Brad Abrahams documents David Huggins, a 72-year-old Hoboken resident claiming alien hybrid offspring since the 1950s, and David Dees, a conspiracy theorist who died believing baking soda cured cancer. The episode examines psychics like Sean Haribance, who consulted presidents but refused Donald Trump, and explores the psychology behind apophenia, trauma, and social media isolation. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how fringe beliefs in cryptozoology, remote viewing, and QAnon create isolated communities, challenging the line between documented reality and surreal conviction. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Questioning UFO Claims00:07:25
Hello, world.
Brad Abrahams is a documentary filmmaker from Canada who's currently based in the USA.
Brad's documentaries feature some of the world's most odd and interesting characters.
For example, he spent three years documenting David Huggins, a 72 year old man who claims he lost his virginity to an extraterrestrial alien woman hybrid and also claims he had multiple children with her.
Brad also focuses a considerable amount of his work on conspiracy theory culture, dissecting the minds of people who believe in the most outlandish. theories and ideas.
This was a super fun episode.
We got to jump down many different rabbit holes.
Without further ado, please enjoy this episode with Brad Abrahams.
Brad, you are an interesting dude.
You have some great work.
Thank you.
I've been watching all of your documentaries for the past few days.
Again, I've already watched them once.
I watched them for the second time.
Appreciate it.
What the hell draws you to these types of characters?
Yeah, so it's two things.
One is really the biggest draw is scoot this thing a little bit closer.
Sure.
The biggest draw is a fascination with belief and wanting to understand why these people believe in these things.
But a smaller draw, maybe it's about a quarter compared to the 75% of that is I also want to believe.
There's a part of me that holds out that UFO abductions are maybe real or Bigfoot is maybe real or some of these conspiracy theories are real.
And I think that's what draws all of us to this subject matter, really.
Even if we're just watching and laughing, we still sort of want to believe that.
That it could be real.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like I was telling you right before we started, the guy Mike Clelland, who wrote the Messenger books about the owls and synchronicities.
Like I was telling you, I had him on here for a couple hours and we were talking.
And it's just, for me, as far as like my experience talking to people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs, I just started to question him so much the more and more we started talking.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like I started to lose sort of like, I wanted to leave him at first.
And then, as we started going down the rabbit hole, and he started talking more about these synchronicities and how he believes he was like some chosen one, and he had been abducted so many times, and it was sort of like his calling in life was to tell this story.
Personally, I sort of lost my personal grip on it.
Did you get the same feeling?
First of all, let's introduce this guy, David Huggins.
Tell me about that documentary that you did.
Yeah.
So, David is a mild mannered. nearly 80 year old man in Hoboken, New Jersey.
And he claims that he has been having extraterrestrial experiences since he was, I think, like nine.
And once he hit 17, these experiences turned sexual.
He says he lost his virginity to one of these extraterrestrials at 17.
I'm glad they waited till he was somewhat age appropriate.
And up until, probably like the, you know, this was happening in the, maybe the 50s or the 60s, up until the 80s or 90s, he kept having these experiences and and decided to chronicle them all through these amazing, surrealistic oil paintings which he, then he would finish a painting and, just like, put it against his wall.
It wasn't for anyone to see except for himself until basically, I came into his life and and saw his studio with which had like 200 something of these paintings um, and knew that I had to put his life to film.
How did you discover him again?
It was, I don't actually really remember.
It was maybe back in like 2010 or 11 or something, listening to some paranormal radio show and they mentioned him offhand as too crazy for them to even talk about.
So I was like, well, this is the guy that I need to try and find and realize he had no internet presence.
He's never, you know, used the internet and doesn't have email or anything like that.
And I tracked down his neighbor who had done a little book of his paintings, which not many people had seen.
And she gave me his home phone number, and I called him like a cold call.
And immediately he was just like, yeah, I think it's time for me to tell my story.
And yeah, we had maybe about like 10 two-hour long phone calls where I got every single detail to try and figure out, is this going to be worth me spending, because it's years to make a documentary, is this going to be worth my time?
Eventually I spent a weekend with him as an experiment.
I slept in his ex-wife's bedroom, whom he still lives with, but she was away on vacation.
And it was just like a weird, wild weekend.
And I was like, yes, this is going to work.
Wow.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
That's fucking wild.
I've had a couple.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's so, but he's told his story.
He has told his story before, right?
Like with that guy, Bud Hopkins.
Well, no, but was he in one of his books or no?
He wasn't.
No, but the Bud Hopkins book, I think it was called Intruders.
That was what David basically, like a lot of alien abductees, didn't have access to all the memories.
And he.
He randomly found this book in a bookstore, started reading it, and there was a chapter called Other Women, Other Men that was about kind of sexual abduction experiences.
And as soon as he started reading it, he said all of the memories started to crystallize again.
They all came clear, and that's when he started to paint them from memory.
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Back to the show.
Real or Made Up00:10:16
And he claims that he had multiple children with these alien beings and held the children and wanted to go.
It's a fucking, it's bananas, the story.
It gets more and more bananas.
Yeah, the children part was, you know, because there's, you know, I've been abducted.
You've heard a lot of people say that.
And maybe that's true.
And then there's, you know, I had sex with aliens.
That's another level of sort of credulity.
Like, will I believe that?
But then there's, I've had lots of hybrid babies with aliens that I've seen.
held and played hide and seek with on the spaceship.
And it's like, wow, you know, I can't really, I can't say I believe anymore.
But I still, I want to believe him in that something happened to him.
But that detail and those details, it's just like too much.
That's too much for me in my brain to imagine.
Maybe that's just because, you know, I can't think outside the box enough for that.
What was your first take dealing with this guy?
Like the first weekend you spent with him, like what was your first reaction?
Just totally disarmed by so down to earth, so nice, normal, like plugged into the world, you know, like into politics and everything.
I would walk his street and meet all of his neighbors and they all loved him.
They all just thought of him as like the grandpa on the street.
He'd been there 30 years.
Go into his place of work, like David's the best.
Most people just didn't even know that he had had these experiences.
He doesn't talk about them with most people.
So I was getting this impression that, you know, I maybe was going to go there thinking he's going to be unhinged in some way.
But that's not the impression you get at all.
And anyone that meets David is just like, wow.
And then that cognitive dissonance starts to happen.
You're like, well, someone that seems so normal, you're not going to write off as just crazy and he's making it up or he has paranoid delusions because that doesn't seem like, what's going on, and so then you really start thinking, like, well, what could that be?
And then that's you know, what I'm most interested in, yeah, yeah.
Now, his massive collection of supernatural sci fi movies on VHS did his obsession with these paranormal sci fi movies start before he these things happened to him before he started telling the stories, or at what point?
Because I, in the documentary, you make the connection, or one of the guys you're interviewing makes the connection saying that.
These experiences, these real life experiences that people have, directly affect these science fiction stories.
And then it's like a cycle.
And then the science fiction stories affect the more real life situations people say they encounter.
Yeah.
So do you know, do you have like a timeline of when he became, started collecting all these movies and becoming obsessed with them?
Yeah.
So what's interesting is that seemed to happen later, you know, just like in the 80s when he started.
Collecting them.
But he, early on, was that movie.
Did you ever see John Carpenter's The Thing, the 80s one, where it's like Kurt Russell and it's like just these horribly disgusting like alien monsters?
Well the, the first version of that, the original version of that, came out the year that he had his first encounter and so or he watched it around that time, you know, probably in the theater or something um, and so there's these things.
You know, i'll hear things like that and and it And it's like, well, maybe then that's in your brain and maybe you still had an experience, but you're like mapping on things that you're seeing.
But still back in, you know, in the, I guess in the 50s and the 60s, that was kind of a UFO mania too.
Like there was like reports of UFOs over the White House.
And, you know, he probably, because there was no internet, he probably had very little exposure to this stuff, but it was still there and around.
And especially when he started remembering most of it.
That's in the 80s, and that's like you know, prime UFO time.
Yeah, a lot of his story, a lot of his drawings are very similar to a lot of other really popular events, and he doesn't have access to the internet, so how would he know?
Right, yeah.
Uh, I don't know how much of that imagery he'd get.
The gray, definitely, I think everyone had seen, but insectoid beings, um, praying mantis, yeah, yeah, and and the tall people, the alien women, those seem pretty unique.
He did see like a he had mentioned like in a Doctor Who episode that he saw that that he had mentioned he saw it and he was like, oh, that's weird.
I'm it's like I'm having a memory and I watched it and it's like these giant ants like these ant people that sort of look like his praying mantis.
And so again, it might be that that he had these experiences and then he saw these these mantoid beings and they remind him of him or he saw those and he's like, oh, I had, you know, mapping that onto.
In his own brain, yeah, it's it also reminds me of the Travis the whole Travis Walton story as well, right?
