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Speaker 1: Talking to Death is released every Friday and brought to you absolutely free. But if you want ad free listening and exclusive bonuses, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus dot com or on Apple Podcasts.
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Speaker 2: Talking to Death is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts.
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Speaker 3: Listener discretion is advised.
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Speaker 2: Welcome back to Talking to Death. If you're a fan of conspiracies and the unexplained, you're gonna love this week's guest. Matthew Frederick is a co host of the iHeart podcast Stuff They Don't Want You To Know, where he dives deeply into conspiracies. Matt Frederick is a good friend of Pains and the entire Tenderfoot family. He's an executive producer on Atlanta Monster and Talking to Death, among many other shows from Tenderfoot. In this episode, Pain and Matt talk about their favorite conspiracies. They talk about aliens, they talk about podcasting music. They even give their thoughts about the recent Trump assassination attempt. So, without further ado, this week Matthew Frederick, Well.
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Speaker 1: We're back, man, Matthew Frederick. I've known you for a long time, man, ever since I've started podcasting. I think i've known you. Do you remember the first time we met.
00:01:20
Speaker 3: I think I do was back in twenty seventeen and you came into the office and we just kind of had a hang. It was like right after you met Jason Hoak and we're hanging out with him, you and Donald and yeah, I was nervous as hell.
00:01:33
Speaker 1: Man, I was like, to meet me, why, yeah, well to meet you got twenty seventeen especially, Yeah, yeah.
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Speaker 3: No, for real, because you guys were already creating something that Ben and Nolan and I who make stuff they don't want you to know. We kind of we were envious of, like putting together a story like that that went so far in depth the way you guys were working on one. Cause you know, in our show, we cover like one topic for an hour roughly, and that's what you get, and we put all our research into it, but you don't get to follow the rabbit holes, which are the most fun parts usually.
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Speaker 1: Right, So you're you were used to. I mean, I guess the format of your show is you tell a lot more stories, really, and you know there isn't necessarily twelve dedicated episodes on one topic, because by episode ten of any topic, you're definitely deep into into some rabbit hole whatever it is, good or bad.
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Speaker 3: Right, yeah, usually pretty bad, It could be bad, yeah, but no, but it was really cool, man, because you guys were, look, I'm about to turn forty one, like in just a couple of days now, and you guys just seemed really young and had that energy of when what that we remembered and specifically think about Ben and I that we remembered having when we started making our show back in like two thousand and nine, two thousand and eight, something like that, and we just were like, dang, I wish I could be like that again.
00:02:57
Speaker 1: That young whipper snapper who's only like a couple of years younger than I know.
00:03:01
Speaker 3: I know, But there, you guys had an energy that was just different I think. But now, yeah, man, it was awesome to meet you. It was awesome to work with you and Donald in particular on Atlanta Monster. That's a I always think always I get this like vision sometimes of going into that vault that we got to go to. Oh yeah, you and Jason talked about it extensively, but man, that just seeing all of that archival footage and audio and then getting to delve into it and find like the little gems that stuck out and then getting to make a show.
00:03:34
Speaker 1: Yeah. For context, we're talking about the podcast that we did together called Atlanta Monster, which is really the first time we met. Was working on that together and at the at the University of Georgia, there's a library that has a legitimate downstairs vault that it feels like you're going into some you know, government archives or something. Yeah, and it felt as cool as it sounded in the podcast. Yeah, And it was huge in there, and they had all these old tapes, film reels of news clips that have really probably been sitting there for I don't know decades and never been seen or watched or transcribed. And we got to I mean, they helped usut a lot, and they went through a bunch of that tape and it was just crazy. I remember just going through and just hitting space bar on the quick time files when we got them back, and just seeing all these different news reports and just it was like a just a moment in time captured that it felt special to be looking at because it was otherwise lost until we got our hands on it.
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Speaker 3: Well, yeah, they needed a reason to digitize it, but dude, it was like looking at this city we lived in in like the history of that city, you know, since at least before we were born. Yeah, which is correct to think about. It was just sitting in a vault like FBI style, you know, like in all the TV shows X Files and all these shows I used to love. There's like this secret at FBI vault, and we found it and we got to make a show with it.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a good time. And that was that was right after I made up in Vanish. It's funny that you said that you were nervous meeting me. Yeah, Donald and I were nervous meeting you guys because we looked at how stuff works and iHeart you guys have been doing podcasts for a long time, and we were totally new to this game, and we didn't know if we were doing it right, or if we were stepping on toes, or if we could you know, befriend anybody, if we would be let into the club. So we had a lot of you know, sort of our own self doubt. But it's been cool ever since I met Jason hook that one day and which became sort of the first conversation leading into making Atlanta Monster together. It's only been super cool with you guys, and it's amazing that all these later we're still making projects together. Yeah, man, we've made shirt.
00:06:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, this shirt. I wore this specifically today because I wore this on Doctor Oz when you and I were on together. So I was like, I'm gonna wearing my doctor Oz shirt.
00:06:13
Speaker 1: You need to get a new shirt.
00:06:14
Speaker 3: No, I only have one, dude. This is this is the one.
00:06:18
Speaker 1: You Basically you're saying you wore your only shirt. It's not just your doctor Oz shirt. It's yes, it's your regular doctor shirt. It's your b shirt, it's your man out to eat.
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Speaker 3: With head store, Magic card shop, Yeah, all that same one.
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Speaker 1: Well, it means a nice shirt. I like it. I approve And so your show is super fun. We talked to Ben before on Talking to Death and we had a good chat. Stuff they don't want you to know, and I think it's just a super fun concept and I was just gonna want to know from you. At what age do you think that you started finding interest in I don't know, the unknown or unexplained or you know, I'll say the work, conspiracy theories, just stuff that is, you know, scratches at your brain that you know you can dig into not everyone has that sort of itch, And I'm just curious for you when that bug bit you, and oh yeah, how that kind of became into fruition later in your life.
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Speaker 3: So I grew up in the church. I was a kid that was super dedicated to it. For some reason. I latched onto it and all of the answer all the questions I ever had about the universe, in the world and how it worked were answered with a book.
00:07:39
Speaker 1: Right.
00:07:39
Speaker 3: I had my Bible that I just gave to my son, by the way, he's going to church with his mom now, and I just gave him my new International version of the Bible.
00:07:48
Speaker 1: And have they changed chapters or something? Is it? No? No, it was just like, are they cool with gay people now or what?
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Speaker 3: What some of the churches are. I grew up in the Methodist Church. And there's a whole thing you can look up right now if you want to about the Methodist Church and division between people who feel very strongly, very differently about that subject.
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Speaker 1: Oh really, that's like a big division, and yeah, yeah, but Methodists.
00:08:12
Speaker 3: It is well for a lot of different churches, but for that one, it was yeah, yeah, But I grew up in that stuff, and I was playing I learned how to play drums early on when I was a kid, like in middle school, and then I played drums in the church and I was doing you know, youth group and all that stuff. That was like my world, My whole world was kind of wrapped around stories about God and visions of God and He's he is basically the answer to the stuff that we don't understand, right, Okay. Then I go to college and I start taking classes like science classes, history classes, and my world kind of opens up quite a bit just the way I think about things.
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Speaker 1: And what changed for you? Did you just find potentially new answers for things?
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Speaker 3: Well, it's actually the crux of my interest in this stuff. I found new answers that felt to be so contradictory to the ones I held so close to myself about how the world worked in the history of it.
00:09:09
Speaker 1: That mean, like Adam and Eve or something or what.
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Speaker 3: Adam and Eve some of the basic stories in the Bible that I took to be like one hundred percent true, Like Noah was definitely on that arc, and like this is all happening and this is all real. You know. The plagues were definitely exactly what happened that way, you know. And then as I'm you know, learning more about history and science, it it breaks me a little bit in that I feel like I'm not necessarily been lied to, but something's been pulled over my eyes, you know. And it made me want to pull back every veil I could possibly locate for everything and anything. Wow, which is which really pushed me down that pathway in the.
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Speaker 1: First big one you think, like something like evolution.
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Speaker 3: The first thing that really broke me was biology. It was like an advanced biology class and and just the intricacy of how all the chemical the biochemical stuff works and you know, the simplest thing of how oxygen actually travels through your body and then once it goes through the capillaries, how it gets to other tissues. And you're just like what and you know, and a lot of people would hear that and then take that to well, Okay, yeah, God God created that, or you know, that is the system that the creator made to work that way. But then if you if you pair that up with some of the other, like other more advanced classes, you start to learn, oh no, no, these are this is like, these are systems that have evolved for sure over the course of millions and millions and millions and millions of years, right, and we can actually answer a lot of these things that I used to put in that column just good, like, oh no, there's actually a system that that makes the planets move in this way and that you know, makes a pulsar be a thing?
00:10:59
Speaker 1: So do you still believe in God or Jesus?
00:11:03
Speaker 3: Personally, I'm out of the dogma stuff. And you know, especially having a son, I'm encouraging him to like get into it because I feel like it shaped me a lot as a person, sure, knowing that stuff, learning and viewing the world in that way. But yeah, no, I'm kind of out of the dogma camp. I'm more like more hippie style, I think the way my parents used to be, which like what just more about no, no, no, I don't do that. But but it's more of like the universe. Like I'm looking out at a bunch of trees in a backyard right now, and you know, I look at all of that stuff. You can view it as individual trees or as one big living system that we're all kind of a part of. And you know, we just we put drywall around ourselves and talking to microphones sometimes and look at screens that have shiny things on them that you know it's playing Elden Ring all night. That's what I do. But ultimately we're a part of that stuff out there.
00:12:01
Speaker 1: But really we should be taking some mushrooms and laying in the grass. And I mean, I mean, I mean that's not even a joke. Really, that's just what we should should be doing today.
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Speaker 3: I think looks don't do drugs, Okay.
00:12:13
Speaker 1: No, I don't like drugs, Docky.
00:12:16
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, but some of the again through stuff they don't want you to know the things that we've learned over the years, and now that now medical research is going into this mental health research into psychedelics and what it can do to open up well people call it the third eye, but open up that part of you that gets so calcified in this world and in the systems that we create, and just let you remember that. Nah, Now you're just out there man, part of that stuff.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: So some of those drugs that you take, like mostly the hallucinogenic drugs, there is some oddities and that a lot of people have very similar specific experiences, even down to the visualizations of like creatures and stuff. And I bet I'm sure you know even more about this stuff than I do, just based on the podcast that you create. But what are your thoughts on that? Do you think that you know, if somebody has taken some sort of drug and they're experiencing something the exact same across the world and it's never been planted in their head to see this little elf in the corner of the room or whatever it is, do you feel like these are real things or our brain just chemically creates it, or do you actually feel like there's a veil that is sort of looser or clearer in some way?
00:13:44
Speaker 3: Man, I wish I had an answer to that, because.
00:13:46
Speaker 1: What's your personal opinion or what do you lean towards.
00:13:50
Speaker 3: I'll tell you a quick story. When I was right like into college, right out of college, there was this stuff called you remember that you ever?
00:14:01
Speaker 1: Oh no, I did salvia?
00:14:03
Speaker 3: Okay, I did it once.
00:14:05
Speaker 1: I did it once as well.
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Speaker 3: Just well, uh, you know, sorry to everybody out there again, don't do drugs, I was a young man.
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Speaker 1: Don't do.
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Speaker 3: But I did salvia with a bunch of friends, like in a safe place, good set and setting. Everything was awesome. And I tried the stuff and I didn't think it had an effect, so I tried it again and I experienced It's the only thing I've ever experienced. It's kind of like that like getting to machine Elves kind of territory with DMT, right. But I became a pixel in the center of this huge kaleidoscopic circular structure, and my sense of being in reality and like nervous system, everything was focused on this one pixel that was kind of at the top center of this thing, and I was attempting to navigate a maze and I was I felt like I did it for a lifetime, and I woke up apparently screaming for my now ex wife, my girlfriend at the time, Wow, like like a little baby. Like I was terrified so much that my existence, all everything I knew went into that pixel. And that's what I was.
00:15:22
Speaker 1: Wait, see, you're looking at a pixel. Is it like a little miniature version of you?
