 Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the punk rocker moon stomper podcast as always I am one of your hosts Amy and my co-host of course is I'm Jason and we have a guest today which I was thinking about this when we have guests the reveal doesn't work for the video version of the podcast so if you're watching the video act surprised we do have a guest today and I'm very excited to have this person joining us because he's one of my all-time favorite people in the world mr. Matt wood hello Matt and welcome hi everybody all right so Amy that's a great great point and either in the editing of the video we can not reveal the person well I have the magically like dissolve in or well like ask them to wear a bag over their head with a question mark it'll be great I can I'm sort of like in the bag on the slide nice just have them all you know the desk chairs that like lowered with the hydraulic lift just like have them so it's like a chest shot which would not work for ladies but then just oops sorry slowly slide into frame that'd be good the possibilities are endless we're good you're revealed now so we'll go with it so I feel like we should just tell people very quickly who Matt is so that we can start drinking and get into the nerdery I like it um so Matt who are you and what are you doing here my name is Matt I'm a musician an author I guess is that right yes I'm a nerd and that's that's kind of it I all these things you're in the right place yeah you're definitely in the right place Matt and I met oddly because he was one of my early fans on Google plus of all places like five years ago now and then we were both at Space Fest which is like the Space Nerd Conference in Tucson and I recognized him from just chatting online because he's also a teacher and I love educators and when educators use my work and then I met Matt and then he slowly revealed to me that he is in mini bosses which is an 8-bit Nintendo cover band so yeah the tribute band so so as I've known Matt over the years he's gotten weirder and weirder and more and more fitting for this show so let's get into it and that means we have to open the beer I have a weird one today I have what is this this is the ballast point I don't know if you can see that there the ballast point cinnamon raisin Commodore American stout whoa I know right I walked by and I was like I don't know if I have no idea what this is gonna be but let's try it fascinating with what they do I really want to go meet those guys and talk beer I know we got to get there at some point Jason what are you drinking today oh boy well you know I haven't gone gone big so far on the show so I decided today that today is gonna be big beer day for me and this one's really big this is a full 32 ounces a quart of beer and this is from the fine folks at the Phoenix ale brewery this is the Biltmore blonde ale in their giant crawler and I can't say enough good things about these guys I just went there to their tasting room and brewery on my birthday and had a group on and got all sorts of awesome beer-ness with that group on including flights pints crawlers and when they found that it was my birthday they gave me a free pint glass and some stickers and then one of the brewers like became our friend was buying us drinks so really awesome people there and it's an interesting place they have going because they're like two companies under one roof because Sonoran brewing another brewery here partnered up with them and decided to I guess Phoenix Phoenix ale brewery brews all Sonoran stuff like in the same location so it's two breweries housed in one place and Phoenix Ale was actually I didn't know this until recently but it was started by like a craft brew legend a guy who used to own many years ago owned a pyramid in Washington so when he sold pyramid brewing he moved to Phoenix and was convinced open a brewery here and open Phoenix Ale brewing so awesome so and this reminds me I am the biggest bitch in the world because I knew it was your birthday but I didn't know the date I'm sorry I missed happy belated birthday it's okay Amy because let's see this show people listening and watching now are watching this in March so we're many months removed so we're okay but I will point out Amy that because of a few episodes ago we recorded actually on Festivus Phoenix Ale brewery has a beer called Festivus that's amazing really good it is I've had it what are you drinking now Matt is the real question what am I drinking now yes so I've got I think you can see it death by coconut by Oscar Beluz nice it's nice not brown it was a little bit of coconut in it it's a little roasted in it just tastes good excellent well like I've had that one all right well Matt cheated and is already drinking no we didn't we didn't tell you but um we're gonna let's let's start opening the beer so there we go actually tough to open this gigantic beer I can't believe how massive that can it's actually really funny and that has one of the giant does that have the giant sipping hole at the top I forget what that's called it actually doesn't so I feel like I should point out I do have a second beer here so I'm not like you're not drinking five times the amount of the rest of us we're all right well it's okay because you and our guests usually do that to me so I'm making up to now cheers all right cheers all right I almost need two hands to drink this beer properly like I feel it's gonna slip out of my hand I I know that feeling with my tiny hands I yeah the story I always tells when I got the iPhone 6 I had to return it for the iPhone SE because I just kept dropping it because my hands were so small this is an interesting beer my wife really wants to get the iPhone SE because she hates the big phones and because it doesn't fit in pockets or anything exactly I'm 100% with her on that I was so annoyed that it just kept like I put in my back down it just be like like this is not this is not gonna work yeah um all right so where do we want to start the thing is because Matt hits on like everything that we do so I don't know do we want to start with let's probably let's probably start with music yeah because I feel like we're gonna talk about so much more beyond that so and there's so much space involved in this this trio right now too so yeah let's let's jump off with the music bit because that's um yeah tell us I don't know I'm I should like prepare questions and things but tell us um mini bosses for those of you who don't know what it is tell us about the band and kind of what the genesis of that that uh very interesting little uh group was okay uh well we can we can go way back in time I guess so mini bosses started out when I was in college back in Massachusetts with my friend Aaron and my other friend Ben and we had a love of video games and I think we started out as just doing some covers of like nirvana stuff you know typical college band house party stuff and then we started working in little bits of super mario or castlevania into songs that we really enjoyed so it was kind of like we created these medleys that mixed all kinds of weird stuff together and people with parties tended to um I don't know mostly enjoy it but we really enjoyed it a lot and we did that for about I don't know six months maybe and we then decided hey we're gonna record an album so we put together a couple of songs that sounded really good to us anyway now I can't even listen to that first recording and we um we put out that album and then we all decided to move to phoenix um and this is like in 2000 and we did a little mini a mini bosses mini tour on the way out playing out of the back of a rider truck um got to meet a lot of really strange people uh and no one I think had ever heard us do this or heard anybody really play this kind of music kind of medley kind of punk rocky because there's no vocals we don't add any special effects to it it's just guitars bass and drums and we play it kind of as close as we can to the original but we do make it a little bit kind of punk rock I guess um and then we got out here and uh we went from there we just started playing locally and then we started getting to play somewhat nationally at some video game conventions and uh it's it's been a really fun god seven it'll be 17 years or 18 years this summer don't don't count years yes okay yeah you feel that it was really old yeah and we should point out just for for people who are curious that you you play drums even though there are two guitars sitting behind you that's going to throw people off you do play drums yeah don't pay any attention to those so how exactly like who came up with the idea and like why did you decide to say like oh let's do typical college nirvana stuff and then also super mario brothers like these two things don't necessarily go hand in hand and then like there isn't just does sheet music for this exist or did you just like play video games a lot get really drunk and then like work it out as you went along um you know it's kind of the latter mostly but back in the in the late 90s there was winamp i don't know if you guys ever used winamp on a pc oh yeah and there were a few websites on the phone was called so far's domain that had all these ripped tracks from the nintendo games and they were called nsf files so you could get a plugin for winamp and then play all of the different parts of the songs that came from the nintendo songs so there was a square wave a triangle wave a noise file um and you could isolate those so we would decide what instruments are going to play what and erin and ben would usually take apart the guitar and bass tones figure those out and if there was any like drum stuff at all which there usually wasn't usually some kind of strange noise um i would figure that out and sometimes write my parts out or i would just play along with what they had figured out and try and make that into a more rock song and i don't really know who came up with the idea first i think it was my friend erin um i think he just decided that uh he really wanted to try this out and we thought it was really funny and weird and we happened to be friends with a lot of nerds that spend a lot of time playing video games i mean we did a i don't know like a 24 person golden eye 64 tournament at one point and be taped at all on vhs so that was really nerdy and that's awesome but yeah it it went from there and it's just been a lot of fun it's been a lot of weird stuff and something that many bosses something many bosses have done really well um and i love that separates many bosses from other video game bands or bands that play video game music is that