t need to harm other people. Tell them to follow their excitement, and they’ll attract whatever they want in life. Uh, that’s it! It’s that simple.

[00:50:11] Ross Blocher: And move on. ‘Cause we’ve already talked about kids enough.

[00:50:14] Carrie Poppy: I feel like I’ve heard a version of this so many times. I had a friend in high school who grew up Scientologist and had a kid immediately after high school. And I met the kid when she was really little, and the mom had Scientology parenting principles. And it was this same kind of thing where it can be expressed very quickly and succinctly, but in practice it’s a mess. ‘Cause it was just like the kid has to encounter her own consequences. So, I—the parent—never provoke consequences.

So, like—so, this kid’s at my apartment, and she was pulling posters off the wall. And I was going like, (politely) “Oh, can you—can you stop? Can you stop?”

And the parent, who can use a slightly firmer hand at least than I can—metaphorical hand—but like—but she’s just sitting there blithely looking at it, blinking her eyes, just no interaction, ‘cause she’s not supposed to give any consequences. It puts me in that—ugh.

[00:51:09] Ross Blocher: Right. In Scientology, the child is just another Thetan. So, it’s like another adult. And that’s how you treat them.

[00:51:15] Carrie Poppy: Sure. Yeah. I guess so.

[00:51:16] Ross Blocher: An adult that’s pulling posters off the wall.

[00:51:18] Carrie Poppy: It just—it reminds me of that whole like sort of—you know, noble, blank slate child hypothesis. It’s just not how anything works.

[00:51:28] Ross Blocher: (Giggles.) Right.

[00:51:29] Carrie Poppy: We’re born with genes and things.

[00:51:31] Ross Blocher: The best laid philosophies meet reality. So, then a very tall man arrives, and he asks what Bashar does for entertainment. Do you do like martial arts or something?

[00:51:43] Carrie Poppy: I love this question! Yeah, “You’re up there in heaven or whatever, 7,000 miles above Sedona. What you doing?”

[00:51:48] Ross Blocher: Yeah, yeah. “ You’ve been around for thousands of years. You’re very—” Well actually, I guess Bashar says he’s 167 of our years, and that was 30 years ago he said that. So, I guess he’s about 200 in Earth years.

[00:52:00] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. So, what does he do up there? Well, first of all, he watches us.

(They laugh stiffly.)

We all have a chuckle at that.

[00:52:08] Ross Blocher: Oh, we’re so entertaining and silly!

[00:52:09] Carrie Poppy: That’s so funny. “But no, seriously, I make sculptures out of energy.” Yeah. Yes. So similar to what Darryl Anka does, making sculptures out of sculpting.

[00:52:22] Ross Blocher: But at least he’s using a variety of materials that don’t exist on your planet.

[00:52:26] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, sure. Gotta one-up it.

[00:52:28] Ross Blocher: And then the guy says, “Do you use your mind, or do you do it with your hands?”

And Bashar says, “With more energy forms.” Okay. So, this was a key moment in my note taking, because I’d been clickety clacking on my keyboard, on the iPad that I borrowed from work, because I discovered typing.

[00:52:46] Carrie Poppy: Oh, that is so cool! Congrats.

[00:52:48] Ross Blocher: And I would feel—there were those two young ladies sitting to my right that I mentioned. And I felt like the one closest to me was side-eyeing my typing and just trying to figure out what’s going on.

[00:53:00] Carrie Poppy: Sure, yeah. We get this sometimes. We’re always writing more than nearly anyone else there.

[00:53:04] Ross Blocher: So, I wrote in my notes, “If anyone reads this within the next five minutes and tells me, I will give them $20.”

(They laugh.)

[00:53:16] Carrie Poppy: And no?

[00:53:16] Ross Blocher: I had forgotten about this, but I just saw this in my notes. She didn’t say anything.

(They laugh.)

[00:53:21] Carrie Poppy: That’s a good trick!

[00:53:23] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Afterwards, she asked what I was doing, but in that moment—if she’d been reading along, it’d be like, “Oh, do I want $20 from the guy?”

[00:53:31] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. You gotta one up that. I think you gotta make it like $100.

[00:53:35] Ross Blocher: Oh, I didn’t have $100 on me. I had to be ready to deliver.

[00:53:37] Carrie Poppy: Oh, that’s fair. That’s fair. I will Venmo the next person.

(They cackle.)

[00:53:42] Ross Blocher: Or I can also do Zelle (laughs) or Apple Pay.

Let’s see, Bashar also said that he plays games. I guess they have games that they play.

[00:53:55] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, he’s hanging out.

[00:53:56] Ross Blocher: His race, they’re in a dreamlike state all the time anyway, because time is not so linear. So, I don’t know. It seems like they don’t have a problem passing time.

[00:54:03] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, it sounds like hanging out to me.

[00:54:06] Ross Blocher: And the guy says, “Oh, that’s cool.” And of course, of course, Bashar says, “It can be any temperature you want it to be.” Oh, so good. That’s one of those ones where it’s like—

[00:54:13] Carrie Poppy: Mmm! He’s so quick! He’s just so quick!

