No Ordinary Monday
The No Ordinary Monday podcast brings you the most incredible tales from people's working lives. Each week, we meet someone whose work is anything but ordinary - they may be clearing landmines, blowing up movie sets, or exploring uncharted caves.
We dive into the how, the why, and a life-defining moment they’ve experienced on the job. Whether it’s spine-tingling, hilarious, or just plain jaw-dropping, their stories will challenge what you thought a “career” could be—and maybe even change the way you think about your own.
No Ordinary Monday
The Ghost Interview (Parapsychologist)
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A ghost hitching a ride in the backseat shouldn’t make sense—until you hear how a veteran parapsychologist pulled the story apart and tried to verify it. We sit down with Loyd Auerbach, one of the most respected names in parapsychology, to explore why some experiences defy easy dismissal and how a single case nudged him toward the idea that consciousness may persist after death.
We start by setting the record straight on what parapsychology actually studies: controlled ESP experiments, mind-matter effects, and careful field investigations of hauntings. Loyd explains the standards behind double-blind and even triple-blind designs, where sceptical scientists have praised the methodology even when they doubt the conclusions. Then we dive into the Livermore case: a Victorian house, a family who kept quiet, and an 11-year-old who could speak with a woman named Lois. From deathbed memories to impossible personal details overheard during a car ride she allegedly “joined,” the account gets stranger—and more testable—when an elderly cousin confirms intimate family stories.
Along the way, we unpack working models that challenge the reality TV shows. Apparitions aren’t optical; people perceive them through non-sensory channels, which explains why cameras usually fail. Residual hauntings may be “recorded history” we pick up with ESP, while poltergeist effects often track to living people. We also touch the bigger questions: what is consciousness made of, can it remain coherent without a brain, and why fear and folklore still shape public perception more than evidence does. Loyd offers clear, calm advice for anyone experiencing activity, plus practical routes to study the field through the Rhine Center and the Forever Family Foundation.
If this conversation sparks your curiosity—or your courage—follow the links in our show notes, join our new Facebook community, and share your thoughts. Subscribe, rate five stars, and leave a short review to help us bring more rigorous, open-minded conversations to your feed. What do you think consciousness really is?
Loyd's Official Website - https://loydauerbach.com/
Rhine Research Centre - https://www.rhineonline.org/
Forever Family Foundation - https://foreverfamilyfoundation.org/
Loyd's Socials:
https://www.youtube.com/loydauerbach
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtLPjIZOnE1DrPEPPYkendQ
https://web.facebook.com/loyd.auerbach.author/?_rdc=1&_rdr#
https://www.instagram.com/profparanormal/?hl=en
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In an old Victorian house in California, a team of parapsychologists sit with the family in the living room. They're interviewing the ghost of a woman named Lois through an 11-year-old boy.
SPEAKER_02:I did ask things like, so Lois, what was it like when you were dying? As she was dying in the hospital, she knew she was dying. She said that she closed her eyes in the hospital, and the next thing she knew, she was in the living room of the house. You know, at this point in my career, I didn't know what I believed about apparitions, about ghosts, honestly.
SPEAKER_00:This wasn't Lloyd Arabach's first paranormal investigation. But this particular case would fundamentally transform what he believed.
SPEAKER_02:It absolutely did move me to the point where I believe consciousness could survive death.
SPEAKER_00:What really happens when we die? Where does our consciousness go? For Lloyd, those questions aren't just about belief. They're scientific.
SPEAKER_02:It's not some sort of conspiracy. We're trying to figure out what's really going on.
SPEAKER_00:Now before we dive in, a very, very quick announcement. I have been blown away by how many of you have tuned in since we launched a couple of months ago. I'm so so grateful to you guys that you're enjoying the show. And to celebrate this amazing response, we have launched a brand new community page on Facebook. This is where you can share your own stories, help shape the show, and connect with guests and other listeners. You'll find the link in the show notes below, and look forward to seeing you all there. Okay, so on to this week's guest. Lloyd Arabach is one of the world's leading parapsychologists, a scientist who has spent over four decades studying what most of us would call the paranormal. He's taught university programs, led hundreds of field investigations, and helped transform how serious researchers approach the study of psychic and ghostly phenomena across the world. What makes Lloyd so fascinating is his refusal to simply believe in this stuff. He is really dedicated to understanding what is actually going on. And as you heard in that intro, one case in particular has had a profound effect on him. Inside a quiet Victorian house in California, Lloyd found himself doing something no scientist ever expects to do interviewing a ghost. You're listening to No Ordinary Monday? Let's get into the show.
SPEAKER_02:Very good, thanks. It's kind of the end of my day, but doing really well.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, I want to sort of kick things off. You're a parapsychologist, I guess is the if you were to call yourself something. I guess what would be great is just to sort of describe for people what that is. And you know, because I guess a lot of people would probably go straight you know, with with a topic like this, they go straight to movies and popular culture. You've got you know uh ghost ghostbusters and reality TV ghost hunting shows, and you've got all the Warren, the the you know, the Warrens and the conjuring movies and that sort of stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:How do you set that apart?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I I one of the good things about public pop culture is people are familiar with it, so I can use that um and talk about it real what it really is. So parapsychology is really the study of what we call psychic phenomena, which includes the ability that people seem to have to pick up information without the use of the normal senses, without logical or intuitive inference. We call that extrasensory perception. Uh, the ability to affect things with their mind directly, we call that mind over matter of consciousness. And it's not just moving objects, it's not just self-there's a range of things that fall in there. And then there's the idea that consciousness, you know, can shift out of the body for a time in out-of-body experiences, can pick up uh information about possibly what the other side is when they have people have near-death experiences. There's uh this whole segment of what people would call reincarnation cases of children who remember previous lives, which are really amazing. Because if they're not reincarnation, what in the world are they? And that's a whole different question in itself.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um, and then of course we have the ghostly phenomena. So parapsychologists look at these, we look at people's experiences, and for the kinds of abilities or experiences we can or phenomena we can bring into the laboratory, we have been doing that since uh since almost the beginning in the late 1800s, but more in controlled experiments in starting around the 1930s for that. So uh unfortunately we can't bring a ghost into the lab because we can't get them to stick to a schedule, but that's a whole different story. Um But you know, pop culture is really it can be useful. When Ghostbusters came out, I was actually part of a graduate parapsychology program at John F. Kennedy University. That's where I got my degree originally. And we got tons of calls from media. You know, there was no internet at that point. That was 1984. And the question that always came up was we know you guys don't do that. What do you really do? And that was the best question that I think we could ever possibly be asked by anyone starting with a pop culture beginning there, a prompt like that. Um and and continually, I I'm very familiar with pop culture. I even though I don't tend to watch anything to do with the Warrens, I'm very aware of what they of the conjuring movies and things like that. Um they are not parasit, they were not parapsychologists. Uh demonology is not a science, it has nothing to do with the field of parapsychology at all. It comes from religion. Um, so there's just this unfortunate mishmash, partly because of Halloween. That was the uh until I think until YouTube and the paranormal TV shows really started going year-round, um, we wouldn't only really be busy with media in October.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Because of Halloween. And it would be witches, it would be van, you know, it would be everything, you know, folklore, all sorts of stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell I guess from you guys consider yourself a scientist. And from what what I hear, it sounds very much like a science. But from the perspective of the scientific community, would they yeah, uh the scientific community at large, would they consider you guys scientists, or is there a disconnect there?
