Danny Jones Podcast - #183 - Murder In Georgia: The Journalist Hunting American Psychos | Payne Lindsey
Aired: 2023-04-30
Duration: 02:14:14


=== Filmmaking Roots and Podcast Beginnings (08:01) ===

[00:00:08]  What's up, man?
[00:00:09]  Welcome.
[00:00:10]  What's up, man?
[00:00:10]  Thanks for having me out here.
[00:00:11]  Absolutely.
[00:00:12]  Absolutely.
[00:00:13]  So, for people who don't know who you are, give me a brief background on how you got into filmmaking and how you got into creating all these podcasts.
[00:00:20]  Yeah.
[00:00:21]  So, my name is Payne Lindsay.
[00:00:23]  I've been filming stuff my whole life.
[00:00:25]  In 2016, I decided to make a true crime podcast and go investigate a missing persons case in my home state of Georgia.
[00:00:34]  And I just started poking around a cold case.
[00:00:36]  And six months into the podcast, there was a huge break in the case.
[00:00:40]  And from that point forward, I. Basically, forged this company, which is Tenderfoot.
[00:00:45]  And we have 20 plus titles now and a whole slew of true crime podcasts about a whole bunch of different cases.
[00:00:53]  What made you want to start creating these audio podcasts?
[00:00:56]  They're like audio documentaries, right?
[00:00:58]  Yeah.
[00:00:59]  I mean, they're similar to like Serial or like Shittown, those other podcasts that go deep into like episodic story breakdowns.
[00:01:08]  It was actually Serial that gave me the idea.
[00:01:11]  My friend had showed me this podcast.
[00:01:13]  He's like, hey, I know it's like an audio thing, but I think you're going to like it.
[00:01:16]  And we were on a little road trip together for the weekend and we were driving back from Louisville to Atlanta and we just binged through cereal.
[00:01:25]  And I was super compelled by it.
[00:01:27]  I thought it was really immersive and I kind of just forgot that I wasn't watching anything.
[00:01:33]  And it kind of gave me the idea, hey, I think you can make something super interesting and a deep dive into something through this medium.
[00:01:41]  And that's kind of where the idea for Up and Vanish, my first podcast, really kind of started.
[00:01:46]  Yeah.
[00:01:46]  What do you think it is about those podcasts?
[00:01:48]  Because they're so fucking compelling.
[00:01:50]  When you listen to them, it's like you can't stop, but it's you're removing all of the video element to it and it's just audio.
[00:01:57]  I think that because there's a missing visual component, there's kind of like this relationship between the listener and I guess the narrator or the host where it kind of feels a little bit more personal.
[00:02:09]  It feels like you're kind of a fly on the wall sometimes.
[00:02:12]  And if it's an investigative thing, it feels like you're kind of like right there with me or you're right there with them.
[00:02:17]  And I think that that is like a special thing that podcasts can especially do that maybe visual.
[00:02:25]  Stuff doesn't really do that.
[00:02:27]  It's because that layer is removed, it kind of makes you use your imagination.
[00:02:32]  Oh, yeah.
[00:02:32]  And there's kind of a closeness.
[00:02:33]  I think you kind of grow from that.
[00:02:35]  Yeah, that's a good point.
[00:02:36]  You do have to use your imagination.
[00:02:38]  Yeah.
[00:02:38]  Because I remember when I listened to probably like the first six or seven episodes of Up and Vanished in the last couple of days.
[00:02:44]  And when I finally watched a couple of videos on YouTube about it, it was not what I had in my head at all.
[00:02:49]  Like when I saw the lady's house and I saw the glove, it's like I had a completely different picture in my head.
[00:02:54]  That's interesting.
[00:02:54]  Oh, yeah.
[00:02:55]  So when you're creating these audio documentaries, Do you have to go like above and beyond with the audio?
[00:03:01]  Do you have to like add way more to it just because it's audio to make it hit?
[00:03:06]  Or, I mean, I don't think that you have to do that.
[00:03:08]  I think that that's the approach that I've taken because I felt that that was necessary.
[00:03:12]  Like, come from a filmmaking brain and visually forward thinking, I wanted to create a world that was a soundscape, immersive, that felt like you were actually somewhere that took you somewhere.
[00:03:28]  And so, that's kind of The only way I knew how to do it.
[00:03:30]  And so that's sort of evolved since my first episode of anything.
[00:03:35]  But there's plenty of shows that don't even take that approach that are wildly successful.
[00:03:40]  I think just because the host connects well with the listener.
[00:03:44]  Yeah, it seems like a very fun thing to do too.
[00:03:46]  It is very fun.
[00:03:47]  Because if you could just go, that's one of the things I love about making documentaries, is just showing up somewhere and hitting the record button and letting it happen.
[00:03:55]  And when you get to do that with just a couple of fucking microphones, it sounds like it's so much easier.
[00:04:00]  That to me is the most attractive part of podcasting.
[00:04:04]  I love TV.
[00:04:05]  I love filmmaking, but there's so many components to that.
[00:04:08]  And it takes forever.
[00:04:09]  And the film industry is super difficult.
[00:04:12]  But if I'm making my own podcast documentary, I can literally, like you said, just go hop in the car, drive to this person's house, press record, and we're doing something and we're in full control of what we're creating.
[00:04:26]  Do you feel like you get more out of people when you just have a microphone and no camera?
[00:04:30]  Absolutely.
[00:04:31]  I think that plenty of people are sort of.
[00:04:34]  Intimidated by, you know, obviously a film crew rolling up to your doorstep.
[00:04:37]  That's going to be a little spooky to most people.
[00:04:40]  It's a lot more, I guess, discreet and sort of disarming if it's just like, hey, like, you know, let's just sit down and have a conversation.
[00:04:48]  Maybe you'll forget that we're even doing that.
[00:04:50]  We're just actually, it's just me and you now.
[00:04:53]  And so you came from a traditional filmmaking background.
[00:04:56]  Like, what were you doing for work before you started doing the podcast?
[00:04:59]  So I was actually directing music videos full time.
[00:05:03]  And, um, It's actually how I met my business partner.
[00:05:05]  He actually managed an artist in Atlanta.
[00:05:08]  So for years, I was doing some pretty high budget stuff eventually for the record labels.
[00:05:14]  And then I started getting burnt out.
[00:05:17]  The music video thing to me originally was just supposed to be a stepping stone to try to make a TV show, to make my own movie.
[00:05:25]  And I was getting burnt out as a freelance creator, struggling to make ends meet financially with what I was doing.
[00:05:33]  And so I kind of got it in my head that I needed to make something on my own again.
[00:05:38]  And that's when this idea for a true crime documentary came to my head.
[00:05:43]  And I was like, well, I can't really make that the way I want to.
[00:05:46]  I don't feel like raising money.
[00:05:47]  I don't feel like half assing this.
[00:05:49]  And so I was like, well, what if I made a podcast that was just as compelling as a proof of concept, really?
[00:05:57]  And then maybe that will grab the attention from the right people, connect the dots to do the bigger thing.
[00:06:02]  It's so much different making a music video than it is from telling a story, right?
[00:06:08]  There's like one of my favorite things that got me into filmmaking was music videos, and that's what I loved.
[00:06:13]  They're fun.
[00:06:14]  That's still, if I could think about it, like if I could pick any profession, I would just want to be make music videos and get rich making music videos.
[00:06:20]  I wouldn't want to do this because it's easy, right?
[00:06:23]  It's fun.
[00:06:23]  It's like it just flows.
[00:06:25]  When you can put music to some sort of visuals, it's just like there's nothing words can do to make it good.
[00:06:30]  It's just a feeling you get.
[00:06:32]  Yeah.
[00:06:32]  It's a short and sweet delivery of, you know, making that song come to life, right?
[00:06:39]  And, uh, Yeah, you're right.
[00:06:40]  It's easy to get burned out in that industry because there's, it's like a big bureaucracy and it's a crazy ladder you have to climb of ass kissing and trying to get more jobs and stressing in between the jobs.
[00:06:53]  And the liberation that comes with creating your own content and being able to self publish it is very different and it's way better.
[00:07:01]  It's priceless.
[00:07:01]  I mean, that's like as a creator, if that's, if you're a creator at heart like I am, then that's almost more valuable than anything else, right?
[00:07:09]  Just to be able to create at your free will and it, matter or like be a part of your job or your life in a serious way is like really the ultimate goal for me.
[00:07:22]  Yeah, me too.
[00:07:23]  When I was, when I first worked in film, in the film industry, working on, you know, various studio sets and, and shooting documentaries and feature films, it was just, I saw that this was a weird world that I didn't initially expect because it's all I ever wanted to do was be a part of that world.
[00:07:38]  And then when I got there, I realized that I'm just surrounded by a bunch of carnies with dental plans that don't see their families ever, maybe once a year.
[00:07:44]  They're just traveling.
[00:07:45]  They get to travel the world, right?
[00:07:47]  But they're alone.
[00:07:47]  They don't See their wife, their kids, their friends, they live out of a fucking truck.
[00:07:52]  Yeah.
[00:07:52]  And when I saw that, that's when I kind of realized that I wanted to start doing my own shit.
[00:07:57]  And, you know, sometimes when you get something and you kind of arrive somewhere where you feel like that was your goal to get there, you realize this isn't all it was cracked up to be.

=== Creating Episodes Under Pressure (11:00) ===

[00:08:09]  There's probably way more than this.
[00:08:11]  Yeah.
[00:08:12]  And I think that that just comes from experience, right?
[00:08:16]  You lived it, you did it, you took a shot at it, and then you realized or came to the realization yourself that shit, I want more than this.
[00:08:24]  This isn't what it was cracked up to be.
[00:08:26]  And that's when you probably had to make your own decision to create something like this, right?
[00:08:31]  Like go out on a limb and take a risk and try to create something on your own that is sustainable.
[00:08:38]  So, Up and Vanish, was that your first project that you did independently?
[00:08:42]  That was my very first podcast.
[00:08:44]  And, you know, I went into it pretty much blindly.
[00:08:47]  At the time, it was, you know, cereal was huge, but there weren't a lot of other podcasts in that exact vein.
[00:08:54]  Where they were just like a deep dive investigative narrative that felt like a documentary or a movie.
[00:09:02]  And so there wasn't really much of a blueprint for me to go off of.
[00:09:07]  And so all I really did was I tried to make a show that I would want to listen to.
[00:09:11]  And I still to this day kind of do that.
[00:09:13]  And I try to not really look around to what everyone else is doing all the time or study that too much.
[00:09:21]  Because I think that I've.
[00:09:24]  Got to a point where I like kind of learning from my own mistakes and taking my own risks.
[00:09:30]  And I don't want to be tainted by what someone else says you should be doing or something that's working for somebody else.
[00:09:38]  Maybe it doesn't work for me.
[00:09:40]  Yeah, there's not a lot of podcasts like that, right?
[00:09:43]  There's really not.
[00:09:43]  There's more now.
[00:09:45]  The most recent one that I've listened to, other than yours, is the one about Elizabeth Holmes, the lady who scammed everyone in Silicon Valley with her.
[00:09:55]  Blood thing that she had.
[00:09:56]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[00:09:57]  Yeah.
[00:09:58]  That one was really good too.
[00:09:59]  Yeah.
[00:09:59]  And along.
[00:10:00]  Yeah.
[00:10:00]  There's, I mean, there's, at this point, there's tons of great podcasts like that.
[00:10:04]  Yeah.
[00:10:04]  What, how long does it take to do it though?
[00:10:06]  Because creating a documentary takes a long fucking time.
[00:10:09]  It's a lot of work, a lot of driving, a lot of, especially if you're bringing people with you to help you be, you know, camera assistants, audio people, whatever it may be.
[00:10:17]  It's, it's monotonous.
[00:10:19]  There's just so much thinking that's involved in making a podcast like that.
[00:10:24]  If you're, if you're doing a story on a cold case and the premise is that, I'm going to go to this town and try to figure out what happened.
[00:10:34]  There's so much thinking involved and so many different pieces to the puzzle that have to be figured out in your own brain and then sort of shaken down and put in a digestible form for a listener.
[00:10:47]  And so that process just takes forever.
[00:10:49]  And what I've learned and how my team has gotten better at working is we're really kind of quick thinking and we don't really overthink it.
[00:10:58]  We just kind of pull the trigger and go with the gut.
[00:11:01]  You can always go back and change stuff.
[00:11:03]  But if you get stuck on one little facet of something, you might miss out on something you didn't know was around the corner because you're still working on that thing that didn't really matter in the first place, right?
[00:11:14]  So I like to think just like, let's just go do this thing, learn from our mistakes, and just kind of keep it moving and be okay with that.
[00:11:23]  One of the things I like about doing these types of podcasts is that there's absolutely zero editing, zero b roll, and zero music you have to do.
[00:11:30]  You just record it and you publish it, no matter how dumb you sounded, no matter what happens.
[00:11:35]  Beautiful.
[00:11:35]  And that's what I love about it.
[00:11:37]  A similar tactic to what you take, or do you put a lot of time?
[00:11:40]  I guess this is a better way of asking how much time do you spend on between recording and actually publishing one of the episodes?
[00:11:46]  So I actually admire what you're doing.
[00:11:49]  I'm actually kind of jealous a little bit.
[00:11:51]  But I mean, we do a similar thing.
[00:11:53]  We'll sit down with somebody, right?
[00:11:56]  But we take that tape and we kind of, you know, whittle it down to the best of the best of the best and put it as like a component in a larger story.
[00:12:07]  And so, like, it's this, like, we get the information the same way.
[00:12:12]  You have the story laid out already.
[00:12:14]  You have the beginning and the end already figured out.
[00:12:16]  Yeah.
[00:12:16]  We have an entire outline and backbone to, I mean, what would, Normally, maybe even be a script, right, for a TV series.
[00:12:24]  And we're kind of plugging and playing, but also it's a living, breathing thing.
[00:12:27]  If it's a documentary, there's so much that's out of your control.
[00:12:30]  You might think it's going to go this way.
[00:12:32]  You might think that person's going to answer the phone when they don't.
[00:12:35]  And so you kind of have to safeguard yourself and plan around this real life thing and try to shape the best result for not only, you know, the case itself and the victim's family, but also, as a listener, a satisfactory ending or something that felt like it.
[00:12:53]  This was worth having listened to.
[00:12:56]  So, but in the case of Up and Vanish, when you released every single episode, that was a long time ago.
[00:13:02]  Yes.
[00:13:02]  When you were doing that, like between episode one, two, three, four, five, six, did you already have everything in the can and edited before you released it?
[00:13:11]  Or were you still in between episode two and three going out there and getting new shit?
[00:13:15]  That was like my ultimate training as a podcaster.
[00:13:20]  And I don't really do it that way anymore, but I was really at the time making Up and Vanish.
[00:13:26]  Week to week to the point where it would be, you know, Sunday night, and I would get a phone call from somebody.
[00:13:34]  I would record it, edit it, put music to it, and it would be in Monday morning's episode.
[00:13:40]  And then as a result of that, someone on Tuesday is responding to this.
[00:13:46]  And so it was kind of building on itself when this case was on fire.
[00:13:50]  It was one of the biggest news stories in Georgia and kind of just, you know, this snowball effect of.
[00:13:57]  Everyone's talking, truth's coming out.
[00:14:00]  We shook the trees, and now we're kind of just capturing what's happening around us.
[00:14:04]  That's cool.
[00:14:05]  That's cool.
[00:14:06]  Because then you get like a vibe that this thing is not super produced or overly produced to where it seems fake.
[00:14:12]  Yeah, it was very real in that sense.
[00:14:14]  But I was going kind of the extra mile to kind of frame it and put it in a way for you where it felt sort of premium.
[00:14:22]  Like it was, even though that call just happened last night, it's playing out like it's, you know, in some Showtime documentary.
[00:14:29]  Or, like, or that was my goal was to make it feel that way.
[00:14:33]  When you released the first episode of the show, what was that process like for you?
[00:14:39]  Was that the first time you ever published anything you ever made online?
[00:14:42]  No, it was the first time I published a podcast.
[00:14:45]  And I was really kind of in my head about it a little bit because, you know, throughout my whole, you know, life and career, I'd identified as a filmmaker, right?
[00:14:55]  And I looked at radio and podcasts as like a different beast.
[00:14:59]  And I didn't want to come onto the scene and be like, hey, I.
[00:15:03]  I do this now.
[00:15:04]  I kind of felt a little like imposter syndrome about it.
[00:15:09]  So much so that I was convinced that no one would like my voice, and everyone always says that.
[00:15:13]  But I really was like, I don't have that kind of voice.
[00:15:17]  I mean, that's what someone in radio has, right?
[00:15:20]  Like, if that was the case, I would have been doing that already or something.
[00:15:24]  And so I was really kind of timid and a little nervous putting it out.
[00:15:28]  But the response in the first week was pretty positive.
[00:15:31]  And I remember it was, I got 5,000.
[00:15:34]  Listens on the first episode, and I was like, That's huge because that's more followers than I have on social media, more friends than I have on Facebook.
[00:15:41]  So, I was like, you know, something's clicking here.
[00:15:44]  And I just kind of kept making a show that I was sort of teaching myself how to make in that process.
[00:15:52]  When you uploaded the episode, where did you post it?
[00:15:54]  I used some old website.
[00:15:58]  I think it's not even around.
[00:15:59]  Maybe it was called Podbean or something like that.
[00:16:01]  Yeah, I've heard of that.
[00:16:02]  Yeah, I just kind of found my own hosting.
[00:16:04]  Also, back then in 2016, it was.
[00:16:06]  So, you didn't post like just the audio on YouTube or anything?
[00:16:08]  You only posted on the audio platforms?
[00:16:10]  I only posted on the audio platforms.
[00:16:12]  I was trying to get it in the same places that I found.
[00:16:15]  Found, you know, serial or the other podcasts that I was looking at.
[00:16:19]  I was trying to sort of frame it to be next to these shows, like, hey guys, there's another one of these.
[00:16:24]  I was there were visual components to it, but it was all like trailer stuff.
[00:16:30]  We actually shot a on the last music video that I did, it's still the last one I've done to this day.
[00:16:36]  We rented a film camera and we kept a couple extra reels to film like a visual trailer for Up and Vanished.
[00:16:45]  And I kind of wanted to put out something that felt super premium and suspenseful.
[00:16:50]  That would make you think, is this a new Netflix series?
[00:16:53]  What is this?
[00:16:54]  And say, oh, no, no, it's just a podcast.
[00:16:56]  And you're like, what?
[00:16:57]  But that was kind of my approach to it.
[00:17:00]  And how did, so your first episode got 5,000 downloads or whatever.
[00:17:04]  How did you promote that?
[00:17:05]  How long did that take for that to sort of take off?
[00:17:08]  It happened pretty quickly.
[00:17:09]  I mean, the first couple of weeks, I was targeting the actual town itself, Osceola, Georgia.
[00:17:18]  I was paying for like Instagram ads of this visual trailer that I had and was.
[00:17:24]  Really, just targeting it to people who were right here because they would definitely know this case.
[00:17:29]  And so they would definitely be interested in this.
[00:17:32]  And once the townspeople kind of got wind of what was going on, it sort of snowballed from there.
[00:17:38]  And then a month or so into it, there was an audience that was significantly larger than just the town.
[00:17:46]  And it was becoming something that was a little bit more zeitgeisty and had a little bit of a buzz to it.
[00:17:53]  And that just kind of kept going.
[00:17:54]  And I never knew what the ceiling of that would be.
[00:17:57]  Never knew.
[00:17:58]  If this was even going to make any money, I was still looking at it like a stepping stone to do some other thing.
[00:18:06]  And then after you posted that first one, how long did it take for you to post the second one and for this thing to really get viral?
[00:18:12]  So after the first one, from that point forward, I was publishing them every week.
[00:18:19]  I think it was every Monday.
[00:18:21]  And barring a few off weeks that I kind of took because I was just in the weeds, but I made episode one.
[00:18:30]  And I had not even started episode two.
[00:18:33]  And in the week between one and two, I made episode two.
[00:18:37]  And that's how I kind of, you know, continued the rest of the show, which I do not recommend for anyone to do it that way.
[00:18:45]  But at the time, it's what I was dealing with.
[00:18:47]  And I was still kind of trying to figure out what the hell I was doing, really.
[00:18:51]  I think that's the best way to do it.
[00:18:53]  I mean, there's something to it.
[00:18:54]  I will say, like, the results are special.
[00:18:57]  But it's, you know, I really lived in this case, in this story, in this podcast.
[00:19:04]  Every day of my life for a year and a half, like quite literally.