Yeah, like with the human/slash alien hybrids, yeah, you know, yeah, which was very odd, uh-huh, and more terrifying.
Like David, the Travis Walton story is like truly terrifying, and David is just like, oh, I had a good time, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, overall, your experience with him and Doc, how long did you film with him?
It was, it was, uh, it happened over years, like maybe three years or something, but.
I would only go like a couple weekends per year to shoot with him because it was all self-funded.
I got a little money from a production company, but it just takes, docs take forever and then it took like two years to, you know, edit it and put it together.
But I'd basically, the first time I went and saw him was like nine years ago.
Wow.
Yeah.
And he still calls me like every other day.
Does he really?
Yeah, he just checks in.
He'll tell me if he had a weird dream, if someone buys one of his paintings.
He just wants to know what's going on with me.
Yeah, I want to buy one of those paintings.
Those things are amazing.
You got to do it in person.
Yeah.
Okay, you got to fly there and buy from him.
Pretty much.
Or if you have a friend in New York.
So is this guy full of shit?
Did this happen to him?
What's your take?
My take is knowing him, he didn't make it up.
He experienced something.
And it's hard for me to believe that it's exactly as he described it.
But so he might be like in the movie, The professor of religious studies says, you know, we experience something, but then popular culture is how we filter it and see it because we can't even comprehend what that reality really is.
So maybe, I mean, that's what I more lean to, that David was having what classically would be called mystical experiences, which are similar to psychedelic experiences without the drugs.
And yeah, they're like almost like religious experiences that David was having.
Maybe it's like some kind of epilepsy.
Like there's, I talked to some neuro, some neurologist or neuroentheologist, and there's like, there are types of waking hour epilepsy that they're very vivid hallucinations.
Maybe, you know, everyone's wrong and he has some kind of paranoid, delusional personality disorder.
Maybe he is making it up or maybe something really happened to him.
Like all these things it could be.
But I, I.
I would just say that I think that he's just not lying.
That's all I can say is that he's not lying that strange things happen to him or he experienced strange things.
And he's telling it as he remembers it.
But if I were with David when one of these things were happening, I don't think I would have seen what he was seeing.
I don't think they were really happening in our objective reality as we see it.
Yeah.
Sort of, it was almost in another dimension, like a dream-like state.
Who knows?
Yeah.
And I also, you know, I'm not, I want to clarify, I'm not saying that like all UFO sightings are this either.
Okay.
Because I think those can be different things.
Like UFOs, which now we have, you know, footage of from the military.
Right.
That's a big leap still from being abducted and from being, from having sex with whoever's on these UFOs, you know?
They don't have to be the same thing.
And I think a lot of people.
Of people get caught up in that.
Well, the funny thing is about the whole, like, I mean, it's a fun, it's such a fun subject.
The funny, the interesting thing about it is, is not that long ago, just like talking about UFOs was like had the stigma of modern day talking about abduction.
Like, right, like now talking about UFOs is like, okay, yeah, it's been in the New York Times.
It's been like, like Navy pilots talk about it.
And it's like, yeah, we accept it.
And, but abduction is kind of like, okay, now you're crossing the line.
But not that long ago, it was like, just talking about seeing UFOs being real, talking about UFOs being real, that was crossing the line.
Yeah.
So how much down the line, farther down the timeline we go, when maybe abduction will be proven right.
Maybe.
Yeah.
And then like, okay, we'll wait for sex with aliens for another 10 years until we accept that.
And then we'll all be looking back at David and being like, damn, he was right.
Yeah.
But I mean, going back in like the Greek and Hindu mythology, their sex with their gods.
Right, who kind of look like aliens and come from the sky, and so it could, you know, it could just be a different form of that, yeah.
He seems just like such a nice person, such a genuine guy.
He doesn't seem like the kind of guy that's looking for attention, yeah.
He's not publishing books or anything.
He seems like the like even the art show seems like something that you guys kind of like, or not maybe you, but other people around him pushed him to do, like encouraged him to do it, yeah.
Oh, no, I did it, like I set up the whole show for him, yeah, because otherwise, they're.
Creatures We Didn't Think Existed00:02:22
No one would see his work in person.
So we just rented a gallery and filled it with his paintings.
And then people just came.
It was like in Manhattan.
So people just walked in.
And it was basically his first show or solo show.
And he got to interact with people.
And everyone that talked to him were like, wow, I look at the images and they look bonkers.
But then I talk to him and now I really have to think about it.
Yeah.
It's fucking fascinating.
Yeah.
What other types of people similar to him have you talked to or interviewed?
Right.
So he's sort of the most, the person who's most experienced the supernatural.
So there's, you know, I've had, I've done a short and working on a feature about cryptozoologists, those who study animals that most likely don't exist or, you know.
Cryptozoologists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It just stands for, it's the study of unknown or hidden animals.
And so Bigfoot falls into that.
The Loch Ness monster falls into that.
And then animals that were once extinct and maybe could still be alive.
So like the Tasmanian tiger.
Have you heard of the coelacanth?
No.
That was a fish that they thought coelacanth?
Yeah.
Okay.
It was a fish that they thought went extinct millions of years ago.
And then just, you know, decades ago actually found it's still alive and still, you know, thriving populations of it.
It looks wild, like this wild prehistoric fish.
So that would be considered like a cryptid, what they study.
And then it goes as far as there's like one called the Mongolian Death Worm, which is sort of in between.
Do you ever see that movie Tremors?
Oh, of course.
Yeah.
So it's sort of like mini or like sandworms from Dune.
It's like these mini versions of that that spit acid.
It's one of the most terrifying animals in all movies.
Yeah.
And so these Mongolian, like, you know, yak herders and desert nomads claim that they see these death worms.
They're not that, they're like maybe like that.
Oh, okay.
But they can like paralyze you, spit acid.
Electrocute you, do psychic things.
So that's like far on the hard to believe end.
And then there's some that, like, you know, we do find creatures that we didn't think existed.
Unraveling Beliefs and Psychology00:15:48
Yeah.
I find it, I love the whole, I love the UFO subject, but when I talk to people about UFOs, I often find that they also believe in Bigfoot.
Yes.
And then it kind of just ruins it for me.
You know?
There's factions, though.
There's some that believe they're connected, that Bigfoot is an interdimensional being.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, and then there's the real cryptozoologists.
They treat it like zoology, you know, like it's a science.
And some of them are actually like primatologists.
And they hate when people connect UFOs and Bigfoot because to them, UFOs are the crazy, stupid thing.
And Bigfoot's the real thing.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've heard of that, like flying saucers and UFO sightings being directly correlated with Bigfoot.
Yep.
Yeah.
It's odd.
It is.
Yeah.
And then I also did a short doc about a conspiracy theorist and now working on a feature doc about a group of conspiracy theorists.
And that's another kind of.
That's another guy that was like really, really nice guy, it seemed like.
And another guy named David.
He was named David and an artist.
Yeah, an artist.
Yeah.
Synchronicities, man.
Exactly.
And he, so he, that's, you know, I, I, I'm not like really interested with the unraveling the conspiracies that he was interested in.
It was more unraveling him and his beliefs and his psychology.
Because, you know, his, the conspiracies and that, they were like so out of this world, right?
Like, you know, no.
Children died at Sandy Hook school shootings and you know everything is a false flag and you know, like mind control stuff, which a lot of it you, when you, when you break it down, a lot of that stuff has precedent.
A lot of it's come true.
Yeah, like MKUltra right, there have been false flag events like Gulf Of Conk and start the Vietnam War and and so and, like Edward Snowden with all the surveillance.
So it it's easier to understand why people fall down those rabbit holes because you know the government's always been lying to us in the most outrageous ways.
But then it's taken to a level where, you know, it's like, oh yeah, the Jews are injecting us with microchips and drinking baby blood and all that.
And it's like, oh, well, yeah.
What do you think it is about people that draws them to those crazy conspiracies?
Is there a commonality that you found between all those people?
Yeah.
I think one is that we all, There's a lot of chaos in the world.
More and more so it feels that way because we're aware of everything that's going on and that's scary and it helps to try and bring order to that chaos.
So if you, if all this horrible shit is happening like you know the Travis Scott concert and it and you're like why, why is that happening it's more scary for some people to think that that just happened.
You know that it was a mistake and it was random versus this was a planned event, you know, and people are controlling all of this.
And so everything that bad that's happening, these are people that are controlling it.
And so there might be a way to break free of that control or I know this secret knowledge and I won't be affected by this.
And so I think that helps especially when it's a little different in this country because you could say like conspiracy theories rose when religion fell in a lot of places.
But because religion was another thing that that sort of brought order out of chaos.
But in the in the United States, you know, belief in religion hasn't fallen.
that seems to be increasing.
Not in Florida.
I don't know where you live.
Not in Florida.