SPEAKER_02:Aaron Ross Powell Well well, certainly the laboratory work that's done by paraphologists, partly because our field's been so paranoid, with the skeptics especially, that we have um always been doing we have been doing double-blind experiments for many, many, many decades, sometimes triple-blind, sometimes quadruple blind studies. And double checking the statistics on that, you know, really being very careful on what the statistics even say, and sometimes even being careful how you how you interpret the uh the results. It's very important to not only follow strict scientific protocols, but here's an interesting thing. Um, mainstream science, a lot of mainstream scientists think we're not a you know, still talk about us being a pseudoscience. The field of parapsychology, the parapsychological association, has been a member field of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences since 1969. So there's that recognition. Um a few years ago, one of my colleagues, Ed May, who was the actually the program director for the uh government start uh Stargate program, the remote viewing program for many years, his background is in physics. And he was putting together with a colleague a two-volume book looking at some of the best evidence for ESP, uh the best research for ESP, but he wanted to bring in people who had who were skeptics to look at the research and say what they thought about the evidence, about the results. Ed was able to talk some of these folks into doing that, and surprise, surprise, they were impressed. They still didn't necessarily agree with, I don't know if it's really this thing you call ESP, but they were very impressed at the quality of the research that was actually done, which is something that we we get dinged on all the time that we have bad methodology. And the answer is we have better methodology. In fact, some of these folks actually said we had better methodology and better controls than most psychology experiments. Wow.
SPEAKER_00:And is that I guess that the issue comes down to the fact that the things that the the phenomena that you guys are studying are inherently difficult and more open to interpretation than quote unquote traditional sciences or or whatever. Is that is that where the troubles come?
SPEAKER_02:That's that's part of it. Um, but there's I think a lot of it is the folklore that's behind it and also the number of practitioners who are either frauds or really bad at it, the people who call themselves psychics. And we get conflated with with them also all the time. Um, you know, and the thing you have to look at too is you know, parapsychology is a social science, like psychology, like sociology. There are different interpretations of people's behavior, cross-culturally and otherwise. There are things that cannot be duplicated in the laboratory or even identified in a laboratory under control conditions. It's a social science. We're dealing with human beings. Human beings are not machines.
SPEAKER_00:I think I think that's where it comes down to is that as you said, you you can't take any of these phenomena inside a laboratory condition and poke and prod them and scan them and whatever.
SPEAKER_02:Um ESP and PK can be brought into the laboratory and has been for a long time, because you can set up a situation very easily where the person could not possibly have known the information they're providing. And that was done with the remote viewing experiments and still is being done with remote viewing. And the thing is that as Ed likes to put it, 19 government agencies came to the remote viewing folks to do tasks, to do something, you know, to get intelligence or information. Yep. 17 of those agencies kept coming back. So what does that say? Did they get useful information or not?
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. I mean, the one thing I really wanted to find out is that, you know, you do I really want to talk to you about is that you do a lot of um investigations. Yeah. Um I know part of your your role is is education and and all and media and things like that, but I really wanted to see, you know, how how do these investigations work? You know, I guess people have a uh a way of reaching out, they experience stuff. Just walk us through what it is like to be an investigator and what happens on these cases.
SPEAKER_02:So, you know, unlike the TV shows, which is when I get cases often it's a follow-up because they have the local ghost center group that came in and did everything, screwed everything up for them. Um but the one thing we do is is focus on what they experienced, uh, when, where, in the house, or wherever it was. So in other words, we're looking starting with the the ghost story, the experience itself. So what when my students say what's you know, ask me what's the most important tool somebody investigating can have, it's interviewing skills, which include listening, not just having a list of questions to ask somebody. That's a really important thing. So getting all that information as much as possible up front. Uh in a typical investigation call, I would want to do a pre-interview on the phone with the principal, whoever had the most experiences. But if I could talk to anyone else living in the place who who had experiences, but also if there is a family member there or someone else who did not have any experiences while they did, I want to talk to them too. And I also want to ask them what what solutions have you tried to find yourself? You know, what what else have you done?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And and do you, I guess a lot of the work, as I said, is mostly is talking to people and understanding their experiences. Right. Right. Um do you because a lot of people might assume that technology would come into it in some way, shape, or form.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So it it sort of does. It sort of does. So so, you know, we have been doing investigations in parapsychology, psychical research well before what we would call modern technology, certainly before electronics. Um you know, there there are a lot of tools that have been used. But basically, when you go on site to places, you explore the entire the entire site. You really have to look at what how things are set up. Hopefully, if you're a good investigator with good training in parapsychology, you'll start noticing things that might be alternative explanations. Because even if they had a legitimate apparition experience, they're on usually most people are on a little bit on edge or they're looking for more. And so let's say a picture falls off the wall. The ghost did it. You know, because that doesn't normally happen. Um, they hear a weird noise at night. That was the house settling, or something hit the house. You know, there's a raccoon outside. We have to go through all of those little the little things, and then we look for the pattern of the experiences as they were reported and in relation to the location. And then finally, for technology, the equipment, how does the environment affect all this? Or is there an effect of the paranormal on the environment? I mean, that's that's what we're really looking for. So, for example, I had a case where um we had a lot of good witnesses to this little girl's ghost and also an elder man's ghost in a house that was built just after the American Civil War. And sometimes neighbors, housekeeper, all sorts of people seeing these people, these folks. And I was working with Japanese television actually, uh, on a number of specials, working with a medium from Japan who actually did work with Japanese police. But during a session where she was conversing with this little girl's ghost, which none of us could see, um, we had a whole bunch of people, not just the Japanese crew. I had some other colleagues with me as well. Um, every piece of equipment we had, we had different kinds of electromagnetic field sensors. Um, we have a couple of guys from the University of Florida there. We had different kinds of temperature sensors, we had a Geiger counter, uh, we had a geomagnetic sensing station looking at the Earth's magnetic field. We had all sorts of stuff, and every bit of it was going off. And it was going off closer to where she said the little girl's ghost was. We even had thermal vision camera, and the thermal vision was picking up something like pulsing in mid-air, a heat pulse, which the company said was not possible. Then all of that correlated to what she was doing. All right, so that's the important thing. We even had a a like a spike in the geomagnetic field that knocked it out uh the chart recorder off kilter, so we had to recalibrate. So when you have something like that going on, all right, you may not be able to say there's a ghost here, but the one thing you can say is this woman was picking up on something that would have a physical impact on the environment on multiple levels. And she was perceiving this as a little girl, as had other people in the house.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Ross Powell I mean, a lot of those experiences that you described sound exciting and unusual. Um not particularly like malevolent or anything like that, but people would as often assume this stuff is scary or people will have fear over this kind of stuff. I mean, uh any cases that you found that I mean, I guess a lot of people might call up because they are afraid. Right. But have you found anything scary in these cases? Only living people.