sticking to guitar and managing to create those sounds just with guitars and not using synths that's incredible yeah yeah it's listening to erin and my friend robin who's in the band now too um listening to them kind of just emulate these sounds is ridiculous and it's it's not easy music i mean it's really complicated there's all kinds of running up and up fretboard and not a lot of chords it's all single notes a lot of picking it's just it's it's insane so i have it easy playing drums and a lot of it's just you know i get to interpret what it is and okay i'm gonna make this big noise here and the southern noise over here and it turns out but the the guitar stuff is really what i think people enjoy the most because it sounds a lot like um metallica and thin loosely kind of put together so yeah it's very cool and you guys have done some pretty insane things i mean i i you did show me once a video of you starting i think was was it phoenix comic con like a comic on way back in the day of you with like a snare drum walking through the crowd like what's amazing to me is this band that's like so obscure has such a loyal following of because like game nerds are insane about the games that they love like how weird was it to be a musician in like that world like i've only been to one con and it wasn't comic on like i can only imagine it's just sort of like whoa it's it's different i mean i've been to you know a lot of like big concerts and big shows where you know everybody there's a fan and mini bosses when we first started playing some of these bigger places like there's a convention called packs the penny arcade expo um and they started out as a online comic i don't know two thousand two i want to i want to say um and they started having conventions up in washington and they asked us to come up and play for their first one and i think there's maybe five six hundred people at that um and we played a lot of shows up to that point where it was you know there's this weird band playing at a bar that does video game music you got to check it out it's hilarious um to suddenly going to a place where we're with a crowd that actually appreciates it and um wants to hear things and i can remember at that show we did a a version of craig metroid to finish up our set and we had everybody turn the lights off in the house and people with their nintendo ds's had lifted up their screens kind of like people would light a lighter out in the crowd and they were just holding them and moving them back and forth uh nice it's it's it's just so good and so bad at the same time it's it it was amazing love it yeah and i i remember that many people have nintendo ds's in a crowd at a show like that's not what i would ever imagine happening but yeah yeah i mean it it moved on from there i mean penny arcade over the years started going up to 20 30 like 60 or 70 000 people at their conventions so there were times we were playing in front of maybe five to ten thousand people um just filling up an entire convention center and we were at the far corner of it and yeah that that video Amy you're talking about um is is hilarious that was another penny arcade thing where they had a catwalk built out on the stage and they had me go out there with a marching snare and a little contact mic and i had to stand out there in the middle of like four or five thousand people and just start playing and that was absolutely terrifying and i played it twice as fast as i was supposed to because let's be clear every good like punk slash rock band really just needs a catwalk that makes sense no um that's that does make a big difference yeah good good i'm glad um but you're not much of a gamer which is the interesting part about you being having been in this band for a you know substantial part of your life and like a zillion years giving you all these all these experiences but like you're not a huge gamer how like you're on well okay you're right you're calling me on it which is pretty pretty uncomfortable i mean like i did say this when i introduced you like you're one of my favorite people in the world because like you're my best friend so i know things about you yeah so i'm calling yeah that's true okay so i should say that there's a way to clarify that a little bit i never had a nintendo and many bosses is exclusively 8-bit nintendo um and i had a sega genesis for a few years growing up um at my dad's house but i could only play that when i was seeing my dad so maybe once every other month um but i was really into computer gaming i had a Commodore 64 growing up so my stepfather would uh i guess you know steal illegally tons and tons of games lots of inappropriate games that children shouldn't play i got to play those um but yeah once we got into college i never had a playstation um i was just kind of stuck and my friends growing up that did have a nintendo uh weren't always that great at sharing it so i wouldn't get a chance to play a castlevania so a lot of the times when i was learning the music i knew what the game was and i maybe played it for 20 minutes once when i was 12 or 13 but while everybody would know all of the movements in the medley that we were putting together by name you know this is the part of the the game when this guy shoots the guy with the axe and blows up or something um i don't know what they are so a lot of times it was so hard for me because i'd be like uh what part is this this is part six part 19 because the nsfs were all cut up into chunks and some of them had 80 90 parts so it was really difficult for me to get that together especially when we were at practice and they'd be like oh yeah we're gonna do this thing with shamus and i'm like i don't know what part that is so yeah being in a nintendo cover band i'm the one that never had a nintendo growing up but although you didn't have a nintendo and you didn't have a playstation in college in college were you still playing uh pc games uh no i didn't i didn't really have a pc i had some friends who had um like x-wing versus tie fighter okay again this is just showing how old i am and i live next door to a guy uh who had a sega Saturn so we got to play some um Saturn games which didn't last long but they're still pretty fun and yeah actually i think when i moved to phoenix uh and erin and i moved in together we actually had a playstation or a playstation 2 at some point so that was kind of my first oh my own personal um gaming console that i got to have and then years later the band we all bought ourselves xbox 360s for a while but yeah now i still don't even have a console i played some pc games i play um curvil space program obsessively like i noticed the other day on steam that it says i'm up at like 800 hours impressive yeah yeah i should have probably put some of those 800 hours to better use but hey amy did you did you have consoles growing up i had a super nintendo that's all i ever had my cousin had the classic nintendo and because he had that i wanted to i wanted something and then he got a sega and that was it between my whole family this is the three so consequently the only games i ever played are like the classic mario games and they're still the only things i played um i have them all on an emulator now and i still have not beaten super mario brothers three yeah because of my so like growing up my mom would say like you know okay you can have a half hour of nintendo time for a half hour of piano time so it was never like i didn't get to just like sit around and just like beat a game in a weekend i don't think i beat super mario world until i was like in my 20s i also yeah i do have to say that that it's pronounced mario in the states not mario sorry thank you yes yes you you guys have a have a longer history than i do so you can call her out on that i was going to be nice yeah thank you i she's canadian though so yeah we'll let that go light and industrious people uh jason what about you are you what's your secret gamers well yeah getting over the cold my voice just cracked your secret gamer voice gamer stop it amy still my favorite simpson's voice yeah um teenage homer so i didn't yeah i didn't uh have a platform um for the longest time my parents didn't uh ever seem to want to buy into the whole video game thing for whatever reason um but we would just watch endless amounts of tv and movies which was weird but no video games for us so um i guess i chose my best friend at the time um because he had a nintendo so i would go over and spend the night at his house on the weekends vital criteria so we could like stay up all night not sleep and beat games it was amazing and then i would come home to my non video game home and be really sad and couldn't wait till the next weekend and you know i thinking back now i don't think that my friend and i really liked each other that much but um you know i was somebody to play games with so and he had the platform for me to play so that was great so that was the nes then eventually i guess my family finally got uh a super nintendo so that was the the platform that i had when i was at home and up until i left for college i guess maybe i think we got a what was after that the nintendo 64 um but i never really played that that much that was kind of after my time i guess but um yeah so that and then when i was an adult um which i still don't think i am but i think the the only platform i've ever purchased was uh was a 360 xbox 360 so i still have that i actually think i have a playstation 2 i don't think i i think i bought that because there was a great star trek game on that but have that uh the 360 the super nintendo and maybe one other but yeah i've just got a got a bunch of console sitting and have a tv dedicated to video games you still have all the consoles oh yeah impressive nice i'm a hardware person and and uh like a tactile person and a thing person so you know and i think i always will be i'm not a hoarder but i like having physical things so instead of having emulators or or having digital music you know i still buy everything physical physical books physical music um physical music that sounds funny but i know what you mean though but yeah no i'm the same way my my super nintendo is still hooked up in my parents house in the basement and it still works i don't play it but there's there's something to be said for like especially the physicality of a controller which is something that like i only learned recently that you can get usb adapted controllers and it was like a total game changer because i'm never gonna bring my of all the things i'm parents house that i want to bring down to california the super nintendo is like relatively