[00:54:18] Ross Blocher: It was fast, and it had the cadence of a joke, but, uh, kind of a miss. More of a chuckle.

[00:54:22] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t give us anything, does it? It’s like cool, it has more than one meaning, doesn’t it? Okay. So, the next person basically asks, “So what’s this thing with the 144,000 people?”

[00:54:33] Ross Blocher: Yeah, so I guess that’s something in Bashar’s teachings, because when I hear 144,000 people, I imagine the people that are sealed—

[00:54:43] Carrie Poppy: In the Bible.

[00:54:43] Ross Blocher: Yeah. In Revelation, with the mark of the lamb.

[00:54:47] Carrie Poppy: So yeah. Some Christian groups take that to mean only 144,000 believers will actually be saved and make it into the kingdom of heaven. Yeah, I don’t connect this with Bashar either. But it did seem to be a Bashar-specific question. And so, he kind of waves this off. He says, “Oh, 144,000. It’s not an exact number, but basically it’s this critical mass where if you have a minority of positive thinking people, they will overwhelm the negativity of the dominant world. And that number is roughly 144,000 positive thinkers.”

[00:55:28] Ross Blocher: Right. That almost had kind of like a biblical import to me as well. ‘Cause I assume he goes for a lot of those numbers because they have that kind of weighty significance. In fact, I just read another passage where he was writing that like 40 years is an important increment, and that’s why it shows up in your religious texts.

But in this case, he was also—with that—reminding me of pleading to God like, “Well, if there’s X number of righteous people in this city, will you not destroy it?” You know, when it came to Sodom and Gomorrah. You know, “Well, if there’s this many righteous people, will you not destroy it?” And kind of haggling with God to get him down to this number.

[00:56:03] Carrie Poppy: Sad!

[00:56:04] Ross Blocher: So, apparently he was—like you say—talking about some number that could overwhelm the negativity in the world and restore—you know, at least maintain like a positive balance of a vibration, thought, whatever mode it is. And so, he said, “This is also a reminder that you never change the world you’re on. You enter a new reality of the version of Earth that you want.”

[00:56:26] Carrie Poppy: Right. Very Lori Spagna.

[00:56:28] Ross Blocher: And everybody clapped for that. “Yay.” (Claps quietly.)

[00:56:31] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. So, this sounds like Lori Spagna. And again, it makes me think of social media. It makes me wonder if he’s sort of indirectly talking about how you can organize your life such that like the news about the world that comes into your awareness represents a world you would like to live in. And all you have to do is only click on the stories that make you feel good.

[00:56:55] Ross Blocher: Oh, that’s one way to navigate.

[00:56:57] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. But I mean, that’s kind of what I think both of them are talking about.

[00:57:01] Ross Blocher: Just living a life where you just kind of shield yourself from the things that don’t interest or encourage you?

[00:57:06] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. The things that bring you down, because they represent a world that you wouldn’t wanna live in.

[00:57:12] Ross Blocher: Yeah, I feel like that kind of mindset just gets you to the point where like, “Well, I didn’t pay my electric bill cause I don’t want to. Taxes are a bummer.”

[00:57:20] Carrie Poppy: Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s gonna leave you high and dry at some point.

[00:57:24] Ross Blocher: That same person also had a question about what’s happening in the next 20 years, and Bashar very scrupulously—

[00:57:32] Carrie Poppy: Oh, he ain’t answering that.

[00:57:33] Ross Blocher: Yeah. He says, “Ooh, I don’t want to make predictions.” Maybe ‘cause some of his other predictions haven’t come out so well.

(Carrie affirms.)

But the guy said, “Well, not predictions, just, you know, what’s going to happen.”

(Carrie chuckles.)

And this is one moment where like the question asker got like the big laugh from the audience. And I don’t know, that probably bothers Bashar like, (grumbling) “I’m supposed to be getting all the laughter here.” Bashar, again, didn’t want to get nailed down on any predictions, but he said, “Well, free energy is something you might keep an eye on. That’s something that you, as a species, can accomplish.” And he reminded us—that’s right, we didn’t mention the cliffhanger last time. We’d mentioned there was going to be a big announcement at the end of this meeting. That’s what we’re all hanging on for! So, he reminds him, “Well, there’s gonna be a big reveal coming soon.”

And then, the annoying lady comes up.

[00:58:23] Carrie Poppy: Okay. Uh, the annoying lady. What’s her deal?

[00:58:27] Ross Blocher: Okay. (Chuckling.) She’s a fast talker, very confusing. She hasn’t formed her thoughts. She’s been in line for a long time. You’d think she would’ve, but whew. Even in my notes, I had a hard time like tracking what it is she was talking about. She’s addressing some guy—I don’t know if she knows him or something—who was into gray aliens, something about like people turning into reptiles.

[00:58:50] Carrie Poppy: Okay. The reptile lady.

(Ross confirms.)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let me go back in my notes here.

[00:58:55] Ross Blocher: You know the annoying lady, with red hair in the green exercise clothes.

