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And what happens when two old friends take their decades of experience in the business and entertainment worlds and sit down with our buddies?

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This is Our Podcast, and we're going to do it Our Way.

Listen to Our Way on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hello. This is Susie Esman and Jeff Garland. I'm here. We are the hosts of the history of Curbier Enthusiasm podcast. Now, we're going to be rewatching and talking about every single episode, and we're going to break it down and give behind the scenes knowledge that a lot of people don't know. We're going to be joined by special guests, including Larry David and Sheryl Hines, Richard Lewis, Bob Oetkerk, and so many more. We're going to have clips, and it's just going to be a lot of fun. Listen to the history of Curbier Enthusiasm on iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts.

It's December 1972. Canadian Jamie Matthews, age 14, is sitting comfortably in his airplane seat. It's his first trip away from home. Jamie's first love is astronomy, and astronomy has earned him the trip of a lifetime. He's been to the White House, to NASA's Mission Control in Texas, to the United Nations, and now he's returning home.

Good evening, ladies.

But there's a problem. And no, it's not the airline food. Someone is threatening to kidnap Jamie because he has a rock, and not just any rock, a moon rock, one retrieved by by an astronaut 240,000 miles from Earth.

This is your captain speaking. Jamie Matthews, please come to the front of the plane. Jamie Matthews, to the front of the plane. Two scary men are here to pick you up. I repeat, two very serious-looking men are here to take you away.

Jamie takes some tentative steps forward. He's just landed in Detroit. Two adults in dark suits meet him on the tarmac. Now, these men are not the kidnappers. They're from the United States secret service. They explain to Jamie what's happening. His parents, back in Canada, received an alarming phone call, threatening his safety. All because of this rock. They want to escort him to the Canadian border just to be safe. Because the Moon Rock isn't exactly a souvenir. It's one of the most rare and valuable materials on Earth. It could be worth millions. To Jamie, it's worth even more. But what the kidnappers don't know is that Jamie doesn't have it. Not yet, anyway, but he will. And the men who called Jamie's parents, they're not the only ones who want a piece of the moon. Welcome to Very Special Episodes, an iHeart Original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is Operation Lunar Eclipse. Okay, so you know how when kids are five or six, they have hyper fixations? I feel like it's like dinosaurs, it's like trucks. For me, it was like Greek mythology, but I feel like for some kids, it's also space.

Were you a space A space kid, Jason or Zaren?

Oh, yeah. You were a space kid? Completely. I'm still mad that they took planetary status away from Pluto. I'm one of those space kids.

My weird, I mean, not weird at all, my space connection is I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. And when I was in high school, every Sunday, I would drive down to the Adler Planetarium and volunteer all Sunday to teach kids science and space demonstrations.

Oh, wow. I love you for that.

That is awesome. It was so cool because it's like every kid... I mean, not every kid. I, as a dork, loved museums. And this idea that I had a badge and I knew the code to get backstage at the museum, it was the coolest thing in the world.

You're a museum insider.

I was a museum insider. I don't mean to big time you because I'm a huge celebrity.

Yeah, no, I understand. You can brag on that. That's worth it. Sometimes you got to flex on us.

I taught them about the Moon mission. I taught them about gravity, but I had no idea about the legality of buying and owning lunar rocks.

They don't want you to know that. That's what it is.

Those kids couldn't handle that.

Yeah, it's all hidden from all of us.

All right. Well, do you guys want to hear a story about stealing Moonrocks in the Black market for illegal Moonrock commerce?

I am buckled up and ready. Jason, you?

Let's blast off. Do some countdown. No, let's just go to the episode.

For a kid super into astronomy, economy, Jamie Matthews had more run-ins with the law than you might have expected. Not because he was breaking the law, but because police kept finding him alone in the middle of the night when he was just eight years old in the last place you'd expect.

My parents were not rich, and we had a house that was close to the cemetery. And so that was the best place to look at the stars at night.

That's Jamie.

So occasionally, the police would come by and see this guy, and they would come and see a guy with a telescope. And so they got me home. I said, I knew where I was.