low on the list but i like having a controller so i can actually like play real games it's kind of awesome and here's the other thing for me to like with those games like those are still and always will be i think the games i love and the games i want to play because i don't know if it's just because i'm too old and pathetic but all the new games are way too complicated for me because they go like 360 degrees and go all over the place i just want my scrolling left to right i mean that's that's what i'm a side-scroller yes and there's something i feel like about i don't know the violence of modern video games or like i why do i want to play a game where like i am being shot at or i am at war or something there's something that's so cute to me about a plumber jumping on turtles i'm like this is just fun this is just adorable like i don't know i mean that game is pretty violent too just in a cutesy way it's pretty violent but it's really bullets and mario brothers i mean they're just moving very slowly and gigantic bullets too and axes swinging from the ceiling and oh man okay and you still die you can die a horrible death yes falling between cracks and whatever that is yes yeah there's a lot there's a lot of like when you think about it falling between cracks into the oblivion which is just like that's actually really creepy it is no it's a terrifying game but you also think back to games that uh you know are popular around the time that uh these games were out that we're talking about and think about the arcade games i mean that's around the time that like mortal combat was out and that was a horribly graphic game per the time i mean it still is it's pretty disgusting but it's still pretty graphic yeah there's an arcade pretty pretty close to me that has it's like ten dollars free play for an hour which is awesome um and they have the mortal combat games and i like i never played them and there there's a lot of blood and a lot of like real violence and it's just like how no wonder kids are kind of fucked up well when you get a when you would get the mortal combat game for like your sega or something for home in the 90s all the blood was disabled yeah all the all that gore was taken out yep but there was a code and you could you know mash in your code and the blood would come back yep so my friend uh my best friend in high school dan he had a sega in the basement and he got mortal combat and his mom was very adamant about us not you know having a gory game down there but we would just punch in the gore codes and just right isn't there even a gore code for nba nba jam i feel like there was oh yeah you know there might have been there might have been nba jam like the basketball yeah yeah oh there were all sorts of codes for that the big head and oh man there were so many and you could get big action remember playing bill clinton oh what okay this is a level of game that i've never experienced they they built so many things into games back then and there wasn't the internet so not everybody knew but they had these things called magazines that were for gamers and they would have codes in there nintendo power yes did either of you ever play with the power glove i i have been born a power glove yeah um know what that is it sounds questionable though in in a in the uh the life of a video game music nerd um i've come across a lot of power gloves um there's a few bands that people have modded those right yeah yeah they use a lot of chip tune guys will use that um and there's a band called uh protoman where they've done a couple of like basically operas based on video game characters wow and there's there's a lot of power glove usage it's it's pretty fantastic but one of the best things you can do for yourself is to go and watch one of the power glove commercials from the from the 90s yeah is it 90s early 90s there are just awesome the definition what is the power glove it's a glove that you wore it was a glove controller so you wore this glove and had like buttons on it and stuff but nintendo was so progressive when it came to technology and video games and it's so funny because even some of that stuff that was you know existed back then was incorporated in games like i don't know i don't think ever reached its full potential and some they tried again with the we with some of the stuff i guess but you know they they had the uh the power pad is that what it was called the track and field that would be a cool thing to somehow mod for drums i don't know make the make the different spots with these feet like do crazy drum stuff well there was um robby the robot too there was that game where the robot would balance the discs yeah nintendo that wasn't very popular but i had a girlfriend in college who absolutely loved that it would be the only game she'd play it was pretty funny nintendo also had the the laser gun too i mean they just had all these cool apparatuses for video games um and i don't know why the power glove never caught on but it was short lived yeah it was it was awkward maybe there'll be a come back all the i mean we we are in the age of like nostalgia across all things so like didn't i see i feel like matt you probably sent it to me that like they were reissuing original nintendo but like in mini form yes so that you can have on getting one yeah no those things sold out so fast i'm sure they'll they'll get in stock again but yeah they were a hot item before christmas um yeah i wanted one but apparently it was one of those things that like you had to get it the day they announced it yeah and i did not maybe maybe in the future they'll run some more but yeah i mean they looked great they looked like the apps like the real machine just yeah tiny but like it has like how many games has like 50 not that 50 i don't think that one has 50 but it has a certain number of games like built into it like on a hard drive all the pocket once yeah right i've got a similar machine i think that's a sega that did the same thing it's like a compact version of some sega system that's got like 50 games on it oh that would be fun it's got a bunch of sonic alter beast again got a bunch of sonic hedgehog but i was never like i never had a sega growing up so i didn't really play those games other than uh arcade form you know most of the sega games i played were arcade games yeah yeah sega had some really good stuff we uh boy we had an altered beast which is a great like shape shifting game um there was hang on and that was really popular in the arcades um one of my favorites was this one called zaxon 3d where sega you would get a pair of 3d glasses that were absolutely terrible um but it was you used a light gun and you would shoot intercontinental ballistic missiles out of the sky before they could you know crash into the earth or something like that it was really weird but i just i love that game because it was so futuristic but it was just terrible i mean you had to get right in front of tv to actually shoot and hit anything so it's good let's encourage our children to sit right in front of the tv which like i feel like we should clarify is like the old school tv where it was you know a box this thick i don't know two feet thick and like you shouldn't sit right up to it because of you know tv rays or whatever yeah damage your eyes damaging tv rays yeah not not modern tvs where it's just an led screen no the ones that like if you look at it too closely you will die apparently and i love love love love super nintendo and always will that's my my main love but uh brought up arcade games kind of big fan of arcade games and as an adult you know it is exciting to see just how popular like barcades are knowing that really any any city i mean i can look up and find a bar that has arcade games well in phoenix now has two at least two i think some of us cobra closed there was one on mill that closed recently i think i think cobra is still around yeah and then there's one up on um camelback and central um why can i not remember the name because i live within walking distance you know i was thinking that because of the popularity like geek culture is pop culture and like the popularity of barcades and stuff the mini bar many bosses should look at or approach breweries to see about doing a collab just saying that there's been some talk there's a there's a place in glendale out here called eight bit brewing yes i've been there have you see i need to go there yes um and they've they've shown some interest in doing that they're they're tap handles i think are um nes controllers yeah it's really cool my god that's awesome and so nerdy yeah and i work in glendale so i should go there i work in peoria so i work for the city of peoria so yeah yay neighbors yeah you guys have you guys have phoenix in maricopa county and weird city things in common yes we do um yeah and we don't observe daylight savings we don't see on the way that threw me off like mad when i lived in arizona i couldn't figure out like why this state decided to be difficult like yeah every other state decided to be like yeah that's that's really what it is jason's right yeah but still it was always very confusing i don't need another thing that messes with my my body clock you know twice a year i mean alcohol but then you don't have the joy of like getting a free hour in the fall yeah but we don't lose one either that's right true okay true okay that one hour is not worth the aggravation i mean fine fine i don't like it either i just live somewhere where i have to do it i mean i could just like be on mountain standard time forever but then i just offset from my life by an hour it also confuses me to no end that vegas is on pacific time wait what really yeah i did not know that vegas is ever looked at a watch when i'm in vegas yeah there is no time there is no clocks yeah in the casinos yeah yeah there's i don't think i've ever noticed a clock aside from in a hotel room yeah that i'm thinking about there is no time because like there's no there's also no windows in vegas right like they deliberately do not want you to know what time it is right it's so you feel less bad when it's three in the morning and you're at the bar and you're still sitting at the bar still putting your money into that machine you know it's funny like being in a casino is kind of like an analog for being on a deep space voyage no windows you can't see out you're trapped in there with weird smells for a long period of time yeah oh the weird smells and it's yeah the weird smells weird there it does it does it's the it's the smoking inside that just laughlin is worse and i've described this to many people but when