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Hello and welcome everyone to Inside Tenderfoot TV. Today we're going inside Flashpoint, our latest show that takes an investigative look at the narratives of the nineteen ninety six Olympic bombing and the subsequent bombings in Atlanta, Georgia. There are a lot of themes in this story that are still
very precient. Today I'm Laura from the Tenderfoot team, and today I'm talking to host and co creator Cole Lakassio and executive producer and co creator Doug Mattica to hear about their experiences digging into such an intense story with some seriously personal strings attached. Let's get into it.
Today.
I'm sitting down with col A Cassio and Doug Matica, the producers and hosts of Flashpoint, and I'm really excited to get into it. Welcome Cole and Doug. Thank you for being here.
Thanks Dor, thanks for having us.
Yeah, so this show just wrapped up, which means that everything is very fresh, and I kind of wanted to start a little bit at the beginning of things before getting into some of the more kind of hard hitting topics of the show and your experience with it. Can both of you just give a little bit of an overview to our listeners of how you got involved in podcasting in the first place, a little bit of your history within this medium, and why you chose it for storytelling.
I got into it through Doug. Actually, I was in college and I was working on in indie film over the summer, is like an internship in between my junior and senior year of college. I met Doug that way. He was a pretty around a film when I was wrapping up college. I did radio all during school and I loved it, but I was trying to figure out a way to not have a typical journalism job after I got out of college, and I'm glad I worked
on that film. I never considered film or storytelling like that in any capacity until I met Doug, and so I hit him up after college, and you know, I went the typical like applying for jobs at like you know, local papers and like ESPN and that sort of thing, but they were all very entry level and not very creatively rewarding. I hit up Doug and asked him what he was doing, and he had just started a podcast company, so naturally it was a good fit. So I moved out to LA.
Well, at first I told him, don't do it, just like my mentor told me, don't get in film. It's the worst thing you can do. Kid, don't do it.
I was told that when I was studying film too.
Yeah.
But you know, when you got it in your head and you need to creative stuff, you just do it. Yeah.
And when was do you mind have asked? When? This was? Just for a sense of kind of what the world of podcasting was at that time, since it's this was grown.
I hit him up first in May of twenty nineteen. That's where I graduated.
Okay, so established industry, but it's grown, right.
And I moved out to Los Angeles in July of twenty nineteen. And you know, honestly, i'd never really listened to a long form narrative podcast of any kind. My first introduction to it, as I'm sure is the case for many people, was Cereal Doug. And Doug gave me basically a homework listening list and it included Cereal and included Shitdown. I can't there were a few more, but I started with Cereal and s Town Yeah, and kind
of just took off from there. It's such an awesome medium to be able to craft the story you want to tell without having to worry about visuals, which was always actually my least favorite part of film. Were the visuals important, but being able to really tap into and take hold of the storytelling aspect of it was very intriguing to me. So I'd moved out to La. The very first thing I got to LA, I went to
the office and met up with him. We caught up and he brought me inside and on his computer he had an article about Eric Rudolf from Outside magazine and I was like, why are you reading that? And he said, do you know about this? Like you're from Atlanta, Like I'm sure you know about Eric Rudolf. And the article was talking about how it was mostly focused on the man hunt and how he was able to sleep in the woods. I think the title of it was Eric Rudolf Slept Here. And he was blown away by it.
And Doug can talk about this more on what fascinated him about it, but when I saw that article, I said, well, I have a connection Eric Rudolf, and I told him my story in my birth story, and the kind took off from there. He actually came up with our original title for the show on the spot right after I told him that story.
Doug, were you looking were you looking into building a podcast around his story kind of in your head already before you talked to Cole about his connection to it?
Totally? I thought his story was and I think Cole mentions this very briefly in one of the apps, but like Eric's story, his timeline is kind of like very synchronous with the timeline of the rise of the far right, the religious right domestically. And I thought that was interesting because he, you know, spoused a lot of those views quite publicly, and he's been pretty prolific from prison. I don't recommend you read his work, but he he's got time on his hands, for sure, but he's also got
clarity of vision. But I was really interested in that the sort of cultural historical piece, but also I was amazed that somebody could hide for five years, How do you do that? And so you know, this outside magazine piece was fascinating. It really just got into the topography of the region, and so I was what I was doing is poking on trying to find an angle, like what's the angle? How do I tell this terrorist story and use it to give a broader cultural overview? But
what's the angle? Like anybody can tell the story? And Jimmy Shoeshine here walks into my office. I mean, shit, you not within an hour of And we had worked together for two months NonStop in production, like we were on set every day, so like this never came up. Why would it? But yeah, he walks into my office sees this, and he's like, oh, I have a story, and I think he actually stepped outside.
