Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Sound (featuring audio wizard Mat Keselman)

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Daniel and Kelly chat with DKEU's audio engineer, Mat Keselman, about the physics of sound and give a behind the scenes look at how Mat works his magic.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Hard podcast. Guaranteed human. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here.

The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, A.O. rewatch, our brand new podcast, where we, We revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestrars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song.

I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia, AEO rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Raiders of the Lost Podcast, we explore cinema like no one else, including huge interviews with stars like Ryan Gosling on Project Hail Mary. It was like the Jaws Shark. Didn't always work, came with its own problems. That's what made it great. The cast of Obsession. On set, there was so much magic happening with each scene we were putting together.

deep dives into classics like 2001 a Space Odyssey or Fight Club, plus weekly episodes on all industry news. Listen to Raiders of the Lost podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow at Raiders of the Lost Podcast and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay.

And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, It's a new podcast from Together in I Heart Women's Sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka, showing out. Shoutouts to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashan Rock's boxing journey. She looks good.

Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Howdy Extraordinaries? Today we're pulling back the DKEU curtain a bit. We're going to see how the sausage is.

made, as it were. So Daniel and I write pretty darn detailed outlines before we record an episode, but often something happens that totally derails our outlined conversation, and that's good. Sometimes the derailment happens because something I thought was kind of obvious. Turns out to not be so obvious, and Daniel will ask clarifying questions that force me to come up with different, better explanations on the fly. Or, Daniel will be working through his outline, and I'll think of some tangentially related topic that I now really want to know about, and Daniel will hop online to do a quick bit of research, and then we'll record a completely unplanned segment.

In each of these cases, our answers are way less polished than we'd like. Lots of false starts, lots of ums, basically lots of stuff that the audience definitely doesn't want to have to sit through. And then Daniel and I have unexpected noises that intrude upon the audio. In today's episode, I learned that, my microphone actually does pick up the sounds my goats make when they're trying to get my attention, and sometimes Daniel apparently records from the inside of a grocery store. More on that later. Anyway, these are only a handful of the many challenges that we throw at Matt Kesselman,

the audio wizard who makes Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe sound so good. So today we're bringing Matt on the show to talk about sound, and how he goes about fixing hours so that your listening experience is so much better than it would be if you were a fly on the wall while Daniel and I record. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's edited universe. I'm a particle physicist and I like thinking about aliens and I've often been told I have a face for radio. Hi, I'm Kelly Weiner's myth.

I study parasites in space. I often make jokes about having a face for radio, but I think actually Daniel and I are quite attractive human beings. Oh, yes. And Daniel has a great voice for radio, so let's focus on the positive. As do you, Kelly. I think our voices work really well together. I appreciate it.

But I will note that when we transitioned from Jorge on the show to Kelly on the show, we did get a fair number of folks writing in to complain about the sound of my voice. But here I am over 100 episodes later. Kiss my butt losers. I'm not going to hate. That's right. But we also got a lot of comments from people who love your voice. And I think it's just a subjective thing, you know.

And it's a big part of finding a podcast you like listening to is, are the voices pleasant and soothing? And that's very personal, you know? That's right. But the good news is you and I have Matt Kesselman to help us whenever our voices are sounding less than their best. That's right. And I want my voice to be smooth because a lot of folks write in and tell me they like to fall asleep to my voice. And, hey, you know, I don't want to disturb. of anybody slumber.

No, I wonder what my cackly laugh does to their dreams. I dream of witches. But today we decided that we were going to invite Matt Kesselman, who is just an absolutely amazing audio engineer who, thankfully for us, spends a lot of time working on our show. And part of why we decided to invite him is because anyone who submits a question that ends up on our listener questions episode gets a raw audio file of Daniel and I having our conversation. And we send it to them before it goes to Matt.

our audio engineer, so that they have a chance to record themselves asking the question and record themselves responding to our response to their question. And then we can send all of that to Matt and he can edit it all at once. And people often respond to us and say, wow, your audio engineer has a lot of work to do. But not just that. Also, they say that it's really interesting to hear the unedited version of the conversation because they can hear our side conversations or when we pause to do research. Or when we back up to say something again.

So they get like a little glimpse behind the curtain. Totally. And so we want to provide that to all of you today. That's right. And so in the second segment of the show, Matt is going to come on and talk to you about the magic that he works on our episode. And he'll play a couple raw clips. So you'll get a peek behind the curtain and see how Daniel and I sound before Matt steps in. And Matt sent a question for us to share with the listeners.

and the question was, what kind of sound do humans hear best? So let's go ahead and hear what the extraordinaire's head to say. Maybe like the middle sounds. Like not super high or super low. That's what I was going to say. But the humans are in the middle. I don't know. What middle of what, though?

Depending on their gender, like women would hear babies crying the best because I've heard stories that they often are more easily working up by that. Related to our size, larger animals can hear sounds with longer wavelengths. Smaller animals can hear sounds with shorter wavelength. High-beached sounds. Females tend to hear higher frequencies better, possibly to help them hear their offspring when they're crying or something similar. Sounds that really stand out from the background and from each other.

As a new mom, I want to say a baby crying. These are great guesses and hilarious stories. Thank you very much, Extraordinaries. And they're basically what I would have guessed, you know, that there's some range we can hear, and obviously ranges we can't hear, and that's going to be tuned to our survival. Yes. Biology is the answer, and that's great. That's how we know that it's an interesting question. No, it's a harmonious blend of biology and physics.

It's biology taking advantage of physics. Biosysics. Bio-first, but yes, biophysics. You know, I think if biophysics means biology is modifying physics, So it's at its core physics. Well, you know, you and I could be at this all day. And so we thought before we invited Matt onto the show, we would let Daniel do a little bit of his physics magic and talk about the physics of sound. So we're going to dig into that a little bit.

And then we are going to bring Matt on. So Daniel, what is sound? Yeah. So sound is not a thing. It's like an arrangement of stuff. It's a traveling pattern of pressure changes in matter. So if something is vibrating like a guitar string, it's going to push and pull on nearby molecules, creating regions of compression and then regions when things are less dense. And so those pressure changes then move through the medium.