=== Unpacking the Duke Guys Mystery (15:56) ===

[00:19:10]  And that was intense.
[00:19:11]  So, I guess we should explain it for people who don't know it.
[00:19:14]  What is the premise of Up and Vanished?
[00:19:16]  And how did you decide to report on this thing?
[00:19:19]  So, Up and Vanished season one is about a missing person named Tara Grinstead, who was a high school teacher in Osceola, Georgia.
[00:19:27]  She mysteriously vanished in 2005, and it was a huge unsolved case in Georgia.
[00:19:34]  It was one of the top 10 unsolved cases on the Georgia Bureau of Investigations website.
[00:19:40]  And the circumstances were weird.
[00:19:42]  She had left this barbecue and she went to her house, allegedly.
[00:19:48]  They found her car in the driveway, cell phone inside, doors locked, but she's just gone.
[00:19:54]  And it was like, how does that happen in this tiny place?
[00:19:58]  And then there was a whole myriad of different persons of interest, but none of them really added up.
[00:20:03]  And so the rumor mill started going in South Georgia for years and years.
[00:20:07]  And it was almost like a.
[00:20:09]  Urban legend at this point.
[00:20:10]  It was totally, you know, had captured, you know, the lives of everyone in the town.
[00:20:17]  And when I came into it, you know, almost 12 years later, I was kind of starting from scratch.
[00:20:23]  And as a total outsider, just went to this town and started talking to people and asking questions as some city guy who has a microphone and apparently makes a podcast.
[00:20:37]  And I just tried to use that to, My advantage, even though some people were like, Are you serious?
[00:20:42]  Who is this guy?
[00:20:43]  There was also a level of, Well, it's a little easier to talk to you than it may be the police or, you know, Dateline with all the cameras they have.
[00:20:52]  And so I just tried to lean into the sort of amateur nature of what I was doing to build some trust with people in the town.
[00:21:02]  So, who specifically tipped you off on this exact, on this specific case?
[00:21:06]  And what made you decide on going to this town and starting here?
[00:21:11]  I just had decided that I was going to make a true crime documentary and I was going to investigate a cold case in my home state.
[00:21:19]  Okay.
[00:21:20]  This was probably, arguably, the biggest cold case in Georgia at the time.
[00:21:27]  And so I started poking around, and a few weeks into it, I realized that, you know, my grandma, of all people, was like best friends with one of the last people to see Tara alive.
[00:21:40]  And so there was this weird sort of closeness.
[00:21:42]  And at the time, I was looking for.
[00:21:44]  Any signs that this was the right thing for me to be doing.
[00:21:48]  And so I looked at that like, hey, I mean, if my grandma is, you know, giving me tips or, you know, like talking to me about real shit in this case, then maybe that's a sign that I'm going the right direction.
[00:22:03]  At least I feel a little bit better about it.
[00:22:06]  And so I just leaned into that and just kept going.
[00:22:10]  And like, what sort of, like, how did this thing become cold?
[00:22:14]  And why do you think that this case just got like put on the back burner and forgotten about?
[00:22:19]  I think that in the early stages, it was.
[00:22:23]  I mean, it was just a damn good mystery, really.
[00:22:26]  Was there corruption?
[00:22:27]  Like, was there cover ups by police inside jobs?
[00:22:31]  What do you think it was?
[00:22:33]  I think that just what they saw didn't make any sense.
[00:22:36]  There were probably some mistakes made early on.
[00:22:39]  There was a way for them to have figured this out back in 2005.
[00:22:44]  And that was in their case file.
[00:22:48]  There were rumors and there were.
[00:22:49]  You know, accounts on record about these two guys, Ryan Duke and Bo Dukes, who ultimately were discovered as the, you know, who murdered Tara.
[00:23:01]  And there was a report about them out here on this pecan orchard burning Tara's body.
[00:23:09]  And I think that it was just so preposterous sounding that these former high school students, super young, one would even be anywhere near Tara.
[00:23:21]  And definitely not doing this, right?
[00:23:24]  And so I think they just kind of turned a blind eye.
[00:23:27]  But there you go.
[00:23:28]  10 years later, now they're looking at ex boyfriends, you know, going through her love life, and it's the neighbor, it's this guy, and it's just this classic, you know, finger pointing in a small town.
[00:23:42]  I love how you did it too.
[00:23:44]  Like, I was on episode three last night.
[00:23:46]  When I was finishing episode three, I was like, holy shit, it's definitely this ex boyfriend who did it.
[00:23:50]  Like, without a doubt, there's no way there's this guy who was overseas in Iraq, and his girlfriend's here, you know, jumping around town, being a little feral cat, and he comes back, he's jealous, and he wants to kill her.
[00:24:02]  Like, I was convinced.
[00:24:03]  And then, like, you freaking, next episode, you're like, I could be wrong.
[00:24:08]  Yeah.
[00:24:08]  That's great how you did that.
[00:24:09]  And that's really kind of how I felt.
[00:24:11]  It's like, I really had no idea who killed Tara, what happened to her.
[00:24:16]  I knew that she didn't run off on her own.
[00:24:19]  And I would just go down these different rabbit holes with different people, and you could find stuff that did look weird, objectively, right?
[00:24:26]  But it would never go all the way there.
[00:24:29]  It could never, like, close the loop.
[00:24:31]  And that was problematic.
[00:24:33]  And then we learned halfway through the season that.
[00:24:36]  There were these other guys over here this whole time.
[00:24:39]  And really, so the second half, not to spoil it for you, but the second half of the show is really kind of a different podcast.
[00:24:46]  It's covering the live, you know, as the breaks in the case are happening, as they're making arrests and new information is coming to light.
[00:24:57]  It's kind of unpacking the story of these guys and what really happened.
[00:25:03]  So, as far as like the place that I'm at, the thing that I remember most.
[00:25:07]  Recently, that I listened to was the part where there was a house that burned down and there was no reason why.
[00:25:11]  It was an abandoned house.
[00:25:12]  Snapdragon Road.
[00:25:13]  Snapdragon Road, right.
[00:25:14]  There was no reason the house would have burned down, but there was a car there that shouldn't have been there.
[00:25:19]  And the dogs, the guys, you were talking to the guy who had the dogs that were supposed to be the cadaver dogs.
[00:25:24]  And you talked to the fire marshal and they were like, What?
[00:25:27]  How did I not hear about this?
[00:25:28]  Like you were finding whole, like massive holes in this burnt down house.
[00:25:31]  Yeah.
[00:25:32]  And at that time, I was like, You know, each time I found something like that, I was like, Is this it?
[00:25:37]  This might be it.
[00:25:39]  And it just turned out to be a red herring.
[00:25:42]  That was weird, but it never went any further than that.
[00:25:45]  But you could tell just even going back and exploring these things that there was stuff that was missed or stuff that had a big question mark on it still.
[00:25:53]  And so I kind of took on the mindset that even if I don't solve this, which my goal was to solve it, but I didn't think that that was possible really, I could at least sort of bring clarity and rule things out.
[00:26:07]  Right.
[00:26:09]  So there's so many cops involved and all the cops know each other.
[00:26:13]  And there's that creepy old cop who was, I don't know how old he was when.
[00:26:16]  He was at her house, but it seemed like he was way older.
[00:26:19]  Who was HD, was his initials, Dicks or whatever?
[00:26:22]  Heath Dykes.
[00:26:23]  Heath Dykes, yeah.
[00:26:24]  He was at her house.
[00:26:25]  Business car in the door.
[00:26:26]  Very suspicious, and there was like he had made a bunch of phone calls to her.
[00:26:30]  Yeah.
[00:26:31]  So, how did basically the little world, the little like bubble you were searching between all the cops and the ex boyfriends, how did that transition into these other guys, these Duke guys?
[00:26:42]  Because you didn't mention these Duke guys haven't been mentioned at all in the first six episodes.
[00:26:46]  No.
[00:26:46]  So.
[00:26:47]  Early on, you know, so Maurice Godwin, the forensic psychologist guy who had, you know, private investigator who had worked this case forever, who I met in episode one.
[00:26:58]  Yeah.
[00:26:59]  He stays throughout the series.
[00:27:02]  Back in the day, I mean, he was here on the ground like early on.
[00:27:06]  And before the podcast came out, I was having many discussions with him about, you know, who you think did it, who I thought did it.
[00:27:14]  And super early on, we were actually looking at this photograph of these former students.
[00:27:21]  Of Tara's, and we were talking about the possibility of it being a former student who killed Tara.
[00:27:30]  I remember thinking at the time, I was like, that just sounds like I don't have anything really grounded with that.
[00:27:36]  And I feel like if I start going down this avenue of suggesting that maybe she had these, you know, peculiar relationships with her students, that would be really insensitive.
[00:27:48]  Well, she did, right?
[00:27:49]  I mean, you talk about it earlier, and then we discover later that she actually did.
[00:27:53]  And so I kind of just put That on the back burner, and I focused on everything that had been covered before.
[00:27:59]  All the documentaries that had talked about this case, you know, the names they brought up Anthony Vickers, Heath Dykes.
[00:28:06]  Anthony, he's the one.
[00:28:07]  Yeah, I remember you specifically, you were interviewing him, and it was on, you recorded it, and you were like, Did you have a relationship with her?
[00:28:12]  He's like, Yeah.
[00:28:13]  He's like, Was it sexual?
[00:28:14]  He's like, Yeah.
[00:28:16]  Right.
[00:28:16]  I was like, Fuck yeah.
[00:28:17]  Holy shit, he said that.
[00:28:19]  And like, that was always like a rumor, and no one had ever seemingly asked that guy point blank if that's what was going on.
[00:28:26]  And At least that mystery was dispelled.
[00:28:30]  It didn't probably look great for him at the time, but, you know, turns out he had nothing to do with it at all.
[00:28:35]  And, yeah, I think that it was just step by step, kind of peeling back the onion layer and finding, you know, this little nugget and that little nugget.
[00:28:44]  And then it was all of a sudden in February 2017, out of nowhere, they have a press conference in Osceola at the courthouse announcing that they arrest a guy named Ryan Duke, who was a former student of Tara's.
[00:28:57]  For her murder, and everyone goes, Who the hell's Ryan Duke?
[00:29:01]  What and was never on their radar, so they say.
[00:29:05]  And it was a total out of left field.
[00:29:07]  And so, it was that day that I had to make a decision Am I going to leave it here and you know, hang up this story for now, my coverage of this, or am I going to lean in even more to all the things that I'm hearing on the ground that are saying, Hey, I don't think it was just this guy, it was this other guy, too.
[00:29:30]  And sure enough.
[00:29:31]  Weeks later, he's arrested.
[00:29:33]  And we kind of go down this path of looking into both of their lives and, you know, were the roles reversed?
[00:29:40]  And there's a lot of evidence to support that.
[00:29:43]  And so it became like these cops screwed up, let this guy get away with this for over a decade.
[00:29:51]  And are they screwing up again?
[00:29:54]  So you personally, through your investigations, had no crumb trail leading to these Duke guys' lives.
[00:30:00]  I had never heard of Ryan Duke.
[00:30:02]  In my life.
[00:30:02]  But what's funny is that picture that I was referring to, right?
[00:30:06]  Back when I was considering looking into the angle of former students, the other suspect, Bo Dukes, who some believe had a larger role in her murder than he's saying, he's in this picture.
[00:30:22]  So all these guys that are in this picture with this truck are the guys that they were all hanging out with, the guys that were at the parties at the pecan orchard.
[00:30:33]  The same friend circle, it was kind of right there.
[00:30:37]  I just had zero clue and zero context to keep going down that direction.
[00:30:42]  But it's crazy that all the people you talk to, none of them mentioned these guys.
[00:30:46]  No, it's crazy.
[00:30:47]  I think that it was really a very well kept secret.
[00:30:51]  And those who did know something, A, didn't want to believe it.
[00:30:56]  And B, were too scared to say a damn thing.
[00:31:01]  And it wasn't very many people who knew.
[00:31:03]  But law enforcement had the opportunity in 2005 to put this whole case to rest and at least interviewed them, you know, arrest them under suspicion of something, and it would have been over.
[00:31:16]  But they just kind of let it go and then it fell between the cracks.
[00:31:19]  And now this case file is this tall and it's just one little file buried in there.
[00:31:25]  But that was the answer.
[00:31:28]  So when they brought him to trial, and what do you say it was 2017?
[00:31:32]  Well, he was arrested in 2017.
[00:31:33]  He was arrested.
[00:31:35]  The trial was postponed and postponed.
[00:31:37]  Didn't even happen until last May.
[00:31:39]  And I was actually subpoenaed.
[00:31:41]  And they were really just doing that to fuck with me.
[00:31:44]  They didn't want me in the courtroom.
[00:31:46]  But we.
[00:31:47]  Rebutted and filed some other thing and basically said, Hey, I'm a journalist.
[00:31:52]  You can't restrict me from being able to cover this public case.
[00:31:57]  Right.
[00:31:57]  And so they backed off and I ended up going for a day or two in the final days.
[00:32:02]  But he, you know, after a two week trial, he was found not guilty.
[00:32:07]  So why did they arrest him in the first place?
[00:32:12]  Because the other guy, Bo Dukes, his friend, came to the police on his own with this story that Ryan had killed her.
[00:32:22]  And that he had helped Ryan burn Tara's body.
[00:32:25]  And so that's how it all started.
[00:32:28]  And then when they finally went to scoop up Ryan, he's messed up.
[00:32:33]  He's like disheveled.
[00:32:34]  Looks like he's on drugs or something.
[00:32:36]  They take him straight to the station.
[00:32:38]  They put a recorder down and they ask him to confess.
[00:32:44]  And he does, he confesses.
[00:32:46]  But turns out the stuff he was confessing to didn't really make sense.
[00:32:52]  And instead of the police in that moment saying, What do you mean?
[00:32:56]  Like, you know, making it make sense or pressing in the right places to get a strong narrative or see if there's any other truth that isn't what you're saying now.
[00:33:07]  I think they were so green.
[00:33:08]  They were so excited that somebody was, you know, that they caught the bad guy.
[00:33:14]  They got a conviction.
[00:33:14]  That they blew it.
[00:33:17]  So, what did he say?
[00:33:19]  How involved did he claim he was?
[00:33:20]  He just said he burned the body.
[00:33:21]  That's it.
[00:33:22]  He didn't kill her.
[00:33:23]  The story is still so weird and convoluted, but it goes a little something like this where the motive is also extremely unclear.
[00:33:31]  He says that he woke up in the middle of the night, drunk out of his mind, got in this truck and drove about 15, 20 minutes straight to Tara's house for whatever reason to rob her.
[00:33:46]  And he breaks into her house with a credit card and she, I guess, appears from the darkness or something and he got spooked and he hit her one hit.
[00:33:56]  One punch and she's dead.
[00:33:59]  And I'm like, what?
[00:34:02]  That doesn't make sense.
[00:34:03]  Maybe that is how it happened, but that makes no fucking sense.
[00:34:06]  Right.
[00:34:07]  And they just took that just word for word like it was no big deal, as if, you know, no one else in the town or any juror wouldn't think that was a little odd.
[00:34:17]  Right.
[00:34:18]  So he claims he went to her house, broke in, punched her in the face.
[00:34:21]  She died.
[00:34:22]  And then he dragged her out and decided to burn her back.
[00:34:24]  So then he goes back to his friend's house.
[00:34:26]  And the next day he tells him when he wakes up, That last night he killed Tara Granstead.
[00:34:34]  And I think, according to their narrative, he first didn't believe him.
[00:34:39]  And then he went and he goes and shows the body to Ryan or to Bo.
[00:34:45]  And he's like, Holy shit, you did kill our former teacher.
[00:34:51]  And, you know, I think the biggest thing about this to me was that it sounded like maybe Ryan didn't really remember.
[00:35:01]  What happened, actually.
[00:35:03]  Even if he did kill her, I don't think that he really remembered it.