00:15:26
Speaker 3: Or you just imagine a huge flat circular structure and I am a single pixel on this thing that.
00:15:34
Speaker 1: You can use imagine self or you. I feel that is you.
00:15:37
Speaker 3: I know that it's meat, but I'm also viewing it from above the circular thing, which.
00:15:42
Speaker 1: Is just see and feel it.
00:15:43
Speaker 3: Yes, dude, I know that's so insane.
00:15:46
Speaker 1: Stuff.
00:15:47
Speaker 3: Well, apparently I thought it was the bad one because I think it has to do with my sensory input, because they were playing some really crazy music track that it had this repetitive, like broken rhythm to it, like drum track to it, and the way the thing was moving in this.
00:16:05
Speaker 1: Like that's not helping at all.
00:16:07
Speaker 3: Bro, it was bad. But the whole point of that is that I hadn't taken any other drugs. I wasn't drinking that night. I wasn't doing anything that would affect my state of being.
00:16:18
Speaker 1: Right.
00:16:19
Speaker 3: I take this one substance into my lungs momentarily, and my brain completely ceases to function in the way it should with all of the systems it's attached to, and I become something else, feel like I'm something else. And then I'm shifted right back into reality or like pulled back, you know, and I feel like there's something going on there with a lot of these different substances. I think, even to some extent, if you look at a bigger picture, some of the sugars that we all eat all the time every day, some of the just some of the stuff we're probably not supposed to be eating that gets manufactured, and then pretty much everything well, yeah, I think it's it's on a much larger scale. So it's a combination of all those things and all those dyes and all that stuff, and it just courses through our body, all the microplastics that are in all of our scrotums and testicles. By the way, guys, you saw that, right the fuck there's microplastics. See that in pretty much every scrin there's not bro, you gotta get them checked. I'm telling you that.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: It's you checked. How do you make for microlastics and your ball sack?
00:17:28
Speaker 3: There was a wide enough study with enough subjects that was basically like, yeah, this is there's microplastics there. There's also microplastics in most of our like uh, most of our bodies, and the forever chemicals that we you know, PF pfas, the per and polyfloral alkyl substances, the stuff like teflon and all that. It's coursing through our bodies in our bloodstream because it will not go away. It cannot go wait, it can't be broken down.
00:17:56
Speaker 1: Wow, Yeah, that's great plastics for the for the laper, which is going to be me in this situation, like what literally is a microplastic and how micro are they and where the hell they're coming from? Is it just from like the ocean and us throwing shit out there and it breaking down and we're consuming it or what what are we talking about here?
00:18:15
Speaker 3: It's from it.
00:18:16
Speaker 1: We are talking like microscopic pieces of plastic under a microscope, Like, yeah, teeny tiny little pieces, but it's plastic still, yes, just a little tiny baby plastic pieces. Yeah, it's an oil based substance, you know, came out of the ground, got turned into that stuff, and at some point all the plastic containers that have ever existed start to break down, whether through the recycling process, going into the groundwater, you know, breaking down over time, which is a long time for him to break down. We're getting you know, getting into the ocean and getting nipped at by different animals than that just kind of flowing out through the oceans, trash that just gets thrown in all the waterways. Bro, It's it's it's insane and we just drink the water and someone were tiny enough. Yeah, And the same thing with teflon. We talked to this lawyer who was suing. Can't you remember the name. I think it's called dark Waters or dark Water. It was an attorney who was fighting this fight about forever chemicals in the water sources where the cattle were drinking from. And it was the forever chemicals were getting into the cattle, and then it was affecting the fish in the water sources, and then all the townsfolks started having crazy high rates of cancer. It's just but it's happening everywhere. Well, I mean, there's plastic everywhere, and there has been for a long time. That's just its own problem. But this is I guess one of the side effects of that, right.
00:19:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it can affect fertility, which you know, yay, there's already a fertility issue going on in the world right and the microplastics and specifically those forever chemicals are like causing the big problems at least that's.
00:19:58
Speaker 1: What they like right now. Are they just too sm are they too small to get rid of? Like? Yeah, can we filter these things out? Or is there a scientist working on a little drop you can put in a drink and it kills it? Or I mean, is it you can't break an there?
00:20:16
Speaker 3: You can separate it, probably, but you'd have to do it at somehow the filtration level, Like if you imagine a water processing plant, you know you could probably do it, but good lord, it would be expensive if I bet to get that kind of thing, because you really start looking at some of these problems, especially if you have a kid, like a child, if you look at these problems in h.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: What's your biggest fear of having a kid right now? I mean, it's definitely he's growing up in a different world than you have did. But as a parent, I don't have any kids. What's your fear?
00:20:49
Speaker 3: It's social media and interactions on the internet, I mean, and.
00:20:54
Speaker 1: The way just being exposed to it and how that shapes his perception.
00:20:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, for me, it's world it's worldview, like how do you see the world around you? How do you see the people around you? And the filters that you end up putting in front of you shape the color and the shape of the people and the words that are coming at you right so like, and I feel like social media and just again a lot of the junk information that just exists out there right now that kind of flows, like I've got an Instagram page for stuff that I want you to know that. I try and keep and I'll scroll through it sometimes and I feel like my brain is to die. It's like dying. There's some cool stuff depending on who you follow, and like, I really like watching stuff from shows. I like like even if it's promotional content. I actually like that.
00:21:44
Speaker 1: But like what.
00:21:46
Speaker 3: Videos, especially like when High Strange came out. Dude, I loved all all of that promo content, like I was eating. I ate that show up in general.
00:21:55
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, that was a fun passion project. And yeah, I mean we we loved shooting some of the visual elements for that. Yeah, just getting weird with.
00:22:04
Speaker 3: It, just floating around.
00:22:06
Speaker 1: It's cool and just go into space. I guess it's yeah.
00:22:11
Speaker 3: But anyway, that stuff, I think social media and all that stuff really worries me. I feel like an old crotchety forty almost forty one year old saying that.
00:22:18
Speaker 1: Right, I know, it's crazy. I watched this video the other day and it was Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, and he was doing some sort of seminar or something and someone was filming and I'm gonna I'm gonna botch this. But he said basically that in the next five to ten years, the content on the Internet is going to become completely like you will not be able to tell what is real and what is not completely indiscernible to anyone's eyes or ears. And that it's going to become crucial in this five to ten year stint where we're adapting to that or figuring out how we verify and validate it, that we really put on our thinking caps and you know, do actual critical thinking, which I feel like in a lot of ways, you know, the accessibility of the internet and as has expanded, even in my own lifetime, it has made it easier to not have to use critical thinking. Yeah, and so I could totally get behind this sort of fear of the masses, almost never having learned how to critically think, and everyone just kind of just going to believe whatever they want to believe. And does truth matter anymore? Right, dude?
00:23:51
Speaker 3: I hope. So that's I mean, that's what benan Olan and I do every week, five times a week. We're just like guys, let's think. Let's think some of these Montessori schools and some of the more alternative like early education schools are all about learning how to think rather than learning the facts and the information you put in your head, because all that is available now. If you want to learn anything, you can find it right now. But you need to learn how to process that information. How do you incorporate it into the stuff you already know?
00:24:24
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah? What are you doing with that? Yeah? You could memorize a fact, but what the fuck does it mean? Yeah? How are you applying this or is there any significance at all? Should you just you know, bury that one in the back, you know? Yeah?
00:24:38
Speaker 3: But yeah, I also worry about how he is going to perceive other people because I think, I think a lot of social media has changed us into a bit of a society of folks who have a surface thing going on and then the people we actually are. And I don't know, I don't like that very much.
00:24:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, that part definitely sucks. Bring back MySpace, you know. Yeah, I want to have a song playing to tell you what mood I'm in without having to tell you, so you know, I'm sad today.
00:25:09
Speaker 3: Did you ever have a band MySpace page?
00:25:12
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, for sure? Oh man, me too, and one and I also had you know one for me? Yeap? Are those gone forever? Are those like on the internet? Archive? Somewhere.
00:25:25
Speaker 3: I tried so hard to find mine it was gone.
00:25:27
Speaker 1: It's totally okay if they're gone, because they would be very cringey. But I'd also be, you know, a little curious. Well, can we talk about I want to talk about something, Okay.
00:25:38
Speaker 3: I really appreciate the way you edit things. I've had the I've been lucky enough to sit down next to you with a laptop and watch you edit. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Zodiac intro, like the first moments in Monster the Zodiac Killer that you came out to San Francisco and you gone on a laptop and you just cut that thing and I watched you do it. I want to talk about how much an understanding of music, how important that is when it comes to editing, like any kind of audio or even video. I feel like rhythm, timing, cadence of dynamics, all of those concepts that are very musical in nature, how important they are when you apply them to a listening or visual experience, Like, how do you do that?
00:26:27
Speaker 1: To me? Personally, it's crucial. It's how I was ever able to get any better edit or train myself, teach myself and learn how to be a better editor. I was never a good musician. I can hear it, I can hear melodies. I can visualize things, but when it comes to like, you know, playing the drums with my hands, like I'm just I don't have the coordination, or painting a picture, it's going to look terrible. But I've always been able to visualize things from a young age, and so when it comes to editing, I started editing super young in my life. My dad bought one of the first max was. It was the it was the iMac that had the different colors. Mine was a blue one, and the first generation came with the iMovie suite and garage band. And so I started started editing my own videos. And back then it was all it started off as as many VHS tapes and I'd had to basically play it through this device into the computer to import it at real time. And then I would take that and because it was it would just all be one clip, I'd have to go in there and cut it up specifically. Actually, let me go back further. The first editing I technically did was on the camera itself, before there was iMovie or a con or friendly editing software. Yeah, I would take my VHS camera and I would do a shot. If I didn't like it, I'd rewind it and try to pause it at that right spot and then hit record and record over it. Yeah, do that over and over again. And so for a lot of my early you know, childhood home movies with my siblings in it, there's occasionally like this weird blip of like and that wasn't supposed to be there, or like a stop start that's so great, man, But like it started that way, and then once I had iMovie, I was like, Wow, this makes us so much easier. And then I went from there to final cut, and then they got rid of final cut, like the change they changed it, and eventually moved on to premiere. And so you know, in the history of how I got here in my career, I was always in the video, always in this storytelling. I started making my own music in garage band, just you know, on the keyboard loops and creating different melodies and you know, singing on them, and then editing that, and then I also would edit the music videos for those, and then that turned into me eventually doing music videos for other artists full time. And you know, a music video is basically an edit to a song, and so there's a there's an important cadence and pacing that is just one just kind of obvious. And then then it becomes okay, well, how do I get creative with this to where it's not just you know, cutting on every single beat? But you know, how can I you know, what works visually to the eye. And that just takes time to learn and experience. And so when I started editing podcasts, it was in some ways a lot easier because there was only one thing to focus on. It was just the sound. But then it became, oh shit, it's just the sound. So if I'm in the basement of this you know, archive place and there's records all around me and it's you know, thirty foot ceilings, an establishing shot in a video could tell you that immediately without me saying anything or there being no sound. But how do I do that? How do I tell you the same thing without always having to literally tell you that? Or what are clever ways I can take you somewhere and then explain as least amount as possible so I don't sound redundant, or when do I really need to tell you what's going on? And what this looks like so you can get what I'm talking about. And that's been a kind of a fun thing to learn, I think. Yes, I've made more and more podcasts over the years, and it's like a constant puzzle I'm trying to solve, as you know, how do I, you know, make the perfect podcast or something? W how do I make it better than the last one? Right?
00:30:57
Speaker 3: Yeah? Good lord, that kind of pressure.
00:30:59
Speaker 1: Man, I appreciate that though. I've just edited for a long time and it just is absolutely just repetition and I would probably cringe at a lot of my old edits. Sometimes you have the tendency to cut it way too fast. Yeah, And so like eventually I had to learn that, like even though it's sounding correct in this moment, it's it is too fast and like kind of just tweaked that even though my brains tell me otherwise than if I go take a break for an hour, come back. Oh yeah, I was right, And so like I'm wasting less time. My decision making is not as stalled. I can make them quicker. The faster you make those basic decisions, the sooner you can get to doing something maybe even more creative, which might take more time or trial and error.