For a second.
He's like, I want to confirm a couple of things. Hold on, And he went outside and he made a call and talked to Leah, his mom, and confirmed a couple of things before he dropped the bomb. And then he dropped it, and I was like, whoa. And it just so happened that I was in the process of
setting up my first podcast, Whistleblower, with Tenderfoot. At the time, it wasn't set up yet, but we were getting close, and it was in production on Whistleblower that at a certain point we were I think, you know, midway through and in Atlanta, Cole's helping on that, he's editing on that, and I Donald just at lunch one day, I was like, what else you got? What are you working on? And I gave him like a two sentence pitch on this and he was like, I'll take that.
I mean, it's an incredibly compelling You have an incredibly compelling position within I guess the broader narrative of Eric Rudolph and the extremism that is growing. Cole, when did you first find out about your birth story and your
relationship to Eric Rudolf? Because you talk in the show about always being fascinated with this bombing And forgive me because I don't remember if you had actually already been interested in that as a young person and then found out because you mentioned I think it was high school or college that she told you. So were you interested in this before you actually knew your connection to it and then it grew or was it something that grew out of finding out your birth story.
I knew about Eric Rudolf pretty early on in my life, because I think when you grow up in Atlanta, you know about that story, right, you know more than most would. I think most people only know typically when you tell them about the Olympic Park bombing, they know Richard Jewell,
they don't really know the name Eric Rudolf. But I think for most people who have lived in Atlanta, you know through the nineties, they're going to know about the man hunt, They're going to know about the additional bombings. So I kind of grew up with that story in the back of my mind, just knowing like this is a crazy story. I knew about my birth story parts of it. I knew about my biological father. I knew about the fact that he just wasn't part of our lives past the age of like two. For me, it
was not a good situation. Thankfully, my mom got out of it. She had a lot of support from her parents and my grandparents. But I did not know about the Eric Rudolf part of it until high school. It was something that I mean, my mom's a very open person. She's an open book, but you have to ask her certain things to get those pieces of her life, and I think it's something that she wasn't trying to keep
from me. She told me everything else. It's just something that she put away, and I don't think it was really important to her after she made the decision to keep me. I think trauma is a very powerful thing. I think it does a lot to memories. I think that played into that. So when I heard that part of the story and I was interested in going this route of journalism, I kind of always kept it up here, you know, to hopefully one day be able to tell
that story. But in a way that doesn't come across as supportive of his actions, right, because I've always been a pro choice person as long as I've been able to understand what that means. So I certainly didn't want people to get the wrong idea about it. But it was always there and I always wanted to tell that story. I just need to find the right way to tell it. And thankfully linking up a Doug and then Tenderfoot, we were able to do that. Right.
Do you mean to run with the old title a little bit here?
Yeah? That I think? Is it?
So? Yeah? Cool was talking about trying to find the right way to tell the story, and originally we had intended to and just for like two years in our mind and our conceptualization of an ideation process. This podcast was called Eric Rudolf Saved My life, not mine his, but but and on the one hand, we wanted to embrace everything about the paradoxical nature of this story. Yes, Eric Wrudo was a monster. Yes, Cole doesn't exist unless
his monstrous actions save his life. But to start off on that, the first foot forward being he saved me. And there was always something that felt off about that. But it was also cool because, well, but we want to we don't want people to be able to avoid the paradoxical moment here. We really want people to have to hold these you know, contradictory truths. Yet it was a bit it was a bridge too far at the
end of the day. I mean, Alex was a was a really strong and sound voice in figuring that out with us, with the whole process for us.
Yeah, and just for contact, Alex Bespa said, is one of the other executive producers on the show.