=== The Bo Dukes Behavior Analysis (02:58) ===

[00:35:07]  And so, like, the ongoing building narrative that was just, you know, that I was not forcing, that was just coming to me and ends up being a stronger version of events is that what if this other guy told him he did this?
[00:35:26]  Who, Bo?
[00:35:27]  Bo Duke says, You killed Tara Grinstead last night.
[00:35:31]  And If you look at both of them, you look at their behavior.
[00:35:36]  One's a liar.
[00:35:36]  One's abusive.
[00:35:38]  One's nasty.
[00:35:40]  One has had trouble with the law his whole life, is a proven liar, is for fraud, stuff like that.
[00:35:48]  Other guy, no one even really knows, is the quiet guy.
[00:35:53]  The quiet guy is who, Bo?
[00:35:54]  Ryan.
[00:35:54]  Ryan.
[00:35:55]  And so if you just look at them on paper, you're like, it's really this guy?
[00:35:59]  And maybe it is.
[00:36:00]  But when these things start adding up and there isn't a.
[00:36:04]  A strong narrative as to why Tara was killed by Ryan and how he did it, then it makes you wonder, well, why don't I know those things?
[00:36:15]  Because that should be there, I think.
[00:36:17]  And they failed to do that.
[00:36:18]  And that's why, in my opinion, he was found not guilty.
[00:36:22]  What is your tinfoil hat theory on why this could have happened?
[00:36:28]  Not saying that you're saying that's what it is.
[00:36:30]  Yeah.
[00:36:30]  I mean, I think that there's no way.
[00:36:35]  That Bo Dukes is not more involved than he's said in the past.
[00:36:40]  I don't know to what degree that is, but until that narrative makes sense to me, I'm going to have some big, glaring questions, and there's going to be some big red flags there.
[00:36:51]  And I think it all goes back to him.
[00:36:53]  And so I don't know exactly how it all happened.
[00:36:58]  I don't know if they drove over to her house or if he did that or if they met in some other place entirely, but there's no way it happened the way they said it did.
[00:37:06]  There's no way Ryan wakes up and goes, Oh, I'm going to Tara's house.
[00:37:11]  Do you have any theories of what the motive could be?
[00:37:13]  I think maybe they could have been hanging out and, you know, maybe on some friendship type stuff, just like with Tara?
[00:37:21]  Yeah.
[00:37:22]  And something got out of control, something got out of hand, and, you know, she ended up dead somehow.
[00:37:30]  And that would involve, you know, somebody likely doing something sexual or went to that place.
[00:37:37]  And I think that if you look at the behavior of someone like Bo Dukes, you know, He does that kind of stuff.
[00:37:45]  He's raped somebody before.
[00:37:47]  Oh, really?
[00:37:48]  He's in jail for rape right now.
[00:37:49]  So it's not like it's out of his character.
[00:37:52]  And so I don't want to point the finger at anybody, but there's a big question mark there.
[00:37:59]  And I think that if we knew some of the main pieces, like how did they ever link up?

=== Investigating a Big Responsibility (04:15) ===

[00:38:06]  To me, that was the big one.
[00:38:07]  If we knew that, then I think that you could piece the rest together.
[00:38:12]  But it didn't happen from some guy waking up drunk out of his mind and just saying, I'm going to go to my former teacher's house to steal what?
[00:38:21]  She's a teacher.
[00:38:22]  She doesn't make any money.
[00:38:23]  That sounds like absolute bullshit.
[00:38:24]  And it's so surprising that the prosecutors and the investigators would just be able to settle with that explanation.
[00:38:31]  It blew my mind that in the five years.
[00:38:34]  But it is Georgia.
[00:38:35]  It is Georgia.
[00:38:37]  I mean, they had five years to get their story straight, and they ran with the same bullshit they did five years ago.
[00:38:43]  And they're mad at me about it.
[00:38:44]  It's like, okay.
[00:38:45]  Who's mad at you?
[00:38:47]  Some people in the GBI have never really liked me very much, and I get it.
[00:38:54]  I'm probably a thorn in their side a little bit.
[00:38:57]  Of course.
[00:38:58]  Some guy coming down and, you know, poking at this case.
[00:39:01]  And anything that I find doesn't make you look good because why didn't you find it?
[00:39:07]  Right.
[00:39:08]  And, you know, it's their, you know, responsibility to actually solve it.
[00:39:12]  And so I think they just really didn't like the fact that I had, that I was investigating this case and I made this podcast that got so hugely popular and put them under the microscope.
[00:39:25]  Right.
[00:39:26]  How many people have listened to this whole series so far?
[00:39:29]  It's, I want to say it's.
[00:39:32]  Over 400 million downloads across the series.
[00:39:37]  That's incredible, man.
[00:39:38]  It's been huge.
[00:39:40]  And I think it's just really a testament to the kind of style we go approach a story like this and it feeling like something is happening.
[00:39:53]  This is special.
[00:39:54]  We're trying to actually solve the murder.
[00:39:58]  We're not just retelling, rehashing some tragedy.
[00:40:02]  Right.
[00:40:02]  And I think there's a big difference.
[00:40:03]  Right.
[00:40:04]  Right.
[00:40:05]  There's something to.
[00:40:08]  Looking under rock, picking up rocks that haven't been picked up before and looking underneath them and finding something that has never had light shined on it before, and then just going down that rabbit hole forever.
[00:40:20]  Or picking up the same rock and being like, hey, I know you all picked this up a long time ago, but did you all look very well?
[00:40:26]  Right.
[00:40:27]  But I mean, specifically when it comes to creating entertainment or media or something like that and publishing it, when you look at the media landscape, it's all stuff that just gets recycled and regurgitated, and people just want to follow what's already popular, what's going to get them more listens or views or whatever.
[00:40:42]  But when you actually like take risks and look for shit that no one's talking about, that is the stuff I think that is extremely powerful.
[00:40:51]  And that was what was new for me.
[00:40:53]  That was the biggest learning curve was, you know, what the hell am I doing as an investigator, podcaster, trying to solve this cold case?
[00:41:03]  How do I juggle this?
[00:41:05]  I knew how to do the creative part to an extent because that's what I've been doing my whole life.
[00:41:09]  And I was just, you know, learning from my mistakes and just.
[00:41:14]  Kept building on what I felt was working.
[00:41:17]  But, you know, me being this sort of, you know, outlier in this small town, talking to strangers and gaining people's trust, that was a new thing in that sort of way.
[00:41:34]  And that was arguably the hardest part about doing Up and Vanished was dealing with the realness and the heaviness of everything.
[00:41:45]  And Knowing how big of a responsibility it really was at the time.
[00:41:49]  Yeah.
[00:41:50]  It's like you're just like putting this puzzle together, like playing a game, and these people's lives are actually like at stake.
[00:41:56]  Yeah.
[00:41:56]  As a listener, yeah, it's a podcast, right?
[00:41:58]  But, you know, these people are still going to call me.
[00:42:01]  You know, they're real people.
[00:42:03]  They're living a real life, and so am I.
[00:42:06]  It might be a cool listen, but it doesn't end when you press stop for me.
[00:42:12]  What kind of, how many people were reaching out to you?
[00:42:14]  Did you get anybody that like, Emailed you or contacted you about this case that, like, provided any big breaks or even lead you on to more stories?

=== Wayne Williams and Atlanta Children (10:59) ===

[00:42:21]  There was tons.
[00:42:22]  I mean, there it's like endless.
[00:42:24]  It was pretty much all the big things that were revelations in the show were things that people had reached out to me about that I sort of verified myself on my own.
[00:42:37]  One of them being that the cops did go and search that pecan orchard based on that tip back in 2005.
[00:42:45]  Oh, wow.
[00:42:46]  And you know, that was a huge piece of information.
[00:42:49]  Because they also kind of brought up the idea that are the statute of limitations up on this?
[00:42:54]  Because if they were looking into this in 2005, you know, if it's been past 10 years, in some scenario, there's a possibility that they couldn't be charged with something because they blew it.
[00:43:06]  Also, you blew it.
[00:43:08]  Right.
[00:43:09]  Did they ever find her DNA or any sort of.
[00:43:11]  So they've always been like real elusive about what they did find.
[00:43:14]  And what I've been told and I believe is the truth is that they found bone fragments, I think specifically teeth.
[00:43:24]  That they were able to test.
[00:43:27]  They burned her body for days and there wasn't much left.
[00:43:32]  Also, it had been over a decade out there.
[00:43:34]  Days, they burned.
[00:43:35]  For days.
[00:43:36]  And so there really wasn't a lot.
[00:43:37]  And you saw that there was no witnesses or anything to this?
[00:43:40]  I mean, they're just out there in the boonies, way out on this private pecan orchard.
[00:43:44]  I think people knew that there was something burning, but I don't think anyone thought it was that, right?
[00:43:51]  And so they had a huge property that this could be done on.
[00:43:55]  And sort of get away with it, which I mean, they did.
[00:43:57]  So, and the building that burned down was just a false flag that had nothing to do with it.
[00:44:01]  Yep, just false flag, just a weird thing, weird coincidence, just like many others in the case.
[00:44:08]  And it's all a result of you know not looking down the right direction from the very beginning and looking everywhere else and then trying to make that work.
[00:44:19]  And that's what the police were doing.
[00:44:21]  Wow, man.
[00:44:23]  So, what are you working on next?
[00:44:24]  What did you decide to do after that?
[00:44:26]  Like more true crime investigations like this, try to dig into more unsolved mysteries.
[00:44:29]  Yeah, so after season one, I made another true crime podcast called Atlanta Monster about the Atlanta child murders in the 80s.
[00:44:39]  And it was a limited series, 10 episodes.
[00:44:43]  And it was an investigative thing again, but also sort of a history lesson in terms of what was happening back then in the 80s and culture at the time and racism and all those things.
[00:44:55]  And I eventually got Wayne Williams on the phone.
[00:45:00]  And so the last half of the show is me talking to him and him basically trying to convince me why he isn't the Atlanta child murderer.
[00:45:08]  Who is Wayne?
[00:45:09]  So he's the guy who was arrested for the Atlanta child murders.
[00:45:12]  And he's definitely the guy who killed those kids.
[00:45:15]  But he would tell you otherwise.
[00:45:16]  And there are some things that are weird that don't add up.
[00:45:20]  But the guy is a pathological liar, he's a psychopath.
[00:45:24]  And I talked to him at length for months in person or on the phone?
[00:45:28]  On the phone.
[00:45:29]  And I was able to eventually get to the point where I was.
[00:45:33]  Going back through all the tape I had and could trip him up on his lies and sort of, you know, hopefully put to rest, at least for me, that this guy is a liar.
[00:45:45]  You know, just because this looks weird over here doesn't mean that he didn't kill these 15 kids over here.
[00:45:51]  So, what is the story?
[00:45:52]  What is this guy's story?
[00:45:53]  If you could like sum it up, like give me like an elevator pitch of what this guy's all about and like the case of the whole Atlanta child murders.
[00:45:59]  So, in the early 80s in Atlanta, black Children were going missing and turning up dead, and it got to the point where they realized that something was happening, these weren't all connected in some way, and there was likely a serial killer.
[00:46:19]  This is kind of the visors being left out in the public, yes, and yes, and they were all kids, they were all black and going missing from you know the poor neighborhoods.
[00:46:31]  Eventually, they find their suspect, and his name is Wayne Williams, and he was a black guy.
[00:46:38]  And he worked in the music industry.
[00:46:42]  That's a loose description.
[00:46:45]  But he recruited kids, and it was like kind of trying to make his own band, right?
[00:46:50]  Like a Jackson 5 kind of thing.
[00:46:53]  And so he had access to these kids, and they eventually.
[00:46:58]  The smoking gun for Wayne was when they went and searched his house, they found these carpet fibers that matched several of the bodies of the victims.
[00:47:09]  And normally you'd say, okay, a carpet fiber, right?
[00:47:12]  Like everyone has carpet.
[00:47:14]  Why is that not someone else's house?
[00:47:16]  Well, it just so happened that this particular fiber that they tracked down all the way was so incredibly rare.
[00:47:23]  That it was in like maybe one or two other houses in the state.
[00:47:27]  And so the likelihood of these fibers being on these victims collectively on its own is crazy.
[00:47:36]  But for those fibers to also be in Wayne Williams' house, what are the odds?
[00:47:40]  And so that was really kind of how they were able to close the book on Wayne Williams being the Atlanta child murderer.
[00:47:49]  He only went to jail for two of the murders, but a lot more are attributed to him.
[00:47:53]  How many?
[00:47:55]  I mean, Some say as many as 30, but I think it's probably realistically 15, 17 of the kids that he killed.
[00:48:04]  I think that some of the other kids on the list, I think that there were other circumstances that were weird, but don't really match the motive and the MO of the other murders.
[00:48:18]  And I think those are just outliers, and there's probably a bunch of different reasons for that.
[00:48:23]  And so he kind of likes to look at those cases that maybe he didn't actually commit.
[00:48:30]  And say, see, I didn't do that.
[00:48:33]  And it's like, yeah, you probably didn't, but you killed all of these other kids.
[00:48:38]  And so it's a really bizarre thing.
[00:48:40]  And I just got so tired of talking to this guy.
[00:48:43]  It was exhausting.
[00:48:44]  And eventually I had to block his number from jail, from all my phones after I kind of let him hang himself.
[00:48:55]  What was his background?
[00:48:58]  How did he get involved in this?
[00:48:59]  And had he been in and out of jail before?
[00:49:02]  What was his motive to doing this?
[00:49:05]  That's always been a big question mark, and I think that what the general consensus is, and it's never really been proven, but it seems like there was probably some sexual nature to the crimes.
[00:49:19]  I think that, you know, there was probably some sort of pedophilia type, you know, either motivation or something where he was attracted to these kids, and that's also why he did the music stuff like that.
[00:49:36]  And He just started scooping them up, and maybe he did something one time and got away with it.
[00:49:45]  And I think he liked the fact that he was able to get away with something so terrible.
[00:49:54]  And he was kind of one of those guys who was a whiz at the time in terms of like radio technology and almost like chasing the news.
[00:50:05]  And he even sort of liked to go out to crime scenes himself and as like a.
[00:50:10]  Independent reporter, and so he, I think, got off on the fact that he was killing these kids and they were all trying to figure out who it was, and he was still doing it and getting away with it.
[00:50:24]  You know, it's hard to, there's no good reason for him to kill a kid, but I think that that's probably in his head what he got from it.
[00:50:34]  Was there any sort of like racial motive involved?
[00:50:37]  And you say he was black and he was only killing black kids, did he ever say about that?
[00:50:40]  And that's that's the weird thing, right?
[00:50:42]  It's like you know.
[00:50:44]  I think that that shocked a lot of people that it was a black guy who killed these black kids.
[00:50:52]  I bet no one expected that.
[00:50:54]  But even the police themselves, and they had said early on, like the FBI profilers, they were saying, you know what?
[00:51:01]  I don't think that a white guy could have done it actually, because if a white guy was going in and snatching kids from these neighborhoods, that would be noticed immediately.
[00:51:13]  Right.
[00:51:14]  And so they had a hunch that.
[00:51:17]  Whoever this person was, whatever their color was, he was able to blend in with his environment and go completely unnoticed while committing these crimes.
[00:51:29]  And so that was kind of a leading factor in terms of the profile they were building of the suspect.
[00:51:36]  And to a lot of people, it's still very shocking.
[00:51:40]  I don't know if it was a race thing.
[00:51:41]  I think he was just taking advantage of the kids who were closest to him.
[00:51:47]  When this was going on, was there sort of a media frenzy around some sort of like, oh, yeah.
[00:51:51]  Racial narrative around it?
[00:51:53]  It was huge.
[00:51:54]  I mean, it was also in the 80s when, you know, racism is alive and well at that point.
[00:52:00]  Right.
[00:52:01]  And, you know, it was at a time where it was, you know, supercharged and these black kids were going missing and it seemed like no one was doing anything about it.
[00:52:11]  And then it eventually became a national news story for some of those same reasons.
[00:52:16]  And it was really the, you know, the Georgia police, the GBI, The Atlanta police, they wanted this thing to go away.
[00:52:27]  It was not making Georgia or Atlanta look very good.
[00:52:30]  They're like, we need to figure out who the hell this guy is and put him behind bars.
[00:52:35]  And so they really pulled out all the stops and they eventually did catch this guy.
[00:52:40]  But at the time, it was a huge story that had a lot of implications.
[00:52:46]  And it was a big shock when Wayne Williams turned out to be the killer.
[00:52:53]  Did he confess to any of that or does he still maintain his innocence?
[00:52:55]  He still maintains his innocence, which also people do that.
[00:52:59]  There's plenty of people who we know.
[00:53:01]  I mean, OJ Simpson says he didn't do it either.
[00:53:03]  Right.
[00:53:04]  Also, I think he says sometimes he did do it.
[00:53:06]  But yeah, it's not surprising.
[00:53:10]  If you analyze him, and I'm not even like an expert at that, but even just for the layperson, he's a pathological liar and he's good at lying.