(Carrie confirms.)

And somewhere in there she says that she’s a scientist.

[00:59:05] Carrie Poppy: Right. Okay. So, I think I followed this, but—

[00:59:09] Ross Blocher: Did you make sense of this?

[00:59:09] Carrie Poppy: Oh man, you’re right. She talks in a very unclear way, but I think this is right. I think the question is basically, “Hey, Bashar. I heard you talk about a guy who believed in conspiracy theories, because that guy was in his reptile brain. Like he was feeling paranoid and defensive and in his lowest mind.” And she’s saying, “I liked that, ‘cause I’m a scientist and, you know, I see that. But here at this conference, there are also a bunch of conspiracy theories. So, how do we all come together?” And then she kind of stumbles to say I think what she really wants to say, which is, “Listen, I just want you to talk about the covid vaccine.” (Laughs.)

[00:59:49] Ross Blocher: Yeah, well she made some reference to a covid vaccine of the ego, which I think was related to what you were talking about, about getting us all together with our conflicting conspiracy theory stories. And yeah, the audience is gonna turn on her, ‘cause she was a bit much, and it was a lot of words and very little comprehensible content.

[01:00:09] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I think she was just nervous to actually ask what she wanted to ask, and she didn’t get there.

[01:00:13] Ross Blocher: And he does that kind of like motion with the hand, like, “Okay, okay. Hold on there. Let’s try to pick this apart.” He at least latched onto that message of us learning to come together and says, “Most of you will eventually come together years down the road.” But again, like he has this whole belief that we all choose which version of Earth we’re on. And over time, we’ll all start choosing the same version of Earth, which I just don’t understand. What does that mean? We’re all in the room together, obviously we’re here together in a shared reality. Are there other people here that we don’t see, because they’re in a different version? I don’t know.

[01:00:47] Carrie Poppy: I think he has to just be talking about like mood and mental states, or I can’t make sense of it at all. But yeah, I think he and Lori Spagna get to this place where they’re just like, “I don’t know. I’m not afraid of covid, so I live in a different world where covid isn’t scary. Oh, it’s scary in your world? Not in mine.”

It’s like that—girl, that’s a mood! That’s not reality. That’s whether you feel skeeved out right now.

[01:01:11] Ross Blocher: Such a cop out. So, this lady does not want to give up the microphone. And she mentions that she’s been vaccinated five times, and some of the audience seems to be a little upset about this. She mentions she has a friend who won’t get vaccinated, and Bashar says, “Well, that’s their choice, isn’t it?”

She’s asking about breathing techniques. I don’t know. She’s all over the place. But she gets to this one point where she starts talking about body informed trauma work that she does.

[01:01:40] Carrie Poppy: Oh! I talked to this woman afterward.

[01:01:41] Ross Blocher: Okay. And I thought, oh, this will get Carrie’s interest.

[01:01:44] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. Redhead, right?

[01:01:47] Ross Blocher: Yep! And she works with Navy Seals in the military and said that because of their work, they had this cult-like mentality, and they’d be close to making a breakthrough, and then they’d withdraw within themselves. Bashar finally says like, “Stop!” Just cause like she just—it’s just this verbal—

[01:02:03] Carrie Poppy: Upchuck. Yeah.

[01:02:05] Ross Blocher: Yeah. She just can’t stop it. And he says, “Let me ask you a question. How long does it take for a child to understand what they need to understand? It takes years. Why are you in such a hurry?”

And she said, “Well, because I see my schizophrenic patients.” And she starts to go into like the negative consequences, which I think, oh, that’s actually a very good response. Yeah. “This is timely. I do need answers.”

(Carrie agrees.)

“I see people’s lives unraveling.”

[01:02:31] Carrie Poppy: Right, right. This isn’t something I can just sit around on.

[01:02:33] Ross Blocher: And he says, “Well, you’re trying to burn through a situation that would otherwise take millennia. Do what you can in the time that you have.”

She’s not happy with that, but she says, “Well, they should stay on their medication, right?”

[01:02:46] Carrie Poppy: Oh! Interesting. Okay.

[01:02:48] Ross Blocher: And he says, “I am not going to give you medical advice! I am not allowed to on your planet. Your world says that we cannot.” But he does—(chuckles) he does mention detoxing. He throws that out there as something benign and helpful that they can do.

(Carrie agrees sardonically.)

And in his response, he mentioned dissociative personality disorder in a way that seemed to validate it.

[01:03:10] Carrie Poppy: Not even a disorder I’ve heard of! I heard of dissociative identity disorder.

[01:03:15] Ross Blocher: Yeah, I think that’s what he meant. But that’s just—you know, Bashar doesn’t fully keep up with the journals.

(Carrie agrees.)

So, finally he tells her, “Hey, you need to set an example of relaxing. Maybe that’ll help them.” And the audience, now fully against her, like claps at that. Like, yeah, tell this lady to relax! And finally, she leaves. It was a super awkward exchange.