Like if you slap your hand on the table, you're creating momentary high pressure in the molecules on that table. And they push on the ones next to it and they push on the ones next to it. So that pressure wave travels. Right. And so this is a way that needs a medium. It moves through a medium. It's a rearrangement through time of the relationship between the molecules in the medium. So I'm feeling even more amazed now by the microphone that's sitting on my desk.

How does those like squishiness of the air get transferred into something my microphone can play back to you? Yes. So a speaker and a microphone are basically the inverse of each other, right? So let's do a speaker first. A speaker creates sound. So there's something inside the speaker, like a cone, that moves back and forth. It's literally physically, mechanically moving at the frequency you want to create. So we think about sound in terms of frequencies, the same way we think about light in terms of frequencies.

You can have like red light and blue light or green light. They are all vibrations of the electromagnetic field at different frequencies. Sound has frequencies also. You can have low frequencies and high frequencies. Daniel frequencies and Kelly frequencies. Exactly. And so a speaker can make these by shaking effectively a drum or a cone at that frequency. So if you shake the cone at 440 hertz, it's going to create 440 hertz sound. Just the same way that like a radio antenna oscillates electrons at a certain frequency and creates photons or electromagnetic waves at that frequency. So you have mechanical vibration

in the case of sound, transmits pressure waves to the air. The microphone is essentially inverse. Pressure waves in the air vibrates something sensitive. So you're converting pressure waves in the air to physical vibrations of something. And then you just need a device that's going to record those vibrations. For example, you could transmit them onto vinyl or you could digitize them and store them on a computer. So a microphone or a speaker are essentially inverses of each other. Okay.

I'm still amazed that we've figured out how to do this. That is pretty cool. It is pretty cool. And there's a lot of really fascinating physics of sound, like how the speed of sound depends on how stiff and dense the material is. So in air, sound travels about 340 meters per second. In water, it's faster because water is denser. And so molecules are closer together. They could push up against each other easier.

It's like 1,500 meters per second. In steel, it's several kilometers per second. Wow. So sound travels faster through the ground. So you know those scenes where somebody's like putting their ear on the ground to hear if the buffalo are coming? Like there's real physics there. Whoa, that's real? That's real, exactly.

And so the things to understand about sound is that there's frequencies, right? So high and ones and low ones. There's also amplitude, right? Is it loud or is it quiet? Those are the crucial things to understand. But musical sounds or voices are much more complicated than just like a single frequency. If you ask somebody with a violin, to play a certain note that's going to correspond to a certain frequency,

but a violin doesn't produce sound at exactly one frequency. So if you want to play 440 hertz, then a violin's also going to play a harmonic, which means 880 hertz, which sounds like another version of the same note. You know, have somebody plays like the low E and the high E on a guitar. They sound nice together because they beat together.

They're not shifted, but they are different notes. And so a violin doesn't just, play the 440, it also plays the 880 and the 1320 and the 1760. And if you play a guitar or a trombone with the same note, it has a different relationship with those harmonics. So you can hear a violin is different from a trombone, even when they're playing the same note. Why is that? Because they have a different set of frequencies that they're playing. It's not a single pure frequency. And this is what we call timber. This is why, like, my voice sounds different from somebody else's voice, even if it was at the same frequency.

Like, if you took Kelly's voice and you shifted it down to Daniel range, it would not sound like Daniel. And this was all new to me, like, 40 minutes ago when we talked to Matt. And so, like, you know, heads up, Matt is going to mention this a little bit and how he can see that in the software that he uses. And that totally blew my mind. I didn't realize that you were getting like harmonics of people's voices. And anyway, very cool.

But there's also lots of fascinating biology here, like how the human voice is. actually generated, right? You don't have like a little violin in your throat, but you do have things that vibrate. You have the vocal cords or sometimes called the vocal folds. They're not like guitar strings. They're more like vibrating valves in an airflow and faster vibration creates a higher pitch. And so like adult male voices are lower because they have longer, thicker vocal folds that vibrate more slowly. And so this is why also two people sing the same note but sound different. And birds are somehow able to make at least two noises at the same time, some birds, not all birds. Wow.

Which is just absolutely like if you should really pay attention to the next time you hear a bird song and try to figure out like, wait a minute, am I actually hearing that bird make two different notes at the same time? And it's able to do that. And anyway, sound is incredible. And some humans can do that too, right? This is this like Himalayan dual note singing thing. Oh. I didn't know that. I know that birds have a very different voice box than we do so that they can do that.

And so now I need to know what happens with the Himalayan people. It's very hard to do, but you can train yourself apparently to do that. And sound is much more complicated than just like generate a sound, hear a sound. You can have interference effects because sound is a wave. And so places where the pressure waves are in the same direction will be louder. That's constructive interference. And places where they're pushing in opposite directions, it'll be weaker. And this is how like noise cancellation works, right? You play the opposite sound,

the one that's beating down when the other sound is beating up, and it cancels it out. So, for example, my daughter has AirPods in and I say, Hey, Hazel, will you take out the trash? And her AirPods plays the opposite of, Hey, Hazel, will you take out the trash? And she hears nothing, right? Which is why she doesn't take up the trash. Perfectly hypothetical example. However, I would like to note that Matt, mentions later in the episode that noise cancelling headphones don't necessarily cancel out people talking to you. And I don't want to get Hazel in trouble. But I'm wondering if maybe Hazel's just not listening. Yeah, there may be a few effects going on here. But this goes into like the design of concert halls, right? Because sound reflects and it can cancel out. So you can have like dead spots in a room

where you can't hear someone from across the room or places where the sound all balances really, really well. And this makes a big difference between like a bad concert hall and a good concert hall where like every seat sounds good or more seats sound really good. You could also have beating sounds. Like if you have two sounds, they're very similar to each other, very close, but not quite on top of each other. Like if you play your guitar tuner at E and then you play your guitar, but it's not quite in tune, you'll hear this like one, one, one, one, boom, those are the waves drifting out of alignment, right? You'll hear them because they're not beating in sync. a harmonic, like 440 and 880, they have the down moments at the same time.