Not on the coast.
Inland, it's probably big.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah.
Our God is Donald Trump down here.
Right.
It seems like it.
And then the people that, so I think anyone can fall into that belief, but the people that go really deep into it, I think then there's something psychologically that's going on, and it could come from, you know, there's studies that, That certain people have had trauma and then that leads them to be suspicious of authority figures, because maybe that trauma was caused by a parent or a teacher.
And then it leads you to have distrust for any authority or authority figure, and usually the largest form of that is the government, and so that trauma makes you suspicious and suspicious for the rest of your life.
And then there's this thing called apophenia, which is it's our faculty to, it's related to our faculty to see patterns in the world.
And so that's a good thing, you know, especially when you're like a hunter-gatherer and you're figuring out like, is that a deer or is that just leaves?
Like a saber-toothed tiger trying to kill me.
Yeah, exactly.
But when it goes into overdrive, and especially in our culture where it's not as important, you can start seeing patterns in places that don't exist.
And that spectrum goes into paranoia if you go to the extreme end, because everything has meaning and there's no randomness, um.
But interestingly, that's also the spectrum towards like creativity, because like, for example, apparently like Da Vinci was had big time apophenia, he would see, you know, in in the grains of wood, he would see like whole scenes and then really to him yeah, and that could be like a painting, um.
But if you take that too far, then you know it's like face in mars or Jesus in the toast.
Yeah, that goes into overdrive and and it seems like a lot of these people have that as well and and some similar with like the numerology, you know, like Like Gematria, it's, it's like where, where everything has numerological significance and can be broken down via numbers.
Yeah, it's similar Hmm Do you do you notice any commonalities with like people who were just lonely?
Yeah, that too.
Yeah, that because what I've noticed I just interviewed this guy who did a documentary about QAnon.
Okay, who's the guy?
Colin Hoback.
Oh, yeah, yeah, and From what he gathered, or what I gather, we talked about it from like the people that are like balls deep into this deep state satanic pedophile ring.
Yeah.
Is that it's just people that just lack a sense of community.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
And that, I would say that is a big part of it.
And it's also where I think a lot more of the like hateful conspiracies come into play because if you take David as an example from my doc, he.
David D's?
Yeah, David D's.
Okay.
D's nuts.
Yeah, D's nuts.
He had no IRL interactions.
He was basically a hermit.
He'd maybe go to the grocery store once every two weeks or something.
And he had one friend in town who was also a conspiracy theorist.
And so all of his interactions were just like online, on Facebook, and in YouTube comments.
And as you know, it's a lot easier to start to marginalize people, to think people are idiots, and to be mean when it's only online.
And your world gets really small.
Even though the internet is big, your world gets smaller and smaller and smaller because you're only interacting with the screen and just your group, your ever-shrinking group.
And so when people like me and my cameraman went out there to meet him, it sort of blows his world open.
He's like, because I'm Jewish, and he's just like, oh, you're a nice Jewish person.
You're not trying to control me.
Yeah, he had a lot of anti-Semitic imagery in his artwork, right?
He did, yeah.
Why was that?
So he would just say, he's not Anti-semitic, he's like anti-zionist um, which he didn't even know what Zionism was.
Uh, but it's, you know, it's it.
I think he's just influenced by everything that comes before him and and beyond, behind every conspiracy theory online.
It's like pretty much the Jews once you, you know, keep is that it's for most of them yeah, even even if it's not like expressly um stated it's.
It goes back to the whole like that protocols of the Elders OF ZION, which is this like famous forgery From Europe in like the 1900s or 1800s, maybe even goes before that.
That was this fake document that was basically saying, written as if it were the Jews, that they want to control the world.
And so it was taken as being real.
Wasn't there also something, the whole like Satanist baby eaters started back then too?
Yeah, blood libel.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And so I think that stuff, and that was always just because the Jews were the other, they were the other in Europe, you know, the marginalized group that would never assimilate.
and had strange rituals and they were from a far off place and they looked a little different, but they looked just, you know, the same enough that they could, you know, sneak into our society.
And so that's where it seemed to start and never have been able to shake that, especially in the conspiracy world.
But, you know, meeting David and him meeting us, it was just like, oh, wow, you know, nice, normal guys are in my life now and I can talk about things that aren't conspiracies.
And he just sort of like lit up.
And wanted to talk about his bunnies and his cats and you know art and and not talk about conspiracies and yeah, he seemed like a completely different person.
Yeah, how long does it take you to do something like that?
That documentary you done him.
That was like a 15 minute short yeah.
That that um, so that was another like self-funded thing.
So it's like you just go there and you try and shoot as much as you can, and so we only really had a couple days to shoot with him.
We wanted to go back, but he he died while I was editing yeah, and he didn't.
He didn't hint that he was sick.
So I had no idea.
If I had known why, I would have like, shown him stuff and tried to go out and film with him again.
So the editing part took like a year just because like I didn't know what to do with it.
How did you find out that he died?
I just saw his obituary online.
Yeah, I was just searching him to get some like image reference of his work and then it showed up in the obituary.
And yeah, he had died two months after we filmed with him.
And he alluded to like very offhand that he might have had some cancer.
But that he cured it with by drinking baking soda Because you had read on YouTube or watched a YouTube video.
It was like you can cure your cancer by if you make your body alkaline enough.
And so he just, he never went to the doctor.
And he also had like a, like a, like an e-meter, like a Scientology machine.
Yeah.
It was called, it looks just like one, but it's different.
It's called the Rife machine.
And it basically works on the principle that every like virus and bacteria and parasite operates on a certain frequency.
And if you like tune another frequency into that frequency, then it kills it all in your body if you hold on to these tubes.
And so, and I mean, he got hoodwinked into buying.
Oh, this is it.
There's thousands of dollars.
Really?
And the person who sold it to him hoodwinked him into buying like 10 of them so that he could resell them, which he was never able to sell any.
And David was poor.
So he just went into debt.
It's super sad.
Did you, are these things, what are they used for?
Are they nothing?
They're just bullshit machines.
I mean, I would say so.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Rife's World.
Yeah, but it's.
It doesn't seem like there's anything to it and in it.
He's like he's using and he's like and I don't even feel a thing Yeah, where do you think he learned about something like is this something like he found on YouTube or like likely?
Yeah, not he didn't really go on Reddit except to look at his own There was a subreddit about him about these nuts.
Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember you showing so he would go on that subreddit So basically they would it was really popular.
It was like now there's like 15,000 people in the subreddit and Wow, they would just post his art and make fun of it, you know, And we but it was super active, like there'd be, like you know 30, 50 comments on on these paintings and he would go on to read them because it was the only place he could see people like talking about his work and so, even though they were calling him like schizophrenic and crazy on there, he still like got a kick out of it and he would um, he would make like burner accounts on Reddit and like argue,
what was the he?
You asked him about um, like marriage or relationship.
He said he got poisoned by something.
Yeah, so he, you know he had never apparently had a steady relationship um, or in his adult life, and and his reason was uh, that he, he had been doing airbrushing as his job.
You know he would do like big billboards and you know movie posters and stuff, which was all a lot of it was done through airbrushing then and he never wore a mask and it's super.
It's like heavy metals, you know aerosolized, that you're breathing in that go, you know that gets into your brain tissue and cadmium was the major one.
Cadmium.
Yeah, that's what it was, and so when he told me that he said, He said, I got poisoned and like I had neurological damage from the cadmium.
And he was sick for like years from that and never really fully recovered.
And that was like the prime of his life.
And it fucked him up enough that his career never recovered and he never was able to, you know, have these, have lasting relations.
It didn't like make total sense.
But I started looking up cadmium poisoning and the effect on the brain.
And there was a lot of links to schizophrenia of it.
Causing schizophrenic like symptoms.
And when he got poisoned that was also around the same time that he fell into these conspiracies and getting really deep into them, and before that it didn't seem like he was like no, I never even had any, I never thought about conspiracies or any of this stuff, like he was into UFOs and and that sort of thing.
But it seemed to coincide and so maybe you know, I drew like a thin link to maybe this neurological damage thrust him into like the deep world of conspiracy.
But you know I shouldn't even be making that link because I'm not having any kind of qualifications to do that, but it's like, it's what I saw.
Now, did you notice any personality traits that were similar with him and people like David Hugg?
No.
No similarities?
Not really.
Yeah, no, not really.
I mean, they're both, I guess one thing, like the cryptozoologists and these people, they tend to be more introverted and a little more hermit-like and spend a lot of time with themselves and self-reflecting.
Getting Hoodwinked Online00:08:02
As well.
But then again, those are also like, you know, people in history that have had like mystical experiences are oftentimes, you know, people are self reflective and they go on these journeys alone.
And yeah.
And you just find like ever since you started talking to these people and filming them, you're just, you're constantly drawn to these types of characters.