Yeah, I didn't want to change it. I didn't want that didn't either, And we after we had that initial conversation with Donald and Alex about it, we kind of digging our feet in a little bit, like being a little stubborn, and we started talking about other potential titles, and nothing was coming up even close to that title in our minds, and how strong that title was. When I told people about the story prior to its release and I used that title, they said, Wow, that is
such an amazing title. Do not change that title to get you attention. But those were very specific types of people that were telling me that too. Those were people that were more in line with our thinking and understanding the type of story we wanted to tell. Those were not people who were coming into it cold or seeing the title come up on their podcast feed for the
first time. You know, so, I think it needs context, and when you're making a podcast, you don't always have that opportunity to vibe context before people listen to it.
Right, I think from my perspective this hearing this, this is the first time I've heard the other titles, and option I do kind of get that there's this The whole show is a paradox. The whole subject is a paradox.
Your relation to it is so paradoxical. And knowing, like you said, Doug, that Eric's continued to publish from prison, he is this kind of champion within this specific community, you may have ended up with a lot of people very non paradoxically clicking through right and listening to the show with very different like it'd be great to get people of different viewpoints listening to it, but I could see how that might have been one of the concerns, right,
is that the sort of I don't want to say ironic, but like slightly ironic nature that that title has, Like you're saying, you can't give any context around it for that first introduction.
Yeah, I think we have a lot of people listening that are at the end of the day, when they get to the end, they're pissed off because a lot of maybe assumptions or beliefs or values that they think they need to hold on to are challenged maybe in a way they're not comfortable with. We're getting some of that anyways, which is fine. Another challenge, just on the creative side, was if that's the title, are we giving
up the ghost here? Are we like teasing the listener into figuring out what the reveal is right from the drop, you know? And at the end of the day, I don't think the reveal was really that. It was cool. I think it was I like the way we handled it, but like that's not what it's about. Getting to that and owning the what you learned from the reveal and then taking that with you through the story is much more important.
And I do want to give Alex a lot of credit too, because he is the only person that came up with the title where I was willing to let go of the old title because I think Flashpoint is such a st title and it speaks to the show in so many ways. Yeah, and where we are today in this climate, can you talk.
A little bit about where you maybe once you decided, okay, we're doing the show, how you started that process of research and crafting the narrative arc and whether that shifted over time. Like, I'd love to hear about that whole process because of all that nuance. And yeah, where it begins versus where it ends up.
You know, it all starts during COVID, like the peak of COVID. And I think it was that summer in twenty twenty I had my first It all started with an interview with my mom. It was in our basement. I was living with my parents at the time. I had just moved back from Los Angeles and was living at home all through COVID and we sat down and just I put a mic in front of her and we talked for two hours. And the bulk of what you hear in episode two is from that first interview
that we did. Doug and I hadn't talked to anyone else. We talked to ourselves about the type of story we wanted to tell, but we hadn't talked to experts at this point. We hadn't talked to anyone related to the story except my mom. So we started with that interview and we took it from there.
That's amazing. Wow, all right, so she shared her story with you, And then how did you go about deciding who to interview who else? What other voices you were going to bring into the show, because there's a lot of them.
Doug was very good at helping me understand the Christian identity, the religious component to the story, and he was very good at pointing me to experts that could talk about that, people he's followed on Twitter for years, Substack wherever I was very much focused on the crime story and finding those people people connected Eric Rudoff family members.
The Tenderfoot team was also really good at helping us find.
Yeah Eye contacts and police.
Yeah, but also one person always inevitably led to another. Yeah, Like we would talk to one FBI guy, they would teach us with a GBI guy, so on and so forth.
Weird anecdote is that for a while there in twenty twenty one, everyone I reached out to or top to died or had someone close to them pass away.
It was quite a wrong.
Like I talked to GBI agent Charles Stone, who comes up many times in the podcast, and I found out I think it was a month and a half later, he passed away.
WHOA.
I went to his house, we sat down for about two and a half hours. He just had surgery, and I found out about six weeks later he passed away. So I'm very fortunate to have been able to sit down with him. Wow.
Okay, So was the narrative arc then sort of developed organically or did you have a really specific from the get go? We want to you know, start here reveal Cole's relationship to every like, you know, focus on the Olympic bombing first and then shift to the clinic and then reveal Cole and then like, how did you actually draft out where the show was going to go? Or was that something that really was kind of an organic result of all these conversations, one leading to the other.