And so they sound nice. I missed that. Could you make that sound again? Matt can make that your ringtone for you, if you like. That would be great. And then there's a lot of work that needs to be done when you're like doing noise removal. And Matt's going to tell us all about that when he gets here. All right.

So let us delay no longer. Actually, quick delay. We're going to do a commercial break. And then when we come back, we will bring Matt on the show. The great Matt Kesselman. Whoop, whoop. Eating well shouldn't be complicated. But somehow it turns into recipes, prep, cleanup, and half your Sunday gone.

Factor solves all that. These are fresh, ready-to-eat meals designed by dieticians, delivered to your door, and ready in just minutes. No prep, no cleanup, no excuses. And it's not just about convenience. You're getting real food, balanced nutrition, and zero artificial stuff. Meals that help you stay on track for all of your goals

without the grind of doing it all yourself. Grilled chicken, roasted veggies, steak plates, postables. They taste like something you'd get in a restaurant, but they come out of your microwave in two minutes flat. If time, cost, or effort have been holding you back from eating better, Factor just took those off the table. Right now, get up to $90 off and free shipping.

Hurry, this offer won't last long. Go to factormeals.ca and use code power. That's up to $90 off and free shipping, but only with the code power at factormeals.ca. Factor, Canada's number one meal delivery service. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.

Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports.

Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo roer to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what do we eat? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week.

Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out, she beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports.

Listen to everyone watches women's sports. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, The Chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO, rewatch, our brand new podcast.

Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life.

Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysler, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song.

I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Matt Kesselman is an audio engineer and producer with over two decades of multidisciplinary experience in the fields of film production, audio post production, and music. Matt has worked with artists and broadcasters like Netflix, the BBC, Lionsgate, Walk Off the Earth, Ill Scarlet, and many others. He develops software tools for audio engineers through his company, Ocelot Audio.

He brings over a decade of teaching and communication experience to the table as a college professor at Metalworks Institute, where he is currently and before that at Durham College. He's also the amazing audio engineer and sound designer behind DKEU. He's the guy who makes us sound not horrible. Thanks for joining us, Matt. He's also the guy who has a shocking amount of blackmail material on both of us. That's right. That's all true. I'm a little nervous. I feel like, am I the first guest that doesn't have a PhD?

Oh. Not even in like chemistry. Wow, I didn't realize we were gatekeeping the guests. That's right. Oh, my gosh. I mean, you folks try to find the secrets to life and how to better all of humankind. And I once produced a song called Candy G-string. So we're a little different. I'll try to hold my end of the bargain and make this entertaining.

Well, that's what makes this a harmonious collaboration. everybody brings their strengths. That's right. Well, maybe we should start actually by telling the story of how we got connected to you, Matt, how you ended up being the audio engineer for the pod. Yeah, how indeed. Well, I was a fan for a long time. And I think like all the other extraordinaries,

I was listening before we were even called the extraordinarys, but I always have questions and I always want to know how things work. And a lot of popular science, I can only consume popular science because I am not smart enough, but a lot of it, you know, I don't believe that. It leaves me wanting and I feel like there's something missing and then there's conflicting things in different popular science publications. And then I found you guys and you break it down.

And it was really enjoyable. And then I thought, why don't I just tell them that I can make them sound even better? Yeah, we got an email out of the blue from you saying, hey, I have notes on your audio engineering. And we dug into it with you. And then eventually we were like, hey, why do you come make the show better? And we haven't looked back yet. That's right. And so one of the reasons we're super excited to have you on the show is because after

Daniel and I do a listener questions episode, we always send the raw audio file exported from Riverside out to the listeners so that they have plenty of time to listen to our conversation and send us an audio file responding. And almost every single one of them is like, wow. this sounds awful. Your audio guy must do so much work. And so we thought that it would be great to have you on the show to like pull back the curtain and talk about like when Kelly forgets to turn off her air conditioner,

how do you remove that sound? And like all of the work that you have to do to make us sound good. Where does that start? Okay. Well, first of all, I want to point out that there are different kinds of podcasts that have different needs, right? Everybody's familiar with the comedians just talking with no editing, with no nothing, and they leave all the mistakes in, and that's part of the charm. There are also narrative podcasts that tell a story kind of like a movie, and our very own

network has a few examples of that, like Red Elvis and the Buzz Aldrin show. I don't know if you've heard that one. But then there's also the informative kind where you're basically enjoying a lecture. And I feel like this is kind of like a lot. lecture mixed in with some lighthearted comedy. And the thing about lectures is that they take a lot of time to prepare. And you two do something that very few people can do. And that is that you basically deliver two lectures a week, often on topics that you're not specialized in. And it's no surprise that sometimes you need to write on the fly. I mean, it's just not possible for any person to deliver that much information without having to stop and sort of rewind and think back

on it. And I think we all sort of treat it that way where you have your outline and you have your idea. And sometimes you come up with a new idea while we record. And then you try it out a few times until you get it right. And when you send it off and you hope that I put it together. I feel like you really, you get me, Matt. You get me. And I want to start describing the podcast now as lectures with light comedy because I feel like that's actually, that's a pretty good description. That's really what it is, right? It's like weird things that are very hard to understand sometimes broken down into small, bite-sized understandable pieces with some prolapse jokes. Which is my favorite type of entertainment. We need constant goat updates, you know? People are curious.