00:31:46
Speaker 3: Right, for any early editors out there, I think the best piece of advice I ever got was respect the rest, as in the rest musically right. So you've got a bunch of them notes if your thinking, you know about your edit, you got a bunch of beats, and then the rest becomes the most important thing in all of that because it gives you time to remember what was just said and really internalize it, crystallize a thought about it, then move on to the next thing, and you can and you anticipate the next thing, and you can really build that anticipation. And that's what dude, That's why I love MAV so much. Makeup and Vanity set that does a lot of them.
00:32:24
Speaker 1: He's amazing.
00:32:25
Speaker 3: Matt is just incredible. And when you've got a good piece of music to edit to, just like you were talking about with the music videos, like it changes I don't know, it changes my mood in the edit, like when I'm physically there doing it because I like listening to the track a bunch of different times as I'm trying.
00:32:41
Speaker 1: To get you know, it's like for me, it's inspo, right, It's it's it's harder to get into some dark, you know mood when you're talking about a serial killer or something, if you're not hearing some brooding, you know, drony sound that kind of take you there and reminds you of how deep and scary this shit really is, right, And so editing to that is way easier, even if it's just temp. But I've also had to learn how to just kind of do it like just raw dog it, like kind of like envision it and almost edit to like a pace to where I think this is probably more a testament to how MAVs than I have, I guess grown in our creative relationship together kind of knowing what to expect from him and vice versa. I can kind of almost at this point and I actually I just recently did it make an entire thing, and I can visualize or imagine the spacing that I'm putting in there one for where my vo will go to kind of a little reprieve like you're talking about that MAVs will probably recognize in this and he can score it. And for the most or there's never a bunch of drastic bumping stuff around unless it sparked some new cool idea, which that happens all the time, and that's just even cooler than the first idea, right, Yep. Part of my drive is that I want people to connect to me through this vessel, and so that that's still like a really strong component of all the work I do. And I really don't feel inspired to do any creative work unless I have that feeling.
00:34:32
Speaker 3: I want to talk more about High Strange when you're ready.
00:34:34
Speaker 1: I'm ready. I'm very ready, dude.
00:34:36
Speaker 3: Okay, is there anything in High Strange that we didn't get to hear because you weren't allowed to put it in there, or you didn't you felt like it was too out there, or something that you feel comfortable actually discussing maybe vaguely.
00:34:52
Speaker 1: I think that I tried to, like my overall goal with at least the first installment of High Strange was to find like the most convincing, hardest to debunk UFO stories of our modern day, you know, in the last fifty years in America that have like supporting evidence, whether it be actual tape or you know, actually what comes to mind, they're the Rindlesham Forest story. So we talked to Charles Holt and Jim Peniston and they've both you know, famously always claim that this happened. I believe both of them. But Jim, when he told his story, which took I swear to God, like three hours, I think he's just spent like so much time thinking about this and trying to explain it and writing books about it that he's almost created another like additional narrative story that maybe didn't happen. This sounds a little wonky, and so I left that part out because it sounded wonky, and Charles Hall will also say it sounds wonky, So I kind of left out both of them kind of beefing with each other. Charles Holt seems to feel like Jim Peniston is, you know, discrediting this story by saying some of the things that he's saying, and so to me, it kind of actually further validated the story. There was a lot of witnesses, but I think that Jim's story about seeing the craft and going up and touching it and like this whole numbers thing and like this code that he thinks means this, and that like he's just gone too far into hypothesizing what these things mean or has imagined some of it up, and it it kind of makes it sound like it's in La La land now. But what is true is that people saw stuff and it wasn't the lighthouse, yes, and and they were very scared. And no matter what it was, the the government seemed to think it was a big deal. I don't know why they'd ever make a big deal about a lighthouse that's always been there doing the same damn thing every night. So something else happened. And Dylan actually interviewed Charles Holt. His was the most convincing interview because he was, you know, kind of reluctant to do this, like he's done it in the past and he's felt like he's been taking advantage of or made this sound like a looney and you know the same with Travis Walton. These guys weren't chomping at the bit to talk and tell this story. They were like, God, I don't know if I want to relive this again. I don't know if I want to explain myself again and subject myself to this criticism. Because the thing is, I know that I saw this, but I don't know what it was. I don't have I don't know how to explain it to you or convince you that it's true. It just is, and that would be frustrating, right, Yeah, to go a lifetime and having experienced an unexplained thing that was super impactful to your life and shape your perception of the universe that you can't explain and people don't believe, or some people don't believe.
00:38:31
Speaker 3: It makes me think about Ryan Graves and a lot of those military personnel and seeing seeing the very specific thing that you described in your show. And it's a show we've didn that right, yes, and and some of the some of the they call them, it's like spheres that are almost clear and then there's something gray at the center of the sphere.
00:38:52
Speaker 1: Dude, very strange specific description there. Yes, So there's rings true and real to me.
00:39:00
Speaker 3: I have a buddy used to play in a band with me. He lives in Augusta and Augusta, Georgia, and he has been going outside every night and just bought a telescope and is attempting to get high quality footage of nightly UAP that are going over a very specific part of wherever he lives in Augusta. He wants to be a little vague, but the dude is one of the most reliable people I know. And he had. He's talked to me for like two hours on the phone now at this point, like trying to explain that he's not crazy. And he's seeing these things that are lights in the sky of different colors that are releasing other lights and it's happening nightly and it's.
00:39:45
Speaker 1: Huge and I'm just seeing and he's.
00:39:47
Speaker 3: Trying to capture it right now, like tonight, he's going to try and capture footage and send it to me so I can send it to you actually, but.
00:39:54
Speaker 1: Please let me see this. Yeah, and if he ever wants, you know, company, well.
00:39:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he's trying to get better optics. So I was like, well, dang, I need to talk to Pain and see what kind of optic or you know, what kind of cameras he's rolling with right now, and if there's any way to attach a telescope or something, because.
00:40:10
Speaker 1: I mean, we can rent a pretty big boy. We could rent one that's like what, I don't know what it would be, Dylan, but like I'm sure Christian would be able to tell us whatever the most expensive long zoom is that we can strap on something and get I don't know, capture it the best.
00:40:29
Speaker 3: It'd be better than what he's working with right now. I don't know, and I know that's like an off the wall thing, but this is a guy I trust that, you know, I've got that music bond with I've spent.
00:40:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you know, this guy isn't just spinning his wheels here. And then you know, talking on his ass. You're like, Okay, I want to see what you're talking about.
00:40:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he sounded scared. He said, he's scared because it's weird. It's it's light in the sky kind of thing where over he watched one of them light up of a little forest that's right by his kind of rural property where he lives. So low then and he called the fire department, he said, because he thought there was a forest fire right there, because this red orange glow the way it was a little bit, it's exactly what I was thinking. I had the images over my head when.
00:41:12
Speaker 1: They thought the same thing, just based on what it looked like from afar, like the forest is on fire, there's red glowing light coming out of it.
00:41:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, but he said, he said, he watched it go up over the tree line and exit, and I'm like, man, and it's when you hear something like that. I love this guy, I trust this guy. But you still when you hear something like that, for me at least, you go are you sure?
00:41:37
Speaker 1: And are are you sure? That's what you saw?
00:41:39
Speaker 3: The Yeah, And it's because you have you kind of have to go into that attitude or you know, you just walk around. What is that thing? Ben said it on his interview with You extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence or something like that.
00:41:55
Speaker 1: It's very true. I don't know whose quote that is, Oh yeah, but.
00:41:58
Speaker 3: I just it's again Ben, Ben and Nolan I have like a set of quotes so we don't even we don't even attribute them to anybody anymore.
00:42:07
Speaker 1: We just say them, and you're right, they're just mantras at this point. Yeah, I think it's a It's always a good thing to do. I mean, when something is so unbelievable, you know, I know that crazy shit happens. I mean people have been struck by lightning literally, yeah, like more than once, Like the impossible has happened. The likelihood of these things maybe next to zero, but yeah, sometimes absolutely crazy things happen. Or you know, there is an unexplained thing that did happen that you know, we haven't been able to, you know, wrap our minds around. Yet I want to know your thoughts on the Trump assassination attempt.
00:42:52
Speaker 3: Oh lord, okay? Uh so Ben and Nole did a special episode yesterday. They recorded it yesterday on Jill Live fifteenth as we're recording this, and they talked about it at length. I wasn't able to join them for that conversation. I've just been following it, kind of following the research in a doc we you created that mostly been created, and it's It's weird.
00:43:16
Speaker 1: Man.
00:43:17
Speaker 3: It feels to me right now like there's so much junk being like again, the thing I worry about with my son. There's so many theories and things that are flying around right now. I don't want to. I don't want to put, you know, put my horses on any wagon right now.
00:43:35
Speaker 1: Yet it feels really.
00:43:37
Speaker 3: Weird to me personally that the Supreme Court decision came down about official you know, presidential stuff. Did did you see that Supreme Court decision about It's been applied mostly to Donald Trump's presidency, but it said that if there's any official actions that are taken while someone's in the White House serving as president, that president cannot be prosecuted for those No matter what, congressmen cannot ask the president or any of the president's staff about their motives behind official actions. Basically, the president has immunity for anything that is done officially. Right, And then you watch that happen, and I'm connecting dots here that are not connected, but you watch that happen. Then you watch the performance of the debates and how terribly that went for everybody.
00:44:28
Speaker 1: Basically yeah, and then yeah.
00:44:31
Speaker 3: And then so like president could do anything current president does terribly. Then you start to think, like, well, who would actually want that to happen? Who would want that terrible thing to happen? A former president being assassinated, which in my mind is a terrible thing, no matter how you feel about the guy. Sure, I think I think the only people that would be really interested are the moneyed powers, the lobbyists, the people who write the laws, the the money that exists for all these campaign donations, all these people who are banking on having a certain president in place. I think you follow that money, and then you still won't make a connection to this young kid because I don't think anybody forced him to do it. I think, well, he's done now, so well you'll never know, right, which is like the whole Patsy thing. We were looking back at anybody, any any of the presidential assassins that have ever existed. Basically, you don't really get to tell your story, and if you do tell your story, like in Syrian Cirrian's case, you either are a liar or you sound insane, you know, talking about I have no recollection of what happened. I can't remember, or if you know James Earl Ray who said he was innocent the entire time. Listen to the MLK tapes, by.
00:45:51
Speaker 1: The way, please do It's great.
00:45:53
Speaker 3: It wears me out.
00:45:54
Speaker 1: Man.
00:45:55
Speaker 3: I don't think somebody paid him to do it or convinced him to do it, at least at this moment, right, I know that's boring. I'm so sorry, man.
00:46:06
Speaker 1: I mean no, no, I mean like you wouldn't have anything really to back that up confidently. For me, Like, my basic just overall knee jerk reaction assessment is that here's a guy standing here, and like there's a lot of questions I have, like one like, how does this guy get on the roof of like the only other building that has a vantage point, yes to potentially shoot the president in the first place. Now, that could be human error, that could be an absolute you know, maybe the sheriff wasn't was taken a piss in the woods and didn't see this guy whatever. But just the the like the luck here, like the the how close this was to something different, like the fact that other people died and Trump got grazed by a bullet on his ear and it didn't take his fucking ear off. And there's these heroic images immediately that are objectively look like, wow, that's crazy, right, Like that's gonna be in a history book. It's just so improbable. Yeah, And it doesn't mean that, like I'm not inferring or suggesting that it's fake or it's a cover up. Real bullets were shot, real people were killed, right, But it's just is he the luckiest person on earth? And both can exist. He could just have been that lucky. But I think when stuff is like that, where it makes you go, is this the luckiest guy on the planet? Don't we do that with everything else? You know, you're in the casino, right and you're on a heater on roulette and you're just hitting everything and you just win, like one hundred thousand dollars from like five hundred bucks. What's gonna happen? Security comes out because like this is an anomaly. They're not saying that you're cheating, but there's a possibility that you are. Because this doesn't happen.
00:48:13
Speaker 3: Like that bear, it's not supposed to.