As a kid, he lived in Chatham, Ontario. It's rural with lots farms and lots of stargazing. As an only child, his parents, Jim and June, bought him a telescope, which Jamie took to the darkest part of the neighborhood, the graveyard. There, he found ink black skies and a galaxy to explore. Jamie isn't sure where his love of science came from. His parents were blue collar workers. Neither was a college graduate, but they recognized their son had a fascinating nation, so they nourished it any chance they could.

My first memory was at two looking at the stars. And from then on, I was totally gone with the stars.

Of course, they all watched as Neil Armstrong took mankind's first steps on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Everyone remembers that. It was a monumental milestone of the 20th century. But people tend to forget how quickly the world moved on, how easily the impossible became routine. Nasa continued to visit the moon in future Apollo missions, six of them in all. But each time, public interest wrist fell off. By the time of the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, NASA had decided this would be the last mission for at least a decade. To commemorate it, NASA and the US State Department sponsored what they called the International Youth Science Tour. It worked like this. Every country in the UN was invited to send a youth representative to watch the final Moon mission. Kids aged 15 to 17 were eligible. They'd see everything, from the launch at Kennedy Space Center to the splashdown on TV from UN headquarters in New York City. The 17-day trip would also include Disneyland, and the kids would get something else besides a front row seat to a moon mission. Nasa was arranging for each kid to receive a piece of Moon Rock. They would present it to their country as a goodwill gesture from the United States to the world.

Gathering Moon Rocks was a priority of the Apollo missions. The samples revealed clues about the age of the moon and how it might have been formed. A Moon Rock was one sentence or a sentence fragment in the story of our galaxy. For Jamie, the chance to hold the rock in his hand would come later. For now, his objective was seeing a rocket launch, which was plenty exciting. Canada's Youth Science Foundation organized an essay contest The topic, The Importance of space exploration to humanity. I mean, obviously. 2000 words in which Jamie brought forth a passionate argument for reaching the stars and beyond. He and a friend both entered. Both sent their essays off, and then they waited. In November 1972, Jamie received a letter from the US Embassy in Ottawa. There were a few words on the page, but Jamie just focused on one of them. Congratulations, it said. You're going to the United States. It was somewhat bitter sweet. Jamie winning meant his friend didn't. There was another wrinkle. Remember that the contest was only open to kids between 15 and 17? Jamie was 13. He lied about his age when he submitted his essay.

They found out a little bit before I got there because there were other things that I had to do. I guess finally, I said that how old I was, they didn't like it. But by that time, it was too late. So I got go.

Jamie had just turned 14, so they let it slide. Still, he was the youngest of the 80 kids from around the world who would see Apollo 17 touch down on the moon. His parents naturally were thrilled.

Oh, they loved it, so they thought it was wonderful for me.

The International Youth Science Tour's first stop was in Washington, DC, where a chartered plane delivered an assembly of students to the current President, Richard Milhouse-Nixon. Nixon was a proponent of the space program. He had arranged for Moon Rock samples to be dispensed from the Apollo 11 mission and was doing the same for Apollo 17. Jamie met Nixon, but the President didn't leave much of an impression.

To be honest, I don't remember anything that he did. I remember shaking his hand, and that's about all I know, to be honest, at that time. To me, it was just another guy. So there were other more people later that I liked, but Nixon, nah.

When the tour moved to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Jamie was put in a hotel room next to the man he really wanted to meet, the first human on the Moon.

We were in a hotel with Neil Armstrong. And in fact, I, with Neil Armstrong, his wife and his kids, were in the pool together for the entire afternoon. And so I got to do Marco Polo with the man that went on the moon. There you go.

All of them went to Kennedy Space Center for the launch of Apollo 17. This launch was notable not only for being the last manned Moon mission, but the first Saturn V rocket to take off at night. One, zero. We have a lift-off.

It's just like daylight here at Kennedy Space Center.

The Saturn V is moving off the pad.

It left it off at noon night, and so it was like the sun rose, it was really amazing. It really was amazing.

Jamie and the others were situated about three miles from the Saturn rocket. That may not sound close, but consider that three miles was roughly the distance any shrapnel would be able to travel in the event the rocket blew up.