=== Gaping Holes in the Story (02:17) ===

[00:53:21]  He's actually pretty charming when you talk to him on the phone and you're like, ah, stop.
[00:53:25]  He.
[00:53:26]  He gets you like going down this way when you were trying to go that way, and he's just really good at it.
[00:53:31]  I think he's probably convinced himself, and he believes that he didn't do it either.
[00:53:36]  He's convinced himself at this point.
[00:53:37]  Interesting.
[00:53:39]  Yeah, I get a lot of, from what you're saying, I get a lot of Charles Manson vibes from this guy.
[00:53:43]  Does he seem, do he seem at all kind of just like completely lost his mind?
[00:53:49]  Full of himself?
[00:53:49]  Narcissistic?
[00:53:50]  He's narcissistic for sure.
[00:53:51]  He's definitely full of himself.
[00:53:53]  He's super charming and quick and sort of witty.
[00:53:59]  And kind of unassuming, like you wouldn't think that this frail old man who's acting all jolly could have done this, right?
[00:54:08]  But if you start just peeling it all back and looking at the facts, it supports the fact that he did, and there are some things that he's lied about that he shouldn't have.
[00:54:20]  And it's just you know, you get into a pattern of covering your ass.
[00:54:25]  At what point are you lying about everything?
[00:54:28]  Have you ever read um, Tom O'Neill's book, Chaos?
[00:54:31]  No, about Charles Manson.
[00:54:32]  Is it good?
[00:54:33]  It's really good.
[00:54:33]  He spent, he was a reporter for some sort of Hollywood magazine, and he was tasked to just write a quick report on the 10 year anniversary, or it was the 20 year anniversary, I think, of the Manson murders.
[00:54:46]  And he did it, and then he just started looking into it and asking for some interviews.
[00:54:52]  Next thing you know, he spent 20 years going down this rabbit hole and three lawsuits with the different magazines that paid him to report on it because he was just so invested in it.
[00:54:59]  And he ended up finding all these gaping holes in the story from everything from, um, Jolly West, who was a CIA chemist, to his probation officer, who was like working with this free clinic in San Francisco with a bunch of hippies and like doing these crazy tests with LSD and with amphetamines.
[00:55:25]  And, you know, there's like these just gaping holes in that story.
[00:55:30]  And he never got to the bottom of it, but it's a fascinating book how he covers it.
[00:55:36]  And I'm getting a lot of the same vibes from what you're saying about this guy.

=== Prison Life and Death Penalty (02:54) ===

[00:55:39]  So I'm curious, like, did this guy ever go to Prison before all this stuff, like how much connection did he have to the law enforcement or the FBI or anything like that?
[00:55:48]  Because there's just so many weird psyops in history when it comes to like murder cases like this that get tons of media coverage, especially when there's a lot.
[00:55:57]  I'm not saying that this is what it is, but it's it smells fishy like that.
[00:56:02]  And that's kind of one of the problems with the case is that if you look at it on a surface level, you can you know draw those assumptions, it's very easy to.
[00:56:12]  Fall down the slippery conspiracy theory slope with this case, especially because there's just weird stuff in it.
[00:56:19]  It's just there's oddities that exist, but the thing is, sometimes weird shit happens, yeah.
[00:56:26]  And you know, at a certain point, you have to look at the cold, hard evidence and put your blinders on and objectively say, Hey, these things couldn't have happened unless he did it, right?
[00:56:40]  I don't care how weird it is, right?
[00:56:42]  So, he definitely did it, he definitely did it.
[00:56:44]  And you said there were 30 kids.
[00:56:46]  There was, yeah, 30 kids on the list.
[00:56:48]  And I think that he probably killed half the kids on that list.
[00:56:53]  And who would have killed the rest of them?
[00:56:54]  Was it someone he was involved with?
[00:56:56]  I don't think that it was a serial killer.
[00:56:58]  I think that they were all just completely different circumstances.
[00:57:03]  And if you dive into the cases, you can tell that it was likely, you know, some may have been just a one off thing that, you know, some other person killed this kid or there was family stuff involved over here and just different kind of scenarios and settings.
[00:57:19]  And, you know, MOs for every other case that it was kind of like not connected to anything other than they just happened at the same time.
[00:57:30]  And because they're all lumped together into this list, he just likes to hang on the fact that he didn't kill every one of those kids.
[00:57:40]  Does he have the death penalty or does he have life in prison?
[00:57:44]  Life in prison.
[00:57:45]  Life, no death.
[00:57:46]  No death.
[00:57:46]  Does Georgia still have the death penalty?
[00:57:48]  I think so.
[00:57:50]  If you have life in prison, why wouldn't you just admit if you really did it, you're already in jail for life?
[00:57:54]  I think because he still gets off on people like me who, you know, wanted to hear him out.
[00:58:01]  It's like, I'm sure he's moved on to the next one.
[00:58:03]  You know, they've done so many documentaries on this over time, over the decades, that I think that to him, it's like the bane of his existence at this point.
[00:58:14]  He likes to be able to preach this narrative to other people.
[00:58:20]  It's like he's still spinning the same.
[00:58:23]  Bullshit web that he was spinning before he went to jail.
[00:58:27]  And that's just, he'll never stop doing that.
[00:58:31]  Strange, man.
[00:58:32]  It is very strange.

=== RV Cases and Breathing Truths (04:05) ===

[00:58:33]  All your stories based out of Georgia?
[00:58:36]  Do all of them come out of Atlanta, your area, or Georgia in specific?
[00:58:40]  No, those were the two biggest cases that I covered.
[00:58:43]  But yeah, season two of Up and Vanish was a missing person from Crestone, Colorado, this small town.
[00:58:51]  Her name's Crystal Reisinger.
[00:58:53]  And then season three was about Ashley Loring, heavy runner, missing from a Native American reservation in Montana.
[00:59:01]  And so, really, like all the cases that I've covered and the true crime stories I've Made podcasts about have taken me kind of all over the place at this point.
[00:59:10]  Did you have to move to these places when you start reporting on them?
[00:59:13]  For a period of time, yeah.
[00:59:14]  I mean, I will get like a part time apartment or Airbnb for a long extended period of time and really kind of be there and immerse myself in the story.
[00:59:28]  And actually, for season three, we rented an RV and we just went to around the town and people we wanted to interview.
[00:59:37]  We would just invite them onto the RV and had a whole basically like a studio set up because it was really kind of uncomfortable in a lot of situations to impose going into their house, and there was no real good public place to do this.
[00:59:52]  And so we kind of needed to bring our controlled element to them to get that tape and to have these one on ones with people.
[01:00:02]  What was that recent case in Florida that happened?
[01:00:05]  I think it was Gabby Petito.
[01:00:08]  The girl was in that reservation.
[01:00:10]  I forget how that story went.
[01:00:11]  I did a whole podcast on it, but that was like maybe a year ago.
[01:00:15]  And they found, I think they found her.
[01:00:17]  Did you follow that at all?
[01:00:18]  You're talking about the, where they were out west on.
[01:00:21]  Yeah, they were out west in some nature reserve and they actually got, her boyfriend got pulled over.
[01:00:26]  Yes.
[01:00:26]  They were driving a truck.
[01:00:28]  Yes.
[01:00:28]  And they interviewed her and she seemed like psychotic.
[01:00:30]  Yeah, that was, yeah, you couldn't miss that case.
[01:00:32]  That was all over.
[01:00:34]  Everywhere.
[01:00:34]  It was like insanely covered.
[01:00:38]  Yeah, I mean, that was a bizarre case.
[01:00:40]  Did they ever find that guy?
[01:00:42]  Yeah, I think he killed himself.
[01:00:44]  Oh, did he?
[01:00:45]  I think they found him and a gun somewhere nearish to where he was last.
[01:00:54]  Everglades or something.
[01:00:55]  Yeah.
[01:00:57]  And there was some sort of, I think, suicide note.
[01:01:00]  I don't know if they ever released what it said.
[01:01:02]  Maybe they did.
[01:01:03]  But it was clear that he had just ran off and ended his life.
[01:01:07]  Yeah.
[01:01:07]  What is it about national parks and people disappearing?
[01:01:11]  I think that there's probably just so many places, so many ways it could go wrong.
[01:01:16]  You know, you might fall down this crevice.
[01:01:18]  You might get eaten by a bear.
[01:01:20]  Yeah.
[01:01:20]  You might just break your leg, and, you know, you're screaming for help and no one hears you.
[01:01:25]  Then you die of starvation.
[01:01:26]  And it's the perfect place to kill somebody.
[01:01:27]  The bear is going to make sure there's no remains of you left, unfortunately.
[01:01:31]  And so they might never find you.
[01:01:32]  Or they're aliens abducting you.
[01:01:34]  I don't know.
[01:01:34]  Or it's the perfect place to kill somebody.
[01:01:36]  You could just feed them to a bear or feed them to a.
[01:01:38]  Oh, yeah.
[01:01:38]  It's like, it's so remote.
[01:01:40]  It's, yeah, you got to be careful out there, especially if you're walking around by yourself.
[01:01:45]  Yeah, man.
[01:01:46]  That's freaking great.
[01:01:46]  So, a lot of these stories that you're reporting on, you're getting tips from people that are like reaching out to you, being like, hey, you got to look at this.
[01:01:52]  Yeah.
[01:01:53]  Pretty much every case I've covered at a certain point in the podcast, I'm getting this surge of new information as a result of what they're listening to.
[01:02:06]  And so, because the townspeople know this podcast exists and they're hearing stuff, they're raising their hand and offering the information that they have.
[01:02:17]  And You know, I didn't know they existed until then.
[01:02:20]  And so it's kind of a living, breathing thing in that way where it kind of builds on itself.
[01:02:26]  Yeah, it's weird how when you do something like this, I'm sure this happened with your Up and Vanish the first season in Georgia.
[01:02:32]  I'm sure like the whole town just becomes completely engulfed in the story where it's all anyone talks about.