SPEAKER_02:Seriously, I mean, I have no fear of anything supernatural. I mean we don't even use the word supernatural, anything paranormal, uh, any of these experiences. I I mean, to me, the worst they could do is what my one of my brothers tried to do is jump out of a closet and try to scare me with going, you know, boo, kind of thing. You know, surprise kind of thing. There, there's nothing that nothing that that's gonna hurt that way. So psychologically, you can have certainly have impact. There's no question about that. But um it's living, and I've had situations with a couple of living people, a couple of different cases of living people, and you know, it was alcoholics or drunks, and it was not good to be there, let's put it that way. Um, so it's really uh my what I tell my students is always remember ghosts don't carry guns and knives, and you you generally are okay with that. On the other hand, folklore from different parts of the world and religion has this downplay or you know, brings in that whole demon malevolence, devilish thing. In fact, I just reading about a report about um a recent meeting of the Council of Exorcists or whatever, I can't even remember what the consortium is called for the Vatican, because there are exorcists still for the Vatican. And one of them was making a statement that uh there's no such thing as psychic ability, it's all from the devil because it has to come from God or it comes from the devil, and God doesn't give these powers to to live to people. Yeah. So the assumption, therefore, is that, and I've heard this before from somebody who was connected, you know, was extremely religious in one way. Um and assuming, and and people have accused us occasionally that you know we're doing the work of the devil because we're talking about human experiences, and yet there are groups of uh Christianity, you know, certain sects in Christianity that as soon as they got somebody who can do something special, they'll use that person for what for whatever way they can. Um so it's okay, I guess, in that circumstance.
SPEAKER_00:So so that side of things with the with the religious uh aspect of things, you got demons and the devil and and all that kind of stuff, like that that kind of sits apart from all the work that you do, I presume.
SPEAKER_02:It does. It does. Um, again, we we have to deal with people's beliefs to a great extent. But we try, you know, the fact is that and I've had people say we need somebody to bring in, you need your can you come in with an exorcist? Like, no, you you're calling the wrong person. We're you know, from a scientific perspective, that's not science, that's magic. Uh and you know, you're you're doing a ritual which is technically magic, kind of like witchcraft is magic, it's that same kind of sorcery, it's magic. Um I I I respect other people's beliefs in that way, I'm just not the right person, and we we are not approaching things that way. Uh and we can't. I mean, if you think about one important thing, uh whatever people believe, if we're talking about a god or gods, one of the qualities of of gods is that they're kind of unknowable. You can't t put them to scientific tests. If it's the big god as with a big G instead of individual gods from other cultures, there's nothing you can do. Uh no way to detect God. This is about faith, right? You can't measure faith and you can't do it, do that kind of connection. So when you then talk about the devil or Satan and demons, which are fallen angels and all of that, they're creations of that magical being. Science can't do that, can't can't touch that. So we can't approach things from that perspective. And frankly, what we know, what JB Ryan in the 30s, the his approach was very appropriate, is that everybody has can tap into this a little bit. We have experiences all the time that are merged into our sensory experiences, our perceptions. And we don't we don't consider these paranormal at all. These are normal. It's just that humans in different cultures have set limitations on what we can do, what our capabilities happen to be.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's where all is, yeah. I mean, I always love uh asking folks like yourself, because you've got such amazing experiences and such an amazing uh I guess career. What uh give us a sense of your, I guess, call it origin story. You know, what what led you into this particular path in the first place and and how did you just become fascinated and and so passionate about it?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I have I will say my origin story is gonna be a little bit uh disappointing to people because I know I've disappointed them before.
SPEAKER_00:It's not like I had a big You didn't have a ghost experience as a kid.