Yeah, in fact, it's really loud, but also so loud that all of your body is shaking at the time. It's really loud, but it was wonderful. It really was. I had not known what it would be like, and no one else will ever see it again. So it was wonderful for me.

Later, Jamie went to Mission Control at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, which is now named for Lyndon Johnson. You've seen it, or a version of it, in practically every movie ever made about space travel. Lots of guys with flat buzz cuts and short-sleeved shirts, sweating over every switch flipped en route to the moon. But Jamie got to see the real thing in person. On a screen, astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Smith traversed the lunar surface. Cernan was the commander, Smith, the copilot, and the only trained geologist to ever visit the Moon. There.

Mark, Gravity. Copy to, Mark. Okay, now let me get to work.

The men leapt between boulders the size of U-haul trailers in the moon's Taurus Littro Valley. They rode a lunar rover over uneven terrain, and they chipped away at rock, coming away with one sample in particular, the size of a brick. But it was when Eugene Cernan spoke to the camera that the Youth Tour really began to perk up.

During the Moonwalks, we were there at Mission Control. And then on the last Moonwalk, just before they left the Moon, Suna, who was the captain, and Smith, who was the other person on the Moon, they got a big rock, and they brought it to the camera and said, This is for you. This is for us. They said, When it gets back to Earth, they'll get it into small places, and each of us will get one when we did. So yeah, the Moon Rock was, What? We're getting that? It was wonderful. It really was.

Here's what Eugene Cernan said to the kids that day.

When we return this rock or some of the others like it to Houston, we'd like to share a piece of this rock with so many of the countries throughout the world. We hope that this will be a symbol of what our feelings are, what the feelings of the Apollo program are, and a symbol of mankind that we can live in peace and harmony in the future.

The tour wound down after that. Jamie and the others watched on TV from the United Nations building as the capsule splashed down. And soon, Jamie was headed back home to be escorted to the Canadian border by Secret Service agents. But Jamie wasn't yet in possession of the rock.

No, well, because it was on the moon. So they had to wait until they got back, and then they had this get into little pieces, and then each one was gone in a piece of plastic, and then it got to me in a month or so. So somebody had called them and said that they were going to kidnap me and the rock, even though it wasn't there.

The police guarded his house for a few months afterward. Eventually, they grew satisfied that the kidnapping threat against Jamie would never materialize. This This isn't a story, by the way, about a young Canadian science enthusiast getting kidnapped. But that young Canadian's Moon Rock? The brick-sized Moon Rock would be analyzed by NASA scientists before it was divvied up for 135 countries, plus every US state and territory. A few weeks later, via special delivery, Canada's piece arrived on Jamie's front doorstep. The rock fragment was encased in luceite. Below it was a Canadian flag which had been brought to the moon and back. The junior astronomer was in possession of something very few civilians have ever seen up close, a moon rock, a little over one gram in size.

It was very dark. People don't realize that the moon is really dark. We only see it because it's in the sky at night. But if When you look at it without that, it reflects only about 5, 6, 7% of the light from the sun. So it's almost like charcoal.

Jamie didn't put it in a safety closet box, nor did he stick it anywhere for safekeeping. It went in a shoe box under his bed, where it could be periodically pulled out to show family or friends, or just to stare at before going to bed. Once, it even wound up in family car.

It was in our car without the doors locked at all for about two hours, and it was just there. Somebody could have done it.

But Jamie had been only a temporary custodian. The moon dust sprinkled over his life for a fleeting period of time. In early 1973, he got a notice. It was time to hand the Moon Rock over to its intended recipient, the country of Canada. During a ceremony at Riddow Hall in Ottawa, Jamie dutifully, but dolefully, handed over the rock to Roland Mishner, the governor general. Because Canada didn't want him to leave empty-handed, they prepared a gift for him in return.

You know what I got in Rituun? I got a book called The Birds of Canada.

Did Canada Confuse Astronomy with Ornithology? Jamie never found out why he was given a book about birds. Maybe it's all they had lying around. But Governor General Mishner was not the final stop for the Moon Rock. It was given to the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Ottawa. And for Jamie, it was like being forced to put it up for adoption. He agonized over the Rock's well-being.

For a few years, I didn't go and see it, but I would call them occasionally and just say, How is it?