Well, she's kept her outsides on the inside recently, so that's nice. Wonderful. Well, from my perspective, I lean heavily into this editing. Because I know that we can go back and fix something or say something a better way, I speak differently than I do in person or if I'm lecturing to a class. I'm lecturing to a class, I don't often back up and say things another way. Just go with it. So I think the listeners are hearing a very unusual slice of our speaking, you know, the intended for editing but unedited version, which is not how like we have a conversation normally. Right. And if listeners want some inside baseball, I always send you the finished episode or a draft of the episode. And then you listen intently and go, oh, actually, that detail is technically right, but there's a better way to say it. And then you send me a pickup because you're perfectionist and you want everything to be correct and true. And that's very admirable as well. And you're always a really good sport when we're like, oh, actually, thank you so much for editing all of that, but I'd like to do it again. So let's make this concrete. Can you show us some examples? of what you get and then what you send us back. Show us the raw, unedited Daniel and Kelly craziness and then the smooth matte output. Sure. I have two separate kinds of examples. Here's a couple where the noise reduction was already done and we're going to focus on your writing on the fly, if you will. So take a close listen to, we'll start with Kelly.

Uh-oh. Trying to communicate this idea. Backing up a couple of of times, a couple of uhs and ums, and then after we'll listen to the, uh, cut up version. And I have no idea what file Matt picked, so, uh, I'm on the edge of my seat. And we don't really have a good framework yet for predicting, like, if you took, you know, X and, uh, say you decided you were going to take, uh, what's a, say you were going to take lions and domesticate them. Okay. So there's that.

Here's, here's the. edited version. Yeah, right. And we don't really have a good framework yet for predicting, like, say you were going to take lions and domesticate them. I'm being ridiculous, right? But like, say you decided... That's not ridiculous. That sounds awesome. I would love to have a house lion. Hey, whatever happened to the house lion I requested anyway. I need a few more years. Yeah, so, I mean, you can see that you got this idea of comparing it to lines and it came on the fly. So you just needed to work through it.

Which is great because I think everybody would rather hear what you intend for them to hear and not for you to sort of back away and just say something that's easier to say. And I think that these on the fly moments are what make our conversations really fun because it is a conversation. You're thinking on the fly. You're coming up with new ideas. You're responding to questions. Also, we could never pull off a scripted podcast twice a week. That's just so much more work. And on top of that, I'm a terrible actor. So if I had to read a scripted podcast, it would sound really stilted. The only way for this to work is for it to be a natural conversation. I massively appreciate that I can like stumble and start over many, many, many times and know Matt is going to listen to all of that and pick out the bits that makes sense. And you're amazing.

Thank you. Sometimes you do put a lot of faith in me. And just to be clear, what I mean by that is that you'll have a great first half of an idea. and then you might write on the fly and work out the second half of the idea. And then when I put them together, sometimes they could sound a little bit disjointed, kind of like a milder version of this real segment that really aired on TV. You have an idea about what we do.

We would not be good at what we do, would we? We would be sloppy. You call it sloppy. I don't want your recordings to sound like that, even though it's completely normal for speech cadence to change over time, when you put it all together and remove the gaps in the middle, it becomes more noticeable. So sometimes I have to do things like tune your voice on certain words or look around and find other times when you said that word in the episode or in other episodes. Wow.

And use it to help build one cohesive sentence. And just to be clear, I never change what you've said. I might just change how it sounds. But the ideas are purely yours. How often does it do we do that to you? I'm feeling really bad right now. It's not something you do to me, but it probably happens more often than you think.

Oh, no. Which is completely normal. You're focused on educating the masses. I'm focused on making it sound smooth without anybody noticing anything was done at all. Well, thank you for making it sound so good and making it sound like you haven't done anything. That's the most flattering part.

You want to hear one of you, Daniel? Yes and no. I do. I do. All right, let's do it. Okay, here we go. The before and after for Daniel. And that one piece of data argue that the Earth could be a flat disc that was perfectly,

that was perfectly aligned to make a circular shadow. Yes. Ooh, boy. That was rough. For some reason, like, were you at a supermarket? Because you hear that beep? Listen again. And that one piece of data argue that the Earth could be a flat.

Do you hear that? Where was this? Yeah, I was not buying a can of olives or something at the same time as recording the podcast. No idea what that comes from. So here's the after. We had that one piece of data argue that the earth could be a flat disc that was perfectly aligned to make a circular shadow. Yes. I sound great afterwards.

Thank you. Yeah. And again, like you said, you don't talk like that in person. It's just that you're trying to communicate things that are new to you in some way and in a way that fits for broadcast. Okay. So when I listen to the audio files, after I send them to you, I'm like, oh, shoot, I left my air conditioner on, or Daniel was trying to explain general relativity at the grocery store. Like, how do you remove, like, the beeps and the background noises?

Like, how hard is that? So there are many different types of noises and many different solutions. Some are automated, some are not. So if it's here, I have some examples. Oh, good. Here is some unprocessed, Daniel. Let me know if you can hear that background noise. So Bell's paradox involves length contraction, the fact that when things move fast, they look short.

So relativity tells us two things. Moving clocks run slow and moving objects look short. So that kind of noise is probably the easiest because it's consistent. It sounds like I'm crinkling paper or something. That's a different thing. That's mouth clicks. And that's a normal thing that happens when you put a microphone really close to the human mouth. it's weird how it doesn't happen in person, but it does on mic.

For that kind of noise, it's because it's consistent, we have software that we basically tell the software, look at this, as long as there's no talking, look at this piece of noise, identify it as noise, and from now on, remove any time you encounter that. And they become more and more sophisticated over the years to the point where they're quite transparent at it. It's still, in many cases, if you go too hard,

things start to sound watery and sort of weird, So you have to be careful with that. But dig into that a little bit more in detail because what you're saying is it's consistent. So you can measure it when the person's not speaking and then you have a template to remove it. But still it's varying. So is an average removal? It's a statistical removal because it can't remove the exact noise moment to moment because there is variation. We heard it.

There is variation, but it's fairly predictable. Like an air conditioner, unless the air conditioner is changing temperatures, is going to give take make the same droney noise throughout the recording. But yes, sometimes I do catch that throughout the recording, sometimes the air conditioner change gears. And then it's no longer being recognized. And I have to compensate for that. There are settings where it's supposed to follow the noise itself.

I don't find those to be very good yet, but tuck changes all the time. Maybe tomorrow they'll be a good one. And is this noise removable because it's at a different frequency than the voice? So you can identify it when I'm not speaking and then you know exactly how to remove it and you can remove it without removing the voice or does it overlap of the voice? And so you are affecting the actual voice as well. Oh, okay. That's a great question.