Yeah.
Yeah.
With beliefs that make other people want to write them off immediately.
Like if there's someone that, that someone else, Or most people would just say, don't waste your time talking to this person.
They're crazy.
I want to really dig in and be like, are they?
Or is what they believe really crazy?
Why do they believe it?
Maybe if we figure that out, we can understand more about ourselves, especially with conspiracies because we have to learn how to have a dialogue about this stuff.
And with these people, now in our country, more than any other country, it's just like, it's just such a split and people are digging in on both sides and there's like no crosstalk at all.
And even in the same families, you know?
Yeah, well, it's a problem with algorithms, right?
Sure.
When you start talking about one thing, it kind of just like they hoodwink you into one little group of people and there's no outside perspective on sites like YouTube and Twitter.
They just kind of like feed you all the same shit.
I'm so curious if Facebook didn't exist, where we would be at.
I know, right?
God.
And then, you know, on top of that, which was something I talked to Cullen about, is the whole censorship thing.
Yeah.
YouTube and Google, especially, and Twitter, they censor a lot of the conversations around the conspiratorial stuff.
And it pushes those people to the Chans, like 8chan and 8coon, pushes them to Reddit.
And then, once they get banned off these big websites like Twitter, it just makes them more emboldened to stand by whatever it is they believe.
And they push it even harder because they feel like they're the one that's got the boot on their neck.
Right.
Which is fascinating how all these, you know, the whole Q thing blew up from that, you know, is when the whole Q thing got banned from Reddit and it pushed it to the Chans, which is essentially, if you follow the timeline, what blew it up, you know, into this massive mainstream thing.
Everyone thinking that Donald Trump was some superhero that was going to take down these evil cabal.
And still do.
Yeah, they still do.
And they're still waiting for JFK Jr. to come back.
Oh, yeah.
Dead.
Oh, my God.
In Dallas.
Yeah.
And his, yeah, his, his, uh, memorial is the shape of a q, the letter q yeah, and and uh oh man, they have this vigil, vigil for him still in, like there was some, they were waiting for him, I think like a week ago, and really in Dallas.
Yes yeah, they're waiting.
Did you go there and film it?
I didn't no I, I did not.
But the that q and you know, QNON Anonymous podcast, they they had someone there.
I think yeah, they did.
Oh, my gosh, I bet that.
I bet you would have caught some interesting characters there yeah, Yeah.
I feel like the whole thing, I've stayed away from the Q verse and even the Q verse and the sort of more political conspiracies because everyone else is covering that, like Vice and other TV channels and websites and stuff.
So I'm less interested in the more current affairs.
Have you seen the HBO documentary?
I haven't.
I really should.
It reminds me so much of your work.
It reminds me of the same type of people, these outcasts.
Yeah.
The outcasts, the people that, you know, the lone, you know, have no sense of community, don't have a lot of, you know, it's sad, but it's so fascinating at the same time.
You know, and here, like in this area, it's like you're, I'm right in the middle of it.
There's so many people like that in Florida.
Yeah.
It's just, I mean, I'm in Texas.
So I've never been to Texas.
I've been to Texas.
I've, like, I've been to the airport, but I've never been outside the airport.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm in the Austin bubble.
Okay.
So you're in, like, the Silicon Valley of Texas.
Yeah.
It just seems like, like, you know, other cities i've lived, like I used to live in, like Miami and Fort Lauderdale, did you really?
I did, yeah.
And and Seattle and you know Toronto, and you've been all over the place.
Yeah, like liberal cities and and um, Austin's like that.
But like, when you leave, Alex Jones lives there, doesn't he?
Yeah exactly, which is funny.
Yeah, and he likes it, you know well yeah, of course he loves it.
You know he loves me being on all those podcasts that are in Austin exactly, and he just got, didn't?
I saw on the news today that he got charged or he got pledged or he got.
Doesn't look good.
He's guilty for the Sandy Hook thing right, doesn't look good.
I know a filmmaker who she just, she's, she's wrapping her movie on him, her doc.
Oh, really?
Yeah, Alex's War.
She was embedded with him for like a year.
What?
Yeah.
Like working, like doing her documentary with his permission?
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
She did that doc, that feel when no GF, I don't know, TFW, no GF, but incels.
I haven't seen that.
Yeah.
And so she's kind of was in that.
Community and got access to Alex.
And he was cool with it.
Yeah.
I don't know the whole story, but yeah.
Is it.
Have you seen the final human scene?
No.
Because they just wrapped it, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
It's like, it's going to be in between.
It's not, it's going to be sort of like both sympathetic and showing him for how he.
Not just like a hip piece trying to make him look like a piece of shit.
I think that's the only reason why she's human.
Yeah.
Have you ever met him?
No.
I've seen him.
Yeah.
Just going crazy at like Barton Springs, or sorry, the Greenbelt, which is just like walking trail.
And at the start of COVID, you had to have like a reservation to use the trail so it wouldn't get too crowded.
And Alex just showed up to go walking there and he didn't have a reservation and he just like lost his mind on the like poor park person, just this kid who was like, I'm sorry, I can't let you in.
And he was just, you know, ranting about it.
And you saw him just.
Yeah.
berating some kid.
Wow.
It's on YouTube too.
Wow.
Yeah.
Have you followed the Bohemian Grove thing?
Yeah.
I mean, that was kind of great.
I thought that was fun.
That was, you know, before Alex Jones was like had sort of picked a side politically.
He hated all politicians, it seemed like.
And, you know, it seems like he's back there now.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Just from like lately, I've seen him on a couple podcasts.
He seems like he's changed his tune on, you know, he used to be like hardcore like Trump guy.
Now he's like.
Anti-Trump again.
Okay.
He changes with the wind, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, and everyone seemed to hate Bush back then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that documentary that he did was pretty fucking cool back then, that he did way back in the day.
It's on YouTube.
Yeah.
Huh.
So are you working on anything right now?
Yeah, so the David Dees piece got me hired to co-direct a feature-length doc where there's going to be maybe like, let's say like 10 conspiracy theorists that we're just going to sort of live with and do these intimate portraits of, like conspiracy theorists, people who are ex-conspiracy theorists.
Family members of conspiracy theorists, and then intertwine that with experts, like historians, psychologists, neurologists, who will give context to why, basically, why we believe, why are conspiracy theories on the rise, etc.
Hidden City Under the Mountain00:02:55
Then working on a feature length doc about cryptozoologists, so the people that study Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and all of those.
I had done a short doc that.
That helped to inspire this.
And then working on a docu series that's about folklore, like bizarre folklore, and Telos or Bust, the one about Mount Shasta, that's sort of like our pilot in progress for that one.
Okay.
Yeah.
Telos or Bust.
Yeah.
Explain that one for people who aren't familiar.
Yeah.
So there's a town in Northern California called Mount Shasta.
It's a really small town, like 3,000 people, but it's known for this majestic place.
mountain that rises up into the sky that you see from miles and miles away and you see it and it's just like, wow, this mountain is striking and it sort of calls you to it.
But most people just drive right by and don't realize that in the town at the foot of the mountains, a large percentage of the people that live there believe that there's a hidden city underneath the mountain called Telus and it's inhabited by what they call ascended masters, Which are sort of these, these perfect beings, immortal beings that maybe were once human.
Um, and they live in this amazing crystalline, interdimensional city.
Yeah and, and they're.
You know, they escaped, you know, Lemuria and Atlantis, when they sank, a handful of them had escaped to tell us, through the inner earth network of tunnels that exists.
So they say um and, and they ended up in underneath Mount Shasta.
And so there's a whole, there's a whole spectrum of beliefs there, like there's a religion that popped up called the I AM Activity, that is based out of there, that has their own set of beliefs.
There's the people that kind of somewhat worship the Ascended Masters.
And then there's those that just, they want to like get into Telos and like think it's a physical city and they look for the door on the mountain.
And some claim that they've found the door and that you can access the city.
Others, it's more like a spiritual place.
So they'll lead you into it through meditation or chanting.
And so it's this whole, but imagine like it's a whole little town of people that.
That whole sort of belief that this thing exists, this sort of metaphysical thing exists under the mountain.
Yeah, and so it's a wild place, and there's, for a town that size, like 10 crystal shops, and they're all like totally busy inside, people just buying crystals and other things.
And everyone you meet is like, or almost everyone you meet is super fascinating, interesting character, has their own story about how they got there and why.
Accurate Psychic Readings00:07:29
It's funny when you go to those weird little remote towns in these random places around the country, you'll find these types of characters.
Sedona is another, I haven't been there, but.
Sedona?
Yeah.
And in Florida, there's Casadega.
And that's a city that's all spiritualists and mediums.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, and psychics.
And so it's a tiny town inside another town, but it's the highest percentage of spiritualists and mediums.
