Cover Image: 2017 presentation at CSICon, Las Vegas. Photograph by Karl Withakay
“I feel like [belief in a Flat Earth] is even more dangerous than, say, Scientology, because its reach right now is huge; it’s tied to so many other unscientific beliefs, and it’s a mindset that is closed to any kind of disconfirmation.”
–Ross Blocher
In part one of my interview with Ross Blocher, one of the cohosts of the Oh No, Ross and Carrie! podcast, we discussed his transition from fundamentalist Christian to skeptical activist, the origin of the podcast, and the show’s coverage of topics such as psychic mediums, Mormonism, and Scientology. In this conclusion of the interview, you’ll read about Blocher’s experiences with Flat-Earthers, firewalking, his near deadly experience using hallucinogens, and (gulp) drinking his own urine.
Palmer: First, let’s talk about the investigation where I heard you almost died using a hallucinogen.
Blocher: Ah yes, well ayahuasca is a potent hallucinogenic drug that gives you religious visions. You see things that have spiritual significance because they feel so personal and profound. We were invited to a resort in Costa Rica, called Rythmia, and they said they would pay for the accommodations and the ceremony. That’s their thing: they invite influencers to write about them. We met authors, other bloggers, and podcasters, as well as paying customers. I think they just hadn’t done their due diligence to look at what we actually do with our show. Certainly, they’d never listened to it. To our credit, I would say, we told them: “Hey, this is an investigation podcast. We report honestly on everything.” And they said, “Oh that’s great. You’re gonna love it.” And so we flew down to Costa Rica and stayed there for five days, and they offered a variety of services, including a purported stem cell treatment. But the real show, the main feature, was this ayahuasca ceremony that they had every night. Up to this point, I had never had any kind of illicit drug, not even marijuana. And so, this was just straight into the deep end in terms of trying this heavy-duty hallucinogen. This drug really puts you out of your proper mind, so if you do it, make sure you have somebody there as a spotter; somebody to keep an eye on you.
Palmer: Carrie didn’t participate?
Blocher: It turned out that Carrie’s SSRI medications were contraindicated for taking ayahuasca. They gave her a homeopathic preparation, a tincture they said was as strong or stronger than ayahuasca, and that’s become a running joke.
For four nights in a row I attended these ceremonies, which would last from ten to fourteen hours. First, you’re taking a hit of this tobacco-based drug called rapé, so you breathe that in first. So, I guess that was really the first drug that I ever had.
You let that act for a while and there’s drums, chanting, music, and all kinds of things that they do to kind of add atmosphere. After a while the shamans serve you this Earthy, pruney brew. It’s not a tasty thing; you’ll never find ayahuasca-flavored Gatorade. And then you just go and sit down on your mat. The whole thing looks kind of creepy, because you have this giant room, called the flight deck, filled with about seventy people each on their individual mattresses. It could easily pass for a suicide cult … really creepy. The music drives the experience and the effect of the drug, so there’s all this flute and drum and rhythmic music, and all of these things that really guide the atmosphere.
So, you sit down on your mat, and you’ve got a blanket for when you get cold. You also have a plastic bucket they call your amigo, because you’re probably going to throw up. Most people vomit under the influence of ayahuasca. I never did, but I wanted to so badly. Each night, I was begging to vomit.
Maybe about half an hour in, as you’re sitting there breathing, meditating, looking at the ceiling, you start to feel geometric patterns assert themselves on top of your vision. When you close your eyes, you see it all the more, so you end up with your eyes closed because it makes you feel more nauseous to keep them open. Those patterns melt into rich, vivid hallucinations … maybe you feel like you’re diving through the ground or traveling through tree roots. Every night was a different experience, and I described them in detail on the podcast.
Palmer: You did this more than once?
Blocher: Yeah, four nights in a row! And I tried to take detailed notes, so I’m there writing in my journal, just lucid enough to scrawl in the book. I think it was the third night that I was having huge revelations, and suddenly every axiom I’d ever heard was blending with every other, and I was thinking “We’re all one! It all makes sense, I get it. This is amazing. Everyone should do this.” These were all simple or even silly statements, but I felt them to my core. Every night I had a different experience. Ayahuasca takes you through waves, so you have the geometric visions, but then after maybe an hour of that, you dive down into the depths of despair. It’s not a recreational drug at all. It’s hard work, and you dread going into the next night. We spent every day in between—all of us who were taking it—saying, “Oh man, I’m so scared about what might happen tonight.”