SPEAKER_02:Um No, I didn't have any of that. Uh my ghostly experiences were, you know, watching TV as a little kid because my I pretty much had a TV set accessible to me when I was two because my dad worked for NVC and I watched the Twilight Zone when I was young. But there was a show called One Step Beyond, which took reported psychic experiences that they often got from the archives of various organizations, and they dramatized them. And then I got hooked. Um, well, first I actually started watching Star Trek when it was originally on. So I got to watch the first few episodes, and they had a lot of psychic stuff there, but at the same time, I started watching a show called Dark Shadows. And um, I should back up and tell you that my dad was involved in the NBC News coverage of the Mercury and Gemini space shots. So I took the science. Um, I was heavily interested in astronomy and space science and geology as well. So I was a little science geek. Uh and when Dark Shadows, which was a fun folklore show with vampires and stuff, they mentioned parapsychology. That was the first time I heard that word. So I went to the library and I found books not only about vampires and werewolves in the one section of the Dewey Decimal system. Sadly, that's where parapsychology books are as well. But that's actually a good thing because that's how I discovered that there were science books on parapsychology. So interesting. That was one of 13 years old. Yeah. I found the science books. I started reading parapsychology. It seemed to me, you know, that these were unanswered questions. So you might say it was a mystery that got me intrigued about all this. I met some other people in college through my studies at Northwestern. Um, so it really was there were a lot of things in the universe, put things in my path. Yeah, you studied cultural anthropology, was it? I studied cultural anthropology with a focus on supernatural folklore. Because that's and and interestingly enough, anthropologists have written about people's psychic experiences because they can get away with it and not have to worry about somebody, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Well, one of the um the the big things we'll love to do on this podcast is to ask a guest to come on to share sort of the most significant standout story of their experience. And um we chatted a little bit about it on our our pre-call, but um it's a fascinating case. And I guess it's one that just to preface it, it's sort of one that stands out because it kind of like it feels really there's no explanation to it, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. No good explanation at least. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Take us through that from the beginning, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Sure. Sure. This so this is um during the time period in the early 80s when we had a parapsychology program at John Kennedy University, and it was post-Ghostbusters. So lots people knew about us, about me, uh, because a ton of public we were like the real life Ghostbusters in that sense. So I got this call from this woman who was a family law attorney in Livermore, California. And she said, uh, you know, um, I saw you on some TV show and we just wanted to talk to you about what's going on with my son. And it's like, what's going on with your son? And she said, Well, um, apparently um he's been seeing and talking to a ghost for over a year and a half since we moved into this house, this old house, Victorian house in Livermore. I said, Really? And so, so start talking to her about this. And first thing I find out is, yeah, he wasn't the only one who's who had seen the ghost. Turned out she, when he started talking about this, and she started talking to her husband about it, and her mother, who occasionally came to visit, all of them, um, the adults had been seeing this woman once uh once a week or so, and the mother-in-law or the mother of the grandmother when she was actually visiting from time to time. They didn't do what the kid did. So it all started because they bought this house in an estate sale. The only living relative of the woman who had passed away in not in the home, so that's a big misconception. She died in the hospital. Yeah, the only living relative was in assisted living, and his attorney would not let the family talk to him at all. But they bought the house, they bought antique furniture, all sorts of furniture. I mean, they got a lot of it, a lot of it, really nice furniture the woman had had. They had there was a porcelain doll collection with dolls from all over the world in a collector's case on the wall, all sorts of stuff. And what happened was the woman came home from work one day. Her son's there, he's looking at the porcelain doll collection, and he turns to his mother and says, Mom, you know, that doll is from Dresden, and this doll is from and she's like, Did you find paperwork? You know we've been through the house to look for everything we could. No, no, Lois told me. And she's like, Well, who's Lois? One of your teachers? No, you know, the ghost that you, dad, and grandma are talk are seeing but aren't talking about. At which point she became a uh really an interrogator. She interrogated, she told me she interrogated her son. Come to find out that they had all, when they were moving in, uh, and they were all like not willing, individually, not as they found out later, not willing to say anything to either of the they didn't want anybody else to think they were crazy, didn't want to scare anybody. Uh, Chris, the boy who was um almost 11 years old at the time, um, he saw this woman walking through the living room, she turned and waved at him, which is something similar to what she was doing to the others, and he waved back.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And she didn't disappear like she would do with the others. She actually stopped and started talking to him. And she was the previous resident who was born in the house herself when it was first, after it was first built, her family moved in there. Um, so he had started having information about her and other things. And so this the mother Pat was not a none of them were afraid at all because nothing bad had happened. But she was concerned, and her concern was my son's about to be a teenager. He's talking to a ghost every day, and is that a good thing? Yeah, growing up. And my first uh response was, well, you know, before we even talk about the investigation, I think I'm gonna get a rec reference for you for a child psychologist uh from JFK, and I want you to take him there and have him talk. And I make sure I got somebody who was skeptical, but not, you know, not a believer, not a disbeliever, but someone else. Um, before I actually went to the house, I met with him for lunch with permission of the family. He said to me, This kid is the most mature kid at this age I've ever met. He ch he said, he tells me he had he runs all his problems by Lois, and she helps him and advises him. He said, if my clients, the kid clients I work with all had Lois as a day therapist, I would be out of business. So he was impressed. He said, I don't know if it's really a ghost or his, but he was blown away. Well adjusted kids? Yeah. So going down there, um university was about a 40-minute drive from from Livermore. And at the time it was between um sessions, and uh most of my students were were kind of to the wind visiting family and such. So the receptionists we had, uh one of our counseling students, uh, Kip was um JFK University at the time had an average age of 35 to 40 years old, mostly people who returned after being away from college for a while. So Kip came with me. He was very interested in hearing about the case. And my wife, my first wife, my wife at the time, Joanna, was with me as well. And we drove down, we got to got in the car at the university, drove down to Livermore. And in the cars, we're talking. This was an older car that was going to be replaced. We were talking about the car I wanted to buy. And Joanna was complaining about her job. She was working as a secretary at a law firm, wanted to quit, and uh trying to figure out what to do next. And Kip, we're asking Kip about his background because he was away from college, uh, from school for a while. He was a professional dancer in LA for television, which is unusual in itself. Very unusual, yeah. The family did not know who was coming with me at all. I just said I was bringing people with me. So we get to the house, um, we're met at the door by uh Pat, her mom, and Chris. Um, the husband was out of town. Uh he was uh on a some sort of uh corporate thing. So, or he he was avoiding us. I wasn't sure exactly what. Um, but Chris then turns and looks at it, turns to this empty spaces, and this is Lois. So, of course, we said hi, Lois, because you know, in that situation, what do you do? Yeah, be polite. Um, then we were taken on a tour of the house, and as we're walking around, um Chris is telling us stories of the family um that Lois participated in growing up and and and otherwise, and also talking about the history of Livermore that Lois told her about, which honestly, I completely separated the history stuff because the case. Could have read stuff pretty easily.
SPEAKER_01:For sure, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So we then end up sitting in the living room, and it's a semicircle with Chris next to me, and then an empty easy chair, which is apparently where Lois was sitting. Though not only Chris could see her time. And then the others were there as well. And the questions, you know, I asked more questions about um the family. And one of the things I want to know is how do we get in touch with your your cousin, the living relative? You're, you know, he his attorney's blocking. And we got enough information for me to talk to him, actually, from Chris. Just track him down and find him. It was not that hard after I got the information from Chris. Or I should say from Lois. Oh my God. You know, she is. I'm facing both both the empty chair and Chris, because I thought it would be impolite to just talk to Chris if there really was the ghost there, right? You know, at this point in my career, I didn't know what I believed about apparition, about ghosts. Honestly, I didn't really know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um so the information we got about that, I'll get to that in a moment. But um, I did ask things like, so Lois, you know, what was it like when you were dying? And the response that Chris gave us was she was, she, as she was dying in the hospital, she knew she was dying. She kind of did a life review. Um, a couple things kind of came to her mind at that time. One was her family was not religious, and she didn't know if there was a heaven and hell. And she didn't know she wasn't, let's say, she wasn't a good girl, let's put it that way. You know, she wasn't a bad girl, but parties and things like that. So she said, I didn't know where I would end up. Right. Didn't know where I would end up. So I just wanted to go home. And then she said, or at least Chris said she said, that she closed her eyes in the hospital, and the next thing she knew, she was in the living room of the house, which was empty. And it was empty for a year and a half. And she decided to wait for the next family or people to come in. And if she liked them, she'd stay. If not, she'd figure out what to do next. Then I asked, okay, now Chris had seen her, and even the family members had seen her wearing different clothing every time they saw her. Yeah. So that's a question that comes up, you know, where to go get their clothes from. And um, occasionally she would be seen at different ages. Uh Chris told us that as well. So I asked, uh I had an idea about this because this is a concept that appeared in very few books that were in print at the time. Let's put it that way. But it was an old it was an old concept. But I asked Lois that question, and the the response was interesting in a couple levels. But she said, as far as I know, I'm just a mind, a float floating mind like a ball of energy, you know, like some of those aliens on Star Trek. Which was kind of a nice tech uh tie-in.
