This is Neal Strauss, host of the Tenderfoot TV true crime podcast to live and die in LA. I'm here to tell you about the new podcast I've been undercover investigating for the last year and a half. It's called to die for. Here's a clip.

All these girls were sent out into the world, and they were told, try to meet important men. Try to attach yourself to important men.

The voice you're hearing is a russian model agent telling me about spies sent out to, say, seduce men with political power.

The war in Ukraine is also being fought by all these girls that are all over important cities.

For the first time, a military train seduction spy reveals how the russian government turned sex and love into a deadly weapon.

If you want to kill your target, it's easy. You just seduce him, take him somewhere, start having sex, and then he's very vulnerable, so you can kill him easily.

To die for is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to inside status Untraced. I'm Laura from the tenderfoot team, and today I'm sitting down with Alex vespested and Liam Luxon, the producer and host of status Untraced. For an intimate look inside the show, Alex and Liam will share their experiences discovering Justin's story, what they went through, digging deep into his strange disappearance, and how working on this show shifted both of their perspectives on life. Plus, you'll get a spoiler free sneak peek into what to expect from the rest of the season. Let's get into it. Today. I'm sitting down with Alex and Liam, the hosts and producers of status untraced. And as we kick off, I can see you on video. Nobody else can see you. I can tell that you guys have some palm trees. You're in a beautiful location. Can you just give us a little sense of where you're at right now, physically?

Yeah, totally. We are sitting on a balcony in a jungle in Mexico over here in Tulum. It's very warm. It's gorgeous out here right now.

Nice. Are you there researching another show?

Not intentionally, but maybe we'll find something. Who knows?

Uh oh. Uh oh.

No. We're down here just as a little relaxation and adventure.

Nice, nice. I actually had a question a little later on, but I'm just gonna go ahead and ask you now, because the show is about a traveler and you're currently traveling around. Is that something that your spirit really connected to within Justin's story more as.

An aspiration rather than like, something that I've done a lot of. I've always been fascinated by it, by traveling. My grandparents have always traveled a lot throughout my life, and it was always something that I loved the idea of doing, but I didn't do a lot of it. I grew up in Kentucky, and I grew up in Colorado before that, so I spent a lot of time in, like, woods and mountains and stuff. But, yeah, I didn't do a lot of travel, actually, the first real international flight I ever took was to India, so, yeah. More in aspiration than in spirit. Well, it is in spirit, for sure. In spirit, yeah.

Yeah. Okay. All right, we'll back up and we'll get started. So, Alex and Liam, can you both share a little bit about yourselves and your background?

Yeah. So I have no experience doing any of this at all. I was.

That's Liam, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, sorry, my name's Liam, in case my voice is not obvious at this point.

And the other one is Alex, which is me.

It sounds different without the background music and the sound effects too.

Yeah, to be fair. Yeah. And I don't talk the same way. That's a lot of coaching from Alex. I was a bartender. I never, never had looked into a story. I've always been fascinated by detective work and things like that, but I had never done anything like this. And not where I expected my life to exactly go, I guess, four years ago. But, yeah, I grew up in the midwest. I was a pretty weird homeschooled kid who was. I'm extremely extroverted. So I was always going out and trying to meet people. And then I moved to Los Angeles when I was 20 just to. To get out to the west coast. Cause I was not a Midwest guy. And, yeah, I loved the wilderness. And, you know, I mean, the origin story of how I got involved is pretty wild, but we can save that for a second. Let Alex introduce himself before we do that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What Liam didn't include is he has a charismatic nature and a knack for people. So that's what I recognized when I first met him. My background in this whole thing. And I won't start from birth. We'll skip that. But I began working with the author Neil Strauss back in 2016, and him and I fell into investigating a missing person's case, which was Elaine Parks case in Malibu. And that snowballed to meeting Jaden Brandt, the private investigator, and us also investigating the case of DEA Shabani. And together we made to live and die in LA. That was my first foray into podcasting with Tenderfoot tv. And it was through a program, a self help program that Neil was running that I heard about Justin. And I heard about Justin Alexander before he went missing. I heard about his adventures and the really cool things he was doing that he was off traveling in the world. That was at one of these events that Neil hosted, and at the next event was September of 2016, and people were starting to basically bring up Justin's name again, but in a different vein of no one's really been hearing from him.