[01:03:39] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I talked to this woman afterward. I had forgotten about this. I ran up and I found her, and I don’t remember what exactly I asked her, but I do remember her saying basically, “I had never heard of him before. So, like I was trying to formulate my thought into a sentence that would make sense to him. You know? But it was all kind of nebulous and hard to follow, and I was struggling to get my own thing out.”

[01:04:03] Ross Blocher: Oh yeah. I’m sure it was frustrating for her too. That’s interesting. And that’s kind of like what you were talking about earlier, about the first-time Bashar listener who wins the golden ticket and gets in the line. What do I do with this?

[01:04:16] Carrie Poppy: And that’s gotta be like most people. And maybe not—maybe it’s not their first time ever like hearing of him, but most people can’t have much to draw on. You know, they’re just thinking, “Oh yeah, he’s that alien guy.” That’s gotta be most of the people who win the ticket.

[01:04:32] Ross Blocher: In the documentary, he was talking about how many people that do recognize him, they’ll see him, and they’ll be like, “Hey, Bashar!”

And he says, “Well, that’s a little awkward because I’m Darryl.”

(They laugh.)

[01:04:44] Carrie Poppy: So awkward.

[01:04:45] Ross Blocher: Well, Darryl’s not as memorable as Bashar. So, that’s what they’re gonna remember.

[01:04:51] Carrie Poppy: And you know what’s happening.

[01:04:53] Ross Blocher: Yeah. So, this man from Australia comes up. He’s an orthopedic surgeon, and he’s interested in synchronicity. And this is where Bashar notices that there’s just too much chatter going on in the audience. I think people are talking about the last woman still. And so, he does that (aggressive shushing) thing to sort of silence people so he can hear better. And so, this guy says that he was visited by a tall gray alien that he saw who was ancient looking. And Bashar immediately inserts, “It’s the Masani.” And I don’t know, that doesn’t mean anything to the guy, and it doesn’t stop him.

Apparently, this transfers along generational lines—this ability to be visited by them or see them. I guess Bashar like says it’ll happen to your kids as well. And the guy says, “Well, I’ve never had any children.”

And Bashar says, “That you know of!” The audience laughed at this. So, he tells this guy that his DNA is in hybrid children. That they’re out there. That he’s a father.

[01:05:53] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. Why not? In for a penny, in for a pound. You randomly cold-read the wrong detail, and now you give this guy an entire second life he can obsess about.

[01:06:03] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Poor guy. So, now all of a sudden he realizes he has children out there he’s not so supporting or doesn’t know.

[01:06:08] Carrie Poppy: So yeah. The hybrid kids, that would suggest that he had sex with a person who he didn’t realize was an alien, impregnated the alien? Right? Yeah.

[01:06:17] Ross Blocher: Something like that. Yeah. Or maybe in one of these traditional abduction stories where you’re pushed and prodded and sexually monkeyed with.

[01:06:26] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, exploited. Or like in Presommar, a movie that I made that’s a reproduction of Midsommar, it does a similar storyline.

[01:06:33] Ross Blocher: Oh, that sounds like a great film.

[01:06:34] Carrie Poppy: Yeah! People should watch it! It’s on YouTube.

[01:06:38] Ross Blocher: There’s a guy who comes up and wants to ask about the difference between the races and why there’s enmity between them. Bashar shuts that down. “No, no, no, no, no. Celebrating differences is how you have unity.” So, that’s his little message against racism.

[01:06:54] Carrie Poppy: Okay, cool. Thank god. Phew! Whoooo. Well, that’s taken care of.

[01:06:58] Ross Blocher: I don’t know. Yeah, he just kind of steps on this and offers his happy vision for the future. “Yes, I understand what you mean by being divided. And yes, division is a problem, but that only happens because so many people feel unworthy of being themselves. Start honoring differences between you as worthy, and then you will have harmony.” Okay.

(Carrie agrees doubtfully.)

And the guy wants to clarify, “Well, are we all the same race?”

And Bashar says, “Well, sort of. Hom sapiens is already a hybrid race mixed from alien races.” And then of his own people, he says that “We don’t have races; that we have different tones because we are a race created from your DNA.”

[01:07:37] Carrie Poppy: Oooh!

[01:07:37] Ross Blocher: Yeah. So, the Bashar folks on Essassani—

[01:07:41] Carrie Poppy: They’re a flip of the Raëlians.

[01:07:42] Ross Blocher: Yeah, exactly. Whereas we are the progeny—well, I guess he would say that we were created from aliens. We have—we’re already a hybrid race, but he in turn—right—is like a further evolution of the human line.

[01:07:56] Carrie Poppy: So, he’s like in AI or something? Something similar to that.

(Ross confirms.)

Huh. Okay. Okay. Oh my god. Let him be—let him say he’s ChatGPT. Let him say it!

[01:08:08] Ross Blocher: In five years.

There’s another man who shows up and thanks Bashar for showing up in his dreams. And Bashar is very quick to say like, “No, no, no, no, that’s not me. That was you, envisioning me.” He just doesn’t wanna—

[01:08:20] Carrie Poppy: Okay, the normal way. Yeah.