And so if you really want to get a reading or talk to a dead loved one, You know, like you want to talk to your great-grandma, you go to Casadaga and you can talk to your great-grandma.
Really?
Yeah.
Do you know what part of Florida it is?
Yeah, it's central, a little north-ish.
I think it's near, my geography is not 100%, but it's nearer to like Orlando.
So it's not that far from here probably.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'll have to look it up.
Yeah, yeah.
We want to do one of our episodes there.
Okay.
Yeah.
Have you ever talked to a medium or anything like that?
I'm not really.
I haven't had a serious conversation with psychics, yes.
But not someone who channels the dead.
Right.
Yeah.
You have talked to psychics, though?
Yes.
Yeah.
What is your experience with psychics?
I talked to this man who's known as the greatest living psychic, or he's like the most scientifically studied psychic.
His name's Sean Haribance.
He's almost 90.
And I found out about him because I'm working on another little short doc about this scientist in Canada who, He was made famous by his God helmet experiments.
So he designed a helmet that stimulated your brain with magnetic fields and created the God experience.
And he also studied, he died, he's a very reputable scientist and fairly well respected.
And he had this psychic, Sean Haribance, into his lab to study his brain to try and figure out what is going on with this guy and also to run studies where he would give psychic readings of people.
He would do a scientific study.
Designed around this and the accuracy was pretty, like statistically astounding.
So he told me to go meet with this guy and he lives out, he lives outside of Houston.
So I just drove and met him and as soon as I walked in the room he um, he asked me how I was doing like post breakup and I had just broken up with like a girlfriend of three years really, yep, and then he started asking me about my, my work shoots that I was working on, and there's no way, because I like these are shoots that I haven't even shot yet.
And he's like, oh yeah, so you're going to Africa and like crazy, like just as soon as I walked in the room and I was just like oh wow um, because I, you know, i'd never had a reading or even necessarily, where was this?
Again, in outside of Houston okay, and the problem is he um he, he's like Trinidadian and Indian and his accent is like almost indecipherable.
Like I understood just half of what he was saying.
It was really hard to understand him.
And he's super old and not in good health.
And so I was meeting with him to see if I would want to film with him.
But yeah, it was wild.
And he's had, so pretty much every past president or administration has consulted him.
And he was showing me like the official documents, like whatever white, like with Bill Clinton, you know, and Bill Clinton's asking him about, he's advising him on like soybean future prices, like crazy shit.
Yeah, yeah.
He's got, he has correspondence with all these.
Past presidents, and the only one of you know, probably since like Reagan, um, that he hasn't consulted was well, and Biden, I doubt he has, but was uh, was Trump.
So Trump was the only one that he and apparently you remember I don't have time for that shit.
Do you remember Corey Lewandowski Trump's he was like Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski Yeah, he was Trump's campaign manager and then he like shoved some like a female reporter in an event and like bruised her arm and then he was out and does he live in Florida?
No, that was Roger Stone.
Oh no, and you're thinking of the other younger guy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah That's not him.
Okay, but anyway, so Corey he look that look that guy up.
He's talking about yeah What's his name?
Corey Lewandowski.
Corey Lewandowski.
So Sean Haribance told me, I don't have proof, obviously, but that Corey Lewandowski reached out to him and was like, well, you know, Trump wants a reading.
We want Trump to get a reading.
And Sean Haribance basically was just like, yeah, I'll give him a reading if he goes and sees like a psychologist or something because like something's not right in his head.
Before meeting him?
Before meeting him.
He said that.
Yeah, so that's the guy.
Okay.
Yeah, so he didn't want to give Trump a reading, basically.
Oh, I wish he would have.
Yeah, it would have been.
Could you imagine being able to film that?
I know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, I read a bunch of the studies that, I mean, he was studied at like, I think like Caltech or just some real serious educational institutions.
And some of his hits, like his psychic hits were like trillion to one odds.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But then other times, like with a lot of this phenomena, it's hard to reproduce consistently.
Other times he was just like as good as chance.
You know, so it wasn't like every time he would be able to read someone accurately, but other times it was just like scary how accurate he was.
Well, is he still alive?
He's still alive.
Look him up real quick.
Yeah.
How do you spell his name?
Sean, S-E-A-N, and then Haribance is H-A-R-R-I-B-A-N-C-E.
Haribance, okay.
Yeah.
So one of the things, I'm just coming back to this guy.
I mean, he's very intense looking.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That's what he looks like now.
Yeah.
The gray hair.
Really nice guy in Houston.
Yeah.
And so he didn't, he had, he didn't even learn to read or write until like in his, in his like teens because he had a severe learning disability.
And also he, um, he has no, his brain has no geospatial faculty.
So if he walks out of his house, he has no idea where he is.
Like he's lost.
Really?
Immediately.
Yeah.
Like he has no, he has, he just doesn't know where he is in space.
Basically, like directionally.
Yeah.
And there's, when they had him in the MRI, there was like, it looked as if he had some kind of brain damage in certain areas.
And so, you know, the lay theory is like that, you know, damage in one area could lead to some kind of ability enhancement in other areas.
Yeah.
I've heard things similar to that with like people who have had lots of brain trauma.
Right.
Yeah.
Like they somehow become like excel in some area of their life, whether it be like, Business or whatever, whatever it is, or sports or amazing at math.
Yeah.
Oh, that's so weird.
Yeah.
So, does he not leave his house?
Not really.
Born With Psychic Abilities00:07:28
And I think, well, with his wife, he has his wife.
So, she always has to be with him.
Yeah.
And he's so old now, I don't think they, you know, do much.
So, did you end up filming with him at all?
No.
Mostly because I can't understand.
I can barely understand him.
That's the problem.
And I like to take a picture of him.
You can, but it's just the interview with him.
I don't know what he's.
Half the time, I don't know what he's saying to me, and I don't know if he's answering my question.
And so maybe his wife was there, but it's yeah, that's a tough one.
And also a tough one to make, like, how do I make that look interesting?
Because all he does is sort of just sit at home.
And his home is, you know, it's not remarkable.
Yeah, that's one of the cool things about your documentary.
Like the first one, the first, what was the first one with David Dees?
Like the, you're just confined to like his trailer, but you fucking made it look so sick with all of the shots that you made.
And even when it comes to like, you showed the montage of him creating that one piece and you had like the wide angle just doing a 180 to him.
That was so cool.
Yeah, we had, we put a 360 cam.
Oh, really?
Between him and his computer.
And we just, like, in post, were spinning the camera.
Circling it.
Yeah.
Wow, that was fucking cool.
Do you do any of the cinematography yourself?
Or are you just strictly behind the scenes?
I do a little.
That one was shot by my buddy Cody Cobb, who's, like, an amazing photographer.
And basically, like, if I can, like, he did that as a favor.
If I can't afford a DP, I'll just shoot it myself.
But I always want to hire a real cinematographer when I can.
Like, Love and Saucers, that was shot by.
Or most of it was shot by the guy who did Napoleon Dynamite, who shot Napoleon Dynamite.
What was?
11 Saucers.
What's that?
No, the David Huggins one.
Oh, oh, oh, okay.
Oh, I didn't understand.
I thought you said 11 Saucers.
11 Saucers.
So the guy who shot Napoleon Dynamite shot that?
Yes.
What?
Yeah.
That's fucking wild, dude.
That was another one that was shot fucking amazing.
And the way, also, like, I noticed the way that you guys, like, spliced the B roll.
Like, I love the way you cut those things.
You know what I mean?
Like, first of all, you started it with, like, just.
I was raped or I lost my virginity to an alien when I was 17 years old.
And then it just like cuts to him like in a fucking valley or something.
Like, it was so cool the way you did that.
What I was about to say before I went into that was we're talking about psychics.
When I first had Mike Cleland on, you know, his story is about like owls and UFOs, like the synchronicities of, you know, how whenever there's owl sightings, there's UFO sightings.
And his theory is that.
When people see these owls, what they really are as aliens, sort of using some sort of visual mind trick to making you think it's an owl.
So you don't think of it as you, you don't remember you saw an alien.
You have this implanted memory of seeing an owl.
And the book, his first book, Messengers, is just basically hundreds of different accounts, like the most famous accounts of these.
These things happening, these situations happening.
And then he goes into, you know, he started telling me that he's seen multiple psychics his whole life.
And he's like, oh yeah, I went to this psychic, I went to that psychic, I've been seeing this psychic, I did hypnotic regression here.
I've been in hypnosis hundreds of times and starts talking about all these psychics.
And I'm like, whoa, like, first of all, I am like deeply skeptical about psychics.
Yeah.
So he starts like talking about his like unwavering belief in mediums and psychics.
And he sort of lost me there, which is the same thing with Bigfoot.
But I start talking about UFOS people, they start talking about Bigfoot.