And there was this interesting debate of, well, Justin can survive anything, and then other people being very concerned. But that was way before I fell down to this world of true crime podcasting. And then just naturally, as my life kind of led down this career path, it was a story that I think Justin's life spoke to me as it speaks to a lot of people, but also just fascinated by the mystery. And I had a desire to look into it. I just felt it was so massive and so complex and was going to need someone at the core of it, the crux of it, who not only could interact and interview and build relationships with the people from Justin's world, but also on an international scale. Right, because he went missing in India. And that's going to take somebody that has patience and compassion and the wanting to interact with a multitude of people. So I spoke to a couple people before Liam, but then when Liam and I met, and I kind of watched the way he interacted with people, and then we started talking about just life in general, what we wanted to do in life.

And he brought up a lot of adventure. My gear started turning, and I was.

Like, okay, it's funny because I think it was a timing thing for us, at least for me, because we met at a random house party in the beginning of 2020, right before COVID shut down everything. Yeah. And while he seems well, he's amazing at pitching me, he never really pitches himself much, especially not at this party. We were talking about what all we do, and he's like, yeah, I did this show. It's called, like, to live and die in LA, which at the moment, I was like, oh, cool, another podcast. Like, everybody has a podcast, whatever. And, like, two weeks later, I threw it on and I binged the entire thing in under a day. Because it's that good. It's so, so good. So I. I did, too.

And I listened to that show, by the way. Yeah, it's excellent.

It's so good. So if you haven't listened to it, go listen to live and die in LA. But then I just kind of, by happenstance, I ran into him again at another party. I think this was literally a week before COVID restrictions came in and locked pretty much everything up. So I talked to him then, and then it was may or something. I saw him posting about the new show that he had made, son of a hitman. And so I kind of reached out to him, was like, hey, this is really good, too. And he was like, yeah, thanks, man. I'm back in LA. What have you been doing to work out? So we connected again. He came over.

I think your exact words, though, were, hey, this is really cool. If you ever have anything you need help with, I would love to help out.

I think I said that the first time we met kind of as a joke.

It wasn't a joke.

It wasn't entirely a joke. I didn't like. I certainly didn't think it was gonna be anything right. So then he came over. We were, like, working out. At this point in my life, COVID again had shut everything down, so my job wasn't happening anymore. I was really kind of in an influx of a lot of things. About two years before that, I had bought a camera and started shooting photography, which the thing I wanted to do was go travel around and, like, shoot travel vlogs and that kind of thing. All of this isn't happening now. Like, I can't do any of this. So I was kind of in a very what am I doing with my life? Kind of stage. And Alex kind of was like, after talking for a second, he's like, oh, yeah. You ever think about being a podcast host? And I was like, I mean, if it was the right story, he's like, come here. And he pulled me inside, and he pulls up Justin's instagram, pulls up a couple of the last posts that he has on there, and he goes, read this. Immediately, I was hooked. And spent the next three days reading everything I could find on him and then reached out to Alex, and I was like, yeah, dude, I think I'm down to do this.

And he was like, great, you have a call in, like, two days.

So. Wow, that's so interesting. What a fascinating time to start that process too. Can you talk a little bit about getting the project going? So, like, Alex, you've been doing the research, and Liam, you're brought in, and then it's COVID, so you can't travel. So what was that process like for you as you're investigating a nomadic traveler?

It's funny because a lot of those challenges never made the show. So much of the world is so tired of hearing about COVID We're ready to be.

Yeah, we don't want to talk about it.

So it was a tricky thing because it was a real challenge. We started this in May of 2020.

Right.

That is when we initially began having conversations with a lot of the players involved. So a lot of those phone calls that you're hearing, those first couple episodes, or because we couldn't go visit those individuals in person. The first interview you hear in episode one is with one of Justin's friends, Jason Schultz. And that was a very strange time because we started having these conversations in May, started doing some phone calls, but Jason was on July, around July or August, when restaurants started reopening in LA.

Yeah.

So the only place we could meet publicly was, like, a patio, which is why you hear all this street noise. And then we all had masks on.

Right.

You know, you don't even think about when you're hearing that interview. But, I mean, for months or close to a year, we kept saying, we're gonna go to India, we're gonna go to India. But all we were waiting on were border restrictions. So the visa process, which maybe happens for 30 seconds in the show, ended up, you know, taking year and a half, six months.

Yeah.

A long time trying to just keep momentum. Right. That was the hardest part.

And I think, ironically, in the two years that we spent, you know, before we went to India, it gave us so much time to talk to so many different people that were involved or knew him, and they were all over the. All over the globe. But, I mean, I'm so blessed that we were able to talk to so many people that were willing to, you know, tell us their experiences with Justin. And, you know, by the time we got over there, I think we both really had a good understanding of who Justin is, which definitely came into play with understanding his full, complex story and disappearance completely.

So you mentioned, and I have a question about that experience you had of getting to know Justin. I think it's episode three or four. You talk about going and meeting his mom in Oregon, and she brings his stuff out of the trunk, and you physically hold it.