You really want to look under the hood. So the way it really works is that the recording is divided into smaller bands of frequencies and each frequency is given what's called a gate or an expander where if a lot of volume hits that area, it's allowed to pass through. So speech, for example. But if there's a quieter moment, it enhances the quiet moment and makes it even quieter. So if you really listen closely, you may be able to notice that there are moments of noise when you talk. But because you're talking and the noise is only present as you're talking, it's not perceptible. A lot of this is about magic tricks and not actually about doing what you think we're doing. By magic tricks, you mean distracting people?

and understanding how attention works. Yeah, I mean, I mean real, real magic, not magic magic, where side of hand and stuff like that. I love that you call that real magic. That's awesome. Okay, and so then how would you remove something like the grocery store? I was not at a grocery store. I want that on the record.

I think you were. I saw it. I saw it. So for a noise like that or like goats, Kelly. Oh, no, you can hear my goats? Oh, yeah. They're goats. They're goats, yeah.

Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, no, it's totally, it's not your fault that they're goats. They do goady things. For things like that, for noises that are not consistent or predictable, oh, which, by the way, let me back up one second. Noise cancelling headphones work on the same principle. So noise cancelling headphones can cancel predictable noise once they recognize that noise. However, if somebody's talking to you or there's a dog barking,

you may notice that your noise cancelling headphones don't work. for this very same reason. So if there is a dog barking or a goat, luckily we live at a time where I can just open it up in a spectral graph and I can actually see all the sound. It looks like splotches. And I can see the goat bleed to an extent. And I can draw it out like in Photoshop.

Whoa! That's amazing! And so what you're looking at is the amplitude versus frequency? Yeah. Time is the X. Frequency is the Y axis and then amplitude is color. Oh. Oh, fascinating. Bright orange means it's very loud. So I can actually see all the harmonics of the goat or a door being slammed or a plane flying by.

And sometimes it's hard to draw them out because there's other stuff happening there. But in most cases, it just takes time. You have to stop, capture that piece, and follow the goat and remove it. How does Daniel's voice show up different than mine? So Daniel has a very deep voice. What does his look like relative to mine? Well, too bad this is not a visual show. So what you would see for any human is just a series of lines on top of each other.

Most sounds, really. And the lowest line is the actual note that Daniel or Kelly are saying. And then all the lines, the notes above that are harmonics that we don't perceive as individual notes, but they're the sort of fingerprint that make Daniel and Kelly sound different. Even if you sing the same note, for example, is just a different combination. of those harmonics. Huh. Like for the same reason

that like a guitar and a violin sound different when they're playing the same note because there's a range of frequencies that gives you

the mental fingerprint to identify it. Exactly. That's all it is. All right. Well, let's take a break and when we get back we're going to chat

with Matt about how software is making his life easier or maybe not. And whether or not he's actually an AI. Yeah. Eating well shouldn't be complicated, but somehow it turns into recipes, prep, clean up, and half your Sunday gone.

Factor solves all that. These are fresh, ready-to-eat meals designed by dietitians, delivered to your door, and ready in just minutes. No prep, no cleanup, no excuses. And it's not just about convenience. You're getting real food, balanced nutrition, and zero artificial stuff. Meals that help you stay on track for all of your goals without the grind of doing it all yourself. Grilled chicken, roasted veggies, steak plates, postables. They taste like something you'd get in a restaurant,

but they come out of your microwave in two minutes flat. If time, cost, or effort have been holding you back from eating better, Factor just took those off the table. Right now, get up to $90 off and free shipping. Hurry, this offer won't last long. Go to FactorMeals.ca and use code power. That's up to $90 off and free shipping, but only with the code power at factormeals.ca.

Factor, Canada's number one meal delivery service. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I-Heart Women's Sports.

Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments to take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports.

Naomi Osaka showing out, she beat. Shout out's to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports.

On the Iheart radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us or rather you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years,

but today we're showing up as our stuff. to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea?

We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysler, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write.

I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back, and we've got Matt in the hot seat today. We are quizzing him about how he makes us sound not horrible because we sound pretty bad in the raw audio that we send to Matt.

So AI is like everywhere now. So could you like tell AI, hey, here's an interview from two people. For starters, cut out every time they say, um, and remove all the background noise. Like are we there where that could happen? Or, yeah, where are we with AI now? We're not there. We might be there. I have no idea what's going to happen.

Maybe next month, none of us will have jobs. I know that some people have very strong beliefs about what's going to happen. I think nobody knows and we may hit a wall or it may never stop. See, the thing is, there are tools that can do things like that, but then they require adult supervision where you check what it did. And then you find that it deleted a very important question or, you know, things like that. So it doesn't help me. It's still faster for me to do it all myself because I work pretty fast. And, you know, I don't have to go back and try to find what's missing.

Okay. The tools I use the most with AI are for noise cleanup. That's also another option, if I don't draw it out with a pencil tool, is there are AIs that are pretty good at being able to tell what noise is, and they sort of split into two categories. One is it removes the noise on its own using all kinds of cool phasing algorithms. And there's one that recognizes your voice and then resynthesizes your voice completely from scratch. Wow. Wow. Which is a little weird. Scary. Scary? Yeah. Well, I had a listener

right to me once that they heard an AI generated podcast and that one of the hosts on that podcast sounded a lot like me. And I was like, what? So then I listened to it. And I was like, that does kind of sound like me. And then I realized there are hundreds of hours of my voice out there for anybody to train an AI to make an AI Daniel. And you only need five seconds now. And by the way, PSA, I don't know about your bank, but my bank has this voice print identification if you call them. Yeah. I asked them to turn that off.