=== Incompetence and Ryan's Testimony (14:44) ===

[01:02:38]  Oh, yeah.
[01:02:39]  It's, uh, it was the biggest thing ever.
[01:02:43]  And, you know, what I realized had happened before the break in the case, it was from all the townspeople, it seemed like it was, you know, 99% of them loved what I was doing.
[01:02:56]  I was, you know, in their eyes, like this good Samaritan.
[01:03:00]  Who was going out of his way, putting himself at risk to tell this story and uncover the truth.
[01:03:07]  And then once the break in the case happened and the podcast was so big and polarizing, I think that the people in the town who were genuinely hurt by what was going on, they either had to say, they wanted to point their finger at somebody, and it was either me or the police.
[01:03:28]  Why would they point their finger at you?
[01:03:31]  It's a good question.
[01:03:32]  I think that.
[01:03:34]  I think because it's easy to assign blame to something.
[01:03:40]  Had I not been here doing this, and maybe you wouldn't have been disrupted the way that you were.
[01:03:46]  And if you would break that down, it kind of sounds crazy, but I think that people need to assign that to someone.
[01:03:52]  And I realized that, yes, some people are going to be upset that I've done this or that I'm doing this just because I'm disrupting.
[01:04:07]  Their lives and not personally or individually, but because it's such a big thing that's happening in such a small place, they can't escape it.
[01:04:17]  Well, what does their family think about it?
[01:04:19]  What is their family?
[01:04:20]  Are you communicating with them still?
[01:04:21]  What do they say about what you did?
[01:04:22]  I don't really talk to her family that much anymore.
[01:04:26]  You know, I've talked to tons of her friends and family.
[01:04:31]  I know it's a big family, and she knew a bunch of people.
[01:04:36]  And so, you know, even that's always been a little bit divided.
[01:04:40]  Right?
[01:04:40]  Really?
[01:04:41]  Yeah.
[01:04:41]  I think that people want to point the finger somewhere.
[01:04:48]  And the problem with doing true crime stuff or an unsolved murder case is that when you find the truth, it's going to hurt.
[01:05:00]  It's really ugly what happened.
[01:05:02]  It's really terrible stuff.
[01:05:04]  Yeah.
[01:05:05]  It's not a good thing, right?
[01:05:08]  No one's having fun.
[01:05:10]  It's the worst of the worst.
[01:05:12]  And.
[01:05:13]  That's really hard to deal with.
[01:05:15]  I've never had to deal with something like that on a personal level, but I've seen it firsthand up close to people that I grew close with and cared about.
[01:05:27]  And so I know that it's something that is completely tragic and life altering.
[01:05:34]  And so I think when something that tragic happens to anybody, it can shape your perception of the things around you.
[01:05:43]  And You know, I don't take any of it personally that if someone didn't like me or they think that XYZ, that's okay.
[01:05:55]  I understand, but I'm not going to.
[01:05:59]  You're just exploiting my daughter's death.
[01:06:01]  I mean, someone might say that, you know?
[01:06:04]  And it's.
[01:06:06]  I know I can go to sleep every night just fine knowing that that's not true.
[01:06:14]  Having done it and lived through the podcast investigation of it all, and from every step of the way, I knew how hard that was and how immense that responsibility was, and that I gave it my all to make sure that I did it the most respectful way possible and never, ever lose sight of what matters the most.
[01:06:44]  Which was trying to figure out what happened to Tara Grinstead.
[01:06:48]  And that I led with that and I continued with that forever.
[01:06:53]  Do you think that your podcast had anything to do with that guy coming forward and ratting out Ryan?
[01:07:00]  Yeah.
[01:07:00]  So some people, especially on Reddit, it seems, really have a distaste for me.
[01:07:09]  They say stuff like, you know, Payne claims he solved that murder.
[01:07:13]  He didn't solve anything.
[01:07:15]  And, you know, my first response is, Well, one, I never claimed to have solved anything.
[01:07:20]  No, you ripped the scab off.
[01:07:22]  Right.
[01:07:22]  And I think people just misinterpret certain things this way.
[01:07:25]  Like, oh, he played a call from his grandmother who said this.
[01:07:29]  I'm like, you would play a call from your grandmother too, man.
[01:07:33]  It's not that deep.
[01:07:34]  It was a special thing at the time.
[01:07:37]  It was really happening.
[01:07:39]  And so I would never say that I solved that case because that wouldn't be true.
[01:07:44]  But I know for sure that the podcast prompted.
[01:07:50]  Bo Dukes to start talking again.
[01:07:52]  Right.
[01:07:52]  And I know that I have proof of that because I have text messages from him sending the podcast to other people before.
[01:08:02]  Really?
[01:08:03]  Yes.
[01:08:03]  Before he ever confessed to anything.
[01:08:06]  How do you have those text messages?
[01:08:07]  Because they sent them to me from multiple people.
[01:08:11]  Law enforcement sent them to you?
[01:08:13]  Oh, hell no.
[01:08:14]  Other friends who I guess narked them out.
[01:08:17]  Oh, shit.
[01:08:18]  Yeah.
[01:08:18]  So I have like the.
[01:08:20]  And I don't.
[01:08:22]  To me, it's like I don't need that validation either way.
[01:08:26]  I know that it clearly brought new life into a case that needed it at the time, and I think good things happened from that.
[01:08:37]  But it's true that this was on his radar, and I think that he probably, in his narcissistic way, felt kind of cool about it, and he just couldn't keep his mouth shut.
[01:08:49]  I don't think it was so much of him being scared.
[01:08:52]  I think that.
[01:08:53]  It was everyone in the town talking about this, and then the whole nation kind of on fire with this podcast.
[01:09:00]  He knew the truth.
[01:09:02]  I think that was empowering to him, and that's when he slipped up and started spilling the beans a little bit.
[01:09:08]  I thought it was interesting how he mentioned I was watching a video of his testimony, and I forget if it was, I forget who was on the stand, but I think it was the brother of Ryan Duke.
[01:09:19]  Yeah, and he was basically saying he was at a party with Bo, and Bo was like, Hey, man, I know who killed her, who was your brother?
[01:09:24]  He's like, Really?
[01:09:25]  He's like, No, no, no, just kidding, don't say anything.
[01:09:27]  That was very interesting how he.
[01:09:29]  These weird exchanges like that, you're like, what?
[01:09:31]  Like.
[01:09:32]  Yeah.
[01:09:33]  Yeah, it's hard to wrap your mind around these conversations.
[01:09:36]  And also, you would see why someone like that wouldn't believe them.
[01:09:39]  Can you pull up the video of Ryan Duke's testimony on the case?
[01:09:47]  He seemed very, very odd when he was on the witness stand.
[01:09:51]  He was like.
[01:09:51]  He is odd.
[01:09:53]  Like, just objectively weird.
[01:09:55]  He seemed out of all of them to be the weirdest.
[01:09:58]  Yeah, it doesn't matter.
[01:09:59]  Just pull up any part of Ryan Duke's testimony.
[01:10:01]  Like, if you skip forward and if you look at the way he answers the questions, how he likes to move his throat to the microphone every time he says something.
[01:10:08]  It was pretty shocking that they even brought him up on the stand.
[01:10:11]  Really that was kind of a surprise to most people.
[01:10:13]  Why wouldn't?
[01:10:14]  Yeah this?
[01:10:15]  Yes, right here.
[01:10:15]  Yeah, full screen.
[01:10:21]  And did you guys party a lot?
[01:10:22]  He's got a lipper in right now.
[01:10:24]  Yes sir, it looks like he's got a big old hog.
[01:10:27]  Yeah, both were either in school.
[01:10:30]  No, Hank was in school and that's all Bo did.
[01:10:33]  That guy looks guilty as shit.
[01:10:38]  What?
[01:10:38]  Drugs marijuana cocaine, Just a little.
[01:10:45]  Your job at Stewart Finance, was that a full-time or part-time job?
[01:10:48]  It was full-time.
[01:10:48]  How long did you work at Stewart Finance?
[01:10:51]  When did you finish?
[01:10:52]  That's a country boy right there.
[01:10:55]  The next summer.
[01:10:56]  So this would have been about summer 2004.
[01:10:59]  Did you ever talk to him?
[01:11:01]  I never talked to him directly, but I talked to him through one of his good friends and as kind of like a conduit when he was in prison.
[01:11:12]  They, I mean, he was instructed to not talk to me at all.
[01:11:18]  And that makes sense, right?
[01:11:19]  Because I'm going to try to ask the hard questions and figure out what's going on here.
[01:11:25]  But, you know, there's been transmissions between a friend and, you know, he's a weird mystery.
[01:11:33]  But, you know, I've never said that Ryan Duke, you know, couldn't have done this.
[01:11:39]  You know, I've never thought that he had nothing to do with this.
[01:11:43]  Mm hmm.
[01:11:43]  I just think that there's a missing piece to the puzzle.
[01:11:47]  And until that narrative of what happened to Tara, how they got together, makes even the slightest bit of sense, then if you have this big elephant in the room with Bo Dukes, who's clearly a piece of shit person, who's capable of doing messed up stuff, I'm not going to feel good about saying that it happened the way that they said.
[01:12:11]  Do you think it could have been like murder for hire?
[01:12:13]  Do you think it could have been the Iraqi veteran boyfriend?
[01:12:16]  No.
[01:12:16]  Against those guys to kill her?
[01:12:18]  No.
[01:12:18]  I think that was just too deep.
[01:12:20]  It's like.
[01:12:21]  Yeah, but it seems the most obvious because it seems like the only motive.
[01:12:24]  The thing is, is that he didn't.
[01:12:26]  He had no reason to want her dead.
[01:12:28]  It's like.
[01:12:29]  Yeah, he broke up with her.
[01:12:31]  And it's like if his heart was broken, you could start spinning the conspiracy theory that he was going to take her out or something.
[01:12:41]  But there was no real motive there.
[01:12:46]  It was peculiar that he was in town.
[01:12:49]  During that time period that she went missing, but so was everybody else.
[01:12:54]  Really?
[01:12:55]  Did she break up with him first, though, and then he broke up with her after?
[01:12:57]  Or so he claims?
[01:12:59]  Yes.
[01:12:59]  And that's all, that's all like he said, she said relationship drama.
[01:13:03]  It is.
[01:13:03]  If you're overseas fighting across the fucking world and your girlfriend's in the same little town, like jumping around from guy to guy, sleeping with students, you would be fucking distraught.
[01:13:14]  Yeah.
[01:13:14]  I think that it was really Marcus Harper had moved on in his head.
[01:13:19]  He still cared about her, but.
[01:13:21]  Yeah.
[01:13:22]  He didn't want to be in that kind of relationship with her anymore, just like anyone else wouldn't want to be in their own circumstances.
[01:13:32]  So there was nothing really suspicious to me about that.
[01:13:36]  You know, the only thing that was like odd really was that he was in town, you know, doing the police ride along that night.
[01:13:45]  But his alibi held up, right?
[01:13:47]  Yeah.
[01:13:47]  And that happened.
[01:13:49]  But, you know, what's even crazier really is that he was doing that.
[01:13:56]  And she still got murdered under everyone's nose.
[01:14:00]  Like the town is not very big.
[01:14:02]  Right.
[01:14:02]  It's just like the timing and the exact moment it had to all happen.
[01:14:09]  It's just so really weird and just like.
[01:14:12]  It's amazing how confusing the whole story is and how many people are involved and how hard it was to figure this out in such a small little town where everybody knows each other.
[01:14:22]  Yeah.
[01:14:23]  It's like I've spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to put these pieces together and I can never get them all the way there.
[01:14:33]  And I've just kind of come to terms with the fact that, you know, we'll never know the full story.
[01:14:40]  And even if.
[01:14:41]  Bo comes back with a news story, or Ryan does.
[01:14:44]  Do we even believe them at this point?
[01:14:46]  No.
[01:14:47]  Right.
[01:14:47]  And so I think we'll never know unless there's some other big revelation that I don't even know where that would come from.
[01:14:56]  Yeah, man.
[01:14:57]  It's wild.
[01:14:57]  And I feel like it's rare, too, where these outlandish mystery murder stories don't have some extreme element of corruption, either from law enforcement or some other.
[01:15:11]  Angle with authorities covering shit up and shit like that.
[01:15:16]  So I think it's wild that this thing does.
[01:15:18]  This story has none of that.
[01:15:19]  It just has incompetence.
[01:15:21]  Yeah, there's a difference between there's corruption and there's incompetence.
[01:15:27]  This is incompetence.
[01:15:29]  And I think that you could assign that to a bunch of different people.
[01:15:34]  And collectively, that created a nightmare scenario of going down the wrong rabbit holes for a decade that could have been prevented.
[01:15:45]  Did Bo and Ryan get, they got life in prison, both of them?
[01:15:49]  So, Ryan, he got found not guilty.
[01:15:52]  So, he's free?
[01:15:53]  He is getting free.
[01:15:54]  He's still going to serve some time for what he took place in that he admitted to, which was destroying the evidence, burning Tara's body with Bo.
[01:16:05]  And Bo was arrested a couple of years ago.
[01:16:10]  He went on this, you know, psycho tear and had, you know, abducted these girls and held them at gunpoint and raped them.
[01:16:20]  Just out of seemingly nowhere.
[01:16:23]  And so he's currently serving time for that right now.
[01:16:27]  He'll probably be in jail forever.
[01:16:28]  Do you think he'd need time for this?
[01:16:31]  I don't think that they've done that yet.
[01:16:34]  Like, they've been able to postpone that and they're going to hit him with the most they can hit him with.
[01:16:41]  But right now, I think he's serving at least 20 in prison and he'll never see the light of day because they're going to hit him with everything else and maybe it's another 20.
[01:16:52]  If he comes out ever, he'll be an old man with no friends and no life and no money.
[01:16:57]  What does Tara's parents or family say about those guys?
[01:17:02]  Do they believe that they're the ones who did it?
[01:17:05]  They definitely believe that they're involved.
[01:17:07]  I think that they believe that Ryan Duke did it.
[01:17:11]  They believe that Ryan did it, not me.
[01:17:12]  Yes.
[01:17:13]  And I think that they believe the GBI's narrative and they want someone to go down for their daughter's murder.

=== Travis Walton Woods Stories (16:14) ===

[01:17:23]  I completely agree.
[01:17:25]  Sympathize with that.
[01:17:27]  And so, if they believe that Ryan Duke is the murderer, obviously they'd be very upset that he was found not guilty for it.
[01:17:37]  But I think that's more of a testament of how law enforcement treated this case and how they wasted five years not making their case any stronger.
[01:17:47]  I don't think the blame can go anywhere else there.
[01:17:49]  What else are you doing?
[01:17:50]  What other kind of stuff are you doing besides this?
[01:17:51]  Are you working on how many podcasts are you working on right now?
[01:17:53]  Man, so many.
[01:17:55]  So, I mean, I've done tons of true crime stuff.
[01:17:57]  About a year and a half ago, I had this.
[01:18:00]  Crazy idea of making an investigative show about UFOs, UAP.
[01:18:06]  And, you know, as a kid, I always just kind of liked the idea.
[01:18:10]  Just sci fi stuff in general always, you know, intrigued me.
[01:18:14]  Steven Spielberg movies, you name it.
[01:18:16]  And so it really kind of started as just a passion project, an idea that I was fond of, even just the idea of, you know, what else?
[01:18:26]  You know, what if there's something else out there and we're not alone?
[01:18:29]  And so I kind of went down this road of trying to, you know, put together an investigative story that.
[01:18:38]  Was in the same vein as the other true crime stories I've told about cold cases and take a similar approach to the topic of UFOs in modern history and today and really kind of figure out what's really up, like what's going on.
[01:18:55]  And I found out pretty quickly through my journey that there was a lot more meat to this bone than I had really even imagined because I'd never really gone down the rabbit holes to.
[01:19:11]  Explore it in this analytical kind of way.
[01:19:14]  And I became, you know, completely convinced beyond a doubt that there is something otherworldly going on and it's just happening right there in front of us under our noses and no one cares.
[01:19:29]  And I, my goal with my new podcast called High Strange was to make a podcast for the skeptic, for the non believer, or for someone who's on the fence or someone like me who was like, Yeah, they're probably real, but like, I don't know.
[01:19:48]  And not forcefully feed something to someone who might have an aversion right away if it pokes their belief system a little bit.
[01:19:59]  And so I wanted to kind of take a different approach, layperson's approach, and unpacking some of the most compelling and hardest to debunk cases in our history and kind of lay it all out there for you to decide, just like I would a true crime podcast.
[01:20:19]  And with the goal being that I want you to listen.
[01:20:25]  And I understand why people would be resistant to this idea because there's a lot of implications that come with it if you believe that we're not alone.
[01:20:37]  If you believe the Bible or you believe this or that, it might be hard to make all these things fit for yourself.
[01:20:46]  And because of that, some people just don't want to go there at all.
[01:20:50]  And so I was trying to make something where I was like, hey, before you tune out, let me just share something with you.
[01:20:58]  And I'm not going to forcefully put this on you.
[01:21:03]  I'm going to spoon feed it to you.
[01:21:05]  And maybe if we can finish this thing together, we can have a real healthy conversation about this topic.
[01:21:12]  So I think that's what it needs an objective, healthy, normal conversation across the board with the reality that.
[01:21:24]  That is interesting.
[01:21:26]  So, how do you take the approach with that documentary?
[01:21:30]  How do you start it?
[01:21:32]  My first thing I wanted to do was go find some of the most compelling stories in modern history that have that are still technically unsolved or haven't been debunked, right?
[01:21:49]  And interview the people who experienced it.
[01:21:52]  And so, I interviewed Travis Walton in episode one and two.
[01:21:58]  And, you know, his story is he went missing for five days in the woods with his logging crew, came back with this crazy story of being on a spaceship.
[01:22:08]  And I met with him in person with my producer, Mike.
[01:22:13]  And, you know, by the end of the conversation, we both looked at each other and said, I'm like, do you believe him?
[01:22:20]  And he's like, yeah.
[01:22:21]  I'm like, me too.
[01:22:23]  And so I was able to walk away with my personal assessment of even if he was lying, I can tell you for sure that Travis Walton himself believes it, and there really is no definitive way to disprove it.
[01:22:37]  And even if, to me, if it was somehow not what they said it was, the circumstances are so bizarre that the alternative of what could have happened is almost stranger than what they're saying happened.
[01:22:53]  And to me, that's compelling.
[01:22:55]  And you can present that kind of case to someone who would be a skeptic, and okay, you poke your holes in this then.
[01:23:03]  You tell me how you feel when you hear this guy talk.
[01:23:05]  You tell me what you think about this.
[01:23:07]  And I think there are a few cases kind of like that in history where there's a lot of strong components to it.
[01:23:15]  And it's really hard to poke that hole that you'd want to poke if you were some stark non believer of something.
[01:23:23]  Yeah.
[01:23:23]  The odd thing about that phenomenon is that if these things are some sort of civilization from somewhere else that are visiting us, they are deliberately.
[01:23:36]  Only making themselves visible enough to convince someone willing to believe, but not enough to convince the skeptic.
[01:23:43]  They're not providing enough evidence to convince somebody who's not willing to believe.
[01:23:46]  They're right on that line.
[01:23:49]  And why is that?
[01:23:50]  And I don't know if I believed.
[01:23:52]  The thing about people like Travis is he definitely believes his own story.
[01:23:55]  Of course.
[01:23:56]  But does that mean that really happened?
[01:23:58]  It does not mean that, no.
[01:23:59]  We don't have evidence that it did happen.
[01:24:01]  We don't have evidence that it didn't happen, other than the fact that he's told the same story and apparently he has a couple other kids that.
[01:24:07]  That were there that verify everything that happened.
[01:24:09]  Yes.
[01:24:10]  According to his story.
[01:24:12]  But, you know, there's definitely a psychological component to that where at a point it becomes religious.
[01:24:20]  Yeah.
[01:24:21]  I mean, it does.
[01:24:23]  And once you come out with that story and it gets that much attention, why change it?
[01:24:32]  Yeah.
[01:24:32]  I think that there's definitely an argument to be made that.
[01:24:37]  You know, he's making this up for whatever reason.
[01:24:41]  And shit, that might even be true.
[01:24:43]  I don't know.
[01:24:45]  But I personally think that if there's any part of his story that's like completely untrue, it's everything that happened after they saw this flying saucer in the woods.
[01:24:58]  I think these guys weren't close enough friends with each other in real life to go to their graves with this, you know, this.
[01:25:08]  Packed of lies of them having seen something weird in the woods.
[01:25:13]  And where was Travis for all those days?
[01:25:17]  If his family was genuinely looking for him, then he wasn't with them, or was his brother in on it?
[01:25:24]  And to what end?
[01:25:26]  It's like that part's hard for me to rationalize.
[01:25:30]  Like he would have had to seize the moment and been like, I'm going to go run off and hide for five days and come back with a crazy story.
[01:25:37]  Maybe he did that, but that's.
[01:25:39]  That to me is crazy too.
[01:25:41]  Yeah.
[01:25:42]  And it's like, well, where were you?
[01:25:44]  You know, because they were looking for him.
[01:25:46]  It's like, it was like a manhunt.
[01:25:49]  What year was that?
[01:25:50]  1975.
[01:25:51]  That's another weird thing to me how come this stuff has stopped happening?
[01:25:56]  I don't think that it stopped happening.
[01:25:57]  There's him, there's Rui Zimbabwe, there's all these close encounters of the third kind.
[01:26:05]  How come we don't hear about this anymore?
[01:26:08]  I don't think that we don't hear about it anymore.
[01:26:10]  I think that if you look at the past 50 years, you can say, okay, yeah, there's that case, there's that case, and they've become sort of like the legendary staple cases that are synonymous with this topic.
[01:26:24]  But I don't think that.
[01:26:26]  You know, it's ever really stopped.
[01:26:29]  I also don't think it's a common thing.
[01:26:31]  Reports of that.
[01:26:33]  Reports of what?
[01:26:34]  Close encounters of the third kind, similar to Travis Walton or Ruiz and Bobway or Betty and Barney Hill.
[01:26:38]  I haven't heard any new cases like that since those cases, since the 90s, early 90s.
[01:26:43]  But if you even look at that for what it is, it's like, okay, how far are we zooming out?
[01:26:49]  I don't think that something like the Roswell incident or the Travis Walton incident is something that happens a lot.
[01:26:57]  If they were really happening, If those are true, I don't think it's a common thing.
[01:27:02]  There also could be, like, you could speculate a lot about it.
[01:27:05]  50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s.
[01:27:09]  Do you know of any cases after the 90s?
[01:27:11]  After the 90s?
[01:27:12]  Yeah.
[01:27:12]  I mean, the Phoenix Lights and, you know, 2000s, there was, you know, a mass sighting.
[01:27:19]  Right, but I'm talking about, like, abductions, like, abduction encounters.
[01:27:22]  I mean, there's people who fucking every year claim they've been abducted, but the problem with that is that how do you prove that, right?
[01:27:29]  And, you know, with the Betty Barney Hill case, what's unique about it is because it's so old, it's like kind of like almost like an origin story for the abduction phenomenon.
[01:27:41]  And so, like, when I look at that, there's not very many, I guess, things they could pull this stuff from.
[01:27:49]  They had to either, like, the idea of a craft floating there, making no noise, being abducted, experiencing loss of time.
[01:27:58]  How many other places was that?
[01:28:00]  Before the Betty Barney Hill case?
[01:28:03]  Not many, not that I'm thinking of off the top of my head in the 1960s.
[01:28:08]  And so, did every other case follow suit with that kind of narrative and was influenced by that?
[01:28:15]  Or did they really genuinely experience something that not many people had on record at least experienced yet?
[01:28:23]  And so, there are cases where people claim that they've been abducted as recently as yesterday, probably.
[01:28:29]  But did they really get abducted?
[01:28:32]  Probably not.
[01:28:32]  Was it sleep paralysis?
[01:28:34]  Maybe.
[01:28:35]  But there's no way to verify their stories really anyway.
[01:28:38]  Like, what would it take for you to believe them, anyways?
[01:28:42]  I mean, would it be the 4K video on your iPhone of the spaceship?
[01:28:47]  I mean, that might do it, but then would you say that's fake because it looks too real?
[01:28:53]  Maybe.
[01:28:54]  I'm like, I always kind of joke around with Mike.
[01:28:56]  Like, I feel like, you know, what is proof, right?
[01:29:01]  Like, what would be enough for anybody?
[01:29:02]  Let's just say today, like, right when I left, there is, you know, on Fox, on CNN, across the board, on all news networks, there is a spacecraft landing on the White House lawn and these aliens are stepping out and shaking Biden's hand.
[01:29:20]  Well, one, I'd be like, that's suspicious, right?
[01:29:23]  But I still think what would happen is people would say, that's a conspiracy.
[01:29:28]  Then that's not true, or this is.
[01:29:30]  And it doesn't matter what it is, you're going to believe what you want to believe.
[01:29:35]  I just think that, you know, I don't know how far the abduction stuff goes.
[01:29:39]  I don't know to what end.
[01:29:42]  The truth, you know, where it ends, I guess.
[01:29:45]  Well, you're starting your series with Travis Walton, and that was kind of a bold decision.
[01:29:51]  You're not really dipping your toe in, you're kind of jumping in head first.
[01:29:53]  And I was kind of like on the fence of whether or not I should do that.
[01:29:57]  But I felt like his narrative was so compelling.
[01:30:00]  If I could just smack you in the face with quite possibly the nuttiest story that there is, and you are still here in your seat with your headphones on, then maybe you'll definitely finish the series.
[01:30:14]  Interesting.
[01:30:14]  And that was kind of like a I'm like, am I going to spook everybody?
[01:30:17]  But I made sure, I tried my best to have like this really sort of like objective approach to it where I wasn't taking.
[01:30:26]  It or myself too seriously.
[01:30:28]  And so it felt like a little, you know, soft handed.
[01:30:31]  And it was, you know, I would say, like, yeah, that sounds crazy.
[01:30:35]  Like, I would probably say, what you're thinking if you thought it was crazy.
[01:30:39]  So, yeah, I don't know where those stories end or if they're all true or not.
[01:30:43]  But I do believe that there are, you know, crafts in the sky that aren't from Earth.
[01:30:49]  And that's been happening for a while.
[01:30:50]  Really?
[01:30:51]  I do believe that, yeah.
[01:30:53]  Which crafts specifically?
[01:30:54]  What reports do you think aren't from Earth?
[01:30:56]  I mean, there's tons that, like, I could reference, but I would say.
[01:30:59]  I think that the Tic Tac stories are definitely something not from Earth.
[01:31:07]  If we're believing the accounts of the Navy pilots and everyone else in the military who was genuinely spooked and perplexed by this, if we're believing them, then I think that there's your biggest account.
[01:31:26]  There's also way better footage of those things.
[01:31:29]  And I don't know why they won't release that.
[01:31:32]  I mean,.
[01:31:33]  Maybe it's, you know, top secret, whatever.
[01:31:35]  If it's a fucking balloon, who cares?
[01:31:38]  But I don't think it's a balloon.
[01:31:38]  I think if it's a balloon or if it's some sort of technology that we're developing secretly, that's why we wouldn't want to release it.
[01:31:44]  I think that's a good reason to keep it secret.
[01:31:46]  It's always a possibility that what we're seeing sometimes is, you know, our own stuff or it's an adversary.
[01:31:54]  Even if it's an adversary, I think that would be a good reason to release it, right?
[01:31:58]  To put this out there so people see what it is so we can start getting more reports of it and to expose.
[01:32:04]  This sort of technology that we don't understand, if it's something that we really don't know what it is.
[01:32:08]  But if it's something that we have and we're secretly developing it and we don't want other nations to know about, I would imagine that would be a great reason to keep it secret and not to release the actual good, compelling footage of it.
[01:32:20]  But then you would, if you're going to go with that theory, then you'd have to add the anecdote of, well, they lied to us then because they said they don't know what they are.
[01:32:31]  But that's what the government does, they lie to us.
[01:32:34]  I mean, sure, but like at what point do you believe them now or do you believe them then or you believe them this time?
[01:32:40]  Right, you can't, you never know.
[01:32:41]  You know, what's like, you never know.
[01:32:43]  That's a bold statement.
[01:32:44]  So that's either the person, you know, that was, you know, approved that statement believes that is true or there's some other like deep, dark, like small black operation that would, you know, that's going on that like is developing technology that like our smartest F 18 pilots don't know about.
[01:33:04]  There definitely is.
[01:33:05]  That definitely exists.
[01:33:06]  Sure.
[01:33:07]  But, like, to what end as well?
[01:33:08]  Like, do we think that we've reached the point where we can do stuff that these F 18s can't?
[01:33:18]  Like, you know, seemingly defy laws of physics with things?
[01:33:22]  Have we gone there?
[01:33:24]  I don't know.
[01:33:25]  But that would also have to be one more asterisk with that way of thinking that they're all ours, which who knows what they are, but they're not what we're used to seeing.