SPEAKER_00:But did she but did wait, did Lois say Star Trek, or did that or you are you just making that?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I mean, Chris said Star Trek that Lois said Star Trek.
SPEAKER_00:Oh.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, okay. Damn. So she was. So I don't know if that was Chris's interpretation. I didn't. This is before the next generation, but he could have been watching reruns of the original series, I guess. Um and then she said that what was said was how she thought of herself, how she pictured herself, is how people who were able to pick up that thought would see her. Because they're not seeing her with their eyes, they're seeing her with their psychic senses, with their mind.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_02:And that's one reason why ghosts can't be photographed, because they're not an optical phenomenon at all. So, all right, so then then um start asking, well, you know, what does Lois want to know from us? And actually, there was some funny interplay. This was '85. And um Chris had gone to see Ghostbusters. I don't know that Lois had actually gone to the movie theater with him, but um, she had seen commercials with him on TV. So whether it was Chris or Lois asking us this question, so you guys didn't bring any equipment. Do you have stuff like in Ghostbusters? And I said, no. Um, you know, I made a joke about you know unlicensed nuclear accelerators and things like that. And and actually we had a promise before we even went out that we wouldn't be bringing any blasters to get rid of her, or we wouldn't be trying to get rid of her. Um then she's then the next question was, Lloyd, what kind of new car do you want to buy? Joanna, do you really want to quit your job? And Kip, how long are you a professional dancer? No way. And none of those things have been talked about since we walked in. We had a tape running. I did check to make sure we hadn't simply forgotten that we talked about that. Um, those had not been said, I didn't even know Kip was going to come with me, so I didn't even tell Pat about that. So, and certainly didn't know Joanna was coming. So, even if I had said on the phone, I've got an old car, I'm going to drive down to Livermore. Um, the other two, there's no way that he could have known that. I said, Well, how does Lois know this? Is she reading our minds? Are you reading our minds, Chris? Yeah. And the response was, he looked very sheepish. He said, Lois didn't trust you guys because of the blaster thing from Ghostbusters. So she got herself to the university. She sat, she got in the backseat of your car, and she rode and listened in on your conversation all the way down. Kip got a little green at that point because he was sitting in the backseat, coming down. And, you know, all right, so two things.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:The only way she could pop they could possibly have known, other than a psychic way, is if my car was bugged. There was no motivation. Literally none. I mean, this was not a case that they were they were planning on making money at, they weren't going to expose it. It was none of that stuff. So there was literally no reason for that. And and at that point, they would have had a note fine. That was there's a whole bunch of things technologically that would have been necessary. Um if you think about the early 80s, I I think the bugs would not have had that far transmission capability to Livermore, you know, that far away. Exactly. No.
SPEAKER_00:You'd like satellite dishes and all sorts.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So the other thing is that when I tracked down this the the cousin, um, he was willing to talk. I he probably I was worried she was he was not going to w be willing to talk to me. But when I talked to these the folks at the Assisted Living Place, I said to them, look, um a faculty member at John F. Kennedy University in Paris Psychology, uh, we're checking into his cousin Lois' old house, which the folks say is haunted, and and just let him know that we got family stories from the ghost of Lois. This is what the family has told us. And he was 92 years old. He was very excited to talk to us because if Lois is still around, maybe he can be around too. I mean, that's what he told me. Um, every one of the stories I started, he finished.
unknown:Wow.
SPEAKER_02:So either Chris had found diaries going back throughout Lois's entire life, which Pat was positive didn't exist. Memorized them. Memorized them, yeah. Um or Lois existed.
SPEAKER_00:That's amazing. So you sat you I mean, you sat down and literally interviewed well, seemingly interviewed a ghost.
SPEAKER_02:It was like talking to it was like talking to somebody with a foreign language and having a translator.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Somebody somebody who could understand English but couldn't speak English.
SPEAKER_00:Did you did you expect that when you started this case, or was that kind of like you were?
SPEAKER_02:I I I had no idea that we were going to get that lucky um or have that situation happen. Oh my god. None whatsoever.
SPEAKER_00:How did it that must have been extraordinary? I mean, you m your mind must be just buzzing with questions.
SPEAKER_02:It was it was well, I mean, we got to ask all those questions that I had, and um I was able to kind of funnel questions after the fact also because I was still in touch with the family for quite some time. Um and uh you know, and and the one of the really interesting things was that you know, what the psychologist said about him having somebody to talk to every day um really played out as he was growing up. I mean, he was a good-looking kid, and girls were, you know, around him all the time. And his mother was so proud of him because he was so good to girls. And I and I put that, having talked to Chris, having I put that to him talking to a woman. He had a female confidant who nobody else could connect to. Um reason.
SPEAKER_00:She stuck with him for years and years after?