Yeah. Because it's incredibly easy, especially for anyone that has their voice out there, for anybody to fake your voice. So that is no longer safe if you have that enabled at your bank. And I'm not endorsing it, but I did find this AI-generated podcast to be pretty good. And I did a little experiment where I took one of Katrina's latest papers,

and I ran it through and I had produced a 50, minute podcast about it. Then I sent it to her and didn't tell her it was AI generated. I said, hey, I heard this podcast about your latest paper. And she listened to it. She was really excited. And she shared it with her laugh. That is weird. So it was surprisingly good. It's pretty compelling stuff, unfortunately. Well, so I think you should be flattered that out of all the voices they could have picked, they decided to scrape your voice, Daniel. It's a good voice. I don't know that they did. You know, just generic podcast dude with a deep voice, I guess.

But no AI is out there making goat jokes, Kelly. So you are unique. Yes. Oh, that's great. I'm so glad. So, Matt, even with the help of software, we send you about an hour, an hour or 20 minutes of audio. It gets compressed to about an hour of podcast. How many hours go into editing?

Anywhere from 5 to 10. Wow. Depending on... If it's physics or biology. The subject matter. Yes, yes. Well, look, if it's about particle accelerators, Daniel already has all that stuff memorized and it's easy to do,

or if we're talking about kely fish or something like that. But if somebody throws you a curveball question that you had to look up, then it could take a bit longer. If there's a guest, it usually takes longer because you have a rapport and a banter. that you're used to and then if somebody else comes in, they may not have that same vibe and it takes a bit of time. And I want to point out that five to ten hours may sound like a lot, but it's not a lot or unusual at all.

If you think about it, it's usually roughly about an hour and a half of raw audio that I get. I have to listen to it at least one time. So that's already an hour and a half. Then I need to do some noise reduction, which can take, you know, 30 to 50 minutes, depending on the type of noise there is. And then from there, every edit that I make, I have to first hear it, stop, listen to it one more time to make sure there is a problem, do the edit, which takes between a few seconds and a few minutes, depending on the edit, and then listen back. And these little things all add up. And before you know it, you're easily crossing the five-hour mark. By the way, one other thing that I forgot to mention is there's the editing sort of to help everything feel smooth and make sense. But then there's also the issue of comedic timing.

over web conferencing. There's a delay whether you like it or not, and it's not something as easy as shifting one voice back because Kelly would say something funny. Daniel would accidentally talk over Kelly because he's been waiting because there's a delay. Then realize that was funny. Laugh at that.

Kelly also hears a delay. So she's already trying to damage control Daniel not laughing. And it becomes this mess. where I'm like, there's a very funny joke here and both laughed at the joke. But because of that delay, it sounds a little bit train wreckish. So that's another thing that I go back. Wow, what a review. Well, because I know that in person, you both would have this banter and laugh and it would be.

So I'm sort of time traveling in a way to put you where you wanted to be, at least where I perceive you wanted to be. So that's also a part of it. Thank you for that. Thank you for making us funny. No, you're the funny ones. I just undo the damage the internet causes. So why does my voice sound so much better in my head?

So when I listen to the file you send me, I think, wow, this sounds way better than when I actually was like talking to Daniel. In this version, Daniel laughed at my joke right away. But I still cringe because I don't love the sound of my voice when I hear it back to me. But when I'm saying it, it doesn't sound so bad. So why is there that? disconnect. I think you have a great voice, Kelly. I love hearing it. Thanks, Daniel. Agreed. Great voice. Thanks, guys. Otherwise, people wouldn't be listening as interesting as you are.

If you had bad voices, people would move on. It's a matter of perspective. So we hear everything else and everyone else through our ear canals. Right? There's air outside and that air vibrates and it goes into your ear canals and we hear it. For ourselves, a big chunk of our voice travels through conduction into our ear from the inside. And that's what people call the inner ear. There's no actual inner ear. I used to think there was when I was a kid, like a third ear in your throat.

There isn't one. You're basically hearing sort of a muffled version of yourself because it's traveling through soft tissue and bone. And then you're also hearing a little bit of yourself through the air going back into your ears. So it's a different, sort of like,

I don't know, when I look in the mirror, I'm gorgeous. When I look at a photo, I look like a crescent moon. I noticed that my face, is curved. And I never noticed that in the mirror because it's just a perspective I'm not used to. And I think that's exactly what happens with your voice is you're used to hearing it a certain way. And no matter how the recording sounds, you'll think it sounds worse because you're just not used to it.

So if somebody was to put their cheek up against Kelly while she was speaking so that her voice traveled like through their soft tissue, would they hear Kelly's internal version of her voice? If you were somehow able to model Kelly's innards From her throat all the way up to the top of her skull And put that between the other person, yes, it would be very strange, but yes I'd just like to put on record that when I see you, I never think Crescent moves But I will now. I have to tell myself the same thing is that that tiny lack of symmetry, which every human has, is just accentuated because I never see it from that angle.

Right. You know? And I feel like most people, when they look at a photo compared to the mirror, they're like, oh, what is that? What happened? Yeah. So you mentioned earlier about real magic and how a big part of this is knowing how it's going to be received by people.

Tell us more about that, about how understanding the way sound is actually perceived and the way people pay attention changes how you do your editing. And tell us about psychoacoustics. So, Daniel, you're going to be proud of me. before I even knew who you were, I've talked to my students about aliens a lot. Plus 10 points. We were all meant to be together.

Yeah. The reason I do that is I always, in the first class, I tell them this is a class for human beings in Earth's atmosphere. Right. Because first of all, sound behaves differently through different materials.

And second, humans have evolved to process their senses in ways that are useful to them. which is another way of saying that what we hear and see and feel is not reality, but our useful version of reality. And sound is no exception to that. I think we may not realize how much of a role it plays. My theory is because there are no ear lids.

Go on. With sight, you have these eyelids where you can close them and not see and get an idea of what it's like to not have that sense, you also have to directly look at the thing that you're looking at to perceive it. And with sound, you hear everything around you. You don't have to look at it with your ear, and you've never closed your ears, right?

Your earballs are always exposed. So it's a sense that's so enveloping and so much part of our lives that we sort of take it for granted and not understand how much information we're constantly getting from our surroundings through sound. And we don't even have the language for it, right?

