and particularly happy today to

inter to introduce ms.. matthew cappucci and he is a self-proclaimed natural disaster and has lived a tempestuous life beyond chasing storms. he began presenting it and writing for local newspapers at age 14 and attended harvard university, where he created his own special concentration, an atmosphere sciences the first ever in the institution is 400 year history. a meteorologist for the post matthew does routine forecasts on npr, canada, ctv news network during hurricanes makes international television appearances during tornado and wildfire episodes and serves as a frequent u.s. see tropical weather expert for bbc news. he also is an on air meteorologist at fox five in

washington, dc a passionate advocate for introducing children and young people to the joy of science. he works part time as an education and college admissions consult and has delivered motivational speeches around the world and is a regular on sirius xm children's place and he still made time to come to fall for the books. so matthew, thank you so much. well, thank you and thank you. guys are showing up i'm just so happy people actually came to this so much. appreciate it. i guess if you notice red stripe on my sunglasses, i'm so mad because two days ago i lost my good sunglasses for the third time. and this time i don't think actually coming back. so these are dollar tree brand much like pretty much everything else i am. but we're here to discuss looking up, which is my new book and hopefully some of read it by show. you did. okay, great.

so one person did. so for those who didn't, we won't give too many spoilers, but in any case, there's a lot to talk about now, as i'm sure you probably guessed. i love pretty much every waking hour of my day and some of the sleeping hours of my day are all made up doing weather as it is. tomorrow night i'm working the evening news. i'll sleep at the station behind the greenscreen. i'll do the morning news again monday morning. so i a very busy schedule and yet i love it because i work five or six different weather jobs and each one i enjoy in a different way. so one of the other jobs and i obviously work for fox five, i do the weather here in d.c. i work for the washington post. i work for npr. i do radio for them. i've been doing some stuff with npr nationally lately. i work for an app in florida called my, which if you don't have it, it's a good app i work for someone else, but i forget who. and then i. i don't sleep much. and as we all know. and then i also work as an educational consultant for a company up in boston, so it keeps me busy and i love it. now that my radar job lets me do storm chasing from that from time to time.

and i was actually down in florida two weeks ago for the hurricane. i'm sure you all saw hurricane ian was in the news. so i took a week off from fox five, flew down there and i was there for about five days before the storm, which meant preparing, getting ready, doing forecasts from 311 each night and doing social media and all that stuff. and then actually came to chase the storm, which initially we were forecasting would come ashore as a high category two. now, who's been in a hurricane, which one? it was so. which category where were you? connecticut oh, okay yeah, possible. and carol, to think about that 75 or 76. okay. i think i forget the name, but it was like a cat two ish. anyone else? a hurricane? which one was this? and item named after? it actually was hurricane. oh, very cool. oh, nice standard that they go

it's your day have i. i'll just tell folks hurricane gracie. in 1985 who else went on a good hurricane? anyone which one? you know. oh, my gosh. you are. you go. okay. so hugo came ashore as a pretty significant storm, but further inland, it quite as bad. but you know, ian we are forecasting to come ashore near the big bend of florida's like a high one low one category two. but it kept trending farther south and east, which meant it would have a better chance of coming ashore stronger before an approaching cold front would weaken its. because of that, i was forecasting high to low in category three. what actually wound up happening. it obviously came ashore in fort myers as a high end category four, but i was prepared to go into like a high to low end three the morning up, when i woke up and saw it was coming ashore as a high end category, i thought, well, this is going to be a little difference. so i had my rental car and my buddy and i stayed in sarasota the night before. i fell asleep at about 230, woke up around o'clock ish, so got a good two and a half hours and wound up.

i wound up working all morning long doing couple of tv hits and then we positioned farther south to the town of venice on the west coast of florida about, say, 60 miles south of tampa, waited there for a little while and a cement parking structure for a couple of hours. and i determined we'd have to reposition farther south east, because the thing kept trending farther south and east. so we went to a place rotunda actually englewood, florida, near rotunda, which is just north of port charlotte. and we waited there a little while as the eyewall, the first edge of that inner donut of extreme winds circling the eye, began to come in. now, dry air wrapping into the storm kind of eroded the leading edge of the so made it a little bit weaker, not quite as strong, but we're there for a little while as i to reposition east again so we're going through winds of like 80 ish miles per hour give or take 90 miles an hour. and we kept seeing these pinpoint lightning strikes everywhere, which extremely unusual in the core of tropical cyclone, you rarely get thunderstorms, never mind one unbroken ring of thunderstorms. so we knew it was still maintaining strength, if not strengthening. then we crossed bridge into

punta gorda. so a little bit south of port charlotte. there we got winds 110 miles an hour, saw the eye and the eye was cool. you know, we didn't have the clear, unfortunately. and then we thought, all right the leading edge is normally stronger. so let's just go back to the hotel in englewood. in doing so, what we had failed to consider along with many other meteorologists because it was a very rare setup, there was so extra precipitation, extra rain on the backside of the storm that helped to drag down momentum from aloft. we got significantly stronger winds. so we're driving back and i can see the edge of the eye walls were essentially going from here back into the worst part of the storm. and like this we got winds 100, then 110, then gusting to 120. as we're driving west towards this hotel, which is a cement structure, it's above sea level. and that surge be too big of an issue. what we didn't expect rainfall rates four plus inches per hour meant road in front of us began to flood. so we're driving west in this rental car. the road starts to flood. i don't mess with floodwaters at all. here's the thing. it's a flat area. it's flooding right of the road,

just left of the road and flood waters are beginning to creep up over the road just like that. a power pole fell right in front of us and we couldn't slow down enough. so we lost the front. two tires. but we don't need tires. so we kept going onwards. who here has driven a vehicle with the front? two tires is gone. anyone? i'm not talking like a little saggy, little now. like just gone. so we kept driving west, my friend who is a meteorologist, but really storm chase before was beginning to panic a little bit and he's looking at me like, is this okay? i'm like, there's no routine. 9 to 5 way to drive into a category four. this is fine. i'll change a tire tomorrow. we only need a couple functioning tires. come to find out the back right tire went out too. so i just chugging along, going west again. he is losing his mind and i'm happy as a clam. i got the radio on the windshield wipers going back and forth. i'm drumming on the steering wheel because it takes a lot to phase me and we start driving the puddles become a little bigger, become flood waters,