SPEAKER_02:She stuck with the house, uh, with Pat in the house for why when he when he left, when he grew up. Yeah. But he would come back and you know, come back and visit home and and see that. The last time I talked to the family was 2004, so it's been 20 years at this point.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, did that case did it did it change your perspective on on what you believed? Did it sort of move you on that scale?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. It it absolutely did move me to the point where um I believe consciousness could survive death in some cases. You know, the the thing and well, I should say not that it can survive death in some cases, but in some cases they stick around. Um, you know, mediums talk about people passing on to another plane of existence or whatever you want to call it, dimension, whatever. Um, and I suspect that there's some evolution of consciousness that changes after you die, uh, but it still survives in some way uh after death. The the ones we call apparitions or ghosts, the vast majority of ghostly experiences people have are with um relatives, loved ones, who either at the moment of shortly after the moment of death or over a couple of day period, but not like sticking around forever. They don't stick around that long.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um they're there to kind of say goodbye to people, that kind of thing. There's a very small percentage that stick around for longer. And, you know, you'll hear psychics on TV and other places say, well, they don't know they're dead. Yeah, they a lot of them, you know, some of them are in denial or say that they don't know that they're dead, but that's like getting a terminal illness and being in denial of that. I mean, it's psychologically it's sound. But then there's plenty of other folks who just simply don't want to go because they're afraid. The fear thing we've we've had heard from witnesses and psychics ostensibly communicating with these apparitions. Uh, we hear that quite a bit. And sometimes it's just they want to have fun, you know, or um have one case still going on of a place the woman was murdered back in the early 1930s, and she's told she's like a party. She likes to hang around the restaurant, she likes people, it has good memories for her when she was alive. So uh and then the USS Hornet Aircraft Carrying Museum, those guys were started appearing after they saved the ship from being scrapped. That's when people started seeing, you know, maintenance people started seeing these guys, and they kind of came back, it seems, to make sure the legacy of the Hornet, which is very important in our history, continues as a museum. So they still work the ship.
SPEAKER_00:So the Hornet is a is a is a is a battleship.
SPEAKER_02:It's aircraft carrier, full-on aircraft carrier, World War II, launched in 1943. Um, it ex it sits in uh Alameda, California, so outside of Oakland. It's been a museum since 1998. It's the ship that picked up Apollo 11 and 12 when they returned from the moon.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, cool.
SPEAKER_02:And it also was the lead ship in the Pacific Fleet from when once it was launched in 43 till the end of the of World War II. Uh, it's the only ship in war that was never struck by enemy fire, even there were significant attempts on it. As if um something was protecting, you know, the it it was the second hornet uh it was the second hornet of World War II, the first Hornet of World War II. Um another aircraft carrier was sunk at the Battle of Midway. And some of the say some of the guys who I talked to who were serving aboard the ship during World War II always felt that the ghosts, the spirits of the guys from the previous Hornet were protecting the ship. Yeah. Uh but it had a lot of a lot of records uh at that point in time. So really fascinating, really cool ship. And so witness witnesses all a glore, you know, people working there, people visiting there, all sorts of stuff.
SPEAKER_00:And and you've I think you've done investigations there as well, haven't you? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Um it was 99, is when I started. Um a psychic actually working with a couple of the folks on the board uh there brought me a brought me in to do a more because and she had a background in science herself. That psychic actually, it was the only psychic I ever met who worked at a at any sort of science organization. She had worked at Genentech for 20 years in data analytics. And she started she was doing readings for people at Genentech, and they said, you know, should you just hang up a shingle, you should do that, you shouldn't do do what you're doing. So she had a really good background in science. It was a really interesting experience working with somebody like that. Um and she had been checking out the Horner herself and um wanted a more thorough investigation. We do a lot of interviews with people, um, you know, did a lot of patterning on that and and had some really interesting experiences on it too.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. And so it sounds like you know, you speak to a lot of people that have experiences, but you don't have those experiences yourself. Is that right?
SPEAKER_02:Most of the time, but I I will say that over the years, um I've I've found my found myself in cases with sensing things. And I usually kind of keep it close to the best. I do work with psychics and mediums that I have vetted specifically for investigation because they're not all good at it's like artists, not everybody can do the same thing. Um and I'll usually not tell them what I'm feeling at all. And I've had my my own, like on the Hornet, I had a couple of experiences where um one of the go one one of the things women reported for a while, and I think they stopped doing the guys have stopped doing it, guys meaning the ghosts, because they're all sailors, right? Um, they were goosing women, pinching their ears. What? Yeah. So my God. And I was walking through um for a TV show. I was walking through uh doing a little experiment, bringing some people on that I knew that had not been on the hornet, see what they might pick up. And my friend Jill, like you know, gave a little squeak ahead of me and kind of moved her, moved herself a little bit and looked at me and and like Lloyd, and it's like, what? It's like you goose me. It's like, and her husband's standing right next to me, and he starts laughing because neither one of us are close enough to do that. Um and after that, when as that happened, something squeezed my arm, like, ha ha, you know, kind of thing. So I felt that. And there was another time I was doing something else where I was able to calm somebody down. Um, and I felt being patted on the back, which was interesting because it wasn't a physical, you know, it's definitely not a physical, it's a physical feeling, but not a physical touch. I this was again for another TV show for popular mechanics for kids, and the 14-year-old host was freaking out because he saw one of the ghosts, and I was calming him down. Oh, wow. And the camera guy is, you know, I'm facing the kid, camera guy's looking over my shoulder from a little way behind me, and I got a kind of a puffy windbreaker on. And when that happened, I got patted on the back after the kids like calm down. Um, it felt like good job, Lloyd. And I turned to him and I said, Did my jacket move? He said, What are you talking about? He said, you know, nothing moved on your back. So um, so I'll I'll feel things from time to time, but uh I'm open to it, but I'm I always tell people I'm the person who gathers everything together and tries to figure out what's going on. So I don't want to be coloring that with my own personal experiences most of the time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you've as you said, you've done years and years of investigations and spoken to so many people and gathered evidence and all that kind of stuff. Like, and you know, with the lowest case, you've got apparitions that are you know describing themselves as free floating energy, you know, that have survived death. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. Yeah, consciousness. And and you've got you know ghosts that, you know, whether it's poltergeist or you know, people patting in the back or pinch and bums of women interacting with the environment. Like have you got a theory or an explanation or what I mean, what do you think is actually going on? How do you explain this stuff?