You have to adapt the language from eyes. Like you said, look at it with your ear instead of hear at it with your ear because that makes no sense, right? Yeah. So we think there's just this baseline of nothing. But in reality, you know the size of the room you're in and what the walls are made out of before you look and tap on the walls. You know from how sound reflects in that room. I have a question about that because I've been told many times to record in a room that doesn't have auditory reflections, right?

Like surround yourself with laundry or something. Right. Because nobody wants to hear the room that you're in. So isn't that weird for people to hear audio that sounds sort of like disembodied or de-roomified? No, because it's far from disembodied and de-rumified. Unless you've been to an an anechoic chamber, you have never heard silence in your life. It's a very, have you been to one?

No. I highly recommend it. It's weird. Sounds like a torture device. You know what? People say that. There's a rumor that no one has ever lasted more than 45 minutes. Not true.

I've been there for hours. But you can hear blood rushing through your ears. Wow. You can hear everything. And not only that, if you're there with a buddy and they turn around and talk and speak the other way, you can barely hear them. We don't realize, or we take for granted, how much of what we hear is actually reflections of the source and not the source itself. So, I mean, an example of some important psychoacoustics that engineers, have to keep in mind and also the answer to the listener question. What do you think? What is the

type of sound or sound that humans hear best? I would have guessed that there's something similar to our visual range where there's a whole spectrum of frequencies and we can see something in the middle where in the middle basically means where we can hear which makes it kind of a non-answer. Right. Well, that's actually, that's a good comparison because with sound you can see red just as well as you can blue with sight. But with sound, it doesn't work that way. With sound, we can hear frequencies from 20 vibrations per second, 20 hertz to 20,000 vibrations per second, 20 kilohertz. But out of those, we don't hear them all equally. The frequency range we hear best is between one and five kilohertz. And that is the range of leaves rustling and twigs breaking. And jaguar is creeping

up on you. So that predators don't creep up on you. It's also the range of a baby crying. Oh. You can hear a baby cry from way farther away than, I don't know, a car engine revving at the same distance, same volume. It's also the sound of a candy bar wrapper, isn't it? That is correct. Yes. Yes, it is. And we've been using that.

For example, police sirens are tuned to that frequency range. And that's why you may have found yourself sitting in your car or walking, hearing a siren, looking around being like, I don't see the police anywhere. Where are they? It's because we're so good at hearing those frequencies. that we can hear them from so far away that we can't even see the source of the sound yet. Wow. So then how does all of this shape your editing? Are you trying to push my voice up to police siren frequencies?

Well, I definitely have to make sure that intelligibility is there and that is in those frequencies. But there's a challenge here. Because we hear those frequencies so well, they become annoying very quickly too. Oh. Because we're acutely tuned to them. So there's a balancing act where if there's not enough, it sounds, I can show you. Do you want me to show you? Yeah.

Yeah, please. So here, let me play Process Daniel here. So Bell's paradox involves length contraction, the fact that when things move fast, they look short. So relativity tells us two things. Moving clocks run slow and moving objects look short. So now I'm going to take out that frequency range that I was just talking about. And you'll notice that you can still hear Daniel, he's loud, but the part that makes him human, loud I mean loud is the volume I made him, not because Daniel is a loud person.

But the intelligibility is just not there. Take a listen. So Bell's paradox involves length contraction, the fact that when things move fast, they look short. So relativity tells us two things. Moving clocks run slow and moving objects look short. And now I'll exaggerate those frequencies and you'll see that it'll kind of hurt your ears. So Bell's paradox involves length contraction, the fact that when things move fast, they look short. Right? So I have to find a happy medium. And that is sometimes something that has to be done temporally. So I have to make sure that some words don't have too much of those frequencies and others do.

That's just one of many ways in which I have to look at the waveforms and understand the science. and then also understand the psychoacoustics, the psychology of how humans perceive this stuff. Well, you're doing a great job because I sometimes meet listeners in real life and they'll say to me, oh my gosh, it's so weird you sound just like you do on the podcast. So you are reproducing us faithfully. I did it. So how much physics did you have to learn to be this good at your job? I see what you're saying.

Yes, audio engineers are real engineers. We're like the dentists of the... audio profession. She's just trying to suss out if you're on the physics camp or the biology camp. She's wondering if you're biased. See, I'm stuck right in the middle between physics and biology. Exactly. It's a good place to be.

Yeah, it's a very fun place to be because who cares about physics if it's not for how it affects sentient beings? Amen. Amen. Hmm. I have thoughts about that. I'm so glad we got you on. You know, Matt, you should be on the show every week. I see.

Kelly just wanted to invite people on the show. show who will disagree with me, gang up on me. So let me tell you another psychoacoustic phenomenon called masking. The way this works, and this probably, like we can't ask evolution, right, but it looks like we've developed this property to curb over stimulation. What happens is if there are certain, and it's very predictable, if there are certain frequencies present, we are deaf to certain other frequencies. in those moments.

It's just like a blind spot in the car. No matter what mirror you look at, you will not see the car right next to you if they're in your blind spots. So we have these blind spots that are constantly very quickly changing as different sounds are present. And very smart programmers

mapped out the exact way we have these blind spots and figured out, you know, we can save a lot of space and audio files if we just throw that stuff away. Oh. Oh, wow. And that is how the MP3 file format was born.

It does throw away a lot of things, but it throws away only things you would not perceive anyway. And so if you've ever had this debate or just heard someone claim that MP3s just don't sound like waves, man, there's just something missing. Not necessarily. If it was a well-encoded MP3, you will never hear what is missing. Wow. Because you're human. Our imperfect hearing has really. helped us save on file sizes. However,

if an alien came and you went, here's a wave file, like here's a recording, and then here's my MP3 of that recording, to that alien, it might sound completely different and upsetting because they don't have our same perception. Those aliens who listen to the podcast might be really sensitive to

those frequencies that our human audience can't hear. As far as we know, when we listen to an MP3, our pets are suffering. They don't seem to be complaining, but they're Definitely not hearing what we hear when we listen to the original recording the way that humans do. So this is like the moral equivalent of masking out the ultraviolet off of a painting and a bee might see a painting very, very differently, whereas a human would be totally unaware.