become now two feet of floodwaters. and when i saw that in the road. i was like, well, i can't go this way, but it was the only road that wasn't flooded. so we were forced to turn around and backtrack for safety as the winds are still going 100 to 120 miles an hour. and i know that we're not in the perfect situation, but i also don't want to freak out, my friend. it's like. it's fine. we'll just go back towards the bridge, you know, escape, surge, escape, whatever. so start going back east again. and we drive three and a half, almost four miles in the hundred 20 mile an hour winds with this vehicle. that has now one functioning tire. and i mean, it's doing the work of a solid one and a half tires. and we finally got back to a bridge where i call my dad. i'm like hey, how many times do we need to drive on? he's like, if the car moves, you're like, great. so we drive up and over the bridge to an apartment complex, which i deem a safe place structurally looks down. it's above the risk surge. i know the fresh water will flood most of the surrounding area, but it's up about two feet. so i think we're good and we

settle underneath it. it's now getting dark. and he says, where are we going to go from here? like we're parking here for cozy up because you're here tonight. so we're there overnight. and the next morning i try to set up a starlink satellite because i was supposed to do the morning news via skype in dc and all cell service was down, satellite wasn't working, and overnight, of course, the roof of the apartment building ripped off. but we are underneath apartment building in a little garage area with vehicles on either side. and so i wound up i was very proud of my this is my most accomplishment here. i changed a tire all by myself, just me. and we change the tire. we got that fixed. so now we have two functioning tires. the back left is to just rubber in the back right. it's pretty saggy to. so we start driving back west towards hotel because that's where my colleague has his vehicle. we only made it about a mile before the tire, just fully peeled off, but that's okay. we kept charging onwards in the middle. apparently there's metal that surrounds the tire and that peeled off too and we got to

winn-dixie and i said no more. so we wound up getting a ride the rest of the way back to his vehicle and and all was well. but that was my experience with hurricane ian. got some great data, great footage, great information and some good communication rental cars. well, anyway, so look, so looking up obviously i like the weather i'm passionate about whether i have pretty much as long as i can remember when i was about three or four years old, i was obsessed with the wind meters spinning on people's roofs. when i was seven, i saved my first communion money to buy a video camera so i could storm chase and i drive little fisher-price electric car all around the neighborhood in these thunderstorms. somehow i didn't get struck and i had a little walkie talkie and i radio my parents. okay, i'm in the cul de sac. i'm near roy's. i'm near a friend's house. i'm near mr. duties house, like. all right, don't get struck by lightning. and it's been like that ever since. when i was nine. i do the school over the p.a. system at indian brook elementary and do the weather periodically for field day and for everything else.

when i was, gosh, 12 or 13 years old, i was really with waterspouts. and when i was 14, i applied to weather camp, which is a real thing. i grew up on cape cod, massachusetts, where we have winter storms. we don't have that much weather. but i was obsessed with all things weather, so i figured weather camp, i can find people like me and my mother. i mean, she's a saint, but she found weather camp at howard university in, d.c., and said, you've got to apply. so i did. they had 65 applicants. they took 12. and fortunately i was one of them. and it was all expenses paid for that, you know, room, board and everything. we just had to get down here. i had the bright idea of taking the megabus and you never taking the megabus okay, so a few folks know what this was like, the way my mother describes it as the only thing that was missing was a live. and essentially it's the bus showed up an hour late. they don't have a bus tracker. they don't have anything. and so we wait in south station and she's accompanying me down here, she's like, why the hell

did you talk me into this? but the tickets were only $10 each. and lord knows we love bargain. so. so we're on this bus and you know, we leave late and it's all college students or folks who just wouldn't seem overly and sort of those are the two crowds. and as we're down there, we stop at a burger king in union, connecticut. so everyone can get out, stretch their legs and like we've been driving an hour, we keep driving. and apparently we lost a lady at the burger king. we only found by taking attendance about 30 minutes down the road. so we backtrack to union, connecticut picked her up, kept south something, happened with traffic in new york and then the toilet evidently overflowed all the first floor we had to stop in hoboken, new jersey. mind you, it's july, so we didn't have air conditioning either. they scoop all that out and. we keep checking south again and a fight broke out between two women in front of me when we passed baltimore.

then someone tried to steal my watch and eventually we got to dc. by the time we got to dc, i was sufficiently terrified. i said, mom, you cannot leave me here. do not. if it's anything like the megabus. i had no idea how wonderful of a place dc is, nor that i would call it home. but i was petrified. i was like, i can't stay here. i was so nervous that morning to go to this weather camp that i couldn't even have my morning bacon at the breakfast buffet, which shows that i was petrified. so i go to this weather camp and, you know, i'm looking around. it's a bunch other kids and they all seem nerdy, too. but i was because i didn't know any of these people and. i had also just had my harrowing experience, megabus. and as we're sitting there, this guy in a hot air balloon shirt walks in and he looks like the male version of miss frizzle and he says, hi, ron, my name is mr. moseley's, wearing his big balloon shirt and i'm sitting there, he's talking. he seems like an eclectic fellow, super nice guy, but all of a sudden i jump upwards, something in my pocket is buzzing and i didn't have a buzz phone. i was not the pinnacle of technology. i didn't have a phone with me

and something in my pocket is squealing and i'm panicking. like, what is it? people are looking at me and then i realize it's my noah weather alert radio we a severe thunderstorm watch and just like that all the kids immediately bonded we all realized we're equally excited about the severe thunderstorm watch. and then i was like, you know what? maybe won't be that bad. so i love the weather camp. over the course of two weeks and i loved it so much that i said i got to keep the same metrocard in case i live in dc someday and i still have that metro card. believe it or not, i have like others, and i never know which one has value, but one of these is the metro card. i think this is a metro card from south america, but you get the idea. one of them is the metro card. so any who at weather camp it was nice because they introduced to the american meteorological society and i was very fascinated with waterspouts and i'd been doing some work on waterspouts just basically trying to figure out how we can better predict or tornadoes over water that will have a tendency in eastern massachusetts to move offshore. and i came up with a little

forecast method i shared with our local national weather service, and they said, hey, this is pretty good stuff. and we tweet sort of the severe thunderstorm warnings and the special marine warnings to include extra phrases to accommodate this threat. when we thought when we thought it would materialize and that summer after the weather camp just so happened that the american meteorology meteorological society was holding their broadcast their weather people conference in boston and somehow mike mogull arranged a for me to go there and i was like this. but it was great. everyone was super nice, but no one really talked to me because why is this 14 year old at the conference? so the next year was in nashville and i thought, i want to present to the conference. maybe then people will talk to me. and so my mother and i flew down in nashville. we did not take the megabus that time. fortunately, we learned our lesson. and i a presentation at the conference when i was signing up for this conference and submitting my stuff, they had a box for like a college student presenter and i was like, yeah, freshman, sophomore in high school, whatever.