[01:08:22] Ross Blocher: He doesn’t want to be held responsible for anybody being like, “And you said this!” Right.

[01:08:25] Carrie Poppy: Smart. Dude’s smart.

[01:08:27] Ross Blocher: I think—yeah, I think Bashar knows how to shut that down quickly.

[01:08:31] Carrie Poppy: I always wonder how this works with Eckankar, where the guys in charge are supposed to visit you in your sleep and then—yeah, what happens if you like fuck him? And then, like later you have to be like, (awkwardly) “That was you. Right?” I mean, like stuff like that has to happen.

[01:08:48] Ross Blocher: Oh, I’m sure it does. People are weird. Brains are strange.

[01:08:51] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I don’t know how they deal with that.

[01:08:54] Ross Blocher: The guy’s question is, “Can humans create anti-gravity propulsion to leave the planet?”

So, Bashar stops him. “Stop. Stop.” ‘Cause the question was going on too long, I guess. And he says, “Yes, yes it is within reach, and—”

[01:09:07] Carrie Poppy: “I can’t believe I let out so many tickets!”

[01:09:09] Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) He says that “Location exists in the object.” And this is that point from the movie with the post-it notes, where he’s explaining like, “Location is just another attribute of an item. And you just need to learn how to discern the difference between the same object in two locations. And once you have equipment that is fine-tuned enough to determine that, then you can bombard an object with the frequency of it being in a different location, and it will either move there or it will completely teleport there.”

(Carrie chuckles and affirms doubtfully.)

So, ta-da. He’s found words that sound good for teleportation.

[01:09:50] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Show us, show us. Why don’t you go ahead and do that?

[01:09:53] Ross Blocher: Yeah, just one macroscopic object. Go ahead.

[01:09:56] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh man. I wish someone with a ticket would ask him to do that.

[01:10:01] Ross Blocher: It was impressive psychobabble. You know what? Let’s listen to a clip.

[01:10:04] Clip:

Darryl Anka: The idea of an object being in a location is incorrect. Location exists in the object. In other words, every object has a—shall we say—energy equation. Part of that energy equation is where and when it is in time and space. If you change that locational variable, the object has to stop existing where it is and take up new residence in the new location you have inserted into the equation. So, if you have an overall ability to read very sensitively the vibrational locational equation of an object in one position, and then you take that object and raise it up—let’s say six feet, ten feet, whatever—and then, you take another reading of its locational vibration at that level, and you see the difference.

If you can see the difference, if your equipment is sensitive enough to see the difference, that difference represents the difference in location. So, if you bring the object back down to the first location, and then you bombard it—imbue it, either electromagnetically, sonically, however—and overwhelm its initial vibration and input the idea of the second location variable vibration, the object will either rise and float up to that location with no visible means of support, or it will teleport instantaneously from here to there.

That’s the secret of anti-gravity is you have to find the locational variable within the object.

Speaker: Thank you very much.

Darryl Anka: You’re very welcome.

(Applause.)

[01:11:37] Ross Blocher: And then, there’s one final woman in the line. She asked the last question. She’s worried about making decisions, and he asks her, “Do you trust in your synchronicity?”

She says, “I don’t know.”

And he says, “Thank you for that.” He was—appreciates the honest answer.

(Carrie affirms.)

And he says, “Well, flip a coin.” Because you know, sure, this is good advice in general. You may flip the coin, and it’ll be tails and you’ll be like, “I really wish it had been heads.” It’s like well, there you go. That’s what you actually wanted.

[01:12:05] Carrie Poppy: It’ll tell you something about—yeah, how you feel.

[01:12:06] Ross Blocher: Right. Or you don’t really care and whatever the result is is fine.

(Carrie agrees.)

Go with that. That’s why I have my Universe Splitter app.

(Carrie affirms.)

The woman has another question about going through a divorce and how difficult this is gonna be for her daughter. Bashar wants a little more info. Like, the daughter’s two years old, and then he just gives some general life advice about how the people that you marry change, and these things happen.

[01:12:32] Carrie Poppy: Family can be anybody!

(Ross agrees.)

And a Mrs. Doubtfire.

[01:12:38] Ross Blocher: (Chuckling.) Mrs. Doubtfire, yeah.

[01:12:38] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Remember?

[01:12:40] Ross Blocher: Watch that. You know, it’s generally good advice, but he gets to give it, ‘cause he’s Bashar now. And he encourages her to just naturally attract the person that her daughter needs and kind of insinuates that the universe will make sure that she does. I hope that’s true.

And that’s it for the questions. And (dropping his voice) Jimmy Church says, “On behalf of everyone here: frigging thank you.”

[01:13:03] Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) He can’t believe what he’s just seen. It is mind blowing the generic advice he just watched!

[01:13:10] Ross Blocher: But Bashar says, “Wait, wait, wait, wait! It’s time for the announcement!”

[01:13:12] Carrie Poppy: Oh, yeah! The big announcement!

[01:13:14] Ross Blocher: Okay, so first disclaimer: remember, there’s no such thing as predicting the future.