When we first started the show, we wanted to save the reveal until the last act of the whole series, so it would have been around episode six, and of course we revealed that in episode two, and I think that was the right move because I think once people understand my connection to the story, they're able to hold onto my words a little harder and maybe listen a little closer than they would otherwise given my connection. But the original outline we had certainly is not what we
up with. We wanted to dig into the connections, the stuff that made people angry. We wanted to dig into that in episode two. Of course we didn't. I think that was the right move because, regardless of people's viewpoints or where they stand on abortion, I think most people listen to all eight episodes, and that is the most valuable tool we could have had in making this show.
Yeah, we initially were scripting episodes where each each episode had sort of a tangential history piece, and little by little it was taking you up through and it was going through the timeline of Rudolph's life. Also, the timeline of Leah's life and also the timeline of America's sort of cultural maturity from you know, the sixties when he was born, when we start our story with Goldwater, et cetera, and jumping back and forth in time was just proved
really way too challenging. Donald and he's just he's so he's so savvy about this stuff without having to try. He's just like, no, simplify, tell the crime story, and then break it down. So we resisted that for a minute, and then we were like, yeah, okay, cool.
Can you talk a little bit about this whole process of crafting the narrative because there were so many people that you also talked to and connected with directly, Cole. I don't remember the name of the gentleman who you talked to on the phone, but you called for the question. Yeah, yeah, So you called him right and you told him your connection, Derek Rudolph, and then he made all these assumptions about
your viewpoint, which is just how people are. But can you talk a little bit about just that experience that you had, maybe your internal experience around reaching out to people who you maybe disagree with, who might have been making assumptions based on your relationship it indirectly to Eric's actions. Was that experience like for you conducting interviews and how did you kind of maintain emotional clarity and try to stay a little I guess neutral and objective in those conversations.
Yeah, it's a great question. I think when I first started reaching out to people, I wasn't getting the response that I would have liked because I wasn't explaining my connection to this story. I was coming into it from I'm a journalist doing a story on Eric Rudolf in his other bombings and the subsequent manhunt. I would love to talk to you in silence. I quickly realized if I followed up and didn't bury the lead on my connection, people were much more willing to talk to me because
they were interested. They were interested in the story. And yeah, I think there were instances too where people came into it with their own set of views and they projected that onto me. And surely I must think this because of X, Y and Z, but that just wasn't the case. When I talked to Tom Brandham, he immediately assumed I thought Eric Rudolf was, in his words, a hero that couldn't be further from the truth. Now, did I correct him when I talked to him, No, because I was
looking to get an interview, and I did. I ran into that a few times. But I think that on the flip side of that, when I talked to certain people, they understood where I was coming from. And in the case of talking to some of these victims, they certainly would not have talked to me if they thought I
thought Eric Rudolf was some type of hero. For example, in the case of Emily Lyons, we sat down for three hours in Birmingham, and she gave me her entire powerful story and she did ask me where I stood on things, and I was very upfront with her from the start, and I think that giving her that context was very important to having a very good, fruitful interview with her, because otherwise I don't think she would have been comfortable telling me her story if she didn't know
where I was coming from.
Yeah, not in the same way. I'll also add that you said it right there. Emily asked you. Tom didn't ask you if people. If people come into it and they're curious about oh wow, that's a wild story, I want to understand what you actually think. It's not like Cole was cagy and didn't tell them he told him. But in the case of somebody like Tom Branham or Dan Gamon, just so happened with those guys that they didn't ask. It's not like we were being coy and
hiding this stuff. But we're there to listen for the most part. If someone asks us, we're there to answer. Certainly Cole is, but somebody doesn't ask if they're not expressing curiosity in you, if they just want to talk about themselves, that's okay.
Right, That is a very good point. I loved. And it's Emily's voice is the last voice that we hear in the podcast, right. I love that. It made me cry so good. I actually I think that I actually exclaimed out loud, like yes, that's such a strong ending hearing her. I really thought it was powerful to hear so much of her and to bring her back in
at the end. And I'm not entirely sure how to ask this question, but you know, she makes this point of this being about men exerting control over women, and I would love to know what your perspective is on this. Having interviewed so many people you talk about being a male voice telling the story, but yeah, what's your perspective on this and how did that narrative show up in this whole process?