Yeah, I kind of like lose it.
Yeah, you lose me there.
I think with psychics, what I think is is like a lot of these things um, 99.99 of it is is not real, and maybe that you know not necessarily that the psychic is a scam artist, but that they're just, you know, saying what's coming to them um, or they are scam artists, but that there's there's like enough there and enough evidence that That point zero zero zero, one percent, let like something is going on.
It's like, you know, the are you familiar with the remote viewing phenomenon, those experiments?
A little bit, yeah.
So that, you know, government program that lasted 20 years, many millions of dollars put into it that had remote viewing.
Who was the guy, the billionaire who did that, who like put a bunch of money into that?
Oh, Bigelow.
Bigelow.
Yeah, yeah.
So he, I don't know if he did, I don't know if he specifically put money into the remote viewing.
He put it into the like UFO stuff.
But for the remote viewing, that was just like Pentagon, CIA money.
Okay.
Yeah.
And once the Freedom of Information Act, once they were able to get those documents through that, it painted a picture of this whole program.
And the people who ran the program at Stanford were able to write about it and have written books about it.
And all of the studies that they did and that were presented to the military were laid bare.
And there's stuff there that even in their own report was like it was statistically significant.
And there were some hits that were sort of impossible to describe in any other way.
I do think that, especially with psychological stuff, this sigh, as they call it, that there's something there.
And it doesn't have to be that it's woo-woo or magic.
It's just we don't even really understand consciousness or how consciousness works.
So it could just be something we don't understand.
It's like a sense that we have that's incredibly rare that some people can tap into sometimes and see at a distance.
In that we just, you know, simply don't understand what's going on there.
And so that, I think that's, that is pretty interesting and, and like could be real.
But that's still pretty far from like a psychic telling you about, you know, what went on in a past life or.
Yeah.
You think some people are just born with just like, like say there is another like parallel dimension to us.
Like some people are just born with.
A better comprehension of that, or they can see it more than other people can, or they have better access to it, whether it is just like some sort of genetic thing with their brain and with something that we don't understand, like a genetic consciousness.
Maybe some are more predisposed to it, but with the whole remote viewing program that the government was funding, the point of that one was that they could teach anyone to do it.
And so they would just teach people that didn't seem to have any ability.
And that was the point of it was that they could train what they called the psychic spies to, to like, it was all to like spy on Russia.
Right.
You know, during the Cold War.
And then the Cold War ended.
They're like, well, we don't need psychic spies anymore.
And we also have, you know, satellites.
Right, right, right.
That are better at it.
So, um, how many do you, how many people successfully did like were able to do remote viewing?
Training Psychic Spies00:08:07
I want to know.
Oh, it was, it was an all right number.
There was like, you know, a handful that were really good at it, like that consistently pretty good.
But I'll, um, there's a great book just called Mind Reach.
Mind reach, yeah, that's that is like sort of details the program.
And the guy who one of the guys who ran it he lives in Austin, Texas, really.
Yeah, so I want to try and he's like again, another guy who's like 90, who yeah, I need to try and get before he, dude, these like these these films that you make they take so long to make, like especially with like David Huggins.
You said three years were yeah, I have similar experience doing stuff like that.
Before I started this, I did a lot of similar types of docu-series stuff.
And my experience with it is just like you explained: the first time you visit, the first time I visited this one group of local fishermen around here, I did a similar documentary about commercial fishing and the people, the lowest level, the deckhands.
And we met with the first guy, and it was like, holy shit, we just discovered another universe.
We're going to go down this rabbit hole.
And we filmed it for like six months.
And then.
I sat on all that footage for like three years before I even touched anything, started editing anything.
It was just such a daunting idea to edit and package all of that shit.
Yeah.
And eventually, I don't know what it was, but I just sat down and started going through it.
And then once I got like a certain percentage cut, I was like, okay, now I can start like taking bites of this thing and eating the whole thing.
Yeah.
Like I sat on the Huggins, my first Huggins footage for like four years.
Really?
I didn't touch it.
I didn't look at it.
I was just like, I can't like I just can't motivate myself.
I don't think it's gonna be good until I finally like I cut just like a little thing out of it to show people.
And then that was the motivation to yeah, to get into it, like cut a little teaser and show people, get the like the real world excitement exactly and make it sort of makes it real, you know, I mean put some music to it, and then it's like okay, now I'm gonna do it and that's yeah.
That's basically also what I learned from, because I worked in ad world too yeah, before this, and still kind of do, and that was like a good skill to learn is like packaging something and Making a thing that people will actually watch without turning away.
Now, when you come up with these ideas to film guys like this, do you just sort of like have the idea and you want to like fund it yourself until you can sort of like figure out how someone else can help you fund it and make it better?
Or do you just want to put it out on the internet and just see what happens?
Yeah, it depends.
The great thing about docs, making docs, is like you can.
Just start.
It's always good to plan and think first, but I can just go with a camera and audio.
It's not going to be great as good as it can be, but I can do something that I like with the D's thing that we can put online.
And I didn't wait for any funding for that one or anything, but then it did lead to interest in doing a bigger project out of that.
So with the series, with the folklore series, yeah, we shot that Mount Shasta thing as a little.
Proof of concept, same with the cryptozoologist stuff.
I think you just sort of have to start because similar like with the ad world, like people aren't going to get behind something unless they can already just see it and see at least a part of it, you know?
And especially now, you have to show people exactly what it's going to look and feel like before you actually make it somehow.
I have like a bad taste in my mouth from that whole world just because like I've done a lot of like short documentaries like you have.
Not recently, but when I did, like I would have production companies calling me or like, you know, production companies that have deals with whatever network it is.
And like, hey, we like that.
Are you working on anything else similar to that?
I just feel like they're fucking real estate brokers, you know, calling me to try to make some money on something cool.
And it's the same thing with podcasts.
Yeah.
A lot of there's like executives working at production companies just scouring podcasts, trying to find somebody to do a show to sell to Netflix.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
It just feels.
Just like a fucking car dealership.
You know what I mean?
It's pretty gross.
Yeah.
Gross.
That's a good word for it.
Yeah, it's the idea.
Maybe I'm just bitter because I've never put a documentary on Netflix.
It's just sort of treating it like disposable, like consumer goods, you know?
Like just thinking of it as content as opposed to a story.
Yeah.
Anyways, I don't know where I was going with that, but doing this was cool because it was like doing the documentary, but it takes, instead of three years, it takes three hours.
Yeah.
And, I don't have to shoot any B-roll or add any music to it.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
And also, yeah, you've made what, how many?
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
You can make hundreds of them in a year, you know, not one in three years.
What's that?
Oh, is it good now?
Yeah.
All right, cool.
And also, you know, pitching to someone, hey, come into my studio for a few hours is a lot easier for them to say yes to than I'm going to be with you for three years of your life.
Now yeah, but you don't have to tell them that in the beginning.
True, you just be like hey, I just want to, can I come to you and film for a day or whatever?
And then, once they get to meet you, i'm sure it's not, i'm sure it's easier for them to let you come back.
Yeah, like with David and so well, I mean, what about you, with all the guests that you've had and all their stories?
Have you changed your mind on things or changed your beliefs on on anything like?
As far as what?
Oh, anything like?
Have you like any beliefs that you had held that have now?
Um, Not really.
I haven't really changed any of my beliefs.
I don't like, I don't know.
I don't really have very many like beliefs that you could probably change for me.
It's more, I'm more of just like open to learning.
I've learned a lot.
I could say that.
I've learned a lot of things.
I've gotten better at like before I started doing this, like I was similar to you.
I would just go out and like and film something interesting, let the camera roll, and I would just try to like package it into something like a cool music video that was weird to watch.
You know what I mean?
And now it's sort of like, now I have to talk and like carry a conversation that's not edited.
Yeah.
So it's more of just me like building a skill and like learning, like having discipline.
Right.
You know what I mean?
To do like, I make sure I do at least one or two of these a week.
And, you know, you get better at certain things.
I've learned a lot.
I always like kind of like, I always, I have this like inner war going on whether I should just do these or go make more documentaries because the documentaries are much more fun to watch.
Sure.
And fucking a podcast.
Yeah.
You know?
But, well, what about.
When you see owls now, though.
Oh, I don't see owls.
I never see owls.
Aliens don't want anything to do with me.
Are there even owls in Tampa?
I don't.
Yeah, there's a few.
My mom has owls.
My mom sees owls all the time in her backyard.
Okay.
She has these little tiny owls.
So my mom might have some sort of connection to aliens.
Yeah.
But no, I don't know.
He was like, I love having the conversations.
Sure.
I don't think I could say, I don't want to say the guy's full of shit.
You know, he could totally, everything he's saying could be real to him.
Yeah.
But, you know, I don't really think about it that much after the conversation either.