close. and they let me present and. it was wonderful and the people at the amos have been unbelievably kind ever since. and it helping meet so many great folks so down the road, you know i was trying to figure out what my next steps would after that and i was trying to figure out how i can sort of get my name there. and i figured maybe newspaper articles. so i started writing newspaper articles, my small town newspaper, remember plymouth, massachusetts it's not a big city. yes. the pilgrims landed, but that's about it. and we still don't know if it's actually that rock, plymouth rock band disappointing children's. sins 1620. and we took eight field trips there when i was elementary middle school. but anyhow, anyhow, i was, you know, trying to figure out how to sort of get the name out there. and i started writing for the local newspaper, the old colony memorial, and i didn't think anyone actually read my pieces because they're deeply i mean, the great management, they're great, you know, great. folks who sort of gave me a shot to write it wasn't a very widely circulated, but i wrote an article and 2013 called 75 years

after the storm, which is a great about the great hurricane of 1938, which was a high end category three that slammed new cost. about 700 fatalities and essentially new england. but it happened around the same time that the events preceding world war one or world war two, rather, were getting going in europe. and so it didn't receive a ton of media attention, but it was enormously disastrous for new england. you actually houses with people on them. people were on their roofs and they were carried a 12 miles from long island to coastal connecticut. that's how bad that storm was, about an 18 foot storm surge in some parts of the world and southwest boston. the blue hill observatory got a wind gust to 186 miles per hour. so it was a bad storm. and i wrote this 75th anniversary piece about it, interviewing few old folks, including my great grandparents, who through that storm and they had a foreign exchange student actually disappear on her way home during the storm. so they had sort of that person. but i wrote an article about it and the next week there was a letter to the editor there in the paper saying, hats off to

magic boogie, you know, signed by a guy named eric jay heller. i didn't know anything about him, but sent an email to my editor saying, hey, could you forward it to whoever wrote this letter? it was really thoughtful. i appreciate it. didn't think folks actually read these pieces. great. i made a brief exchange and that was that. that was 2013. and fast forward a couple of years, i keep going to these weather conferences and i'm trying to figure out my next steps for college. obviously, i wanted to be a meteorologist i wanted to get a meteorology degree. but the question was where there are just a few a few schools really good for tv meteorology. there's lyndon state up in vermont. phenomenal school. and i fell in love with it instantly when i toured there. there's cornell, great school, ivy league school, middle of new york. i wanted someplace a little bit more urban, you know, a little bit more near the city because it's it's out there. and i was sort of comparing those those are really the two that i had in mind. however, lyndon had a 99% acceptance rate, and i wanted to make sure my sort of weather backup plan in case weather didn't work my degree would be respected in other industries

too. and i just wasn't as confident about that. there. cornell, i knew would be the case, but cornell was so incredibly expensive. they wanted thousands thousand dollars a year. i didn't have 37,000, but i had the walmart price match guarantee, who's been a walmart who's tried the price match guarantee? no one. oh, you got to try it. so it works for colleges to because if you apply to any other ivy league school and get in there, cornell will match your offer. match their offer. so my mother and i talk it through and we decided apply to harvard on a whim. so did because harvard is the most well-endowed. they got plenty of money and. they tend to share it. so i applied to all three, but i never took the harvard application seriously. when it came time to write a supplemental, i say i just use one of my old essays and i was like for further details me because i'd rather let. in a retrospective may not have been the best option, but it worked because i'd my accolades

speak for themselves then must be for them and so i never took it seriously. so one night after it's a bit of my application, i'm tutoring. this was back when i had one of those flip phones. you know, the phones were you flip up, there's a keyboard. i thought it was the pinnacle of technology it had letters in addition to just numbers. i was shocked because prior i was sending a text message would be like seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, four, four just to get like a w or whatever. so it had letters, but it never rang because was going to call me. i'm in high school, so was a high school senior and i used to work home schooling. a student named thomas and he came from a very serious family. his aunt, uncle were were as parent guardians. they were extremely wouldn't let him play outside that sort of thing. and i was essentially his only source of education. and i was trying to teach him physics. and cal too, and all this stuff. he was in middle school, but i wanted to get him as much as i could. and in 4 hours a week. but his family was super strict. they wouldn't let him have a phone or anything. but my phone rang in the middle of me, teaching him and i was

mortified because a my phone never rings and it would be disrespect me to have it on and be i don't know how to shut thing off. i had never turned on vibrator or turn on whatever so i had no idea how to silence it. it's a number i don't recognize. i assume it's a spam number so i just i leave it be and thomas you know we kind of chuckle back and forth and i was really the only social interaction thomas had either so periodically try to make him laugh and then the phone rang again. that number i didn't recognize, obviously. telemarketer and it rang again. and finally, the fourth time i picked it up, a smile at thomas, i said, who are you? what do you want? why do you keep calling me? i don't want your solar panels. leave me alone. and i hung up and thomas was giggling, laughing. he was hysterical. and if nothing else, it gave him a bit of cheer because. unfortunately, he didn't get to laugh much in his life. and so i figured that's that spam calls an hour later driving home and my phone rings again and being the goody two shoes i

am, i pulled over and put my hazards on so i could answer the phone. same number. what's. yes this is haley show up in the harvard university admissions department. how are you. i haley? yes, it's matthew there. one second. hello. and it turns out that harvard interviews people and she was calling to schedule the interview. so i scheduled it for the next day. she said they'd send someone down to interview me at my high school. now it turns out she was not only just scheduler, she was also the interviewer. so she drove down from cambridge, massachusetts it's to cape cod and it's about an hour she'll probably tell you at my high school great school number one high school in massachusetts but we don't look like much a converted furniture store. we just have classrooms that are, you know, blankets, things. we have piles of couches. the is haunted when it rained do

have to put cups in the hallway to collect the rain. we had a fruit fly infestation a while, which they combated with apple cider, which got spilled to floors. we're eternally sticky after that and we didn't have a cafeteria, anything like that. and the only conference room was what we call the fishbowl, the front of the school. so i reserved the conference and we went in there and midway through there was a fire drill as what happened. but she was asking me a bunch of questions. we were chatting and forth and i didn't take it as seriously as i. i was rather casual and informal and indefatigably, charming and. but she asked me who my favorite author. and i said, it's a book you might not know. it's giver by lois lowry. she said, way, lois lowry is one of my clothes friends and. the interview went perfectly after, so by some miracle i got into harvard and. i didn't want to go there. they don't have atmospheric sciences at all. they have a couple of weather courses. the nearest thing is earth and planetary sciences within the confines of which i'd only be allowed to take four atmospheric