Then in 1978, Jamie made his customary call. The museum had some bad news for Jamie.

I called, and it was gone. And they said that it was stolen. And I thought, Jeez, if you could have done that, I should have just kept it in a Jew box in my bed.

Hi, I'm Susie Esman. And I am Jeff Garland. Yes, you are. And we are the hosts of the history of Curbier Enthusiasm podcast. We're going to watch every single episode. It's 122, including the pilot, and we're going to break them down.

And by the way, most of these episodes I have not seen for 20 years.

Yeah, me too. We're going to have guest stars and people that are very important to the show, like Larry David.

I did once try and stop a woman who was about to get hit by a car. I screamed out, Watch out.

And she said, Don't you tell me what to do. And Sheryl Hines.

Why can't you just up and have a good time?

And Richard Lewis.

How am I going to tell I'm going to leave now? Can you do it on the phone?

Do you have to do it in person?

What's the deal? Not canceling cable. You have to go in.

As a human being. He's helped you.

And then we're going to have behind the scenes information. Tidbits. Yes, tidbits is a great word. Anyway, we're both a wealth of knowledge about this show because we've been doing it for 23 years. So subscribe now and you could listen to the history of Curbant Enthusiasm on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts.

Good song. The Johnny Carson theme, right? Hey, who wrote that?

Skip. Who do you think? It's your buddy. Hi, everyone. I'm Paul Anca.

And I'm Skip Bronson.

And what happens when two old friends take their decades of experience in the business and entertainment worlds and sit down with our buddies?

You get Our Way, a brand new show from My Heart podcast where we chop it up with our pals about everything under the sun.

Hear about Michael Bouvier's entrance into show business.

And get business insight from Mark Burnet.

Find out what scares my son-in-law, Jason Bateman.

And discover the bragging rights that come with beating Michael Jordan at golf.

Together, we know just about everybody, including sitting presidents.

So join us as we ask the questions they've not been asked before. Tell it like it is and even sing a song or two.

This is our podcast, and we're going to do it our way.

Listen to Our Way on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcast.

There was a reason the US government dispatched the Secret Service to meet Jamie Matthews at the airport. Of course, they were concerned for the welfare of a child on a goodwill trip to improve foreign relations. But there was another factor at play. Moonrocks are one of the great black markets in the world. They're worth millions.

This Moon Rock ended up in my pocket for almost 24 hours.

That's Joseph Goodhines. Joseph has one heck of a resume.

Started off as an army aviator and intelligence officer. And went to work for the FA. I was recruited away as a special agent, recruited away from the FA by US Department of Transportation, Office of Inspector General. Then I was recruited away from D-O-T-O-I-G by NASA O-I-G, where I serve for about 10 years, a little over actually, as a senior special agent, which means I headed up task force investigations.

That's right. Nasa has special agents. They're armed. They can make arrests. They look into things like missing NASA property, people pretending to be astronauts, and cybercrime. How this isn't a CSI spinoff is beyond me. But anyway, in the late 1990s, Joseph took note of the fact that a number of the Moon Rocks gifted by the United States to foreign governments couldn't be accounted for. Some countries said they had no record of receiving them. Others said they had been reported missing or stolen. Sometimes, Joseph would get word of a conman who purported to have a Moon Rock for sale. You Usually, they didn't. It would be a fake. Like two brothers who insisted their father had been given some Moonrocks by astronaut John Glenn. John Glenn was an astronaut, but he never went to the Moon. For the most part, Moonrocks belong to NASA and the US government. Some have been retrieved by Russia and China, and some lunar meteorites have landed on Earth. But most Moon samples were from the Apollo missions. They can only be gifted or loaned out by NASA. If anyone acquires an Apollo mission Moonrock from anyone other than NASA, well, that would be wrong.

It would have to be offered, as in the case of the Apollo 11 and 17 missions.

Nasa takes the position, as does the United States, that nobody can own a Moonrock or dust. And so we gift it to the Nations of the world, 135 Apollo 11 Moonrocks on a stand, and we gifted to the nations of the world, 135 Moonrocks on a plaque like this. Essentially, these were our way of saying, Hey, look, all the members of the United Nations were all in on this together. We may be sending the rockets to and from the moon, but this is a global effort.