Palmer: But seriously Ross, what was your motivation to have continued after your horrible first experience?
Blocher: The idea is that you go down into the depths, and you experience just pure disgust, pure sadness, pure isolation … all of these horrible feelings, and you’re miserable, and you hear people vomiting all around you, and sobbing. And you’re doing that too. But then you come out of that eventually after I don’t know, an hour? You lose all track of time. So, you’re in the depths of misery, but then you come out of that, and that’s when you start having all of these connections. “Oh my goodness, everything makes sense … everything I’ve ever heard. I get it! It all ties together!” And you have this kind of grand view of life. And that’s why people come back. It’s because they feel they’re going to get these big spiritual insights that are going to make their lives better.
Palmer: But when the hallucinations end, you really don’t keep those supposed insights, right?
Blocher: Well, you have this afterglow and enough of a sense of what you saw the previous night that the memory of the profundity stays with you. And you want to get back, or at least you just want to be a better person. After the third night, if that had been my final experience, I think if you had asked me, I would have said that everyone should do this once in their lives. And I might still say that, but … be careful. Pick a good place where you have trusted people around to take care of you. And that was one of the marketing claims that drew us in. They said they had a licensed medical clinic.
So, the fourth night I had taken my cup, and I was fighting the effects and I wasn’t having the rich visions. My limbs were spasming with occasional, uncontrollable shakes and jerks. So that was weird, but then when they put out the call for the second cup, I went and I took it, and I wrote down in my journal, “Well, I feel like I should do this for the listeners. I feel like I’ve been trying to fight the effect tonight. Let’s go get that second cup.”
And I shouldn’t have. The second cup of ayahuasca set in, and I was just feeling this pain throughout my body, and I wanted to vomit so badly, but I couldn’t. I was just miserable, squirming around, and I couldn’t get comfortable. So I went outside and I would lay on this stone slab and sometimes I would fall off. And I hit my head a few times. And then I would just go lay on the ground or in the grass. I couldn’t stop moaning: “I hate this. I hate this. Make it stop. Make it go away.” Eventually that moaning morphed into panic and a conviction that I was dying. I felt like my organs were shutting down.
Then my vision started to recede. There’s still this part of me that’s lucid through all of this and kind of running Ross’s commentary helplessly in the background. I felt like I was seeing the world through fisheye lenses, and I’m wildly staggering, shirtless on the lawn, convinced that my body is shutting down and dying.
And at that point, I lost my ability to assert any kind of super ego over what I was saying or have any kind of control. It was just pure “id.” Whatever was in my head just flooded out of my mouth: I was yelling, babbling, saying, “I can’t die here! Call the doctors!” I remember telling a wide-eyed shaman: “We need to call a doctor. This is bad. I’m dying.” I estimate this lasted about six hours: me staggering around convinced that I was fighting for my life and trying to stay conscious, stumbling and falling over.
Palmer: They didn’t call the medics? Was your reaction actually not unusual to them?
Blocher: Their position is, “You’re going through this death-like process, but it’s really just ego death. You’re just experiencing something that feels like death, but you’ll be fine.” But they didn’t warn us about this. I’ve heard statistics that it happens to one in three hundred people. So hey, lucky me! Some people can have this psychotic break, where they just go crazy, and they’re yelling and they’re convinced they’re dying. So that was me. That was absolutely me.
Palmer: Just wow! Was that the most dangerous thing you’ve done in the service of the podcast?
Blocher: Yeah, probably. Definitely it was the most scared I’ve ever been. We’ve had medical professionals write and say it sounds like I was experiencing serotonin syndrome, which can be dangerous and even fatal. Others said I probably wasn’t that close to death. I was probably safer than I thought I was, but boy was it frightening in the moment. So, yeah, that’s one of the most dangerous things I’ve done. Another one is firewalking; that’s one that’s affected me long term.
Palmer: You were a featured speaker at CSICon 2017, and I was at your presentation! From what I recall about your firewalking report, successfully not getting burned has nothing to do with the mind. It’s just the physics of the situation, right?
Blocher: We went in with that knowledge, and that’s absolutely correct. Under proper conditions, wood is a poor heat conductor and you can make safe passage. If you don’t let the embers cool down sufficiently, or if you make the walkway too long, you’re setting yourself up for failure, no matter what your mental condition is. So, we had gone to this lecture down in the San Diego area, and they talked to us for hours about getting our minds in the right place, and about the supposed metaphysical aspect of firewalking. Carrie and I tried thinking negative thoughts as we went out the first time, just to see if the physics alone could protect us.