[01:13:18] Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. Stop, stop, stop!

[01:13:21] Ross Blocher: Buuut! When a lot of energy creates a momentum that is unlikely to change, we are allowed to say certain things.

[01:13:27] Carrie Poppy: And then, if we are wrong, we still claim success!

[01:13:30] Ross Blocher: That’s right. (Chuckles.) “So, in the next few years, events on your planet will create the following situation.” First, in late 2024 and 2025, the channel himself—

[01:13:41] Carrie Poppy: Darryl Anka.

[01:13:42] Ross Blocher: Thank you—will begin teaching more principles in detail about how the system works. In 2026, we will deliver—when we determine the schedule—information—and this is 90-95% likely to happen—that will create an opportunity. Some of your psychics are already sensing it—somewhere from middle 2026 and beginning the idea of 2027.

The “idea” of 20—?! Stop it! Stop it, Bashar!

(Carrie agrees with laughter.)

Stop it, Bashar. “You will experience a major contact event.”

(Carrie “ooh”s.)

“Everyone on your planet will become aware of this. The contact will be open; it will be flowing, and it will herald a new momentum heading towards a shift in your realities, individually and indirectly towards joining your intergalactic family. We thank you at this time for co-creating this experience. We will see you all again, and good day!”

[01:14:38] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, so he always thanks you for co-creating his being there. So, 2027, is that what you said?

[01:14:44] Ross Blocher: Yeah, (chuckling) the idea of 2027 or middle 2026, but yeah, we’re gonna have a major contact event.

[01:14:51] Carrie Poppy: Let’s really not let him weasel out of this. So, 2026 or 2027.

[01:14:56] Ross Blocher: That’s it. You’ve got through 2027. I’ll allow that. There better be a major, unambiguous contact event.

[01:15:00] Carrie Poppy: There will be a major contact event. And yeah. Let’s define our terms here. So, when I hear that I think: the skies part, an alien appears. Multiple people grab their iPhones, photograph it, are like, “Guess what I saw?” Here it is from a bunch of different angles, different people, their stories mostly line up. There’s a specific place it happened. A media outlet that somebody’s heard of covers it.

[01:15:30] Ross Blocher: Yeah. And I think if it’s a contact event, it needs to be even more than just an encounter of a UFO craft. It needs to be like an encounter of the third kind. A close encounter.

[01:15:41] Carrie Poppy: Yes. Which means physical?

[01:15:42] Ross Blocher: Yeah. Like meeting an actual body.

[01:15:43] Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fingertips touching.

[01:15:46] Ross Blocher: Yeah, and an alien. We see the alien. We communicate. Everybody acknowledges it happened.

[01:15:51] Carrie Poppy: And the reason we’re being so specific about this is because we know how this works. We’ve been making this show since 2011, you guys, and let me tell you what happens. People make these predictions, and then when the prediction doesn’t come true, you know what they do? They say, “Well, I didn’t mean it literally. I meant that the world was gonna change in this am ambiguous way that you didn’t even notice. In fact, didn’t that year kind of come and go and was sort of unremarkable? That’s exactly what I meant!”

And we’re not gonna let that happen. Not to you guys, not to the listeners!

[01:16:23] Ross Blocher: And I think Bashar has been burnt by predictions before. So, when—

[01:16:29] Carrie Poppy: His?! His own? Okay.

[01:16:31] Ross Blocher: Yeah. So, when I was trying to look up how far in the future he was—which I am still a big question mark about—I noticed that there was a book called Bashar: Blueprint for Change, A Message from the Future. I was like, okay, there’s some future support. Hey, why don’t I buy that book online?

[01:16:49] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Okay, great.

[01:16:50] Ross Blocher: Huh? That’s weird. Nobody’s selling it. Oh, I can’t get it as an eBook? Hmm. It’s not on his website? That’s interesting. It was written in 1990. Where could it be? So, I tried many different ways, and I could only find it as a used book that very few people were selling. And for like a hundred dollars or more for this little paperback.

[01:17:13] Carrie Poppy: Somewhere, I have a little paperback by Darryl Anka, called The Quest for Truth that hopefully surfaces. But—

[01:17:19] Ross Blocher: Ooh! Okay. I did a stupid thing. I went ahead and I bought—for $105—a copy on eBay.

[01:17:25] Carrie Poppy: And when you showed it to me, I was like, “Oh, I saw this too. I thought about buying this too.” So, I’m glad you did. Okay.

[01:17:30] Ross Blocher: What would’ve been said is if we had both bought it. So, I’m not supposed to get it till Monday now. It got delayed, but I did find—and this took some work—I did find an eText copy of it that I, you know, trust as far as I can throw it. So, I do want to verify that this is the actual book, but someone did make a PDF out of this. So, I don’t know how I’ll follow up with this later. I’ll try to like find some good juicy stuff, but already I found him making some predictions back in 1990 or even earlier. Some of these essays in the book are dated 1987, so very early in his Bashar career.