Like, once we do the podcast, I don't dwell on it and think about it a lot.
I just kind of like, I remember the conversation.
Owls, Aliens, and Moms00:03:55
I remember the important parts of it.
I try to retain as much of it as I can and try to carry it into more conversations so I can just keep learning more and so on and so forth and just keep having better conversations.
I try to treat these like documentaries.
I try to treat these like little mini documentaries as best I possibly can.
So, anyways, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
You've had such a wild group of people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just look at the list.
I know.
Nothing's consistent.
It's not very consistent at all, especially when I'm trying to pitch a legitimate person on here who's not into any of the crazy fringe ideas, cultures.
You know what I mean?
There's one guy I had on here who's a doctor, a nutritional doctor, scientist.
And then typically when I try to reach out to people, I should show my credibility.
Look, I've interviewed.
Well, put aside, they're all criminals and conspiracy theorists.
So it gets weird sometimes when you're trying to talk to new people.
Yeah, that's happened to me.
As well, like with really where they're like, they'll go look on my website and be like, Oh, you interview wackos, yeah, right, right.
No, I'm not gonna be in your film, yeah.
The consistency is the biggest thing for me, just trying to you know remain consistent to it.
And um, there's a book about it too that I really like.
Um, I can't, the name is Escape, uh, The War of Art.
Okay, have you heard of that?
No, no, I haven't.
Um, it's it's all about uh, the guy's name is Steven, his last name's escaping me, anyways.
It's about he's a writer.
And he just talks about like confronting the muse, you know what I mean?
Confronting resistance, right?
Like the muse is the thing you get all your creativity from and like flows through you and just your connection with that, with your creativity is hindered by resistance.
Resistance can be anything, whether it be like eating or checking your emails, going on your phone, playing video games, watching movies or whatever.
And it's like the resistance is the one thing that stands in the way of you and the muse.
So, like, Every single day, if you're a creative person, the last thing you want to do is like get up and go to work in the morning every day, the same time, and have a routine.
So, his whole thing is you know, always sit down every day and do your work, whether you feel good or bad or creative or dry, you know, always sit down and you know, put in the time every single day.
And that's what you have to do.
You know, that's what creativity is being consistent and being disciplined.
And putting the time into your craft.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
And I was never like that before.
I would just be like, inspirate.
I have to be inspired to do something.
So even when you're not inspired, when you don't feel that calling, that pull, you know what I mean?
When you don't feel that, still sit down and push.
So that's what I gained.
You know, I made the connections between doing this and that.
Yeah.
I mean, that's always been my problem.
And it's still my biggest problem is not forcing myself or disciplining myself to work.
I have to be excited.
And then that's why things take years.
Yeah.
The resistance fucks you up, man.
Yeah.
The resistance, you'll grow old and fucking look back and just be like, God damn.
Yeah.
You know, I also feel like sometimes looking back, like in my early to mid 20s, like that was like, man, that was the most creative time of my life.
Like, so I'm like, made some of the coolest shit or did some of the coolest shit I ever did.
And I always wonder if that, if that sort of like connection to the muse, whatever you want to call it, if that dwindles the older you get.
You know what I mean?
Your connection gets worse and worse and worse.
The reception goes down.
I mean, even Hunter S. Thompson, I don't know if you've ever seen his, he had a schedule.
He, like, his sort of daily schedule.
And even, you know, which included all the drugs that he would consume.
History in the Everglades Keys00:14:50
Yeah.
But even he had this set block of time where he would write no matter what.
Really?
Yeah.
And no matter how fucked up he was, he would sit and write.
Really?
Yeah.
And it would end up being at, like, you know, midnight or three in the morning or something.
Yeah.
I've actually, he's fascinating.
I've been wanting to, like, Go down the rabbit hole of his story and his documentaries.
I just haven't done it yet.
Yeah.
He was a fan of Florida.
Was he?
I think he spent some time in the Keys.
Did he really?
Oh, the Key.
Have you ever been to the Keys?
You're going there right now, aren't you?
There tomorrow, yeah, for a month.
What are you doing there?
I got invited to an artist's residency.
So basically they give me an apartment and a studio and to just, and like a bicycle for a month.
And like it's just a space for me to work on whatever without what I want to work on without any distractions of like home.
Really?
Family.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what are you going to do?
I'm just going to like write, work on a movie.
Like a screenplay idea, work on these docs, like researching, editing.
Yeah.
I'm writing a podcast episode for the QAnon Anonymous guys.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
It's going to be on Mount Shasta about the Teal Express story.
So just work on all of that or not, or just, you know.
Have you ever listened to their podcast?
Is it like one of those produced podcasts with music and editing?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I love those podcasts.
And they're like serialized, right?
Like they tell stories through episodes.
Yeah.
Sometimes they'll be multi parts, but.
But actually, usually it's just like, you know, they'll get into, you know, some character in the conspiracy verse.
And that's what, you know, it's all about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Those podcasts are awesome.
Yeah.
But they focus, it's just conspiracy theories.
Those, the Keys is a fucking crazy place, dude.
Crazy.
You've never been?
I've gone for like when I was a kid.
Yeah.
And then I went like a couple days some years ago, but never really got to experience the craziness of the Keys.
When I was, I think, 19 years old.
Like when I first started between like 17 and 18 and 19, I was like, that's when I first started doing like, like picking up a video camera and making money with it.
And I got hired by a really big real estate company who owned a lot of like resorts and marinas in the Keys.
And through knowing somebody, they hired me to do video tours of all of their resorts and marinas.
And they owned apartment buildings everywhere.
Like not apartment, but like the condo buildings.
Yeah.
So I was going to like.
Big houses, condos, all these things all over the Keys by myself with a little Canon GL2.
And I was there for, I think, two and a half months when I was like 19 years old by myself.
They gave me like a little hotel room.
You know, I would start in each town.
So I'd start in Key Largo, go to Isla Murata, Marathon, then down to Key West eventually.
And I was by myself the whole time living in these tiny little hotel rooms.
And I had, they gave me a per diem of like 60 bucks a day.
And I would save it.
And I bought, I got a little, I brought my spear gun with me.
And every night I would swim under the bridges because there's bridges, fucking bridges everywhere, dude.
Like every mile there's a bridge.
And I would swim under the bridges at night and I would shoot lobster illegally.
And I would rip the tails off underwater because it's so illegal to do this.
And I'd rip the tails off underwater and stuff my board shorts pockets with lobster tails.
Then I'd go to Publix and buy corn, canned corn.
And I would bake the lobster tails, eat lobster tails and corn every fucking night, dude.
I've saved so much money.
That was an amazing adventure.
But Key West specifically is a crazy fucking town.
Yeah, I just imagine, I mean, a lot of drug running history.
Oh, yeah.
Uh huh.
And some, like, Cuban history.
And I hear there's still a lot of illegal, like, cockfighting going on there.
I wouldn't put it past them.
Yeah.
Yeah, a lot of crazy shit down there.
It's a fun place to party.
A lot of college kids go down there and get fucked up.
You should have, um, uh, Did you see Square Grouper?
Billy Corbin's documentary?
It's been a while.
It's been a while.
Yeah, I've seen it.
You should have this guy on.
He lives in Everglades City, Dave Shealy.
He was in.
I don't know if you saw my short about the skunk ape, which is South Florida's Bigfoot.
Yeah.
Did you see that?
Yeah.
Is that like Vice or something?
No.
Maybe.
No, no.
I think maybe you saw something else.
I just had a guy in here like three weeks ago who lives in Everglades.
In the Everglades.
He's like a big weed pot hauler guy.
Was that Dave Shealy?
No, his name wasn't Dave Shealy.
Oh, okay.
The fuck was his name?
Why am I forgetting his name?
Let me look it up real quick.
Hold on.
If you.
What the fuck?
I feel like such an idiot for not remembering his name.
This guy.
Tim McBride.
Can I see his photo?
Yeah.
I don't know him, but he lives in Everglades.
Google it.
This is like a bad photo.
Just Google Tim McBride.
Yeah, he was like one of the biggest pot haulers in Florida.
And he got a really long prison sentence.
So Dave Shealy did that stuff as well, but he's also.
Tim McBride, type in saltwater cowboy after that.
This guy.
Oh.
Vice did a thing on him.
It's like Hulk Hogan.
Yeah.
Yeah, so Dave Shealy is kind of like this guy, except he also has what's called the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters.
Yeah, I've seen this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want to say it was on Vice I saw.
I don't remember where I saw it online, but I didn't make the connection.
Okay, you did it.
Yeah, yeah.
And so he had that history of drug hauling in Everglade City, and he also is like styled himself as the foremost researcher of the skunk ape in the Everglades.
So he's like a, he considers himself a cryptozoologist and goes out there.
Oh, really?
And he has a campground out there.
That's pretty weird.