There is one exception.

The astronauts, when they came back from the Moon.

The Moon isn't exactly a sterile working environment. Like coal miners, astronauts can come home dirty.

They were allowed to keep their gloves and patches. On the patches and gloves was lunar debris. So there was one astronaut that would actually bang on gloves and cut pieces of his patches apart and put them in Painting City. And so essentially, NASA ruled, Okay, we gifted that away, too.

But for most people who haven't been blasted into space, being in possession of a lunar rock is suspicious, and it didn't sit right with Joe.

Risk to our astronauts. Remember, we had astronauts die in practice in Apollo 1. These guys were risking their lives. They got it. They accomplished something. The world united seeing Neil Armstrong take that first step on the moon. And the idea that petty thugs would be stealing these Moon Rocks for their own wealth, something that I never could understand, and it seemed wrong. It's something that I wanted to accomplish when I was an agent.

So in 1998, Joseph decided to take a closer look at the illicit Moon Rock market. His idea was incredibly simple. He would invite criminals to come to him.

Essentially what we did was we put an ad in USA Today, Moon Rocks Wanted, with an astronaut jumping on the moon. I was looking for con artists to approach me so that we could do the sting operation.

Moonrocks Wanted, Send Asking Price. What Joseph expected were a series of calls from con artists, and he did get some of those. But then he got a call from someone named Alan.

What we didn't expect guy by the name of Alan Rosen to call me and say, Hey, look, all those other guys that are calling you, that's bogus. Nobody's allowed to own a Moon Rock, but guess what? I've got it, and it's for sale. And I said, What's the asking price? He said, $5 billion.

Alan didn't sound like the others. For one thing, he had proof he was in possession of a Moon Rock. He sent Joseph a photo of the very same plaque used in the Goodwill Moon Rock tour, the wooden plaque with the country's flag and Nixon's dedication. Alan, however, had taken one measure to make a positive identification of which country it was from a little more difficult.

The center of the flag was blocked out as was the recipient country. We contacted one country after the next, and we found out, guess what? Nobody knows where their Moon Rocks are. We gifted the Moon Rocks, and they don't know where they are. Some thought they never even received them.

Joseph later learned that the rock belonged to Honduras. So began the plan for the world's first ever sting operation to recover a stolen Moon Rock. But there was another problem. Alan knew what he had was very rare and very valuable. His asking price was $5 million. In order to provide Alan with proof of funds, Joe needed $5 million, and NASA didn't pay him that well. So he went to the FBI, who, according to Joseph, told him they couldn't help. So he went to the CIA, and they couldn't help either. Finally, Joseph called his father, a former Marine. His father didn't have the money, but he had something more valuable, some fatherly advice. His dad told him to make a phone call to one person in particular.

And so what we did was we contacted the guy by the name of H. Ross Peron, a billionaire who ran for President in 1992, and got through to his secretary and I said, Hey, look, I need a favor. I'm looking for somebody. Can't really talk about it. But if H. Ross Baroe could call, I'll convey that information to him.

H. Ross Perot was one of the great characters of the 1990s, an excitable Texas billionaire who ran for President in 1992 as an independent. He got almost 20 million votes and lost to Bill Clinton, but that didn't affect his patriotism.

Ten seconds later, the phone rings, and H. Ross Perot is on the other side and he goes, Hello, Joe, how can I help you? I said, Mr. Perot, what we need is $5 million to get back a moonwalk. He goes, No problem. With the money in hand, the bank willing to give a letter saying that we had the money and so forth. We set up this thing at a bank in Miami where he had the Moon Rock in a vault. And so we put in an undercover agent in the bank, pretending to be an official that was going to photograph it.

Alan agreed to meet in Miami and have a bank official photograph the Moon Rock so Joseph could verify that Alan had it. Only the bank official was an undercover agent. Joseph and his colleagues were waiting for Alan outside. It turned out Alan had acquired the rock from Colonel Arguecia Ogarte, who claimed he'd been given it in the 1970s during political unrest in Honduras. Alan had agreed to buy it for $50,000. A judge had approved a warrant to seize the rock, but now Joseph had to get it back to NASA. Which brings us back to his pocket.