Yeah.

And you talk about how you've never met him, but you're digging deep into his life, and you're getting to know all the people around him. And I'm just really curious to know a little bit more about what that experience was like. I'd love to hear from both of you what's it like to investigate and get to know somebody who may be dead, who may be alive, and who you've never actually met.

I think we should talk about that moment first, especially you, because Susie, his mother, offered for Liam to try on his jacket. I didn't really hold his things, but I watched Liam do it, and for me, it was even weird. So I'm curious what it was like for you.

So we flew up to Portland and rented a car. Drove about 2 hours south just outside of Salem, Oregon, where Susie, justin's mother, lives. That night, we met Susie for dinner at this nice little italian place and got to. Got to know her a little bit. We had talked before, but this was like the first real one on one time we had had with her really, really sweet lady. We didn't really dive much into the case that first night. We were trying to, you know, get a little bit more personal. This is who we are kind of thing. And, of course, justin came up because, you know, it was.

That's why we were there.

It's impossible to not, you know, and did not talk about that. So the next day, we went and we got breakfast, and, you know, again, we talked for a couple hours over breakfast a lot about kind of the struggle of getting an investigation started in another country. I mean, her difficulty with getting a visa. There's this. It was like, this is kind of like the setting of the beginning of all the struggles that they've ended up having in India as well. So, anyways, here in Salem, we sat down, we found this little co working space, and really talked about everything. I don't know. It was a very. It was a very real moment of just everybody else talked about Justin as this untouchable, heroic adventurer. And in this light, he was just, you know, he was just a son, you know, who was really, really missed. So we did the whole interview, and then she was about to head out to Utah, which is where she had actually spent time once she came back from India, and she was going there to, you know, meditate and find some healing and grief. Yeah. Which she tries to do about once a year.

Before she left, you know, she asked me if I wanted to come downstairs and see some of the stuff that they had recovered from India. And so we went down to the car, and she pulled out some stuff. Like, the first thing I think she handed me was this woven basket. So, you know, one of the things about survival that's really important is you have to be able to create baskets and. And things to carry your food or whatever else is actually very important to survival.

Gathering nuts yeah. Berries, even, to hold water.

Yeah. And so. So she showed me, you know, some of his early craftsmanship from when he was in the wilderness survival school. And then I believe she pulled out a. It was like a. It was a box given to Justin from the US Marines, thanking him for his assistance teaching them survival techniques, both training them, and then done with them a couple of nice little handwritten notes. There's a plaque from. I don't remember who the plaque was from, but it's from some government. Again, similar sort of thing was marines as well. And then we started to get to, like, the stuff from India itself. And it was.

And she's just pulling them out one after the other after the other. Just. It really was a moment of, wow. Here are. These things we've seen in pictures are visualized in our mind, and then.

There.

They are, the last remnants of Justin, and they're like.

You can tell that they're very, very important to her. These are treasures that she holds onto a lot of sentimental value. The first one that we saw, I saw the flute in the car, but she didn't pull it out immediately. The first things she pulled out from the stuff that were there was that head wrap that's seen in the last photo, which. Yeah, it's just. It's crazy to think that, you know, he was wearing that last time he was seen. And then she. She pulled out his jacket, and she was like, do you want to try it on? And so I did. I put it on, and then she handed me the flute staff as well. And it was just. It was just kind of crazy because it had been about. It had been about a year since I started looking into his case. And I've read about everything and talked.

To a lot of friends and, yeah, various people.

Before this moment, I had idolized the man. I had just researched heavily everything about his life, but putting them on, like, putting on the jacket and holding the flute, it was. It was. It was weird. It's almost like picking up a mantle, you know, like. Like the olympic torch was just handed to me or something. I don't know. It was larger than life.

I'm very open of her to share that.

Yeah, definitely. I don't particularly believe that, like, items have, like, some spiritual power or energy or whatever, but it. But it did feel like that in that moment, they actually had to. In order to get that flute over, they had to make a fake one.

And that is an interesting tidbit, is that the police wanted to confiscate all the items that were there and not return them to the family. And Jonathan Skeels, being one step ahead, realized that they would confiscate the flute, and Susie may never get it. So he went and bought another flute and fashioned it the same way Justin fashioned it and handed it to the police and said, this one's Justin's. And then kept the real one.

Yeah. For susie, it's definitely something that hits me still. I'm never gonna meet this guy. That's just. It's just, it's weird. It's really weird. And the grief for somebody that, you know, I probably wouldn't have known about him if he didn't disappear, but it's. I wish. I wish I could have met him, you know?