Both Carrie and I walked across the coals and that was great, and I should have stopped there. That would have been A-okay! But I thought, “Well, when am I going to get a chance to do this again?” And I felt great. I was having fun. So, everybody else got their turn, and they said, “Does anyone want to go again?” So, I said, “Yeah. Sure. I’ll do it.” So, I walked across the coals again. And I thought, “Why not, I’ll do it again!” So, I kept walking over the coals, because, “Hey, this is fun! I’m still getting the adrenaline out of it.” And so, I ended up doing six walks.
On the final walk, I turned around on the coals at the end and I walked back. So, I did a double. And the whole time I thought it was fine. They had a bucket there, but they were warning us that once you put your feet in the bucket you can’t go again because the moisture will lead to burning. I should have put my feet in the bucket right away, especially after that last one.
Palmer: So, you didn’t know you had burned your feet immediately?
Blocher: Alas, no. As I drove us back up to Los Angeles (a three-hour trip), the pain started setting in. I felt what it is like to be a hamburger, and it was excruciating. So painful. We had to stop a few times … one time to go to a store, and I could just barely make my way barefoot. We bought some cooling gel, and that helped a little.
Both my feet developed terrible blisters. My left foot took a while to heal, but it did heal. My right foot has never fully returned to normal. I must have had a genetic predisposition to eczema that had not expressed itself before, but it continues to this day. And this was nearly five years ago.
Palmer:
Okay, let’s talk about my favorite conspiracy:
Flat-Earth. How did you decide to do this subject, and what
is your take on it?
Blocher: This is actually a relatively recent phenomenon, because I think when we started the podcast it was so fringe that you wouldn’t even be able to find a group of people that you could get together in a room who believed that the Earth was Flat. It was just one of those half-joking things; one thought of it as a parody akin to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I think it really started in earnest in 2015 with Mark Sargent posting his “Flat Earth Clues” videos on YouTube. YouTube has been such a potent force for evil when it comes to these viral ideas, where people would be watching some other topic and then react to a suggestion: “Well that’s interesting! Flat Earth! Let’s watch that for a lark.” And then they fall down the rabbit hole. I think it draws a certain personality type: people who are motivated by a serial mistrust of everybody else. And it’s also oddly tied into Biblical literalism: “four corners of the Earth” and all that.
So, we were really curious about this new movement and wanted to see how these conversations play out. We found a Meetup group that gathered in Santa Monica regularly. We went to a few of their meetings, and after eating at a pizzeria, we would go to the beach nearby and watch the sunset. You see the disk of the Sun lowering, lowering, lowering, as it’s bisected by the horizon. So, I asked them, “Okay, so what are you seeing right now?” And they said, “The Sun’s just moving farther away.” And I said, “But can’t you see it’s disappearing below the horizon?” They said “No, no, no, it just gets farther and then it gets so dim that we don’t see it anymore.”
In our investigations, we’re not trying to talk people out of anything. We’re just there to observe and report. But I had to say, “I just can’t understand what you’re seeing. We’re looking at this together, and that’s not what’s happening!”
Palmer: Did you get the feeling that it was cognitive dissonance of some type? Or are they just Poes?
Blocher: They are not Poes. That’s always the first thing people want to know: “Is this a lark? Are they having a laugh? Are they just kind of pulling one over?” They are not. They do believe this. I am absolutely convinced of that having interacted with many Flat-Earthers. It’s such a pernicious thing. I feel like this is even more dangerous than, say, Scientology, because its reach right now is huge; it’s tied to so many other unscientific beliefs, and it’s a mindset that is closed to any kind of disconfirmation. Once you have that in your head, that everybody’s lying to you, and that they’re part of this large, evil plot, you can’t take in disconfirming information. Anything that doesn’t line up with your worldview, rather than being corrective or just new evidence to consider, is evil. I don’t know how to combat that. I really don’t.
Palmer:
I understand you were part of the IIG test, testing a
Flat-Earth in cooperation with Flat-Earthers?
Blocher: Yes, I started the conversation about that test with the Flat-Earthers and set up the time and place. I had originally been in communication with the Santa Monica group about an investigation for our podcast, and it grew in scale when we discussed ways to test the curvature of the Earth. They were the ones who suggested the Salton Sea because it has negligible tides, and as they claim, “Water cannot hold a curve.” Heat distortion made it hard to get clear visuals, but they used that ambiguity to argue the conclusions. Suffice it to say, no one left with a changed mind.