sciences courses, which isn't enough. but harvard made it. i'd only have to pay $8,000 a year, which, if you do the math eight is less than 37,000. but cornell matched the offer. so then i had a really tricky choice. went out to cornell taught it. it was raining that day. i said, nope, not cornell. so it's lyndon or harvard. i figured i could transfer out of harvard, but you can never transfer in. so i left my computer on the ground. i made my dog go and press the accept harvard thing. and i essentially sealed the deal to go to a school that have atmospheric sciences, which was terrifying. so fast forward, i go to harvard i don't love it. everyone else seems snooty using words like apropos and an historic brick, which right off the bat sets me off and everyone else has khakis. but then again, i guess i have khakis, but yeah, it was it was interesting. i knew immediately i did not belong there. i'm a waffle house kind person there. there. i had people at and i'm wandering around and, you know,

trying to make friends and stuff. and about three weeks into it, as i know, i don't like the school already. i have a physics midterm. i apparently wasn't in the right email list that would have informed that the midterm was canceled so i show up to the jefferson laboratories looking for this midterm exam, which i know begins at like 10:00. so i get there at 940 and i have my dixon ticonderoga number two pencils ready to go. and i usually get a case of those every semester. and i couldn't find the room. apparently physicists can't number. one, 12 is next for 11 is over to 13. and i became hopelessly lost in these laboratories looking for an exam that wasn't set to happen and 945 became 950 became 10:00 became 1010. and i realized that's it. doors are closed wherever the exam. i failed the exam and it was sort of the combination of i don't belong here and everyone else is smarter than me. i this is not my place wandering

around in second floor and i sit down and i take my backpack off and i tear up and that's that. and as i'm sitting there for a little while, i notice a nameplate across the hallway and it says jay heller. and if you remember, eric, jay heller was the name of that guy years earlier who had written in to this tiny town newspaper. it turns. he was an award winning physicist and chemist, harvard, who just happened to be resident of plymouth, massachusetts. i had no idea. so i knocked on the door, i check my email. i found out apparently the exam been canceled and i knock on the door and i introduced myself and he remembered instantly and i remembered him. and we chatted for a little while and he said. so you want to get an atmospheric sciences education? how do you plan to do that at harvard? i said, well, you know, when we had read about this thing called the special, essentially you design your own major from scratch. looks really tough, know it's a 40 page application, but the biggest thing is you have to find an viser and i mean. i don't know anyone here. he said, you just found an advisor. and so with that's this random

connection years prior became the advisor to help me. start my own little department of one dispatcher. concentration in atmospheric sciences at harvard. and it all sort of came together and more digging. we did. we found resources as there is a green screen studio in the basement, the library that no one knew about. and i go there once a week and practice doing weather forecasts. i got the key to the roof of harvard and i'd go there periodically and watch the storms or look for thundersnow. and finally, i heard thundersnow. it was awesome, but all these things started coming together. or this. there was one thing called the 91 r, where if you took a special concentrate action, you could design your own course. and so i designed a course where one quarter of the course, it's a tiny fraction of a credit would be storm chasing, which technically meant storm chasing was a four credit opportunity, which technically meant i could use outside scholarships to fund storm chasing which worked so i'd go out to the plains every and storm chase and chase tornadoes, whatnot. and somehow this whole thing came and i never really felt that harvard was home, but it was a place for me to sort of

get what i needed and then move on. and it was great too, because i could cross the road mit three days a week. so things sort of came together over time. there were some semesters where i'd have to take double the number of classes i should have. i took seven classes. one semester i'd run mit three times a week on thursdays two and 3 p.m., i had to make an appearance. three different courses, two at harvard, one in the mit. i make an appearance in one sprint to another. take the mbta shuttle down the street to mit. it dropped me off in front of the school and they have a quarter mile long hallway called the infinity, and it feels infinite, especially if you're running in a full winter car with a backpack on filled with textbook diving in and out of people and tourists and whatnot, where i was always a sight to behold, but i make it to that last class and make appearance and somehow it all got done the tricky part was when i was getting closer to graduation i realized, well, it's coming, time to get a job. and i always thought i was a pretty meteorologist. the tricky thing is when you're

20, 21 years old, you want to be a meteorologist for a big tv station. they think it's laughable. no one wants to give you a shot i used to send out my demo reel, which was a good demo a real mind you and i once got a rejection of 4 minutes my real is 8 minutes long. they never even clicked on it's this was from a station in appleton wisconsin and the best offer i got at the time was $31,000 for a three year contract, meaning i'd get to 31 after three years. and that was it. otherwise i got an offer from california for 27,000 and that was it. and all my harvard are again these crazy fancy schmancy skyscraper jobs where you know, some have stock and they're all making six figures, they're all doing whatever. and then i'm trying to get to a place that will pay me up to the poverty line because realistically in tv, unless in a good sized city, tv pays incredibly poorly and no one would take me seriously. so i was the only one to essentially leave harvard in my

my friend group, my table everything without a job, without an offer, without anything. and it was absolutely humiliating, humiliating and just demoralizing thought, why did i spend four years in this career which is bound be a dead end tv jack squat? why it's not working. i'm going to spend 20 years trying to climb a ladder so i can make slightly more than poverty wages. and it was it was horrible. and i remember the last semester was just torturous i felt like i was wandering towards a dead end. i had. and by the end of semester i was like, you know what, meteorology is not going to be it. i to change course. so i looked in. so i looked into different consulting opportunities and figured, do i really want to do that? but if nothing else, it would pay the bills and was a hedge fund in new york that i applied for and it was the only place where i got any calls back and i wound up getting five interviews with them. and so the day before i graduated, i took the train down

new york at 3:00 in the morning, threw on a suit and tie, marched in the skyscraper bar and all the interviews went very well and shiny starting salary and a great job and all the and i was like, well sold out. and as i was because the next day was my last storm chase with the last of my money and i'd be going out to oklahoma and we're making small talk. this one of the interviewers led me to the elevator and he said to me, yeah, it was small talk, like things that already been taken care of. i'd be getting the contract in the mail, it sounded like, and he said, by the way, you know, are you as passionate about this job as you are, whether i said absolutely not. there's nothing i'm as passionate about as i am, whether but if you're going to hire me and put me on the payroll, i'll do a darn good job because that's what i do, he said, trust us don't give up quite yet and it sounds like a movie, but it happened and i got in the elevator and that was that. and the next day i woke up in oklahoma check my email and they said, sorry, we don't think you're the right candidate for this job.