00:48:15
Speaker 1: So it like warrants further investigation and inspection, you know, I think and I hope that they released that. To me, it's the ballistics, like let's see, like, guess what came from where? That would tell me all the things that I think I don't really know.
00:48:30
Speaker 3: Well, that's what the guys just did it. By the time this comes out, that episode will have come out, and what they were looking at specifically were jurisdiction for that specific building, for the roof of that building, right and right now, the best understanding is that Secret Service did not they believe in have said publicly that it was not their purview to check that building. That was local law enforcement. Local law enforcement, you know, at least according to the story, came up on the roof, found the guy who then you know, aimed the rifle at them and then immediately aimed at at form Resident Donald Trump and started firing like in that moment, you know, like it was like.
00:49:07
Speaker 1: A real quick yeah, and real quick thing. Yeah.
00:49:10
Speaker 3: So I you know when you put for me, life is starting to resemble more and more the thing that we experience on one of these black screens, these black mirrors that we all look into all day long. I'm looking into two of them right now as we're talking. And I think since life, as we look around in the events we hear about, the real news stories are resembling more and more narratives that have been written, you know by some guys you graduated from Harvard.
00:49:38
Speaker 1: No, it's a story, it's a it's a fairy tale. Like in real life.
00:49:42
Speaker 3: You know, the weirdness factor is creeping in and getting it's it's increasing in a way that I'm uncomfortable with. And when anything happens. Now you can you can try well, no, you can hyper focus on every little detail and break it apart if if you want to, in a way that will maybe even make you start to second guess or doubt the truth, like the full on actual facts truth. But if you break it down into its small enough pieces, you might start to doubt it because you're like, but wait, how or wait, hold on when and you know I do that to myself. I notice I do that to myself in my real world with this whole like conspiracy theory thinking, yeah, yeah, where you connect dots sometimes and aren't there.
00:50:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta check yourself. You know, you might be kind of constructing it versus finding it.
00:50:36
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, but if you don't, if you're not somewhat vigilant or you know, hopefully not hyper vigilant, you will miss things. And I've found that with through personal experience in my life too, where you're just like, oh, I never saw that coming. But if I would have been paying attention in retrospect, oh yeah, I saw that. It's interesting when we find ourselves, each of us, in a place where we're in these social media of bubbles. We're in our content bubbles on all the algorithms, we only see what kind of a machine learning decides. We see that.
00:51:09
Speaker 1: They think I want to see weird shit. I don't only sometimes give me the weird shit I want to give my girlfriend my phone. I don't always look at that my sport page look like that. That's crazy.
00:51:22
Speaker 3: It's just skateboards. I like skateboards, but.
00:51:25
Speaker 1: I swear they're pushing it on us. It's it's it's bad. But we've really we've.
00:51:31
Speaker 3: Run the risk all of us right now of just being fully misinformed or dis you know, the disinformation. We just we think the wrong stuff is reality, all of us. And I'm putting myself in that boat too.
00:51:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a.
00:51:47
Speaker 3: Dangerous time to be a human that thinks, especially a human that thinks about thinking.
00:51:52
Speaker 1: I know, or doesn't think very well.
00:51:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm in there, you know.
00:52:00
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean like when I when I saw like I'm pretty sure I saw like the like the main news shot of the assassination attempt within a minute of it probably happening. Yes, And my first thought, and this is you know, only knowing what I knew then, which was nothing. I was like, Wow, if this is real, could there be a better pr stunt? Like what whether it was on purpose or not, could there be a better way to frame him as a hero. I'm not saying that that's was intentionally done either way, that's the outcome, ye, right, I think general consensus is going to feel that way. I mean, shitt like he got shot at and survived it. That's crazy, right, So Like that's a that could be that's a heroic thing in a lot of people's books, right, But I just thought like, wow, like for other people to die and be injured and him to get this like, you know, tiny little ear cut, it's just like and you didn't have blood all over his face. It was just like a nice little it was just like perfect. Yeah, And it just like stuff like that makes me just go how And sometimes shit just happens like that, And so I remind myself that people get struck by lightning. The craziest shit in the world can happen. You can flip a coin one hundred times and it can be tails. It's possible. It doesn't matter, doesn't mean that it's likely to happen or that it does happen, but it can. And it just makes me be like, Okay, am I missing something. It's it's still crazy either way that he he left with just the most minor of injuries and is instantly without a doubt winning this selection.
00:54:06
Speaker 3: Now, who knows?
00:54:07
Speaker 1: Man. I felt like.
00:54:10
Speaker 3: I felt like after that debate, it was pretty obvious who America would choose if you were given those two choices, and the whole thing that goes back and stuff that I want you to we talked about is a long time ago. It's it feels like we are the whole system is rigged for us already. It's rigged for them, and we're the ones who get played because there are only two parties. You have basically two sides of the same coin. But it's the same coin, right, And it doesn't matter because in the end, it's all the same money, it's all the same corporations, it's all the same people who manufacture and ship and you know, pull resources out of the ground. It's all those same people that pull the reins on any politician in this country, unless you're on the local level or if you're you know, even some congress people are not as easily I guess manipulated and coerced. But man, that's just my opinion. By the way, maybe America has a great system that's perfect, and I just don't understand it.
00:55:14
Speaker 1: I highly doubt it.
00:55:15
Speaker 3: Right, But because you know, if you look at the electoral college, that's just really quick, I'll preach my show stuff. They don't want you to know. Has been looking at this kind of stuff since two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine. We've been making a podcast since twenty thirteen, where we try and make those connections where here's a really important thing. You know, you need to know about the political system and the electoral college, and the way laws are written by lobbyist groups, the way think tanks run those lobbyist groups, the way those think tanks are run by, you know, people who used to run manufacturing corporations, and how it's all this interwoven thing, and then how does all of that end up translating to where weapons go in the world, where they're deployed, who the enemy is of the United States, how that shapes up, and it always brings me back to Project Blue Beam. You know, you remember that one pain.
00:56:12
Speaker 1: I do but give us the log line for those who may be unfamiliar with that.
00:56:16
Speaker 3: That's the one where some government, probably the United States government through the Pentagon, is developing something with DARPA that is akin to looks like, sounds like, feels like alien spacecraft where they could develop something in fake an alien invasion so that all of planet Earth has a common enemy and we all come together and we unite as one. It is a dude, I'm calling it now, Project Bluebeam.
00:56:48
Speaker 1: Do you think that's that's true.
00:56:50
Speaker 3: No, No, I don't think it's true. It's my favorite conspiracy theory.
00:56:53
Speaker 1: Didn't It also coexists with real aliens too. Yeah?
00:56:57
Speaker 3: Good, that's the thing.
00:56:58
Speaker 1: And how would we make yo? What the fuck like? But where them?
00:57:03
Speaker 3: Think about the uncertainty that we just described with a twenty year old man who got on a roof and fired a rifle at a former president. Imagine that there are things in the sky coming down and the news is saying is showing us images of these huge craft that are the size of a small city or the size of a building or a football field, and they have desires and they have threats, and we just have to accept that whatever AP and Reuters and you know whoever else is reporting it, we just have to accept that that's actually what's happening, and that the military information embargo would actually be giving us the truth because you know, it would be controlled. So I just am I imagine that scenario.
00:57:47
Speaker 1: Scary scary thought.
00:57:50
Speaker 3: Yeah what Ben always says, we're fun at parties.
00:57:56
Speaker 1: We're fun at parties. Invited, Please you want to go to a party really bad? We don't know what a party? Yeah? Will be weird, I promise.
00:58:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll bring my guitar. Man, I've got an acoustic in a jambe let's go.
00:58:14
Speaker 1: So what are you looking for to most in the podcast world? Man? You've been in the game for a long time. You've you've made killer shows. You have a long running successful show with stuff they don't want you to know. Love all those dudes, Love everyone at iHeart. What are you looking forward to next in your career creatively or beyond a.
00:58:33
Speaker 3: Couple of things. Personally, I am getting back into writing music again, kind of the way you were we were discussing earlier. Just having a pretty crappy setup, but just writing melodies and beats and that kind of thing again. And I love it, loving it. So I'm just doing that.
00:58:49
Speaker 1: Man. It's good for your brain creatively too, to kind of take yourself there, especially when you're doing you know, complex long form storytelling. I think it's a good kind of balance. And I don't know, I wish I could play instruments the way that you do, but I can appreciate it and in the same way in a different way kind of collaborating with MAVs on on stuff, and it's a it's a good time and athletic it's a good use of that muscle.
00:59:14
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, dude, I'm excited about that stuff. I'm excited about the fourth season, official season of Monster Monster BTK with I. You know, I don't know how much we can talk about it yet, but it's coming this year.
00:59:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, before it's coming. Yeah, it's gonna be an absolutely insane show. I spent a lot of hours days actually talking with with btk's daughter. Yeah, very sweet, strong willed person and has suffered the unimaginable and is able to talk about it and open and it's it's very impressive, and it's very enlightening, and it's it's also very sad and very very ski Yeah, some of the some of the stories that she she told us. But yeah, I'm looking forward to finishing that and putting it out. Yeah.
01:00:07
Speaker 3: Man, people are gonna get a really interesting look into that dude. Via carry and then, uh, you guys just talk to John Douglas again too, which is one of my Yes.
01:00:15
Speaker 1: I love that I talked to him about that case.
01:00:18
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
01:00:19
Speaker 1: It feels like that was forever ago. I think it was forever, like twenty one May. Yeah, I love that dude, like the real mind hunter guy. He was so great too. He was super nice. And yeah, he's like he's the goat, like he kind of you know, defined the serial killer, which sounds insane, but yeah, you know, jeez, man.
01:00:39
Speaker 3: And there's a there's another news show coming out that's it's true crime and it's more historical mystery, and it's the time that two women separately attempted to assassinate President Ford. They two women unsuccessfully attempted to as unrelated, unrelated, but it it's it's about to come out in September and we're finishing it up right now. Creator Toby Ball is making it. Who does crime writers on and a bunch of other.
01:01:09
Speaker 1: Sho I love Toby. He's great.
01:01:11
Speaker 3: Yeah he did strange rivals too, but this is his kind of brainchild.
01:01:16
Speaker 1: And then, oh, he'd be great at that. That's a I vaguely remember him. I think mentioning this to me at podcast Movement one time. We had a couple of beers when we're talking about podcast. But yet, no, he's great, that'd be awesome. I'm looking forward to that.
01:01:29
Speaker 3: It's intense. It's intense. Well, man, Pain, I just got to tell you, I love everything you do, man, And getting a little text like that you just sent me like a piece of music, a trailer something that is like getting me all excited about the next ua V or whatever. That's one of my favorite things that can happen on my phone, dude, So thank you.
01:01:49
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, man, I appreciate Also, I appreciate you always responding and like listening to it and having anything to say about it at all. That that's flattering and his fun to share, just like you know, under the hood of like what we're working on, like hey, check this little nugget out, you know.
01:02:06
Speaker 3: Well, I just hope you know. I never mean to just be flattering to you because I give criticism.
01:02:10
Speaker 1: Of you know, a long and great No, I know, and I appreciate it. Yeah, dude, Like I'll sing you some more. I got some more cooking up.
01:02:20
Speaker 3: Yes, I can't wait.
01:02:21
Speaker 1: I got you, I got you. But yeah, man, it's been fun dude, long overdue, and I'm excited about all this stuff we got coming out together. And I'll be sure to float you some some interesting uh little clips here in the next few weeks as we gear up for the next installment of UAV.
01:02:38
Speaker 3: Heck you, oh hey, I forgot subscribe to Flashpoint. That's a brand new show that's coming out of Tenderfoot in my art it's yeah.
01:02:47
Speaker 1: You can subscribe now, right yeah, yeah, go right now.
01:02:50
Speaker 3: Subscribe to Flashpoint.
01:02:52
Speaker 1: It's so out on your podcast app. Don't be lazy. You can keep listening to it right now. And also go do that. Go do it. You're driving pool over safely whenever you can
01:03:10
Speaker 3: It's right, And get stuff I'll want you know in there too, and make sure look if you
Speaker 1: Talking to Death is released every Friday and brought to you absolutely free. But if you want ad free listening and exclusive bonuses, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus dot com or on Apple Podcasts.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Talking to Death is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts.