SPEAKER_02:Aaron Ross Powell So with apparitions, you know, the idea of consciousness after we have we have three different categories of what people would call ghostly stuff. Poltergeists are compl or are related to living people, not to dead people. So it's it's and they're all physical. So it's it's a different kind of phenomena. And then there is the residual hauntings or hauntings, which are the seeming ghosts that are locked in patterns. And those are just us picking up history, picking up stuff in the environment, information. That's that's our ESP. Or there's another model that suggests that um our brains are capable of picking up information in the in maybe in the geomagnetic field that is existing or in some other field that's there, physical field. So more of a biophysical kind of thing that has not been tested because we don't have the money to test it. Uh, it wouldn't require very much exper money, but it's still we can't test it right now. But with with apparitions, um, going off of what Lois said, which actually is an old idea that because we know so we know a couple things. We know that you got a bunch of people in a room, and two people are seeing the ghost, and they describe the same ghost, but they may describe the same ghost facing them, and they themselves may be coming facing different directions. So imagine you're in two different parts of the room facing different directions, but the ghost is facing you head on. Yep. All right, so that's a problem. Second problem, there's nothing about the human eye that should be able to pick up something that everybody can't see. And cameras should be able to pick because if you can see it, that means it's reflecting light or giving off light. So there's that problem. Ghosts are not optical. When people say they hear the voice of a ghost, why didn't everybody else hear it? And how come your recorder can't pick it up if it's an actual acoustical sound? So we get back to this, what Lois said basically, which is that consciousness, the thing that survives death, the thing that is us, is capable when alive, of doing some ESP and other similar things. Um, the question I often put to people is okay, you're a dead guy, you're a ghost, you do not have eyes that have a retina. So how do you see? Because light will just go right through it. So there's no rods and cones. How on how how can you hear? You don't have an eardrum to react to f acoustical sound. Therefore, it's got to be non-senses, non-sensory perception. It's perception. They see us with non-sensory perception, what we call ESP. We see them with ESP.
SPEAKER_00:And and that's it, like I I think that I I really understand the receiving part. You know, there's an extrasensory perception that we don't understand yet, potentially.
SPEAKER_02:But it's the transmitting part that I think I'm having more is what is it on a different plane of anatomy or quantum or i the the really the question comes to the it's the central question of what is consciousness? And you know, it's what is consciousness in the body, whether it's in the brain or the whole body or whatever else. Um, or is it, you know, there's there's some folks who who put out the the model that consciousness is not even resident in the brain or in the body, that we are just the receivers. I don't necessarily subscribe to this, I'm just kind of putting this out there. So we are an interface to consciousness, whether it's in us or outside of us in that sense. The the real question for an apparition for that kind of survival is can consciousness be coherent and keep personality? Um, what is it made out of? That's the uh that's the other question. What is it made out of? And you know, we're we're not even close to there yet uh in physics. We're we don't even know enough about the brain to say definitively that it's in the brain.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, if you had uh one huge achievement that you wanted to leave as your legacy, like if you could achieve something as a as a dream achievement and at the end of your career, what would it be?
SPEAKER_02:I want people to recognize that these experiences that people report, whether they're the ESP of the living, these things of the living or of the dead, you know, apparitional experiences. Um I think it's really because I don't know that you really will come to a definitive conclusion of survival of death until you get there. Um but I want people to recognize that there's nothing supernatural about these things, nothing paranormal about these things. These experiences are part of the spectrum of human experience and abilities and capabilities. And we have because of folklore and fear, because of religion and fear, we have set limits, and also because the materialist perspective, which is held back some aspects of science in many respects, um look looking at it only that way, um, people I want people to recognize that we are all capable of more than what they're telling us. And it's not it's not some sort of conspiracy. It's just based in fear or dogma, one or the other. Um I'm hoping what I really try to cut through is for people to ask questions that people should separate pop culture from what's really going on and what's important in these situations. And I hope, you know, in the next number of years that I have left, that um we end up with some advances in physics looking at consciousness, in in other fields looking at consciousness that give some light to what these what what the idea of consciousness capable of expanding or picking up information beyond the brain case, uh what's called non-local consciousness, that this is all real in that sense.
SPEAKER_00:Brilliant. Um I mean I always love just uh wrapping these things up with just advice for listeners, you know. Um and I guess there's two sort of pieces that I'd love to ask you is for anyone listening that feels like they have been experiencing something or whatever, what kind of main piece of advice would you give to someone that may be feeling like they're experiencing a haunting or something to that effect?
SPEAKER_02:So I I would say, you know, there there are people in my field, myself included, of course, who you can contact, um, who can kind of shed some light on some things, um at least point you into the right direction for certain references. There's some really good books that explain stuff, uh including mine, of course. Um I I'd say that you should not be afraid to talk to others, especially in your family, unless unless you know for a fact their religious background or you know, I guess you could say um their belief about this stuff is overtly negative because they're just gonna throw it out the window. But there are plenty of people. I I found for a long time I was meeting people uh here in the Bay Area. Um, when they found out what I did, they would tell me their story. They're either a psychic experience, a ghostly experience, something like that. And I would always like to ask them, have you ever told anybody about this? No, because people are gonna think I'm weird, but you know, you're in that, so I can talk to you about it. And the sad thing is that there were occasions where I would be told a story by one guy, and then I'd meet his wife, and she'd tell she'd find out about me and start telling me her stories. And neither one of them, and they weren't even the same stories, but neither one of them, they had common experiences, and they never talked about these things. And wow, I I I suspect that if you had 100 people in a room and had everybody close their eyes and just say, raise your hand if you've ever had a psychic experience or paranormal experience, the majority of people would raise their hand. Um, as long as they don't look and see everybody else raising their hands.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. So it's all about legit basically just sort of this is not a taboo subject. It's just not something we should be talking about more. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And so um our organizations are always willing to talk to people or point you in the right direction for any of these experiences that you might actually have. Um, and we deal with psychic experiences, not UFO or things like that. So it's it's just important to make that distinction too. And just knowing there is nothing evil, malevolent. Um, that's all pop culture. You know, the the paranormal TV shows are about spookiness. That's why they investigate in the dark, which is a stupid thing to do, honestly. I'll tell you very honestly that the vast majority of ghostly encounters and experiences have happened either during the daytime or with the lights on. So it's one thing to do it at night, it's another thing to do it at light at night in perfect darkness because the number of ghostly encounters or experiences in pure darkness that have happened outside the TV shows, of course, has been so minimal. Uh, because if it's dark, how are you going to see the ghost? Well, of course, it's a thought form, so they look like they're lit up. But people don't report getting woken up by ghosts. That just doesn't happen.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. And for um for anyone who's interested in following your footsteps, what uh what advice do you have for anyone that uh would love to be a parapsychologist?
SPEAKER_02:So there are resources, um, classes and places, places, for example, the Rhine Research Center, which is in its 90th year since the founding of the Duke Parapsychology Lab. Um, we offer courses, uh, online courses. I've had students from Australia and Thailand and England and all over the world, India, places like that. But we cover a lot of different topics uh out there. Um, things on the ghostly side, you know, on the investigative side, some serious research research courses, if you're interested in that. So, and we have certificate programs as well. Uh, and then there are other places that um offer single courses. There's a couple of folks in England who are again listed on my parapsychology online resources page. Um, it's really easy to find us, but it's important to know that you should just check out who they are because there are a lot of people who offer stuff that has nothing really to do with parapsychology. Uh, it's more pop culture and folklore than anything else. And those courses are fun, but not if you want to be a serious parapsychologist or semi-serious parapsychologist.