Okay. Here’s one. “The basic goal,”—he has this whole plan for us to do daily meditations so that everybody stops at noon in their time zone and does a one-minute meditation for peace. And he says, “The basic goal is to have every individual—yes, every single individual—on your planet doing that one-minute meditation by January 1st, 2000.”

(Carrie “uh-oh”s.)

“You will find such a high degree of accelerated energy focused on world peace around your world that you’ll be able to have the foundations laid down for one world, between 1990 and the year 2000—no later than 2013, 2011.”

[01:18:43] Carrie Poppy: Oh, man. I remember in college hearing about people doing this, people who would do these massive meditation events to try to get some tipping point. I think the transcendental meditation people would be up in this a lot.

[01:18:58] Ross Blocher: That did not catch on the way he had hoped. Which is too bad, ‘cause we could have had a perfect, one-world society 10 years ago. Okay, here’s a good one.

“Thus, you can perhaps readily understand that point C—your year 2017—” So, he’s already talking many years in the future for him. “—initiates and represents the time when there will be within your society the capability of joining us with your own spacecraft. Although, it may be earlier, perhaps five years earlier.”

(Carrie “uh-oh”s.)

“That is when your technology will allow you to develop the idea similar to our spacecraft technology. You will have this by 2017 if you maintain your adherence to the template, which it seems in all likelihood you will, by 2027 you,”—and this is bolded—“you will be absolutely interwoven into the Galactic Association of Worlds.”

(Carrie “wow”s.)

So, we’ve got till 2027 for that to come true.

[01:19:56] Carrie Poppy: Okay! Oh, okay. Okay. He’s not wrong yet.

[01:19:59] Ross Blocher: We will be absolutely interwoven into the Galactic Association of Worlds.

[01:20:04] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Again, I wonder if he would just claim that that has happened, and we don’t know about it, because the government made those crafts. There’s so many ways to get out of these predictions.

[01:20:13] Ross Blocher: Oh yeah, of course. “Well, that was if everything stayed according to plan, and it did for people in the right frequency. But you are in the planet where you have chosen your reality, and it is not that reality.” Or who knows?

[01:20:27] Carrie Poppy: I saw something from 1988 where he was saying in the next 30 years, there should be contact. And that would be 2018. Yep.

[01:20:36] Ross Blocher: So, already I found—and there’s more in here too, but I’ve already found him making a lot of failed predictions. So, I think this kind of taught him early on to stop doing that and try to buy up all the copies of this book, so nobody reads them.

[01:20:49] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Perhaps, perhaps.

[01:20:51] Ross Blocher: I’m hoping there’s more juicy stuff. I can’t wait for my $105 book to show up.

[01:20:55] Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Okay. Yeah. And I’ll have to look for my other. Maybe we’ll have a Bashar book report somewhere in the next couple years.

[01:21:00] Ross Blocher: Sounds good. So that was—that was it. (Dropping his voice.) Jimmy Church had us all applaud for him, but then quickly said like, “Alright, get out! Everybody get out! No photos. Move!”

The blonde girl who was sitting next to me did finally ask, “Hey, uh, I noticed you were like typing the whole day. What are you typing?”

I said, “Oh.”

[01:21:18] Carrie Poppy: My screenplay.

[01:21:19] Ross Blocher: “I have a—” (Laughs.) Yeah. Automatic writing. I couldn’t—it couldn’t be helped. I said, “I have a podcast, and I take very thorough notes.” She was satisfied with that. And we sailed off back into the crowd.

[01:21:30] Carrie Poppy: One time in the ’90s, my mom was on an airplane, and a guy next to her was typing. And she was like what are you typing? And he was like, “My screenplay.”

And she goes, “(Scoffs.) You and everybody else.”

(Ross laughs.)

And then, it turned out it was—

[01:21:44] Ross Blocher: Someone we’ve heard of?

[01:21:45] Carrie Poppy: Harry Anderson, the guy on Night Court.

[01:21:48] Ross Blocher: What?! Oh my goodness!

[01:21:49] Carrie Poppy: And Cheers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She said that she clocked it, because when she said, “You and everybody else,” he made a face like if only you knew lady. And so, then as she was getting off, she asked somebody and they were like, “Oh, that’s Harry Anderson. He’s on Night Court.”

[01:22:04] Ross Blocher: Oh my goodness! I remember that actor. He was very recognizable.

[01:22:09] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Big crop of red hair. He’s passed away, but actually, his daughter Eva is a friend of mine. Yeah. Just—

[01:22:13] Ross Blocher: Oh wow! Small world.

[01:22:16] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Many years later.

[01:22:17] Ross Blocher: Small world. Well, that’s it for our Bashar series, but like you say, I’m sure we’ll have some fun things to report back on in the future.

[01:22:25] Carrie Poppy: I’m Bashar (b-sure) of it.

[01:22:27] Ross Blocher: That was unexpected and therefore humorous.

[01:22:29] Carrie Poppy: I barely put any effort in.

(They laugh.)

[01:22:31] Ross Blocher: That’s why it was slightly humorous. Alright. Well, that’s it for this episode.