=== Battelle and Fighter Jet Secrets (11:13) ===

[01:33:38]  There's so many different.
[01:33:39]  And they go back a long time.
[01:33:41]  Right.
[01:33:41]  And that to me is also odd.
[01:33:43]  That's very odd.
[01:33:44]  When you go back to the 50s, then you start to get freaky.
[01:33:47]  To me, those are the most compelling cases.
[01:33:49]  Yeah.
[01:33:49]  Because you can go back, like, as a researcher, and you can look up, like, literally what happened that day.
[01:33:54]  Right.
[01:33:55]  And we know exactly where technology was to a point.
[01:34:00]  Right.
[01:34:01]  It's a Kodak film picture that wasn't photoshopped.
[01:34:05]  Right.
[01:34:05]  So, what the hell is that thing?
[01:34:08]  Yeah, I think, if anything, I think the sightings and the videos and the accounts from, like, the 50s and the 60s could be definitely alien.
[01:34:15]  But when it comes to the new stuff, I just don't know.
[01:34:17]  I don't trust the people that got us into the Iraq War under false.
[01:34:20]  Pretense.
[01:34:20]  Yeah.
[01:34:21]  It's harder to believe that stuff now when you see it.
[01:34:23]  Like, even if it's super compelling.
[01:34:25]  Have you seen, um, you can find, I don't know if you've seen the article yet, but there's an article posted on Warzone where the, uh, the journalist, Tyler, if you get his last name, he found out the, uh, have you ever heard, I gotta give some context.
[01:34:39]  Have you ever heard of Ryan Graves, the Navy fighter pilot who recounts seeing these objects on his radar?
[01:34:45]  Yeah.
[01:34:46]  I actually spoke to him on, on the High Strange podcast.
[01:34:49]  Okay.
[01:34:50]  Um, He recounts seeing this thing, or not him seeing it, but he saw it on his radar.
[01:34:55]  But one of the guys that he was flying with saw something he described as a cube inside of a sphere.
[01:35:01]  Yep.
[01:35:01]  You remember that?
[01:35:02]  Yep.
[01:35:02]  What do you think about that?
[01:35:04]  That's just weird.
[01:35:05]  Yeah.
[01:35:06]  I'll be honest, my reaction to that when he described that to us for the podcast was like, I'm going to text you something, Jordan.
[01:35:12]  That sounds oddly specific.
[01:35:16]  Right.
[01:35:16]  And it's like, you have this sort of trope idea, this Hollywood image in your head from.
[01:35:22]  All the, you know, sci fi movies over generations that it's this flying saucer all the time and not something that is maybe none of those things at all.
[01:35:35]  Like, what would that be?
[01:35:37]  I don't know.
[01:35:37]  Like, you could speculate, but like, it doesn't sound like a craft.
[01:35:42]  Also, it sounds like nothing we've ever had ever.
[01:35:45]  So, like, is it like an energy thing?
[01:35:47]  Is it like a portal?
[01:35:49]  Like, is it like a drone that looks really cool?
[01:35:53]  Like, I don't know.
[01:35:55]  Yeah.
[01:35:55]  So, so this article.
[01:35:56]  That was done by this guy on the war zone.
[01:35:59]  He basically discovered the patent that was, I think, approved in the 80s, I think, for a radar deflecting device that is basically propelled into the atmosphere.
[01:36:14]  Does it look like it?
[01:36:15]  Via a submarine.
[01:36:16]  And it's a balloon with a radar deflector inside.
[01:36:20]  Go down, you can actually see the diagram for the patent.
[01:36:23]  Oh, weird, yeah.
[01:36:23]  So it's a tetrahedron.
[01:36:25]  Is that the right word?
[01:36:26]  But it could easily be mistaken for a cube if you're flying by it really fast.
[01:36:30]  Yeah.
[01:36:30]  I mean, it looks.
[01:36:31]  Kind of similar, and they were developed during the Cold War and they were actually tested over Cuba.
[01:36:38]  So, why would these things be floating out here now, right, in their airspace without their knowing?
[01:36:43]  Right, and the interesting thing is that they only started seeing them once they upgraded their radar, yeah, in their F 18s, yes, so they could essentially be testing their own stuff on their own radar because they essentially, sure, yeah, like it was deflecting the radar, it was working on the old radar when they upgraded.
[01:37:04]  Instantly, they started seeing them.
[01:37:05]  Yeah, we're not going to tell you it's there.
[01:37:06]  You tell us if you see anything as the test of scale.
[01:37:09]  It actually shows you everything about the patent.
[01:37:12]  So, can you zoom in on that?
[01:37:15]  Are there any images of the real thing?
[01:37:18]  U.S. patent number 2463517, titled Airborne Corner Reflector.
[01:37:24]  Interesting.
[01:37:25]  Yeah, you can do a deep dive on all of this stuff.
[01:37:26]  It's literally on USPT.
[01:37:28]  Yeah, you never know.
[01:37:29]  It could totally just be this thing, right?
[01:37:32]  Something that we don't have much knowledge of that is.
[01:37:37]  Not alien, but foreign enough to spook a Navy fighter pilot.
[01:37:41]  Right.
[01:37:42]  So, what they were doing was they were deploying these things from submarines over Cuba.
[01:37:47]  And then they were like shooting like phony radar signals, trying to confuse the scramble stuff to scramble Soviet radar.
[01:37:52]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:37:54]  During the Cold War.
[01:37:55]  That's wild.
[01:37:55]  That's a good find.
[01:37:57]  So there's lots of things, man.
[01:37:59]  I don't know.
[01:37:59]  Ever since the Tic Tac and this thing, I just have been super skeptical that, you know, this is.
[01:38:05]  And then the recent thing that came out a couple days ago that that bookshot over.
[01:38:10]  What was that recent one, Jordan?
[01:38:11]  Where was that?
[01:38:12]  That was like in Venezuela or somewhere like that.
[01:38:14]  The Colombian one?
[01:38:14]  Colombia.
[01:38:15]  That was where it was.
[01:38:15]  Oh, yeah, I like that one.
[01:38:17]  Yeah.
[01:38:17]  I mean, it does look cool.
[01:38:19]  I'll give them that.
[01:38:20]  I don't think that shit is aliens.
[01:38:22]  I think that's got to be our technology.
[01:38:24]  And maybe it is, but that's a very UFO looking thing, right?
[01:38:32]  They didn't.
[01:38:33]  Yeah.
[01:38:34]  They made it look like we want them to look like, then.
[01:38:40]  Yeah.
[01:38:40]  Yeah, it looks like a manta ray or a disc flying balloon.
[01:38:43]  I don't think that it's like a traditional balloon because I feel like it would.
[01:38:50]  Move differently if a plane passes it like that.
[01:38:53]  Yeah.
[01:38:54]  How fast is that plane going?
[01:38:55]  Like 100 miles an hour?
[01:38:57]  I think so.
[01:38:57]  Something like that.
[01:38:58]  How fast would something be if you're driving on the highway and you passed a sign?
[01:39:01]  How fast would it be going compared to if you play that back again?
[01:39:05]  It doesn't seem to be moving very fast.
[01:39:06]  Yeah.
[01:39:07]  So I don't think it is moving very fast.
[01:39:08]  It optically appears that way, but it's not.
[01:39:11]  Right.
[01:39:12]  But I think it is moving.
[01:39:15]  Right.
[01:39:16]  Yeah.
[01:39:16]  It's just also super high up there.
[01:39:18]  Like it's like, you know, maybe it's not an alien spaceship, but.
[01:39:23]  I don't think it's a balloon that flew away from the Party City parking lot either.
[01:39:28]  No.
[01:39:28]  You know, it's super high up there.
[01:39:31]  And it looks like a craft, like a thing that does something.
[01:39:37]  So, yeah, so that to me is either like some advanced balloon or like technology.
[01:39:42]  The thing is, there's shit that we don't know what it looks like that we are currently developing, just like that example I just showed you.
[01:39:48]  That thing that there's a literal U.S. patent on that no one has ever seen before.
[01:39:54]  And these fighter pilots weren't even aware that these.
[01:39:56]  Things existed.
[01:39:57]  So, how do you kind of, I guess, rationalize why there is a UAP task force?
[01:40:05]  Why does anybody in the government feel like it's an important thing to explore these unknown objects in the sky that have been ruled out pretty much everywhere else?
[01:40:20]  If it just was total bullshit.
[01:40:23]  My theory evolves almost weekly on this, but right now I think it's a limited hangout.
[01:40:30]  Limited hangout.
[01:40:31]  Yeah.
[01:40:32]  I think basically it's just, that's like a dumb CIA.
[01:40:36]  It's CIA jargon for just a distraction.
[01:40:39]  We're going to give you a little bit of truth here to distract everybody from what's really going on.
[01:40:43]  And what's really going on, you think?
[01:40:46]  I think it's secret projects that we have going on through stuff like DARPA or Skunk Works that we're developing and that we're testing that we don't want foreign entities to know about.
[01:40:59]  So is your feeling that none of them would be something?
[01:41:03]  Otherworldly?
[01:41:06]  I don't know, but the more shit that comes out, like all these crazy acronym tasks force, all these people talking about it and people making careers on this stuff, and the more shit that comes out about it and the more headlines I see in the New York Times, the more I start to lean towards limited hangout and that it's just a distraction.
[01:41:27]  Yeah, I mean, false flag.
[01:41:29]  I just don't like instinctually like to give the government too much credit.
[01:41:36]  I don't.
[01:41:36]  Think that they're that smart.
[01:41:39]  I don't think that they're smart enough to plot this whole, like, you know, deep campaign to make you look over here and do this.
[01:41:50]  I think that they're not that smart.
[01:41:53]  They've done it, they've attempted to do that before, but they also didn't succeed.
[01:41:56]  So it's like when they attempted that before, just like Project Blue Book stuff.
[01:42:00]  Like, you know, like, sure, some people were probably affected by their misinformation campaigns and, you know, thinking that.
[01:42:09]  You were loony or you're crazy if you saw something in the sky that you thought was an alien spaceship.
[01:42:15]  But, like, people never stopped thinking that, really.
[01:42:18]  Some people did.
[01:42:19]  But, like, it's like, what is the.
[01:42:22]  At what point is it like.
[01:42:24]  Is something true?
[01:42:26]  Like, even if it's 0.1%, the universe is so big, it's like it wouldn't be impossible for it to have happened.
[01:42:35]  Definitely not.
[01:42:36]  And so, it's kind of.
[01:42:37]  So, with that in mind, it's hard to kind of.
[01:42:41]  I guess break down the things that we see here on Earth, but it's something that's been talked about for literally centuries.
[01:42:49]  Like, as far as you go back in history, they're describing shit like people still describe they see in the sky.
[01:42:56]  Right.
[01:42:56]  And so, like, you go back far enough, none of those things existed.
[01:43:01]  Right.
[01:43:01]  We weren't even flying planes yet.
[01:43:03]  Definitely.
[01:43:03]  And so, there's no doubt that the government has some pretty cool, badass stuff up their sleeve.
[01:43:10]  I don't know if it's stuff that.
[01:43:12]  You know, I don't know if it's stuff that they've developed on our own, if it's stuff that we've found that we've sort of reverse engineered, sure, yeah, figured out how to use.
[01:43:21]  Maybe it could be both.
[01:43:22]  I don't know where the how do you feel about that whole theory of because that's kind of the low key rumblings around, uh, you know, other journalists that I've talked to.
[01:43:32]  There, there's a common knowledge or idea that the government has, uh, like alien spacecraft and they're reverse engineering it.
[01:43:42]  I think it's totally possible, yeah, I think it's totally possible.
[01:43:46]  And they're doing a damn good job of keeping it secret.
[01:43:49]  Yeah, because I think that for that to be such a big secret, I don't think that many people know about it.
[01:43:54]  I don't think that they're sitting up there, you know, Congress or whatever, you know, lying through their teeth.
[01:44:01]  I think that they just don't know.
[01:44:04]  I think that there's a little like private company that a few people know about.
[01:44:08]  There's a company called Battelle.
[01:44:10]  Is that what it's called?
[01:44:11]  Is it the one in Vegas?
[01:44:12]  No, no.
[01:44:13]  There's a company called B A T T E L L E, if you look it up.
[01:44:17]  They have most of these contracts to work on these things.
[01:44:20]  I actually just recently.
[01:44:21]  Are they rumored to be one of the ones that.
[01:44:23]  I just learned about Battelle recently through another podcast I did, but these guys have some of these crazy futuristic anti gravity contracts.
[01:44:33]  Oh, cool.
[01:44:35]  And even light photon propulsion shit, stuff that you can wrap your mind around that they're doing.
[01:44:42]  And it's all based on national security and war.
[01:44:49]  Man, I hope they're doing that because that'd be pretty damn cool.