and the offer evaporated like that. so i had nothing. and remember, that year was 2019. and, you know, i used sort of my last storm chase trip to chase around. i skipped my harvard graduation because i want to go. and i went to nebraska instead because nebraska has tornadoes and i chase some great tornadoes was a great storm. chase got four really nice, well-structured tornadoes, lost a couple of windshields and giant hail, which doesn't sound like a success, believe me. it's a success. and as you can by now, vehicles and i have a tenuous relationship with and know that the storm chase drew to a close and that was that and i drove back home and that drive was the most depressing drive ever because driving from oklahoma back to massachusetts was like, well, i got nothing to show for myself. and the night before i got back to massachusetts, i got a call from a station, portland, maine, which was a pretty good station they said, hey, can you come in for an interview? and i was like, sure. and i took a left in connecticut, went towards

towards maine. and then while i was up there, i got another call from the post and said, hey, we'll give you a and they named a very average of slightly below average salary to come down to d.c. and do your thing will make you position because i've been freelancing for them a couple of years i said, all right i'll i said, you can do $5,000 better. i'll take it. and i hung up and they called 30 minutes later and i was like, all right, go apartment shopping. and so things sort of came together. so i couldn't go down straightaway because i had to go down to chile first for a solar eclipse. i had to, but there's a solar eclipse and i'm not there like bad things happen. so anyway, went down to chile for the solar and i came back and i attached a u-haul in the back of my hail dented truck. and i came to dc and i work the post for, for about a year and a half, two years full time. and i was there for though for about seven months before the pandemic. and i got to say i had the best boss ever at the washington post, jason sarmiento, who knows the capital weather gang. yeah jason is the one who created this thing from scratch. he it as a blog now. it has a million followers. it makes a ton of money. it's extremely popular. i mean, he has probably 40, 50%

of followers of like the weather channel, accuweather, all those and it's just him running the show like he's a very soft spoken to anyway. so i went there and i was sort of on this hamster love writing, writing, writing every day. but during hurricane season year, i'd be writing all these articles about hurricanes. international outlets would say, hey, want someone at the washington post to do a quick tv hits about the hurricane? and jason would be like, matthew, you do it. and so i started actually doing real tv hits for bbc news for whoever and it wasn't a full time tv job. it was like at, least i'm starting to make a real demo reel where i'm actually on real news. and then the pandemic struck and obviously the pandemic was bad for a lot of people, but for me it was great. the reason being i was in a cubicle every day at the washington post, which is incredibly boring. every morning i'd stop at the capital one cafe and i'd get myself a white chocolate chocolate just to help me wake up. because i didn't want real hot chocolate because a bit too much sugar. i didn't want caffeine or coffee or anything cause i don't drink that. so i have this white chocolate hot chocolate, which i always

was like mostly milk and was healthy. apparently i was having 820 calories before i started my day. i popped a button on live tv for station in india. that's why i discovered the treadmill. anyway, i still hate the treadmill, but around that time, you know, i realized if we can work remote, it doesn't have to be from home it can be from wherever. so i start working remote in oklahoma in kansas and texas and whatever. and that was 2020 wasn't a great year for tornadoes. it was a big year for hurricanes. so i started going down for all these hurricane intercepts. i'd be in the eye of these hurricanes and more international started calling and ctv in canada started calling and all these groups started i'd be doing more and more tv hits, which was great because i could throw on a suit jacket and still wear my sweat pants at home. and then 2021 happened. and during 2021, things were getting a little better. it was a good year for storm chasing tornadoes and stuff. so rob, my buddy first we went to alaska to chase the northern lights. i got to fly beneath the northern lights, which you can

read about in here. then we went down to texas and oklahoma and all this stuff. and the first day i was down there, i called a couple of friends. it was like, today is a day like you want a storm chaser? meet me in dallas at, whatever time in the morning. and to my surprise, two of my friends flew in and i picked them up in dallas. we stopped at all, got in the way and all they had to eat that day was breadsticks because i was like, we got to get to quanah, texas, and we got there and we got two really good tornadoes and shattered another windshield and. i posted the videos online because i was trying sort of bolster my morale because this time since i had chase partners with me, i hand one of them a camera. i could have a microphone on and i could do the whole, hey, gang meteorologist matt butcher here, a tornado, whatever, blah, blah, blah thing and add to my real. so over the course of all this i had a really dynamic demo reel. i had me on international news outlets doing metric imperial australia, north hemispheres, all these things i had me with a number of tornadoes. i had me in the eye of a hurricane i had me with, you know, shattering and hailstorms. i'd be like, hey guys, we lost a window, but that's okay.

and i had all this stuff and i was like, this is a really good real by then i had enough of falling between the washington between everything else but wmu, a local npr affiliate that my twitter audience was growing to, and it seemed like people were starting to take notice and around them, i saw an opening on indeed.com for a gig at fox five here in d.c.. i thought, oh, we'll give it a whirl now, the reason i knew it was a long shot was because there are 210 different tv markets in the country. you work your way up from the bottom. most people start market 150 to 200. after a couple of years, work up to lower size markets than medium size. and then then large markets than major markets. and the top ten markets are like these coveted things where people never get to see in their lives. and i knew it was way, way beyond me. and i essentially sent an editorial on a whim, an idea i'm the news director, and i said, i'm not conventional candidate, but i know my stuff. and i figure that if i can do the weather in front of a tornado or being pelted by hail, i can do it in front of a green

screen. i hope. take me seriously for my, you know, my stuff, not my age. and to surprise, he wrote back and he scheduled the interview for a couple days later. and so i was like, wow. he actually wrote back like, this is it. so i spent an hour before this zoom interview setting up late. so i had the perfect lighting, putting marks on the floor, so i knew where to put my chair. i had the tv, ifb earpiece so i could look the part. i had my suit tie on. i put a little makeup on so i could look the tv part and the camera flips and it's this guy who looks like he belongs at like, a barbecue like this new england dad. and right off the bat, you can tell instantly he's a super good guy. and it turns out this guy, paul, was from sandwich, massachusetts, or lived like 20 years in sandwich, massachusetts, which was a town next to where i grew. his neighborhood was right next where i took lessons. apparently, his son and i have mutual friends and it was such a nice interview and such a far cry from all my hedge fund interviews and all these horrific other interviews that i