00:00:18
Speaker 3: Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Talking to Death. If you're a fan of conspiracies and the unexplained, you're gonna love this week's guest. Matthew Frederick is a co host of the iHeart podcast Stuff They Don't Want You To Know, where he dives deeply into conspiracies. Matt Frederick is a good friend of Pains and the entire Tenderfoot family. He's an executive producer on Atlanta Monster and Talking to Death, among many other shows from Tenderfoot. In this episode, Pain and Matt talk about their favorite conspiracies. They talk about aliens, they talk about podcasting music. They even give their thoughts about the recent Trump assassination attempt. So, without further ado, this week Matthew Frederick, Well.
00:01:10
Speaker 1: We're back, man, Matthew Frederick. I've known you for a long time, man, ever since I've started podcasting. I think i've known you. Do you remember the first time we met.
00:01:20
Speaker 3: I think I do was back in twenty seventeen and you came into the office and we just kind of had a hang. It was like right after you met Jason Hoak and we're hanging out with him, you and Donald and yeah, I was nervous as hell.
00:01:33
Speaker 1: Man, I was like, to meet me, why, yeah, well to meet you got twenty seventeen especially, Yeah, yeah.
00:01:39
Speaker 3: No, for real, because you guys were already creating something that Ben and Nolan and I who make stuff they don't want you to know. We kind of we were envious of, like putting together a story like that that went so far in depth the way you guys were working on one. Cause you know, in our show, we cover like one topic for an hour roughly, and that's what you get, and we put all our research into it, but you don't get to follow the rabbit holes, which are the most fun parts usually.
00:02:07
Speaker 1: Right, So you're you were used to. I mean, I guess the format of your show is you tell a lot more stories, really, and you know there isn't necessarily twelve dedicated episodes on one topic, because by episode ten of any topic, you're definitely deep into into some rabbit hole whatever it is, good or bad.
00:02:26
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, usually pretty bad, It could be bad, yeah, but no, but it was really cool, man, because you guys were, look, I'm about to turn forty one, like in just a couple of days now, and you guys just seemed really young and had that energy of when what that we remembered and specifically think about Ben and I that we remembered having when we started making our show back in like two thousand and nine, two thousand and eight, something like that, and we just were like, dang, I wish I could be like that again.
00:02:57
Speaker 1: That young whipper snapper who's only like a couple of years younger than I know.
00:03:01
Speaker 3: I know, But there, you guys had an energy that was just different I think. But now, yeah, man, it was awesome to meet you. It was awesome to work with you and Donald in particular on Atlanta Monster. That's a I always think always I get this like vision sometimes of going into that vault that we got to go to. Oh yeah, you and Jason talked about it extensively, but man, that just seeing all of that archival footage and audio and then getting to delve into it and find like the little gems that stuck out and then getting to make a show.
00:03:34
Speaker 1: Yeah. For context, we're talking about the podcast that we did together called Atlanta Monster, which is really the first time we met. Was working on that together and at the at the University of Georgia, there's a library that has a legitimate downstairs vault that it feels like you're going into some you know, government archives or something. Yeah, and it felt as cool as it sounded in the podcast. Yeah, And it was huge in there, and they had all these old tapes, film reels of news clips that have really probably been sitting there for I don't know decades and never been seen or watched or transcribed. And we got to I mean, they helped usut a lot, and they went through a bunch of that tape and it was just crazy. I remember just going through and just hitting space bar on the quick time files when we got them back, and just seeing all these different news reports and just it was like a just a moment in time captured that it felt special to be looking at because it was otherwise lost until we got our hands on it.
00:04:47
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, they needed a reason to digitize it, but dude, it was like looking at this city we lived in in like the history of that city, you know, since at least before we were born. Yeah, which is correct to think about. It was just sitting in a vault like FBI style, you know, like in all the TV shows X Files and all these shows I used to love. There's like this secret at FBI vault, and we found it and we got to make a show with it.
00:05:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a good time. And that was that was right after I made up in Vanish. It's funny that you said that you were nervous meeting me. Yeah, Donald and I were nervous meeting you guys because we looked at how stuff works and iHeart you guys have been doing podcasts for a long time, and we were totally new to this game, and we didn't know if we were doing it right, or if we were stepping on toes, or if we could you know, befriend anybody, if we would be let into the club. So we had a lot of you know, sort of our own self doubt. But it's been cool ever since I met Jason hook that one day and which became sort of the first conversation leading into making Atlanta Monster together. It's only been super cool with you guys, and it's amazing that all these later we're still making projects together. Yeah, man, we've made shirt.
00:06:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, this shirt. I wore this specifically today because I wore this on Doctor Oz when you and I were on together. So I was like, I'm gonna wearing my doctor Oz shirt.
00:06:13
Speaker 1: You need to get a new shirt.
00:06:14
Speaker 3: No, I only have one, dude. This is this is the one.
00:06:18
Speaker 1: You Basically you're saying you wore your only shirt. It's not just your doctor Oz shirt. It's yes, it's your regular doctor shirt. It's your b shirt, it's your man out to eat.
00:06:31
Speaker 3: With head store, Magic card shop, Yeah, all that same one.
00:06:36
Speaker 1: Well, it means a nice shirt. I like it. I approve And so your show is super fun. We talked to Ben before on Talking to Death and we had a good chat. Stuff they don't want you to know, and I think it's just a super fun concept and I was just gonna want to know from you. At what age do you think that you started finding interest in I don't know, the unknown or unexplained or you know, I'll say the work, conspiracy theories, just stuff that is, you know, scratches at your brain that you know you can dig into not everyone has that sort of itch, And I'm just curious for you when that bug bit you, and oh yeah, how that kind of became into fruition later in your life.
00:07:26
Speaker 3: So I grew up in the church. I was a kid that was super dedicated to it. For some reason. I latched onto it and all of the answer all the questions I ever had about the universe, in the world and how it worked were answered with a book.
00:07:39
Speaker 1: Right.
00:07:39
Speaker 3: I had my Bible that I just gave to my son, by the way, he's going to church with his mom now, and I just gave him my new International version of the Bible.
00:07:48
Speaker 1: And have they changed chapters or something? Is it? No? No, it was just like, are they cool with gay people now or what?
00:07:55
Speaker 3: What some of the churches are. I grew up in the Methodist Church. And there's a whole thing you can look up right now if you want to about the Methodist Church and division between people who feel very strongly, very differently about that subject.
00:08:07
Speaker 1: Oh really, that's like a big division, and yeah, yeah, but Methodists.
00:08:12
Speaker 3: It is well for a lot of different churches, but for that one, it was yeah, yeah, But I grew up in that stuff, and I was playing I learned how to play drums early on when I was a kid, like in middle school, and then I played drums in the church and I was doing you know, youth group and all that stuff. That was like my world, My whole world was kind of wrapped around stories about God and visions of God and He's he is basically the answer to the stuff that we don't understand, right, Okay. Then I go to college and I start taking classes like science classes, history classes, and my world kind of opens up quite a bit just the way I think about things.
00:08:50
Speaker 1: And what changed for you? Did you just find potentially new answers for things?
00:08:56
Speaker 3: Well, it's actually the crux of my interest in this stuff. I found new answers that felt to be so contradictory to the ones I held so close to myself about how the world worked in the history of it.
00:09:09
Speaker 1: That mean, like Adam and Eve or something or what.
00:09:11
Speaker 3: Adam and Eve some of the basic stories in the Bible that I took to be like one hundred percent true, Like Noah was definitely on that arc, and like this is all happening and this is all real. You know. The plagues were definitely exactly what happened that way, you know. And then as I'm you know, learning more about history and science, it it breaks me a little bit in that I feel like I'm not necessarily been lied to, but something's been pulled over my eyes, you know. And it made me want to pull back every veil I could possibly locate for everything and anything. Wow, which is which really pushed me down that pathway in the.
00:09:50
Speaker 1: First big one you think, like something like evolution.
00:09:53
Speaker 3: The first thing that really broke me was biology. It was like an advanced biology class and and just the intricacy of how all the chemical the biochemical stuff works and you know, the simplest thing of how oxygen actually travels through your body and then once it goes through the capillaries, how it gets to other tissues. And you're just like what and you know, and a lot of people would hear that and then take that to well, Okay, yeah, God God created that, or you know, that is the system that the creator made to work that way. But then if you if you pair that up with some of the other, like other more advanced classes, you start to learn, oh no, no, these are this is like, these are systems that have evolved for sure over the course of millions and millions and millions and millions of years, right, and we can actually answer a lot of these things that I used to put in that column just good, like, oh no, there's actually a system that that makes the planets move in this way and that you know, makes a pulsar be a thing?
00:10:59
Speaker 1: So do you still believe in God or Jesus?
00:11:03
Speaker 3: Personally, I'm out of the dogma stuff. And you know, especially having a son, I'm encouraging him to like get into it because I feel like it shaped me a lot as a person, sure, knowing that stuff, learning and viewing the world in that way. But yeah, no, I'm kind of out of the dogma camp. I'm more like more hippie style, I think the way my parents used to be, which like what just more about no, no, no, I don't do that. But but it's more of like the universe. Like I'm looking out at a bunch of trees in a backyard right now, and you know, I look at all of that stuff. You can view it as individual trees or as one big living system that we're all kind of a part of. And you know, we just we put drywall around ourselves and talking to microphones sometimes and look at screens that have shiny things on them that you know it's playing Elden Ring all night. That's what I do. But ultimately we're a part of that stuff out there.
00:12:01
Speaker 1: But really we should be taking some mushrooms and laying in the grass. And I mean, I mean, I mean that's not even a joke. Really, that's just what we should should be doing today.
00:12:10
Speaker 3: I think looks don't do drugs, Okay.
00:12:13
Speaker 1: No, I don't like drugs, Docky.
00:12:16
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, but some of the again through stuff they don't want you to know the things that we've learned over the years, and now that now medical research is going into this mental health research into psychedelics and what it can do to open up well people call it the third eye, but open up that part of you that gets so calcified in this world and in the systems that we create, and just let you remember that. Nah, Now you're just out there man, part of that stuff.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: So some of those drugs that you take, like mostly the hallucinogenic drugs, there is some oddities and that a lot of people have very similar specific experiences, even down to the visualizations of like creatures and stuff. And I bet I'm sure you know even more about this stuff than I do, just based on the podcast that you create. But what are your thoughts on that? Do you think that you know, if somebody has taken some sort of drug and they're experiencing something the exact same across the world and it's never been planted in their head to see this little elf in the corner of the room or whatever it is, do you feel like these are real things or our brain just chemically creates it, or do you actually feel like there's a veil that is sort of looser or clearer in some way?
00:13:44
Speaker 3: Man, I wish I had an answer to that, because.
00:13:46
Speaker 1: What's your personal opinion or what do you lean towards.
00:13:50
Speaker 3: I'll tell you a quick story. When I was right like into college, right out of college, there was this stuff called you remember that you ever?
00:14:01
Speaker 1: Oh no, I did salvia?
00:14:03
Speaker 3: Okay, I did it once.
00:14:05
Speaker 1: I did it once as well.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: Just well, uh, you know, sorry to everybody out there again, don't do drugs, I was a young man.
00:14:13
Speaker 1: Don't do.
00:14:16
Speaker 3: But I did salvia with a bunch of friends, like in a safe place, good set and setting. Everything was awesome. And I tried the stuff and I didn't think it had an effect, so I tried it again and I experienced It's the only thing I've ever experienced. It's kind of like that like getting to machine Elves kind of territory with DMT, right. But I became a pixel in the center of this huge kaleidoscopic circular structure, and my sense of being in reality and like nervous system, everything was focused on this one pixel that was kind of at the top center of this thing, and I was attempting to navigate a maze and I was I felt like I did it for a lifetime, and I woke up apparently screaming for my now ex wife, my girlfriend at the time, Wow, like like a little baby. Like I was terrified so much that my existence, all everything I knew went into that pixel. And that's what I was.