He may pop out of the end of this. I haven't finished the show. I'm listening along with everybody else. So this comes out mid season, which means that I, like everyone else, am going to be surprised. Although I may hop over to ten or fit plus and just binge the rest of it, because I can't. I don't know that I can wait. But I'm curious. The role of social media in people's lives. Yeah. And in Justin's in particular, it comes up as having kind of a few roles to play for him, it seems like. And one of them is this driver for his nonstop adventuring. It seems like he's always kind of seeking an audience and, you know, sharing what he's experiencing, and it's kind of bigger and bigger and bigger. And I thought it was really interesting to reflect on. I think it's something that everyone faces right now, and I'd love to know what y'all's perspective on this nomad influencer is in general. And if your ideas and perspectives about social media have shifted and changed over the last. I guess it's been four or five years that you've been working on the show and getting to know Justin's story.

For me, I. One, I aspired to be that when I started, and I don't now. Yeah, there's. There's a lot more to the. To the life, especially when you start to dig into Justin and some of the stuff that he was struggling with. Christopher Ryan said it really well. Like, really, really well at the beginning when he's like, you know, how do you experience the moment when you're always experiencing the moment if you're always chasing, experiencing something or showing the experience to somebody else? It definitely became taxing on. On him, I think. And it's everything in balance, I guess. Is where I now look at it. I think that's something that's interesting about Justin's story, too, is it's not like you don't have to be an adventurer to relate to Justin's struggles. He's a complex individual that had aspirations and goals. He just also happened to do it while on the back of a motorcycle with no home, traveling around the world. So, you know, there's. I think. And that is something that's so fantastical, so you want to show it to everyone online, but that's not. That's not what life's about. And I think he knew that.

I think he struggled with balancing those two things.

Yeah. And without any spoilers, the next episode of the season, episode five, definitely dives deeper into that. I did jump ahead because I couldn't handle the cliffhanger. So, yeah, way to not have any spoilers, but kind of touch on that. Alex, did you want to share anything about the theme?

I think there's pros and cons to that. Right. People can get aspired from certain types of content on social media, but then you do question, yeah. How much of that is reality? I think it's important to remember everyone's struggles, you know?

Yeah.

Who do you think really needs to listen to this podcast?

I think there's a little bit of something for just about everyone. Right. Cause again, Justin, was it just a real human being that had massive triumphs and massive failures? All of that is real, and it's all very, very relatable. I think all of us, again with social media, like, see a window into other people's lives and kind of sometimes almost want a little bit of an escape from ourselves. And I think the podcast, I mean, everybody should listen to it. Cause it's pretty smart.

My answer is, we will take all the swifties. It seems to be working for the Kelsey brothers, so gladly send them our way.

Swifties would love this show, actually.

I think swifties.

And here's why.

Yeah, please.

Because Taylor Swift writes about emotional things. Like, the thing about status on trace that I really took away from listening to the show is you don't have to be a quote unquote true crime fan to really get a lot out of the show. I actually felt like the story of Justin, that kind of the way that we walk and navigate in the world, like, really compelling, the mental health elements, really compelling. And I think swifties would be the perfect audience for this show because of that emotional, sensitive element that a lot of people have.

She's a vagabond traveler just on a different sort of stage.

Well, absolutely.

A really big one.

And I think Justin's message to his motto of be kind and do epic shit to me absolutely stands out as, you know, love. The people around you find constant moments to be helpful and generous, which he did throughout his entire life, sometimes at his own expense, and then follow what makes you feel alive. It doesn't have to be traveling around the world. It could be writing a book. It could be cooking. It could be really whatever it wants to be. So I do think it just relates to everybody.

I think it's for anyone who's ever had a moment of questioning where they are, what they're doing in life.

Yeah.

And how can that not be anyone? At some point, we all hit little pockets where you wonder, is this for me? Am I on the right path? What more does life possibly have to offer? And if anything, happily take every true crime listener, please recommend it to your friends. But also anyone who's just doing a little internal searching. This might provide a bit of meditative reflection.

Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I think the show is very universal. I would love to know. You mentioned a big challenge being travel restrictions, but what were some of the other big challenges that you faced while reporting on this case?

Everything. There was not one easy thing about this show. Everything was seven steps. One, me learning how to interview. That was a new one. Alex almost killed me three times.

And it was a lot of practice of listening and understanding and clarifying. That was a practice you got better at.

Yeah, no, it's definitely. Definitely rolled into other aspects of my life now, too. And then getting information over there became very like, it's just different.