i'm in a casino in laughlin the smell is cigarettes old people and death it's really a depressing place that sounds horrible it just sounds like the smell of sadness people go there waiting to die like it is just an awful place that was the one though there's one casino in halifax and it was go show where i did my undergrad um there was one casino and it was always just like exclusively old women whose husbands had died who were just gambling away their retirement funds because they had nothing else to do anymore and it was just like you never saw young people like doing anything it was it was almost exclusively old people it was so sad can i have a question though about canadian casinos because well i grew up pretty close to montreal but i've never gone to the casinos up there on the river but i've always wondered so if you if you lose a lot of money when you leave a canadian casino do they just give it back to you because they feel sorry for you like is that is that a thing i mean thank you no yeah we're waiting to make that joke for like 25 years so finally we're sorry you lost your money here's a gift bag of your money um no i in you know the one time i gambled in a casino in canada i put five dollars i got five dollars worth of nickels and then played the nickel slots until i ran out of nickels because then it was i think and it wasn't even free drinks it was 25 cent drinks which is so weird um but yeah i just like i think it was like three hours i didn't remember who i went with but it was only once and it was very weird and we just yeah we did the slots for the cheap drinks because we figured it would be a thing to do and um i lost five whole dollars i miss being able to use coins in the machines and i miss getting coins out of the machines yeah i feel like that would just be the fun tactile sensation of winning anything of just like coins instead of just like beeps i've only had a sensation of putting coins in i've never had yeah that's that's the norm i think but uh yeah you know in this age of nostalgia i see it coming back somewhere somebody digging up those old machines and yeah having a casino putting in a coin pulling the thing and having that that sensation of yeah yeah they probably are working for your loss actually places still have those they don't have the old the slot machines but they have the old cigarette machines which is always funny to see when you walk by those i have seen those i've seen those it's like modern cigarette machines it's so weird it's so weird that they're like in bars yeah i don't know i would have one of those in my apartment as long as it wasn't dispensing cigarettes yeah it's pretty cool i figure that's something yeah yeah the boxes of candy would work it would totally work um i feel like before we get into space because we're gonna get into space soon because we should i don't know oh i've got a good segue do you have a segue because i was gonna ask matt about his other band very briefly because i don't think jason that i told you about this one treasure mammal okay treasure mammal which i described to people it's not really a band so much as like weird experiential art because the last time i saw a treasure mammal ended up on somebody's shoulders in the conga line wow yeah yeah i forget it wasn't my shoulders though it was not your shoulders it was your friend mig's shoulders that's right he saw that i was not involved enough so he came and like crawled under my legs stood up and then suddenly i was on your shoulders and then i could not be not be in a conga line and there was an inflatable sandcloth that fell on me and i think it fell on you too yeah it did knock knock you just ago um so you do other music too i don't know if you want to if you want to kind of mention some of like your other weird side projects that are you know around phoenix because you because because treasure mammals like actively playing shows right now yeah yeah mini bosses is uh on kind of hiatus but treasure mammal um we are active um amy you kind of described it perfectly it's it's more of an experience than anything um it's my friend abe gill uh he started this band in 2004 um as a single guy and a sampler and some strange outfits and a funny looking microphone um and at times it sounds like a motivational speakers set gone really wrong um we now have two drummers uh myself and my friend jeff he's jeff right and my stage name is jeff wrong um and we have dancers that wear custom made um body suits um yeah i can't forget about the dancers uh and it's it's just really interesting weird strange odd and a lot of fun um we have inflatable christmas things we had a giant inflatable scooby-doo we brought to south by southwest um and uh yeah we're about to start recording a new album um in the next couple weeks i think uh and yeah we're uh we're really weird it sounds like you guys would have played a lot at uh trunk space all the time at trunk space um that's where i was the last time i saw you guys like two years ago yeah well now there's a new trunk space yes the new trunk space is um in a church downtown and it's a fantastic space awesome interesting yeah yeah we've got a show coming up in march there so the weirdest thing about you guys is that you have like this cult following like it's like it's such a it's just an obscure i don't know i've always wanted to see one of the shows what's that bar that you guys do downtown a lot that i've never been to it's not valley bar but it's the other one that like you want yes that like you will have 200 people rolling around on the floor yeah like it's like it's just so weird it's like it's really an experience of like oddity and strangeness and costumes yeah yeah we haven't done it there in a while um but it's yeah it's great um Amy they've got they've got good beer there and they've got good burritos they do have really good bean and cheese burritos yes and now they have a deck out here i have not been there since the deck but i've driven by it yeah it looks awesome nice nice so yeah that's that's your other i just feel like you can't not mention like if we're going into all the weird of awesome i'm glad you brought that up gotta mention treasure mammal it's honestly i think i've seen treasure mammal i don't know like six or seven times it's it's like the weirdest i never really know what's gonna happen and it's like the best part is it's like you guys played in LA once and it was one of those like like i forget where downtown but i'm never going back there ever again because yes pear space because it was like some okay good because that was the most annoying venue in the world it was like some some rich kid who like self produced because of money their own album and like had an album release party that you guys are just words you guys are supposed to play like 11 but this kid just played for like three hours because it was like masturbation for him and then you were on to like 1am and you still got people rolling on the floor and like like doing all of Abe's weirdness with you it's just like it's such a weird like it's such a trip to see that happen yeah that was i think that was the first time you saw treasure mammal uh i think that might have been i think it might have been there were like six you guys are also angry it was i yeah it was the strangest group of people that were there for this kids like self-produced horrible album of like whiny style i don't know it was just terrible but yeah it was it was it was interesting it was an experience we'll put it at that um it was a good time so since we've moved away from gaming i feel like jason we probably killed your segue into space no because i'm going to bring up gaming again just to have this segue but we were talking about arcade games and have that have either of you played michael jackson's moonwalker i played 64 version of it really okay it is that the old one it's awesome and creepy and awesome because the whole point of the game is to like save the children so you're michael jackson you go around and like dance you like kill the bad guys by dancing and your like special move is dancing and then you go and like save the children all the children like huddle around michael it's it's i remember this so so wrong but kind of epic yeah and there's a boombox right where the music's supposed to be coming from yes oh yep and i forget like the credits of it are so funny too because it's so like very much egocentric michael jackson you know it's like michael jackson presents or produced by michael jackson like his name is just everywhere and he's just this god who's coming to save everyone with his dancing we need a little window with this when you guys edit this just to show what this looks like oh i remember seeing it and it's it's fantastic it's incredible i've seen it uh now in in a few few of the barcades i've gone to and uh that's just endless fun especially when beer is involved is it at copa in phoenix because if it is i don't know i don't know it could be here i have to check on that but anyway okay so moonwalker is sort of space related so we can transition oh one one other thing i wanted to bring up and i don't think many bosses ever ever played this song but one of my favorite sort of kind of space related songs in a video game ever would be from duck tails the moon level no if you're not familiar with that you should listen to that song that song is kind of epic and i know it best from from the uh game boy version but i think the music is the same in the nintendo version in the nes version but yes duck tails the moon level awesome music we we have played the duck tails theme really oh the theme nice but there's another eight-bit cover band called the advantage that's i don't think they're around anymore but they did do that that's awesome i'm gonna have to check that out all right let's talk space amy so moonwalkers um who's your favorite moonwalker matt because i know you can name them all anyways besides uh yeah real moonwalker you know what i gotta go with gene sernan i i really do i mean i also love albin a lot because he's just really cute um but for some reason gene sernan's always stuck in my mind and it might be because of that the first space fest that i went to that i met you at um i was coming back for my car i'd parked in the in the basement of this really beautiful resort that they have space fest at and gene sernan had just left his car and was walking into the elevator by himself just carrying like a briefcase and i i was standing there thinking okay the the last man on the moon is is about to take an elevator and he's like 50 feet in front of me i need to be on