And so I fly back from Miami to Houston, and the bootrock is in my pocket. Got a briefcase, I've armed, and the whole nine yards And what I was thinking was, if someone's going to steal anything, they're going to steal the briefcase. They're not going to steal what's in my pocket. And so then we brought that back immediately to Johnson Space Center's Lunar Lab, where it was tested.

The Sting, which was dubbed Operation Lunar Eclipse, was successful. Alan Rosen tried to get the rock returned to him in court, arguing he obtained it legally. But a judge sided with NASA and ruled the rock had to be forfeited to the US government. The space agency then returned it to Honduras. But NASA didn't have the resources to make a hunt for missing Moon Rocks an ongoing project. When Joseph retired from the space agency in 2000, he decided to outsource the search to a group he knew would be very devoted to the cause, his students at the University of Phoenix.

But again, NASA Office of Inspector General is very small. We have under 100 agents, and so I could not sell them with the idea of expending resources to look for Moonrocks that we gifted away. When I retired from NASA, I started telling my graduate criminal justice graduate students, I've got this really great investigative drill that I want you to go through. It's called the Moon Rock Project. Here are all the Moon Rocks that we're trying to account for all over the world. I want you to go out and try to find. What we did not realize at the time was that so many were actually stolen or missing, and that Actually, no country had an inventory control system that even if they had it, they knew where they were.

Systematically, he and his students tried to chase down as many leads as they could for the Missing Rocks, which turned up in some surprising places. The Apollo 17 rock gifted to Arkansas was found in the archives of former governor Bill Clinton. His predecessor, David Prior, had received it in 1976, and it was probably just packed up when Clinton lost re-election in 1980. He was one of three governors who happened to be in possession of a rock. In Cyprus, the American ambassador had been assassinated. A diplomat's relative grabbed the rock and held onto it until she read about the missing rocks in 2009. Some rocks were in storage. At least one probably wound up in a landfill. Joseph and his team found 78 of them, but many are still missing.

And those are just, and again, 150 are missing. Some of the states are missing them. New York is missing their Powell 11, Delaware is missing their Powell 11, New Jersey is missing their Powell 17, and a lot of the nations of the world are missing their moon. No doubt. There's no doubt in my mind that there's a Black market.

But what about Canada's Goodwill Rock? Rock, the Jamie Matthews Rock. By the time Joseph began his Moon Rock project in 2002, Jamie's Rock had been missing for well over two decades, and it carried a significant price tag.

One of a kind, and to a collector that's in value. When we in Operation Lunar Eclipse, and remember, this goes back some time, the seller, Alan Rosen, offered it to me for $5 million. And I said, Oh, well, let me research that and talk to you. And I talked to some experts in NASA. Priceless. That's what they said. But along the lines of priceless, $5 million could be a reasonable.

And as Joe's students began diving into the story, they discovered something odd.

In 2002, they started finding the story that he's recounting that it was stolen in 1978. I'd go on to my students, I'd go, That's not acceptable. It's not acceptable that you're getting a story that says it was stolen. Where's the police report? Where's the newspaper stories? This is a piece of Canadian history and NASA history. Where is the trail? And so they kept fracking it.

There was no police report and no news stories. Jamie's Moon Rock was nowhere. For years afterward, Jamie had kept on calling the museum, asking if the Moon Rock had reappeared.

I kept calling back every year to find out, and they said, We don't know. And finally, after 10 years, I just said, Okay, it's never going to get back.

The 1970s turned into the 1980s. Jamie attended the University Toronto and the University of Western Ontario. He got a job. He sometimes forgot about the rock. The 1980s turned into the 1990s and then the 2000s. When something is missing for decades, the odds of ever finding it again are slim. The Moon Rock had officially wound up on the proverbial milk carton. Then, one day in 2008, Jamie decided to use the single best investigative tool of them all, Google.

Hi, I'm Susie Esman. And I am Jeff Garland. Yes, you are. And we are the hosts of the history of Curbier Enthusiasm podcast. We're going to watch every single episode. It's 122, including the pilot, and we're going to break them down.