SPEAKER_00:And it's I guess it's a it's not a career that people would jump into unless you're really passionate about it, because it's not a moneymaker.
SPEAKER_02:It's not a money, it is not a moneymaker unless you can write a book that sells a lot of copies, which is incredibly rare. Um, yeah. Yeah, it's just not um, yeah, if you think you're getting into it for the money, maybe some psychics and mediums can do that, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00:We uh Well you are providing a service, you know?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's a service, and and you know, most of us in the field, and not everybody in the field deals with all the same phenomena, but we do feel like we're we're investigating mysteries, we're investigating the human condition. You know, to me it's incredibly unscientific to ignore the experiences, or as some pseudo-skeptics will often say, oh, that's just mass hallucination. It's like and to which I have to reply, I want to see the scientific studies on mass hallucination, because they really don't exist. That's a hallucination, actually, that they are they are there. Yeah. Yeah. So it's easy to get lifted. It's not easy to explore what's really going on.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully, uh in the future things become much more into the light and accepted, and uh we we can all talk about a bit more. You know, we've had I've had other episodes where it's uh I I had a death anthropologist, and it's all just about talking. You know, they're about solutions against me about talking about stuff, you know. So um Brilliant. Lloyd, at the end I I like to sort of offer you a chance to plug what you've got. Obviously, you've got so you mentioned websites and all sorts of stuff, but you know, just uh tell us what can people hear you doing, where they can find you.
SPEAKER_02:So um my website again is LloydAuwerback.com. It's important to spell my name with one L. You can see it, you know. Hopefully you see it on the screen. Um there's a lot of there's if you're interested in ghosts, there's a whole FAQ on ghostly phenomena that's there. And a lot of, like I said, there's a resources page. I have a media page with many, many, many podcasts and TV things that that are there that are linked out. If you want to, even a few lectures that I've actually done that are available to watch uh for anybody. Uh but uh for classes for education, there is the Ryan Education Center. It is linked on the website, but it's just simply if you go to Ryan, that's r-h-in-e.org, you can click on education and find all those opportunities. But even the main site, the Rhine Center site, has got videos in the media library that you can watch currently. I think they're all available. We have over 100 lectures on all sorts of topics uh related to this subject. Um, and you'll you can get a lot out of that. And we hope that you would join the Rhine and your benefits for joining the Rhine Center and supporting the organization as well. Uh, and then if you're interested in the whole question of mediumship and that the idea of life after death, there is an organization called the Forever Family Foundation, which I am president of, as it happens. It's Forever Family Foundation.org. You can join for free, and there's some good information. Information on the site. We actually run grief retreats with the mediums and a grief counselor a few times a year in different parts of the US. We've been trying to figure out how to do them overseas. We haven't quite figured that one out yet. And we we do scientific testing of our meet of the mediums so they get certified. The organization doesn't, you know, we don't pay anybody for anything and any for any of that. And it's really all about supporting the work of evidential mediums in the family grieving process and supporting the work of uh scientists looking at concepts of survival of bodily death. So apparitions, reincarnation, mediumship, all of that stuff. So looking at that from a very scientific perspective. And even our mediums go to science classes. So we uh we have uh we got a good group there. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Bro. Well, Lloyd, thank you so much for taking the time to uh sit down and chat about all this stuff. It's been a fantastic conversation and um really really uh be an odd to have you on.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Anytime. And that is a wrap on this week's episode. A huge thanks again to Lloyd for sharing his incredible experiences with us, and a big thanks to you all for listening as well. If you'd like to learn more about Lloyd's work, you'll find links to his books, his lectures, and research in the show notes and on our website, no ordinarymonday.com. And as always, you can find extra clips and visuals from this episode across our socials, uh, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more, and our new community page as well on Facebook, which is just called No Ordinary Monday Podcast Community. Go and check it out. Alright, so time for this week's listener story segment. Uh, if you want your story read out, head to the website and click the listener story page to record a short voice note, or you can write one up, or you can email hello h l o at no ordinary monday.com with the listener story uh in the subject line. So this listener writes Since finishing my doctorate, I've spent most of my working life hopping from one medical conference to another, anywhere between four and ten per year. On paper, it sounds glamorous. World travel, fascinating talks, clever doctors, cutting edge science. In reality, it's basically cardio with lanyard and heels. These venues are huge, think multiple football fields. No matter where your next meeting is, it's always on the opposite side of the hall, uphill somehow both ways. My step count is great, but my feet are not. And then there's the badge. Supposedly professional, but in practice it flips backwards, tangles in my hair, and occasionally attempts to strangle me mid-conversation. I've accepted that we're mortal enemies. And networking is its own endurance sport. You cycle through the same small talk lines. Where are you based? First time in the Congress? How do you pronounce that molecule again? And after an hour of that, I trade my PhD for just a decent coffee, which, by the way, doesn't exist. There's a well-known rule of thumb at these conferences: the better the science, the worse the coffee. And travel? Well, let's just say glamorous is a generous word. I've eaten mini bar peanuts during a Barcelona riot, and watched Atlanta descend into utter chaos over three snowflakes, all while trying to reach a hematology session. But for all the chaos, I wouldn't swap it. You learn a lot, you walk even more, and you come home with a lifetime supply of tote bags, dermatology creams, and branded pens. If you want to get into this line of work, my advice better shoes, stronger coffee, and lower your expectations for the Wi-Fi. That story was kindly sent in by my wife, who is actually at a conference as I record this. She is a management consultant working in the biotech and pharma industry. Alright, so next week we head to the wilds of Namibia to meet Marlies Van Vuren. She is a conservationist, filmmaker, and co-founder of the Nankuse Wildlife Sanctuary. It's a place where cheetahs, baboons, leopards roam just meters from her home, and where her team rescues, rehabilitates, and releases some of Africa's most extraordinary and endangered animals. Marlise's story is full of courage, chaos, and compassion, and trust me, you don't want to miss it. So hit subscribe now so you won't miss out on that. If you enjoyed today's episode and feel like doing something nice for us, just click five stars and maybe leave a review and tell a family member a friend. It really helps us spread the word and grow the show. We can attract more extraordinary guests for you guys, and we can also inspire new listeners for the community. And that's it. This show is independently produced, hosted, and edited by me, Chris Barron. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great Monday, everyone, and we will see you next week.
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