Early on, Doug and I were very aware of the fact that it was two men, three men, four men telling the story, the story about women, the story about choice, and I think early on we really shied away from my perspective and more we're trying to make it about my mom's story. And thankfully episode two does have a large part of her story. So we were always being very delicate with it until one day Doug told me, no,
this is your story. You're telling it. It's time you take some authority and tell it the way you want to tell it and from your perspective. And I think that once we establish that, it sort of clicked for me. But that is to say, every single part of this story is about that narrative of men controlling women. Let's take my mom's story. For example, my biological father, as you hear in episode two, throughout that entire process, was
very controlling of her. He's the one who went to prison, yet he expected my mother to wait around a high school student, wait around until he got out of prison, right, and then when she did get out of prison. He expected her to spend house arrest with him. That, as my mom says, isn't love. That's not a relationship. That's not healthy. And ultimately, I do think that if it's a large reason of why I'm here today is because
of his control over her. I don't know if we want to say it like that, but I think my point came across there.
No, I think that's fair. I think that you Again, it fits into the paradoxical nature of this story, where the critique of patriarchal control is something that is essential and it's baked into this, but it doesn't change the fact that the person who's telling the story exists because of patriarchal control. Patriot like an approach to inflicting your views, Eric Rudolf inflicting his views of the world on everyone else, and they are very misogynistic and male and racist and
white supremacist, et cetera. Again, I think it's it's a tricky wicket, but it's nonetheless it fits with the rest of the story we're telling. And so yeah, we were extremely deferential to whether it was Leah or any of the other women whose stories we were trying to tell until it got to the point where it was it became clear that there had to be a framing device for all of that, and it had to be our host, and it is his story. Like be clear that that
men controlling women is straight fuckery. Yet own the fact that you're here telling your story.
You all had a very challenging task ahead of you to You're not remaining neutral, right, but like you're poking, like you said, the things that make people upset, but you're also attempting not to alienate everybody, you know, And that's a really important thing to try to do. And I appreciate that that's what you're you know.
The good news is, I think both Doug and I both have experience in not alienating people. I mean, whether it's our families, our friends, We are around and interact with people who don't hold our set of beliefs right and so constantly, and those people are also listening to our show. And I think and I hope the fact that we were able to hold listeners for so long and to have them hear what we have to say. Sure, it's going to make people upset. We understood that coming in.
But I do hope that people take something from the show that they didn't expect, and that's where the paradox comes in.
So who do you think really needs to listen to this podcast?
I mean, I'm I'm sure there's a preaching to the choir component of this that isn't who needs to listen, But I think that's I'd like to think that those people listen and recognize that maybe we got some things right. But I also think there's a component of people that they maybe aren't quite keen to some of the undercurrents. Like we talk about the murmurations and how movements happen, and movements always have like a fringe, and a murmuration
has outliers and fringes that are pulling it. That's what gives the thing shape, right, is that the outliers are pulling out, sometimes even separating and coming back in those sorts of fringes, and a movement are and I'm not saying it's they're created with Machavelian and tent, but they are. They exist in a way that makes it a whole lot easier to ignore some of the ify stuff because while there's a really extreme person over there that's doing
stuff that I would never subscribe to that. I would never recommend bombing an abortion clinic. No, no, right, but some of the stuff you are doing, if that person weren't there, it might be a little on the edge. So I think that that in political speak, it's called moving the Overton window. That also is kind of that drama being beat so loudly it's become boring. But I think there's a lot of people that consider themselves very moderate that maybe don't realize how things are being nudged around,
like maybe the ground they're standing on. I'd like those people to potentially hear this and at least say it's food for thought.
I mean, I will chime in and say since episode one, two three four, the first part of this release, I've had people reach out to me who I know where they stand politically, belief set, and they just thought it was amazing, you know, is the word they would use. They couldn't wait to hear more. They thought my perspective was so interesting and unique. But I do think that they thought I was going a certain way with it, and that's been the case with a lot of people
in my life. Is like, who I know lean or are fully blown on that end of the spectrum. They'll listen to the first few, take one thing from it, and then we go a different direction, and they feel, I guess, a bit isolated by that when they shouldn't. But I think naturally that's just where we are today. I don't think it's possible for people to hear certain words in a sequence and not take that as the end of the world.