=== Stanton Friedman Chemical Debate (09:01) ===

[01:44:51]  My friend, the guy who was just on here, he recently went to the UA that hearing a couple days ago and he was talking to one of the congresswomen about this.
[01:44:59]  She had never even heard about Battelle and he was like talking to her about it, trying to like explain it and teach her about it.
[01:45:04]  She's like, Oh, we got to go there.
[01:45:06]  I never heard of this before.
[01:45:07]  And it's crazy because this is like one of the longest standing, like, yeah, like you maybe you maybe should have heard of this one.
[01:45:12]  Yeah, I'm on the fence about it.
[01:45:13]  I don't know.
[01:45:14]  What do you think about Bob Lazar?
[01:45:16]  So, um, to me, Bob Lazar is so frustrating.
[01:45:21]  Um, For two reasons.
[01:45:24]  One, if he's lying, why are we still talking about it today?
[01:45:29]  That's annoying that he's still like, it feels like there's still some gray area there.
[01:45:34]  And two, if it's true that we're considering the fact that he's lying.
[01:45:38]  Because if he's telling the truth, it's like, damn, that's all the information you ever wanted to know about like UFOs in Area 51 is right there.
[01:45:46]  My biggest problem with Lazar, he's a very believable guy when you hear him talk.
[01:45:51]  Very believable.
[01:45:52]  He seems nice.
[01:45:53]  You want to believe him.
[01:45:55]  But the whole college thing, I can't let it go.
[01:46:00]  The fact that he lied about where he went to college.
[01:46:03]  And it's like, if you're someone like me who's gone and, you know, Investigated a cold murder case, these would be red flags in someone's character.
[01:46:14]  And if you lied about this, where do your lies stop?
[01:46:17]  He has, to my knowledge, no one's ever asked him outright why he's lied about his background.
[01:46:25]  And I would just love to know his response.
[01:46:27]  Maybe he'd have a really good response, but I can't imagine what it would be that would make me feel better.
[01:46:33]  I think that.
[01:46:34]  Well, he would have a good reason to lie about MIT, right?
[01:46:37]  Because MIT has a lot of secret programs.
[01:46:41]  Yeah, but like he's not in the yearbooks.
[01:46:44]  The teachers that he named were like teachers somewhere else.
[01:46:48]  Right, that's true.
[01:46:48]  And it's like, okay, like we're talking about like a long time ago.
[01:46:54]  They didn't just scrub you from like the digital database.
[01:46:58]  Right.
[01:46:58]  Like, are you implying that they like erased you?
[01:47:02]  Well, someone there would remember you.
[01:47:04]  Anybody, right?
[01:47:06]  And the fact that there's nobody, I think that he just said a lie one time a long time ago in the 90s.
[01:47:13]  Not really thinking about what we'd be saying 30 years from now.
[01:47:19]  And I think he just avoids it at all costs.
[01:47:21]  And that makes me question everything else about his story.
[01:47:24]  Yeah.
[01:47:25]  For me, the thing is, Jeremy Corbell really kind of like ruins it for me.
[01:47:29]  When I saw his.
[01:47:30]  How so?
[01:47:31]  He ruined it for me specifically when he debated Stanton Friedman about it.
[01:47:35]  And Stanton Friedman is a legendary physicist.
[01:47:38]  Okay.
[01:47:40]  I highly recommend watching that debate on YouTube.
[01:47:42]  It's fascinating.
[01:47:42]  You haven't seen it, yeah.
[01:47:44]  Stan Friedman questions him on the degrees too.
[01:47:47]  And he goes, Why did he lie about this stuff?
[01:47:49]  And I think Jeremy's response was, Come on, man, haven't you ever lied to try to get a chick before?
[01:47:55]  Okay.
[01:47:56]  And he made the case like, Look, we've made multiple offers to Bob.
[01:48:00]  I don't know.
[01:48:00]  I think that interview was close to seven years ago, that debate I'm referring to.
[01:48:07]  And Stanton said that, Look, we've reached out to him many times, offered to debate him on it, to talk to him about it.
[01:48:14]  He won't talk to anyone that knows anything about physics.
[01:48:17]  He'll only talk to layman people about this stuff.
[01:48:20]  He'll only talk to George Knapp, Joe Rogan, people that aren't physics, don't have physics backgrounds and don't understand physics language.
[01:48:28]  Right.
[01:48:28]  So you're saying like the physics in what he's presenting don't necessarily make sense according to another physicist.
[01:48:35]  That's what Stanton was saying.
[01:48:36]  Which would still be an opinion versus an opinion.
[01:48:39]  It's not like this guy's like, hey, I've built one of these things and that's not how you do it.
[01:48:43]  Right.
[01:48:43]  And that's what Eric Weinstein is saying too.
[01:48:45]  I mean, Eric Weinstein publicly reached out and offered to debate him or to even have a conversation with him about this stuff.
[01:48:51]  I wish that would happen.
[01:48:52]  And, He's never done it.
[01:48:53]  He's never talked.
[01:48:55]  There's no documented.
[01:48:56]  That bothers me.
[01:48:57]  I don't like that.
[01:48:58]  And the other weird thing to Mia, too, is he's always had a handler.
[01:49:02]  Like before he had John Lear or Gene Huff, rather.
[01:49:05]  The John Lear story is weird, too.
[01:49:07]  Yeah.
[01:49:08]  But the Gene Huff thing, and now Jeremy Corbell, like anywhere he goes, even if it's on Larry King or Rogan or whatever, he's always got this person right here to basically fill in the gaps for him.
[01:49:17]  And I actually, I know Jeremy Corbell personally.
[01:49:20]  I've never asked him straight up about.
[01:49:23]  The Lazar college thing, but now I want to.
[01:49:26]  And I mean, I really would rather ask Lazar himself.
[01:49:29]  Like, I want to know not what Jeremy says or this person says in response.
[01:49:35]  I want to look someone in the eye and ask them a hard question and see what they say.
[01:49:41]  Right.
[01:49:42]  Because that's the linchpin to me in most of Bob Lazar's story.
[01:49:47]  And I can't really reason with the idea that, well, maybe that part he lied about, but the rest he didn't.
[01:49:53]  I don't know.
[01:49:54]  And then there's the fact that he got a job at Area 51, right?
[01:49:58]  So he got a job at Area 51 right after his wife's.
[01:50:03]  Killed herself and he married somebody else also like days before his wife committed suicide.
[01:50:09]  Yeah, he's a weird dude with a weird history.
[01:50:11]  If you're going to work at the most top secret fucking base in the United States of America, you don't think that that would be a red flag into hiring you?
[01:50:18]  Yeah, it's hard for me to see why he was the best pick for those kinds of reasons.
[01:50:25]  Like, wouldn't you try to avoid situations like that?
[01:50:28]  Absolutely.
[01:50:29]  They would never fucking hire somebody whose wife committed suicide.
[01:50:31]  Unless there was some other motive to it.
[01:50:32]  And it was also the tie to the Hell's Angels that his wife had that she went to jail because of some sort of.
[01:50:37]  Something happened with the Hells Angels.
[01:50:39]  Yeah, there's all kind of weird stuff with like his personal life that's odd.
[01:50:43]  And the other thing is Jeremy Corbell's documentary.
[01:50:46]  I don't know if this is right.
[01:50:47]  This is what I've heard from multiple people and read.
[01:50:50]  So take it for what it's worth.
[01:50:51]  But in the beginning of his film where they're talking about the FBI raiding him for having Element 115, apparently that was, there was a FOIA done on that FBI raid and it was specifically because somebody just bought some sort of chemical from United Nuclear and used it to murder their.
[01:51:09]  Somebody in it, like their wife or something.
[01:51:10]  Yes, that's that is true.
[01:51:12]  And they basically, so Jeremy admitted that was that was true.
[01:51:14]  You made that up.
[01:51:15]  No, no, that is that is actually true that that there was a murder investigation, right?
[01:51:21]  But I actually do still find this one a little bit odd.
[01:51:25]  Um, maybe like why are they going pulling out all the stops?
[01:51:29]  Like, I would love to know exactly how they pinpointed this specific element and tracked it all the way to Bob Lazar.
[01:51:38]  That's a convenient.
[01:51:39]  You know, person to track it to if anything he's saying is true.
[01:51:44]  And I don't really know what happened with that.
[01:51:46]  I mean, he didn't go to jail for that.
[01:51:48]  Right.
[01:51:49]  But, like, you could easily look at that as, like, a good excuse to go raid his place or just to fuck with him, ruffle his feathers.
[01:52:00]  It's just still weird.
[01:52:01]  Like, it's like, you guys still care about this guy or something.
[01:52:06]  Or what are the chances that he gets wrapped up in some weird murder investigation?
[01:52:11]  But no, everything's good, though.
[01:52:12]  Mm hmm.
[01:52:13]  But, you know, I don't know one who's been, house has been raided for some element that they have.
[01:52:19]  How did they even track that?
[01:52:20]  It was just a chemical somebody bought, like a common chemical somebody used to kill their wife.
[01:52:25]  And it was the guy literally bought it from his website.
[01:52:27]  That's why.
[01:52:28]  Okay.
[01:52:28]  Apparently, allegedly.
[01:52:31]  Then why isn't he in prison for that?
[01:52:33]  Because it's not illegal to sell the chemical just because you sell bleach.
[01:52:36]  What were they looking for?
[01:52:38]  I forget.
[01:52:38]  I don't know what the name of the chemical was, but I guess they were looking for, maybe you can find it.
[01:52:43]  I don't think they even said what they were looking for, but they, I mean, The murder investigation is why they were there, is what they said.
[01:52:49]  But I'm like, what were they looking for exactly?
[01:52:50]  Well, that's a good point.
[01:52:51]  Like, if you bought bleach from Ace Hardware and you went and got it.
[01:52:53]  Looking for more bleach?
[01:52:54]  I don't know.
[01:52:54]  Why is the FBI going to raid Ace Hardware?
[01:52:57]  That's what I'm saying.
[01:52:58]  Maybe because he's.
[01:52:59]  Maybe they just needed to prove that he sold it or something.
[01:53:02]  I don't know.
[01:53:03]  Maybe.
[01:53:04]  But like, what would they have needed?
[01:53:05]  Like a physical printout of something?
[01:53:08]  And here's another question I have about him.
[01:53:13]  If he is this whistleblower, right?
[01:53:14]  If he blew the whistle on this most.
[01:53:16]  the government's.
[01:53:17]  one of the government's most top secret programs in history.
[01:53:19]  Yeah.
[01:53:22]  Why is Jeremy on that interview or that debate with Stanton Friedman bragging about how Bob still has all these federal government contracts with this company, United Nuclear?
[01:53:30]  I don't know.
[01:53:32]  Edward Snowden, does he have any government contracts?
[01:53:35]  Do any of these other whistleblowers get government contracts?
[01:53:39]  I don't think so.
[01:53:39]  No, they're ready to scoop that guy up whenever they could.
[01:53:42]  Right, yeah.
[01:53:42]  So if he is this whistleblower on the government program, why would the government still be doing these secret government contracts with him?
[01:53:49]  Yeah, what is he even doing?
[01:53:51]  Or what is he even saying he's doing with them?

=== Caltech Contracts and Whistleblowers (03:25) ===

[01:53:53]  Jeremy, you have to pull up the interview, but Jeremy Corbell is basically pull up the Jeremy Corbell Stanton Freeman interview.
[01:53:57]  But he says it multiple times during the interview that he's doing all kinds of crazy, cutting edge, science based studies for the government, for secret government programs.
[01:54:07]  Yeah, it's like it's one of those things where, you know, everything can't be true.
[01:54:11]  Like it's not like it can't all be true.
[01:54:14]  And so if you look at Bizarre or Bizarre Lazar through that lens, it's like the same thing.
[01:54:19]  Like it can't all be true.
[01:54:21]  Yeah.
[01:54:22]  Bob Lazar, during your Talking, I don't remember where it is.
[01:54:25]  Maybe go like a quarter of the way through now that we had that.
[01:54:28]  He has said, Great, that's gonna be.
[01:54:30]  Was well, let's see, I have his file.
[01:54:32]  He graduated in August, not with his class.
[01:54:35]  That usually means you failed a course, you know.
[01:54:39]  Okay, he took a lot of science courses, didn't he?
[01:54:43]  She says, Chemistry.
[01:54:46]  What else?
[01:54:48]  Chemistry.
[01:54:50]  Okay, was he valedictorian of his class?
[01:54:53]  It doesn't mean you failed the course, it may be you just took you didn't.
[01:54:56]  Take a class and do the required credits.
[01:54:58]  That's again a thing that doesn't quite make sense.
[01:55:01]  But I feel you.
[01:55:02]  Let me finish it.
[01:55:08]  He didn't have any other science courses.
[01:55:10]  Then I asked, Was he valedictorian?
[01:55:13]  No.
[01:55:14]  She laughed.
[01:55:16]  He's talking about his high school teacher.
[01:55:17]  And I have to give you the background why I asked that question.
[01:55:20]  I was valedictorian in my high school class in Linden, New Jersey, 1951, a long time ago.
[01:55:26]  And I was accepted at MIT.
[01:55:29]  Except I couldn't afford to go.
[01:55:31]  Tuition was $950.
[01:55:34]  What is it, $27,000 now?
[01:55:38]  So I resented the kind of implication that this guy had graduated from one of the top schools in the country and MIT qualifies.
[01:55:47]  Was he in the top 10 in his class?
[01:55:49]  No.
[01:55:49]  Oh, maybe they heard about MIT.
[01:55:51]  No.
[01:55:52]  Oh, God.
[01:55:52]  I'm just laughing.
[01:55:53]  Top 100?
[01:55:54]  No.
[01:55:56]  He was like 265 out of 366, which is the bottom third.
[01:56:00]  Okay, but can we cut to the chase here?
[01:56:02]  Well, he's getting there.
[01:56:03]  The point is that the notion that he went to MIT doesn't stand up.
[01:56:09]  Nobody could find him in a yearbook.
[01:56:10]  None of five people there, I talked to, including the registrar, had any connection with him.
[01:56:16]  And he was in the bottom third of his class.
[01:56:18]  And MIT admissions office says you've got to be in the top 20%.
[01:56:23]  They'll bend if it's more than 15, you know.
[01:56:29]  So, you know, he was lying about having gone to MIT.
[01:56:34]  I'd called Caltech.
[01:56:36]  They never heard of him.
[01:56:37]  He was asked in Rachel, Nevada, home of the infamous Little Alien, to name some of his professors.
[01:56:44]  He said, Let's see, Bill Duxler will remember me from Caltech Physics.
[01:56:50]  I looked in my directory.
[01:56:51]  There's Bill Duxler.
[01:56:52]  I called him.
[01:56:54]  He never taught at Caltech, only at Pierce Junior College, which is a long way intellectually, if not geologically, from Caltech.
[01:57:03]  He checked.
[01:57:05]  Bob had taken a course under him at the very same time when he was supposedly at MIT.
[01:57:08]  2,500 miles away.
[01:57:11]  And if you can go to MIT, you don't go to Pierce Junior College.
[01:57:14]  Right.
[01:57:16]  So we've got some dissimulation.