There's a reason you do not hear any international interviews in the first four episodes, and that is because it is extremely difficult to get a hold of anybody overseas. In parts of Asia, India specifically. There's no white pages, there's no contact list. The figuring out and navigating, that was tricky. Nobody schedules interviews, so trying to do that remotely, it just was not happening.

What do you mean? No one schedules interviews? Does that mean they only. You have to run into one another to have a conversation?

Yep, pretty much. You walk in, you knock on a door.

Yeah.

Oh, okay. You just go to people's houses and see if they're home.

Yep.

Which.

Which, in a way, which is part of the culture.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you. And once you do meet them and you get their WhatsApp or phone number, they're a bit more receptive. But saying, hey, I would love to meet you next week, Tuesday at 02:00 and it's not happening.

No, no.

That's so interesting. That's very different from american culture.

Wow.

The other challenge, which is the cliffhanger that you hear in episode four, which, you know, plays out in a matter of twelve minutes in the episode, also, you know, it was a process of three months working with Justin's parents and the advice from private investigator Jaden Brandt to access some of Justin's digital footprints. It was a process that took Liam many phone calls, many hiccups, almost an absolute screw up of losing the number entirely and lots of hours at T Mobile and. And sprint.

Yeah, that was those. Fun. Yeah. It got to that point where we were saying one. One goal, this the next goal, next goal. By the time we started that, that it felt like that was our last thing that we could do before going to India. It was the only thing that we just, like, we had talked to a bunch of people, we understood a lot about the case, but it was like the one lead that had never been figured out, you know, and we had no idea what we would find at all. It presented a challenge and also part of the thrill, I think, to me, that was where our story somewhat parallels Justin in the adventure of not necessarily knowing, but you're just kind of riding it out.

It really wasn't an idea of, hey, has this been done? No, it hasn't. Everyone's saying, can't be done.

Let's try it.

Let's try.

Right? And what were some of the most rewarding things about working on this story?

Wow.

For me, great butter chicken.

Oh, fantastic butter chicken. That's a fact.

I believe it.

Yeah. Self discovery. For me, there's so much of that. I think I have a lot more purpose and direction in my life after doing this. Thank you, Justin. His short answer, but big, but, yeah.

Alex, I'm gonna stick with the butter chicken. I had experience working on a couple different cases of this nature, but in a lot of ways, watching and at times guiding. But really seeing Liam grow with confidence was super cool. Taking swings and risks that I don't think everybody would take. But for somebody who came into this world absolutely fresh and threw his whole heart into it and really cared not just about making the story break, but honoring somebody he didn't know, honoring their legacy and treating it with respect, you know, just watching it over the course of four years was really rewarding for me.

That's very sweet. I love it without too many spoilers, but maybe with one or two little sneak peeks, what can listeners expect in the rest of the season?

Okay, it's a good question. So there's a lot of adventure. A lot of. A lot of adventure. Get to experience a whole new culture. We've really tried to bury in to the episodes just so you can kind of feel what we felt while we were there. But then on top of that, we have a little symbol that we have buried in every single episode of the show. Not gonna tell you more than that. You can listen through and find it.

I'll add to that. There isn't every episode. It's not in the same place in every episode. And it's a symbol for Justin. A moment for Justin to have a say.

Yeah. Short, short answer. There's lots of stuff on the back half.

I love it. Yeah, it definitely feels like the story is just starting to really warm up. I'm excited to follow y'all's journey to India and hear what happens.

Awesome. Thank you.

Yeah. Anything else to add?

Be kind and do epic shit.

Perfect. So I was asked to only listen to the first four episodes of this show before the interview so I would be on the same page as all the listeners, but I couldn't help myself. The cliffhanger at the end of episode four is so insane that I had to binge the rest. If you're like me and you want to hear what happens next on status untraced, instead of waiting week to week, head on over to tenderfitplus.com and subscribe. You can binge the entire series ad free. And as a tenderfoot plus subscriber, you'll get instant access to a ton of other great shows from Tenderfoot, all ad free and exclusive bonuses made just for you. Go check it out. I'm Laura Benson, and this has been another installment of Inside Tenderfoot TV. Thanks for listening.

As a comedian and a retired detective, listening to network news, robots talk about crime is like swallowing balloons filled with ice cream. It's the most bland way possible for me to consume something I'm passionate about. So I gathered up some friends to make our own show. Every Monday through Friday, my team and I glove up and sift through the bows of the Internet to bring you the latest top crime stories. We're talking cold cases, hot cases, organized crime, disorganized crime, sex cults with snakes, sex cults without snakes. We'll keep you updated on all of it. Plus, we'll round out your week every Saturday by taking you back in crime with a historical crime story narrated so beautifully, you'll wish God gave you three years to listen with. I'm Todd McCollum.

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