It's hard not to be defensive. That's again something that we're trying to do here. Is like, even if somebody may listen to this and feel like there's a lot of finger wagging, there's some I guess, but I hope that's not the point. But it's really hard not to be defensive. It's really hard to hear criticism. That just is always the case. It doesn't matter who you are, how righteous or humble you may be. It's just it's
a difficult thing to take. And so even if you're not even being criticized, if you feel like you're being criticized, it's just hard. Right, nobody said being human was easy. Let'st I check.
So what do you hope people will gain from this show?
I think it's what we've been talking about. I think it's more than anything. Perspective that my story in my mom's story is not the rule is not should not be taken at face value. My mother had a lot of help. She had a lot of support financially, emotionally. If it were any other situation, I would not have turned out the way I am. And with that comes privilege, and I recognized that privilege, and I think for that
for that reason, that is why choice must exist. And also I think we're giving too much power sometimes to Eric Rudolph because my mom could have gone to a different abortion clinic, right, she could have still carried out the procedure, but she didn't. But that was a choice. At the end of the day, that was still a choice that she made.
The world your mom grew up in afforded her a choice and we say this and allowed her to get her arms around her moment. Without that choice, who knows what she would have done. Honestly, who knows what she would have done. People do crazy stuff when they're in situations like that. But it's like that idea of arguing with someone whose argument is to take your argument is to take the ability or the platform to argue away from you, Like you have to just afford that much.
But I think my takeaway that I would hope for is probably I came into this different from Cole. Cole really wanted to have a conversation about abortion and I wanted to have a conversation about the culture. They're not unrelated. But that's what I'd like to see, is just a more serious conversation about the culture instead of just like this tribal screaming match.
When you say the culture, can you just expand clarifying?
Yeah, about so the political dynamics in play and how it's kind of seeped into every every decision of our lives, the way in which we present ourselves to the world, Like it's all gotten a little bit infected by that, and I think that that's inevitable.
Yet the way that we deal with it isn't.
I'd like to think that there can be a conversation that's not pedantic or like trying to prove each other wrong, but rather if I may get really sacaraing and go ted lasso, just being curious, there's something to that that I can appreciate.
Yeah, well, there's a different I don't remember when you're engaged in curiosity, Like there's a different part of your brain that's activated than when you're engaged in a debate. Right, Like, being able to actually be in that space allows you to kind of depersonalize a little bit. I think it's like the science mind. You know, if you're researching and you're looking for a specific answer, you're going to find
that specific answer to fit your hypothesis. If you're just openly exploring something and you're listening in a more neutral place, there's an infinite number of possibilities that can come out of that, right that probably aren't going to match that hypothesis that you may have set up for yourself.
Right. Cole's story is a good example of that. The example of people hearing his story and making certain assumptions about him is perfectly fine, But the fact of the matter is he, in order to end up where he ended up, necessarily had to not personalize it.
I think being able for me, being able to talk to everyone on every end of the spectrum in this entire show was incredibly valuable. And also to be able to sit in a room with someone like Emily Lyons where the actions of one man in a way saved
my life but destroyed hers. That's pretty powerful. And to be able to talk to her about that and for her to love me and for me to love her is what mys And to be able to have a conversation about that and to be able to hold our contradictory truths at the same time, that's powerful.
Yeah, I think sharing that is the best we can do. I'd like you, I can't I can't expect or even attempt to have someone else in habit Cole's experience of that, but sharing it, you'd hope that people would open up about the possibility of having a real conversation without you know, blowing shit up.
Yeah, thank you for the conversation. It was really great to connect and I again really appreciate the work you did on the show and the conversation that it's hopefully will open up just one on one with people, if we get folks talking about some of these things in a more interpersonal, nuanced way, like great, amazing and I really appreciate you taking the time today. So thank you, Yeah, thank you.
Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Flashpoint. This series is released weekly absolutely free, but for ad free listening, early access and exclusive bonuses, you can subscribe to tenderfoot Plus on Apple Podcasts, or at tenderfootplus dot com