was like, wow. like, if he runs this place the way he runs this interview, that would be a -- good place to work. and to my surprise, about three days later, i was at the dollar tree is talking about potato chips, which sounds really sad and it is pretty sad, but they had the best potato like anyone ever tried. zfs voodoo chips? yes. oh, where are you from? okay, so whenever i discovered them in new and apparently wah wah and a couple of others around here, those abs chips. but they also had them at the dollar. so anyway, triceps. but i'm like cradling all potato chips as i'm wandering out of the dollar tree. my phone rings and i pick it up and like hello and it's paul. i'm like, oh, so i throw the potato chips in the ground. i kind of stand right because obviously i'm on the phone. he must be able to see my posture and he's like, we want to offer you the job. can you work any shifts and like for the first time in my life, i was absolutely speechless. and he was like, matthew, i'm like, yes, i can work any shift. and they wanted me to start. eight days later, so i called

the washington post. i had no time. give a two week notice. i'm like, i'll go down to 20 hours a week and you all have to be flexible. it worked and two or three days later i found myself like training and making graphics and stuff, getting ready and. then the morning of july 1st, i my first show was going to be july third weekend, but on july 1st they call me, they're like, hey, you just get dressed nice. we might throw me on camera briefly to sort of, you know, meet the anchors and stuff. and i was petrified because here's the most educated tv marg in the country. one of the biggest tv marks in the country. me no formal tv experience. and i went in at like 10:00 and i walked around the studio around them and tucker, the morning meteorologist surprise this is your first weather forecast. here's a clicker. i was like, i don't know the forecast and like we know, you know the weather you're doing this forecast and it was the best possible thing. like it's so bizarre. have a place where everyone's rooting you on but fox is that kind of place. so i gave my first hit naturally. i talked to fast i pointed out dulles, but i was off just

because the green screen so getting better at that but in this this hit i just did right into the weather and i mentioned the chance of a couple of really strong storms that afternoon, maybe a rotating storm or and they were like it was great and they said, come back this afternoon. you know, swing in and you'll make a similar appearance in the evening. i've been joking for weeks that the best possible thing that could happen to me would be if there was a tornado warning my first day of work, because i can't do gentle introductions. i just need like something to talk about. so i show up, i get to meet sue palka, who watches fox. everyone knows who palka. sue palka is like the beloved matriarch of the station. she recently retired. but if you human sunshine you could just make that a person that's sue palka in her lower sixties just had a grandchild just retired but she was the most amazing person and i got to meet her on this afternoon and walk in and the other meteorologist is upstairs doing the forecast and they're going to rotate out with sue. and we're sitting down there talking about weather and we notice a red box pop up on the map like is that a tornado

warning? she's like, it is. let's upstairs. and i thought i was going to watch them do the tornado warning, but she hands me mic and says, go for it. so i got to do the tornado warning my first day that night went out for drinks next to the studio with, actually went out for supper. next, the studio with jim lowe came one of the station's main anchors who i'd been watching in boston years prior. and i was again very starstruck and like it's jim logue. i watched him when i was little i met him briefly when i was 13, but i was too nervous. say hello. so this is getting a do over on the way back from that, i'm driving like successful first day another tornado warning, right? as i'm driving past the studio. so i take a quick and i drive in. i don't have my suit jacket or anything and i sprint in right before the rain and it's a tornado warning for downtown d.c.. and i roll up my sleeves and i happen from the green screen and that was that. and it was the best possible first day. and that gave me the confidence needed because if i can do tornado warning, i can do a regular, regular, whatever. so the next weeks, obviously, i was very nerdy, the news and i sort of break out equations

stuff and get very geeky and to my surprise, people seem to like it. and even though i was still talking way too fast was like, you're doing a great job. people love the geekiness, like keeping you and it's so bizarre to have a tv station that will let me talk about waffle house or let me talk about my weekend or let me talk about whatever. but they love it. then september 1st, i remember i was still a freelance meteorologist days up to september 1st. i've been badgering management. i was probably a little annoying being like it's going to tornado on wednesday like it, it's really going to tornado like you have to have on wednesday and you're like, okay, huh? and i was like, no, like, when's is going to be big day? and they were taking me seriously. like they had staffing already, but they didn't need a seventh extra meteorologist there. but it was torturous because that morning i was slated to go in anyway for a promo. she were basically you stand standing your suit and tie and you smile at the camera they photoshop into all these things and with great power comes great responsibility but i trust them. and so i'm standing there for this photo shoot and i go, the assistant news director again, i'm like, hey it's t minus one hour till tornado time.

can i please stay? he was like, yeah, we'd love to have you. we just we don't have room you today. we have too many meteorologists as it is. and i got kind of cranky. i was like, fine, i'll do it myself. so i out the studio and i'm taking my shirt off as i'm running down the road in bethesda which probably made me look anyway. but that's nothing new. and i hop in the car and, i drive as quickly as i legally can, drive to the direct direction of bowie, maryland and. as i'm heading there, i'm like, you know what? i got to go to better moisture farther east. and i look in the map, the radar map, i have sort of linked to my gps and i see there's a rotating storm off to my south and i drive right there to where i think a tornado touched down. and to my surprise and tornado touches down right front of me, crosses the road, and i'm on the side of the road with my phone out like this. i is a fox i'm meteorologist that spooky here is the suddenly they had room for me and i sent that back there they had it on the air within a couple minutes, but by then i was still driving around. so they have me on the phone

doing tornado coverage after this tornado's gone through. so not only do we have the video, which has never happened in dc or really anywhere on the east coast for that matter. have a meteorologist actually out there in the field like here's the tornado in maryland never mind actually on the air driving after doing live coverage, looking at the radar. well, i also pulled on the side of the road. so did that for little while. they couldn't get a crew to me. so i had to do the 3:00, 4:00 and 5:00 news with my iphone just like this. then we got a crew and i was doing hits for everyone night, whether it be fox five, philadelphia. gosh, everyone. i did msnbc the next night. i did d.w. bbc. i one point i forgot if i was supposed to do metric or imperial so, i just threw out everything which it worked and it was great and it was such a whirlwind. but the day after i got a note from powell, the boss at fox five, who was down in the carolinas at the time. but he said, fine, we all your coverage. we got to talk soon. we have bigger plans for you. and it was just best possible

text to and yeah so they they offered me a full time role and i wound up chatting with them to make this weird hybrid kind of full time, part time thing that i am now. because given that i'm 25 years old, i want to make sure i'm available every platform because like, you guys look very young. for example, when's the last time you sat and watched tv news? probably not. but you have apps. exactly. so my generation has apps and so i figure, you know, i want to everywhere. so that's why i work full time for an app in florida. i work 3 to 7 days a week for fox, five here in d.c. i work five days a week for the washington post. i work for wmu three days a week. i'll do stuff for bbc, d.w., npr, whoever else. and then i work on the side as an education consultant for a company in boston. so it's it's a lot of hours and i don't sleep much but i don't need sleep much. but it's the best. my boss, everybody i mean, at all the companies i work for, i do have the best employers in the world and they take me seriously.