00:15:22
Speaker 1: Wait, see, you're looking at a pixel. Is it like a little miniature version of you?
00:15:26
Speaker 3: Or you just imagine a huge flat circular structure and I am a single pixel on this thing that.
00:15:34
Speaker 1: You can use imagine self or you. I feel that is you.
00:15:37
Speaker 3: I know that it's meat, but I'm also viewing it from above the circular thing, which.
00:15:42
Speaker 1: Is just see and feel it.
00:15:43
Speaker 3: Yes, dude, I know that's so insane.
00:15:46
Speaker 1: Stuff.
00:15:47
Speaker 3: Well, apparently I thought it was the bad one because I think it has to do with my sensory input, because they were playing some really crazy music track that it had this repetitive, like broken rhythm to it, like drum track to it, and the way the thing was moving in this.
00:16:05
Speaker 1: Like that's not helping at all.
00:16:07
Speaker 3: Bro, it was bad. But the whole point of that is that I hadn't taken any other drugs. I wasn't drinking that night. I wasn't doing anything that would affect my state of being.
00:16:18
Speaker 1: Right.
00:16:19
Speaker 3: I take this one substance into my lungs momentarily, and my brain completely ceases to function in the way it should with all of the systems it's attached to, and I become something else, feel like I'm something else. And then I'm shifted right back into reality or like pulled back, you know, and I feel like there's something going on there with a lot of these different substances. I think, even to some extent, if you look at a bigger picture, some of the sugars that we all eat all the time every day, some of the just some of the stuff we're probably not supposed to be eating that gets manufactured, and then pretty much everything well, yeah, I think it's it's on a much larger scale. So it's a combination of all those things and all those dyes and all that stuff, and it just courses through our body, all the microplastics that are in all of our scrotums and testicles. By the way, guys, you saw that, right the fuck there's microplastics. See that in pretty much every scrin there's not bro, you gotta get them checked. I'm telling you that.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: It's you checked. How do you make for microlastics and your ball sack?
00:17:28
Speaker 3: There was a wide enough study with enough subjects that was basically like, yeah, this is there's microplastics there. There's also microplastics in most of our like uh, most of our bodies, and the forever chemicals that we you know, PF pfas, the per and polyfloral alkyl substances, the stuff like teflon and all that. It's coursing through our bodies in our bloodstream because it will not go away. It cannot go wait, it can't be broken down.
00:17:56
Speaker 1: Wow, Yeah, that's great plastics for the for the laper, which is going to be me in this situation, like what literally is a microplastic and how micro are they and where the hell they're coming from? Is it just from like the ocean and us throwing shit out there and it breaking down and we're consuming it or what what are we talking about here?
00:18:15
Speaker 3: It's from it.
00:18:16
Speaker 1: We are talking like microscopic pieces of plastic under a microscope, Like, yeah, teeny tiny little pieces, but it's plastic still, yes, just a little tiny baby plastic pieces. Yeah, it's an oil based substance, you know, came out of the ground, got turned into that stuff, and at some point all the plastic containers that have ever existed start to break down, whether through the recycling process, going into the groundwater, you know, breaking down over time, which is a long time for him to break down. We're getting you know, getting into the ocean and getting nipped at by different animals than that just kind of flowing out through the oceans, trash that just gets thrown in all the waterways. Bro, It's it's it's insane and we just drink the water and someone were tiny enough. Yeah, And the same thing with teflon. We talked to this lawyer who was suing. Can't you remember the name. I think it's called dark Waters or dark Water. It was an attorney who was fighting this fight about forever chemicals in the water sources where the cattle were drinking from. And it was the forever chemicals were getting into the cattle, and then it was affecting the fish in the water sources, and then all the townsfolks started having crazy high rates of cancer. It's just but it's happening everywhere. Well, I mean, there's plastic everywhere, and there has been for a long time. That's just its own problem. But this is I guess one of the side effects of that, right.
00:19:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it can affect fertility, which you know, yay, there's already a fertility issue going on in the world right and the microplastics and specifically those forever chemicals are like causing the big problems at least that's.
00:19:58
Speaker 1: What they like right now. Are they just too sm are they too small to get rid of? Like? Yeah, can we filter these things out? Or is there a scientist working on a little drop you can put in a drink and it kills it? Or I mean, is it you can't break an there?
00:20:16
Speaker 3: You can separate it, probably, but you'd have to do it at somehow the filtration level, Like if you imagine a water processing plant, you know you could probably do it, but good lord, it would be expensive if I bet to get that kind of thing, because you really start looking at some of these problems, especially if you have a kid, like a child, if you look at these problems in h.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: What's your biggest fear of having a kid right now? I mean, it's definitely he's growing up in a different world than you have did. But as a parent, I don't have any kids. What's your fear?
00:20:49
Speaker 3: It's social media and interactions on the internet, I mean, and.
00:20:54
Speaker 1: The way just being exposed to it and how that shapes his perception.
00:20:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, for me, it's world it's worldview, like how do you see the world around you? How do you see the people around you? And the filters that you end up putting in front of you shape the color and the shape of the people and the words that are coming at you right so like, and I feel like social media and just again a lot of the junk information that just exists out there right now that kind of flows, like I've got an Instagram page for stuff that I want you to know that. I try and keep and I'll scroll through it sometimes and I feel like my brain is to die. It's like dying. There's some cool stuff depending on who you follow, and like, I really like watching stuff from shows. I like like even if it's promotional content. I actually like that.
00:21:44
Speaker 1: But like what.
00:21:46
Speaker 3: Videos, especially like when High Strange came out. Dude, I loved all all of that promo content, like I was eating. I ate that show up in general.
00:21:55
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, that was a fun passion project. And yeah, I mean we we loved shooting some of the visual elements for that. Yeah, just getting weird with.
00:22:04
Speaker 3: It, just floating around.
00:22:06
Speaker 1: It's cool and just go into space. I guess it's yeah.
00:22:11
Speaker 3: But anyway, that stuff, I think social media and all that stuff really worries me. I feel like an old crotchety forty almost forty one year old saying that.
00:22:18
Speaker 1: Right, I know, it's crazy. I watched this video the other day and it was Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, and he was doing some sort of seminar or something and someone was filming and I'm gonna I'm gonna botch this. But he said basically that in the next five to ten years, the content on the Internet is going to become completely like you will not be able to tell what is real and what is not completely indiscernible to anyone's eyes or ears. And that it's going to become crucial in this five to ten year stint where we're adapting to that or figuring out how we verify and validate it, that we really put on our thinking caps and you know, do actual critical thinking, which I feel like in a lot of ways, you know, the accessibility of the internet and as has expanded, even in my own lifetime, it has made it easier to not have to use critical thinking. Yeah, and so I could totally get behind this sort of fear of the masses, almost never having learned how to critically think, and everyone just kind of just going to believe whatever they want to believe. And does truth matter anymore? Right, dude?
00:23:51
Speaker 3: I hope. So that's I mean, that's what benan Olan and I do every week, five times a week. We're just like guys, let's think. Let's think some of these Montessori schools and some of the more alternative like early education schools are all about learning how to think rather than learning the facts and the information you put in your head, because all that is available now. If you want to learn anything, you can find it right now. But you need to learn how to process that information. How do you incorporate it into the stuff you already know?
00:24:24
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah? What are you doing with that? Yeah? You could memorize a fact, but what the fuck does it mean? Yeah? How are you applying this or is there any significance at all? Should you just you know, bury that one in the back, you know? Yeah?
00:24:38
Speaker 3: But yeah, I also worry about how he is going to perceive other people because I think, I think a lot of social media has changed us into a bit of a society of folks who have a surface thing going on and then the people we actually are. And I don't know, I don't like that very much.
00:24:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, that part definitely sucks. Bring back MySpace, you know. Yeah, I want to have a song playing to tell you what mood I'm in without having to tell you, so you know, I'm sad today.
00:25:09
Speaker 3: Did you ever have a band MySpace page?
00:25:12
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, for sure? Oh man, me too, and one and I also had you know one for me? Yeap? Are those gone forever? Are those like on the internet? Archive? Somewhere.
00:25:25
Speaker 3: I tried so hard to find mine it was gone.
00:25:27
Speaker 1: It's totally okay if they're gone, because they would be very cringey. But I'd also be, you know, a little curious. Well, can we talk about I want to talk about something, Okay.
00:25:38
Speaker 3: I really appreciate the way you edit things. I've had the I've been lucky enough to sit down next to you with a laptop and watch you edit. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Zodiac intro, like the first moments in Monster the Zodiac Killer that you came out to San Francisco and you gone on a laptop and you just cut that thing and I watched you do it. I want to talk about how much an understanding of music, how important that is when it comes to editing, like any kind of audio or even video. I feel like rhythm, timing, cadence of dynamics, all of those concepts that are very musical in nature, how important they are when you apply them to a listening or visual experience, Like, how do you do that?
00:26:27
Speaker 1: To me? Personally, it's crucial. It's how I was ever able to get any better edit or train myself, teach myself and learn how to be a better editor. I was never a good musician. I can hear it, I can hear melodies. I can visualize things, but when it comes to like, you know, playing the drums with my hands, like I'm just I don't have the coordination, or painting a picture, it's going to look terrible. But I've always been able to visualize things from a young age, and so when it comes to editing, I started editing super young in my life. My dad bought one of the first max was. It was the it was the iMac that had the different colors. Mine was a blue one, and the first generation came with the iMovie suite and garage band. And so I started started editing my own videos. And back then it was all it started off as as many VHS tapes and I'd had to basically play it through this device into the computer to import it at real time. And then I would take that and because it was it would just all be one clip, I'd have to go in there and cut it up specifically. Actually, let me go back further. The first editing I technically did was on the camera itself, before there was iMovie or a con or friendly editing software. Yeah, I would take my VHS camera and I would do a shot. If I didn't like it, I'd rewind it and try to pause it at that right spot and then hit record and record over it. Yeah, do that over and over again. And so for a lot of my early you know, childhood home movies with my siblings in it, there's occasionally like this weird blip of like and that wasn't supposed to be there, or like a stop start that's so great, man, But like it started that way, and then once I had iMovie, I was like, Wow, this makes us so much easier. And then I went from there to final cut, and then they got rid of final cut, like the change they changed it, and eventually moved on to premiere. And so you know, in the history of how I got here in my career, I was always in the video, always in this storytelling. I started making my own music in garage band, just you know, on the keyboard loops and creating different melodies and you know, singing on them, and then editing that, and then I also would edit the music videos for those, and then that turned into me eventually doing music videos for other artists full time. And you know, a music video is basically an edit to a song, and so there's a there's an important cadence and pacing that is just one just kind of obvious. And then then it becomes okay, well, how do I get creative with this to where it's not just you know, cutting on every single beat? But you know, how can I you know, what works visually to the eye. And that just takes time to learn and experience. And so when I started editing podcasts, it was in some ways a lot easier because there was only one thing to focus on. It was just the sound. But then it became, oh shit, it's just the sound. So if I'm in the basement of this you know, archive place and there's records all around me and it's you know, thirty foot ceilings, an establishing shot in a video could tell you that immediately without me saying anything or there being no sound. But how do I do that? How do I tell you the same thing without always having to literally tell you that? Or what are clever ways I can take you somewhere and then explain as least amount as possible so I don't sound redundant, or when do I really need to tell you what's going on? And what this looks like so you can get what I'm talking about. And that's been a kind of a fun thing to learn, I think. Yes, I've made more and more podcasts over the years, and it's like a constant puzzle I'm trying to solve, as you know, how do I, you know, make the perfect podcast or something? W how do I make it better than the last one? Right?
00:30:57
Speaker 3: Yeah? Good lord, that kind of pressure.
00:30:59
Speaker 1: Man, I appreciate that though. I've just edited for a long time and it just is absolutely just repetition and I would probably cringe at a lot of my old edits. Sometimes you have the tendency to cut it way too fast. Yeah, And so like eventually I had to learn that, like even though it's sounding correct in this moment, it's it is too fast and like kind of just tweaked that even though my brains tell me otherwise than if I go take a break for an hour, come back. Oh yeah, I was right, And so like I'm wasting less time. My decision making is not as stalled. I can make them quicker. The faster you make those basic decisions, the sooner you can get to doing something maybe even more creative, which might take more time or trial and error.