Kind of. It's like if humans, when you see yellow, you're temporarily blind to purple. Hmm. Weird. Why? Why? Why does that happen? I don't know. I haven't asked God yet, but I think. I think probably because of the overstimulation thing. I think if we were to hear everything all at once, our brains would explode. I think it's just too much information. So people who get overstimulated, do they hear some of that? Or is that just a different thing? You know, that's a great question.

I don't, that might be part of it. That might be part of it, that they don't experience masking the same way. But the interesting is that it's very predictable, this masking and how it happens. It's very specific. and it's the same for children and for women and for men and for everybody. I don't know that there's a group of people to whom MP3s don't sound right, objectively, like a blind test. Yeah.

So, yeah, I don't know. Maybe some people do experience less masking. Maybe that's part of it. So, Matt, I imagine you have loads of fun stories, in part because, like, Daniel and I always hit record, and then we're like, we totally forgot we hit record, and we have conversations about the most personal things happening in our lives. And then we send it to you. And so you, it's a very asymmetrical relationship. I think you know a lot about the things that are going wrong in my life. I don't know nearly as much about what's going on in your life. I can make you a list if you want to even the

playing field. I mean, that, you feel, lay it on me. But, but so I imagine that one, you know a lot of secrets from people. But, and tell us some weird funny stories from, from life as an audio engineer. There are many inappropriate stories. There is, okay, here's one that is right in the middle between science and some biology and perception. So mostly physics. So I was in Santa Monica, which is, is it a part of L.A. or is it outside of L.A.? Boy, Daniel. You're from California.

You should know this. I don't know. Well, you know, there's the effective L.A., which is a big blob of urbanized area. Then there's L.A. County. Then there's L.A. City. And I don't know the distinctions between all of them. Yeah, I don't understand how that's a municipality. Because when I was working there, they were shuttle us around from location to location and the names of the neighborhoods and how things fit into the municipalities. It didn't make any sense. Anyway, I was in Santa Monica filming with Smokey Robinson. Wow. Wow. For a very interesting documentary, by the way, called Paid in Full on the BBC and C.

B.C., wherever you are about the unfair treatment of black musicians throughout history. Wow. In any case, I was there with Smokey Robinson, and they rented a special villa just for him, you know, the VIP treatment. And there's always this air of when a really important person comes in. No one stops the recording for any reason, right? Do your job, be quiet. We have a very limited amount of time with this person.

So I'm sitting there, I'm set up, I have my computer open, I've miced him up, I have a mic on him, I have a mic on him, I have a mic above him, and I have a spectrum analyzer open just because I didn't really need it, but it shows you all the frequencies in real time. And suddenly during the interview, I see these sort of spikes at like 5 hertz, which is way lower than what humans can hear. And I'm realizing that even though the microphone is suspended and is supposed to not pick anything up through the floor, I've created a seismometer by accident. Oh. And I can see that there's an earthquake coming. Wow. Wow.

And so in the middle of this interview, I go, hey, excuse me. And the director looks at me like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I'm very, very sorry. I think there's an earthquake coming and we should get ready to evacuate or move away from the walls or get to the – I don't remember what you're supposed to do, but we're in California. I expected everyone to know. except for me. And they're like, what are you talking about? There's nothing happening. You've, this is Smokey Robinson. What are you doing? I mean, everybody was nice. We're all friends.

But as that's happening, the lights start to shake. Oh, wow. Wow. And there's a rumble. And luckily, it wasn't a big earthquake or anything. Everything was fine. But I predicted an earthquake using a microphone and a computer screen. That's amazing. And I interrupted an important recording. And that's magic, right? And Smokey Robinson is now like Matt Kesselman is mad. magic. Everybody knows now. He was like, that's okay, baby. He's got a very, very soft voice. I love well, that is a great story. I don't have any comparable stories for, of warning famous people about impending natural disasters. It's a very niche story market. All right. Well, thank you for coming on the show and for telling us all about what happens in the background to make us sound so good.

Before you go, tell people where they can find out more about you and what's up to. You can find me for everything at Matt Kesselman.com. That's M-A-T-K-E-S-E-L-M-A-N.com. And if you don't like to spell things that are complicated, I just bought the goshfather.com, and that goes to my website too. So you can use that instead. Matt, I appreciate you so much for so many reasons,

and now I appreciate that you came on the show. You're the best. There are lots of reasons why the show sounds good, is fun to listen to and easy to listen to, and many of those are because of Matt. Thank you very much. Amen. Thank you for having you. This was a lot of fun. Thanks, everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D&K Universe. Come engage with us. You can email us at questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www. www. daniel and Kelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an I-Heart podcast. Thanks for joining us. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s. is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, AEO rewatch,

our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life, guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall,

the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just, words, but a song. Well, I thought you're all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia.

A.O. Rewatch on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Raiders of the Lost Podcast, we explore cinema like no one else, including huge interviews with stars like Ryan Gosling on Project Hail Mary. It was like the Jaws Shark. Didn't always work, came with its own problems. That's what made it great. The cast of obsession. set, there was so much magic happening with each scene we were putting together.

Deep dives into classics like 2001 of Space Odyssey or Fight Club, plus weekly episodes on all industry news. Listen to Raiders of the Lost podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow at Raiders of the Lost podcast and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. What's up fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. We're the host of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together in I Heart Women's Sports.

We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka, showing out. Shoutouts to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashan Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports.

Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Jake Brennan. And on my podcast, Disgraceland. I tell the stories behind. music's biggest names, like how the story of the foo fighters isn't just about music, it's about grief, shock, in the moment everything changed.

Imagine that. You're in the biggest band on the planet, as Dave Grohl was in 1994 in Nirvana, and the phone rings, and you learn that your singer, your friend, the reluctant voice of a generation, Kurt Cobain, is dead. Listen to Disgraceland on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.