they they treat me extremely well. and i'm just blessed to get to do what i love to do in a city. i love the people and i love the city and this place is home and sort of this this is the story about that. this is a story about all the people who sort of made it, every single teacher, every twist of fate, every boss who sort of took a shot and hopefully it's just the beginning of a lengthy career, if you will get me around. if folks get sick of me, whatever. but hopefully people will keep me around. and it's it's been pretty fun. so i assume that i'm going to open up for questions or am i supposed to repackager what would you like? i bet we have questions. am i right about that? yeah. why? we go go to questions and if you raise your hand, i'll come you with the microphone. you thank you for this is a wonderful when it comes to change weather what the kind of big concerns that you have the big concerns for me is ah that it is so heavily by people who have no idea what the heck they're talking about on both sides. yesterday you had people throw a can of soup at a van gogh painting.

you have people chained themselves up in the road. they are doing so much to detract from the good message of science and policy that we could be putting. at the same time, you have innumerable politicians who deny that climate change is even happening. and so it's incredibly frustrating from both sides to have people who are so passionate about causes they know nothing about. and that's what really frustrates me in my talks and in what i do as a as a science communicator. i hew as closely as i can to the science about what we know and also about what we don't know. and that seems to resonate well with about 80% of people and 20% of people, 10% on the side of climate panic and 10% of inside a climate denial. and it's the heck out of them. and to me, that's the right balance. but i think what we need to do climate wise is bring it down. and when we're communicating together on a local level. and what i mean by that is when i'm doing nationally, if i'm talking to, say, houston, jim-bob in houston probably doesn't care that the polar bears are swimming more or that it's warmer up in the north pole where santa claus lives.

they don't care. but i say, hey, jim, have you noticed raining more in houston lately? might say, yeah, say well, since 1970s. warmed about point eight degrees in houston because of that for every fahrenheit, the air temperature warms, the air can hold 4% more water. so suddenly we've got 12% more water. we should theoretically be seeing. we're actually seeing an uptick of about 12% in how much water's coming down, which is the equivalent of 49 extra days of rain every. and we're seeing a doubling of flood events. and suddenly this abstract thing may seem way too distant for. this regular guy is suddenly tangible and affects him personally. and so that's what i try to make climate change about how it how it sort of hits folks where it hurts in and locally. and i think the biggest thing with climate change is that conditions are evolving faster than our infrastructure is able to evolve. that's the message try to send. not that the weather is doom and gloom because of this. great question. the other questions please ask questions please.

freddie, thank you for coming. get out of here. so my morning commute listening to is usually a sort of i'm half paying attention. and then i hear your voice and i hear your metaphors and am paying attention to every of the upcoming days of of weather that i can expect your metaphors, your use of language really, really helps penetrate the morning. so my question for you as school librarian is what do you read when you read? what were you reading when you were growing up that gave a gift with words? i read lot of the hardy boys and thank you for that. i think part of it was reading, but part of it was also i've been teaching pretty much in some context at least since middle school. i mean, i'd be tutoring kids at lunchtime in high school. i tutored virtually every day and. you know, in college i work in tutoring too. i kept trying to figure out, how can i teach this in a better

way? when i was probably nine years old, ten years old, my sister was just going to kindergartner or preschool. so you're trying to angles and she could not remember acute obtuse or right angle and i was like, how can i teach this to her? and she was struggling the math. and i was like, you know what, mom, dad come over here. now, if you ever meet my dad? he's a very type-a person. it's like this. he's a very nice person, but very sort of set his ways about many things and it's often his way or. the highway. my mother much more relaxed, much more whatever. and then my sister is an interesting character. she still still tells folks who are adopted, but any whom i line them all up, i'm like, emily, you want to figure out how angle's work? how about this and i brought her over. i'm like, emily, people say, you're little cute. you're in a cute. and she's like, oh, and they brought my over. i said, seat. and i made him go like this. i said, see, dad thinks he's always right. everything has to be perfect, nice and neat nice, neat, right angle, 90 degrees. she was like, oh, makes sense.

then i brought my mother over to see where this is going, see mom some might call her a little fluffy. she is up to sort of to signal a larger and it was unconventional. my mother was a good sport and it worked and so we know where i'm going. on handbasket. i hop, but i figure if that sort of thing works, if it makes an impression, it might be an unconventional way. but, you know, it works like i was trying to how freezing rain worked and it happened to be freezing rain one day. fox so i went out to the garden and i uprooted this miniature tree and it was dripping all over the place. but brought it right in before my weather hit. you can probably if you go back and look at the footage, you just see me wandering to the background with the tree as they're talking to some unrelated story. but when it came for the weather had, i'm like, this is what's happening right now. you see, there's no, you know, freezing rain, no ice in the bottom where the roots are

because. it's warmer down there. but if you go up a bit, untreated surfaces are beginning to rhyme over and that's sort of thing that works. i just i don't consider myself a media personality or, you know, news because lord knows i'm not i'm just a teacher who happens to work on the radio and tv and everywhere else. and if i can just make this a classroom, then that's a goal. and the other question is ask questions. hi, i'm wondering about and i missed the beginning of your talk, but about different routes into education and training. like you went to college and you learned a lot there. but i think a lot of young people are learning in different ways. yep. how do you think people might be able to get into a path like yours through lots of different routes in terms of like a teaching in terms of the media stuff, just in terms of like learning about whether in learning about how to be a personality like there's probably lots of different you could do that conventional and unconventional that's a really good question. i think honestly baptism by fire in that there's no try to think

a good way to answer it like with weather for example about 10 to 20% of what i use in the job actually came classroom. the rest came through self-exploration, like, you guys don't see me driving. the quasi geostrophic arctic potential vorticity each day. did that help in understanding the physics of what's under the hood a little bit. is it useful in the day to day not at all, but in terms of how to talk to people or in terms of sort of understanding the mechanics of the atmosphere, the more storm chasing. i did the more active and passive observation i did better. and i think ultimately that's what's helped the most with any need to be as weather savviness, intimate with the weather as can be to the point where if i think going to be tornado in annapolis there's probably going be a tornado in annapolis. so it's all sort of just getting out in the field, doing as much as possible communication wise and same exact thing. no one remembers my first month of of npr things because i had a boring style an unconventional style that wasn't working. switch things up a little bit and it works. i mean, it was working.