00:31:46
Speaker 3: Right, for any early editors out there, I think the best piece of advice I ever got was respect the rest, as in the rest musically right. So you've got a bunch of them notes if your thinking, you know about your edit, you got a bunch of beats, and then the rest becomes the most important thing in all of that because it gives you time to remember what was just said and really internalize it, crystallize a thought about it, then move on to the next thing, and you can and you anticipate the next thing, and you can really build that anticipation. And that's what dude, That's why I love MAV so much. Makeup and Vanity set that does a lot of them.
00:32:24
Speaker 1: He's amazing.
00:32:25
Speaker 3: Matt is just incredible. And when you've got a good piece of music to edit to, just like you were talking about with the music videos, like it changes I don't know, it changes my mood in the edit, like when I'm physically there doing it because I like listening to the track a bunch of different times as I'm trying.
00:32:41
Speaker 1: To get you know, it's like for me, it's inspo, right, It's it's it's harder to get into some dark, you know mood when you're talking about a serial killer or something, if you're not hearing some brooding, you know, drony sound that kind of take you there and reminds you of how deep and scary this shit really is, right, And so editing to that is way easier, even if it's just temp. But I've also had to learn how to just kind of do it like just raw dog it, like kind of like envision it and almost edit to like a pace to where I think this is probably more a testament to how MAVs than I have, I guess grown in our creative relationship together kind of knowing what to expect from him and vice versa. I can kind of almost at this point and I actually I just recently did it make an entire thing, and I can visualize or imagine the spacing that I'm putting in there one for where my vo will go to kind of a little reprieve like you're talking about that MAVs will probably recognize in this and he can score it. And for the most or there's never a bunch of drastic bumping stuff around unless it sparked some new cool idea, which that happens all the time, and that's just even cooler than the first idea, right, Yep. Part of my drive is that I want people to connect to me through this vessel, and so that that's still like a really strong component of all the work I do. And I really don't feel inspired to do any creative work unless I have that feeling.
00:34:32
Speaker 3: I want to talk more about High Strange when you're ready.
00:34:34
Speaker 1: I'm ready. I'm very ready, dude.
00:34:36
Speaker 3: Okay, is there anything in High Strange that we didn't get to hear because you weren't allowed to put it in there, or you didn't you felt like it was too out there, or something that you feel comfortable actually discussing maybe vaguely.
00:34:52
Speaker 1: I think that I tried to, like my overall goal with at least the first installment of High Strange was to find like the most convincing, hardest to debunk UFO stories of our modern day, you know, in the last fifty years in America that have like supporting evidence, whether it be actual tape or you know, actually what comes to mind, they're the Rindlesham Forest story. So we talked to Charles Holt and Jim Peniston and they've both you know, famously always claim that this happened. I believe both of them. But Jim, when he told his story, which took I swear to God, like three hours, I think he's just spent like so much time thinking about this and trying to explain it and writing books about it that he's almost created another like additional narrative story that maybe didn't happen. This sounds a little wonky, and so I left that part out because it sounded wonky, and Charles Hall will also say it sounds wonky, So I kind of left out both of them kind of beefing with each other. Charles Holt seems to feel like Jim Peniston is, you know, discrediting this story by saying some of the things that he's saying, and so to me, it kind of actually further validated the story. There was a lot of witnesses, but I think that Jim's story about seeing the craft and going up and touching it and like this whole numbers thing and like this code that he thinks means this, and that like he's just gone too far into hypothesizing what these things mean or has imagined some of it up, and it it kind of makes it sound like it's in La La land now. But what is true is that people saw stuff and it wasn't the lighthouse, yes, and and they were very scared. And no matter what it was, the the government seemed to think it was a big deal. I don't know why they'd ever make a big deal about a lighthouse that's always been there doing the same damn thing every night. So something else happened. And Dylan actually interviewed Charles Holt. His was the most convincing interview because he was, you know, kind of reluctant to do this, like he's done it in the past and he's felt like he's been taking advantage of or made this sound like a looney and you know the same with Travis Walton. These guys weren't chomping at the bit to talk and tell this story. They were like, God, I don't know if I want to relive this again. I don't know if I want to explain myself again and subject myself to this criticism. Because the thing is, I know that I saw this, but I don't know what it was. I don't have I don't know how to explain it to you or convince you that it's true. It just is, and that would be frustrating, right, Yeah, to go a lifetime and having experienced an unexplained thing that was super impactful to your life and shape your perception of the universe that you can't explain and people don't believe, or some people don't believe.
00:38:31
Speaker 3: It makes me think about Ryan Graves and a lot of those military personnel and seeing seeing the very specific thing that you described in your show. And it's a show we've didn that right, yes, and and some of the some of the they call them, it's like spheres that are almost clear and then there's something gray at the center of the sphere.
00:38:52
Speaker 1: Dude, very strange specific description there. Yes, So there's rings true and real to me.
00:39:00
Speaker 3: I have a buddy used to play in a band with me. He lives in Augusta and Augusta, Georgia, and he has been going outside every night and just bought a telescope and is attempting to get high quality footage of nightly UAP that are going over a very specific part of wherever he lives in Augusta. He wants to be a little vague, but the dude is one of the most reliable people I know. And he had. He's talked to me for like two hours on the phone now at this point, like trying to explain that he's not crazy. And he's seeing these things that are lights in the sky of different colors that are releasing other lights and it's happening nightly and it's.
00:39:45
Speaker 1: Huge and I'm just seeing and he's.
00:39:47
Speaker 3: Trying to capture it right now, like tonight, he's going to try and capture footage and send it to me so I can send it to you actually, but.
00:39:54
Speaker 1: Please let me see this. Yeah, and if he ever wants, you know, company, well.
00:39:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he's trying to get better optics. So I was like, well, dang, I need to talk to Pain and see what kind of optic or you know, what kind of cameras he's rolling with right now, and if there's any way to attach a telescope or something, because.
00:40:10
Speaker 1: I mean, we can rent a pretty big boy. We could rent one that's like what, I don't know what it would be, Dylan, but like I'm sure Christian would be able to tell us whatever the most expensive long zoom is that we can strap on something and get I don't know, capture it the best.
00:40:29
Speaker 3: It'd be better than what he's working with right now. I don't know, and I know that's like an off the wall thing, but this is a guy I trust that, you know, I've got that music bond with I've spent.
00:40:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you know, this guy isn't just spinning his wheels here. And then you know, talking on his ass. You're like, Okay, I want to see what you're talking about.
00:40:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he sounded scared. He said, he's scared because it's weird. It's it's light in the sky kind of thing where over he watched one of them light up of a little forest that's right by his kind of rural property where he lives. So low then and he called the fire department, he said, because he thought there was a forest fire right there, because this red orange glow the way it was a little bit, it's exactly what I was thinking. I had the images over my head when.
00:41:12
Speaker 1: They thought the same thing, just based on what it looked like from afar, like the forest is on fire, there's red glowing light coming out of it.
00:41:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, but he said, he said, he watched it go up over the tree line and exit, and I'm like, man, and it's when you hear something like that. I love this guy, I trust this guy. But you still when you hear something like that, for me at least, you go are you sure?
00:41:37
Speaker 1: And are are you sure? That's what you saw?
00:41:39
Speaker 3: The Yeah, And it's because you have you kind of have to go into that attitude or you know, you just walk around. What is that thing? Ben said it on his interview with You extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence or something like that.
00:41:55
Speaker 1: It's very true. I don't know whose quote that is, Oh yeah, but.
00:41:58
Speaker 3: I just it's again Ben, Ben and Nolan I have like a set of quotes so we don't even we don't even attribute them to anybody anymore.
00:42:07
Speaker 1: We just say them, and you're right, they're just mantras at this point. Yeah, I think it's a It's always a good thing to do. I mean, when something is so unbelievable, you know, I know that crazy shit happens. I mean people have been struck by lightning literally, yeah, like more than once, Like the impossible has happened. The likelihood of these things maybe next to zero, but yeah, sometimes absolutely crazy things happen. Or you know, there is an unexplained thing that did happen that you know, we haven't been able to, you know, wrap our minds around. Yet I want to know your thoughts on the Trump assassination attempt.
00:42:52
Speaker 3: Oh lord, okay? Uh so Ben and Nole did a special episode yesterday. They recorded it yesterday on Jill Live fifteenth as we're recording this, and they talked about it at length. I wasn't able to join them for that conversation. I've just been following it, kind of following the research in a doc we you created that mostly been created, and it's It's weird.
00:43:16
Speaker 1: Man.
00:43:17
Speaker 3: It feels to me right now like there's so much junk being like again, the thing I worry about with my son. There's so many theories and things that are flying around right now. I don't want to. I don't want to put, you know, put my horses on any wagon right now.
00:43:35
Speaker 1: Yet it feels really.
00:43:37
Speaker 3: Weird to me personally that the Supreme Court decision came down about official you know, presidential stuff. Did did you see that Supreme Court decision about It's been applied mostly to Donald Trump's presidency, but it said that if there's any official actions that are taken while someone's in the White House serving as president, that president cannot be prosecuted for those No matter what, congressmen cannot ask the president or any of the president's staff about their motives behind official actions. Basically, the president has immunity for anything that is done officially. Right, And then you watch that happen, and I'm connecting dots here that are not connected, but you watch that happen. Then you watch the performance of the debates and how terribly that went for everybody.
00:44:28
Speaker 1: Basically yeah, and then yeah.
00:44:31
Speaker 3: And then so like president could do anything current president does terribly. Then you start to think, like, well, who would actually want that to happen? Who would want that terrible thing to happen? A former president being assassinated, which in my mind is a terrible thing, no matter how you feel about the guy. Sure, I think I think the only people that would be really interested are the moneyed powers, the lobbyists, the people who write the laws, the the money that exists for all these campaign donations, all these people who are banking on having a certain president in place. I think you follow that money, and then you still won't make a connection to this young kid because I don't think anybody forced him to do it. I think, well, he's done now, so well you'll never know, right, which is like the whole Patsy thing. We were looking back at anybody, any any of the presidential assassins that have ever existed. Basically, you don't really get to tell your story, and if you do tell your story, like in Syrian Cirrian's case, you either are a liar or you sound insane, you know, talking about I have no recollection of what happened. I can't remember, or if you know James Earl Ray who said he was innocent the entire time. Listen to the MLK tapes, by.
00:45:51
Speaker 1: The way, please do It's great.
00:45:53
Speaker 3: It wears me out.
00:45:54
Speaker 1: Man.
00:45:55
Speaker 3: I don't think somebody paid him to do it or convinced him to do it, at least at this moment, right, I know that's boring. I'm so sorry, man.
00:46:06
Speaker 1: I mean no, no, I mean like you wouldn't have anything really to back that up confidently. For me, Like, my basic just overall knee jerk reaction assessment is that here's a guy standing here, and like there's a lot of questions I have, like one like, how does this guy get on the roof of like the only other building that has a vantage point, yes to potentially shoot the president in the first place. Now, that could be human error, that could be an absolute you know, maybe the sheriff wasn't was taken a piss in the woods and didn't see this guy whatever. But just the the like the luck here, like the the how close this was to something different, like the fact that other people died and Trump got grazed by a bullet on his ear and it didn't take his fucking ear off. And there's these heroic images immediately that are objectively look like, wow, that's crazy, right, Like that's gonna be in a history book. It's just so improbable. Yeah, And it doesn't mean that, like I'm not inferring or suggesting that it's fake or it's a cover up. Real bullets were shot, real people were killed, right, But it's just is he the luckiest person on earth? And both can exist. He could just have been that lucky. But I think when stuff is like that, where it makes you go, is this the luckiest guy on the planet? Don't we do that with everything else? You know, you're in the casino, right and you're on a heater on roulette and you're just hitting everything and you just win, like one hundred thousand dollars from like five hundred bucks. What's gonna happen? Security comes out because like this is an anomaly. They're not saying that you're cheating, but there's a possibility that you are. Because this doesn't happen.