And by the way, most of these episodes I have not seen for 20 years.

Yeah, We're going to have guest stars and people that are very important to the show, like Larry David.

I did once try and stop a woman who was about to get hit by a car. I screamed out, Watch out.

And she said, Don't you tell me what to do. And Sheryl Hines.

Why can't you just lighten up and have a good time?

And Richard Lewis.

How am I going to tell I'm going to leave now? Can you do it on the phone?

Do you have to do it in person?

What's the deal? Not to canceling cable. You have to go in.

As a human being, he's helped you.

And then we're going to have behind the scenes information. Tidbits. Yes, tidbits is a great word. Anyway, we're both a wealth of about this show because we've been doing it for 23 years. So subscribe now and you could listen to the history of Curbant Enthusiasm on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts.

Good song, the Johnny Carson theme, right? Hey, who wrote that?

Skip, who do you think? It's your buddy. Hi, everyone. I'm Paul Anca.

And I'm Skip Bronson.

And what happens when two old friends take their decades of experience in the business and in entertainment worlds and sit down with our buddies.

You get Our Way, a brand new show from My Heart podcast, where we chop it up with our pals about everything under the sun.

Hear about Michael Bouvier's entrance into show business.

And get business insight from Mark Burnet.

Find out what scares my son-in-law, Jason Bateman.

And discover the bragging rights that come with beating Michael Jordan at golf.

Together, we know just about everybody, including sitting presidents.

So join us as we ask the they've not been asked before. Tell it like it is and even sing a song or two.

This is our podcast, and we're going to do it our way.

Listen to Our Way on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

In 2008, Jamie wasn't really looking for the rock fragment, but for the rock itself. He was hoping to find a picture of the larger piece, the one the astronauts of Apollo 17 had returned to Earth with before it was segmented into smaller sections. But when he tried googling, he found something else instead.

And I wanted to get a thing before it was gotten into all those pieces, the big thing the first time. So I was looking there, I figured, somebody must have it. And then I I found my thing.

What Jamie found was a photo of a man holding his Moon Rock. Really Canada's Moon Rock, but still, it was on the plaque. The digital photo had a visible watermark with the date. The photo was from 2000, eight years prior. Jamie was able to trace the origin of the photo to a storage facility in Elmer, Quebec, one that belonged to the museum. He phoned the curator.

I said, Wait, what? And so I looked and I found out that it was in a warehouse in a place in Quebec for 35 years. And nobody knows how it got there. But as soon as I knew it, I called the curator and I said, Hey, you've got my room rock. It took me a while to say it because he didn't He didn't believe me at first.

As more of the story came out, it seemed increasingly unlikely the rock had ever been stolen. The museum had no record of a theft. Joseph Goodhinds had never found a police report. More than likely, it had been Clintoned and misplaced for decades. Here's Joseph Goodhinds again.

What my guess is, and only having dealt these all over the world, is because nobody accounted for this, that after they were done with their Lou tour, they said, Okay, where do we put it? Put them in storage over here. They did. And it was like in box 3005, who knows? But they just lost track of it over the decades.

But why had the museum told Jamie the Rock had been stolen instead of misplaced.

And nobody knows how it got there. So it's a little bit like Indiana Jones at the last movie, except for me, it's like Indiana Jamie and the Lost Rune Rock. It was just there, and Nobody knows how it got there. Nobody knows because if you go back to that time, nobody is around anymore.

Maybe they simply wanted him to stop calling. But there's another wrinkle to the story. Remember that Joseph and graduate students were looking into the rock as early as 2002. Jamie found the photo in 2008.

My students actually tracked it down in 2003 there.

According to Joseph, his students had actually located the rock five years earlier in 2003 in Elmer. Not through Google, but through detective work. They called every museum and museum-associated building in the area. The problem no one told Jamie.

Here's the thing. He's not wrong. He probably did discover it in 2008 because the problem with that moonwalk is it was never into an inventory control system. And maybe there was somebody that discovered it in 1995. But you discover it, there it is, and then you forget about it.