[01:22:36] Carrie Poppy: Our theme music is by Brian Keith Dalton.

[01:22:38] Ross Blocher: Our administrative managing is by Ian Kremer, and this episode was listened to by you. Thank you!

[01:22:44] Carrie Poppy: Now remember—don’t you remember? You just did it.

[01:22:46] Ross Blocher: You just listened to it.

[01:22:47] Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Hellooo?

[01:22:48] Ross Blocher: You’re still listening to it.

[01:22:49] Carrie Poppy: Hello?!

[01:22:50] Ross Blocher: Why won’t it end?

[01:22:50] Carrie Poppy: You can support this and all our investigations by going to MaximumFun.org/join.

[01:22:55] Ross Blocher: Yes, please and thank you. You can also leave a positive review. You can tell a friend. You can channel an ancient or future alien who highly recommends the podcast.

[01:23:06] Carrie Poppy: Yeees! Yes. An AI created by the show.

[01:23:09] Ross Blocher: Or you know, put it in a channel somewhere. My buddy Keith listens to the show, my running buddy, and he was out looking for new podcasts to add to his lineup, and he just discovered in the wild someone saying like, “Oh, you should really listen to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!.” And they wrote a nice summary of it.

(Carrie “aw!”s.)

And he said, “Found in the wild,” and sent me a screen grab, and it made my day.

[01:23:31] Carrie Poppy: Wait, wait, wait. They wrote it on like a piece of paper?

[01:23:33] Ross Blocher: Like on a forum somewhere where other people were asking, “What podcast should I listen to?”

[01:23:37] Carrie Poppy: Oh, I see, I see, I see.

[01:23:38] Ross Blocher: And you could also make one of our days by recommending the show to others.

[01:23:43] Carrie Poppy: I saw someone you know in a table store.

[01:23:45] Ross Blocher: Oh my goodness! Yeah. Um, uh, Katie! And her husband, Ben.

[01:23:48] Carrie Poppy: (Chuckling.) Yeah, Katie and—yeah. Yes! Yes, yes. Perfectly lovely people.

[01:23:51] Ross Blocher: They’re both animators at Disney.

[01:23:53] Carrie Poppy: They bought a table. I bought a table.

[01:23:54] Ross Blocher: Yeah, it was a Spanish furniture—

[01:23:56] Carrie Poppy: Italian? Maybe Spanish.

[01:24:00] Ross Blocher: Uh-oh. We have—

[01:24:01] Carrie Poppy: Uh-oh!

[01:24:02] Ross Blocher: Uh-oh. Gonna have to the bottom of this story!

[01:24:02] Carrie Poppy: Somewhere around there. European tables.

[01:24:05] Ross Blocher: But I was like, oh, that is such a place to find Carrie. That sounds right.

She and I weren’t running on Monday, and she told me that story, so. Very cool.

[01:24:12] Carrie Poppy: Oh, nice. They were very sweet.

[01:24:14] Ross Blocher: Yeah, they’re awesome people.

[01:24:15] Carrie Poppy: They picked a good table.

[01:24:16] Ross Blocher: Oh, were you jealous? Like, “Let me buy that from you.”

[01:24:19] Carrie Poppy: No, no. We picked a better table.

(They laugh.)

[01:24:22] Ross Blocher: The gloves come off!

[01:24:24] Carrie Poppy: Theirs was good. Ours was great.

(They laugh.)

And remember:

[01:24:30] Clip:

Darryl Anka: A lot of the things that are missing, so to speak, from the way you live your life is that you just don’t yet have a truly embedded understanding of how things actually work. Once you gain that, you will go, “Oh, well that makes sense. I’m just doing this, and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is, because if it’s the outcome that’s not compatible with me, synchronicity will turn me around and I will go down the path that is mine.” Simple as that.

And of course, it will include everyone that’s important to you in your excitement and in your passion, because why would passion leave anyone out that’s important to you? Then, it wouldn’t be your passion, would it?

[01:25:05] Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

[01:25:17] Promo:

Music: Ominous, low, rumbling tones.

John Hodgman: They can be anywhere. At your office, in your car. And they. Are. Wrong.

Speaker 1: My mom says that the Grey House didn’t exist, but she’s wrong!

Speaker 2: He just does it wrong.

Jesse Thorn: Someone in your life is wrong about something. Something small, something weird, something vitally important. Only one person has the courage to tell them just how wrong they are.

John: You know what you did was wrong, but your daughter is a liar who eats garbage.

(They laugh.)

Music: Instantly transitions to a relaxed, bouncy synth.

John: They call me Judge John Hodgman. Listen to me on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

Jesse: If someone in your life is doing you wrong, don’t just take it. Take it to court. Submit your case at MaximumFun.org/jjho.

(Three gavel bangs.)

[01:26:02] Sound Effect: Cheerful ukulele chord.

[01:26:03] Speaker 1: MaximumFun.org.

[01:26:04] Speaker 2: Comedy and culture.

[01:26:06] Speaker 3: Artist owned.

[01:26:07] Speaker 4: Audience supported.

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