this elevator with this guy so i i didn't want to run and be like that terrifying guy that's suddenly running at someone you know who's elderly but i did kind of run and try to get right to that that that elevator door and sneak in there and ride with him and i just caught it as the doors were closing and then walked up one flight and saw him again but it was it was pretty impressive and then i i guess seeing him at the the space fest in pasadena what was that two years ago now three years three years ago yeah three years ago i happened to be outside like on the phone almost every time that he showed up and got out of his van so he was always there and i was just taking these weird pictures of gene sernan climbing out i've seen those pictures yeah actually now that you mentioned it i've seen those pictures you had so many pictures of like it's so funny it's like an indistinct old man getting out of a car if you don't know who you're looking at it's this is the funny thing with space fest um which is like like you never know where else will you have to pay a lot of attention to the old men in the room because the old men might be the people who walked on the moon um which is pretty fun so tell tell us where your fascination with space comes from well um i think it comes from my first grade classroom um i wasn't a strong reader and i i was put into this thing called a multi-age classroom which is like an experimental thing in the early 80s where the idea was kind of like uh you cram first second and third graders all into a room together with one teacher and the teacher would teach the third graders and that would trickle down to the second graders and the first graders was kind of like trickle down education um so i didn't learn to read properly um but there was a space book on a shelf that my teacher had gotten and i remember picking it up and it was all pictures of men walking on the moon so there was all this beautiful like colored pictures of apollo and i was maybe like seven i guess at the time seven or eight and that was the book like i would go to every time that i wanted to take something home with me um to read or do a project on and my parents were always like well you know what do you what would you like to have as like a birthday gift or a christmas gift and that kind of spawned me asking for anything i could get my hands on that was related to space so i'd get all these um books about you know supersonic flight and things like that and then for the the very brief time of my life that actually had cable television growing up we had nicolodian and uh i was watching all these strange british like sci-fi shows um and then my stepfather introduced me to the original star trek and i got completely obsessed with that i started reading all the star trek novels um then i went into uh arthur clark novels um and at that point i was like okay yeah i'm gonna be an astronaut and um that's kind of how i started to point my life and that obviously didn't happen because i'm still sitting here on earth talking to you guys but um that just led into like a lifelong fascination with it and um even through high school like i convinced my high school science teacher to create an astronomy class and a meteorology class um and we went on really cool field trips and then i went and did astronomy for college and yeah so i've never really kind of given up that on that first book that i read in first grade or whatever and i still love going back and watching all the old star treks and getting obsessed with uh i started finally started watching deep space nine because i didn't watch that in the 90s and now i'm three seasons into that so yeah it's been it's been a really it's been a really uh lifelong kind of passion did you watch next generation oh yeah okay yeah i i will put that on and watch that whenever i need to just zone out it's it's fantastic and i have a few friends out here too that also love it that i could quote episodes that but that's awesome as i would like yeah next gen became my obsession and then you know i mean yeah i do credit that um kind of starting not really starting but fueling my obsession with space and space exploration um and i never really got into the original and i've tried many times um i like it for what it is but next gen was always my love and uh watched deep space nine when it was on never watched voyager but only in the recent in recent year started watching voyager because i became friends with an actor on voyager and i was like yeah i should probably watch voyager so that's cool so interesting and i've got to ask since we're we're both uh in phoenix have you been to the challenger space center i haven't okay and i i've actually yeah even i've been there and i only lived there for three years i haven't i i have a bit of a sore spot for for them actually i tried to intern there out of college um at one in massachusetts and i but i don't really think i understood the idea of that uh and high peak that an intern makes no money um and i got kind of frustrated with them i i've tried i applied a few times out here to them when they were looking for positions like maybe 10 years ago um but yeah it's it's in peoria isn't it it is in peoria and uh you know i would at some point i need to go back to haven't been for a couple years but i feel that at some point it's kind of like an obligation but also something that would benefit me selfishly should get some fellow space geeks together and and approach them and try to help them do something more awesome than they do um amy will probably agree but you know it just it should be a lot more awesome than it is it was disappointing it was one of the first i think i went there i'd been living in the states for like a year or so and i was really excited to see like a thing with space things what are you peeps like debating scratching a space here it's pretty great um yeah i was i wanted it to be way more exciting than it was like the coolest thing they have is like a simulator of the space station which is like a room that is built to look like the space station not really like they have some it's like honestly they have really cool models like that's fun but yeah they need to have their game yeah that's i think that was their big thing was they would have um you know kids groups and school groups up there to do like mock missions which is which is really great um and i tried to do that for some of the schools that i've taught at but i could just never get permission to do any field trips which is thanks arizona um but yeah it's that's another thing like i out here in phoenix i mean we've got this desert where there's so many so much opportunity for dark skies and there's so much space science going on in asu u of a and um discovery channel telescope is up at na u but there's just so little outreach especially in phoenix like i never i never really hear about any of like uh like the saguaro astronomy club or phoenix um for the phoenix uh astronomical society doing much in the way of public outreach and it's insane because both asu and u of a are so actively involved in things happening in space right now yeah it's i mean it's different it's a completely different story in tucson where you've got u of a and the flandro uh planetarium they do stuff all the time i mean they do things with bars i mean there's even space bar um down in tucson uh that's less of space themed than i personally think it should be but um don't they have a telescope there or something they do they have a couple and every time i've gone there hoping to use the telescope there's been nobody around to do it and they won't let me use it you know they used to i don't think it it's around anymore i'll have to look but i know in tucson i think it was actually south of tucson but there used to be a hotel that was like themed with astronomy and they stayed there once telescopes that you could like use nice nice yeah it was the vega bray observatory yeah that's right spend a night there um it's no longer a bed and breakfast it's okay just an observatory nobody was oh my god pete you are i know i'm sorry i can't still under the bed oh i'm glad he finally came out today yeah he wants to say hi good um yeah he likes matt so you know he wants to say hi to you i feel like i should i should preface this or explain this that everybody who on the internet who ever asks me what i do with pete when i travel for weeks at a time he drives i drive him to phoenix and he stays with matt so matt's my long-term cat sitter yes and although you're wearing like 12 months or 12 weeks at one point yeah i think you've had him for when i was in australia and then was traveling right on the heels of australia i was gone for like seven and a half weeks i think you had him for nine weeks because i just couldn't i'm not gonna leave me alone and just have like a rotating cast of people come in to be like all right hi pa okay here's some food go about your business yeah i love to be cared for um he knows that you're talking to matt so that's why he's hanging out he knows he's a clever kitty this one um but yeah no speaking speaking of matt um yeah you just mentioned trying to like do things with the challenger center and stuff um because you are a teacher of humans um which i which i always say yeah we should i feel like we should also say that like you are a math and science teacher and currently working with um i mean i tell people that like you work with felons but that's not entirely exclusively the case is it no i work with probationers um i mean you work with scary people sometimes yeah but i i would say most of the people that come in so i teach adult ed and uh most of the people that we work with uh i work for the superior court so we do have people that come in that are on probation or parole um or that have um you know been to jail at prison but we also work with the community um but it's it's a very different situation than a traditional um teaching classroom because everybody's there because they they have something they need to get done either they want to improve their english they want to get ready for college or they want their g ed so it's not the kind of situation that i've been in the past where um if i have a difficult student it involves um working with the principal and all of this it's if there's somebody who's who's difficult um as an adult we can tell them that you know this program is just not suitable for them and uh if you know they need to find some place else to go so it's it's a lot different and i've taught middle school all the way through high school and adults and it's it's really it's