Jamie didn't realize they had it until 2008, and it wasn't until 2009 when boy and rock were reunited. The National Museum of Natural Sciences, now known as the Canadian Museum of Nature, wasn't able to put the Moon Rock back on display, so it went to the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa on loan. There, Jamie was able to see it for the first time in over 30 years. Fittingly, it was the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Canada's Goodwill Moon Rock is now with the Canadian Museum of Nature, where it periodically goes on display. The Rock's journey had been a little murky. Jamie's wasn't. A love of astronomy turned into a love of astrophysics. He became Dr. Jamie Matthews, and then Professor Jamie Matthews, an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia, where he measures the vibrations of stars too far away to be seen by a telescope on Earth, not even a telescope in a cemetery. A stroke has resulted in some expressive aphasia, a little trouble finding words, but it hasn't slowed his work or his love for it. Bearing witness to the Apollo 17 mission, Caring for a Peace of Lunar Rock, set him on a path for life.

Oh, no. It was really good for me. It After this, I did lots of things after that with space and astronomy and so on. No, this was like, Come on, how many people have their own Moonwalk? I mean, it's wonderful for me. That will always be one of the things that I'll like is the fact that I actually had a real Moonwalk. I couldn't expect anything more than that, to be honest.

There was a study released in late 2023. The Apollo 17 lunar lander module, which was left behind on the moon, may be causing tiny moonquakes, small changes to the lunar surface from the materials expanding and contracting with temperature changes. But Apollo 17 has been causing those tremors for a long time. The mission reverberated through dozens of teenagers who were invited to witness history in 1972, through people like Joseph Goodheitz, who want to protect the legacy of those missions, missions that were only possible because astronauts sacrificed themselves in our pursuit of lofty goals, and through Jamie Matthews, who, for a brief time, owned a tiny piece of it all and got a book about birds in return.

And I still have it, of Of course. So now it really is nice for me. But at the time, it was like, birds? Yeah.

Okay. I have to feel like coming back that playing Marco Polo with Neil Armstrong is maybe the biggest flex of all time?

Oh, are you kidding me? He touched the moon, and you got to touch him playing Marco Polo. I mean, not to be weird about it, but you're like, Neil, boom, got you. That's crazy.

He touched the moon. And so if you touched him, it's like you've touched the moon.

Yeah, it's like two degrees of Kevin Bacon, but the moon.

And in that story, he just casually mentions like, Oh, yeah, I met Richard Nixon, but nah, didn't do anything for me. So good. Love Jamie.

I have to say, though, living in LA and pitching TV constantly, you're always talking to network executives who are just like, We're looking for the next procedural. We really want just a crime procedural. And I'm like, Where is NASA's special agents? Where's That show.

I mean, that is like CBS written all over it.

Oh, God. Right? Csi, NASA? Yeah.

Are you kidding me? Now, did you guys have a very special character of this episode that was your favorite? Do you have one that just jumped out for you?

Jason?

I was thinking about going with Neil Armstrong and his wife and kids, splashing around the pool, which just was a cool cameo. But we just talked about Neil.

I actually think the very special character in this episode is me, Dana Schwartz, the volunteer at the Adler Planetarium, tangentially related to this story, just devoted to educating the next generation of space-loving kids.

Actually, I have a different character. Let me just read you much.

Is it also me?

How about the guy at the museum who, after fielding these calls for several years, just decides, I know how to put an end to this. I'll tell him it's stolen. What a great way to get someone off off your back. Yeah.

That is 100% a great way to get someone off your back. I think I've done that. They're like, I don't know where it is. Your car was stolen, man. Stop calling me. Now, Dana, I got to say, in all honesty, you were also my favorite special episode character. So I don't know why Jason was thinking, but I went with you, too.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Top five. Yeah.

Come on. Volunteers, we got to support the volunteers. Do it for love.

Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. This episode was written by Jake Rosson. Our producer, editor, and sound designer is Josh Fisher. Additional editing by John Washington. Mixing and mastering by Behid Pleasure. Very Special Episodes is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnet, and me, Jason English. Original music by Elise McCoy. Our Story Editor is Marissa Brown. Research and fact-checking by Marissa Brown, Austin Thompson, and Jake Rosson. Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Our executive producer is me, Jason English. We'll see you back here next week after our first Very Special field trip Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeartPodcasts.

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