it just wasn't working as you know, it's fine tuning. same thing with fox five. i used to talk really fast and i'm getting a little better now, but it's, you know, i think cause, you know, i still talk to you fast. everyone knows i still talk to you fast, but it's all about sort of just doing with tv. there's no way to rehearse there's no way to practice. it's just completely different. the red light turns on, you know, your live and and stuff like that. so ultimately i think it's just about building a platform. it's getting yourself in my case, getting yourself into as many places where have the means to teach and to learn as possible. and going after natural curiosity, you can't fake it if you're bored about something, it be teaching it or learning it. so about sort of just pursuing what it is, folks actually to learn about nurturing natural curiosity. your question you had a question to write. i. i think this is going to c-span, right? it's it's actually an air it's on the air. i feel important. i can't say bad words. my kids have pointed out that you have already already this

are you going storm chasing next year my going storm chasing next year so most definitely yes come hell or high water i will storm chasing that's not my quote that's my question. oh so the great thing about fox five and paul in particular he me a contract that no one else in the tv business would even think about dreaming up. but he somehow and he said if you can go storm chasing and april-may we'll make it happen. and this year i had sort of arranged to do it may i think next year will be trickier because like this may there are no storms to chase. april had everything and i sort of bet on the wrong month next year i might see if i can just have like five remote days where essentially i either skype it and do the weather like i'm an oklahoma storm chasing tail. let's talk to horses weather because i did do a tornado warning from a gas station actually in in texas we were a little bit understaffed that day. and i knew like i'm the tornado guy. and so i sat there on zoom with my phone, someone else who have graphics at the studio, you can really tell it.

you know, it looked pretty good and folks were sort of reassured that tornado person was on that day. and so i might see if i can pitch doing a couple of remote days rather than just taking the whole month. but yeah, i love storm chasing. i live for it. my other half. can i go with you? sure. i'm always looking is because i've always wanted to do. i'm always looking for folks come storm chasing. i you know i, i mean half the friends i brought storm chasing i met through random means of of meeting folks and so yeah, i'm always happy to bring folks storm chasing, especially because i was a department of one in school. it's not like i had other weather colleagues in my classes you know the department christmas parties were incredibly lonesome. there's never anyone to drive home from them either. but yeah, i'm always looking for storm chaser partners. freddy, what's up? this is going be our last. last question. we saving, freddy is the most loyal fox fire fan there is out there. he gets to every zip trips. he gets to everything. you're very popular at fox five. well, thank you, matthew cappucci. i wanted to say it is an honor

to meet you and wanted to say i enjoyed the fox five a lot when fox nine morning and you're up so early in the morning. i didn't know people were actually up that early. i just thought it was broadcast like senior centers or something. that is a great question. but yeah, it's like i wake up so early in the morning because i have a class like eight in the morning and i go to montgomery college. sorry, what do you study? i'm a general studies program. very nice. so, yeah, i mean, i'm enjoying watching in the morning and including that weather and traffic on the fives green screen all that. oh, the traffic, the traffic. the traffic lights. i always do talk about traffic know it's not has anyone see me do traffic. now we're just going to say i'm not going to in miami in traffic someone wrote in a couple of weeks ago and we want you to bring the same passion to traffic as you do to weather like a who's naturally passionate about traffic and b, it's not like it can be like roads, block currency, then yay. so i'm still trying to figure out how to bring that warmth to

traffic but we're getting there and we appreciate your viewership. and also another thing i was going to say, i remember september 1st, 2021, and maryland, that was the day i remember i was on my godmother's house at the time like we were to leave. we were in annapolis i was so i was with my father and i was like, we were i was like working on my grandmother's house there in annapolis, like, we left out there and there was like still a lot of heavy storms going on. oh, yeah. and it was so i was like, really there that day we were leaving. and then i, i was yeah, i was going to ask what was going on there in annapolis and other with a storm that we were leaving and that was like crazy. great question. so i wish had my weather map anyway. yeah are here okay the remnants hurricane ida were coming through just remnants essentially a juicy souped up tropical atmosphere but with a lot of extra or spin in the air that was working up the east coast came so here's these.

all face for and we ate at that of c-span now so anyway the cold front was off to a west here's d.c. the cold front was over here. what that meant was we are in the warm sector, the soupy atmosphere ahead of the. but that twist was coming through. so on that particular day, we got just enough sunshine to juice up the atmosphere even more cause these little pockets of air to go up. now in a highly sheared environment or one characterized by change of wind speed, direction with heights, anything that spans multiple layers will begin rotate. that's exactly what happened in annapolis. well, actually it started way back down towards dahlgren near. gosh, was that king george county way down there anyway? it was sort the title potomac way down that way. that was one lone storm, one supercell storm. so it didn't have to compete with neighbors as it worked farther north and east. it wasn't a super tall storm didn't have any hail or anything like that with it, but it just really tapped into rotation.

and so i happen to be there, but it bizarre because ordinarily tropical tornadoes form in environments with low lcl or lifting condensation levels, meaning the clouds are super low. you can't see them. this one was very unique. it was a bizarre one. but with that, i think a yeah, we'll probably wrap up. i do appreciate everyone come out today. i'm shocked. the folks actually came here to listen to me yammer and thank you so much. yes and and you can buy his book up at blue tent over there where you'll sign him, right? oh, yeah. i guess we're all going to go there yet. so go on up there. and you can buy a book, get him to sign it. but before you leave, if you would take a survey fall through the book would really appreciate your thoughts about this presentation and other another ideas that you have for a festival next year i get these results we can send you the results. i want to know what people have to say. okay there you go. somebody will be reading them if you like me. my name is matthew. tweet five. if you didn't like me, my name is michael. tweet foxfire. thank you so much, matthew.

thank you