it's challenging but it's it's really rewarding sometimes too it's watching people who've been unsuccessful for whatever reason they're lives at getting um getting into college or getting a high school diploma um or just weren't ready as kids to be um to be in a formal education setting you know i've got people who are in their 80s who are trying to get a g ed um so yeah it's different um and i try to let some of my space nerdery come out uh wallowing with them but usually the the least favorite topic is science um you know after that it's so scary because it's terrifying yeah and it's that's that's a hard thing to do but um i mean well i've Amy i've used some of your videos in class before um but really getting people interested in the cool stuff the interesting stuff that's out there and seeing you know where the science sometimes the science fiction crosses over that's a lot of fun so that's one of the things i enjoy about educating a lot yeah and that's a really good segue to discuss the fact that you also educate people through writing books speaking of science and science fiction yeah um i know this because i edited your book um but yeah no you uh you recently finished your first book and you're working on a second right now um about science and science fiction so yeah tell us about your your book because like it is good thank you um that's my first amazon review right there but i'll i'll leave that on amazon it's good it is it is good um yeah so i i wrote a book uh for because the age group is 12 to 15 year olds but really kind of anybody who's interested in in how science fiction and science kind of go hand in hand um and it's uh it's something i've always kind of wanted to do in the back of my mind i think for years and years and i was lucky enough to get the opportunity with a company called nomad press out of my home state actually which is weird um just vermont we should say because you keep mentioning that you grew up close to canada but you didn't say where you grew up so vermont vermont it's close to canada that's that's the state tagline yeah that's it we make ben and jerry's um we have really good beer and it's cold most of year yeah good because what you want when you're freezing is ice cream and beer i do but that's just weird i was just i was just in in again you anyone who's listening to this in march uh in january i was in provo utah and it was minus 17 degrees celsius which i think is about five degrees fahrenheit and um there's like four ice cream stores with walk in within walking distance of my hotel and everyone was like there's really great ice cream in town and i'm like i can barely feel my face why do i want to put cold inside my body um yeah but that was pretty interesting anyways go on you wrote a book about science and science fiction i did um it doesn't include ice cream but i suppose excuse me somebody could eat ice cream in the cold while they're reading it too there you go um but it's geared for parents educators and and kids that um want to know a little bit more about how real some of the science fiction is um for example i guess we talk about you know whether or not we can actually clone a dinosaur um bring them back to life um how likely uh you know robots are to be our friends and then you know murder us in our sleep and take over our lives um faster than light travel um finding space aliens i talk all about that in there and it's it was really a lot of fun for me to write um just because they were all things that i loved growing up i mean i love the Jurassic park movies and you know star wars and star track and all these you know great novels that were coming out in the 80s and 90s um and that was just kind of a natural extension um it's also got neat little activities or labs for people to do uh with their kids so if you've got like a you know a miniature human that likes to blow things up or break things um they probably won't do much damage with the stuff that i wrote in there but there's things like getting your own dna um out of your cheeks which is kind of neat um and uh boy i'm trying to think of some of the other ones i have um for some reason so when i did my 23 and me um testing for dnews we had to spit in a vial right so whenever you wouldn't you just said um getting dna out of your cheeks i can think of as a kid being like look mom i found my dna yeah it's true um yeah but i feel like i feel like this book for you is like such the best example of like nerdery gone right for like you've done all kinds of weird stuff as we've discussed in your life of like the gaming and the music and the teaching and all of this um but like to be able to write a book for people that's educational which is a passion of yours that's about the stuff that you love like that's so awesome yeah i i feel really lucky to be able to do that and and i think about you know when i was a kid like a book like this um i i would have read from cover to cover and it would have been one of those things that i would be you know bugging my parents with all the time like can i do this can we do this can i you know do this interesting thing uh can i watch this tv show tell me more about this i want to learn about space or dinosaurs and is science fiction now i think is is a lot more everything about being nerdy i think is a lot more mainstream but um there's still a lot of things that people just kind of take at face value in science fiction so i think it's really valuable for kids to also see or anybody to see what the science is behind them um because science fiction and science fact they influence each other um and it just it keeps going back and forth um and there was even a npr uh thing on the other day about how a lot of entrepreneurs are now starting to look at science fiction stories even like classic science fiction to think about what's the next big thing like i mean five years ago none of us would have thought of probably coming up with something like uber but now it's everywhere and and people use it all over the world but who you know coming up with an idea like that you know who who could have come up with something like that so science fiction's full of these things um and it's yeah i mean we're we're living in a sci-fi society at this point now yeah as a hit in my uh career as a journalist one of my favorite things to kind of throw in periodically where articles kind of showing how sci-fi is becoming sci-fi or star trek becoming reality things like that highlighting advances in technology and and uh you know showing how they were portrayed on star trek or other shows and how we have that technology now it's kind of awesome so uh you know it's really fun to see that um and kind of highlighting it to people because again i think people are very casual observers and you know don't really pay much attention to to sci-fi or things going on so kind of highlighting how it uh influences or or has become part of our daily lives is really cool yeah yeah it's do go ahead Amy oh i'm just gonna say and it makes like it and what's so great about that is that it makes the science so accessible through science fiction like even if you don't like science you can see something in a movie that you you put no effort into wanting to see you beyond like eh why not here's my like what how much is the movie these days like 50 bucks like i don't know movies are insane i haven't seen a movie in a really long time and i only go to a second-run theater so it's two dollars um but yeah somebody who just like sees something in a movie is like this is super cool and then you can be like well did you know that they're actually developing this technology and it just like gives people a reference point to actually understand what it is that that science is doing instead of like it becomes less scary and way more exciting that way and that's so fun to like see that inspiration in people so i'd love to see something like that at the end of star wars you know during the crawl like why not have like a little half screen thing that says like you know hey here's some of the science behind some of the stuff that you saw like you know can we actually travel faster than light or yeah you know can someone actually build a real lightsaber i mean there's all kinds of content like that it would be great to see it you know piggybacked on things like you know popular movies or tv shows i think um uh well amy you might remember this because of the martian but wasn't there like a like a nasa um trailer before the movie or something like that when it came out even it might have even been crowdfunded i don't know because i only saw the movie this is like the worst way to say it but i only saw the movie at the world premiere in toronto because i was covering it for nasa tv um and there was no there was no preview no nothing like preamble was director talking about it and then they immediately went into it because it was everyone you know this roy thompson hall in toronto which is like this massive concert venue um yeah i don't know in our media saturated world now and with social media and everything it it's both awesome and kind of annoying but with movies now like uh what's the one with chris pratt now that's out uh passengers passengers yeah so like immediately what's great is that i have seen the the trailer for that and i still don't understand what the movie's possibly going to be about well i haven't seen it either and people seem to hate it but the one thing about that and we see with now all sci-fi movies or space related movies is almost immediately after it comes out you'll get space writers you know commenting or or scientists whatever publishing stories saying how close did they come to to actually getting the science right in this movie so yeah and that's the one thing they've said about that movie is that they actually got the science right as far as they think yeah that that's that's another sci-fi movie though i just i don't think i'm gonna see it just doesn't look that good to me and i read kind of a i read a bit of a review about it that painted it as more of like a like a sci-fi stalker film what does that even mean i don't want it into a horror that would be awesome i would be all for that but yeah it just sounds awful yeah it i don't want to i don't want to give it a way to your listeners because i don't spoil i learned too much about the film but all right so i've got to ask you this have you ever been to any of the sci-fi dinner parties that as you host no so they do this thing and dinner parties yeah i don't know about these so it's really cool and i don't know how consistent they are with them they do them