Palmer: Have you seen the documentary about Flat-Earthers, Behind the Curve? I learned that this belief has become like a religion to some. It becomes their core belief system, and it may be personally offensive to some if you question it.
Blocher: That’s a great film. I went to a premiere in Los Angeles and saw some of my Flat-Earth friends there. They had mixed feelings about the portrayal. And you’re right: the belief breaks up families and relationships. It’s a genuinely tough problem, because when someone’s removed themselves from the discussion, and you can’t have an honest conversation anymore, what can you do?
Palmer: It also seems to be a flashpoint leading people into all the other conspiracies, and that has consequences. Like maybe these people don’t get vaccines. It may be wrong for skeptics to ignore this, although I have seen the opinion expressed that we should do just that.
Blocher: Yeah, just like the Flat-Earth rabbit hole that people fall
down, I think we need to have good materials out there
… you want to have a compelling rabbit hole that
people can fall down where they can learn the actual
science.
Palmer: So, here’s the last question about the podcast. I have to ask about your urine drinking. What possessed you?
Blocher: We are part of a network of podcasts called Maximum Fun, and once a year we have a pledge drive where we try to get people to support the show. Our listeners are very generous, and support us so we can pay for all these crazy things we do. There are already incentives to join, but we’ll throw in bonus incentives and offer to do crazy things. This previous year we said if we got to a certain number of new and upgrading subscribers, we would get a billboard that says “Research Round Earth” to put near a Flat-Earth conference. We ended up fulfilling this with an aerial billboard! We paid for a plane to fly over a Flat-Earth conference in Texas. Mark Sargent even saw it and texted us to let us know.
So, these are the type of fun things we get to do as podcasters. We were trying to encourage people to support us, and we set a ridiculously lofty goal of 4,000 new and upgrading subscribers. At that level, we said we’d try this urine therapy thing everyone’s telling us about. And then we got to 4,000. So, great; now we had to drink our own pee.
Palmer:
This is clearly an alt-med thing, so what do people expect
is the benefit of doing this?
Blocher: The idea is that urine is not a waste product but is actually a collection of all these really important, tailor-made medicines. It’s a whole pharmacopoeia that your body is building for you; things that you need. They even recommend aging the pee. There’s all this discussion saying fresh pee does this-and-that, but aged pee is better, so you’ve got to store it for a while, and here’s how to store it. And of course, they’ve got testimonials up the wazoo, stories about diseases that have been cured, and naturally that includes my aforementioned eczema. Well, when I commit to doing something, I do it! No half measures. Every morning I filled and drank a cup, and I realized later I did not have to drink that much pee. I was way overdoing it. I would also store pee so I could soak my feet in aged urine. It was awful and disgusting, and I’m so glad to be done with it.
Palmer: Okay, dare I ask: what is a future goal of that magnitude for the podcast?
Blocher: We had two goals this year that we did not reach, and many people are glad we didn’t. We hit 3,800, so we just missed the 4,000 mark at which I would apply to visit McKamey Manor. It’s a fright house where this guy, who many call a psychopath, tortures you physically and psychologically. He’ll interview you beforehand and learn your weaknesses before he exploits them. Many buckle and say, “I can’t take it anymore! Let me out!” He’ll reply, “No, you signed the agreement; you don’t have the right to leave.” Listeners were up in arms about this, writing, “No! Do not do it. How do I donate for you not to go there?”
We had an even higher goal that involved drinking sperm and applying it to one’s skin. Carrie thought this was no big deal. I said, “Big deal! I’d rather not.” Thankfully, I dodged that bullet. For now.
Palmer: Do you realize when the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast sets crazy-high Patreon goals, and the goal is reached, they do practical things? One big one was promising that if they hit a certain very high goal, they would reward one of their cohosts, Jay Novella, with a full-time paid position supporting the show. And they did get to it, and so Jay was hired full time. A win for Jay and a win for the show. No bodily fluids were involved.
Blocher: That seems far more rational and productive!
Photo credits: Unless otherwise attributed, all photos are courtesy of Ross Blocher and Carrie Poppy.
Oh No, Ross and Carrie! on the web:
Interviews of other podcast hosts by Rob Palmer:
- Richard Saunders (The Skeptic Zone)
- Jay Novella (The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe)
- Celestia Ward (Squaring the Strange)
- Michael Marshal (Be Reasonable)
- Brian Dunning (Skeptoid)
Ross ‘admitting’ he believes in Flat-Earth:
Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia promo featuring Ross Blocher