He's just, yeah, he's a character that would be super fun.
Are you going to talk to him on your way down there?
No.
Yeah, I haven't chatted with him since I filmed with him.
I'm not sure what he would have thought of the documentary.
Maybe he'd like it, but.
Yeah.
He's kind of a scary guy.
Is he really?
A little bit.
Yeah.
Why is he scary?
He's got like those eyes that like those sort of like cold blue eyes that like, you know, could murder you if you say the wrong thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a, there's a ton of fucking, there's a ton of history in here in this area of like big time cocaine and weed pot traffickers.
You know what I mean?
Like, just like I know a lot of people who are in like their 50s and 60s who were just.
Just around here that I know who were like gone, went to prison for a long time for smuggling cocaine.
Decades, yeah.
Like a lot, like just randomly, like I'll just find out.
Like I didn't even know, like you, I was interviewing, um, you know who Manny Puig is?
He's like the wild, have you ever seen Wild Boys on MTV?
I've heard of it, yeah.
So he's like, he's like the guy who, who swims down with like the giant 15 foot crocodile alligators and like levitates them.
Like he puts them into like a catatonic state underwater and then he like go, he like rides the, he was the first guy to ride a giant, great hammerhead shark, just a crazy guy.
And he's originally he still lives in Florida.
He was on here and I was talking to another guy who went to prison, for I had a guy in the podcast who's in prison for 10 years for smuggling coke.
He's like, oh, Manny Quick, I met him in prison.
Yeah, he used to.
He used to be a pot hauler, so it's just like this fraternity of drug smugglers in Florida.
Because Miami was such a oh yeah, a global hub, for it built Miami yeah yeah, it was just like a like a retirement resort, basically until it's insane came through, Yeah.
It's fucking insane.
Have you seen that new Cocaine Cowboys documentary?
Or the latest one on Netflix?
No, I just.
The revive of it?
No, I just saw the original.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The original was pretty good.
He's a weird way of making documentaries.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a cheesy way.
He did that one.
Is it called Screwball?
Screwball.
I haven't seen that one.
Yeah.
I mean, either where it's like kids that are.
Yeah.
Kids portray the whole thing.
Yeah.
You know who's another really interesting guy that I want to fucking meet?
I know people who.
He lives in Miami.
One of my favorite filmmakers is Harmony Kareen.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
He.
There was this this kind of pirate 35 millimeter movie theater in Miami for a while called night owl That was in a half abandoned shopping mall and Harmony Korean's office like his production office was right above it and he would sometimes like come and curate Oh really?
Yeah Wow, yeah dude.
He's he's got some have you seen beach bomb?
Oh, yeah fucking amazing.
That's Key West.
I don't know if they actually shot any of it in Key West.
Oh, yeah, they did.
Oh, they did.
Oh, yeah, you can tell a lot of it's in the Key I don't know if it's Key West specifically that I remember but a lot of it's definitely in the Keys some of it looked like California.
Really?
Yeah, some of it did.
Maybe it was shot in California.
It looked like it was all Miami and Keys.
It would make sense if it was Florida.
Because he lives there, right?
Yeah, he lives in Miami.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure he still lives here.
Yeah, a friend of mine, a friend of mine who's like an underwater cinematographer who lives in Key Biscayne, he says his kid goes to the same school as Harmony in Miami.
This was two years ago, I think you told me that.
Yeah, yeah.
But I'm sure he has to still live there.
Yeah.
He's one of those weird guys.
You don't hear anything from him or see anything from him in the media at all.
Just like every 10 years, he comes out with some crazy film.
Yeah, there used to be this film organization in Miami called Borscht, and Harmony would do some curation with him, but he never showed up.
He would never just be there.
Yeah.
He was like behind the scenes.
He seems like the kind of guy who would do what you're about to do in the keys.
Just go sit in an empty apartment for a month and write shit.
Except he wouldn't need to be invited to that residency.
He'd just be able to buy shit.
Right.
He would just do it himself.
Yeah.
So are you supplementing all of this creative work with commercial jobs?
Kind of.
Yeah.
I do do docs for clients and branded docs, you know?
The buzzword.
Branded docs.
Yeah.
So it's like Sponsored by Old Spice.
Or like Alaska Airlines will want.
Like a doc style thing, or like I did one for Amazon and Gates Foundation.
Yeah, the deep state, exactly.
Amazon, I love that guy's Jeff Bezos, David's Jeff Bezos picture.
Yeah, that he was working on as we were, didn't make any sense, but it was funny.
Yeah, no, all of it was just so absurd, but hilarious at the same time.
Yeah, man, it's so sad that guy died.
I wonder what happened to all of his artwork.
They should turn it into NFTs.
They, I mean, he would have made a killing.
He would have made it and he was so poor like he was just in debt living in a trailer basically like a double wide trailer Like poverty level and Yeah,
he could have I don't think he ever would have been able to figure it out like he wasn't that savvy online someone would have had to do it all for him But this other conspiracy theorist that like lives down the road from him who's like a bigger conspiracy theorist He he inherited all of David's like intellectual property really he's got everything He was even selling like David's shirts and like hats and stuff after he died.
A little weird.
That is a little strange.
Yeah.
Is there like one subject or person that you would want to document or do a story on like a fucking holy grail for Brad?
No, it's always like every day is just kind of a new discovery and a new thing.
So I kind of want to make one.
About the manosphere.
You know like like uh there's, you know like there's, this whole sort of sphere of like, men's rights activists meninists um, oh yeah, they're called like men going their own way who like, have said no to all women in relationships, the incels um, and there was a conference in Orlando called the Make Women Great Again conference, and it it was, and no women were involved in that.
It was just these, these like men's rights activists, guys who were gonna teach women how to be great again.
Um, that whole world seems, seems like basically it's just like uh, and how it, how it uh, has exploded with the sort of far right conspiracy world too.
There's a lot of intersection there that would be a really interesting and dark one to dive into.
Yeah, that's scary.
Yeah yeah, the whole, the I haven't seen the incel thing you were talking about, but those, those types of people are, they seem, like the most dangerous ones.
They're the ones that just like, blow up, oh yeah, shoot fucking schools up and shit.
Yeah, Yeah.
I mean, it would only be like, it wouldn't focus just on those guys, but like, that whole world seems kind of ripe for getting into it.
It's interesting.
Like, the whole QAnon thing, I always thought it was like far right wing ideologically.
Not anymore, yeah.
Now it's the whole spectrum.
Yeah.
There's like yoga moms, is a big part of QAnon, and hippies, you know, like ayahuasca slinging.
See, I had no idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like vegans.
It's captured everyone.
Yeah.
That's so wild.
I had a guy, I have a guy on here who's a lawyer, and he's like a hardcore liberal.
Okay.
I wouldn't say like hardcore.
He doesn't like go out flaunting it like most people flaunt their rebel flags, but he has this obsession with representing like the most extreme polar opposite of himself.
Oh, wow.
Like, he's representing one of the Capitol riot people.
One of the guys who was on the Capitol on January 6th.
Like, the guy assaulted a police officer, and he's like defending him in court.
Representing Extreme Opposites00:01:47
And he also, he's like defended like serial killers.
He's invited them into his home because they had nothing else.
Like, neo Nazis who have killed people, like, killed people just because they were black.
Represented these people and just like gotten into their heads and like spent so much time with them.
It's just like so interesting.
I mean, maybe he.
How people want to do that.
Like, this guy, I'm like, dude, like, you need to.
Video camera.
You gotta be a fucking filmmaker, not a lawyer.
But he's got way more money than most documentary filmmakers.
Wow.
Yeah, it's weird.
It's weird.
There's a lot of that stuff around in Florida.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Crazy shit, man.
Well, thanks for doing this, dude.
I really appreciate it.
Where can people follow the stuff that you do online and find more of your work and do anything they can to support you?
Yeah, I have a website.
It's bradabrahams.net.
And then on Instagram, I'm bradwtf.
And on Twitter, I'm loving saucers.
That's it.
Your Twitter is Lovin' Saucers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I made it for the film and then it's just become my personal Twitter.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
That's one more thing I wanted to ask you.
What did you do?
I bought it on YouTube.
Is that how else are you distributing that one?
That one, it used to be on Amazon Prime.
Okay.
And now Discovery, you know, there's Discovery Plus now.
Yeah.
Discovery Channel has around.
So now they have the sort of rights to that for streaming.
So you have to, you can buy it on Amazon or iTunes or YouTube or I think on Tubi, it's free.
You can just watch it.
Well, we want people to pay for it.
I still get money from it.
If they watch it on 2B, because there's.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, sick.
Yeah, okay.
So, but yeah, like any streaming service, it's on, and it's like four bucks to rent it.
One of the best documentaries I've ever seen.
Thank you.
Thanks for creating amazing content like that, dude.