periodically and i'm on a mailing list to get notified about them but um yeah like i went to one of the first ones they did but they'll like choose a movie and have somebody who is you know somehow either involved with the movie or involved with whatever topic they want to talk about associated to that movie um comment they give like a sack dinner with really bad food but you know they provide food and you sit there you eat and then you watch um whatever episode of star trek or you know a movie or something and then they'll do like a lecture or discussion afterwards it's really cool and to do this i went the one i went to they did the the gorn episode from star trek and uh yeah i mean i i i don't know how they choose who they're gonna have as their guest or how they tie in these topics but uh you know they do kind of spread across sci-fi and make it very very broad and interesting but they do that and i think they do it monthly so i'll if i remember i'll send you the link um to their websites they have a website for it and uh yeah happens right on asu's campus and you know that's always fun going back there after so many years because it's completely transformed since i went there so many decades ago um but the coolest thing now walking on that campus is seeing like the the model of uh the curiosity rover i haven't seen that they've got a life size life size replica of curiosity there it's pretty cool you need to do this yeah you should definitely go asu has neat stuff they do have neat stuff and i've got a friend my friend matt works in the physics department over there need to find him go do the things they've done some stuff with their planet i'll be back to you but um yeah they i need to get on more lists and actually go and interact with peoples i know well i that's that's another thing too about like science and science fiction is i know a lot of science centers and planetariums do um like adult nights um but i haven't heard of um the arizona science center doing anything like this yeah which i think would be fantastic i mean the last thing i saw that they're doing is a another metallica light show in the um in the planetarium which is great i mean i'm not a huge metallica person but you know i i hope that maybe they're doing stuff where they're involving the science and everything seems like it would be more appropriate if they did queen or something that sort of had a tie in yeah yeah but oh well little flash gordon would be wonderful well see it's gonna take people like us like going and being annoying and saying yeah you know what you need to do doing something yeah yeah yeah mm you know the kind of people that every business hates hey let me tell you what somebody's gotta do it right yeah yeah no that's what it takes absolutely yeah yeah so like when we've talked about amy doing doing uh you know sky watches or things like that uh you know we should do that sometime we'll do one in phoenix and we'll yeah we'll publicize it and get some people to come out that would be fun that would be a lot yeah we could definitely find a good event going on and do like a live show from there or something totally do things yeah there's north america eclipse this summer although that's not here yeah but that's in like tennessee yeah yeah well we need to we'll find the we'll find a distillery that wants to host a party we'll get them to sponsor it i have a telescope at that cover so we'll take the telescope we'll go and we'll get a bunch of whiskey we'll have a good time this this can't possibly go wrong whiskey telescope and eclipse what could possibly like all the things you need live on the internet supply go wrong uh yeah whatever whatever goes wrong will be the right kind of wrong at that point yeah we'll go that do do i get to um do i get to ask you guys questions too do i get to um that's never been done before you're you're setting new ground here but yeah for it because jason i know this is this is the first time we've met but amy's talked a lot about you and and um your passion for UFOs and things like that and i'm just curious tell me more about the UFO stuff that you are into well we're definitely UFOs are a big part of this show and we're going to talk about so many facets of UFOs over the course of this show but you know i was in the unique position of being hired by and helping start a UFO company a for-profit UFO company solely focused on UFOs and extraterrestrials like a full-fledged media company all about UFOs so and i did that from for more than six years so i was a full-time salaried UFO journalist investigator researcher um so you know i really went into it knowing not much at all about UFOs other than you know growing up in the desert of arizona and seeing all sorts of strange things certainly being here in 97 for the phoenix lights seeing that um you know so i dove down the rabbit hole and and uh you know had to get up to speed pretty fast and you know you find out very quickly when you start doing the research that uh the whole UFO subject is a lot more complex than just UFOs are they alien are they not um there's a lot going on with the whole field of UFOs so you know i was i was totally enveloped in it for for more than six years and i'm still heavily involved in it following it closely um but i'm i'm uh interested in that subject quite deeply um i've seen a lot of things that i can't explain but at the same time having been my focus for more than six years you know a great benefit that i have is that you know being involved in that focusing on that studying it researching it and having people contact you daily you know i've seen thousands upon thousands of photos and videos both old and new you know pre-photo shop film days um to modern stuff and so i got pretty darn good at being able to identify things that are commonly misidentified um so i can you know seeing a photo or video i have a pretty good idea of what the most likely explanation is for something that's in the sky day or night but you know there are things that uh you know seem to defy logic defy physics um you know bizarre things going on and they've been investigated by governments around the world and still are so there's some fascinating things going on in the sky and being a lover of space you know and and lover of the unknown in general you know that that piques my curiosity and you know i approach it scientifically and journalistically keeping an open mind and just trying to you know go after these things chase them as far as i can and try to figure them out yeah that sounds amazing that's i can remember too like being in high school like my frilly my early couple years of college um i was really into ufo so i even wrote my my senior my high school senior paper about ufo stuff like that and i grew up around people who had like some really wild ufo stories um and i as i got older i became a lot more skeptical about it um but there's still some stories like my my mother uh had one completely insane story that she could never explain um and i i've never had anybody who actually could explain it either so that's i always love still reading about that kind of stuff and keeping up with it although it's never i haven't been that involved as i was when i was younger and that's one of the one of my favorite things about the ufo subject is just finding out how absolutely everybody is curious or fascinated by or you know has some sort of personal experience with ufos you know when people find out that you're in the ufo field or you know you're somebody who not going to laugh at them if they talk about ufos they have a ufo story or they know somebody who has a ufo story it's pretty interesting yeah yeah and it's it's sometimes it's sad too when a lot of people will you know dismiss that kind of stuff out of hand but it's also a great tool to get people talking about things about science and great thinking and being objective and you know whenever whenever kids bring it up in my classes or science classes it was always really fun because it always start out with a great you know conversation where we'd end up either talking about you know things that you can prove and things that you can't and and what does that mean in terms of science and what does it mean in terms of um somebody's you know decision to believe something based on that so yeah i i always find that stuff fascinating it's always a lot of fun and especially especially getting young kids talking about things like that yeah because you'll find i find out that you know some kids might really be into dinosaurs and not care about um you know uh space as much but for whatever reason aliens gets everybody talking you know what a lot of a lot of schools especially in the uk in the past um five to ten years i'm gonna say um have really incorporated the extra terrestrial theme and a lot of their curriculum and they'll use it for for writing assignments creative writing and things like that they'll go so far as to stage like ufo crashes on the school grounds and have the kids go out and they'll have like local police departments and stuff there the kids will go out and they'll basically have to like conduct investigations or act as journalists um you know find out what the details are the evidence that was collected or whatever just everything about the incident that happened and then write a story about it wow but that's pretty common yeah that just gave me a new idea for one of the chapters i'm writing awesome yeah that i if i was a kid i would have loved doing that yeah because as a science teacher i mean you can use that and all kinds of stuff there's forensics there's writing there's using scientific theory you know yeah that would that would be fantastic well and with the movie arrival arrival i still haven't seen it but uh you know there's a whole communication thing too i mean that's uh an amazing element too it just really there's so many things that you can use to really get kids thinking about you know so many different areas and not just kids too yeah i'm gonna say it's it's adults too like it'll pique that curiosity and want you make you want to learn a bit more and it's just a great teachable moment for anybody it's one of my favorite thing one of my favorite things too in the ufo field is the several friends who focus on essentially ufo philosophy just you know kind of thinking about questions like that like you know communicating with extraterrestrials so and even in like the whole seddy field over years i mean it's in the 80s i mean that was most of it was a joke there are hardly any you know researchers that were taken seriously if that's what they wanted