00:48:13
Speaker 3: Like that bear, it's not supposed to.
00:48:15
Speaker 1: So it like warrants further investigation and inspection, you know, I think and I hope that they released that. To me, it's the ballistics, like let's see, like, guess what came from where? That would tell me all the things that I think I don't really know.
00:48:30
Speaker 3: Well, that's what the guys just did it. By the time this comes out, that episode will have come out, and what they were looking at specifically were jurisdiction for that specific building, for the roof of that building, right and right now, the best understanding is that Secret Service did not they believe in have said publicly that it was not their purview to check that building. That was local law enforcement. Local law enforcement, you know, at least according to the story, came up on the roof, found the guy who then you know, aimed the rifle at them and then immediately aimed at at form Resident Donald Trump and started firing like in that moment, you know, like it was like.
00:49:07
Speaker 1: A real quick yeah, and real quick thing. Yeah.
00:49:10
Speaker 3: So I you know when you put for me, life is starting to resemble more and more the thing that we experience on one of these black screens, these black mirrors that we all look into all day long. I'm looking into two of them right now as we're talking. And I think since life, as we look around in the events we hear about, the real news stories are resembling more and more narratives that have been written, you know by some guys you graduated from Harvard.
00:49:38
Speaker 1: No, it's a story, it's a it's a fairy tale. Like in real life.
00:49:42
Speaker 3: You know, the weirdness factor is creeping in and getting it's it's increasing in a way that I'm uncomfortable with. And when anything happens. Now you can you can try well, no, you can hyper focus on every little detail and break it apart if if you want to, in a way that will maybe even make you start to second guess or doubt the truth, like the full on actual facts truth. But if you break it down into its small enough pieces, you might start to doubt it because you're like, but wait, how or wait, hold on when and you know I do that to myself. I notice I do that to myself in my real world with this whole like conspiracy theory thinking, yeah, yeah, where you connect dots sometimes and aren't there.
00:50:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta check yourself. You know, you might be kind of constructing it versus finding it.
00:50:36
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, but if you don't, if you're not somewhat vigilant or you know, hopefully not hyper vigilant, you will miss things. And I've found that with through personal experience in my life too, where you're just like, oh, I never saw that coming. But if I would have been paying attention in retrospect, oh yeah, I saw that. It's interesting when we find ourselves, each of us, in a place where we're in these social media of bubbles. We're in our content bubbles on all the algorithms, we only see what kind of a machine learning decides. We see that.
00:51:09
Speaker 1: They think I want to see weird shit. I don't only sometimes give me the weird shit I want to give my girlfriend my phone. I don't always look at that my sport page look like that. That's crazy.
00:51:22
Speaker 3: It's just skateboards. I like skateboards, but.
00:51:25
Speaker 1: I swear they're pushing it on us. It's it's it's bad. But we've really we've.
00:51:31
Speaker 3: Run the risk all of us right now of just being fully misinformed or dis you know, the disinformation. We just we think the wrong stuff is reality, all of us. And I'm putting myself in that boat too.
00:51:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a.
00:51:47
Speaker 3: Dangerous time to be a human that thinks, especially a human that thinks about thinking.
00:51:52
Speaker 1: I know, or doesn't think very well.
00:51:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm in there, you know.
00:52:00
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean like when I when I saw like I'm pretty sure I saw like the like the main news shot of the assassination attempt within a minute of it probably happening. Yes, And my first thought, and this is you know, only knowing what I knew then, which was nothing. I was like, Wow, if this is real, could there be a better pr stunt? Like what whether it was on purpose or not, could there be a better way to frame him as a hero. I'm not saying that that's was intentionally done either way, that's the outcome, ye, right, I think general consensus is going to feel that way. I mean, shitt like he got shot at and survived it. That's crazy, right, So Like that's a that could be that's a heroic thing in a lot of people's books, right, But I just thought like, wow, like for other people to die and be injured and him to get this like, you know, tiny little ear cut, it's just like and you didn't have blood all over his face. It was just like a nice little it was just like perfect. Yeah, And it just like stuff like that makes me just go how And sometimes shit just happens like that, And so I remind myself that people get struck by lightning. The craziest shit in the world can happen. You can flip a coin one hundred times and it can be tails. It's possible. It doesn't matter, doesn't mean that it's likely to happen or that it does happen, but it can. And it just makes me be like, Okay, am I missing something. It's it's still crazy either way that he he left with just the most minor of injuries and is instantly without a doubt winning this selection.
00:54:06
Speaker 3: Now, who knows?
00:54:07
Speaker 1: Man. I felt like.
00:54:10
Speaker 3: I felt like after that debate, it was pretty obvious who America would choose if you were given those two choices, and the whole thing that goes back and stuff that I want you to we talked about is a long time ago. It's it feels like we are the whole system is rigged for us already. It's rigged for them, and we're the ones who get played because there are only two parties. You have basically two sides of the same coin. But it's the same coin, right, And it doesn't matter because in the end, it's all the same money, it's all the same corporations, it's all the same people who manufacture and ship and you know, pull resources out of the ground. It's all those same people that pull the reins on any politician in this country, unless you're on the local level or if you're you know, even some congress people are not as easily I guess manipulated and coerced. But man, that's just my opinion. By the way, maybe America has a great system that's perfect, and I just don't understand it.
00:55:14
Speaker 1: I highly doubt it.
00:55:15
Speaker 3: Right, But because you know, if you look at the electoral college, that's just really quick, I'll preach my show stuff. They don't want you to know. Has been looking at this kind of stuff since two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine. We've been making a podcast since twenty thirteen, where we try and make those connections where here's a really important thing. You know, you need to know about the political system and the electoral college, and the way laws are written by lobbyist groups, the way think tanks run those lobbyist groups, the way those think tanks are run by, you know, people who used to run manufacturing corporations, and how it's all this interwoven thing, and then how does all of that end up translating to where weapons go in the world, where they're deployed, who the enemy is of the United States, how that shapes up, and it always brings me back to Project Blue Beam. You know, you remember that one pain.
00:56:12
Speaker 1: I do but give us the log line for those who may be unfamiliar with that.
00:56:16
Speaker 3: That's the one where some government, probably the United States government through the Pentagon, is developing something with DARPA that is akin to looks like, sounds like, feels like alien spacecraft where they could develop something in fake an alien invasion so that all of planet Earth has a common enemy and we all come together and we unite as one. It is a dude, I'm calling it now, Project Bluebeam.
00:56:48
Speaker 1: Do you think that's that's true.
00:56:50
Speaker 3: No, No, I don't think it's true. It's my favorite conspiracy theory.
00:56:53
Speaker 1: Didn't It also coexists with real aliens too. Yeah?
00:56:57
Speaker 3: Good, that's the thing.
00:56:58
Speaker 1: And how would we make yo? What the fuck like? But where them?
00:57:03
Speaker 3: Think about the uncertainty that we just described with a twenty year old man who got on a roof and fired a rifle at a former president. Imagine that there are things in the sky coming down and the news is saying is showing us images of these huge craft that are the size of a small city or the size of a building or a football field, and they have desires and they have threats, and we just have to accept that whatever AP and Reuters and you know whoever else is reporting it, we just have to accept that that's actually what's happening, and that the military information embargo would actually be giving us the truth because you know, it would be controlled. So I just am I imagine that scenario.
00:57:47
Speaker 1: Scary scary thought.
00:57:50
Speaker 3: Yeah what Ben always says, we're fun at parties.
00:57:56
Speaker 1: We're fun at parties. Invited, Please you want to go to a party really bad? We don't know what a party? Yeah? Will be weird, I promise.
00:58:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll bring my guitar. Man, I've got an acoustic in a jambe let's go.
00:58:14
Speaker 1: So what are you looking for to most in the podcast world? Man? You've been in the game for a long time. You've you've made killer shows. You have a long running successful show with stuff they don't want you to know. Love all those dudes, Love everyone at iHeart. What are you looking forward to next in your career creatively or beyond a.
00:58:33
Speaker 3: Couple of things. Personally, I am getting back into writing music again, kind of the way you were we were discussing earlier. Just having a pretty crappy setup, but just writing melodies and beats and that kind of thing again. And I love it, loving it. So I'm just doing that.
00:58:49
Speaker 1: Man. It's good for your brain creatively too, to kind of take yourself there, especially when you're doing you know, complex long form storytelling. I think it's a good kind of balance. And I don't know, I wish I could play instruments the way that you do, but I can appreciate it and in the same way in a different way kind of collaborating with MAVs on on stuff, and it's a it's a good time and athletic it's a good use of that muscle.
00:59:14
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, dude, I'm excited about that stuff. I'm excited about the fourth season, official season of Monster Monster BTK with I. You know, I don't know how much we can talk about it yet, but it's coming this year.
00:59:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, before it's coming. Yeah, it's gonna be an absolutely insane show. I spent a lot of hours days actually talking with with btk's daughter. Yeah, very sweet, strong willed person and has suffered the unimaginable and is able to talk about it and open and it's it's very impressive, and it's very enlightening, and it's it's also very sad and very very ski Yeah, some of the some of the stories that she she told us. But yeah, I'm looking forward to finishing that and putting it out. Yeah.
01:00:07
Speaker 3: Man, people are gonna get a really interesting look into that dude. Via carry and then, uh, you guys just talk to John Douglas again too, which is one of my Yes.
01:00:15
Speaker 1: I love that I talked to him about that case.
01:00:18
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
01:00:19
Speaker 1: It feels like that was forever ago. I think it was forever, like twenty one May. Yeah, I love that dude, like the real mind hunter guy. He was so great too. He was super nice. And yeah, he's like he's the goat, like he kind of you know, defined the serial killer, which sounds insane, but yeah, you know, jeez, man.
01:00:39
Speaker 3: And there's a there's another news show coming out that's it's true crime and it's more historical mystery, and it's the time that two women separately attempted to assassinate President Ford. They two women unsuccessfully attempted to as unrelated, unrelated, but it it's it's about to come out in September and we're finishing it up right now. Creator Toby Ball is making it. Who does crime writers on and a bunch of other.
01:01:09
Speaker 1: Sho I love Toby. He's great.
01:01:11
Speaker 3: Yeah he did strange rivals too, but this is his kind of brainchild.
01:01:16
Speaker 1: And then, oh, he'd be great at that. That's a I vaguely remember him. I think mentioning this to me at podcast Movement one time. We had a couple of beers when we're talking about podcast. But yet, no, he's great, that'd be awesome. I'm looking forward to that.
01:01:29
Speaker 3: It's intense. It's intense. Well, man, Pain, I just got to tell you, I love everything you do, man, And getting a little text like that you just sent me like a piece of music, a trailer something that is like getting me all excited about the next ua V or whatever. That's one of my favorite things that can happen on my phone, dude, So thank you.
01:01:49
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, man, I appreciate Also, I appreciate you always responding and like listening to it and having anything to say about it at all. That that's flattering and his fun to share, just like you know, under the hood of like what we're working on, like hey, check this little nugget out, you know.
01:02:06
Speaker 3: Well, I just hope you know. I never mean to just be flattering to you because I give criticism.
01:02:10
Speaker 1: Of you know, a long and great No, I know, and I appreciate it. Yeah, dude, Like I'll sing you some more. I got some more cooking up.
01:02:20
Speaker 3: Yes, I can't wait.
01:02:21
Speaker 1: I got you, I got you. But yeah, man, it's been fun dude, long overdue, and I'm excited about all this stuff we got coming out together. And I'll be sure to float you some some interesting uh little clips here in the next few weeks as we gear up for the next installment of UAV.
01:02:38
Speaker 3: Heck you, oh hey, I forgot subscribe to Flashpoint. That's a brand new show that's coming out of Tenderfoot in my art it's yeah.
01:02:47
Speaker 1: You can subscribe now, right yeah, yeah, go right now.
01:02:50
Speaker 3: Subscribe to Flashpoint.
01:02:52
Speaker 1: It's so out on your podcast app. Don't be lazy. You can keep listening to it right now. And also go do that. Go do it. You're driving pool over safely whenever you can
01:03:10
Speaker 3: It's right, And get stuff I'll want you know in there too, and make sure look if you