=== Leslie James Fall Bullshit Claims (14:35) ===

[01:57:18]  Is that a good word on it?
[01:57:20]  I'd love to say something about that.
[01:57:23]  Can Jeremy speak to that now?
[01:57:24]  Sure.
[01:57:25]  I've got something else.
[01:57:26]  You've got to give me a second.
[01:57:28]  You say something.
[01:57:29]  Basically, let's just get to the crux of it.
[01:57:32]  The crux of it is none of this is really the point.
[01:57:35]  I mean, really, the point is how did he know that.
[01:57:38]  Go ahead and clap.
[01:57:39]  That's a good one, Bob.
[01:57:40]  That's for you.
[01:57:41]  None of this is really the point.
[01:57:42]  The point is this.
[01:57:45]  How did Bob know that on Wednesday over Papoose Dry Lake that there'd be some.
[01:57:49]  I didn't say he wasn't.
[01:57:50]  So anyway, you don't have to watch the whole thing, but it's just really.
[01:57:54]  Defend the college thing or no?
[01:57:56]  No, he earlier in this interview when he's chatting, he's asking him about it again.
[01:58:00]  His verbatim response was, Haven't you ever lied to get a chick?
[01:58:03]  Okay, so so Jeremy seems like he he knows that is weird and it's not a good look for him, but he's just he just doesn't want to talk past it.
[01:58:11]  He's looking past it, right?
[01:58:12]  He's kind of accepted like maybe Bob lied, but I don't care.
[01:58:15]  I have a harder time looking past that, yeah.
[01:58:18]  Um, yeah, I do.
[01:58:19]  And then there was another college called Pacifica University that was convicted and they got shut down because they were allegedly.
[01:58:27]  A degree mill.
[01:58:28]  They were selling degrees and he had a degree from that place too.
[01:58:31]  There's so many crazy stories.
[01:58:32]  Yeah, it's like, why has he had this kind of convincing narrative and he's a believable, nice looking guy and all these weird parts of his past?
[01:58:43]  You can't overlook that stuff if you're trying to figure out if someone's telling the truth or not.
[01:58:47]  Right.
[01:58:48]  But I mean, if I'm Jeremy Corbell, I'm willing to avoid the truth to tell a great story and to create a great documentary because it is a great story.
[01:58:58]  And it's a hell of a story.
[01:58:59]  Yeah.
[01:58:59]  You know, it's like a party wants it to be true.
[01:59:01]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:59:03]  And there's so, I mean, and then he left out John Lear and he left out Gene Huff, which is really interesting.
[01:59:08]  I don't know why he left those guys out because those guys were really important parts of the story.
[01:59:12]  I mean, John Lear was literally like the beginning of this whole thing.
[01:59:17]  Yeah, I wish I could sit down with Bob Lazar and ask him these kind of questions and just see what the response is and really kind of have a conversation about everything and be able to make my own personal assessment that.
[01:59:32]  Probably won't ever happen, but hey, Bob, if you're listening, it's on the table.
[01:59:36]  It'd be cool.
[01:59:37]  Yeah.
[01:59:37]  Well, listening to all of his interviews, man, I was sold.
[01:59:40]  I was completely sold.
[01:59:42]  Very believable.
[01:59:43]  His body language, the way he talked about shit.
[01:59:45]  Yeah.
[01:59:47]  That's the annoying part.
[01:59:49]  He's like, I just like, it seems like he's telling the truth.
[01:59:52]  You want to believe the guy, but you can't overlook obvious things.
[01:59:56]  You can't, or they need to be addressed head on.
[01:59:59]  Right.
[02:00:00]  Like if Bob Lazar told me that, look, dude, I lied because of XYZ.
[02:00:07]  I might buy that actually.
[02:00:08]  Like, okay, I still think that it was weird.
[02:00:12]  But if you're going to like dodge it or seemingly dodge the question and not just come out and say, hey, like all this shit I said is true, this part isn't, I'm sorry, but like this part's still true.
[02:00:26]  Like, I feel like there's a, you should, you should do that if you're him.
[02:00:30]  Yeah.
[02:00:30]  I feel like the next big documentary has to be like somebody that actually blows the Bob Lazar story out of the water because, you know, the story of Bob Lazar has been told.
[02:00:41]  Right.
[02:00:41]  It's been done.
[02:00:42]  It's the biggest podcast that Joe Rogan ever did.
[02:00:44]  There's a freaking incredible documentary that Jeremy made.
[02:00:49]  Somebody has to look at it and really pick it apart and convince people.
[02:00:53]  It's going to be hard to do.
[02:00:55]  I think he's kind of elusive like that.
[02:00:58]  It seems like he has a small circle.
[02:01:00]  But there's people around him, I think, that could know.
[02:01:03]  Yeah, I think so too.
[02:01:04]  But what you need, though, is Lazar's responses to the hard questions.
[02:01:09]  Right.
[02:01:09]  Like that.
[02:01:10]  You know what I mean?
[02:01:11]  Exactly.
[02:01:12]  Even for me, for every other listener or viewer, it'll be very telling if he never does that, if he never takes the opportunity to talk to people.
[02:01:19]  Absolutely.
[02:01:19]  If you don't understand physics, then I can't wholeheartedly believe anything until that's done.
[02:01:25]  Right.
[02:01:27]  And that's the thing, getting back to the beginning of this conversation, is once you start to gain this freedom of creating whatever you want and posting it online and being able to be an independent, free creator, basically just reporting whatever's interesting to you, you have to remember.
[02:01:53]  Not to just lean into things because you get the money or because you get the clicks on it.
[02:01:59]  Like a lot of people do that, and it's extremely obvious when people start to just lean in and lean in and lean in until they've completely forgotten who they were.
[02:02:06]  I mean, the news does that every damn day.
[02:02:08]  Yeah.
[02:02:09]  It's like every headline, every click, every YouTube thumbnail.
[02:02:15]  It's like, you know, everyone is about the clicks.
[02:02:19]  You know, you can't do that.
[02:02:21]  You can't operate.
[02:02:22]  With that mentality, if you're truly objectively investigating anything, right?
[02:02:28]  You really can't.
[02:02:29]  Doesn't mean you don't button it up and make it sexy and make it, you know, something premium that you trust or enjoy, but you cannot fall for the bullshit because then you're putting out bullshit.
[02:02:43]  Right.
[02:02:44]  You can't not just fall for the bullshit.
[02:02:46]  You can't fall for your own bullshit.
[02:02:47]  For your own bullshit.
[02:02:48]  Just try, just because you're seeing so much success in one thing or one narrative.
[02:02:53]  Oh, that's cheap.
[02:02:54]  That's low.
[02:02:55]  I don't know if you follow sports at all, but the greatest example, the greatest modern example of this to me is Skip Bayless.
[02:03:03]  Oh, God.
[02:03:05]  Yeah.
[02:03:05]  What he has become over the years from being a sports reporter to just being this fucking clown talking head is bizarre.
[02:03:12]  It's so obvious how fake his narratives are and how he just does that because it's part of a show.
[02:03:18]  Yeah, like the hating LeBron shit.
[02:03:21]  That blows my mind.
[02:03:23]  Is this just a gag or what?
[02:03:24]  It is.
[02:03:25]  It's so, it's so, like, really fucking good.
[02:03:28]  What are you talking about?
[02:03:29]  Right.
[02:03:30]  Yeah.
[02:03:30]  It's so obviously just a fabricated narrative that he's created this just, he's created this giant labyrinth of people that love to hate him.
[02:03:39]  Yep.
[02:03:39]  And he's seen so much success from it.
[02:03:41]  He just leans into it and he doesn't want to try to challenge his own beliefs anymore.
[02:03:45]  He's just going to keep leaning into it.
[02:03:46]  Just keep saying that and saying more of that and doubling down on that and distorting that even more and going further and further down that rabbit hole.
[02:03:53]  Right.
[02:03:54]  When, you know, it could have been something else.
[02:03:56]  Right.
[02:03:57]  And I see a lot of that in the UFO topic, man.
[02:04:00]  I like to see more of an open conversation about it.
[02:04:03]  I like to see more people talking about it and making content on it, like you are and other people are, like I even am.
[02:04:09]  But I think that's good.
[02:04:11]  I think that's good that people are doing that.
[02:04:13]  It needs that.
[02:04:13]  Building an economy around it.
[02:04:15]  I think that's important.
[02:04:16]  But at the same time, I hate grifters.
[02:04:18]  I hate to see grifters.
[02:04:20]  There's just been, I mean, like, all the content over the years in the UFO space has been really geared and targeted towards.
[02:04:31]  Believers of something, you know, fans of UFOs and aliens.
[02:04:35]  And I get it, right?
[02:04:36]  It's like, it is fun.
[02:04:38]  But, you know, at what point do we try to have a healthy, realistic conversation?
[02:04:45]  You can't just target the people who are already going to talk about it.
[02:04:51]  We need to expand the conversation.
[02:04:53]  We need more people in this room.
[02:04:55]  Yeah.
[02:04:55]  And that was one of my goals with High Strange to, you know, try to expand or elevate the conversation.
[02:05:04]  Push it forward in any way at all.
[02:05:06]  Where if you were someone who wasn't thinking very open-minded about really anything, that you maybe you're a little bit more open-minded about anything.
[02:05:16]  Because the reality is, I don't know what's true and what's not true.
[02:05:21]  I don't.
[02:05:22]  But I also know that we don't know everything yet.
[02:05:24]  You know, we learn so much every day.
[02:05:27]  You just look back in history, it's very obvious.
[02:05:31]  I think that we forget that sometimes, that we're still learning.
[02:05:35]  And there's something to all of this.
[02:05:39]  I believe that.
[02:05:40]  And someone else may not believe that.
[02:05:43]  That's fine, but you should still be in the conversation.
[02:05:46]  Have you seen James Fox's new documentary, Moment of Contact?
[02:05:49]  No, I heard it's good, though.
[02:05:50]  Oh, my God.
[02:05:50]  Is it good?
[02:05:50]  Fucking amazing.
[02:05:51]  Yeah, that's on the list.
[02:05:52]  It's one of the best documentaries on this topic I've seen in a long time, probably since the phenomenon.
[02:05:58]  His work is incredible.
[02:05:59]  Damn, yeah, no, I'm pumped for that.
[02:06:00]  There was like literal, there's like hundreds of witnesses in this little town in Virginia, Brazil that saw a live alien running around the town.
[02:06:08]  Yeah, I know the story.
[02:06:09]  Yeah.
[02:06:09]  So, what do you make of that story, though?
[02:06:11]  I think that one's real.
[02:06:13]  Right.
[02:06:14]  Some of them you're like, well, what was it though?
[02:06:16]  There's no way all of these people came out and talked about this.
[02:06:19]  These military people, these cops, these.
[02:06:21]  And those sisters or whatever, like.
[02:06:22]  Schoolgirls walking home from school.
[02:06:24]  What's their incentive to totally fabricate this thing?
[02:06:27]  All the people, I mean, he had so much, he had to do so much work and convincing to convince, to get these people to go on camera and talk.
[02:06:35]  Isn't there allegedly like a video of it, like rumored to exist?
[02:06:38]  But where is it though?
[02:06:39]  I don't know.
[02:06:39]  Right.
[02:06:40]  There is a bit.
[02:06:40]  Well, what happened right after this is that apparently these quote unquote men in black.
[02:06:45]  Came and started knocking on people's door, offering them money, and basically saying, You know, I hope you and your kids have a long and healthy life.
[02:06:53]  Here's some money we're going to offer you and let us know if you need anything.
[02:06:57]  Weird.
[02:06:57]  So, like, weird sort of like intimidation tactics that were being done by people that seemed to be Americans, according to these people in Brazil.
[02:07:06]  Yeah.
[02:07:06]  I mean, there was a military response to the whole thing.
[02:07:09]  The U.S. Air Force landed there the next day.
[02:07:11]  Yeah.
[02:07:11]  Also, kind of odd, right?
[02:07:13]  It's like, What are you doing?
[02:07:15]  Why are y'all doing all this if it's absolutely nothing?
[02:07:18]  Right.
[02:07:18]  You know, and, um, What is the lady's name?
[02:07:21]  The New York Times reporter.
[02:07:23]  Leslie Kane?
[02:07:24]  Leslie Kane.
[02:07:25]  Yeah, she just was on video a couple days ago, confirmed.
[02:07:28]  She said that she talked to some of her sources in the government, I guess in the Pentagon, and they, her sources, according to her, said that the story's true.
[02:07:36]  Really?
[02:07:37]  Yeah.
[02:07:39]  That's pretty big.
[02:07:40]  That's pretty fucking big.
[02:07:41]  And I know Leslie pretty well.
[02:07:43]  Do you really?
[02:07:43]  I've interviewed her a few times for High Strange, and she's a straight shooter, really.
[02:07:50]  And she has spent a lifetime.
[02:07:53]  Developing pretty strong relationships with people.
[02:07:57]  So, I mean, if Leslie's saying she heard that, I believe that she did hear that.
[02:08:01]  Yeah.
[02:08:02]  Find that Leslie Kane.
[02:08:04]  It's like a three second video of her talking about that.
[02:08:06]  It's wild.
[02:08:06]  She's sitting next to James while he's telling the story about this.
[02:08:11]  I want to see the video, man.
[02:08:12]  If it exists, I hope we get to see it one day.
[02:08:15]  Yeah.
[02:08:16]  I mean, it's just like another thing is like the crashed flying saucer thing seems so bizarre to me.
[02:08:22]  Like, how do they crash this thing?
[02:08:24]  If they're so advanced, how are they crashing it?
[02:08:26]  And this.
[02:08:27]  And this fucking living entity or a biological, biologically engineered creature is here.
[02:08:34]  Like, we've crashed our planes and lived.
[02:08:37]  Yeah, right.
[02:08:38]  Travis Barker survived a plane crash and he's drumming his brains out.
[02:08:42]  So, I think it's possible.
[02:08:44]  I think it's like, I don't think that because you could be so technologically advanced or something that there isn't some element of error.
[02:08:52]  I don't think they meant to crash.
[02:08:54]  If they've ever actually crashed here, I guarantee you they were like, oh shit, we fucked up.
[02:08:59]  Leslie Keene, James Fox.
[02:09:04]  Just type that in, see if that comes up.
[02:09:07]  Click on videos.
[02:09:09]  I might have seen this on Twitter.
[02:09:11]  There it is.
[02:09:12]  That one.
[02:09:12]  Yep.
[02:09:15]  But I would love Leslie to talk about what she's been.
[02:09:19]  If you wouldn't mind.
[02:09:20]  Turn it up.
[02:09:20]  Give me some more volume.
[02:09:21]  I don't want to push the envelope here.
[02:09:22]  So if I'm going to say something that's going to make you uncomfortable, you tell me.
[02:09:25]  Because she reached into some deep people that are deep, deep in her back pocket.
[02:09:31]  That it made some confirmations for her.
[02:09:33]  It took James 20 or like 12 or 15 years to make this documentary.
[02:09:38]  Geez, 15 years.
[02:09:40]  I mean, that's incredible.
[02:09:42]  I did speak to a number of people with high clearances or been in this issue for years and years and years.
[02:09:50]  Some of the insiders that I consult with.
[02:09:53]  And I mean, basically, they verified that this happened.
[02:09:57]  A movie like that comes out, you could see all kinds of people reacting and saying, What are you crazy?
[02:10:04]  Something?
[02:10:04]  Creatures?
[02:10:05]  You know, no.
[02:10:06]  It's the opposite.
[02:10:07]  These insiders were confirming this.
[02:10:10]  So that was really exciting.
[02:10:12]  Really exciting.
[02:10:13]  And it was great for James.
[02:10:14]  Yes.
[02:10:15]  Told you.
[02:10:16]  And the fact that there was U.S. involvement, and most likely, debris and even bodies from that case reside now in the United States.
[02:10:28]  I'm not able to find out where.
[02:10:29]  I can't get that information, but never give up.
[02:10:34]  And I also wanted to say about the medical, I mean, I was able to talk to this doctor in Brazil who didn't actually perform, no, he was the doctor of Shunju when he was in the hospital.
[02:10:49]  And so he knew a lot about what caused his death.
[02:10:52]  And the autopsy report was really interesting because of the nature of the microorganisms that were found on him, which have all kinds of suggestive components of coming from some kind of a non human creature.
[02:11:05]  And I still have to do more work on that, but it's very evidential.
[02:11:09]  That's the thing that I wish we had more information on the toxin that killed, I believe it was Marco Cherizzi.
[02:11:17]  I don't, I'm not sure about that one.
[02:11:19]  I think that could have been basically they killed him because they didn't want him to talk.
[02:11:24]  Which one was that one?
[02:11:25]  He was the guy, he was the cop who actually handled the alien.
[02:11:28]  Oh, yeah.
[02:11:28]  And he got messed up from it or something.
[02:11:30]  Yeah.
[02:11:30]  He literally died like less than 24 hours later of complete immune system shutdown.
[02:11:36]  There are, I mean, dozens of stories kind of similar to that where there's like, you know, they.
[02:11:42]  People claiming that if you get too close to something or there's something unsafe for humans with certain types of interactions with either UAP or extraterrestrials.

=== American History Conspiracy Nonsense (02:20) ===

[02:11:54]  I mean, the military was even looking into that, studying that as part of their.
[02:11:59]  Really?
[02:11:59]  Yeah, that was in their previous one that Lou Elizondo was a part of, whatever they want to call it now, I don't know.
[02:12:08]  But yeah, they were researching UFOs and.
[02:12:13]  Part of their study was into like if they've harmed us or in instances where people have claimed that they experienced some sort of harm or you know, even you know, like sexual encounters and stuff like that.
[02:12:29]  Like, they were legitimately exploring these kinds of claims.
[02:12:35]  I mean, I feel like that would just be a tremendous waste of time and money if there's zero chance that it's any of it's true, right?
[02:12:44]  Unless they're just big sci fi buffs.
[02:12:46]  I don't know, yeah.
[02:12:47]  It's crazy, man.
[02:12:48]  There's so much to it.
[02:12:49]  There's so much to it.
[02:12:50]  And I wish I, you know, I don't know.
[02:12:53]  Like I said before, the more I see big publications talking about it that have ties to the Pentagon and the Pentagon releasing stuff, and the more I get suspicious.
[02:13:02]  And also, the more Annie Jacobson books I read, the more suspicious I become.
[02:13:07]  It's so easy just to fall down into this mess, this web of complete nonsense.
[02:13:14]  I mean, it all stems from we just don't definitively know anything, right?
[02:13:17]  Like, we don't definitively know enough to stop racking your brain on it.
[02:13:23]  And if you, Rack your brain too hard on anything.
[02:13:25]  Drive yourself crazy.
[02:13:26]  You might enter the conspiracy hand or some nonsense might come spewing out of your mouth before you know it.
[02:13:35]  Right.
[02:13:35]  Well, I love the quote that what's the difference between the truth and a conspiracy theory?
[02:13:40]  It's six months.
[02:13:42]  It's so true, though.
[02:13:45]  Dude, well, thank you, Yen, for doing this.
[02:13:47]  I had fun.
[02:13:48]  Dude, that was awesome, man.
[02:13:49]  Thank you for having me out here.
[02:13:50]  I guess tell people where they can find your podcast and follow you online and all that stuff.
[02:13:53]  Yeah, so I'm Payne Lindsay.
[02:13:55]  My social media, Instagram, Twitter, is just at Payne Lindsay.
[02:13:59]  And my new podcast that investigates the UFO phenomenon in American history is called High Strange.
[02:14:06]  It's an eight part series.
[02:14:07]  It's available now wherever you listen to your podcast.
[02:14:09]  Sounds fascinating, man.
[02:14:10]  Thanks again.
[02:14:11]  Thank you so much, man.
[02:14:12]  I appreciate it.
[02:14:12]  Hell yeah, man.
[02:14:13]  Cheers.
[02:14:14]  Good night, everybody.