to look at but now with all these exoplanets showing up everywhere and you know people having access to every news article you can imagine constantly through facebook and the internet whatever now it's a much more common thing i mean you know you've got all kinds of different versions of seddy and everybody's doing different research and it's all you know becoming respectable now that is actually if you feel like there's something to look for and as awesome as that is it's so funny because in the ufo world in the ufo community seddy is largely regarded as not necessarily bad guys like the government's government is bad guys but seddy's frowned upon really and that's so baffling because you think here is mainstream science getting mainstream funding getting mainstream media coverage they're looking for intelligent extraterrestrial life what more could you possibly want but uh but no no seddy is frowned upon and uh you know largely because people misunderstand what city what especially the seddy institution does um you know they focus on the listening for radio signals and it's a very small part of what the seddy institute does yeah yeah i mean a lot of the kepler data and what we the the the exoplanets that have been discovered a lot of the people at seddy institute have played a large role in that they do some awesome stuff i'm a big seddy fan yeah i think i think a lot of people just look at seddy as like the weirdos who sit around trying to talk to aliens yeah and you know there are people in the ufo community the reason they don't like them is because of that that radio focus because you know there are aliens obviously wouldn't be using radio waves and that's a big criticism of seddy like people think that if there's this advanced civilization they're not going to be using radio waves for communication but seddy's also looking for laser communication laser-based communication i mean they're doing all sorts of things so yeah right sorry that just had to go on my my seddy love around that makes me unpopular but no no do it do it i'm i'm two thumbs up for all right search for extra corrections yeah i'm i'm finding it very interesting but yeah i don't know i haven't really like engaged in that part of the space world much so i will well and there's all sorts of interesting things going on right now i mean from alien megastructures to you know uh fast radio bursts you know lots of different mysterious things going on that you know have been detected for years and and scientists around the world have been focusing attention on specific things that have happened and still no consensus on identifying sources for mysterious signals so that stuff is always exciting yeah yeah yeah no matter what you believe or what you know like it's awesome to realize that there's so many things that we can't explain like even if we'll eventually figure it out it's like that unknowingness that's like really fun to just like it's like such a grander scale too i mean we don't know we hardly know anything about our planet like there's so many things here that we have no idea but we don't know about this little planet of ours and like every year you read like oh scientists cover 4 000 new species wow where did those come from yeah how are we don't know anything that's in our ocean like it's crazy so like these mysteries in space are just like like expanded exponentially it's crazy i love it that's what's that's what's great about science because there's never going to be a shortage of things to to find or look for yeah yeah yeah yeah it's so cool yeah science it's awesome speaking of shortage how are you guys doing on your beer um well i'm almost done with mine i've been trying to drink very fast yeah still got beer still have some i mean i've i've at this point i should say like i've cracked my second bottle but i'm only here so i'm not gonna finish it but i have finished my first one i'll actually have to go to my refrigerator to get mine which is on the far end of my massive home that i live in so it might take me five seconds to do that we could we could wrap up the show we don't have to finish my giant beer guys sorry i decided to drink a quart of beer but no i like that you decided to drink a quart of beer um i had to make up for my previous episodes where you always had a big beer and i was not playing the big i really i had a big beer in the fridge too i think i have like space boy or space party beer like very appropriate beer but i really want to try this cinnamon raisin Commodore stout yeah i don't love you which is not as like cinemony as i was expecting it to be it's like a really just nice easy drinking stout yeah i'm a fan i like it can't complain about that um yeah i'm also just looking at the time we were in an hour and a half i don't know should we should we wrap it just for the sake of our listeners people are good why don't they shut up i know i know i love that we um i i don't know matt you were asking questions do you have any more questions you'd like to ask um as jason tries to finish the massive beer pete i don't know where pete is i think he's probably sleeping on the bed oh well i'm glad he made an appearance it's always a good show when pete makes a good appearance too he's right into the camera for a second there so if you're listening to this you should go and check out the video podcast because you'll look at pete's face yes i felt like i heard him purring at one point too so that's awesome you might have i was trying to get him to stop like you know he likes to rub his face on everything to market as his own and i don't want him rubbing up against the mic while we're recording because you'll just hear like a so yeah but you might have heard him purring yeah well let's let's wrap the show amy i'm not gonna force people to wait around till i finish my beer i've chugged as much as i can all i can think of is um because our first episode just went live for those of you listening um and there were a few comments that were you know remarking on the fact that our first episode is an hour and 48 minutes long or something like it's nearly two hours they're like oh i'm gonna have to like settle in for this i'm like oh i feel bad um but i don't feel that because like this is awesome and this has all been like really really fun stuff to talk about um so we should ask you matt as we ask all of our guests if you could go to anybody in the solar system um forget about things like how to stay alive and whether or not technology restrictions yeah yeah all of those things uh forget about those where would you go and why well okay so this changes for me often and i think about this question a lot um i'm gonna go with uh my miss which is a moon of saturn and it would have an amazing view of saturn and it also happens to be the desktop background on my computer right now that i put on yesterday which is a chesley bonestill painting who i'm obsessed with and would like to get some of this print someday so yeah today i would go to minus because i'd like a nice distant view of saturn in the sky and that's awesome very amazing very good answer just yeah we've never had i mean that's definitely an obscure moon that i don't think anybody knows exists um i how far how far is it from saturn relative to the other moons is it one of the outer more the outer more larger moons uh you know what i don't remember what order it is it's it's not a it's not a ring grazing moon um but i don't think it's out quite as far as titan is i think it's a little bit closer but i could be totally wrong and somebody will probably correct me in the comments below well you've put a disclaimer i'm so happy with your answer because it's so different from anything we've had and we like different so that's great yeah yeah yeah you're because you're like a proper space nerd person yeah i mean i'm sitting next to my space duct tape so it's amazing uh matt where can people go to follow you on the internet and creep creep on you and creep on me and uh find follow what you're doing i am on twitter at eos dis uh i'm on instagram at matthew brendan wood but brendan is spelled b r e n d e n and uh i will have a facebook author page that i forgot to make live today we'll we'll put all your links in the description yeah yeah no no by the time this episode goes up we'll have it there we'll have all your stuff and we'll also put links up for your at least your first book i don't know if your second do you have a do you know when your second book pub date is uh i think it's november of this year but okay so we'll because i'm right well we'll put the link to the first book up and uh yeah people now know the second book exists which is about the solar system we should say it's a egg tour of the planets um again for for sort of 12 to 15 year olds um right yeah that's it all right awesome um jason where can we find more of you uh twitter is the best i am at eccentric a c e c e n t r i c also eccentric dot com and you can always find me and uh this show and other content at rogue planet dot tv all right and if you want to follow my daily activities which vary from space to very much non-space ast vintage space vintage like 1950s space like what's up there um on twitter also on instagram um my my uh if you want to know more like super nerd space stuff from me vintage space is my main youtube channel and if you are watching this on youtube you will find all of those links um and if you are listening to the podcast and you want to see the video podcast uh the channel is just amy sure title number two yes dot com amy sure title two that's because amy sure title apparently i years ago made it direct to that's not surprising i'm really sad about that but in retrospect it was probably the right move at the time so yeah so yeah in case you didn't know the show is available in both video and audio format you can find the audio on itunes and stitcher and really everywhere else so that will be your audio version but you really should watch the video version i highly encourage it it's fun sometimes we do things it's entertaining um all right so i guess with that um thank you everybody for listening to yet another episode um as always be sure to leave us any ideas for beers you'd like us to drink or people you would like us to talk to or topics you'd like us to take on anything like that in the comment section below on youtube or um i'm not totally sure where to leave them as comments on the audio versions but you can also of course tweet at us and um yeah we will keep uh we'll keep drinking and talking space and nergery and music at you guys so thank you so much for joining us bye cheers